Chapter XIII: Introduction: I (12)

As I passed the lamp rolled low, which Amelia always left in a window to guide her father, I remembered a story I had heard, how at the age of eight George had disappeared for a night and most of a day. His family had lowered a lantern into the well, and shouted in the woods around the sugar-bush, thinking of wild cats and wolves, which still came out of the deep forests from time to time to carry off lambs and ravish the chicken coops. His hysterical mother peered into the bear’s pen, half-expecting to see strips of clothing on the ground and blood on the animal’s tusks. The whole countryside was aroused. At last, after a mournful meal, his father had gone into the basement with a candle and a pitcher to bring up cider, and found the boy, drunk beside a barrel.

I thought then how one came to know people by the accumulation of glimpses; the sight of George, wet and drunk on the little bridge, a moment too fleeting even to speak to him; and after that his solitude and my solitude, in which my memory assembled other casual words and brief encounters. In that country I met my neighbors chiefly on the road. Thickets and piles of brushwood, the gravel, the puddles, the barbed-wire fences, the hitching-posts, and the piazzas, filled the corners of every picture of their lives. A one-horse vehicle brought me near them, like the field-glasses with which a naturalist detects a bird in a tree, though its plumage is the color of the tree. All my relations with George Stearns and his family, for example, were of this kind: the talk of one of them and myself in a buggy, or between one in a buggy and one standing beside the wheel or on a porch; the look of one of them in a barnyard or a field....

Thus about the nucleus of George’s face in the rainstorm, previous impressions gathered, later images and later conversations were to gather, rounding out a pointless history. Recollections of similar men’s lives served as intuition into his life, so that, as I turned in at my father’s gate, I could see him behind me in the darkness, blustering and hiccoughing, slipping down in the flooded grass, I could hear his obstinate sighs in the wind as it pulled the clouds away.

His eighty-acre farm was a miserable piece of property. Gashed with gullies, the fields of red clay sloped acutely above the house and barn, which were almost hidden in the edge of a swamp. A lake lay like an immense ditch in the center of this swamp, and into it the rains carried the topsoil from increasingly arid fields. George’s father had understood the weakness of his farm, and had kept the upper acres in sod-crops, filled the gullies with stone, planted clover to nourish the soil, rotted the grain-straw in the barnyard, and carted it with manure into the fields. But George preferred to forget these hard expedients, and the farm became, as it were, a portrait of himself. He planted only a little oats for the horse, a little corn for the cattle. The fences tottered and fell under loads of woodbine and wild grapes. In great pastures full of thistles two or three sharp-hipped cows gnawed the june-grass that grew between the stones.

George hired out by the day to his more ambitious neighbors. He was satisfied with this way of life; to move from farm to farm without responsibility, to work without haste or worry, to spend his earnings and his leisure in a saloon. The lot of his wife and daughter was not so agreeable. They lived like a pair of domestic animals in a pen: coarse trees on three sides, the tantalizing road on the other; no variety of duty or scene, no entertainment, no plans, nothing to expect. Inevitably their poverty would pinch closer and closer, and they were bound to a man who was happy and didn’t care.

At first Amelia seemed to bear it better than her mother. As a tall, wry-faced girl Mrs. Stearns, having been assured by her brothers that she need not expect to be courted for her looks, had married George to avoid becoming an old maid. George’s mother had suggested that he might settle down when he married, and she had to take the risk. The little house like a dry-goods box had seemed, in those days, a respectable home; but other people’s prosperity had built all around it, to its shame, incomparable mansions with turrets, lightning-rods, and picketting around the chimneys, incomparable hip-roofed barns with the name of the owner stencilled under crossed flags; and George’s house had deteriorated with his land and himself. Mrs. Stearns fretted less at her husband’s shortcomings than at the looks of the place.

“Everything’s goin’ to pieces,” I heard her complain one day. “It’s the worst lookin’ place in the county. Look at that broke rig with the weeds growin’ through the wheels. The tools all out gettin’ rusted. I’ll be switched if the mare don’t look mangy!”

“Oh stop it, Ma!” Amelia muttered. “I’m tired of that kind of talk!”

“Nobody goes by on the road,” her mother went on, “nothin’ to see, nothin’ to do. And me sick. Your pa gets the best of it, he gets out among folks. We women don’t get no further’n you could throw a stone.”

Amelia marched across from the sink, her round shoulders raised, shaking her dish-towel angrily. “Who’s to blame for this God-awful marsh? What’s the good of whimperin’? Who’s to blame, I ast you? Better go to bed, Ma, and rest.”

When the girl went out to do her milking, the sick woman shuffled off to bed. If it rained she tossed back and forth on her bed, kept awake by the water which gushed in all the gullies, washing the best of their land down to the lake. The temporary rivers gurgled and grew thick, without foam, and ended as suddenly as they had begun. It seemed that soon there would be nothing but rocks between the fences.

Amelia was a short, flat-chested girl with muscular arms and extremely wide hips. Her chapped and freckled skin seemed to have been drawn tightly over the bones of her face--over the long nose, the cheek-bones exactly in the center of her cheeks, the receding but stubborn chin--a face in which were combined poor health and great strength. Her eyelids fluttered so much that one could not remember the eyes, and her thin lips pouted habitually.

She did all the work, had always done it. As a child she went to school only during the winter months, and ceased altogether at fourteen when the school inspector could not force her to go. She kept the house decently clean, baked, churned butter, made her own clothes, and nursed her increasingly bed-ridden mother. Then there were the chores: she gave the cattle frozen corn-fodder to supplement the straw which they ate from the stack, milked them, and took the can to the cheese factory, and pumped from the stinking vat her share of whey for the pigs. I had seen her staggering down ditches which she had shovelled in the snow drifts, her long arms almost pulled from their sockets by the slopping pails of swill, or stooping over the smoke from a kettle-shaped stove which melted the ice in the water-trough. At butchering time she worked elbow to elbow with the men, scraping the bristles from the carcass soused in boiling water, and she alone cut up the pigs, rubbed and smoked the bacon, and ground the sausage. She watched over the old sows when they farrowed, sometimes far into the night, lest they eat their young. Her last duty was to turn down the lamp in the kitchen window where her father could see it as he stumbled up the road.

In October I was driving to the village before dawn to meet a cousin at the station. An odor, iced and musky, came out of the woods. The dewy red leaves looked swollen, and the thickets very large with mist. My horse was willing, and I enjoyed the road, pointed like a rod into distant hollows and forests or lifted up to pierce the sky, feeling an absolute solitude. But when I came near the Stearns farm I saw some one waiting for me. It was Amelia, and she waved, and when I stopped, gripped the wheel with her red hands and stared at me, her face very sharp as if whittled away.

“Gerson, won’t you stop and look at my pa. He’s sick. I’m scared--scared to wake him up.”

I followed her--not into the house, to my surprise--but into the barn, where the light fell with a feeble quiver from the two peepholes and innumerable cracks. Amelia pointed into the nearly empty hay-mow, where I saw first a pair of heavy boots, smeared with mud, the toes turned sharply outward, and beyond them George’s face, enormous, crimson, and disdainful, with hay in his hair and several stalks in his moustache.

“I’m sorry, Amelia. He’s dead.”

“Oh Lord ... I thought so.”

“Is there anything I can do? Shall I tell anybody?”

“Well you can stop and tell Mrs. Bemis. You’re goin’ to the village? Tell an undertaker to come, the cheapest one.”

“Is that all?” I repeated, shocked by her perfunctory courage.

“Yeah, that’s all.” She sighed. “I got to wake up mother and tell her.”

Four months later she married a man named Nick Richter. Her mother expressed a peevish gratification: “Amelia couldn’t stand it, bein’ alone. I ain’t much company no more.” She grew weaker, and kept her newly married daughter at her bedside all that winter, exercising a tyranny with her eyes when she could not speak, and they buried her in April.

There was a large funeral, for during the six months by which she had survived her husband, the community had decided that she was a martyr to his drunken shiftlessness. Amelia asked my father and me to bring two teams to take people from the house to the cemetery, and she herself rode in my father’s carriage with her only living uncle, his wife, and another relative. But after the service she separated herself from her family and climbed into the front seat beside me, looking very tired, her face tight and yellow, her mouth twitching as if with anger.

“I couldn’t stand those sneaky women another minute. My Aunt Cynthy and Mrs. Smart, the old hens. They think I don’t show a proper feeling. They’ll start again’s soon as we get home, but I might’s well have a rest, I guess.”

“Good idea,” I said.

“Of course I’ll miss her and she was always good to me,” she added timidly, as if to please me, and buried her pale nose in a handkerchief.

To change the subject I asked, “Are you and Nick going to stay at the farm?”

“I s’pose so.”

“I thought you might try something else. The land isn’t much good, is it?”

“No good at all. Worn out, sandy--stones and ditches. It’s gettin’ now so’s it won’t raise grass--never was manured any. And the fences are all down. God, I hate it!”

I asked why.

“Well, not just because it’s poor farmin’. I don’ know--the woods maybe, those rotten trees so close. It’s no way to live; you see ’em all day and hear ’em all night. When I was a kid I used to be scared our house would slide into the lake. Was you ever down there? It just shows you what it’s always been like. If you fell in, you’d have some chance--but if you was always in....”

Her voice weakened to a loud whisper. “You need some excitement. I never went nowhere, never saw nothin’--had to work. I guess you wouldn’t have the nerve to get out of a dead hole like that if you knew you got to come back. That’s why I never went to dances. I guess you’d jump into the lake for good--when you got home I mean.”

I felt uncomfortable. “Why don’t you sell the whole outfit and rent a house near town. Nick could make as much by the day as he does here.”

She did not seem to listen. “And it’s so awful still,” she muttered. “My God. It’s so still you can hear the slime dripping in the well.”

I renewed my encouragement. “Sell it and go to town. Nick could make two or three dollars a day. Don’t try to stick it out another year. Give yourself a chance. Have an auction,” I said.

“Oh Lord,” she cried. “Sell all that junk? It wouldn’t bring thirty cents. Spread all that rubbish round the yard for a lot of old women to pick over? I should say not.”

“Well, do something then,” I said impatiently. We were in sight of the house.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Amelia moaned. “I couldn’t go off and leave that house--everything the way it’s always been. It’d be like leaving one of them, Ma or Pa, like not burying them,” she said.

II

Nick Richter had married to improve his position. His father, a blacksmith, having speculated in Texas oil, had been forced, just before he died, to sell his house, his shop, and every hammer and horseshoe. Nick disliked his father’s trade, and drifted in a radius of ten miles around the village, working by the day, week, or month, at odd jobs. He bought a horse and buggy when he could afford to, selling them if he lost his job, and looked for a wife at every Saturday and Sunday night dance for several years. But he danced with his jaw, his neck, and his elbows, and the boisterous girls merely laughed at him, so these entertainments left him lonely and discouraged.

The lake in the swamp below the Stearns house contained pickerel and black bass, which George had been too law-abiding as well as too lazy to exterminate with nets. Since the owner was a bed-ridden widow in Milwaukee, he was its virtual proprietor, and rented his flat-bottomed rowboat two or three times a week. Nick drove up before the barn one Sunday morning, two bamboo poles wagging behind his buggy, and Amelia showed him where to tie his horse and brought the heavy oars from the shed.

He was soon recognized as her beau. George had always puttered about the sheds on Sunday, and Amelia, leaving her chores to him, claimed her first regular holiday. They went to picnics, and drove from village to village, stopping at the saloons for soda and beer, and sat very late on the back porch. Sometimes they went to the lake to fish or pretend to fish.

I saw them there one morning just before George died, as I walked through the swamp on an old corduroy road. From the tall maples leaves floated to the ground like a harvest of ghostly oranges. Through a clearing I could see the murky hills, and when I approached the lake, the water glimmered between the boughs in mother-of-pearl strips. From the tottering boat-house a muddy channel led out through the reeds to a cup-shaped harbor, separated from the deep water by a sand bar. In this quiet place a few lilies grew, the yellow thrusting their closed, hard heads above the surface, the white spreading tufts of petals like miniature swans.

Here the boat was at rest, the oars hanging from the oarlocks. I stood on the shore for several minutes, unobserved, and then turned back into the woods. Nick crouched in the bottom of the boat, half-hidden, and Amelia, sitting on the broad back seat, held his head in her lap. Upon her face there was a vague, pale look of ecstasy, an ecstasy of possession without confidence and without hope.

There followed George’s death, their hasty marriage, the mother’s illness and death. By spring Nick must have recognized the sterility of the farm, for he put in only the patch of oats and the patch of corn, ploughed up the garden for Amelia, and began to hire out to his neighbors as George had done. He was a good worker in his sour, muttering way, his shoulders bent forward like the wings of a large hawk, his gaunt wrists extended stiffly. Perhaps his marriage was a disappointment; certainly he failed to feel the security of a man of property, the serenity of a married man, of which he may have dreamed. Perhaps he had been contaminated by Amelia’s discontent. Perhaps he was afraid of her: a weak swimmer who had ventured into what looked like a stagnant pool, to find himself in the embrace of a profound, indomitable current.

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.”

Aghast at this disclosure, the little missionary persistently attempted to convince the hunter of his sins, and after a week Milli-ru-ak shot at him--by accident. The bullet passed harmlessly between the white man’s arm and his body, embedding itself in the shaky pulpit he was building at the time. He could see the splintered hole now as he placed his open Bible upon it and reached for the dangling bell-rope behind the pulpit.

The _ding-dong_ that marked the Sabbath day was caught up by the blizzard and carried with the boom of the devil-drum out over the polar wastes. Every Sunday and Wednesday since the completion of the meeting-house the missionary had doggedly rung the first and second bell summoning an indifferent people to listen to the word of his God. Not a soul had ever responded.

He rang the first bell longer than usual. Now that the magic of Ah-king-ah had failed to change the wind, now that the dogs were starving, and the people were eating the last of the moldy seal-meat originally intended for the animals, surely, he thought, they were ready to abandon their ways of darkness for the light of Christianity.

He allowed the bell-rope to fall, and poured a bit of oil from a deflated seal-skin container into the stone lamp in the middle of the floor. When the flame flared up from the moss wick he held his hands over it. Not for himself would he have used any of the precious oil, but he hoped that some curious Eskimo might come and, seeing the fire, spread the news of it in the village. The people might come to him then, since there was no oil in the native igloos--no oil for heating, no oil for melting ice for water, no oil for cooking the moldy seal-meat. Only the medicine-man had oil now.

The dogs outside had quieted, and the voice of Ah-king-ah’s drum alone rode the gale. The little missionary, squatting over the lamp, kept turning his thin, expectant face toward the outside door. He was always looking for it to open, but it never did. Fifteen minutes dragged by before he rose and rang the second bell. In the silence that followed its last clang the _oom-oom_ of Ah-king-ah’s drum mocked him with his failure in the service of his Master.

Across the vapor of his breath the rows of clean new benches reproached him with their emptiness, and from the bare wooden walls frost-pegs on every nail-head pointed at him like accusing white fingers. He turned slowly and, mounting the pulpit, stood, his hands on the open Bible, his blue eyes looking down wistfully on the cheerless room. The smoky bracket lamp behind him threw his shadow, long and grotesque, across the bare benches, as if in pity trying to cover them. The sound of the devil-drum filtered in faint, taunting, but the missionary cleared his throat and, as was his wont, began his lonely Sunday service. His voice, forlorn and strange at first, grew firmer as he proceeded.

At the end he closed his Bible and turned out the light. There was a dispirited sag to his narrow shoulders as he went back to his living room. Today, because death was so near to them all, the Eskimos’ animal-like indifference to him and his message made him feel small and forsaken; made him ache with the terrible longing of the lonely white man for his kind. For a moment he stood uncertain, his breath clouding the cold, stale atmosphere of the igloo; then with the air of one banishing personal weaknesses he shoved his parka hood over his head, drew the long fur about his face, and made his way out through the snow tunnel leading from his door to the open.

The force of the gale struck him flat against a trampled snow-bank where red stains still defied the covering of the wind-blown snow. Not a bone or a piece of fur remained of the dog who had died there an hour before.

The pallor of the arctic noon was filled with frost-dust borne on wind of such velocity that its passing was like the whiz of speeding bullets. Through the fur about his face the man peered at the ice-pack lying like a gray monster below him. Stationary it appeared at first, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the murky light, it became a thing of horrid life, heaving, quivering, forming itself into grotesque shapes with a slowness that was as sinister and relentless as death. Through the blizzard as far as he could see berg was creeping up over berg, grinding, crunching, to heights of twenty, thirty feet, until the masses tottered and crashed down on the other side, sending powdered ice streaming on the gale like ocean spray. The awful, insensate force loosed thus in a strange, unearthly land struck to the missionary’s soul with primeval terror. He felt puny, insignificant, cruelly at the mercy of that tremendous wind which was blowing the ice-pack down from the pole and maliciously grounding it in the shallow waters of the strait. For an instant something primitive in him was near to endowing it with the malevolent personality the Eskimos were even then trying to placate through Ah-king-ah’s drum.

“God, Father,” he prayed with sudden, panicky earnestness, “change the wind!”

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, reverberated the devil-drum.

Far out on the pack, where death was certain, a dark thing moved. It drew nearer the village, a great bull walrus scouting vainly for leads of open water that meant life to the small herd wallowing along in its wake. The scout rolled its three thousand pounds from side to side over the moving ice, dexterously fastening its tusks into the base of each berg and pulling itself to the top. On the pinnacle it reared still higher on its flippers, sniffing the air, tusked head swaying, short-sighted eyes trying to pierce the thick atmosphere. A moment of decision, and through the stridor of the elements a bellowing grunt rumbled deep and lone, signaling the advance of the herd. The valiant creature wallowed on from point to point of vantage, progressing through the zone of constant and terrible danger with a courageous dignity that won admiration even from the hungry missionary, who saw it as food, heat, life itself.

Opposite the village the walrus escaped the buckling of the ice by a hair’s-breadth, and drawing itself up to the peak of a moving berg, paused longer than usual to toss its mighty tusks in nervous apprehension of a new danger. Just as the berg began to topple it sensed the presence of human beings, and sent its wild trumpetings to warn the herd. The gallant animal, too late to take any thought for itself, plunged recklessly. A patch of black in the gaping angle between two floes, a slow closing of the frigid trap, and a long-drawn despairing roar wove itself through the hissing of the wind and the booming of the devil-drum. As it died away, the ice was marked by a seeping red stain.

The herd, panic-stricken at the loss of their leader, flung themselves forward to destruction, leaving crushed bodies to mark a spotted trail of death across the ice-field.

The last terror-driven creature was disappearing in the haze of the blizzard when a bent Eskimo battled his way down from the _kashim_ to the edge of the heaving ice. He sheltered himself in the lee of a floe, looking long at the evidences of tragedy before him. Three wolf-dogs, scenting the blood, came out from under the snow and sat on their haunches to send their hunger-cry keening through the glimmering twilight. Starving though they were, neither man nor beasts dared venture over the few feet that lay between them and the meat tantalizing them on the creeping ice.

“O God, Father, change the wind!” prayed the missionary.

_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, propitiated the devil-drum of Ah-king-ah.

II

When the white man saw the Eskimo, he started. Then tightening the hood of his parka against the stinging ice-dust, he began creeping cautiously away toward the sound of the drum. With every backward glance he quickened his progress. At last he would be able to enter the tunnel of the _kashim_ while the guard was absent from his post; for though the missionary’s presence had been tolerated in the igloos, he had never yet succeeded in forcing his way into the council-house. He had convinced himself that once in the _kashim_, where he could address the assembled village, he could persuade them to abandon their heathen incantations and fling themselves on the mercy of God.

He pressed forward eagerly toward the open jaws of a whale which formed the entrance to the tunnel. Despite his haste, he came to an abrupt halt inside the passage. A queer cross of driftwood lay there, warning strangers against entering the _kashim_ while the medicine-man was performing the weird mysteries of his calling.

The missionary’s hesitation was banished by his zeal, and a moment later he caught up a club from the stack of hunting implements near the opening and began to feel his uneven way along the icy stones of the tunnel. Half a dozen steps plunged him into darkness where every movement of his feet roused wolf-dogs driven to shelter by the storm. They leaped, savagely snarling their hatred of the disturbing white, and the missionary, knowing that one misstep would send him sprawling under their slavering jaws, laid about him with a club, beating a way through the starving animals.

He advanced blindly until a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel guided him to the opening in the floor of the _kashim_ above. With a gasp of relief, he clutched the ladder that led upward, and mounted. He was not observed as he thrust his head into the dim room, hot and rank with ammoniacal smells and the reek of close-packed bodies. Miak, the witch-woman, huddled in one corner, tending the wick of the medicine-man’s stone lamp. It’s smoky light barely revealed the skin-covered shelf about the walls where hunters, stripped to the waist, sat cross-legged and cross-armed, their Mongolian faces set in earnest concentration. On the floor below them squatted the women, the old men, and the quiet children, naked as fishes.

All eyes were on Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man--Ah-king-ah who had successfully defied the Christianizing efforts of two former missionaries. Many were the tales told of the man’s cunning and strength not only among the Eskimo tribes, but among the whalers and the white traders of the arctic. In the Season of the Sun, when the tribes assembled on In-ga-lee-nay for the yearly Festival of the Whale, it took Miak, the witch-woman, three days to sing all the runes of his magic. Mightiest and richest shaman of the high North was Ah-king-ah, and great in the eyes of the Innuits, was the singing of Miak. So strong were his words of enchantment, he could plunge a hunting-knife through his vitals and dance with his necklace of bird-claws dangling from the point behind. So marvelous were his chants of wizardry that the sound of them formed kayaks, which took him far to the moonless land, where spirits of departed ivory-hunters yielded up their secrets to him. Ah-king-ah had the spirit of a crow. Ah-king-ah was a son of the wind. Ah-king-ah flew to the moon on the rays of the ice-blink. Once he flew to Siberia and challenged Nan-kum, the one-eyed shaman of the Chuckchees, to battle for the supremacy of the North. Had not all the village seen them fighting over the strait one morning--two great black crows whose raucous screams sent chills to the hearts of the bravest hunters? Mightiest shaman of the North was Ah-king-ah. With his beak he had wrenched off the leg of Nan-kum and flung it to the ice, cawing triumphantly, while the cripple flapped away defeated to Asiatic shores. Had not Milli-ru-ak found the leg where it fell, and was it not the leg of a man? And did not hunters returning from Siberian tundras report Nan-kum hobbling about on one leg ever after? Great indeed was Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man, and greater still would he be when he had changed the wind that was bringing famine to In-ga-lee-nay; greater and richer, for his price would be half the fruits of the village hunt for the space of six hunting moons.

The missionary’s eyes fell upon Ah-king-ah, half crouching in the middle of the floor. He was six feet tall, and nude except for a short, transparent garment made of the intestines of seals and trimmed with the crimson beaks of sea-parrots. He was beating upon the sacred devil-drum and chanting runes treating of the secret things of spirits, while his slim, naked feet made weird passes and performed strange, halting steps. With every movement his superb brown body rippled beneath the transparent shirt, setting all the beaks clattering in measured cadence. Behind him sat his three apprentices, swaying their naked bodies as they thumped the floor with sticks adorned with wolf-tails and gull-wings.