Van Rieten turned from Stone and waked Etcham, with some difficulty. When he was awake and saw it all, Etcham stared and said not one word.
"You saw him slice off two swellings?" Van Rieten asked.
Etcham nodded, chokingly.
"Did he bleed much?" Van Rieten demanded.
"Ve'y little," Etcham replied.
"You hold his arms," said Van Rieten to Etcham.
He took up Stone's razor and handed me the light. Stone showed no sign of seeing the light or of knowing we were there. But the little head mewled and screeched at us.
Van Rieten's hand was steady, and the sweep of the razor even and true. Stone bled amazingly little and Van Rieten dressed the wound as if it had been a bruise or scrape.
Stone had stopped talking the instant the excrescent head was severed. Van Rieten did all that could be done for Stone and then fairly grabbed the light from me. Snatching up a gun he scanned the ground by the cot and brought the butt down once and twice, viciously.
We went back to our hut, but I doubt if I slept.
CHAPTER VI
Next day, near noon, in broad daylight, we heard the two voices from Stone's hut. We found Etcham dropped asleep by his charge. The swelling on the left had broken, and just such another head was there miauling and spluttering. Etcham woke up and the three of us stood there and glared. Stone interjected hoarse vocables into the tinkling gurgle of the portent's utterance.
Van Rieten stepped forward, took up Stone's razor and knelt down by the cot. The atomy of a head squealed a wheezy snarl at him.
Then suddenly Stone spoke English.
"Who are you with my razor?"
Van Rieten started back and stood up.
Stone's eyes were clear now and bright, they roved about the hut.
"The end," he said; "I recognize the end. I seem to see Etcham, as if in life. But Singleton! Ah, Singleton! Ghosts of my boyhood come to watch me pass! And you, strange specter with the black beard and my razor! Aroint ye all!"
"I'm no ghost, Stone," I managed to say. "I'm alive. So are Etcham and Van Rieten. We are here to help you."
"Van Rieten!" he exclaimed. "My work passes on to a better man. Luck go with you, Van Rieten."
Van Rieten went nearer to him.
"Just hold still a moment, old man," he said soothingly. "It will be only one twinge."
"I've held still for many such twinges," Stone answered quite distinctly. "Let me be. Let me die in my own way. The hydra was nothing to this. You can cut off ten, a hundred, a thousand heads, but the curse you can not cut off, or take off. What's soaked into the bone won't come out of the flesh, any more than what's bred there. Don't hack me any more. Promise!"
His voice had all the old commanding tone of his boyhood and it swayed Van Rieten as it always had swayed everybody.
"I promise," said Van Rieten.
Almost as he said the word Stone's eyes filmed again.
Then we three sat about Stone and watched that hideous, gibbering prodigy grow up out of Stone's flesh, till two horrid, spindling little black arms disengaged themselves. The infinitesimal nails were perfect to the barely perceptible moon at the quick, the pink spot on the palm was horridly natural. These arms gesticulated and the right plucked toward Stone's blond beard.
"I can't stand this," Van Rieten exclaimed and took up the razor again.
Instantly Stone's eyes opened, hard and glittering.
"Van Rieten break his word?" he enunciated slowly. "Never!"
"But we must help you," Van Rieten gasped.
"I am past all help and all hurting," said Stone. "This is my hour. This curse is not put on me; it grew out of me, like this horror here. Even now I go."
His eyes closed and we stood helpless, the adherent figure spouting shrill sentences.
In a moment Stone spoke again.
"You speak all tongues?" he asked quickly.
And the mergent minikin replied in sudden English:
"Yea, verily, all that you speak," putting out its microscopic tongue, writhing its lips and wagging its head from side to side. We could see the thready ribs on its exiguous flanks heave as if the thing breathed.
"Has she forgiven me?" Stone asked in a muffled strangle.
"Not while the moss hangs from the cypresses," the head squeaked. "Not while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain will she forgive."
And then Stone, all with one motion, wrenched himself over on his side. The next instant he was dead.
When Singleton's voice ceased the room was hushed for a space. We could hear each other breathing. Twombly, the tactless, broke the silence.
"I presume," he said, "you cut off the little minikin and brought it home in alcohol."
Singleton turned on him a stern countenance.
"We buried Stone," he said, "unmutilated as he died."
"But," said the unconscionable Twombly, "the whole thing is incredible."
Singleton stiffened.
"I did not expect you to believe it," he said; "I began by saying that although I heard and saw it, when I look back on it I cannot credit it myself."
WILLIAM SANSOM
A WOMAN SELDOM FOUND
Once a young man was on a visit to Rome.
It was his first visit; he came from the country - but he was neither on the one hand so young nor on the other so simple as to imagine that a great and beautiful capital should hold out finer promises than anywhere else. He already knew that life was largely illusion, that disappointments came in compensation: and he knew, too, that life could offer a quality even worse - the probability that nothing would happen at all. This was always more possible in a great city intent on its own business.
Thinking in this way, he stood on the Spanish steps and surveyed the momentous panorama stretched before him. He listened to the swelling hum of the evening traffic and watched, as the lights went up against Rome's golden dusk. Shining automobiles slunk past the fountains and turned urgently into the bright Via Condotti, neon-red signs stabbed the shadows with invitation; the yellow windows of buses were packed with faces intent on going somewhere - everyone in the city seemed intent on the evening's purpose. He alone had nothing to do.
He felt himself the only person alone of everyone in the city. But searching for adventure never brought it - rather kept it away. Such a mood promised nothing. So the young man turned back up the steps, passed the lovely church, and went on up the cobbled hill towards his hotel. Wine-bars and food-shops jostled with growing movement in those narrow streets. But out on the broad pavements of the Vittorio Veneto, under the trees mounting to the Borghese Gardens, the high world of Rome would be filling the most elegant cafйs in Europe to enjoy with apйritifs the twilight. That would be the loneliest of all! So the young man kept to the quieter, older streets on his solitary errand home.
In one such street, a pavementless alley between old yellow houses, a street that in Rome might suddenly blossom into a secret piazza of fountain and baroque church, a grave secluded treasure-place - he noticed that he was alone but for the single figure of a woman walking down the hill towards him.
As she drew nearer, he saw that she was dressed with taste, that in her carriage was a soft Latin fire, that she walked with respect. Her face was veiled, but it was impossible to imagine that she would not be beautiful. Isolated thus with her, passing so near to her, and she symbolising the adventure of which the evening was so empty - a greater melancholy gripped him. He felt wretched as the gutter, small, sunk, pitiful. So that he rounded his shoulders and lowered his eyes - but not before casting one furtive glance into hers.
He was so shocked at what he saw that he paused, he stared, shocked, into her face. He had made no mistake. She was smiling. Also - she too had hesitated. He thought instantly: "Whore?" But no- it was not that kind of smile, though as well it was not without affection. And then amazingly she spoke:
"I- I know I shouldn't ask you… but it is such a beautiful evening - and perhaps you are alone, as alone as I am�
�"
She was very beautiful. He could not speak. But a growing elation gave him the power to smile. So that she continued, still hesitant, in no sense soliciting:
"I thought… perhaps… we could take a walk, an apйritif…"
At last the young man achieved himself:
"Nothing, nothing would please me more. And the Veneto is only a minute up there."
She smiled again:
"My home is just here…"
They walked in silence a few paces down the street, to a turning that young man had already passed. This she indicated. They walked to where the first humble houses ended in a kind of recess. In the recess was set the wall of a garden, and behind it stood a large and elegant mansion. The woman, about whose face shone a curious glitter - something fused of the transparent pallor of fine skin, of grey but brilliant eyes, of dark eyebrows and hair of lucent black - inserted her key in the garden gate.
They were greeted by a servant in velvet livery. In a large and exquisite salon, under chandeliers of fine glass and before a moist green courtyard where water played, they were served with a frothy wine. They talked. The wine - iced in the warm Roman night - filled them with an inner warmth of exhilaration. But from time to time the young man looked at her curiously.
With her glances, with many subtle inflections of teeth and eyes she was inducing an intimacy that suggested much. He felt he must be careful. At length he thought the best thing might be to thank her - somehow thus to root out whatever obligation might be in store. But here she interrupted, first with a smile, then with a look of some sadness. She begged him to spare himself any perturbation: she knew it was strange, that in such a situation he might suspect some second purpose: but the simple truth remained that she was lonely and - this with a certain deference - something perhaps in him, perhaps in that moment of dusk in the street, had proved to her inescapably attractive. She had not been able to help herself.
The possibility of a perfect encounter - a dream that years of disillusion will never quite kill - decided him. His elation rose beyond control. He believed her. And thereafter the perfections compounded. At her invitation they dined. Servants brought food of great delicacy; shell-fish, fat bird-flesh, soft fruits. And afterwards they sat on a sofa near the courtyard, where it was cool. Liqueurs were brought. The servants retired. A hush fell upon the house. They embraced.
A little later, with no word, she took his arm and led him from the room. How deep a silence had fallen between them! The young man's heart beat fearfully - it might be heard, he felt, echoing in the hall whose marble they now crossed, sensed through his arm to hers. But such excitement rose now from certainty. Certainty that at such a moment, on such a charmed evening - nothing could go wrong. There was no need to speak. Together they mounted the great staircase.
In her bedroom, to the picture of her framed by the bed curtains and dimly naked in a silken shift, he poured out his love; a love that was to be eternal, to be always perfect, as fabulous as this their exquisite meeting.
Softly she spoke the return of his love. Nothing would ever go amiss, nothing would ever come between them. And very gently she drew back the bedclothes for him.
But suddenly, at the moment when at last he lay beside her, when his lips were almost upon hers - he hesitated.
Something was wrong. A flaw could be sensed. He listened, felt - and then saw that the fault was his. Shaded, soft-shaded lights by the bed - but he had been so careless as to leave on the bright electric chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. He remembered the switch was by the door. For a fraction, then, he hesitated. She raised her eyelids - saw his glance at the chandelier, understood.
Her eyes glittered. She murmured:
"My beloved, don't worry - don't move…"
And she reached out her hand. Her hand grew larger, her arm grew longer and longer, it stretched out through the bed-curtains, across the long carpet, huge and overshadowing the whole of the long room, until at last its giant fingers were at the door. With a terminal click, she switched out the light.
MARGARET ST. CLAIR
THE PERFECTIONIST
I had nightmares about it for several years afterward-the kind where something is on your heels, and you make desperate efforts, each more futile than the last, to escape it-and always felt bad about them when I woke up. I never could decide whether I was justified in having bad dreams at all.
It began when I went to live with Aunt Muriel in 1933. I hadn't had a job for six months when I got the letter of invitation from her, and I hadn't eaten much at all for two weeks.
Aunt Muriel wasn't exactly my aunt, to begin with. She was a sort of great-aunt, once removed, on my mother's side, and I hadn't seen her since I was a beady-eyed kid in knee breeches.
The invitation might have surprised me-though she explained in the letter that she was an old woman, getting lonely, and felt the need of some kindred face near her-only I was too hungry to wonder.
There was a money order in the letter, and a ticket to Downie, where she lived. After I paid the back room rent with the money order and got myself a meal with double portions of everything, I had two dollars and thirteen cents left. I caught the afternoon train to Downie, and a little before noon the next day I was walking up the steps to Aunt Muriel's house.
Aunt Muriel herself met me at the door. She seemed glad to see me. She wrinkled up her mouth in a smile of welcome.
"So good of you to come, Charles!" she said. "I really can't thank you enough! So very good of you!" She ran to italics.
Reprinted from Mystery Booh Magazine, by permission of the author.
I was beginning to warm up to the old girl. She didn't look any older to me than she had fifteen years before. She'd been held together by whalebone and net collars then, and she still was. I put the more flattering portion of this idea into words.
"Oh, Charles," she chirped, "you flatterer!" She gave me another smile and then led me into the hall.
I followed her up the stairs to my room on the second floor front. It had a high ceiling and a tall four-poster bed which should have had curtains around it to cut off the draft. After she left, I put my imitation leather suitcase in the big closet and went into the bath next door to clean up.
Lunch was laid on the dining-room table when I came down, and a maid, who looked a good deal older than Aunt Muriel, was fluttering in and out with more dishes. With my aunt's encouragement, I ate enough to keep me comatose all afternoon, and then sat back with a cigarette and listened to her talk.
She began by doing a good deal of commiserating with herself on the subject of her age and loneliness, and a good deal of self-congratulation because she was going to have a young kinsman around from now on.
It developed that I was expected to make myself useful in small ways like walking the dog-an unpleasant Pomeranian named Teddy -and taking letters to the mailbox. This was perfectly all right with me, and I told her so.
There was a short hiatus in the conversation. Then, picking Teddy up off the floor where he'd been during the meal, she installed him in her lap and launched out on an account of what she called her hobby. In the last year or so she'd taken up drawing and it had become, from what she said, almost an obsession.
Holding Teddy under one arm, she rose and went to the walnut sideboard and returned with a portfolio of drawings for me to look at.
"I do almost all my drawing here in the dining room," she said, "because the light is so good. Tell me, what do you think of these!" She handed me fifty or sixty small sheets of drawing paper.
I spread the drawings out on the dining-room table, among the litter of dishes, and examined them carefully. They were all in pencil, though one or two had been touched up with blotches of water color, and they were all of the same subject, four apples in a low china bowl.
They had been labored over; Aunt Muriel had erased and reerased until the surface of the paper was gritty and miserable. I racked my brains for something nice to say about them.
"You
-uhh-you've really caught something of the essence of those apples," I forced out after a moment. "Very creditable."
My aunt smiled. "I'm so glad you like them," she replied. "Amy said-the maid, you know-that I was silly to work at them so much, but I couldn't stop, I couldn't bear to stop, until they were perfect." She paused, then added, "Do you know, Charles, I had the biggest difficulty!"
"Yes?"
"The apples kept withering! It was dreadful. I put them in the icebox just as soon as I got through for the day, but still they went bad after two or three weeks. It wasn't until Amy thought of dipping them in melted wax that they lasted long enough."
"Good idea."
"Yes, wasn't it? But you know, Charles, I've gotten rather tired of apples lately. I'd like to try something else… I've been thinking, that little tree out on the lawn would make a good subject."
She went over to the window to show me the tree she meant. I followed her. It was a young sapling, just coming into leaf. My aunt said it was a flowering peach.
"Don't you think that would be a good subject, Charles? I believe I'll try it this afternoon while you take Teddy for a little walk."
Amy helped bundle my aunt up in several layers of coats and mufflers, and I carried the stool, the easel, the box of pencils and the paper out into the garden for her.
She was rather fussy about the location of the various items, but I finally got them fixed to her satisfaction. Then, though I'd much rather have had an after-luncheon nap upstairs, I snapped the lead on Teddy's objectionable little collar and started out for a survey of the town of Downie.
I soon realized that Downie was the sort of town whose social life centers around the drugstore, but I managed to kill the next two hours by letting Teddy investigate the lamp posts which caught his fancy.
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