The Indian Drum (1917)/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX
THE SOUNDING OF THE DRUM
NOISES of the wind and the roaring of the lake made inaudible any sound of his approach to the cabin; she heard his snowshoes, however, scrape the cabin wall as, after taking them off, he leaned them beside the door. He thrust the door open then and came in; he did not see her at first and, as he turned to force the door shut again against the wind, she watched him quietly. She understood at once why the Indian woman had been afraid of him. His face was bloodless, yellow, and swollen-looking, his eyes bloodshot, his lips strained to a thin, straight line.
He saw her now and started and, as though sight of her confused him, he looked away from the woman and then back to Constance before he seemed certain of her.
"Hello!" he said tentatively. "Hello!"
"I'm here, Henry."
"Oh; you are! You are!" He stood drawn up, swaying a little as he stared at her; whiskey was upon his breath, and it became evident in the heat of the room; but whiskey could not account for this condition she witnessed in him. Neither could it conceal that condition; some turmoil and strain within him made him immune to its effects.
She had realized on her way up here what, vaguely, that strain within him must be. Guilt—guilt of some awful sort connected him, and had connected Uncle Benny, with the Miwaka—the lost ship for which the Drum had beaten the roll of the dead. Now dread of revelation of that guilt had brought him here near to the Drum; he had been alone upon the beach twelve hours, the woman had said—listening, counting the beating of the Drum for another ship, fearing the survival of some one from that ship. Guilt was in his thought now—racking, tearing at him. But there was something more than that; what she had seen in him when he first caught sight of her was fear—fear of her, of Constance Sherrill.
He was fully aware, she now understood, that he had in a measure betrayed himself to her in Chicago; and he had hoped to cover up and to dissemble that betrayal with her. For that reason she was the last person in the world whom he wished to find here now.
"The point is," he said heavily, "why are you here?"
"I decided to come up last night."
"Obviously." He uttered the word slowly and with care. "Unless you came in a flying machine. Who came with you?"
"No one; I came alone. I expected to find father at Petoskey; he hadn't been there, so I came on here."
"After him?"
"No; after you, Henry."
"After me?" She had increased the apprehension in him, and he considered and scrutinized her before he ventured to go on. "Because you wanted to be up here with me, eh, Connie?"
"Of course not!"
"What's that?"
"Of course not!"
"I knew it!" he moved menacingly. She watched him quite without fear; fear was for him, she felt, not her. Often she had wished that she might have known him when he was a young man; now, she was aware that, in a way, she was having that wish. Under the surface of the man whose strength and determination she had admired, all the time had been this terror—this guilt. If Uncle Benny had carried it for a score of years, Henry had had it within him too. This had been within him all the time!
"You came up here about Ben Corvet?" he challenged.
"Yes—no!"
"Which do you mean?"
"No."
"I know then. For him, then—eh. For him!"
"For Alan Conrad? Yes," she said.
"I knew it!" he repeated. "He's been the trouble between you and me all the time!"
She made no denial of that; she had begun to know during the last two days that it was so.
"So you came to find him?" Henry went on.
"Yes, Henry. Have you any news?"
"News?"
"News of the boats?"
"News!" he iterated. "News to-night! No one'll have more'n one news to-night!"
From his slow, heavy utterance, a timbre of terrible satisfaction betrayed itself; his eyes widened a little as he saw it strike Constance, then his lids narrowed again. He had not meant to say it that way; yet, for an instant, satisfaction to him had become inseparable from the saying, before that was followed by fright—the fright of examination of just what he had said or of what she had made of it.
"He'll be found!" she defied him.
"Be found?"
"Some are dead," she admitted, "but not all. Twenty are dead; but seven are not!"
She looked for confirmation to the Indian woman, who nodded: "Yes." He moved his head to face the woman, but his eyes, unmoving, remained fixed on Constance.
"Seven?" he echoed. "You say seven are not! How do you know?"
"The Drum has been beating for twenty, but not for more!" Constance said. Thirty hours before, when she had told Henry of the Drum, she had done it without belief herself, without looking for belief in him. But now, whether or not she yet believed or simply clung to the superstition for its shred of hope, it gave her a weapon to terrify him; for he believed—believed with all the unreasoning horror of his superstition and the terror of long-borne and hidden guilt.
"The Drum, Henry!" she repeated. "The Drum you've been listening to all day upon the beach—the Indian Drum that sounded for the dead of the Miwaka; sounded, one by one, for all who died! But it didn't sound for him! It's been sounding again, you know; but, again, it doesn't sound for him, Henry, not for him!"
"The Miwaka! What do you mean by that? What's that got to do with this?" His swollen face was thrust forward at her; there was threat against her in his tense muscles and his bloodshot eyes.
She did not shrink back from him, or move; and now he was not waiting for her answer. Something—a sound—had caught him about. Once it echoed, low in its reverberation but penetrating and quite distinct. It came, so far as direction could be assigned to it, from the trees toward the shore; but it was like no forest sound. Distinct too was it from any noise of the lake. It was like a Drum! Yet, when the echo had gone, it was a sensation easy to deny—a hallucination, that was all. But now, low and distinct it came again; and, as before, Constance saw it catch Henry and hold him. His lips moved, but he did not speak; he was counting. "Two," she saw his lips form.
The Indian woman passed them and opened the door, and now the sound, louder and more distinct, came again.
"The Drum!" she whispered, without looking about. "You hear? Three, I've heard. Now four! It will beat twenty; then we will know if more are dead!"
The door blew from the woman's hand, and snow, swept up from the drifts of the slope, swirled into the room; the draft blew the flame of the lamp in a smoky streak up the glass chimney and snuffed it out. The moonlight painted a rectangle on the floor; the moonlight gave a green, shimmering world without. Hurried spots of cloud shuttered away the moon for moments, casting shadows which swept raggedly up the slope from the shore. The woman seized the door and, tugging it about against the gale, she slammed it shut. She did not try at once to relight the lamp.
The sound of the Drum was continuing, the beats a few seconds apart. The opening of the door outside had seemed to Constance to make the beats come louder and more distinct; but the closing of the door did not muffle them again. "Twelve," Constance counted to herself. The beats had seemed to be quite measured and regular at first; but now Constance knew that this was only roughly true; they beat rather in rhythm than at regular intervals. Two came close together and there was a longer wait before the next; then three sounded before the measure—a wild, leaping rhythm. She recalled having heard that the strangeness of Indian music to civilized ears was its time; the drums beat and rattles sounded in a different time from the song which they accompanied; there were even, in some dances, three different times contending for supremacy. Now this seemed reproduced in the strange, irregular sounding of the Drum; she could not count with certainty those beats. "Twenty—twenty-one—twenty-two!" Constance caught breath and waited for the next beat; the time of the interval between the measures of the rhythm passed, and still only the whistle of the wind and the undertone of water sounded. The Drum had beaten its roll and, for the moment, was done.
"Now it begins again," the woman whispered. "Always it waits and then it begins over."
Constance let go her breath; the next beat then would not mean another death. Twenty-two, had been her count, as nearly as she could count at all; the reckoning agreed with what the woman had heard. Two had died, then, since the Drum last had beat, when its roll was twenty. Two more than before; that meant five were left! Yet Constance, while she was appreciating this, strained forward, staring at Henry; she could not be certain, in the flickering shadows of the cabin, of what she was seeing in him; still less, in the sudden stoppage of heart and breathing that it brought, could she find coherent answer to its meaning. But still it turned her weak, then spurred her with a vague and terrible impulse.
The Indian woman lifted the lamp chimney waveringly and scratched a match and, with unsteady hands, lighted the wick; Constance caught up her woolen hood from the table and put it on. Her action seemed to call Henry to himself.
"What are you going to do?" he demanded.
"I'm going out."
He moved between her and the door. "Not alone, you're not!" His heavy voice had a deep tone of menace in it; he seemed to consider and decide something about her. "There's a farmhouse about a mile back; I'm going to take you over there and leave you with those people."
"I will not go there!"
He swore. "I'll carry you then!"
She shrank back from him as he lurched toward her with hands outstretched to seize her; he followed her, and she avoided him again; if his guilt and terror had given her mental ascendency over him, his physical strength could still force her to his will and, realizing the impossibility of evading him or overcoming him, she stopped.
"Not that!" she cried. "Don't touch me!"
"Come with me then!" he commanded; and he went to the door and laid his snowshoes on the snow and stepped into them, stooping and tightening the straps; he stood by while she put on hers. He did not attempt again to put hands upon her as they moved away from the little cabin toward the woods back of the clearing; but went ahead, breaking the trail for her with his snowshoes. He moved forward slowly; he could travel, if he had wished, three feet to every two that she could cover, but he seemed not wishing for speed but rather for delay. They reached the trees; the hemlock and pine, black and swaying, shifted their shadows on the moonlit snow; bare maples and beeches, bent by the gale, creaked and cracked; now the hemlock was heavier. The wind, which wailed among the branches of the maples, hissed loudly in the needles of the hemlocks; snow swept from the slopes and whirled and drove about them, and she sucked it in with her breath. All through the wood were noises; a moaning came from a dark copse of pine and hemlock to their right, rose and died away; a wail followed—a whining, whimpering wail—so like the crying of a child that it startled her. Shadows seemed to detach themselves, as the trees swayed, to tumble from the boughs and scurry over the snow; they hid, as one looked at them, then darted on and hid behind the tree trunks.
Henry was barely moving; now he slowed still more. A deep, dull resonance was booming above the wood; it boomed again and ran into a rhythm. No longer was it above; at least it was not only above; it was all about them—here, there, to right and to left, before, behind—the booming of the Drum. Doom was the substance of that sound of the Drum beating the roll of the dead. Could there be abiding in the wood a consciousness which counted that roll? Constance fought the mad feeling that it brought. The sound must have some natural cause, she repeated to herself—waves washing in some strange conformation of the ice caves on the shore, wind reverberating within some great hollow tree trunk as within the pipe of an organ. But Henry was not denying the Drum!
He had stopped in front of her, half turned her way; his body swayed and bent to the booming of the Drum, as his swollen lips counted its soundings. She could see him plainly in the moonlight, yet she drew nearer to him as she followed his count. "Twenty-one," he counted—"Twenty-two!" The Drum was still going on. "Twenty-four—twenty-five—twenty-six!" Would he count another?
He did not; and her pulses, which had halted, leaped with relief; and through her comprehension rushed. It was thus she had seen him counting in the cabin, but so vaguely that she had not been certain of it, but only able to suspect. Then the Drum had stopped short of twenty-six, but he had not stopped counting because of that; he had made the sounds twenty-six, when she and the woman had made them, twenty-two; now he had reckoned them twenty-six, though the Drum, as she separated the sound from other noises, still went on!
He moved on again, descending the steep side of a little ravine, and she followed. One of his snowshoes caught in a protruding root and, instead of slowing to free it with care, he pulled it violently out, and she heard the dry, seasoned wood crack. He looked down, swore; saw that the wood was not broken through and went on; but as he reached the bottom of the slope, she leaped downward from a little height behind him and crashed down upon his trailing snowshoe just behind the heel. The rending snap of the wood came beneath her feet. Had she broken through his shoe or snapped her own? She sprang back, as he cried out and swung in an attempt to grasp her; he lunged to follow her, and she ran a few steps away and stopped. At his next step, his foot entangled in the mesh of the broken snowshoe, and he stooped, cursing, to strip it off and hurl it from him; then he tore off the one from the other foot, and threw it away, and lurched after her again; but now he sank above his knees and floundered in the snow. She stood for a moment while the half-mad, half-drunken figure struggled toward her along the side of the ravine; then she ran to where the tree trunks hid her from him, but where she could look out from the shadow and see him. He gained the top of the slope and turned in the direction she had gone; assured then, apparently, that she had fled in fear of him, he started back more swiftly toward the beach. She followed, keeping out of his sight among the trees.
To twenty-six, he had counted—to twenty-six, each time! That told that he knew one was living among those who had been upon the ferry! The Drum—it was not easy to count with exactness those wild, irregularly leaping sounds; one might make of them almost what one wished—or feared! And if, in his terror here, Henry made the count twenty-six, it was because he knew—he knew that one was living! What one? It could only be one of two to dismay him so; there had been only two on the ferry whose rescue he had feared; only two who, living, he would have let lie upon this beach which he had chosen and set aside for his patrol, while he waited for him to die!
She forced herself on, unsparingly, as she saw Henry gain the shore and as, believing himself alone, he hurried northward. She went with him, paralleling his course among the trees. On the wind-swept ridges of the ice, where there was little snow, he could travel for long stretches faster than she; she struggled to keep even with him, her lungs seared by the cold air as she gasped for breath. But she could not rest; she could not let herself be exhausted. Merciless minute after minute she raced him thus— A dark shape—a figure lay stretched upon the ice ahead! Beyond and still farther out, something which seemed the fragments of a lifeboat tossed up and down where the waves thundered and gleamed at the edge of the floe.
Henry's pace quickened; hers quickened desperately too. She left the shelter of the trees and scrambled down the steep pitch of the bluff, shouting, crying aloud. Henry turned about and saw her; he halted, and she passed him with a rush and got between him and the form upon the ice, before she turned and faced him.
Defeat—defeat of whatever frightful purpose he had had—was his now that she was there to witness what he might do; and in his realization of that, he burst out in oaths against her— He advanced; she stood, confronting—he swayed slightly in his walk and swung past her and away; he went past those things on the beach and kept on along the ice hummocks toward the north.
She ran to the huddled figure of the man in mackinaw and cap; his face was hidden partly by the position in which he lay and partly by the drifting snow; but, before she swept the snow away and turned him to her, she knew that he was Alan.
She cried to him and, when he did not answer, she shook him to get him awake; but she could not rouse him. Praying in wild whispers to herself, she opened his jacket and felt within his clothes; he was warm—at least he was not frozen within! No; and there seemed some stir of his heart! She tried to lift him, to carry him; then to drag him. But she could not; he fell from her arms into the snow again, and she sat down, pulling him upon her lap and clasping him to her.
She must have aid, she must get him to some house, she must take him out of the terrible cold; but dared she leave him? Might Henry return, if she went away? She arose and looked about. Far up the shore she saw his figure rising and falling with his flight over the rough ice. A sound came to her too, the low, deep reverberation of the Drum beating once more along the shore and in the woods and out upon the lake; and it seemed to her that Henry's figure, in the stumbling steps of its flight, was keeping time to the wild rhythm of that sound. And she stooped to Alan and covered him with her coat, before leaving him; for she feared no longer Henry's return.