Complete weird tales of.., p.1339
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1339
As he sat there, gloomily perusing the Verbena Herald, a slight noise on the narrow forest trail attracted his attention, and a shadow fell across his newspaper.
He looked up, then got up; a small donkey with basket panniers had halted in the trail and was regarding Burke earnestly, furry ears slanted forward.
Beside the donkey stood a girl in rough grey homespun, her jacket belted in with a web cartridge loop, her short skirts wet with dew. She wore stout leather puttees strapped over heavy little walking boots, a broad felt hat, and a formidable revolver on either hip.
“Are you going to Darrel’s?” she asked diffidently.
“Yes,” he said, hat in hand.
“We had no letter. Did you write? I am Miss Darrel.”
He bowed and named himself.
“I didn’t write,” he continued: “I suppose I should have. I came up here on the impulse of the moment — the hotel at Verbena was noisy and full of tangos, and the shooting in that vicinity is said to be rotten. Not that I cared particularly. But I chanced to see your advertisement — and I came.” He glanced around at the woods rather forlornly, then: “I hope I have not inconvenienced you.”
“No,” she said gravely.
“Do you think you could take me?” — with another profoundly distrustful glance at the surrounding jungle. Then, turning to look at her, he saw in the brown eyes a glimmer like sunlight crinkling a brook.
“It is amusing,” he admitted. “If nobody had come for me I’d have been in a fine mess, I fancy.”
“You should have let us know. I might have been away looking up wild orange stock.... And my father is an invalid. So there might have been nobody to meet you.”
“In that case,” he said, “no doubt an alligator or a snake would have got to me before long, so my sufferings would have been comparatively brief.”
She laughed, shyly, watching him stow away his valises and gun-cases in the wicker panniers. Then she said to the little donkey in her pretty voice: “Come, Joseph, we’re going home now.” And the donkey turned in the trail and walked solemnly into the woods.
“Joseph?” he inquired, falling into step beside her. “Father named him Joseph because he says he’s such an ass. I never could see the joke, and father won’t explain.”
Burke laughed.
“Your father must be a very interesting man.”
“I like him,” she said demurely.
“I suppose,” suggested Burke mischievously, “that your father is mayor of Sapphire City.”
The girl laughed outright:
“Did you expect to see a town here?”
“Naturally.”
“So did we when we came. There is a map of Sapphire City attached to the literature they sent us — streets, avenues, squares, plantations, orange groves — in process of completion! But the only street we could find was Main Street. We’re walking on it now.”
“Well, when you found out that there was nothing here, why on earth did you remain?” inquired Burke.
“We did not know where else to go. We had no money left. And the grim joke of it seemed to amuse father. Besides, after the first month under a tent father’s health improved. So that settled it.”
“Do you live in a tent?” inquired Burke.
“Oh, no,” she laughed. “We built a bungalow. We’ve done a great deal in the five years we have been here.”
“Five years in this place!”
“Yes. I was only fifteen when we came. There was nothing here then — except” — she looked up laughingly— “Main Street. But you shall see what we have done. The soil is wonderful, the climate healthful and — to us — delightful. We have a splendid orange grove; pineapples, bananas, cocoanuts, guavas, sapodillas; we have green vegetables the year-round — everything, in fact, except meat.... And we have that sometimes.”
“From where?”
“From the woods.”
“Game?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes,” she laughed, “it is something else.”
“So your father shoots.”
“No; I do.”
He glanced at her superb, young figure and his eyes noted again the revolvers on her hips.
“You don’t go shooting with those, do you?” he asked, amused.
“I hope I may never have to,” she replied quietly. Her expression had changed; for a moment she remained grave, and her brown eyes seemed clear and cold as pools in the October woods. Then the sunlight glimmered in them again.
“We’ll try very hard to make you comfortable,” she said, “but our resources are slender.”
“Oh, I’ll be all right! I won’t be a nuisance—”
“We have no servants except negro wench who cooks, and her husband who potters about the grove and garden. I do the housework—”
“And hunting,” he added, smilingly. And she smiled too, such a frank, sweet, winning smile that the cardiac muscles of Mr. Burke involuntarily contracted, causing him surprise and loss of breath. Maybe it was due to cigarettes and overwork. Maybe not.
“The truth is,” she said with gay indifference, “we are dreadfully poor. If anybody had a little capital they could make a wonderful fruit and vegetable ranch of this place and ship North the very earliest and finest of everything. But” — she shrugged— “there’s no possible way for us to do it — no way to begin. We can’t hire men; and as we have nothing to ship out, the Sea Cow comes only every two weeks. So we just grow what we need for ourselves, and what one unusually lazy negro can attend to. There’s nothing else for us to do.”... Her brown eyes grew remote and she became silent.
At intervals Burke watched the faraway expression that so entirely changed her face, and found the sudden dreaminess a phase of her intensely fascinating and exquisitely in contrast with her young and supple virility.
Sunlight slanted through the woods, barring the trail with gold; and he thought whimsically of the road through life which this young girl might have travelled had it also not been barred to her by gold. For she possessed no golden key.
There could be no progress where gold barred one out, no chance. He believed this — had been brought up to believe it. In practice he had proven it many times: his daily business life in New York confirmed it. And the only reason why he was not now in New York, busily accumulating more money than any one man really needed, was that he had begun to talk to himself and make financial deals in his sleep.
Which scared his partners and ultimately himself. And when his physician’s verdict was the funny house or a vacation, he chose the latter.
But everywhere he had been assailed by too much noise; his manservant got on his nerves and he shipped him back; hotels, orchestras, automobiles, tangos, women, newspapers, all proved too much for his nerves.
He carried a gun about but would not fire it because of the noise it made; he became morbidly sensitive to noise, moving from one place to another to escape it. Even the ticking of his watch at night worried him, and he let it run down.
Reginald Burke was very nearly down and out when he left New York. When he arrived at Sapphire City he was merely holding his own.
She had noticed the lines in his face — features far too youthful to bear such imprints. But, oddly enough, turning now to glance at him again, it seemed to her as though the lines she had noticed had already become less visible and partly effaced. Or was it because he happened to smile at her?
“This certainly is a pretty path,” he said.
“Path! Please, Mr. Burke, remember that the citizens of Sapphire City may be a trifle sensitive.”
They both laughed; Joseph, plodding ahead, turned his wise ears to listen.
She said, her smile fading a trifle:
“It is beautiful — all this. But it is lonely.... I ought not to say that; I suppose I feel it because Pm young.”
“Few people in the world really care for solitude — particularly those who say they do.”
“I don’t see how anybody can really care for perpetual solitude. When we lived in New York, before we lost everything, even as a child of fifteen I used to creep off into my own room and lock myself in, fancying that I wanted to be alone. But” — and her brown eyes became tragic for a moment— “I could never again feel that way, I think.”
“You are mistaken.”
“No, no! These five years of loneliness have taught me the happiness of living in cities! You don’t know, Mr. Burke — you don’t know what silence and solitude mean.... Only for an hour of New York — only to be able to look out into a street where people are moving — where there is passing to and fro — and the sound of voices — the clatter — noise—”
“Noise!” he repeated. “Good Lord!”
“Yes, mere noise — the noise of human life and movement. I am sick for it — sick!” She turned her head sharply, but he had caught the glint of a tear.
“It’s absurd for me to talk like this!” she said, forcing a little laugh. “It’s idiotic to say such things to a man I’ve known half an hour. I didn’t mean to bore you.”
“You’re a very bad promoter,” he remarked. “Sapphire City will never boom if you say such things to possible investors.”
He spoke so seriously that she turned to look at him and saw him laughing at her.
“I thought you meant it,” she said.
“Maybe I do.”
“You would never dream of buying land in this place!”
“You seem to be very certain concerning the substance of my dreams, Miss Darrel.”
“The substance,” she retorted, laughing, “is of such stuff as dreams are made of.”
“That,” he said mischievously, “is all you know about it! My dreams, recently, have been so concretely profitable that one or two more of them might even finance Sapphire City!”
She did not understand him; neither apparently did Joseph, who wagged his long, furry ears indifferently and plodded on at a brisker gait.
“Joseph smells his stable,” commented the girl. “Little wretch! It’s the only time he ever moves faster than a walk.”
The trail — or rather, Main Street — widened. Looking ahead, Burke saw a vast area of sunshine in brilliant contrast to the tall, dusky forest walls between which they had been moving.
Presently they came into the clearing. A low house made of silvery palmetto logs rose in front of them, flanked by a vegetable garden and orange grove in brilliant fruit as well as bloom. Beyond the flat-woods stretched away, beautiful, open, park-like.
“Sapphire City,” whispered the girl demurely. “Yonder on the veranda sits His Honor, the Mayor.”
The “Mayor,” a spare gentleman of sixty, with closely cropped white hair and mustache and the pallid hands of an invalid, watched the progress of the approaching procession from his easy chair.
First, Joseph passed the veranda at a gleeful gait, headed for his stall; but a big, lazy negro headed him, unpacked the panniers, and deposited Burke’s luggage on the veranda.
Next, side by side, came the daughter of the Mayor and Burke.
“Father,” began Jessie Darrel, “this is Mr. Burke, who—”
“How are you, Burke?” interrupted Darrel, smiling.
“Why, Darrel!” exclaimed the younger man. “I did not dream it was you! — I never connected you with — with the Mayor of Sapphire City!” he ended, laughingly.
Darrel offered his hand.
“It takes several minutes for me to rise — I’m an invalid — but getting better. How are you, Burke?”
“All right!... That is, Pm not supposed to be very well. That’s why I’m here — for that down-and-out feeling.”
“That is why I’m here,” observed Darrel grimly.
“I see; excessive mental and financial activity.”
“Excess of the former, total absence of the latter.”
“Oh.... I’m sorry, Darrel—” He looked at the elder man curiously, keenly. Then a slow, hot colour came into his face: “Darrel,” he said bluntly, “it hadn’t anything to do with us — had it?”
“Oh, that’s all right, Burke; the half-gods go when the gods arrive! No mere individual can stand what competition has now become.”
“I didn’t know,” said the younger man. “I’m sorry.”
Darrel waved his sunburned but translucent hand: “It’s the game. I was one of the tenpins, that’s all. Now that I’m down and out I really don’t care. We don’t care, do we, Jessie?” passing his arm around his tall young daughter, who had been standing close to his chair.
“Of course we don’t,” she said, looking at Burke and deliberately nullifying what she had said to him a few minutes before on the trail.
The young man reddened again, but she smiled at him, saying:
“What could New York offer us in exchange for the sunny tranquillity of this spot?”
“You see,” said Darrel, “we are contented. A quiet conscience, a peaceful mind, enough to live on, sunshine, solitude — few can hope for as much as that in life.” And turning to the big, lazy negro: “Mose, take Mr. Burke’s luggage to the spare room. Now, Burke, if you care to wash—”
“Thanks — I will.”
Lizards frisked among the chinks of his log-walled chamber, playing hide-and-seek in the Spanish moss with which the chinks were stuffed.
Being harmless and rather pretty reptiles, Burke found them amusing, and paused in his ablutions to watch them catch flies and tiny winged things on the ceiling.
A bat hanging to his blinds like a velvety, withered leaf, did not disturb him either, and, while shaving, he made frequent trips to look at the grotesque and devillike little creature which hung pendant, sound asleep.
“Lord!” he muttered, “if I could only sleep like that! And, somehow, I believe I shall.”
And that night, for the first time in months, he ceased to dream of daring financial combinations; and in the morning Jessie Darrel noticed the absence of the deep lines in his face. The nervous expression of the mouth, too, seemed softened; and his hand was certainly steadier when he took his morning cup of coffee from her.
He had brought with him a dozen or so of the more recent novels, and Darrel, who had finished his breakfast, sat poring over them.
“I suppose they’re rot,” he said, “but they’re a godsend to us.” He glanced whimsically at Burke, who was eating vigorously of waffles and honey. “It’s an odd feeling to want trifles and not be able to afford them. Not that we really care, but you know even in these five years I cannot seem to get used to the sensation.”
“Squandering money for trifles,” remarked Jessie, “is hard to break away from — like any other bad habit.”
“As for me,” added Darrel, “I was never so happy in all my life as I am now.”
“And I,” said Jessie quietly.
Darrel said, leaning forward and tapping the book he held:
“I tell you, Burke, when the crash came all that worried me was my daughter. I was afraid she would miss all that she had been accustomed to — miss her friends, her little luxuries and extravagances — miss the city, the life and movement of the streets, the excitement and gaiety. But, do you know, she has never foil one moment felt the lack of all these things. It’s odd, isn’t it, that a young girl should be so thoroughly happy and contented in a place like this?”
“It is — fortunate,” said Burke slowly; and he looked out across the sunny yard toward the orange grove, where golden fruit hung amid a mound of snowy, scented blossoms.
That night he slept as soundly as he had slept when a boy; and all day long he lounged on the veranda, soaking in sunshine, basking in the perfumed silence, conscious of a balm invading mind and body, realizing that a healing process was beginning.
He became aware, too — and it profoundly surprised him — that he was no longer worrying about his business — not even thinking of it half the time.
And by the end of the week he had ceased to think about it at all, except sporadically. And then the very idea of it bored him.
It was the stillest, calmest, sunniest, and most tranquil week in all his life. Nobody made demands on his attention; his bruised nerves and mind no longer shrank from sound; voices and movement he no longer dreaded.
Darrel read most of the time; Jessie remained noiselessly busy about her housework until noon, then chatted unconcernedly with both men or picked up a book or her sewing.
In the afternoon she usually went off somewhere, sometimes on horseback, followed by three nondescript dogs. After such absences they usually had game for dinner, quail or wild duck — once a wild turkey, once venison.
But the girl made so little of her success, deprecating any wonder or praise from Burke, that he never could learn the incidents of the chase — incidents dear to the average man — precious as memories, doubly precious as material for such hunting yams as the best of us spin — our chiefest glory and our chiefest sin.
“You killed that turkey on the wing?” repeated Burke.
“Yes.”
“With a rifle!”
“Yes.”
“That’s wonderful! Tell me exactly how—”
“He flew over me. That is all.”
“But wasn’t it a proud and thrilling moment for you when that great and magnificent wild bird came tumbling earthward out of a sapphire sky—”
“He looked like a tame turkey,” she said, laughing; “and anybody could have shot him. Will you have some more com pone, Mr. Burke?”
The Sea Cow was due in a day or two, and Burke had decided to go home. When he told Jessie she merely nodded and smiled, which worried Burke enormously.
“Darrel,” he said, that same day, after Jessie had ridden off without either rifle or dogs, presumably on a quest for wild orange stock, “what is land worth around here?”
Darrel laughed and told him.
“How many acres have you?”
Darrel told him.
“I suppose,” said the younger man thoughtfully, “I could pick up enough around here for a fruit ranch.”
“I suppose you could, without the slightest difficulty,” replied the other, smiling; “but I imagine it’s about the last thing in the world you would ever think of doing, or care to do if you ever did think of it.”
