A Far Cry

By ZONA GALE

MONG the red porch chairs Elmer Dasher sat in a denim swing which leniently dissented He did not seem like a man who would sit and swing; such a molested-looking man.

Hands parted the curtains of a window behind him and hung there a pink card on which was printed "Ice." It was evening, but tomorrow morning's slumber must not be flawed by this task. Immediately the hands appeared upon the porch. Mrs. Dasher's hands wore all the expression that she had. They seemed to have done so much. Her face had experienced so little.

"Hot," said she.

"Why shouldn't it be? It's summer time," said Elmer Dasher.

He tilted the swing, and the spirited disclaimer of the frame did not annoy them. She rocked and they did not hear the creaking board. Near the cement pavement the sprinkler fizzed and squirted; they did not observe that in order to avoid it passers were obliged to make a detour under the maples.

Elmer Dasher took his watch and held it. The last bright cloud hung on Patch Hill and stained the air. Shadow floated and fell. For five minutes while airy dissolution ran upon the light, Mr. Dasher eyed the dial. Then he descended the steps and turned off the city water. Unconscious that it is a triumph of social evolution for a community to be organized like that, and without a casual glance at the elemental glory of the sunset, he returned to his swing.

Ludlow, his neighbor, crossed the connecting lawns and desired to know how everything was. Ludlow had a woman's eyes. Elmer Dasher held him in subconscious contempt, for he made disconcerting observations, such as he made now to Dasher's inevitable reply that everything was complete, complete:

"Sometimes I wonder why Patch Grove doesn't collapse and slide down Patch Hill and pile up in the valley."

Dasher inquired why on earth it should do that. He knew his town; "hard-boiled business, hard-boiled recreation, hard-boiled family life," he had once summed it up; but he could not imagine why business blocks, houses, garages, and folk should ever give way, of their own futility, and slide down to the valley of the Patch, the brown river. Ludlow's long harangue only confused him.

"You won't find any better place to live," he indignantly defended.

"I'm afraid not," said Ludlow, sighed, mentioned the thunder heads in the west, and went home.

"Queer duck," Elmer Dasher thought.

Abruptly, distinctly, he heard a cry. He could not divine its direction nor tell whether it was the voice of man or woman. It might have been a signal, very clear, though from a distance. He looked at his wife but she, with moving lips, was counting something and had heard nothing. He thought that the boys must be playing ball on the school grounds, and he tilted the swing again.

The hall gas flared up. Over her who had lighted it the warm tide surged, showed her pointed face, her thin arms—Geraldine Dasher, a name to which her faint self of forty bore no relation. She emerged, announced a destination, was met by "Why not ever sit down here at home with us?" and pregnable, without resentment, sank to the top step.

Within the houses, behind the dying brilliance of the brick walls, girls were dressing. In Patch Grove no one dresses before dinner. The virginity of the toilette is preserved for its main purpose. On the porches sat those who did not dress for the evening any more. In many of these the desire to give life had changed to a dynamic hostility to those already alive. As with the Dashers:

"Hot." "Why shouldn't it be? It's summer time." "That isn't funny." "My dear, nothing is funny to you." "My clothes are—they're so funny I don't like to go to church." "The churches have gone to the dogs. Best keep out of them." "You would insult my religion!" And so on to: "I'm rather sick of this whole thing." Whereon Geraldine cried abruptly: "How do you think I feel about that?" and laughed, harshly, so that a silence fell.

In their silence a telegram was given over the telephone in the hall. Dasher took the message, came back, his face sagging with concern, and said:

"Mama, Katy's sick. She wants us to go to the city and "bring the boy home with us."

Mrs. Dasher asked for details which had not been given, made and rejected fractions of plans, objected. Dasher said: "Nonsense. Katy's the only niece I've got in the world. Going, too, Jerry? Don't keep us waiting."

The enormous night received the little car. Ten miles of dusky cornland, warm with the breath of the day; eight miles of city streets, sleepy with heat, nervous with light, washed by a thin black stream of beings. Pearl City traffic formed the veins of some vast undivined body. That body seemed to have a voice, raucous, unresting. The powers of that body were evident—to give death, to give life, to sin, to rejoice, to agonize. Was there no more to that unknown being? Could it only bellow with its body while its veins flowed with the traffic?

Katy was at a hospital and with her the little boy, wondering, frail. The ward was shared with a woman, a Bohemian, red and black. Katy was a yellow shadow on a pillow. Old in cell and in spirit she said: "Don't bother to stay. He'll be here. But he can't work and see to the boy, too. Me? I don't know and I don't care." She lay like a little animal left too long in a trap to be watching any more.

Elmer Dasher was shaken, said "But my God, Katy"; and Katy, turning her head fretfully from him, was caught by the aspect of the Bohemian woman, and cried out. The Bohemian woman was sitting erect and trying terribly for breath. No nurse was there, the passages were quiet. The Dashers, always lax, uncentered, were thrown into distraction. Elmer ran and rang and called. It was Mrs. Dasher who reached the woman and, in some deep impulse to physical contact, held her as she died. Mrs. Dasher kept saying : "I don't understand this. I don't understand this."

Jerry caught up the terrified little boy, ran by the nurse who was moving upon the room, crouched in the tonneau, and hugged the child. He wept, was stilled, and later roused to faint interests. She was stirred by his quiet, then by his motion. While they waited, she sought for ways to give him protection. Passers glanced at them and it flashed to her: They think he's mine. She adjusted his collar and said in an admirably imitated abstraction: "Yes, darling."

At last her father and mother came crossing the street. To Jerry they seemed detached and of a familiarity strange and passionate, such as she felt in saying over her own name.

"I don't understand that," Mrs. Dasher was still saying weakly. In the seat beside her husband she wept and seemed rapt, unaware of anything save that which had just happened. Elmer Dasher was silent, but wholly in the body, as was clear when he cursed in a traffic crisis.

This crisis he assumed to have been imagined: He heard a car, with a strange siren, a faint melodious siren; a car seeking, he thought, to pass him, and nearly succeeding. Dasher could hear the silver alternation, a cadence such as three pipes might give, softly blown. When had a man ever devised a siren like that? "Some music hound," thought Dasher. And when a tight place narrowed in before him and the light cry of insistence followed close, he drew far to the right to let the fellow pass. The fellow did not pass. Amazed, as he looked back, Dasher saw the street momentarily empty. "Must have been a fire whistle," Dasher thought, and slid back into the channel.

They drew into the country, into the tender vacant air of fields. Now emerged the sky, which in town they had forgotten. The sky was void of stars. To the southwest were thrusts of lightning, incessant, at innocent play, unconcerned with any fruit of death. A faint huskiness came deepening of thunder.

"What's that?" the child asked and, grown shyly accustomed, questioned of fireflies, of miasma, of the smell of honey and hay. These questions gave Jerry rapture. His breath and his brushing eyelash gave her rapture. The child fell asleep, and in dear discomfort Jerry held him; for mile upon mile she held him and dreaded the ride's end.

She felt a lift of pleasure when the car was stalled. At the foot of a sharp slope up to a road-bed the car stopped. Elmer Dasher, who could not so much as set a hinge on a door, was helpless. He lifted the hood, produced tools, said names of parts; but it was plain that he was helpless. No farmstead light was near and they set themselves to wait for passers. It was a road little frequented. And now the high black clouds were shot with flame.

They faced a meadow made limitless by night. The life of the dark was there, the dark peopled by rustle, breath, odor. In the stillness these influences came confidently to the car. The night breathed, and along its vast invisible veins coursed some faint fluid, tincturing the darkness, flowing through the little bodies of men.

Suddenly Elmer Dasher felt a frightful nostalgia. Home, home! He wanted to be at home. But when he thought of his house, his porch with red chairs, it was not these that he wanted. Home. Some core of the word seemed to emerge and demand him. Where did he want to go?

Far away, as if from another meadow under another night, there came a call, of no remembered bird. A bird call which fused with the rising wind, threaded the thunder, haunted the ear, and died. It voiced his nostalgia, it was pure and pleading. It bore an echo of unbearable sweetness. Or was it a bird call? He thought now that it might have been a wavering engine whistle. … Far down the curve of the railroad across the distant swamp, a yellow eye outrayed in the first rain.

"The 'way freight," said Elmer Dasher. "It's none too good for us. We'll signal them, and if they row we'll report them to the directors!"

The highway was level with the fields. To the fields' edge they rolled their car, an ancient servant, and left it locked in darkness; with its lamps lighted their way and flagged the freight train. In magnificent languor, like a train of the Orient, the thundering thing rolled indolently down and stopped. A blown torch brushed out a little pool of light. A Patch Grove voice hailed them, exclaimed, bade them climb aboard. Received into the warm cave of the cab, these four blinked at the red throat of the fire-box and felt the rich reprieve of some convalescence.

The enormous night held the little train. The enormous sky held the little storm. Standing in the gangway Elmer Dasher threw back his head and took the hour. Motion, roar, electricity blue on the metal, thunder of wheel and of cloud, and he in their midst. He felt in flight over farther spaces. They swept by a steel plant, saw the belch and glare, made out men and mounds of slag. One of the sheds stood drenched in the red beauty of the pouring, and naked figures flowered from wild color. In that flash were the tumult of farther industry, roar of innumerable trains, glitter of all the cities, their veins flowing with men and women in sin, joy, anguish. He was feeling all that there was to feel! He could have cried a challenge as the engine went challenging the lit blackness.

But why did the engineer blow the whistle, running through open country? Or did he blow the whistle? He was sitting quietly on the seat, his attention on the track. One hand lay on his knee and one on the window-sill. The engine whistle was not blown! That insistent and sovereign call which had seemed like the voice of their flight, it came toward them from some horizon. What horizon? Who was calling? Calling whom? Beauty and anguish flowed together in Elmer Dasher. He felt drunkenness, incredibly enhanced.

"The glory of the Lord—eh, old girl?" he shouted. No one heard him.

On the fireman's seat Mrs, Dasher, cowering with covered eyes, looked round at him. She had not heard what he said, had not seen what he saw, had felt nothing that he felt, had been puzzled by no cry; but her face held its own emotion, wore now as much experience as her hands.

"Elmer," she cried, "I don't understand what happened to her and I don't believe I ever shall."

But this he did not hear. "The glory of the Lord, by the great horn spoon!" he bellowed, and looked about.

Neither death nor the fury of the hour occupied Jerry. In the thunder of the engine and of the storm, she had found that the child clutched at her.

Before midnight they were dry in their rooms and the little boy was sleeping. Elmer Dasher's exaltation, his wife's pity and terror, Jerry's brief motherhood, all boxed dry in their rooms.

The storm cleared and left the air sultry, intolerable. Dasher could not sleep. He went downstairs and sat in the swing. Ludlow was moving about the lawn, barefooted in the drenched grass. He came to the Dashers' veranda rail.

"Been up in town, have you?" he said. "I tell you, if there's reason why Patch Grove should collapse and slide into the valley. Pearl City ought to drop into the ground with no warning. Ought to disappear from the human eye."

Something shook Elmer Dasher. He seemed to remember that this destiny of man he had recently been stirred to resist. But automatically he replied:

"You won't find a better city anywhere than Pearl."

"I'm afraid not," said Ludlow, and went home.

Faintly, a far horn which would wake few, Elmer Dasher heard the cry again. In it was the nostalgia of the night, of the world, of some hidden being striving to be heard. But of this cry he could not divine direction nor meaning. It might have been a signal or a challenge. To whom? And from where? Boys could not be playing ball on the school grounds

He moved nervously in his swing and the frame dissented leniently. He felt an instant and acute relief and comfortably concluded that this faint squeak was all that he had noted.

Hearing this squeak, his wife descended, quavered. "That you, Elmer?" and came to her rocking chair on its creaking board. The moon in its third quarter, a trinket of silver gilt, was tilted above the elms, but the Dashers did not observe. Nor did they note the clean new anger of the second storm cutting its low way along the west.

Beneath the hall burner Jerry passed, came to the threshold, and when her mother said "Better sit down" emerged and obeyed.

"I don't understand it and I never shall," said Mrs. Dasher heavily.

"Don't say that again!" Elmer Dasher cried. "There isn't a woman in the world that'll keep on saying the same thing over and over the way you will."

"I won't be here long to say anything. I'm sick of the whole thing."

Jerry interposed: "It's hot again, isn't it?" She heard: "Why shouldn't it be? It's summer time." And: "Can anybody see whether I hung up the ice card?"