THE BLEEDING HEART
the man in the library and had even been a little proud in a queer
way that he had a life quite secret, quite independent of the alter–
nate afternoons in the reading room and that what she did at other
times was equally unimaginable to him. But now beside the woeful
river, she was almost frightened to think of him just as she had almost
been frightened as a child when everyone had left the church after
the last
Mass
and she had wondered what happened then, whether
the plaster saints came to life and if God emerged, full-bodied, from
the wafers in the ciborium.
Rose did not know, until she was actually within her room again,
shadowy with dusk and musty with the old upholstery of the buckling
wicker chairs, that there had been another reason why she had not
liked to come back: now she was face to face with the knowledge that
she had seen the driver of the electric car who was, therefore, one
of the authors of the noises in the other house. The car had got
there before she did. The very moment she stepped across her
threshold onto the distempered carpet with its muddy oak leaves,
the sounds came, feebly ill-natured, straight to her anticipating ears.
There were no new sounds, no children's voices.
All that afternoon, while she was thinking of the man as he
sat in his own library (the Samuel Sewell was closed today) in one
of the white clapboard houses in the side streets of the town, the
dulled hubbub went on beyond the wall. At first she paid little heed;
she was thinking of the chintz wing chair he might be sitting in with
his feet on a brass fender before a fire. And at first the sounds were
unobtrusive. But toward dark, they became more insistent and she
grew fully conscious of them. Although she could not hear words
nor could she tell what sort of movements were being made, she was
entirely alert, straining to read this trifling mystery. Mter a little,
she was able to separate some of the noises and she heard a door
open and close and a telephone ring and a clock strike and outside,
in the street, she heard a boy irrelevantly cry, "Richard?" and she
heard something bump over an uncarpeted floor. But above-or
rather beneath, for it was little more than a jerky hum-the other
sounds, there was a voice complaining, directly on the other side of
the wall; it was a venomous and senile whimper which went on
and on. It seemed to be uttering short curses with just time for a
breath in between the tenth, perhaps, and the eleventh. Presently
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