The Collected Stories

by Earl

  IX.

  IT WAS while they were eating at the counter of a delicatessen store in a small town in Pennsylvania that their heads shot up at the sound of faint throbbing from outside. With a wide-eyed glance at each other, Walwin and Finny dashed out into the street, swinging their heads all ways to catch the direction of the noise. In the absolute quiet it seemed to come from everywhere.

  Then, with the suddenness of a bomb, a car swung around the corner and headed away from them. Shouting like madmen, Walwin and Finny sprinted after the vehicle. For a hearbreaking instant it seemed that the driver would not hear or notice them and drive on, and Walwin had completely. lost his head. Otherwise he would have jumped into a near-by car and given chase. As it was he stopped and stood like a shipwrecked sailor, forlornly watching a ship sail by his island.

  At the moment he did think of using a car, he noticed the other car, now a block away, slowing down. Then it gyrated wildly, bounced against one curb, veered to the other and ran up onto the sidewalk and into a plate-glass window with a tremendous clatter in that great silence.

  Walwin was there as fast as his legs could carry him. Praying that the crash had not been fatal to the driver, he panted up. Then he stopped, stockstill. He felt his heart stop, too, for a moment. He could only stare at the girl who stepped out, and she at him. Their eyes locked in a gaze of indescribable intensity.

  Walwin found himself speechless. No less, apparently, the girl. He had tried to picture this scene in the past hours—this meeting with another survivor. He had thought of words to say for the occasion, a cheery greeting. He could not bring them to mind now. Anything he might say, anything at all, would sound fantastic, ridiculous.

  There is that strange joy when two friends meet whom fate has kept apart for years. There is that poignant happiness when one who has been saved from death returns to his loved ones. There is that overwhelming emotion that must have arisen when Robinson Crusoe met his man Friday, But the feeling that swept over these two in that instant of meeting was of far greater magnitude.

  Four days of wandering over a lifeless land, and then to find another alive was——

  WALWIN suddenly found the girl in his arms, sobbing fitfully against his shoulder. She gave out her story in broken words, as though casting off a burden—the fearful hours of the red mist, the realization of universal death, the maddeningly lonely hours and days of wandering and searching for other survivors.

  “You can imagine,” she concluded, somewhat more composed, “the violent shock when I saw you in the rear-vision mirror of my car, waving your arms. A knife seemed to go through me; I just went limp like water. I was conscious while the car swung this way and that, but I was powerless to raise a finger. Then there was the crash. I didn’t feel it. My only thought was to get out, to get out and meet a live human being after——”

  She shuddered. Then she drew away from Walwin, dried her eyes, and smiled happily at Finny, who had been standing there with a foolish, but welcoming grin.

  “My name’s Eve,” she said. “Eve Beckwith, of Philadelphia.”

  “Eve! How appropriate!” murmured Walwin. “Mine should be Adam perhaps, but instead that’s our cat.”

  “A cat!” screamed the girl. “A real live cat? Lead me to it right away!”

  The three humans walked down the street in a curious state of dazed happiness. For in finding one another they had the firm hope of finding yet others in this world scourged by the deadly red mist. Walwin gave his name and Finny’s and then told how they had been saved.

  The girl had been saved quite accidentally. She had been sorting canning peaches in the earthen basement of the old rambling house at the edge of town in which she lived with her spinster aunt. Suddenly there had been the disagreeable odor of the red gas. Alarmed, she had run to the cavern’s only opening, to be met by a stinging, blinding cloud of nauseating red gas. It was with the strength of desperation that she had reached up and swung to the solid oak trap panel.

  This had effectively sealed off the red gas, had also immured her totally from the outside world, with only a four-inch length of candle to light the Stygian darkness. First she had been horribly sick, physically and mentally. Her aunt, out on a shopping tour, must be dead or dying! Her parents, in the small town she had left to get a job in the big city, they, too, would be——

  Then she had snapped herself out of hysteria, realizing her sanity depended on being calm for the following hours. She had level-headedly snuffed out the candle, to conserve precious oxygen, and steeled herself for an indefinite stay in her damp, lightless, spider-infested tomb. A day and a night later she had crawled out, miserable and coughing.

  “At first,” she finished, “I felt tremendously relieved that I had escaped alive. Not only relieved, but glad. Then, a little later”—her voice became husky—“I did not feel so happy about it. I saw the hand of death around me. Everywhere! Hope that the doom had not been widespread vanished, as I drove all through the city—a city of the dead! Then those horrible days of driving and searching, searching for life that seemed to have been extinguished en masse, save for myself. I went halfway to Mayville, my home town, then turned back. I did not want to destroy that last picture in my mind of a contented father and smiling mother living in peaceful happiness.”

  The girl’s strained face softened for a moment. Then a look of raw horror came into her eyes as she went on:

  “I decided to head north, into the thickly populated seaboard, in the hope that there had been survivors by sheer weight of numbers. Instead, there were only greater heaps of the dead. Lord! The utter loneliness of it—the aching emptiness——”

  She was suddenly sobbing again, in Walwin’s arms. For a moment he comforted her and murmured, “Poor girl! Poor frightened girl!”

  FINALLY she broke away, ashamed of her weakness, and they made their way down the street. Finny following behind. Their footfalls scraped inordinately loud in the vast stillness which had lain over the world for four days. Although they did not realize it, they were involuntarily treading lightly, as though fearful of disturbing the oppressive quiet. Their eyes constantly darted to and fro; they held their heads to one side, ears strained forward.

  Suddenly, they caught one another’s eyes. It was the girl who voiced their common thought. “Always looking, looking,” she whispered. “And listening, listening. For four empty, endless days. Looking for movement that lurked, it seemed, just beyond the next corner. Listening for sounds that did not exist——”

  They had arrived before the food store in which the two men had been eating, and the girl uttered a little shriek. Adam, licking his chops and sunning himself in well-fed contentment, looked up at them in feline nonchalance.

  “You cute little rascal——” The girl scooped him up eagerly, cuddled him tenderly. Walwin watched with a half smile on his lips. Then he turned to Finny, who stood by quietly, not showing much of his feelings of relief that he and his companion were not the only two left alive.

  “Finny,” he said crisply, “see what you can dig up in the line of food. Those canned shrimps were good, and that mince pie—be sure it’s cellophane wrapped. It isn’t Thanksgiving, but we’ll make it a Thanksgiving feast.”

  Finny disappeared into the store front, and from its interior came the sounds of falling cans.

  “Funny,” murmured Eve, “I didn’t have any appetite to speak of for four days. Now I’m violently hungry!”

  Their meal over the store’s counter proved to be an hour of merry chatter and light spirits. As though a crushing load had been lifted from their minds, they found it not impossible to laugh and be gay again. Four days’ of accumulated depression slipped away. For a while they did not feel as though they were isolated in a universe which had disinherited life.

  But when conversation lulled, Walwin caught himself straining—straining to hear sounds other than those they made. He noticed the girl, too, sitting stiffly, tensed. He realized, in part, how the last four days had affected t
hem, changed them; perhaps taken away forever their ability to be at ease, and replaced it with an aching sense of loss. Perhaps they would always be looking, listening——

  THE CHEMICAL MURDER

  Emotions may lead to strange results. In playing with chemicals, unexpected results may follow your intentions and actions, so you should always be sure that you get the right reagent bottle. And there really is such a thing as being frightened to death. We are glad to present a story based on correct chemistry by an author who knows his science.

  CHAPTER I

  DISCOVERY

  MARY FLETCHER was cleaning up in Master George’s laboratory. Busily dusting with the feather duster, she took extreme care not to knock over any of the set-ups of glassware on the bench; Master George, kind and gentle though he was almost always, had a bit of a temper when something was disturbed or broken. But Mary didn’t hold that against Master George; Lord no. He was really a very likeable man, paid his rent regular, kept his nose to his work, and treated her like a civilized being. Not like that other place she had had, where two of the boarders were habitual drunkards, and the other one a sneering boor. Master George never spoke crossly to her, never looked angrily at her, never chided her with the arrogance of a boarder. And in return, Mary did far more for him than she would have done for any other man who happened to rent rooms in her place. Somehow—Mary felt a little sinful each time the thought came to her—this kind, slightly grey-haired chemist called Master George reminded her of her dead husband, dead, poor soul, for these twenty years.

  As she dusted off the long, black composition table top, her eyes encountered the black leather-covered loose leaf notebook, in which Master George was forever writing, it seemed to her. Five years ago, when he had first come to live in this house, he had brought that notebook, and from then on she saw it every day, lying in various places. Mary didn’t understand much about those things which Master George did, chemistry and experimenting, but it seemed everything he did went down in that notebook. Mary didn’t know either what Master George was aiming for in his ceaseless boiling, pouring, melting, and stirring, but it must be something important. Oh, yes! Master George was no play-boy, she could tell that by looking into his soft brown eyes, and must be trying to do something of great consequence. Sometimes, with a little excusable curiosity, she would stay a bit and watch him in his work, but never could she fathom what it was all about. Master George himself—well, she wouldn’t call it exactly a failing—but he was just a mite closelipped about his work. But then, that was none of Mary’s business, nor anybody else’s, just so long as he paid his high rent (even Mary admitted it was high) and raised no undue rumpus. As long as he did his part, Mary would do hers; dust his laboratory every day, give it a general clean-up on Mondays, send out his mail, receive his packages, prepare his meals, and keep his little bedroom in the back clean and tidy.

  Although Mary would never admit it openly, hardly to herself, Master George was a mystery to her. When her neighbors happened to ask her in backyard conversation what “that there chemist man was a-trying to do with his smells and lights and chemicals,” she would assume an important look and say that “it wasn’t for the likes of her to be a-giving away the secrets of her boarder, more especially as he said himself never to gossip about him and his doings.” But for all the prestige she had amongst her kind in the neighborhood for having such a strange boarder, she sometimes felt piqued that she really knew as little as they.

  Master George led a very regular life. He got up every day at 7:30 at Mary’s knock on the door, ate breakfast in the kitchen at 8:00, and then went straight to his laboratory and worked there from 8:15 to generally about 10:00 at night, sometimes later, sometimes not so late, and sometimes all night. His dinner and supper he generally took a half-hour off for at noon and 7:00 and ate in the dining room, but sometimes he would not show up at those hours. At such times Mary would quietly peer into the laboratory, see him bent over some apparatus or dish or flask, and as quietly disappear again to bring back a little later a cold lunch on a tray. She would deposit this at one corner of the table and glance over to him just before she left. It always warmed her heart at such times when he happened to look up and say “Thank you, Mary,” in his soft voice, or just smiled his thanks. She didn’t mind at all the extra trouble when a man appreciated it like Master George. That was his daily routine. On rare occasions, about twice a month, Mary should judge, he left the house after eating breakfast, and stayed away all day. Where he went, Mary had no idea.

  As for the man himself, Mary would say he was kind and gentle, civil and courteous, good-looking, with large, brown eyes, and very quiet. Not very big in size, but very tireless as a worker, at least in his laboratory. He seemed to have an unlimited source of money, and that was something Mary could never quite understand. Nobody ever called on him and he never sent out anything, so Mary couldn’t see where he got his money, unless he got it those days he was away. Or else—Mary favored the idea—he had lots of money at least enough to be independent, and needed no more. Nevertheless, he paid his rent and board and room in three-month periods promptly in advance in good money, and as long as he did that, and got it honestly—Mary was certain he did—she would never say “boo.”

  Of his work, Mary could tell you many things, none of which would be correct. “Liquids a-boiling, pots a-steaming, burners a-hissing, lights a-flashing, sparks a-flying,” was the general description that to Mary pictured his laboratory. At times things much more vivid had been witnessed by her. Once there had been a bad fire; Master George called it ether. In a big pool on the non-burnable table-top and dripping to the wooden floor, the viciously-flaming ether seemed about to consume the entire room, and Mary screamed for Master George to come out and save himself, more anxious for him than for the furniture. But Master George, cool and quick, let the ether burn itself out, while he played a stream of cold water from a running condenser all around the floor outside the ring of flame, not into the flames of burning ether. With characteristic suddenness, the ether burned itself out and Master George calmly threw away the cracked flask that had let the dangerous ether out on the table top. Mary calmed her beating heart and looked in surprise at the small amount of damage to the floor done by the seemingly-hot flames. At another time Master George came staggering out of the laboratory, coughing as if he had consumption, and pushed her to the windows. Between coughs he told her to open them all quickly, zero cold or no zero cold, while he, after dampening a rag and holding it to his nose, ran again into the fuming laboratory and dumped something down the drain. At another time Mary had heard a loud bang while she sat knitting, with an echo of tinkling glassware. In palpitating fear, she ran as fast as her years would let her to the back of the house where the laboratory was, and looked in. Master George was just taking off a pair of goggles and looking with something like pain in his face at the mess of broken glass and colored liquids spread on the table top. He shut off the vacuum pump with an angry jerk, and stood for a moment in silent contemplation. As Mary started to clean up the mess, Master George gently pushed her away, and told her he’d do it himself, as long as he was the cause of it, and besides she might cut herself.

  THE coming of Master George as her one and only boarder in her new house—that is, new in point of acquisition, not in age—had introduced into Mary’s life a something else that was new. It wasn’t any silly thing like love; she was past such thought, but it was a contact, however slight, with things in life that she had never known of or heard about. She realized it this warm spring day, as she dusted around busily, while Master George was eating his breakfast. Mary had led a very mediocre, drudgelike existence, and this interest in Master George and his work had put a new indefinable zest into her later life. She fervently hoped he would remain there for a long time, as long as she would be able to care for the house and care for him. He had been sick at times, and that was when Mary could repay him in warm-hearted services for the kindness and comfort he had brought her.r />
  Filled with the happiness of contented living, Mary began to dust off the rows of bottles of all shapes and sizes which reposed in a five-shelved cupboard against the back wall. Mary hadn’t the least idea what all the things were in those bottles, but she had had strict warnings never to tamper with them, nor to let anyone else ever touch them. Most of them had strange names blown in the glass, some had paper labels stuck on them. As the duster flicked over the last two bottles on the lower shelf, their paper labels, which had been hanging loosely, dislodged and fluttered to the floor. Mary kept her eye on them and picked up the one—there was still enough glue to make it stick she could see—and pasted it back on the bottle it had fallen from. She did this in the way she had seen Master George do it, by wetting the tip of a finger, and rubbing it over the glue till it was sticky. Then she stooped carefully, for Mary was rheumatic these last few years, picked up the second errant label, and pasted it back on its bottle.

  Then the duster swept over the rest of the bottles merrily while Mary hummed a little tune to herself.

  As the footsteps of Master George came to her through the open door from down the hallway, Mary unconsciously inveigled a smile into her lined face so that she could greet him in the way she felt was fit.

  “A fine mornin’, Master George,” she said as he came in.

  “Yes, indeed, Mary.”

  George Lockhart, the “Master George” of Mary’s simplicity, was a man well up in the forties, with a touch of grey already in his black locks. Good-looking in a sombre way, he was possessed of large, soft, brown eyes, full lips, and a finely-chiseled nose. Of medium height, his round-shouldered figure betrayed the sedentary life of a student of natural arts. His movements were deliberate and easy, and his voice, soft and unhurried. He walked with an unconscious grace to his desk, beside the window through which flooded the morning sun, and pulled out the drawer. His long nervous fingers held up a sheet of paper with a series of chemical names on it. After a momentary survey, he handed it to Mary.