Part 8 (1/2)
”You're lyin'!”
”No, I'm not.”
”Thedy, this jar has to have somethin' in it. Somethin' besides the junk you say. Too many people believe there's somethin' in it, Thedy. You can't change that. The carny-man, if you talked to him, lied. Come here, Thedy.”
”What you want?” she asked sullenly.
”Come over here.”
”Keep away from me, Charlie.”
”I just want to show you something, Thedy.” His voice was soft, low and insisting. ”Here, kittie, kittie - here kittie!”
It was another night, about a week later. Gramps Medknowe and Granny Carnation came, followed by young Juke and Mrs. Tridden and Jahdoo, the colored man. Followed by all the others, young and old, creaking into chairs, each with his or her symbol, though hope, fear, and wonder in mind. Each not looking at the shrine, but saying h.e.l.lo softly to Charlie.
They waited for the others to gather. From the s.h.i.+ne of their eyes one could see that each saw something different in the jar, something of the life and the pale life after life, and the life in death and the death in life, each with his story, his cue, his lines, familar, old but new.
Charlie sat alone.
”h.e.l.lo, Charlie.” A glance around, into the empty bedroom. ”Where's your wife? Gone off again to visit her folks?”
”Yeah, she run off again to Tennessee. Be back in a couple weeks. She's the darndest one for running off. You know Thedy.”
”Great one for gantin' off, that woman.”
Soft voices talking, getting settled, and then, quite suddenly, like a black leopard moving from the dark - Tom Carmody.
Tom Carmody standing outside the door, knees sagging and trembling, arms hanging and shaking at his side, staring into the room. Tom Carmody not daring to enter. Tom Carmody with his mouth open, but not smiling. His lips wet and slack, not smiling. His face pale as chalk, as if it had been kicked with a boot.
Gramps looked up at the jar, cleared his throat and said, ”Why, I never noticed so definite before. It's got blue eyes.”
”It always had blue eyes,” said Jahdoo.
”No,” whined Gramps. ”No, it didn't. It was brown last time we was here.” He blinked upward. ”And another thing - it's got brown hair. Didn't have brown hair before.”
”Yes, yes it did,” sighed Mrs. Tridden.
”No, it didn't!”
”Yes, it did!”
Tom Carmody, s.h.i.+vering in the summer night, staring at the jar. Charlie, glancing up at it, rolling a cigarette, casually, at peace and calm, very certain of his life and world and thoughts. Tom Carmody, alone, seeing things about the jar he never saw before. Everybody seeing what they wanted to see; all thoughts running in a tide of quick rain.
My baby! My little baby! screamed the thought of Mrs. Tridden.
A grain! thought Gramps.
The colored man jigged his fingers. Middibamboo Mamma!
A fisherman pursed his lips. Jellyfis.h.!.+
Kitten! Here kittie, kittie, kittie! the thoughts drowned clawing in Juke's skull. Kitten!
Everything and anything! shrilled Granny's weazened thought. The night, the swamp, the death, the pallid moist things of the sea!
Silence, and then Gramps said, ”I wonder. I wonder. Wonder if it's a he - or a she - or just a plain old it?”
Charlie glanced up, satisfied, tamping his cigarette, shaping it to his mouth. Then he looked at Tom Carmody, who would never smile again, in the door. ”I reckon we'll never know. Yeah, I reckon we won't.” Charlie smiled.
It was just one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in plasma, forever dreaming, circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you -
JOHN METCALFE.
THE BAD LANDS.
It is now perhaps fifteen years ago that Brent Ormerod, seeking the rest and change of scene that should help him to slay the demon neurosis, arrived in Todd toward the close of a mid-October day. A decrepit fly bore him to the one hotel, where his rooms were duly engaged, and it is this vision of himself sitting in the appalling vehicle that makes him think it was October or thereabouts, for he distinctly remembers the determined settling-down of the dusk that forced him to drive when he would have preferred to follow his luggage on foot.
He decided immediately that five o'clock was an unsuitable time to arrive in Todd. The atmosphere, as it were, was not receptive. There was a certain repellent quality about the frore autumn air, and something peculiarly shocking in the way in which desultory little winds would spring up in darkening streets to send the fallen leaves scurrying about in hateful, furtive whirlpools.
Dinner, too, at the hotel hardly brought the consolation he had counted on. The meal itself was unexceptionable, and the room cheerful and sufficiently well filled for that time of year, yet one trivial circ.u.mstance was enough to send him upstairs with his temper ruffled and his nerves on edge. They had put him at a table with a one-eyed man, and that night the blank eye haunted all his dreams.
But for the first eight or nine days at Todd things went fairly well with him. He took frequent cold baths and regular exercise and made a point of coming back to the hotel so physically tired that to get into bed was usually to drop immediately into sleep. He wrote back to his sister, Joan, at Kensington that his nerves were already much improved and that only another fortnight seemed needed to complete the cure. Altogether a highly satisfactory week.
Those who have been to Todd remember it as a quiet, secretive watering place, couched watchfully in a fold of a long range of low hills along the Norfolk coast. It has been p.r.o.nounced restful by those in high authority, for time there has a way of pa.s.sing dreamily as if the days, too, were being blown past like the lazy clouds on the wings of wandering breezes. At the back, the look of the land is somehow strangely forbidding, and it is wiser to keep to the sh.o.r.e and the more neighboring villages. Salterton, for instance, has been found normal.
There are long stretches of sand dunes to the west, and by their side a nine-hole golf course. Here, at the time of Brent's visit, stood an old and crumbling tower, an enigmatic structure which he found interesting from its sheer futility. Behind it an inexplicable road seemed to lead with great decision most uncomfortably to nowhere - Todd, he thought, was in many ways a nice spot, but he detected in it a tendency to grow on one unpleasantly. He came to this conclusion at the end of the ninth day, for it was then that he became aware of a peculiar uneasiness, an indescribable malaise.
This feeling of disquiet he at first found himself quite unable to explain or a.n.a.lyze. His nerves he had thought greatly improved since he had left Kensington, and his general health was good. He decided, however, that perhaps yet more exercise was necessary, and so he walked along the links and the sand dunes to the queer tower three times a day instead of twice.
His discomfort rapidly increased. He would become conscious, as he set out for his walk, of a strange sinking at his heart and of a peculiar moral disturbance which was very difficult to describe. These sensations attained their maximum when he had reached his goal upon the dunes, and he suffered then what something seemed to tell him was very near the pangs of spiritual dissolution.
It was on the eleventh day that some faint hint of the meaning of these peculiar symptoms crossed his mind. For the first time he asked himself why it was that of all the many rambles he had taken in Todd since his arrival each one seemed inevitably to bring him to the same place - the yellow sand dunes with the mysterious-looking tower in the background. Something in the bland foolishness of the structure seemed to have magnetized him, and in the unaccountable excitement which the sight of it invariably produced, he had found himself endowing it with almost human characteristics.
With its white-nightcap dome and its sides of pale yellow stucco it might seem at one moment to be something extravagantly ridiculous, a figure of fun at which one should laugh and point. Then, as likely as not, its character would change a little, and it would take on the abashed and crestfallen look of a jester whose best joke has fallen deadly flat, while finally, perhaps, it would develop with startling rapidity into a jovial old gentleman laughing madly at Ormerod from the middle distance out of infinite funds of merriment.
Now Brent was well aware of the dangers of an obsession such as this, and he immediately resolved to rob the tower of its unwholesome fascination by simply walking straight up to it, past it, and onward along the road.
It was on the morning of one of the last October days that he set out from the hotel with this intention in his mind. He reached the dunes at about ten, and plodded with some difficulty across them in the direction of the tower. As he neared it his accustomed sensations became painfully apparent, and presently increased to such a pitch that it was all he could do to continue on his way.
He remembered being struck again with the peculiar character of the winding road that stretched before him into a hazy distance where everything seemed to melt and swim in shadowy vagueness. On his left the gate stood open, to his right the grotesque tower threatened.
Now he had reached it, and its shadow fell straight across his path. He did not halt to examine it, but strode forward through the open gate and entered upon the winding road. At the same moment he was astonished to notice that the painful clutch at his heart was immediately lifted, and that with it, too, all the indescribable uneasiness which he had characterized to himself as ”moral” had utterly disappeared.
He had walked on for some little distance before another rather remarkable fact struck his attention. The country was no longer vague; rather, it was peculiarly distinct, and he was able to see for long distances over what seemed considerable stretches of parklike land, gray, indeed, in tone and somehow sad with a most poignant melancholy, yet superficially, at least, well cultivated and in some parts richly timbered. He looked behind him to catch a glimpse of Todd and of the sea, but was surprised to find that in that direction the whole landscape was become indistinct and shadowy.
It was not long before the mournful aspect of the country about him began so to depress him and work upon his nerves that he debated with himself the advisability of returning at once to the hotel. He found that the ordinary, insignificant things about him were becoming charged with sinister suggestion and that the scenery on all sides was rapidly developing an unpleasant tendency to the macabre. Moreover, his watch told him that it was now half-past eleven - and lunch was at one. Almost hastily he turned to descend the winding road.