At last the singer came out,accompanied by the conductor,who helped her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial auf Wiedersehen—which set Paul to wondering whether she were not an old sweetheart of his.Paul followed the carriage over to the hotel,walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the singer alighted,and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors which were opened by a Negro in a tall hat and a long coat.In the moment that the door was ajar,it seemed to Paul that he,too,entered.He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps,into the warm,lighted building,into an exotic,a tropical world of shiny,glistening surfaces and basking ease.He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the dining-room,the green bottles in buckets of ice,as he had seen them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday supplement.A quick gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence,and Paul was startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway;that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet about him;that the lights in front of the concert hall were out,and that the rain was driving in sheets between him and the orange glow of the windows above him.There it was,what be wanted—tangibly before him,like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime；as the rain beat in his face,Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night outside,looking up at it.
He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks.The end had to come some time;his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs,explanations that did not explain,hastily improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up,his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wallpaper,the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box,and over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin,and the framed motto,"Feed my Lambs,"which had been worked in red worsted by his mother,whom Paul could not remember.
Half an hour later,Paul alighted from Negley Avenue car and went slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare.It was a highly respectable street,where all the houses were exactly alike,and where businessmen of moderate means begot and reared large families of children,all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter catechism,and were interested in arithmetic;all of whom were as exactly alike as their homes,and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived.Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing.His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister.He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat,the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home.The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head.After each of these orgies of living,he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch;the loathing of respectable beds,of common food,of those house permeated by kitchen odors;a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless,colorless mass of everyday existence;a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.
The nearer he approached the house,the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all;his ugly sleeping chamber,the cold bathroom with the grimy zinc tub,the cracked mirror,the dripping spiggots;his father,at the top of the stairs,his hairy legs sticking out from his nightshirt,his feet thrust into carpet slippers.He was so much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches.Paul stopped short before the door.He felt that he could not be accosted by his father tonight;that he could not toss again on that miserable bed.He would not go in.He would tell his father that he had no carfare,and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayed all night.
Meanwhile,he was wet and cold.He went around to the back of the house and tried one of the basement windows,found it open,raised it cautiously,and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor.There he stood,holding his breath,terrified by the noise he had made;but the floor above him was silent,and there was no creak on the stairs.He found a soap-box,and carried it over to the soft ring of light that streamed from the furnace door,and sat down.He was horribly afraid of rats,so he did not try to sleep,but sat looking distrustfully at the dark,still terrified lest he might have awakened his father.In such reactions,after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar,when his senses were deadened,Paul's head was always singularly clear.Suppose his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar?Then,again,suppose his father had come down,pistol in hand,and he had cried out in time to save himself,and his father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him?Then,again,suppose a day should come when his father would remember that night,and wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand?With this last supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.
