She tried to jerk her arm loose. “Let me alone.”
“You can’t go out in this. What is it?”
“Let me alone. Please.” She jerked her arm, pulling at the door which he was holding.
“You can’t. What is it? I’ll do it. What is it?”
But she just looked at him, jerking at her arm and at the door knob. “I must go to the village. Please, Roger.”
“You can’t do that. At night, and in all this rain.”
“Please. Please.” He held her. “Please. Please.” But he held her, and she let the door go and went back up stairs. And he went back to the typewriter, to this market still going great guns.
He is still at it at midnight. This time Anne has on a bathrobe. She stands in the door, holding to the door. Her hair is down. “Roger,” she says. “Roger.”
He goes to her, fast for a fat man; maybe he thinks she is sick. “What? What is it?”
She goes to the front door and opens it; the rain comes in again. “There,” she says. “Out there.”
“What?”
“He is. Blair.”
He draws her back. He makes her go to the office, then he puts on his raincoat and takes the umbrella and goes out. “Blair!” he calls. “John!” Then the shade on the office window goes up, where Anne has raised it and carried the desk lamp to the window and turned the light out-doors, and then he sees Blair, standing in the rain, without any hat, with his blue coat like it was put on him by a paper-hanger, with his face lifted toward Anne’s window.
And here we are again: the bald husband, the rural plute, and this dashing blade, this home-wrecking poet. Both gentlemen, being artists: the one that doesn’t want the other to get wet; the other whose conscience won’t let him wreck the house from inside. Here we are, with Roger trying to hold one of these green silk, female umbrellas over himself and the poet too, jerking at the poet’s arm.
“You damned fool! Come in the house!”
“No.” His arm gives a little as Roger jerks at it, but the poet himself doesn’t move.
“Do you want to drown? Come on, man!”
“No.”
Roger jerks at the poet’s arm, like jerking at the arm of a wet saw-dust doll. Then he begins to yell at the house: “Anne! Anne!”
“Did she say for me to come in?” the poet says.
“I — Yes. Yes. Come in the house. Are you mad?”
“You’re lying,” the poet says. “Let me alone.”
“What are you trying to do?” Roger says. “You can’t stand here like this.”
“Yes, I can. You go on in. You’ll take cold.”
Roger runs back to the house; they have an argument first because Roger wants the poet to keep the umbrella and the poet won’t do it. So Roger runs back to the house. Anne is at the door. “The fool,” Roger says. “I can’t—”
“Come in!” Anne calls. “John! Please!” But the poet has stepped out of the light and vanished. “John!” Anne calls. Then she began to laugh, staring at Roger from between her hair brushing at her hair with her hands. “He — he looked so f — funny. He I — looked so—” Then she was not laughing and Roger had to hold her up. He carried her upstairs and put her to bed and sat with her until she could stop crying. Then he went back to the office. The lamp was still at the window, and when he moved it the light went across the lawn and he saw Blair again.
He was sitting on the ground, with his back against a tree, his face raised in the rain toward Anne’s window. Roger rushed out again, but when he got there, Blair was gone. Roger stood under the umbrella and called him for a while, but he never got any answer. Maybe he was going to try again to make the poet take the umbrella. So maybe he didn’t know as much about poets as he thought he did. Or maybe he was thinking about Pope. Pope might have had an umbrella.
They never saw the poet again. This one, that is. Because this happened almost six months ago, and they still live there. But they never saw this one. Three days later, Anne gets the second letter, mailed from the village. It is a menu card from the Elite Café, or maybe they call it the Palace. It was already autographed by the flies that eat there, and the poet had written on the back of it. Anne left it on Roger’s desk and went out, and then Roger read it.
It seems that this was the shot. The one that Roger had always claimed to be waiting for. Anyway, the magazines that don’t have any pictures took the poem, stealing it from one another while the interest or whatever it was ate up the money that the poet never got for it. But that was all right, too, because by that time Blair was dead.
Amos Crain’s wife told them how the poet had left town. And a week later Anne left too. She went up to Connecticut to spend the rest of the summer with her mother and father, where the children were. The last thing she heard when she left the house was the typewriter.
But it was two weeks after Anne left before Roger finished it, wrote the last word. At first he wanted to put the poem in too, this poem on the menu card that wasn’t about freedom, either, but he didn’t. Conscience, maybe he called it, put over the old haymaker, and Roger took it standing, like a little man, and sent off the poem for the magazines to jaw over, and tied up the papers he had written and sent them off too. And what was it he had been writing?
Him, and Anne, and the poet. Word for word, between the waiting spells to find out what to write down next, with a few changes here and there, of course, because live people do not make good copy, the most interesting copy being gossip, since it mostly is not true.
So he bundled the pages up and sent them off and they sent him the money. It came just in time, because the winter was coming and he still owed a balance on Blair’s hospital and funeral. So he paid that, and with the rest of the money he bought Anne a fur coat and himself and the children some winter underwear.
Blair died in September. Anne and the children were still away when he got the wire, three or four days late, since the next batch of them had not arrived yet. So here he is, sitting at his desk, in the empty house, with the typewriting all finished, holding the wire in his hand. “Shelley,” he says. “His whole life was a not very successful imitation of itself. Even to the amount of water it took.”
He didn’t tell Anne about the poet until after the fur coat came. “Did you see that he . . .” Anne said.
“Yes. He had a nice room, in the sun. A good nurse. The doctor didn’t want him to have a special nurse at first. Damn butcher.”
Sometimes when a man thinks about them making poets and artists and such pay these taxes which they say indicates that a man is free, twenty-one, and capable of taking care of himself in this close competition, it seems like they are obtaining money under false pretenses. Anyway, here’s the rest of it, what they did next.
He reads the book, the story, to her, and her not saying anything until he had finished. “So that’s what you were doing,” she said.
He doesn’t look at her, either; he is busy evening the pages, getting them smooth again. “It’s your fur coat,” he said.
“Oh,” she says. “Yes. My fur coat.”
So the fur coat comes. And what does she do then? She gave it away. Yes. Gave it to Mrs. Crain. Gave it to her, and her in the kitchen, churning, with her hair in her face, brushing her hair back with a wrist that looked like a lean ham. “Why, Miz Howes,” she says. “I caint. I reely caint.”
“You’ll have to take it,” Anne says. “We — I got it under false pretenses. I don’t deserve it. You put bread into the ground and reap it; I don’t. So I can’t wear a coat like this.”
And they leave it there with Mrs. Crain and they go back home, walking. Only they stop in broad daylight, with Mrs. Crain watching them from the window, and go into a clinch on their own account. “I feel better,” Anne says.
“So do I,” Roger says. “Because Blair wasn’t there to see Mrs. Crain’s face when you gave her that coat. No freedom there, or equality either.”
But Anne is not listening. “Not to think,” she says, “that he . . . to dress me in the skins of little slain beasts. . . . You put him in a book, but you didn’t finish it. You didn’t know about that coat, did you? God beat you, that time, Roger.”
“Ay,” Roger says. “God beats me lots of times. But there’s one thing about it. Their children are bigger than ours, and even Mrs. Crain can’t wear my underclothes. So that’s all right.”
Sure. That was all right.
