Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Do you hear anything?” she whispered.

  “A bird singing in the starlight.”

  She listened for a moment, both hands on his shoulders, then twisted slightly: and he set her down and released her. His heart was going it. Yet the exertion had not been severe. She weighed one hundred and twenty.

  Under the slim twin palms they seated themselves. At her request he played his flashlight over her satchel; and from it she extracted a bottle of spring water and a paper box full of cold chicken, bread, fruit, and assorted chocolates.

  “I had them put up for us by the dining-car steward,” she said. “I thought perhaps we might not find everything quite ready at the bungalow.”

  “We haven’t even found the bungalow,” he said, and laughed nervously. But to Rosalie it was not yet a laughing matter.

  The night was balmy, the air delicious; so was the chicken. He laid his flashlight on the ground and they Ate in its brilliant, fan-shaped radiance. Traces of tears, like the powdery silver of dew on iris blossoms, still made her eyes brilliant; and now he knew what a young goddess looked like eating nectar and quaffing ambrosia, as he furtively observed the girl beside him.

  First she bit a dainty little semi-circle out of a sandwich, and after her pretty lips had moved as though in murmured prayer thirty-two times, she blushingly set the mouth of the bottle to her own and drank as innocently as a little bird drinks, its beak uptilted toward Heaven, giving thanks for every swallow.

  Every now and then he picked up the flashlight and swept the cobwebs of the night from their surroundings as with a broom of glory. This fine phrase also occurred to Brown, and he employed it, conscious of inspiration totally new which apparently was evoking from the commonplace within him a most unusual and gratifying mental attitude toward life.

  She smiled a shy acknowledgment of this literary eruption. And the intellectual response from her confirmed his dawning opinion that she was mentally as extraordinary as she was physically attractive.

  His flashlight played over long silvery banners of Spanish moss, ran glittering across massed magnolia foliage set with gigantic white cups of scented bloom, flashed on trailing yellow jasmine, swept across China trees where the great, lilac-tinted bunches of blossoms hung all misty with hovering moths.

  “It’s like a wonderful scene set for the theatre,” he said. Which trite remark did him no damage, she considering it very original.

  Unseen things ruffled and flapped in the trees occasionally, and these inexplicable interruptions were all that mitigated her increasing confidence and even pleasure in the situation. But the dry, silken rustle of unseen plumage on high concerned her and always temporarily disconnected her appetite until Brown rose and searched the big water oak’s top with his flashlight; and there disclosed three big, snow-white birds standing solemnly on one leg each.

  “The lovely things!” she exclaimed in the quick reaction of relief and delight. “They stand there like guardian angels watching over us.” And she continued to nibble her chocolate bonbon with thankfulness and content.

  Brown carefully laid the flashlight on the ground between them.

  “Do you know,” he said, “that you are a very extraordinary girl?”

  She lifted her head in pretty surprise.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” he continued. “You are just right, exactly balanced — feminine but not too feminine; brave but not aggressively cocky; patient but not meek; self-controlled but neither stolid nor ignorant. As far as I can discover, you are the real thing in girls.”

  “W-what an odd thing to think!”

  “Why, just consider your qualities,” he went on, deeply interested in his analysis; “you are a good sport, or you never would have taken a chance and started for this God-forsaken place. Yet, you are farseeing and thoughtful, or you wouldn’t have had the dining-car steward put up this dinner for us.

  “You are reticent, full of a charming sort of dignity, and so confident in the security of your own self-respect that you accept temporarily a menial position for household work when your own profession no longer affords you a living.”

  “But I”

  “That is admirable!” he interrupted warmly, somewhat excited by his own unsuspected powers of logical analysis. “That is noble — like Cincinnatus at the plow; like Israel Putnam in his undershirt; like Jeanne d’Arc; like—”

  The emotion superinduced by his own eloquence checked him: then:

  “I do not understand how it is,” he said, “but to me you have already proven a most inexplicable inspiration — I may even say an exhilaration. In our brief companionship I seem to think of things I never before thought of — ideas, language, phrases, elegancies of verbal expression, flow fluently and without any effort on my part.

  “When I talk with you, look at you, I feel as though there were original possibilities in me. I aspire to — I don’t know exactly what just yet, I am—” Again he checked himself to let his eyes rest on her in silence.

  She sat at the foot of a palm tree, her dainty hands clasped under her chin, elbows set on her knees, eyes lowered. And in her cheeks the delicate colour came and went, waning, glowing with every word and with the confused thoughts he was stirring and stampeding in her youthful brain.

  She looked up with a forced laugh — for both their sakes:

  “A housekeeper is only a salaried employee.... I came to be that — and nothing else.”

  Then, suddenly, between them there was everything to be said — much to be said that ought not to be — much that should be said with chances against their saying it.

  Neither spoke until, after a long while, the flashlight which had been burning redder and redder, glimmered and went out.

  “Have you another battery?” she asked.

  “No. You are not afraid, are you?”

  She made no answer; but when he drew himself across the ground beside her the smooth little hand he encountered slightly returned his pressure.

  “You are not afraid now, Rosalie.”

  “A little.”

  “Of what, dear?”

  There was no need to answer.

  At times he thought she was asleep, she breathed so evenly, but sooner or later a little tremulous movement of her head on his shoulder undeceived him.

  But the night was nearly spent before his lips touched her cheek and rested there, minute after minute, until, softly stirring, she turned and met his lips with hers.

  The stars had gone; it was day — that day when the keepers of the house should tremble, and the strong men should bow themselves.

  And now Rosalie was trembling — trembling for all that life had meant for her. In his arms, denying her lips to him with desperate head pressed against his breast, she lay motionless, tense, enduring the blinding, throbbing moments. Her brain whirled with words and phrases — with precept, proverb, and stammered prayer, with incoherencies of passion, faltered avowals.

  And suddenly above her, with the roar of wide wings rising, three great snowy birds took flight into the ocean of dawning light.

  Startled and still dazed, she threw back her head on his shoulder and looked up. And saw them mounting to the sky on broad, angelic wings, higher, higher, until their fanning pinions caught from below earth’s darkened rim the crimson edges of the hidden sun, so that they glimmered on high all silver and rose.

  “Our angels — have gone,” she faltered.

  “White herons.”

  But she freed herself from his arms and knelt there, still looking up.

  “Leaving me alone with you” she whispered. “Alone here on earth — you and I — master and maid.”

  “Rosalie!”

  “Master and maid,” she murmured, covering her face with her slender fingers.

  But he had drawn himself over beside her, rising to his knees; and his arm encircled her supple body.

  “Your — servant — and creature,” she shuddered.

  ... “And the stars — saw — how nearly it wa
s true.”

  “Dearest,” he said, “I want no other wife but you. Don’t you understand?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you realize,” he said excitedly, “that you have spoiled me for every other girl in the world?”

  “I?” she whispered.

  “Do you suppose any other woman could mean anything to me now?”

  “Is it — love?”

  “Good God!” he said. “Do you doubt it? Don’t you realize that you are the real thing?”

  But Rosalie could neither answer nor check her tears.

  It grew lighter around them. And when the first rosy sunbeams swept the woods and turned the pool at their feet to a sheet of shimmering pink, Brown’s arm around her suddenly tightened.

  “Darling!” he shouted. “Look!”

  She turned her lovely, dishevelled head: across the stream, directly in front of them, set in a clearing of palms, stood the bungalow, every window glittering in the sun.

  A STORY OF PRIMITIVE LOVE

  CONTENTS

  A STORY OF PRIMITIVE LOVE

  THE MESSENGER

  A STORY OF PRIMITIVE LOVE

  I

  They were doing their work very badly. They got the rope around his neck, and tied his wrists with moose-bush withes, but again he fell, sprawling, turning, twisting over the leaves, tearing up everything around him like a trapped panther.

  He got the rope away from them; he clung to it with bleeding fists, he set his white teeth in it, until the jute strands relaxed, unravelled, and snapped, gnawed through by his white teeth.

  Twice Tully struck him with a gum hook. The dull blows fell on flesh rigid as stone.

  Panting, foul with forest mould and rotten leaves, hands and face smeared with blood, he sat up on the ground, glaring at the circle of men around him.

  “Shoot him!” gasped Tully, dashing the sweat from his bronzed brow; and Bates, breathing heavily, sat down on a log and dragged a revolver from his rear pocket. The man on the ground watched him; there was froth in the corners of his mouth.

  “Git back!” whispered Bates, but his voice and hand trembled. “Kent,” he stammered, “won’t ye hang?”

  The man on the ground glared.

  “Ye’ve got to die, Kent,” he urged; “they all say so. Ask Lefty Dyce; ask Carrots. — He’s got to swing fur it — ain’t he, Tully? — Kent, fur God’s sake, swing fur these here gents!”

  The man on the ground panted; his bright eyes never moved.

  After a moment Tully sprang on him again. There was a flurry’ of leaves, a crackle, a gasp and a grunt, then the thumping and thrashing of two bodies writhing in the brush. Dyce and Carrots jumped on the prostrate men. Lefty Sawyer caught the rope again, but the jute strand’s gave way and he stumbled. Tully began to scream, “He’s chokin’ me!” Dyce staggered out into the open, moaning over a broken wrist.

  “Shoot!” shouted Lefty Sawyer, and dragged Tully aside. “Shoot, Jim Bates! Shoot straight, b’God!” —

  “Git back!” gasped Bates, rising from the fallen log.

  The crowd parted right and left; a quick report rang out — another — another. Then from the whirl of smoke a tall form staggered, dealing blows — blows that sounded sharp as the crack of a whip.

  “He’s off! Shoot straight!” they cried.

  There was a gallop of heavy boots in the woods. Bates, faint and dazed, turned his head.

  “Shoot!” shrieked Tully.

  But Bates was sick; his smoking revolver fell to the ground; his white face and pale eyes contracted. It lasted-only a moment; he started after the others, plunging, wallowing through thickets of osier and hemlock underbrush.

  Far ahead he heard Kent crashing on like a young moose in November, and he knew he was making for the shore. The others knew too. Already the gray gleam of the sea cut a straight line along the forest edge; already the soft clash of the surf on the rocks broke faintly through the forest silence.

  “He’s got a canoe there!” bawled Tully. “He’ll be into it!”

  And he was into it, kneeling in the bow, driving his paddle to the handle. The rising sun gleamed like red lightning on the flashing blade; the canoe shot to the crest of a wave, hung, bows dripping in the wind, dropped into the depths, glided, tipped, rolled, shot up again, staggered, and plunged on.

  Tully ran straight out into the cove surf; the water broke against his chest, bare and wet with sweat. Bates sat down on a worn black rock and watched the canoe listlessly.

  The canoe dwindled to a speck of gray and silver; and when Carrots, who had run back to the gum camp for a rifle, returned, the speck on the water might have been easier to hit than a loon’s head at twilight. So Carrots, being thrifty by nature, fired once, and was satisfied to save the other cartridges. The canoe was still visible, making for the open sea. Somewhere beyond the horizon lay the keys, a string of rocks bare as skulls, black and slimy where the sea cut their base, white on the crests with the excrement of sea birds.

  “He’s makin’ fur the Key to Grief!” whispered Bates to Dyce.

  Dyce, moaning, and nursing his broken wrist, turned a sick face out to sea.

  The last rock seaward was the Key to Grief, a splintered pinnacle polished by the sea. From the Key to Grief, seaward a day’s paddle, if a man dared, lay the long wooded island in the ocean known as Grief on the charts of the bleak coast.

  In the history of the coast, two men had made the voyage to the Key to Grief, and from there to the island. One of these was a rum-crazed pelt hunter, who lived to come back; the other was a college youth; they found his battered canoe at sea, and a day later his battered body was flung up in the cove.

  So, when Bates whispered to Dyce, and when Dyce called to the others, they knew that the end was not far off for Kent and his canoe; and they turned away into the forest, sullen, but satisfied that Kent would get his dues when the devil got his.

  Lefty spoke vaguely of the wages of sin. Carrots, with an eye to thrift, suggested a plan for an equitable division of Kent’s property. —

  When they reached the gun camp they piled Kent’s personal effects on a blanket.

  Carrots took the inventory: a revolver, two gum hooks, a fur cap, a nickel-plated watch, a pipe, a pack of new cards, a gum sack, forty pounds of spruce gum, and a frying pan.

  Carrots shuffled the cards, picked out the joker and flipped it pensively into the fire. Then he dealt cold decks all around.

  When the goods and chattels of their late companion had been divided by chance — for there was no chance to cheat — somebody remembered Tully.

  “He’s down there on the coast, starin’ after the canoe,” said Bates huskily. —

  He rose and walked toward a heap on the ground covered by a blanket. He started to lift the blanket, hesitated, and finally turned away. Under the blanket lay Tully’s brother, shot the night before by Kent.

  “Guess we’d better wait till Tully comes,” said Carrots uneasily. Bates and Kent had been campmates. An hour later Tully walked into camp. —

  He spoke to no one that day. In the morning Bates found him down on the coast digging, and said: “Hello, Tully! Guess we ain’t much hell on lynchin’!”

  “Naw,” said Tully. “Git a spade.”

  “Goin’ to plant him there?”

  “Yep.” —

  “Where he kin hear them waves?”

  “Yep.”

  “Purty spot.”

  “Yep.”

  “Which way will he face?”

  “Where, he kin watch fur that damned canoe!” cried Tully fiercely.

  “He — he can’t see,” ventured Bates uneasily. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

  “He’ll heave up that there sand when the canoe comes back! An’ it’s a-comin’! An’ Bud Kent’ll be in it, dead or alive! Git a spade!”

  The pale light of superstition flickered in Bates’s eyes. He hesitated.

  “The — the dead can’t see,” be began; “kin they?”

  Tull
y turned a distorted face toward him.

  “Yer lie!” he roared. “My brother kin see, dead or livin’! An’ he’ll see the hangin’ of Bud Kent! An’ he’ll git up outer the grave fur to see it, Bill Bates! I’m tellin’ ye! I’m tellin’ ye! Deep as I’ll plant him, he’ll heave that there sand and call to me, when the canoe comes in! I’ll hear him; I’ll be here! An’ we’ll live to see the hangin’ of Bud Kent!”

  About sundown they planted Tully’s brother, face to the sea.

  II

  On the Key to Grief the green waves rub all day. White at the summit, black at the base, the shafted rocks rear splintered pinnacles, slanting like channel buoys. On the polished pillars sea birds brood — white-winged, bright-eyed sea birds, that nestle and preen and flap and clatter their orange-coloured beaks when the sifted spray drives and drifts across the reef.

  As the sun rose, painting crimson streaks criss-cross over the waters, the sea birds sidled together, huddling row on row, steeped in downy drowse.

  Where the sun of noon burnished the sea, an opal wave washed, listless, noiseless; a sea bird stretched one listless wing.

  And into the silence of the waters a canoe glided, bronzed by the sunlight, jewelled by the salt drops stringing from prow to thwart, seaweed a-trail in the diamond-flashing wake, and in the bow a man dripping with sweat.

  Up rose the gulls, sweeping in circles, turning, turning over rock and sea, and their clamour filled the sky, starting little rippling echoes among the rocks.

  The canoe grated on a shelf of ebony; the seaweed rocked and washed; the little sea crabs sheered sideways, down, down, into limpid depths of greenest shadows. Such was the coming of Bud Kent to the Key to Grief.

  He drew the canoe halfway up the shelf of rock and sat down, breathing heavily, one brown arm across the bow. For an hour he sat there. The sweat dried under his eyes. The sea birds came back, filling the air with soft querulous notes.

  There was a livid mark around his neck, a red, raw circle. The salt wind stung it; the sun burned it into his flesh like a collar of red-hot steel. He touched it at times; once he washed it with cold salt water. —