Complete weird tales of.., p.1348
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1348
“Yes,” said Gray, smiling, “it’s the Sphinx Iris that brings me into Inca County.”
The Doctor, in his soiled linen clothes, crossed one leg over the other, relighted his half-burnt cheroot, wiped his brow with a snuffy handkerchief, and glanced ironically at Gray.
“Let me tell you something,” he said; “I gave up practice many years ago and came down here with my little daughter. I’ve been here ever since, and in all those years I have never seen this legendary and marvellous Sphinx Iris; I have never heard of anybody seeing it. And there are plenty of magnolia trees here, too — forests of them.” He hunched up over his specimen boxes again with a shrug of disdain. “The only reason for believing that the Sphinx Iris ever existed is the single specimen in the National Museum, reputed to have been taken in this vicinity nearly sixty years ago by a German named von Allerdings. That’s the label on it. Nobody knows anything further; nobody knows whether it was labelled by mistake, whether von Allerdings ever even saw the specimen, whether it came from America, or Europe, or Asia, or Australia.”
“The writing on the label seems to resemble von Allerdings’ writing,” said Gray, diffidently.
“I’ve heard that, too; but von Allerdings never men-, tioned the Sphinx Iris in any of his notebooks.”
“He died within a few days of the alleged date of capture.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that, also. But if you want to know my opinion, I think Sphinx Iris is an exceedingly rare moth from some still unexplored region south of us — say Venezuela or Brazil. It may have been carried here in some high, swift, air current; or maybe von Allerdings got it on the Amazon from some Indian. But I don’t believe it is native in this region; I don’t believe it was hatched here; that the caterpillar feeds on the magnolia — in fact, I haven’t any faith in anything concerning that moth. You’ve got to show me, young man.”
Gray laughed:
“I’d be delighted to show you, Doctor. I’m going to try to show somebody.”
“Huh! And you came all the way down here for that!”
“Certainly.”
“Just because of an old and yellow label stuck on a pin under a moth which nobody knows anything about!”
“That’s the reason.... It’s a good sporting proposition.”
“Science isn’t sport,” remarked the Doctor drily.
“No; but don’t you think a scientist ought to have a lively imagination — under perfect control, of course?”
“No, I don’t. All I want to imagine is what I see under my nose. All I believe is what I can prove. Anything else,” he grunted, “doesn’t concern me — doesn’t interest me.”
Gray said pleasantly:
“It’s different with me. The mere reading of that old, yellow label pinned under an unknown moth was an inspiration to me — a defiance — the most exciting challenge to intelligence and enterprise that I can conceive.”
“The trouble with modern scientists,” growled the Doctor, “is that they’re too picturesque. Nothing excites me unless red ants or dermestes beetles get into my collection.”
Gray laughed.
“We’re alike in that respect,” he said. “But really, Doctor, don’t you think that what is written on that old label is intensely interesting? Here it is; I made a transcript—” He pulled out his notebook, unstrapped it, turned rapidly to the desired page, and held it out for the Doctor to peruse. Which that gentleman did, scowling:
Sphinx moth, female, believed to be undescribed, taken near Iris Creek, southern Florida, April 1st, 1854, while depositing her eggs on a magnolia leaf — eggs proving sterile. Dr von Allerdings suggests the name, Xylophanes iris.
“The writing,” repeated Gray, “is very generally conceded to be in Dr von Allerdings’ hand.”
“You said that. It doesn’t impress me,” returned Dr. Stevens. “Anyhow, it’s your affair. I suppose you have a month’s vacation, and if you choose to spend it looking around here for a moth that never existed in this region, why, go ahead!” He waved his hand with a flourish, and pinned another specimen.
“Yes,” said Gray, “I think I’ll go ahead.... Thank you, anyway, for warning me. No doubt you are right. But I’ll just wander about a bit—” He rose, readjusted his pack, picked up his gun, and said good-bye very pleasantly.
“Stop!” grunted the other. Gray halted and turned inquiringly.
“There’s plenty of room for you here.”
“Oh. Thank you, but I’ve been camping and I don’t mind it—”
“Well, I do! These are my woods. Everything’s mine, as far as you can ride in any direction between sunrise and sunset. And I don’t propose to have anybody camping on my land when I’ve a roof and a bed to offer them.”
Gray began to laugh, and he came back slowly to the porch.
“You’re very kind, Doctor. Of course — if you feel that way about it—”
“I do.”
“That is very hospitable. I’ll be glad to make your house my headquarters.”
The Doctor nodded:
“You won’t be in our way. There’s only myself and my daughter Celia. And a few negroes. Take us as you find us. We don’t keep up any style. My income doesn’t amount to anything—” he waved his expressive and soiled hand, “but things grow here — enough for us to eat.... And Celia makes pin money out of her wild hogs. We get along — get along—” he rambled on absently, examining a superb specimen of Papilio daunus which required a bath of naphtha.
Gray loosened the straps of his pack and let it fall.
Presently the Doctor noticed this, fished out a whistle from his coat pocket, and blew it noisily. Ten minutes later a lazy negro shuffled out of the house.
“Take Mr. Gray’s things, and give him a room,” said the Doctor, absently, still engrossed in his examination of Papilio daunus.
So Gray followed the negro into the house and down a hallway to the right, where he was shown into a room adorned with extremely simple and inartistic furniture.
As soon as he sat down on the iron bed he knew that the mattress was stuffed with Spanish moss. But, until that night, he did not know that several pine cones and assorted twigs had been included in the moss.
For a while he watched the blue-tail lizards scampering over wall and ceiling. A chestnut-coloured scorpion sidled coyly from a crack in the wall, and Gray transfixed him with his penknife and cast him into the slop jar.
His surroundings did not cheer him — the shabbiness, the neglect — the fat, untidy doctor with his soiled person and his obstinate and academic attitude toward everything — all these began to superinduce something resembling gloom.
Young, ardent, alert, burning to distinguish himself in special research, Gray had come to spend his vacation in a quest that had already lured and disheartened hundreds of his brother entomologists.
He had scarcely dared hope for results; he was prepared for failure; yet, somehow, the wet blanket so ponderously spread upon the entire enterprise by the Doctor depressed him.
And, as he sat there on his iron bed, he thought of the magnificent moth he had come to hunt for, the wonderful Xylophanes iris.
The only specimen known was a huge creature measuring a little more than eleven inches from tip to tip — a giant among the sphingida — a monstrous, bird-like creature.
As for its colouring, it was incredibly magnificent: a broad, metallic gold band, edged with coppery green, crossed midway both wings: the remainder of the wing surface was a metallic and iridescent blue, shading to violet; and head, thorax, and abdomen glittered in peacock hues like the dazzling plumage of a humming-bird.
The legs of the moth were crimson.
And, as he sat there, there came from the passageway outside the jingle of spurred heels — a sweet, gay, cheerful young voice inquiring:
“Where did you put the gentleman, Scipio?” And the next moment a young girl in ragged riding clothing and spurs came into his room like a breeze.
“Oh, there you are! How do you do!” offering her hand. “Don’t get up! I’ll sit here beside you; I’m Celia Stevens. So you came down to look for that big sphinx moth? Father told me just now. Oh, there have been others here on the same business — mostly old men. Father told me you were young, so I came in to talk to you.”
“I’m very glad you did,” said Gray, smiling down his astonishment at her unannounced and very unconventional entrance.
“Yes, I’m glad, too. There are not any men of my own age here — I’ve only seen a few in all my life. Are you going to be very busy, Mr. Gray? Too busy to go about with me?”
She took his breath away with her charming directness of appeal, but he managed to say that he would not be unduly occupied, and that he looked forward to their future acquaintance.
“Oh, it will be more than acquaintance, I hope,” she said. “It will be friendship, I am sure. As for me, I’m just dying for a friendship with somebody. Do you think you’ll like me?”
“V-very much,” he said, bewildered and mentally blown about by this fresh and fragrant young hurricane that had suddenly invaded his rather unaired privacy — and was now sweeping him as a strong sweet wind sweeps a chamber too long unventilated.
“Well,” she concluded, after a serious inspection of him, “I’m perfectly sure I shall like you. How old are you?”
“I? Well, I’m about twenty-six, I believe,” he admitted, bracing himself mentally for the next assault upon convention.
“I’m nineteen. I’ve lived here sixteen years. Father taught me; I’ve never been to school. I’ve never been anywhere except once to Fort Coquina. There was a young man there. I was dying to bring him back here with me — he was the first I had ever seen — but he behaved very oddly when I asked him to come, and afterward I found that he was married.... Are you?”
“N-no.”
“After all, I don’t see why he couldn’t have come over to visit us and go about with me. I didn’t care whether he was married.”
“Perhaps his wife objected,” suggested Gray, laughing.
“I don’t see why she should. He was hers. All I wanted was to go about with him,” she said, frowning.
She looked down at her riding boots, crossed them, looked up at him, and instantly the sweet, direct, engaging smile broke out again.
“The main thing,” she said, “is to have a friend. It’s a wonderful thing to have a friend — a young one, I mean. But only entomologists ever come here, and they’re all rather too old for friendship. You’re the first young one I’ve ever seen.... Tell me” — leaning frankly nearer and looking very wistfully into his face— “do you think you’ll like me?”
“I do now!” he said, confused and touched by her candour.
She jumped up with a gay little laugh:
“I thought I’d make you like me. I shall try every minute. What would you like to do now?”
She stood waiting as some slender, beautiful dog awaits impatiently the purpose of its friend and master, challenging him to anything with its eyes.
“Where have you come from?” he asked, looking at her shabby boy’s riding clothes and boots.
“I’ve been riding herd.”
“What?”
“Don’t you know?”
He shook his head.
“Then come,” she said impatiently, extending her slim hand, “I’ll tell you about it in the woods. We’ll go out into the woods and look about for your moth; and while we’re looking I’ll tell you about my hogs.”
He put on his shooting cap, slung a collecting box over his shoulder, pocketed a big cyanide jar and a folding net, and turned to find his welcome sparkling in her clear, grey eyes.
“Father,” she said, as they passed the Doctor on the veranda, “I’ve surely got to kill Ole Hawg. He caught a doe last night, down by Iris Creek, and tore her to bits; and that’s the third deer this month.”
“Look sharp that Ole Hawg doesn’t cut up your horse — and you too,” said her father. “You get a big boar like that on the rampage and he’ll tackle an elephant if he’s cornered.”
“I’ll go after him with Mr. Gray,” she said. “There’ll be a branding this week. I don’t want those Long Lagoon crackers to drive any more wild pigs over the line. And when we ride herd I’ll take Mr. Gray and we’ll hunt Ole Hawg and kill him. Shall we?” — turning to Gray.
“Certainly,” said the young man, laughing, “but I don’t understand what is going to be done, and I don’t know what you mean by Ole Hawg.”
He included the Doctor in his humorous appeal, but the latter had hunched up over a bowl of naphtha, in which he was giying Papilio daunus a bath.
Gray was inclined to watch the proceedings, haying had experience in degreasing specimens, but a soft and sudden possession of his hand advised him that his youthful friend was impatient; and he turned away with her, shoulder to shoulder, down the steps across the scrubby clearing, and into the woods.
There was no path, and little undergrowth except on hammock land and along water courses.
Huge trees towered above them — both kinds of oak, hickory, palmetto, giant magnolias, pines, gum trees. Everywhere birds flitted; everywhere butterflies were flying through the alternate bands of sunlight and shadow. Lizards careered over the dead leaves and raced up trees, chasing one another round and round the trunk.
“It all looks very wonderful to me,” said Gray to his slender companion: “I left Washington in a flurry of snow last week.”
“Snow,” she repeated. “I should like to see it — see it falling — see the world white and cool with it.”
“You’ll go north some day?”
“I don’t know how I am to get there. We haven’t any money at all, you know — except a very little that father has, and what I can earn by rounding up wild hogs for the smokehouse.”
He said laughingly:
“You’ll go North some day, somehow — even if you have to marry a Yankee to do it.”
“Marry? I?” She forced a smile. “Pretty girls in silks and jewels and laces marry. Look at me, Mr. Gray.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “I am not wearing evening dress in these woods, am I?”
“But you have it to wear.” She looked out into the forest vista, and her grey eyes became serious and remote. “What a delightful place the outside world must be,” she said, “cities, people, steamboats, music, lights at night everywhere — I saw electric lights at Fort Coquina—”
She checked herself abruptly: there came a sudden rustle among the dead leaves in the close-grown hammock — a scurry among the saw-palmettos.
“Silence,” she motioned, “I want to see.” And, one small hand resting lightly on his arm to keep him in his place, she leaned quietly forward, peering into the thicket. Minute after minute she stood there, motionless. And at last, from the tangle, came a questioning grunt.
“Wild pigs,” she whispered, “yearlings. Look!”
Then he saw three good-sized, shaggy beasts come out into an open space — black, wild looking, heavily furred with thick, coarse hair. And he could see no difference between these razorbacks and the wild boar of the Old World.
Suddenly their round, furry ears were pricked forward; they stood at gaze for a moment, then with savage grunts they wheeled and scrambled back into the hammock, crashing away through palmetto scrub and brier patch.
“Unbranded,” she said. “Anybody can shoot them. I’ll have to try to put our brand on those yearlings this week or the crackers north of our line will surely rope or shoot them.”
“But how do you catch them to brand them?” he asked curiously.
“Oh, I get my niggers and the dogs and then we ride them down and rope them.”
“Ride down those wiry beasts? Why, they run like rabbits! I should think it would take some riding to overtake them.”
“It does. They get into such terrible places — swamps and branches and brier swales.”
“Is it safe work for you?” he asked.
“Safe? Oh, yes.”
“But a headlong gallop through these woods is not what I’d call exactly safe. Besides, they’re certainly surly and fierce looking brutes.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t do to let a tusker catch you — or a big wild sow with pigs. She’d tear you to pieces with her teeth, even if she has no tusks.”
“Then it isn’t safe,” he insisted.
“Yes, it is. I don’t propose to let any sow or boar catch me!” she retorted, laughing. “That’s why I’m going after Ole Hawg tomorrow.”
“Ole Hawg?”
“That’s what we call him in the forest. He’s a very big grey boar — almost as big as a hammock bear — and as shaggy as a goat. He’s so old — that’s why he’s grey — and his tusks! Why, the lower pair flare out like curved knives, and the upper pair almost meet over his bristly nose. And he’s a devil, Mr. Gray. He goes alone — everything is afraid of him — he’d kill anything, or try to. That’s why I want to get him out of the way.”
After a moment he said:
“Does your father approve of your hunting such a beast as this?”
“Approve?” She laughed. “I am not a child.”
“I know. But a creature like that is very dangerous.” She halted, turned to him gaily:
“The best sport is in going after something you’re a little afraid of,” she said. “My first panther scared me badly. So did my first bear. Even my first wildcat gave me buck fever. I missed him. But I think I’ll shoot straight at Ole Hawg.... Especially if you are near me.”
“I shall be near,” he said gravely, Without any apparent reason a lump had come into his throat. He swallowed in silence and walked on beside her.
“It’s a curious thing, friendship, isn’t it?” she mused, slipping one arm under his and holding to his sleeve as she walked. “Just this morning I was thinking how many friends I had — the dogs, the horses, my hens and ducks and turkeys — and Scipio and Rosa. And still I seemed to be so lonely.... But now — that I have you, too — it all seems perfect.... Do you feel that way, too?”
“Of course I do,” he replied cordially, conscious again of the threatening lump in his throat.
