At the end of the first week Anne brought Rogie to the flat. When James was awake he liked to have the baby crawling and laughing about him. Sometimes Anne wanted to cry as she watched the numbed form propped in the big bed and the laughing, crawling baby dragging his little limbs in their awkward newness over the limbs that would never walk again.
At the end of the second week she felt that she had lived this way for years, that she would never live otherwise. The loft and the world with its bickering were far away, behind the present routine. On Tuesdays and Sunday evenings two old men took turns in coming to see James. A quick, wiry little man came on Tuesday. A slow, fat man on Sunday. They came early in the evening, just after their own suppers, and James watched all day for their coming. They never had much news and there were long pauses between their remarks. The flat was never so still, so cut off from the world functioning beyond this silence, as in these long intervals between the items of office gossip. Anne could never shut the kitchen door and forget the old men, but sat tense, waiting for the next buzz from the sick room.
They had imposed upon themselves this task of calling, but she felt their relief when, always a few moments before half-past eight, each old man rose to go, said something reassuring about soon seeing James Mitchell back at work, and with awkward kindliness got himself out of the room. Then Anne would go in, straighten her father's pillows, make him comfortable for the night, and listen with assumed interest while he retailed in his thick, halting speech, their meager news. The paucity of it hurt beyond her strength to reply. To have lived fifty-five years and have no interests larger than the clickings of a machine, functioning far above him; to be bound in the tiny screws and cogs of an intricate mechanism, towering into official dimness. The old men depressed Anne terribly, almost more than James himself. His illness separated him, in his first distinction, from the rest of his world. But they were still part of it. Like chained animals they seized and gnawed at each tiny happening until they had gnawed it to powder. In these clouds of dust they were walking blindly toward the grave.
On the nights when the old men did not come James dropped asleep almost immediately after his light supper. Anne put little Roger to bed. Hilda found some reason to leave the house, even if it were only "to run down to Mrs. Welles' for a minute," and Anne was alone. Sometimes she sat in her old room, beside Rogie's basket, and stared out into the darkening street. Strange noises emerged into the stillness, tickings and creakings in the walls, rustlings and faint tappings.
Anne's thoughts, too vivid to be held within her brain, slipped into the darkness and she saw them, pictures in the thick silence; the terrible black vacuum of life in which moved the old gray men, her father, Hilda, herself, Roger, Tom, the dancing marionettes about him; Hilary Wainwright, his keen-eyed partners in great enterprises; Merle snatching at beauty, the grimed workers; all groups of whirling dervishes, spinning round in useless effort, until they dropped into decay and death.
It was in such a mood, one night about three weeks after she had come to care for James, that Anne went on the back porch, where the sure shining of the stars, the black outline of the unchanging hills, sometimes gave her rest. But to=night no peace came. The stars were hard and cold, the hills indifferent. Locked in a vault of decay and death, she heard the voice of Life, like the undertone of the sea wailing forever: This is all there is. I am decay and death, decay and death.
So deep was she within the darkness of this realization that when a man's quick step sounded on the stairs and she saw Roger smiling up, Anne stared back as if he were a stranger from another world. Roger's smile vanished and he bounded up the last steps and took her in his arms. At his touch the vividness of thought vanished, and she seemed to slip down from the high places of a dream into waking. It was good to feel his hold again and Anne smiled at him, but he looked at her anxiously.
"Princess, you're awfully pale, and your eyes are as big as saucers."
"Are they? That's good news; they always were too small."
"I'm not joking, Anne. You look all in."