Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 39
Accordingly I slipped down the moist bank into the slow current and started to wade across. The water reached my thighs, and the mud, into which I sank up to my knees, yielded with the greatest reluctance as I moved my feet. As I approached the opposite bank, my progress became more difficult and my footing less secure. Only a few yards separated me from safety, when, as I was just about to grasp the reeds swaying above my head, I felt with a ghastly sensation of finality that I was sinking deeper and deeper into the mire.
Hardly daring to breathe, I remained motionless as the stuff crept slowly up my legs. Then I made one frenzied effort to withdraw my feet, only to find that I was accelerating the speed of my descent. Within an inch of my outstretched hand a tuft of marsh grass was protruding from the bank. For several minutes I dully regarded this possible means of escape before I fully appreciated its value. My mind was numb and heavy, unwilling to function. Idly I extended my arm and almost touched the grass. I tried again and this time came a little closer. Then as it dawned on me that probably this handful of grass was my last chance of life in this world, I centered all my hopes on it. My fingers quivered to secure a hold, and I felt a hot, crazy tension gathering round my eyes. Sweat broke from my pores as I strained forward, but the tuft which a moment before had been within an inch of my hand, was now two inches away. Between the grass and the tips of my fingers the space was growing wider. It was a fearful thing to watch. Hopelessly I looked around for another means of escape, but there was nothing to be found. The marshes were as still as death, and the air seemed to be growing more suffocating. The idea of calling for help came to me, but the possibility of being reached in time by human aid was too obviously remote for even my fear-weakened intelligence to entertain. I wondered what had become of the stick I had been carrying only a few minutes before. Looking about, I saw it floating idly on the current several yards away. That stick would have been useful. It might have saved my life. Now it lay beyond my grasp like the smug moral of an Aesop fable.
The steady advance of the mud along my legs caused me to make one last attempt to reach the grass and from the eagerness of my effort it seemed as though my arms would spring from their sockets. I failed abjectly, and was about to abandon hope when the idea came to me that if I flung myself forward with all my strength in the direction of the grass I might be able to add a few more inches to my reach, and thus either secure a hold or else topple helplessly, face downward, into the muddy water of the stream.
Without giving myself time to consider this possibility, I lurched forward, and falling completely off balance, clutched at the grass. It slipped through my fingers, and with a little splash the water closed over my head. I experienced a sensation of being strangled in the dark. There was a mad pounding in my ears. As I thrashed wildly about in the water, I was suddenly electrified by the realization that my fingers were clawing at the very base of another tuft of grass, growing below the surface of the stream. With a greedy feeling of relief I pulled myself forward until I was able to raise my head from the water. My fingers sank deep into the earth around the roots of the grass and held firm. The mud sucked viciously at my legs, but gradually I drew myself nearer the bank. The tuft I had previously missed was now directly above my head. Very carefully I reached up and seized it. Then began a tortuous hand over hand contest, a slow painful battle of inches in which a fractional miscalculation or the snapping of a reed might have made all the difference between victory and defeat. Imperceptibly I drew myself from the mire until at last I was clear of it. Then I scrambled up the bank of the stream and sprawled in the rank ooze lying between the reeds. It was pleasant to feel and I wallowed in it with animal satisfaction. Now that I was too exhausted to repel their attacks the mosquitoes settled down on me in swarms, but as I looked stupidly at the mud worming through my fingers, I was insensible to pain. Never had life seemed more worth living, and in a vague way I felt that my expedition to the marshes had produced the opposite effect to the one I had expected, or rather, hoped for.
With a gloating feeling I turned my eyes back to the stream from which I had escaped. It was rising. The tide was running in from the sea, and in a short space the current would flood. I considered this with satisfaction, for now I should be able to swim across instead of trusting myself again to its treacherous bed.
As I lay there resting I became dimly aware of the fact that for some minutes past a stray, disconnected picture had been floating through my mind. It was a picture of the western sky overspread with a vast black cloud threatening to consume the sun. It was all clear and distinct in my memory, every detail being so vivid that I was convinced the impression was not a figment of my imagination. The thing had actually happened and a feeling of disquiet crept over me as I tried to trace the picture to its source. Then I sprang to my feet and stood swaying among the reeds. A distant volley of thunder rolled through the heavens, echoed, and died away.
I remembered now where I had seen the picture. Only a short time before, when I had been struggling from the stream, I had gazed up at the sky and unconsciously made a mental note of its appearance. At the time I had failed to appreciate the meaning of the heavy cloud slipping like an unclean thing across the western section of the horizon, but now I appreciated only too keenly its significance. To be overtaken by a storm on the marshes was to be overtaken by death itself. Even if I escaped the quicksand the mosquitoes would be in at the kill. Already my ears were filled with the chanting of their requiem.
While I stood there considering this new danger, a bolt of lightning like a fiery seam ran across the sky, a deluge of thunder fell shuddering through the air, and darkness settled down on the marshes. As though giant hands were squeezing the clouds, rain descended in an overwhelming blanket. With all my reason I strove to beat down the fear that was rising in me. It was as though God or some other supernatural agency had decided to destroy me for my temerity in attempting to reach the island.
For several hundred yards I stumbled on through the rain and darkness, when a flash of lightning, laying bare an area of glistening sand, made me stop abruptly. With absolute certainty I knew that once I had put foot on that reedless plain I was lost beyond all chance of escape. A sensation of nausea filled my stomach, my legs failed, and with a feeling of unspeakable misery, I sank down among the reeds.
Whenever the lightning smote the sky the island sprang quiveringly into view and lay vividly revealed on the marshes, dancing there before my eyes as though it were tempting me on. And through the din of the rain and thunder I hurled at it a curse of impotent rage. Then fear gained the upper hand, and, rising like a distracted creature impelled by its mad desire to escape, I turned my back on the island and fought my way through the reeds. When I reached the edge of the stream I tore off my shoes, and without stopping to consider the consequences, took a shallow dive from the bank. My body shot through the water, and a few strokes brought me to the opposite side. With frenzied haste I climbed over the edge of the stream and lurched onward through the reeds.
The knowledge that the blackness of the storm might merge into that of night sharpened my determination to gain the mainland. Under the-clash of the lightning the sky was palpitating with fire. My ears were sore from the sound of thunder, and as the rain descended the breath was whipped from my body. During the short intervals between the play of the lightning, I was left in thick darkness, through which I staggered with outstretched hands. Beneath the bitter radiance of the lightning the shore ahead of me was occasionally outlined. A dull glow flooding up from behind a hill told me that some farmer’s house had been struck. In my mind’s eye I could see black figures darting back and forth in the firelight as they strove to save their livestock. The knowledge that human activities were taking place so near at hand gave me an intenser feeling of remoteness and desolation.
That evening on the marshes I sounded the uttermost depths of fear. For a time I was an abject and unqualified coward. And my fear was the more overpowering in that it was made up not only of imaginings, but also of horribly realistic facts. The clammy hand of terror lay against my back urging me ever onward in spite of my exhausted condition. At times I tripped, became tangled in the reeds. Once I missed my footing altogether and splashed into one of the little streams criss-crossing my path. When I emerged, my face was bleeding and my body was covered with slime. Toward the end of my flight I began to curse and rave incoherently. My anger was directed against the island as the cause of my humiliation. I hated the place with the hate of the conquered.
At last, when I reached the short strip of submerged soil lying against the mainland, I ran across it with my body bent forward and my head rolling from side to side. I was sobbing softly to myself. Before I reached the shore my strength gave out. I fell on my face in the mud and water. Like some prehistoric reptile emerging from a swamp I wriggled onto the shore and lay there with my fingers digging at the earth.
Once I turned my head to look back at the island. A bolt of lightning forked directly over it and the tall trees, sharply limned against the unnaturally green background of the reeds, seemed to be stepping silently toward me over the marshes.
“Take them away!” I screamed. My voice was lost in the rain.
I dreamed that night that Hilda was standing alone among the reeds fronting the island. From where I stood I could see her clearly as she turned and held out her arms to me. With a sharp conviction that I was about to lose her I rushed out on the marshes, but before I could reach her side I sank in the quicksand and went struggling down into the dark. As my head sank into the stifling slime my hands, still clutching at the air, grasped two small bare feet. My descent was arrested, and by slipping my hands further up along the legs I was able to pull myself from the quicksand. Then I found myself holding Scarlet in my arms. Her neck and shoulders were covered like a beast’s with short, yellow hair, and her head was that of an Indian idol, heavy and obscene, with thick, grinning lips and bleared eyes. She approached her distorted face to mine and gripped me round the waist. Together we fell back on the marshes and the soft, warm mud closed over us. But this time I felt no fear.
When I awoke I rose and went to the window with a feeling of disgust. My skin was raw and feverish and I ached in all my joints.
As the dawn broke I looked down on the silent grove and thought of this unclean thing. Not content with influencing my days, Scarlet had now begun to taint my nights.
CHAPTER XVI
BENEATH THE GOLDEN avalanche of the noonday sun all life was silent in the grove. The trees, transfixed by the heat, stood frozen in a yellow glow. On their limbs each tiny leaf lay glued to its plane of air, and on the lawn each spear of grass stood poised and still. It was as though life at full tide had been caught and crystallized in a setting of dream-swept radiance. Only the chant of the distant surf gave token that nature stirred. Remotely, the slumberous cadence of the waves stole up from the beach, touching the ear soothingly like the distant ticking of an old clock heard in the restless hours of the night. The wind which but a short time before had moved like a sigh through the trees, had drifted back to the sea. An enchanted sleep hung over the place. Even the birds were still, their wings at rest.
In the midst of this trance-like silence, yet unable to yield to its spell, I had been sitting watchfully all morning at my table on the lawn of MacKellar’s cottage. Only a moment ago, Scarlet had stood beside me, and as I had looked up at her, my thoughts had unconsciously reverted to the excitingly repulsive dream of the night just past, when clasped in each other’s arms we had sunk beneath the soft, warm mud of the marshes.
In some indefinable way Scarlet seemed different to me now, a shade more thoughtful and subdued. Her eyes no longer met mine with their usual glint of challenge. She gave the impression that she was holding herself in reserve, waiting quietly and planning, as though she were playing some game. Without admitting it to myself I was secretly stirred by the idea.
This impression, rather than belief, had grown in me from the evening, only a few days past, when I had seen her huddled at my feet in the semi-darkness of the hall. Now as she stood beside me I felt that in a sense I had placed myself a little deeper in her power. With her I was sharing a secret, and the very nature of that secret had established an intimate bond between us. Also, as a consequence of that mad outbreak of mine, there was a feeling of power in me. It was something altogether foreign to my nature, and not unpleasant. This woman, whose body had so often dominated my thoughts, fired my desire, and swayed my very reason, I had beaten with my hands. The memory of the yielding of her soft flesh against my open palms aroused in me an unhealthy sensation of satisfaction. I might do it again, I thought, as I took in the full, graceful lines of her figure. Even now I could rise from my chair and crumple her to my feet. But mingled with this emotion there was a vague feeling of sympathy... something that drew her as a woman a little closer to me.
Hitherto whenever I had heard stories in which women had suffered at the hands of men, I had always been conventionally outraged, but in the presence of the woman I had beaten I saw things in a new and less chivalrous light, and, ironically, I twisted the feet off of another tame ideal. Few were now left to me of the collection I had been secretly treasuring all my life. Soon I would be stripped of them all — the sooner the better, perhaps.
Scarlet’s voice cut in on my thoughts.
“Your face is swollen,” she said.
“And yours is better,” I replied.
“Mine wasn’t so badly bruised... only the lips. I used some ointment stuff and a little paint and powder.”
“What did you tell MacKellar?” I asked, despising myself for the question.
“Nothing definite. Merely that I’d been walking and tripped over some blackberry vines. He believes anything I say. It’s easier.”
She smiled faintly and gazed down the grove with a pensive expression in her eyes.
“That was sportsmanlike of you,” I said, after a moment’s silence.
“Oh, not particularly. I was partly to blame, you know.”
I made no answer to this and she continued rather apologetically, “I’ll not bother you much any more, David, but at least we might try to be friends, don’t you think?”
“Friendship is not for you,” I said. “You’d hate it.”
Before she answered she walked a few paces across the lawn.
“And so do you,” she replied with a gleam of her old spirit returning to her eyes — then in softer voice, “Would you like me to leave that ointment in your room?”
“No,” I said shortly, then added, “Yes. Thanks.”
“That’s right, David,” she called back. “It might relieve your irritation.”
From the doorway of the cottage she smiled at me for an instant. I was fascinated by the white flash of her teeth. With a feeling of annoyance I turned back to the table.
* * * * *
AFTER Scarlet had left I took up some lines of verse into which all morning I had been apathetically endeavoring to breathe a little life. At the end of half an hour of mechanical shifting they still limped along on bandaged feet, a dolorous procession of meaningless words. As I scanned the stuff I was discouraged by its extreme futility. Exasperated at last by the smug insincerity of my thoughts, I defaced with a burst of true inspiration all that I had written.
The profound silence of the grove was gradually wearing on my nerves. I had a feeling that unless I received a message from Hilda before another night had passed I should take some unwise action. With the intention of consulting MacKellar about this, I rose from the table and had started for the cottage when I heard my name called out behind me. I turned quickly and saw John Elliott striding across the lawn. His presence shattered the enchantment of the grove.
“You’re just the man, Landor,” he cried in a hearty voice. “I’ve been stalking you through the trees.”
“My instincts must have warned me,” I replied, smiling slightly. “As you see I was about to make good my escape.”
“But I would have followed you on like the hound of hell,” he said, dropping a heavy hand on my shoulder “When I seek a victim for my hospitality, I’m an implacable man.”
He, too, was smiling, but his strange eyes blazed unpleasantly down into mine, and, involuntarily, I stepped back a pace. Tightening his grip on my shoulder, he continued to speak in an unnaturally loud voice, considering his nearness to me.
“Mrs. Elliott has commissioned me to invite you to dine with us to-night,” he said. “Ever since that day we went sailing she has been too ill to get out. What a day it was, eh? Will you come?”
“You’re very kind,” I replied, watching him closely. “I accept with pleasure.”
“That’s as I thought,” he said as though to himself, then glancing over my shoulder he withdrew his hand and took a step forward.
“That invitation also holds for you, young lady,” he said in a changed voice. “I’m my wife’s messenger.” Scarlet was leaning in the doorway, her cheek resting against her white, rounded arm which was held extended above her head along the frame of the door. In her pose, there was something of the slave girl. As she lazily regarded Elliott through half- closed eyes, there was a provocative smile on her lips. In that same intimate way she had often looked at me and now as I saw her thus challenging another with her eyes, I was surprised by a sudden flash of jealousy.
