Shortest Day by Jane Langton Read Free Book Online

Morgan sat back in the darkened room and watched the pair of geese he had stalked so carefully last May at that little lake in New Hampshire.
    There was the female, sitting patiently on her eggs, apparently asleep. Nearby stood the male, his head erect on his long dark neck. Now he stalked along the shore, darting glances left and right, stopping to lower his head and probe for parasites in his tail feathers.
    Pretty soon—yes, the zoom lens was picking up the interloper, far away, on the other side of the pond. It was a single male, all by himself, paddling grandly forward. How close would he be allowed to come?
    Here was the moment. Morgan’s male jerked his neck upright and uttered a honk. Then he took to the water with a rush and lunged at the enemy, eager for battle, beak hissing, wings flapping.
    Morgan always laughed at this point, because the other goose backed away as if he were saying, “Excuse me , no offense,” and took to the air, with Morgan’s male in hot pursuit.
    The female had been protected. The male had exercised his rights. It was the way any lover would feel when his possession of the female was endangered. He would see it as a threat, he would fend it off, he would keep his mate to himself.
    Let the psychiatrists invent their theories. Let them pile theory on theory. The protection of mating rights was instinctive. It was the way of the world. It was natural, perfectly natural.

CHAPTER 8
    O master and missus, are you all within?
    Pray open the door and let us come in .
    O master and missus a-sitting by the fire ,
    Pray think on us poor travellers ,
    A-travelling in the mire .
    â€œSomerset Wassail”
    T he cold had settled in with a vengeance. There had been a few beguiling days at the end of November, days of fraudulent warmth when people thought, Oh, well, this winter may not be so bad . Now illusions were shattered. Winter was a hard, bad time. They had forgotten how awful it was. Heavy coats were pulled out of closets. Oh, God, the moths! Gloves were exhumed from drawers, the left one missing. Forty dollars? Just for gloves? The children had mislaid their winter hats and scarves and mittens, they had forgotten them at school, they had lost them in the rough and tumble of last March. Thermostats were turned up, furnaces roared into life, radiators rattled and steamed, hot air billowed through registers. Oil trucks rumbled up and down the streets of Cambridge.
    In Memorial Hall the huge hollow spaces to be heated were as vast as in any cathedral. The dilapidated auditorium where Mary and Homer Kelly taught their classes was often cold. It tended to be forgotten when the building manager twiddled his thermostats in the morning.
    The Saturday class was early. At home in Concord they had to get up at six in order to have breakfast and get one of their cold cars going by seven. Then it was a matter of rushing the car up the steep hill beside the Sudbury River, failing to make it the first time, rushing it up again, hurtling through the woods, tearing down Route 2 to the Alewife parking garage, and boarding the train to Harvard Square.

    One of the subway exits in the Square was right beside the Johnson gate, the most pompous of all the entrances to Harvard Yard. This morning the weather in the Yard was even colder than that of the Square. The buildings looked cold too, huge rectangular chunks of brick and stone. People were going to and fro, professors and students bundled against the chilly air, their breath steaming. Burly teenage kids were taking a shortcut to Rindge High. Some sentimental freshman had put a lighted Christmas tree in a second-floor window of Hollis Hall.
    Hurrying forward in the direction of Memorial Hall with her arm tucked into Homer’s, Mary boldly brought up again her doubts about the accident that had killed Henry Shady. “Listen, Homer, don’t you think we should say something to somebody in the Cambridge Police Department about what I