Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Ledlie, who was a large, heavy, red-faced man with a noticeably small mouth, faded blue eyes, and grey chin whiskers, picked a budding sprig from a bush, nibbled it, and gravely seated himself on the edge of the horse-trough. He was wearing a cigar behind his ear which he presently extracted, gazed at, then reconsidering the extravagance, replaced.

  “‘Boy?’ inquired Ledlie, resting one soil-incrusted boot on his spade.”

  “Three gals, Pete — that’s your record,” he remarked, gazing reproachfully out across the salt meadows beyond the causeway. “They won’t bring you in nothin’,” he added, shutting his thin lips.

  “I kind of like them,” said Greensleeve with a sigh.

  “They’ll eat their heads off,” retorted Ledlie; “then they’ll git married an’ go off some’rs. There ain’t nothin’ to gals nohow. You oughtn’t to have went an’ done it.”

  There seemed to be no further defence for Greensleeve. Ledlie continued to chew a sprig of something green and tender, revolving it and rolling it from one side of his small, thin-lipped mouth to the other. His thin little partner brooded in the sunshine. Once he glanced up at the sign which swung in front of the road-house: “Hotel Greensleeve: Greensleeve and Ledlie, proprietors.”

  “Needs painting, Archie,” he volunteered mildly.

  “I dunno,” said the other. “Since the gunnin’ season closed there ain’t been no business except them sports from New York. The bar done good; that’s all.”

  “There were two commercial men Wednesday week.”

  “Yes, an’ they found fault with their vittles. They can go to the other place next time,” which was as near as Ledlie ever came to profanity.

  After a silence Ledlie said: “Here come your kids, Pete. I guess I’ll let ’em dig a little bait for me.”

  Down the road they came dancing, and across the causeway over Spring Pond — Jack, aged four, Doris, three, and Catharine, two; and they broke into a run when they caught sight of their father, travelling as fast as their fat little legs could carry them.

  “Is there a new baby? Is there a new baby?” shouted Jack, while still at a distance.

  “Is it a boy? I want another brother! Is it a boy?” shrilled Doris as she and baby Catharine came panting up with flushed and excited faces.

  “It’s a girl,” said Greensleeve mildly. “You’d better go into the kitchen and wash your faces.”

  “A girl!” cried Jack contemptuously. “What did mamma do that for?”

  “Oh, goodness!” pouted Doris, “I didn’t want any more girls around. What are you going to name her, papa?”

  “Athalie, I believe,” he said absently.

  “Athalie! What kind of name is that?” demanded Jack.

  “I dunno. Your mamma wanted it in case the baby was a girl.”

  The children, breathing hard and rapidly, stood in a silent cluster looking up at their father. Ledlie yawned frightfully, and they all instantly turned their eyes on him to discover if possible the solitary tooth with which rumour credited him. They always gazed intently into his mouth when he yawned, which irritated him.

  “Go on in and wash yourselves!” he said as soon as speech became possible. “Ain’t you heard what your papa told you!”

  They were not afraid of Mr. Ledlie; they merely found him unsympathetic, and therefore concerned themselves with him not at all.

  Ignoring him, Jack said, addressing his father: “I nearly caught a snake up the road. Gee! But he was a dandy.”

  “He had stripes,” said Doris solemnly.

  “He wiggled,” asserted little Catharine, and her eyes became very round.

  “What kind was he, papa?” inquired Jack.

  “Oh, just a snake,” replied Greensleeve vaguely.

  The eager faces of the children clouded with disappointment; dawning expectancy faded; it was the old, old tragedy of bread desired, of the stone offered.

  “I liked that snake,” muttered Jack. “I wanted to keep him for a pet. I wanted to know what kind he was. He seemed very friendly.”

  “Next time,” suggested Ledlie, “you pet him on the head with a rock.”

  “What?”

  “Snakes is no good. There’s pizen into ‘em. You kill every one you see an’ don’t ask questions.”

  In the boy’s face intelligence faded. Impulse lay stunned after its headlong collision with apathy, and died out in the clutch of ignorance.

  “Is that so, papa?” he asked, dully.

  “Yes, I guess so,” nodded Greensleeve. “Mr. Ledlie knows all about snakes and things.”

  “Go on in an’ wash!” repeated Ledlie. “You don’t git no supper if you ain’t cleaned up for table. Your papa says so, don’t you, Pete?”

  Greensleeve usually said what anybody told him to say.

  “Walk quietly,” he added; “your poor mamma’s asleep.”

  Reluctantly the children turned toward the house, gazing inquiringly up at the curtained window of their mother’s room as they trooped toward the veranda.

  Jack swung around on the lower step:

  “Papa!” he shouted.

  “Well?”

  “I forget what her name is!”

  “Athalie.”

  CHAPTER II

  HER first memories were of blue skies, green trees, sunshine, and the odour of warm moist earth.

  Always through life she retained this memory of her early consciousness — a tree in pink bloom; morning-glories covering a rotting board fence; deep, rich, sun-warmed soil into which her baby fingers burrowed.

  A little later commenced her memory of her mother — a still, white-shawled figure sewing under a peach tree in pink bloom.

  Vast were her mother’s skirts, as Athalie remembered them — a wide white tent under which she could creep out of the sunlight and hide.

  Always, too, her earliest memories were crowded with children, hosts of them in a kaleidoscopic whirl around her, and their voices seemed ever in her ears.

  By the age of four she had gradually understood that this vaguely pictured host of children numbered only three, and that they were her brother and two sisters — very much grown up and desirable to play with. But at seven she began to be surprised that Doris and Catharine were no older and no bigger than they were, although Jack’s twelve years still awed her.

  It was about this time that the child began to be aware of a difference between herself and the other children. For a year or two it did not trouble her, nor even confuse her. She seemed to be aware of it, that was all.

  When it first dawned on her that her mother was aware of it too, she could never quite remember. Once, very early in her career, her mother who had been sewing under the peach tree, dropped her work and looked down at her very steadily where she sat digging holes in the dirt.

  And Athalie had a vague idea in after life that this was the beginning; because there had been a little boy sitting beside her all the while she was digging; and, somehow, she was aware that her mother could not see him.

  She was not able to recollect whether her mother had spoken to her, or even whether she herself had conversed with the little boy. He never came again; of that she was positive.

  When it was that her brother and sisters began to suspect her of being different she could not remember.

  In the beginning she had not understood their half-incredulous curiosity concerning her; and, ardently communicative by nature, she was frank with them, confident and undisturbed, until their child-like and importunate aggressiveness, and the brutal multiplicity of their questions drove her to reticence and shyness.

  For what seemed to amaze them or excite them to unbelief or to jeers seemed to her ordinary, unremarkable, and not worthy of any particular notice — not even of her own.

  That she sometimes saw things “around corners,” as Jack put it, had seemed natural enough to her. That, now and then, she seemed to perceive things which nobody else noticed never disturbed her even when she became aware that other people were unable
to see them. To her it was as though her own eyesight were normal, and astigmatism the rule among other people.

  But the blunt, merciless curiosity of other children soon taught Athalie to be on her guard. She learned that embarrassed reserve which tended toward secretiveness and untruth before she was eleven.

  And in school she learned to lie, learned to deny accusations of being different, pretended that what her sisters accused her of had been merely “stories” made up to amuse them.

  So, in school, she made school-life endurable for herself. Yet, always, there seemed to be something between her and other children that made intimacies impossible.

  At the same time she was conscious of the admiration of the boys, of something about herself that they liked outside of her athletic abilities.

  She had a great many friends among the boys; she could out-run, out-jump, out-swim any of them in the big country school. She was supple and trim, golden-haired and dark-eyed, and ready for anything that required enterprise and activity of mind or body. Her ragged skirts were still short at eleven — short enough not to impede her. And she led the chase for pleasure all over that part of Long Island, running wild with the pack from hill to tide-water until every farmer in the district knew “the Greensleeve girl.”

  There was, of course, some deviltry among cherry trees and apple orchards — some lawlessness born of sheer exuberance and superb health — some malicious trespassing, some harrying of unpopular neighbours. But not very much, considering.

  Her home life was colourless, calm, comfortable, and uneventful as she regarded it. Business at the Hotel Greensleeve had fallen off and in reality the children had very little. But children at that age who live all day in the open, require little except sympathetic intelligence for their million daily questions.

  This the Greensleeve children found wanting except when their mother did her best to stimulate her own latent intelligence for their sakes.

  But it rested on the foundation of an old-fashioned and limited education. Only the polite, simpler, and more maidenly arts had been taught her in the little New Jersey school her father had kept. And her education ceased when she married Greensleeve, the ex-”professor” of penmanship, a kind, gentle, unimaginative man, unusually dull even for a teacher. And he was a failure even at that.

  They began married life by buying the house they were now living in; and when Greensleeve also failed as a farmer, they opened the place as a public tavern, and took in Ledlie to finance it.

  So it was to her mother that Athalie went for any information that her ardent and growing intellect required. And her mother, intuitively surmising the mind-hunger of youth, and its vigorous needs, did her limited best to satisfy it in her children. And that is really all the education they had; for what they got in the country school amounted to — well it amounted to what anybody ever gets in school.

  Her most enduring, most vivid memories of her mother clustered around those summer days of her twelfth year, brief lamp-lit scenes between long, sunlit hours of healthy, youthful madness — quiet moments when she came in flushed and panting from the headlong chase after pleasure, tired, physically satisfied, to sit on the faded carpet at her mother’s feet and clasp her hands over her mother’s knees.

  Then “what?” and “why?” and “when?” and “how?” were the burden of the child’s eager speech. Nothing seemed to have escaped her quick ears or eyes, no natural phenomena of the open; life, birth, movement, growth, the flow, and ebb of tides, thunder pealing from high-piled clouds, the sun shining through fragrant falling rain, mists that grew over swamp and meadow.

  And, “Why?” she always asked.

  Nothing escaped her; — swallows skimming and sheering Spring Pond, trout that jumped at sunset, the quick furry shapes of mink and muskrat, the rattling flash of a blue-winged kingfisher, a tall heron wading, a gull mewing.

  Nothing escaped her; the casual caress of mating birds, procreation in farm-yard and barn-yard, fledgelings crying from a robin’s nest of mud and messy refuse, blind kittens tugging at their blinking mother.

  Death, too, she saw, — a dusty heap of feathers here, a little mound of fur, there, which the idle breezes stirred under the high sky, — and once a dead dog, battered, filthy and bloody, shot by the roadside; and once some pigs being killed on a farm, all screaming.

  Then, in that school as in every school, there was the sinister minority, always huddling in corners, full of mean silences and furtive leering. And their half-heard words, half-understood phrases, — a gesture, a look that silenced and perplexed her — these the child brought also to her mother, sitting at her feet, face against her knees.

  For a month or two her mother had not been very well, and the doctor who had brought Athalie into the world stopped in once or twice a week. When he was with her mother the children were forbidden the room.

  One evening in particular Athalie remembered. She had been running her legs off playing hounds-and-hares across country from the salt-hay stacks to the chestnut ridge, and she had come in after sunset to find her mother sewing in her own bedroom, her brother and sisters studying their lessons in the sitting-room where her father also sat reading the local evening paper.

  Supper was over, but Athalie went to the kitchen and presently returned to her mother’s room carrying a bowl of bread and milk and half a pie.

  Here on the faded carpet at her mother’s feet, full in the lamplight she sat her down and ate in hungry silence while her mother sewed.

  Athalie seldom studied. A glance at her books seemed to be enough for her. And she passed examinations without effort under circumstances where plodders would have courted disaster.

  Rare questions from her mother, brief replies marked the meal. When she had satisfied her hunger she jumped up, ran downstairs with the empty dishes, and came slowly back again, — a slender, supple figure with tangled hair curling below her shoulders, dirty shirt-waist, soiled features and hands, and the ragged blue skirt of a sailor suit hanging to her knees.

  “Your other sailor suit is washed and mended,” said her mother, smiling at her child in tatters.

  Athalie, her gaze remote, nodded absently. After a moment she lifted her steady dark blue eyes:

  “A boy kissed me, mamma,” she remarked, dropping cross-legged at her mother’s feet.

  “Don’t kiss strange boys,” said her mother quietly.

  “I didn’t. But why not?”

  “It is not considered proper.”

  “Why?”

  Her mother said: “Kissing is a common and vulgar practice except in the intimacy of one’s own family.”

  “I thought so,” nodded Athalie; “I soaked him for doing it.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Oh, it was that fresh Harry Eldon. I told him if he ever tried to get fresh with me again I’d kill him.... Mamma?”

  “Yes?”

  “All that about poor old Mr. Manners isn’t true, is it?”

  Her mother smiled. The children had been taught to leave a morsel on their plates “for manners”; and to impress it upon them their mother had invented a story about a poor old man named Manners who depended upon what they left, and who crept in to eat it after they had retired from table.

  So leaving something “for Manners” had been thoroughly and successfully inculcated, until the habit was formed. And now Athalie was the last of the children to discover the gentle fraud practised upon her.

  “I’m glad, anyway,” concluded the child. “I never thought we left him enough to eat.”

  Her mother said: “I shall tell you only truths after this. You are old enough to understand reason, now, and to reason a little yourself.”

  “I do.... But I am not yet perfectly sure where babies come from. You said you would tell me that some day. I’d really like to know, mamma.”

  Her mother continued to sew for a while, then, passing the needle through the hem she looked down at her daughter.

  “Have you formed any opinion of your ow
n?”

  “Yes,” said the child honestly.

  “Then I’d better tell you the truth,” said her mother tranquilly, “because the truth is very wonderful and beautiful — and interesting.”

  So she related to the child, very simply and clearly all that need be told concerning the mystery of life in its beginnings; and Athalie listened, enchanted.

  And mostly it thrilled the child to realise that in her, too, lay latent a capability for the creation of life.

  Another hour with her mother she remembered in after years.

  Mrs. Greensleeve had not been as well: the doctor came oftener. Frequently Athalie returning from school discovered her mother lying on the bed. That evening the child was sitting on the floor at her mother’s feet as usual, just inside the circle of lamplight, playing solitaire with an ancient pack of cards.

  Presently something near the door attracted her attention and she lifted her head and sat looking at it, mildly interested, until, suddenly, she felt her mother’s eyes on her, flushed hotly, and turned her head away.

  “What were you looking at?” asked her mother in a low voice.

  “Nothing, mamma.”

  “Athalie!”

  “What, mamma?”

  “What were you looking at?”

  The child hung her head: “Nothing—” she began; but her mother checked her: “Don’t lie, Athalie. I’ll try to understand you. Now tell me what you were — what you thought you were looking at over there near the door.”

  The child turned and glanced back at the door over her shoulder.

  “There is nothing there — now,” she muttered.

  “Was there anything?”

  Athalie sat silent for a while, then she laid her clasped hands across her mother’s knees and rested her cheek on them.

  “There was a woman there,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Over by the door.”

  “You saw her, Athalie?”

  “Yes, mamma.”

  “Did she open the door and come in and then close it behind her?”

  “No.”

  “How did she come in?”

  “I don’t know. She — just came in.”