The Party at Jack's Read Online

And always time lay feeding at his heart. It crept along the channels of his blood, it grew within his flesh and flowered in his brain like a grey and cancerous plant. He lay tranced below its hypnotic pressure, like a rabbit caught and held under the baleful spell of a serpent’s eye, he was powerless to act or move, but always he was conscious of his life wasting and consuming fatally under the strange dark light of time. In his heart there dwelt forever the horror of a memory, almost captured, of a word almost spoken, of a decision almost understood and made. The knowledge of some great labor left undone, of a terrible duty unfulfilled, of the irrevocable years that had been passed and wasted and of friends and works forgot while he lay tranced and stricken by time’s sorcery, haunted him day and night, but what the goal, the labor, and the duty were, he could not say.

Smoke! His life was passing like a dream under the strange and terrible visages of time, and Jack sought for some door he could enter, and he found none open. He longed for some goal and home and harbor, and he had nowhere to go.

Then, out of the old house where all lay sleeping he crept one day into the high and ancient street where all the houses tottered and leaned together like conspiring crones and where bright sunlight cut cool depths of Gothic shadows and where it was always morning.

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Now Jack was walking in an ancient cobbled street, but not the one he lived in. The old gabled houses with their mellow timbers, their bright rich colors, and their high Gothic overhang seemed to bend and lean like old live things above the narrow cobbled ways, conferring quietly in all the attitudes of familiar personal intimacy. They had a look of old witch-haggery, crone-like, wise and ancient, and yet unmalign. They were like old benignant wives and gossips of the town huddled above some juicy morsel of town scandal, and yet they seemed innocent and familiar.

Although the street was hundreds of years old, it had a quality that was wonderfully fresh and living. The slow wear and waste of time, the rich alluvial deposits of centuries seemed only to have given to the street a richer and profounder sort of life. This life had not only entered or worked its way into the old houses, it had also got into the cobbles and the narrow pavements before the houses, giving a line of life, a rich and vital color to everything. The old timbers of the houses were seasoned in the hues of time, and even in the warp and wave of ancient walls, in the sag and bend of roofs and basements, there was a rich undulant vitality which only time could bring. Moreover, all harsh lines and angles seemed to have been rubbed and softened by this slow enormous chemistry of time. And this chemistry had given the street a warmth and life which seemed to Jack to make it not only richer in quality, but somehow more young and wholesome than the streets of home.

The street sprang instantly into living unity, with a tone and quality which was incomparable and unique, and yet the houses were richly varied by all the colors and designs of an elfin and capricious architecture. But in comparison to this street, a street at home with its jargon of ugly and meaningless styles, its harsh pale colors broken with gloomy interspersions of dingy grey and rusty brown, the prognathous rawness of apartment houses, lofts, and office buildings of new raw brick or glaring stone, that ranged from dreary shambles of two stories to forty glittering floors of arrogant steel and stone, the ragged confusion of height, and the beaten weariness of grey pavements bleakly worn by a million feet, seemed sterile, raw, and lifeless in its senseless and chaotic fury.

It was morning, the sun cut crisply and yet with an autumnal mellowness into the steep old shadows of the street. The sun felt warm and drowsy, but in the shadows of the houses Jack felt at once the premonitory breath of frost.

Before one of the old houses a woman with thick mottled arms and wide solid-looking hams was down upon her hands and knees, vigorously “going for” the stone step before a door. Jack noticed that the step was of old red stone, worn and hollowed deeply by the feet of four hundred years, and at the same time he noticed that the street and pavement was made of this same red stone, and had been worn, rounded, and enriched by time just as everything else had been. The woman who was scrubbing the stone finished, and got up like a strong clumsy animal. Her face was red, flushed triumphantly by her labor, and with a swift motion of her thick red hand she brushed back some strands of blown hair. Then she seized the bucket of grey sudsy water and dashed it out into the gutter. Finally she began to talk loudly and cheerfully to a woman who was passing along the other side of the street with an enormous market basket on her arm. And Jack felt that all of this was just as it had always been. All his former sensations of strangeness and phantasmal unreality had vanished. He felt secure and certain and exultant. He seemed always to have known this street, and all the people in it, and this knowledge gave him a feeling of the most extraordinary happiness he had ever known.

A man rode slowly by upon a bicycle. The man wore a flat cap, he had a straight stiff collar and wore a stringy necktie. He had on a belted coat, and he wore thick solid shoes and long black woollen stockings. He pedalled with deliberate care, pausing at the apex of his stroke, while his wheel wobbled perilously on the cobbles, and pedalling downward with a strong driving motion that sent him swiftly forward again. The man had a small lean face, a little bristly tuft of moustache, and hard muscular jaws that writhed unpleasantly. Jack was sure he knew this man.