Joyce was standing in the vestibule of _Godiva_, smoking a cigarette.
She had been there a great part of the journey; fast trains always made
her mind too busy for sitting still. She had pacified the at first
disapproving young brakeman by getting out her sketchbook and making a
quick cartoon of him.
Not for many weeks had she been so unconsideringly happy. She never
thought of trains as hurrying toward something but rather fleeing
wildly _from_. Those great eloquent machines (she hated to have to
board a train without seeing the engine first) crouched ready for
flight like huge beasts breathing panic. They were symbols of the
universal terror; she trembled with excitement to feel the thrill of
escape--escape from anything. Escape, for the moment, from Time and
Space. She wondered how any one could ever sleep or be bored in a
train. You’d think their faces would be transfigured when they got out.
She hummed to herself as she stood alone in the vestibule. Life seemed
to be beginning all over again: her mind was freshly sensitized to the
oddity of human faces, to the colour and vitality of the country, the
strong swelling curves of the hills. I am flying, flying, she chanted;
I am flying from a dream. I am a little mad. My mind is fuller than
it’ll hold: all sorts of thoughts are slopping over the brim, getting
lost because there isn’t room for them. I must let them flow faster so
I can be aware of them all. What happens to the thoughts that get spilt
before you can quite seize them? I must ask George.... I wonder which
George it will be?
Once she had startled him by giving him a book she found in a
second-hand store, _The Four Georges_. For it amused her to insist
that there were four of him: George the Husband, George the Father,
George the Publicity Man, and then George the Fourth--_her_ George, the
troubled and groping dreamer, framed in an open window....
* * * * *
Go and see Granville, said the Advertising Agent to her. He’s getting
up a booklet for the L or somebody. He might be able to use some of
these drawings of yours. And because it was urgent he had given her the
address. Her knees were quivery as she turned the bend in the corridor,
looking for his number.
It was a sultry day, the door of the little office was open. There was
a window, high up at the back of the old building, looking over the
Brooklyn Bridge. He was leaning on the sill, the smoke of his pipe
drifted outward into that hot tawny light that hangs over the East
River on summer afternoons. At first he did not seem to hear her tap on
the glass panel; then he turned, glanced at her steadily and without
surprise. As he had no idea she was coming she thought perhaps he had
mistaken her for someone he knew.
“Look here,” he said, “I want to show you something.”
She put down her folder of drawings and crossed to the sill. He leaned
there in his shirt sleeves, pointing with the stem of his pipe, as
easily as though they were old friends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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