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Contents

He had never seen such a thing in his life. He could have looked at it with tolerance and even a mild curiosity, had it kept still, both immovable-still and silent-still. But it did neither. And it was intent upon him. It intended to . . . do what? He didn’t know. But whatever it intended was meant for him, all right. It loomed and swelled and swooped upon him with a horrid speed.

There was first the whiteness. White, in itself, was not alarming, but this whiteness was shaped to suggest something that had never in his experience been white before. The shape of a “face” had never been as white as this. It had been black, tan, yellow, pink, peach, or creamy with red or brown blotches, all of which variations he had accepted in his day, but he had never seen a face-shape in a color basically so dead and terrible a white.

It was a face, because on a face, as he knew very well, there were eyes, nose, and mouth. On this thing there were eyes, very large, great black-and-red circles, interlined with the uncanny white, but also very small, peering at him from the centers of those circles. Two small somewhat almond-shaped elements in a design would not have been frightening had they been still, but these moved. They “saw” him. They projected something cold and tired that he somehow received and knew to be both intent and indifferent, placing him as one among many, and what of it? He wasn’t used to that.

There was a jutting-forth in the proper central position, as “nose,” and it was white, but yet worse. The white had an improbable ending, a coloration at the foremost knob that was perfectly round and brilliantly crimson. This monstrous nose was not mere design, either. It quivered, it drew in air, it was casting a shaft of warm air upon his very cheek.

Then there was “mouth.” Mouth he understood. Mouth spoke, mouth smiled, mouth kissed. This mouth was either a small pink-lined slit or huge curvings of red, outlined by blue, and all on that dead white, and in the midst, the little part writhed and from it came booming sounds and huffs of air. While the nose twitched and the little slits of eyes watched, the mouth stretched hideously, making the great red-and-blue outlines grow larger and larger and the noise was too near, too loud. . . .

He screamed his terror. It came out in waves, intermittent with the gasping breaths he had to draw (he knew that) in whatever peril.

His father was laughing. His mother was thrusting him toward the thing. It raised sharp triangles of red-and-blue brows and it breathed, and it boomed, while he screamed his mortal terror of what was so grotesquely an exaggeration and a contradiction of much that he had learned to trust, so far.

His mother turned him; her hand spread on his back. “He’s a little young,” she said, and then to him, crooning, “Wasn’t that a funny man?”

His father said happily, “All kids love clowns. Listen to them squeal!” Children were screaming, along the row.

But for him, the baby guessed, there would be peace, now, for a while, and nothing but what he could bear. For a while.

“Hush. Hush,” his mother said, “Don’t be so silly. Such a funny man!”

So he drew himself into himself, for he had to live, he knew that, and he rested, trembling for the mercy of the giants with whom he lived, but whom he dared not altogether trust, anymore. Anymore.

Deedee Jonas lay on her stomach in a certain spot at the very lip of the swimming pool, where the coping met the concrete of the deck.

The rule was that no one, at all, ever, was allowed to swim alone, but Deedee had dunked herself in the shallow end long enough to get wet. So the scrap of pink-flowered cotton she wore was dank and cold. The mock brassiere, which was a mere prophecy on Deedee’s flat little chest, was crushed upon the heat of the stone. Her left arm was crooked to make a pillow for her forehead. From the ends of her short blond hair, cold little trickles slipped around her neck. The sun beat on her bare shanks. She lay very still.

The kids weren’t out of Sunday school yet. They soon would come . . . one or two of her neighborhood pals . . . in suit with towel, clicking through the gate.

Deedee hadn’t felt like going to Sunday school. It was too beautiful a day . . . too beautiful a day. “This is the day that the Lord has made: we will rejoice in it and be glad.” That’s what they would be saying inside the stone walls in the religious gloom. Deedee liked that very much.

Deedee was twelve: her father was dead. She and her mother lived here alone. Her mama hadn’t gone to church this morning, either. There was company for lunch.

Deedee liked being exactly where she was. In a way, she would be sorry when the kids did come. This spot, where she was lying, had a magic secret. She would never tell the kids about it. Or anyone. She wouldn’t tell for anything.

Just one week ago, a fact which had given her discovery a Sundayish flavor, Deedee had flopped upon this spot for no reason at all. Ever since, she’d had a reason, and ever since, she had permitted herself to lie here a little while each day. She rationed her pleasure.

The coping of the pool was smooth to the fingertips, smooth but speckled with holes like small Swiss-cheese holes. The concrete of the deck was rougher with swirls in it like huge fingerprints, lying in a pattern. Just where these two textures met, here at the shallow end, the men who had poured the deck had made a tiny mistake in their subtle business of grading the concrete. Water was supposed to be gently led away from the pool and off the deck into the soil. But just here a long narrow puddle tended to remain.

Last Sunday, when Deedee had opened her eyes, without thought, expecting to see nothing, since her nose was nearly touching the solid deck, she had suddenly seen through to a glorious world in full color, vast and enchanting. She was looking down into the vault of the sky.

Every day since, Deedee had been able to lie face down, eyes hidden, seeming to be asleep or drugged by the sun, and all the while she could plainly see the whole world above her and behind her and even before her. The puddle was a mirror.

She was looking now, past the strangely narrowed shadow of her own jawbone, at the blue blue sky, the fresh shining gold-edged green of the camphor leaves, and everything was greener, bluer, and more golden and more whatever it was. She could see the gate. No one could surprise her. There was delight in this. She could see the bright pink of the geraniums along the two-steps-down. She could see the jasmine vine on the trellis climbing to the eaves and she could see the house roof, chimney, clouds in the sky. She could see the whitewashed wall that was actually twenty feet from the top of her head.

She seemed to look through the slot of the puddle into a bowl, and in the bowl was the whole world upside down, at once bigger and smaller than real. It was so beautiful. It was her own. If Deedee blew out her breath gently the whole secret reflected world would tremble.

Alone by the pool, half-naked, looking like a pagan child, Deedee Jonas was in a state of awe.

Her mother, Helen Jonas, came out of the house with Douglas Carey. “Has she drowned?” said Helen calmly. “Where is she?”

“On the deck. I see her,” the man said. “Frying.”

Deedee heard them. She also saw them at the gate. She did not move.

“What have we here?” said Douglas, “One pink lizard with yellow hair.”

“Hi.” Deedee made her voice sleepy.

“Deedee, aren’t you done on that side?” her mother said.

“Um um.”

“Leave her,” said Douglas. “Fried children. Favorite dish in southern California.”

“I sometimes wonder,” said Helen, “what it is going to do to their skins. They’ll all wind up with leather hides.”

“Well?” he said tolerantly.

Deedee watched them. They sat down side by side on the canvas pad of the settee. Her mother was wearing last season’s suit, the blue-and-white polka dot. Her mother’s hair was yellow.

Deedee was well content with her mother. Other kids would sometimes say, “My mom will have kittens!” “My mom will flip!” But Deedee’s mom neither flipped nor had kittens. She made safety rules with sense to them. Deedee never saw reason to break them. She made honesty rules and then made it easy to tell her the truth. She did not fuss or nag. She liked to listen and she understood adventures very well. Deedee was warm and easy with her mother and never even thought about the relationship.

Her father she often forgot, although he was present in her cosmos, something good there. Like the Lord, but not so near.

The Lord was her Father.

Douglas Carey was a man. He often came for lunch, to swim, or in the evening to take her mother somewhere. Several men did. But this one Deedee liked best.

Deedee watched him now and he didn’t know she could see him at all. There was something deeply thrilling about this. She could see them both, so clearly, and she thought they were beautiful. She watched her mother untangle her toes from her sandals and stretch out her nice sun-tinted legs. She watched Douglas Carey light their cigarettes. She listened to their easy lazy voices, the adult chatter, of which she received the sense of easiness.

Deedee was very happy. It was just perfect. The beautiful day. Her mother near. And only Douglas Carey, besides . . . who was Deedee’s own.

This was a kind of secret. At least nobody ever spoke of it or ever would. This man had done the one thing necessary. He had paid attention. Deedee knew. No child is fooled by phony attention. No child is flattered by the boring question or the dull comment on the answer. “How do you like school this year?” “Oh, isn’t that nice!” “What are you doing, dear?” “My, that must be fun!” This was the kind of chitchat between the generations that passed for attention, but it didn’t mean anything.

When Douglas Carey asked a question, he received the answer: he gave it thought. It didn’t matter so much whether he liked the answer or even whether he liked Deedee herself. He wanted to know about her and what she was thinking and this was more gratifying than well-meant goodwill. It gave her dimension, solidified her being. For instance, he always heard what she said, and heard it the first time, and got it right. He knew, right now, that Deedee was lying on the deck not far away, and he did not forget it. She existed in his attention.

And therefore, he was hers. Deedee didn’t wonder why. This was simply so.

“The concert’s on Thursday and so is the Millers’ party. Choose one, I guess,” her mother was saying.

“Decisions. Decisions. Let’s go to the movies.”

“The sky could fall in before Thursday, I suppose.”

“That’s the spirit.” He’d stretched out his legs, too. Deedee could study his profile. “This I like,” he said. “Secluded.”

“Not many can see through a brick wall,” her mother murmured.

“Nobody can see over, either. Where are all the kids today?”

“They’ll be around.”

“I like it the way it is,” he said. “Just us chickens.”

Deedee saw her mother’s forearm come up swiftly. “My heathen child,” said her lazy voice, “skipped Sunday school.”

“Oh, well,” he said quickly, and to Deedee it was a miracle of understanding. “Such a beautiful day.”

“Pure Chamber of Commerce.”

“Look at that cloud.”

The cloud was purest white on blue. Then in Deedee’s own bright reflected world there was movement, under the cloud and the sky. As her mother turned up her face to look, Douglas leaned forward. His left arm went around her mother’s neck. His brown right hand came up and pressed the flesh of her mother’s shoulder. The faces came together. Helen’s lips parted and yearned, and then they were kissing, smashed together, and Deedee’s heart was jumping, jumping, and the puddle was troubled by her breath and the bright world quivered and shook to pieces.

“Blue skies . . .” Deedee heard her mother say dreamily. The voice was easy.

“Nothing but blue skies . . .” he sang softly.

Deedee stopped her breath and the puddle steadied. They were sitting as if nothing had happened. In their voices nothing had happened. They had no notion that she could see.

Deedee’s heart kept jumping. She was rigid. She couldn’t hold as still as this much longer.

“Hate to miss the concert . . .”

“Midge Miller is one of those aggressive hostesses, alas.”

“Takes offense? Well . . .”

The casual easy voices went right on.

Silently, Deedee rolled her body. She slipped off the coping and into the water with scarcely a splash. She swam underwater, face fiercely frowning, breath held hard, silence roaring in her ears.

“I think she must have gills,” said Helen Jonas in affectionate mock dismay. She watched the lively weaving of the skinny little legs down under the blue surface.

“Let’s tell her,” he said in a low voice. “Isn’t this the perfect time? Let me tell her.”

“No, I . . .”

“Honey, we better. If we want the wedding set up for the first of September. I’d like to tell her, Helen. I think I can. We’re pretty good friends. I’ve seen to that.”

“I know. I know you have.”

Deedee’s head broke the surface just beyond the ladder and made the violent backward fling that cast the wet hair out of her eyes. Deedee swam on to the far end and her water-sleek head floated where she held to the coping under the diving board.

Helen Jonas put her hand on her throat. “You had better let me tell her,” she said in sudden nervousness.

“If you say so,” he agreed amiably. “Well, meanwhile . . .” He got up and made a flat dive, a great commotion. He threshed busily down the pool.

Helen saw Deedee’s face turn, and turn away, with panic in the motion. Deedee climbed out. Deedee came trotting along the poolside, her heels thudding.

“Hey!” Douglas was calling. “Hey, Ducks!”

Deedee snatched her towel off the low wall and said through it to her mother, “Forgot my earplugs.”

Then the gate clicked. Helen distinctly heard the relief in Deedee’s cry of greeting. “Oh hi, Mary Jo. Come on in.”

Helen shook her cigarette end into the plastic poolside ashtray. It had burned her middle finger. She put the finger in her mouth.

Intuition? How had Deedee received across the sunny air the news of the way it was between her mother and the man? How had Helen now received, over air and water and on the antennae of her motherhood, the news that Deedee knew? Helen was quite sure that Deedee conquered shock and pain—her dripping child who sturdily stood and plied the towel and welcomed the other little girl with iron poise.

Pain? Jealousy? Helen did not feel herself riven between the two of them. Something was wrong but not this.

Ah, Douglas was only a man, not yet a father. He had tried with Deedee, but he had not done it right. Oh Lord, I should have noticed, she thought. I’ve been reckless and careless with Deedee. Oh, forgive me. Oh, if Deedee is hurt and if Deedee can’t now accept him for a father . . . what will I do? What will I do?

Helen Jonas saw the clear bright sunny world and all her happiness turn upside down.

She got up and put on her cap and walked down the steps into the water.

The little girls trotted to the board. Deedee stood on the brink of a dive.

“I’ll watch,” called Douglas from the side. “Mind the ankles.” He was just a man, a nice friendly man, cut off from the news that shouted in the sunny air.

But Deedee didn’t look at him. She bounced into the air and came down, feet first, and feet wide, in an ugly jump.

The man had sense enough to be silent.

Helen swam to the deep end. She pulled herself out. “Deedee . . .”

“Go ahead and try it,” yelled Deedee’s floating head. “It doesn’t hurt so much.”

The neighbor’s child shivered on the board.

“Deedee,” said Helen in a low clear voice, “come here please.” The little girl obeyed. She’d never had reason to disobey. She swam to her mother. She hauled herself out of the water. They sat side by side, legs dangling.

“Douglas and I want to get married,” Helen said, clear and low. Words spoken in the sun.

“Oh?” said Deedee. Her wet lashes stuck together and made a pointed border to her frightened eyes.

The neighbor’s child jumped in with a fine splash. Ripples lapped on their legs.

“He wanted you to like him,” Helen said. (To be blunt, to be absolutely straight and blunt, and quickly so, was all she knew to do.)

“That’s O.K.,” said Deedee hastily. Helen saw her swallow. “Would we live here or someplace else?” The eyes cast a panic look around the world as if to see how much of it could be held together.

“We’d live here,” Helen said. “At least for a long while.”

Silence on the rim where they were. Mary Jo was floundering on a rubber toy. Douglas was standing in the water watching her. His back was turned. Maybe he had antennae after all.

Helen said to her child, “While I was deciding how I felt about Douglas, it was private. It should be.”

“I guess . . .” said Deedee and she flushed.

“Now,” said Helen in a businesslike way, “if you don’t want me to marry him, then I won’t do it. So you think it over. Tell me, if you think you could get used to it.”

Deedee’s heart was jumping again. But slowly, slowly, the world was rolling over and balancing back. This was a very grown-up kind of talk. Sharp and real. Hard and true. Solid. Everything shook except this honesty. Except this sacrifice.

Douglas came walking on the deck, making big wet foot marks.

“Excuse us,” said Helen. “This is mother-to-daughter stuff and you’re not in the picture. Yet.”

“Excuse me,” he said quietly. And he walked behind them and walked on.

“I guess I was dumb, huh, Mama?” Deedee said.

“I think he was a little bit dumb,” said Helen. “I guess he was . . . wooing you to be his daughter.”

Deedee sat very straight on the rim of the pool and she lifted both arms high over head. Something seemed to fly loose from her fingertips, a ghostly dove, a me-thing, a piece of a foolish secret. Her eyes turned sideways a little mischievously. “I can take it,” said Deedee with bold stoicism. She gave her bottom a mysterious flip of force and made a neat dive from a sitting position.

Helen stood up and walked along the deck, slightly trembling.

“All right?” he asked.

“She is a wonderful child!” said Helen fiercely. “An absolutely wonderful little girl! You see you appreciate that.”

Deedee swam on her back and looked into heaven. Three fathers, she thought. Well, O.K. She felt a little lonely but proud.

When she came out to sun herself again, she did not lie in her magic spot. The world in the puddle was the Lord’s world, as all worlds would ever be. And the Lord had other children. And it was confusing, but it was true, that her mother was a kind of sister, too, and the man was brother, and Deedee must help them.

They sat late at the lunch table and afterwards moved through the dim, cool, high-ceilinged rooms to the Judge’s library where, in their quiet talk, the old man’s past and the young man’s future seemed to telescope and touch. But at twenty minutes after three, on that hot, bright, June Saturday afternoon, the present tense erupted. Out in the quiet street arose the sound of trouble.

Judge Kittinger adjusted his pince-nez, rose, and led the way to his old-fashioned veranda from which they could overlook the tree-roofed intersection of Greenwood Lane and Hannibal Street. Near the steps to the corner house, opposite, there was a surging knot of children and one man. Now, from the house on the Judge’s left, a woman in a blue housedress ran diagonally toward the excitement. And a police car slipped up Hannibal Street, gliding to the curb. One tall officer plunged into the group and threw restraining arms around a screaming boy.

Mike Russell, saying to his host “Excuse me, sir,” went rapidly across the street. Trouble’s center was the boy, ten or eleven years old, a towheaded boy with tawny-lashed blue eyes, a straight nose, a fine brow. He was beside himself, writhing in the policeman’s grasp. The woman in the blue dress was yammering at him. “Freddy! Freddy! Freddy!” Her voice simply did not reach his ears.

“You ole stinker! You rotten ole stinker! You ole nut!” All the boy’s heart was in the epithets.

“Now, listen . . .” The cop shook the boy who, helpless in those powerful hands, yet blazed. His fury had stung to crimson the face of the grown man at whom it was directed.

This man, who stood with his back to the house as one besieged, was plump, half-bald, with eyes much magnified by glasses. “Attacked me!” he cried in a high whine. “Rang my bell and absolutely leaped on me!”

Out of the seven or eight small boys clustered around them came overlapping fragments of shrill sentences. It was clear only that they opposed the man. A small woman in a print dress, a man in shorts, whose bare chest was winter-white, stood a little apart, hesitant and distressed. Up on the veranda of the house the screen door was half-open, and a woman seated in a wheelchair peered forth anxiously.

On the green grass, in the shade, perhaps thirty feet away, there lay in death a small brown-and-white dog.

The Judge’s luncheon guest observed all this. When the Judge drew near, there was a lessening of the noise. Judge Kittinger said, “This is Freddy Titus, isn’t it? Mr. Matlin? What’s happened?”

The man’s head jerked. “I,” he said, “did nothing to the dog. Why would I trouble to hurt the boy’s dog? I try—you know this, Judge—I try to live in peace here. But these kids are terrors! They’ve made this block a perfect hell for me and my family.” The man’s voice shook. “My wife, who is not strong . . . my stepdaughter, who is a cripple . . . these kids are no better than a slum gang. They are vicious! That boy rang my bell and attacked! I’ll have him up for assault! I . . .”

The Judge’s face was old ivory and he was aloof behind it.

On the porch a girl pushed past the woman in the chair, a girl who walked with a lurching gait.

Mike Russell asked, quietly, “Why do the boys say it was you, Mr. Matlin, who hurt the dog?”

The kids chorused, “He’s an ole mean . . .” “He’s a nut . . .” “Just because . . .” “. . . took Clive’s bat and . . .” “. . . chases us . . .” “. . . tries to put everything on us . . .” “. . . told my mother lies . . .” “. . . just because . . .”

He is our enemy, they were saying; he is our enemy.

“They . . .” began Matlin, his throat thick with anger.

“Hold it a minute.” The second cop, the thin one, walked toward where the dog was lying.

“Somebody,” said Mike Russell in a low voice, “must do something for the boy.”

The Judge looked down at the frantic child. He said, gently, “I am as sorry as I can be, Freddy . . .” But in his old heart there was too much known, and too many little dogs he remembered that had already died, and even if he were as sorry as he could be, he couldn’t be sorry enough. The boy’s eyes turned, rejected, returned. To the enemy.

Russell moved near the woman in blue, who pertained to this boy somehow. “His mother?”

“His folks are away. I’m there to take care of him,” she snapped, as if she felt herself put upon by a crisis she had not contracted to face.

“Can they be reached?”

“No,” she said decisively.

The young man put his stranger’s hand on the boy’s rigid little shoulder. But he too was rejected. Freddy’s eyes, brilliant with hatred, clung to the enemy. Hatred doesn’t cry.

“Listen,” said the tall cop, “if you could hang onto him for a minute . . .”

“Not I,” said Russell.

The thin cop came back. “Looks like the dog got poison. When was he found?”

“Just now,” the kids said.

“Where? There?”

“Up Hannibal Street. Right on the edge of ole Matlin’s back lot.”

“Edge of my lot!” Matlin’s color freshened again. “On the sidewalk, why don’t you say? Why don’t you tell the truth?”

“We are! We don’t tell lies!”

“Quiet, you guys,” the cop said. “Pipe down, now.”

“Heaven’s my witness, I wasn’t even here!” cried Matlin. “I played nine holes of golf today. I didn’t get home until . . . May?” he called over his shoulder. “What time did I come in?”

The girl on the porch came slowly down, moving awkwardly on her uneven legs. She was in her twenties, no child. Nor was she a woman. She said in a blurting manner, “About three o’clock, Daddy Earl. But the dog was dead.”

“What’s that, miss?”

“This is my stepdaughter . . .”

“The dog was dead,” the girl said, “before he came home. I saw it from upstairs, before three o’clock. Lying by the sidewalk.”

“You drove in from Hannibal Street, Mr. Matlin? Looks like you’d have seen the dog.”

Matlin said with nervous thoughtfulness, “I don’t know. My mind . . . Yes, I . . .”

“He’s telling a lie!”

“Freddy!”

“Listen to that,” said May Matlin, “will you?”

“She’s a liar, too!”

The cop shook Freddy. Mr. Matlin made a sound of helpless exasperation. He said to the girl, “Go keep your mother inside, May.” He raised his arm as if to wave. “It’s all right, honey,” he called to the woman in the chair, with a false cheeriness that grated on the ear. “There’s nothing to worry about, now.”

Freddy’s jaw shifted and young Russell’s watching eyes winced. The girl began to lurch back to the house.

“It was my wife who put in the call,” Matlin said. “After all, they were on me like a pack of wolves. Now, I . . . I understand that the boy’s upset. But all the same, he can not . . . He must learn . . . I will not have . . . I have enough to contend with, without this malice, this unwarranted antagonism, this persecution . . .”

Freddy’s eyes were unwinking.

“It has got to stop!” said Matlin almost hysterically.

“Yes,” murmured Mike Russell, “I should think so.” Judge Kittinger’s white head, nodding, agreed.

“We’ve heard about quite a few dog-poisoning cases over the line in Redfern,” said the thin cop with professional calm. “None here.”

The man in the shorts hitched them up, looking shocked. “Who’d do a thing like that?”

A boy said, boldly, “Ole Matlin would.” He had an underslung jaw and wore spectacles on his snub nose. “I’m Phil Bourchard,” he said to the cop. He had courage.

“We jist know,” said another. “I’m Ernie Allen.” Partisanship radiated from his whole thin body. “Ole Matlin doesn’t want anybody on his ole property.”

“Sure.” “He doesn’t want anybody on his ole property.” “It was ole Matlin.”

“It was. It was,” said Freddy Titus.

“Freddy,” said the housekeeper in blue, “now, you better be still. I’ll tell your dad.” It was a meaningless fumble for control. The boy didn’t even hear it.

Judge Kittinger tried, patiently. “You can’t accuse without cause, Freddy.”

“Bones didn’t hurt his ole property. Bones wouldn’t hurt anything. Ole Matlin did it.”

“You lying little devil!”

“He’s a liar!”

The cop gave Freddy another shake. “You kids found him, eh?”

“We were up at Bourchard’s and were going down to the Titus house.”

“And he was dead,” said Freddy.

“I know nothing about it,” said Matlin icily. “Nothing at all.”

The cop, standing between, said wearily, “Any of you people see what coulda happened?”

“I was sitting in my backyard,” said the man in shorts. “I’m Daugherty, next door, up Hannibal Street. Didn’t see a thing.”

The small woman in a print dress spoke up. “I am Mrs. Page. I live across on the corner, Officer. I believe I did see a strange man go into Mr. Matlin’s driveway this morning.”

“When was this, ma’am?”

“About eleven o’clock. He was poorly dressed. He walked up the drive and around the garage.”

“Didn’t go to the house?”

“No. He was only there a minute. I believe he was carrying something. He was rather furtive. And very poorly dressed, almost like a tramp.”

There was a certain relaxing among the elders. “Ah, the tramp,” said Mike Russell. “The good old reliable tramp. Are you sure, Mrs. Page? It’s very unlikely. . . .”

But she bristled. “Do you think I am lying?”

Russell’s lips parted, but he felt the Judge’s hand on his arm. “This is my guest Mr. Russell. . . . Freddy.” The Judge’s voice was gentle. “Let him go, Officer. I’m sure he understands, now. Mr. Matlin was not even at home, Freddy. It’s possible that this . . . er . . . stranger . . . Or it may have been an accident . . .”

“Wasn’t a tramp. Wasn’t an accident.”

“You can’t know that, boy,” said the Judge somewhat sharply. Freddy said nothing. As the officer slowly released his grasp, the boy took a free step backwards, and the other boys surged to surround him. There stood the enemy, the monster who killed and lied, and the grown-ups with their reasonable doubts were on the monster’s side. But the boys knew what Freddy knew. They stood together.

“Somebody,” murmured the Judge’s guest, “somebody’s got to help the boy.” And the Judge sighed.

The cops went up Hannibal Street, toward Matlin’s back lot, with Mr. Daugherty. Matlin lingered at the corner talking to Mrs. Page. In the front window of Matlin’s house the curtain fell across the glass.

Mike Russell sidled up to the housekeeper. “Any uncles or aunts here in town? A grandmother?”

“No,” she said shortly.

“Brothers or sisters, Mrs. . . . ?”

“Miz Somers. No, he’s the only one. Only reason they didn’t take him along was it’s the last week of school and he didn’t want to miss.”

Mike Russell’s brown eyes suggested the soft texture of velvet, and they were deeply distressed. She slid away from their appeal. “He’ll just have to take it, I guess, like everybody else,” Mrs. Somers said. “These things happen.”

He was listening intently. “Don’t you care for dogs?”

“I don’t mind a dog,” she said. She arched her neck. She was going to call to the boy.

“Wait. Tell me, does the family go to church? Is there a pastor or a priest who knows the boy?”

“They don’t go, far as I ever saw.” She looked at him as if he were an eccentric.

“Then school. He has a teacher. What grade?”

“Sixth grade,” she said. “Miss Dana. Oh, he’ll be O.K.” Her voice grew loud, to reach the boy and hint to him. “He’s a big boy.”

Russell said, desperately, “Is there no way to telephone his parents?”

“They’re on the road. They’ll be in some time tomorrow. That’s all I know.” She was annoyed. “I’ll take care of him. That’s why I’m here.” She raised her voice and this time it was arch and seductive. “Freddy, better come wash your face. I know where there’s some chocolate cookies.”

The velvet left the young man’s eyes. Hard as buttons, they gazed for a moment at the woman. Then he whipped around and left her. He walked over to where the kids had drifted, near the little dead creature on the grass. He said softly, “Bones had his own doctor, Freddy? Tell me his name?” The boy’s eyes flickered. “We must know what it was that he took. A doctor can tell. I think his own doctor would be best, don’t you?”

The boy nodded, mumbled a name, an address. That Russell mastered the name and the numbers, asking for no repetition, was a sign of his concern. Besides, it was this young man’s quality—that he listened. “May I take him, Freddy? I have a car. We ought to have a blanket,” he added softly, “a soft, clean blanket.”

“I got one, Freddy . . .” “My mother’d let me . . .”

“I can get one,” Freddy said brusquely. They wheeled, almost in formation.

Mrs. Somers frowned. “You must let them take a blanket,” Russell warned her, and his eyes were cold.

“I will explain to Mrs. Titus,” said the Judge quickly. “Quite a fuss,” she said, and tossed her head and crossed the road.

Russell gave the Judge a quick nervous grin. He walked to the returning cops. “You’ll want to run tests, I suppose? Can the dog’s own vet do it?”

“Certainly. Humane officer will have to be in charge. But that’s what the vet’ll want.”

“I’ll take the dog, then. Any traces up there?”

“Not a thing.”

“Will you explain to the boy that you are investigating?”

“Well, you know how these things go.” The cop’s feet shuffled. “Humane officer does what he can. Probably Monday, after we identify the poison, he’ll check the drugstores. Usually, if it is a cranky neighbor, he has already put in a complaint about the dog. This Matlin says he never did. The humane officer will get on it Monday. He’s out of town today. The devil of these cases, we can’t prove a thing, usually. You get an idea who it was, maybe you can scare him. It’s a misdemeanor, all right. Never heard of a conviction myself.”

“But will you explain to the boy . . .” Russell stopped, chewed his lip, and the Judge sighed.

“Yeah, it’s tough on a kid,” the cop said.

When the Judge’s guest came back, it was nearly five o’clock. He said, “I came to say good-bye, sir, and to thank you for the . . .” But his mind wasn’t on the sentence and he lost it and looked up.

The Judge’s eyes were affectionate. “Worried?”

“Judge, sir,” the young man said, “must they feed him? Where, sir, in this classy neighborhood is there an understanding woman’s heart? I herded them to that Mrs. Allen. But she winced, sir, and she diverted them. She didn’t want to deal with tragedy, didn’t want to think about it. She offered cakes and Cokes and games.”

“But my dear boy . . .”

“What do they teach the kids these days, Judge? To turn away? Put something in your stomach. Take a drink. Play a game. Don’t weep for your dead. Just skip it, think about something else.”

“I’m afraid the boy’s alone,” the Judge said gently, “but it’s only for the night.” His voice was melodious. “Can’t be sheltered from grief when it comes. None of us can.”

“Excuse me, sir, but I wish he would grieve. I wish he would bawl his heart out. Wash out that black hate. I ought to go home. None of my concern. It’s a woman’s job.” He moved and his hand went toward the phone. “He has a teacher. I can’t help feeling concerned, sir. May I try?”

The Judge said, “Of course, Mike,” and he put his brittle old bones into a chair.

Mike Russell pried the number out of the Board of Education. “Miss Lillian Dana? My name is Russell. You know a boy named Freddy Titus?”

“Oh, yes. He’s in my class.” The voice was pleasing.

“Miss Dana, there is trouble. You know Judge Kittinger’s house? Could you come there?”

“What is the trouble?”

“Freddy’s little dog is dead of poison. I’m afraid Freddy is in a bad state. There is no one to help him. His folks are away. The woman taking care of him,” Mike’s careful explanatory sentences burst into indignation, “has no more sympathetic imagination than a broken clothes-pole.” He heard a little gasp. “I’d like to help him, Miss Dana, but I’m a man and a stranger, and the Judge . . .” He paused.

“. . . is old,” said the Judge in his chair.

“I’m terribly sorry,” the voice on the phone said slowly. “Freddy’s a wonderful boy.”

“You are his friend?”

“Yes, we are friends.”

“Then, could you come? You see, we’ve got to get a terrible idea out of his head. He thinks a man across the street poisoned his dog on purpose. Miss Dana, he has no doubt! And he doesn’t cry.” She gasped again. “Greenwood Lane,” he said, “and Hannibal Street—the southeast corner.”

She said, “I’ll come. I have a car. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

Russell turned and caught the Judge biting his lips. “Am I making too much of this, sir?” he inquired humbly.

“I don’t like the boy’s stubborn conviction.” The Judge’s voice was dry and clear. “Any more than you do. I agree that he must be brought to understand. But . . .” the old man shifted in the chair. “Of course, the man Matlin is a fool, Mike. There is something solemn and silly about him that makes him fair game. He’s unfortunate. He married a widow with a crippled child, and no sooner were they married than she collapsed. And he’s not well off. He’s encumbered with that enormous house.”

“What does he do, sir?”

“He’s a photographer. Oh, he struggles, tries his best and all that. But with such tension, Mike. That poor misshapen girl over there tries to keep house, devoted to her mother. Matlin works hard, is devoted, too. And yet the sum comes out in petty strife, nerves, quarrels, uproar. And certainly it cannot be necessary to feud with children.”

“The kids have done their share of that, I’ll bet,” mused Mike. “The kids are delighted—a neighborhood ogre, to add the fine flavor of menace. A focus for mischief. An enemy.”

“True enough.” The Judge sighed.

“So the myth is made. No rumor about ole Matlin loses anything in the telling. I can see it’s been built up. You don’t knock it down in a day.”

“No,” said the Judge uneasily. He got up from the chair.

The young man rubbed his dark head. “I don’t like it, sir. We don’t know what’s in the kids’ minds, or who their heroes are. There is only the gang. What do you suppose it advises?”

“What could it advise, after all?” said the Judge crisply. “This isn’t the slums, whatever Matlin says.” He went nervously to the window. He fiddled with the shade pull. He said, suddenly, “From my little summerhouse in the backyard you can overhear the gang. They congregate under that oak. Go and eavesdrop, Mike.”

The young man snapped to attention. “Yes, sir.”

“I . . . think we had better know,” said the Judge, a trifle sheepishly.

The kids sat under the oak, in a grassy hollow. Freddy was the core. His face was tight. His eyes never left off watching the house of the enemy. The others watched him, or hung their heads, or watched their own brown hands play with the grass.

They were not chattering. There hung about them a heavy, sullen silence, heavy with a sense of tragedy, sullen with a sense of wrong, and from time to time one voice or another would fling out a pronouncement, which would sink into the silence, thickening its ugliness . . .

The Judge looked up from his paper. “Could you . . .”

“I could hear,” said Mike in a quiet voice. “They are condemning the law, sir. They call it corrupt. They are quite certain that Matlin killed the dog. They see themselves as Robin Hoods, vigilantes, defending the weak, the wronged, the dog. They think they are discussing justice. They are waiting for dark. They speak of weapons, sir—the only ones they have. B.B. guns, after dark.”

“Great heavens!”

“Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to stop it.”

Mrs. Somers was cooking supper when he tapped on the screen. “Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”

“I want your help, Mrs. Somers. For Freddy.”

“Freddy,” she interrupted loudly, with her nose high, “is going to have his supper and go to bed his regular time, and that’s all about Freddy. Now, what did you want?”

He said, “I want you to let me take the boy to my apartment for the night.”

“I couldn’t do that!” She was scandalized.

“The Judge will vouch . . .”

“Now, see here, Mr. what’syourname—Russell. This isn’t my house and Freddy’s not my boy. I’m responsible to Mr. and Mrs. Titus. You’re a stranger to me. As far as I can see, Freddy is no business of yours whatsoever.”

“Which is his room?” asked Mike sharply.

“Why do you want to know?” She was hostile and suspicious.

“Where does he keep his B.B. gun?”

She was startled to an answer. “In the shed out back. Why?”

He told her.

“Kid’s talk,” she scoffed. “You don’t know much about kids, do you, young man? Freddy will go to sleep. First thing he’ll know, it’s morning. That’s about the size of it.”

“You may be right. I hope so.”

Mrs. Somers slapped potatoes into the pan. Her lips quivered indignantly. She felt annoyed because she was a little shaken. The strange young man really had hoped so.

Russell scanned the street, went across to Matlin’s house. The man himself answered the bell. The air in this house was stale, and bore the faint smell of old grease. There was over everything an atmosphere of struggle and despair. Many things ought to have been repaired and had not been repaired. The place was too big. There wasn’t enough money, or strength. It was too much.

Mrs. Matlin could not walk. Otherwise, one saw, she struggled and did the best she could. She had a lost look, as if some anxiety, ever present, took about nine-tenths of her attention. May Matlin limped in and sat down, lumpishly.

Russell began earnestly, “Mr. Matlin, I don’t know how this situation between you and the boys began. I can guess that the kids are much to blame. I imagine they enjoy it.” He smiled. He wanted to be sympathetic toward this man.

“Of course they enjoy it.” Matlin looked triumphant.

“They call me The Witch,” the girl said. “Pretend they’re scared of me. The devils. I’m scared of them.”

Matlin flicked a nervous eye at the woman in the wheelchair. “The truth is, Mr. Russell,” he said in his high whine, “they’re vicious.”

“It’s too bad,” said his wife in a low voice. “I think it’s dangerous.”

“Mama, you mustn’t worry,” said the girl in an entirely new tone. “I won’t let them hurt you. Nobody will hurt you.”

“Be quiet,” said Matlin. “You’ll upset her. Of course nobody will hurt her.”

“Yes, it is dangerous, Mrs. Matlin,” said Russell quietly. “That’s why I came over.”

Matlin goggled. “What? What’s this?”

“Could I possibly persuade you, sir, to spend the night away from this neighborhood . . . and depart noisily?”

“No,” said Matlin, raring up, his ego bristling, “no, you cannot! I will under no circumstances be driven away from my own home.” His voice rose. “Furthermore, I certainly will not leave my wife and stepdaughter.”

“We could manage, dear,” said Mrs. Matlin anxiously.

Russell told them about the talk under the oak, the B.B. guns.

“Devils,” said May Matlin, “absolutely . . .”

“Oh, Earl,” trembled Mrs. Matlin, “maybe we had all better go away.”

Matlin, red-necked, furious, said, “We own this property. We pay our taxes. We have our rights. Let them! Let them try something like that! Then, I think, the law would have something to say. This is outrageous! I did not harm that animal. Therefore, I defy . . .” He looked solemn and silly, as the Judge had said, with his face crimson, his weak eyes rolling.

Russell rose. “I thought I ought to make the suggestion,” he said mildly, “because it would be the safest thing to do. But don’t worry, Mrs. Matlin, because I . . .”

“A B.B. gun can blind,” she said tensely.

“Or even worse,” Mike agreed. “But I am thinking of the—”

“Just a minute,” Matlin roared. “You can’t come in here and terrify my wife! She is not strong. You have no right.” He drew himself up with his feet at a right angle, his pudgy arm extended, his plump jowls quivering. “Get out!” he cried. He looked ridiculous.

Whether the young man and the bewildered woman in the chair might have understood each other was not to be known. Russell, of course, got out. May Matlin hobbled to the door and as Russell went through it, she said, “Well, you warned us, anyhow.” And her lips came together sharply.

Russell plodded across the pavement again. Long, enchanting shadows from the lowering sun struck aslant through the golden air and all the old houses were gilded and softened in their green setting. He moved toward the big oak. He hunkered down. The sun struck its golden shafts deep under the boughs. “How’s it going?” he asked.

Freddy Titus looked frozen and still. “O.K.,” said Phil Bourchard with elaborate ease. Light on his owlish glasses hid the eyes.

Mike opened his lips, hesitated. Suppertime struck on the neighborhood clock. Calls, like chimes, were sounding.

“. . . ’s my mom,” said Ernie Allen. “See you after.”

“See you after, Freddy.”

“O.K.”

“O.K.”

Mrs. Somers’ hoot had chimed with the rest and now Freddy got up, stiffly.

“O.K.?” said Mike Russell. The useful syllables that take any meaning at all in American mouths asked, “Are you feeling less bitter, boy? Are you any easier?”

“O.K.,” said Freddy. The same syllables shut the man out.

Mike opened his lips. Closed them. Freddy went across the lawn to his kitchen door. There was a brown crockery bowl on the back stoop. His sneaker, rigid on the ankle, stepped over it. Mike Russell watched, and then, with a movement of his arms, almost as if he would wring his hands, he went up the Judge’s steps.

“Well?” The Judge opened his door. “Did you talk to the boy?”

Russell didn’t answer. He sat down.

The Judge stood over him. “The boy . . . The enormity of this whole idea must be explained to him.”

“I can’t explain,” Mike said. “I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.”

“Perhaps I had better . . .”

“What are you going to say, sir?”

“Why, give him the facts,” the Judge cried.

“The facts are . . . the dog is dead.”

“There are no facts that point to Matlin.”

“There are no facts that point to a tramp, either. That’s too sloppy, sir.”

“What are you driving at?”

“Judge, the boy is more rightfully suspicious than we are.”

“Nonsense,” said the Judge. “The girl saw the dog’s body before Matlin came . . .”

“There is no alibi for poison,” Mike said sadly.

“Are you saying the man is a liar?”

“Liars.” Mike sighed. “Truth and lies. How are those kids going to understand, sir? To that Mrs. Page, to the lot of them, Truth is only a subjective intention. ‘I am no liar,’ sez she, sez he. ‘I intend to be truthful. So do not insult me.’ Lord, when will we begin? It’s what we were talking about at lunch, sir. What you and I believe. What the race has been told, and told in such agony, in a million years of bitter lesson. Error, we were saying. Error is the enemy.”

He flung out of the chair. “We know that to tell the truth is not merely a good intention. It’s a damned difficult thing to do. It’s a skill, to be practiced. It’s a technique. It’s an effort. It takes brains. It takes watching. It takes humility and self-examination. It’s a science and an art . . .

“Why don’t we tell the kids these things? Why is everyone locked up in anger, shouting liar at the other side? Why don’t they automatically know how easy it is to be, not wicked, but mistaken? Why is there this notion of violence? Because Freddy doesn’t think to himself, Wait a minute. I might be wrong. The habit isn’t there. Instead, there are the heroes—the big-muscled, noble-hearted, gun-toting heroes, blind in a righteousness totally arranged by the author. Excuse me, sir.”

“All that may be,” said the Judge grimly, “and I agree. But the police know the lesson. They—”

“They don’t care.”

“What?”

“Don’t care enough, sir. None of us cares enough—about the dog.”

“I see,” said the Judge. “Yes, I see. We haven’t the least idea what happened to the dog.” He touched his pince-nez.

Mike rubbed his head wearily. “Don’t know what to do except sit under his window the night through. Hardly seems good enough.”

The Judge said, simply, “Why don’t you find out what happened to the dog?”

The young man’s face changed. “What we need, sir,” said Mike slowly, “is to teach Freddy how to ask for it. Just to ask for it. Just to want it.” The old man and the young man looked at each other. Past and future telescoped. “Now,” Mike said. “Before dark.”

Suppertime, for the kids, was only twenty minutes long. When the girl in the brown dress with the bare blond head got out of the shabby coupé, the gang was gathered again in its hollow under the oak. She went to them and sank down on the ground. “Ah, Freddy, was it Bones? Your dear little dog you wrote about in the essay?”

“Yes, Miss Dana.” Freddy’s voice was shrill and hostile. I won’t be touched! it cried to her. So she said no more, but sat there on the ground, and presently she began to cry. There was contagion. The simplest thing in the world. First, one of the smaller ones, whimpering. Finally, Freddy Titus, bending over. Her arm guided his head, and then he lay weeping in her lap.

Russell, up in the summerhouse, closed his eyes and praised the Lord. In a little while he swung his legs over the railing and slid down the bank. “How do? I’m Mike Russell.”

“I’m Lillian Dana.” She was quick and intelligent, and her tears were real.

“Fellows,” said Mike briskly, “you know what’s got to be done, don’t you? We’ve got to solve this case.”

They turned their woeful faces.

He said, deliberately, “It’s just the same as a murder. It is a murder.”

“Yeah,” said Freddy and sat up, tears drying. “And it was ole Matlin.”

“Then we have to prove it.”

Miss Lillian Dana saw the boy’s face lock. He didn’t need to prove anything, the look proclaimed. He knew. She leaned over a little and said, “But we can’t make an ugly mistake and put it on Bones’s account. Bones was a fine dog. Oh, that would be a terrible monument.” Freddy’s eyes turned, startled.

“It’s up to us,” said Mike gratefully, “to go after the real facts, with real detective work. For Bones’s sake.”

“It’s the least we can do for him,” said Miss Dana, calmly and decisively.

Freddy’s face lifted.

“Trouble is,” Russell went on quickly, “people get things wrong. Sometimes they don’t remember straight. They make mistakes.”

“Ole Matlin tells lies,” said Freddy.

“If he does,” said Russell cheerfully, “then we’ve got to prove that he does. Now, I’ve figured out a plan, if Miss Dana will help us. You pick a couple of the fellows, Fred. Have to go to all the houses around and ask some questions. Better pick the smartest ones. To find out the truth is very hard,” he challenged.

“And then?” said Miss Dana in a fluttery voice.

“Then they, and you, if you will . . .”

“Me?” She straightened. “I am a schoolteacher, Mr. Russell. Won’t the police . . .”

“Not before dark.”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“Dirtier work.”

She bit her lip. “It’s nosy. It’s . . . not done.”

“No,” he agreed. “You may lose your job.”

She wasn’t a bad-looking young woman. Her eyes were fine. Her brow was serious, but there was the ghost of a dimple in her cheek. Her hands moved. “Oh well, I can always take up beauty culture or something. What are the questions?” She had a pad of paper and a pencil half out of her purse, and looked alert and efficient.

Now, as the gang huddled, there was a warm sense of conspiracy growing. “Going to be the dickens of a job,” Russell warned them. And he outlined some questions. “Now, don’t let anybody fool you into taking a sloppy answer,” he concluded. “Ask how they know. Get real evidence. But don’t go to Matlin’s—I’ll go there.”

“I’m not afraid of him.” Freddy’s nostrils flared.

“I think I stand a better chance of getting the answers,” said Russell coolly. “Aren’t we after the answers?”

Freddy swallowed. “And if it turns out . . .”

“It turns out the way it turns out,” said Russell, rumpling the tow head. “Choose your henchmen. Tough, remember.”

“Phil. Ernie.” The kids who were left out wailed as the three small boys and their teacher, who wasn’t a lot bigger, rose from the ground.

“It’ll be tough, Mr. Russell,” Miss Dana said grimly. “Whoever you are, thank you for getting me into this.”

“I’m just a stranger,” he said gently, looking down at her face. “But you are a friend and a teacher.” Pain crossed her eyes. “You’ll be teaching now, you know.”

Her chin went up. “O.K., kids. I’ll keep the paper and pencil. Freddy, wipe your face. Stick your shirt in, Phil. Now, let’s organize.”

It was nearly nine o’clock when the boys and the teacher, looking rather exhausted, came back to the Judge’s house. Russell, whose face was grave, reached for the papers in her hands.

“Just a minute,” said Miss Dana. “Judge, we have some questions.”

Ernie Allen bared all his heap of teeth and stepped forward. “Did you see Bones today?” he asked with the firm skill of repetition. The Judge nodded. “How many times and when?”

“Once. Er . . . shortly before noon. He crossed my yard, going east.”

The boys bent over the pad. Then Freddy’s lips opened hard. “How do you know the time, Judge Kittinger?”

“Well,” said the Judge, “hm . . . let me think. I was looking out the window for my company and just then he arrived.”

“Five minutes of one, sir,” Mike said.

Freddy flashed around. “What makes you sure?”

“I looked at my watch,” said Russell. “I was taught to be exactly five minutes early when I’m asked to a meal.” There was a nodding among the boys, and Miss Dana wrote on the pad.

“Then I was mistaken,” said the Judge thoughtfully. “It was shortly before one. Of course.”

Phil Bourchard took over. “Did you see anyone go into Matlin’s driveway or back lot?”

“I did not.”

“Were you out of doors or did you look up that way?”

“Yes, I . . . When we left the table. Mike?”

“At two-thirty, sir.”

“How do you know that time for sure?” asked Freddy Titus.

“Because I wondered if I could politely stay a little longer.” Russell’s eyes congratulated Miss Lillian Dana. She had made them a team, and on it, Freddy was the How-do-you-know-for-sure Department.

“Can you swear,” continued Phil to the Judge, “there was nobody at all around Matlin’s back lot then?”

“As far as my view goes,” answered the Judge cautiously.

Freddy said promptly, “He couldn’t see much. Too many trees. We can’t count that.”

They looked at Miss Dana and she marked on the pad. “Thank you. Now, you have a cook, sir? We must question her.”

“This way,” said the Judge, rising and bowing.

Russell looked after them and his eyes were velvet again. He met the Judge’s twinkle. Then he sat down and ran an eye quickly over some of the sheets of paper, passing each on to his host.

Startled, he looked up. Lillian Dana, standing in the door, was watching his face.

“Do you think, Mike . . .”

A paper drooped in the judge’s hand.

“We can’t stop,” she challenged.

Russell nodded, and turned to the Judge. “May need some high brass, sir.” The Judge rose. “And tell me, sir, where Matlin plays golf. And the telephone number of the Salvage League. No, Miss Dana, we can’t stop. We’ll take it where it turns.”

“We must,” she said.

It was nearly ten when the neighbors began to come in. The Judge greeted them soberly. The Chief of Police arrived. Mrs. Somers, looking grim and uprooted in a crêpe dress, came. Mr. Matlin, Mrs. Page, Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty, a Mr. and Mrs. Baker, and Diane Bourchard who was sixteen. They looked curiously at the tight little group, the boys and their blond teacher.

Last of all to arrive was young Mr. Russell, who slipped in from the dark veranda, accepted the Judge’s nod, and called the meeting to order.

“We have been investigating the strange death of a dog,” he began. “Chief Anderson, while we know your department would have done so in good time, we also know you are busy, and some of us,” he glanced at the dark windowpane, “couldn’t wait. Will you help us now?”

The Chief said genially, “That’s why I’m here, I guess.” It was the Judge and his stature that gave this meeting any standing. Naïve, young, a little absurd it might have seemed had not the old man sat so quietly attentive among them.

“Thank you, sir. Now, all we want to know is what happened to the dog.” Russell looked about him. “First, let us demolish the tramp.” Mrs. Page’s feathers ruffled. Russell smiled at her. “Mrs. Page saw a man go down Matlin’s drive this morning. The Salvage League sent a truck to pick up rags and papers which at ten forty-two was parked in front of the Daughertys’. The man, who seemed poorly dressed in his working clothes, went to the tool room behind Matlin’s garage, as he had been instructed to. He picked up a bundle and returned to his truck. Mrs. Page,” purred Mike to her scarlet face, “the man was there. It was only your opinion about him that proves to have been, not a lie, but an error.”

He turned his head. “Now, we have tried to trace the dog’s day and we have done remarkably well, too.” As he traced it for them, some faces began to wear at least the ghost of a smile, seeing the little dog frisking through the neighborhood. “Just before one,” Mike went on, “Bones ran across the Judge’s yard to the Allens’ where the kids were playing ball. Up to this time no one saw Bones above Greenwood Lane or up Hannibal Street. But Miss Diane Bourchard, recovering from a sore throat, was not in school today. After lunch, she sat on her porch directly across from Mr. Matlin’s back lot. She was waiting for school to be out, when she expected her friends to come by.

“She saw, not Bones, but Corky, an animal belonging to Mr. Daugherty, playing in Matlin’s lot at about two o’clock. I want your opinion. If poisoned bait had been lying there at two, would Corky have found it?”

“Seems so,” said Daugherty. “Thank God, Corky didn’t.” He bit his tongue. “Corky’s a show dog,” he blundered.

“But Bones,” said Russell gently, “was more like a friend. That’s why we care, of course.”

“It’s a damned shame!” Daugherty looked around angrily.

“It is,” said Mrs. Baker. “He was a friend of mine, Bones was.”

“Go on,” growled Daugherty, “What else did you dig up?”

“Mr. Matlin left for his golf at eleven-thirty. Now, you see, it looks as if Matlin couldn’t have left poison behind him.”

“I most certainly did not,” snapped Matlin. “I have said so. I will not stand for this sort of innuendo. I am not a liar. You said it was a conference . . .”

Mike held the man’s eye. “We are simply trying to find out what happened to the dog,” he said. Matlin fell silent.

“Surely you realize,” purred Mike, “that, human frailty being what it is, there may have been other errors in what we were told this afternoon. There was at least one more.

“Mr. and Mrs. Baker,” he continued, “worked in their garden this afternoon. Bones abandoned the ball game to visit the Bakers’ dog Smitty. At three o’clock the Bakers, after discussing the time carefully lest it be too late in the day, decided to bathe Smitty. When they caught him for his ordeal Bones was still there. . . . So, you see, Miss May Matlin, who says she saw Bones lying by the sidewalk before three o’clock, was mistaken.”

Matlin twitched. Russell said sharply, “The testimony of the Bakers is extremely clear.” The Bakers, who looked alike, both brown outdoor people, nodded vigorously.

“The time at which Mr. Matlin returned is quite well established. Diane saw him. Mrs. Daugherty, next door, decided to take a nap, at five after three. She had a roast to put in at four-thirty. Therefore, she is sure of the time. She went upstairs and from an upper window, she, too, saw Mr. Matlin come home. Both witnesses say he drove his car into the garage at three-ten, got out, and went around the building to the right of it—on the weedy side.”

Mr. Matlin was sweating. His forehead was beaded. He did not speak.

Mike shifted papers. “Now, we know that the kids trooped up to Phil Bourchard’s kitchen at about a quarter of three. Whereas Bones, realizing that Smitty was in for it, and shying away from soap and water like any sane dog, went up Hannibal Street at three o’clock sharp. He may have known in some doggy way where Freddy was. Can we see Bones loping up Hannibal Street, going above Greenwood Lane?”

“We can,” said Daugherty. He was watching Matlin. “Besides, he was found above Greenwood Lane soon after.”

“No one,” said Mike slowly, “was seen in Matlin’s back lot except Matlin. Yet, almost immediately after Matlin was there, the little dog died.”

“Didn’t Diane . . .”

“Diane’s friends came at three-twelve. Their evidence is not reliable.” Diane blushed.

“This . . . this is intolerable!” croaked Matlin. “Why my back lot?”

Daugherty said, “There was no poison lying around my place, I’ll tell you that.”

“How do you know?” begged Matlin. And Freddy’s eyes, with the smudges under them, followed to Russell’s face. “Why not in the street? From some passing car?”

Mike said, “I’m afraid it’s not likely. You see, Mr. Otis Carnavon was stalled at the corner of Hannibal and Lee. Trying to flag a push. Anything thrown from a car on that block, he ought to have seen.”

“Was the poison quick?” demanded Daugherty. “What did he get?”

“It was quick. The dog could not go far after he got it. He got cyanide.”

Matlin’s shaking hand removed his glasses. They were wet.

“Some of you may be amateur photographers,” Mike said. “Mr. Matlin, is there cyanide in your cellar darkroom?”

“Yes, but I keep it . . . most meticulously . . .” Matlin began to cough.

When the noise of his spasm died, Mike said, “The poison was embedded in ground meat which analyzed, roughly, half-beef and the rest pork and veal, half and half.” Matlin encircled his throat with his fingers. “I’ve checked with four neighborhood butchers and the dickens of a time I had,” said Mike. No one smiled. Only Freddy looked up at him with solemn sympathy. “Ground meat was delivered to at least five houses in the vicinity. Meat that was one-half beef, one-quarter pork, one-quarter veal, was delivered at ten this morning to Matlin’s house.”

A stir like an angry wind blew over the room. The Chief of Police made some shift of his weight so that his chair creaked.

“It begins to look . . .” growled Daugherty.

“Now,” said Russell sharply, “we must be very careful. One more thing. The meat had been seasoned.”

“Seasoned!”

“With salt. And with . . . thyme.”

“Thyme,” groaned Matlin.

Freddy looked up at Miss Dana with bewildered eyes. She put her arm around him.

“As far as motives are concerned,” said Mike quietly, “I can’t discuss them. It is inconceivable to me that any man would poison a dog.” Nobody spoke. “However, where are we?” Mike’s voice seemed to catch Matlin just in time to keep him from falling off the chair. “We don’t know yet what happened to the dog.” Mike’s voice rang. “Mr. Matlin, will you help us to the answer?”

Matlin said thickly, “Better get those kids out of here.”

Miss Dana moved, but Russell said, “No. They have worked hard for the truth. They have earned it. And if it is to be had, they shall have it.”

“You know?” whimpered Matlin.

Mike said, “I called your golf club. I’ve looked into your trash incinerator. Yes, I know. But I want you to tell us.”

Daugherty said, “Well? Well?” And Matlin covered his face.

Mike said gently, “I think there was an error. Mr. Matlin, I’m afraid, did poison the dog. But he never meant to, and he didn’t know he had done it.”

Matlin said, “I’m sorry . . . It’s . . . I can’t . . . She means to do her best. But she’s a terrible cook. Somebody gave her those . . . those herbs. Thyme . . . thyme in everything. She fixed me a lunch box. I . . . couldn’t stomach it. I bought my lunch at the club.”

Mike nodded.

Matlin went on, his voice cracking. “I never . . . You see, I didn’t even know it was meat the dog got. She said . . . she told me the dog was already dead.”

“And of course,” said Mike, “in your righteous wrath, you never paused to say to yourself, ‘Wait, what did happen to the dog?’ ”

“Mr. Russell, I didn’t lie. How could I know there was thyme in it? When I got home, I had to get rid of the hamburger she’d fixed for me—I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She tries . . . tries so hard . . .” He sat up suddenly. “But what she tried to do today,” he said, with his eyes almost out of his head, “was to poison me!” His bulging eyes roved. They came to Freddy. He gasped. He said, “Your dog saved my life!”

“Yes,” said Mike quickly, “Freddy’s dog saved your life. You see, your stepdaughter would have kept trying.”

People drew in their breaths. “The buns are in your incinerator,” Mike said. “She guessed what happened to the dog, went for the buns, and hid them. She was late, you remember, getting to the disturbance. And she did lie.”

Chief Anderson rose.

“Her mother . . .” said Matlin frantically, “her mother . . .”

Mike Russell put his hand on the plump shoulder. “Her mother’s been in torment, tortured by the rivalry between you. Don’t you think her mother senses something wrong?”

Miss Lillian Dana wrapped Freddy in her arms. “Oh, what a wonderful dog Bones was!” She covered the sound of the other voices. “Even when he died, he saved a man’s life. Oh, Freddy, he was a wonderful dog.”

And Freddy, not quite taking everything in yet, was released to simple sorrow and wept quietly against his friend. . . .

When they went to fetch May Matlin, she was not in the house. They found her in the Titus’s back shed. She seemed to be looking for something.

Next day, when Mr. and Mrs. Titus came home, they found that although the little dog had died, their Freddy was all right. The Judge, Russell, and Miss Dana told them all about it.

Mrs. Titus wept. Mr. Titus swore. He wrung Russell’s hand. “. . . for stealing the gun . . .” he babbled.

But the mother cried, “. . . for showing him, for teaching him. . . . Oh, Miss Dana, oh, my dear!”

The Judge waved from his veranda as the dark head and the blond drove away.

“I think Miss Dana likes him,” said Ernie Allen.

“How do you know for sure?” said Freddy Titus.

Miss Murphy often made reasons to be in the corridor when the four of them were due to come by. She knew their schedules. She could anticipate. She was to be found, looking vague, with papers in her hand, just turning into Mr. Madden’s office, or perhaps just leaving her own, and she would hesitate and frown and pretend to be preoccupied, but her pale green eyes under dust-colored lashes would secretly watch them. After they had gone by, she would go about her business, concealing the depth of her pleasure.

As assistant vice-principal (read clerk) of the high school she ought to have been, without exception, on the side of society and the group. But when the four of them went by in their inevitable formation, something lively and stubborn and sly, something that contradicted everything she lived by, lifted up a voice to say inside her, “Nevertheless, this is magnificent!”

Miss Murphy was a little woman who had looked about the same age for the last fifteen years, ever since she had lost the bloom of being very young. She was a pale red-head with pale freckled skin, and the flesh of her face did not cling cleanly to the bones but was rather doughy and lumpy as if the sculptor had thrown the clay upon the framework in careless preliminary and then never had got around to any refinement of his work. Miss Murphy was everything law-abiding, anxious and reliable. She was destined to be “good old Miss Murphy” and she knew this and was even rather pleased about it. What, in her, responded? What clapped impious applause in her heart—to see the four of them go by?

Miss Murphy was not, of course, the only one who watched them in their habit of march . . . that strange phenomena . . . and pretended not to see it. New students were sometimes impelled to jeer in astonishment, but they soon learned that it was better not to notice.

The faculty, the principal’s office staff, the adults, deplored but could not forbid this ritual. Four seniors walked by. That was all. In their passage they did nothing illegal. But they did something. And they did it down the long corridors of the school between classes, whenever all four were able to travel together in the same direction. And on the campus . . . sometimes as they arrived in the morning, having made some unseen rendezvous, and every day as they departed . . . the four of them . . . the girl, and the boys.

On a spring Tuesday, just before the end of fourth period, Miss Murphy found herself compulsively gathering up a packet of record cards. In a moment the bell would ring, the individual cells of the orderly hive would erupt, the periodical roar of voices and thump of feet and rush of bodies exchanging positions, would happen. Miss Murphy knew she was deliberately waiting out the necessary minutes before the four of them would be going past her door. She rested her wrists upon the edge of her desk, the record cards loose but ready in her hands, and her quiet waiting was like meditation before a dubious god.

When the clock had moved enough, she rose, she opened her door. She did not step out into the humming traffic. She stood still and began to slip and sort the cards.

They were coming, because the hum lessened. The four of them traveled in a shell of lesser noise.

It was always exactly the same. First by a step came the girl, Ivy Voll. She was tall. She had a small head held high on a neck that was disproportionately thick. Her forehead was rounded and high and her dark hair went straight back from this bold brow to hang in a limp mass between her shoulder blades. She walked proudly on small feet that almost crossed over each other to follow a straight line and create a swagger in her narrow hips. Ivy Voll looked dead ahead with eyes like a sleepwalker’s. This was the strange, the subtly evil thing. She walked as if, although she led the pack, she was also its prisoner.

A step behind her and a step to the left loomed Stan Fuller, constituting himself a wall at her back, taller than she, a fierce burly boy. His dark frown went over her left shoulder to warn any interfering thing from their immediate path.

Ranging on the flanks were Ross and Tentor. Greyhounds both, they mooched loosely along, their heads held forward, restless, turning, fending, guarding. Ross, with his long straight slicked blond hair, his long predatory nose, his narrow eyes, walked on the left, his feet even with Stan’s but the forward bend of his torso and neck guarding the girl. Tentor, a less blond version with a nose less sharp, and eyes that were always puffed and sleepy (as if he never slept at night but engaged instead in some nameless dissipation)—Tentor ranged on the right flank and, in the pattern, walked on the halfway line . . . a bit ahead of the boys, and half a step behind the girl.

In this peculiar phalanx they moved, they swept along. If anyone chanced or dared to stand in their path, the whole formation could veer without altering their relative positions. The girl simply kept stepping in that strange proud blind way and her three escorts kept bulking, just behind, as if the four of them defied all that might break them apart even when, as a unit and quite flexibly, they yielded and they threaded through. The sweep and rhythm, the rigidity of their march—and something in their cold eyes—made it unnecessary for them to swerve very often.

When they had gone by, Miss Murphy feigned a decision, closed her hand about the cards, and turned toward the principal’s office. The little shivering ride along her nerves was like a drug she took in secret.

Was there not integrity in them? In their very scorn? In the imperial air itself, the nerve it took, the calm arrogance of their strange and self-sufficient alliance, the very coldness of their eyes? Was this not somehow magnificent? What would it be to live like that? To have no truck with a thousand nervous little conformities, to resign from the anxiety to please those in authority, to walk so proudly, to be like Ivy Voll, Queen and Head Slave of however small a kingdom, however evil? What could goodness, civilization, propriety, offer that could compare?

Mr. Madden came up behind her. “Coming to see me? After you, Miss Murphy . . .”

She had an uneasy feeling that she had been caught this time.

The principal sat down behind his desk. A thin man, he was, with a stiff body and stiff white hair. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. “How I wish we could reach those four,” he sighed, “before we lose them. Do you have any ideas, Miss Murphy?”

“I? Why no, I’m afraid not,” she said, knowing that she had indeed been caught since he spoke directly to what he had known was in her mind. “I have these for your file, sir.”

He did not even look at the cards. “Have you ever tried to get at them individually?”

“I think everyone has tried,” she said in her bright everyday voice.

Privately she didn’t think it was any use. For taken one by one, neither the girl nor any of the boys was formidable. Ivy Voll was of no importance in the school’s closed society. She was an indifferent student, and did not compete in any usual ways. The boys were, none of them competing athletes, none of them politicians or joiners. It was their alliance alone that gave them identity. And the alliance was old. She seemed to remember it taking shape during the last quarter of their sophomore year. Now they were seniors. So the alliance was old and it was strong and Miss Murphy did not think that Mr. Madden or any of his staff could break it up before spring came.

“If we do not help them,” he said and shook his head.

Help them? thought Miss Murphy daringly to herself. Help them to what? To obscurity and humble place? After this strange, almost mystic thing that gives them status?

“I am asking your advice because it seems to me—I don’t know how to put this, Miss Murphy—but it seems to me that your approach may be a little different.”

Miss Murphy flushed. “It’s true that I have tried very hard to understand, from their point of view,” she said piously.

“Yes?” he said.

Sometimes Miss Murphy shuddered to think of any possible point of view for the girl, Ivy . . . or of her possible relationship with those three males, which could scarcely be that of three parfait gentle knights to a fair lady. But this was only one facet of the problem. Not much had been proven against the four this year. Although much was believed and even more suspected. They were almost certainly still vandals. The year before they had been caught twice and lectured and let off. This year they had learned how not to leave any clues behind them. They were bullies, of course, and had been openly so last year. This year they were more skillful, and used pressure and threat instead of blows.

Nevertheless, Miss Murphy said earnestly, “Mr. Madden . . . separately they aren’t significant. They have welded themselves into this unit because it gives them meaning—”

“I don’t like the meaning,” he interrupted sharply.

“No, no, of course not,” she said hastily, “but just the same—they use some qualities we can admire.”

“What do you consider those to be?” the principal said flatly.

“They are loyal to each other—”

“Are they? Have they ever been tested?”

“They show,” said Miss Murphy, “a certain courage. Courage in itself should be worth something.”

“Many criminals have courage,” said Mr. Madden, “and often they have power and power is often glamorous.”

It was a fair hit and Miss Murphy knew she was flushing. “And these four have achieved a certain amount of power and glamour, pretty young and pretty cheap,” he went on. “Tell me how to jolt them out of that. And make them substitute the kind of power and glamour that you can work for for fifty years. . . .”

Miss Murphy found herself thinking, Yes you can work for it and hard for fifty years or for a hundred years, and never get it. And she thought, Just the same, just the same, there is something strong and bold and magnificent—about taking it. Now.

“I’ve talked to their people myself,” the principal was saying wearily, “and it gets us nowhere. The parents simply do not know. Ivy’s mother and father think of her as a perfectly ordinary young girl, not too bright, not too enthusiastic, not doing too well in her studies . . . but ‘popular.’ Lord help us! Stan’s father thinks he is grown and he’s quite complacent about it. ‘Let the kid alone,’ he says. Ross’s folks are financially harassed this year and they are so frantically absorbed in their troubles that the boy goes unnoticed. He merely appends to them. As for Tentor, he lives with grandparents who write him off in one sentence. He is seventeen. Once they were seventeen and they survived. They expect him to do the same.”

He sighed and raised his eyes to her. “So they’ve come up like weeds. And we have failed with them. I wish you could tell me how to change the basic wrong and rotten thing.”

“They defy the group,” she stammered, “they don’t conform.”

He stared at her and said, “My soul, my soul . . . if that were all . . .” Then he got out of his chair, shaking off that moment of despair. “I will tell you this,” he said. “The moment, if it comes, that they are fairly caught . . . I will do all I can to blacken their records. I will feed them into the hands of juvenile experts, and police psychiatrists. I can afford no more weak and hopeful wishes about these four. There isn’t time.”

He smiled at her to let down the tension. “Thanks, anyway,” he said gently.

Miss Murphy went away in some confusion.

Just the same, just the same . . . her mind kept saying. The four of them are so strong. The wide world, she thought, might use them, just as they were—out there where the wicked sometimes flourish like the green bay tree.

She did not think the school could change them now. She herself would miss the sight of them. The school would miss something when next year the four would not be back.

Miss Murphy wished she could, in the few weeks remaining, set up a contact for herself. What she had long tried to do was project toward them the sound friendly give-and-take attitude she held toward other students . . . even as they looked through her with those icy eyes. (They looked through anybody over twenty. Their eyes could pass over you so blankly that you wanted to pinch yourself.) Maybe she had been wrong not to betray to them how she felt she truly understood them.

But maybe someday, somehow, and yet . . . she could reach them . . . without any motive to change them. There was a wicked excitement to this thought.

Miss Murphy lived with her widowed sister Daphne, who was not well and in Miss Murphy’s memory never had been. Daphne was weak and low that evening. She had been sitting in the sun and had received an irritation of the skin. It was one of the misfortunes of Daphne that nature never did her good. Sun, air, wind, fire or earth, all these usually turned out to have harmed her superdelicate sensibilities.

About a quarter of nine, Daphne discovered that her peach-colored pills had run out, the ones she took before bed. So Miss Murphy set forth to the neighborhood drugstore, with her normal cheerful willingness to serve.

It was a pleasant evening and she enjoyed walking the four blocks, the seeing into other people’s houses now that the lights were on, the glimpsing of a bridge game or a lonely TV watcher, or a family dinner party lingering late at table because everyone was reluctant to leave the quips and the teasings to wash the dishes. Miss Murphy enjoyed all the dear mild suburban world.

The little cluster of shops was darkened. Only the drugstore was still in business at this hour. Miss Murphy had a pleasant exchange of commonplaces with the clerk, received her package and left with a cheerful “Good night.”

But as she drew even with the dark and silent gas station, she began to wonder about Daphne’s lotion. Was it low, too? From old experience, Miss Murphy felt she had better call up home and ask. For the drugstore was about to close, as the hour closed to nine o’clock, and she would not have time to return tonight and if Daphne were uncomfortable . . .

So Miss Murphy, both kind and shrewd in the matter, left the sidewalk, stepped into the green phone booth that stood against the stucco outside wall of the office of the service station.

As she pulled the thin flaps of the door shut, the light failed to go on but, after firming the door as best she could, Miss Murphy made nothing of the semidarkness, which was not very important, and hopefully put her dime in.

Nothing happened. The phone was dead and dumb. It must be out of order. Turning her mind to the prospect of going back and calling from the drugstore itself—Miss Murphy took a full minute to discover and realize that she could not open the door of the booth. It was out of order, too, in a very stubborn way. She could not get out of the dark phone booth. She was imprisoned in this upright coffin with no way to telephone for help.

It was a ridiculous entrapment.

Nine o’clock of a spring evening and Miss Delphine Murphy had gotten herself locked into a telephone booth!

She peered out through the glass fighting a sudden feeling of suffocation which was purely subjective. She could tell by reflections on the sidewalk that some of the lights in the drugstore were going out. Then she was able to make out the figure of the clerk, as he emerged and as he locked the door. Miss Murphy rapped on the glass with the metal clasp of her purse, making all the noise she decorously could, but he strode away in the opposite direction.

Never in her life before had Miss Murphy been in a position to cry out for help . . . to lift up her voice. She couldn’t decide what to shout. To shout “Help” seemed absurd. It seemed quaint and ridiculous like something out of a comic strip. Nevertheless, she had to shout something so she called, “HI . . . HI . . . Hi there!” The clerk vanished into the reaches of the parking lot at the other side of the drugstore, and in a little while his car rattled out into the street and turned to go off the other way, so that it did not pass her. Now the whole small business section was abed for the night.

Traffic on this street was rather thin. Miss Murphy was not in absolute darkness because the streetlight was shedding down upon the gas station corner. But neither was she very visible in her little prison and the passing cars made nothing of the fact that the door to the phone booth was shut. Perhaps they could not even see that this was so.

Miss Murphy resolved that she must take the desperate measure of breaking the glass. It was a shock to discover that she could not break it, that the glass was very tough, and had embedded in it, besides, a wire mesh. When the heel of her shoe had no more effect than had her elbow, she began to be afraid.

The fear whistled around her head like a bird and lit upon the name of her sister, Daphne. Miss Murphy had the medicine. Daphne was alone and not feeling well and was easily visited by swarms of wild dreads and melodramatic forebodings. Daphne would miss her soon. Daphne would think that something terrible had happened to her. Daphne would know that her sister never never would delay deliberately her return with the medicine. So Daphne would be frantic and to be frantic was very bad for her.

Miss Murphy felt frantic for Daphne’s sake. But after a minute or two, she knew she was frantic for herself. She was feeling claustrophobic. How was she going to get out . . . get out . . . the words began to shout in her consciousness. GET OUT.

She caught herself turning and twisting and pounding unreasonably on the glass when there was no one who could possibly have heard her. Miss Murphy took a hold upon herself and tried to think. The thing to do was stop someone. There did not seem to be any pedestrians. But there were cars. How could she stop a car? Peering with her cheek tight on the cold glass, Miss Murphy saw a convertible come gliding. It was cruising, going softly. It was not full of stern purpose. One could feel this. It seemed, almost, that this car, in the gentle evening, in the quiet streets of the town, was looking for trouble.

Miss Murphy rapped on the glass and cried, “Hi! Hi! Hi!”

As the car slipped by, she saw who was in it.

Stan Fuller was driving. The car, no cheap rattletrap jalopy, but a good-looking modern shining expensive car, was his. It was hard to say how the kids got these cars . . . they just did. It seemed that the intense desire, the absolute necessity of the young American to own a car generated its own satisfaction. So . . . Stan Fuller sat behind the wheel but it was as if the common agreement of the four of them directed the car’s cruising prowling motion. Ivy Voll sat in the middle and on the edge of the front seat, a little forward of the others, as was her assigned position. Tentor sat on her right, watching and guarding. Ross, who belonged on the left, was draped by his arms across the back of the seat behind Stan where he could project his watchfulness to the left, as was his station.

Miss Murphy saw them go by, saw Stan and Ivy hold their heads to look straight forward, saw only Tentor peering to the right where she was so helplessly hidden.

The sight of the four of them, on the prowl in a car, briefly intrigued her. But she was not out of her prison and she could not think how to get out.

In about four minutes, she was astonished to see the convertible approach once more and from the same direction, as if it had circled.

Then she was thrilled when it rocked gently over the gutter and slipped in upon the pavement of the service station. It rolled into the shadow of the laundry building that bounded this place. It stopped. The four of them sat there.

Miss Murphy filled with relief and also with shame to be caught, and especially by them, in so undignified and ridiculous a situation, tapped primly upon the glass. She called out, “The door is jammed. Stan? Would you please try to open it? This is Miss Murphy. Jim Tentor? Ivy?”

They did not appear to have heard her.

So Miss Murphy kept on tapping and calling to them, repeating and repeating in a curious suspension of her own attention. She chose not to notice how much time was going by. But at last her wrist weakened and felt tired and her hand fell and her voice failed. She could see their heads. She began to think she could see their cold eyes, their expressions—as cold and baleful as wolves. She saw Stan put one huge foot up and hang it by the ankle over the far side of the car. She knew Ross had relaxed, for he had nothing to watch to the left now but the brick wall of the laundry. She saw Tentor, with neck arched, watching the street behind them. Ivy sat with her head high. Ivy lit a cigarette. They seemed to have settled themselves, as if this were a drive-in movie. Were they going to sit there and watch Miss Murphy turning in her trap?

She did turn. She revolved in her cage. She tried the phone again. But nothing had happened to put it suddenly and obligingly back in working order. She braced herself to make no more appeals, to wait with some kind of dignity.

But the thought of Daphne came again and she felt her nerve crack, her dignity wash out in rage.

“Listen!” she cried. “Listen to me. My sister is ill. I have her medicine. I must get out. My sister is ill. She needs her medicine! Medicine!” It should have counted, the appeal to medical necessity. It did count among the civilized. Did not planes fly with the serums, ambulances race, cops clear the way to the hospital? The world agreed that the medicine must get through.

But the four of them were not moved.

In a kind of last grasp after reason, Miss Murphy supposed she could not be heard. So she stopped her useless noise.

She heard Ross say restlessly, “What’d say? Shall we stripe out?”

And Ivy say, “What’s the hurry?”

They spoke in ordinary conversational voices. Miss Murphy heard them. Therefore, they had heard everything she had been shouting—every frantic word of hers that still rang in her own ears.

Miss Murphy’s head became filled with a red rage.

She sank down, missed the seat, went all the way to the floor and felt at first an enormous relief. To be so degraded as to sit on a dirty floor and lean her clean forehead upon the worn wooden seat . . . to give up . . . to feel the first comforting rush of self-pity . . . Soon Miss Murphy was weeping.

She would not look at them again. But they were looking at her. They could see her, crumpled where she was. They could even hear her sobbing. A little pride came back. She hushed herself and looked at her watch as best she could. It was 9:22. Twenty-two minutes had reduced her to this?

She put her chin on her forearm, stared at the back wall of the booth and forced her mind to turn over. The gas station opened, she guessed, not much earlier than eight in the morning. This then was her earliest firm hope of release.

Now she trembled and felt ill. She could endure. She must endure. But it was horrifying and primitive: it called upon reserves she had not used in years if ever. Long shudders of rage were going up and down her spine. She must not think, for even one moment, of the four of them or she might begin to pound her head upon the glass and hurt herself.

Then she heard a motor start. Were they going? She would not look. Then she heard a scream of brakes. A car had come. Then she heard a voice crying in concern for her, “Hey, lady! Gee—I’m sorry! Look, I’m getting you out right away! Gee, what a shame!”

She looked then and saw a man beyond the glass who had a tool in his hands. She struggled to her feet, feeling weary and soiled, and she heard the wonderful crunching of breaking wood, and then she was free.

The man owned the gas station. “Say, listen, that’s a mean thing to happen,” he said, supporting her with his kind strong arm. “How long were you in there? I got here as soon as I could. I had to put some clothes on, and I hadda come all the way across town. Guess it took me about twenty minutes . . . Well, I’m sorry.”

Miss Murphy, standing in the air, looked toward the laundry building. No convertible was there. They had vanished.

She heard him say, “The minute the girl called me I came as fast as I could . . .”

“The minute . . . who . . . called . . . you?”

“Some girl . . . name of Ivy Voll . . .”

“Called you! Twenty minutes ago!”

“That’s right. Say, are you O.K.?” He thought she might feel faint. He led her to his car. “I wanna wedge this door so as nobody else gets into trouble. Then I’ll take you home,” he promised.

“Yes, my sister . . . Her medicine . . . you see . . . ?”

Miss Murphy got weakly into the man’s car and sat there and the cold air sharpened the cold of the sweat at her hairline. Then they had learned how to do that. They had conformed. They had acted to save her. And the group would so reckon—that they had saved her. Then, if they sat and watched for twenty minutes and did not tell her so . . . but watched her suffering . . . it was too subtle and refined a cruelty to count. And it was not because they were so cold and so callous that they did not recognize her suffering. Nor that they were too young, too self-centered . . . or too ignorant. On the contrary. They not only recognized it, they prolonged it deliberately. And they enjoyed it.

This was the basic wrong and rotten thing.

When she reached home, her sister Daphne looked up from the novel in which she had become lost. “What kept you, Delphine?” asked Daphne, lazily. And then jealously, “I suppose it’s nice out.”

“Very nice,” said Miss Murphy, whose legs were like water.

In the morning, soon after the first bell rang, a message came that called Miss Murphy into Mr. Madden’s office. When she got there, she found his room was full. There was a man who could be nothing on earth but a police officer. And standing in formation, but like culprits before judgment, were the four.

Miss Murphy’s lumpy little face was very pale this morning. She felt no new shock to see the four of them, for the basic shock that had rocked her whole system was still operating. Now she seemed to look all the way through them with cold green eyes.

“Last night,” said Mr. Madden, in a voice of well-reined-in anger and excitement, “this office was wrecked, as you can see.”

Then Miss Murphy saw . . . saw the torn papers, the broken drawers, the ink on the wall.

“These four students, as you know, have done this sort of thing before. They were forgiven, last year. This time Police Officer Davis here and I feel that something a bit different is going to have to be done about them. Now, I called you in, Miss Murphy, because they say”—in Mr. Madden’s thin cultivated voice there was a small but distinct sneer—“that you can give them an alibi.”

“I?” she said.

The eyes of the four were on her. For once she stood in the range of their eye-beams and was solid and seen.

“You know—” began Stan.

“Quiet,” snapped Mr. Madden. A wave of something like alarm went through the phalanx. Mr. Madden was on the warpath. No one could doubt it.

“These four,” he said ostensibly to Miss Murphy but really to the policeman, “have gotten away with just about enough. We cannot help them here at school with the measures at our command. And they need help . . . and they need it from experts and they will someday know that they are very fortunate to be getting it right now.” Mr. Madden glanced about him. “This handkerchief,” he said, “was found here in my office. And it gives them away. Now, let’s get past this nonsense about an alibi and get on with it.”

Miss Murphy looked at the handkerchief, a grimy scrap of cotton with I. V. upon the corner in some black ink. I. V. For Ivy Voll. For Ivy. And the Roman way to write a four. She brooded on symbolism.

“Better let me put this to her,” said the man Davis, courteously, for Mr. Madden was obviously not quite objective this morning. “Now, Miss Murphy, it seems that last night, up until close to 9 p.m., there was somebody in the building.”

“Adult education class. About 9:02,” snapped Mr. Madden. “Mr. Collins locked up after it. No trouble then. But when I came here, after something I found I needed at home, I walked right into the activities. They were at work, all right. In the dark. One of them hit me. . . .”

Miss Murphy now saw the slight bruise upon his face.

“That,” said Madden with satisfaction, “will make it enough of a crime so that we can really—”

“Let’s—er—get at this alibi business,” said Davis, clearing his throat. “Now, Miss Murphy. Mr. Madden came here and caught them . . . although of course they got away in the dark . . . at about 9:20. Where were you at that time? Do you know?”

Miss Murphy did not speak. But she knew. She remembered.

“They say you were locked in a phone booth,” said Davis. “They say that they called the man to come and let you out. They say they stayed by you . . .”

“Is that what they say?” There was a sick chill in her voice. The four rippled slightly—like a sensitive plant recoiling from a touch.

“We have checked with the man,” said Davis in his calm voice, “and he corroborates so much of their story. The girl called him close after nine. Now he let you out at 9:25 or a few moments later but says these four were not there. Then.”

Miss Murphy said nothing. The times marched stately in her mind. She recalled reading her watch in the poor light, with her knees on the dirty floor.

“You see how it stands, Miss Murphy?” Davis said. “They could have come here to the school after phoning. . . .”

“They did,” said Madden positively.

“Somebody—” began Ivy.

“Be still,” the principal said. “Miss Murphy, I can only warn you very carefully. Don’t make a mistake about this.”

Miss Murphy stood there with power.

“You saw us,” Stan said accusingly.

“Sure she did,” said Ross.

The eyes of the girl, Ivy, bored into Miss Murphy’s. Well? they said. There was even a little scorn in them. You are trapped, they said. You have to speak true and you know it.

Miss Murphy smiled and spoke true. “Yes, they were there. All four. They stood by me.” She said this without bitterness as if she spoke in a not unpleasant dream. “So,” she continued, “they couldn’t have done this damage. Not between 9 and 9:25. Is that what you wanted of me?”

“Gee, thanks,” she heard one say. Was it Tentor?

“If she gives them the alibi . . .” Davis said and opened his hands.

“Miss Murphy,” said the principal in a tired voice, “if this is mercy, if you mistakenly think that they ought to be let off again . . .”

“No, sir,” she said placidly.

“Get back to your classes,” he snapped at them.

The four, with a certain scurry of feet, went away.

“If you are trying to be friendly and lying for them . . . Oh, I know you have had a certain sneaking fondness . . .” Mr. Madden’s mouth looked as if it might froth and Davis had his ears pricked. “Then you are so wrong,” said Madden fiercely. “This was our last chance to save them. Don’t you know that? They’ll lie low, now, till the end of the year.”

“I know it was the last chance,” Miss Murphy said coolly. “But the truth is true. And it doesn’t much matter. They are trash.”

Both men looked at her a little shocked and startled, and then they let her go.

A little later she sat at her own desk and heard them knock and called “Come in.” They came in and arranged themselves before her. She knew at once what they had come to do. They were conforming. They’d throw a sop to civilization. They had grown shrewd. They would, in cold blood and on the surface, pretend to conform. So they would thank her. She felt quite cool and free.

“Gee, Miss Murphy,” Stan said to her, “we wanted to tell you we think it was swell of you.”

“To tell the truth?” said Miss Murphy lightly.

“Somebody just put my handkerchief there,” said Ivy in her small whine. “On purpose. Because we get blamed anyway.”

“Trying to frame us,” Ross said.

Tentor smiled, but his puffy eyes were sleepless in evil.

“Oh yes, you have been framed,” Miss Murphy said. Her green eyes looked them over indifferently from under her dusty lashes. “You may go now,” she said and her mouth curved slightly. She might as well have said Go on to hell.

The icy mystery of her cruelty . . . for she saw where they were going and did not care . . . this intrigued them. They blinked at her, their eyes shifted, puzzled. But they left. Outside they fell into formation. The girl, Ivy, put her small feet proudly down and drew on that sleepwalker’s look, and Stan seemed fierce as ever, and the greyhounds ranged on the flanks, defying anyone to touch them or teach them, as they walked away.

Miss Murphy could see them in her mind’s eye. She watched for the last time. She thought, What waste! Born, raised, grown so high, and lost already. Too late. Good-bye.

Elyot was speaking. He usually was. He had a high, pleasant voice that rippled along eagerly. They were in Elyot’s room on the second floor. They often were. He had an old-fashioned fireplace, and a large box that he managed to keep filled with odds and ends of wood so that there could be a fire in the evenings. It was never much of a fire but it worked the old magic and they all gathered there.

The girls from the top floor were business girls. Helen, who would have liked to be taken out by young men, was not much asked. Sonia, who was asked more often, had a streak of inertia that made the whole idea of getting dressed up and playing desirable female too much of a bother. Running down to Elyot’s room was different. His room was their club. Mrs. MacCleery, who owned the house, raised no objections. Indeed, twice (since her son Kevin had taken to joining them) she had brought up coffee and cookies, embarrassing them. For, after all, they were modern young people. They took turns bringing more sophisticated refreshment.

This evening, the fire was going and they had settled down. Helen Fielding was sitting on a cushion on the floor and was staring into the fire. Sonia Jones was in the armchair with both plump legs swung over one arm of it. She was eating salted almonds, as complacent and comfortable as a cat. Kevin MacCleery sat where he always sat, in the chair with the wooden arms, his head tilted to listen.

Elyot—James Elyot—was a tall young man about as wide as a stick, with a large head balanced on a thin neck like a heavy blossom on an inadequate stem. He wore glasses, fiercely framed in black, on his pale, slightly beaked nose. He was restless. Sometimes he paced. Sometimes he perched. He liked to poke at the fire. He was full of sound and theory. He had a drop or two of preacher’s blood. He was serious and he was moral and didn’t try to conceal this.

“I have something to present to you,” he was saying. “I have an idea.”

“What’s all this?” asked Sonia in her soft, lazy voice.

“It has occurred to me,” pronounced Elyot, “that the trouble with us is very simple.”

“Nothing is very simple,” said Helen in a melancholy way. She was a small tense girl with a suffering heart.

“Perfectly clear and perfectly simple, as I see it,” said Elyot severely. “Listen to this. Every single one of us knows some of the rules for the good life. We all know at least one or two things that, without any question, we ought to be doing, but we don’t do them. That is where we fail.”

“Who’s failing?” drawled Sonia. “And in what way, Elyot dear?” She had green eyes and a mop of fair unkempt hair. Everybody liked Sonia; she was big, good-natured, easygoing.

Elyot turned his glasses upon her. “Shall I put it into words?” he challenged in his donnish way. “We all left school some time ago. We are still young, although not as young as we once were. And time is creeping on. True, we have jobs. We earn. We eat.”

Kevin MacCleery didn’t move in his chair. He was only the listener. This was understood. Everyone knew that Elyot was not including him.

“But not one of us,” continued Elyot, “is on the path. I am not speaking materially. I speak of our growth toward being successful human beings. Which of us is what he ought to be? Who, when you get down to it, does not know better than he does?”

“Go on,” said Helen.

“Very well,” said Elyot. “Therefore, I propose an experiment. I propose that we have a Motto Day.”

“A what?” Sonia let her voice squeak.

“I am serious,” said Elyot unnecessarily. He always was. It made him a misfit in the office. “And I have worked out the procedure, in detail. If you agree to this, I think it might be very interesting.”

“You want us to do something?”

“Exactly.” He relished the stunned silence. Then he perched on the edge of his divan and inclined his big head. “Suppose the three of us—” continued Elyot in his eager, earnest way. “Let’s see. Tonight is Friday—Suppose we take the weekend to think this over, very carefully. Then, sometime during this weekend, each of us will put down on pieces of paper as many mottoes—I mean rules, suggestions, sayings—that we can think of, in which we really believe. Mottoes to live by.”

Sonia groaned and rolled her eyes in humorous comment.

Elyot went on: “Now, type them out so that they will all be alike. Use my machine. I never lock my door. And I’ll leave some pennies on my desk. Wrap each motto round a penny and drop it into that empty tobacco tin. Understood?”

“You must have been lying awake all night, dreaming this up,” said Sonia. “And then what?”

“Then, on Monday morning, we’ll meet here, before work. We’ll draw. And we’ll promise. Each of us will take a vow to live by whatever motto he draws out of the tin. Just one. And live by it from say, eight o’clock on Monday morning to eight o’clock that evening. That’s twelve hours, only half a day. Not long. But I mean live by it. I mean, for once in our lives, do it.”

The room was silent except for the fire which spat at them.

Sonia swung her legs. “You mean like ‘Honesty is the best policy’?” She grinned.

“If you believe that,” snapped Elyot, “put it down.”

“I don’t know whether I believe it,” said Sonia. “I never gave it a thought, frankly.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” inquired Helen. She tipped up her small face with her crooked teeth showing too much in the mouth that was too big for the width of the jaw. She was a young woman who was not good-looking, and she couldn’t think, offhand, of a saying that could help. “A family motto—like semper fidelis?” she asked.

“That’s more like it.” Elyot nodded.

“I don’t understand, Elyot. Why doesn’t each of us use his own? Why should we draw lots?” Helen said.

“Because—” Elyot leapt up and began to pace. “Because I think we ought to commit ourselves blindly. I think that is the way to do it. I think that is the way to be shaken up.”

“Why should we be shaken up?” drawled Sonia. “I don’t know that I want to be shaken up particularly.”

“Of course, if you are satisfied.” Elyot’s light voice had a sting in it.

“I don’t mean that,” said Sonia dryly. Her plump face looked momentarily thinner.

Helen was gazing into the fire. “We are practicing to be failures all right,” she said with romantic sadness. “We aren’t what we ought to be. I see what Elyot means. We are all fairly young, and fairly precious, to ourselves, but we do seem to have stopped. I know I am not on the way to anything. Isn’t that what you mean, Elyot?”

“He doesn’t know what he means,” chided Sonia fondly. “Just a brainstorm. Ignore it. It will go away.”

“No, I think I’d like to go through with this experiment,” said Helen vigorously. “What have I got to lose?”

Elyot said, “Good. Now, come on, Sonia. You could try it for twelve hours, couldn’t you? What about it?”

“It’s childish,” Sonia said. “Anyway, suppose I drew semper fidelis? Look, I go to the office. I do the filing and type a few letters. There’s not a lot of opportunity, see? It wouldn’t mean anything.”

“You’d have to try living out whatever it means,” said Elyot. “That’s the whole point. We’d have to commit ourselves totally. I say that’s what’s the matter. We never do. How many nights have we sat here talking and analyzing and stating that this is right and that is wrong? But what has happened? Where is any result? We don’t even evolve anything consistent out of the conglomeration. Now, I am simply saying: Take one rule. One idea. One that somebody believes in. And just try it, for half a day.”

Sonia was silent.

“Somebody!” burst out Helen, swiveling on her small haunches. “What if I drew a motto that I don’t believe in?”

“So much the better,” cried Elyot. “You wouldn’t have to believe in it. You would simply try it. In order to make this an experiment, it would be best if you didn’t get your own. That is why we need to be three. With three of us, the chances would be that none would get his own. None of us would know exactly where his motto came from, either. Nor could it possibly have been tailored for one of us, especially. Now don’t you see? Come on, Sonia,” he wheedled.

“You mean this seriously, Elyot?” said Sonia.

“What would be the point, otherwise?” said Elyot innocently. “The fact is, we had all better think hard before we type out these things. One of us might have to live by anything we put down. That should give us pause. Of course, don’t do it if you are afraid.” His sudden drop in pressure was effective.

Helen said tensely, “It won’t be easy to think up something.”

“No,” said Elyot cheerfully.

“It could be dangerous. . . .” said Helen.

“How could an experiment, only twelve hours long, hurt anybody?” scoffed Elyot. “I am willing. If I draw one of my own it will serve me right. I am hoping to get something new and strange to me. I’d like to see what would happen.”

“So would I,” said Helen tremulously.

“Nothing much would happen,” said Sonia as if to comfort her. “Unless somebody tried to play a joke on one of us.”

Helen showed alarm at once and it seemed that Sonia’s suspiciousness was going to kill the fragile notion that was Elyot’s idea. Elyot, however, braced against this.

“I’ll tell you what,” he cried. “We’ll let Mac here do the drawing. He couldn’t possibly rig anything.”

The man in the wooden chair winced, very slightly.

Helen said, rather quickly, in a caressing tone, “Oh, yes. Please, Mac, you draw for us. I’d like that. That would seem as if we were—oh, putting ourselves in the hands of more than chance. . . .”

The man in the wooden chair was rigid.

“Wait a minute,” snapped Elyot. “Don’t bring religion into this. I’m talking about an experiment.”

“I just mean,” said Helen, “like consulting the Oracle at Delphi.”

“Or superstition, either,” said Elyot sourly. “It’s common sense to let Mac—”

Sonia said loudly, “Now, wait a minute. Are we actually going to do this? And another thing. Must we tell? Tell what we draw, I mean?”

“Hmmm.” Elyot became thoughtful. “A good question.”

“I wouldn’t consider it, if I had to tell,” said Sonia bluntly.

“Naturally, we wouldn’t tell until the day was over,” Elyot conceded. “But how can we evaluate an experiment if we don’t know the results?” he demanded.

“Just the results, all right,” said Sonia. “Like good, bad, or indifferent.” Her green eyes were shrewd.

But Elyot said slowly, “If you take a vow and then can’t keep your word—if you say you will and then just goof off—you are not even a minimum human being.” Elyot was absurdly serious, but it stung.

Sonia said shortly, “All right. We’ll try it. And Mac does the drawing. That’s if he will . . .”

The man in the wooden chair spoke up. “I’ll draw for you if you want me to.” He had a lovely voice, warm and deep.

“It’s agreed then,” cried Elyot delightedly. “We’ll do it on Monday. Who’s got any pennies?” He began to shed pennies upon the table top. Kevin MacCleery could hear them clattering. He listened, because he could not see. He was blind.

He was thinking: Children, playing games. What did they know about the things fate could do to a person? They were believers, they implied. Believers in what? In their own total responsibility? If they did what was right instead of doing what was wrong, then they would have happy lives? Or succeed? Ah, children! Eager, naïve, ridiculous babies. Failures, they called themselves. Yet fate had left each of them two eyes.

Kevin MacCleery had lost his sight eight months before. He was twenty-nine years old, a little senior to these others. He had been trained for architecture. He had done what was right, worked hard, disciplined himself, and he had had his feet on a path. But a man who cannot see cannot create a building.

So Kevin MacCleery was burrowing here, in his mother’s house. Ever since his personal catastrophe, he had kept safe here, and more than half-dead. The world came to him faintly through his ears. He had made do with radio for months, but this was becoming hard to bear. In the last few weeks, he had taken to dropping in on Elyot when the girls from the top floor were there.

His mother encouraged this. She was so glad, she said, that he was making friends. She had even brought up coffee and cookies; he had had to tell her not to do that again.

He and his mother were in an impasse. Mary MacCleery was a widow with this big old-fashioned house into which she took boarders. She also worked by day in a dress shop. Thus she managed. For Kevin to burrow here cost very little. What he ate. That was all. Clothes, he cared nothing about. He was not competing anymore. What did it matter?

Kevin was a burly, muscular young man with a pleasant blunt-featured face, and a shock of black hair. He asked his mother to cut his hair once in a while. So she fed him and she cut his hair. Otherwise, she could not help him at all.

Everything she said irritated him almost unbearably. Poor Mary MacCleery could express herself only in clichés. Banalities. She advised him, lovingly, to “try to make the best of it.” He said best was a superlative of good, and where was there any good in being blind? She had wanted him to get a guide dog and go out. He had asked why. Nothing to see. She had begged him to learn Braille. He said that he had read the classics and what esoteric and unpopular stuff he might want to read now would not be available. She uttered hopeful phrases about employment and being useful that had made him, on at least one occasion, shout “Basket weaving!” at her.

He was always sorry, later, but he could not help it. He could not communicate with his mother. He burrowed here. There was nothing to fill the hours, either by night or by day.

So, to go and sit in Elyot’s room, and listen, had become important to him. He found this possible because of Elyot’s character. Elyot had no sensitivity. He was so wound up in the champing of his wits that he did not curb his tongue for the sake of anyone’s feelings. Elyot could say, for instance, “Mac couldn’t possibly rig anything,” meaning “the poor so-and-so is blind.” As Elyot knew, and did not pretend not to know—and if he pitied it, Elyot never said so.

The girls were all right too. Sonia had been, from the first. She had accepted his presence and his condition with a good-natured indifference welcome to him. Sonia was a little aloof, a little mysterious, but she did not fuss. Helen was sometimes inclined to coo, but Kevin could put up with it. He could remember Helen’s looks.

In fact, he could remember how they all had looked, when he had had his sight. When he had been on his path, he had thought of them as a rum lot. The younger three among his mother’s boarders, able to afford no better place to live. Unfortunates, all three. Ungifted. Handicapped. There was Elyot’s grotesque physique, Helen’s unprettiness, Sonia’s fat. They had seemed to him, in those days, doomed to a mediocrity worse than failure. Comparatively speaking. Compared to his own strong body, good looks, energetic brilliance, and his achievements, his ambition, and his destiny.

Now, of course, it was different. They could see and he could not.

He had come to understand them better, as he listened to all that they said, and heard perhaps a little more. He had heard just now the self-drama in Helen’s melancholy and the touch of selfish lethargy behind Sonia’s reluctance.

He, himself, thought the idea was mildly interesting. It was just like Elyot, of course, who was one of the brainy idiots one finds in the world. Someone pursuing reason through the mazes of reality and not even noticing that he was in a maze. Kevin would gladly draw their lots for them. He would be the instrument of chance, their blind fate. It seemed appropriate.

Saturdays were just chunks of time for Kevin MacCleery but Sundays were always especially trying. His mother asked him to go to church with her in the morning, as usual, and he as usual refused to go. After church she stayed at home to “be with him.” She cooked a special dinner. She tried to chat. By midafternoon, the lame talk between them died of her frustration and his guilt. He could not help it; she drove him nearly wild. Kevin went away from her and drifted upstairs.

Elyot had guaranteed to be out of his room on Saturday evening, from six o’clock on, and most of Sunday afternoon. So Kevin, hearing the room to be empty, opened the unlocked door and groped his way to the table. He was tempted. Perhaps he could remember the keyboard of a typewriter. Perhaps he could put a motto or two round a penny and none of them would know. A dirty trick. But he sat down at the table. Life, he thought bitterly. This is an adventure. I might be able to type a stupid line.

His left hand felt for the tobacco tin and fumbled within it. There were several wrapped pennies in the tin now. His right hand found paper. He fed it into the machine. His fingers felt thick.

When he thought he had them placed, he began to type. He hit a few keys and felt for the lever that changes to another line. Was it set for double spacing? Couldn’t quite be sure. He hit more keys. Impulsively he pushed the key that locked in capital letters. He wouldn’t trust himself to shift and capitalize properly. The typewriter clicked, sounding agreeably busy. He practiced, and felt a brief elation. This collapsed suddenly.

Life? Kevin ripped the sheet of paper out. He folded it and began to tear. He did not know whether his fingers had been where he wished them to be. He did not know whether what he had put on paper was gibberish or not. How could he ever know? He couldn’t see.

His right toe felt for the wastepaper basket. He let the strips of paper fall out of his hands. So much for the adventure.

“Toujours gai,” he would type out for them. Or “Look on the bright side.” But he could not. And it was best that he did not. Let the children have their little game. Let him not spoil it with his experienced bitterness. His part was to draw for them, in the morning. Then he could listen, in the evening, to the results of their adventure. It was something. It was the most that he would have.

Kevin went listlessly back down the stairs and heard his mother say, “Would you like some music, dear? There is the symphony, so nice . . .”

Nice! “Oh, Mother,” he said, “for heaven’s sake let me be!”

Mary MacCleery’s throat ached. She knew that what came out of it always struck him wrong. “Well, then,” she piped, “if you don’t mind, dear, I should do a little housework.”

“Yes, Mother. I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“You’ll never know,” he muttered.

She watched his big body, his good body, her beloved son’s body, shamble off toward his bedroom where she knew he would lie in the dark, beyond her reaching.

Mary MacCleery went upstairs to see to her house. She thanked heaven for this house, and the extra rooms she could rent out for money so that she could keep and feed her son. She believed in counting her blessings and looking on the bright side. She did not always find the mottoes easy to live by.

On Monday morning at a quarter to eight Elyot, shaved, dressed, poised for the day’s work, opened his door for Helen and Sonia. Kevin MacCleery was just coming up the stairs.

“Now, then,” said Elyot, pleased that everyone was prompt, “here we are. Gather round.”

The four of them gathered round the tobacco tin.

“Have you got it, Mac?” Elyot’s hand took Kevin’s and with no pity and no nonsense, and no particular tact, he put the blind man’s hand upon the tin.

“Got it,” Kevin said.

“First, swear?” said Elyot, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. (Sonia’s eyes were sleepy; Helen’s were bright.) “You do solemnly swear,” said Elyot to them, “that this will be Motto Day? From eight o’clock this morning until eight o’clock tonight?”

“I swear,” said Helen.

“I swear,” said Elyot.

Sonia said, “Me, too. Hurry up. Dish them out, Mac.”

Kevin’s fingers pursued the pleasant weight of pennies round the tin’s inside. “For you, Helen,” he said quietly.

“Thanks, Mac.” The wrapped penny went out of his fingers.

“For you, Sonia.”

“Thanks, old bean.” Sonia’s lazy voice.

“For you, Elyot.”

“Good.”

“And for me,” said Kevin. His fingers took up a penny.

Silence. Then, “Want me to read yours for you, Mac?” said Elyot briskly, accepting this development without fuss.

Kevin said, “No. No, thanks. I’ll find out.”

“A meeting is called at eight o’clock,” said Elyot.

“All right. So long.”

“See you later, Mac.”

“Bye.”

“Au ’voir.”

“See you later,” said Kevin.

The absurd little ceremony made Kevin smile, as he followed them slowly down the stairs. After all, it was interesting. It was something to think about.

He could smell bacon and he went into his mother’s kitchen. Her anxious voice said, “Two eggs, dear?”

“Fine.” He could hear the eggs crack. His fingers held the penny. “I swear,” he said, under his breath. His lips curved.

Mary MacCleery, watching, felt weight lift off her heart. Let him keep smiling, please, God! But she must be very careful. She put the plate of bacon and eggs before him without speaking.

Her son said, “Mother, would you please read aloud what’s written on this?”

“Of course, dear.” She did not ask why. Her voice was nervous. She took the crumpled bit of paper. “It’s typed,” she said. “It’s just three words.”

“What words?”

“Why, it says, ‘of the party.’ ”

“Says what?”

She hadn’t heard a note like this in his voice for months. “Just ‘of the party.’ I don’t understand.” Her voice trembled. She could see the familiar bitterness and disappointment fading to the familiar resignation on his face.

“What did you do, Mother?” he asked, in a moment. “In Elyot’s room last night?”

“Why . . . I told you. I went round the house to check—you know Mrs. Barnes doesn’t always empty things as she should. I . . . what have I done? I didn’t know,” she cried in a high-pitched defensive voice. She had done wrong, doing right. She always did, somehow. She never pleased him.

“The tobacco tin on Elyot’s desk?” His voice was cold and stern and she trembled.

“Well, I emptied it, dear. I thought it was just paper. So I threw it into the fireplace and lit a match. I thought I’d get rid of it. Well, of course, as the paper burned I saw the pennies. Then I realized that Elyot must have had them wrapped up in paper for some reason. There were some more slips of paper in the wastepaper basket. So I just wrapped the pennies up again.

“Perhaps it was childish,” said Kevin mournfully, “but it was interesting. But you wrecked the whole experiment.”

“Darling, what did I do? I didn’t mean anything wrong.”

“Clumsy,” he said, brutal with irritation. “It doesn’t mean anything, now. You saw to that. You got hold of my stupid practicing . . .”

“Practicing? On the typewriter? Oh, were you practicing, dear?” Her voice fluted with hope. It made him furious. Poor Mary MacCleery, looking on the bright side, said, “But the typing is perfect, darling. There’s not a single mistake!”

He said, “Mother, heaven help us, you mean well. I know that.” His teeth clenched. His head drooped.

She said timidly, “Your eggs, getting cold . . .” She never knew how she managed to fail him, and it was breaking her heart.

“All right,” said Kevin. “You didn’t know. It can’t be helped. It’s ruined, but never mind.”

She bit her lip until it hurt. She must not speak. Whatever would come out of her mouth would only rub him the wrong way. She loved him; she wanted to help him; she meant well. Oh, God knew it! But there was only one thing that she could do, just now. Keep silent and let her tears roll silently.

The house was very quiet when everyone had gone to work on Monday morning. Outside, cars rushed by. A dog barked. A child cried out. Sometimes, of course, the old house creaked.

Kevin could find his way about the downstairs part of the house very well by now. He was free to roam. He could turn on the radio. He could find his food in the kitchen. He could answer the telephone, were it to ring—which it seldom did.

So he moved about this morning, restless, sorry for the wreck of the little experiment. He could imagine the others, puzzled, angry, disappointed. It was ruined forever, so he judged. He didn’t think they could work themselves up to the same pitch, another time. He could not, himself. So, too bad. Too bad.

After they had sworn, so solemnly. . . . He had sworn, too.

“If you can’t keep your word,” Kevin heard Elyot’s voice saying in scorn, “you’re not even a minimum human being.”

Elyot had said they must commit themselves, blindly. I am blind, thought Kevin. What was it that I swore? I swore to live by whatever was on that piece of paper, for twelve hours. And what was on the paper? Three nonsensical words. “Of the party.”

How can I live by them? What party? I am of no party, unless it will be the sad party of four, tonight, when I will have to tell them how the whole experiment went sour.

Wait. Now, wait . . . I am of the party of four that drew pennies out of the tobacco tin. I dealt myself in. What does it mean to be of the party? Partisan? On their side? Then what I should do is let them all know, right away, what has happened. I mustn’t let them flounder all day. I must get word to them. Yes, that’s it. I must warn them. But how can I?

He moved restlessly from room to room. There was only one way and he wasn’t sure that it was possible. Finally, he stood with the telephone in his hands. Did he know enough about where the three others worked to reach them on the telephone?

He had sworn. This was his duty. All right. Kevin dragged the phone, on its long cord, to where he could sit in an easy chair. His fingers were clumsy on the dial. He moved the dial round. “Operator,” said a voice.

“Operator, how do I get Information?”

“Dial 113 for Information,” singsonged the voice.

“I am blind,” burst out Kevin desperately. “Please help me to remember how the letters are set on the dial.”

He seemed to hear, in the silence, something breaking. Then the voice said, in a perfectly human, nonprofessional manner, “Of course. Now follow me. The hole at the top on the right is one only—no letter—then the next one round to the left is ABC. Have you got that?”

“Right,” said Kevin.

“The third hole is DEF.”

“Right.”

“GHI.”

“Of course.” His fingers were following.

“JKL. Then MNO. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Then PRS. There is no Q.”

“Is that so?”

“People don’t notice,” the girl said with pride, as if she had invented the dial herself. “But it’s something you’ll have to remember. All right? Next comes TUV. Then WXY.”

“Yes.”

“And no Z, either. The last hole is zero.”

“I never noticed there wasn’t a Z,” said Kevin. “I mean in the days when I could see.”

“You know now. But can you remember all that? And you want 113,” she reminded him anxiously.

“Yes, I will remember now. God bless you,” said Kevin, heartily, astonishing himself.

“A pleasure,” said the voice warmly.

Kevin sat there holding the phone. He couldn’t help smiling. Then, very carefully, he dialed 113.

“Information,” singsonged another voice.

“Please help me,” he said. “I want the phone number of a place called Greenhill something or other. It’s a firm that employs draughtsmen. It’s somewhere near MacArthur Park.”

“What is the full name of the firm, please?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is the address, please?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But this is very important.”

The voice said disapprovingly, “One moment, please.”

Kevin sat there, holding the phone.

The voice said, “There is a Greenhill Engineering Company in that area,” and quickly rattled off a number.

“Oh, good. Now, please,” said Kevin, “would you just repeat the number so that I’m sure to remember? I am blind.”

This time he was not surprised when everything cool, remote and official fell away. The girl’s voice—for now the voice was a girl’s voice—gave the number again. Kevin repeated it.

“Fine,” said the girl. “Now you are on your own. Good luck.”

“Thanks a million,” said Kevin weakly.

“Any time,” said the girl gaily. Then she was gone.

He would never see that girl. But then he never would have seen her. So it did not pertain. Kevin realized that he had been in touch, normally, just like anybody else. It was odd. Now, as he fingered the dial and recited the number to himself, something was forming. It wasn’t a visual image exactly, but it was as if he saw, with some new sense that had at least space and order to it, the dial under his hand. He marveled fearfully. He worked his fingers, very carefully, and dialed the number.

“Greenhill Engineering,” the phone responded.

“Mr. James Elyot, please.” Kevin was jubilant. He had done it!

“Mr. Elyot is not in the office at the moment,” the voice purred. “May I take a message?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Kevin, his spirits dashed. “When will he be back?”

“I am not sure. May I ask him to return your call?”

“Yes, please. Would you ask him to phone Kevin MacCleery as soon as possible? He knows the number. Thank you.”

Kevin put the phone on the cradle. Looming in his thoughts was the strange fact that this voice had not even needed to know that he was a blind man. It hadn’t pertained, at all. There was this web, then, that was normally sightless. How odd! But never mind that, where the devil was Elyot? Kevin began to fret. He had done wonders, for someone half-dead, but he had not yet reached Elyot, which was his sworn duty. He had not yet warned the members of his party that they were being cheated out of their experiment and why. Well, then, reach one of the girls? Yes, he must. But how?

Helen Fielding worked in a bookshop, but he could not remember the name of it. Sonia, he thought, he would never find. She worked in some business office. What business? Where? Best wait for Elyot to ring him back. Elyot would be able to find and tell the girls. But where was Elyot?

Kevin was reluctant to take his hands away from the telephone, which was warm from his flesh. Wait. The corset business! He had heard Sonia say that, in derision. Had she been joking? Did corsets exist in this modern world? Peerless! The word came back to him. Had Sonia been joking? Was it possible that there existed such a business to which such a word applied? How could he find out? Better try the bookshop. That should be less difficult. Well, then, who would know?

He dialed Information again. It was a different voice this time. “Can you give me the number of a public library?” he asked. He could not upset all officialdom. This would take some time. But he thought he could find a person who would help him. He felt confident. Had he not already said, twice, on the telephone that he was blind? He knew he could say it again. A library, he thought, ought to have some person willing to find him the name and the phone number of a bookshop.

“Which library, please?” asked Information.

“Any one. No, wait. One in my area.” He told her where he was. Then he was holding in his mind, almost as if it were in his hand and he could touch it, the phone number of a branch library. His fingers were nimble on the dial, this time. “Can you help me, please?” he said to the voice of the library.

“I can try,” she said politely.

“Have you the yellow pages there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am blind,” said Kevin. “So I am not exactly a customer of yours . . .”

“You could be,” said the voice placidly. “We have a Braille room.”

“Nothing I’d want.”

“How do you know?” said the voice, saucily.

“I can imagine.”

“You cannot,” she said.

“Look,” he said, “I am in a hurry. I’m after a couple of phone numbers that I need badly. Will you help me?”

“I’d be glad to,” she said. “What is it that you want?”

“I need the number of a bookshop. It’s not more than half an hour from here. It’s in this area, or not too far . . . I think I might recognize the name if I heard it. Now, can you dig up some bookshops?”

“Beacon?” the voice said.

Kevin gasped. She was very quick, he thought. “No.”

“Courier?”

Intelligence was on the line connected to his ear. He marveled. “No,” he said.

“Dodd’s? I think that’s too far afield.”

“That’s not it, anyway.”

“King’s Bookshop?”

“By George, I really think that’s the one. Good for you!”

“Well, good.” She read off the phone number.

“I’ll try it,” he said earnestly. “Now, one more. There is some company that may be called Peerless and manufactures what could be called a corset. I can’t tell you any more than that. Do you think you can dig up the phone number?”

“I can try.” The voice was close to laughing.

“It’s very important,” he said.

“It must be,” said the voice, stifling mirth. “Hang on.”

“What are you doing?” he said into the silence that ensued.

“I’m doing my best with the clues I’ve got,” the voice said cheerfully. “Now hush . . .”

Kevin hushed. The line sang. He felt connected. He said into the phone, “I don’t want to read the Bible or the works of William Shakespeare.”

“I suppose you have read them already?” she said pertly.

“It so happens that I have.”

“Oh, go on! Cymbeline? Nobody reads Cymbeline!”

“I’m not going to learn Braille for the sake of Cymbeline!”

“Oh,” said the voice, sounding enlightened. “So you can’t read! So that’s it! Well, now we have the whole truth.”

“You don’t have to be so sarcastic . . .” Kevin spluttered.

“Listen,” said the voice indignantly. “I know someone who is blind and she reads like a whiz and has been reading for five years now, and if she hasn’t come to the end of what she can get in Braille, pray, who are you?”

“Who are you?” said Kevin furiously.

“I work here; name of MacCarthy.”

“Name of MacCleery, here,” he said.

“An Irishman!” said MacCarthy gaily. “Here we have a Peerless Lingerie. Opaque, do you imagine?” She giggled.

Kevin began to laugh, helplessly. “Give me the number, like a good girl.”

“Well, yes, sir,” said MacCarthy meekly, and did so. “Wait, here’s another—Peerless Foundation.”

“Give me that, too. I can try the both of them. And listen, MacCarthy,” said Kevin, “I may visit you, one of these days.”

“Oh, do come and see us,” chirped MacCarthy. “Perhaps we’ll have some trifle to astonish you, though you are already as wise as an owl, having read almost everything.”

Kevin, with the phone tight to his ear, joyously soaking up insults, now saw that someone superior to MacCarthy (before whom MacCarthy had better behave) had just come within earshot. Her voice changed. “Anything else I can do, sir?”

“No, thank you, acushla.” Kevin was grinning.

“Now, are you sure you can remember all three numbers?”

“We’ll see.” Kevin reeled off all three.

“That’s right,” said MacCarthy. He seemed to see, in the place where she was, how that inhibiting presence was moving away and how MacCarthy’s eye was following this, as her voice lost formality. “Hey, that’s pretty good!”

“Oh, I can remember,” Kevin said jauntily.

“You’ve got a lovely Irish voice in your mouth, well-read MacCleery,” she said, “as if you didn’t know it.”

She hung up on him and he leaned back in the chair, feeling as if he had been struck by lightning. Or by light. Why, he could see MacCarthy. She might be a young red-head, or a plump married lady, or an elfish old spinster—but that didn’t matter. He still saw her, with an extra sense. She was a female of a certain quality of mind and spirit, and he could tell and it was like light.

After a while, he dialed one of the two Peerless numbers she had given him. He would try Sonia first. He seemed to know that Sonia would not be upset by this disappointment, or at least not as much so as Helen would be. Looking backwards at the two girls, with this newfound sense, he felt quite sure.

Peerless Foundation recognized Sonia’s name. “Just a moment please.” Clicks clicked at him. Kevin waited, feeling wonderfully pleased that he was connected with the right place.

Then a man said, “Who is that, please?”

“I wanted Miss Sonia Jones,” said Kevin, hearing, seeing a man in a huff.

“Miss Jones has not come in today—nor telephoned,” said Huff.

“But where is she, then?”

“She is not at her desk,” said the man with righteous indignation. “Who is this, please?”

“Never mind,” said Kevin. He rang off. He didn’t like Huff. But what could have happened to Sonia? He felt very uneasy. And where was Elyot? He realized that he had better stay off the phone, if he were to receive Elyot’s call.

But he barely could stay off. He tore himself away and walked about bumping into objects, but seeing, with this new sense. In a flood of light, he saw his mother, and his heart winced with shame and sorrow. Why didn’t the phone ring?

The phone remained silent. Finally (and with some amusement) he rationalized himself into his duty to phone the bookshop. He did so with no trouble. “Miss Helen Fielding, please.”

“Miss Fielding has already gone out to lunch. May I give her a message?”

“When will she be back?” Kevin was feeling a distinct alarm. Why, he still hadn’t reached any one of them.

“I can’t say, exactly. I should think in about an hour.”

“Please ask her to ring Kevin MacCleery.”

“I will, Mr. MacCleery,” said the voice pleasantly.

Kevin hung up. Lunch! He went to turn on the radio and get the time. Why, it was almost one! Where had the morning flown to? He went out to the kitchen to get the sandwich his mother had left for him and his glass of milk. Before he bit into the sandwich, Kevin MacCleery suddenly burst into song. Of course, he had a lovely Irish voice! That saucy chit in the library . . . He may as well make her a chit. He’d never see her, nor her appearance. But he “saw” her, well enough.

Finally he sat down and finished his sandwich solemnly. He drank his milk. Then he got up and walked to the phone. He dialed Information again, was given the number of a School of Braille.

“How long does it take to learn Braille?” he inquired.

“That depends on how bright you are,” came the reply.

“Oh, I’m bright enough. I have never particularly wanted to learn . . .”

The School said to him severely, “Unless you mean to apply yourself, Mr. MacCleery, don’t waste our time. We have others.”

Kevin said, “Yes, ma’am,” quite humbly. It did him good.

He hummed to himself. His voice vibrated in his chest. He bumbled around the downstairs rooms. He was feeling a tearing excitement. At last the phone rang and it was Elyot.

Kevin began to explain to him, rapidly, what had happened. Elyot just listened. “If you’ll phone the girls—” said Kevin. “Look, I’m sorry. I tried to get you, long ago. I really am sorry.” Kevin knew that he wasn’t sounding sorry, at all. He said, “Look, Elyot, there’s something I want to do. I want to give a party. Tonight. Supper? I want to bring all the food and drink. Can we have it up in your room? The four of us? About seven? All right?”

“All right,” said Elyot weakly. “Fine.”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” said Kevin. “I want to provide the whole works. So, see you later?”

“Fine,” said Elyot.

Kevin hung up without noticing which of them had done all the talking. A party! Of course! Wasn’t he sworn? So, give a party and thus be “of it.” Of course!

In his bedroom he found his wallet where his mother had laid it, long ago, in his handkerchief drawer. There was some money in it. How much, he didn’t know, didn’t care. All would be well. He could get credit. He could talk them into it.

He went to the hall-stand and found the white stick his mother had bought for him. The delicatessen must still be in the same place. Or, if not, he would find another.

He went out of the house. He wasn’t afraid. It was just that he had never seen any reason for going out before. But now that he was going to give a party he must see to the arrangements and provide and plan. And “of the party” he was bound to be, this day.

Three nonsensical words. How strange that, when applied, they had turned out not to be nonsense. I must have been ready, he thought soberly, to turn into the world—to stop cowering like a—a coward. A cowering coward. It was just the prod, just the needed thing. There will be something I can make yet, and it won’t be baskets. He began to tremble. His ears were bringing the noises of the world to him and, standing on the pavement, he began to feel confused.

Somebody’s feet halted. “Can I help you?” the person said in a polite tenor.

“It’s a wicked thing, I think,” said Kevin blithely, “to stand in the way of a person’s kindness.”

“When did you kiss the Blarney Stone?” said the voice. A hand took his arm.

“If there is a delicatessen in the next street,” said Kevin, “I am going there.”

“There is.”

“You’re a Scot,” said Kevin alertly.

“Watch your foot on the left,” said the person. “It’s on the brink of the curb. You’re Mary MacCleery’s son. You need a haircut.”

Kevin said gravely, “I can see that. Would you put my foot in the barber’s shop, while you’re about it?”

“I’d be proud to,” the person said.

Kevin, who “saw” that this man was his elder and a good man, thought: Now, I believe it. It’s not I that should be so proud. Let him be proud and so let us be connected. “It’s nice out of prison,” he said into the air. And “nice” was a modest word, and a word that was not too proud.

James Elyot did not own a car. He had never needed to spend the money. He caught the bus a few minutes before eight o’clock and, choosing to wait for the exact moment, he did not unwrap his penny, nor read what was typed upon the piece of paper, until it was eight o’clock exactly.

He was prepared for something couched in big abstract words, words like love or courage or faith. He read what was on the paper and was plunged at once into bewilderment. The last thing he had expected was that he would not even understand the motto he had sworn to live by.

The line of typing slanted upwards on the torn scrap. It began without a capital letter but the last three letters were in upper case. It read “come to the AID.”

Elyot stared at it. Now who, he thought crossly, had put a thing like this into the tobacco tin? Helen, he guessed. It was Helen who had spoken of the oracle and an oracle was often cryptic. But what the devil did AID stand for?

His mind went to work at a translation. “Come” was simple enough. He turned it round into “go”—from where he sat. He was to proceed in space? Very well. But whither?

He glanced at the man who was reading his morning paper in the seat beside him. “Excuse me,” said Elyot. “I have an instruction here and I can’t understand it. Do you happen to know what the letters A-I-D stand for?”

“Hm? A-I what?”

“A-I-D,” repeated Elyot patiently. “I’ve got to go there but I don’t know what the letters stand for.”

There was something about Elyot, about his high bare brow, his heavy glasses, the thinness of his neck, that caused the male of the species to want to make fun of him. Poor Elyot was a kind of walking cartoon and the shine of his earnest eyes invited mockery. The female of the species seemed able simply to observe (but, of course, without coquetry) his freakish personality. But a man always wanted to make fun of him. It was his abysmal innocence, his very seriousness, that outraged a man, who perhaps could remember when he, too, had thought that the whole world went, by reason and in moral order, toward the ideal.

This perfect stranger looked at Elyot glumly and said, “Associated Independent Dog-lovers.”

Elyot neither laughed nor flinched. He said gravely, “I don’t think that can be it, do you?”

The man moved uneasily. “I’ve got no idea,” he growled. “Army Intelligence? Airplane Inspection? Who knows?”

Elyot mused aloud. “I doubt if I am being told to go to anything military. I was 4-F.”

AID. The letters were dancing in his head. Associated. Amalgamated. Or American, Asian, African, Australian? I for International, Industrial, Incorporated. And D for Development, Division—

Before he knew it, he was getting off at his regular stop and proceeding according to his normal routine into the office.

Elyot shook off his fruitless dredging up of words. He could never guess. He must find out. He felt strangely at sea. In pure habit, he took off his jacket, rolled up his cuffs, climbed up on his stool.

Ron Mercer said, “ ’Morning.” Bill Moran grunted welcome.

“Good morning,” said Elyot. He stared at the tools of his trade. Now wait—he had promised. He could not just sit here and begin work as usual. He had to live by the motto.

Elyot said, “Say, do either of you know what the letters A-I-D stand for?”

“Why?” asked Mercer.

“Because I’ve got to go there.”

“Go where?”

“Wherever it is,” said Elyot.

“A-I-D. Hm . . .” Mercer rolled his eyes. “Amalgamated Institute . . .”

“Go on.”

Ron Mercer sent his reddish eyebrows up his forehead. “I don’t understand. Why?”

“I’ve given my word,” said Elyot stiffly. “I’ve taken a vow.”

“Oh, yes?” Mercer’s left eyelid fluttered a wink, meant for Moran. “You’ve got to go there, eh, Elyot? What are you supposed to do when you get there?”

“That remains to be seen,” said Elyot.

“Associated Institute of Dowsers, isn’t it?” said Mercer in pious innocence.

“Of what?”

“Dowsers, of course.”

“What is that?”

“Water-diviners.” Mercer brayed out a laugh. “Come on, what’s the big idea, Elyot? You took a what?”

“Never mind,” said Elyot in a resigned voice.

Moran, the third draughtsman, was the eldest. He had a pink face under a thatch of white hair. He said, “Seriously, Elyot, what is all this about?”

Elyot was the perennial fool. He never learned. He took the piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Moran. “This is what I’ve got to do. What do you think it means?”

Moran kept his face smooth. “Where did you get this?”

“It’s my motto for the day.”

Moran’s bright blue eyes snapped wide open. Elyot could feel himself cringing. “Never mind,” he stammered. “It’s just—something I’ve got to do. I’ve got to go there.”

“For a bet?”

Elyot did not know how to lie. “No,” he said, “not that.”

Moran tilted his white head. “Well, of course, I have seen these three letters, many times.”

“Where?”

“Oh, on the way downtown,” said Moran musingly.

“You can’t miss ’em, actually. They’re on a big sign. A-I-D.”

“You’re sure?” said Elyot in excitement.

“That’s what the sign says.” Moran moved his hands, keeping his eyes on the drawing board.

“Is it a church? I mean a cult? Something like that?”

Moran’s lashes flickered. “Could be,” he murmured. “The sign’s on an office building, though.”

Elyot slid one thigh off the stool. “Well, then, I’d better go.”

“You mean it!” burst Mercer.

“I told you . . . I swore I would,” said Elyot. He marveled that something so simple could not be understood. He marched to where he had hung his jacket.

Moran stared at Mercer. Mercer’s brows were high. Moran winked. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” said Elyot awkwardly.

After he had gone, Mercer heaved a great sigh. “He is the end,” he announced. “What bee has he got in his bonnet today? Took a vow. Got to go. . . .”

“Oh, who knows,” chuckled Tom Moran. “Want to know where I sent him?” Moran told.

Mercer guffawed.

Elyot got on a bus with the uneasy feeling that he did not know what he was doing. How new, how strange, to be adrift on mere obedience. This was not Elyot’s way. He continually sent his mind ahead of him, searching for ways and means toward self-improvement, toward the good and the right and the fruitful path. Now, he took steps in the dark.

He kept peering ahead for the sign. Suddenly he saw it.

He got off at the next stop. The building upon which the sign was affixed was modern, made of steel and glass. Elyot dashed into its lobby and inspected the board where the tenants were listed.

Elyot stiffened. So Moran had been having his little joke, as usual.

But here stood Elyot, his routine broken, out of the office in the morning, a thing unheard of . . . and he was committed to obey. If he did not understand what it was that he obeyed, that could be part of his lesson. So Elyot stood, feeling the vague pain of being, for a reason unknown to him, always the butt of men’s jokes . . . and an enormous stubbornness overtook him. He was committed blindly, as he had said. Well, then, to go ahead in darkness and incomprehension was exactly what he had asked for. Elyot clenched his underslung jaw.

He looked round him, marched to the door, pushed, and entered. A svelte young woman seated at a handsome modern desk said, “Yes? May I help you?”

“I don’t know,” said Elyot. “I am looking for something. I don’t think this is the place.”

“Are you a decorator, sir?” she asked politely.

“No,” said Elyot. “No, no.” He took the piece of paper out of his pocket. “You see, I am sworn to do what it says to do on this piece of paper.”

The girl’s lashes fluttered rapidly. She looked over her shoulder, as if she were glad to remember that there were other people in inner rooms, within her call.

“It could mean a place,” said Elyot earnestly. “Or a concept . . .”

“A what?” She kept watching his face while her hand dragged the fat telephone book up to the desk top. He stood there, feeling numb. She dared to look down. She riffled pages. “Association of Industrial Designers?”

“No,” said Elyot miserably. “This should be something that I’ll have to do.”

The girl opened her mouth to gasp, and instead made an exaggerated Oh-sound. She gave him a long look. “I guess this is it, then.” She wrote out an address for him.

“Thank you,” said Elyot. He turned dejectedly. His face burned. He felt like an idiot.

He hurried out of the building, pursued by shame. He had done this before, forgotten the obvious. Why hadn’t he looked in the telephone book in the first place? The truth was, he suspected—as he had vaguely suspected before—Elyot was not adjusted to this world. Any other civilized man would have looked in the telephone book.

A bus was stopping at the corner, and he ran for it.

He got off the bus in a mindless daze, found the building, went in. A woman dressed in white said alertly, “Yes, sir?”

“My name is Elyot. I have come.” He stood still. He hadn’t the slightest idea what would happen next. He wondered whether he was about to be absolved of his vow, having fulfilled it. He waited for the next move.

“Well, we’re pleased to see you, Mr. Elyot,” the woman said. “Sit down, will you?”

Is it really so simple? Elyot wondered.

She had pulled out a printed form briskly, and she began to fire questions at him and to fill in his answers.

“Your full name, sir? Address? Age? Blood-type?”

Elyot gave what answers he could, almost dreamily. Nothing made sense, and he had given up expecting sense.

Then he was sitting in a chair in another room and a man was being hearty and brisk and Elyot didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, Elyot was lying on a hard bed and the man was doing things to his arm. Then Elyot was lying there in a state of terror, watching his blood being drawn away.

Another white-clad woman bent over him, professionally cheerful and encouraging.

Elyot said, “Where is this place? Where am I?”

“We call ourselves Aid.”

“What does that mean?” Elyot could barely whisper.

“It means giving blood,” she said soothingly. “That’s all.”

“I don’t . . . understand.”

“Well, you are giving aid,” the nurse said. “By giving your blood you may save a life, you know.”

Elyot did not want to save a life. Elyot, terrified almost out of his wits, praying only for the ordeal to be over, now dimly perceived that his had been a bloodless life. To give his blood . . . he would have thought this to be the last thing he had to give.

The whole experiment was a joke, he thought bitterly, a cruel hoax. Somebody had managed to interfere with it. This made no sense. He should have known. He was always the butt . . . Tears came into his eyes. He was tied here, losing blood, and he was not understood. And couldn’t understand why not. The nurse was saying, “There now, soon over. It’s a fine thing you are doing.” But Elyot wept like a lonely child.

Afterwards, he felt very ill. The nurse petted him, the doctor thanked him. They brought him hot coffee. They fussed over him.

When he recovered enough strength, at last, to make his way to the street and into a taxi, he lay back weakly in the seat and was conveyed to the office. He staggered in. The girl at the switchboard said there had been a phone call for him. He must phone a Kevin MacCleery. So Elyot phoned Kevin.

In his strange condition of physical weakness and an awareness of the physical that was upsetting, in fact devastating, he did not note the brisk volubility that was coming over the line from the landlady’s blind and normally silent son. He received Kevin’s invitation to a party apathetically. “Fine,” he said.

Well, he thought, hanging up, very simple. Perfectly clear. No one had been deliberately cruel. There had been no mischief. Blood and emotion were not involved. A simple accident—easy to understand. Logical, even. His little experiment had never really begun.

I am an idiot, said Elyot to himself. Any normally intelligent man would have guessed that those ridiculous words were no motto, no instruction, must be an error. He should never have taken them seriously. He should have seen, at once, that something had gone wrong. But Elyot, somehow, never did. He approached life seriously, literally, innocently. And the world, the whole world, complex and mysterious—wherein the dark blood moved—laughed to see.

“Don’t you feel well, Mr. Elyot?” asked the receptionist.

“I’ll be all right,” said Elyot feebly. “I’ve just given some blood, that’s all.”

She seemed inclined to fuss over him but he left her. He didn’t call the girls. This slipped out of his mind. He went into the men’s room, where he dashed cold water upon his face.

He came back into the office where his co-workers were perched on their high stools, and climbed upon his own.

Mercer said to him, “Are you feeling all right, Elyot?”

“All right,” said Elyot morosely.

“Gave blood, eh?” said Moran. “Makes you feel dizzy? Listen, I’m sorry about the interior decorators. I was just joking. I’d like to apologize if I sent you out of your way.”

“All right,” said Elyot dully.

“Is it much of a thing to give blood?” asked Mercer nervously. “I always mean to, but never get round to it.”

“It’s all right,” said Elyot, stuck in the rut of one meaningless word.

Moran said, “Care for a cigarette, Elyot?”

“No, thanks.” Elyot took up his tools. He began to put down one fine careful line.

As his shocked psyche began to relax he thought to himself, Wait a minute. I was wrong, just now. I shouldn’t have declined that cigarette. Elyot seemed to know, as he had not heretofore known, that men use symbols. For Moran to offer him a cigarette was not to be taken literally. To have accepted would have meant to forgive. Elyot blinked and swallowed. He began to perceive a difference in the atmosphere.

All his life Elyot had stubbornly ignored atmosphere. He had pursued his own way against hostility, against derision, against everything of the blood, never understanding why he had to push so. But in this moment, neither Moran nor Mercer was hostile. They were feeling sheepish, instead. They were respectful. They wanted to be forgiven. For some reason Elyot had become something of a hero.

But Elyot was moral. He would not receive this respect dishonestly. So he raised his head and looked at Moran and then at Mercer with his clear, bright, innocent eyes. “I was scared stiff,” he said. “Weak, all my life. Suppose I don’t have a lot of blood? It nearly finished me.”

Mercer, fleshy and sanguine, turned redder. Elyot sensed his shame. But Moran said gruffly, “You did all right, Elyot.”

Elyot now perceived that to have confessed fear was only enhancing his bravery in their eyes. It was reproaching them too. He had not meant to reproach them. For the first time Elyot sensed kindliness, going both ways. Elyot knew, now, that these men were sometimes afraid. He knew now they made fun of the big rules because they could feel shame. Their jokes and their scorns were only padding between them and the great and terrible issues that they knew about as well as he. For the first time in his life Elyot understood what the joke was.

Elyot let out a rusty laugh. “Do you want to hear something ridiculous?” he asked. “The whole thing was a mistake and the laugh was certainly on me!”

Sonia Jones thought of herself as a terrible softie. She hated to see anyone made uncomfortable. She often said whatever, at the moment, would make that person feel better. For herself, she normally took the path of the least possible resistance.

Now, finding herself on her way to work with this penny in her pocket, she grimaced. She had never actively wished to join in this silly experiment of Elyot’s. But when Elyot had hurt Kevin MacCleery, and then Helen had hurt him even worse with her stupid cooing, Sonia had only wanted to bury it quickly, and bring the talk back to a strain that Kevin could endure. It hadn’t meant anything else to her at the time. Now it seemed that she was going through with this nonsense.

She was reluctant to unwrap the paper and read what was on it. She supposed she would have to make some effort; at least she would have to produce something to tell in the evening that would please Elyot. The whole thing was ridiculous, of course. But Elyot took it so seriously and so did Helen.

She thought now that this experiment could be troublesome and unpleasant if you took it too hard. She sighed and unwrapped her slogan and read it.

But it made no sense at all! Sonia found herself, to her astonishment, very angry. On the paper was typed three words, “for all good.” That was no motto. Nothing there could be lived by. It meant nothing! Or if it did—how had it happened to come to her? Why was she so furious?

She was struck—she was deeply hit somewhere. Who was taking a swipe at Sonia Jones in this underhand way? Which of them had fixed it so that she got this particular combination of words to live by? Who thought Sonia Jones was not already “for all good”?

When she was! As a matter of fact, she behaved very well—certainly too well for her own advantage. Was she not always kind, tolerant, softhearted? Did she not always avoid trouble and conflict with everybody she met?

What did they think she was? A villain? Somebody evil? “For all good.” What did it mean, if anything? Sonia found that she could not imagine either Elyot or Helen putting down such a thing as a motto. It wasn’t like either of them. It wasn’t precise enough. It wasn’t even a sentence. It was nothing . . . unless it was meant to be an insult.

But it simply did not apply! She’d pay no attention to it, whatsoever. She crushed the bit of paper down deep into her coat pocket and her hand came away from it as if her fingers had touched fire.

The bus was waddling through the morning traffic, along a street that was no longer residential and not yet business, but a depressing mixture of both. What was old was shabby. What was new was jerry-built. Sonia, gazing out, realized that she was angry because she was afraid. “Oh, come on, now,” she said to herself. And then she saw a sign.

There was a church on the corner. It was small and old. Beside its steps there was a notice board, and on the board in white letters there was the sign: God Is All Good.

The bus ambled by. Sonia’s heart was in an uproar of alarm. She was afraid because she had taken her oath and she must not break it, but to keep it was going to be difficult and upsetting and she did not want to do it . . . But she must! Sonia got up; at the next stop she got off the bus.

She stood in this strange street with her coat flapping open and the bit of paper burning in her pocket. “Twelve hours. Half a day,” she said to herself, and she began to walk back toward the church. She did not know what she was going to do. But the paper said “for all good” and the sign had told her, “God Is All Good.” So Sonia Jones, on Monday morning, was plainly committed to do something for God!

She crossed to the corner where the church stood. Perhaps it was locked up and nobody there. Then she would give herself full marks for trying and go on her way. No, she could not! If her duty wasn’t here, she would have to look elsewhere for it. In a state of panic, Sonia went up the church steps and put her hand upon the door. It wasn’t locked. It opened.

Inside, the light was dim. Once upon a time this church had been given the beauty and dignity of stained glass. But the sanctuary had a musty smell and it was cold.

A man’s voice said, “Won’t you sit down, please? You are welcome.”

He had been sitting there, she now perceived. He was a young man with dark hair, a lock of which fell across his forehead. He said, “I am Donald Biggin, the minister. Can I help you?”

She said, “I am not a member of this church. I came in because—I had to. What is there that I can do?”

“To help us?” he said, with quick intuition of her meaning. He smiled at her. “That’s kind. Sit down. There must be something. . . .”

Sonia said numbly, “Yes.” She moved into one of the wooden pews and sat down. She looked toward the pulpit and the choir stalls. Sonia thought of herself as a Christian, if only by inertia. Her parents had gone to church, sometimes. But for Sonia, since she had grown up, Sunday was a holiday, a day on which one didn’t have to go to work and could wash one’s hair.

The young clergyman sat down quietly in the pew ahead of her. He seemed to assess her mood. He said, “This is supposed to be a dying church. This building, I mean.” He paused. “I was sent here to preside over its end.”

“Oh,” she said. “Why?”

He told her, in a quiet voice. “This neighborhood has changed. Once there were prosperous houses, and the people supported the church as a matter of course. But they grew older. The houses were too big. The people sold. The houses began to be converted into apartments, or else they gave way to little shops.” His voice was not bitter at all. “Many of the people moving in were—not of this persuasion. Many are of none. The church has lost its people, they say. My present congregation consists of a few faithful women. No men.” He looked at her and smiled. “Now, I have told you my troubles.”

Sonia found her mind taking in what she had heard. “What will become of this building?” she asked. “Will the land be sold and the church pulled down?”

“Unless,” he said, “I pull life into it.”

“You are new?”

“Yes, I’ve been here just over a month. I was just sitting here, wondering how I am going to do it.”

Sonia was not afraid anymore, and the chill of the building had somehow disappeared. She felt warm suddenly. “Not if,” she asked teasingly, “but just how?”

He laughed and leaned back. “What shall I do?” he asked. “Shall I preach such fiery and dramatic sermons as to become known far and wide? That would take some time. Besides,” he said, sobering, “I’m not one for antics—in the pulpit.”

Sonia said, in a friendly way, “The men don’t come? Just women? What about the children?”

He turned his head. “The old Sunday school gave up a year ago last autumn.”

“Don’t these women have children?” Sonia asked.

He bit his lips. He got up and said, “Come along. I’ll show you something.”

He led her toward the back and then sharply left, to a flight of stairs. The treads were worn; the stairs creaked with age. He switched on lights and, preceding, led her down into the basement. “This was the Sunday school,” he said.

Sonia looked around at desolation. It was a large room, deep into the ground, with rows of dirty windows, very high in the walls—hung with tattered filthy cotton curtains. At the far end of the room there were piles of wooden chairs, heaped upon wooden tables. The floor was covered with linoleum, its design so worn and dirty that it could barely be discerned. There was dust everywhere. The air itself was tired and dirty.

But Sonia straightened up and took in a deep breath. “Well!” she said vigorously. “It’s pretty obvious what there is to do. This place has got to be cleaned.” She was taking off her coat. “Is there water? Is there a pail and a scrubbing brush?”

“There is water, all right,” he told her. “Over there. It was a kitchen. I doubt if the water is hot. The caretaker has what weapons he uses in a cupboard, but I’m afraid he’s gone off somewhere with the key. He isn’t here on Mondays.”

She looked at him. “Just the same, I must do it today!”

“You are going to clean this place, today?”

“Yes, I must,” she said recklessly, fiercely. “Where is the kitchen? The water? I’ll find some cleaning things.”

Donald Biggin let her go across the basement room alone. He was thoughtful. He went up into the small room where the telephone was.

“Mrs. Dodd? This is Donald Biggin, at the church.”

“Oh, yes?”

“There is a young woman here,” he said slowly, “who says she is going to clean the Sunday school room today. But she has nothing to use. She needs brushes and mops and cleaning cloths and I don’t know what else. The caretaker isn’t here. I don’t know what to do.”

“Cleaning things? Well, I suppose I could lend you some.”

“Who else could?”

“Well, I could pop into Mary Parr’s . . .”

“Would you? I don’t know who this girl is, you see. She just walked in out of the blue. She says she must do it today.”

“She does?” Curiosity is strong in human females. “I’ll bring the things over myself.”

“Thank you.” He rang off and then dialed another number. He was smiling fondly, for love of the human race.

By now Sonia had discovered the sink. The water was cold. She was still rummaging for something in the way of cleaning equipment when the women began to arrive.

Sonia felt absolutely marvelous. This is crazy, she told herself, but I don’t care! Perhaps it isn’t very much to do, but it is something. And I am going to do it, darned if I’m not—I mean (excuse me, Lord) I really am!

So she turned to the women in high spirits. “Oh, good! You’ve brought some stuff! How could we get some hot water?”

Mrs. Dodd came over to where Sonia stood beside the ancient gas stove. Suspicion was slain in Mrs. Dodd at once. Sonia’s reckless dedication to a task was shining all round her. “They used to use this stove for church socials,” said Mrs. Dodd. “I don’t know whether it’s even safe—”

The other woman said, “Listen, Joe knows all about these things. I’ll see if he could take a look at it on his lunch hour.”

“There’s plenty to do before lunch,” said Sonia. “First, we’d better pull down those awful curtains, don’t you think?”

“What a mess!” said one of the women furiously. Her eyes shone with the light of battle.

“Miss . . . er . . .” said the other.

“I’m Sonia Jones.”

“Well look, you ought to have something over your nice clothes. I’ll run over home and get an apron for you.”

“Let’s get this end clean, and then move all the furniture to the clean end.”

“How can we move all that?”

Donald Biggin appeared with a stepladder and two more women. A Mrs. Miller said her young son and his pals could just as well lift tables and chairs as do whatever they were doing.

The project grew. Joe Parr was appealed to, as in an emergency, and he took time out to come and make the stove work.

Meanwhile the rags on the windows came down with billows of dust and laughter. Donald Biggin got up on the ladder to wash the windows. He had put himself under Sonia’s direction. Somehow this made for ease between the young man and his parishioners. This plump, bustling young madwoman was a challenge to them all.

Young girls came, bearing more and more equipment, as their mothers decreed, and boys came to lift and carry. One of the women washed the church’s supply of thick cups and put a coffeepot on the revived stove. The basement buzzed.

“Who’s going to come to this Sunday school?” asked Joe Parr, who had somehow forgotten he should be back at work.

Donald Biggin called down from the top of the ladder. “All the children we can catch.”

Joe Parr grinned from ear to ear. “Well, I’m all for it!”

Donald Biggin had to clutch at his ladder in his joyful surprise.

By lunchtime the floors and the windows were clean. The walls were dusted down and the worst of the marks scrubbed off them. Two women appeared, bearing masses of sandwiches.

The afternoon saw even more workers present than in the morning. The women (the faithful women, thought Donald Biggin) had the bit in their teeth now. This place was going to be clean, or else. Once it was clean and ready, it would have a power, a suction—and children would come. He knew this.

“Who is going to teach in this Sunday school?” asked Joe Parr as he was leaving.

“We’ll find some teachers,” said Donald Biggin cheerfully. “Miss Jones will take one class, I hope.”

But Sonia looked up from where she was inspecting a stubborn stain on a table top. “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t.”

“We wish you would,” he said gently.

The whole roomful of people had fallen silent.

Sonia said, “How can I teach what I need to learn?”

“Sometimes,” the minister said, “a very good way to learn is to try to teach.”

People were nodding. All fell thoughtfully to their labors.

“I’ll do all I can,” the minister said, “but we’ll need a superintendent for our Sunday school.”

Joe Parr, at the foot of the stairs, burst out suddenly: “I’ve got some ideas. . . .”

Donald Biggin went to him and, saying nothing, shook his hand.

The day drew on. Some women, taking a child or two, reluctantly went away, when supper was looming over the kitchens at home. A last little knot of them gathered round Sonia. “We’ll have to wash and polish the rest of the tables tomorrow,” they said. “Will you be here?”

“I don’t know,” said Sonia. “I forgot, but I have a job.”

Her back ached. Her face was dirty. The women spoke to her fondly. “Oh, you’ve got to come,” they said. “Please come. Please try. We’ll see you tomorrow, won’t we?”

Sonia smiled at them, thanked them, said warm good nights to them. Then the big room—so scrubbed and changed—was silent and empty, except for Donald Biggin and Sonia Jones, who rubbed a rag rather futilely upon the grimy metal of the stove burners.

His hands took hold of her shoulders gently, and turned her. “You have done enough. You must stop now.”

“What is the time?”

“It’s nearly six o’clock.”

“No, I’ll keep on,” she said. “It’s not late.” Not late enough. Not eight o’clock yet. Sonia told herself this for an excuse. The truth was, she did not want to stop. But the minister insisted. He led her back up to the church. “Come, sit down. Rest a minute. Talk to me.”

So she sat down and her aching hands fell idle in her lap. She said, “This part could stand some polishing, too.”

“Enough! Enough!” he cried. “Haven’t you caused enough of a revolution in one day?”

Sonia looked at the stained glass. “It wasn’t me.”

“You’ll come back? If you can? Surely, Sunday?”

She said, looking straight into his eyes, “You don’t need any more women in this church.”

“I need one like you,” he said promptly. “With energy, and devotion, and such tremendous qualities . . .”

“I?”

“Well, of course, you,” he said heartily. “Don’t you know what your gifts are?”

She looked so strangely startled and afraid that he put his hand on hers. Her hand turned and their fingers clasped together.

“I’ll—probably come back,” said Sonia. “I—I think I’ll just have to.” Her eyes filled.

He said, “Pray with me.”

“I wish I could. . . .”

She put her right forearm on the pew in front of her and put her face against it. Her left hand was held warmly, in a strong and steady hand. Sonia’s tears trickled into the fabric of her sleeve.

The minister prayed, but not aloud. He spoke nothing aloud. So Sonia began to talk to herself. I don’t know how to pray. I thought I was doing all right. Me and my kind heart—which it never was. Me and my being so amiable and so easygoing—and so lazy and so worthless. Doing nothing, being nothing, counting for nothing—and always trying to tell myself that this was being good. What if there is, somewhere inside this blob of lazy flesh, a skeleton, a brain, a backbone—a person who has gifts?

I’ll lose my job, she thought—veering to practical thoughts for relief. And then she thought: It doesn’t matter. I can get another job. I can afford to do this. What do I mean—afford? I can’t afford not to!

O Lord, she prayed at last, I’ve been afraid of You. But if there is in me a need for sacrifice and devotion, and if You have given me gifts to use, then help me. . . .

Donald Biggin, as they came out of the door to the church steps, knew very well that she’d been crying her heart out. He knew very well that she’d gone through some crisis, and he knew that it was good. But he said “Good night” and “See you tomorrow” in tones of easy, friendly confidence.

Sonia said, almost in her normal voice, with a note of mischief, “Do you feel better?”

He did not answer at once. Then he said, “Don’t you know? We’re going to have a Sunday school. We are going to have a congregation. It is alive.”

Helen Fielding was in the habit of walking to work. She had once enjoyed the charm of the early light and morning stir, but now, usually, she walked trailing dreams. She had gone over the route so often that she was able to cross the streets and turn the corners and arrive, having never noticed the scenery at all.

The bookshop would not yet be open for customers when Helen arrived. She would pass along the aisles between the tall embankments of books that had once seemed so glamorous to her. She would go up to the office overlooking the shop where she kept, not the books to read, but the business books and wrote down in them the tidy and implacable figures. Glamour had gone out of the place for Helen. She knew, only too well, that it was just another market where a commodity was bought and sold.

Although she was this small, tense, efficient, not very good-looking girl, glamour appealed to her. She was a dreamer. These days she was dreaming a personal dream of romantic love. She called him Tony in the dream. Waking, she called him Mr. King and rarely called his name aloud, at all.

He was the nephew of the man who owned the bookshop and had newly come to work into the business. Nobody doubted that he would some day take it over. So as heir, he received deference and some envy here. He seemed (she dreamed) lonely. He did not, of course, know that from her, humblest of the humble, keeping the figures so neatly in the ledgers, he was receiving the yearning homage of her secretly suffering heart.

She was able to make every day a day of drama because of him. Would he walk past her desk? Would he speak? If he spoke, what would he say, and what would she answer? For her, all this was loaded with undeniable significance. For him (she knew very well), it did not even exist.

Helen had learned better than to try to flirt. She had found out, long ago, that if she tried she only made herself ridiculous. A plain girl is deprived of the dragging of the lashes, the provocative side-glance, the quirking of the lips. They are no weapons in her arsenal. These little tricks announce “Look, I am desirable.” So they do not belong to her. For her they are presumptuous and they turn men away. The trouble is, what is there to bring men toward her? Helen did not know.

This Monday morning she looked at the motto that Kevin MacCleery had given her and read “Now is the time.”

It fell pat into her mood. It felt reckless. Nothing to lose, she thought. Yes, she would throw herself, heart and soul, into living by this motto. She was pleased with it. She caught herself praying, at once, to a guardian angel, or the laws of chance, or whatsoever star, Let it be now. Let what be? Why, let Tony King notice her, today. That was a way to put it baldly. Notice her favorably was perhaps too much to ask.

Wait. Helen was walking along her normal route, pondering her slogan, praying, dreaming—but Helen was conscientious and efficient. So as she repeated it—“Now is the time”—she realized that now did not mean half an hour from now or when she got to the office. She wrenched herself out of the prayer and the dream and now, walking to work, she forced her eyes to see the pavement before her, the shopwindows, the red lights and the green, and she forced her mind to dwell upon the scenery. She found it difficult. This walk had been routine for so long that to look in the present tense seemed unnecessary and boring.

Yet Helen conscientiously did it, the best she could. In consequence, when she came to the bookshop and went in, it looked, by virtue of the quality of her attention, different on this Monday morning. She realized that she had dismissed this place as it really was, long ago, and substituted for it an image in her mind. Normally she walked through a shaft of air labeled Novels and beyond that through the idea of History and then Biography.

This morning she walked on a brown wooden floor between wooden tables upon which were piled sheets of paper, cut to size, bound together, with printing on them. She walked through a dance of dust motes. She saw shabbiness in the corners. She knew these were signs, not of failure, but of success. It was a busy bookshop. There was never time to worry about new paint or rearrangements. The trappings of success are not what people think. Helen brought her mind back to the present tense in which she was bound by her vow to live, today. She went up the stairs and settled herself in her own cubbyhole, feeling the strangeness of her impressions.

When Mrs. Peaseley came in, Helen saw her to be a woman of uncertain age whose hair was most certainly dyed that jet black. Helen heard her make the usual bossy remarks and knew (with surprise) that she made them in order to shake off some domestic self and its anxieties, to establish Mrs. Peaseley’s own image firmly in her mind for the day. She was a woman who needed this job and who dyed her hair in the belief that it made her look younger and more capable. Helen had never before noticed that Mrs. Peaseley felt insecure.

Seated in her cubbyhole, Helen could see nothing, but if she stood she could overlook the deep narrow place below. And she knew his hours. She used to find an excuse to stand up so that she could watch him come in. She would usually fumble with the pencils at the pencil-sharpener and meanwhile look slyly over her shoulder downward to see his tall figure, his gleaming cap of red-brown hair—to watch his progress, his pause for a few words with the head salesman, Mr. Copely.

This morning she did the same thing but in her mind her motto echoed. So, first, she saw herself—here, now—standing up, sending her adoring gaze downward, and she became aware of the fact that Mrs. Peaseley was aware, and no doubt had been for weeks, of Helen’s motive, of Helen’s dream.

So Helen stopped playing with the pencils, turned and stood still, boldly and frankly, looking down at him.

Now he was just coming in the door. He was a good-looking young man, an eligible bachelor. She knew nothing else about him, except in a dream.

Now, he paused to speak to Mr. Copely. Copely bobbed his head. Copely resented the young heir but needed to please him. The young heir was a little afraid of Mr. Copely.

Helen felt astonished. A strange thought came to her. Were most other people as shy, as uncertain of themselves, as anxious as she? Could this be true? Even good-looking people?

Helen sat down at the desk again. Now was the time.

Very well. His feet were on the stairs.

She was a young woman of twenty-six, sitting at this desk with her hands clasped. He was a young man of twenty-nine, coming up the stairs. They were strangers. They were here.

Now he was entering the offices. Helen did not turn her head to give him her too-nervous, birdlike nod and pipe up in her too-shrill twitter to say, “Good morning, Mr. King.” She sat still. She heard him say, “Good morning, Miss Fielding.”

She turned her head now. She looked at a face she had not really seen for some time. A handsome face, yes. The eyebrows were endearingly crooked. The brown eyes were, of course (she knew this), seeing some image of Helen Fielding that existed behind them but not necessarily elsewhere. Why, he could not possibly be seeing through . . . but she was. She was seeing a young man who was walking softly, trying to edge himself into this organization without offending anyone or giving himself away. A young man who was not earning enough money, who was only an apprentice . . . Her old image broke up. Prince Charming was not here, just now. She saw Anthony King.

Helen knew, and it was the first time that she had perceived this, that she was, to him, another old-timer. She had been in this place before him. So he walked softly with her, rather automatically, of course. With her, he had never needed to bother, beyond politeness, because she had never bothered him. A scrawny little female who huddled over her books and bobbed him one nervous good morning a day, fearing lest she seem to flirt or wish to be noticed. Of course she faded into the walls.

Now was the time, however. Today was different. So Helen said, “Hello. What a lovely morning.”

It was the first time she had spoken to him on a level. But she was a young woman and he was a young man and to exchange greetings was nothing to agonize over.

Now he was looking at her and he saw her. He smiled and said, “Wonderful. Good weekend?” She nodded. He lifted his right hand in a half-wave and went on by.

She began to do her work. “Now is the time.” Must keep remembering. Had given her word.

At ten-thirty, there would be coffee. Ah, drama! Every day the burning question was, Will he take coffee with us today? Whenever he did, Helen had never been able to talk to him. She had always been frozen to timid, self-conscious silence.

Today, on this strange and nowish day, when Helen had almost finished her coffee, now, he came. She did not fade into the wall. She said to him, “Do you think you are going to enjoy being in the bookselling business, Mr. King?” She wanted to know and now was the time to ask him.

His cup clattered to his saucer. “I’m not sure,” he said to her. “I honestly don’t know enough about it, yet.”

“Does it startle you to see how commercial it is?”

His head moved sharply. “Yes, it does,” he said alertly. “Will I get over that?”

“Books are still meant to be read,” she said slowly. “I suppose you have to remember what they are for.”

Mrs. Peaseley was lost, and she snorted. She said she had better get back to work. Her fearful eye flicked at Helen Fielding. It said, “Better watch your step.”

“Do you like reading, too?” asked Tony.

“I used to,” said Helen, speaking slowly and honestly. “But I sometimes feel as if mountains of books hang over me. They never stop. You can never catch up. It seems hopeless.”

“Ninety percent of them don’t matter,” he said quickly.

Helen looked at him thoughtfully. “Doesn’t it make you nervous?” she inquired. If now was the time, then you said what you thought, now, and if it was dull and uninteresting—you couldn’t have fooled anybody, anyway.

Tony King let out a sigh. He said, “I wish you’d come and have lunch with me, Miss Fielding. I’d like to talk. I must admit I feel a little lost. I am supposed to know so much more than I do know. Would you take pity?”

Helen, the plain, the shy, said boldly, “I’d like to talk, too. Most of the time,” she told him, “I feel as if I had a gag in my mouth, and cotton in my ears. There is so much I wish I could say and so much I would like the chance to listen to.”

He said eagerly, “The best fun in the world is to talk—” He cast a sideways glance to make sure that Mrs. Peaseley had gone. He said, “I am so tired of tiptoeing round this shop, seeing things I don’t understand, seeing things I’d like to change . . . but I can’t be sure. Please, let’s talk. When? Lunch? One o’clock?”

“Now would be nice,” said Helen, “but one o’clock will have to do.”

She knew her eyes were alight and she knew that her eyes were the windows into the person behind the not-very-pretty, totally accidental arrangement of features that was only her face.

In the accidentally pleasing arrangement of features that was his face, she now saw that there were windows, too.

“Make it a quarter to,” said Tony King, “please?”

He was shy. He was anxious.

When Mary MacCleery came home at six o’clock as usual, that Monday, she found her son, Kevin, standing in the kitchen. He said to her in a lively voice, “Mother, I won’t be having supper with you tonight.”

Her hand flew to her throat in an old-fashioned gesture.

“I’m giving a party for the girls and Elyot, up in Elyot’s room. You don’t mind, Mother?”

“Of course not.” She was afraid to say more.

Kevin said, “I want you to look at this food I bought.” He opened the refrigerator.

“But how—?”

“Oh, I went out and got it. Tell me—”

“You’ve had a haircut!” his mother said.

“Looks better, doesn’t it?”

It did. So did he. He had his suit on. His tie was crooked. She loved him. Her throat ached.

“What do you think? Is this going to be enough?” He was taking paper bags out of the refrigerator. Mary MacCleery didn’t know what to think. His posture, his voice, his aspect were all so changed.

“Mother—” He seemed to have seen her hand at her throat, her teeth sharp on her lip. “Don’t worry. Probably I’ve had my stupid head in the sand long enough.” He was smiling. Her throat had closed.

He went on, urgently, “Please help me, Mother? I’d like all this food set out on a big tray. We’ve got one, haven’t we? Mother, would you do it? I’d like it to look pretty. And could you make coffee? And help me carry it all upstairs?”

“Of course, dear. Yes, dear.” Help him! Her eyes stung. She began to unwrap a parcel. “You could feed a regiment,” she said, almost hysterically. “You went out and bought all this?”

“That I did, Mother, I think I’ll learn Braille.”

“Oh?”

“And another thing. I want to go to church with you, on Sunday. Talk to the choir leader. No reason why I shouldn’t sing, is there?”

“No reason at all,” she said, rather shortly, lest she sob. “I’ll just get down the big . . .” She could not say another word. Her tongue licked in one fat, silent tear.

Kevin said, just as if he could see, “Lick the salt. That’s it. That’s what you used to tell me.” His tone was gentle and teasing, with the dear and condescending teasing of the healthy young. “Maybe we’ll look on the bright side now, the two of us?” he said.

Mary MacCleery began to weep with all the noise that her heart required.

They were in Elyot’s room with the fire going. The great spread of food had been admired, attacked, and was now depleted.

Kevin MacCleery had been doing most of the talking. He had explained what had happened to the experiment. Helen (who had already phoned him during the afternoon and already received this news with no particular excitement) now kept smiling. Sonia drew in one sharp breath, but made no comment. Elyot seemed wrapped in thought. “Well, it was a shame!” Kevin had said. “All your fine sentiments, burned in the fire!” Nobody had taken the occasion to complain.

“But how was my mother to know? She can’t be blamed. What she found in the wastebasket . . .” he had continued. “Well, I had been practicing on the typewriter. I couldn’t tell whether I had typed anything legible or not. Evidently I had. ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.’ Why is it that you always use that line for typing practice?”

Nobody knew.

Kevin kept on being talkative and quite gay. “ ‘Of the party’ was the motto I got,” he told them, “So eat, drink and be merry. This is the party.”

It was Helen who spoke up responsively. She sat on her favorite cushion. There was a new quality of confidence about her. She teased Kevin, just a bit, and they laughed.

Sonia was not talking . . . not eating much, either. The richer foods simply did not appeal to her. Elyot kept munching thoughtfully. He hadn’t said much.

Then came the moment when Helen stopped in the middle of a sentence. She glanced at her watch and sighed and it was as if a bell rang. “Eight o’clock,” she said softly. “Motto Day is over.”

“Is it, then?” said Kevin in melodious regret.

Elyot stirred. “Wait. You don’t mean that you’ve been doing this? The rest of you, too?”

“I certainly have,” said Helen. “And if you want to know what the results are, Elyot, I say they’re fine. I say they’re wonderful.”

“But what-in-the-world motto . . . ?”

Sonia said quickly, “We don’t have to tell.” (She couldn’t bear to tell; it had meant too much). “Results, that’s all we promised to tell. So I’ll just agree.” She couldn’t help beaming fondly upon him. “It was a terrific experiment, Elyot.”

Elyot stared like an owl.

“None of those scraps had any business making sense,” said Kevin, in his new and robust manner. “Mine doesn’t sound like a motto at all, does it? But it worked out, you know . . . It worked out very well.”

Helen said, “Didn’t yours, Elyot? You don’t have to tell us what it was.”

“Oh. Yes. Well. I . . . uh.” Elyot rubbed his skinny arm. “Say, Mac,” he croaked feebly, “how did you happen to put the letters A I D in caps?”

“Now, did I?” said Kevin blithely. “I didn’t know that. I can’t see, remember?” But he could, in his way. He’d go to that branch library tomorrow. Oh, he’d get there. And he’d learn Braille, faster than anybody ever learned it before. And he had better earn himself one of those dogs, somehow, and singing lessons, too. Not a minute to waste, had he. Not one.

“I did a damn fool thing,” said Elyot provocatively. He hadn’t had sense enough to know that his motto made no sense. But his mind was half suspecting that somehow sense had been made. He rather wanted to know what they would think. Maybe they would comfort him with logic. But nobody pressed him to tell.

Helen was staring gravely into the fire. She was thinking, We must talk and talk some more. It’s the best fun in the world. But we’ll argue. Tony just can’t do what he thinks he ought to do. He can’t go for the cake and skip the bread-and-butter. He has to remember the business side, and I’m going to make him understand. There’s my kind of bookkeeping, too. It’s not enough—just to dream. No, it isn’t.

In the hush, Elyot’s wits began to revive. He got up and began to prowl. A theory sprouted. “This is ve-ery interesting,” he announced. “What’s happened, here? We committed ourselves, we thought, to something from outside. Some old race wisdom.”

“My motto has been around for centuries,” said Helen, with a little sigh. “But I hadn’t tried—”

“That’s it!” crowed Elyot. “That’s what I was saying in the first place. But see here? Did it matter what the motto was? Didn’t we stir up something from our insides? Something surprising, that was always right there? For instance . . .”

He stopped. My blood, he thought, and sat down suddenly to attack another piece of cake. After what he had been through he needed strength. Bodily strength? He began to think about what Moran had told him concerning this physical culture course. But would he go for that? Did Elyot really want to know how it would feel to walk around on strong legs? Was he going to risk the acquisition of muscles and tamper with his personality? He didn’t know.

“It shook me up, all right,” he said sheepishly.

Sonia had crossed her arms and was holding her shoulders. “It was dangerous, all right,” she said. But her voice had taken on an eerie sound, the sound of joy.

The little fire roared along, softly, softly.

Then the blind man, seeming to know exactly what to do now, tipped his head up and began to sing an old song.

Mary MacCleery, passing in the hall, heard their ragged chorusing, and then their laughter.

There is a strip of carpet, red as blood, that runs from the foyer of the Pearl City Club, across the middle of the square dim cocktail lounge, to the dining room. Tiny spotlights, embedded in the low ceiling, shed light upon this crimson path. All around the walls, in near-darkness, people sit on padded benches, sipping, watching who comes and who goes.

But the cocktail lounge of the Pearl City Club is not just another bar. Everyone who is anyone in town proves it by being a member, so that the eyes that watch, here, are connected with power, the ears that listen are wise in local lore, the voices that murmur are never boisterous. Nothing that could be called rowdy had ever happened in this room.

At a little after eight, on a Saturday evening in May, the lounge was filled, dim shapes bent heads all around. Up the two steps from the brighter dining room came a party of three. These were Mr. and Mrs. John Martinelli, and their only daughter, Teresa. The little spotlights had a pink tinge; the carpet threw up rosy reflections, flattering to faces. John Martinelli was not very tall but he carried himself like a giant. His hair was white, rising to a crest. His face was fine-featured with a small beaked nose. His father and his grandfather before him had been somebodies in Pearl City; he had done better than they. He walked proudly. Alicia, his wife, was an inch taller than he, a fair woman, with elegant bones. She had been someone all her life, too. She walked with grace; the light was kind to the patient sweetness of her face.

But the watchers did not watch these two; they watched the girl, slim, dark, beautiful and mysterious. Teresa was wearing a dinner gown of a deep and brilliant blue. Moving above the red, the hem was empurpled.

Now, on the other end of the carpet, two men came in from the foyer. And the fairest flower of Pearl City, watching, caught breath. The Hustons, at this moment! Mark and his brother, Charles, who did not count. But Mark Huston!

Breath caught because two months ago Teresa Huston had gone from the hospital to her father’s house and was still living there. So the murmuring sounds suffered a failure in volume. It was not that the good people stopped talking, rudely, in order to look and listen. But voices lost emphasis; ears that had been listening lost interest.

Obviously, the two parties of people must meet in the very center of the room. There might be some clue given, some emotion hinted, some attitude betrayed. Something might be revealed when the beautiful young woman in blue must pass the tall young man in the dark suit . . . two who had been joined together (at great expense, with champagne flowing) and who were now asunder.

The brothers broke step, just momentarily, but quickly recovered the rhythm of their pace. The Martinellis had not visibly faltered. As the groups drew together, John Martinelli nodded. Charles Huston said, “Good evening, ma’am. Evening, sir.” None stopped moving.

It seemed that nothing was going to be revealed and Pearl City, although with the tiniest ruffle of nervous disappointment, approved. But then the taller and the thinner of the two young men stopped walking. “How have you been, Teresa?” he said to her gently.

The girl in blue lifted her face. She was smiling. She said, “Splendid.”

The thin young man grew suddenly taller. He lifted his right hand and slapped her hard across her pretty face. The sharp crack of flesh on flesh was like a gunshot in this place.

The father turned his head, the neck corded. The mother whimpered. A soft roar of shock and protest began to run around the four walls. The brother, Charles Huston, took Mark’s arm in a rough hand and turned him, forced him, shoved him back along the way they had come, out into the foyer, out of the building, and away. Joseph Jasper popped like a jack-in-the-box from the manager’s office, for he had extra senses to tell him when or if anything went wrong in the Pearl City Club. He took the mother’s arm. The father took the daughter’s. She was smiling. They were whisked away into the private offices, leaving the audience gasping at an empty stage.

The good people of Pearl City had been to the motion pictures, had read books. They knew that for a man to slap a woman was not unheard of in this century. But to have done such a thing here, out of the blue, for no cause, in public, and in this public . . . ! well! Young Mark Huston had just committed social and economic suicide.

And some sighed for the pity of it, and some for the excitement, and all with the certain knowledge that young Mark Huston had done it now. Oh, he was through. There would be a divorce, surely. And he would go elsewhere. Oh, he was finished. John Martinelli would see to that.

In half an hour, Joseph Jasper came out of his offices and left the door open as if to say, See, nothing in the box. He had smuggled them out another way. The audience sighed. “No Second Act,” said the Judge’s wife. The Judge, sitting in the corner, thought to himself, That was the Second Act curtain. The Third Act will be in Reno. I won’t hear it.

Six weeks later the Judge made his good-mornings to the six people in his chambers. He was about to hear it, after all. Pearl City was a small city. The Judge knew almost everyone in it, at least by reputation. But this never had and would not now prevent him from discharging his duty as he should. He said, “Mr. Fairlee, you are counsel for Mrs. Huston?”

“I am, your honor,” said Fairlee, the lawyer.

“Mr. Mark Huston, you are your own counsel?”

“If your honor pleases.”

The young husband was in cold control of his voice, his eyes, his body. The young wife sat between her father and her mother and did not look up. The Judge thought, as he so often did, that there had been a divorce between these two long, long ago. They had gathered now only for him to decide upon what basis the law was going to confirm the existing fact. He tilted his great leather chair slightly. “In this preliminary hearing we must examine the grounds of Mrs. Huston’s suit. Mr. Fairlee?”

“Extreme cruelty.”

John Martinelli said, “With your indulgence, I would like to describe a certain incident to which I was a witness, as was my wife and also Mr. Charles Huston.”

The Judge nodded indulgence. He had learned, long ago, how to listen with one ear. Besides, he had been there himself. He watched this man’s face, the fierce pride in it, he recognized the arrogant manner that John Martinelli had worn even in his schooldays.

Let’s see, mused the Judge, John was two years behind me. He must be at least three years younger than Alicia . . . It’s been a good match. Teresa is . . . let’s see . . . twenty-five. Her wedding was in June, four years ago. Not a good match, perhaps. He mused upon the Hustons. Charles, in his thirties, was “new” by Pearl City reckoning, but he had done very well in the bank. Was tactful, well-mannered, and accepted. His younger brother had been half-accepted for his sake, when the lad had first come here, fresh from law school. Then, of course, having married Teresa Martinelli, Mark had been someone.

But the Judge knew that Mark Huston had not proved to be the kind of young man who had married well, and then climbed smoothly along an ascending path. His struggle to “get started” in the law had been punctuated by certain outbursts and commotions. He was a tense young man, with startling cheekbones; it was said that he had a temper; it was said that he could be eloquent in a rather astonishing way. He was either old-fashioned or very new-fashioned. A genius or a fool, and so difficult to tell which, at his age. An interesting young man. But now, of course, finished.

It might be that he had kept Teresa too long in that first cheap little apartment, after what she had been used to in her father’s house. There was too the tragic loss of their baby, last April. An incident not well-understood. Whatever it was, the Judge had very little hope for this marriage. He thought it was finished.

“. . . spoke to Teresa. He asked her how she had been.” John Martinelli had come to the climax of his story. “She gave him a civil answer. She said ‘Just fine’ or something of the sort. And then”—John Martinelli’s voice began to shake—“then he slapped her in her face. And no man slaps my daughter. . . .”

The Judge’s hand had been making notes, without his particular attention. Now he said, with a calm flavor of reason covering human curiosity, “What happened after that?”

The two young men stared at the bookcase. The young wife kept her head down. The father bridled. The mother cocked her head. Fairlee cleared his throat. John Martinelli said, “Mr. Jasper very kindly allowed my wife to rest a moment in his office. Then we went out to our car. Mark Huston was out there and he apologized, in one sentence. Nothing more was said. He left. We left. My daughter was given great pain and humiliation.”

But had not gone to Reno, thought the Judge. He glanced at Teresa. She was wearing black-and-white, and a small hat with a little veil of heavy mesh that fell over her eyes. She sat despondently between her father and her mother. The Judge did not permit himself an audible sigh.

He turned his chair slightly. “Mr. Huston?”

Mark Huston said, “I have no defense. I should not have slapped her. I apologized. I have nothing more to say.”

The Judge thought, Oh, yes, they bring these matters to court when they have already been settled, and not before. It was finished. Nevertheless, he had his duty. He said, “Mr. Charles Huston? Have you anything to add?”

Charles Huston said, “I am here to be with my brother. I am very sorry for it all. Nothing to add.”

Oh, tactful young man, thought the Judge, here for the sake of his blood but very carefully so. The Judge felt an impulse to push at this delicately balanced position. “You were a witness to this incident?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“You agree that Mr. Martinelli has stated exactly what happened?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know why your brother did what he did?”

“No, sir,” said Charles stolidly. And do not care, his manner said, because he was a fool and he is finished.

The Judge gnawed on his lower lip. Oh, why prolong this dreary formality? Committed to justice based on truth, the Judge knew and none better how elusive was the truth. But for a young man to commit social and economic suicide in the middle of the cocktail lounge of the Pearl City Club was a very strange action for an ambitious and intelligent young man to take. The Judge knew how many doors had closed in Mark Huston’s face since that evening. He knew that wherever the lad might go, now, this blot would haunt his record. He knew the lad must have been suffering. But he asked, sternly, as was his duty, “Why did you do it, Mr. Huston?”

“For no valid reason,” said the young husband. “There is no excuse.”

“I see that you’ve got a retrial of the Haskell Case,” said the Judge suddenly.

“Yes, your honor. As soon as that is concluded, I’ll be leaving Pearl City.”

“I see.” Quixotic, thought the Judge. Stubborn. Fighting. But not fighting this. Still, she could have gone to Reno. He could have left town. Why didn’t they? Not that he saw any hope. These two had been asunder long before the incident at the Club which was nothing but a symptom. However, dutifully, the Judge turned and said, “Mrs. Huston?”

The girl said, “There is nothing I can say.”

To himself, the Judge humphed. Teresa Martinelli who had had “everything” all her life, money beauty brains and personality, sat much too limp in that chair.

Then the mother said, “Your honor, I would like to correct one thing in my husband’s statement.”

“Yes, Mrs. Martinelli?”

“The word my daughter used.”

“The word?” Ah, she was a charming lady, Alicia. The Judge smiled at her.

“She did not say ‘Just fine.’ She said only one word. She said the word, ‘Splendid.’ ”

“I see. Mark Huston asked her how she had been. She answered with one word. Splendid.” The Judge scribbled. But he was lying low.

“And I would like to point out to your honor,” she went on, “that there was a weight on the word.”

Teresa said, full of life and fire, “It’s no use, Mother. None of them will listen. They are men.”

John Martinelli said, “Alicia, I don’t know what you are trying to—”

“Just a minute,” said the Judge, with quick authority. “Mrs. Martinelli, will you please—”

“Speak with precision?” Alicia cut in. The Judge felt his heart stop and resume with a thud. “Yes, your honor, I will.” She said. “Teresa intended to wound and anger Mark as much as she could and she did it with great precision.”

The Judge knew that his eyelids were fluttering. He calmed them and said to the girl, “Mrs. Huston, we are examining the grounds for your divorce. Is this pertinent?”

“If I thought you would understand,” the girl said, “I would tell you how pertinent it is.”

The Judge leaned forward. “I think you had better tell me.”

Mark Huston said loudly, “I hit her. That’s that, isn’t it?”

Teresa said, “You see, when Mark and I were married we were very much in love and we had a word—”

Mark said, “This isn’t necessary and it can do no good. I hit her. I admit it. I announce it. Isn’t that enough?”

The Judge said to him, with sweet authority, “I agree with you, Mr. Huston, that privacy would be desirable. So . . . Mr. and Mrs. Martinelli, Mr. Fairlee, and Mr. Charles Huston, will you all please step out into my anteroom?”

“Will you hear me?” said Teresa breathlessly. She had been boneless. Now she was taut with life.

“It is my duty to hear you, Mrs. Huston,” purred the Judge. “The rest of you, if you please . . .”

Alicia rose and said, “Come, John” with surprising authority. John rose. Fairlee was already up. The Hustons both rose.

“Mr. Mark Huston, sit down,” said the Judge severely.

The others went through the door and Fairlee closed it.

The Judge settled into the comfortable leather. “Now then, Mrs. Huston, I will hear you.”

The young man sat down and stared at the bookcase, controlled to endure.

Teresa said, “We were in love. There was a certain song. There was a certain sunset and . . . what happened afterwards.” Her voice was low. But the Judge’s ears were pricked up. Mark Huston sat like stone. “And the word we had,” she said, “was ‘splendid.’ ”

The Judge said gently, “So that it was a key word for both of you? A private word, sanctified?”

“Yes, sir.” She reached up and pushed the veil out of her eyes. Her eyes were so beautiful that the Judge was forced to swallow. “Sir, you know that Mark was what you would call struggling?”

“I know,” said the Judge kindly.

“We had a very small apartment and not very much . . . But you see, sir, my father has a good deal of money and he has always spoiled me. He likes to do it. He always has. But . . . Mark was embarrassed. He asked me not to take so many things from my father. I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t even listen to him. We . . . about six months after we were married, I think it was . . . we had a dreadful quarrel about it and that is when I spoiled the word. I said, ‘Oh, you think it’s splendid to live like this.’ I said . . . other mean and selfish things.”

“All right, Tessa,” snapped the young man. “Don’t wallow.”

“You will hear me?” Teresa said to the Judge.

“So that the sacred word was spoiled,” the Judge said calmly. “Yes, that happens.”

“And doesn’t matter . . .” the young man said.

“If you will be quiet . . .” the Judge said. “Go on.”

“It mattered then,” Teresa said, “but not too much. We . . . got over that somehow. Then he took the Haskell case. Well, you know that he lost it.”

The Judge nodded.

“Nothing would do,” said Teresa, “but that he had to get a new trial for that miserable boy. We fought about that. I wanted him to drop the whole hopeless business. It wasn’t doing him a bit of good, I said. No profit and he was only heading for another failure. He said he was concerned. I said he ought to be concerned about his child. We were expecting a child, at that time.”

“Yes,” the Judge said gently. The young man put one hand over his eyes, to endure. The Judge noted this with a glance and said to the girl, “I am listening.”

“Mark said that he was concerned for his child because his child must have an honorable father. He said he had failed an innocent boy and he was going to redeem his failure. I said he was being ridiculous. We had a terrible fight. Well, your honor, sir . . . I have always been a brat. And Mark is not a placid soul, either. So, in April . . .”

The young man took his hand down and was stiff against the chair back.

“He was going to a meeting one night,” the girl said, speaking very fast. “It had to do with the case. He was going to make a kind of speech. It might help that boy’s prospects. My parents were out of town. I didn’t want to be alone. I begged . . . No . . .” She sat very straight, “I ordered him not to leave me. But he said that he would leave a phone number. I could call. And he went. Well, of course, I was so furious. I had always had, you see, just about everything I wanted. I don’t know whether anger like that can bring on labor. But I went into labor. But I would not phone him. I was too angry to do that. I called my doctor, who told me to come to the hospital. I called a taxi. The driver was . . . well, he was very worried about my state. So . . . there was a traffic accident. And . . . I lost the baby.”

Now her head went down. “Which was my fault.”

Her husband said, “I had left her when she asked me not to go. So you see that there are grounds. And that is enough.”

The Judge thought, That was the First Act. Was it? He said aloud, “Is that enough, Teresa?”

Teresa straightened. “No,” she said. “Not for me. When Mark got to me in the hospital, I was in pain, everything was so awful, there wasn’t any baby . . . He felt bad enough. But I said to him, ‘Of course you did make a splendid speech, darling.’ ”

The Judge saw old pain on the young man’s face. He saw pain, old and new, on the girl’s face and in her eyes. He saw no hope for this marriage. Too much pain had been given and received. But he said, “Then, afterwards?”

“Oh my father,” she said, “came rushing back and made a fuss, of course. Special nurses, everything under the sun. Nothing would do but that I come home and be petted. It sounded sensible. That wasn’t why I went. My father bought everything . . . everything in the world you would think I’d need. My mother and I pretended that it was only temporary and only sensible, until I was strong again. The truth was, Mark didn’t want me back. He said nothing at all. So there I stayed. How could I go back? I didn’t know how I could,” said Teresa. “I had never been taught . . . don’t you see?”

If the Judge saw, he said nothing. “So that night at the Club,” she went on, holding her head high in humility, “do you see how I, without cause, hit him with a word? A weapon so heavy . . . a word with such a terrible weight on it . . . that he had to slap me? He could no more help slapping me than he could help blinking his eye.” Teresa’s beautiful eyes were filled with tears.

Mark said, “But I ought to have helped it. Since I, at least, knew better. She never has understood these things, your honor. She never had learned, that’s true. Even now, she doesn’t see that I ought to have helped it.”

“Oh yes, you ought to have helped it,” the Judge said. “I agree.”

Mark said, “Thank you.”

Teresa said, “But that Mark should lose his place, here, and hurt his career and have the whole town talking . . . when it was I who hit him. What can I do?”

“Nothing,” Mark said, quietly. “Nothing. Let it go.”

The Judge said, “I take it that you would agree, Teresa, to this. If a divorce were to be granted in this case on the grounds of extremely cruelty, the cruelty was yours?”

“Yes, I would agree to that,” she said fervently. “I would think that very fair. I wish that everyone in town could know it.”

“They won’t,” said Mark angrily. “You’re getting this divorce.”

Teresa said sadly, “That’s the convention.”

Mark looked at the books and said on the burst of a sigh, “Well, is that all?”

The Judge said mildly, “How should I know whether that is all or what else there may be between you?”

Mark turned his head sharply. “What changed you? That’s what I’d like to know. What could have changed you?”

“When I couldn’t make my father listen to what I’d done,” Teresa said. “When he simply wouldn’t hear. When I see how he insists that I can do no wrong because I am his daughter. It isn’t true. Don’t you think I know what I said to you? If I hadn’t known and if you hadn’t known that I knew . . . then nothing . . .” Her throat closed.

In a moment the young man said quietly, “What does this mood mean against your whole life? Don’t you think I know how your mind works?”

The girl neither moved nor spoke. The Judge said, “Have you thought of this, Mark? What if her heart is broken?”

“Oh, Tessa,” Mark cried, “we can never . . .”

“I know,” she said, quietly. “It’s too late. Why do you think my heart is broken?” The room was very still.

The Judge got out of his big chair. “I think this hearing stands recessed. Sine die.” Neither of them paid him any attention, as he left them.

In the anteroom he said, “This hearing is postponed, indefinitely. No hurry, is there? Will you not,” he said to all the faces, “agree that such destruction should not be lightly or ignorantly undertaken?”

Alicia Martinelli gave him one lightning look and dropped her eyelids. John Martinelli said, “How can she? How can they? I don’t know . . .”

“It is not for you to know,” said the Judge kindly, “or me. Or Pearl City. It is for them to know. Let them alone.”

Charles Huston made flustered farewells. Fairlee, the lawyer, turned to go and John Martinelli must confer with him for a moment.

So the Judge looked down at Alicia.

“Is it too late for them, David?” she asked.

“I do not know. I cannot tell. Young hearts do break.”

Alicia smiled. “Young hearts do mend, sometimes.”

“I am glad if that is so,” the Judge said.

“That is so.”

John Martinelli returned to them. “Come along, darling.” He looked at the Judge, cocky little man, a bit bewildered. “I suppose I should thank you.”

“Yes, I . . . rather think you should,” said the Judge as if he were thinking of something else. “Good day.”

Alone in his anteroom, the Judge mused. He could see the terrace of the Pearl City Club, before it had been remodeled. He could see the young girl with the moon on her face and hear her crying, “Don’t you care if you break my heart?”

And he could hear himself, young man in a passion of ambition, saying, “Alicia, I have so much to do, so many years . . . The only honest thing I can say to you is please don’t wait.” And that ignorant young man in his callow prime had added, “As for a broken heart, that’s a silly sentimental phrase of no precision whatsoever.”

And the young girl had raised her head and said to the moon, “Precision?” Putting a weight on a word that later . . . three years later . . . had fallen heavy between them forever. So they had married well, each of them, but not each other.

The Judge sighed. He was wiser now. He remembered the suffering of the young. It was a part of his wisdom to remember. A word with a weight on it, that only two could know. Which goes to show, he told himself wryly, that when you hear a word, you mustn’t be too sure you know its meaning . . . precisely.

He sneaked over to his chamber door and put his ear upon the wood. He had a little hope, not much, yet some. Life was full of maybes . . . one maybe after another. So it took daring and would they dare?

Listening, he could hear, within, no words at all.

The breakfast room was on the east, for the sake of the sun. The sun shone in. Bob Smite, husband and father, stabbed the yellow fluff of his scrambled eggs from the pale green plate. In his left hand he held a section of the morning paper, folded to reveal to him a quarter of the Editorial page.

Larry Smite, sixteen-year-old son, had his chin tucked in to permit him to pore down upon the Sporting Section. He had spilled a little cocoa on it.

Dorothy Smite, wife and mother, crunched toast in her good white teeth and looked out the window, crinkling her eyes against the double light, the sun, and the bounce of the sunlight from the shining machinery, the pop-up toaster, the percolater, the electric frying pan. On the fourth side of the table, cords snaked into the wall.

“Not going to be late tonight, are you?” she asked in the voice she used to her husband, not the voice she used to her son.

“Six-fifteen, as usual,” Bob answered. “Far as I know. Why?”

“I was thinking of a rib roast. But I guess I’ll just take a steak out of the freezer.”

“Nothing the matter with steak,” he said.

“Hey, Mom, could I use the car after school?” the boy asked.

“Why?” asked she and did not wait for the answer. “The thing is I’ve got some shopping and then I’m supposed to have my hair done. But if it’s important . . .”

“No, that’s O.K. I can get a ride,” her son said promptly.

“Ride where?”

“Game.”

“Who’s playing?” the father asked, looking up with his sense of duty showing.

“Jefferson.”

“Going to beat them?”

The boy shrugged.

“Well, good luck,” the father said, and looked at his watch. He went up to clean his teeth. When he got down, the boy had gone. He kissed Dorothy on her temple. “By the way, can you take my gray suit to the cleaners? Tell them, on special?”

“O.K.,” she said.

Such was breakfast time, at the Smite’s, an autumn morning.

Bob Smite, husband and father, householder, job-holder, proceeded in an easy gait, past two blocks’ worth of smart little houses like his own, each just as fresh and neat on its small plot. Leaves were falling from certain slender trees. The neighborhood was too new for trees of size. The neighborhood was proudly kept up. Leaves did not linger long upon these little green rugs of barbered grass.

Busline was certainly convenient. Nevertheless, he would soon have to have a second car. Bob’s attention flickered, unfocused, through layers of consciousness, weather, money, a slight pinch of his right shoe, and deep and far, a point in his mind from which he observed the commonplace luxury of his home, and, with a little blend of scorn and sorrow, assessed the table talk, considered his wife and her hairdo, his son and the football game, and himself moving in his groove.

When he came to the corner, he was suddenly focused and alert. Yes, there was time. If the first bus was not the one, he could afford to wait for another and maybe . . . He exchanged a placid “Good morning” with a passenger he had seen before, but he took care not to involve himself in conversation. The first bus was not the one. Bob Smite, risking some questioning looks . . . let it go.

Eight minutes later, on the second bus, he saw what he had been hoping to see.

He climbed aboard with a sense of delight and made his way well back, where he bent over the man in the aisle seat and said firmly, “Would you mind, sir, shifting to the other side? We’d . . . er . . . like to talk.”

The strange man shifted, with grace enough, and Bob thanked him and sat down with a sigh. “Well,” he said to the remaining passenger, “Here we are again. Now, where were we?”

The little man in the window-side seat had a face brown as a nut and wrinkled as a prune. He had pure white hair and white eyebrows as saucy as a cat’s whiskers on his brown brow. A merry little blue eye peered from under. Bob Smite did not know this man’s name, nor did this man know his.

They took a peculiar care not to know.

The little man said, “We were in outer space, I believe. Been troubling you?”

“Oh, I’ve been floating around out there,” said Bob genially. “Frankly, I don’t understand it. Stars and stuff. Masses and gases, and everything moving. I don’t see how we can ever understand. And sometimes I doubt that we ought to try.”

“There’s no doubt we are trying,” said the little man dryly. “If by ‘we’ you mean the human race. The human race keeps pushing its brains out, all the time, and proving how it has been all wrong, up to now.”

“Yeah,” said Bob. “Proving that about every two weeks, these days. It used to get proved every two or three centuries. What I was thinking . . .”

“Go ahead,” said the little man eagerly.

Bob plunged ahead. “Here is man, standing in the middle. Looking up and out at huge speeds and distances. Also, looking down and in, at microscopic . . .”

“Sub-microscopic. . . .” The little man nodded.

“Do you think we are actually in the middle?”

“Say,” said the little man, gleaming, “That’s an interesting question. From where man sits, of course, it would have to seem to be the middle. Is that your point?”

Bob felt a surge of pure affection for him. “Listen,” he said unnecessarily, for this man could and did listen, “we aren’t happy, suspended in the middle, are we? You might say the suspense is terrible. Why? Because we’d like to know, we’d like to feel satisfied. Look at the new thoughts about space—if I dig them, which maybe I don’t. They are saying maybe space curves around on itself. And there aren’t any ends. Well, that ties it up, in a way, doesn’t it? That’s a restful thought. That’s a kind of unity. Also, going the other way, man keeps trying to get to one thing. Maybe it’s all one thing. Energy, for instance. We want something simple and unified. We want something we can throw our brains all the way around. But the farther we explore . . . Don’t you think maybe we are going to have to settle for knowing that we can never throw our human brains all the way around?”

“And that’s rough on the human race, all right,” said the little man thoughtfully. “That makes us nervous, I guess.”

“Nervous, is right.” Bob fell silent.

He didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe it was science. He didn’t know much about science. Maybe it was philosophy. He didn’t know much about philosophy, either. But Bob Smite was a member of the human race, and within the limits of his ignorance, he, too, took pleasure in pushing his brain out . . . frightening himself, humbling himself . . . and wondering.

He couldn’t remember how he had got into this exchange with this stranger, but every once in a while, the two of them met on the bus and wondered together. Sometimes they wondered together without speaking. He looked, now, at his companion.

The little man’s head was nodding slowly and Bob’s pleasure was enormous.

“Can you,” the man said rather dreamily, after a while, “with your human brain, really imagine the true track of this bus in . . . well, in space. Here is this bus, going down this street westward, by our reckoning. It is also at the same time revolving with the earth on the earth’s axis. It is going around the sun as the earth goes. It is, furthermore, moving swiftly through space as the entire solar system is moving. Now what is its track, taking into account the speeds?”

“And such speeds,” said Bob, his brain creaking.

Too soon, it seemed, Bob had to get off at his corner. He felt strangely refreshed and fortified. He always did. The day closed around him, job-holder, breadwinner. He plunged into the day.

Larry Smite slouched along to high school, achieving a split-second rendezvous with a friend as if it were nothing but a coincidence, speaking of dual pipes, overdrive, and the first-string quarterback’s right knee . . . maintaining the necessary attitudes. Goons were goons. Squares were squares. Culture was for the birds.

He went through his first three classes looking as if he would at any moment topple and go to sleep. Fourth period, he had English with Mrs. Blair, who was a small, thin, middle-aged black-and-white-haired woman, with thick glasses that much magnified her brown eyes. Larry Smite looked sleepier than ever. But his ears missed not one syllable this woman said.

As class was dismissed, she spoke up carelessly. “Larry, would you stay a moment?”

The boy’s heart jumped but he took care to look as stupid as possible. When the students had gone, some few bothering to give him a sympathetic grimace, Larry closed the classroom door without instruction to do so. He approached the teacher. He stood quietly beside her desk.

Mrs. Blair opened the center drawer and took out his manuscript. He recognized the smudgy typing, and also the very shape of his words, as familiar to him as if, with fingers, he had pressed them into this shape and no other. Its sudden dearness shook his heart.

“This,” said Mrs. Blair, leaning back, seeming to let go and lose the tension of authority, and therefore show herself to be humanly fatigued, “is fine, on the whole. Now, I am pretty sure that your ear and your instinct is as good, and probably much better than mine, so I hesitate . . .”

“The seventh line and the eighth,” said Larry. “I knew it! I knew it! It’s too dum-de-dum. You mean the seventh and eighth lines, don’t you, Mrs. Blair?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, her enlarged eyes meeting his eager eyes respectfully. “And now, if two of us notice the same thing, we can assume . . .”

“It’s wrong,” he said. “How can I fix it?”

“There are no rules I can quote to cover this,” said the teacher. “You are far beyond the doggerel stage, Larry. You are handling rhythms that . . .” She sighed. “I had a teacher once, myself, who compared them to the sea. The waves come in and break and you expect each breaking . . . but it never comes at the exact second that you expect. There is always the little surprise.”

“Not dum-de-dum,” said the boy. “Not bong-bong, like a drum. I know. I know. And I knew it wasn’t right, just in those two lines. But jeepers . . .” He rubbed the bristles on his head. He had forgotten himself completely.

“How did you know, I wonder?” murmured Mrs. Blair.

“I don’t mean I know,” the boy said. “I just kinda feel . . . I feel around . . .” Now he moved his fingers in the air. “Then, when it feels right to me . . . well, then it does. But I don’t know if I am right. That’s why . . .”

The teacher shook her head gently. “I can help you a little more. But not much more. The best I can do is encourage you. I think this is excellent, Larry. On the whole, excellent. The music . . . the images . . .” She stopped, feeling inadequate.

“It’s not music, though,” he said quickly. “In music, see, a note is a note. A certain sound. But this . . . is words.”

“And words,” said the teacher at once, “have other dimensions. Associations. Meanings.” She leaned forward. “Appendicitis is quite a pretty sound.”

The boy grinned at her appreciatively. “Sure,” he said. He picked up his manuscript, the one sheet with the poem on it. “I got to try and fix it,” he murmured.

“Yes, it’s up to you,” the teacher said in a humble way. “I have no rules to give out.”

The boy’s eyes were a greenish-blue, quite brilliant, when he let them be seen, although he wasn’t looking at her but through her now. “It’s not exactly by rule . . .” he began.

The teacher held her breath

“It’s like the tail of a . . . of a . . .” He threw his arm out in a swinging curve. “Oh, I don’t know . . . not a breeze, exactly . . . but something that goes trailing through that we can’t see . . . but only by the bending of the grass . . .”

The teacher was absolutely quiet and motionless.

“Oblique . . .” the boy said, frowning. “That gets somewhere near what I’m trying . . .” Then he shook his head. “But not exactly.” He fell silent, with his head cocked. He seemed to be listening.

The teacher stirred in a moment. “After you fix it,” she said gently, “what shall we do with it? Would you like to see it printed somewhere?”

“Oh no,” he said, flustered, and jolted back. “I just fool around with this, Mrs. Blair. I mean, I wouldn’t want people to know.” His young cheeks were hot. “And anyhow, I’m not sure I can fix it.”

The teacher said quietly, “You must fix it. And that has nothing to do with other people.”

He met her eyes and his were intensely aware of her meaning and then they fell. He didn’t answer.

“But I’m bound to tell you, again, what I think is true,” said the teacher. “I think you are gifted. I think it is important.”

“Well, I just . . . Gee, thanks a lot, Mrs. Blair.” The strangely wise, or strangely new, spirit behind the greenish eyes winked out. This was an embarrassed high school boy. He wadded the paper into his pocket, pretending it didn’t matter much.

Mrs. Blair said, yearningly, “Tell me, do your parents . . . ?”

Larry caught his lip in his teeth and shook his head. The eyes were wary.

“I’d like to see it when you’ve fixed it,” she said carelessly. “Just privately. If you don’t mind.”

“O.K.” He let his breath out rather tremulously. “Well, so long, Mrs. Blair. Thanks, I mean for what you said.”

She nodded, withdrawn, as he wished her to be, and she began to shift other papers on her desk.

Larry went out into the corridor. He went, fast and swinging, toward the cafeteria, and he felt swell. That old Blairsey, she was smart and no kidding, because she spotted that bad place right away, and it made him feel good. And she knew how to keep quiet, too. (While his mom was shopping. Shopping, for Pete’s sake! And his pop went back and forth, back and forth, every day on the bus.) But of course he, Larry Smite, would never be a poet. A fellow doesn’t want to try and be a poet. For a living, for Pete’s sake? But in that seventh line he needed a different word, a word with the right feeling, soft and thick, and kinda black-dark, hanging on it like moss. And yet two syllables, ping pong . . . the pong darker. . . .

At this point in his reflections, Larry passed into the cafeteria and merged with his contemporaries. After school, he went to the game and sat in the card section and did his bit between the halves.

Dorothy Smite took the car that afternoon and made her rounds, accomplishing a lot of petty errands that she lumped under the term “shopping.” Took Bob’s suit to the cleaner. Bought a new plastic glass for the bathroom. A card of shirt buttons. Two pairs of nylons at a sale. The marketing.

At four o’clock she entered the beauty parlor.

Edna’s strong fingers felt wonderful on her scalp, so she let her neck muscles go and her head hang heavy over the washing tray. Wet-headed, she sat before the mirror in the little booth and Edna began to make pin-curls. Dorothy sighed.

“I waited for you, Edna,” she said. “I hope you realize that is why I was such a filthy mess.”

Edna had a long narrow face, and when she lifted her long upper lip, she revealed long narrow teeth. “I keep remembering what you said last time. About peace.”

“Yes. Yes, peace.” Dorothy closed her eyes.

“It sticks in my mind.”

Dorothy smiled. “What did I say? I said the trouble starts when anybody gets it into his head that he is absolutely right. He knows. He’s got it totally solved. His is the only way.”

“Which gives him the license to beat this perfect truth into somebody else’s head . . . with a bomb. Uh-huh. Well, I think you’re absolutely right,” said Edna with a certain impishness.

Dorothy beamed at Edna’s image in the mirror. “I used to worry about these things when I was a child. It’s funny. You’re supposed to grow up. The dirty word, these days, is ‘immature.’ But what do they mean, ‘mature’?”

Edna snorted. “These days, the thing is to go along without upsetting any apple carts at all. It’s called adjusting.”

Dorothy shivered. “Ooooh, how I hate that word. What if we see something going on that is wrong? We shouldn’t adjust to it, should we?”

“Right,” said Edna.

“We shouldn’t change ourselves to get along with it. Figure how to live with it.”

“Let the rest of the world adjust to us, eh?” said Edna cheerfully.

Dorothy closed her eyes once more. “Well, that depends. If we really knew what’s wrong, and what’s good. Of course, we think we are sure of some things. Peace, for instance. That’s good. Doesn’t everyone agree?”

“I think it is good,” said Edna soberly.

“Yet if people really wanted peace,” said Dorothy, “it could be had. We’re smart enough. We ought to be. Look at all we know already, about psychology and all? People keep talking about maturity and love and understanding. Then why aren’t we peaceful and good?”

Edna’s fingers went on working, while she considered. “I think everybody probably wants to be good, don’t you? The thing is, what does he mean by that? A juvenile delinquent, now, he probably thinks not to be ‘chicken’ is a good thing. So he breaks the law to show how brave he is. Well, bravery . . . that’s not bad, is it? I guess we all try pretty much to be good in our own way.”

Dorothy opened her eyes and stared at herself. “You know what I think? I don’t think we are on the track at all. Not yet. We get too mixed up. We try to do our duty but maybe we’re too quick . . .”

“Quick?” said Edna, softly and receptively. Her fingers, lifting the tiny strands of hair, gave feathery sensations to Dorothy’s scalp.

“Well . . .” Dorothy lifted both hands under the bib she wore. “What I mean is, we settle too quickly for something like that. ‘I got to be brave.’ Or these. ‘I got to be patient.’ ‘I got to stick up for my rights.’ But those two are almost opposites. You see? Both good. But only part good.”

“Hm,” said Edna in quick response.

“You know,” said Dorothy, “once or twice in my life I’ve had a . . . well, a funny feeling. As if, for one second, I got out of the crust of myself, as if I saw everything differently, just for one second.”

Edna said, “When you get this feeling . . . whatever it is . . . you’re not proud of yourself? It’s not like feeling happy, either?”

“No,” said Dorothy, her eyes widening. Eyes met, by way of the glass.

“Did you want the back curled high?” asked Edna. “Or rolled on the neck, kinda?”

“I guess, on the neck,” said Dorothy. “My husband likes it that way.”

“You know what my husband says? He says he likes my hair gray!”

They laughed.

Dorothy looked at the woman in the mirror, not the one named Edna, but the other one. “Take ‘love,’ ” she said murmuringly. “The word ‘love’ is all over the psychology books these days. But what it means? Everybody figures that out just for himself. And it has a hundred meanings. A million meanings. Everybody settles for part of them.”

Edna said, and her unhandsome face looked blind, “Does anybody know, I wonder, the whole meaning?”

Dorothy ducked her head suddenly. She said contritely, “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I jerk? I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“That’s O.K.,” said Edna, and worked silently for a while. Then she said, wistfully, “We’re too small, I guess. We’re too busy. Trying to do the right thing and to love our neighbor. We just take it for granted we know what that means. Or else we think other people must know and so we do the way they do. We all go along.”

“No, we don’t,” said Dorothy suddenly. “Not everybody. Not everybody, always. Couldn’t have. Or nothing would ever have changed . . . in all the centuries. Don’t you see?”

“That’s so,” said Edna. Dorothy saw Edna’s head tilt. Then Edna said in an impulsive rush, “You always give me something to think about, Mrs. Smite.”

Dorothy closed her lids because, for some strange reason, her eyes had filled with tears.

At the dinner table that evening, Bob Smite spoke admiringly. “Say, you must have shot the works, today, hon. Looks pretty nice.”

“Just a shampoo and set,” his wife replied. “Improvement, huh? I guess I had let it go a little too long.” She cut meat. “Anything new at the office?”

“The usual,” he said cheerfully. “Who won?” he asked his son.

“They clobbered us. 28 to 7,” said Larry. “Hoffendorp’s knee went out in the second quarter.”

“Too bad.” His father clicked a sympathetic tongue.

“I’m glad you’re not heavy enough for football,” said Larry’s mother, absentmindedly. She’d said this before. Her son shot her a sharp green glance, but said nothing.

“Take my suit?” Bob asked.

“Ready Thursday.”

“Well, that will do, I guess.”

“Eat your salad, Larry.”

“I am, Mom.”

Such was dinnertime, at the Smite’s. Pleasant people, they were. Mutually interested. Mutually kind.

Not much later, Bob Smite sat in his accustomed chair with the evening paper in his hands. He was trying to make a three-dimensional image of the track of his chair in space. Let’s see. A rolling, that was more or less like a spiral bracelet, which bracelet was also in another spiral, probably. Then the single track of the chair, and its speeds which must alter the shape of the track. . . . He couldn’t extract it. He bent his brain. Suddenly, he got a whiff in his mind of something shining . . . distant, beautiful, strange. . . . A little scary. Bob swallowed. He would like to try to describe this experience. Like to tell somebody. Ah nuts, he thought. The family would think I was nuts. And maybe I am. I better quit trying to sprain my brain on this stuff.

Larry Smite was sprawled on the couch. The seventh line was singing in his head. He’d got it. But now he must put line eight, back-to-back, balanced . . . sort of reversed, like in a mirror. De dum dum. Couldn’t get it. Missing one word that would carry what he wanted to put . . . Could he use the word ‘wonderful’? A soiled word. A spoiled word. Could he wiggle it into the line so that it would mean what it ought to mean? Wonder-filled. Nah, and besides, pretty nearly nobody was filled with wonder . . . for Pete’s sake! . . . anymore.

Larry let go, realizing that he was using his will, which he had already guessed was not the way. Forget it. Let the right word, meaning and sound, just come to him.

Dorothy finished the dishes and used scented soap on her hands. We are pretty good people, as people go, she was thinking. Bob works faithfully to support us, and does it well. I keep this house as I ought, or I surely try. Larry gets good grades. He’s not a grind; he is one of the fellows. He is doing nicely. And we love each other. We do our best.

She thought with a pang, Do I?

She drifted into the living room. Bob had the paper, of course. Larry was flopped there. The day’s work over, now was their time to relax, together, in their comfortable home . . . this loving family, these fine and decent people, nobody neurotic, nobody off the beam, all moving with their times.

Dorothy Smite suddenly, with a strong passion, wished she could take the Bible off the bookshelf. There was a passage she wanted to find. But that would be such an odd thing for her to do. She renounced this fierce and selfish desire, and sat down in her chair and brightened her expression.

“What’s on television?” she asked cheerfully.

Bob stirred. He loved her and wished to please her. He flipped the paper open to the Amusement page. There was a symbol drawn there. A star.

A voice spoke in the quiet room. “Starshine,” it said.

“What, dear?” Dorothy turned her face.

Bob felt his mouth to be open. He must have said it. He hadn’t meant to speak. He wished he hadn’t. It was the far-off glinting light he’d “seen,” still haunting his mind, that he’d been reaching to name. But there was no such word as “starshine.” And what was Bob Smite, husband, father, homeowner, job-holder, doing with it falling out of his mouth? “There’s no such word, is there?” he said aloud and rattled the newspaper.

(If Dorothy now said, “How come you thought of such a thing? Is it in the paper?” Bob Smite would be unable to reply. What pressure, he quaked, in the loving curiosity that clamps right down on anything spontaneous . . . anything sweetly wild. “How did you happen to think of that?” they asked you, the ones who loved you. And you couldn’t explain, because you loved them, too. So you had to cover up what was wild and yet deep. . . . You wanted to be what they needed and expected. How guarded you had to be!)

But it wasn’t Dorothy, it was the boy who spoke. Sprawled on the couch, he was yet, somehow, totally alerted. “I don’t think there’s such a word,” he said. “There’s the word ‘sunshine.’ And the word ‘moonshine.’ But . . . ‘starlight’ it would be.” His mouth continued to move, as if it were tasting.

Bob looked at him curiously.

His mother did not look at him, too directly. She was remembering within herself how Larry had always been so fond of words, so ready to play with them, as if he felt for them. She was taking note. He still felt for them, then, although this special interest had gone underground. She loved her son and she would not frighten him for anything. So Dorothy said, dreamily, “Maybe there should be such a word. The stars do shine. There must be such a thing. Too far, of course. Too far for us.”

Her heartbeat quickened. She feared that she had said too much. If, in Bob’s eyes, there should be loving amusement she did not want to see it. She did not look.

“Starshine,” the boy repeated. “A mush-mouth noise. . . .” He cleared his throat and quickly reached for a more normal vocabulary. “I mean, it sounds kinda funny, you know?” he mumbled.

“Not so far,” said Bob Smite slowly. “We walk around in it every day. The sun is a star.”

The boy’s green eyes had opened wide but neither parent saw this.

“There is starshine on us every day,” said Dorothy breathlessly, “but we just don’t . . . notice?” Her eyes met Bob’s eyes.

The respectably pretty living room was still for half a moment.

Then the boy squirmed, restlessly.

Bob Smite moved. “What’ll you have, Dot?” he said rather gruffly. “Big choice! A whodunit or a western?”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” she said quickly. “Larry?”

“I don’t care, Mom.” The boy relaxed into the couch cushions.

(Funny, he mused, Dad and a word that isn’t a word. And an idea. And Mom getting it, so fast. Larry could have said a lot more about words. He thought about them so much. But secretly. Gosh, here at home, you didn’t want to upset the people you loved with a lot of probably crazy stuff. You told yourself they wouldn’t understand. But now into the boy’s mind crept a question that made him uneasy. What if they could understand?)

He squirmed.

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . .” he droned, achieving youthful scorn.

Dorothy smiled at him but she thought: What is it around us every day that we do not notice? Dare not? Is it Love? The whole thing? Is it a little bit too wonderful? Are we afraid?

She blinked and turned her eyes to the screen.

Picture and music had begun. Bob went back and settled into his chair.

He had a feeling of deep happiness, as if they had all just escaped some unbearable glory . . . that was, nevertheless, there. But the room was normal, now. It was just home. The evening was going to be typical. On the surface, considerately, they all conformed.

It was a temptation to look at Joseph Harte and his wife, Elizabeth, and think what a mercy it was that they had attracted each other. At first glance, certainly, they were an unattractive pair.

Joseph Harte was short, thick-bodied, dark, foreign. He had dark, quick eyes, magnified by glasses. The lower part of his well-fleshed face was dark with the shadow of a beard no matter how recently he had shaved. Although his black hair was thin and he would soon be partially bald, he somehow looked to be a hairy man. Under the strong nose, his lips were well-cut and full and rather surprising. His voice was soft and blurred by the remnant of a middle European accent and a small impediment, not quite a lisp. He was hesitant in his manner. The quick eyes were shy.

His wife, Elizabeth, was different.

Where his effect was dark and heavy, hers was all pale and brittle and narrow and refined. She was taller than he, American Gothic, all vertical lines. She, too, wore glasses, over small mild eyes, and her light hair, framing her pale fine-textured face, had no warmth of yellow in it. Her mouth was prim, thin lips slashed across her sharp-boned chin, and she spoke with precision in a sharp Yankee twang.

Her manner was abrupt and a little snappish. It took a while to realize that this had its origin in her own diffidence and timidity.

After you knew them, you began to change your mind. They took a little knowing. But he, for all the heavy look of him, was as sensitive, as subtly aware of all manner of small delights in the world about him, as a man could be. She had a vein of humor that was dry and delightful when she dared let it out, and her mind was alert and warmly interested in a variety of things.

And so you were attracted and you began to wonder. At least, I wondered, when I came to know them, once upon a time, in the Middlewestern university town where I went to school.

One thing that was attractive about them, that changed your mind, that made you wonder, was the shining fact that they were happy together. He had the air of a man who trusted himself to see a little deeper than some. She had the cool, sweet confidence that a princess or a nun can have, the air of a woman who was sure of something.

I wondered how they had ever discovered and attracted each other. Sometimes a couple, left over in the race to mate, fall together by default and make the best of it. But they must first meet. How had these two met each other?

It couldn’t have been in their schooldays, for they had married late in both their lives. Besides, he had been educated at a large European university. While she, although she came of reading and thinking people, nevertheless had very little formal schooling beyond the high school in a small New England town, very much like (but not) Pownal, Vermont.

They couldn’t have met at their place of employment, either. He was a professor of history and a good one, as I should know. She had been a dressmaker. A country dressmaker, nothing chic and nothing fancy. Yet I think she must have been a good one, for she would have been meticulous and she had good taste. But surely there was no point of contact between two such disparate occupations.

Then perhaps they had a common hobby. Well, he was a chess player. She painted dainty little landscapes in watercolor. And although they were interested in a multitude of things, when I knew them, these things, it was plain to see, had interested them together.

Geography? Well, obviously, they must have been in the same place, at least. And it was true, he had taught for a time in a small fine New England college, very much like (but not) Bennington, Vermont. Suppose they had both been in the state of Vermont? It hardly seemed enough.

Mutual friends, I supposed. And yet, how could that be?

When you are curious, you ask, with what roundabout tact you can muster, and when you are curious enough, you eventually find out.

There was a little story. I knew there had to be.

Of course, one has to be very quiet and respectful to be told such a story. Young as I was, I had sense enough to be flattered that she told me, in her twangy voice, barrenly, shyly, and yet very proudly. One saw that to her it was the greatest love story in the world.

When I think of it now, I am not sure but what it was, in a way.

Elizabeth Hall was one of those unfortunates who answer physically the stereotyped description of an old maid. And she woke up in her thirties to the realization that she had become what she looked like. There were circumstances. For instance, the kind of work she did because it was all she could do, but which threw her with women and only women. Then there was the place, a little town from which so many males escaped while too many females stayed behind. And her own timid and somewhat forbidding manner wasn’t helpful.

Nor was she one who could make a desperate decision, transform herself into what she was not, and with no money, dash forth, full of verve and confidence, with a lipstick and a new personality, to better hunting grounds. So, at thirty-two, her people dead and gone, there she was, a woman with a heart as warm as any, but high and dry, doomed, it seemed, to live alone forever.

Late one icy afternoon, she found herself on a bus. She had obliged a customer in the next town over, working late on a final fitting, and she was tired and hungry and dispirited, yet not very anxious to get home. She was a tense and tactful paying guest in the house of a family friend, where two narrow rooms were all the home she had or probably ever would have.

The bus was rather full but she found one empty seat and sat by the window, looking out at the bleak grays of the snowless landscape in the fading light of a gray and sunless sky. There had been frost. The road was icy in patches. The cold was bitter. The mood was gray.

He got on and sat beside her.

She saw him, of course, out of the corner of her eye, and he was not attractive, not a type she knew or wanted to know. Seat-mates in the grab-bag of a public bus, they rode along, as far apart as if they had been in different counties.

She went on looking out the window and in her mind were melancholy thoughts. The day was dying. The year was dying. And she was growing old.

The bus was no sleek modern vehicle but a high-built clumsy affair, and it blustered along.

Until they came to the hill.

No idea of danger was in her mind so the shock was tremendous when the driver cried out in a high-pitched voice, and everyone realized at once that the bus was slipping . . . slipping sideways. It was out of control on the icy hill and the embankment was steep at their right. All of a sudden, she was sure they were all going to die.

This was all there was going to be! There wasn’t going to be any more, not here, on this earth, which suddenly changed in her eyes and her heart.

How dear . . . how inexpressibly dear . . . it was! How lovely this evening light! How miraculous those gentle colors! How beautiful was the earth and the life upon it! All of it! Everything! It was like looking around home, just as you are going away, and seeing every shabby thing you have loved in the tender light of parting.

And all the sterility of all her days piled into one great sad sum, because the line was being drawn, even now, at the bottom, and the addition would be made, the total arrived at.

Some of the passengers were screaming, some scrambling. All this in seconds of panic. But she turned and looked at the man beside her and felt no difference between them. He was a human being, who had eyes to see and ears to hear, who had been alive on this beautiful earth and soon would not be, for the bus was sliding faster now and in one more second would be over the edge and hurtling to the valley.

She put her hand on his cuff. Out of the bursting love she was feeling for the life, itself, that she was leaving, she said to him passionately, “I love you.”

The bus careened. Then, in the inexplicable way of things, it struck on the hard mass of an old stump, a stubborn relic of the forest that had once clothed this slope, long hidden in the brush. The bus pivoted on this sturdy point and came to rest, quivering, with a wheel smashed and gone, down on its knee, you might say, but stationary and still on the road.

No one was even hurt.

There was confusion, of course—cars stopping, policemen, questions asked, names and addresses written down.

Not even bruised, Elizabeth was taken home in somebody’s car, and although she stayed abed a day, just for good measure, by the day after that she was up and at her sewing.

It was all over. All but her blush of shame when she remembered what she had said.

About a week later she found a letter from the stranger in her mail. He had happened to hear her give her name. He had written, he said, to hope she had suffered no harm in the near-accident. He expected, he wrote, to be in Pownal on the following Saturday. He wondered if he might venture to call upon her. He would like very much to ask her to dine with him that Saturday evening. He would have a car, he said, and he would reserve a table at the town’s best restaurant in the hope that she would agree. But if she were already engaged for that evening, she could at once say so when he appeared.

It was a timid and tentative kind of letter. It breathed an air of feeling itself to be greatly daring.

She was very much upset! She had never been so upset in all her life!

For four days she could think of nothing else. She would feel furiously indignant. How dared he! For there were only two assumptions the man could make. One, and the most charitable, that she must have gone out of her mind and had not known what she was saying. The other, that she had been eying him sideways all along, and it was he, in person, whom she had in some foolish fashion made her hero. He must have taken it personally. Oh, how embarrassing!

(The one thing he’d never guess was what she’d really meant to say, before it was too late. She’d meant to cry, “We, who were on the earth together . . . oh, all of us should have loved it and each other.”)

But then, again, she would feel so excited, just at the adventure of it, pleasant or unpleasant, that she could barely do her work. As the news seeped about the house, subtle pressures were brought to bear upon her to keep the date. Her landlady’s excited scent of a wild romance. The scoffing disbelief of the daughter of the house. One thing and another.

And when she remembered that feeling, the love of all life in which her unfortunate outburst had been rooted, she wondered if she dared deny, or avoid, or let pass any experience of life at all.

So, believing that she could soon divine just how presumptuous he was daring to be, and soon put him in his place if that became necessary, she kept the date.

She wore her second-best dress.

He came and he was very courteous.

They dined, and it was a complete fiasco.

A demon got into her. She became so ladylike, so cool, so hideously well-bred and aloof, that she was hardly human. It was as if the demon of shame made her try to live down the slightest possibility that she could love anything. She looked like a stick and she acted like a stick and she couldn’t help it, although she soon saw he was a gentle and not a presumptuous man.

But he was too shy or too inexperienced or too puzzled to get around this guard of hers. She couldn’t tell whether he wanted to. She found out he was a teacher and she realized that Joseph Harte was a cultivated man for all his hairy look. But as soon as they seemed launched upon some topic that would let them explore each other’s thoughts, the demon would pop up. It would cross her mind, for instance, that he might be a student as well as a teacher, that he was curious about her type, and she was a specimen upon a pin. So she froze up.

It was dreadful.

They dined in an atmosphere of total refinement at the best place in town. She was stiff. He was courteous. It was ghastly.

She had rehearsed a thousand times some way to tell him what she had meant by that blurted statement in the bus . . . some smooth, amusing way. It was no use. She could not.

Now and then he cleared his throat as if there were something he wanted to say, and he would moisten his lips. But he did not say it.

Those awful words of hers hung over them and before the evening was far along she thought that if he dared to mention them she’d just have to stare and pretend she didn’t remember a thing about it.

When they rose from the table she was ready to go home and bury her head (in what disappointment she couldn’t then imagine) and try to put the whole thing out of her mind forever. Whatever he had expected, he obviously hadn’t found it, for he agreed with a suggestion of relief that he would now take her home.

So they set off, in the little two-door sedan. It was only five blocks to where she lived. They were nothing at all but embarrassed strangers, anxious to part forever.

And so they might have done.

But in the middle of one quiet block, as they drove along, suddenly a house door was flung open. The gesticulating figure of a middle-aged woman ran into their path. “Help! My aunt! She’s hurt herself! Oh, I don’t know what to do!”

The professor got out and the dressmaker followed. They found an old woman lying on the rug, moaning. She had fallen on the stairs. Her head was gashed and bleeding. But she was conscious and terrified. It was the bleeding that frightened her.

Elizabeth knew a little first aid. She found that no bones were broken. The woman could move and stand. So Elizabeth staunched the head wound as best she could.

Meanwhile, Joseph Harte called the hospital.

In five minutes, they were in the car again. They put the old woman in the front, wailing and crying. It was Elizabeth who crawled the narrow way into the back, with the niece, who had gone all to pieces and whimpered uselessly. They would get to the hospital in minutes, once they started, but the frightened woman was rocking herself to and fro, although Elizabeth was doing her best to quiet her. It was going to be a most uncomfortable journey. The professor had the motor going.

Then, in that moment of noise, of moans and cries, he turned, suddenly, and put his hand on the old woman’s cheek.

He said to her, “Hush. I love you.”

And like magic, she fell quiet. She pressed her cheek against his hand, briefly, and then as they started off, she let her head fall back quietly against Elizabeth’s cradling arms. It was strange, very strange, but she was easy and quiet all the way to the hospital.

The old woman’s hurt was not serious. The niece would stay. Trained hands took over. Elizabeth went first, out to the car.

When the professor followed, he found her weeping there.

“I couldn’t believe you understood,” she told him. “I couldn’t believe that.”

“I came tonight to tell you that I did,” he said, “but I could find no way to tell you.”

And that was how it began, I suppose. How they discovered they were both in love with the whole world. How he came to have the air of a man who believed he could understand these things, and she the air of a woman who was absolutely sure that he could.

Nothing could have been more attractive, don’t you see?

“Just a perfect fall day,” said the young woman in her gentle voice.

“Very nice,” said Janet Brown.

“Do you see the red tree, beside the yellow? Isn’t that beautiful?”

“I see it.” But Janet, who was feeling contrary, thought, It is no more beautiful than green. Green trees are good enough, if it is beauty you want. Or a bare tree. Or any kind of tree.

“The sky’s so blue.”

Janet did not respond to this; she closed her eyes briefly. If she had her own teeth still, she would have ground them together. Well, this is the way the rest of it will go, she thought. Every suitable day, providing that I am judged able, some young Junior Leaguer, like this one, will wheel me into the open air and tell me that the sky is blue, the grass is green, the sun is shining. Or put me in a winter window and warn me that the snow is white. It is going to be a pretty fascinating and challenging existence, from here on out.

“I am so glad, Mrs. Brown,” the girl said, “that you were brave enough to come outdoors today.”

Brave? thought Janet. Dear child, I was desperate. She resolved, however, that she would insist upon being taken outdoors as often and for as long as she possibly could. After all, no matter who said so, the world outside was beautiful. Inside, the inhabitants of this Home were depressing to look at, almost as depressing as a glance into a mirror. I must see some beauty, Janet thought. I would like to hear something of importance, too.

Of course, she herself had been, so far, on her best behavior; she had watched her tongue. But not one of the inhabitants had said, so far, anything Janet considered to be worth the breath it took to say it. The nurses were all so cheerful and gay that it turned one sour, in some feeble redress of the balance of truth. These Junior Leaguers spoke to one as if one were feeble-minded. Watered down, thought Janet. Always patient, always kind. They wore an attitude like a uniform, all these kind young women who “gave up their time.”

“You are having visitors, today?” said this one, whose name was Beatrice something-or-other. One was to call her Beatrice. She wore a wedding ring. She wore a woolen skirt and a twin sweater outfit that was perfectly matched to the skirt in an odd rosy color, and had no doubt cost a great deal. She had on medium-heeled walking pumps that seemed to be made of real lizard. Her fair hair remained smooth in the faint breeze; her fair skin was not made up, unless it had been done very skillfully, indeed. She sat on a bench beside Mrs. Brown’s wheelchair, with her hands folded gracefully in her lap. Well born. Well mannered. Well married, no doubt. Charitably inclined?

Not necessarily, thought Janet, with more amusement than scorn. She is just doing a good work, because don’t they all?

She had been well born, well married, well off, once, had Janet Brown.

The girl was raising her voice, carefully and patiently, to repeat, “Are you having visitors today?”

I heard you, thought Janet. “Yes, I am. My daughter-in-law and my niece are coming. Soon, I imagine.”

“How nice,” said Beatrice, smiling a very pretty smile that did not push up the cheeks too far nor show the teeth too much. “And then you will want to give them tea, won’t you? That will be nice, I’m sure.”

You’re sure, thought Janet.

She looked at the blue sky, the brilliant clump of trees, the half acre of parklike slope. The city was blotted away. One knew it was there, beyond the trees and pleasant houses of this elegant suburb, but it did not intrude.

Oh yes, very nice. Monica was coming for a decision. To find out whether or not Janet, after having tried it for a week, could bear to stay here. And Janet was going to announce that she could bear it. Oh, more than that. She was going to lie in the teeth that were no longer her own, and announce that she liked it very much.

The fact is, I can’t bear to live with Monica, Janet was thinking. Not that the truth will be told. She did not dislike her daughter-in-law. She appreciated Monica’s “devotion,” quotation marks and all. But now that her son Eric was spending six months of the year abroad, the house seemed more Monica’s house than it had seemed before. And now that her old companion was gone, Janet had become Monica’s charge.

Alas, Johannah was dead. Johannah ought not to have died, having been only sixty-three. Janet Brown was almost eighty, and ought not to have been the survivor. But . . . here she was.

She thought, Sally Beth will be along for moral support, wearing her blue wool and her gold beads, I’ll wager. Monica will come in her beige suit, without her mink. I wonder if she knows why she never wears her mink when she comes to see me. She pities all here and she does not think it kind to appear too handsome, too prosperous, too obviously cherished. As a matter of fact, that mink stole makes her much too broad in the beam. . . . Oh come now, Janet, you must not think meanly of Monica, who is a good woman. Or of Sally Beth, who is simply a rather stupid forty-five and cannot help that. Nor must you think meanly of this place, or the world, for that matter.

But she went on thinking, Monica will say that she will not consider going to France with Eric, the next time, unless I feel perfectly happy here. And it is true, that if I were to make a fuss, she would not go. But I shall say that Monica must go, that this is a lovely place, very well run. I shall point out that here, there are companions of my own age.

Sally Beth will nod and beam and agree. She will think it is a great insight. Then we shall have tea. Monica will kiss me on the cheek and go creaking off in her girdle, almost sure that we have done the right thing. And I, if the truth were told, shall sigh in some relief.

And the truth will have been told, in a way.

But companionship I shall have, no more.

She had grown very thin, in these last years, Janet had. Her body was a bundle of old bones. Her joints were just not quite hurting. None of them moved easily. The knuckles of her brown spotted old hands were gnarled. Her legs were unsteady and her balance poor. She could shuffle along indoors, on the tightly stretched carpets, but not again would she walk freely on these gravel paths, or run on the slippery grass, like that pack of children, streaming across the slope now.

Sometimes her mind rested and ceased its turning and time passed in a dream. But her mind was turning much too fast and much too restlessly, today.

“You are not cold, are you, Mrs. Brown?” said Beatrice solicitously.

“No. No.” Janet was, in fact, feeling the chill a little. She was wrapped up in a woolen coat and she wore a hat, pulled well down, since her white hair had become so sparse on her head that the scalp showed. But there was no flesh to protect her bones, and her feet, in the ugly black shoes built to give support, were without sensation, already.

“I should think those children would freeze,” said Beatrice.

The children, there were about six little girls, were running with bare knees flashing under cotton dresses that flared and fluttered below their skimpy sweaters. Ah no, thought Janet. They have a chill on the outer skin, on their firm cheeks, on the ends of their little noses, but the warm blood is racing, inside. She could remember.

The children were suddenly in a knot and jumping, simply jumping up and down where they stood, as if they could not simply stand, and they were all screaming at the top of their lungs, each to be heard over the others.

“It must be a school holiday,” said Beatrice, a bit anxiously. “Does the noise bother you, Mrs. Brown?”

“No,” said Janet. It did not bother her, as noise. It seemed senseless, an unnecessary expenditure of energy. But it was better than to have been reduced to the necessary. It was that energy, so abundant as to be thrown away, that bothered her, by contrast. I, she thought, will strive with all my might, and for my vanity, I will lift the pot and pour the tea when my visitors come. Well, then, energy diminishes. It is the law. Janet watched the children.

The noise stopped suddenly and the tallest little girl, who had been in the very center of the knot, went pelting across the grass with her long, straight blond hair streaming behind her. She wore a red plaid dress and a torn white sweater and dirty sneakers on her racing feet. But she was graceful, with the grace of seven healthy years. That free abundant grace. She darted like a bird. The rest of the children seemed to go tumbling after her, in a comet’s tail. Now she turned and came straight toward them.

Beatrice said, with a slight defensive bracing of her body, “I suppose a holiday in the middle of the week is always great fun.”

Not always, thought Janet, still feeling contrary. Sometimes, one doesn’t know what to do with it. Stolidly, she watched the leader swerve and sail away to the right. When the pack went whooping and wailing behind some shrubbery, Beatrice relaxed.

“Shall I move you into the sun a little more, Mrs. Brown? I see you are in shadow. I don’t want you to catch cold.”

Oh, come on, thought Janet grumpily. If I caught cold I’d be incarcerated with the others and you wouldn’t have to devote yourself to only one of us.

“You are very thoughtful, my dear,” she said aloud. To herself she said severely, Come now, my girl, at almost eighty, do you resent having landed upon this fine expensive shelf? Or are you resenting that fine new mechanism, that scampers upon the earth in fine new power? It is the law and you have never been a woman to complain.

Beatrice had risen with the grace of being twenty-one-or-two, and now, with gentle control, she shifted the chair. “Is that better? Doesn’t the sun feel good?”

“Oh yes,” said Janet. “Thank you.” Oh yes, she was thinking, the sun, the great and terrible sun, in all its majesty and lifegiving mystery, it “feels good.”

Indoors, the old women would be swapping symptoms. Janet felt like weeping. She was not ill; she was merely old, and she had not chosen to be as she was, although she did not want to die. The trouble with you is, she scolded herself, you have not often been bored. Then you must get used to it.

The girl’s hand came to touch her lapel and draw the coat more nearly closed over Janet’s throat. It was a pretty hand, unblemished, supple, and it drew away quickly.

“Thank you,” Janet murmured. She knew very well that the young hand did not wish to touch her. She knew very well that she had not turned out to be, like some, a dainty pink-and-white old lady. Her ancient flesh was not attractive. No one would really touch her anymore, except a nurse, who was paid to do so, or a doctor, for his duty. It was another part of life that one outlived.

But she turned her wrinkled face to the touch of the sun and she thought, Well, there is the sun and there is the sky, and they must speak to me.

Suddenly the pack was on them. The child who led went by on the verge of the path, like the wind, and the others bumbled and bumped behind her.

Beatrice stood up, moving quickly. “Children,” she called. “You, little girl in the red dress. Would you please come here?”

The ringleader changed course and came around, leaning against the circle she was making, as if, with relish, she came to a meeting. Beatrice crouched to look into the flushed and somewhat haughty little face. They were not far away. There was nothing wrong with Janet’s ears.

“Tell me, have you permission to play here?” Beatrice sounded reasonable and kind.

“We always play here.”

“Don’t you think you ought to play away from the building?” Beatrice was gentle. “You really mustn’t bother other people, you know.”

But the little girl did not know anything of the kind. She wiggled backwards, swinging her little hind-end sassily. “We always play here,” she shouted defiantly, and was off. Her pack streamed after.

Beatrice came back to her bench, with her pretty smile on, saying to Janet apologetically, “I suppose this is a park to them. They are having so much fun.”

I don’t know about that, thought Janet. She seemed to know, instead, that the little leader was bored, that she was faster than the rest and that this bored her. She is ahead, thought Janet. She shouldn’t be playing with younger and slower children.

Beatrice sat down and said, “That one is a little rascal, I’m afraid, but isn’t she cute? I love children.”

Oh ho, do you? Janet wondered. In the abstract? What do you know about rascals? She said aloud, old-ladyishly, “Have you any children, my dear?” She guessed the answer.

“Not yet,” said Beatrice in a tone of reverence and faintly of apology.

Janet shivered secretly within the coat. Not yet. But I have been, she thought. I have not only been a little girl, a rascal, wild with energy and too quick for the others, but I have already been a young wife, like you, and I, too, said I “loved children.” And I, too, did not know what I was talking about until my son was born. I have been a young mother and got through that terror. I have been a mother grown older. I have also been a middle-aged matron, like Monica, and in those days I, too, encased myself and tried to diet and wore whatever was the thing to wear and “kept up” and ran around to “meetings.” I have been a widow. I have been a well-to-do old lady with a companion to whom I could say anything I chose to say, and with friends who were not yet dead or immobilized. And am now, in this chair, a bag of bones, raddled and worn. Yet I am still Janet. Still Janet. Still all those Janets.

Her mind abandoned this brooding and concluded, smartly, And that little girl is going to be compelled to tease us, now. I can remember.

“This air is so fresh,” Beatrice was saying. “Isn’t it good?”

“Yes,” said Janet. But so is the air of a cave, she thought, the frowst of human closeness, man and woman, mother and child, where we breathe each other’s breath. But no one will ever wish to be close to me, again. I, Janet, am one of those inside, where we shall sit in our separate chairs, after the nurses have washed us sweet and clean, and we shall all antiseptically watch television until we die.

She seemed to be seeing the whole pageant of her woman’s life and she thought, It was beautiful and it was cruel. It is still a little beautiful and very cruel. But that is the law. The best she could do, from now on out, was to peer at the world’s magnificence through whatever chinks she could find in a day. And be as little trouble as possible.

A challenging life, if you like, she thought, and said politely, “It is good of you to sit with me.”

So it is, she thought wearily. It takes control and sacrifice to be bored with any grace at all.

Then Beatrice stiffened. Something was coming. The little girl in the red plaid dress was flying along this path like an arrow. Full of mischief, under a compulsion to stir up some drama in this meaningless holiday, she ran deliberately too close. She did it to annoy. She stumbled over Janet’s footrest and went tumbling. The string of following children curled up on itself and watched, from afar.

Janet had felt a hard jolt, but the chair had not capsized, her feet had felt nothing. “Are you hurt, Mrs. Brown?” Beatrice was on her feet, looking pale and responsible.

“No. No.”

Beatrice took strides to where the child was picking herself up as nimbly as she had fallen. One of her knees was red. It was nothing. So Beatrice took her by the shoulder and said in a fierce voice that Janet had not heard before, “Look, sister, I warned you and now you have had it. You . . . go home.” Gone was her blandness. “Do you hear me? What is your name?”

The old lady in the chair could feel her heart beating, her blood stirring.

The child, who had been yanked by the angry adult hand so that she was looking into Janet’s face, did not say what her name was. Janet, with a strong and marvelous thirst to remember how it was to be in that skin, was meeting the child’s eyes. They were a smoky blue in color, yet very clear, and now they widened.

The little girl cried out, in a kind of shocked terror, “Hey, there’s somebody in there!”

Then she wiggled away from Beatrice, ducked her sun-streaked locks and was off like a wild thing. Her battered sneakers spurted gravel.

At the end of the path, Monica and Sally Beth were just stepping, side by side, through the gap in the hedge, from the parking lot. The child sensed their bulk, divined her only chance and in an instant took it, plunging through between them as their two bodies, encased like sausages in their stern girdles, each made a mighty swing at its middle to give her passage. The child was gone.

Now the two ladies uttered twin belated hoots of soprano alarm and clutched each other, tottering on their spike heels, reminding Janet of a pair of billikens on stilts. They were not hurt. They would not fall. The only thing that was upset was their dignity.

Janet knew that her mouth was making a wolfish grin. (It was the teeth.) She knew her old eyes were bright with the mischief that was in the child that was still in her. But she grinned up at this Beatrice, because her heart had lightened so. She knew that life, beautiful and cruel, was also sometimes funny.

“We survive,” she croaked, past the primitive laughter in her throat.

But the young face above her did not put on its sweet political smile. Those eyes met hers. They were greenish eyes, a trifle slanted. The pupils were set in the corners, now, as the glance came sideways. The look was grave. It said, thoughtfully, I see you.

Janet Brown was jolted. It was a collision. She covered her teeth. Why, there is somebody in there! she thought with a shock. Behind that smooth and charming face, there is a Beatrice who has been, and who will always be, among others, this Beatrice. As I am Janet.

They turned, together, to greet the accumulated Monica, and the continuance of Sally Beth, in the beige and the blue.

THE END

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