by Jerry
universally-liked Dick Calder. These two had been firm friends before, in spite of the fact that they had often flirted with the same girl. But it was impossible for two young fellows to love Amelia and continue to love each other.
To do Amelia justice” she was rigidly impartial between Burton and Calder. For both she had the same silvery tones, for both the same fascinating smile. To both, if they asked the same questions, she returned identically the same answers. To both she sang the same songs, with the crescendo on the same passages, and both, at the conclusion of the songs, received the same languishing, irresistible smile over the right shoulder, which made them her slaves on the spot.
One evening, a curious incident happened. Burton and Calder were as usual basking in the rays of their divinity, when by some mischance Amelia’s brooch fell to the ground.
Both the swains stooped to pick it up, but Burton was successful. Delighted at his triumph over his rival, he solicited the honour of re-fastening it.
Calder watched him with jealous eyes. Suddenly a clumsy pair of waltzers, not looking where they were going, came hard into Burton. The brooch pin was driven deep into the fair throat of Amelia. Burton started in horror; he began a savage oath, but stopping in time he pulled out the pin. Amelia had not uttered a sound.
Burton, speechless with dismay, was taking out his handkerchief to staunch the blood; a little crowd was gathering round them; when I, suddenly recollecting myself, rushed in. With the speed of lightning I slipped out my handkerchief and tied it round Amelia’s neck.
“Stand back, all of you!” I said in a tone of command. Even Burton and Calder fell back a little.
“My niece is very sensitive,” I said. “The hurt is not great, but it would be as well that she should go home at once.” A terror had possessed me; an overmastering fear of detection held me as in a vice.
“I assure you, uncle, that I am not hurt at all,” said Amelia.
“Come along,” I said sternly.
I hurried her off, finding just time to bid my adieus to my hostess, and to console the dumfounded Burton by saying there was no danger.
We drove, not home, but direct to Moore’s lodgings. Hurriedly we went upstairs. Moore was still up. He seemed surprised to see us.
“What do you want,” he said.
“Fools that we are,” I answered. “Why, we were within a hair’s breadth of detection. The creature can’t bleed!’
“Why, what need has she to bleed?” he said.
“Every need,” I answered. “Doesn’t a girl bleed when a pin is driven a good inch into her throat? “
“What do you mean?”
I explained the circumstances, and how I hoped I had for this once staved off discovery. I had been just in time.
“No,” he said, when I had finished. “I never thought she would need to bleed. Strange that I should have forgotten that. They say that murderers always forget just one thing, just one little thing. But they take pains to get rid of the blood, and I ought to take pains to have it there.”
“Give it up, Moore,” I said.
“Give it up! Never!” he shouted. “Give it up for a few drops of blood! Rather would I drain my own veins into hers. Rather go out and kill somebody. What did Mephistopheles say? ‘Blood is a peculiar sort of juice.’ But I will make it.”
Miss Brooke was “ill” for a few weeks, from “shock to the system.” At the end of that time I saw Moore again. He and the Phantasm were in the room together. He gave me a pin.
“Prick her,” he said.
I obeyed, not unwillingly; and to my horror something very like bleeding began.
“Yes,” said Moore, “I have done it. I have looked up Shakespeare. Do you remember what Shylock says, to prove that a Jew is, after all, a man? ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?’ Now every one of these marks my Amelia has; so I say she is a genuine woman. Why, if you tickle her, she will laugh!”
“No one is likely to tickle her,” I said.
“No; but after our last experience it is well to be prepared for all emergencies.”
In this case, however, I did not make an experiment. Moore’s word was enough. If the creature’s smile was so detestable, what must her laugh be like?
After her time of seclusion, Amelia again appeared in Society, and was again the cynosure of all eyes, chiefly, however, of the four owned by Burton and Calder. These latter had never ceased to make inquiries after her health.
I had often wondered whether Burton had noticed that the scratch of the pin had drawn no blood; but his conduct afterwards set me at ease. If he had seen it he had probably thought that his Venus was too ethereal to bleed even the thinnest celestial ichor.
Though Amelia certainly could not feel, yet there was no doubt that in the future she would bleed if pricked, and I was free from anxiety on that score. But there was one thing which caused me considerable uneasiness. She was a girl of originality—indeed, I venture to think that there has never been a girl quite like her—yet there was a sameness, an artificiality, about her which puzzled and alarmed me. To the same question she always and inevitably returned the same answer. On topics of the day she always had the same opinion, expressed in the same words. My rival, Sir John Bolas, who didn’t like her for some reason or other, used to say that in her company he always felt as if talking to a very well-trained parrot. She uttered her opinions as if they had been learnt verbatim from someone else.
The time drew near for Calder and Burton to declare themselves. I need not say that, closely as I watched the doings of Amelia, I was not present on these auspicious occasions. But I can distinctly assert, nevertheless, from my knowledge of human nature, that the language of Calder, who came second, was almost precisely the same as that of Burton, who had the first chance. Hence it followed, with mathematical certainty, that Amelia’s reply would be the same to both.
Here was a pretty predicament! What I had blamed in her was her unwomanly constancy; but this very constancy had led—as I was sure both a priori and from the happy faces of the two young men—to a display of fickleness unparalleled in the whole history of womankind. Within an hour after accepting Burton the faithless creature accepted Calder in almost identically the same terms. Even the most heartless of coquettes had surely never been guilty of such conduct as this.
All this, however, was for the present merely a plausible conjecture, based upon a more or less certain knowledge of character. To make sure of it, I determined to ask. The result but too sadly confirmed my fears. Burton was almost delirious with joy.
“She is mine,” he said; “and that beast Calder was never in it with her. To think that I should ever have been afraid of a cad like that!”
I congratulated him, as in duty bound, and spent an hour with him, which may have been pleasant to him, but became very tedious to me, so difficult was it to get him off his one eternal topic and induce him to talk like a rational being. At last, however, I managed to effect my escape, and made my way to Calder. He also received me very graciously.
“Old man,” he said, “I have good news to tell you. Amelia has just consented to be engaged to me.”
“Indeed!” I replied; “I am very pleased to hear it. You are a happy man, Dick.”
“Yes,” he said, “happier than I deserve. But what delights me almost as much as having won her is that she never gave a thought to that fellow Burton. If I had had any sense I must have seen that a girl like her could never be taken in by a wretched fellow like him; but somehow I managed to be jealous of him. Well, that’s all over, thank goodness. I really believe I shall get to like him now I’m sure he can do me no harm.”
And so the young fellow chatted on, cutting me to the heart with almost e
very sentence that he uttered. What a dreadful awakening I was preparing for him! For of course, the awful truth must be told him, that he and his rival had fallen in love with a sham. It would be an awkward moment for both of us. Should I tell him now, and get it over? On the whole I preferred to put it off, and consult Moore first. His fertile brain would suggest a way out of the difficulty. Perhaps he would make a second automaton that would do for one of the rival suitors, while the other kept to Amelia. At any rate, I preferred to get his advice before acting. He had made the Phantasm bleed; might he not get us out of this still more unpleasant position?
I told him of the new complication. To my surprise he made light of it.
“Well?” he said, when I had finished my recital.
“Well?” I replied, “I should think that was enough.”
“Why,” he said, “I can see nothing wonderful in that. The wonder would be if they hadn’t proposed to her. Women have had offers before now.”
“But you can’t intend to let things go on as they are?” I cried.
“That’s exactly what I do intend,” he answered. “Why should I interfere?”
“But think of it for one moment,” I said. “Two men in love with the same automaton; two men in the position of accepted lovers at the same moment! Think of even one man in that position! How awful it is—why, it is too dreadful to think of!”
“Then I shan’t think of it,” he answered coolly. “My dear fellow, what is there so strange in it all? Men have been in love with stone-like women before this. Men have given themselves up to heartless and soulless abstractions before this. Anyone who gets my Amelia will get something, at any rate, not a mere doll.”
The plain fact dawned on me that Moore’s extraordinary success had turned his brain. He had put so much of himself into his automaton that he had positively begun to regard her as a real living being, in whose veins flowed his own blood, in whose nostrils was his own breath. Eve was not more truly bone of Adam’s bone than this Amelia was part and parcel of Moore’s life.
There was a mysterious union between them which gave me an uncanny feeling of sorcery. Could it be that by some unholy means Moore had succeeded in conveying some portion of his own life to this creature of his brain? I tried to dismiss the thought, for I am a man of science; yet it recurred again and again.
Burton and Calder were engaged to Amelia. It may be easily understood that now and then they came into collision. Sometimes things looked strange to them. Calder once demanded an explanation of his fiancée as to the frequency of Burton’s visits. She gave him an account that satisfied him, and sealed it with a smile and a kiss that made him feel like a villain forever doubting her.
People wondered at the confidence with which both the young men asserted that they were the favoured suitors, and admired the daring skill with which Amelia played off one against the other. No one warned the young men; it was none of our business to interfere with them.
In such matters one young man is remarkably similar to another. Their very modes of speech tend to become the same. In asking Amelia to fix the day, need it be wondered at that they used precisely the same terms as have been used by all young men from the day when that nameless suitor of “pretty Jane” promised to buy the ring for his beloved? The result may be easily foreseen. Amelia, by some hidden law of her being, for which not she but perhaps Moore was to blame, could not help fixing the same day for both. Had a third candidate appeared on the scene, she would have fixed the same day for him also.
When I had heard this fatal denouement, I confess that even Moore’s influence could not keep me from taking a step on my own account. I would not destroy Amelia, much as I hated her for the trouble she had caused me. Something seemed to tell me that her death would be the certain death of Moore, whose life was bound up in hers as closely as the life of Jacob was bound up in that of Benjamin.
By some subtle process, every time danger threatened Amelia, Moore’s spirits seemed to sink; every time she surmounted the danger his spirits rose again. He had put himself into her. I would not destroy her; but I went to Calder and I gave him a pretty plain hint as to the position of affairs between her and Burton. He would not believe me.
“If I thought she was false,” he said, “I would stab her where she stood, were it at the very altar. But it cannot be. She has pledged herself to me, and mine she is!”
“I know it for a fact,” I answered, “that she has promised to marry Burton on the 29th of February.”
“The twenty-ninth,” he cried. “Why, that is my day, the day on which she promised to marry me.”
“Precisely so,” I said. “What she means to do I don’t know.”
“But I know what I mean to do,” he answered gloomily. “I will have it out with her.”
“No violence.”
“None at all. Don’t fear me. By Heaven, what a heartless creature. But it can’t be true. You are deceiving me.”
“Too true. But find out for yourself.”
I took my leave, and went home.
I afterwards ascertained what Calder’s plan was. He made no inquiry from Amelia; he simply went and begged her to put off the day of his marriage a month, from the twenty-ninth of-February to the last day of March. She readily agreed. He then went off and bought a sharp Spanish dagger.
The day of the marriage drew near, and nearer. Every preparation was completed.
It was to be fashionable. The church was got ready in expectation of a large assemblage of people. At length the eventful morning dawned. I was to give the bride away to Burton, as after the postponement of Calder’s wedding he was the only bridegroom left in the race. We came out and stood before the altar.
As I passed along I noticed two figures in different parts of the building, both familiar to me. They were Moore and Calder. The former was untidy, evidently excited and restless. The latter was scrupulously neat; but he had a strangely determined look on his face. One hand was hidden under the breast of his frock coat.
The service proceeded.
Fancy a girl like this being told she was a daughter of Abraham, so long as she was not afraid with any amazement! Certainly a cooler, less perturbed daughter of the patriarch I never saw. She gave the responses in a clear, musical voice. They came to the fatal question—“Wilt thou have this man to be thy husband?”
Before she could answer “I will,” there was a sudden confusion; a man rushed forward, drew forth a dagger from his breast, and shouting, “You shall not!” stabbed Amelia to the heart—or rather through the left side of her bodice. She fell to the ground, striking her head heavily as she fell against the rail. There was a whirr, a rush. The anti-phonograph was broken. I bent over her, and opened her dress to staunch the wound. Moore had made no provision for her bleeding there. As I drew out the dagger, it was followed by a rush of sawdust.
In the confusion of the strange discovery, no one noticed that a real death was taking place not twenty feet away. As the sexton was clearing out the church, he noticed a man asleep in one of the pews, leaning against a pillar. He went up and touched him; but there was no answer. He shook him; but the man was as heedless as Baal. It was Arthur Moore, and he was dead. He had put his life into his masterpiece; his wonderful toy was broken, and the cord of Moore’s life was broken with it.
And as for me, why, I am no longer a fashionable physician. As I write, there are men about me, who talk of me as a patient.
THE LAST DAYS OF EARTH
John Stanton
BEING THE STORY OF THE LAUNCHING OF THE “RED SPHERE.”
A MAN and a woman sat facing each other across a table in a large room. They were talking slowly, and eating—eating their last meal on earth. The end was near; the sun had ceased to warm, was but a red-hot cinder outwardly; and these two, to the best of their belief, were the last people left alive in a world-wilderness of ice and snow and unbearable cold.
The woman was beautiful—very fair and slight, but with the tinge of health upon her delicate s
kin and the fire of intellect in her eyes. The man was of medium height, broad-shouldered, with wide, bald head and resolute mien—a man of courage, dauntless purpose, strenuous life. Both were dressed in long robes of a thick, black material, held in at the waist by a girdle.
As they talked, their fingers were busy with a row of small white knobs let into the surface of the table, and marked with various signs. At the pressure of each knob a flap in the middle of the table opened, and a small glass vessel, with a dark, semi-liquid compound steaming in it, was pushed up. As these came, in obedience to the tapping of their fingers, the two ate their contents with the aid of tiny spoons. There was no other dining apparatus or dinner furniture upon the table, which stood upon a single but massive pedestal of grey metal.
The meal over, the glasses and spoons replaced, the table surface clean and clear, a silence fell between them. The man rested his elbows upon his knees and his chin upon his upturned palms. He did not look at his fair companion, but beyond her, at a complicated structure projecting from the wall. This was the Time Indicator, and gave, on its various discs, the year, the month, the day, the hour and the instant, all corrected to mean astronomical time and to the exact latitude and longitude of the place. He read the well-known symbols with defiant eyes. He saw that it was just a quarter to thirteen in the afternoon of Thursday, July 18th, 13,000,085 A.D. He reflected that the long association of the place with time-recording had been labour spent in vain. The room was in a great building on the site of ancient Greenwich. In fact, the last name given to the locality by its now dead and cold inhabitants had been Grenijia.
From the time machine, the man’s gaze went round the room. He noted, with apparently keen interest, all the things that were so familiar to him—the severely plain walls, transparent on one side, but without window-frame or visible door in their continuity; the chilling prospect of a faintly-lit expanse of snow outside; the big telescope that moved in an airtight slide across the ceiling, and the little motor that controlled its motions; the electric radiators that heated the place, forming an almost unbroken dado round the walls’; the globe of pale brilliance that hung in the middle of the room and assisted the twilight glimmer of the day; the neat library of books and photo-phono cylinders, and the tier of speaking machines beneath it; the bed in the further corner, surrounded by yet more radiators; the two ventilating valves; the great dull disc of the Pictorial Telegraph; and the thermometer let into a vacant space of floor. On this last his glance rested for some time, and the woman’s also. It registered the degrees from absolute zero, and stood at a figure equivalent to 420 Fahrenheit. From this tell-tale instrument the eyes of the two turned to each other, a common knowledge shining in each face. The man was the first to speak again.