More Than Human (2 page)

He was in the wood, numbly prying the bark from a dead oak, when it happened. His hands were still and his head came up hunting, harking. He was as aware of the pressures of spring as an animal, and slightly more than an animal could be. But abruptly the spring was more than heavy, hopeful air and the shifting of earth with life. A hard hand on his shoulder could have been no more tangible than this call.
       He rose carefully, as if something around him might break if he were clumsy. His strange eyes glowed. He began to move—he who had never called nor been called, nor responded before. He moved towards the thing he sensed and it was a matter of will, not of external compulsion. Without analysis, he was aware of the bursting within him of an encysted need. It had been a part of him all his life but there was no hope in him that he might express it. And bursting so, it flung a thread across his internal gulf, linking his alive and independent core to the half-dead animal around it. It was a sending straight to what was human in him, recieved by an instrument which, up to now, had accepted only the incomprehensible radiations of the new-born, and so had been ignored. But now it spoke, as it were, in his own tongue.
       He was careful and swift, careful and silent. He turned his wide shoulders to one side and the other as he moved, slipping through the alders, passing the pines closely as if it were intolerable to leave the direct line between himself and his call. The sun was high; the woods were homogeneously the woods, front, right, left; yet he followed his course without swerving, not from knowledge, not by any compass, but purely in conscious response.
       He arrived suddenly, for the clearing was, in the forest, a sudden thing. For fifty feet outward the earth around the close-set pickets had been leached and all trees felled years ago, so that none might overhang the fence. The idiot slipped out of the wood and trotted across the bare ground to the serried iron. He put out his arms as he ran, slid his hands between the pickets, and when they caught on his starved bony forearms his legs kept moving, his feet sliding, as if his need empowered him to walk through the fence and the impenetrable holly beyond it.
       The fact that the barrier would not yield came to him slowly. It was as if his feet understood it first and stopped trying and then his hands, which withdrew. His eyes, however, would not give up at all. From his dead face they yearned through the iron, through the holly, ready to burst with answering. His mouth opened and a scratching sound emerged. He had never tried to speak before and could not now; the gesture was an end, not a means, like the starting of tears at a crescendo of music.
       He began to move along the fence walking sidewise, finding it unbearable to turn away from the call.

It rained for a day and a night and for half the next day, and when the sun came out it rained again, upward; it rained light from the heavy jewels which lay on the rich new green. Some jewels shrank and some fell and then the earth in a voice of softness, and leaves in a voice of texture, and flowers speaking in color, were grateful.
       Evelyn crouched on the window seat, elbows on the sill, her hands cupped to the curve of her cheeks, their pressure making it easy to smile. Softly, she sang. It was strange to hear for she did not know music; she did not read and had never been told of music. But there were birds, there was the bassoon of wind in the eaves sometimes; there were the calls and cooings of small creatures in that part of the wood which was hers and, distantly, from the part which was not. Her singing was made of these things, with strange and effortless fluctuations in pitch from an instrument unbound by the diatonic scale, freely phrased.

But I never touch the gladness
May not touch the gladness
Beauty, oh beauty of touchness
Spread like a leaf, nothing between me and the sky but
light,
Rain touches me
Wind touches me
Leaves, other leaves, touch and touch me...

       She made music without words for a long moment and was silent, making music without sound, watching the raindrops fall in the glowing noon.
       Harshly, “What are you doing?”
       Evelyn started and turned. Alicia stood behind her, her face strangely tight. “What are you doing?” she repeated.
       Evelyn made a vague gesture towards the window, tried to speak.
       “Well?”
       Evelyn made the gesture again. “Out there,” she said. “I—I—” She slipped off the window seat and stood. She stood as tall as she could. Her face was hot.
       “Button up your collar,” said Alicia. “What is it, Evelyn? Tell me!”
       “I’m trying to,” said Evelyn, soft and urgent. She buttoned her collar and her hands fell to her waist. She pressed herself, hard. Alicia stepped near and pushed the hands away. “Don’t do that. What was that... what you were doing? Were you talking?”
       “Talking, yes. Not you, though. Not Father.”
       “There isn’t anyone else.”
       “There is,” said Evelyn. Suddenly breathless, she said, “Touch me, Alicia.”
       “
Touch
you?”
       “Yes, I... want you to. Just...” She held out her arms. Alicia backed away.
       “We don’t touch one another,” she said, as gently as she could through her shock. “What is it, Evelyn? Aren’t you well?”
       “Yes,” said Evelyn. “No. I don’t know.” She turned to the window. “It isn’t raining. It’s dark here. There’s so much sun, so much—I want the sun on me, like a bath, warm all over.”
       “Silly. Then it would be all light in your bath... We don’t talk about bathing, dear.”
       Evelyn picked up a cushion from the window seat. She I put her arms around it and with all her strength hugged it to her breast.
       “Evelyn! Stop that!”
       Evelyn whirled and looked at her sister in a way she had never used before. He mouth twisted. She squeezed her eyes tight closed and when she opened them, tears fell. “I want to,” she cried, “I want to!”
       “Evelyn!” Alicia whispered. Wide-eyed, she backed away to the door. “I shall have to tell Father.”
       Evelyn nodded, and drew her arms even tighter around the cushion.

When he came to the brook, the idiot squatted down beside it and stared. A leaf danced past, stopped and curtsied, then made its way through the pickets and disappeared in the low gap the holly had made for it.
       He had never thought deductively before and perhaps his effort to follow the leaf was not thought-born. Yet he did, only to find that the pickets were set in a concrete channel here. They combed the water from one side to the other; nothing larger than a twig or a leaf could slip through. He wallowed in the water, pressing against the iron, beating at the submerged cement. He swallowed water and choked and kept trying, blindly, insistently. He put both his hands on one of the pickets and shook it. It tore his palm. He tried another and another and suddenly one rattled against the lower cross-member.
       It was a different result from that of any other attack. It is doubtful whether he realized that this difference meant that the iron here had rusted and was therefore weaker; it simply gave hope because it was different.
       He sat down on the bottom of the brook and in water up to his armpits, he placed a foot on each side of the picket which had rattled. He got his hands on it again, took a deep breath and pulled with all his strength. A stain of red rose in the water and whirled downstream. He leaned forward, then back with a tremendous jerk. The rusted underwater segment snapped. He hurtled backward, striking his head stingingly on the edge of the channel. He went limp for a moment and his body half rolled, half floated back to the pickets. He inhaled water, coughed painfully, and raised his head. When the spinning world righted itself he fumbled under the water. He found an opening a foot high but only about seven inches wide. He put his arm in it, right up to the shoulder, his head submerged. He sat up again and put a leg into it.
       Again he was dimly aware of the inexorable fact that will alone was not enough; that pressure alone upon the barrier would not make it yield. He moved to the next picket and tried to break it as he had the one before. It would not move, nor would the one on the other side.
       At last he rested. He looked up hopelessly at the fifteen-foot top of the fence with its close-set, outcurving fangs and its hungry rows of broken glass. Something hurt him; he moved and fumbled and found himself with the eleven-inch piece of iron he had broken away. He sat with it in his hands, staring stupidly at the fence.
      
Touch me, touch me
. It was that, and a great swelling of emotion behind it; it was a hunger, a demand, a flood of sweetness and of need. The call had never ceased, but this was something different. It was as if the call were a carrier and this a signal suddenly impressed upon it.
       When it happened that thread within him, bridging his two selves, trembled and swelled. Falteringly, it began to conduct. Fragments and flickerings of inner power shot across, were laden with awareness and information, shot back. The strange eyes fell to the piece of iron, the hands turned it. His reason itself ached with disuse as it stirred; then for the first time came into play on such a problem.
       He sat in the water, close by the fence, and with the piece of iron he began to rub against the picket just under the cross-member.
       It began to rain. It rained all day and all night and half the next day.

“She
was
here,” said Alicia. Her face was flushed.
       Mr Kew circled the room, his deep-set eyes alight. He ran his whip through his fingers. There were four lashes. Alicia said, remembering, “And she wanted me to touch her. She asked me to.”
       “She’ll be touched,” he said. “Evil, evil,” he muttered. “Evil can’t be filtered out,” he chanted, “I thought it could, I thought it could. You’re evil, Alicia, as you know, because a woman touched you, for years she handled you. But not Evelyn... it’s in the blood and the blood must be let. Where is she, do you think?”
       “Perhaps outdoors... the pool, that will be it. She likes the pool. I’ll go with you.”
       He looked at her, her hot face, bright eyes. “This is for me to do. Stay here!”
       “Please...”
       He whirled the heavy-handled whip. “You too, Alicia?”
       She half turned from him, biting into a huge excitement. “Later,” he growled. He ran out.
       Alicia stood a moment trembling, then plunged to the window. She saw her father outside, striding purposefully away. Her hands spread and curled against the sash. Her lips writhed apart and she uttered a strange wordless bleat.

When Evelyn reached the pool, she was out of breath. Something—an invisible smoke, a magic—lay over the water. She took it in hungrily, and was filled with a sense of nearness. Whether it was a thing which was near or an event, she did not know; but it was near and she welcomed it. Her nostrils arched and trembled. She ran to the water’s edge and reached out towards it.
       There was a boiling in the upstream end, and up from under the holly stems he came. He thrashed to the bank and lay there gasping, looking up at her. He was wide and flat, covered with scratches. His hands were puffy and water-wrinkled; he was gaunt and worn. Shreds of clothing clung to him here and there, covering him not at all.
       She leaned over him, spellbound, and from her came the call—floods of it, loneliness and expectancy and hunger, gladness and sympathy. There was a great amazement in her but no shock and no surprise. She had been aware of him for days and he of her, and now their silent radiations reached out to each other, mixed and mingled and meshed. Silently they lived in each other and then she bent and touched him, touched his face and shaggy hair.
       He trembled violently, and kicked his way up out of the water. She sank down beside him. They sat close together, and at last she met those eyes. The eyes seemed to swell up and fill the air; she wept for joy and sank forward into them, wanting to live there, perhaps to die there, but at very least to be a part of them.
       She had never spoken to a man and he had never spoken to anyone. She did not know what a kiss was, and any he might have seen had no significance to him. But they had a better thing. They stayed close, one of her hands on his bare shoulder, and the currents of their inner selves surged between them. They did not hear her father’s resolute footsteps, nor his gasp, nor his terrible bellow of outrage. They were aware of nothing but each other until he leapt on them, caught her up, lifted her high, threw her behind him. He did not look to see where or how she struck the ground. He stood over the idiot, his lips white, his eyes staring. His lips parted and again he made the terrible sound. And then he lifted the whip.
       So dazed was the idiot that the first multiple blow, and the second, seemed not to affect him at all, though his flesh, already soaked and cut and beaten, split and spouted. He lay staring dully at that midair point which had contained Evelyn’s eyes and did not move.
       Then the lashes whistled and clacked and buried their braided tips in his back again and the old reflex returned to him. He pressed himself backward trying to slide feet-first into the water. The man dropped his whip and caught the idiot’s bony wrist in both his hands. He literally ran a dozen steps up the bank, the idiot’s long tattered body flailing along behind him. He kicked the creature’s head, ran back for his whip. When he returned with it the idiot had managed to rear up on his elbows. The man kicked him again, rolled him over on his back. He put one foot on the idiot’s shoulder and pinned him down and slashed at the naked belly with the whip.
       There was a devil’s shriek behind him and it was as if a bullock with tiger’s claws had attacked him. He fell heavily and twisted, to look up into the crazed face of his younger daughter. She had bitten her lips and she drooled and bled. She clawed at his face; one of her fingers slipped into his left eye. He screamed in agony, sat up, twined his fingers in the complexity of lace at her throat, and clubbed her twice with the loaded whip-handle.
       Blubbering, whining, he turned to the idiot again. But now the implacable demands of escape had risen, flushing away everything else. And perhaps another thing was broken as the whip-handle crushed the consciousness from the girl. In any case there was nothing left but escape, and there could be nothing else until it was achieved. The long body flexed like a snap-beetle, flung itself up and over in a half-somersault. The idiot struck the bank on all fours and sprang as he struck. The lash caught him in midair; his flying body curled around it, for a brief instant capturing the lashes between the lower ribs and the hipbone. The handle slipped from the man’s grasp. He screamed and dove after the idiot, who plunged into the arch at the holly roots. The man’s face buried itself in the leaves and tore; he sank and surged forward again in the water. With one hand he caught a naked foot. It kicked him on the ear as he pulled it towards him. And then the man’s head struck the iron pickets.
       The idiot was under and through already and lay half out of the brook, twitching feebly in an exhausted effort to bring his broken body to its feet. He turned to look back and saw the man clinging to the bars, raging, not understanding about the underwater gap in the fence.
       The idiot clung to the earth, pink bloody water swirling away from him and down on his pursuer. Slowly the escape reflex left him. There was a period of blankness and then a strange new feeling came to him. It was as new an experience as the call which had brought him here and very nearly as strong. It was a feeling like fear, but where fear was a fog to him, clammy and blinding, this was something with a thirsty edge to it, hard and purposeful.
       He relaxed his grasp on the poisoned weeds which grew sickly in the leached ground by the brook. He let the water help him and drifted down again to the bars, where the insane father mouthed and yammered at him. He brought his dead face close to the fence and widened his eyes. The screaming stopped.
       For the first time he used the eyes consciously, purposely, for something other than a crust of bread.
       When the man was gone he dragged himself out of the brook and, faltering, crawled towards the woods.