Through the glass he watched her take the news. It seemed to him that she swayed as she got up and stood blinking at Miss Wiess.
“I hope she’s gone for good,” Butler said to himself. “I can’t be responsible for everybody out of work in this city. I’d go crazy.”
Later he came downstairs into a belt of low, stifling city heat; twice on his way home he stopped at soda fountains for cold drinks. In his apartment he locked the door, as he so often did lately, as if he were raising a barrier against all the anxiety outside. He moved about, putting away some laundry, opening bills, brushing his coat and hanging it up—for he was very neat—and singing to himself:
I can’t give you anything but love, baby,
That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby——
He was tired of the song, but he continually caught himself humming it. Or else he talked to himself, like many men who live alone.
“Now, that’s two colored shirts and two white ones. I’ll wear this one out first, because it’s almost done. Almost done… Seven, eight, and two in the wash—ten——”
Six o’clock. All the offices were out now; people hurrying out of elevators, swarming down the stairs. But the picture came to Butler tonight with a curious addition; he seemed to see someone climbing up the stairs, too, passing the throng, climbing very slowly and resting momentarily on the landings.
“Oh, what nonsense!” he thought impatiently. “She’d never do it. She was just trying to get my goat.”
But he kept on climbing up flights of stairs with her, the rhythm of the climbing as regular and persistent as the beat of fever. He grabbed his hat suddenly and went out to get dinner.
There was a storm coming; the sultry dust rose in swirls along the street. The people on the street seemed a long way removed from him in time and space. It seemed to him that they were all sad, all walking with their eyes fixed on the ground, save for a few who were walking and talking in pairs. These latter seemed absurd, with their obliviousness of the fact that they were making a show of themselves with those who were walking as it was fitting—silent and alone.
But he was glad that the restaurant where he went was full. Sometimes, when he read the newspapers a lot, he felt that he was almost the only man left with enough money to get along with; and it frightened him, because he knew pretty well that he was not much of a man and they might find it out and take his position away from him. Since he was not all right with himself in his private life, he had fallen helplessly into the clutches of the neurosis that gripped the nation, trying to lose sight of his own insufficiencies in the universal depression.
“Don’t you like your dinner?” the waitress asked.
“Yes, sure.” He began to eat self-consciously.
“It’s the heat. I just seen by the papers another woman threw herself out of a ninth-story window this afternoon.”
Butler’s fork dropped to the floor.
“Imagine a woman doing that,” she went on, as she stooped for the fork. “If I ever wanted to do that, I’d go drown myself.”
“What did you say?”
“I say I’d go drown myself. I can’t swim anyhow. But I said if——”
“No, before that—about a woman.”
“About a woman that threw herself out of a ninth-story window. I’ll get the paper.”
He tried to stop her; he couldn’t look at the paper. With trembling fingers he laid a dollar on the table and hurried out of the restaurant.
It couldn’t possibly be her, because he had seen her at four, and it was now only twenty after seven. Three hours. A news stand drifted up to him, piled with late editions. Forming the sound of “agh” in his throat, he hurried past, hurried on, into exile.
He had better look. It couldn’t be Sarah.
But he knew it was Sarah. BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED, LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH. He passed another news stand and, turning into Fifth Avenue, walked north. The rain began in large drops that sent up whiffs of dust, and Butler, looking at the crawling sidewalk, suddenly stopped, unable to go forward or to retrace his steps.
“I’ll have to get a paper,” he muttered. “Otherwise I won’t sleep.”
He walked to Madison Avenue and found a news stand; his hand felt over the stacked papers and picked up one of each; he did not look at them, but folded them under his arm. He heard the rain falling on them in crisp pats, and then more softly, as if it was shredding them away. When he reached his door, he suddenly flung the soggy bundle down a basement entrance and hurried inside. Better wait till morning.
He undressed excitedly, as if he hadn’t a minute to lose. “It’s probably not her,” he kept repeating aloud. “And if it is, what did I have to do with it? I can’t be responsible for everybody out of work in this city.” With the help of this phrase and a hot double gin, he fell into a broken sleep.
He awoke at five, after a dream which left him shaken with its reality. In the dream he was talking to Sarah Belknap again. She lay in a hammock on a porch, young once more, and with a childish wistfulness. But she knew what was going to happen to her presently—she was going to be thrown from a high place and be broken and dead. Butler wanted to help her—tears were running out of his eyes and he was wringing his hands—but there was nothing he could do now; it was too late. She did not say that it was all his fault, but her eyes, grieving silently and helplessly about what was going to happen, reproached him for not having prevented it.
The sound that had awakened him was the plop of his morning paper against the door. The resurgent dream, heartbreaking and ominous, sank back into the depths from which it came, leaving him empty; and now his consciousness began to fill up with all the miserable things that made their home there. Torn between the lost world of pity and the world of meanness where he lived, Butler sprang out of bed, opened the door and took up the paper. His eyes, blurred with sleep, ran across the columns:
BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED.
LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH.
For a moment he thought it was an illusion. The print massed solidly below the headline; the headline itself disappeared. He rubbed his eyes with one fist; then he counted the columns over, and found that two columns were touching that should have flanked the story— but, no; there it was:
BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED.
LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH.
He heard the cleaning woman moving about in the hall, and going to the door, he flung it open.
“Mrs. Thomas!”
A pale Negress with corded glasses looked up at him from her pail.
“Look at this, Mrs. Thomas!” he cried. “My eyes are bad! I’m sick! I’ve got to know! Look!”
He held the paper before her; he felt his voice quivering like a muscle: “Now, you tell me. Does it say, ‘Business Woman Leaps to Death? Right there! Look, can’t you?”
The Negress glanced at him curiously, bent her head obediently to the page.
“Indeed it does, Mr. Butler.”
“Yes?” He passed his hand across his eyes. “Now, below that. Does it say, ‘Mrs. John Summer’? Does it say, ‘Mrs. John Summer’? Look carefully now.”
Again she glanced sharply at him before looking at the paper. “Indeed it does, Mr. Butler. ‘Mrs. John Summer.’ “After a minute she added, “Man, you’re sick.”
Butler closed his door, got back into bed and lay staring at the ceiling. After a while he began repeating his formulas aloud:
“I musn’t get to thinking that I had anything to do with it, because I didn’t. She’d been offered another job, but she thought she was too good for it. What would she have done for me if she’d been in my place?”
He considered telephoning the office that he was ill, but young George Eddington was expected back any day, and he did not dare. Miss Wiess had gone on her vacation yesterday, and there was a substitute to be broken in. The substitute had not known Mrs. Summer, so there would be no discussion of what had happened.
It was a day of continuing heat, wasted unprolific heat that cradled the groans of the derrick and the roar of the electric riveters in the building going up across the street. In the heat every sound was given its full discordant value, and by early afternoon Butler was sick and dizzy. He had made up his mind to go home, and was walking restlessly about his office when the thing began to happen. He heard the clock outside his office ticking loud in the hot silence, heard the little, buzzing noise it made, passing the hour; and at the same moment he heard the sigh of pneumatic hinges, as the corridor door swung open and someone came into the outer office. Then there wasn’t a sound.
For a moment he hoped that it was someone he would have to
