Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  The youth lay asleep now. As she extinguished the candle and stole from the room, all the pupæ of the Death’s Head began to squeak in the darkness.

  The student-gardener could do no more work for the present. He lay propped up in bed, pasty, scarlet lipped, and he seemed bald and lidless, so colourless were hair and eye-lashes.

  “Can I do anything for you, Karl?” asked Maryette, coming in for a moment as usual in the intervals of her many duties.

  “The ink, if you would be so condescending — and a pen,” he said, watching her out of hollow, sallow eyes of watery blue.

  She fetched both from the café.

  She came again in another hour, knocking at his door, but he said rather sharply that he wished to sleep.

  Scarcely noticing the querulous tone, she departed. She had much to do besides her duties in the belfry. Her father was an invalid who required constant care; there was only one servant, an old peasant woman who cooked. The Government required her father to keep open the White Doe Tavern, and there was always a little business from the scanty garrison of Sainte Lesse, always a few meals to get, a few drinks to serve, and nobody now to do it except herself.

  Then, in the belfry she had duties other than playing, than practice. Always at night the clock-drum was to be wound.

  She had no assistant. The town maintained none, and her salary as Mistress of the Bells of Sainte Lesse did not permit her to engage anybody to help her.

  So she oiled and wound all the machinery herself, adjusted and cared for the clock, swept the keyboard clean, inspected and looked after the wires leading to the tiers of bells overhead.

  Then there was work to do in the garden — a few minutes snatched between other duties. And when night arrived at last she was rather tired — quite weary on this night in particular, having managed to fulfill all the duties of the sick youth as well as her own.

  The night was warm and fragrant. She sat in the dark at her open window for a while, looking out into the north where, along the horizon, heat lightning seemed to play. But it was only the reflected flashes of the guns. When the wind was right, she could hear them.

  She had even managed to write to her lover. Now, seated beside the open window, she was thinking of him. A dreamy, happy lethargy possessed her; she was on the first delicate verge of slumber, so close to it that all earthly sounds were dying out in her ears. Then, suddenly, she was awake, listening.

  A window had been opened in the room overhead.

  She went to the stars and called:

  “Karl!”

  “What?” came the impatient reply.

  “Are you ill?”

  “No. N-no, I thank you—” His voice became urbane with an apparent effort. “Thank you for inquiring — —”

  “I heard your window open—” she said.

  “Thank you. I am quite well. The air is mild and grateful.... I thank mademoiselle for her solicitude.”

  She returned to her room and lighted her candle. On the white plaster wall sat the Death’s Head moth.

  She had not been in her room all day. She was astonished that the moth had not left.

  “Shall I have to put you out?” she thought dubiously. “Really, I can not keep my window closed for fear of visitors for you, Madam Death! I certainly shall be obliged to put you out.”

  So she found a sheet of paper and a large glass tumbler. Over the moth she placed the tumbler, then slipped the sheet of paper under the glass between moth and wall.

  The thing cried and cried, beating at the glass with wings as powerful as a bird’s, and the girl, startled and slightly repelled, placed the moth on her night table, imprisoned under the tumbler.

  For a while it fluttered and flapped and cried out in its strange, uncanny way, then settled on the sheet of paper, quivering its wings, both eyes like living coals.

  Seated on the bedside, Maryette looked at it, schooling herself to think of it kindly as one of God’s creatures before she released it at her open window.

  And, as she sat there, something came whizzing into the room through her window, circled around her at terrific speed with a humming, whispering whirr, then dropped with a solid thud on the night table beside the imprisoned female moth.

  It was the first suitor arrived from outer darkness — a big, powerful Death’s Head moth with eyes aglow, the yellow skull displayed in startling contrast on his velvet-black body.

  The girl watched him, fascinated. He scrambled over to the tumbler, tested it with heavy antennæ; then, ardent and impatient, beat against the glass with muscular wings that clattered in the silence.

  But it was not the amorous fury of the creature striking the tumbler with resounding wings, not the glowing eyes, the strong, clawed feet, the Death’s Head staring from its funereal black thorax that held the girl’s attention. It was something else; something entirely different riveted her eyes on the creature.

  For the cigar-shaped body, instead of bearing the naked ribs of a skeleton, was snow white.

  And now she began to understand. Somebody had already caught the moth, had wrapped around its body a cylinder of white tissue paper — tied it on with a fine, white silk thread.

  The moth was very still now, exploring the interstices between tumbler and table with heavy, pectinated antennæ.

  Cautiously Maryette bent forward and dropped both hands on the moth.

  Instantly the creature cried out horribly; it was like a mouse between her shrinking fingers; but she slipped the cylinder of tissue paper from its abdomen and released it with a shiver; and it darted and whizzed around the room, gyrating in whistling circles around her head until, unnerved, she struck at it again and again with empty hands, following, driving it toward the open window, out of which it suddenly darted.

  But now there was another Death’s Head in the room, a burly, headlong, infatuated male which drove headlong at the tumbler and clung to it, slipping, sliding, filling the room with a feathery tattoo of wings.

  It, also, had a snow-white body; and before she had seized the squeaking thing and had slipped the tissue wrapper from its body, another Death’s Head whirred through the window; then another, then two; then others. The room swarmed; they were crawling all over the tumbler, the table, the bed. The room was filled with the soft, velvety roar of whirring wings beating on wall and ceiling and against the tumbler where Madam Death sat imprisoned, quivering her wings, her eyes two molten rubies, and the ghastly skull staring from her back.

  How Maryette ever brought herself to do it; how she did it at last, she had no very clear idea. The touch of the slippery, mousy bodies was fearsomely repugnant to her; the very sight of the great, skull-bearing things began to sicken her physically. A dreadful, almost impalpable floss from their handled wings and bodies smeared her hands; the place vibrated with their tiny goblin cries.

  Somehow she managed to strip them of the tissue cylinders, drive them from where they crawled on ceiling, wall and sill into whistling flight. Amid a whirlwind of wings she fought them toward the open window; whizzing, flitting, circling they sped in widening spirals to escape her blows, where she stood half blinded in the vortex of the ghostly maelstrom.

  One by one they darted through the open window out into the night; and when the last spectral streak of grey had sped into outer darkness the girl slammed the windowpanes shut and leaned against the sill enervated, exhausted, revolted.

  The room was misty with the microscopic dust from the creatures’ wings; on her palms and fingers were black stains and stains of livid orange; and across wall and ceiling streaks and smudges of rusty colour.

  She was still trembling when she washed the smears from her hands. Her fingers were still unsteady as she smoothed out each tiny sheet of tissue paper and laid it on her night table. Then, seated on the bed’s edge beside the lighted candle, she began to read the messages written in ink on these frail, translucent tissue missives.

  Every bit of tissue bore a message; the writing was microscopic, the script German
, the language Flemish. Slowly, with infinite pains, the little bell-mistress of Sainte Lesse translated to herself each message as she deciphered it.

  She was trembling more than ever when she finished. Every trace of colour had fled from her cheeks.

  Then, as she sat there, struggling to keep her mind clear of the horror of the thing, striving to understand what was to be done, there came upon her window pane a sudden muffled drumming sound, and her frightened gaze fell upon a Death’s Head moth outside, its eyes like coals, its misty wings beating furiously for admittance. And around its body was tied a cylinder of white tissue.

  But the girl needed no more evidence. The wretched youth in the room overhead had already sealed his own doom with any one of these tissue cylinders. Better for him if the hemorrhage had slain him. Now a firing squad must do that much for him.

  Yet, even still, the girl hesitated, almost incredulous, trying to comprehend the monstrous grotesquerie of the abominable plot.

  Intuition pointed to the truth; logic proved it; somewhere in the German trenches a comrade of this spy was awaiting these messages with a caged Death’s Head female as the bait — a living loadstone wearing the terrific emblems of death — an unfailing magnet to draw the skull-bearing messengers for miles — had it not been that a nearer magnet deflected them in their flight!

  That was it! That was what the miserable youth upstairs had not counted on. Chance had ruined him; destiny had sent Madam Death into the room below him to draw, with her macabre charms, every ardent winged messenger which he liberated from his bedroom window.

  The subtle effluvia permeating the night air for miles around might have guided these messengers into the German trenches had not a nearer and more imperious perfume annihilated it. Headlong, amorous, impatient they had whirled toward the embraces of Madam Death; the nearer and more powerful perfume had drawn the half-maddened, half-drugged messengers. The spy in the room upstairs, like many Germans, had reasoned wrongly on sound premises. His logic had broken down, not his amazing scientific foundation. His theory was correct; his application stupid.

  And now this young man was about to die. Maryette understood that. She comprehended that his death was necessary; that it was the unavoidable sequence of what he had attempted to do. Trapped rats must be drowned; vermin exterminated by easiest and quickest methods; spies who betray one’s native land pass naturally the same route.

  But this thing, this grotesque, incredible, terrible attempt to engraft treachery on one of nature’s most amazing laws — this secret, cunning Teutonic reasoning, this scientific scoundrelism, this criminal enterprise based on patient, plodding and German efficiency, still bewildered the girl.

  And yet she vaguely realized how science had been already prostituted to Prussian malignancy and fury; she had heard of flame jets, of tear-bombs, of bombs containing deadly germs; she herself had beheld the poison gas rolling back into the trenches at Nivelle under the town tower. Dimly she began to understand that the Hun, in his cunning savagery, had tricked, betrayed and polluted civilization itself into lending him her own secrets with which she was ultimately to be destroyed.

  The very process of human thinking had been imitated by these monkeys of Europe — apes with the ferocity of hogs — and no souls, none — nothing to lift them inside the pale where dwells the human race.

  There came a rapping on the café door. The girl rose wearily; an immense weight seemed to crush her shoulders so that her knees had become unsteady.

  She opened the café door; it was Sticky Smith, come for his nightcap before turning in.

  “The man upstairs is a German spy,” she said listlessly. “Had you not better go over and get a gendarme?”

  “Who’s a spy? That Dutch shrimp you had in your garden?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he?” demanded the muleteer with an oath.

  She placed her lighted candle on the bar.

  “Wait,” she said. “Read these first — we must be quite certain about what we do.”

  She laid the squares of tissue paper out on the bar.

  “Do you read Flemish?” she whispered.

  “No, ma’am — —”

  “Then I will translate into French for you. And first of all I must tell you how I came to possess these little letters written upon tissue. Please listen attentively.”

  He rested his palm on the butt of his dangling automatic.

  “Go on,” he said.

  She told him the circumstances.

  As she commenced to translate the tissue paper messages in a low, tremulous voice, the sound of a door being closed and locked in the room overhead silenced her.

  The next instant she had stepped out to the stairs and called:

  “Karl!”

  There was no reply. Smith came out to the stair-well and listened.

  “It is his custom,” she whispered, “to lock his door before retiring. That is what we heard.”

  “Call again.”

  “He can’t hear me. He is in bed.”

  “Call, all the same.”

  “Karl!” she cried out in an unsteady voice.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  MADAM DEATH

  There was no reply, because the young man was hanging out over his window sill in the darkness trying to switch away, from her closed window below, the big, clattering Death’s Head moth which obstinately and persistently fluttered there.

  What possessed the moth to continue battering its wings at the window of the room below? Had the other moths which he released done so, too? They had darted out of his room into the night, each garnished with a tissue robe. He supposed they had flown north; he had not looked out to see.

  What had gone wrong with this moth, then?

  He took his emaciated blond head between his bony fingers and pondered, probing for reason with German thoroughness — that celebrated thoroughness which is invariably riddled with flaws.

  Of all contingencies he had thought — or so it seemed to him. He could not recollect any precaution neglected. He had come to Sainte Lesse for a clearly defined object and to make certain reports concerning matters of interest to the German military authorities north of Nivelle.

  The idea, inspired by the experiments of Henri Fabre, was original with him. Patiently, during the previous year, he had worked it out — had proved his theory by a series of experiments with moths of this species.

  He had arranged with his staff comrade, Dr. Glück, for a forced hatching of the pupæ which the latter had patiently bred from the enormous green and violet-banded caterpillars.

  At least one female Death’s Head must be ready, caged in the trenches beyond Nivelle. Hundreds of pupæ could not have died. Where, then, was his error — if, indeed, he had made any?

  Leaning from the window, he looked down at the frantic moth, perplexed, a little uneasy now.

  “Swine!” he muttered. “What, then, ails you that you do not fly to the mistress awaiting you over yonder?”

  He could see the cylinder of white tissue shining on the creature’s body, where it fluttered against the pane, illuminated by the rays of the candle from within the young girl’s room.

  Could it be possible that the candle-light was proving the greater attraction?

  Even as the possibility entered his mind, he saw another Death’s Head dart at the window below and join the first one. But this newcomer wore no tissue jacket.

  Then, out of the darkness the Death’s Heads began to come to the window below, swarms of them, startling him with the racket of their wings.

  From where did they arrive? They could not be the moths he liberated. But.... Were they? Had some accident robbed their bodies of the tissue missives? Had they blundered into somebody’s room and been robbed?

  Mystified, uneasy, he hung over his window sill, staring with sickening eyes at the winged tumult below.

  With patient, plodding logic he began to seek for the solution. What attracted these moths to the room below? Was it the candle-l
ight? That alone could not be sufficient — could not contend with the more imperious attraction, the subtle effluvia stealing out of the north and appealing to the ruling passion which animated the frantic winged things below him.

  Patiently, methodically in his mind he probed about for some clue to the solution. The ruling passion animating the feathery whirlwind below was the necessity for mating and perpetuating the species.

  That was the dominant passion; the lure of candle-light a secondary attraction.... Then, if this were so — and it had been proven to be a fact — then — then — what was in that young girl’s bedroom just below him?

  Even as the question flashed in his mind he left the window, went to his door, listened, noiselessly unlocked it.

  A low murmur of voices came from the café.

  He drew off both shoes, descended the stairs on the flat pads of his large, bony feet, listening all the while.

  Candle-light streamed out into the corridor from her open bedroom door; and he crept to the sill and peered in, searching the place with small, pale eyes.

  At first he noticed nothing to interest him, then, all in an instant, his gaze fell upon Madam Death under her prison of glass.

  There she sat, her great bulging abdomen distended with eggs, her lambent eyes shining with the terrible passion of anticipation. For one thing only she had been created. That accomplished she died. And there she crouched awaiting the fulfillment of her life’s cycle with the blazing eyes of a demon.

  From the café below came the cautious murmur of voices. The young man already knew what they were whispering about; or, if he did not know he no longer cared.

  The patches of bright colour in his sunken cheeks had died out in an ashen pallor. As far as he was concerned the world was now ended. And he knew it.

  He went into the bedroom and sat down on the bed’s edge. His little, pale eyes wandered about the white room; the murmur of voices below was audible all the while.

  After a few moments’ patient waiting, his gaze rested again on Madam Death, squatting there with wings sloped, and the skull and bones staring at him from her head and distended abdomen.