She saw me, at the same time that I saw her. In fact, she turned and stared at me. I couldn't have escaped her, as I stood there under the street-lamp. But no slightest sign of recognition came from that coldly inquiring face. She neither smiled nor bowed nor looked back. And the wine-colored landaulet swept on, leaving me standing there with my sodden hat in my hand and a great ache of desolation in my heart.
She must have seen me, I repeated as I turned disconsolately back and stood watching men and women still ducking under doorways and dodging into side-streets and elbowing into theater-lobbies. It seemed during the next few moments as though that territory once known as the Rialto were a gopher-village and some lupine hunger had invaded it. Before the searching nuzzles of those rain-guests all pleasure-seekers promptly vanished. Gaily cloaked and slippered women stampeded away as though they were made of sugar and they and their gracious curves might melt into nothing at the first touch of water. Above the sidewalk, twenty paces from the empty doorway where I loitered, an awning appeared, springing up like a mushroom from a wet meadow. In toward one end of this awning circled a chain of limousines and taxicabs, controlled by an impassive Hercules in dripping oil-skins. And as a carrier-belt empties grain into a mill-bin, so this unbroken chain ejected hurrying men and women across the wet curb into the light-spangled hopper of the theater-foyer. And the thought of that theater, with its companionable crush of humanity, began to appeal to my rain-swept spirit.
Yet I stood there, undecided, watching the last of the scattering crowd, watching the street that still seemed an elongated bull-ring where a matador or two still dodged the taurine charges of vehicles. I watched the electric display-signs that ran like liquid ivy about the shop fronts, and then climbed and fluttered above the roofs, misty and softened by rain. I watched the ironic heavens pour their unabating floods down on that congested and overripe core of a city that no water could wash clean.
Then the desolation of the empty streets seemed to grow unbearable. The spray that blew in across my dampened knees made me think of shelter. I saw the lights of the theater no more than twenty paces away. It was already a warren of crowded life. The thought of even what diluted companionship it might offer me continued to carry an appeal that became more and more clamorous.
A moment later I stood before its box-office window, no wider than a medieval leper-squint, from which cramped and hungry souls buy access to their modern temples of wonder.
"Standing room only," announced the autocrat of the wicket. And I meekly purchased my admission-ticket, remembering that the head usher of that particular theater had in the past done me more than one slight service.
Yet the face of this haughtily obsequious head usher, as his hand met mine in that free-masonry which is perpetuated by certain silk-threaded scraps of oblong paper, was troubled.
"I haven't a thing left," he whispered.
I peered disconsolately about that sea of heads seeking life through the clumsy lattice of polite melodrama.
"Unless," added the usher at my elbow, "you'll take a seat in that second lower box?"