Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982)

by Grey, Zane

  Memory surged up in Adam, moving him to speak aloud his own deeply hidden secret, by the revelation of which he might share the shame and remorse and agony of Magdalene Virey.

  "I will tell you my story," he said, and the words were as cruel blades at the closed portals of his heart. Huskily he began, halting often, breathing hard, while the clammy sweat beaded upon his brow. What was this life--these years that deceived with forgetfulness? His trouble was there as keen as on the day it culminated. He told Magdalene of his boyhood, of his love for his brother Guerd, and of their life in the old home where all, even friendships of the girls, was for Guerd and nothing for him. As he progressed Magdalene Virey's own agony was forgotten. The quiver of her body changed to strung intensity, the heaving of her bosom was no longer the long-drawn breath to relieve oppression. Remorselessly as she had bared her great secret, Adam confessed his little, tawdry, miserable romance--his wild response to the lure of a vain Mexican girl, and his fall, and the words that had disillusioned him.

  "Ah, so long ago and far away!" echoed Magdalene Virey, all the richness of her wonderful voice gathering in a might of woman's fury. "Oh, such a thing for a girl to say!...And Adam--she, this Margarita, was the only woman you ever loved--ever knew that way?"

  "Yes."

  "And she was the cause of your ruin?"

  "Indeed she was, poor child!"

  "The damned hussy!" cried Magdalene, passionately. "And you--only eighteen years old? How I hate her! And what of the man who won her fickle heart?"

  Adam bowed as a tree in a storm. "He--he was my brother."

  "Oh no!" she burst out. "The boy you loved--the brother! Oh, it can't be true!"

  "It was true...And, Magdalene--I killed him."

  Then with a gasp she enveloped him, in a fierce, protective frenzy of tenderness, arms around him, pressing his face to her breast, hanging over him as a mother over her child.

  "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How terrible!...Your brother!...And I thought my secret, my sin, my burden so terrible! Oh, my heart bleeds for you... Wansfell, poor unhappy wanderer!"

  Chapter XVIII

  July! At last the endlessly long, increasingly hot June days brought the leaden-hazed month of July, when no sane man ever attempted to cross Death Valley while the sun was high.

  In all hours, even in the darkness, the bold, rugged slopes of the Panamints reflected sinister shades of red. And the valley was one of grey swirling shadows and waving veils of heat like transparent smoke. Beyond that vast, strange, dim valley rose the drab and ochre slopes of the Funeral Mountains, sweeping up to the bronze battlements and on to the lilac and purple peaks blurred in the leaden-hued haze that obscured the sky. The sun was sky-broad, an illimitable flare, with a lurid white heart into which no man could look.

  Adam was compelled to curtail his activities. He did not suffer greatly from the heat, but he felt its weakening power. Ever his blood seemed at fever heat. Early in the mornings and late in the evenings he prepared simple meals, which, as the days dragged on, were less and ever less partaken of by his companions and himself. During the midday hours, through the terrible heat, he lay in the shade, sweltering and oppressed, in a stupor of sleep. The nights were the only relief from the immense and merciless glare, the bearing down of invisible bars of red-hot iron. Most of these long hours of darkness Adam lay awake or walked in the gloom or sat in the awful stillness, waiting for he knew not what. But that he waited for something he knew with augmenting dread.

  When the full blast of this summer heat came, Virey changed physically and mentally. He grew thin. He walked with bowed shoulders. His tongue protruded slightly and he always panted. Every day he ate less and slept less than on the day before. He obeyed no demands from Adam and took no precautions. His sufferings would have been less and his strength would have been greater had he refrained from exposing himself to the sun. But he revelled in proofs of the nature of Death Valley.

  And if Virey had ever worn a mask in front of Adam he now dropped it. Indeed he ignored Adam, no longer with scorn or indifference, but as if unaware of his presence. Whenever Adam wanted to be heard by Virey, which desire diminished daily, he had to block his path, confront him forcefully. Virey was given over wholly to his obsession. His hate possessed him body and soul. And if it had ever been a primitive hate to destroy, it had been restrained, and therefore rendered infinitely cruel, by the slow, measured process of thought, of premeditation.

  Often when Adam absented himself from camp, Virey had a trick of climbing the weathered slope to roll down rocks. He seemed mad to do this. Yet when Adam returned he would come clambering down, wet and spent, a haggard sweating wretch not yet quite beyond fear. In vain had Adam argued, pleaded, talked with him; in vain had been the strident scorn of a man and the curses of rage. Virey, however, had a dread of Adam's huge hands. Something about them fascinated him. When one of these, clenched in an enormous fist, was shoved under his nose with a last threat, then Virey would retire sullenly to the shack. In every way that was possible he kept before Magdalene Virey the spectacle of his ruin and the consciousness that it was her doing. These midsummer days soon made him a gaunt, unshaven, hollow-eyed wretch. Miserable and unkempt he presented himself at meals, and sat there, a haggard ghost, to mouth a little food and to stare at his wife with accusing eyes. He reminded her of cool, shaded rooms, of exquisite linen and china, of dainty morsels, of carved-glass pitchers full of refreshing drink and clinking ice. Always he kept before her the heat, the squalour, the dirt, the horror of Death Valley. When he could present himself before her with his thin, torn garments clinging wet to his emaciated body, his nerves gone from useless exertions, his hands bloody and shaking as if with palsy, his tongue hanging out--when he could surprise her thus and see her shrink, then he experienced rapture. He seemed to cry out: Woman! behold the wreck of Virey!

  But if that was rapture for him, to gloat over the doom of her seemed his glory. Day by day Death Valley wrought by invisible lines and shades a havoc in Magdalene Virey's beauty. To look at her was to have striking proof that Death Valley had never been intended for a woman, no matter how magnificent her spirit. The only spirit that could prevail here was the one which had lost its earthly habiliments. Like a cat playing with a mouse, Virey watched his wife. Like Mephistopheles gloating over the soul of a lost woman, Virey attended to the slow manifestations of his wife's failing strength. He meant to squeeze every drop of blood out of her heart and still keep, if possible, life lingering in her. His most terrible bitterness seemed to consist of his failure to hide her utterly and forever from the gaze of any man save himself. Here he had hidden her in the most desolate place in the world, yet another man had come, and, like all the others, had been ready to lay down his life for her. Virey writhed under this circumstance over which he had no control. It was really the only truth about the whole situation that he was able to grasp. The terrible tragedy of his hate was that it was not hate, but love. Like a cannibal, he would have eaten his wife raw, not from hunger, but from his passion to consume her, incorporate her heart and blood and flesh into his, make her body his forever. Thought of her soul, her mind, her spirit, never occurred to Virey. So he never realised how she escaped him, never understood her mocking scorn.

  But through his thick and heat-hazed brain there must have pierced some divination of his failing power to torture her. The time came when he ceased to confront her like a scarecrow, he ceased accusing her, he ceased to hold before her the past and its contrast to the present, he gave up his refinement of cruelty. This marked in Virey a further change, a greater abasement. He reverted to instinct. He retrograded to a savage in his hate, and that hate found its outlet altogether in primitive ways.

  Adam's keen eye saw all this, and the slow boil in his blood was not all owing to the torrid heat of Death Valley. His great hands, so efficient and ruthless, seemed fettered. A thousand times he had muttered to the silence of the night, to the solemn, hazed daylight, to the rocks that had souls, and to the
invisible presence ever beside him: "How long must I stand this? How long--how long?"

  One afternoon as he awoke late from the sweltering siesta he heard Mrs. Virey scream. The cry startled him, because she had never done that before. He ran.

  Adam found her lying at the foot of the stone bench in a dead faint. The brown had left her skin. How white the wasted face! What dark shadows under the hollow eyes! His heart smote him remorselessly.

  As he knelt and was about to lift her head he espied a huge, hairy spider crawling out of the folds of her grey gown. It was a tarantula, one of the ugliest of the species. Adam flipped it off with his hand and killed it under his boot.

  Then with basin of water and wetted scarf he essayed to bring Mrs. Virey back to consciousness. She did not come to quickly, but at last she stirred, and opened her eyes with a flutter. She seemed to be awakening from a nightmare of fear, loathing, and horror. For that instant her sight did not take in Adam, but was a dark, humid, dilated vision of memory.

  "Magdalene, I killed the tarantula," said he. "It can't harm you now...Wake up! Why, you're stiff and you look like--like I don't know what!...You fainted and I've had a time bringing you to."

  "Oh!" she cried. "It's you." And then she clung to him while he lifted her, steadying her upon her feet, and placed her on the stone bench. "So I fainted?...Ugh! That loathsome spider! Where is it?"

  "I covered it with sand," he replied.

  "Would it have--bitten me?"

  "No. Not unless you grasped it."

  Slowly she recovered and, letting go of him, leaned back in the seat. Crystal beads of sweat stood out upon her white brow. Her hair was wet. Her sensitive lips quivered.

  "I've a perfect horror of mice, bugs, snakes, spiders--anything that crawls," she said. "I can't restrain it. I inherited it from my mother...And what has mind got to do with most of a woman's feelings? Virey has finally found that out."

  "Virey!...What do you mean?" rejoined Adam.

  "I was leaning back here on the bench when suddenly I heard Virey slipping up behind me. I knew he was up to something. But I wouldn't turn to see what. Then with two sticks he held the tarantula out over me--almost in my face. I screamed. I seemed to freeze inside. He dropped the tarantula in my lap...Then all went black."

  "Where--is he now?" asked Adam, finding it difficult to speak.

  "He's in the shack."

  Adam made a giant stride in that direction, only to be caught and detained by her clinging hands. Earnestly she gazed up at him, with melancholy, searching eyes.

  He uttered a loud laugh, mirthless, a mere explosion of surcharged breath. "No!...I can't get angry. I can't be a man any more. This Death Valley and the sun--and you--have worked on my mind...But I'll tell you what--nothing can stop me from beating Virey--so he'll never do that again."

  "Ah I...So I've worked on your mind? Then it's the only great deed I ever did...Wansfell, I told you Virey has threatened to shoot you. He's meant to more than once, but when you have come he has been afraid. But he might."

  "I wish to heaven he'd try it," responded Adam, and, loosing the woman's hold upon his hands, he strode toward the shack.

  "Virey, come out!" he called, loudly, though without any particular feeling. There was no reply, and he repeated the call, this time louder. Still Virey remained silent. Waiting a moment longer, Adam finally spoke again, with deliberate, cold voice. "Virey, I don't want to mess up that room with all your wife's belongings in there. So come outside."

  At that Adam heard a quick, panting breath. Then Virey appeared--came to the door of the shack. Adam could not have told what the man's distorted face resembled. He carried a gun, and his heart was ferocious if his will was weak.

  "Don't you--lay one of your--bloody hands on me," he panted.

  Adam took two long strides and halted before Virey, not six feet distant.

  "So you've got your little gun, eh?" he queried, without any particular force. Adam had been compelled to smother all that mighty passion within him, or he could not have answered for his actions. "What are you going to do with it?"

  "If you make a--move at me--I'll kill you," came the husky, panting response.

  "Virey, I'm going to beat you within an inch of your worthless life," declared Adam, monotonously, as if he had learned this speech by rote. "But I've got to talk first. I'm full of a million things to call you."

  "Damn you, I'll not listen," replied Virey, beginning to shake with excitement. The idea of using the gun had become an intent and was acting powerfully upon him. "You leave my--camp--you get out--of this valley!"

  "Virey, are you crazy?" queried Adam. The use of his voice had changed that deadlock of his feelings. He must not trust himself to bandy speech with Virey. The beating must be administered quickly or there would be something worse. Yet how desperately hard not to try to awaken conscience or sense in this man!

  "No, I'm not crazy," yelled Virey.

  "If you're not crazy, then that trick of throwing a tarantula on your wife was damnable--mean--hellish--monstrous...My God! man, can't you see what a coward you are? To torture her--as if you were a heathen! That delicate woman--all quivering nerves! To pick on a weakness, like that of a child! Virey, if you're not crazy you're the worst brute I've ever met on the desert. You've sunk lower than men whom the desert has made beasts. You--"

  "Beast I am--thanks to my delicate wife," cried Virey, with exceeding bitter passion. "Delicate? Ha-ha! The last lover of Magdalene Virey can't see she's strong as steel--alive as red fire! How she clings to memory! How she has nine lives of a cat--and hangs on to them--just to remember!...And you--meddler! You desert rat of a preacher Get out--or I'll kill you!"

  "Shoot and be damned!" flashed Adam, as with leap as swift as his voice he reached a sweeping arm.

  Virey's face turned ashen. He raised thee gun. Adam knocked it up just as it exploded. The powder burned his forehead, but the bullet sped high. Another blow sent the gun flying to the sand. Then Adam, fastening a powerful grip on Virey, clutching shirt and collar and throat at once, dragged him before the stone bench where Mrs. Virey sat, wide-eyed and pale. Here Adam tripped the man and threw him heavily upon the sand. Before he could rise Adam straddled him, bearing him down. Then Adam's big right hand swept and dug in the sand to uncover the dead tarantula.

  "Ah! here's your spider!" he shouted. And he rubbed the hairy, half-crushed tarantula in Virey's face. The man screamed and wrestled. "Good! you open your mouth. Now we'll see...Eat it--eat it, damn your cowardly soul!" Then Adam essayed to thrust the spider between Virey's open lips. He succeeded only partly. Virey let out a strangling, spitting yell, then closed his teeth as a vice. Adam smeared what was left of the crushed tarantula all over Virey's face.

  "Now get up," he ordered, and, rising himself, he kicked Virey. Adam, in the liberation of his emotions by action, was now safe from himself. He would not kill Virey. He could even hold in his enormous strength. He could even think of the joy of violence that was rioting inside him, of the ruthless fierceness with which he could have rent this man limb from limb.

  Virey, hissing and panting in a frenzy, scrambled to his feet. Fight was in him now. He leaped at Adam, only to meet a blow that laid him on the sand. It had not stunned him. Up he sprang, bloody, livid, and was at Adam again. His frenzy lent him strength and in that moment he had no fear of man or devil. The desert rage was on him. He swung his fists, beat wildly at Adam, tore and clawed. Adam slapped him with great broad hands that clapped like boards, and then, when Virey lunged close, he closed his fist and smashed it into Virey's face. The man of the cities went ploughing in the sand. Then on his hands and knees he crawled like a dog, and, finding a stone, he jumped up to fling it. Adam dodged the missile. Wildly Virey clutched for more, throwing one after another. Adam caught one and threw it back, to crack hard on his opponent's shin. Virey yelled no more. His rage took complete possession of him. Grasping up a large rock, he held it as a mace and rushed upon Adam to brain him. That action and intent
to kill was the only big response he had made to this wild environment. He beat at Adam. He lunged up to meet his foe's lofty head. He had no fear. But he was mad. No dawning came to him that he was being toyed with. Strong and furious at the moment, he might have succeeded in killing a lesser man. But before Adam he was powerless to do murder. Then the time came when Adam knocked the rock out of his hand and began to beat him, blow on blow to face and body, with violence, but with checked strength, so that Virey staggered here and there, upheld by fists. At last, whipped out of rage and power to retaliate, Virey fell to the sands. Adam dragged him into the shack and left him prostrate and moaning, an abject beaten wretch who realised his condition.

  Most difficult of all for Adam then was to face Mrs. Virey. Yet the instant he did he realised that his ignorance of women was infinite.

  "Did the bullet--when he fired--did it hit you?" she queried, her large eyes, intense and glowing, wonderfully dark with emotion, flashing over him.

  "No--it missed--me," panted Adam, as with heavy breath he sank upon the stone bench.

  "I picked up the gun. I was afraid he'd find it. You'd better keep it now," she said, and slipped it into his pocket.

  "What a--dis--gusting--sight for you--to have--to watch!" exclaimed Adam, trying to speak and breathe at once.