cautiously and carefully so as not to do anything that would offend the
drugged burden of the silence. He would move a leg or an arm slyly and
then he would lie quite quiet for a time holding his breath until the
cracking pain came plunging again and again into his chest. He could
feel the stillness filling in all the spaces and crevices around him,
so that he thought it rose and swelled hideously.
He was afraid of those hours before he went to sleep; before he could
drop off with that overwhelming sense that in losing consciousness he
was consciously letting himself drown in a tremendous, swollen wave of
silence.
And then toward morning that sudden, inevitable awakening. His rousing
himself to listen. His whole body becoming rigid; tautly holding itself
with straining, shaking muscles to the position in which he lay. The
sweat breaking out all over him and trickling coldly down from his
armpits along his sides. His cunning shifting of his head so that he
could clear his ears to hear better. His futile harkening for the sound
that never came. His intensive shivering waiting for it. And nothing but
the stillness. He could never make himself move. The thing was so
actual; suffocatingly potent; malignant. He had grown terrified of
attempting to disrupt it in any of those little ways at his command. He
had begun to think that the noise he would make would not be a noise. He
could not have stood the shock of making a noise that would be quite
vacantly without sound.
All day long, working in his fields, he used to wonder at it. In the
sunlight it was with him still and bated. It rose up to him from the
ground at his feet, from the soil it had wormed itself into. It crushed
down on him from the clear, blue sweep of the sky. It spread unseen
toward him down the long, uncertain slopes of the hills coming on
always from all sides and staying.
It had become so that nothing was real to him; nothing but the stillness
that drenched everything; stifling and choking.
The old mare working her way in front of the plow along the narrowed,
deepening furrows, was a ghost creature to him. The grayness of her
blurred ahead of him in the brightest stream of sunlight. Her foolish,
stilly gliding played horridly on his raw nerves. At all times she was a
phantom animal, stirring with the intangible motion of the silence. He
felt that she did not belong to him; that she was a thing of the
stillness.
He would trail after her, his quivering, thin hands on the plow handles,
his eyes riveted on her bony withers. He would try to concentrate his
thoughts on the way she moved and then overcome quite suddenly with the
quiet, insidious stealth of her ambling, he would pull her up and stop
to mop his forehead, his eyes going slowly around him as if he almost
expected to see the thing that had lain that smothering, strangling hold
on to him.
His one and only companion was a yellow mongrel that had come slinking
in at the farm gate, its tail drooping between its legs. He had been
glad at first of having the dog with him. And then gradually he had come
to feel the oddness of the animal. If he could have done so he would
have turned the dog out again into the stillness from which it had come
to him. He was sure that the mongrel must be old; unnaturally old. He
could not understand the dog's awful quiet. In his heart he was scared
of the dog. The mongrel followed incessantly at his heels, always with
dragging tail. Whenever his eyes turned behind him they met the
mongrel's eyes that were fixed on him; the eyes that were filled with
that uncanny, beaten look as if it had been horridly cowed. There was an
age of agony in the dog's eyes. As the days went on he became more and
more afraid of the mongrel's eyes.
He had come out to the farm to start with because of the silence. He had
felt that he would have to get away from the noise and the tumultuous
uproar of the city. After what he had done he could not stand it. He had
gotten away. He thought now that his mind would snap; that it would
break from under the lull which had come into it--The lull which
devastated him with its hushed brutality.
He had never been fond of people. Even in those days back there in the
city before he had done the thing that was wrong he had mistrusted them.
And after it he had run from them. Run wildly and unthinkingly to cover
with the fear of them coming on behind him. The deathly, lonely farm was
to him at that time a haven of rest.
He had made up his mind to live on the farm until the end of his life.
He used to think bitterly of his waiting so patiently for his death.
When he could think of anything other than the silence he thought of his
dying; of life being squeezed out of him by the shrouded quiet.
Sometimes he would wonder if it were death that ominously waited for
him in that appalling, threatening stillness.
There had been days when he had tried to recall the sound of voices he
had known. He had spent long hours in awakening in his memory those
voices. He had wanted particularly to think of people laughing. He used
to want to get the pitch of their laughing; to surround himself with the
vibration of reiterated laughter. And then when he had gotten it so that
he almost heard it, so that he felt that with concentrated attention he
might hear the laughing, he would find himself listening to the
frightful, numbing stillness.
He had not the courage to go on trying that.
Following the plow and the old gray mare through the fields with the dog
skulking abjectly at his heels, he would think of that thing which he
had done that had ostracized him from the rest of humanity. He never
thought of the possibility of making his life over again. He could not
have thought of it if he had wanted to. It was all too hopeless; too
impossible to think about. The deadening quiet in which he had been
steeped had drained him; sapped from him all initiative.
When evening came he would go into his shack and close the door. He
would light the oil lamp on the old table that stood in the center of
the room and he would go about getting supper for himself and the
mongrel. He took great care always to move his pots and pans gently. If
he picked up a plate he did it slowly, softly. When he put his bowl of
food on the table he slid it consciously onto the surface without noise.
And going to and fro not oftener than he had to, his feet in their
padded moccasins lifted him to his toes.
He ate quietly and quickly, swallowing his food without chewing, feeding
himself and the dog with his fingers. And all the while feeling that the
stillness was rushing down from the hills and gathering to greater force
about him.
And when he was quite finished with the clearing away of his dishes he
would sit beside the table, the mongrel in front of him, and he would
think frantically of the relief of talking. His lips would begin to
quiver hideously; to move. That hoarse, inhuman muttering that had no
sound of voice in it would start. And then he would see the dog's eyes,
filled with that horrid, beaten look, fixed on his mouth and he would
stop, gasping.
Once every little while old man Efferts would come down to the shack in
the valley.
He knew nothing of old man Efferts other than that ever since he had
come to live at the farm Efferts had stopped in for an evening now and
again.
At first he had resented old man Efferts' coming. Later when he had seen
that Efferts would not interfere with him he had not minded so much. He
had become quite used to seeing the bent, huddled figure of the man
trailing down the hillside and shambling into the room to sit there
opposite to him quite silent. Of late he had gone about fetching the old
man a glass of cider and a piece of bread. And they had sat facing each
other, never talking; just sitting rigidly with the dog on the floor
between them and the silence spilling itself in gigantic floods all
around them. And then old Efferts would light his pipe and when he had
finished it he would get up and go out of the door. And after he had
watched old man Efferts go, with the feeling that he might not be real,
he would stumble up to his room to lie in the narrow wooden bed trying
to shut his ears to the deafening silence about him; cringing between
his blankets as the swell of it heightened insidiously.
He knew that the stillness had swamped itself into old man Efferts. He
could see the stamp of it in the uncertain, stupefied face; in the
bewildered eyes that had behind them something of the look that stayed
on in the dog's eyes; in the thin-lipped mouth that drooled at the
corners; in the old man's still, quiet way of moving, the unreal,
phantom way in which the gray mare moved. He did not know why the old
man should come to him to sit so dumbly opposite him for a whole
evening. He did not care. He was long past caring.
There were times when he thought he might tell old man Efferts of that
thing which he had done years ago and which had isolated him from his
fellows. Not that he thought so much of it. He had almost forgotten it.
The stillness had made him forget everything but itself; had pushed
everything out of his mind before its own spreading weight. But he kept
the thought of speaking to Efferts of what he had done in the back of
his head. He knew how his telling it to Efferts could not fail to act.
He knew that something would infallibly happen; that the surprise of it
could not help but penetrate the thickness of Efferts' silence. He
always felt, soothing himself with the thought of relief, that when the
power of the stillness became unbearable he would shock old Efferts into
talk. There were moments when he hungered savagely to force old Efferts
out of his walling quiet. Moments when he was starving for the comfort
of human sound. His voice and Efferts' voice. Voices that would rise
above the stillness; voices that would penetrate cunningly through the
quiet; voices that would speak and answer each other.
He was sitting in the center of his lamp lit room. He had had his supper
and had cleared away the dishes with his usual crafty carefulness. He
had lighted his pipe. He sat in the chair beside the table; his body
quite rigid; his arms and legs stiffened to a torturing quiet. The
mongrel crouched at his feet. There was something strange in the way the
animal lay; in its tightened muscles that pulled and twitched as it
breathed. Whenever he looked down his eyes met the dog's eyes.
Outside the heavy shadows of the night crept along the ground, pushed on
by the rushing, rising silence behind them. He knew that the stillness
was rolling down the slope of those long hills. He knew that its awful
quiet was gathering in the valley. He knew that it was trickling
horridly still into the low ceilinged room. He had the feeling for the
thousandth time that the most minute noise was swallowed up in the
stillness before it came into being.
He looked up then to see the door shoved warily ajar. A wrinkled, ugly
hand showed against the dark wood in a lighter patch of brown. A coarse
booted foot came behind the swing of the door. Standing against the
black of the night he saw old man Efferts.
He watched the old man come into the room.
He saw him pull up a chair, lifting it from off the floor and setting it
down opposite to him within the pooling space of the yellow lamplight.
He stared at Efferts as he sank into the chair.
Old man Efferts took out his pipe and lit it.
He kept his eyes on Efferts as he had so often done; on the uncertain,
stupefied face that was turned to him; on the bewildered eyes that had
something behind them of the look that stayed on in the dog's eyes; on
the thin-lipped mouth that drooled at the corners.
He got up then and went on his toes to the door and closed it softly. He
felt that Efferts' eyes were on him; and the mongrel's eyes. He came
back and sat down in his chair.
They both smoked quietly.
He remembered the glass of cider and the piece of bread.
He could not bring himself to move to-night.
He felt the suffocating weight of the stillness crowding past him. It
was expanding menacingly throughout the small room. It filled in all
about him.
Presently old man Efferts would finish his pipe and would get up and
shamble out of the door. He would sit there and watch him go as he
always watched, wondering if perhaps old man Efferts was not real. And
then he would stumble up to bed and lie awake and listen to the
stillness that grew greater and greater.
He wanted the relief from that silence; wanted it desperately;
passionately.
He remembered that if he told Efferts of that thing that he had come so
near forgetting in the smothering quiet that he would have what he so
frantically wanted. Some human speech. Human talk that would break the
silence even for a little while; the sound of human voices that would
rise and answer each other.
He glanced at the old man surreptitiously. He tried to think what
expression would come into that stupid face with the bewildered eyes; he
tried to see the thin-lipped drooling mouth as it would look with the
lips of it startled into moving.
He sat very still.
Words formed themselves; lagging into his mind.
"I--am--going--to--tell--"
He would start to say it to old man Efferts that way.
He could not stand the stillness any longer.
Anything was better than the appalling agony of the quiet.
He made a little tentative movement with his thin, shaking hands.
He felt that Efferts was staring at him.
The mongrel crouching at his feet moved stealthily. He heard no sound
from the animal's moving. He knew it had gotten to its feet. He saw it
standing there between where he sat and where Efferts sat.
He felt his lips begin to quiver.
"I--am--going--to--"
He got the words into his head again through the menacing, waiting
stillness.
He muttered something.
Old man Efferts leaned forward, his hand behind his ear.
In a sudden blinding flash of knowledge he realized that old man Efferts
was deaf.
He felt his mouth twisting around his face.
He tried then to shout.
His eyes avoided the mongrel's eyes that he knew were filled with that
uncanny, beaten look and were fixed on his jerking, grimacing mouth.
All about him the ominous, malignant silence.
He tried again and again to speak. He could not talk. Sweat stood out in
great, glistening beads on his forehead and dribbled blindingly into his
wide, distended eyes. His body shook with the stupendous effort he was
making. His tongue was swollen. He could feel his throat tightening so
that it hurt. He could not get his words into that hoarse, inhuman
muttering that had no sound of voice in it.
He kept on trying and trying to speak----
He saw that old man Efferts had finished his pipe. He watched him get
out of his chair and go shambling across the room and through the door.
He sat there.
His hands went up to his working mouth. He wanted to hide the hideous
jerking of it.
His eyes met the mongrel's eyes.
The stillness grew appalling.