Complete weird tales of.., p.476
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 476
“Please tell me all you can, Duane, for I am most unhappy.”
“The house is very still and full of sunlight and cut flowers. Scott is meditating great deeds, lying flat in the dirt. Kathleen sits watching him from the parapet. And I am here in the library, with that ghastly book at my elbow, pouring out all my doubts and fears to the only man in the world — whom God bless and protect wherever he may be — Oh, Duane, Duane, how I love you!”
She hurriedly directed and sealed the letter and placed it in the box for outgoing mail; then, unquiet and apprehensive regarding what she had ventured to write, she began a restless tour of the house, upstairs and down, wandering aimlessly through sunny corridors, opening doors for a brief survey of chambers in which only the shadow-patterns of leaves moved on sunlit walls; still rooms tenanted only by the carefully dusted furniture which seemed to stand there watching attentively for another guest.
Duane had left his pipe in his bedroom. She was silly over it, even to the point of retiring into her room, shredding some cigarettes, filling the rather rank bowl, and trying her best to smoke it. But such devotion was beyond her physical powers; she rinsed her mouth, furious at being defeated in her pious intentions, and, making an attractive parcel of the pipe, seized the occasion to write him another letter.
“There is in my heart,” she wrote, “no room for anything except you; no desire except for you; no hope, no interest that is not yours. You praise my beauty; you endow me with what you might wish I really possessed; and oh, I really am so humble at your feet, if you only knew it! So dazed by your goodness to me, so grateful, so happy that you have chosen me (I just jumped up to look at myself in the mirror; I am pretty, Duane, I’ve a stunning colour just now and there is a certain charm about me — even I can see it in what you call the upcurled corners of my mouth, and in my figure and hands) — and I am so happy that it is true — that you find me beautiful, that you care for my beauty.... It is so with a man, I believe; and a girl wishes to have him love her beauty, too.
“But, Duane, I don’t think the average girl cares very much about that in a man. Of course you are exceedingly nice to look at, and I notice it sometimes, but not nearly as often as you notice what you think is externally attractive about me.
“In my heart, I don’t believe it really matters much to a girl what a man looks like; anyway, it matters very little after she once knows him.
“Of course women do notice handsome men — or what we consider handsome — which is, I believe, not at all what men care for; because men usually seem to have a desire to kick the man whom women find good-looking. I know several men who feel that way about Jack Dysart. I think you do, for one.
“Poor Jack Dysart! To-day’s papers are saying such horridly unpleasant things about the rich men with whom he was rather closely associated in business affairs several years ago. I read, but I do not entirely comprehend.
“The New York papers seem unusually gloomy this summer; nothing but predictions of hard times coming, and how many corporations the attorney-general is going to proceed against, and wicked people who loot metropolitan railways, and why the district-attorney doesn’t do his duty — which you say he does — oh, dear; I expect that Scott and Kathleen and I will have to take in boarders this winter; but if nobody has any money, nobody can pay board, so everybody will be ruined and I don’t very much care, for I could teach school, only who is to pay my salary if there’s no money to pay it with? Oh, dear! what nonsense I am writing — only to keep on writing, because it seems to bring you a little nearer — my own — my Duane — my comrade — the same, same little boy who ran away from his nurse and came into our garden to fight my brother and — fall in love with his sister! Oh, Fate! Oh, Destiny! Oh, Duane Mallett!
“Here is a curious phenomenon. Listen:
“Away from you I have a woman’s courage to tell you how I long for you, how my heart and my arms ache for you. But when I am with you I’m less of a woman and more of a girl — a girl not yet accustomed to some things — always guarded, always a little reticent, always instinctively recoiling from the contact I really like, always a little on the defensive against your lips, in spite of myself — against your arms — where, somehow, I cannot seem to stay long at a time — will not endure it — cannot, somehow.
“Yet, here, away from you, I so long for your embrace, and cannot imagine it too long, too close, too tender to satisfy my need of you.
“And this is my second letter to you within the hour — one hour after your departure.
“Oh, Duane, I do truly miss you so! I go about humming that air you found so quaint:
“‘Lisetto quittée la plaine,
Moi perdi bonheur à moi —
Yeux à moi semblent fontaine
Depuis moi pas miré toi!’
and there’s a tear in every note of it, and I’m the most lonely girl on the face of the earth to-day.
“Geraldine Qui Pleure.”
“P.S. — Voici votre pipe, Monsieur!”
* * *
CHAPTER XIV. THE PROPHETS
AUGUST IN TOWN found an unusual number of New York men at the clubs, at the restaurants, at the summer theatres. Men who very seldom shoved their noses inside the metropolitan oven during the summer baking were now to be met everywhere and anywhere within the financial district and without. The sky-perched and magnificent down-town “clubs” were full of men who under normal circumstances would have remained at Newport, Lenox, Bar Harbor, or who at least would have spent the greater portion of the summer on their yachts or their Long Island estates.
And in every man’s hand or pocket was a newspaper.
They were scarcely worth reading for mere pleasure, these New York newspapers; indeed, there was scarcely anything in them to read except a daily record of the steady decline in securities of every description; paragraphs noting the passing of dividends; columns setting forth minutely the opinions of very wealthy men concerning the business outlook; chronicles in detail of suits brought against railroads and against great industrial corporations; accounts of inquiries by State and by Federal authorities into combinations resulting in an alleged violation of various laws.
Here and there a failure of some bucket-branded broker was noted — the reports echoing like the first dropping shots along the firing line.
Even to the most casual and uninterested outsider it was evident that already the metropolis was under a tension; that the tension was increasing almost imperceptibly day by day; that there seemed to be no very clear idea as to the reason of it, only a confused apprehension, an apparently unreassuring fear of some grotesque danger ahead, which daily reading of the newspapers was not at all calculated to allay.
Of course there were precise reasons for impending trouble given and reiterated by those amateurs of finance and politics whose opinions are at the disposal of the newspaper-reading public.
Prolixity characterised these solemn utterances, packed full of cant phrases such as “undigested securities” and “the treacherous attack on the nation’s integrity.”
Two principal reasons were given for the local financial uneasiness; and the one made the other ridiculous — first, that the nation’s Executive was mad as Nero and had deliberately begun a senseless holocaust involving the entire nation; the other that a “panic” was due, anyway. It resembled the logic of the White Queen of immortal memory, who began screaming before she pricked her finger in order to save herself any emotion after the pin had drawn blood.
Men knew in their hearts that there was no real reason for impending trouble; that this menace was an unreal thing, intangible, without substance — only a shadow cast by their own assininity.
Yet shadows can be made real property when authority so ordains. Because there was once a man with a donkey who met a stranger in the desert.
The stranger bargained for and bought the donkey; the late owner shoved the shekels into his ample pockets and sat down in the mule’s shadow to escape the sun; and the new owner brought suit to recover the rent due him for the occupation of the shadow cast by his donkey.
There was also a mule which waited seven years to kick.
There are asses and mules and all sorts of shadows. The ordinance of authority can affect only the shadow; the substance is immutable.
Among other serious gentlemen of consideration and means who had been unaccustomed to haunt the metropolis in the dog days was Colonel Alexander Mallett, President of the Half Moon Trust Company, and incidentally Duane’s father.
His town-house was still open, although his wife and daughter were in the country. To it, in the comparative cool of the August evenings, came figures familiar in financial circles; such men as Magnelius Grandcourt, father of Delancy; and Remsen Tappan, and James Cray.
Others came and went, men of whom Duane had read in the newspapers — very great men who dressed very simply, very powerful men who dressed elaborately; and some were young and red-faced with high living, and one was damp of hair and long-nosed, with eyes set a trifle too close together; and one fulfilled every external requisite for a “good fellow”; and another was very old, very white, with a nut-cracker jaw and faded eyes, blue as an unweaned pup’s, and a cream-coloured wig curled glossily over waxen ears and a bloodless and furrowed neck.
All these were very great men; but they and Colonel Mallett journeyed at intervals into the presence of a greater man who inhabited, all alone, except for a crew of a hundred men, an enormous yacht, usually at anchor off the white masonry cliffs of the seething city.
All alone this very great man inhabited the huge white steamer; and they piped him fore and they piped him aft and they piped him over the side. Many a midnight star looked down at the glowing end of his black cigar; many a dawn shrilled with his boatswain’s whistle. He was a very, very great man; none was greater in New York town.
It was said of him that he once killed a pompous statesman — by ridicule:
“I know who you are!” panted a ragged urchin, gazing up in awe as the famous statesman approached his waiting carriage.
“And who am I, my little man?”
“You are the great senator from New York.”
“Yes — you are right. But” — and he solemnly pointed his gloved forefinger toward heaven— “but, remember, there is One even greater than I.”
Duane had heard the absurd lampoon as a child, and one evening late in August, smoking his after-dinner cigar beside his father in the empty conservatory, he recalled the story, which had been one of his father’s favorites.
But Colonel Mallett scarcely smiled, scarcely heard; and his son watched him furtively. The trim, elastic figure was less upright this summer; the close gray hair and cavalry mustache had turned white very rapidly since spring. For the first time, too, in all his life, Colonel Mallett wore spectacles; and the thin gold rims irritated his ears and the delicate bridge of his nose. Under his pleasant eyes the fine skin had darkened noticeably; thin new lines had sprung downward from the nostrils’ clean-cut wings; but the most noticeable change was in his hands, which were no longer firm and fairly smooth, but were now the hands of an old man, restless if not tremulous, unsteady in handling the cigar which, unnoticed, had gone out.
They — father and son — had never been very intimate. An excellent understanding had always existed between them with nothing deeper in it than a natural affection and an instinctive respect for each other’s privacy.
This respect now oppressed Duane because long habit, and the understood pact, seemed to bar him from a sympathy and a practical affection which, for the first time, it seemed to him his father might care for.
That his father was worried was plain enough; but how anxious and with how much reason, he had hesitated to ask, waiting for some voluntary admission, or at least some opening, which the older man never gave.
That night, however, he had tried an opening for himself, offering the old stock story which had always, heretofore, amused his father. And there had been no response.
In silence he thought the matter over; his sympathy was always quick; it hurt him to remain aloof when there might be a chance that he could help a little.
“It may amuse you,” he said carelessly, “to know how much I’ve made since I came back from Paris.”
The elder man looked up preoccupied. His son went on:
“What you set aside for me brings me ten thousand a year, you know. So far I haven’t touched it. Isn’t that pretty good for a start?”
Colonel Mallett sat up straighter with a glimmer of interest in his eyes.
Duane went on, checking off on his fingers:
“I got fifteen hundred for Mrs. Varick’s portrait, the same for Mrs. James Cray’s, a thousand each for portraits of Carl and Friedrich Gumble; that makes five thousand. Then I had three thousand for the music-room I did for Mrs. Ellis; and Dinklespiel Brothers, who handle my pictures, have sold every one I sent; which gives me twelve thousand so far.”
“I am perfectly astonished,” murmured his father.
Duane laughed. “Oh, I know very well that sheer merit had nothing much to do with it. The people who gave me orders are all your friends. They did it as they might have sent in wedding presents; I am your son; I come back from Paris; it’s up to them to do something. They’ve done it — those who ever will, I expect — and from now on it will be different.”
“They’ve given you a start,” said his father.
“They certainly have done that. Many a brilliant young fellow, with more ability than I, eats out his heart unrecognised, sterilised for lack of what came to me because of your influence.”
“It is well to look at it in that way for the present,” said his father. He sat silent for a while, staring through the dusk at the lighted windows of houses in the rear. Then:
“I have meant to say, Duane, that I — we” — he found a little difficulty in choosing his words— “that the Trust Company’s officers feel that, for the present, it is best for them to reconsider their offer that you should undertake the mural decoration of the new building.”
“Oh,” said Duane, “I’m sorry! — but it’s all right, father.”
“I told them you’d take it without offence. I told them that I’d tell you the reason we do not feel quite ready to incur, at this moment, any additional expenses.”
“Everybody is economising,” said Duane cheerfully, “so I understand. No doubt — later — —”
“No doubt,” said his father gravely.
The son’s attitude was careless, untroubled; he dropped one long leg over the other knee, and idly examining his cigar, cast one swift level look at the older man:
“Father?”
“Yes, my son.”
“I — it just occurred to me that if you happen to have any temporary use for what you very generously set aside for me, don’t stand on ceremony.”
There ensued a long silence. It was his bedtime when Colonel Mallett stirred in his holland-covered armchair and stood up.
“Thank you, my son,” he said simply; they shook hands and separated; the father to sleep, if he could; the son to go out into the summer night, walk to his nearest club, and write his daily letter to the woman he loved:
“Dear, it is not at all bad in town — not that murderous, humid heat that you think I’m up against; and you must stop reproaching yourself for enjoying the delicious breezes in the Adirondacks. Women don’t know what a jolly time men have in town. Follows the chronical of this August day:
“I had your letter; that is breeze enough for me; it was all full of blue sky and big white clouds and the scent of Adirondack pines. Isn’t it jolly for you and Kathleen to be at the Varicks’ camp! And what a jolly crowd you’ve run into.
“I note what you say about your return to the Berkshires, and that you expect to be at Berkshire Pass Inn with the motor on Monday. Give my love to Naïda; I know you three and young Montross will have a bully tour through the hill country.
“I also note your red-pencil cross at the top of the page — which always gives me, as soon as I open a letter of yours, the assurance that all is still well with you and that victory still remains with you. Thank God! Stand steady, little girl, for the shadows are flying and the dawn is ours.
“After your letter, breakfast with father — a rather silent one. Then he went down-town in his car and I walked to the studio. It’s one of those stable-like studios which decorate the cross-streets in the 50’s, but big enough to work in.
“A rather bothersome bit of news: the Trust Company reconsiders its commission; and I have three lunettes and three big mural panels practically completed. For a while I’ll admit I had the blues, but, after all, some day the Trust Company is likely to take up the thing again and give me the commission. Anyway, I’ve had a corking time doing the things, and lots of valuable practice in handling a big job and covering large surfaces; and the problem has been most exciting and interesting because, you see, I’ve had to solve it, taking into consideration the architecture and certain fixed keys and standards, such as the local colour and texture of the marble and the limitations of the light area. Don’t turn up your pretty nose; it’s all very interesting.
