The Unpossessed Read Online Free

a milliner’s card came out. (But what did she want, this woman who— surely she loved her husband ?) “Madame Bertha invites you . . .” Well what was she after then—a letter from Jeffrey, from Bruno? a letter from Miles, “goodbye, my dear, I’ve gone away”? No, no, it was some thread, some meaning she was looking for; some way of finding the world without reading papers from Germany . . .
    She raced up the stairs in terror, in doubt.
    She burst the door open—and in the pit of her being peace vanquished regret, for there was no change and no sign of a change; for he sat there with his feet on a chair and with all that she loved and all that she hated him for written plainly on his face; he had come home, like a child, for his supper. He took off his glasses and his eyes opened and closed several times patiently like a baby’s growing used to her light. And she herself was taking off her hat to stay (enormously bored, enormously relieved) at the same moment that she advanced to kiss him.
    His hand shot up as though to ward off something. “Old Son-of-a-Bitch cut me again today,” he said; “and before I forget—Jeffrey called, to speak to you I think.” His hand wavered with an air, she thought, of laying a smoke-screen between them. “A ten percent cut,” he said with a certain grim complacence.
    She paused, startled by the irrelevance; “Old Son-ofa-Bitch?” she faltered, trying to focus her wits: her impulse being to cry impatiently “What of it? that has nothing to do with us ” ; then fluttered, lost to the notion of their being children playing at being adults, pretending to care about such irrelevancies; and rushed to him dropping the bundles, perceiving how his pride lay bleeding out of all proportion, tortured by how, in coming home to him, she had in her mind deserted him, had turned and fled from him twenty times.
    She would pierce his wavering smoke-screen and purge him with her comfort.

2. MILES
    BUT COMFORT was salt to his wounds. He had been reared to expect just punishment from an angry God; then God was mercilessly withdrawn and since then nothing adequate supplied. In punishment one found the final solace; in repentance the blessing of convalescence, return to grace. All of his life women (his aunts, his frightened mother, now Margaret) had come to him stupidly offering comfort, offering love; handing him sticks of candy when his soul demanded God; and all of his life he had staved them off, put them off, despising their credulity, their single-mindedness, their unreasoning belief that on their bosoms lay peace. For if he were once to give in, to let their softness stop his ears, still the voices that plagued him this way and that, they would be giving him not peace, but death; the living death of the man who has consented to live the woman’s life and turned for oblivion to love as he might have turned to drink.
    For Son-of-a-Bitch he had felt sharp admiration, when the man, by virtue of his superior position, bent to deliver perfunctorily to him the cut. He had bared his chest, had taken the cut without flinching, as his just due from Mr. Pidgeon pinch-hitting admirably for God; and then because he felt complacently like a dog he had wheeled his bleeding chest about and exposed for Mr. Pidgeon’s further flagellation the humble seat of his pants. “Has my work fallen off, Mr. Pidgeon?” And Son-of-a Bitch, stirred by no womanly compunction, led further perhaps by temptation than his original desire would have taken him, added to the cut a well-placed kick in the pants: “We might have cut you anyway, Flinders; but we don’t feel you’ve been getting much punch in your work.”
    Gratefully stung, Miles thanked him; that is, he said in so many words, “Perhaps you’re right.” And felt as he had felt when Uncle Daniel, flogging him with a wand of