Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Yes.... May I not go?”

  “No — please.”

  “Is there danger?”

  “No.... I don’t know if there is any danger.”

  “Will you be cautious, then?”

  He turned and looked at her in the dim light. Standing so for a little while they remained silent. Then he drew a deep, quiet breath. She held out one hand, slowly; half way he bent and touched her fingers with his lips; released them. Her arm fell listlessly at her side.

  After he had been gone a long while, she turned away, moving with head lowered. At the bridge she waited for him.

  A red moon rose low in the east. It became golden above the trees, paler higher, and deathly white in mid-heaven.

  It was long after midnight when she went into the house to light fresh candles. In the intense darkness before dawn she lighted two more and set them in an upper window on the chance that they might guide him back.

  At five in the morning every clock struck five.

  She was not asleep; she was lying on a lounge beside the burning candles, listening, when the door below burst open and there came the trampling rush of feet, the sound of blows, a fall ——

  A loud voice cried:— “Because you are armed and not in uniform! — you British swine!” —

  And the pistol shots crashed through the house.

  On the stairs she swayed for an instant, grasped blindly at the rail. Through the floating smoke below the dead man lay there by the latticed window — where they had sat together — he and she ——

  Spectres were flitting to and fro — grey shapes without faces — things with eyes. A loud voice dinned in her ears, beat savagely upon her shrinking brain:

  “You there on the stairs! — do you hear? What are those candles? Signals?”

  She looked down at the dead man.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Through the crackling racket of the fusillade, down, down into roaring darkness she fell.

  After a few moments her slim hand moved, closed over the dead man’s. And moved no more.

  In the moat L’Ombre still remained, unstirring; old Anne lay in the kitchen dying; and the Wood of Aulnes was swarming with ghastly shapes which had no faces, only eyes.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE SEED OF DEATH

  It was Dr. Vail whose identification secured burial for Neeland, not in the American cemetery, but in Aulnes Wood.

  When the raid into Finistère ended, and the unclean birds took flight, Vail, at Quimper, ordered north with his unit, heard of the tragedy, and went to Aulnes. And so Neeland was properly buried beside the youthful châtelaine. Which was, no doubt, what his severed soul desired. And perhaps hers desired it, too.

  Vail continued on to Paris, to Flanders, got gassed, and came back to New York.

  He had aged ten years in as many months.

  Gray, the younger surgeon, kept glancing from time to time at Vail’s pallid face, and the latter understood the professional interest of the younger man.

  “You think I look ill?” he asked, finally.

  “You don’t look very fit, Doctor.”

  “No.... I’m going West.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think that you are — going West?”

  “There’s a thing over there, born of gas. It’s a living thing, animal or vegetable. I don’t know which. It’s only recently been recognized. We call it the ‘Seed of Death.’”

  Gray gazed at the haggard face of the older man in silence.

  Vail went on, slowly: “It’s properly named. It is always fatal. A man may live for a few months. But, once gassed, even in the slightest degree, if that germ is inhaled, death is certain.”

  After a silence Gray began: “Do you have any apprehension—” And did not finish the sentence.

  Vail shrugged. “It’s interesting, isn’t it?” he said with pleasant impersonality.

  After a silence Gray said: “Are you doing anything about it?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s working in the dark, of course. I’m feeling rottener every day.”

  He rested his handsome head on one thin hand:

  “I don’t want to die, Gray, but I don’t know how to keep alive. It’s odd, isn’t it? I don’t wish to die. It’s an interesting world. I want to see how the local elections turn out in New York.”

  “What!”

  “Certainly. That is what worries me more than anything. We Allies are sure to win. I’m not worrying about that. But I’d like to live to see Tammany a dead cock in the pit!”

  Gray forced a laugh; Vail laughed unfeignedly, and then, solemn again, said:

  “I’d like to live to see this country aspire to something really noble.”

  “After all,” said Gray, “there is really nothing to stifle aspiration.”

  It was not only because Vail had been gazing upon death in every phase, every degree — on brutal destruction wholesale and in detail; but also he had been standing on the outer escarpment of Civilization and had watched the mounting sea of barbarism battering, thundering, undermining, gradually engulfing the world itself and all its ancient liberties.

  He and the young surgeon, Gray, who was to sail to France next day were alone together on the loggia of the club; dusk mitigated the infernal heat of a summer day in town.

  On the avenue below motor cars moved north and south, hansoms crept slowly along the curb, and on the hot sidewalks people passed listlessly under the electric lights — the nine — and — seventy sweating tribes.

  For, on such summer nights, under the red moon, an exodus from the East Side peoples the noble avenue with dingy spectres who shuffle along the gilded grilles and still façades of stone, up and down, to and fro, in quest of God knows what — of air perhaps, perhaps of happiness, or of something even vaguer. But whatever it may be that starts them into painful motion, one thing seems certain: aspiration is a part of their unrest.

  “There is liberty here,” replied Dr. Vail— “also her inevitable shadow, tyranny.”

  “We need more light; that’s all,” said Gray.

  “When light streams in from every angle no shadow is possible.”

  “The millennium? I get you.... In this country the main thing is that there is some light. A single ray, however feeble, and even coming from one fixed angle only, means aspiration, life....”

  He lighted a cigar.

  “As you know,” he remarked, “there is a flower called Aconitum. It is also known by the ominous names of Monks-Hood and Helmet-Flower. Direct sunlight kills it. It flourishes only in shadow. Like the Kaiser-Flower it also is blue; and,” he added, “it is deadly poison.... As you say, the necessary thing in this world is light from every angle.”

  His cigar glimmered dully through the silence. Presently he went on; “Speaking of tyranny, I think it may be classed as a recognized and tolerated business carried on successfully by those born with a genius for it. It flourishes in the shade — like the Helmet-Flower.... But the sun in this Western Hemisphere of ours is devilish hot. It’s gradually killing off our local tyrants — slowly, almost imperceptibly but inexorably, killing ’em off.... Of course, there are plenty still alive — tyrants of every degree born to the business of tyranny and making a success at it.”

  He smoked tranquilly for a while, then:

  “There are our tyrants of industry,” he said; “tyrants of politics, tyrants of religion — great and small we still harbor plenty of tyrants, all scheming to keep their roots from shriveling under this fierce western sun of ours — —”

  He laughed without mirth, turning his worn and saddened eyes on Gray:

  “Tyranny is a business,” he repeated; “also it is a state of mind — a delusion, a ruling passion — strong even in death.... The odd part of it is that a tyrant never knows he’s one.... He invariably mistakes himself for a local Moses. I can tell you a sort of story if you care to listen.... Or, we can go to some cheerful show or roof-garden — —”
r />   “Go on with your story,” said Gray.

  CHAPTER XII

  FIFTY-FIFTY

  Vail began:

  Tyranny was purely a matter of business with this little moral shrimp about whom I’m going to tell you. I was standing between a communication trench and a crater left by a mine which was being “consolidated,” as they have it in these days.... All around me soldiers of the third line swarmed and clambered over the débris, digging, hammering, shifting planks and sandbags from south to north, lugging new timbers, reels of barbed wire, ladders, cases of ammunition, machine guns, trench mortars.

  The din of the guns was terrific; overhead our own shells passed with a deafening, clattering roar; the Huns continued to shell the town in front of us where our first and second lines were still fighting in the streets and houses while the third line were reconstructing a few yards of trenches and a few craters won.

  Stretchers and bearers from my section had not yet returned from the emergency dressing station; the crater was now cleared up except of enemy dead, whose partly buried arms and legs still stuck out here and there. A company of the Third Foreign Legion had just come into the crater and had taken station at the loopholes under the parapet of sandbags.

  As soon as the telephone wires were stretched as far as our crater a message came for me to remain where I was until further orders. I had just received this message and was walking along, slowly, behind the rank of soldiers, who stood leaning against the parapet with their rifles thrust through the loops, when somebody said in English — in East Side New York English I mean— “Ah, there, Doc!”

  A soldier had turned toward me, both hands still grasping his resting rifle. In the “horizon blue” uniform and ugly, iron, shrapnel-proof helmet strapped to his bullet head I failed to recognize him.

  “It’s me, ‘Duck’ Werner,” he said, as I stood hesitating.... You know who he is, political leader in the 50th Ward, here. I was astounded.

  “What do you know about it?” he added. “Me in a tin derby potting Fritzies! And there’s Heinie, too, and Pick-em-up Joe — the whole bunch sewed up in this here trench, oh my God!”

  I went over to him and stood leaning against the parapet beside him.

  “Duck,” I said, amazed, “how did you come to enlist in the Foreign Legion?”

  “Aw,” he replied with infinite disgust, “I got drunk.”

  “Where?”

  “Me and Heinie and Joe was follerin’ the races down to Boolong when this here war come and put everything on the blink. Aw, hell, sez I, come on back to Parus an’ look ’em over before we skiddoo home — meanin’ the dames an’ all like that. Say, we done what I said; we come back to Parus, an’ we got in wrong! Listen, Doc; them dames had went crazy over this here war graft. Veeve France, sez they. An’ by God! we veeved.

  “An’ one of ’em at Maxeems got me soused, and others they fixed up Heinie an’ Joe, an’ we was all wavin’ little American flags and yellin’ ‘To hell with the Hun!’ Then there was a interval for which I can’t account to nobody.

  “All I seem to remember is my marchin’ in the boolyvard along with a guy in baggy red pants, and my chewin’ the rag in a big, hot room full o’ soldiers; an’ Heinie an’ Joe they was shoutin’, ‘Wow! Lemme at ‘em. Veeve la France!’ Wha’ d’ye know about me? Ain’t I the mark from home?”

  “You didn’t realize that you were enlisting?”

  “Aw, does it make any difference to these here guys what you reelize, or what you don’t? I ask you, Doc?”

  He spat disgustedly upon the sand, rolled his quid into the other cheek, wiped his thin lips with the back of his right hand, then his fingers mechanically sought the trigger guard again and he cast a perfunctory squint up at the parapet.

  “Believe me,” he said, “a guy can veeve himself into any kind of trouble if he yells loud enough. I’m getting mine.”

  “Well, Duck,” I said, “it’s a good game — —”

  “Aw,” he retorted angrily, “it ain’t my graft an’ you know it. What do I care who veeves over here? — An’ the 50th Ward goin’ to hell an’ all!”

  I strove to readjust my mind to understand what he had said. I was, you know, that year, the Citizen’s Anti-Graft leader in the 50th Ward.... I am, still, if I live; and if I ever can get anything into my head except the stupendous din of this war and the cataclysmic problems depending upon its outcome.... Well, it was odd to remember that petty political conflict as I stood there in the trenches under the gigantic shadow of world-wide disaster — to find myself there, talking with this sallow, wiry, shifty ward leader — this corrupt little local tyrant whom I had opposed in the 50th Ward — this ex-lightweight bruiser, ex-gunman — this dirty little political procurer who had been and was everything brutal, stealthy, and corrupt.

  I looked at him curiously; turned and glanced along the line where, presently, I recognized his two familiars, Heinie Baum and Pick-em-up Joe Brady with whom he had started off to “Parus” on a month’s summer junket, and with whom he had stumbled so ludicrously into the riff-raff ranks of the 3rd Foreign Legion. Doubtless the 1st and 2nd Legions couldn’t stand him and his two friends, although in one company there were many Americans serving.

  Thinking of these things, the thunder of the cannonade shaking sand from the parapet, I became conscious that the rat eyes of Duck Werner were furtively watching me.

  “You can do me dirt, now, can’t you, Doc?” he said with a leer.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Aw, as if I had to tell you. I got some sense left.”

  Suddenly his sallow visage under the iron helmet became distorted with helpless fury; he fairly snarled; his thin lips writhed as he spat out the suspicion which had seized him:

  “By God, Doc, if you do that! — if you leave me here caged up an’ go home an’ raise hell in the 50th — with me an’ Joe here — —”

  After a breathless pause: “Well,” said I, “what will you do about it?” — for he was looking murder at me.

  Neither of us spoke again for a few moments; an officer, smoking a cigarette, came up between Heinie and Pick-em-up Joe, adjusted a periscope and set his eye to it. Through the sky above us the shells raced as though hundreds of shaky express trains were rushing overhead on rickety aërial tracks, deafening the world with their outrageous clatter.

  “Listen, Doc — —”

  I looked up into his altered face — a sallow, earnest face, fiercely intent. Every atom of the man’s intelligence was alert, concentrated on me, on my expression, on my slightest movement.

  “Doc,” he said, “let’s talk business. We’re men, we are, you an’ me. I’ve fought you plenty times. I know. An’ I guess you are on to me, too. I ain’t no squealer; you know that anyway. Perhaps I’m everything else you claim I am when you make parlor speeches to Gussie an’ Reggie an’ when you stand on a bar’l in Avenoo A an’ say: ‘my friends’ to Billy an’ Izzy an’ Pete the Wop.

  “All right. Go to it! I’m it. I got mine. That’s what I’m there for. But — when I get mine, the guys that back me get theirs, too. My God, Doc, let’s talk business! What’s a little graft between friends?”

  “Duck,” I said, “you own the 50th Ward. You are no fool. Why is it not possible for you to understand that some men don’t graft?”

  “Aw, can it!” he retorted fiercely. “What else is there to chase except graft? What else is there, I ask you? Graft! Ain’t there graft into everything God ever made? An’ don’t the smart guy get it an’ take his an’ divide the rest same as you an’ me?”

  “You can’t comprehend that I don’t graft, can you, Duck?”

  “What do you call it what you get, then? The wages of Reeform? And what do you hand out to your lootenants an’ your friends?”

  “Service.”

  “Hey? Well, all right. But what’s in it for you? Where do you get yours, Doc?”

  “There’s nothing in it for me except to give honest service to the people who trust me.”
>
  “Listen,” he persisted with a sort of ferocious patience; “you ain’t on no bar’l now; an’ you ain’t calling no Ginneys and no Kikes your friends. You’re just talkin’ to me like there wasn’t nobody else onto this damn planet excep’ us two guys. Get that?”

  “I do.”

  “And I’m tellin’ you that I get mine same as any one who ain’t a loonatic. Get that?”

  “Certainly.”

  “All right. Now I know you ain’t no nut. Which means that you get yours, whatever you call it. And now will you talk business?”

  “What business do you want to talk, Duck?” I added; “I should say that you already have your hands rather full of business and Lebel rifles — —”

  “Aw’ Gawd; this? This ain’t business. I was a damn fool and I’m doin’ time like any souse what the bulls pinch. Only I get more than thirty days, I do. That’s what’s killin’ me, Doc! — Duck Werner in a tin lid, suckin’ soup an’ shootin’ Fritzies when I oughter be in Noo York with me fren’s lookin’ after business. Can you beat it?” he ended fiercely.

  He chewed hard on his quid for a few moments, staring blankly into space with the detached ferocity of a caged tiger.

  “What are they a-doin’ over there in the 50th?” he demanded. “How do I know whose knifin’ me with the boys? I don’t mean your party. You’re here same as I am. I mean Mike the Kike, and the regular Reepublican nomination, I do.... And, how do I know when you are going back?”

  I was silent.

  “Are you?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Doc, will you talk business, man to man?”

  “Duck, to tell you the truth, the hell that is in full blast over here — this gigantic, world-wide battle of nations — leaves me, for the time, uninterested in ward politics.”

  “Stop your kiddin’.”

  “Can’t you comprehend it?”

  “Aw, what do you care about what Kink wins? If we was Kinks, you an’ me, all right. But we ain’t Doc. We’re little fellows. Our graft ain’t big like the Dutch Emperor’s, but maybe it comes just as regular on pay day. Ich ka bibble.”