“How long have you felt like this?” said Ben.
“Always,” said Eugene.
“As long as I can remember.
But I didn’t know about it until you —” He stopped.
“Until I what?” said Ben.
There was a pause.
“You are dead, Ben,” Eugene muttered.
“You must be dead.
I saw you die, Ben.”
His voice rose sharply.
“I tell you, I saw you die.
Don’t you remember?
The front room upstairs that the dentist’s wife has now?
Don’t you remember, Ben?
Coker, Helen, Bessie Gant who nursed you, Mrs. Pert?
The oxygen tank?
I tried to hold your hands together when they gave it to you.”
His voice rose to a scream.
“Don’t you remember?
I tell you, you are dead, Ben.”
“Fool,” said Ben fiercely.
“I am not dead.”
There was a silence.
“Then,” said Eugene very slowly, “which of us is the ghost, I wonder?”
Ben did not answer.
“Is this the Square, Ben?
Is it you I’m talking to?
Am I really here or not?
And is this moonlight in the Square?
Has all this happened?”
“How should I know?” said Ben again.
Within Gant’s shop there was the ponderous tread of marble feet.
Eugene leaped up and peered through the broad sheet of Jannadeau’s dirty window.
Upon his desk the strewn vitals of a watch winked with a thousand tiny points of bluish light.
And beyond the jeweller’s fenced space, where moonlight streamed into the ware-room through the tall side-window, the angels were walking to and fro like huge wound dolls of stone.
The long cold pleats of their raiment rang with brittle clangor; their full decent breasts wagged in stony rhythms, and through the moonlight, with clashing wings the marble cherubim flew round and round.
With cold ewe-bleatings the carved lambs grazed stiffly across the moon-drenched aisle.
“Do you see it?” cried Eugene.
“Do you see it, Ben?”
“Yes,” said Ben.
“What about it?
They have a right to, haven’t they?”
“Not here!
Not here!” said Eugene passionately.
“It’s not right, here!
My God, this is the Square!
There’s the fountain!
There’s the City Hall!
There’s the Greek’s lunch-room.”
The bank-chimes struck the half hour.