As a rule I am only too anxious to find a reason to leave my room. No sooner am I in it than I begin to cast around for one. When I do go, I do not go far. My average radius is three blocks. I am always afraid of running into an acquaintance who will express surprise at seeing me and ask questions. I avoid going downtown and, when I must go, I carefully stay away from certain streets. And I think I have carried over from my schooldays the feeling that there is something urilawful in being abroad, idle, in the middle of the day.
However, I am poor at finding reasons. I seldom go out more than four times a day, three times for meals and the fourth on a contrived errand or on some aimless impulse. I rarely take long walks.
For lack of exercise, I am growing heavy. When Ira objects, I point out that I shall lose weight quickly enough in the Army. The streets at this time of yearare forbidding, and then, too, I have no overshoes. Occasionally I do take a longer excursion, to the laundry or to the barber shop, to Woolworth's for envelopes, or even farther, at Ira's request, to pay a bill; or, without her knowledge, to see Kitty Daumler. And then there are obligatory visits to the family.
I have fallen into the habit of changing restaurants regularly. I do not want to become too familiar a sight in any of them, friendly with sandwich men, waitresses, and cashiers, and compelled to invent lies for their benefit.
At half-past eight I eat breakfast. Afterward I walk home and settle down to read the paper in the rocker by the window. I cover it from end to end, ritualistically, missing not a word. First come the comic strips (i follow them because I have done so since childhood, and I compel myself to read even the newest, most unpalatable ones), then I read the serious news and the columnists, and, finally, the gossip, the family page, the recipes, the obituaries, the society news, the ads, the children's puzzles, everything. Reluctant to put it aside, I even reread thecomics to see if I have missed anything. re-entering waking life after the regeneration (whenit is that) of sleep, I go in the body from nakedness toclothing and in the mind from relative purity to pollution. raising the window, I test the weather; opening the paperI admit the world. i am now full of the world, and wide awake. It is nearlynoon, time for lunch. Since eleven I have been growingrestless, imagining that I am hungry again.
Into thesilence of the house there fall accentuating sounds, theclosing of a door in another room, the. ticking of dropsfrom a faucet, the rustling of the steam in the radiatorThe thrum of a sewing machine upstairs.
The unmade bedThe walls, are brightly striped. The maid knocks and. pushes open the door. She has a cigarette in her mouth. i think I am the only one before whom she dares smokebb@ccshe recognizes that I am of no importance. at the restaurant I discover that I am not hungry at allBut now I have no alternative and so I eat. The stairs area little more difficult this time. I come into the room breathing hard, and turn on the radio. I smoke. I listen to half anhour of symphonic music, disturbed when I fail to catchthe announcer before he begins to advertise someone'scredit-clothing. By one o'clock the day has changed, hastaken on a new kind of restlessness. I make my effort toread but cannot key my mind to the sentences on the pageor the re[erences in the words. My mind redoubles itsefforts, but thoughts of doubtful relevance are stragglingin and out of it, the trivial and the major together. Andsuddenly I shut it off. It is as vacant as the street. I get upand turn on the radio again. Three o'clock, and nothing15 has happened to me; three o'clock, and the dark is already etting in; three o'clock, and the postman has bobbed by for the last time and left nothing in my box. I have read the paper and looked into a book, I have had a few random thoughts '@.
"Mr. Five-by-five, He's five feet high An" he's five feet wide…" and now, like any housewife, I am listening to the radio.
The landlady's daughter has cautioned us not to play it too loudly; her mother has been bedridden for more than three months. The old woman is not expected to live long. She is blind and very nearly bald; she must be close to ninety. I see her at times, between the curtains, as I go upstairs. The daughter has been managing the house since September. She and her husband, Captain Briggs, live in the third-floor apartment. He is in the Quartermaster Di. vision. A man of about fifty (much older than his wife), he is solid, neat, gray, and quiet-spoken. We often see him walking outside the fence, smoking a last cigarette before retiring.
At four-thirty I hear Mr. Vanaker next door, coughing and growling. Iva, for some reason of her own, has named him the "werewolf." He is a queer, annoying creature. His coughing, I am convinced, is partly alcoholic and partly nervous.
And it is also a sort of social activity. Ira does not agree. But I know that he coughs to draw attention to himself. I have lived in rooming houses so long that I have acquired an eye for the type. Years ago, on Dorchester Avenue, there was an old man who refused to shut his door but sat or lay facing the hall and watched everyone, day and night. And there was another on SchillerStreet in whose washbasin you could always hear the water running. That was his manner of making himself known to us. Mr. Vanaker coughs. got only that, but when he goes to the toilet he leaves the door ajar. He tramps down the hall, and a moment later you hear him splashing. Ira lately complained about this to Mrs. Briggs, who thereupon tacked a notice on the walclass="underline" Occupant please close door when using and wear bathrobes to and st. ro. So far it hasn't helped.
Through Mrs. Briggs we have learned a number of interestingfacts about Vanaker. Before the old woman took to bed he was continually urging her to go to the movies with him. "When it should be plain to anybody Mamma can't see a thing." He was formerly in the habit of runningdown to answer the phone in his pajama trousers only-the reason for the bathrobe warning. The Captain had to step in and put an end to that. Marie has found half-smoked cigars ground out on the floors of unoccupied rooms. She suspects Vanaker of snooping through the house. He is no gentleman. She cleans his room, and she knows. Marie has high standards for white conduct, and her nostrils grow wider when she speaks of him. The old woman, Mrs. Kiefer, once threatened to put him out, she claims.
Vanaker is energetic. Hatless, he hurries in his black moleskin jacket up the street and between the snowy bushes. He slams the street door and kicks the snow from his boots on the first step. Then, coughing wildly, he runs up.
At six, I meet Ira at Fallon's for supper. We eat there quite regularly. Sometimes we go to the "Merit" or to a cafeteria on Fifty-third Street. Our evenings are generally short. We turn in before midnight.
December 17
IT IS a narcotic dullness. There are times when I am not even aware that there is anything wrong with this existence. b, on the other hand, there are times when I rouse myself in bewilderment and vexation, and then I think of myself as a moral casualty of the war. I have changed. Two incidents in the past week have shown me how greatly. The first can hardly be called an incident. I was leafing through Goethe's Poetry and Lstence and I came upon the following phrase: "This loathing of life has both physical and moral causes '.. Radix malorum est weariness of life. Then came the statement: "Nothing occasions this "@.@ccweariness more than the recurrence of the passion oflove." Deeply disappointed, I put the book down. nevertheless, I could not help seeing how differentlythis would have affected me a year ago, and how muchI had altered. Then, I might have found it true but notespecially noteworthy. I might have been amused by thatEnglishman but not moved. But his boredom threw tpartassion of love" in the shadow and he instantly took hisplace for me beside that murderer Barnardine in Measure. st. or Measure whose contempt for life equaled his contempt for death, so that he would not come out of his cell. ffbe executed. To be so drawn to those two was proofthat I had indeed changed. @, And now the second incident. my father-in-law, old Almstadt, came down with a badcold, and Ira, knowing how inept her mother is, asked meto go there and help ou. the Almstadts live on the Northwest Side, a dreary, ff.. hour's ride on the El. I found the house in great disorder. mrs.