The Lost Master - The Collected Works

by Stanley G. Weinbaum

  "I don't care," she told herself again, picking up the lingerie. "I'm glad I wore it" She spread it against her, standing before the door-mirror, and turned a little pirouette. Black stockings must have looked somewhat less sensual, she thought, but there wasn't very much of the dansette. She tucked up her skirt, surveying her legs critically. Long, soft, rounded, nice!

  "I'm glad!" she repeated. "I'm glad he liked the way I looked—glad he was man and I woman enough to thrill! And that I'm honest enough to be glad! In fact," she told her reflection, "I'm a complete Pollyanna, and what of it?"

  She folded the garment, placed it on the bed, and proceeded to bury it with others from various closets and drawers. The janitor struggled in with a flat steamer trunk, and she transferred the bed's burden to its hollow. She followed with an old hand-mirror of her grandmother's, a manicure set that was a graduation gift, a few other mementoes. For a moment or two she hesitated over a framed picture of Paul, finally laying it on the dresser. "If there's room," she thought.

  The doorbell rang; she ran to answer.

  "Oh—Walter!"

  "H'lo, Vanny." He stood polishing his glasses. "Mind if I come in?" He entered. "Congratulations—or is it best wishes? I never remember which to offer the bride."

  "I'll take a little of both," said Vanny. "You don't seem very enthused."

  "Oh, I really am!" He paused again. "Only Paul, you know—"

  "What about Paul?" she was a little anxious.

  "Well, he asked me to see you. He got your note, and I guess it pretty well upset him."

  "I should have been more tactful, I suppose," said Vanny, "but I didn't exactly know how."

  "You certainly didn't! He came over this morning before I was up, and in such a state! 'You wormed yourself into this situation,' he said. 'You're Vanny's confidential agent! Now you see her for me!' Then he told me about your note, and he said; 'She even signed herself Evanne. To me!"

  "I didn't mean to do that," said Vanny. "I was rushed and excited."

  "Well," said Walter, obviously ill at ease, and with a plunge-into-cold-water expression, "the upshot of his remarks is this: He thinks you married Edmond Hall because of your quarrel with him."

  "Oh, that's utterly ridiculous!"

  "Well, I'm just telling you. He said, 'You find out if it's true. I can't go around myself, and I can't write or call up, but you find out and if it's true, tell her we'll fix it somehow. Tell her not to worry, and we'll get her out of it!' "

  "You tell Paul he's insulting!"

  "Now listen, young lady," said Walter, "I can see Paul's side of it. You know the whole crowd sort of considered you two paired, otherwise there'd have been a few others on your trail. I might have had a try myself. And you did show a pretty sudden reversal of form."

  "Paul and I were never engaged.."

  "He seemed to feel differently."

  "Maybe I did encourage him some," admitted Vanny. "I liked him immensely and—I was wrong, I guess. I'm sorry."

  "If I'm not presuming," said Walter, "just why did you marry Edmond Hall?"

  The girl flashed. "Because I love him!"

  "You kept it well concealed."

  "I didn't know until last night! Besides, I'm not on cross examination, and I resent being questioned!"

  Walter turned soothing. "No offense, my dear. IT sing your requiem to the crowd." He turned toward the door.

  Vanny relented. "Walter, you and Paul—both of you—must come to see me when we get back. Paul knows where.""Oh, are you going somewhere?"

  Vanny was a bit flustered. "Why, I suppose so—if Edmond wants to. We hadn't discussed it."

  " `If Edmond wants to!' He certainly toned you down in a hurry! I wouldn't have believed it possible!"

  "He's wonderful!"

  "He must be. Good-bye, Vanny—The crowd'll be less of a riot without you!"

  Men called for her trunk. She hurried a few last-minute articles into it, watched it closed, strapped, and borne away. She picked up the reluctant Eblis, and descended to her car, leaving Paul's forgotten picture still lying face downward on the commode.

  CHAPTER VI

  OLYMPIAN LOVE

  EDMOND was sitting in his laboratory when Vanny returned, and she ran up the stairs radiant and flushed and a trifle heated from her exertions. She stopped in the doorway. Her newly acquired mate sat on a board bench peering into a spinning bowl filled with bright liquid. She tiptoed forward to peek over his shoulder, and glimpsed a distorted reflection of her own face.

  Edmond turned, and she thrilled again to his glance of admiration. He drew her to the bench beside him. "You are very beautiful, dear."

  "I am glad if you think so."

  For some time they sat silent, Vanny content in her lover's arms, and Edmond turning various thoughts in the intricacies of his minds. "I strike closer to the secret of happiness," he reflected. "The pursuit of happiness through sensation, which is but the search for beauty, is the pleasantest and most promising of the ways I have followed. And this being whom tradition will term my mate is in all ways the most aesthetic, the most desirable means to my end."

  Vanny twisted in his arms, to look up at him. "Walter Nussman came in while I was packing."

  "Indeed. With a message from Paul, doubtless."

  "Why, yes," the girl said. "The whole crowd was thoroughly surprised by the suddenness of the affair. In fact"—she smiled—"I was myself! Not that I'm sorry, dear—but I just don't understand yet."

  "And that," said Edmond, "is hardly surprising."

  "Were you as amazed as I was?"

  "Not I" He had nothing to lose by frankness; the prey was trapped and caged. "I tricked you into it."

  "You mean you fibbed a little," laughed Vanny. "Men always do to girls—especially men in love."

  "I never lie," replied Edmond, "having never found the need. I planned your love beforehand. I took you at your weakest—at the Venice, when your resistance was negligible. I trapped you again last night—sated you sleepy with food, lulled you with words until you were prey to any suggestion of a stronger will, and then placed you in such a position that your own modesty, your own training, your own self-respect, forced you to admit you loved me. You could not have resisted; the experiment was too well designed."

  He paused, noting the effect of his words. A trace of horror, a trace of hurt reproach, showed in his companion's face, but not the violent emotion he had half anticipated.

  "Edmond! An experiment! You talk as if I were no more to you than these things around us!" She indicated the array of cages and instruments with a contemptuous gesture, watching for his answer.

  "But you do mean more, dear! You are my symbol of beauty and my final hid for happiness. Hereafter these other interests shall be—diversions."

  Edmond was satisfied. His bird was well trapped and tamed, and did not even comprehend the method of her taking. "And thus," he reflected, "ends the experiment's inception and begins its consummation. Now if I am indeed his prototype, let us explore the meaning of love to the superman."

  Vanny rested content against him; she thought nothing of his confession, he realized, because the thing was done to win her; it justified itself because she was the desired object. He drew her close again, caressing her body with his long fingers. Again he stripped that unresisting body of its coverings. His twin minds reveled in an unaccustomed riot of sensation, and forgot for the time to be properly analytical. He raised the vibrant form in his arms and carried her to that room where stolid Anna had borne him.

  The girl tensed in his embrace. "Edmond! There is someone else in the room!"

  She had somehow sensed his duality. "There is no other, dear. You tremble at shadows." He soothed her, drowning her senses in a flood of passion; her breath blew against him in fluttering gasps. "Cheyne-Stokes breathing," he noted, and then forgot method and analysis as his twin minds fused in a riot of ecstacy; Vanny was murmuring, and for a moment a paean sang in his ears.

  Then he lay panting, drawn
and exhausted, in the silence of diminishing sobs; his fingers clenched into curious fists.

  "The superman!" he jeered. "Nietzsche—Nietzsche and Gobineau! Was it your shades that gibbered around my nuptial couch?"

  CHAPTER VII

  A HONEYMOON OF DREAM

  EDMOND awoke with an unaccustomed weariness and a heaviness in his limbs. A weakening lassitude sat upon him, and a somber sense of futility. "It is a truism," he reflected, "that pleasure is won at the expense of pain. The accounts of the cosmos balance, and for each thing that is granted, payment is exacted even to the last place of the decimal." And in his other mind: "To this extent at least I am human, in that my desires still exceed my abilities."

  But Vanny arose radiant; she went humming about the house, presented herself to the stolid Magda in the kitchen, and felt only passing regret at the defection of Eblis. For the great cat had liked neither the house nor its master, and had quietly departed during the night without a leave-taking, vanishing mysteriously as is the custom of his kind.

  Vanny explored her new demesne; she found much to admire in the old furnishings, and some items which she promised herself to change. The gloomy library with its skull-topped fire-place depressed her; some effluvium from the ancient volumes seemed to keep the place in deeper shadow than natural. She looked into several books; they did not interest her and she returned to the upper floor to proceed with her unpacking, to find Edmond risen and vanished, doubtless to his laboratory. She was happy; Paul, Walter, and her friends had disappeared from het memory almost from the moment of her encounter with Edmond, just three evenings before. It was as if she had been suddenly reborn in another character.

  Descending to arrange a late breakfast, she found her new husband reading in the library. He had had a fire laid in the grate to relieve the brisk autumnal chill, and sat idly smoking, turning the pages of a gray volume, as if glancing aimlessly through it. Vanny watched him for a moment beyond the arch of the doorway; she saw something romantically mediaeval in the faint flicker of the firelight on his pallid intelligent features. "Like a student in ancient times," she thought, and skipped in to perch beside him on the massive chair. He placed his arm around her, and she peered over his head at the text he held. Hen-scratches! "What's that you're reading, dear?"

  Edmond leaned back in the chair. "The only surviving volume of the work of Al Golach ibn Jinnee, my dear. Does the name mean anything to you?"

  "Less than nothing!"

  "He was an apostate monk, turned Moslem. His work is utterly forgotten; no one save me has read these pages for nearly five centuries."

  "Ooh! What's it about?"

  Edmond translated the page before him; Vanny listened almost incredulously. "Gibberish," was her first thought, but an eerie shudder made her tremble. Little of the mad blasphemy was clear to her, yet there was an aura of horror cast about her by the words.

  "Edmond! Stop!"

  He patted her hand, and she departed for Magda's kitchen, but she perceived a curious illusion; a gigantic shadow followed her just out of direct vision—a shape horribly winged and formless, yet never quite visible; it danced along almost behind her, and persisted for several minutes in the sunny kitchen. There finally she threw off her sense of depression in the matter-of-fact association of Magda, checking supplies of staples, planning menus for the following day.

  After a late breakfast, they returned again to the library, Edmond sat in his usual place before Homo's skull, and Vanny on the foot-stool at his feet. She watched the play of shadow on the little oil landscape.

  "Edmond, I don't like that picture."

  "I'll have it moved to the laboratory, dear." He had long since ceased to speculate concerning the daub. "And Edmond, dear—"

  He smiled at her.

  "Shall we go somewhere for a while? Not, of course, unless you want, but I should like to have a little time to adjust myself—to get straightened out. Things happen so quickly."

  "Surely, Vanny. I understand. Wherever you choose."

  Vanny was never certain thereafter whether they actually traveled, and, far from adjusting herself to her altered living, reality seemed to be slipping away from her like melting ice in her fingers. The journey, if journey it was, seemed too incredible, though parts of it had color and solidity. There was a day and a night in New Orleans—she remembered the startling expanse of Canal Street—when she was deliriously happy in Edmond's love, and other periods when they were. suddenly in the house on Kenmore, dream-like, without transition. But at other times she re-called visits to places and cities that she was sure had no counterpart in reality. They wandered apparently for many days through an unnatural bloody-hued desert, subsisting on the contents of a water-skin Edmond carried, and the meat of strange little fungoid things that bobbled about in the air like potatoes in water. And they wore heavy furs, and were bitterly cold by night; even the day brought only a wan half-sunlight, and the sun seemed small as a dinner plate. And once they stood very still while a great thing only slightly like the little airy mushrooms droned overhead; it was too high above them to see clearly, but it buzzed along with a purposeful tenacity toward some unguessable objective.

  At another time they stood bathed in muggy clouds on a low bill, watching the misty lights of a curious city below them. Edmond whispered warnings to her; something evil was abroad in the city, and she gripped a six-inch dart in her hand. She never remembered the outcome of this adventure, but she retained the impression of terrific destructive power in the tiny dart, and a vague supposition that it was a little reeket of some sort.

  And there were many nights in the house on Kenmore when Edmond reclined in his chair and she danced for him, danced with no thought of modesty now, but with a wild sense of grace and pleasure; the fire behind her limned her body in charcoal-like silhouette, and her strange mate watched her with an admiration that she would almost have died to create. On one of these evenings he stripped her white body of every covering and folded about it an iridescent robe of purple he had acquired for her; the room was in darkness save for a faint fireglow, and that night she danced with her body gleaming like a metal sword. The eyeless gaze of Homo's small skull seemed to her to follow her movements, and the musty volumes on the wallshelves breathed an incense. That was a night of ecstasy long remembered! There was never a night that Edmond seemed more human, more sincere, more vital in his loving of her.

  But reality was dropping away. The very solid walls of the house were growing unstable; they wavered and shifted like stage-settings when her glance was not directly on them; the sturdy oak doorways went misty as she passed, and chairs were never quite where she expected when she sat down. Even the familiar street beyond the windows took on a smoky appearance, and she could not read for the shadows that stole out of corners. This dream honey-moon was befogging her tense little mind; reality and fancy were becoming confused and inseparable. The solid material of every-day life grew shadowy, while the shadows in the corner took on a terrifying solidity.

  Edmond watched the progress of Vanny's unsettlement with an interest not altogether academic or unsympathetic; his experiment was striking emotional chords he had not known he possessed. And he him-self was not wholly unscathed; his languor strengthened about him like a misty net; nor was he unaware of the reason. His keen analysis of situation had instantly developed the x-quantity in the experiment.

  "We are alien beings, Vanny and I," he concluded. "She is not mentally capable of sustaining our intimacy, nor I physically. Ours is the mating of the eagle and the doe; each is in its own sphere a competent entity, but the eagle's beak is too sharp for the doe's lips, and the doe's hindquarters somewhat too sturdy for the avian physique." He twisted his saturnine features in a smile. "Yet there are certain compensations."

  But a culmination impended, and arrived with an uncompromising finality. Vanny collapsed first under the strain of the unnatural union. Edmond entered the arch of the library one day to find her lying senseless before the fire-place in a
limp heap of iridescence, with the flames almost licking at her robe, and a reddening bruise between her eyes. He bore her to his chair and used what means he had to restore her; for several minutes thereafter she seemed dazed, and clung fearfully to him.

  "It came out of the wall," she murmured. "It came out on ragged wings."

  "The fire has vitiated the air here," said Edmond. "You were overcome, and struck your head on the mantel."

  "No! I saw it, Edmond! It flew out at me!"

  "You fainted and struck your bead," Edmond repeated. He drew the girl erect, led her up the stairs.

  "I saw it! I saw it!" she was murmuring. "It came out on ragged wings, with eyes that bit—"

  He supported her to her bed, easing her gently down. He placed long fingers on her forehead, and held her eyes with a gaze grown suddenly intense.

  "There were no shadows, dear," he said. "There will be no shadows hereafter. You are to sleep now. You are very sleepy, dear."

  Vanny obediently slept. Edmond watched her for a moment and then left her with slow thoughtful steps. He felt again the surge of unaccustomed pity; she was too beautiful to be thus tormented.

  "I must not destroy her!" he thought in his complex minds, and repeated almost fiercely: "I must not destroy her!"

  CHAPTER VIII

  OLD EVE

  IT was several days before Vanny felt quite herself again; she wandered about the house in her purple robe with a bemused air; but the shadows remained quiescent in their corners, and chairs and walls were properly inert. Edmond was pleasantly considerate, and spent much of his afternoons amusing her with dagger-like comment, description, or fancy, but there were no more visions. In the main, he held the conversation to commonplace topics and routine affairs. He had casually liquidated the bonds which had sup-plied her modest income, and purchased a variety of stocks for her. The two months of their union had witnessed a considerable appreciation of these, and he brought her a sheaf of certificates to endorse. He was going to sell them, he told her, as she reclined on her bed.