The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  Mrs. Walters was still alone in the kitchen when I got downstairs. In spite of all my thinking, not more than ten minutes had passed since I had gone upstairs. The table, I saw, was completely set and there was a comfortable smell of food in the air. I said “Hello,” and she answered with a smile that would have been all right if we had been the best of friends.

  “Supper’s almost ready,” she observed.

  I brushed that aside. “Mrs. Walters, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  She smiled again, more thinly. “Very well, Professor Sayles. Only let’s be quiet. I have given Julian a sleeping tablet after the shock of this afternoon. It ought to make him sleep clear through tonight, but I don’t want to take a chance on waking him. He needs all the rest he can get.”

  “Certainly.” I kept my voice low. “This is it. When Anne and I were running back to the house just before we found you and Julian and Mrs. Marcy, we heard a noise.”

  “Did you?” Her voice was without intonation.

  “Yes.” She was looking at me steadily. I returned her stare and went on, “It was an odd sort of noise. We thought it came from this house.”

  She dropped her glance. “Perhaps it did. You haven’t told me what it was like.” Her tone was wholly indifferent, and while she spoke she carried a plate of soup from the stove and set it at one of the places.

  “A sort of roaring, pulsing, crashing sound,” I said and the words sounded silly in my own ears.

  She did not permit herself a smile. “Goodness. It sounds complicated. No, I didn’t happen to hear it, but of course I know what it was. So do you.”

  “Maybe I’m obtuse, but I don’t think I do.”

  She went back for another plate. “Nonsense, Mr. Sayles. Thunder, of course. Sometimes here in the valley the claps echo back and forth. I’ve heard something like what you mention once or twice myself.”

  “The thing sounded as if it came from this house.”

  She shrugged. “From somewhere over the roof, perhaps. I may have heard it and forgotten it because of everything that happened right afterward. I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  “It wasn’t thunder,” I said quietly. “Mrs. Marcy told me she’d heard it once or twice before. And she must know the sound of thunder in her own country. And Anne described it to me before it happened.”

  That seemed to have an effect upon her. She put the second plate down with a clatter and looked at me coldly. “You seem to have lost no time around here, Mr. Sayles. Talking to Mrs. Marcy and Miss Conner as if you were some kind of private detective. What’s on your mind?”

  “Julian’s my friend, Mrs. Walters. I find him in a strange sort of ménage and obviously a sick man.”

  She gave me a look of contempt. “You’re worried about Julian, so you talk to Mrs. Marcy about him!”

  “No. I didn’t talk to her about him. She told me about the noise amongst a lot of other things, all volunteered on her part.” I despised myself for bothering to justify my actions to this woman.

  For a time she paid no further attention to what I had said. Then she stopped doing things around the stove and turned to confront me. “I told you what the noise was, Mr. Sayles. If you don’t believe me, there’s no sense our wasting time about it. You can talk it over some more with Miss Conner—and Mrs. Marcy—if you’re still determined to make a mystery out of a simple, natural thing. The three of you seem to have found something in common. Thunder.”

  The scorn with which she delivered this retort did not affect me, but clearly there was no point in going on with the subject. I sat down in a chair and kept my mouth shut. She looked at me once or twice as if she hoped I’d give her another opening and then went on with her work. At the end of an uncomfortable silence she remarked, “I shouldn’t wonder if it was that very clap of thunder that frightened Mrs. Marcy. Something must have made her slip on those stairs.”

  I agreed to that hypothesis indifferently and went on watching the purple light outside the east window fade to blackness across the inky water of the river. The rain had stopped but the night was sullen and lowering.

  Mrs. Walters did not seem anxious for another long silence between us. “You know,” she said, “I should have asked if you knew first aid, Professor. It never occurred to me. You might have been the very man we needed.” She smiled at me and I still did not like it. “I’m rather accustomed to taking care of sick people, so I just jumped right in. I’m afraid I was rather bossy.”

  “No,” I answered, wondering idly what she was getting at. “I’m no expert on what to do till the doctor comes. I was glad you took charge.” I turned to look at her. “You must have done a good job. I thought the woman was badly hurt.”

  But that was not what I had really thought. The moment I had caught sight of that fragile, tumbled body at the foot the stairs I had thought I was looking at death.

  The big woman was watching me carefully. There was an alertness that amounted to tension under the make-up on her broad face. “She gave me a turn, too. She looked almost as if she was dead, didn’t she?”

  I nodded.

  “I was never so relieved in my life as when the aromatic spirits brought her round. It’s wonderful what that stuff will do.” She gave a little laugh. “But up to then I was really frightened about her.”

  “You picked her up and carried her to that sofa as if you were used to that sort of thing all your life,” I said, trying to make my tone sound admiring. It was a stupid little speech, as awkward as most efforts to give the devil his due, but I was surprised at its effect upon her. She bit her lip and turned away. After a while, with her back still turned toward me, she said, “Oh, that was nothing.” And then, after a pause, “She wasn’t heavy.”

  14.

  ANNE CAME into the kitchen a few minutes later. She had on a dull-green dress that brought out the lights in her hair and the warmth of her skin and, for a second, as I looked at her, some of the depression went out of my mind and I forgot how tired I was beginning to feel. Supper was a silent meal because none of us seemed to be able to conjure up a topic of conversation that wouldn’t leave one member of the trio out of it. After we’d eaten as much as we wanted—which in my case was no great amount—we washed dishes together by a sort of common consent. Personally, I don’t like cleaning up after a meal—I did too much of it when I was a boy—but anything was better than leaving the warmth and company of the kitchen to adventure into the silence of the rest of the house. Anne, I think, felt the same way. After we had finished, Mrs. Walters laid a tray for Julian, “. . . in case he wakes up, though I hope he won’t,” as she put it, and then there was nothing more to do in the kitchen.

  A trivial thing happened as we started to leave the place. “Well we can sit in the living room for a few minutes,” Anne had just said, with no cheer in her tone, and picked up the lamp on the table when Mrs. Walters went over to her with sudden swiftness and took the thing out of her hand.

  “You can’t have that,” she declared sharply. “I don’t want to have to stumble around here in the dark if Julian should happen to need anything.” And she put the lamp firmly back on the table.

  Anne looked startled and indignant for a moment and then turned away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you wanted it there.” She looked at Mrs. Walters speculatively. “You take wonderful care of Uncle Julian,” she observed.

  “I try to,” Mrs. Walters replied in a level voice.

  We groped our way through the black hall and into the living room. Anne lit the lamp in there, but the pool of yellow light it spilled brightened only a fraction of the place; the shadows in the corners were thick and smooth as velvet. I put a match to my pipe and Anne smoked a cigarette. We sat together on the sofa, not too close together, and watched Mrs. Walters in the chair by the lamp. She had a basket of mending.

  “What holes Julian does make in his socks,” she observed at last. “He’s got to get some new ones. Remind me, Anne, the next time we go to town.
”

  Anne grunted. “You don’t need to do all that,” she said in a voice that was perceptibly too considerate. “Mrs. Marcy does the darning.”

  “I know,” Mrs. Walters answered shortly, but I noticed that she went on with what she was doing.

  For a while Anne and I talked in low tones about the past, about the university and things we had done together when she was a kid. “The girls used to tease me about you,” she said once. “But they were only jealous.” I grinned at that, but it was not an altogether happy feeling. After a while our small talk ran down and the silence took complete possession of the room. Fatigue was heavy in my body, but I was scarcely sleepy. Instead, it seemed to me that I was noticing things with more than normal distinctness. It was preternaturally quiet. I began to wish that the river outside would make more noise instead of slipping to the sea without a sound. My ears felt empty and, literally, I could hear the sound of my own heart and of Anne’s breathing beside me. All the while I was listening, waiting to hear something and it did not come. After a time I transferred my attention to Mrs. Walters and wondered what was going on behind those eyes of hers. Nothing, to judge from the placidity of her expression and yet, I was sure that she was alert and aware of Anne and myself, perhaps even of what we were thinking. Was she listening, too?

  Then I yawned and that seemed to break the shell of quiet in which we had been enclosed. “You must be dead for sleep,” Anne exclaimed suddenly in a contrite voice. “It’s practically bedtime, anyhow. Let’s all go up.”

  My legs were heavy when I hoisted myself back on them.

  “To tell the truth, it has been a long day. And your fresh country air has a numbing effect on a pair of city-poisoned lungs like mine.”

  Mrs. Walters nodded. “It has been a long day,” she agreed. “Not the happiest possible one for your visit, Professor Sayles. But there’s always tomorrow.”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed. “Well, if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  She did not rise from her chair. “Certainly. Anne, you go along up, too. I’ll follow you in a minute. I see there’s still one more sock to finish. But don’t wait for me; I’ll be all right alone.”

  A flash of irritation went through me then, as it did so often after the things she said, because there was something obscurely contradictory between her words and the tone in which she uttered them. The way she spoke managed to imply that she wished one or both of us would stay there with her till she was ready to go. I could not see a reason in the world for obliging her. Companionship, at least of the negative sort that Anne and I had provided, could not be what she wanted from us. Neither could it be worry. Confused and unpleasant as the events of the day had been, they were over now. Or so I thought.

  Anne went over to the mantel and lighted a candle. “Time to retire,” she said and made a child’s face. As I followed her, I turned once and looked back into the living room. Mrs. Walters was still sitting there quietly, drawing the thread steadily back and forth. The needle gleamed in the lamplight, but her face was turned half away and shadowed. “Good night,” I said softly, so as not to wake Julian. “Pleasant dreams,” she returned negligently, without lifting her head.

  My room was colder and darker than before. Anne came into it for a moment and lit the candle on my washstand. “All the discomforts of a fine old colonial home,” she said, smiling, and then her face was suddenly grave. “Oh, Dick, I can’t tell you . . .”

  “What, Anne?”

  “How glad I am you’re here. For Uncle Julian’s sake and mine. I haven’t known what to do . . .” Her voice sounded near tears.

  I patted her shoulder. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “If you say so,” she replied. But there was doubt in her voice. “My room’s next to yours, by the way, and hers is right across the hall. If you need anything, pound on the wall and I’ll get it for you.”

  “Thanks. I won’t. Unless it’s waking up in the morning. You can pound on the wall when it’s time to get up.”

  Then we said good night and I thought of all the other times we had done that in the old days . . . It wasn’t the same at all, of course, and yet, I was reminded of the past in spite of myself. This time it was she who shut the door on me. I was left in the bleakness of my room, shivering; I undressed in silence, without bothering to unpack anything except my pajamas, and got into the cot before the candlewick had stopped glowing.

  When I surrendered my weight to the bed, I expected that sleep would wash over me in a minute or two, if not immediately. For some reason it didn’t. Even my eyes remained open for a long time, though there was nothing to see except the faintly lighter oblongs of the windows, unbroken by a single star. I deliberately made every muscle in my body relax, but still sleep didn’t come, though in those days I never had any trouble about losing myself in unconsciousness the moment I went to bed. But this time my senses were still on the alert even after my body was utterly limp and, when I finally closed my eyes, oblivion was not complete.

  Going to sleep is a mysterious process anyhow. The senses don’t blur and fade simultaneously and merge into nothingness. The first one to go, of course, is sight, the minute the eyelids are lowered, and then I suppose the next to vanish are taste and smell, though it was a long time before I stopped being aware of the reek of the candle smoke in the air. For an even longer time I was conscious of the rough feeling of the blanket under my chin and, as for hearing, I don’t believe I ever did wholly stop listening.

  There was nothing to hear, nothing important. For a time there were the sounds Anne made in the next room, but they were soon over. And then the occasional crack and creak of an old house settling itself for the night. Outside the windows was the faintest possible rustle of air and every once in a while the minute plop of a drip from the eaves. These were trivial sounds and yet I kept hearing them in spite of myself. My mind stubbornly refused to relinquish its last sentry and I went on listening. Perhaps it was for the sound of Mrs. Walters coming upstairs, which I did hear after a while. She made very little disturbance about it, but I heard her come up the stairs, and it sounded as if she hesitated once or twice on the way up. Then she came down the hall; I could follow that cautious progress of hers there, too, and when she stopped for a long time outside my door I was not surprised. She was wondering, I knew, if I was asleep. I gave her no clue, though I had an irresistible impulse to utter one loud mock snore to startle her.

  Even after the door of her room had closed behind her, I could not abandon myself wholly. . . . I was still listening and I faced the fact that what I expected, or dreaded, to hear was a recurrence of that sound of the afternoon. Whenever I thought squarely about it, the echo of that damnable noise went booming in my inner ear and, as I lay there, I could feel the prickle of sweat breaking out on the palms of my hands. What could have made such a noise?

  The conviction was borne in upon me that Julian had progressed very far indeed with that thing of his. It, and it only, could account for the sound. Anne had even recognized it. . . . We should have talked more about it, especially on the second ride back from town, when we were alone and safe from being overheard. But I knew why we had not. There was nothing we could have said about that noise because there was nothing familiar in it. And there was the possibility that Julian might be right, and that the reason the sound we had heard was so strange and terrifying was because it came—I put the thought out of my mind.

  Lying in the dark with nothing by which to measure time except the beating of my heart, minutes or hours may have passed before I fell asleep. I have no precise idea how long I lay there listening, or even if I ever was wholly asleep. Probably I was, because the next thing I knew was that something was happening outside the house. The thing that woke me was surprising. My room, as I have said, looked down on the court between the shoulder of the house and the narrower strip of the ell back to the barn. Its windows faced almost north and hence along the road that led up the Point and ultimately to Barsham Harbor. The cor
ner of the barn was between me and most of that road, which was perhaps why the sound of feet on it had not waked me sooner. Anyhow, there was the squelch and thud of feet outside. Someone was approaching the house, and the tempo of the steps was hurried. Whoever it was had a long stride and was hurrying, though not running.

  The moment I opened my eyes I could see a faint line of yellow light along the underside of the top window casement on the left, a gleam that alternately dimmed and increased, but which was growing progressively brighter. Although I had never in my life seen that sort of thing before, I knew at once what it was—the light from a lantern carried by a walking man. I got out of bed with anxiety of a nameless sort plucking at my thoughts and went to the window. I was right. It was a lantern, swinging along the road, but I could see little of whoever was carrying it.

  Even before the sound of knuckles on the back door I was into my trousers and shoes and was pulling on my old varsity sweater over my head. Quick as I was, Anne was ahead of me; I bumped into her in the hall outside.

  “Dick,” she said in a whisper. “What is it? Who’s there?”

  “Dunno. A man. That’s all I could tell.”

  The knuckles were more urgent against the door and we stumbled down the stairs. Hot paraffin spilled on my hand from the candle I was carrying. Anne was right on my heels as I blundered through the hall and into the kitchen. The knocking sounded much louder in there, of course, and there was an urgency in it that suggested anxiety. And then, in that second as we were coming through the kitchen doorway the last vestige of comfort or security was stripped from us by a single word. It was spoken from the other side of the door, in a low voice, by the man outside.

  “Elora!” he said and his tone was half-angry, half-anxious.