Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

— We’ll never be able to get it down.

— Of course we can.

— Everybody take hold, come on Doris, and you, Andy, and we’ll see if we can pull it back and make it fast to the porch.

We all pulled, but we couldn’t budge it. We stood there, holding it and watching it. It was high up, and seemed almost halfway to the end of the Point.

— Can we send up some messengers, Uncle Tom.

— No, I don’t think we’d better — we’ve got our hands full as it is—

— Susan could cut them out.

— We might manage to make it fast to the Walkers’ barn—

Susan was just running in to cut out the paper messengers, the little rings of paper to send up the cord, when suddenly there was a twang, the cord had snapped, and we all took a step backward, so that Uncle Tom almost had to sit down.

— It’s gone. As I thought.

We stood there, all of us, in the wind, and watched it go. It got smaller and smaller and in a few minutes we couldn’t see it at all. It was going straight out towards Provincetown, across Massachusetts Bay.

In the afternoon the wind dropped almost as suddenly as it had begun, but the clouds were gathering again behind the Standish Monument, getting blacker and blacker. Everything became silent. The trees and bushes were as still as if they were listening. We played bean bag in the sitting room with Porper, until Porper got silly and wanted to throw the pine-needle cushion at the board instead of the bean bag, so then we played the battleship card game, but Porper always wanted to have the Amphitrite and the Vesuvius , so he and Susan played croquinole, while I went down to the playhouse to study Latin. When I went out, Mother and Uncle David were standing on the porch, looking across the bay with the telescope.

— Are you going to the playhouse, Andy?

— Yes.

— Ten to one you’ll get wet on the way back.

— I don’t care.

In the playhouse it was almost too dark to read, so I left the door open; and I could watch the lightning behind the monument, and see the oak leaves beginning to stir again in an icy-cold draught of air that seemed to come very low over the ground. This was going to be a humdinger, and no mistake. What Aunt Norah always called a shingle-ripper, because it sounded as if the shingles were being ripped off the roof when the lightning and thunder came so close. Utor, fruor, fungor, potior , and vescor . The ablative absolute. Who wanted to know about ablatives. And what silly names they had for them, anyway. I went through the fourth declension three times, reciting it’ aloud while I bounced a cracked Ping-pong ball against the partition of the bicycle shed. That. And that. And that. And that. And then suddenly the wind came, and whirled half the pages in the book, and the window screen whistled, and when I went to the door I saw that the water in front of the Standish Hotel had gone completely white. I was afraid, but excited. Perhaps I’d better go back to the house, and be with the others. Before the storm actually got to us across the bay.

I closed the window and door and ran up the slope. By the time I got to the house the wind was so strong that it almost took me off my feet. I saw Uncle Tom standing at the base of the windmill, looking first upward at the top of it, with his eyes shaded by his hand, and then down at the foot. When I joined him he pointed to the leg of the windmill nearest to the house and then put his mouth close to my cheek and shouted.

— I’m afraid it will go over. We’ll have to lash it. Do you think you could climb — I’ll get the clothes line.

He went into the kitchen, while I stood and watched the windmill. The slender steel leg was heaving out of the ground and then settling again, four inches at a time. The mill was shut off, but spinning just the same, and pumping slowly; the wind was so irregular that whenever it caught the wheel broadside on, it whirled it and at the same time pushed it so violently that the whole frame of steel seemed to tug out of the ground. The diagonal struts were singing like telephone wires. I stood on the lowest strut and the leg lifted me right up with it.

Uncle Tom came back with the coil of clothes line.

Do you think you could climb up. You’re nimbler than I am. Are you afraid.

— No.

— All right, then, take this, and climb up to the third crosspiece and make it fast to this leg, above and below the crosspiece, and then carry the rope round the next leg, that one and then back again round this one. Do you see what I mean?

I took the coil of rope and climbed up the little galvanized iron steps, one at a time, with my khaki trousers flattened against my legs like boards, hardly able to breathe, and stepped out on the crosspiece. The whole windmill was rocking like the mast of a boat. I lowered myself to straddle the gray crosspiece and dropped the coil over the corner of it and brought it up, twice, and made three square knots, the way Mr. Dearing had showed me, and then slid along to the other leg and looped the rope twice over and under the crosspiece there.

— Now the same thing with the first one again.

I slid back and did it.

— Now drop me the rope. And come down. Before you get blown down.

He yelled this up at me, grinning, and I dropped the coil to him, and he went towards the kitchen porch with it. When I got there he had taken half a dozen turns round a post with it and was knotting it.

— That ought to hold. What do you think.

— If the post will hold, Uncle Tom.

— Oh, the post will hold all right. I’m not so sure about the rope.

We went back to the windmill and watched it. The leg was still lifting, but not so much, the rope was holding it down. The first rain was beginning, coming in large fierce drops, almost horizontally, separate and stinging, and smacking against the side of the house as loudly as hailstones. Aunt Norah came round the corner to the edge of the porch and shouted something.

— What did you say?

She put her hands to her mouth.

— If it’s all right—

— Yes, it’s all right.

— You’d better come in — Doris and David—

— What?

— Come in.

— All right, we’re coming.

It got dark very suddenly, and as we ran along the side porch I saw a lightning-flash crawl quite slowly down behind the statue of Miles Standish, a pale lilac color, very bright, and almost as slow as if it were being drawn down with a pen. I remembered what Father said about counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, a second to a mile, and started to count, but the crash came between the first count and the second, a terrific shingle-ripper, and so low and close that it seemed to go right over my hair. As I dived round the corner to the sheltered part of the porch at the front the rain made me shut my eyes, but I could still see the little black figure of Miles Standish with the sword stroke of light behind him. What was this about Doris and David. Uncle Tom was holding the screen door for me, but it got away from him just as I went in, and clapped back against the wall. Then he pulled it shut by main force, against the wind, which sang through it, and closed the inside door, and we were in the dining-room-and-sitting-room, where everything seemed quiet by contrast, and the lamps were lit, one of them hanging on chains over the dining-table, the other over the table at the other end of the room, with a bowl of bayberry leaves. I could hear Porper shouting to Susan upstairs. Aunt Norah was holding her spectacles in her hand and wiping the rain off her cheek.

— They’ve gone out to the boat—

— What do you mean.

— Doris and David. I tried to stop them—

— You mean in the Osprey —?