Presently, as often happened to Lester, a lovely thing bloomed there, silent, unseen. Through the crazy, rhythmless chatter of the typewriters in the office, through the endless items on the endless bills, he heard it coming, as from a great distance, on radiant feet. It was only rhythm at first, divine, ordered rhythm, putting to flight the senseless confusion of what lay about him.
And then there glowed before him the glory of the words, the breathtaking upward lift of the first one, the sonorous cadences of the lines that followed, the majestic march of the end.
“Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from awe,
He reached a middle height, and at the stars
Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank
The army of unalterable law.”
Lester Knapp’s heart swelled, shone bright, escaped out of its misery, felt itself one with the greatness of the whole.
The words kept singing themselves in his ear … “… he looked, and sank.” “… marched, rank on rank.” “The army of unalterable law.”
The weighty, iron clang of the one-syllabled word at the end gave him a sensation of an ultimate strength somewhere. He leaned on that strength and drew a long free breath.
His lean sallow face was lighted from within, and shone. He leaned far over his desk to hide this. He tried to think of something else, to put away from him this unmerited beauty and greatness. A man who is a failure in a business-office ought not for an instant to forget his failure. The least he can do is to be conscious of his humiliation at all times.
But in spite of himself, his lips were curved in a sweet, happy smile.
Harvey Bronson glanced at him and felt irritated and aggrieved by his expression. “What call has a dead loss like Lester Knapp got to be looking so doggone satisfied with himself!” he thought.
V
That afternoon when at half-past four he stepped out on the street again, his long lean face was quite without expression. But it was not sallow. It was very white.
He walked straight before him for a step or two, stopped short and stared fixedly into the nearest show-window, one of Jim McCarthy’s achievements.
Mrs. Prouty happened to stand there too. She was looking at a two-hundred-dollar fur coat as tragically as though it were the Pearly Gates and she sinking to Gehenna. She dreamed at night about that fur coat. She wanted it so that she could think of little else. Unlike Mrs. Merritt, she had no resources of fine old Paisley shawls to fall back on.
She looked up now, saw who had come to a stop beside her, and said, with the professional cordiality of a rector’s wife, “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Knapp,” and was not at all surprised when he did not answer or notice that she was there. Lester Knapp was notoriously absentminded. It was one of his queer trying ways. He had so many. Poor Mrs. Knapp! But how brave she was about it. It was splendid to see a woman so loyal to a husband who deserved it so little. She looked sideways at him, forgetting for an instant her heartache over the coat. Mercy! What a sickly-looking man! Bent shoulders, hollow chest, ashy-gray skin … no physique at all. And the father of a family! Such men ought not to be allowed to have children.
The coat caught her eye again, with its basilisk fascination. She sighed and stepped into the store to ask to see it again, although she knew it was as far out of her reach as a diamond tiara. To handle its soft richness made her sick with desire, but she couldn’t keep away from it when she was downtown.
Her moving away startled Lester from his horrified gaze on nothingness, and he moved on with a jerky, galvanized gait like a man walking for the first time after a sickness.
He had lost his job. He had been fired. At the end of the month there would be no money at all to keep things going, not even the little they had always had.
Was it the earth he was treading, solid earth? It seemed to sway up and down under him till he was giddy. He was giddy. He was going to faint away. Oh, that would be the last disgrace. To faint away on the street because he had lost his job. The world began to whirl around before his eyes, to turn black. He caught at a tree.
For an instant his eyes were blurred, his ears rang loudly; and then with racking pains, consciousness began to come back to him. He still stood there, his arm still flung around the tree. He had not fainted.
In the pause while he fought inwardly for strength to go on, when every step seemed to plunge him more deeply into the black pit of despair, he was conscious of a steady voice, saying something in his ear—or was it inside his head? The street was quite empty. It must be in his head. How plainly he heard it—another one of those tags of poetry which haunted him. …
“But make no sojourn in thy outgoing,
For haply it may be
That when thy feet return at evening
Death shall come in with thee.”
At once it was as though strong wine had been held to his lips, as though he had drunk a great draught of vigor. His eye cleared, his heart leaped up, he started forward with a quick firm step.
“When thy feet return at evening
Death shall come in with thee.”
There was no need to despair. He was not helplessly trapped. There was a way out. A glorious way! The best way all around. The rightness of it blazed on him from every point as he hurried up the street. It meant for the children that at last he would be able to give them money, real money, just like any
