Suddenly he did not want to know who had come into the next room; yet he was irresistibly impelled to find out. In one corner of his door was the transparent spot through which almost the whole outer office was visible, but now Butler discovered a minute scrape in the painted letter B of his name. Through it he could see the floor, and the dark little hall giving on the corridor where chairs for visitors were placed. Clamping his teeth together, he put his eye to this crack.
Tucked beneath the chair and criss-crossing the chair legs were a pair of woman’s tan shoes. The sole of one shoe turned toward him, and he made out a gray oval in the center. Breathlessly he moved until his eye was at the other hole. There was something sitting in the chair—rather, slumped in it, as if it had been put down there and had immediately crumpled. A dangling hand and what he could see of the face were of a diaphanous pallor, and the whole attitude was one of awful stillness. With a little, choking noise, Butler sprang back from the door.
III
It was several minutes before he was able to move from the wall against which he had backed himself. It was as if there was a sort of bargain between himself and the thing outside that, by staying perfectly still, playing dead, he was safe. But there was not a sound, not a movement, in the outer office and, after a while, a surface rationality asserted itself. He told himself that this was all the result of strain; that the frightening part of it was not the actual phantom, but that his nerves should be in a state to conjure it up. But he drew little consolation from this; if the terror existed, it was immaterial whether it originated in another world or in the dark places of his own mind.
He began making a systematic effort to pull himself together. In the first place, the noises outside were continuing as before; his office, his own body, were tangible as ever, and people were passing in the street; Miss Rousseau would answer the pressure of a bell which was within reach of his hand. Secondly, there could, conceivably, be some natural explanation of the thing outside; he had not been able to see the whole face and he could not be absolutely sure that it was what he thought it was; any number of people had cardboard in their shoes these days. In the third place—and he astonished himself at the coolness with which he deliberated this—if the matter reached an intolerable point, one could always take one’s own life, thus automatically destroying whatever horror had come into it.
It was this last thought that caused him to go to the window and look down at the people passing below. He stood there for a minute, never quite turning his back on the door, and watched the people passing and the workmen on the steel scaffolding over the way. His heart tried to go out to them, and he struggled desperately to assert the common humanity he shared with them, the joys and griefs they had together, but it was impossible. Fundamentally, he despised them and—that is to say, he could make no connection with them, while his connection with the thing in the next room was manifest and profound.
Suddenly Butler wrenched himself around, walked to the door and put his eye to the aperture. The figure had moved, had slumped farther sideways, and the blood rushed up, tingling, into his head as he saw that the face, now turned sightlessly toward him, was the face of Sarah Summer.
He found himself sitting at his desk, bent over it in a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
How long he had sat there he did not know, when suddenly he heard a noise, and recognized it, after a moment, as the swishing sigh of the hinges on the outer door. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was four o’clock.
He rang for Miss Rousseau, and when she came, asked: “Is anyone waiting to see me?”
“No, Mr. Butler.”
“Was there someone earlier?”
“No, sir.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve been in the filing room, but the door was open; if anyone had come in I’d surely have heard them.”
“All right. Thanks.”
As she went out, he looked after her through the open door. The chair was now empty.
IV
He took a strong bromide that night and got himself some sleep, and his reasoning reassumed, with dawn, a certain supremacy. He went to the office, not because he felt up to it but because he knew he would never be able to go again. He was glad he had gone, when Mr. George Eddington came in late in the morning.
“Man, you look sick,” Eddington said.
“It’s only the heat.”
“Better see a doctor.”
“I will,” said Butler, “but it’s nothing.”
“What’s happened here the last two weeks?”
BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED.
LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH.
“Very little,” he said aloud. “We’ve moved out of the Two Hundredth Street warehouse.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Your brother’s.”
“I’d rather you’d refer all such things to me for confirmation. We may have to move in again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Where’s Miss Wiess?”
“Her mother’s sick; I gave her three days’ vacation.”
“And Mrs. Summer’s left…Oh, by the way, I want to speak to you about that later.”
Butler’s heart constricted suddenly. What did he mean? Had he seen the papers?
“I’m sorry Miss Wiess is gone,” said Eddington. “I wanted to go over all this last month’s business.”
“I’ll take the books home tonight,” Butler offered conciliatingly. “I can be ready to go over them with you tomorrow.”
“Please do.”
Eddington left shortly. Butler found something in his tone disquieting—the shortness of a man trying to prepare one for even harsher eventualities. There was so much to worry about now, Butler thought; it hardly seemed worth while worrying about so many things. He sat at his desk in a sort of despairing apathy, realizing at lunchtime that he had done nothing all morning.
At 1:30, on his way back to the office, a chill wave of terror washed suddenly over him. He walked blindly as the remorseless sun led him along a path of flat black and hostile gray. The clamor of a fire engine plunging through the quivering air had the ominous portent of things in a nightmare. He found that someone had closed his windows, and he flung them open to the sweltering machines across the street. Then, with an open ledger before him, he sat down to wait.
Half an hour passed. Butler heard Miss Rousseau’s muffled typewriter in the outer office, and her voice making a connection on the phone. He heard the clock move over two o’clock with a rasping sound; almost immediately he looked at his watch and found it was 2:30. He wiped his forehead, finding how cold sweat can be. Minutes passed. Then he started bolt upright as he heard the outer door open and close slowly, with a sigh.
Simultaneously he felt something change in the day outside—as if it had turned away from him, foreshortening and receding like a view from a train. He got up with difficulty, walked to the door and peered through the transparent place into the outer office.
She was there; her form cut the shadow of the corner; he knew the line of her body under her dress. She was waiting to see if he could give her a job, so that she could keep herself, and her son might not have to give up his ambitions.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing. Come back next week. Between three and four.”
“I’ll come back.”
With a struggle that seemed to draw his last reserve of strength up from his shoes, Butler got himself under control and picked up the phone. Now he would see—he would see.
“Miss Rousseau.”
“Yes, Mr. Butler.”
“If there’s anyone waiting to see me, please send them in.”
“There’s no one waiting to see you, Mr. Butler. There’s——”
Uttering a choked sound, he hung up the phone and walked to the door and flung it open.
It was no use; she was there, clearly discernible, distinct and vivid as in life. And as he looked, she rose slowly, her dark garments falling about her like cerements—arose and regarded him with a wan smile, as if, at last and too late, he was going to help her. He took a step backward.
Now she came toward him slowly, until he could see the lines in her face, the wisps of gray-gold hair under her hat.
With a broken cry, he sprang backward so that the door slammed. Simultaneously he knew, with a last fragment of himself, that there was something wrong in the very nature of the logic that had brought him to this point, but it was too late now. He ran across the office like a frightened cat, and with a sort of welcome apprehension of nothingness, stepped out into the dark air beyond his window. Even had he grasped the lest fact that he sought for—the fact that the cleaning woman who had read him the newspaper could neither read nor write—it was too late for it to affect him. He was already too much engrossed in death to connect it with anything or to think
