More Than Human Read online

  But I never touch the gladness

  May not touch the gladness

  Beauty, oh beauty of touchness

  Spread like a leaf, nothing between me and the sky but light,

  Rain touches me

  Wind touches me

  Leaves, other leaves, touch and touch me….

  She made music without words for a long moment and was silent, making music without sound, watching the raindrops fall in the glowing noon.

  Harshly, “What are you doing?”

  Evelyn started and turned. Alicia stood behind her, her face strangely tight. “What are you doing?” she repeated.

  Evelyn made a vague gesture toward the window, tried to speak.

  “Well?”

  Evelyn made the gesture again. “Out there,” she said. “I—I—” She slipped off the window seat and stood. She stood as tall as she could. Her face was hot.

  “Button up your collar,” said Alicia. “What is it, Evelyn? Tell me!”

  “I’m trying to,” said Evelyn, soft and urgent. She buttoned her collar and her hands fell to her waist. She pressed herself, hard. Alicia stepped near and pushed the hands away. “Don’t do that. What was that… what you were doing? Were you talking?”

  “Talking, yes. Not you, though. Not Father.”

  “There isn’t anyone else.”

  “There is,” said Evelyn. Suddenly breathless, she said, “Touch me, Alicia.”

  “Touch you?”

  “Yes, I … want you to. Just …” She held out her arms. Alicia backed away.

  “We don’t touch one another,” she said, as gently as she could through her shock. “What is it, Evelyn? Aren’t you well?”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn. “No. I don’t know.” She turned to the window. “It isn’t raining. It’s dark here. There’s so much sun, so much—I want the sun on me, like a bath, warm all over.”

  “Silly. Then it would be all light in your bath…. We don’t talk about bathing, dear.”

  Evelyn picked up a cushion from the window seat. She put her arms around it and with all her strength hugged it to her breast.

  “Evelyn! Stop that!”

  Evelyn whirled and looked at her sister in a way she had never used before. Her mouth twisted. She squeezed her eyes tight closed and when she opened them, tears fell. “I want to,” she cried, “I want to!”

  “Evelyn!” Alicia whispered. Wide-eyed, she backed away to the door. “I shall have to tell Father.”

  Evelyn nodded, and drew her arms even tighter around the cushion.

  When he came to the brook, the idiot squatted down beside it and stared. A leaf danced past, stopped and curtsied, then made its way through the pickets and disappeared in the low gap the holly had made for it.

  He had never thought deductively before and perhaps his effort to follow the leaf was not thought-born. Yet he did, only to find that the pickets were set in a concrete channel here. They combed the water from one side to the other; nothing larger than a twig or a leaf could slip through. He wallowed in the water, pressing against the iron, beating at the submerged cement. He swallowed water and choked and kept trying, blindly, insistently. He put both his hands on one of the pickets and shook it. It tore his palm. He tried another and another and suddenly one rattled against the lower cross-member.

  It was a different result from that of any other attack. It is doubtful whether he realized that this difference meant that the iron here had rusted and was therefore weaker; it simply gave hope because it was different.

  He sat down on the bottom of the brook and in water up to his armpits, he placed a foot on each side of the picket which had rattled. He got his hands on it again, took a deep breath and pulled with all his strength. A stain of red rose in the water and whirled downstream. He leaned forward, then back with a tremendous jerk. The rusted underwater segment snapped. He hurtled backward, striking his head stingingly on the edge of the channel. He went limp for a moment and his body half rolled, half floated back to the pickets. He inhaled water, coughed painfully, and raised his head. When the spinning world righted itself, he fumbled under the water. He found an opening a foot high but only about seven inches wide. He put his arm in it, right up to the shoulder, his head submerged. He sat up again and put a leg into it.

  Again he was dimly aware of the inexorable fact that will alone was not enough: that pressure alone upon the barrier would not make it yield. He moved to the next picket and tried to break it as he had the one before. It would not move, nor would the one on the other side.

  At last he rested. He looked up hopelessly at the fifteen-foot top of the fence with its close-set, outcurving fangs and its hungry rows of broken glass. Something hurt him; he moved and fumbled and found himself with the eleven-inch piece of iron he had broken away. He sat with it in his hands, staring stupidly at the fence.

  Touch me, touch me. It was that, and a great swelling of emotion behind it: it was a hunger, a demand, a flood of sweetness and of need. The call had never ceased, but this was something different. It was as if the call were a carrier and this a signal suddenly impressed upon it.

  When it happened that thread within him, bridging his two selves, trembled and swelled. Falteringly, it began to conduct. Fragments and flickerings of inner power shot across, were laden with awareness and information, shot back. The strange eyes fell to the piece of iron, the hands turned it. His reason itself ached with disuse as it stirred; then for the first time came into play on such a problem.

  He sat in the water, close by the fence, and with the piece of iron he began to rub against the picket just under the cross-member.

  It began to rain. It rained all day and all night and half the next day.

  “She was here,” said Alicia. Her face was flushed.

  Mr. Kew circled the room, his deepset eyes alight. He ran his whip through his fingers. There were four lashes. Alicia said, remembering, “And she wanted me to touch her. She asked me to.”

  “She’ll be touched,” he said. “Evil, evil,” he muttered. “Evil can’t be filtered out,” he chanted. “I thought it could, I thought it could. You’re evil, Alicia, as you know, because a woman touched you, for years she handled you. But not Evelyn … it’s in the blood and the blood must be let. Where is she, do you think?”

  “Perhaps outdoors … the pool, that will be it. She likes the pool. I’ll go with you.”

  He looked at her, her hot face, bright eyes. “This is for me to do. Stay here!”

  “Please …”

  He whirled the heavy-handled whip. “You too, Alicia?”

  She half turned from him, biting into a huge excitement. “Later,” he growled. He ran out.

  Alicia stood a moment trembling, then plunged to the window. She saw her father outside, striding purposefully away. Her hands spread and curled against the sash. Her lips writhed apart and she uttered a strange wordless bleat.

  When Evelyn reached the pool, she was out of breath. Something—an invisible smoke, a magic—lay over the water. She took it in hungrily, and was filled with a sense of nearness. Whether it was a thing which was near or an event, she did not know; but it was near and she welcomed it. Her nostrils arched and trembled. She ran to the water’s edge and reached out toward it.

  There was a boiling in the upstream end and up from under the holly stems he came. He thrashed to the bank and lay there gasping, looking up at her. He was wide and flat, covered with scratches. His hands were puffy and water-wrinkled; he was gaunt and worn. Shreds of clothing clung to him here and there, covering him not at all.

  She leaned over him, spellbound, and from her came the call—floods of it, loneliness and expectancy and hunger, gladness and sympathy. There was a great amazement in her but no shock and no surprise. She had been aware of him for days and he of her, and now their silent radiations reached out to each other, mixed and mingled and meshed. Silently they lived in each other and then she bent and touched him, touched his face and shaggy hair.

  He t
rembled violently, and kicked his way up out of the water. She sank down beside him. They sat close together, and at last she met those eyes. The eyes seemed to swell up and fill the air; she wept for joy and sank forward into them, wanting to live there, perhaps to die there, but at very least to be a part of them.

  She had never spoken to a man and he had never spoken to anyone. She did not know what a kiss was and any he might have seen had no significance to him. But they had a better thing. They stayed close, one of her hands on his bare shoulder, and the currents of their inner selves surged between them. They did not hear her father’s resolute footsteps, nor his gasp, nor his terrible bellow of outrage. They were aware of nothing but each other until he leapt on them, caught her up, lifted her high, threw her behind him. He did not look to see where or how she struck the ground. He stood over the idiot, his lips white, his eyes staring. His lips parted and again he made the terrible sound. And then he lifted the whip.

  So dazed was the idiot that the first multiple blow, and the second, seemed not to affect him at all, though his flesh, already soaked and cut and beaten, split and spouted. He lay staring dully at that midair point which had contained Evelyn’s eyes and did not move.

  Then the lashes whistled and clacked and buried their braided tips in his back again and the old reflex returned to him. He pressed himself backward trying to slide feet-first into the water. The man dropped his whip and caught the idiot’s bony wrist in both his hands. He literally ran a dozen steps up the bank, the idiot’s long tattered body flailing along behind him. He kicked the creature’s head, ran back for his whip. When he returned with it the idiot had managed to rear up on his elbows. The man kicked him again, rolled him over on his back. He put one foot on the idiot’s shoulder and pinned him down and slashed at the naked belly with the whip.

  There was a devil’s shriek behind him and it was as if a bullock with tiger’s claws had attacked him. He fell heavily and twisted, to look up into the crazed face of his younger daughter. She had bitten her lips and she drooled and bled. She clawed at his face; one of her fingers slipped into his left eye. He screamed in agony, sat up, twined his fingers in the complexity of lace at her throat, and clubbed her twice with the loaded whip-handle.

  Blubbering, whining, he turned to the idiot again. But now the implacable demands of escape had risen, flushing away everything else. And perhaps another thing was broken as the whip-handle crushed the consciousness from the girl. In any case there was nothing left but escape, and there could be nothing else until it was achieved. The long body flexed like a snap-beetle, flung itself up and over in a half-somersault. The idiot struck the bank on all fours and sprang as he struck. The lash caught him in midair; his flying body curled around it, for a brief instant capturing the lashes between the lower ribs and the hipbone. The handle slipped from the man’s grasp. He screamed and dove after the idiot, who plunged into the arch at the holly roots. The man’s face buried itself in the leaves and tore; he sank and surged forward again in the water. With one hand he caught a naked foot. It kicked him on the ear as he pulled it toward him. And then the man’s head struck the iron pickets.

  The idiot was under and through already and lay half out of the brook, twitching feebly in an exhausted effort to bring his broken body to its feet. He turned to look back and saw the man clinging to the bars, raging, not understanding about the underwater gap in the fence.

  The idiot clung to the earth, pink bloody water swirling away from him and down on his pursuer. Slowly the escape reflex left him. There was a period of blankness and then a strange new feeling came to him. It was as new an experience as the call which had brought him here and very nearly as strong. It was a feeling like fear but where fear was a fog to him, clammy and blinding, this was something with a thirsty edge to it, hard and purposeful.

  He relaxed his grasp on the poisoned weeds which grew sickly in the leached ground by the brook. He let the water help him and drifted down again to the bars, where the insane father mouthed and yammered at him. He brought his dead face close to the fence and widened his eyes. The screaming stopped.

  For the first time he used the eyes consciously, purposely, for something other than a crust of bread.

  When the man was gone he dragged himself out of the brook and, faltering, crawled toward the woods.

  When Alicia saw her father returning, she put the heel of her hand in her mouth and bit down until her teeth met. It was not his clothes, wet and torn, nor even his ruined eye. It was something else, something which—“Father!”

  He did not answer, but strode up to her. At the last possible instant before being walked down like a wheat stalk, she numbly stepped aside. He stamped past her and through the library doors, leaving them open. “Father!”

  No answer. She ran to the library. He was across the room, at the cabinets which she had never seen open. One was open now. From it he took a long-barreled target revolver and a small box of cartridges. This he opened, spilling the cartridges across his desk. Methodically he began to load.

  Alicia ran to him. “What is it? What is it? You’re hurt, let me help you, what are you…”

  His one good eye was fixed and glassy. He breathed slowly, too deeply, the air rushing in for too long, being held for too long, whistling out and out. He snapped the cylinder into place, clicked off the safety, looked at her and raised the gun.

  She was never to forget that look. Terrible things happened then and later, but time softened the focus, elided the details. But that look was to be with her forever.

  He fixed the one eye on her, caught and held her with it; she squirmed on it like an impaled insect. She knew with a horrifying certainty that he did not see her at all, but looked at some unknowable horror of his own. Still looking through her, he put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  There was not much noise. His hair fluffed upward on top. The eye still stared, she was still pierced by it. She screamed his name. He was no less reachable dead than he had been a moment before. He bent forward as if to show her the ruin which had replaced his hair and the thing that held her broke, and she ran.

  Two hours, two whole hours passed before she found Evelyn. One of the hours was simply lost; it was a blackness and a pain. The other was too quiet, a time of wandering about the house followed by a soft little whimpering that she made herself: “What?” she whimpered, “what’s that you say?” trying to understand, asking and asking the quiet house for the second hour.

  She found Evelyn by the pool, lying on her back with her eyes wide open. On the side of Evelyn’s head was a puffiness, and in the center of the puffiness was a hollow into which she could have laid three fingers.

  “Don’t,” said Evelyn softly when Alicia tried to lift her head. Alicia set it back gently and knelt and took her hands and squeezed them together. “Evelyn, oh, what happened?”

  “Father hit me,” Evelyn said calmly. “I’m going to go to sleep.”

  Alicia whimpered.

  Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn’t anything else at all anywhere?”

  Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length. She swallowed. “It’s a madness. It’s bad.”

  Evelyn’s quiet face was suffused with a kind of wisdom. “It isn’t bad,” she said. “I had it.”

  “You have to get back to the house.”

  “I’ll sleep here,” said Evelyn. She looked up at her sister and smiled. “It’s all right … Alicia?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t ever wake up,” she said with that strange wisdom. “I wanted to do something and now I can’t. Will you do it for me?”

  “I’ll do it,” Alicia whispered.

  “For me,” Evelyn insisted. “You won’t want to.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “When the sun is bright,” Evelyn said, “take a bath in it. There’s more, wait.” She
closed her eyes. A little furrow came and went on her brow. “Be in the sun like that. Move, run. Run and … jump high. Make a wind with running and moving. I so wanted that. I didn’t know until now that I wanted it and now I … oh, Alicia!”

  “What is it, what is it?”

  “There it is, there it is, can’t you see? The love, with the sun on its body!”

  The soft wise eyes were wide, looking at the darkling sky. Alicia looked up and saw nothing. When she looked down again, she knew that Evelyn was also seeing nothing. Not any more.

  Far off, in the woods beyond the fence, there was a rush of weeping.

  Alicia stayed there listening to it and at last put out her hand and closed Evelyn’s eyes. She rose and went toward the house and the weeping followed her and followed her, almost until she reached the door. And even then it seemed to go on inside her.

  When Mrs. Prodd heard the hoof thuds in the yard, she muttered under her breath and peered out between the dimity kitchen curtains. By a combination of starlight and deep familiarity with the yard itself, she discerned the horse and stoneboat, with her husband plodding beside it, coming through the gate. He’ll get what for, she mumbled, off to the woods so long and letting her burn dinner.

  He didn’t get what for, though. One look at his broad face precluded it. “What is it, Prodd?” she asked, alarmed.

  “Gimme a blanket.”

  “Why on earth—”

  “Hurry now. Feller bad hurt. Picked him up in the woods. Looks like a bear chewed him. Got the clo’es ripped off him.”

  She brought the blanket, running, and he snatched it and went out. In a moment he was back, carrying a man. “Here,” said Mrs. Prodd. She flung open the door to Jack’s room. When Prodd hesitated, the long limp body dangling in his arms, she said, “Go on, go on, never mind the spread. It’ll wash.”