Complete weird tales of.., p.1293
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1293
“Answer me; who alone in all the world can read the message in those sculptured eyes?”
“Can you?” he asked, curiously troubled. “Yes; I, and the dying man in marble.”
“What do you read there?”
“Pardon for guilt. You have foreshadowed it unconsciously — the resurrection of the soul. That is what you have left in marble for the mercilessly just to ponder on; that alone is the meaning of your work.”
Through the throbbing silence he stood thinking, searching his clouded mind.
“The eyes of the dying man are your own,” she said. “Is it not true?”
And still he stood there, groping, probing through dim and forgotten corridors of thought toward a faint memory scarcely perceptible in the wavering mirage of the past.
“Let us talk of your career,” she said, leaning back against the thick foliage—” your success, and all that it means to you,” she added gayly.
He stood staring at the darkness. “You have set the phantoms of forgotten things stirring and whispering together somewhere within me. Now tell me more; tell me the truth.”
“You are slowly reading it in my eyes,” she said, laughing sweetly. “Read and remember.”
The fever in him seared his sight as he stood there, his confused gaze on hers.
“Is it a threat of hell you read in the marble?” he asked.
“No, nothing of destruction, only resurrection and hope of Paradise. Look at me closely.”
“Who are you?” he whispered, closing his eyes to steady his swimming senses. “When have we met?”
“You were very young,” she said under her breath—” and I was younger — and the rains had swollen the Canadian river so that it boiled amber at the fords; and I could not cross — alas!”
A moment of stunning silence, then her voice again: “I said nothing, not a word even of thanks when you offered aid.... I — was not too heavy in your arms, and the ford was soon passed — soon passed. That was very long ago.” Watching him from shadowy sweet eyes, she said:
“For a day you knew the language of my mouth and my arms around you, there in the white sun glare of the river. For every kiss taken and retaken, given and forgiven, we must account — for every one, even to the last.
“But you have set a monument for us both, preaching the resurrection of the soul. Love is such a little thing — and ours endured a whole day long! Do you remember? Yet He who created love, designed that it should last a lifetime. Only the lost outlive it.”
She leaned nearer:
“Tell me, you who have proclaimed the resurrection of dead souls, are you afraid to die?” Her low voice ceased; lights broke out like stars through the foliage around them; the great glass doors of the ballroom were opening; the illuminated fountain flashed, a falling shower of silver. Through the outrush of music and laughter swelling around them, a clear far voice called “Françoise!”
Again, close by, the voice rang faintly, “Françoise! Françoise!”
She slowly turned, staring into the brilliant glare beyond.
“Who called?” he asked hoarsely.
“My mother,” she said, listening intently. “Will you wait for me?”
His ashen face glowed again like a dull ember. She bent nearer, and caught his fingers in hers.
“By the memory of our last kiss, wait for me!” she pleaded, her little hand tightening on his.
“Where?” he said, with dry lips. “We cannot talk here! — we cannot say here the things that must be said.”
“In your studio,” she whispered. “Wait for me.”
“Do you know the way?”
“I tell you I will come; truly I will! Only a moment with my mother — then I will be there!” Their hands clung together an instant, then she slipped away into the crowded rooms; and after a moment Helmer followed, head bent, blinded by the glare.
“You are ill, Philip,” said his host, as he took his leave. “Your face is as ghastly as that dying vaquero’s — by Heaven, man, you look like him!”
“Did you find your girl in black?” asked his hostess curiously.
“Yes,” he said; “good night.”
The air was bitter as he stepped out — bitter as death. Scores of carriage lamps twinkled as he descended the snowy steps, and a faint gust of music swept out of the darkness, silenced as the heavy doors closed behind him.
He turned west, shivering. A long smear of light bounded his horizon as he pressed toward it and entered the sordid avenue beneath the iron arcade which was even now trembling under the shock of an oncoming train. It passed overhead with a roar; he raised his hot eyes and saw, through the tangled girders above, the illuminated disk of the clock tower — all distorted — for the fever in him was disturbing everything — even the cramped and twisted street into which he turned, fighting for breath like a man stabbed through and through.
“What folly!” he said aloud, stopping short in the darkness. “This is fever — all this. She could not know where to come—”
Where two blind alleys cut the shabby block, worming their way inward from the avenue and from Tenth Street, he stopped again, his hands working at his coat.
“It is fever, fever!” he muttered. “She was not there.”
There was no light in the street save for the red fire lamp burning on the corner, and a glimmer from the Old Grapevine Tavern across the way. Yet all around him the darkness was illuminated with pale unsteady flames, lighting him as he groped through the shadows of the street to the blind alley. Dark old silent houses peered across the paved lane at their aged counterparts, waiting for him.
And at last he found a door that yielded, and he stumbled into the black passageway, always lighted on by the unsteady pallid flames which seemed to burn in infinite depths of night.
“She was not there — she was never there,” he gasped, bolting the door and sinking down upon the floor. And, as his mind wandered, he raised his eyes and saw the great bare room growing whiter and whiter under the uneasy flames.
“It will burn as I burn,” he said aloud — for the phantom flames had crept into his body. Suddenly he laughed, and the vast studio rang again.
“Hark!” he whispered, listening intently. “Who knocked?”
There was some one at the door; he managed to raise himself and drag back the bolt.
“You!” he breathed, as she entered hastily, her hair disordered and her black skirts powdered with snow.
“Who but I?” she whispered, breathless. “Listen! do you hear my mother calling me? It is too late; but she was with me to the end.” Through the silence, from an infinite distance, came a desolate cry of grief—” Françoise!”
He had fallen back into his chair again, and the little busy flames enveloped him so that the room began to whiten again into a restless glare. Through it he watched her.
The hour struck, passed, struck and passed again. Other hours grew, lengthening into night. She sat beside him with never a word or sigh or whisper of breathing; and dream after dream swept him, like burning winds. Then sleep immersed him so that he lay senseless, sightless eyes still fixed on her. Hour after hour — and the white glare died out, fading to a glimmer. In densest darkness, he stirred, awoke, his mind quite clear, and spoke her name in a low voice.
“Yes, I am here,” she answered gently.
“Is it death?” he asked, closing his eyes.
“Yes. Look at me, Philip.”
His eyes unclosed; into his altered face there crept an intense curiosity. For he beheld a glimmering shape, wide-winged and deep-eyed, kneeling beside him, and looking him through and through.
CHAPTER IV
THE TREE OF DREAMS
IT WAS A slim, well-groomed, top-hatted, frock-coated Smith who entered his private office that morning; it was a very different species of Smith who left stealthily by a back corridor an hour later, a shabby-genteel Smith whose cravatless collar was fastened with a democratic bone collar button — whose clean but shapeless trousers bagged and flapped in the June breeze — who gazed out at Broadway from under the faded brim of a cheap felt hat — who, as he forced his pace from a Fifth Avenue saunter into a Third Avenue hustle, thrust both thin, clean hands into his trousers pockets and satisfied himself that every cent which he meant to spend for a week was there in the shape of ten one-dollar bills.
At Wall Street he adjusted his glasses and peered about with pleasant, near-sighted eyes to discover the policeman at the crossing in order to avoid him. Once beyond the financial zone downtown he had no fear of being recognized by anybody; his features, he was modestly persuaded, resembled the typical features of about fifty per cent of the male inhabitants of Manhattan, although those same features had been public and newspaper property for three years now — ever since his father, J. Abingdon Smith, 2d, had faded heavenward, leaving the enormous fortune in Manhattan real estate to his only son, J. Abingdon Smith, 3d.
He was still a young man, thin of hair, nearsighted, endowed with sufficient intelligence to enable him to turn over his inherited fortune, legitimately increased, to any heir he might have if he should ever marry. Had he resembled Smith the first, or Smith the second, he would have done this as a matter of family routine — married the sort of girl that generations of Smiths found inoffensive enough to marry; produced one heir, and, when the proper time arrived, would have in his turn decorously and formally faded heavenward — leaving a J. Abingdon Smith, 4th, to follow his example.
But Smith had inherited from his mother a thin but deep streak of romantic sentiment. This vein ran clean through him, and might have manifested itself in almost any form along the line of least resistance, had it not been half imbedded in a stratum of negative platitudes inherited from his emotionless father.
As he stood in his shabby clothes, near the new Hall of Records, waiting for a Fourth Avenue car, a slender, blue-eyed girl, passing, looked up at him with such a frank, sweet gaze that he missed his next breath and then made up for it by breathing twice too quickly. He had an idea that he had seen her before, but finally decided he hadn’t.
To be loved for himself alone was one of his impractical ideas, born of the maternal sentimental streak; but, for years, the famous Smith fortune, its enormous holdings in realty, the doings of the Smiths, their shrewd sales, purchases, leases, improvements, their movements, their personal affairs, their photographed features had been common property and an unfailing source of news for the press; and he knew perfectly well that, however honest and theoretically disinterested a girl might be, the courtship of a J. Abingdon Smith, of whatever vintage, could not help representing a bunch of figures that no human being in shape of a female biped could avoid seeing, no matter how tightly she closed her innocent eyes. Thinking of these things, he calmly encountered the curious eyes of the conductor as he boarded a crowded car.
The blue-eyed girl also got in, but Smith, on the back platform, did not see her.
“That fellow,” said the conductor to the grip-man, as he swung off the front platform after collecting a fare, “is a ringer for J. Abingdon Smith, the millionaire.”
And the conductor was not the only one; several passengers were amused by the resemblance this near-sighted, shabby young man bore to the features that every newspaper had made familiar to the submerged tenth, the frantically swimming twentieth, and the marooned remainder of the great unwashed.
Half an hour later Smith said to the conductor: “Would you be kind enough to stop here?”
“Certainly, Mr. Smith,” said the conductor, meaning a joke.
Smith ambled along, intent upon his own business. The blue-eyed girl had preceded him in the same direction; but as he entered the main doorway of the Smith model tenement houses, which formed almost a complete quadrangle around the block, he was not aware that she was on the iron and concrete stairway, three stories above him, and was still climbing heavenward.
When he reached his room, which he had paid for in advance, he found that his trunk and furniture had arrived. The air in the room was close; he opened the window.
For a while he bustled busily about, arranging the meager furniture. The narrow iron bed he dragged into a corner by the window, pushed the washstand against the opposite wall and hung a ninety-eight-cent mirror over it. He laid a strip of carpet in the center of the floor, placed a pine table upon it, and then, picking up the only chair, distractedly began traveling about with it, trying the effect, first in one corner, then in another.
At this juncture Kerns, his agent, general estate manager, and boyhood friend, slipped into the room on tiptoe, carefully closing the door behind him.
“I don’t know where to put it,” Smith said, pausing to settle his refractory glasses and glance suspiciously at Kerns out of pleasant, near-sighted eyes. “When they have only one chair where do they usually put it, Tommy?”
“When they get down to one chair they usually put it in the stove,” said Kerns.
“What? They do? That’s another point, Kerns; we’ve got to give them free furniture somehow; I mean for the same rent. You figure it up; cut out something or other—” He gazed vaguely about the bare walls as though contemplating their possible economic elimination. Then, he looked at the floor; but his tenants, being wingless, required something to stand on. “Could we give them bed, tables, and chair, and cut out that gas range?” he suggested.
“Not unless you throw in a stove,” said Kerns, trying to look serious. “And if you do that, they’ll keep their coal in the bath tubs, as before.”
Smith began to remove the contents of a shabby little trunk. First, there were shaving utensils, which he placed in a row on the unpainted wash-stand, then a tin pitcher and wash basin, a cake of soap, and last, some cheap towels.
“I’ve a notion that I’ve too much crockery,” he said, gazing about. “Do you think I’ve overdone it? I don’t need two plates — do I? And all that tinware — do I? What the deuce are you grinning at?” he added, diving into his battered trunk again and emerging with both arms full of tinware. These utensils he hung upon nails above the sink in the corner, arranging them with care.
“That’s the place for pots and pans, isn’t it, Kerns?” he said, backing off to observe the effect. Then, by chance, he caught sight of himself in the ninety-eight-cent mirror, and a slight flush of embarrassment rose to his cheeks.
“Do I look like a respectable man out of work?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”
“Exactly,” replied Kerns; “you look like what you are — a well-meaning gentleman, permanently unemployed — and likely to remain so. In other words, dear friend, you resemble a Lulu bird of leisure.”
“Do you mean to say I look like myself?” demanded Smith innocently. “Do I seem to be made up for a part? There was an impudent conductor who called me Smith. Don’t you suppose he did it in joke? And — a — a girl — who looked at me — er—”
“Because you’re a winner. Because a Smith ill dressed is half confessed; because a Smith in any other clothes would look as neat; because a Sm—”
Smith’s brows contracted, but lifelong endurance of Kerns’s raillery had habituated him to disregard such gibes.
“John Abingdon,” continued Kerns, “I’ve inspected these barracks of yours to-day because you insisted; I’ve met you here because you told me to; but it’s all portentous and top-heavy nonsense on your part, and it’s my business to say so whether it makes you fidgety and sulky or not.”
“We won’t start that line of discussion again,” said Smith, “because, Kerns, outside of your own harmless routine, you’re so densely ignorant that I am continually ashamed of you. What do you know about humanity?”
“I thought you weren’t going to start that thing going,” yawned Kerns.
“You started it yourself,” said Smith.
“All right, then; I’ll go on. Haven’t I told you a thousand times that, if you are anxious to know how your tenants live, I can tell you, or any of your collectors or your brokers, or even your janitors. Every time you do a thing without my advice you mess matters. You insisted on giving them bath tubs, and they used them for coal, and I had to straighten that out by taking away their cook stoves and substituting gas ranges and ovens. You insisted on inserting rotary ventilators in every window, and the noise of the wheels kept your tenants awake at night; and, when they don’t sleep, they fight. Besides, they all caught cold, and there are a dozen enraged Hibernians suing you now. If you could only know what I know and see what I’ve seen—”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, Tom, that I don’t intend to slop over and bestow charity; but I do want to know what are my just obligations to my tenants, and how I can place them in a better position.”
He was somewhat heated when he finished, and stood touching his forehead with his handkerchief.
“Toot! Toot!” said Kerns plaintively, backing toward the door. “The next stop is Chautauqua. Go it your own way, Smithy; I’m about due at the club for luncheon.”
The door slammed as the wash basin struck it; Smith glared at the dent in the woodwork, prepared to hurl the coffeepot. But Kerns did not come back; and, after a while, he replaced the coffeepot, searched his trunk for a collar, buttoned it to his flannel shirt, and, picking up his hat, went out into the hallway.
And there he encountered the slender girl with the blue eyes.
There was something very innocent in her confident, fearless gaze; as he passed her, lifting his hat, he bade her good day in his pleasant voice. Her quaintly impersonal nod in acknowledgment pleased him.
“Just what I thought,” he reflected, as he descended the stairs: “the poor are always nice to each other; they’re frank and human, unspoiled by our asinine code of conventions. If I’d worn a top hat that girl would have looked the other way; if I’d noticed her she’d have been defiant or sullen or saucy.”
And while he trudged about, purchasing groceries for his luncheon, he looked out upon the world through optimistic glasses, smiling, warm-hearted, pleased with himself and everybody he encountered.
