“Then let us take some of the apples with us,” they persisted.
“Ha!” he cried, “ye tale-bearers! I know the trick ye’d play! Here then—”
He shook the tree like a giant. The apples rolled to the ground so fast that they looked like strands of amber beads. The children, laughing and shouting, gathered them as they fell. They began to compare the red spots. In some the drop of blood was found just under the skin, a thin streak of carmine that penetrated to the core and coloured the silvery pulp; in others it was an isolated clot, the size of a whortleberry; and on a few a narrow crescent of crimson reached half-way around the outside of the shining rind.
Suddenly a noise, not loud but agonising, startled the little ones. They looked up at their friend. He had become horrible. His face was contorted until it was unrecognisable; his eyes were fixed on the ground as if he beheld a spectre there. Shrieking, they ran from the orchard, nor cast one fearful glance behind.
The next day the smith, filled with curiosity by the tales of the children, found an odd hour in which to visit Micah Rood’s house. He invited the tailor, a man thin with hunger for gossip, to go with him. The gate of the orchard stood open, flapping on its hinges as the children had left it. The visitors sauntered through, thinking to find Micah in the house, for it was the noon hour. They tasted of this fruit and that—tried a pear, now an apricot, now a pippin,
“The tree of the gold apples is right in the centre,” said the smith.
He pointed. The tailor looked; then his legs doubled under him as naturally as they ever did on the bench. The smith looked; his arm dropped by his side. After a time the two men went on, clinging to each other like children in the dark.
Micah Rood, with his sunny hair tangled in the branches, his tongue black and protruding, his face purple, and his clinched hands stained with dirt, hung from the tree of the golden apples. Beneath him, in a trench from which the ground had been clawed by human hands, was a shapeless, discoloured bundle of clothes. A skull lay at one end of the trench, and beneath it a mouldy pack was found with precious stones amid the decaying contents.
The House That Was Not
Bart Fleming took his bride out to his ranch on the plains when she was but seventeen years old, and the two set up housekeeping in three hundred and twenty acres of corn and rye. Off toward the west there was an unbroken sea of tossing corn at that time of the year when the bride came out, and as her sewing window was on the side of the house which faced the sunset, she passed a good part of each day looking into that great rustling mass, breathing in its succulent odours and listening to its sibilant melody. It was her picture gallery, her opera, her spectacle, and, being sensible,—or perhaps, being merely happy,—she made the most of it.
When harvesting time came and the corn was cut, she had much entertainment in discovering what lay beyond. The town was east, and it chanced that she had never ridden west. So, when the rolling hills of this newly beholden land lifted themselves for her contemplation, and the harvest sun, all in an angry and sanguinary glow sank in the veiled horizon, and at noon a scarf of golden vapour wavered up and down along the earth line, it was as if a new world had been made for her. Sometimes, at the coming of a storm, a whiplash of purple cloud, full of electric agility, snapped along the western horizon.
“Oh, you’ll see a lot of queer things on these here plains,” her husband said when she spoke to him of these phenomena. “I guess what you see is the wind.”
“The wind!” cried Flora.“You can’t see the wind, Bart.” “Now look here, Flora,” returned Bart, with benevolent emphasis, “you’re a smart one, but you don’t know all I know about this here country. I’ve lived here three mortal years, waitin’ for you to git up out of your mother’s arms and come out to keep me company, and I know what there is to know. Some things out here is queer—so queer folks wouldn’t believe ’em unless they saw. An’ some’s so pig-headed they don’t believe their own eyes. As for th’ wind, if you lay down flat and squint toward th’ west, you can see it blowin’ along near th’ ground, like a big ribbon; an’ sometimes it’s th’ colour of air, an’ sometimes it’s silver an’ gold, an’ sometimes, when a storm is comin’, it’s purple.”
“If you got so tired looking at the wind, why didn’t you marry some other girl, Bart, instead of waiting for me?”
Flora was more interested in the first part of Bart’s speech than in the last.
“Oh, come on!” protested Bart, and he picked her up in his arms and jumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a little girl—but then, to be sure, she wasn’t much more.
Of all the things Flora saw when the corn was cut down, nothing interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be, because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is high and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which the sallow mystics of India see the moving shadows of the future.
She had not known there were neighbours so near, and she wondered for several days about them before she ventured to say anything to Bart on the subject. Indeed, for some reason which she did not attempt to explain to herself, she felt shy about broaching the matter. Perhaps Bart did not want her to know the people. The thought came to her, as naughty thoughts will come, even to the best of persons, that some handsome young men might be “baching” it out there by themselves, and Bart didn’t wish her to make their acquaintance. Bart had flattered her so much that she had actually begun to think herself beautiful, though as a matter of fact she was only a nice little girl with a lot of reddish-brown hair, and a bright pair of reddish-brown eyes in a white face.
“Bart,” she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed toward the great black hollow of the west, “who lives over there in that shack?”
She turned away from the window where she had been looking at the incarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale. But then, her eyes were so blurred with the glory she had been gazing at, that she might easily have been mistaken.
“I say, Bart, why don’t you speak? If there’s anyone around to associate with, I should think you’d let me have the benefit of their company. It isn’t as funny as you think, staying here alone days and days.”
“You ain’t gettin’ homesick, be you, sweetheart?” cried Bart, putting his arms around her. “You ain’t gettin’ tired of my society, be yeh?”
It took some time to answer this question in a satisfactory manner, but at length Flora was able to return to her original topic.
“But the shack, Bart! Who lives there, anyway?”
“I’m not acquainted with ’em,” said Bart, sharply.“Ain’t them biscuits done, Flora?”
Then, of course, she grew obstinate.
“Those biscuits will never be done, Bart, till I know about that house, and why you never spoke of it, and why nobody ever comes down the road from there. Someone lives there I know, for in the mornings and at night I see the smoke coming out of the chimney.”
“Do you now?” cried Bart, opening his eyes and looking at her with unfeigned interest.“Well, do you know, sometimes I’ve fancied I seen that too?”
“Well, why not,” cried Flora, in half anger. “Why shouldn’t you?”
“See here, Flora, take them biscuits out an’ listen to me. There ain’t no house there. Hello! I didn’t know you’d go for to drop the biscuits. Wait, I’ll help you pick ’em up. By cracky, they’re hot, ain’t they? What you puttin’ a towel over ’em for? Well, you set down here on my knee, so. Now you look over at that there house.You see it, don’t yeh? Well, it ain’t there! No! I saw it the first week I was out here. I was jus’ half dyin’, thinkin’ of you an’ wonderin’ why you didn’t write. That was the time you was mad at me. So I rode over there one day—lookin’ up company, so t’ speak—and there wa’n’t no house there. I spent all one Sunday lookin’ for it. Then I spoke to Jim Geary about it. He laughed an’ g
ot a little white about th’ gills, an’ he said he guessed I’d have to look a good while before I found it. He said that there shack was an ole joke.”
“Why—what—”
“Well, this here is th’ story he tol’ me. He said a man an’ his wife come out here t’ live an’ put up that there little place. An’ she was young, you know, an’ kind o’ skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked on her an’ worked on her, an’ one day she up an’ killed the baby an’ her husband an’ herself. Th’ folks found ’em and buried ’em right there on their own ground. Well, about two weeks after that, th’ house was burned down. Don’t know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I guess it burned!”
“You guess it burned!”
“Well, it ain’t there, you know.”
“But if it burned the ashes are there.”
“All right, girlie, they’re there then. Now let’s have tea.”
This they proceeded to do, and were happy and cheerful all evening, but that didn’t keep Flora from rising at the first flush of dawn and stealing out of the house. She looked away over west as she went to the barn and there, dark and firm against the horizon, stood the little house against the pellucid sky of morning. She got on Ginger’s back—Ginger being her own yellow broncho—and set off at a hard pace for the house. It didn’t appear to come any nearer, but the objects which had seemed to be beside it came closer into view, and Flora pressed on, with her mind steeled for anything. But as she approached the poplar windbreak which stood to the north of the house, the little shack waned like a shadow before her. It faded and dimmed before her eyes.
She slapped Ginger’s flanks and kept him going, and she at last got him up to the spot. But there was nothing there. The bunch grass grew tall and rank and in the midst of it lay a baby’s shoe. Flora thought of picking it up, but something cold in her veins withheld her. Then she grew angry, and set Ginger’s head toward the place and tried to drive him over it. But the yellow broncho gave one snort of fear, gathered himself in a bunch, and then, all tense, leaping muscles, made for home as only a broncho can.
The Piano Next Door
Babette had gone away for the summer; the furniture was in its summer linens; the curtains were down, and Babette’s husband, John Boyce, was alone in the house. It was the first year of his marriage, and he missed Babette. But then, as he often said to himself, he ought never to have married her. He did it from pure selfishness, and because he was determined to possess the most illusive, tantalizing, elegant, and utterly unmoral little creature that the sun shone upon. He wanted her because she reminded him of birds, and flowers, and summer winds, and other exquisite things created for the delectation of mankind. He neither expected nor desired her to think. He had half-frightened her into marrying him, had taken her to a poor man’s home, provided her with no society such as she had been accustomed to, and he had no reasonable cause of complaint when she answered the call of summer and flitted away, like a butterfly in the morning sunshine, to the place where the flowers grew.
He wrote to her every evening, sitting in the stifling, ugly house, and poured out his soul as if it were a libation to a goddess. She sometimes answered by telegraph, sometimes by a perfumed note. He schooled himself not to feel hurt. Why should Babette write? Does a goldfinch indict epistles; or a hummingbird study composition; or a glancing, red-scaled fish in summer shallows consider the meaning of words?
He knew at the beginning what Babette was—guessed her limitations—trembled when he buttoned her tiny glove—kissed her dainty slipper when he found it in the closet after she was gone—thrilled at the sound of her laugh, or the memory of it! That was all. A mere case of love. He was in bonds. Babette was not. Therefore he was in the city, working overhours to pay for Babette’s pretty follies down at the seaside. It was quite right and proper. He was a grub in the furrow; she a lark in the blue. Those had always been and always must be their relative positions.
Having attained a mood of philosophic calm, in which he was prepared to spend his evenings alone—as became a grub— and to await with dignified patience the return of his wife, it was in the nature of an inconsistency that he should have walked the floor of the dull little drawing-room like a lion in cage. It did not seem in keeping with the position of superior serenity which he had assumed, that, reading Babette’s notes, he should have raged with jealousy, or that, in the loneliness of his unkempt chamber, he should have stretched out arms of longing. Even if Babette had been present, she would only have smiled her gay little smile and coquetted with him. She could not understand. He had known, of course, from the first moment, that she could not understand! And so, why the ache, ache, ache of the heart! Or was it the heart, or the brain, or the soul?
Sometimes, when the evenings were so hot that he could not endure the close air of the house, he sat on the narrow, dusty front porch and looked about him at his neighbours. The street had once been smart and aspiring, but it had fallen into decay and dejection. Pale young men, with flurried-looking wives, seemed to Boyce to occupy most of the houses. Sometimes three or four couples would live in one house. Most of these appeared to be childless. The women made a pretence at fashionable dressing, and wore their hair elaborately in fashions which somehow suggested boarding-houses to Boyce, though he could not have told why.
Every house in the block needed fresh paint. Lacking this renovation, the householders tried to make up for it by a display of lace curtains which, at every window, swayed in the smoke-weighted breeze. Strips of carpeting were laid down the front steps of the houses where the communities of young couples lived, and here, evenings, the inmates of the houses gathered, committing mild extravagances such as the treating of each other to ginger ale, or beer, or ice-cream.
Boyce watched these tawdry makeshifts at sociability with bitterness and loathing. He wondered how he could have been such a fool as to bring his exquisite Babette to this neighbourhood. How could he expect that she would return to him? It was not reasonable. He ought to go down on his knees with gratitude that she even condescended to write him.
Sitting one night till late,—so late that the fashionable young wives with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,—and raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard, softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, the sound of comfortable melody.
It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit—that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road, hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.
Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound, multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things. Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jammed against the balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-coloured wall of his house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest, with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in his nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proud and erect as pure men before their Judge. He stood on a mountain at sunrise, and saw the marvels of the amethystine clouds below his feet, heard an eternal and white silence, such as broods among the everlasting snows, and saw an eagle winging for the sun. He was in a city, and away from him, diverging like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets, and to his sense came the beat, beat, beat of the city’s heart. He saw the golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to progress; saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their liberation; heard the roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all the peoples of earth walking with common purpose, in fealty and und
erstanding. And then, from the swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calm as philosophy, and from that, nothingness.
Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to the echoes which this music had awakened in his soul. He retired, at length, content, but determined that upon the morrow he would watch— the day being Sunday—for the musician who had so moved and taught him.
He arose early, therefore, and having prepared his own simple breakfast of fruit and coffee, took his station by the window to watch for the man. For he felt convinced that the exposition he had heard was that of a masculine mind. The long, hot hours of the morning went by, but the front door of the house next to his did not open.
“These artists sleep late,” he complained. Still he watched. He was too much afraid of losing him to go out for dinner. By three in the afternoon he had grown impatient. He went to the house next door and rang the bell. There was no response. He thundered another appeal. An old woman with a cloth about her head answered the door. She was very deaf, and Boyce had difficulty in making himself understood.
“The family is in the country,” was all she would say. “The family will not be home till September.”
“But there is some one living here?” shouted Boyce.
“I live here,” she said with dignity, putting back a wisp of dirty gray hair behind her ear. “It is my house. I sublet to the family.”
“What family?”
But the old creature was not communicative.
“The family that lives here,” she said.
“Then who plays the piano in this house?” roared Boyce. “Do you?”
He thought a shade of pallor showed itself on her ash-coloured cheeks. Yet she smiled a little at the idea of her playing.
“There is no piano,” she said, and she put an enigmatical emphasis to the words.
The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Elia W. Peattie Page 12
