In any case, the call was followed by an invitation to dinner, and not long after that Annette placed me next to Miss Barry at lunch. Mrs. Grace did the same, and so did Cantyre when he insisted on my joining a party he gave at a theater. Two or three other meetings were accidental, and if I say that in all of them Miss Barry herself made the advances it is only to emphasize my nervousness. I had no right to be meeting her; I had no business to be allowing her to talk to me and show that—well, that she didn’t dislike me. The revolver was still in my desk and I began to ask myself if it wasn’t my duty to make use of it. True, she had not accused me with her eyes, but she was in some ways doing worse. What was to be the end of it?
I welcomed the work at Atlantic City, then, for more reasons than one. It took me away from New York; it kept me out of danger. Cantyre having confided to me the fact that his hopes were not dead, it left the field free to him. Never for a moment did he suspect that in my heart there was anything that could interfere with him; nor did he so much as dream that in hers....
It is curious that in proportion as the craving for drink diminished its place was taken by another craving for what I knew I couldn’t have. There was every reason why I couldn’t have it, why I could never have it. Atlantic City offered me, therefore, the readiest means of flight.
When that should be over I was planning a still further retirement. Sterling Barry was in California, directing the first stages of the erection of a block of university buildings in which he took great pride. Coningsby himself had suggested that when the Atlantic City job was finished there would be an opening for me there if I cared to make a bid for it. I did so care, and he promised to speak for me. Once I reached the Pacific, I was resolved not to come back for years, and perhaps never to come back at all.
It is lucky for me that I am temperamentally inclined to look forward. The retrospective view in my case would very soon have led me back to Greeley’s Slip, but I was rarely inclined to dwell on it. Once when I was crossing the Atlantic as a small boy our steamer had run on the rocks at Cape Clear. To enable us to get off her before she slipped back into the water and went down, long rope ladders were lowered to us from the top of the cliff, and up them we had to climb. This we did in a foggy Irish dawn, seeing just the rope rung ahead of us. Had we been able to look farther up the face of the cliff my mother and sisters would hardly have had the nerve for the ascent. As it was, they could see that single rung and no more, and so could keep their gaze upward without fear.
In the same way I kept my own gaze forward. I tried not to look ahead of the day, and at Atlantic City the days, even in November, were bearable enough. The booming of the long miles of breakers acted on me as a sedative. They dulled memory; they dulled pain; at the same time they incited me to work as the piercing wail of the bagpipes incites the Highlander to fight. I got companionship from them and a sense of timelessness. In their roll and tumble and crash I could hear the poluphoisboio thalasses in which Homer put the sound of breakers forever into speech.
So November went by, and a great part of December. Christmas was approaching, and I was eager to have it over. Not that it mattered to me; but the sense that there was a gay companionship in the world from which I was excluded got slightly on my nerves. Cantyre, who came down to spend a week-end with me whenever he could, having to go for that season to his relatives in Ohio, I looked for nothing more festal than a merry meal with Lovey.
The late afternoon on the day before Christmas Eve was both windy and foggy, with a dash of drizzle in the air. The men had knocked off working, and as I left the half-finished building I stood for a minute to get the puffs of wet wind in my face. The lights along the Board Walk were reflected on the wet planks as in a blurred mirror. Here and there a pedestrian beat his way against the wind, and an occasional rolling-chair—the jinrikisha of Atlantic City—disappeared into the aureole of the sea-front.
As I came down our rickety temporary steps I became aware that a woman’s figure darted out of the shelter of a pavilion on the shore edge and walked rapidly across toward me. She wore an ulster and a tam-o’-shanter cap, and made a gallant little figure in the wind. More than that I did not take time to notice, as I had no suspicion that she could have anything to do with me.
I was, in fact, turning southward toward the house where I was staying when she managed to beat her way in front of me.