Evidently the finer and more delicate instincts of a woman were divining my motive and sympathizing with my mental and sentimental perplexity.
So when she said: ‘I don’t think you had better go near my father,’ I was convinced of her gentle solicitude in my behalf.
‘With a bucket of salad,’ I whispered softly, ‘much may be accomplished, Wilna.’ And I took her little hand and pressed it gently and respectfully. ‘Trust all to me,’ I murmured.
She stood with her head turned away from me, her slim hand resting limply in mine. From the slight tremor of her shoulders I became aware how deeply her emotion was now swaying her. Evidently she was nearly ready to become mine.
But I remained calm and alert. The time was not yet. Her father had had his prunes, in which he delighted. And when pleasantly approached with a bucket of salad he could not listen otherwise than politely to what I had to say to him. Quick action was necessary – quick but diplomatic action – in view of the imminence of this young man Green, who evidently was persona grata at the bungalow of this irritable old dodo.
Tenderly pressing the pretty hand which I held, and saluting the finger-tips with a gesture which was, perhaps, not wholly ungraceful, I stepped into the kitchen, washed out several heads of lettuce, deftly chopped up some youthful onions, constructed a seductive French dressing, and, stirring together the crisp ingredients, set the savoury masterpiece away in the ice-box, after tasting it. It was delicious enough to draw sobs from any pig.
When I went out to the veranda, Wilna had disappeared. So I unfolded and set up some more box-traps, determined to lose no time.
Sunset still lingered beyond the chain of western mountains as I went out across the grassy plateau to the cornfield.
Here I set and baited several dozen aluminum crow-traps, padding the jaws so that no injury could be done to the birds when the springs snapped on their legs.
Then I went over to the crater and descended its gentle, grassy slope. And there, all along the borders of the vapoury wall, I set box-traps for the lithe little denizens of the fire, baiting every trap with a handful of fresh, sweet clover which I had pulled up from the pasture beyond the cornfield.
My task ended, I ascended the slope again, and for a while stood there immersed in pleasurable premonitions.
Everything had been accomplished swiftly and methodically within the few hours in which I had first set eyes upon this extraordinary place – everything! – love at first sight, the delightfully lightning-like wooing and winning of an incomparable maiden and heiress; the discovery of the fire creatures; the solving of the emerald problem.
And now everything was ready, crow-traps, fire-traps, a bucket of irresistible salad for Blythe, a modest and tremulous avowal for Wilna as soon as her father tasted the salad and I had pleasantly notified him of my intentions concerning his lovely offspring.
Daylight faded from rose to lilac; already the mountains were growing fairy-like under that vague, diffuse lustre which heralds the rise of the full moon. It rose, enormous, yellow, unreal, becoming imperceptibly silvery as it climbed the sky and hung aloft like a stupendous arc-light flooding the world with a radiance so white and clear that I could very easily have written verses by it, if I wrote verses.
Down on the edge of the forest I could see Blythe on his camp-stool, madly besmearing his moonlit canvas, but I could not see Wilna anywhere. Maybe she had shyly retired somewhere by herself to think of me.
So I went back to the house, filled a bucket with my salad, and started toward the edge of the woods, singing happily as I sped on feet so light and frolicsome that they seemed to skim the ground. How wonderful is the power of love!
When I approached Blythe he heard me coming and turned around.
‘What the devil do you want?’ he asked with characteristic civility.
‘I have brought you,’ said I gaily, ‘a bucket of salad.’
‘I don’t want any salad!’
‘W-what?’
‘I never eat it at night.’
I said confidently:
‘Mr Blythe, if you will taste this salad I am sure you will not regret it.’ And with hideous cunning I set the bucket beside him on the grass and seated myself near it. The old dodo grunted and continued to daub the canvas; but presently, as though forgetfully, and from sheer instinct, he reached down into the bucket, pulled out a leaf of lettuce, and shoved it into his mouth.
My heart leaped exultantly. I had him!
‘Mr Blythe,’ I began in a winningly modulated voice, and, at the same instant, he sprang from his camp-chair, his face distorted.
‘There are onions in this salad!’ he yelled. ‘What the devil do you mean! Are you trying to poison me! What are you following me about for, anyway? Why are you running about under foot every minute!’
‘My dear Mr Blythe,’ I protested – but he barked at me, kicked over the bucket of salad, and began to dance with rage.
‘What’s the matter with you, anyway!’ he bawled. ‘Why are you trying to feed me? What do you mean by trying to be attentive to me!’
‘I – I admire and revere you—’
‘No, you don’t!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t want you to admire me! I don’t desire to be revered! I don’t like attention and politeness! Do you hear! It’s artificial – out of date – ridiculous! The only thing that recommends a man to me is his bad manners, bad temper, and violent habits. There’s some meaning to such a man, none at all to men like you!’
He ran at the salad bucket and kicked it again.
‘They all fawned on me in Boston!’ he panted. ‘They ran about under foot! They bought my pictures! And they made me sick! I came out here to be rid of ’em!’
I rose from the grass, pale and determined.
‘You listen to me, you old grouch!’ I hissed. ‘I’ll go. But before I go I’ll tell you why I’ve been civil to you. There’s only one reason in the world: I want to marry your daughter! And I’m going to do it!’
I stepped nearer him, menacing him with outstretched hand:
‘As for you, you pitiable old dodo, with your bad manners and your worse pictures, and your degraded mania for prunes, you are a necessary evil that’s all, and I haven’t the slightest respect for either you or your art!’
‘Is that true?’ he said in an altered voice.
‘True?’ I laughed bitterly. ‘Of course it’s true, you miserable dauber!’
‘D-dauber!’ he stammered.
‘Certainly! I said “dauber” and I mean it. Why, your work would shame the pictures on a child’s slate!’
‘Smith,’ he said unsteadily, ‘I believe I have utterly misjudged you. I believe you are a good deal of a man, after all—’
‘I’m man enough,’ said I, fiercely, ‘to go back, saddle my mule, kidnap your daughter, and start for home. And I’m going to do it!’
‘Wait!’ he cried. ‘I don’t want you to go. If you’ll remain I’ll be very glad. I’ll do anything you like. I’ll quarrel with you, and you can insult my pictures. It will agreeably stimulate us both. Don’t go, Smith—’
‘If I stay, may I marry Wilna?’
‘If you ask me I won’t let you!’
‘Very well!’ I retorted, angrily. ‘Then I’ll marry her anyway!’
‘That’s the way to talk! Don’t go, Smith. I’m really beginning to like you. And when Billy Green arrives you and he will have a delightfully violent scene—’
‘What!’
He rubbed his hands gleefully.
‘He’s in love with Wilna. You and he won’t get on. It is going to be very stimulating for me – I can see that! You and he are going to behave most disagreeably to each other. And I shall be exceedingly unpleasant to you both! Come, Smith, promise me that you’ll stay!’
Profoundly worried, I stood staring at him in the moonlight, gnawing my mustache.
‘Very well,’ I said, ‘I’ll remain if—’
Something checked me, I did not quite know what for a moment. B
lythe, too, was staring at me in an odd, apprehensive way. Suddenly I realised that under my feet the ground was stirring.
‘Look out!’ I cried; but speech froze on my lips as beneath me the solid earth began to rock and crack and billow up into a high, crumbling ridge, moving continually, as the sod cracks, heaves up, and crumbles above the subterranean progress of a mole.
Up into the air we were slowly pushed on the ever-growing ridge; and with us were carried rocks and bushes and sod, and even forest trees.
I could hear their tap-roots part with pistol-like reports; see great pines and hemlocks and oaks moving, slanting, settling, tilting crazily in every direction as they were heaved upward in this gigantic disturbance.
Blythe caught me by the arm; we clutched each other, balancing on the crest of the steadily rising mound.
‘W-what is it?’ he stammered. ‘Look! It’s circular. The woods are rising in a huge circle. What’s happening? Do you know?’
Over me crept a horrible certainty that something living was moving under us through the depths of the earth – something that, as it progressed, was heaping up the surface of the world above its unseen and burrowing course – something dreadful, enormous, sinister, and alive!
‘Look out!’ screamed Blythe; and at the same instant the crumbling summit of the ridge opened under our feet and a fissure hundreds of yards long yawned ahead of us.
And along it, shining slimily in the moonlight, a vast, viscous, ringed surface was moving, retracting, undulating, elongating, writhing, squirming, shuddering.
‘It’s a worm!’ shrieked Blythe. ‘Oh, God! It’s a mile long!’
As in a nightmare we clutched each other, struggling frantically to avoid the fissure; but the soft earth slid and gave way under us, and we fell heavily upon that ghastly, living surface.
Instantly a violent convulsion hurled us upward; we fell on it again, rebounding from the rubbery thing, strove to regain our feet and scramble up the edges of the fissure, strove madly while the mammoth worm slid more rapidly through the rocking forests, carrying us forward with a speed increasing.
Through the forest we tore, reeling about on the slippery back of the thing, as though riding on a plowshare, while trees clashed and tilted and fell from the enormous furrow on every side; then, suddenly out of the woods into the moonlight, far ahead of us we could see the grassy upland heave up, cake, break, and crumble above the burrowing course of the monster.
‘It’s making for the crater!’ gasped Blythe; and horror spurred us on, and we scrambled and slipped and clawed the billowing sides of the furrow until we gained the heaving top of it.
As one runs in a bad dream, heavily, half-paralyzed, so ran Blythe and I, toiling over the undulating, tumbling upheaval until, half-fainting, we fell and rolled down the shifting slope onto solid and unvexed sod on the very edges of the crater.
Below us we saw, with sickened eyes, the entire circumference of the crater agitated, saw it rise and fall as avalanches of rock and earth slid into it, tons and thousands of tons rushing down the slope, blotting from our sight the flickering ring of flame, and extinguishing the last filmy jet of vapor.
Suddenly the entire crater caved in and filled up under my anguished eyes, quenching for all eternity the vapour wall, the fire, and burying the little denizens of the flames, and perhaps a billion dollars’ worth of emeralds under as many billion tons of earth.
Quieter and quieter grew the earth as the gigantic worm bored straight down into the depths immeasurable. And at last the moon shone upon a world that lay without a tremor in its milky lustre.
‘I shall name it Verma gigantica,’ said I, with a hysterical sob; ‘but nobody will ever believe me when I tell this story!’
Still terribly shaken, we turned toward the house. And, as we approached the lamplit veranda, I saw a horse standing there and a young man hastily dismounting.
And then a terrible thing occurred; for, before I could even shriek, Wilna had put both arms around that young man’s neck, and both of his arms were clasping her waist.
Blythe was kind to me. He took me around the back way and put me to bed.
And there I lay through the most awful night I ever experienced, listening to the piano below, where Wilna and William Green were singing, ‘Un Peu d’Amour’.
GREY MAGIC
In our first extract from The Slayer of Souls, Victor Cleves meets Tressa Norne for the first time, unaware that she will become his wife …
To Victor Cleves came the following telegram in code:
Washington,
April 14th, 1919.
Investigation ordered by the State Department as the result of frequent mention in despatches of Chinese troops operating with the Russian Bolsheviki forces has disclosed that the Bolsheviki are actually raising a Chinese division of 30,000 men recruited in Central Asia. This division has been guilty of the greatest cruelties. A strange rumour prevails among the Allied forces at Archangel that this Chinese division is led by Yezidee and Hassani officers belonging to the sect of devil-worshipers and that they employ black arts and magic in battle.
From information so far gathered by the several branches of the United States Secret Service operating throughout the world, it appears possible that the various revolutionary forces of disorder, in Europe and Asia, which now are violently threatening the peace and security, of all established civilization on earth, may have had a common origin. This origin, it is now suspected, may date back to a very remote epoch; the wide-spread forces of violence and merciless destruction may have had their beginning among some ancient and predatory race whose existence was maintained solely by robbery and murder.
Anarchists, terrorists, Bolshevists, Reds of all shades and degrees, are now believed to represent in modern times what perhaps once was a tribe of Assassins – a sect whose religion was founded upon a common predilection for crimes of violence.
On this theory then, for the present, the United States Government will proceed with this investigation of Bolshevism; and the Secret Service will continue to pay particular attention to all Orientals in the United States and other countries. You personally are formally instructed to keep in touch with XLY-371 (Alek Selden) and ZB-303 (James Benton), and to employ every possible means to become friendly with the girl Tressa Norne, win her confidence, and, if possible, enlist her actively in the Government Service as your particular aid and comrade.
It is equally important that the movements of the Oriental, called Sanang, be carefully observed in order to discover the identity and whereabouts of his companions. However, until further instructions he is not to be taken into custody. M.H. 2479.
(Signed)
JOHN RECKLOW
The long despatch from John Recklow made Cleves’s duty plain enough.
For months, now, Selden and Benton had been watching Tressa Norne. And they had learned practically nothing about her.
And now the girl had come within Cleves’s sphere of operation. She had been in New York for two weeks. Telegrams from Benton in Chicago, and from Selden in Buffalo, had prepared him for her arrival.
He had his men watching her boarding-house on West Twenty-eighth Street, men to follow her, men to keep their eyes on her at the theatre, where every evening, at 10:45, her entr’acte was staged. He knew where to get her. But he, himself, had been on the watch for the man Sanang; and had failed to find the slightest trace of him in New York, although warned that he had arrived.
So, for that evening, he left the hunt for Sanang to others, put on his evening clothes, and dined with fashionable friends at the Patrons’ Club, who never for an instant suspected that young Victor Cleves was in the Service of the United States Government. About half-past nine he strolled around to the theatre, desiring to miss as much as possible of the popular show without being too late to see the curious little entr’acte in which this girl, Tressa Norne, appeared alone.
He had secured an aisle seat near the stage at an outrageous price; the main show was still thu
ndering and fizzing and glittering as he entered the theatre; so he stood in the rear behind the orchestra until the descending curtain extinguished the outrageous glare and din.
Then he went down the aisle, and as he seated himself Tressa Norne stepped from the wings and stood before the lowered curtain facing an expectant but oddly undemonstrative audience.
The girl worked rapidly, seriously, and in silence. She seemed a mere child there behind the footlights, not more than sixteen anyway – her winsome eyes and wistful lips unspoiled by the world’s wisdom.
Yet once or twice the mouth drooped for a second and the winning eyes darkened to a remoter blue – the brooding iris hue of far horizons.
She wore the characteristic tabard of stiff golden tissue and the gold pagoda-shaped headpiece of a Yezidee temple girl. Her flat, slipper-shaped footgear was of stiff gold, too, and curled upward at the toes.
All this accentuated her apparent youth. For in face and throat no firmer contours had as yet modified the soft fullness of immaturity; her limbs were boyish and frail, and her bosom more undecided still, so that the embroidered breadth of gold fell flat and straight from her chest to a few inches above the ankles.
She seemed to have no stock of paraphernalia with which to aid the performance; no assistant, no orchestral diversion, nor did she serve herself with any magician’s patter. She did her work close to the footlights.
Behind her loomed a black curtain; the strip of stage in front was bare even of carpet; the orchestra remained mute.
But when she needed anything – a little table, for example – well, it was suddenly there where she required it – a tripod, for instance, evidently fitted to hold the big iridescent bubble of glass in which swarmed little tropical fishes – and which arrived neatly from nowhere. She merely placed her hands before her as though ready to support something weighty which she expected and – suddenly, the huge crystal bubble was visible, resting between her hands. And when she tired of holding it, she set it upon the empty air and let go of it; and instead of crashing to the stage with its finny rainbow swarm of swimmers, out of thin air appeared a tripod to support it.
Out of the Dark Page 26
