But he went. As he left the room his wife placed a revolver in his pocket.
The great porch of the mansion was dark, but the physician made out that the door was open, and he entered. A feeble light came from the bronze lamp at the turn of the stairs, and by it he found his way, his feet sinking noiselessly in the rich carpets. At the head of the stairs the man met him. The doctor thought himself a tall man, but the stranger topped him by half a head. He motioned the physician to follow him, and the two went down the hall to the front room. The place was flushed with a rose-colored glow from several lamps. On a silken couch, in the midst of pillows, lay a woman dying with consumption. She was like a lily, white, shapely, graceful, with feeble yet charming movements. She looked at the doctor appealingly, then, seeing in his eyes the involuntary verdict that her hour was at hand, she turned toward her companion with a glance of anguish. Dr. Block asked a few questions. The man answered them, the woman remaining silent. The physician administered something stimulating, and then wrote a prescription which he placed on the mantel-shelf.
“The drug store is closed tonight,” he said, “and I fear the druggist has gone home. You can have the prescription filled the first thing in the morning, and I will be over before breakfast.”
After that, there was no reason why he should not have gone home. Yet, oddly enough, he preferred to stay. Nor was it professional anxiety that prompted this delay. He longed to watch those mysterious persons, who, almost oblivious of his presence, were speaking their mortal farewells in their glances, which were impassioned and of unutterable sadness.
He sat as if fascinated. He watched the glitter of rings on the woman’s long, white hands, he noted the waving of light hair about her temples, he observed the details of her gown of soft white silk which fell about her in voluminous folds. Now and then the man gave her of the stimulant which the doctor had provided; sometimes he bathed her face with water. Once he paced the floor for a moment till a motion of her hand quieted him.
After a time, feeling that it would be more sensible and considerate of him to leave, the doctor made his way home. His wife was awake, impatient to hear of his experiences. She listened to his tale in silence, and when he had finished she turned her face to the wall and made no comment.
“You seem to be ill, my dear,” he said. “You have a chill. You are shivering.”
“I have no chill,” she replied sharply. “But I—well, you may leave the light burning.”
The next morning before breakfast the doctor crossed the dewy sward to the Netherton house. The front door was locked, and no one answered to his repeated ringings. The old gardener chanced to be cutting the grass near at hand, and he came running up.
“What you ringin’ that door-bell for, doctor?” said he. “The folks ain’t come home yet. There ain’t nobody there.”
“Yes, there is, Jim. I was called here last night. A man came for me to attend his wife. They must both have fallen asleep that the bell is not answered. I wouldn’t be surprised to find her dead, as a matter of fact. She was a desperately sick woman. Perhaps she is dead and something has happened to him. You have the key to the door, Jim. Let me in.”
But the old man was shaking in every limb, and refused to do as he was bid.
“Don’t you never go in there, doctor,” whispered he, with chattering teeth. “Don’t you go for to ’tend no one. You jus’ come tell me when you sent for that way. No, I ain’t goin’ in, doctor, nohow. It ain’t part of my duties to go in. That’s been stipulated by Mr. Netherton. It’s my business to look after the garden.”
Argument was useless. Dr. Block took the bunch of keys from the old man’s pocket and himself unlocked the front door and entered. He mounted the steps and made his way to the upper room. There was no evidence of occupancy. The place was silent, and, so far as living creature went, vacant. The dust lay over everything. It covered the delicate damask of the sofa where he had seen the dying woman. It rested on the pillows. The place smelled musty and evil, as if it had not been used for a long time. The lamps of the room held not a drop of oil.
But on the mantel-shelf was the prescription which the doctor had written the night before. He read it, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
As he locked the outside door the old gardener came running to him.
“Don’t you never go up there again, will you?” he pleaded, “not unless you see all the Nethertons home and I come for you myself. You won’t, doctor?”
“No,” said the doctor.
When he told his wife she kissed him, and said: “Next time when I tell you to stay at home, you must stay!”
The Angel With the Broom
Paula Landless walked slowly down the street looking for a home, as any discerning person might almost have surmised, so wide and examining were her eyes, so wistful and importunate her mouth, so pallid and lonely her face.
The discerning person would not have said that Paula Landless was young. At least, not quite. She had been young perhaps, last year, or the year before that, when she lived in her Iowa home, and had known next to nothing of life. The home, swarming with girls, had crowded her out; the old sad world had called to her. She had felt very strong and full of pity, and so had come up to Chicago, where a number of things were going badly, to help set them aright. For two years she had attended a school with a long and imposing name, and had come out to join the great army of welfare workers who insist that if you try hard enough, you can make almost everybody happy. Paula, now a member of a certain society of combined—one had almost said syndicated—charities, was as said before, looking for a home.
She wanted it to be among “her people,” her unconscious and probably protesting parishioners; she was bent passionately upon the idea of “neighbouring,” and it was necessary therefore, to find a home in the very “midst of things.” This being in the midst of things meant being in the midst of much squalor and dirt, many children and innumerable germs, it seemed. Paula had looked at many rooms that morning that turned her squeamish, and had reproached herself for being disgustingly fastidious, a provincial Pharisee, a snob, a hypocrite. She quite exhausted herself with the hurling of self-reproachful epithets. But in spite of all this, she had edged, little by little, onto a cleaner street.
It was a curious street; not littered precisely, for the pavement was clean; but cluttered rather with little shops; little insistent shops that made their nature at once known, and that somehow cried out the personality as well as the nationality of their owners. There a Russian, here a German, across the way an Italian, yonder a Bohemian. Oh, and beyond a Polish midwife, next to an Irish undertaker; and all in between and round about saloons, as cosmopolitan as sin.
If the summer day had not been darkening for a shower, Paula could have seen much better. As it was, she had to go rather close to the little shops and peer into them, hoping she might see some “room for rent” sign which would give her an excuse to rest her weary feet.
So that was how, peering in what seemed the darkest of them all, she beheld a sight not to be forgotten. A girl, ten years of age perhaps, slender and spiritual, with black eyes and a torrent of black curls, stood in the shaft of light that fell from an overhanging lamp, holding high two seven-branched candlesticks of ancient beaten brass. Her scant white dress clung about her slender limbs, and her long, uncovered arms trembled with the weight of the candelabra. She looked as if about to take flight, all radiant and white and delicate as she was, and Paula stopped, her breath caught in her throat, wondering how, amid so much ugliness, a thing of beauty like this should be.
Then she saw the child’s surroundings—saw too, the meaning of her gesture. A man, her father, no doubt, stood on the counter above her, arranging his wares on the shelf. And such wares! Candlesticks old and new, basins and pitchers of brass and amalgam, samovars, fire irons, stewpans of copper, bells of bronze. Then on other shelves, books in an inviting array; books done in vellum with clasps of brass or of silver; other books in tongues that f
lung their cabalistic titles sardonically at Paula’s ignorance; heaped pamphlets in equally strange letters. “Oh!” said Paula softly, clasping her hands in their shabby gloves. And then again: “Oh!”
“You want something, Miss?” asked the man on the counter. Paula looked up at him and smiled. He was small, dark and eager with an eagle-like nose and eyes as bright as his daughter’s.
“I want,” said Paula, “A—a home.” She paused; then said: “If you please.”
“A home?” He seemed puzzled, but he looked nicely human, and amenable to neighbourly offices.
“Yes. A room, you know. I must live hereabouts. I’m going to work for the Amalgamated Charities. I’d like to be—to be near here.”
Moses Lubin knew she was polite by what she did not say. He took the candlesticks from his daughter, placed them on a shelf and jumped down from the counter.
“Mama, mama,” he called. “Here is a young miss who wants a home.”
Then Paula met Mrs. Lubin, who was little too, and dark, and looked as if she might sometime have shed terrible tears. She took Paula in swiftly; and as swiftly made up her mind when Paula had told her tale.
“I have a good neighbour who will take you,” she said. “She will be glad.”
The good neighbour lived next door. Mrs. Hunding, wife of Otto Hunding, the stationer and tobacconist. Germans—blond, broad, kindly and willing to make a little more than expenses.
Yes, they had a room—the front upstairs room. Unfurnished. Paula looked at it. Three windows with small panes looked out on the thronged street. The floor was new; the paper clean and not so bright a green as one might have feared.
“Would you be willing to be a little social, evenings?” asked Mrs. Hunding, looking at Paula with maternal eyes.
“Oh, yes, certainly. I should love it. I—I am all alone in the city, Mrs. Hunding. It is very good of you—”
Mrs. Hunding raised a large deprecatory hand. “It is not good of me,” she said succinctly.“I wish it—for my son.”
Suddenly her lips quivered. Paula drew a little closer to her. “I am afraid I don’t quite understand.”
“My son is not well. He goes nowhere. But he is very bright. He would have been a fine man already only—” She paused.
“Let me see him,” said the girl who meant to set things right.
Frau Hunding led the way to a little alcove which opened off the main part of the shop, commanding a tiny window that inserted itself unobtrusively between the show windows of the Hunding and the Lubin shops. Here, in his invalid’s chair sat a young man, blue of eye, mild of countenance, with a dreamer’s head and ripe lips which life had failed to touch to sensuality. There was a look of ineptitude about him—the look of a youth hopelessly defeated. Paula’s eyes swept him involuntarily as if to learn the meaning of this expression. She saw then that his legs were shrivelled, and that he was as useless as a rag doll for all the practical purposes of life.
His eyes besought her favour, timorously and yet proudly like a child’s eyes. She found herself holding out her hand:
“Your mother says I may live here,” she said brightly. “And that evenings I may sit with the family.” Her voice faltered a little, from pitying embarrassment. “You play chess?” she asked, groping for some union of tastes.
So she became, in a way, one of them. She put a cot, a deal table, three chairs and an alarm clock in the bare room above the shop. She had enough bedclothes for cleanliness and almost enough for warmth. Mrs. Hunding set a blooming plant in the room; Mrs. Lubin contributed a brass inkwell. From her trunk Paula unearthed a little hand-worked table spread, and some photographs of the home folk. She was settled then and quite content, and she went about her work very bravely, very eagerly. All day she laboured among the poor, the foreign, the ill. And her heart sang within, because she thought she was setting things right—because she believed that by and by she and the others who worked with her, would get ahead of the misery, would ride through it, so to speak, and come out on the other side.
Then, nights, the Hundings heard the stories of her adventures, and the blue eyes of Casper Hunding shone upon her in understanding.
“I told you, Hunding, that it would he a good thing for Casper to have the maiden here,” Frau Hunding whispered to her husband when Paula had been with them a week. “You see for yourself how it is. He laughs with her; he beats her at chess; never have I seen him so happy.”
But Hunding shook his big head.
“Today, yes,” he said. “But what comes tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” said Frau Hunding sharply, “there will not be very many tomorrows for my boy already.”
If the Hundings and the Lubins had liked each other well enough before, they became true friends now. The little welfare worker drew them together. She flashed from one place to the other with her golden gossip, telling each pleasant things of the other. She sewed on doll dresses for little Miriam Lubin, who stole in evenings to hang over her chair and listen to her stories of what was to be found out in the world. Miriam danced for the Hundings, who thought her like a fairy, and sometimes Casper and Miriam and Paula sang together the more melodious of the street songs that were forever making their way into the neighbourhood. And while they were singing Moses Lubin and his wife and the two elder Hundings would sit outside and listen, feeling more at home than they had done since they left their own countries.
It was now a pleasure for Lubin to go into Hunding’s shop each morning and evening, calling out:
“My paper, if you please, neighbour.”
“Here it is, laid aside for you, neighbour.” They talked over the news together, feeling like allies; like men with a common experience, both being from the old country. They meant to be good to each other if trouble ever came. The homesickness that had been forever like a shadow in their hearts began to grow less. They felt settled at last. They loved to watch little Miriam, who was so happy and so unspotted from the world; they were all tender with Casper, doomed in his youth; they had a reverence for the eager, white faced Paula Landless, who was like Elizabeth of Hungary, or Catherine of Siena. Hunding made the comparisons. Lubin did not object to them. He, too, believed in saints.
Then the morning came when Lubin, going in for his paper, lingered a little longer than was his wont.
“This is news for you,” said Hunding. “The Archduke of Austria has been slain by an assassin. The work of a revolutionist, no doubt. I have my opinion of these revolutionists, Lubin, and I cannot see how it is that a man like you will sell their dirty pamphlets.”
“I have no dirty pamphlets in my place, neighbour. On the contrary, I keep the books of the highest thinkers—social democrats, syndicalists, sabotists, the Industrial Workers of the World, the intellectuals of Russia—all sorts. You do not understand this ferment, neighbour.”
“And to what does it lead, Lubin? Answer me that? To murder,—to—”
“A king more or less does not trouble me, Hunding. This archduke was a dangerous man; he was against the cause of liberty—” his voice began to rise. Casper over in his alcove, felt a trembling creep over his body. He could not endure raised voices.
“Father, father,” he called, “I am not well. Would you bring me some cold water?”
Lubin went home and a little later Mrs. Lubin came over with some broth for Casper.
“What good neighbours we have. Otto,” said Mrs. Hunding. “What do you two care about kings or revolutionists? Keep your shops and hold your tongues.”
Hunding agreed. He apologised to Lubin. Lubin accepted his view. “We are both good men,” said they to themselves, each after his own fashion, and thinking in his own tongue.“What reason have we to quarrel?”
But overseas other good men were quarrelling. They were being driven forth from their little, contented homes, from their little busy shops. They who had been so harmlessly occupied in the gentler tasks of living, were being forced to an ultimate task. Their manhood was being tried out by the last test.
They, who had no hate, were being educated in it; they whose hands were bloodless, were receiving instructions in the red art of war. Day by day the horror grew, as “the far-flung battle line” stretched out across stricken miles; as beautiful towns lay in ruins; as valleys and rivers were heaped with the dead; as the smoke of funeral pyres lifted from devastated fields.
Those in the struggle arose to the hour; those far from it felt their hearts bleed with a vicarious anguish greater than they could express. It seemed the catastrophe of civilisation; the vast disillusionment of a world which had dreamed of brotherhood. And now Hunding knew himself for a German indeed, and the loyal subject of his emperor; and Lubin, loving no emperor, with no cause to love his country, palpitated to Russia’s name with every drop of blood in his dark little body. With each German advance, Hunding swelled with a pride that was more than a pride. It was more than love of country. It was the very essence of his manhood. And as the Czar’s vast armies mobilised, ever pouring in from their remote homes, all that was wild and free, strong and sad, stirred in the passionate breast of Lubin as the forces of a burning mountain leap in its deep heart.
“Hah, Germany, Germany, my Fatherland!” cried Hunding one morning.“It is not afraid to be misunderstood. It stands between the hordes of the East guarding and protecting the world. What does it care for scorn? Germany does her duty to the end.”
“Madness! Madness!” shrieked Lubin. “Your warlord, your blood sucker, who calls a treaty a little piece of paper! Shame on you that you honour such a man! Shame on the men that follow him to battle, to wade in blood and tears!”
Casper in his alcove, put his face in his hands. He could not stand to see little Miriam dancing without on the pavement to the sound of a hurdy-gurdy, she so joyous, and these fathers so swollen with anger. He longed for Paula Landless who knew how to speak words of peace. As for him, he could not speak. He felt faint again. The world was going round—going round. Hunding had come out from behind his counter, and towered over Lubin, who backed toward the door. Then Casper, through the blur of his senses saw them both to be on the sidewalk, saw Miriam standing with both hands to her mouth as if in fright.
The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Elia W. Peattie Page 9
