Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Don’t talk to me while I’m driving,” said the Dryad.

  “No,” said Jones.

  “Don’t even say ‘no’!” insisted the Dryad.

  A sharp thwack shattered the silence; the golf ball sailed away toward the fifth green, landing in a gully. “Oh, bother!” exclaimed the Dryad, petulantly, as the small black caddie pattered forward, irons rattling in his quiver. “Now, Mr. Jones, it is up to you” — doubtless a classically mythological form of admonition common to Dryads but now obsolete.

  The Dryad, receiving no reply, looked around and beheld Jones, net poised, advancing on tiptoe across the green.

  “What is it — a snake?” inquired the Dryad in an unsteady voice.

  “It is The White Devil!” whispered Jones.

  The Dryad’s skirts were short enough as it was, but she hastily picked them up. She had a right to. “Does it bite?” she whispered, looking carefully around in the grass. But all she could see was a strangely beautiful butterfly settled on a blue wild blossom which swayed gently in the wind on the edge of the jungle. So she dropped her skirts. She had a right to.

  Now, within a few moments of the hour when Jones had first laid eyes on her, and she on Jones, he had confided to her his family history, his ambitions, his ethical convictions, and his theories concerning the four known forms of the exquisite Ajax butterfly of Florida. She had been young enough to listen without yawning — which places her age somewhere close to eighteen. Besides, she had remembered almost everything that Jones had said, which confirms a diagnosis of her disease. There could be no doubt about it; the Dryad was afflicted with extreme Youth, for she now recognized the butterfly from the eulogy of Jones, and her innocent heart began a steady tattoo upon her ribs as Jones, on tiptoe, crept nearer and nearer, net outstretched.

  The moment was solemn; breathless, hatless, bare-armed, the Dryad advanced, skirts spread as though to shoo chickens.

  “Don’t,” whispered Jones.

  But the damage had been accomplished; Ajax jerked his pearl and ashen banded wings, shot with the fiery crimson bar, flashed into the air, and was gone like the last glimmer of a fading sun-spot.

  “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” cried the Dryad, clasping her highly ornamental hands; “what on earth will you think of my stupidity?”

  “Nothing,” said Jones, resolutely, swallowing hard and gazing at the tangled jungle.

  “It was too stupid,” insisted the Dryad; and, as the silence of Jones assented, she added, “but it is not very nice of you to say so.”

  “Why, I didn’t,” cried Jones.

  “You did,” said the Dryad, tears of vexation in her blue eyes. “And to pay for your discourtesy you shall make me a silk net and I shall give up golf and spend my entire time in hunting for White Devils, to make amends.”

  The suggested penance appeared to attract Jones.

  “Give up golf — which I am perfectly mad about,” repeated the Dryad, “just because you were horrid when I tried to help you.”

  “That will be delightful,” said Jones, naïvely. “We will hunt Ajax together — all day, every day — —”

  “Oh, I shall catch — something — the first time I try,” observed the Dryad, airily. She teed up a practice ball, hit it a vicious whack, followed its flight with narrowing blue eyes, and, turning placidly upon Jones, smiled a dangerous smile.

  “If I don’t catch an Ajax before you do I’ll forfeit anything you please,” she said.

  “I’ll take it,” said Jones.

  “But,” cried the Dryad, “what do you offer against it?”

  “Whatever I ask from you,” he said, deliberately.

  “You are somewhat vague, Mr. Jones.”

  “I won’t be when I win.”

  “Tell me what you want — if you win!”

  “What? With this caddie hanging around and listening?” The Dryad, wide-eyed and flushed, regarded him in amazement.

  Jones picked up a pinch of wet sand from the box, moulded it with great care into a tiny truncated cone, set it on the tee, set his ball on top of it, whipped the air persuasively with his driver once or twice, and, settling himself into the attitude popularly attributed to the Colossus of Rhodes, hit the ball for the longest, cleanest drive he had ever perpetrated.

  “Dryad,” he said, politely, “it is now up to you.”

  Of all the exquisite creatures that float through the winter sunshine of the semi-tropics this is the most exquisite and spirituelle. Long, slender, swallow-tailed wings, tinted with pearl and primrose, crossed with ashy stripes and double-barred with glowing crimson — this is the shy, forest-haunting creature that the Dryad sought to snare, and sought in vain.

  Sometimes, standing on the long, white shell roads, where myriads of glittering dragon-flies sailed, far away a pale flash would catch the sun for an instant; and “Ready! Look out!” would cry the Dryad. Vanity! Swifter than a swallow the Ajax passed, a pearly blurr against the glare of the white road; swish! swish! the silken nets swung in vain.

  “Oh, bother,” sighed the Dryad.

  Again, in the dim corridors of the forest, where tall palms clustered and green live oaks spread transparent shadows across palmetto thickets, far in some sunlit glade a tiny wing-flash would bring the Dryad’s forest cry: “Quick! Oh, quick!” But the woodland ghost was gone.

  “Oh, bother, bother!” sighed the Dryad. “There are flowers — the sparkleberry is in blossom — there is bloom on the China tree, but this phantom never stops! Can nothing stop it?”

  Day after day, guarding the long, white road, the Dryad saw the phantom pass — always flying north; day after day in the dim forest, the hurrying, pale-winged, tireless creatures fled away, darting always along some fixed yet invisible aërial path. Nothing lured them, neither the perfumed clusters of the China-berry, nor the white forest flowers; nothing checked them, neither the woven curtain of creepers across the forest barrier, nor the jungle walled with palms.

  To the net of the Dryad and of Jones had fallen half a thousand jewelled victims; the exquisite bronzed Berenice, the velvet and yellow Palamedes, the great orange-winged creatures brilliant as lighted lanterns. But in the gemmed symmetry of the casket the opalescent heart was missing; and the Dryad, uncomforted, haunted the woodlands, roaming in defiance of the turquoise-tinted lizards and the possible serpent whose mouth is lined with snow-white membranes — prowling in contempt of that coiled horror that lies waiting, S shaped, a mass of matted grey and velvet diamond pattern from which two lidless eyes glitter unwinking.

  “How on earth did anybody ever catch an Ajax?” inquired the Dryad at the close of one fruitless, bootless day’s pursuit.

  “I suppose,” said Jones, “that every year or so the Ajax alights.” That was irony.

  “On what?” insisted the Dryad.

  “Oh, on — something,” said Jones, vaguely. “Butterflies are, no doubt, like the human species; flowers tempt some butterflies, mud-puddles attract others. One or the other will attract our Ajax some day.”

  That night Jones, with book open upon his knees, sat in the lamplight of the great veranda and read tales of Ajax to the Dryad; how that, in the tropics, Ajax assumes four forms, masquerading as Floridensis in winter and as Telamonides in summer, and how he wears the exquisite livery of Marcellus, too, and even assumes, according to a gentleman named Walsh, a fourth form. Beautiful pictures of Ajax illumined the page where were also engraved the signs of Mars and of Venus. The Dryad looked at these; Jones looked at her; the rest of the hotel looked at them. Jones read on.

  Sleepy-eyed the Dryad listened; outside in the burnished moonlight the whippoorwill’s spirit call challenged the star-set silence; and far away in the blue night she heard the deep breathing of the sea. Presently the Dryad slept in her rocking-chair, curved wrist propping her head; Jones was chagrined. He need not have been, for the Dryad was dreaming of him.

  There came a day late in April when, knee deep in palmetto scrub, the Dryad and Jones stood leaning upon t
heir nets and scanning the wilderness for the swift-winged forest phantom they had sought so long. Ajax was on the wing; glimpse after glimpse they had of him, a pale shadow in the sun, a misty spot in the shadow, then nothing but miles of palmetto scrub and the pink stems of tall pines.

  Suddenly an Ajax darted into the sunny glade where they stood, and a ragged, faded brother Ajax fluttered up from the ground and, Ajax-like, defied the living lightning.

  Wing beating wing they closed in battle, whirling round and round one another above the palmetto thicket. The ragged and battered butterfly won, the other darted away with the speed of a panic-stricken jacksnipe, and his shabby opponent quietly settled down on a sun-warmed twig.

  Then it was that inspiration seized the Dryad: “Mr. Jones, you trick wild ducks into gunshot range by setting painted wooden ducks afloat close to the shore where you lie hidden. Catch that ragged Ajax, place him upon a leaf, and who knows?”

  Decoy a butterfly? Decoy the forest phantom drunk with the exhilaration of his own mad flight! It was the invention of a new sport.

  Scarcely appearing to move at all, so cautious was his progress, Jones slowly drew near the basking and battle-tattered creature that had once been Ajax. There was a swift drop of the silken net, a flutter, and all was over. In the palm of Jones’s hand, dead, lay the faded and torn insect with scarce a vestige of former beauty on the motionless wings.

  Doubting, yet stirred to hope, he placed the dead butterfly on a palmetto frond, wings expanded to catch the sun; and then, standing within easy net-stroke, the excited Dryad and Jones strained their eyes to catch the first far glimpse of Ajax in the wilderness.

  What was that distant flash of light? A dragon-fly sailing? There it is again! And there again! Nearer, nearer, following the same invisible aërial path.

  “Quick!” whispered the Dryad. A magnificent Ajax flashed across the glade, turned an acute angle in mid-air, and in an instant hung hovering over the lifeless insect on the palm leaf.

  Swish-h! A wild fluttering in the net, a soft cry of excitement from the Dryad, and there, dead, in the palm of the hand of Jones, lay the first perfect specimen, exquisite, flawless, beautiful beyond words.

  Before the Dryad could place the lovely creature in safety another Ajax darted into the glade, sheered straight for the decoy, and the next instant was fluttering, a netted captive.

  Then the excitement grew; again and again Ajax appeared in the vicinity; and the tension only increased as the forest phantom, unseeing or unheeding the decoy, darted on in a mad ecstasy of flight.

  No hunter, crouched in the reeds, could find keener excitement watching near his decoys than the Dryad found that April day, motionless, almost breathless, scanning the forest depths for the misty-winged phantom of the tropic wilderness. One in six turned to the decoy; there were long, silent intervals of waiting and of strained expectancy; there were false alarms as a distant drifting dragon-fly glimmered in the sun; but one by one the swift-winged victims dashed at the decoy and were taken in their strength and pride and all their unsullied beauty. And when the sport of that April morning was over, and when Denis, the Ethiopian, turned the horses’ heads homeward, Ajax Floridensis, Ajax Marcellus and Ajax Telamonides were no longer mysteries to the Dryad and to Jones.

  But there was a deeper mystery to solve before returning to the vast caravansary across the river; and while they hesitated to attack it, I, mademoiselle, having met and defeated Ajax in fair and open trial of cunning and of wit, think fit to throw a ray of modern light upon this archaic tale.

  It is true that Ajax, of the family of Papilio, rivals the wind in flight, and seldom, in spring and summer, deigns to alight. Yet I have seen Ajax Telamonides alight in the middle of the roadway, and, netting him, have found him fresh from the chrysalis, and therefore weak and inexperienced. Ajax Floridensis I have taken with a net as he feasted on the bunches of white sparkleberry on the edge of the jungle.

  Rarely have I seen Ajax seduced by the wild phlox blossoms, but I have sometimes caught him sipping there.

  As for the decoy, I have used it and taken with it scores and scores of Ajax butterflies which otherwise I could not have hoped to capture. This is not all; the great Tiger Swallowtail of the orange groves can be decoyed by a dead comrade of either sex; so, too, can the royal, velvet-robed Palamedes butterfly; and when the imperial Turnus sails high among the magnolias’ topmost branches, a pebble cast into the air near him will sometimes bring him fluttering down, following the stone as it falls to the ground. These three butterflies, however, are generally easily decoyed, and all love flowers. Yet, in experimenting with decoys, I have never seen an Ajax decoy to any dead butterfly except an Ajax; and the dead butterfly may be of either sex, and as battered as you please.

  It is supposed by some that butterflies can distinguish colour and form at no greater distance than five feet; and experiments in decoying appear to bear out this theory. Butterflies decoy to their own species, even to faded and imperfect ones.

  Of half a dozen specimens set out on leaves and twigs, among which were Papilio Palamedes, Cresphontes, and Turnus, Ajax decoyed only to an imperfect and faded Ajax, and finally, when among that brilliant array of specimens a single upper wing of a dead Ajax was placed on a broad leaf, Ajax came to it, ignoring the other perfect specimens.

  Yet Ajax will fight in single combat with any live butterfly, and so will Palamedes, Turnus, and Cresphontes.

  If a female Luna moth is placed in a cage of mosquito netting and hung out of the window at night she is almost certain to attract all the male Luna moths in the neighbourhood before morning. In this case, as it is in the case of the other moths of the same group, it is the odor that attracts.

  But in the case of a dead Ajax butterfly it appears to be colour even more than form; and it can scarcely be odor, because the Ajax butterflies of both sexes decoy to a dead and dried butterfly of either sex. With this abstruse observation, mademoiselle, I, personally, retire into the jungle to peep out at a passing vehicle driven by an Ethiopian known as Denis, and containing two young people of sexes diametrically opposed. And I am pleasantly conscious that I can no longer conceal their identity from you, mademoiselle.

  “No,” she said, “I know who they are. Please continue about them.”

  So I smiled and continued:

  “And after all these weeks, during which I have so faithfully accompanied you, are you actually going to insist that I lost my bet?” asked the Dryad in a low voice.

  “But you didn’t, did you?” said the pitiless Jones.

  “I let you catch the first Ajax. I might have prevented you; I might have even caught it myself!”

  “But you didn’t, did you?” said the pitiless Jones.

  “Because,” continued the Dryad, flushing, “I was generous enough to think only of capturing the butterflies, while all the time it appears you were thinking of something else. How sordid!” she added, scornfully.

  “You admit I won the bet?” persisted that meanest of men.

  “I admit nothing, Mr. Jones.”

  “Didn’t I win the bet?”

  Silence.

  “Didn’t I — —”

  “Goodness, yes!” cried the Dryad. “Now what are you going to do about it?”

  “You said,” observed Jones, “that you would forfeit anything I desired. Didn’t you?”

  The Dryad looked at him, then looked away.

  “Didn’t you?”

  Silence.

  “Di — —”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Then I am to ask what I desire?”

  No answer.

  “So,” continued Jones in a low voice, “I do ask it.”

  Still no answer.

  “Will you — —”

  “Mr. Jones,” she said, turning a face toward him on which was written utter consternation.

  “Will you,” continued Jones, “permit me to name the first new butterfly that I capture, after you?”

  Her eyes wide
ned.

  “Is — is that all you desire?” she faltered. Suddenly her eyes filled.

  “Absolutely all,” said Jones simply— “to name a new species of butterfly after my wife — —”

  However, that was the simplest part of the whole matter; the trouble was all ahead, waiting for them on the veranda — two hundred pounds of wealthy trouble sitting in a rocking-chair, tatting, and keeping tabs upon the great clock and upon the trolley cars as they arrived in decorous procession from the golf links.

  There was a long, long silence.

  “Is — is that all?” inquired my little neighbour.

  “Can’t you guess the rest?”

  But she only sighed, looking down at the lace handkerchief which she had been absently twisting in her lap.

  “You know,” said I, “what keys unlock the meaning of all stories?”

  She nodded.

  “The keys of The Past,” I said.

  She sighed, looking down into her smooth little empty hands:

  “I threw them away, long ago,” she said. “For me there remains only one more door. And that unlocks of itself.”

  And we sat there, thinking, through the still summer afternoon.

  CHAPTER XXI

  IN A BELGIAN GARDEN

  That evening I found Williams curled up in his corner at the Café Jaune.

  “You are sun-burned,” he said, inspecting me.

  “A little. I’ve been in Florida.”

  “What?”

  “With the ghosts of years ago. But it seemed very realistic to me as I sat in the sun and recalled it. Possibly it was even real enough to sun-burn me a little.”

  He eyed me with considerable chagrin. Perhaps he thought that he had the monopoly of poetic fancies. It was most agreeable to me to touch him up. They’re a jealous bunch, those whittlers of fact into fiction.

  However, he brightened as he drew a letter from his pocket: