Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Erith wishes to speak to Dr. Langford. … Is that you, Doctor?… Oh, yes, I’m perfectly well…. Tell me, how soon can you cure a man of — of dipsomania?… Of course…. It was a stupid question. But I’m so worried and unhappy… Yes…. Yes, it’s a man I know…. It wasn’t his fault, poor fellow. If I can only get him to you and persuade him to tell you the history of his case… I don’t know whether he’ll go. I’m doing my best. He’s here in my library…. Oh, no, he isn’t intoxicated now, but he was yesterday. And oh, Doctor! He is so shaky and he seems so ill — I mean in mind and spirit more than in body…. Yes, he says he needs something…. What?… Give him some whisky if he wants it?… Do you mean a highball?… How many?… Oh… Yes… Yes, I understand … I’ll do my very best…. Thank you. … At three o’clock?… Thank you so much, Doctor Langford. Good-bye!”

  She hung up the receiver, took a look at herself in the dressing-glass, and saw reflected there a yellow-haired hazel-eyed girl who looked a trifle scared. But she forced a smile, made a hasty toilette and rang for the butler, gave her orders, and then walked leisurely into the library. McKay lifted his tragic face from his hands where he stood before the fire, his elbows resting on the mantel.

  “Come,” she said in her pretty, resolute way, “you and I are perfectly human. Let’s face this thing together and find out what really is in it.”

  She took one armchair, he the other, and she noticed that all his frame was quivering now — his hands always in restless, groping movement, as though with palsy. A moment later the butler came with a decanter, ice, mineral water and a tall glass. There was also a box of cigars on the silver tray.

  “You’ll fix your own highball,” she said carelessly, nodding dismissal to the butler. But she looked only once at McKay, then turned away — pretence of picking up her knitting — so terrible it was to her to see in his eyes the very glimmer of hell itself as he poured out what he “needed.”

  Minute after minute she sat there by the fire knitting tranquilly, scarcely ever even lifting her calm young eyes to the man. Twice again he poured out what he “needed” for himself before the agony in his sickened brain and body became endurable — before the tortured nerves had been sufficiently drugged once more and the indescribable torment had subsided. He looked at her once or twice where she sat knitting and apparently quite oblivious to what he had been about, but his glance was no longer furtive; he unconsciously squared his shoulders, and his head straightened up.

  Without lifting her eyes she said: “I thought we’d talk over our plans when you feel better.”

  He glanced sideways at the decanter: “I am all right,” he said.

  She had not yet lifted her eyes; she continued to knit while speaking:

  “First of all,” she said, “I shall place your testimony and my report in the hands of my superior, Mr. Vaux. Does that meet with your approval?”

  “Yes.”

  She knitted in silence a few moments. He kept his eyes on her. Presently — and still without looking up — she said: “Are you within the draft age?”

  “No. I am thirty-two.”

  “Will you volunteer?”

  “No.”

  “Would you tell me why?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell you why. I shall not volunteer because of my habits.”

  “You mean your temporary infirmity,” she said calmly. But her cheeks reddened and she bent lower over her work. A dull colour stained his face, too, but he merely shrugged his comment.

  She said in a low voice: “I want you to volunteer with me for overseas service in the Army Intelligence Department…. You and I, together…. To prove what you have surmised concerning the German operations beyond Mount Terrible…. And first I want you to go with me to Dr. Langford’s hospital …. I want you to go this afternoon with me. … And face the situation. And see it through. And come out cured.” She lifted her head and looked at him. “Will you?” And in his altering gaze she saw the flicker of half-senseless anger intensified suddenly to a flare of hatred.

  “Don’t ask anything like that of me,” he said. She had grown quite white.

  “I do ask it…. Will you?”

  “If I wanted to I couldn’t, and I don’t want to. I prefer this hell to the other.”

  “Won’t you make a fight for it?”

  “No!” he said brutally.

  The girl bent her head again over her knitting. But her white fingers remained idle. After a long while, staring at her intently, he saw her lip quiver.

  “Don’t do that!” he broke out harshly. “What the devil do you care?”

  Then she lifted her tragic white face. And he had his answer.

  “My God!” he faltered, springing to his feet. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you care? You can’t care! What is it to you that a drunken beast slinks back into hell again? Do you think you are Samaritan enough to follow him and try to drag him out by the ears?… A man whose very brain is already cracking with it all — a burnt-out thing with neither mind nor manhood left—”

  She got to her feet, trembling and deathly white.

  “I can’t let you go,” she whispered.

  Exasperation almost strangled him and set afire his unhinged brain.

  “For Christ’s sake!” he cried. “What do you care?”

  “I — I care,” she stammered— “for Christ’s sake … And yours!”

  Things went dark before her eyes…. She opened them after a while on the sofa where he had carried her. He was standing looking down at her. … After a long while the ghost of a smile touched her lips. In his haunted gaze there was no response. But he said in an altered, unfamiliar voice: “I’ll go if you say so. I’ll do all that’s in me to do. … Will you be there — for the first day or two?”

  “Yes…. All day long…. Every day if you want me. Do you?”

  “Yes…. But God knows what I may do to you…. There’ll be somebody to — watch me — won’t there?… I don’t know what may happen to you or to myself…. I’m in a bad way, Miss Erith… I’m in a very bad way.”

  “I know,” she murmured.

  He said with an almost childish directness: “Do men always live through such cures?… I don’t see how I can live through it.”

  She rose from the sofa and stood beside him, feeling still dizzy, still tremulous and lacking strength.

  “Let us win through,” she said, not looking at him. “I think you will suffer more than I shall. A little more…. Because I had rather feel pain than give it — rather suffer than look on suffering…. It will be very hard for us both, I fear.”

  Her butler announced luncheon.

  CHAPTER IV

  WRECKAGE

  The man had been desperately ill in soul and mind and body. And now in some curious manner the ocean seemed to be making him physically better but spiritually worse. Something, too, in the horizonwide waste of waters was having a sinister effect on his brain. The grey daylight of early May, bitter as December — the utter desolation, the mounting and raucous menace of the sea, were meddling with normal convalescence.

  Dull animosity awoke in a battered mind not yet readjusted to the living world. What had these people done to him anyway? The sullen resentment which invaded him groped stealthily for a vent.

  Was THIS, then, their cursed cure? — this foggy nightmare through which he moved like a shade in the realm of phantoms? Little by little what had happened to him was becoming an obsession, as he began to remember in detail. Now he brooded on it and looked askance at the girl who was primarily responsible — conscious in a confused sort of way that he was a blackguard for his ingratitude.

  But his mind had been badly knocked about, and its limping machinery creaked.

  “That meddling woman,” he thought, knowing all the time what he owed her, remembering her courage, her unselfishness, her loveliness. “Curse her!” he muttered, amid the shadows confusing his wounded mind.

  Then a meaningless anger grew with hi
m: She had him, now! he was trapped and caged. A girl who drags something floundering out of hell is entitled to the thing if she wants it. He admitted that to himself.

  But how about that “cure”?

  Was THIS it — this terrible blankness — this misty unreality of things? Surcease from craving — yes. But what to take its place — what to fill in, occupy mind and body? What sop to his restless soul? What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction? A distorted world, a cloudy mind, the body-substance of a ghost? And for the magic world she had destroyed she offered him a void to live in — Curse her!

  There were no lights showing aboard the transport; all ports remained screened. Arrows, painted on the decks in luminous paint, pointed out the way. Below decks, a blue globe here and there emitted a feeble glimmer, marking corridors which pierced a depthless darkness.

  No noise was permitted on board, no smoking, no other lights in cabin or saloon. There was scarcely a sound to be heard on the ship, save the throbbing of her engines, the long, splintering crash of heavy seas, and the dull creak of her steel vertebrae tortured by a million rivets.

  As for the accursed ocean, that to McKay was the enemy paramount which had awakened him to the stinging vagueness of things out of his stupid acquiescence in convalescence.

  He hated the sea. It was becoming a crawling horror to him in its every protean phase, whether flecked with ghastly lights in storms or haunted by pallid shapes in colour — always, always it remained repugnant to him under its eternal curse of endless motion.

  He loathed it: he detested the livid skies by day against which tossing waves showed black: he hated every wave at night and their ceaseless unseen motion. McKay had been “cured.” McKay was very, very ill.

  There came to him, at intervals, a girl who stole through the obscurity of the pitching corridors guiding him from one faint blue light to the next — a girl who groped out the way with him at night to the deck by following the painted arrows under foot. Also sometimes she sat at his bedside through the unreal flight of time, her hand clasped over his. He knew that he had been brutal to her during his “cure.”

  He was still rough with her at moments of intense mental pressure — somehow; realised it — made efforts toward self-command — toward reason again, mental control; sometimes felt that he was on the way to acquiring mental mastery.

  But traces of injury to the mind still remained — sensitive places — and there were swift seconds of agony — of blind anger, of crafty, unbalanced watching to do harm. Yet for all that he knew he was convalescent — that alcohol was no longer a necessity to him; that whatever he did had now become a choice for him; that he had the power and the authority and the will, and was capable, once more, of choosing between depravity and decency. But what had been taken out of his life seemed to leave a dreadful silence in his brain. And, at moments, this silence became dissonant with the clamour of unreason.

  On one of his worst days when his crippled soul was loneliest the icy seas became terrific. Cruisers and destroyers of the escort remained invisible, and none of the convoyed transports were to be seen. The watery, lowering daylight faded: the unseen sun set: the brief day ended. And the wind went down with the sun. But through the thick darkness the turbulent wind appeared to grow luminous with tossing wraiths; and all the world seemed to dissolve into a nebulous, hell-driven thing, unreal, dreadful, unendurable!

  “Mr. McKay!”

  He had already got into his wool dressing-robe and felt shoes, and he sat now very still on the edge of his berth, listening stealthily with the cunning of distorted purpose.

  Her tiny room was just across the corridor. She seemed to be eternally sleepless, always on the alert night and day, ready to interfere with him.

  Finally he ventured to rise and move cautiously to his door, and he made not the slightest sound in opening it, but her door opened instantly, and she stood there confronting him, an ulster buttoned over her nightdress.

  “What is the matter?” she said gently.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you having a bad night?”

  “I’m all right. I wish you wouldn’t constitute yourself my nurse, servant, mentor, guardian, keeper, and personal factotum!” Sudden rage left him inarticulate, and he shot an ugly look at her. “Can’t you let me alone?” he snarled.

  “You poor boy,” she said under her breath.

  “Don’t talk like that! Damnation! I — I can’t stand much more — I can’t stand it, I tell you!”

  “Yes, you can, and you will. And I don’t mind what you say to me.”

  His malignant expression altered.

  “Do you know,” he said, in a cool and evil voice, “that I may stop

  SAYING things and take to DOING them?”

  “Would you hurt me physically? Are you really as sick as that?”

  “Not yet…. How do I know?” Suddenly he felt tired and leaned against the doorway, covering his dulling eyes with his right forearm. But his hand was now clenched convulsively.

  “Could you lie down? I’ll talk to you,” she whispered. “I’ll see you through.”

  “I can’t — endure — this tension,” he muttered. “For God’s sake let me go!”

  “Where?”

  “You know.”

  “Yes…. But it won’t do. We must carry on, you and I.”

  “If you — knew—”

  “I do know! When these crises come try to fix your mind on what you have become.”

  “Yes…. A hell of a soldier. Do you really believe that my country needs a thing like me?” She stood looking at him in silence — knowing that he was in a torment of some terrible sort. His eyes were still covered by his arm. On his boyish brow the blonde-brown hair had become damp.

  She went across and passed her arm through his. His hand rested, fell to his side, but he suffered her to guide him through the corridors toward a far bluish spark that seemed as distant as Venus, the star.

  They walked very slowly for a while on deck, encountering now and then the shadowy forms of officers and crew. The personnel of the several hospital units in transit were long ago in bed below.

  Once he said: “You know, Miss Erith, it is not I who behaves like a scoundrel to you.”

  “I know,” she said with a dauntless smile.

  “Because,” he went on, searching painfully for thought as well as words, “I’m not really a brute — was not always a blackguard—”

  “Do you suppose for one moment that I blame a man who has been irresponsible through no fault of his, and who has made the fight and has won back to sanity?”

  “I — am not yet — well!”

  “I understand.”

  They paused beside the port rail for a few moments.

  “I suppose you know,” he muttered, “that I have thought — at times — of ending things — down there. … You seem to know most things. Did you suspect that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “I wake easily.”

  “I know you do. I can’t stir in bed but I hear you move, too…. I should think you’d hate and loathe me — for all I’ve done — for all I’ve cost you.”

  “Nurses don’t loathe their patients,” she said lightly.

  “I should think they’d want to kill them.”

  “Oh, Mr. McKay! On the contrary they — they grow to like them — exceedingly.”

  “You dare not say that about yourself and me.”

  Miss Erith shrugged her pretty shoulders: “I don’t have to say anything, do I?”

  He made no reply. After a long silence she said casually: “The sea is calmer, I think. There’s something resembling faint moonlight up among those flying clouds.”

  He lifted his tragic face and gazed up at the storm-wrack speeding overhead. And there through the hurrying vapours behind flying rags of cloud, a pallid lustre betrayed the smothered moon.

  There was just enough light, now, to reveal t
he forward gun under its jacket, and the shadowy gun-crew around it where the ship’s bow like a vast black, plough ripped the sea asunder in two deep, foaming furrows.

  “I wish I knew where we are at this moment,” mused the girl. She counted the days on her fingertips: “We may be off Bordeaux…. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  To him it had been a century of dread endured through half-awakened consciousness of the latest inferno within him.

  “It’s been very long,” he said, sighing.

  A few minutes later they caught a glimpse of a strangled moon overhead — a livid corpse of a moon, tarnished and battered almost out of recognition.

  “Clearing weather,” she said cheerfully, adding: “To-morrow we may be in the danger zone…. Did you ever see a submarine?”

  “Yes. Did you?”

  “There were some up the Hudson. I saw them last summer while motoring along Riverside Drive.”

  The spectral form of an officer appeared at her elbow, said something in a low voice, and walked aft.

  She said: “Well, then, I think we’d better dress. … Do you feel better?”

  He said that he did, but his sombre gaze into darkness belied him. So again she slipped her arm through his and he suffered himself to be led away along the path of shinning arrows under foot.

  At his door she said cheerfully: “No more undressing for bed, you know. No more luxury of night-clothes. You heard the orders about lifebelts?”

  “Yes,” he replied listlessly.

  “Very well. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  She lingered a moment more watching him in his brooding revery where he stood leaning against the doorway. And after a while he raised his haunted eyes to hers.

  “I can’t keep on,” he breathed.

  “Yes you can!”

  “No…. The world is slipping away — under foot. It’s going on without me — in spite of me.”

  “It’s you that are slipping, if anything is. Be fair to the world at least — even if you mean to betray it — and me.”

  “I don’t want to betray anybody — anything.” He had begun to tremble when he stood leaning against his door. “I — don’t know — what to do.”