Husband and wife -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
But a new decision had come to me while I strove to eat, and on making
my way up to daylight again I set out to put it into operation. Reaching
Broadway, I drifted southward till I came on one of the large
establishments for ready-to-wear clothing which I knew were to be found
in the neighborhood. On entering the vast emporium I adopted a new
manner. No longer shrinking as I had shrunk since waking to the fact of
my misfortune, I walked briskly up to the first man whom I saw at a
distance eying me haughtily.
"See here," I said, in a good-mixer voice, "I’ve just got back from
France, and look at the way they’ve rigged me out. Was in hospital
there, after I’d got all kinds of shock, and this is the best I could do
without coming back to God’s country in a French uniform. Now I want to
see the best you can do and how pretty you can make me look."
On emerging I was, therefore, passable to glance at, and after a
hair-cut and a shave I was no longer afraid to see my reflection in a
glass. I had, too, another inspiration. It occurred to me that I might
startle myself into finding the way home. Calling a taxi, I drove
boldly with my bags to the Grand Central Terminal, trusting to the inner
voice to tell me the place for which to buy my ticket. With half the
instinct of a horse my feet might take the road to the stable of their
own accord.
I recognized the station and all its ways—the red-capped colored men,
the white-capped white ones, the subterranean shops, the gaunt marble
spaces. I recognized the windows at which I must have taken tickets
hundreds of times, and played my comedy by walking up first to one and
then to another, waiting for the inner voice to give me a tip. I found
nothing but blank silence. The world was all before me where to
choose—only Providence was not my guide. Or if Providence was my guide,
His thread of flame was not visible.
I suppose that in that station that afternoon I was like any other man
intending to take a train. At least I could say that. So pleased was I
with myself that more than once during the two hours of my test I went
into the station lavatory just for the sake of seeing myself in the
glass. It was a long glass, capable of reflecting some dozen men at a
time, and I was as like the rest as one elephant is like another. Oh,
that relief! Oh, that joy! Not to be a freak or a nut made up for the
moment for my sense of homelessness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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