They sat in an almost empty downtown subway train, their bundles about them, the stops called by the guard. They both hunched a little, when the stop nearest Lot & Company’s was called, but did not speak. Farther and farther downtown—the last passengers leaving. It was the hour the crowds move upward. Strange deep moments for Bellair—moments in which this was more than Davy sitting beside him. This was Boy—Davy Acton but the symbol of a great need.
6
A hurried walk to the east with their bundles to a quarter that Bellair had not known before, past the great stretches of massive buildings which the day had abandoned, to a low [Pg 294]and older sort that carried on a night-life of their own, where children cried, halls were narrow, and the warmth became heaviness.... A plump little woman who had not lost hope (she did not see the stranger at first because the boy filled her eyes); a dark, second-floor hall, a little room with a lamp and a red table-cloth; a door at either end, and opposite the door they entered, one window.... How bewildered she was with the bundles, desiring to prepare something for them right away. Indeed, it would have helped her to be active in their behalf.... Bellair was smiling.
Davy told part and Bellair part. Presently all was forgotten in the presence of the calamity that had befallen. It was slow to change her mind about Lot & Company. Davy had impressed upon her for two years the lessons administered there. Not to be changed in a moment, this estimate—that before all poverty, before all need, and above all hope, a place at Lot & Company’s was a permanent place, “if a fellow did his part”—that Lot & Company was an honest house. Davy told of the paper Mr. Bellair had forced from them, and Bellair touched upon the life he had led in those halls, just a little and with haste. To help him to speak authoritatively, he added that he would help Davy to another position.... Then he looked around, and glanced at his watch. There was a small anteroom which they occupied.... Bellair had asked about the other door. “An empty room,” Mrs. Acton told him.
Of course it was for rent. On the spur of the moment, he declared he would take it, asked her to rent it for him, insisting on paying in advance. He would come in the morning—have his things brought later.... No, Davy was not to look for a position to-morrow. Davy must devote himself to him to-morrow. He left them happily. The mother called after him in hopeless excitement that he had left enough to rent the room all summer.
He did not show the Lot & Company paper to Bessie; in fact, he never showed it but once, and that was to Davy Acton immediately after it was obtained. He had thought of taking it across the street to show the landlady, but perhaps that would merely have added to her living confusion. It had been most important for Davy, but to reopen the subject with Bessie, his manner might have touched an “I-told-you-so” indelicacy.... She was happy when he found her that night. Clothes in quantity were already begun—the next ten forenoons at the dressmakers’. She thanked him charmingly, studied him with a quizzical expression that invariably haunted him afterward.
Bellair could never tell just what would do it, but occasionally through an hour’s chat, he would say something, just enough above her comprehension to challenge her. Once opened, her faculties were not slow, but the life she had chosen, held her mind so consistently to its common level that the habit was formed. Mainly when he spoke above her, she ceased to listen, ignored him; but when something he said just hit home, she praised him with animation, as one would a sudden gleam of unexpected intelligence on the part of a child. It became one of his most remarkable realisations that a man who has anything worth while to say must come down to say it, just as certainly as he must go up to get it.
The sense of adventure with her did not return this night, though she had seemed to accept him differently from before; as if he belonged, part of her impediment mainly, but at moments of surpassing value, like a machine that one packs a day for a half-hour’s work it may do. His money had purchased something.
Bellair sat in the dark of his room, feet on the window-sill, hat still on, at two o’clock, his last night in the hotel where he never had belonged. He was very tired and longed for sleep; and yet there was a different longing for sleep than that which belonged to physical weariness. It had to do with his hunger for the Faraway Woman. This startled him. What was that refreshing mystery afterward? Did he go to her in sleep—did she come? Why was it that the burden of parting invariably increased through the long days? It had been so on the ship. In the morning he could live; then the hours settled down, until it seemed he must leap back to her; the ship’s ever increasing distance at times literally twisting his faculties until he was dazed with pain.
He had not thought of this before. Why was it always when the pressure increased and the ardour mounted—that he longed for sleep?... Nothing came to his work-a-day brain from the nights. His dreams were of lesser matters—and yet, something within pulled him to unconsciousness like the rush of a tide. It gave him a sense of the vastness, a glimpse of the inner beauty of life.