JOHN THOMPSON
225
Besides, he has his faithful companion plodding Dobbin, pulling the
ice wagon from house to house, a few paces away. Dobbin would be half
asleep behind his blinkers, mumbling some sugar cubes. Perhaps he drops a
few neady formed oatsy road-apples, and fluttering out of nowhere in a
ruille of tiny feathers the innocent sparrows cock their litde heads and
hop,peck,hop,peck.
And being alone in a house is nothing to you or me--yet don't we
sometimes in an empty house try to extend our perceptions throughout its
hollows, and don't we in our stories and in our dreams, as if we were
unwilling to conceive of a place totally uninhabited, furnish the vacancies
at least an apparition for tenant? When we were kids, any dwelling that
stood vacant awhile and neglected was known to us as "the haunted
house" where we dared all comers to pass a night.
Alone--what harm can he do all alone? There is nobody there to be
harmed or to do harm. An intruder he is, but intruding on what? Why of
course upon the house itself. We know that in stories again and in dreams,
houses are not mere sticks and stones.
So much ofmankind's varied experience
has passed there.
..
.It was itself, that House of the Seven Gables,
like a human
heart.
...
What were the old timbers but its skeleton frame?
At windy times
it would bellow in its sooty throat (the big.flue, we mean,
of
its wide chimney.
. ..)
But Dick's house has no voice, not yet anyway; later he may have occasion
to fancy, almost, a certain animation as of flesh and bone. Now like
Goldilocks he yearns only for something
in
its abandonment to comfort
him in his own. No one has set out even one bowl of porridge to coolon
this kitchen table. And in the silence of the house his earache concentrates
itself evilly, pressing hot tears once more from his eyes.
Middle ear infections are common in children, so medical science
informs us. A child's short and straight Eustachian tube readily conveys
bacteria to an ear; the adult is blessed with a longer upward angled pas–
sage. Invading the middle ear, these bacteria foment a pressure of fluid
behind the tender eardrum resulting in considerable pain and sometimes
affecting the labyrinth or semi-circular canals themselves, whence we
receive our signals of balance. If an infection goes untreated, the fluid
pressure can break the eardrum. Such inflammation in the old days
before antibiotics could develop into dread mastoiditis threatening the
very brain. Luckily Dick doesn't know any of this lore nor indeed will
such peril arise for him. But what can he do? The house has received
him but it is not prepared to play nurse or nanny, let alone the role so
much more intimate than those and so absent now. Lost-and how can
empty absence weigh on us like all the shouldered world-"bear our
losses"-meanwhile we search for what seemed lost. How could it truly
be lost and gone and remain such a heavy burden? But at last the pro-
