Complete weird tales of.., p.1333
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1333
“Oh. When is the parson coming? It’s getting late, you know.”
She was silent.
“He’s coming today — tonight — isn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.... Jim said he might not come till tomorrow — or next week.”
“Or the week after that,” suggested Kemper grimly, “ — or perhaps not for a month or two. Is that what he means, Mazie?”
“I don’t know.... I guess he means to marry me — sometime—”
“Sooner or later? Is that the way he talks?”
“Yes.... It’s often that way in this country.... I guess he means to do right.”
“Is that so!” snapped Kemper savagely, and swung in his tracks. “Billet,” he said very distinctly, “you’re no good — you and your can of kerosene! Do you understand? Why, you dirty weasel, there isn’t a lamp or lantern in your shanty that burns anything except a candle!”
He took a step nearer to the big, sullen lout who stood nursing his battered countenance by the window.
“The next time you come slinking around when the Fire Warden sends out a call, you’ll find yourself kicked headfirst into the lock-up. And Heaven help you if the woods burn within forty miles of Lynx Peak. Do you get that? And God help you if you ever monkey with my trees!”
“Prove it!” snarled Billet. “An’ lemme tell you I’ll hev the law onto you — a-breakin’ into a honest man’s—”
“Cut it out P’ said the other sternly. And, turning to Mazie: “Come,” he said, “it’s getting late.”
“She shan’t stir outen this here house P’ yelled Billet. “Why not?” asked Kemper, staring at him.
“She’s mine!”
“No — she’s mine. Are you not, Mazie?”
There was a silence, then came a low whisper.
“Yes.”
“Well, then, by Gawd,” screamed Billet in a fury, “she kin take off them clothes an’ gimcracks!”
“What!”
“They’re mine! I paid for the makin’ o’ them. Take ’em off, d’ye hear!” he shouted, lurching out into the room. Kemper shoved him back and slapped his face till he howled. Then turning to the girl:
“Mazie, is this true?”
“Yes.”
“Have you any clothes of your own?”
“A gingham dress and sunbonnet in my valise.”
“Put them on.”
The two men waited in the darkening house while behind the half-closed door the girl exchanged her finery for gingham and sunbonnet. Billet, enraged but in deadly fear of the man who had so coolly damaged him, slouched in the doorway and gnawed his knuckles and glared; Kemper smoked and tried to think. But events were occurring too rapidly for him to analyze the reason why they were happening at all. And in a few moments Mazie came out in her clinging gingham gown.
Scant were her skirts, moulding the straight, young figure in limp and modest folds; her hair was lovely in its disorder; her eyes all starry with unshed tears.
“There are your duds,” said Kemper to Billet. “Now, get out of my way P’ And he reached for the can of kerosene.
Then, in a flash, Billet had snatched it and dashed out of the door, headed for the forest.
“Damn you!” he panted back, “I’ll spile your woods for you before I git out o’ this!”
“Stop!” shouted Kemper, levelling his gun. “You won’t? Well, then here’s yours!”
The room roared with the double explosion; and Billet was down in the grass, screaming and clawing at his trousers’ seat.
“Have you killed him?” whispered the girl, clutching Kemper’s arm.
“No; it’s only salt,” said Kemper quietly. “Come, are you ready to go with me?”
“Where?”
“Wherever I take you.... Will you come?”
“Yes.”
Billet, yelling lustily, had run squattering into the bushes. The can of kerosene, uncorked, lay in the dust, the last drops trickling out. Kemper gave it a kick as he passed, then, drawing his arm around the girl’s slender body, moved slowly beside her up the hill.
Through the violet twilight Rittenfeldt’s camp fire glimmered like a heap of dusty rubies as they came up and halted at its edge. Rittenfeldt rose, took off his cap to her politely, and then resumed a squinting observation, through a magnifying glass, of something that wriggled in the palm of his hand.
“Oncideres cingulatushe remarked in his big, pleasant voice. “I haff today already yet twenty-seven species identified.”
Mazie seated herself on a log; Kemper wrapped her in a blanket and seated himself beside her.
“As soon as your head touched my shoulder, there in the waggon,” he explained under his breath, “I knew that I wanted you.... I never took love seriously. But it’s hit me like lightning.”
Her pretty head drooped; he put his arm around her, and her head sank on his shoulder.
“You said,” he whispered, “that you didn’t know what love was.... Do you know now, Mazie?”
After a few moments, under the blanket her small hand, moving, encountered his and clung. It was his answer.
At the fire Rittenfeldt had caught another beetle:
“Clytus pictus!” he exclaimed excitedly. “So iss it that I have alretty today twenty-eight species of coleoptera identified!”
THE BETTER MAN
ALTHOUGH THEIR RESPECTIVE fathers had been cordial enemies for years, these two young people had never even heard of each other. They lived more than a thousand miles apart, geographically speaking, and about a million, socially.
It happened that their fathers put on immortality within a few hours of each other. It also happened that the two youthful heirs came into their respective inheritances on the same day.
Kings and commis-voyageurs are born upon the same day: queens and couturières. It’s one of those things that happen.
The newspapers noticed nothing extraordinary in the coincidence. But Fate smiled and made a memorandum on the border of her tunic, while her two sisters continued spinning and snipping.
Now, these same two young people, who had never even heard of each other, appeared to be perfectly capable of handling what the kind gods had so suddenly dumped into their laps: both, properly advised, entered into possession and enjoyment of their individual birthrights, and settled down to responsibilities which might have appalled maturity, but which merely mildly excited a young man of twenty-two and a girl of twenty-one. Felices errore suo.
The business in life for the young man was to maintain the social and financial prestige of his race and name. Conservative investments, financial and social, were traditional in his family — which happened to be one of those few families known abroad as well as at home. William de Montfort Clifton was his name; Clifton the hundred-year-old home of his race — along the Hudson somewhere; Montfort House the name of his Southern estate; and No. 1650 1/2 Fifth Avenue his turreted metropolitan stronghold. He did his best to live up to these things, but he was only twenty-two. Also, he had the Three, Fate Sisters Three, to reckon with, and a girl who lived more than a thousand miles away, and had a capacity for chewing-gum and romantic fiction.
It was part of her business in life to hold tight to what her father, Ritter the Brewer, had amassed for her. He left, along with much money, a flock of breweries, a meaningless mass of domestic architecture in a Western metropolis known to her as “home,” and a tract of scrubby Florida land, decorated with what her father had usually referred to as a “chatoo,” and at other and more modest intervals as a “pungaloo.” However, Edna never confused her p’s and b’s.
These material tokens of parental thrift Miss Ritter understood were to be adroitly cherished. So she first learned how to cherish them and then did it. The first six months of her administration showed profits increased all along the line.
The remainder of Edna’s business in life was to better herself socially. And she went about it with that same vivid imagination and fearless enthusiasm which had made Peter Ritter the malt monarch of New Mexico. At the end of a month her manœuvres had landed her in a magnificent apartment at the Hotel Arabesque, Manhattan, from the windows of which she could gaze upon the locked gates of the city’s social fortifications. One good look at them ought to have settled the social ambitions of any brewer’s daughter with brains.
But Edna Ritter, endowed with brains, was also cursed with a magnificent imagination. And in addition to these handicaps she thoroughly believed in the fiction she read.
For a week she sat beside her windows, perusing bestsellers, the social columns in all the papers, and inspecting a certain chilly mass of limestone and bronze architecture which composed the abiding place of William de Montfort Clifton. How to get into it and stay there was her problem.
The house stood just across the Avenue, in a direct line from her windows.
Now the young man who resided there was Edna’s ideal of all that was desirable socially, financially, and sentimentally. And she knew that, speaking colloquially, she had the chances of the classic snowball.
Had it not been for American literature, hope had died within her the instant she set her dainty foot in Gotham Town. But even in full realization of the social gulf which now yawned before her in all its hideous proportions, American literature came to her aid.
And after a week’s steady study of the month’s bestselling books, and after a cool survey of her fresh, young face and figure in a triple mirror, she was perfectly persuaded that a personal encounter with this young man, under romantic circumstances, would prove as deadly to him and as satisfactory to her as any similar episode in any best-seller ever dictated.
It took her two or three days to create, mentally, the romantic setting and circumstances for the scene. Then she prepared to enter the great mansion.
But when at last Edna set out to scale the gilded bronze railing, she started in the opposite direction; for her Ritter imagination, now all afire, was inspiring her to an attempt as stupendous as any coup ever executed by her father. And she knew, deep in her determined mind, that in all romantic novels the shortest distance between two given points is always the longest way round. Otherwise there would be no novel.
As for young Clifton, he had decided to look over his Southern domain, Montfort House, with a view to a two weeks’ house party. This Edna read in several social columns. Also, he wanted some dove shooting. And being a man, and a young one, he went about this business of pleasure as straight as a flying bullet.
Which resulted in the hooking up of his private car to the end of the same train-de-luxe that was carrying Edna Ritter southward through the first snowstorm of the new year.
It was no coincidence. She had read about his plans in the daily papers.
He, in his handsome private quarters aboard, slept as innocently as a child, awoke refreshed, and dictated business letters to his private secretary.
But her imagination burned her like a living flame, and she lay tossing, with white hands clenched and cheeks afire far into the night.
Thus, also, had old Peter Ritter conceived those lightning strokes which delivered into his acquisitive fists all malted opposition to the monopoly of a territory doomed already to gulp down Ritter’s Extra Golden Brew — or nothing.
It gulped the Golden Brew.
And Edna swallowed everything the modern romantic novelist offered to a cloyed but still unexterminated clientèle.
Peter Ritter’s recognition of a social aristocracy which did not recognize him had been limited to an expensive imitation of what that aristocracy did with its money.
When he discovered that it built houses instead of sojourning at huge hotels, he, also, built a house — the largest of homes, with more kinds of architecture to it than any mansion in all the West. Which was going some.
When he learned that the aristocracy were affecting the life of landed, gentry — very carefully imitated from the real thing — Peter Ritter also bought land wholesale, erected a “chatoo” as near Montfort House as possible, and defiantly awaited the next social idiocy with stolid determination to “see it and raise it.”
That was really all he wanted — to match, aggressively, the best that challenged, then glare grimly across his own frontiers at a boundary line he had no desire to cross, but merely to defy. For at the social deadline his imagination stopped; that was its limit; he never could conceive himself crossing that Rubicon. So, of the two imaginations, his daughter’s was, perhaps, the more superb. Cæsar’s offspring was not afraid to go a-paddling. Her shoes and stockings were off already, her skirts tucked up.
“The die is cast,” she murmured, resolutely discarding her chewing-gum forever, as she boarded the train-de-luxe.
The “chatoo,” as Edna Ritter found it, appeared to be in as good a state of repair as any Florida residence possibly can be after a Florida summer has tampered with it.
Mildew marked the interior for its own; a fair number of spiders, ants, scorpions, lizards, and assorted and many-legged creatures were retreating before the languid and perfunctory manœuvres of black servants, when Miss Ritter entered upon the scene with her retinue of white ones.
But upon the arrival of the young and vigorous mistress of the “chatoo,” matters were accelerated indoors and out; lazy negroes galvanized into action as far as any Ethiopian can be; the work in marl pit, on the shell roads, in orange grove, and on pineapple plantation systematized and accelerated; dogs and horses sent on from summer quarters in Georgia; sloop, sailboat, powerboat, and canoe put into commission on the river; and the private signal of the house of Ritter flung to the breeze.
And at last only one matter remained unadjusted to perplex Miss Ritter — a matter which had given her father great pleasure during his aggressive life.
This matter concerned a great, flat plain about five miles square, bordered irregularly by woods — the greatest feeding place for wild doves in the entire South.
Claimed by the Cliftons, counterclaimed by Peter Ritter, fought over legally during the latter’s lifetime, posted by both claimants, taken from one court to another, this property had furnished to Peter Ritter the only light amusement and mental relaxation he ever had permitted himself.
To him it had been a delightful and exciting game — a satisfying combination of checkers, poker, and pinochle — a game so interesting that he never permitted a settlement to threaten the sport, but always made some legal move so that the lingering delight of the contest might continue indefinitely. And the fury of William de Montfort Clifton, Senior, knew no bounds. But it was a private and very discreet fury. Only his lawyers ever suspected it. As for his son and heir, he had heard of the contest for the first time when he arrived at Montfort House that lovely January morning.
The letter from his attorney ended:
“Shoot there as often as you please: pay no attention to the Ritter trespass signs. Post the entire plain. And if any other people attempt to shoot over it, have them thrown out bodily. The courts will uphold you!” So that evening, as William de Montfort Clifton paced the flowery coquina terraces of Montfort House, he determined to oust any of the brewer’s brood who might prove presumptuous enough to invade the plain that winter — never dreaming of what that brood consisted, and that its sole specimen, aged twenty-one, had already caused shooting pits to be dug, his own trespass notices to be torn down, and others posted bearing the hated name of Ritter.
Later that night, however, “Ole George,” his father’s negro kennel-master, brought the news of these outrages to the young master of Montfort House, who had just given his orders for a horse, a dog, a gun, and two hundred shells, an hour before sunrise.
“What!” said the young man incredulously. “Do you mean to tell me the Ritter people are already on the spot?”
“Yaas, suh,” repeated Ole George. “Dees done dug de pits ercross de flight line, suh — moh’n ten or six, suh, whar I’se done baited doves foh de Kunnel. Yaas, suh — hit’s dat white-trash nigger, Benjamin — dat ole kennel no ‘count roustabout—”
“This man is Ritter’s kennel-master?”
“Mistuh Ritter daid, suh.”
“What? Oh, yes, I believe I’ve heard so.... When was it? I forget — and anyway, who is it interfering with us now?”
“Ah reckon hit’s some o’ de fambly, suh, a-mekkin’ er fuss, same as hit’s allus been befo’, suh.”
“Very well,” said young Clifton grimly. “I’ll occupy one of those pits tomorrow. Then we’ll see! No I don’t want anybody with me — I don’t want anybody, I tell you. Have the horse ready an hour before sunrise. I’ll take that red-ticked pup — what do you call him? — that native-bred, nondescript thing you told me about this afternoon? Good night, George.”
Muttering, he turned away toward his sleeping quarters, dropping his clenched hands into the pockets of his dressing gown, mad clean through. For there was one thing no Clifton could calmly endure, and that was any attempts upon real estate or acreage, the clever acquiring of which had been the foundation of the family’s vast metropolitan prosperity.
“Damn that Dutchman,” muttered young Clifton to himself, “whoever he may be! If his father fought mine all his life over that five-mile bit of sand and stubble, I’ll fight him — no fear! And TO show him who is the better man!”
Then, his irritation already ended, he yawned, stretched his athletic body, gazed humorously into vacancy, and smiled — merely because he was in good health and all the world still seemed to him as young and fresh and happy as himself. Only the weariness of age comprehends how long the world has lasted — or how endlessly it is doomed to endure. Tempus omnia revelat.
And so it came about that in the still dark hour before the dawn of a January day, several million little stars looked down at a young man in shooting coat and leggins, watched him curiously as he mounted his horse, shoved a shotgun into the leather bucket, adjusted saddle bags, gathered bridle, and whistled a red-ticked setter to follow out into the pallid lustre of a cloudless night.
Down the white shell drive he walked his horse through pale masses of phantom bloom, where oleander, hibiscus, and plumbago suavely perfumed the starry darkness.
