Then I, who had been sitting too long silent, raised my voice. 'Ah, that's a mysterious question, when you think of it, how people spend their time. We only see them after all in glimpses; but what, I often wonder, do they do in their hushed and shrouded hours--in all the interstices of their lives?'
'In the times, I mean, when no one sees them. In the intervals.'
Of course there was a deaf lady present. 'What did you say?' she inquired, holding out her ear-trumpet for my answer.
What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How should I amuse my imagination, that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia or exotic birds; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on their outspread wings in the blue air above the Andes?
But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done or left undone? And the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski, of all whose works I had never read a word.
Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'
'Cadogan Gardens? I am afraid I am lost myself. Perhaps, Sir,' I added (we two seemed oddly alone and intimate in that white world of mystery together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I am looking for?' I breathed their name.
'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated. 'I don't think I have ever heard of Hesperian Gardens.'
'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'The Gardens of the Sunset and the singing Maidens!'
'But what I am really looking for,' I confided to that dim-seen figure, 'what I am always hoping to find is the Fortunate Abodes, the Happy Orchard, the Paradise our parents lost so long ago.'
As I sat there, hopeless, with my coat and hat on in my bedroom, I felt I had no hold on life, no longer the slightest interest in it. To gain all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger; and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse that twitches a little after life has left it.