Complete weird tales of.., p.556
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 556
“And, Louis, I’d row you about on the majestic expanse of the stump-pond, and we’d listen to the frogs. Can you desire anything more romantic?
“The trouble with you is that you’re romantic only on canvas. Anyway, I can’t stir you to sentiment. Can I? True, I never tried. But if you come here, and conditions are favourable, and you are so inclined, and I am feeling lonely, nobody can tell what might happen in a flat scow on the stump-pond.
“To be serious for a moment, Louis, I’d really love to have you come. You know I never before saw the real country; I’m a novice in the woods and fields, and, somehow, I’d like to have you share my novitiate in this — as you did when I first came to you. It is a curious feeling I have about anything new; I wish you to experience it with me.
“Rita is awake and exploring the box of Maillard’s which is about empty. Be a Samaritan and send me some assorted chocolates. Be a god, and send me something to read — anything, please, from Jacobs to James. There’s latitude for you. Be a man, and send me yourself. You have no idea how welcome you’d be. The chances are that I’d seize you and embrace you. But if you’re willing to run that risk, take your courage in both hands and come.
“Your friend,
“VALERIE WEST.”
The second week of her sojourn she caught a small pickerel — the only fish she had ever caught in all her life. And she tearfully begged the yokel who was rowing her to replace the fish in its native element. But it was too late; and she and Rita ate her victim, sadly, for dinner.
At the end of the week an enormous box of bonbons came for her. Neither she nor Rita were very well next day, but a letter from Neville did wonders to restore abused digestion.
Other letters, at intervals, cheered her immensely, as did baskets of fruit and boxes of chocolates and a huge case of books of all kinds.
“Never,” she said to Rita, “did I ever hear of such an angel as Louis Neville. When he comes the first of August I wish you to keep tight hold of me, because, if he flees my demonstrations, I feel quite equal to running him down.”
But, curiously enough, it was a rather silent and subdued young girl in white who offered Neville a shy and sun-tanned hand as he descended from the train and came forward, straw hat under one arm, to greet her.
“How well you look!” he exclaimed, laughingly; “I never saw such a flawless specimen of healthy perfection!”
[Illustration: “‘How well you look!’ he exclaimed”]
“Oh, I know I look like a milk-maid, Kelly; I’ve behaved like one, too. Did you ever see such a skin? Do you suppose this sun-burn will ever come off?”
“Instead of snow and roses you’re strawberries and cream,” he said— “and it’s just as fetching, Valerie. How are you, anyway?”
“Barely able to sit up and take nourishment,” she admitted, demurely. “… I don’t think you look particularly vigorous,” she added, more seriously. “You are brown but thin.”
“Thin as a scorched pancake,” he nodded. “The ocean was like a vast plate of clam soup in which I simmered several times a day until I’ve become as leathery and attenuated as a punctured pod of kelp…. Where’s the rig we depart in, Valerie?” he concluded, looking around the sun-scorched, wooden platform with smiling interest.
“I drove down to meet you in a buck-board.”
“Splendid! Is there room for my suit case?”
“Plenty. I brought yards of rope.”
They walked to the rear of the station where buckboard and horse stood tethered to a tree. He fastened his suit case to the rear of the vehicle, swathing it securely in, fathoms of rope; she sprang in, he followed; but she begged him to let her drive, and pulled on a pair of weather-faded gloves with a business-like air which was enchanting.
So he yielded seat and rusty reins to her; whip in hand, she steered the fat horse through the wilderness of arriving and departing carriages of every rural style and description — stages, surreys, mountain-waggons, buck-boards — drove across the railroad track, and turned up a mountain road — a gradual ascent bordered heavily by blackberry, raspberry, thimble berry and wild grape, and flanked by young growths of beech and maple set here and there with hemlock and white pine. But the characteristic foliage was laurel and rhododendron — endless stretches of the glossy undergrowth fringing every woodland, every diamond-clear water-course.
“It must be charming when it’s in blossom,” he said, drawing the sweet air of the uplands deep into his lungs. “These streams look exceedingly like trout, too. How high are we?”
“Two thousand feet in the pass, Kelly. The hills are much higher. You need blankets at night….” She turned her head and smilingly considered him:
“I can’t yet believe you are here.”
“I’ve been trying to realise it, too.”
“Did you come in your favourite cloud?”
“No; on an exceedingly dirty train.”
“You’ve a cinder mark on your nose.”
“Thanks.” He gave her his handkerchief and she wiped away the smear.
“How long can you stay? — Oh, don’t answer! Please forget I asked you. When you’ve got to go just tell me a few minutes before your departure…. The main thing in life is to shorten unhappiness as much as possible. That is Rita’s philosophy.”
“Is Rita well?”
“Perfectly — thanks to your bonbons. She doesn’t precisely banquet on the fare here — poor dear! But then,” she added, philosophically, “what can a girl expect on eight dollars a week? Besides, Rita has been spoiled. I am not unaccustomed to fasting when what is offered does not interest me.”
“You mean that boarding house of yours in town?”
“Yes. Also, when mother and I kept house with an oil stove and two rooms the odour of medicine and my own cooking left me rather indifferent to the pleasures of Lucullus.”
“You poor child!”
“Not at all to be pitied — as long as I had mother,” she said, with a quiet gravity that silenced him.
Up, up, and still up they climbed, the fat horse walking leisurely, nipping at blackberry leaves here, snatching at tender maple twigs there. The winged mountain beauties — Diana’s butterflies — bearing on their velvety, blue-black pinions the silver bow of the goddess, flitted ahead of the horse — celestial pilots to the tree-clad heights beyond.
Save for the noise of the horse’s feet and the crunch of narrow, iron-tired wheels, the stillness was absolute under the azure splendour of the heavens.
“I am not yet quite at my ease — quite accustomed to it,” she said.
“To what, Valerie?”
“To the stillness; to the remote horizons…. At night the vastness of things, the height of the stars, fascinate me to the edge of uneasiness. And sometimes I go and sit in my room for a while — to reassure myself…. You see I am used to an enclosure — the walls of a room — the walled-in streets of New York…. It’s like suddenly stepping out of a cellar to the edge of eternal space, and looking down into nothing.”
“Is that the way these rolling hillocks of Delaware County impress you?” he asked, laughing.
“Yes, Kelly. If I ever found myself in the Alps I believe the happiness would so utterly over-awe me that I’d remain in my hotel under the bed. What are you laughing at? Voluptates commendat rarior usus.”
“Sit tua cura sequi, me duce tutus eris!” he laughed, mischievously testing her limit of Latin.
“Plus e medico quam e morbo periculi!” she answered, saucily.
“You cunning little thing!” he exclaimed: “vix a te videor posse tenere manus!”
“Di melius, quam nos moneamus talia quenquam!” she said, demurely; “Louis, we are becoming silly! Besides, I probably know more Latin than you do — as it was my mother’s favourite relaxation to teach me to speak it. And I imagine that your limit was your last year at Harvard.”
“Upon my word!” he exclaimed; “I never was so snubbed and patronised in all my life!”
“Beware, then!” she retorted, with an enchanting sideway glance: “noli me tangere!” At the same instant he was aware of her arm in light, friendly contact against his, and heard her musing aloud in deep contentment:
“Such perfect satisfaction to have you again, Louis. The world is a gray void without the gods.”
And so, leisurely, they breasted the ascent and came out across the height-of-land. Here and there a silvery ghost of the shorn forest stood, now almost mercifully hidden in the green foliage of hard wood — worthlessly young as yet but beautiful.
From tree to tree flickered the brilliant woodpeckers — they of the solid crimson head and ivory-barred wings. The great vermilion-tufted cock-o’-the-woods called querulously; over the steel-blue stump-ponds the blue kingfishers soared against the blue. It was a sky world of breezy bushes and ruffled waters, of pathless fields and dense young woodlands, of limpid streams clattering over greenish white rocks, pouring into waterfalls, spreading through wild meadows set with iris and pink azalea.
“How is the work going, Louis?” she asked, glancing at him askance.
“It’s stopped.”
“A cause de — ?”
“Je n’en sais rien, Valerie.”
She flicked the harness with her whip, absently. He also leaned back, thoughtfully intent on the blue hills in the distance.
“Has not your desire to paint returned?”
“No.”
“Do you know why?”
“Partly. I am up against a solid wall. There is no thoroughfare.”
“Make one.”
“Through the wall?”
“Straight through it.”
“Ah, yes” — he murmured— “but what lies beyond?”
“It would spoil the pleasures of anticipation to know beforehand.”
He turned to her: “You are good for me. Do you know it?”
“Querida said that, too. He said that I was an experience; and that all good work is made up of experiences that concern it only indirectly.”
“Do you like Querida?” he asked, curiously.
“Sometimes.”
“Not always?”
“Oh, yes, always more or less. But sometimes” — she was silent, her dark eyes dreaming, lips softly parted.
“What do you mean by that?” he inquired, carelessly.
“By what, Louis?” she asked, naïvely, interrupted in her day-dream.
“By hinting — that sometimes you like Querida — more than at others?”
“Why, I do,” she said, frankly. “Besides, I don’t hint things; I say them.” She had turned her head to look at him. Their eyes met in silence for a few moments.
“You are funny about Querida,” she said. “Don’t you like him?”
“I have no reason to dislike him.”
“Oh! Is it the case of Sabidius? ‘Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare!’”
He laughed uneasily: “Oh, no, I think not…. You and he are such excellent friends that I certainly ought to like him anyway.”
But she remained silent, musing; and on the edge of her upcurled lip he saw the faint smile lingering, then fading, leaving the oval face almost expressionless.
So they drove past the one-story post office where a group of young people stood awaiting the arrival of the stage with its battered mail bags; past the stump-pond where Valerie had caught her first and only fish, past a few weather-beaten farm houses, a white-washed church, a boarding house or two, a village store, a watering-trough, and then drove up to the wooden veranda where Rita rose from a rocker and came forward with hand outstretched.
“Hello, Rita!” he said, giving her hand a friendly shake. “Why didn’t you drive down with Valerie?”
“I? That child would have burst into tears at such a suggestion.”
“Probably,” said Valerie, calmly: “I wanted him for myself. Now that
I’ve had him I’ll share him.”
She sprang lightly to the veranda ignoring Neville’s offered hand with a smile. A hired man took away the horse; a boy picked up his suit case and led the way.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said to Valerie and Rita.
That evening at supper, a weird rite where the burnt offering was rice pudding and the stewed sacrifice was prunes, Neville was presented to an interesting assemblage of the free-born.
There was the clerk, the drummer, the sales-lady, and ladies unsaleable and damaged by carping years; city-wearied fathers of youngsters who called their parents “pop” and “mom”; young mothers prematurely aged and neglectful of their coiffure and shoe-heels; simpering maidenhood, acid maidenhood, sophisticated maidenhood; shirt-waisted manhood, flippant manhood, full of strange slang and double negatives unresponsively suspicious manhood, and manhood disillusioned, prematurely tired, burnt out with the weariness of a sordid Harlem struggle.
Here in the height-of-land among scant pastures and the green charity which a spindling second-growth spread over the nakedness of rotting forest bones — here amid the wasted uplands and into this flimsy wooden building came the rank and file of the metropolis in search of air, of green, of sky, for ten days’ surcease from toil and heat and the sad perplexities of those with slender means.
Neville, seated on the veranda with Valerie and Rita in the long summer twilight, looked around him at scenes quite new to him.
On the lumpy croquet ground where battered wickets and stakes awry constituted the centre of social activity after supper, some young girls were playing in partnership with young men, hatless, striped of shirt, and very, very yellow of foot-gear.
A social favourite, very jolly and corporeally redundant, sat in the hammock fanning herself and uttering screams of laughter at jests emanating from the boarding-house cut-up — a blonde young man with rah-rah hair and a brier pipe.
Children, neither very clean nor very dirty, tumbled noisily about the remains of a tennis court or played base-ball in the dusty road. Ominous sounds arose from the parlour piano, where a gaunt maiden lady rested one spare hand among the keys while the other languidly pawed the music of the “Holy City.”
Somewhere in the house a baby was being spanked and sent to bed. There came the clatter of dishes from the wrecks of the rite in the kitchen, accompanied by the warm perfume of dishwater.
But, little by little the high stars came out, and the gray veil fell gently over unloveliness and squalour; little by little the raucous voices were hushed; the scuffle and clatter and the stringy noise of the piano died away, till, distantly, the wind awoke in the woods, and very far away the rushing music of a little brook sweetened the silence.
Rita, who had been reading yesterday’s paper by the lamplight which streamed over her shoulder from the open parlour-window, sighed, stifled a yawn, laid the paper aside, and drew her pretty wrap around her shoulders.
“It’s absurd,” she said, plaintively, “but in this place I become horribly sleepy by nine o’clock. You won’t mind if I go up, will you?”
“Not if you feel that way about it,” he said, smiling.
“Oh, Rita!” said Valerie, reproachfully, “I thought we were going to row
Louis about on the stump-pond!”
“I am too sleepy; I’d merely fall overboard,” said Rita, simply, gathering up her bonbons. “Louis, you’ll forgive me, won’t you? I don’t understand why, but that child never sleeps.”
They rose to bid her good night. Valerie’s finger tips rested a moment on Neville’s sleeve in a light gesture of excuse for leaving him and of promise to return. Then she went away with Rita.
When she returned, the piazza was deserted except for Neville, who stood on the steps smoking and looking out across the misty waste.
“I usually go up with Rita,” she said. “Rita is a dear. But do you know,
I believe she is not a particularly happy girl.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why…. After all, such a life — hers and mine — is only happy if you make it so…. And I don’t believe she tries to make it so. Perhaps she doesn’t care. She is very young — and very pretty — too young and pretty to be so indifferent — so tired.”
She stood on the step behind and above him, looking down at his back and his well-set shoulders. They were inviting, those firm, broad, young shoulders of his; and she laid both hands on them.
“Shall I row you about in the flat-boat, Louis?”
“I’ll do the paddling—”
“Not by any means. I like to row, if you please. I have cold cream and a pair of gloves, so that I shall acquire no blisters.”
They walked together out to the road and along it, she holding to her skirts and his arm, until the star-lit pond came into view.
Afloat in the ancient, weedy craft he watched her slender strength mastering the clumsy oars — watched her, idly charmed with her beauty and the quaint, childish pleasure that she took in manoeuvring among the shoreward lily pads and stumps till clear water was reached and the little misty wavelets came slap! slap! against the bow.
“If you were Querida you’d sing in an exceedingly agreeable tenor,” she observed.
“Not being Querida, and labouring further under the disadvantage of a barytone, I won’t,” he said.
“Please, Louis.”
“Oh, very well — if you feel as romantic as that.” And he began to sing:
”My wife’s gone to the country,
Hurrah! Hurrah!”
“Louis! Stop it! Do you know you are positively corrupt to do such a thing at such a time as this?”
“Well, it’s all I know, Valerie—”
“I could cry!” she said, indignantly, and maintained a dangerous silence until they drifted into the still waters of the outlet where the starlight silvered the sedge-grass and feathery foliage formed a roof above.
Into the leafy tunnel they floated, oars shipped; she, cheek on hand, watching the fire-flies on the water; he, rid of his cigarette, motionless in the stern.
After they had drifted half a mile she seemed disinclined to resume the oars; so he crossed with her, swung the boat, and drove it foaming against the silent current.
On the return they said very little. She stood pensive, distraite, as he tied the boat, then — for the road was dark and uneven — took his arm and turned away beside him.
