Читать книгу A Brand New World - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 4

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The plantations of the Cains in Puerto Rico lay back from the north coast, some thirty kilometers from San Juan. Bisected by the railroad and by the main auto road, they spread green and fragrant in the vivid sunlight. Rows of orange and grapefruit trees, stretching over the undulating sand, with pineapples between the rows of trees.

Here and there, thickets of banana trees, encouraged to grow and break the force of the trade wind from the sea; a tall spreading mango—a sapling perhaps back in the almost forgotten days when Spain ruled this island; occasional clumps of giant coconuts rising on the low hillsides; trees with smooth brown trunks and feather-duster tops, the trunks all bent backward from the coast by the wind.

The main auto road, lined with its majestic royal palms, was oily black and sometimes very noisy; the railroad with its metal ties was a dark streak like a double pencil line amid the green of the trees. But the plantation crossroads were white ribbons of sand in the sunlight, and whiter still at night, under the white glory of the moon.

It was then, at night, that the magic romance of the tropics was to me always most poignant. At sundown the brisk trades were stilled. A quiet, brooding somnolence fell upon everything. The native shacks, palm-thatched, burned brown by the sun, turned darkly mysterious. Off beyond the distant coast, as it showed from the commanding height of the Cains’ veranda, the sea at night was dimly purple under a gem-studded purple sky; and sometimes the moonbeams shimmered off there in the silent magic darkness. The scent of the orange blossoms hung heavy in the still air, exotic, stirring the fancy to a million half formed dreams that one may tell but never express.

Upon the highest knoll, an eminence of perhaps a hundred feet, stood the Cains’ plantation house. A white road led up the slope to it. A broad, spreading frame bungalow, with a peaked tin roof, and a wide flat veranda around three of its sides, with coconut posts set at intervals. A bunch of bananas always hung there, ripening; a box lying against the house wall was filled with oranges at intervals by a native boy.

Beyond the house, at the edge of the knoll-top, a corral with open sides and heavy thatched roof housed the saddle and workhorses. The Cains’ one concession to modernity—the garage, and a small hangar for Dan’s sport plane—stood well beyond the foot of the knoll. In the evening, lolling in the wicker chairs on the veranda, one could not see the garage, and if the traffic on the main road chanced to be dull, one might go back in fancy half a century, to when this magic land must have been at its best. It was still very beautiful. Sunlight and color and warmth.

But the blight, here as everywhere else in the northern hemisphere, was already at hand.

“Tomorrow,” said Dan, “we’ll ride over to Arecibo. Want to, Hulda?”

“On horseback?”

“Yes,” he said. “You don’t think, knowing you as I do, I’d insult you with a car or a plane?”

Hulda can drive a car or handle a plane as well as any one. But for all our Dutch stolidity, there is a strain of romance in us. Hulda’s greatest pleasure was riding astride the little Puerto Rican horses; and though there seems nothing hotter on Earth than a white sand road at noon in the cane fields, Hulda would always ride through them with delight.

“Good,” she said, and laughed, “Senor Dan, that will please me so much.”

But her mocking laugh was forced, for this was February 10th of that fateful winter. An unknown fear lay upon Hulda, as on us all; and the cane fields on the way to Arecibo might have been hot other years, but they certainly were not hot now.

This evening, for instance, as Mr. and Mrs. Cain and their son Dan, and Hulda, sat in the living room of the bungalow, the shutters were all closed and a huge brazier of charcoal burned beside them for warmth. Already it had smoked up the ceiling; and Mr. Cain, despairing that the cool spell would soon moderate, promised his wife for the tenth time that he would get a stove from San Juan and rig it up all shipshape with a pipe—“Like in Vermont, eh, Ellen? Hulda, I’m going to radio your father tomorrow. This local weather bureau’s too dumb to tell me anything. Your father ought to know—he’s a scientist; they’re supposed to know everything.”

The Cains were what, a decade or so ago, were called plain folks. New Englanders, Cain had made his money on a Vermont farm. Their only son Dan had grown to manhood and graduated from college with one of the new agricultural degrees; and partly because of Mrs. Cain’s frail health they had taken Dan and established themselves in Puerto Rico.

Dan now was the brains and the energy of the business. I had gone to school with Dan Cain. A big, rangy, husky, six-footer, with crisp, curly brown hair, blue eyes and a laughing boyish sun-tanned face.

A handsome young giant, I should imagine any girl would love him at sight. Demure little Hulda, a brown sparrow of a girl, loved him, I felt certain, though nothing as yet had been said of any engagement between them. I rather hoped it would come to pass; and I think Dan’s parents did also, for Hulda was very lovable.

Life often holds odd coincidences. At eleven o’clock, this night of February 10, I was in Washington with father and Freddie. What father was telling me I thought then the most important event of the world’s welfare.

But at almost the same time, Hulda, in Puerto Rico, was sitting in the living room with Dan Cain. And another event, wholly different in significance yet of equal importance to the world, was impending. The elder Cains had retired. Dan and Hulda, characteristic of them of late when alone, had fallen into sober discussion.

Dan was really perturbed over the weather. The temperature had gone far into the forties the night before. It certainly was not good for Puerto Rican trees. And the Florida citrus industry was wiped out this winter. It had snowed last week all over the peninsula; a fall of snow with a following freeze that had killed everything which the December freeze had spared. And now—into the forties in Puerto Rico! Ten degrees lower would be freezing. If this went on—

The sound of a pony thudding up the knoll at a gallop broke in upon Hulda’s and Dan’s gloomy reflections. They stared at each other.

“What could that be?” Dan was on his feet.

The pony came up to the front porch entrance, stopped, and on the wooden steps bare feet sounded. Dan flung open the door. The pale-blue vacuum light newly established in the Puerto Rican rural districts was behind him; the door way was a dark rectangle of brilliant stars and cold moonlight, and a rush of chill air swept in.

A peon was on the porch, dirty white trousers and white shirt, ghostly in the moonlight. He was barefooted and bareheaded. His little pony stood at the foot of the steps in a lather of sweat, drooping and panting.

“Ramon!” Dan exclaimed. “What the devil! Come in here!”

It was one of the Cain’s house boys. He came in, chattering, but not from the cold. His coffee-colored face had a green cast with its pallor. He was frightened almost beyond speech.

“What the devil!”

Dan shook the boy with annoyance. Hulda stood apart, staring, and a nameless fear was on her; an unreasonable shudder as though this thing—in its outward aspect the mere fright of a native boy, which probably meant nothing important—were something gruesome, horrible, unutterably frightening.

“Ramon—” Dan shook him again, and the boy suddenly poured out a flood of Spanish, broken, incoherent. Hulda could not understand it. She saw Dan’s face grow grave, and then he laughed. But it struck Hulda then that the incredulous laugh had a note of fear in it.

“Ramon, que dice?” The boy understood English. Dan added, “Don’t be a fool, Ramon! Tell me—”

Hulda asked anxiously, “What is it, Dan?”

He swung on her, and as he saw her face, the solemn fear in her dark eyes, his laugh faded.

“Hulda, he says he was riding home from a fiesta over at the Rolf plantation in Factor. Coming back—you know the hills back there where the bat caves are—what we call our Eden tract? He saw something—a woman like a ghost, he says. A woman’s figure that jumped—it’s out there now.”

Ramon had shrunk against the wall, shuddering; the whites of his black eyes glistened in the blue glare of the vacuum tube.

“Ramon, you been drinking?”

“No! Oh, no—no, senor!”

“What else, Dan?”

Hulda wanted to laugh. It was funny, paying serious attention to a native’s devil story. Other years, an Americano senor would laugh at any peon who talked of a ghost he had seen in the moonlight. But not now; there was an uncanniness in the very air everywhere in the world this winter.

The boy was quieter. He told Dan more and Dan soberly translated it. A thing like a great round silver ball, big as a native shack, glistening with the moonlight on it as it lay in a coconut grove, a mile from the Cains’ plantation house, near the hills where the bat caves are.

Ramon’s pony had suddenly shied, and then Ramon had seen the gleaming white thing lying there. And then he had seen a figure like that of a woman or a girl—a white girl, with flowing white hair.

It was quite near him, standing beside the sloping trunk of a big palm tree that grew on the hillside. Twenty feet away, perhaps, and ten feet higher than the trail along which he was riding.

Ramon was stiff with fear. His pony halted; it stood with upraised head and pointing ears. It saw the white woman’s motionless figure and suddenly raised its head with a long shuddering neigh of fear. The sound must have startled the white woman up there. Ramon saw her crouch; then she leaped from the hillside.

His pony bolted. And then he lashed it for home, fearing the thing was chasing him.

Dan was very solemn. “That doesn’t sound like a ghost tale, Hulda. Ramon, saddle our ponies. Mine—Parti-blanco—and the senorita’s. Not with the aparejo—with the man’s saddle.”

He glanced at Hulda, her trim figure in leather puttees and brown riding trousers. Her face was now almost as white as her blouse.

She stammered, “You want to go out there—go and see—”

Ramon whimpered, “Senor, I’m afraid, here at the corral—if it followed after me!”

Dan strode to the porch. The broad spread of the plantations lay solemn and still under the cold white moon. The thatched roof of the corral was dark, with inky black shadows beside the building. The banana trees arching up over the house waved gently in the night breeze. Everything was sharply white and black. But there was no sign of any intruder, human or otherwise.

“I’ll go with you to saddle the ponies, Ramon. We’ll go—you want to go Hulda?”

“Yes,” she said. She felt at that moment too frightened to stay in the house without Dan, and thought of the elder Cains asleep in the adjoining room never occurred to either of them.

With sweaters donned against the midnight cold, they saddled the ponies and started.

Dan rode ahead, with Hulda almost beside him, and Ramon, his pony as reluctant as himself, following after them. It was a brief ride during which they hardly spoke. Down the knoll, past the silent garage; past the somnolent group of shacks of the plantation workers.

The road was narrow—white sand like a trail. Coconut trees arched it in places, and beside it spread the tracts of fruit trees. It wound back toward a low-lying range of hills and up a steep declivity, where it turned stony from the rain water which daily washed down it.

Dan was flinging watchful glances around them. “Don’t see anything yet, Hulda. Do you?” His voice was a cautious half whisper.

The sure-footed ponies picked their way carefully up the stony trail. They went through a little ravine and emerged into a small valley, a plateau almost flat on this higher land. Hills a hundred feet high fenced it in; its table-like surface of white sand was ruled off with the dark green lines of fruit trees. It was the Cain’s two-hundred acre “Eden tract.” It lay brooding and drowsy under the moon, without a sign of human movement.

Dan halted; Ramon’s pony came beside him.

“Where were you when you saw it, Ramon?”

The boy gestured. He was trembling again. He held his pony forcibly from wheeling to run back. The other ponies seemed to sense the terror. They raised their heads; one whimpered, and they were all quivering. But Dan forced them slowly forward.

The trail skirted the hills to the left. Above it, halfway up a steep ascent, three black yawning mouths of the batcaves showed. Hulda had often been in them with Dan; a guano deposit in them was used as fertilizer for the trees. Hulda saw them now, round and black with the moonlight on the rocks beside them, fifty feet above the valley.

Ramon suddenly chattered: “There! You see it? Ave Maria—”

Off at the edge of the fruit trees, in the shadows of a clump of coconut palms, a great round thing gleamed. A silver sphere, like a white ball some twenty feet high, lying there. It was several hundred feet away, but Hulda could see a black rift in it. A crack? A doorway!

It had a sort of quality about it—a ball, not bouncing actually, but appearing, indefinably, translucent, almost weightless. She knew then, though not with conscious reasoning, what all this was to mean. A silver sphere lying there, with a black rift in it like a doorway, and a small black patch in its side—like a window!

“Hulda! Look!” Dan’s hand went to her arm with a grip that both hurt and steadied her. The three ponies were standing with braced feet in the sand. Dan’s flung up its head to neigh; but his fist thumped its head and stilled it.

And then Hulda saw the figure, as the native boy had seen it half an hour before. It was standing now near the trail ahead of them, between two orange trees; and just as Hulda saw it, the thing moved over, and stopped in the moonlight on the white trail, as though to bar their passage. It was not far ahead of them. Hulda could see it plainly. A white figure; but it did not shimmer. Not ghostly—white only because of the moonlight on it. Uncanny, weird, yet not gruesome.

It was the figure of a girl; small, as small as Hulda. A slim, pink-white girl’s body, with flowing draperies which in daylight might have been sky-blue. Long white hair flowing over pink shoulders.

Dan’s grip on Hulda tightened; then he cast her off and his hand caught her bridle reins and held her pony firmly. Behind them Ramon and his pony were thudding away in a panic.

Dan breathed, “It—she sees us!”

The girl’s arms went slowly up as though with a gesture. It did not seem menacing; a gesture of fear perhaps. Pale-white arms, of delicate human shape. They were bare, but as they slowly raised, the folds of the drapery clung to them.

Abruptly Dan called, “Hello, there—”

The figure did not move further. But the ponies were becoming unmanageable. Dan exclaimed hastily, “Dismount, Hulda!—you’ll be thrown off! I can hold them.”

Hulda and Dan dismounted. But Dan could not hold the ponies. They jerked away from him. He and Hulda were left standing in the sand of the trail, gazing after the two terror-stricken animals as they galloped away toward home.

Dan remembered later that there came to him then a fleeting wonderment. Why were these ponies so afraid of this white figure of a girl in the moonlight? From this distance there seemed nothing about the figure unduly to frighten the animal. The question was not answered until long afterward. But there were indeed things about this white shape which the ponies evidently saw and felt—things which were denied to Hulda’s and Dan’s human senses.

Hulda gasped, “Oh, they’ve gone!” She stood by Dan clinging to him. The white figure in the road was gone also. But in a moment more they saw it again—near to them now, not more than thirty feet away. It was standing off the trail among the fruit trees.

Dan murmured, “It’s human, Hulda. Nothing to be afraid of—see, it’s only a girl. You call to her.”

Hulda’s quavering voice floated out, “We see you. Who are you? We’re friends.”

The figure moved again: backward, floating or walking soundlessly but swiftly, as though with sudden fear.

“Come on,” said Dan. He started briskly forward along the trail, with Hulda close after him. But within a dozen steps, he stopped. And then to both Dan and Hulda came amazement, and the thrill of real fear.

The figure had been retreating. But the hill was close behind it. Suddenly it stopped, seemed to gather itself, to crouch, to spring. It left the ground and sailed up into the unobstructed moonlight above the orange trees. Sailing up in an arc it passed almost directly over their heads and landed soundlessly in the road behind them!

As it passed overhead, outlined against the stars, they saw it more plainly. It seemed a girl of human form, cast in a fashion which might well have been called beautiful. She poised, not as though flying, but sailing. Face toward the ground, white hair waving behind her, arms outstretched, with the folds of her drapery robe opened fan-shaped, fluttering like wings. There was a brief glimpse of her lower limbs, human of mold with the robe wound by the wind close around them.

A thing of beauty, had it not been so uncanny. She floated in a sailing arc as though almost weightless; and with a flip, dropped to the ground upright upon her feet. A fairy’s leap! Soundless, graceful! Romantic, yet uncanny. A figure of enchantment from the dream of a child.

Dan tried to laugh. Fear seemed incongruous. As he and Hulda turned, the figure stood again in the trail facing them. And they could see it was a slim young girl, strangely beautiful, fearful as a fawn at their approach; yet she lingered, seeming—Dan wondered if his fancy were playing him tricks—desirous of conquering her fear and meeting them.

“Hulda—nothing to be afraid of. Don’t move; you’ll frighten her!”

They stood motionless. The white girl in the moonlight down the road took a step forward. They did not move. She came a little further, paused. Then another step. She was not floating, but walking—they could see the outlines of her limbs moving beneath the drapery.

And now he could see her face. Queer, strange of feature, yet in what way they could not have said. And certainly beautiful, gentle, anxious, and afraid. Youthful, a mere girl; and with those flowing waves of snow-white hair framing her face and falling thick over her pink-white shoulders.

She stood, twenty feet away. Dan and Hulda were almost holding their breaths. Dan murmured, “Speak to her again. Softly—don’t frighten her!”

Hulda said gently, “Can you understand me? We’re friends.”

The strange girl stood birdlike, trembling. Hulda repeated, “We’re friends—won’t hurt you. Shall we come nearer? Who are you?”

There was a moment of silence. And then the girl spoke. A soft whisper of a voice, ethereal as the fairy voice of a child’s enchanted fancy; a wraith of sound, but it carried, and Hulda and Dan heard it plainly.

“Zetta! Zetta! Zetta!”