Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Better wait a bit,” he said; “it would not do to have that horse feel a fluttering pulse, telegraphing along the snaffle. Tell me, are you spurred?”

  She lifted the hem of her habit; two small spurs glittered on her polished boot heels.

  “That’s it, you see,” he observed; “you probably have not ridden cross saddle very long. When your mount swerved you spurred, and he bolted, bit in teeth.”

  “That’s exactly it,” she admitted, looking ruefully at her spurs. Then she dropped her skirt, glanced interrogatively at him, and, obeying his grave gesture, seated herself again upon the bench.

  “Don’t stand,” she said civilly. He took the other end of the seat, lifting the still slumbering squirrel to his knee.

  “I — I haven’t said very much,” she began; “I’m impulsive enough to be overgrateful and say too much. I hope you understand me; do you?”

  “Of course; you’re very good. It was nothing; you could have stopped your horse yourself. People do that sort of thing for one another as a matter of course.”

  “But not at the risk you took — —”

  “No risk at all,” he said hastily.

  She thought otherwise, and thought it so fervently that, afraid of emotion, she turned her cold, white profile to him and studied her horse, haughty lids adroop. The same insolent sweetness was in her eyes when they again reverted to him. He knew the look; he had encountered it often enough in the hallway and on the stairs. He knew, too, that she must recognize him; yet, under the circumstances, it was for her to speak first; and she did not, for she was at that age when horror of overdoing anything chokes back the scarcely extinguished childish instinct to say too much. In other words, she was eighteen and had had her first season the winter past — the winter when he had not been visible among the gatherings of his own kind.

  “Those squirrels are very tame,” she observed calmly.

  “Not always,” he said. “Try to hold this one, for example.”

  She raised her pretty eyebrows, then accepted the lump of fluffy fur from his hands. Instantly an electric shock seemed to set the squirrel frantic, there was a struggle, a streak of gray and white, and the squirrel leaped from her lap and fairly flew down the asphalt path.

  “Gracious!” she exclaimed faintly; “what was the matter?”

  “Some squirrels are very wild,” he said innocently.

  “I know — but you held him — he was asleep on your knee. Why didn’t he stay with me?”

  “Oh, perhaps because I have a way with animals.”

  “With horses, too,” she added gayly. And the smile breaking from her violet eyes silenced him in the magic of a beauty he had never dreamed of. At first she mistook his silence for modesty; then — because even as young a maid as she is quick to divine and fine of instinct — she too fell silent and serious, the while the shuttles of her reason flew like lightning, weaving the picture of him she had conceived — a gentleman, a man of her own sort, rather splendid and wise and bewildering. The portrait completed, there was no room for the hint of presumption she had half sensed in the brown eyes’ glance that had set her alert; and she looked up at him again, frankly, a trifle curiously.

  “I am going to thank you once more,” she said, “and ask you to put me up. There is not a flutter of fear in my pulse now.”

  “Are you quite sure?”

  “Perfectly.”

  They arose; he untied the horse and beckoned it to the walk’s edge.

  “I forgot,” she said, laughing, “that I am riding cross saddle. I can mount without troubling you—” She set her toe to the stirrup which he held, and swung herself up into the saddle with a breezy “Thanks, awfully,” and sat there gathering her bridle.

  Had she said enough? How coldly her own thanks rang in her ears — for perhaps he had saved her neck — and perhaps not. Busy with curb and snaffle reins, head bent, into her oval face a tint of color crept. Did he think she treated lightly, flippantly, the courage which became him so? Or was he already bored by her acknowledgment of it? Sensitive, dreading to expose youth and inexperience to the amused smile of this attractive young man of the world, she sat fumbling with her bridle, conscious that he stood beside her, hat in hand, looking up at her. She could delay no longer; the bridle had been shifted and reshifted to the last second of procrastination. She must say something or go.

  Meeting his eyes, she smiled and leaned a little forward in her saddle as though to speak, but his brown eyes troubled her, and all she could say was “Thank you — good-by,” and galloped off down the vista through dim, leafy depths heavy with the incense of lilac and syringa.

  II

  THE IDLER

  Concerning the Young Man in the Ditch and His Attempts to Get Out of It

  Although he was not vindictive, he did not care to owe anything to anybody who might be inclined to give him a hearing on account of former obligations or his social position. Everybody knew he had gone to smash; everybody, he very soon discovered, was naturally afraid of being bothered by him. The dread of the overfed that an underfed member of the community may request a seat at the table he now understood perfectly. He was learning.

  So he solicited aid from nobody whom he had known in former days; neither from those who had aided him when he needed no aid, nor those who owed their comfortable position to the generosity of his father — a gentleman notorious for making fortunes for his friends.

  Therefore he wrote to strangers on a purely business basis — to amazing types lately emerged from the submerged, bulging with coal money, steel money, copper money, wheat money, stockyard money — types that galloped for Fifth Avenue to build town houses; that shook their long cars and frisked into the country and built “cottages.” And this was how he put it:

  “Madam: In case you desire to entertain guests with the professional services of a magician it would give me pleasure to place my very unusual accomplishments at your disposal.”

  And signed his name.

  It was a dreadful drain on his bank account to send several thousand engraved cards about town and fashionable resorts. No replies came. Day after day, exhausted with the practice drill of his profession, he walked to the Park and took his seat on the bench by the bridle path. Sometimes he saw her cantering past; she always acknowledged his salute, but never drew bridle. At times, too, he passed her in the hall; her colorless “Good morning” never varied except when she said “Good evening.” And all this time he never inquired her name from the hall servant; he was that sort of man — decent through instinct; for even breeding sometimes permits sentiment to snoop.

  For a week he had been airily dispensing with more than one meal a day; to keep clothing and boots immaculate required a sacrifice of breakfast and luncheon — besides, he had various small pensioners to feed, white rabbits with foolish pink eyes, canary birds, cats, albino mice, goldfish, and other collaborateurs in his profession. He was obliged to bribe the janitor, too, because the laws of the house permitted neither animals nor babies within its precincts. This extra honorarium deprived him of tobacco, and he became a pessimist.

  Besides, doubts as to his own ability arose within him; it was all very well to practice his magic there alone, but he had not yet tried it on anybody except the janitor; and when he had begun by discovering several red-eyed rabbits in the janitor’s pockets that intemperate functionary fled with a despondent yell that brought a policeman to the area gate with a threat to pull the place.

  At length, however, a letter came engaging him for one evening. He was quite incredulous at first, then modestly scared, perplexed, exultant and depressed by turns. Here was an opening — the first. And because it was the first its success or failure meant future engagements or consignments to the street, perhaps as a white-wing. There must be no faltering now, no bungling, no mistakes, no amateurish hesitation. It is the empty-headed who most strenuously demand intelligence in others. One yawn from such an audience meant his professional damnation — he knew that; every
second must break like froth in a wine glass; an instant’s perplexity, a slackening of the tension, and those flaccid intellects would relax into native inertia. Incapable of self-amusement, depending utterly upon superior minds for a respite from ennui, their caprice controlled his fate; and he knew it.

  Sitting there by the sunny window with a pair of magnificent white Persian cats purring on either knee, he read and reread the letter summoning him on the morrow to Seabright. He knew who his hostess was — a large lady lately emerged from a corner in lard, dragging with her some assorted relatives of atrophied intellects and a husband whose only mental pleasure depended upon the speed attained by his racing car — the most exacting audience he could dare to confront.

  Like the White Knight he had had plenty of practice, but he feared that warrior’s fate; and as he sat there he picked up a bunch of silver hoops, tossed them up separately so that they descended linked in a glittering chain, looped them and unlooped them, and, tiring, thoughtfully tossed them toward the ceiling again, where they vanished one by one in mid-air.

  The cats purred; he picked up one, molded her carefully in his handsome hands; and presently, under the agreeable massage, her purring increased while she dwindled and dwindled to the size of a small, fluffy kitten, then vanished entirely, leaving in his hand a tiny white mouse. This mouse he tossed into the air, where it became no mouse at all but a white butterfly that fluttered ‘round and ‘round, alighting at last on the window curtain and hung there, opening and closing its snowy wings.

  “That’s all very well,” he reflected, gloomily, as, at a pass of his hand, the air was filled with canary birds; “that’s all very well, but suppose I should slip up? What I need is to rehearse to somebody before I face two or three hundred people.”

  He thought he heard a knocking on his door, and listened a moment. But as there was an electric bell there he concluded he had been mistaken; and picking up the other white cat, he began a gentle massage that stimulated her purring, apparently at the expense of her color and size, for in a few moments she also dwindled until she became a very small, coal-black kitten, changing in a twinkling to a blackbird, when he cast her carelessly toward the ceiling. It was well done; in all India no magician could have done it more cleverly, more casually.

  Leaning forward in his chair he reproduced the two white cats from behind him, put the kittens back in their box, caught the blackbird and caged it, and was carefully winding up the hairspring in the white butterfly, when again he fancied that somebody was knocking.

  III

  THE GREEN MOUSE

  Showing the Value of a Helping Hand When It Is White and Slender

  This time he went leisurely to the door and opened it; a girl stood there, saying, “I beg your pardon for disturbing you—” It was high time she admitted it, for her eyes had been disturbing him day and night since the first time he passed her in the hall.

  She appeared to be a trifle frightened, too, and, scarcely waiting for his invitation, she stepped inside with a hurried glance behind her, and walked to the center of the room holding her skirts carefully as though stepping through wet grass.

  “I — I am annoyed,” she said in a voice not perfectly under command. “If you please, would you tell me whether there is such a thing as a pea-green mouse?”

  Then he did a mean thing; he could have cleared up that matter with a word, a smile, and — he didn’t.

  “A green mouse?” he repeated gently, almost pitifully.

  She nodded, then paled; he drew a big chair toward her, for her knees trembled a little; and she sat down with an appealing glance that ought to have made him ashamed of himself.

  “What has frightened you?” inquired that meanest of men.

  “I was in my studio — and I must first explain to you that for weeks and weeks I — I have imagined I heard sounds—” She looked carefully around her; nothing animate was visible. “Sounds,” she repeated, swallowing a little lump in her white throat, “like the faint squealing and squeaking and sniffing and scratching of — of live things. I asked the janitor, and he said the house was not very well built and that the beams and wainscoting were shrinking.”

  “Did he say that?” inquired the young man, thinking of the bribes.

  “Yes, and I tried to believe him. And one day I thought I heard about one hundred canaries singing, and I know I did, but that idiot janitor said they were the sparrows under the eaves. Then one day when your door was open, and I was coming up the stairway, and it was dark in the entry, something big and soft flopped across the carpet, and — it being exceedingly common to scream — I didn’t, but managed to get past it, and” — her violet eyes widened with horror— “do you know what that soft, floppy thing was? It was an owl!”

  He was aware of it; he had managed to secure the escaped bird before her electric summons could arouse the janitor.

  “I called the janitor,” she said, “and he came and we searched the entry; but there was no owl.”

  He appeared to be greatly impressed; she recognized the sympathy in his brown eyes.

  “That wretched janitor declared I had seen a cat,” she resumed; “and I could not persuade him otherwise. For a week I scarcely dared set foot on the stairs, but I had to — you see, I live at home and only come to my studio to paint.”

  “I thought you lived here,” he said, surprised.

  “Oh, no. I have my studio—” she hesitated, then smiled. “Everybody makes fun of me, and I suppose they’ll laugh me out of it, but I detest conventions, and I did hope I had talent for something besides frivolity.”

  Her gaze wandered around his room; then suddenly the possible significance of her unconventional situation brought her to her feet, serious but self-possessed.

  “I beg your pardon again,” she said, “but I was really driven out of my studio — quite frightened, I confess.”

  “What drove you out?” he asked guiltily.

  “Something — you can scarcely credit it — and I dare not tell the janitor for fear he will think me — queer.” She raised her distressed and lovely eyes again: “Oh, please believe that I did see a bright green mouse!”

  “I do believe it,” he said, wincing.

  “Thank you. I — I know perfectly well how it sounds — and I know that horrid people see things like that, but” — she spoke piteously— “I had only one glass of claret at luncheon, and I am perfectly healthy in body and mind. How could I see such a thing if it was not there?”

  “It was there,” he declared.

  “Do you really think so? A green — bright green mouse?”

  “Haven’t a doubt of it,” he assured her; “saw one myself the other day.”

  “Where?”

  “On the floor—” he made a vague gesture. “There’s probably a crack between your studio and my wall, and the little rascal crept into your place.”

  She stood looking at him uncertainly: “Are there really such things as green mice?”

  “Well,” he explained, “I fancy this one was originally white. Somebody probably dyed it green.”

  “But who on earth would be silly enough to do such a thing?”

  His ears grew red — he felt them doing it.

  After a moment she said: “I am glad you told me that you, too, saw this unspeakable mouse. I have decided to write to the owners of the house and request an immediate investigation. Would — would it be too much to ask you to write also?”

  “Are you — you going to write?” he asked, appalled.

  “Certainly. Either some dreadful creature here keeps a bird store and brings home things that escape, or the house is infested. I don’t care what the janitor says; I did hear squeals and whines and whimpers!”

  “Suppose — suppose we wait,” he began lamely; but at that moment her blue eyes widened; she caught him convulsively by the arm, pointing, one snowy finger outstretched.

  “Oh-h!” she said hysterically, and the next instant was standing upon a chair, pale as a ghost. It
was a wonder she had not mounted the dresser, too, for there, issuing in creepy single file from the wainscoting, came mice — mice of various tints. A red one led the grewsome rank, a black and white one came next, then in decorous procession followed the guilty green one, a yellow one, a blue one, and finally — horror of horrors! — a red-white-and-blue mouse, carrying a tiny American flag.

  He turned a miserable face toward her; she, eyes dilated, frozen to a statue, saw him advance, hold out a white wand — saw the uncanny procession of mice mount the stick and form into a row, tails hanging down — saw him carry the creatures to a box and dump them in.

  He was trying to speak now. She heard him stammer something about the escape of the mice; she heard him asking her pardon. Dazed, she laid her hand in his as he aided her to descend to the floor; nerveless, speechless, she sank into the big chair, horror still dilating her eyes.

  “It’s all up with me,” he said slowly, “if you write to the owners. I’ve bribed the janitor to say nothing. I’m dreadfully mortified that these things have happened to annoy you.”

  The color came back into her face; amazement dominated her anger. “But why — why do you keep such creatures?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked. “It is my profession.” “Your — what?”

  “My profession,” he repeated doggedly.

  “Oh,” she said, revolted, “that is not true! You are a gentleman — I know who you are perfectly well!”

  “Who am I?”

  She called him by name, almost angrily.

  “Well,” he said sullenly, “what of it? If you have investigated my record you must know I am as poor as these miserable mice.”

  “I — I know it. But you are a gentleman — —”

  “I am a mountebank,” he said; “I mean a mountebank in its original interpretation. There’s neither sense nor necessity for me to deny it.”

  “I — I don’t understand you,” she whispered, shocked.

  “Why, I do monkey tricks to entertain people,” he replied, forcing a laugh, “or rather, I hope to do a few — and be paid for them. I fancy every man finds his own level; I’ve found mine, apparently.”