It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice.
He was used to that before he ever saw either of them.
He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised.
It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men.
‘She is trying to make me cry,’ he thought, lying cold and rigid in his bed, his hands beneath his head and the moonlight falling across his body, hearing the steady murmur of the man’s voice as it mounted the stairway on its first heavenward stage;
‘She was trying to make me cry.
Then she thinks that they would have had me.” Chapter 8
MOVING quietly, he took the rope from its hiding place.
One end of it was already prepared for making fast inside the window.
Now it took him no time at all to reach the ground and to return; now, with more than a year of practice, he could mount the rope hand over hand, without once touching the wall of the house, with the shadowlike agility of a cat.
Leaning from the window he let the free end whisper down.
In the moonlight it looked not less frail than a spider skein.
Then, with his shoes tied together and strung through his belt behind him, he slid down the rope, passing swift as a shadow across the window where the old people slept.
The rope hung directly before the window.
He drew it tautly aside, flat against the house, and tied it.
Then he went on through the moonlight to the stable and mounted to the loft and took the new suit from its hiding place.
It was wrapped in paper, carefully.
Before unwrapping it he felt with his hands about the folds of the paper.
‘He found it,’ he thought.
‘He knows.’
He said aloud, whispering:
“The bastard.
The son of a bitch.”
He dressed in the dark, swiftly.
He was already late, because he had had to give them time to get to sleep after all the uproar about the heifer, the uproar which the woman had caused by meddling after it was all over, settled for the night, anyway.
The bundle included a white shirt and a tie.
He put the tie into his pocket, but he put on the coat so that the white shirt would not be so visible in the moonlight.
He descended and emerged from the stable.
The new cloth, after his soft, oftenwashed overalls, felt rich and harsh.
The house squatted in the moonlight, dark, profound, a little treacherous.
It was as though in the moonlight the house had acquired personality: threatful, deceptive.
He passed it and entered the lane.
He took from his pocket a dollar watch.
He had bought it three days ago, with some of the money.
But he had never owned a watch before and so he had forgot to wind it.
But he did not need the watch to tell him that he was already late.
The lane went straight beneath the moon, bordered on each side by trees whose shadowed branches lay thick and sharp as black paint upon the mild dust.
He walked fast, the house now behind him, himself now not visible from the house.
The highroad passed the lane a short distance ahead.
He expected at any moment to see the car rush past, since he had told her that if he were not waiting at the mouth of the lane, he would meet her at the schoolhouse where the dance was being held.
But no car passed, and when he reached the highroad he could hear nothing.
The road, the night, were empty.
‘Maybe she has already passed,’ he thought.
He took out the dead watch again and looked at it.
The watch was dead because he had had no chance to wind it.
He had been made late by them who had given him no opportunity to wind the watch and so know if he were late or not.
Up the dark lane, in the now invisible house, the woman now lay asleep, since she had done all she could to make him late.
He looked that way, up the lane; he stopped in the act of looking and thinking; mind and body as if on the same switch, believing that he had seen movement among the shadows in the lane.
Then he thought that he had not, that it might perhaps have been something in his mind projected like a shadow on a wall.
‘But I hope it is him,’ he thought. ‘I wish it was him.