“All for the best, you know—all for the best, we're all of us sure of that. Love doesn't last—doesn't last—doesn't last—as good fish in the sea as ever were caught out of it—nobody's heart could break at twenty-five. You think you're happy and proud—you think you're lovers and friends—but that doesn't last, doesn't last, doesn't last—none of it lasts at all.”
If he only weren't so tired he could do something. But instead he feels only as a man feels who has been drinking all day in the instant before complete intoxication—his body is as distinct from him as if it were walking behind him with his shadow—all the colors he sees seem exaggeratedly dull or brilliant, he has little sense of distance, the next street corner may be a block or a mile away, it is all the same, his feet will take him there, his feet that keep going mechanically, one after the other, one after the other, as if they marched to a clock. There is no feeling in him that stays long enough to be called by any definite word—there is only a streaming parade of sensations like blind men running through mist, shapes that come out of fog and sink back to it, without sight, without number, without name, with only continual hurry of feet to tell of their presence.
A slinky man comes up at his elbow and starts to talk out of the side of his mouth.
“Say, mister—”
“Oh, go to hell!” and the man fades away again, without even looking startled, to mutter “Well, you needn' be so damn peeved about it—I'll say you needn' be so damn peeved—whatcha think you are, anyhow—Marathon Mike?” as Oliver's feet take Oliver swiftly away from him.
Nancy. The first time he ever kissed her when it was question and answer with neither of them sure. And then getting surer and surer—and then when they kissed. Never touching Nancy, never. Never seeing her again never any more. That song the Glee Club used to harmonize over—what was it?
We won't go there any more,
We won't go there any more
We won't go there any mo-o-ore——
He lifts his eyes for a moment. A large blue policeman is looking at him fixedly from the other side of the street, his nightstick twirling in a very prepared sort of way. For an instant Oliver sees himself going over and asking that policeman for his helmet to play with. That would be the cream of the jest—the very cream—to end the evening in combat with a large blue policeman after having all you wanted in life break under you suddenly like new ice.
He had been walking for a very long time. He ought to go to bed. He had a hotel somewhere if he could only think where. The policeman might know.
The policeman saw a young man with staring eyes coming toward him, remarked “hophead” internally and played with his nightstick a little more. The nearer Oliver came the larger and more unsympathetic the policeman seemed to him. Still, if you couldn't remember what your hotel was yourself it was only sensible to ask guidance on the question. His mind reacted suddenly toward grotesqueness. One had to be very polite to large policemen. The politeness should, naturally, increase as the square of the policeman.