Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/163

Rh derogatory, I did not know. Mrs. Bernstein, anyhow, was very unpleasant during those four awful days. Boyde had not even given her the $10. She paid me dreadful visits, she threatened to sell my things (what? I wondered), to turn me out; she sent up hardly any food....

Waiting for Boyde's step, listening all day, all night ... I needed my books, my dreams, my inner crack, as I had never needed them before during those horrible four days. They seemed an eternity. The long nights, of course, were by far the worse; the dreams, the expectancy, for ever anticipating the familiar tread of stockinged feet on the stairs, wondering what in the world had happened, how things would end.... Had he been arrested, perhaps for something terrible? They were haunted nights that made me dread the first sign of coming dusk. It seemed like weeks, an incalculable time altogether had passed since I had seen him.... Then the spider took the place of the other vermin. I have always particularly disliked spiders, and this one was the father of them all; though it was the horror of him, not the physical presence, that haunted my nights so persistently. He was, I am sure, the Spider Idea. He originated in a room in Toronto, where a friend foolishly let his prototype, a tarantula, escape, and where it hid all night. It was my room. He came from Florida with a case of bananas. He was very big, if sluggish, his swollen body and hairy black legs the nastiest I had ever seen. I spent the night with this monster on the loose, and the first thing in the morning I saw him, low down on the wall, quite close to me. He had crept for warmth to a pipe near the hot air register.

This spider now came at me, stirred into life by the chance activity of some memory cell. He came crawling across the leads, dragging his bulging body slowly, then feeling over the smooth glass with his legs that were like black brushes a chimney sweep might use. Up the stairs he came too, but sideways there, being too large to move in his usual way; first three legs on one side, then three legs on the other, heaving himself along, the mass of his body between them sloping like a boat at sea. The fat Rh