It wasn’t a very complicated operation, as I recalled it. All I needed to do was unscrew a little hexagonal nut and disconnect the line, clean out a little filter screen, suck out the dirt from the line with my mouth till the gas flowed clear, and than tighten the nut up again. The thing oughtn’t to take more than five minutes with a small wrench. I should have tried to find the trouble in the first place, instead, of wasting all that time. I’d have saved myself a ripping headache, if I had, and been halfway down to Danbury by now.
I rummaged around for tools under the car seat, but all I could find was a jack without a handle, a lug wrench for changing tires, and a bunch of rusty chains. It was damned silly. All I needed was almost any kind of small wrench, or even a pair of ordinary pliers; but I couldn’t do it with my fingers or my teeth. I looked in the trunk compartment in the back, but there weren’t any tools there, only my bag and my kit of instruments. And there was nothing in the latter which would be of any use for that kind of job. I closed the lid down again.
There hadn’t been any house that had looked occupied, where I might borrow a wrench, since I had turned off at Stony Falls. That shambling figure which had vanished down the Swamp Road, and the rutted way itself, didn’t look very promising. I decided to go on down the road ahead to see if I could find a house.
I left my coat on the car seat, and the keys in the ignition lock. It didn’t seem likely that anyone would come along that God-forsaken road while I was away. Still, I did take the envelope from my coat pocket that Mrs. X, old John R. Buchanan’s chatelaine, had given me, and folded it and stuck it into my hip pocket. It felt rather thick and waddy. There might be as many as fifty bills in it, I thought. I wondered if the old man had told her to give me fifty dollars, all in ones. That would be rather mean. More likely it was fifty tens, five hundred dollars, which would be a fair price for doing nothing.
There were cicadas singing in the twilight as I went along. The road was still narrow and stony. It was bordered by deep ditches on either side, filled with dusty, waist-high weeds; and beyond them the eternal poison-ivy stone fences without a break. On the other side of the fences were woods of oak and pine, and now and then a clump of silver birches. In a hundred feet I had rounded a bend and lost sight of the car back at the fork.
I had gone about a quarter mile when I saw an old shingled farmhouse at my right, a hundred feet off the road among tall weeds and a furze of second-growth. I slowed when I came abreast of it, looking it over. But the windows were eyeless, and the chimney bricks were fallen in a heap of rubble at one end of it, while the roof was only a skeleton of ridgepole and naked rafters in the silver air. Even the gap in the stone fence where the entrance gate had been was filled with thick high weeds, and the road that had gone in could no longer be made out.
I had veered a couple of feet off the high crown of the road, before seeing that the place was abandoned. My foot struck something soft as I started on. I stopped again to look down at it. It was a dirty shapeless old blue felt hat, lying on the road.
It certainly was the damnedest-looking hat. Its brim had been cut away in saw-tooth scallops all around, and crescent and star-shaped holes had been cut in its crown, in the way boys and boy-witted men sometimes do to old hats. It was just lying there, with no one around that it might belong to, while in the woods and weedy fields on either side insects creaked and sang.
I don’t know what impelled me to stoop and pick it up. Perhaps because of its color. It was filthy with ingrained dirt and grease. But it was—or it had been once —of a soft lovat-blue color. I have always been partial to lovat-blue hats, though they’re not always easily obtainable in the hat shops. I had bought the last one I had owned during my final year in medical school, and had worn it four or five years, and might have been wearing it yet if my secretary hadn’t screamed. I still had it, the same way most men keep their old hats, on a shelf of my closet back at 511 West.
This cut-up hat had the texture of what had once been a good piece of felt, in spite of its dirt, when I picked it up. And no wonder, since it had the colophon of Haxler’s on Fifth Avenue, where I bought my own hats. I pulled down the sweatband—a 7 3/8. Looking more closely, I could see where paper initials had been pasted on the band. They had peeled off; but the stained and darkened leather was still a little lighter where they had been, and I could make their shape out: “H.N.R., Jr.”
It was my own old hat. No one’s else. Here on this road, all chopped up that way. When had I last seen it on my closet shelf? Last week, or last winter? I would have said only yesterday. A man puts something away, and thinks of it as being just where he put it. Its image is in his mind. Yet it might have been a good many months since I had last actually seen that old hat on my shelf. Maybe as far back as last fall Mrs. Millens had given it to the janitor or the Salvation Army, in a fit of ridding up, as she calls it, without bothering to tell me.
It gave me a queer feeling of a lost kinship. I couldn’t help but have it. To find it lying here on the deserted road, a hundred miles from home, filthy and mutilated, but still something that had once been an integral part of my appearance and personality. A hat is more intimate than a necktie or even than a pair of gloves. It is a kind of badge of a man’s individuality, of his profession and his rank. The king’s crown, and the peasant’s mob-cap; banker’s Homburg or cowboy’s sombrero, a headpiece and the way a man wears it show his character and set his style. This had been my hat, and I had always worn it a little at an angle.
Now it was cut with a knife into the shape of a clown’s hat. I wondered what kind of man had last worn it. If he had liked the color, too.
I had probably got fifty different species of bacteria and protozoa on my finger tips just in the brief handling I had given it. I tossed it over into the deep weeds beside the road.
There was a crushed grasshopper lying on the road, which had been under the hat when I picked it up. I took the insect up between my thumb and forefinger. A gray stone dust was ground into its body, from a car tire or a heel that had trodden on it. It had been crushed at some time before the hat had dropped.
Its feelers were still stirring, and brown saliva was oozing from its mandibles. Its front legs were crossed as if in prayer. Its black eyes were as black as blank black shining quartz or glass. They were still alive, to some degree, I suppose, but I don’t think they were aware of me.
I don’t know how long crushed insects take to die. But probably not very long. The hat had been here even less a time than that. Perhaps the boy or man who had dropped it would discover his loss, and come back soon looking for it, if he was fond of it. I might as well have left it where I had found it on the road.
I crushed the insect’s thorax in my fingers, and tossed it, too, into the ditch.
The eyeless old house with its skeleton roof stared at me across the high weeds in the silver twilight, and cheepers throbbed, and cicadas shrilled. I heard a croaking in the ditch, like a bull-throated frog, as I arose.
“Awrg!”
And then again, “Awrg!”
Slow, with long seconds in between, as if pausing for a tremendous breath. A sound that was quite inhuman.
There was a faint stirring in the dusty weeds as I went on, though no more than a frog might make. I went on down the road. There had been no reason I should stop for an inhumanly croaking frog.... Yet if my headache had not been with me still, doubtless I should have recognized it as significant that, subconsciously, I had thought of that slow croak as inhuman. One does not think of a frog’s croak as inhuman. It is the croak of a frog. One only thinks of something as inhuman which should be human. And perhaps is, in part.
A half mile or three quarters farther on I began to come at last to the indications of inhabited civilization —the first I had seen since I had turned off at sunset on this nightmare way, the first sign of any human life even —and I began to breathe more normally, as if some tense scene in a play, or some exhausting and frightful work I had been doing, was over.
The unbroken warty ivy-grown stone fence had given way on both sides of me—on my left to a bushy twelve-foot hedge of California privet, thick with white sweet-smelling blossoms that in the daytime must be a treat for bees, and on my right to a whitewashed snake fence, bordering a gnarled old apple orchard in tall grass. The road surface seemed to be growing a little better, too— still stony, but not so much, and a little wider and more level, as if it might have been graded at some time in the past forty years.
There was a red composition roof above the hedge in a moment more, and a glimpse of a newly painted white gable. A telephone line came up this far, I saw, along the road in front of me, with a wire from the last pole going in across the hedge to the house.
That tenuous, slight wire, looping in across the hedge, was like a life line. After that long lonely road of eyeless houses, of poison fences and woods and weedy fields, of a phantasmal figure vanishing, of the singing of the insects in the empty twilight and of that old mutilated hat of mine, and all the other damned lonesomeness of it, it was like suddenly emerging into the living world of sane and ordinary things again.
I had drawn no blank, certainly. I had suffered no cataleptic trance. I had been conscious every minute of the past hour since I had turned off onto this road at sunset. Perhaps even hyperconscious. But I had just been so damned alone. The feeling of being stuck, of being maybe ten times farther than I had actually been from anywhere—as it was turning out—and of having, perhaps, to spend the night ahead in walking, had magnified and intensified every minute. But my situation hadn’t really been so bad as I had thought. And now it wasn’t bad at all any longer.
To a civilized man, beyond the simple animal need for food, the greatest necessity is a contact with other men, I decided. The dregs of the headache were still in me, but my skull was no longer split in two. However remote in miles from the nearest city I might still be now, or even from the next house, a phone line was a contact with the whole world, and with everything in it. With restaurants, taxis, laundries, garages, hospitals, or the police. With the news of the hour and the talk of men, as instantly as if the whole world were only beyond a wall, in an adjacent room.
I was hungry, but a phone could get me food, or get me a car that would take me to it. I was filthy, but from somewhere, at some price, I could get clean clothes. If I couldn’t get the car started by my own efforts now, where I had left it stalled back there by the dead sign at the entrance to that phantasmal rutted road, I could get a garage man from the next town to do it for me, or from some town, even if I had to offer him a hundred dollars to come down from Pittsfield or up from Danbury....
A man has to go along a nightmare road with a splitting skull, to appreciate all the meaning of a phone.
A hundred feet along the privet hedge I came to the entrance of a graveled, suburban-looking driveway, with tire tracks on it.
The red-roofed cottage was only fifty feet inside—a story-and-a half Berkshire colonial, painted white with red shutters, with a mass of Paul’s Scarlets covering one side. A lawn of white clover and long blue grass was in front of it, and there was a flower garden in the back.
Beyond the house, another hundred and fifty feet or so, up at the end of the drive, there was a substantial-looking barn, big and modern, painted white and with a red roof, also, and with a cupola rising from the center of its roof ridge, topped by a spire with a brass grasshopper weather vane. Like the famous grasshopper vane on Faneuil Hall, I think, in Boston.
A station wagon with a flat tire stood out on the drive in front of the barn, headed toward the doors, but not yet put away. There was a whitewashed pigpen and some chickenhouses to one side, though no pigs or chickens in them. Back beyond the barn was a windmill and a water tank, up on a little rise of ground, and rock-studded pastures and copses of evergreens, back to a line of woods.
It was the kind of pretty little country place with some city comforts, urbs in rure, which somebody had spent some moderate money, thought, and pleasure in fixing up. The house, with its old fanlight and tiny attic windows, must be an old eighteenth-century original, restored to its simple pristine lines from whatever gingerbread decorations had been added by intervening fancy-loving generations. It was the summer home of some cultivated man, I knew it, of simple tastes, with a fondness for solitude and old things—for reading books, and perhaps writing them, and puttering in his garden. Perhaps a retired college professor, I thought; and—because of the, Faneuil weather vane—probably from Boston.
There was a mailbox stuck on a five-foot pole at the edge of the road, beside the drive. “A. MacComerou,” it said simply, in small stenciled letters.
The name, somewhat unique, rang a bell in my mind. It couldn’t be the name of anyone in the medical profession, for medical doctors are always particular about advertising their degrees. Almost any of us would sooner appear without a shirt than without his Dr. or M.D., particularly on his mailbox. I was reminded of medical school, all the same. Then it clicked. Homicidal Psychopathology, by Adam MacComerou, which had been our textbook in Med Psych 12 during my senior year.
There was never another textbook like it. I could still feel the weight of it, just lifting it, and see again before my eyes its somber brown buckram binding, enclosing its twelve hundred and eighty-seven pages of fact-packed small-type text, with notes and indices. Selected Case Histories in an Approach to an Examination of the Basic Problems of Homicidal Psychopathology, Together with a Brief Inquiry into Certain Aspects of Aberrant and Divided Personality Among Men of Superior Mentality, by Adam MacComerou, A.B., Ph.D., Litt.D. (causa honoris, Chicago), Sc.D. (Yale), LL.D. (Swarthmore, Columbia, McGill), Lowell Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, was the full title page of it, as I remembered it. Hom. Psych. was what we had always called it, for short.
Old Adam knew his murderers. The dull and ponderous title had been deliberately fabricated, he had explained in one of his dry footnotes, to keep screwball laymen away, who might have found themselves too much interested in it, otherwise. He knew the power of suggestion on weak minds. Actually Hom. Psych. had been anything but dull and heavy. Lucidly written, wise, and full of meat, it was more dramatic than most fiction, in the stories it told of murderous mentalities and its analyses of just what had made them like that. As a textbook, of course, it would always be a classic in its field, the final word.
This A. MacComerou couldn’t be old Adam himself, of course. He must be dead by now, with all that had been in his brain. It mightn’t even be any relation, or anyone who had ever heard of him. Still, it wasn’t a very usual name.
I felt a momentary hesitation, I recall it. I had been fascinated by Hom. Psych. when I had had it, at an impressionable age. I had memorized whole paragraphs of it, and had passed it with an A. MacComerou, I had always felt, was a great mind.
Yet I wasn’t sure whether I should care to meet him now, in person, if it was the same.
I must get that item analyzed in my mind—my feeling in that moment as I stood there beside the mailbox, before going in, at twilight. My feeling that I would rather it didn’t turn out to be old Adam MacComerou himself.
In part, of course, I was tired, and had a headache—I didn’t particularly want to meet any man too intelligent, who might want to converse too much. In part, I think it was due to a general feeling I have that authors and their books are separate things; and that if a man has written a great book, the best of him is in it. An author and his book are no more identical than a father and his child, or a man and his wife. They are related, and they have a similarity in various ways; but you can like one without liking the other. They are not the same.
But it was something more than that. Old MacComerou had found a particular quiet amusement in poking fun at medical doctors in various paragraphs all through Hom. Psych., in a quiet and good-humored way, but at the same time also somewhat irritating. The medical profession hadn’t been very advanced in its understanding of the problems of mental disorders at the time he had wr
itten it; and some of the more ignorant medical doctors had even branded psychiatry as a quack science. It was like astrology or phrenology, they had said, pseu-doscientific bait for fools.
Old Adam had been too great a man to enter into any exchange of name calling. But he had naturally found some amusement in pricking, in his quiet way, at practitioners of medicine and surgery, here and there, in his book. He wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t. One of the most interesting chapters in Hom. Psych. was the one called “Jekyll-Hyde, M.D.,” in which he had gathered together the case histories of murderers who had all happened to be doctors. I’ll admit that he had plenty there.
But it didn’t mean that, just because I was a doctor, he would find a murderer in me, of course....
There was a gray bird with a white breast, a phoebe, that fussed and flew low before my eyes in that moment as I paused at the entrance to the drive. She had built her nest in a cylinder-shaped newspaper box, open at both ends, that was close beside the mailbox, I saw, and there were nestlings in it. Phoebes generally have several broods that way, all summer, and are devoted parents. Generally, too, they are friendly birds, nesting around houses as they always do, and being accustomed to humans.
But this particular mother phoebe might never have seen a man before, from the way she reacted to me. Flying back and forth across my face on gray wings in the twilight, as if I were some kind of bloody panther she would beat back with her white breast, with her soft twittering cries.
I heard a tinkling sound beyond the hedge as I started in, and a feline wail. A gray cat with white paws and a white face, wearing a collar jangling with little bells, came slinking out from the roots of the hedge onto the gravel, almost at my feet. It looked up at me with a hoarse twanging wail coming from its throat, like the wail of a steel guitar.
The Red Right Hand Page 9