The stars were shining. It was much too early in the year for there to be anything blooming but a few clumps of snowdrops and the only wild flowers were the speckled skunk cabbages in the hollow but there was in the air a soft fragrance of earth as fine as roses and he stopped to fill his lungs and his head with it. The world seemed fine in the street light and the starlight and young, too, even in its shabbiness, as if the fate of the place had only just begun to be told. The earth, covered lightly with leaves, moss, garlic grass and early clover, was waiting for his treasure.
When there was no sign of Mr. Freeley at quarter after two he began to worry. It was so still that he could have heard a car in the far distance and he heard nothing. He wanted help on his mission, he did not want to do it alone, but at twenty minutes past two he decided that he would have to. He unlocked the garage doors, which, poorly hung, scraped loudly in the gravel. He looked in the back seat. His hoard was safe. When he backed the old car out onto the road the only light burning in the neighborhood was in his mother’s parlor. He was too excited to imagine the mischief she might be up to and she was up to plenty. She had her new friend in Remsen Park on the telephone. “Emile’s just gone out to hide the eggs,” she said. “He just left. I don’t know but I’ve got a feeling he’s going to hide them in the Delos Circle neighborhood. I mean wouldn’t it be just like Mr. Freeley to give everything to those rich snobs and forget his friends in Remsen Park? Wouldn’t it be just like him?”
In another two hours, Emile thought, as he shifted from reverse into low, his mission would be accomplished and, this close to success, he saw how heavily the responsibility had weighed on his mind. A light was burning in a house at the corner but it was a small, narrow window, closely curtained, and he guessed that it was a bathroom. As he watched the light went out. From the top of Turner Street near the golf links he could see all over the village—see how perfect and reassuring the darkness was and how deeply the place slept, and the thought of so many men, women, children and dogs wandering through their labyrinthine dreams made him smile. He stood at the headlights of his car, reading the instructions. Eight eggs at the corner of Delwood Avenue and Alberta Street, three eggs on Alberta Street, ten eggs at the junction of Delos Circle and Chestnut Lane.
The Hazzards lived at the corner of Delwood Avenue and Alberta Street. Mrs. Hazzard was awake. She had waked from a bad dream at about two and was sitting at the open window, smoking. She was thinking about the eggs—about those that contained warrants for travel—and wondering if any would be hidden on Alberta Street. She wanted to see Europe. There was more envy than longing in her feeling. It was not so much that she wanted to see the world as that she wanted to see what other people had seen. When she read in the paper that Venice was sinking into the sea and that the leaning tower of Pisa was due to collapse, what she felt was not sadness at the disappearance of these wonders but a sharp bitterness at the image of Venice vanishing beneath the waves before she, Laura Hazzard, had seen it. She also felt that she was singularly well equipped to appreciate the pleasures of travel. It was her kind of thing. When friends and relations returned from Europe with their photographs and souvenirs she listened to their accounts of travel with the feeling that her impressions would have been more vivid, her souvenirs and photographs would have been more beautiful and that she would have fitted more gracefully into a gondola. But there were some tender sentiments mixed with her envy. Travel was linked in her mind to the magnificence and pathos of love; it would be like a revelation of the affections. She had sensed, in love, a sky much deeper than the blue sky of the Northern Hemisphere; more spacious rooms and stairways, arches, domes, all the paraphernalia of the enormous past. She was thinking of this when she saw a car come around the corner and stop. She recognized Emile and watched him begin to hide his eggs in the grass. This whole sequence of events—the bad dream that waked her, her thoughts as she sat at the open window and the sudden arrival of the young man in the starlight—seemed to her marvelous and in her excitement she called down to him from the window.
Despair swept over Emile when he heard her voice. How, short of wringing her neck, could he undo the fact that she had seen him at his secret task? “Shhh,” he said, looking up at the window, but she had gone and in a minute she opened the door and ran out barefoot and in her nightgown. “Oh, Emile, you know I think I was meant to find one,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep and I was just sitting at the window when you came along. I have to have one of the gold ones, Emile! Give me one of the gold ones.”
