Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

He tipped his hat, “Good evening, Mildred. My, how the boy is growing.”

“I doe to cool,” the child lisped.

His mother interpreted. “He means he goes to school. He is so proud of it.”

“Nursery school, of course.”

“Yes, Mr. Dean. The Sitters. They are such lovely things. And so good with children. And there’s the cost. Or, rather, the lack of it. You just give them a bouquet of flowers or a little bottle of perfume or a pretty picture and they are satisfied. They positively refuse to take any money. I can’t understand that. Can you, Mr. Dean?”

“No,” said Dean. “I can’t.”

He’d forgotten what a talker Mildred was. There had been a period in school, he recalled, when she had been appropriately nicknamed Gabby.

“I sometimes think,” she said, hurrying on so she’d miss no time for talk, “that we people here on Earth attach too much importance to money. The Sitters don’t seem to know what money is, or if they do, they pay no attention to it. As if it were something that was not important. But I understand there are other races like that. It makes one think, doesn’t it, Mr. Dean?”

And he remembered now another infuriating trait of Mildred’s—how she inevitably ended any string of sentences with a dangling question.

He didn’t try to answer. He knew an answer was not expected of him.

“I must be getting on,” he said. “I am late already.”

“It was nice to see you, Mr. Dean,” said Mildred. “I so often think of my days in school and sometimes it seems like just positively ages and there are other times when it seems no more than just yesterday and …”

“Very nice, indeed,” said Dean, lifting his hat to her, then almost scurrying off.

It was undignified, he grumbled to himself, being routed in broad daylight on a public street by a talkative woman.

As he went up the walk to the house, he heard Carrie bustling angrily about.

“Johnson Dean,” she cried the instant he came in the door, “you sit right down and eat. Your food’s already cold. And it’s my circle night. Don’t you even stop to wash.”

Dean calmly hung up his hat and coat.

“For that matter,” he said, “I guess I don’t need to wash. My kind of job, a man doesn’t get too dirty.”

She was bustling about in the dining area, pouring his cup of coffee and straightening up the bouquet of mums that served for the centerpiece.

“Since it’s my circle night,” she said, laying deliberate stress upon the words to shame him for being late, “I won’t stay to wash the dishes. You just leave them on the table. I will do them later.”

He sat down meekly to eat.

Somehow, for some reason he could not understand, fulfilling a need of which he was not aware, he suddenly felt safe. Safe and secure against a nagging worry and a half-formed fear that had been building up within him without his knowing it.

Carrie came through the living room, settling a determined hat upon her determined head. She had the very air of a woman who was late for her circle meeting through no fault of her own. She halted at the door.

“You got everything you need?” she asked, her eyes making a swift inventory of the table.

“Everything.” He chuckled. “Have a good time at the circle. Pick up a lot of gossip.”

It was his favorite quip and he knew it irked her—and it was childish, too. But he could not resist it.

She flounced out of the door and he heard her putting down her heels with unnecessary firmness as she went down the walk.

With her going, a hard silence gripped the house and the deeper dusk moved in as he sat at the table eating.

Safe, he thought—old Johnson Dean, school man, safe inside the house his grandfather had built—how many years ago? Old-fashioned now, with its split-level floor plan and its high-bricked fireplace, with its double, attached garage and the planter out in front.

Safe and lonely.

And safe against what threat, against what creeping disturbance, so subtle that it failed of recognition?

He shook his head at that.

But lonely—that was different. That could be explained. The middle-young, he thought, and the very old are lonely. The middle-young because full communication had not been established, and the very old because communication had broken down.

Society was stratified, he told himself, stratified and sectored and partitioned off by many different factors—by age, by occupation, by education, by financial status. And the list did not end there. One could go on and on. It would be interesting, if a man could only find the time, to chart the stratification of humanity. Finished, if it ever could be finished, that chart would be a weird affair.

He finished the meal and wiped his mouth carefully with the napkin. He pushed back from the table and prowled the darkening living area.

He knew that he should at least pick up the dishes and tidy up the table. By rights, he should even wash them. He had caused Carrie a lot of fuss because he had been late. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He couldn’t settle down. Safe, he still was not at peace.

There was no use in putting this business off any longer, he realized, no use to duck the fear that was nagging at him. He knew what it was he faced, if he only would admit it.

Stuffy was crazy, of course. He could not possibly be right. He’d been thinking too much—imagining, rather.

The kids were no different now than they’d ever been.

Except that the grade averages had improved noticeably in the last ten years or so.

Except that there were, as one might expect of such grade averages, an increase in scholarships.

Except that the glitter of competitive sports was beginning to wear off.

Except that there was, in Millville, almost no delinquency.

And those solemn childish faces, with the big, bright eyes, staring up at him from the papers on his desk.

He paced slowly up and down the carpeting before the big brick fireplace, and the dead, black maw beneath the chimney throat, with the bitter smell of old wood ashes in it, seemed to be a mouth making sport of him.

He cracked one feebly clenched old fist into a shaky palm.

“It can’t be right,” he said fiercely to himself.

And yet, on the face of all evidence, it was.

The children in Millville were maturing faster; they were growing up, intellectually, much faster than they should.

And perhaps even more than that.

Growing in a new dimension, he wondered. Receding farther from the savage that still lingered in humanity. For sports, organized sports on whatever basis, still remained a refined product of the cave—some antagonism that Man had carried forward under many different guises and which broke forth at least partially in the open in the field of sports.

If he could only talk with the students, he thought, if he could somehow find out what they thought, then there might be a chance of running this thing to the ground.

But that was impossible. The barriers were too high and intricate, the lines of communication much too cluttered. For he was old and they were young; he was authority and they were the regimented. Once again the stratifications would keep them apart. There was no way in which he could approach them.

It was all right to say there was something happening, ridiculous as it might sound. But the important matter, if such should be the case, was to discover the cause and to plot the trend.

And Stuffy must be wrong. For it was fantastic to suggest the Sitters were engineering it.

Peculiarly enough, the Sitters, alien as they were, had established themselves as solid citizens of Millville. They would, he was sure, do nothing to jeopardize the position they had won—the position of being accepted and generally let alone and little talked about.