Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “And I’ll add this for my own satisfaction: the man who gets her, and doesn’t marry her, will ultimately experience a biting from that same worm which will make our lacerations resemble the agreeable tickling of a feather.

  “We’re a rotten lot of cowards. And what hypocrites we are!

  “I saw Fontaine sending flowers to his wife. He’d been at Athalie’s all the evening. There are only two occasions on which a man sends flowers to his wife; one of them is when he’s in love with her.

  “Aren’t we the last word in scuts? Custom-ridden, habit-cursed, afraid, eternally afraid of something — of our own sort always, and of their opinions. And that offering of flowers when the man who sends them hopes to do something of which he is ashamed, or has already done it!

  “How I do run on! In vino veritas — there’s some class to pickled truth! Here are olives for thought, red peppers for honesty, onions for logic — and cauliflower for constancy — and fifty-seven other varieties, Clive — all absent in the canned make-up of the modern man.

  “‘When you and I behind the veil have passed’ — but they don’t wear veils now; and now is our chance.

  “We’ll never take it. Hall-marks are our only guide. When absent we merely become vicious. We know what we want; we know what we ought to have; but we’re too cowardly to go after it. And so are you. And so am I.

  “Yours —

  “Reeve.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  DURING that first year Athalie Greensleeve saw a great deal of New York society, professionally, and of many New York men, socially.

  But the plaything which society attempted to make of her she gently but adroitly declined to become. She herself drew this line whenever it was necessary to draw it, never permitting herself to mistake the fundamental attitude of these agreeable and amicably demonstrative people toward her, or toward any girl who lived alone in New York and who practised such a profession.

  Not among the people who employed her and who paid her lavishly for an evening’s complacency; not among people who sought her at her own place during business hours for professional advice or for lighter amusement could she expect any other except professional recognition.

  And after a few months of wistful loneliness she came, gradually, to desire from these people nothing except what they gave.

  But there were some people she met during that first year’s practice of her new profession who seemed to be unimpressed by the popular belief in such an awesome actuality as New York “society.” And some of these, oddly enough, were the descendants of those who, perhaps, had formed part of the only real society the big, raw, sprawling city ever had. But that was long, long ago, in the day of the first President.

  New York will always be spotted with the symptoms but will never again have it. Paris has gone the same way. London is still flushed with it, Berlin hectic, Vienna fevered. But the days of a “society” as a distinct ensemble, with a logical reason for being, with authority, with functions, with offensive and defensive powers and fixed boundaries, is over forever; possibly never existed, certainly never will exist in the series of gregarious aggregations and segregations known to a perplexed and slightly amused world as the city of New York.

  For Athalie that first year of new interests and of unfamiliar successes passed more rapidly than had any single month ever before passed in her life since the strenuous and ragged days of childhood.

  It was a year of novelty, of excitement, of self-development, and the development of interests as new as they had been unsuspected.

  Like a gaily illuminated pageant the processional passed before her with its constantly changing surroundings, new faces, new voices, new ideas, new motives.

  And the new faces were to be scanned and understood, the new voices listened to intently, the new ideas analysed, the new motives detected and dissected.

  In drawing-rooms, in ballrooms, in boudoirs, new scenes constantly presented themselves; one house was never like the next, one hostess never resembled another; wealth itself was presented to her under innumerable aspects ranging all the way from that false modesty and smugness known as meekness, to fevered pretence, arrogance, and noisy aggressiveness.

  Wonderful school for a girl to learn in! — the gilded halls of which were eternally vexed and swept by the winds and whirlwinds of every human passion.

  For here, under her still, clear scrutiny, was huddled humanity itself, unconsciously bent on self-revelation. And Athalie’s very presence amid assemblies ever shifting, ever renewed, was educating her eyes and ears and intellect to an insight and a comprehension she had never dreamed of.

  In some the supreme necessity for self-ventilation interested her; in others, secretiveness hermetically sealed fascinated her. Motives interested or disinterested, sordid or noble; desires, aspirations, hopes, perplexities, — whatever a glance, a word, an attitude, a silence, suggested to her, fixed her attention, excited her intelligence to curiosity, and focussed her interest to a mental concentration.

  Out of which emerged deductions — curious fruits of logic, experience, instinct, intuitiveness, and of some extraneous perception, outside of and independent of her own conscious and objective personality.

  But in one radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of either sex ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of psychic phenomena.

  For those two worlds in which we all dwell, the supraliminal or waking world, the transliminal, or sleeping world, were merged in this young girl.

  The psychological fact that natural or induced sleep is necessary for extraneous or for auto-suggestion, did not exist for her. Her psychic qualities were natural and beautiful, as much a part of her objective as of her subjective life. Neither the trance induced by mesmerism or hypnotism, nor the less harmful slumber by induction, nor the sleep of nature itself was necessary for the girl to find herself in rapport with others or with her own higher personality — her superior spiritual self. Nor did her clairvoyance require trances; nor was sleep in others necessary before she ventured suggestion.

  A celebrated physician who had been eager to meet her found her extremely interesting but rather beyond his ability to classify.

  How much of her he believed to be fraud might be suspected by what he said to her that evening in a corner of a very grand house on Fifth Avenue:

  “There is no such thing as a ‘control’; there is no such thing as a ‘medium.’ No so-called medium has ever revealed anything that did not exist either in her own consciousness or in the consciousness of some other living human being.

  “Self-delusion induced by auto-suggestion accounts for the more respectable victims of Spiritism. For Spiritism is a doctrine accepted by many people of education, intelligence, refinement, and of generally excellent judgment.

  “And it is a pity, because Spiritism is a bar to all real intellectual, material, moral, and spiritual progress. It thrives only because it pretends to satisfy an intense human craving — the desire to re-establish personal relations with the dead. It never has done this; it never will, Miss Greensleeve. And if you really believe it has done this you are sadly and hopelessly mistaken.”

  “But,” said Athalie, looking at him out of blue eyes the chiefest beauty of which was their fearless candour, “I do not concern myself with what is called Spiritism — with trances, table-tipping, table-rapping, slate-writing, apparitions, reincarnations — with cabinets, curtains, darkened rooms, psychic circles.”

  “You employ a crystal in your profession.”

  “Yes. I need not.”

  “Why do you do it, then?”

  “Some clients ask for it.”

  “And you see things in it?”

  “Yes,” said the girl simply.

  “And when your clients do not demand a crystal-reading?”

  “I can see perfectly well without it — when I can see clearly at all.”

  “Into the future?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “T
he past, too, of course.”

  “Not always.”

  She fascinated the non-scientific side of this famous physician; he interested her intensely.

  “Do you know,” she ventured with a faint smile, “that you are really quite as psychically endowed as I am?”

  His handsome, sanguine features flushed deeply, but he smiled in appreciation.

  “Not in the manner you so saucily imply, Miss Greensleeve,” he said gaily. “My work is sound, logical, reasonable, and based on fundamental truths capable of being proven. I never saw an apparition in my life — and believed that it was really there!”

  “Oh! So you have seen an apparition?”

  “None that could have really existed independently of my own vision. In other words it wouldn’t have been there at all if I hadn’t supposed I had seen it.”

  “You did suppose so?”

  “I knew perfectly well that I didn’t see it. I didn’t even think I saw it.”

  “But you saw it?”

  “I imagined I did, and at the same time I knew I didn’t.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, “you did see it, Dr. Westland. You have seen it more than once. You will see it again.”

  A heavier colour dyed his face; he started impatiently as though to check her — as though to speak; and did not.

  She said: “If what I say is distasteful to you, please stop me.” She waited a moment; then, as he evinced no desire to check or interrupt her: “I am very diffident about saying this to you — to a man so justly celebrated — pre-eminent in the greatest of all professions. I am so insignificant in comparison, so unimportant, so ignorant where you are experienced and learned.

  “But may I say to you that nothing dies? I am not referring to a possible spiritual world inhabited perhaps by souls. I mean that here, on this earth, all around us, nothing that has ever lived really dies.... Is what I say distasteful to you?”

  He offered no reply.

  “Because,” she said in a low voice, “if I say anything more it would concern you. And what you saw.... For what you saw was alive, and real — as truly living as you and I are. It is nothing to wonder at, nothing to trouble or perplex you, to see clearly — anybody — you have ever — loved.”

  He looked up at her in a silence so strained, so longing, so intense, that she felt the terrific tension.

  “Yes,” she said, “you saw clearly and truly when you saw — her.”

  “Who? in God’s name!”

  “Need I tell you, Dr. Westland?”

  No, she had no need to tell him. His wife was dead. But it was not his wife he had seen so often in his latter years.

  No, she had no need to tell him.

  Athalie had never been inclined to care for companions of her own sex. As a child she had played with boys, preferring them. Few women appealed to her as qualified for her friendship — only one or two here and there and at rare intervals seemed to her sufficiently interesting to cultivate. And to the girl’s sensitive and shy advances, here and there, some woman responded.

  Thus she came to know and to exchange occasional social amenities with Adele Millis, a youthful actress, with Rosalie Faithorn, a handsome girl born to a formal social environment, but sufficiently independent to explore outside of it and snap her fingers at the opinions of those peeping over the bulwarks to see what she was doing.

  Also there was Peggy Brooks, a fascinating, breezy, capable young creature who was Dr. Brooks to many, and Peggy to very few. And there were one or two others, like Nina Grey and Jeanne Delauny and Anne Randolph.

  But of men there would have been no limit and no end had Athalie not learned very early in the game how to check them gently but firmly; how to test, pick, discriminate, sift, winnow, and choose those to be admitted to her rooms after the hours of business had ended.

  Of these the standards differed, so that she herself scarcely knew why such and such a one had been chosen — men, for instance, like Cecil Reeve and Arthur Ensart — perhaps even such a man as James Allys, 3rd. Captain Dane, of course, had been a foregone conclusion, and John Lyndhurst was logical enough; also W. Grismer, and the jaunty, obese Mr. Welter, known in sporting circles as Helter Skelter Welter, and more briefly and profanely as Hel. His running mate, Harry Ferris had been included. And there was a number of others privileged to drift into the rooms of Athalie Greensleeve when she chose to be at home to anybody.

  From Clive she heard nothing: and she wrote to him no more. Of him she did hear from time to time — mere scraps of conversation caught, a word or two volunteered, some careless reference, perhaps, perhaps some scrap of intentional information or some comment deliberate if not a trifle malicious.

  But to all who mentioned him in her presence she turned a serene face and unclouded eyes. On the surface she was not to be read concerning what she thought of Clive Bailey — if indeed she thought about him at all.

  Meanwhile he had married Winifred Stuart in London, where, it appeared, they had taken a house for the season. All sorts of honourables and notables and nobles as well as the resident and visiting specimens of a free and sovereign people had been bidden to the wedding. And had joyously repaired thither — the bride being fabulously wealthy and duly presented at Court.

  The American Ambassador was there with the entire staff of the Embassy; also a king in exile, several famished but receptive dukes and counts and various warriors out of jobs — all magnetised by the subtle radiations from the world’s most powerful loadstone, money.

  They said that Mrs. Bailey, Sr., was very beautiful and impressive in a gown that hypnotised the peeresses — or infuriated them — nobody seemed to know exactly which.

  Cecil Reeve, lounging on the balcony by the open window one May evening, said to Hargrave — and probably really unconscious that Athalie could hear him if she cared to: “Well, he got her all right — or rather his mother got her. When he wakes up he’ll be sick enough of her millions.”

  Hargrave said: “She’s a cold-blooded little proposition. I’ve known Winifred Stuart all my life, and I never knew her to have any impulse except a fishy one.”

  “Cold as a cod,” nodded Cecil. “Merry times ahead for Clive.”

  And on another occasion, later in the summer, somebody said in the cool dusk of the room:

  “It’s true that the Bailey Juniors are living permanently in England. I saw Clive in Scotland when I was fishing out Banff way. He says they’re remaining abroad indefinitely.”

  Some man’s voice asked how Clive was looking.

  “Not very fit; thin and old. I was with him several times that month and I never saw him crack a smile. That’s not like him, you know.”

  “What is it? His wife?”

  “Well, I fancy it lies somewhere between his mother and his wife — this pre-glacial freeze-up that’s made a bally mummy of him.”

  And still again, and in the tobacco-scented dusk of Athalie’s room, and once more from a man who had just returned from abroad:

  “I kept running into Clive everywhere. He seems to haunt the continent, turning up like a ghost here and there; and believe me he looks the part of the lonely spook.”

  “Where’s his Missis?”

  “They’ve chucked the domestic. Didn’t you know?”

  “Divorced?”

  “No. But they don’t get on. What man could with that girl? So poor old Clive is dawdling around the world all alone, and his wife’s entertainments are the talk of London, and his mother has become pious and is building a chapel for herself to repose in some day when the cards go against her in the jolly game.”

  The cards went against her in the game that autumn.

  Athalie had been writing to her sister Catharine, and had risen from her desk to find a stick of sealing-wax, when, as she turned to go toward her bedroom, she saw Clive’s mother coming toward her.

  Never but once before had she seen Mrs. Bailey — that night at the Regina — and, for the first time in her life, she recoiled before such a visi
tor. A hot, proud colour flared in her cheeks as she drew quietly aside and stood with averted head to let her pass.

  But Clive’s mother gazed at her gently, wistfully, lingering as she passed the girl in the passage-way. And Athalie, turning her head slowly to look after her, saw a quiet smile on her lips as she went her silent way; and presently was no longer there. Then the girl continued on her own way in search of the sealing-wax; but she was moving uncertainly now, one arm outstretched, feeling along the familiar walls and furniture, half-blinded with her tears.

  “Mrs. Bailey, Jr., looked pale and pretty sitting there.”

  So the chapel fulfilled its functions.

  It was a very ornamental private chapel. Mrs. Bailey, Sr., had had it pretty well peppered with family crests and quarterings, authentic and imaginary.

  Mrs. Bailey, Jr., looked pale and pretty sitting there, the English sunlight filtered through stained glass; the glass also was thoroughly peppered with insignia of the House of Bailey. Rich carving, rich colouring, rich people! — what more could sticklers demand for any exclusive sanctuary where only the best people received the Body of Christ, and where God would meet nobody socially unknown.

  Clive arrived from Italy after the funeral. The meeting between him and his wife was faultless. He hung about the splendid country place for a while, and spent much time inside the chapel, and also outside, where he directed the planting of some American evergreens, hemlock, spruce, and white pine.

  But the aromatic perfume of familiar trees was subtly tearing him to tatters; and there came a day when he could no longer endure it.

  His young wife was playing billiards with Lord Innisbrae, known intimately as Cinders, such a languid and burnt out young man was he, with his hair already white, and every lineament seared with the fires of revels long since sunken into ashes.

  He watched them for a while, his hands clenched where they rested in his coat pockets, the lean muscles in his cheeks twitching at intervals.

  When Innisbrae took himself off, Winifred still lounged gracefully along the billiard table taking shots with any ball that lay for her. And Clive looked on, absent-eyed, the flat jaw muscles working at intervals.