Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “That’s funny,” said Brown. “What position did he offer you?”

  “Housekeeper.”

  “That’s funny, too.... You don’t know how to keep house, do you?”

  “No,” she said serenely, “but what was I to do? I had to take a chance.”

  “What’s the man’s name — if you don’t mind?” he demanded suspiciously.

  “Brown.”

  “What!!!”

  “Brown — a Mr. William Brown,” she repeated, surprised.

  “Why, that’s my name!” he cried.

  She stared at him:

  “That’s true,” she said, flushing. “I had forgotten what your name was.” Which admission would have deeply injured Brown’s vanity, had he not been so astonished.

  “T-tell me where this — this man Brown lives?” he requested unsteadily. “There’s something queer about this, I’m afraid.”

  “Queer?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Where does your ticket take you?”

  “My ticket,” she replied uneasily, “takes me as far as the city of Sapadillo—”

  “Oh Lord!” groaned Brown. We’ve done it now!”

  “W-what do you mean?” she stammered, beginning to suspect the truth.

  “Why, it’s met” he explained dramatically, and with a fine disregard of grammar. “I am that same William Brown! I live near Sapadillo! I advertised for a housekeeper. I read your letter. It sounded all right to me. So I wrote you, sent you your ticket, and told you to go ahead and I’d meet you at Sapadillo. That’s what comes of not investigating references, and sidestepping a personal interview! But I do everything that way — I do things on the jump. I bought that land within ten minutes. I backed that show within ten minutes of the time that Silkmann put it up to me. I do things that way. And look where it’s landed us both.”

  “W-what am I to do?” she faltered.

  “Do? I don’t know. What am I to do with you?”

  “B-but I signed my right name, Rosalie White,” she said. “You ought to have known!”

  “I know you did. I didn’t recognize it. There were about five million girls in that show. I never thought of you. It never occurred to me that Rosalie White could be you! Housekeepers don’t usually sing next to the lead and negotiate high C, do they? How was I to know it was you?”

  “I offered to call on you.”

  “Yes, I know it. But I was — out of sorts. I didn’t want to be bothered. I told the manager of the Elysian Employment Agency to go and see you, and she reported you all right — and not over fifty years old.”

  “I gave her ten dollars to say so,” nodded Rosalie. “I had to have something to do. And — would you please tell me what in the world I am to do now?” Somebody said very distinctly: “All aboard!” They looked at each other in consternation.

  “All aboard,” insisted the coloured porter politely. “What shall I do!” gasped Rosalie White.

  “Go aboard,” he said, bewildered. “There’s nothing else I can think of now!”

  “The porter took her satchel and his suit-case. They stepped hastily aboard. The next second the long train moved slowly out of the station.

  As far as appearances were concerned, it was all wrong, otherwise quite all right. But appearances convince the world, proverbs to the contrary.

  And it would have been difficult to persuade anybody that Brown was traveling with his housekeeper.

  He knew it; she knew it. But as they were on the same train, going along at forty miles an hour, bound for the same destination, they couldn’t avoid travelling together unless one of them jumped off.

  It seemed rather absurd for them not to look at each other, not to speak to each other.

  And after they had done these things, realizing that if anybody was going to damn them the material had already been supplied. Brown remarked that they might as well lunch and dine together.

  Which they did the first day out, and the second day, too, uneasily conscious all the while that they were having an unusually agreeable journey.

  When everybody aboard concluded that they were not sister and brother the shockingly ringless state of Rosalie’s slender white hands inspired each passenger on the Verbena Limited with a separate and entirely characteristic conclusion.

  But who these passengers were and what they thought does not concern this story — or anything else, very much.

  Toward the close of the second day, when the landscape from the car windows had gradually changed from snow and maples to sunshine and palms — from Italians, goats, and sparrows to niggers, razorbacks, and buzzards — Rosalie, curled up deep in her revolving chair, lifted her violet eyes from the magazine she had been reading, and discovered immediately that Brown in the chair opposite was doing the same.

  The faint smile on her lips faded into seriousness. —

  “You know,” she said, “that you have been very, very nice to me, Mr. Brown.... It might have been difficult for us both, but you have made it easy for me.” Facilis descensus — that was the trouble. Convention is a taut string keyed to fiddle on, not with. Amateurs who tighten or relax it do so at their peril.

  “You made it easy for us both,” he said.... “And after all, we know we’re all right.”

  With which half-baked remark she agreed. But there’s no leaven in it. It’s what the world knows about you that concerns you, or ought to.

  “After all,” she said, “I am your housekeeper.”

  “And the keepers of the house shall tremble!” But Rosalie did not. Maybe because she knew that a little further along in that divine and awful chapter was written: “And desire shall fail.” But maybe she didn’t know it — didn’t even know enough to tremble. Few do. The environs of the Pit are meadows full of flowers. That is where Proserpine got hers. Daffodils still grow there, and many are they that pick them.

  “Certainly,” said Brown, with easy confidence, “you are housekeeper at Sapadillo Manor.”

  “Is that its name?”

  “Yes. It just occurred to me. Do you think it an incongruous name for a portable bungalow?”

  She was doubtful; and she was so pretty when serious, and so distractingly pretty when not — as for instance now, as she looked up under her long lashes and laughed —

  “You don’t like the name!” he said.

  “Not, perhaps, for a portable bungalow. A manor house ought to be permanent and — and rather stately, oughtn’t it?”

  “We’ll be funny about it,” he said. “We’ll call it Terrapin Towers.”

  She seemed to think the suggestion mildly witty. “Well, then,” he said, “you name it!”

  “I? That would not do. Housekeepers don’t christen gentlemen’s country estates.”

  “Please think of something!”

  She considered for a while in silence, her teeth worrying the page of the magazine. When she had nibbled at it sufficiently, he had concluded that she was an unusually interesting as well as ornamental girl; and by that time she had not thought of a name.

  “I think,” she said, “a name will occur to us when we first see the place.”

  “Nothing ever occurs to me,” he said. “I have no imagination.”

  “You seem to.”

  “I?”

  “Yes. Haven’t you already in your imagination created a vast, tropical plantation out of the land you have acquired?”

  “No,” he said honestly, “I haven’t. I got as far as picturing Sapadillo City to myself, and when it began to resemble St. Augustine, along came the foreman of the gang I sent down, and knocked the last glimmer of romance out of it — and out of me.”

  She sat very quiet: Brown had not gilded for her the pill she was to swallow. He had been honest with her: he told her all he knew about the place, which was meagre information. She had paled slightly when he included snakes in the scenery; and the remaining assets did not seem very attractive to her.

  “One thing I do know,” he said. “The bungalow is all right. You wo
n’t have to go out of it, you know.” She nodded.

  “All you have to do,” he said, “is to saunter about with a bunch of keys. Isn’t that about all?”

  She lifted her violet eyes, a little distressed:

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m afraid that the duties of a housekeeper are not very clear to me.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. If there’s anything to do, you’ll see that somebody does it. And that’s all there is about a housekeeper’s business.”

  “I — I mean to be very faithful.” She looked up. Her eyes, too, seemed to be of that sort — fashioned for frankness, faith, perhaps credulity.

  A porter came by announcing dinner. Brown looked at Rosalie with a questioning smile — so companionable had they already grown, so eloquent already had become this discourse of a single silent glance.

  His eyes, smiling, said:

  “Shall we dine now — together?”

  Hers replied:

  “Your pleasure is mine.”

  At table, happening to encounter a hostile stare from legalized maternity at a neighbouring table, she flushed and bent her head. Brown was holding forth very happily upon some unimportant subject; and the girl sat there, with heightened colour, as though listening.

  And after he had ended, she still sat, pensive, looking down at her pretty, ringless fingers, restless in her lap.

  Afterward, in their chairs once more, her eyes on the sunset which swept the rattling windows with a running flash of fire: “You know,” she said, “that was our last dinner.”

  “What?”

  “Our last dinner together.”

  He started to reply, but remained silent.

  “Housekeepers don’t dine with their employers,” she added, smiling at him. And the smile was unembarrassed and genuine because he resembled at the moment a sulky little boy, balked of something he shouldn’t have.

  “We’ll discuss that later,” he said.

  Her pretty face grew serious:

  “There will be nothing to discuss,” she said in a low voice.

  She came in late to breakfast. He had waited for her as usual.

  “That is not right,” she said. “We should begin to break ourselves of that habit.”

  But they began their grapefruit together very happily.

  At luncheon, too, they said nothing further about the habit. After all, it was scarcely worth while, for before dinner they would be at Sapadillo City.

  All their luggage was gathered and piled together when that metropolis became visible. Brown recognized it from his foreman’s inventory: one water tank, one sidetrack, one empty freight car firmly rusted to same. Evidently the entire population of Sapadillo City had gathered to welcome the lord of the portable bungalow: seven negroes, three razorbacks, a houn’dawg, and a buzzard. The only noise was furnished by the houn’-dawg, and it was a melancholy salute.

  The train lingered only to deposit the two passengers for Sapadillo City and their baggage, then, whistling its deep sense of relief, moved on, gathering momentum rapidly as though dreading the possibility of further detention in such a place.

  Brown looked at Rosalie, and she gazed inquiringly at Brown.

  “There seems to be no station here,” he said hesitatingly. He had cherished dreams of a hack to take him to the bungalow, wherever it was, but one look at the suburbs of Sapadillo City settled any such dream.

  Worse still, no pecuniary consideration could induce any of the city’s inhabitants to produce waggon or wheelbarrow for the transportation of his housekeeper, himself and his luggage.

  They stood in a shiny black row, flanked by the houn’-dawg and the razorbacks, and grinningly declined to entertain any suggestion of manual labor. The buzzard, perched on a black gum tree, looked on with perfect indifference.

  So they were obliged to leave the trunks. Laden with his suit-case and her satchel, Brown took the path indicated. It was a white, sandy path running through scrub palmetto: and the prospects being in favour of snakes, he suggested that Rosalie should walk behind him.

  Which made her a trifle pensive, because she took it as the first expression from him of their new relations as master and housekeeper. It was all right, of course, it had to be that way. And Rosalie, silent and subdued, tripped along in the wake of the lord of the bungalow, her somewhat sad young eyes fixed on the level sunset.

  The declining sun tipped the flat waste of palmetto fronds with pink and amber fire and painted tall pines and palms crimson. From a wood’s blue shadow came the querulous, insistent whisper of the widow-bird, discounting the coming twilight.

  Trudging along, Brown looked over his shoulder: “This isn’t very cheerful,” he said. “I ought to have learned something about this place before I came here — or let you come. But, somehow, I always do things the wrong way.”

  “I don’t mind coming,” she said with a little note of hesitation in her voice, “if you think there’s really a bungalow here.”

  “Why, of course there is! I sent one down, and I also sent a gang down to put it up.”

  “Did you say it was a — a portable bungalow?”

  “Yes. Anybody can put it up or take it to pieces.”

  “Very portable?”

  “What!”

  “I wondered if it were possible that anybody could have t-taken it away.”

  “Good heavens!” he said, “why do you suppose such a thing as that?”

  “I don’t know.... Why did those darkeys grin at us so incessantly?”

  “They always grin. That is the sum total of their physical exertions,... Where the dickens is that bungalow? How far do you suppose we have walked?”

  “About five miles?” she ventured interrogatively. “Oh, no, not over a quarter of a mile. But I was told it was only five minutes’ stroll from the station.”

  “There is no station,” she observed uneasily. “That’s so! That may be the trouble. Perhaps they couldn’t tell just how far it was, having no station to start from.”

  “You are trying to reassure me,” she said quietly. “You are as much worried as I am.”

  “Worried? Not a bit! I only am wondering—”

  He halted; she came forward beside him; and they stood there, knee-deep in palmetto, gazing at the dying cinders of the sun. Red as a bed of coals the last glow glimmered through the palms; turned to ashes along the horizon even as they looked.

  “There is a star,” she said in a low voice.

  It was already night.

  He said cheerfully:

  “If you care to risk going on, I’m sure we’ll find the bungalow in a few minutes.”

  “What else is there to do?” she asked.

  “We could go back.”

  “Where?”

  “To the sta — to the railroad.”

  “Would we be any better off there?”

  He was silent.

  “I — I didn’t like those pigs — and that large and very horrid bird that kept watching us,” she said.

  “Oh, that was only a buzzard—”

  “A buzzard!”

  “Yes — they’re common down South—”

  “But — I’ve heard that buzzards sit around and wait for people to die! T-tell me frankly, fearlessly, do you suppose that bird was waiting to see us get lost in these woods?”

  “No, of course not. You mustn’t think such things. You are not going to lose your nerve, are you?”

  “N-no.”

  Her voice was not very steady. He touched her arm. She was trembling.

  “Please don’t,” he said, “Pm terribly sorry; it’s all my fault. But there is nothing to be afraid of. If worst comes to worst, a night under these big yellow stars isn’t so bad.” He leaned nearer, peering at her. She was weeping in silence.

  For her benefit he accused himself and called himself various graphic names, some of which fitted, but he didn’t know it. Also, he put one arm around her shoulders; and she drew back against him with a gasp as the shuddering cry of
a great cat-owl broke out in the starlight, filling the woods with uncanny echoes.

  He had in his grip an electric flashlight; now he fished it out, and, shining the path, persuaded her forward into the woods.

  Ghostly palms arched over them; enormous yellow stars sparkled between the fronds. Even by day the tropic forest would have been an awesome novelty: and now, at night, it frightened her. Spectral grey moss waved mournfully from the live oaks; festoons of vines and creepers draped the sad high arches with strange tapestries; subtly disturbing odours haunted the dusky silence, scent of spicy, unknown saps and gums dripping, vague perfumes of exotics — leaf and bark and bloom.

  For the hard, rapid beating of Rosalie’s heart the upas tree itself might have exhaled from its magic foliage the suave, seductive odour that grew sweeter all around them.

  But it was only a China tree making more exquisite the star lustre.

  A little stream running molten silver cut their path, spreading to a pool in front of them under a pair of thin and slender palms.

  Brown looked at the water, played his flashlight over it, then set his luggage on the ground.

  “I shall have to carry you across,” he said; sank one knee slightly, and picked her up.

  Arms clasping his neck, she looked down at the water: “What,” she asked, “is on the other side?”

  “The bungalow, of course.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He was silent.

  “Because we have come a long way,” she faltered. “Are you tired?”

  “No.... I’d sit down for a little while if you don’t mind.... Because, somehow, I don’t believe we are — are ever going to get out of these w-woods—”

  “Rosalie! Don’t cry.”

  Quiet sobs.

  “Rosalie!”

  Sobs under better control and now stifled by his shoulder.

  “Rosalie, dear, you will be brave, won’t you?” His voice shook, perhaps from the charm his own words held for him — an unexpected charm — for he had not meant to say “Rosalie” or “dear,” or to link the two words that had linked themselves in his own mind so prettily, so naturally, even before he uttered them.

  She lifted her head and stared around her in the darkness, sitting up very slender and straight in his arms.