2
That sort of thing—he reflected next evening, when he turned in immediately after dinner—was not the sort of thing he had expected of his Canal street home. He had thought of it as being a quiet backwater, out of reach of the tides of life. And if Eddie Silver was going to come there!... He fell asleep, only to be awakened by the cry,
“F’lix! Oh you F’lix!” and a pounding on his door. “G’ up! We’re having li’l’ Swinburne party!”
Felix lighted a match. It was one o’clock. How had that madman got into the house at this hour? Anyway, there was no sleeping now. Besides, he had had six hours’ sleep.
He rose and dressed, and went into the other room. “Make me a little coffee, Roger,” he pleaded.... And an hour later he managed to slip away, and went back to his room and wrote feverishly on his letter—the letter which he would never send—to Rose-Ann ... falling asleep with his head on the table, and only waking in time to get to the office, without breakfast.
The third evening Eddie Silver came again, and this time Felix felt himself too tired to write, and drank whiskey with the rest. In the morning he was apparently none the worse, except that he had no appetite for anything except a cup of coffee and a cigarette. In the afternoon, for lack of sufficient sleep, he needed more coffee. And of course, the more coffee one drank, the less one seemed to need real food, so that dinner, too, consisted exclusively of coffee. And then he could not sleep, and sat up half the night writing. Fortunately, Eddie Silver did not come again for a while, so there was a lull in the fever of existence. But it took days to get back to normal habits of eating and sleeping again.
And Felix, in the meantime, had commenced, for the sake of companionship and good coffee, to take his dinners with Don and Roger in their room, taking his turn in providing them. These meals were of a delicatessen sort, sometimes chosen because the ingredients reminded Don and Roger of Spain or Italy, and sometimes because they made an interesting colour scheme.
For a while their evenings were quiet. Felix would labour upon that endless letter to Rose-Ann—who had by now come to seem to him an unreal figure, an invention of his own fancy; only becoming real again for a moment, a moment only, when he saw on his desk at the office an envelope addressed to him in her large undisciplined handwriting. Within that envelope would be a friendly note, saying nothing; and he would reply in kind.
One day he dropped in at the little Community Theatre to see how things were getting on; Rose-Ann in her latest note had expressed some curiosity about her old class and its new teacher. He found old Mrs. Perk there.
“It’s pretty bad,” Mrs. Perk whispered. “They don’t like the new one at all. And they miss you, too.” Which somehow pleased him very much, even though he suspected it to be only an old woman’s flattery.
“And how do you like your new place? You don’t look very well fed. No, it’s no use; men can’t keep house by themselves. You’ll have to wait till Miss Rosy comes back, and be taken care of right!”
“I’m afraid Miss Rosy will never come back,” said Felix.
“Don’t you bother yourself about that!—Here, thread this needle for me, with your young eyes.... Why, I asked her for a piece of the wedding cake, the very day she went away so sudden. She’ll be back all right!”
So old Mrs. Perk had been joking with Rose-Ann, too—about him. Felix wondered how she had taken it....
“No, your bachelor hall won’t last much longer, I can promise you that.”
He laughed and went away, amused at the quaint pseudo-wisdom of the old. She thought she knew all about him and Rose-Ann. Two young things hopelessly in love, but too shy to tell each other so! And in this situation the inconveniences of bachelor’s hall would operate as a deus ex machina, driving him in despair and her in pity into each other’s arms—and matrimony!
How simple it all seemed to her! And how complex it all was in reality!
Mrs. Perk had the old-fashioned-woman’s naïve confidence in the importance of woman’s cooking; for that matter, how did she know that Rose-Ann could cook? Most probably she couldn’t! Girls like Rose-Ann didn’t nowadays.... And besides, how could Mrs. Perk be expected to understand the pleasures of a man living alone, free, able to keep what hours he chose—the sheer lazy charm of a masculine establishment, however inefficient!
Yes, Felix really enjoyed this happy-go-lucky kind of existence. As long as there was plenty of good coffee, and cigarettes, nothing else mattered very much—not even Eddie Silver.
He had commenced to come again. At first his visits were welcome as a relief from the monotony of Canal street life. But he was becoming a nuisance.... He would come in at all hours, but preferably when they had just gone to bed—pounding on the doors until they awoke and let him in. If the hall-door downstairs chanced to be locked, he would stand in the street and call to them, and throw pebbles—or dollars—against their front windows.... They would be drifting peacefully into dreams when something would wrench violently and painfully at their attention—they would try to ignore it and go on dreaming, but it would come again, determined, familiar, insistent—and they would reluctantly awake enough to become conscious of a voice in the street calling out their names. “Don! Roger! F’li-i-ix!”
“It’s that damned Eddie Silver!” they would groan, and finally somebody, with a brain aching for sleep, would stumble down the stairs and let him in.
“Wake up there, F’lix—I brought you nice li’l’ bo’l’ Swinburne!” he would call, rattling Felix’s doorknob, until he rose and joined in the festivities.
So strong is the power of association that Felix came to loathe the poetry of Swinburne—it had the smell of whiskey on it....
It was increasingly hard to keep awake in the afternoons, however much he drugged himself with coffee. Getting up in the morning became a tragedy—his whole being cried out for the sleep he could not have. Sometimes during the day, in the midst of a story, his mind would suddenly go blank for a minute. His appetite failed, and there were pains in his stomach that nothing but whiskey would relieve. He caught a bad cold, and had a cough that would not go away. And then, one morning in the eighth week of his stay in the Canal street menage, he found himself too ill to go to the office.