It was one of her sudden outbursts, and the receiver was hung up.
After all, this abrupt termination to an unsatisfactory mode of speech was the wisest method for us both. We couldn't go on sparring and there was nothing to do but spar. Knowing that I couldn't speak plainly she had ceased to expect me to do so, and yet...
When I say that this was a relief to me, you must understand it only in the sense that my situation was too difficult to allow of my inviting further complications. Had I been free—but I wasn't free. The conviction that somewhere in the world I had permanent ties began to be as strong as the belief that at some time in my life love had been the dominating factor. There had been a woman. Lydia Blair had seen her. Her flaming eyes haunted me from a darkness in which they were the only thing living. The fact that I couldn't construct the rest of the portrait no more permitted me to doubt the original than you can doubt the existence of a plant after you have seen a leaf from it. The best I could hope for now was the privilege of living and working in some simple, elemental way that would give me the atmosphere in which to re-collect myself, recueillement, the French graphically name the process, and grow unconsciously back into the facts that effort would not restore to me.
For that simple, elemental work and life the opportunity came to me at last. I see now that it was opportunity, though I should not have said so at the time. At the time it was only hard necessity, though hard necessity with those products of shelter and food which in themselves meant peace. I had peace, therefore, of a kind, and to it I am able now to attribute that growth and progress backward, if I may so express myself, which led to the miracle.
My work next day lay in peeling off the burlap from the newly arrived consignment, stripping the rolls of the sheepskins in which they were wrapped inside, spreading the rugs flat, and sweeping them with a stiff, strong broom. After that we laid them in assorted piles, preparatory to carrying them up-stairs. They were Khorassans, Kirmanshahs, Bokharas, and Sarouks, with a superb lot of blue and gold Chinese reproduced on the company's looms in India.
The good-natured Peter Bridget taking his turn up-stairs, my colleague that day was an American of Finnish extraction, whose natural sunniness of disposition had been soured by the thwarting of a strong ambition to "get on." Combining the broad features of the Lapp with Scandinavian hair and complexion, his expression reminded you of a bright summer day over which a storm was beginning to lower. The son of one large family and the father of another, he was at war with the world in which his earning capacity had come to have its limitations fixed at eighteen dollars a week.
He was not conversational; he only grunted remarks out of a slow-moving bitterness of spirit.
"What's the good of always layin' the pipe and never gettin' no oil along it? That's what I want to know. Went to work when I was fourteen, and now I'm forty-two, and in exactly the same spot."
"You're not in exactly the same spot," I said, "because you've got your wife and children."
"And the money I've spent on that woman and them kids!"