The Hunter and Other Stories Part 7

Morphy rolled over on his back and began to roar out a song to the Maryland sky, a mocking song that Wobblies sing to the tune of "When the bugle calls up yonder I'll be there."

You will eat, by and by, In that glorious land they call the sky- 'Way up high!

Work and pray, You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

Feach snorted and turned away, walking down the river bank. The singer's booming notes followed him until he had reached the pines beyond the two rows of frame huts that were the Polacks' quarters.

By morning the little man had recovered his poise. For two weeks he held it-going jauntily around with his cargo of doubleness and his bobbing walk, smiling with puffed cheeks when Morphy called him "Parson"-and then it began to slip away from him. For a while he still smiled, and still said one thing while patently thinking of another; but his eyes were no longer jovially occupied with those other things: they were worried.

He took on the look of one who is kept waiting at a rendezvous, and tries to convince himself that he will not be disappointed. His nights became restless; the least creaking of the clapboard barrack or the stirring of a sleeping man would bring him erect in bed.

One afternoon the boiler of a small hoisting engine exploded. A hole was blown in the store-house wall, but no one was hurt. Feach raced the others to the spot and stood grinning across the wreckage at Morphy. Carey, the superintendent, came up.

"Every season it's got to be something!" he complained. "But thank G.o.d this ain't as bad as the rest-like last year when the roof fell in and smashed everything to h.e.l.l and gone."

Feach stopped grinning and went back to work.

Two nights later a thunderstorm blew down over the canning-factory. The first distant rumble awakened Feach. He pulled on trousers, shoes, and shirt, and left the bunk-house. In the north, approaching clouds were darker than the other things of night. He walked toward them, breathing with increasing depth, until, when the clouds were a black smear overhead, his chest was rising and falling to the beat of some strong rhythm.

When the storm broke he stood still, on a little hummock that was screened all around by bush and tree. He stood very straight, with upstretched arms and upturned face. Rain-fat thunder-drops that tapped rather than pattered-drove into his round face. Jagged streaks of metal fire struck down at ground and tree, house and man. Thunder that could have been born of nothing less than the impact of an enormous something upon the earth itself, crashed, crashed, crashed, reverberations lost in succeeding crashes as they strove to keep pace with the jagged metal streaks.

Feach stood up on his hummock, a short man compactly plump, hidden from every view by tree and undergrowth; a little man with a pointed nose tilted at the center of the storm, and eyes that held fright when they were not blinking and squinting under fat rain-drops. He talked aloud, though the thunder made nothing of his words. He talked into the storm, cursing G.o.d for half an hour without pause, with words that were vilely blasphemous, in a voice that was suppliant.

The storm pa.s.sed down the river. Feach went back to his bunk, to lie awake all night, shivering in his wet underwear and waiting. Nothing happened.

He began to mumble to himself as he worked. Carey, reprimanding him for over-cooking a basket of tomatoes, had to speak three times before the little man heard him. He slept little. In his bunk, he either tossed from side to side or lay tense, straining his eyes through the darkness for minute after minute. Frequently he would leave the sleeping-house to prowl among the buildings, peering expectantly into each shadow that house or shed spread in his path.

Another thunderstorm came. He went out into it and cursed G.o.d again. Nothing happened. He slept none after that, and stopped eating. While the others were at table he would pace up and down beside the river, muttering to himself. All night he wandered around in distorted circles, through the pines, between the buildings, down to the river, chewing the ends of his fingers and talking to himself. His jauntiness was gone: a shrunken man who slouched when he walked, and shivered, doing his daily work only because it required neither especial skill nor energy. His eyes were more red than brown, and dull except when they burned with sudden fevers. His finger-nails ended in red arcs where the quick was exposed.

On his last night at the cannery, Feach came abruptly into the center of the group that awaited the completion of night between house and river. He shook his finger violently at Morphy.

"That's crazy!" he screeched. "Of course there's a G.o.d! There's got to be! That's crazy!"

His red-edged eyes peered through the twilight at the men's faces: consciously stolid faces once they had mastered their first surprise at this picking up of fortnight-old threads: the faces of men to whom exhibitions of astonishment were childish. Feach's eyes held fear and a plea.

"Got your proof with you tonight?" Morphy turned on his side, his head propped on one arm, to face his opponent. "Maybe you can show me why there's got to be a G.o.d?"

"Ever' reason!" Moisture polished the little man's face, and muscles writhed in it. "There's the moon, and the sun, and the stars, and flowers, and rain, and-"

"Pull in your neck!" The big man spit for emphasis. "What do you know about them things? Edison could've made 'em for all you know. Talk sense. Why has there got to be a G.o.d?"

"Why? I'll tell you why!" Feach's voice was a thin scream; he stood tiptoe, and his arms jerked in wild gestures. "I'll tell you why! I've stood up to Him, and had His hand against me. I've been cursed by Him, and cursed back. That's how I know! Listen: I had a wife and kid once, back in Ohio on a farm she got from her old man. I come home from town one night and the lightning had came down and burnt the house flat-with them in it. I got a job in a mine near Harrisburg, and the third day I'm there a cave-in gets fourteen men. I'm down with 'em, and get out without a scratch; I work in a box-factory in Pittsburgh that burns down in less'n a week. I'm sleeping in a house in Galveston when a hurricane wrecks it, killing ever'body but me and a fella that's only crippled. I shipped out of Charleston in the Sophie, that went down off Cape Flattery, and I'm the only one that gets ash.o.r.e. That's when I began to know for sure that it was G.o.d after me. I had sort of suspected it once or twice before-just from queer things I'd noticed-but I hadn't been certain. But now I knew what was what, and I wasn't wrong either! For five years I ain't been anywheres that something didn't happen. Why was I hunting a job before I came up here? Because a boiler busts in the Deal's Island packing-house where I worked before and wiped out the place. That's why!"

Doubt was gone from the little man; in the quarter-light he seemed to have grown larger, taller, and his voice rang.

Morphy, perhaps alone of the audience not for the moment caught in the little man's eloquence, laughed briefly.

"An' what started all this hullabaloo?" he asked.

"I done a thing," Feach said, and stopped. He cleared his throat sharply and tried again. "I done a thi-" The muscles of throat and mouth went on speaking, but no sound came out. "What difference does that make?" He no longer bulked large in the dimness, and his voice was a whine. "Ain't it enough that I've had Him hounding me year after year? Ain't it enough that everwheres I go He-"

Morphy laughed again.

"A h.e.l.l of a Jonah you are!"

"All right!" Feach gave back. "You wait and see before you get off any of your cheap jokes. You can laugh, but it ain't ever' man that's stood up to G.o.d and wouldn't give in. It ain't ever' man that's had Him for an enemy."

Morphy turned to the others and laughed, and they laughed with him. The laughter lacked honesty at first, but soon became natural; and though there were some who did not laugh, they were too few to rob the laughter of apparent unanimity.

Feach shut both eyes and hurled himself down on Morphy. The big man shook him off, tried to push him away, could not, and struck him with an open hand. Sandwich picked Feach up and led him in to his bed. Feach was sobbing-dry, old-man sobs.

"They won't listen to me, Sandwich, but I know what I'm talking about. Something's coming here-you wait and see. G.o.d wouldn't forget me after all these years He's been riding me."

"Course not," the freckled ex-sailor soothed him. "Everything'll come out all right. You're right."

After Sandwich had left him Feach lay still on his bunk, chewing his fingers and staring at the rough board ceiling with eyes that were perplexed in a blank, hurt way. As he bit his fingers he muttered to himself. "It's something to have stood up to Him and not give in. . . . He wouldn't forget. . . . Chances are it's something new. . . . He wouldn't!"

Presently fear pushed the perplexity out of his eyes, and then fear was displaced by a look of unutterable anguish. He stopped muttering and sat up, fingers twisting his mouth into a clown's grimace, breath hissing through his nostrils. Through the open door came the noise of stirring men: they were coming in to bed.

Feach got to his feet, darted through the door, past the men who were converging upon it, and ran up along the river-a shambling, jerky running. He ran until one foot slipped into a hole and threw him headlong. He scrambled up immediately and went on. But he walked now, frequently stumbling.

To his right the river lay dark and oily under the few stars. Three times he stopped to yell at the river.

"No! No! They're wrong! There's got to be a G.o.d! There's got to!"

Half an hour was between the first time he yelled and the second, and a longer interval between the second and third; but each time there was a ritualistic sameness to word and tone. After the third time the anguish began to leave his eyes.

He stopped walking and sat on the b.u.t.t of a fallen pine. The air was heavy with the night-odor of damp earth and mold, and still where he sat, though a breeze shuffled the tops of the trees. Something that might have been a rabbit padded across the pine-needle matting behind him; a suggestion of frogs' croaking was too far away to be a definite sound. Lightning-bugs moved sluggishly among the trees: yellow lights shining through moth-holes in an irregularly swaying curtain.

Feach sat on the fallen pine for a long while, only moving to slap at an occasional pinging mosquito. When he stood up and turned back toward the canning-factory he moved swiftly and without stumbling.

He pa.s.sed the dark American bunk-house, went through the unused husking-shed, and came to the hole that the hoisting engine had made in the store-house wall. The boards that had been nailed over the gap were loosely nailed. He pulled two of them off, went through the opening, and came out carrying a large gasoline can.

Walking downstream, he kept within a step of the water's edge until to his right a row of small structures showed against the sky like evenly s.p.a.ced black teeth in a dark mouth. He carried his can up the slope toward them, panting a little, wood-debris crackling under his feet, the gasoline sloshing softly in its can.

He set the can down at the edge of the pines that ringed the Polacks' huts, and stuffed his lower lip with snuff. No light came from the double row of buildings, and there was no sound except the rustling of tree and bush in the growing breeze from southward.

Feach left the pines for the rear of the southernmost hut. He tilted the can against the wall, and moved to the next hut. Wherever he paused the can gurgled and grew lighter. At the sixth building he emptied the can. He put it down, scratched his head, shrugged, and went back to the first hut.

He took a long match from his vest pocket and sc.r.a.ped it down the back of his leg. There was no flame. He felt his trousers; they were damp with dew. He threw the match away, took out another, and ignited it on the inside of his vest. Squatting, he held the match against the frayed end of a wall-board that was black with gasoline. The splintered wood took fire. He stepped back and looked at it with approval. The match in his hand was consumed to half its length; he used the rest of it starting a tiny flame on a corner of the tar-paper roofing just above his head.

He ran to the next hut, struck another match, and dropped it on a little pile of sticks and paper that leaned against the rear wall. The pile became a flame that bent in to the wall.

The first hut had become a blazing thing, flames twisting above as if it were spinning under them. The seething of the fire was silenced by a scream that became the whole audible world. When that scream died there were others. The street between the two rows of buildings filled with red-lighted figures: naked figures, underclothed figures-men, women, and children-who achieved clamor. A throaty male voice sounded above the others. It was inarticulate, but there was purpose in it.

Feach turned and ran toward the pines. Pursuing bare feet made no sound. Feach turned his head to see if he were being hunted, and stumbled. A dark athlete in red flannel drawers pulled the little man to his feet and accused him in words that had no meaning to Feach. He snarled at his captor, and was knocked down by a fist used club-wise against the top of his head.

Men from the American bunk-house appeared as Feach was being jerked to his feet again. Morphy was one of them.

"Hey, what are you doing?" he asked the athlete in the red drawers.

"These one, 'e sit fire to 'ouses. I see 'im!"

Morphy gaped at Feach.

"You did that?"

The little man looked past Morphy to where two rows of huts were a monster candelabra among the pines, and as he looked his chest arched out and the old sparkling ambiguity came back to his eyes.

"Maybe I done it," he said complacently, "and maybe Something used me to do it. Anyways, if it hadn't been that it'd maybe been something worse."

AN INCH AND A HALF OF GLORY.

Out of the open doorway and an open second-story window thin curls of smoke came without propulsion to fade in the air. Above, a child's face-a young face held over the sill with a suggestion of standing tiptoe-was flat against the gla.s.s of a window on the third floor. The face held puzzlement without fear. The man on Earl Parish's left saw it first.

"Look!" he exclaimed, pointing. "There's a kid up there!"

The others tilted their faces and repeated: "There's a kid up there."

"Did anybody turn in the alarm yet?" a man who had just arrived asked.

"Yes," several voices a.s.sured him, one adding, "The engines ought to be here any minute now."

"He's all right, that kid," the man who had first seen the child praised his discovery. "Ain't crying or nothing."

"Most likely he don't even know what's going on."

"The firemen will be here in a second. Ain't much use of us trying to do anything. They can get him out with their hook'n'ladders quicker than we could."

Feet shuffled on the sidewalk and gazes left the upper window to fasten on the smoking doorway. No one answered the man who had spoken last. After a moment, his face reddened. Earl Parish found his own cheeks warm. Looking out of the corners of his eyes at the faces around him, he saw more color than before. His glance met another man's. Both looked quickly across the street again.

A woman's voice came from a house behind the men.

"Somebody ought to get that child out of there! Even if it ain't burnt up, it's liable to get scared into convulsions or something."

Earl Parish tried to take his gaze away from the upstairs window, and failed. It was terrible, and it held him: a stupid flat face into which panic must come each instant-and did not. If the child had cried and beat the pane with its hands there would have been pain in looking at it, but not horror. A frightened child is a definite thing. The face at the window held its blankness over the men in the street like a poised club, racking them with the threat of a blow that did not fall.

Earl Parish wet his lips and thought of words he did not say. The child was not in real danger. No great heat was behind the smoke that came from the house. To leave these men and bring the child down from its window would seem a flaunting of inexpensive courage. To suggest a rescue-if he could have explained his wish to save the child from consciousness of danger rather than from danger itself, he would have spoken. But he distrusted his ability to make the distinction clear.

"The engines ought to be here any minute now," the man who had made that prediction twice before was repeating. He scowled up and down the red-brick street. "Where in the h.e.l.l are them engines?" he demanded.

The man who had discovered the face at the window cleared his throat, his eyes focused somewhat rigidly on the window.

"Maybe she's right," he said. "The kid's liable to be scared into fits. I had a nephew that got scared into St. Vitus's dance just by having a cat jump up on him."

"Is that so?" the fire department's herald asked with extraordinary interest.

"Maybe we better-" Earl Parish suggested.

"Maybe we better."

The group swayed indecisively. Then eight men crossed the street, their pace quickening as they approached the smoking doorway. Going up the four wooden steps they jostled one another, each trying to get ahead of the others. All were going into the house: such risk as attended them would be shared. But he who went first would bring the child down: the others would const.i.tute a not especially important chorus.

Inside the door a gust of smoke blew on them, shutting out the light, scorching eyes and throats. Gongs and sirens clamored in the street.

"There's the engines now!" their prophet cried. "They'll have the kid down in no time!"

Out of sight, the suspended blow in the child's face was without power. Seven men went back into the street with nothing apologetic in the manner of their going. Earl Parish remained in the house.

Through the smoke that clouded but did not fill the hallway bra.s.s lines gleamed on a flight of steps. He hesitated. He wanted to climb those steps and either bring the child down or stay with it until the fire had been extinguished. But to do so seemed a breach of faith with the men who had gone back to the street. Had he told them he was going through with the venture, they would have accompanied him. Having stayed silently behind, if he came out now with the child, or was found upstairs with it when the fire had been put out, they would think he had tricked them so he might pose as one who had gone alone through something that had daunted them.

He took a step toward the street, and stopped. To go out without the child now would be no better. The men in the street, who no doubt had missed him by this time, would think he had lost courage after breaking faith with them.

Earl Parish went up the bra.s.s-striped steps. The smoke thickened as he mounted, but was never dense enough to make advance difficult. He saw no flames. On the third floor a rickety door barred him from the front of the building until he remembered this was an unusual occasion, an emergency, strictly speaking. He thrust the door in with his shoulder.

He found little smoke in the room with the child, though a thin fog came in with him. The child came to him.

"'Moke," it p.r.o.nounced gravely.

"You're all right, sonny," Earl Parish said, picking the child up. "I'll have you out of here in a jiffy."

He draped a red and green cloth from the table lightly about its head, leaving a corner loose for his own possible use. He took pains not to show himself at the window, and went down the way he had come up.

In the street again, someone took the child. He was faintly giddy from the smoke, the effort of groping his way down with the child, and the excitement that had grown in him as he descended-the nervousness that is inseparable from even the most orderly of retreats. He stood very erect, avoiding curious stares. The eyes of the seven men who had crossed the street with him reproached him from twenty paces.

He walked away, down the street with a stiff affectation of nonchalance: a short, st.u.r.dy man of thirty or so in a stiffly pressed double-breasted coat that made him as rectangular as a shoe-box standing on end.

At his desk the next morning Earl Parish searched the day's papers. In the Morning Post he found an inch and a half of simple news that a fire of unknown origin had been subdued with slight damage after a child had been carried to safety by Earl Parish. He folded the account into the center of the newspaper and put it out of sight.

Between the departure of No. 131, southbound, and the arrival of No. 22, a train announcer came to Earl Parish's window and grinned at him over the sign that said, INFORMATION.

"Where's the medal?" the train announcer asked.

Earl Parish grinned foolishly back, blood came into his face, he perspired.

The news went around the station: Earl Parish had rescued a child from a blazing building-two children. The station employees with whom he was intimate joked about his deed. The more important employees-baggage master, stationmaster, chief dispatcher-congratulated him solemnly, as if on behalf of the company. At noon, the general pa.s.senger agent himself, on his way to a convention in St. Louis, stopped to commend Earl Parish's bravery. Earl Parish listened to his words, answered his questions, kept his gaze fixed on the general pa.s.senger agent's watch chain, and perspired. The general pa.s.senger agent's train was finally announced. He shook Earl Parish's hand and went away.

Earl Parish did his day's work in an emotional muddle, avoiding eyes, mopping his moist face incessantly with his handkerchief. Looking up to find the most casual glance turned in his direction, his face would go crimson, and a desire to drop on his knees out of sight below the window would come to him. Between the necessary contacts with fellow employees and inquiring travelers he pretended business with guidebooks and folders in the rear of his cubbyhole, and there was exaltation in him.

That night he lay for a long while across his bed, studying the printed inch and a half he had cut from the Morning Post. There had been nothing heroic-except perhaps in a negative way-about his going into the smoking building: he had brought the child down not as one would s.n.a.t.c.h it from peril, but as one would protect it from awareness of peril. Nevertheless, it was pleasant to lie across his bed knowing that people throughout the city had read of what he had done, that his acquaintances thought him a man of courage and perhaps were mildly boasting that they knew this Earl Parish.