Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Then do not frighten Mr. Pawling out. Already you have scared my other partner, Mr. Skidder, like there never was any rabbits scared. You are foolish. If you are reasonable, I shall make money and you shall have your share. If you are not, then there is no money to give you.”

  Sondheim said: “Take a slant at them yellow-backs, Karl.” And Kastner screwed a powerful jeweller’s glass into his eye and began a minute examination of the orange-coloured treasury notes, to find out whether they were marked bills.

  Bromberg said heavily: “See here, Angelo, you gotta quit this damned stalling! You gotta get them women out, and do it quick or we’ll blow your dirty barracks into the North River!”

  Sondheim began to wag his soiled forefinger again.

  “Yeh quit us cold when things was on the fritz. Now, yeh gotta pay. If you wasn’t nothing but a wop skunk yeh’d stand in with us. The way you’re fixed would help us all. But now yeh makin’ money and yeh scared o’ yeh shadow! — —”

  Bromberg cut in: “And you’ll be outside when the band starts playing. Look what’s doing all over the world! Every country is starting something! You watch Berlin and Rosa Luxemburg and her bunch. Keep your eye peeled, Angy, and see what we and the I. W. W. start in every city of the country!”

  Kastner, having satisfied himself that the bills had not been marked, and pocketed his jeweller’s glass, pushed back his lank blond hair.

  “Yess,” he said in his icy, incisive voice, “yoost vatch out already! Dot crimson tide it iss rising the vorld all ofer! It shall drown effery aristocrat, effery bourgeois, effery intellectual. It shall be but a red flood ofer all the vorld vere noddings shall live only our peoble off the proletariat!”

  “And where the hell will you be then, Angelo?” sneered Bromberg. “By God, we won’t have to ask you for our share of your money then!”

  Again Sondheim leaned over him and wagged his nicotine-dyed finger:

  “You get the rest of our money! Understand? And you get them women out! — or I tell you we’ll blow you and your joint to Hoboken! Get that?”

  “I have understood,” said Puma quietly; but his heavy face was a muddy red now, and he choked a little when he spoke.

  “Give us a date and stick to it,” added Bromberg. “Set it yourself. And after that we won’t bother to do any more jawin’. We’ll just attend to business — your business, Puma!”

  After a long silence, Puma said calmly: “How much you want?”

  “Ten thousand,” said Sondheim.

  “And them women out of this,” added Bromberg.

  “Or ve get you,” ended Kastner in his deadly voice.

  Puma lifted his head and looked intently at each one of them in turn. And seemed presently to come to some conclusion.

  Kastner forestalled him: “You try it some monkey trick and you try it no more effer again.”

  “What’s your date for the cash?” insisted Sondheim.

  “February first,” replied Puma quietly.

  Kastner wrote it on the back of an envelope.

  “Und dese vimmen?” he inquired.

  “I’ll get a lawyer — —”

  “The hell with that stuff!” roared Bromberg. “Get ’em out! Scare ’em out! Jesus Christ! how long d’yeh think we’re going to stand for being hammered by that bunch o’ skirts? They got a lot o’ people sore on us now. The crowd what uster come around is gettin’ leery. And who are these damned women? One of ’em was a White Nun, when they did the business for the Romanoffs. One of ’em fired on the Bolsheviki — that big blond girl with yellow hair, I mean! Wasn’t she one of those damned girl-soldiers? And look what she’s up to now — comin’ over here to talk us off the platform! — the dirty foreigner!”

  “Yes,” growled Bromberg, “and there’s that redheaded wench of Vanya’s! — some Grand Duke’s slut, they say, before she quit him for the university to start something else — —”

  Kastner cut in in his steely voice: “If you do not throw out these women, Puma, we fix them and your hall and you — all at one time, my friend. Also! Iss it then for February the first, our understanding? Or iss it, a little later, the end of all your troubles, Angelo?”

  Puma got up, nodded his acceptance of their ultimatum, and opened the door for them.

  When they trooped out, under the brick arch, they noticed his splendid limousine waiting, and as they shuffled sullenly away westward, Bromberg, looking back, saw Puma come out and jump lightly into the car.

  “Swine!” he snarled, facing the bitter wind once more and shuffling along beside his silent brethren.

  Puma went east, then north to the Hotel Rajah, where, in a private room, he was to complete a financial transaction with Alonzo B. Pawling.

  Skidder, too, came in at the same time, squinting rapidly at his partner; and together they moved toward the elevator.

  The elevator waited a moment more to accommodate a willowy, red-haired girl in furs, whose jade eyes barely rested on Puma’s magnificent black ones as he stepped aside to make way for her with an extravagant bow.

  “Some skirt,” murmured Skidder in his ear, as the car shot upward.

  Marya left the car at the mezzanine floor: Puma’s eyes were like coals for a moment.

  “You know that dame?” inquired Skidder, his eyes fairly snapping.

  “No.” He did not add that he had seen her at the Combat Club and knew her to belong to another man. But his black eyes were almost blazing as he stepped from the elevator, for in Marya’s insolent glance he had caught a vague glimmer of fire — merely a green spark, very faint — if, indeed, it had been there at all....

  Pawling himself opened the door for them.

  “Is it all right? Do we get the parcel?” were his first words.

  “It’s a knock-out!” cried Skidder, slapping him on the back. “We got the land, we got the plans, we got the iron, we got the contracts! — Oh, boy! — our dough is in — go look at it and smell it for yourself! So get into the jack, old scout, and ante up, because we break ground Wednesday and there’ll be bills before then, you betcha!”

  When the cocktails were brought, Puma swallowed his in a hurry, saying he’d be back in a moment, and bidding Skidder enlighten Mr. Pawling during the interim.

  He summoned the elevator, got out at the mezzanine, and walked lightly into the deserted and cloister-like perspective, his shiny hat in his hand.

  And saw Marya standing by the marble ramp, looking down at the bustle below.

  He stopped not far away. He had made no sound on the velvet carpet. But presently she turned her head and the green eyes met his black ones.

  Neither winced. The sheer bulk of the beast and the florid magnificence of its colour seemed to fascinate her.

  She had seen him before, and scarcely noted him. She remembered. But the world was duller, then, and the outlook grey. And then, too, her still, green eyes had not yet wandered beyond far horizons, nor had her heart been cut adrift to follow her fancy when the tides stirred it from its mooring — carrying it away, away through deeps or shallows as the currents swerved.

  CHAPTER XX

  The pale parody on that sacred date which once had symbolised the birth of Christ had come and gone; the ghastly year was nearing its own death — the bloodiest year, for all its final triumph, that the world had ever witnessed — l’année horrible!

  Nor was the end yet, of all this death and dying: for the Crimson Tide, washing through Russia, eastward, seethed and eddied among the wrecks of empires, lapping Poland’s bones, splashing over the charred threshold of the huns, creeping into the Balkans, crawling toward Greece and Italy, menacing Scandinavia, and arousing the stern watchers along the French frontier — the ultimate eastward barrier of human liberty.

  And unless, despite the fools who demur, that barrier be based upon the Rhine, that barrier will fall one day.

  Even in England, where the captive navies of the anti-Christ now sulked at anchor under England’s consecrated guns, some talked glibly of
rule by Soviet. All Ireland bristled now, baring its teeth at government; vast armies, disbanding, were becoming dully restless; and armed men, disarming, began to wonder what now might be their destiny and what the destiny of the world they fought for.

  And everywhere, among all peoples, swarmed the stealthy agents of the Red Apocalypse, whispering discontent, hinting treasons, stirring the unhappy to sullen anger, inciting the simple-minded to insanity, the ignorant to revolution. For four years it had been a battle between Light and Night; and now there threatened to be joined in battle the uttermost forces of Evolution and Chaos — the spiritual Armageddon at last, where Life and Light and Order must fight a final fight with Degeneracy, Darkness and Death.

  And always, everywhere, that hell-born Crimson Tide seemed to be rising. All newspapers were full of it, sounding the universal alarm. And Civilisation merely stared at the scarlet flood — gawked stupidly and unstirring — while the far clamour of massacre throughout Russia grew suddenly to a crashing discord in Berlin, shaking the whole world with brazen dissonance.

  Like the first ominous puff before the tempest, the deadly breath of the Black Death — called “influenza,” but known of old among the verminous myriads of the East — swept over the earth from East to West. Millions died; millions were yet to perish of it; yet the dazed world, still half blind with blood and smoke, sat helpless and unstirring, barring no gates to this pestilence that stalked the stricken earth at noon-day.

  New York, partly paralysed by sacrifice and the blood-sucking antics of half-crazed congressmen, gorged by six years feeding after decades of starvation, welcomed the incoming soldiers in a bewildered sort of way, making either an idiot’s din of dissonance or gaping in stupid silence as the huge troop-ships swept up the bay.

  The battle fleet arrived — the home squadron and the “6th battle squadron” — and lay towering along the Hudson, while officers and jackies swarmed the streets — streets now thronged by wounded, too — pallid cripples in olive drab, limping along slowly beneath lowering skies, with their citations and crosses and ribbons and wound chevrons in glinting gold under the relighted lustres of the metropolis.

  So the false mockery of Christmas came to the city — a forced festival, unutterably sad, for all that the end of the war was subject of thanks in every church and synagogue. And so the mystic feast ended, scarcely heeded amid the slow, half-crippled groping for financial readjustment in the teeth of a snarling and vindictive Congress, mean in its envy, meaner in revenge — a domestic brand of sectional Bolsheviki as dirty and degenerate as any anarchist in all Russia.

  The President had sailed away — (Slava! Slava! Nechevo!) — and the newspapers were preparing to tell their disillusioned public all about it, if permitted.

  And so dawned the New Year over the spreading crimson flood, flecking the mounting tide with brighter scarlet as it crept ever westward, ever wider, across a wounded world.

  * * * * *

  Palla had not seen Jim for a very long time now. Christmas passed, bringing neither gift nor message, although she had sent him a little remembrance — The Divine Pantheon, by an unfrocked Anglican clergyman, one Loxon Fettars, recently under detention pending investigation concerning an alleged multiplicity of wives.

  The New Year brought no greeting from him, either; nobody she knew had seen him, and her pride had revolted at writing him after she had telephoned and left a message at his club — her usual concession after a stormy parting.

  And there was another matter that was causing her a constantly increasing unrest — she had not seen Marya for many a day.

  Quiet grief for what now appeared to be a friendship ended — at other times a tingle of bitterness that he had let it end so relentlessly — and sometimes, at night, the secret dread — eternally buried yet perennially resurrected — the still, hidden, ever-living fear of Marya; these the girl knew, now, as part of life.

  And went on, steadily, with her life’s business, as though moving toward a dark horizon where clouds towered gradually higher, reflecting the glimmer of unseen lightning.

  Somehow, lately, a vague sensation of impending trouble had invaded her; and she never entirely shook it off, even in her lighter moods, when there was gay company around her; or in the warm flush of optimistic propaganda work; or in the increasingly exciting sessions of the Combat Club, now interrupted nightly by fierce outbreaks from emissaries of the Red Flag Club, who were there to make mischief.

  Also, there had been an innovation established among her company of moderate socialists; a corps of missionary speakers, who volunteered on certain nights to speak from the classic soap-box on street corners, urging the propaganda of their panacea, the Law of Love and Service.

  Twice already, despite her natural timidity and dread of public speaking, Palla had faced idle, half-curious, half sneering crowds just east or west of Broadway; had struggled through with what she had come to say; had gently replied to heckling, blushed under insult, stood trembling by her guns to the end.

  Ilse was more convincing, more popular with her gay insouciance and infectious laughter, and her unexpected and enchanting flashes of militancy, which always interested the crowd.

  And always, after these soap-box efforts, both Palla and Ilse were insulted over the telephone by unknown men. Their mail, also, invariably contained abusive or threatening letters, and sometimes vile ones; and Estridge purchased pistols for them both and exacted pledges that they carry them at night.

  On the evening selected for Palla’s third essay in street oratory, she slipped her pistol into her muff and set out alone, not waiting for Ilse, who, with John Estridge, was to have met her after dinner at her house, and, as usual, accompany her to the place selected.

  But they knew where she was to speak, and she did not doubt they would turn up sooner or later at the rendezvous.

  All that day the dull, foreboding feeling had been assailing her at intervals, and she had been unable to free herself entirely from the vague depression.

  The day had been grey; when she left the house a drizzle had begun to wet the flagstones, and every lamp-post was now hooded with ghostly iridescence.

  She walked because she had need of exercise, not even deigning to unfurl her umbrella against the mist which spun silvery ovals over every electric globe along Fifth Avenue, and now shrouded every building above the fourth story in a cottony ocean of fog.

  When finally she turned westward, the dark obscurity of the cross-street seemed to stretch away into infinite night and she hurried a little, scarcely realising why.

  There did not seem to be a soul in sight — she noticed that — yet suddenly, halfway down the street, she discovered a man walking at her elbow, his rubber-shod feet making no sound on the wet walk.

  Palla had never before been annoyed by such attentions in New York, yet she supposed it must be the reason for the man’s insolence.

  She hastened her steps; he moved as swiftly.

  “Look here,” he said, “I know who you are, and where you’re going. And we’ve stood just about enough from you and your friends.”

  In the quick revulsion from annoyance and disgust to a very lively flash of fright, Palla involuntarily slackened her pace and widened the distance between her and this unknown.

  “You better right-about-face and go home!” he said quietly. “You talk too damn much with your face. And we’re going to stop you. See?”

  At that her flash of fear turned to anger:

  “Try it,” she said hotly; and hurried on, her hand clutching the pistol in her wet muff, her eyes fixed on the unknown man.

  “I’ve a mind to dust you good and plenty right here,” he said. “Quit your running, now, and beat it back again—” His vise-like grip was on her left arm, almost jerking her off her feet; and the next moment she struck him with her loaded pistol full in the face.

  As he veered away, she saw the seam open from his cheek bone to his chin — saw the white face suddenly painted with wet scarlet.


  The sight of the blood made her sick, but she kept her pistol levelled, backing away westward all the while.

  There was an iron railing near; he went over and leaned against it as though stupefied.

  And all the while she continued to retreat until, behind her, his dim shape merged into the foggy dark.

  Then Palla turned and ran. And she was still breathing fast and unevenly when she came to that perfect blossom of vulgarity and apotheosis of all American sham — Broadway — where in the raw glare from a million lights the senseless crowds swept north and south.

  And here, where Jew-manager and gentile ruled the histrionic destiny of the United States — here where art, letters, service, industry, business had each developed its own species of human prostitute — two muddy-brained torrents of humanity poured in opposite directions, crowding, shoving, shuffling along in the endless, hopeless Hunt for Happiness.

  She had made, in the beginning of her street-corner career, arrangements with a neighbouring boot-black to furnish one soap-box on demand at a quarter of a dollar rent for every evening.

  She extracted the quarter from her purse and paid the boy; carried the soap-box herself to the curb; and, with that invariable access of fright which attacked her at such moments, mounted it to face the first few people who halted out of curiosity to see what else she meant to do.

  Columns of passing umbrellas hid her so that not many people noticed her; but gradually that perennial audience of shabby opportunists which always gathers anywhere from nowhere, ringed her soap-box. And Palla began to speak in the drizzling rain.

  For some time there were no interruptions, no jeers, no doubtful pleasantries. But when it became more plain to the increasing crowd that this smartly though simply gowned young woman had come to Broadway in the rain for the purpose of protesting against all forms of violence, including the right of the working people to strike, ugly remarks became audible, and now and then a menacing word was flung at her, or some clenched hand insulted her and amid a restless murmur growing rougher all the time.

  Once, to prove her point out of the mouth of the proletariat itself, she quoted from Rosa Luxemburg; and a well-dressed man shouldered his way toward her and in a low voice gave her the lie.