Saul scoffed at my apparent submission and seemed a little more content to retain the relative dimness of candlelight than the occurrence before dinner would have seemed to make possible in him. Notwithstanding that, I made no issue of it.
We retired to our rooms quite early as we usually do. Before we separated, however, Saul said something quite odd to my way of thinking. He was standing at the head of the stairs looking down, I was about to open the door to my room.
“Doesn’t it all seem familiar?” he asked.
I turned to face him, hardly knowing what he was talking about.
“Familiar?” I asked of him.
“I mean,” he tried to clarify, “as though we’d been here before. No, more than just been here. Actually
I looked at him with a disturbing sense of alarm gnawing at my mind. He lowered his eyes with a nervous smile as though he’d said something he was just realizing he should not have said. He stepped off quickly for his room, muttering a most uncordial good night to me.
I then retired to my own room, wondering about the unusual restlessness which had seemed to possess Saul throughout the evening manifesting itself not only in his words but in his impatient card play, his fidgety pose on the chair upon which he sat, the agitated flexing of his fingers, the roving of his beautiful dark eyes about the living room. As though he were looking for something.
In my room, I disrobed, effected my toilet and was soon in bed. I had lain there about an hour when I felt the house shake momentarily and the air seemed abruptly permeated with a weird, discordant humming that made my brain throb.
I pressed my hands over my ears and then seemed to wake up, my ears still covered. The house was still. I was not at all sure that it had not been a dream. It might have been a heavy truck passing the house, thus setting the dream into motion in my upset mind. I had no way of being absolutely certain.
I sat up and listened. For long minutes I sat stock still on my bed and tried to hear if there were any sounds in the house. A burglar perhaps or Saul prowling about in quest of a midnight snack. But there was nothing. Once, while I glanced at the window, I thought I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a momentary glare of bluish light shining underneath my door.
But, when I quickly turned my head, my eyes saw only the deepest of blackness and, at length, I sank back on my pillow and fell into a fitful sleep.
The next day was Sunday. Frequent wakings during the night and light, troubled sleep had exhausted me. I remained in bed until ten-thirty although it was my general habit to rise promptly at nine each day, a habit I had acquired when quite young.
I dressed hastily and walked across the hall, but Saul was already up. I felt a slight vexation that he had not come in to speak to me as he sometimes did nor even looked in to tell me it was past rising time.
I found him in the living room eating breakfast from a small table he had placed in front of the mantelpiece. He was sitting in a chair that faced the portrait.
His head moved around quickly as I came in. He appeared nervous to me.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” I said. “You know I never sleep this late.”
“I thought you were tired,” he said. “What difference does it make?”
I sat down across from him, feeling rather peevish as I took a warm biscuit from beneath the napkin and broke it open.
“Did you notice the house shaking last night?” I asked.
“No. Did it?”
I made no reply to the flippant air of his counter-question. I took a bite from my biscuit and put it down.
“Coffee?” he said. I nodded curtly and he poured me a cup, apparently oblivious to my pique.
I looked around the table.
“Where is the sugar?” I asked.
“I never use it,” he answered. “You know that.”
“I use it,” I said.
“Well, you weren’t up, John,” he replied with an antiseptic smile.
I rose abruptly and went into the kitchen. I opened up one side of the cabinet and retrieved the sugar bowl with irritable fingers.
Then, as I passed it, about to leave the room, I tried to open the other side of the cabinet. It would not open. The door had been stuck quite fast since we moved in. Saul and I had decided in facetious keeping with neighbourhood tradition that the cabinet contained shelf upon shelf of dehydrated ghosts.
At the moment, however, I was in little humour for droll fancies. I pulled at the door knob with rising anger. That I should suddenly insist on that moment to open the cabinet only reflected the ill-temper Saul’s neglect could so easily create in me. I put down the sugar bowl and placed both hands on the knob.
“What on earth are you doing?” I heard Saul ask from the front room.
I made no answer to his question but pulled harder on the cabinet knob. But it was as if the door were imbedded solidly into the frame and I could not loosen it the least fraction of an inch.
“What were you doing?” Saul asked as I sat down.
“Nothing,” I said and the matter ended. I sat eating with little if any appetite. I do not know whether I felt more anger than hurt. Perhaps it was more a sense of injury since Saul is usually keenly sensitive to my responses, but that day he seemed not the slightest particle receptive. And it was that blase dispas-sion in him, so different from his usual disposition, that had so thoroughly upset me.
Once, during the meal, I glanced up at him to discover that his eyes were directed over my shoulder, focusing on something behind me. It caused a distinct chill to excite itself across my back.
“What are you looking at?” I asked of him.
His eyes refocused themselves on me and the slight smile he held was erased from his lips.
“Nothing,” he replied.
Nonetheless I twisted about in my chair to look. But there was only the portrait over the mantel and nothing more.
“The portrait?” I asked.
He made no answer but stirred his coffee with deceptive composure.
I said, “Saul, I’m talking to you.”
His dark eyes on me were mockingly cold. As though they meant to say, Well, so you are but that is hardly a concern of mine, is it?
When he would not speak I chose to attempt an alleviation of this inexplicable tension which had risen between us. I put down my cup.
“Did you sleep well?” I asked.
His gaze moved up to me quickly, almost, I could not avoid the realization, almost suspiciously.
“Why do you ask?” he spoke distrustingly.
“Is it such an odd question?”
Again he made no reply. Instead he patted his thin lips with his napkin and pushed back his chair as though to leave.
“Excuse me,” he muttered, more from habit than politeness, I sensed.
“Why are you being so mysterious?” I asked with genuine concern.
He was on his feet, ready to move away, his face virtually blank.
“I’m not,” he said. “You’re imagining things.”
I simply could not understand this sudden alteration in him nor relate it to any equivalent cause. I stared incredulously at him as he turned away and began walking toward the hallway with short, impatient steps.
He turned left to pass through the archway and I heard his quick feet jumping up the carpeted steps. I sat there unable to move, looking at the spot from which he had just disappeared.
It was only after a long while that I turned once more to examine the portrait more carefully.
