‘Don’t you see that?’
‘I see Nile green,’ she maintained. ‘The same as you see.’
I swept the pieces into the box.
‘We are neither of us well,’ I said.
‘I should think you must be deranged to behave so,’ she snapped, ‘and it is no wonder I am not well the way you treat me.’
‘How could I know what you wanted me to see?’ I began.
‘Wanted you to see!’ she cried. ‘You keep it up ? You pretend you didn’t see it, after all? Oh! I have no patience with you.’
She burst into tears, fled upstairs and I heard her slam and lock our bedroom door.
I put that puzzle together again and the likeness of that hungry, filthy child in the picture to our Amy made my heart ache.
I found a stout box, cut two pieces of straw-board just the shape of the puzzle and a trifle larger, laid one on top of it and slid the other under it. Then I tied it together with string and wrapped it in paper and tied the whole.
I put the box in my overcoat pocket and went out carrying the flat parcel.
I walked round to MacIntyre’s.
I told him the whole story and showed him the puzzle.
‘Do you want the truth?’ he asked.
‘Just that,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he reported. ‘You are as overstrung as she is and the same way. There is absolutely no picture on either side of this. One side is solid green and the other solid pink.’
‘How about the coincidence of the names on the box?’ I interjected. ‘One suited what I saw, one what she said she saw.’
’Let’s look at the box,’ he suggested.
He looked at it on all sides.
‘There’s not a letter on it,’ he announced. ‘Except “picture puzzle” on top and “50 cents” on the end.’
‘I don’t feel insane,’ I declared.
‘You aren’t,’ he reassured me. ‘Nor in any danger of being insane. Let me look you over.’
He felt my pulse, looked at my tongue, examined both eyes with his ophthalmoscope, and took a drop of my blood.
‘I’ll report further,’ he said, ‘in confirmation to-morrow. You’re all right, or nearly so, and you’ll soon be really all right. All you need is a little rest. Don’t worry about this idea of your wife’s, humor her. There won’t be any terrible consequences. After Christmas go to Florida or somewhere for a week or so. And don’t exert yourself from now till after that change.’
When I reached home, I went down into the cellar, threw that puzzle and its box into the furnace and stood and watched it burn to ashes.
III
When I came upstairs from the furnace Helen met me as if nothing had happened. By one of her sudden revulsions of mood she was even more gracious than usual, and was at dinner altogether charming. She did not refer to our quarrel or to the puzzle.
The next morning over our breakfast we were both opening our mail. I had told her that I should not go to the office until after Christmas and that I wanted her to arrange for a little tour that would please her. I had phoned to the office not to expect me until after New Year’s.
My mail contained nothing of moment.
Helen looked up from hers with an expression curiously mingled of disappointment, concern and a pleased smile.
‘It is so fortunate you have nothing to do,’ she said ‘I spent four whole days choosing toys and favors and found most of those I selected at Bleich’s. They were to have been delivered day before yesterday but they did not come. I telephoned yesterday and they said they would try to trace them. Here is a letter saying that the whole lot was missent out to Roundwood. You noticed that Roundwood station burned Monday night. They were all burnt up. Now I’ll have to go and find more like them. You can go with me.’
I went.
The two days were a strange mixture of sensations and emotions.
Helen had picked over Bleich’s stock pretty carefully and could duplicate from it few of the burned articles, could find acceptable substitutes for fewer. There followed an exhausting pursuit of the unattainable through a bewildering series of toy-shops and department-stores. We spent most of our time at counters and much of the remainder in a taxicab.
In a way it was very trying. I did not mind the smells and bad air and other mere physical discomforts. But the mental strain continually intensified. Helen’s confidence that Amy would be restored to us was steadily waning and her outward exhibition of it was becoming more and more artificial, and consciously sustained, and more and more of an effort. She was coming to foresee, in spite of herself, that our Christmas celebration would be a most terrible mockery of our bereavement. She was forcing herself not to confess it to herself and not to show it to me. The strain told on her. It told on me to watch it, to see the inevitable crash coming nearer and nearer and to try to put away from myself the pictures of her collapse, of her probable loss of reason, of her possible death, which my imagination kept thrusting before me.
On the other hand Helen was to all appearance, if one had no prevision by which to read her, her most charming self. Her manner to shop-girls and other sales-people was a delight to watch. Her little speeches to me were full of her girlish whimsicality and unexpectedness. Her good will towards all the world, her resolution that everything must come right and would come right haloed her in a sort of aureole of romance. Our lunches were ideal hours, full of the atmosphere of courtship, of lovemaking of exquisite companionship. In spite of my forebodings, I caught the contagion of the Christmas shopping crowds; in spite of her self-deception Helen revelled in it. The purpose to make as many people as possible as happy as might be irradiated Helen with the light of fairyland; her resolve to be happy herself in spite of everything made her a sort of fairy queen. I found myself less and less anxious and more and more almost expectant. I knew Helen was looking for Amy every instant. I found myself in the same state of mind.
Our lunch on Christmas Eve was a strange blend of artificiality and genuine exhilaration. After it we had but one purchase to make.
‘We are in no hurry,’ Helen said. ‘Let’s take a horse-hansom for old sake’s sake.’
In it we were like boy and girl together until the jeweler’s was reached.
There gloom, in spite of us, settled down over our hopes and feelings. Helen walked to the hansom like a gray ghost. Like the whisper of some far-off stranger I heard myself order the driver to take us home.
In the hansom we sat silent, looking straight in front of us at nothing. I stole a glance at Helen and saw a tear in the corner of her eye. I sat choking.
All at once she seized my hand.
‘Look!’ she exclaimed, ‘Look!’
I looked where she pointed, but discerned nothing to account for her excitement.
‘What is it?’ I queried.
‘The old man!’ she exclaimed.
‘What old man?’ I asked bewildered.
‘The old man on the puzzle,’ she told me. ‘The old man who was leading Amy.’
Then I was sure she was demented. To humor her I asked:
‘The old man with the brown coat?’
‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘The old man with the long gray hair over his collar.’
‘With the walking stick?’ I inquired.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘With the crooked walking stick.’
I saw him too! This was no figment of Helen’s imagination.
It was absurd of course, but my eagerness caught fire from hers. I credited the absurdity. In what sort of vision it mattered not she had seen an old man like this leading our lost Amy.
I spoke to the driver, pointed out to him the old man, told him to follow him without attracting his attention and offered him anything he asked to keep him in sight.
Helen became possessed with the idea that we should lose sight of the old man in the crowds. Nothing would do but we must get out and follow him on foot. I remonstrated that we were much more likely to lose sight of him that way, and st
ill more likely to attract his notice, which would be worse than losing him. She insisted and I told the man to keep us in view.
A weary walk we had, though most of it was mere strolling after a tottering figure or loitering about shops he entered.
It was near dusk and full time for us to be at home when he began to walk fast. So fast he drew away from us in spite of us. He turned a corner a half a square ahead of us. When we turned into that street he was nowhere to be seen.
Helen was ready to faint with disappointment. With no hope of helping her, but some instinctive idea of postponing the evil moment I urged her to walk on, saying that perhaps we might see him. About the middle of the square I suddenly stood still.
‘What is the matter?’ Helen asked.
‘The house!’ I said.
‘What house?’ she queried.
‘The house in the puzzle picture,’ I explained. ‘The house where I saw Amy at the window.’
Of course she had not seen any house on the puzzle, but she caught at the last straw of hope.
It was a poor neighborhood of crowded tenements, not quite a slum, yet dirty and unkempt and full of poor folks.
The house door was shut, I could find no sign of any bell. I knocked. No one answered. I tried the door. It was not fastened and we entered a dirty hallway, cold and damp and smelling repulsively. A fat woman stuck her head out of a door and jabbered at us in an unknown tongue. A man with a fez on his greasy black hair came from the back of the hallway and was equally unintelligible.
‘Does nobody here speak English?’ I asked.
The answer was as incomprehensible as before.
I made to go up the stairs.
The man, and the woman, who was now standing before her door, both chattered at once, but neither made any attempt to stop me. They waved vaguely explanatory, deprecating hands towards the blackness of the stairway. We went up.
On the second floor landing we saw just the old man we had been following.
He stared at us when I spoke to him.
‘Son-in-law,’ he said, ‘son-in-law.’
He called and a door opened. An oldish woman answered him in apparently the same jargon. Behind was a young woman holding a baby.
‘What is it?’ she asked with a great deal of accent but intelligibly.
Three or four children held on by her skirts.
Behind her I saw a little girl in a blue-check dress.
Helen screamed.
IV
The people turned out to be refugees from the settlement about the sacked German Mission at Dehkhargan near Tabriz, Christianized Persians, such stupid villagers that they had never thought or had been incapable of reporting their find to the police, so ignorant that they knew nothing of rewards or advertisements, such simple-hearted folk that they had shared their narrow quarters and scanty fare with the unknown waif their grandfather had found wandering alone, after dark, months before.
Amy, when we had leisure to ask questions and hear her experiences, declared they had treated her as they treated their own children. She could give no description of her kidnappers except that the woman had on a hat with roses in it and the man had a little yellow mustache. She could not tell how long they had kept her nor why they had left her to wander in the streets at night.
It needed no common language, far less any legal proof, to convince Amy’s hosts that she belonged to us. I had a pocket full of Christmas money, new five and ten dollar gold pieces and bright silver quarters for the servants and children. I filled the old grandfather’s hands and plainly overwhelmed him. They all jabbered at us, blessings, if I judged the tone right. I tried to tell the young woman we should see them again in a day or two and I gave her a card to make sure.
I told the cabman to stop the first taxicab he should see empty. In the hansom we hugged Amy alternately and hugged each other.
Once in the taxicab we were home in half an hour; more, much more than half an hour late. Helen whisked Amy in by the servants’ door and flew upstairs with her by the back way. I faced a perturbed and anxious parlorful of interrogative relatives and in-laws.
‘You’ll know before many minutes,’ I said, ‘why we were both out and are in late. Helen will want to surprise you and I’ll say nothing to spoil the effect.’
Nothing I could have said would have spoiled the effect because they would not have believed me. As it was Helen came in sooner than I could have thought possible, looking her best and accurately playing the formal hostess with a feeble attempt at a surprise in store.
The dinner was a great success, with much laughter and high spirits, everybody carried away by Helen’s sallies and everybody amazed that she could be so gay.
‘I cannot understand,’ Paul’s wife whispered to me, ‘how she can ever get through the party. It would kill me in her place.’
‘It won’t kill her,’ I said confidently. ‘You may be sure of that.’
The children had arrived to the number of more than thirty and only the inevitably late Amstelhuysens had not come. Helen announced that she would not wait for them.
‘The tree is lighted,’ she said. ‘We’ll have the doors thrown open and go in.’
We were all gathered in the front parlor. The twins panted in at the last instant. The grown-ups were pulling motto-crackers and the children were throwing confetti. The doors opened, the tree filled all the back of the room. The candles blazed and twinkled. And in front of it, in a simple little white dress, with a fairy’s wand in her hand, tipped with a silver star, clean, healthy-looking, and full of spirits was Amy, the fairy of the hour.
The Snout
I
I WAS not so much conning the specimens in the Zoological Garden as idly basking in the agreeable morning sunshine and relishing at leisure the perfect weather. So I saw him the instant he turned the corner of the building. At first, I thought I recognized him, then I hesitated. At first he seemed to know me and to be just about to greet me; then he saw past me into the cage. His eyes bulged; his mouth opened into a long egg-shaped oval, till you might almost have said that his jaw dropped; he made an inarticulate sound, partly a grunt, partly the ghost of a howl, and collapsed in a limp heap on the gravel. I had not seen a human being since I passed the gate, some distance away. No one came when I called. So I dragged him to the grass by a bench, untied his faded, shiny cravat, took off his frayed collar and unbuttoned his soiled neckband. Then I peeled his coat off him, rolled it up, and put it under his knees as he lay on his back. I tried to find some water, but could see none. So I sat down on the bench near him. There he lay, his legs and body on the grass, his head in the dry gutter, his arms on the pebbles of the path. I was sure I knew him, but I could not recall when or where we had encountered each other before. Presently he answered to my rough and ready treatment and opened his eyes, blinking at me heavily. He drew up his arms to his shoulders and sighed.
‘Queer,’ he muttered, ‘I come here because of you and I meet you.’
Still I could not remember him and he had revived enough to read my face. He sat up.
‘Don’t try to stand up!’ I warned him.
He did not need the admonition, but clung to the end of the bench, his head bowed wagglingly over his arms.
‘Don’t you remember,’ he asked thickly. ‘You said I had a pretty good smattering of an education on everything except Natural History and Ancient History. I’m hoping for a job in a few days, and I thought I’d put in the time and keep out of mischief brushing up. So I started on Natural History first and—’
He broke off and glared up at me. I remembered him now. I should have recognized him the moment I saw him, for he was daily in my mind. But his luxuriant hair, his tanned skin and above all his changed expression, a sort of look of acquired cosmopolitanism, had baffled me.
‘Natural History!’ he repeated, in a hoarse whisper. His fingers digging in the slats of the bench he wrenched himself round to face the cage.
‘Hell!’ he screamed. ‘There it i
s yet!’
He held on by the end iron-arm of the bench, shaking, almost sobbing.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I queried. ‘What do think you see in that cage?’
‘Do you see anything in that cage?’ he demanded in reply.
‘Certainly,’ I told him.
‘Then for God’s sake,’ he pleaded. ‘What do you see?’
I told him briefly.
‘Good Lord,’ he ejaculated. ‘Are we both crazy ?’
‘Nothing crazy about either of us,’ I assured him.
‘What we see in the cage is what is in the cage.’
‘Is there such a critter as that, honest?’ he pressed me.
I gave him a pretty full account of the animal, its habits and relationships.
‘Well,’ he said, weakly, ‘I suppose you’re telling the truth. If there is such a critter let’s get where I can’t see it.’
I helped him to his feet and assisted him to a bench altogether out of sight of that building. He put on his collar and knotted his cravat. While I had held it I had noticed that, through its greasy condition, it showed plainly having been a very expensive cravat. His clothes I remarked were seedy, but had been of the very best when new.
‘Let’s find a drinking fountain,’ he suggested, ‘I can walk now.’
We found one not far away and at no great distance from it a shaded bench facing an agreeable view. I offered him a cigarette and we smoked. I meant to let him do most of the talking.
‘Do you know,’ he began presently. ‘Things you said to me run in my head more than anything anybody ever said to me. I suppose it’s because you’re a sort of philosopher and student of human nature and what you say is true. For instance, you said that criminals would get off clear three times out of four, if they just kept their mouths shut, but they have to confide in some one, even against all reason. That’s just the way with me now.’
The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics) Page 19
