clouds of nicotine into his lungs at the very moment he was trying to ingest a bowl of tomato soup into his ulcered stomach.
Mr Jasper got it all.
Eyes beginning to emboss, he would wave it back. The women returned it. Thus did the smoke circulate until thinned out or reinforced by new, yet more intense, exhalations.
To face a full afternoon of complaints and queries and thumbing of merchandise and the topping of all by the girl who shared the counter with him and chewed gum as though she wanted the people in Arabia to hear her chewing. The smacking and the popping and the grinding made Mr Jasper’s insides do frenzied contortions, made him stand statue like and disordered or else burst out with a hissing:
Life was full of irritations.
Then there were the neighbours, the people who lived upstairs and on the sides. The society of
They were a unity, those people. There was a touchstone of attitude in their behaviour, a distinct criterion of method.
It consisted of walking with extra weighty tread, of reassembling furniture with sustained regularity, of throwing wild and noisy parties every other night and inviting only those people who promised to wear hobnailed boots and dance the chicken reel. Of arguing about all subjects at top voice, of playing only cowboy and hillbilly music on a radio whose volume knob was irretrievably stuck at its farthest point. Of owning a set of lungs disguised as a two to twelve months old child, which puffed out each morning to emit sounds reminiscent of the lament of air raid sirens.
Mr Jasper’s present nemesis was Albert Radenhausen, Junior, age seven months, possessor of one set of incredibly hardy lungs which did their best work between four and five in the morning.
Mr Jasper would find himself rolling on to his thin back in the dark, furnished, two-room apartment. He would find himself staring at the ceiling and waiting for the sound. It got to a point where his brain dragged him from needed sleep exactly ten seconds before four each morning. If Albert Radenhausen, Junior, chose to slumber on, it did no good to Mr Jasper. He just kept waiting for the cries.
He would try to sleep, but jangling concentration made him prey, if not to the expected wailing, then to the host of other sounds which beset his hypersensitive ears.
A car coughing past in the street. A rattle of Venetian blind. A set of lone footsteps somewhere in the house. The drip of a faucet, the barking of a dog, the rubbing legs of crickets, the creaking of wood. Mr Jasper could not control it all. Those sound makers he could not stuff, pad, twist off, adjust to — kept plaguing him. He would shut his eyes until they hurt, grip tight fists at his sides.
Sleep still eluded. He would jolt up, heaving aside the sheets and blankets, and sit there staring numbly into the blackness, waiting for Albert Radenhausen, Junior, to make his utterance so he could lie down again.
Analysing in the blackness, his mind would click out progressions of thought. Unduly sensitive? — he would comment within. I deny this vociferously. I am aware, Mr Jasper would self-claim. No more. I have ears. I can hear, can’t I?
It was suspicious.
What morning in the litter of mornings that notion came, Mr Jasper could not recall. But once it had come it would not be dismissed. Though the definition of it was blunted by passing days, the core remained unremovable.
Sometimes in a moment of teeth-gritting duress, the idea would reoccur. Other times it would be only a vague current of impression flowing beneath the surface.
But it stuck. All these things that happened to him. Were they subjective or objective, within or without? They seemed to pile up so often, each detail linking until the sum of provocations almost drove him mad. It almost seemed as though it were done with intent. As if…
Mr Jasper experimented.
Initial equipment consisted of one white pad, lined, plus his ball-point pen. Primary approach consisted of jotting down various exasperations with the time of their occurrence, the location, the sex of the offender and the relative grossness of the annoyance; this last aspect gradated by numbers ranging from one to ten.
Example one, clumsily notated while still half asleep.
Following this entry, Mr Jasper settled back on his flattened pillow with a sigh approximating satisfaction. The start was made. In a few days he would know with assurance if his unusual speculation was justified.
Before he left the house at eight-seventeen a.m., Mr Jasper had accumulated three more entries; viz:
One rather odd facet of Mr Jasper’s efforts came to his attention as he left his small apartment. This was, in short, that he had put down much of his temper through this simple expedient of written analysis. Not that the various noises had failed, at first, to set his teeth on edge and cause his hands to flex involuntarily at his sides. They had not. Yet the translation of amorphous vexation into words, the reduction of an aggravation to one succinct memorandum somehow helped. It was strange but pleasing.
The bus trip to work provided further notations.
The sniffing man drew one immediate and automatic entry. But once that irritant was disposed of, Mr Jasper was alarmed to note the rapid accumulation of four more. No matter where he moved on the bus there was fresh cause for drawing pen-point from scabbard and stabbing out more words.
Then Mr Jasper found himself standing again beside the man with the uncommon cold. He did not take the pad from his pocket but his eyes closed and his teeth clamped together bitterly. Later he erased the original grading for the man.
And at lunch, amidst usual antagonisations, Mr Jasper, with a fierce and jaundiced eye, saw system to it all.
He seized on a blank pad page.
