Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  She ran up her private flag the next winter, amid a thousand other gay and flaunting colours breaking out all over town. The newspapers roared a salute to the wealthiest debutante; and an enthusiastic press, not yet housebroken but agile with much exercise in leaping and fawning, leaped now about the debutante’s slippers, grinning, slavering and panting. Later, led by instinct and its Celebrated Nose, it bounded toward young Lord Willowmere, jumped and fawned about him, slightly soiling him, until in midwinter the engagement it had announced was corroborated, and a million shop-girls and old women were in a furor.

  He was a ruddy-faced young man who wore his bowler hat toward the back of his head, a small, pointed moustache, and who walked always as though he were shod in riding boots.

  He would have made a healthy studgroom for any gentleman’s stable. Person and intellect were always thoroughly scrubbed as with saddle-soap. Had he been able to afford it, his stables would have been second to none in England.

  Soon he would be able to afford it.

  To his intimates, including his fiancée, he was known as “Stirrups.” All day long he was in the saddle or on the box, every evening at the Cataract Club or at a cabaret. Between times he called upon Miss Cassillis — usually finding her out. When he found her not at home, he called elsewhere, very casually.

  Two continents were deeply stirred over the impending alliance.

  III

  Young Jones, in wildest Florida, had never heard of it or of her, or of her income. His own fortune amounted to six hundred dollars, and he had been born in Brooklyn, and what his salary might be only he and the Smithsonian Institution knew.

  He was an industrious young man, no better than you or I, accepting thankfully every opportunity for mischief which the Dead Lake region afforded. No opportunities of that kind ever presenting themselves in that region, he went once a month to Miami in the Orange Puppy, and drank too many swizzles and so forth, et cetera.

  Having accomplished this, he returned to the wharf, put the Orange Puppy into commission, hoisted sail, and squared away for Matanzas Inlet, finding himself too weak-minded to go home by a more direct route.

  He had been on his monthly pilgrimage to Miami, and was homeward bound noisily, using his auxiliary power so that silence should not descend upon him too abruptly. He had been, for half an hour now, immersed in a species of solitaire known as The Idiot’s Delight, when he caught himself cheating himself, and indignantly scattered the pack to the four winds — three of which, however, were not blowing. One card, the deuce of hearts, fluttered seaward like a white butterfly. Beyond it he caught sight of another white speck, shining like a gull’s breast.

  It was a big yacht steaming in from the open sea; and her bill of lading included Miss Cassillis and Willowmere. But Jones could not know that. So he merely blinked at the distant Chihuahua, yawned, flipped the last card overboard, and swung the Orange Puppy into the inlet, which brimmed rather peacefully, the tide being nearly at flood.

  Far away on the deck of the Chihuahua the quick-fire racket of Jones’s auxiliary was amazingly audible. Miss Cassillis, from her deck-chair, could see the Orange Puppy, a fleck of glimmering white across a sapphire sea. How was she to divine that one Delancy Jones was aboard of her? All she saw when the two boats came near each other was a noisy little craft progressing toward the lagoon, emitting an earsplitting racket; and a tall, lank young man clad in flannels lounging at the tiller and smoking a cigarette.

  Around her on the snowy deck were disposed the guests of her parents, mostly corpulent, swizzles at every elbow, gracefully relaxing after a morning devoted to arduous idleness. The Victor on deck, which had furnished the incentive to her turkey-trotting with Lord Willowmere, was still exuding a syncopated melody. Across the water, Jones heard it and stood looking at the great yacht as the Orange Puppy kicked her way through the intensely blue water under an azure sky.

  Willowmere lounged over to the rail and gazed wearily at the sand dunes and palmettos. Presently Miss Cassillis slipped from her deck-chair to her white-shod feet, and walked over to where he stood. He said something about the possibilities of “havin’ a bit of shootin’,” with a vague wave of his highly-coloured hand toward the palmetto forests beyond the lagoon.

  If the girl heard him she made no comment. After a while, as the distance between the Chihuahua and the Orange Puppy lengthened, she levelled her sea glasses at the latter craft, and found that the young man at the helm was also examining her through his binoculars.

  While she inspected him, several unrelated ideas passed through her head; she thought he was very much sunburned and that his hatless head was attractive, with its short yellow hair crisped by the sun. Without any particular reason, apparently, she recollected a young man she had seen the winter before, striding down the wintry avenue about his business. He might have been this young man for all she knew. Like the other, this one wore yellow hair. Then, with no logic in the sequence of her thoughts, suddenly the memory of how she had run away when she was nine years old set her pulses beating, filling her heart with the strange, wistful, thrilling, overwhelming longing which she had supposed would never again assail her, now that she was engaged to be married. And once more the soft fire burned in her cheeks.

  “Stirrups,” she said, scarcely knowing what she was saying, “I don’t think I’ll marry you after all. It’s just occurred to me.”

  “Oh, I say!” protested Willowmere languidly, never for a moment mistrusting that the point of her remark was buried in some species of American humour. He always submitted to American humour. There was nothing else to do, except to understand it.

  “Stirrups, dear?”

  “What?”

  “You’re very pink and healthy, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged his accustomed shrug of resignation.

  “Oh, I say — come, now — —” he murmured, lighting a cigarette.

  “What a horrid smash there would be if I didn’t make good, wouldn’t there, Stirrups?” She mused, her blue eyes resting on him, too coldly.

  “Rather,” he replied, comfortably settling his arms on the rail.

  “It might happen, you know. Suppose I fell overboard?”

  “Fish you out, ducky.”

  “Suppose I — ran away?”

  “Ow.”

  “What would you do, Stirrups? Why, you’d go back to town and try to pick another winner. Wouldn’t you?”

  He laughed.

  “Naturally that is what you would do, isn’t it?” She considered him curiously for a moment, then smiled. “How funny!” she said, almost breathlessly.

  “Rather,” he murmured, and flicked his cigarette overboard.

  The Orange Puppy had disappeared beyond the thicket of palmettos across the point. The air was very warm and still.

  Her father waddled forward presently, wearing the impressive summer regalia of a commodore in the Siwanois Yacht Club. His daughter’s blue eyes rested on the portly waistline of her parent — then on his fluffy chop-whiskers. A vacant, hunted look came into her eyes.

  “Father,” she said almost listlessly, “I’m going to run away again.”

  “When do you start?” inquired that facetious man.

  “Now, I think. What is there over there?” — turning her face again toward the distant lagoon, with its endless forests of water-oak, cedar, and palmetto.

  “Over there,” said her father, “reside several species of snakes and alligators. Also other reptiles, a number of birds, and animals, and much microbic mud.”

  She bit her lip. “I see,” she said, nodding.

  Willowmere said: “We should find some shootin’ along the lagoon. Look at the ducks.”

  Mr. Cassillis yawned; he had eaten too heavily of duck to be interested. Very thoughtfully he presented himself with a cigar, turned it over and over between his soft fingers, and yawned again. Then, nodding solemnly as though in emphasis of a profound idea of which he had just been happily delivered, he waddled slowly back alon
g the deck.

  His daughter looked after him until he disappeared; gazed around her at the dawdling assortment of guests aboard, then lifted her quiet eyes to Willowmere.

  “Ducky,” she said, “I can’t stand it. I’m going to run away.”

  “Come on, then,” he said, linking his arm in hers.

  The Victor still exuded the Tango.

  She hesitated. Then freeing herself:

  “Oh, not with you, Stirrups! I wish to go away somewhere entirely alone. Could you understand?” she added wistfully.

  He stifled a yawn. American humour bored him excessively.

  “You’ll be back in a day or two?” he inquired. And laughed violently when the subtlety of his own wit struck him.

  “In a day or two or not at all. Good-bye, Stirrups.”

  “Bye.”

  The sun blazed on her coppery hair and on the white skin that never burned, as she walked slowly across the yacht’s deck and disappeared below.

  While she was writing in her cabin, the Chihuahua dropped her anchors. Miss Cassillis listened to the piping, the thud of feet on deck, the rattle and distant sound of voices. Then she continued her note:

  I merely desire to run away. I don’t know why, Mother, dear. But the longing to bolt has been incubating for many years. And now it’s too strong to resist. I don’t quite understand how it came to a crisis on deck just now, but I looked at Stirrups, whose skin is too pink, and at Father, who had lunched too sumptuously, and at the people on deck, all digesting in a row — and then at the green woods on shore, and the strip of white where a fairy surf was piling up foam into magic castles and snowy battlements, ephemeral, exquisite. And all at once it came over me that I must go.

  Don’t be alarmed. I shall provision a deck canoe, take a tent, some rugs and books, and paddle into that lagoon. If you will just let me alone for two or three days, I promise I’ll return safe and sound, and satisfied. For something has got to be done in regard to that longing of mine. But really, I think that if you and Father won’t understand, and if you send snooping people after me, I won’t come back at all, and I’ll never marry Stirrups. Please understand me, Mother, dear.

  Cecil.

  This effusion she pinned to her pillow, then rang for the steward and ordered the canoe to be brought alongside, provisioned for a three days’ shooting trip.

  So open, frank, and guileless were her orders that nobody who took them suspected anything unusual; and in the full heat and glare of the afternoon siesta, when parents, fiancé, and assorted guests were all asleep and in full process of digestion and the crew of the Chihuahua was drowsing from stem to stern, a brace of sailors innocently connived at her escape, aided her into the canoe, and, doubting nothing, watched her paddle away through the inlet, and into the distant lagoon, which lay sparkling in golden and turquoise tints, set with palms like a stupid picture in a child’s geography.

  Later, the Chihuahua fired a frantic gun. Later still, two boats left the yacht, commanded respectively by one angry parent and one fiancé, profoundly bored.

  IV

  When Miss Cassillis heard the gun, it sounded very far away. But it irritated as well as scared her. She pushed the canoe energetically through a screen of foliage overhanging the bank of the lagoon, it being merely her immediate instinct to hide herself.

  To her surprise and pleasure, she discovered herself in a narrow, deep lead, which had been entirely concealed by the leaves, and which wound away through an illimitable vista of reeds, widening as she paddled forward, until it seemed like a glassy river bordered by live-oak, water-oak, pine, and palmetto, curving out into a flat and endless land of forests.

  Here was liberty at last! No pursuit need now be feared, for the entrance to this paradise which she had forced by a chance impulse could never be suspected by parent or fiancé.

  A little breeze blew her hair and loosened it; silently her paddle dipped, swept astern in a swirl of bubbles, flashed dripping, and dipped again.

  Ahead of her a snake-bird slipped from a dead branch into the water; a cormorant perched on the whitened skeleton of a mango, made hideous efforts to swallow a mullet before her approach disorganized his manœuvres.

  So silently the canoe stole along that the fat alligators, dozing in the saw-grass, dozed on until she stirred them purposely with a low tap of her paddle against the thwarts; then they rose, great lumbering bodies propped high on squatty legs, waddled swiftly to the bank’s edge, and slid headlong into the water.

  Everywhere dragon-flies glittered over the saw-grass; wild ducks with golden eyes and heads like balls of brown plush swam leisurely out of the way; a few mallard, pretending to be frightened, splashed and clattered into flight, the sunlight jewelling the emerald heads of the drakes.

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” her heart was singing to itself, while her enchanted eyes missed nothing — neither the feebly flying and strangely shaped, velvety black butterflies, the narrow wings of which were striped with violent yellow; nor the metallic blue and crestless jays that sat on saplings, watching her; nor the pelicans fishing with nature’s orange and iridescent net in the shallows; nor the tall, slate-blue birds that marched in dignified retreat through the sedge, picking up their stilt-like legs with the precision of German foot-soldiers on parade.

  These and other phenomena made her drop her paddle at intervals and clap her hands softly in an ecstasy beyond mere exclamation. How restfully green was the world; how limpid the water; how royally blue the heavens! Listening, she could hear the soft stirring of palmetto fronds in the forests; the celestial song of a little bird that sat on a sparkle-berry bush, its delicate long-curved bill tilted skyward. Then the deep note of splendour flashed across the scheme of sound and colour as a crimson cardinal alighted near her, crest erect.

  But more wonderful than all was that at last, after eighteen years, she was utterly alone; and liberty was showering its inestimable gifts upon her in breathless prodigality — liberty to see with her own eyes and judge with her own senses; liberty to linger capriciously amid mental fancies, to move on impulsively to others; liberty to reflect unurged and unrestricted; liberty to choose, to reject, to ignore.

  “They inspected each other, apparently bereft of the power of speech.”

  Now and then a brilliant swimming snake filled her with interest and curiosity. Once, on a flat, low bush, she saw a dull, heavy, blunt-bodied serpent lying asleep in the sun like an old and swollen section of rubber hose. But when she ventured to touch the bush with her paddle, the snake reared high and yawned at her with jaws which seemed to be lined in white satin. Which fortunately made her uneasy, and she meddled no more with the Little Death of the southern swamps.

  She was now passing very close to the edge of the “hammock,” where palmettos overhung the water; and as the cool, dim woodlands seemed to invite her, she looked about her leisurely for an agreeable landing place. There were plenty to choose from; and she selected a little sandy point under a red cedar tree, drove her canoe upon it, and calmly stepped ashore. And found herself looking into the countenance of Jones.

  For a full minute they inspected each other, apparently bereft of the power of speech.

  She said, finally: “About a year ago last February, did you happen to walk down Fifth Avenue — very busily? Did you?”

  It took him an appreciable time to concentrate for mental retrospection.

  “Yes,” he said, “I did.”

  “You were going down town, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “On business?”

  “Yes,” he said, bewildered.

  “I wonder,” she said timidly, “if you would tell me what that business was? Do you mind? Because, really, I don’t mean to be impertinent.”

  He made an effort to reflect. It was difficult to reflect and to keep his eyes on her but also it is impolite to converse with anybody and look elsewhere. This he had been taught at his mother’s knee — and sometimes over it.

  “My business
down town,” he said very slowly, “was with an officer of the Smithsonian Institution who had come on from Washington to see something which I had brought with me from Florida.”

  “Would you mind telling me what it was you brought with you from Florida?” she asked wistfully.

  “No. It was malaria.”

  “What!”

  “It was malaria,” he repeated politely.

  “I — I don’t see how you could — could show it to him,” she murmured, perplexed.

  “Well, I’ll tell you how I showed it to him. I made a little incision in my skin with a lancet; he made a smear or two — —”

  “A — what?”

  “A smear — he put a few drops of my blood on some glass plates.”

  “Why?”

  “To examine them under the microscope.”

  “Why?”

  “So that he might determine what particular kind of malaria I had brought back with me.”

  “Did he find out?” she asked, deeply interested.

  “Yes,” said Jones, displaying mild symptoms of enthusiasm, “he discovered that I was fairly swarming with a perfectly new and undescribed species of bacillus. That bacillus,” he added, with modest diffidence, “is now named after me.”

  She looked at him very earnestly, dropped her blue eyes, raised them again after a moment:

  “It must be — pleasant — to give one’s name to a bacillus.”

  “It is an agreeable and exciting privilege. When I look into the culture tubes I feel an intimate relationship with those bacilli which I have never felt for any human being.”

  “You — you are a — —” she hesitated, with a slight but charming colour in her cheeks, “a naturalist, I presume?” And she added hastily, “No doubt you are a famous one, and my question must sound ignorant and absurd to you. But as I do not know your name — —”

  “It is Jones,” he said gloomily, “ — and I am not famous.”

  “Mine is Cecil Cassillis; and neither am I,” she said. “But I thought when naturalists gave their names to butterflies and microbes that everything concerned immediately became celebrated.”