Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

must get pretty dull for you.”

“Not very,” she said, smiling. “My aunts bring me the papers and other things. Even movies. We’ve got a projector. My favorite stars are Antonio Morino and Alice Terry. I like her better even than Clara Bow.”

He looked at her hard for a moment. “I suppose you read a lot?”

She nodded. “Fitzgerald’s my favorite author.” She started around the table, hesitated, suddenly grew shy. “Would you like some lemonade?”

He’d noticed the dewed silver pitcher, but only now realized his thirst. Yet when she handed him a glass, he held it untasted and said awkwardly, “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Jack Barry.”

She stared at his outstretched right hand, slowly extended her own toward it, shook it up and down exactly once, then quickly dropped it.

He chuckled and gulped some lemonade. “I’m a biology student. Been working at Wood’s Hole the first part of the summer. But now I’m here to do research in marine ecology⁠—that’s sort of sea-life patterns⁠—of the inshore islands. Under the direction of Professor Kesserich. You know about him, of course?”

She shook her head.

“Probably the greatest living biologist,” he was proud to inform her. “Human physiology as well. Tremendous geneticist. In a class with Carlson and Jacques Loeb. Martin Kesserich⁠—he lives over there at town. I’m staying with him. You ought to have heard of him.” He grinned. “Matter of fact, I’d never have met you if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Kesserich.”

The girl looked puzzled.

Jack explained, “The old boy’s been off to Europe on some conferences, won’t be back for a couple days more. But I was to get started anyhow. When I went out this morning Mrs. Kesserich⁠—she’s a drab sort of person⁠—said to me, ‘Don’t try to sail to the farther islands.’ So, of course, I had to. By the way, you still haven’t told me your name.”

“Mary Alice Pope,” she said, speaking slowly and with an odd wonder, as if she were saying it for the first time.

“You’re pretty shy, aren’t you?”

“How would I know?”

The question stopped Jack. He couldn’t think of anything to say to this strangely attractive girl dressed almost like a “flapper.”

“Will you sit down?” she asked him gravely.

The rattan chair sighed under his weight. He made another effort to talk. “I’ll bet you’ll be glad when summer’s over.”

“Why?”

“So you’ll be able to go back to the mainland.”

“But I never go to the mainland.”

“You mean you stay out here all winter?” he asked incredulously, his mind filled with a vision of snow and frozen spray and great gray waves.

“Oh, yes. We get all our supplies on hand before winter. My aunts are very capable. They don’t always wear long lace dresses. And now I help them.”

“But that’s impossible!” he said with sudden sympathetic anger. “You can’t be shut off this way from people your own age!”

“You’re the first one I ever met.” She hesitated. “I never saw a boy or a man before, except in movies.”

“You’re joking!”

“No, it’s true.”

“But why are they doing it to you?” he demanded, leaning forward. “Why are they inflicting this loneliness on you, Mary?”

She seemed to have gained poise from his loss of it. “I don’t know why. I’m to find out soon. But actually I’m not lonely. May I tell you a secret?” She touched his hand, this time with only the faintest trembling. “Every night the loneliness gathers in around me⁠—you’re right about that. But then every morning new life comes to me in a little box.”

“What’s that?” he said sharply.

“Sometimes there’s a poem in the box, sometimes a book, or pictures, or flowers, or a ring, but always a note. Next to the notes I like the poems best. My favorite is the one by Matthew Arnold that ends,

‘Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude⁠—’ ”

“Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “Who sends you these boxes?”

“I don’t know.”

“But how are the notes signed?”

“They’re wonderful notes,” she said. “So wise, so gay, so tender, you’d imagine them being written by John Barrymore or Lindbergh.”

“Yes, but how are they signed?”

She hesitated. “Never anything but ‘Your Lover.’ ”

“And so when you first saw me, you thought⁠—” He began, then stopped because she was blushing.

“How long have you been getting them?”

“Ever since I can remember. I have two closets of the boxes. The new ones are either by my bed when I wake or at my place at breakfast.”

“But how does this⁠—person get these boxes to you out here? Does he give them to your aunts and do they put them there?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But how can they get them in winter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look here,” he said, pouring himself more lemonade, “how long is it since you’ve been to the mainland?”

“Almost eighteen years. My aunts tell me I was born there in the middle of the war.”

“What war?” he asked startledly, spilling some lemonade.

“The World War, of course. What’s the matter?”

Jack Barr was staring down at the spilled lemonade and feeling a kind of terror he’d never experienced in his waking life. Nothing around him had changed. He could still feel the same hot sun on his shoulders, the same icy glass in his hand, scent the same lemon-acid odor in his nostrils. He could still hear the faint chop-chop of the waves.

And yet everything had changed, gone dark and dizzy as a landscape glimpsed just before a faint. All the little false notes had come to a sudden focus. For the lemonade had spilled on the headline of the newspaper the girl had tossed down, and the headline read:

Hitler In New Defiance

Under the big black banner of that head swam smaller ones:

Foes of Machado Riot in Havana

Big N.R.A. Parade Planned

Balbo Speaks in New York

Suddenly he felt a surge of relief. He had noticed that the paper was yellow and brittle-edged.

“Why are you so interested in old newspapers?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t call day-before-yesterday’s paper old,” the girl objected, pointing