messages as drastic, inexplicable activity.
Patrick himself stood utterly still for some moments watching the boy in amazement. A breeze touched the hair on their heads at exactly the same time. It shook the ribbonaround the boy’s collar and moved one of the poet’s coattails to the left.
Patrick broke his pose, and, beginning, once again, to think about the woman, he walked half a block down Main Street to wait for the trolley.
I n the evenings of the past, Maud and her husband Charles had agreed never to discuss funerals.
Instead, they discussed spiders.
Not that Maud had particularly wanted to discuss spiders, but when it was a choice between funerals or spiders, what alternative did she have?
“If you wish to grow and thrive,” her mother-in-law had always chanted, “let the spiders go alive.”
This seemed to Maud to have been a particularly apt piece of advice when applied to her own domestic situation. Charles adored spiders. He admired them. He considered them a superior species and he was determined that they should “Go alive.”
The spiders in his collection had been silenced and stilled in the most humane way possible and not, even then, without a generous amount of guilt on the young undertaker’s part.
Maud could always tell when Charles had made an addition to his collection. He would be grim and silent for days, cheered only by the fact that he had never allowed the housekeeper to remove a single cobweb from the upper storey of Grady and Son. Downstairs was different. He was not so impractical that he did not understand that, down there, the ceilings should be swept clean. He simply avoided looking upwhile he was working, as if it had never crossed his mind that a spider might have ever entered the premises.
One night, as Maud sat crocheting in the upstairs parlour underneath a ceiling which, over the years, had become a complete mesh of aged webs, many of them soiled, broken and deserted, she had decided to broach the subject of house cleaning with her husband, who was reading near the potbellied stove. She was intelligent enough to approach the issue from a spider’s point of view.
“It would seem unlikely,” she had begun, “that we shall have any new spiders in this room. There is just not enough space. Surely a young spider wouldn’t want to move in up there… among all those wrecks?”
“If they don’t like it, let them do something about it,” Charles replied. “I’m certainly not going to disturb anything.”
Maud was not this easily put off the track. “Perhaps,” she continued, “they are simply not strong enough to do anything about it… maybe the situation has gotten out of hand and they need help. Then, wouldn’t it be a Christian act to remove the webs they don’t need… the old ones?”
“Spiders
never
need help,” Charles had replied, astonished that she had even considered the possibility. “They
always
know exactly what they are doing.”
“Supposing the house suddenly filled up with black widows?” Maud was testing. “Surely you’d kill them.”
“Black widows have a completely unfair, undeserved reputation. They do
not
bite unless they are threatened, and even then only if they are protecting an egg mass. No, I would
not
kill them. We could live side by side with them quite easily, happily in fact. Anyway, there aren’t any around here. Or, at least, not very many.”
Charles had managed to find one though, in an abandoned out-house and, because they were so rare, he was forced to add it to his collection. A particularly depressing day. He had recounted in detail how the spider had made no effort to escapewhen he had trapped it in a little box and how, later, it had accepted the chloroform as if it had always known its fate. (Like an Irish patriot going to the gallows, his mother had sighed, sentimentally.) A particularly brave and dignified spider for whom Charles had felt nothing but affection and respect.
Maud secretly admired the black
Patrick himself stood utterly still for some moments watching the boy in amazement. A breeze touched the hair on their heads at exactly the same time. It shook the ribbonaround the boy’s collar and moved one of the poet’s coattails to the left.
Patrick broke his pose, and, beginning, once again, to think about the woman, he walked half a block down Main Street to wait for the trolley.
I n the evenings of the past, Maud and her husband Charles had agreed never to discuss funerals.
Instead, they discussed spiders.
Not that Maud had particularly wanted to discuss spiders, but when it was a choice between funerals or spiders, what alternative did she have?
“If you wish to grow and thrive,” her mother-in-law had always chanted, “let the spiders go alive.”
This seemed to Maud to have been a particularly apt piece of advice when applied to her own domestic situation. Charles adored spiders. He admired them. He considered them a superior species and he was determined that they should “Go alive.”
The spiders in his collection had been silenced and stilled in the most humane way possible and not, even then, without a generous amount of guilt on the young undertaker’s part.
Maud could always tell when Charles had made an addition to his collection. He would be grim and silent for days, cheered only by the fact that he had never allowed the housekeeper to remove a single cobweb from the upper storey of Grady and Son. Downstairs was different. He was not so impractical that he did not understand that, down there, the ceilings should be swept clean. He simply avoided looking upwhile he was working, as if it had never crossed his mind that a spider might have ever entered the premises.
One night, as Maud sat crocheting in the upstairs parlour underneath a ceiling which, over the years, had become a complete mesh of aged webs, many of them soiled, broken and deserted, she had decided to broach the subject of house cleaning with her husband, who was reading near the potbellied stove. She was intelligent enough to approach the issue from a spider’s point of view.
“It would seem unlikely,” she had begun, “that we shall have any new spiders in this room. There is just not enough space. Surely a young spider wouldn’t want to move in up there… among all those wrecks?”
“If they don’t like it, let them do something about it,” Charles replied. “I’m certainly not going to disturb anything.”
Maud was not this easily put off the track. “Perhaps,” she continued, “they are simply not strong enough to do anything about it… maybe the situation has gotten out of hand and they need help. Then, wouldn’t it be a Christian act to remove the webs they don’t need… the old ones?”
“Spiders
never
need help,” Charles had replied, astonished that she had even considered the possibility. “They
always
know exactly what they are doing.”
“Supposing the house suddenly filled up with black widows?” Maud was testing. “Surely you’d kill them.”
“Black widows have a completely unfair, undeserved reputation. They do
not
bite unless they are threatened, and even then only if they are protecting an egg mass. No, I would
not
kill them. We could live side by side with them quite easily, happily in fact. Anyway, there aren’t any around here. Or, at least, not very many.”
Charles had managed to find one though, in an abandoned out-house and, because they were so rare, he was forced to add it to his collection. A particularly depressing day. He had recounted in detail how the spider had made no effort to escapewhen he had trapped it in a little box and how, later, it had accepted the chloroform as if it had always known its fate. (Like an Irish patriot going to the gallows, his mother had sighed, sentimentally.) A particularly brave and dignified spider for whom Charles had felt nothing but affection and respect.
Maud secretly admired the black
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