I hung around, loath to go, but hating myself all the while for not
doing so. And every day Whitney would come at me with his insane scheme.
'Over there! It isn't very far. Two days--maybe three. How about it?
Eh?' and then that tense sweep of the arm to the north. I don't know
what it was, weariness, disgust, irritation of the whole sorry plan
of things, but finally, and to my own astonishment, I found myself
consenting, and within two days Whitney had his crazy pack outfit ready,
and on the morning of the third day we set out. Mrs. Whitney had said
nothing when we unfolded our intentions to her, nor did she say anything
when we departed, but stood on the porch of the bungalow, her hand up
to her throat, and watched us out of sight. I wondered what she was
thinking about. The Voodoos--that was the name of the mountains we were
heading for--had killed a good many men in their time."
Hardy took a long and thoughtful sip from the glass in front of him
before he began again. "I've knocked about a good deal in my life," he
said; "I've been lost--once in the jungle; I've starved; I've reached
the point where I've imagined horrors, heard voices, you understand, and
seen great, bearded men mouthing at me--a man's pretty far gone when
that happens to him--but that trip across the desert was the worst I've
ever taken. By day it was all right, just swaying in your saddle, half
asleep a good part of the time, the smell of warm dust in your nose, the
three pack-mules plodding along behind; but the nights!--I tell you,
I've sat about camp-fires up the Congo and watched big, oily black men
eat their food, and I once saw a native village sacked, but I'd rather
be tied for life to a West Coast nigger than to a man like Whitney. It
isn't good for two people to be alone in a place like that and for one
to hate the other as I hated him. God knows why I didn't kill him; I'd
have to get up and leave the fire and go out into the night, and, mind
you, I'd be shuddering like a man with the ague under that warm, soft
air. And he never for a minute suspected it. His mind was scarred with
drink as if a worm had bored its slow way in and out of it. I can see
him now, cross-legged, beyond the flames, big, unshaven, heavy-jowled,
dirty, what he thought dripping from his mouth like the bacon drippings
he was too lazy to wipe away. I won't tell you what he talked about;
you know, the old thing; but not the way even the most wrong-minded of
ordinary men talks; there was a sodden, triumphant deviltry in him that
was appalling. He cursed the country for its lack of opportunity of a
certain kind; he was like a hound held in leash, gloating over what he
would do when he got back to the kennels of civilization again. And all
the while, at the back of my mind, was a picture of that white-and-gold
woman of his, way back toward the south, waiting his return because she
owed him her life for the brilliant career she had ruined. It made you
sometimes almost want to laugh--insanely. I used to lie awake at night
and pray whatever there was to kill him, and do it quickly. I would have
turned back, but I felt that every day I could keep him away from Los
Pinos was a day gained for Mrs. Whitney. He was a dangerous maniac, too.
The first day he behaved himself fairly well, but the second, after
supper, when we had cleaned up, he began to fumble through the packs,
and finally produced a bottle of brandy.
"'Fine camping stuff!' he announced. 'Lots of results for very little
weight. Have some?'
"'Are you going to drink that?' I asked.
"'Oh, go to the devil!' he snapped. 'I've been out as much as you have.'
I didn't argue with him further; I hoped if he drank enough the sun
would get him. But the third night he upset the water-kegs, two of
them. He had been carrying on some sort of weird celebration by himself,
and finally staggered out into the desert, singing at the top of his
lungs, and the first thing I knew he was down among the kegs, rolling
over and over, and kicking right and left. The one that was open was
gone; another he kicked the plug out of, but I managed to save about
a quarter of its contents. The next morning I spoke to him about it.
He blinked his red eyes and chuckled.
"'Poor sort of stuff, anyway,' he said.
"'Yes,' I agreed; 'but without it you would blow out like a candle in
a dust storm.' After that we didn't speak to each other except when it
was necessary.
"We were in the foot-hills of the Voodoos by now, and the next day we
got into the mountains themselves--great, bare ragged peaks, black and
red and dirty yellow, like the cooled-off slake of a furnace. Every
now and then a dry gully came down from nowheres; and the only human
thing one could see was occasionally, on the sides of one of these,
a shivering, miserable, half-dead piñon--nothing but that, and the
steel-blue sky overhead, and the desert behind us, shimmering like
a lake of salt. It was hot--good Lord! The horn of your saddle burned
your hand. That night we camped in a canyon, and the next day went
still higher up, following the course of a rutted stream that probably
ran water once in a year. Whitney wanted to turn east, and it was all
a toss-up to me; the place looked unlikely enough, anyway, although
you never can tell. I had settled into the monotony of the trip by
now and didn't much care how long we stayed out. One day was like
another--hot little swirls of dust, sweat of mules, and great black
cliffs; and the nights came and went like the passing of a sponge over
a fevered face. On the sixth day the tragedy happened. It was toward
dusk, and one of the mules, the one that carried the water, fell over
a cliff.
"He wasn't hurt; just lay on his back and smiled crossly; but the
kegs and the bags were smashed to bits. I like mules, but I wanted
to kill that one. It was quiet down there in the canyon--quiet and
hot. I looked at Whitney and he looked at me, and I had the sudden,
unpleasant realization that he was a coward, added to his other
qualifications. Yes, a coward! I saw it in his blurred eyes and the
quivering of his bloated lips--stark dumb funk. That was bad. I'm
afraid I lost my nerve, too; I make no excuses; fear is infectious.
At all events, we tore down out of that place as if death was after
us, the mules clattering and flapping in the rear. After a time I
rode more slowly, but in the morning we were nearly down at the
desert again; and there it lay before us, shimmering like a lake of
salt--three days back to water.
"The next two days were rather a blur, as if a man were walking on
a red-hot mirror that tipped up and down and tried to take his legs
from under him. There was a water-hole a little to the east of the
way we had come, and toward that I tried to head. One of the mules
gave out, and staggered and groaned, and tried to get up again. I
remember hearing him squeal, once; it was horrible. He lay there,
a little black speck on the desert. Whitney and I didn't speak to
each other at all, but I thought of those two kegs of water he had
upset. Have you ever been thirsty--mortally thirsty, until you feel
your tongue black in your mouth? It's queer what it does to you. Do
you remember that little place--Zorn's--at college? We used to sit
there sometimes on spring afternoons. It was cool and cavern-like,
and through the open door one could see the breeze in the maple-trees.
Well, I thought about that all the time; it grew to be an obsession,
a mirage. I could smell the moss-like smell of bock beer; I even
remembered conversations we had had. You fellows were as real to me
as you are real to-night. It's strange, and then, when you come to,
uncanny; you feel the sweat on you turn cold.
"We had ridden on in that way I don't know how long, snatching a
couple of feverish hours of sleep in the night, Whitney groaning and
mumbling horribly, when suddenly my horse gave a little snicker--low,
the way they do when you give them grain--and I felt his tired body
straighten up ever so little. 'Maybe,' I thought, and I looked up.
But I didn't much care; I just wanted to crawl into some cool place and
forget all about it and die. It was late in the afternoon. My shadow was
lengthening. Too late, really, for much mirage; but I no longer put
great stock in green vegetation and matters of that kind; I had seen
too much of it in the last two days fade away into nothing--nothing
but blistering, damned sand. And so I wouldn't believe the cool reeds
and the sparkling water until I had dipped down through a little swale
and was actually fighting my horse back from the brink. I knew enough
to do that, mind you, and to fight back the two mules so that they drank
just a little at a time--a little at a time; and all the while I had to
wait, with my tongue like sand in my mouth. Over the edge of my horse's
neck I could see the water just below; it looked as cool as rain. I was
always a little proud of that--that holding back; it made up, in a way,
for the funk of two nights earlier. When the mules and my horse were
through I dismounted and, lying flat, bathed my hands, and then, a tiny
sip at a time, began to drink. That was hard. When I stood up the heat
seemed to have gone, and the breeze was moist and sweet with the smell
of evening. I think I sang a little and waved my hands above my head,
and, at all events, I remember I lay on my back and rolled a cigarette;
and quite suddenly and without the slightest reason there were tears in
my eyes. Then I began to wonder what had become of Whitney; I hadn't
thought of him before. I got to my feet, and just as I did so I saw him
come over the little rise of sand, swaying in his saddle, and trying,
the fool, to make his horse run. He looked like a great scarecrow blown
out from some Indian maize-field into the desert. His clothes were torn
and his mask of a face was seamed and black from dust and sweat; he saw
the water and let out one queer, hoarse screech and kicked at his horse
with wabbling legs.
"'Look out!' I cried, and stepped in his way. I had seen this sort
of thing before and knew what to expect; but he rode me down as if
I hadn't been there. His horse tried to avoid me, and the next moment
the sack of grain on its back was on the sands, creeping like a great,
monstrous, four-legged thing toward the water. 'Stay where you are,'
I said, 'and I'll bring you some.' But he only crawled the faster. I
grabbed his shoulder. 'You fool!' I said. 'You'll kill yourself!'
"'Damn you!' he blubbered. 'Damn you!' And before I knew it, and with
all the strength, I imagine, left in him, he was on his feet and I was
looking down the barrel of his gun. It looked very round and big and
black, too. Beyond it his eyes were regarding me; they were quite mad,
there was no doubt about that, but, just the way a dying man achieves
some of his old desire to will, there was definite purpose in them.
'You get out of my way,' he said, and began very slowly to circle me.
You could hardly hear his words, his lips were so blistered and swollen.
"And now this is the point of what I am telling you." Hardy fumbled
again for a match and relit his cigarette. "There we were, we two,
in that desert light, about ten feet from the water, he with his gun
pointing directly at my heart--and his hand wasn't trembling as much
as you would imagine, either--and he was circling me step by step,
and I was standing still. I suppose the whole affair took two minutes,
maybe three, but in that time--and my brain was still blurred to other
impressions--I saw the thing as clearly as I see it now, as clearly as
I saw that great, swollen beast of a face. Here was the chance I had
longed for, the hope I had lain awake at night and prayed for; between
the man and death I alone stood; and I had every reason, every instinct
of decency and common sense, to make me step aside. The man was a devil;
he was killing the finest woman I had ever met; his presence poisoned
the air he walked in; he was an active agent of evil, there was no doubt
of that. I hated him as I had never hated anything else in my life, and
at the moment I was sure that God wanted him to die. I knew then that
to save him would be criminal; I think so still. And I saw other
considerations as well; saw them as clearly as I see you sitting here.
I saw the man who loved Mrs. Whitney, and I saw Mrs. Whitney herself,
and in my keeping, I knew, was all her chance for happiness, the one
hope that the future would make up to her for some of the horror of
the past. It would have been an easy thing to do; the most ordinary
caution was on my side. Whitney was far larger than I, and, even in
his weakened condition--I was weak myself--stronger, and he had a gun
that in a flash of light could blow me into eternity. And what would
happen then? Why, when he got back to Los Pinos they would hang him;
they would be only too glad of the chance; and his wife?--she would
die; I knew it--just go out like a flame from the unbearableness of
it all. And there wasn't one chance in a thousand that he wouldn't kill
me if I made a single step toward him. I had only to let him go and in
a few minutes he would be dead--as dead as his poor brute of a horse
would be within the hour. I felt already the cool relief that would be
mine when the black shadow of him was gone. I would ride into town and
think no more of it than if I had watched a tarantula die. You see, I
had it all reasoned out as clearly as could be; there was morality and
common sense, the welfare of other people, the man's own good, really,
and yet--well, I didn't do it."
"Didn't?" It was Jarrick who put the question a little breathlessly.
"No. I stepped toward him--so! One step, then another, very slowly,
hardly a foot at a time, and all the while I watched the infernal circle
of that gun, expecting it every minute to spit fire. I didn't want to
go; I went against my will. I was scared, too, mortally scared; my legs
were like lead--I had to think every time I lifted a foot--and in a
queer, crazy way I seemed to feel two people, a man and a woman, holding
me back, plucking at my sleeves. But I went. All the time I kept saying,
very steady and quiet: 'Don't shoot, Whitney! D'you hear! Don't shoot or
I'll kill you!' Wasn't it silly? Kill him! Why, he had me dead ten times
before I got to him. But I suppose some trace of sanity was knocking at
his drink-sodden brain, for he didn't shoot--just watched me, his red
eyes blinking. So! One step at a time--nearer and nearer--I could feel
the sweat on my forehead--and then I jumped. I had him by the legs, and
we went down in a heap. He shot then; they always do! But I had him tied
up with the rags of his own shirt in a trice. Then I brought him water
in my hat and let him drink it, drop by drop. After a while he came to
altogether. But he never thanked me; he wasn't that kind of a brute. I
got him into town the morning of the second day and turned him over to
his wife. So you see"--Hardy hesitated and looked at the circle of our
faces with an odd, appealing look--"it _is_ queer, isn't it? All mixed
up. One doesn't know." He sank back in his chair and began to scratch,
absent-mindedly, at a holder with a match.
The after-theatre crowd was beginning to come in; the sound of
laughter and talk grew steadily higher; far off an orchestra wailed
inarticulately.
"What became of them?" I asked.
Hardy looked up as if startled. "The Whitneys? Oh--she died--Martin
wrote me. Down there, within a year. One would know it would happen.
Like a flame, I suppose--suddenly."
"And the man--the fellow who was in love with her?"
Hardy stirred wearily. "I haven't heard," he said. "I suppose he is
still alive."
He leaned over to complete the striking of his match, and for an instant
his arm touched a glass; it trembled and hung in the balance, and he
shot out a sinewy hand to stop it, and as he did so the sleeve of his
dinner jacket caught. On the brown flesh of his forearm I saw a queer,
ragged white cross--the scar a snake bite leaves when it is cicatrized.
I meant to avoid his eyes, but somehow I caught them instead. They were
veiled and hurt.
THE WAKE[2]
BY DONN BYRNE
From _Harper's Magazine_
[2] Copyright, 1915, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1916, by Donn
Byrne.
At times the muffled conversation in the kitchen resembled the resonant
humming of bees, and again, when it became animated, it sounded like the
distant cackling of geese. Then there would come a pause; and it would
begin again with sibilant whispers, and end in a chorus of dry laughter
that somehow suggested the crackling of burning logs.
Occasionally a figure would open the bedroom door, pass the old man
as he sat huddled in his chair, never throwing a glance at him, and
go and kneel by the side of the bed where the body was. They usually
prayed for two or three minutes, then rose and walked on tiptoe to the
kitchen, where they joined the company. Sometimes they came in twos,
less often in threes, but they did precisely the same thing--prayed
for precisely the same time, and left the room on tiptoe with the same
creak of shoe and rustle of clothes that sounded so intensely loud
throughout the room. They might have been following instructions laid
down in a ritual.
The old man wished to heaven they would stay away. He had been sitting
in his chair for hours, thinking, until his head was in a whirl. He
wanted to concentrate his thoughts, but somehow he felt that the
mourners were preventing him.
The five candles at the head of the bed distracted him. He was glad when
the figure of one of the mourners shut off the glare for a few minutes.
He was also distracted by the five chairs standing around the room like
sentries on post and the little table by the window with its crucifix
and holy-water font. He wanted to keep thinking of "herself," as he
called her, lost in the immensity of the oaken bed. He had been looking
at the pinched face with its faint suspicion of blue since early that
morning. He was very much awed by the nun's hood that concealed the back
of the head, and the stiffly posed arms and the small hands in their
white-cotton gloves moved him to a deep pity.
Somebody touched him on the shoulder. "Michael James."
It was big Dan Murray, a gaunt red farmer, who had been best man at his
wedding.
"Michael James."
"What is it?"
"I hear young Kennedy's in the village."
"What of that?"
"I thought it was best for you to know."
Murray waited a moment, then he went out, on tiptoe, as everybody did,
his movements resembling the stilted gestures of a mechanical toy.
Down the drive Michael heard steps coming. Then a struggle and a shrill
giggle. Some young people were coming to the wake, and he knew a boy had
tried to kiss a girl in the dark. He felt a dull surge of resentment.
She was nineteen when he married her; he was sixty-three. Because he had
over two hundred acres of land and many head of milch and grazing cattle
and a huge house that rambled like a barrack, her father had given her
to him; and young Kennedy, who had been her father's steward for years,
and had been saving to buy a house for her, was thrown over like a bale
of mildewed hay.
Kennedy had made several violent scenes. Michael James remembered the
morning of the wedding. Kennedy waylaid the bridal-party coming out of
the church. He was drunk. "Mark me," he had said, very quietly for a
drunken man--"mark me. If anything ever happens to that girl at your
side, Michael James, I'll murder you. I'll murder you in cold blood. Do
you understand?"
Michael James could be forgiving that morning. "Run away and sober up,
lad," he had said, "and come up to the house and dance."
Kennedy had gone around the countryside for weeks, drunk every night,
making threats against the old farmer. And then a wily sergeant of the
Connaught Rangers had trapped him and taken him off to Aldershot.
Now he was home on furlough, and something had happened to her, and he
was coming up to make good his threat.
What had happened to her? Michael James didn't understand. He had given
her everything he could. She had taken it all with a demure thanks, but
he had never had anything of her but apathy. She had gone around the
house apathetically, growing a little thinner every day, and then a few
days ago she had lain down, and last night she had died, apathetically.
And young Kennedy was coming up for an accounting to-night. "Well,"
thought Michael James, "let him come!"
Silence suddenly fell over the company in the kitchen. Then a loud
scraping as they stood up, and a harsher grating as chairs were pushed
back. The door of the bedroom opened and the red flare from the fire and
lamps of the kitchen blended into the sickly yellow candle-light of the
bedroom.
The parish priest walked in. His closely cropped white hair, strong,
ruddy face, and erect back gave him more the appearance of a soldier
than a clergyman. He looked at the bed a moment, and then at Michael
James.
"Oh, you mustn't take it like that, man," he said. "You mustn't take
it like that. You must bear up." He was the only one who spoke in his
natural voice.
He turned to a lumbering farmer's wife who had followed him in, and
asked about the hour of the funeral. She answered in a hoarse whisper,
dropping a courtesy.
"You ought to go out and take a walk," he told Michael James. "You
oughtn't to stay in here all the time." And he left the room.
Michael James paid no attention. His mind was wandering to strange
fantasies he could not keep out of his head. Pictures crept in and
out of his brain, joined as by some thin filament. He thought somehow
of her soul, and then wondered what a soul was like. And then he
thought of a dove, and then of a bat fluttering through the dark,
and then of a bird lost at twilight. He thought of it as some lonely
flying thing with a long journey before it and no place to rest. He
could imagine it uttering the vibrant, plaintive cry of a peewit. And
then it struck him with a great sense of pity that the night was cold.
In the kitchen they were having tea. The rattle of the crockery sounded
very distinctly. He could distinguish the sharp, staccato ring when a
cup was laid in a saucer, and the nervous rattle when cup and saucer
were passed from one hand to the other. Spoons struck china with a faint
metallic tinkle. He felt as if all the sounds were made at the back of
his neck, and the crash seemed to burst in his head.
Dan Murray creaked into the room. "Michael James," he whispered, "you
ought to take something. Have a bite to eat. Take a cup of tea. I'll
bring it in to you."
"Oh, let me alone, Daniel," he answered. He felt he would like to kick
him and curse him while doing so.
"You must take something." Murray's voice rose from a whisper to a low,
argumentative sing-song. "You know it's not natural. You've got to eat."
"No, thank you, Daniel," he answered. It was as if he were talking to a
boy who was good-natured but tiresome. "I don't feel like eating. Maybe
afterward I will."
"Michael James," Murray continued.
"Well, what is it, Daniel?"
"Don't you think I'd better go down and see young Kennedy and tell him
how foolish it would be of him to come up here and start fighting? You
know it isn't right. Hadn't I better go down? He's at home now."
"Let that alone, Daniel, I tell you." The thought of Murray breaking
into the matter that was between himself and the young man filled him
with a sense of injured delicacy.
"I know he's going to make trouble."
"Let me handle that, like a good fellow, and leave me by myself, Daniel,
if you don't mind."
"Ah well, sure. You know best." And Murray crept out of the room.
As the door opened Michael could hear some one singing in a subdued
voice and many feet tapping like drums in time with the music. They
had to pass the night outside, and it was the custom, but the singing
irritated him. He could fancy heads nodding and bodies swaying from
side to side with the rhythm. He recognized the tune, and it began to
run through his head, and he could not put it out of it. The lilt of
it captured him, and suddenly he began thinking of the wonderful brain
that musicians must have to compose music. And then his thoughts
switched to a picture he had seen of a man in a garret with a fiddle
beneath his chin.
He straightened himself up a little, for sitting crouched forward as
he was put a strain on his back, and he unconsciously sat upright to
ease himself. And as he sat up he caught a glimpse of the cotton gloves
on the bed, and it burst in on him that the first time he had seen her
she was walking along the road with young Kennedy one Sunday afternoon,
and they were holding hands. When they saw him they let go suddenly,
and grew very red, giggling in a half-hearted way to hide their
embarrassment. And he remembered that he had passed them by without
saying anything, but with a good-humored, sly smile on his face, and
a mellow feeling within him, and a sage reflection to himself that
young folks will be young folks, and what harm was there in courting
a little on a Sunday afternoon when the week's work had been done?