pretend they were whole shrubs instead of half ones. Stern was sickened by the diseased shrubs; it was not so much their appearance that troubled him but the feeling that he had betrayed a sacred trust. "The house has been standing here for thirty years with whole shrubs," he said to his wife. "We're in it a month and there are halves." [Pg 27] There was, too, the dog escort problem. The house was somewhat isolated from transportation conveniences, and to get to the railroad station each day (where he left for his job in the city), Stern had to cross the huge, long-deserted estate old man Bagby had once skidded across in a sleigh. It was spread out over eighty acres and took Stern twenty-three minutes each way, much too long a walk to be brisk and refreshing. The train ride then would be an hour and six minutes, which meant that Stern would be traveling roughly three hours each day. When they had first considered the house, his wife had said, "Take the ride once. It may be too long. See how you like it." But Stern had answered, "I don't want to know about it. I love the house. If I take the ride, I may not like it and we'll never live in this house. I love this house and I don't want to know about any rides." The estate was a lonely, windless, funereal place, terribly quiet, with many odd little buildings, and for the first weeks of walking its length Stern made it his business to investigate a different one of them each morning. On one such morning, he climbed the watchtower and stood on the second floor, looking out of the cracked windows onto huge, rolling lawns and at bushes that had holes in them, seemingly torn out at random by large fists. Stern wondered how the estate was when it was[Pg 28] new, and then he walked over to the main estate building. On an impulse, he poked his elbow through a weak door panel and looked around innocently in the clear morning as though he, too, was surprised at all the commotion. Able to open the lock now, he waited till the echo had quieted and went inside the estate building, sweating hard, and then climbed the winding steps to the second floor. Doing everything in a hurry, he stood first in the elegantly constructed floor tub of the main bedroom and then went out to the circular balcony, extended his arms, and hollered, "Throw them to the lions," to imaginary throngs below. Then he decided to take something. The rooms seemed empty, except for a packet of newspapers tied with string. Stern worked a single paper loose and, tucking it under his arm, walked swiftly down the stairs. He smelled coffee burning and then ran out the door and kept running all the way to the
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