Главная страница | Эзотерика, оккультизм | Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers

Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers
Robert W. Chambers

Hugh Lamb


For the first time in one volume, the best stories of one of America’s most popular classic authors of the supernatural.Robert William Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895) has long been recognised as a landmark work in the field of the macabre, and has been described as the most important work of American supernatural fiction between Poe and the moderns. Despite the book’s success, its author was to return only rarely to the genre during the remainder of a writing career which spanned four decades.When Chambers did return to the supernatural, however, he displayed all the imagination and skill which distinguished The King in Yellow. He created the enigmatic and seemingly omniscient Westrel Keen, the ‘Tracer of Lost Persons’, and chronicled the strange adventures of an eminent naturalist who scours the earth for ‘extinct’ animals – and usually finds them. One of his greatest creations, perhaps, was 1920’s The Slayer of Souls, which features a monstrous conspiracy to take over the world: a conspiracy which can only be stopped by supernatural forces.For the first time in a single volume, Hugh Lamb has selected the best of the author’s supernatural tales, together with an introduction which provides further information about the author who was, in his heyday, called ‘the most popular writer in America’.
















Copyright (#u6e753e46-ed42-5e10-a23e-48ba926a85f7)


HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Collins Chillers edition published 2018

First published in Canada in two volumes by Ash-Tree Press 1998, 1999

Selection, introduction and notes © Hugh Lamb 2018

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008265366

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008265373

Version: 2018-09-04




Dedication (#u6e753e46-ed42-5e10-a23e-48ba926a85f7)


This collection of stories by a New York author is dedicated, with great affection, to another writer from that city – my daughter-in-law, Margaret Reyes Dempsey.


Contents

Cover (#u66719167-5630-564d-ae60-a227f6a80040)

Title Page (#u9ac8c185-309c-553b-b7dd-7611e94b50c3)

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

PART ONE: ORIGINS – 1895–1899 (#u8aaf8954-135a-5587-a8e8-fcee6592eb22)

Introduction (#ud484a8c9-687d-5202-95d4-6158ca006691)

The Yellow Sign (#u4c4a3ca9-b50d-5806-afbd-f306b778ce26)

A Pleasant Evening (#ube7387bf-8db7-50f4-910f-13de0c650f8f)

Passeur (#u08c071f7-4f34-5ff6-bae0-37a8964c6566)

In the Court of the Dragon (#u6a941a83-194d-5482-a92d-bca63fadfae5)

The Maker of Moons (#uead35271-eb9b-5cc9-90d7-25e3b90ba0d0)

The Mask (#litres_trial_promo)

The Demoiselle d’Ys (#litres_trial_promo)

The Key to Grief (#litres_trial_promo)

The Messenger (#litres_trial_promo)

PART TWO: DIVERSIONS – 1900–1938 (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#litres_trial_promo)

Out of the Depths (#litres_trial_promo)

Un Peu d’Amour (#litres_trial_promo)

Grey Magic (#litres_trial_promo)

Samaris (#litres_trial_promo)

In Search of the Great Auk (#litres_trial_promo)

The Death of Yarghouz Khan (#litres_trial_promo)

The Sign of Venus (#litres_trial_promo)

The Third Eye (#litres_trial_promo)

The Seal of Solomon (#litres_trial_promo)

The Bridal Pair (#litres_trial_promo)

In Search of the Mammoth (#litres_trial_promo)

Death Trail (#litres_trial_promo)

The Case of Mr Helmer (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Also in this series

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PREFACE (#u6e753e46-ed42-5e10-a23e-48ba926a85f7)


Robert William Chambers, in his day one of America’s most popular authors, was born in New York, 26 May 1865, the son of New York lawyer William P. Chambers. The family were of Scottish descent. He had an early interest in art, studying at the Art Students League in New York, and in 1886 he went to Paris where he studied at the Academie Julien for seven years. He was accompanied by Charles Dana Gibson, destined to become one of America’s most celebrated portrait painters, who also illustrated some of Chambers’s books in later life.

When Chambers and Gibson returned to America in 1893, it was Gibson who got the lucky break into an art career. Chambers turned to writing instead. His first book, In the Quarter (1894), was based on his experiences in France. It sold fairly well, enough to encourage him to try his hand at a second book based on his French sojourn. The King in Yellow (1895) turned out to be an instant success and set Chambers on a writing career that lasted forty years. It was also one of the most successful books of the macabre, a genre to which Chambers would return only occasionally during his life.

Out of the Dark contains the best of Chambers’s work in this field, taken from books as far apart in publication as 1895 and 1920. By the time of his death on 16 December 1933, Robert W. Chambers had produced nearly 100 books (88 are listed in the British Library Catalogue in Britain alone). Sadly, only a very few dealt with the macabre.



PART ONE (#ulink_f0acc8f6-7745-5b46-9755-19d4d586b08f)




INTRODUCTION (#ulink_4ced8bd6-319e-5620-92f0-a3b9bc1b67ad)


The tradition of the American in Paris – the expatriate enjoying himself in one of Europe’s most appealing cities – goes back way beyond such luminaries as Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway. So many Americans got to know the place as a result of the First World War that it was quite forgotten that others had been there before, under less trying circumstances.

When Robert Chambers and Charles Dana Gibson went there to study art in 1886, we must hope they had as good a time as Miller (while perhaps not so athletic). They stayed there for seven years, after all. What did come out of it was a book of tales of terror seldom surpassed in the genre, yet in its own way a very unsatisfying work, making the reader wish for more. Which statement just about sums up the writing career of Robert W. Chambers, as far as enthusiasts in this genre are concerned.

Chambers, despite displaying an early, unique talent for tales of terror, returned to them very seldom in later life. He was an astute writer, who knew what sold well, and produced the goods accordingly. Spy novels, adventure stories, society dramas, social comedies – if that’s what the public wanted, then Chambers was happy to oblige.

He was one of the authors featured in ‘How I “Broke into Print”’, an article in the Strand Magazine’s November 1915 edition, and had this to say on his first major success:

My most important ‘break into print’ was with a collection of short stories of a weird and uncanny character, entitled The King in Yellow, which the public seemed to like. So flatteringly was it received, indeed, that it decided me to devote all my time to fiction, and so I have been writing ever since. I cannot say which of my books I prefer, because just as soon as I have finished a story I dislike it. I am continually trying to do something better, so that I presume my ‘best’ book will never be written.

The King in Yellow (1895) is at the same time one of the most enjoyable yet one of the most irritating books in the fantasy catalogue. At its best – as in ‘The Yellow Sign’ – it is genuinely scary, with original ideas seldom equalled. At its worst – as in ‘The Prophets’ Paradise’ (not included here: think yourselves lucky) it is obscure, pompous, and overwritten.

The title refers to a play, rumoured to be so evil that it shatters lives and lays waste souls. We never get to see much of it; in fact, this much-vaunted evil work doesn’t even appear in some of the stories. Where it does, as in ‘The Yellow Sign’ or ‘The Mask’, it adds untold atmosphere. Where it doesn’t, as in ‘The Street of the First Shell’ (again not included), then the book is a distinct let-down. At times, it is hard to see what Chambers is intending with this erratic book. While it is an indispensable part of any self-respecting horror reader’s library, I have to say that it does not live up to its reputation.

And yet, as strange as anything (and at a time when M.R. James was just starting his ghost story career), there comes a line in ‘In the Court of the Dragon’ which could not be more Jamesian:

… I wondered idly … whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery.

‘The Yellow Sign’ is by far and away the most reprinted story from The King in Yellow, and earned the praise of H.P. Lovecraft, among others. It very quickly conjures up an atmosphere of death and decay (count the words in this vein that appear in just the first few paragraphs) and, in the form of the church watchman, one of the genre’s most disturbing figures.

‘In the Court of the Dragon’ and ‘The Demoiselle D’Ys’ are lesser items, though ‘In the Court of the Dragon’ has its own scary church figure. ‘The Mask’ limply trails its fingers in the waters of science fiction, like so many tales from the 1890s. (An odd fact: Chambers mentions Gounod’s ‘Sanctus’ in ‘The Mask’, as a symbol of purity; Werner Herzog used the music over the closing credits of his film Nosferatu in 1979, a most un-pure film.)

While Chambers borrowed various things from Ambrose Bierce to embellish The King in Yellow, like the names Carcosa and Hastur, he has inspired precious few imitators himself. There may be one: Sidney Levett-Yeats, the British writer, introduces a book written by the devil (in his story ‘The Devil’s Manuscript’ (1899)) which ruins lives when read. It is titled The Yellow Dragon.

As The King in Yellow proved to be a winner, Chambers turned to writing full-time, while still keeping up his artistic habits (though, oddly, he never seems to have illustrated any of his own books, Charles Dana Gibson certainly illustrated some for him). He supplied illustrations for magazines such as Life, Truth, and Vogue, and was photographed for The King in Yellow, palette in hand.

He married Elsa Vaughn Moller in 1898, and they spent their married life at Broadalbin, an 800 acre estate in the Sacandaga Valley, northern New York State. Broadalbin had been in the Chambers family since his grandfather William Chambers first settled there in the mid-1800s. This beautiful country estate in the Adirondacks included a game preserve (where it seems Chambers never shot) and a fishing lake.

Broadalbin House was remodelled by Chambers’s architect brother, William Boughton Chambers, and was crammed with the family’s and Chambers’s collection of books, paintings, and Oriental objets d’art. His collection of butterflies was said to be one of the most complete in America.

Chambers spent most of the year at Broadalbin, travelling into New York to work in an office which he kept secret from his family (so much so that they had trouble finding it when he died). His chauffeur would drop him off and pick him up again at a spot some distance from the office.

Chambers lavished much care and affection on Broadalbin, planting thousands of trees on the estate. When he died, he was buried under one of the oaks.

Not all his time at Broadalbin was contented. He saw 200 acres of the estate vanish under the waters of the Sacandaga Reservoir which now covers much of the valley. He would have been even more desolate at the fate of his carefully planted trees (see Part Two).

Though part of the house at Broadalbin was demolished, the building still stands, now owned by the Catholic Church. It was abandoned (literally overnight, on the death of Chambers’s widow in 1938) for some years, and was vandalised terribly. It is reported that Chambers’s papers were used by intruders and squatters to light fires.

Chambers loved the outdoor life: it shows up in his writing time and again, where his descriptions of nature, scenery and forests are superbly evocative. A keen hunter, shooter and fisher, his characters are so often engaged in these pursuits as to suggest Chambers himself at play. He could apparently call most kinds of birds and was well versed in Indian languages (see ‘The Key to Grief’).

He must have been the most fortunate of authors: successful, rich and surrounded by the life he loved and wrote about. It is easy to see why he was reported to be so popular with his estate workers and neighbours in this period of his life.

To follow up the success of The King in Yellow, Chambers published another book of short stories in 1896, The Maker of Moons.

The title story, included here, is in many ways a practice run at his 1920 novel The Slayer of Souls. As in that book, we have ample helpings of the American secret service (fine men all), Oriental magic, and strange goings-on in the forest. It also shows how Chambers would finally drift away from the fantasy genre, into the world of espionage and adventure. ‘The Maker of Moons’ is nonetheless a superb fantasy, quite unlike anything else around at the time, and holds up well, even now.

From the same book comes ‘A Pleasant Evening’, another indication of the way Chambers would develop. Here, in a fairly traditional theme, he shows the skill that would lead to The Tree of Heaven (in Part Two) – the writing of neat and well crafted supernatural tales, not necessarily meant to frighten.

The next year, Chambers published The Mystery of Choice, a fine set of stories which was a series of vaguely connected tales, set mainly in France, but this time not in Paris. By far and away the most powerful of them was ‘The Messenger’.

This is a long, sometimes rambling story that nevertheless guides the reader along to a most eerie conclusion. The setting – coastal Brittany – has seldom been used to such effect, and the historical tale behind the story’s events has a grotesque ring of truth. This is one of Chambers’s best stories, and its use of the traditional masked figure has never been bettered.

‘Passeur’ from the same book, is a much shorter, traditional ghost story, easily guessed by anyone familiar with the genre. But Chambers is too good to give it all away completely; relish the scenery he depicts in the closing paragraphs.

Sticking out like a sore thumb from the rest of the stories in the book, ‘The Key to Grief’ is set far away from France. Chambers might have borrowed the odd name or two from Bierce for The King in Yellow; here he all but ransacked Bierce’s living-room. This is a shameless reworking of Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, which still has its own sense of the unknown, and is included here by virtue of its unusual location.

The Mystery of Choice contained a lot of what was to become the cardinal vice of Chambers’s writing as time went by: an awful tendency to be rather soppy, especially in his romantic scenes. This style probably didn’t read too well in the 1890s; nowadays it just grates alarmingly.

After 1900 Chambers moved steadily away from his roots in the fantasy genre, but still – though not often enough – popping back from time to time, as will be seen in Part Two.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

January 2018





THE YELLOW SIGN (#ulink_c22ee24b-1193-5724-9ca2-689c250c4c69)


‘Let the red dawn surmise

What we shall do,

When this blue starlight dies

And all is through.’




I


There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: ‘To think that this also is a little ward of God’?

When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a chestnut.

I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After working awhile I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the color out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not understand how I could have painted such sickly color into a study which before that had glowed with healthy tones.

I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

‘Is it something I’ve done?’ she said.

‘No – I’ve made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,’ I replied.

‘Don’t I pose well?’ she insisted.

‘Of course, perfectly.’

‘Then it’s not my fault?’

‘No, it’s my own.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ she said.

I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look over the illustrations in the Courier Français.

I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed I strove to arrest it, but now the color on the breast changed and the whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water. Vigorously I plied palette knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all the time what a séance I should hold with Duval who had sold me the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was defective nor yet the colors of Edward. ‘It must be the turpentine,’ I thought angrily, ‘or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by the afternoon light that I can’t see straight.’ I called Tessie, the model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the air.

‘What have you been doing to it?’ she exclaimed.

‘Nothing,’ I growled, ‘it must be this turpentine!’

‘What a horrible color it is now,’ she continued. ‘Do you think my flesh resembles green cheese?’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said angrily, ‘did you ever know me to paint like that before?’

‘No, indeed!’

‘Well, then!’

‘It must be the turpentine, or something,’ she admitted.

She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and rubbed until I was tired and finally picked up my brushes and hurled them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of which reached Tessie’s ears.

Nevertheless she promptly began: ‘That’s it! Swear and act silly and ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look! What’s the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!’

I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until, thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the shoulder.

‘Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,’ she announced.

‘Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,’ I said yawning. I looked at my watch.

‘It’s after six, I know,’ said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the mirror.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t mean to keep you so long.’ I leaned out of the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval and leaned from the window.

‘Is that the man you don’t like?’ she whispered.

I nodded.

‘I can’t see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,’ she continued, turning to look at me, ‘he reminds me of a dream – an awful dream I once had. Or,’ she mused, looking down at her shapely shoes, ‘was it a dream after all?’

‘How should I know?’ I smiled.

Tessie smiled in reply.

‘You were in it,’ she said, ‘so perhaps you might know something about it.’

‘Tessie! Tessie!’ I protested, ‘don’t you dare flatter by saying that you dream about me!’

‘But I did,’ she insisted. ‘Shall I tell you about it?’

‘Go ahead,’ I replied, lighting a cigarette.

Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

‘One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring, ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight because I don’t remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out. Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be afraid; everything outside seemed so – so black and uncomfortable. Then the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was soaked.’

‘But where did I come into the dream?’ I asked.

‘You – you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.’

‘In the coffin?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you know? Could you see me?’

‘No; I only knew you were there.’

‘Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?’ I began laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

‘Hello! What’s up?’ I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the window.

‘The – the man below in the churchyard; he drove the hearse.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said, but Tessie’s eyes were wide with terror. I went to the window and looked out. The man was gone. ‘Come, Tessie,’ I urged, ‘don’t be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.’

‘Do you think I could forget that face?’ she murmured. ‘Three times I saw the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and – and soft! It looked dead – it looked as if it had been dead a long time.’

I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

‘Look here, Tessie,’ I said, ‘you go to the country for a week or two, and you’ll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when night comes your nerves are upset. You can’t keep this up. Then again, instead of going to bed when your day’s work is done, you run off to picnics at Sulzer’s Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real hearse. That was a soft-shell crab dream.’

She smiled faintly.

‘What about the man in the churchyard?’

‘Oh, he’s only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.’

‘As true as my name is Tessie Rearden, I swear to you, Mr Scott, that the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who drove the hearse!’

‘What of it?’ I said. ‘It’s an honest trade.’

‘Then you think I did see the hearse?’

‘Oh, I said diplomatically, ‘if you really did, it might not be unlikely that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.’

Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief and taking a bit of gum from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, ‘Good-night, Mr Scott,’ and walked out.




II


The next morning, Thomas, the bellboy, brought me the Herald and a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for it, not that I, being a Catholic, had any repugnance for the congregation next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter, whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been my own rooms, and who insisted on his r’s with a nasal persistence which revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape, an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who could play the ‘Doxology’ with an amendment of minor chords which one hears only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister was a good man, but when he bellowed: ‘And the Lorrrd said unto Moses, the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is my name. My wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with my sworrrd!’ I wondered how many centuries of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

‘Who bought the property?’ I asked Thomas.

‘Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this ’ere ’Amilton flats was lookin’ at it. ’E might be a bildin’ more studios.’

I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming repugnance took possession of me.

‘By the way, Thomas,’ I said, ‘who is that fellow down there?’

Thomas sniffed. ‘That there worm, sir? ’E’s night-watchman of the church, sir. ’E maikes me tired-a-sittin’ out all night on them steps and lookin’ at you insultin’ like. I’d a punched ’is ’ed, sir – beg pardon, sir—’

‘Go on, Thomas.’

‘One night a comin’ ’ome with ’Arry, the other English boy, I sees ’im a sittin’ there on them steps. We ’ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two girls on the tray service, an’ ’e looks so insultin’ at us that I up and sez: “Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?” – beg pardon, sir, but that’s ’ow I sez, sir. Then ’e don’t say nothin’ and I sez: “Come out and I’ll punch that puddin’ ’ed.” Then I hopens the gate and goes in, but ’e don’t say nothin’, only looks insultin’ like. Then I ’its ’im one, but, ugh! ’is ’ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to touch ’im.’

‘What did he do then?’ I asked, curiously.

‘’Im? Nawthin’.’

‘And you, Thomas?’

The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

‘Mr Scott, sir, I ain’t no coward an’ I can’t make it out at all why I run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an’ was shot by the wells.’

‘You don’t mean to say you ran away?’

‘Yes, sir; I run.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an’ run, an’ the rest was as frightened as I.’

‘But what were they frightened at?’

Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years’ sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas’s cockney dialect but had given him the American’s fear of ridicule.

‘You won’t believe me, Mr Scott, sir?’

‘Yes, I will.’

‘You will lawf at me, sir?’

‘Nonsense!’

He hesitated. ‘Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of ’is fingers come off in me ’and.’

The utter loathing and horror of Thomas’s face must have been reflected in my own for he added:

‘It’s orful, an’ now when I see ’im I just go away. ’E makes me hill.’

When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of his right hand was missing.

At nine o’clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a merry ‘Good morning, Mr Scott’. When she had reappeared and taken her pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas much to her delight. She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to chatter.

‘Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor’s.’

‘Who are “we”?’ I demanded.

‘Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr Whyte’s model, and Pinkie McCormack – we call her Pinkie because she’s got that beautiful red hair you artists like so much – and Lizzie Burke.’

I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said: ‘Well, go on.’

‘We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and – and all the rest. I made a mash.’

‘Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?’

She laughed and shook her head.

‘He’s Lizzie Burke’s brother, Ed. He’s a perfect gen’l’man.’

I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing, which she took with a bright smile.

‘Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,’ she said, examining her chewing gum, ‘but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.’

Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up – and what an accomplished young man he was – and how he thought nothing of squandering half a dollar for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the woollen department of Macy’s. Before she finished I began to paint, and she resumed the pose, smiling and chattering like a sparrow. By noon I had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it.

‘That’s better,’ she said.

I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched her shoot up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail, awkward child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and among all my models she was my favorite. It would have troubled me very much indeed had she become ‘tough’ or ‘fly’, as the phrase goes, but I never noticed any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart that she was all right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and I had no intention of doing so, partly because I had none myself, and partly because I knew she would do what she liked in spite of me. Still I did hope she would steer clear of complications, because I wished her well, and then also I had a selfish desire to retain the best model I had. I knew that mashing, as she termed it, had no significance with girls like Tessie, and that such things in America did not resemble in the least the same things in Paris. Yet having lived with my eyes open, I also knew that somebody would take Tessie away some day, in one manner or another, and though I professed to myself that marriage was nonsense, I sincerely hoped that, in this case, there would be a priest at the end of the vista. I am a Catholic. When I listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything, including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good. A man who lives as much alone as I do, must confess to somebody. Then, again, Sylvia was Catholic, and it was reason enough for me. But I was speaking of Tessie, which is very different. Tessie also was Catholic and much more devout than I, so, taking it all in all, I had little fear for my pretty model until she should fall in love. But then I knew that fate alone would decide her future for her, and I prayed inwardly that fate would keep her away from men like me and throw into her path nothing but Ed Burkes and Jimmy McCormicks, bless her sweet face!

Tessie sat blowing rings of smoke up to the ceiling and tinkling the ice in her tumbler.

‘Do you know that I also had a dream last night?’ I observed.

‘Not about that man?’ she asked, laughing.

‘Exactly. A dream similar to yours, only much worse.’

It was foolish and thoughtless of me to say this, but you know how little tact the average painter has.

‘I must have fallen asleep about 10 o’clock,’ I continued, ‘and after a while I dreamt that I awoke. So plainly did I hear the midnight bells, the wind in the tree-branches, and the whistle of steamers from the bay, that even now I can scarcely believe I was not awake. I seemed to be lying in a box which had a glass cover. Dimly I saw the street lamps as I passed, for I must tell you, Tessie, the box in which I reclined appeared to lie in a cushioned wagon which jolted me over a stony pavement. After a while I became impatient and tried to move but the box was too narrow. My hands were crossed on my breast so I could not raise them to help myself. I listened and then tried to call. My voice was gone. I could hear the trample of the horses attached to the wagon and even the breathing of the driver. Then another sound broke upon my ears like the raising of a window sash. I managed to turn my head a little, and found I could look, not only through the glass cover of my box, but also through the glass panes in the side of the covered vehicle. I saw houses, empty and silent, with neither light nor life about any of them excepting one. In that house a window was open on the first floor and a figure all in white stood looking down into the street. It was you.’

Tessie had turned her face away from me and leaned on the table with her elbow.

‘I could see your face,’ I resumed, ‘and it seemed to me to be very sorrowful. Then we passed on and turned into a narrow black lane. Presently the horses stopped. I waited and waited, closing my eyes with fear and impatience, but all was silent as the grave. After what seemed to me hours, I began to feel uncomfortable. A sense that somebody was close to me made me unclose my eyes. Then I saw the white face of the hearse-driver looking at me through the coffin lid—’

A sob from Tessie interrupted me. She was trembling like a leaf. I saw I had made an ass of myself and attempted to repair the damage.

‘Why, Tess,’ I said, ‘I only told you this to show you what influence your story might have on another person’s dreams. You don’t suppose I really lay in a coffin, do you? What are you trembling for? Don’t you see that your dream and my unreasonable dislike for that inoffensive watchman of the church simply set my brain working as soon as I fell asleep?’

She laid her head between her arms and sobbed as if her heart would break. What a precious triple donkey I had made of myself! But I was about to break my record. I went over and put my arm about her.

‘Tessie, dear, forgive me,’ I said; ‘I had no business to frighten you with such nonsense. You are too sensible a girl, too good a Catholic to believe in dreams.’

Her hand tightened on mine and her head fell back upon my shoulder, but she still trembled and I petted her and comforted her.

‘Come, Tess, open your eyes and smile.’

Her eyes opened with a slow languid movement and met mine, but their expression was so queer that I hastened to reassure her again.

‘It’s all humbug, Tessie. You surely are not afraid that any harm will come to you because of that?’

‘No,’ she said, but her scarlet lips quivered.

‘Then what’s the matter? Are you afraid?’

‘Yes. Not for myself.’

‘For me, then?’ I demanded gayly.

‘For you,’ she murmured in a voice almost inaudible. ‘I – I care for you.’

At first I started to laugh but when I understood her, a shock passed through me and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent confession. I could pass it by with a laugh. I could misunderstand her and reassure her as to my health. I could simply point out that it was impossible she could love me. But my reply was quicker than my thoughts, and I might think and think now when it was too late, for I had kissed her on the mouth.

That evening I took my usual walk in Washington Park, pondering over the occurrences of the day. I was thoroughly committed. There was no back-out now, and I stared the future straight in the face. I was not good, not even scrupulous, but I had no idea of deceiving either myself or Tessie. The one passion of my life lay buried in the sunlit forests of Brittany. Was it buried forever? Hope cried ‘No!’ For three years I had been listening to the voice of Hope, and for three years I had waited for a footstep on my threshold. Had Sylvia forgotten? ‘No!’ cried Hope.

I said that I was not good. That is true, but still I was not exactly a comic opera villain. I had led an easy-going reckless life, taking what invited me of pleasure, deploring and sometimes bitterly regretting consequences. In one thing alone, except my painting, was I serious, and that was something which lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests.

It was too late now for me to regret what had occurred during the day. Whatever it had been, pity, a sudden tenderness for sorrow, or the more brutal instinct of gratified vanity, it was all the same now, and unless I wished to bruise an innocent heart my path lay marked before me. The fire and strength, the depth of passion of a love which I had never even suspected, with all my imagined experience in the world, left me no alternative but to respond or send her away. Whether because I am so cowardly about giving pain to others, or whether it was that I have little of the gloomy Puritan in me, I do not know, but I shrank from disclaiming responsibility for that thoughtless kiss, and in fact had no time to do so before the gates of her heart opened and the flood poured forth. Others who habitually do their duty and find a sullen satisfaction in making themselves and everybody else unhappy, might have withstood it. I did not. I dared not. After the storm had abated I did tell her that she might better have loved Ed Burke and worn a plain gold ring, but she would not hear of it, and I thought perhaps that as long as she had decided to love somebody she could not marry, it had better be me. I, at least, could treat her with an intelligent affection, and whenever she became tired of her infatuation she could go none the worse for it. For I was decided on that point although I knew how hard it would be. I remembered the usual termination of Platonic liaisons and thought how disgusted I had been whenever I heard of one. I knew I was undertaking a great deal for so unscrupulous a man as I was, and I dreaded the future, but never for one moment did I doubt that she was safe with me. Had it been anybody but Tessie I should not have bothered my head about scruples. For it did not occur to me to sacrifice Tessie as I would have sacrificed a woman of the world. I looked the future squarely in the face and saw the several probable endings to the affair. She would either tire of the whole thing, or become so unhappy that I should have either to marry her or go away. If I married her we would be unhappy. I with a wife unsuited to me, and she with a husband unsuitable for any woman. For my past life could scarcely entitle me to marry. If I went away she might either fall ill, recover, and marry some Eddie Burke, or she might recklessly or deliberately go and do something foolish. On the other hand if she tired of me, then her whole life would be before her with beautiful vistas of Eddie Burkes and marriage rings and twins and Harlem flats and Heaven knows what. As I strolled along through the trees by the Washington Arch, I decided that she should find a substantial friend in me anyway and the future could take care of itself. Then I went into the house and put on my evening dress, for the little faintly perfumed note on my dresser said, ‘Have a cab at the stage door at eleven’, and the note was signed ‘Edith Carmichel, Metropolitan Theatre’.

I took supper that night, or rather we took supper, Miss Carmichel and I, at Solari’s and the dawn was just beginning to gild the cross on the Memorial Church as I entered Washington Square after leaving Edith at the Brunswick. There was not a soul in the park as I passed among the trees and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odor of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It was this:

‘Have you found the Yellow Sign?’

‘Have you found the Yellow Sign?’

‘Have you found the Yellow Sign?’

I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before and it troubled me more than I cared to think.

I dressed and went down into my studio. Tessie sat by the window, but as I came in she rose and put both arms around my neck for an innocent kiss. She looked so sweet and dainty that I kissed her again and then sat down before the easel.

‘Hello! Where’s the study I began yesterday?’ I asked.

Tessie looked conscious, but did not answer. I began to hunt among the piles of canvases, saying, ‘Hurry up, Tess, and get ready; we must take advantage of the morning light.’

When at last I gave up the search among the other canvases and turned to look around the room for the missing study I noticed Tessie standing by the screen with her clothes still on.

‘What’s the matter,’ I asked, ‘don’t you feel well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then hurry.’

‘Do you want me to pose as – as I have always posed?’

Then I understood. Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course, the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and native innocence were dreams of the past – I mean for her.

I suppose she noticed the disappointment on my face, for she said: ‘I will pose if you wish. The study is behind the screen here where I put it.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we will begin something new’; and I went into my wardrobe and picked out a Moorish costume which fairly blazed with tinsel. It was a genuine costume, and Tessie retired to the screen with it enchanted. When she came forth again I was astonished. Her long black hair was bound above her forehead with a circlet of turquoises, and the ends curled about her glittering girdle. Her feet were encased in the embroidered pointed slippers and the skirt of her costume, curiously wrought with arabesques in silver, fell to her ankles. The deep metallic blue vest embroidered with silver and the short Mauresque jacket spangled and sewn with turquoises became her wonderfully. She came up to me and held up her face smiling. I slipped my hand into my pocket and drawing out a gold chain with a cross attached, dropped it over her head.

‘It’s yours, Tessie.’

‘Mine?’ she faltered.

‘Yours. Now go and pose.’ Then with a radiant smile she ran behind the screen and presently reappeared with a little box on which was written my name.

‘I had intended to give it to you when I went home tonight,’ she said, ‘but I can’t wait now.’

I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither Arabic nor Chinese, nor as I found afterwards did it belong to any human script.

‘It’s all I had to give you for a keepsake,’ she said, timidly.

I was annoyed, but I told her how much I should prize it, and promised to wear it always. She fastened it on my coat beneath the lapel.

‘How foolish, Tess, to go and buy me such a beautiful thing as this,’ I said.

‘I did not buy it,’ she laughed.

‘Then where did you get it?’

Then she told me how she had found it one day while coming from the Aquarium in the Battery, how she had advertised it and watched the papers, but at last gave up all hopes of finding the owner.

‘That was last winter,’ she said, ‘the very day I had the first horrid dream about the hearse.’

I remembered my dream of the previous night but said nothing, and presently my charcoal was flying over a new canvas; and Tessie stood motionless on the model stand.




III


The day following was a disastrous one for me. While moving a framed canvas from one easel to another my foot slipped on the polished floor and I fell heavily on both wrists. They were so badly sprained that it was useless to attempt to hold a brush, and I was obliged to wander about the studio, glaring at unfinished drawings and sketches until despair seized me and I sat down to smoke and twiddle my thumbs with rage. The rain blew against the windows and rattled on the roof of the church, driving me into a nervous fit with its interminable patter. Tessie sat sewing by the window, and every now and then raised her head and looked at me with such innocent compassion that I began to feel ashamed of my irritation and looked about for something to occupy me. I had read all the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my elbow. I knew every volume by its color and examined them all, passing slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase. I did not remember it and from the floor could not decipher the pale lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie. She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘“The King in Yellow”.’

I was dumbfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous mottled binding as I would at a snake.

‘Don’t touch it, Tessie,’ I said; ‘come down.’

Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the studio with it. I called to her but she slipped away with a tormenting smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.

‘Tessie!’ I cried, entering the library, ‘listen, I am serious. Put that book away. I do not wish you to open it!’ The library was empty. I went into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had hidden herself so well that it was half an hour later when I discovered her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her foolishness. ‘The King in Yellow’ lay at her feet, but the book was open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She had opened ‘The King in Yellow’. Then I took her by the hand and led her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose and entering the unused store-room took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning to end.

When, faint with the excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at me.

We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing ‘The King in Yellow’. Oh the sin of writing such words – words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words – words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now knew to be the Yellow Sign. I shall never know why I refused, though even at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be glad to know what it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now and not a sound came up from the misty streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a gray blot in the gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine and I knew that she knew and read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the Hyades, and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other, swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelop me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie’s soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As for me I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside me, which I understand.

They will be very curious to know the tragedy – they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor – the livid corpse of the watchman from the church: ‘I have no theory, no explanation. That man must have been dead for months!’

I think I am dying. I wish the priest would—





A PLEASANT EVENING (#ulink_628800dd-3ab7-5eac-b08b-a95a724b6f28)


‘Et pis, doucett’ment on s’endort

On fait sa carne, on fait sa sorgue,

On ronfle, et, comme un tuyau d’orgue

L’tuyau s’met à ronfler plus fort …’

ARISTIDE BRUANT




I


As I stepped upon the platform of a Broadway cable-car at Forty-second Street, somebody said, ‘Hello, Hilton, Jamison’s looking for you.’

‘Hello, Curtis,’ I replied, ‘what does Jamison want?’

‘He wants to know what you’ve been doing all the week,’ said Curtis, hanging desperately to the railing as the car lurched forward; ‘he says you seem to think that the Manhattan Illustrated Weekly was created for the sole purpose of providing salary and vacations for you.’

‘The shifty old tom-cat!’ I said indignantly, ‘he knows well enough where I’ve been. Vacation! Does he think the State Camp in June is a snap?’

‘Oh,’ said Curtis, ‘you’ve been to Peekskill?’

‘I should say so,’ I replied, my wrath rising as I thought of my assignment.

‘Hot?’ inquired Curtis, dreamily.

‘One hundred and three in the shade,’ I answered. ‘Jamison wanted three full pages and three half pages, all for process work, and a lot of line drawings into the bargain. I could have faked them – I wish I had. I was fool enough to hustle and break my neck to get some honest drawings, and that’s the thanks I get!’

‘Did you have a camera?’

‘No. I will next time – I’ll waste no more conscientious work on Jamison,’ I said sulkily.

‘It doesn’t pay,’ said Curtis. ‘When I have military work assigned to me, I don’t do the dashing sketch-artist act, you bet; I go to my studio, light my pipe, pull out a lot of old Illustrated London News, select several suitable battle scenes by Caton Woodville – and use ’em too.’

The car shot round the neck-breaking curve at Fourteenth Street.

‘Yes,’ continued Curtis, as the car stopped in front of the Morton House for a moment, then plunged forward again amid a furious clanging of gongs, ‘it doesn’t pay to do decent work for the fat-headed men who run the Manhattan Illustrated. They don’t appreciate it.’

‘I think the public does,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure Jamison doesn’t. It would serve him right if I did what most of you fellows do – take a lot of Caton Woodville’s and Thulstrup’s drawings, change the uniforms, “chic” a figure or two, and turn in a drawing labelled “from life”. I’m sick of this sort of thing anyway. Almost every day this week I’ve been chasing myself over that tropical camp, or galloping in the wake of those batteries. I’ve got a full page of the “camp by moonlight”, full pages of “artillery drill” and “light battery in action”, and a dozen smaller drawings that cost me more groans and perspiration than Jamison ever knew in all his lymphatic life!’

‘Jamison’s got wheels,’ said Curtis, ‘—more wheels than there are bicycles in Harlem. He wants you to do a full page by Saturday.’

‘A what?’ I exclaimed, aghast.

‘Yes he does – he was going to send Jim Crawford, but Jim expects to go to California for the winter fair, and you’ve got to do it.’

‘What is it?’ I demanded savagely.

‘The animals in Central Park,’ chuckled Curtis.

I was furious. The animals! Indeed! I’d show Jamison that I was entitled to some consideration! This was Thursday; that gave me a day and a half to finish a full-page drawing for the paper, and, after my work at the State Camp I felt that I was entitled to a little rest. Anyway I objected to the subject. I intended to tell Jamison so – I intended to tell him firmly. However, many of the things that we often intended to tell Jamison were never told. He was a peculiar man, fat-faced, thin-lipped, gentle-voiced, mild-mannered, and soft in his movements as a pussy cat. Just why our firmness should give way when we were actually in his presence, I have never quite been able to determine. He said very little – so did we, although we often entered his presence with other intentions.

The truth was that the Manhattan Illustrated Weekly was the best paying, best illustrated paper in America, and we young fellows were not anxious to be cast adrift. Jamison’s knowledge of art was probably as extensive as the knowledge of any ‘Art editor’ in the city. Of course that was saying nothing, but the fact merited careful consideration on our part, and we gave it much consideration.

This time, however, I decided to let Jamison know that drawings are not produced by the yard, and that I was neither a floor-walker nor a hand-me-down. I would stand up for my rights; I’d tell old Jamison a few things to set the wheels under his silk hat spinning, and if he attempted any of his pussy-cat ways on me, I’d give him a few plain facts that would curl what hair he had left.

Glowing with a splendid indignation, I jumped off the car at the City Hall, followed by Curtis, and a few minutes later entered the office of the Manhattan Illustrated News.

‘Mr Jamison would like to see you, sir,’ said one of the compositors as I passed into the long hallway. I threw my drawings on the table and passed a handkerchief over my forehead.

‘Mr Jamison would like to see you, sir,’ said a small freckle-faced boy with a smudge of ink on his nose.

‘I know it,’ I said, and started to remove my gloves.

‘Mr Jamison would like to see you, sir,’ said a lank messenger who was carrying a bundle of proofs to the floor below.

‘The deuce take Jamison,’ I said to myself. I started toward the dark passage that leads to the abode of Jamison, running over in my mind the neat and sarcastic speech which I had been composing during the last ten minutes.

Jamison looked up and nodded softly as I entered the room. I forgot my speech.

‘Mr Hilton,’ he said, ‘we want a full page of the Zoo before it is removed to Bronx Park. Saturday afternoon at three o’clock the drawing must be in the engraver’s hands. Did you have a pleasant week in camp?’

‘It was hot,’ I muttered, furious to find that I could not remember my little speech.

‘The weather,’ said Jamison, with soft courtesy, ‘is oppressive everywhere. Are your drawings in, Mr Hilton?’

‘Yes. It was infernally hot and I worked like the devil—’

‘I suppose you were quite overcome. Is that why you took a two days’ trip to the Catskills? I trust the mountain air restored you – but – was it prudent to go to Cranston’s for the cotillion Tuesday? Dancing in such uncomfortable weather is really unwise. Good-morning, Mr Hilton, remember the engraver should have your drawings on Saturday by three.’

I walked out, half hypnotized, half enraged. Curtis grinned at me as I passed – I could have boxed his ears.

‘Why the mischief should I lose my tongue whenever that old tom-cat purrs!’ I asked myself as I entered the elevator and was shot down to the first floor. ‘I’ll not put up with this sort of thing much longer – how in the name of all that’s foxy did he know that I went to the mountains? I suppose he thinks I’m lazy because I don’t wish to be boiled to death. How did he know about the dance at Cranston’s? Old cat!’

The roar and turmoil of machinery and busy men filled my ears as I crossed the avenue and turned into the City Hall Park.

From the staff on the tower the flag drooped in the warm sunshine with scarcely a breeze to lift its crimson bars. Overhead stretched a splendid cloudless sky, deep, deep blue, thrilling, scintillating in the gemmed rays of the sun.

Pigeons wheeled and circled about the roof of the gray Post Office or dropped out of the blue above to flutter around the fountain in the square.

On the steps of the City Hall the unlovely politician lounged, exploring his heavy underjaw with wooden toothpick, twisting his drooping black moustache, or distributing tobacco juice over marble steps and close-clipped grass.

My eyes wandered from these human vermin to the calm scornful face of Nathan Hale, on his pedestal, and then to the gray-coated Park policeman whose occupation was to keep little children from the cool grass.

A young man with thin hands and blue circles under his eyes was slumbering on a bench by the fountain, and the policeman walked over to him and struck him on the soles of his shoes with a short club.

The young man rose mechanically, stared about, dazed by the sun, shivered, and limped away. I saw him sit down on the steps of the white marble building, and I went over and spoke to him. He neither looked at me, nor did he notice the coin I offered.

‘You’re sick,’ I said, ‘you had better go to the hospital.’

‘Where?’ he asked vacantly. ‘I’ve been, but they wouldn’t receive me.’

He stooped and tied the bit of string that held what remained of his shoe to his foot.

‘You are French,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Have you no friends? Have you been to the French Consul?’

‘The Consul!’ he replied, ‘no, I haven’t been to the French Consul.’

After a moment I said, ‘You speak like a gentleman.’

He rose to his feet and stood very straight, looking me, for the first time, directly in the eyes.

‘Who are you?’ I asked abruptly.

‘An outcast,’ he said, without emotion, and limped off thrusting his hands into his ragged pockets.

‘Huh!’ said the Park policeman who had come up behind me in time to hear my question and the vagabond’s answer; ‘don’t you know who that hobo is? – An’ you a newspaper man!’

‘Who is he, Cusick?’ I demanded, watching the thin shabby figure moving across Broadway toward the river.

‘On the level you don’t know, Mr Hilton?’ repeated Cusick, suspiciously.

‘No, I don’t; I never before laid eyes on him.’

‘Why,’ said the sparrow policeman, ‘that’s “Soger Charlie”; – you remember – that French officer what sold secrets to the Dutch Emperor.’

‘And was to have been shot? I remember now, four years ago – and he escaped – you mean to say that is the man?’

‘Everybody knows it,’ sniffed Cusick, ‘I’d a-thought you newspaper gents would have knowed it first.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked after a moment’s thought.

‘Soger Charlie—’

‘I mean his name at home.’

‘Oh, some French dago name. No Frenchman will speak to him here; sometimes they curse him and kick him. I guess he’s dyin’ by inches.’

I remembered his case now. Two young French cavalry officers were arrested, charged with selling plans of fortifications and other military secrets to the Germans. On the eve of their conviction, one of them, Heaven only knows how, escaped and turned up in New York. The other was duly shot. The affair had made some noise, because both young men were of good families. It was a painful episode, and I had hastened to forget it. Now that it was recalled to my mind, I remembered the newspaper accounts of the case, but I had forgotten the names of the miserable young men.

‘Sold his country,’ observed Cusick, watching a group of children out of the corner of his eyes, ‘—you can’t trust no Frenchman nor dagoes nor Dutchmen either. I guess Yankees are about the only white men.’

I looked at the noble face of Nathan Hale and nodded.

‘Nothin’ sneaky about us, eh, Mr Hilton?’

I thought of Benedict Arnold and looked at my boots.

Then the policeman said, ‘Well, so long, Mr Hilton,’ and went away to frighten a pasty-faced little girl who had climbed upon the railing and was leaning down to sniff the fragrant grass.

‘Cheese it, de cop!’ cried her shrill-voiced friends, and the whole bevy of small ragamuffins scuttled away across the square.

With a feeling of depression I turned and walked toward Broadway, where the long yellow cable-cars swept up and down, and the din of gongs and the deafening rumble of heavy trucks echoed from the marble walls of the Court House to the granite mass of the Post Office.

Throngs of hurrying busy people passed up town and down town, slim sober-faced clerks, trim cold-eyed brokers, here and there a red-necked politician linking arms with some favourite heeler, here and there a City Hall lawyer, sallow-faced and saturnine. Sometimes a fireman, in his severe blue uniform, passed through the crowd, sometimes a blue-coated policeman, mopping his clipped hair, holding his helmet in his white-gloved hand. There were women too, pale-faced shop girls with pretty eyes, tall blonde girls who might be typewriters and might not, and many, many older women whose business in that part of the city no human being could venture to guess, but who hurried up town and down town, all occupied with something that gave to the whole restless throng a common likeness – the expression of one who hastens toward a hopeless goal.

I knew some of those who passed me. There was little Jocelyn of the Mail and Express; there was Hood, who had more money than he wanted and was going to have less than he wanted when he left Wall Street; there was Colonel Tidmouse of the 45th Infantry, N.G.S.N.Y., probably coming from the office of the Army and Navy Journal, and there was Dick Harding who wrote the best stories of New York life that have been printed. People said that his hat no longer fitted – especially people who also wrote stories of New York life and whose hats threatened to fit as long as they lived.

I looked at the statue of Nathan Hale, then at the human stream that flowed around his pedestal.

‘Quand même,’ I muttered and walked into Broadway, signalling to the gripman of an uptown cable-car.




II


I passed into the Park by the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street gate; I could never bring myself to enter it through the gate that is guarded by the hideous pigmy statue of Thorwaldsen.

The afternoon sun poured into the windows of the New Netherlands Hotel, setting every orange-curtained pane a-glitter, and tipping the wings of the bronze dragons with flame.

Gorgeous masses of flowers blazed in the sunshine from the grey terraces of the Savoy, from the high grilled court of the Vanderbilt palace, and from the balconies of the Plaza opposite.

The white marble façade of the Metropolitan Club was a grateful relief in the universal glare, and I kept my eyes on it until I had crossed the dusty street and entered the shade of the trees.

Before I came to the Zoo I smelled it. Next week it was to be removed to the fresh cool woods and meadows in Bronx Park, far from the stifling air of the city, far from the infernal noise of the Fifth Avenue omnibuses.

A noble stag stared at me from his enclosure among the trees as I passed down the winding asphalt walk. ‘Never mind, old fellow,’ said I, ‘you will be splashing about in the Bronx River next week and cropping maple shoots to your heart’s content.’

On I went, past herds of staring deer, past great lumbering elk, and moose, and long-faced African antelopes, until I came to the dens of the great carnivora.

The tigers sprawled in the sunshine, blinking and licking their paws; the lions slept in the shade or squatted on their haunches, yawning gravely. A slim panther travelled to and fro behind her barred cage, pausing at times to peer wistfully out into the free sunny world. My heart ached for caged wild things, and I walked on, glancing up now and then to encounter the blank stare of a tiger or the mean shifty eyes of some ill-smelling hyena.

Across the meadow I could see the elephants swaying and swinging their great heads, the sober bison solemnly slobbering over their cuds, the sarcastic countenances of camels, the wicked little zebras, and a lot more animals of the camel and llama tribe, all resembling each other, all equally ridiculous, stupid, deadly uninteresting.

Somewhere behind the old arsenal an eagle was screaming, probably a Yankee eagle; I heard the ‘tchug! tchug!’ of a blowing hippopotamus, the squeal of a falcon, and the snarling yap! of quarrelling wolves.

‘A pleasant place for a hot day!’ I pondered bitterly, and I thought some things about Jamison that I shall not insert in this volume. But I lighted a cigarette to deaden the aroma from the hyenas, unclasped my sketching block, sharpened my pencil, and fell to work on a family group of hippopotami.

They may have taken me for a photographer, for they all wore smiles as if ‘welcoming a friend’, and my sketch block presented a series of wide open jaws, behind which shapeless bulky bodies vanished in alarming perspective.

The alligators were easy; they looked to me as though they had not moved since the founding of the Zoo, but I had a bad time with the big bison, who persistently turned his tail to me, looking stolidly around his flank to see how I stood it. So I pretended to be absorbed in the antics of two bear cubs, and the dreary old bison fell into the trap, for I made some good sketches of him and laughed in his face as I closed the book.

There was a bench by the abode of the eagles, and I sat down on it to draw the vultures and condors, motionless as mummies among the piled rocks. Gradually I enlarged the sketch, bringing in the gravel plaza, the steps leading up to Fifth Avenue, the sleepy park policeman in front of the arsenal – and a slim, white-browed girl, dressed in shabby black, who stood silently in the shade of the willow trees.

After a while I found that the sketch, instead of being a study of the eagles, was in reality a composition in which the girl in black occupied the principal point of interest. Unwittingly I had subordinated everything else to her, the brooding vultures, the trees and walks, and the half indicated groups of sun-warmed loungers.

She stood very still, her pallid face bent, her thin white hands loosely clasped before her. ‘Rather dejected reverie,’ I thought, ‘probably she’s out of work.’ Then I caught a glimpse of a sparkling diamond ring on the slender third finger of her left hand.

‘She’ll not starve with such a stone as that about her,’ I said to myself, looking curiously at her dark eyes and sensitive mouth. They were both beautiful, eyes and mouth – beautiful, but touched with pain.

After a while I rose and walked back to make a sketch or two of the lions and tigers. I avoided the monkeys – I can’t stand them, and they never seem funny to me, poor dwarfish, degraded caricatures of all that is ignoble in ourselves.

‘I’ve enough now,’ I thought; ‘I’ll go home and manufacture a full page that will probably please Jamison.’ So I strapped the elastic band around my sketching block, replaced pencil and rubber in my waistcoat pocket, and strolled off toward the Mall to smoke a cigarette in the evening glow before going back to my studio to work until midnight, up to the chin in charcoal gray and Chinese white.

Across the long meadow I could see the roofs of the city faintly looming above the trees. A mist of amethyst, ever deepening, hung low on the horizon, and through it, steeple and dome, roof and tower, and the tall chimneys where thin fillets of smoke curled idly, were transformed into pinnacles of beryl and flaming minarets, swimming in filmy haze. Slowly the enchantment deepened; all that was ugly and shabby and mean had fallen away from the distant city, and now it towered into the evening sky, splendid, gilded, magnificent, purified in the fierce furnace of the setting sun.

The red disk was half hidden now; the tracery of trees, feathery willow and budding birch, darkened against the glow; the fiery rays shot far across the meadow, gilding the dead leaves, staining with soft crimson the dark moist tree trunks around me.

Far across the meadow a shepherd passed in the wake of a huddling flock, his dog at his heels, faint moving blots of gray.

A squirrel sat up on the gravel walk in front of me, ran a few feet, and sat up again, so close that I could see the palpitation of his sleek flanks.

Somewhere in the grass a hidden field insect was rehearsing last summer’s solos; I heard the tap! tap! tat-tat-t-t-tat! of a woodpecker among the branches overhead and the querulous note of a sleepy robin.

The twilight deepened; out of the city the music of bells floated over wood and meadow; faint mellow whistles sounded from the river craft along the north shore, and the distant thunder of a gun announced the close of a June day.

The end of my cigarette began to glimmer with a redder light; shepherd and flock were blotted out in the dusk, and I only knew they were still moving when the sheep bells tinkled faintly.

Then suddenly that strange uneasiness that all have known – that half-awakened sense of having seen it all before, of having been through it all, came over me, and I raised my head and slowly turned.

A figure was seated at my side. My mind was struggling with the instinct to remember. Something so vague and yet so familiar – something that eluded thought yet challenged it, something – God knows what! troubled me. And now, as I looked, without interest, at the dark figure beside me, an apprehension, totally involuntary, an impatience to understand, came upon me, and I sighed and turned restlessly again to the fading west.

I thought I heard my sigh re-echoed – but I scarcely heeded; and in a moment I sighed again, dropping my burned-out cigarette on the gravel beneath my feet.

‘Did you speak to me?’ said some one in a low voice, so close that I swung around rather sharply.

‘No,’ I said after a moment’s silence.

It was a woman. I could not see her face clearly, but I saw on her clasped hands, which lay listlessly in her lap, the sparkle of a great diamond. I knew her at once. It did not need a glance at the shabby dress of black, the white face, a pallid spot in the twilight, to tell me that I had her picture in my sketch-book.

‘Do – do you mind if I speak to you?’ she asked timidly. The hopeless sadness in her voice touched me, and I said, ‘Why, no, of course not. Can I do anything for you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, brightening a little, ‘if you – you only would.’

‘I will if I can,’ said I cheerfully; ‘what is it? Out of ready cash?’

‘No, not that,’ she said, shrinking back.

I begged her pardon, a little surprised, and withdrew my hand from my change pocket.

‘It is only – only that I wish you to take these,’ – she drew a thin packet from her breast – ‘these two letters.’

‘I?’ I asked astonished.

‘Yes, if you will.’

‘But what am I to do with them?’ I demanded.

‘I can’t tell you; I only know that I must give them to you. Will you take them?’

‘Oh, yes, I’ll take them,’ I laughed, ‘am I to read them?’ I added to myself, ‘It’s some clever begging trick.’

‘No,’ she answered slowly, ‘you are not to read them; you are to give them to somebody.’

‘To whom? Anybody?’

‘No, not to anybody. You will know whom to give them to when the time comes.’

‘Then I am to keep them until further instructions?’

‘Your own heart will instruct you,’ she said, in a scarcely audible voice. She held the thin packet toward me, and to humor her I took it. It was wet.

‘The letters fell into the sea,’ she said. ‘There was a photograph which should have gone with them but the salt water washed it blank. Will you care if I ask you something else?’

‘I? Oh, no.’

‘Then give me the picture that you made of me to-day.’

I laughed again, and demanded how she knew I had drawn her.

‘Is it like me?’ she said.

‘I think it is very like you,’ I answered truthfully.

‘Will you not give it to me?’

Now it was on the tip of my tongue to refuse, but I reflected that I had enough sketches for a full page without that one, so I handed it to her, nodded that she was welcome, and stood up. She rose also, the diamond flashing on her finger.

‘You are sure that you are not in want?’ I asked, with a tinge of good-natured sarcasm.

‘Hark!’ she whispered; ‘listen! – do you not hear the bells of the convent!’

I looked out into the misty night.

‘There are no bells sounding,’ I said, ‘and anyway there are no convent bells here. We are in New York, mademoiselle’ – I had noticed her French accent – ‘we are in Protestant Yankee-land, and the bells that ring are much less mellow than the bells of France.’

I turned pleasantly to say good-night. She was gone.




III


‘Have you ever drawn a picture of a corpse?’ inquired Jamison next morning as I walked into his private room with a sketch of the proposed full page of the Zoo.

‘No, and I don’t want to,’ I replied, sullenly.

‘Let me see your Central Park page,’ said Jamison in his gentle voice, and I displayed it. It was about worthless as an artistic production, but it pleased Jamison, as I knew it would.

‘Can you finish it by this afternoon?’ he asked, looking up at me with persuasive eyes.

‘Oh, I suppose so,’ I said, wearily; ‘anything else, Mr Jamison?’

‘The corpse,’ he replied, ‘I want a sketch by tomorrow – finished.’

‘What corpse?’ I demanded, controlling my indignation as I met Jamison’s soft eyes.

There was a mute duel of glances. Jamison passed his hand across his forehead with a slight lifting of the eyebrows.

‘I shall want it as soon as possible,’ he said in his caressing voice.

What I thought was, ‘Damned purring pussy-cat!’ What I said was, ‘Where is this corpse?’

‘In the Morgue – have you read the morning papers? No? Ah, – as you very rightly observe you are too busy to read the morning papers. Young men must learn industry first, of course, of course. What you are to do is this: the San Francisco police have sent out an alarm regarding the disappearance of a Miss Tufft – the millionaire’s daughter, you know. Today a body was brought to the Morgue here in New York, and it has been identified as the missing young lady – by a diamond ring. Now I am convinced that it isn’t, and I’ll show you why, Mr Hilton.’

He picked up a pen and made a sketch of a ring on a margin of that morning’s Tribune.

‘That is the description of her ring as sent on from San Francisco. You notice the diamond is set in the centre of the ring where the two gold serpents’ tails cross!

‘Now the ring on the finger of the woman in the Morgue is like this,’ and he rapidly sketched another ring where the diamond rested in the fangs of the two gold serpents.

‘That is the difference,’ he said in his pleasant, even voice.

‘Rings like that are not uncommon,’ said I, remembering that I had seen such a ring on the finger of the white-faced girl in the Park the evening before. Then a sudden thought took shape – perhaps that was the girl whose body lay in the Morgue!

‘Well,’ said Jamison, looking up at me, ‘what are you thinking about?’

‘Nothing,’ I answered, but the whole scene was before my eyes, the vultures brooding among the rocks, the shabby black dress, and the pallid face – and the ring, glittering on that slim white hand!

‘Nothing,’ I repeated, ‘when shall I go, Mr Jamison? Do you want a portrait – or what?’

‘Portrait – careful drawing of the ring, and, er, a centre piece of the Morgue at night. Might as well give people the horrors while we’re about it.’

‘But,’ said I, ‘the policy of this paper—’

‘Never mind, Mr Hilton,’ purred Jamison, ‘I am able to direct the policy of this paper.’

‘I don’t doubt you are,’ I said angrily.

‘I am,’ he repeated, undisturbed and smiling; ‘you see this Tufft case interests society. I am – er – also interested.’

He held out to me a morning paper and pointed to a heading.

I read: ‘Miss Tufft Dead! Her Fiancé was Mr Jamison, the well known Editor’.

‘What!’ I cried in horrified amazement. But Jamison had left the room, and I heard him chatting and laughing softly with some visitors in the press-room outside.

I flung down the paper and walked out.

‘The cold-blooded toad!’ I exclaimed again and again; ‘—making capital out of his fiancée’s disappearance! Well, I – I’m d—nd! I knew he was a bloodless, heartless, grip-penny, but I never thought – I never imagined—’ Words failed me.

Scarcely conscious of what I did I drew a Herald from my pocket and saw the column entitled: ‘Miss Tufft Found! Identified by a Ring. Wild Grief of Mr Jamison, her Fiancé.’

That was enough. I went out into the street and sat down in City Hall Park. And, as I sat there, a terrible resolution came to me; I would draw the dead girl’s face in such a way that it would chill Jamison’s sluggish blood, I would crowd the black shadows of the Morgue with forms and ghastly faces, and every face should bear something in it of Jamison. Oh, I’d rouse him from his cold snaky apathy! I’d confront him with Death in such an awful form, that, passionless, base, inhuman as he was, he’d shrink from it as he would from a dagger thrust. Of course I’d lose my place, but that did not bother me, for I had decided to resign anyway, not having a taste for the society of human reptiles. And, as I sat there in the sunny park, furious, trying to plan a picture whose sombre horror should leave in his mind an ineffaceable scar, I suddenly thought of the pale black-robed girl in Central Park. Could it be her poor slender body that lay among the shadows of the grim Morgue! If ever brooding despair was stamped on any face, I had seen its print on hers when she spoke to me in the Park and gave me the letters. The letters! I had not thought of them since, but now I drew them from my pocket and looked at the addresses.

‘Curious,’ I thought, ‘the letters are still damp; they smell of salt water too.’

I looked at the address again, written in the long fine hand of an educated woman who had been bred in a French convent. Both letters bore the same address, in French:

CAPTAIN D’YNIOL

(Kindness of a Stranger.)

‘Captain d’Yniol,’ I repeated aloud, ‘confound it, I’ve heard that name! Now, where the deuce – where in the name of all that’s queer—’ Somebody who had sat down on the bench beside me placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

It was the Frenchman, ‘Soger Charlie’.

‘You spoke my name,’ he said in apathetic tones.

‘Your name!’

‘Captain d’Yniol,’ he repeated; ‘it is my name.’

I recognized him in spite of the black goggles he was wearing, and, at the same moment it flashed into my mind that d’Yniol was the name of the traitor who had escaped. Ah, I remembered now!

‘I am Captain d’Yniol,’ he said again, and I saw his fingers closing on my coat sleeve.

It may have been my involuntary movement of recoil – I don’t know – but the fellow dropped my coat and sat straight up on the bench.

‘I am Captain d’Yniol,’ he said for the third time, ‘charged with treason and under sentence of death.’

‘And innocent!’ I muttered, before I was even conscious of having spoken. What was it that wrung those involuntary words from my lips, I shall never know, perhaps – but it was I, not he, who trembled, seized with a strange agitation, and it was I, not he, whose hand was stretched forth impulsively, touching his.

Without a tremor he took my hand, pressed it almost imperceptibly, and dropped it. Then I held both letters toward him, and, as he neither looked at them nor at me, I placed them in his hand. Then he started.

‘Read them,’ I said, ‘they are for you.’

‘Letters!’ he gasped in a voice that sounded like nothing human.

‘Yes, they are for you – I know it now—’

‘Letters! – letters directed to me?’

‘Can you not see?’ I cried.

Then he raised one frail hand and drew the goggles from his eyes, and, as I looked I saw two tiny white specks exactly in the centre of both pupils.

‘Blind!’ I faltered.

‘I have been unable to read for two years,’ he said.

After a moment he placed the tip of one finger on the letters.

‘They are wet,’ I said; ‘shall – would you like to have me read them?’ For a long time he sat silently in the sunshine, fumbling with his cane, and I watched him without speaking. At last he said, ‘Read, Monsieur,’ and I took the letters and broke the seals.

The first letter contained a sheet of paper, damp and discolored, on which a few lines were written:

My darling, I knew you were innocent—

Here the writing ended, but, in the blur beneath, I read:

Paris shall know – France shall know, for at last I have the proofs and I am coming to find you, my soldier, and to place them in your own dear brave hands. They know, now, at the War Ministry – they have a copy of the traitor’s confession – but they dare not make it public – they dare not withstand the popular astonishment and rage. Therefore I sail on Monday from Cherbourg by the Green Cross Line, to bring you back to your own again, where you will stand before all the world, without fear, without reproach.

ALINE.

‘This – this is terrible!’ I stammered; ‘can God live and see such things done!’

But with his thin hand he gripped my arm again, bidding me read the other letter; and I shuddered at the menace in his voice.

Then, with his sightless eyes on me, I drew the other letter from the wet, stained envelope. And before I was aware – before I understood the purport of what I saw, I had read aloud these half effaced lines:

‘The Lorient is sinking – an iceberg – mid-ocean – good-bye – you are innocent – I love—’

‘The Lorient!’ I cried; ‘it was the French steamer that was never heard from – the Lorient of the Green Cross Line! I had forgotten – I—’

The loud crash of a revolver stunned me; my ears rang and ached with it as I shrank back from a ragged dusty figure that collapsed on the bench beside me, shuddered a moment, and tumbled to the asphalt at my feet.

The trampling of the eager hard-eyed crowd, the dust and taint of powder in the hot air, the harsh alarm of the ambulance clattering up Mail Street – these I remember, as I knelt there, helplessly holding the dead man’s hands in mine.

‘Soger Charlie,’ mused the sparrow policeman, ‘shot his-self, didn’t he, Mr Hilton? You seen him, sir – blowed the top of his head off, didn’t he, Mr Hilton?’

‘Soger Charlie,’ they repeated, ‘a French dago what shot his-self’; and the words echoed in my ears long after the ambulance rattled away, and the increasing throng dispersed, sullenly, as a couple of policemen cleared a space around the pool of thick blood on the asphalt.

They wanted me as a witness, and I gave my card to one of the policemen who knew me. The rabble transferred its fascinated stare to me, and I turned away and pushed a path between frightened shop girls and ill-smelling loafers, until I lost myself in the human torrent of Broadway.

The torrent took me with it where it flowed – East? West? – I did not notice nor care, but I passed on through the throng, listless, deadly weary of attempting to solve God’s justice – striving to understand His purpose – His laws – His judgments which are ‘true and righteous altogether.’




IV


‘More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold. Sweeter also than honey and the honey-comb!’

I turned sharply toward the speaker who shambled at my elbow. His sunken eyes were dull and lustreless, his bloodless face gleamed pallid as a death mask above the blood-red jersey – the emblem of the soldiers of Christ.

I don’t know why I stopped, lingering, but, as he passed, I said, ‘Brother, I also was meditating upon God’s wisdom and His testimonies.’

The pale fanatic shot a glance at me, hesitated, and fell into my own pace, walking by my side. Under the peak of his Salvation Army cap his eyes shone in the shadow with a strange light.

‘Tell me more,’ I said, sinking my voice below the roar of traffic, the clang! clang! of the cable-cars, and the noise of feet on the worn pavements – ‘tell me of His testimonies.’

‘Moreover by them is Thy servant warned and in keeping of them there is great reward. Who can understand His errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright and I shall be innocent from the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight – O Lord! My strength and my Redeemer!’

‘It is Holy Scripture that you quote,’ I said; ‘I also can read that when I choose. But it cannot clear for me the reasons – it cannot make me understand—’

‘What?’ he asked and muttered to himself.

‘That, for instance,’ I replied, pointing to a cripple, who had been born deaf and dumb and horridly misshapen – a wretched diseased lump on the sidewalk below St Paul’s Churchyard – a sore-eyed thing that mouthed and mowed and rattled pennies in a tin cup as though the sound of copper could stem the human pack that passed hot on the scent of gold.

Then the man who shambled beside me turned and looked long and earnestly into my eyes. And after a moment a dull recollection stirred within me – a vague something that seemed like the awakening memory of a past, long, long forgotten, dim, dark, too subtle, too frail, too indefinite – ah! the old feeling that all men have known – the old strange uneasiness, that useless struggle to remember when and where it all occurred before.

And the man’s head sank on his crimson jersey, and he muttered, muttered to himself of God and love and compassion, until I saw that the fierce heat of the city had touched his brain, and I went away and left him prating of mysteries that none but such as he dare name.

So I passed on through dust and heat; and the hot breath of men touched my cheek and eager eyes looked into mine. Eyes, eyes, that met my own and looked through them, beyond – far beyond to where gold glittered amid the mirage of eternal hope. Gold! It was in the air where the soft sunlight gilded the floating motes, it was under foot in the dust that the sun made gilt, it glimmered from every window pane where the long red beams struck golden sparks above the gasping gold-hunting hordes of Wall Street.

High, high, in the deepening sky the tall buildings towered, and the breeze from the bay lifted the sun-dyed flags of commerce until they waved above the turmoil of the hives below – waved courage and hope and strength to those who lusted after gold.

The sun dipped low behind Castle William as I turned listlessly into the Battery, and the long straight shadows of the trees stretched away over greensward and asphalt walk.

Already the electric lights were glimmering among the foliage although the bay shimmered like polished brass and the topsails of the ships glowed with a deeper hue, where the red sun rays fall athwart the rigging.

Old men tottered along the sea-wall, tapping the asphalt with worn canes, old women crept to and fro in the coming twilight – old women who carried baskets that gaped for charity or bulged with moldy stuffs – food, clothing? – I could not tell; I did not care to know.

The heavy thunder from the parapets of Castle William died away over the placid bay, the last red arm of the sun shot up out of the sea, and wavered and faded into the sombre tones of the afterglow. Then came the night, timidly at first, touching sky and water with gray fingers, folding the foliage into soft massed shapes, creeping onward, onward, more swiftly now, until color and form had gone from all the earth and the world was a world of shadows.

And, as I sat there on the dusky sea-wall, gradually the bitter thoughts faded and I looked out into the calm night with something of that peace that comes to all when day is ended.

The death at my very elbow of the poor blind wretch in the Park had left a shock, but now my nerves relaxed their tension and I began to think about it all – about the letters and the strange woman who had given them to me. I wondered where she had found them – whether they really were carried by some vagrant current in to the shore from the wreck of the fated Lorient.

Nothing but these letters had human eyes encountered from the Lorient, although we believed that fire or berg had been her portion; for there had been no storms when the Lorient steamed away from Cherbourg.

And what of the pale-faced girl in black who had given these letters to me, saying that my own heart would teach me where to place them?

I felt in my pockets for the letters where I had thrust them all crumpled and wet. They were there, and I decided to turn them over to the police. Then I thought of Cusick and the City Hall Park and these set my mind running on Jamison and my own work – ah! I had forgotten that – I had forgotten that I had sworn to stir Jamison’s cold, sluggish blood! Trading on his fiancée’s reported suicide – or murder! True, he had told me that he was satisfied that the body at the Morgue was not Miss Tufft’s because the ring did not correspond with his fiancée’s ring. But what sort of man was that! – to go crawling and nosing about morgues and graves for a full-page illustration which might sell a few extra thousand papers. I had never known he was such a man. It was strange too – for that was not the sort of illustration that the Weekly used; it was against all precedent – against the whole policy of the paper. He would lose a hundred subscribers where he would gain one by such work.

‘The callous brute!’ I muttered to myself, ‘I’ll wake him up – I’ll—’

I sat straight up on the bench and looked steadily at a figure which was moving toward me under the spluttering electric light.

It was the woman I had met in the Park.

She came straight up to me, her pale face gleaming like marble in the dark, her slim hands outstretched.

‘I have been looking for you all day – all day,’ she said, in the same low thrilling tones – ‘I want the letters back; have you them here?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I have them here – take them in Heaven’s name; they have done enough evil for one day!’

She took the letters from my hand; I saw the ring, made of the double serpents, flashing on her slim finger, and I stepped closer, and looked her in the eyes.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘I? My name is of no importance to you,’ she answered.

‘You are right,’ I said, ‘I do not care to know your name. That ring of yours—’

‘What of my ring?’ she murmured.

‘Nothing – a dead woman lying in the Morgue wears such a ring. Do you know what your letters have done? No? Well I read them to a miserable wretch and he blew his brains out!’

‘You read them to a man!’

‘I did. He killed himself.’

‘Who was that man?’

‘Captain d’Yniol—’

With something between a sob and a laugh she seized my hand and covered it with kisses, and I, astonished and angry, pulled my hand away from her cold lips and sat down on the bench.

‘You needn’t thank me,’ I said sharply; ‘if I had known that – but no matter. Perhaps after all the poor devil is better off somewhere in other regions with his sweetheart who was drowned – yes, I imagine he is. He was blind and ill – and broken-hearted.’

‘Blind?’ she asked gently.

‘Yes. Did you know him?’

‘I knew him.’

‘And his sweetheart, Aline?’

‘Aline,’ she repeated softly, ‘—she is dead. I come to thank you in her name.’

‘For what? – for his death?’

‘Ah, yes, for that.’

‘Where did you get those letters?’ I asked her, suddenly.

She did not answer, but stood fingering the wet letters.

Before I could speak again she moved away into the shadows of the trees, lightly, silently, and far down the dark walk I saw her diamond flashing.

Grimly brooding, I rose and passed through the Battery to the steps of the Elevated Road. These I climbed, bought my ticket, and stepped out to the damp platform. When a train came I crowded in with the rest, still pondering on my vengeance, feeling and believing that I was to scourge the conscience of the man who speculated on death.

At last the train stopped at 28th Street, and I hurried out and down the steps and away to the Morgue.

When I entered the Morgue, Skelton, the keeper, was standing before a slab that glistened faintly under the wretched gas jets. He heard my footsteps, and turned around to see who was coming. Then he nodded, saying, ‘Mr Hilton, just take a look at this here stiff – I’ll be back in a moment – this is the one that all the papers take to be Miss Tufft – but they’re all off, because this stiff has been here now for two weeks.’

I drew out my sketching-block and pencils.

‘Which is it, Skelton?’ I asked, fumbling for my rubber.

‘This one, Mr Hilton, the girl what’s smilin’. Picked up off Sandy Hook, too. Looks as if she was asleep, eh?’

‘What’s she got in her hand – clenched tight? Oh, a letter. Turn up the gas, Skelton, I want to see her face.’

The old man turned up the gas jet, and the flame blazed and whistled in the damp, fetid air. Then suddenly my eyes fell on the dead.

Rigid, scarcely breathing, I stared at the ring, made of two twisted serpents set with a great diamond – I saw the wet letters crushed in her slender hand – I looked, and – God help me! – I looked upon the dead face of the girl with whom I had been speaking on the Battery!

‘Dead for a month at least,’ said Skelton, calmly.

Then, as I felt my senses leaving me, I screamed out, and at the same instant somebody from behind seized my shoulder and shook me savagely – shook me until I opened my eyes again and gasped and coughed.

‘Now then, young feller!’ said a Park policeman bending over me, ‘if you go to sleep on a bench, somebody’ll lift your watch!’

I turned, rubbing my eyes desperately.

Then it was all a dream – and no shrinking girl had come to me with damp letters – I had not gone to the office – there was no such person as Miss Tufft – Jamison was not an unfeeling villain – no, indeed! – he treated us all much better than we deserved, and he was kind and generous too. And the ghastly suicide! Thank God that also was a myth – and the Morgue and the Battery at night where that pale-faced girl had – ugh!

I felt for my sketch-block, found it; turned the pages of all the animals that I had sketched, the hippopotami, the buffalo, the tigers – ah! where was that sketch in which I had made the woman in shabby black the principal figure, with the brooding vultures all around and the crowd in the sunshine—? It was gone.

I hunted everywhere, in every pocket. It was gone.

At last I rose and moved along the narrow asphalt path in the falling twilight.

And as I turned into the broader walk, I was aware of a group, a policeman holding a lantern, some gardeners, and a knot of loungers gathered about something – a dark mass on the ground.

‘Found ’em just so,’ one of the gardeners was saying, ‘better not touch ’em until the coroner comes.’

The policeman shifted his bull’s-eye a little; the rays fell on two faces, on two bodies, half supported against a park bench. On the finger of the girl glittered a splendid diamond, set between the fangs of two gold serpents. The man had shot himself; he clasped two wet letters in his hand. The girl’s clothing and hair were wringing wet, and her face was the face of a drowned person.

‘Well, sir,’ said the policeman, looking at me; ‘you seem to know these two people – by your looks—’

‘I never saw them before,’ I gasped, and walked on, trembling in every nerve.

For among the folds of her shabby black dress I had noticed the end of a paper – my sketch that I had missed!




PASSEUR (#ulink_324988ed-688c-537b-af6e-3b3d55690c5d)


When he had finished his pipe he tapped the brier bowl against the chimney until the ashes powdered the charred log smouldering across the andirons. Then he sat back in his chair, absently touched the hot pipe-bowl with the tip of each finger until it grew cool enough to be dropped into his coat pocket.

Twice he raised his eyes to the little American clock ticking upon the mantel. He had half an hour to wait.

The three candles that lighted the room might be trimmed to advantage; this would give him something to do. A pair of scissors lay open upon the bureau, and he rose and picked them up. For a while he stood dreamily shutting and opening the scissors, his eyes roaming about the room. There was an easel in the corner, and a pile of dusty canvases behind it; behind the canvases there was a shadow – that gray, menacing shadow that never moved.

When he had trimmed each candle he wiped the smoky scissors on a paint rag and flung them on the bureau again. The clock pointed to ten; he had been occupied exactly three minutes.

The bureau was littered with neckties, pipes, combs and brushes, matches, reels and fly-books, collars, shirt studs, a new pair of Scotch shooting stockings, and a woman’s work-basket.

He picked out all the neckties, folded them once, and hung them over a bit of twine that stretched across the looking-glass; the shirt studs he shovelled into the top drawer along with brushes, combs, and stockings; the reels and fly-books he dusted with his handkerchief and placed methodically along the mantelshelf. Twice he stretched out his hand towards the woman’s work-basket, but his hand fell to his side again, and he turned away into the room staring at the dying fire.

Outside the snow-sealed window a shutter broke loose and banged monotonously, until he flung open the panes and fastened it. The soft, wet snow, that had choked the window-panes all day, was frozen hard now, and he had to break the polished crust before he could find the rusty shutter hinge.

He leaned out for a moment, his numbed hands resting on the snow, the roar of a rising snow-squall in his ears; and out across the desolate garden and stark hedgerow he saw the flat black river spreading through the gloom.

A candle sputtered and snapped behind him; a sheet of drawing paper fluttered across the floor, and he closed the panes and turned back into the room, both hands in his worn pockets.

The little American clock on the mantel ticked and ticked, but the hands lagged, for he had not been occupied five minutes in all. He went up to the mantel and watched the hands of the clock. A minute – longer than a year to him – crept by.

Around the room the furniture stood ranged – a chair or two of yellow pine, a table, the easel, and in one corner the broad curtained bed; and behind each lay shadows, menacing shadows that never moved.

A little pale flame started up from the smoking log on the andirons; the room sang with the sudden hiss of escaping wood gases. After a little the back of the log caught fire; jets of blue flared up here and there with mellow sounds like the lighting of gas-burners in a row, and in a moment a thin sheet of yellow flame wrapped the whole charred log.

Then the shadows moved; not the shadows behind the furniture – they never moved – but other shadows, thin, gray, confusing, that came and spread their slim patterns all around him, and trembled and trembled.

He dared not step or tread upon them, they were too real; they meshed the floor around his feet, they ensnared his knees, they fell across his breast like ropes. Some night, in the silence of the moors, when wind and river were still, he feared these strands of shadow might tighten – creep higher around his throat and tighten. But even then he knew that those other shadows would never move, those gray shapes that knelt crouching in every corner.

When he looked up at the clock again ten minutes had struggled past. Time was disturbed in the room; the strands of shadow seemed entangled among the hands of the clock, dragging them back from their rotation. He wondered if the shadows would strangle Time, some still night when the wind and the flat river were silent.

There grew a sudden chill across the floor; the cracks of the boards let it in. He leaned down and drew his sabots towards him from their place near the andirons, and slipped them over his chaussons; and as he straightened up, his eyes mechanically sought the mantel above, where in the dusk another pair of sabots stood, little slender, delicate sabots, carved from red beech. A year’s dust grayed their surface; a year’s rust dulled the silver band across the instep. He said this to himself aloud, knowing that it was within a few minutes of the year.

His own sabots came from Mort-Dieu; they were shaved square and banded with steel. But in days past he had thought that no sabot in Mort-Dieu was delicate enough to touch the instep of the Mort-Dieu passeur. So he sent to the shore light-house, and they sent to Lorient, where the women are coquettish and show their hair under the coiffe, and wear dainty sabots; and in this town, where vanity corrupts and there is much lace on coiffe and collarette, a pair of delicate sabots was found, banded with silver and chiselled in red beech. The sabots stood on the mantel above the fire now, dusty and tarnished.

There was a sound from the window, the soft murmur of snow blotting glass panes. The wind, too, muttered under the eaves. Presently it would begin to whisper to him from the chimney – he knew it – and he held his hands over his ears and stared at the clock.

In the hamlet of Mort-Dieu the panes sing all day of the sea secrets, but in the night the ghosts of little gray birds fill the branches, singing of the sunshine of past years. He heard the song as he sat, and he crushed his hands over his ears; but the gray birds joined with the wind in the chimney, and he heard all that he dared not hear, and he thought all that he dared not hope or think, and the swift tears scalded his eyes.

In Mort-Dieu the nights are longer than anywhere on earth; he knew it – why should he not know? This had been so for a year; it was different before. There were so many things different before; days and nights vanished like minutes then; the pines told no secrets of the sea, and the gray birds had not yet come to Mort-Dieu. Also, there was Jeanne, passeur at the Carmes.

When he first saw her she was poling the square, flat-bottomed ferry-skiff from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu, a red skirt fluttering just below her knees. The next time he saw her he had to call to her across the placid river, ‘Ohé! Ohé! passeur!’ She came, poling that flat skiff, her deep blue eyes fixed pensively on him, the scarlet skirt and kerchief idly flapping in the April wind. Then day followed day when the far call ‘Passeur!’ grew clearer and more joyous, and the faint answering cry, ‘I come!’ rippled across the water like music tinged with laughter. Then spring came, and with spring came love – love, carried free across the ferry from the Carmes to Mort-Dieu.

The flame above the charred log whistled, flickered, and went out in a jet of wood vapour, only to play like lightning above the gas and relight again. The clock ticked more loudly, and the song from the pines filled the room. But in his straining eyes a summer landscape was reflected, where white clouds sailed and white foam curled under the square bow of a little skiff. And he pressed his numbed hands tighter to his ears to drown the cry, ‘Passeur! Passeur!’

And now for a moment the clock ceased ticking. It was time to go – who but he should know it, he who went out into the night swinging his lantern? And he went. He had gone each night from the first – from that first strange winter evening when a strange voice answered him across the river, the voice of the new passeur. He had never heard her voice again.

So he passed down the windy wooden stairs, lantern hanging lighted in his hand, and stepped out into the storm. Through sheets of drifting snow, over heaps of frozen seaweed and icy drift he moved, shifting his lantern right and left, until its glimmer on the water warned him. Then he called out into the night, ‘Passeur!’ The frozen spray spattered his face and crusted the lantern; he heard the distant boom of breakers beyond the bar, and the noise of mighty winds among the seaward cliffs.

‘Passeur!’

Across the broad flat river, black as a sea of pitch, a tiny light sparkled a moment. Again he cried, ‘Passeur!’

‘I come!’

He turned ghastly white, for it was her voice – or was he crazy? – and he sprang waist deep into the icy current and cried out again, but his voice ended in a sob.

Slowly through the snow the flat skiff took shape, creeping nearer and nearer. But she was not at the pole – he saw that; there was a tall, thin man, shrouded to his eyes in oilskin; and he leaped into the boat and bade the ferryman hasten.

Halfway across he rose in the skiff, and called, ‘Jeanne!’ But the roar of the storm and the thrashing of the icy waves drowned his voice. Yet he heard her again, and she called to him by name.

When at last the boat grated upon the invisible shore, he lifted his lantern, stumbling among the rocks, and calling to her, as though his voice could silence the voice that had spoken a year ago that night. And it could not. He sank shivering upon his knees, and looked out into the darkness, where an ocean rolled across a world. Then his stiff lips moved, and he repeated her name, but the hand of the ferryman fell gently upon his head.

And when he raised his eyes he saw that the ferryman was Death.




IN THE COURT OF THE DRAGON (#ulink_8cadd8f8-0ea3-5235-ba56-409a50445547)


‘Oh Thou who burn’st in heart for those who burn

In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;

How long be crying, “Mercy on them, God!”

Why, who are thou to teach and He to learn?’

In the Church of St Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled in the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle, sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind him came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C—.

My chair was near the chancel rail. I now turned toward the west end of the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned too. There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation seated itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the organ voluntary ceased.

I had always found the organ-playing at St Barnabé highly interesting. Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the French quality of taste; taste reigned supreme, self-controlled, dignified and reticent.

Today, however, from the first choir I had felt a change for the worse, a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy hand had struck across the church, at the serene peace of those clear voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect’s books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St Barnabé, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening too, but not in works on architecture.

Then I remembered that St Barnabé was not much more than a hundred years old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval superstitions with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth century rococo.

But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon. Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.

I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation, who do not love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever refused to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I felt that in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument there was something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him, while the manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was there seemed small hope of escape!

My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare he play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the people near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The placid brows of the kneeling nuns, still turned toward the altar, lost none of their devout abstraction, under the pale shadow of their white head-dress. The fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at Monseigneur C—. For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been singing an Ave Maria.

But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the rest I had counted on, when I entered St Barnabé that afternoon.

I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble: the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body, and a mind benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to my favorite church for healing. For I had been reading ‘The King in Yellow’.

‘The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down in their dens.’ Monseigneur C – delivered his text in a calm voice, glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not why, toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from behind his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw him disappear by a small door that leads to some stone stairs which descend directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white as his coat was black. ‘Good riddance!’ I thought, ‘with your wicked music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.’

With a feeling of relief, with a deep calm feeling of relief, I turned back to the mild face in the pulpit, and settled myself to listen. Here at last was the ease of mind I longed for.

‘My children,’ said the preacher, ‘one truth the human soul finds hardest of all to learn; that it has nothing to fear. It can never be made to see that nothing can really harm it.’

‘Curious doctrine!’ I thought, ‘for a Catholic priest. Let us see how he will reconcile that with the Fathers.’

‘Nothing can really harm the soul,’ he went on, in his coolest, clearest tones, ‘because—’

But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery the same way. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart sank; and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked at him: I could not look away from his black figure and his white face. When he was exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across the church, straight into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly: I have never seen any other like it; would to God I might never see it again! Then he disappeared by the same door through which I had watched him depart less than sixty seconds before.

I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like that of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath before crying out.

To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me so? Me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other sensation was merged in this one pang; even fear was subordinate to grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.

As I have said, St Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery gets a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory, which have not even colored glass.

The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw him; I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his second passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door. As for the look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing, and I was a nervous fool.

I looked about. This was a likely place to harbor supernatural horrors! That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C—, his collected manner, and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a little discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced above his head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady, supporting one corner of the pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask table-cloth in a high wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose up there in the organ loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him, and puff him out of existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit, which, at the time, I thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself and everything else, from the old harpy outside the railing, who had made me pay ten centimes for my chair, before she would let me in (she was more like a basilisk, I told myself, than was my organist with the anaemic complexion): from that grim old dame, to, yes, alas! to Monseigneur C— himself. For all devoutness had fled. I had never yet done such a thing in my life, but now I felt a desire to mock.

As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it, for the jingle in my ears of

‘The skirts of St Paul has reached.

Having preached us those six Lent lectures,

More unctuous than ever he preached:’

keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.

It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and shake myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was committing but still I rose and left the church.

A spring sun was shining on the rue St Honoré, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction.

I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back – a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these years: it was there though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of gray stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.

I left the river side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées and turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along the green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench, children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud, and all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he was not looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the Avenue. I knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the accomplishment of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save myself.

The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole being expressed but one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.

In anguish I watched him, where he went down the broad crowded Avenue, that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses, and the helmets of the Garde Republicaine.

He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and far out beyond it – I know not where I went, but after a long while as it seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a table before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was hours now since I had seen him. Physical fatigue, and mental suffering had left me no more power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed to hide away in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long way off.

I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the rue de Rennes to the rue du Dragon.

It is an ‘Impasse’, traversable only for foot passengers. Over the entrance on the rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron dragon. Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close the ends that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during the day into the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after midnight, and one must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on the side. The sunken pavement collects unsavory pools. Steep stairways pitch down to doors that open on the court. The ground floors are occupied by shops of second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day long the place rings with the clink of hammers, and the clang of metal bars.

Unsavory as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard, honest work above.

Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live alone. When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.

I had to walk awhile before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when I had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along and I took it.

From the Arc to the rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour, especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at the mercy of Sunday fête makers.

There had been time before I passed under the Dragon’s wings, to meet my enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, now refuge was close at hand.

Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our concierge and his wife walked about among them with their black poodle, keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the side-walk. I returned their greetings and hurried in.

All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in which the gas burned dimly.

My apartment was at the top of a house, half way down the court, reached by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit of passage-way intervening. I set my foot on the threshold of the open door, the friendly, old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to rest and shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw him, ten paces off. He must have entered the court with me.

He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the time had come.

Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by the entrance on the rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should escape.

It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down the court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the archway, and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn here and spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that of an archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the rue du Dragon were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me, and at the same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed doors, their cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which he had threatened had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from the fathomless shadows; the point from which it would strike was his infernal eyes. Hopeless, I set my back against the barred doors and defied him.

There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as the congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse’s staff in the south aisle, preceding Monseigneur C— to the sacristy.

The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbor, rose also, with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my face in disapproval.

Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle, I sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward the door.

I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I looked up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only his side I saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like one of those devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused torture chambers of mediaeval castles.

But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. Had I escaped? That which gave him the power over me came back out of oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him – they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I had recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he was come to do; and now I knew that while my body sat safe in the cheerful little church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.

I crept to the door; the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens; and the wet winds from the Lake of Hali chilled my face.

And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon.

Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!’





THE MAKER OF MOONS (#ulink_b2220cce-ae21-5a57-ad88-3177600ef302)


‘I have heard what the Talkers were talking – the talk

Of the beginning and the end;

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.’




I


Concerning Yue-Laou and the Xin I know nothing more than you shall know. I am miserably anxious to clear the matter up. Perhaps what I write may save the United States Government money and lives, perhaps it may arouse the scientific world to action; at any rate it will put an end to the terrible suspense of two people. Certainty is better than suspense.

If the Government dares to disregard this warning and refuses to send a thoroughly equipped expedition at once, the people of the State may take swift vengeance on the whole region and leave a blackened devastated waste where today forest and flowering meadowland border the lake in the Cardinal Woods.

You already know part of the story; the New York papers have been full of alleged details. This much is true: Barris caught the ‘Shiner’ red-handed, or rather yellow-handed, for his pockets and boots and dirty fists were stuffed with lumps of gold. I say gold, advisedly. You may call it what you please. You also know how Barris was – but unless I begin at the beginning of my own experiences you will be none the wiser after all.

On the third of August of this present year I was standing in Tiffany’s, chatting with George Godfrey of the designing department. On the glass counter between us lay a coiled serpent, an exquisite specimen of chiseled gold.

‘No,’ replied Godfrey to my question, ‘it isn’t my work; I wish it was. Why, man, it’s a masterpiece!’

‘Whose?’ I asked.

‘Now I should be very glad to know also,’ said Godfrey. ‘We bought it from an old jay who says he lives in the country somewhere about the Cardinal Woods. That’s near Starlit Lake, I believe—’

‘Lake of the Stars?’ I suggested.

‘Some call it Starlit Lake – it’s all the same. Well, my rustic Reuben says that he represents the sculptor of this snake for all practical and business purposes. He got his price too. We hope he’ll bring us something more. We have sold this already to the Metropolitan Museum.’

I was leaning idly on the glass case, watching the keen eyes of the artist in precious metals as he stooped over the gold serpent.

‘A masterpiece!’ he muttered to himself, fondling the glittering coil, ‘look at the texture! whew!’ But I was not looking at the serpent. Something was moving – crawling out of Godfrey’s coat pocket – the pocket nearest me – something soft and yellow with crablike legs all covered with coarse yellow hair.

‘What in Heaven’s name,’ said I, ‘have you got in your pocket? It’s crawling out – it’s trying to creep up your coat, Godfrey!’

He turned quickly and dragged the creature out with his left hand.

I shrank back as he held the repulsive object dangling before me, and he laughed and placed it on the counter.

‘Did you ever see anything like that?’ he demanded.

‘No,’ said I truthfully, ‘and I hope I never shall again. What is it?’

‘I don’t know. Ask them at the Natural History Museum – they can’t tell you. The Smithsonian is all at sea too. It is, I believe, the connecting link between a sea urchin, a spider, and the devil. It looks venomous but I can’t find either fangs or mouth. Is it blind? These things may be eyes but they looks as if they were painted. A Japanese sculptor might have produced such an impossible beast, but it is hard to believe that God did. It looks unfinished too. I have a mad idea that this creature is only one of the parts of some larger and more grotesque organism – it looks so lonely, so hopelessly dependent, so cursedly unfinished. I’m going to use it as a model. If I don’t out-Japanese the Japs my name isn’t Godfrey.’

The creature was moving slowly across the glass case towards me. I drew back.

‘Godfrey,’ I said, ‘I would execute a man who executed any such work as you propose. What do you want to perpetuate such a reptile for? I can stand the Japanese grotesque but I can’t stand that – spider—’

‘It’s a crab.’

‘Crab or spider or blindworm – ugh! What do you want to do it for? It’s a nightmare – it’s unclean!’

I hated the thing. It was the first living creature that I had ever hated.

For some time I had noticed a damp acrid odor in the air, and Godfrey said it came from the reptile.

‘Then kill it and bury it,’ I said, ‘and by the way, where did it come from?’

‘I don’t know that either,’ laughed Godfrey. ‘I found it clinging to the box that this gold serpent was brought in. I suppose my old Reuben is responsible.’

‘If the Cardinal Woods are the lurking places for things like this,’ said I, ‘I am sorry that I am going to the Cardinal Woods.’

‘Are you?’ asked Godfrey; ‘for the shooting?’

‘Yes, with Barris and Pierpont. Why don’t you kill that creature?’

‘Go off on your shooting trip, and let me alone,’ laughed Godfrey.

I shuddered at the ‘crab’, and bade Godfrey good-bye until December.

That night, Pierpont, Barris, and I sat chatting in the smoking car of the Quebec Express when the long train pulled out of the Grand Central Depot. Old David had gone forward with the dogs; poor things, they hated to ride in the baggage car, but the Quebec and Northern road provides no sportsman’s cars, and David and the three Gordon setters were in for an uncomfortable night.

Except for Pierpont, Barris, and myself, the car was empty. Barris, trim, stout, ruddy, and bronzed, sat drumming on the window ledge, puffing a short fragrant pipe. His gun case lay beside him on the floor.

‘When I have white hair and years of discretion,’ said Pierpont languidly, ‘I’ll not flirt with pretty serving maids; will you, Roy?’

‘No,’ said I, looking at Barris.

‘You mean the maid with the cap in the Pullman car?’ asked Barris.

‘Yes,’ said Pierpont.

I smiled, for I had seen it also.

Barris twisted his crisp gray moustache, and yawned.

‘You children had better be toddling off to bed,’ he said. ‘That lady’s-maid is a member of the Secret Service.’

‘Oh,’ said Pierpont, ‘one of your colleagues?’

‘You might present us, you know,’ I said; ‘the journey is monotonous.’

Barris had drawn a telegram from his pocket, and as he sat turning it over and over between his fingers he smiled. After a moment or two he handed it to Pierpont who read it with slightly raised eyebrows.

‘It’s rot – I suppose it’s cipher,’ he said. ‘I see it’s signed by General Drummond—’

‘Drummond, Chief of the Government Secret Service,’ said Barris.

‘Something interesting?’ I enquired, lighting a cigarette.

‘Something so interesting,’ replied Barris, ‘that I’m going to look into it myself—’

‘And break up our shooting trio—’

‘No. Do you want to hear about it? Do you, Billy Pierpont?’

‘Yes,’ replied that immaculate young man.

Barris rubbed the amber mouthpiece of his pipe on his handkerchief, cleared the stem with a bit of wire, puffed once or twice, and leaned back in his chair.

‘Pierpont,’ he said, ‘do you remember that evening at the United States Club when General Miles, General Drummond, and I were examining that gold nugget that Captain Mahan had? You examined it also, I believe.’

‘I did,’ said Pierpont.

‘Was it gold?’ asked Barris, drumming on the window.

‘It was,’ replied Pierpont.

‘I saw it too,’ said I; ‘of course, it was gold.’

‘Professor La Grange saw it also,’ said Barris; ‘he said it was gold.’

‘Well?’ said Pierpont.

‘Well,’ said Barris, ‘it was not gold.’

After a silence Pierpont asked what tests had been made.

‘The usual tests,’ replied Barris. ‘The United States Mint is satisfied that it is gold, so is every jeweller who has seen it. But it is not gold – and yet – it is gold.’

Pierpont and I exchanged glances.

‘Now,’ said I, ‘for Barris’ usual coup-de-théâtre: what was the nugget?’

‘Practically it was pure gold; but,’ said Barris, enjoying the situation intensely, ‘really it was not gold. Pierpont, what is gold?’

‘Gold’s an element, a metal—’

‘Wrong! Billy Pierpont,’ said Barris coolly.

‘Gold was an element when I went to school,’ said I.

‘It has not been an element for two weeks,’ said Barris; ‘and, except General Drummond, Professor La Grange, and myself, you two youngsters are the only people, except one, in the world who know it – or have known it.’

‘Do you mean to say that gold is a composite metal?’ said Pierpont slowly.

‘I do. La Grange has made it. He produced a scale of pure gold day before yesterday. That nugget was manufactured gold.’

Could Barris be joking? Was this a colossal hoax? I looked at Pierpont. He muttered something about that settling the silver question, and turned his head to Barris, but there was that in Barris’ face which forbade jesting, and Pierpont and I sat silently pondering.

‘Don’t ask me how it’s made,’ said Barris, quietly; ‘I don’t know. But I do know that somewhere in the region of the Cardinal Woods there is a gang of people who do know how gold is made, and who make it. You understand the danger this is to every civilized nation. It’s got to be stopped of course. Drummond and I have decided that I am the man to stop it. Wherever and whoever these people are – these gold makers – they must be caught, every one of them – caught or shot.’

‘Or shot,’ repeated Pierpont, who was owner of the Cross-Cut Gold Mine and found his income too small; ‘Professor La Grange will of course be prudent – science need not know things that would upset the world!’

‘Little Willy,’ said Barris laughing, ‘your income is safe.’

‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘some flaw in the nugget gave Professor La Grange the tip.’

‘Exactly. He cut the flaw out before sending the nugget to be tested. He worked on the flaw and separated gold into its three elements.’

‘He is a great man,’ said Pierpont, ‘but he will be the greatest man in the world if he can keep his discovery to himself.’

‘Who?’ said Barris.

‘Professor La Grange.’

‘Professor La Grange was shot through the heart two hours ago,’ replied Barris slowly.




II


We had been at the shooting box in the Cardinal Woods five days when a telegram was brought to Barris by a mounted messenger from the nearest telegraph station, Cardinal Springs, a hamlet on the lumber railroad which joins the Quebec and Northern at Three Rivers Junction, thirty miles below.

Pierpont and I were sitting out under the trees, loading some special shells as experiments; Barris stood beside us, bronzed, erect, holding his pipe carefully so that no sparks should drift into our powder box. The beat of hoofs over the grass aroused us, and when the lank messenger drew bridle before the door, Barris stepped forward and took the sealed telegram. When he had torn it open he went into the house and presently reappeared, reading something that he had written.

‘This should go at once,’ he said, looking the messenger full in the face.

‘At once, Colonel Barris,’ replied the shabby countryman.

Pierpont glanced up and I smiled at the messenger who was gathering his bridle and settling himself in his stirrups. Barris handed him the written reply and nodded good-bye: there was a thud of hoofs on the greensward, a jingle of bit and spur across the gravel, and the messenger was gone. Barris’ pipe went out and he stepped to windward to relight it.

‘It is queer,’ said I, ‘that your messenger – a battered native – should speak like a Harvard man.’

‘He is a Harvard man,’ said Barris.

‘And the plot thickens,’ said Pierpont; ‘are the Cardinal Woods full of your Secret Service men, Barris?’

‘No,’ replied Barris, ‘but the telegraph stations are. How many ounces of shot are you using, Roy?’

I told him, holding up the adjustable steel measuring cup. He nodded. After a moment or two he sat down on a camp stool beside us and picked up a crimper.

‘That telegram was from Drummond,’ he said; ‘the messenger was one of my men as you two bright little boys divined. Pooh! If he had spoken the Cardinal County dialect you wouldn’t have known.’

‘His make-up was good,’ said Pierpont.

Barris twirled the crimper and looked at the pile of loaded shells. Then he picked up one and crimped it.

‘Let ’em alone,’ said Pierpont, ‘you crimp too tight.’

‘Does his little gun kick when the shells are crimped too tight?’ enquired Barris tenderly; ‘well, he shall crimp his own shells then – where’s his little man?’

‘His little man,’ was a weird English importation, stiff, very carefully scrubbed, tangled in his aspirates, named Howlett. As valet, gilly, gunbearer, and crimper, he aided Pierpont to endure the ennui of existence, by doing for him everything except breathing. Lately, however, Barris’ taunts had driven Pierpont to do a few things for himself. To his astonishment he found that cleaning his own gun was not a bore, so he timidly loaded a shell or two, was much pleased with himself, loaded some more, crimped them, and went to breakfast with an appetite. So when Barris asked where ‘his little man’ was, Pierpont did not reply but dug a cupful of shot from the bag and poured it solemnly into the half filled shell.

Old David came out with the dogs and of course there was a powwow when Voyou, my Gordon, wagged his splendid tail across the loading table and sent a dozen unstopped cartridges rolling over the grass, vomiting powder and shot.

‘Give the dogs a mile or two,’ said I; ‘we will shoot over the Sweet Fern Covert about four o’clock, David.’

‘Two guns, David,’ added Barris.

‘Are you not going?’ asked Pierpont, looking up, as David disappeared with the dogs.

‘Bigger game,’ said Barris shortly. He picked up a mug of ale from the tray which Howlett had just set down beside us and took a long pull. We did the same, silently. Pierpont set his mug on the turf beside him and returned to his loading.

We spoke of the murder of Professor La Grange, of how it had been concealed by the authorities in New York at Drummond’s request, of the certainty that it was one of the gang of gold-makers who had done it, and of the possible alertness of the gang.

‘Oh, they know that Drummond will be after them sooner or later,’ said Barris, ‘but they don’t know that the mills of the gods have already begun to grind. Those smart New York papers built better than they knew when their ferret-eyed reporter poked his red nose into the house on 58th Street and sneaked off with a column on his cuffs about the “suicide” of Professor La Grange. Bill Pierpont, my revolver is hanging in your room; I’ll take yours too—’

‘Help yourself,’ said Pierpont.

‘I shall be gone over night,’ continued Barris; ‘my poncho and some bread and meat are all I shall take except the “barkers”.’

‘Will they bark tonight?’ I asked.

‘No, I trust not for several weeks yet. I shall nose about a bit. Roy, did it ever strike you how queer it is that this wonderfully beautiful country should contain no inhabitants?’

‘It’s like those splendid stretches of pools and rapids which one finds on every trout river and in which one never finds a fish,’ suggested Pierpont.

‘Exactly – and Heaven alone knows why,’ said Barris; ‘I suppose this country is shunned by human beings for the same mysterious reasons.’

‘The shooting is the better for it,’ I observed.

‘The shooting is good,’ said Barris, ‘have you noticed the snipe on the meadow by the lake? Why it’s brown with them! That’s a wonderful meadow.’

‘It’s a natural one,’ said Pierpont, ‘no human being ever cleared that land.’

‘Then it’s supernatural,’ said Barris; ‘Pierpont, do you want to come with me?’

Pierpont’s handsome face flushed as he answered slowly, ‘It’s awfully good of you – if I may.’

‘Bosh,’ said I, piqued because he had asked Pierpont, ‘what use is little Willy without his man?’

‘True,’ said Barris gravely, ‘you can’t take Howlett you know.’

Pierpont muttered something which ended in ‘d—n’.

‘Then,’ said I, ‘there will be but one gun on the Sweet Fern Covert this afternoon. Very well, I wish you joy of your cold supper and cold bed. Take your nightgown, Willy, and don’t sleep on the damp ground.’

‘Let Pierpont alone,’ retorted Barris, ‘you shall go next time, Roy.’

‘Oh, all right – you mean when there’s shooting going on?’

‘And I?’ demanded Pierpont grieved.

‘You too, my son; stop quarrelling! Will you ask Howlett to pack our kits – lightly mind you – no bottles – they clink.’

‘My flask doesn’t,’ said Pierpont, and went off to get ready for a night’s stalking of dangerous men.

‘It is strange,’ said I, ‘that nobody ever settles in this region. How many people live in Cardinal Springs, Barris?’

‘Twenty counting the telegraph operator and not counting the lumbermen; they are always changing and shifting. I have six men among them.’

‘Where have you no men? In the Four Hundred?’

‘I have men there also – chums of Billy’s only he doesn’t know it. David tells me that there was a strong flight of woodcock last night. You ought to pick up some this afternoon.’

Then we chatted about alder-cover and swamp until Pierpont came out of the house and it was time to part.

‘Au revoir,’ said Barris, buckling on his kit, ‘come along, Pierpont, and don’t walk in the damp grass.’

‘If you are not back by tomorrow noon,’ said I, ‘I will take Howlett and David and hunt you up. You say your course is due north?’

‘Due north,’ replied Barris, consulting his compass.

‘There is a trail for two miles and a spotted lead for two more,’ said Pierpont.

‘Which we won’t use for various reasons,’ added Barris pleasantly; ‘don’t worry, Roy, and keep your confounded expedition out of the way; there’s no danger.’

He knew, of course, what he was talking about and I held my peace.

When the tip end of Pierpont’s shooting coat had disappeared in the Long Covert, I found myself standing alone with Howlett. He bore my gaze for a moment and then politely lowered his eyes.

‘Howlett,’ said I, ‘take these shells and implements to the gun room, and drop nothing. Did Voyou come to any harm in the briers this morning?’

‘No ’arm, Mr Cardenhe, sir,’ said Howlett.

‘Then be careful not to drop anything else,’ said I, and walked away leaving him decorously puzzled. For he had dropped no cartridges. Poor Howlett!




III


About four o’clock that afternoon I met David and the dogs at the spinney which leads into Sweet Fern Covert. The three setters, Voyou, Gamin, and Mioche were in fine feather – David had killed a woodcock and a brace of grouse over them that morning – and they were thrashing about the spinney at short range when I came up, gun under arm and pipe lighted.

‘What’s the prospect, David,’ I asked, trying to keep my feet in the tangle of wagging, whining dogs; ‘hello, what’s amiss with Mioche?’

‘A brier in his foot sir; I drew it and stopped the wound but I guess the gravel’s got in. If you have no objection, sir, I might take him back with me.’

‘It’s safer,’ I said; ‘take Gamin too, I only want one dog this afternoon. What is the situation?’

‘Fair sir; the grouse lie within a quarter of a mile of the oak second growth. The woodcock are mostly on the alders. I saw any number of snipe in the meadows. There’s something else in by the lake – I can’t just tell what, but the woodduck set up a clatter when I was in the thicket and they come dashing through the wood as if a dozen foxes was snappin’ at their tail feathers.’

‘Probably a fox,’ I said; ‘leash those dogs – they must learn to stand it. I’ll be back by dinner time.’

‘There is one more thing sir,’ said David, lingering with his gun under his arm.

‘Well,’ said I.

‘I saw a man in the woods by the Oak Covert – at least I think I did.’

‘A lumberman?’

‘I think not sir – at least – do they have Chinamen among them?’

‘Chinese? No. You didn’t see a Chinaman in the woods here?’

‘I – I think I did sir – I can’t say positively. He was gone when I ran into the covert.’

‘Did the dogs notice it?’

‘I can’t say – exactly. They acted queer like. Gamin here lay down and whined – it may have been colic – and Mioche whimpered – perhaps it was the brier.’

‘And Voyou?’

‘Voyou, he was most remarkable sir, and the hair on his back stood up. I did see a groundhog makin’ for a tree near by.’

‘Then no wonder Voyou bristled. David, your Chinaman was a stump or tussock. Take the dogs now.’

‘I guess it was sir; good afternoon sir,’ said David, and walked away with the Gordons leaving me alone with Voyou in the spinney.

I looked at the dog and he looked at me.

‘Voyou!’

The dog sat down and danced with his fore feet, his beautiful brown eyes sparkling.

‘You’re a fraud,’ I said; ‘which shall it be, the alders or the upland? Upland? Good! – now for the grouse – heel, my friend, and show your miraculous self-restraint.’

Voyou wheeled into my tracks and followed closely, nobly refusing to notice the impudent chipmunks and the thousand and one alluring and important smells which an ordinary dog would have lost no time in investigating.

The brown and yellow autumn woods were crisp with drifting heaps of leaves and twigs that crackled under foot as we turned from the spinney into the forest. Every silent little stream, hurrying toward the lake, was gay with painted leaves afloat, scarlet maple or yellow oak. Spots of sunlight fell upon the pools, searching the brown depths, illuminating the gravel bottom where shoals of minnows swam to and fro, and to and fro again, busy with the purpose of their little lives. The crickets were chirping in the long brittle grass on the edge of the woods, but we left them far behind in the silence of the deeper forest.

‘Now!’ said I to Voyou.

The dog sprang to the front, circled once, zigzagged through the ferns around us and, all in a moment, stiffened stock still, rigid as sculptured bronze. I stepped forward, raising my gun, two paces, three paces, ten perhaps, before a great cock grouse blundered up from the brake and burst through the thicket fringe toward the deeper growth. There was a flash and puff from my gun, a crash of echoes among the low wooded cliffs, and through the faint veil of smoke something dark dropped from mid-air amid a cloud of feathers, brown as the brown leaves under foot.

‘Fetch!’

Up from the ground sprang Voyou, and in a moment he came galloping back, neck arched, tail stiff but waving, holding tenderly in his pink mouth a mass of mottled bronzed feathers. Very gravely he laid the bird at my feet and crouched beside it, his silky ears across his paws, his muzzle on the ground.

I dropped the grouse into my pocket, held for a moment a silent caressing communion with Voyou, then swung my gun under my arm and motioned the dog on.

It must have been five o’clock when I walked into a little opening in the woods and sat down to breathe. Voyou came and sat down in front of me.

‘Well?’ I enquired.

Voyou gravely presented one paw which I took.

‘We will never get back in time for dinner,’ said I, ‘so we might as well take it easy. It’s all your fault, you know. Is there a brier in your foot? – let’s see – there! it’s out my friend and you are free to nose about and lick it. If you loll your tongue out you’ll get it all over twigs and moss. Can’t you lie down and try to pant less? No, there is no use in sniffing and looking at that fern patch, for we are going to smoke a little, doze a little, and go home by moonlight. Think what a big dinner we will have! Think of Howlett’s despair when we are not in time! Think of all the stories you will have to tell to Gamin and Mioche! Think what a good dog you have been! There – you are tired old chap; take forty winks with me.’

Voyou was tired. He stretched out on the leaves at my feet but whether or not he really slept I could not be certain, until his hind legs twitched and I knew he was dreaming of mighty deeds.

Now I may have taken forty winks, but the sun seemed to be no lower when I sat up and unclosed my lids. Voyou raised his head, saw in my eyes that I was not going yet, thumped his tail half a dozen times on the dried leaves, and settled back with a sigh.

I looked lazily around, and for the first time noticed what a wonderfully beautiful spot I had chosen for a nap. It was an oval glade in the heart of the forest, level and carpeted with green grass. The trees that surrounded it were gigantic; they formed one towering circular wall of verdure, blotting out all except the turquoise blue of the sky-oval above. And now I noticed that in the center of the greensward lay a pool of water, crystal clear, glimmering like a mirror in the meadow grass, beside a block of granite. It scarcely seemed possible that the symmetry of tree and lawn and lucent pool could have been one of nature’s accidents. I had never before seen this glade nor had I ever heard it spoken of by either Pierpont or Barris. It was a marvel, this diamond-clear basin, regular and graceful as a Roman fountain, set in the gem of turf. And these great trees – they also belonged, not in America but in some legend-haunted forest of France, where moss-grown marbles stand neglected in dim glades, and the twilight of the forest shelters fairies and slender shapes from shadow-land.

I lay and watched the sunlight showering the tangled thicket where masses of crimson cardinal flowers glowed, or where one long dusty sunbeam tipped the edge of the floating leaves in the pool, turning them to palest gilt. There were birds too, passing through the dim avenues of trees like jets of flame – the gorgeous cardinal bird in his deep stained crimson robe – the bird that gave to the woods, to the village fifteen miles away, to the whole country, the name of Cardinal.

I rolled over on my back and looked up at the sky. How pale – paler than a robin’s egg – it was. I seemed to be lying at the bottom of a well, walled with verdure, high towering on every side. And, as I lay, all about me the air became sweet scented. Sweeter and sweeter and more penetrating grew the perfume, and I wondered what stray breeze, blowing over acres of lilies could have brought it. But there was no breeze; the air was still. A gilded fly alighted on my hand – a honey fly. It was as troubled as I by the scented silence.

Then, behind me, my dog growled.

I sat quite still at first, hardly breathing, but my eyes were fixed on a shape that moved along the edge of the pool among the meadow grasses. The dog had ceased growling and was now staring, alert and trembling.

At last I rose and walked rapidly down to the pool, my dog following close to heel.

The figure, a woman’s, turned slowly toward us.




IV


She was standing still when I approached the pool. The forest around us was so silent that when I spoke the sound of my own voice startled me.

‘No,’ she said – and her voice was smooth as flowing water, ‘I have not lost my way. Will he come to me, your beautiful dog?’

Before I could speak, Voyou crept to her and laid his silky head against her knees.

‘But surely,’ said I, ‘you did not come here alone.’

‘Alone? I did come alone.’

‘But the nearest settlement is in Cardinal, probably nineteen miles from where we are standing.’

‘I do not know Cardinal,’ she said.

‘Ste. Croix in Canada is forty miles at least – how did you come into the Cardinal Woods?’ I asked amazed.

‘Into the woods?’ she repeated a little impatiently.

‘Yes.’

She did not answer at first but stood caressing Voyou with gentle phrase and gesture.

‘Your beautiful dog I am fond of, but I am not fond of being questioned,’ she said quietly. ‘My name is Ysonde and I came to the fountain here to see your dog.’

I was properly quenched. After a moment or two I did say that in another hour it would be growing dusky, but she neither replied nor looked at me.

‘This,’ I ventured, ‘is a beautiful pool – you call it a fountain – a delicious fountain: I have never before seen it. It is hard to imagine that nature did all this.’

‘Is it?’ she said.

‘Don’t you think so?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t thought; I wish when you go you would leave me your dog.’

‘My – my dog?’

‘If you don’t mind,’ she said sweetly, and looked at me for the first time in the face.

For an instant our glances met, then she grew grave, and I saw that her eyes were fixed on my forehead. Suddenly she rose and drew nearer, looking intently at my forehead. There was a faint mark there, a tiny crescent, just over my eyebrow. It was a birthmark.

‘Is that a scar?’ she demanded drawing nearer.

‘That crescent-shaped mark? No.’

‘No? Are you sure?’ she insisted.

‘Perfectly,’ I replied, astonished.

‘A—a birthmark?’

‘Yes – may I ask why?’

As she drew away from me, I saw that the color had fled from her cheeks. For a second she clasped both hands over her eyes as if to shut out my face, then slowly dropping her hands, she sat down on a long square block of stone which half encircled the basin, and on which to my amazement I saw carving. Voyou went to her again and laid his head in her lap.

‘What is your name?’ she asked at length.

‘Roy Cardenhe.’

‘Mine is Ysonde. I carved these dragonflies on the stone, these fishes and shells and butterflies you see.’

‘You! They are wonderfully delicate – but those are not American dragonflies—’

‘No – they are more beautiful. See, I have my hammer and chisel with me.’

She drew from a queer pouch at her side a small hammer and chisel and held them toward me.

‘You are very talented,’ I said, ‘where did you study?’

‘I? I never studied – I knew how. I saw things and cut them out of stone. Do you like them? Some time I will show you other things that I have done. If I had a great lump of bronze I could make your dog, beautiful as he is.’

Her hammer fell into the fountain and I leaned over and plunged my arm into the water to find it.

‘It is there, shining on the sand,’ she said, leaning over the pool with me.

‘Where,’ said I, looking at our reflected faces in the water. For it was only in the water that I had dared, as yet, to look her long in the face.

The pool mirrored the exquisite oval of her head, the heavy hair, the eyes. I heard the silken rustle of her girdle, I caught the flash of a white arm, and the hammer was drawn up dripping with spray.

The troubled surface of the pool grew calm and again I saw her eyes reflected.

‘Listen,’ she said in a low voice, ‘do you think you will come again to my fountain?’

‘I will come,’ I said. My voice was dull; the noise of water filled my ears.

Then a swift shadow sped across the pool; I rubbed my eyes. Where her reflected face had bent beside mine there was nothing mirrored but the rosy evening sky with one pale star glimmering. I drew myself up and turned. She was gone. I saw the faint star twinkling above me in the afterglow, I saw the tall trees motionless in the still evening air, I saw my dog slumbering at my feet.

The sweet scent in the air had faded, leaving in my nostrils the heavy odor of fern and forest mould. A blind fear seized me, and I caught up my gun and sprang into the darkening woods. The dog followed me, crashing through the undergrowth at my side. Duller and duller grew the light, but I strode on, the sweat pouring from my face and hair, my mind a chaos. How I reached the spinney I can hardly tell. As I turned up the path I caught a glimpse of a human face peering at me from the darkening thicket – a horrible human face, yellow and drawn with high-boned cheeks and narrow eyes.

Involuntarily I halted; the dog at my heels snarled. Then I sprang straight at it, floundering blindly through the thicket, but the night had fallen swiftly and I found myself panting and struggling in a maze of twisted shrubbery and twining vines, unable to see the very undergrowth that ensnared me.

It was a pale face, and a scratched one that I carried to a late dinner that night. Howlett served me, dumb reproach in his eyes, for the soup had been standing and the grouse was juiceless.

David brought the dogs in after they had had their supper, and I drew my chair before the blaze and set my ale on a table beside me. The dogs curled up at my feet, blinking gravely at the sparks that snapped and flew in eddying showers from the heavy birch logs.

‘David,’ said I, ‘did you say you saw a Chinaman today?’

‘I did sir.’

‘What do you think about it now?’

‘I may have been mistaken sir—’

‘But you think not. What sort of whiskey did you put in my flask today?’

‘The usual sir.’

‘Is there much gone?’

‘About three swallows sir, as usual.’

‘You don’t suppose there could have been any mistake about that whiskey – no medicine could have gotten into it for instance.’

David smiled and said, ‘No sir.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘I have had an extraordinary dream.’

When I said ‘dream’, I felt comforted and reassured. I had scarcely dared to say it before, even to myself.

‘An extraordinary dream,’ I repeated; ‘I fell asleep in the woods about five o’clock, in that pretty glade where the fountain – I mean the pool is. You know the place?’

‘I do not sir.’

I described it minutely, twice, but David shook his head.

‘Carved stone did you say sir? I never chanced on it. You don’t mean the New Spring—’

‘No, no! This glade is way beyond that. Is it possible that any people inhabit the forest between here and the Canada line?’

‘Nobody short of Ste. Croix; at least I have no knowledge of any.’

‘Of course,’ said I, ‘when I thought I saw a Chinaman, it was imagination. Of course I had been more impressed than I was aware of by your adventure. Of course you saw no Chinaman, David.’

‘Probably not sir,’ replied David dubiously.

I sent him off to bed, saying I should keep the dogs with me all night; and when he was gone, I took a good long draught of ale, ‘just to shame the devil’, as Pierpont said, and lighted a cigar. Then I thought of Barris and Pierpont, and their cold bed, for I knew they would not dare build a fire, and, in spite of the hot chimney corner and the crackling blaze, I shivered in sympathy.

‘I’ll tell Barris and Pierpont the whole story and take them to see the carved stone and the fountain,’ I thought to myself; what a marvelous dream it was – Ysonde – if it was a dream.

Then I went to the mirror and examined the faint white mark above my eyebrow.




V


About eight o’clock next morning, as I sat listlessly eyeing my coffee cup which Howlett was filling, Gamin and Mioche set up a howl, and in a moment more I heard Barris’ step on the porch.

‘Hello, Roy,’ said Pierpont, stamping into the dining room, ‘I want my breakfast by jingo! Where’s Howlett – none of your café au lait for me – I want a chop and some eggs. Look at that dog, he’ll wag the hinge off his tail in a moment—’

‘Pierpont,’ said I, ‘this loquacity is astonishing but welcome. Where’s Barris? You are soaked from neck to ankle.’

Pierpont sat down and tore off his stiff muddy leggings.

‘Barris is telephoning to Cardinal Springs – I believe he wants some of his men – down! Gamin, you idiot! Howlett, three eggs poached and more toast – what was I saying? Oh, about Barris; he’s struck something or other which he hopes will locate these gold-making fellows. I had a jolly time – he’ll tell you about it.’

‘Billy! Billy!’ I said in pleased amazement, ‘you are learning to talk! Dear me! You load your shells and you carry your own gun and you fire it yourself – hello! here’s Barris all over mud. You fellows really ought to change your rig – whew! what a frightful odor!’

‘It’s probably this,’ said Barris tossing something onto the hearth where it shuddered for a moment and then began to writhe; ‘I found it in the woods by the lake. Do you know what it can be, Roy?’

To my disgust I saw it was another of those spidery wormy crablike creatures that Godfrey had in Tiffany’s.

‘I thought I recognized that acrid odor,’ I said; ‘for the love of the Saints take it away from the breakfast table, Barris!’

‘But what is it?’ he persisted, unslinging his field-glasses and revolver.

‘I’ll tell you what I know after breakfast,’ I replied firmly, ‘Howlett, get a broom and sweep that thing into the road – what are you laughing at, Pierpont?’

Howlett swept the repulsive creature out and Barris and Pierpont went to change their dew-soaked clothes for dryer raiment. David came to take the dogs for an airing and in a few minutes Barris reappeared and sat down in his place at the head of the table.

‘Well,’ said I, ‘is there a story to tell?’

‘Yes, not much. They are near the lake on the other side of the woods – I mean these gold-makers. I shall collar one of them this evening. I haven’t located the main gang with any certainty – shove the toast rack this way will you, Roy – no, I am not at all certain, but I’ve nailed one anyway. Pierpont was a great help, really – and, what do you think, Roy? He wants to join the Secret Service!’

‘Little Willy!’

‘Exactly. Oh, I’ll dissuade him. What sort of reptile was it that I brought in? Did Howlett sweep it away?’

‘He can sweep it back again for all I care,’ I said indifferently, ‘I’ve finished my breakfast.’

‘No,’ said Barris, hastily swallowing his coffee, ‘it’s of no importance; you can tell me about the beast—’

‘Serve you right if I had it brought in on toast,’ I returned.

Pierpont came in radiant, fresh from the bath.

‘Go on with your story, Roy,’ he said; and I told them about Godfrey and his reptile pet.

‘Now what in the name of common sense can Godfrey find interesting in that creature?’ I ended, tossing my cigarette into the fireplace.

‘It’s Japanese, don’t you think?’ said Pierpont.

‘No,’ said Barris, ‘it is not artistically grotesque, it’s vulgar and horrible – it looks cheap and unfinished—’

‘Unfinished – exactly,’ said I, ‘like an American humorist—’

‘Yes,’ said Pierpont, ‘cheap. What about that gold serpent?’

‘Oh, the Metropolitan Museum bought it; you must see it, it’s marvelous.’

Barris and Pierpont had lighted their cigarettes and, after a moment, we all rose and strolled out to the lawn, where chairs and hammocks were placed under the maple trees.

David passed, gun under arm, dogs heeling.

‘Three guns on the meadows at four this afternoon,’ said Pierpont.

‘Roy,’ said Barris as David bowed and started on, ‘what did you do yesterday?’

This was the question that I had been expecting. All night long I had dreamed of Ysonde and the glade in the woods, where, at the bottom of the crystal fountain, I saw the reflection of her eyes. All the morning while bathing and dressing I had been persuading myself that the dream was not worth recounting and that a search for the glade and the imaginary stone carving would be ridiculous. But now, as Barris asked the question, I suddenly decided to tell him the whole story.

‘See here, you fellows,’ I said abruptly, ‘I am going to tell you something queer. You can laugh as much as you please to, but first I want to ask Barris a question or two. You have been in China, Barris?’

‘Yes,’ said Barris, looking straight into my eyes.

‘Would a Chinaman be likely to turn lumberman?’

‘Have you seen a Chinaman?’ he asked in a quiet voice.

‘I don’t know; David and I both imagined we did.’

Barris and Pierpont exchanged glances.

‘Have you seen one also?’ I demanded, turning to include Pierpont.

‘No,’ said Barris slowly; ‘but I know that there is, or has been, a Chinaman in these woods.’

‘The devil!’ said I.

‘Yes,’ said Barris gravely; ‘the devil, if you like – a devil – a member of the Kuen-Yuin.’

I drew my chair close to the hammock where Pierpont lay at full length, holding out to me a ball of pure gold.

‘Well?’ said I, examining the engraving on its surface, which represented a mass of twisted creatures – dragons, I supposed.

‘Well,’ repeated Barris, extending his hand to take the golden ball, ‘this globe of gold engraved with reptiles and Chinese hieroglyphics is the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin.’

‘Where did you get it?’ I asked, feeling that something startling was impending.

‘Pierpont found it by the lake at sunrise this morning. It is the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin,’ he repeated, ‘the terrible Kuen-Yuin, the sorcerers of China, and the most murderously diabolical sect on earth.’

We puffed our cigarettes in silence until Barris rose, and began to pace backward and forward among the trees, twisting his gray moustache.

‘The Kuen-Yuin are sorcerers,’ he said, pausing before the hammock where Pierpont lay watching him; ‘I mean exactly what I say – sorcerers. I’ve seen them – I’ve seen them at their devilish business, and I repeat to you solemnly, that as there are angels above, there is a race of devils on earth and they are sorcerers. Bah!’ he cried, ‘talk to me of Indian magic and Yogis and all that clap-trap! Why, Roy, I tell you that the Kuen-Yuin have absolute control of a hundred millions of people, mind and body, body and soul. Do you know what goes on in the interior of China? Does Europe know – could any human being conceive of the condition of that gigantic hellpit? You read the papers, you hear diplomatic twaddle about Li Hung Chang and the Emperor, you see accounts of battles on sea and land, and you know that Japan has raised a toy tempest along the jagged edge of the great unknown. But you never before heard of the Kuen-Yuin; no, nor has any European except a stray missionary or two, and yet I tell you that when the fires from this pit of hell have eaten through the continent to the coast, the explosion will inundate half a world – and God help the other half.’

Pierpont’s cigarette went out; he lighted another, and looked hard at Barris.

‘But,’ resumed Barris quietly, ‘“sufficient unto the day”, you know – I didn’t intend to say as much as I did – it would do no good – even you and Pierpont will forget it – it seems so impossible and so far away – like the burning out of the sun. What I want to discuss is the possibility or probability of a Chinaman – a member of the Kuen-Yuin, being here, at this moment, in the forest.’

‘If he is,’ said Pierpont, ‘possibly the gold-makers owe their discovery to him.’

‘I do not doubt it for a second,’ said Barris earnestly.

I took the little golden globe in my hand, and examined the characters engraved upon it.

‘Barris,’ said Pierpont, ‘I can’t believe in sorcery while I am wearing one of Sanford’s shooting suits in the pocket of which rests an uncut volume of the “Duchess”.’

‘Neither can I,’ I said, ‘for I read the Evening Post, and I know Mr Godkin would not allow it. Hello! What’s the matter with this gold ball?’

‘What is the matter?’ said Barris grimly.

‘Why – why – it’s changing color – purple, no, crimson – no, it’s green I mean – good Heavens! these dragons are twisting under my fingers—’

‘Impossible!’ muttered Pierpont, leaning over me; ‘those are not dragons—’

‘No!’ I cried excitedly; ‘they are pictures of that reptile that Barris brought back – see – see – how they crawl and turn—’

‘Drop it!’ commanded Barris; and I threw the ball on the turf. In an instant we had all knelt down on the grass beside it, but the globe was again golden, grotesquely wrought with dragons and strange signs.

Pierpont, a little red in the face, picked it up, and handed it to Barris. He placed it on a chair, and sat down beside me.

‘Whew!’ said I, wiping the perspiration from my face, ‘how did you play us that trick, Barris?’

‘Trick?’ said Barris contemptuously.

I looked at Pierpont, and my heart sank. If this was not a trick, what was it? Pierpont returned my glance and colored, but all he said was, ‘It’s devilish queer,’ and Barris answered, ‘Yes, devilish’. Then Barris asked me again to tell my story, and I did, beginning from the time I met David in the spinney to the moment when I sprang into the darkening thicket where that yellow mask had grinned like a phantom skull.

‘Shall we try to find the fountain?’ I asked after a pause.

‘Yes – and – er – the lady,’ suggested Pierpont vaguely.

‘Don’t be an ass,’ I said a little impatiently, ‘you need not come, you know.’

‘Oh, I’ll come,’ said Pierpont, ‘unless you think I am indiscreet—’

‘Shut up, Pierpont,’ said Barris, ‘this thing is serious; I never heard of such a glade or such a fountain, but it’s true that nobody knows this forest thoroughly. It’s worthwhile trying for; Roy, can you find your way back to it?’

‘Easily,’ I answered; ‘when shall we go?’

‘It will knock our snipe shooting on the head,’ said Pierpont, ‘but when one has the opportunity of finding a live dream-lady—’

I rose, deeply offended, but Pierpont was not very penitent and his laughter was irresistible.

‘The lady’s yours by right of discovery,’ he said, ‘I’ll promise not to infringe on your dreams – I’ll dream about other ladies—’

‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘I’ll have Howlett put you to bed in a minute. Barris, if you are ready – we can get back to dinner—’

Barris had risen and was gazing at me earnestly.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked nervously, for I saw that his eyes were fixed on my forehead, and I thought of Ysonde and the white crescent scar.

‘Is that a birthmark?’ said Barris.

‘Yes – why, Barris?’

‘Nothing – an interesting coincidence—’

‘What! – for Heaven’s sake!’

‘The scar – or rather the birthmark. It is the print of the dragon’s claw – the crescent symbol of Yue-Laou—’

‘And who the devil is Yue-Laou?’ I said crossly.

‘Yue-Laou – the Moon Maker, Dzil-Nbu of the Kuen-Yuin – it’s Chinese Mythology, but it is believed that Yue-Laou has returned to rule the Kuen-Yuin—’

‘The conversation,’ interrupted Pierpont, ‘smacks of peacocks’ feathers and yellow-jackets. The chicken pox has left its card on Roy, and Barris is guying us. Come on, you fellows, and make your call on the dream-lady. Barris, I hear galloping; here come your men.’

Two mud-splashed riders clattered up to the porch and dismounted at a motion from Barris. I noticed that both of them carried repeating rifles and heavy Colt revolvers.

They followed Barris, deferentially, into the dining room, and presently we heard the tinkle of plates and bottles and the low hum of Barris’ musical voice.

Half an hour later they came out again, saluted Pierpont and me, and galloped away in the direction of the Canadian frontier. Ten minutes passed, and, as Barris did not appear, we rose and went into the house, to find him. He was sitting silently before the table, watching the small golden globe, now glowing with scarlet and orange fire, brilliant as a live coal. Howlett, mouth ajar, and eyes starting from the sockets, stood petrified behind him.

‘Are you coming,’ asked Pierpont, a little startled. Barris did not answer. The globe slowly turned to pale gold again – but the face that Barris raised to ours was white as a sheet. Then he stood up, and smiled with an effort which was painful to us all.

‘Give me a pencil and a bit of paper,’ he said.

Howlett brought it. Barris went to the window and wrote rapidly. He folded the paper, placed it in the top drawer of his desk, locked the drawer, handed me the key, and motioned us to precede him.

When we again stood under the maples, he turned to me with an impenetrable expression. ‘You will know when to use the key,’ he said; ‘Come, Pierpont, we must try to find Roy’s fountain.’




VI


At two o’clock that afternoon, at Barris’ suggestion, we gave up the search for the fountain in the glade and cut across the forest to the spinney where David and Howlett were waiting with our guns and the three dogs.

Pierpont guyed me unmercifully about the ‘dream-lady’ as he called her, and, but for the significant coincidence of Ysonde’s and Barris’ questions concerning the white scar on my forehead, I should long ago have been perfectly persuaded that I had dreamed the whole thing. As it was, I had no explanation to offer. We had not been able to find the glade although fifty times I came to landmarks which convinced me that we were just about to enter it. Barris was quiet, scarcely uttering a word to either of us during the entire search. I had never before seen him depressed in spirits. However, when we came in sight of the spinney where a cold bit of grouse and a bottle of Burgundy awaited each, Barris seemed to recover his habitual good humor.

‘Here’s to the dream-lady!’ said Pierpont, raising his glass and standing up.

I did not like it. Even if she was only a dream, it irritated me to hear Pierpont’s mocking voice. Perhaps Barris understood – I don’t know, but he bade Pierpont drink his wine without further noise, and that young man obeyed with a childlike confidence which almost made Barris smile.

‘What about the snipe, David,’ I asked; ‘the meadows should be in good condition.’

‘There is not a snipe on the meadows, sir,’ said David solemnly.

‘Impossible,’ exclaimed Barris, ‘they can’t have left.’

‘They have, sir,’ said David in a sepulchral voice which I hardly recognized.

We all three looked at the old man curiously, waiting for his explanation of this disappointing but sensational report.

David looked at Howlett and Howlett examined the sky.

‘I was going,’ began the old man, with his eyes fastened on Howlett, ‘I was going along by the spinney with the dogs when I heard a noise in the covert and I seen Howlett come walkin’ very fast toward me. In fact,’ continued David, ‘I may say he was runnin’. Was you runnin’, Howlett?’

Howlett said ‘Yes’, with a decorous cough.

‘I beg pardon,’ said David, ‘but I’d rather Howlett told the rest. He saw things which I did not.’

‘Go on, Howlett,’ commanded Pierpont, much interested.

Howlett coughed again behind his large red hand.

‘What David says is true sir,’ he began; ‘I h’observed the dogs at a distance ’ow they was a workin’ sir, and David stood a lightin’ of ’s pipe be’ind the spotted beech when I see a ’ead pop up in the covert ’oldin’ a stick like ’e was h’aimin’ at the dogs sir—’

‘A head holding a stick?’ said Pierpont severely.

‘The ’ead ’ad ’ands, sir,’ explained Howlett, ‘’ands that ’eld a painted stick – like that, sir. ’Owlett, thinks I to myself, this ’ere’s queer, so I jumps in an’ runs, but the beggar ’e seen me an’ w’en I comes alongside of David ’e was gone. “’Ello ’Owlett,” sez David, “what the ’ell” – I beg pardon, sir – “’ow did you come ’ere,” sez ’e very loud. “Run!” sez I, “the Chinaman is harryin’ the dawgs!” “For Gawd’s sake wot Chinaman?” sez David, h’aimin’ ’is gun at every bush. Then I thinks I see ’im an’ we run an’ run, the dawgs a boundin’ close to heel sir, but we don’t see no Chinaman.’

‘I’ll tell the rest,’ said David, as Howlett coughed and stepped in a modest corner behind the dogs.

‘Go on,’ said Barris in a strange voice.

‘Well sir, when Howlett and I stopped chasin’, we was on the cliff overlooking the south meadow. I noticed that there was hundreds of birds there, mostly yellowlegs and plover, and Howlett seen them too. Then before I could say a word to Howlett, something out in the lake gave a splash – a splash as if the whole cliff had fallen into the water. I was that scared that I jumped straight into the bush and Howlett he sat down quick, and all those snipe wheeled up – there was hundreds – all asquealin’ with fright, and the woodduck came bowlin’ over the meadows as if the old Nick was behind.’

David paused and glanced meditatively at the dogs.

‘Go on,’ said Barris in the same strained voice.

‘Nothing more sir. The snipe did not come back.’

‘But that splash in the lake?’

‘I don’t know what it was sir.’

‘A salmon? A salmon couldn’t have frightened the duck and the snipe that way?’

‘No – oh no, sir. If fifty salmon had jumped they couldn’t have made that splash. Couldn’t they, Howlett?’

‘No ’ow,’ said Howlett.

‘Roy,’ said Barris at length, ‘what David tells us settles the snipe shooting for today. I am going to take Pierpont up to the house. Howlett and David will follow with the dogs – I have something to say to them. If you care to come, come along; if not, go and shoot a brace of grouse for dinner and be back by eight if you want to see what Pierpont and I discovered last night.’

David whistled Gamin and Mioche to heel and followed Howlett and his hamper toward the house. I called Voyou to my side, picked up my gun and turned to Barris.

‘I will be back by eight,’ I said; ‘you are expecting to catch one of the gold-makers are you not?’

‘Yes,’ said Barris listlessly.

Pierpont began to speak about the Chinaman but Barris motioned him to follow, and, nodding to me, took the path that Howlett and David had followed toward the house. When they disappeared I tucked my gun under my arm and turned sharply into the forest, Voyou trotting close to my heels.

In spite of myself the continued apparition of the Chinaman made me nervous. If he troubled me again I had fully decided to get the drop on him and find out what he was doing in the Cardinal Woods. If he could give no satisfactory account of himself I would march him in to Barris as a gold-making suspect – I would march him in anyway, I thought, and rid the forest of his ugly face. I wondered what it was that David had heard in the lake. It must have been a big fish, a salmon, I thought; probably David’s and Howlett’s nerves were overwrought after their Celestial chase.

A whine from the dog broke the thread of my meditation and I raised my head. Then I stopped short in my tracks.

The lost glade lay straight before me.

Already the dog had bounded into it, across the velvet turf to the carved stone where a slim figure sat. I saw my dog lay his silky head lovingly against her silken kirtle; I saw her face bend above him, and I caught my breath and slowly entered the sunlit glade.

Half timidly she held out one white hand.

‘Now that you have come,’ she said, ‘I can show you more of my work. I told you that I could do other things besides these dragonflies and moths carved here in stone. Why do you stare at me so? Are you ill?’

‘Ysonde,’ I stammered.

‘Yes,’ she said, with a faint color under her eyes.

‘I – I never expected to see you again,’ I blurted out, ‘—you – I – I – thought I had dreamed—’

‘Dreamed, of me? Perhaps you did, is that strange?’

‘Strange? N—no – but – where did you go when – when we were leaning over the fountain together? I saw your face – your face reflected beside mine and then – then suddenly I saw the blue sky and only a star twinkling.’

‘It was because you fell asleep,’ she said, ‘was it not?’

‘I – asleep?’

‘You slept – I thought you were very tired and I went back—’

‘Back? – where?’

‘Back to my home where I carve my beautiful images; see, here is one I brought to show you today.’

I took the sculptured creature that she held toward me, a massive golden lizard with frail claw-spread wings of gold so thin that the sunlight burned through and fell on the ground in flaming gilded patches.

‘Good Heavens!’ I exclaimed, ‘this is astounding! Where did you learn to do such work? Ysonde, such a thing is beyond price!’

‘Oh, I hope so,’ she said earnestly, ‘I can’t bear to sell my work, but my step-father takes it and sends it away. This is the second thing I have done and yesterday he said I must give it to him. I suppose he is poor.’

‘I don’t see how he can be poor if he gives you gold to model in,’ I said, astonished.

‘Gold!’ she exclaimed, ‘gold! He has a room full of gold! He makes it.’

I sat down on the turf at her feet completely unnerved.

‘Why do you look at me so?’ she asked, a little troubled.

‘Where does your step-father live?’ I said at last.

‘Here.’

‘Here!’

‘In the woods near the lake. You could never find our house.’

‘A house!’

‘Of course. Did you think I lived in a tree? How silly. I live with my step-father in a beautiful house – a small house, but very beautiful. He makes his gold there but the men who carry it away never come to the house, for they don’t know where it is and if they did they could not get in. My step-father carries the gold in lumps to a canvas satchel. When the satchel is full he takes it out into the woods where the men live and I don’t know what they do with it. I wish he could sell the gold and become rich for then I could go back to Yian where all the gardens are sweet and the river flows under the thousand bridges.’

‘Where is this city?’ I asked faintly.

‘Yian? I don’t know. It is sweet with perfume and the sound of silver bells all day long. Yesterday I carried a blossom of dried lotus buds from Yian, in my breast, and all the woods were fragrant. Did you smell it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wondered last night whether you did. How beautiful your dog is; I love him. Yesterday I thought most about your dog but last night—’

‘Last night,’ I repeated below my breath.

‘I thought of you. Why do you wear the dragon claw?’

I raised my hand impulsively to my forehead, covering the scar.

‘What do you know of the dragon claw?’ I muttered.

‘It is the symbol of Ye-Laou, and Ye-Laou rules the Kuen-Yuin, my step-father says. My step-father tells me everything that I know. We lived in Yian until I was sixteen years old. I am eighteen now; that is two years we have lived in the forest. Look! – see those scarlet birds! What are they? There are birds of the same color in Yian.’

‘Where is Yian, Ysonde?’ I asked with deadly calmness.

‘Yian? I don’t know.’

‘But you have lived there?’

‘Yes, a very long time.’

‘Is it across the ocean, Ysonde?’

‘It is across seven oceans and the great river which is longer than from the earth to the moon.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Who? My step-father; he tells me everything.’

‘Will you tell me his name, Ysonde?’

‘I don’t know it, he is my step-father, that is all.’

‘And what is your name?’

‘You know it, Ysonde.’

‘Yes, but what other name?’

‘That is all, Ysonde. Have you two names? Why do you look at me so impatiently?’

‘Does your step-father make gold? Have you seen him make it?’

‘Oh yes. He made it also in Yian and I loved to watch the sparks at night whirling like golden bees. Yian is lovely – if it is all like our garden and the gardens around. I can see the thousand bridges from my garden and the white mountain beyond—’

‘And the people – tell me of the people, Ysonde!’ I urged gently.

‘The people of Yian? I could see them in swarms like ants – oh! many, many millions crossing and recrossing the thousand bridges.’

‘But how did they look? Did they dress as I do?’

‘I don’t know. They were very far away, moving specks on the thousand bridges. For sixteen years I saw them every day from my garden but I never went out of my garden into the streets of Yian, for my step-father forbade me.’

‘You never saw a living creature nearby in Yian?’ I asked in despair.

‘My birds, oh such tall, wise-looking birds, all over gray and rose color.’

She leaned over the gleaming water and drew her polished hand across the surface.

‘Why do you ask me these questions,’ she murmured; ‘are you displeased?’

‘Tell me about your step-father,’ I insisted. ‘Does he look as I do? Does he dress, does he speak as I do? Is he American?’

‘American? I don’t know. He does not dress as you do and he does not look as you do. He is old, very, very old. He speaks sometimes as you do, sometimes as they do in Yian. I speak also in both manners.’

‘Then speak as they do in Yian,’ I urged impatiently, ‘speak as – why, Ysonde! why are you crying? Have I hurt you? – I did not intend – I did not dream of your caring! There Ysonde, forgive me – see, I beg you on my knees here at your feet.’

I stopped, my eyes fastened on a small golden ball which hung from her waist by a golden chain. I saw it trembling against her thigh, I saw it change color, now crimson, now purple, now flaming scarlet. It was the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin.

She bent over me and laid her fingers gently on my arm.

‘Why do you ask me such things?’ she said, while the tears glistened on her lashes. ‘It hurts me here—’ she pressed her hand to her breast – ‘it pains – I don’t know why. Ah, now your eyes are hard and cold again; you are looking at the golden globe which hangs from my waist. Do you wish to know also what that is?’

‘Yes,’ I muttered, my eyes fixed on the infernal colored flames which subsided as I spoke, leaving the ball a pale gilt again.

‘It is the symbol of the Kuen-Yuin,’ she said in a trembling voice; ‘why do you ask?’

‘Is it yours?’

‘Y – yes.’

‘Where did you get it?’ I cried harshly.

‘My – my step-fa—’

Then she pushed me away from her with all the strength of her slender wrists and covered her face.

If I slipped my arm about her and drew her to me – if I kissed away the tears that fell slowly between her fingers – if I told her how I loved her – how it cut me to the heart to see her unhappy – after all that is my own business. When she smiled through her tears, the pure love and sweetness in her eyes lifted my soul higher than the high moon vaguely glimmering through the sunlit blue above. My happiness was so sudden, so fierce and overwhelming that I only knelt there, her fingers clasped in mine, my eyes raised to the blue vault and the glimmering moon. Then something in the long grass beside me moved close to my knees and a damp acrid odor filled my nostrils.

‘Ysonde!’ I cried, but the touch of her hand was already gone and my two clenched fists were cold and damp with dew.

‘Ysonde!’ I called again, my tongue stiff with fright – but I called as one awakening from a dream – a horrid dream, for my nostrils quivered with the damp acrid odor and I felt the crab-reptile clinging to my knee. Why had the night fallen so swiftly – and where was I – where? – stiff, chilled, torn, and bleeding, lying flung like a corpse over my own threshold with Voyou licking my face and Barris stooping above me in the light of a lamp that flared and smoked in the night breeze like a torch. Faugh! the choking stench of the lamp aroused me and I cried out:

‘Ysonde!’

‘What the devil’s the matter with him?’ muttered Pierpont, lifting me in his arms like a child, ‘has he been stabbed, Barris?’




VII


In a few minutes I was able to stand and walk stiffly into my bedroom where Howlett had a hot bath ready and a hotter tumbler of Scotch. Pierpont sponged the blood from my throat where it had coagulated. The cut was slight, almost invisible, a mere puncture from a thorn. A shampoo cleared my mind, and a cold plunge and alcohol friction did the rest.

‘Now,’ said Pierpont, ‘swallow your hot Scotch and lie down. Do you want a broiled woodcock? Good, I fancy you are coming about.’

Barris and Pierpont watched me as I sat on the edge of the bed, solemnly chewing on the woodcock’s wishbone and sipping my Bordeaux, very much at my ease.

Pierpont sighed his relief.

‘So,’ he said pleasantly, ‘it was a mere case of ten dollars or ten days. I thought you had been stabbed—’

‘I was not intoxicated,’ I replied, serenely picking up a bit of celery.

‘Only jagged?’ enquired Pierpont, full of sympathy.

‘Nonsense,’ said Barris, ‘let him alone. Want some more celery, Roy? – it will make you sleep.’

‘I don’t want to sleep,’ I answered; ‘when are you and Pierpont going to catch your gold-maker?’

Barris looked at his watch and closed it with a snap.

‘In an hour; you don’t propose to go with us?’

‘But I do – toss me a cup of coffee, Pierpont, will you – that’s just what I propose to do. Howlett, bring the new box of Panatella’s – the mild imported – and leave the decanter. Now Barris, I’ll be dressing, and you and Pierpont keep still and listen to what I have to say. Is that door shut tight?’

Barris locked it and sat down.

‘Thanks,’ said I, ‘Barris, where is the city of Yian?’

An expression akin to terror flashed into Barris’ eyes and I saw him stop breathing for a moment.

‘There is no such city,’ he said at length, ‘have I been talking in my sleep?’

‘It is a city,’ I continued, calmly, ‘where the river winds under the thousand bridges, where the gardens are sweetly scented and the air is filled with the music of silver bells—’

‘Stop!’ gasped Barris, and rose trembling from his chair. He had grown ten years older.

‘Roy,’ interposed Pierpont coolly, ‘what the deuce are you harrying Barris for?’

I looked at Barris and he looked at me. After a second or two he sat down again.




Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.


Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/hugh-lamb/out-of-the-dark-tales-of-terror-by-robert-w-chambers/) на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.