The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

that defied analysis. His zest for life became swallowed up in the rising tide of sorrow and mental chaos which was engulfing him.
    As autumn approached, with faint notice on his part, his anger and resentment retreated, leaving in their wake a gentle stir of regret and remorse. Imperceptibly, he grew physically weary; a strange sensation of loneliness and isolation enveloped him. A species of timidity came upon him; he felt an unhappy remoteness from people, and began to edge away from life.
    His deepening sense of isolation drove him more and more back upon his memories. Sunk in his armchair before the fire, he passed the days and sometimes the nights, for he had lost count of these, merged as they were into one another.
    His increasing mental haziness had rejected the fact of her death; often she was there with him, just beyond the firelight or the candlelight. She talked and laughed with him. Sometimes, at night, he woke to see her standing over him or sitting in his chair before the dying fire. By some mysterious process, the glory of first love flamed again in him. He forgot that they had ever parted. His twisted memories visioned her with him in places where she had never been. He had forgotten all but the past, and that was brightly distorted.
    He sat waiting for her. He seemed to remember that she had promised to come. Outside, the street was quiet. She was late. Why didn’t she come? Childish tears fell over his cold cheeks. He sat weeping in front of the sinking fire.
    A nameless dread seized him; she would not come! In the agony of his disappointment, he did not see that the fire had died and the candles had sputtered out. He sat wrapped in immeasurable sadness. He knew that she would not come.
    Something in this thought fired his disintegrating brain. She would not come; then he must go to her.
    He rose, shaking with cold, and groped toward the door. Yes, he would go to her.
    The gleam of a streetlight through a French window caught his attention. He stumbled toward it. His cold fingers fumbled a moment with the catch, but he tore it open with a spark of his old determination and power, and stepped out—and down to the pavement a hundred feet below.

Sanctuary

 
     
     
One
     
    On the Southern coast, between Merton and Shawboro, there is a strip of desolation some half a mile wide and nearly ten miles long between the sea and old fields of ruined plantations. Skirting the edge of this narrow jungle is a partly grown-over road which still shows traces of furrows made by the wheels of wagons that have long since rotted away or been cut into firewood. This road is little used, now that the state has built its new highway a bit to the west and wagons are less numerous than automobiles.
    In the forsaken road a man was walking swiftly. But in spite of his hurry, at every step he set down his feet with infinite care,for the night was windless and the heavy silence intensified each sound; even the breaking of a twig could be plainly heard. And the man had need of caution as well as haste.
    Before a lonely cottage that shrank timidly back from the road the man hesitated a moment, then struck out across the patch of green in front of it. Stepping behind a clump of bushes close to the house, he looked in through the lighted window at Annie Poole, standing at her kitchen table mixing the supper biscuits.
    He was a big, black man with pale brown eyes in which there was an odd mixture of fear and amazement. The light showed streaks of gray soil on his heavy, sweating face and great hands, and on his torn clothes. In his woolly hair clung bits of dried leaves and dead grass.
    He made a gesture as if to tap on the window, but turned away to the door instead. Without knocking he opened it and went in.
Two
    The woman’s brown gaze was immediately on him, though she did not move. She said, “You ain’t in no hurry, is you, Jim Hammer?” It wasn’t, however, entirely a question.
    “Ah’s in trubble, Mis’ Poole,” the