by Jerry
“Oh, ipskiddy, ickyrah,” she said. “I’ll bet pocket handkerchiefs grow up there. They’ll grow anywhere.”
“Is a pocket handkerchief a flower?” I asked.
“Is a snapdragon an animal?” she asked.
Putting it that way, it seemed reasonable, and I could see the fields of pocket handkerchiefs, snowy white with blue borders and tiny monograms in one corner. It would be a lot of trouble looking for us, but Della was worth it.
“OK, Mercedes,” I said. “I’ll bring you a yard of them.”
She began to shake me. “Wake up, Abner. What are you talking about? Who is this Mercedes woman, anyway?”
I opened my eyes. She was sitting on the bed by me. A flourish of trumpets and a rapid tattoo of drums struck up inside me, as always, when I see that Della.
“Della, if you are another dream, go away.” I said.
She took my hands and put them where it felt good. “Are these dreams?” she asked. I couldn’t think of a better way to establish a fact.
“How’d you get here?” I asked after I had done my duty and my pleasure, kissing those two brown eyes and that Della-flavored mouth.
“Oh, the Navy has a heart,” she said. “Deeply buried under mountains of red tape, but it’s there.” She pushed me away from her. “I’ve just come from talking to Hanrahan. It looks like I’m married to a hero.”
“No, kid,” I said, “Columbus and Hanrahan arc the heroes. Me and Peralonzo are a couple of guys they need to do what they want to do.” I told her about my dream, if that was what it was—I don’t think it was, exactly, but f didn’t know what else to call it.
“I always thought Old Lady Dunstable had the wrong dope,” I said, when I got through. And I looked at her sadly, “blast and damn, Della,” I almost cried, “how can I leave a world with you in it?”
She got up and walked over to the window. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Oh. you’re just like all the sailors I ever heard of,” she said. “Get a girl knocked up and then leave town.”
I didn’t get it, and then I did. I went into free fall, dropping down mile upon mile. After what seemed like years, I came out of it and walked across the room and put my hands on her brave shoulders and turned her around.
“Lady, you would not kid?” I asked.
She shook her head. “This is no drill, Abner,” she said.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“I guess I’ve known at least a couple of weeks,” she said, “It wasn’t official until this morning. But Dr. Hurlburt says there’s no doubt about it.”
“Well, girl,” I said, “are you sad, mad, or glad?”
“I feel like a big trap has snapped shut oil me,” she said. “And I feel very foolish and very angry with myself, as if I’d done something dumb or careless. And I feel like I’ve been crowned Queen of the May. I guess I feel like a woman instead of a girl all of a sudden, and I’m not used to it.” She was talking very fast. “But what about you? What do you think about being a papa?”
I had thoughts but no words so I did the only thing I knew to do. I hugged her close and kissed her for a long time and patted her on the fanny. I was very graceful that she did not need more than this to reassure her. And as I kissed her I heard the siren but let it scream on until I had finished the kiss.
To the Moon, Old Hanrahan had said, we needed a man who not only would go to the Moon but who damned well would want to get back. Oh, he was a wise one, that Hanrahan, watching Marco, watching Johnny, watching me, until he knew his man. And this morning. Della, like all Navy wives, had availed herself of the free medical attention at the base clinic. And when Hurlburt called Hanrahan and told him Della was pregnant, that was it.
That was it. Marco and Johnny could fly it there, as well as I could. But I had the best, the most, the strongest reason to get back.
Della and I walked out of the room, into the sunshine. Marco and Johnny were waiting, but it no longer mattered. I didn’t want to change places with them.
“We’ll see you two o’clock, next week.” Johnny said, “and we’ll pitch a triple whingding.”
Marco said. “Vaya con Dios.” He said it very well. Not as well as Peralonzo, as he could not put as much meaning into it, but it was good to hear.
I took Della by the hand to cut across the quad to the briefing room. Marco and Johnny fell in behind us. In a few minutes I would say what I had to say, and Della would say what she had to say. We would hold each other in a brief lather of misery and then I’d let her go. After that, letting loose from gravity would be no problem.
Peralonzo, old buddy, I thought, as voyagers we are pikers, stay-at-homes. I thought about the birds and the bees anti the hard, stubby facts of life. About all the millions and millions of spermatozoa making the voyage from testes to ovum, all of them perishing save one tiny voyager. A doctor once told me that comparatively speaking, the journey must be, can only be. measured in millions of miles. And Peralonzo had made that journey, and so had I. And I knew that Peralonzo returned, and I knew that Abner Evans would make it also.
On the way we passed the mimosa tree, and the little brown bird was still there. You could hardly call the sound he made singing—to tell the truth, he couldn’t carry a tune any better than I could—but he was, as Peralonzo had done and as I was going to do, giving it everything he had.
SOMETHING
Allen Drury
SMALL AND PROVINCIAL, THE college topped the gentle rise in the center of the plain; small and provincial, the museum stood just east of it amid the level fields. Through the open windows the afternoon sun, streaming across a thousand miles of Middle West, came to rest in a warm pool of light at the foot of the Egyptian Room door. Outside, the trees, planted around the building in a self-conscious row by some long-forgotten founder, stirred gently in the fresh yet drowsy air of early spring. The season, not yet productive of flies, permitted the heavily ornamented front doors to stand open on a view which passed across the main college buildings to the town, beyond it to fields already sown with grain, and so presently to an endless immensity of far distances lost at last in the cloudless depths of the sky.
Standing outside on the steps for a second before going back in, he felt completely at peace. Everything—his position as curator, the chance to study, the opportunity to live with just the right degree of responsibility in the academic atmosphere he loved—conspired to give him a steady satisfaction, sharpened by the afternoon’s perfection into something approaching happiness. Even the neglect which was his only reward for die careful care he gave the museum’s small but comprehensive collection had ceased to bother him. They cared little for him, the students whose cars he could see in the distance passing toward the town, and even the faculty rarely entered his domain; but today that seemed unimportant, far away, in another world from this warm and sleepy hour.
As he stood there, his mind lazily relaxed, a little breeze rose suddenly in the fields, sliding like a snake through the shoots of grain. It leaped and twisted toward him, turning and writhing as though moved by a life of its own. A pleasurable anticipation banished the thought that the sparse hairs, so carefully combed, would be disarranged. What if they were! It was spring, and wind was good in the spring, and what if hairs were disarranged! He hoped they would be.
He noticed that the breeze had grown stronger, darting from side to side through the grass. It was about a hundred yards away, now. From somewhere in the fields it had picked up a weatherbeaten scrap of paper, was tossing it furiously back and forth like a puppy with a bone. Just before the wind reached him, the paper fell to the ground; then the current of air, rushing swiftly up the steps, struck him full in the face. He gasped, not only at its force, which he had underestimated, but at its nature, which he had not foreseen. It was hot—unusually hot and dry; so arid and lifeless that it quite took his breath away for a second. It wasn’t a spring wind at all; rather the wind of summer, and summer somewhere far away in a hot land. It caus
ed his throat to constrict painfully; then it was gone.
He looked around stupidly, as though he expected to see something behind him; but there was nothing. Only the open doors, the main room of the museum with its neat row of cases, the grand stairway going up to the right, and the sun falling across the floor to the Egyptian Room. He shook his head, as if dazed, and laughed. What a silly thought! For a moment, when the breeze had dropped the paper so abruptly, he had had the curious impression that its sudden loss of interest had been caused by a more than normal whimsy. He had had the odd idea that it had dropped the paper because it was bored. And when it had finally reached the steps, it had seemed to pass, not around, but through him. He laughed again, ruefully; he was getting old! Old and doddering and—and crazy in the head, as they said.
He turned back to the peaceful panorama which stretched to the horizon. Spring! Spring, and he was not so old, either! As if to prove it, he ran lightly down the steps to where the paper lay on the grass. He couldn’t leave rubbish lying around for the cats to play with. There were two or three, living in forgotten corners of the masonry, existing on mice and insects and scraps of food he sometimes remembered to bring them; one was a little gray kitten, of which he was quite fond. Realizing what a holiday they would have with it if they found it, he picked the paper up, folded it neatly, and trotted back up the steps.
At the top he turned for a last look at the gentle peace of the afternoon. Then he started in. In the doorway he paused. For some reason he could not explain, he wanted to close the doors after him. He attempted to ignore the feeling; he could not, the compulsion was too strong. After a moment, not knowing quite why, he pulled the doors part-way together; a shame-faced gesture, and one coming, though he did not know it, too late.
He noticed the confusion on his desk as soon as he started towards it. The papers he had left neatly piled on each side of the blotter had been pushed askew; one was half-way across the floor to the Egyptian Room. If the breeze had done that, it must have taken almost a right-angle turn once it got inside the door, for the desk stood along the wall to the right, opposite the foot of the stairs. Or had it been one of the cats, slipping in when his back was turned? He remembered running down the steps, leaving the door unguarded. After a moment he decided that must be it; and a tolerant amusement caused him to smile. Charming animals, but pesky, sometimes; and apt to be mischievous. It was not until he.reached the desk that his complacency vanished.
Was it only a quirk of the mind, or did he actually see a pattern in the confusion there?
He could almost swear to it; a sort of deliberate disarray, as though someone had picked the papers up, held them high above the desk, and then let them fall. And on the desk itself, the papers still remaining had a curiously abandoned look, as though someone had been engaged in disturbing them and then had stopped suddenly. And again that odd impression of boredom shot through his mind, bringing with it this time a faint uneasiness, such as one might feel in the presence of something just a little abnormal, and strange.
Still, he thought, as he picked up the papers and rearranged them in their former order, it could have been the cats; in fact, it must have been the cats. The little gray kitten in particular was fond of climbing on the desk; never, to be sure, to wreak quite such havoc as it had this time, but always to disturb whatever it came across. He realized that it must be somewhere in the building now, and, thinking of the serious damage it could do to the fragile exhibits on the second floor, he started hastily up the marble staircase. On the landing he paused abruptly. Before he could stop himself, he had whirled around like a toy on a revolving platform and called out into the empty room below.
“What’s that?” he said. The words flung themselves back to him sibilantly from the echoing walls. Nothing stirred in the sunlight on the floor, no sounds other than those of the day outside came to him. After a moment he laughed shortly. How stupid! He knew he was alone in the building; he must have imagined that sudden sensation of another presence. He told himself firmly not to be a fool. If he started seeing things in broad daylight, what would it be like when—he gasped, and a little chill of fear ran suddenly down his back.
“Well, for heaven’s sakes,” he said to the listening statues, the attentive cases, “look at that desk!”
He was not quite sure how he got back down the stairs and across the floor to it, for when he did his relief blotted out the details of one of the hardest things he had ever done. “I feel like dancing a jig,” he thought; and the idea amused him so much that he began to laugh. What would people say if they came in and caught him capering! And for such an insignificant reason, too. Simply because a kitten had got its paw wet with ink and drawn a long smear on his blotter—simply because a kitten was a kitten, beyond all doubt—he wanted to dance a jig! He continued to chuckle at himself while he picked up the papers for the second time and put them away in the desk. If he wasn’t the one, letting a breeze and a kitten give him the fidgets! What wouldn’t it be next!
He had just finished putting the last paper away in the drawer when the noise began. At first it was very faint and very far away, and he hardly noticed it. Then it grew stronger and he began to hear it. Intrigued by its quality, he tried idly to find an explanation. It wasn’t a steady sound, but quick, nervous, separated. It might be someone having trouble with his car; but not quite. It might be water spattering onto pavement from a hose; but not quite. For a long time it seemed to originate in the fields. Not until he decided that it sounded exactly like heavy cloth being torn did he realize that it was coming from somewhere inside the building.
His first impulse was one of disbelief, followed by annoyance. It wasn’t enough to see things; one had to hear them too. He told himself again not to be a fool. There was probably some very simple explanation. But when none occurred to him, he began to grow afraid. It was such a pointless noise; there was so little excuse for it. It seemed to exist outside time and space, as remote from humdrum reason as the paper in the breeze or the disarrangement on his desk. In fact, if one were romantic enough, one might almost see a connection between them, a certain perverse pattern linking them together. Not that he did, of course; but it was all he could do to make himself leave the desk and begin searching the building. Only a sense of duty and the realization that he would be foolish to give in to his feeling made him do so.
When he had gone through all the rooms, upstairs and down, and found each as he knew it would be, placid and empty and still, he returned breathlessly to the head of the stairs. The noise was beginning to grow a little louder, its harsh rasp more frequent. He shook his head helplessly. It couldn’t be explained; and it couldn’t be found; and he didn’t really know what to do about it. He might ignore it; but it was scarcely the sort of thing one could ignore. It was too strange, too—frightening.
His hands felt cold; the combination of the beautiful day and that pointless sound produced by its very incongruity a mood closely approaching terror. He knew that running back to the head of the stairs so fast that he had almost missed the landing and fallen hadn’t helped matters any; but he had not been able to prevent that instinctive flight, even when his mind told him it was a flight from nothing. The sunlight had seemed suddenly garish, the peace of the afternoon a mockery; he had had again that sharp impression of—something. It had given wings to his feet; be fore he knew it, he had hastened back to the echoing expanse of the main room.
Resting for a moment while he caught his breath, he began to notice a new rhythm in the noise. It was slower; no quieter, but much slower. Presently it stopped for several seconds and then began again. A thrill of recognition caused him to catch his breath. It’s getting bored again, he thought; what will it do now? He cleared his throat abruptly and counted firmly to ten. When he had finished he forced himself to laugh.
“How absurd!” he said aloud. “I’m talking just as though there really were something.”
The familiar sound of his own voice restored his composure and hi
s common sense. What a doddering old ninny he was! Making a ghost out of whole cloth and then letting it scare him to death! He must have one foot in the grave, indeed; the one he thought with, evidently.
He marched firmly down the stairs and across to his desk, putting the noise aside brusquely. Let it tear up the whole roll of burlap if he wanted to, whatever it was. He had other things to do. He couldn’t be bothered with noises, no matter how unique.
Noticing the ink-smeared blotter when he reached the desk, he remembered that the kitten was still somewhere in the building.
“Kitty!” he called. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!” Then he gave an amused sigh of relief. “Why, of course,” he said. “It’s sharpening its claws somewhere.”
After that it was easy to search the building again. It was one thing to look for a Noise, a disembodied Something; it was another to look for a kitten. Outside the door of the Egyptian Room he hesitated momentarily in the sun. In his mind’s eye he could almost see the little animal, busily engaged in—or could he? Supposing—supposing that when he opened the door he saw—A sudden furious scratching decided him. The little devil must be sharpening its claws on one of the mummy-cases that stood along the walls. He strode forward impatiently, into the absolute silence of the empty room.
“Kitty?” he said tentatively. His only answer was a sudden bickering of the birds in the trees outside. He called again.
“Here, kitty?” The silence seemed to become, if anything, more profound.
“Come out here, you little scamp!” he said; in spite of himself he was unable to keep a pleading note out of his voice. “Come out from under there!
“Kitty!” he said firmly; and regretted it at once, for the noise answered him. As surely as though it had spoken, it answered; a surprised, somewhat uncertain, somewhat puzzled answer.
“What?” its rasp seemed to be saying.
