Once I used to enjoy teas, found entertainment in those brief shouted conversations, those perilous feasts. Perhaps I was sad because I was so out of it all. And what was I in—what took its place? I was going back to emptiness and silence. To greet me would be a voiceless darkness, my evening companion a book.
I got on a car full of damp passengers. As if beaten down by the relentless glare of the electric lights, all the faces drooped forward, hollows under the eyes, lines round the mouths. They sat in listless poses, exhaling the smell of wet woolen and rubber and I sat among them, also exhaling damp smells—also with hollows under my eyes and lines round my mouth. That, too, didn’t matter. What difference if I was hollowed and lined when there was no one to care?
My room was unlighted and cold. I lighted the gas and stood with uplifted hand surveying it. It was like a hollow shell, an empty echoing shell, that waited for a living presence to brighten it. Just then it seemed to me as if I never could do this—its loneliness would be as poignant and pervasive when I was there, would steal upon me from the corners, surround and overwhelm me like a rising sea. My little possessions, my treasures, that were wont to welcome me, had lost their friendly air. I suddenly saw them as they really were, inanimate things grasped and held close because associated with the memory of a home. In the stillness the rain drummed on the tin roof and the line in a forgotten poem rose to my mind, “In the dead unhappy night and when the rain is on the roof.”
I snatched a match and hurried to the fire. Thrusting the flame between the bars of the grate, I said to myself:
“I must get some kind of a pet—a dog or a Persian cat. I’ve not enough money to adopt a child.”
The fire sputtered and I crouched before it. I didn’t want any supper, I didn’t want to move. I think a long time passed, several hours, during which I heard the clock ticking on the mantel over my head, and the rain drumming on the roof. Now and then the rumbling passage of a car swept across the distance.
I have often sat this way and my thoughts have always gone back to the past like homing pigeons to the place where they once had a nest. To-night they went forward. My married life seemed a great way off, and the Evelyn Drake in it looked on by the Evelyn Drake by the fire, a stranger long left behind. The memories of it had lost their sting, even the pang of disillusion was only a remembrance. With my eyes on the leaping flames I looked over the years that stretched away in front, diminishing to a point like a railway track. My grandmother had lived to eighty-two and I was supposed to be like her. Would I, at eighty-two, be still a pair of ears for young men’s love stories and young women’s dreams of conquest?
Oh, those years, that file of marching years, coming so slowly and so inevitably, and empty, all empty!
The rain drummed on the roof, the clock ticked and the smell of my best skirt singeing, came delicately to my nostrils. Even that didn’t matter. From thirty-three to eighty-two—forty-nine years of it. I looked down at my feet, side by side, smoking on the fender. Wasn’t it Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked to define happiness, answered, “four feet on the fender”?
There was a knock on the door, probably the count to continue the recital of his love’s young dream. My “Come in” was not warm.