G. Ranger Wormser

“ The moon was on the wane. It hung very low in the sky so that the red-gold streak of it seemed to dip into the water. A cold northeast wind lashed over the waves. Dark swollen purplish clouds raced together in an angry mass. The sea itself was black but for the tossing gigantic waves with their dead white crests of spraying foam. The pounding of them on the beach below him vibrated in his ears. The sea-gulls were flying heavily close to the earth; their inhuman, piercing shrieking filling the air.
The little girl had spoken to him.
He turned from the sea then. He went into his shanty. ”

“ The ghostly shapes of them pattering sinuously and silently along the ground; the dull scratching thud of the claws and bodies that hurled themselves again and again into the strong wire netting. The impossibility of their escape throttled her. Their futile attempts at freedom caused a powerful nausea to creep over her. And there in the center of the run she could distinguish, chained to the dog-house,—a pale blur in the fading light,—the motionless yellow mass of the chow, China-Ching. ”

“ Of course there was old man Efferts. Old man Efferts did not live so very far away. He knew he could not count on Efferts. Efferts had lived there too long in the stillness that rolled down to him from the hills and came together to lie flat and sluggish, thudding down on the valley land. If he could bring himself to walk into the ten-mile-off town shouting so that other people would follow after him shouting; so that there would be some kind of continuous, human noise for a while. It was that he wanted more than anything else; human noise. ”

“ Louder and louder they grew until the sound of them echoed clatteringly through the silence of the night. Then sudden deafening stillness.
As yet he could make out no form. He wondered what was happening. Slowly he realized that the gloom-merged mass of the crucifix had been seen and that the feet were coming toward it. A long half minute and then something soft and cold brushed his cheek. A quick, half-smothered cry. A woman had reached him with her outstretched hands. Her fingers had touched his face.
"Mon Dieu!" She whispered. "Then I am not alone? Mon Dieu! Who are you?" ”

“ And always and ever the sea haunted him.
The fishing men coming home late at night across the water had grown used to steering their course by the unreal light that trickled out to them from the shanty on the top of the cliffs. And in the dawn when they pushed their smacks off from the long, hard beach to sail out to the nets, they knew that from the high precipices above them the man was watching. ”

“ Great daubs of them clung in the crevices of the chalk cliffs. A mat of shadows crept over the flat salt marshes and through the dank yellowed grasses. There was a sudden chill in the wind that came to him from off the water. A flock of screeching sea-gulls wildly beating their wings, rose from the cliffs and whirred out toward the open sea, the uncanny piercing sound of their shrieking coming deafeningly back to him. ”

“ And he had kept the desk there. He was just a bit insistent about it. Then, too, he liked the blind up so that he could stare out into the evening and at the house opposite.
For all his impossible vanity there must have been imbedded deep down in the small, hard soul of the man some excessive, frantic hunger of self-recognition by others. A potential desire to accomplish an assertion of self that could in no way be denied; a fundamental energy which had in some way made possible the work, but which he could never admit for fear that it might evade the importance of himself. ”

“ He knew that the stillness had swamped itself into old man Efferts. He could see the stamp of it in the uncertain, stupefied face; in the bewildered eyes that had behind them something of the look that stayed on in the dog's eyes; in the thin-lipped mouth that drooled at the corners; in the old man's still, quiet way of moving, the unreal, phantom way in which the gray mare moved. He did not know why the old man should come to him to sit so dumbly opposite him for a whole evening. ”

“ Let me go, Ernest. Before it's too late;—let me go!"
He came and put a hand on her shoulder.
"I'll never let you go," he said.
"You must!" She whispered. "You've got to let me. Just to get away from all this. I've never been away in all my life. He'd never let me go—either."
Unconsciously her eyes went up to the picture.
The full, red face with the hard lines in it. The thick, sensual lips. The small, cunning eyes that laughed. The ponderous, heavy set of the figure. The big, powerful hands.
His gaze followed after hers.
And very suddenly he left her side. He walked over to the mantel. ”

“ You've no reason for not being happy. The trouble with you, Jenny, is that you've too lively an imagination."
"Oh, no, Ernest. I've got to get away. Somewhere—anywhere. Just by myself. I don't love you, Ernest. You don't really love me. It's only because I'm Daniel Drare's daughter that you married me. It was just his wealth and his power and—and is unscrupulous self that fascinated you."
"You don't know what you're saying."
"I do, I do, Ernest! You'd like to be like him. But you can't. You are like him in a lot of ways. The little ways. But you're not big enough to be really like him. ”

“ The girl looked down in surprise.
"But what, Maman?"
The woman's breath came quickly.
"He is a child. Say that he is a baby. He is all that I have. You and he are all—everything! Say, Angele, that he is a child! Only yesterday, you remember—the long curls? The velvet suit? Surely it was yesterday. Say, Angele, that he—is—still—a—little—one."
The girl threw back her head and laughed. The shadows lay like long, dark fingers on the white of her throat.
"Of course. He is young—too young even now when they take the young. You have no need to worry, Maman. Maman—what is it?" ”

“ And then when he had gotten it so that he almost heard it, so that he felt that with concentrated attention he might hear the laughing, he would find himself listening to the frightful, numbing stillness.
He had not the courage to go on trying that.
Following the plow and the old gray mare through the fields with the dog skulking abjectly at his heels, he would think of that thing which he had done that had ostracized him from the rest of humanity. He never thought of the possibility of making his life over again. ”

“ I'd like to have you think of other things. There're plenty of other things. I want you to think of them. I—want—"
He broke off abruptly.
"What do you want?"
"I—I—want—you—I can't say it!"
For a little while they were silent. It grew darker. The shadows that lay along the ground moved upward through the bushes of rhododendron. He watched the fantastic mesh of them shifting there. The gray of the crescent moon grew faintly yellow. His eyes roved over the shadow splashed reach of flowers. The heavy odor of them sickened him.
"If only you'd try to like them!" She said it wistfully. ”

“ James had brought China-Ching home in the old runabout; brought him to the kennels tied down in a great basket. She had not paid much attention to either man or dog. The first sight that she had of the chow had been because of James. She had heard his cursing and the crack of his huge whip. She had gone out on the porch then and had seen the man beating the dog with all his strength; the man swearing loudly and furiously and the chow silent. She had never gotten over that spectacle. It was the first time she had ever seen a dog maintain silence. ”

“ The woman and the girl stood close.
"Oh—petite maman;" she whispered piteously.
The woman's eyes dilated.
There, following after Jean; going through the shadow-saturated street; moving unheeded among the vague figures of the people going to and fro. Something was there. Some scant movement like a current too quiet to see. A shadow in the shadows that her sight could not hold to. In the dark, gloom-soaked street, staying close to her Jean, she could feel something. ”

“ At first he had resented old man Efferts' coming. Later when he had seen that Efferts would not interfere with him he had not minded so much. He had become quite used to seeing the bent, huddled figure of the man trailing down the hillside and shambling into the room to sit there opposite to him quite silent. Of late he had gone about fetching the old man a glass of cider and a piece of bread. And they had sat facing each other, never talking; just sitting rigidly with the dog on the floor between them and the silence spilling itself in gigantic floods all around them. ”

“ THE STILLNESS
He cringed in shuddering awe beneath the stillness. He could not stand the heavy, deep silence of it; the muffled, sucking thickness absorbing so completely all sound into its deadening mat. He had gotten so that he had to be perpetually stopping himself from screaming. He had to keep watch on himself always. He was terrified that he might go mad. He feared the oppression of the awful quiet would craftily draw his reason away from him. ”

“ Gigantic blossoming clumps of rhododendron. Slender, fragile lilies of the valley showing white and faint on the deep green leaves. Violets somewhere. He got the sickeningly sweet scent of them. Early roses growing riotously. He detested the perfume of roses.
Overhead the darkening sky that held in the west the thin gray crescent of the coming moon.
And all through the garden the first dull blue shadows of evening. Shadows that blurred around the shapes of flowers; shadows that spread over the flowers, smearing out the spotting color of them until they were a gloom-splotched, ghostly mass. ”

“ He stood quite still knowing that beneath its dank dribbling thickness, the sea churned wildly in its rising tide.
And standing there motionless he heard a voice calling through the quiet denseness of the fog. A voice coming from a distance and muffled by the mist. He started. It was her voice calling to him from the narrow pathway that wound up the chalk cliffs to the back of his shanty. ”

“ Her hands clenched rigidly on his shoulders.
"Gregory," she whispered, "tell me, dear—you've been so strange of late—so terribly unlike yourself. Tell me, dear, what is it?"
"Nothing, dearest girl—nothing."
"Oh, but there is something!" She exclaimed passionately. "I've known it right along. I haven't asked because I thought you'd tell me. Why—one must be blind not to see how you've changed! You're—you're just a skeleton of yourself, Gregory." She paused for breath. "Can't you bring yourself to tell me—can't you, dear?" ”

“ His one and only companion was a yellow mongrel that had come slinking in at the farm gate, its tail drooping between its legs. He had been glad at first of having the dog with him. And then gradually he had come to feel the oddness of the animal. If he could have done so he would have turned the dog out again into the stillness from which it had come to him. He was sure that the mongrel must be old; unnaturally old. He could not understand the dog's awful quiet. In his heart he was scared of the dog. The mongrel followed incessantly at his heels, always with dragging tail. ”

“ CHINA-CHING [1]
The racket was terrific. The yelping, the shrill prolonged whines, the quick incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling.
The woman stood at the window gazing out into the gathering twilight. Before her eyes stretched the drab, flat fields; here and there a shadowy mass of trees reached their feathery tips that were etched in darkly against the graying skies. Directly before her, beyond the unkept waste that might at one time have been a garden, reared the high, wire walls of the kennels. ”

“ He always felt, soothing himself with the thought of relief, that when the power of the stillness became unbearable he would shock old Efferts into talk. There were moments when he hungered savagely to force old Efferts out of his walling quiet. Moments when he was starving for the comfort of human sound. His voice and Efferts' voice. Voices that would rise above the stillness; voices that would penetrate cunningly through the quiet; voices that would speak and answer each other.
He was sitting in the center of his lamp lit room. ”

“ No man had a more unbounded faith in himself. At that time he had not been conscious of his lack of success. Now, of course, he looked back on it all as a period of development; something which had prepared him for this that was even then destined to come.
He told himself that in this small house, away from the surrounding clatter and nuisances of the city, he had found time to write; to be himself; to really express what he knew himself to be.
He had become tremendously well known in that space of six years. No one ever doubted the genius of Jasper Wald. ”

“ They went from the door together down the street and out onto the back patch of the wharf. Through the grayness they could see the boat rocking on the water at the farther end. The wail of the rising wind; the pounding of the sea; and close to them the muffled, bumping sound of the smack thrown again and again at the long wooden piles of the wharf. ”

“ No one ever quite knew whether or not Manners heard that Andreyvitch was to be of the house-party. Perhaps he had; probably he had not. If Kathleen were to be there, that would have been all-sufficient, as far as Manners was concerned.
By that time Manners had worked himself out of his frenzy of hatred against the Russian. They had been able to explain it to themselves by saying that he had talked himself into it. As a matter of fact, the whole thing was totally subconscious. Whenever he had become conscious the man was anywhere near him, he had begun to realize his hatred of him. ”

“ He knew then, he had always known, that the wood was some live, evil thing—the Wood of Living Trees; and that it hid the presence of something infinitely more foul.
A queer odor assailed his nostrils. An odor that was not only of the damp, dank underbrush; an odor that, in its putridness, almost suffocated him. ”

“ They, who made their living from the sea, could not understand how he could be content to live the way he was living. They could not have known that he would infinitely rather have died than to have taken one thing from out the sea from which he had already filched his soul. ”

“ Manners' voice rang out clearly, in surprising sternness.
"We all know what exists in this world. We know that greater than all else is faith. As long as you speak before those who know what real goodness is, who believe in it, there is no harm done! I hardly think this is the first time you've tried to impress evil on people—The reason for that's easily understood. But, thank God." His tone vibrated with earnestness. "Thank God, you can do nothing here!"
The Russian turned on him. ”