The Cry of the Owl Read Online Free PDF Page A

Robert amused himself by making a separate drawing on a postcard of the
protura
with bullfighting knee pants on its stocky legs, a triangular cap, and gaily tasseled darts in its hands. He sent it off to Edna and Peter Campbell with a note: “Making fine progress! Love to you both, Bob.”
    What he wanted to do was drive by the girl’s house again. He had not been to her house in six days now, and Wednesday last, or maybe it was Tuesday, when he had resisted an impulse to go, he had sworn he wouldn’t go again. It was a perilous thing to do. God, if Nickie ever found out! How she’d laugh and shriek and jeer! He felt he should thank his luck he hadn’t been discovered so far, and that he should quit it. Yet it affected him exactly in the way liquor did alcoholics, he thought, people who swore off and went back to the bottle. Maybe it was because nothing else filled his life, there was nothing attractive around him now except the girl called Thierolf. That was what people said about alcoholics, that they had nothing more interesting to fill their lives with, so they drank. What he felt, slowly walking his room at six-ten of a Saturday evening, was temptation. It wasn’t impossible for him to resist it, he assured himself. Go to a rotten movie, if necessary. Or be stronger, have some dinner somewhere, then come back and read this evening. Write the Campbells a letter and ask them to come down some weekend. He couldn’t put them up, but the Putnam Inn wasn’t a bad little hotel. Get the girl out of your mind. Crazy things like spying on a girl in her house couldn’t be considered conducive to an orderly life. Or to mental health. Robert laughed a little. It was going against doctor’s orders.
    Now it was dark. Six-eighteen. He turned on his radio for some news.
    He sat on his couch half listening to the abbreviated news items and debating whether to go again tonight or not. For the last time. Maybe she wouldn’t be there, since it was Saturday evening. Robert was aware that part of his brain was arguing like a suddenly eloquent orator who had jumped to his feet after being silent a long while:“What’s the matter with going one more time? You haven’t been caught up to now. What’s so serious if she does see you? You don’t look like a psychopath.” (Second voice: “Do psychopaths necessarily look like psychopaths? Certainly not.”) “Anyway, you don’t care if you’re caught or seen. What’ve you got to lose? Isn’t that what you’re always saying?” The orator sat down. No, that wasn’t what he was always saying, and he
would
care if he were seen by the girl. And yet to stay home that evening seemed like death, a slow and quiet death, and to see the girl again was life. And which side are you on, Robert Forester? And why was it so hard to live?
    Off a main road out of Langley, he took a two-lane, badly paved road which was a shortcut to Humbert Corners. There was not a single street light along the road, and since the few private houses he passed were set far back, it seemed that he drove himself through a world of solid night. He went at a speed below thirty-five miles per hour, as he had constantly to avoid potholes. At Humbert Corners, he made a jog, turning right at the bank building with its red-and-blue mailbox on the corner, continuing on up a hill so steep he had to shift to second gear. At last came the dark house with white shutters on the left, which meant that the lane where he always left his car was three-tenths of a mile farther. He slowed and dimmed his lights, until he was driving by parking lights alone. He pulled some thirty feet into the lane, stopped and got out, then reached in the door pocket of his car for his flashlight. He used the flashlight at intervals on the road, mainly to see where to step out of the way of a passing car, though few cars had ever passed when he had been here.
    There was a light at the front side window, the living-room window, and one at the back, in