The cheap fur collar had not meant that.
Nor the tweed hat.
But to find just this kind of meanness and sordidness, the sight of Jones wheeling an ash can with bare hands, then dusting, with dusty hands, the ash from the knees of worn trousers—
And all with such an air of good cheer and confidence. The cock-sparrowlike sideways tilt of the head, the ridiculous little strut of accomplishment with which he returned along the cement path! This was something to tighten the muscles in one’s arms, to contract the fingers, to narrow the eyes. But just the same—
No, the objection was not real, could not be real, all this was a natural part of the strangeness, it was inevitable; and in its way, also, it was a fine enough sharpening of the whole point that in its discovery it should bring with it a pullulating ant heap of new and all-too-human experience: to have blundered thus into such an unforeseeable quagmire of the deformed and spiritually unvirtuous — horrible though it might be — was of the very essence of the chosen adventure. To think, for instance, only of the names of those streets, as contrasted with their actual nature — Vassal Lane, Alpine Street, Fayerweather, Fresh Pond Avenue — Alpine, of all things, in a district as flat as a dried river bed, and as noisome! And all the shabby purlieus, moreover, of filled-in clay pits and mudholes, acres of festering tomato tins and sardine tins, rusted fragments of cars, old bedsprings, blown paper, greasy rags. When the wind came from the northwest, one smelt a sour and acrid smell of slow burning, the animal odor of smoldering human refuse, worse than the ghats of India: it drifted day-long from the reclaimed quarries by Fresh Pond, covering the entire forlorn suburb of wretched houses in its bitter miasma. To think, in the morning, of opening one’s windows to that! In the evening, if one walked forth toward the pond, in search of the picturesque, perhaps a sunset over Belmont to lift one’s eyes to, one saw also the shadowy and sinister figures which poked, like hobgoblins, at a score of sickly little flames in that waste land, prodding with sticks to see if here or there some object might be salvaged from the heaps of refuse. Only the trees, in that district, had any dignity, the willow-trees;—and especially the one, an old one, with a trunk as massive as an oak, which stood at the junction of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street. And this had been useful. Its great girth gave excellent cover.
Of course Jones was poor — no one would live in a neighborhood like that if he could help it. If the Acme Advertising Agency did any business at all, it must be infinitesimal. No further proof of this was needed than that he had himself, twice, spent part of a morning in the bare hall outside the office — not a soul had come or gone in the whole time. And of course Mister T. Farrow must be a thing of the past — if he existed, he had at any rate never been seen. Perhaps Jones had just bought the name and good will. Anyway, apparently, Jones just sat there — three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon — without doing a thing. Once or twice, the telephone had rung, but it had been impossible to overhear what Jones was saying — it might even have been his wife.
What did he do there?
Perhaps that was where the whisky came in. Though he never showed any signs of it.
Or perhaps most of his business was mail-order advertising, the preparation of sales-letters — which could be managed largely by correspondence. A typewriter could be heard there intermittently, and used, moreover, with quite respectable speed. But always, then, came the long silence. In fact, it had soon become only too obvious that the fruitful end for observation was not the business, but the domestic, end of Jones’s little life-pattern — the study of the house, although a great deal more difficult, would in time be more rewarding. But how to manage this? To be seen hanging about there day after day, or even sitting in a car, would ultimately attract attention — it might not be Jones, it might be any one, but it would be dangerous. There was the problem of the postman, for instance.…
Toppan! The very thing.
He sat up in bed, switched on the light in the corner, looked at the hexagonal wrist watch — quarter to three.
Why not present the whole business to Toppan as a mere exercise in detection — the latest and best specimen — a particularly attractive problem? It would join on to the previous conversation perfectly: and his pleasure in it, both their pleasures, would be deliciously enhanced by the fact that Toppan wouldn’t quite dare presume that it was a question of the other thing, the pure murder, or in any case that it was for anything but the novel. Why not? And why not now? To rouse Toppan from his sleep, startle him, take him thus off his guard, with all his conscious defenses down, still surrounded, as it were, by all the naïve transparency of sleep — it would be like turning a harsh searchlight on a naked soul. An experience in itself.
In the study, knotting the dressing gown, he paused to look at the map, leaning close to it to familiarize himself once more with the tangle of small streets between Huron and Concord Avenues, and also to observe the column of dates which he had entered in pencil on the upper left-hand margin: ten of them, — the latest this morning’s. It looked formidable enough. Ten days. Possibly a little slow: but certainly there had been no delay? Map of the City of Cambridge. C. Frank Hooker Acting Engineer. 1932.…
From the table beneath it he picked up the small green book which lay open there, with the pages downward, and read again the passage which had caught his attention earlier in the evening. “But there is the dark eye which glances with a certain fire, and has no depth. There is a keen quick vision which watches, which beholds, but which never yields to the object outside: as a cat watching its prey. The dark glancing look which knows the strangeness, the danger of its object, the need to overcome the object. The eye which is not wide open to study, to learn, but which powerfully, proudly or cautiously glances, and knows the terror or the pure desirability of strangeness in the object it beholds.” Extraordinary that Lawrence should have said just that — italicizing the word “strangeness”—but wasn’t he completely mistaken in assuming that there was no desire — in the savage eye — to learn, to study? In any case, what was the savage eye? Who was to say? or who was to say that — finally speaking — it wasn’t the only true eye in the world, the only one which saw virtuously?
The terror, or the desirability of strangeness.
The pure desirability!
That was odd, too. An odd, but perhaps natural, antithesis. Something a little uncomfortable in it, as well. But why? After all, if the prime need was to overcome the object, then the study of it was absolutely indispensable, was simply a means to an end. The cat, in short, understands—in the deepest sense — the mouse: observes it with that sort of pure virtue of love which is the prelude to conquest. It sees, and knows, the mouse—and that is precisely its playing with it. In the savage eye there is therefore not merely the desire to kill, there is also that look which just as coldly embraces a tree, a landscape, a star, an idea. It must purify what it sees, and see what it purifies: the only vision which is noble. There is no compromise with the object, no placid or reasoned acceptance of it. It is seen, understood, and destroyed. The vision is pure.