I no longer know ... I no longer know ...
VIII
He is often late. I have noticed that I am almost invariably the one to have to wait. Work in his office ends at the same time as mine, but the two places are at a distance from each other, and it always seems a long time before I see him coming.
The first minutes go by unheeded because the seven o'clock outpouring streams by where I post myself on the sidewalk. No signal is given. At a mysterious order and at a given moment a black wave foams and contracts at the exit, and as in greeting to the open light sends up a thousand exclamations, which make one long cry of relief.
This evening it is still light, and the escaping crowd is not inclined to hurry. The sluggishness of the air, the sonorousness, the droning, the motley street ... the crowd condenses and remains coagulated on one spot. Is it ever going to decide to pass on!
When the day's work is over, you come back to the brilliant world marvelling at the holiday sky, and blinking.... Summer is knocking at the window ... it does you good to be standing on your legs expanding your lungs. One group attracts you. They all look like wags, their conversation fascinates; if you were to listen to them, you would remain standing there with your hands in your pockets. But you are being awaited at home, and the circle almost as soon as formed breaks up with casual farewells flung over the shoulder.
When the women hurry along, rain or shine, it is in the subconscious urge to show themselves to everyone. Those who swelled the hubbub a little while ago with jostling elbows and foreheads set like a ram's—"get a move on you!"—are the first to display their pronounced busts and the slowest to walk away with chirps and winged signs and nods and a swaying of sinuous backs.
The street is emptied. Some women still pace up and down the block. They are waiting for someone too.
There he is!
From the busy far-end of the street, across the eddies of people, nothing to tell me it is he but the shape of his hat. Again I feel the security that his appearance always brings.