I

They should have arrived in the morning, the cool bright-haze morning of clear and misty things, the forward-gleaming morning. Two young people in love should have arrived when the sun warmed the earth and the pine trees were like torches. They would have seen vast shoulders of earth covered with primeval verdure sloping to the sea. They would have seen the sea itself, bright blue like the sky with a roaring fringe of white where the rocks made foam. The cottages would seemed like tanned young faces with eyes opening. They would have sensed great land and something vast and spiriting. They would have loved Caromb as a place to be in love.

But they arrived when the pine trees gathered shadow and the black wing stirred all forms to hunch and creep; when the mountains loomed ominously like huge death-stones moving to close one in; when the sea was bleak and chill and lonely; when dogs barked; when houses began to creak and strain; when seals on the far rocks rolled sounds across the empty waters; when the wind moaned and the sea pounded. It was ghost-hour in Caromb. It was the hour of the black wing. It was close to night and the time of covered consciousness.

Surely there were some in the village who would have warned them. "Dear young people, do not come to Caromb now. Wait till morning. Wait till you are as old as we." But no one knew they were coming. They knew no one in the town save one by name.

The sun xx had left the sky when they, leaving the highway, turned westward. It was the last main turn of what he called their western detour.

"I think we are going to like Caromb," he said. "No, not a perfect

2

place. We will find no place as we want it unless we make it so. But
I have a good feeling about Caromb." His voice was strangely sober.

"I hope so," she replied. "I've always wanted to be near the sea
and mountains and I hope when people see our happiness they will not
try to destroy it. Why do they? Why do they feel they have to? Why
can't two people make a hundred happy? Why is it the other way? It
must be quaint, Caromb, with no street lights and everyone carrying
lanterns."

"In less than an hour we will be there," he said. To himself he
thought, "Living things are prey, the greater the life the greater
the bait for scavengers." But he smiled and gave her knee a reassuring pat. He steered the car with one hand. She held his free hand.

She was loving him very much, feeling the strange intimacy of being
married, the mystery of unfolding and of being married again and again
to the same man. Each time some not as yet blended parts in each
of them met and mingled there was a marriage. Three unforgettable
times already they had been married. She wondered when and what the
fourth would be. She spoke to him.

"I used to think one was married once and for all. Just once the
two people, all of them, came together completely. I was frightfully
romantic and uninstructed and - yes, blind to the real adventure
and experience of it. It isn't so, is it? I have many people in me.
You have many people in you. Each time any two of them really meet
there is a marriage. Do you know how many marriages we've had? We will
keep on having them, won't we? And then one day, I suppose towards
the end, there will happen the one great final blending which I
believed happened at once in the beginning."

Her eyes were happy and wistful. She put her arm through his, drawing close to him, enveloping the two of them in a secure, self-

3

sustaining, self-fulfilling, strong and yet so fragile personal
world.

He kept his eyes on the road. He had to keep them there. He was
driving but he felt driven. The road was bordered by pine trees now,
and occasional clearings, sometimes white fences and white ranch
houses. All the farms were called ranches. This was ranch country.
It was a harsh word, ranch; harsher than farm.

They were on the road to the peninsula, a road over the earth,
the deep earth, blocks of elements, events, and dry fire. The body
of earth speeds and the body of man is carried along.

Be with us always, earth,
Let us not fall below,
But hold our wingless feet
As they rest upon you.

The road to the peninsula. On and on it went, further and further
from the highway; and as grey twilight came a chill entered him. The
landscape seemed weird. He began feeling they were headed towards a
remote other-world, entirely cut-off spot, a place of frightful
happenings. There was a brooding here, a peering tragic something,
as though all of this ground had suffered a catastrophe, perhaps a
sinking under water, a deluge of its life - and now, though again
emerged, it could think of nothing but its tragedy. Voices seemed
as if shouting at him, "Who goes there? Why are you emerging this
over-shadowed land? You had best keep out." He wanted to. He wanted
to turn back.

Why, after all, were they going to Caromb? Simply because people
had told them of it. Simply because others had gone there. But no one
had said anything about this sombre tragic thing. They had told of

4

how quaint, how lovely, how unique it was, a delightful survival of
another age. Had they felt nothing ominous? Was it only in himself,
some queer personal mood? He tried to draw himself from it. He smiled.

"We will like Caromb," he said, and patted her. To himself he said,
"Ah, my dear, how snug and warm and secure you are. Never before have
I envied the place of a woman. I envy it now. Man is and must be
exposed - and the universe is pitiless."

An unexpected fear gripped him. Some of the cars behind him might be
the cars of gangsters. One of them might draw closer to him, force him
to the side and make him stop. He had heard tell of such things. A
friend of his had been chased by men planning a bank robbery. They
wanted a decoy car. The roads were not safe. They were more dangerous
than in the days of the highwaymen. The old bandits simply wanted the
loot. These modern fellows were killers. He wished his car was a heavy
car and very speedy.

He shook the picture off. What on earth is the matter with me? he
asked. No, I am not fearless. No imaginative person is. But certainly
these fears do not belong to me.

Then he felt creepy, and he realized he had been picturing ghosts
squatting on dead trees back in the woods, black forms rushing out
to spot his car and rushing back to spread the news, "They are alone
on the road. Let's get them." He whizzed the car, flying from
pursuing ghosts, smashing through those which besieged them.

"Marian," he spoke, "do you know what our life and our literature
lack? Contact with the unseen world, the world conjured by the
strong emotions including fear. Imagination stems from the strong
emotions. Great love, great fear make us see things and give us,
if only in ourselves, a seeming relationship with a living universe.
Science and reason and machines and civilization have crowded us

5

back, insulating us from all experience save experience of facts.
Our lives are humdrum. Our literature is but a mirror of our routine
lives. Now, the only time we really feel anything or see anything is
when we dream and have nightmares. The primitives saw things. The
ancients saw things. What would Greek and Hindu literature be without
the gods and the hosts of figures and events of another world? Shakes-
peare saw things. As children we see things. One sees no more than
he feels. We feel nothing and hence see nothing."

Marian smiled up at him, snuggled closer, and let him feel she was
happy as she was, feeling and seeing quite enough.

They came to a town, but it was Caromb. It was a place called
Portello. They had heard about this too. It had been described as one
of the enchanting spots along the coast. They debated. Should they
rest here for the night and drive to Caromb in the morning? Something
urged them to move on and see Caromb.

Marian, sitting upright, was looking out. For four miles they
sped along a broad road and then took a sharp turn and began winding
and going down.

"Down to the sea," he said.

"I believe I can smell it," she said. "How awfully dark it is
here. The trees close over us." She shuddered. "Look, there is a
light, a house, and another one. They scare me. Do you suppose this
is Caromb?"

"I don't know," he said. "There must be a main street and this
probably is the road to it."

They were still rather high. They truned again, and caught a glimpse
of a sheeny surface which they took to be the sea, swooped down a
long hill and there, suddenly, under rows of pine trees, were a number

6

of small dimly lit stores. "Caromb," he pronounced. He drove slowly.
They peered out, trying to sense the place. "Do you like it?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Want to look around? Maybe we can find a place for the night. We
might try a hotel."

"They say the hotels are so expensive."

"Do you know what I'd like to do?" he suddenly asked. "I'd like to
find something we can rent by the week. I don't care whether it is a
room or an apartment or a house. But by the week. Not longer. Not
for a whole month. Then if we don't like it we can move on." To move
on, that was it. A voice was pleading with him, shouting at him to
fly, to leave, to fly away while he still had the chance. "There's
something sombre here, don't you think?" He was sure she would agree.

She surprised him. "Nø," she said, "I like it. I think the houses
are nice. I like the pine trees."

"Yes, so do I," he said. "I've always like pines. But see how the
cottages hug together and the trees hold gloom. I do not like it."

"Oh," she said, "I wouldn't want to be in one of those places."

"Well, then, were else? They all seem the same to me. Perhaps we
would do better over at Portello."

They had stopped before a cottage bearing a quaint painted sign of
rooms for rent. It was dusk. There was no wind. Everything was still,
but they heard the sea pounding. Like jungle drums it pounded. And
to the drum beats no one walked or drove along the vacant street.

They sat peering at the cottage. "Shall we try it?" he asked.

"It doesn't look as though anyone lives in it."

He said, "I don't like those squat pines. They look like enormous
black draws." He had frightened her; so he laughed. "Well, come on,

7

let's see."

They rapped on the door and waited. Eyes seemed looking through the curtains but no one came. They rapped again. "Queer," said John. Then the door opened and instantly there was a rush and swirl of cold force like an electric discharge crackling and shocking them with fear. A ghastly faced woman appeared, took one look at them and recoiled as if she, a ghost herself, had seen something far more frightening. Her wide open eyes were glazed and she seemed trying to shout, "Go away! You can't come in here!" Behind her they could see in a旁 two ordinary looking young women sitting on a couch, rooming-house fashion.

Marian spoke, "Have you a room?" The woman stared. John pressed forward, shouldering against the crackling air. "We want a room for the night. If you have one may we see it?" The woman found her voice, a repellant rasping voice. "I have no rooms. They are all taken."

"Thank you," said John, but before they could turn to go the woman had slammed the door.

"Bang," said John. He was stinging all over. They climbed into the car. "Our first reception in Caromb," he said, ironically. Marian said nothing. Her face was set and mask-like as he had sometimes seen it when she was holding back some bewildering painful emotion. "Don't take it too hard," he said. "It was only a rooming-house and only a landlord. Perhaps she spoke the truth. Perhaps she had no rooms."

Marian gasped, "Why - why, nothing like that has ever happened to me. Did you see her? She looked like a ghost. She made me feel like something worse. I know she had a room. Why did she refuse us? Do you suppose..?" She glanced at her hand. "I have my glove on. Do you - she could not see the ring - do you suppose?"

8

"Maybe," said John. Then he released himself. "I'm damn glad she didn't see the ring. Her glance would have polluted it. She was a witch. You would have thought we were in league with the devil, that we had come to bargain for her dead soul. Christ, what an experience! This is Caromb. Let's get out of here."

He drove the car down the gloom vacant street, not fast because of the bumps and ruts. It was like going through a bat infested tunnel with no view of the other end. Truly Caromb was of another age - with a vengeance. The advantages of a machine-made age mounted quite high in his estimation.

"Why did she do it?" Marian persisted. "We must have frightened her as much as she frightened us. Why, I've never had such a thing happen to me. You would have thought we were escaped convicts. Did you see those common looking girls sitting on the couch. They looked funny too. I know she had a room. She simply refused us, slapped our faces. Aren't there any lights in the houses either?"

"People are suspicious," said John. "They are evil and they think everyone else is. We have no business going to rooming houses. We look too well. They immediately wonder why we aren't at the best place. But I know what she was. She was an agent of fate. I feel fated here. Only, I don't know whether she were warning me away or baiting me to come and cast anchor in this place. Caromb is fateful, I tell you. I want to fly from it, yet something impells me to stay. Now I've said it."

They were mounting the long steep hill. The drum beats were behind them. The car faltered. John shifted geers. Marian clutched him. "Don't let it slip back. John, do something! It will. We are slipping back!"

9

"No, no, dear."

They turned sharp left and began whizzing through the place
where the forest of trees closed over them. It was pitch black,
save for the car's headlights and for the occasional lights, like
the eyes of animals, gleaming from house windows in the deep woods.

"I wouldn't want to live in there," said Marian. "It is terrible
in there. See how dark it is. Terrible things happen. People get
murdered."

"That's a happy thought," he said. "Ah, yes, we are going to like
Caromb."

The streets of Portello were lighted, and to see a movie house
and a five and ten cent store was somewhat reassuring, but Marian
did not like the looks of the men hanging about.

John found the best hotel in town. In their room they held each
other tightly, but the contest had begun, the struggle of their
love against the shadow of Caromb.

While they slept the waves beat the beach like a drum, and on the
beach strange figures gathered, huddled in a bunch and swayed and
chanted:

John, Marian, two in love,
Come, come to our drum,
Come to the sea brineless and deep
With the swift undertow,
Come to our beach and see white bones,
Come to our dance, John, Marian,
You who came when it was ghost-hour
In Caromb, come, come.

10

And off on a mountain to the south of the valley there was a
gathering of a different band, and through the serene night they
chorused:

John, Marian, two in love,
Come, yes come to Caromb,
Dance on the beach, swim the sea,
Struggle with the rocks,
Hold each other, John, Marian,
And mount the shadow and come,
Yes, come to the stars of Caromb.

11

## II

Sunlight flooded the room. John went to the window and looked out. "Darling," was his delighted cry, "it is a different world." She came and looked out. They were high above the buildings and over the roofs they could see the bright blue waters of the bay of Portello, dotted with small fishing craft and two large schooners and off in the distance the glittering slopes of sand cliffs on top of which were perched white houses with red roofs. "Isn't it beautiful," she said. "Oh, I love it. I have never seen anything like that."

"Last night was a nightmare," he said. "I don't believe it really happened."

"Neither do I," she agreed. "How could it have? See how bright and fresh everything is. Caromb will be beautiful too."

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll call Miss Roberts. She will probably remember my name. The same friend who told me of her told her of me. I hope she will remember. It will be good to know someone in this region and she can, if she will, put us in touch with things."

He phoned her. Then he spoke to Marian. "Of course. You heard? Why didn't we do this at first? She was happy to hear we were nearby. Curious how things work. She wants to see us at three o'clock."

Before that hour they checked out of the hotel and drove to Caromb, both feeling restored and connected. They would meet Miss Roberts. Through her they would make contacts with others of their own kind. Caromb would unfold. Yes, now there were prospects of an interesting time. "A simple thing like a phone call and just one person can change the cast of everything," said John.

12

In a happy mood they went to the beach and sat there in the sand sunning themselves. "It is beautiful, simply beautiful," said Marian. "See those waves. Look, here comes a huge one! This is what you wanted, isn't it, dear John. A sea that smells like the sea, rocks, pine trees, and I want the beach. We must come out every day. Look at those darling children."

Three young tots in sun suits were romping ahead of their mother. A curly-haired dog gambled with them, barking and getting tangled in their legs. Two young men in trousers and striped bathing shirts strode along where the sand was hard. An elderly grey-haired gentleman, hatless, with a cane, moved briskly in the opposite direction. A tramp shambled through the loose sand. At one point he sprang down, grabbed an old newspaper and shoved it in his pocket. "Not many people out," said John. "It is still a bit cold but the sun is warm and one does get a sense of brilliance and something of the sea resort feeling. They have kept it as it should be. Not a trace of anything commercial here. It is as wild and beautiful, as much itself, as it was a thousand years ago."

Miss Roberts had told them there were no numbers on the houses. "You will just have to look for the two streets. You will get used to it," she had said. "Guess we'd better start," said John. "We'll have to find it. Miss Roberts expects people to be punctual."

At three prompt they presented themselves. Miss Roberts welcomed them. She was cordial. She was abrupt. Her face was alert and vital. Her hair was almost white. She was sympathetic. She was sharp and business-like, and the form of her speech, her tone of voice, were clear, concise, intellectual. A mother-manager, was John's impression. They sat in her cozy redwood living-room and talked.

13

They spoke of mutual acquaintances, of people who had visited Caromb, of literature, of present-day conditions. John and Marian told them something of themselves and of the trip, the western detour, which had finally brought them to Caromb. Miss Roberts mentioned how, many years ago, she had suddenly come to the end of her life in an eastern city, and how, without more ado, she had simply left her home town and had come to settle in Caromb. Not many people knew of it then. Only later had it developed into an art center and had it acquired a reputation. Miss Roberts was, then, an old resident. John had gathered that she had established herself as a power in the community. It was to her that people went when they wanted something done.

Soon Miss Roberts brought the conversation to practical matters. She wanted to know just what kind of a place they wanted and for how long. Finally she suddenly said, "I have a plan, if you will accept it. I will turn my place over to you for as long a time as you may need it - that is, I have a guest coming in a week, but it is yours till then if you would like it." Her offer was abrupt and so generous that neither of them could reply at once. "It will not in-convenience me," she added. "I have a place I can stay."

"But Miss Roberts," said Marian. "Oh, thank you very much."

"Yes, very much," said John.

"But how can we?" said Marian. Miss Roberts smiled but was silent. "Oh, thank you," said Marian again. She glanced at John. John nodded. With Miss Roberts one had to say definitely yes or no. He wanted to say yes, but not without letting her know they were considering as well as thanking her.

"Then we will work out the details later," said Miss Roberts. She

14

continued, "I have invited some people to tea, a few of those I thought
you would like to meet and who would like to meet you."

The people came. John had an impression that they trooped in. He
were
dismissed it. There was Frank Williams and his wife. Years ago John
had first read Williams' poetry and liked it. Williams was warm,
candid, outspoken. Marian liked him. John had a feeling he was brooding
over something. Albert Caston, whose autobiograhy, recently published,
was having a wide success. Caston was humorous and ironic, an observer
of the great show, with a quick mind which took delight in pointed
statements that allowed of no come back. Mrs Caston was dark, vivid,
energetic. A number of others; one of them an architect retired from
active practice who was now doing only the houses he wanted to do
the way he wanted to do them. He had sweetness and quaintness, and
Marian thought he was adorable, de lightful.

John and Marian had a very happy time - so much so that all traces
of the disagreeable experience of the night before were erased and
they felt they were and would be quite happily at home in Caromb.

Later that evening as they were getting read for bed John said,
"Haven't things moved swiftly! Here in the twinkling of an eye we
have a cozy little place and many friends. We go to the Caston's
tomorrow afternoon. The next day it will be another. Miss Roberts is
a marvel. She sees what is to be done and simply does it. But I hate
to think of us sort of putting her out. She has everything ordered
here. I wonder how she likes living alone. Yet, it was her gift. But
how different from last night. That ghost-house with its ghost
keeper. I have an entirely different feeling about Caromb."

"So have I," said Marian, but she was rather tired and very
sleepy.

15

John said, "I don't quite like this separate sleeping, but one
can't have everything. Anyway, you are not far away. Call me if you
want anything. Goodnight, sweet darling." He tucked her in, kissed
her, switched off the light and went to his room.

Marian, he knew, would fall asleep at once. She went to sleep with
the blissful ease of a child. Thank goodness she can, he thought. He
lay awake. It was pitch black in the room and somewhat close. It was
as if the black were a substance pressing against him. He envisioned
the squat pines - where they guardians or gaolers - surrounding the
house, but he felt secure, untroubled, snug. He tried to sense accu-
ately, without emotional coloring, the nature of the currents which
were moving them into Caromb, the friendly, the unfriendly, the happy,
the ominous. Perhaps his feelings and all of the signs and portents
of one kind and another meant nothing special. He had somewhat learned
to discount and check his tendency to invest all things with meaning.
It was troublesome, this tendency. It made him see significances
where there was nothing to be seen. It was similar on the mental
plane to Marian's tendency on the emotional plane to invest all
things with feeling, to sense feeling where there was nothing to be
felt. Thus they both complicated life unnecessarily. In any case, they
would like Caromb. People make the place, and they liked the people.
This much was sure.

As the fire died in the sitting-room hearth the house, with creaks
of wood, adjusted to the cold of night. His nerves were a bit jumpy,
but the cracks and pops did not really bother him. He had lived in
creaky wooden houses before. But just as he was about to fall asleep
a crack like a gun report went off near his head. He sat bolt upright

16

and reached for the light, his body aquiver. He withdrew his hand.
"Fool," he said, "fool man full of mouse-fears, of creak and crack
fears. If anything is going to happen in this place it won't be in
terms of little noises." He listened to Marian's breathing. It was
deep and regular. Whatever the noise had been it had not awakened
her. Perhaps he had dreamed it. Miss Roberts lived in this house
alone. He felt ashamed of his fright. He lay down. Sometimes Marian
had nightmares and called out for help. He would just as soon that she
slept peacefully this night.

They were driving about looking for a cottage. They wanted first to
spot the place they wanted and then find the agent. Along the sea
front were solid grey stone houses buttressed against the winds and
ages. "They look mediaeval," said John. Marian's large grey-blue
eyes were taking them in. "I don't know that I like them," she said,
"they are cold and bleak like prisons or fortresses. Cold people
must live in them, cold remote people, mental people who know
what life is but who do not feel it."

are
"No," he granted, "they are not decorative. Nor are they feminine.
Nothing about this country is. It is masculine, starkly so, sombre
and beautiful at the same time. They have to build houses like these
against the sea. How long do you think a pretty little cottage would
last? They might as well set up doll houses."

"I suppose so," she said.

"I can see these places at night," he continued, "with their slit-
windows lighted, and the leaded panes - they would look like mediaeval
castles. A person landing here from the sea would surely think he was

17

stepping ashore into another age. I belong in that other age."

"We both do, I guess," she said. "Both of us are back there in
the days of Abelard and Heloise. Just the same I'd rather live in a
white frame house."

"And they have fog here. Remember that. The grey fog, the grey
stones. I think they've taken these stones from along the sea. They
belong here. I wonder which place is Jordon's. They say he built the
tower himself. He writes his poetry in it. I don't know that I'd
like that."

"I wouldn't," said Marian, "and I won't like the fog."

"Well, never mind. You know what they do. Remember what Miss
Roberts said? When the fog gets too much for them they simply drive
up the valley a way and there it is like bright summer. The Valley
of Caromb. I wonder where it is. We've heard so much about it. Look
at that mountain over there! Did you ever see anything like it? That
green, how very strange. Bright green with something very dark under-
neath, virginal and sombre, untouched and yet having passed through
all the sorrows of the earth. Into such a formation the pied piper
might have disappeared. Or it might have housed the cyclops' cave.
And see that white building at the foot of the slope. It looks like
a church. I wish this were our first experience of Caromb, this morn-
ing experience. Somehow I can't quite forget that first night."

They left the outer drive and began winding along the more shelt-
ered lanes, noticing each house they passed, paying particular atten-
tion to those which bore for rent signs. They stopped before a lovely
little place with a beautiful flower garden. It occupied an open plot
where two roads intersected. They liked it. Marian said she would be
happy to live there. They went in. The woman wanted a long -term
lease. It turned out, however, that she was in the renting business

18

and would be glad to show them other places. They went with her.
After several trials she thought of taking them to see a house on
Caromb Point. This notion pleased Marian. She wanted to be out from
town.

They drove south and out, out beyond where the cottages clustered,
where at night the pine trees gathered gloom. They stopped before an
unpainted shingled house, the last house on the road. Beyond was
the beach, and beyond the beach was the sea. The location was wonder-
ful.

The agent spoke, "Over there," she said, "is Caromb Valley." They
saw a long broad opening where the mountains folded down. "The
Valley!" they exclaimed; and to John it seemed there was something
organic, like the inside of a person, about those folds. "Yes," said
the agent, "from here you get the very best view. And now, over there,
just beyond that mound, is the beach. You are near the beach here,
but protected from the winds by that mound. It is the best location
in Caromb. This is called Gull House. Would you like to go in?"

"Why Gull House?" asked John. "Because," she answered, "back
over there, you see, you see that water, well, the gulls collect
there and then all at once you will see them rising in a great white
cloud and sometimes on their way to the sea they circle over this
house. No one knows why, but they do. People who have been on ships
say the gulls circle here like they circle a ship. Would you like
to go in?" So they went in.

The wood was redwood neatly fitted but unfinished, clean, odorous,
satiny, dull-gleaming redwood, the wood of the houses of Caromb. The
main room was large with many windows and very bright. It was dry
and fairly warm with no closed or musty smell. It did not seem long

19

unoccupied. It's ceiling was the gabled roof of the house, high and
spacious. "It is a sort of studio," said John. "It would make an
excellent workroom." He noted the large stone hearth. They could have
a very cheerful blaze in it. Upstairs were a balcony over-looking the
main room, a sun porch, and three small bedrooms. Marian was non-
committal. There was some feature she did not like.

They passed through a glass door out onto a stone porch. Marian
immediately changed expression. "Oh, I like this," she said. "What a
marvelous view of the valley from here. Why, you look right down it,
how far? How far would you? And this garden! Did you ever see such
a delightful thing? Wouldn't mother love it! Nasturtiums, daisies,
rock flowers, flowering moss, petunias. And see that purple iris and
those yellow poppies and those red and white geraniums! Why, there
is everything here, and all sort of wild. Oh, I love this!"

They went inside to talk it over. "Why is the rent so low?" asked
Marian. "Is it difficult to heat?"

John talked for the agent. "Oh, no, Marian," he said. "Feel how
dry and warm it is now. With a fire going... I can guarantee the
heat. You see," he told the agent, "my wife has a strange fear
that one of these days she is going to freeze to death." He laughed.
"No, Marian, forget about the heat. If that is all that is troubling
you I think we can take the place." He recalled Miss Roberts saying
that if they saw a good place they had better sign for it at once
as Easter week was coming and the rents would go up. Again he talked
for the agent.

Marian's eyes were glancing around unsurely. "I like this room.
I love the garden. This is just the best location. I want to be out

20

like this. If you are sure it will be warm enough..."

So they rented it. John and Marian took Gull House for a month, the next day they moved in. Where would they sleep? In Gull House in Caromb. And the gulls circled over it. And the figures on the beach were gleeful. And the figures on the moun...

in rejoiced.

balcony. I don't like those rooms, those doors, they give you a feeling that someone is behind them,"

"Then where?" asked John. "Those are the bedrooms. You know, I naturally supposed - I don't see anything wrong with them. That one in the rear is quite cool."

"Down here," she said, pointing to the room off the sitting-room.

"I'll sleep down here. Can't both of us? I don't want you away from me. Can't we somehow arrange a double-bed or take another bed in there?"

"Why, darling," he said, "the upstairs is all arranged. What is the matter with it?"

"I don't like those stairs. I don't want to go up them. I don't like that balcony. I don't like those rooms. Look at those doors. They look as if someone is behind them."

"For goodness' sake," he laughed. "as we have tenants! But what's the use? If you feel that way about it, why didn't you tell me? We didn't have to take this house. It is foolish to pay money for a place half of which frightens you. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I like this large room," she said. "I love the garden. I like this location. I wouldn't live in one of those closed-in surrounded cottages for anything. I want to be here. Only, I don't want to go upstairs."

"Good grief," he said. "Well, then, here that for your room and when night comes on we'll see where I'll sleep."

21

III

The next day they moved in. Where would they sleep? Which was to
be their bedroom? "Not up there," said Marian. "I don't like that
balcony. I don't like those rooms, those doors. They give you a
feeling that someone is behind them."

"Then where?" asked John. "Those are the bedrooms, you know. I
naturally supposed - I don't see anything wrong with them." That one
in the rear is quite cozy."

"For goodness sakes," he laughed, "so we have tenants! Rats! What's
come over you? If you feel that way about it why didn't you tell me?
We didn't have to take this house. It is foolish to pay money for a
place half of which frightens you. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I like this large room," she said. "I love the garden. I like
this location. I wouldn't live in one of those closed-in shrouded
cottages for anything. I want to be here. Only, I don't want to go
upstairs."

"Good grief," he said. "Well, then, have that for your room and
when night comes on we'll see where I'll sleep."

22

They went to tea at the Jordon's, the place of the grey stone tower overlooking the sea. On the gate was a sign - "Not in until after four o'clock." Mrs Jordon came out to meet them. She was cordial, warm and chill at the same time. Marian seemed to draw the warmth from her, the kind of caring a mother would have. She looked after Marian, leaving John to follow.

Inside was Nathaniel Jordon - Jordon, the poet of Caromb. He was kindly and pleasant yet remote and silent and rugged like the rocks of his tower. His face was sharp with narrowed intensity and his eyes seemed to gaze as if they were always gazing across the sea from the slit-windows of his stone house. He smoked a pipe and wore leather puttees. The puttees enclosed his limbs as he had enclosed his life.

The dining-room was like a monk's refectory, bare, stern, enduring, the grey stones prominent, a long heavy dark wood table, and a window almost level with a mound of earth which gave a marvelous view of the ocean. John felt the mediaeval castle effect very strongly.

Caston and his wife were there. His place at the table was next to Marian. Suddenly he turned and asked her, "What is queer in you?" His tone was caustic but his smile was benovulent. Something in him made him want to disturb, even to annihilate life; something in him made him want to protect that which he would disturb or destroy.

Marian did not know what to say. She said nothing. She grew uncomfortable. She became miserable.

Caston explained himself, "This Caromb is a place of queer people. If you have come here you must have something queer in you."

"Oh," she said.

He continued, "Caromb is a place of lost souls. Are you lost? No,

23

you are young. This is no spot for young people. Why did you come?"

"I don't know," she faltered.

John wanted to help her. Caston, of course, did not realize how impressionable, unguarded, easily bewildered she was. He did not realize he was making her suffer - or perhaps he did; but he did not know that she would hate him, hate his intellectual aggressiveness and see him as a sort of **EX** ogre with a sandy goatee.

Caston with his beard, caustic and benovulent; Jordon with his pipe, silent, rugged, grey, intense; Mrs Caston, straight, out-looking, with sharp speech; John with chin drawn in and forehead out; Mrs Jordon, warm and chill, caring for Marian, pouring tea, now again saying to her husband, "Nathaniel, put another log on the fire,"; Marian, vulnerable, and strong yet fluttering as she tried to find a way of meeting Caston should he ask her another question - they sat talking in the monk's refectory of Jordon's castle in Caromb.

As they were leaving Caston asked, "Who will take us home? We have no car."

"We will, gladly," said John, "if you don't mind the rumble seat."

Mrs Jordon algs offered. Her's was a sedan.

Caston gazed at John's car. "Thank you," he said. "A roadster."
He smiled and shook his head with that queer benovelence of his.
"You two are in love. Go along. We'll go with Mrs Jordon." Then to
John he added, "Have you seen Point Goros? See it sometime. It is
worth seeing. Most places are merely advertized. This is the real
thing. Goodby, and come to see us."

The dive home was short through the earth at sunset. They took
the outer drive winding along the shore between the beach and the

24

wave worn rocks. Far to the west the sun was sinking behind a band
of slate/xy clouds. The sea was turning slate-like. The breakers,
livid-white, pounded on the sand. "It is very much the sea to-
night," said John, "but I would like to see a ship. It is too empty.
There should be boats, fishing craft, sailboats, along here, but I
suppose it is too exposed. This really is the vast wide ocean -
oh, bleak, bleak, and vast and empty, oh, thou ocean."

As if moored to it, a large dark cloud overhung the mountain south
of the valley, casting the mound beneath in sombre shadow. Up the
valley there was light, a strange soft twilight haze which illumined
the hills as they folded down. "Look at that," said John, "ominous,
lyrical, and magnificent. I have never seen such oppressive beauty."

Marian was drawn far into herself, still smarting from Caston's
remarks. "Ah, darling," said John, "he didn't mean anything by it. He
didn't mean to hurt you. It is just his way. He really is quite
kindly. You have that problem, you know, of not letting others give
you feeling that you are being defeated. Human relationships should
not be, and in some cases they are not, competitions - though surely
the competitive element is still much too strong. I dare say Caston
is motivated by it. It was ingrained in his generation. The task of
our generation is to work it out. If we don't, if we are enslaved by
it as they were - this will be our defeat. Cooperation, the art of
cooperation...not independence but the art of dependence, of fruitful
inter-living -"

Then he shivered. "It gets chill very quick."

Around another bend they went and he exclaimed, "Here we are,
Gull House. And this is our first evening in our new home." He did
not dare tell her how bleak and repellent it seemed to him. "We'll

25

have a fire in a jiffy."

Neither were hungry so they drew up chairs to the hearth, Marian chancing to pick the one which would let her see the balcony if she raised her head. Soon the fire was blazing and they sat before it and talked. There seemed no need for other lights. And as they talked the dusk thickened beyond the windows and gloom gathered in the house, filling the gabled roof and the queer high angles above the balcony. But they did not notice this, at least John did not. Nor did he hear the wood begin creaking and cracking, nor the feet of the wind scraping, troding, scampering across the roof.

At length he said, "Well, now can eat something. What shall we have?"

Marian was curiously unresponsive. Then she spoke in a voice unlike her own. "John, I've been seeing the most awful things." A chill shot through him, an eery cold creepy thing. He noticed how dark it was. He saw her face with wide strange eyes made weird and fantastic by the play of flames and gloom. "What have you seen?" he asked.

"There is a man on the balcony! He is going to shoot me!"

John laughed. He wondered if his nervous undertone were audible. He laughed again, more heartily. "Oh, my goodness," he said, "is that all?"

"He is there, John. He is there." Her voice was a whisper. "Any minute he may shoot me."

It was of course a wild fancy but her tone and the gloom of the room were getting to him. He felt as rooted in his chair as she seemed in hers. "Oh, Marian," he laughed, "there is no man in this house save me, and I have no gun."

"He is up there and he is going to shoot me!"

26

"Not me?" he asked.

"No, me!"

Suddenly he sprang up. "We need lights, more lights about this
place." He switched on the one high up in the angles above the bal-
cony. A ghastly pale glare oozed down. "There," he said, looking up,
"where is your man?"

"He has run into one of the rooms."

"For Christ's sake," said John, "are you going to go on like this every night?" Then he was sorry. "No, sweetheart, believe me, there is no man. What would he be doing here? Why on earth should anyone want to shoot you? See, I'll go and look."

"Yes, look," said Marian.

John mounted the stairway. It creaked at every step. He walked along the balcony. It creaked. He opened each door and looked in. "Nothing up here."

"Thank you," she said. "Come down now, please."

John came down and switched on every light he could find. He clos-
ed the curtains. Those for the French windows and the glass door
leading to the stone porch would not fit over. Large gaps were left
for the outside night to peer in. And the outside night, far down at
the end of the road, was, he felt, darker and more sinister than it
was in town where the cottages kept each other company and banded
against the black external world. "Well, anyway," he said, "this is
better." "Yes, much," she replied. "Thank you."

But both were tingling nervously and as they silently prepared
supper they felt as if eyes, eyes, were on them."Why in God's name
did we take this house?" thought John. At the back of his mind was
the question of where he would sleep.

27

Marian grew more at ease. She laughed and explained, "You know, I've read so much about people being shot from balconies."

John nodded. "Reading matter is responsible for most of the fears of the world. But we've got to fill this place. We've got to occupy it. In a day or two after we've put our things about it will feel different. Like any other place we've got to give it our atmosphere. We must inhabit it. Tonight it is inhabiting us. That often happens at first." He wanted to tell her they would have to invite people, give parties. One gay party would transform the place. He sensed, however, that she was developing a resistance against the people of Caromb, mainly against Caston but the feeling would spread out. He might have to work it without her knowing.

They were before the fire again, hugging close to it, as though it were the only cheerful, warm, reassuring thing in their lives. "Fire is a good thing," said John. He poked it and put on another log. He lit a cigarette. Marian spoke "It is dark outside." "There is no moon," he said. "Tomorrow we must buy candles," she said. He nodded. "Yes, these redwood walls, that high roof, those queer high angles - the few yellow bulbs do not light them up. This room should be as bright at night as it is by day. Otherwise it is bound to be spooky."

He saw Marian getting sleepy. "Suppose I sleep upstairs," he suggested. Her eyes opened with fright. "No, John." "All right," he said, "but how are we going to arrange it?"

Just then the wind hit a corner of the house and set off a pack of cracking popping noises. "What was that?" she asked, startled. "Nothing but the wind and the house," he said. "Wooden houses are like that, and I daresay redwood houses particularly. Perhaps it wasn't built any too snugly. We'll get used to it. Simply remember that it

28

is nothing but the wind and house. Now what about sleeping? Want me to sleep with you?" She said yes fervently. "But it is only a single bed," he reminded her, "we'll be a bit crowded." "I won't mind that," she replied, "I couldn't bear to sleep alone."

They closed the door on the living-room, shutting themselves in the small off-room. It was like closing the lid of a redwood box.

Before she fell asleep he said, "Caston is all right. Did you hear what he said? He looked at our two-people roadster and said we were in love. He recognizes that. What does it matter what else he says?"

"I don't know," was her muffled response.

For a long while he gazed as if blind into the black box and heard gusts of wind set off creaks and pops, and, now and again, swift scampering sounds as if huge light feet were flying across the roof. He felt chill. Snug sleeping Marian warmed him where their bodies touched. He wished they had loved each other before she dozed off. Love? He felt fear. He felt a creeping horror. He felt that only his naked will stood between him and paralysis. Rigid in a redwood box.

The waves beat the beach like a drum, and on the beach weird figues gathered, huddled in a bunch and swayed and chanted:

John, Marian, two in love,
Have come to Caromb, to Gull House
In Caromb, near our beach, near our drum,
Away from others where we can have fun,
And dance, and near the undertow
Dance to the beating of our drum,
John and Marian have come.

29

## IV

The expressman arrived with their trunks. He was solid and hefty of daylight earth. He felt like talking. "From the east? How is it there? Depression bad? You like the coast, eh? Well, I don't. How long are you going to be here?"

"Perhaps a month," said John.

"You've got a nice place out here."

"Yes, haven't we?" said John.

"I don't like Caromb."

"No, why?"

"Oh," said the man, "I don't like the sea. I live way back up there the other side of the town road but I can hear the sea pounding. Before I kind of got used to it it drove me crazy. Strange thing," he paused, "you are nearer it than I am but you don't get it so much here."

"No," said John, "I guess that mound, that rise of xix land sort of protects us. It is like the dirt-work of a trench."

"I see," said the man. "The shots fly over your head. You are just as lucky they do. They would drive me crazy, if I was as near as you - without the mound. Well, I hope you like it."

"I hope so," said John.

He had hardly closed the door when there was another rap. This time it was a man looking for work. He was in overalls. He looked rather well-kept, like a man who had had savings, just a little, to fall back upon. He smiled. He tipped his hat. "Sorry," said John, "we have nothing here. This is not our place. We have it for only a short time." The man went away. Four times that morning there were

30

for men looking work. "Oh, those poor fellows," said Marian. "There are so many of them. What do they do? How do their families live? Won't the country have to do something about them? Why aren't we actively helping to bring about a new order of things? I suppose we are, in our way, but the economic thing is so urgent and here, now."

John said nothing to Marian of what the expressman had said about the pounding of the waves and its affect on him. She seemed not to have noticed the waves like drum beats, and it was just as well. Yet, perhaps she had. Think of her the night before fancying a murderer on the balcony and keeping it all to herself. She was very strange that way - full of all kinds of imaginings and feelings which she set her face against and would not speak. Now the problem of unemployed men was bothering her - but jobless men were tangible, and about tangible things she usually said what she felt.

She unpacked the trunks. Her mood improved. She grew happy. The taking out of familiar things seemed to put her in touch with the times when they had been so warm together and inviolable in their love-world. A thing put here, a touch there - and Gull House was being filled by them. They were claiming it, giving content and atmosphere to what had been an empty redwood shell. John smiled with pleasure as he watched her transform the place. She smiled as she said, "Do you know what I felt like in bed last night?"

"No," he replied, "but I'll bet it was something awful."

"It was," she laughed. "I felt we were sealed in a coffin and that bats were flying over it and that all life is a tomb. Perhaps death really is a resurrection."

"Another cheerful feeling."

"Oh, I don't feel that way now. I really feel wonderfully well. The

31

The days are so different here. It is only when night comes on. I don't believe I've ever felt such a difference. Usually if I like a place I feel that the days are beautiful in one way, the nights are beautiful in another. But these nights scare me. Can't we arrange about the sleeping?

John considered. He said he thought he could bring a bed down from the second floor. Perhaps it could be put in her room, twin bed effect. No, she said, that would make it too crowded, and if it were crowded she knew she would again feel she was in a coffin.

John had a curious irrational sense that she, or some force, was pushing him away, parting them, working to dissolve their life, the world of shared experiences which they had worked for, loved, and been happy in. Something was forever at one, challenging whatever one was trying to create. Things never left one alone. Sometimes the things were important, like the difficult problems and crises they had struggled with and passed through. Sometimes the things were trifling, or apparently so, like the present matter. The furnishings of the house made it necessary that they sleep in separate beds. The size of the room commanded that they have separate rooms. Strange forces were at work.

The coffin idea was, of course, nonsense. She was making too much of it, investing it with too much feeling, letting it work on her. Coffin or no coffin he wanted to be in the same room with her. To him, a mutually shared bed-room was the very heart of married live. In it the whole atmosphere of man and woman, intimately related, was created. There the little things as well as great things became valuable, little personal things like hair pins and the dust of her powder on the polished surface of the dressing table. Marian, in

32

times past, had felt this even more strongly than himself. Now, at
the behest of an image, she was willing to sacrifice it all. No, sne
coula not bear to think of him sleeping on the second floor. But the
coffin image would not allow her to want him in with her. It was a
queer, a sort of insane criss-crossing of forces. Or was he himself
making a mountain out of nothing?

What he finally did was to bring a bed down and place it under the
far window under the gabled roof of the living-room. It did at least
this one good thing - it helped to fill the room. During the day they
could use it as a couch. It was a happy idea. Over it they put one of
their own blankets, a warm rich texture full of color. "Ah, that looks
fine," said John.

Marian went into the garden and gathered bunches of flowers and
arranged them, glorious clusters of yellow, orange, red and purple,
on the grey stone ledge above the hearth, on the tables,most every-
where a vase could rest. "It gets better and better," said John. "I
wouldn't be surprised if we would come to really like this place."

"I like it now," she said. "Look at that valley view. Could any-
thing be more wonderful? Whoever placed those French windows facing
the valley knew what he was doing. I've always wanted to live in a
place like this with the sea and the mountains altogether."

"Do you know what they say Purgatory is?" asked John. "Man's
internal suffering in the midst of great external beauty."

"Come outside, dear," she said, "the air and the sun are marvelous.
I wonder what birds those are singing."

Her hair brushing his bent cheek, their arms entwined and very
tender, they felt the sun entering them, melting the chill, the
remoteness, the surface and the deep interior ice to disappear in the

33

balmy air, and the flowers and the birds sang to them and they,
facing the bright valley, saw it lovely rolling away and opening and
the hills folding down and ever far far away.

"Oh, John, it is so lovely here. Your skin is golden. It is like
sunshine."

"You are lovely here," he said. "Nothing is so beautiful. God placed you here, down here on this little earth, to make radiation, and when he needs light in heaven he will take you there. So?"

"I won't go unless he needs you."

"I am afraid, dear, that each one goes as each one has to."

"But we are married, and so it must be that each two go as each two have to."

"Perhaps you are right. I hope you are. But, oh, my dear, how diminutive we are, here, now, in the sunshine gazing at the valley, holding each other - how underneath it all, with fleeting touch, the touch of hands surrendered to weave transience - the vast currents of life, the waves of earth, this great earth itself but a tiny floating ball and there, X X X X X vastly beyond where the clouds roll by, the curve of the universe - how sightless, blind, blind - oh, that my eyes might see and I might know towards what we are living and struggling."

"Is happiness the answer? Then we have it."

"Yes," he said, "the personal answer, from this or that, your or my individual point of view. It can be one's answer to himself, for himself. Your answer in relation to yourself and to me, my answer in relation to myself and to you. It can be man's answer to himself, for himself. But man is related to things outside himself, and for those other things there may have to be others answers. Things work out, not according to wish, but according to necessity; and, as you

34

know, I believe there are two kinds of necessity, one superior, the other inferior. Fate is superior necessity. Accident is inferior necessity. We, human beings, have as it were a choice. Some of us have chosen. All who have not are ruled by accident, and if they obtain happiness that too is an accident. You and I are in the steam of fate. But this does not, not yet, give us sight. We make our way blindly - just as we came to Caromb."

They heard a knock on the door. John went. "Hello," he said gladly. "We heard you might be here. Come in, come in, Arthur. How did you find us?" He led the way to the porch. "Marian, here is Arthur."
"Oh, hello," said Marian, holding out her hand. "Sit down with us. We were just sunning ourselves and looking at the valley."

"How do you like it in Caromb?" asked Arthur, smiling.

"But first," said John, "let me tell you how well you look. Caromb certainly agrees with you. We were told you are here for good. You should be. Marian, see those cheeks. Arthur is positively handsome."

Arthur's eyes flashed. He smiled with reserved delight. As always he was dressed well, with a dash of youth, white trousers, tweed coat, and his eager alert face. He offered John a cigarette. They had known each other in a different place. All three felt a curiously happy binding, a sort of kinship, thus meeting in Caromb.

Arthur talked. "I hope you are going to like it here well enough to stay on. I have finished with large cities. They have nothing to give me. All that is worst in our civilization congests in them. Here one has all that is best. I hope you will stay. It is a strange place. The people are strange. Well, people are strange everywhere. Have you met Caston? You know then he feels that young people make a mistake coming here. There are many here like Caston - well, not

35

like him, he is only like himself, but I mean others who feel, older
people who feel this is their place and who put up the bars against
youth. Then there are others for whom the country is too great. They
feel that everything about here is too great for them. It overwhelms
them. They drink to hide from it. You should see some of the parties."

"Why do they stay?" asked John.

"Oh," said Arthur, "some of them have come here to die because
they can live cheaply while they live. To move would be too expensive.
You will feel it here, a sort of guardedness, a tightfistedness for
which they are not to blame. They live on their incomes and now that
most incomes have been cut or almost lost they have to shrink accord-
ingly."

"Penurious?" asked John.

"Something like that," said Arthur, "not all of them by any means,
but it is in the atmosphere, nothing lavish, if you know what I mean."

Marian spoke up. "I'd rather be out here, wouldn't you Arthur? I'd
rather be out here and have to save and skimp than drudge in an
office."

"It depends," said John. "In business you may be a slave to some
one else's system. In penury you may be a slave to your own system.
You are the slave of a system in either case. The main question is
not whether one is here or there; it is a matter of, whatever the
condition and place, how fruitful or fruitless one's life is. Incident
ally, there is no such thing as an independent income. It is simply
a phrase, a manner of speaking. What is more to the point - both
salaries and incomes may soon be things of the past. The entire
system has collapsed. We are merely hanging on to a corpse, somehow
still managing to live on a rapidly disintegrating body. Without

36

realizing it we have turned vultures, big vultures, little vultures,
all of us, even the workingmen. But tell me one thing," he asked of
Arthur, "what do the women do?"

"Do you know Miss Roberts?" asked Arthur. "You mean women like
her?"

an

"Yes, but she is an exception. One could only ask of her in individual
terms. I mean the women in general. What do they do in Caromb?"

"I don't think I understand you," said Arthur.

"This is masculine country," said John, "beautiful but bonfy and
sombre. It is always sombre underneath, even now with the blue sky
and the white clouds and the sun shining. If you will pardon me, just
at this minute it reminds me of a giant's carcass covered with
green. Did you ever hear the story that the earth was built by a race
of giants? Well, I often wondered what happened to them when the job
was finished. Now I know. They trooped out here to Caromb and lay
down and died and there was no one to bury them so God simply covered
their bones with earth and the grass grew. See them. There they are."

"Don't say that, John," said Marian.

H

"There, you see," he said, "how can women stand it? Ah, now I
know. It is they who build the quaint little houses that huddle
together behind the trees in the village out of sight of all this.
Yes, dear women, and I can understand them, they are driven out of
sight to build cute little hiding places."

Arthur laughed guardedly. "You should see some of the parties,"
he said. But something seemed to restrain him from speaking much
about the country as if he feared that Caromb, overhearing him, might
revenge itself, so potently did the mountains seem like giants
listening, ever prepared to move forward and blot one out.

37

"Well," said Arthur, "I just dropped in and must be going. I want to bring you one of my pictures and I'd like to have you over at my place for tea soon."

"Yes," said John, "and you must drop in when you can't and we want you here for dinner."

Afterwards he said to Marian, "It was strangely good to see him, wasn't it? It was almost as if he were the first and only person we've met in goodness knows how long." "Wasn't it, though," she very much agreed; and a deep sigh came from her.

Later they went into town for shopping and the mail and they did not forget the candles. Gull House would be lighted that night.

And the seige of night was upon them.

They drew the curtains. John went towards the French windows. He opened the door and stepped out. Through the dusk, far to the east and up, high up in its sheltered mountain spot, he could dimly discern the white ranch house Arthur had told them about when he was describing the unique places scattered in remote nooks over the hills and up the valley. As John gazed he saw, to either side of the house as if they were suspended on tall rods, two blue-white lights come on. In the dusk they twinkled like two stars. He called Marian. "Look," he said. "I thought there were no beacons on this coast, but there they are - the stars of Caromb. I think I'll call them that."

Marian said, "Even on this side of the house we can hear the sea pounding. It is very still tonight - only the pounding."

"Have you noticed it much?" he asked. "Does it bother you?"

"No," she said, "I rather like it, but once when I woke up last night it sounded like someone pounding on our coffin. Now it sounds like drum beats. I don't mind it."

38

John again tried to draw the curtains over the French windows and the glass door but as on the previous evening large gaps were left for the outside dark to peer in.

On the long table they placed the peat holders, inserted the candles, and lit them. They backed off to see the effect. "No," said Marian, "they won't do. They are funerall looking, as if on a befun. They make the place look ghostly."

John laughed, "Well, it seems we have coffins and caskets and befunrs enough to set up in business. We should make some profit out of Gull House. In any case, I've put that high light on. You can keep your eye on the balcony. Do you still feel someone is up there?"

"Yes," she said, "but he doesn't scare me so much tonight, but isn't this a perfect setting for a murder story."

"Why not write one," he suggested. "That too might be profitable."

He felt the vacant uninhabited spaces of the house. Suddenly he strongly wished they had invited people to dinner. A gay dinner party, just one, that was what the place needed. He and Marian, alone, were not enough. They simply were not. They seemed to have forgotten how to be voluble and happy. They were too grave, too silent, watching what they said and did as if unseen eyes and ears were all about the house. They seemed to have forgotten how to be close and intimate. It was as though a wedge were between them, as though something were working upon them, draining them of blood and substance, making them as empty as the place.

The empty chairs, stood around impressing their vacancy upon them, at least upon him; and it was a physical impossibility that they occupy all the chairs. Marian did not seem to mind - and who would, under ordinary circumstances. Yes, but this was an unusual circumst-

39

ances, an unusual housex, not ordinary chairs. They, all of them,
should be occupied. All of the chairs in the world should be occupi-
ed. There should be nothing vacant anywhere. All the rooms, all the
houses, all the fields and the towns. People should fill the earth.
They should fill the universe. The world should be thick with people.
In any case, these chairs, these Gull House chairs, should be filled.
Just once he wanted human bodies in them. He wanted human voices
to fill the room and impress it with the fact that people did dare
talk and make noise, that they coughed and laughed and blew their
noses. He wanted human sounds to ascend and fill the gabled roof
and the queer angles over the balcony. He wanted to prove something
to Gull House. "Marian," he said, "we should return invitations to
our Caromb friends." He expected opposition. She surprised him by
giving none. He went to the phone at once. Thursday evening, he told
everyone.

"There," he said. "I feel better. I've broken something. Something
had a hold on me. By the way, wasn't that a fine thing Miss Roberts
did, turning her house over to us?"

"It really was," she said, answered.

"She is a remarkable person. And do you know what she told me
about you? She said anyone could see how wonderful you are." Marian
was touched and pleased. He continued, "I told her, by the way,
that we are expecting a child."

"What did she say?" was her quick question.

"What we would expect of her. The women here, even those who have
not been mothers, seem to still have some feeling about it and for
it. I wish you had a real friend here. I've always felt that women
need and should have women with them when life is coming. Men do
not fill the bill. There are subtle things which only women can

40

give and share. Some of the old societies must have recognized this.
Modern life ignores it - and we pay a heavy price. If things go on at
the present rate the time will come when motherhood is taboo - I mean
that pregnancy will be something to be ashamed of, and all people
will exist in deserts because any growing thing will offend them."

"I wish Meridel was here," said Marian.

"Yes," said John, "and I wish your mother was here."

Later, as they sat before the fire John suddenly realized that an
expectancy had already formed in him, an expectation that something
to be feared would surely come upon them in Gull House. "Superstition,"
he said aloud. "What?" asked Marian with a slight start. "Nothing,"
he said, but they gazed at each other queerly. "Yes, it was," she
pressed. "Tell me. Tell me what you have been thinking. You look
sad. John, you are not sad, are you?"

"Sad? No. That is the way my face is built. They used to always
tell me I looked sad. I didn't feel it. Not often. I was just wonder-
ing why we have come to this remote corner of the earth. I sort of
feel cut off from everything."

Marian's tone was curiously irritated, as though she felt and
were resenting some criticism he had made of her. "I don't. I don't
feel cut off. I have never lived in such a beautiful spot."

He shrugged. "As one feels it..."

Later he tucked her in bed and kissed her goodnight. He made sure
that all of the doors were locked, switched off the lights, and
climbed into his bunk in the large vacant room under the gabled
roof.

The fire, still flickering in the hearth, sent a dim glow into
the otherwise dark room, and spurts of unsteady light. John with

41

face turned towards the room looked. Their two empty chairs, as they had left them before the hearth, stood out. He could imagine them as huddled ghosts. But the notion of ghosts did not disturb him. Let Gull House be haunted. What was in the house did not frighten him. He suddenly made this distinction, realized this, and thought it strange. The creaks, the feet of the wind upon the roof, the queer flickering shapes - they were not disturbing. Yes, Marian could send chills through him, and it was she who was afraid of what was in the house. Through her he could be upset. He himself - and he knew his ears were straining for sounds, perhaps footsteps, from outside. Yes, he was in a shameful dull terror of what might come in.

But what might come in? Burglars? It was possible but not probable that such a body would present itself. Besides, what if one did? The common variety of house thief was as old fashioned and as harmless as a ghost.

Gangsters? They were far more formidable. They were spreading out, from the big cities spreading their guns and power and disregard of life, a vast cold network out and out. Soon even the farms would be run by racketeers. If one wished for a one-class society his wish would speedily come true - a society of racketmen. Gangsters, the logical outcome of competitive society, of the rank growth of the acquisitive urge, of power divorced from human values. They were embodiments and symbols of forces which menaced everything constructive thing in life.

Armies of men, unemplyed, were drifting over the land, gathering rebellion to sweep and break and kill because they had been taught that only by killing can one have life and living was being denied them.

42

Even boys were turning criminal to buy gasoline to take their
sweethearts for a ride.

Yes, with vengeance men were taking men for rides.

Yet Caromb was a remote spot, and Gull House a remote house in
Caromb. But physical distance had not much to do with it. The thing
was in the air; and the air carried swiftly and was all-circulating,
all-touching. No longer was there such a thing as an island fastness.
Gull House was within the range of the stars - as much so as a so-called
zone in the midst of the roar of traffic.

He chanced to recall what a police captain had once told his
father and his father had passed on to him. "Don't do anything. Pre-
tend you are sleeping and keep in bed. A man who is desperate enough
to enter your house is desperate enough to kill you. Leave him alone.
Your life is more valuable than your possessions. Let him have them.
If you don't go after him he'll take what he wants and go. He doesn't
want you. You, unless you trouble him, are no concern of his. He
wants to live. He wants to get what he needs and escape. Let him
get it and let him escape. If you bother him he'll likely kill you."

This solved that matter. Then, however, he pictured a burglar
stealing entering Marian's window. She persisted in having it open. She
said she had to have the air. He locked all the others. He imagined
her terrified scream. He could not bear that. No, for God's sake no,
no scream from her. It would unstring him. It would set his jaws
jabbering helplessly. It was this he feared, this helplessness, this
that could be done to him through her. But would such a thing actu-
ally happen? In past emergencies, he knew, the shock of the event
had suddenly released in him a deep dark titanic force, a terrific
conquering thing.

43

In any case he had a clue. The imagining of Marian's scream and its effect upon him had given him a clue. He was vulnerable, he realized, through her; and he feared that what might happen to him through her would weaken him so that he would be unable to protect her, to protect himself, to defend them from the swirling attacks of of the world's evil, the evil he sensed bearing down on them in Caromb. O blind. O helpless.

It was a new sensation, something a single man never felt; a new position, a new relationship, a new responsibility which marriage exposed him to.

Weapons were of no use. If he filled the house with weapons, if the whole town armed, so easily could the world outnumber and defeat them. He was thrown back upon himself, back utterly. And himself cast him upon his fate, and his fate doubled him back ultimately upon the force within himself - this, and the living forces of the world.

He wondered if other men had heard their wives and children scream and if their awakened sense of vulnerability, their aroused feeling of a demand for a protection they feared they might not be able to give, had driven them to erect defenses which ironically became causes for other men to erect defenses - with everyone frightened and suspicious of the other, but mostly frightened each one by fear of his own helplessness. And had women heard men scream. And had both heard children scream. And had children seen the terror of their parents. And was the whole world fighting itself to defend itself, killing to live, made insane by a basic insecurity - an obsession, a horrible insanity which had convinced itself that by aggression we defend, by destroying we build, by hating we love, by doubting we have faith, by strangling we are made free.

44

Or was there no insanity in it? Was man sanely desiring hate, and
the force to hate anything which even seemed like love; doubt, and
the power to doubt and destroy even the semblance of faith; death,
and the will to kill even notions of life? Then man was lost. Horrible
though it was, it were far better that he be mad, a mad destroyer -
for insanity can be cured.

Suddenly from the dark of her room John heard Marian cry, "Oh,
help me. Somebody help me." But he had heard this cry before and knew
it was from a nightmare. He answered calmly, "What is it, dear?" His
words carried to her, partially awakening her. "What?" she asked. Then
he heard her turn over and there was silence.

From how many others, from what vast number of covered conscious-
nesses were there cries into the night for help?

But of them, of himself and Marian - was there some disembodied
force working on them here in Caromb? Was it trying to get him, to
get them? Was it wedging them apart, the better to strike? This was
superstition, but it was a fact that something was separating them,
as symbolized by the placing of their beds. Nor was it mere feeling
that some sensitivity, some sense or feeling was going to sleep in
her as though it or she were being chloroformed. She was becoming so
with drawn attention that at times he felt she was an utter stranger. Did she
have a similar feeling about him?

All at once he felt horror rising in him, horror of that nameless
thing which was looming upon them from the outside world. And into
his mind there came a means of protection from it, a devise he had
long ago picked up in a book of magic; and without a shade of protest
from his modern civilized self he promptly used it. Mentally he drew

46

V

Several days passed - mornings, forward-gleaming mornings of clear and misty things - evenings, nights of shadow and black wings.

Marian increased. Obviously, even to John, she was increasing in Caromb. The air, sea and mountain, braced her. The temperature, neither too warm nor too chill, was pleasantly stimulating. Never had her physical condition been so vital and bouyant. Each day she awoke with a happy smile or laugh. She found pleasure in the housework. The garden continued to delight her. Yes, Marian was happy in a strange new way, strange to John and curiously disquieting because it seemed a self-inspired thing arising from within herself independently of him - strange, disturbing, and he could not help but feel that somehow it was put on, that in some way it was willfully perverse. Yet neither could he deny its authenticity.

A probable explanation came to him when he remembered what he was prone to forget - that she was with child. There were no marked signs as yet, and nothing had occurred to make him realize it. But might not what he forgot be with her constantly, ever present as a quiet singing in her consciousness? He did not know but he had heard tell that women in pregnancy usually acquired a self-arising happiness a contentment, a self-sufficient bouyant sense which, in a way, withdrew them from men. Having been fulfilled by sex, bearing its fruit, they felt no need and no desire for further sex contacts - and this condition symbolized their general state. Perhaps this was it. Perhaps all the rest were merely his imaginings; and what he had felt to be a supernatural wedging apart of their lives was no more and no less than perfectly natural biology. He assumed it was so, and, for a time, felt reconciled to this new Marian and to this

47

sombre beautiful Caromb. He even went so far as to consider permanently settling in Caromb, and with this in mind he especially eyed all houses or plots of ground which bore for sale signs.

Marian, though her fondness for the large day-bright living-room had grown, continued having an aversion for the second floor. John, then, felt doubly called upon to inhabit it. Each day he did inhabit it to this extent - he always shaved in the upper bathroom.

From the window he could see over the roof of their nearest neighbor beyond to the dark green slope of the mountain south of the valley, and, at the foot, the white building which he had first taken to be a church. Now he knew it was a nunnery, the home of the Caromb nuns - just what it should have been to fit in with the mediaeval aspect of Caromb. Over that way, too, though concealed by a hill, was a mission. The original had long since crumbled, but part of the old dull-earth wall still stood and the rest had been restored, and the grave of its founder was nearby, the father who had established missions all along the coast but whose favorite was the mission of Caromb.

John wondered what manner of men belonged in Caromb - white, black, red, brown? Rugged grey spirits braced with patience and fortitude, men like Jordon. Yet Caromb was dark and sombre. John had something dark, intensely dark in him, and, yes, sombre too. Often he had seen people gaze at him with the expression and the feeling he had for Caromb. Perhaps he also belonged. Perhaps his spirit, long restless for its home on earth, had at last found its true dwelling place.

But not completely could he accept this, for ever so often the shadow would arise and fold over him, and he would be filled with

48

that strange foreboding, that underlying horror, and that specific
dred of night. Sometimes in broad daylight as he was driving through
town the fear would grip him suddenly. He would feel overcast, marked,
doomed, and he would peer at each face he passed anxious to find if
the fear were peculiar to him or if it were shared by all the people
of the village.

On their day-faces he could discern no signs of it. They moved
about the shopping district like the folk of any other town. In the
stores they sold bread and meat and groceries like tradespeople
anywhere. He envied their complacency. He ached for it. Gladly would
he have foregone any distinction he may have had - and his imagination-
if once, one night, he might like them return to cozy snug undisturb-
ing homes.

But he came to note one thing. Yes, they too were marked, but
perhaps not by fear, but marked. In all of them he sensed a strange
subtone of seriousness. Under the green the mountains were sombre.
Under their smiles the men were serious. They were curiously seri-
ous. And they were silent. They spoke, but it was as if nothing had
been said, and the words faded and the sounds passed away. Men of
closed lips, he called them - sealed by Caromb. Even from boys on the
street, from children at play, there came no noise, no shouts, no
gay laughter. Truly, the youths smiled and often they were beautiful,
but they did not sing. And about everyone was a haunting something,
as though unspoken but mutually understood was the common expecta-
tion that one day the piper would come and lead them through the
door of the mountain.

Thursday evening arrived, and the dinner party. The people came.

49

They trooped in. John could not dismiss the impression this time. They trooped in. He felt guilty to feel it, as if he were wronging them to characterize their entrance with ghost-significances. He liked them. They had been very kind and cordial to himself and Marian. Yet feel it he did. They trooped in.

They admired the large living-room with its gabled roof. They praised the view of the valley from the French windows. This was, they agreed, without doubt the finest location in Caromb.

They asked how John and Marian were enjoying it. Did they like Caromb? Marian was truthfully enthusiastic. John sincerely said it was the most impressively beautiful spot he had ever seen. He did not want to speak of the sombre undertone. He dared not mention the fear. He had a fantastic notion that at the mere word he would see everyone's hair stand on end as before them a frightful shape materialized.

They ate. Later they filled the chairs, and John felt satisfied. Their voices carried up. The roof and the queer angles above the balcony were filled. They invited John and Marian to visit them. Then they left. They trooped out - and not a trace of them remained.

In the empty room John and Marian stood looking at each other. Each knew what the other felt. Her face was almost aghast. "Why, how queer," she said. "I felt no contact, not the slightest contact with any of them."

"Nor I," said John. "Is it us? Is it them? Is it the house?"

The next morning there was fog so thick it misted the panes and drizzled on the stone porch. A few feet beyond the house they could see nothing. The external world seemed to have disappeared. But the

insert

( insert page 49 )

Marian shivered, as if she were now aware of an ice that had been collecting in her; and John, gazing at her, suddenly remembered her fear that she would freeze to death. All along he had joked about it, assuming it was a fear of physical cold. Now, all at once, it was a serious thing to him, and a chill something shot through him. It might be a fear of spiritual cold, a fear that she would be iced and frozen from life. Ah, Marian...

"What is one to do?" she managed to ask. She was fighting against her increasing paralysis. "You say we should have fruitful inter-relationships. I do too. Oh, I do. We should. I want them. But how can one have them when people are so remote and queer and act as if they were dead? Competition would be better. It would be better if they hated each other and fought and clawed."

John could do nothing but shrug. "I don't know," he said. "There is a strange and very pronounced unrelatedness here. The people are not related to this country. They are not related organically either to the land or to the sea. They do not work the soil. They do not work the water. They have no productive relations or connections with Caromb. And so - they have no productive connections with each other. This may be the explanation. If it is, there is not much that we can do. One cannot easily remake an artificial into an organic thing."

He finished speaking, and he knew he had said nothing at all to really help her.

50

delivery boy came from the grocery. As he was plumping down the
packages John said to him, "Well, we are having a bit of rain to-
day. Too bad."

"It ain't raining," said the boy. "This ain't rain." His voice was
reproving, as if he felt that John should know better.

"No?" said John. "I'm sorry. What is it?"

"This is fog."

"Oh," said John, "pardon me."

"It's all right," said the boy.

John called to Marian, "My dear, this is fog."

"Oh, is it?" she laughed. "Yes," he said, "this is an example of
what we may expect most any time. Fog like rain. I wonder what
happens when it really rains."

Towards noon the fog dispersed, but then clouds came and the sky
remained overcast. John felt the need of a change. He said change
but he knew he meant, if not escape, a most decided respite, some-
thing different, softer, brighter, away from Caromb and its sea and
its pounding and its hills and their dark looming green. He suggested
a trip up the valley.

They curved down the hill pass the earth-colored mission. They
found the valley road. The road wound along close to the northern
range of hills, so that nothing save the foot of the slopes could
be seen to the right, but to the south the valley spread out until
stopped by the mountains, and most of the valley floor was under
cultivation - huge acreages of artichokes, pear orchards, all regu-
lar and orderly, and occasional ranch houses. The road was higher
than the valley floor and they could look down upon it.

Soon they were in sunshine. Marian gave cries of joy as scene

51

after scene, all strange and beautiful, unfolded. John too at first,
seeing with his hopes and expectations rather than with his eyes,
liked it. Then he began feeling that closed in, oppressive sensation
again; but he kept silent because he did not want to spoil the thing
for her. He felt the high slopes folding down on him, bearing down,
hemming him, pushing, rolling like huge shoulders upon and against
him.From this view the frame of the mountains did indeed look like
the protruding ribs and bones of giants too large for their graves.

Somehow the vegetation made it worse. He would rather have been
in a bare jagged canyon or among the stark sand-hills of the
desert.

It was still. Nothing stirred. The leaves were still. Only the
purr of the car and the noise of its tires on the gravelled road.
It was empty. Suddenly with a start he realized it was empty, fertile
but empty. There were no cattle grazing on the slopes, no horses
in the yards, no sheep in the pens, no men in the fields. Not one
single man, one human figure, had they seen. Yet everything was
orderly and cultivated. It gave him an eerie feeling, as if invisible
hands had worked a fertile valley for food they could never use.

The road began winding. The valley narrowed. It narrowed and narrowed. In front
At length they came to a sight which made even Marian want to
turn back. They were approaching a group of trees more strange than
any they had ever seen. The trunks were as large as great oaks. They
were colored a ghastly grey. And ghastly grey were the limbs and the
queer foliage which bore them downward. They seemed dead, yet they
were alive, a live forest of them. To John they seemed like gaunt
arms stuck up from the earth with the hands fallen at the wrist -
as though some body underground had thrust up a hundred arms in a
vain attempt to grasp the air and disentomb itself, and, failing -

52

there the livid bones stood with fingers trailing.

They turned back quickly. As they neared the mouth of the valley
John felt space again and was glad he was emerging at Caromb. But
they had run under clouds again. The air was chill. Marian thought
she saw a man in a field. It was only a scarecrow, and there were
no crows, no men, not a single living soul. Somewhere off in the
distance a dog barked and as they skirted the sea they seemed to
hear a different kind of bark, perhaps seals. They wondered if there
were seals far out on the rocks of Point Goros.

That night John suddenly rebelled. There was no earthly reason why
they should remain in Caromb and he determined to persuade Marian
of it.

"Let's call quits," he began abruptly. She gazed up at him as he
leaned against the stone body of the chimney, waiting for him to
continue. "I think we have seen enough of Caromb, all we need to see.
I know you love the flowers and the sea and the mountains, but, after
all, these are physical things and we can find them anywhere."

"But, John," she said, "I like it here."

"I know you do," he said. "Don't value your senses so much."

His tone rasped her. "We have done nothing but travel," she said
with critical irritation. "We do not nothing but move from place to
place. You hardly come to rest but what you want to move on. I can't
bear the thought of having to pack the trunks and looking for an-
other house in another town and having the telephone connected and
the water turned on and the electricity."

"Yes," he said, "but it seems to me that it is I who take care
of those things and as for the other matter - if you will remember,
we stayed in the last place a month, and before that it was two

53

months. Besides, you were quite willing that we stay here only for
a week for a trial. What if we have paid a month's rent? That is not
important, not as important as some other things."

"I know," she said, softening somewhat, "but John, I really like
it here."

"What do you like?" he asked. "The people? You do not. How can
you? They are all right. Yes, in a way, I like them. They are our
kind. And yet - there is that strange lack of contact. Nothing circ-
culating. No special warmth. No drawing. No deep meetings. Nothing
basic in common towards which we all are moving. No building. No
growth. It would be the same if we lived here twenty years. We see
them. They come. They go. And nothing has happened. I've never in
my life experienced such a thing. It must seem queer to them too.
Doubtless we seem as strange to them as they seem to us. They too
wonder what's the matter. I sometimes feel that they feel we are
marked, marked *XXX* for some special fate they don't want to get
drawn into. I know, I'm doubtless seeing it all through myself. One
usually does to some extent, and there's every chance that just now
I am doing it altogether. But it is not merely fancy that they came
here last night and left and took nothing of us with them and left
nothing of themselves with us. It would be better if we were com-
pletely off to ourselves, seeing no one. Now I can understand Jordon
and his tower. The whole thing may be in us, or, if you will, in
me. But it is a fact that it is in me, and, frankly, I want to do
something about it."

Marian said nothing. She merely gazed at him. He could sense her
agreeing with his impressions and yet holding out against him in the
matter of acting. Usually he could persuade her. Now, not a thing

54

had he done. He tried again, and this time he hurt her. He was
sorry. She kissed him and made up; but not an inch had she budged.
So finally he asked, "You really want to stay? The place means that
much to you?" "Yes, John," she said simply. "I give up," he said.
"I'll swear I do not understand you, but if it means that much to
you we'll stay. I'll work out of my state. Perhaps it will be better
so."

Still later that night, to the pounding of the drum, the figures
gathered on the beach. They had grown in size. They had increased
in number, and all of them wore false hoofs. One prominent amongst
them had set the fashion, so they all wore false hoofs. And they
huddled in a bunch and swayed and chanted:

John, Marian, two in love,
Have come to stay in Caromb,
In Gull House near our drum,
We will have fun, we will have fun,
Oh, John, Oh, Marian, drum, drum, drum,
To our drum, come, to our beach, come,
Ye-i-o-u-m, ye-i-o-u-um!

55

VI

There was a rap on the door. John went. He would not let Marian answer the door or even the telephone. He opened it. At once he felt caught in a vortex of swirling crackling force. It was like the experience with the ghost-keeper of the rooming-house - only, he was on the inside this time. Outside was a man. John looked at him and had a wild notion he was one of the creeping dwarf pines trying to hunch into his house. He had an impulse to slam the door.

"Good morning," said the man, smiling and bowing. "Are you Mr Andrews, Mr John Andrews?"

In spite of the things swirling in him John could not help but notice the man's pleasant voice, his chubby, innocent, youthful looks. He caught hold of himself. He checked his wild impressions. He tried to still the strange upheaval inside of him. He tried to make his voice sound calm and civil. "Yes, I am. What do you want?"

"I was told you were here," the man said, continued, but now he showed a queer embarrassment, "and I came to see if you would give me an interview for our paper."

"Oh," said John, laughing. He noticed the man's embarrassment but assumed that his own odd behavior had been communicated to him. A newspaper reporter was not a hunching pine. "What paper?" he asked.

"The local paper. I write for it and do a number of jobs including reporting."

was
John smiled. This was different. What had all of his commotion been about? A number of his friends, visiting Caromb, had been given good

56

write-ups in the local paper. He had sort of expected that something
like this might happen to him.

The man went on, "We heard you were in Caromb and wanted to get
your impressions of it and a few things about yourself. If you are
busy I can call again."

A hunching pine would not say, "If you are busy I can call again."
John heard himself saying, "No, I am not busy just now. Come in."

The man bowed and followed John.

"This is my wife," said John by way of introducing Marian. The man
bowed but glanced strangely at her.

She felt something queer. She felt it at once, strongly. She withdrew from the men as far as she could, taking a chair back from the fire.

John sensed her state. He wondered if she felt struck by the
vortex thing. He caught hold of himself. He forced the idea from his
mind. He would not allow himself to be victimized by wild foolish
notions.

They talked about Caromb. They talked about John's travels. And
as they talked both John and the man became more at ease. The man
asked for his impressions of the condition of the country, particularly
for
his views as regards men and women and the increasing difficulties
experienced in the man-woman relationship.

Then, suddenly, with a return of his queer embarrassment, the man
said, "Now about yourself -" He paused as if he did not want to go
on.
John felt that strange swirling start up. He tensed involuntarily.
"Yes?" said John.

The man swallowed and brought out, "We hear you are just married."
He twitched and seemed to be under considerable strain, but his

57

eyes peered eagerly.

In spite of himself John felt the vortex again. Again he saw the
man hunching and peering. He paused. He handed him the key and slam
his face. With enforced calm he replied, "Not just. It is a number
of months now."

The man nodded strangely and asked, "Is this your honeymoon?"

John paused. He was struggling with himself. He would not let
those wild fancies master him. Finally he said, "I suppose you could
call it that, though again some time has passed."

Why was he so tense against this subject? Yes, of course. He knew
now. If the local paper wanted his general impressions and views,
good. He was used to having his ideas made public, and a bit of
publicity of the right kind was a helpful thing. But his marriage
was private, strictly so, and he wanted it kept private.

But why was the man twitching and perspiring so, as if he felt he
were treering upon unmentionable themes, as if he were being forced
to do something he did not want to do? There was something very odd
in this. What was it all about?

man

The man glanced at the floor uncomfortably. He jerked up, acquiv-
er with excitement. "We heard that you and your wife are really in
love!" the words came out under pressure. "Are you?" he paused
and twitched. "Are you really? Will you verify that for me?"

"Verify it!" John exclaimed. His head was whirling. Had he really
heard the man or was he imagining it? Were these the man's words?
Was this incredulous tone his actual tone?

Marian quickly leaned forward as though she wanted to shout, "What
is the matter? What is the matter with us? Why is it all so strange?
What is the matter with you, man? Haven't you ever seen or heard of

58

a man and a woman being in love?"

"And may I," asked the man. His body worked with the same queer embarrassment. His voice had the same incredulous tone. "May I bring up one more point? I have read your writings and from all we gather you believe in life, I mean, you really do believe in it."

"True," said John promptly. He was more in command of himself, more at ease. This was a matter which could be printed, and he reasoned that since it interested the man a development might keep him away from private subjects. "I do," he repaid, "but why does it seem so odd?"

"It interests me." He had toned down. He too was evidently trying to check himself. "Would you mind talking about it?"

"On the contrary," said John, "I'd be glad to, briefly. What would you like to know?"

The man swung one chubby leg over the other. Nervously he lit a cigarette. Then he remembered to offer John one. He smiled. He wiped his head. "Well, just how did it come about, this belief? Not many people have it, you know, and now that the world is smashing and God has gone and even belief in paper wealth has been destroyed - why, nothing is left, nothing at all. Don't you see? It would make a corking good story and besides I am personally interested. I suppose like all of us, you experienced the usual doubts and disillusions?"

John said to himself, "Well, this is more like it." The man seemed sober and rational all at once. All of the queer thing had passed. His ideas and his questions were sane and comprehensible. Even his appearance had changed. In any case John saw him differently. There was a healthy red glow in his cheeks, life in his voice. He was

59

a flesh and blood daylight human being, substantial, palpable,
capable of interests and contacts - even though he had come to pry
into their affairs.

"Yes," said John, expanding, "I had many if not all of them; but,
for some not yet explained reason, I did not stop there. I did not
come to rest there. If you hit bottom hard enough you will rebound
up. You see what I mean?"

The man nodded. He removed his glasses and wiped them.

"The trouble with us is," John continued, "that even in going down
we go half way half heartedly with buffers about us and ourselves
cringing at most small pains and fears. Even when we sink we do not
shake free of our incompetence to live."

"That's a good point and an excellent line," said the man enthusiastically. He glanced with admiration at John. "I'd like to put that down." He scribbled on his pad. "Please go on."

"Well," said John, "once, a number of years back, life took me
down - and then, by grace, I came up. Later I learned, as one learns
by often diving into the sea, how it is done, and I acquired in some
measure the ability to take others, who wished to go, down - and aid
them to come up. I am speaking of purification as a necessary step
towards the perfecting of humans."

Marian interrupted him. "John," she began. She stopped. "Nothing,"
she said. She was sure he was talking in terms the man would not
understand, but perhaps it was better to let him go on. She felt the
change. She saw the man's admiration. Maybe some good would come of
it.

"Last summer," he went on, "a number of us went swimming, and

60

what I saw happen forever removed whatever of doubt may have still remained in me. I saw life grow. I saw life grow beyond the stage where it is generally assumed it stops growing. I saw my wife grow. Since then we have been swimming together. What one sees, if he sees, is a sound basis for what one believes. Thus I believe. Have I answered your question? Have I said enough?

The man had been taking notes and now he eagerly exclaimed, "There is a sea here. Why not try it here? I would join. I know others. Caromb is just the place! Now where was it that your experiment of last summer took place?"

"In Paula," said John. "There is where we live."

"And what were the names of the other people?"

John gave several...

"Let us by all means do it here," said the man. "And would you mind if I made a story of this for a Mala paper, with photographs of you and your wife? It would be a splendid thing. People should know of this. Nothing like it has even happened in the country before. It is especially important now, with everyone doubting, with everyone feeling that the world is coming to an end. They should know about this. May I?"

John saw Marian recoil. He himself recoiled. He felt he had been tricked and trapped. All of the vortex feelings whirled in him again. But as though something else were speaking through him he heard his voice say, "Yes, you may."

The man gathered his notes and prepared to leave, He thanked John. His face beamed. His queer embarrassment was very evident. He shook hands. His hand, moist, trembled. He said he would return the next day for the photographs.

["61", "And what is your name?" John asked.", "\"Dunney,\" said the man, \"Cal Dunney.\"", "He bowed out. John slammed the door.", "\"Too late,\" he said to himself with stinging bitterness. \"The horse is out.\" He gripped his feelings. He shoved them down and back. He made himself smile and appear calm and poised. Marian was swiftly coming towards him, her body agitated, her face and eyes weird, horrified. She must not know how he felt.", "She clutched him. \"John,\" she cried, \"don't, don't!\"", "He tried to soothe her. She plunged on. \"Don't let him take the photographs. Everything was so queer. I felt we were in a frightful whirlpool. I felt we were in that forest of those livid bearded trees with a body underground thrusting up a hundred arms to grip us and disemtomb itself. He was just like Caston. He thought we were queer. He tricked you. John, he tricked us. He got you to speak and then said what he wanted it for. Why was he so excited, as if he had never seen or heard of two people being in love? John, what does that mean? He XXX going to do something to us.\"", "John smiled and patted her hand. \"There, there, dear, don't work yourself up. Dunney is all right. Yes, he was queer in the beginning, but he came around. I've already told you that several men I know have come here to Caromb and they have given them good write-ups. I sort of thought something like this might happen. It is just as well.\"\nHe talked hard. He was persuading himself as well as her, giving her no chance to arouse the whirlpool feelings in him. \"The papers here have a clean, a cultured tone, because this is a cultured community. Besides, the small town newspapers are not like the metropolitan press. Whatever is written will be acceptable. I'm glad the people of"]

62

Caromb will read the ideas. Something good may happen here. We may start something. Don't worry, dear. You'll see, it will work out all right."

"It won't," she said. "I feel it. I know it. How can you believe the people will read the ideas? Do you think Dunney understood what you said?"

"Of course he did, at least some of it."

"But, John," she tried to show him, "don't you see? Even if Dunney is all right - and he is not because he wouldn't have tricked you if he were - but even if he is, and even if the papers here are all right - that is not the point. It is the Mala newspapers, what they will do. You yourself say that the metropolitan press - "

"I know," he said, "but what can they do. Yes, they may sensationalize it."

"The photographs, John," she reminded him, "and Dunney's strange incredulous attitude - oh, something awful will happen. I feel it. I know it."

He was thoughtful. At length, seeing that he had completely failed to persuade her, he felt it would be best to admit something. Gazing at her gravely he said, "Not desirable. You are quite right." A shiver went down him. "But it just happens that we have not much choice. The horse is already out. Dunney has caught fire. He feels, from some reason unknown to us, that it a big thing. If we refuse him - you see, the thing is already out, out of our hands. If we refuse him the photographs he can go ahead and use the material anyway and set fire to the Mala press and down upon us will come reporters and cameramen and we will be prisoners here, prisoners of the press in Gull House. We do not want that. We do not want to be penned in

63

here, And we would have to stay in behind locked doors. We would hate that. The minute we stepped out they would shoot us. What is there to do? If they come we must meet them half way. Theirs is a game. If they tag you you've got to play - or, run and hide where they can't follow or find - but that in itself would make a howling good story. "The Andrews Escape." "The Andrews are Being Tracked." "The Andrews are Found." "Here They Are!" I can just see the headlines. No, no, we wouldn't want that. Well, we have been tagged. We can do nothing but play along until they get tired."

"But, John -"

"Yes, dear, I know. We can wish it hadn't happened. But that does nothing good. Come, darling, don't take it so hard. Don't exaggerate it. Nothing much has happened yet, I mean nothing to be so disturbed about."

"It has," she said. "I am not exaggerating. I know what I saw and felt. So do you. You won't admit it. You rationalize. You are too optimistic and trusting. What will happen now?"

"No, not really. I don't think anything will. Yes, I wish we had known in advance that Dunney was connected with that Mala paper. I would have talked less. But what would we have done, run from him? He has nothing against us. You can see he is decent - at least he wants to be. His paper has nothing either. It is their business to print news, and news, my dear, is whatever breaks a law or a custom, or whatever has never been done before. Thus criminals and outlaws are news. Thus great men and great events are news, for they always do something that is not usual. We - well, what we do and have done is not news to us but it may be news to others. To love in an age of hate, to believe in an age of doubt - yes, this may be news, if this is an age of hate and doubt. We can do nothing but wait and

64

see. I do wish, though, oh, my dear, I wish very deeply that you had
not been drawn into it."

Marian had gone to the window and was standing there gazing out,
her back to him. She seemed not to have heard his last words, not to
have felt what he conveyed in them. But she had. His feeling had reach-
ed and touched and opened her, drawing her to him. Soon she was so
filled with a sense of union with him that she felt superior to all
that only a short while ago had assailed her. To be with him, this was
what she most desired and valued most. Let them be together, and noth-
ing could harm them. All other things, even the distressing things,
were comparatively unimportant.

Still without looking at him she spoke. Her tone was curiously
calm, casual, almost irrelevant. "The mountains are beautiful today.
We must take some pictures, John. One of the house and one of the
garden and one of the sea and one of the mountains. I want to send
them to mother. She would love it here." She turned around and smiled.
He could see that the upheaval had left her. She was poised and state-
ly. She went to him placed an arm through his and led a very surpris-
ed John to the window.

"Mother, you know," she went on, "doesn't like most of the places
she goes because she misses her garden. She would love this. I wish
she were with us. We haven't heard from her for a long while now. I
hope she isn't sick."

He wanted to ask what had happened, how she had come to change
so quickly. She was amazing that way. At one minute she would seem
completely under a thing. At the next, she would be flowing majest-
ically above it.

"I hope not," he replied, smiling his admiration; and now he felt

65

her change affecting him, making him feel so very much better, more
sure of himself, more capable of handling whatever might arise. "Yes,
wouldn't it be fine if she were here. I'd feel more at home, more
that we were a family. We could fill Gull House. Just the two of us
are not enough. Two are enough for romance, yes? More are needed for
life. I'd love to see her in the garden. Perhaps we can persuade
her to come. It is still cold in Paula. She would like the spring
out here. Come to think of it, we haven't been getting from any one,
not many, have we?"

She smiled up at him and shook her head.

"No," he said, "it is as if the whole world, our world, all the
life we formerly knew and so deeply belonged to - before we took
this western detour - it has proceeded, back, back there far far off
beyond the hills beyond the valley - oh, ye gods, far beyond the
valley."

Gull House, and John and Marian in it, on earth, the deep earth,
blocks of elements, events, and dry fire. The body of earth speeds
and the body of man is carried along, sinking in earth-catastrophes,
rising in earth-triumphs, unable to establish an independent fate.

66

VII

Dunney returned. He did not troop in. He bounced in, bubbling flesh-blood eager for a scoop. His queer embarrassment was gone. He was intent on business. Giving John and Marian oblique contacts, he busied himself with his camera and its paraphernalia.

Along with him came his wife, a pretty young woman, and a man, bearded, evidently older, but in manner and spry movements as youthful, more youthful than any of them. His name was Burrows. He had written an important book on primitive psychology.

While Dunney arranged for the taking of the pictures, Burrows and John talked. This was why Burrows had come. Dunney had fired him with a description of Andrews, of John Andrews, strange and dark, who, according to him, had delved into man's underconsciousness.

Burrows' main interest was in the primitive mind surviving in modern man; and it soon became evident that he was a poet even more than a scientist. Yes, he wrote and spoke about the subject in clear impersonal terms; but what he really wanted was personal experience, he feeling that in himself, a modern civilized gentleman, there were all the main features which characterized the workings of man's psyche ages ago. The chief difference, he thought, was this: that over his primitivity was a layer of complicated diversions and restraints which merely checked, somewhat sterilized, and often degraded what primitive men were comparatively free purely to express. Civilization was a halter. The horse was tamed, sometimes gelded, always dressed; but it was a horse just the same.

He went straight into the matter, unmindful of Dunney's preparations, so eager and glad was he to have a man with whom he could

67

discuss it. John went with him, and also became absorbed. He was interested, too, in Burrows himself, in puzzling him out.

Marian stood off to one side with Mrs Dunney, listening to the talk of the men. Out of one eye she was watching Dunney set up the paraphernalia. She saw him place the camera on its tripod. She saw him, with arms waving, throw the black cloth over his head and focus the camera. He seemed grotesque, like a black-hooded figure of night-Caromb. His head reappeared. Suddenly it flashed upon her what he was, he and his modern outfit - a paid agent of civilized inhumanity. That was what he was.

Suddenly too there swept into her mind a picture of the actual condition of the modern world with all of its various powers and agents of man's inhumanity to man. She and John, they had been living so out of touch with it all, living in an isolated exhalted personal world of romance and love. Now...crash!..thud!..their personal world was invaded by this other thing and she was painfully brought face to face with actuality...men preying on men, preying even when all their better feelings urged them not to prey. Here was Dunney, perhaps unconscious of what he was really doing. Here were herself and John - here, now, suddenly, without apparent cause and certainly without warning, they were being preyed upon. They were to be victimized and used, misused - for what? for whom? A shudder of revulsion swept through her.

"All ready!" said Dunney, smiling. "Mr Andrews, will you take that chair? And you, Mrs Andrews, the other?"

John, cool and collected, walked over and sat down. He glanced towards Marian. She did not move. She was repelled. She was holding

68

back strongly. Then, of a sudden, it came to her that John, her John,
the man she loved, was sitting there. With a powerful rush of feel-
ing she felt, "Even were he on the electric chair I would sit with
him." She moved forward. She sat down. She saw Mrs Dunney and Burrows
looking on as if they were viewing an exhibit of prehistoric freaks.
At least, this was what their expressions meant to her. Well, she
would face them. Let them look. With John she would face the camera
and Dunney and the Mala press and the entire world - and she and John
would not be victimized. She felt this strongly.

Dunney suggested a pose. They took it.

"Hold that!" he exclaimed.

There was a blinding flash, a muffled explosion.

They jumped. The others laughed.

"That's one," said Dunney, removing the plate and inserting an-
other one. "Now one more to make sure."

He shot a second and a third.

"That's all," he said smiling. "I think they will be good."

They got up. John unlimbered himself and smiled ironically. Marian,
feeling violated in spite of herself, joined Mrs Dunney and kept as
far off and as much out of things as she could. Dunney quickly assembl-
ed his outfit and then sat down and listened eagerly to the conversa-
tion between John and Burrows. They had resumed talking.

John agreed with Burrows in the main. And he did think that if
one were a horse one first needed to become frankly and purely a
horse. But this was not an end - as so many modern people, reacting
against the false restraints and domestications of civilization,
assumed. It was a beginning. The great task was to transform a good
horse into a good man, to transform the animal into a human being -

69

not halter it, not tame it, but truly educate it, the primitive in man,
through a process of intensive individualization until, on the cultur-
ed plane, one was as purely and as completely himself as primitive
men were on the primitive plane. Thus the aim, as he saw it, was not
to return to a 'natural' state - save in so far as this was a necc-
essary detour. The aim was to move on from a subhuman to a human
state, crashing the barrier to man - or, as some liked to phrase it,
from man to superman.

Hitherto, most so-called changes, the steps through barbarism to
civilization, had been mainly external, having to do chiefly with
modifications of man's exterior modes of life but leaving the basic
psyche of man practically unchanged - so that, in substance, each
so-called advance merely gave rise to a new primitivity, a new
savagery, a new barbarism, the succeeding, because of ill-devised
complications, often being worse than the preceeding. Thus, what
man most needed was not a succession of social changes, but a
progression of deep-seated transformations within himself. And, to
John's mind, the most urgent need of the time was a means for
effecting these progressions. This was the basic problem of education.
And education was the basic undertaking of human life.

"Just now especially," said John in conclusion, "the entire world
has agreed to ask one main question - What can be done? - What shall
I do? The need is to find an essential answer to this question."

As he had agreed with Burrows so Burrows agreed with him - and a
basis of spontaneous interchange became established between them.

Dunney felt he had to leave. "It was very interesting," he said.
"It was a privilege to hear such a discussion." He gathered his

70

things. Burrows arose, saying that he would soon come back and resume the talk. Mrs Dunney smiled and shook hands and said she hoped she would see them again.

At the door Dunney paused. "Thanks," he said, "thanks for the pictures. I'll bring them around and let you see them before I send them in. If you don't like them we'll have to take them up."

John waved them off. He turned to her, "Well, how was it?" He could see she was upset but in a pretty good state nevertheless.

She laughed strangely. "I felt I was in a weird kind of an operating room," she said. She went on to tell him how Dunney had appeared to her, what she had realized about the world and their position in it, her attitude towards it all, the strong feeling which had rushed through her as she came to take her place in the chair beside him.

"That is fine," said John. "Ah, my dear, that is great, that is my Marian. You are right. Together, we can face and conquer the world of preying men."

"Even about Dunney I felt differently," she said. "I felt he couldn't help himself. Perhaps that was why he was so embarrassed yesterday. He didn't want to do it, and yet he had to. If he brings those pictures I'll believe he is all right. But you, dear? Didn't you feel anything? You didn't seem to. How could you go on talking with Mr Burrows like that?"

John smiled and shrugged. "Oh, yes, I felt it." But he would not admit either to her or to himself how much. He would not allow himself to feel the whirlpool again. His sense of helplessness, his ego, rejected it. It was rejected, too, by a strong wish to keep a fundamental awareness of the general helplessness of all human life from coming too near the surface. Such an awareness was quicken-

71

ing in him, increasing alarmly. Half emerged, it was profoundly un-
comfortable. Fully emerged, it would be unbearable.

"What did you make of Mr Burrows?" she asked. "I was puzzled."

"So was I," he answered. "He is very interesting. I wonder what his background is, how he came to take up these things. It was curious, wasn't it, how Dunney and his camera and the press sort of dramatically illustrated the so-called civilized complications we were speaking about."

She nodded. "I saw that. I hoped Dunney would see it. Well, we will wait and see what comes of it. I am not at all worried, though I did feel invaded and shocked at the time. I am even willing to forgive Mr Burrows for appearing to come here out of curiosity simply to see an exhibit of freaks."

They laughed.

Burrows had been so intrigued by John, so stimulated by his talk with him, that he presented himself the very next morning. He had brought his book for them to read. He especially wanted to know if John felt he had caught the feeling of the material.

He talked about himself. This was one of the things they wanted. He said he was in Caromb for a short while only. He had a cabin in the mountains, in the Great Dadam region. There he did his writing. Had John and Marian been down to the Great Dadam? They should go. It was a difficult drive but very rewarding. The Caromb region was tame and civilized in comparison. Too many people, too many events and social affairs. One got caught and tangled in them. They wasted one's time. Something was always going on and people would not let

72

one alone. But down at his cabin there was no human soul for miles
around. Yes, a few mounatin folk, but they were part of the mountains.
They belonged to the great wild brooding hills and deep forests far
more than they did to men. He would go back as soon as the road was
opened.

Burrows lit his pipe, smiled inwardly, and continued, "I've had
several strange experiences down there. You know," he paused and gazed
intently at John, "it doesn't take long for civilization to slip from
us, given the right setting; and when it does - well, there one is,
looking at the world as primitive men saw it, feeling what they felt,
investing all natural shapes with living meanings - only, I am not so
sure that we merely project ourselves into nature. I think it quite
possible that nature does live and that she is inhabited with all the
creatures and the beings which we modern people believe were merely
imagined. Who knows but what, what we call myths were, at the time
they were written, actual descriptions of what the men of those times
saw, saw as <u>XX</u> plainly and as really as we see telephones and motor-
cars."

"It is certainly possible," said John, feeling that it would take
but little more to make him actually see things in night-Caromb.

Burrows paused. He smiled. "I am going to tell you of an ex-
perience." His tone became intimate. "I believe you will appreciate
it and not think I am simply a man mildly deranged. It happened one
evening in my cabin, or, rather, just outside it. I was there alone.
Usually my wife is with me. She likes it too. But she was off some-
where. Twilight had come and I chanced to step outdoors. I wasn't
looking for anything. My mind, as a matter of fact, was on something
else. Suddenly I stood stark still. I could not see what it was but

73

I sensed something. A chill, an electric wave shot through me and I stood petrified and yet curiously unafraid. There was a rustle, as though the brush were being trampled - and there down the glen went Pan. And it was Pan - as surely as I am Burrows and you are Andrews." He smiled strangely, his head slightly tipped to one side, his beard and pipe prominent.

Marian was gazing at him. John smiled. "I can believe it," he said. "There is a curious life in this country, even here in what you call civilized Caromb. It does something to one. I can imagine how it must be in the Great Dadam. And neither do I mean that it is all in us. No, there is something out there too, something that has been driven from our cities, as the animals have, but which still lives. Only the other day I called Caromb, "The Silencer." Now I must call it, "The Vivifyer" - the place which strips our eyes and feelings to the nerve of sight."

"And don't you believe we should bring it back, that exiled sight of exiled life?" asked Burrows. "Don't you believe we should open ourselves to it and contact it? It seems to me that human life would be so much more rich and thrilling, even if a bit fearful, if we did. I have seen all the great skyscrapers and the finest motor-cars in the world, but not all of them even approached giving me what I experienced the few minutes I saw Pan."

"Perhaps we do not need to bring it back," said John strangely. "Perhaps, whether we will or won't, it will come to us."

Marian read Burrows' book. She absorbed it quickly. Certain ideas stood out for her, making upon her a deep impression. The idea of the taboo. It was not new to her, but now it was freshened and given deeper clearer content. The degree to which primitive men were and

74

are ruled by taboo. The degree to which primitive psychology still
survived in modern men; and so, then, the extent to which taboos,
together with the penalties for breaking them, still governed ordinary
life.

In another part of the book she was particularly struck by the
statement that sometimes a symbol is enough to integrate a divided
person. Provided that things have previously happened to make the
integration possible, if, so to speak, the split parts are ready to
be joined, then the mere presentation and perception of the right
symbol will draw them together, causing what appears to be a spontaneous
miraculous fusion.

She discussed these ideas with John. She asked Burrows about them
when he called. КАК ВЫ МАЙДАХИИ НАУКИ

For several days running Burrows dropped in to see them. It seemed
that he could not keep away. Then, abruptly, he stopped coming. They
never saw him afterwards, and they never knew why.

Meanwhile, with some misgivings, they were wondering what had
become of Dunney and the photographs. He had not shown up. But, on
the other hand, so far as they knew, nothing had appeared in the
Mala paper.

John said, "Maybe they have not wanted them. Maybe the story isn't
news, after all. Perhaps Dunney has dropped the idea."

"But he took the pictures," said Marian. "He said he would let
us see them. But now he has them and he doesn't have to bother with
us anymore. I wish you hadn't let him do it, John. Now I feel it
again, that queer thing. I feel they will do something to us. The
world is such an awful place. They are scheming. They are lying in

75

wait to spring on us. Oh, dear...what can we do?

"Yes," he admitted, "I feel it myself. I don't like the silence, the waiting. It is sort of ominous. But perhaps it is nothing, merely our fear of the unknown. There can't be anything. They have had a day, two days now. The press works fast."

Suddenly that night the phone rang. It jangled in the empty room, the sounds rising like bell-bats towards the gabled roof and the high angles over the balcony. John jumped as though something had struck him. He tingled all over. A chill shot through him. He felt as if his hair were going to stand on end. He gripped himself. What was all the stir about it? It was simply a phone ring. He picked up the receiver.

Long distance for John Andrews... Mala calling Mr Andrews...

He felt that the black outside world was hunching in. He tensed against it. He could see Marian's face, fearful, made weird and fantastic by the play of flames and gloom, the face which had seen a murderer on the balcony.

Was he John Andrews?...

John heard the voice at the other end. It was like a ghost's from a YYY ghost-world.

Yes - or perhaps he was John Andrews' ghost.

Well, then, this was a Mala newspaper... They were taking the story from another paper and wanted him to check it...

The other side.

John followed carefully, paively, correcting and verifying.

He turned up. He shook himself to make sure it was himself. He turned to Marian. She had overheard, of course, Her face was stony and mask-like.

"The thing is already out!" he exclaimed. "Some morning paper must have run it." All inside of him felt sickish and shaky.

¶ insert page 75)

"It is out!" cried John to himself. He felt a swift tugging and swirling as if he were suddenly caught in a black powerful under-tow which was sweeping and rushing him out and out to some unknown frightful destination.

The ghost-voice read...

John, forcing his ears to listen and his mind to work, followed carefully, naively, correcting and verifying.

"Thank you," said the ghost-voice.

John hung up.

76

Her face broke. "I told you not to trust Dunney," she cried. "Where
are the photographs? They have used them. He lied to us. He didn't let
us see them. Oh, what will come of it."

He moved towards her. "Now, now," he said, "come, dear. Have you
forgetten all you felt the other day? Don't let this thing smash into
you. We can't help but feel it hit us, but I mean we shouldn't give
in to it. It can't be bad. The story I just checked was quite decent,
not at all sensational. Some errors, but I caught them."

All at once he wheeled about and went to the phone. "We'll see,"
he said. He was brisk. He seemed to be in command of himself. He
called Dunney. His face was set and stern. "No answer," he said.
He waited a short while and called again.

There was rap on the door. Marian hastily arose. John went.

It was Dunney, a figure of the night - and Dunney blew in. He
was smiling but agitated. His queer embarrassment was very pronounced.
He spoke rapidly, trying to cover himself with words. In his hand
was a paper. It flapped like bat-wings.

"Sorry I couldn't get there sooner," he said. "Sorry I had to lie
about the pictures. It is a trick of the game. It came out this
morning. Here it is. I hope you won't think it is too bad."

Marian, stiff and chill, her eyes accusing him, stood off.

Dunney bounced over to the table near the dim yellow lamp. He
mopped his forhead. He spread the page. He and John huddled over it.

There it was, on the front sheet, the photo and the story with
bold headlines which ran, TWO IN LOVE. Next, in smaller type, came,
ANDREWS BELIEVES IN LIFE. And then the story, the news story, of
their love and marriage and honeymoon in Caromb and his ideas about

77

life - accuracy and error almost inextricably mingled but all done
in a strangely sober daring tone. Only the headlines glared. They
glared, the bold black letters gleaming, flaring out into a whirling
sinister world.

"Well?" asked Dunney, nervously.

"Not bad," said John, controlling himself. "Indeed, quite good."

Dunney was much relieved. It was quite evident that he had a
sincere regard for John and a wish that he not be a cause of anything
really harming them.

"But," said John, "will you please explain why all of this to-do
over love and belief in life?"

Dunney blinked and evaded.

Marian had been standing off from them, very straight, her fingers
clenched, her expression defiant, her entire person resenting and
resisting this newspaper happening as strongly as John had resisted
staying in Caromb. But now an odd, bewildered, incredulous shadow
came upon her.

John said to Dunney, "Just a short while ago I phoned you. A
Mala paper got me on the phone."

"I know," said Dunney, "they've been calling me too. I've asked
them to drop it. I didn't know it was going to flare so big. It has
gotten away from me. Believe me I've asked them to drop it. I lied
about the photos but I'm not lying about this. I'll do all I can."

"What does it mean," asked John, "that all the Mala press is
going to run it?"

"I am afraid," said Dunney. He squirmed and hitched himself. "But
this is my paper. I'm not responsible for what appears in the others.
I have nothing to do with them. I'm sorry. I'll do my best. Well,