And not heart so much as vision.
The vision was this little man, who now so obsessed him: this little man, his house, his clothes, his name, his daily orbit. He was here, in this room: walked like a fly across the ceiling, as if the ceiling were the large white map — (now pinned to the wall over the table in the next room) — of Cambridge: on that map, with its concentric circles which marked the distance, in quarter miles, from the City Hall, a whole week of the life of Jones was now over and over again enacted. He opened his door in Reservoir Street, stooped to pick up The Herald, went in again. He opened the door later, and came out. From the little copper letter box — first unlocking it with a key — he extracted letters, glanced over them, selected some, replaced others. He walked to Huron Avenue, crossed it, and proceeded west to a block of one-story dingy shops between Fayerweather Street and Gurney Street; entered a grocer’s and left an order; then came out to wait for a streetcar. At half past five in the afternoon, he reappeared, carrying an evening paper; looked again in the letter box; unlocked the green door. The upper part of the door was of glass, and from across the street he could be seen going up a flight of stairs which turned to the left.…
His life went by the clock. He came out, to go in again; he went in, to come out again. The streets in which he walked were always the same. Perhaps that was why he so seldom lifted his odd, amused eyes or bothered to look left or right. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — on Friday he had left early, at a few minutes after eight, and come back at four. And at the other end of his life, the School Street end, his goings and comings were just as precise, just as methodical. Always the same route, the same apparently meaningless circuit round Pemberton Square, the pause for the reflective cup of coffee, then the accelerated descent of Beacon Street to the office. And at half past twelve, three-quarters of an hour for lunch, sometimes at a sandwich shop in Province Court, sometimes at the Waldorf in Bromfield Street.
He walked on the ceiling like a fly: it was easy to see him there: easy to meet him, at the bottom of those awful little streets: he came quite suddenly around the corner of Vassal Lane, for example, so suddenly that Ammen jumped, and laughed, for a moment forgetting that Jones did not know him by sight. To turn and saunter away, obliquely across the street, with averted face, and taking cover behind a coal truck, had been very simple. Vassal Lane. That had been an exception, too, in the routine, for Jones had gone there, to the house at the corner of Alpine Street, the first thing in the morning, directly after breakfast. Moreover, he had gone there as if with hesitation: to begin with he had passed it, merely pausing to look rather earnestly at the door; and he had then sauntered, rather slowly, all the way to Fresh Pond Avenue. There, standing across the street from the Pumping station, he had waited for fully five minutes, alternately staring at the pond and the row of half-fledged willows by the station. A dark day, with now and then a little spatter of rain. On the way back, he went into the house — a two-family house like his own — and stayed there about five minutes. It was the sudden meeting with him, at the corner of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street — (he hadn’t thought Jones would have had time to get so far) — that had first suggested the advisability of hiring a drive-yourself car. Sitting in the closed Buick, parked now at one place and now at another, but usually on the south side of Huron Avenue, it had been easy to see without being seen. For the observation of the area immediately round the house, it was in fact ideaclass="underline" but of course no good for following. For that, it had been necessary either to board Jones’s streetcar at Appleton Street, having seen him get on, or to lie in wait for him at the top of the ramp in Harvard Square.… Thanks to the little man’s regularity, both had been quite simple.
The neighborhood was detestable — it ought to be burned down. With all its inhabitants. A typical suburban swarm of wooden two-family houses, all exactly alike, brown shingles, dirty white-railed porches and balconies, one or two with projecting flagpoles. Here and there an attempt had been made at a clipped privet hedge: but for the most part the little front yards were bare, except for a forsythia bush or two. At exact intervals, for miles, the cement walk branched in toward a porch, from which opened two doors, one for the lower part of the house, one for the upper. On the right of each house another narrower cement path led to the cellar doors, at the rear. It was along this — on Monday evening — that he had seen Jones, with bare pink hands, bareheaded and wearing an old black sweater, trying to roll a heavy ash can on its rim. It was too much for him — it kept sitting down, wrenching itself away from his fingers. But after a deep breath or two, the hands still resting on the rims, the head bowed, he managed to heave it up again and to roll it a little farther toward the street, — toward the grimy border of ringed earth at the curbstone where week after week it waited for the ash man. The entire street was marked in this fashion. In front of each shabby little house was the deep pair of rings, grooved in the earth, where ash can and garbage can rested. And the inevitable residue of onionskin and eggshell and orange peel.… Sickening.
The clock in the professor’s room sounded, through the thin walls, its tyang—half past two.
He thought of the map, with its concentric circles, — Reservoir Street, one and three-quarter miles from City Hall, at its south end, where it joined Highland Street; but where Jones lived, a little farther. By Yellow Taxi, a fifty-cent fare from the Square.
K. N. Jones. 85 Reservoir Street.…
It had turned out to be Karl — not Kenneth, as he had guessed.
But who was the woman who was seen now and then passing the windows, with a white cloth bound over her hair? It had been impossible to make out whether she was old or young, or what she looked like. Once she had come down the outside stairs at the back, to the cement path, but before he could get a good look at her she had rapped her dustpan twice, sharply, on the edge of the ash can, and gone in again. It might be either his wife or his mother. It might be his sister. It was even possible that there were two women, not one; for occasionally she had seemed taller than he expected. But of this it was difficult to judge. Whoever it was, or whoever they were, thus far they had never come out of the house while he was watching. Probably his wife.
The curious thing was the repugnance which the actual scene had aroused in him from the beginning — from the very beginning. There was something really loathsome in it. The paltry houses, the ill-paved street, the ash cans, the litter, the air of furtiveness and meanness and defeat which overhung the whole neighborhood — there had been something in this which seemed a little outside his calculations. Of course, the unexpected was to be expected. Jones, Karl Jones, was not the sort of fellow who would be found living in a huge and grand apartment house — far from it.