Complete weird tales of.., p.504
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 504
Only the unmarried triplets, Flavilla and Drusilla, remained amiably indifferent in the midst of all these family financial scurryings and preparations to secure world patents in a monopoly which promised the social regeneration of the globe.
The considerable independent fortunes that their mother had left them they invested in Green Mouse, at their father’s suggestion; but further than that they took no part in the affair.
For a while the hurry and bustle and secret family conferences mildly interested them. Very soon, however, the talk of psychic waves and millions bored them; and as soon as the villa at Oyster Bay was opened they were glad enough to go.
Here, at Oyster Bay, there was some chance of escaping their money-mad and wave-intoxicated family; they could entertain and be entertained by both of the younger sets in that dignified summer resort; they could wander about their own vast estate alone; they could play tennis, sail, swim, ride, and drive their tandem.
But best of all — for they were rather seriously inclined at the age of eighteen, or, rather, on the verge of nineteen — they adored sketching, in water colors, out of doors.
Scrubby forelands set with cedars, shadow-flecked paths under the scrub oak, meadows where water glimmered, white sails off Center Island and Cooper’s Bluff — Cooper’s Bluff from the north, northeast, east, southeast, south — this they painted with never-tiring, Pecksniffian patience, boxing the compass around it as enthusiastically as that immortal architect circumnavigated Salisbury Cathedral.
And one delicious morning in early June, when the dew sparkled on the poison ivy and the air was vibrant with the soft monotone of mosquitoes and the public road exhaled a delicate aroma of crude oil, Drusilla and Flavilla, laden with sketching-blocks, color-boxes, camp-stools, white umbrellas and bonbons, descended to the great hall, on sketching bent.
Mr. Carr also stood there, just outside on the porch, red, explosive, determined legs planted wide apart, defying several courtly reporters, who for a month had patiently and politely appeared every hour to learn whether Mr. Carr had anything to say about the new invention, rumors of which were flying thick about Park Row.
“No, I haven’t!” he shouted in his mellow and sonorously musical bellow. “I have told you one hundred times that when I have anything to say I’ll send for you. Now, permit me to inform you, for the hundred and first consecutive time, that I have nothing to say — which won’t prevent you from coming back in an hour and standing in exactly the same ridiculous position you now occupy, and asking me exactly the same unmannerly questions, and taking the same impertinent snapshots at my house and my person!”
He executed a ferocious facial contortion, clapped the monocle into his left eye, and squinted fiercely.
“I’m getting tired of this!” he continued. “When I wake in the morning and look out of my window there are always anywhere from one to twenty reporters decorating my lawn! That young man over there is the worst and most persistent offender!” — scowling at a good-looking youth in white flannels, who immediately blushed distressingly. “Yes, you are, young man! I’m amazed that you have the decency to blush! Your insolent sheet, the Evening Star, refers to my Trust Company as a Green Mouse Trap and a Mouseleum. It also publishes preposterous pictures of myself and family. Dammit, sir, they even produce a photograph of Orlando, the family cat! You did it, I am told. Did you?”
“I am trying to do what I can for my paper, Mr. Carr,” said the young man. “The public is interested.”
Mr. Carr regarded him with peculiar hatred.
“Come here,” he said; “I have got something to say to you.”
The young man cautiously left the ranks of his fellows and came up on the porch. Behind Mr. Carr, in the doorway, stood Drusilla and Flavilla. The young man tried not to see them; he pretended not to. But he flushed deeply.
“I want to know,” demanded Mr. Carr, “why the devil you are always around here blushing. You’ve been around here blushing for a month, and I want to know why you do it.”
The youth stood speechless, features afire to the tips of his glowing ears.
“At first,” continued Mr. Carr, mercilessly, “I had a vague hope that you might perhaps be blushing for shame at your profession; I heard that you were young at it, and I was inclined to be sorry for you. But I’m not sorry any more!”
The young man remained crimson and dumb.
“Confound it,” resumed Mr. Carr, “I want to know why the deuce you come and blush all over my lawn. I won’t stand it! I’ll not allow anybody to come blushing around me — —”
Indignation choked him; he turned on his heel to enter the house and beheld Flavilla and Drusilla regarding him, wide-eyed.
He went in, waving them away before him.
“I’ve taught that young pup a lesson,” he said with savage satisfaction. “I’ll teach him to blush at me! I’ll — —”
“But why,” asked Drusilla, “are you so cruel to Mr. Yates? We like him.”
“Mr. — Mr. Yates!” repeated her father, astonished. “Is that his name? And who told you?”
“He did,” said Drusilla, innocently.
“He — that infernal newspaper bantam — —”
“Pa-pah! Please don’t say that about Mr. Yates. He is really exceedingly kind and civil to us. Every time you go to town on business he comes and sketches with us at — —”
“Oh,” said Mr. Carr, with the calm of deadly fury, “so he goes to Cooper’s Bluff with you when I’m away, does he?”
Flavilla said: “He doesn’t exactly go with us; but he usually comes there to sketch. He makes sketches for his newspaper.”
“Does he?” asked her father, grinding his teeth.
“Yes,” said Drusilla; “and he sketches so beautifully. He made such perfectly charming drawings of Flavilla and of me, and he drew pictures of the house and gardens, and of all the servants, and” — she laughed— “I once caught a glimpse in his sketch-book of the funniest caricature of you — —”
The expression on her father’s face was so misleading in its terrible calm that she laughed again, innocently.
“It was not at all an offensive caricature, you know — really it was not a caricature at all — it was you — just the way you stand and look at people when you are — slightly — annoyed — —”
“Oh, he is so clever,” chimed in Flavilla, “and is so perfectly well-bred and so delightful to us — to Drusilla particularly. He wrote the prettiest set of verses — To Drusilla in June — just dashed them off while he was watching her sketch Cooper’s Bluff from the southwest — —”
“He is really quite wonderful,” added Drusilla, sincerely, “and so generous and helpful when my drawing becomes weak and wobbly — —”
“Mr. Yates shows Drusilla how to hold her pencil,” said Flavilla, becoming warmly earnest in her appreciation of this self-sacrificing young man. “He often lays aside his own sketching and guides Drusilla’s hand while she holds the pencil — —”
“And when I’m tired,” said Drusilla, “and the water colors get into a dreadful mess, Mr. Yates will drop his own work and come and talk to me about art — and other things — —”
“He is so kind!” cried Flavilla in generous enthusiasm.
“And so vitally interesting,” said Drusilla.
“And so talented!” echoed Flavilla.
“And so—” Drusilla glanced up, beheld something in the fixed stare of her parent that frightened her, and rose in confusion. “Have I said — done — anything?” she faltered.
With an awful spasm Mr. Carr jerked his congested features into the ghastly semblance of a smile.
“Not at all,” he managed to say. “This is very interesting — what you tell me about this p-pu — this talented young man. Does he — does he seem — attracted toward you — unusually attracted?”
“Yes,” said Drusilla, smiling reminiscently.
“How do you know?”
“Because he once said so.”
“S-said — w-what?”
“Why, he said quite frankly that he thought me the most delightful girl he had ever met.”
“What — else?” Mr. Carr’s voice was scarcely audible.
“Nothing,” said Drusilla; “except that he said he cared for me very much and wished to know whether I ever could care very much for him.... I told him I thought I could. Flavilla told him so, too.... And we all felt rather happy, I think; at least I did.”
Her parent emitted a low, melodious sort of sound, a kind of mellifluous howl.
“Pa-pah!” they exclaimed in gentle consternation.
He beat at the empty air for a moment like a rotund fowl about to seek its roost. Suddenly he ran distractedly at an armchair and kicked it.
They watched him in sorrowful amazement.
“If we are going to sketch Cooper’s Bluff this morning,” observed Drusilla to Flavilla, “I think we had better go — quietly — by way of the kitchen garden. Evidently Pa-pah does not care for Mr. Yates.”
Orlando, the family cat, strolled in, conciliatory tail hoisted. Mr. Carr hurled a cushion at Orlando, then beat madly upon his own head with both hands. Servants respectfully gave him room; some furniture was overturned — a chair or two — as he bounced upward and locked and bolted himself in his room.
What transports of fury he lived through there nobody else can know; what terrible visions of vengeance lit up his outraged intellect, what cold intervals of quivering hate, what stealthy schemes of reprisal, what awful retribution for young Mr. Yates were hatched in those dreadful moments, he alone could tell. And as he never did tell, how can I know?
However, in about half an hour his expression of stony malignity changed to a smile so cunningly devilish that, as he caught sight of himself in the mirror, his corrugated countenance really startled him.
“I must smooth out — smooth out!” he muttered. “Smoothness does it!” And he rang for a servant and bade him seek out a certain Mr. Yates among the throng of young men who had been taking snapshots.
XV
DRUSILLA
DURING WHICH CHAPTER Mr. Carr Sings and One of His Daughters Takes her Postgraduate
Mr. Yates came presently, ushered by Ferdinand, and looking extremely worried. Mr. Carr received him in his private office with ominous urbanity.
“Mr. Yates,” he said, forcing a distorted smile, “I have rather abruptly decided to show you exactly how one of the Destyn-Carr instruments is supposed to work. Would you kindly stand here — close by this table?”
Mr. Yates, astounded, obeyed.
“Now,” said Mr. Carr, with a deeply creased smile, “here is the famous Destyn-Carr apparatus. That’s quite right — take a snapshot at it without my permission — —”
“I — I thought — —”
“Quite right, my boy; I intend you shall know all about it. You see it resembles the works of a watch.... Now, when I touch this spring the receiver opens and gathers in certain psychic waves which emanate from the subconscious personality of — well, let us say you, for example!... And now I touch this button. You see that slender hairspring of Rosium uncurl and rise, trembling and waving about like a tentacle?”
Young Yates, notebook in hand, recovered himself sufficiently to nod. Mr. Carr leered at him:
“That tentacle,” he explained, “is now seeking some invisible, wireless, psychic current along which it is to transmit the accumulated psychic waves. As soon as the wireless current finds the subconscious personality of the woman you are destined to love and marry some day — —”
“I?” exclaimed young Yates, horrified.
“Yes, you. Why not? Do you mind my trying it on you?”
“But I am already in love,” protested the young man, turning, as usual, a ready red. “I don’t care to have you try it on me. Suppose that machine should connect me with — some other — girl — —”
“It has!” cried Carr with a hideous laugh as a point of bluish-white fire tipped the tentacle for an instant. “You’re tied fast to something feminine! Probably a flossy typewriter — or a burlesque actress — somebody you’re fitted for, anyway!” He clapped on his monocle, and glared gleefully at the stupefied young man.
“That will teach you to enter my premises and hold my daughter’s hand when she is drawing innocent pictures of Cooper’s Bluff!” he shouted. “That will teach you to write poems to my eighteen-year-old daughter, Drusilla; that will teach you to tell her you are in love with her — you young pup!”
“I am in love with her!” said Yates, undaunted; but he was very white when he said it. “I do love her; and if you had behaved halfway decently I’d have told you so two weeks ago!”
Mr. Carr turned a delicate purple, then, recovering, laughed horribly.
“Whether or not you were once in love with my daughter is of no consequence now. That machine has nullified your nonsense! That instrument has found you your proper affinity — doubtless below stairs — —”
“I am still in love with Drusilla,” repeated Yates, firmly.
“I tell you, you’re not!” retorted Carr. “Didn’t I turn that machine on you? It has never missed yet! The Green Mouse has got you in the Mouseleum!”
“You are mistaken,” insisted Yates, still more firmly. “I was in love with your daughter Drusilla before you started the machine; and I love her yet! Now! At the present time! This very instant I am loving her!”
“You can’t!” shouted Carr.
“Yes, I can. And I do!”
“No, you don’t! I tell you it’s a scientific and psychical impossibility for you to continue to love her! Your subconscious personality is now in eternal and irrevocable accord and communication with the subconscious personality of some chit of a girl who is destined to love and marry you! And she’s probably a ballet-girl, at that!”
“I shall marry Drusilla!” retorted the young man, very pale; “because I am quite confident that she loves me, though very probably she doesn’t know it yet.”
“You talk foolishness!” hissed Carr. “This machine has settled the whole matter! Didn’t you see that spark?”
“I saw a spark — yes!”
“And do you mean to tell me you are not beginning to feel queer?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Look me squarely in the eye, young man, and tell me whether you do not have a sensation as though your heart were cutting capers?”
“Not in the least,” said Yates, calmly. “If that machine worked at all it wouldn’t surprise me if you yourself had become entangled in it — caught in your own machine!”
“W-what!” exclaimed Carr, faintly.
“It wouldn’t astonish me in the slightest,” repeated Yates, delighted to discover the dawning alarm in the older man’s features. “You opened the receiver; you have psychic waves as well as I. I was in love at the time; you were not. What was there to prevent your waves from being hitched to a wireless current and, finally, signaling the subconscious personality of — of some pretty actress, for example?”
Mr. Carr sank nervously onto a chair; his eyes, already wild, became wilder as he began to realize the risk he had unthinkingly taken.
“Perhaps you feel a little — queer. You look it,” suggested the young man, in a voice made anxious by an ever-ready sympathy. “Can I do anything? I am really very sorry to have spoken so.”
A damp chill gathered on the brow of Bushwyck Carr. He did feel a trifle queer. A curious lightness — a perfectly inexplicable buoyancy seemed to possess him. He was beginning to feel strangely youthful; the sound of his own heart suddenly became apparent. To his alarm it was beating playfully, skittishly. No — it was not even beating; it was skipping.
“Y-Yates,” he stammered, “you don’t think that I could p-possibly have become inadvertently mixed up with that horrible machine — do you?”
Now Yates was a generous youth; resentment at the treatment meted out to him by this florid, bad-tempered and pompous gentleman changed to instinctive sympathy when he suddenly realized the plight his future father-in-law might now be in.
“Yates,” repeated Mr. Carr in an agitated voice, “tell me honestly: do you think there is anything unusual the matter with me? I — I seem to f-feel unusually — young. Do I look it? Have I changed? W-watch me while I walk across the room.”
Mr. Carr arose with a frightened glance at Yates, put on his hat, and fairly pranced across the room. “Great Heavens!” he faltered; “my hat’s on one side and my walk is distinctly jaunty! Do you notice it, Yates?”
“I’m afraid I do, Mr. Carr.”
“This — this is infamous!” gasped Mr. Carr. “This is — is outrageous! I’m forty-five! I’m a widower! I detest a jaunty widower! I don’t want to be one; I don’t want to — —”
Yates gazed at him with deep concern.
“Can’t you help lifting your legs that way when you walk — as though a band were playing? Wait, I’ll straighten your hat. Now try it again.”
Mr. Carr pranced back across the room.
“I know I’m doing it again,” he groaned, “but I can’t help it! I — I feel so gay — dammit! — so frivolous — it’s — it’s that infernal machine. W-what am I to do, Yates,” he added piteously, “when the world looks so good to me?”
“Think of your family!” urged Yates. “Think of — of Drusilla.”
“Do you know,” observed Carr, twirling his eyeglass and twisting his mustache, “that I’m beginning not to care what my family think!... Isn’t it amazing, Yates? I — I seem to be somebody else, several years younger. Somewhere,” he added, with a flourish of his monocle— “somewhere on earth there is a little birdie waiting for me.”
“Don’t talk that way!” exclaimed Yates, horrified.
“Yes, I will, young man. I repeat, with optimism and emphasis, that somewhere there is a birdie — —”
“Mr. Carr!”
“Yes, merry old Top!”
“May I use your telephone?”
“I don’t care what you do!” said Carr, gayly. “Use my telephone if you like; pull it out by the roots and throw it over Cooper’s Bluff, for all I care! But” — and a sudden glimmer of reason seemed to come over him— “if you have one grain of human decency left in you, you won’t drag me and my terrible plight into that scurrilous New York paper of yours.”
