Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “No, dearie. It was chloral. And of course, the papers got hold of it and nobody wants the apartment. That’s why you get it cheap — if you’ll take it and chase out the jinx that’s been wished on me. Will you, dearie?”

  “I don’t know,” said the girl, looking around at the newly decorated and cheerful rooms.

  The landlady sniffed: “It certainly was one on me when I let that jinx into my house — to have her go dead on me and all like that.”

  “Poor thing,” murmured Athalie, partly to herself.

  “No, she wasn’t poor. You ought to have seen her rings! Them’s what got her into trouble, dearie; — and the roll she flashed.”

  “Wasn’t it suicide?” asked Athalie.

  “‘Wasn’t it suicide?’ asked Athalie.”

  “I gotta tell you the truth. No, it wasn’t. She was feeling fine and dandy. Business had went good.... There was a young man to visit her that evening. I seen him go up the stairs.... But I was that sleepy I went to bed. So I didn’t see him come down. And next day at noon when I went up to do the room she lay dead onto the floor, and her rings gone, and the roll missing out of her stocking.”

  “Did the man kill her?”

  “Yes, dearie. And the papers had it. That’s what put me in Dutch. I gotta be honest with you. You’d hear it, anyway.”

  “But how could he give her chloral—”

  The anxious, excited little woman’s volubility could suffer restraint no longer:

  “Oh, he could dope her easy in the dark!” she burst out. “Not that the house ain’t thur’ly respectable as far as I can help it, and all my lodgers is refined. No, Miss Greensleeve, I won’t stand for nothing that ain’t refined and genteel. Only what can a honest woman do when she’s abed and asleep, what with all the latch keys and entertainin’, and things like that? No, Miss Greensleeve, I ain’t got myself to blame, being decent and law-abiding and all like that, what with the police keeping tabs and the neighbourhood not being Fifth Avenoo either! — and this jinx wished on me—”

  “Please—”

  “Oh, I suppose you ain’t a-goin’ to stay here now that you’ve learned all about these goin’s on and all like that—”

  “Please wait!” — for the voluble landlady was already beginning to sniffle;— “I am perfectly willing to stay, Mrs. Meehan, — if you will promise to be a little patient about my rent until I secure a position—”

  “Oh, I will, Miss Greensleeve! I ain’t plannin’ to press you none! I know how it is with money and with young ladies. Easy come, easy go! Just give me what you can. I ain’t fixed any too good myself, what with butchers and bakers and rent owed me and all like that. I guess I can trust you to act fair and square—”

  “Yes; I am square — so far.”

  Mrs. Meehan began to sob, partly with relief, partly with a general tendency to sentimental hysteria: “I can see that, dearie. And say — if you’re quiet, I ain’t peekin’ around corners and through key-holes. No, Miss Greensleeve; that ain’t my style! Quiet behaved young ladies can have their company without me saying nothing to nobody. All I ask is that no lady will cut up flossy in any shape, form, or manner, but behave genteel and refined to one and all. I don’t want no policeman in the area. That ain’t much to ask, is it?” she gasped, fairly out of breath between eloquence and tears.

  “No,” said Athalie with a faint smile, “it isn’t much to ask.”

  And so the agreement was concluded; Mrs. Meehan brought in fresh linen for bed and bathroom, pulled out the new bureau drawers and dusted them, carried away a few anæmic geraniums in pots, and swept the new hardwood floor with a dry mop, explaining that the entire apartment had been renovated and redecorated since the tragic episode of last August, and that all the furniture was brand new.

  “Her trunks and clothes and all like that was took by the police,” explained Mrs. Meehan, “but she left some rubbish behind a sliding panel which they didn’t find. I found it and I put it on the top shelf in the closet—”

  She dragged a chair thither, mounted it, and presently came trotting back to the front room, carrying in both arms a bulky box of green morocco and a large paper parcel bursting with odds and ends of tinsel and silk. These she dumped on the centre table, saying: “She had a cabinet-maker fix up a cupboard in the baseboard, and that’s where she kept gimcracks. The police done me damage enough without my showin’ them her hidin’ place and the things she kept there. Here — I’ll show it to you! It’s full of keys and electric wires and switches—”

  She took Athalie by the arm and drew her over to the west side of the room.

  “You can’t see nothing there, can you?” she demanded, pointing at the high wainscoting of dull wood polished by age.

  Athalie confessed she could not.

  “Look!”

  Mrs. Meehan passed her bony hand along the panels until her work-worn forefinger rested on a polished knot in the richly grained wood. Then she pushed; and the entire square of panels swung outward, lowering like a drawbridge, and presently rested flat on the floor.

  “How odd!” exclaimed Athalie, kneeling to see better.

  What she saw was a cupboard lined with asbestos, and an elaborate electric switchboard set with keys from which innumerable insulated wires radiated, entering tubes that disappeared in every direction.

  “What are all these for?” she asked, rising to her feet.

  “Dearie, I’ve got to be honest with you. This here lady was a meejum.”

  “A — what?”

  “A meejum.”

  “What is that?”

  “Why don’t you know, dearie? She threw trances for twenty per. She seen things. She done stunts with tables and tambourines and accordions. Why this here place is all wired and fixed up between the walls and the ceiling and roof and the flooring, too. There is chimes and bells and harmonicas and mechanical banjos under the flooring and in the walls and ceiling. There’s a whispering phonograph, too, and something that sighs and sobs. Also a machine that is full of singing birds that pipe up just as sweet and soft and natural as can be.

  “On rainy days you can amuse yourself with them keys; I don’t like to fool with them myself, being nervous with a weak back and my vittles not setting right and all like that—” Again she ran down from sheer lack of breath.

  Athalie gazed curiously at the secret cupboard. After a few moments she bent over, lifted and replaced the panelling and passed her slim hand over the wainscot, thoughtfully.

  “So the woman was a trance-medium,” she said, half to herself.

  “Yes, Miss Greensleeve. She read the stars, too, and she done cards on the side; you know — all about a blond gentleman that wants to meet you and a dark lady comin’ over the water to do something mean to you. She charged high, but she had customers enough — swell ladies, too, in their automobiles, and old gentlemen and young and all like that.... Here’s part of her outfit” — leading Athalie to the centre table and opening the green morocco box.

  In the box was a slim bronze tripod and a big sphere of crystal. Mrs. Meehan placed the tripod on the table and set the crystal sphere upon it, saying dubiously: “She claimed that she could see things in that. I guess it was part of her game. I ain’t never seen nothing into that glass ball, and I’ve looked, too. You can have it if you want it. It’s kind of cute to set on the mantel.”

  She began to paw and grub and rummage in the big paper parcel, scratching about in the glittering mess of silk and embroidery with a pertinacity entirely gallinaceous.

  “You can have these, too,” she said to Athalie— “if you want ‘em. They’re heathen I guess—” holding up some tawdry Japanese and home-made Chinese finery.

  But Athalie declined the dead woman’s robes of office and Mrs. Meehan rolled them up in the wrapping paper and took them and herself off, very profuse in her gratitude to Athalie for consenting to occupy the apartment and thereby remove the “jinx” that had inhabited it since the tragedy of the month before.

&nbs
p; A very soft and melancholy mew from the basket informed the girl that Hafiz desired his liberty. So she let him out and he trotted at her heels as she walked about inspecting the apartment. Also he did considerable inspecting on his own account, sniffing at every door-sill and crack, jumping up on chairs to look out of windows, prowling in and out of closets, his plumy tail jerking with dubiousness and indecision.

  The apartment was certainly clean. Evidently the house had been a good one in its day, for the trim was dark old mahogany, rich and beautiful in colour; and the fireplace was rather pretty with its acanthus leaves and roses deeply carved in marble which time had toned to an ivory tint.

  The darkly stained floor of hardwood was, of course, modern. So were the new and very hideous oriental rugs made in Hoboken, and the aniline pink wall-paper, and the brand new furniture still smelling of department store varnish. Hideous, too, were the electric fixtures, the gas-log in the old-time fireplace, and the bargain counter bric-a-brac geometrically spaced upon the handsome old mantel.

  But there were possibilities in the big, square room facing south and in the two smaller bed chambers fronting the north. A modern bathroom connected these.

  To find an entire top floor in New York at such a price was as amazing as it was comfortable to the girl who had not expected to be able to afford more than a small bedroom.

  She had a little money left, enough to purchase food and a few pots and pans to cook it over the gas range in one of the smaller rooms.

  And here she and Hafiz had their first meal on the long world-trail stretching away before her. After which she sat for a while by the window in a stiff arm-chair, thinking of Clive and of his silence, and of the young girl he was one day to marry.

  Southward, the lights of the city began to break out and sparkle through the autumn haze; tall towers, hitherto invisible, suddenly glimmered against the sky-line. A double vista of lighted street lamps stretched east and west below her.

  The dusty-violet light of evening softened the shabby street below, veiling ugliness and squalor and subtly transmuting meanness and poverty to picturesqueness — as artists, using only the flattering simplicity of essentials, show us in etching and aquarelle the romance of the commonplace. And so the rusty iron balconies of a chop suey across the street became quaint and curious: dragon and swinging gilded sign, banner and garish fretwork grew mellow and mysterious under the ruddy Hunter’s Moon sailing aloft out of the city’s haze like a great Chinese lantern.

  From an unseen steeple or two chimes sounded the hour. Farther away in the city a bell answered. It is not a city of belfries and chimes; only locally and by hazard are bell notes distinguishable above the interminable rolling monotone of the streets.

  And now, the haze thickening, distant reverberations, deep, mellow, melancholy, grew in the night air: fog horns from the two rivers and the bay.

  Leaning both elbows on the sill of the opened window Athalie gazed wearily into the street where noisy children shrilled at one another and dodged vehicles like those quick tiny creatures whirling on ponds.

  Here and there, the flare of petroleum torches lighted push-carts piled with fruit or laden with bowls of lemonade and hokey-pokey. Sidewalks were crowded with shabby people gossiping in groups or passing east and west — about what squalid business only they could know.

  On the stoops of all the dwellings, brick or brownstone, people sat; the men in shirt-sleeves, the young girls bare-headed, and in light summer gowns. Pianos sounded through open parlour windows; there was dancing going on somewhere in the block.

  Eastward where the street intersected the glare of the dingy avenue, a policeman stood on fixed post, the electric lights guttering on his metal-work when he turned. Athalie had laid her cheek on her arms and closed her eyes, from fatigue, perhaps; perhaps to force back the tears which, nevertheless, glimmered on her lashes where they lay close to the curved white cheeks.

  Little by little the girl was taking degree after degree in her post-graduate course, the study of which was man.

  And for the first time in her life a new reaction in the laboratory of experience had revealed to her a new element in her analysis; bitterness.

  Which is akin to resentment. And to these it is easy to ally recklessness.

  There came to her a moment, as she sat huddled there at the window, when endurance suddenly flashed into a white anger; and she found herself on her feet, pacing the room as caged things pace, with a sort of blindly fixed purpose, seeing everything yet looking at nothing that she passed.

  But after this had lasted long enough she halted, gazing about her as though for something that might aid her. But there was only the room and the furniture, and Hafiz asleep on a chair; only these and the crystal sphere on its slim bronze tripod. And suddenly she found herself on her knees beside it, staring into its dusky transparent depths, fixing her mind, concentrating every thought, straining every faculty, every nerve in the one desperate and imperative desire.

  But through the crystal’s depths there is no aid for those who “see clearly,” no comfort, no answer. She could not find there the man she searched for — the man for whom her soul cried out in fear, in anger, in despair. As in a glass, darkly, only her own face she saw, fire-edged with a light like that which burns deep in black opals.

  Prone on the floor at last, her white face framed by her hands, her eyes wide open in the dark, she finally understood that her clear vision was of no avail where she herself was concerned; that they who see clearly can never use that vision to help themselves.

  Fiercely she resented it, — the more bitterly because for the first time in her life she had condescended to any voluntary effort toward clairvoyance.

  Wearily she sat up on the floor and gathered her knees into her arms, staring at nothing there in the darkness while the slow tears fell.

  Never before had she known loneliness. A man had made her understand it. Never before had she known bitterness. A man had taught it to her. Never again should any man do what this man had done to her! She was learning resentment.

  All men should be the same to her hereafter. All men should stand already condemned. Never again should one among them betray her mind to reveal itself, persuade her heart to response, her lips to sacrifice their sweetness and their pride, her soul to stir in its sleep, awake, and answer. And for what the minds and hearts of men might bring upon themselves, let men be responsible. Their inclinations, offers, protests, promises as far as they regarded herself could never again affect her. Let man look to himself; his desires no longer concerned her. Let him keep his distance — or take his chances. And there were no chances.

  Athalie was learning resentment.

  Somebody was knocking. Athalie rose from the floor, turned on the lights, dried her eyes, went slowly to the door, and opened it.

  A large, fat, pallid woman stood in the hallway. Her eyes were as washed out as her faded, yellowish hair; and her kimono needed washing.

  “Good evening,” she said cordially, coming in without any encouragement from Athalie and settling her uncorseted bulk in the arm-chair. “My name is Grace Bellmore, — Mrs. Grace Bellmore. I have the rear rooms under yours. If you’re ever lonely come down and talk it over. Neighbours are not what they might be in this house. Look out for the Meehan, too. I’d call her a cat only I like cats. Say, that’s a fine one on your bed there. Persian? Oh, Angora—” here she fished out a cigarette from the pocket of her wrapper, found a match, scratched it on the sole of her ample slipper, and lighted her cigarette.

  “Have one?” she inquired. “No? Don’t like them? Oh, well, you’ll come to ‘em. Everything comes easy when you’re lonely. I know. You don’t have to tell me. God! I get so sick of my own company sometimes—”

  She turned her head to gaze about her, twisting her heavy, creased neck as far as the folds of fat permitted: “You had your nerve with you when you took this place. I knew Mrs. Del Garmo. I warned her, too. But she was a bone-head. A woman can’t be careless in this
town. And when it comes to men — say, Miss Greensleeve, I want to know their names before they ask me to dinner and start in calling me Grace. It’s Grace after meat with me!” And she laughed and laughed, slapping her fat knee with a pudgy, ring-laden hand.

  Athalie, secretly dismayed, forced a polite smile. Mrs. Bellmore blew a few smoke rings toward the ceiling.

  “Are you in business, Miss Greensleeve?”

  “Yes.... I am looking for a position.”

  “What a pretty voice — and refined way of speaking!” exclaimed Mrs. Bellmore frankly. “I guess you’ve seen better days. Most people have. Tell you the truth, though, I haven’t. I’m better off than I ever was before. Of course this is the dull season, but things are picking up. What is your line, Miss Greensleeve?”

  “Stenographer.”

  “Oh! Well, I don’t suppose I could do anything for you, could I?”

  “I don’t know what your business is,” ventured Athalie, who, heretofore had not dared even to surmise what might be the vocation of this very large and faded woman who wore a pink kimono and a dozen rings on her nicotine-stained fingers, and who smoked incessantly.

  The woman seemed to be a trifle surprised: “Haven’t you ever heard of Grace Bellmore?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Athalie with increasing diffidence.

  “Well, maybe you wouldn’t, not being in the profession. The managers all know me. I run an Emergency Agency on Broadway.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” said the girl.

  “No? Then it’s like this: a show gets stuck and needs a quick study. They call me up and I throw them what they want at an hour’s notice. They can always count on me for anything from wardrobe mistress to prima donna. That’s how I get mine,” she concluded with a jolly laugh.

  Athalie, feeling a little more confidence in her visitor, smiled at her.

  “Say — you’re a beauty!” exclaimed Mrs. Bellmore, gazing at her. “You’re all there, too. I could place you easy if you ever need it. You don’t sing, do you?”