Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  First of all Selwyn laid a cubic crystal on an anvil, and struck it sharply and repeatedly with a hammer. Austin’s thin hair rose, and Edgerton Lawn swallowed nothing several times; but nobody went to heaven, and the little cube merely crumbled into a flaky pink powder.

  Then Selwyn took three cubes, dropped them into boiling milk, fished them out again, twisted them into a waxy taper, placed it in a candle-stick, and set fire to it. The taper burned with a flaring brilliancy but without odour.

  Then Selwyn placed several cubes in a mortar, pounded them to powder with an iron pestle, and, measuring out the tiniest pinch — scarcely enough to cover the point of a penknife, placed a few grains in several paper cartridges. Two wads followed the powder, then an ounce and a half of shot, then a wad, and then the crimping.

  The guests stepped gratefully outside; Selwyn, using a light fowling-piece, made pattern after pattern for them; and then they all trooped solemnly indoors again; and Selwyn froze Chaosite and boiled it and baked it and melted it and took all sorts of hair-raising liberties with it; and after that he ground it to powder, placed a few generous pinches in a small hand-grenade, and affixed a primer, the secret composition of which he alone knew. That was the key to the secret — the composition of the primer charge.

  “I used to play base-ball in college,” he observed smiling— “and I used to be a pretty good shot with a snowball.”

  They followed him to the cliff’s edge, always with great respect for the awful stuff he handled with such apparent carelessness. There was a black sea-soaked rock jutting out above the waves; Selwyn pointed at it, poised himself, and, with the long, overhand, straight throw of a trained ball player, sent the grenade like a bullet at the rock.

  There came a blinding flash, a stunning, clean-cut report — but what the others took to be a vast column of black smoke was really a pillar of dust — all that was left of the rock. And this slowly floated, settling like mist over the waves, leaving nothing where the rock had been.

  “I think,” said Edgerton Lawn, wiping the starting perspiration from his forehead, “that you have made good, Captain Selwyn. Dense or bulk, your Chaosite and impact primer seem to do the business; and I think I may say that the Lawn Nitro-Powder Company is ready to do business, too. Can you come to town to-morrow? It’s merely a matter of figures and signatures now, if you say so. It is entirely up to you.”

  But Selwyn only laughed. He looked at Austin.

  “I suppose,” said Edgerton Lawn good-naturedly, “that you intend to make us sit up and beg; or do you mean to absorb us?”

  But Selwyn said: “I want more time on this thing. I want to know what it does to the interior of loaded shells and in fixed ammunition when it is stored for a year. I want to know whether it is necessary to use a solvent after firing it in big guns. As a bursting charge I’m practically satisfied with it; but time is required to know how it acts on steel in storage or on the bores of guns when exploded as a propelling charge. Meanwhile,” turning to Lawn, “I’m tremendously obliged to you for coming — and for your offer. You see how it is, don’t you? I couldn’t risk taking money for a thing which might, at the end, prove dear at any price.”

  “I cheerfully accept that risk,” insisted young Lawn; “I am quite ready to do all the worrying, Captain Selwyn.”

  But Selwyn merely shook his head, repeating: “You see how it is, don’t you?”

  “I see that you possess a highly developed conscience,” said Edgerton Lawn, laughing; “and when I tell you that we are more than willing to take every chance of failure—”

  But Selwyn shook his head: “Not yet,” he said; “don’t worry; I need the money, and I’ll waste no time when a square deal is possible. But I ought to tell you this: that first of all I must offer it to the Government. That is only decent, you see—”

  “Who ever heard of the Government’s gratitude?” broke in Austin. “Nonsense, Phil; you are wasting time!”

  “I’ve got to do it,” said Selwyn; “you must see that, of course.”

  “But I don’t see it,” began Lawn— “because you are not in the Government service now—”

  “Besides,” added Austin, “you were not a West Pointer; you never were under obligations to the Government!”

  “Are we not all under obligation?” asked Selwyn so simply that Austin flushed.

  “Oh, of course — patriotism and all that — naturally — Confound it, I don’t suppose you’d go and offer it to Germany or Japan before our own Government had the usual chance to turn it down and break your heart. But why can’t the Government make arrangements with Lawn’s Company — if it desires to?”

  “A man can’t exploit his own Government; you all know that as well as I do,” returned Selwyn, smiling. “Pro aris et focis, you know — ex necessitate rei.”

  “When the inventor goes to the Government,” said Austin, with a shrug— “vestigia nulla retrorsum.”

  “Spero meliora,” retorted Selwyn, laughing; but there remained the obstinate squareness of jaw, and his amused eyes were clear and steady. Young Lawn looked into them and the hope in him flickered; Austin looked, and shrugged; but as they all turned away to retrace their steps across the moors in the direction of Silverside, Lansing lightly hooked his arm into Selwyn’s; and Gerald, walking thoughtfully on the other side, turned over and over in his mind the proposition offered him — the spectacle of a modern and needy man to whom money appeared to be the last consideration in a plain matter of business. Also he turned over other matters in his mind; and moved closer to Selwyn, walking beside him with grave eyes bent on the ground.

  The matter of business arrangements apparently ended then and there; Lawn’s company sent several men to Selwyn and wrote him a great many letters — unlike the Government, which had not replied to his briefly tentative suggestion that Chaosite be conditionally examined, tested, and considered.

  So the matter remained in abeyance, and Selwyn employed two extra men and continued storage tests and experimented with rifled and smooth-bore tubes, watchfully uncertain yet as to the necessity of inventing a solvent to neutralise possible corrosion after a propelling charge had been exploded.

  Everybody in the vicinity had heard about his experiments; everybody pretended interest, but few were sincere; and of the sincere, few were unselfishly interested — his sister, Eileen, Drina, and Lansing — and maybe one or two others.

  However, the younger set, now predominant from Wyossett to Wonder Head, made up parties to visit Selwyn’s cottage, which had become known as The Chrysalis; and Selwyn good-naturedly exploded a pinch or two of the stuff for their amusement, and never betrayed the slightest annoyance or boredom. In fact, he behaved so amiably during gratuitous interruptions that he won the hearts of the younger set, who presently came to the unanimous conclusion that there was Romance in the air. And they sniffed it with delicate noses uptilted and liked the aroma.

  Kathleen Lawn, a big, leisurely, blond-skinned girl, who showed her teeth when she laughed and shook hands like a man, declared him “adorable” but “unsatisfactory,” which started one of the Dresden-china twins, Dorothy Minster, and she, in turn, ventured the innocent opinion that Selwyn was misunderstood by most people — an inference that she herself understood him. And she smiled to herself when she made this observation, up to her neck in the surf; and Eileen, hearing the remark, smiled to herself, too. But she felt the slightest bit uncomfortable when that animated brunette Gladys Orchil, climbing up dripping on to the anchored float beyond the breakers, frankly confessed that the tinge of mystery enveloping Selwyn’s career made him not only adorable, but agreeably “unfathomable”; and that she meant to experiment with him at every opportunity.

  Sheila Minster, seated on the raft’s edge, swinging her stockinged legs in the green swells that swept steadily shoreward, modestly admitted that Selwyn was “sweet,” particularly in a canoe on a moonlight night — in spite of her weighty mother heavily afloat in the vicinity.

  “He’s nic
e every minute,” she said— “every fibre of him is nice in the nicest sense. He never talks ‘down’ at you — like an insufferable undergraduate; and he is so much of a man — such a real man! — that I like him,” she added naïvely; “and I’m quite sure he likes me, because he said so.”

  “I like him,” said Gladys Orchil, “because he has a sense of humour and stands straight. I like a sense of humour and — good shoulders. He’s an enigma; and I like that, too. . . . I’m going to investigate him every chance I get.”

  Dorothy Minster liked him, too: “He’s such a regular boy at times,” she explained; “I do love to see him without his hat sauntering along beside me — and not talking every minute when you don’t wish to talk. Friends,” she added— “true friends are most eloquent in their mutual silence. Ahem!”

  Eileen Erroll, standing near on the pitching raft, listened intently, but curiously enough said nothing either in praise or blame.

  “He is exactly the right age,” insisted Gladys — as though somebody had said he was not— “the age when a man is most interesting.”

  The Minster twins twiddled their legs and looked sentimentally at the ocean. They were a pair of pink and white little things with china-blue eyes and the fairest of hair, and they were very impressionable; and when they thought of Selwyn they looked unutterable things at the Atlantic Ocean.

  One man, often the least suitable, is usually the unanimous choice of the younger sort where, in the disconcerting summer time, the youthful congregate in garrulous segregation.

  Their choice they expressed frankly and innocently; they admitted cheerfully that Selwyn was their idol. But that gentleman remained totally unconscious that he had been set up by them upon the shores of the summer sea.

  In leisure moments he often came down to the bathing-beach at the hour made fashionable; he conducted himself amiably with dowager and chaperon, with portly father and nimble brother, with the late débutantes of the younger set and the younger matrons, individually, collectively, impartially.

  He and Gerald usually challenged the rollers in a sponson canoe when Gerald was there for the week-end; or, when Lansing came down, the two took long swims seaward or cruised about in Gerald’s dory, clad in their swimming-suits; and Selwyn’s youth became renewed in a manner almost ridiculous, so that the fine lines which had threatened the corners of his mouth and eyes disappeared, and the clear sun tan of the tropics, which had never wholly faded, came back over a smooth skin as clear as a boy’s, though not as smoothly rounded. His hair, too, crisped and grew lighter under the burning sun, which revealed, at the temples, the slightest hint of silver. And this deepened the fascination of the younger sort for the idol they had set up upon the sands of Silverside.

  Gladys was still eloquent on the subject, lying flat on the raft where all were now gathered in a wet row, indulging in sunshine and the two minutes of gossip which always preceded their return swim to the beach.

  “It is partly his hair,” she said gravely, “that makes him so distinguished in his appearance — just that touch of silver; and you keep looking and looking until you scarcely know whether it’s really beginning to turn a little gray or whether it’s only a lighter colour at the temples. How insipid is a mere boy after such a man as Captain Selwyn! . . . I have dreamed of such a man — several times.”

  The Minster twins gazed soulfully at the Atlantic; Eileen Erroll bit her under lip and stood up suddenly. “Come on,” she said; joined her hands skyward, poised, and plunged. One after another the others followed and, rising to the surface, struck out shoreward.

  On the sunlit sands dozens of young people were hurling tennis-balls at each other. Above the beach, under the long pavilions, sat mothers and chaperons. Motors, beach-carts, and victorias were still arriving to discharge gaily dressed fashionables — for the hour was early — and up and down the inclined wooden walk leading from the bathing-pavilion to the sands, a constant procession of bathers passed with nod and gesture of laughing salutation, some already retiring to the showers after a brief ocean plunge, the majority running down to the shore, eager for the first frosty and aromatic embrace of the surf rolling in under a cloudless sky of blue.

  As Eileen Erroll emerged from the surf and came wading shoreward through the seething shallows, she caught sight of Selwyn sauntering across the sands toward the water, and halted, knee-deep, smilingly expectant, certain that he had seen her.

  Gladys Orchil, passing her, saw Selwyn at the same moment, and her clear, ringing salute and slender arm aloft, arrested his attention; and the next moment they were off together, swimming toward the sponson canoe which Gerald had just launched with the assistance of Sandon Craig and Scott Innis.

  For a moment Eileen stood there, motionless. Knee-high the flat ebb boiled and hissed, dragging at her stockinged feet as though to draw her seaward with the others. Yesterday she would have gone, without a thought, to join the others; but yesterday is yesterday. It seemed to her, as she stood there, that something disquieting had suddenly come into the world; something unpleasant — but indefinite — yet sufficient to leave her vaguely apprehensive.

  The saner emotions which have their birth in reason she was not ignorant of; emotion arising from nothing at all disconcerted her — nor could she comprehend the slight quickening of her heart-beats as she waded to the beach, while every receding film of water tugged at her limbs as though to draw her backward in the wake of her unquiet thoughts.

  Somebody threw a tennis-ball at her; she caught it and hurled it in return; and for a few minutes the white, felt-covered balls flew back and forth from scores of graceful, eager hands. A moment or two passed when no balls came her way; she turned and walked to the foot of a dune and seated herself cross-legged on the hot sand.

  Sometimes she watched the ball players, sometimes she exchanged a word of amiable commonplace with people who passed or halted to greet her. But she invited nobody to remain, and nobody ventured to, not even several very young and ardent gentlemen who had acquired only the rudiments of social sense. For there was a sweet but distant look in her dark-blue eyes and a certain reserved preoccupation in her acknowledgment of salutations. And these kept the would-be adorer moving — wistful, lagging, but still moving along the edge of that invisible barrier set between her and the world with her absent-minded greeting, and her serious, beautiful eyes fixed so steadily on a distant white spot — the sponson canoe where Gladys and Selwyn sat, their paddle blades flashing in the sun.

  How far away they were. . . . Gerald was with them. . . . Curious that Selwyn had not seen her waiting for him, knee-deep in the surf — curious that he had seen Gladys instead. . . . True, Gladys had called to him and signalled him, white arm upflung. . . . Gladys was very pretty — with her heavy, dark hair and melting, Spanish eyes, and her softly rounded, olive-skinned figure. . . . Gladys had called to him, and she had not. . . . That was true; and lately — for the last few days — or perhaps more — she herself had been a trifle less impulsive in her greeting of Selwyn — a little less sans-façon with him. . . . After all, a man comes when it pleases him. Why should a girl call him? — unless she — unless — unless —

  Perplexed, her grave eyes fixed on the sea where now the white canoe pitched nearer, she dropped both hands to the sand — those once wonderfully white hands, now creamed with sun tan; and her arms, too, were tinted from shoulder to finger-tip. Then she straightened her legs, crossed her feet, and leaned a trifle forward, balancing her body on both palms flat on the sand. The sun beat down on her; she loosened her hair to dry it, and as she shook her delicate head the superb red-gold mass came tumbling about her face and shoulders. Under its glimmering splendour, and through it, she stared seaward out of wide, preoccupied eyes; and in her breast, stirring uneasily, a pulse, intermittent yet dully importunate, persisted.

  The canoe, drifting toward the surf, was close in, now. Gerald rose and dived; Gladys, steadying herself by a slim hand on Selwyn’s shoulder, stood up on the bow, ready to plun
ge clear when the canoe capsized.

  How wonderfully pretty she was, balanced there, her hand on his shoulder, ready for a leap, lest the heavy canoe, rolling over in the froth, strike her under the smother of foam and water. . . . How marvellously pretty she was. . . . Her hand on his shoulder. . . .

  Miss Erroll sat very still; but the pulse within her was not still.

  When the canoe suddenly capsized, Gladys jumped, but Selwyn went with it, boat and man tumbling into the tumult over and over; and the usual laughter from the onlookers rang out, and a dozen young people rushed into the surf to right the canoe and push it out into the surf again and clamber into it.

  Gerald was among the number; Gladys swam toward it, beckoning imperiously to Selwyn; but he had his back to the sea and was moving slowly out through the flat swirling ebb. And as Eileen looked, she saw a dark streak leap across his face — saw him stoop and wash it off and stand, looking blindly about, while again the sudden dark line criss-crossed his face from temple to chin, and spread wider like a stain.

  “Philip!” she called, springing to her feet and scarcely knowing that she had spoken.

  He heard her, and came toward her in a halting, dazed way, stopping twice to cleanse his face of the bright blood that streaked it.

  “It’s nothing,” he said— “the infernal thing hit me. . . . Oh, don’t use that!” as she drenched her kerchief in cold sea-water and held it toward him with both hands.

  “Take it! — I — I beg of you,” she stammered. “Is it s-serious?”

  “Why, no,” he said, his senses clearing; “it was only a rap on the head — and this blood is merely a nuisance. . . . Thank you, I will use your kerchief if you insist. . . . It’ll stop in a moment, anyway.”

  “Please sit here,” she said— “here where I’ve been sitting.”

  He did so, muttering: “What a nuisance. It will stop in a second. . . . You needn’t remain here with me, you know. Go in; it is simply glorious.”

  “I’ve been in; I was drying my hair.”