Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Three empires, two kingdoms, and a great republic resounded with the hellish din of arming twenty million men. Her soft lips were touched with the smile of youth that learns for the first time it is beloved; her eyes of a child, exquisite, brooding, rested with a little more courage now on his — were learning, little by little, to sustain his gaze, endure the ardour that no careless, laughing speech of his could hide or dim or quench.

  In the twilight of the streets there was silence, save for the rush of motors and the recurrent trample of armed men. But the heart of Rue Carew was afire with song — and every delicate vein in her ran singing to her heart.

  There was war in the Eastern world; and palace and chancellery were ablaze. But they spoke of the West — of humble places and lowly homes; of still woodlands where mosses edged the brooks; of peaceful villages they both had known, where long, tree-shaded streets slept in the dappled shadow under the sun of noon.

  * * * * *

  Marotte came, silent, self-respecting, very grey and tranquil in his hour of trial.

  There were two letters for Neeland, left by hand. And, when the old man had gone away bearing his silver tray among his heavier burdens:

  “Read them,” nodded Rue Carew.

  He read them both aloud to her: the first amused them a little — not without troubling them a little, too:

  * * * * *

  Monsieur Neeland:

  It is the Tzigane, Fifi, who permits herself the honour of addressing you.

  Breslau escaped. With him went the plans, it seems. You behaved admirably in the Café des Bulgars. A Russian comrade has you and Prince Erlik to remember in her prayers.

  You have done well, monsieur. Now, your task is ended. Go back to the Western World and leave us to end this battle between ourselves.

  It is written and confirmed by the stars that what the Eastern World has sown it shall now reap all alone.

  We Tziganes know. You should not mock at our knowledge. For there is a dark star, Erlik, named from the Prince of Hell. And last night it was in conjunction with the red star, Mars. None saw it; none has ever beheld the dark star, Erlik.

  But we Tziganes know. We have known for five thousand years that Erlik hung aloft, followed by ten black moons. Ask your astronomers. But we Tziganes knew this before there ever were astronomers!

  Therefore, go home to your own land, monsieur. The Prince of Hell is in the heavens. The Yellow Devil shall see the Golden Horn again. Empires shall totter and fall. Little American, stand from under.

  Adieu! We Tziganes wish you well — Fifi and Nini of the Jardin Russe.

  “Adieu, beau jeune homme! And — to her whom you shall take with you — homage, good wishes, good augury, and adieux!”

  * * * * *

  “‘To her whom you shall take with you,’” he repeated, looking at Rue Carew.

  The girl blushed furiously and bent her head, and her slender fingers grew desperately busy with her handkerchief.

  Neeland, as nervous as she, fumbled with the seal of the remaining letter, managed finally to break it, glanced at the writing, then laughed and read:

  * * * * *

  My dear Comrade Neeland:

  I get my thousand lances! Congratulate me! Were you much battered by that canaille last night? I laugh until I nearly burst when I think of that absurd bousculade!

  That girl I took with me is all right. I’m going to Petrograd! I’m going on the first opportunity by way of Switzerland.

  What happiness, Neeland! No more towns for me, except those I take. No more politics, no more diplomacy! I shall have a thousand lances to do my talking for me. Hurrah!

  Neeland, I love you as a brother. Come to the East with me. You shall make a splendid trooper! Not, of course, a Terek Cossack. A Cossack is God’s work. A Terek Cossack is born, not made.

  But, good heavens! There is other most excellent cavalry in the world, I hope! Come with me to Russia. Say that you will come, my dear comrade Neeland, and I promise you we shall amuse ourselves when the world’s dance begins ——

  * * * * *

  “Oh!” breathed the girl, exasperated. “Sengoun is a fool!”

  Neeland looked up quickly from his letter; then his face altered, and he rose; but Rue Carew was already on her feet; and she had lost most of her colour — and her presence of mind, too, it seemed, for Neeland’s arms were half around her, and her hands were against his shoulders.

  Neither of them spoke; and he was already amazed and rather scared at his own incredible daring — already terribly afraid of this slender, fragrant creature who stood rigid and silent within the circle of his arm, her head lowered, her little, resisting hands pressed convulsively against his breast.

  And after a long time the pressure against his breast slowly relaxed; her restless fingers moved nervously against his shoulders, picked at the lapels of his coat, clung there as he drew her head against his breast.

  The absurd beating of his heart choked him as he stammered her name; he dropped his head beside her hot and half hidden cheek. And, after a long, long time, her face stirred on his breast, turned a very little toward him, and her young lips melted against his.

  So they stood through the throbbing silence in the slowly darkening room, while the street outside echoed with the interminable trample of passing cavalry, and the dim capital lay like a phantom city under the ghostly lances of the searchlights as though probing all Heaven to the very feet of God in search of reasons for the hellish crime now launched against the guiltless Motherland.

  And high among the planets sped the dark star, Erlik, unseen by men, rushing through viewless interstellar space, hurled out of nothing by the Prince of Hell into the nothing toward which all Hell is speeding, too; and whither it shall one day fade and disappear and pass away forever.

  * * * * *

  “My darling — —”

  “Oh, Jim — I have loved you all my life,” she whispered. And her young arms crept up and clung around his neck.

  “My darling Rue — my little Rue Carew — —”

  Outside the window an officer also spoke through the unbroken clatter of passing horsemen which filled the whole house with a hollow roar. But she heard her lover’s voice alone as in a hushed and magic world; and in her girl’s enchanted ears his words were the only sounds that stirred a heavenly quiet that reigned between the earth and stars.

  BARBARIANS

  With the outbreak of the First World War, Chambers largely abandoned the weird fiction and romances of his earlier career, focusing instead on patriotic wartime adventure novels and, later, on more serious historical fiction.

  First published in 1917, this is an adventure novel about the exploits of a group of American civilians who, sickened by their country’s apathy during the First World War, decide to travel to Europe to join in the conflict as soldiers.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  Stent lost the fight, fell outward, wider, dropping back into mid-air.

  TO

  LYLE and MADELEINE MAHAN

  I

  “Daughter of Light, the bestial wrath

  Of Barbary besets thy path!

  The Hun is beating his painted drum;

  His war horns blare! The Hun is come!”

  “Father, I feel his fœtid breath:

  The thick air reeks wit
h the stench of death;

  My will is Thine. Thy will be done

  On Turk and Bulgar, Czech and Hun!”

  II

  She understands.

  Where the dead headland flare

  Mocks sea and sand;

  Where death-lights shed their glare

  On No-Man’s-Land.

  France takes her stand.

  Magnificently fair,

  The Flaming Brand

  Within her slender hand;

  Christ’s lilies in her hair.

  III

  “Daughter of Grief, thy House is sand!

  Thy towers are falling athwart the land.

  They’ve flayed the earth to its ribs of chalk

  And over its bones the spectres stalk!”

  “Father, I see my high spires reel;

  My breast is scarred by the Hun’s hoofed heel.

  What was, shall be! I read Thy sign:

  Thy ocean yawns for the smitten swine!”

  IV

  Then, from Verdun

  Pealed westward to the Somme

  From every gun

  God’s summons: “Daughter! Come!”

  Then the red sun

  Stood still. Grew dumb

  The universal hum

  Of life, and numb

  The lips of Life, undone

  By Death.... And so — France won!

  V

  “Daughter of God, the End is here!

  The swine rush on: the sea is near!

  My wild flowers bloom on the trenches’ edge;

  My little birds sing by shore and sedge.”

  “Father, raise up my martyred land!

  Clothe her bones with Thy magic hand;

  Receive the Brand Thy angel lent,

  And stanch my blood with Thy sacrament.”

  CHAPTER I

  FED UP

  So this is what happened to the dozen-odd malcontents who could no longer stand the dirty business in Europe and the dirtier politicians at home.

  There was treachery in the Senate, treason in the House. A plague of liars infested the Republic; the land was rotting with plots.

  But if the authorities at Washington remained incredulous, stunned into impotency, while the din of murder filled the world, a few mere men, fed up on the mess, sickened while awaiting executive galvanization, and started east to purge their souls.

  They came from the four quarters of the continent, drawn to the decks of the mule transport by a common sickness and a common necessity. Only two among them had ever before met. They represented all sorts, classes, degrees of education and of ignorance, drawn to a common rendezvous by coincidental nausea incident to the temporary stupidity and poltroonery of those supposed to represent them in the Congress of the Great Republic.

  The rendezvous was a mule transport reeking with its cargo, still tied up to the sun-scorched wharf where scores of loungers loafed and gazed up at the rail and exchanged badinage with the supercargo.

  The supercargo consisted of this dozen-odd fed-up ones — eight Americans, three Frenchmen and one Belgian.

  There was a young soldier of fortune named Carfax, recently discharged from the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, who seemed to feel rather sure of a commission in the British service.

  Beside him, leaning on the blistering rail, stood a self-possessed young man named Harry Stent. He had been educated abroad; his means were ample; his time his own. He had shot all kinds of big game except a Hun, he told another young fellow — a civil engineer — who stood at his left and whose name was Jim Brown.

  A youth on crutches, passing along the deck behind them, lingered, listening to the conversation, slightly amused at Stent’s game list and his further ambition to bag a Boche.

  The young man’s lameness resulted from a trench acquaintance with the game which Stent desired to hunt. His regiment had been, and still was, the 2nd Foreign Legion. He was on his way back, now, to finish his convalescence in his old home in Finistère. He had been a writer of stories for children. His name was Jacques Wayland.

  As he turned away from the group at the rail, still amused, a man advancing aft spoke to him by name, and he recognized an American painter whom he had met in Brittany.

  “You, Neeland?”

  “Oh, yes. I’m fed up with watchful waiting.”

  “Where are you bound, ultimately?”

  “I’ve a hint that an Overseas unit can use me. And you, Wayland?”

  “Going to my old home in Finistère where I’ll get well, I hope.”

  “And then?”

  “Second Foreign.”

  “Oh. Get that leg in the trenches?” inquired Neeland.

  “Yes. Came over to recuperate. But Finistère calls me. I’ve got to smell the sea off Eryx before I can get well.”

  A pleasant-faced, middle-aged man, who stood near, turned his head and cast a professionally appraising glance at the young fellow on crutches.

  His name was Vail; he was a physician. It did not seem to him that there was much chance for the lame man’s very rapid recovery.

  Three muleteers came on deck from below — all young men, all talking in loud, careless voices. They wore uniforms of khaki resembling the regular service uniform. They had no right to these uniforms.

  One of these young men had invented the costume. His name was Jack Burley. His two comrades were, respectively, “Sticky” Smith and “Kid” Glenn. Both had figured in the squared circle. All three were fed up. They desired to wallop something, even if it were only a leather-rumped mule.

  Four other men completed the supercargo — three French youths who were returning for military duty and one Belgian. They had been waiters in New York. They also were fed up with the administration. They kept by themselves during the voyage. Nobody ever learned their names. They left the transport at Calais, reported, and were lost to sight in the flood of young men flowing toward the trenches.

  They completed the odd dozen of fed-up ones who sailed that day on the suffocating mule transport in quest of something they needed but could not find in America — something that lay somewhere amid flaming obscurity in that hell of murder beyond the Somme — their souls’ salvation perhaps.

  Twelve fed-up men went. And what happened to all except the four French youths is known. Fate laid a guiding hand on the shoulder of Carfax and gave him a gentle shove toward the Vosges. Destiny linked arms with Stent and Brown and led them toward Italy. Wayland’s rendezvous with Old Man Death was in Finistère. Neeland sailed with an army corps, but Chance met him at Lorient and led him into the strangest paths a young man ever travelled.

  As for Sticky Smith, Kid Glenn and Jack Burley, they were muleteers. Or thought they were. A muleteer has to do with mules. Nothing else is supposed to concern him.

  But into the lives of these three muleteers came things never dreamed of in their philosophy — never imagined by them even in their cups.

  As for the others, Carfax, Brown, Stent, Wayland, Neeland, this is what happened to each one of them. But the episode of Carfax comes first. It happened somewhere north of the neutral Alpine region where the Vosges shoulder their way between France and Germany.

  After he had exchanged a dozen words with a staff officer, he began to realize, vaguely, that he was done in.

  CHAPTER II

  MAROONED

  “Will they do anything for us?” repeated Carfax.

  The staff officer thought it very doubtful. He stood in the snow switching his wet puttees and looking out across a world of tumbled mountains. Over on his right lay Germany; on his left, France; Switzerland towered in ice behind him against an arctic blue sky.

  It grew warm on the Falcon Peak, almost hot in the sun. Snow was melting on black heaps of rocks; a black salamander, swollen, horrible, stirred from its stiff lethargy and crawled away blindly across the snow.

  “Our case is this,” continued Carfax; “somebody’s made a mistake. We’ve been forgotten. And if they don’t relieve us rather soon some
of us will go off our bally nuts. Do you get me, Major?”

  “I beg your pardon — —”

  “Do you understand what I’ve been saying?”

  “Oh, yes; quite so.”

  “Then ask yourself, Major, how long can four men stand it, cooped up here on this peak? A month, two months, three, five? But it’s going on ten months — ten months of solitude — silence — not a sound, except when the snowslides go bellowing off into Alsace down there below our feet.” His bronzed lip quivered. “I’ll get aboard one if this keeps on.”

  He kicked a lump of ice off into space; the staff officer glanced at him and looked away hurriedly.

  “Listen,” said Carfax with an effort; “we’re not regulars — not like the others. The Canadian division is different. Its discipline is different — in spite of Salisbury Plain and K. of K. In my regiment there are half-breeds, pelt-hunters, Nome miners, Yankees of all degrees, British, Canadians, gentlemen adventurers from Cosmopolis. They’re good soldiers, but do you think they’d stay here? It is so in the Athabasca Battalion; it is the same in every battalion. They wouldn’t stay here ten months. They couldn’t. We are free people; we can’t stand indefinite caging; we’ve got to have walking room once every few months.”

  The staff officer murmured something.

  “I know; but good God, man! Four of us have been on this peak for nearly ten months. We’ve never seen a Boche, never heard a shot. Seasons come and go, rain falls, snow falls, the winds blow from the Alps, but nothing else comes to us except a half-frozen bird or two.”

  The staff officer looked about him with an involuntary shiver. There was nothing to see except the sun on the wet, black rocks and the whitewashed observation station of solid stone from which wires sagged into the valley on the French side.

  “Well — good luck,” he said hastily, looking as embarrassed as he felt. “I’ll be toddling along.”

  “Will you say a word to the General, like a good chap? Tell him how it is with us — four of us all alone up here since the beginning. There’s Gary, Captain in the Athabasca Battalion, a Yankee if the truth were known; there’s Flint, a cockney lieutenant in a Calgary battery; there’s young Gray, a lieutenant and a Prince Edward Islander; and here’s me, a major in the Yukon Battalion — four of us on the top of a cursed French mountain — ten months of each other, of solitude, silence — and the whole world rocking with battles — and not a sound up here — not a whisper! I tell you we’re four sick men! We’ve got a grip on ourselves yet, but it’s slipping. We’re still fairly civil to each other, but the strain is killing. Sullen silences smother irritability, but—” he added in a peculiarly pleasant voice, “I expect we are likely to start killing each other if somebody doesn’t get us out of here very damn quick.”