The Tunnel Page 12

  And Natalie and her father definitely were not of the summer people.

  Her shyness prevented her from making friends with the young fry that swarmed in and out of the surf and clambered over the great black dripping rocks and were summoned home to lunch and dinner by collected, worldly mothers or snobbish nursemaids. She wanted to be a part of their universe, wanted it desperately, but was afraid to make advances.

  One morning she woke up feeling bold. She ran over the dunes and down to the beach, critically inspected sandpipers, gulls and the broad vault of light blue sky, and told herself that she was exactly like anyone else. She felt wonderful, exhilarated with a proud sense of ownership.

  “I’m a part of it now,” she thought. “It’s all mine, just as much as it is theirs. I belong here, just as they do.”

  The dry, deterring sand was already hot against the bare soles of her feet. She plunged through it and skimmed when she reached the wet, hard part that was covered when the tide was high; skimmed straight to the crowd of children who were launching a big rotten piece of driftwood at the rolling beachside breakers. A couple of them looked up when they saw her, then seemed to take her presence for granted. Nobody noticed when she laid to and gave a mighty push at the slippery log.

  But she knew it was a silly thing they were all doing. Her father would not have approved. She was scornful, though she had no intention of showing it. You could push the log at the breakers for hours and the breakers would always push it right back at you. Even if you got it over the first roll, there were other, more powerful rolls behind it. Natalie grunted and shoved with the rest of them but she had known at the start that the whole thing was absolutely useless.

  After a while they gave up and began to shove each other around. Natalie soon became disgusted with this horseplay. Her voice came out loudly and clearly.

  “Let’s get some crabs!” she shouted, conscious, before the words left her mouth, that she was alone again, apart, standing before them all in her blue swimming suit, a prey to their terrible scrutiny. And she was afraid. Because she was afraid, she tossed her head and her lips trembled.

  The horrible part of it was that nobody seemed to hear her, or care that she had spoken. She needed recognition. She stamped her small foot on the hard sand, saw the imprint it left, and wept inside when a tongue of water swept over it and obliterated it.

  Hot tears scalding her eyes, she stamped on into the surf, thrusting herself against the first breaker, smashing through it. She would fight the sea, make it know she was here. Waves swirled and eddied, now around her waist, now giving way to her. It was dangerous to go out too far, when the tide was ebbing. There was undertow. There were dips and folds in the ocean floor. Natalie didn’t care; she took another tentative step forward, and it was then that the pain struck full.

  Unbelievable, excruciating pain, terrifying and inexorable swept through her. Something, down there on the sandy bottom, had a sharp knife and was sawing off her toe. Her first yell had vanished in the roar of the breakers; her toe hurt so much that she couldn’t move, couldn’t open her mouth to scream for help. Yet she seemed to be dancing inside herself, knowing that this monster of the deep would keep on sawing at her, taking first her toe, then her ankle and her leg. Her blood would be carried in foaming waters to the children safe on shore; children who didn’t care, who would never bother to wonder why she had gone into the ocean and never come back. Behind the agony of pain there was the drama of it, the wondering if her father would really care.

  Yet even as she struggled to shore, dragging her foot with the inexplicable weight hanging to it, she knew what it was to reach the depths of childish ignominy. A crab had bitten her.

  As long as she lived she would never forget the laughter as she did her witch’s dance before them, shaking and brandishing her foot to free herself from the hideous burden; tying herself in knots, while tears streamed down her face and her body was contorted in what was really more shame than agony.

  She saw the blue and white jerseys, the faded cotton sunsuits in delighted choral surrounding her. She knew she was as funny as a crutch, and knew equally well she could never face them again. Finally the crab, stunned from its beatings against the hard sand, let go, and swung in a nasty blue arc to the sea. Sobbing and panting, Nat ran to the rented house on the beach, the finest house in town.

  She had never told anyone but Bob about the crab.

  Trevil knew she couldn’t bear them, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know why her stomach turned and her keen sight dimmed when she saw them, or even thought of having to touch their spiny shells.

  How did he know he could torture her with them? How?

  She wrenched her mind from the miserable childhood memory and looked around her.

  She had reached the bottom of the long hill and the orchard was behind her. Almost a mile along her way, she had reached the part of the walk she feared. Now she must strike into the road at the very point where the railroad tracks crossed it at the far end of the tunnel.

  Once she passed the tunnel the walk became enjoyable; the hill and the orchard carried a secret thrill which she had to admit she looked forward to with a kind of repulsed fascination. At the halfway point she would begin to strain for the first sight of the tracks, though she knew she ought to shut her eyes and march along as though she were in an unseeing, unthinking vacuum.

  Today it was as if some physical force might keep her from crossing the tracks to the safety of the other side. She stopped by the road and stared at it, willing her foot, in its sensible brogue, to step upon its macadam surface. Her foot would not move.

  This must be an omen, something to which she should pay attention. She had always known that she must search the ground, go over every inch of it for evidence; but she had never dared. There would be something here which would tell her that Bob had been here. Whatever it was, she must find it.

  There was proof, somewhere along the sides of the road; a shred of cloth, a button, a hair of his head. He must have left proof. He said he would come back to her living or dead, and he couldn’t be sure that she was watching that night when his car was flung and scattered by the rushing locomotive. He could not be sure she knew, so he must have left a message.

  She could not go to the village until she found it and read it. Bob wanted her to know he had come.

  In her careful, painstaking way, taking slow and infinitely cautious steps, she plodded through the drifts and bayous left by the snow. She took off her mittens and filtered the chilling numbing snow, grimed from the soot of the train, through her fingers. Fifteen feet back and forth she walked, then took a deep breath, stalked stolidly across the road, and began to search the other side.

  When she found it, she was bent far over, her eyes fixed on a spot of brown earth where the ground had been cleared as though to mark the way. Her hand, rough and red from the cold, trembled hesitantly toward the piece of cloth. She could scarcely feel it as she picked it up.

  That shoulder patch, its yellow, red and green design in felt, she had seen it before. She had sewn it on the sleeve of his shirt herself, one of the new shirts he’d bought the day before he went away.

  The train was entering the tunnel a quarter of a mile away. It whistled, one long and one single short.

  With the sound in her ears, she felt as though she would never be able to move again.

  Better to let Trev kill her than live such a moment all over again. If she killed him, like Bob, Trev and his mother might both return some day.

  Chapter 21

  Trevil Sherrett.

  Natalie stared at the name written in her own strong hand. The letters flickered and wavered, turned into a picture of the man.

  She wrote it again—Trevil Sherrett.

  He of the sensitive lips, the intelligent eyes, the fine nose and sympathetic grin—qualities which had won her when the train emerged from the tunnel and she found herself holding that meaningless slip of yellow paper in her hand.

 
“The meaningless authorities wish to inform you with meaningless sympathy that your meaningless hero husband is meaningless—”

  If Robert Helms comes back to you he will not come back alive.

  Strange, is it not, how life goes on, and how one man replaces another?

  She had later come to realize that Trev had the rare quality of projecting himself into the personalities of others. He had sensed exactly how she felt, and had planned objectively how best to get her through the rest of the journey. This quality and his sublime tact had enabled her to carry on. He hated to hurt anybody because he could imagine the hurt inflicted on himself.

  Mrs. Sherrett had come to Natalie’s compartment immediately after the porter brought her the message from Trevil. She stood in the narrow doorway, her blue-veined hand holding the knob in light support. Swaying slightly with the motion of the train, she looked first at Natalie and then at her son, her eyebrows raised in gentle question.

  “Mother,” said Trevil, “this is Mrs. Helms. She’s just heard that her husband has been killed in action.”

  Natalie caught her breath. The bare statement hurt, but the pain was a cleansing caustic. Now it had been said, in words. You could tear up a telegram, throw it out the window, and pretend it had never been. Spoken words stayed with you. Mrs. Sherrett knew about Bob now, too. The more people who knew he was dead, the more likely it was that it was true. Once you accepted something as true you went on, somehow,—numbed and crushed, but on.

  You might even be glad of help. Natalie could feel herself looking at Mrs. Sherrett as a whipped dog searches his master’s face for a smile.

  Mrs. Sherrett rallied admirably.

  “You poor child.” She came in and seated herself on Natalie’s other side. Now Natalie was protected on the left and right from further onslaught by the War Department or anyone else. “How terrible,” she continued briskly, “that it should have happened like this, on the train. Were you going to him, Mrs. Helms?”

  “No,” said Natalie. “I was—coming from him. I was going to Richmond, to meet his family.”

  Mrs. Sherrett shook her head. She was a woman, Natalie thought, who had been called upon many times during her life to shake her head over deaths and disasters and acts of God. She did it well, with just the right touch of sympathy, withholding herself so as not to seem cloying, showing herself to be firm and staunch as the Rock of Gibraltar, a person to be depended on.

  “She won’t let us help her,” said Captain Sherrett, “but we’re going to anyway. We’ll move her to my compartment, Mother.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Sherrett. She turned to Natalie, and Natalie saw that her gray eyes were very kind. “I know how you feel, my dear. Believe me. However much you may want to be alone it’s good to have friends near.”

  “Yes,” said Natalie. “You’re right, I know. I should …” She could feel her mind as though it were a living thing; she pictured it turning, twisting, inside her brain like a rat trying to find the passage through a maze. A way out. A way out. A way not to think, or a way to think. The raw ends of her mind must bleed copiously until the poison was out, until the tissues could set about their work of healing. She hadn’t started to bleed yet, in her mind. She had read enough about shock to know that the sufferer is paralyzed, held in a comatose state until realization sets in. Perhaps tonight, in the deep well of dark, she would wake up and understand. Then she would really be able to give in. Now she was rigid, while her mind was doing its subconscious work.

  Mrs. Sherrett, in a gray hand-knitted suit, her composed aristocratic face in exactly the right adjustment to deal with any emotional crisis on anybody’s part. Oddly, she seemed to understand.

  Captain Trevil Sherrett’s face was a perfect copy of his mother’s except that it was sharp where hers was now dim. He was ready too. The Sherretts were always ready.

  Natalie could do exactly as she wanted, within limits. She could talk, or she could be quiet. She could laugh hysterically, or she could cry. She could read a book, order a drink, eat dinner, or not eat dinner, just as she pleased. She could stare out the window and they would not mind if she spoiled their journey.

  But they were there. They would watch her without seeming to watch her. Mrs. Sherrett’s gray-clad arms were there if she should collapse. Of course, Mrs. Sherrett would have an ample supply of sleeping tablets, stored against trouble in the night. Her son’s function would be to run errands, to shield Natalie from the careless glances of others on the train, to walk her up and down on the platform for exercise when they made brief stops. They would help her to decide whether or not to see Bob’s parents in Richmond; if she decided against it, they would tell her where to go and what to do.

  These two were capable. They were definitely summer people, and they were paying strict attention to her.

  There was no trouble in the night. Natalie took two of Mrs. Sherrett’s pills and went to sleep in the berth that was really Trevil’s.

  She woke only once. The train had stopped at a siding to take on ice for the air-conditioning system. From somewhere in the region of the wheels came the sounds of men loading boxes, the clang of metal on metal as doors were secured, the rumble of cartwheels over planking. She reached and cautiously lifted the shade an inch. A bare light bulb fastened to a post shed a lurid glow over a bright tin roof. Under the roof was a bench with a man sitting on it. It was like any siding any place in the world: Utah, Nebraska, Ohio or Delaware.

  Bob Helms was dead. There was nothing new in that. She had been perfectly aware that he was going to die; he had died the instant she had set foot on this train. She could hardly remember his face, but the strength of his arms around her was vivid. With him still so close she didn’t mind being alone.

  Mrs. Sherrett stirred beyond the open connecting door.

  “All right, Natalie?”

  Natalie pulled down the shade. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you—quite all right.” She went back to sleep.…

  That was then and this was now:

  Dr. Olessa said, “Take those games we used to play during the war, Trev. That was when you really got a chance to display your brilliance. I might almost say that we reached ninety-five percent brains and only five percent emotion then.”

  “I suppose,” said Trev, “you mean that we couldn’t either of us afford to take chances. Being some three thousand or more miles apart, we had to work things out pretty carefully.”

  “Of course,” said Cam. “With all that time between moves, it’s a wonder either of us ever lost.”

  Natalie was tired of hearing about the long-distance chess Trev and Cam had played while Trev was an officer overseas. They did it by letter. Cam had kept a board set up permanently in his study and Trev, who had to travel light, had done it by diagram. It had taken them on an average of twelve months to play a single game. They never stopped talking about it.

  Sarah sat and knitted placidly. She was making an afghan now, an intricate matter of multi-colored squares. Natalie felt it was her duty to talk to Sarah while the game was going on, but there never seemed to be anything to say.

  Natalie rose from the deep couch before the fire. It was not drawing well tonight; occasional bursts of smoke were billowing into the room, forced by a heavy wind outside. The wind was trying to get into the house. There was something connected with the wind that she ought to do, but she couldn’t think just what it was. Whatever it was, she had to do it now, and she didn’t want anybody creeping after her and watching. She stretched very casually.

  “Drink, anyone?” Nat waited. “Cam, I don’t think you have enough light there.” She adjusted the study lamp behind him. The rays fell directly on the board. A tin roof covering a bench in a station. The light cast shadows on the small hairs at the back of Dr. Olessa’s neck.

  The two men looked up and smiled briefly, shaking their heads. “No, thank you, dear,” said Sarah efficiently.

  Natalie went out by the kitchen door because the kitchen was the logical place f
or her to be. There was nothing wrong in the kitchen that she could see, or smell. When she went to bed she would have to work on the problem of Trev’s death some more. Figure means at greater length and with, she hoped, some better results. Trev would not waste time, nor could she afford to.

  There were two steps to the ground; the kitchen garden six paces to the right, a stretch of lawn between it and the stone terrace which extended from the dining room of the house. Mrs. Sherrett had decorated the terrace with two large blue urns, and in the summer there were deck chairs there, and an awning, one of the kind that bent in the middle of the pole. An English yew flourished at the outer comer of the terrace, and it was under the yew that Natalie had buried the shoulder patch.

  She knew now that she should have kept it in the house. She must make haste to dig it up, otherwise Bob might be offended. It was silly for her to have buried it in the first place. Bob had left it out for her to find and she probably should keep it right in her purse, a little matter of loyalty. She had put it in a small white box, so it wouldn’t be dirty. Bob was always neat and clean.

  She knelt on the cold stone of the terrace and began to dig with her fingers at the spot beneath the yew. The earth was hard and unyielding, and it should have been soft because she had put the box away only that morning.

  In five fruitless minutes she knew the truth. Trey had been there before her. He had dug the box out and was planning to use it against her, part of a far-flung, clever scheme; a plot so complicated that she couldn’t even begin to fit the parts of the puzzle. She couldn’t combat him at all. This was far more complicated than any game of chess. She would have to be very simple and direct to beat him at all.