CHAPTER XXV
McCloy took me back on the Evening Sun, according to his promise, about mid-January, and about the same time Mrs. Bernstein sold her house and moved to another lower down the street, almost opposite to the doctor's. There were no insects, all our things were out of pawn, we had overcoats again, but we had to find a new Ikey, for the old Ikey, of course, would have nothing more to do with our trousers, gladstone bag, top hat and tennis cups.
The East 19th Street chapter was closed when Boyde went to Blackwell Island; another in the same street had begun: Mrs. Bernstein begged us to move with her: we owed her big arrears of rent; also, for some odd reason, she really liked us. In her odd way she even tried to mother me, as though her interest, somewhere perhaps her pity too, were touched. "You haf had drouble in England, I subbose?" she hinted sympathetically. She had read the newspapers carefully, and could not understand why I should be exiled in poverty in this way unless I had done something shady at home. It followed that I had been sent out to America for my country's good. She shared, that is, the view most people took of my position in New York.
Only three months had passed since we arrived, but it seemed years. I had never lived anywhere else. The sheltered English life, the Canadian adventures, above all the months upon our happy island, lay far away down the wrong end of a telescope, small, distant patches, brightly coloured, lit by a radiant sun, remote, incredible. It was not myself but another person I watched moving across these miniature maps of memory. Those happy days, states, places, those careless, sanguine moods, those former points of view so bright with hope, seemed gone for ever.
