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Moths in the Arc Light
by
Bates was hurt because he had hurt her. He who had regarded life only from the standpoint of Bates, bachelor, found himself thinking through her, as though his mind had been absorbed in hers. With a shock of pain he could feel her lamenting that it was bad enough to be under the business strain all day, without being exposed to ogling in her house of glass. He wanted to protect her—from himself.
For a week he didn’t once stand by the window, even to look down at the street, twelve stories below, which he had watched as from his mountain shack a quizzical hermit might con the life of the distant valley. He missed the view, and he was glad to miss it. He was actually giving up something for somebody. He felt human again.
Though he did not stand by the window it was surprising how many times
a day he had to pass it, and how innocently he caught glimpses of the life across the way. More than once he saw her looking at him. Whenever she glanced up from work her eyes seemed drawn to his. But not flirtatiously, he believed. In the distance she seemed aloof as the small cold winter moon.
There was another day that was a whirl of craziness. Everybody wanted him at once. Telegrams crossed each other. The factory couldn’t get materials. Two stenographers quarreled, and both of them quit, and the typewriter agency from which he got his girls had no one to send him just then save extremely alien enemies who confounded typewriters with washing machines. When the office was quiet and there was only about seven more hours of work on his desk, he collapsed. His lax arms fell beside him. He panted slowly. His spinning head drooped and his eyes were blurred.
“Oh, buck up!” he growled.
He lifted himself to his feet, slapped his arms, found himself at the window. Across there she was going home. Involuntarily— looking for a greeting from his one companion in work—he threw up his arm in a wave of farewell.
She saw it. She stood considering him, her two hands up to her head as she pinned her hat. But she left the window without a sign. Suddenly he was snapping: “I’ll make you notice me! I’m not a noon-hour window flirt! I won’t stand your thinking I am!”
With a new energy of irritation he went back. Resting his eyes every quarter of an hour he sat studying a legal claim, making notes. It was eight—nine—ten. He was faint, yet not hungry. He rose. He was surprised to find himself happy. He hunted for the source of the glow, and found it. He was going to draw that frosty moon of a girl down to him.
In the morning when he came in he hastened to the window and waited till she raised her head. He waved—a quick, modest, amiable gesture. Every morning and evening after that he sent across his pleading signal. She never answered but she observed him and— well, she never pulled down the window shade.
His vacation was in July. Without quite knowing why, he did not want to go to the formal seaside hotel at which he usually spent three weeks in being polite to aunts in their nieces’ frocks, and in discovering that as a golfer he was a good small-boat sailor. He found himself heading for the Lebanon Valley, which is the valley of peace; and he discovered that yellow cream and wild blackberries and cowslips and the art of walking without panting still exist. He wore soft shirts and became tanned; he stopped worrying about the insolvency of the Downstate Interurban Company, and was even heard to laugh at the landlord’s stories.