The Scarecrow, and Other Stories

by G. Ranger Wormser

It had become so that nothing was real to him; nothing but the stillness that drenched everything; stifling and choking.

The old mare working her way in front of the plow along the narrowed, deepening furrows, was a ghost creature to him. The grayness of her blurred ahead of him in the brightest stream of sunlight. Her foolish, stilly gliding played horridly on his raw nerves. At all times she was a phantom animal, stirring with the intangible motion of the silence. He felt that she did not belong to him; that she was a thing of the stillness.

He would trail after her, his quivering, thin hands on the plow handles, his eyes riveted on her bony withers. He would try to concentrate his thoughts on the way she moved and then overcome quite suddenly with the quiet, insidious stealth of her ambling, he would pull her up and stop to mop his forehead, his eyes going slowly around him as if he almost expected to see the thing that had lain that smothering, strangling hold on to him.

His one and only companion was a yellow mongrel that had come slinking in at the farm gate, its tail drooping between its legs. He had been glad at first of having the dog with him. And then gradually he had come to feel the oddness of the animal. If he could have done so he would have turned the dog out again into the stillness from which it had come to him. He was sure that the mongrel must be old; unnaturally old. He could not understand the dog's awful quiet. In his heart he was scared of the dog. The mongrel followed incessantly at his heels, always with dragging tail. Whenever his eyes turned behind him they met the mongrel's eyes that were fixed on him; the eyes that were filled with that uncanny, beaten look as if it had been horridly cowed. There was an age of agony in the dog's eyes. As the days went on he became more and more afraid of the mongrel's eyes.

He had come out to the farm to start with because of the silence. He had felt that he would have to get away from the noise and the tumultuous uproar of the city. After what he had done he could not stand it. He had gotten away. He thought now that his mind would snap; that it would break from under the lull which had come into it—The lull which devastated him with its hushed brutality.

He had never been fond of people. Even in those days back there in the city before he had done the thing that was wrong he had mistrusted them. And after it he had run from them. Run wildly and unthinkingly to cover with the fear of them coming on behind him. The deathly, lonely farm was to him at that time a haven of rest.

He had made up his mind to live on the farm until the end of his life. He used to think bitterly of his waiting so patiently for his death. When he could think of anything other than the silence he thought of his dying; of life being squeezed out of him by the shrouded quiet. Sometimes he would wonder if it were death that ominously waited for him in that appalling, threatening stillness.

There had been days when he had tried to recall the sound of voices he had known. He had spent long hours in awakening in his memory those voices. He had wanted particularly to think of people laughing. He used to want to get the pitch of their laughing; to surround himself with the vibration of reiterated laughter. And then when he had gotten it so that he almost heard it, so that he felt that with concentrated attention he might hear the laughing, he would find himself listening to the frightful, numbing stillness.

He had not the courage to go on trying that.

Following the plow and the old gray mare through the fields with the dog skulking abjectly at his heels, he would think of that thing which he had done that had ostracized him from the rest of humanity. He never thought of the possibility of making his life over again. He could not have thought of it if he had wanted to. It was all too hopeless; too impossible to think about. The deadening quiet in which he had been steeped had drained him; sapped from him all initiative.