Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Nina, Eileen, and Selwyn formed a lagging and leisurely rear-guard, though always within signalling distance of Boots and the main body; and, when necessary, the two ex-army men wig-wagged to each other across the uplands to the endless excitement and gratification of the children.

  It was a perfect week-end; the sky, pale as a robin’s egg at morn and even, deepened to royal blue under the noon-day sun; and all the world — Long Island — seemed but a gigantic gold-green boat stemming the running purple of the sea and Sound.

  The air, when still, quivered in that deep, rich silence instinct with the perpetual monotone of the sea; stiller for the accentless call of some lone moorland bird, or the gauzy clatter of a dragon-fly in reedy reaches. But when the moon rose and the breeze awakened, and the sedges stirred, and the cat’s-paws raced across the moonlit ponds, and the far surf off Wonder Head intoned the hymn of the four winds, the trinity, earth and sky and water, became one thunderous symphony — a harmony of sound and colour silvered to a monochrome by the moon.

  Then, through the tinted mystery the wild ducks, low flying, drove like a flight of witches through the dusk; and unseen herons called from their heronry, fainter, fainter till their goblin yelps died out in the swelling murmur of a million wind-whipped leaves.

  Then was the moorland waste bewitching in its alternation of softly checkered gray and shade, where acres of feathery grasses flowed in wind-blown furrows; where in the purple obscurity of hollows the strange and aged little forests grew restless and full of echoes; where shadowy reeds like elfin swords clattered and thrust and parried across the darkling pools of haunted waters unstirred save for the swirl of a startled fish or the smoothly spreading wake of some furry creature swimming without a sound.

  Into this magic borderland, dimmer for moonlit glimpses in ghostly contrast to the shadow shape of wood and glade, Eileen conducted Selwyn; and they heard the whirr of painted wood-ducks passing in obscurity, and the hymn of the four winds off Wonder Head; and they heard the herons, noisy in their heronry, and a young fox yapping on a moon-struck dune.

  But Selwyn cared more for the sun and the infinite blue above, and the vast cloud-forms piled up in argent splendour behind a sea of amethyst.

  “The darker, vaguer phases of beauty,” he said to Eileen, smiling, “attract and fascinate those young in experience. Tragedy is always better appreciated and better rendered by those who have never lived it. The anatomy of sadness, the subtler fascination of life brooding in shadow, appeals most keenly to those who can study and reflect, then dismiss it all and return again to the brightness of existence which has not yet for them been tarnished.”

  He had never before, even by slightest implication, referred to his own experience with life. She was not perfectly certain that he did so now.

  They were standing on one of the treeless hills — a riotous tangle of grasses and wild flowers — looking out to sea across Sky Pond. He had a rod; and as he stood he idly switched the gaily coloured flies backward and forward.

  “My tastes,” he said, still smiling, “incline me to the garishly sunlit side of this planet.” And, to tease her and arouse her to combat: “I prefer a farandole to a nocturne; I’d rather have a painting than an etching; Mr. Whistler bores me with his monochromatic mud; I don’t like dull colours, dull sounds, dull intellects; and anything called ‘an arrangement’ on canvas, or anything called ‘a human document’ or ‘an appreciation’ in literature, or anything ‘precious’ in art, or any author who ‘weaves’ instead of writes his stories — all these irritate me when they do not first bore me to the verge of anæsthesia.”

  He switched his trout-flies defiantly, hopeful of an indignant retort from her; but she only laughed and glanced at him, and shook her pretty head.

  “There’s just enough truth in what you say to make a dispute quite profitless. Besides, I don’t feel like single combat; I’m too glad to have you here.”

  Standing there — fairly swimming — in the delicious upper-air currents, she looked blissfully across the rolling moors, while the sunlight drenched her and the salt wind winnowed the ruddy glory of her hair, and from the tangle of tender blossoming green things a perfume mounted, saturating her senses as she breathed it deeper in the happiness of desire fulfilled and content quite absolute.

  “After all,” she said, “what more is there than this? Earth and sea and sky and sun, and a friend to show them to. . . . Because, as I wrote you, the friend is quite necessary in the scheme of things — to round out the symmetry of it all. . . . I suppose you’re dying to dangle those flies in Brier Water to see whether there are any trout there. Well, there are; Austin stocked it years ago, and he never fishes, so no doubt it’s full of fish. . . . What is that black thing moving along the edge of the Golden Marsh?”

  “A mink,” he said, looking.

  She seated herself cross-legged on the hill-top to watch the mink at her leisure. But the lithe furry creature took to the water, dived, and vanished, and she turned her attention to the landscape.

  “Do you see that lighthouse far to the south?” she asked; “that is Frigate Light. West of it lies Surf Point, and the bay between is Surf Bay. That’s where I nearly froze solid in my first ocean bath of the year. A little later we can bathe in that cove to the north — the Bay of Shoals. You see it, don’t you? — there, lying tucked in between Wonder Head and the Hither Woods; but I forgot! Of course you’ve been here before; and you know all this; don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly, “my brother and I came here as boys.”

  “Have you not been here since?”

  “Once.” He turned and looked down at the sea-battered wharf jutting into the Bay of Shoals. “Once, since I was a boy,” he repeated; “but I came alone. The transports landed at that wharf after the Spanish war. The hospital camp was yonder. . . . My brother died there.”

  She lifted her clear eyes to his; he was staring at the outline of the Hither Woods fringing the ochre-tinted heights.

  “There was no companion like him,” he said; “there is no one to take his place. Still, time helps — in a measure.”

  But he looked out across the sea with a grief for ever new.

  She, too, had been helped by time; she was very young when the distant and fabled seas took father and mother; and it was not entirely their memory, but more the wistful lack of ability to remember that left her so hopelessly alone.

  Sharper his sorrow; but there was the comfort of recollection in it; and she looked at him and, for an instant, envied him his keener grief. Then leaning a little toward him where he reclined, the weight of his body propped up on one arm, she laid her hand across his hand half buried in the grass.

  “It’s only another tie between us,” she said— “the memory of your dead and mine. . . . Will you tell me about him?”

  And leaning there, eyes on the sea, and her smooth, young hand covering his, he told her of the youth who had died there in the first flush of manhood and achievement.

  His voice, steady and grave, came to her through hushed intervals when the noise of the surf died out as the wind veered seaward. And she listened, heart intent, until he spoke no more; and the sea-wind rose again filling her ears with the ceaseless menace of the surf.

  After a while he picked up his rod, and sat erect and cross-legged as she sat, and flicked the flies, absently, across the grass, aiming at wind-blown butterflies.

  “All these changes!” he exclaimed with a sweep of the rod-butt toward Widgeon Bay. “When I was here as a boy there were no fine estates, no great houses, no country clubs, no game preserves — only a few fishermen’s hovels along the Bay of Shoals, and Frigate Light yonder. . . . Then Austin built Silverside out of a much simpler, grand-paternal bungalow; then came Sanxon Orchil and erected Hitherwood House on the foundations of his maternal great-grandfather’s cabin; and then the others came; the Minsters built gorgeous Brookminster — you can just make out their big summer palace — that white spot beyond Surf Point! — and
then the Lawns came and built Southlawn; and, beyond, the Siowitha people arrived on scout, land-hungry and rich; and the tiny hamlet of Wyossett grew rapidly into the town it now is. Truly this island with its hundred miles of length has become but a formal garden of the wealthy. Alas! I knew it as a stretch of woods, dunes, and old-time villages where life had slumbered for two hundred years!”

  He fell silent, but she nodded him to go on.

  “Brooklyn was a quiet tree-shaded town,” he continued thoughtfully, “unvexed by dreams of traffic; Flatbush an old Dutch village buried in the scented bloom of lilac, locust, and syringa, asleep under its ancient gables, hip-roofs, and spreading trees. Bath, Utrecht, Canarsie, Gravesend were little more than cross-road taverns dreaming in the sun; and that vile and noise-cursed island beyond the Narrows was a stretch of unpolluted beauty in an untainted sea — nothing but whitest sand and dunes and fragrant bayberry and a blaze of wild flowers. Why” — and he turned impatiently to the girl beside him— “why, I have seen the wild geese settle in Sheepshead Bay, and the wild duck circling over it; and I am not very aged. Think of it! Think of what this was but a few years ago, and think of what ‘progress’ has done to lay it waste! What will it be to-morrow?”

  “Oh — oh!” she protested, laughing; “I did not suppose you were that kind of a Jeremiah!”

  “Well, I am. I see no progress in prostrate forests, in soft-coal smoke, in noise! I see nothing gained in trimming and cutting and ploughing and macadamising a heavenly wilderness into mincing little gardens for the rich.” He was smiling at his own vehemence, but she knew that he was more than half serious.

  She liked him so; she always denied and disputed when he became declamatory, though usually, in her heart, she agreed with him.

  “Oh — oh!” she protested, shaking her head; “your philosophy is that of all reactionaries — emotional arguments which never can be justified. Why, if the labouring man delights in the harmless hurdy-gurdy and finds his pleasure mounted on a wooden horse, should you say that the island of his delight is ‘vile’? All fulfilment of harmless happiness is progress, my poor friend—”

  “But my harmless happiness lay in seeing the wild-fowl splashing where nothing splashes now except beer and the bathing rabble. If progress is happiness — where is mine? Gone with the curlew and the wild duck! Therefore, there is no progress. Quod erat, my illogical friend.”

  “But your happiness in such things was an exception—”

  “Exceptions prove anything!”

  “Yes — but — no, they don’t, either! What nonsense you can talk when you try to. . . . As for me I’m going down to the Brier Water to look into it. If there are any trout there foolish enough to bite at those gaudy-feathered hooks I’ll call you—”

  “I’m going with you,” he said, rising to his feet. She smilingly ignored his offered hands and sprang erect unaided.

  The Brier Water, a cold, deep, leisurely stream, deserved its name. Rising from a small spring-pond almost at the foot of Silverside lawn, it wound away through tangles of bull-brier and wild-rose, under arches of weed and grass and clustered thickets of mint, north through one of the strange little forests where it became a thread edged with a duck-haunted bog, then emerging as a clear deep stream once more it curved sharply south, recurved north again, and flowed into Shell Pond which, in turn, had an outlet into the Sound a mile east of Wonder Head.

  If anybody ever haunted it with hostile designs upon its fishy denizens, Austin at least never did. Belted kingfisher, heron, mink, and perhaps a furtive small boy with pole and sinker and barnyard worm — these were the only foes the trout might dread. As for a man and a fly-rod, they knew him not, nor was there much chance for casting a line, because the water everywhere flowed under weeds, arched thickets of brier and grass, and leafy branches criss-crossed above.

  “This place is impossible,” said Selwyn scornfully. “What is Austin about to let it all grow up and run wild—”

  “You said,” observed Eileen, “that you preferred an untrimmed wilderness; didn’t you?”

  He laughed and reeled in his line until only six inches of the gossamer leader remained free. From this dangled a single silver-bodied fly, glittering in the wind.

  “There’s a likely pool hidden under those briers,” he said; “I’m going to poke the tip of my rod under — this way — Hah!” as a heavy splash sounded from depths unseen and the reel screamed as he struck.

  Up and down, under banks and over shallows rushed the invisible fish; and Selwyn could do nothing for a while but let him go when he insisted, and check and recover when the fish permitted.

  Eileen, a spray of green mint between her vivid lips, watched the performance with growing interest; but when at length a big, fat, struggling speckled trout was cautiously but successfully lifted out into the grass, she turned her back until the gallant fighter had departed this life under a merciful whack from a stick.

  “That,” she said faintly, “is the part I don’t care for. . . . Is he out of all pain? . . . What? Didn’t feel any? Oh, are you quite sure?”

  “Eileen watched the performance with growing interest.”

  She walked over to him and looked down at the beautiful victim of craft.

  “Oh, well,” she sighed, “you are very clever, of course, and I suppose I’ll eat him; but I wish he were alive again, down there in those cool, sweet depths.”

  “Killing frogs and insects and his smaller brother fish?”

  “Did he do that?”

  “No doubt of it. And if I hadn’t landed him, a heron or a mink would have done it sooner or later. That’s what a trout is for: to kill and be killed.”

  She smiled, then sighed. The taking of life and the giving of it were mysteries to her. She had never wittingly killed anything.

  “Do you say that it doesn’t hurt the trout?” she asked.

  “There are no nerves in the jaw muscles of a trout — Hah!” as his rod twitched and swerved under water and his reel sang again.

  And again she watched the performance, and once more turned her back.

  “Let me try,” she said, when the coup-de-grâce had been administered to a lusty, brilliant-tinted bulltrout. And, rod in hand, she bent breathless and intent over the bushes, cautiously thrusting the tip through a thicket of mint.

  She lost two fish, then hooked a third — a small one; but when she lifted it gasping into the sunlight, she shivered and called to Selwyn:

  “Unhook it and throw it back! I — I simply can’t stand that!”

  Splash! went the astonished trout; and she sighed her relief.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” she said, “you and I certainly do belong to different species of the same genus; men and women are separate species. Do you deny it?”

  “I should hate to lose you that way,” he returned teasingly.

  “Well, you can’t avoid it. I gladly admit that woman is not too closely related to man. We don’t like to kill things; it’s an ingrained distaste, not merely a matter of ethical philosophy. You like to kill; and it’s a trait common also to children and other predatory animals. Which fact,” she added airily, “convinces me of woman’s higher civilisation.”

  “It would convince me, too,” he said, “if woman didn’t eat the things that man kills for her.”

  “I know; isn’t it horrid! Oh, dear, we’re neither of us very high in the scale yet — particularly you.”

  “Well, I’ve advanced some since the good old days when a man went wooing with a club,” he suggested.

  “You may have. But, anyway, you don’t go wooing. As for man collectively, he has not progressed so very far,” she added demurely. “As an example, that dreadful Draymore man actually hurt my wrist.”

  Selwyn looked up quickly, a shade of frank annoyance on his face and a vision of the fat sybarite before his eyes. He turned again to his fishing, but his shrug was more of a shudder than appeared to be complimentary to Percy Draymore.

  She had divined, someh
ow, that it annoyed Selwyn to know that men had importuned her. She had told him of her experience as innocently as she had told Nina, and with even less embarrassment. But that had been long ago; and now, without any specific reason, she was not certain that she had acted wisely, although it always amused her to see Selwyn’s undisguised impatience whenever mention was made of such incidents.

  So, to torment him, she said: “Of course it is somewhat exciting to be asked to marry people — rather agreeable than otherwise—”

  “What!”

  Waist deep in bay-bushes he turned toward her where she sat on the trunk of an oak which had fallen across the stream. Her arms balanced her body; her ankles were interlocked. She swung her slim russet-shod feet above the brook and looked at him with a touch of gaminerie new to her and to him.

  “Of course it’s amusing to be told you are the only woman in the world,” she said, “particularly when a girl has a secret fear that men don’t consider her quite grown up.”

  “You once said,” he began impatiently, “that the idiotic importunities of those men annoyed you.”

  “Why do you call them idiotic?” — with pretence of hurt surprise. “A girl is honoured—”

  “Oh, bosh!”

  “Captain Selwyn!”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said sulkily; and fumbled with his reel.

  She surveyed him, head a trifle on one side — the very incarnation of youthful malice in process of satisfying a desire for tormenting. Never before had she experienced that desire so keenly, so unreasoningly; never before had she found such a curious pleasure in punishing without cause. A perfectly inexplicable exhilaration possessed her — a gaiety quite reasonless, until every pulse in her seemed singing with laughter and quickening with the desire for his torment.

  “When I pretended I was annoyed by what men said to me, I was only a yearling,” she observed. “Now I’m a two-year, Captain Selwyn. . . . Who can tell what may happen in my second season?”

  “You said that you were not the — the marrying sort,” he insisted.