Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  As he walked along the path, with the garden scent, he felt the strange sense of urgency and of panic drop away from him, for the street and house were in themselves assurances that everything was exactly as it should be.

  He mounted the brick steps and went across the porch and reached out his hand for the knocker on the door.

  There was a light in the sitting room and he knew his mother would be there, waiting for him to arrive, but that it would be Tilda, hurrying from the kitchen, who would answer to his knock, for his mother did not move about as briskly as she had.

  He knocked and waited and as he waited he remembered the happy days he’d spent in this house before he’d gone to Harvard, when his father still was living. Some of the old families still lived here, but he’d not seen them for years, for on his visits lately he’d scarcely stirred outdoors, but sat for hours talking with his mother.

  The door opened, and it was not Tilda in her rustling skirts and her white starched collar, but an utter stranger.

  “Good evening,” he said. “You must be a neighbor.”

  “I live here,” said the woman.

  “I can’t be mistaken,” said Harrington. “This is the residence of Mrs. Jennings Harrington.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman. “I do not know the name. What was the address you were looking for?”

  “2034 Summit Drive.”

  “That’s the number,” said the woman, “but Harrington—I know of no Harringtons. We’ve lived here fifteen years and there’s never been a Harrington in the neighborhood.”

  “Madam,” Harrington said, sharply, “this is most serious—”

  The woman closed the door.

  He stood on the porch for long moments after she had closed the door, once reaching out his hand to clang the knocker again, then withdrawing it. Finally he went back to the street.

  He stood beside the car, looking at the house, trying to catch in it some unfamiliarity—but it was familiar. It was the house to which he’d come for years to see his mother; it was the house in which he’d spent his youth.

  He opened the car door and slid beneath the wheel. He had trouble getting the key out of his pocket and his hand was shaking so that it took a long time for him to insert it in the ignition lock.

  He twisted the key and the engine started. He did not, however, drive off immediately, but sat gripping the wheel. He kept staring at the house and his mind hurled back the fact again and yet again that strangers had lived behind its walls for more than fifteen years.

  Where, then, were his mother and her faithful Tilda? Where, then, was Henry, who was a hand at tulips? Where the many evenings he had spent in that very house? Where the conversations in the sitting room, with the birch and maple burning in the fireplace and the cat asleep upon the hearth?

  There was a pattern, he was reminded—a deadly pattern—in all that had ever happened to him; in the way that he had lived, in the books that he had written, in the attachments he had had and, perhaps, more important, the ones he had not had. There was a haunting quality that had lurked behind the scenes, just out of sight, for years, and there had been many times he’d been aware of it and wondered at it and tried to lay his fingers on it—but never a time when he’d ever been quite so acutely aware of it as this very moment.

  It was, he knew, this haunted factor in his life which kept him steady now, which kept him from storming up the walk again to hammer at the door and demand to see his mother.

  He saw that he had stopped shaking, and he closed the window and put the car in gear.

  He turned left at the next corner and began to climb, street after street.

  He reached the cemetery in ten minutes’ time and parked the car. He found the topcoat in the rear seat and put it on. For a moment, he stood beside the car and looked down across the town, to where the river flowed between the hills.

  This, he told himself, at least is real, the river and the town. This no one could take away from him, or the books upon the shelf.

  He let himself into the cemetery by the postern gate and followed the path unerringly in the uncertain light of a sickle moon.

  The stone was there and the shape of it unchanged; it was a shape, he told himself, that was burned into his heart. He knelt before it and put out his hands and laid them on it and felt the moss and lichens that had grown there and they were familiar, too.

  “Cornelia,” he said. “You are still here, Cornelia.”

  He fumbled in his pocket for a pack of matches and lit three of them before the fourth blazed up in a steady flame. He cupped the blaze between his hands and held it close against the stone.

  A name was graven there.

  It was not Cornelia Storm.

  Senator Johnson Enright reached out and lifted the decanter.

  “No, thanks,” said Harrington. “This one is all I wish. I just dropped by to say hello. I’ll be going in a minute.”

  He looked around the room in which they sat and now he was sure of it—sure of the thing that he had come to find. The study was not the same as he had remembered it. Some of the bright was gone, some of the glory vanished. It was faded at the edges and it seemed slightly out of focus and the moose head above the mantle was somehow just a little shabby, instead of grand and notable.

  “You come too seldom,” said the senator, “even when you know that you are always welcome. Especially tonight. The family are all out and I’m a troubled man.”

  “This business of the state department?”

  Enright nodded. “That is it exactly. I told the President, yes, I would take it if he could find no one else. I almost pleaded with him to find another man.”

  “You could not tell him no?”

  “I tried to,” said the senator. “I did my best to tell him. I, who never in my life have been at a loss for words. And I couldn’t do it. Because I was too proud. Because through the years I have built up in me a certain pride of service that I cannot turn my back upon.”

  The senator sat sprawling in his chair and Harrington saw that there was no change in him, as there had been in the room within which they sat. He was the same as ever—the iron-gray unruly mop of hair, the woodchopper face, the snaggly teeth, the hunched shoulders of a grizzly.

  “You realize, of course,” said Enright, “that I have been one of your most faithful readers.”

  “I know,” said Harrington. “I am proud of it.”

  “You have a fiendish ability,” said the senator, “to string words together with fishhooks hidden in them. They fasten into you and they won’t let loose and you go around remembering them for days.”

  He lifted up his glass and drank.

  “I’ve never told you this before,” he said. “I don’t know if I should, but I suppose I’d better. In one of your books you said that the hallmark of destiny might rest upon one man. If that man failed, you said, the world might well be lost.”

  “I think I did say that. I have a feeling …”

  “You’re sure,” asked the senator, reaching for the brandy, “that you won’t have more of this?”

  “No, thanks,” said Harrington.

  And suddenly he was thinking of another time and place where he’d once gone drinking and there had been a shadow in the corner that had talked with him—and it was the first time he’d ever thought of that. It was something, it seemed, that had never happened, that could not remotely have happened to Hollis Harrington. It was a happening that he would not—could not—accept, and yet there it lay, cold and naked in his brain.

  “I was going to tell you,” said the senator, “about that line on destiny. A most peculiar circumstance, I think you will agree. You know, of course, that one time I had decided to retire.”

  “I remember it,” said Harrington. “I recall I told you that you should.”

  “It was at that time,” said th
e senator, “that I read that paragraph of yours. I had written out a statement announcing my retirement at the completion of my term and intended in the morning to give it to the press. Then I read that line and asked myself what if I were that very man you were writing of. Not, of course, that I actually thought I was.”

  Harrington stirred uneasily. “I don’t know what to say. You place too great a responsibility upon me.”

  “I did not retire,” said the senator. “I tore up the statement.”

  They sat quietly for a moment, staring at the fire flaming on the hearth.

  “And now,” said Enright, “there is this other thing.”

  “I wish that I could help,” said Harrington, almost desperately. “I wish that I could find the proper words to say. But I can’t, because I’m at the end myself. I am written out. There’s nothing left inside me.”

  And that was not, he knew, what he had wished to say. I came here to tell you that someone else has been living in my mother’s house for more than fifteen years, that the name on Cornelia’s headstone is not Cornelia’s name. I came here to see if this room had changed and it has changed. It has lost some of its old baronial magic…

  But he could not say it. There was no way to say it. Even to so close a friend as the senator it was impossible.

  “Hollis, I am sorry,” said the senator.

  It was all insane, thought Harrington. He was Hollis Harrington. He had been born in Wisconsin. He was a graduate of Harvard and—what was it Cedric Madison had called him—the last surviving gentleman.

  His life had been correct to the last detail, his house correct, his writing most artistically correct—the result of good breeding to the fingertips.

  Perhaps just slightly too correct. Too correct for this world of 1962, which had sloughed off the final vestige of the old punctilio.

  He was Hollis Harrington, last surviving gentleman, famous writer, romantic figure in the literary world—and written out, wrung dry of all emotion, empty of anything to say since he had finally said all that he was capable of saying.

  He rose slowly from his chair.

  “I must be going, Johnson. I’ve stayed longer than I should.”

  “There is something else,” said the senator. “Something I’ve always meant to ask you. Nothing to do with this matter of myself. I’ve meant to ask you many times, but felt perhaps I shouldn’t, that it might somehow…”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Harrington. “I’ll answer if I can.”

  “One of your early books,” said the senator. “A Bone to Gnaw, I think.”

  “That,” said Harrington, “was many years ago.”

  “This central character,” said the senator. “This Neanderthaler that you wrote about. You made him seem so human.”

  Harrington nodded. “That is right. That is what he was. He was a human being. Just because he lived a hundred thousand years ago—”

  “Of course,” said the senator. “You are entirely right. But you had him down so well. All your other characters have been sophisticates, people of the world. I have often wondered how you could write so convincingly of that kind of man—an almost mindless savage.”

  “Not mindless,” said Harrington. “Not really savage. A product of his times. I lived with him for a long time, Johnson, before I wrote about him. I tried to put myself into his situation, think as he did, guess his viewpoint. I knew his fears and triumphs. There were times, I sometimes think, that I was close to being him.”

  Enright nodded solemnly. “I can well believe that. You really must be going? You’re sure about that drink?”

  “I’m sorry, Johnson. I have a long way to drive.”

  The senator heaved himself out of the chair and walked with him to the door.

  “We’ll talk again,” he said, “and soon. About this writing business. I can’t believe you’re at the end of it.”

  “Maybe not,” said Harrington. “It may all come back.”

  But he only said this to satisfy the senator. He knew there was no chance that it would come back.

  They said good-night and Harrington went trudging down the walk. And that was wrong—in all his life, he’d never trudged before.

  His car was parked just opposite the gate and he stopped beside it, staring in astonishment, for it was not his car.

  His had been an expensive, dignified model, and this one was not only one of the less expensive kinds, but noticeably decrepit.

  And yet it was familiar in a vague and tantalizing way.

  And here it was again, but with a difference this time, for in this instance he was on the verge of accepting unreality.

  He opened the door and climbed into the seat. He reached into his pocket and found the key and fumbled for the ignition lock. He found it in the dark and the key clicked into it. He twisted, and the engine started.

  Something came struggling up from the mist inside his brain. He could feel it struggle and he knew what it was. It was Hollis Harrington, final gentleman.

  He sat there for a moment and in that moment he was neither final gentleman nor the man who sat in the ancient car, but a younger man and a far-off man who was drunk and miserable.

  He sat in a booth in the farthest, darkest corner of some unknown establishment that was filled with noise and smell and in a corner of the booth that was even darker than the corner where he sat was another one, who talked.

  He tried to see the stranger’s face, but it either was too dark or there was no face to see. And all the time the faceless stranger talked.

  There were papers on the table, a fragmented manuscript, and he knew it was no good and he tried to tell the stranger how it was no good and how he wished it might be good, but his tongue was thick and his throat was choked.

  He couldn’t frame the words to say it, but he felt it inside himself—the terrible, screaming need of putting down on paper the conviction and belief that shouted for expression.

  And he heard clearly only one thing that the stranger said.

  “I am willing,” said the stranger, “to make a deal with you.”

  And that was all there was. There was no more to remember.

  And there it stood—that ancient, fearsome thing—an isolated remembrance from some former life, an incident without a past or future and no connection with him.

  The night suddenly was chilly and he shivered in the chill. He put the car in gear and pulled out from the curb and drove slowly down the street.

  He drove for half an hour or more and he was still shivering from the chilly night. A cup of coffee, he thought, might warm him and he pulled the car up to the curb in front of an all-night quick-and-greasy. And realized with some astonishment that he could not be more than a mile or two from home.

  There was no one in the place except a shabby blonde who lounged behind the corner, listening to a radio.

  He climbed up on a stool.

  “Coffee, please,” he said and while he waited for her to fill the cup he glanced about the place. It was clean and cozy with the cigarette machines and the rack of magazines lined against the wall.

  The blonde set the cup down in front of him.

  “Anything else?” she asked, but he didn’t answer, for his eye had caught a line of printing across the front of one of the more lurid magazines.

  “Is that all?” asked the blonde again.

  “I guess so,” said Harrington. “I guess that’s all I want.”

  He didn’t look at her; he was still staring at the magazine.

  Across the front of it ran the glaring lines:

  THE ENCHANTED WORLD OF HOLLIS HARRINGTON!

  Cautiously he slid off the stool and stalked the magazine. He reached out quickly and snatched it from the rack before it could elude him. For he had the feeling, until he had it safely in his hand, that the magazine would be like all t
he rest of it, crazy and unreal… He took it back to the counter and laid it down and stared at the cover and the line stayed there. It did not change; it did not go away. He extended his thumb and rubbed the printed words and they were real enough.

  He thumbed swiftly through the magazine and found the article and staring out at him was a face he knew to be his own, although it was not the kind of face he had imagined he would have—it was a somewhat younger, darker face that tended to untidiness, and beneath that face was another face that was without a doubt a face of great distinction. And the caption that ran between them asked a question: Which one of these men is really Hollis Harrington?

  There was as well a picture of a house that he recognized in all its ramshackleness and below it another picture of the same house, but highly idealized, gleaming with white paint and surrounded by neatly tended grounds—a house with character.

  He did not bother with the reading of the caption that ran between the houses. He knew what it would say.

  And the text of the article itself:

  Is Hollis Harrington really more than one man? Is he in actuality the man he thinks he is, a man he has created out of his own mind, a man who moves in an incredibly enchanted world of good living and good manners? Or is this attitude no more than a carefully cultivated pose, an exceptional piece of perfect showmanship? Or could it be that to write in the manner that he does, to turn out the sleekly tailored, thoughtful, often significant prose that he has been writing for more than thirty years, it is necessary that he create for himself another life than the one he really lives, that he has forced himself to accept this strange internal world of his and believe in it as a condition to his continued writing….

  A hand came out and spread itself across the page so he could not read and he looked up quickly. It was the hand of the waitress and he saw there was a shining in her eyes that was very close to tears.

  “Mr. Harrington,”’ she said. “Please, Mr. Harrington. Please don’t read it, sir.”

  “But, miss…”

  “I told Harry that he shouldn’t let them put in that magazine. I told him he should hide it. But he said you never came in here except on Saturdays.”