Complete weird tales of.., p.1340
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1340
“Why?”
“You’re not that sort. You belong in town. You’d never be happy away from New York.”
After a moment’s silence Burke turned and looked Darrel straight in the eyes.
“You are not happy here, either,” he said calmly. Darrel flushed, sustaining his cool scrutiny. Then, like a good sportsman who knows he has lost, he said very quietly:
“No, I am not happy.”
“You’re homesick.”
“I think I am.”
“For New York.”
Darrel nodded.
“I knew it was a bluff,” said Burke. “You pretend to be happy on your daughter’s account.”
“Yes.”
“And you really think she’s contented here?” Darrel’s flush deepened; he looked at Burke in a startled, distressed way:
“She says she is contented. Have you any reason to believe otherwise?”
“She is eating her heart out. And so are you, Darrel. What’s bred in the bone remains until the bones are buried. Don’t tell me; I know. Medicine may help the sick, but it sickens the well. This place is medicine — good medicine. I’m enjoying it. When I get well I’ll want to go. You and your daughter have had your treatment. You’re well; she never was ill. You want to go and you can’t. And this overdosing with silence and sunshine and God’s own country is killing you both by inches. Am I right, Darrel?”
The elder man made no answer.
“What I want to do is this,” continued Burke. “I want you to put in your acreage with as much more that I shall buy, and make out of this place a fruit ranch second to none in the country.
“I’ll finance it: we’ll find the proper people to run it. Then let us come here in the winter and enjoy it and play with it until we’re tired; and then let us go back to town in God’s name!”
Darrel sat trembling in his chair, looking down, picking aimlessly at the light shawl that lay across his knees.
“It’s a cinch,” said Burke. “Are you in?”
No answer.
“Is it a go?”
“I can’t take — your money.”
“I guess I took yours, five years ago — and never knew it — never gave it a thought. Besides — with God’s help — I’m going to take everything you have left in the world — if I can.”
Darrel lifted his eyes and looked steadily at the younger man.
“Do you think there’s any chance for me?” asked Burke. “I never before loved a woman.... Do you think there’s any chance?”
“You might try,” said Darrel quietly.
Late that afternoon, Burke, still speaking of Jessie, mentioned the brace of heavy pistols she wore; and Darrel said gravely:
“White women need such safeguards down here.” Which gave Burke a sickly internal shock: and a few minutes later he looked at his watch: and repeated the inspection a little later.
Darrel was now dozing in his big chair: Jessie had not yet returned: and Burke, restless, and scarcely knowing why, took his shotgun and went out to the barn.
The three dogs came up, wagging and sniffling; he turned, looked out into the park-like expanse of flat-woods, then, seized with sudden nervousness, he called to Mose to saddle a horse for him and do it quickly. Mose grinned from ear to ear, but hastened not at all.
“Which Way did Miss Darrel ride?” asked Burke, as the horse was at last brought around in shabby accoutrements and trappings.
“Miss Jessie ‘low she gwine ride de flat-woods, sah. Das whar de wil’ orange grow, yaas, sah. An’ I ‘spec’ she-all done tuk an’ rid to Owl Branch.”
“How far is it, Mose?”
“Fo’ mile, sah.”
“East?”
“Yaas, sah.”
“Trail?”
“Burnt grass trail, sah. Ef yo’ keeps de burnt grass aige on de p’int uv yo’ right shoulder, you is sholy gwine fotch up at Owl Branch, sah.”
Burke nodded from his saddle, half turned to whistle the dogs, shoved his shotgun into the worn leather boot, and shook out his bridle.
At a long, swinging lope, he rode into the flat-woods, where a turpentine orchard edged the cultivated land — groves of tall, scarred pines all but girdled — a pitiful, mutilated company.
Then in a few minutes the wilderness began — the beautiful flat-woods, where splendid trees dotted the park-like plain as though they had been set out there by some landscape gardener.
Eastward he cantered, the declining sun at his back, his horse’s long, blue shadow leading, until the velvet-black edge of the burnt grass appeared on his right.
Already, amid the ashes, tender new grass sprouts were springing up in tufts intensely green; bevy after bevy of quail whirred up and spread out across the horizon, steadily dwindling dots against the sky.
The hounds ran them; ran rabbits too, now and then, but, however far circling, they kept the cantering horse in view until a streak of brier and maple thicket, tall cypress tops, and a glimmer of silvery water revealed the course of Owl Branch. —
He rode along it, first north, then south, finding no sign of Jessie Darrel. He had now become exceedingly nervous; the low-hanging sun began to scare him; and he drove his horse at a gallop through the open “hammock,” looking anxiously in every direction.
There was a narrow crossing, but he had already overrun it; and it was only when he missed the hounds, drew bridle, and looked back, that he saw them huddling on the edge of the briers, snuffing the ground.
So he wheeled his horse and came galloping back. There was a narrow lane, no wider than a game trail, leading down through the bushes.
“Go on!” he cried huskily to the dogs. “Hie on! Forward! Get around there, you pups!” And, as he waved them on and followed, he saw in the mud her horse’s tracks.
Through a clear, shallow branch, swarming with bream and tiny pike, thrashed the dogs; after them splashed his horse, breasting the rough hammock and mounting it in a dozen bounds.
And here Burke whipped out his shotgun and fired both barrels in quick succession, then sat his saddle, motionless, scarcely breathing.
A year of growing fear amounting to terror passed with the dragging seconds; then, suddenly, from the forest on his left three shots came, distant and dull.
His shout to the dogs ended in a sob; he swung his horse and launched him headlong across the palmetto scrub. Once he was almost unseated and thrown as a rattlesnake buzzed and his horse bounded aside, but he clung to the saddle and to his shotgun, and drove on through the waning light of the woods.
The setting sun painted every tree trunk crimson, and stained the dead leaves with sombre red: ghosts of the water already floated in filmy cerements among the cypress; strange whistlings and squawks and croaks and the heavy rustle of great wings fanning above him marked some hidden heronry.
A moment later the dogs yelped hysterically and fled past him, outstripping his horse; and as he galloped into the more open woods he caught sight of her, standing beside her horse, the dogs leaping madly about her.
The reaction from his dread of the “black terror” had evidently altered his face, for as he rode up and dismounted, she came forward and gazed earnestly into his drawn and pallid visage.
“What is it?” she asked. “Has anything happened to father?”
He shook his head, unable to speak for the moment.
“What is the matter?” she repeated. “I heard your shots, and I answered them. Is there anything wrong, Mr. Burke?”
“No. Is there anything wrong with you? You are all over dead leaves and you have been crying! Did your horse throw you?”
“No.”
She looked at him, bewildered; more bewildered still when he took her hands and pressed his lips to them, crushing them in silence. And she could feel the muscles of his face working.
“Tell me,” she faltered, “what has happened — to make you look at me like that?”
“Nothing. Why have you been crying?”
“I don’t know — exactly.... Why did you follow me out here?”
“I don’t know what possessed me to follow you — what made me so anxious — worried—”
“Anxious? About what?”
“Your father mentioned the reason that you went armed.... And — it was getting late—”
“Was it for me you were afraid?” she asked, amazed. “Oh God, yes!” he broke out: “I couldn’t stand it — I can never stand it again — to know you are out here alone — alone — and the black peril always to be reckoned with — and the sun going down — in such a land as this! — and you out in it — somewhere — alone—”
“Mr. Burke—”
“I can’t stand it, Jessie! — I — what’s the use of my telling you I love you — worship you — that since I’ve known you I’ve never had any thought except for you — you lovely, wonderful thing! — you’ve got to care for me. — Can’t you, dear? You must! Forgive me — I don’t know what I’m saying: I’m very humble; I’m begging for your regard — just a little bit of your friendship to begin — I’m totally at your mercy — but I’ll never, never let you go! — Please — please overlook my b-bad manners and my violence, because I’m really afraid of you — only I’m more afraid of losing you — I don’t know what I’m saying! When a plain business man is — is in love under circumstances — like these — it — it knocks him down and out — it does, indeed.”
Her bewilderment had become a flushed silence; her brown eyes had met and sustained his gaze to the limit of endurance.
Now, though he still retained her hands in a grip that might have hurt anybody except a girl too excited, too deeply moved to heed mere physical pain, she had lowered her brown eyes, her head, too; and she stood very straight and still there in the last level rays of the setting sun.
Presently she spoke with an effort, still looking down: “So you came here — on my account — afraid for me.”
“I suppose,” he said, chagrined, “that I made a donkey of myself.”
But his expression altered swiftly when she looked up. There were tears in her eyes and her lips quivered. “It was dear of you to come,” she said.
“Jessie!”
“You knew that I cared for you. Didn’t you? I began to do it within the very hour I saw you first.... And I was afraid I’d show it Because I — I knew it was in my voice, in my eyes, in everything I said or thought or did....”
“Jessie! Jessie! I never even dreamed it!”
“Didn’t you? Father did. Mose and Venus knew it. I believe the dogs knew it — I am sure that Joseph did — and even the very forest trees seemed to know. Oh, I was afraid you’d know it, too! — but I was more afraid you wouldn’t.”
“My darling!”
“And I didn’t know what to do!” she murmured; “I didn’t know what to do about it — and that’s why I was sitting out here in the woods — trying to think — trying to think it out—”
“Dearest! Dearest!—”
“ — I had given you up. I was completely down and out when — you fired to signal me.”
He drew her close; she put both strong, young arms around his neck.
“You took your time about answering my signal,” he said, unsteadily.
“I could not seem to find my revolver.”
“Why not?”
“I was down and out — down on my knees, half blind with — with tears—”
“Doing what?”
“Asking God for you,” she said faintly.
“Dearest! Dearest! Was that your prayer?”
“Yes, my principal prayer.... I did pray for a home in New York,” she added naïvely.... “That was childish, wasn’t it?”
“Poor little heart that misses its nursery! You shall have it again, toys and all.”
“But if I am to live with you I don’t care where I live. Anywhere will be like New York to me — if I am to live with you.”
He said:
“Love is love; home is home. To combine them is to enter Paradise. I think I have found the key to it.”
“Paradise is wherever you take me,” she whispered. “And I shall take you home — back to New York. Because it is the nursery we both were born to, you and! It’s full of dust and draughts and broken toys — trash, junk, memories, and tarnished household gods. It’s shabby and old-fashioned, unsanitary, dingy, and worn out. But we miss it when we remain away too long. And our hearts know no peace until we are playing there once more with the old familiar and battered toys.”
“But your health — Reginald—”
He unclasped one arm and waved it defiantly at the evening sky:
“I had rather,” he said, “go crazy in New York than remain safe and sane and live to be a hundred anywhere else!”
“Dearest!”
“Not that I want to live there! No New Yorker wants to live there. All they want is to come back to town every two weeks to see whether it’s still there. And that’s all I want. And when you and I go back, and after we have remained there long enough to be sure the town is all right and is still going, we can always go away again for a few weeks — until it’s time to return and look it over again. That is all New York means to New Yorkers; but what it means is everything on earth.”
“Our nursery,” she sighed.
“With the dear phantoms that haunt it.”
She nodded, thinking of her mother. His eyes, too, had become remote and tender.
After a moment they looked at each other. And, divining his very thoughts, timidly, very sweetly, she offered her lips in her first kiss.
NUMBER SEVEN
HE SPELLED LITERATURE with a large L and loved to indulge in it as a profession.
There undoubtedly was about him a certain lack of sophistication which incited the ungodly to guy him.
Yet his personal appearance seemed to be normal enough, and rather nice, except when practicing his profession or talking about it. And he usually was engaged in one or the other pastime. But when he did these things, and particularly when he put on his large, moon-like writing spectacles, he instantly became a provocation to the mischievous. Besides, he was smooth-shaven, boyish, and rather pink — a fascinating temptation to the irreverent. But the irreverent sometimes get theirs.
Through the round lenses of his glasses his eyes, also, seemed very round and wide, and of a baby-blue colour, and they beamed with benevolence, mildness, receptiveness, and gentle enthusiasms. Which was sufficient to damn him.
Also, the clean-cut and decisive virility of his head and shoulders seemed to disappear utterly under the consecrated mantle of genius, and a sort of downy immaturity immediately softened and transfigured him when monkeying with his Muse; and at such moments he resembled the illustrations of “Verdant Green” in the early editions of that immortal volume.
Perhaps his only trouble was that he insisted on spelling literature with a large L, and took it and himself too ponderously. When he said very seriously, “I am writing a book,” it was as though Napoleon had remarked, “I am changing the map of Europe!” — there was so much of finality in the observation — and of pleasantly informal omniscience.
Possibly he had been too long about that book. For the mere threatened consummation of a book in these piping times of genius, when everybody from the attic to below stairs cherishes literary designs upon a wealthy and insatiable public, may have left his friends unawed and but very slightly impressed. Authors, at best, are not held in excessive esteem by really busy people, the general idea beings — which is usually true — that literature is a godsend to those unfitted for real work. But very few authors comprehend what is their status in a brutal, practical, and humorous world.
Smith did not appreciate this any more than do you and I; and he went about his profession with an innocent and cheerful sort of consecrated gravity that is to be encountered only in the sister professions, Music and the Drama.
Now, this same book of his had progressed sufficiently to combine with the characteristic noises of New York and give Smith several headaches.
To the traditions of his calling he was as faithful as a district leader to Tammany Hall: the beliefs and customs of the past guided him: a writer who went to his work as regularly and simply as a banker went to his bank was merely a sordid machine; inspiration and his Muse remained the only motives toward labour that Smith recognized — the only signals for him to kick in and get busy with literature.
And of all traditions of his art, the tyranny of environment clutched him most completely, and he devoutly believed in solitude as a stimulus to reflection and as a necessity when genius was in labour.
That is why, conscious of subtle premonitions, he went south and hunted about for some cozy obscurity where the expected progeny of his brain might be born far from the distracting racket of the metropolis. And somewhere down there he heard of Number Seven — a solitary fruit ranch on Sting-Ray Creek — and thither he proceeded after a short correspondence with one C. Weymouth, evidently the owner and proprietor of Number Seven.
And there is where he made a radical mistake if dignified peace and quiet undisturbed were what he was after. For C. Weymouth was not Charles, or Chester, or even Cæsar, as he had idly speculated, but her name was Cyrille, and she was golden-haired, golden-eyed, Greek built, and entirely capable of taking up her late father’s prosperous business, of introducing a dehydrating plant as an innovation, and of making it pay nearly three hundred percent.
Also, she had no reverence at all for authors; she was inclined to be humorous, whether busy or otherwise; she went about in a white serge long-skirted riding coat, riding breeches, a flat sun helmet, and tan puttees. And she rolled her own cigarettes.
About a dozen “houn’-dawgs” usually accompanied her. When they didn’t, they were inclined to mourn, her absence — another serious condition for Smith and his unborn book to cope with.
He tried the seclusion of his room: the clatter of the dehydrators, the constant, melodious chatter and laughter of the negro fruit dryers distracted his inspired attention. He tried working on the various verandas with which the house seemed to be infested: and the birds — blue jays, robins, warblers, red-bellied woodpeckers, and mocking birds — were noisier than the noisiest street in Manhattan Town.
