Time Will Darken It Read Free Page A

the cry of
Ready or not you shall be caught
was no more alarming than the fireflies or the creak of the porch swing.
    Elm Street is now in its old age and nothing of all this is left. There are cars instead of carriages, no gypsy wagon has been seen in this part of the country for many years. The ice-cream wagon stopped being undependable and simply failed to come.
    If you happen to be curious about the Indians of Venezuela, you can supply yourself with credentials from the Ministry of Education and letters from various oil companies to their representatives in field camps. With your personal belongings and scientific instruments, including excavating tools for, say, a crew of twelve men—with several hundred sugar bags for specimens, emergency food rations, mosquito netting, and other items essential for carrying on such archæological work—you can start digging and with luck unearth pottery and skeletons that have lain in the ground since somewhere around A.D. 1000. The very poverty of evidence will lead you to brilliant and far-reaching hypotheses.
    To arrive at some idea of the culture of a certain street in a Middle Western small town shortly before the First World War, is a much more delicate undertaking. For one thing, there are no ruins to guide you. Though the houses are not kept up as well as they once were, they are still standing. Of certain barns and outbuildings that are gone (and with them trellises and trumpet vines) you will find no trace whatever. In every yard a dozen landmarks (here a lilac bush, there a sweet syringa) are missing. There is no telling what became of the hanging fern baskets with American flags in them or of allthose red geraniums. The people who live on Elm Street now belong to a different civilization. They can tell you nothing. You will not need mosquito netting or emergency rations, and the only specimens you will find, possibly the only thing that will prove helpful to you, will be a glass marble or a locust shell split up the back and empty.

3
    “If you want me to ask them to leave, I will,” Austin said, turning to the four-poster bed. “I’ll go right now and explain to them that it was all a mistake, and that we just aren’t in a position to have company at this time.”
    To do this meant that he and the Potters would have to face each other in an embarrassment so hideous that he didn’t dare think about it. Nevertheless, if that was what she wanted, if he had put a greater burden on her than she could manage, then he was ready, at whatever cost to himself, to set her free.
    “Seriously,” he said.
    The offer was not accepted.
    He turned away and opened the bottom drawer of the highboy, searching for summer underwear. “I’m going to take a bath and shave,” he said. “It’s almost five-thirty. Somebody has to be downstairs to let people in.” He went off down the hall.
    Now is the time to be quiet, to stand patiently in this upstairs bedroom and wait for some change in the position of the woman on the bed. So far as a marriage is concerned, nothing that happens downstairs in the living-room or the dining-room or the kitchen is ever as important as what goes on behind the closed bedroom door. It is the point at which curious friends and anxious or interfering relatives have to turn away.
    The big double bed, like the quilt, is an heirloom and possibly a hundred years old. At the top of each heavy square post there is a dangerous spike, intended to hold the huge canopy that is now in the Kings’ barn, gathering dust. The highboy, also of antique mahogany, contains a secret drawer in which (since Martha King had no secrets and Austin hid his elsewhere) are kept a velvet pincushion in the shape of a strawberry and odds and ends of ribbon. Originally dark, the woodwork in this room has been painted white. The windows extend to the floor and are open to the slight stirring of air that blesses this side of the house, carrying with it the scent of petunias from the