Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Don’t say such things!” he said angrily.

  “The world would say them — your friends — perhaps Geraldine might be led to doubt — Oh, Scott, dear, I know, I know! And above all — I am afraid. There are too many years between us — too many blessed memories of my children to risk.... Don’t try to make me care for you in any other way.”

  A quick flame leaped in his eyes.

  “Could I?”

  “No!” she exclaimed, appalled.

  “Then why do you ask me not to try? I believe I could!”

  “You cannot! You cannot, believe me. Won’t you believe me? It must not happen; it is all wrong — in every way — —”

  He stood looking at her with a new expression on his face.

  “If you are so alarmed,” he said slowly, “you must have already thought about it. You’ll think about it now, anyway.”

  “We are both going to forget it. Promise that you will!” She added hurriedly: “Drop my hand, please; there is Geraldine — and Mr. Grandcourt, too!... Tell me — do my eyes look queer? Are they red and horrid?... Don’t look at me that way. For goodness’ sake, don’t display any personal interest in me. Go and turn over some flat rocks and find some lizards!”

  Geraldine, bare-armed and short-skirted, came swinging along the woodland path, Delancy Grandcourt dogging her heels, as usual, carrying a pair of rods and catching the artificial flies in the bushes at every step.

  “We’re all out of trout at the house!” she called across to the stream to her brother. “Jack Dysart is fishing down the creek with Naïda and Sylvia. Where is Duane?”

  “Somewhere around, I suppose,” replied Scott sulkily. His sister took a running jump, cleared the bank, and alighted on a rock in the stream. Poised there she looked back at Grandcourt, laughed, sprang forward from stone to stone, and leaped to the moss beside Kathleen.

  “Hello, dear!” she nodded. “Where did you cross? And where is Duane?”

  “We crossed by the log bridge below,” replied Kathleen. She added: “Duane left us half an hour ago. Wasn’t it half an hour ago, Scott?” with a rising inflection that conveyed something of warning, something of an appeal. But on Scott’s face the sullen disconcerted expression had not entirely faded, and his sister inspected him curiously. Then without knowing why, exactly, she turned and looked at Kathleen.

  There was a subdued and dewy brilliancy in Kathleen’s eyes, a bright freshness to her cheeks, radiantly and absurdly youthful; and something else — something so indefinable, so subtle, that only another woman’s instinct might divine it — something invisible and inward, which transfigured her with a youthful loveliness almost startling.

  They looked at one another. Geraldine, conscious of something she could not understand, glanced again at her sulky brother.

  “What’s amiss, Scott?” she asked. “Has anything gone wrong anywhere?”

  Scott, pretending to be very busy untangling Grandcourt’s cast from the branches of a lusty young birch, said, “No, of course not,” and the girl, wondering, turned to Kathleen, who sustained her questioning eyes without a tremor.

  “What’s the matter with Scott?” asked his sister. “He’s the guiltiest-looking man — why, it’s absurd, Kathleen! Upon my word, the boy is blushing!”

  “What!” exclaimed Scott so furiously that everybody laughed. And presently Geraldine asked again where Duane was.

  “Rosalie Dysart is canoeing on the Gray Water, and she hailed him and he left us and went down to the river,” said Kathleen carelessly.

  “Did Duane join her?”

  “I think so—” She hesitated, watching Geraldine’s sombre eyes. “I really don’t know,” she added. And, in a lower voice: “I wish either Duane or Rosalie would go. They certainly are behaving unwisely.”

  Geraldine turned and looked through the woods toward the Gray Water.

  “It’s their affair,” she said curtly. “I’ve got to make Delancy fish or we won’t have enough trout for luncheon. Scott!” calling to her brother, “your horrid trout won’t rise this morning. For goodness’ sake, try to catch something beside lizards and water-beetles!”

  For a moment she stood looking around her, as though perplexed and preoccupied. There was sunlight on the glade and on the ripples, but the daylight seemed to have become duller to her.

  She walked up-stream for a little distance before she noticed Grandcourt plodding faithfully at her heels.

  “Oh!” she said impatiently, “I thought you were fishing. You must catch something, you know, or we’ll all go hungry.”

  “Nothing bites on these bally flies,” he explained.

  “Nothing bites because your flies are usually caught in a tree-top. Trout are not arboreal. I’m ashamed of you, Delancy. If you can’t keep your line free in the woods” — she hesitated, then reddening a little under her tan— “you had better go and get a canoe and find Duane Mallett and help him catch — something worth while.”

  “Don’t you want me to stay with you?” asked the big, awkward fellow appealingly. “There’s no fun in being with Rosalie and Duane.”

  “No, I don’t. Look! Your flies are in that bush! Untangle them and go to the Gray Water.”

  “Won’t you come, too, Miss Seagrave?”

  “No; I’m going back to the house.... And don’t you dare return without a decent brace of trout.”

  “All right,” he said resignedly. The midges bothered him; he mopped his red face, tugged at the line, but the flies were fast in a hazel bush.

  “Damn this sort of thing,” he muttered, looking piteously after Geraldine. She was already far away among the trees, skirts wrapped close to avoid briers, big straw hat dangling in one hand.

  As she walked toward the Sachem’s Gate she was swinging her hat and singing, apparently as unconcernedly as though care rested lightly upon her young shoulders.

  Out on the high-road a number of her guests whizzed past in one of Scott’s motors; there came a swift hail, a gust of wind-blown laughter, and the car was gone in a whirl of dust. She stood in the road watching it recede, then walked forward again toward the house.

  Her accustomed elasticity appeared to have left her; the sun was becoming oppressive; her white-shod feet dragged a little, which was so unusual that she straightened her head and shoulders with nervous abruptness.

  “What on earth is the matter with me?” she said, half aloud, to herself.

  During these last two months, and apparently apropos of nothing at all, an unaccustomed sense of depression sometimes crept upon her.

  At first she disregarded it as the purely physical lassitude of spring, but now it was beginning to disquiet her. Once a hazy suspicion took shape — hastily dismissed — that some sense, some temporarily suppressed desire was troubling her. The same idea had awakened again that evening on the terrace when the faint odour from the decanter attracted her. And again she suspected, and shrank away into herself, shocked, frightened, surprised, yet still defiantly incredulous.

  Yet her suspicions had been correct. It was habit, disturbed by the tardiness of accustomed tribute, that stirred at moments, demanding recognition.

  Since that night in early spring when fear and horror of herself had suddenly checked a custom which she had hitherto supposed to be nothing worse than foolish, twice — at times inadvertently, at times deliberately — she had sought relief from sleepless nervousness and this new depression in the old and apparently harmless manner of her girlhood. For weeks now she had exercised little control of herself, feeling immune, yet it scared her a little to recognise again in herself the restless premonitions of desire. For here, in the sunshine of the forest-bordered highway, that same dull uneasiness was stirring once more.

  It was true, other things had stirred her to uneasiness that morning — an indefinable impression concerning Kathleen — a definite one which concerned Rosalie Dysart and Duane, and which began to exasperate her.

  All her elasticity was gone now; tired without reason, sh
e plodded on along the road in her little white shoes, head bent, brown eyes brooding, striving to fix her wandering thoughts on Duane Mallett to fight down the threatening murmurs of a peril still scarcely comprehended.

  “Anyway,” she said half aloud, “even if I ever could care for him, I dare not let myself do it with this absurd inclination always threatening me.”

  She had said it! Scarcely yet understanding the purport of her own words, yet electrified, glaringly enlightened by them, she halted. A confused sense that something vital had occurred in her life stilled her heart and her breathing together.

  After a moment she straightened up and walked forward, turned across the lawn and into the syringa-bordered drive.

  There was nobody in the terrace except Bunbury Gray in a brilliant waistcoat, who sat smoking a very large faïence pipe and reading a sporting magazine. He got up with alacrity when he saw her, fetched her a big wicker chair, evidently inclined to let her divert him.

  “Oh, I’m not going to,” she observed, sinking into the cushions. For a moment she felt rather limp, then a quiver passed through her, tightening the relaxed nerves.

  “Bunbury,” she said, “do you know any men who ever get tired of idleness and clothes and their neighbours’ wives?”

  “Sure,” he said, surprised, “I get tired of those things all right. I’ve got enough of this tailor, for example,” looking at his trousers. “I’m tired of idleness, too. Shall we do something and forget the cut of my clothes?”

  “What do you do when you tire of people and things?”

  “Change partners or go away. That’s easy.”

  “You can’t change yourself — or go away from yourself.”

  “But I don’t get tired of myself,” he explained in astonishment. She regarded him curiously from the depths of her wicker chair.

  “Bunbury, do you remember when we were engaged?”

  He grinned. “Rather. I wouldn’t mind being it again.”

  “Engaged?”

  “Sure thing. Will you take me on again, Geraldine?”

  “I thought you cared for Sylvia Quest.”

  “I do, but I can stop it.”

  She still regarded him with brown-eyed curiosity.

  “Didn’t you really tire of our engagement?”

  “You did. You said that my tailor is the vital part of me.”

  She laughed. “Well, you are only a carefully groomed combination of New York good form and good nature, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s rather rough, isn’t it? Or do you really mean it that way?”

  “No, Bunny dear. I only mean that you’re like the others. All the men I know are about the same sort. You all wear too many ties and waistcoats; you are, and say, and do too many kinds of fashionable things. You play too much tennis, drink too many pegs, gamble too much, ride and drive too much. You all have too much and too many — if you understand that! You ask too much and you give too little; you say too much which means too little. Is there none among you who knows something that amounts to something, and how to say it and do it?”

  “What the deuce are you driving at, Geraldine?” he asked, bewildered.

  “I’m just tired and irritable, Bunny, and I’m taking it out on you.... Because you were always kind — and even when foolish you were often considerate.... That’s a new waistcoat, isn’t it?”

  “Well — I don’t — know,” he began, perplexed and suspicious, but she cut him short with a light little laugh and reached out to pat his hand.

  “Don’t mind me. You know I like you.... I’m only bored with your species. What do you do when you don’t know what to do, Bunny?”

  “Take a peg,” he said, brightening up. “Do you — shall I call somebody — —”

  “No, please.”

  She extended her slim limbs and crossed her feet. Lying still there in the sunshine, arms crooked behind her head, she gazed straight out ahead. Light breezes lifted her soft bright hair; the same zephyrs bore from tennis courts on the east the far laughter and calling of the unseen players.

  “Who are they?” she inquired.

  “The Pink ‘uns, Naïda, and Jack Dysart. There’s ten up on every set,” he added, “and I’ve side obligations with Rosalie and Duane. Take you on if you like; odds are on the Pink ‘uns. Or I’ll get a lump of sugar and we can play ‘Fly Loo.’”

  “No, thanks.”

  A few moments later she said:

  “Do you know, somehow, recently, the forest world — all this pretty place of lakes and trees—” waving her arm toward the horizon— “seems to be tarnished with the hard living and empty thinking of the people I have brought into it.... I include myself. The region is redolent of money and the things it buys. I had a better time before I had any or heard about it.”

  “Why, you’ve always had it — —”

  “But I didn’t know it. I’d like to give mine away and do something for a living.”

  “Oh, every girl has that notion once in a lifetime.”

  “Have they?” she asked.

  “Sure. It’s hysteria. I had it myself once. But I found I could keep busy enough doing nothing without presenting my income to the Senegambians and spending life in a Wall Street office. Of course if I had a pretty fancy for the artistic and useful — as Duane Mallett has — I suppose I’d get busy and paint things and sell ’em by the perspiration of my brow — —”

  She said disdainfully: “If you were never any busier than Duane, you wouldn’t be very busy.”

  “I don’t know. Duane seems to keep at it, even here, doesn’t he?”

  She looked up in surprise: “Duane hasn’t done any work since he’s been here, has he?”

  “Didn’t you know? What do you suppose he’s about every morning?”

  “He’s about — Rosalie,” she said coolly. “I’ve never seen any colour box or easel in their outfit.”

  “Oh, he keeps his traps at Hurryon Lodge. He’s made a lot of sketches. I saw several at the Lodge. And he’s doing a big canvas of Rosalie down there, too.”

  “At Hurryon Lodge?”

  “Yes. Miller lets them have the garret for a studio.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said slowly.

  “Didn’t you? People are rather catty about it.”

  “Catty?”

  Sheer surprise silenced her for a while, then hurt curiosity drove her to questions; but little Bunbury didn’t know much more about the matter, merely shrugging his shoulders and saying: “It’s casual but it’s all right.”

  Later the tennis players, sunburned and perspiring, came swinging up from the courts on their way to the showers. Bunbury began to settle his obligations; Naïda and the Pink ‘uns went indoors; Jack Dysart, handsome, dishevelled, sat down beside Geraldine, fastening his sleeves.

  “I lost twice twenty,” he observed. “Bunny is in fifty, I believe. Duane and Rosalie lose.”

  “Is that all you care about the game?” she asked with a note of contempt in her voice.

  “Oh, it’s good for one’s health,” he said.

  “So is confession, but there’s no sport in it. Tell me, Mr. Dysart, don’t you play any game for it’s own sake?”

  “Two, mademoiselle,” he said politely.

  “What two?”

  “Chess is one.”

  “What is the other?”

  “Love,” he replied, smiling at her so blandly that she laughed. Then she thought of Rosalie, and it was on the tip of her tongue to say something impudent. But “Do you do that game very well?” was all she said.

  “Would you care to judge how well I do it?”

  “As umpire? Yes, if you like.”

  He said: “We will umpire our own game, Miss Seagrave.”

  “Oh, we couldn’t do that, could we? We couldn’t play and umpire, too.” Suddenly the thought of Duane and Rosalie turned her bitter and she said:

  “We’ll have two perfectly disinterested umpires. I choose your wife for one. Whom do you ch
oose?”

  Over his handsome face the slightest muscular change passed, but far from wincing he nodded coolly.

  “One umpire is enough,” he said. “When our game is well on you may ask Rosalie to judge how well I’ve done it — if you care to.”

  The bright smile she wore changed. Her face was now only a lovely dark-eyed mask, behind which her thoughts had suddenly begun racing — wild little thoughts, all tumult and confusion, all trembling, too, with some scarcely understood hurt lashing them to recklessness.

  “We’ll have two umpires,” she insisted, scarcely knowing what she said. “I’ll choose Duane for the second. He and Rosalie ought to be able to agree on the result of our game.”

  Dysart turned his head away leisurely, then looked around again unsmiling.

  “Two umpires? Soit! But that means you consent to play.”

  “Play?”

  “Certainly.”

  “With you?”

  “With me.”

  “I’ll consider it.... Do you know we have been talking utter nonsense?”

  “That’s part of the game.”

  “Oh, then — do you assume that the — the game has already begun?”

  “It usually opens that way, I believe.”

  “And where does it end, Mr. Dysart?”

  “That is for you to say,” he replied in a lower voice.

  “Oh! And what are the rules?”

  “The player who first falls really in love loses. There are no stakes. We play as sportsmen — for the game’s sake. Is it understood?”

  She hesitated, smiling, a little excited, a little interested in the way he put things.

  At that same moment, across the lawn, Rosalie and Duane strolled into view. She saw them, and with a nervous movement, almost involuntary, she turned her back on them.

  Neither she nor Dysart spoke. She gazed very steadily at the horizon, as though there were sounds beyond the green world’s rim. A few seconds later a shadow fell over the terrace at her feet — two shadows intermingled. She saw them on the grass at her feet, then quietly lifted her head.