“You said you were tired; and you’ve had a terrible shock — —”
“That is why I need you,” she said in a low voice. Then, looking up at him with a pale smile: “I want you — just once more.”
They went in together. Her maid, hearing the opening door, appeared and took her away; and Jim turned into the living-room. A lighted lamp on the piano illuminated his own framed photograph — that was the first thing he noticed — the portrait of himself in uniform, flanked on either side by little vases full of blue forget-me-nots.
He started to lift one to his face, but reaction had set in and his hands were shaking. And he turned away and stood staring into the empty fireplace, passionately possessed once more by the eternal witchery of this young girl, and under the spell again of the enchanted place wherein she dwelt.
The very air breathed her magic; every familiar object seemed to be stealthily conspiring in the subdued light to reaccomplish his subjection.
Her maid appeared to say that Miss Dumont would be ready in a few minutes. She came, presently, in a clinging chamber-gown — a pale golden affair with misty touches of lace.
He arranged cushions for her: she lighted a cigarette for him; and he sank down beside her in the old place.
Both were still a little shaken. He said that he believed the explosion had come from the outside, and that the principal damage had been done next door, in Mr. Puma’s office.
She nodded assent, listlessly, evidently preoccupied with something else.
After a few moments she looked up at him.
“This is the second day of February,” she said. “Within the last month Jack Estridge died, and Vanya died.... To-day another man died — a man I have known from childhood.... His name was Pawling. And his death has ruined me.”
“When — when did you learn that?” he asked, astounded.
“This morning. My housekeeper in Shadow Hill telephoned me that Mr. Pawling had killed himself, that the bank was closed, and that probably there was nothing left for those who had funds deposited there.”
“You knew that this morning?” he asked, amazed.
“Yes.”
“And you — you still had courage to go to your Red Cross, to your canteen and Hostess House — to that horrible Red Flag Club — and face those beasts and make the — the perfectly magnificent speech you made! — —”
“Did — did you hear it!” she faltered.
“Every word.”
For a few moments she sat motionless and very white in her knowledge that this man had heard her confess her own conversion.
Her brain whirled: she was striving to think steadily trying to find the right way to reassure him — to forestall any impulsive chivalry born of imaginary obligation.
“Jim,” she said in a colorless voice, “there are so many worse things than losing money. I think Mr. Pawling’s suicide shocked me much more than the knowledge that I should be obliged to earn my own living like millions of other women.
“Of course it scared me for a few minutes. I couldn’t help that. But after I got over the first unpleasant — feeling, I concluded to go about my business in life until it came time for me to adjust myself to the scheme of things.”
She smiled without effort: “Besides, it’s not really so bad. I have a house in Shadow Hill to which I can retreat when I sell this one; and with a tiny income from the sale of this house, and with what I can earn, I ought to be able to support myself very nicely.”
“So you — expect to sell?”
“Yes, I must. Even if I sell my house and land in Connecticut I cannot afford this house any longer.”
“I see.”
She smiled, keeping her head and her courage high without apparent effort:
“It’s another job for you,” she said lightly. “Will you be kind enough to put this house on your list?”
“If you wish.”
“Thank you, Jim, I do indeed. And the sooner you can sell it for me the better.”
He said: “And the sooner you marry me the better, Palla.”
At that she flushed crimson and made a quick gesture as though to check him; but he went on: “I heard what you said to those filthy swine to-night. It was the pluckiest, most splendid thing I ever heard and saw. And I have seen battles. Some. But I never before saw a woman take her life in her hands and go all alone into a cage of the same dangerous, rabid beasts that had slain a friend of hers within the week, and find courage to face them and tell them they were beasts! — and more than that! — find courage to confess her own mistakes — humble herself — acknowledge what she had abjured — bear witness to the God whom once she believed abandoned her!”
She strove to open her lips in protest — lifted her disconcerted eyes to his — shrank away a little as his hand fell over hers.
“I’ve never faltered,” he said. “It damned near killed me.... But I’d have gone on loving you, Palla, all my life. There never could have been anybody except you. There was never anybody before you. Usually there has been in a man’s life. There never was in mine. There never will be.”
His firm hand closed on hers.
“I’m such an ordinary, every day sort of fellow,” he said wistfully, “that, after I began to realise how wonderful you are, I’ve been terribly afraid I wasn’t up to you.
“Even if I have cursed out your theories and creeds, it almost seemed impertinent for me to do it, because you really have so many talents and accomplishments, so much knowledge, so infinite a capacity for things of the mind, which are rather out of my mental sphere. And I’ve wondered sometimes, even if you ever consented to marry me, whether such a girl as you are could jog along with a business man who likes the arts but doesn’t understand them very well and who likes some of his fellow men but not all of them and whose instinct is to punch law-breakers in the nose and not weep over them and lead them to the nearest bar and say, ‘Go to it, erring brother!’”
“Jim!”
For all the while he had been drawing her nearer as he was speaking. And she was in his arms now, laughing a little, crying a little, her flushed face hidden on his shoulder.
He drew a deep breath and, holding her imprisoned, looked down at her.
“Will you marry me, Palla?”
“Oh, Jim, do you want me now?”
“Now, darling, but not this minute, because a clergyman must come first.”
It was cruel of him, as well as vigorously indelicate. Her hot blush should have shamed him; her conversion should have sheltered her.
But the man had had a hard time, and the bitterness was but just going.
“Will you marry me, Palla?”
After a long while her stifled whisper came: “You are brutal. Do you think I would do anything else — now?”
“No. And you never would have either.”
Lying there close in his arms, she wondered. And, still wondering, she lifted her head and looked up into his eyes — watching them as they neared her own — still trying to see them as his lips touched hers.
* * * * *
He was the sort of man who got hungry when left too long unfed. It was one o’clock. They had gone out to the refrigerator together, his arm around her supple waist, her charming head against his shoulder — both hungry but sentimental.
“And don’t you really think,” she said for the hundredth time, “that we ought to sell this house?”
“Not a bit of it, darling. We’ll run it if we have to live on cereal and do our own laundry.”
“You mean I’ll have to do that?”
“I’ll help after business hours.”
“You wonderful boy!”
There seemed to be some delectable things in the ice chest.
They sat side by side on the kitchen table, blissfully nourishing each other. Birds do it. Love-smitten youth does it.
“To think,” he said, “that you had the nerve to face those beasts and tell them what you thought of them!”
“Darling!” she remonstrated, placi
ng an olive between his lips.
“You should have the Croix de Guerre,” he said indistinctly.
“All I aspire to is a very plain gold ring,” she said, smiling at him sideways.
And she slipped her hand into his.
“Are you going back into the army, Jim?” she asked.
“Who said that?” he demanded.
“I — I heard it repeated.”
“Not now,” he said. “Unless—” His eyes narrowed and he sat swinging his legs with an absent air and puckered brows.
And after a while the same aloof look came into her brown eyes, and she swung her slim feet absently.
Perhaps their remote gaze was fixed on visions of a nearing future, brilliant with happiness, gay with children’s voices; perhaps they saw farther than that, where the light grew sombre and where a shadowed sky lowered above a blood-red flood, rising imperceptibly, yet ever rising — a stealthy, crawling crimson tide spreading westward across the world.
THE SLAYER OF SOULS
A rare return to the occult themes of Chambers’ earlier work, this supernatural thriller was first published in 1920. After an American, Tressa Norne, escapes the clutches of the followers of Erlik, a vengeful Oriental God, she must convince the Western authorities of a plot by a global conspiracy of black magicians to take over the world. She is aided by her lover and ally, the secret agent Victor Cleeves.
Cover of the first edition
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
TO
MY FRIEND
GEORGE ARMSBY
I
Mirror of Fashion, Admiral of Finance, Don’t, in a passion, Denounce this poor Romance; For, while I dare not hope it might Enthuse you, Perhaps it will, some rainy night, Amuse you.
II
So, your attention, In poetry polite, To my invention I bashfully invite. Don’t hurl the book at Eddie’s head Deep laden, Or Messmore’s; you might hit instead Will Braden.
III
Kahn among Canners, And Grand Vizier of style, Emir of Manners, Accept — and place on file — This tribute, which I proffer while I grovel, And honor with thy matchless Smile My novel.
R. W. C.
CHAPTER I
THE YEZIDEE
Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside.
For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her.
But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of horror in a dream.
She stood near the steamer’s stern apart from other passengers, a slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.
Under her haunted eyes Asia was slowly dissolving to a streak of vapour in the misty lustre of the moon.
Suddenly the ancient continent disappeared, washed out by a wave against the sky; and with it vanished the last shreds of that accursed nightmare which had possessed her for four endless years. But whether during those unreal years her soul had only been held in bondage, or whether, as she had been taught, it had been irrevocably destroyed, she still remained uncertain, knowing nothing about the death of souls or how it was accomplished.
As she stood there, her sad eyes fixed on the misty East, a passenger passing — an Englishwoman — paused to say something kind to the young American; and added, “if there is anything my husband and I can do it would give us much pleasure.” The girl had turned her head as though not comprehending. The other woman hesitated.
“This is Doctor Norne’s daughter, is it not?” she inquired in a pleasant voice.
“Yes, I am Tressa Norne.... I ask your pardon.... Thank you, madam: — I am — I seem to be — a trifle dazed — —”
“What wonder, you poor child! Come to us if you feel need of companionship.”
“You are very kind.... I seem to wish to be alone, somehow.”
“I understand.... Good-night, my dear.”
Late the next morning Tressa Norne awoke, conscious for the first time in four years that it was at last her own familiar self stretched out there on the pillows where sunshine streamed through the porthole. All that day she lay in her bamboo steamer chair on deck. Sun and wind conspired to dry every tear that wet her closed lashes. Her dark, glossy hair blew about her face; scarlet tinted her full lips again; the tense hands relaxed. Peace came at sundown.
That evening she took her Yu-kin from her cabin and found a chair on the deserted hurricane deck.
And here, in the brilliant moonlight of the China Sea, she curled up cross-legged on the deck, all alone, and sounded the four futile strings of her moon-lute, and hummed to herself, in a still voice, old songs she had sung in Yian before the tragedy. She sang the tent-song called Tchinguiz. She sang Camel Bells and The Blue Bazaar, — children’s songs of the Yiort. She sang the ancient Khiounnou song called “The Saghalien”:
I
In the month of Saffar Among the river-reeds I saw two horsemen Sitting on their steeds. Tulugum! Heitulum! By the river-reeds
II
In the month of Saffar A demon guards the ford. Tokhta, my Lover! Draw your shining sword! Tulugum! Heitulum! Slay him with your sword!
III
In the month of Saffar Among the water-weeds I saw two horsemen Fighting on their steeds. Tulugum! Heitulum! How my lover bleeds!
IV
In the month of Saffar, The Year I should have wed — The Year of The Panther — My lover lay dead, — Tulugum! Heitulum! Dead without a head.
And songs like these — the one called “Keuke Mongol,” and an ancient air of the Tchortchas called “The Thirty Thousand Calamities,” and some Chinese boatmen’s songs which she had heard in Yian before the tragedy; these she hummed to herself there in the moonlight playing on her round-faced, short-necked lute of four strings.
Terror indeed seemed ended for her, and in her heart a great overwhelming joy was welling up which seemed to overflow across the entire moonlit world.
She had no longer any fear; no premonition of further evil. Among the few Americans and English aboard, something of her story was already known. People were kind; and they were also considerate enough to subdue their sympathetic curiosity when they discovered that this young American girl shrank from any mention of what had happened to her during the last four years of the Great World War.
It was evident, also, that she preferred to remain aloof; and this inclination, when finally understood, was respected by her fellow passengers. The clever, efficient and polite Japanese officers and crew of the Nan-yang Maru were invariably considerate and courteous to her, and they remained nicely reticent, although they also knew the main outline of her story and very much desired to know more. And so, surrounded now by the friendly security of civilised humanity, Tressa Norne, reborn to light out of hell’s own shadows, awoke from four years of nightmare which, after all, perhaps, never had seemed entirely actual.
And now God’s real sun warmed her by day; His real moon bathed her in creamy coolness by night; sky and wind and wave thrilled her with their blessed assurance that this was once more the real world which stretched illimitably on every side from horizon to horizon; and the fair faces and pleasant voices of her own countrymen made the past seem only a ghastly dream that never again could enmesh her soul with its web of sorcery.
And now the days at sea fled very swiftly; an
d when at last the Golden Gate was not far away she had finally managed to persuade herself that nothing really can harm the human soul; that the monstrous devil-years were ended, never again to return; that in this vast, clean Western Continent there could be no occult threat to dread, no gigantic menace to destroy her body, no secret power that could consign her soul to the dreadful abysm of spiritual annihilation.
Very early that morning she came on deck. The November day was delightfully warm, the air clear save for a belt of mist low on the water to the southward.
She had been told that land would not be sighted for twenty-four hours, but she went forward and stood beside the starboard rail, searching the horizon with the enchanted eyes of hope.
As she stood there a Japanese ship’s officer crossing the deck, forward, halted abruptly and stood staring at something to the southward.
At the same moment, above the belt of mist on the water, and perfectly clear against the blue sky above, the girl saw a fountain of gold fire rise from the fog, drift upward in the daylight, slowly assume the incandescent outline of a serpentine creature which leisurely uncoiled and hung there floating, its lizard-tail undulating, its feet with their five stumpy claws closing, relaxing, like those of a living reptile. For a full minute this amazing shape of fire floated there in the sky, brilliant in the morning light, then the reptilian form faded, died out, and the last spark vanished in the sunshine.
When the Japanese officer at last turned to resume his promenade, he noticed a white-faced girl gripping a stanchion behind him as though she were on the point of swooning. He crossed the deck quickly. Tressa Norne’s eyes opened.
“Are you ill, Miss Norne?” he asked.
“The — the Dragon,” she whispered.
The officer laughed. “Why, that was nothing but Chinese day-fireworks,” he explained. “The crew of some fishing boat yonder in the fog is amusing itself.” He looked at her narrowly, then with a nice little bow and smile he offered his arm: “If you are indisposed, perhaps you might wish to go below to your stateroom, Miss Norne?”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 949