Complete weird tales of.., p.622
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 622
In the cheeks of the mirrored witness a faint fire began to burn: her own face grew pink: but she answered, looking the shadowy witness steadily in the eyes:
“When he took my hand at the door — and during — whatever happened — afterward.”
And she excused the witness and turned her back to the looking-glass.
The only witness for the defence was the accused — unless her own heart were permitted to testify. Or — and there seemed to be some slight confusion here — was Quarren on trial? Or was she herself?
This threatened to become a serious question; she strove to think clearly, to reason; but only evoked the pale, amused face of Quarren from inner and chaotic consciousness until the visualisation remained fixed, defying obliteration. And she accepted the mental spectre for the witness box.
“Ricky,” she said, “do you really love me?”
But the clear-cut, amused face seemed to mock her question with the smile she knew so well — so well, alas!
“Why are you unworthy?” she said again— “you who surely are equipped for a nobler life. What is it in you that I have responded to? If a woman is so colourless as to respond merely to love in the abstract, she is worth nothing better, nothing higher, than what she has evoked. For you are no better than other men, Ricky; indeed you are less admirable than many; and to compare you to Sir Charles is not advantageous to you, poor boy — poor boy.”
In vain she strove to visualise Sir Charles; she could not. All she could do was to mentally enumerate his qualities; and she did so, the amused face of Quarren looking on at her from out of empty space.
“Ricky, Ricky,” she said, “am I no better than that? — am I fit only for such a response? — to find the contact of your hand so wonderful? — to thrill with the consciousness of your nearness — to let my senses drift, contented merely by your touch — yielding to the charm of it — suffering even your lips’ embrace — —”
She shuddered slightly, drawing one hand across her eyes, then sitting straight, she faced his smiling phantom, resolute to end it now forever.
“If I am such a woman,” she said, “and you are the kind of man I know you to be — then is it time for me to fast and pray, lest I enter into temptation.... Into the one temptation I have never before known, Ricky — and which, in my complacency and pride I never dreamed that I should encounter.
“And it is coming to that!... A girl must be honest with herself or all life is only the same smiling lie. I’m ashamed to be honest, Ricky; but I must be. You are not very much of a man — otherwise I might find some reason for caring: and now there is none; and yet — I care — God knows why — or what it is in you that I care for! — But I do — I am beginning to care — and I don’t know why; I — don’t — know why — —”.
She dropped her face in her hands, sitting there bowed low over her knees. And there, hour after hour she fought it out with herself and with the amused spectre ever at her elbow — so close at moments that some unaroused nerve fell a-trembling in its sleep, threatening to awaken those quiet senses that she already feared for their unknown powers.
* * *
The season was approaching its end, still kicking now and then spasmodically, but pretty nearly done for. No particularly painful incidents marked its demise except the continued absence of Quarren from social purlieus accustomed to his gay presence and adroit executive abilities.
After several demoralised cotillions had withstood the shock of his absence, and a dozen or more functions had become temporarily disorganised because he declined to occupy himself with their success; and after a number of hostesses had filled in his place at dinner, at theatres, at week-ends, on yachts and coaches; and after an unprecedented defiance of two summonses to the hazardous presence of Mrs. Sprowl, he obeyed a third subpœna, and presented himself with an air of cheerful confidence that instantly enraged her.
The old lady lay abed with nothing more compromising than a toothache; Quarren was conducted to the inner shrine; she glared at him hideously from her pillows; and for one moment he felt seriously inclined to run.
“Where have you been?” she wheezed.
“Nowhere in particu — —”
“I know damn well you’ve been nowhere,” she burst out. “Molly Wycherly’s dance went to pieces because she was fool enough to trust things to you. Do you know who led? That great oaf, Barent Van Dyne! He led like a trick elephant, too!”
Quarren looked politely distressed.
“And there are a dozen hostesses perfectly furious with you,” continued the old lady, pounding the pillows with a fat arm— “parties of all sorts spoiled, idiocies committed, dinners either commonplace or blank failures — what the devil possesses you to behave this way?”
“I’m tired,” he said, politely.
“What!”
He smiled:
“Oh, the place suits, Mrs. Sprowl; I haven’t any complaint; and the work and wages are easy; and it’s comfortable below-stairs. But — I’m just tired.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about my employers, and I’m talking like the social upper-servant that I am — or was. I’m merely giving a respectable warning; that is the airy purport of my discourse, Mrs. Sprowl.”
“Do you know what you’re saying?”
“Yes, I think so,” he said, wearily.
“Well, then, what the devil are you saying?”
“Merely that I’ve dropped out of service to engage in trade.”
“You can’t!” she yelled, sitting up in bed so suddenly that her unquiet tooth took the opportunity to assert itself.
She clapped a pudgy hand to her cheek, squinting furiously at Quarren:
“You can’t drop out,” she shouted. “Don’t you ever want to amount to anything?”
“Yes, I do. That’s why I’m doing it.”
“Don’t act like a fool! Haven’t you any ambition?”
“That also is why,” he said pleasantly. “I am ambitious to be out of livery and see what my own kind will do to me.”
“Well, you’ll see!” she threatened— “you’ll see what we’ll do to you — —”
“You’re not my kind. I always supposed you were, but you all knew better from the day I took service with you — —”
“Ricky!”
“It is perfectly true, Mrs. Sprowl. My admittance included a livery and the perennial prerogative of amusing people. But I had no money, no family affiliations with the very amiable people who found me useful. Only, in common with them, I had the inherent taste for idleness and the genius for making it endurable to you all. So you welcomed me very warmly; and you have been very kind to me.... But, somewhere or other — in some forgotten corner of me — an odd and old-fashioned idea awoke the other day.... I think perhaps it awoke when you reminded me that to serve you was one thing and to marry among you something very different.”
“Ricky! Do you want to drive me to the yelling verge of distraction? I didn’t say or intimate or dream any such thing! You know perfectly well you’re not only with us but of us. Nobody ever imagined otherwise. But you can’t marry any girl you pick out. Sometimes she won’t; sometimes her family won’t. It’s the same everywhere. You have no money. Of course I intend that you shall eventually marry money — What the devil are you laughing at?”
“I beg your pardon — —”
“I said that you would marry well. Was that funny? I also said, once — and I repeat it now, that I have my own plans for one or two girls — Strelsa Leeds included. I merely asked you to respect my wishes in that single matter; and bang! you go off and blow up and maroon yourself and sulk until nobody knows what’s the matter with you. Don’t be a fool. Everybody likes you; every girl can’t love you — but I’ll bet many of ’em do.... Pick one out and come to me — if that’s your trouble. Go ahead and pick out what you fancy; and ten to one it will be all right, and between you and me we’ll land the little lady!”
“You’re tremendously kind — —”
“I know I am. I’m always doing kindnesses — and nobody likes me, and they’d bite my head off, every one of ’em — if they weren’t afraid it would disagree with them,” she added grimly.
Quarren rose and came over to the bedside.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Sprowl,” he said. “And — I like you — somehow — I really do.”
“The devil you do,” said the old lady.
“It’s a curious fact,” he insisted, smiling.
“Get out with you, Ricky! And I want you to come — —”
“No — please.”
“What?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I want to see some real people again. I’ve forgotten what they resemble.”
“That’s a damned insolent remark!” she gasped.
“Not meant to be. You are real enough, Heaven knows. But,” and his smile faded— “I’ve taken a month off to think it out. And, do you know, thinking being an unaccustomed luxury, I’ve enjoyed it. Imagine my delight and surprise, Mrs. Sprowl, when I discovered that my leisurely reflections resulted in the discovery that I had a mind — a real one — capable of reason and conclusions. And so when I actually came to a conclusion my joy knew no bounds — —”
“Ricky! Stop those mental athletics! Do you hear? I’ve a toothache and a backache and I can’t stand ‘em!”
Quarren was laughing now; and presently a grim concession to humour relaxed the old lady’s lips till her fat face creased.
“All right,” she said; “go and play with the ragged boy around the corner, my son. Then when you’re ready come home and get your face washed.”
“May I come occasionally to chat with you?”
“As though you’d do that if you didn’t have to!” she exclaimed incredulously.
“I think you know better.”
“No, I don’t!” she snapped. “I know men and women; that’s all I know. And as you’re one of the two species I don’t expect anything celestial from you.... And you’d better go, now.”
She turned over on her pillow with a grunt: Quarren laughed, lifted one of her pudgy and heavily ringed hands from the coverlet, and, still smiling, touched the largest diamond with his lips.
“I think,” he said, “that you are one of the very few I really like in your funny unreal world.... You’re so humanly bad.”
“What!” she shouted, floundering to a sitting posture.
But, looking back at her from the door, he found her grinning.
* * *
CHAPTER VII
PREMONITIONS OF SPRING started the annual social exodus; because in the streets of Ascalon and in the busy ways of Gath spring becomes summer over night and all Philistia is smitten by the sun.
And all the meanness and shabbiness and effrontery of the monstrous city, all its civic pretence and tarnished ostentation are suddenly revealed when the summer sun blazes over Ascalon. Wherefore the daintier among the Philistines flee — idler, courtier, dangler and squire of dames — not to return until the first snow-flakes fall and the gray veil of November descends once more over the sorry sham of Ascalon.
Out of the inner temple, his ears still ringing with the noise of the drones, Quarren had gone forth. And already, far away in the outer sunshine, he could see real people at work and at play, millions and millions of them — and a real sky overhead edging far horizons.
He began real life once more in a bad way, financially; his money being hopelessly locked up in Tappan-Zee Park, a wooded and worthless tract of unimproved land along the Hudson which Quarren had supposed Lester Caldera was to finance for him.
Recently, however, that suave young man had smilingly denied making any such promise to anybody; which surprised and disconcerted Quarren who had no money with which to build sewers, roads, and electric plants. And he began to realise how carelessly he had drifted into the enterprise — how carelessly he had drifted into everything and past everything for the last five years.
After a hunt for a capitalist among and outside his circle of friends and acquaintances he began to appreciate his own lunacy even more thoroughly.
Then Lester Caldera, good-naturedly, offered to take the property off his hands for less than a third of what he paid Sprowl for it; and as Quarren’s adjoining options were rapidly expiring he was forced to accept. Which put the boy almost entirely out of business; so he closed his handsome office downtown and opened another in the front parlour of an old and rather dingy brown-stone house on the east side of Lexington Avenue near Fiftieth Street and hung out his sign once more over the busy streets of Ascalon.
Richard Stanley Quarren
Real Estate
Also he gave up his quarters at the Irish Legation to the unfeigned grief of the diplomats domiciled there, and established himself in the back parlour and extension of the Lexington Avenue house, ready at all moments now for business or for sleep. Neither bothered him excessively.
He wrote no more notes to Strelsa Leeds — that is, he posted no more, however many he may have composed. Rumours from the inner temple concerning her and Langly Sprowl and Sir Charles Mallison drifted out into the real world every day or so. But he never went back to the temple to verify them. That life was ended for him. Sometimes, sitting alone at his desk, he fancied that he could almost hear the far laughter of the temple revels, and the humming of the drones. But the roar of the street-car, rushing, grinding through the steel-ribbed streets of Ascalon always drowned it, and its far seen phantom glitter became a burning reality where the mid-day sun struck the office sign outside his open window.
Fate, the ugly jade, was making faces at him, all kinds of faces. Just now she wore the gaunt mask of poverty, but Quarren continued to ignore her, because to him, there was no real menace in her skinny grin, no real tragedy in what she threatened.
Real tragedy lay in something very different — perhaps in manhood awaking from ignoble lethargy to learn its own degeneracy in a young girl’s scornful eyes.
All day long he sat in his office attending to the trivial business that came into it — not enough so far to give him a living.
In the still spring evenings he retired to his quarters in the back parlour, bathed, dressed, looking out at the cats on the back fences. Then he went forth to dine either at the Legation or with some one of the few friends he had cared to retain in that magic-lantern world which he at last had found uninhabitable — a world in which few virile men remain very long — fewer and fewer as the years pass on. For the gilding on the temple dome is peeling off; and the laughter is dying out, and the hum of the drones sounds drowsy like unreal voices heard in summer dreams.
“It is the passing of an imbecile society,” declaimed Westguard— “the dying sounds of its meaningless noise — the first omens of a silence which foretells annihilation. Out of chaos will gradually emerge the elements of a real society — the splendid social and intellectual brotherhood of the future — —”
“See my forthcoming novel,” added Lacy, “$1.35 net, for sale at all booksellers or sent post-paid on receipt of — —”
“You little fashionable fop!” growled Westguard— “there’s a winter coming for all butterflies!”
“I’ve seen ’em dancing over the snow on a mild and sunny day,” retorted Lacy. “Karl, my son, the nobly despairing writer with a grouch never yet convinced anybody.”
“I don’t despair,” retorted Westguard. “This country is getting what it wants and what it deserves, ladled out to it in unappetising gobs. Year after year great incoming waves of ignorance sweep us from ocean to ocean; but I don’t forget that those very waves also carry a constantly growing and enlightened class higher and higher toward permanent solidity.
“Every annual wave pushes the flotsam of the year before toward the solid land. The acquaintance with sordid things is the first real impulse toward education. Some day there will be no squalor in the land — neither the physical conditions in our slums nor the arid intellectual deserts within the social frontiers.”
“But the waves will accomplish that — not your very worthy novels,” said Lacy, impudently.
“If you call me ‘worthy’ I’ll bat you on the head,” roared Westguard, sitting up on the sofa where he had been sprawling; and laughter, loud and long, rattled the windows in the Irish Legation.
The May night was hot; a sickly breeze stirred the curtains at the open windows of Westguard’s living room where the Legation was entertaining informally.
Quarren, Lacy, O’Hara, and Sir Charles Mallison sat by the window playing poker; the Earl of Dankmere, perched on the piano-stool, was mournfully rattling off a string of melodies acquired along Broadway; Westguard himself, flat on his back, occupied a leather lounge and dispensed philosophy when permitted.
“You know,” said Lacy, dealing rapidly, “you’re only a tin-horn philosopher, Karl, but you really could write a good story if you tried. Get your people into action. That’s the game.”
O’Hara nodded. “Interestin’ people, in books and outside, are always doin’ things, not talkin’,” he said— “like Sir Charles quietly drawin’ four cards to a kicker and sayin’ nothin’.”
“ — Like old Dankmere, yonder, playing ‘Madame Sherry’ and not trying to tell us why human beings enjoy certain sounds known as harmonies, but just keeping busy beating the box — —”
“ — Like a pretty woman who is contented to be as attractive and cunnin’ as she can be, and not stoppin’ to explain the anatomy of romantic love and personal beauty,” added O’Hara.
“ — Like — —”
“For Heaven’s sake give me a stack of chips and shut up!” shouted Westguard, jumping to his feet and striding to the table. “Everybody on earth is competent to write a book except an author, but I defy anybody to play my poker hands for me! Come on, Dankmere! Let’s clean out this complacent crowd!”
Lord Dankmere complied, and seated himself at the table, anxiously remarking to Quarren that he had come to America to acquire capital, not to spend it. Sir Charles laughed and dealt; Westguard drew five cards, attempted to bluff Quarren’s full hand, and was scandalously routed.
