Rivvin made the fish-out-of-water contortions of a man being killed. Thwaite brought his slung-shot down on the beast-head skull.
The blow was enough to crush in a steel cylinder. The beast wrinkled its snout and shook its head from side to side, worrying like a bull-dog at Rivvin's throat.
Again Thwaite struck and again and again. At each blow the portentous head oscillated viciously. The awful thing about it to me was the two blue bosses on each side of the muzzle, like enamel, shiny and hard looking; and the hideous welt of red, like fresh sealing-wax, down between them and along the snout.
Rivvin's struggles grew weaker as the great teeth tore at his throat. He was dead before Thwaite's repeated blows drove in the splintered skull and the clenched jaws relaxed, the snout crinkling and contracting as the dog-teeth slid from their hold.
Thwaite gave the monster two or three more blows, touched Rivvin and fairly dashed out of the room, shouting.
“You stay here!”
I heard the sound of prying and sawing. There alone I looked but once at the dead cracksman. The thing that had killed him was the size of a four to six year old child, but more stockily built, looked entirely human up to the neck, and was dressed in a coat of bright dark blue, a vest of crimson velvet, and white duck trousers. As I looked the muzzle wriggled for the last time, the jaws fell apart and the carcass rolled sideways. It was the very duplicate in miniature of the figure in the big picture on the staircase landing.
Thwaite came dashing back. Without any sign of any qualm he searched Rivvin and tossed me two or three bundles of greenbacks.
He stood up.
He laughed.
“Curiosity,” he said, “will be the death of me.” Then he stripped the clothing from the dead monster, kneeling by it.
The beast-hair stopped at the shirt collar. Below that the skin was human, as was the shape, the shape of a forty-year-old man, strong and vigorous and well-made, only dwarfed to the smallness of a child.
Across the hairy breast was tatooed in blue,
“HENGIST EVERSLEIGH.”
“Hell,” said Thwaite.
He stood up and went to the fatal door. Inside he found the electric button. The room was small and lined with cases of little drawers, tier on tier, rows of brass knobs on mahogany.
Thwaite opened one.
It was velvet lined and grooved like a jeweler's tray and contained rings, the settings apparently emeralds.
Thwaite dumped them into one of the empty bags he had taken from Rivvin's corpse. The next case was of similar drawers of rings set with rubies. The first of these Thwaite dumped in with the emeralds.
But then he flew round the room pulling out drawers and slamming them shut, until he came upon trays of unset diamonds. These he emptied into his sack to the last of them, then diamond rings on them, other jewelry set with diamonds, then rubies and emeralds till the sack was full.
He tied its neck, had me open a second sack and was dumping drawer after drawer into that when suddenly he stopped.
His nose worked, worked horridly like that of the dead monster.
I thought he was going crazy and was beginning to laugh nervously, was on the verge of hysterics when he said:
“Smell! Try what you smell.” I sniffed. “I smell smoke,” I said.
“So do I,” he agreed. “This place is afire.”
“And we locked in!” I exclaimed.
“Locked in?” he sneered. “Bosh. I broke open the front door the instant I was sure they were dead. Come! Drop that empty bag. This is no time for haggling.”
We had to step between the two corpses. Rivvin was horridly dead. The colors had all faded from the snout. The muzzle was all mouse-color.
When we had hold of the bag of coin, Thwaite turned off the electric lights and we struggled out with that and the bag of jewels, and went out into the hallway full of smoke.
“We can carry only these,” Thwaite warned me. “We'll have to leave the rest.” I shouldered the bag of coin, and followed him down the steps, across a gravel road, and, oh the relief of treading turf and feeling the fog all about me.
At the wall Thwaite turned and looked back. “No chance to try for those other bags,” he said. In fact the red glow was visible at that distance and was fast becoming a glare. I heard shouts.
We got the bags over the wall and reached the car. Thwaite cranked up at once and we were off.
How we went I could not guess, nor in what directions, nor even how long. Ours was the only vehicle on the roads we darted along.
When the dawn light was near enough for me to see Thwaite stopped the car. He turned to me.
“Get out!” he said.
“What?” I asked.
He shoved his pistol muzzle in my face. “You've fifty thousand dollars in bank bills in your pockets,” he said. “It's a half a mile down that road to a railway station. Do you understand English? Get out!”
I got out.
The car shot forward into the morning fog and was gone.
IV
He was silent a long time.
“What did you do then?” I asked. “Headed for New York,” he said, “and got on a drunk. When I came round I had barely eleven thousand dollars. I headed for Cook's office and bargained for a ten thousand dollar tour of the world, the most places and the longest time they'd give for the money; the whole cost on them. I not to need a cent after I started.”
“What date was that?” I asked.
He meditated and gave me some approximate indications rather rambling and roundabout. “What did you do after you left Cook's?” I asked.
“I put a hundred dollars in a savings bank,” he said. “Bought a lot of clothes and things and started.
“I kept pretty sober all round the world because the only way to get full was by being treated and I had no cash to treat back with.
“When I landed in New York I thought I was all right for life. But no sooner did I have my hundred and odd dollars in my pockets than I got full again. I don't seem able to keep sober.”
“Are you sober now?” I asked. “Sure,” he asserted.
He seemed to shed his cosmopolitan vocabulary the moment he came back to everyday matters.
“Let's see you write what I tell you on this,” I suggested, handing him a fountain-pen and a torn envelope, turned inside out.
Word by word after my dictation he wrote. “Until you hear from me again
Yours truly,
No Name.
I took the paper from him and studied the handwriting. “How long were you on that spree?” I asked.
“Which?” he twinkled.
“Before you came to and had but eleven thousand dollars left,” I explained. “I don't know,” he said, “I didn't know anything I had been doing.”
“I can tell you one thing you did,” I said.
“What?” he queried.
“You put four packets, each of one hundred hundred-dollar bills, in a thin manila clasp- envelope, directed it to a New York lawyer and mailed the envelope to him with no letter in it, only a half sheet of dirty paper with nothing on it except: 'Keep this for me until I ask for it,' and the signature you have just written.”
“Honest?” he enunciated incredulously. “Fact!” I said.
“Then you believe what I've told you,” he exclaimed joyfully. “Not a bit I don't,” I asseverated.
“How's that?” he asked.
“If you were drunk enough,” I explained, “to risk forty thousand dollars in that crazy way, you were drunk enough to dream all the complicated nightmare you have spun out to me.
“If I did,” he argued, “how did I get the fifty thousand odd dollars?”
“I'm willing to suppose you got it with no more dishonesty on your part,” I told him, “than if you had come by it as you described.”
“It makes me mad you won't believe me,” he said. “I don't,” I finished.
He gloomed in silence. Presently he said: “I can stand looking at him now
,” and led the way to the cage where the big blue-nosed mandril chattered his inarticulate bestialities and scratched himself intermittently.
He stared at the brute. “And you don't believe me?” he regretted.
“No, I don't,” I repeated, “and I'm not going to. The thing's incredible.”
“Couldn't there be a mongrel, a hybrid?” he suggested.
“Put that out of your head,” I told him, “the whole thing's incredible.”
“Suppose she'd seen a critter like this,” he persisted, “just at the wrong time?”
“Bosh!” I said. “Old wives' tales! Superstition! Impossibility!”
“His head,” he declared, “was just like that.” He shuddered.
“Somebody put drops in some of your drink,” I suggested. “Anyhow, let's talk about something else. Come and have lunch with me.”
Over the lunch I asked him:
“What city did you like best of all you saw?”
“Paris for mine,” he grinned, “Paris forever.”
“I tell you what I advise you to do,” I said.
“What's that?” he asked, his eyes bright on mine. “Let me buy you an annuity with your forty thousand,” I explained, “an annuity payable in Paris. There's enough interest already to pay your way to Paris and leave you some cash till the first quarterly payment comes due.”
“You wouldn't feel yourself defrauding the Eversleighs?” he questioned. “If I'm defrauding any people,” I said, “I don't know who they are.”
“How about the fire?” he insisted. “I'll bet you heard of it. Don't the dates agree?”
“The dates agree,” I admitted. “And the servants were all dismissed, the remaining buildings and walls torn down and the place cut up and sold in portions just about as it would have been if your story were true.”
“There now!” he ejaculated. “You do believe me!”
“I do not!” I insisted. “And the proof is that I'm ready to carry out my annuity plan for you.”
“I agree,” he said, and stood up from the lunch table.
“Where are we going now?” he inquired as we left the restaurant.
“Just you come with me,” I told him, “and ask no questions.”
I piloted him to the Museum of Archæology and led him circuitously to what I meant for an experiment on him. I dwelt on other subjects nearby and waited for him to see it himself.
He saw.
He grabbed me by the arm. “That's him!” he whispered. “Not the size, but his very expression, in all his pictures.” He pointed to that magnificent, enigmatical black-diorite twelfth-dynasty statue which represents neither Anubis nor Seth, but some nameless cynocephalus god.
“That's him,” he repeated. “Look at the awful wisdom of him.” I said nothing.
“And you brought me here!” he cried. “You meant me to see this! You do believe!”
“No,” I maintained. “I do not believe.”
After I waved a farewell to him from the pier I never saw him again. We had an extensive correspondence six months later when he wanted his annuity exchanged for a joint-life annuity for himself and his bride. I arranged it for him with less difficulty than I had anticipated. His letter of thanks, explaining that a French wife was so great an economy that the shrinkage in his income was more than made up for, was the last I heard from him.
As he died more than a year ago and his widow is already married, this story can do him no harm. If the Eversleighs were defrauded they will never feel it and my conscience, at least, gives me no twinges.
Alfandega 49 A
I
The Alders was the last place on earth where anyone would have expected to encounter an atmosphere of tragedy and gloom. The very air of the farm seemed charged with the essence of cheerfulness and friendliness. There appeared to be diffused about the homestead some subtle influence promoting sociability and cordiality.
Perhaps it was merely that the Hibbards had miraculous luck in attracting only the right kind of boarders; possibly, they possessed an almost superhuman intuition which enabled them to avoid accepting any applicant likely to be uncongenial to the others, to themselves or to the place; maybe it was merely the personal effect of the Hibbards and of their welcome which seemed, in some magical fashion, to make all newcomers as much at home as if they had lived at the Alders from childhood. Certainly all their boarders were mutually congenial.
Never was summer-boarding-house so free from cliques, coteries, jealousies, enmities, bickerings and squabbles. The children played all day long apparently, but never seemed noisy or quarrelsome. The old ladies knitted or crocheted, teetering everlastingly in their rocking-chairs on the veranda, beaming at each other and at the landscape. The almost daily games of cards gave rise to scarcely any disputes. The folks at the Alders were very unlike an accidental gathering of summer boarders and much more resembled an unusually large and harmonious family.
This, I suppose, was due to the Hibbards' positive genius for managing a boarding-house and to their genial disposition. Naturally, from their temperament, they enjoyed it, they showed that they enjoyed it and they made everybody feel that they enjoyed it, so that each boarder felt like an invited guest.
The girls never seemed to have anything to do except to make everybody have a good time. Yet they had a great deal to do. In the heydey of the Alders the four girls divided their duties systematically.
Susie, the eldest, and the head of the house, rose early, oversaw the getting of the breakfast, and superintended everything. After dinner she always took a long rest and nap. Then, after supper, she stayed up until the last boarder had come indoors and said goodnight, chiefly occupying herself with seeing to it that all together were enjoying themselves, and each separately. She did it very well too. It was a sight to see her, the moment she was free from presiding at the supper table, appear out on the lawn or on the piazza, or in the parlor, according to the weather. She was tall, plump and handsome, held herself erect and had the art of making herself look well in very inexpensive dresses, mostly of her own devising. She was always smiling, her light brown hair haloing her face, her blue eyes shining. As she came she swept one comprehensive glance over her guests, unerringly picked out that one, man or woman, lad or girl, child or baby, which seemed enjoying life least, made for that particular individual and wholeheartedly devoted herself to affording enjoyment. She could afford it, too. She was jolly and had an infectious gaiety that was irresistible. She talked well. She was a fair pianist and a really splendid singer. She played, if need be, and sang, too, indefatigably. Never did a party of boarders have a more conscientious, more solicitous or more tactful hostess.
Mattie, who was taller and stouter than Susie, with brown eyes looking out of a face generally expressionless, but sometimes lit by a sympathetic smile, habitually slept late and was abed early. But she bore valiantly the brunt of the long middle of the summer days, took upon herself all that pertained to personal dealings with the servants, engaged them, dismissed them if unsatisfactory, controlled them when restive or cajoled them if dissatisfied, oversaw the getting of the dinner and supper, and made the desserts and ices. Among the boarders her chief activity was the foreseeing of incipient coolnesses and the tactful dissipation of any small cloud on the social atmosphere. It was chiefly due to her that no germ of antipathy ever developed, at the Alders, into dislike, that no seed of aversion, ever, in that atmosphere, ripened into enmity. She did her part so cleverly that few of the boarders realized that she ever did anything at all, or suspected that she had any social influence.
The two younger sisters superintended the sweeping, dusting, bed-making, lamp-cleaning and all the other details contributing to the comfort of the boarders outside of the dining-room. Also Anna made the always abundant and miraculously appetizing cakes in great variety.
The Alders was always full to its capacity, which meant thirty in the house and any number of boys up to nine in one of the out-buildings, a one-story stone cottage which h
ad once been part of the slave quarters. In it were two double-beds, three canvas cots and at least seven boys; increased to eleven, sometimes, by casual transient guests of the boy-boarders.
The three boys of the family lived out there in summer with the boarders and visitors and kept them in a perpetual good humor.
The Hibbards had learnt this not by precept, but by example. They had grown up to it with their growth. For Susie had been a small girl, Buck a small boy and the rest little children when their widowed mother had begun to take boarders. They had learned much of her art, unconsciously and without knowing that they were learning it.
She was dead and gone before I first knew the Alders. But her spirit still informed the life of the place. She must have been a real lady, every fiber and breath of her, and she must have been a levelheaded, practical woman. They quoted some of her aphorisms.
“You cannot make money on twenty-one really good meals a week when you only charge six dollars board,” she was reputed to have said. “See that everything is eatable and every meal abundant and give them fried chicken and ice-cream, all they can eat, on Sundays and Thursdays, and they'll always be enthusiastic about the table.”
“People can have a good time only in their own way. Find out what they like to do and encourage them to do it, if it is not wrong. That is the only way to please anybody.”
“Either don't take boarders at all or make them feel as welcome as cousins.
“Leave out what you can't afford altogether. People never miss what no one has and no one can see. But never skimp anything you have. It is economy to offer everyone a third helping of everything.”
“Season the food with good nature.”
“Be easy-going about everything.” They were easy-going about everything. I've seen Susie tired to death, but gaily hiding it under an exterior of spontaneous vivacity, come back into the big parlor at eleven o'clock Saturday night with two handfuls of cornmeal to scatter on the floor to make it more slippery for dancing. And she did it graciously. They all did such things, and did them instinctively.
Lukundoo and Other Stories Page 7