Now that he saw his unappetizing meal, he realized that he was hungry. But he certainly couldn't eat there in the kitchen, although it was arranged exactly as he had instructed Malone. In the living-room it might be better, but by the time he had partly cleared the litter of books and papers from the table the dimensions of the effort annoyed him and he threw them back in a worse jumble than before. There was a card table somewhere; that would be just the thing to set on the porch under the honeysuckle. Jerome went all over the house looking for the card table until he remembered that it was in the cellar. The cellar was unlit and he had another hunt for a lamp. He found it at last on the top shelf of the pantry, with just enough oil to make a feeble splutter and a very decided and unpleasant odor. The cellar steps led down from the kitchen, and if the kitchen was cheerless, the cellar was a vault. Clammy damp enveloped him, and the mystery and loneliness of unused places stored with unused things. It was like a deserted house from which the inhabitants had fled at a plague. Jerome located the table under the slats of what had been Alice's baby bed and a broken pedestal. He got it out with difficulty, covered himself with dust and found that the hinge had been broken and it wouldn't stand.
Jerome threw the table down and went back into the kitchen. He jerked the shroud from the humps and ate an unappetizing sandwich of cold beef cut too thick and bread too thin. The cake he had just mashed into Pips' food when he remembered some jam of Alice's. He found a single glass and spread it thick on the remaining crumbs. The cake was possible this way, but now it was all gone in the mash for Pips. While he watched Pips gobbling it up, the clock struck six. And there were four hours yet until the earliest possible bed-time.
Jerome lit a cigar and went out into the garden, but the seclusion and privacy were gone. Through what had been a luxuriant privet hedge he could see the lights of the next house half a block away. At the other end of the garden it was worse. Here he had cut back a wall of hollyhocks, to give more sun to the pansies below and then left the hose running full force until it had washed out the pansy plants, and now a mournful row of bare stems guarded the empty plot.
After all, a garden was an unsatisfactory thing. It was only in the making that the thing had any power of absorption. Once it was made you never knew how much of it you would see. Last year bugs had eaten the roses, and the year before scale had destroyed the apple trees. If the shrubs got along well, then something happened to the flowers, and if the flowers acted on schedule, then the trees didn't.
Spring hit you before you had made up your mind what bulbs you wanted in; or hung back so late that you had no time to plant anything before summer scorched what little you did have. And if spring and summer acted rationally, just about the time you began to get some comfort out of the shaded spots and the smell of things, along came autumn and stripped it bare. There was always a senseless rush and change, nothing permanent accomplished, just stupid repetition over and over, rubbing in the analogy to the impermanent accomplishment of one's own effort. After forty, a man ought to live in a climate the same all the year round, where the futility of accomplishment wasn't always being preached by this eternal leafing and blossoming and dying, round and round in a purposeless circle.
Jerome stopped under a great lilac, primed to nakedness, and glared at its hideous tidiness.
"What do you think you get out of it, anyhow? A few weeks ago you were as bare as you will be again in another few weeks. And you've been doing it to my knowledge for the last fifteen years. You've never really been young or old. You just go on and on. And the little you do do, you can't help, although every spring you look as if you had chosen to be a lilac and had it all your own way. You can't help being a lilac. It was settled for you ages ago in a little brown seed. You can't even prolong your blooming a week beyond the law. You're...."
Suddenly the lilac reminded him of Jean. It was so strong, untrimmed, and indifferent to his tirade. Jerome shrugged and went back into the house. The silence was oppressive. Malone had not returned. There was no reason that she should be in, but it annoyed him that she was out.
At nine o'clock he went to bed.