“Well, Nancy?”
“Well—”
They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.
“Good-by darling, darling, darling!” says Ollie through lips like a marionette's.
Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again—the arms of somebody else in Oliver's body—and a cold mouth hurting her cheek—and still she cannot speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so disturbingly has gone out of the door.
XVI
Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a distinguished street by any means—there are neither plate-glass shops nor 'residences' on it—just an ordinary street of little stores and small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman car. In a good many houses the lights are out already—it is nearly eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early—only the drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, “Dr. Edwin K. Buffinton—Chiropractor,” “McMurphy and Kane's,” “The Rossiter,” with its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap.
Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.
Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together “don't, don't, don't,” in the whine of a nasty nurse.