...Then, seeing the plight of his companions, young Hope dived to their assistance. Breaking the drowning grip of one boy with a blow in the face, he seized both of them and swam with them to the shore. Rushed to the hospital by Charles Hand, local law student who is spending the vacation with his parents, they are now out of danger thanks to...
The paper passed from bed to bed. Each of them read, and silence followed. It was not broken until Phyllis arrived carrying three bunches of flowers. Then it was Roger who spoke, and he spoke grimly:
“Did he dive?”
Phyllis was indignant. “Oh, my, Roger, don’t you see it in the paper? Of course he dived.”
“I was under water myself. I never seen it.”
“I saw it. It was a beautiful dive.”
Wally nodded with large and genuine magnanimity. “O. K. That’s all we want to know. If he dived — O. K.”
Phyllis beamed. “Oh, my, Edwin! Don’t you feel grand?”
Edwin indeed felt grand. Such is the faith of twelve that he believed every word of it. His soul was at peace.
(Liberty, July 17, 1937)
The Visitor
Looking back at it, sorting his recollections into something resembling order, Greg Hayes is sure now that the first warning he had, of a presence there in the room, was a smell — a pungent, exotic reek that was strange, yet oddly familiar. He remembers knowing, though not yet fully awake, that this could not be a dream, as some article had once informed him that “While visual images are constantly reproduced in sleep, olfactory sensations never are, unless caused by external stimulus.” At this point, wondering about the stimulus, he thinks he opened his eyes. But then came a blank in consciousness, followed by an interval of staring at two beautiful, lambent orbs; and he suspects that this was produced by hypnotic narcosis, during which sight functioned, but thought was wholly suspended. Then music sounded, some distance off, in the night, unlocking his mind, somehow, so he regained control of his will. With an effort, he shifted his gaze from these twin luminescences, with their lovely, shifting colors, so suggestive of northern lights, to probe the half-dark of the room. So doing, he became aware of a face, an expression of deep perplexity, and an unmistakable pattern of stripes, which zigged and zagged and tapered to fine points. Only then, at last, did he realize that facing him was a tiger.
Even then, he has no memory of panic, or even of undue alarm. He knew, of course, how the tiger got in: it was through the open window, where he hadn’t put in the screen. He had taken the storm windows off after Easter, as always, but when it came to the screens, he had clownishly said he was “bushed” — “Yah, yah, yah, they can wait till tomorrow, can’t they? Flies don’t come out in the spring.” But when tomorrow came, so also did a prospect, to whom he showed a house, for Bridleway Downs, Inc., of which he was general manager. Other tomorrows brought still other prospects, and he kept postponing the screens. And he knew where the tiger came from: the Biedermann-Rossi Circus, whose band even now was playing the music he’d heard, The Skaters’ Waltz, actually, which was the cue for the flying trapeze act that wound up the main performance, proving the night was wearing on. He himself was responsible for the show’s being there, as for $1,000 he had rented them their lot, earning his directors’ thanks, but the neighbors’ deep resentment. They regarded the invasion as vulgar, an infringement on “exclusiveness.” Rita, his wife, went quite a lot further, denouncing it as a “damned nuisance.” Having slept not at all the preceding night on account of the bellowing, neighing, squealing, roaring, and trumpeting that had gone on until dawn, she had moved, “for the duration,” into the children’s room, which was in the same wing, but in the front part of the house — which explained why he was here alone. Thus, all antecedents of the case, its causative factors, so to speak, wore the color of chickens, his own ugly brood, coming home to roost. And yet he insists that at this time he felt no sense of guilt, of remorse, or of responsibility for what had happened.
Instead, he felt stimulated, full of a faith in God, in the nice way things turn out if you just give them a chance, in Kipling’s If—. So, proudly keeping his head when all about him would unquestionably have been losing theirs and blaming it on him, he hitched up on one elbow, said: “Haya?” His voice seeming firm, his visitor pleased, he elaborated: “How they treating you, fellow? What you doing in here?” The tiger, relaxing his baffled look, advanced. He was already between the beds, no more than a foot away, but now he moved closer, exploring Greg with his nose. Reaching out, Greg gave the great head a pat. He was astonished at its warmth, its silky softness, its sociability. It pushed against his hand, turned its jowl for a scratch. He obliged. Then casually, not hurrying, he slid a foot from under the cover, on the other side of the bed, and got up. The tiger, surprised, cocked two small ears at him. “Okay, Big Boy,” said Greg. “Stay right where you are — and we’ll have your friends up here to take you home in the fractional part of a jiffy.” So saying he stepped to the door, remembering with relief that it opened inwards, so that once he closed it after him there was nothing the tiger could do, short of battering it apart, to open it. He got a hand on the knob, pulled, and knifed through. But the tiger, in the fractional part of a jiffy, hopped over the bed to follow. “My God,” says Greg, awestruck in retrospect, “you got no idea what it was like. You couldn’t believe it — not if you saw it you couldn’t — when he went up in the air and came sailing at me. It was like some genie, rising out of a bottle, in one of the Eastern fables.” Quickly he closed the door, gasped when it creaked from a heavy bump. He waited, had a moment of fear when the knob began to clack, apparently from an inquisitive paw. When that subsided, he went to call the police.
The hall extension was just a few steps away, and it wasn’t until he lifted the receiver that he felt his first qualm — of retributive justice, of punishment, richly deserved and rapidly closing in. For he had a two-party phone, taken for reasons that were slightly too smart. “I happen to know,” he had told Rita, “that the Milsteads are next on the list to share a line, and with loud-speakers like them listening in, who needs advertising?” She hadn’t liked it, but he had gone ahead anyway, and the idea had paid off, handsomely. Whenever a deal was tight, he simply called his office and, when he heard a click, began telling his girl about “that other prospect we have, you know, the one offering a bonus — personal slipperoo to me, cumsha payola cum louder I can’t quite hear you yet — if I’ll swing this thing to him. So ring him, will you? He’s not quite the type we want, but if he raises the ante a little, who am I to pass judgment?” Time after time, after some such phony dialogue, overheard by Mrs. Milstead and broadcast to all and sundry, he had closed a sale to advantage, and had come to regard the arrangement as one of his minor triumphs. It had one slight flaw: little Shelley Milstead visited on the phone, and had formed the unfortunate habit of leaving the receiver off. It was off now, as the mocking yelps of the “howler” at once informed him.