The Sinful Ones

Chapter Two The Stopped Clock

Carr took the brass-edged steps three at a time, crossed the lobby, pushed hurriedly through the revolving door which always made him feel like a squirrel in a wheel. He joined the crowd streaming toward Michigan Boulevard.

Street lights were beginning to supplement the canyoned twilight. Newsboys were shouting. Bus stops and islands of dubious safety were crowded, likewise the stairways leading to the long El platforms. From the wide doorways of multi-storage garages, cars were edging forward by stages, bluffing their way into the thick traffic. Other cars were being honked at while they paused to pick up riders. Lone pedestrians darted between bumpers in a way that would have made everyone flinch in a less punch-drunk city than Chicago.

It was wonderful to lose yourself to the rush-hour rhythm, Carr felt, to get away from General Employment, and to be where people were people, and not just an assortment of job capacities, salary levels, and letters of reference. Of course Marcia was going to revive that distressing job question, apply it to him directly—but not for a couple of hours, thank God!

Preoccupation with people considered solely as clients of General Employment must be what was wrong with him, Carr decided. That must be the explanation of his fit of nerves this afternoon. For so long he had thought of people as mere human raw material, as just something that went with application blanks and it would be a lot more convenient if they were shipped in boxes—for so long had this attitude been pounded into him, month after boring month, that now people were having their revenge on him, by acting woodenly toward him, as if he didn’t exist.

Carr chuckled. The dumpy man’s psychosis had been an odd one. He’d read about cases where insane people perform some action over and over again, meaninglessly—even up to complicated dramatic interludes, complete with words and gestures. But you’d think such interludes would revolve around some situation of greater tragic potentialities than merely applying for a job.

Still, when you came to think of it, what situation has greater tragic potentialities than the attempt to get a job?

He reached Michigan Boulevard. The wall of empty space on the other side, fronting the wall of buildings on this, gave a lift to his spirits. A fringe of restless tress hinted at the lake beyond. The Art Institute traced a classic pattern against the stone-gray sky. Here the air still seemed to carry a trace of freshness from this morning’s rain. As he turned north, stepping out briskly, he began to think of Marcia, but after a bit his attention was diverted to a small man walking a little way ahead of him at an equally fast pace.

Carr’s legs were considerably longer, but the small man had a peculiar skip to his stride. His movements gave the impression of elusiveness; he was constantly weaving, seeking the open channels in the crowd. His dark hair was long and untidy.

Carr felt one of those surges of curiosity that an unknown figure sometimes evokes. He was tempted to increase his pace so that he could get a look at the stranger’s face.

At that moment the small man whirled around. Carr stopped. The small man peered at him through horn-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses. Then what seemed to be an expression of extreme horror crossed the stranger’s face. For a moment he crouched as if paralyzed. Then, all in a rush, he turned and darted away, dancing past people, scurrying from side to side, finally whisking out of site around the next corner, like a puppet jerked offstage.

Car felt like laughing wildly. The frightened girl ha written, “But the small dark man with glasses is your friend.” He certainly hadn’t acted that way!

Someone bumped into Carr from behind and he darted forward—half nervous reaction, half belated intention to pursue the small dark man. But after a dozen or so hurtling paces it occurred to him that he was making himself look ridiculous, and in any case he could hardly overcome the fellow’s head-start.

It was as if the governor of a machine, temporarily out of order, had begun to function again. He fell back into his former not conspicuously rapid gait. He was back in the rush-hour rhythm.

He looked down the next cross-street. The small dark man was nowhere in sight. He might very well be three blocks away by now, the way he’d been going.

Carr smiled. It occurred to him that he really had no good reason to believe that this was the frightened girl’s small dark man. After all—arresting thought!—there must be thousands, tens of thousands of small dark men with glasses in the world.

But he found he couldn’t laugh off the incident quite that easily. It had reawakened that same mood that the frightened girl had evoked in him this afternoon—a mood of uneasiness and frustrated excitement. Carr’s memory kept picturing the face of the frightened girl.

He pictured her as a college girl, the sort who would cut classes in order to sit on the brink of a fountain and argue very seriously with some young man about the meaning of art. With pencil smudges on her cheeks. The picture fitted, all right. Only consider the howling naïveté of her wondering whether she had “awakened” him.

And yet even that question might cut a lot deeper than you’d think. Wasn’t there a sense in which he actually was “unawakened?”—a person who’d dodged life, who’d never been truly comfortable with any job or any woman—except Marcia, he reminded himself hurriedly. He’d always had that sense of a vastly richer and more vivid existence just out of reach.

For that matter, didn’t most people live their lives without every really “awakening”—as dull as worms, as mechanical as insects, their thoughts spoon-fed to them by newspaper and radio? Couldn’t robots perform the much over-rated “business of living” just as well?

Certainly this afternoon’s events had been of a sort to disturb the imagination most peculiarly. He couldn’t off-hand think of a single satisfactory explanation for the frightened girl’s actions: insanity, neurosis, or some actual danger. Or perhaps a joke?

No, there’d been something undeniably sinister about the wall-eyed blonde, and something in her attitude toward the frightened girl suggestive of a morbid spiritual tyranny. Carr flushed, remembering the slap.

And then those encounters with the dumpy man and the small dark man coming so pat, the latter just as predicted. Carr had the uneasy conviction that he had blundered somehow into a vast shadowy web.

He had reached the Michigan Avenue bridge. In the dusk the Chicago River was a dark, matte floor. He could sense the fine sprinkling of soot that filmed the ripples.

He noticed an odd black motor-barge approaching the bridge. A small, clumsy looking vessel with a long low cabin and a squat stack.

But it was the bargeman who was the most impressive. He was a man of gigantic stature, big-framed. His face was big-jawed, deep-eyed, a fighter’s, but above it rose a great white forehead. His clothes were rough and black, yet Carr fancied that there was about him an air of intellectual power. In his right hand, like a pike, he carried a wicked-looking boathook with a thick shaft almost twice as long as himself.

As the barge neared the bridge he slowly lifted his head and fixed on Carr a gaze so intense, so speculative, so meaningful, that Carr almost jerked back from the rail.

He was still looking at Car, his face a half-squared white oval against the black of his garments and the deck, as the barge floated on under the bridge.

All the way home, over the big windy bridge, between the gleaming white and yellow-gray pylons of the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, through the dark, gay streets of the near North Side and up to the very steps of the old brownstone house in which he rented a room, Carr tried to discern the outlines of the web in which he seemed to have become entangled. He was quite unsuccessful, and as for a spider, there was not even the shadow of one. What possible linkage could there be between a frightened girl, an unbalanced magnetic inspector, a strange who fled at the sight of you, and perhaps a gargantuan bargeman?

The hallway was musty and dim. He felt in his pigeon-hole, but there was no mail. He hurried up the ornately balustraded stairs, relic of the opulent days of the 1890’s. On the stairs it was darker. A small stained-glass window, mostly patches of dark red and purple, gave the only light.

Just as he reached the turn, he thought he saw himself coming toward himself in the gloom.

The illusion lasted only a moment. Then he recognized the figure for his reflection in the huge mirror, misty, time-streaked and speckled, that occupied most of the wall space of the landing. It had happened to him before.

But still he stood there, staring at the dark-engulfed image of a tall, rather slightly-built man with light hair and small, regular features. A trivial experience had taken on a new meaning, had caused a crystallization of emotion and thought.

There he was—Carr Mackay. And all around him was an unknown universe. And just want, in the universe, did Carr Mackay mean or matter? What was the real significance of the routine, the dark rhythm, that was rushing him through life at an ever-hastening pace toward a grave somewhere? Did it have any significance—that is, any significance a man could accept or endure—especially when any break in the rhythm, like this afternoon’s events, could make it seem so dead and purposeless, an endless marching and counter-marching of marionettes?

He ran blindly past the reflection up the stairs.

In the hall above it was darker still. A bulb had burned out and not been replaced. He felt his way down the corridor and opened the door of his own room.

It was high-ceilinged and comfortable, with rich old woodwork that countless layers of cheap paint couldn’t quite obliterate, and there was an old brass bed with rods and knobs like a fancy birdcage. Starting in at once to change his clothes, Carr tried to let the place take him and cradle him in its suggestion of the familiar and of his life with Marcia and her crowd, make him forget that lost Carr Mackay down there in the mirror. There were his golf clubs in the corner, the books on sailing, the case of poker chips on the mantelpiece, the box for shirt studs with the theater program beside it, and the sleek military hairbrushes Marcia had given him. But tonight they seemed as arbitrary and poignantly useless an assortment of objects as those placed in an old Egyptian grave, to accompany their owner on his long trek through the underworld.

They were not as alive, even, as the two dusty books on metaphysics he had bought in college and never waded more than a quarter through, or the little plaster plaque of the masks of comedy and tragedy presented fifteen years ago to the members of the college dramatic association, or the long-unopened box of chessmen, or the tarnished silver half-pint flask.

He slung his brown suit on a hanger, took it in the closet, and reached down his blue suit, still in its wrapper from the cleaner’s.

There in the gloom he seemed again to see the face of the frightened girl. His hand holding the weighted hanger stopped halfway down from the rack. He could make out the serious, hunted eyes, the thin features, the nervous lips.

She had the key, the password to the hidden world. She knew the answer to the question that dark-engulfed Mackay had been asking.

The imagined lips parted nervously, as if she were about to speak.

With an angry exhalation of held breath, Carr jerked back into the room. What could he be thinking? It was only in wistful, half-baked books that men of thirty-nine fell in love with moody, mysterious, coltish college girls. Or were caught up in glamorously sinister intrigues that existed solely in such girls’ hot-house brains.

He put on his blue suit, then started to transfer to it the stuff in the pockets of the brown one. He came upon the note the frightened girl had scribbled. He must have shoved it into his pocket when the dumpy man had started misbehaving. He turned it over and saw that he hadn’t read all of it.

His lips twisted in a wry, incredulous smile. Then he spat out a laugh. That tore it! If that didn’t prove that she’d been suckled on The Prisoner of Zenda and weaned on Graustark, he’d like to know. Lion’s tail and five sisters! She probably carried the Rajah’s ruby in a bag around her neck and wrote love letters with a black swan’s quill. In short, she went in for a brand of melodrama and high mystification that had gone out with the bustle. Here was the key to her antics, and she could stop haunting his imagination right now.

Why, there was no question but that Marcia was the right woman for him, even I at times she was a little too eager to change his life. Capable, charming, successful, mature. An executive with an important publishing firm. Competent at both business and pleasure. His kind. Sailed and golfed with him and the crowd, playing a shrewd game of poker, went to theaters and interesting parties, knew important people. He and Marcia would reach some satisfying understanding soon, maybe even get married. What competition could be offered by a mere maladjusted girl?

“But,” something reminded him quickly, “didn’t you decided at the office that it wasn’t anything like love that was the bond between you and the frightened girl? Aren’t you trying to dodge the problem by shifting it to an entirely different emotional level?”

He hurried into the bathroom, rubbing his chin. Marcia liked him to be well-groomed and his beard felt pretty conspicuous. He looked into the mirror to confirm his suspicious and once again he saw a different Carr Mackay.

The one down there on the stairs had seemed lost. This one, framed in surgical white, looked trapped. A neat, wooden little Mackay who went trudging through life without inquiring what any of the signposts meant, who always grabbed at pleasures he didn’t want, who kept selling himself this, that, and the other thing—customer Jekyll and salesman Hyde. A stupid Mackay, who always stuck to the ordained routine. A dummy.

He really ought to shave, yes, but the way he was feeling, the sooner he and Marcia got started drinking, the better. He’d skip shaving this once.

As he made this decision, he was conscious of a disproportionate feeling of guilt.

But everyone, at some time or another, finds himself attaching grotesque importance to some trivial action. Like stepping on, or not stepping on, a crack in the sidewalk.

He’d probably been reading too many “Five O’Clock Shadow” ads.

Forget it.

He hurried into the rest of his clothes, started toward the door, stopped by the bureau, pulled open the top drawer, looked for a moment at the three flat pints of whiskey nestling inside it. Then he shut the drawer quickly and hurried into the hall, down the stairs, averting his eyes from the mirror, passed quickly through the still shadowy hall, and out into the street.

It was a relief to know he’d be with Marcia in a few minutes. But eight dark blocks are eight dark blocks, and they have to be walked, and to walk them takes time no matter how rapidly you stride. Time for your sense of purpose and security to dwindle to nothing. Time for the familiar to become the chillingly unfamiliar. Time for the patterns you live by to lose their neat outlines. Time to get away from the ads and the pink lights and the television voices and to think a little bit about the universe—to realize that it’s a place of mystification and death, with no more feeling than a sausage grinder for the life oozing through it.

The buildings to either side became the walls of a black runway, and the occasional passers-by, shadow-swathed automatons.

He became conscious of the dark rhythm of existence as a nerve-twisting, insistent thing that tugged at him like a marionette’s string, trying to drag him back to some pattern from which he had departed. A compound of hurrying footsteps, roaring engines, screeching streetcars, drumming propellers, surging oceans, spinning planets, plunging stars, and still something more.

Just a mood, he told himself, a very intense mood. But wasn’t that saying enough? Wasn’t the essence of a mood one’s inability to combat it? And the more intelligent you were, the more readily you could see through all dodges and rationalizations back to the cold, harsh, unfathomable reality of the mood itself.

Being with Marcia could fix him up, he told himself, as the dark facades crept slowly by. She at least couldn’t ever become a stranger. There was too much between them. Once with her, he would snap back to normal.

But he had forgotten her face.

A trivial thing. It is always easy momentarily to forget a face, no matter how familiar. Like a name, or the place where you’ve put something for safe-keeping. And the more you try to remember it, the more the precise details elude you.

Carr tried. A hundred faces blinked and faded in his mind, some hauntingly suggestive of Marcia, some grotesquely dissimilar. Girls he had know in college, job applicants of months ago whom he had never thought of since, pictures in magazines, faces glimpsed for a moment in a crowded street, others with no source-tag at all.

Light from a first-story window spilled on the face of a girl in a blue slicker just as she passed him. His heart pounded as he walked on. He had almost grabbed her and said, “Marcia!” And she hadn’t been Marcia’s type at all.

He walked faster. The apartment tower where Marcia lived edged into view, grew threateningly tall.

He hurried up the flagstone walk flanked by shrubbery. The lobby was a long useless room furnished in some supposedly Spanish style, with lots of carved wood and red leather. He stopped at the desk. The clerk was at the back of the cubicle, talking to someone over the phone. Carr waited, but the clerk seemed determined to prolong the conversation. Carr cleared his throat. The clerk yawned and languorously flexed the arm that held the receiver, as if to call attention to the gold seal-ring and cuff-linked wrist.

The automatic elevator was waiting, the door open, the cage dark. Carr delayed no longer. He stepped in and pushed the seven button.

Nothing happened.

After jabbing the button a couple of more times, he decided he’d better tell the clerk it was out of order.

But just then the door closed, the light blinked on, and the cage started upward.

It was a small cage. Vermillion panels, brass fittings, a carpet of darkest red. A small placard said that it could safely carry 1,500 pounds. The vermillion was darkened where people had learned, and worn spots showed where packages had been rested on the brass rail and things stuck behind it.

The cage stopped at seven. The door opened. A fat man in a thick overcoat took his finger off the outside button and stepped inside without waiting. Carr squeezed past his paunch, turned around as soon as he was through the door and snapped, “I beg your pardon!” But the door was already closing and the boorish fat man made no rejoinder.

Carr walked down the red-carpeted hall. In front of Marcia’s door he hesitated. She mightn’t like him barging in this way. But who could be expected always to wait the pleasure of that prissy clerk?

Behind him he heard the cage stop at the ground floor.

He noticed that the door he faced was ajar.

He pushed it open a few inches.

“Marcia,” he called. “Marcia?” His voice came out huskily.

He stepped inside, into the living room. The reading lamp with its white, tufted shade showed dull pearl walls, white bookcase, blue over-stuffed sofa with a coat and yellow silk scarf tossed across it, and a faint curl of cigarette smoke from somewhere.

Marcia wouldn’t go off and leave the door like that.

The bedroom door was open. He crossed to it, his footsteps soundless on the thick carpet. He stopped.

Marcia was sitting on an upholstered stool before a big-mirrored dressing table. Over a chair to one side a gray silk dressing gown was thrown. She was wearing absolutely nothing. A squashed cigarette was smoldering in a tiny silver ash tray. She was lacquering her nails.

That was all. But to Carr it seemed that he had blundered into one of those elaborately realistic department store window displays. He almost expected to see faces peering in the dark window, seven stories up.

Modern bedroom in rose and smoke. Seated mannequin at vanity table. Perhaps a placard, party in script: “Point up your Pinks with Gray.”

He stood there stupidly, a step short of the doorway, saying nothing, making no move.

In the mirror her eyes seemed to meet his. He couldn’t believe that she was unaware of his presence. He had never know her so brazenly immodest.

She went on lacquering her nails.

She might be angry with him for coming up without the obligatory phone call. But it wasn’t like Marcia to choose this queer way of showing her displeasure—and herself.

Or was it? Was she deliberately trying to tease him?

He watched her face in the mirror. It was this one he had forgotten, all right. There were the firm lips, the cool forehead framed by reddish hair, the fleeting quirks of expression—not the ones he was most used to, but definitely hers.

Yet recognition did not bring the sense of absolute certainty it should. Something was lacking—the feeling of a reality behind the face, animating it.

She finished her nails and held them out to dry.

A sharp surge of uneasiness went through Carr. This was nonsensical, he told himself. He must move or speak.

She sat more erect and drew back her shoulders. A faint, admiring and self-satisfied smile settled into her lips. With the pads of her fingertips, still being careful about the polish, she lightly stroked her breasts—upward, almost unnecessarily. Her smile grew dreamy.

The finger-pads closed in on the aureoles and pinched the small nipples. He thought he could see them stiffen.

He felt himself stiffen.

His throat was constricted and his legs felt numb. And looking at her, tauntingly nude, teasingly erotic, he took a forward step. She had no right to tempt him so—

And then all of a sudden it came back: the awful feeling he’d had that afternoon. It stopped him in his tracks.

What if Marcia weren’t really alive at all, not consciously alive, but just part of the dance of mindless atoms, a clockworks show that included the whole world, except himself? Merely by coming a few minutes ahead of time, merely by omitting to shave, he had broken the clockwork rhythm. That was why the clerk hadn’t spoken to him, that was why the elevator hadn’t worked when he’d first pushed the button, that was why the fat man had ignored him, that was why Marcia didn’t greet him. It wasn’t time yet for those little acts in the clockworks show.

The creamy telephone tinkled. Lifting it gingerly, fingers stiffly spread, the figure at the vanity held it to her ear a moment and said, “Certainly. Send him up.”

She inspected her nails, waved them, regarded her reflection in the glass, reached for the gray negligee, and—her smile at herself in the mirror became mischievous and (there was the suggestion of a conspiratorial wink) a touch cruel. She drew back her hand, crossed it over the other across her knees, and sat there primly upright, “marking time.” But her smile continued to dance.

Through the open door Carr could hear the drone of the rising cage.

The cage stopped. There was the soft jolt of its automatic door opening. Carr waited for footsteps. They didn’t come.

That was his elevator, he thought with a shudder, the one he was supposed to come up in.

Suddenly Marcia turned. “Darling,” she said, rising quickly.

The hairs on the back of his neck lifted. She wasn’t looking straight at him, he felt, but at something behind him. She was watching him come through the living room. And she seemed to be quietly enjoying the surprise she knew her nakedness would give him.

Then he realized that she was really looking at him, and that this was Marcia’s face to the life, a face vital with awareness, just as he remembered it, and that everything else had been his stupid imagination, and why the devil had he been surprised at her not noticing him sooner when he’d sneaked in so silently?

The surge of relief made his knees shake.

He put out his arms. “Marcia!”