unclaimed-recollection / 30 - A Room at Pinecliff.md# 30. A Room at Pinecliff > **Narrator:** Resa Maresh · **Setting:** Pinecliff · **Act 3, Part 9** > The first snow comes to Pinecliff, and with it a visitor with a bag.  Old Teva gave me the weather before the kettle had boiled, which is not the order, and I knew from that alone that something was wrong with the day. "Snow," he said. "You have not given me the gossip." "The gossip will keep. It has kept for a week." He took the cup I handed him and held it in both hands, like a man warming himself at something he does not trust. "I have been awake since four with my knee, and my knee says snow, and my knee has not been wrong since the year the cistern froze. By evening. Heavy, if it holds off long enough to gather itself." "It is early for it." "It is late for it, if you ask the larches. They turned a month ago." He drank, and made the face, and set the cup down with the usual air of having been wronged by the tea. "Now the gossip. Corrin Vask's second girl and the cooper's son from Tern are to be married in the spring, and the speech has been composed. It is forty minutes. Corrin has asked me to hear it. I have said that I am old and may not live to the end of it, and he has said that this is the point." "And the news?" "A notice on the leaf from Solvara." He said the word as he says all words that begin with money. "Pre-winter rounds on the line. A crew on the morning freight tomorrow, to see to the station and the line side. The reckoner in the basement, the cistern valve, the signal lamps, the fittings along the platform. Brum will shout. They will take most of the day and leave a mess on the platform and a docket in the passage." He looked at me over the rim of the cup, which he had picked up again. "That is the news. It is the whole of it. I read it twice." I put a bowl in front of him, because he had not asked, and he took it, because he does not refuse a thing he has not asked for. It was barley and root again, and the heel of the smoked fat. The pot had been on since before dawn. The lid was tilted a hand's width, the way I keep it, to let the steam walk out into the cold. The third bell gave its low flat note from the post by the cistern as the wind moved it. I looked out through the door, because I always do. The sky over the Saddle had the colour of a pewter plate, close and even and holding something back. *Not yet,* I thought, to the bell, from habit. I have said it so often that I no longer hear myself say it. It has become a thing I do with my hands, like wiping a counter that does not need it. * * * The boy came on the afternoon local. I did not know it was a boy with a reason. I was on the platform because I am always on the platform for the afternoon local, and I told myself it was the bread, which I had left rising and which could be trusted for another quarter hour. The sky had come down lower since the morning. It had the stillness that comes before a thing, the sort of quiet in which a dropped spoon sounds like an announcement. The local came round the curve below the Saddle with its lamps lit, though it was not yet dark, and slowed beside the shed with its long settling sigh. The doors opened. I counted. A woman with a crate of eggs, packed in straw. Brum Tollet's nephew, back from a week at the quarries, who lifted a hand to me and did not slow down. The conductor, lifting two fingers to me from the step. And a young man in a rust-coloured quilted vest over a blue tunic, with a chipped front tooth that I could see from the length of the platform, because he was smiling at nobody, with a canvas bag in one hand and a brass flask in the other, and the pale, hollow, wide-awake look of someone who has had four hours' sleep a night for three years and has made a settlement with it. Four. I did not say it. I stood where I was. He saw me, and stopped, and put the bag down on the boards with great care, as if it might object. He did what he does with a person he has been told about, which is to straighten, and bow his head by about the width of a finger, and give me the whole of his attention. "Mistress Maresh," said Zahir Dasan. "Resa." "Resa." He tried it. He seemed satisfied. "I have come to ask about a room." "Have you." "I was told that there were rooms to be had at Pinecliff." He cleared his throat. "It was said to me, on a platform, over a cup of tea, in a manner so extraordinarily casual that I have been thinking about it for four days. I was told also that it is cold, and quiet, and an hour on the local, and that the kitchen is warm, and that the air is, I was told, very good." He looked at me with enormous innocence. "I thought it only polite to come and see whether it was." "I see," I said. "And who was it that spoke to you, on a platform, over a cup of tea?" "I am afraid I am sworn to say it was nobody." "Nobody has a great many opinions about the air." "He is a very opinionated nobody," said Zahir gravely, "and I have decided that I am fond of him." I picked up the bag, which he allowed with the reluctance of a guest who has been taught it is a courtesy, and he fell in beside me, flask in hand, along the platform past the shed and the cistern. "It was Idrin who gave me the afternoon," he said. "He said the yard would keep. It is the second time he has said that in a week, and I begin to think it is a sentence that costs him a great deal." He let a breath out. "Krel gave me a speech." "I am sure he did." "It was not an unkind one. He is upset. He has told me that he has one hand who can keep a shed and that the hand is, as of this week, to be shared between a yard and a hill. He said it twice." He considered. "He also said that it was a fair thing for a man to want, and that he would speak to the Guild about a hand who would not need to be shared. Until that is found, the yard will cover me on the evenings I am not there. Some evenings I will be there, and on those I shall take the late local home, and come in quietly, and no one is to leave a lamp." "I will leave a lamp." "You are not to leave a lamp." "I will leave a lamp," I said, "and you will walk round it." He laughed. It is a lovely sound, quick and a little surprised, like a bird that has decided against going. Then he looked at the kitchen door, open at the end of the platform with the light coming out of it in a long yellow bar, and I saw his face do what a face does when it has been told about a place for a long time and is looking at it. "Ah," said Zahir, quite softly. "It is lit." "It is always lit." "I know," he said. "That is the thing they tell me." * * * I do not say that Teva looked up. He is too old a man to be seen looking up at anything. But the old light hangs lowest over the end of my counter, where he sits, and when the kitchen door opened it caught the white of his hair and the whole of the man seemed to turn a quarter toward the draught, as a plant does. "Teva," I said. "This is Zahir Dasan. He is Odran's friend from the yard at Tern. The one with the tea." "The one who was in the Halloway crew." Teva looked him over, in the way of a man who has looked at a great many young people and has been, over the years, mostly right. "I heard. The one with the ledger of other people's kit." "It is a very small ledger," said Zahir. "Hm," said Teva. "I have come about a room." Zahir put the flask down on the counter. He unscrewed it, and took from his vest a small glass, and from his sleeve another, and did the thing that I have seen him do in my own kitchen with great gravity and that never fails to feel like a small ceremony: he poured, once, low, and then a second time, a little higher, and the third from the full height of his arm, so that the tea fell in a thin gold rope, and did not splash. "Please," he said, and held the glass to Teva with two hands. "It is only tea." Teva, who says that he does not like tea, took the glass. He looked into it as if he had been given a letter. He drank it. "Hm," he said, rather differently. "It is a very small thing," said Zahir. "I do not like to be a guest in a house and not pour for it." "It is my kettle," I said. "It is my hands," said Zahir, and gave me the third glass, and I will say that I was disarmed. In a Kandren kitchen the host pours. It is the whole law of the long table. A meal is incomplete if someone nearby is left out, and the person who has kept the pot on is the one who fills the bowl. He had come into my kitchen with a different law, quite as old, and was asking with great courtesy whether the two might share a counter. "Between us," I said, "we will manage." "Between us," said Zahir, "we shall have a great deal of tea."  Teva put his glass down. It was empty, and he looked at the bottom of it for a moment longer than was necessary, and when he spoke it was in the voice of a man changing the subject. "There is a spare above the shed," he said. "I know," I said. "It is not much of a room." He said it to the counter. "It has a window that looks at the cistern, a stove that draws if you are kind to it, and a bed that was my wife's mother's. The stair is bad. The sixth step goes." "Every stair in the Reach has a bad sixth step," said Zahir, who had visibly been waiting for this. "The doctor has it, when she comes. Twice a year, three times in a bad one." Teva turned the glass. "She comes when she is needed, and she is not needed now, and when she is she will go to whichever bed the council finds for her, as they do for any guest who is only passing, and she will not mind. I have asked." He cleared his throat. "I have not let it to a person in a good many years. I should want a sum. It is not a large sum. I should want it on the first of the month, and I should want the stove banked and the stair kept, and no one's boots in the bed." "A sum I shall find agreeable," said Zahir, and the way he said it, with a small private shine, made me think of the clerk at the Tern window, whom I have never met. "I do not know what you shall find." Teva was still looking at the glass. "I have eaten at the end of this counter for eleven years. I have eaten here, in the main, because I have not got anyone at home to talk to, and Resa has not yet had the heart to tell me that she cannot hear me over the pot." He coughed. It was a dry cough, and had nothing wrong with it. "A man who pours tea like that, and is about, in the evenings, would be of use to me. I should not mind a person to say the weather to who has to listen." "I shall listen," said Zahir, "to every word. I shall bring you the news of the yard, and the Guild, and the freight. I am very good at news." He had gone, I saw, rather pink about the ears, which is a thing that happens to him when he has been given something he did not know he would be allowed to want. "I should be glad of the room. If it is not an imposition." "It is a room," said Teva. "That is what it is for." "I will tell Hanne," I said, at last, to the pot. "She will be glad. She will say nothing for some time, and then she will write a line in Edda's book." "She is already glad," said Teva. "I had it from Edda this morning. Somebody said there was a young man who might want a bed." He looked at me. "I do not know who." "No," I said. "Nor do I." He took the bag up the stair himself. He said that it was a thing a lodger does. He came down again in a quarter of an hour with his vest unbuttoned and a small twist of paper in his hand, and put it down on the counter in front of Teva with some formality. "Dates," said Zahir. "From my mother's last parcel. They are not, perhaps, as good as they were when they left. A tenant ought to bring a thing." Teva took the twist of paper in his fist as if it might be taken back. He did not eat one that afternoon, nor, I think, that day, and I did not look to see where it went. * * * The evening local came in a little after seven, in the dark, with its lamps lit and the first of the snow going past them. It had come at dusk, as Teva's knee had said: a few flakes drifting out of the grey, so lightly that I thought at first it was frost shaking out of the larches. Then the air filled. It came down fat and slow and silent over the platform boards and the shed roof and the cistern's cap, and every lamp along the platform had a small soft halo round it, like a thing drawn by a hand that was trying to be kind. I stood in my doorway with a lantern and watched it a good deal longer than the bread required. The doors opened. I counted. Three, and the conductor: a man with a sack, my brother with snow on his shoulders, and behind him Sevran, who stepped down, and stopped. He stops on platforms. He stopped as he does at the third bell, with his head very slightly tilted. Then I saw what he had seen. The old light in my kitchen had brightened, which it does for two people, and I have never been able to say what sets it going. But there was a boy at my counter pouring tea from a height for an old man who was visibly enjoying himself, and the kitchen was full, and Sevran stood in the snow and looked at it with the face of someone who has been handed a thing and is not sure he is allowed to keep it. "Zahir," he said. "He has taken the room above the shed," I said. "The air," said Sevran, to the snow, "is, I am told, very good." My brother's hand went to the strap and came away. His ears went. "Mm," said Odran. "It has been thought about for four days," I said. "I am told it was nobody." I turned and went in, because there are things a person does not stand and watch, and laid the table. There were five bowls. There ought to have been four. I put the fifth at the end by the wall, in the place where nobody sits, and did not explain it to myself. It is a Kandren rule: a meal is incomplete if someone nearby has been left out, and you do not wait to see who. You set the place and the person comes. Nobody sat in it. But when the soup was in, with Teva at the counter's end with his glass, and Sevran in the head chair he took in his first week and has never been asked to give up, and my brother on the bench at his left hand with a hand's breadth between them that nobody was looking at, Zahir put his flask down before the fifth bowl and poured it a glass, quite quietly. Nobody remarked. Sevran looked at the glass and then at the boy, and laid his spoon along the edge of his bowl at the angle at which a spoon should lie. "There is snow," said Zahir, to the window, in a voice of enormous satisfaction. "It is a proper one. It is the first my mother will see. She has been writing since spring that she wishes it to be a good one, and to lie, and that I must tell her at once." "Tell her it is a proper snow," I said. "Tell her the pot is on." I will not describe the rest of the meal, because I do not remember it, which is the best thing that can be said of one. It went on a long time and nobody left. I remember my brother's hand flat on the table in a place where it was not afraid, and Sevran's laugh at Teva's account of Corrin Vask and the forty-minute speech, and the old light holding bright over the counter like a person who has decided not to be tactful. Later the boy and the old man crossed the platform to the shed in a thick quiet, Teva on the lodger's arm, and went up the bad stair one step at a time, and a window over the shed went yellow. Sevran and my brother went up the hill, past the cistern and the coal shed, with the snow a finger deep on the path and their two sets of prints going up it side by side. After a while the window at the top went the colour of an old light under a knitted cosy, and stayed lit a good while. I did the pots. I banked the stove, and left the lid tilted, and looked at the platform from the door, at the snow coming down on the lamps and the white post by the cistern with its three bells, and I thought of what I had told Odran in this kitchen with a cloth in my hand. *I should like it to be fixed on a day when it matters. When somebody asks.* I had not asked. Nobody had. It seemed a pity, a little, on a night like this. But the bell said nothing to the contrary. "I know," I said to it, quite gently. "Not yet." * * * There was a foot of it by morning, or what the platform took for a foot, a smooth blue hush with the lamps still burning in it and the sky above the Saddle going from dark to the grey of a pigeon's wing. I was out before the early local with the rolls. I do it every morning now. It began, I suppose, as a thing for one person, and has become a thing for the platform, and I do not examine it. They go in a cloth, warm, with a little of the smoked fat folded in, and I hand them up at the door of the first car to whoever is there, with the same words. *Eat on the train.* Sevran was there, with his hat on and his satchel across his chest and snow on the brim, standing at the platform's edge with his head tilted. My brother was beside him, a hand's breadth off, with a look of great composure and a suggestion of sleeplessness. They had come down the hill together in the dark. I had heard them on the path, and there had not been a great deal of talk. And then, from the foot of the shed stair, a young man in a quilted vest with a flask in his hand, who came across the snow at a pace that was very nearly a run, and stopped in front of me, a little out of breath, with his hair standing up. "I am not late," said Zahir. "You are four minutes early." "Idrin says that is the same thing." He put the flask under his arm. "I did not know that I should be down. It was a very good bed. I think that I slept for more than four hours." "It is a fair bed," I said, "and a long step to the platform. You will learn it." I gave him a roll. "Eat on the train." "Is that a rule?" "It is a rule." "Since when?" "Since Tuesday," I said, and handed the second roll to Sevran, who took it in both hands and looked at it with the expression of a man being told he is allowed a word, and the third to Odran, who took it without a word and put it in his pocket. "Three, and yours, Zahir. I made four." I had made four. I had made them at half past four in the dark, with a face that I will not describe, because I had known, as one knows these things, that there would be a boy.  The chime rang. It rings when the local is called, the three bells together, rising, and I heard them as I do every morning with part of my ear: clean, and a little less clean, and the third. It was flat. It was flat in the snow, with a dull dead hush in it, because the bell had a cap of white on its shoulder and the cold had got into the bronze. But it was the note I have heard every morning for half a year, and it was answered, as it always is, by a man at the edge of the platform who had stopped. He stood with his roll in his hands and his head very slightly on one side, listening, in the way he does, to a sentence with a word missing. I have watched him do it for months. I have thought about it more than I have said. He stood in the snow, and the bell rang its three, and the last of it hung in the cold and was gone, and he let his breath out, and I saw him smile at nothing, with his mouth shut. Zahir was looking at him. He had gone very still, which for him is rare. He looked at the bell and then at Sevran and then, quite slowly, at me, and I will say that he has a very good face for a ledger, because it showed me nothing at all. "Is it always so?" he said, not loud. "Since spring," I said. "Hm," said Zahir, and wrote nothing down. They got on. Sevran and Zahir sat on the near side, facing, with the rolls in their laps, and my brother stood at the door of the car for a moment with his hand on the rail, looking at them as a man looks at a thing he has counted twice. Then he stepped back down. He is going to walk them down every morning. He has said that he is not. He had gone a little red at the ears, saying it. I stood on the platform with the empty cloth in my hand and watched the local go out into the snow. I thought: *three, going.* Then I thought, for the first time, a different thought. I thought: *four.* And I went in, and put the kettle on. * * * The Solvara crew came on the morning freight, a little before ten, and for an hour I thought of nothing but the mess. There were five of them in slate-grey coats and flat caps with the brass badge, and a sixth who got down from the guard's van last, slowly, with a ladder on his shoulder. They fanned out along the platform, one to the reckoner in the basement, two along the line lights, one to the cistern, where Brum had been waiting since first light with his arms folded. I went back into my kitchen and shut the door on the shouting, which had begun. The sixth did not go with the others. I did not see where he went at first. I was at the counter with the dough, and it was Teva, who had come down from the shed with the dates in his pocket and was not eating one, who said, from his place at the end, without any particular emphasis: "There is a man on a ladder at the post." I wiped my hands. I went to the door. He was a big man, past sixty, with grey hair tied back at the neck and a grey beard clipped short, in a heavy coat with a leather apron under it, rust-brown and creased in a hundred places like an old map. He had set the ladder against the post by the cistern and gone up it with the ease of a man to whom ladders are a language. The third bell was hanging in its bracket in front of him. He had one hand flat against its shoulder, and in the other, held like a thing of great delicacy, a small wooden mallet. He tapped it. He listened, with his head cocked, and the snow coming down on the brim of his cap. He tapped it again. It gave its low dull note, and I saw the corner of his mouth go. I walked out to the foot of the ladder. I have no good reason for what I did next, which was to stand and hold it. "You are steadying it," said the man, without looking round. "I am." "It does not need steadying." "I thought it did," I said. He looked down at me then. He has a great, lined, kind face, like a loaf that has been baked a great many times, and an expression I have seen before and not often: the particular amusement of a man who is about to be caught at something. His eyes went over my apron, and my sleeves, and the flour I had not seen to the elbow. "You will be the sister," he said. "Resa Maresh. And you are the founder. My brother told me. He said that you lie awake over it." "I do. I sleep very badly. It is a vice." He tapped the bell. "There was a young man in my yard in the Foundries, a good while back, with your brother standing at the gate. A very good ear. He touched the rim of one of mine with a finger and told me, in the most polite way I have ever been told a thing, that the third at Pinecliff was flat." "He has stopped under it every morning that he has been here. For a season, and then again." "I know it is flat. I cast it flat." He said it without heat. "It was the pour. A cold week and a bad day, and I looked at the rim when it came out of the mould and thought, *I shall go up and see to that*. I wrote it down. I was paid, in fact, for the doing. Solvara had the contract for the halt and they put a visit into the fee, to bring it to pitch." He drew the mallet across the bronze and let the hum die. "That was thirty years ago." "It is a long time to be meaning to." "It is a very long time. I have no defence. I say every year that I am going to do it." He tapped the bell again. "I have been writing to myself about it ever since. I am very diligent in the matter of writing to myself. It is a pity I do not answer." The corner of his mouth went again. "The fee was paid. The work was not. Solvara found it this autumn, in a ledger, in a drawer, in the way that they find things, and sent me a letter. Then a second. The third had my name on it, underlined, and a date, and a place on the rounds, with a crew." He looked down at me from the ladder with great composure. "I have finally made time." I held the ladder. I felt, I will confess, something unmistakably like a laugh come up through my chest and stop at my teeth. "You did not come because anyone asked," I said. "Never. I should have run." He eased the bell a half-inch on its pin with a hand the size of a spade. "I came because it was a thing on a list. It is the only way I ever get anything done. Will you hold this?" I held it. I will not say how it was done. I stood at the foot of a ladder in the snow while a man took the third bell down from its bracket with a hoist and a sling, and carried it in his arms, as one would a great cold child, into the shed, and set it on a trestle by the slate. He had a tuning fork in his waistcoat pocket that he held to his ear, and a rasp wound in soft hide. Teva came out and stood in the shed door in a rug and told me that it was the most interesting thing that had happened on the platform since the cistern froze. I took the man a bowl of the barley and root, because it is a courtesy, and he ate it on the shed step with the bell at his shoulder and told me it was a very good soup. "You are not Solvara," I said. "Not as such. I am what they hire when a bell wants doing." He wiped the bowl with the bread. "I am a man with a yard and a contract. The yard is a day's travel. I do not like to leave it." "But you came." "I came. You will find that most things come, if you let a clerk write the date on them." He handed me the bowl. "Does he still stop?" I did not pretend that I did not know who he meant. "Every morning. He started again the day he came home." "Then I shall be quick," said the founder, and picked up the rasp. The afternoon local came in with two bells. I will say that Teva was magnificent. He stood on the platform in his rug and informed the conductor, as the local drew up and the chime rang, a clean rising note, a little less clean, and then a gap in the wind where the third should be, that it was a rest. "It is a rest," he said, to a man who had worked the line for twenty years and had never been told. "A phrase of music, with a silence in it. I should call that Halloway. It is very fashionable." The conductor, who is a patient man, looked at the post, where a patch of bare bracket stood against the snow, and agreed that it was. * * * The evening local was a quarter of an hour late, because of the snow. I stood on the platform with the lantern in the dark and the flakes drifting through its light. The Solvara crew had gone, on the freight that stops for them at four, leaving a docket in the passage and a very clean reckoner and a platform that smelled of lamp oil and hot metal, and Brum, who had been shouted at, I think, as much as he had shouted, and who had gone home content. The bell was back on the post. I had not watched it go up. It had been done at the end of the afternoon, with the light going, in the careful hush of a job being finished, and I had been in my kitchen with the bread. When I came out, the ladder was gone, and the man with it, with a nod and a bowl returned and his tools in a roll under his arm. He had stopped at my door. He had said, "I have rung it once. You will want to hear it with the others," and then, with a kind of shy gravity, "It was a good bell. It only wanted telling." And he had gone down the platform to the freight, a big grey man in the snow, and did not look back. I did not ring it. I had not the right. The local came round the curve with its lamps lit and the snow in them. I heard it first as a long note under the wind, and then the whole shaking weight of it, slowing, with its sigh, and the chime came up out of the post as it always does when the local is called, three bells together, rising. It rose. I heard it as one hears a thing one has waited for a long time and had given up expecting. A clean note. A little less clean. And the third. It came out of the cold air of the platform low and round and true, the note that is not a note at all and had been, for half a year, an insult and an answer, and was now simply a bell, hanging in the snow, saying what it was. I looked at the door of the car. My brother stepped down first. He stopped. I saw him hear it, and I saw him look, not at the bell but down the length of the platform to the edge where the lantern light ended, and then at the man behind him. Sevran had stepped on to the boards with his hat in his hand. He stood as he stands, at the place where the platform edge meets the dark. He tilted his head. He waited. I have said that I count doors, and it is true. But I have another habit that I have never told anyone, which is that when the chime is rung I count it too. One. Two. And then a held breath, and the third. For half a year it has been the longest silence on the line. I counted it again in the snow, standing with my lantern, and it came, true, and the last of it went up into the white, and still he did not move. I do not know what is in his head. I have never known. I have thought, in some seasons, that it is better not to ask, and I thought it again, watching him. But I know what a face does when a person is told a word. It does not smile at once. It goes very still, as it did, and then the stillness has something moving under it, like water under ice. "Someone has mended it," said Sevran. He said it to nobody. To the snow. He said it quite quietly, in his careful voice. "A man with a mallet," I said, "this morning." I held up the lantern a little. "He was a long time getting round to it." "Yes." He looked at the bell. "It is very true." And he did what he does with a train window, a platform stall, a bad stair. He lifted his hand, flat, and held it in the air for a moment toward the post, in a gesture I do not think he knew he was making.  My brother had not moved. He stood in the snow a hand's breadth off, looking at me, and I looked back, and neither of us said anything for the length of a held breath. I have thought about that look since. It was the look of a man who has been carrying something up a hill for a long time and has been told that the person at the top has had it already. It had nothing in it for me to name. "Mm," said Odran. "Come and eat," I said. "It is cold, and the pot is on." * * * I did not go to bed after the supper. I do not, on the nights the late local runs. It is a thing I have done for many months, since the first of them, and I have never once examined the reason. Teva did not go to bed either. At half past ten he was still at the end of my counter, in the place where the old light hangs lowest, with a glass of tea gone cold in front of him and the twist of paper beside it, unopened, with its corner turned back a little. I did not say that he looked like a man who had been waiting up. I said that I was going to put the pot on to warm. "I do not wait up," said Teva. "I happen to be awake." "Of course." "He said the yard would need him this evening. He said it at the door, in the morning, with a roll in his hand, as if it were an apology." Teva moved the glass. "I did not say that it was unnecessary. I only said that I should be here." The snow had thickened. It fell steadily past the windows, soundless and enormous, and the platform lamps were soft, round blurs. The pot ticked. The old light glowed. It does its work for two people only, I have always thought, but I had noticed that evening that it seemed to hold, for the length of the room, a certain softness for the old man at the end of the counter, who had been a long time without anyone to be awake for. The late local came a little before midnight. I heard it before I saw it. The long, low note of it under the wind. I went to the door with the lantern and stood in it, and the whole bright, shaking, weary length of it slowed beside the shed with a sound like a large animal settling, and the chime rose, the three of it, and I did not so much as turn my head. It was true. I am beginning to get used to it. I do not think I ever shall. One person got down. He had a flask in his hand, and snow on his shoulders, and a bag on his back that was not the bag of a man who has just arrived, but the satchel of a man who has been at work. He stood on the platform for a moment, as they do, to see what the dark had put there. And I saw him see, at the far end, the long yellow door of my kitchen, with a lantern in it, and a woman, and, beyond her, in the light of the old lamp, an old man at a counter with his hand at his glass. "I was told not to leave a lamp," said Zahir, when he reached me. He was very tired, and very pleased, and he said it with great dignity. "I did not leave a lamp. I am standing in the door." "That is not a lamp." "I am a very large lamp," I said, and he laughed, quite softly, and the sound went out into the snow and did not come back. "I will come in for a moment," said Zahir. "I shall not stay. I only want to say good night." "You will have a bowl." "I shall not." "You will," I said, and he did. He sat at the near end of the counter, by the old man, with the bowl in front of him and the snow still on his collar. Teva said nothing at all, for some time, and then said that the late local was cold, and that it was a mercy there was a stove at the other end. He said it in a very ordinary voice, to the soup. Zahir answered that it was, and that the shed had been busy, and that Krel had put his head round the door at ten and said that the racks were very well kept for a man with the wrong address. I wiped the counter that did not need it. When the bowl was empty Zahir sat with his hands round it, for a minute, in the warm, and then turned his wrist over, where the blue bead on his cord had gone faintly warm, and read what it had for him. "I sent word to her from the yard last night," he said, "that it was a proper snow. She has answered. She has asked me to say that she is bringing a coat, and that she is not bringing the goat." He considered. "She is not, I think, certain about the goat. There is a sentence in which the goat is mentioned, and it does not end." "When will she come?" "In four days, if the line is kind. She says that she will arrive on a morning when she has been awake for two nights, and will therefore be insufferable, and that I am to be gentle." He closed his hand over the bead. "She has never seen a snow. She has only been told. I think that she has decided to be told it again by me." Zahir said that he did not know what is eaten at a first snow, and I said that nor did I, which was true. Then, because it was late and the pot was on, I let myself think about it, standing at my own counter with the cloth in my hand. I thought of changing what goes in the pot. I did not decide. It was only a thing to consider, as a person considers the weather, with her hand on the lid. "I shall think about it," I said. "With the greatest seriousness?" "In secret," I said, and he went pink to the ears, and said good night to the old man, and to the old light, and to me, and went out into the snow. I watched the two of them go, in the end, because Teva could not be prevented. He got up from his stool with the rug round his shoulders, and the twist of paper in his fist, and said that he supposed he had better see the lodger home. "The stair," he said. "It is a bad one. A man might not find the sixth in the dark." They went out together across the white platform, slowly, the tall one with his arm a little out and the old one with his hand on it, in the glow of the lamps and the falling snow, and up the bad stair one step at a time. The window above the shed went yellow. I banked the stove. I tilted the lid of the pot, and set the old light low. I stood in the doorway with my shawl round me and my breath going up white and looked at the platform, with the post by the cistern and its three bells hanging in their bracket, covered in snow to the shoulder. The wind moved them. I heard them, softly, in the dark, all three, one beneath another, clean and a little less clean and the third. "There," I said. There were two lit windows on the hill and the shed. A train had come and gone. There was snow lying on everything, and a pot on the stove, and a room above a shed that was let. I left the door as it is.