— Then, what is it?
— Yes, since they don't know what they're looking for, of course they don't see anything, wandering around in the daylight. There's so much daylight you can't see anything up there, unless you cut a path through it. Why, in good weather, one afternoon I saw Aldebaran, the red Eye of the Bull, keeping watch on the Pleiades, you know. That means it's a very old star, being red like that. Yes, the red Eye of Taurus, he muttered coming back, — keeping a watch on them. They bear some watching, the Pleiades. . Do you know? One night I was assailed in the darkness. A man struck me, square across the eyes, and do you know, from that blow? the force of it brought light to my eyes? and I identified him afterward, I saw him plain as could be. His American Legion cap showed as plain as could be. Then he looked round evasively. — Tell me, he said, close by again, — did you bring your great Mirror?
— Mirror. .?
— There now, it's not easy to transport, I imagine. The great mirror in which you can see all that goes on in your kingdoms. But… we need it here, he said bending closer, and with another quick look round, — the American Legion. They watch me all the time, you know. Very interested, very interested in this of course. He included the balloon stand in a gesture. — Though it's no secret. Why, more than one night they've come and picketed the house here. With your great mirror, we could keep an eye on them, the Town Carpenter finished, and watched intently the pockets searched before him until the gold cigarette case was brought out, empty. — For the messages! he exclaimed, taking it. — And with the secret inscription. There now, later you will explain it to me, he said, running his thumb over the words; then in a sudden feat of conjuring the gold case was gone inside the frontal folds of his clothing, and he stood with a large watch snapped open in his hand. — Of course I'd have known you anywhere, he said raising his brilliant eyes from the watch face. — There now, eleven-thirty. Later on we shall simplify things. Why, all the others are drowning in details. That's what happens to them, you know. That's where we'll outwit them. We must simplify. .
His words were caught on the wind. The dog followed him. Before he was out of sight, there was the sound of thunder, rolling like a body to rest in the south. The Town Carpenter shook his fist at it, but did not diminish his step.
The wind had come up quite sudden. It commenced to blow with that terrible quality peculiar to the winter wind, pointless, and the more bitter. March winds make a boisterous kind of sense, blowing seeds and seed-pods, blowing off the white pustular symptoms of winter, awakening, preparing for growth; and a vengeful sense in the fall, so long as a leaf remains where it grew, but the winter wind blows nothing, and blows that nowhere, blows with destructive violence where there is nothing left to destroy, vindictive and viciously fingered to leave no crevice untouched. Looking up, even the balloon stand is testament to something, erect with the stupid patience of objects so violated, testimony found futile as the wincî itself in the envy as quickly rejected as it is longed after. The clouds conspired over Mount Lamentation had lost their distinct edges, and mounted in a dark mass as though what lay beyond there were already suffering what the wind, if simply to justify itself, threatened to bring closer. It blew round the corners of the carriage barn, over the snow clotted against the mound of what had been the kitchen midden for as long as he could remember, over the snow crusted on the ground behind the barn, showing its surface here and there as though that ground had never been disturbed, as though the surface were all of it that existed.
He drew his shoulders closer together still, and almost lost his balance as he turned away from this desolation where something moved with the sudden effortless ease of an apparition, unconcerned with inertia, unrestricted by the ingenious arrangement of muscle and tendon, weight and intention whose failure to coincide threatened to upset him now. He made the gesture he might have made if he had had a stick in his hand, and expected it to support him; and then twisted like a man menaced on one hand by the very thing he has turned to escape on the other. Whether the empty carriage barn had put forth the shade of Heracles, caroling a missionary jaunt beyond the mountains, or John Huss had approached from that distant direction to urge those already baptized against false miracles, ecclesiastical greed, and seeking tangible evidence of Christ's presence instead of in His enduring word; and whether the two met on the horizon to merge, to vie, or simply compare wares, there was no time to consider, for he looked up to see the bull, its great head thrown up against the wind and the storm it threatened, the great rounds of the eyes wide open, fixed on webs of red veins. Where it had come from, or to what purpose, its casual properties and the questions which might have been asked on a day in June, none of that — was provoked by the bull's appearance. Its back end wheeled as it came to the fence and stopped there, in a halt of defiance which challenged the wind and left it to be consumed in its own violence.
— That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness. . Janet read, alone in her room, the prophet Zephaniah, as any passing her closed door might have heard. None did. — And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the Lord: and their blood shall be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung. . The paranoid wind shivered the pane at her back. — Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together, O nation not desired. . The unwavering quality of her voice sustained the relish of the prophet whose benisons she followed here, near breathless with being a step ahead of him, far and away from the New Testament wail down these same halls which had catechized and left her to work out her own excursions among the alarms of the Old. — The Lord will be terrible unto them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth; and men shall worship him, every one from his place, even all the isles of the heathen.
Zephaniah gets his business done quickly. Three chapters suffice; and he makes way for Haggai, whose nose is just as out of joint. In spite of her absorption, Janet read with the assurance of the Old Testament reader who knows that the New will follow, is, in fact, in hand with its more temperate prospects; just as she could read the New Testament without trepidation, knowing that any insinuations of wavering charity on the part of its engineers were bolstered by a Figure Who brooked no nonsense, lurking, "ravin in tooth and claw," at the ready, among the unalterable jots and tittles of His seventy-two-letter masquerade in the Old. Haggai anticipates Him shaking the earth, the heavens, the sea, the dry land, the nations, phenomenal antics still dignified as acts of God set forth with such strenuous diligence that the tenth minor prophet is drained in two chapters; but Janet had for the moment enough of a good thing with — when I turn back your captivity before your eyes, saith the Lord. Her blue lips finished, they repeated while she stood and gazed through that glass, a window tucked high on the house looking down to the carriage barn.
The wind had reached a height of delusion. Now, right before her eyes, it was given something to do: particles of snow appeared, conjured by the wind's own madness. Janet drew closer to the window. Standing with both palms flattened against the glass, her upper lip rose slowly as she stared below, to see the figure between the carriage barn and the bull's enclosure reel as though attacked on both sides, gain his balance and pause, steadying himself, and set out with what at first appeared extreme difficulty walking, until he broke into a run, up toward the house and out of her sight. — He is come, her blue lips made out; but the upper one was drawn down to the line of her bite, giving her a slightly perplexed look, as she turned to emerge, leaving two irregular near-translucent blots on the glass behind her.