On the way I met Hasse and walked the last bit with him.
He looked dusty and miserable.
"You've got thinner," said I.
He nodded, and told me that he never got proper meals at night now.
Almost every day his wife spent with friends she had found, and didn't come home till late.
He was glad for her to have the entertainment, but he had no inclination to cook for himself alone when he got in at night.
And anyway he wasn't very hungry; he was too tired for that.
I looked at him as he walked beside me with drooping shoulders.
Perhaps he really believed what he said, but it was pitiful to listen to.
It was only for the want of a little bit of security, a little bit of money, that this marriage, this humble, inoffensive life, had foundered.
I thought of the millions there were like him, and that it was always only for the little bit of security and the little bit of money.
In a revolting way, life had shrunk to a miserable battle for bare existence.
I thought of the fight that afternoon, I thought of what I had seen these last weeks; I thought of all the things I had tried already; and then I thought of Pat and suddenly had the feeling that the gulf could never be bridged.
The leap was too wide, life had become too dirty for happiness, it couldn't last, one didn't believe in it any more; this was only a breathing space, not a harbour.
We climbed up the stairs and opened the door.
On the landing Hasse stopped.
"Well, au revoir—"
"You eat something to-night," said I.
He shook his head with a feeble smile, as if to ask pardon for himself, and went into his empty, dark room.
I looked after him.
Then I went on along the tube of the corridor.
Suddenly I heard soft singing. I stopped and listened.
It was not, as I first thought, Erna Bonig's gramophone; it was Pat's voice.
She was alone in her room singing.
I looked across toward the door behind which Hasse had vanished, I bent down and listened, and then suddenly I pressed my hands together.
Damn it all, breathing space or no breathing space, harbour or no harbour, be they sundered so far that they will never be bridged, never be believed—for that very reason, because one could not believe it, for that reason was if always so bewilderingly new and overwhelming—happiness.
Pat did not hear me come in.
She was sitting on the floor in front of the looking-glass trying on a hat, a little black cap.
Beside her on the carpet stood the lamp.
The room was filled with a warm, golden brown twilight, and only her face was brightly lit from the lamp.
She had drawn up a-chair, from which hung down a bit of silk.
On the seat lay a pair of scissors gleaming.
I remained quietly standing in the door and watched her gravely working at the cap.
She was fond of sitting on the floor and I had often before found her fallen asleep in some corner on the floor, a book beside her, and the dog.
The dog was beside her now and started to growl.
Pat looked up and saw me in the mirror.
She smiled, and it seemed to me that the whole world became brighter by it.
I crossed "the room, knelt down behind her, and, after all the filth of the day, put my lips on the warm, smooth skin of the neck before me.
She held up the black cap.
"I've altered it, darling.
Do you like it?"
"It is a perfectly lovely hat," said I. "But you're not even looking.
I've cut the brim away behind and turned up the front."
"I can see that quite clearly," said I, with my face in her hair, "it is a hat to make a Paris milliner green with envy if she could see it."
"But Robby!" Laughing, she pushed me back. "You haven't any idea about it at all.
I wonder sometimes if you ever see what I have on."
"I see every little detail," I declared sitting close beside her on the floor, though a bit in the shadow on account of my nose.
"So?
Then what did I have on last night?"
"Last night?" I meditated. I actually did not know!