Stan had sat down on the edge of the bed shaking with laughter. He shrugged his shoulders.
“My blood will be on your head Elaine forever.... Forever, do you hear me?... into the night where people dont sit laughing and sneering. Dont you think I dont see you.... If the worst happens it will not be my fault.”
“Go-od night,” shouted Stan. In a last spasm of laughing he fell off the edge of the bed and rolled on the floor. Jimmy went to the window and looked down the fire escape into the alley. Oglethorpe had gone. It was raining hard. A smell of wet bricks rose from the housewalls.
“Well if this isnt the darnedest fool business?” He walked back into his room without looking at Stan. In the door Ellen brushed silkily past him.
“I’m terribly sorry Jimmy ...” she began.
He closed the door sharply in her face and locked it. “The goddam fools they act like crazy people,” he said through his teeth. “What the hell do they think this is?”
His hands were cold and trembling. He pulled a blanket up over him. He lay listening to the steady beat of the rain and the hissing spatter of a gutter. Now and then a puff of wind blew a faint cool spray in his face. There still lingered in the room a frail cedarwood gruff smell of her heavycoiled hair, a silkiness of her body where she had crouched wrapped in the sheet hiding.
Ed Thatcher sat in his bay window among the Sunday papers. His hair was grizzled and there were deep folds in his cheeks. The upper buttons of his pongee trousers were undone to ease his sudden little potbelly. He sat in the open window looking out over the blistering asphalt at the endless stream of automobiles that whirred in either direction past the yellowbrick row of stores and the redbrick station under the eaves of which on a black ground gold letters glinted feebly in the sun: Passaic. Apartments round about emitted a querulous Sunday grinding of phonographs playing It’s a Bear. The Sextette from Lucia, selections from The Quaker Girl. On his knees lay the theatrical section of the New York Times. He looked out with bleared eyes into the quivering heat feeling his ribs tighten with a breathless ache. He had just read a paragraph in a marked copy of Town Topics.
Malicious tongues are set wagging by the undeniable fact that young Stanwood Emery’s car is seen standing every night outside the Knickerbocker Theatre and never does it leave they say, without a certain charming young actress whose career is fast approaching stellar magnitude. This same young gentleman, whose father is the head of one of the city’s most respected lawfirms, who recently left Harvard under slightly unfortunate circumstances, has been astonishing the natives for some time with his exploits which we are sure are merely the result of the ebullience of boyish spirits. A word to the wise.
The bell rang three times. Ed Thatcher dropped his papers and hurried quaking to the door. “Ellie you’re so late. I was afraid you weren’t coming.”