The Pigeon [antikvár]

jfit the time the pigeon affair overtook him, unhinging his life from one day to the next, Jonathan Noel, already past fifty, could look back over a good twenty-year period of total uneventfulness and would never have expected anything of importance could ever overtake him again—other than death someday. And that was perfectly all right with him. For he was not fond of events, and hated outright those that rattled his inner equilibrium and made a muddle of the external arrangements of life. The majority of such events lay, thank God, far back in the dim, remote years of his childhood and youth, which he no longer had any desire whatever to recall, and when he did, then only with the greatest aversion: On a summer afternoon, in July of 1942, in or near Charenton, as he was returning home from fishing—^there had been a thunderstorm that