“My wife’s calling me, Allin. I have to go wipe the dishes.”
“It’s a big cloud of vapors, 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 on Hawaii, 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 about 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; and my books that tell how to defeat it. It doesn’t want me preaching anymore. It wants to incorporate me into its huge body, to 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 Gin.
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 gray 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 occasional 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 obvious statement.”
“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 wrecked car.”
“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. 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. 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. “That sure is swell. I wish I could be there. I wish I didn’t know the things I know. I wish lots of things.”
“Are you all right?”
“So far, so good. I’m locked in the kitchen now. Part of the front wall of the house blew in. But I planned my retreat. When the kitchen door gives, I’m heading for the cellar. If I’m lucky I may hold out there until morning. It’ll have to tear the whole damned house down to get to me, and the cellar floor is pretty solid. I have a shovel and I may dig—deeper. . . .”
It sounded like a lot of other voices on the phone.
“What’s that?” Herb Thompson demanded, cold, shivering.
“That?” asked the voice on the phone. “Those are the voices of twelve thousand killed by a typhoon, seven thousand killed by a hurricane, three thousand buried by a cyclone. Am I boring you?
That’s what the wind is. It’s a lot of people dead. The wind killed them, took their minds to give itself intelligence. It took all their voices and made them into one voice. All those millions of people killed in the past ten thousand years, tortured and run from continent to continent on the backs and in the bellies of monsoons and whirlwinds. Oh Christ, what a poem you could write about it!”
The phone echoed and rang with voices and shouts and whinings.
“Come on back, Herb,” called his wife from the card table.
“That’s how the wind gets more intelligent each year, it adds to itself, body by body, life by life, death by death.”
“We’re waiting for you, Herb,” called his wife.
“Damn it!” He turned, almost snarling. “Wait just a moment, won’t you!” Back to the phone. “Allin, if you want me to come out there now, I will! I should have come earlier . . .”
“Wouldn’t think of it. This is a grudge fight, wouldn’t do to have you in it now. I’d better hang up. The kitchen door looks bad; I’ll have to get in the cellar.”
“Call me back, later?”
“Maybe, if I’m lucky. I don’t think I’ll make it. I slipped away and escaped so many times, but I think it has me now. I hope I haven’t bothered you too much, Herb.”
“You haven’t bothered anyone, damn it. Call me back.”
“I’ll try. . . .”
Herb Thompson went back to the card game. His wife glared at him. “How’s Allin, your friend?” she asked, “Is he sober?”
“He’s never taken a drink in his life,” said Thompson, sullenly, sitting down. “I should have gone out there hours ago.”
“But he’s called every night for six weeks and you’ve been out there at least ten nights to stay with him and nothing was wrong.”
“He needs help. He might hurt himself.”
“You were just out there, two nights ago, you can’t always be running after him.”
“First thing in the morning I’ll move him into a sanatorium. Didn’t want to. He seems so reasonable otherwise.”
At ten-thirty coffee was served. Herb Thompson drank his slowly, looking at the phone. I wonder if he’s in the cellar now, he thought.
Herb Thompson walked to the phone, called long-distance, gave the number.
“I’m sorry,” said the operator. “The lines are down in that district. When the lines are repaired, we will put your call through.”
“Then the telephone lines are down!” cried Thompson. He let the phone drop. Turning, he slammed open the closet door, pulled out his coat. “Oh Lord,” he said. “Oh, Lord, Lord,” he said, to his amazed guests and his wife with the coffee urn in her hand. “Herb!” she cried. “I’ve got to get out there!” he said, slipping into his coat.
There was a soft, faint stirring at the door.
Everybody in the room tensed and straightened up.
“Who could that be?” asked his wife.
The soft stirring was repeated, very quietly.
Thompson hurried down the hall where he stopped, alert.
Outside, faintly, he heard laughter.
“I’ll be damned,” said Thompson. He put his hand on the doorknob, pleasantly shocked and relieved. “I’d know that laugh anywhere. It’s Allin. He came on over in his car, after all. Couldn’t wait until morning to tell me his confounded stories.” Thompson smiled weakly. “Probably brought some friends with him. Sounds like a lot of other . . .”
He opened the front door.
The porch was empty.
Thompson showed no surprise; his face grew amused and sly. He laughed. “Allin? None of your tricks now! Come on.” He switched on the porch light and peered out and around. “Where are you, Allin? Come on, now.”
A breeze blew into his face.
Thompson waited a moment, suddenly chilled to his marrow. He stepped out on the porch and looked uneasily, and very carefully, about.
A sudden wind caught and whipped his coat flaps, disheveled his hair. He thought he heard laughter again. The wind rounded the house and was a pressure everywhere at once, and then, storming for a full minute, passed on.
The wind died down, sad, mourning in the high trees, passing away; going back out
