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PARTISAN REVIEW
a caddis worm as bait?" The wine in the man's throat gurgled: like a
death rattle as he looked out at the levelled mountains. "There was
a short notice in some review or other," he said, "outlined in black.
Even so ... even so ..."
In the limbo where he waited a moment before he wakened
fully, he thought he was writing the opening paragraph of a chil–
dren's story in which a little boy lay on his stomach drinking water
from a stream. Suddenly
his
eyes encountered two others, hooded,
sparkling with some horrible intelligence. They belonged to a mon–
strous caddis worm which advanced through the water as he with–
drew.
He woke violently. He clasped his hands to his forehead and in
the darkness softly moaned. "I must control myself. I must not perish
here."
3.
Late in May, Milenka disappeared. Dr. Pakheiser was disturbed
but not really anxious until the fourth night passed and' he still dined
alone. On the fifth morning he diffidently asked Mrs. Horvath if
she had seen the cat, and he detected something doubtful, something
covert in her reply. She was not arrogant and her eyes seemed unable
to focus on
his
face. She said- uncomfortably, it seemed to him–
"No, Doctor. I see him Sunday. My husband see him Sunday. He
come back, don't you worry." Then she looked directly at him and
smiled, "He know where his sardine is, I tell you." The doctor was
smoking and as he went to the table to drop a long ash into the tray
there, his hand abruptly shook and the ashes fell to the carpet. He and
the woman both briefly looked at them, dispersed fanwise on the
green border. And he knew then that she was hiding something, for
she did not reproach
him
for his clumsiness even though she had just
finished using the carpet sweeper. He was so angry that he stumbled
to the door and his rage so blinded him that he had to lean against
the jamb a moment before he could see the steps.
It
was, not, at this
moment, that he was mourning the loss of Milenka; it was that he
had sensed, despite her near-civility and his own timorousness, as
killing a hatred between them as though they were two jungle beasts,
determined to destroy one another.
"If
she has killed my cat," he
brooded as he drove through the gate, "then I . . . " but he could
not finish the sentence. He could devise no penalty high enough for
such wickedness, no penance sufficiently humiliating.
For two weeks nothing passed between the manageress and her
lodger. Nothing, that is, but glances boldly indignant on the doctor's
