Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  So Kitten Brown it was for him in future. After he had fought all the younger members of the scientific staff in turn, he gradually became resigned to this annoying nom d’amour.

  Lightly but thoroughly equipped for scientific field research, we had arrived at the rendezvous in time to bribe the two guides engaged by the Government to go back to their own firesides.

  A week later the formidable expedition of representative ladies arrived; and now they were sitting on the shore of Lake Susan W. Pillsbury, at a little distance from us, trying to keep the midges from their features and attempting to eat the fare provided for them by me.

  I myself couldn’t eat it. No wonder they murmured. But hunger goaded them to attack the greasy mess of trout and fried cornmeal.

  Kitten was saying to me:

  “Our medicine chest isn’t very extensive. I hope they brought their own. If they didn’t, some among us will never again see New York.”

  I stole a furtive glance at the unfortunate women. There was one among them — but let me first enumerate their heavy artillery:

  There was the Reverend Dr. Amelia Jones, blond, adipose, and close to the four-score mark. She stepped high in the Equal Franchise ranks. Nobody had ever had the temerity to answer her back.

  There was Miss Sadie Dingleheimer, fifty, emaciated, anemic, and gauntly glittering with thick-lensed eye-glasses. She was the President of the National Prophylactic Club, whatever that may be.

  There was Miss Margaret McFadden, a Titian, profusely toothed, muscular, and President of the Hair Dressers’ Union of the United States.

  There was Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt, a grass one — Batt being represented as a vanishing point — President of the National Eugenic and Purity League; tall, gnarled, sinuously powerful, and prone to emotional attacks. The attacks were directed toward others.

  These, then, composed the heavy artillery. The artillery of the light brigade consisted only of a single piece. Her name was Angelica White, a delegate from the Trained Nurses’ Association of America. The nurses had been too busy with their business to attend such picnics, so one had been selected by lot to represent the busy Association on this expedition.

  Angelica White was a tall, fair, yellow-haired girl of twenty-two or three, with violet-blue eyes and red lips, and a way of smiling a little when spoken to — but let that pass. I mean only to be scientifically minute. A passion for fact has ever obsessed me. I have little literary ability and less desire to sully my pen with that degraded form of letters known as fiction. Once in my life my mania for accuracy involved me lyrically. It was a short poem, but an earnest one:

  Truth is mighty and must prevail, Otherwise it were inadvisable to tell the tale.

  I bestowed it upon the New York Evening Post, but declined remuneration. My message belonged to the world. I don’t mean the newspaper.

  Her eyes, then, were tinted with that indefinable and agreeable nuance which modifies blue to a lilac or violet hue.

  Watching her askance, I was deeply sorry that my cooking seemed to pain her.

  “Guide!” said Mrs. Doolittle Batt, in that remarkable, booming voice of hers.

  “Ma’am!” said Kitten Brown and I with spontaneous alacrity, leaping from the ground as though shot at.

  “This cooking,” she said, with an ominous stare at us, “is atrocious. Don’t you know how to cook?”

  I said with a smiling attempt at ease:

  “There are various ways of cooking food for the several species of mammalia which an all-wise Providence—”

  “Do you think you’re cooking for wild-cats?” she demanded.

  Our smiles faded.

  “It’s my opinion that you’re incompetent,” remarked the Reverend Dr. Jones, slapping at midges with a hand that might have rocked all the cradles of the nation, but had not rocked any.

  “We’re not getting our money’s worth,” said Miss Dingleheimer, “even if the Government does pay your salaries.”

  I looked appealingly from one stony face to another. In Miss McFadden’s eye there was the somber glint of battle. She said:

  “If you can guide us no better than you cook, God save us all this day week!” And she hurled the contents of her tin plate into Lake Susan W. Pillsbury.

  Mrs. Doolittle Batt arose:

  “Come,” she said; “it is time we started. What is the name of the first lake we may hope to encounter?”

  We knew no more than did they, but we said that Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt was the first, hoping to placate that fearsome woman.

  “Come on, then!” she cried, picking up her carved and varnished mountain staff.

  Miss Dingleheimer had brought one, too, from the Catskills.

  So Kitten Brown and I loaded our mule, set him in motion, and drove him forward into the unknown.

  Where we were going we had not the slightest idea; the margin of the lake was easy travelling, so easy that we never noticed that we had already gone around the lake three times, until Mrs. Batt recognized the fact and turned on us furiously.

  I didn’t know how to explain it, except to say feebly that I was doing it as a sort of preliminary canter to harden and inure the ladies.

  “We don’t need hardening!” she snarled. “Do you understand that!”

  I comprehended that at once. But I forced a sickly smile and skipped forward in the wake of my mule, with something of the same abandon which characterizes the flight of an unwelcome dog.

  In the terrified ear of Kitten I voiced my doubts concerning the prospects of a pleasant journey.

  We marched in the following order: Arthur, the heavily laden mule, led; then came Kitten Brown and myself, all hung over with stew-pans, shotguns, rifles, cartridge-belts, ponchos, and the toilet reticules of the ladies; then marched the Reverend Dr. Jones, and, in order, filing behind her, Miss Dingleheimer, Mrs. Batt, Miss McFadden, and Miss White — the latter in her trained nurse’s costume and wearing a red cross on her sleeve — an idea of Mrs. Batt, who believed in emergency methods.

  Mrs. Batt also bore a banner, much interfered with by the foliage, bearing the inscription:

  EQUAL RIGHTS! EUGENICS OR EXTERMINATION!

  After a while she shouted:

  “Guide! Here, you may carry this banner for a while! I’m tired.”

  Kitten and I took turns with it after that. It was hard work, particularly as one by one in turn they came up and hung their parasols and shopping reticules all over us. We plodded forward like a pair of moving department stores, not daring to shift our burdens to Arthur, because we had already stuffed into the panniers of that simple and dignified animal all our collecting boxes, cyanide jars, butterfly nets, note-books, reels of piano wire, thermometers, barometers, hydrometers, stereometers, aeronoids, adnoids — everything, in fact, that guides are not supposed to pack into the woods, but which we had smuggled unbeknown to those misguided ones we guided.

  And, to make room for our scientific paraphernalia, we had been obliged to do a thing so mean, so inexpressibly low, that I blush to relate it. But facts are facts; we discarded nearly a ton of feminine impedimenta. There was fancy work of all sorts in the making or in the raw — materials for knitting, embroidering, tatting, sewing, hemming, stitching, drawn-work, lace-making, crocheting.

  Also we disposed of almost half a ton of toilet necessities — powder, perfumery, cosmetics, hot-water bags, slippers, negligees, novels, magazines, bon-bons, chewing-gum, hat-boxes, gloves, stockings, underwear.

  We left enough apparel for each lady to change once. They’d have to do some scrubbing now. Science can not be halted by hatpins; cosmos can not be side-tracked by cosmetics.

  Toward sunset we came upon a small, crystal clear pond, set between the bases of several lofty mountains. I was ready to drop with fatigue, but I nerved myself, drew a deep, exultant breath, and with one of those fine, sweeping gestures, I cried:

  “Lake Mrs. Gladys Doolittle Batt! Eureka! At last! Excelsior!”

  There was a profound silence beh
ind me. I turned, striving to mask my apprehension with a smile. The ladies were regarding the pond in surprise. I admit that it was a pond, not a lake.

  Injecting into my voice the last remnants of glee which I could summon, I shouted, “Eureka!” and began to caper about as though the size and beauty of the pond had affected me with irrepressible enthusiasm, hoping by my emotion to stampede the convention.

  The cold voice of Mrs. Doolittle Batt checked my transports:

  “Is that puddle named after me?” she demanded.

  “M-ma’am?” I stammered.

  “If that wretched frog-pond has been christened with my name, somebody is going to get into trouble,” she said ominously.

  A profound silence ensued. Arthur patiently switched at flies. As for me, I looked up at the majestic pines, gazed upon the lofty and eternal hills, then ventured a sneaking glance all around me. But I could discover no avenue of escape in case Mrs. Batt should charge me.

  “I had been informed,” she began dangerously, “that the majestic body of water, which I understood had been honoured with my name, was twelve miles long and three miles wide. This appears to be a puddle!”

  “B-b-but it’s very p-pretty,” I protested feebly. “It’s quite round and clear, and it’s nearly a quarter of a mile in d-diameter—”

  “Mind your business!” retorted Mrs. Doolittle Batt. “I’ve been swindled!”

  Kitten Brown knew more about women than did I. He said in a fairly steady voice:

  “Madame, it is an outrage! The women of this mighty nation should make the Government answerable for its duplicity! Your lake should have been at least twenty miles long!”

  Everybody turned and looked at Kitten. He was a handsome dog.

  “This young man appears to have some trace of common-sense,” said Mrs. Batt. “I shall see to it that the Government is held responsible for this odious act of insulting duplicity. I — I won’t have my name given to this — this wallow!—” She advanced toward me, her small eyes blazing: I retreated to leeward of Arthur.

  “Guide!” she said in a voice still trembling with passion. “Are you certain that you have made no mistake? You appear to be unusually ignorant.”

  “I am afraid there can be no room for doubt,” I said, almost scared out of my senses.

  “And on top of this outrage, am I to eat your cooking?” she demanded passionately. “Did I come here to look at this frog-pond and choke on your cooking? Did I?”

  “I can cook,” said a clear, pleasant voice at my elbow. And Miss White came forward, cool, clean, fresh as a posy in her uniform and cap. I immediately got behind her.

  “I can cook very nicely,” she said smilingly. “It is part of my profession, you know. So if you two guides will be kind enough to build the fire and help me—” She let her violet eyes linger on me for an instant, then on Brown. A moment later he and I were jostling each other in our eagerness to obey her slightest suggestion. It is that way with men.

  So we built her a fire and unpacked our provisions, and we waited very politely on the ladies when dinner was ready.

  It was a fine dinner — coffee, bacon, flap-jacks, soup, ash-bread, stewed chicken.

  The heavy artillery, made ravenous by their journey, required vast quantities of ammunition. They banqueted largely. I gazed in amazement at Mrs. Doolittle Batt as she swallowed one flap-jack after another, while her eyes bulged larger and larger.

  Nor was the capacity of Miss Dingleheimer and the Reverend Dr. Jones to be mocked at by pachyderms.

  Brown and I left them eating while we erected the row of little tents. Every lady had demanded a separate tent.

  So we cut saplings, set up the silk, drove pegs, and brought armfuls of balsam boughs.

  I was afraid they’d demand their knitting and other utensils, but they had eaten to repletion, and were sleepy; and as each toilet case or reticule contained also a nightgown, they drew the flaps of their several tents without insisting that we unpack Arthur’s panniers.

  They all had disappeared within their tents except Miss White, who insisted on cooking something for us, although we protested that the scraps of the banquet were all right for mere guides.

  She stood beside us for a few minutes, watching us busy with our delicious dinner.

  “You poor fellows,” she said gently. “You are nearly starved.”

  It is agreeable to be sympathized with by a tall, fair, fresh young girl. We looked up, simpering gratefully.

  “This is really a most lovely little lake,” she said, gazing out across the still, crystalline water which was all rose and gold in the sunset, save where the sombre shapes of the towering mountains were mirrored in glassy depths.

  “It’s odd,” I said, “that no trout are jumping. There ought to be lots of them there, and this is their jumping hour.”

  We all looked at the quiet, oval bit of water. Not a circle, not the slightest ripple disturbed it.

  “It must be deep,” remarked Brown.

  We gazed up at the three lofty peaks, the bases of which were the shores of this tiny gem among lakes. Deep, deep, plunging down into dusky profundity, the rocks fell away sheer into limpid depths.

  “That little lake may be a thousand feet deep,” I said. “In 1903 Professor Farrago, of Bronx Park, measured a lake in the Thunder Mountains, which was two thousand seven hundred and sixty-nine feet deep.”

  Miss White looked at me curiously.

  Into a patch of late sunshine flitted a small butterfly — one of the Grapta species. It settled on a chip of wood, uncoiled its delicate proboscis, and spread its fulvous and deeply indented wings.

  “Grapta California,” remarked Brown to me.

  “Vanessa asteriska” I corrected him. “Note the anal angle of the secondaries and the argentiferous discal area bordering the subcostal nervule.”

  “The characteristic stripes on the primaries are wanting,” he demurred.

  “It is double brooded. The summer form lacks the three darker bands.”

  A few moments’ silence was broken by the voice of Miss White.

  “I had no idea,” she remarked, “that Alaskan guides were so familiar with entomological terms and nomenclature.”

  We both turned very red.

  Brown mumbled something about having picked up a smattering. I added that Brown had taught me.

  Perhaps she believed us; her blue eyes rested on us curiously, musingly. Also, at moments, I fancied there was the faintest glint of amusement in them.

  She said:

  “Two scientific gentlemen from New York requested permission to join this expedition, but Mrs. Batt refused them.” She gazed thoughtfully upon the waters of Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt. “I wonder,” she murmured, “what became of those two gentlemen.”

  It was evident that we had betrayed ourselves to this young girl.

  She glanced at us again, and perhaps she noticed in our fascinated gaze an expression akin to terror, for suddenly she laughed — such a clear, sweet, silvery little laugh!

  “For my part,” she said, “I wish they had come with us. I like — men.”

  With that she bade us goodnight very politely and went off to her tent, leaving us with our hats pressed against our stomachs, attempting by the profundity of our bows to indicate the depth of our gratitude.

  “There’s a girl!” exclaimed Brown, as soon as she had disappeared behind her tent flaps. “She’ll never let on to Medusa, Xantippe, Cassandra and Company. I like that girl, Smith.”

  “You’re not the only one imbued by such sentiments,” said I.

  He smiled a fatuous and reminiscent smile. He certainly was good-looking. Presently he said:

  “She has the most delightful way of gazing at a man—”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said pleasantly.

  “Oh. Did she happen to glance at you that way?” he inquired. I wanted to beat him.

  All I said was:

  “She’s certainly some kitten.” Which bottled that young man for a w
hile.

  We lay on the bank of the tiny lake, our backs against a huge pine-tree, watching the last traces of colour fading from peak and tree-top.

  “Isn’t it queer,” I said, “that not a trout has splashed? It can’t be that there are no fish in the lake.”

  “There are such lakes.”

  “Yes, very deep ones. I wonder how deep this is.”

  “We’ll be out at sunrise with our reel of piano wire and take soundings,” he said. “The heavy artillery won’t wake until they’re ready to be loaded with flap-jacks.”

  I shuddered:

  “They’re fearsome creatures, Brown. Somehow, that resolute and bony one has inspired me with a terror unutterable.”

  “Mrs. Batt?”

  “Yes.”

  He said seriously:

  “She’ll make a horrid outcry when she asks for her knitting. What are you going to tell her?”

  “I shall say that Indians ambuscaded us while she was asleep, and carried off all those things.”

  “You lie very nicely, don’t you?” he remarked admiringly.

  “In vitium ducit culpæ fuga,” said I. “Besides, they don’t really need those articles.”

  He laughed. He didn’t seem to be very much afraid of Mrs. Batt.

  It had grown deliciously dusky, and myriads of stars were coming out. Little by little the lake lost its shape in the darkness, until only an irregular, star-set area of quiet water indicated that there was any lake there at all.

  I remember that Brown and I, reclining at the foot of the tree, were looking at the still and starry surface of the lake, over which numbers of bats were darting after insects; and I recollect that I was just about to speak, when, of a sudden, the silent and luminous surface of the water was shattered as with a subterranean explosion; a geyser of scintillating spray shot upward flashing, foaming, towering a hundred feet into the air. And through it I seemed to catch a glimpse of a vast, quivering, twisting mass of silver falling back with a crash into the lake, while the huge fountain rained spray on every side and the little lake rocked and heaved from shore to shore, sending great sheets of surf up over the rocks so high that the very tree-tops dripped.

  Petrified, dumb, our senses almost paralyzed by the shock, our ears still deafened by the watery crash of that gigantic something that had fallen into the lake, and our eyes starting from their sockets, we stared at the darkness.