Free The Lonely by Paul Gallico Page B

walk and slender figure made him stop and stare.
    He was saying to himself: “It’s Catharine,” as though this were part of the dream too and he was identifying someone. Even this queer inability to move was dreamlike, a remembered fantasy out of the night when the body became suddenly heavy and leaden and refused to obey the dictates of the mind. Catharine—within his sight, within his reach. With a curious pang he saw her sunny smile flash as she recognized an acquaintance on the way to her car at the curb and paused a moment to talk.
    Jerry moved slightly, half into the doorway of the stationery shop, and was startled to find that his limbs still retained the power of locomotion. Then why was he not running forward down the street to Catharine? A crying of her name, a shout of greeting, a wave of his arm, and she would look up and see him coming towards her. Old habits, old memories, days and nights of longing to see her, of thinking about her, were strongly impelling him, and yet he remained where he was.
    Then through the confusion and turmoil in his mind a stronger power penetrated the chaos within him like a sombre undertone—the remembrance of the reason for his presence there, the purpose of his mission—and he felt suddenly like a traitor. He thought at once of Patches, and she came so alive in his mind that for a moment he felt like a traitor to both.
    Time seemed to hang suspended while he waited, and he had the feeling that at any instant Catharine would feel his presence, would look up and come to him. But she did not. She chatted for a moment and then moved on to her car, her books under her arm. For her, Jerry was three thousand miles away, no closer than his latest letter, which she carried in her handbag. Even had she glanced down the block in his direction, she might not have recognized him shielded in the doorway, because in her thoughts he was so firmly placed in England.
    Still motionless, Jerry watched her climb into her roadster and drive away towards home, her hair blowing out behind her, and his thoughts went back to the daydreams he used to have during the long, dreary hours on their way to and from missions when there was no enemy attack and he would soothe his nerves and pass the time with fantasies of how it would be to come back to Catharine again, what their meeting would be like, and where, and how.
    In his mind he had gone over them all, placing it in New York, perhaps at the airport, or at the little railway station of Westbury, or even at the door of her home, beneath the tall elms and the lilac bushes, and his yearnings would always culminate in the moment when she would run into his outstretched arms and he would feel her hair against his cheek, and the tender touch of her mouth, confirming for all time the promise they had made to each other before he left.
    And as he stood there he realized that the moment had come and gone, and that he was no longer the same Jerry Wright who had left Westbury two years ago with his new wings on his breast and Catharine in his heart, and never would be again. And he had a sudden longing for his home, his father and mother, his room and his things. He left the doorway and began to walk rapidly.
    He took a back way to Severn Avenue so as to avoid the necessity of passing Catharine’s house across the street from his. Coming around from behind, he walked the short gravel driveway, and, standing inside the white-columned Georgian portico, he pressed the button of the bell.
    Deep inside the house he heard the well-remembered sound of the vibration and a sharp bark, and for the first time he had the feeling that the dream shroud was breaking up, that he was indeed a living person.
    The touch of his finger upon the bell, the sounds, the entrance with the polished brass letter box, the nick in the woodwork he had made with his hockey stick when he had slipped there one winter’s day, the familiar feel of the worn, thick mat beneath his feet—seemed to