Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “She’s wonderfully attractive.”

  “She is. But if she doesn’t disentangle her wires and straighten out she’ll burn out.... What’s that ahead? A wolf!”

  It was the rest house at the end of the étape — a tiny, distant speck on the snowy plain.

  Brisson leaned over and caught Palla’s eye. Both smiled.

  “Well,” he said, “for a girl who doesn’t believe in anything, you seem cheerful enough.”

  “I am cheerful because I do believe in everything and in everybody.”

  Brisson laughed: “You shouldn’t,” he said. “Great mistake. Trust in God and believe nobody — that’s the idea. Then get married and close your eyes and see what God will send you!”

  The girl threw back her pretty head and laughed.

  “Marriage and priests are of no consequence,” she said, “but I adore little children!”

  CHAPTER II

  They were a weary, half-starved and travel-stained quartette when the Red Guards stopped them for the last time in Russia and passed them through, warning them that the White Guards would surely do murder if they caught them.

  The next day the White Guards halted them, but finally passed them through, counselling them to keep out of the way of the Red Guards if they wished to escape being shot at sight.

  In the neat, shiny, carefully scrubbed little city of Helsingfors they avoided the huns by some miracle — one of Brisson’s customary miracles — but another little company of Americans and English was halted and detained, and one harmless Yankee among them was arrested and packed off to a hun prison.

  Also, a large and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities and professions — consuls, chargés, attachés, and innocent, agitated citizens — was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo.

  But Brisson’s daily miracles continued to materialise, even in the land of the Finn. By train, by sleigh, by boat, his quartette floundered along toward safety, and finally emerged from the white hell of the Red people into the sub-arctic sun — Estridge with painfully scanty luggage, Palla Dumont with none at all, Ilse Westgard carrying only her Cossack saddle-bags, and Brisson with his damning papers still sewed inside his clothes, and owing Estridge ten dollars for not getting murdered.

  They all had become excellent comrades during those anxious days of hunger, fatigue and common peril, but they were also a little tired of one another, as becomes all friends when subjected to compulsory companionship for an unreasonable period.

  And even when one is beginning to fall in love, one can become surfeited with the beloved under such circumstances.

  Besides, Estridge’s budding sentiment for Ilse Westgard, and her wholesome and girlish inclination for him, suffered an early chill. For the poor child had acquired trench pets from the Cossacks, and had passed on a few to Estridge, with whom she had been constantly seated on the front seat.

  Being the frankest thing in Russia, she told him with tears in her blue eyes; and they had a most horrid time of it before they came finally to a sanitary plant erected to attend to such matters.

  Episodes of that sort discourage sentiment; so does cold, hunger and discomfort incident on sardine-like promiscuousness.

  Nobody in the party desired to know more than they already knew concerning anybody else. In fact, there was little more to know, privacy being impossible. And the ever instinctive hostility of the two sexes, always and irrevocably latent, became vaguely apparent at moments.

  Common danger swept it away at times; but reaction gradually revealed again what is born under the human skin — the paradox called sex-antipathy. And yet the men in the party would not have hesitated to sacrifice their lives in defence of these women, nor would the women have faltered under the same test.

  Brisson was the philosophical stoic of the quartette. Estridge groused sometimes. Palla, when she thought herself unnoticed, camouflaged her face in her furs and cried now and then. And occasionally Ilse Westgard tried the patience of the others by her healthy capacity for unfeigned laughter — sometimes during danger-laden and inopportune moments, and once in the shocking imminence of death itself.

  As, for example, in a vile little village, full of vermin and typhus, some hunger-crazed peasants, armed with stolen rifles and ammunition, awoke them where they lay on the straw of a stable, cursed them for aristocrats, and marched them outside to a convenient wall, at the foot of which sprawled half a dozen blood-soaked, bayoneted and bullet-riddled landlords and land owners of the district.

  And things had assumed a terribly serious aspect when, to their foolish consternation, the peasants discovered that their purloined cartridges did not fit their guns.

  Then, in the very teeth of death, Ilse threw back her blond head and laughed. And there was no mistaking the genuineness of the girl’s laughter.

  Some of their would-be executioners laughed too; — the hilarity spread. It was all over; they couldn’t shoot a girl who laughed that way. So somebody brought a samovar; tea was boiled; and they all went back to the barn and sat there drinking tea and swapping gossip and singing until nearly morning.

  That was a sample of their narrow escapes. But Brisson’s only comment before he went to sleep was that Estridge would probably owe him a dollar within the next twenty-four hours.

  They had a hair-raising time in Helsingfors. On one occasion, German officers forced Palla’s door at night, and the girl became ill with fear while soldiers searched the room, ordering her out of bed and pushing her into a corner while they ripped up carpets and tore the place to pieces in a swinishly ferocious search for “information.”

  But they did nothing worse to her, and, for some reason, left the hotel without disturbing Brisson, whose room adjoined and who sat on the edge of his bed with an automatic in each hand — a dangerous opportunist awaiting events and calmly determined to do some recruiting for hell if the huns harmed Palla.

  She never knew that. And the worst was over now, and the Scandinavian border not far away. And in twenty-four hours they were over — Brisson impatient to get his papers to Washington and planning to start for England on a wretched little packet-boat, in utter contempt of mines, U-boats, and the icy menace of the North Sea.

  As for the others, Estridge decided to cable and await orders in Copenhagen; Palla, to sail for home on the first available Danish steamer; Ilse, to go to Stockholm and eventually decide whether to volunteer once more as a soldier of the proletariat or to turn propagandist and carry the true gospel to America, where, she had heard, the ancient liberties of the great Democracy were becoming imperilled.

  The day before they parted company, these four people, so oddly thrown together out of the boiling cauldron of the Russian Terror, arranged to dine together for the last time.

  Theirs were the appetites of healthy wolves; theirs was the thirst of the marooned on waterless islands; and theirs, too, was the feverish gaiety of those who had escaped great peril by land and sea; and who were still physically and morally demoralized by the glare and the roar of the hellish conflagration which was still burning up the world around them.

  So they met in a private dining room of the hotel for dinner on the eve of separation.

  Brisson and Estridge had resurrected from their luggage the remains of their evening attire; Ilse and Palla had shopped; and they now included in a limited wardrobe two simple dinner gowns, among more vital purchases.

  There were flowers on the table, no great variety of food but plenty of champagne to make up — a singular innovation in apology for short rations conceived by the hotel proprietor.

  There was a victrola in the corner, too, and this they kept going to stimulate their nerves, which already were sufficiently on edge without the added fillip of music and champagne.

  “As for me,” said Brisson, “I’m in sight of nervous dissolution already; — I’m going back to my wife and children, thank God—” he smiled at Palla. “I’m grateful to the God you don’t believe in, dear little lady. And if He is
willing, I’ll report for duty in two weeks.” He turned to Estridge:

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve cabled for orders but I have none yet. If they’re through with me I shall go back to New York and back to the medical school I came from. I hate the idea, too. Lord, how I detest it!”

  “Why?” asked Palla nervously.

  “I’ve had too much excitement. You have too — and so have Ilse and Brisson. I’m not keen for the usual again. It bores me to contemplate it. The thought of Fifth Avenue — the very idea of going back to all that familiar routine, social and business, makes me positively ill. What a dull place this world will be when we’re all at peace again!”

  “We won’t be at peace for a long, long while,” said Ilse, smiling. She lifted a goblet in her big, beautifully shaped hand and drained it with the vigorous grace of a Viking’s daughter.

  “You think the war is going to last for years?” asked Estridge.

  “Oh, no; not this war. But the other,” she explained cheerfully.

  “What other?”

  “Why, the greatest conflict in the world; the social war. It’s going to take many years and many battles. I shall enlist.”

  “Nonsense,” said Brisson, “you’re not a Red!”

  The girl laughed and showed her snowy teeth: “I’m one kind of Red — not the kind that sold Russia to the boche — but I’m very, very red.”

  “Everybody with a brain and a heart is more or less red in these days,” nodded Palla. “Everybody knows that the old order is ended — done for. Without liberty and equal opportunity civilisation is a farce. Everybody knows it except the stupid. And they’ll have to be instructed.”

  “Very well,” said Brisson briskly, “here’s to the universal but bloodless revolution! An acre for everybody and a mule to plough it! Back to the soil and to hell with the counting house!”

  They all laughed, but their brimming glasses went up; then Estridge rose to re-wind the victrola. Palla’s slim foot tapped the parquet in time with the American fox-trot; she glanced across the table at Estridge, lifted her head interrogatively, then sprang up and slid into his arms, delighted.

  While they danced he said: “Better go light on that champagne, Miss Dumont.”

  “Don’t you think I can keep my head?” she demanded derisively.

  “Not if you keep up with Ilse. You’re not built that way.”

  “I wish I were. I wish I were nearly six feet tall and beautiful in every limb and feature as she is. What wonderful children she could have! What magnificent hair she must have had before she sheared it for the Woman’s Battalion! Now it’s all a dense, short mass of gold — she looks like a lovely boy who requires a barber.”

  “Your hair is not unbecoming, either,” he remarked, “ — short as it is, it’s a mop of curls and very fetching.”

  “Isn’t it funny?” she said. “I sheared mine for the sake of Mother Church; Ilse cut off hers for the honour of the Army! Now we’re both out of a job — with only our cropped heads to show for the experience! — and no more army and no more church — at least, as far as I am concerned!”

  And she threw back hers with its thick, glossy curls and laughed, looking up at him out of her virginal brown eyes of a child.

  “I’m sorry I cut my hair,” she added presently. “I look like a Bolshevik.”

  “It’s growing very fast,” he said encouragingly.

  “Oh, yes, it grows fast,” she nodded indifferently. “Shall we return to the table? I am rather thirsty.”

  Ilse and Brisson were engaged in an animated conversation when they reseated themselves. The waiter arrived about that time with another course of poor food.

  Palla, disregarding Estridge’s advice, permitted the waiter to refill her glass.

  “I can’t eat that unappetising entrée,” she insisted, “and champagne, they say, is nourishing and I’m still hungry.”

  “As you please,” said Brisson; “but you’ve had two glasses already.”

  “I don’t care,” she retorted childishly; “I mean to live to the utmost in future. For the first time in my silly existence I intend to be natural. I wonder what it feels like to become a little intoxicated?”

  “It feels rotten,” remarked Estridge.

  “Really? How rotten?” She laughed again, laid her hand on the goblet’s stem and glanced across at him defiantly, mischievously. However, she seemed to reconsider the matter, for she picked up a cigarette and lighted it at a candle.

  “Bah!” she exclaimed with a wry face. “It stings!”

  But she ventured another puff or two before placing it upon a saucer among its defunct fellows.

  “Ugh!” she complained again with a gay little shiver, and bit into a pear as though to wash out the contamination of unaccustomed nicotine.

  “Where are you going when we all say good-bye?” inquired Estridge.

  “I? Oh, I’m certainly going home on the first Danish boat — home to Shadow Hill, where I told you I lived.”

  “And you have nobody but your aunt?”

  “Only that one old lady.”

  “You won’t remain long at Shadow Hill,” he predicted.

  “It’s very pretty there. Why don’t you think I am likely to remain?”

  “You won’t remain,” he repeated. “You’ve slipped your cable. You’re hoisting sail. And it worries me a little.”

  The girl laughed. “It’s a pretty place, Shadow Hill, but it’s dull. Everybody in the town is dull, stupid, and perfectly satisfied: everybody owns at least that acre which Ilse demands; there’s no discontent at Shadow Hill, and no reason for it. I really couldn’t bear it,” she added gaily; “I want to go where there’s healthy discontent, wholesome competition, natural aspiration — where things must be bettered, set right, helped. You understand? That is where I wish to be.”

  Brisson heard her. “Can’t you practise your loving but godless creed at Shadow Hill?” he inquired, amused. “Can’t you lavish love on the contented and well-to-do?”

  “Yes, Mr. Brisson,” she replied with sweet irony, “but where the poor and loveless fight an ever losing battle is still a better place for me to practise my godless creed and my Law of Love.”

  “Aha!” he retorted, “ — a brand new excuse for living in New York because all young girls love it!”

  “Indeed,” she said with some little heat, “I certainly do intend to live and not to stagnate! I intend to live as hard as I can — live and enjoy life with all my might! Can one serve the world better than by loving it enough to live one’s own life through to the last happy rags? Can one give one’s fellow creatures a better example than to live every moment happily and proclaim the world good to live in, and mankind good to live with?”

  Ilse whispered, leaning near: “Don’t take any more champagne, Palla.”

  The girl frowned, then looked serious: “No, I won’t,” she said naïvely. “But it is wonderful how eloquent it makes one feel, isn’t it?”

  And to Estridge: “You know that this is quite the first wine I have ever tasted — except at Communion. I was brought up to think it meant destruction. And afterward, wherever I travelled to study, the old prejudice continued to guide me. And after that, even when I began to think of taking the veil, I made abstinence one of my first preliminary vows.... And look what I’ve been doing to-night!”

  She held up her glass, tasted it, emptied it.

  “There,” she said, “I desired to shock you. I don’t really want any more. Shall we dance? Ilse! Why don’t you seize Mr. Brisson and make him two-step?”

  “Please seize me,” added Brisson gravely.

  Ilse rose, big, fresh, smilingly inviting; Brisson inspected her seriously — he was only half as tall — then he politely encircled her waist and led her out.

  They danced as though they could not get enough of it — exhilaration due to reaction from the long strain during dangerous days.

  It was already morning, but they danced on. Palla’s deli
cate intoxication passed — returned — passed — hovered like a rosy light in her brain, but faded always as she danced.

  There were snapping-crackers and paper caps; and they put them on and pelted each other with the drooping table flowers.

  Then Estridge went to the piano and sang an ancient song, called “The Cork Leg” — not very well — but well intended and in a gay and inoffensive voice.

  But Ilse sang some wonderful songs which she had learned in the Battalion of Death.

  And that is what was being done when a waiter knocked and asked whether they might desire to order breakfast.

  That ended it. The hour of parting had arrived.

  No longer bored with one another, they shook hands cordially, regretfully.

  * * * * *

  It was not a very long time, as time is computed, before these four met again.

  CHAPTER III

  The dingy little Danish steamer Elsinore passed in at dawn, her camouflage obscured by sea-salt, her few passengers still prostrated from the long battering administered by the giant seas of the northern route.

  A lone Yankee soldier was aboard — an indignant lieutenant of infantry named Shotwell — sent home from a fighting regiment to instruct the ambitious rookie at Camp Upton.

  He had hailed his assignment with delight, thankfully rid himself of his cooties, reported in Paris, reported in London; received orders to depart via Denmark; and, his mission there fullfilled, he had sailed on the Elsinore, already disenchanted with his job and longing to be back with his regiment.

  And now, surly from sea-sickness, worried by peace rumours, but still believing that the war would last another year and hopeful of getting back before it ended, he emerged from his stuffy quarters aboard the Elsinore and gazed without enthusiasm at the minarets of Coney Island, now visible off the starboard bow.

  Near him, in pasty-faced and shaky groups, huddled his fellow passengers, whom he had not seen during the voyage except when lined up for life-drill.

  He had not wished to see them, either, nor, probably, had they desired to lavish social attentions on him or upon one another.