Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Silence, delicately accented by the faint harmony of mosquitoes, brooded over Cooper’s Bluff.

  “There’s no use,” said Drusilla at last; “one can draw a landscape from every point of view except looking down hill. Mr. Yates, how on earth am I to sit here and make a drawing looking down hill?”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “I had better hold your pencil again. Shall I?”

  “Do you think that would help?”

  “I think it helps — somehow.”

  Her pretty, narrow hand held the pencil; his sun-browned hand closed over it. She looked at the pad on her knees.

  After a while she said: “I think, perhaps, we had better draw. Don’t you?”

  They made a few hen-tracks. Noticing his shoulder was just touching hers, and feeling a trifle weary on her camp-stool, she leaned back a little.

  “It is very pleasant to have you here,” she said dreamily.

  “It is very heavenly to be here,” he said.

  “How generous you are to give us so much of your time!” murmured Drusilla.

  “I think so, too,” said Flavilla, washing a badger brush. “And I am becoming almost as fond of you as Drusilla is.”

  “Don’t you like him as well as I do?” asked Drusilla.

  Flavilla turned on her camp-stool and inspected them both.

  “Not quite as well,” she said frankly. “You know, Drusilla, you are very nearly in love with him.” And she resumed her sketching.

  Drusilla gazed at the purple horizon unembarrassed. “Am I?” she said absently.

  “Are you?” he repeated, close to her shoulder.

  She turned and looked into his sun-tanned face curiously.

  “What is it — to love? Is it” — she looked at him undisturbed— “is it to be quite happy and lazy with a man like you?”

  He was silent.

  “I thought,” she continued, “that there would be some hesitation, some shyness about it — some embarrassment. But there, has been none between you and me.”

  He said nothing.

  She went on absently:

  “You said, the other day, very simply, that you cared a great deal for me; and I was not very much surprised. And I said that I cared very much for you.... And, by the way, I meant to ask you yesterday; are we engaged?”

  “Are we?” he asked.

  “Yes — if you wish.... Is that all there is to an engagement?”

  “There’s a ring,” observed Flavilla, dabbing on too much ultramarine and using a sponge. “You’ve got to get her one, Mr. Yates.”

  Drusilla looked at the man beside her and smiled.

  “How simple it is, after all!” she said. “I have read in the books Pa-pah permits us to read such odd things about love and lovers.... Are we lovers, Mr. Yates? But, of course, we must be, I fancy.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Some time or other, when it is convenient,” observed Flavilla, “you ought to kiss each other occasionally.”

  “That doesn’t come until I’m a bride, does it?” asked Drusilla.

  “I believe it’s a matter of taste,” said Flavilla, rising and naively stretching her long, pretty limbs.

  She stood a moment on the edge of the bluff, looking down.

  “How curious!” she said after a moment. “There is Pa-pah on the water rowing somebody’s maid about.”

  “What!” exclaimed Yates, springing to his feet.

  “How extraordinary,” said Drusilla, following him to the edge of the bluff; “and they’re singing, too, as they row!”

  From far below, wafted across the sparkling waters of Oyster Bay, Mr. Carr’s rich and mellifluous voice was wafted shoreward:

  “I der-reamt that I dwelt in ma-arble h-a-l-ls.”

  The sunlight fell on the maid’s coquettish cap and apron, and sparkled upon the buckle of one dainty shoe. It also glittered across the monocle of Mr. Carr.

  “Pa-pah!” cried Flavilla.

  Far away her parent waved a careless greeting to his offspring, then resumed his oars and his song.

  “How extraordinary!” said Flavilla. “Why do you suppose that Pa-pah is rowing somebody’s maid around the bay, and singing that way to her?”

  “Perhaps it’s one of our maids,” said Drusilla; “but that would be rather odd, too, wouldn’t it, Mr. Yates?”

  “A — little,” he admitted. And his heart sank.

  Flavilla had started down the sandy face of the bluff.

  “I’m going to see whose maid it is,” she called back.

  Drusilla seated herself in the sun-dried grass and watched her sister.

  Yates stood beside her in bitter dejection.

  So this was the result! His unfortunate future father-in-law was done for. What a diabolical machine! What a terrible, swift, relentless answer had been returned when, out of space, this misguided gentleman had, by mistake, summoned his own affinity! And what an affinity! A saucy soubrette who might easily have just stepped from the coulisse of a Parisian theater!

  Yates looked at Drusilla. What an awful blow was impending! She never could have suspected it, but there, in that boat, sat her future stepmother in cap and apron! — his own future stepmother-in-law!

  And in the misery of that moment’s realization John Chillingham Yates showed the material of which he was constructed.

  “Dear,” he said gently.

  “Do you mean me?” asked Drusilla, looking up in frank surprise.

  And at the same time she saw on his face a look which she had never before encountered there. It was the shadow of trouble; and it drew her to her feet instinctively.

  “What is it, Jack?” she asked.

  She had never before called him anything but Mr. Yates.

  “What is it?” she repeated, turning away beside him along the leafy path; and with every word another year seemed, somehow, to be added to her youth. “Has anything happened, Jack? Are you unhappy — or ill?”

  He did not speak; she walked beside him, regarding him with wistful eyes.

  So there was more of love than happiness, after all; she began to half understand it in a vague way as she watched his somber face. There certainly was more of love than a mere lazy happiness; there was solicitude and warm concern, and desire to comfort, to protect.

  “Jack,” she said tremulously.

  He turned and took her unresisting hands. A quick thrill shot through her. Yes, there was more to love than she had expected.

  “Are you unhappy?” she asked. “Tell me. I can’t bear to see you this way. I — I never did — before.”

  “Will you love me; Drusilla?”

  “Yes — yes, I will, Jack.”

  “Dearly?”

  “I do — dearly.” The first blush that ever tinted her cheek spread and deepened.

  “Will you marry me, Drusilla?”

  “Yes.... You frighten me.”

  She trembled, suddenly, in his arms. Surely there were more things to love than she had dreamed of in her philosophy. She looked up as he bent nearer, understanding that she was to be kissed, awaiting the event which suddenly loomed up freighted with terrific significance.

  There was a silence, a sob.

  “Jack — darling — I — I love you so!”

  Flavilla was sketching on her camp-stool when they returned.

  “I’m horridly hungry,” she said. “It’s luncheon time, isn’t it? And, by the way, it’s all right about that maid. She was on her way to serve in the tea pavilion at Mrs. Magnelius Grandcourt’s bazaar, and her runabout broke down and nearly blew up.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” exclaimed Drusilla.

  “I’m talking about Mrs. Magnelius Grandcourt’s younger sister from Philadelphia, who looks perfectly sweet as a lady’s maid. Tea,” she added, “is to be a dollar a cup, and three if you take sugar. And,” she continued, “if you and I are to sell flowers there this afternoon we’d better go home and dress.... What are you smiling at, Mr. Yates?”

  Drus
illa naturally supposed she could answer that question.

  “Dearest little sister,” she said shyly and tenderly, “we have something very wonderful to tell you.”

  “What is it?” asked Flavilla.

  “We — we are — engaged,” whispered Drusilla, radiant.

  “Why, I knew that already!” said Flavilla.

  “Did you?” sighed her sister, turning to look at her tall, young lover. “I didn’t.... Being in love is a much more complicated matter than you and I imagined, Flavilla. Is it not, Jack?”

  XVI

  FLAVILLA

  Containing a Parable Told with Such Metaphorical Skill that the Author Is Totally Unable to Understand It

  The Green Mouse now dominated the country; the entire United States was occupied in getting married. In the great main office on Madison Avenue, and in a thousand branch offices all over the Union, Destyn-Carr machines were working furiously; a love-mad nation was illuminated by their sparks.

  Marriage-license bureaus had been almost put out of business by the sudden matrimonial rush; clergymen became exhausted, wedding bells in the churches were worn thin, California and Florida reported no orange crops, as all the blossoms had been required for brides; there was a shortage of solitaires, traveling clocks, asparagus tongs; and the corner in rice perpetrated by some conscienceless captain of industry produced a panic equaled only by a more terrible coup in slightly worn shoes.

  All America was rushing to get married; from Seattle to Key West the railroads were blocked with bridal parties; a vast hum of merrymaking resounded from the Golden Gate to Governor’s Island, from Niagara to the Gulf of Mexico. In New York City the din was persistent; all day long church bells pealed, all day long the rattle of smart carriages and hired hacks echoed over the asphalt. A reporter of the Tribune stood on top of the New York Life tower for an entire week, devouring cold-slaw sandwiches and Marie Corelli, and during that period, as his affidavit runs, “never for one consecutive second were his ample ears free from the near or distant strains of the Wedding March.”

  And over all, in approving benediction, brooded the wide smile of the greatest of statesmen and the great smile of the widest of statesmen — these two, metaphorically, hand in hand, floated high above their people, scattering encouraging blessings on every bride.

  A tremendous rise in values set in; the newly married required homes; architects were rushed to death; builders, real-estate operators, brokers, could not handle the business hurled at them by impatient bridegrooms.

  Then, seizing time by the fetlock, some indescribable monster secured the next ten years’ output of go-carts. The sins of Standard Oil were forgotten in the menace of such a national catastrophe; mothers’ meetings were held; the excitement became stupendous; a hundred thousand brides invaded the Attorney-General’s office, but all he could think of to say was: “Thirty centuries look down upon you!”

  These vague sentiments perplexed the country. People understood that the Government meant well, but they also realized that the time was not far off when millions of go-carts would be required in the United States. And they no longer hesitated.

  All over the Union fairs and bazaars were held to collect funds for a great national factory to turn out carts. Alarmed, the Trust tried to unload; militant womanhood, thoroughly aroused, scorned compromise. In every city, town, and hamlet of the nation entertainments were given, money collected for the great popular go-cart factory.

  The affair planned for Oyster Bay was to be particularly brilliant — a water carnival at Center Island with tableaux, fireworks, and illuminations of all sorts.

  Reassured by the magnificent attitude of America’s womanhood, business discounted the collapse of the go-cart trust and began to recover from the check very quickly. Stocks advanced, fluctuated, and suddenly whizzed upward like skyrockets; and the long-expected wave of prosperity inundated the country. On the crest of it rode Cupid, bow and arrows discarded, holding aloft in his right hand a Destyn-Carr machine.

  For the old order of things had passed away; the old-fashioned doubts and fears of courtship were now practically superfluous.

  Anybody on earth could now buy a ticket and be perfectly certain that whoever he or she might chance to marry would be the right one — the one intended by destiny.

  Yet, strange as it may appear, there still remained, here and there, a few young people in the United States who had no desire to be safely provided for by a Destyn-Carr machine.

  Whether there was in them some sporting instinct, making hazard attractive, or, perhaps, a conviction that Fate is kind, need not be discussed. The fact remains that there were a very few youthful and marriageable folk who had no desire to know beforehand what their fate might be.

  One of these unregenerate reactionists was Flavilla. To see her entire family married by machinery was enough for her; to witness such consummate and collective happiness became slightly cloying. Perfection can be overdone; a rift in a lute relieves melodious monotony, and when discords cease to amuse, one can always have the instrument mended or buy a banjo.

  “What I desire,” she said, ignoring the remonstrances of the family, “is a chance to make mistakes. Three or four nice men have thought they were in love with me, and I wouldn’t take anything for the — experience. Or,” she added innocently, “for the chances that some day three or four more agreeable young men may think they are in love with me. One learns by making mistakes — very pleasantly.”

  Her family sat in an affectionately earnest row and adjured her — four married sisters, four blissful brothers-in-law, her attractive stepmother, her father. She shook her pretty head and continued sewing on the costume she was to wear at the Oyster Bay Venetian Fête and Go-cart Fair.

  “No,” she said, threading her needle and deftly sewing a shining, silvery scale onto the mermaid’s dress lying across her knees, “I’ll take my chances with men. It’s better fun to love a man not intended for me, and make him love me, and live happily and defiantly ever after, than to have a horrid old machine settle you for life.”

  “But you are wasting time, dear,” explained her stepmother gently.

  “Oh, no, I’m not. I’ve been engaged three times and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. That isn’t wasting time, is it? And it’s such fun! He thinks he’s in love and you think you’re in love, and you have such an agreeable time together until you find out that you’re spoons on somebody else. And then you find out you’re mistaken and you say you always want him for a friend, and you presently begin all over again with a perfectly new man — —”

  “Flavilla!”

  “Yes, Pa-pah.”

  “Are you utterly demoralized!”

  “Demoralized? Why? Everybody behaved as I do before you and William invented your horrid machine. Everybody in the world married at hazard, after being engaged to various interesting young men. And I’m not demoralized; I’m only old-fashioned enough to take chances. Please let me.”

  The family regarded her sadly. In their amalgamated happiness they deplored her reluctance to enter where perfect bliss was guaranteed.

  Her choice of rôle and costume for the Seawanhaka Club water tableaux they also disapproved of; for she had chosen to represent a character now superfluous and out of date — the Lorelei who lured Teutonic yachtsmen to destruction with her singing some centuries ago. And that, in these times, was ridiculous, because, fortified by a visit to the nearest Destyn-Carr machine, no weak-minded young sailorman would care what a Lorelei might do; and she could sing her pretty head off and comb herself bald before any Destyn-Carr inoculated mariner would be lured overboard.

  But Flavilla obstinately insisted on her scaled and fish-tailed costume. When her turn came, a spot-light on the clubhouse was to illuminate the float and reveal her, combing her golden hair with a golden comb and singing away like the Musical Arts.

  “And,” she thought secretly, “if there remains upon this machine-made earth one young man worth my kind consideration, it wouldn’
t surprise me very much if he took a header off the Yacht Club wharf and requested me to be his. And I’d be very likely to listen to his suggestion.”

  So in secret hopes of this pleasing episode — but not giving any such reason to her protesting family — she vigorously resisted all attempts to deprive her of her fish scales, golden comb, and rôle in the coming water fête. And now the programmes were printed and it was too late for them to intervene.

  She rose, holding out the glittering, finny garment, which flashed like a collapsed fish in the sunshine.

  “It’s finished,” she said. “Now I’m going off somewhere by myself to rehearse.”

  “In the water?” asked her father uneasily.

  “Certainly.”

  As Flavilla was a superb swimmer nobody could object. Later, a maid went down to the landing, stowed away luncheon, water-bottles and costume in the canoe. Later, Flavilla herself came down to the water’s edge, hatless, sleeves rolled up, balancing a paddle across her shoulders.

  As the paddle flashed and the canoe danced away over the sparkling waters of Oyster Bay, Flavilla hummed the threadbare German song which she was to sing in her rôle of Lorelei, and headed toward Northport.

  “The thing to do,” she thought to herself, “is to find some nice, little, wooded inlet where I can safely change my costume and rehearse. I must know whether I can swim in this thing — and whether I can sing while swimming about. It would be more effective, I think, than merely sitting on the float, and singing and combing my hair through all those verses.”

  The canoe danced across the water, the paddle glittered, dipped, swept astern, and flashed again. Flavilla was very, very happy for no particular reason, which is the best sort of happiness on earth.

  There is a sandy neck of land which obstructs direct navigation between the sacred waters of Oyster Bay and the profane floods which wash the gravelly shores of Northport.