Free False Entry by Hortense Calisher Page A

that comes like a second wind.
    “What you stopping for?” said Johnny. Again I had the feeling that he already knew.
    I turned, looking back at the way we had come. I turned again, holding unsure hands in front of me.
    The town, I thought—it was inside out. For here on the main street, where always a certain few lights burned, municipal and lonely, we stood on a long rib of dark. And scattered like beads around us, the houses, that should have been as dark as they were silent, had each its little spore of light, those hooded lights, paler than candles, that housewives place in the window when a man is late from home.
    “The town,” I said. “Look at the town.”
    He did not answer. He waited, slow elder brother, for me to show him in my sharpness what he already knew.
    “The courthouse light is out,” I whispered. “And the one over the church door.”
    Still he waited. The wind moved, shabby-sweet.
    I saw the houses, lit up for a fair.
    “Johnny!” I said. I whispered it. “Who were the men in the cars?”
    For answer, he led me down an alley, behind a store, where a gamecock chirred.

Chapter VIII. Semple’s Store. The Hill.
    S EMPLE’S STORE. I’LL ENTER it again, in a moment, as the two of us did so long ago. But first, I sit here, having just reread as I do each evening the excursion of the night before. I see a change. I see a change in the method by which I record. I did not expect this so soon.
    Come, come, I did not anticipate it at all. There is a dangerous arrogance in those words “so soon”—the secret pomp of the dissembler, of one all too used to being, in most company, the subtlest, the most aware. But if I begin to dissemble to myself, then I am done.
    As to the change. When I began this, I counted on every resource of a memory of more than average intensity. Memory runs on of itself for most, a river always partially underground. But for me it is my harnessed “familiar” who can be focused like a camera obscura upon a chosen scene of the past. Gradually, then, within that boxlike frame, granules of light stream toward a center, and in an atmosphere dead and clear as old starlight, the color gathers again to the peach, the prussic smell to the bitten stone. Faces are the hardest, somehow foreign to that landscape, Venetian heads thrust into a nature morte. But even when they come they are only addenda to the once quick gesture now repeated andante, to the light word fossilized, to the cadence of the said and the unsaid, the felt and the unfelt, all returned now in empathy to me, who will hold them like coral, forever.
    Therefore, when I began this it did not occur to me to premeditate any discours sur la méthode. I am the method. Nor do I forget that I am also the critic voice, outside the scene and above it, even as Donne was, when, in the depth of his devotions, he felt the stone beneath his knee, the tickling straw. But I see now that the encyclopedist cannot research his own past with the same calm as, daily, he may do it for others, building out of the crabbed footnotes a half-column’s worth of man.
    One keeps a tryst with one’s own life at a certain peril. Not that my owl, my monitor, will desert me. It is not likely that I shall lose, in the transports of memory, what cannot be lost even in any transport of love.
    Still, there is too little of the critic voice in last night’s notes; they speak too often in the soft, mucused voice of self-immersion, in the hypnotic voice of the child I was. “Excursion” is such a suggestive word. I must be more careful to keep in mind that the box has a frame.
    Once inside the shop, Johnny seemed to shrink, reminded, as I thought then, of who he was. For, as he lit a lamp and brooded over the length of its wick, I saw in his slumped shoulders only the mingy posture of the part-time clerk, and later, when he spoke, I took the tone of his voice for the clerk’s serviceable tone. I did not yet know its note for that dead timbre, accepting