Complete weird tales of.., p.670
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 670
No such specimen as this could hope to escape instant marriage. Here were features so mathematically flawless that they became practically featureless; here was bodily balance so ideal that the ultimate standards of Greek perfection seemed lop-sided in comparison. No, there could be no doubt about it; this young man was certainly required for the purpose of scientific propagation; willy-nilly he was destined to be one of the ancestors of that future and god-like race which must, one day, people the earth to replace the bigoted and degenerate population which at present encumbered it.
She regarded him without the slightest personal interest now. His symmetry wearied her profoundly.
“When are you going to let me out?” he asked cheerfully.
She looked at him almost insolently under slightly lifted brows.
“Presently,” she said; and began to fumble in her satchel. In a few moments she produced two bottles, a roll of antiseptic cotton, and a hypodermic needle.
“Will you come with me voluntarily?” she inquired, stepping nearer and looking down at him, “or must I use force?”
He might have been humorously willing to go; he really desired to see this amusing adventure to the finish. But man resents coercion.
“Force?” he repeated.
“Exactly,” she replied, displaying her pocket pharmacy.
“What are those things you have in your hand?” he asked, trying to see.
“Chloroform and a hypodermic needle. If you do not wish to come with me voluntarily you may take your choice.”
He laughed long and loud and derisively.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Be kind enough to undo this net. I might have been willing to go with you and look ’em over — your friends, you know; but I don’t care for your idea of humour.”
“Your reply is typically man-like and tyrannical. For centuries man has enjoyed and abused the option of doing what he pleased. Now men are going to do what we please, whether or not it suits them.”
“So I’ve understood,” he said, laughing; “but this revolt has been on for a year and I haven’t noticed any men doing what they did not wish to do.”
“We have four who are doing it. They are in training for their honeymoons. You are to be the fifth to begin training,” she said coolly.
He laughed again derisively, and lay watching her. She walked up close beside him and seated herself on the rock marked “Votes for Women.”
“I suppose,” she said, tauntingly, “that you were rather astonished to wake up from your fishing nap, and find yourself — —” she considered the effect of her words, gazing at him insolently from under slightly lowered lashes— “find yourself all balled up in a fish net.”
He only grinned at her.
“What are you laughing at?” she demanded, unsmiling.
“Lying here flat on my back, I am smiling at Woman! at every individual woman on earth! at this ridiculous feminine uprising, this suffragette revolution — at your National Female Federation Committee; the thousands of local unions; this strike of your entire sex; this general boycott of my sex! What has it accomplished?” He tried to wave his hand.
“You parade and make speeches in the streets, throw bricks, slap the faces of a few State Congressmen, and finally proclaim a general strike and boycott.
“And what’s the result? All social functions and ceremonies are suspended; caterers, florists, confectioners, cabmen, ruined; theatres, restaurants, department stores, novelists, milliners, in financial throes; a falling off of over eighty per cent. in marriages and births — and you are no nearer a vote than you were before the great strike paralysed the business of this Republic.”
The young lady had been growing pinker and pinker.
“Oh! . . . And is that why you are laughing?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s the funniest strike that ever happened to a serious-minded sex. Because you know your sex, as a sex, is a trifle destitute of a sense of humour — —”
“That expression,” she cut in with bitter satisfaction, “definitely determines your intellectual and social limits, Mr. Langdon. You are what you appear to be — one of those dreary bothers whose stock phrase is ‘a sense of humour’ — the kind of young man who has acquired a florid imitation of cultivation, a sort of near-polish; the type of person who uses the word ‘brainy’ for ‘capable,’ and ‘mentality’ for ‘intelligence’; the dreadful kind of person who speaks of a subject as ‘meaty’ instead of properly employing the words ‘substance’ or ‘material’; the sort of — —”
Langdon, red and wrathful, sat up on the ground, peering at her through the enveloping net.
“Never in my life,” he said, “have I been spoken to in such terms of feminine contempt. Stop it! Can’t you appreciate a joke?”
“Mr. Langdon, the day is past when women will either countenance or take part in any disrespectful witticisms, slurs, or jests at the expense of their own sex. Once — and that not very long ago — they did it. Comic papers made my sex the subject of cartoons and witticisms; the stage dared to spread the contemptible misinformation; women either smiled or remained indifferent. The impression became general and fixed that women were gallinaceous, that a hen-like philosophy characterised the sex; that they were, at best, second-rate humans, tagging rather gratefully at the heels of the Lords of Creation, unconcerned with the greater and vital questions of the world.
“Now your sex has discovered its mistake. After countless centuries of intellectual and physical bondage Woman has calmly risen to assert herself — not as the peer of man, but as his superior!”
“What!” exclaimed Langdon, angrily.
“Certainly. Since prehistoric times man has attempted to govern and shape the destinies of all things living on this earth. He has made of his reign a miserable fizzle. It is our turn now to try our hands.
“And so, at last, woman steps forward, tipping the symbols of despotic power — sceptre and crown — from the nerveless hand and dishonoured brow of her recent lord and master! And down he goes under her feet — where he belongs.”
Langdon, unable to endure such language, attempted to sit up, but the net interfered and he lay clawing at the meshes while the girl calmly continued:
“The human race, as it is at present, is a disgrace to the world it inhabits. We women have now decided to repeople the earth scientifically with a race as wholesome in body as our instruction shall render it in mind. Those among us women who are adjudged physically and mentally perfect for this great and sacred work have pledged ourselves to the sacrifice — pro bono publico.
“We shall pick out, from your degenerate sex, such physically perfect individuals as chance to remain; we shall regard our marriages with them as purely scientific and cold-blooded affairs; we have begun, for the purposes of re-populating the world by capturing four symmetrical young men. You are the fifth. The Regents of the New Race University will select for you several girls who, theoretically, are best qualified to become the mothers of your — —”
“Stop!” shouted Langdon, tearing violently at the net. “I don’t want you to talk that way to me!”
“What way?”
“You know perfectly well,” he retorted, blushing vividly. “I won’t stand it!”
“What a slave to prudery and smug convention you are,” she observed with amused contempt. “Nobody in the University is going to shock your modesty.”
“Well, what are they going to do?”
“Turn you loose in the preserve after the Regents have inspected you.”
“And then?”
“Oh, I suppose two or three girls will be selected.”
“To do w-what?”
“To pay you marked attention.”
“M-m-marked what?”
“Attention. Two or three girls will begin to court you.”
“How?”
“Oh, the usual way — by sending you flowers and books and bon-bons, and asking permission to call on you in your cave,” she said carelessly.
There was an embarrassed pause, then:
“Will you be one of those — those aspirants to my hand?” he inquired.
She said indifferently: “I hope not. I’m sure I don’t desire to be the mother of — —”
“Stop! I tell you to stop conversing on such topics!” he yelled, struggling and squirming and finally rolling over, all fours in the air.
“I want to get up!” he shouted. “My position is undignified! Anybody’d think I was a prize animal. I don’t like this poultry talk! I’m a man! I’m no bench-winner. And if ever I marry and p-p-produce p-p-progeny, it will be somebody I select, not somebody who selects me!”
The girl looked at him sternly.
“No,” she said. “For centuries man has mated from sentiment and filled the earth with mental and physical degeneracy. Now woman steps in. It is her turn. And she flings aside precedent, prejudice, and sentiment — for the good of the human race! and joining hands with Science marches forward inexorably toward the millennium!”
The girl was so earnest, so naïve, so emotionally stirred by the picture evoked that she enacted in pretty gestures the allegory of womanhood trampling upon sentimental emotion and turning toward Science with arms outstretched.
Langdon, who had managed to sit up, regarded her with terrified interest.
“Would you be amiable enough to remove this net?” he asked, shivering.
“I shall take you before the Board of Regents of the New Race University. They will assign you a cave.”
“This joke has gone far enough,” he said. “Please take off this net.”
“No. I am going to show the Regents what I caught.”
“Me?”
“Certainly.”
“But, my poor child,” he said, “I am not what I seem. The joke is entirely on woman — poor, derided, deluded, down-trodden, humourless woman! Why, all this symmetry of mine — all these endearing young charms, are — are — —”
He hesitated, looked at her, reflected, wavered. She was so pretty — somehow he didn’t want to tell her. He felt furtively of his rubber chest improver, his flexible pneumatic calves, his golden brown wig, his pencilled brows, silky moustache, and carefully fashioned rosebud mouth. . . . A sudden and curious distaste for confessing to her that all the beauties were unreal came over him.
Meanwhile, paying him no further attention for the moment, she was trying hard to uncork the bottle of chloroform.
When she succeeded, she soaked the roll of antiseptic cotton, folded it in a handkerchief, and re-corked the bottle. Then, eyeing him coldly, holding the saturated handkerchief with one hand, her pretty nose with the other, she said with nasal difficulty:
“Dow, Bister Lagdod, bake up your bind dot to struggle — —”
“Are you actually going to do it?” he asked, incredulously.
“I ab!” she replied firmly.
“Nonsense! You are not accustomed to give chloroform!”
“Do; but I’ve read up od the subject — —”
“What!” he exclaimed, horrified. “Look out what you’re doing, child! Don’t you dare try that on me!”
“I’ve got to,” she insisted. “Please dod bake be dervous or we bay have ad accidend — —”
“Take that stuff away!” he yelled. “You’ll give me too much and then I won’t wake up at all!”
“I’ll be as careful as I cad,” she promised him. “Dow be still — —”
“But this is monstrous!” he retorted, flopping about in the leaves like a stranded fish and frantically endeavouring to dodge the wet and reeking handkerchief.
“Let go of my nose! Help! He — he — hah — h — um! bz-z-z-z — —” and he suddenly relaxed and fell back a limp, loose-limbed mass among the leaves.
Pale and resolute the girl knelt beside him, freed him from the net, and, bending nearer, gazed earnestly into his unconscious features. Still gazing, she drew a postman’s whistle from her satchel, set it to her lips, and was about to summon the student on duty at the distant gate to help bring in the quarry, when something about the features of the recumbent young man arrested her attention.
The postman’s whistle fell from her pretty lips; her startled eyes widened as she bent closer to examine the perfections which had captivated her from a scientific standpoint.
At that instant consciousness began to return; he gave a sudden spasmodic and comprehensive flop; there was a report like a pistol. His chest improver had exploded.
Terrified, trembling, she dropped on her knees beside him; never before had she heard of a young man being blown to pieces by chloroform. Then, almost hysterical, she ran to the stream, filled her leather satchel with water, and, running back again, emptied it upon his upturned countenance.
Horror on horror! His golden brown hair — his very scalp seemed to be parting from his forehead — eyebrows, silky moustache, lips — his entire face seemed to be coming off; and, as she shrieked and tottered to her feet, he began to sputter and kick so violently that both pneumatic calves blew up like the reports of a double-barreled shotgun.
And Ethra reeled back against a tree and cowered there, covering her shocked eyes with shaking fingers.
* * *
VII
IT IS A surprising and trying moment for a girl who throws water upon a young man’s face to see that face begin to dissolve and come off, feature by feature, in polychromatic splendour.
She did not faint; her intellect reeled for a moment; then she dropped her hands from her eyes and saw him sitting up on the ground, blinking at her gravely from a streaked and gaudy countenance. His wig was tilted over one eye; rouge and pearl powder made his cheeks and chin very gay; and his handsome, silky moustache hung by one corner from his upper lip. It was too much. She sat down limply on a mossy log and wept.
His senses returned gradually; after a while he got up and walked down to the edge of the brook with all the dignity that unsteady legs permitted.
Fascinated, she watched him at his ablutions where he squatted by the water’s edge, scrubbing away as industriously as a washer-racoon. It did not occur to her to flee; curiosity dominated — an overpowering desire to see what he really resembled in puris naturalibus.
After a while he stood up, hurled the damp wig into the woods, wiped his hands on his knickerbockers and his face on his sleeve, and, bending over, examined his collapsed calves.
And all the while, as the fumes of the chloroform disappeared and he began to realise what had been done to him, he was becoming madder and madder.
She recognised the wrath in his face as he swung on his heel and came toward her.
“It is your own fault!” she said, resolutely, “for playing a silly trick like — —” But she observed his advance very dubiously, straightening up to her full slender height to confront him, but not rising to her feet. Her knees were still very shaky.
He halted close in front of her. Something in the interrogative yet fearless beauty of her upward gaze checked the torrent of indignant eloquence under which he was labouring, and, presently, left him even mentally mute, his lips parted stupidly.
She said: “According to the old order of things a well-bred man would ask my pardon. But a decently-bred man, in the first place, wouldn’t have done such a thing to me. So your apology would only be a paradox — —”
“What!” he exclaimed, stung into protest. “Am I to understand that after netting me and chloroforming me and nearly drowning me — —”
“My mistake was perfectly natural. Do you suppose that I would even dream of trailing you as you really are?”
He gazed at her bewildered; passed his unsteady hand over his countenance, then sat down abruptly beside her on the mossy log and buried his head in his hands.
She looked at him haughtily, sitting up very straight; he continued beside her in silence, face in his hands as though overwhelmed. Nothing was said for several minutes — until the clear disdain of her gaze changed, imperceptibly; and the rigidity of her spinal column relaxed.
“I am very sorry this has happened,” she said. There was, however, no sympathy in her tone. He made no movement to speak.
“I am sorry,” she repeated after a moment. “It is hard to suffer humiliation.”
“Yes,” he said, “it is.”
“But you deserved it.”
“How? I didn’t fashion my face and figure.”
She mistook him: “Somebody did.”
“Yes; my parents.”
“What!”
“Oh, I don’t mean that silly make-up,” he said, raising his head.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean my own face and figure. What you did to me — your netting me, doping me, and all that wasn’t a patch on what you said afterward.”
“What do you mean? What did I say?”
“You asked me if I supposed that you would dream of netting a man with a face and f-figure like — —”
“Mr. Langdon!”
“Didn’t you?”
“I — you — we — —”
“You did! And can any man suffer any humiliation to compare with words like those? I merely ask you.”
With eyes dilated, breath coming quickly, she stared at him, scarcely yet comprehending the blow which her words had dealt to one of the lords of creation.
“Mr. Langdon,” she said, “do you suppose that I am the sort of girl to deliberately criticise either your features or your figure?”
“But you did.”
“I merely meant that you should infer — —”
“I inferred it all right,” he said bitterly.
Perplexed, not knowing how to encounter such an unexpected reproach, vaguely distressed by it, she instinctively attempted to clear herself.
“Please listen. I hadn’t any idea of mortifying you by explaining that you are not qualified by nature to interest the modern woman in — —”
He turned a bright red.
“Do you suppose such a condemnation — such a total ostracism — is agreeable to a man? . . . Is there anything worse you can say about a man than to inform him that no woman could possibly take the slightest interest in him?”
