“All right,” he said. “You can go to work at once. To-morrow I will look up your reference. If it be satisfactory, I will keep you.”
The Oberkellner provided me with an apron and a short alpaca jacket; and in this garb Ernest Neuman, musician, merged his identity, as he supposed for good and all, into that of Ernest Lexow, waiter.
VII.
TWO years elapsed. Their history is easily told. I lived and moved and had my being in a profound apathy to all that passed around me. The material conditions of my existence caused me no distress. I dwelt in a dingy room in a dirty house; ate poor food, wore poor clothing, worked long hours; was treated as a menial and had to put up with a hundred indignities every day; but I was wholly indifferent, had other things to think of. My thoughts and my feelings were concentrated upon my one great grief. My heart had no room left in it for pettier troubles. I do not believe that there was a waking moment in those two years’ when I was unconscious of my love and my loss. Veronika abode with me morning, noon, and night. My memory of her and my unutterable sorrow for her engrossed me to the exclusion of all else.
My violin I did not unlock from year’s end to year’s end. I could not get over my hatred for the bare idea of music. Music recalled the past too vividly. I had not the fortitude to endure it. The sound of a hand-organ in the street was enough to cause me a twinge like that of a nerve touched by steel.
As the winter leaped into spring, and days came which were the duplicates of those I had spent with her, of course my pain grew more acute. The murmur of out-door life and the warmth and perfume of the spring air, penetrated to the very quick of memory and made it quiver. But at about this time I began to taste an unexpected pleasure. It was an odd one. Of old, during our betrothal, I had been tormented almost nightly by bad dreams. As surely as I laid my head upon its pillow, so surely would I be wafted off into an ugly nightmare—she and I were separated—we had quarreled—she had ceased to love me. But now that my worst dream had been excelled by the reality, I began to have dreams of quite another sort. As soon as sleep closed upon me, the truth was annihilated, Veronika came back. All night long we were supremely happy; we played and sang and talked together, just as we had been used to do. These dreams were astonishingly life-like. Indeed, in the morning after one, I would wonder which was the very fact, the dream or the waking. My nightly dream got to be a goal to look forward to during the day. But as the summer deepened, I dreamed less and less frequently, and at length ceased altogether.
Autumn returned, and winter; and my life did not vary. Time was slow about healing my wounds, if time meant to heal them at all. But time did not mean to heal them at all, as ere long became apparent.
One afternoon in November, a month or so before the two years would have terminated, a young man entered the shop and ensconced himself at a table in the corner. Having delivered his order and lighted a cigarette, he pulled out a yellow covered French book from the pocket of his coat, and speedily became immersed in its perusal. I don’t know what it was in the appearance of this young man that attracted my attention. Almost from the moment of his advent my eyes kept going back to him. His own eyes being fastened upon his book, I could stare at him without giving offense. And stare at him I did to my heart’s content.