Through The Wall Read Online Free Page B

very successful. Her faded hair, well streaked with grey, was at the moment disintegrating from the curls in which it had been set. She gave it a casual pat as she said,
    “You may well ask! You wouldn’t think anyone would, or him either! But the fact is they’d got each other’s backs up, and neither of them thinking anything in the world except proving they were right and the other one wrong.”
    “How grim! What did they do?”
    Mrs. Deane gave the hair another pat.
    “Stayed there till morning. Mrs. Pratt said she thought she knew something about swearing—her husband had been at sea, and you know what sailors are—but the language that inspector used was beyond anything she’d ever heard in her life. And you can’t really wonder! And after that they had the inspectors go round a lot oftener so it shouldn’t happen again—locking the door after the horse was stolen—because once was enough, I’m sure, and not at all the sort of thing you’d expect to have cropping up constantly, though you never can tell.”
    Ina went back to listening at the window which overlooked the street. She didn’t think Marian was locked in a lavatory, and she was quite sure she couldn’t be alone in a railway carriage with a lunatic, because the trains were always crowded till much later than this. But Mrs. Deane’s anecdotes had not been reassuring. There were a lot of other things that could happen to you besides getting locked in and meeting lunatics. Look at what you read in the papers every day. And it was all very well when it was happening to someone who was just a name in a column of newsprint—you read it, and it made a break in the dull everyday things which were happening all round you. And you didn’t mind very much even if it was something rather dreadful, because it didn’t seem real unless you knew the people yourself. But if something dreadful was to happen to someone you knew—if something dreadful was to happen to Marian—Her hands and feet were suddenly cold.
    And then she was listening and looking out, because the bus had stopped at the end of the road and people were getting off. One of them was a woman, and she was coming this way. She didn’t look like Marian. The road was not very brightly lighted. The woman passed into the shadowed stretch between the lampposts. Ina opened the window and leaned out. Now she was coming towards the light again— yellow light, spilled like a pool on the damp pavement. It must have been raining.
    The woman came into the pool of light, and Ina drew back, catching her breath. Because it was a stranger. It wasn’t anyone she had ever seen before. It wasn’t Marian.
    She shut the window and turned back into the room. She was really frightened now. It was after nine o’clock. Marian would never be as late as this unless something had happened. Something—the word was like a black curtain behind which all the imaginable and unimaginable terrors crouched. At any moment the curtain might lift or part. She stood there looking at the clock, whilst the cold spread upwards from hands and feet until she was shivering with it.
    At eighteen she had been quite unusually pretty, with dark curling hair, eyes like blue flowers—it was Cyril who had made this comparison—and the fine delicate skin which takes such a lovely bloom in health and fades so soon in illness. Ina was not actually ill, but she had lost her bloom. She led a dull, uninteresting life, and she had no energy to do anything about it. By the time she had tidied up their three rooms and walked round to the shops, where she had to stand in a queue for fish, it was as much as she could do to get as far as the library and change her book. She wouldn’t have missed doing that for anything in the world. Her fatigue would vanish as she took down book after book from the shelves, dipping here and reading there, fleeting the morning away till it was time to go home and make her lunch of whatever had been left over from