“I couldn’t figure what she wanted, but I was so fascinated by her that if she’d asked me to attempt to swim the Channel without water-wings I’d have undertaken it.
“Her room was in a little tower that stuck up above the roof, removed from every other bedroom in the place, with windows looking out across the sea and gardens. It was so quiet there that we could hear the waves against the beach, and the shouting of the revelers came to us like echoes from a distant mountaintop.
“I knocked, but got no answer; knocked again, then tried the door. It was unfastened, and swung open to my hand. Elaine was lying on a sofa by the window with the light from two tall candelabra shining on her. She was asleep, apparently, and her gorgeous hair lay spread across the jade-green cushion underneath her head. You recall that hair, Doctor Trowbridge? It was like a molten flame; it glowed with dazzling brilliance, with here and there sharp sudden flashes as of superheated gold.
“She was wearing a green nightrobe of the filmiest silk crêpe, which shaded but hid nothing of her wonderfully made body. Her long green eyes were closed, but the long black lashes curled upon her cheeks with seductive loveliness. Her mouth was slightly parted and I caught a glimpse of small white teeth and the tip of a red tongue between the poinsettia vividness of her lips. The soft silk of her gown clung to the lovely swell of her small, pointed breasts, the tips of which were rouged the same rich red as her lips, her fingertips and toes.
“I felt as if my body had been drained of blood, as if I must drop limply where I stood, for every bit of strength had flowed from me. I stood and gazed upon that miracle of beauty, that green and gold and blood-red woman, absolutely weak and sick with overmastering desire.
“She stirred lazily and flung an arm across her eyes as she moaned gently. I stood above her, still as death.
“For a moment she lay there with the blindfold of her rounded arm across her face, then dropped it languidly and turned her head toward me.
“Her glowing green eyes looked up in my face, and the pupils seemed to widen as she looked. Her breath came faster and her body tensed, as though in sudden pain. Swift, almost, as a snake’s, her scarlet tongue flicked over scarlet lips and opal teeth.
“‘You love me, Frazier, don’t you?’ she murmured in a throaty undertone which seemed to lose itself in the shadows where the candlelight had faded. ‘You love me as only an American loves, with your heart and soul and spirit, and your chivalry and truth and faith?’
“I couldn’t speak. My breath seemed held fast in my throat, and when I tried to form an answer only a hoarse, groaning sound escaped my lips.
“The pupils of her green eyes flared as with a sudden inward light, her lithe, slim body shook as with an ague, and she laughed a softly purring laugh deep in her throat. ‘Mine,’ she murmured huskily. ‘Mine, all mine for ever!’
“She raised her arms and drew me down to her, crushed my lips against her mouth till it seemed she’d suck my soul out with her stifling kiss.
“Half fainting as I was, she pushed me back, rolled up my tunic-cuff and bit me on the wrist. She made a little growling sound, soft and caressing, but, somehow, savage as the snarling of a tigress toying with her prey. Her teeth were sharp as sabers, and the blood welled from the wound like water from a broken conduit. But before I could cry out she pressed her mouth against the lesion and began to drink as though she were a famished traveler in the desert who had stumbled on a spring.
“She looked up from her draft, her red lips redder still with blood, and smiled at me. Before I realized what she did, she raised her hand and bit herself upon the wrist, then held the bleeding white limb up to me. ‘Drink, beloved; drink my blood as I drink yours,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘It will make us one!’
“Her blood was salty and acerb, but I drank it greedily as I had drunk champagne an hour or two before, sucked it thirstily as she sucked mine, and it seemed to mount up to my brain like some cursèd oriental drug. A chill ran through me, as though a bitter storm-wind swept in from the sea; a red mist swam before my eyes; I felt that I was sinking, sinking in a lake of bitter, scented blood.”
THE SPEAKER PAUSED AND passed a hand across his forehead, where small gouts of perspiration gleamed. “Then—” he began, but Jules de Grandin raised his hand.
“You need not tell us more, Monsieur,” he murmured. “In England and America there is a silly superstition that seduction is exclusively a masculine prerogative. Eh bien, you and I know otherwise, n’est-ce-pas?”
Taviton looked gratefully at the small Frenchman. “Thanks,” he muttered.
“MacLeod refused point-blank to marry us. ‘I’d sooner gie ye’r lich t’ th’ kirkyard turf than join ye wie yon de’l’s bairn,’ he told me when I asked him.
“When we asked a priest to marry us we found French law required so much red tape—getting baptismal certificates and all that nonsense—that it was impractical; so I applied for leave to London, and Elaine joined me on the ship. We were married by the master just as soon as we were out of French territorial waters.
“I cabled home for funds and we had a grand time shopping first in London, then at the Galeries LaFayette in Paris when my discharge came through.
“But I wasn’t happy. Passion may be part of love, but it’s no substitute. Elaine was like a quenchless fire; there was no limit to her appetites nor any satisfying them. She wanted me, and all that I possessed. I never saw her eat much heavy food, but the amount of caviar and oysters and pasties she consumed was almost past belief, and she drank enough champagne and brandy to have put a dipsomaniac to shame; yet I never saw her show the smallest sign of drunkenness. No kind of sport or exercise held any interest for her, but she’d dance all afternoon and until the final tune was played at night, and still be fresh when I was so exhausted that I thought I’d drop. Shopping never seemed to tire her, either. She could make the rounds of twenty stores, looking over practically the entire stock of each, then come home glowing with delight at what she’d purchased and be ready for a matinee or thé dansant and an evening’s session at the supper clubs.
“When I appraised her thus and realized her shallowness and the selfishness which amounted to egotism, I felt I hated her; but more than that I loathed myself for having let her make a slave of me, and against the memory of her branding kisses and the night when we had drunk each other’s blood there rose like a reproachful ghost the recollection of the evening I had said good-bye to Agnes just before I went to Dix to proceed to ship at Hoboken. How sweet and cool and comforting that last kiss seemed; there was something like a benediction in her promise, ‘I’ll be waiting for you, Frazier, waiting if it means for time and all eternity, and loving you each minute that I wait.’
“But when I lay in Elaine’s arms so feverishly clasped it seemed our bodies melted and were fused in one, and felt the sting of her hot kisses on my mouth, or the bitter tang of her blood in my throat, I knew that I was weak as wax in her hot grasp, and that she owned me bodily and spiritually. I was her slave and thing and chattel to do with as she liked, powerless to offer any opposition to her slightest whim.
“Her blood-lust was insatiable. Five, ten, a dozen times a night, she’d wound me with her teeth or nails, and drink my blood as though it had been liquor and she a famished drunkard. The Germans have a word for it: Blutdurst—bloodcraving, the unappeasable appetite of the blutsanger, the vampire, for its bloody sustenance.
“Sometimes she’d make me take her blood, for she seemed to find as keen delight in being passive in a blood-feast as when she drank ‘the red milk’, as she called it.
“Sometimes she’d mutilate herself upon the hands and feet and under the left breast, then lie with outstretched arms and folded feet while I applied my lips to the five wounds. ‘Love’s crucifixion’, she called it, and when she felt my mouth against the cuts upon her palms and side and insteps she would make small growling noises in her throat, and almost swoon in ecstasy.
“I was weak with loss of blood within three months, but as
powerless to refuse my veins to her as I was to tell her that the sums she spent in shopping were driving me to bankruptcy.
“Things were changed when I came home to Harrisonville. My parents had both died with influenza while I was away. Agnes’ father had committed suicide. He’d been in business as an importer, dealing exclusively with German houses, and the blockade of the Allies and our later entrance into the war completely ruined him. They told me when his bills were paid there was less than a hundred dollars left for Agnes.
“She made a brave best of it. Nearly everything was gone, but she furnished a small flat with odds and ends that no one bid for at the auction of her father’s things, got a place as a librarian and carried on.
“She took my treachery standing, too. Some women would have tried to show their gallantry by being over-friendly, calling on us and asserting their proprietary rights as old friends of the bridegroom. Agnes stayed away with reserve and decency until our house was opened, then came to the reception quite like any other friend. Lord, what grit it must have taken to run the gauntlet of those pitying eyes! I don’t believe there was a soul in town who didn’t know we’d been engaged and that I’d let her down.
“If there were any bitterness in her she didn’t show it. I think that my lips trembled more than hers when she took my hand and whispered, ‘I’m praying for your happiness, Frazie.’
“God knows I needed prayers.”
TEARS WERE STREAMING FROM de Grandin’s eyes. “La pauvre!” he muttered thickly. “La pauvre brave créature! Monsieur, if you spend all of life remaining to you flat upon your face before Madame your wife, you fail completely to abase yourself sufficiently!”
“You’re telling me?” the other answered harshly. “It’s not for me I’ve come to you this evening, sir. Whatever I get I have coming to me, but Agnes loves me. God knows why. It’s to try and save her happiness I’m here.”
“Tiens, say on, Monsieur,” the little Frenchman bade. “Relate this history of perfidy and its result. It may be we can salvage something of the happiness you let slip by. What else is there to tell?”
“Plenty,” rejoined Taviton. “Elaine could not abide the thought of Agnes. ‘That cold-faced baby; that dough-cheeked fool!’ she stormed. ‘What does she know of love? What has she to give a man—or what can she take from him? Say she’s frigid, cold, unloving as a statue, icy-hearted as a fish!’ she ordered. ‘Say it, my lover. You won’t? I’ll kiss the words from you!’ And when she held me in her arms again and stifled me with bloody kisses—Heaven help me!—I forswore my love, forgot the debt of life I owed to Agnes, and repeated parrotwise each wretched, lying slander that she bade me speak.
“It was a little thing that freed me from my slavery. We’d given up the house here and taken an apartment in New York. Elaine was in her element in the world of shops and theaters and night clubs; she hardly seemed to take a moment’s rest, or to need it, for that matter. My old outfit was going to parade on Decoration Day in honor of the buddies who went west, and she set herself against my coming back to Harrisonville, even to participate in the parade. I don’t think she cared a tinker’s dam about my going, but she’d grown so used to having me obey her like a docile, well-trained dog it never seemed to occur to her that I might go when she forbade me. Perhaps, if she had pleaded or used her deadly, seductive power, she would have prevailed, but she’d grown so she had no respect for me. Seldom did she say so much as ‘please’ when ordering me about; I was necessary to her satisfaction—there never was a hint of any other man—but only as any other chattel that she owned. She showed no more affection for me than she might bestow upon her powder puff or lipstick. She loved the things providing creature comforts and sensory satisfaction; I was one. The endearing names she called me while she held me in her arms were purely reflex, a sort of orchestration to a dance of Sapphic passion.
“‘If you disobey me you’ll be sorry all your life,’ she warned as I left the house that morning.
“I went and marched with what remained of the old outfit. The excesses I’d been subject to had weakened me, and when the parade was dismissed I reeled and fell. Coroner Martin’s ambulance had been assigned for public service, and they put me in it and took me to his funeral home. I thought he looked more serious than a little fainting-fit would warrant when he helped me to his private office and offered me a glass of brandy.
“‘Feeling stronger now, Frazier?’ he asked.
“‘Yes, sir, thank you,’ I replied as I handed back the glass, ‘quite fit.’
“‘Strong enough to stand bad news?’
“‘I suppose so; I’ve stood it before, you know, sir.’
“He seemed at a loss for what to say, looking at his sets of record cases, at his wall safe and the telephone; anywhere except at me. Finally, ‘It’s Mrs. Taviton,’ he told me. ‘There’s been an accident; she’s been—’
“‘Killed?’ I asked him as he hesitated.
“I felt like shouting, ‘That’s not bad news, man; that’s tidings of release!’ but I contrived to keep a look of proper apprehension on my face while I waited confirmation of my hope.
“‘Yes, son, she’s been killed,’ he answered kindly. ‘They telephoned the police department an hour ago, and as you were marching then the police relayed the message to me. They knew I’d always served your family, and—’
“‘Of course,’ I interrupted. ‘Make all necessary arrangements with New York authorities, please, and send for her as soon as possible.’ I had difficulty to keep from adding, ‘And be sure you dig her grave so deep that she’ll not hear the judgment trumps!’
“Elaine had jumped or fallen from a window, fallen fourteen stories to a concrete pavement; but despite the fact that practically all her bones were broken Mr. Martin told me that her beauty was not marred. Certainly, there was no blemish visible as I sat beside her body on the night before the funeral.
“Mr. Martin was an artist. He had placed her in a casket of pale silver-bronze with écru satin lining and had clothed her in a robe of pale Nile green. Her head was turned a little to one side, facing me, and the soft black lashes swept her flawless cheeks so naturally it seemed that any moment they might rise and show the gleaming emerald of her eyes. One hand lay loosely on her breast, the fingers slightly curled as if in quiet sleep; the other rested at her side, and in the flickering light of the watch-candles I could swear I saw her bosom rise and fall in slumber.
“I could not take my eyes off her face. That countenance of perfect beauty I had looked upon so often, those slim red-fingered hands and little satin-shod feet from which I’d drunk the blood at her command—it seemed impossible that they were now for ever quiet with the quietness of death.
“‘But it’s release,’ I told myself. ‘You’re free. Your bondage to this beautiful she-devil’s done; you can—’ the thought seemed profanation, and I thrust it back, but it came again unbidden: ‘Now you can marry Agnes!’
“It was a trick of light and shadow, doubtless, but it seemed to me the dead lips in the casket curved in a derisive smile, and through the quiet of the darkened room of death there came, faint as the echo of an echo’s echo, that whisper I had heard Armistice Night beside the sea at Biarritz: ‘Mine! Mine; all mine for ever!’
“We buried her in Shadow Lawn, and Agnes sent me a brief note of sympathy. Within a month we saw each other, in two months we were inseparable as we had been before the war. Last winter she agreed to marry me.
“I think I knew how Kartophilos felt when he was reconciled with Heaven the night that Agnes promised she would be my wife. All that I’d forfeited I was to have. The promises of childhood were to be fulfilled. I put the memory of marriage to Elaine behind me like an ugly dream, and a snatch of an old war song was upon my lips as I let myself into my bedroom:
There’s a kiss with a tender meaning.
Other kisses you recall,
But the kisses I get from you, sweetheart,
Are the sweetest kisses of all . .
.
“That night I’d had the sweetest kiss I’d known since I went off to war; life was starting afresh for me, I was—
“My train of happy thought broke sharply. My bedroom was instinct with a spicy, heady perfume, cloying-sweet, provocative as an aphrodisiac. I recognized it; it was a scent that cut through all the odors of the antiseptics a moment before I had first seen Elaine in the convalescent section of the nursing-home at Biarritz.
“I looked wildly round the room, but there was no one there. Stamping to the nearest window I sent it sailing up, and though it was a zero night outside I left it fully open till the last faint taint of hellish sweetness had been blown away.
“Shivering—not entirely from cold—I got in bed. As the velvet darkness settled down when I snapped off the light, I felt a soft touch on my cheek, a touch like that of soft, cold little fingers seeking my lips. I brushed my face as though a noisome insect crawled across it, and it seemed I heard a little sob—or perhaps a snatch of mocking laugh—beside me in the darkness.
“I put my hand out wildly. It encountered nothing solid, but in the pillow next my head was a depression, as though another head were resting there, and the bedclothes by my side were slightly raised as if they shrouded slimly rounded limbs and small and pointed breasts.
“I dropped back, weak with panic terror, and against my throat I felt the tiny rasping scrape of little fingernails. How often that same feeling had awakened me from sleep when Elaine’s craving for a draft of ‘the red milk’ was not to be denied! And then I heard—subjectively, as one hears half-forgotten music which he struggles to remember—‘Give me your blood, belovèd, it will warm me. I am cold.’ Then, sharp and clear as the echo of a sleigh’s bells on a frosty night, repeated those six words which had been my bill of sale to slavery: ‘Mine! Mine; all mine for ever!’
“I woke next morning with a feeling of malaise. Sure I’d suffered from a nightmare, I was still reluctant to rise and look into the mirror, and reluctance grew to dread when I put my hand up to my throat and felt a little smarting pain beneath my fingers. At last I took my courage in both hands and went into the bathroom. Sheer terror made me sick as I gazed at my reflection in the shaving-glass. A little semilunar scar was fresh upon my throat, the kind of scar a curved and pointed fingernail would make.
A Rival from the Grave Page 36
