Complete weird tales of.., p.679
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 679
“There are millions of them by the roadside,” she said as he stumbled to his feet and drew the frail blossom through his buttonhole with unsteady fingers.
“Yes,” he said, “there are other roses in the world.” Then he drew a deep, quiet breath and smiled at her.
She smiled, too.
“This was her room,” she explained, “the room where she first met her husband, the room into which she came a bride, the room where she died, poor thing. Oh, I forgot that you don’t know who she was!”
“Elizabeth Tennant,” he answered calmly.
“Why — how did you know?”
“God knows,” he said; and bent his head, touching the petals of the wild rose with his lips. Then he looked up straight into her eyes — one was hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey.
* * *
XXII
AS THEY LEFT the house an hour later, walking down the path slowly, shoulder to shoulder, she said:
“Mr. Brown, I want you to like that house.”
A sudden and subtly hideous idea glided into his brain.
“You don’t believe in suffragettes, do you?” he said, forcing a hollow laugh.
“Why, I am one. Didn’t you know it?”
“You!”
“Certainly. Goodness! how you did run! But,” she added with innocent satisfaction, “I think I have secured every bit as good a one as the one Gladys chased out of a tree with her horrid marmoset.”
* * *
XXIII
THE EUGENIC REVOLUTION might fairly be said to have begun with the ignominious weddings of Messrs. Reginald Willett, James Carrick, De Lancy Smith, and Alphonso W. Green.
Its crisis culminated in the Long Acre riots. But the great suffragette revolution was now coming to its abrupt and predestined end; the reaction, already long overdue, gathered force with incredible rapidity and exploded from Yonkers to Coney Island, in a furious counter-revolution. The revolt of the Unfit was on at last.
Mobs of maddened spinsters paraded the streets of the five boroughs demanding spouses. Maidens of uncertain age and attractions who, in the hysterical enthusiasm of the eugenic revolution, had offered themselves the pleasures of martyrdom by vowing celibacy and by standing aside while physically perfect sister suffragettes pounced upon and married all flawless specimens of the opposite sex, now began to demand for themselves the leavings among the mature, thin-shanked, and bald-headed.
In vain their beautiful comrades attempted to explain the eugenistic principles — to point out that the very essence of the entire cult lay in non-reproduction by the physically unfit, and in the ultimate extinction of the thin, bald, and meagre among the human race.
But thousands and thousands of the love-maddened rose up and denounced the Beauty Trust, demanded a return to the former conditions of fair competition in the open shop of matrimony.
They were timidly encouraged by thousands of middle-aged gentlemen who denied that either excessive meagreness or baldness was hereditary; they even dared to assert that the suffragette revolution had been a mistake, and pointed out that only an average of one in every hundred women had taken the trouble to exercise her privilege at the polls in the recent election, and that ninety per cent. of those who voted marked their ballots wrong or forgot to mark them at all, or else invalidated them by writing suggestions to the candidates on the backs of the ballots.
A week of terrible confusion ensued, and, in the very midst of it, news came from London that Miss Pondora Bottomly, who, after throwing bricks all day through the back windows of Windsor Castle, had been arrested by a very thin Scotch policeman, had suddenly seized the policeman and married him in spite of his terrified cries.
A shout of protest arose from every human man in the civilised world; a groan of dismay burst from every human woman. It was the beginning of the end; the old order of things was already in sight; men, long hidden, reappeared in public places; wives shyly began to respond to the cautious “good-mornings” of their long ignored husbands, the wealthy and socially desirable but otherwise unattractive plucked up spirits; florists, caterers, modistes, ministers came out of seclusion and began to prowl around the débris of their ruined professions with a view to starting out again in business; and here and there the forgotten art of flirting was furtively resurrected and resumed in the awaking metropolis.
“Perfection,” said America’s greatest orator on the floor of the Senate, “is endurable only because unattainable. The only things on earth that make this world interesting are its sporting chances, its misfortunes, and its mutts!”
And within a month after the delivery of this classic the American nation had resumed its normal, haphazard aspect. The revolution, the riots on Fifth Avenue and Long Acre, the bachelors’ St. Bartholomew were all forgotten; Tammany Hall and the Republican State Organization yawned, stretched, rubbed their eyes, awoke, and sat up licking their hungry chops; the gentlemen in charge of the Bureau of Special Privileges opened the long-locked drawers of that piece of furniture, and looked over the ledgers; trusts, monopolies, systems came out of their cyclone cellars; turf associations dredged the dump-docks for charters, whither a feminine municipal administration had consigned them; all-night cafés, dance-halls, gambling houses reopened, and the electric lights sparkled once more on painted cheeks and tinted lips.
The good old days of yore were returning fast on the heels of the retreat of woman; capital shook hands with privilege; the prices of staples soared; joints, dives, and hospitals were fast filling up; jails and prisons and asylums looked forward to full houses. It was the same old world again — the same dear old interesting, exciting, grafting, murdering, diseased planet, spinning along through space — just as far as usual from other worlds and probably so arranged in order that other worlds might not suffer from its aroma.
And over it its special, man-designed god was expected to keep watch and deal out hell or paradise as the man-made regulations which governed the deity and his abode required.
So once again the golden days of yore began; congregations worshipped in Fifth Avenue churches and children starved on Avenue A; splendid hospitals were erected, palatial villas were built in the country; and department stores paid Mamie and Maud seven dollars a week — but competed in vain, sometimes, with smiling and considerate individuals who offered them more, including enough to eat.
The world’s god was back in his heaven; the world would, therefore, go very well; and woman, at last, was returning to her own sphere to mind her own business — and a gifted husband, especially created as her physical and mental lord and master by a deity universally regarded as masculine in sex.
* * *
LEFT OVER
XXIV
SHE KNEW SO little about the metropolis that, on her first visit, a year before, she had asked the driver of the taxicab to recommend a respectable hotel for a lady travelling alone; and he had driven her to the Hotel Aurora Borealis — that great, gay palace of Indiana limestone and plate glass towering above the maelstrom of Long Acre.
When, her business transacted, she returned to the Westchester farm, still timid, perplexed, and partly stunned by the glitter and noise of her recent metropolitan abode, she determined never again to stop at that hotel.
But when the time came for her to go again the long list of hotels confused her. She did not know one from the other; she shrank from experimenting; and, at least, she knew something about the Aurora Borealis and she would not feel like an utter stranger there.
That was the only reason she went back there that time. And the next time she came to town that was the principal reason she returned to the Aurora Borealis. But the next time, she made up her mind to go elsewhere; and in the roaring street she turned coward, and went to the only place she knew. And the time after that she fought a fierce little combat with herself all the way down in the train; and, with flushed cheeks, hating herself, ordered the cabman to take her to the Hotel Aurora Borealis.
But it was not until several trips after that one — on a rainy morning in May — that she found courage to say to the maid at the cloak-room door:
“Who is that young man? I always see him in the lobby when I come here.”
The maid cast an intelligent glance toward a tall, well-built young fellow who stood pulling on his gloves near the desk.
“Huh!” she sniffed; “he ain’t much.”
“What do you mean?” asked the girl.
“Why, he’s a capper, mem.”
“A — a what?”
“A capper — a gambler.”
The girl flushed scarlet. The maid handed her a check for her rain-coat and said: “They hang around swell hotels, they do, and pick up acquaintance with likely looking and lonely boobs. Then the first thing the lonely boob knows he’s had a good dinner with a new acquaintance and is strolling into a quiet but elegant looking house in the West Forties or Fifties.” And the maid laughed, continuing her deft offices in the dressing-room, and the girl looked into the glass at her own crimson cheeks and sickened eyes.
At luncheon he sat at a little table by a window, alone, indolently preoccupied with a newspaper and a fruit salad. She, across the room, kept her troubled eyes away. Yet it was as though she saw him — perhaps the mental embodiment of him was the more vivid for her resolutely averted head.
Every detail of his appearance was painfully familiar to her — his dark eyes, his smooth face which always seemed a trifle sun-tanned, the fastidious and perfect taste of his dress in harmony with his boyish charm and quiet distinction — and the youth of him — the wholesome and self-possessed youth — that seemed to her the most dreadful thing about him in the new light of her knowledge. For he could scarcely be twenty-five.
Every movement he made had long since fascinated her; his unconscious grace had been, to her, the unstudied assurance of a man of the world bred to a social environment about which she knew only through reading.
Never had she seen him but straightway she began to wonder who and what exalted person in the unknown metropolitan social circle he might be.
She had often wondered, speculated; sometimes dreamily she had endowed him with name and position — with qualities, too — ideal qualities suggested by his air of personal distinction — delightful qualities suggested by his dark, pleasant eyes, and by the slight suspicion of humour lurking so often on the edges of his smoothly shaven lips.
He was so clean-looking, so nice — and he had the shoulders and the hands and the features of good breeding! And, after all — after all, he was a gambler! — a derelict whose sinister living was gained by his wits; a trailer and haunter and bleeder of men! Worse — a decoy sent out by others!
She had little appetite for luncheon; he seemed to have less. But she remembered that she had never seen him eat very much — and never drink anything stronger than tea.
“At least,” she thought with a mental quiver, “he has that to his credit.”
The quiver surprised her; she was scarcely prepared for any emotion concerning him except the natural shock of disillusion and the natural pity of a young girl for anything ignoble and hopelessly unworthy.
Hopelessly? She wondered. Was it possible that God could ever find the means of grace for such a man? It could be done, of course; it were a sin for her to doubt it. Yet she could not see how.
Still, he was young enough to have parents living somewhere; unmarred enough to invite confidence if he cared to. . . . And suddenly it struck her that to invite confidence was part of his business; his charm part of his terrible equipment.
She sat there breathing faster, thinking.
His charm was part of his equipment — an infernal weapon! She understood it now. Long since, innocently speculating, she had from the very beginning and without even thinking, conceded to him her confidence in his worthiness. And — the man was a gambler!
For a few moments she hated him hotly. After a while there was more sorrow than heat in her hatred, more contempt for his profession than for him. . . . And somebody had led him astray; that was certain, because no man of his age — and appearance — could have deliberately and of his own initiative gone so dreadfully and cruelly wrong in the world.
Would God pity him? Would some means be found for his salvation? Would salvation come? It must; she could not doubt it — after she had lifted her eyes once more and looked at him where he sat immersed in his newspaper, a pleasant smile on his lips.
A bar of sunlight fell across his head, striping his shoulder; the scarlet flowers on the table were becoming to him. And, oh! he seemed so harmless — so delightfully decent; there where the sunlight fell across his shoulder and spread in a golden net across the white cloth under his elbows.
She rose, curiously weary; a lassitude lay upon her as she left the room and went out into the city about her business — which was to see her lawyer concerning the few remaining details of her inheritance.
The inheritance was the big, prosperous Westchester farm where she lived — had always lived with her grandfather since her parents’ death. It was turning out to be very valuable because of the mania of the wealthy for Westchester acreage and a revival in a hundred villages of the magnificence of the old Patroons.
Outside of her own house and farm she had land to sell to the landed and republican gentry; and she sold it and they bought it with an avidity that placed her financial independence beyond doubt.
All the morning she transacted business downtown with the lawyer. In the afternoon she went to a matinée all by herself, and would have had a most blissful day had it not been for the unquiet memory of a young man who, she had learned that morning, was fairly certain of eternal damnation.
That evening she went back to Westchester absent-minded and depressed.
* * *
XXV
IT WAS IN early June when she arrived in town again. He was in the lobby as usual; he lunched at the table by the window as usual. There seemed to be nothing changed about him except that he was a handsomer man than she had supposed him.
She ate very little luncheon. As usual, he glanced at her once — a perfectly pleasant and inoffensive glance — and resumed his luncheon and his newspaper. He was always quiet, always alone. There seemed to be a curious sort of stillness which radiated from him, laying a spell upon his environment for a few paces on every side of him. She had felt this; she felt it now.
Downtown her business was finally transacted; she went to a matinée all by herself, and found herself staring beyond the painted curtain and the mummers — beyond the bedizened scenery — out into the world somewhere and into two dark, boyish eyes that looked so pleasantly back at her. And suddenly her own eyes filled; she bent her head and touched them with her handkerchief.
No, she must never again come to the Hotel Aurora Borealis. There were reasons. Besides, it was no longer necessary for her to come to town at all. She must not come any more. . . . And yet, if she could only know what became of him — whether salvation ever found him ——
The curtain fell; she rose and pinned on her hat, gathered her trifles, and moved out with the others into the afternoon sunshine of Broadway.
That evening she dined in her room. She had brought no luggage. About ten o’clock the cab was announced.
As she walked through the nearly deserted lobby she looked around for him. He stood near the door, talking to the hotel detective.
Halting a moment to button her gloves, she heard the detective say:
“Never mind the whys and whats! You fade away! Understand?”
“By what authority do you forbid me entrance to this hotel?” asked the young man coolly.
“Well, it’s good enough for you that I tell you to keep out!”
“I can not comply with your suggestion. I have an appointment here in half an hour.”
“Now you go along quietly,” said the detective. “We’ve had our eyes on you. We know all about you. And when the hotel gets wise to a guy like you we tip him off and he beats it!”
“We can discuss that to-morrow; I tell you I have an appointment — —”
“G’wan out o’ here!” growled the detective.
The young man quietly fell into step beside him, but on the sidewalk he turned on him, white and desperate.
“I tell you I’ve got to keep that appointment.” He stood aside as the girl passed him, head lowered, and halted to wait for her cab. “I tell you I’ve got to go back — —”
“Here, you!” The detective seized his arm as he attempted to pass; the young man wheeled and flung him aside, and the next instant reeled back as the detective struck him again with his billy, knocking him halfway into the street.
“You damned dead-beat!” he panted, “I’ll show you!”
The young man stood swaying, his hands against his head; porters, cabmen, and the detective saw him stagger and fall heavily. And the next moment the girl was kneeling beside him.
“Let him alone, lady,” said somebody. “That bum isn’t hurt.”
The “bum,” in fact, was getting to his feet, groping for some support; and the girl’s arm was offered and he leaned on it a moment, clearing his eyes with a gloved hand. Suddenly he made a movement so quick that she never understood how she wrenched the short, dull-blue weapon from his hand.
“Pick up your hat!” she gasped. “Do what I tell you!”
He looked at her, dazed, then the blood blotted his dark eyes again. She stooped swiftly, caught up his hat, and, holding tightly to his arm, opened the other door of the taxicab.
“They’ll kill you here,” she whispered. “Come with me. I’ve got to talk to you!”
“Lady — are you crazy?” demanded the tall head-porter, aghast.
But she had got him into the cab. “Drive on,” she said through clenched teeth. And the chauffeur laughed and started east.
