“Do you know what I feel like? As if it was night and I was on a ship going out to sea, and as if the land was getting smaller and smaller. I can just see the lights of houses and little towns twinkling in a line along the edge of the shore.”
“Where’s the ship going?” I asked.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” came her answer through the dusk.
A knock cut off my reply. It was Roger, dropped in for an hour before dinner. Lizzie rose and was for going, but I urged her to stay and she sank back in her chair, glad, poor soul, to be with us and escape the dreariness of her own thoughts. I lit the student lamp and he and I sat down by it with Lizzie near the window, the light falling across her skirts, the upper part of her dimly blocked out in shadows and the pale patches of her face and hands.
As usual, she said almost nothing and a selfish fear stirred in me that she was going to spoil our hour. It’s hard for two people on intimate confidential terms, to have a gay spontaneous interview while a third sits dumb in a corner. I think Roger felt the irk of it at first. He did most of the talking and he did it to me. But as the time wore on I noticed that he began to address himself more and more to her. He seemed unconscious of it and it set me wondering. Was he—a man not susceptible to personal influences—going to feel that queer magnetic draw? It interested me so much that I forgot to follow what he said and watched him, and there was no doubt about it—he did keep turning toward the window, where he could see nothing but a motionless shape and the indistinct oval of a face.
The conversation resolved itself into a monologue, two mute ladies and a talking man.
Roger really did feel it; Roger, who would hardly listen to me when I told him about her in the restaurant. It showed what a force she possessed, and my fancy dwelt on it till I began to see it as a visible thing stretching from her and reaching out toward him. It was an uncanny idea, but it obsessed me, and Roger’s voice sunk to a rumbling bass murmur as I tried to picture what it might look like—a thin steady ray like a search-light, or a quivering thread of vibrating air, or long clutching tentacles such as an octopus has, or a spectral arm of gigantic size like the one Eusapia Pallidino conjured out of shape when “the conditions were favorable.” The cessation of his voice broke my imaginings and I was rather glad of it. Next time I see him I’m going to tell him about them and ask him which of the collection it felt most like.
I wrote all this a week ago, and reading it over to-night it seems strange that I was only amused, strange by contrast with the way I feel about the same thing now. It’s not that there’s any difference, or that anything has gone wrong, but—well, it was a joke then and it doesn’t seem to be a joke any more.
What’s made the change was something that happened here this afternoon. It’s nothing at all, but it disturbed me. I hate to think it did. I hate to write it did. I hate to have the suspicious petty side of me come up and look at me and say: “I’m still here. You can’t get rid of me. I’m bound up with the rest of you and every now and then I break loose.”
If I wasn’t a foreboding simpleton who had had her nerve shaken by bad luck I’d simply laugh. And instead of doing that I feel like a cat on the edge of a pond with a stone tied around its neck, and I can’t sleep. I put out the light and went to bed and here I am up again, wrappered and slippered, writing it out. If I put it down in black and white, see it staring up at me in plain words, it will fall back into its proper place. An insignificant thing—a nonsensical thing—the kind of thing you tell to your friends at a lunch as a good story on yourself.