The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder Page B

existence presents a face of vacancy or derision. She came to divine the black hours when the razor blade trembles in the hand. During the early months of the venture it was the Ashleys’ custom to retire upstairs after the dishes had been washed and to continue their reading aloud in Mrs. Ashley’s room. But she soon learned that it was unwise to leave the lodgers to themselves at that hour; she became aware that most of the rooms contained restless, fretful, or frantic human beings. Some particular tension began to collect in them after sunset. So the evenings were spent in the large sitting room. Often Lily sang to her mother’s accompaniment. One by one the roomers would creep down the stairs. Many would stay for the reading aloud. During the hot months the social hour was transferred to the summerhouse; a reader’s eyes would be spared and the group would sit in silence under the spell of the moonlight or starlight on the pond and the muted complaints of Sophia’s slowly gliding ducks.
    Beata Ashley admirably filled the role of boardinghouse keeper. She set up a ward against disorder as many schoolmasters do—she exacted a standard of behavior of more than human height. She demanded punctuality, precedence for ladies, coats and neckties at table, decorum in speech, grace before meals, and restraint in expressing admiration for the waitresses. A number of traveling gentlemen were not accepted a second time at “The Elms.” They took to boasting at the Tavern’s saloon that they had been disbarred from “Rope-end Hall,” but the boasts rang increasingly hollow. The legend spread—a mixture of perfect fried chicken, the best coffee in Illinois, sheets smelling of lavender, of being aroused in the morning not by kicks on the door but by angel voices repeating one’s name. During the trial and the months that followed Ashley’s rescue the girls were aware that their mother was giving little attention to the books read aloud in the evening, even when it fell her turn to read. A change took place in the summer of 1903, however. On Tuesday nights they read Don Quixote in French. Beata Ashley found not humor but truth in the adventures of the knight for whom the world was filled with evil necromancers and with those bitter injustices which a man must put right. Her needle would come to rest, suspended in meditation, at the account of his devotion to a peasant girl whom he declared to be the first of all women. They read the Odyssey. It told of a man undergoing many trials in far countries; to him came the wise goddess, the gray-eyed Pallas Athene, upbraiding him when he was discouraged and promising him that one day he would return to his homeland and to his dear wife. She was tired by the housework, she was consoled by the reading, and she slept.
    For all their work the profits were meagre. The Ashleys held their heads just above water.
    Lodgers came and went at “The Elms,” but there were few callers. Dr. Gillies made professional visits and on each occasion exchanged a few words, but he did not sit down. Mrs. Gillies dropped in from time to time on a Sunday afternoon, as did Wilhelmina Thoms. There was one regular visitor, however, Miss Olga Doubkov, the town’s dressmaker. She called on alternate Wednesday evenings. She was not received with notable warmth by Mrs. Ashley, but the girls welcomed her eagerly. She brought the news of the town and of the world.
    Hard circumstances had left Olga Doubkov—reportedly a Russian princess—high and dry in Coaltown. Her father, pursued by the police for revolutionary activity, had fled to Constantinople with an ailing wife and two daughters. He had joined Russian friends in a mining town in western Canada, but his wife’s health was unable to sustain the climate there and he had accepted a call to Coaltown. Olga Doubkov was an orphan at twenty-one and set out to support herself by her skill as a needlewoman.