by R. W. Heilig
jewels of the women each ray seemed to dance like an imp with its mate.
A seat like a throne, covered with furs of tropic beasts of prey, stood
in one corner of the room in the full glare of the light, waiting for
the monarch to come. Above were arranged with artistic _raffinement_
weird oriental draperies, resembling a crimson canopy in the total
effect. Chattering visitors were standing in groups, or had seated
themselves on the divans and curiously-fashioned chairs that were
scattered in seeming disorder throughout the salon. There were critics
and writers and men of the world. Everybody who was anybody and a little
bigger than somebody else was holding court in his own small circle of
enthusiastic admirers. The Bohemian element was subdued, but not
entirely lacking. The magic of David Gardner's name made stately dames
blind to the presence of some individuals whom they would have passed on
the street without recognition.
Chance surveyed this gorgeous assembly with the absent look of a
sleep-walker. Not that his sensuous soul was unsusceptible to the
atmosphere of culture and corruption that permeated the whole, nor to
the dazzling colour effects that tantalised while they delighted the
eye. But to-night they shrivelled into insignificance before the
splendour of his inner vision. A radiant dreamland palace, his play, had
risen from the night of inchoate thought. It was wonderful, it was real,
and needed for its completion only the detail of actual construction.
And now the characters were hovering in the recesses of his brain, were
yearning to leave that many-winded labyrinth to become real beings of
paper and ink. He would probably have tarried overlong in this fanciful
mansion, had not the reappearance of an unexpected guest broken his
reverie.
"Jack!" he exclaimed in surprise, "I thought you a hundred miles away
from here."
"That shows that you no longer care for me," Jack playfully answered.
"When our friendship was young, you always had a presentiment of my
presence."
"Ah, perhaps I had. But tell me, where do you hail from?"
"Gardner called me up on the telephone--long-distance, you know. I
suppose it was meant as a surprise for you. And you certainly looked
surprised--not even pleasantly. I am really head-over-heels at work.
But you know how it is. Sometimes a little imp whispers into my ears
daring me to do a thing which I know is foolish. But what of it? My legs
are strong enough not to permit my follies to overtake me."
"It was certainly good of you to come. In fact, you make me very glad. I
feel that I need you to-night--I don't know why. The feeling came
suddenly--suddenly as you. I only know I need you. How long can you
stay?"
"I must leave you to-morrow morning. I have to hustle somewhat. You know
my examinations are taking place in a day or two and I've got to cram up
a lot of things."
"Still," remarked Chance, "your visit will repay you for the loss of
time. Gardner will read to us to-night his masterpiece."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. I only know it's the real thing. It's worth all the
wisdom bald-headed professors may administer to you in concentrated
doses at five thousand a year."
"Come now," Jack could not help saying, "is your memory giving way?
Don't you remember your own days in college--especially the mathematical
examinations? You know that your marks came always pretty near the
absolute zero."
"Jack," cried Chance in honest indignation, "not the last time. The last
time I didn't flunk."
"No, because your sonnet on Cartesian geometry roused even the
math-fiend to compassion. And don't you remember Professor Squeeler,
whose heart seemed to leap with delight whenever he could tell you that,
in spite of incessant toil on your part, he had again flunked you in
physics with fifty-nine and a half per cent.?"
"And he wouldn't raise the mark to sixty! God forgive him,--I cannot."
Here their exchange of reminiscences was interrupted. There was a stir.
The little potentates of conversation hastened to their seats, before
their minions had wholly deserted them.
The king was moving to his throne!
Assuredly David Gardner had the bearing of a king. Leisurely he took
his seat under the canopy.
A hush fell on the audience; not a fan stirred as he slowly unfolded his
manuscript.
XI
The music of David Gardner's intonation captivated every ear.
Voluptuously, in measured cadence, it rose and fell; now full and strong
like the sound of an organ, now soft and clear like the tinkling of
bells. His voice detracted by its very tunefulness from what he said.
The powerful spell charmed even Chance's accustomed ear. The first page
gracefully glided from David's hand to the carpet before the boy
dimly realised that he was intimately familiar with every word that fell
from David's lips. When the second page slipped with seeming
carelessness from the reader's hand, a sudden shudder ran through the
boy's frame. It was as if an icy hand had gripped his heart. There could
be no doubt of it. This was more than mere coincidence. It was
plagiarism. He wanted to cry out. But the room swam before his eyes.
Surely he must be dreaming. It was a dream. The faces of the audience,
the lights, David, Jack--all phantasmagoria of a dream.
Perhaps he had been ill for a long time. Perhaps Gardner was reading the
play for him. He did not remember having written it. But he probably had
fallen sick after its completion. What strange pranks our memories will
play us! But no! He was not dreaming, and he had not been ill.
He could endure the horrible uncertainty no longer. His overstrung
nerves must find relaxation in some way or break with a twang. He turned
to his friend who was listening with rapt attention.
"Jack, Jack!" he whispered.
"What is it?"
"That is my play!"
"You mean that you inspired it?"
"No, I have written it, or rather, was going to write it."
"Wake up, Chance! You are mad!"
"No, in all seriousness. It is mine. I told you--don't you
remember--when we returned from Coney Island--that I was writing a
play."
"Ah, but not this play."
"Yes, this play. I conceived it, I practically wrote it."
"The more's the pity that Gardner had preconceived it."
"But it is mine!"
"Did you tell him a word about it?"
"No, to be sure."
"Did you leave the manuscript in your room?"
"I had, in fact, not written a line of it. No, I had not begun the
actual writing."
"Why should a man of Gardner's reputation plagiarise your plays, written
or unwritten?"
"I can see no reason. But--"
"Tut, tut."
For already this whispered conversation had elicited a look like a stab
from a lady before them.
Chance held fast to the edge of a chair. He must cling to some reality,
or else drift rudderless in a dim sea of vague apprehensions.
Or was J
ack right?
Was his mind giving way? No! No! No! There must be a monstrous secret
somewhere, but what matter? Did anything matter? He had called on his
mate like a ship lost in the fog. For the first time he had not
responded. He had not understood. The bitterness of tears rose to the
boy's eyes.
Above it all, melodiously, ebbed and flowed the rich accents of David
Gardner.
Chance listened to the words of his own play coming from the older man's
mouth. The horrible fascination of the scene held him entranced. He saw
the creations of his mind pass in review before him, as a man might look
upon the face of his double grinning at him from behind a door in the
hideous hours of night.
They were all there! The mad king. The subtle-witted courtiers. The
sombre-hearted Prince. The Queen-Mother who had loved a jester better
than her royal mate, and the fruit of their shameful alliance, the
Princess Marigold, a creature woven of sunshine and sin.
Swiftly the action progressed. Shadows of impending death darkened the
house of the King. In the horrible agony of the rack the old jester
confessed. Stripped of his cap and bells, crowned with a wreath of
blood, he looked so pathetically funny that the Princess Marigold could
not help laughing between her tears.
The Queen stood there all trembling and pale. Without a complaint she
saw her lover die. The executioner's sword smote the old man's head
straight from the trunk. It rolled at the feet of the King, who tossed
it to Marigold. The little Princess kissed it and covered the grinning
horror with her yellow veil.
The last words died away.
There was no applause. Only silence. All were stricken with the dread
that men feel in the house of God or His awful presence in genius.
But the boy lay back in his chair. The cold sweat had gathered on his
brow and his temples throbbed. Nature had mercifully clogged his head
with blood. The rush of it drowned the crying voice of the nerves,
deadening for a while both consciousness and pain.
XII
Somehow the night had passed--somehow in bitterness, in anguish. But it
had passed.
Chance's lips were parched and sleeplessness had left its trace in the
black rings under the eyes, when the next morning he confronted David
in the studio.
David was sitting at the writing-table in his most characteristic
pose, supporting his head with his hand and looking with clear piercing
eyes searchingly at the boy.
"Yes," he observed, "it's a most curious psychical phenomenon."
"You cannot imagine how real it all seemed to me."
The boy spoke painfully, dazed, as if struck by a blow.
"Even now it is as if something has gone from me, some struggling
thought that I cannot--cannot remember."
David regarded him as a physical experimenter might look upon the
subject of a particularly baffling mental disease.
"You must not think, my boy, that I bear you any malice for your
extraordinary delusion. Before Jack went away he gave me an exact
account of all that has happened. Divers incidents recurred to him from
which it appears that, at various times in the past, you have been on
the verge of a nervous collapse."
A nervous collapse! What was the use of this term but a euphemism for
insanity?
"Do not despair, dear child," David caressingly remarked. "Your
disorder is not hopeless, not incurable. Such crises come to every man
who writes. It is the tribute we pay to the Lords of Song. The
minnesinger of the past wrote with his heart's blood; but we moderns dip
our pen into the sap of our nerves. We analyse life, love art--and the
dissecting knife that we use on other men's souls finally turns against
ourselves.
"But what shall a man do? Shall he sacrifice art to hygiene and
surrender the one attribute that makes him chiefest of created things?
Animals, too, think. Some walk on two legs. But introspection
differentiates man from the rest. Shall we yield up the sweet
consciousness of self that we derive from the analysis of our emotion,
for the contentment of the bull that ruminates in the shade of a tree or
the healthful stupidity of a mule?"
"Assuredly not."
"But what shall a man do?"
"Ah, that I cannot tell. Mathematics offers definite problems that admit
of a definite solution. Life states its problems with less exactness and
offers for each a different solution. One and one are two to-day and
to-morrow. Psychical values, on each manipulation, will yield a
different result. Still, your case is quite clear. You have overworked
yourself in the past, mentally and emotionally. You have sown unrest,
and must not be surprised if neurasthenia is the harvest thereof."
"Do you think--that I should go to some sanitarium?" the boy falteringly
asked.
"God forbid! Go to the seashore, somewhere where you can sleep and play.
Take your body along, but leave your brain behind--at least do not
take more of it with you than is necessary. The summer season in
Atlantic City has just begun. There, as everywhere in American society,
you will be much more welcome if you come without brains."
David's half-bantering tone reassured Chance a little. Timidly he
dared approach once more the strange event that had wrought such havoc
with his nervous equilibrium.
"How do you account for my strange obsession--one might almost call it a
mania?"
"If it could be accounted for it would not be strange."
"Can you suggest no possible explanation?"
"Perhaps a stray leaf on my desk a few indications of the plot, a
remark--who knows? Perhaps thought-matter is floating in the air.
Perhaps--but we had better not talk of it now. It would needlessly
excite you."
"You are right," answered Chance gloomily, "let us not talk of it. But
whatever may be said, it is a marvellous play."
"You flatter me. There is nothing in it that you may not be able to do
equally well--some day."
"Ah, no," the boy replied, looking up to David with admiration. "You
are the master."
XIII
Lazily Chance stretched his limbs on the beach of Atlantic City. The
sea, that purger of sick souls, had washed away the fever and the fret
of the last few days. The wind was in his hair and the spray was in his
breath, while the rays of the sun kissed his bare arms and legs. He
rolled over in the glittering sand in the sheer joy of living.
Now and then a wavelet stole far into the beach, as if to caress him,
but pined away ere it could reach its goal. It was as if the enamoured
sea was stretching out its arms to him. Who knows, perhaps through the
clear water some green-eyed nymph, or a young sea-god with the tang of
the sea in his hair, was peering amorously at the boy's red mouth. The
people of the deep love the red warm blood of human kind. It is always
the young that they lure to their watery haunts, never the shrivelled
limbs that totter shivering to the grave.
Such fancies c
ame to Chance as he lay on the shore in his bathing
attire, happy, thoughtless,--animal.
The sun and the sea seemed to him two lovers vying for his favor. The
sudden change of environment had brought complete relaxation and had
