Free Rear Window by Cornell Woolrich Page A

with their hammering and sawing.
      I felt sorry for the couple in the flat below.   I used to wonder how they stood it with that bedlam going on above their heads.   To make it worse the wife was in chronic poor health, too; I could tell that even at a distance by the listless way she moved about over there, and remained in her bathrobe without dressing.   Sometimes I'd see her sitting by the window, holding her head.   I used to wonder why he didn't have a doctor in to look her over, but maybe they couldn't afford it.   He seemed to be out of work.   Often their bedroom light was on late at night behind the drawn shade, as though she were unwell and he was sitting up with her.   And one night in particular he must have had to sit up with her all night, it remained on until nearly daybreak.   Not that I sat watching all that time.   But the light was still burning at three in the morning, when I finally transferred from chair to bed to see if I could get a little sleep myself.   And when I failed to, and hopscotched back again around dawn, it was still peering wanly out behind the tan shade.
      Moments later, with the first brightening of day, it suddenly dimmed around the edges of the shade, and then shortly afterward, not that one, but a shade in one of the other rooms — for all of them alike had been down — went up, and I saw him standing there looking out.
      He was holding a cigarette in his hand.   I couldn't see it, but I could tell it was that by the quick, nervous little jerks with which he kept putting his hand to his mouth, and the haze I saw rising around his head.   Worried about her, I guess.   I didn't blame him for that.   Any husband would have been.   She must have only just dropped off to sleep, after night-long suffering.   And then in another hour or so, at the most, that sawing of wood and clattering of buckets was going to start in over them again.   Well, it wasn't any of my business, I said to myself, but he really ought to get her out of there.   If I had an ill wife on my hands.   .   .   .
      He was leaning slightly out, maybe an inch past the window frame, carefully scanning the back faces of all the houses abutting on the hollow square that lay before him.   You can tell, even at a distance, when a person is looking fixedly.   There's something about the way the head is held.   And yet his scrutiny wasn't held fixedly to any one point, it was a slow, sweeping one, moving along the houses on the opposite side from me first.   When it got to the end of them, I knew it would cross over to my side and come back along there.   Before it did.   I withdrew several yards inside my room, to let it go safely by.   I didn't want him to think I was sitting there prying into his affairs.   There was still enough blue night-shade in my room to keep my slight withdrawal from catching his eye.
      When I returned to my original position a moment or two later, he was gone.   He had raised two more of the shades.   The bedroom one was still down.   I wondered vaguely why he had given that peculiar, comprehensive, semicircular stare at all the rear windows around him.   There wasn't anyone at any of them, at such an hour.   It wasn't important, of course.   It was just a little oddity, it failed to blend in with his being worried or disturbed about his wife.   When you're worried or disturbed, that's an internal preoccupation, you stare vacantly at nothing at all.   When you stare around you in a great sweeping arc at windows, that betrays external preoccupation, outward interest.   One doesn't quite jibe with the other.   To call such a discrepancy trifling is to add to its importance.   Only someone like me, stewing in a vacuum of total idleness, would have noticed it at all.
      The flat remained lifeless after that, as far as could be judged by its windows.   He must have either gone out or gone to bed himself.   Three of the shades remained at normal height,