IV
Emmy had become an obsession with Januarius Jones, such an obsession that it had got completely out of the realm of sex into that of mathematics, like a paranoia. He manufactured chances to see her, only to be repulsed; he lay in wait for her like a highwayman, he begged, he threatened, he tried physical strength, and he was repulsed. It had got to where, had she acceded suddenly, he would have been completely reft of one of his motivating impulses, of his elemental impulse to live: he might have died. Yet he knew that if he didn’t get her soon he would become crazy, an imbecile.
After a time it assumed the magic of numbers. He had failed twice: this time success must be his or the whole cosmic scheme would crumble, hurling him, screaming, into blackness, where no blackness was, death where death was not. Januarius Jones, by nature and inclination a Turk, was also becoming an oriental. He felt that his number must come: the fact that it would not was making an idiot of him.
He dreamed of her at night, he mistook other women for her, other voices for hers; he hung skulking about the rectory at all hours, too wrought up to come in where he might have to converse sanely with sane people. Sometimes the rector, tramping huge and oblivious in his dream, flushed him in out-of-the-way corners of concealment, flushed him without surprise.
“Ah, Mr. Jones,” he would say, starting like a goaded elephant, “good morning.”
“Good morning, sir,” Jones would reply, his eyes glued on the house.
“You are out for a walk?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” And Jones would walk hurriedly away in an opposite direction as the rector, entering his dream again, resumed his own.
Emmy told Mrs. Mahon of this with scornful contempt.
“Why don’t you tell Joe, or let me tell him?” Mrs. Mahon asked.
Emmy sniffed with capable independence. “About that worm? I can take care of him, all right. I do my own fighting.”
“And I bet you are good at it, too.”
And Emmy said: “I guess I am.”