The Best Short Stories of 1917 Part 66

"It do look fearful, like. But you needn't be afraid. It's better to be friends with it, you might say. And then go to bed and fergit it."

They thanked him for his goodness, bade him good-by, and he clinked down the flags of the walk and started across the street.

He had got midway across when they all heard a startling sound, an unearthly cry.

It came out of the distance, and struck the stillness like a blow.

"What is it? What is it, Margie?" Mrs. Reeves whispered excitedly.

Faint and quavering at its beginning, the cry grew louder and more shrill, and then died away, as the breath that made it ebbed and was spent. It seemed as if this unusual night had found at last a voice suited to its mood. Twice the cry was given, and then all was still as before.

At its first notes the muscles in Mrs. Pollard's arm had tightened. But Mr. Barber had hastened back at once with rea.s.surance.

"I guess Mrs. Pollard knows what that is," he called to them from the gate. "It's only our old friend Moll, that lives down there in the notch. She gets lonesome, every thunderstorm, and let's it off like that. It's only her rheumatiz, I reckon. We wouldn't feel easy ourselves without them few kind words from old Moll!"

The two women applauded as they could his effort toward humor. Then, "Come on, Sallie, quick!" Mrs. Pollard cried to her guest, and the two women bolted up the steps of the portico and flew like girls through the door, which they quickly locked between themselves and the disquieting night.

Once safe within, relief from their nerves came at the simple effort of laughter, and an hour later, when it was clear that the stars still held to their courses, the two ladies were at their ease again, beneath the lamp on the table, with speech and conversation to provide an escape from thought. The night seemed to cool its high temper as the hours wore on, and gradually the storm allowed itself to be forgotten.

Together, at bed time, the two made their tour of the house, locking the windows and doors, and visiting the pantry on the way for an apple.

Outside all was truly calm and still, as, with mock and exaggerated caution, they peered through one last open window. A periodic, lazy flash from the far distance was all that the sky could muster of its earlier wrath. And they tripped upstairs and to bed, with that hilarity which always attends the feminine pursuit of repose.

But in the night they were awakened.

Not for nothing, after all, had the skies marshalled that afternoon array of their forces. Now they were as terribly vociferous as they had been terrifyingly still before. Leaves, that had drooped melancholy and motionless in the afternoon, were whipped from their branches at the s.n.a.t.c.h of the wind. The rain came down in a solid cataract. The thunder was a steady bombardment, and the frolic powers above, that had toyed and practised with soundless flashes in the afternoon, had grown wanton at their sport, and hurled their electric shots at earth in appallingly accurate marksmans.h.i.+p. Between the flashes from the sky, the steady glare of a burning barn here and there reddened the blackness. The village dead, under the pelted sod, must have shuddered at the din. Even the moments of lull were saturate with terrors. In them rose audible the roar of waters, the clatter of frightened animals, the rattle of gates, the shouts of voices, the click of heels on the flags of the streets, as the villagers hurried to the succor of neighbors fighting fires out on the hills. For long afterward the tempest of that night was remembered.

For hours while it lasted, trees were toppled over, and houses rocked to the blast.

And for as long as it would, the rain beat in through an open window and wetted the two women where they lay in their bed, afraid to stir, even to help themselves, gripped in a paralysis of terror.

Their nerves were not the more disposed to peace, either, by another token of the storm. All through the night, since their waking, in moments of stillness sufficient for it to be heard, they had caught that cry of the late afternoon. Doggedly it a.s.serted itself against the uproar. It insisted upon being heard. It too wished to shriek relievingly, like the inanimate night, and publish its sickness abroad.

They heard it far off, at first. But it moved, and came nearer. Once the two women quaked when it came to them, shrill and clear, from a point close at hand. But they bore its invasion along with the wind and the rain, and lay shameless and numb in the rude arms of the night.

They lay so till deliverance from the hideous spell came at last, in a vigorous pounding at the front door.

"It's John!" Mrs. Pollard cried in her joy. "And through such a storm!"

She slipped from the bed, threw a damp blanket about her, and groped her way out of the room and down the stair, her guest stumbling after. They scarcely could fly fast enough down the dark steps. At the bottom Mrs.

Pollard turned brighter the dimly burning entry lamp, shot back the bolt with fingers barely able to grasp it in their eagerness, and threw open the door.

"John!" she cried.

But there moved into the house the tall and thin but heavily framed figure of an old woman, who peered about in confusion.

In a flash of recognition Mrs. Pollard hurled herself against the intruder to thrust her out.

"No!" the woman said. "No, you will not, on such a night!" And the apparition herself, looking with feverish curiosity at her unwilling hostesses, slowly closed the door and leaned against it.

Mrs. Pollard and her friend turned to fly, in a mad instinct to be anywhere behind a locked door. Yet before the instinct could reach their muscles, the unbidden visitor stopped them again.

"No!" she said. "I am dying. Help me!"

The two women turned, as if hypnotically obedient to her command. Their tongues lay thick and dead in their mouths. They fell into each other's arms, and their caller stood looking them over, with the same fevered curiosity. Then she turned her deliberate scrutiny to the house itself.

In a moment she almost rea.s.sured them with a first token of being human and feminine. On the table by the stairs lay a book, and she went and picked it up. "Fine!" she mused. Then her eye travelled over the pictures on the walls. "Fine!" she said. "So this is the inside of a fine house!" But suddenly, as her peering gaze returned to the two women, she was recalled to herself. "But you wanted to put me out--on a night like this! Hear it!"

For a moment she looked at them in frank hatred. And on an impulse she revenged herself upon them by sounding, in their very ears, the shrill cry they had heard in the afternoon, and through the night, that had mystified the villagers for years from the grove. The house rang with it, and with the hard peal of laughter that finished it.

All three of them stood there, for an instant, viewing each other. But at the end of it the weakest of them was the partly sibylline, partly mountebank intruder. She swayed back against the wall. Her head rolled limply to one side, and she moaned, "O G.o.d, how tired I am to-night!"

Frightened as they still were, their runaway hearts beating a tattoo that was almost audible, the two other women made a move to support her.

But she waved them back with a suddenly returning air of command. "No!"

she said. "You wanted to put me out!"

The creature wore some sort of thin skirt whose color had vanished in the blue-black of its wetness. Over her head and shoulders was thrown a ragged piece of shawl. From under it dangled strands of grizzled gray hair. Her dark eyes were hidden in the shadows of her impromptu hood.

The hollows of her cheeks looked deeper in its shadows.

She loosed the shawl from her head, and it dropped to the floor, disclosing a face like one of the Fates. She folded her arms, and there was a rude majesty in the ma.s.sive figure and its bearing as she tried to command herself and speak.

"I come here--in this storm. Hear it! Hear that! I want shelter. I want comfort. And what do you say to me!... Well, then I take comfort from you. You thought I was your husband. You called his name. Well, I saw him this afternoon. He drove out. I called to him from the roadside.

'Let me tell your fortune! Only fifty cent!' But he whipped up his horse and drove away. You are all alike. But I see him now--in Woodman's Narrows. It rains there, same as here. Thunder and lightning, same as here. Trees fall. The wind blows. The wind blows!"

The woman had tilted her head and fixed her eyes, s.h.i.+ning and eager, as if on some invisible scene, and she half intoned her words as if in a trance.

"I see your husband now. His wagon is smashed by a tree. The horse is dead. Your husband lies very still. He does not move. There!"--she turned to them alert again to their presence--"there is the husband that you want. If you don't believe me, all I say is, wait! He is there. You will see!"

She ended in a peal of laughter, which itself ended in a weary moan.

"Oh, why can't you help me!" She came toward them, her arms outstretched. "_Don't_ be afraid of me. I want a woman to know me--to comfort me. I die to-night. It's calling me, outside. Don't you hear?...

"Listen to me, you women!" she went on, and tried to smile, to gain their favor. "I lied to you, to get even with you. You want your husband. Well, I lied. He isn't dead. For all you tried to shut me out.

Do you never pity? Do you never help? O-oh--"

Her hand traveled over her brow, and her eyes wandered.

"No one knows what I need now! I got to tell it, I got to tell it! Hear that?" There had been a louder and nearer crash outside. "That's my warning. That says I got to tell it, before it's too late. No storm like this for forty years--not since one night forty years ago. My G.o.d, that night!" Another heavy rumble interrupted her. "Yes, yes!" she turned and called. "I'll tell it! I promise!"

She came toward her audience and said pleadingly, "Listen--even if it frightens you. You've got to listen. That night, forty years ago"--she peered about her cautiously--"I think--I think I hurt two people--hurt them very bad. And ever since that night--"

The two women had once again tried to fly away, but again she halted them. "Listen! You have no right to run away. You got to comfort me! You hear? Please, please, don't go."

She smiled, and so seemed less ugly. What could her two auditors do but cling to each other and hear her through, dumb and helpless beneath her spell?

"Only wait. I'll tell you quickly. Oh, I was not always like this. Once I could talk--elegant too. I've almost forgotten now. But I never looked like this then. I was not always ugly--no teeth--gray hair. Once I was beautiful too. You laugh? But yes! Ah, I was young, and tall, and had long black hair. I was Mollie, then. Mollie Morgan. That's the first time I've said my name for years. But that's who I was. Ask Bruce--he knows."

She had fallen back against the wall again, her eyes roaming as she remembered. Here she laughed. "But Bruce is dead these many years. He was my dog." A long pause. "We played together. Among the flowers--in the pretty cottage--under the vines. Not far from here. But all gone now, all gone. Even the woods are gone--the woods where Bruce and I hunted berries. And my mother!"

Again the restless hands sought the face and covered it.