“Emily, I beg of you never to talk in this way again. I blame myself beyond all telling. Please, dear, let us try to forget it all!”
The sobbing figure seemed not to hear. “Agatha,” she said, “I want you to promise me something,—that you will never keep from me anything in regard to Vanderkoep. It is my right to know everything and at once. So you must not only tell me, but it must be immediately, the next morning—whatever, whatever, it may be.”
Agatha, whose affection for her friend was ever her line of least resistance, succumbed.
“Why, yes, dear, I promise,” she agreed, nervously. “Let me make you some tea.”
Within the few months of Vanderkoep’s spectral existence there had at times threatened to appear—though the admission could not have been wrung from either of the two friends—a narrow rift within the exquisitely close tissue of their intimacy. The lack was perhaps not so much of understanding as of sincerity, of outspokenness, between them; and Miss Agatha, who suffered excruciatingly from the knowledge of this, was also painfully aware of the cause. Quite unconsciously, Emily was jealous of her more intimate knowledge of Vanderkoep. And why, thought the unhappy Agatha, should she not be? How grotesquely cruel it was that Emily should always be obliged to learn at second hand of Vanderkoep’s countless physical perfections and delicious infant waywardnesses! that she should be denied the mirrored joy of once holding her own dream-baby in her arms! It was so simple a thing to dream—why might not poor dear Emily yield herself to at least one radiant delusion?
Early in May, according to the arithmetic of Miss Agatha’s visions, Vanderkoep attained the dignity of his first anniversary. Truthful and conscientious to a fault, she communicated the report of this festival, though with an evident unwillingness.
“We will let the china wait a little,” said Miss Emily, with determination. “Sit down and tell me all about it. What did he say?”
“He said ‘mamma,’ ” replied Miss Agatha, with the tender patience of one teaching the blind, “and hugged you with that happy little scream of his.”
Miss Emily nodded.
“And then he laughed mischievously, showing all his cunning little teeth.”
“Five of them,” interjected Miss Emily, accurately.
“And when I tried to find out what pleased him so much, I saw that he was holding tightly under his arm a toy elephant—”
“Where had he gotten it?”
“Why, it was one of his birthday presents from you. I think you must have given him a dozen. One was a fine bay horse, harnessed into a cart, with real harness and all that. It seemed to delight him particularly.”
“Boys always love horses so,” said Miss Emily, wisely.
“And though I tried to make him come to me, he wouldn’t. He stayed with you and cuddled.”
Thus was the narrative continued and pieced out and refitted and every least detail adjusted to its place. At the close of which Miss Emily put on her glasses and sat down at her desk to enter faithfully into the book devoted to Vanderkoep the full and unabridged history of his first birthday.
A few days later the first prolonged heat wave swept blightingly over the city.
“I think we cannot get away too soon. Emily,” observed Miss Agatha. “How fortunate it is we haven’t to wait till June!”
Miss Emily said nothing.
“What do you think, my dear?” pursued Miss Agatha.
“I suppose I might as well say, now,” said Miss Emily, “that I think we cannot go out of town this summer.”
“But why?”
“Because of Vanderkoep,” Miss Emily came out flatly.
“Well?”
“His very existence is exclusively associated with our rooms here. Do you feel confident, Agatha, that if we went away and interrupted our psychic connection with these surroundings—I hardly know how to put it—”
“I know I should dream of Vanderkoep anywhere,” declared Miss Agatha, wearily.
“But how do you know? Have you ever been able to control—”
“No,” confessed Miss Agatha.
“And yet you would venture—”
“It would make you unhappy, would it not, Emily, to go away?” interrupted Miss Agatha, to whom these discussions were painful, she could not tell why. “Very well, then, we will stay. I suppose we would better have a maid in for the summer.”
So, through the listless warmth of May, the determined heat of June, and the relentless blaze of July, the two ladies lingered on in the little flat in Twelfth Street. There was little enough to interest or stimulate. Existence itself seemed a perfunctory and in no way desirable affair. The two ladies availed themselves to the fullest of their library subscription, corresponded with friends spending the summer in Europe—and talked of Vanderkoep. Miss Agatha proved herself of heroic stuff by suppressing her almost intolerable longing for cool air and the smell of the sea; Miss Emily suffered the heat and discomfort in significant silence.
During the first week of August came the crisis of the summer’s feverish violence. The ominous stillness associated with extreme heat pervaded places where hitherto one had been conscious of nothing but noise. The torrid, throbbing nights were less to be borne than the burning days; sleep, except in snatches, was impossible. From the whole stricken city seemed to rise continuous, unlovely exhalations of sickness, suffering, death.III
Miss Emily’s never too robust strength yielded to the cruel heat, and for days Miss Agatha nursed her faithfully. During one feverish evening, in particular, when no night coolness came to bring relief, Miss Agatha spent all her strength in the effort to gain a little comfort for her friend. At midnight, exhausted, she lay down without undressing in her own room and slept till dawn. When she awoke, it was with a cry. Miss Emily, lightly dozing in the next room, heard it.
“What is it, Agatha dear?” she asked. Receiving no answer, she called again, then went into Agatha’s room. Her friend was sitting upright with a curious expression on her tired face.
An almost supernatural intuition directed Miss Emily’s challenge, “You have been dreaming of Vanderkoep!”
“I am not myself, Emily.” Miss Agatha began to talk very fast. “It’s the heat. It muddles one’s head so. I’m really not responsible. I’m not, indeed. Don’t talk of it, Emily. Let us wait till another time.”
“I know,” said Miss Emily. “You need not tell me. He’s dead. My baby’s dead.”
She went and stood by the window and looked vaguely out. “What killed him?” She turned sharply to Miss Agatha.
“Emily, I feel like a murderer!” she broke out. “Don’t, don’t!”
“What killed him?” persisted Miss Emily, in a hard voice.
“Darling—he died from a fever. I think it must have been the heat. We did everything for him. He did not seem to suffer, Emily!”
Miss Emily said nothing, but continued to stand by the window. Her back was rigid. She wrung her hands incessantly.
“Emily,” begged Miss Agatha, clasping her about the shoulders, “you must not suffer so. It is not too late. Listen, dear,—you must wait until I can get a strong sleeping-powder from the drug-store. Then I shall take it and let it put me to sleep, and I shall dream—of course I shall. I shall dream him back again. I know, Emily, that this was not a true dream. You see, dear, the heat and all!”
“And could that comfort me—that you should dream a lying dream? What are you doing to me, Agatha? Why should you want to lie to me, now, when my baby’s dead?”
Outside, in the street, there was the first stir of day. Miss Emily, ignoring her friend’s entreaties, hurriedly dressed herself, tied a veil neatly over her hat and buttoned her cotton gloves. Then, still in silence, she went to the outer door and turned the knob.
“Emily!” cried the agonized Miss Agatha, “where are you going?”
Miss Emily paused a moment. “Why, I am going,” she said, steadily, “to get some flowers for my baby.”
I. Ruth Pinch is a character
in Charles Dickens’s 1844 Martin Chuzzlewit; sweet-natured and domestic, she works as a governess and a housewife.
II. A reference to the scene in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which she grows and shrinks from drinking from a mysterious bottle and eating a small cake.
III. Prior to the introduction of electric fans and air conditioning, hundreds would die in heat waves; one such period in 1911 killed 211 people in New York alone.
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) was a highly popular British writer of more than 60 children’s books written under the name “E. Nesbit,” including The Railway Children (1906). She was also a socialist and political activist, and co-founder of the Fabian Society, later affiliated with the Labour Party. Nesbit wrote dozens of short stories, including many for adult audiences. Her collections of horror stories entitled Grim Tales and Something Wrong were both first published in 1903, and another collection including supernatural fiction appeared in 1906. The following, a chilling cautionary tale with overtones of Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, first appeared in the Strand Magazine of February 1908 under her married name E. Bland.
The Third Drug by E. Bland (Edith Nesbit)
I
Roger Wroxham looked round his studio before he blew out the candle, and wondered whether, perhaps, he looked for the last time. It was large and empty, yet his trouble had filled it and, pressing against him in the prison of those four walls, forced him out into the world, where lights and voices and the presence of other men should give him room to draw back, to set a space between it and him, to decide whether he would ever face it again—he and it alone together. The nature of his trouble is not germane to this story. There was a woman in it, of course, and money, and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments—and all of these reached out tendrils that wove and interwove till they made a puzzle problem of which heart and brain were now weary.
He blew out the candle and went quietly downstairs. It was nine at night, a soft night of May in Paris. Where should he go? He thought of the Seine, and took—an omnibus. When at last it stopped he got off, and so strange was the place to him that it almost seemed as though the trouble itself had been left behind. He did not feel it in the length of three or four streets that he traversed slowly. But in the open space, very light and lively, where he recognised the Taverne de Paris and knew himself in Montmartre, the trouble set its teeth in his heart again, and he broke away from the lamps and the talk to struggle with it in the dark, quiet streets beyond.
A man braced for such a fight has little thought to spare for the details of his surroundings. The next thing that Wroxham knew of the outside world was the fact which he had known for some time that he was not alone in the street. There was someone on the other side of the road keeping pace with him—yes, certainly keeping pace, for, as he slackened his own, the feet on the other pavement also went more slowly. And now they were four feet, not two. Where had the other man sprung from? He had not been there a moment ago. And now, from an archway a little ahead of him, a third man came.
Wroxham stopped. Then three men converged upon him, and, like a sudden magic-lantern picture on a sheet prepared, there came to him all that he had heard and read of Montmartre—dark archways, knives, Apaches,I and men who went away from homes where they were beloved and never again returned. He, too—well, if he never returned again, it would be quicker than the Seine, and, in the event of ultramundane possibilities, safer.
He stood still and laughed in the face of the man who first reached him.
“Well, my friend?” said he; and at that the other two drew close.
“Monsieur walks late,” said the first, a little confused, as it seemed, by that laugh.
“And will walk still later if it pleases him,” said Roger. “Good night, my friends.”
“Ah!” said the second, “friends do not say adieu so quickly. Monsieur will tell us the hour.”
“I have not a watch,” said Roger, quite truthfully.
“I will assist you to search for it,” said the third man, and laid a hand on his arm.
Roger threw it off. The man with the hand staggered back.
“The knife searches more surely,” said the second.
“No, no,” said the third, quickly; “he is too heavy. I for one will not carry him afterwards.”
They closed round him, hustling him between them. Their pale, degenerate faces spun and swung round him in the struggle. For there was a struggle. He had not meant that there should be a struggle. Someone would hear—someone would come.
But if any heard none came. The street retained its empty silence; the houses, masked in close shutters, kept their reserve. The four were wrestling, all pressed close together in a writhing bunch, drawing breath hardly through set teeth, their feet slipping and not slipping on the rounded cobblestones.
It was then that Roger felt the knife. Its point glanced off the cigarette-case in his breast pocket and bit sharply at his inner arm. And at the sting of it Roger knew, suddenly and quite surely, that he did not desire to die. He feigned a reeling weakness, relaxed his grip, swayed sideways, and then suddenly caught the other two in a new grip, crushed their faces together, flung them off, and ran. It was but for an instant that his feet were the only ones that echoed in the street. Then he knew that the others too were running.
He ran more swiftly—he was running now for his life—the life that he had held so cheap three minutes before. And all the streets were empty—empty like dream-streets, with all their windows dark and unhelpful, their doors fast closed against his need. Only now and again he glanced to right or left, if perchance some window might show light to justify a cry for help, some door advance the welcome of an open inch.
There was at last such a door. He did not see it till it was almost behind him. Then there was the drag of the sudden stop—the eternal instant of indecision. Was there time? There must be. He dashed his fingers through the inch-crack, grazing the backs of them, leapt within, drew the door after him, felt madly for a lock or bolt, found a key, and, hanging his whole weight on it, managed to get the door home and turned the key. Then someone cursed breathlessly outside; there was the sound of feet that went away.
He found himself listening, listening, and there was nothing to hear but the silence, and once, before he thought to twist his handkerchief round it, the drip of blood from his hand.
By and by he knew that he was not alone in this house, for from far away there came the faint sound of a footstep, and, quite near, the faint answering echo of it. And at a window high up on the other side of the courtyard a light showed. Light and sound and echo intensified, the light passing window after window, till at last it moved across the courtyard and the little trees threw black shifting shadows as it came towards him—a lamp in the hand of a man.
It was a short, bald man, with pointed beard and bright, friendly eyes. He held the lamp high as he came, and when he saw Roger he drew his breath in an inspiration that spoke of surprise, sympathy, pity.
“Hold! hold!” he said, in a singularly pleasant voice; “there has been a misfortune? You are wounded, monsieur?”
“Apaches,” said Roger, and was surprised at the weakness of his own voice.
“Fortunately,” said the other, “I am a surgeon. Allow me.”
He set the lamp on the step of a closed door, took off Roger’s coat, and quickly tied his own handkerchief round the wounded arm.
“Now,” he said, “courage! I am alone in the house. No one comes here but me. If you can walk up to my rooms you will save us both much trouble. If you cannot, sit here and I will fetch you a cordial. But I advise you to try to walk. That portecochère is, unfortunately, not very strong, and the lock is a common spring lock, and your friends may return with their friends; whereas the door across the courtyard is heavy, and the bolts are new.”
Roger moved towards the heavy door whose bolts were new. The stairs seemed to go on for ever. The doctor lent his arm, but the ca
rved banisters and their lively shadows whirled before Roger’s eyes. Also he seemed to be shod with lead, and to have in his legs bones that were red hot. Then the stairs ceased, and there was light, and a cessation of the dragging of those leaden feet. He was on a couch, and his eyes might close.
When next he saw and heard he was lying at ease, the close intimacy of a bandage clasping his arm, and in his mouth the vivid taste of some cordial.
The doctor was sitting in an arm chair near a table, looking benevolent through gold-rimmed pince-nez.
“Better?” he said. “No; lie still, you’ll be a new man soon.”
“I am desolated,” said Roger, “to have occasioned you all this trouble.”
“In a big house like this,” said the doctor, as it seemed a little sadly, “there are many empty rooms, and some rooms which are not empty. There is a bed altogether at your service, monsieur, and I counsel you not to delay in seeking it. You can walk?”
Wroxham stood up. “Why, yes,” he said, stretching himself. “I feel, as you say, a new man.”
A narrow bed and rush-bottomed chair showed like doll’s-house furniture in the large, high, gaunt room to which the doctor led him.
“You are too tired to undress yourself,” said the doctor; “rest—only rest,” and covered him with a rug, snugly tucked him up, and left him.
“I leave the door open,” he said, “in case you should have any fever. Good night. Do not torment yourself. All goes well.”
Then he took away the lamp, and Wroxham lay on his back and saw the shadows of the window-frames cast by the street lamps on the high ceiling. His eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, perceived the carving of the white panelled walls and mantelpiece. There was a door in the room, another door than the one which the doctor had left open. Roger did not like open doors. The other door, however, was closed. He wondered where it led, and whether it were locked. Presently he got up to see. It was locked. He lay down again.
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