The Birds and Other Stories Read online

  His wife's voice, calling his name, drove away the sudden, desperate desire for sleep.

  "What is it? What now?" he said sharply.

  "The wireless," said his wife. "I've been watching the clock. It's nearly seven."

  "Don't twist the knob," he said, impatient for the first time, "it's on the Home where it is. They'll speak from the Home."

  They waited. The kitchen clock struck seven. There was no sound. No chimes, no music. They waited until a quarter past, switching to the Light. The result was the same. No news bulletin came through.

  "We've heard wrong," he said, "they won't be broadcasting until eight o'clock."

  They left it switched on, and Nat thought of the battery, wondered how much power was left in it. It was generally recharged when his wife went shopping in the town. If the battery failed they would not hear the instructions.

  "It's getting light," whispered his wife, "I can't see it, but I can feel it. And the birds aren't hammering so loud."

  She was right. The rasping, tearing sound grew fainter every moment. So did the shuffling, the jostling for place upon the step, upon the sills. The tide was on the turn. By eight there was no sound at all. Only the wind. The children, lulled at last by the stillness, fell asleep. At half past eight Nat switched the wireless off.

  "What are you doing? We'll miss the news," said his wife.

  "There isn't going to be any news," said Nat. "We've got to depend upon ourselves."

  He went to the door and slowly pulled away the barricades. He drew the bolts, and kicking the bodies from the step outside the door breathed the cold air. He had six working hours before him, and he knew he must reserve his strength for the right things, not waste it in any way. Food, and light, and fuel; these were the necessary things. If he could get them in sufficiency, they could endure another night.

  He stepped into the garden, and as he did so he saw the living birds. The gulls had gone to ride the sea, as they had done before; they sought sea food, and the buoyancy of the tide, before they returned to the attack. Not so the land birds. They waited and watched. Nat saw them, on the hedgerows, on the soil, crowded in the trees, outside in the field, line upon line of birds, all still, doing nothing.

  He went to the end of his small garden. The birds did not move. They went on watching him.

  "I've got to get food," said Nat to himself, "I've got to go to the farm to find food."

  He went back to the cottage. He saw to the windows and the doors. He went upstairs and opened the children's bedroom. It was empty, except for the dead birds on the floor. The living were out there, in the garden, in the fields. He went downstairs.

  "I'm going to the farm," he said.

  His wife clung to him. She had seen the living birds from the open door.

  "Take us with you," she begged, "we can't stay here alone. I'd rather die than stay here alone."

  He considered the matter. He nodded.

  "Come on, then," he said, "bring baskets, and Johnny's pram. We can load up the pram."

  They dressed against the biting wind, wore gloves and scarves. His wife put Johnny in the pram. Nat took Jill's hand.

  "The birds," she whimpered, "they're all out there, in the fields."

  "They won't hurt us," he said, "not in the light."

  They started walking across the field towards the stile, and the birds did not move. They waited, their heads turned to the wind.

  When they reached the turning to the farm, Nat stopped and told his wife to wait in the shelter of the hedge with the two children.

  "But I want to see Mrs. Trigg," she protested. "There are lots of things we can borrow, if they went to market yesterday; not only bread, and..."

  "Wait here," Nat interrupted. "I'll be back in a moment."

  The cows were lowing, moving restlessly in the yard, and he could see a gap in the fence where the sheep had knocked their way through, to roam unchecked in the front garden before the farmhouse. No smoke came from the chimneys. He was filled with misgivings. He did not want his wife or the children to go down to the farm.

  "Don't jib now," said Nat, harshly, "do what I say."

  She withdrew with the pram into the hedge, screening herself and the children from the wind.

  He went down alone to the farm. He pushed his way through the herd of bellowing cows, which turned this way and that, distressed, their udders full. He saw the car standing by the gate, not put away in the garage. The windows of the farmhouse were smashed. There were many dead gulls lying in the yard and around the house. The living birds perched on the group of trees behind the farm and on the roof of the house. They were quite still. They watched him.

  Jim's body lay in the yard... what was left of it. When the birds had finished, the cows had trampled him. His gun was beside him. The door of the house was shut and bolted, but as the windows were smashed it was easy to lift them and climb through. Trigg's body was close to the telephone. He must have been trying to get through to the exchange when the birds came for him. The receiver was hanging loose, the instrument torn from the wall. No sign of Mrs. Trigg. She would be upstairs. Was it any use going up? Sickened, Nat knew what he would find.

  "Thank God," he said to himself, "there were no children."

  He forced himself to climb the stairs, but halfway he turned and descended again. He could see her legs, protruding from the open bedroom door. Beside her were the bodies of the black-backed gulls, and an umbrella, broken.

  "It's no use," thought Nat, "doing anything. I've only got five hours, less than that. The Triggs would understand. I must load up with what I can find."

  He tramped back to his wife and children.

  "I'm going to fill up the car with stuff," he said. "I'll put coal in it, and paraffin for the primus. We'll take it home and return for a fresh load."

  "What about the Triggs?" asked his wife.

  "They must have gone to friends," he said.

  "Shall I come and help you, then?"

  "No; there's a mess down there. Cows and sheep all over the place. Wait, I'll get the car. You can sit in it."

  Clumsily he backed the car out of the yard and into the lane. His wife and the children could not see Jim's body from there.

  "Stay here," he said, "never mind the pram. The pram can be fetched later. I'm going to load the car."

  Her eyes watched his all the time. He believed she understood, otherwise she would have suggested helping him to find the bread and groceries.

  They made three journeys altogether, backwards and forwards between their cottage and the farm, before he was satisfied they had everything they needed. It was surprising, once he started thinking, how many things were necessary. Almost the most important of all was planking for the windows. He had to go round searching for timber. He wanted to renew the boards on all the windows at the cottage. Candles, paraffin, nails, tinned stuff; the list was endless. Besides all that, he milked three of the cows. The rest, poor brutes, would have to go on bellowing.

  On the final journey he drove the car to the bus stop, got out, and went to the telephone box. He waited a few minutes, jangling the receiver. No good, though. The line was dead. He climbed onto a bank and looked over the countryside, but there was no sign of life at all, nothing in the fields but the waiting, watching birds. Some of them slept--he could see the beaks tucked into the feathers.

  "You'd think they'd be feeding," he said to himself, "not just standing in that way."

  Then he remembered. They were gorged with food. They had eaten their fill during the night. That was why they did not move this morning...

  No smoke came from the chimneys of the council houses. He thought of the children who had run across the fields the night before.

  "I should have known," he thought, "I ought to have taken them home with me."

  He lifted his face to the sky. It was colorless and gray. The bare trees on the landscape looked bent and blackened by the east wind. The cold did not affect the living birds, waiting out there in
the fields.

  "This is the time they ought to get them," said Nat, "they're a sitting target now. They must be doing this all over the country. Why don't our aircraft take off now and spray them with mustard gas? What are all our chaps doing? They must know, they must see for themselves."

  He went back to the car and got into the driver's seat.

  "Go quickly past that second gate," whispered his wife. "The postman's lying there. I don't want Jill to see."

  He accelerated. The little Morris bumped and rattled along the lane. The children shrieked with laughter.

  "Up-a-down, up-a-down," shouted young Johnny.

  It was a quarter to one by the time they reached the cottage. Only an hour to go.

  "Better have cold dinner," said Nat. "Hot up something for yourself and the children, some of that soup. I've no time to eat now. I've got to unload all this stuff."

  He got everything inside the cottage. It could be sorted later. Give them all something to do during the long hours ahead. First he must see to the windows and the doors.

  He went round the cottage methodically, testing every window, every door. He climbed onto the roof also, and fixed boards across every chimney, except the kitchen. The cold was so intense he could hardly bear it, but the job had to be done. Now and again he would look up, searching the sky for aircraft. None came. As he worked he cursed the inefficiency of the authorities.

  "It's always the same," he muttered, "they always let us down. Muddle, muddle, from the start. No plan, no real organization. And we don't matter, down here. That's what it is. The people up country have priority. They're using gas up there, no doubt, and all the aircraft. We've got to wait and take what comes."

  He paused, his work on the bedroom chimney finished, and looked out to sea. Something was moving out there. Something gray and white among the breakers.

  "Good old Navy," he said, "they never let us down. They're coming down channel, they're turning in the bay."

  He waited, straining his eyes, watering in the wind, towards the sea. He was wrong, though. It was not ships. The Navy was not there. The gulls were rising from the sea. The massed flocks in the fields, with ruffled feathers, rose in formation from the ground, and wing to wing soared upwards to the sky.

  The tide had turned again.

  Nat climbed down the ladder and went inside the kitchen. The family were at dinner. It was a little after two. He bolted the door, put up the barricade, and lit the lamp.

  "It's nighttime," said young Johnny.

  His wife had switched on the wireless once again, but no sound came from it.

  "I've been all round the dial," she said, "foreign stations, and that lot. I can't get anything."

  "Maybe they have the same trouble," he said, "maybe it's the same right through Europe."

  She poured out a plateful of the Triggs' soup, cut him a large slice of the Triggs' bread, and spread their dripping upon it.

  They ate in silence. A piece of the dripping ran down young Johnny's chin and fell onto the table.

  "Manners, Johnny," said Jill, "you should learn to wipe your mouth."

  The tapping began at the windows, at the door. The rustling, the jostling, the pushing for position on the sills. The first thud of the suicide gulls upon the step.

  "Won't America do something?" said his wife. "They've always been our allies, haven't they? Surely America will do something?"

  Nat did not answer. The boards were strong against the windows, and on the chimneys too. The cottage was filled with stores, with fuel, with all they needed for the next few days. When he had finished dinner he would put the stuff away, stack it neatly, get everything shipshape, handy-like. His wife could help him, and the children too. They'd tire themselves out, between now and a quarter to nine, when the tide would ebb; then he'd tuck them down on their mattresses, see that they slept good and sound until three in the morning.

  He had a new scheme for the windows, which was to fix barbed wire in front of the boards. He had brought a great roll of it from the farm. The nuisance was, he'd have to work at this in the dark, when the lull came between nine and three. Pity he had not thought of it before. Still, as long as the wife slept, and the kids, that was the main thing.

  The smaller birds were at the window now. He recognized the light tap-tapping of their beaks, and the soft brush of their wings. The hawks ignored the windows. They concentrated their attack upon the door. Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

  "I'll smoke that last cigarette," he said to his wife. "Stupid of me, it was the one thing I forgot to bring back from the farm."

  He reached for it, switched on the silent wireless. He threw the empty packet on the fire, and watched it burn.

  Monte Verita

  They told me afterwards they had found nothing. No trace of anyone, living or dead. Maddened by anger, and I believe by fear, they had succeeded at last in breaking into those forbidden walls, dreaded and shunned through countless years--to be met by silence. Frustrated, bewildered, frightened, driven to fury at the sight of those empty cells, that bare court, the valley people resorted to the primitive methods that have served so many peasants through so many centuries: fire and destruction.

  It was the only answer, I suppose, to something they did not understand. Then, their anger spent, they must have realized that nothing of any purpose had been destroyed. The smoldering and blackened walls that met their eyes in the starry, frozen dawn had cheated them in the end.

  Search parties were sent out, of course. The more experienced climbers among them, undaunted by the bare rock of the mountain summit, covered the whole ridge, from north to south, from east to west, with no result.

  And that is the end of the story. Nothing more is known.

  Two men from the village helped me to carry Victor's body to the valley, and he was buried at the foot of Monte Verita. I think I envied him, at peace there. He had kept his dream.

  As to myself, my old life claimed me again. The second war churned up the world once more. Today, approaching seventy, I have few illusions; yet often I think of Monte Verita and wonder what could have been the final answer.

  I have three theories, but none of them may be true.

  The first, and the most fantastic, is that Victor was right, after all, to hold to his belief that the inhabitants of Monte Verita had reached some strange state of immortality which gave them power when the hour of need arrived, so that, like the prophets of old, they vanished into the heavens. The ancient Greeks believed this of their gods, the Jews believed it of Elijah, the Christians of their Founder. Throughout the long history of religious superstition and credulity runs this ever-recurrent conviction that some persons attain such holiness and power that death can be overcome. This faith is strong in eastern countries, and in Africa; it is only to our sophisticated western eyes that the disappearance of things tangible, of persons of flesh and blood, seems impossible.

  Religious teachers disagree when they try to show the difference between good and evil: what is a miracle to one becomes black magic to another. The good prophets have been stoned, but so have the witch doctors. Blasphemy in one age becomes holy utterance in the next, and this day's heresy is tomorrow's credo.

  I am no great thinker, and never have been. But this I do know, from my old climbing days: that in the mountains we come closest to whatever Being it is that rules our destiny. The great utterances of old were given from the mountaintops: it was always to the hills that the prophets climbed. The saints, the messiahs, were gathered to their fathers in the clouds. It is credible to me, in my more solemn moods, that the hand of magic reached down that night to Monte Verita and plucked those souls to safety.

  Remember, I myself saw the full moon shining upon that mountain. I also, at midday, saw the sun. What I saw and hea
rd and felt was not of this world. I think of the rock face, with the moon upon it; I hear the chanting from the forbidden walls; I see the crevasse, cupped like a chalice between the twin peaks of the mountain; I hear the laughter; I see the bare bronzed arms outstretched to the sun.

  When I remember these things, I believe in immortality...

  Then--and this is perhaps because my climbing days are over, and the magic of the mountains loses its grip over old memories, as it does over old limbs--I remind myself that the eyes I looked into that last day on Monte Verita were the eyes of a living, breathing person, and the hands I touched were flesh.

  Even the spoken words belonged to a human being. "Please do not concern yourself with us. We know what we must do." And then that final, tragic word, "Let Victor keep his dream."

  So my second theory comes into being, and I see nightfall, and the stars, and the courage of that soul which chose the wisest way for itself and for the others; and while I returned to Victor, and the people from the valley gathered themselves together for the assault, the little band of believers, the last company of those seekers after Truth, climbed to that crevasse, between the peaks, and so were lost.

  My third theory is one that comes to me in moods more cynical, more lonely, when, having dined well with friends who mean little to me, I take myself home to my apartment in New York. Looking from the window at the fantastic light and color of my glittering fairy-world of fact that holds no tenderness, no quietude, I long suddenly for peace, for understanding. Then, I tell myself, perhaps the inhabitants of Monte Verita had long prepared themselves against departure, and when the moment came it found them ready, neither for immortality nor for death, but for the world of men and women. In stealth, in secret, they came down into the valley unobserved, and, mingling with the people, went their separate ways. I wonder, looking down from my apartment into the hub and hustle of my world, if some of them wander there, in the crowded streets and subways, and whether, if I went out and searched the passing faces, I should find such a one and have my answer.

  Sometimes, when traveling, I have fancied to myself, in coming upon a stranger, that there is something exceptional in the turn of a head, in the expression of an eye, that is at once compelling and strange. I want to speak, and hold such a person instantly in conversation, but--possibly it is my fancy--it is as though some instinct warns them. A momentary pause, a hesitation, and they are gone. It might be in a train, or in some crowded thoroughfare, and for one brief moment I am aware of someone with more than earthly beauty and human grace, and I want to stretch out my hand and say, swiftly, softly, "Were you among those I saw on Monte Verita?" But there is never time. They vanish, they are gone, and I am alone again, with my third theory still unproven.