FOR THE NEXT three weeks Amy had to deliver her lectures, to chat pleasantly with the hundreds of people who were introduced to her and answer their questions politely and with intelligence, while it seemed to her that nothing was important except what had happened to her that afternoon at Vine Falls.
While she was staying in Illinois for the two lectures she was giving there, she was delighted to get a telephone call from Lou, who wanted to tell her that all arrangements about the apartment were now completed and that she could move in whenever she liked.
“Seen any more pictures?” inquired Lou, when they had finished talking about practical details.
“No. I’ve been trying to, but they won’t come.”
“How do you mean—trying to?”
“Lying in the dark with my eyes shut. But it’s no use. I suppose you haven’t heard anything?”
“Not a thing. If I do, I’ll call you up at once. There doesn’t seem anything more to say, does there? I’ll see you at the apartment, then, on the seventeenth. Take care of yourself, honey,” and she rang off.
The affectionate little name cheered Amy, who was feeling lonelier than usual because she was bored with lecturing, with the crowds and long railway trips, and only wanted to get to New York and settle into the apartment and wait for Lou’s visit. She was also irritated because the unsettled life she was leading prevented her from starting her new story, which she could feel growing in her mind, and which was almost ready to be put into words. She promised herself that she would begin it on her first evening in the apartment, and in spite of her disturbed and unhappy state of mind she looked forward to doing so.
The lectures, the parties, the long railway journeys, went on. She played her part in them docilely, like the good child she had promised her mother she would try to be, but she only longed for the times late at night when she was alone, and could lie awake in her Pullman sleeper and begin to dream. Outside, America went past in the darkness. Behind the train lay the cold hills of Vermont, and it was thundering towards the rich woods of the Carolinas. Amy played the old train-game of wondering how near, or how far, the train-traveller is from the person loved best in the world. Now the train descends a long curve; I am farther away from him. Now it is climbing a hill; perhaps I am half a mile nearer. But then she would suddenly remember in the middle of the game that she did not know where he was, and that he was in danger. He was in danger. The thought was always at the back of her mind, a warning whisper. Danger. The train thundered slowly through the night, and she fell asleep.
The apartment was in a shabby brownstone house in a street that was quiet, for New York. Its windows looked across roofs to a wide avenue where traffic hummed and roared, and neon lights shone with their insanely steady glare. Amy liked to sit at the living-room window in the twilight and silence, watching the glow that came up from the avenue as if from a witch’s cauldron. When she sat there, listening and dreaming, she thought of her tower over Hyde Park in London and experienced the same feeling of loneliness and power. A picture-house on the avenue had revived The Soldier of Misfortune in the slack summer season, and her own name shone high above the dark roofs in scarlet fire. But it was not possible for her to believe that that was her name, the name of the girl who sat here in the dusk, reading it over and over again until her eyes were dazzled. It was the name of someone who did not seem real, and Amy could feel no excitement about it.
She had started her new story, but it was not yet Beginning to Run. She was enjoying the writing of it, because she always enjoyed writing, but she could not lose herself in it as she usually lost herself in a story. For the first time since she had been a child writing The Wolf of Leningrad at Highbury Walk, she could not give her mind utterly to her writing. The deep current of her thoughts turned steadily and persistently to the young American who was in danger. Her thoughts of him were not ordinary thoughts, but resembled dreams or moods, influencing everything she did and colouring all her everyday thoughts as if with a strange dye. I am a different person, she thought, over and over again during her long, lonely day. It’s as if I were under a spell or something.
She had plenty of time to write her new story, for her only daily visitor was a coloured girl named Myrtle, who cleaned the flat for Boone and his wife, and had been taken on by their tenant with the flat. Myrtle only came in for two hours in the morning and for an hour at night in order to prepare the supper. In her first week at the flat Amy had had one or two callers; people whom her American agent thought might amuse her or be useful to her. They were electrically lively New Yorkers, capable of amusing anyone who was not already dead on their feet, but it is well known that when someone is under a spell, nothing but the counter-spell will free them. These people did not happen to have the counter-spell; and therefore Amy had no use for them. They found her nice but dull, and having decided that she wanted to be left alone to work, they did not call or telephone again.
“The States don’t seem to have stimulated the little Lee much,” said Christopher Humfriss discontentedly, handing Jeremy Aubrett a letter from their New York representative. “Apparently all she does is to sit in a room in the Village and write. That’s all she does in London.”
“I think it was Montaigne (or was it Pascal?) who said that all man’s misfortunes arise from his inability to do just that one thing,” observed Mr. Aubrett. “How I wish some of our other writers would follow her example!”
Sometimes Amy explored New York. She went to all the places that were utterly unlike London: walked down Fifth Avenue, went out to Coney Island (where the noise and glare and smells stunned her), or sat in Childs (the New York equivalent of Lyons) eating sundaes and watching the people. But even in Childs, where she felt more at home than in any other part of New York, she could not fall into that daydream, that fruitful trance, which comes to some writers when they sit silent and observant in a crowd, and which until now had never failed to come to her. When she awoke in the small hours, and lay staring into the dim summer dawn and breathing the cool wind sweeping through the city from the sea, she was still aware of anxiety at the back of her mind, a feeling of trouble and pain, like nothing so much as a motionless dark cloud. It was a dreary, heavy, waiting feeling. She explained it by admitting her impatience to see Lou again, and hear her talk about Bob.
In this lonely dreamlike time, alone save for the haunting presence of a young man in danger, Amy thought more about her own feelings and character than she had ever done before, and came to the natural conclusion that she was a very queer person indeed. One night she made a list of the ordinary things she did not like, and also a list of the things she had never done, and to her amazement it covered two sheets of notepaper. She sat staring at it for a long time, feeling rather frightened, and her dismay increased when, her thoughts turning to Bob as an escape from their own uneasiness, she suddenly realized how very unusual were her feelings about him. I’m very queer, there’s no doubt about that, she decided, standing up at last and crumpling the paper with a sigh. Perhaps I’m going mad? Thank goodness Lou will be here the day after to-morrow, and then I can talk to her about Bob and she’ll make me feel he’s a real person again, not a kind of dream. But I must be a very strange person, to feel like this about someone I’ve only seen once when they were a little boy.
That night was hot, and she slept badly because she was disturbed by the crying of some children in a tenement house across the road who could not rest for the heat. She awoke at six o’clock from a troubled slumber and after lying for a little while listening to the morning noises in the street, she got out of bed and went across to the window and leaned out into the air of early day.
At once she knew that it was going to be very hot. Heat came up from the sidewalks and off the roofs as if the stone and metal were burning, and the sky was already white, as if the cool blue of the night had all been scorched away. She stared down dazedly into the street, yawning and closing her heavy eyes for a moment. She felt as if she had not been to sleep at all. In the very hot weather, day and night seem to be one, undivided by the beautiful coolness of dawn and evening. Heat binds them helpless in a long period of time for which no name had yet been found, and everyone who works and suffers in the heat feels this mysterious suspension of ordinary hours. To-day, Amy knew, was going to be one of these unnamed, weary spells. She yawned again and drew in her head.
It was too hot to go out. She had a shower, and settled down after breakfast to write, while Myrtle moved about the flat, cleaning and tidying and sometimes glancing at Amy, sitting at the table, writing. Amy found Myrtle romantic, for was not Myrtle black? and the very tones of her voice were unfamiliar, as if a glossy cat should begin to talk. Just because she found Myrtle so romantic, she found it even more difficult to talk to her than she did to most people, and so she kept up a grave polite way with her which impressed Myrtle but also rather awed her. She saw Amy as a tiny scribbling witch with never a dark hair out of place on the hottest day, who moved lightly about in Mexican sandals small as a child’s and owned a cupboardful of wonderful clothes at which she seldom troubled to look. But she liked the way Amy spoke to her; the natural graces and good manners of the negro, which spring from a poet’s heart, found their echo in Amy’s frequent “pleases” and “would you minds,” and Myrtle told the sister with whom she roomed in Harlem that Miss Lee surely had lovely English manners.
Myrtle walked about in white shoes with high heels and a white skirt and frilled pale pink blouse, washing the dishes and sometimes humming to herself, and Amy sat writing away for dear life, never lifting her head, sometimes stretching out her aching wrist to rest it, in her old childish habit, sometimes groping for the glass of ice water that always stood beside her on the table and taking a sip at it while she read through a few lines, then settling to write again.
Two hours passed. Then Myrtle, pausing at the door with her white straw hat swinging in her dark hand, said softly:
“Miss Lee, it’s all cleaned up now. Ah’m gwine.”
Amy nodded, without looking up.
“Good morning, Miss Lee. Sure is going to be hot!” and Myrtle went out, quietly shutting the door after her.
Amy wrote on. The ice-box, turned full on to freeze the ice-cream Myrtle had made for her lunch, hummed distinctly in the stillness. A shrill roar which made the air seem hotter came across from the avenue, but the street below was drowsily hushed in the noonday heat, and in the apartment was silence, made more silent by the tiny domestic sounds threading through it. Amy forgot the ice cream, and ate two thickly buttered slices of rye bread and two tomatoes and drank a glass of milk for her lunch, took another shower (absently, because the story was unfolding itself in her head all the time she stood under the spray of water) and then went back to her writing. Vaguely she felt glad that it was so hot, and that the flat and the streets outside, quivering with heat haze, were caught in this unnamed, timeless period; it was a wonderful day for writing! With her nerves slightly on edge from sleeplessness, and this hot, hushed silence all about her, she could write as if there were no pen, no symbols, between the paper and her thought. For the story was “Beginning to Run” at last, and the pen raced, and Amy’s bare ankles were twisted uncomfortably round the legs of her chair and a piece of hair had come loose from the mass coiled on the top of her head for coolness, and her fingers were damp and aching with their grip on the pen. For the first time since that afternoon at Vine Falls, she had forgotten everything except her story, and she was happy.
It was called The Tower of the Wicked. It began with the brother and sister, waiting for their train in the old Swiss town asleep in the noonday heat. They strolled about the deserted squares and peered into the cool gloom of old churches to fill up time while they waited, and then, on the outskirts of the town near the bridge across the rushing mountain river, they found a tall old tower of crumbling brown stone, with one window looking away towards the mountains, and the brother pulled the bell that hung on the rusty chain outside the weed-grown door. …
It was an exciting beginning; Amy had not enjoyed writing a story so much since China Walk, her own favourite among her books. The hours flew by, and at five o’clock she made some tea and absently drank it, filling her mouth with bread and jam while she read through what she had written and finally setting the cup down on the clean sheets of paper where it made a moist ring. She pushed the cup aside and settled to write again.
It was a long time later (but she did not know how long, for she had been unconscious of time) that a sound, an irritating and familiar sound, broke through the mist of imagination that was shutting her away from the world. The noise must have been going on for some minutes, but she would not let it come in; she would not listen to it, nor realize what it was, nor even lift her eyes from the paper in front of her. Then it stopped, and she thought thankfully: that’s all right. But a minute later it came again, steady and persistent, cutting through the silence in the hot room, coming past the people in her mind to her ears. She leaned back, flinging down her pen, and looked angrily towards the door of the apartment.
Someone was ringing the bell.
She waited a moment, but the noise went on, so she got up, muttering crossly, and walked across to the door and flung it open.