Do you hear? “Quiet.” Mr. Steel’s tantrum is a whisper: “Quiet.” — You see? You see how he grabbed for the bracelet?
“Shhh. Give it here! We will have no scandal!” says Mr. Steel. “Lord knows what he’s capable of. We don’t know him. He has a foreign accent. Didn’t you hear? A rastaquouère. In for an inch, in for a mile. If he’s in it, let him be in it.”
Mr. Steel opened the wardrobe: he felt for an overcoat, the one in the back, the one furthest back; he unfastened its pocket; look! The bracelet’s in there, that’s where the bracelet is.
“But you won’t accuse a person who. .” (Let’s not forget: we’re talking about a sick woman, a delicate woman.)
Mr. Steel, however, has a persuasive “shhh!” Mr. Steel has a masterful “shhh,” produced with a finger to his lips.
And a cynical “pfff!” by which the women’s mouths are sealed for good.
Lovely Pallas in lovely armor changes visibly into an atrocious hand puppet from a fairground Pandora’s Box. “I have come for you,” she cackles, “flee, if you can.” And she rocks on the swaying spring of the words “you would have to submit to a search”; “flee, watch out, for you are innocent, flee, watch out, precisely because you are innocent, for you are also that to which shame gladly adheres; the impression is against you, Mr. Steel has charged you, he’s charged you falsely and knows it; Mr. Steel is strong, Mr. Steel will hand you over, for you are innocent.”
Such was the speech he heard from the horror that grew out of the words “you would have to submit to a search,” and barely had she finished speaking than he made a break for it. He’s running. Four steps at a time. Behind him, a vampire; before him, catastrophe. There’s a target, he’s an arrow aimed at a target; inevitably, he hits it. And what if he doesn’t? And why would he have to? Are there no such things as miracles?
Horror is hot on his heels, and hot on the heels of horror is the spry thought of a miracle. Hip! hip! Get going, little mouse. And the little mouse gets going, the little mouse is outpacing horror, oopsy-daisy! Now horror senses it on her back, its small, pink, ticklish snout, but how heavy it is, it’s heavier and heavier, and what’s with that whizzing that’s become of its amusing mousy squeak? “A miracle? A miracle? You’re where miracles go to die!” — And the rat is heavier and heavier, it’s not a rat, it’s his chafing affliction, it’s damned Saint Christopher’s mounting burden.
“I’m where miracles go to die”; does he feel, then, the head of cattle led to slaughter, and does he feel that infamy all his own?
He barges into the room — they’re here. Even today he can still hear how miserably he shrieked “out!” rummaging through the dresser. Rifling through his pockets. Each time he sank a hand into a new one, he wished with an absurd sort of hope that it would not be in vain. At the same time, he was both a feather, extended so far it hurt, and its sheath, which knows that it can allow the feather to go no further lest it break, and which dreads that moment, knowing it won’t outlive the feather. But the feather’s frenetic yearning to be let loose, and the panicked fear of the sheath, which knows only destruction can bring relief, were cracking with shared impatience, for things to ease up already. The yearning; the fear; a limit; a fall that has no end. — Only it wasn’t found, there was nothing in the pockets. He turned around. How must he have appeared that Mr. Steel, who was standing here with his hands stuck haphazardly in his pockets, allowed himself to say: “Don’t look there, surely it’s not there!” Yes, what kind of face had he made? Perhaps it’s enough to say a let-down one. We can’t exclude that he looked let down. How, too, to respond, and what to say, if you’re fascinated by the chest of drawers “where it might be as well”; the linens, now strewn about again, “where it might be, too”; the built-in dresser with ties, papers and books, nooks; and what about the wallpaper — might there be a tear in it? — And so many more, so many more potential seats of betrayal?
“So how did I look? So how did I behave?” Only now, in reverse somehow, does he see Mr. Steel’s mute and rhythmic “no’s.” This repeated negation was surely an answer. . But an answer to what? After all, he knows that he hadn’t said a word, that he hadn’t asked a thing.
He is sitting here on the chair. He’s dropped his left hand, the one with the “mail,” dead; the right, the one with the “chin,” is propped on his knee. Before him, yesterday; he’s looking at yesterday, and out of the blue it’s as though beneath something that’s a filthy brown. After a moment it dawns on him that that thing, sort of like a canvas, portrays the fleeting, present moment when they’re foraging in vain, to which Mr. Steel’s mute “no way’s” yesterday seem to apply. Now he knows! He’d ransacked the wardrobe to no avail; he’d turned to face the room again; he was sorely let down when he now suddenly realized what potential snares there still were here; and a new hope germinates within him. . He sees himself as though doubled: he sees himself as a moron, and how he is betraying himself, looking at Mr. and Mrs. Steel and at the possible hiding places and pointing with his finger here, there, over there. Which is to say: “So did you slip it into the linens?” — “No,” Mr. Steel remarked. — “Under the mattress, then?” — “No way!” that slanderer smiles.
No way, says the person sitting with his back to the window and gloomily resisting something he knows quite welclass="underline" that nothing will come of his resistance, no way, the negating twist of the head didn’t apply to the querying index finger. It did not apply, for Mr. Steel didn’t know that I was asking specifically for what I was asking for. If he had merely suspected, he would have. . “He would have what?” he retorted to himself, riled up with comical haste, “he would have what?”
But the answer that barged into his mind was so odious that, regardless of his actually now having answered himself (it sounded like: “He would have slapped me.”), he discovered a still more odious strength within himself; the strength to sequester that answer after the fact. He whitewashed it, word for word, with a question already carefully poised for ambush a moment earlier. It was the question: “How would it have been, then, had there been no negation?”
Actually, the person sitting in the window deferred that incredible object. Having answered the mental question of how it was appropriate to answer, it was as though he immediately forgot the answer, knowing nonetheless that he had forgotten and why he had to forget. Did he forget it? No, he merely embargoed it. The way alarming newspaper reports are embargoed at critical times. “Even the ones that are true?” Even the ones that are true. “But doesn’t their truth go on regardless?” Of course, their truth goes on regardless. “So then what have you gained by the embargo?” Time. You might gain some time.