"Once you agree with me," said Cooper, "I don't see why it is necessary for you to continue."
[XI]
ROMANCE
At 5:15 in the afternoon of an exceptionally sultry day in August, John P. Wesley, forty-seven years old, in business at No. 634 East Twenty-sixth Street as a jobber in tools and hardware, was descending the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway at Twenty-eighth Street, when it occurred to him suddenly how odd it was that he should be going home. His grip tightened on the hand rail and he stopped short in his tracks, his eyes fixed on the ground in pained perplexity. The crowd behind him, thrown back upon itself by this abrupt action, halted only for a moment and flowed on. Cheerful office-boys looked back at him and asked what was the answer. Stout citizens elbowed him aside without apology. But Wesley did not mind. He was asking himself why it was that the end of the day's work should invariably find him descending the stairs to the downtown platform of the Subway. Was there any reason for doing that, other than habit? He wondered why it would not be just as reasonable to cross the avenue and take an uptown train instead.
Wesley had been taking the downtown train at Twenty-eighth Street at 5:15 in the afternoon ever since there was a Subway. At Brooklyn Bridge he changed to an express and went to the end of the line. At the end of the line there was a boat which took him across the harbour. At the end of the boat ride there was a trolley car which wound its way up the hill and through streets lined with yellow-bricked, easy-payment, two-family houses, out into the open country, where it dropped him at a cross road. At the end of a ten minutes' walk there was a new house of stucco and timber, standing away from the road, its angular lines revealing mingled aspirations toward the Californian bungalow and the English Tudor. In the house lived a tall, slender, grey-haired woman who was Wesley's wife, and two young girls who were his daughters. They always came to the door when his footsteps grated on the garden path, and kissed him welcome. After dinner he went out and watered the lawn, which, after his wife and the girls, he loved most. He plied the hose deliberately, his eye alert for bald patches. Of late the lawn had not been coming on well, because of a scorching sun and the lack of rain. A quiet chat with his wife on matters of domestic economy ushered in the end of a busy day. At the end of the day there was another day just like it.
And now, motionless in the crowd, Wesley was asking whether right to the end of life this succession of days would continue. Why always the south-bound train? He was aware that there were good reasons why. One was the tall grey-haired woman and the two young girls at home who were in the habit of waiting for the sound of his footsteps on the garden path. They were his life. But apparently, too, there must be life along the uptown route of the Interborough. He wanted to run amuck, to board a north-bound train without any destination in mind, and to keep on as far as his heart desired, to the very end perhaps, to Van Cortlandt Park, where they played polo, or the Bronx, where there was a botanical museum and a zoo. Even if he went only as far as Grand Central Station, it would be an act of magnificent daring.
Wesley climbed to the street, crossed Fourth Avenue, descended to the uptown platform, and entered a train without stopping to see whether it was Broadway or Lenox Avenue. Already he was thinking of the three women at home in a remote, objective mood. They would be waiting for him, no doubt, and he was sorry, but what else could he do? He was not his own master. Under the circumstances it was a comfort to know that all three of them were women of poise, not given to making the worst of things, and with enough work on their hands to keep them from worrying overmuch.