AN EXPERIENCE
VII
AN EXPERIENCE
For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.
There was something in the event which discharged him of all obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several of those relations—father, son, brother, husband—without identifying him very satisfyingly in either.
As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another's curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no manuscript, or plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.
After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much effort as was needed to relieve one of one's discomfort; to pull at one's wilted collar and loosen the linen about one's reeking neck meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it was less suffering to suffer passively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze, decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was damper without being cooler than the air within.