Crouching, he heard the dietitian and her companion enter the room.
The dietitian was nothing to him yet, save a mechanical adjunct to eating, food, the diningroom, the ceremony of eating at the wooden forms, coming now and then into his vision without impacting at all except as something of pleasing association and pleasing in herself to look at—young, a little fullbodied, smooth, pink-and-white, making his mind think of the diningroom, making his mouth think of something sweet and sticky to eat, and also pink-colored and surreptitious.
On that first day when he discovered the toothpaste in her room he had gone directly there, who had never heard of toothpaste either; as if he already knew that she would possess something of that nature and he would find it.
He knew the voice of her companion also: It was that of a young interne from the county hospital who was assistant to the parochial doctor, he too a familiar figure about the house and also not yet an enemy.
He was safe now, behind the curtain.
When they went away, he would replace the toothpaste and also leave.
So he squatted behind the curtain, hearing without listening to it the woman’s tense whispering voice:
“No!
No!
Not here.
Not now.
They’ll catch us.
Somebody will—No, Charley!
Please!”
The man’s words he could not understand at all.
The voice was lowered too.
It had a ruthless sound, as the voices of all men did to him yet, since he was too young yet to escape from the world of women for that brief respite before he escaped back into it to remain until the hour of his death.
He heard other sounds which he did know: a scuffing as of feet, the turn, of the key in the door.
“No, Charley!
Charley, please!
Please, Charley!” the woman’s whisper said.
He heard other sounds, rustlings, whisperings, not voices.
He was not listening; he was just waiting, thinking without particular interest or attention that it was a strange hour to be going to bed.
Again the woman’s fainting whisper came through the thin curtain:
“I’m scared!
Hurry!
Hurry!”
He squatted among the soft womansmelling garments and the shoes.
He saw by feel alone now the ruined, once cylindrical tube.
By taste and not seeing he contemplated the cool invisible worm as it coiled onto his finger and smeared sharp, automatonlike and sweet, into his mouth.
By ordinary he would have taken a single mouthful and then replaced the tube and left the room.
Even at five, he knew that he must not take more than that.
Perhaps it was the animal warning him that more would make him sick; perhaps the human being warning him that if he took more than that, she would miss it.
This was the first time he had taken more.
By now, hiding and waiting, he had taken a good deal more.
By feel he could see the diminishing tube.
He began to sweat.
Then he found that he had been sweating for some time, that for some time now he had been doing nothing else but sweating.
He was not hearing anything at all now.
Very likely he would not have heard a gunshot beyond the curtain.
He seemed to be turned in upon himself, watching himself sweating, watching himself smear another worm of paste into his mouth which his stomach did not want.
Sure enough, it refused to go down.
Motionless now, utterly contemplative, he seemed to stoop above himself like a chemist in his laboratory, waiting.
He didn’t have to wait long.
At once the paste which he had already swallowed lifted inside him, trying to get back out, into the air where it was cool.
It was no longer sweet.
In the rife, pinkwomansmelling, obscurity behind the curtain he squatted, pinkfoamed, listening to his insides, waiting with astonished fatalism for what was about to happen to him.
Then it happened.
He said to himself with complete and passive surrender:
‘Well, here I am.’