Hour of the Horde

2

Miles stood motionless.

A giant’s hand seemed to close powerfully about his chest, squeezing the breath out of him. Not breathing, he stared at the changed sun and the red-washed landscape, and an old, old fear dating back to the polio attack—fear of his own traitorous body’s finding some way to jail him a second time, before his work could be accomplished—woke inside him.

Grimly he forced himself to breathe and move. He leaned his upper thighs against the heavy shapes of his paint box and cloth-covered painting, pressing them hard against the railing to keep from falling. He rubbed his eyes viciously with the fingers of his good hand and for a painful moment blinked through watery tears at blurred surroundings. But when his gaze cleared again, the redness of sun and land was unchanged, and the fear began to grow into unreasoning anger, like a bubble of fire expanding under his breastbone.

His doctor at the university hospital had told him last month that he was working too hard. His landlady and even Marie Bourtel, who loved him and understood him better than anyone else, had pleaded with him to slow down. So, to be sensible, he had forced himself to get at least six hours’ sleep a night these last two weeks—and still this false and untrustworthy body had failed him, after all.

With brutal fingers he rubbed his eyes once more. But the color of light and sun would not change. Furiously, helplessly, he looked around the walkway for a phone booth.

Probably, he thought, he should stop using his eyes immediately, so that they would not get any worse. He would phone his doctor…

But the walkway bookstore, holding the only phone in the long passageway, was locked up behind glass doors because it was Sunday. Maybe he could get somebody to help him…

Because it was Sunday, the walkway was all but deserted. But looking now, Miles saw three other figures near its far end. The nearest of them was a tall, thin, black-haired girl hugging an armful of books to her nearly breastless front. Beyond the girl were a squarely built, blue-suited older man who looked like one of the academic staff and a stocky, sweatered young man with the brown leather scabbard of a slide rule hanging at his belt. Miles started toward them, lugging his paints and canvas.

But then, suddenly, hope leaped faintly within him. For the other three were also staring around themselves with a dazed air. As he watched, they moved toward each other, like people under a huddling instinct in a time of danger. By the time he reached them they were close together and already talking.

“But it has to be something!” the girl was saying shakily, hugging her books to her as if they were a life belt and she afloat on a storm-tossed sea.

“I tell you, it’s the end!” said the older man. He was stiff and gray in the face, and he spoke with barely moving, gray lips, holding himself unnaturally erect. The reddened sunlight painted rough highlights on his bloodless face. “The end of the world. The sun’s dying…”

“Dying? Are you crazy?” shouted the sweatered young man with the slide rule. “It’s dust in the atmosphere. A dust storm south and west of us maybe. Didn’t you ever see a sunset—”

“If it’s dust, why aren’t things darker?” asked the girl. “Everything’s clear as before, even the shadows. Only it’s red, all red—”

“Dust! Dust, I tell you!” shouted the young man. “It’s going to clear up any minute. Wait and see…”

Miles said nothing. But the first leap of hope was expanding into a sense of relief that left him weak at the knees. It was not him then. The suddenly bloody color of the world was not just a subjective illusion caused by his own failing eyesight or exhausted mind, but the result of some natural accident of atmosphere or weather. With the sense of relief, his now-habitual distaste for wasting precious time in social talk woke in him once more. Quietly he turned away and left the other three still talking.

“I tell you,” he heard the sweatered young man insisting as he moved off, “it’ll have to clear up in a minute. It can’t last…”

But it did not clear up, as Miles continued on across the east campus toward his rooming house in the city beyond. On the way he passed other little knots of people glancing from time to time up at the red sun and talking tensely together. Now that his own first reaction to the sun change was over, he found a weary annoyance growing in him at the way they all were reacting.

To a painter, a change in the color values of the daylight could be important. But what was it to them, these muttering, staring people? In any case, as the sweatered young man had said, it would be clearing up shortly.

Pushing the whole business out of his mind, Miles slogged on homeward, feeling the tiredness creeping up in him as the working excitement drained out of him, and his one good arm, for all its unusual development of muscle, began to weary with the labor of lugging canvas and paint box the half mile to his rooming house.

But the subject of the sun change was waiting for him even there. As he walked in the front door of his rooming house at last, he heard his landlady’s television set sounding loudly from the living room of her ground-floor apartment.

“No explanation yet from our local weather bureau or the U.S. Meteorological Service…” Miles heard, as he passed the open living-room door. Through it, he had a glimpse of Mrs. Arndahl, the landlady, sitting there with several of the other roomers, silently listening, “No unusual disturbances in the sun or in our own atmosphere have been identified so far, and the expert opinion believes such disturbances could not have taken place without…”

There was a stiffness, an aura of alarm about those watching and listening to the set, that woke annoyance again in Miles. Everyone around him, it seemed, was determined to get worked up about this purely natural event. He stepped by quickly but quietly on the brown carpet before the open door and mounted the equally worn carpet of the stairs to the silence and peace of his own large second-floor room.

There he gratefully laid down at last his canvas and painting tools in their proper places. Then he flopped heavily, still dressed, back down on his narrow bed. The white glass curtain fluttered in the breeze from his half-open window. Weariness flooded through him.

It was a satisfying weariness, in spite of the failure of the afternoon’s work—a deep exhaustion, not merely of body and mind, but of imagination and will as well, reflecting the effort he had put into the painting. But still… frustration stirred in him once more—that effort had still been nothing more than what was possible to any normal man. It had not been the creative explosion for which he searched.

For the possibility of that explosion was part of his own grim theory of art, the theory he had built up and lived with ever since that day when he had been painting at the foot of the west bluff, four years ago. According to the theory, there should be possible to an artist something much more than any painter had ever achieved up to now. Painting that would be the result of the heretofore normal creative outburst many times multiplied—into an overpassion.

To himself, more prosaically, he called this overpassion “going into overdrive,” and it should be no more impossible than the reliably recorded displays of purely physical ability shown by humans under extreme emotional stress—in that phenomenon known as hysterical strength.

Hysterical strength, Miles knew, existed. Not merely because he had evidence of it, but also in the thick manila envelope of newspaper clippings he had collected over the last four years. Clippings like the one about the distraught mother who had lifted the thousands of pounds of her overturned car in order to pull her trapped baby from underneath the vehicle. Or the instance of the bedridden old man in his eighties who had literally run to safety, as cleverly as any slack-wire performer, across a hundred feet of telephone wire to a telephone pole to escape from the third floor of a burning apartment building.

He did not need these things to believe in hysterical strength, because he had expressed it. Himself.

And what the body could do, he told himself again now, wrapped in exhaustion on his bed, the creative spirit should be able to do as well. Someday yet he would tap it artistically—that creative overdrive. And when he did, he would at last tear himself free of that bitterness in him that saw old animal guilts and angers, all the primitive limitations of man—mirrored in everything he tried to reproduce on canvas.

When that moment came, he thought, dully and pleasantly now, sinking into drowsiness, a scene like the one he had painted today would show the future, the promise of Man—instead of a human past of bloody instinct and Stone Age violence underlying all that civilization had built.

The exhaustion lapping around him sucked him slowly down into sleep, like a foundering boat. He let himself sink, unresisting. It was an hour before he was due to meet Marie Bourtel off campus for dinner. Time enough for him to rest a few minutes before washing and dressing to go out. He lay, his thoughts flickering gradually into extinction…

Sleep took him.

When he woke, Miles could not at first remember what time of day it was or why he had wakened. And then it came again—a pounding on his door and the voice of his landlady was calling through it to him.

“Miles! Miles !” Mrs. Arndahl’s voice came thinly past the door, as if she were pushing it through the crack underneath the door. “Phone call for you! Miles, do you hear me?”

“It’s all right. I’m awake,” he called back. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Groggily he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat upright. The single window of his room was a square of night blackness, with the shade not drawn above it. His eyes went to the large round face of the windup alarm clock that stood before the mirror on his dresser. The hands stood at five minutes to ten. He had been asleep at least four hours.

In the mirror his sleep-tousled dark hair, fallen down over his forehead, gave him a wild and savage look. He shoved the hair back and forced himself to his feet. He stumbled across the room, stepped out of the door, and walked numbly down the hall to the upstairs extension phone, which was lying out of its cradle. He picked it up.

“Miles!” It was the soft voice of Marie Bourtel. “Have you been there all this time?”

“Yes,” he muttered, still too numb from sleep to wonder why she asked.

“I called a couple of times for you earlier, but Mrs. Arndahl said you hadn’t come in yet. I finally had her check your room anyway.” The usually calm, gentle voice he was used to hearing on the phone had an unusual edge to it. An edge of something like fear. “Didn’t you remember you were going to meet me for dinner at the Lounge?”

“Lounge?” he echoed stupidly. He scrubbed his face with the back of his hand that held the phone, as if to rub memory back into his head. Then contrition flooded him. He remembered the plan to have dinner with Marie at six thirty at the Lounge, which was an off-campus restaurant on the east bank of the river. “Sorry, Marie—I guess I did it again. I was painting this afternoon, and I came back and lay down. I must’ve fallen asleep.”

“Then you’re all right.” There was relief in Marie’s voice for a second; then tension returned. “You don’t know what’s been happening?”

“Happening?”

“The sun’s changed color! About five o’clock this afternoon—”

“Oh, that?” Miles rubbed the back of his hand again over his sleep-numbed face. “Yes, I saw it change. I’d just finished painting—what about it?”

“What about it?” Marie’s voice held a sort of wonder. “Miles, the sun’s changed color !”

“I know,” said Miles a little impatiently. But then, rousing him from that first impatience to sudden near anger, came recognition of the relief in Marie’s voice a few seconds before, when she had said: “Then you’re all right.”

Those remembered words jarred unpleasantly back to mind his own first few moments of alarm when he had seen the sun’s changed color. He heard the edge in his own voice as he answered her.

“I know the sun’s changed color! I said I saw it happen! What of it?”

“Miles—” Marie’s voice broke off, oddly, as if she were uncertain of what to say to him. “Miles, I want to see you. If you’ve been asleep all this time you haven’t had dinner yet, have you?”

“Well… no. I haven’t.” Miles was abruptly reminded of the emptiness inside him. Come to think of it, he had not eaten since breakfast, thirteen hours before.

“I’ll meet you at the Lounge in ten minutes then,” said Marie swiftly. “You can have some dinner, and we can talk. Ten minutes?”

“All right,” he said, still somewhat numb with sleep.

“Good-bye, Miles.”

“Good-bye.”

He hung up.

Slowly waking up in the process, Miles went back to his room, washed his face, put on a fresh shirt and a sport coat, and left the rooming house for the half-mile walk back across the two campuses and their connecting walkway to the business section beyond the east campus. As he passed the landlady’s living room, the door was still ajar, and from within he heard the voice of a television announcer, still talking about the change, and saw the backs of a number of people sitting and listening.

The irritation which Marie’s concern for him had awakened in him expanded again to include these people. It was ridiculous, almost superstitious of them, to be stampeded into fear just because of what seemed to be a change—undoubtedly temporary, undoubtedly freakish—in the color of the sun.

“Latest reports over Honolulu say that the redness persists—” The TV announcer’s voice was cut off sharply as Miles softly closed the front door of the house behind him. He headed up the darkened street under the towering, dark-leaved branches of the elms toward the footbridge and the east bank of the river where the Lounge was.

His walk across the campus and over the footbridge was like a walk though an evacuated city. There seemed to be nobody about. But once on the far side of the river, when he pushed open the door of the Lounge, he found the place crowded; only the crowd was all clustered at one end, around the television set at the front of the bar. Forty or fifty people, many of them students, were seated and standing there, packed closely together, listening in absolute silence to the same sort of news broadcast he had overheard as he was leaving his rooming house. He threaded his way through them and went back into the rear area where the high-backed wooden booths were; all of these were empty.

Miles took a corner booth in the back of the room. It was the booth he and Marie always took if it was available, and after a few moments their usual waitress, a girl named Joan, a part-time student in the English Department, came through the swinging doors from the kitchen, saw him, and came over to ask him what he wanted.

“Just coffee—two coffees, for now—” Miles remembered suddenly that Marie had said she had already eaten. “I guess just one dinner, come to think of it. Are there any hot beef sandwiches left?”

“Lots of them,” said Joan. “Hardly anyone’s been eating. They’re all listening to television. We’re listening, back in the kitchen. You know the weather people can’t figure it out? The sun’s actually changed. I mean, it isn’t just something in our atmosphere—” She broke off in the face of Miles’ silence. “I’ll get your coffee.”

She went off. She had scarcely brought two cups of coffee back and left again in search of Miles’ sandwich when the sound of footsteps from the front of the Lounge made him look up. He saw Marie coming quickly down the aisle between the booths toward him.

She looked at him with the brown eyes that were now so dark and luminous they seemed to have doubled their size in her white face.

“Miles…” She reached across the table to lay her hand on his arm. “Do you feel all right?”

“All right? Me?” He smiled at her, for clearly she needed reassurance. “I’m still a little dopey from sleep and I could stand some food. Outside of that, I’m fine. What’s the matter with you?”

She looked at him strangely.

“Miles, you can’t be that much out of touch with the rest of the world,” she said. “You just can’t !”

“Oh—” The word came out more harshly than he had meant it to. “You mean this business about the sun changing color? Don’t worry, it hasn’t done any damage yet. And if it did, that’s not my line of work. So why worry about it?”

The waitress came up with Miles’ order and said hello to Marie.

“Isn’t it terrible? It’s still going on,” she said to Marie. “We’re all following the news, back in the kitchen. They’re just beginning to see it from planes in the South Pacific now—and it’s still red.”

She went back to the kitchen.

“I’ll tell you why you ought to worry,” said Marie quietly and tensely, taking her hand from his arm and sitting back almost huddled in her corner of the booth. “Because it’s something that affects the whole world, all the people in the world, and you’re one of them.”

Automatically he had picked up his fork and begun to eat. Now, at these words, he laid his fork down again. The wave of exhaustion inside him, the wave of anger first pricked to life by the alarm and concern of the people on campus he had passed on his way back to the rooming house, returned with force to wash his appetite away. The mashed potatoes and gravy he had just put into his mouth seemed to have no more taste than if they were made of flour and water and artificial coloring.

“The other two billion won’t miss me if I stick to my own work,” he said. “I’ve got more important things to worry about. I spent all day today painting the river bluffs and the freeway bridge. Do you want to know how it came out?”

“I can guess how it came out,” answered Marie. She too was a student in the school of art at the university. Like Miles, she was graduating this spring. Unlike Miles, she had neither a grant for European study waiting for her nor the supporting belief of her instructors that she had the makings of a truly unusual artist in her. It did not help that Miles himself could see promise in her work. For even he could not bring himself to class that promise with what he himself was after in painting.

“Marie,” an instructor had said bluntly to Miles one day in a burst of frankness, “is going to be good—possibly quite good—if she works hard at it. You’re either going to be unmatchable or impossible.”

Yet in spite of this, there were elements in Marie’s work which were the equivalent of those very elements for which Miles searched in his own. Where he was stark, she was beautiful; where he was violent, she was gentle. Only, he wanted his equivalents of these things on a different level from that on which she had found hers.

“Well, it was the same thing all over again,” said Miles. He picked up the fork once more and mechanically tried to force himself to eat. “The painting turned savage on me—as usual.”

“Yes,” answered Marie in a low voice, “and I know why.”

He looked up sharply from his plate at her and found her eyes more brilliant upon him than ever.

“And this business about the sun proves it,” she went on, more strongly. “I don’t mean the change in color itself; I mean the way you’re reacting to it—” She hesitated, then burst out with a rush. “I’ve never said this to you, Miles. But I always knew I’d have to say it someday, and now this thing’s happened and the time’s come! You aren’t ever going to find the answer to what’s bothering you about the way you paint. You never will because you won’t look in the right direction. You’ll look everywhere but there!”

“What do you mean?” He stared at her, the cooling hot beef sandwich now completely forgotten. “And what’s this business of the sun got to do with it?”

“It’s got everything to do with it,” she said tightly, taking hold of her edge of the table with both hands, as if her grip on it were a grip on him, forcing him to stand still and listen to her. “Maybe this change in the color of the sun hasn’t hurt anything yet—that’s true. But it’s frightened a world full of people! And that doesn’t mean anything to you. Don’t you understand me, Miles? The trouble with you is you’ve got to the point where something like this can happen, and a world full of people be frightened to death by it—and you don’t react at all!”

He looked narrowly at her.

“You’re telling me I’m too wound up in my painting?” he asked. “Is that it?”

“No !” Marie answered fiercely. “You’re just not interested enough in the rest of life!”

“The rest of life?” he echoed. “Why, of course not! All the rest of life does for me is get between me and the painting—and I need every ounce of energy I can get for work. What’s wrong with that?”

“You know what’s wrong!” Marie started out of her corner and leaned across the table toward him. “You’re too strong, Miles. You’ve got to the point where nothing frightens you anymore—and that’s not natural. You’re all one-sided, like that overdeveloped arm of yours and nothing on the other side—” Abruptly she began to cry, but silently, the tears streaming down her face, even while her voice went on, low and tight and controlled as before.

“Oh, I know that’s a terrible thing to say!” she said. “I didn’t want to say it to you, Miles. I didn’t! But it’s true. You’re all one huge muscle in the part of you that’s a painter, and there’s nothing left in you on the human side at all. And still you’re not satisfied. You keep on trying to make yourself even more one-sided, so that you can be a bloodless, camera-eyed observer! Only, it can’t be done—and it shouldn’t be done! You can’t go on in this way without destroying yourself. You’ll turn yourself into a painting machine and still never get what you want, because it really isn’t pictures on canvas you’re after, Miles. It’s people! It really is! Miles—”

Her words broke off and echoed away into the silence of the empty dining area at the back of the Lounge. Into that silence, from the bar at the front, came the unintelligible murmur of the announcer speaking from the television set and still relaying news, or the lack of it, about the sudden change of color of the sun. Miles sat without moving, staring at her. Finally, he found the words for which he was reaching.

“Is this what you called me up, and asked me to meet you here, to say?” he asked, at last.

“Yes!” answered Marie.

He still sat, staring at her. There was a hard, heavy feeling of loneliness and pain just above his breastbone. He had thought that at least there was one person in the universe who understood what he was trying to do. One person, anyway, who had some vision of that long road and that misty goal toward which he was reaching with every ounce of strength he had and every waking hour of his days. He had thought that Marie understood. Now it was plain she did not. She was, in the end, as blind as the rest of them.

If only she had understood, she would have realized that it was people he had been striving to get free of, right from the start. He had been trying to pull himself out of the quicksand of their bloody history and narrow lives, so that he would be able to see clearly, hear clearly, and work without their weight clinging to his mind and hampering the freedom of his mind’s eye.

But Marie had evidently never seen this fact, any more than the rest.

He got to his feet, picked up his check and hers, and walked away from her to the cashier and out of the Lounge without another word.

Outside, still the streets were all but deserted. And through this desert cityscape, under a full moon made dusky by the reflection of reddened sunlight, he returned slowly to his rooming house.