The five stood in an indecisive little group, looking at each other. A waiter who had been darting his head around a corner to survey them at intervals now darted himself around and approached them with a velvet-covered but none the less insistent air. “If your party is not coming inside——?”
They left as indecisively, and drove home in amazement. It had not occurred to them that they would not be able to read the dark pages of this affair. The sensation of utter futility is new to youth, and momentarily stuns. Until they had followed up every avenue of investigation left them, they had evaded the wings of horror that had been hovering ahead. Now there was room for all that awfulness. They spoke in low tones, the situation becoming more hopeless as they discussed it. Jim said the publicity of the police was not to be desired; Crawf and Dum-Dum, abject almost to cringing by now, said that of course they would finance investigation through a private detective agency, which proposition was speedily approved by Jerry. Joy sat in the tentacles of a memory that added horror. What were the last words she had ever said to Sarah? A practical request to keep out of her life, and she, Joy, would do the same. Under the calcium ray of this dreadful evening’s events, her words were conceited, selfish, ill-tempered—self-sufficient. If one only knew, when words were flying around, that those were the last words that person would ever hear from one’s mouth—how many things would remain unsaid!
A repressed goodnight to the two guilty youths, and leaving Jim, who was to go straight to the detective office. She and Jerry went to Sarah’s room of one accord, then wandered aimlessly through the empty-seeming apartment before going to bed. . . .
“She’ll turn up,” said Jerry; but her voice hung fire.
She did not turn up. Days thickened into weeks, with the detective bringing steady reports of investigation along a blank wall. Something that he had said on undertaking the case quivered in Joy’s memory.
“A missing-girl proposition is almost hopeless, you know, when twelve thousand disappear every year.”
“Twelve thousand a year—in this country!” she cried, and he nodded.
“So you see—it gets pretty difficult.”
It was a strange thing—this voidness that had been Sarah. When Sarah had been there, their lives were as separate as if they had been two strange boarders in the same boarding house. She had never found anything in common with Sarah; she had never tried to. She had disliked her, and not done her best to conceal this dislike. Now Sarah was gone, and her absence made no ripple in Joy’s life. How could she miss her absence, having never really felt her presence—having even suggested that they ignore each other’s presence? But her going left Joy with a queer feeling of self-hatred. Sarah had been a lonely figure, a drifter on the churning waters of excitement; a drifter with nothing upon which to cling, knowing no more than to keep her head above the rising tide. And Joy had faithfully imitated the performance related of certain people, who, some nineteen hundred years ago, had passed by on the other side.
Passing by on the other side was glossed over nowadays as: “It isn’t any of my business.” Everyone did it about everyone. In this new analysis she wondered—-if she had not been passing Jerry by on the other side also. The answer rose automatically to her throat: “It isn’t any of my business.”