At the end of the week Katy returned. The routine of life settled. Trained by Martha, Katy duplicated to her best the comfort that Martha had infused. Each night as Jean closed the door behind her, she felt it claim her, this grotesque, terrible duplicate of Martha's devotion. For thirty dollars a month, Katy created a home, followed the small customs that had sprung from Martha's love.
As the days slid by, one exactly like another, Jean felt as if she were being walled forever in Katy's ordered emptiness. She left earlier in the morning and returned later at night, but it was there waiting, until the day came to center in the moment when she would have to turn the knob and enter the warm, lighted vault; sit alone at the well-prepared meal and afterwards try to read in the silence. All day she was conscious of it waiting.
Strange fears rose in Jean and she was helpless before them. Sometimes she left the office in the middle of the afternoon and went home to face and conquer the terrible emptiness, and sometimes she walked in the night until she could scarcely stand, and it was there waiting for her. Gradually in the depth of the emptiness, something formed, a shadow-shape that Jean could neither annihilate nor grasp. It was as if, in her going, Martha had left a door open behind her, a narrow crack through which Jean could neither see clearly, nor quite close. And the thought of death began to sift down through life, absorbing its reality.
Jean saw herself, her work, her smallest act, as a pebble in the conglomerate mass of time. Like a gigantic rock crusher, Time reduced all effort to powder. In the vacant hours of the night, under the gleam of the cold, gold stars, the endings of things came to obsess Jean. Everything ended, everything. No matter how deeply indented the surface, the ending washed it clean again. Separation washed out human relationships, old age washed away physical effort and interest, death washed away all. Everything ended, books, buildings, days, nights, work, rest, love, life. Everything lasted for a while and then stopped.
Hour after hour Jean sat, staring out to the river, stifled by the fact of death, that great ending containing within itself all the ends of one's smallest acts.
Where was Martha now? Was there nothing anywhere of that patient little figure that had trotted so busily through its daily rounds? Were all the habits and preferences one built up through the years, but things of flesh? Was there nothing left anywhere, in any form, of that gigantic faith? Did man impose upon himself this sentence of life? Summon himself from nowhere, to struggle for a moment, and go back to nothingness again? In his terror of the immense quietness of Death, had he invented Heaven, an escape from the inconceivable peace he had never known in life? Had he invented God because he dared not be alone beyond the grave? And if Man had not imposed his own sentence, who had? Martha's God, the Tyrant who hurled us into life, whipped us through the years, snatched us away at the end, never for one single moment, revealing His purpose. Or was it all some huge machine set going in the unthinkable beginning of Time, grinding purposelessly on to an unthinkable end?
The door would neither open wide nor close, and Jean's hair whitened above the temples.
In April, when the trees began to bud, she gave Katy an extra month's wages and dismissed her. Jean had reached another ending; the ending of the senseless battle that had once seemed so worth while. She was going back to the gray fog, to the wide still spaces, back to the warm sands and cool salt winds and the sea, that neither sought nor promised peace but had it.
When the details of her going were arranged with the committee, Jean went to tell Jerome Stuart. Now that she was leaving, this quiet man with the stooping student shoulders and the thick gray hair, always ruffled to disorder, stood out for a moment, against the background of their work together, and Jean felt, as he sat looking at her, that he was surprised and disappointed. But it did not matter. Nothing mattered.
"You are really leaving for good?"