“He’s not even here,” Roger says to himself; like he had told the poet, he used to write poetry himself, and so he knew them. “He’s up there at Anne’s door now, kneeling outside her door.” And outside that door was as close to Anne as Roger got too, for some time. But that was later, and he and the poet are now in the office, with him trying to make the poet shut his yap and go up to bed, and the poet refusing.
“I cannot lie under your roof,” the poet says. “May I see Anne?”
“You can see her in the morning. Any time. All day, if you want to. Don’t talk drivel.”
“May I speak to Anne?” the poet says, like he might have been speaking to a one-syllable feeb.
So Roger goes up and tells Anne and comes back and sits behind the typewriter again and then Anne comes down and Roger hears her and the poet goes out the front door. After awhile Anne comes back alone. “He’s gone,” she says.
“Is he?” Roger says, like he is not listening. Then he jumps up. “Gone? He can’t — this late. Call him back.”
“He won’t come back,” Anne says. “Let him alone.” She goes on upstairs. When Roger went up a little later, the door was locked.
Now get this. This is it. He came back down to the office and put some paper into the typewriter and began to write. He didn’t go very fast at first, but by daylight he was sounding like forty hens in a sheet-iron corn-crib, and the written sheets on the desk were piling up. . . .
He didn’t see or hear of the poet for two days. But the poet was still in town. Amos Crain saw him and came and told Roger. It seems that Amos happened to come to the house for something, because that was the only way anybody could have got to Roger to tell him anything for two days and nights. “I heard that typewriter before I crossed the creek,” Amos says. “I see that blue dressing-sacque at the hotel yesterday,” he says.
That night, while Roger was at work, Anne came down the stairs. She looked in the office door. “I’m going to meet him,” she said.
“Will you tell him to come back?” Roger said. “Will you tell him I sent the message?”
“No,” Anne said.
And the last thing she heard when she went out and when she came back an hour later and went upstairs and locked her door (Roger was sleeping on the sleeping-porch now, on an army cot) was the typewriter.
And so life went on in its old, pleasant, happy way. They saw one another often, sometimes twice a day after Anne quit coming down to breakfast. Only, a day or so after that, she missed the sound of the typewriter; maybe she missed being kept awake by it. “Have you finished it?” she said. “The story?”
“Oh. No. No, it’s not finished yet. Just resting for a day or so.” Bull market in typewriting, you might say.
It stayed bullish for several days. He had got into the habit of going to bed early, of being in his cot on the sleeping-porch when Anne came back into the house. One night she came out onto the sleeping-porch, where he was reading in bed. “I’m not going back again,” she said. “I’m afraid to.”
“Afraid of what? Aren’t two children enough for you? Three, counting me.”
“I don’t know.” It was a reading lamp and her face was in the shadow. “I don’t know.” He turned the light, to shine it on her face, but before it got to her face she turned, running. He got there just in time to have the door banged in his face. “Blind! Blind!” she said beyond the door. “Go away! Go away!”
He went away, but he couldn’t get to sleep. So after a while he took the metal shade off the reading lamp and jimmied the window into the room where the children slept. The door from here into Anne’s room wasn’t locked. Anne was asleep. The moon was getting down then, and he could see her face. He hadn’t made any noise, but she waked anyway, looking up at him, not moving. “He’s had nothing, nothing.
The only thing he remembers of his mother is the taste of sherbet on Sunday afternoon. He says my mouth tastes like that. He says my mouth is his mother.” She began to cry. She didn’t move, face-up on the pillow, her arms under the sheet, crying. Roger sat on the edge of the bed and touched her and she flopped over then, with her face down against his knee, crying.
They talked until about daylight. “I don’t know what to do. Adultery wouldn’t get me — anybody — into that place where he lives. Lives? He’s never lived. He’s—” She was breathing quiet, her face turned down, but still against his knee — him stroking her shoulder. “Would you take me back?”
“I don’t know.” He stroked her shoulder. “Yes. Yes. I’d take you back.”
And so the typewriting market picked up again. It took a spurt that night, as soon as Anne got herself cried off to sleep, and the market held steady for three or four days, without closing at night, even after Pinkie told him how the telephone was out of fix and he found where the wires were cut and knows where he can find the scissors that did it when he wants to.
He doesn’t go to the village at all, even when he had a free ride. He would spend half a morning sitting by the road, waiting for somebody to pass that would bring him back a package of tobacco or sugar or something. “If I went to the village, he might have left town,” he said.
On the fifth day, Amos Crain brought him his mail. That was the day the rain came up. There was a letter for Anne. “He evidently doesn’t want my advice on this,” he said to himself. “Maybe he has already sold it.” He gave the letter to Anne. She read it, once.
“Will you read it?” she said.
“I wouldn’t care to,” he said.
But the typing market is still steady, so that when the rain came up this afternoon, he had to turn on the light. The rain was so hard on the house that he could watch his fingers (he used two or three of them) hitting the keys without hearing a sound. Pinkie didn’t come, so after a while he quit and fixed a tray and took it up and left it on a chair outside Anne’s door. He didn’t stop to eat, himself.
It was after dark when she came down the first time. It was still raining. He saw her cross the door, going fast, in a raincoat and a rubber hat. He caught her as she opened the front door, with the rain blowing in. “Where are you going?” he said.
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
