‘Have you, now; tell me about it, Allin, old man,’ Herb Thompson played it jovially into the phone, while his wife looked on and his neck began to sweat.
‘It began six weeks ago. . .’
‘Oh, yes? Well, well.’
‘. . . I thought I had it licked. I thought it had given up following and trying to get me. But it was just waiting. Six weeks ago I heard the wind laughing and whispering around the corners of my house, out here. Just for an hour or so, not very long, not very loud. Then it went away.’
Thompson nodded into the phone. ‘Glad to hear it, glad to hear it.’ His wife stared at him.
‘It came back, the next night. It slammed the shutters and kicked sparks out of the chimney. It came back five nights in a row, a little stronger each time. When I opened the front door, it came in at me and tried to pull me out, but it wasn’t strong enough. Tonight it is.’
‘Glad to hear you’re feeling better,’ said Thompson.
‘I’m not better, what’s wrong with you? Is your wife listening to us?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I see. I know I sound like a fool.’
‘Not at all. Go on.’
Thompson’s wife went back into the kitchen. He relaxed. He sat down on a little chair near the phone. ‘Go on, Allin, get it out of you, you’ll sleep better.’
‘It’s all around the house now, like a great big vacuum machine nuzzling at all the gables. It’s knocking the trees around.’
‘That’s funny, there’s no wind here, Allin.’
‘Of course not, it doesn’t care about you, only about me!’
‘I guess that’s one way to explain it.’
‘It’s a killer, Herb, the biggest damnedest prehistoric killer that ever hunted prey. A big sniffling hound, trying to smell me out, find me. It pushes its big cold nose up to the house, taking air, and when it finds me in the parlour it drives its pressure there, and when I’m in the kitchen it goes there. It’s trying to get in the windows, now, but I had them reinforced and I put new hinges on the doors, and bolts. It’s a strong house. They built them strong in the old days. I’ve got all the lights in the house on, now. The house is all lighted up, bright. The wind followed me from room to room, looking through all the windows, when I switched them on. Oh!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It just snatched off the front screen door!’
‘I wish you’d come over here and spend the night, Allin.’
‘I can’t! God, I can’t leave the house. I can’t do anything. I know this wind, Lord, it’s big and it’s smart. I tried to light a cigarette a moment ago, and a little draught sucked the match out.
The wind likes to play games, it likes to taunt me, it’s taking its time with me, it’s got all night. And now! God, right now, one of my old travel books, on the library table, I wish you could see it. A little breeze from God knows what small hole in the house has flipped the cover of the book open and the little breeze is — turning the pages one by one. I wish you could see it. There’s my introduction. Do you remember the introduction to my Tibet book, Herb?’
‘Yes.’
‘This book is dedicated to those who lost the game of elements written by one who has seen, but who has always escaped.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘The lights have gone out!’
The phone crackled.
‘The power lines just went down. Are you there, Herb!’
‘I still hear you.’
‘The wind got jealous of all that light in my house, it tore the power lines down. The telephone will probably go next. Oh, it’s a real party, me and the wind, I tell you! Just a second.’
‘Allin?’ A silence. Herb leaned against the mouthpiece. His wife glanced in from the kitchen. Herb Thompson waited, ‘Allin?’
‘I’m back,’ said the voice on the phone. ‘There was a draught from the door and I shoved some wadding under it to keep it from cooling my legs. I’m glad you didn’t come out after all, Herb, I wouldn’t want you in this mess. It just broke one of the living-room windows and a regular gale is in the house, knocking pictures off the wall. Do you hear it?’
Herb Thompson listened. There was a wild sirening on the phone and a whistling and banging. Allin shouted over it. ‘Do you hear it?’
Herb Thompson swallowed drily. ‘I hear it.’
‘It wants me alive, Herb. It doesn’t dare knock the house down in one fell blow. That’d kill me. It wants me alive, so it can pull me apart, finger by finger. It wants what’s inside me. My mind, my brain. It wants my life-power, my psychic force, my ego. It wants intellect.’
‘My wife’s calling me, Allin, I have to go wipe the dishes.’
‘It’s a big cloud of vapours, winds from all over the world. The same wind that ripped the Celebes a year ago, the same pampero that killed in Argentina, the typhoon that fed well in Hawaii, and the hurricane that knocked the coast of Africa early this year. It’s part of all those storms I escaped. It followed me from the Himalayas because it didn’t want me to know what I know of it, the Valley of the Winds where it gathers and plans its destruction. Something, a long time ago, gave it a start in the direction of life.
I know its feeding grounds, I know where it is born and where parts of it expire. For that reason, it hates me, for I have written books against it, telling how to defeat it. It doesn’t want me preaching any more. It wants to incorporate me into its huge body, give it knowledge. It wants me on its own side!’
‘I have to hang up, Allin, my wife — ‘
‘What?’ A pause, the blowing of the wind in the phone, distantly. ‘What did you say?’
‘Call me back in about an hour, Allin.’
He hung up.
He went out to wipe the dishes. His wife looked at him and he looked at the dishes, rubbing them with a towel.
‘What’s it like out tonight?’ he said.
‘Nice. Not very chilly. Stars,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing.’
The phone rang three times in the next hour. At eight o’clock the company arrived, Stoddard and his wife. They sat around until eight-thirty talking and then got out and set up the card-table and began to play Black Jack.
Herb Thompson shuffled the cards over and over, with a clittering, shuttering effect and clapped them out, one at a time before the three other players. Talk went back and forth. He lit a cigar and made it into a fine grey ash at the tip, and adjusted his cards in his hand and on occasion lifted his head and listened. There was no sound outside the house. His wife saw him do this, and he cut it out immediately, and discarded a Jack of Clubs.
He puffed slowly on his cigar and they all talked quietly with occasionally small eruptions of laughter, and the clock in the hall sweetly chimed nine o’clock.
‘Here we all are,’ said Herb Thompson, taking his cigar out and looking at it reflectively. ‘And life is sure funny.’
‘Eh?’ said Mr. Stoddard.
‘Nothing, except here we are, living our lives, and some place else on earth a billion other people live their lives.’
‘That’s a rather naïve statement.’
‘True, nevertheless. Life,’ he put his cigar back in his lips, ‘is a lonely thing. Even with married people. Sometimes when you’re in a person’s arms you feel a million miles away from them.’
‘I like that,’ said his wife.
‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he explained, not with haste; because he felt no guilt, he took his time. ‘I mean we all believe what we believe and live our own little lives while other people live entirely different ones. I mean, we sit here in this room while a thousand people are dying. Some of cancer, some of pneumonia, some of tuberculosis. I imagine someone in the United States is dying right now in a motor crash.’
‘This isn’t very stimulating conversation,’ said his wife.
‘I mean to say, we all live and don’t think about how other people think or live their lives or die. We wait until death comes to us. What I mean is here we sit, on our self-assured butt-bones, while, thirty miles away, in a big old house, completely surrounded by night and God-knows-what, one of the finest guys who ever lived is — ‘
‘Herb!’
He puffed and chewed on his cigar and stared blindly at his cards. ‘Sorry.’ He blinked rapidly and bit his cigar. ‘Is it my turn?’
‘It’s your turn.’
The playing went around the table, with a flittering of cards, murmurs, conversation, laughter. Herb Thompson sank lower into his chair and began to look ill.
The phone rang. Thompson jumped and ran to it and jerked it off the hook.
‘Herb! I’ve been calling and calling.’
‘I couldn’t answer, my wife wouldn’t let me.’
‘What’s it like at your house, Herb?’
‘What do you mean, what’s it like?’
‘Has the company come?’
‘Hell, yes, it has — ‘
‘Are you talking and laughing and playing cards?’
‘Christ, yes, but what has that got to do with — ‘
‘Are you smoking your ten cent cigar?’
‘God damn it, yes, but. . .’
‘Swell,’ said the voice on the phone, enviously. ‘That sure is swell. I
