Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  In various and weird stages of morning déshabillé the heavy artillery came down to the shore for morning ablutions, all a-row like a file of ducks.

  They glared at me as I leaped ashore:

  “I want my breakfast!” snapped Mrs. Batt. “Do you hear what I say, guide? And I don’t wish to be kept waiting for it either! I desire to get out of this place as soon as possible.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I intend to stay here for some time.”

  “What!” bawled the heavy artillery in booming unison.

  But my temper had been sorely tried, and I was in a mood to tell the truth and make short work of it, too.

  “Ladies,” I said, “I’ll not mince matters. Mr. Brown and I are not guides; we are scientists from Bronx Park, and we don’t know a bally thing about this wilderness we’re in!”

  “Swindler!” shouted Mrs. Batt, in an enraged voice. “I knew very well that the United States Government would never have named that puddle of water after me!”

  “Don’t worry, madam! I’ve named it after Mr. Brown. And the new species of gigantic fish which I discovered in this lake I have named after myself. As for leaving this spot until I have concluded my scientific study of these fish, I simply won’t. I intend to observe their habits and to capture one of them if it requires the remainder of my natural life to do so. I shall be sorry to detain you here during such a period, but it can’t be helped. And now you know what the situation is, and you are at liberty to think it over after you have washed your countenances in Lake Kitten Brown.”

  Rage possessed the heavy artillery, and a fury indescribable seized them when they discovered that Indians had raided their half ton of feminine perquisites. I went up a tree.

  When the tumult had calmed sufficiently for them to distinguish what I said, I made a speech to them. From the higher branches of a neighboring tree Kitten Brown applauded and cried, “Hear! Hear!”

  “Ladies,” I said, “you know the worst, now. If you keep me up this tree and starve me to death it will be murder. Also, you don’t know enough to get out of these forests, but I can guide you back the way you came. I’ll do it if you cease your dangerous demonstrations and permit Mr. Brown and myself to remain here and study these giant fish for a week or two.”

  “‘If you keep me up this tree and starve me to death it will be murder.’”

  They now seemed disposed to consider the idea. There was nothing else for them to do. So after an hour or two, Brown and I ventured to descend from our trees, and we went among them to placate them and ingratiate ourselves as best we might.

  “Think,” I argued, “what a matchless opportunity for you to be among the first discoverers of a totally new and undescribed species of giant fish! Think what a legacy it will be to leave such a record to posterity! Think how proud and happy your descendants will be to know that their ancestors assisted at the discovery of Minnius Smithii!”

  “Why can’t they be named after me?” demanded Mrs. Batt.

  “Because,” I explained patiently, “they have already been named after me!”

  “Couldn’t something be named after me?” inquired that fearsome lady.

  “The bats,” suggested Brown politely, “we could name a bat after you with pleasure—”

  I thought for a moment she meant to swing on him. He thought so, too, and ducked.

  “A bat!” she shouted. “Name a bat after me!”

  “Many a celebrated scientist has been honoured by having his name conferred upon humbler fauna,” I explained.

  But she remained dangerous, so I went and built the fire, and squatted there, frying bacon, while on the other side of the fire, sitting side by side, Kitten Brown and Angelica White gazed upon each other with enraptured eyes. It was slightly sickening — but let that pass. I was beginning to understand that science is a jealous mistress and that any contemplated infidelity of mine stood every chance of being squelched. No; evidently I had not been fashioned for the joys of legal domesticity. Science, the wanton jade, had not yet finished her dance with me. Apparently my maxixe with her was to be external. Fides servanda est.

  That afternoon the heavy artillery held a council of war, and evidently came to a conclusion to make the best of the situation, for toward sundown they accosted me with a request for the raft, explaining that they desired to picnic aboard and afterward row about the lake and indulge in song.

  So Brown and I put aboard the craft a substantial cold supper; and the heavy artillery embarked, taking aboard a guitar to be worked by Miss Dingleheimer, and knitting for the others.

  It was a lovely evening. Brown and I had been discussing a plan to dynamite the lake and stun the fish, that method appealing to us as the only possible way to secure a specimen of the stupendous minnows which inhabited the depths. In fact, it was our only hope of possessing one of these creatures — fishing with a donkey engine, steel cable, and a hook baited with a bat being too uncertain and far more laborious and expensive.

  I was still smoking my pipe, seated at the foot of the big pine-tree, watching the water turn from gold to pink: Brown sat higher up the slope, his arm around Angelica White. I carefully kept my back toward them.

  On the lake the heavy artillery were revelling loudly, banqueting, singing, strumming the guitar, and trailing their hands overboard across the sunset-tinted water.

  I was thinking of nothing in particular as I now remember, except that I noticed the bats beginning to flit over the lake; when Brown called to me from the slope above, asking whether it was perfectly safe for the heavy artillery to remain out so late.

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “Suppose,” he shouted, “that those fish should begin to jump and feed on the bats again?”

  I had never thought of that.

  I rose and hurried nervously down to the shore, and, making a megaphone of my hands, I shouted:

  “Come in! It isn’t safe to remain out any longer!”

  Scornful laughter from the artillery answered my appeal.

  “You’d better come in!” I called. “You can’t tell what might happen if any of those fish should jump.”

  “Mind your business!” retorted Mrs. Batt. “We’ve had enough of your prevarications—”

  Then, suddenly, without the faintest shadow of warning, from the centre of the lake a vast geyser of water towered a hundred feet in the air.

  For one dreadful second I saw the raft hurled skyward, balanced on the crest of the stupendous fountain, spilling ladies, supper, guitars, and knitting in every direction.

  Then a horrible thing occurred; fish after fish shot up out of the storm of water and foam, seizing, as they fell, ladies, luncheon, and knitting in mid-air, falling back with a crashing shock which seemed to rock the very mountains.

  “Help!” I screamed. And fainted dead away.

  “Then a horrible thing occurred.”

  Is it necessary to proceed? Literature nods; Science shakes her head. No, nothing but literature lies beyond the ripples which splashed musically upon the shore, terminating forever the last vibration from that immeasurable catastrophe.

  Why should I go on? The newspapers of the nation have recorded the last scenes of the tragedy.

  We know that tons of dynamite are being forwarded to that solitary lake. We know that it is the determination of the Government to rid the world of those gigantic minnows.

  And yet, somehow, it seems to me as I sit writing here in my office, amid the verdure of Bronx Park, that the destruction of these enormous fish is a mistake.

  What more splendid sarcophagus could the ladies of the lake desire than these huge, silvery, itinerant and living tombs?

  What reward more sumptuous could anybody wish for than to rest at last within the interior dimness of an absolutely new species of anything?

  For me, such a final repose as this would represent the highest pinnacle of sublimity, the uttermost zenith of mortal dignity.

  So what more is there for me to say?

&nb
sp; As for Angelica — but no matter. I hope she may be comparatively happy with Kitten Brown. Yet, as I have said before, handsome men never last. But she should have thought of that in time.

  I absolve myself of all responsibility. She had her chance.

  ONE OVER

  I

  Professor Farrago had remarked to me that morning:

  “The city of New York always reminds me of a slovenly, fat woman with her dress unbuttoned behind.”

  I nodded.

  “New York’s architecture,” said I, “ — or what popularly passes for it — is all in front. The minute you get to the rear a pitiable condition is exposed.”

  He said: “Professor Jane Bottomly is all façade; the remainder of her is merely an occiputal backyard full of theoretical tin cans and broken bottles. I think we all had better resign.”

  It was a fearsome description. I trembled as I lighted an inexpensive cigar.

  The sentimental feminist movement in America was clearly at the bottom of the Bottomly affair.

  Long ago, in a reactionary burst of hysteria, the North enfranchised the Ethiopian. In a similar sentimental explosion of dementia, some sixty years later, the United States wept violently over the immemorial wrongs perpetrated upon the restless sex, opened the front and back doors of opportunity, and sobbed out, “Go to it, ladies!”

  They are still going.

  Professor Jane Bottomly was wished on us out of a pleasant April sky. She fell like a meteoric mass of molten metal upon the Bronx Park Zoölogical Society splashing her excoriating personality over everybody until everybody writhed.

  I had not yet seen the lady. I did not care to. Sooner or later I’d be obliged to meet her but I was not impatient.

  Now the Field Expeditionary Force of the Bronx Park Zoölogical Society is, perhaps, the most important arm of the service. Professor Bottomly had just been appointed official head of all field work. Why? Nobody knew. It is true that she had written several combination nature and love romances. In these popular volumes trees, flowers, butterflies, birds, animals, dialect, sobs, and sun-bonnets were stirred up together into a saccharine mess eagerly gulped down by a provincial reading public, which immediately protruded its tongue for more.

  The news of her impending arrival among us was an awful blow to everybody at the Bronx. Professor Farrago fainted in the arms of his pretty stenographer; Professor Cornelius Lezard of the Batrachian Department ran around his desk all day long in narrowing circles and was discovered on his stomach still feebly squirming like an expiring top; Dr. Hans Fooss, our beloved Professor of Pachydermatology sat for hours weeping into his noodle soup. As for me, I was both furious and frightened, for, within the hearing of several people, Professor Bottomly had remarked in a very clear voice to her new assistant, Dr. Daisy Delmour, that she intended to get rid of me for the good of the Bronx because of my reputation for indiscreet gallantry among the feminine employees of the Bronx Society.

  Professor Lezard overhead that outrageous remark and he hastened to repeat it to me.

  I was lunching at the time in my private office in the Administration Building with Dr. Hans Fooss — he and I being too busy dissecting an unusually fine specimen of Dingue to go to the Rolling Stone Inn for luncheon — when Professor Lezard rushed in with the scandalous libel still sizzling in his ears.

  “Everybody heard her say it!” he went on, wringing his hands. “It was a most unfortunate thing for anybody to say about you before all those young ladies. Every stenographer and typewriter there turned pale and then red.”

  “What!” I exclaimed, conscious that my own ears were growing large and hot. “Did that outrageous woman have the bad taste to say such a thing before all those sensitive girls!”

  “She did. She glared at them when she said it. Several blondes and one brunette began to cry.”

  “I hope,” said I, a trifle tremulously, “that no typewriter so far forgot herself as to admit noticing playfulness on my part.”

  “They all were tearfully unanimous in declaring you to be a perfect gentleman!”

  “I am,” I said. “I am also a married man — irrevocably wedded to science. I desire no other spouse. I am ineligible; and everybody knows it. If at times a purely scientific curiosity leads me into a detached and impersonally psychological investigation of certain — ah — feminine idiosyncrasies—”

  “Certainly,” said Lezard. “To investigate the feminine is more than a science; it is a duty!”

  “Of a surety!” nodded Dr. Fooss.

  I looked proudly upon my two loyal friends and bit into my cheese sandwich. Only men know men. A jury of my peers had exonerated me. What did I care for Professor Bottomly!

  “All the same,” added Lezard, “you’d better be careful or Professor Bottomly will put one over on you yet.”

  “I am always careful,” I said with dignity.

  “All men should be. It is the only protection of a defenseless coast line,” nodded Lezard.

  “Und neffer, neffer commid nodding to paper,” added Dr. Fooss. “Don’d neffer write it, ‘I lofe you like I was going to blow up alretty!’ Ach, nein! Don’d you write down somedings. Effery man he iss entitled to protection; und so iss it he iss protected.”

  Stein in hand he beamed upon us benevolently over his knifeful of sauerfisch, then he fed himself and rammed it down with a hearty draught of Pilsner. We gazed with reverence upon Kultur as embodied in this great Teuton.

  “That woman,” remarked Lezard to me, “certainly means to get rid of you. It seems to me that there are only two possible ways for you to hold down your job at the Bronx. You know it, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said; “either I must pay marked masculine attention to Professor Bottomly or I must manage to put one over on her.”

  “Of course,” said Lezard, “the first method is the easier for you—”

  “Not for a minute!” I said, hastily; “I simply couldn’t become frolicsome with her. You say she’s got a voice like a drill-sergeant and she goose-steps when she walks; and I don’t mind admitting she has me badly scared already. No; she must be scientifically ruined. It is the only method which makes her elimination certain.”

  “But if her popular nature books didn’t ruin her scientifically, how can we hope to lead her astray?” inquired Lezard.

  “There is,” I said, thoughtfully, “only one thing that can really ruin a scientist. Ridicule! I have braved it many a time, taking my scientific life in my hands in pursuit of unknown specimens which might have proved only imaginary. Public ridicule would have ended my scientific career in such an event. I know of no better way to end Professor Bottomly’s scientific career and capability for mischief than to start her out after something which doesn’t exist, inform the newspapers, and let her suffer the agonising consequences.”

  Dr. Fooss began to shout:

  “The idea iss schön! colossal! prachtvol! ausgezeichnet! wunderbar! wunderschön! gemütlich—” A large, tough noodle checked him. While he labored with Teutonic imperturbability to master it Lezard and I exchanged suggestions regarding the proposed annihilation of this fearsome woman who had come ravening among us amid the peaceful and soporific environment of Bronx Park.

  It was a dreadful thing for us to have our balmy Lotus-eaters’ paradise so startlingly invaded by a large, loquacious, loud-voiced lady who had already stirred us all out of our agreeable, traditional and leisurely inertia. Inertia begets cogitation, and cogitation begets ideas, and ideas beget reflexion, and profound reflexion is the fundamental cornerstone of that immortal temple in which the goddess Science sits asleep between her dozing sisters, Custom and Religion.

  This thought seemed to me so unusually beautiful that I wrote it with a pencil upon my cuff.

  While I was writing it, quietly happy in the deep pleasure that my intellectual allegory afforded me, Dr. Fooss swabbed the last morsel of nourishment from his plate with a wad of rye bread, then bolting the bread and wiping his beard with his finge
rs and his fingers on his waistcoat, he made several guttural observations too profoundly German to be immediately intelligible, and lighted his porcelain pipe.

  “Ach wass!” he remarked in ruminative fashion. “Dot Frauenzimmer she iss to raise hell alretty determined. Von Pachydermatology she knows nodding. Maybe she leaves me alone, maybe it is to be ‘raus mit me. I’ weis’ ni’! It iss aber besser one over on dat lady to put, yess?”

  “It certainly is advisable,” replied Lezard.

  “Let us try to think of something sufficiently disastrous to terminate her scientific career,” said I. And I bowed my rather striking head and rested the point of my forefinger upon my forehead. Thought crystallises more quickly for me when I assume this attitude.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lezard fold his arms and sit frowning at infinity.

  Dr. Fooss lay back in a big, deeply padded armchair and closed his prominent eyes. His pipe went out presently, and now and then he made long-drawn nasal remarks, in German, too complicated for either Lezard or for me to entirely comprehend.

  “We must try to get her as far away from here as possible,” mused Lezard. “Is Oyster Bay too far and too cruel?”

  I pondered darkly upon the suggestion. But it seemed unpleasantly like murder.

  “Lezard,” said I, “come, let us reason together. Now what is woman’s besetting emotion?”

  “Curiosity?”

  “Very well; assuming that to be true, what — ah — quality particularly characterizes woman when so beset.”

  “Ruthless determination.”

  “Then,” said I, “we ought to begin my exciting the curiosity of Professor Bottomly; and her ruthless determination to satisfy that curiosity should logically follow.”