was followed by a great surge of relief, much like what one would feel on setting down a forty-pound pack after forty years. He had not known… he had not
And away went the restimulation. Back into the past went the whip and the bellowing, the magic and the loss -remembered still, but back where they belonged, with their raw-nerve tendrils severed so that never again could they reach into his present. The call was no maelstrom of blood and emotion, but the aimless chunterings of a hungry brat.
He sank and shot backward like a great lean crawfish, under the fence. He slogged up out of the brook, turned his back on the call and went back to his work.
When he got back to his shelter, streaming with perspiration, an eighteen-inch flagstone on his shoulder, he was weary enough to forget his usual caution. He crashed in through the underbrush to the tiny clearing before his door, and stopped dead.
There was a small naked infant about four years old squatting in front of his door.
She looked up at him and her eyes – her whole dark face – seemed to twinkle. ‘He-hee!’ she said happily.
He tipped the stone off his shoulder and let it fall. He loomed over her, shadowed her; sky-high and full of the threats of thunder.
She seemed completely unafraid. She turned her eyes away from him and busily began nibbling at a carrot, turning it squirrel-wise, around and around as she ate.
A high movement caught his eye. Another carrot was emerging from the ventilation chinks in the log wall. It fell to the ground and was followed by still another.
‘Ho-ho.’ He looked down, and there were
The only advantage which Lone possessed under these circumstances was a valuable one: he had no impulse whatever to question his sanity and start a confusing debate with himself on the matter. He bent down and scooped one of the children up. But when he straightened she wasn’t there any more.
The other was. She grinned enchantingly and started on one of the new carrots.
Lone said, ‘What you doing?’ His voice was harsh and ill-toned, like that of a deaf-mute. It startled the child. She stopped eating and looked up at him open-mouthed. The open mouth was filled with carrot chips and gave her rather the appearance of a pot-bellied stove with the door open.
He sank down on his knees. Her eyes were fixed on his and his were eyes which had once commanded a man to kill himself and which, many times, violated the instincts of others who had not wanted to feed him. Without knowing why he was careful. There was no anger in him or fear; he simply wanted her to stay still.
When he was done, he reached for her. She exhaled noisily, blowing tiny wet chips of raw carrot into his eyes and nostrils, and vanished.
He was filled with astonishment – a strange thing in itself, for he had seldom been interested enough in anything to be astonished. Stranger still, it was a respectful astonishment.
He rose and put his back against the log wall, and looked for them. They stood side by side, hand in hand, looking up at him out of little wooden wondering faces, waiting for him to do something else.
Once, years ago, he had run to catch a deer. Once he had reached up from the ground to catch a bird in a treetop. Once he had plunged into a stream after a trout.
Once.
Lone was simply not constituted to chase something he knew empirically that he could not catch. He bent and picked up his flagstone, reached up and slid aside the outside bar which fastened his door and shouldered into the house.
He bedded his flagstone by the fire and swept the guttering embers over part of it. He threw on more wood and blew it up brightly, set up his green-stick crane and swung the iron pot on it. All the while there were two little white-eyed knobs silhouetted in the doorway, watching him. He ignored them.
The skinned rabbit swung on the high hook by the smoke hole. He got it down, tore off the quarters, broke the back and dropped it all into the pot. From a niche he took potatoes and a few grains of rock salt. The salt went into the pot and so did the potatoes after he had split them in two on his axe-blade. He reached for his carrots. Somebody had been at his carrots.
He wheeled and frowned at the doorway. The two heads whipped back out of sight. From outdoors came small soprano giggles.
Lone let the pot boil for an hour while he honed the axe and tied up a witch’s broom like Mrs Prodd’s. And slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his visitors edged into the room. Their eyes were fixed on the seething pot. They fairly drooled.
He went about his business without looking at them. When he came close they retreated and when he crossed the room they entered again – that little fraction more each time. Soon their retreats were smaller and their advances larger until at last Lone had a chance to slam the door shut – which he did.
In the sudden darkness, the simmer of the pot and the small hiss of the flames sounded very loud. There was no other sound. Lone stood with his back against the door and closed his eyes very tight to adjust them more quickly to the darkness. When he opened them, the bars of waning daylight at the vents and the fireglow were quite sufficient for him to see everything in the room.
The little girls were gone.
He put on the inner bar and slowly circled the room. Nothing.
He opened the door cautiously, then flung it wide. They were not outside either.
He shrugged. He pulled on his lower lip and wished he had more carrots. Then he set the pot aside to cool enough so that he could eat and finished honing the axe.
At length he ate. He had reached the point of licking his fingers by way of having dessert, when a sharp knock on the door caused him to leap eighteen inches higher than upright, so utterly unexpected was it.
In the doorway stood the little girl in the plaid dress. Her hair was combed, her face scrubbed. She carried with a superb air an object which seemed to be a handbag but which at second glance revealed itself as a teakwood cigarette box with a piece of binder-twine fastened to it with four-inch nails. ‘Good evening,’ she said concisely. ‘I was passing by and thought I would come to call. You
This parroting of a penurious beldame who once was in the habit of cadging meals by this means was completely incomprehensible to Lone. He resumed licking his fingers but he kept his eyes on the child’s face. Behind the girl, suddenly, appeared the heads of his two previous visitors peeping around the doorpost.
The child’s nostrils, then her eyes, found the stewpot. She wooed it with her gaze, yearned. She yawned, too, suddenly. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said demurely. She pried open the lid of the cigarette box, drew out a white object and folded it quickly but not quickly enough to conceal the fact that it was a large man’s sock, and patted her lips with it.
Lone rose and got a piece of wood and placed it carefully on the fire and sat down again. The girl took another step. The other two scuttled in and stood, one on each side of the doorway like toy soldiers. Their faces were little knots of apprehension. And they were clothed this time. One wore a pair of lady’s linen bloomers, the like of which has not been seen since cars had tillers. It came up to her armpits, and was supported by two short lengths of the same hairy binder-twine, poked through holes torn in the waistband and acting as shoulder straps. The other one wore a heavy cotton slip, or at least the top third of it. It fell to her ankles where it showed a fringe of torn and unhemmed material.
With the exact air of a lady crossing a drawing room towards the bonbons, the white child approached the stew-pot, flashed Lone a small smile, lowered her eyelids and reached down with a thumb and forefinger, murmuring, ‘May I?’
Lone stretched out one long leg and hooked the pot away from her and into his grasp. He set it on the floor on the side away from her and looked at her woodenly.
‘You’re a real cheap stingy son of a bitch,’ the child quoted.
This also missed Lone completely. Before he had learned to be aware of. what men said, such remarks had been meaningless. Since, he had not been exposed to them. He stared at her blankly and pulled the pot protectively closer.
The child’s eyes narrowed and her colour rose. Suddenly she began to cry. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’m hungry.
