“I’ll take you up, Rainey,” he said through lips that barely moved. “When shall we try it?”
Rainey grinned down at him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s sensible,” he said. “That’s damned sensible of you, Linn. Tomorrow’s Sunday. Suppose we try it first thing in the morning.”
Linn nodded without saying anything. His face was still angry.
Rainey said: “I don’t suppose you’ve got a swimming suit. Well, I’ll get you one, and we’ll go off a little after breakfast. Don’t worry about it. You’ll see it’ll be all right.”
Linn nodded again.
Footsteps approached from the end of the porch. Metcalf and I stood as Mrs. Rainey came up. Her face was white at Linn’s.
“Please, Mr. Linn,” she said earnestly, “I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t think it’s safe to tamper with yourself that way. I wish you’d think it over first, anyway. I honestly think you’d be wiser to let well enough alone.”
There was an uncomfortable pause during which nobody could think of anything to say. Then Linn bowed awkwardly at Mrs. Rainey and said: “I think perhaps your husband is right, Mrs. Rainey.” He spoke stiffly, and his face was flushed: he was embarrassed. “We’ll see tomorrow. I’m—I’m really anxious now to try it.” He bowed again. “You’ll excuse me? I’ve some letters to get off.” He turned toward the door.
Mrs. Rainey went with him, her hand on his arm, saying as she went: “Please, don’t, Mr. Linn. I’d never—”
“My dear,” Rainey called after her, not succeeding in altogether keeping the snarl out of his voice, “you mustn’t intrude. It wasn’t nice of you to eavesdrop.”
She paid no attention at all to him.
He jerked himself up tall and straight, and took a step forward.
“Pauline,” he called, and there wasn’t anything in his tone except authority.
Mrs. Rainey turned her head over her shoulder as Linn opened the door. The light fell on her blonde hair and handsome face with its very tired blue eyes.
“Yes, dear,” she said to her husband, smiled politely, and went into the hotel with Linn.
Rainey said: “Well, how about billiards?”
His game was terrible that night.
II
A little to the left of the hotel, a short concrete pier stuck out into the lake like a stubby finger pointing at the other shore. Fifteen or twenty of us—guests of the hotel, a hotel employee or two, a few men from the development company’s camp, and some from the village—were on hand to watch the Rainey-Linn experiment the next morning.
The promoter, in red bathing suit and light overcoat, was on the pier when I got there. He was sitting on the railing, smoking a cigar and talking to Metcalf and some of his other hired men.
“Good morning,” he said. I had missed him at breakfast. “A swell day, eh?”
“Yeah. Looks like you’re going to have plenty of audience.”
He chuckled in a satisfied way.
Presently Linn came out of the hotel, in a tan rep bath-robe that hung around his heels. Close behind him came Mrs. Rainey. She caught up with him and began talking to him, walking close to his side. Linn spoke stiffly to her as they came down the pebble walk to the pier. It was plain that she was still trying to persuade him to call the experiment off, and that her interest in it embarrassed him.
I looked at her husband. He was smiling jovially toward the approaching pair, but his blue eyes weren’t as jolly as his mouth.
Linn and the woman came up to us. Linn’s face was wan, with lines from nose-corners past mouth corners. His mouth was thin and so were his eyes. He kept his eyes on the pier in front of him, never letting them look either right or left, where he might see the water.
“All set?” Rainey greeted him in a loud, too hearty voice.
Linn said: “Yes.”
Rainey took off his coat and handed it to Metcalf. In the red swimming suit he seemed larger than ever, a big sun-brown athlete. He had a little too much meat on him everywhere, but under that outer soft covering of flesh he had plenty of muscles everywhere.
Linn dropped his bath-robe on the pier. The suit he wore was a little too loose around the waist and beside Rainey’s ruddy bulk he looked almost puny. Nevertheless he was compact and wiry, better set up than he had seemed in his clothes.
Rainey went down first to the boat tethered at the foot of a landing ladder.
“Come on,” he called heartily.
That wasn’t necessary, because Linn was already following him, but that was like Rainey.
Linn went down the ladder slowly. His knuckles showed tight and white on each rung. His eyes were open very little if at all. His lips moved in and out with his breathing. His face was sallow and damp.
Rainey took the oars. Linn sat in the stern facing him. When Rainey pulled the boat clear of the pier I saw Linn’s ghastly frightened face bent toward the bottom of the boat. His eyes were screwed tight.
Rainey rowed the boat farther from the pier than was necessary, building up his act, of course. Linn did not once raise his head. His back was bent, tense, and small in comparison with the rowing promoter’s bulk.
Mrs. Rainey was standing beside me, shivering. Twice she muttered something. The second time I thought it polite to say: “I beg your pardon?”
She laughed nervously.
“Talking to myself,” she said. “Oh, I wish—”
She didn’t finish her wish. She was staring with desperate eyes at the men in the boat, working her fingers together with a force that made one of her knuckles crack sharply.
The others of the audience had been standing around cracking jokes, trying to guess whether the experiment would be a success or not. The postmaster’s son—a fidgety slim youth with a bright-eyed, cheerful, pimply face—had bet one of his companions a dollar that Linn would have to be dragged out of the lake. Nobody took the affair very seriously until it became apparent that Mrs. Rainey was so highly wrought up over it. Then the others began to catch her nervousness, so that by the time the boat stopped we were all quite tense.
Rainey shipped his oars and stood up. He looked like a living statue against the dark trees that bounded the lake on the other side, and I suppose he knew it. The lake was smooth and shiny.
Rainey said something to Linn. The smaller man stood up, facing the pier. His eyes were still shut, with a tightness that drew his brows down and wrinkled his forehead.
Rainey spoke again.
Linn nodded but did not move otherwise.
Rainey laughed and went on talking.
No sound of this came to us. All I could hear was the lapping of the water against the pier, the shuffling of feet among the audience, and Mrs. Rainey’s breathing.
Linn bent forward quickly, and as quickly straightened himself again. His knees didn’t look very steady.
He put his hands together in front of his chest, rubbing the back of his left nervously with the palm of his right. His eyes were clenched shut.
Rainey spoke again.
Linn nodded emphatically.
Rainey came up behind Lynn, and, in a confusion of flailing arms and legs, the smaller man went out over the side of the boat into the lake.
Mrs. Rainey screamed.
Standing with his legs far apart, Rainey steadied the violently rocking boat and looked down at the turmoil Linn was making in the lake.
The man in the water seemed to have a dozen arms and legs, and all of them working, beating the lake into white froth.
The man in the boat called some laughing thing down to the man in the water.
Linn’s head, wet and black as a seal’s, came up high out of the water and went down again in an upflung shower of white drops. His arms beat the lake into a whirlpool.
The man in the boat stopped laughing and called sharply to him, the words head down coming clear to us on the pier.
Mrs. Rainey had begun to pace up and down the edge of the pier, muttering to herself again. I heard her
say something with the name of God in it.
Rainey called again into the lake, but with no effect on the boiling confusion there.
Linn’s head came up high again, and he seemed to be trying to climb up into the air.
Then he plunged down and the water closed over him.
Mrs. Rainey had stopped running up and down the edge of the pier. She was standing beside me. Her fingers were digging into my arm. She was saying, “Oh, Oh, Oh!” softly and foolishly.
The black head of the man in the lake showed on the surface like the snout of a fish, and vanished, his white face not showing at all.
Rainey went out of the boat, into the lake in a short clean arc, as smoothly as if he had been poured into the water.
The next few seconds seemed like a lot of minutes—before the two heads came to the surface again.
They came up side by side.
Linn’s arms came out of the water, flailing, beating the lake as if it was something he was fighting. They knocked spume high over his head.
Rainey caught Linn, let him go, caught him, let him go again.
They maneuvered around in the water, one smoothly, skillfully, the other crazily, violently.
Rainey was trying to get behind Linn, and failing.
Twice it looked as if Rainey had tried to hit Linn with a fist, to quiet him. Linn was twisting and turning and beating up too much water for the blows to be clearly seen, but if they landed they didn’t do much good.
Linn was fighting now for a hold on Rainey.
Rainey’s attempts to get a safe hold on Linn failed.
Rainey seemed to be tiring, moving slower around Linn now.
Mrs. Rainey’s digging fingers had my arm sore by now. She was babbling excitedly, incoherently.
I turned my head to the others and asked: “Hadn’t somebody better go help him?”
The postmaster’s son jumped across the pier and disappeared down a ladder. Others, including Metcalf, followed him.
I remained with Mrs. Rainey, watching the two men in the water.
There was less confusion there now, and their heads were close together, but it didn’t look as if Rainey had secured a very good safe-hold on Linn. However they were moving, if very slowly, in the direction of the empty boat.
The roar of a motor broke out below us, and a blunt boat carrying the postmaster’s son, Metcalf, and two other men dashed away from the pier.
Mrs. Rainey screamed again and her fingers ground painfully into the bone of my arm. I looked quickly from the motor boat to where the men had been struggling in the water.
Neither Rainey nor Linn could be seen. The surface of the lake was smooth and shiny except where the motor boat cut it.
Then, after what seemed too many minutes to justify any guess except that both men had gone under for good, the water was broken close to the deserted boat, almost in the path of the motor boat. It was just a queer hump in the surface, as if something had struggled up almost to the top.
The motor boat sheered off. Men leaned over the side of it where the hump had showed. The boat and the men hid the spot from us.
The boat twisted again, slowing up, and bumped into the empty boat, lying far over into the water under the weight of the leaning men.
Presently we could see that they were lifting Linn aboard.
Rainey did not appear.
Metcalf took off his coat and shoes and went overboard, came up after a while, rested for a moment with one arm on the gunwale of the rowboat, and dived again.
One of the other men began diving.
The postmaster’s son brought Linn to the pier in the motorboat. The others stayed in the rowboat, taking turns diving. Men from the pier in other boats joined them out there.
Linn was carried up to the hotel, and a doctor was called.
I took Mrs. Rainey up to the hotel and got rid of her by turning her over to the proprietor’s wife. My arm was sore as hell.
Three-quarters of an hour later, when Linn had been drained of water, restored to semi-consciousness, and put to bed, the divers brought Rainey’s body.
Nothing the doctors knew could bring him to life again.
He was dead.
AN INCH AND A HALF OF GLORY
Out of the open doorway and an open second-story window thin curls of smoke came without propulsion to fade in the air. Above, a child’s face—a young face held over the sill with a suggestion of standing tiptoe—was flat against the glass of a window on the third floor. The face held puzzlement without fear. The man on Earl Parish’s left saw it first.
“Look!” he exclaimed, pointing. “There’s a kid up there!”
The others tilted their faces and repeated: “There’s a kid up there.”
“Did anybody turn in the alarm yet?” a man who had just arrived asked.
“Yes,” several voices assured him, one adding, “The engines ought to be here any minute now.”
“He’s all right, that kid,” the man who had first seen the child praised his discovery. “Ain’t crying or nothing.”
“Most likely he don’t even know what’s going on.”
“The firemen will be here in a second. Ain’t much use of us trying to do anything. They can get him out with their hook’n’ladders quicker than we could.”
Feet shuffled on the sidewalk and gazes left the upper window to fasten on the smoking doorway. No one answered the man who had spoken last. After a moment, his face reddened. Earl Parish found his own cheeks warm. Looking out of the corners of his eyes at the faces around him, he saw more color than before. His glance met another man’s. Both looked quickly across the street again.
A woman’s voice came from a house behind the men.
“Somebody ought to get that child out of there! Even if it ain’t burnt up, it’s liable to get scared into convulsions or something.”
Earl Parish tried to take his gaze away from the upstairs window, and failed. It was terrible, and it held him: a stupid flat face into which panic must come each instant—and did not. If the child had cried and beat the pane with its hands there would have been pain in looking at it, but not horror. A frightened child is a definite thing. The face at the window held its blankness over the men in the street like a poised club, racking them with the threat of a blow that did not fall.
Earl Parish wet his lips and thought of words he did not say. The child was not in real danger. No great heat was behind the smoke that came from the house. To leave these men and bring the child down from its window would seem a flaunting of inexpensive courage. To suggest a rescue—if he could have explained his wish to save the child from consciousness of danger rather than from danger itself, he would have spoken. But he distrusted his ability to make the distinction clear.
“The engines ought to be here any minute now,” the man who had made that prediction twice before was repeating. He scowled up and down the red-brick street. “Where in the hell are them engines?” he demanded.
The man who had discovered the face at the window cleared his throat, his eyes focused somewhat rigidly on the window.
“Maybe she’s right,” he said. “The kid’s liable to be scared into fits. I had a nephew that got scared into St. Vitus’s dance just by having a cat jump up on him.”
“Is that so?” the fire department’s herald asked with extraordinary interest.
“Maybe we better—” Earl Parish suggested.
“Maybe we better.”
The group swayed indecisively. Then eight men crossed the street, their pace quickening as they approached the smoking doorway. Going up the four wooden steps they jostled one another, each trying to get ahead of the others. All were going into the house: such risk as attended them would be shared. But he who went first would bring the child down: the others would constitute a not especially important chorus.
Inside the door a gust of smoke blew on them, shutting out the light, scorching eyes and throats. Gongs and sirens clamored in the street.
“There’s the en
gines now!” their prophet cried. “They’ll have the kid down in no time!”
Out of sight, the suspended blow in the child’s face was without power. Seven men went back into the street with nothing apologetic in the manner of their going. Earl Parish remained in the house.
Through the smoke that clouded but did not fill the hallway brass lines gleamed on a flight of steps. He hesitated. He wanted to climb those steps and either bring the child down or stay with it until the fire had been extinguished. But to do so seemed a breach of faith with the men who had gone back to the street. Had he told them he was going through with the venture, they would have accompanied him. Having stayed silently behind, if he came out now with the child, or was found upstairs with it when the fire had been put out, they would think he had tricked them so he might pose as one who had gone alone through something that had daunted them.
He took a step toward the street, and stopped. To go out without the child now would be no better. The men in the street, who no doubt had missed him by this time, would think he had lost courage after breaking faith with them.
Earl Parish went up the brass-striped steps. The smoke thickened as he mounted, but was never dense enough to make advance difficult. He saw no flames. On the third floor a rickety door barred him from the front of the building until he remembered this was an unusual occasion, an emergency, strictly speaking. He thrust the door in with his shoulder.
He found little smoke in the room with the child, though a thin fog came in with him. The child came to him.
“’Moke,” it pronounced gravely.
“You’re all right, sonny,” Earl Parish said, picking the child up. “I’ll have you out of here in a jiffy.”
He draped a red and green cloth from the table lightly about its head, leaving a corner loose for his own possible use. He took pains not to show himself at the window, and went down the way he had come up.
In the street again, someone took the child. He was faintly giddy from the smoke, the effort of groping his way down with the child, and the excitement that had grown in him as he descended—the nervousness that is inseparable from even the most orderly of retreats. He stood very erect, avoiding curious stares. The eyes of the seven men who had crossed the street with him reproached him from twenty paces.
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