1
COMING out on the street, swinging his stick, Felix was vividly conscious of the outer world—it was as if the curtain had just risen upon a stage scene. The shapes of the trees in the distance had all the interest of a beautifully painted set—artificial, as scenery should be, not aping nature, but symbolizing it. The houses that stood beside the road were cardboard shapes that suggested great masses of brick and stone. And the way the night sky bent down at the street-end to touch the earth—that was marvelous.
The whole scene was refreshing. It had the beauty of something made to be looked at. It was as if the outer-world were no longer the unnoted background of a drama in which he was a baffled participant: he had stepped out of the play now, he was a spectator—he could look on and enjoy the spectacle.
There was a sense of vast release in his mind. The burden of emotion, of pain, of grief, of anger, the intolerable burden of human illusion, was lifted. His shoulders felt lighter, and he carried himself with a jaunty air.
A man passed him—no spectator like himself of this play, but a participant in it, a man to whom things really seemed to matter. With a tired droop of the head and shoulders, putting one foot mechanically before another, he was going home. Two girls passed, eagerly talking to each other. None of them saw him, or the world through which they moved—they were busy acting their parts, too busy thinking about yesterday and tomorrow.
How good it was no longer to have a part to play—to be able to look on, full of curiosity! He was like a disembodied spirit that wanders freely upon the earth without a care. The world was beautiful. All the time that he had been worrying about other things, it had been beautiful—and he had been too passionately entangled in the coil of personal emotions to notice.... The crooked branch of an elm, from which all but a few leaves had fallen, drooping black against the luminous sky—the world had been full of such things all along, and he had never paused to look before.
It was pleasant to have a mind able to notice little things—like the fantastic shadow that danced along the sidewalk, growing shorter and longer and dodging about in front and behind—a mind that could dwell upon light things, instead of revolving eternally in some cycle of hope and fear. A leisurely, disinterested, curious mind!
As he walked, his thoughts touched lightly upon Rose-Ann—he had a fleeting memory-picture, uncoloured by any painful emotion, of her standing on the balcony of that house in Woods Point, about to jump off into the snow-bank; he sensed her as a creature possessed by some wish which she did not understand, driven on by it to delightful and absurd actions.... And Clive, ironically officiating as host to a bridal pair in the house which he had built to shelter his own happiness.... And Phyllis, holding Clive perpetually at arm’s length, because he was not utterly a god.... And himself, strangest shape of all, taking the emotions of all these other characters seriously and trying to adjust his life to them! They were like people in a play, strange and foolish, beautiful and pitiful. He saw them all, he saw his own past self, with a delicate and appreciating exactitude.
But they did not matter—he could stop thinking of them, and look at the nimbus of light around the arc lamp on the corner. That was strange and beautiful, too.
To be a spectator of the spectacle of existence! At first that was enough. But presently he was aware of a vague desire for a fellow-spectator. The desire was faint, but faint as it was it moved his steps to the Illinois Central platform, and presently he emerged upon Michigan Avenue.