Part 27

Early in the next harvest I stopped one afternoon to ask Amelia if Nick could help my father any day that week. The horizon was wrinkled with heat waves, the zenith as dark as a sea, and one never ceased to hear the growling of binders. In all the reaped fields the stubble was spotted with bindweed like drops of blood. As I turned down toward the swamp I observed the poverty of the fields there, the exhausted soil gaping through the grass, the thin stand of grain, the great parched gullies, the bogs where the birds shouted over the ripe weeds. The trees slept in the sunshine: not a leaf swayed, but sometimes one feathered prematurely to the ground.

My mare trotted in at Amelia’s gate under the poplars full of blackbirds. In the semicircle of forest the little house squatted, staring blindly from its windows. The sheds leaned against the barn. A sick dove staggered over the rocks by the water-trough. A little way from the kitchen door, some shirts and stockings and cotton sheets hung on a line stretched between two posts.

“Hello!” I shouted. No answer. “Amelia!” An echo, small and soft, came back from the woods: “_Amee-lia!_” I jumped out of the buggy and went up the steps, certain that if she had gone to town she would have taken in the washing. The kitchen smelled of boot-leather, manure, soft soap, and cooking, and there was another odor which I identified as that of moth-balls.

Could she be asleep? The pendulum of the clock creaked monotonously. I stepped inside and called again. The breakfast dishes lay in and around a dishpan of cold water, and the fire in the range was only a handful of pink coals. I felt the embarrassment of an empty house. Deciding that she had gone to the woods for blackberries, I drove away.

As I passed one of the farms owned by a man named Beacon, I saw him sitting on the lawn, a pitcher of water beside him, fanning his brick-red face with a newspaper. In hot weather he left the heavy work to his sons, since he weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. He beckoned to me and came down, wheezing and ponderous, to the road. “As you went by Stearns’,” he asked, with the worried frown of a man who has a larger harvest than he can handle, “did you see anything of Nick?”

I shouted because he was deaf. “No, Mr. Beacon. I stopped at the house, but there wasn’t anybody there.”

“Whew,” he sighed. “Nobody there. Queer. Nick’s been helpin’ us out, and he hain’t showed up today. He al’ays sends word. I thought he must’a been sick.”

“It is funny,” I admitted. “Amelia wasn’t there either.”

“Well, it’s a new wrinkle for Nick,” he concluded mournfully.

I intended to stop at Amelia’s again, but as I came back from the village I detected in the air a faint bitterness of smoke--so faint at first that I thought it had drifted down from a forest fire in the north. When I came to the top of a hill I saw it, hanging in a black mushroom over the swamp. I touched the mare with my whip and rattled into the alley, where the smoke was thick and steady and the color of wheat-chaff, blowing slowly overhead.

It was the Stearns house. Through a hole in the roof a great draught lifted the flame as if in a chimney. The yard was full of men, whose faces in the ruddy light were strange and glistening. Sweat dripped on their blue shirts. They were fighting the fire eagerly and with some skill; already they had chopped away the flaming porch. Three men in turn worked the handle of the coughing, spurting pump, and bucket after bucket of water was passed from hand to hand and emptied.

I saw immediately that Amelia and Nick were not there. Some buggies and an auto had stopped along the road, and several women looked on with interest, their summer dresses and parasols lending to the catastrophe an air of picnic. Among the spectators, but near enough to make his orders heard above the crackle and roar of the fire, the shouts, the axes, the creak of the pump handle, old Beacon was enthroned on a dry-goods box.

“Well my boy,” he demanded, “what d’you think of this? Did they have any insurance?” He smiled wickedly.

Indignant at his suspicion, I tried to offer some explanation, to remember some clue. Then I shouted into his ear, “They hadn’t any insurance. I remember. Amelia asked father about it, and he told her not to bother, but to sell out when she had a chance.”

A look of perplexity, even of disappointment, passed across old Beacon’s face, that resembled a great, sagacious beet. He swelled his cheeks and blew wearily. “Well, I’ll be damned, anyway,” he said.

The roof fell, splitting like paper, and after that the fire diminished. The floor sent up smoke and steam, but no more flame. The kitchen stove crashed through the charred boards into the cellar.

“But I don’ know what these men are burstin’ themselves for at this job,” the old man said. “Looks to me like nobody’s goin’ to thank ’em for it. The mare and the cart’re gone.” He settled his damp cheeks in the folds of his neck.

“Oh,” I shouted half-heartedly, “I guess they’ve gone to town. They’ll be back, poor devils.”

“But I knew better.” My eyes had rested on the clothesline; the washing which had hung there was gone, and on the ground beneath in an uneven row the clothespins lay. I remembered the harmless dying coals in the range. I remembered the unwashed dishes and the odor of mothballs. I remembered what Amelia had said the day her mother was buried: “I couldn’t go off and leave that house--everything the way it’s always been.”

Had they been in the house? Had they heard me call? Had they been hiding there, in the other rooms or behind a door?

The fire left a ruin shaped like a charred pot. The men drew off--wet, black, tired, and puzzled--washed their faces at the pump and rolled down their sleeves. The horses were untied, every one piled into one vehicle or another, and they drove away shouting; but those who spoke of the cause of the fire did so in pairs, very quietly.

From the charred and broken house the smoke went up straight to the sky. Now it was as soft as wool, now like a tower or shell. It widened over the swamp, casting a shadow upon the lake, and persisted until dusk with an even, melancholy trembling.

III

Years afterward, while I was stopping for a few days in a town in the western part of the State, a carnival set up its tents in a dance-hall park between the river and the tracks. I saw a van or two come down the main street, the horses’ fetlocks stirring up dust in clouds which settled on their sweaty backs and on the faces of the man with his cheeks full of tobacco and the hatchet-faced woman who sat on the packing cases and rolls of canvas. That night two of the vagrants appeared at the boarding-house table where I took my meals. The shuttered dining room smelled like a potato cellar where the sprouts have nosed their way upward and the scabby tubers have rotted for months, and when the landlady trotted out of the kitchen and set down platters of meat in slabs as large as her hand, the regular boarders looked with sick faces at their plates and at one another.

But the theatrical ladies ate with the silent heartiness of women paid to eat in a shop window as an advertisement of whatever they ate. Chemises of shadow lace showed through georgette shirtwaists, making their bodies look embossed with garlands and butterflies. Under mats of blondined hair fastened with rhinestone pins, their faces had an identical appearance of porcelain, the hard eyes surrounded by pencilled lashes and eyebrows, spots of orange rouge exactly between the nose and the ear. Their nails cut in triangles shone like celluloid. Grasping the knives and forks vigorously, their eyes unfocussed, their red mouths in motion, they ate the fat meat to the last drop of gravy, the soggy pie to the last crumb.

The next afternoon I crossed the iron footbridge with an aimless curiosity, into the Grove. The river was only a trickle from puddle to puddle and gave off an odor similar to that of cucumbers, and the reflections of narrow, green and yellow leaves upon its surface were like the footprints of innumerable birds on a flat of mud.

Five great wagons and a mud-caked Ford were drawn up along the river. The horses grazed in an adjoining meadow, the sweat dried in flakes on their backs, switching at the flies and never lifting their heads to look at the noisy camp, unfolded from the loads which they had drawn.

In the center, like a fat woman pirouetting, the merry-go-round revolved laboriously. The mincing legs of its horses kicked out behind, their foamless lips were parted, and a pair of crimson tigers drew a chariot for those too timid or too large to go astride. The power which set the minute stallions and sky-blue bears gradually rocking and circling came from a steam engine like a short-necked bottle, whose whistle preceded the slapping and squeaking of the leather belts and the outburst of shrill tunes from the calliope, when all the passengers, mostly children, had been hoisted and set upright in the saddles.

A crowd of untidy women and shouting boys filled the alley between the tents. The refreshment booth, a great umbrella of canvas enclosed by planks laid from barrel to barrel, did a brisk business in ice-cream cones, in tepid drinks, in hot dogs and patties of ground meat stewing on a black griddle. A young man whose hair hung down in shoestrings and a plump woman with brown pouches beneath her eyes ran from side to side shouting, “What’s yours?” and “Don’t push plee-ase,” storing the nickels and dimes in a cash-register drawer which opened and shut with a grating noise.

Next to it stood a “hit-the-nigger-baby” establishment--a hierarchy of dolls, and a pile of baseballs with which to knock them down, and a display of bad cigars and felt pillow-covers for prizes. Though it was Saturday afternoon few men were there to patronize it, for those who had worked all morning in the heat naturally preferred to lie on couches indoors, with newspapers over their faces.

The showmen’s cheeks drooped with disillusionment and fatigue. Business was not good; business was never good, or never good enough. It was a hard life: shouting, luring, browbeating, laughing, and singing--eating the poorest food, counting the smallest coins, packing the tents, frayed finery, nigger-dolls, fangless rattlesnakes, and petrified Belgian babies; the boss and his wife going ahead in the Ford to rent the next park, the rest following slowly after the strong-smelling horses. They must have learned, the youngest Carnival Queen and the newest freak, that romance is for those who see, never for those who do, and underpaid as a profession.

I stopped to look at a picture of the dope-fiend, a moon-colored young man with scaly, presumably allegorical beasts nestling against his ribs. Hanging beside it were posters of Jocko, the Baboon-Man, who spoke the monkey language and ate raw meat, a snake charmer among her serpents which stood up in spirals as thick as trees, and the Fat Woman, a belted, brooched, and corsetted feather-bed, with oval fingers scarcely meeting across her tremendous chest. A nervous little man, who looked as if he might at any moment burst into tears, was lecturing a dozen people. I was not tempted by his promises, for I could hear the tremolo of the young man who would say, “Cigarette smoking has made me what I am today,” and the charmer crooning perfunctorily to her sick snakes; I could smell his ether and her toilet-water. I had seen a Wild Man from Java or Borneo or somewhere else who tore off the heads of live, squawking hens with his teeth and sucked their blood, and felt sure that this poor tent had nothing so sensational to offer.

The leaves of the maples, pockmarked and bleached by a common blight, loosened and glided through the windless air, the calliope played, the barkers grew hoarse, several babies cried. I went on to the next tent, labelled in great letters GAY PAREE, joining the crowd which gathered to see a free show before the performance.

Three women and a negro stood on a platform like a large bench. The women wore diaphanous slips, all beads and fringe, which did not cover a row of pink and green legs, two of which were crooked and four very fat. I recognized the ladies of the boarding house. They stared at the crowd with the solemnity of caged animals, apparently trying to look voluptuous on the couchless, cushionless boards. One of them pulled her blouse away from her body and stared avidly inside it. The negro who stood sleepily beside them crouched now and began to pipe, drearily and loud, on a sort of flute. The women stiffened, their lips parted, the pupils of their eyes grew large and cold. Three arms were lifted, and all their bodies throbbed, paused, and throbbed again. Then each one curved her waist extremely, first to the right side, then to the left, and each seemed to spring upward and relax like a bow from which an arrow has been shot. Three shrill cries and a tapping of the negro’s foot marked the beat.

During the dance a woman came out of the tent behind the performers and sat down in the ticket-box. It was Amelia.

I was shocked and amazed. Seven years had passed. And the pair had vanished like a rock, not thrown, but laid in a pond. No one had suspected their intention, and after they went, their neighbors wondered why rather than where they had gone. The police could have traced them, but why should they have been traced? The farm, which was heavily mortgaged, went to a real estate agent who came out from time to time to stare at the ruin and to stamp over the miserable fields, not knowing what to do with them. Seven years ago.... Doubtless some one found out what had become of them, but I had been away from home for years and had never heard.

Amelia had changed more than I, and at first I was afraid she would give me a wild welcome--to what? The tent was all she had. But in a few moments I began to doubt if she would have recognized her own father. She sat there above me like a figure in a jack-in-the-box, took out a roll of tickets like a pulley-wheel, and counted the change in a box. Her small eyes drifted heedlessly from dull face to dull face: so many strangers, so many fools, so many tickets to be sold! She had forgotten me, forgotten above all what I remembered.

She was grotesquely fat. Her narrow lips had been pressed together by rectangular cheeks, there were deep crevices at her wrists, and the sharp chin was lost in a succession of double chins gathered into a tight necklace of amber beads as large as cherries. Her hair was drawn up in a pompadour over a visible brown rat, her purple velvet dress had worn leathery at the elbows. But it was evident, by the way she sat in that booth like a pulpit, that all this meant progress and prosperity. Every distortion of her face, every aggrandizement of her body proclaimed her contentment. Soothed by movement and noise, gorged by excitement, the girl who had resembled years ago a wistful rat, was satisfied.

I looked about for Nick, and his appearance between the flaps, coat-tails first, as he argued with some one inside the tent, silenced the music and arrested the dancing. He came forward and began to harangue the onlookers and to shake his large fists, straining the frock-coat which was buttoned too tightly over his chest. He had not changed, unless exaggeration be a change: his glance was still hurt and ominous, and there was the suggestion of a curse in the tone of his voice. It was plain that the carnival had not been his salvation. Amelia did not look at him but nevertheless she seemed, in her fulfillment, to mock his angry hands, the furtive hope of his eyes, his mastiff-jaw that would never dare to snap.

“You have here, ladies and gentlemen,” he continued, smiling wanly, “the flower of Oriental art. It is no singing and dancing for children. There are things about it they would not appreciate. All these famous performers have appeared in Paris. The French do not relish tame entertainments. They like it hot, they like it strong. You have seen their free preliminary dance. It is only a sample of what they can do. The admission is ten cents. I advise you strongly to come in. The show starts in five minutes.”

The women and the negro sauntered down the steps behind the flap. Nick disappeared. Amelia began to tear off tickets and make change, and presently she followed, never glancing at the stragglers or at me.

I did not see them again. I did not need to hear their story. For in the dusty grove were tents, the brass throats of the calliope opened again, and the whole town throbbed with music. Those silences in which she had heard “slime dripping in the well” were vanquished.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Copyright, 1925 (under title “This Way Out”), by P. F. Collier & Son Company. Copyright, 1926, by Glenway Wescott.

THE DEVIL DRUM[19]

By BARRETT WILLOUGHBY

(From _The Century Magazine_)

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._

Up from the _kashim_, the underground council-house, came the beat of the devil-drum, pulsing hollow and strange amid the scream of the gale and the rumble of icebergs grinding below the snow-buried Eskimo village.

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._

Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man, was trying to change the wind. Day and night for two moons the polar blizzard had split its force on the bleak island pyramid thrusting up through the ice of Bering Strait. It was a wind of death, a devil’s wind, piling floe on floe until the ice grounded, yet keeping it ever a-stir. No life could exist beneath the pack or on top of it, and in the igloos clinging to the white slope of the shore the people, unable to hunt, were facing starvation.

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._

In the temporary lull the hollow rhythm grew louder, penetrating the walls of the missionary’s igloo, where he, the only white man on the island, sat alone before a table clutching an open book with both mittened hands. The twilight of the arctic noon made no impression on the thick frost-crust of the window, but the wan rays of a kerosene-lamp fell on the volume, and on the missionary’s gray hair showing above the dropped hood of his reindeer parka. With every breath a shaft of vapor clouded the chill air, for his supply of driftwood had vanished while the blizzard was in its first month, and after he had shared his oil with the village families there was little left for use in his Eskimo heating-lamp.

The reverberation of the devil-drum was suddenly pierced by the wail of a wolf-dog dying under the teeth of its hunger-maddened mates. The man raised sunken eyes, blue and fervid with a terrible anxiety, and listened. The sounds of cannibalistic ravening sent a tremor through his body.

“God--God--” he flattened his palms on the open Bible and strained his thin face upward in desperate supplication--“God, Father, change the wind!” During a moment’s silence his gaze remained fixed on something beyond the blackened ceiling of the igloo, beyond the driven ice-dust of the blizzard. Then in a voice that gathered confidence as he proceeded he filled the room with ringing phrases from the Book:

“He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven: and by his power he brought in the south wind.

“He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as the sands of the sea.

“And He let it fall in the midst of their camp, round about their habitations.

“So they did eat and were well filled.”

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, the devil-drum beat a barbarous amen.

“They did eat and were well filled!” The missionary closed the Bible and firmly, as one who has found new courage, repeated the words in the Eskimo tongue. He rose from the table, a lean, little man even in his heavy furs, and crossed over to a corner where a canned-milk box did duty as a cupboard. From the curled bacon rind that hung there he cut a thin slice and slipped it hungrily into his mouth. Chewing a bit of it eased the gnawing in his stomach, which had not yet grown accustomed to one meal a day, a ration made necessary since he had divided the last of his provisions with the village.

Opening a door at the back of the igloo he made his stooping way into another larger room--the schoolhouse and church his own hands had built so hopefully six months before. Under his stiff fingers the light flared up from a bracket lamp, revealing a small wall-blackboard which had never known a chalk mark and the yellow lumber of benches that had yet to feel the contact of Eskimo garments.

In the beginning the Eskimos had treated him with the good-natured tolerance of their race. They accepted his presents, ate his food, and begged or borrowed from him in accordance with their code: The white man who outwits us is a better man than we, and we admire him; the white man we outwit is a fool. The unsuspecting little missionary, confident that he was making great strides into their friendship, was unusually generous; but the moment he tried to preach the word of his God, the moment he attempted to interfere with their customs, he found himself up against a glacial wall of resentment.

“Leave us alone! Leave us alone!” Milli-ru-ak, the hunter, had said to him in the squirrel-hunting season when the missionary went to remonstrate with him for biting off the nose of his wife’s lover. “Leave us alone! Does the Eskimo force his way on the white man who invades his country? Why does the white man force his way on the Eskimo? Leave us alone!”

“But Milli-ru-ak, to bite off the nose of thy neighbor----”

“Listen, white man, to the law of my fathers!” The hunter’s dark eyes narrowed. “Had my neighbor come to me and said: ‘Milli-ru-ak, thy woman hath found favor in my eyes. Let us change wives during the squirrel-hunting, that our families may be allied when the children are born’; then would I have been proud that my neighbor should have taken his pleasure with my wife and I with his. But my neighbor was without honor. He waited until I was gone to the hunt, then like a thief he goes to my woman. I found him there. I bit off his nose. Such,” said Milli-ru-ak, turning on his heel, “was the just law of my fathers.”