The Stories of John Cheever Part 15

She had not seen him for years. He was wearing a suit that was too small for him. His face was red. In her shame at having wished a living man dead (for she had never experienced malevolence or bitterness without hurrying to cover it with love, and, among her friends and her family, those who received her warmest generosity were those who excited her impatience and her shame), she went to Russell impulsively and took his hand. Her face shone with tears. "Oh, it was so good of you to come; you were one of his best friends. We've missed you, Russell. Come see us. Can you come tomorrow? We're leaving on Sat.u.r.day. Come for supper. It will make it seem like old times. Come for supper. We can't ask Myra and the children because we don't have a maid this year, but we'd love to see you. Please come." Russell said that he would.

The next day was windy and clear, with a heartening lightness, a multiplicity of changes in its moods and its lights-a day that belonged half to summer, half to autumn, precisely like the day when the pig had drowned. After lunch, Mrs. Nudd and Pamela went to an auction. The two women had reached a reasonable truce, although Pamela still interfered in the kitchen and looked on Whitebeach Camp impatiently as her just inheritance. Randy, with the best will in the world, had begun to find his wife's body meager and familiar, his desires as keen as ever, and so he had been unfaithful to her once or twice. There had been accusations, a confession, and a reconciliation, and Pamela liked to talk all this over with Mrs. Nudd, searching, as she said, for "the truth" about men.

Randy had been left with the children that afternoon and had taken them to the beach. He was a loving but impatient father, and from the house he could be heard scolding Binxey. "When I speak to you, Binxey, I don't speak to you because I want to hear the sound of my own voice, I speak to you because I want you to do what I say!" As Mrs. Nudd had told Russell, they had no maid that summer. Esther was doing the housework. Whenever anyone suggested getting a cleaning woman, Esther would say, "We can't afford a cleaning woman, and anyhow I don't have anything to do. I don't mind doing the housework, only I just wish you all would remember not to track sand into the living room..." Esther's husband had spent his vacation at Whitebeach Camp, but he had returned to work long since.

Mr. Nudd was sitting on the porch in the hot sun that afternoon when Joan came out to him with a letter in her hand. She smiled uneasily and began to speak in an affected singsong that always irritated her father. "I've decided that I won't drive down with you tomorrow," she said. "I've decided that I'll stay here for a little while longer, Daddy. After all, there's nothing for me to do in New York. I have no reason to go down, have I? I wrote to Helen Parker, and she's going to come up and stay with me, so that I won't be alone. I have her letter right here. She says that she'd like to come. I thought we would stay here until Christmas. I've never been here in the winter before in all these years. We're going to write a book for children, Helen and I. She's going to draw the pictures, and I'm going to write the story. Her brother knows a publisher, and he said-"

"Joan, dear, you can't stay here in the winter." Mr. Nudd spoke gently.

"Oh, yes I can, yes I can, Daddy," Joan said. "Helen understands that it isn't comfortable. I've written her all about that. We're willing to rough it. We can get our own groceries in Macabit. We'll take turns walking into the village. I'm going to buy some firewood and a lot of canned goods and some-"

"But, Joan, dear, this house wasn't built to be lived in during the winter. The walls are thin. The water will be turned off."

"Oh, we don't care about the water-we'll get our water out of the lake."

"Now, Joan, dear, listen to me," Mr. Nudd said firmly. "You cannot stay here in the winter. You would last about a week. I would have to come up here and get you, and I don't want to close this house twice." He had spoken with an edge of impatience, but now reason and affection surged into his voice. "Think of how it would be, dear, with no heat and no water and none of your family."

"Daddy, I want to stay!" Joan cried. "I want to stay! Please let me stay! I've planned it for so long."

"You're being ridiculous, Joan," Mr. Nudd cut in. "This is a summer house."

"But, Daddy, I'm not asking very much!" Joan cried. "I'm not a child any more. I'm nearly forty years old. I've never asked you for anything. You've always been so strict. You never let me do what I want."

"Joan, dear, please try to be reasonable, please at least try to be reasonable, please try and imagine-"

"Esther got everything she wanted. She went to Europe twice; she had that car in college; she had that fur coat." Suddenly, Joan got down on her knees, and then sat on the floor. The movement was ugly, and it was meant to enrage her father.

"I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay, I want to stay!" she cried.

"Joan, you're acting like a child!" he shouted. "Get up."

"I want to act like a child!" she screamed. "I want to act like a child for a little while! Is there anything so terrible about wanting to act like a child for a little while? I don't have any joy in my life any more. When I'm unhappy, I try to remember a time when I was happy, but I can't remember a time any more."

"Joan, get up. Get up on your feet. Get up on your two feet."

"I can't, I can't, I can't," she sobbed. "It hurts me to stand up-it hurts my legs."

"Get up, Joan." He stooped down, and it was an effort for the old man to raise his daughter, to her feet. "Oh, my baby, oh, my poor baby!" he said, and he put his arm around her. "Come into the bathroom and I'll wash your face, you poor baby." She let him wash her face, and then they had a drink and sat down to a game of checkers.

RUSSELL got to Whitebeach Camp at half past six, and they drank some gin on the porch. The liquor made him garrulous, and he began to talk about his war experiences, but the atmosphere was elastic and forgiving, and he knew that nothing he did there that night would be considered wrong. They went outside again after supper, although it was cool. The clouds had not colored. In the glancing light, the hillside shone like a bolt of velvet. Mrs. Nudd covered her legs with a blanket and looked at the scene. It was the most enduring pleasure of these years. There had been the boom, the crash, the depression, the recession, the malaise of imminent war, the war itself, the boom, the inflation, the recession, the slump, and now there was the malaise again, but none of this had changed a stone or a leaf in the view she saw from her porch.

"You know, I'm thirty-seven years old," Randy said. He spoke importantly, as if the pa.s.sage of time over his head was singular, interesting, and a dirty trick. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue. "If I'd gone back to Cambridge for my reunion this year, it would have been my fifteenth."

"That's nothing," Esther said.

"Did you know that the Teeters have bought the old Henderson place?" Mr. Nudd asked. "There's a man who made a fortune in the war." He stood, turned the chair he was sitting in upside down, and pounded at the legs with his fist. His cigarette was wet. When he sat down again, the long ash spilled onto his vest.

"Do I look thirty-seven?" Randy asked.

"Do you know that you've mentioned the fact that you're thirty-seven eight times today?" Esther said. "I've counted them."

"How much does it cost to go to Europe in an airplane?" Mr. Nudd asked.

The conversation went from ocean fares to whether it was pleasanter to come into a strange city in the morning or the evening. Then they recalled odd names among the guests who had been at Whitebeach Camp; there had been Mr. and Mrs. Peppercorn, Mr. and Mrs. Starkweather, Mr. and Mrs. Freestone, the Bloods, the Mudds, and the Parsleys.

That late in the season, the light went quickly. It was sunny one minute and dark the next. Macabit and its mountain range were canted against the afterglow, and for a while it seemed unimaginable that anything could lie beyond the mountains, that this was not the end of the world. The wall of pure and bra.s.sy light seemed to beat up from infinity. Then the stars came out, the earth rumbled downward, the illusion of an abyss was lost. Mrs. Nudd looked around her, and the time and the place seemed strangely important. This is not an imitation, she thought, this is not the product of custom, this is the unique place, the unique air, where my children have spent the best of themselves. The realization that none of them had done well made her sink back in her chair. She squinted the tears out of her eyes. What had made the summer always an island, she thought; what had made it such a small island? What mistakes had they made? What had they done wrong? They had loved their neighbors, respected the force of modesty, held honor above gain. Then where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people who surrounded her seem like the figures in a tragedy?

"Remember the day the pig fell into the well?" she asked. The sky was discolored. Below the black mountains, the lake ran a rough and deadly gray. "Weren't you playing tennis with Esther, Russell? That was Esther's tennis summer. Didn't you win the pig at the fair in Lawchester, Randy? You won it at one of those things where you throw baseb.a.l.l.s at a target. You were always such a good athlete."

They all waited graciously for their turn. They recalled the drowned pig, the launch on Gull Rock, Aunt Martha's corsets hanging in the window, the fire in the clouds, and the bl.u.s.tering northwest wind. They laughed helplessly at the place where Nora fell down the stairs. Pamela cut in to recall the announcement of her engagement. After this, they recalled how Miss Coolidge had gone upstairs and returned with a briefcase full of music, and, standing by the open door, so that she could get the light, had performed the standard repertoire of the rural Protestant Church. She had sung for more than an hour. They couldn't stop her. During her recital, Esther and Russell left the porch and went up to the field to bury the drowned pig. It was cool. Esther held a lantern while Russell dug the grave. They had decided then that even if they were in love they could never marry, because he wouldn't leave Macabit and she would never live there. When they got back to the porch, Miss Coolidge was singing her last selection, and then Russell left and they all went to bed.

The story restored Mrs. Nudd and made her feel that all was well. It had exhilarated the rest, and, talking loudly and laughing, they went into the house. Mr. Nudd lighted a fire and sat down to play checkers with Joan. Mrs. Nudd pa.s.sed a box of stale candy. It had begun to blow outside, and the house creaked gently, like a hull when the wind takes up the sail. The room with the people in it looked enduring and secure, although in the morning they would all be gone.

THE FIVE-FORTY-EIGHT.

When Blake stepped out of the elevator, he saw her. A few people, mostly men waiting for girls, stood in the lobby watching the elevator doors. She was among them. As he saw her, her face took on a look of such loathing and purpose that he realized she had been waiting for him. He did not approach her. She had no legitimate business with him. They had nothing to say. He turned and walked toward the gla.s.s doors at the end of the lobby, feeling that faint guilt and bewilderment we experience when we bypa.s.s some old friend or cla.s.smate who seems threadbare, or sick, or miserable in some other way. It was five-eighteen by the clock in the Western Union office. He could catch the express. As he waited his turn at the revolving doors, he saw that it was still raining. It had been raining all day, and he noticed now how much louder the rain made the noises of the street. Outside, he started walking briskly east toward Madison Avenue. Traffic was tied up, and horns were blowing urgently on a cross-town street in the distance. The sidewalk was crowded. He wondered what she had hoped to gain by a glimpse of him coming out of the office building at the end of the day. Then he wondered if she was following him.

Walking in the city, we seldom turn and look back. The habit restrained Blake. He listened for a minute-foolishly-as he walked, as if he could distinguish her footsteps from the worlds of sound in the city at the end of a rainy day. Then he noticed, ahead of him on the other side of the street, a break in the wall of buildings. Something had been torn down; something was being put up, but the steel structure had only just risen above the sidewalk fence and daylight poured through the gap. Blake stopped opposite here and looked into a store window. It was a decorator's or an auctioneer's. The window was arranged like a room in which people live and entertain their friends. There were cups on the coffee table, magazines to read, and flowers in the vases, but the flowers were dead and the cups were empty and the guests had not come. In the plate gla.s.s, Blake saw a clear reflection of himself and the crowds that were pa.s.sing, like shadows, at his back. Then he saw her image-so close to him that it shocked him. She was standing only a foot or two behind him. He could have turned then and asked her what. she wanted, but instead of recognizing her, he s.h.i.+ed away abruptly from the reflection of her contorted face and went along the street. She might be meaning to do him harm-she might be meaning to kill him.

The suddenness with which he moved when he saw the reflection of her face tipped the water out of his hat brim in such a way that some of it ran down his neck. It felt unpleasantly like the sweat of fear. Then the cold water falling into his face and onto his bare hands, the rancid smell of the wet gutters and paving, the knowledge that his feet were beginning to get wet and that he might catch cold-all the common discomforts of walking in the rain-seemed to heighten the menace of his pursuer and to give him a morbid consciousness of his own physicalness and of the ease with which he could be hurt. He could see ahead of him the corner of Madison Avenue, where the lights were brighter. He felt that if he could get to Madison Avenue he would be all right. At the corner, there was a bakery shop with two entrances, and he went in by the door on the cross-town street, bought a coffee ring, like any other commuter, and went out the Madison Avenue door. As he started down Madison Avenue, he saw her waiting for him by a hut where newspapers were sold.

She was not clever. She would be easy to shake. He could get into a taxi by one door and leave by the other. He could speak to a policeman. He could run-although he was afraid that if he did run, it might precipitate the violence he now felt sure she had planned. He was approaching a part of the city that he knew well and where the maze of street-level and underground pa.s.sages, elevator banks, and crowded lobbies made it easy for a man to lose a pursuer. The thought of this, and a whiff of sugary warmth from the coffee ring, cheered him. It was absurd to imagine being harmed on a crowded street. She was foolish, misled, lonely perhaps-that was all it could amount to. He was an insignificant man, and there was no point in anyone's following him from his office to the station. He knew no secrets of any consequence. The reports in his briefcase had no bearing on war, peace, the dope traffic, the hydrogen bomb, or any of the other international skullduggeries that he a.s.sociated with pursuers, men in trench coats, and wet sidewalks. Then he saw ahead of him the door of a men's bar. Oh, it was so simple!

He ordered a Gibson and shouldered his way in between two other men at the bar, so that if she should be watching from the window she would lose sight of him. The place was crowded with commuters putting down a drink before the ride home. They had brought in on their clothes-on their shoes and umbrellas-the rancid smell of the wet dusk outside, but Blake began to relax as soon as he tasted his Gibson. He glanced around at the common, mostly not-young faces that surrounded him and that were worried, if they were worried at all, about tax rates and who would be put in charge of merchandising. He tried to remember her name-Miss Dent, Miss Bent, Miss Lent-and he was surprised to find that he could not remember it, although he was proud of the retentiveness and reach of his memory and it had only been six months ago.

Personnel had sent her up one afternoon-he was looking for a secretary. He saw a dark woman-in her twenties, perhaps-who was slender and shy. Her dress was simple, her figure was not much, one of her stockings was crooked, but her voice was soft and he had been willing to try her out. After she had been working for him a few days, she told him that she had been in the hospital for eight months and that it had been hard after this for her to find work, and she wanted to thank him for giving her a chance. Her hair was dark, her eyes were dark; she left with him a pleasant impression of darkness. As he got to know her better, he felt that she was oversensitive and, as a consequence, lonely. Once, when she was speaking to him of what she imagined his life to be-full of friends.h.i.+ps, money, and a large and loving family-he had thought he recognized a peculiar feeling of deprivation. She seemed to imagine the lives of the rest of the world to be more brilliant than they were. Once, she had put a rose on his desk, and he had dropped it into the wastebasket. "I don't like roses," he told her.

She had been competent, punctual, and a good typist, and he had found only one thing in her that he could object to-her handwriting. He could not a.s.sociate the crudeness of her handwriting with her appearance. He would have expected her to write a rounded backhand, and in her writing there were intermittent traces of this, mixed with clumsy printing. Her writing gave him the feeling that she had been the victim of some inner-some emotional conflict that had in its violence broken the continuity of the lines she was able to make on paper. When she had been working for him three weeks-no longer-they stayed late one night and he offered, after work, to buy her a drink. "If you really want a drink," she said, "I have some whiskey at my place."

She lived in a room that seemed to him like a closet. There were suit boxes and hatboxes piled in a corner, and although the room seemed hardly big enough to hold the bed, the dresser, and the chair he sat in, there was an upright piano against one wall, with a book of Beethoven sonatas on the rack. She gave him a drink and said that she was going to put on something more comfortable. He urged her to; that was, after all, what he had come for. If he had any qualms, they would have been practical. Her diffidence, the feeling of deprivation in her point of view, promised to protect him from any consequences. Most of the many women he had known had been picked for their lack of self-esteem. When he put on his clothes again, an hour or so later, she was weeping. He felt too contented and warm and sleepy to worry much about her tears. As he was dressing, he noticed on the dresser a note she had written to a cleaning woman. The only light came from the bathroom-the door was ajar-and in this half light the hideously scrawled letters again seemed entirely wrong for her, and as if they must be the handwriting of some other and very gross woman. The next day, he did what he felt was the only sensible thing. When she was out for lunch, he called personnel and asked them to fire her. Then he took the afternoon off. A few days later, she came to the office, asking to see him. He told the switchboard girl not to let her in. He had not seen her again until this evening.

BLAKE DRANK a second Gibson and saw by the clock that he had missed the express. He would get the local-the five-forty-eight. When he left the bar the sky was still light; it was still raining. He looked carefully up and down the street and saw that the poor woman had gone. Once or twice, he looked over his shoulder, walking to the station, but he seemed to be safe. He was still not quite himself, he realized, because he had left his coffee ring at the bar, and he was not a man who forgot things. This lapse of memory pained him.

He bought a paper. The local was only half full when he boarded it, and he got a seat on the river side and took off his raincoat. He was a slender man with brown hair-undistinguished in every way, unless you could have divined in his pallor or his gray eyes his unpleasant tastes. He dressed-like the rest of us-as if he admitted the existence of sumptuary laws. His raincoat was the pale buff color of a mushroom. His hat was dark brown; so was his suit. Except for the few bright threads in his necktie, there was a scrupulous lack of color in his clothing that seemed protective.

He looked around the car for neighbors. Mrs. Compton was several seats in front of him, to the right. She smiled, but her smile was fleeting. It died swiftly and horribly. Mr. Watkins was directly in front of Blake. Mr. Watkins needed a haircut, and he had broken the sumptuary laws; he was wearing a corduroy jacket. He and Blake had quarreled, so they did not speak.

The swift death of Mrs. Compton's smile did not affect Blake at all. The Comptons lived in the house next to the Blakes, and Mrs. Compton had never understood the importance of minding her own business. Louise Blake took her troubles to Mrs. Compton, Blake knew, and instead of discouraging her crying jags, Mrs. Compton had come to imagine herself a sort of confessor and had developed a lively curiosity about the Blakes' intimate affairs. She had probably been given an account of their most recent quarrel. Blake had come home one night, overworked and tired, and had found that Louise had done nothing about getting supper. He had gone into the kitchen, followed by Louise, and had pointed out to her that the date was the fifth. He had drawn a circle around the date on the kitchen calendar. "One week is the twelfth," he had said. "Two weeks will be the nineteenth." He drew a circle around the nineteenth. "I'm not going to speak to you for two weeks," he had said. "That will be the nineteenth." She had wept, she had protested, but it had been eight or ten years since she had been able to touch him with her entreaties. Louise had got old. Now the lines in her face were ineradicable, and when she clapped her gla.s.ses onto her nose to read the evening paper, she looked to him like an unpleasant stranger. The physical charms that had been her only attraction were gone. It had been nine years since Blake had built a bookshelf in the doorway that connected their rooms and had fitted into the bookshelf wooden doors that could be locked, since he did not want the children to see his books. But their prolonged estrangement didn't seem remarkable to Blake. He had quarreled with his wife, but so did every other man born of woman. It was human nature. In any place where you can hear their voices-a hotel courtyard, an air shaft, a street on a summer evening-you will hear harsh words.

The hard feeling between Blake and Mr. Watkins also had to do with Blake's family, but it was not as serious or as troublesome as what lay behind Mrs. Compton's fleeting smile. The Watkinses rented. Mr. Watkins broke the sumptuary laws day after day-he once went to the eight-fourteen in a pair of sandals-and he made his living as a commercial artist. Blake's oldest son-Charlie was fourteen-had made friends with the Watkins boy. He had spent a lot of time in the sloppy rented house where the Watkinses lived. The friends.h.i.+p had affected his manners and his neatness. Then he had begun to take some meals with the Watkinses, and to spend Sat.u.r.day nights there. When he had moved most of his possessions over to the Watkinses' and had begun to spend more than half his nights there, Blake had been forced to act. He had spoken not to Charlie but to Mr. Watkins, and had, of necessity, said a number of things that must have sounded critical. Mr. Watkins' long and dirty hair and his corduroy jacket rea.s.sured Blake that he had been in the right.

But Mrs. Compton's dying smile and Mr. Watkins' dirty hair did not lessen the pleasure Blake took in setting himself in an uncomfortable seat on the five-forty-eight deep underground. The coach was old and smelled oddly like a bomb shelter in which whole families had spent the night. The light that spread from the ceiling down onto their heads and shoulders was dim. The filth on the window gla.s.s was streaked with rain from some other journey, and clouds of rank pipe and cigarette smoke had begun to rise from behind each newspaper, but it was a scene that meant to Blake that he was on a safe path, and after his brush with danger he even felt a little warmth toward Mrs. Compton and Mr. Watkins.

The train traveled up from underground into the weak daylight, and the slums and the city reminded Blake vaguely of the woman who had followed him. To avoid speculation or remorse about her, he turned his attention to the evening paper. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the landscape. It was industrial and, at that hour, sad. There were machine sheds and warehouses, and above these he saw a break in the clouds-a piece of yellow light. "Mr. Blake," someone said. He looked up. It was she. She was standing there holding one hand on the back of the seat to steady herself in the swaying coach. He remembered her name then-Miss Dent. "h.e.l.lo, Miss Dent," he said.

"Do you mind if I sit here?"

"I guess not."

"Thank you. It's very kind of you. I don't like to inconvenience you like this. I don't want to..." He had been frightened when he looked up and saw her, but her timid voice rapidly rea.s.sured him. He s.h.i.+fted his hams-that futile and reflexive gesture of hospitality-and she sat down. She sighed. He smelled her wet clothing. She wore a formless black hat with a cheap crest st.i.tched onto it. Her coat was thin cloth, he saw, and she wore gloves and carried a large pocketbook.

"Are you living out in this direction now, Miss Dent?"

She opened her purse and reached for her handkerchief. She had begun to cry. He turned his head to see if anyone in the car was looking, but no one was. He had sat beside a thousand pa.s.sengers on the evening train. He had noticed their clothes, the holes in their gloves; and if they fell asleep and mumbled he had wondered what their worries were. He had cla.s.sified almost all of them briefly before he buried his nose in the paper. He had marked them as rich, poor, brilliant or dull, neighbors or strangers, but no one of the thousand had ever wept. When she opened her purse, he remembered her perfume. It had clung to his skin the night he went to her place for a drink.

"I've been very sick," she said. "This is the first time I've been out of bed in two weeks. I've been terribly sick."

"I'm sorry that you've been sick, Miss Dent," he said in a voice loud enough to be heard by Mr. Watkins and Mrs. Compton. "Where are you working now?"

"What?"

"Where are you working now?"

"Oh, don't make me laugh," she said softly.

"I don't understand."

"You poisoned their minds."

He straightened his neck and braced his shoulders. These wrenching movements expressed a brief-and hopeless-longing to be in some other place. She meant trouble. He took a breath. He looked with deep feeling at the half-filled, half-lighted coach to affirm his sense of actuality, of a world in which there was not very much bad trouble after all. He was conscious of her heavy breathing and the smell of her rain-soaked coat. The train stopped. A nun and a man in overalls got off. When it started again, Blake put on his hat and reached for his raincoat.

"Where are you going?" she said.

"I'm going to the next car."

"Oh, no," she said. "No, no, no." She put her white face so close to his ear that he could feel her warm breath on his cheek. "Don't do that," she whispered. "Don't try and escape me. I have a pistol and I'll have to kill you and I don't want to. All I want to do is to talk with you. Don't move or I'll kill you. Don't, don't, don't!"

Blake sat back abruptly in his seat. If he had wanted to stand and shout for help, he would not have been able to. His tongue had swelled to twice its size, and when he tried to move it, it stuck horribly to the roof of his mouth. His legs were limp. All he could think of to do then was to wait for his heart to stop its hysterical beating, so that he could judge the extent of his danger. She was sitting a little sidewise, and in her pocketbook was the pistol, aimed at his belly.

"You understand me now, don't you?" she said. "You understand that I'm serious?" He tried to speak but he was still mute. He nodded his head. "Now we'll sit quietly for a little while," she said. "I got so excited that my thoughts are all confused. We'll sit quietly for a little while, until I can get my thoughts in order again."

Help would come, Blake thought. It was only a question of minutes. Someone, noticing the look on his face or her peculiar posture, would stop and interfere, and it would all be over. All he had to do was to wait until someone noticed his predicament. Out of the window he saw the river and the sky. The rain clouds were rolling down like a shutter, and while he watched, a streak of orange light on the horizon became brilliant. Its brilliance spread-he could see it move-across the waves until it raked the banks of the river with a dim firelight. Then it was put out. Help would come in a minute, he thought. Help would come before they stopped again; but the train stopped, there were some comings and goings, and Blake still lived on, at the mercy of the woman beside him. The possibility that help might not come was one that he could not face. The possibility that his predicament was not noticeable, that Mrs. Compton would guess that he was taking a poor relation out to dinner at Shady Hill, was something he would think about later. Then the saliva came back into his mouth and he was able to speak.

"Miss Dent?"

"Yes."

"What do you want?"

"I want to talk to you."

"You can come to my office."

"Oh, no. I went there every day for two weeks."

"You could make an appointment."

"No," she said. "I think we can talk here. I wrote you a letter but I've been too sick to go out and mail it. I've put down all my thoughts. I like to travel. I like trains. One of my troubles has always been that I could never afford to travel. I suppose you see this scenery every night and don't notice it any more, but it's nice for someone who's been in bed a long time. They say that He's not in the river and the hills but I think He is. 'Where shall wisdom be found?' it says. 'Where is the place of understanding? The depth saith it is not in me; the sea saith it is not with me. Destruction and death say we have heard the force with our ears.'

"Oh, I know what you're thinking," she said. "You're thinking that I'm crazy, and I have been very sick again but I'm going to be better. It's going to make me better to talk with you. I was in the hospital all the time before I came to work for you but they never tried to cure me, they only wanted to take away my self-respect. I haven't had any work now for three months. Even if I did have to kill you, they wouldn't be able to do anything to me except put me back in the hospital, so you see I'm not afraid. But let's sit quietly for a little while longer. I have to be calm."

The train continued its halting progress up the bank of the river, and Blake tried to force himself to make some plans for escape, but the immediate threat to his life made this difficult, and instead of planning sensibly, he thought of the many ways in which he could have avoided her in the first place. As soon as he had felt these regrets, he realized their futility. It was like regretting his lack of suspicion when she first mentioned her months in the hospital. It was like regretting his failure to have been warned by her shyness, her diffidence, and the handwriting that looked like the marks of a claw. There was no way of rectifying his mistakes, and he felt-for perhaps the first time in his mature life-the full force of regret. Out of the window, he saw some men fis.h.i.+ng on the nearly dark river, and then a ramshackle boat club that seemed to have been nailed together out of sc.r.a.ps of wood that had been washed up on the sh.o.r.e.

Mr. Watkins had fallen asleep. He was snoring. Mrs. Compton read her paper. The train creaked, slowed, and halted infirmly at another station. Blake could see the southbound platform, where a few pa.s.sengers were waiting to go into the city. There was a workman with a lunch pail, a dressed-up woman, and a woman with a suitcase. They stood apart from one another. Some advertis.e.m.e.nts were posted on the wall behind them. There was a picture of a couple drinking a toast in wine, a picture of a Cat's Paw rubber heel, and a picture of a Hawaiian dancer. Their cheerful intent seemed to go no farther than the puddles of water on the platform and to expire there. The platform and the people on it looked lonely. The train drew away from the station into the scattered lights of a slum and then into the darkness of the country and the river.

"I want you to read my letter before we get to Shady Hill," she said. "It's on the seat. Pick it up. I would have mailed it to you, but I've been too sick to go out. I haven't gone out for two weeks. I haven't had any work for three months. I haven't spoken to anybody but the landlady. Please read my letter."

He picked up the letter from the seat where she had put it. The cheap paper felt abhorrent and filthy to his fingers. It was folded and refolded. "Dear Husband," she had written, in that crazy, wandering hand, "they say that human love leads us to divine love, but is this true? I dream about you every night. I have such terrible desires. I have always had a gift for dreams. I dreamed on Tuesday of a volcano erupting with blood. When I was in the hospital they said they wanted to cure me but they only wanted to take away my self-respect. They only wanted me to dream about sewing and basketwork but I protected my gift for dreams. I'm clairvoyant. I can tell when the telephone is going to ring. I've never had a true friend in my whole life..."

The train stopped again. There was another platform, another picture of the couple drinking a toast, the rubber heel, and the Hawaiian dancer. Suddenly she pressed her face close to Blake's again and whispered in his ear. "I know what you're thinking. I can see it in your face. You're thinking you can get away from me in Shady Hill, aren't you? Oh, I've been planning this for weeks. It's all I've had to think about. I won't harm you if you'll let me talk. I've been thinking about devils. I mean, if there are devils in the world, if there are people in the world who represent evil, is it our duty to exterminate them? I know that you always prey on weak people. I can tell. Oh, sometimes I think I ought to kill you. Sometimes I think you're the only obstacle between me and my happiness. Sometimes..." She touched Blake with the pistol. He felt the muzzle against his belly. The bullet, at that distance, would make a small hole where it entered, but it would rip out of his back a place as big as a soccer ball. He remembered the unburied dead he had seen in the war. The memory came in a rush; entrails, eyes, shattered bone, ordure, and other filth.

"All I've ever wanted in life is a little love," she said. She lightened the pressure of the gun. Mr. Watkins still slept. Mrs. Compton was sitting calmly with her hands folded in her lap. The coach rocked gently, and the coats and mushroom-colored raincoats that hung between the windows swayed a little as the car moved. Blake's elbow was on the window sill and his left shoe was on the guard above the steam-pipe. The car smelled like some dismal cla.s.sroom. The pa.s.sengers seemed asleep and apart, and Blake felt that he might never escape the smell of heat and wet clothing and the dimness of the light. He tried to summon the calculated self-deceptions with which he sometimes cheered himself, but he was left without any energy for hope of self-deception.

The conductor put his head in the door and said, "Shady Hill, next, Shady Hill."

"Now," she said. "Now you get out ahead of me."

Mr. Watkins waked suddenly, put on his coat and hat, and smiled at Mrs. Compton, who was gathering her parcels to her in a series of maternal gestures. They went to the door. Blake joined them, but neither of them spoke to him or seemed to notice the woman at his back. The conductor threw open the door, and Blake saw on the platform of the next car a few other neighbors who had missed the express, waiting patiently and tiredly in the wan light for their trip to end. He raised his head to see through the open door the abandoned mansion out of town, a NO TRESPa.s.sING sign nailed to a tree, and then the oil tanks. The concrete abutments of the bridge pa.s.sed, so close to the open door that he could have touched them. Then he saw the first of the lampposts on the northbound platform, the sign SHADY HILL in black and gold, and the little lawn and flower bed kept up by the Improvement a.s.sociation, and then the cab stand and a corner of the old-fas.h.i.+oned depot. It was raining again; it was pouring. He could hear the splash of water and see the lights reflected in puddles and in the s.h.i.+ning pavement, and the idle sound of splas.h.i.+ng and dripping formed in his mind a conception of shelter, so light and strange that it seemed to belong to a time of his life that he could not remember.

He went down the steps with her at his back. A dozen or so cars were waiting by the station with their motors running. A few people got off from each of the other coaches; he recognized most of them, but none of them offered to give him a ride. They walked separately or in pairs-purposefully out of the rain to the shelter of the platform, where the car horns called to them. It was time to go home, time for a drink, time for love, time for supper, and he could see the lights on the hill-lights by which children were being bathed, meat cooked, dishes washed-s.h.i.+ning in the rain. One by one, the cars picked up the heads of families, until there were only four left. Two of the stranded pa.s.sengers drove off in the only taxi the village had. "I'm sorry, darling," a woman said tenderly to her husband when she drove up a few minutes later. "All our clocks are slow." The last man looked at his watch, looked at the rain, and then walked off into it, and Blake saw him go as if they had some reason to say goodbye-not as we say goodbye to friends after a party but as we say goodbye when we are faced with an inexorable and unwanted parting of the spirit and the heart. The man's footsteps sounded as he crossed the parking lot to the sidewalk, and then they were lost. In the station, a telephone began to ring. The ringing was loud, evenly s.p.a.ced, and unanswered. Someone wanted to know about the next train to Albany, but Mr. Flanagan, the stationmaster, had gone home an hour ago. He had turned on all his lights before he went away. They burned in the empty waiting room. They burned, tin-shaded, at intervals up and down the platform and with the peculiar sadness of dim and purposeless lights. They lighted the Hawaiian dancer, the couple drinking a toast, the rubber heel.

"I've never been here before," she said. "I thought it would look different. I didn't think it would look so shabby. Let's get out of the light. Go over there."

His legs felt sore. All his strength was gone. "Go on," she said.

North of the station there were a freight house and a coal-yard and an inlet where the butcher and the baker and the man who ran the service station moored the dinghies, from which they fished on Sundays, sunk now to the gunwales with the rain. As he walked toward the freight house, he saw a movement on the ground and heard a sc.r.a.ping sound, and then he saw a rat take its head out of a paper bag and regard him. The rat seized the bag in its teeth and dragged it into a culvert.

"Stop," she said. "Turn around. Oh, I ought to feel sorry for you. Look at your poor face. But you don't know what I've been through. I'm afraid to go out in the daylight. I'm afraid the blue sky will fall down on me. I'm like poor Chicken-Licken. I only feel like myself when it begins to get dark. But still and all I'm better than you. I still have good dreams sometimes. I dream about picnics and heaven and the brotherhood of man, and about castles in the moonlight and a river with willow trees all along the edge of it and foreign cities, and after all I know more about love than you."

He heard from off the dark river the drone of an outboard motor, a sound that drew slowly behind it across the dark water such a burden of clear, sweet memories of gone summers and gone pleasures that it made his flesh crawl, and he thought of dark in the mountains and the children singing. "They never wanted to cure me," she said. "They..."

The noise of a train coming down from the north drowned out her voice, but she went on talking. The noise filled his ears, and the windows where people ate, drank, slept, and read flew past. When the train had pa.s.sed beyond the bridge, the noise grew distant, and he heard her screaming at him, "Kneel down! Kneel down! Do what I say. Kneel down!"

He got to his knees. He bent his head. "There," she said. "You see, if you do what I say, I won't harm you, because I really don't want to harm you, I want to help you, but when I see your face it sometimes seems to me that I can't help you. Sometimes it seems to me that if I were good and loving and sane-oh, much better than I am-sometimes it seems to me that if I were all these things and young and beautiful, too, and if I called to show you the right way, you wouldn't heed me. Oh, I'm better than you, I'm better than you, and I shouldn't waste my time or spoil my life like this. Put your face in the dirt. Put your face in the dirt! Do what I say. Put your face in the dirt."

He fell forward in the filth. The coal skinned his face. He stretched out on the ground, weeping. "Now I feel better," she said. "Now I can wash my hands of you, I can wash my hands of all this, because you see there is some kindness, some saneness in me that I can find and use. I can wash my hands." Then he heard her footsteps go away from him, over the rubble. He heard the clearer and more distant sound they made on the hard surface of the platform. He heard them diminish. He raised his head. He saw her climb the stairs of the wooden footbridge and cross it and go down to the other platform, where her figure in the dim light looked small, common, and harmless. He raised himself out of the dust-warily at first, until he saw by her att.i.tude, her looks, that she had forgotten him; that she had completed what she had wanted to do, and that he was safe. He got to his feet and picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen and walked home.