Wanderer of the Wasteland

by Grey, Zane

  But through his thick and heat-hazed brain there must have pierced some divination of his failing power to torture her. The time came when he ceased to confront her like a scarecrow, he ceased accusing her, he ceased to hold before her the past and its contrast to the present, he gave up his refinement of cruelty. This marked in Virey a further change, a greater abasement. He reverted to instinct. He retrograded to a savage in his hate, and that hate found its outlet altogether in primitive ways.

  Adam’s keen eye saw all this, and the slow boil in his blood was not all owing to the torrid heat of Death Valley. His great hands, so efficient and ruthless, seemed fettered. A thousand times he had muttered to the silence of the night, to the solemn, hazed daylight, to the rocks that had souls, and to the invisible presence ever beside him: “How long must I stand this? How long—how long?”

  One afternoon as he awoke late from the sweltering siesta he heard Mrs. Virey scream. The cry startled him, because she had never done that before. He ran.

  Adam found her lying at the foot of the stone bench in a dead faint. The brown had left her skin. How white the wasted face! What dark shadows under the hollow eyes! His heart smote him remorselessly.

  As he knelt and was about to lift her head he espied a huge, hairy spider crawling out of the folds of her grey gown. It was a tarantula, one of the ugliest of the species. Adam flipped it off with his hand and killed it under his boot.

  Then with basin of water and wetted scarf he essayed to bring Mrs. Virey back to consciousness. She did not come to quickly, but at last she stirred, and opened her eyes with a flutter. She seemed to be awakening from a nightmare of fear, loathing, and horror. For that instant her sight did not take in Adam, but was a dark, humid, dilated vision of memory.

  “Magdalene, I killed the tarantula,” said he. “It can’t harm you now … Wake up! Why, you’re stiff and you look like—like I don’t know what! … You fainted and I’ve had a time bringing you to.”

  “Oh!” she cried. “It’s you.” And then she clung to him while he lifted her, steadying her upon her feet, and placed her on the stone bench. “So I fainted? … Ugh! That loathsome spider! Where is it?”

  “I covered it with sand,” he replied.

  “Would it have—bitten me?”

  “No. Not unless you grasped it.”

  Slowly she recovered and, letting go of him, leaned back in the seat. Crystal beads of sweat stood out upon her white brow. Her hair was wet. Her sensitive lips quivered.

  “I’ve a perfect horror of mice, bugs, snakes, spiders— anything that crawls,” she said. “I can’t restrain it. I inherited it from my mother … And what has mind got to do with most of a woman’s feelings? Virey has finally found that out.”

  “Virey! … What do you mean?” rejoined Adam.

  “I was leaning back here on the bench when suddenly I heard Virey slipping up behind me. I knew he was up to something. But I wouldn’t turn to see what. Then with two sticks he held the tarantula out over me—almost in my face. I screamed. I seemed to freeze inside. He dropped the tarantula in my lap … Then all went black.”

  “Where—is he now?” asked Adam, finding it difficult to speak.

  “He’s in the shack.”

  Adam made a giant stride in that direction, only to be caught and detained by her clinging hands. Earnestly she gazed up at him, with melancholy, searching eyes.

  He uttered a loud laugh, mirthless, a mere explosion of surcharged breath. “No! … I can’t get angry. I can’t be a man any more. This Death Valley and the sun—and you— have worked on my mind … But I’ll tell you what—nothing can stop me from beating Virey—so he’ll never do that again.”

  “Ah, I … So I’ve worked on your mind? Then it’s the only great deed I ever did … Wansfell, I told you Virey has threatened to shoot you. He’s meant to more than once, but when you have come he has been afraid. But he might.”

  “I wish to heaven he’d try it,” responded Adam, and, loosing the woman’s hold upon his hands, he strode toward the shack.

  “Virey, come out!” he called, loudly, though without any particular feeling. There was no reply, and he repeated the call, this time louder. Still Virey remained silent. Waiting a moment longer, Adam finally spoke again, with deliberate, cold voice. “Virey, I don’t want to mess up that room with all your wife’s belongings in there. So come outside.”

  At that Adam heard a quick, panting breath. Then Virey appeared—came to the door of the shack. Adam could not have told what the man’s distorted face resembled. He carried a gun, and his heart was ferocious if his will was weak.

  “Don’t you—lay one of your—bloody hands on me,” he panted.

  Adam took two long strides and halted before Virey, not six feet distant.

  “So you’ve got your little gun, eh?” he queried, without any particular force. Adam had been compelled to smother all that mighty passion within him, or he could not have answered for his actions. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “If you make a—move at me—I’ll kill you,” came the husky, panting response.

  “Virey, I’m going to beat you within an inch of your worthless life,” declared Adam, monotonously, as if he had learned this speech by rote. “But I’ve got to talk first. I’m full of a million things to call you.”

  “Damn you, I’ll not listen,” replied Virey, beginning to shake with excitement. The idea of using the gun had become an intent and was acting powerfully upon him. “You leave my—camp—you get out—of this valley!”

  “Virey, are you crazy?” queried Adam. The use of his voice had changed that deadlock of his feelings. He must not trust himself to bandy speech with Virey. The beating must be administered quickly or there would be something worse. Yet how desperately hard not to try to awaken conscience or sense in this man!

  “No, I’m not crazy,” yelled Virey.

  “If you’re not crazy, then that trick of throwing a tarantula on your wife was damnable—mean—hellish—monstrous … “My God! man, can’t you see what a coward you are? To torture her—as if you were a heathen! That delicate woman—all quivering nerves! To pick on a weakness, like that of a child! Virey, if you’re not crazy you’re the worst brute I’ve ever met on the desert. You’ve sunk lower than men whom the desert has made beasts. You—”

  “Beast I am—thanks to my delicate wife,” cried Virey, with exceeding bitter passion. “Delicate? Ha-ha! The last lover of Magdalene Virey can’t see she’s strong as steel— alive as red fire! How she clings to memory! How she has nine lives of a cat—and hangs on to them—just to remember! … And you—meddler! You desert rat of a preacher. Get out—or I’ll kill you!”

  “Shoot and be damned!” flashed Adam, as with leap as swift as his voice he reached a sweeping arm.

  Virey’s face turned ashen. He raised the gun. Adam knocked it up just as it exploded. The powder burned his forehead, but the bullet sped high. Another blow sent the gun flying to the sand. Then Adam, fastening a powerful grip on Virey, clutching shirt and collar and throat at once, dragged him before the stone bench where Mrs. Virey sat, wide-eyed and pale. Here Adam tripped the man and threw him heavily upon the sand. Before he could rise Adam straddled him, bearing him down. Then Adam’s big right hand swept and dug in the sand to uncover the dead tarantula.

  “Ah! here’s your spider!” he shouted. And he rubbed the hairy, half-crushed tarantula in Virey’s face. The man screamed and wrestled. “Good! you open your mouth. Now we’ll see … Eat it—eat it, damn your cowardly soul!” Then Adam essayed to thrust the spider between Virey’s open lips. He succeeded only partly. Virey let out a strangling, spitting yell, then closed his teeth as a vise. Adam smeared what was left of the crushed tarantula all over Virey’s face.

  “Now get up,” he ordered, and, rising himself, he kicked Virey. Adam, in the liberation of his emotions by action, was now safe from himself. He would not kill Virey. He could even hold in his enormous strength. He could even think of the joy of viole
nce that was rioting inside him, of the ruthless fierceness with which he could have rent this man limb from limb.

  Virey, hissing and panting in a frenzy, scrambled to his feet. Fight was in him now. He leaped at Adam, only to meet a blow that laid him on the sand. It had not stunned him. Up he sprang, bloody, livid, and was at Adam again. His frenzy lent him strength, and in that moment he had no fear of man or devil. The desert rage was on him. He swung his fists, beat wildly at Adam, tore and clawed. Adam slapped him with great broad hands that clapped like boards, and then, when Virey lunged close, he closed his fist and smashed it into Virey’s face. The man of the cities went plowing in the sand. Then on his hands and knees he crawled like a dog, and, finding a stone, he jumped up to fling it. Adam dodged the missile. Wildly Virey clutched for more, throwing one after another. Adam caught one and threw it back, to crack hard on his opponent’s shin. Virey yelled no more. His rage took complete possession of him. Grasping up a large rock, he held it as a mace and rushed upon Adam to brain him. That action and intent to kill was the only big response he had made to this wild environment. He beat at Adam. He lunged up to meet his foe’s lofty head. He had no fear. But he was mad. No dawning came to him that he was being toyed with. Strong and furious at the moment, he might have succeeded in killing a lesser man. But before Adam he was powerless to do murder. Then the time came when Adam knocked the rock out of his hand and began to beat him, blow on blow to face and body, with violence, but with checked strength, so that Virey staggered here and there, upheld by fists. At last, whipped out of rage and power to retaliate, Virey fell to the sands. Adam dragged him into the shack and left him prostrate and moaning, an abject beaten wretch who realized his condition.

  Most difficult of all for Adam then was to face Mrs. Virey. Yet the instant he did he realized that his ignorance of women was infinite.

  “Did the bullet—when he fired—did it hit you?” she queried, her large eyes, intense and glowing, wonderfully dark with emotion, flashing over him.

  “No—it missed—me,” panted Adam, as with heavy breath he sank upon the stone bench.

  “I picked up the gun. I was afraid he’d find it. You’d better keep it now,” she said, and slipped it into his pocket.

  “What a—dis—gusting—sight for you—to have—to watch!” exclaimed Adam, trying to speak and breathe at once.

  “It was frightful—terrible at first,” she returned. “But after the gun went flying—and you had stopped trying to make him eat the—the spider—ugh! how sickening I … After that it got to be—well, Wansfell, it was the first time in the years I’ve known my husband that I respected him. He meant to kill you. It amazed me. I admired him … And as for you—to see you tower over him—and parry his blows— and hit him when you liked—and knock him and drag him— oh, that roused a terrible something in me! I never felt so before in my whole life. I was some other woman. I watched the blood flow, I heard the thuds and heavy breaths, I actually smelled the heat of you, I was so close—and it all inflamed me, made me strung with savage excitement—I had almost said joy … God knows, Wansfell, we have hidden natures within our breasts.”

  “If only it’s a lesson to him!” sighed Adam.

  “Then it were well done,” she replied, “but I doubt—I doubt. Virey is hopeless. Let us forget … And now will you please help me search in the sand here for something I dropped. It fell from my lap when I fainted, I suppose. It’s a small ivory case with a miniature I think all the world of. Last and best of my treasures!”

  Adam raked in the sand along the base of the bench, and presently found the lost treasure. How passionately, with what eloquent cry of rapture, did she clutch it!

  “Look!” she exclaimed, with wonderful thrill in her voice, and held the little case open before Adam’s eyes.

  He saw a miniature painting of a girl’s face, oval, pure as a flower, with beautiful curls of dark bronze, and magnifi- cent eyes. In these last Adam recognized the mother of this girl. The look of them, the pride and fire, if not the color, were the same as Magdalene Virey’s.

  “A sweet and lovely face,” said Adam.

  “Ruth!” she whispered. “My daughter—my only child— my baby that I abandoned to save her happiness! … Oh, mockery of life that I was given such a heart to love—that I was given such a perfect child!”

  The midsummer midnight furnace winds began to blow.

  They did not blow every night or many nights consecutively; otherwise all life in the valley would soon have become extinct. Adam found the hot winds heretofore, that he had imagined were those for which the valley was famed, were really comfortable compared with these terrible furnace blasts. In trying to understand their nature, Adam concluded they were caused by a displacement of higher currents of cool air. Sometime during the middle of the night there began a downward current of cool air from the mountain heights; and this caused a disturbance of the vast area of hot air in the burning valley below sea level. The tremendous pressure drove the hot air to find an outlet so it could rise to let the cool air down, and thus there came gusts and gales of furnace winds, rushing down the valley, roaring up the canyons.

  The camp of the Vireys, almost in the center of one of these outlets and scarcely a quarter of a mile from the main valley, lay open to the full fury of these winds.

  The first of August was a hazy, blistering day in which the valley smoked. Veils of transparent black heat—shrouds of moving white transparent heat! The mountains’ tops were invisible, as if obscured in thin, leaden-hued fog; their bases showed dull, sinister red through the haze. Nothing moved except the strange veils and the terrible heaven-wide sun that seemed to have burst. It was a day when, if a man touched an unshaded stone with his naked hand, he would be burned as by a hot iron. A solemn, silent, sulphurous, smoky, deadly day, inimical to life!

  But at last the sunset of red hell ended that day and merciful darkness intervened. The fore part of the night was hot, yet endurable, and a relief compared to the sunlit hours. Adam marked, however, or imagined, a singular, ominous, reddish hue of the dim stars, a vast still veil between him and the sky, a waiting hush. He walked out into the open, peering through the dimness, trying to comprehend. The color of the stars and heavens, and of the dull black slopes, and of the night itself, seemed that of a world burned out. Immense, dim, mysterious, empty, desolate! Had this Death Valley finally unhinged his mind? But he convinced himself that it was normal. The unreality, the terror, the forbidding hush of all the elements, the imminence of catastrophe—these were all actually present. Anything could happen here. Exaggeration of sense was impossible. This Death Valley was only a niche of the universe and the universe only a part of the infinite. He felt his intelligence and emotion, and at the same time the conviction that only a step away was death. The old wonder arose—was death the end? Not possible! Yet the cruelty, the impassivity of nature, letting the iron consequences fall—this seemed to crush him. For the sake of a woman who suffered agony of body and mind, Adam was at war with nature and the spirit of creation. Why? The eternal query had no answer. It never would be answered.

  As the hours wore away the air grew hotter, denser. Like a blanket it seemed to lie heavily on Adam. It was the hottest, stillest, most oppressive, strangest night of all his desert experience. Sleep was impossible. Rest was impossible. Inaction was impossible. Every breath seemed impossible of fulfilment. A pressure constricted Adam’s lungs. The slow, gentle walk that he drove himself to take, which it was impossible to keep from taking, brought out a hot flood of sweat on his body, and the drops burned as they trickled down his flesh.

  “If the winds blow tonight!” he muttered, in irresistible dread.

  Something told him they would blow. Tonight they would blow harder and hotter than ever before. The day of leaden fire had promised that. Nature had her midnight change to make in the elements. Time would not stand still. The universe prevailed on its inscrutable course; the planets burned; the suns blazed upon their earths; and this ball
of rock on which Adam clung, groaning with the other pygmies of his kind, whirled and hurtled through space, now dark and then light, now hot and then cold slave to a blazing master ninety million miles away. It was all so inconceivable, inscrutable, unbelievable.

  There came a movement of air fanning his cheek, emphasizing the warmth. He smelled anew the dry alkali dust, the smoky odor, almost like brimstone. The hour was near midnight and the deathlike silence brooded no more. A low moan, as of a lost soul, moved somewhere on the still air. Weird, dismal, uncanny, it fitted the spectral shadows and shapes around him, and the night with its mystery. No human sound, though it resembled the mourn of humanity! A puff of hot wind struck Adam in the face, rushed by, rustling the dead and withered brush, passed on to lull and die away. It seemed to leave a slow movement in the still air, a soft, restless, uneasy shifting, as of an immense volume becoming unsettled, Adam knew. Behind that sudden birth of life the dead air pressed the furious blasts of hell—the midnight furnace wind of Death Valley.

  Adam listened. How strange, low, sad the moan! His keen ears, attuned to all varieties of desert sound, seemed to fill and expand. The moan swelled to a low roar, lulling now, then rising. Like no sound he had ever heard before, it had strange affinity with the abyss of shadows. Suddenly the air around Adam began a steady movement northward. Its density increased, or else the movement, or pressure behind, made it appear so. And it grew swift, until it rustled the brush. Down in the valley the roar swelled like the movement of a mighty storm through a forest. When the gale reached the gateway below Adam it gave a hollow bellow.