midday
Store clothes on the chair by the bed . He was taking it easy . Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour the instant his eyes opened . Here the flat next door was so close that the bed-room was in twilight even at midday . On the farm he could tell by the feeling -- an intangible thing , but infallible . He could gauge the very quality of the blackness that comes just before dawn . The crowing of the cocks , the stamping of the cattle , the twittering of the birds in the old elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the ghostly light -- these things he had never needed .