He couldn’t capture her attention. She kept striving to go on past him toward that distant yet ever present reverberation.
“Mitty!” he said sharply, and shook her by the shoulders to bring her back.
Words were loosened from her, fell out at random, as if the shaking had dislodged them. “They’re calling me,” he heard her murmur, “calling me. Let me hear what they want to say.”
He swept her up in his arms forthwith and staggered back to the house with her.
Mallory was still waiting for him outside the doorway, where he’d left him. “What’s the matter, did she turn her ankle?”
“No, she’s — I don’t think she’s well. She’s talking kind of funny, as if she’s gone out of her head. What’ll I do?”
“It’s that sound doing it,” Mallory said. “It’s made her hysterical or something.” He held the door back for him.
Jones carried her inside and into their own room, past the startled eyes of the youngster, who was the only one of the four of them still remaining at the table where they’d been playing.
He closed their room door behind him with the back of his foot and set her on her feet. “What’s the matter with you?” he urged in a plaintive undertone. “What’re you acting this way for?”
He struck a match and lit the lamp.
She had sought the edge of the bed by now, and was sitting on it. She was looking at him as calmly, as matter-of-factly, as though the incident hadn’t occurred at all.
“You’d better lie down,” he suggested.
He saw her put her fingertips lightly to each side of her forehead.
“Do you want a cold cloth for your head? Does it bother you?”
“I keep trying to think,” she said vaguely. “Oh, if you’d only let me alone!”
He lit a cigarette and flung the spent match impatiently aside. “You know what you said out there, don’t you? What’d you mean by that? Did you know what you were saying? What’d you mean, they were calling you? Who was calling you?”
She pushed the back of her hand absently in his direction, as if the very sound of his voice was an interruption in itself.
Somebody knuckled the door lightly, and when he opened it narrowly, Mallory was standing outside. “Here,” he said, “try these, see if that’ll help her any.” He handed Jones two small tufts of absorbent cotton, evidently taken from a first-aid kit; they were twined into the elongated shapes of stoppers.
Jones thanked him with a nod and took them over to her. He stroked back the hair from the sides of her head. “Here, let me put these in your ears, see if they’ll shut it out a little.”
She glanced down at them curiously, but offered no resistance while he deftly inserted them.
“Can you still hear it?”
She didn’t answer. She just looked at him as though she wondered what he was doing it for.
He adjusted them a little tighter. “Now can you hear it?”
“I hear it—” She didn’t finish what she was saying, but her hands had started towards her chest.
When she tried to raise them toward her ears, he quickly held them down to keep her from removing the stoppers. He sat with her like that a while, watching her closely. In a little while she had quieted, made no further attempt to free her wrists. He got her to lie down, and when her eyes had dropped closed, in either sleep or resignation, he left her and went outside to the others.
Chris was sitting there with her hands loosely crossed and resting against the edge of the table, in an attitude of enforced calm. The tautness of the lines of her face, and its whiteness, and an occasional palsied vibration of both her hands at once, as if with the unease of their position, showed how insincere the attitude was.
Jones joined them without saying anything, and roved restlessly about the room, making a complete circuit of the table two or three times at a slow drifting gait. Each time he came around the side opposite her, her eyes would fasten on him and follow him along the short arc of his passing before her, until the curve had carried him to far offside again. They had a pleading, questioning look in them that he was powerless to answer.
It kept on and on and on. There had never been a time when it wasn’t; he couldn’t remember any. There would never be a time when it would no longer be sounding; he couldn’t visualize, couldn’t conceive of any.
The girl’s head suddenly dropped to the table. Mallory shifted closer and put his hand on her shoulder caressingly.
“Don’t cry, honey. It’s nothing, it won’t hurt you.”
He coaxed her to stand up. She held her face averted from Jones, as if ashamed now that he had witnessed her momentary capitulation. She held it pressed concealingly against her father’s encircling arm.
Jones found a curious thought assailing him. With a glance behind him at the doorway through which he had recently passed, he thought, I wish she’d cry too, like that.
“I’ll take her in,” Mallory said to him under his breath. He led Chris over to the door at the other side of the room. “I want you to get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll sit with you a while until you drop off. You’re not such a big girl yet after all. Not too big for that, anyway.”
And then, after the door had already closed behind the two of them, Jones overheard Mallory’s answer to some low-voiced plaint she must have made to him. “No, he won’t think any the less of you. Don’t you fret about that. He knows just how it is. Everybody can’t be brave all the time.”
Jones shook his head to himself, alone there in the room, in a sort of pantomimic compunction.
He was still there when Mallory came out again a good while later. Without a word, as though both were moved by the same common impulse toward uninhibited discussion and review of the matter, the two of them went outside to the veranda together and stood there by the rail.
A pall of silence hung over the finca, a silence that was only emphasized by that ceaseless throbbing. Even the stars seemed to jar in their fixed places with it.
“Sounds a little closer, doesn’t it?” Mallory suggested.
Jones timed it with his fingertips against the rail. “Either that or the beat’s quickening up. Did you get Chris to go to sleep?”
“She’ll be all right. I told her I’d be right outside.”
Jones kept on drumming in time with it; then saw that he was doing it and desisted abruptly. “Let’s try to break it down,” he said, turning toward the other man.
“How d’you mean?”
“Get at it. Do something with it. Not just stand here drinking it in. Well, either it’s something dangerous or it isn’t. Now to be something dangerous, actively dangerous, it would have to be something human, wouldn’t it? Something caused by a human agency. You’ve been living around here longer than I have. Just what human agencies are there around here that could be responsible for a far-off drumming like that?”
“There aren’t any,” Mallory answered flatly.
“I suppose that should be a consolation, but if anything it makes it worse. It’s certainly not supernatural; I can feel it right here in my chest, at every vibration.”
“There are no wild Indians, no nomad Indians, on this side of the mountains. They’re all people who’ve been domesticated for generations back, like the ones who work for me. They’re afraid of it themselves. You saw how they all ran off.”
“What about the other side of the mountains?”
“That’s an uninhabited valley.”
“Well, has it been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s uninhabited?” Jones persisted. “Has it been investigated, or has it just been written off as uninhabited?”