The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder Page A

been ransacked. The contents of her bureau drawers had been flung about the floor. In the cupboard the lining of her coat had been slit open. A knife had been run through her mattress; her pillow was cut into shreds. The backs of the pictures on the walls had been torn away.
    Colonel Stotz in Springfield hated the Ashleys. He was convinced that somewhere in Mrs. Ashley’s room there would be information about John Ashley’s rescuers. There would be letters; there might even be recent letters from the hunted man. There might be a photograph of him that could be reproduced on posters.
    Throughout their married life Ashley had been only four times separated from his wife for twenty-four hours. The only letters she had from him were those which he had written her daily from the jail. These were missing. Missing, too, was her only photograph of him—a faded blue print from which he looked out laughing, holding high his two-year-old son. The following morning the daughters looked wonderingly at their mother. Her face had never shown anxiety or fear and did not show it now. The confrontation with the enemy seemed to strengthen her.
    As the months went by Beata Ashley gradually emerged from her torpor. The work was unremitting. There is no day of rest for those who take lodgers. To Constance it was an exciting game. She was never tired, not even on Monday evenings after a day over the washtubs. Lily seemed to have returned from that far country where she had been moving in a dream. All day there was cooking, dusting, making beds, and dishwashing. Sophia was the only member of the family to pass the gate; Lily had no wish to; Constance longed to accompany her sister into the town, but Sophia knew that she was not yet ready to face the hostility of her school-friends. Roger’s remittances to his mother rose to ten and twelve dollars a month. He reported that he was doing well, but he sent no name or address to which she might reply. Sophia did the shopping, took the lodgers’ money, bought furniture, opened new rooms, and abounded in “ideas.” She wrote her brother long letters. It was a proud day when she could tell him that she had paid the taxes. The town watched her activity with grudging admiration. She was said to be “sharp as a scalping knife.” Auctions were rare in Coaltown, but it was often quietly circulated that a family was selling its “things”—elderly people were leaving town or a home was broken up by death. There was Sophia. When fire and the overenthusiasm of the volunteer fire department combined to make havoc of a house or the contents of an attic, there was Sophia buying bed linen, window curtains, old clothes, mattresses, and chamber pots. A Baptist church by Old Quarry Pond faltered to its end; Sophia bought the piano that had served its Sunday school—three dollars a month for five months. She bought a second cow. She began raising ducks; she suffered a defeat with turkeys. An eighth room was fitted out by the end of May, 1904. During the warm weather guests were even lodged in the Rainy Day House. Mrs. Swenson was persuaded to return as hired girl. After the occasion on which Mrs. Ashley’s bedroom had been ransacked it was Lily’s idea—or, to all appearances, Lily’s idea—that Porky should live at “The Elms,” sleeping in a small room off the kitchen. In return for his meals he did the heavy work about the house and helped the family to master those difficulties to which hostelries are particularly subject. There were heart attacks and convulsions. There was sleepwalking and drunkenness and theft. Mrs. Ashley came to know the drummer’s condition: the uprootedness, the compulsion to boast, the burden of having to present all day a front of dazzling success (“Mrs. Ashley, I got so many orders today, I don’t see how I’ll be able to fill ’em!”), the drinking to obtain sleep, the nightmare in which