Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Dearest!”

  “Not that I want to live there! No New Yorker wants to live there. All they want is to come back to town every two weeks to see whether it’s still there. And that’s all I want. And when you and I go back, and after we have remained there long enough to be sure the town is all right and is still going, we can always go away again for a few weeks — until it’s time to return and look it over again. That is all New York means to New Yorkers; but what it means is everything on earth.”

  “Our nursery,” she sighed.

  “With the dear phantoms that haunt it.”

  She nodded, thinking of her mother. His eyes, too, had become remote and tender.

  After a moment they looked at each other. And, divining his very thoughts, timidly, very sweetly, she offered her lips in her first kiss.

  NUMBER SEVEN

  HE spelled literature with a large L and loved to indulge in it as a profession.

  There undoubtedly was about him a certain lack of sophistication which incited the ungodly to guy him.

  Yet his personal appearance seemed to be normal enough, and rather nice, except when practicing his profession or talking about it. And he usually was engaged in one or the other pastime. But when he did these things, and particularly when he put on his large, moon-like writing spectacles, he instantly became a provocation to the mischievous. Besides, he was smooth-shaven, boyish, and rather pink — a fascinating temptation to the irreverent. But the irreverent sometimes get theirs.

  Through the round lenses of his glasses his eyes, also, seemed very round and wide, and of a baby-blue colour, and they beamed with benevolence, mildness, receptiveness, and gentle enthusiasms. Which was sufficient to damn him.

  Also, the clean-cut and decisive virility of his head and shoulders seemed to disappear utterly under the consecrated mantle of genius, and a sort of downy immaturity immediately softened and transfigured him when monkeying with his Muse; and at such moments he resembled the illustrations of “Verdant Green” in the early editions of that immortal volume.

  Perhaps his only trouble was that he insisted on spelling literature with a large L, and took it and himself too ponderously. When he said very seriously, “I am writing a book,” it was as though Napoleon had remarked, “I am changing the map of Europe!” — there was so much of finality in the observation — and of pleasantly informal omniscience.

  Possibly he had been too long about that book. For the mere threatened consummation of a book in these piping times of genius, when everybody from the attic to below stairs cherishes literary designs upon a wealthy and insatiable public, may have left his friends unawed and but very slightly impressed. Authors, at best, are not held in excessive esteem by really busy people, the general idea beings — which is usually true — that literature is a godsend to those unfitted for real work. But very few authors comprehend what is their status in a brutal, practical, and humorous world.

  Smith did not appreciate this any more than do you and I; and he went about his profession with an innocent and cheerful sort of consecrated gravity that is to be encountered only in the sister professions, Music and the Drama.

  Now, this same book of his had progressed sufficiently to combine with the characteristic noises of New York and give Smith several headaches.

  To the traditions of his calling he was as faithful as a district leader to Tammany Hall: the beliefs and customs of the past guided him: a writer who went to his work as regularly and simply as a banker went to his bank was merely a sordid machine; inspiration and his Muse remained the only motives toward labour that Smith recognized — the only signals for him to kick in and get busy with literature.

  And of all traditions of his art, the tyranny of environment clutched him most completely, and he devoutly believed in solitude as a stimulus to reflection and as a necessity when genius was in labour.

  That is why, conscious of subtle premonitions, he went south and hunted about for some cozy obscurity where the expected progeny of his brain might be born far from the distracting racket of the metropolis. And somewhere down there he heard of Number Seven — a solitary fruit ranch on Sting-Ray Creek — and thither he proceeded after a short correspondence with one C. Weymouth, evidently the owner and proprietor of Number Seven.

  And there is where he made a radical mistake if dignified peace and quiet undisturbed were what he was after. For C. Weymouth was not Charles, or Chester, or even Cæsar, as he had idly speculated, but her name was Cyrille, and she was golden-haired, golden-eyed, Greek built, and entirely capable of taking up her late father’s prosperous business, of introducing a dehydrating plant as an innovation, and of making it pay nearly three hundred percent.

  Also, she had no reverence at all for authors; she was inclined to be humorous, whether busy or otherwise; she went about in a white serge long-skirted riding coat, riding breeches, a flat sun helmet, and tan puttees. And she rolled her own cigarettes.

  About a dozen “houn’-dawgs” usually accompanied her. When they didn’t, they were inclined to mourn, her absence — another serious condition for Smith and his unborn book to cope with.

  He tried the seclusion of his room: the clatter of the dehydrators, the constant, melodious chatter and laughter of the negro fruit dryers distracted his inspired attention. He tried working on the various verandas with which the house seemed to be infested: and the birds — blue jays, robins, warblers, red-bellied woodpeckers, and mocking birds — were noisier than the noisiest street in Manhattan Town.

  He took a folding card-table out under the trees: it wobbled. He paid a negro to build for him an immovable table and a movable and massively rustic chair, and plant both in the orange grove: and after the first week Cyrille formed the habit of coming and sitting sidesaddle on the table; and her “dawgs” clustered in cordial circles around him yawning, shoving, or scratching wood ticks. All the plumbers in the world could not have unplugged the fount of his inspiration under these conditions.

  Whether it was ignorance of the habits and habitat of Genius, or whether it was merely mischief on Cyrille’s part — whether the girl was unaccustomed to brainchildren in gestation, or whether she viewed the layette humorously — perhaps nobody knew except herself.

  Sun-tanned to a creamy ‘tint, all aglow with youth and a flawless digestion, she detached oranges from the branch over Smith’s head and ate them, powdering Smith, his manuscript, and the table with perfumed blossoms, spiders, ants, caterpillars, and minute jets of vapour-like spray from the sunny pulp into which she bit.

  “And what are you going to make them do now — I mean your hero and heroine, Mr. Smith?” she inquired, her golden-brown eyes which slanted slightly, Chinese fashion, opening wide under the long lashes.

  “You must understand,” he said, “that modern fiction does not tolerate either a hero or a heroine as the public understand such antiquities.”

  “No?” she exclaimed, surprised.

  “Not at all. All that sort of thing is as primitive as the old ‘broadsides’ and chapbooks — as archaic as ‘The Beggar’s Opera.’”

  “But you have to write about somebody?” she insisted. “Don’t you?”

  “I am not sure that even that is necessary,” he replied, regarding her very seriously through his round writing glasses. “I can conceive of a novel concerning nobody in particular — dealing only with vast, vague, passionless masses — with cosmic generalities.” His conceptions were inclined to be immaculate.

  “But — goodness!” exclaimed Cyrille. “How can you make a pretty girl and a handsome young man out of cosmic generalities? And how can you make a novel without love?”

  “You are all wrong,” he said earnestly. “Even granted a principal value in the composition and a balancing mass a degree or so less in value — in other words, what you speak of as a ‘hero’ and a ‘heroine’ — it is not necessary to attribute manly attractiveness to the one, nor physical beauty to the other.”

  “Why not?”

  “Be
cause everybody else does. Pretty heroines and handsome heroes are insipid. Also they are false to nature. Better take the physically ugly and unattractive.”

  “But the world is so full of pretty girls,” insisted Cyrille, “why not use a few?”

  “They’re used up. That’s why.”

  “But there are millions of pretty girls — more than enough for all the novels that ever will be written! Why not use them? Why hunt about and pick out unattractive people?”

  “Physical unattractiveness makes for literary strength!” he explained solemnly. “There is a girl in this novel of mine, but she’s anything but ornamental. As a matter of fact, she is anæmic, unhealthy, and afflicted with strabismus and St. Vitus dance.”

  “I suppose,” she said innocently, “that any sort of dancing is fashionable just now. You are appealing to the public very cleverly, Mr. Smith.”

  “What!” he protested warmly. “I’m doing nothing of the sort! I’m ignoring every popular convention. I’m making her strong, but repellant. And as for the man — the ‘hero,’ as you might call him, he’s physically something awful. He is bald!”

  “Dear me,” said Cyrille, detaching another orange and scattering white petals and caterpillars, “ — I never saw but one really repulsive man, and he was the blue-gum nigger that the sheriff shot out in the flat-woods.”

  “Really?” inquired Smith, peering at her through his spectacles, his scholarly enthusiasm for the “human document” mildly aroused. “And why, Miss Weymouth, did this — er — official — assassinate this — ah — blue-gum-colored man?”

  “Because the — ah — colored man stopped my horse,” said the girl quietly.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t ask him why,” she drawled. “I was on the point of it, but the sheriff asked him first — with a Winchester. Mine was only an automatic. And it stuck in the holster.”

  “Very interesting!” observed Smith. “A local incident somewhat remarkable — but not perfectly clear to me — in fact, a trifle obscure.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you must live here a little longer to understand the subtleties of such episodes—” She sat on the edge of his table, gently swinging one leg under the skirt of her snowy riding coat.

  Presently she flung away the orange skin and dried her finger-tips.

  “Why not write about real things if you are so devoted to realism?” she said. “To burrow and tunnel and worm your way into the subterranean and subjective, to split philosophical hairs, subdivide paradoxical subtleties, plant theories in culture tubes and watch them multiply — these things are not real, not vital — are they?”

  “What?” he asked, astonished.

  But the girl only laughed and looked straight into his round spectacles.

  “I don’t know anything; you probably have discovered that,” she said. “Art seems to be lost on me — real beauty remains to me a closed book—” She glanced upward and around her, the smile faintly lingering: “Only sunshine and green leaves, blossoms, waters ruffled by the summer wind — and the high blue and the moon’s ghost sleeping there — a bird and its song — the stillness of woods — a young girl, fair, sweet of voice — and a man to match her — these are all that appeal to me or stir me — or interest me. Alas! I am no poet — not fitted for understanding.... As you see, I don’t know very much about anything, Mr. Smith — except such things — and the dehydrating and sun-curing of fruit.”

  Smith removed his writing glasses. The downy, rosy immaturity of him seemed to fade at once. A deepening crease between his eyebrows, and his slightly troubled perplexity made of his face a visage, clean-cut, sunburnt, and firm.

  “I’m not prepared to say that you lack in appreciation,” he said. “I do not precisely understand how it is, but I have noticed, frequently, that when you express yourself there is a flavour in what you say, not untinctured with an instinctive and — er — perhaps poetic species of comprehension.”

  “What an odd idea!”

  He continued rather warmly:

  “In your society I have, at moments, been conscious of a very distinct mental pleasure — perhaps, even, a slight exhilaration. Which to me is proof conclusive that we understand the same language.”

  “Naturally, being American.”

  “I mean in a subtler sense.”

  “That subtler sense of yours, Mr. Smith, leaves me alone and quite deserted — a material and wistful lingerer at the gates of your understanding.”

  “That is very finely put!” he said, much interested. “I don’t quite see — it’s really amazing that a girl — just a young, healthy, beautiful girl — should instinctively and without previous literary training, express herself so concisely and so interestingly — may I add, so charmingly?”

  “You may,” she said, smiling, with a slightly mischievous inclination of her pretty head — but her cheeks became tinted with a noticeable colour.

  Now, it’s all very well to play the game: it’s all very funny to find malicious amusement in the solemnity and innocence of a spectacled young literary man. But that same young man, without spectacles, and temporarily taking notice of his tormentor’s charm, is a different proposition.

  Also, he rose and seated himself on the table beside her; and he was nearly six feet of symmetry in his white flannels.

  “Why don’t you write?” he asked.

  “I?”

  “Why not? You say what you have to say delightfully.”

  “But,” she faltered, flushing, “I have nothing to say, Mr. Smith.”

  “Surely you have, Miss Weymouth! You are endowed with a mind!”

  “Am I?” But the mischief in her eyes was confused by his straight glance — keen, clear, grey eyes he had, a trifle nearsighted, but nice for a man to have.

  “Really,” she said, the warm colour still heating her cheeks, “you are very kind to think me capable of any worthy mental effort. But I am not; when I think at all I think of my dehydrating plant, which cost ten thousand dollars, and how it has already paid for itself. That’s about all I ever think of, Mr. Smith — except when I go North for three months. And then all I think about is having a good time.”

  She detached another orange, and powdered Smith with snowy petals.

  “I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, and impulsively dusted his head and shoulders with the softest, prettiest hand he had ever noticed in his rather brief career upon his native planet.

  When Cyrille did what she did the slight consequences of her thoughtless action spread as atmospheric agitation spreads before a lifted finger, in never ending and concentric ripples until, as it is asserted, even the most distant star eventually feels the disturbance. This is called cause and effect.

  Now the cause was Cyrille’s hand dusting orange bloom from the short, brown hair and well-set shoulders of one George Smith: the effect was in duplicate — Smith noticed the slender and smooth loveliness of her hand, then he was agreeably aware of that same hand hovering over his hair and shoulders. And Cyrille, with philanthropic intentions only, became aware of the texture and short, thick crispness of Smith’s hair. And, instinctively but confusedly transferring her attentions to the petals and caterpillars on his shoulders, she became aware, also, that these shoulders were rather broad, well made, and symmetrical. Which terminated her activities with her hand.

  “Thank you,” said Smith.... “Please don’t bother.”

  Superfluous: Cyrille had already ceased to bother, rather abruptly. After a moment she quietly prepared the orange and bit into the brilliant pulp.

  “Why did you come down here?” she asked naively.

  “So I might write my book undisturbed.”

  “Do I disturb you?”

  “No — please don’t go—” as she set one foot on the ground. “No, you don’t disturb me.... I didn’t feel like writing this morning.”

  “Do you have to wait until you feel like writing before you accomplish anything, Mr. Smith?”

  “Of course.”

/>   “What would happen if you just sat down and wrote whether or not you felt particularly like it? A bestseller?”

  “Possibly,” he replied, with a shrug of disdain.

  “How humiliating! And yet,” she continued, her pretty head on one side and mischief in her golden-brown eyes again, “I don’t see why a writer should have to wait until he feels like writing.”

  “What?” he asked sharply.

  “Why, I might say the same — I might say that I’ll wait until I feel like working. I don’t always like to work, you know.”

  “A man can’t write” he explained, “unless he’s in the mood.”

  “To write,” she said, “it is merely necessary to have something to say, isn’t it? Didn’t you tell me so?”

  “Yes — I”

  “Well, then! You always have something to say, don’t you — whether or not you happen to feel like saying it! Therefore, why shouldn’t you do the work of writing it out, regularly, just as any business man goes to his business whether he feels like it or not? There’s always business for him to transact, you know.”

  Smith looked up impatiently as though about to answer her; but he seemed to find nothing to say. Maybe her beauty preoccupied him; maybe her logic was disturbing him. Something seemed to, for the perplexed expression came into his grey eyes, and his brows bent slightly inward; and she thought him exceedingly nice looking for the first time since she had laid eyes on him.

  “I think I’ll go,” she said, casually.

  However, neither of them stirred.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-three.”

  “You have rather a remarkable mind.”

  “I haven’t any at all — except for drying fruit.”

  He said, taking no notice of her deprecating conclusions:

  “It’s interesting to find mind and physical beauty together—” Then, getting red, perhaps because she did: “To me, Miss Weymouth, you are a human document, and interesting on that account.”

  Which statement cooled her cheeks rather suddenly, and she glanced at him out of her golden eyes with no very philanthropic designs.