"Well, I—see what you mean of course." He stood tall and drooping near her, so that she must bend her neck awkwardly to see his face as he went on, driven by some compulsion to talk when perhaps he had no real wish to do so: "Strange thing—had a dream a while ago, possibly an echo of my reading—Huck Finn likely. Lost in a fog, on a raft, watching the river stream past me—sometimes the water'd slop up between chinks in the logs. All under a milky fog, no landmarks, but I could see the river all the time, the dark flow of it, now and then trash and broken things sliding past. It went on, you know, years, a hundred years, who could say? And I thought I was motionless, nothing more than a pair of eyes, brain somewhere back of them. Well, but—here was the nightmare, you see—I suddenly understood that I was drifting too, had been all the time. Doesn't sound like anything in the telling, but it was horrible—I can't tell you. Drifting all the time when I thought only the river was in motion. The sleeping brain's comment on myself, you see?—myself as summing up all human stupidity. Or blindness—much kinder word, isn't it? 'So may you, when the music's done, awake and see the rising sun'—that's from Thomas Carew, I think, died 1639 or around there. My head is an attic, you know, full of little facts with dust on them. They were so concerned, those poets, with treating love itself as a work of art, you'd think to read them superficially they had nothing else on their minds. But there was a depth, Miss Nolan, something you don't discover right away. All that polish, glitter, gracefulness, word-play, that was something they produced after accepting the squalor and danger and confusion of seventeenth-century living. They knew what they were doing. Reading the avant-garde stuff of nowadays, usually the contrast is merely grotesque, still I keep finding parallels. Here and there. It keeps an old man interested. Well, I'm babbling like second childhood. Telling dreams, at my age! Look, can I get you anything? I think I'll take a walk around the block, can't sit still. Coke? Sandwich?"
"I guess not, thanks all the same. Jumpy stomach."
"Mm, I know." Her neck ached. Please go! He was leaning down, a remote, remotely friendly ghost, a friend of Thomas Carew, also a human being in distress. "A thing like this—you know, Miss Nolan, I believe the very worst of it is that we forget. Because we have to, maybe. We're beaten down somehow, used up, licked in the end by the daily littleness—head colds, weakening eyesight, the brush-your-teeth-and-put-out-the-milk-bottles sort of thing, and there's no defense." At any other time, Edith thought, she would have enjoyed listening to this particular Herb Chalmers. "My God, littleness steals everything, including the last breath. And before then, you see, no matter what we resolve, what we hope for—we forget."
"I sha'n't forget."
"I'm fifty, Miss Nolan. You're still very young. Thirty years from now, d'you think you'll know just as clearly what's been happening here, what will happen when those people come back through that door? Ah, I don't know, I'm talking like a fool—who's going to see thirty years ahead? Jim Doherty's already forgetting. In a bar."
"What? Did you see him?"
"Last night he was anyway, and it looked as if he was laying the foundation for a long one. After I took Vic home last night I came back to town, to the college—had to make some kind of pass at the week's work that's piled up on me—they've been very nice, leave of absence and so on, but I notice things pile up anyway, letters, term papers, what not. On the way home I stopped at Judson's—that's uptown, bar where I used to go sometimes with Jim and—Ann, before all this. He was there, tight as a tick, must have been working on it all afternoon. Not here today, I notice. Last night I tried to get him to go home with me, but he'd made friends with some character who looked respectable, capable of putting him to bed right side up."
Edith said absently: "Someone will always be around to put him to bed."
"Know what you mean. Democracy in action." I can't smile, Herb. "Well—go for a walk, I guess. Can't sit still. 'Bye." He stumbled off, a weary progress with a slow grab at every chair-back along the awkward route...
Cecil Warner came through the doorway at the left, alone, his broad face sallow, all ruddiness washed away. He passed the press table with a shake of the head and no other answer to some tactless and poorly timed question. He came up the aisle, and sank with slow motion into the seat beside Edith, relaxing his bulk all at once with the suddenness of an old man's muscles letting go. "Tell me," she said.