The Tunnel

by Baynard Kendrick

  The Tunnel

  Baynard Kendrick

  Life was very beautiful, very happy and very desirable in those short years after the war. Peace brought everything, homes for the victors, children for the childless, a belief in ourselves and our country we had never possessed before. Banded together in unity the world at last was secure.

  It really wasn’t possible that a price must be paid for the idiocies of war. Hadn’t we won? Worrying and weeping couldn’t resurrect the dead nor restore entirely the maimed and wounded, so why weep and worry?

  Ask our God to do the weeping and the worrying. We need Him now, and it’s easy to be humble. He’s a big strong God, so let Him get busy. Tell Him to stop frowning, too. The world He made is speeding along on a railroad track. He put us on board. Is there any need to punish us?

  Tell Him to stop frowning, please. When He frowns He darkens the sun. When the sun is darkened, the minds of men are darkened with it. When the minds of men are darkened the world goes into a tunnel, and only the power of God, Himself, can bring us into the clear.

  Chapter 1

  Natalie Sherrett stood at the great picture window which filled one end of the drawing room and stared down at the railroad tracks in the valley below. The Sherretts’ house in West Kenwood stood on a hill, and for some time now the view out over the uncultivated apple orchard had become a puzzling panorama of vital interest.

  The gnarled old trees, without apparent cause, had adopted a nasty habit of changing almost overnight, blossoming sweetly in dead of winter, shedding into bleakness when the season should be spring, turning yellow with decaying leaves in summer.

  The trains were unpredictable, too. Nat watched one now, puffing along cityward from West Kenwood. Turning her head slowly from left to right, her fists clenched tight, she was oblivious to the others in the room behind her until the outmoded commuters’ train had vanished into the tunnel. Then she leaned slightly forward.

  A country road curved around and down from in front of the house, and part of the road, where it crossed the tracks, was visible from Natalie’s post at the window at the back of the house. There was always a chance that the city-bound train as it left the tunnel might hit a car and kill someone, crush some fine boy who had luckily escaped death in the war.

  Natalie, during her three years of marriage to Trevil Sherrett, had learned to gauge accurately the length of time that it took a train to come through the tunnel. Lately, she found her mind had become a timetable. The Kenwood & Northern was a branch, offering to the residents of the select community not more than four trains during the night and six during the day.

  She was sick of the trains. They took Trevil Sherrett to work in the morning and brought him home in the evening. They whistled in the valley, sending a resonant summons up to filter into the old Sherrett house and distract her from her daily tasks. At night, the whistles spelled loneliness, waking her sometimes, and sometimes dragging her from bed, to stand at the window and watch for the demonic glare of the firebox and the sparks which shot up from the smokestack of the outmoded locomotive.

  If the wind was right, the smoke occasionally paid an unwelcome visit, gritting the shining top of the grand piano and depositing a stubborn film on her carefully polished furniture, clouding the windows, leaving a nasty coppery taste against her tongue.

  She hated the Sherrett house. It was stuffy and full of mid-Victorian geegaws and draperies, reminiscent of Trevil’s equally stuffy mother who had died there the year before.

  “Heaven knows,” Natalie thought, “I’m lucky to have a place to live.”

  But it couldn’t be too much of a crime to wish that she and Trevil might build a house of their own.

  She turned away from the window and sat down on a high-backed chair, staring at Trev and Dr. Cameron Olessa, hunched over the chess table by the fireplace on the other side of the room.

  Why should Sundays depress her so? This one seemed particularly gray, one of those neutral, indecisive days, cold and chilly and horrid, with an overcast sky unable to decide on either rain or snow.

  It was strange that when Trev and Cam buried themselves under one of their interminable chess games, she often forgot they were there. She regarded them now dispassionately, two bodies facing each other.

  It occurred to Nat that she had been regarding Trevil Sherrett dispassionately for some time now, just how long she wasn’t quite sure. Her detached, analytical interest was really not an indication that all affection for her husband had died. The same faraway, out-of-this-world attitude applied just as much to Dr. Cameron Olessa and to a great many other people, too; maybe to everyone. People were existing to her but they had ceased to seem real.

  Everyone, she felt, had started using her for a purpose, like those beautiful, well-turned-out figures who are constantly preying on your emotions to sell you some product from the pages of a magazine. That was undoubtedly the answer. Trevil had retreated into the pages of a magazine.

  He wore a sports coat now and a soft blue shirt with a turned-down collar. His face and throat were attractively tanned, but to Nat the coloring smacked more of sun lamp than of sun, an incongruous note at that particular time of the year. His hair, still thick at thirty-four, was graying at the temples and rumpled now, with a habit he had of worrying at it with one slender, artistic hand. His soft brown slacks were mussed enough to give that careless country air so essential to a weekend in West Kenwood.

  Nat had learned that Trevil’s clothes, like so many other things, were illusory, filling her for the moment with a false sense of permanency. In the morning, another working day, the careless clothes and the carefree occupant would be replaced by a proper business suit, occupied by the world’s most conservative business man. The heavy, scuffed brogues would turn overnight into neatly polished shoes of black, designed to walk city streets or give their owner proper respect while making a tour of inspection in his fabric mill. The intimacy of open collar, designed for home consumption, would be chastely closed to public view under the confines of collar and polka-dot tie. She was married to a dozen different people rolled into one, an actor who kept popping off-stage to change both personality and costume.

  It wasn’t much consolation to know that the same changeability was a trait of Dr. Cameron Olessa. Right now, the doctor looked like a kindly professor, roundish of face, slightly bald and with owlish glasses. Over the weekend, he was wearing his Ph.D. and his half a dozen other degrees and that same nice air of carelessness applicable to West Kenwood. Underneath that air, he knew quite well that Nat was frightened of his erudition. No matter how kindly a glance he gave her, she found herself wondering which one of Dr. Olessa’s degrees was at work.

  He intended to trick her through his friendship, trap her into revealing things which his brilliant mind could tabulate as being good for her soul. Look what he had done to Sarah, his wife—turned her into a puppet, a square, placid, friendly woman, sitting and knitting, and saying nothing.

  Nat didn’t intend to be a puppet. Life might have suddenly warped itself, but she’d stick with sheer tenaciousness to having a mind of her own.

  Watching the eternal chess game, firelight flickering on hand-carved ivory, Natalie hated chess as much as she despised the Sherrett house. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Utter silence and then when you’d worked yourself up to expecting something cataclysmic, one of the players would reach out a finger and move a piece of ivory a single square.

  “The human mind is a funny thing,” remarked Dr. Olessa, his attention on Trevil Sherrett’s move.

  Trevil grinned. “Clever, eh?”

  “Yes,” Cam admitted thoughtfully. “Ninety percent of your thought process that led up to making that move was brilliant. The other ten percent was insanity. Yet
you acted on the last ten percent, doing something you didn’t mean.”

  “Well, reply to it then, and don’t talk so much.” Trevil looked smug.

  “I never take advantage of anyone’s blind spots,” said Cam. “Instead, I’ll let you take it back and make another move. My reply to this would be to take your queen.”

  “Hell!” muttered Trevil, replacing the pawn he had moved with such caution. “I thought I had that all worked out, and I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Exactly,” said Cam. “That’s why I said the human mind is a funny thing. Do people do the things in life that their bodies do, or do they do what they dream?”

  “Don’t be abstruse and silly at the same time,” Trev advised. “I do what my body does. I’ve barked my shins too many times not to know that. I couldn’t get hurt in a dream.”

  “You can get hurt worse by what your mind cooks up than by barking your shins,” Cam told him. “You can make yourself ill and kill yourself even by knowing subconsciously that things are not what they seem.”

  “I always know what I’m doing,” said Trevil.

  Cam laughed. “Like when you moved that pawn and exposed your queen? Don’t fool yourself, Trev. People not only don’t know what they’re doing half the time, but they don’t know what they’re reading. A clever writer can kick a reader right in the face with cold, hard facts set down on paper, and the reader won’t know until the end of the book whether or not the things the author wrote were true.”

  “You’re talking about fiction now,” Trev protested.

  “Sure,” said Cam. “Fiction’s a lie. The paradoxical thing is that the bigger the he, the truer it must seem. To be good, it has to affect your emotions, make you frightened or happy, make you laugh or cry.”

  “But fiction writers never write about anything that actually happened,” said Trev. “That’s what makes it fiction.”

  “How do you know what actually happens?” asked Dr. Olessa, peering owlishly through his glasses. “We’re sitting here in a living-room. If a writer put this scene in a book and a reader read it, would that reader know until the end if it’s true, or just the author’s, or one of his character’s fevered dreams?”

  “I’d know,” said Trevil.

  “Certainly, you would,” Dr. Olessa admitted. “You and I would know, and Sarah and Nat would know. That is, we’d recognize the authenticity of the scene if we read it. But suppose as a writer I went further and started describing what went on in our minds. If I wrote cleverly enough an outside reader might accept our thoughts as true, but when I came to describing your thoughts you’d know immediately that I was writing fiction. As for Sarah and Nat you wouldn’t be so sure. After all, they might have told me what they were thinking without your knowledge. When you read what I wrote about my own thoughts, none of you would know where fiction stopped and truth began.”

  Trevil thought for a moment before he asked, “Would you?”

  “Maybe I stuck my neck out a little.” Gam was hesitant. “Theoretically, as a writer, I should be able to put down what I’m thinking without fear or favor. Actually, it’s the most difficult thing in the world to do. Even in the most intimate conversation we unconsciously use a lot of selectivity. We dodge tactlessness, humiliation and embarrassment and try to stick to the point so we won’t sound incoherent. Freud recognized that if we could ever achieve the goal of complete self-expression, a great many mental ills could be helped if not completely cured.”

  Natalie felt that Cameron Olessa’s words were clutching at her, tangling her in a network of a vague, unformed idea. She vainly tried to detach herself, but a question broke through. “What do you mean by complete self-expression, Cam?”

  “Just that, without any ifs, ands or buts,” he told her. “There’s another term for it—free association; pouring out literally everything, either to someone else or on paper what you think about yourself and others, all your beliefs and reactions, fantasies and dreams, every attendant feeling—love, hate; from high hopes through discouragement to despair.” He turned back to the chessboard with a slow shake of his head.

  Nat found she must persist. “Why do you say that’s so difficult?”

  Without looking up Cam said, “Try it. See if you can break down every religious, moral and social belief that years of conditioning have set in concrete. You’ll find why it’s hard to do.”

  Sarah Olessa said, “When you get to talking like that, Cameron, you make me want to scream.”

  Natalie picked up part of the Sunday paper and rattled it loudly. She couldn’t bring herself to look at it. Even glancing at the headlines created an air of detachment inside of her that seemed to remove her from the world of the living. What was Tel Aviv, and where? Why did people such as Molotov and Vishinsky have to exist? There were dozens of others.

  She crumpled the paper and tossed it on the floor. It might be nice to run down through the orchard and hide in the tunnel.

  “Would anyone like some tea?” she asked.

  “None for me.” Cam leaned closer over the board and moved a piece impatiently. The piece looked as though it might have floated as it disappeared into an intricate maze of other pieces.

  Trev said, “I’ll drink another highball, darling,” and ran a hand through his hair.

  She wished he wouldn’t do that. Whenever he ruffled his hair, it showed more white at the temples.

  “I’ll drink some tea with you, Nat,” said Sarah, not losing a click of her needles.

  Natalie looked at the ornate French clock on the mantle. Five-sixteen. The trouble was, the train was late. She got up and threaded her way through the massive furniture, past the heavy English lounge and the open desk, cluttered with Trevil’s papers, past the grand piano and the antique bookcase. Some day the bookcase would have to be moved. It was too close to the dining-room door, but Trev’s mother had liked it there, and there it would stay.

  In the dining-room, she looked at another clock on the mantle. Still five-sixteen. The place was full of clocks. They ticked and chimed and chattered and ran on like crazy.

  There was something the matter with her, not the trains. Their schedule was different on Sunday. She stopped by the buffet, poured herself a drink of gin, and drank it straight. It tasted like medicine.

  As she put the gin bottle back, she noticed the Scotch. The bottle was nearly empty. Trevil must be drinking too much. She remembered his opening that bottle the previous day.

  She shut the buffet door and looked at herself in the sideboard mirror. She was very pretty, close to thirty, dark-eyed, slender, her hair done just right with a gentle line upward from the neck in back, her eyebrows keen, her lipstick straight, her eyes a sympathetic gray.

  A train whistled down in the valley. Five-twenty-two.

  She went in the kitchen to make the tea and suddenly felt tired. It was difficult to find the things. There must have been a party the night before. She laughed at her own foolishness. Certainly there had been a party. Parties always tired her. One couldn’t get servants, and she hated clearing things away. This was one of the afternoons she’d have to pay.

  The train was going into the tunnel.

  Yes, definitely there was something the matter with her, and not with the trains. She had been aware of that problem for a long time now, acutely conscious of the frightening moments in the borderlands between light and darkness; the last quick glimpses of speeding events before the blackness of unsurety snapped down.

  Dr. Olessa was aware of the problem, too. She was certain of that, and equally certain he was trying to help. None of his carefully worded hints about the wonderful work psychiatrists had done in the Army had been missed by Natalie. She had no intention of unburdening her soul to any man, for no man living could be trusted. It was rather a pity that Cam Olessa was such a fool.

  She raised her hands in a gesture as though to thrust dark curtains aside.

  What had Cam meant by saying, “We’re sitting here in a living-room. If a write
r put this scene in a book, and a reader read it, would that reader know until the end if it’s true? …”

  Natalie found herself seized with a sudden exultation. She had always wanted to write. Suppose she wrote that scene herself—put right down in black and white everything that had happened, everything that had been said. Of course, she would be the writer then. But wouldn’t she be bound to know what parts of her writing were true?

  Suppose she wrote down everything—what she did, and what she thought she wanted to do.… Suppose she wrote about Bob.…

  Bob had always liked her eyes and her hair and her smile. He had told her so. Captain Robert Helms. Mrs. Robert Helms. When had that been? One, two, or maybe three long years ago. Maybe more.

  “Hello, darling. Do you work in this canteen for love or money?”

  “Money, of course. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s love. I’ll prove it to you if you ever get off duty.”

  “That might be nice, except we’re not allowed to go out with officers.”

  “Why, my dear Miss—”

  “Strong. Natalie Strong.”

  He leaned his arms on the counter and grinned. “I don’t believe you’re too strong.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I’m sure.” His laugh had all the joy of life, making his blue eyes twinkle, creasing his forehead, wreathing his face until you had to laugh with him.

  “We’re not allowed to talk to officers.”

  “Natalie, my darling, I’m not an officer; I’m a Japanese spy.”

  Sunday they ate on the docks in San Francisco. Crabs had always frightened her, and she shuddered at the thousands of them piled around with their yellowish shells, and backs of pink, and cruel claws.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked as she clung to him tightly.

  “The crabs. I hate them. One bit me when I was a little girl.”

  “I thought your name was Strong.”

  “It’s a fake.”

  “We’ll eat lobster,” he promised. “It’s a fake out here, too. It loses its claws when it swims west of Denver.”