SOURCE: "The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories," in Sinclair Ross & Ernest Buckler, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975, pp. 9-24.

Between 1934 and 1952, Sinclair Ross published sixteen short stories, all but three of them in the Queen's Quarterly. Great credit is owing to this distinguished university journal for such faithful encouragement of a fledgling Canadian writer. These stories, especially those collected in The Lamp At Noon and Other Stories, comprise perhaps the most consistently excellent literary pieces to appear in Canada during the 1930s and 1940s.

Since limitation of space precludes discussing each of Ross' stories in turn, it has been necessary to treat them under general headings. Yet each repays close scrutiny, and at least three are superb little masterpieces.

Literary Techniques

A number of the stories are narrated from the viewpoint of a young boy between the ages of ten and fifteen. While he seldom felt inclined to use a distinctive idiom or dialect, such as Twain adopted for Huck Finn, Ross nonetheless wanted this youthful narrative voice to seem fresh and natural. He was also aware, from his own experience, that prairie farm boys in the 1930s entered early into the world of adult responsibility. The grim facts of the Depression required a maturity of outlook far beyond their years. Ross sought to combine the natural impulsiveness of youth with the tempered understanding and quiet acceptance of the adult world. Yet the meanings which the stories unfolded often demanded a kind of insight—and a phrasing of that insight—far beyond the limited powers of a young boy:

And Scripture we did read, Isaiah, verse about, my mother in her black silk dress and rhinestone brooch, I in my corduroys and Sunday shoes that pinched. It was a very august afternoon, exactly like the tone that had persisted in my mother's voice since breakfast time. I think I might have openly rebelled, only for the hope that by compliance I yet might win permission for the trip to town with Rock. I was inordinately proud that my father had suggested it, and for his faith in me forgave him even Isaiah and the plushy afternoon. Whereas with my mother, I decided, it was a case of downright bigotry.

("Cornet at Night")

Almost immediately we recognize the general territory of Huck Finn, but Twain would not have allowed Huck such big words as "august," "compliance," "inordinately proud" or "downright bigotry." When Twain wants to do bigotry he has a drunken Pap tongue-lash a coloured university professor. Huck simply doesn't know what the word "bigotry" means, though he clearly recognizes the bigot that his father is. Ross has additional things to accomplish. Notice, for example, how this whole passage is shaded in meaning by the exquisite choice of "august" and "plushy," so that in the boy's clear-sighted judgment the ritual of a Sunday afternoon reflects a beautifully light satirical tone.

Here and there, we may feel that the narrative voice grows slightly strained:

I have always been tethered to reality, always compelled by an unfortunate kind of probity in my nature to prefer a bare-faced disappointment to the luxury of a future I have no just claims upon.

("Cornet at Night")

A boy may well develop such an outlook on life, but no eleven year old could phrase it as perceptively. Ross overcomes this problem by consistent use of the past tense, and by such useful devices as the repetition in this passage of "always." The narrative voice takes on a retrospective quality, a distancing which makes us forget for a moment that we are listening to a youth. Ross adopted this rather complex narrative voice—youthful but also quietly sage—for several of his best stories: "The Outlaw," "Cornet at Night," "The Runaway," "One's a Heifer," and, more recently, "The Flowers That Killed Him."

A second distinctive narrative voice is that of the prairie farm woman. Two of Ross' finest stories, "A Field of Wheat" and "The Painted Door," employ this approach, thus allowing us to experience at first hand lives of terrible loneliness and isolation. Ross was particularly attracted to this narrative mode, and the novel As for Me and My House combines his two strongest forms of story-telling—the vivid intimacy of first-person narration combined with the prairie woman's point of view.

Occasionally the stories use a shifting narrative pattern. "The Lamp at Noon," for example, alternates the viewpoint between Paul and Ellen, an appropriate device since the story involves a husband/wife debate about the value of prairie farm life. A similar narrative mode appears in "Not by Rain Alone": Part I shows events from Will's point of view; Part II (originally published separately as "September Snow") gives frightening glances into the demented mind of Will's wife.

Ross is equally diverse and skilful when describing landscape, weather, and the seasons. The prairie writer is here faced with a special problem; to the outsider, the prairie appears empty, featureless, almost without character. It is thus a major triumph for Ross that the land comes to life so magnificently in these stories. But it is a particular kind of life. Here the landscape has a brooding, threatening quality, as though just beyond the horizon a malevolent God is preparing horrors of nature to hurl against an embattled people. Weather here is cursed, at first flattering human hopes, then mockingly dashing them asunder.

There is, of course, nothing made-up or fanciful about Ross' use in these stories of wind and storm, dust, hail, and snow. During the time that he lived the experiences which became the raw material of his art, the Canadian prairies were a gigantic dust bowl for years on end. To the farmers it seemed that nature had turned against them forever, exacting a terrible price for some unknown crime. At the heart of the stories is an unequal, but nonetheless heroic, struggle between tenacious man and relentless nature.

Personification is of primary use in making nature seem hostile to his prairie farm characters. Wind doesn't merely blow in these stories; it pries into the very houses and lives of a people besieged:

Tense; she fixed her eyes upon the clock, listening. There were two winds: the wind in flight, and the wind that pursued. The one sought refuge in the eaves, whimpering, in fear; the other assailed it there, and shook the eaves apart to make it flee again. Once as she listened this first wind sprang inside the room, distraught like a bird that has felt the graze of talons on its wing; while furious the other wind shook the walls, and thudded tumbleweeds against the window till its quarry glanced away again in fright. But only to return—to return and quake among the feeble eaves, as if in all this dustmad wilderness it knew no other sanctuary.

("The Lamp at Noon")

This paragraph is beautifully conceived and executed. The wind becomes diabolically alive, with the dominant image of a hunt carried superbly throughout the passage. But the personification works in two directions: we feel the savage attack of the wind but are never allowed to forget that a woman, alone and tensely watching a clock, listens to a predatory drama, which will go on and on and on . . . until she cracks.

At other moments, Ross works this same effect using a landscape of snow:

Then she wheeled to the window, and with quick short breaths thawed the frost to see again. The glitter was gone. Across the drifts sped swift and snakelike little tongues of snow. She could not follow them, where they sprang from, or where they disappeared. It was as if all across the yard the snow were shivering awake—roused by the warnings of the wind to hold itself in readiness for the impending storm. The sky had become a sombre, whitish grey. It, too, as if in readiness, had shifted and lay close to earth. Before her as she watched a mane of powdery snow reared up breast-high against the darker background of the stable, tossed for a moment angrily, and then subsided again as if whipped down to obedience and restraint. But another followed, more reckless and impatient than the first. Another reeled and dashed itself against the window where she watched. Then ominously for a while there were only the angry little snakes of snow. The wind rose, creaking the troughs that were wired beneath the eaves. In the distance, sky and prairie now were merged into one another linelessly. All round her it was gathering; already in its press and whimpering there strummed a boding of eventual fury.

("The Painted Door")

This powerful build-up to storm is described in no neutral way. Rather, some live but hostile force has selected this desolate farm house as a target for its assault. With the outside world completely cut off, it begins to try its strength, and release its wrath, upon the lonely woman who stares unmoving through the frozen window.

Many of the finest moments in Ross' stories combine these few but simple elements: menacing nature, lonely humans, a tightening claustrophobia. The dominant mood is one of attrition, with a terrible harmony between the working of wind upon soil and snow and the slow undermining of human stamina and strength.

Prairie Life and Prairie People

Knowledge is valuable no matter where we find it, and one aspect of literary criticism is an assessment of what we learn about life at a particular time and place. The historian and economist can give us the statistical data about prairie farm life in the 1930s, but literature alone can render these hard facts in an imaginative or creative way. Indeed, the Depression years in the Canadian west have been represented in a variety of evocative ways, from the impressive National Film Board production called The Drylanders (1962) to Michiel Horn's brilliant anthology, The Dirty Thirties: Canadians in the Great Depression (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1972). But it remains for writers like Sinclair Ross, who actually lived through those years, to illuminate them.

In Ross' stories, knowledge of prairie life is revealed in many ways. While the social historian or economist can usefully record that farm income dropped dramatically, and therefore drastically curtailed consumer purchasing, perhaps only the imaginative writer can communicate the effect, as in this passage from "Cornet at Night" in which the boy is instructed what to do when he takes the eggs to market in town:

By the time they had both finished with me there were a great many things to mind. Besides repairs for my father's binder, I was to take two crates of eggs each containing twelve dozen eggs to Mr. Jenkins' store and in exchange have a list of groceries filled. And to make it complicated, both quantity and quality of some of the groceries were to be determined by the price of eggs. Thirty cents a dozen, for instance, and I was to ask for coffee at sixty-five cents a pound. Twenty-nine cents a dozen and coffee at fifty cents a pound. Twenty-eight and no oranges. Thirty-one and bigger oranges. It was like decimals with Miss Wiggins, or two notes in the treble against three in the bass. For my father a tin of special blend tobacco, and my mother not to know. For my mother a box of face powder at the drugstore, and my father not to know.

("Cornet at Night")

Sometimes Ross' knowledge reveals itself in brief but precise instinctive reactions—a glance at a man's hands conveys the certainty that he won't be any good at setting up wheat stooks; or humiliation comes from thinking, against one's better judgment, that a balky horse can be cured:

Of course he was wrong. He should have known what every horseman knows, that a balky horse is never cured. If you're unscrupulous, you'll trade it off or sell it. If you're honest, you'll shoot it. Promptly, humanely, before it exasperates you to moments of rage and viciousness from which your self-respect will never quite recover. For weeks and months on end it will be a model horse, intelligent, cooperative, and then one fine day, when you're least expecting trouble, it will be a balky one again. You'll waste time and patience on it. You'll try persuasion first, then shouts and curses. You'll go back to persuasion, then degrade yourself to blows. And at last, weary and ashamed, you'll let the traces down and lead it to its stall.

("The Outlaw")

This exact and detailed knowledge of horses runs throughout Ross' fiction, and some of his best writing has been concerned with the relationship of boy and horse—for example, from the early story "A Day with Pegasus," through the better known "The Outlaw," to sequences in both The Well and Whir of Gold.

Ross's male characters, especially the farmers in the short stories, share with their creator this accumulated knowledge of prairie farm life. They can best be defined, not in relation to any society or to the universe, but simply in relation to nature. They think crop. They learn to read the skies. They are men who gauge and calculate, who play endlessly, as it were, a desperate game of chance with the weather and the seasons. And it is well to understand the effect of these obsessions upon themselves, their wives, and their children.

Ross' farmers are big, silent men who go about their work with a dogged fortitude that is truly impressive. Working farms which are at best marginally viable as economic units, and engaged as they are in a desperate duel with the land, it is hardly surprising that their inner lives reveal some terrible tensions. As heads of families they must grow the crops which buy the clothes and put the food on the kitchen table; failure to do this means more than the possibility of poverty or the ignominy of going on relief, for the vast majority of Saskatchewan farmers were on some form of relief during the Depression years. Failure entails, too, a loss of moral authority, the inability to retain what has traditionally been seen as a man's chief role, the support of his wife and children. Because of these pressures many of these prairie farmers suffered terrible strains, or broke under the unequal struggle against the unyielding seasons. Ross records, with both power and compassion, the heroic lives of these simple but good men, and celebrates their intense loyalty to a land which had apparently gone bad forever.

The farm wives form a distant point of this impossible prairie triad: men, women, and land. A typical moment in a Ross story finds the wife alone in the farm house, straining for a glimpse through the window of her husband ploughing in far off fields or struggling through mountainous drifts of snow. These are the loneliest women in Canadian fiction, and Ross has an especial understanding of their unjust plight. They are basically good and faithful mates, with an instinctive awareness of the severe tensions under which their husbands labour. But the desolation and hopelessness of prairie farm life occasionally gets to them, often against their own wills and desires. Then they come face to face with reality and with pained awareness count the toll of their way of life:

There was a dark resentment in her voice now that boded another quarrel. He waited, his eyes on her dubiously as she mashed a potato with her fork. The lamp between them threw strong lights and shadows on their faces. Dust and drought, earth that betrayed alike his labour and his faith, to him the struggle had given sternness, an impressive courage. Beneath the whip of sand his youth had been effaced. Youth, zest, exuberance—there remained only a harsh and clenched virility that yet became him, that seemed at the cost of more engaging qualities to be fulfilment of his inmost and essential nature. Whereas to her the same debts and poverty had brought a plaintive indignation, a nervous dread of what was still to come. The eyes were hollowed, the lips pinched dry and colourless. It was the face of a woman that had aged without maturing, that had loved the little vanities of life, and lost them wistfully.

("The Lamp at Noon")

Sometimes the bleak face of despair leads to desperate acts. Ellen, in "The Lamp at Noon," flees into a prairie dust storm and unwittingly suffocates the child whom she is trying to free from such a terrible life. In "Not by Rain Alone" (Part II), Eleanor dies when a winter blizzard invades the house and freezes her in the act of childbirth. It is the sense of being utterly cut off from the world (both women are alone) which vividly characterizes their lives. Neighbours are far distant through swirling dust or across frozen prairie; no radios or phones bring the outside world into these bare parlours and kitchens; husbands come for meals or to sleep. Even a rare trip to town may become a traumatic experience, as in the fine story, "Nell," with its lovely symbol of fidelity in a remembered ketchup bottle. Indeed, the overall testimony of these stories suggests only a single motivating force which keeps these prairie farm women struggling on—the hope that their children will one day enjoy a better way of life.

The children in the stories are a fascinating group. They share with their parents the discipline and hard work of prairie farm life, and their lives are likewise not without tensions. The pressure to be "good" and "nice" comes largely from their mothers, the children becoming the objects of their mothers cultural aspirations:

It was the children now, Joe and Annabelle: this winter perhaps they could send them to school in town and let them take music lessons. Annabelle, anyway. At a pinch Joe could wait a while; he was only eight. It wouldn't take Annabelle long to pick up her notes; already she played hymn tunes by ear on the organ. She was bright, a real little lady for manners; among town people she would learn a lot. The farm was no place to bring her up. Running wild and barefoot, what would she be like in a few years? Who would ever want to marry her but some stupid country lout?

("A Field of Wheat")

With significant frequency the drive for culture takes the form in these stories of music lessons; to play the piano is a sure sign that one has risen above the level of chickens and crops. (The nature of these lessons is nicely detailed in Chapter 11 of Whir of Gold.) Equally impressive is the belief in the benefits of formal schooling, as though education were the one certain way of delivering the next generation from the hardships and heartbreaks of prairie farm life.

The children, moreover, often find themselves caught between two different value systems. Fathers, needing help with the farm work, encourage the useful skills; mothers insist upon religion, good manners, and those dreary piano lessons! Somehow, between chores and cultural workouts, the youngsters find moments for exotic dreams or brave fantasies. The climactic moments of their young lives occur, however, when parental pressures subside, when both parents gladly hand over some adult sphere of responsibility to the proudly waiting child. And while we naturally welcome this initiation into the adult community, we also sense that this parental dream of a better future may never be realized for these children. We come away haunted by the thought that, as with their mothers and fathers before them, these children will in time yield to this lonely and harsh environment.

Three Stories

Many of the themes and techniques discussed above appear in three of Ross' masterly stories: "A Field of Wheat," "Cornet at Night," and "The Painted Door."

"A Field of Wheat" (Ross' first story published in Canada) opens on a strong note of hope. After years of blight and failure, a great crop of wheat is ripening for John. For his wife Martha, little dreams of the future begin to form, better schooling for the children, perhaps even something left over for herself and John. Ross creates in Martha's mind a quietly musing quality which parallels the outer scene of the great crop shimmering in the summer sun. This is one of the story's strong points—the subtle equation between the human world and the world of nature. Indeed, after sixteen years of marriage, Martha has come to see John almost in terms of the land—dried out and without hope. But this once, with the great crop coming on, she dreams that it (not herself) will restore John to his former self. This balanced tension between inner weather and outer weather is beautifully caught again in the symbol of the poppies, that most fragile of flowers, which the daughter Annabelle grows in the garden behind the house:

Sitting down on the doorstep to admire the gaudy petals, she complained to herself, "They go so fast—the first little winds blow them all away." On her face, lengthening it, was bitten deeply the enigma of the flowers and the naked seed-pods. Why did the beauty flash and the bony stalks remain?

Ross thus establishes the terrible fragility of prairie farm life, the extraordinary beauty followed by sudden destruction and loss. And with this symbolic touch Ross begins the horrible prelude to storm.

The description of the hail storm—from Martha's first sensing it through its savage length—is one of the finest set pieces Ross has written, and takes its authority from his first-hand experience of prairie storms. This shows especially in Martha's frantic efforts at defence—throwing open the barn door for John and the horses, the children holding pillows against the exposed windows. And then the breaking ferocity of the storm, "like a weapon that has sunk deep into flesh," invading the house, smashing windows, lamps, dishes, and leaving the poor mutt Nipper beaten to death by the door. And after the storm has passed, they walk out into the fields:

Nothing but the glitter of sun on hailstones. Nothing but their wheat crushed into little rags of muddy slime. Here and there an isolated straw standing bolt upright in headless defiance.

This is the farthest point of endurance, with the great promise of the season stretched dead before them. Both John and Martha are at the breaking point, but mask their agony before the children. It is only later, with anger and frustration and rage in her eyes and on her lips, that Martha seeks John in the barn, and finds him sobbing against the mane of a horse. Watching him cry is the most terrible moment of her life—a reaction which indicates the price exacted on these prairie farmers by the code of tough masculinity. Without letting him know that she has witnessed his agony, Martha creeps back to the house to clear up the mess left in the wake of the storm:

Martha hurried inside. She started the fire again, then nailed a blanket over the broken window and lit the big brass parlour lamp—the only one the storm had spared. Her hands were quick and tense. John would need a good supper tonight. The biscuits were water soaked, but she still had the peas. He liked peas. Lucky that they had picked them when they did. This winter they wouldn't have so much as an onion or potato.

There is a fantastic strength of character in these final acts and thoughts of Martha (notice how the clipped rhythm of the sentences seems to keep the deeper emotions temporarily at bay), and the story's ending sees love and compassion wrenched from the potential chaos of human despair. The will to go on never completely dies in the world of Ross' fiction, and some of his finest moments show the little lights of hope burning bravely against the black and massive forces of negation.

"Cornet at Night" is narrated by Tommy Dickson, an eleven-year-old prairie farm boy. It is a story which celebrates at least two firsts in Tommy's life—his first trip to town alone (his father is too busy with the harvest to find another hand, so Tommy is sent on the mission) and, secondly, his first awareness of a world of strange and beauty which exists outside the narrow compass of farm life. It is thus a story in which practical responsibility comes in conflict with aesthetic impulse.

Tommy is one of those prairie lads caught between the different values of his parents. His father's great compulsion is the crop; ripe wheat will be harvested, Sunday or not. Tommy's mother warns of the vengeance that will be reaped by breaking the Sabbath, or keeping Tommy home from school to help with the harvest. Ross sketches these parental values in a quietly satirical tone in the early part of the story:

He slammed out at that to harness his horses and cut his wheat, and away sailed my mother with me in her wake to spend an austere half-hour in the dark, plushy little parlour. It was a kind of vicarious atonement, I suppose, for we both took straight-backed chairs, and for all of the half-hour stared across the room at a big pansy-bordered motto on the opposite wall: As for Me and My House We Will Serve the Lord.

But the male forces win out, and Tommy goes off to town to hire another hand. Tommy finds a young man named Philip, with shabby clothes but gentle manners, whose delicate hands hardly suggest the kind of man his father wants:

His hands were slender, almost a girl's hands, yet vaguely with their shapely quietness they troubled me, because, however slender and smooth, they were yet hands to be reckoned with, strong with a strength that was different from the rugged labour-strength I knew.

On the ride home, Tommy discovers that Philip is a musician (Ross skilfully withholds the symbolic cornet until after the middle point of the story). Philip turns out to be a hopeless worker and, after one glorious evening of cornet music. Tommy's father drives him back to town.

From the mid point of the story, Ross develops a powerful tension between two sets of values, already prefigured in Tommy's parents. In one sense, Tommy has shown poor judgment and thus failed the test of his father's work ethic. The father nicely diverts the blame for this onto Tommy's mother—with all her nonsense about music lessons! On this count Tommy has been humiliated, but he has learned in the process that you don't judge every man by the toughness of his hands, or his ability to set up stooks. Tommy defends Philip as a musician, and about that there could be no argument:

There were no answers, but presently he reached for his cornet. In the dim, soft darkness I could see it glow and quicken. And I remember still what a long and fearful moment it was, crouched and steeling myself, waiting for him to begin.

And I was right: when they came the notes were piercing, golden as the cornet itself, and they gave life expanse that it had never known before.

Nor is Tommy the only one listening. His parents also respond to this extraordinary and unexpected beauty, as though realizing that the endless drudgery of farm life had almost closed their ears forever to the possibility of such unearthly loveliness. Once Philip has gone, Tommy's anger at the world flares briefly and then subsides into the pattern of acceptance which prairie life demands: "It's like that on a farm. You always have to put the harvest first."

Ross handles the theme of this story with great delicacy. Despite the temporary defeat of Tommy's pride, and the apparent triumph of his father's values, we see a process of growth—a developing awareness in Tommy that farm values are not the only values. (The story of Tommy's later life is, in a sense, transferred to Sonny in Whir of Gold.) Moreover, the resolution of this story's tensions is supported throughout by a subtle deployment of diction. One notes, for example, how the word "lesson" threads through the story in a variety of contrasting contexts. There are the overt lessons—Tommy's music lessons, and the lesson he tries to give Philip in stooking. And there are the hidden ones—the lesson which the Lord, so his mother claims, will teach Tommy's father for desecrating the Sabbath with work (Philip embodies that particular lesson); the lesson which Tommy's parents sense from the beauty of cornet music by night; the lesson Tommy learns about the potential beauty of the world outside the farm.

Towards the end of the story, Ross plays with equally skilful effect on the word "golden." Its usual form is in such phrases as "golden harvest," but a rival connotation emerges in the beauty of the gleaming instrument which Philip raises to his lips. The quiet and subtle meaning of the story—an ironical probing into the value systems of prairie farm life—is superbly caught in the final sentence, where the different sets of values are brought together powerfully and established, once and for all, in their proper relationship: "A harvest, however lean, is certain every year; but a cornet at night is golden only once."

"The Painted Door" is perhaps Ross' most dramatic story. It is told almost entirely from the woman's point of view, and spans a single day and night in her life—a fateful time, nonetheless, which brings her first act of sexual infidelity since her marriage, and the death of her husband. Ann and John have together struggled with prairie farm life for seven years. They have only two close neighbours—Steven, a bachelor, who farms alone about a mile away, and John's father, five miles across the hills. It is winter and the story opens with an ominous reference—to be repeated throughout the story—to "a double wheel around the moon," a certain prelude to storm.

Moreover, the early pages make it clear that Ann is undergoing a crisis in her relationship with both John and the prairie. A caustic quality colours her exchanges with John as he prepares to set out across the hills to visit his aging father: "'Plenty to eat—plenty of wood to keep me warm—what more could a woman ask for?'" What, indeed?—except company—she hasn't seen anyone but John for two whole weeks—and love; but John really loves the battle for survival with the land:

Year after year their lives went on in the same little groove. He drove his horses in the field; she milked the cows and hoed potatoes. By dint of his drudgery he saved a few months' wages, added a few dollars more each fall to his payments on the mortgage; but the only real difference that it all made was to deprive her of his companionship, to make him a little duller, older, uglier than he might otherwise have been.

The middle section of the story, before Steven arrives, is a brilliant depiction of the lonely winter day of a prairie farm wife. Even the familiar noises of the house—crackling stove and ticking clock—grate on her taut nerves, and the rising blizzard slowly builds the atmosphere into a terrible tension. Ann's few attempts at relief somehow fail to bring any comfort—touching up the interior with white paint, returning in memory to happier days, when John was younger and more alive, when she danced with the youthful Steven (the recurring reference to Steven shows Ross' skill at creating dramatic suspense). Ann simply faces the hard truth that life has passed her by.

Then Steven comes. But his coming brings no lessening of the tension. Alone now with this younger man, whose calm assurance contrasts strongly with John's dullness, Ann is forced to admit an attraction:

She felt eager, challenged. Something was at hand that hitherto had always eluded her, even in the early days with John, something vital, beckoning, meaningful. She didn't understand, but she knew. The texture of the moment was satisfyingly dreamlike: an incredibility perceived as such, yet acquiesced in. She was John's wife—she knew—but also she knew that Steven standing here was different from John.

As Ann and Steven put in the long hours until John's return (five miles across the hills in a blizzard), the tension continues to build inside this desolate farm house. Finally, they respond to both the attraction and the desire.

However, the presence of John, not in person but in thought, dominates the relationship of Ann and Steven throughout the long winter night. Ross' handling of John's off-stage presence is masterly. For example, we notice a subtle transition in the way John is referred to. The phrasing of Ann's doubt that John would attempt to return home through the blizzard is vaguely threatening: "'. . . he wouldn't dare . . . he wouldn't dare . . .'" Steven's judgments are more ominous: "'—it would be suicide to try,'" and "'A man couldn't live in it.'" Finally, in a splendidly symbolic moment, Ann imagines that she has dreamed of John's return, that he has stood over her menacingly just as the shadows from the stove mass above the sleeping lovers:

There was one great shadow that struggled towards her threateningly, massive and black and engulfing all the room. Again and again it advanced, about to spring, but each time a little whip of light subdued it to its place among the others on the wall.

One cannot sufficiently praise the suggestive brilliance of this passage: words such as "struggled" and "advanced" force us to imagine John making his slow way through the blizzard, and the play of shadows on the wall beautifully parallels Ann's unsuccessful attempts to put John completely from her mind.

The final pages of the story bring a resolution to Ann's agony, and a totally unexpected dénouement. Ann's dark night of the soul—she suffers terrible pangs of guilt while Steven slumbers contentedly beside her—is finally dissolved by the coming of day. Ann now stands convinced of two certainties—that John is the man she really loves, and that somehow he has made his way home through the blizzard. In a surprise ending of great dramatic power—one which sends our minds reeling back across the whole length of the story—Ross finally reveals the Tightness of Ann's intuition.