1
FELIX began the task of forgetting—a task for youth in its most fantastically stern mood:—of trying to forget that unforgettable moment on the station platform with Rose-Ann. Or at least, to behave as though it had not occurred. For he was convinced that neither of them had intended it to occur.
It was obviously an accident—the mere mood of parting. It had meant nothing. It must be ignored.
But it was hard to ignore. It was a moment to which memory would recur. It dramatized vividly for him the fact—to which he sought to adjust himself—of Rose-Ann’s absence.
Rose-Ann’s absence made a great deal of difference, it seemed—and not only to himself. What she had predicted in regard to her dramatic class came true very quickly. Under Miss Clark’s fussy direction, all the fun was taken out of the work for everybody. Mrs. Perk looked on the altered face of things with an air of wry disapproval, and whispered to Felix, “Oh, it’s not the same place at all any more!” The children were listless. Paul froze into a silent rage at some unfortunate remark of Miss Clark’s about his scenery and left Community House, and Felix began to stay away from the rehearsals altogether.
He wrote these things to Rose-Ann, and received brief replies which showed how remote all these matters had now become to her. He accepted the probability that Springfield had captured her for good and all this time. It was true that she always inquired in a friendly way about the things in which they had both been interested; but these weekly inquiries were tinged with a kind of faint retrospective glamour, as though to her these interests were already invested with the pathos of distance. She was evidently saying good-bye to her moment of freedom.
Felix did not tell her how much he missed her. He was rather ashamed of the fact. There was something intellectually disgraceful about a state of dependence upon one person for companionship....
It was true, he had Clive. But he had been neglecting Clive, and now Clive had other concerns. Clive had several times urged him to come out over the week-end to Woods Point, where he was undertaking to spend the winter in his summer cottage, and Felix had always had some engagement with Rose-Ann which prevented his going. Now, when he would be glad to accept such an invitation, it was not renewed; Clive, it appeared, was so much interested in some girl that he had no time to spare for Felix. And Clive was the only person about the office that he cared for; at Community House since Rose-Ann had gone, there was no one. He wished that he had taken the trouble to make a few more friends. It made all the difference in the world to have some one to talk to at the day’s end, some one to share one’s thoughts with....
Suddenly he began to find Community House intolerable. He spent his evenings looking for a place to live. Certainly he could not be less lonely anywhere else! And one evening, on Canal Street, in a dingy building which had apparently once been a residence and was now rented out room by room, he found a tiny hall-room on the third floor which he had not the excuse of not being able to afford. He made some explanation for leaving Community House—which it seemed was not needed, for room there was much in demand—and moved at once into his new home.
It was a room about eight by eleven feet, hardly holding the cot-bed, table and chair, which constituted its furnishing. He improvised a shelf above the tiny radiator in the corner for his half-dozen books.... And for one evening he was happy, in being away from Community House, in being in a place of his own, in having in some way established his independence.
And then loneliness descended upon him in a black mist, obliterating the clear outlines of the actual world. He managed to get through the day’s work somehow, and then he wandered about hopelessly, unseeingly, the victim of a longing that made the very act of breathing a pain; a longing that he could not understand—for what was Rose-Ann to him?