“Awful shape, but she’d been sick so long—a man’s slack ways!” he heard Flora say.

They fed him, shooed him out of the way, thrust into his hands the paper the postman had left.

Somebody Outside

He thought it was gone forever, the sound of that well-remembered voice, but it came to comfort him—out of the ether or out of the happy past

Helen R. Hull

Illustrations: Courtney Allen

Collier’s, vol. 80, Aug. 20, 1927, pp. 20-21, 41.

Thomas had finished his evening chores. That is, he had locked the door of the barn upon his car and had carried to the kitchen a handful of chips scraped up in the dark from the ground near the chopping block. He rubbed his hands along his baggy trousers, and listened a moment, his stocky figure crouched near the stove. He could hear Jennie’s rocker, little short creaks. On his round, sandy face lay a curious expression of bewilderment, like a garment meant for another man, so little did it fit into the wrinkles at the corners of his blue eyes, the cheerful furrows in his cheeks.

“Thomas!” The word was a thin gasp.

“Coming!” he sang out, and clattered into the living-room. “How you feeling now, Jennie?”

“That pain is worse. Round my heart. You better get my drops.” She did not turn. Her rocker creaked, and her thin hands pressed against her knees, sharp under the gray shawl.

Thomas hurried into the kitchen. He filled a glass, spilled out half the water.

“Where is that darned bottle?” His searching hand sent a saucer splintering into the sink. “Look what I’ve done! Where—”

“Look on the clock shelf.”

“Here it is. I got it, Jennie.” He was back, the water slopping in the glass he carried. “You better pour it out. After the way I spilled it last time.” He held his breath as Jennie let the liquid drip from the mouth of the tiny bottle. Six drops. Then he sighed loudly. “Now you’ll feel better right off.”

“Thomas, I should think those batteries ’d be charged. I can’t stand that whumping noise any longer. And the wind too.”

“Oh, pshaw, I forgot them. Yes, they’re all right. I’ll bring ’em right up, and we’ll have a concert. Can’t turn off the wind, but I’ll give you a concert. That’ll help, Jennie.”

He stumbled down the steep cellar stairs. Too bad he had forgotten about them. Jennie hated that noise. His fault too, leaving the switch on, so the batteries had run down. He was always forgetting something. No wonder Jennie lost patience with him. There, he’d left that cellar door open, for the March wind to rush into the house.

His stubby fingers fumbled with the attachment, and the sound of the small dynamo ceased.

Jennie turned her face toward him as he reëntered the living-room.

“It’s much easier now,” she said, and smiled at him.

“I told you!” Thomas spoke in loud relief. When Jennie felt better and smiled, he could slip out from that baffling oppression, could almost forget she was sick. He bustled around the table and got stiffly to his knees beside the stand at the window, connecting the wires for the battery.

“You just wait a minute and I’ll have some music for you,” he said.

There was something immensely diverting about this box. The bulbs glowed out, his fingers moved the dials slowly. He wasn’t very good at tuning in. Henry, his son, was clever about it. Henry could pick up any station he liked. Now, which way should he move that dial? Whirring, a faint disturbance against his eardrums. Whoop, there it came! A voice. He pulled off the ear phones and plugged in for the loud speaker.

“Some style, Jennie, us sitting here and—”

“Listen, Thomas!” Jennie leaned forward.

“United States Navy Band, playing orchestral number, ‘Those Hot Ole Doggity Blues.’”

“Oh, land, I’ve heard that enough.” Thomas lifted his hand to twirl the dial, but Jennie cried out:

“Let it be, Thomas. Last night you didn’t get anything clear when you shut off that station. You let it be. They’ll have something else.”

The notes blared into the little sitting-room; full orchestra, then a man’s voice, singing, “Those hot—ole—doggity blues!” Jennie tapped her foot softly. Suddenly, as if a door had closed, the sound stopped. Before Thomas touched the machine, Jennie had cried out, “Wait!”

Remote, infinitely faint, there came the tone of a violin, gay, light, like a fountain in sunshine.

“I’ll get it clearer.” Thomas attacked his dials, turned them, and there was the navy band, crashing out the final chords.

“If you wouldn’t touch it!” Tears rolled down Jennie’s cheeks. “It’s that same station, somewhere you don’t know, and I like it.”

“I wanted to get it closer for you.” Thomas pulled his ear phones into place again. He peered up at Jennie. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t hear her with the headpiece over his ears. Poor girl! She didn’t mean to sound so worked up. There!

* * *

They listened in silence. A city station and a lecture on Arizona. Thomas sat back, his legs in their wrinkled, smeared trousers crossed, with a fine air of achievement. Something grand, this listening to folks right in your own house.

“Just a moment, please. In a moment we will announce the next offering on our program. Just a moment, please.”

“I wish,” said Jennie, “that I knew where that violin was. It isn’t any of these stations near here.”

“Texas, mebbe. Or Denver.” Thomas nodded proudly. “When we get that other wire up, and Henry said he’d help Sunday, mebbe we can pick up London.”

“Or Mars.” Jennie was rocking again, but slowly, without the terrible short rhythm of pain. “Maybe Mars. I can’t see—” She lifted one tremulous hand, held it open, closed it, the thin fingers doubling into the palm. “Here in my hand are some of those sounds. You can’t see them. Nor hear them. Just the same as on top of the house. If you knew how to tune it, I think you might hear lots of things. They want to get in. That’s why they interfere. Wanting to be heard. I wish I could live long enough to get more of those things in the air. Not concerts. Or lectures. Even if Arizona is nice to hear about, I—”

Thomas stared at her, his bushy eyebrows pulled together. Jennie had a way, sometimes, of talking queer.

“You can hear enough—” He broke off, his frown disappearing in a grin, his blue eyes moving quickly to the bright hollow of the loud speaker. “Just listen here. More music.”

“Our next offering—” began a deliberate voice.

Finally they heard the weather report. Fair, with northerly gales, subsiding toward evening. And the time. Thomas pulled out his watch. A little slow. Then he shut off the current:

“Show’s all over. Time for bed.” He stood beside Jennie, offering his shoulder for her hand, steadying himself as she slowly got to her feet.

“Maybe if we tried it at midnight, say, we could catch some of those other sounds.”

“We’d catch China,” cried Thomas—“China, where they stay up when we’re in bed. You wait till I get that other wire rigged Sunday.”

“Sometimes”—they were moving slowly toward the stairs, Jennie’s feet dragging over the old rugs—“sometimes I’m real sure those interfering voices are—somebody outside, trying to get in.”

* * *

In the morning Jennie couldn’t get up. Her hands were numb, and when she lifted her eyelids there was a film across her eyeballs. Thomas scrambled into his clothes, he telephoned the doctor and his son. He ran out, his suspenders flapping, to chop more kindling. The handful of chips wouldn’t blaze up to heat the water.

But Jennie’s eyelids never lifted again; her face kept its strangeness.

Through the days that followed Thomas blundered like a clumsy, wretched sleepwalker. His son Henry and his wife, a plump, black-eyed woman with brisk, competent ways, took charge of things. They fed him, shooed him out of the way, thrust into his hands the morning paper which the postman had left. He crept out to the barn, away from the women who helped Henry’s wife clean the house. He heard Flora say, “Awful shape, but she’d been sick so long, and they wouldn’t have anyone in. A man’s slack ways!”

* * *

He sat on his chopping block in the old shed. The wind, shifting to southerly, flapped the bedding and rugs strung along the clotheslines. It caught a sheet of the newspaper spread on his knees and carried it up against the branches of an apple tree. Thomas, looking up, thought that the buds at the tips of the branches were swelling. The paper struggled and twisted. It was caught. He remembered that once, years ago, his kite had lodged in that very crotch. He was climbing the tree to rescue it, but a fresh gust had swept it away down the valley just as his hand reached toward it. His hands covered his face, his stubby fingers digging into his hair. Years—

“Now, Father, you’re coming down to live with us. Room for your car in my garage. Don’t feel so bad. Poor Mother, she’s happier, out of her suffering.”

“I’m all right.” Thomas ground his fist against his knee. Happier? Jennie? Where was she?

In the days that followed Thomas became aware for the first time in his life of the grinding pressure of time—slow, heavy hours from breakfast to bedtime. When he slept he would be awakened by Jennie’s voice, “Thomas!” only to be assaulted in every sense by the strangeness of the room; the flat, smooth mattress; the empty space beside him where his hand crept, trembling; the pencil of light on the ceiling; street noises outside the window.

He suggested that he might go back to the old house. Flora disposed of that. “How would it look, us letting you stay there alone?” And Henry said, “You’ll get used to being here, Father, and we want you. You’d rather stay with your folks, now, wouldn’t you?”

His folks! Jennie was his folks. And she was gone.

One evening Henry came in, triumphant. He had a fine offer for the old place. A real estate agent wanted it for a city man. He’d pay any price for the location. The house wasn’t worth much.

“I won’t sell!” Thomas thumped his fist down on the table.

“Then you’d have a comfortable income. You’ve always been land poor. You should have sold the place years ago and moved to town. You’ve never farmed, really.”

Thomas looked at the two: Flora’s dark eyes, determined and bright; Henry’s kindly face, shadowed a little by uncertainty. How could he tell them—vaguely he fumbled among his feelings—that the old house and hillside held all that was Thomas Parsons: the drifting, easy pattern of his days; his life with Jennie; that away from there he was nothing but a shambling old man, furtively watching the hands of a clock circle heavily around the hours.

“Tomorrow I’ll drive up and look things over,” he said slowly.

As he backed out of the garage the next morning Flora stood on the kitchen steps, her checked apron thrown over head.

“Father!” she shrilled. “Bring your radio set down. It would be nice evenings.”

His car slewed in the spring mud, jumped perilously out of the yard.

“Damned if I will,” he muttered. “Bring Jennie’s radio—”

His clumsy fingers wobbled the key all over the lock before they could insert it. The house puffed out at him with a clammy, musty sigh as he opened the door. He’d build up a fire to drive out that chill. It wasn’t good for the house.

He tiptoed through the dining-room, to the living-room door. Flora had left everything shipshape—an empty orderly room. If he could just hear Jennie’s voice!

There was the old phonograph in the corner, under the dingy chenille cover. Why, somewhere in that pile of records was that old one, Jennie’s voice. He hurried around the center table and squatted on the floor, fumbling over the disks. They hadn’t touched the phonograph all winter. But that record—smaller than the regular ones. He held it up, his hands shaking. Two years ago, the last time he and Jennie had gone to the city, he had dragged Jennie into the shop. “Hear your own voice,” the sign read. He thought it was a silly idea. He fitted the disk in place and ground at the handle. Squealing, humming, metallic and faint:

This is Jennie Parsons speaking. It is January, nineteen twenty-two, and I am in town with my husband.

Jennie, mincing her words, saying what the clerk told her.

Thomas lifted the small black disk and stared at it. Her voice could stay on that piece of lifeless stuff; in those holes, waving in his unsteady grasp. He made a quick start toward the window, stumbled against the piles of records he had scattered over the floor, flung out his hands for support.

“Oh, gosh a’mighty!”

Between his fingers was one small bit of the disk. The rest clinked from the edge of the marble-topped table down on the floor.

* * *

Clumsily, his breath wheezing between his teeth, he picked up the bits and tried to fit them into place.

“You doddering fool!” he cried out.

That had been the only thing left of Jennie, that tracery of pin pricks.

He moved across to the stand which held the black receiving apparatus of the radio. With his coat sleeve he wiped away the film of dust. That picked up things you couldn’t see nor hear. What was it Jennie was always saying? That those interfering voices might be people outside trying to get in? If he could just tune in properly—

He laughed. Huh, he was getting foolish notions. But all around him came the pressure of a gentle insistence. Why, that was the way Jennie always made him feel when she wanted him to do something—every time he tried to duck out of it he would find her right in front of him, just waiting, until he finally gave up and did it, whatever it was she wanted.

If he should rig up that new wire—it was ready, there in the barn. He ran his fingers wildly through his hair. At least no one would know how foolish he was. It would do no harm. Jennie had believed—

In the corner of the barn stood the supports Henry had rigged; on the floor lay the shining coil of wire. Thomas moved with a dogged haste unlike his usual leisurely attacks. He set the long ladder against the house, slid the roof ladder up until the prongs caught over the ridge. The copper wire a circle of light about his shoulders, one of the supports under his arm, he clambered up to the ridge of the house. The morning haze had thickened into a fine spring rain, cool on his face, faintly silver against the shingles and the black trunks of the trees.

They had planned, Henry and he, to run this new wire from the house to the peak of the barn. He filled his mouth with nails, dragged the hammer out of his hip pocket, wriggled astride the ridge to reach the gable end of the roof.

Thomas drove in one nail. The hammer slipped out of his hand, bumped down the roof, and caught on a projecting shingle nail. Thomas stretched for it, his hand moving cautiously down the wet roof, farther....

Then, amazingly, he seemed to be again in the living-room, sitting before the instrument, turning the dials, his fingers curiously deft. The room was cool and dusky, as if the rain hung soft curtains within the walls. His eyes blurred: was it the living-room or a great space, limitless, with the spring rain falling, falling? Jennie was waiting. He was sure that in a moment he would have tuned—for Jennie. He wondered at his expertness; he was always so clumsy. A distant humming, and then—it was Jennie’s voice, clear and firm, without the plaintive undertone of those last months of illness. Jennie’s young voice, laughing at him:

“Old curly-headed Butter Fingers!”

“Where are you, Jennie?” How could he think that she would hear him? And yet she was answering.

“I guess you need me around, don’t you?”

That was what she had always said when she came back from a visit....

“I can’t find you, Jennie. I’m not much use alone.”

“Next time I go I guess I’ll have to take you with me.”

That gay, tender laugh! Why, she had just come back from her first visit home. He could see the gray light catch on the passementerie that edged her blue dress. As he tried to stumble toward her the rain fell in a close-pressing curtain over her, over him.

* * *

He couldn’t see clearly. With an effort he opened his eyelids wide and looked. Why, his thumb and finger moved slowly round and round the blunt head of his hammer. Over him swung a long, trailing branch of the clinging rose bush, and into his face dropped a bit of ragged cloth, torn loose from the trellis. That rose bush climbed against the side of the house. He had broken it away. Amazement shone in his blue eyes. He had fallen, then, slipped down from the roof. He could see the coil of wire spinning brightly above him, caught on the eaves trough; suddenly, as he watched, uncoiling in a great spiral. And Jennie—a shiver, like that of the wire as it dropped in its long spiral, moved over his limp body. Then the rain fell on his fast-closed eyelids.