Read Online Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson - Free Book Online Page B

heard many answers and who could very likely read almost any meaning. Perhaps someday, Natalie thought quickly, chiding herself, I’ll learn to talk for a longer time and not stop to think about it in the middle.
    â€œâ€”novel?” the man said.
    This was hopeless; they were too far into their conversation for Natalie to say anything at all without losing all the ground she had gained; she would betray herself utterly if she asked him what he had said; she could hardly pretend she didn’t care, or walk off, or turn her back; she could certainly not go back now and ask him if he were having a nice time. “I didn’t hear you,” she said suddenly, frightening herself almost to tears. “I was thinking about myself instead of listening.”
    Four for the gospel-makers;
    Three, three, rivals,
    Two, two, lily-white boys, clothed all in green-O,
    One is one and all alone and evermore will be so.
    â€œThinking what about yourself?” the man asked.
    Said the detective, leaning foward, “Have you given any thought to the extreme danger of your position? What about the knife?”
    â€œAbout how wonderful I am,” Natalie said. She smiled. Now I can get up and walk away, she thought, the faster the better. She started to get up, but the man got up first, and took hold of her arm.
    â€œAbout how wonderful she is,” he said as though to himself. “Thinking about how wonderful she is.”
    A little chill went down Natalie’s back at his holding her arm, at the strange unfamiliar touch of someone else. Leading her by the arm, he moved to the tray where full glasses stood, took one and handed it to Natalie, and took another for himself.
    Five for the cymbols at your door,
    Four for the gospel-makers,
    people shouted at them as they moved.
    â€œCome along,” the man told Natalie. “This I intend to hear more about.”
    â€œAnd the blood?” the detective said fiercely. “What about the blood, Miss Waite?
How
do you account for the blood?”
    â€œOne is one and all alone and evermore will be so.”
    â€œYou will not escape this,” the detective said. He dropped his voice and said, so quietly that she barely heard him, “
This
you will not escape.”
    The strange man led Natalie away from the crowd on the lawn and across the grass; after a minute the people and their voices (
“Six are the six proud walkers . . .”
) were removed into a background noise, distantly behind them in the night-filled garden. They moved slowly; Natalie was afraid to speak, not trusting her voice in the new silence, perhaps she was still turned to the noise behind and when she spoke it would be in a scream. In those few quick minutes the man walking next to her had changed so rapidly from one shadow, on the lighted lawn, to another shadow, in the dark garden, and her final statement to him had been so conclusive, that past “Are you having a good time?”—which now seemed even less appropriate than before—there was nothing to say.
    He spoke, at last. Without the support of other noise, his voice was weak, and perhaps even older than it had sounded before.
    â€œNow then,” he said. “Tell me what she thinks is so wonderful about herself.”
    How far wrong, Natalie thought, can one person be about another? Perhaps in that little time I have grown in his mind and he is now talking to some Natalie he thought he had hold of by the arm. She felt the grass under her feet, the soft brush of bushes against her hair, and his fingers on her arm. It was no longer afternoon; the time had slipped away from under Natalie and while she had been behaving in her mind, under the lights, as though it were five o’clock, she found now in the darkness that it was much, much later, long past dinnertime, long past any daylight. She found that she was carefully carrying a glass in her hand, and she brought it up and sipped at it, standing