That was when the thing happened to him. He sat looking at what he had made in a gleeful and amazed amusement at his own cunning in contriving for God, for Nature the unmathematical, the overfecund, the prime disorderly and illogical and patternless spendthrift, to prove his mathematical problem for him, when he discovered that he had given six weeks to the month of October and that the day in which he now stood was November twelfth.
It seemed to him that he could see the actual numeral, incontrovertible and solitary, in the anonymous identical hierarchy of the lost days; he seemed to see the row of cans on the shelf a half mile away, the dynamic torpedolike solid shapes which up to now had merely dropped one by one, silently and without weight, into that stagnant time which did not advance and which would somehow find for its two victims food as it found them breath, now in reverse to time, time now the mover, advancing slow and irresistible, blotting the cans one by one in steady progression as a moving cloud shadow blots. Yes, he thought. It’s the Indian summer that did it. I have been seduced to an imbecile’s paradise by an old whore; I have been throttled and sapped of strength and volition by the old weary Lilith of the year.
He burned the calendar and went back to the cabin. She had not returned yet. He went to the closet and counted the cans. It was two hours to sunset yet; when he looked out toward the lake he saw that there was no sun and that a mass of cloud like dirty cotton had crossed from east to north and west and that the feel and taste of the air too had changed. Yes, he thought.
The old bitch. She betrayed me and now she doesn’t need to pretend. At last he saw her approaching, circling the lake, in a pair of his trousers and an old sweater they had found in the locker with the blankets. He went to meet her. “Good Lord,” she said. “I never saw you look so happy. Have you painted a picture or have you discovered at last that the human race really doesn’t have to even try to produce art—” He was moving faster than he knew; when he put his arms around her he jolted her to a stop by physical contact; thrust back, she looked at him with actual and not simulated astonishment now.
“Yes,” he said. “How’s for a spot of necking?”
“Why, certainly, friend,” she said immediately. Then she thrust herself back again to look at him. “What’s this? What’s going on here?”
“Will you be afraid to stay here alone tonight?” Now she began to free herself.
“Let me go. I cant see you good.” He released her, though he did manage to meet the unwinking yellow stare which he had never yet been able to lie to. “Tonight?”
“This is the twelfth of November.”
“All right. Then what?” She looked at him. “Come on. Let’s go to the house and get to the bottom of this.” They returned to the house; again she paused and faced him. “Now let’s have it.”
“I just counted the cans. Measured the—” She stared at him with that hard, almost grim impersonality. “We can eat for about six days more.”
“All right. Then what?”
“It was the mild weather. Like time had stopped and us with it, like two chips on a pond. So I didn’t think to worry, to watch. So I’m going to walk to the village. It’s only twelve miles. I could be back by noon tomorrow.” She stared at him. “A letter. From Mac. It will be there.”
“Did you dream it would be there, or did you find it out in the coffee pot when you were measuring the grub?”
“It will be there.”
“All right. But wait till tomorrow to go. You cant walk twelve miles before dark.” They ate and went to bed. This time she came straight and got into the cot with him, as heedless of the hard and painful elbow which jabbed him as she would have been on her own account if the positions had been reversed, as she was of the painful hand which grasped his hair and shook his head with savage impatience. “My God, I never in my life saw anybody try as hard to be a husband as you do. Listen to me, you lug. If it was just a successful husband and food and a bed I wanted, why the hell do you think I am here instead of back there where I had them?”
“You’ve got to sleep and eat.”
“Certainly we have. So why worry about it? That’s like worrying about having to bathe just because the water in the bathroom is about to be cut off.” Then she rose, got out of the cot with the same abrupt violence; he watched her cross to the door and open it and look out. He could smell the snow before she spoke. “It’s snowing.”
“I know it. I knew this afternoon she realised the game was up.”
“She?” She closed the door. This time she went to the other cot and got into it. “Try to get to sleep. It’ll be a hard walk tomorrow, if it snows much.”
“It will be there though.”
“Yes,” she said. She yawned, her back to him. “It’s probably been there a week or two.”
He left the cabin shortly after daylight. The snow had ceased and it was quite cold. He reached the village in four hours and found the letter from McCord. It contained a check for twenty-five dollars; he had sold one of the puppets, and he had the promise of a job for Charlotte in a department store during the holiday season. It was well after dark when he reached home. “You can put it all in the pot,” he said. “We’ve got twenty-five dollars. And Mac’s got a job for you. He’s driving up Saturday night.”
“Saturday night?”
“I wired him. I waited for an answer. That’s why I’m late.” They ate and this time she got quietly into the narrow cot with him and this time she even crept close to him who had never before known her to do such at any time, to anything.
“I’ll be sorry to leave here.”
“Will you?” he said quietly, peacefully, lying on his back, his arms crossed on his chest like a stone effigy on a tenth-century sepulchre. “You’ll probably be glad to get back, once you are there though. People to see again, McCord and the others you liked, Christmas and all that. You can get your hair clean again and your nails manicured—” This time she did not move, whose habit it was to assault him with that cold and disregardful savageness, shaking and jerking at him not only for conversation but even for mere emphasis. This time she lay perfectly still, not even breathing, her voice filled not with a suspiration but sheer amazed incredulity:
“You’ll probably. You are. You can. Harry, what do you mean?”
“That I wired Mac to come and get you. You’ll have your job; that will keep you until after Christmas all right. I thought I’d just keep half the twenty-five dollars and stay on here. Maybe Mac can find something for me too; if nothing else, maybe a W.P.A. job of some sort. Then I’d come on back to town and then we could—”
“No!” she cried. “No! No! Jesus God, no! Hold me! Hold me hard, Harry! This is what it’s for, what it all was for, what we were paying for: so we could be together, sleep together every night: not just to eat and evacuate and sleep warm so we can get up and eat and evacuate in order to sleep warm again! Hold me! Hold me hard! Hard!” He held her, his arms rigid, his face still turned upward, his lips lifted away from his rigid teeth.
God, he thought. God help her. God help her.
They left snow at the lake, though before they reached Chicago they had overtaken the end of the south-moving Indian summer for a little while. But it did not last and now it was winter in Chicago too; the Canadian wind made ice in the Lake and blew in the stone canyons holly-burgeoned with the imminent Christmas, crisping and frosting the faces of policemen and clerks and panhandlers and Red Cross and Salvation Army people costumed as Santa Claus, the defunctive days dying in neon upon the fur-framed petal faces of the wives and daughters of cattle and timber millionaires and the paramours of politicians returned from Europe and the dude ranches to spend the holidays in the air-carved and opulent tenements above the iron lake and the rich sprawling city before departing for Florida, and of the sons of London brokers and Midland shoe-peg knights and South African senators come to look at Chicago because they had read Whitman and Masters and Sandburg in Oxford or Cambridge—members of that race which without tact for exploration and armed with note-books and cameras and sponge bags elects to pass the season of Christian holiday in the dark and bitten jungles of savages.
Charlotte’s job was in a store which had been one of her first customers for the first figurines she had made.
