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The Long Run
by
“No; as he comes back to his wife after the day’s work is done.” A new thought came to me as I looked at him. “You ought to have had one,” I added.
He laughed again. “A wife, you mean? So that there’d have been some one waiting for me even if the Muse decamped?” He went on after a pause: “I’ve a notion that the kind of woman worth coming back to wouldn’t be much more patient than the Muse. But as it happens I never tried–because, for fear they’d chuck me, I put them both out of doors together.”
He turned his head and looked past me with a queer expression at the low panelled door at my back. “Out of that very door they went–the two of ’em, on a rainy night like this: and one stopped and looked back, to see if I wasn’t going to call her–and I didn’t–and so they both went….”
III
“The Muse?” (said Merrick, refilling my glass and stooping to pat the terrier as he went back to his chair)–“well, you’ve met the Muse in the little volume of sonnets you used to like; and you’ve met the woman too, and you used to like her; though you didn’t know her when you saw her the other evening….
“No, I won’t ask you how she struck you when you talked to her: I know. She struck you like that stuff I gave you to read last night She’s conformed–I’ve conformed–the mills have caught us and ground us: ground us, oh, exceedingly small!
“But you remember what she was; and that’s the reason why I’m telling you this now….
“You may recall that after my father’s death I tried to sell the Works. I was impatient to free myself from anything that would keep me tied to New York. I don’t dislike my trade, and I’ve made, in the end, a fairly good thing of it; but industrialism was not, at that time, in the line of my tastes, and I know now that it wasn’t what I was meant for. Above all, I wanted to get away, to see new places and rub up against different ideas. I had reached a time of life–the top of the first hill, so to speak–where the distance draws one, and everything in the foreground seems tame and stale. I was sick to death of the particular set of conformities I had grown up among; sick of being a pleasant popular young man with a long line of dinners on my list, and the dead certainty of meeting the same people, or their prototypes, at all of them.
“Well–I failed to sell the Works, and that increased my discontent. I went through moods of cold unsociability, alternating with sudden flushes of curiosity, when I gloated over stray scraps of talk overheard in railway stations and omnibuses, when strange faces that I passed in the street tantalized me with fugitive promises. I wanted to be among things that were unexpected and unknown; and it seemed to me that nobody about me understood in the least what I felt, but that somewhere just out of reach there was some one who did, and whom I must find or despair….
“It was just then that, one evening, I saw Mrs. Trant for the first time.
“Yes: I know–you wonder what I mean. I’d known her, of course, as a girl; I’d met her several times after her marriage; and I’d lately been thrown with her, quite intimately and continuously, during a succession of country-house visits. But I had never, as it happened, really seen her….
“It was at a dinner at the Cumnors’; and there she was, in front of the very tapestry we saw her against the other evening, with people about her, and her face turned from me, and nothing noticeable or different in her dress or manner; and suddenly she stood out for me against the familiar unimportant background, and for the first time I saw a meaning in the stale phrase of a picture’s walking out of its frame. For, after all, most people are just that to us: pictures, furniture, the inanimate accessories of our little island-area of sensation. And then sometimes one of these graven images moves and throws out live filaments toward us, and the line they make draws us across the world as the moon-track seems to draw a boat across the water….