A VIEW OF THE WOODS
495
discriminately, in the stomach and then in the crotch. Suddenly he
threw himself on the ground and began to roll like a man on fire.
She was on top of him at once, rolling with him and still kicking,
and now with both fists free to batter his chest.
"I'm an old man!" he piped. "Leave me alone!" But she did
not stop. She began a fresh assault on his jaw.
"Stop stop!" he wheezed. "I'm your grandfather!"
She paused, her face exactly on top of his. Pale identical eye
looked into pale identical eye. "Have you had enough?" she asked.
The old man looked up into his own image. It was triumphant
and hostile. "You been whipped," it said, "by me," and then it added,
bearing down on each word, "and I'm PURE Pitts."
In the pause she loosened her grip and he got hold of her
throat. With a sudden surge of strength, he managed to roll over and
reverse their positions so that he was looking down into the face
that was his own but had dared to call itself Pitts. With his hands
still tight around her neck, he lifted her head and brought it down
once hard against the rock that happened to be under it. Then he
brought it down twice more. Then looking into the face in which
the eyes, slowly rolling back, appeared to pay him not the slightest
attention, he said, "There's not an ounce of Pitts in me."
He continued to stare at his conquered image until he perceived
that though it was absolutely silent, there was no look of remorse
on it. The eyes had rolled back down and were set in a fixed glare
that did not take him in. "This ought to teach you a good lesson,"
he said in a voice that was edged with doubt.
He managed painfully to get up on his unsteady kicked legs
and to take two steps, but the enlargement of his heart which had
begun in the car was still going on. He turned his head and looked
behind him for a long time at the little motionless figure with its
head on the rock.
Then he fell on his back and looked up helplessly along the
bare trunks into the tops of the pines and
his
heart expanded once
more with a convulsive motion. It expanded so fast that the old
man felt as if he were being pulled after it through the woods, felt
as if he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward
the lake. He perceived that there would be a little opening there, a
little place where he could escape and leave the woods behind him.
