Short Stories 1927-1956 Read Free

things may have spied out the intruder had instantly withdrawn . I sighed, and turned away. The forsaken pierces quicker to the heart than by way of the mind. My green-winged car looked oddly out of place – even a little homesick – under the porch. She was as grey with dust as were my odd horseman’s whiskers. I had come to the conclusion – quite wrongly – that for the time being, at least, the place was unoccupied; though possibly at any moment caretaker or housekeeper might appear.
    Indeed, my foot was actually on the step of the car, when, as if at a definite summons, I turned my head and discovered not only that the door was now open, but that a figure – Mr Bloom’s – was standing a pace or so beyond the threshold, his regard steadily fixed on me. Mr Bloom – a memorable figure. He must have been well over six feet in height, but he carried his heavy head and heavy shoulders with a pronounced stoop. He was both stout and fat, and yet his clothes now hung loosely upon him, as if made to old measurements – a wide, black morning-coat and waistcoat, and brown cloth trousers. I noticed in particular his elegant boots. They were adorned with what I had supposed was an obsolete device – imitation laces. A well-cut pair of boots, nonetheless, by a good maker. His head was bald on thecrown above a fine lofty forehead – but it wore a superfluity of side hair, and his face was bushily bearded. With chin drawn up a little, he was surveying me from under very powerful magnifying spectacles, his left hand resting on the inside handle of the door.
    He had taken me so much by surprise that for the moment I was speechless . We merely looked at one another; he, with a more easily justifiable intentness than I. He seemed, as the saying goes, to be sizing me up; to be fitting me in; and it was his voice that at length set the porch echoing again – a voice, as might have been inferred from the look of him, sonorous but muffled, as if his beard interfered with its resonance.
    ‘I see you are interested in the appearance of my house,’ he was saying.
    The greeting was courteous enough; and yet extraordinarily impersonal. I made the lamest apologies, adding some trivial comment on the picturesqueness of the scene, and the general ‘evening effects’. But of this I am certain; the one thing uppermost in my mind, even at this stage in our brief acquaintance, was the desire not to continue it. Mr Bloom had somehow exhausted my interest in his house. I wanted to shake him off, to go away. He was an empty-looking man in spite of his domed brow. If his house had suggested vacancy, so did he; and yet – I wonder.
    Far from countenancing this inclination, however, he was inviting me not to leave him. He was welcoming the interloper. With a slow comprehensive glance to left and right, he actually stepped out at last under the porch, and – with a peculiar tentative gesture – thrust out a well-kept, fleshy hand in my direction, as if with the intention of putting me entirely at my ease. He then stood solemnly scrutinizing my tiny car, which, with him as solitary passenger, would appear more like a perambulator!
    At a loss for any alternative, I withdrew a pace or so, and took another long look at the façade – the blank windows, their red-brick mouldings, the peeping chimney-stacks, the quiet, serene sufficiency of it all. There was, I remember, a sorry little array of half-made, abandoned martins’ nests plastered up under the narrow jutting of the roof. But this craning attitude was fatiguing, and I turned and looked back at Mr Bloom.
    Mr Bloom apparently had not stirred. Thus inert, he resembled the provincial statue of some forgotten Victorian notability – his feet set close together in those neat, polished, indoor boots, his fat fingers on his watch-chain . And now he seemed to be smiling at me out of his bluish-grey, rather prominent eyes, from under those thick distorting glasses. He was suggesting that I should