Spring slipped away. Cripple Street was filled to the brim with bland summer. Janey went every day to the cemetery with flowers. In September she began to come back with flowers in her belt.
It was a rainy, dismal day in October. Mr. Barria had a remote sense of hearing Janey's laugh. It seemed to him there was a strange presence in the shop. He peered out, and saw Hamp Sharkey outlined against the window, large, slow-moving, and calm, a man who seemed to avoid all troubles of the flesh by virtue of having enough flesh, and solid bone beneath. Janey looked up at him and laughed. Around her were the old Annuals, containing the loves of Edwards and Eleanors.
Mr. Barria leaned back in his chair. Some untraced suggestion led him to counting his years idly. He made them out to be nearly eighty. They seemed suddenly to rest on his shoulders like a weight. If one considered them at all, they were heavy, the years. And for this human life, it was only intelligible in the abstract. Of its details there were too many.
The shop grew duskier, and the rain beat on the windows with an incessant pattering, a multitude of tiny details, sounding accordingly as one might listen. For either it would seem a cheerful, busy sound of the kindly water, humble and precious and clean, needful in households, pleasant in the fulness of rivers, comfortable, common, familiar; or it was the low sigh of the driven rain, the melancholy iteration and murmur of water circling like everything else its wheel of change, earth and ocean and sky, earth and ocean and sky, and weary to go back to its vague, elemental vapor, as before the worlds were shaped.
Mr. Barria turned back to his volume, bound in gray paper with a German imprint. To his ears the sound of the two voices talking became as abstract as the rain. Hamp Sharkey's laugh was like the lowing of a contented ox, and Janey's, as of old, like the ripple of a brook in a meadow.
TOBIN'S MONUMENT
I was a student then and lived on the second floor of a brick dormitory with foot-worn stones and sagging casements. The windows looked across one end of the campus on ivy-covered walls of other buildings, on a bronze statue whose head was bent to indicate that the person represented had taken life seriously in his day. Near at hand was a street of unacademic noises, horse-cars, shops, German bands, newsboys, people who bought and sold without higher mathematics and seldom mentioned Horatius Flaccus.
But there were drifts and eddies of the street that would turn aside and enter the dormitories commercially. Tobin was one of these. He came to my door by preference, because of the large crack in the panel. For, if one entered the dormitory commercially and knocked at the doors, one never knew—it might be Horatius Flaccus, a volume of size and weight. But with a crack in the panel one could stand outside at ease and dignity, looking through it, and crying, “M'las ca-andy! Peanuts!” Then, if anything arrived, without doubt it arrived. A man might throw what he chose at his own door.