They walked on in silence. Every now and then Jep would stop and stand listening attentively into the forest. But he heard not the slightest sound to indicate a presence trespassing here, other than his own. Sometimes they would come to a cleared place carpeted with soft green moss and shaded by big magnolia trees covered with large white blossoms—smelling of death.
“I guess maybe I should’ve listened to Lemmie. It shore ’nuff is spooky down in here.” He stared up into the tops of the trees, every now and then seeing patches of blue. It was so dark here in this part of the woods—almost like night. Suddenly he heard a whirring sound. Almost in that second he recognized it; he stood paralyzed with fear—then Pete let out a short, horrible, little yelp. It broke the spell. He turned around, and there was a big rattlesnake poised to strike a second time. Jep jumped as far as he could, tripped, and fell flat on his face. Oh God! This was the end! He forced his eyes to look around, expecting to see the snake whirling through the air at him, but when his eyes finally came into focus, nothing was there. Then he saw the tip of a tail and a long cord of singing buttons crawling into the undergrowth.
For several minutes he couldn’t move, he was so dazed by shock, and his body was numb with terror. Finally he raised up on his elbow and looked for Pete, but Pete wasn’t anywhere in sight. He jumped up and began to search frantically for the dog. When he found him, Pete had rolled down a red gulley and was lying dead at the bottom, all stiff and swollen. Jep didn’t cry; he was too frightened for that.
Now what would he do? He didn’t know where he was. He began to run and then to tear madly through the forest, but he couldn’t find the path. Oh, what was the use? He was lost. Then he remembered the stream, but that was useless. It ran through the swamp, and in parts it was too deep to wade; and in the summer it was sure to be infested with moccasins. Darkness was coming on, and the trees began to throw grotesque shadows about him.
“How does that ol’ convict stand it in here?” he thought. “Oh, my God, the convict! I forget all ’bout him. I’ve got to get out of this place.”
He ran on and on. Finally he came to one of the cleared spots. The moon was shining right in the center. It looked like a cathedral.
“Maybe if I climb a tree,” he thought, “I can see the field an’ figger out a way to get there.”
He looked around for the tallest of the trees. It was a straight, slick sycamore, with no branches near the bottom. But he was a good climber. Maybe he could make it.
He clasped the trunk of the tree with his strong, little legs and began to pull himself upward, inch by inch. He would climb two feet and slip down one. He kept his head strained back, looking up at the nearest branch he could clasp. When he reached it, he grabbed it and let his legs dangle free from the tree trunk. For a minute he thought he was going to fall, dangling there in space. Then he swung his leg over the next limb and sat astraddle it, panting for breath. After awhile he continued on up, climbing, limb after limb. The ground got farther and farther away. When he reached the top, he stuck his head up over the tree top and looked around, but he could see nothing except trees, trees everywhere.
He descended to the broadest and the strongest of the tree limbs. He felt safe up here, with the ground so far away. Up here no one could see him. He would have to spend the night in the tree. If only he could stay awake and not fall asleep. But he was so tired that everything seemed to be whirling around and around. He shut his eyes for a minute and almost lost his balance. He came out of his trance with a start and slapped his cheeks.
It was so quiet, he couldn’t even hear the crickets nor the bull frogs’ nightly serenade. No, everything was quiet and frightening and mysterious. What was that? He jumped with a start; he heard voices; they were coming close; they were almost upon him! He looked down to the earth and he could see two figures moving in the underbrush. They were coming towards the clearing. Oh, oh, thank God! It must be some of the searchers.
But then he heard one of the voices, tiny and frightened, scream: “Stop! Oh please, please lemme go! I want to go home!”
Where had Jep heard that voice before? Of course, it was Lemmie’s voice!
But what was Lemmie doing way down here in these woods? He had gone home. Who had him? All these thoughts ran through Jep’s mind; then suddenly the realization of what was happening dawned on him. The escaped convict had Lemmie!
A voice, deep and threatening, split the air: “Shut up, you brat!”
He could hear Lemmie’s scared sobbing. Their voices were quite clear now; they were almost directly under the tree. Jep held his breath with fear. He could hear his heart pound, and he could feel the ache of his stomach’s knotted muscles.
“Sit down here, kid,” the convict commanded, “and stop that damn cryin’!”
Jep could see that Lemmie fell helplessly to the ground and rolled over on the soft moss, trying desperately to stifle his sobs.
The convict was still standing. He was big and bulged with muscles. Jep could not see his hair; it was covered with a massive straw hat—the kind the convicts wear when they are working on the chain gang.
“Now tell me, kid,” he demanded of Lemmie by shoving him, “how many people are there out lookin’ for me?”
Lemmie didn’t say a thing.
“Answer me!”
“I don’t know,” Lemmie answered faintly.
“All right. O.K. But tell me—what parts of the woods have they already covered?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aw, damn you.” The convict slapped Lemmie across the cheek. Lemmie broke into renewed hysterics.
“Oh, no! No! This can’t be happening to me,” Jep thought. “It’s all a dream, a nightmare. I’ll wake up and find out that it ain’t so.”
He shut his eyes and opened them, in a physical attempt to prove that it was all just a nightmare. But there they were, the convict and Lemmie; and here he was, perched in the tree, scared even to breathe. If only he had something heavy, he could drop it on top of the convict’s head and knock him cold. But he didn’t have anything. He stopped his thoughts in mid-passage, for the convict was speaking again.
“Well, come on, kid; we can’t stay here all night. The moon’s goin’ out, too—must be goin’ to rain.” He scanned the sky through the tree tops.
Jep’s blood froze with terror; it seemed as if he was looking right at him; he was looking right at the branch he was sitting on. Any minute he would see him. Jep closed his eyes. The seconds pounded past like hours. When he finally got up the courage to look again, he saw that the convict was trying to pick Lemmie up off the ground. He hadn’t seen him, thank God!
The convict said: “Come on, kid, before I cuff yuh a good one.”
He was holding Lemmie half way up, like a sack of potatoes. Then suddenly he dropped him. “Shut up that cryin’!” he screamed at him. So electrifying was the tone of his voice that Lemmie stopped dead still. Something was the matter. The convict was standing by the tree, listening attentively into the forest.
Then Jep heard it, too. Something was coming through the undergrowth. He heard twigs snapping and bushes being scraped past. From where he was sitting he could see what it was. There were ten men closing in a circle around the clearing. But the convict could only hear the noise. He wasn’t sure what it was; he became panicky.
Lemmie yelled, “Here we are! Here—Over he—!” But the convict had grabbed him; he was furtively pressing Lemmie’s face into the ground. The little body was squirming and kicking, and then, all of a sudden, it went limp and lay very still. Jep saw the convict take his hand off the back of the boy’s head. Something was the matter with Lemmie. Then Jep saw it in a flash; it was like something he just knew—Lemmie was dead! The convict had smothered him to death!
The men were no longer creeping in; they broke through the underbrush furiously. The convict saw he was trapped; he backed up against the trunk of Jep’s tree and began to whine.
And then it was all over. Jep yelled and the m
en held their arms to catch him. He jumped and landed, unharmed, in the arms of one of the men.
The convict was handcuffed and crying. “That damned kid! It was all his fault!”
Jep looked over at Lemmie. One of the men was bending over him. Jep heard him turn to a man by his side and say, “Yep, he’s dead all right.”
It was then that Jep began to laugh; he laughed hysterically, and hot salty tears ran down his cheeks.
The Familiar Stranger
“And Beulah,” Nannie called, “before you go, come in here and fix my pillows, this rocking chair’s awfully uncomfortable.”
“Yes, ma’am, ah’ll be right there.”
Nannie sighed heavily. She picked up the paper and thumbed through the first sheets to the society section—or social column as there wasn’t any real society in Collinsville.
“Let’s see now,” she said, adjusting her horn rimmed glasses over her proud nose. “ ‘Mr. and Mrs. Yancey Bates go to Mobile to visit relatives.’ Not nothin’ much to that, people are always visiting each other,” she mused half aloud. She turned down to the death notices, it always gave her a grim pleasure to read them. Day by day the people she had known all her life, the men and women she had grown up with, they were all dying. She was proud that she was still alive while they lay cold and still in their graves.
Beulah came into the room. She came over to the rocker in which Miss Nannie sat reading the paper. She took the pillows out from behind the aging woman’s back, puffed them up and arranged them comfortably again behind her mistress’s back.
“That feels much better, Beulah. You know I get this rheumatism every time about this year. It’s so painful and I do feel so helpless, yes, indeed, so helpless.”
Beulah nodded agreeingly, sympathetically.
“Yes, ma’am, ah knows just how it be. Ah had an uncle once near ’bout died from it.”
“I see here in the paper, Beulah, where old Will Larson died. Funny no one has called me up or told me about it. He used to be a friend of mine, you know, Beulah, a very good friend.” She nodded her head waggishly, implying, of course, that he had been one of her legion of phantom admirers.
“Well,” said Beulah, glancing at the big grandfather clock that stood against the wall, “ah guess ah bettah be goin’ on down to the doctah’s to get yo medicine. Just you stay there and ah’ll be back real quick.”
She disappeared out the door and in about five minutes Nannie heard the front door slam. She glanced over the paper once more. She tried to get interested in the editorial, she tried the article about the proposed new furniture factory but always by some irresistible, magnetic force she turned back to the obituary notices. She read them over two or three times. Yes, she had known them all.
She looked into the bright red and blue flames that burned in the fireplace. How many times had she gazed into that fireplace? How many cold winter mornings had she arisen from underneath her bright scrap quilts, hopped across the freezing floor and painfully built a fire there? Thousands of times! She had always lived in this house on the main residential street, and so had her father and his father before him. They had been real pioneers, she was proud of her heritage. But all that was past, her mother and father were dead, and her old friends were passing away, slowly, almost unobserved. No one would hardly think that it was the passing of a sort of dynasty, a dynasty of southern aristocracy—the hamlet, the village, the city. They were passing in the night, the tiny flames of their lives were being blown out by that strange and unseen force.
She pushed the paper out of her lap and closed her eyes. The heat and closeness of the room made her feel sleepy. She had almost fallen to sleep when she was awakened by the grandfather clock chiming the hour. One, two, three, four—
She looked up and she seemed a little startled, she sensed a presence in the room, other than her own. She reached for her glasses and, slipping them on, she looked about the room. Everything seemed in order. It was terribly quiet, there didn’t even seem to be the sound of cars passing on the street.
When her eyes finally came to focus she saw him. He was standing directly in front of her. She gave a little gasp.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”
“You know me then?” said the young gentleman.
“Your face seems familiar.” Her voice was calm and only surprised.
“I do not wonder,” the gentleman spoke eloquently. “I know you quite well. I remember seeing you once when you were a very little girl, you were a sweet child. Don’t you remember the time I came to visit your mother?”
Nannie looked at him hard. “No, I don’t remember, you could not have known my mother—you are so young. I am an old woman, my mother was dead before you were even born.”
“Oh, no—no. I remember your mother quite well. A very reasonable woman. You look somewhat like her. The nose, the eyes, and you both had the same white hair. Quite remarkable, quite!” The man looked down at her. His eyes were very black and his lips were very red, almost as if he had them rouged. He seemed attractive to the old woman; she felt herself being drawn to him.
“I remember you now. Yes, of course, I was just a little girl. But I remember you, you came and woke me up very late one night, the night”—suddenly she gasped, a glint of recognition and horror swept her eyes—“the night my mother died!”
“That’s right, my, but you have a remarkable memory, for one so old!” His voice inflected the last few words deliberately. “But you remember me many times since then. The night your father passed away, and there were countless other times. Yes, yes indeed, I have seen you many times and you me, it is only now, this moment, that you should have recognized me. Why, only the other night I was talking to an old friend of yours, Will Larson.”
Nannie’s face bleached white, her eyes were burning from her head, she could not take her eyes from the man’s face. She did not want him to touch her, just so long as he did not touch her she felt quite safe. Presently she said in a hollow voice:
“Then you must be—”
“Now come,” interrupted the stranger. “My good lady, let us not quibble. It will not be bad, as a matter of fact it is a rather pleasant sensation.”
She grasped the sides of the chair, and began to rock feverishly. “Get away,” she whispered hoarsely. “Get away from me, don’t touch me, no not now, is this all I am to get out of life, it isn’t fair, stay away, please!”
“Oh,” laughed the sleek young gentleman, “madam, you are behaving like a child about to take a castor oil. I assure you it is not the least bit unpleasant. Now, just come here, closer, closer, let me kiss you upon the brow, it will be quite painless, you feel so quiet and restful, it will be just like falling asleep.”
Nannie pushed herself as far back in the chair as she could. His red painted lips were coming nearer. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t even breathe. She hadn’t ever thought it would be like this. She scrouged down in the lowest corners of the chair and pushed one of the pillows tightly over her face. He was strong, she could feel him pulling the pillow away from her. His face, his puckered lips, his amorous eyes; he was like some grotesque lover.
She heard a door slam. She screamed as loud as she could. “Beulah, Beulah, Beulah!” She heard the running footsteps. She pushed the pillow away. The colored woman’s black face looked down at her.
“What’s ailin’ you, Miss Nannie? Is somthin’ wrong? Do you want that I should call the doctah?”
“Where is he?”
“Whar is who, Miss Nannie? What you talkin’ about?”
“He was here, I saw him, he was after me, oh, Beulah I tell you he was here.”
“Aw, now, Miss Nannie, you been having those nightmares again.”
Nannie’s eyes lost their hysterical violet spark; she looked away from the troubled Beulah. The fire in the fireplace was dying slowly, the last flames dancing mincingly.
“Nightmare? This time? I wonder.”
Louise
Ethel opened
the door stealthily and looked up and down the dark corridor. It was deserted and she sighed with relief as she closed the door. Well, that was one thing done, and the only thing she had found out was that either Louise didn’t keep her mail or she burned it. The rest of them must be down at dinner, she thought; I’ll say I had a sick headache.
She crept down the stairs and went quickly across the great lounge, across the terrace, and into the dining room. The room was filled with the sound of girls’ laughing and talking. Unobserved, she took her place next to Madame at the fourth table in the quietly pretentious dining salon of Miss Burke’s Academy for Young Ladies.
In answer to Madame’s questioning eyes, she lied, “I’ve been suffering from a severe headache—I lay down to rest and I suppose I must have fallen asleep—I did not hear the dinner chimes.” She spoke with the smooth perfection of wording and accent that Miss Burke so desired all her students to acquire. Ethel was, in Miss Burke’s opinion, the epitome of all that she could ever hope to attain among her students. A young lady of seventeen with background, wealth, and certainly a most brilliant mind. The majority of the Academy girls thought Ethel rather on the stupid side—that is, about life. Ethel, in turn, blamed her unpopularity upon Louise Semon, a French girl of exquisite beauty.
Louise was generally acknowledged to be the Queen Bee of the Academy. The girls worshipped her, and the teachers jealously admired her both for her mind and for her almost uncanny beauty. She was a tall girl, magnificently proportioned, with dark olive skin. Jet black hair framed her face and flowed rich and wavy to her shoulders—under certain lights it cast off a bluish halo. Her eyes, as Madame of table four had once exclaimed in a rapture of admiration, were as black as the night. She was dearly loved by everyone—everyone except Ethel and possibly Miss Burke herself, who somehow vaguely resented the girl’s influence over the entire school. She did not feel that it was good for the school or for the girl herself. The girl had had excellent letters from the Petite Ecole in France and the Mantone Academy in Switzerland. Miss Burke had met neither of the girl’s parents, who resided at their chalet in Geneva. All arrangements had been made through a Mr. Nicoll, Louise’s American guardian, from whom Miss Burke received her check annually. Louise had come at the opening of the fall semester and had within five months put the Academy into the palm of her hand.