Page:The Post-Mortem Murder by Sinclair Lewis.djvu/2

 2 THE CENTURY MAGAZINE ing me, with extraordinary earnest- ness: "Are you a professor?" "I teach English." "You write books?" I pointed to a box of manuscript. "Then, please, you got to help us. Byron Sanders is dying. He says he 's got to see a learned man to give him some important papers/' Doubtless I betrayed hesitation, for I can re- member her voice rising in creepy ululation: "Please! He 's dying — that good old man that never hurt nobody!" I fluttered about the room to find my cap. I fretted that her silly phrase of "important papers" sounded like a melodrama, with maps of buried treas- ure, or with long-lost proofs that the chore boy is really the kidnapped son of royalty. But these unconscious defenses against the compulsion ex- pressed in her face, with its taut and terrified oval of open mouth, were in vain. She mooned at me, she impa- tiently waited. I dabbled at my collar and lapels with my fingers, instead of decently brushing ofT the stains of smoking and scribbling. I came stumbling and breathless after her. She walked rapidly, unspeaking, in- tense, and I followed six inches behind, bespelled by her red-and-black ging- ham waist and her chip of a brown hat. We slipped among the gray houses of the town, stumped into country stilly and shimmering with late afternoon. By a trail among long salty grasses we passed an inlet where sandpipers sprinted and horseshoe-crabs bobbed on the crisping ripples. We crossed a moorland to a glorious point of blow- ing grasses and sharp salt odor, with the waves of the harbor nickering be- yond. In that resolute place my em- barrassed awe was diluted, and I al- most laughed as I wondered: "What is this story-book errand? Ho, for the buried treasure! I '11 fit up a fleet, out of the six hundred dollars I have in the savings-bank, and find the pirates' skellingtons. 'Important pa- pers!' I '11 comfort the poor dying gentleman, and be back in time for another page before supper. The har- bor is enchanting. I really must have a sail this summer or go swimming." * My liveliness, uneasy at best in the presence of that frightened, fleeing wo- man, wavered when we had dipped down through a cranberry-bog and en- tered a still, hot woods of dying pines. They were dying, I tell you, as that old man in there was dying. The leaves were of a dry color of brick dust; they had fallen in heaps that crunched beneath my feet; the trunks were lean and black, with an irritation of branches; and all the dim alleys were choking with a dusty odor of decay. It was hot and hushed, and my throat tickled, my limbs dragged in a hopeless languor. Through ugly trunks and red needles we came to a restrained dooryard and an ancient, irregular house, a dark house, very sullen. No one had laughed there these many years. The windows were draped. The low porch between the main structure and a sag- ging ell was drifted with the pine- needles. My companion's tread was startling and indecent on the flapping planks. She held open the door. I hesitated. I was not annoyed now; I was afraid, and I knew not of what I was afraid. Prickly with unknown disquietude, I entered. We traversed a ball choked with relics of the old shipping days of Kennuit: a whale's vertebra, a crib-