Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  It was, in fact, such a pretty spectacle that I was going over to sit beside her while she did it, but Kemper started just when I was going to, and I turned away. Some men invariably do the wrong thing. But a handsome man doesn’t last long with a pretty girl.

  I was thinking of this as I stood contemplating an alligator slide, when Grue came back saying that the shore on which we had landed was the termination of a shell-mound, and that it was the only dry place he had found.

  So I bade him pitch our tents a few feet back from the shore; and stood watching him while he did so, one eye reverting occasionally to Evelyn Grey and Kemper. They both were seated cross-legged beside the branch, and they seemed to be talking a great deal and rather earnestly. I couldn’t quite understand what they found to talk about so earnestly and volubly all of a sudden, inasmuch as they had heretofore exchanged very few observations during a most brief and formal acquaintance, dating only from sundown the day before.

  Grue set up our three tents, carried the luggage inland, and then hung about for a while until the vast shadow of a vulture swept across the trees.

  I never saw such an indescribable expression on a human face as I saw on Grue’s as he looked up at the huge, unclean bird. His vitreous eyes fairly glittered; the corners of his mouth quivered and grew wet; and to my astonishment he seemed to emit a low, mewing noise.

  “What the devil are you doing?” I said impulsively, in my amazement and disgust.

  He looked at me, his eyes still glittering, the corners of his mouth still wet; but the curious sounds had ceased.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing. I thought you spoke.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  He made no reply. Once, when I had partly turned my head, I was aware that he was warily turning his to look at the vulture, which had alighted heavily on the ground near the entrails and heads of the mullet, where he had cast them on the dead leaves.

  I walked over to where Evelyn Grey and Kemper sat so busily conversing; and their volubility ceased as they glanced up and saw me approaching. Which phenomenon both perplexed and displeased me.

  I said:

  “This is the Black Bayou forest, and we have the most serious business of our lives before us. Suppose you and I start out, Kemper, and see if there are any traces of what we are after in the neighborhood of our camp.”

  “Do you think it safe to leave Miss Grey alone in camp?” he asked gravely.

  I hadn’t thought of that:

  “No, of course not,” I said. “Grue can stay.”

  “I don’t need anybody,” she said quickly. “Anyway, I’m rather afraid of Grue.”

  “Afraid of Grue?” I repeated.

  “Not exactly afraid. But he’s — unpleasant.”

  “I’ll remain with Miss Grey,” said Kemper politely.

  “Oh,” she exclaimed, “I couldn’t ask that. It is true that I feel a little tired and nervous, but I can go with you and Mr. Smith and Grue—”

  I surveyed Kemper in cold perplexity. As chief of the expedition, I couldn’t very well offer to remain with Evelyn Grey, but I didn’t propose that Kemper should, either.

  “Take Grue,” he suggested, “and look about the woods for a while. Perhaps after dinner Miss Grey may feel sufficiently rested to join us.”

  “I am sure,” she said, “that a few hours’ rest in camp will set me on my feet. All I need is rest. I didn’t sleep very soundly last night.”

  I felt myself growing red, and I looked away from them both.

  “Oh,” said Kemper, in apparent surprise, “I thought you had slept soundly all night long.”

  “Nobody,” said I, “could have slept very pleasantly during that musical performance of yours.”

  “Were you singing?” she asked innocently of Kemper.

  “He was singing when he wasn’t firing off his pistol,” I remarked. “No wonder you couldn’t sleep with any satisfaction to yourself.”

  Grue had disappeared into the forest; I stood watching for him to come out again. After a few minutes I heard a furious but distant noise of flapping; the others also heard it; and we listened in silence, wondering what it was.

  “It’s Grue killing something,” faltered Evelyn Grey, turning a trifle pale.

  “Confound it!” I exclaimed. “I’m going to stop that right now.”

  Kemper rose and followed me as I started for the woods; but as we passed the beached boats Grue appeared from among the trees.

  “Where have you been?” I demanded.

  “In the woods.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Nothing.”

  There was a bit of down here and there clinging to his cotton shirt and trousers, and one had caught and stuck at the corner of his mouth.

  “See here, Grue,” I said, “I don’t want you to kill any birds except for camp purposes. Why do you try to catch and kill birds?”

  “I don’t.”

  I stared at the man and he stared back at me out of his glassy eyes.

  “You mean to say that you don’t, somehow or other, manage to catch and kill birds?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  There was nothing further for me to say unless I gave him the lie. I didn’t care to do that, needing his services.

  Evelyn Grey had come up to join us; there was a brief silence; we all stood looking at Grue; and he looked back at us out of his pale, washed-out, and unblinking eyes.

  “Grue,” I said, “I haven’t yet explained to you the object of this expedition to Black Bayou. Now, I’ll tell you what I want. But first let me ask you a question or two. You know the Black Bayou forests, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever see anything unusual in these forests?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The man stared at us, one after another. Then he said:

  “What are you looking for in Black Bayou?”

  “Something very curious, very strange, very unusual. So strange and unusual, in fact, that the great Zoölogical Society of the Bronx in New York has sent me down here at the head of this expedition to search the forests of Black Bayou.”

  “For what?” he demanded, in a dull, accentless voice.

  “For a totally new species of human being, Grue. I wish to catch one and take it back to New York in that folding cage.”

  His green eyes had grown narrow as though sun-dazzled. Kemper had stepped behind us into the woods and was now busy setting up the folding cage. Grue remained motionless.

  “I am going to offer you,” I said, “the sum of one thousand dollars in gold if you can guide us to a spot where we may see this hitherto unknown species — a creature which is apparently a man but which has, in the back of his head, a third eye—”

  I paused in amazement: Grue’s cheeks had suddenly puffed out and were quivering; and from the corners of his slitted mouth he was emitting a whimpering sound like the noise made by a low-circling pigeon.

  “Grue!” I cried. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What is he doing?” screamed Grue, quivering from head to foot, but not turning around.

  “Who?” I cried.

  “The man behind me!”

  “Professor Kemper? He’s setting up the folding cage—”

  With a screech that raised my hair, Grue whipped out his murderous knife and hurled himself backward at Kemper, but the latter shrank aside behind the partly erected cage, and Grue whirled around, snarling, hacking, and even biting at the wood frame and steel bars.

  And then occurred a thing so horrid that it sickened me to the pit of my stomach; for the man’s sagging straw hat had fallen off, and there, in the back of his head, through the coarse, black, ratty hair, I saw a glassy eye glaring at me.

  “Kemper!” I shouted. “He’s got a third eye! He’s one of them! Knock him flat with your riflestock!” And I seized a shot-gun from the top of the baggage bundle on the ground beside me, and leaped at Grue, aiming a terrific blow a
t him.

  “‘Kemper!’ I shouted.... ‘He is one of them! Knock him flat with your riflestock!’”

  But the glassy eye in the back of his head was watching me between the clotted strands of hair, and he dodged both Kemper and me, swinging his heavy knife in circles and glaring at us both out of the front and back of his head.

  Kemper seized him by his arm, but Grue’s shirt came off, and I saw his entire body was as furry as an ape’s. And all the while he was snapping at us and leaping hither and thither to avoid our blows; and from the corners of his puffed cheeks he whined and whimpered and mewed through the saliva foam.

  “Keep him from the water!” I panted, following him with clubbed shot-gun; and as I advanced I almost stepped on a soiled heap of foulness — the dead buzzard which he had caught and worried to death with his teeth.

  Suddenly he threw his knife at my head, hurling it backward; dodged, screeched, and bounded by me toward the shore of the lagoon, where the pretty waitress was standing, petrified.

  For one moment I thought he had her, but she picked up her skirts, ran for the nearest boat, and seized a harpoon; and in his fierce eagerness to catch her he leaped clear over the boat and fell with a splash into the lagoon.

  As Kemper and I sprang aboard and looked over into the water, we could see him going down out of reach of a harpoon; and his body seemed to be silver-plated, flashing and glittering like a burnished eel, so completely did the skin of air envelope him, held there by the fur that covered him.

  And, as he rested for a moment on the bottom, deep down through the clear waters of the lagoon where he lay prone, I could see, as the current stirred his long, black hair, the third eye looking up at us, glassy, unwinking, horrible.

  A bubble or two, like globules of quicksilver, were detached from the burnished skin of air that clothed him, and came glittering upward.

  Suddenly there was a flash; a flurrying cloud of blue mud; and Grue was gone.

  After a long while I turned around in the muteness of my despair. And slowly froze.

  For the pretty waitress, becomingly pale, was gathered in Kemper’s arms, her cheek against his shoulder. Neither seemed to be aware of me.

  “Darling,” he said, in the imbecile voice of a man in love, “why do you tremble so when I am here to protect you? Don’t you love and trust me?”

  “Oo — h — yes,” she sighed, pressing her cheek closer to his shoulder.

  I shoved my hands into my pockets, passed them without noticing them, and stepped ashore.

  And there I sat down under a tree, with my back toward them, all alone and face to face with the greatest grief of my life.

  But which it was — the loss of her or the loss of Grue, I had not yet made up my mind.

  THE IMMORTAL

  I

  As everybody knows, the great majority of Americans, upon reaching the age of natural selection, are elected to the American Institute of Arts and Ethics, which is, so to speak, the Ellis Island of the Academy.

  Occasionally a general mobilization of the Academy is ordered and, from the teeming population of the Institute, a new Immortal is selected for the American Academy of Moral Endeavor by the simple process of blindfolded selection from Who’s Which.

  The motto of this most stately of earthly institutions is a peculiarly modest, truthful, and unintentional epigram by Tupper:

  “Unknown, I became Famous; Famous, I remain Unknown.”

  And so I found it to be the case; for, when at last I was privileged to write my name, “Smith, Academician,” I discovered to my surprise that I knew none of my brother Immortals, and, more amazing still, none of them had ever heard of me.

  This latter fact became the more astonishing to me as I learned the identity of the other Immortals.

  Even the President of our great republic was numbered among these Olympians. I had every right to suppose that he had heard of me. I had happened to hear of him, because his Secretary of State once mentioned him at Chautauqua.

  It was a wonderfully meaningless sensation to know nobody and to discover myself equally unknown amid that matchless companionship. We were like a mixed bunch of gods, Greek, Norse, Hindu, Hottentot — all gathered on Olympus, having never heard of each other but taking it for granted that we were all gods together and all members of this club.

  My initiation into the Academy had been fixed for April first, and I was much worried concerning the address which I was of course expected to deliver on that occasion before my fellow members.

  It had to be an exciting address because slumber was not an infrequent phenomenon among the Immortals on such solemn occasions. Like dozens of dozing Joves a dull discourse always set them nodding.

  But always under such circumstances the pretty ushers from Barnard College passed around refreshments; a suffragette orchestra struck up; the ushers uprooted the seated Immortals and fox-trotted them into comparative consciousness.

  But I didn’t wish to have my inaugural address interrupted, therefore I was at my wits’ ends to discover a subject of such exciting scientific interest that my august audience could not choose but listen as attentively as they would listen from the front row to some deathless stunt in vaudeville.

  That morning I had left the Bronx rather early, hoping that a long walk might compose my thoughts and enable me to think of some sufficiently entertaining and unusual subject for my inaugural address.

  I walked as far as Columbia University, gazed with rapture upon its magnificent architecture until I was as satiated as though I had arisen from a banquet at Childs’.

  To aid mental digestion I strolled over to the noble home of the Academy and Institute adjoining Mr. Huntington’s Hispano-Moresque Museum.

  It was a fine, sunny morning, and the Immortals were being exercised by a number of pretty ushers from Barnard.

  I gazed upon the impressive procession with pride unutterable; very soon I also should walk two and two in the sunshine, my dome crowned with figurative laurels, cracking scientific witticisms with my fellow inmates, or, perhaps, squeezing the pretty fingers of some — But let that pass.

  I was, as I say, gazing upon this inspiring scene on a beautiful morning in February, when I became aware of a short and visibly vulgar person beside me, plucking persistently at my elbow.

  “Are you the great Academician, Perfessor Smith?” he asked, tipping his pearl-coloured and somewhat soiled bowler.

  “Yes,” I said condescendingly. “Your description of me precludes further doubt. What can I do for you, my good man?”

  “Are you this here Perfessor Smith of the Department of Anthropology in the Bronx Park Zoölogical Society?” he persisted.

  “What do you desire of me?” I repeated, taking another look at him. He was exceedingly ordinary.

  “Prof, old sport,” he said cordially, “I took a slant at the papers yesterday, an’ I seen all about the big time these guys had when you rode the goat—”

  “Rode — what?”

  “When you was elected. Get me?”

  I stared at him. He grinned in a friendly way.

  “The privacy of those solemn proceedings should remain sacred. It were unfit to discuss such matters with the world at large,” I said coldly.

  “I get you,” he rejoined cheerfully.

  “What do you desire of me?” I repeated. “Why this unseemly apropos?”

  “I was comin’ to it. Perfessor, I’ll be frank. I need money—”

  “You need brains!”

  “No,” he said good-humouredly, “I’ve got ‘em; plenty of ‘em; I’m overstocked with idees. What I want to do is to sell you a few—”

  “Do you know you are impudent!”

  “Listen, friend. I seen a piece in the papers as how you was to make the speech of your life when you ride the goat for these here guys on April first—”

  “I decline to listen—”

  “One minute, friend! I want to ask you one thing! What are you going to talk about?”

  I
was already moving away but I stopped and stared at him.

  “That’s the question,” he nodded with unimpaired cheerfulness, “what are you going to talk about on April the first? Remember it’s the hot-air party of your life. Ree-member that each an’ every paper in the United States will print what you say. Now, how about it, friend? Are you up in your lines?”

  Swallowing my repulsion for him I said: “Why are you concerned as to what may be the subject of my approaching address?”

  “There you are, Prof!” he exclaimed delightedly; “I want to do business with you. That’s me! I’m frank about it. Say, there ought to be a wad of the joyful in it for us both—”

  “What?”

  “Sure. We can work it any old way. Take Tyng, Tyng and Company, the typewriter people. I’d be ashamed to tell you what I can get out o’ them if you’ll mention the Tyng-Tyng typewriter in your speech—”

  “What you suggest is infamous!” I said haughtily.

  “Believe me there’s enough in it to make it a financial coup, and I ask you, Prof, isn’t a financial coup respectable?”

  “You seem to be morally unfitted to comprehend—”

  “Pardon me! I’m fitted up regardless with all kinds of fixtures. I’m fixed to undertake anything. Now if you’d prefer the Bunsen Baby Biscuit bunch — why old man Bunsen would come across—”

  “I won’t do such things!” I said angrily.

  “Very well, very well. Don’t get riled, sir. That’s only one way to build on Fifth Avenoo. I’ve got one hundred thousand other ways—”

  “I don’t want to talk to you—”

  “They’re honest — some of them. Say, if you want a stric’ly honest deal I’ve got the goods. Only it ain’t as easy and the money ain’t as big—”

  “I don’t want to talk to you—”

  “Yes you do. You don’t reelize it but you do. Why you’re fixin’ to make the holler of your life, ain’t you? What are you goin’ to say? Hey? What you aimin’ to say to make those guys set up? What’s the use of up-stagin’? Ain’t you willin’ to pay me a few plunks if I dy-vulge to you the most startlin’ phenomena that has ever electrified civilization sense the era of P.T. Barnum!”