Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Of course I will, you little trump!” he said, encircling her waist, forgetful of old Miller, plodding along behind them.

  But it was no secret to old Miller, nor to any native in the country-side for a radius of forty miles. No modern invention can equal the wireless celerity that distributes information concerning other people’s business throughout the rural wastes of this great and gossipping nation.

  She made him release her, blushing hotly as she remembered that Miller was behind them, and she scolded her lover roundly, until later, in a moment of thoughtlessness, she leaned close to his shoulder and told him she adored him with every breath she drew, which was no sillier than his reply.

  The long blue shadows on the snow and the pink bars of late sunlight had died out together. It had grown warmer and grayer in the forest; and after a little one or two snow-flakes came sifting down through the trees.

  They had not jumped the big silver boar, nor had they found a trace of him among the trails that crossed and recrossed the silent reaches of the forest. Light was fading to the colourless, opaque gray which heralded a snow-storm as they reached the feeding-ground, spread out their fur coats, and dropped, belly down, to reconnoitre.

  Nothing moved among the oaks. They lay listening minute after minute; no significant sound broke the silence, no dead branch cracked in the hemlocks.

  She lay close to him for warmth, chin resting on his shoulder, her cheek against his. Their snow-shoes were stuck upright in a drift behind them; beside these squatted old Miller, listening, peering, nostrils working in the wind like an old dog’s.

  They waited and watched through a fine veil of snow descending; in the white silence there was not a sound save the silken flutter of a lonely chickadee, friendly, inquiring, dropping from twig to twig until its tiny bright eyes peered level with Geraldine’s.

  Evidently the great boar was not feeding before night. Duane turned his head restlessly; old Miller, too, had become impatient and they saw him prowling noiselessly down among the rocks, scrutinising snow and thickets, casting wise glances among the trees, shaking his white head as though communing with himself.

  “Well, little girl,” breathed Duane, “it looks doubtful, doesn’t it?”

  She turned on her side toward him, looking him in the eyes:

  “Does it matter?”

  “No,” he said, smiling.

  She reached out her arms; they settled close around his neck, clung for a second’s passionate silence, released him and covered her flushed face, all but the mouth. Under them his lips met hers.

  The next instant she was on her knees, pink-cheeked, alert, ears straining in the wind.

  “Miller is coming back very fast!” she whispered to her lover. “I believe he has good news!”

  Miller was coming fast, holding out in one hand something red and gray — something that dangled and flapped as he strode — something that looked horrible and raw.

  “Damn him!” said the old man fiercely, “no wonder he ain’t a-feedin’! Look at this, Miss Seagrave. There’s more of it below — a hull mess of it in the snow.”

  “It’s a big strip of deer-hide — all raw and bleeding!” faltered the girl. “What in the world has happened?”

  “His work,” said Miller grimly.

  “The — the big boar?”

  “Yes’m. The deer yard over there. He sneaked in on ’em last night and this doe must have got stuck in a drift. And that devil caught her and pulled her down and tore her into bits. Why, the woods is all scattered with shreds o’ hide like this! I wish to God you or Mr. Mallett could get one crack at him! I do, by thunder! Yes’m!”

  But it was already too dusky among the trees to sight a rifle. In silence they strapped up the coats, fastened on snow-shoes, and moved out along the bare spur of the mountain, where there was still daylight in the open, although the thickening snow made everything gray and vague.

  Here and there a spectral tree loomed up among the rocks; a white hare’s track, paralleled by the big round imprints of a lynx, ran along the unseen path they followed as Miller guided them toward Westgate.

  Later, outlined in the white waste, ancient apple-trees appeared, gnarled relics of some long-abandoned clearing; and, as they passed, Duane chanced to glance across the rocks to the left.

  At first he thought he saw something move, but began to make up his mind that he was deceived.

  Noticing that he had halted, Geraldine came back, and then Miller returned to where he stood, squinting through the falling flakes in the vague landscape beyond.

  “It moved; I seen it,” whispered Miller hoarsely.

  “It’s a deer,” motioned Geraldine; “it’s too big for anything else.”

  For five minutes in perfect silence they watched the gray, flat forms of scrub and rock; and Duane was beginning to lose faith in everybody’s eyes when, without warning, a huge, colourless shape detached itself from the flat silhouettes and moved leisurely out into the open.

  There was no need to speak; trembling slightly, he cleared his rifle sight of snow, steadied his nerves, raised the weapon, and fired.

  A horrid sort of scream answered the shot; the boar lurched off among the rocks, and after him at top speed ran Duane and Miller, while Geraldine, on swift skis, sped eastward like the wind to block retreat to the mountain. She heard Duane’s rifle crack again, then again; heard a heavy rush in the thicket in front of her, lifted her rifle, fired, was hurled sideways on the rocks, and knew no more until she unclosed her bewildered eyes in her lover’s arms.

  A sharp pain shot through her; she gasped, turned very white, and lay with wide eyes and parted lips staring at Duane.

  Suddenly a penetrating aroma filled her lungs; with all her strength she pushed away the flask at her lips.

  “No! No! Not that! I will not, Duane!”

  “Dear,” he said unsteadily, “you are very badly hurt. We are trying to carry you back. You must let me give you this — —”

  “No,” she sobbed, “I will not! Duane — I—” Pain made her faint; her grasp on his arm tightened convulsively; with a supreme effort she struck the flask out of his hand and dropped back unconscious.

  CHAPTER XXIII. SINE DIE

  The message ran:

  “My sister badly hurt in an accident; concussion, intermittent consciousness. We fear spinal and internal injury. What train can you catch?

  Scott Seagrave.”

  Which telegram to Josiah Bailey, M.D., started that eminent general practitioner toward Roya-Neh in company with young Dr. Goss, a surgeon whose brilliancy and skill did not interfere with his self-restraint when there were two ways of doing things.

  They were to meet in an hour at the 5.07 train; but before Dr. Bailey set out for the rendezvous, and while his man was still packing his suit-case, the physician returned to his office, where a patient waited, head hanging, picking nervously at his fingers, his prominent, watery eyes fixed on vacancy.

  The young man neither looked up nor stirred when the doctor entered and reseated himself, picking up a pencil and pad. He thought a moment, squinted through his glasses, and continued writing the prescription which the receipt of the telegram from Roya-Neh had interrupted.

  When he had finished he glanced over the slip of paper, removed his gold-rimmed reading spectacles, folded them, balanced them thoughtfully in the palm of his large and healthy hand, considering the young fellow before him with grave, far-sighted eyes:

  “Stuyvesant,” he said, “this prescription is not going to cure you. No medicine that I can give you is going to perform any such miracle unless you help yourself. Nothing on earth that man has invented, or is likely to invent, can cure your disease unless by God’s grace the patient pitches in and helps himself. Is that plain talk?”

  Quest nodded and reached shakily for the prescription; but the doctor withheld it.

  “You asked for plain talk; are you listening to what I’m saying?”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” burst out Quest; “I’
m going to pull myself together. Didn’t I tell you I would? But I’ve got to get a starter first, haven’t I? I’ve got to have something to key me up first. I’ve explained to you that it’s this crawling, squirming movement on the backs of my hands that I can’t stand for. I want it stopped; I’ll take anything you dope out; I’ll do any turn you call for — —”

  “Very well. I’ve told you to go to Mulqueen’s. Go now!”

  “All right, doctor. Only they’re too damn rough with a man. All right; I’ll go. I did go last winter, and look where I am now!” he snarled suddenly. “Have I got to get up against all that business again?”

  “You came out in perfectly good shape. It was up to you,” said the doctor, coldly using the vernacular.

  “How was it up to me? You all say that! How was it? I understood that if I cut it out and went up there and let that iron-fisted Irishman slam me around, that I’d come out all right. And the first little baby-drink I hit began the whole thing again!”

  “Why did you take it? You didn’t have to.”

  “I wanted it,” retorted Quest angrily.

  “Not badly enough to make self-control impossible. That’s what you went up there for, to get back self-control. You got it but didn’t use it. Do you think there is any sort of magic serum Mulqueen or I or anybody under Heaven can pump into you that will render you immune from the consequences of making an alcohol sewer of yourself?”

  “I certainly supposed I could come out and drink like a gentleman,” said the young man sullenly.

  “Drink like a — what? A gentleman? What’s that? What’s drinking like a gentleman? I don’t know what it is. You either drink alcohol or you don’t; you either swill it or you don’t. Anybody can do either. I’m not aware that either is peculiar to a gentleman. But I know that both are peculiar to fools.”

  Quest muttered, picking his fingers, and cast an ugly side look at the physician.

  “I don’t know what you just said,” snapped Dr. Bailey, “but I’ll tell you this: alcohol is poison and it has not — and never had — in any guise whatever, the slightest compensating value for internal use. It isn’t a food; it’s a poison; it isn’t a beneficial stimulant; it’s a poison; it isn’t an aid to digestion; it’s a poison; it isn’t a life saver; it’s a life taker. It’s a parasite, forger, thief, pander, liar, brutalizer, murderer!

  “Those are the plain facts. There isn’t, and there never has been, one word to say for it or any excuse, except morbid predisposition or self-inculcated inclination, to offer for swallowing it. Now go to your brewers, your wine merchants, your champagne touts, your fool undergraduates, your clubmen, your guzzling viveurs — and they’ll all tell you the contrary. So will some physicians. And you can take your choice. Any ass can. That is all, my boy.”

  The young man glowered sulkily at the prescription.

  “Do I understand that this will stop the jumps?”

  “If you really believe that, you have never heard me say so,” snapped Dr. Bailey.

  “Well, what the devil will it do?”

  “The directions are there. You have my memorandum of the régime you are to follow. It will quiet you till you get to Mulqueen’s. Those two bits of paper, however, are useless unless you help yourself. If you want to become convalescent you can — even yet. It won’t be easy; it will hurt; but you can do it, as I say, even yet. But it is you who must do it, not I or that bit of paper or Mulqueen!

  “Just now you happen to want to get well because the effect of alcohol poison disturbs you. Things crawl, as you say, on the back of your hand. Naturally, you don’t care for such phenomena.

  “Well, I’ve given you the key to mental and physical regeneration. Yours is not an inherited appetite; yours is not one of those almost foredoomed and pitiable cases. It’s a stupid case; and a case of gross self-indulgence in stupidity that began in idleness. And that, my son, is the truth.”

  “Is that so?” sneered Quest, rising and pocketing the prescription.

  “Yes, it is so. I’ve known your family for forty years, Stuyvesant. I knew your parents; I exonerate them absolutely. Sheer laziness and wilful depravity is what has brought you here to me on this errand. You deliberately acquired a taste for intoxicants; you haven’t one excuse, one mitigating plea to offer for what you’ve done to yourself.

  “You stood high in school and in college; you were Phi Beta Kappa, a convincing debater, a plausible speaker, an excellent writer of good English — by instinct a good newspaper man. Also you were a man adapted by nature to live regularly and beyond the coarser temptations. But you were lazy!”

  Dr. Bailey struck his desk in emphasis.

  “The germ of your self-indulgence lay in gross selfishness. You did what pleased you; and it suited you to do nothing. I’m telling you how you’ve betrayed yourself — how far you’ll have to climb to win back. Some men need a jab with a knife to start their pride; some require a friend’s strong helping arm around them. You need the jab. I’m trying to administer it without anæsthetics, by telling you what some men think of you — that it is your monstrous selfishness that has distorted your normal common sense and landed you where you are.

  “Selfishness alone has resulted in a most cruel and unnatural neglect of your sister — your only living relative — in a deliberate relapse into slothful and vicious habits; in neglect of a most promising career which was already yours; in a contemptible willingness to live on your sister’s income after gambling away your own fortune.

  “I know you; I carried you through teething and measles, my son: and I’ve carried you through the horrors of alcoholic delirium. And I say to you now that, with the mental degeneration already apparent, and your naturally quick temper, if you break down a few more cells in that martyred brain of yours, you’ll end in an asylum — possibly one reserved for the criminal insane.”

  A dull colour stained the pasty whiteness of Quest’s face. For several minutes he stood there, his fingers working and picking at each other, his pale, prominent eyes glaring.

  “That’s a big indictment, doctor,” he said at last.

  “Thank God you think it so,” returned the doctor. “If you will stand by your better self for one week — for only one week — after leaving Mulqueen’s, I’ll stand by you for life, my boy. Come! You were a good sport once. And that little sister of yours is worth it. Come, Stuyvesant; is it a bargain?”

  He stepped forward and held out his large, firm, reassuring hand. The young fellow took it limply.

  “Done with you, doctor,” he said without conviction; “it’s hell for mine, I suppose, if I don’t make my face behave. You’re right; I’m the goat; and if I don’t quit butting I’ll sure end by slapping some sissy citizen with an axe.”

  He gave the doctor’s hand a perfunctory shake with his thin, damp fingers; dropped it, turned to go, halted, retraced his steps.

  “Will it give me the willies if I kiss a cocktail good-bye before I start for that fresh guy, Mulqueen?”

  “Start now, I tell you! Haven’t I your word?”

  “Yes — but on the way to buy transportation can’t I offer myself one last — —”

  “Can’t you be a good sport, Stuyve?”

  The youth hesitated, scowled.

  “Oh, very well,” he said carelessly, turned and went out.

  As he walked along in the slush he said to himself: “I guess it’s up the river for mine.... By God, it’s a shame, for I’m feeling pretty good, too, and that’s no idle quip!... Old Squills handed out a line of talk all right-o!... He landed it, too.... I ought to find something to do.”

  As he walked, a faint glow stimulated his enervated intelligence; ideas, projects long abandoned, desires forgotten, even a far echo from the old ambition stirring in its slumber, quickened his slow pulses. The ghost of what he might have been, nay, what he could have made himself, rose wavering in his path. Other ghosts, long laid, floated beside him, accompanying him — the ghosts of dead opportunities, dead ideals, lofty inspi
rations long, long strangled.

  “A job,” he muttered; “that’s the wholesome dope for Willy. There isn’t a newspaper or magazine in town where I can’t get next if I speak easy. I can deliver the goods, too; it’s like wiping swipes off a bar — —”

  In his abstraction he had walked into the Holland House, and he suddenly became conscious that he was confronting a familiarly respectful bartender.

  “Oh, hell,” he said, greatly disconcerted, “I want some French vichy, Gus!” He made a wry face, and added: “Put a dash of tabasco in it, and salt it.”

  A thick-lipped, ruddy-cheeked young fellow, celebrated for his knowledge of horses, also notorious for other and less desirable characteristics, stood leaning against the bar, watching him.

  They nodded civilly to one another. Quest swallowed his peppered vichy, pulled a long face and said:

  “We’re a pair of ‘em, all right.”

  “Pair of what?” inquired the thick-lipped young man, face becoming rosier and looking more than ever like somebody’s groom.

  “Pair of bum whips. We’ve laid on the lash too hard. I’m going to stable my five nags — my five wits!” — he explained with a sneer as the other regarded him with all the bovine intelligence of one of his own stable-boys— “because they’re foundered; and that’s the why, young four-in-hand!”

  He left the bar, adding as he passed:

  “I’m a rotting citizen, but you” — he laughed insolently— “you have become phosphorescent!”

  The street outside was all fog and melting snow; the cold vichy he had gulped made him internally uncomfortable.

  “A gay day to go to Mulqueen’s,” he muttered sourly, gazing about for a taxicab.

  There was none for hire at that moment; he walked on for a while, feeling the freezing slush penetrate his boot-soles; and by degrees a sullen temper rose within him, revolting — not at what he had done to himself — but at the consequences which were becoming more unpleasant every moment.

  As he trudged along, slipping, sliding, his overcoat turned up around his pasty face, his cheeks wet with the icy fog, he continued swearing to himself, at himself, at the slush, the cold vichy in his belly, the appetite already awakened which must be denied.