Author: Various
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: More short stories in the Life + 70 years Public Domain, collected mostly from magazines and newspapers. Humour, romance, weird, action... 1: The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall / John Kendrick Bangs 2: My Only Murder / Ernest Favenc 3: Paul's Case / Willa Cather 4: Uncle James's Golf Match / "Sapper" 5: How to Get Things Done / Robert Benchley 6: Two Aces / Henry Leverage 7: The Red Room / "Waif Wander" 8: The Devil's Wager / William Makepeace Thackeray 9: The Motor-Burglar / Richard Dehan 10: The Birth of a Masterpiece / Lucas Malet 11: The House of the Worm / Mearle Prout 12: Spirit-Led / Erne

PAST MASTERS 103

Produced and Edited by Terry Walker ("Pulpmeister") from short stories in magazines, newspapers and other sources, and all in the Life + 70 years public domain.

31 October 2022

Contents

1: The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall / John Kendrick Bangs

2: My Only Murder / Ernest Favenc

3: Paul's Case / Willa Cather

4: Uncle James's Golf Match / "Sapper"

5: How to Get Things Done / Robert Benchley

6: Two Aces / Henry Leverage

7: The Red Room / "Waif Wander"

8: The Devil's Wager / William Makepeace Thackeray

9: The Motor-Burglar / Richard Dehan

10: The Birth of a Masterpiece / Lucas Malet

11: The House of the Worm / Mearle Prout

12: Spirit-Led / Ernest Favenc

13: The Garage Crime / Anonymous

14: A Desperate Choice / Guy Thorne

15: Trapped / Richard Ashe King

16: Disinherited / Richard Ashe King

17: La Belle Dame Sans Souci / Peter Cheyney

18: The Beach / Charles G. Norris

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1: The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall

John Kendrick Bangs

1862-1922

Harper’s Weekly, 27 June 1891

THE TROUBLE with Harrowby Hall was that it was haunted, and, what was worse, the ghost did not content itself with merely appearing at the bedside of the afflicted person who saw it, but persisted in remaining there for one mortal hour before it would disappear.

It never appeared except on Christmas Eve, and then as the clock was striking twelve, in which respect alone was it lacking in that originality which in these days is a sine qua non of success in spectral life. The owners of Harrowby Hall had done their utmost to rid themselves of the damp and dewy lady who rose up out of the best bedroom floor at midnight, but without avail. They had tried stopping the clock, so that the ghost would not know when it was midnight; but she made her appearance just the same, with that fearful miasmatic personality of hers, and there she would stand until everything about her was thoroughly saturated.

Then the owners of Harrowby Hall caulked up every crack in the floor with the very best quality of hemp, and over this were placed layers of tar and canvas; the walls were made waterproof, and the doors and windows likewise, the proprietors having conceived the notion that the unexorcised lady would find it difficult to leak into the room after these precautions had been taken; but even this did not suffice. The following Christmas Eve she appeared as promptly as before, and frightened the occupant of the room quite out of his senses by sitting down alongside of him and gazing with her cavernous blue eyes into his; and he noticed, too, that in her long, aqueously bony fingers bits of dripping seaweed were entwined, the ends hanging down, and these ends she drew across his forehead until he became like one insane. And then he swooned away, and was found unconscious in his bed the next morning by his host, simply saturated with sea-water and fright, from the combined effects of which he never recovered, dying four years later of pneumonia and nervous prostration at the age of seventy-eight.

The next year the master of Harrowby Hall decided not to have the best spare bedroom opened at all, thinking that perhaps the ghost's thirst for making herself disagreeable would be satisfied by haunting the furniture, but the plan was as unavailing as the many that had preceded it.

The ghost appeared as usual in the room— that is, it was supposed she did, for the hangings were dripping wet the next morning, and in the parlor below the haunted room a great damp spot appeared on the ceiling. Finding no one there, she immediately set out to learn the reason why, and she chose none other to haunt than the owner of the Harrowby himself. She found him in his own cosey room drinking whiskey— whiskey undiluted— and felicitating himself upon having foiled her ghost-ship, when all of a sudden the curl went out of his hair, his whiskey bottle filled and overflowed, and he was himself in a condition similar to that of a man who has fallen into a water-butt. When he recovered from the shock, which was a painful one, he saw before him the lady of the cavernous eyes and seaweed fingers. The sight was so unexpected and so terrifying that he fainted, but immediately came to, because of the vast amount of water in his hair, which, trickling down over his face, restored his consciousness.

Now it so happened that the master of Harrowby was a brave man, and while he was not particularly fond of interviewing ghosts, especially such quenching ghosts as the one before him, he was not to be daunted by an apparition. He had paid the lady the compliment of fainting from the effects of his first surprise, and now that he had come to he intended to find out a few things he felt he had a right to know. He would have liked to put on a dry suit of clothes first, but the apparition declined to leave him for an instant until her hour was up, and he was forced to deny himself that pleasure. Every time he would move she would follow him, with the result that everything she came in contact with got a ducking. In an effort to warm himself up he approached the fire, an unfortunate move as it turned out, because it brought the ghost directly over the fire, which immediately was extinguished. The whiskey became utterly valueless as a comforter to his chilled system, because it was by this time diluted to a proportion of ninety per cent of water. The only thing he could do to ward off the evil effects of his encounter he did, and that was to swallow ten two-grain quinine pills, which he managed to put into his mouth before the ghost had time to interfere. Having done this, he turned with some asperity to the ghost, and said:

“Far be it from me to be impolite to a woman, madam, but I'm hanged if it wouldn't please me better if you'd stop these infernal visits of yours to this house. Go sit out on the lake, if you like that sort of thing; soak the water-butt, if you wish; but do not, I implore you, come into a gentleman's house and saturate him and his possessions in this way. It is damned disagreeable.”

“Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe,” said the ghost, in a gurgling voice, “you don't know what you are talking about.”

“Madam,” returned the unhappy householder, “I wish that remark were strictly truthful. I was talking about you. It would be shillings and pence— nay, pounds, in my pocket, madam, if I did not know you.”

“That is a bit of specious nonsense,” returned the ghost, throwing a quart of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby. “It may rank high as repartee, but as a comment upon my statement that you do not know what you are talking about, it savors of irrelevant impertinence. You do not know that I am compelled to haunt this place year after year by inexorable fate. It is no pleasure to me to enter this house, and ruin and mildew everything I touch. I never aspired to be a shower-bath, but it is my doom. Do you know who I am?”

“No, I don't,” returned the master of Harrowby. “I should say you were the Lady of the Lake, or Little Sallie Waters.”

“You are a witty man for your years,” said the ghost.

“Well, my humor is drier than yours ever will be,” returned the master.

“No doubt. I'm never dry. I am the Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall, and dryness is a quality entirely beyond my wildest hope. I have been the incumbent of this highly unpleasant office for two hundred years to-night.”

“How the deuce did you ever come to get elected?” asked the master.

“Through a suicide,” replied the specter. “I am the ghost of that fair maiden whose picture hangs over the mantelpiece in the drawing-room. I should have been your great-great-great-great-great-aunt if I had lived, Henry Hartwick Oglethorpe, for I was the own sister of your great-great-great-great-grandfather.”

“But what induced you to get this house into such a predicament?”

“I was not to blame, sir,” returned the lady. “It was my father's fault. He it was who built Harrowby Hall, and the haunted chamber was to have been mine. My father had it furnished in pink and yellow, knowing well that blue and gray formed the only combination of color I could tolerate. He did it merely to spite me, and, with what I deem a proper spirit, I declined to live in the room; whereupon my father said I could live there or on the lawn, he didn't care which. That night I ran from the house and jumped over the cliff into the sea.”

“That was rash,” said the master of Harrowby.

“So I've heard,” returned the ghost. “If I had known what the consequences were to be I should not have jumped; but I really never realized what I was doing until after I was drowned. I had been drowned a week when a sea-nymph came to me and informed me that I was to be one of her followers forever afterwards, adding that it should be my doom to haunt Harrowby Hall for one hour every Christmas Eve throughout the rest of eternity. I was to haunt that room on such Christmas Eves as I found it inhabited; and if it should turn out not to be inhabited, I was and am to spend the allotted hour with the head of the house.”

“I'll sell the place.”

“That you cannot do, for it is also required of me that I shall appear as the deeds are to be delivered to any purchaser, and divulge to him the awful secret of the house.”

“Do you mean to tell me that on every Christmas Eve that I don't happen to have somebody in that guest-chamber, you are going to haunt me wherever I may be, ruining my whiskey, taking all the curl out of my hair, extinguishing my fire, and soaking me through to the skin?” demanded the master.

“You have stated the case, Oglethorpe. And what is more,” said the water ghost, “it doesn't make the slightest difference where you are, if I find that room empty, wherever you may be I shall douse you with my spectral pres—”

Here the clock struck one, and immediately the apparition faded away. It was perhaps more of a trickle than a fade, but as a disappearance it was complete.

“By St. George and his Dragon!” ejaculated the master of Harrowby, wringing his hands. “It is guineas to hot-cross buns that next Christmas there's an occupant of the spare room, or I spend the night in a bathtub.”

But the master of Harrowby would have lost his wager had there been anyone there to take him up, for when Christmas Eve came again he was in his grave, never having recovered from the cold contracted that awful night. Harrowby Hall was closed, and the heir to the estate was in London, where to him in his chambers came the same experience that his father had gone through, saving only that, being younger and stronger, he survived the shock. Everything in his rooms was ruined— his clocks were rusted in the works; a fine collection of water-color drawings was entirely obliterated by the onslaught of the water ghost; and what was worse, the apartments below his were drenched with the water soaking through the floors, a damage for which he was compelled to pay, and which resulted in his being requested by his landlady to vacate the premises immediately.

The story of the visitation inflicted upon his family had gone abroad, and no one could be got to invite him out to any function save afternoon teas and receptions. Fathers of daughters declined to permit him to remain in their houses later than eight o'clock at night, not knowing but that some emergency might arise in the supernatural world which would require the unexpected appearance of the water ghost in this on nights other than Christmas Eve, and before the mystic hour when weary churchyards, ignoring the rules which are supposed to govern polite society, begin to yawn. Nor would the maids themselves have aught to do with him, fearing the destruction by the sudden incursion of aqueous femininity of the costumes which they held most dear.

So the heir of Harrowby Hall resolved, as his ancestors for several generations before him had resolved, that something must be done. His first thought was to make one of his servants occupy the haunted room at the crucial moment; but in this he failed, because the servants themselves knew the history of that room and rebelled. None of his friends would consent to sacrifice their personal comfort to his, nor was there to be found in all England a man so poor as to be willing to occupy the doomed chamber on Christmas Eve for pay.

Then the thought came to the heir to have the fireplace in the room enlarged, so that he might evaporate the ghost at its first appearance, and he was felicitating himself upon the ingenuity of his plan, when he remembered what his father had told him— how that no fire could withstand the lady's extremely contagious dampness. And then he bethought him of steam-pipes. These, he remembered, could lie hundreds of feet deep in water, and still retain sufficient heat to drive the water away in vapor; and as a result of this thought the haunted room was heated by steam to a withering degree, and the heir for six months attended daily the Turkish baths, so that when Christmas Eve came he could himself withstand the awful temperature of the room.

The scheme was only partially successful. The water ghost appeared at the specified time, and found the heir of Harrowby prepared; but hot as the room was, it shortened her visit by no more than five minutes in the hour, during which time the nervous system of the young master was well-nigh shattered, and the room itself was cracked and warped to an extent which required the outlay of a large sum of money to remedy. And worse than this, as the last drop of the water ghost was slowly sizzling itself out on the floor, she whispered to her would-be conqueror that his scheme would avail him nothing, because there was still water in great plenty where she came from, and that next year would find her rehabilitated and as exasperatingly saturating as ever.

It was then that the natural action of the mind, in going from one extreme to the other, suggested to the ingenious heir of Harrowby the means by which the water ghost was ultimately conquered, and happiness once more came within the grasp of the house of Oglethorpe.

The heir provided himself with a warm suit of fur under-clothing. Donning this with the furry side in, he placed over it a rubber garment, tight-fitting, which he wore just as a woman wears a jersey. On top of this he placed another set of under-clothing, this suit made of wool, and over this was a second rubber garment like the first. Upon his head he placed a light and comfortable diving helmet, and so clad, on the following Christmas Eve he awaited the coming of his tormentor.

It was a bitterly cold night that brought to a close this twenty-fourth day of December. The air outside was still, but the temperature was below zero. Within all was quiet, the servants of Harrowby Hall awaiting with beating hearts the outcome of their master's campaign against his supernatural visitor.

The master himself was lying on the bed in the haunted room, clad as has already been indicated, and then—

The clock clanged out the hour of twelve.

There was a sudden banging of doors, a blast of cold air swept through the halls, the door leading into the haunted chamber flew open, a splash was heard, and the water ghost was seen standing at the side of the heir of Harrowby, from whose outer dress there streamed rivulets of water, but whose own person deep down under the various garments he wore was as dry and as warm as he could have wished.

“Ha!” said the young master of Harrowby. “I'm glad to see you.”

“You are the most original man I've met, if that is true,” returned the ghost. “May I ask where did you get that hat?”

“Certainly, madam,” returned the master, courteously. “It is a little portable observatory I had made for just such emergencies as this. But, tell me, is it true that you are doomed to follow me about for one mortal hour— to stand where I stand, to sit where I sit?”

“That is my delectable fate,” returned the lady.

“We'll go out on the lake,” said the master, starting up.

“You can't get rid of me that way,” returned the ghost. “The water won't swallow me up; in fact, it will just add to my present bulk.”

“Nevertheless,” said the master, firmly, “we will go out on the lake.”

“But, my dear sir,” returned the ghost, with a pale reluctance, “it is fearfully cold out there. You will be frozen hard before you've been out ten minutes.”

“Oh no, I'll not,” replied the master. “I am very warmly dressed. Come!” This last in a tone of command that made the ghost ripple.

And they started.

They had not gone far before the water ghost showed signs of distress.

“You walk too slowly,” she said. “I am nearly frozen. My knees are so stiff now I can hardly move. I beseech you to accelerate your step.”

“I should like to oblige a lady,” returned the master, courteously, “but my clothes are rather heavy, and a hundred yards an hour is about my speed. Indeed, I think we would better sit down here on this snowdrift, and talk matters over.”

“Do not! Do not do so, I beg!” cried the ghost. “Let me move on. I feel myself growing rigid as it is. If we stop here, I shall be frozen stiff.”

“That, madam,” said the master slowly, and seating himself on an ice-cake— “that is why I have brought you here. We have been on this spot just ten minutes; we have fifty more. Take your time about it, madam, but freeze, that is all I ask of you.”

“I cannot move my right leg now,” cried the ghost, in despair, “and my overskirt is a solid sheet of ice. Oh, good, kind Mr. Oglethorpe, light a fire, and let me go free from these icy fetters.”

“Never, madam. It cannot be. I have you at last.”

“Alas!” cried the ghost, a tear trickling down her frozen cheek. “Help me, I beg. I congeal!”

“Congeal, madam, congeal!” returned Oglethorpe, coldly. “You have drenched me and mine for two hundred and three years, madam. To-night you have had your last drench.”

“Ah, but I shall thaw out again, and then you'll see. Instead of the comfortably tepid, genial ghost I have been in my past, sir, I shall be iced-water,” cried the lady, threateningly.

“No, you won't, either,” returned Oglethorpe; “for when you are frozen quite stiff, I shall send you to a cold-storage warehouse, and there shall you remain an icy work of art forever more.”

“But warehouses burn.”

“So they do, but this warehouse cannot burn. It is made of asbestos and surrounding it are fireproof walls, and within those walls the temperature is now and shall forever be 416 degrees below the zero point; low enough to make an icicle of any flame in this world— or the next,” the master added, with an ill-suppressed chuckle.

“For the last time let me beseech you. I would go on my knees to you, Oglethorpe, were they not already frozen. I beg of you do not doo—”

Here even the words froze on the water-ghost's lips and the clock struck one. There was a momentary tremor throughout the ice-bound form, and the moon, coming out from behind a cloud, shone down on the rigid figure of a beautiful woman sculptured in clear, transparent ice. There stood the ghost of Harrowby Hall, conquered by the cold, a prisoner for all time.

The heir of Harrowby had won at last, and to-day in a large storage house in London stands the frigid form of one who will never again flood the house of Oglethorpe with woe and sea-water.

As for the heir of Harrowby, his success in coping with a ghost has made him famous, a fame that still lingers about him, although his victory took place some twenty years ago; and so far from being unpopular with the fair sex, as he was when we first knew him, he has not only been married twice, but is to lead a third bride to the altar before the year is out.

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2: My Only Murder

Ernest Favenc

1845-1908

My Only Murder and other Stories, 1899

IT WAS SIMPLY a choice between killing a man, and outraging all the finer sensibilities of my nature. Had I not done the deed I should have had to appear in another man's eyes as a coldblooded, selfish ingrate. I swear to you that it was to spare the feelings of both of us that I took upon myself the terrible responsibility of slaying a fellow-creature.

Do I regret the deed? Not at all.

Twelve years ago, I was just coming to the end of my term of partnership in a North Queensland station, and well pleased I was to get out of it, for pastoral property was falling rapidly. My two partners were not so happy over the matter. The rate at which they were buying me out had, under our agreement, been fixed some time previously, and as prices had since steadily fallen, they had to pay me more than the market value. But, then, had stations gone up, as was anticipated by them when the rate was agreed upon, I should have been forced to accept less than the market value, so it was just the fortune of war.

I had to be up on the station by a fixed date, the wet season had arrived, and there was not a day to spare. If I did not attend on the date specified for delivery, it might form a pretext for the other side to repudiate their bad bargain. The rain came down steadily, and I knew that my work was cut out to reach the place in time. Once across the Banderoar river, I was safe, but when I arrived on the bank it was a swim, and fast rising. There was too much at stake to hesitate; crocodiles or not, I must cross. My horse could swim well, I knew, and so could I. It was growing late, so, without more ado, I undressed, strapped my clothes on the saddle, unbuckled the reins, crossed the stirrup-leathers in front, and started.

As soon as old Hielandman (my horse) was out of his depth and swimming straight, I slipped off and swam alongside him. We were nearly two-thirds of the way across when suddenly Hielandman struck against a submerged snag. The shock and the strong current made me foul him, and ere I could get clear he had clipped me on the head with his fore-foot. I don't remember much about what happened immediately afterwards, only it seemed mighty hard to drown just as I was about to retire with a small competency and get married. Then I felt cold, and oh! so sick, and, after an interval, I found myself ashore with a great singing in my ears and a taste in my mouth as though I had swallowed all the flood-water in North Queensland.

I had been pulled out by one of a party of men camped on the bank I was making for. He had bravely jumped in without waiting to undress, and after being nearly drowned himself, had dragged me ashore. He was standing by the fire wringing out his wet clothes, and, with the glow of new-born life within me, I thought he was the most glorious fellow I had ever seen.

'By Jove, old man!' he said to me cheerily, 'if I had waited to take my trousers off you would have been feeding the crocodiles now.'

I did not doubt it, and I told him how deeply grateful I felt, and how I could never thank him sufficiently. To die just then would have been especially bitter, and I said so.

Hielandman had got free of the snag and swum to land safely. Beyond the lump on my head there was no damage done. My new friends were a party of drovers returning from delivering a mob of cattle. I camped with them that night, and next morning, with a light heart, departed for my destination. Needless to say, I had assured Jenkins, my rescuer, of my undying gratitude, and told him that whenever he desired it, my home should be his home, and my purse his purse. He took it all very nicely, told me that he was sure I would have done the same for him, that he wanted nothing; but to oblige me, if ever he did become 'stone broke' he would remember my kind offer.

TWELVE YEARS elapsed. The money I had received for my share of I he station had, by judicious investment, turned into a nice little fortune. I was married to a wife exactly suited to me, we had three healthy children, and lived in good style in one of the prettiest suburbs of Sydney. I had often told my wife of the gallant way in which Jenkins, whom I had never since seen, plunged into the flooded river and rescued me, and she as often said that it would crown the happiness of her life to see him and thank him with her own lips.

One day I was accosted in George street by a bearded and sunburnt bushman dressed in unmistakeable slop clothes, who seized me by the hand and ejaculated, 'But for being told, I should never have known you. You look a different sort of fellow to what you did when I pulled you out of the Banderoar. By love, old man, had I waited to take off my trousers you'd have been a gone coon!' It was Jenkins, my preserver.

I was delighted to see him and insisted on his coming out to stay with me. He agreed willingly, and I was at last able to present to my wife the saviour of her husband. That she was disappointed, I could see; but, being a good little woman, she did not let the guest observe it. Truth to tell, I somehow shared her sentiments. I had, perhaps, rather over done my description, and had made my wife expect to see something akin to one of Ouida's heroes. Jenkins certainly did show to better advantage at his own camp fire than in town in his newly-creased reach-me-downs, but we forgave all that, and made him royally welcome. At dinner he was rather awkward, and insisted on telling my wife the story of my rescue twice over, always emphasising the fact that, had he stopped to doff his trousers, I should have been drowned.

From that date there commenced an ordeal which I would not willingly— nay, one which I could not— again endure. When Jenkins gained a little confidence he became argumentative and dictatorial. I am a sociable man, and my house was a favourite with my friends, but Jenkins sat upon them all. He asserted his opinions loudly and emphatically, and when unacquainted with the place or topic under discussion, always had some friend of the past to quote who knew all about it. He held views on the labour troubles which were rank heresy to my circle of pastoral friends, but never did he hesitate to loudly assert them. And yet he was a good fellow, evidently looking upon me as a sort of a creation of his own.

'Ah!' he would say, as we stood regarding my pretty house, the sunny, flowering garden, and the children playing on the lawn, 'we should never have seen this if you had gone to the bottom of the Banderoar. If I had stopped to take off' -

I felt this, too, and wrung his hand in response. Perhaps that very evening we had a small dinner-party, and when I saw a demure smile steal over everybody's face, I knew that in the coming silence I should hear Jenkins describing what would have happened had he 'stopped to pull'— Then, I could have slain him. We had not a lady friend to whom he had not confided, in a loud voice, that singular instance of his presence of mind in refraining from undressing. Those male friends whom Jenkins had not insulted, I had quarrelled with on account of their frivolity in always asking me if 'Jenkins had taken his trousers off yet?'

But the worst of it was that the dear fellow really believed that he was affording me the most exquisite happiness in entertaining him. He was convinced that for twelve years I had been pining to pay off my debt, and that now I was enraptured. He was my shadow and reverenced everything belonging to me. How could I break this charm by declaring that I was tired of him? It would have been worse than heartless.

At last my patient wife began to grow short-tempered and restless. She told me plainly once that Jenkins had not pulled her out of the Banderoar, and that she did not see why she should put up with him any longer. I tried to point out that as she and I were one it really amounted to the same thing, but she replied that it certainly did not. We were not married when it happened, and if I had been drowned she would have married somebody else— perhaps someone not oppressed by having barnacled to him a devoted rescuer who was eternally advertising that he had not taken off his trousers.

I felt that a climax neared— and that something must be done to prevent the breaking up of my once happy home. At times I meditated investing a portion of my capital in a small selection somewhere and getting Jenkins to go and look after it for me, but he expressed himself as being contented where he was, and so greatly averse to returning to the bush, that I abandoned the ideas. Now, too, he began to indulge in sheepish flirtations with the maids, and my wife sternly requested me to 'speak to your friend.' I attempted to do so, but when I saw his mild, affectionate eyes gazing at me and knew that he was thinking of the time when he struggled beneath the muddy flood waters without taking off his trousers, I broke down. I could not wound his gentle heart.

It came to me suddenly— the inspiration, the solution of the difficulty. Jenkins must die!

Once resolved, I acted. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't help it, any more than Deeming could help killing his wives, or Mr Neill Cream could help poisoning all those poor girls in London. Jenkins was a friendless bushman; I was a man with responsibilities and a family. Their happiness stood first, and it was kinder to Jenkins to kill him at once than to undeceive him.

I shall not enter into details as to the carrying out of my design. Enough to say that it was perfectly successful. I have no intention of teaching the art of murder made easy. Jenkins died peacefully and painlessly. The doctor said that his constitution had been undermined by exposure and hardship. When he was confined to his bed my wife forgave him everything, and nursed him with unremitting care. I have even seen tears in the poor little woman's eyes as she murmured that she was afraid we should lose him. Other people came to see him, and he passed away happy in the firm belief that he left behind him a large circle of sorrowing friends.

I buried him in my own ground in Waverley cemetery, and erected a neat stone with a suitable inscription, stating that he had risked his life in preserving me from death.

All my old friends are back again. Everybody has told me what a manly fellow I was, and how they admired my social pluck in not looking coldly upon an old benefactor who did not happen to be quite up to the Government House standard of dress and manners. My conscience is easy.

_____________________

3: Paul's Case

Willa Cather

1873-1947

McClure’s Magazine May 1905

IT was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburg High School to account for his various misdemeanors. He had been suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the principal's office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty room, suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown, and the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but, for all that, there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban of suspension.

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce.

When questioned by the principal as to why he was there, Paul stated, politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie, but Paul was quite accustomed to lying— found it, indeed, indispensible for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their respective charges, which they did with such a rancour and aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder and impertinence were among the offences named, yet each of his instructors felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started back with a shudder, and thrust his hands violently behind him. The astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and definitely personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another he had made all his teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical aversion.

His teachers felt, this afternoon, that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy. He stood through it, smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that held his hat. Paul was always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people might be watching him and trying to detect something. This conscious expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, was usually attributed to insolence or "smartness."

As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an impertinent remark of the boy's, and the principal asked him whether he thought that a courteous speech to have made a woman. Paul shrugged his shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.

"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite, or impolite, either. I guess it's a sort of way I have of saying things, regardless."

The principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether he didn't think that a way it would be well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told that he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was but a repetition of the scandalous red carnation.

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing-master voiced the feeling of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which none of them understood. He added: "I don't really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he was born in Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there of a long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow."

The drawing-master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from his teeth.

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the soldiers' chorus from "Faust," looking wildly behind him, now and then, to see whether some of his teachers were not there to writhe under his light-heartedness. As it was now late in the afternoon, and Paul was on duty that evening as usher in Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper, but would hang about an Oakland tobacconist's shop until it was time to go to the concert hall.

When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room at about half-past seven that evening, half a dozen boys were there already, and Paul began, excitedly, to tumble into his uniform. It was one of the few that at all approached fitting, and he thought it very becoming, though he knew that the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always considerably excited while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music-room; but to-night he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on him.

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the house to seat the early comers.

He was a model usher; gracious and smiling, he ran up and down the aisles; nothing was too much trouble for him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were his greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought him a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the color came to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were a great reception, and Paul were the host.

When the symphony began, Paul sank into one of the rear seats, with a long sigh of relief. It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit within him— something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul half closed his eyes, and gave himself up to the peculiar stimulus such personages always had for him. The soloist chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth and the mother of many children; but she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and above all, she had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, which, in Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of romance.

After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to sleep, and to-night he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew, and, after hastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to the side door where the soprano's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.

Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like those of a lighted cardboard house under a Christmas tree. All the actors and singers of the better class stayed there when they were in the city, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there in the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people go in and out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull care behind him forever.

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor who helped her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial auf wiedersehen, which set Paul to wondering whether she were not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the singer alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors that were opened by a negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he too entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in the supper-party pictures of the Sunday World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that his boots were letting in the water, and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he wanted— tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime, but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to come sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs, explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that were forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow wall-paper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar box and over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red worsted by his mother.

Half an hour later, Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and where business men of moderate means begot and reared large families of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it to-night with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he always had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless, colorless mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt to the sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber, the cold bath-room, with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spigots, his father at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his night-shirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by his father to-night, that he could not toss again on that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his father that he had no car fare, and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayed all night.

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made, but the floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He found a soap box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the dark, still terrified least he might have awakened his father. In such reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard him getting in at the window, and come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to church and Sabbath-school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out on their front "stoops," and talked to their neighbors on the next stoop, or called to those across the street in neighborly fashion. The men usually sat on gay cushions placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in their Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of a kindergarten. The men on the steps— all in their shirt sleeves, their vests unbuttoned— sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest step of his "stoop," staring into the street, while his sisters, in their rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about how many shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles some one had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm, and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red glass pitcher, ornamented with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious color of the pitcher.

To-day Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sighted eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago— he was now barely twenty-six— he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order to curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one, had married the first woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an angular schoolmistress, much older than he, who also wore thick glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted, like herself.

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business, arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home, and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy." His father told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of putting in an electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings, that were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of these cash-boys who had become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.

After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's to get some help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for car fare. This latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was, that he thought a boy ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded up-stairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the dish-water from his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to live again.

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among Edwards's following, not only because the young actor, who could not afford to employ a dresser, often found the boy very useful, but because he recognized in Paul something akin to what Churchmen term 'vocation.'

It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the overture from "Martha", or jerked at the serenade from "Rigoletto," all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies, wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odors of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there; with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps, and richly appareled women who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends urged upon him— well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel-organ. He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stage-struck— not, at any rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.

After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than ever repulsive: the bare floors and naked walls, the prosy men who never wore frock-coats, or violets in their button-holes; the women with their dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a jest, anyway. He had autograph pictures of all the members of the stock company, which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incredible stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his audience grew listless, he became desperate and would bid all the boys good-night, announcing that he was going to travel for a while, going to Naples, to Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious, and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he should have to defer his voyage until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his instructors know how heartily he despised them and their homilies, and how thoroughly he was appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to fool with theorems; adding, with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of that nervous bravado which so perplexed them, that he was helping the people down at the stock company; they were old friends of his.

The upshot of the matter was, that the principal went to Paul's father, and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his stead, the doorkeeper at the theatre was warned not to admit him to the house, and Charley Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's stories reached them— especially the women. They were hard-working women, most of them supporting indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul's was a bad case.

THE EAST-BOUND train was plowing through a January snow-storm; the dull dawn was beginning to show gray, when the engine whistled a mile out of Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window-glass with his hand, and peered out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom-lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a gang of laborers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had made the all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he was ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly because he was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburg business man, who might have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle awoke him, he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.

When he arrived at the Jersey City station, Paul hurried through his breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him. After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman, and had himself driven to a men's furnishing establishment that was just opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying with endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put on in the fitting-room; the frock-coat and dress-clothes he had bundled into the cab with his linen. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver and a new scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked, he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his purchases packed into various traveling bags.

It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in advance, in engaging his rooms, a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry into New York. He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his scrap-book at home there were pages of description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell-boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely see across the street but within the air was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the taboret beside the couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own courage, for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter. Until now, he could not remember the time when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there— behind him, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him— and Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.

But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny & Carson's deposits as usual— but this time he was instructed to leave the book to be balanced. There were above two thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank-notes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for a full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable pretext. The bank-book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From the time he slipped the bank-notes into his pocket until he boarded the night train for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation. It was not the first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done, and this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs. He watched the snow-flakes whirling by his window until he fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a start; half of one of his precious days gone already! He spent more than an hour in dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be.

When he went down-stairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated, carriages and tradesmen's wagons were hurrying to and fro in the winter twilight, boys in woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps, the avenue stages made fine spots of color against the white street. Here and there on the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass cases, against the sides of which the snow-flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley, somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage winter-piece.

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed from the hotels that reared their dozen stories fearlessly up into the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were running in and out of the awning that was stretched across the sidewalk, up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above, about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow-flakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.

When Paul went down to dinner, the music of the orchestra came floating up the elevator shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and he sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of color— he had for a moment the feeling of not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms, reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him alone.

When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The flowers, the white linen, the many-colored wine glasses, the gay toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulating repetitions of the "Blue Danube" from the orchestra, all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering radiance. When the rosy tinge of his champagne was added— that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in his glass— Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all. This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged-looking business men got on the early car; mere rivets in a machine, they seemed to Paul— sickening men, with combings of children's hair always hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes. Cordelia Street— Ah! that belonged to another time and country; had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in his loge at the Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window. When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity and partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed.

Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town, and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to make his train and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in the afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and the Pittsburg papers.

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous. Even under the glow of his wine he was never boisterous, though he found the stuff like a magician's wand for wonder-building. His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette, and his sense of power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for pleasure, even at school, but to be noticed and admired, to assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly, more honest even, now that he had no need for boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, "dress the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole affair exploited in the Pittsburg papers, exploited with a wealth of detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's father had refunded the full amount of the theft, and that they had no intention of prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless boy, and his Sabbath-school teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that end. The rumor had reached Pittsburg that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak to the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him finally and forever. The gray monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him with a sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. With something of the old childish belief in miracles with which he had so often gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the corridor to the elevator.

He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all-sufficient. The glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he was game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his own place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci music and looked about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness of his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before now. But the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he had to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He looked affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, it had paid indeed!

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and burnt. There came upon him one of those fateful attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closed his eyes and let the tide of things wash over him.

His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York, and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his dressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the looks of the thing.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow, he was not afraid of anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so he went down stairs and took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab, directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass, and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed a while, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to the cold.

The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet, remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late. He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

____________________

4: Uncle James's Golf Match

"Sapper"

H. C. McNeile, 1888-1937

Hutchinson’s Story Magazine, April 1921

"UNCLE JAMES should be here soon," said Molly thoughtfully from the other end of the tea-table. "For Heaven's sake be nice to him, Peter."

"When have I ever not been nice to Uncle James?" I demanded. "But I tell you candidly, Molly, that it can't last much longer. He's only fifty-five: he will almost certainly live another forty years. And I can't stand another forty years of Uncle James."

"I'm sure he'll leave us all his money, old boy," she said pleadingly.

"I can't help that," I retorted firmly— at least as firmly as I ever can retort to Molly. "A man can buy money at too great to price. And if he brings another of his abominable inventions with him this time, I shall tell him what I think. He ought to know better at his age."

"I know, Peter," she answered gently. "But it's only for the week-end...."

"Only!" I echoed bitterly. "Thank God for it."

"I must say I do hope he hasn't invented anything else for saving work in the house," she conceded. "Servants are so difficult in these days, and the parlour-maid seems to be settling down at last."

"He should confine his atrocities to his own home," I said. "A man who tries to emulate Heath Robinson in real life ought to be locked up."

Molly sighed. "I know, darling," she murmured. "But think of the money."

And they say that women are idealists....

"Take that last week-end he spent here," I began wrathfully, and then Molly stopped me.

"Don't, dear, don't," she begged. "And that reminds me, they've never sent up yet to repair the kitchen ceiling."

Mind you, if the diabolical contrivances conceived in Uncle James's perverted mind were harmless little things like patent match-boxes or unbreakable sock-suspenders, I wouldn't mind. He is an excellent judge of wine, and has an excellent cellar— two assets which enable one to slur over small idiosyncrasies in their possessor. But— well, take that last week-end.

I feared the worst when he arrived: he was so infernally pleased with himself. He came on Friday, and on Saturday I had to go up to Town, so my knowledge of what happened is only second-hand. I was met at the station by Molly— a rather wild-eyed Molly— who poured out the whole hideous story on the way up to the house. Uncle James had waited till I was well away before he sprang it on her— and even she had tried to be firm when she heard what it was.

"It was a patent labour-saving device for me in the kitchen, Peter," she exclaimed weakly. "Little pulleys and things— and bits of string. I explained everything to Martha— told her he was eccentric, and that we could take it down the instant he went— and she seemed to understand." She faltered a little and my heart sank.

"It took him two hours to put it up with stepladders, while Martha sat sardonically in a corner. Then he explained to us how it worked. Oh! it was awful."

I took her arm: she was rapidly becoming hysterical.

"Of course, something went wrong. Uncle James says it was the hook coming out of the ceiling— I know the plaster is all over the floor. But whatever it was, the big saucepan of potatoes shot into the corner— Martha's corner— and she couldn't get out of the way in time."

Molly gulped. "She got up with potatoes all over her, and threw them one by one at Uncle James."

"Did she hit him?" I asked eagerly.

"Twice," answered Molly. "Then she left the house."

Well, now that was the last time he stayed with us. Do you wonder that at times I felt I couldn't stand it much longer? Of course, Molly's account of it was a trifle incoherent— possibly even a trifle exaggerated. But the one salient fact remains that his last visit cost us Martha.

A series of loud explosions outside the door recalled me from the bitter past, and Molly got up, looking alarmed.

"Good gracious, what's that?" she cried.

"Probably he has invented a motor-car," I answered grimly, "which goes sideways with the passengers underneath."

"Do you think it's Uncle James?" she asked uneasily, and at that moment the front door bell rang.

It was Uncle James right enough, and we went out into the hall to greet him.

"Ah! my dear children," he cried as he saw us, "I've arrived."

"Anything wrong with the car?" asked Molly as she kissed him.

"Not going very well," he answered, shaking hands with me. "And now it's stopped altogether. I wish you'd just give me a hand, Peter."

"Certainly." I'm afraid my smile was a trifle strained. With an ordinary car I can compete: not with Uncle James's. "What's the trouble?"

"Well— I'll just show you the idea," he said cheerfully as he led the way. "I've got a few notions of my own incorporated in the general design— little gadgets, you know. Now, first of all"— he gazed pensively at the dashboard— "we'll try that a little farther open. And, Peter— if you just pull that wire by the steering pillar she ought to start."

I pulled the wire, and Uncle James tackled the starting handle. There was an alarming report, and a cloud of white smoke which seemed to please him.

"Ah! spark's all right, anyway," he murmured. "Once more."

This time she back-fired so violently that only the greatest agility on his part saved him from a broken wrist. In view of what was to come, I found myself wishing later that he hadn't been quite so agile.

"Pull harder, Peter," he cried, returning to the assault.

I did― I pulled the whole wire out, and the car promptly started.

"I knew she'd go," he announced complacently. "Just a little patience wanted."

I preserved a discreet silence as we went round to the garage: there are moments when speech is both unwise and tactless. And it was not until we were strolling back to the house, my sin still undiscovered, that I breathed again.

"You must let me run you up to the club-house in mine to- morrow morning, Uncle James," I said lightly. "Course in splendid condition."

"Aren't you going to London to-morrow?" he demanded.

"No. I'm taking a holiday in honour of your visit."

I forbore to tell him that Molly had threatened divorce unless I did.

"What sort of time will suit you?" I went on. "Then I can ring up and let them know about caddies."

Uncle James did not immediately reply, and I noticed he looked a little thoughtful.

"To tell you the truth, Peter," he began slowly, "I wasn't particularly anxious to play golf with you to-morrow morning. The fact is, I wanted"— he hesitated for a moment— "I wanted to practise a bit before I played you again."

"Well— we won't play a serious round, Uncle James," I said mildly. "We might get up there and knock about a bit: have some lunch, don't you know— and play in the afternoon."

Anything to keep him out of the house; those were Molly's instructions.

"Yes," he agreed. "We might do that. And in the afternoon I shall beat you."

"Why, of course. Beat my head off."

"I have cured my slice, Peter," he announced.

"Good," I cried. "You'd have beaten me last time but for that."

"No— not last time. But I shall this."

There was an air of such complete conviction about his tone that I glanced at him in mild surprise. Uncle James may be and is an excellent judge of wine; Uncle James may be and is a public pest with his inventions; but Uncle James cannot be and is not and never will be a golfer. He is not like anything on this earth that I have ever seen when he gets a golf club in his hands. He is, and I say it advisedly with due regard to the solemnity of making such a claim for any man, the worst golfer in the world.

"I have— er— turned what little ingenuity I possess, Peter, upon a lengthy and scientific consideration of the game of golf." He spoke as a man does who weighs his words with care, and involuntarily we both paused. "I have read many books on the game— by Vardon and Taylor and others— men doubtless well qualified to write on the subject."

I bowed silently speech was beyond me.

"And it seems to me," he went on, "that they evade the real issue. For instance now, they unite in saying that the essence of golf lies in the swing. But how am I to know that my swing is like theirs?"

"How indeed?" I murmured chokingly.

"Again they reiterate the statement, 'slow back.' But ideas of slowness differ."

"True," I agreed— "very true."

To see Uncle James take his club back reminds one of a man lunging furiously at a wasp.

"Two points of many, you perceive, Peter," he continued, "on which I came to the conclusion that a little ingenuity might be of great assistance. And so, I have— er— perfected, or am in the process of perfecting, a small device, by which the— er— comparative novice like myself can obtain mechanical assistance in carrying out these maxims."

Thank God! Molly joined us at that moment: I was beginning to turn pale. Uncle James encased in pulleys on a Saturday morning on the links was a prospect that made me feel faint. Better a thousand times that the entire domestic staff should resign.

"Is it a very complicated device, Uncle James?" I asked feebly, and I heard Molly catch her breath. "It takes a little adjustment," he answered. "And I shall require Molly's assistance."

"Uncle James has invented something," I explained, studiously avoiding her eye, "which he thinks will improve his golf."

"What sort of thing?" inquired Molly.

"It's not so much an original invention," he explained, "as a common-sense application of a well-known principle— the principle of elasticity."

I suppose I looked mystified— I certainly felt it— and he beamed at us contentedly. Then he fumbled in his pocket and produced a small parcel.

"It is my firm belief," he continued, as he undid the string, "that with this I shall be able to reduce my handicap to single figures, or even"— he paused for a moment, and his voice shook a little at the thought— "or even to scratch."

At first sight the invention looked like a cross between a young octopus and the tram-lines at the Elephant and Castle. On closer inspection it looked like a nightmare. Streamers of india-rubber flowed in all directions from metal rings, terminating in little clips and loops. Some were short and some were long some were thick and some were thin— and to each was affixed a label.

"There it is, you see," he remarked proudly, "neat and simple. Merely following first principles, Peter."

"But," I stammered, "how does it work, Uncle James?"

"You must surely follow the main idea," he exclaimed, with the genial toleration of the great brain. "each of these lengths of rubber fulfils a purpose of its own, and the thickness and length have been calculated to enable them to fulfil that purpose scientifically. For instance— this one."

He indicated a short, stocky little fellow, with a loop at the end.

"Now, Duncan lays great stress on the action of the right elbow during the upward swing. He insists that it should be kept close to the body. By the simple process of attaching this loop round the right elbow— the result is obtained."

"I'm afraid I'm still rather dense," I said dazedly.

"The ring— this metal ring," he explained a little wearily, "is attached to the inside of my coat. From it the rubber goes to my right elbow. These others go elsewhere. Similarly with the remaining rings. Each is securely fastened inside my coat, and from them the rubber cords go to their respective places where they are secured."

"What is the long, thin one, Uncle James?" asked Molly wildly.

"That one?" He examined the label. "To left wrist for follow through. You see it fulfils a dual purpose. It restrains one in the upward swing— and assists one in the downward."

And then, thank heavens! the dressing-bell rang, and we went indoors. My brain was reeling: it was incredible to think that any man could have such a mind. And what made it worse was that Molly seemed to be in a splendid temper. I even heard her congratulate her abominable relative on his cleverness.

"Could anything be better, old boy?" she said, coming into my dressing-room. "He'll be perfectly happy on the links, with you and his indiarubber." She choked slightly.

"Understand me, Molly," I answered coldly. "I go to London to-morrow, and I do not return till Uncle James has left. I shall have a telephone message in the morning. I utterly and absolutely refuse to take your confounded relative up to the links on a Saturday morning, swathed from head to foot in rubber bands."

"But, Peter darling," she began soothingly.

"Go away," I said firmly— "go away. I hate your family."

"But, Peter darling," she continued, "he won't do any harm. He can't play any worse with it on than he does with it off."

"That," I agreed, "is an indubitable fact. But— why, confound it, Molly— it's against the rules. It must be against the rules. It's absolutely immoral."

"I know, dearest," she answered. "But no one will find out— and it keeps him happy. After all, it's better than letting him loose in the house...."

Of course, I gave in finally; I knew I should, I always do with Molly. And after all she was quite right. The infernal machine would be hidden underneath his coat, and no one need know. And he has got a lot of money.

ii

WE GOT off about ten on Saturday morning— Uncle James and I. Molly had sewn the rings into his coat after dinner the night before under his expert eye; she had then superintended the connecting up in the morning after breakfast. And that completed her share of the performance. She flatly refused to accompany us to the links, on the plea of household duties. She equally flatly refused to speak to me alone, or even to meet my eye. So I placed Uncle James's bag of nineteen clubs in the car and we started.

It was a beautiful day for golf— soft, balmy, and without a breath of wind. Moreover, Thick James was in a splendid temper.

"I shall do a good round this afternoon, Peter," he affirmed confidently. "Splendid device, this of mine. Tried one or two practise swings while you were getting the car."

"Good," I cried. With the new day had come a certain cheerful optimism, and I let the car out a bit more. "But if I was you, Uncle James, I'd lie low about it. Don't tell anyone, and you might make a bit of money to-morrow."

I could see the pride of the inventor struggling with the wonderful idea I had suggested. To actually beat somebody at golf! It opened a vista of possibility almost too marvellous for imagination.

"You see," I continued craftily, "people might belittle your game if they knew."

I left it at that, and hoped for the best. There were quite a number of men about when we arrived at the club-house, and as Uncle James wanted to try his device, I fixed up a game for the morning. Then I showed him a hole where he could practise approach shots, and left him. It was a fatal move on my part: I ought to have known better. To leave Uncle James alone on a links— especially on Saturday morning— is asking for trouble. I got it. The first man I saw as I came in after my round was Colonel Thresher. He was talking to the secretary, who was trying to soothe him.

"I'll look into it, Colonel," he said mildly. "Leave it to me."

"But I tell you there's a madman on the links," roared the irate officer. "He's dug a hole on the seventeenth fairway big enough to bury a cow in."

My heart sank; it was the seventeenth where I had left Uncle James.

"The damned man is a menace to public safety," fumed the Colonel. "He hits the ball backwards and through his legs. And he's using the most appalling language. Here he is, sir— here he is."

I choked and turned round as Uncle James entered. I could see at a glance that he was no longer in a splendid temper. Far from it.

"The lies on this course are atrocious, Peter," he cried as soon as he saw me— "positively atrocious."

I attempted to intervene— but it was too late.

"And they won't be improved, sir," roared the Colonel, "by your exhibition of trench digging. Damn it— a man falling into some of those holes you've made would break his neck."

"Confound your impertinence, sir," began Uncle James shaking his fist in his rage. And then he paused suddenly: in mid-air, so to speak. A spasm of pain passed over his face, and a loud twanging noise came from the region of his back. The Colonel started violently, and retreated, while the secretary took two rapid paces to the rear.

"I told you he was mad," muttered the Colonel nervously. "He's got a musical box in his shirt."

It was that remark that finished it, and removed the last vestige of Uncle James's self-control. To have his latest invention alluded to as a musical box turned him temporarily into a raving lunatic. And as other members drew near in awestruck silence a torrent of words in a strange tongue poured from his lips. It turned out to be some Indian dialect, of which my relative knew a smattering. Unfortunately, so did the Colonel, and he answered in the same language. I gathered later from an onlooker, who also understood the lingo, that honours were about easy, with the betting slightly on Uncle James. He'd got in first with some of the choicer terms of endearment. And then Uncle still further lost his head. He challenged the Colonel to a game that afternoon for a tenner— a challenge which that warrior immediately accepted with a sardonic laugh.

To every one else it seemed a most happy termination of the incident: to me it was the last straw. Uncle James had no more chance of beating the Colonel than I should have of beating Abe Mitchell. Not that the Colonel was a good golfer; he wasn't. But he was one of those steady players who can be relied on to go round in two or three over sevens. Which, with Uncle as his opponent, meant a victory for the Colonel by ten and eight. However, the challenge had been given and accepted: there was nothing for it but to hope for the best. Uncle James had disappeared to wash his hands; the Colonel had been led away breathing hard, when I suddenly thought of Molly. After all, he was her relative.

"Is that you, Molly?" I said over the 'phone. "Well, the worst has occurred. Your uncle has challenged old Colonel Thresher to a game this afternoon— after the combined efforts of most of the members just prevented a free fight in the smoking-room."

I heard her choke gently. Then— "Well, that's all right, Peter."

"It isn't," I fumed. "He's got no more chance of winning than— than— Don't you understand: Thresher called his invention a musical box. It came into action as they were abusing one another, and twanged. It's an affair of honour with Uncle James. And if he loses, he'll never forgive us."

"He mustn't lose, Peter." I thought her voice was thoughtful.

"Then I wish to heaven you'd come up and prevent it," I said peevishly.

"I will," she said, and I gasped. "What ball is he using?"

"Silver Kings. Red dots. But look here, Molly, you mustn't ... It's for a tenner.... Are you there?"

She wasn't she'd rung off. And somewhat pensively I joined Uncle James at the bar. I never quite know with Molly: she is capable of doing most peculiar things.

"I'll teach him, Peter." He greeted me with a scowl. "What did he say— musical box? The infernal scoundrel."

"What was it that made the noise, Uncle James?" I asked soothingly.

"One of the longer rubbers got caught up in my braces," he said. "Incidentally it nipped a bit of my back....—  Bah! Musical box. The villain."

"Is it acting all right?" I led him towards the dining- room.

"I shall adjust it finally after lunch," he stated.

"You don't think," I hazarded, "that as you haven't actually perfected it yet, it would perhaps be better to play without it."

"Certainly not." He glared sombrely at the back of his rival, and once again I heard him whisper: "Musical box."

Then we sat down to lunch. It was a silent meal and I was glad when it was over. Uncle James— that genial if eccentric individual— had departed: an infuriated and revengeful man had taken his place. And what would be the result on his disposition when he forked up ten Bradburys to the Colonel was beyond my mental scope. He was never at his best on the golf links: but this time...

He disappeared for a considerable time, after consuming two glasses of our best light port, which he stated was completely unfit for human consumption, and I wandered thoughtfully towards the first tee. There was no sign of Molly, though I thought I saw the flutter of something red in the distance, which might have been her. And then the professional strolled up.

"Hear there's a tenner on Colonel Thresher's game," he said affably.

"There is," I answered grimly. "Did you see his opponent playing this morning?"

"I saw the gentleman doing exercises on the seventeenth," he said guardedly.

"That's my uncle, Jenkins," I cried bitterly— "or rather my wife's uncle. Can you as a man and a golfer give me the faintest shadow of hope that the match won't end on the tenth green?"

"Your uncle, is he," he returned diplomatically. "Peculiar style, sir, hasn't he?"

"Peculiar," I groaned. "He'd earn a fortune on the variety stage. By the way, you haven't seen my wife, have you?"

"Yes, sir. I thought she was playing with you. She's just bought a couple of old remakes."

"What brand, Jenkins?" I asked slowly.

"Red-dot silver kings. Seemed very keen on 'em, though she generally uses Dunlops."

I turned away lest he should see my face. I had more or less resigned myself to being cut out of Uncle James's will and to seeing his money go to a home for lost cats; but to be turned out of the club as well for Molly's nefarious scheme was a bit over the odds. What devilry she contemplated I did not know— I didn't even try to guess. But not for nothing had she invested in two remake red dots, and disappeared into the blue.

"Here they are," said Jenkins. "Odd sort of walk your uncle has got, sir."

Now Uncle James has many peculiarities, but I had never noticed anything strange about his pedestrianism. The shock, therefore, was all the greater. To what portion of his anatomy he had attached his infernal machine factory I was in ignorance: but the net result was fierce. He looked like a cross between a king penguin and a trussed fowl suffering from an acute attack of locomotor ataxy. A perfect bevy of members had gathered outside the club-house, and were watching him with awed fascination: his caddy, after one fearful convulsion of laughter, had relapsed into his customary after-luncheon hiccoughs. It was a dreadful spectacle— but worse, far worse, was to come.

The Colonel stalked to the tee in grim silence. His face was a little flushed: in his eyes was the light of battle.

"Ten pounds, you said, sir— I believe."

"I will make it twenty, if you prefer," said Uncle James loftily.

"Certainly," snapped the Colonel, and addressed his ball.

Usually after lunch the Colonel fails to reach the fairway of the first hole. On this occasion, however, the ball flew quite a hundred yards down the middle of the course, and the Colonel stepped magnificently off the tee and proceeded to light a cigar.

The members drew closer as Uncle James advanced, and even the caddy forbore to hiccough. The moment was tense with emotion it still lives in my memory and ever will.

"Slow back," had said Vardon; "follow through," had ordered Ray. Merciful heavens! they should have seen the result of their teaching. Uncle James achieved the most wonderful wind shot of modern times.

He lifted his driver like a professional weight-lifter, and at about the same velocity. Then, his face grim with determination, he let it down again. To say that he followed through would be to damn with faint praise. The club itself finished twenty yards in front of the Colonel's ball, and Uncle James fell over backwards.

"Very good," said the Colonel. "But the object of the game is to get your ball into the hole— not your club."

"Another driver, boy," said Uncle James magnificently when he was again in a vertical position, and at that moment I felt proud of being related to him. Once more Uncle James lifted his club; once more, under the combined influence of the "to left wrist for follow through" rubber and his inflexible determination, the club descended. And this time he hit the ball. In cricket phraseology point would have got it in the neck. As it was, the Colonel's caddy sprang into the air with a scream of fear, and got it in the stomach, whence the ball rebounded into the tee box.

"Confound it, sir!" roared the Colonel. "That's my boy."

"Precisely, sir," returned Uncle James complacently. "It is therefore my hole."

For a moment I feared for Colonel Thresher's reason. Even Jenkins, a most phlegmatic man, retired rapidly behind the starter's box, and laid his head on a cold stone. In fact, only Uncle James seemed unperturbed. He unwound himself, twanged faintly, and started for the second tee.

"I must adjust my 'right elbow in' grip, Peter," he remarked as I trailed weakly behind him. "It prevents me raising my club with the freedom required for a perfect swing."

"Do you mean to say, sir "— the Colonel had at last found his voice— "that you intend to claim that hole?"

"I presume that we are playing under the rules of golf." Uncle James regarded him coldly. "And the point is legislated for. Should a player's ball strike his opponent or his opponent's caddy the player wins the hole."

"That doesn't apply to attempted murder off the tee," howled the Colonel.

"You are not in the least degree funny, sir," returned Uncle Jam. still more coldly. "In fact, I find you rather insulting. If you like, and care to forfeit the stakes, we will call the match off."

"I'll be damned if I do," roared the other. "But before you drive next time, sir, I'll take precautions. I came out to play golf, not to be killed by a brass band."

Uncle James turned white, but he controlled himself admirably. Even when he reached the second tee, and the Colonel, seizing his caddy, went to ground in a pot bunker, over the edge of which they both peered fearfully, Uncle retained his dignity.

"Straight down the middle is the line, I suppose," he remarked to his caddy.

"Yus," said the caddy from a range of twenty yards:

But unfortunately Uncle James did not go straight down the middle. It's a very nice five hole is our second: a drive, a full brassie and a mashie on to the green over a little hill. But you must get your drive— otherwise... And Uncle was otherwise. I measured it afterwards. His driver hit the ground exactly eighteen inches behind the ball, travelling with all the force of "to left wrist for follow through." The shaft followed through; the head did not. It remained completely embedded in the turf.

"Have you finished?" demanded the Colonel, emerging from his dugout. Then he pointed an outraged finger at the broken head. "This is a tee, sir, not a timber-yard. Would you be good enough to remove that foreign body before I drive?" I removed it: I was afraid Uncle would twang again if he stooped. And then the Colonel addressed his ball. From there by easy stages, with a fine-losing hazard off a tree, it travelled out of bounds.

"Stroke and distance, I presume," murmured Uncle. "Boy, another driver."

And then ensued a spectacle which almost shattered my nerves. Uncle James got stuck. He got his club up but he couldn't get it down. Both arms were wrapped round his neck, the club lay over his left shoulder pointing at the ground. And there he remained, saying the most dreadful things, and biting his sleeve.

"Posing for a statue?" asked the Colonel satirically.

"Grrr—" said Uncle, and suddenly something snapped. The club came down like a streak of lightning— there was a sweet, clear click, and even Duncan would have been satisfied with the result. Probably it was the most exquisite moment of Uncle's life. Heaven knows how it happened— certainly the performer didn't. But for the first time and— I feel tolerably confident— the last, Uncle James hit a perfect drive. It was three hundred yards if it was an inch, and the Colonel turned pale.

"That's two I've played," said Uncle calmly. "You play the odd, sir."

It was then that the fighting spirit awoke in all its intensity in his opponent, and Uncle James followed him from bunker to bunker counting audibly until they came up with his drive.

"I'm playing one off ten," he remarked genially. "And you'll bally well play it," snapped the Colonel.

Uncle James smiled tolerantly. "Certainly. As you please. Boy, the wry-necked mashie."

But it wasn't the wry-necked mashie's day in. Whatever Duncan might have thought about Uncle's drive, I don't think he'd have passed the wry-necked mashie. At the best of times it was a fearsome weapon— on this occasion it became diabolical. Turf and mud flew, in all directions— only the ball remained in statu quo.

"That's like as we lie," said the Colonel, as Uncle paused for breath.

"Confound you, sir— go away," roared Uncle James, completely losing all vestige of self-control. And at that moment I saw Molly peering over the hill that guarded the green.

"The laid-back niblick, boy." Uncle threw the wry-necked mashie into a neighbouring garden— and resumed the attack.

"Fourteen— fifteen— sixteen," boomed the Colonel. "Why not get a spade.... Ah! congratulations. You've hit the ball, even if you have sliced it out of bounds. Perhaps you'd replace some of the turf— or shall I send for a 'ground under repair ' notice?"

"Your shot, sir," said Uncle thickly.

"Let me see— I'm playing one off six," remarked the Colonel. "And you're out of bounds."

"I may not be." Uncle ground his teeth. "I may have hit a tree and bounced back. G-r-r-r!"

There was a loud tearing noise, and Uncle James started as if an asp had stung him.

"Confound you, sir," howled the Colonel, as he topped his ball, "will you be silent when I'm playing?

But Uncle James was beyond aid.

"My God, Peter!" he muttered. "I've come undone."

It was only too true: he was twanging all over like a jazz band. Portions of India-rubber were popping out of his garments like worms on a damp green, and every now and then the back of his coat was convulsed by some internal spasm.

"Can't you take it off altogether?" I asked feverishly.

"No. I can't," he snapped. "The beastly thing is sewn in."

We heard the Colonel's voice from the green.

"I have played sixteen," he began— then he stopped with a strangled snort. And as we topped the hill we saw him staring horror-struck at the hole, his lips moving soundlessly.

"That was a lucky shot of yours, uncle," came Molly's gentle voice from a shelter where she was knitting. "Hit that log and bounced right back into the hole."

And the brazen woman came across the green towards us literally staring me straight in the face. "How does the game stand, Colonel Thresher?" she asked sweetly.

"The game, madam," he choked. "This isn't a game— it's an— an epidemic. He's murdered my caddy and dug a grave for him, and supplied the music— and now he's bounced into the hole." He shook his putter in the air and faced Uncle James.

"You have that for a half," said Uncle, dispassionately regarding a twenty-yard putt. Then he looked at the Colonel and frowned. "What are you staring at, confound you, sir?"

But the Colonel was backing away, stealthily, muttering to himself.

"I knew it—  knew it," he said shakingly. "It's a monkey: the damned man's a musical monkey. He's got a tail— he's got two tails. He's got tails all over him. I've got 'em again: must have. What on earth will Maria say?"

"What the devil?" began Uncle James furiously. "It's all right— quite all right, sir," answered the Colonel. "I'm not very well to- day. Touch of fever. Tails— scores of tails. Completely surrounded by tails. Some long— some short: some with loops— and some without. Great heavens! there's another just popped out of his neck. Must go and see a doctor at once. Never touch the club port again, I swear it. Never— "

Still muttering, he faded into the distance, leaving Uncle James speechless on the green.

"What the devil is the matter with the fool?" he roared when he had partially recovered his speech.

"I don't think he's very well, Uncle," said Molly chokingly.

"But isn't he going to play any more?" demanded Uncle. "He'd never have holed that putt, and I'd have been two up."

"I know, dear," said Molly, slipping her arm through his and leading him gently from the green. "But I think he's a little upset."

"Of course, if the man's ill," began Uncle doubtfully.

"He is, Uncle James," I said firmly— "a touch of the sun." I warily dodged two long streamers trailing behind him, and took his other arm. "What about going home for tea?"

Uncle brightened.

"That reminds me," he murmured, "I've just perfected a small device for automatically washing dirty cups and saucers."

"Splendid," I remarked, staring grimly at Molly. "You shall try it this afternoon."

___________________

5: How to Get Things Done

Robert Benchley

1889-1945

Chips off the Old Bentley, 1949

A GREAT MANY people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is "Don't you wish you knew?" and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn't hear the original question.

But the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country are wondering how I have time to do all my painting, engineering, writing and philanthropic work when, according to the rotogravure sections and society notes, I spend all my time riding to hounds, going to fancy-dress balls disguised as Louis XIV or spelling out GREETINGS TO CALIFORNIA in formation with three thousand Los Angeles school children. "All work and all play," they say.

The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known psychological principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I shall have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon.

The psychological principle in this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us say that I have five things which have to be done before the end of the week: (1) a basketful of letters to be answered, some of them dating from October, 1928  (2) some bookshelves to be put up and arranged with books  (3) a hair-cut to get  (4) a pile of scientific magazines to go through and clip (I am collecting all references to tropical fish that I can find, with the idea of some day buying myself one) and  (5) an article to write for this paper.

Now. With these five tasks staring me in the face on Monday morning, it is little wonder that I go right back to bed as soon as I have had breakfast, in order to store up health and strength for the almost superhuman expenditure of energy that is to come. Mens sana in corpore sano is my motto, and, not even to be funny, am I going to make believe that I don't know what the Latin means. I feel that the least that I can do is to treat my body right when it has to supply fuel for an insatiable mind like mine.

As I lie in bed on Monday morning storing up strength, I make out a schedule. "What do I have to do first?" I ask myself. Well, those letters really should be answered and the pile of scientific magazines should be clipped. And here is where my secret process comes in. Instead of putting them first on the list of things which have to be done, I put them last. I practice a little deception on myself and say: "First you must write that article for the newspaper." I even say this out loud (being careful that nobody hears me, otherwise they would keep me in bed) and try to fool myself into really believing that I must do the article that day and that the other things can wait. I sometimes go so far in this self-deception as to make out a list in pencil, with "No. 1. Newspaper article" underlined in red. (The underlining in red is rather difficult, as there is never a red pencil on the table beside the bed, unless I have taken one to bed with me on Sunday night.)

Then, when everything is lined up, I bound out of bed and have lunch. I find that a good, heavy lunch, with some sort of glutinous dessert, is good preparation for the day's work as it keeps one from getting nervous and excitable. We workers must keep cool and calm, otherwise we would just throw away our time in jumping about and fidgeting.

I then seat myself at my desk with my typewriter before me and sharpen five pencils. (The sharp pencils are for poking holes in the desk-blotter, and a pencil has to be pretty sharp to do that. I find that I can't get more than six holes out of one pencil.) Following this I say to myself (again out loud, if it is practical) "Now, old man! Get at this article!"

Gradually the scheme begins to work. My eye catches the pile of magazines, which I have artfully placed on a near-by table beforehand. I write my name and address at the top of the sheet of paper in the typewriter and then sink back. The magazines being within reach (also part of the plot) I look to see if anyone is watching me and get one off the top of the pile. Hello, what's this! In the very first one is an article by Dr. William Beebe, illustrated by horrifying photographs! Pushing my chair away from my desk, I am soon hard at work clipping.

One of the interesting things about the Argyopelius, or "Silver Hatchet" fish, I find, is that it has eyes in its wrists. I would have been sufficiently surprised just to find out that a fish had wrists, but to learn that it has eyes in them is a discovery so astounding that I am hardly able to cut out the picture. What a lot one learns simply by thumbing through the illustrated weeklies! It is hard work, though, and many a weaker spirit would give it up half-done, but when there is something else of "more importance" to be finished (you see, I still keep up the deception, letting myself go on thinking that the newspaper article is of more importance) no work is too hard or too onerous to keep one busy.

Thus, before the afternoon is half over, I have gone through the scientific magazines and have a neat pile of clippings (including one of a Viper Fish which I wish you could see. You would die laughing). Then it is back to the grind of the newspaper article.

This time I get as far as the title, which I write down with considerable satisfaction until I find that I have misspelled one word terribly, so that the whole sheet of paper has to come out and a fresh one be inserted. As I am doing this, my eye catches the basket of letters.

Now, if there is one thing that I hate to do (and there is, you may be sure) it is to write letters. But somehow, with the magazine article before me waiting to be done, I am seized with an epistolary fervor which amounts to a craving, and I slyly sneak the first of the unanswered letters out of the basket. I figure out in my mind that I will get more into the swing of writing the article if I practice a little on a few letters. This first one, anyway, I really must answer. True, it is from a friend in Antwerp asking me to look him up when I am in Europe in the summer of 1929, so he can't actually be watching the incoming boats for an answer, but I owe something to politeness after all. So instead of putting a fresh sheet of copy-paper into the typewriter, I slip in one of my handsome bits of personal stationary and dash off a note to my friend in Antwerp. Then, being well in the letter-writing mood, I clean up the entire batch. I feel a little guilty about the article, but the pile of freshly stamped envelopes and the neat bundle of clippings on tropical fish do much to salve my conscience. Tomorrow I will do the article, and no fooling this time either.

When tomorrow comes I am up with one of the older and more sluggish larks. A fresh sheet of copy-paper in the machine, and my name and address neatly printed at the top, and all before eleven A.M.! "A human dynamo" is the name I think up for myself. I have decided to write something about snake-charming and am already more than satisfied with the title "These Snake-Charming People." But, in order to write about snake-charming, one has to know a little about its history, and where should one go to find history but to a book? Maybe in that pile of books in the corner is one on snake-charming! Nobody could point the finger of scorn at me if I went over to those books for the avowed purpose of research work for the matter at hand. No writer could be supposed to carry all that information in his head.

So, with a perfectly clear conscience, I leave my desk for a few minutes and begin glancing over the titles of the books. Of course, it is difficult to find any book, much less one on snake-charming, in a pile which has been standing in the corner for weeks. What really is needed is for them to be on a shelf where their titles will be visible at a glance. And there is the shelf, standing beside the pile of books! It seems almost like a divine command written in the sky: "If you want to finish that article, first put up the shelf and arrange the books on it!" Nothing could be clearer or more logical.

In order to put up the shelf, the laws of physics have decreed that there must be nails, a hammer and some sort of brackets to hold it up on the wall. You can't just wet a shelf with your tongue and stick it up. And, as there are no nails or brackets in the house (or, if there are, they are probably hidden somewhere) the next thing to do is to put on my hat and go out to buy them. Much as it disturbs me to put off the actual start of the article, I feel that I am doing only what is in the line of duty to put on my hat and go out to buy nails and brackets. And, as I put on my hat, I realize to my chagrin that I need a hair-cut badly. I can kill two birds with one stone, or at least with two, and stop in at the barber's on the way back. I will feel all the more like writing after a turn in the fresh air. Any doctor would tell me that.

So in a few hours I return, spick and span and smelling of lilac, bearing nails, brackets, the evening papers and some crackers and peanut butter. Then it's ho! for a quick snack and a glance through the evening papers (there might be something in them which would alter what I was going to write about snake-charming) and in no time at all the shelf is up, slightly crooked but up, and the books are arranged in a neat row in alphabetical order and all ready for almost instantaneous reference. There does not happen to be one on snake-charming among them, but there is a very interesting one containing some Hogarth prints and one which will bear even closer inspection dealing with the growth of the Motion Picture, illustrated with "stills" from famous productions. A really remarkable industry, the motion-pictures. I might want to write an article on it sometime. Not today, probably, for it is six o'clock and there is still the one on snake-charming to finish up first. Tomorrow morning sharp! Yes, sir!

And so, you see, in two days I have done four of the things I had to do, simply by making believe that it was the fifth that I must do. And the next day, I fix up something else, like taking down the bookshelf and putting it somewhere else, that I have to do, and then I get the fifth one done.

The only trouble is that, at this rate, I will soon run out of things to do, and will be forced to get at that newspaper article the first thing Monday morning.

_______________

6: Two Aces

Henry Leverage

Carl Henry, 1879-1931

All Story Weekly, 29 Sep 1917

Mildly preposterous pulp yarn of WW1 fighter planes, by an author who didn't know too much about it.  The original text has "marcelle" instead of "nacelle"!  American writer Leverage constructed his own constantly changing past in interviews, at times claiming having done time in Sing Sing (true) and at other times claiming to be English-born (false).

DANTON was an "Ace" in the British Royal Flying Corps. An Ace, as all men know, is a flyer who has succeeded in "sitting on the tail" of five Fokker, or more. He may have brought down lesser fry than Fokkers-Aviatiks or Taubes—  but these had never been considered fair game by the B.R.F.C.

Danton had an idea that the war would be won in the air. This was another way of saving that artillery would finish the job, and that artillery was blind without the eyes of the army poised anywhere from ten thousand feet to extreme elevation above the enemy's territory. The game of spotting shots or photographing or protecting the heavier tractor-planes was one that called for all the skill and daring of super-birdmen.

Danton was of this type. He had been rejected twice in the examinations, due to his light weight and youth. This, however, he had over-come by sheer perseverance and coolness when under fire at the Flanders front. The ambulance he drove bore the charmed life of its driver. It had been riddled and overturned. It had ventured to the front trenches, and, in the end, when they asked Danton what he wanted in the way of promotion, he had pointed up into the air where a Sopwith's "Pup" hovered, and said: "That's the highest little order in the world."

Danton earned his place upon the staff of the Royal Flying Corps after a winter of hard work. The birdmen of the corps are required to do a number of "stunts" that would daunt an American trick flyer before they may qualify for the Pup or dragon-fly type of planes. These two types can climb two thousand feet a minute, which is twenty miles an hour, straight toward the zenith. They can also speed a full hundred and fifty miles an hour when the engine is running sweetly, which makes them the fastest carriers that man has built.

Danton's Pup answered to his hand like a surf-board in the currents of Hawaii's ocean. Its wings were little more than seven yards from tip to tip. He had learned all the tricks, such as diving straight downward upon the pup's nose, or looping the loop like a tumbler-pigeon dizzy with delight.

He became known to the Germans as a flier to fear and to stay away from. Twice Boelke, the great German Ace, had dropped from a silver cloud down toward Danton, and each time Danton had riddled the wings of the German's machine.

When Boelke was killed, upon another front, Danton roamed the air for a foeman worthy of his wings. It was during this time that he won his Ace by bringing down five of the German planes. A sixth came out for him, and in the battle that took place Danton jammed his Lewis gun just as he looped the loop, and was sitting upon the tail for a finishing salvo.

Men rose from the trenches to watch the fight between Danton and the German Ace in a Fokker. Danton, with bullets spitting from his automatic revolver, drove the Fokker to the earth, where it crashed and took fire.

A company of Australians came running up in time to drag the German from the wreckage of his machine. He faced Danton, who had alighted from the pup. The German thrust out his hand impulsively. The two enemies clasped in respect, then both reeled, staggered, and fell across the green. Danton had been shot through his right lung and arm. The German had not been hit. His body, however, was singed and scorched. His leathern clothes clung to his skin. He had inhaled the fire and smoke of his machine.

Both birdmen were taken to the same hospital. There was an American surgeon there who had a wonderful way with a pierced lung or a flamed tissue. The two were placed in a separate ward consisting of twin beds. Then the surgeon operated upon the German first. Danton had requested it. It was according to his division. It was the one glow in all the strife.

Danton recovered slowly. He learned that the German had been removed to a detention camp, and then to England. The American doctor and the nurses had told him that the birdman's name was Karl. He had refused to write to Germany when permitted. He had never given his name. He had sulked before going away, like some big child, and had cursed Danton for bringing him down.

Danton forgot him— all save the blue of his eyes and the cleft in his chin. "A poor loser," was the birdman's comment, as he dismissed the thought and turned toward the roses some one had placed at the head of his bed.

A week later he crossed the Channel, with a month's furlough, and the pain in his lung all but gone under the skillful touch of the American surgeon.

The month lengthened into three before he started to chafe for the open sky and the swirl of a racing propeller. He wanted the old game that had been driven into his blood like a heritage of the great unrest. It was at this time he first heard of the new German aspirant to the honors of Immelman and Boelke.

This "killer" had come, like a knight of old, out of Flanders, to throw his glove into the lists, and had downed the best Ace of the French Corps, had been a thorn in the side of the American Escadrille; then, as by some instinct, had picked out as fair game the same flying-ground where the unknown Karl had been conquered by Danton. Over this the killer would fly, at eighteen thousand feet, and "nose-dive" even the Avion du Chasse of the French or the new British Bristol, in a manner that spoke of a kingfisher darting for trout in a limpid stream.

Danton heard tall talk of this new German machine, which was as yet unclassified and uncaptured. It was the last word of Mercedes factory; it was said to be all of two hundred horse-power: and it was handled by one man, or devil, according to the stories of those who had met the killer. When the killer was credited with three British planes in one day— and two of these within a minute of fighting— the matter became serious enough to warrant all attention. The papers called down their anathemas, and urged the Flying Corps to greater effort. The unknown became the talk of the front from the Alps to the sea.

The higher Aces lurked in silver clouds for one swoop at the newcomer, who was fast equaling Immelman's record of thirty planes. They glimpsed the killer at times, but those who closed regretted it, for they were either lured over a pit of guns or driven down out of control behind the German lines.

Danton worried over the news like a lion-hunter at the report of friends being dragged into the jungle. He reported five times for the Corps. He wrote articles for the Times, then desperately bribed a royal surgeon with all kinds of promises and lies for a clear bill of health and a certificate that his lungs were like two leathern bellows, and his nerve as chilled as Sheffield steel. He got the billet—a last-word Pup.

He crossed the Channel as a pigeon goes home to his own. Other planes were crossing, but he outdistanced them all. He circled over the old ground, looped the loop, shelved down a thousand feet, then skimmed the stately French elms, and landed upon the mark, and found his friends and his mechanics awaiting his coming with outstretched arms. They had recognized him when even a speck in the air by the skill of his descent and the manner of handling the sensitive Pup.

"The Eyes of the Army" had need for a thousand Dantons. The orders were out from headquarters to keep all German machines back of a twenty-mile line. A great offensive was all but launched. The drum-fire and the roll of artillery echoed and reechoed athwart a red-blazed sky. Tracks everywhere upon which great guns were being hurried up to the first trenches. Bristols, Martinsydes, pups, and R.F.C. battle-planes held the air, and swooned and maneuvered below the far-flung line.

"We'll hold you," they told Danton, "for another day. The air is ours now. It may not be to-morrow. Besides, we want you to meet an old friend of ours—the Avenger. He's got seventeen to his credit. That Pup you drove over ought to close up his record. It's a beastly shame the stuff we've had to get along with, and how late they are learning."

Danton waited. The Avenger was a new name given to the killer, of whom all England had been denouncing.

Days passed without any definite word of this airman. Danton took the air to try out his engine, but was ordered to stay well back of the British trenches. He chafed over this order, and sulked— a speck in the sky, with the nose of his machine ever turning toward the Rhine, like a hound in scent of fair game. He came down in a spiral nosedive, satisfied that his Pup was tuned to perfection. He walked across the park, after turning the plane over to the mechanics, and went into the lieutenant's Headquarters to report. Planes were arriving one by one out of the gloom. They had been over the set route, and were bringing in their observations. Danton waited for the full count. He wanted to see if any were missing.

An hour passed, and then two. Five planes had not reported. Word came in then that one of the five was down and safely landed in the Verdun region.

"That leaves four," said the lieutenant to Danton; "four to the credit of the Germans— Burke, Southgate, O'Hara, and— who's the other?"

"Little Connell— the Ace!"

The lieutenant grew thoughtful. He tugged at his mustache. "We'll get the reason to-morrow," he mused, "but I'll bet a 'pony' the Avenger is up again— looks like his work. Connell flies high, and has seven to his credit that we know of. He wouldn't go down without a fight, or a better man against him. We've got to get that fellow. We'll bait him. I'll send Daggert and Delaney out with a tractor, and you can take the air at five thousand meters, or, better. Take Connell's route. You'll find a copy of his orders in the château. Tell Daggert and Delaney to be ready at sunrise. I want that German Ace added to your scalps, Danton. I don't know anybody else who can do it. Do you?"

Danton flushed. He lighted a cigarette to hide his confusion. "I'll try," he said tersely. "The Pup is barking nicely sir, and it ought to turn the trick if we lure that fellow out, or up. I know his style— it's the same as that Karl's I winged when I got scratched."

"Karl's?" It was the lieutenant's turn to tighten his lips. "This killer must be his pupil. I can tell Karl's fledglings as high as they can fly. They all came over the line in one way— high, with cloud cover somewhere below them. They didn't go up when we got the shrapnel bursting nicely. Only fools do that now. They dropped from this cloud, and were out of range before we could think. Karl taught us that 'flip' (trick), but it was Boelke's in the beginning."

Danton saluted, and walked through the gloom toward the château. He turned, now and then, and listened. He went on each time with high resolve in his heart. Little Connell had been his best friend in the old days when they were all learning. Now Connell was missing, and the odds were, as the lieutenant had said, that the Avenger had winged him while far back of the German lines. The official reports of the enemy would give the details, but these were generally late in coming.

Danton found the orders of the day and the route set for Connell. He had not deviated far from this, Danton concluded. It was in the Somme sector, and full of pit-falls and lurking Fokkers. A Fokker, however, had not winged Little Connell, for the plane he drove had a full ten miles upon the Fokkers. It was the new "made in Germany" machine that had brought down the British flyer. No other kind could out-climb or outspeed the B.R.F.C. standard.

The game, Danton knew, had resolved itself in design and the survival of the fleetest. All things being equal, the bird-man with ten miles per hour over his quarry was superior to a hundred of the slower machines.

Danton had good cause to remember the coming of the Fokkers, and the havoc they had wrought among the slower British machines in the early days of the struggle for the air. They had pounced like hawks down upon, around, and under their prey. They had cleared the way for the Germans, all on one afternoon. They had given the French a hard battle for supremacy. They had cost untold lives in the ranks of the Allies, and when they were met and conquered, it was through the mechanical skill of the home factories, and not the cunning of birdmen.

"Give us complete control of the sky," Danton's chief had stated more than once, "and we have an open road to Berlin."

This was the cry of the entire army. No one of all that splendid expedition had not learned to rely upon the planes as upon their own eyes. It was as if another dimension had been brought into play upon the stage of modern warfare. History had been written by armies fighting upon a flat surface. Now all was changed. The third dimension had been called to the aid of both sides. The field had widened over night. The end was not yet, but the supreme holder of the third dimension was the answer to the deadlock.

The Pup plane that Danton drove was England's last word. Others, and faster, were building, or were projected. Danton took the air by a narrow margin over the elms the following morning. The Pup was tuned to the last revolution, but even at that there was great danger in rising and in landing. No flying-field seemed big enough to get the necessary run.

He mounted in a straight, high-angled flight. He soared ever the heavier tractor containing Daggert and Delaney, and went up and up, and out over the German trenches and the shell-dug roads of devastated France. He saw here and there German planes rising to meet him, like bubbles coming up through placid water. He laughed them away. They were a mile below him, and ten minutes too late for the tractor. He caught then, as he sighted the silver-ribboned Somme, the fluffy bursts of searching shrapnel. It, too, was far down, and mushroomed vainly.

Danton had but three hours of gasoline, all that the Pup could carry. His Lewis gun was fixed, and the cam timed with the whirling blades of the propeller before him, so that he could fire directly ahead, or down or up, by maneuvering the entire plane.

Danton had secured his Ace by nose-diving, or dropping at the rate of two hundred miles a minute upon his prey. He had learned to spiral this descent, as a corkscrew sinks into a cork, and to hedge about the doomed quarry a hail of steel through which it could not escape. He could also loop the loop when pursued by a Fokker, and bring up upon that plane's tail before the German knew what had happened. This maneuver called for certain conditions which were not always to be had. It was nerve-racking and dangerous; and Danton preferred the nose-dive for its simplicity and effectiveness.

The tractor containing the two veteran airmen had risen to avoid shrapnel. It had also brought out the best of the German planes in pursuit. These were trying to gain its level. Danton watched them, then peered ahead for some sign of a single plane that would prove formidable. This plane, he reasoned would be the Avenger, and of the new supertype of which they had no inkling.

Danton searched out the haze and the safety of the clouds as he followed the tractor. He was flying high enough to be in perfect safety. He had, he knew, the fastest bird in the air that morning. He wanted one glimpse of the Avenger. He wanted to be above it when it attacked the tractor. The rest would be his famous nose-dive, from which no lower plane should escape. True, the other might have a trick or two up his sleeve. The other might "flip" in line, and bring up sitting on the pup's tail. One had done this to Connell, perhaps. It was a maneuver the little British flyer had always feared.

Danton's plane burst through the last of a clammy haze, to emerge out into the white sunlight. He blinked his eyes, then peered ahead over the sights of the Lewis gun, and through the blades of the swishing propeller. He saw a silver flake high in the sky. It was rising in a spiral, like a birch-leaf caught in a lifting eddy of wind. It was a battle-plane— a one-man killer, and it was of a new construction that Danton had never seen before.

"The Avenger!" he exclaimed. "It's that, or one like that."

He climbed to a higher cloud. He clove through fluff and vapor. Each bank struck against his covered face as a cold, clammy hand. His speed, as he rose, was as some mote rising toward the sun. The Avenger had not noticed him. It was intent upon rising above the fast-flying tractor. Daggert and Delaney had sensed its purpose and were striving to hold their own.

The Pup reached eighteen thousand feet before Danton was satisfied that he held the altitude-gage over the German. Clouds had favored him in gaining this position. He had no fear. The tractor, however, was in great danger. The fast-rising German knew this type, and could attack it in its most vulnerable spot. That would be from above or directly below. Broadside on, or directly ahead or astern was the tractor's favorite fighting position. It carried a heavier gun than the Lewis. It could spray grapeshot or light shrapnel from all sides.

The Avenger poised with banked wings as the upper position was obtained. Daggert and Delaney were plainly nervous. Danton knew this by the manner of their flying. They had swerved from a straight course, and had lost speed by so doing. They had not followed Danton's orders in keeping the attacking plane fully extended. The movement was all but fatal.

The Avenger, for such Danton now knew it to be, had ceased climbing, and was beginning to drop. It was then that Danton tilted his Pup for a long glide that pointed below the tractor. He reasoned that the German machine would be in a certain spot at the moment he reached the same position.

He saw, then, that the Avenger had recognized the menace that had glided from out of the clouds. The tractor drove on, like a sluggish crane, while the Avenger and Danton's Pup converged toward each other, with Danton holding the better position. They had three miles of limpid air to fall in, and they were both falling in the long nose-glide, as divers cleaving for one object at the bottom of the sea.

The German flier glanced upward with cool calculation. The two descending planes were plumbing the converging lines of an acute angle whose base was the sky and whose apex was the earth. Danton had leaned forward and placed a drum of fifty shells upon his Lewis gun. Other drums, with their ammunition in two layers, like strawberries in a cake, were ready for instant use.

Danton's lips closed. The Berserker rage at the carelessness of the tractor-plane had given place to a steely coolness. He felt the cut of the wind as it struck over the edge of his forward guard. He was dropping all of two hundred miles a minute. It was but a second after he placed the drum upon the rapid-firer, that he heard, above the roar of his exhaust the answering exhaust of the other plane. He was over it then, and both were falling toward the earth. He sighted along the air cooled barrel of the Lewis, and touched the trigger.

Gas from the discharge struck back at his exposed forehead. His goggles fogged. He held the trigger back, and thought coolly, deliberately, as he pressed the dive home. It was his oldtime coup, and there seemed no chance for the German plane.

The German, however, had realized the danger. It would never do to stay within the cone of Danton's flying hedge of steel. There was one thing to do, in a case of its kind. That was to bank sharply and allow the following machine to pass. It was another way of setting upon its tail. The maneuver called for all the skill of the German pilot, and all the strength that was in the plane. It succeeded.

Danton, intent upon getting within close range, saw himself striking across and down through the void. He turned his head slightly. A face peered over the "nacelle" of the German plane. Its pilot was smiling. Danton almost lost his grip upon himself. He brought the Pup to a gliding climb that strained every stay of his machine. He mounted then, as the German winged toward the earth. The tractor appeared from the north. They went back to the British line together. When they had landed Danton stepped from his cramped position, lighted a cigarette. And hurried over to the Château.

"Is the lieutenant here?" he asked with drawn face. The lieutenant of the escadrille heard his voice.

"Come up," he call from an upper room. Danton mounted the stairway. He was almost dizzy. He groped along the dark hallway, then pressed a door open. Three men were inside, consulting a scale map of northern France. The lieutenant glanced at Danton then saw that something had happened, and came across the room.

"What is it, Danton?" Danton clicked his heels and saluted, as he sparred for words. "I," he said, "missed the Avenger. I tried. I had him. I—"

"What!" Danton passed his thin, well-shaped hand across his eyes and brows.

"I had him, lieutenant, where I wanted him. We were beyond the anti-aircraft guns— ten miles within the lines. I could have got him, for the Pup had miles over him. I could have—"

"Well? What's the matter, Danton? Why didn't you get him? He's done us enough damage, you ought to know that!"

"I don't fight fate!" blurted Danton. "Where was the— the fate, boy?"

"In the new Mercedes, or whatever kind of plane that was. It's fast, but not so fast as the Pup! Karl was in it."

The lieutenant's face clouded. Danton closed his eyes in strained thought. The thing was beyond belief, but he had seen it himself. He sought for words to explain exactly, what had happened. He remembered that the familiar face that had peered from the cock-pit of the German machine, had smiled upon him. He had seen that same smile when he had brought Karl to earth, and Karl had first shaken hands, and then had remembered to let respect turn to hate in the manner of his race, when captured by the British.

Danton turned and said:

"It was Karl— the German I drove down once before. The bird-man who wouldn't give his name or station. It was Karl, I tell you! I never forget a face. I glimpsed him as I shot down alongside the Mercedes. He has escaped from the detention camp. Good God, lieutenant, why do they let those things happen? He's taken a tremendous toll of our men. He's still living. He—"

Danton's voice choked.

"Nonsense, boy!" declared the aged commander. "It couldn't be. You're unstrung. You've been up too high. The old trouble with your lung is coming back. Take a week off— go to England."

Danton dropped his face in two hot palms. He saw there the sweeping face of the German.

He opened his eyes, and glanced up at the lieutenant.

"Will you wire?" he asked guardedly.

"To the camp?"

"Yes."

"It's useless, but to suit you I'll do it. Now take things coolly, boy. You're unstrung, that's all."

The next morning Danton took the air. The Pup had been groomed like a Grand Prix winner. It answered to the controls in a manner that delighted the heart of the birdman. He had the lieutenant's permission to free-lance the entire German front He had an abiding desire to grapple once more with the Mercedes and its pilot. This time, he concluded, it would not get away so easily. He was its master. It was but a question of finding the German in the air and away from the lesser "Archibalds," as Danton called the anti-aircraft guns.

He followed the silver stream of the Somme. His altitude was all of twelve thousand feet, with the Pup in reserve. The network of the German lines had been passed in safety. No plane had come up to meet him. Keen eyes, however, had undoubtedly been upon him from the first. The word had been passed along the entire line that something new in Bristols was scouting for Fokkers. Danton raised his head-gear and goggles. He breathed the cutting air as if it were flavored by the wine-land below him.

He edged toward the Verdun sector and Belfort. His intention was to land at that fortress, and return along the line in the afternoon, or the following day. Clouds had formed overhead like fluffy balls of shrapnel. They were higher than the pup. Danton watched them, fearing a surprise. He raised his elevating plane, and climbed. It was in time. A speck burst from a center ball of vapor. It came with the glide of a swallow— the darting lunge of a javelin. It was the plane of the Avenger.

Danton stiffened as he realized the ambush he had fallen into. He had not mounted high enough to escape its downward thrust. He was trapped in much the same way he had often trapped other planes. He felt a stay snap as the Avenger got the range. The center of the whirling wheel before the Mercedes seemed to be spitting crimson hate. Danton could not meet this fire. His position was desperate. He thought rapidly as he tilted the nose of the pup. He could not drop in time to escape. He could not loop. He shelved the air, in the manner of a paper floating upon its edge. It took all of his skill to hold this position, and fall with dizzy side lurches.

The maneuver was partly successful. The Mercedes tried to bank and hold its spitting fire upon the Pup at the same time. It failed, after riddling Danton's upper plane and chipping his propeller. The two planes ranged alongside, neither able to use its fixed machine gun.

Danton breathed freely. The game was his now. He had the speed, and the other was at his mercy. Reaching, he placed a drum upon the Lewis gun.

Both planes were doing the best. The Pup gained a slightly higher level. Fifty yards more and Danton knew he could loop and bring up behind the other, and give it the raking fire from which no plane could escape. He turned his rudder. The German had sought to edge away. He followed, higher in the air, but not too far away to strike. They were flying over the deadlock of criss-crossed trenches that marked No Man's Land. The armies were watching them. Both planes were marked— one with the circle, the other with the cross.

The Avenger's plant attempted to edge downward and toward the German lines. Danton drove it back. He came close in this maneuver— so close that the German turned and stared at him from over the rim of the cock-pit. The smile was gone from the Avenger's face. Death was very close, indeed. Danton watched, with superior sense of control. He studied the white features across the air. He sighted his automatic revolver over the gulf. The range was short. He could hardly miss. Poignant eyes appealed to him like twin stars of steely blue. Death was near, but the other had not become unnerved.

The Mercedes swerved slightly. It came closer, as if braving the leveled revolver. The upper fuselage of the German plane locked below Danton's lower surface. He held his fire as he swung away. They flew side by side to the beat of roaring exhausts. The pilot of the Mercedes plane took both hands from the controls. Danton squared his jaw as he saw the movement. There was danger and death in it.

He saw the leather helmet lifted from a head of golden hair, as a queen might lift a crown. He all but lost control as a girl leaned over the nacelle and locked a pair of wide blue eyes into his own with a power he could not resist.

He lowered the automatic inch by inch, then let it drop within his lap. A red flush mounted his wind-dried cheeks. His hand trembled as he steadied the rushing pup. The rush of blood died down slowly.

He was unnerved for the first time in his life. There was danger now in flying at the speed the two planes were moving. He had passed Belfort, he knew. He could not circle and hold the other plane in the position he wanted it. The girl was still bent on escape. He closed the gap between them, and signaled for her to keep to the south. Her face was hidden beneath the marcelle. The golden streamer of her hair seemed to strike back from the center of the propeller.

Fair as she was, Danton realized that she was far too dangerous a flyer to allow to escape. She had accounted for seventeen or more English bird-men. She it was who had brought down little Connell. Danton showed by the steady pressure he exerted toward the south that he wanted her to plane down and into French territory. He wanted the honor of taking her prisoner. It would be no more than his due.

She understood this maneuver. Her eyes lifted from a survey of the land below, and turned toward Danton. He nodded as she dipped with the Mercedes. He followed her plane, holding it in such a manner that it was always under the muzzle of the Lewis machine-gun.

There was no escape for her, he thought. She was as much a prisoner as if they had been upon English soil, and he was following her to the detention camp. Her descent was a long, swift glide. He circled as she landed upon an open space between rows of poplars. It was dangerous, extreme, but he followed her, further down the aisle. His plane bumped the ground, rose, then settled and came to a rocking halt. He sprang out, drew his automatic, and ran back through the grass.

The Mercedes had broken a wheel and a wing-strut in alighting. Its engine gave forth an oily vapor as it cooled. The girl stood waiting for him. Her hair had been rapidly tied into a hempen knot. Her figure seemed heavy in the leathern costume she wore. She towered over Danton, as he came to her side and bowed, as some Minerva or statue to Diana.

"You surrender?" he said, half in question, half in command.

The girl's eyes were proud and disdainful. The oil that had spattered her features in landing, drove all thought of romance from Danton's intentions. She looked the part she had played. Danton repeated his request. His hand dropped to the butt of his automatic.

He did not draw it, however. The girl had turned, slightly, and thrown back her head. She searched the surrounding country with a tiny slim of amusement in her blue eyes. Her hand raised to her hair and pressed a coil back from her forehead. She shielded her eyes with the hollow of her palm, then smiled as her lips parted over an even row of perfect teeth.

It was Danton's turn to be anxious. There was an assurance in his captor's posture that led him to believe that she was expecting help from some source. She seemed to know the spot upon which they had both landed. It was upon the shelf of a highland, back of which rose the first hills of the Alps. He heard a river and falling of waters below and beyond the row of poplars. He listened to the sounds that stirred the still air, and caught the measured chime of some village bell. It was high noon, he concluded.

They seemed to be far from strife, and the war's grim influence. The girl had found a tiny mirror while he was searching. With this she had succeeded in removing most of the oil and grime from her cheeks. She turned, as she replaced the mirror within her breast, and regarded Danton with level-drawn brows. He saw a light within the depths of her eyes that was never of the birdwoman and the Avenger. She had softened.

"Come," she said, almost queenly. "I want to show you where we are. I know this place. I am not your prisoner and you are not my captor. We— you and I are—" The girl's voice rose to a musical laugh. She turned and held out her hand.

"Come, let's be friends," she said. "You gave me my life, although you took Karl's—my brother's."

The anxiety in her voice was a softening accusation. She seemed to have prepared for a blow. It was all in war to bring down birdmen. They were the eyes of the armies. One "ace" flyer was worth ten thousand men. Danton realized that the girl had harmed the Allies more than any living woman. She had become the Avenger in order to avenge the supposed death of her brother. It was all in the game.

"He is not dead," answered Danton simply. "Karl— living?"

"Yes— in the detention camp. I thought you were Karl when I saw you yesterday. There is a resemblance— you fly like him."

"Are you sure he lives?"

The note of sheer joy in her voice came to Danton as an untamed reward.

"He lives! If he didn't write it is because he doesn't want to. He can! Perhaps he never forgot, or forgave me for bringing him down. He seemed that way. We were in the hospital together— he was burned in falling. He's well now, Avenger."

The revelation brought a touch of color to the cheeks of the girl. She glanced down, archly, at Danton. "

I didn't know," she whispered. "I didn't know you had spared him. And you are an Englander? Come. I want to show you where we landed."

Danton felt as in the presence of some penitent queen, who had slain and wished to be forgiven. The sex in her had come back with rushing force. She was no longer the Avenger and the despair of the Royal Flying Corps. The motive that had driven she had never existed. It had been a fancied wrong, nursed by a proud spirit. There were such women in Germany and in England, but not many.

He forgave her as they reached the edge. A village with quaint roofs lay, seemingly at their feet. Danton swept this Alpine view with troubled eyes. He turned and sought for the landmarks of the fortress of Belfort. It was then that his fists clinched. Doubt as to his locality shot through the old wound in his breast. He faced the bird-woman accusingly. She stepped to the edge of the gulf and glanced down. Her brows lifted as she said: "See, Englander. See the soldiers coming up the valley. They are coming after us— a full company of them."

"Blue devils?" asked Danton. "No, Englander. Not Blue Devils. Do they look like French?"

Danton's lips closed as he recognized their nationality. He had been lured by the girl into Switzerland. The soldiers were Alpine scouts. His eyes blazed as he strode to her side. "You—" he started to say, then paused in wonder.

The girl was swaying upon the edge. Her hands pressed to her breast as her cheeks blanched white. She leaned over the brink. He sprang forward and grasped her about the waist. It was in time. Her heart beat wildly against his side as he drew her to safety.

"What is it?" he asked softly.

"I went dizzy, Englander. I looked down. I've lost the bird sense. I can never fly again. What has happened, Englander?"

"Your sweet sex has returned," answered Danton. "You're a girl—a woman with a soul, now. There was a time when you didn't have any."

Her answer was to turn and glance archly down at him. Her checks reddened as she asked: "I'm as you would have me, then?"

When a woman capitulates, it is unconditionally. Danton's Pup was undamaged, and the Swiss soldiers had a long way to climb. Also the Pup made nothing of the light extra weight of the girl. So when the panting soldiers reached the plateau all they saw was a badly wrecked Mercedes, and a fast disappearing speck in the heavens, headed toward the distant British lines. Karl's sister was on her way to join him— for a while.

_________________

7: The Red Room

Waif Wander

Mary Helena Fortune, 1833-1911

The Australian Journal, Nov 1868

The long series of crime stories under the general heading "The Detective's Album", featuring Mark Sinclair narrating his cases, began in The Australian Journal in 1868, and continued until 1908.  At least one collection was published in book form, but with some some 500 stories, a "Complete Works" would be a challenging read. This is one of the first, if not the first.

IN the pursuit and arrest of criminals in every corner of the world, what a powerful assistance has the art of photography been to policemen of every grade. Before its perfection and dissemination to every quarter of the globe, the detective had little to guide him save the imperfect and stereotyped description in the Police Gazette, of the verbally given impression of some not over-observant victim, perhaps. Now it is different. In almost three cases out of every five the first mail puts us in possession of a facsimile on paper of the object of our search, and we are in a position to pounce upon him at once, with a certainty as to his identity of which nothing can deprive us.

When I promised to give to the public the police histories of some of the pictured forms and faces in my detective album, I had not duly considered the task I was about to undertake. It will be a harrowing one. There is not one of those portraits that does not bring vivid remembrances to me; and some of them most terrible ones, that are calculated, even at this distance of time, to make me shudder, and the blood run colder in my veins.

The album generally lies in the drawer of my office desk at my headquarters; and it is not kept for the amusement of visitors, or, indeed, for anyone's inspection save my own. It has a horrible fascination for me, and one which is very strange in a person so used to such scenes as those in which the originals of my portraits have played the principal part. And so deeply interesting, at least to my recollection, are every one of the episodes connected with those pictured faces that I have turned the leaves over and over again for many minutes without being able to decide which of its pages I should first unfold. But selection would be only invidious, and I shall take the simplest way, relating my acquaintance with the history of each leaf as it comes, commencing with the first page.

I could not have done better, I think; for the tale of crime connected with this one will take me back to the early days of the Victorian diggings, and to the scenes which are already becoming a recollection of the past, and which are not likely to be renewed. There are many who will read these pages to whom the localities into which my reminiscences will lead me will be familiar, but they will recognize no topographical correctness in the names I shall apply to the places I shall have to describe. There remain still, in many of the scenes I shall find it necessary to portray, persons to whom my stories must bring terrible memories, and with whom the real names must inevitably connect the tragedies. Under these circumstances, it will be more charitable to select colonial names at random, and without attempting to locate them at proper distances from each other.

It is, let me see, twelve years ago now, since I was riding, one lovely spring day, through one of the prettiest bits of wild country in Victoria. A most beautiful and perfect specimen of the "bush track" led over plain and through gorge, and by winding creek; now but lightly marking its rarely-travelled path through an old box forest, and anon emerging upon a broad and rolling plain, where the scattered trees flourished restingly, like the old oaks in an English demesne. Sometimes it climbed tortuously up a steep and rooky range; sometimes it vanished entirely on the arid side of a sloping sun-browned eminence. Sometimes it carried me on through a perfect richness of soft, green wattles, or stopped lazily at a deep, still water pool; but always beautiful, and always enjoyable in the soft genial brightness of an Australian September day.

I had just reached such a spot— a still, dark-bosomed waterhole, that lay but a little distance from the faint track. That wayfarers had made it a resting-place was evident from the marks of hoof and foot that trampled one place at its edge, and from the bits of half-burnt wood and white ashes that lay at the foot of a near tree. But there had not been enough of this to destroy the natural beauty of the spot; and the soft bushes around were green and fresh-looking, and the lordly trees as grand, and the dark water as restful, as if the eye of man had never looked upon the scene.

My horse seemed to have an inclination to drink, so I turned him, or rather let him take his own course, towards the pool; and then I dismounted, and while he satisfied his thirst by long draughts of the cool water, I stood by his side holding the bridle in my hand, and admired the surroundings of the quiet bush waterhole.

Every one at all familiar with Australian country scenery knows the value of these deep pools in a country so ill-watered as ours is. They are generally to be met with on the beds of dry creeks, where their steep edges, worn away by many a winter torrent, are fringed by the spring-blossomed wattle, or guarded by the old gnarled gum-tree, that stands like a silent sentinel over the secrets of the pool. Of what value they are in the hot and droughty summer of our eastern land, let the foot-sore swagsman tell, who, faint and weary, at last reaches one to refresh and to cool.

I was not faint and weary, yet the dark water pool had an attraction for me that I did not attempt to resist. "What a dark hiding-place for the victim dead," I thought; "and if it were even so, not less placidly would its surface reflect those feathery wattle boughs laden with their clusters of golden down, and not less sweetly would that joyous magpie warble his notes as he plumes himself, with the water for a mirror."

At this moment my horse lifted his head from the water with a long sigh of content, but as he did so he pricked up his ears and started. Looking behind me to see what had alarmed him, I saw something that startled myself, being, as I was, unaware of the presence of a living being.

It was a man seated upon a dead log by the water's side, with his elbows on his knees, and his face buried in his bands. The usual swag lay beside him, and he was dusty and way-worn looking; but he did not seem like a digger, but, to my accustomed eyes, like a new chum, viz., one who had not been long in the colony.

His whole attitude was one of the deepest dejection. If he had heard my approach, he must have paid no attention to it, for his bowed head remained upon his hands even as the horses feet began to shift in the water preparatory to his dipping his lips in a fresh part of the pool. I don't know how it was, but my heart was drawn towards this lonely man, sitting there so desolate by the bush waterhole, and I did what I would not perhaps have done in a less lonely place— I addressed him.

"Hallo, mate! What's the matter with you? Not sick, eh?"

The stranger lifted his head slowly, and as if with an effort, and when he did so I perceived that the face was that of a young man of evident gentle breeding.

"You are not ill, or in want any way, I hope?" I asked again, as he did not immediately answer.

"No, I am only thoroughly tired out, and— and low-spirited," he added, hesitatingly. "Can you tell me how far the Bridge Hotel is from this?"

"Well, I have never been here before," I replied, "but I think I can make a tolerably good guess. The Bridge Hotel is about a mile and a half from Carrick police-station, and Carrick police-station is about two miles from where you sit. You are some three and a half miles from the Bridge Hotel."

"It's a good walk yet," he said, with a sigh of weariness.

"I'll tell you what you can do to shorten the road," I observed, impulsively. "Come with me to the camp— company will lighten the way, and you can have a rest there and start fresh."

"Are you going to the police camp?" he asked, with interest, looking me all over quickly as he spoke.

I was in plain clothes, having only recently been removed into the detective force.

"Yes— I am going straight there."

"You are not a policeman? You have nothing to do with the force?" he inquired eagerly.

"I have quite enough to do with it to insure you a welcome at any rate," was my evasive reply, "if you are coming with me; and if you are not, why I must be going, for the sun dips fast in Australia when he gets as low as he is at present."

At this moment occurred one of those apparently simple incidents, the life and death consequences of which it is too hard for materialism to account for. Upon such simple things hang the whole issue of a person's future life. The delay of a moment— the breaking of a strap— the falling of a few raindrops— the stumbling of a foot against a stone— upon these, and such things as these, have rested the issue of life in how many recorded and unrecorded instances.

The animal I had ridden, being satisfied with his long draught of the refreshing element, at this moment withdrew his forefoot from the clayey brink of the pool. As he did so, I turned to recover a firmer foothold, a something caught in his foot, or rather around it, and tripped him. It was apparently a black string, one end of which was embedded in the mud; but the horse's foot detached it, and he climbed to the sward by my side with it hanging, limp and dirty, yet dripping with water, around his ankle.

I stooped down and removed it, lifting it at the same time to examine it more closely. It was a black silk necktie, with an embroidery in what had once been richly-colored floss in the corners; but the action of the water had left only faint hues where had once been a brilliant imitation of natural flowers. Satisfied with my inspection, I threw it from me— was it chance that made it alight upon the foot of my new acquaintance? His eye followed it from my hand— I saw that as I cast it away— and when it rested on his boot I was looking into his face, and saw a lividness spread over it too decided not to be noticed. Following my example, he stooped and raised the dripping rag from the ground, and examined it closely, with a head so bent down that the brim of his hat shaded his face from my eyes. But I could see the hands that held the bit of silk, and the long delicate-looking fingers trembled like leaves in a breeze.

Apparently the sight of this rag, dragged from the muddy edge of an Australian bush waterhole, recalled memories or feelings which the traveler could not bear; his legs trembled under him, his very lips grew ashen hued, and he fell back upon the log from which he had arisen at his last question to myself. He clasped the necktie firmly in his fingers, and once more bent his head over them, and groaned as one in agony of mind that could not be given utterance to.

My curiosity as well as my pity was deeply aroused. What could this stranger have possibly found in this dirty, soiled string to arouse such evident distress? "What on earth is the matter, my good friend?" I asked, laying my hand kindly on his shoulder. "That dripping thing that my horse has unconsciously pulled out of the mud has affected you strangely. Won't you tell me what it is?"

"It is murder," he replied, hoarsely, "and a murder that I have come half around the globe to find. Oh God," he added, rising to his feet and excitedly lifting the hand that held the bit of black silk, in an attitude of invocation, "help me to discover and avenge! But why should I doubt? Hast Thou not led me here, all unconsciously, to the very spot— to the very spot? I thank thee, Oh my God!" and he sat down once more and burst into a passion of tears.

I was glad to see the tears— painful as it is at all times to see them flow from a man's eyes— for I knew they would act as a safety-valve to the intensity of his feelings, of whatever nature they might be. And so I did not attempt to interrupt him until the first burst was over, and his grief had subsided into deep sobs that seemed to tear him. Then I spoke to him kindly.

"My dear fellow, I do not know the cause of your trouble, of course, and I do not ask to know it, if you do not wish to tell me; but I do not like to leave you here alone in this state. You have spoken of murder. Can I not help you? I am an officer of detectives, and I am on my way to Carrick Police Station. Here, put your swag on my horse, and I will walk with you. We may help you. Come, now."

"A detective! Oh, yes, I will go with you! Surely heaven is ready to help me, since you are sent to throw at my feet the first clue to the lost. I am ready;" and looking a long look first at the cold deep water we were about to leave, he lifted his swag and be able to threw it over my saddle.

I daresay we walked half a mile before the silence was broken between us, the stranger walking on one side of the horse, with his hand resting on the swag to steady it, and I on the other, carelessly holding the bridle of my well-trained animal. The man seemed almost completely absorbed in thought, and I don't believe that he was conscious in any degree of the nature of the country we were journeying over. He still held the necktie in his hand, and every now and then he looked at it sadly; but at length he folded it up, placed it in his breast, and then spoke to me.

"Shall we go near the Bridge Hotel at all on our way to the camp?"

"No— it is a mile and a half from the station. Are you anxious to get there? Do you expect to meet anyone?" I asked, wishing to get him into conversation.

"I expect to meet a murderer," he answered, hurriedly; "but, see, I'm going to tell you my story now. Mine is a retiring disposition at any time, and by-and-bye I may not be inclined to speak in the presence of your companions. Pray, listen to every word, for I do not speak from any motive but one, which requires your help as a detective."

And, as he concluded, he arranged the swag more securely, and letting the horse move on until he passed him, placed himself by my side.

I had already noticed what a handsome young fellow he was. His features were aquiline, and his hair and beard a dark brown. He had large, dark, melancholy-looking eyes, and his face was deathly pale; and his years might have numbered twenty-five, but not more.

"It is three years ago now," he began, "since the news of the great gold finds of Australia reached the quiet country town where our widowed mother shared the home and the affections of her two only children. We were both boys. Edward was two years younger than I; and when he heard of the suddenly-acquired fortunes of the land of gold, ropes would not have held him at home.

" 'Why should I not go and make money?' he asked. 'We may plod on here in poverty for ever. No, mother, do not say me nay. I shall soon return to fill your lap with a golden shower, and then George need not grow any paler at that weary desk.'

"And so he went, and I was left alone with our mother, keeping on still my situation to support us both. Edward was even more fortunate than he had dreamed, for the first letter we received from him brought home a handsome sum, the produce of his first gold-mining speculation in the colony.

"I will not tire you with a description of my mother's delight when, at the end of the first year of his absence, we received a letter from Edward stating his intention of returning home at once. He had been so fortunate that a handsome fortune was to be shared with us; and the boy's letter was like a burst of sunshine, it was so full of delight and joy, and it made my poor mother's heart young again. Edward was her favourite too, and he was worthy of her love.

"Well, months passed away wearily, and we heard no more of my brother, and my mother began to droop and pine, and to fancy all sorts of evil had befallen the lad. He had told us in his letter that he was on his way to Melbourne when he wrote it, and that he carried his gold with him. A 'heavy swag' he called it; determined to entrust it to no one, so fearful was he of losing it. At last, yielding to my poor mother's entreaties, I wrote a note to the postmaster at Reid's Creek—the place where my brother had been working—acquainting him with the particulars of our anxiety, and requesting that he would try to gain any particulars that he could for us.

"By the very next mail came a reply from a mate of poor Edward's, who had fortunately happened to be at Reid's Creek when the postmaster got mine. His tidings fell like a thunderbolt upon us, and from the very hour of its receipt my mother sank rapidly.

"It stated that the writer had accompanied Edward on his way to town until they reached the Bridge Hotel, at Coghill Creek. There he had heard such news as induced him to say farewell to Edward, and turn his steps in the direction of the new rush at McIvors.

"Things at McIvors not proving as he had anticipated, he had retraced his steps without loss of time, but only to find that Edward had left the Bridge Hotel.

"He went on to say that he had followed the Sydney-road to town, step by step, and inquired in every direction for his late mate, and all to no purpose. He was certain that he had not sailed in any vessel that had left the port, and from the large quantity of gold he carried on his person, and the great temptation it would have proved to the cupidity of anyone of the many bad characters to whom his simplicity might expose his gold after he had parted with his more prudent mate, that mate dreaded the worst.

"I have told you," continued the speaker, forgetting weariness and pace in the trouble of his own words, and walking on rapidly—"I have already told you that this letter grievously affected my mother—it killed her. From the moment of its receipt she conjured up continual pictures of her boy lying in a bloody and hidden grave—a martyr to the gold he had gone to procure for her sake, and she died gladly, in the full certainty of meeting him all the sooner.

"I am afraid, stranger," continued the young man, pausing, and looking sadly into my face, "that I could not in a year make you understand the deep love I bore for this young brother. People said that our faces were so similar that strangers might well mistake the one for the other; but there was no similarity in our dispositions. I was always quiet, and, it may be, moody, and he was full of life and life's sunshine; but my heart was not moody towards my brother Edward, and I loved him with a 'love passing the love of woman.'

"Yes," cried the traveler, passionately, and stopping in his walk to hold my arm excitedly, "I loved him more as a father would love an affectionate son, than as one brother feels for another; and I have come sixteen thousand miles to find the necktie his dead mother's fond fingers wrought for him lying at my feet! Tell me, what does it mean? You who live in an atmosphere of such things and read them, tell me, does this mean murder, or only madness?" and he dragged the wet silk rag again from his breast, and held it at arm's length before my eyes.

He asked me if it meant murder or madness, and, sooth to say, I did not know what to answer him. The wild light in his eyes made me dread that his mind was unsettled, but that he had told me a true story, and had good reason to dread the murder of a brother, I had my own reasons for believing.

"Listen to me, my dear fellow," I said gently, looking kindly into his craving, anxious eyes meanwhile. "You have come a long distance to find out a cruel secret and to discover the guilty, and will you now render further efforts hopeless by encouraging an excitement which will be pernicious to your objects as well as to your own health? I am able, believe me, to sympathize with your feelings and affection for your lost brother, but I shall be obliged to cease doing so if you give way to weakness in the matter. There, give me your hand, and accept mine, as that of one in every way willing to help you to discover the truth so long as you will try to be calm and to trust him. Will you?"

He laid his hand frankly in my own, looked searchingly into my eyes once more, and then pressed my hand in a firm grasp.

"I will— I will try," he said, walking; onward again, and so permitting me to do the same; "but it is very hard to be quiet with a burning heart, and every footstep following the track of a murdered brother."

"Now listen to me again," I continued, "while I tell you something that will deeply interest you. By a strange coincidence, my business at Carrick Police Station is so nearly connected with the object that drew you from your English home, that I might just as well have been dispatched up here for the very purpose of elucidating your mystery. About a month ago, a man of property was lost track of in the vicinity of this very Bridge Hotel, and as he had a large sum of money in his possession, his friends have naturally become very anxious about him. I have been sent up to try for any trace that might be discovered of him in this neighborhood, and I meet with you, come so very far to tell me, as it were, of a lost brother at this same Bridge Hotel. You are sure your brother has been here, since you find his necktie lying at your foot, and I am sure that the woman who keeps this hotel is an intriguing, unprincipled creature, whose inordinate love of dress and display might urge her to any crime of which cupidity is capable. Now, what do you think of all this, my friend?"

"I think that the hand of God is in it," he replied, solemnly. "And see," I added, opening my pocket-book and producing from it a carte, which I handed him, "here is a likeness of this landlady of the Bridge Hotel. Look at it and see if it seem like the portrait of a woman base enough to assist in murder for the sake of gold."

"Must it of necessity be this woman?" he said, with a shudder. "It is the portrait of a bold yet handsome woman, of a low intellectual type, and a fierce untamable temper; but I hate to believe it possible that one of the same sex as my dead mother— the gentle and the good— should be even suspected of so horrible a deed."

"And yet such deeds they do," I replied, "and do with a coldness and a cruelty at times that men cannot do more than equal. I have come up with a strong suspicion against this Mrs. Henry, as she calls herself. She has been living at this house now five years, passing as a widow, and in such a style that she must have some other source of wealth than the hotel, which to the certain knowledge of the police, does not pay her license. She drives a buggy and pair, and rides a blood horse fit for a queen. There is not a lady in Victoria can outshine her in dress, and she exhibits it far and near on every opportunity. She has been known to spend eighty pounds with a travelling jeweler on a single ornament, and we must find out where the gay lady gets her money."

"It is your province to be suspicious," said the young traveler, as he handed me back the portrait of Mrs. Henry; "but a woman who enjoys the frivolities of life would be the last I would suspect of blood-spilling, and yet somebody murdered our boy."

"Bah!" I answered, looking with a sneering lip at the picture, ere I replaced it in my pocket. "I am suspicious, and that is a bad, bold, vicious countenance."

Will you have a look at it, reader? It is the portrait that I have chosen from my detective album to illustrate this story with. Would you ever suppose that the original of that regal figure, with the beautiful face full of consciousness of its own beauty, could have lured men to death with as little pity as a ghoul? Or those soft-looking rounded fingers, loaded with rings, could have been remorselessly dabbled in the warm blood of a dozen victims? There is a tragic air in the attitude in which the artist has depicted her in her heavy silken robes. She stands with half averted face, one hand grasping the back of a rich arm-chair, the other hanging carelessly by her side, and contrasting its whiteness with the dark hue of the dress. Her hair is a wealth of gloss and waves, but it is pushed carelessly back from a broad, smooth brow, and the face seems half turned toward the watcher with an expression of haughty astonishment at your presumption in daring to scan it.

Such was the portrait of one of the most remorseless criminals Victoria has ever produced.

My companion and I walked on with but few words more until we came within sight of Carrick Station. It was one of those up-country stations that seems to have been planted in the most out-of-the-way spots, in total defiance of common sense. There were not three houses within as many miles of it; and the constables who were unfortunate enough to be stationed there passed a most wretched and lonely time of it.

The sun was just dipping behind the tops of the trees as we approached the camp, and the low beams tinged with a last flush the salient points of the landscape. Grey rooks were ruddy with his warm tints; long, pendant branches of box swayed in the evening breeze, catching ever and anon the red flush as they momentarily escaped the shadow of their own foliage. Long shadows lay on the soft grass, and made but the greener every bit of herbage by the dark contrast. Carrick was a pretty spot under such influences.

And so my companion seemed to think; he stood still for a moment when the beauty of the scene appeared first to strike him, and then he strode on again silently. Suddenly, however, he started again, and, turning a white face toward me, asked abruptly, "Who is that?"

Following with my eye the direction of his pointing finger, I saw my old friend, Sergeant Thomson, leading a horse toward the stable, and in earnest conversation with a man who was walking by his side. The two figures were only about thirty yards from us, and I could see that the stranger was of a slight, delicate-seeming figure, and walked as one who was either weakly or much fatigued.

"The policeman is Sergeant Thomson," I answered, "a very clever fellow, and one who will be of great assistance to us in managing Mrs. Henry. The man who is with him I do not know; he is evidently a stranger who is going to stop at the camp all night."

As I spoke, the constable went on alone, and his companion turned on his track and came directly toward us. His eyes were bent upon the ground as in deep thought, and he was entirely unaware of our approach. He was, as a nearer view further convinced me, very delicate, but there was another fact that struck me still more vividly when he had come within a distance of twenty yards, and that was his astonishing likeness to my new friend. At the same moment that this likeness attracted my attention the approaching young man lifted his eyes and perceived us, and as he did so, he uttered an exclamation of astonishment, and darted forward hastily.

My companion stopped short and lifted his hand as if to ward off the contact of the stranger. But as he stared wildly into his face, the hand dropped, and the arms of the young man were around my new friend. There was a muttered, smothered, half-choked cry of "Edward! My brother!" that told its own tale, and I passed on, leaving the brothers to exhibit their feelings in solitude. What those feelings were I could well guess, for to one, at least, it was the recovery of the dead.

I daresay you will either feel, or affect to feel, very much shocked when I tell you that I felt most heartily disappointed at this disappointment to the tragedy I had already interwoven with my visit to the bush water-hole.

Before I recalled the memory of my companion's deep affection for this young brother, I would have much preferred that he should have been waiting in the bottom of the hole for me to pull him up, so that he might have been, dead although he was, a witness against Mrs. Henry. Better feelings, however, soon got the mastery over the hard heart of the detective, and I was prepared to reciprocate the kindly expressions of my new friend when he shortly after introduced his brother to me, with a deep joy in his eyes, and in the very tones of his voice that one must have been of adamant not to have sympathized with.

Talking of being introduced, I think it is almost time that I introduced you to the name of these young men. They were called Mansfield, and that knowledge, shared between you and me, will facilitate the course of my story considerably.

The night had closed round the station when the "quartette," composed of the two brothers, myself, and Sergeant Thomson, were gathered in one of the little barrack rooms, interestedly listening to the strange story by which Edward Mansfield at once accounted for his suspicious disappearance and his unexpected arrival in the vicinity of the Bridge Hotel. The brothers had spent some time in intercourse, which the sergeant and I took care not to interrupt, after supper; but when at length the darkness had fallen densely down upon forest and plain, they came in together, and I could see in the sad eyes of the lad that his mother's memory had not been tearless.

"Let us sit close," said the elder, drawing chairs forward, "Edward has a wild story to tell you. If," he added, vehemently, as he turned to me with the same wild light in his eyes that I had seen at the waterhole— "if God permits to go unpunished the inhuman woman who murders for gold, and brought the widow's grey hairs with sorrow to the grave, then is He not a God of justice!"

With strongly excited curiosity we seated ourselves, and prepared to listen to the young man's tale. It was a tale that deeply affected even me at the time, and one which urged me on the track of the murderess, as the smell of blood might the sleuth hound; and if it does not thrill your hearts to listen to it now, I don't know what hearts are made of.

"I can't take time to tell you day and date, my friends," commenced the youth with the pale, sad face, as he sat with his hand on his brother's shoulder, and his eyes fixed on that older, yet similar face, as if he feared he might again lose it, "but it is unnecessary. You all know when I left the Ovens diggings, and how I came here to the Bridge Hotel, carrying gold that was to make my poor mother rich and happy. It seems but yesterday that I shook Bob's hand as he started for McIvors, and yet a twelvemonth of such heaviness has passed since as might well build up a barrier of forgetfulness between me and it.

"It had been well for me had I gone with him and left the Bridge Hotel and its siren mistress far behind me, but I couldn't— I couldn't do it, George. You know how susceptible I was always to female influence; and the happiness induced by my great success, and my near prospect of returning to the comfort of home, and the society of its beloved inmates, rendered me even more liable to be imposed upon by the allurements of this woman.

"You have seen her likeness, George, but it can give you no idea of her diabolical fascination of manner. I was as helpless as a child in her hands— nay, more than helpless, for I was a willing slave. Oh, may heaven curse her!" ejaculated the youth, clenching his hand while a red flush mounted angrily into his white face, and a fierce light glowed in his dark eyes, "and the fascination that allures men to death.

"By why do I so speak? Is she not already accursed? The demon with the fair face and the devil's heart, bought with blood dabbed hands full of gold? It kills me to feel," he added vehemently, "that, by this indulgence of a criminal weakness, I lost the light of my mother's old age, that I had so long worked for; and that to punish me God saw fit to take her away without her boy's hand to press in death. But I was only a lad, George," he added, pleading, as if begging for his brother's forgiveness— "was only a lad, and like putty in the hands of this inhuman woman."

"My poor Edward, you were in nothing to blame," said the elder, soothingly, as he pressed his brother's band in a warm grip. "You were sinned against, my poor boy, but in nothing have you sinned. Be calm, Edward, retribution is coming..."

With an effort the young man continued, "In but a very short time I had confided to this creature every hope and aspiration of my heart— my love for you, George, my devotion to my widowed mother. I had told her of the delight I anticipated in pouring my gold into my mother's lap, and telling her that we should feel trouble or want no more. And she, the vile thing, feigned to sympathize in feelings which she understood no more than the animals in her stable. Good God! How she must have laughed at the fool who spoke of his deep consciousness of a mother's holy affection, and yet permitted himself to be molded by a word from such a woman as she!

"I don't know how many days had passed, but they were not many, when the end came. They were days full of the delight of young and foolish passion— days spent in the woods around the Bridge Hotel, or in the luxurious private rooms of her own cottage. I longed to go toward the home of my affections, but an invincible chain appeared to bind me to the siren's side.

"Every morning I rose with the determination of proceeding, only to meet with wooings and smiles that bound me to her side like iron. She had installed me in the best room of the hotel and given me the key of a safe which it contained; and there I placed my gold, and did not fail to often assure myself of its safe keeping.

"And in this room I retired to rest on the last frightful night of my stay at the hotel. They called it the red room, from, as I supposed, the colour of its furniture and decorations. God knows, it might well be called the room of that sanguinary hue; for although every luxury that could gratify the senses and minister to sleep was gathered there, it was the room of blood.

"Oh, the recollection of that night is more than I can bear; it seems to bring me face to face with a violent death once more!"

The wine which I poured out and offered the young narrator at this moment was not unneeded. The perspiration was gathering in heavy drops on his pale forehead, and every limb trembled as he ceased. His brother sat and listened with clenched hands and corrugated brow, the picture of fierce determination; and even Sergeant Thomson, the phlegmatic, showed unmistakable symptoms of deep interest.

As for myself, I was more than deeply interested; I was craving for a further confirmation of my suspicions respecting Mrs. Henry, and beginning to see a strange ending to my young friend's story. I already hated this woman's character, but if she had done as my expectations led me to believe from the tendency of Edward Mansfield's tale, it was a satisfaction to me to feel assured that no punishment the law could adjudge would be sufficient to expiate her crimes.

"You will think me childishly weak," continued young Mansfield, after he had recovered himself enough to proceed; "but you can have no conception of the sufferings of that terrible night. The terror and the pain I then endured have weakened me, mind and body, for life. But I must go on, or your patience will be exhausted.

"I don't know what had come over me that night, but I could not sleep. I had retired earlier than was my wont, because a traveler had arrived at the house, and taken up so much of Mrs. Henry's attention that there seemed little left for me. I was jealously disposed, and sought my room in a huff; and fully determined to leave for Melbourne in the morning of the following day.

"With the weakness of a spoony feeling, however, I was no sooner in bed than a thousand thorns seemed to be under me, and I regretted that I had left the society of the woman who had such influence over me, and half determined to re-seek it.

"Under these feelings I rose and assumed my clothes again; as I buttoned my vest, however, I felt the key of the safe that contained my gold. An invincible inclination to see it was aroused by the contact of the key, and I had soon lighted my candle and drawn from the closet the chamois bag containing the metal so precious to me. The very touch of the nuggets brought home, and the prospects the wealth had opened, so vividly before me, that a complete revulsion of feeling was the consequence. The wretched cause of my infatuation was as totally forgotten as if she had never existed.

"I threw myself once more on the bed, dressed as I was, and with the long bag of gold laid on my chest, and my hands laid on it, I abandoned myself to a delightful picture of home that my imagination conjured up before me. The very weight of the gold that lay on my breast, a precious incubus, was so far from being oppressive that, instead of being a discomfort, I positively enjoyed the sensation. There was over forty pounds in weight of the precious metal, all the result of my own digging. It would have been a heavy load to carry many tens of miles had it been iron or flour, or indeed anything but gold; but we never felt it, neither Bob nor I, save as a delightful certainty of our future independence.

"And so I lay there and caressed it, and built such fond castles in the future air, as boyhood and youth will build, though death is standing at the threshold. And I pictured my mother's sweet smile, and George's beloved face, without a care that my gold would not smooth, until the candle flickered and went out, and left me alone in the darkness.

"But I scarcely noted the change, so full of the absent was I; and I only gathered up the gold closer to my face with both hands, as if it held light as well as all other blessings; and in this instance it was more to me, for it was life itself. Had it not been for the gold laying as it did in so unlikely a spot, I should never have sat here to tell you how they murdered me, brother George.

"Unconsciously I fell asleep. The soothing influence of dear home thoughts had banished the unholy unrest that had kept me awake hitherto. I had no intention of sleeping when I lay down there dressed to think of you and mother, but I did sleep; and only wakened as one wakens from sleep to die.

"Oh, it was terrible, brother George, to wake up with the consciousness of a fearful and unavoidable death certainly at your heart, and a sense, though but a momentary one, that never— never again would your eyes rest upon the features of a loving face.

"It was what seemed to be a sharp tug that awoke me— a tug that appeared, at the same time, to wrench and to smother me; and— oh, God!— I felt as if my eyes were burst open to see for only one moment a sight that I shall recall with horror to my dying day.

"My first consciousness was, as I have said, suffocation; and simultaneously with the opening of my eyes, I involuntarily lifted my hand to my throat. A strong cord encircled it, but it also encircled the bag of gold that I had gathered up caressingly over the lower part of my face, and that fact was the saving of my life, since it partially nullified the effects of the strangling rope that was momentarily compressing my throat more and more.

"Just as I opened my eyes, life seemed leaving me, but the one frightful stare I was enabled to give, as my apparent last, showed me a scene that cannot be forgotten.

"The whole wall behind the red-curtained bed had disappeared, and in the illuminated opening were two figures that I knew only too well. One was that of Mrs. Henry, and the other Karl Schwitz, a German, surly and silent, who seemed to be factotum at the Bridge Hotel. The man held in his hand the end of the cord which was throttling me, and which, by some mechanical contrivance, was tightly stretched from side to side of the bed.

"The woman was anxiously watching my face, and I encountered her bloodthirsty eyes as mine opened in the last agony of consciousness.

"'How hard he dies!' said the monstrous woman in a whisper, that I heard as if it had been shouted in my ears. 'Ah! Look at this—this is it! That will finish it, Schwitz!'

"And she dragged the bag of gold from under the cord.

"Immediately it tightened. I tried to scream— to beg, to implore, for a second, but my brain, for one horrid moment, seemed wrenching from my skull, and I felt the blood gush from my nose, and mouth, and ears, and a flood of blood seemed to rush between my eyes and the woman's face, and it was all over; I was unconscious.

"It could not have been for very long that I remained so, and it was with an almost unbearable sense of agony that I partially regained my senses. The cold night air was fanning my face, over which I felt the dabbling blood as it dripped slowly over my forehead. Over my forehead! Yes; for my head was hanging down, and I looked strangely at the apparently inverted heaven, with its dark expanse and bright, twinkling stars, that hung above me so silently. As consciousness slowly returned, I became aware that I was lying strangely over the back of a horse, and that some one was mounting behind me.

"At that moment I felt a hand, warm and life-like it seemed, against my pained frame, stealing up against my heart, where it rested for a moment, ere that woman's remorseless whisper was again heard.

"There is no fear, Schwitz; he is quite dead. But be sure and sink him well."

"My God, the agony of that moment! Like lightning it flashed over me that my only chance of life was to feign death— one groan, one sigh, nay, one breath, and I was lost! And I was going to be sank— where...?

"How I ever lived daring that fearful ride through the dark bush heaven only knows. I was in the most fearful pain, yet dared not move, when my very position was the most acute torture. I formed a hundred plans, but my sense of utter prostration rendered them all futile. Had I possessed but my ordinary strength, how easily I could have fallen from the horse, and grappled with my intended murderer, or fled into the hiding of the night; but I felt my entire helplessness, and that, should I fall, it would be but to lie on the grass, and be dispatched by the knife of him whose life mine would too certainly endanger.

"And yet, could I have known the fate before me, I think I would have tried even to grapple with a death in the dark to avoid it. After an apparently interminable ride, the animal was pulled up, and his living rider dismounted. As for me, I was a corpse only— a thing but to be hidden in the deep bush waterhole; and so I was tossed to the ground, and fell with the weight of death to the earth.

"With a celerity induced by fear, the German assassin commenced attaching to my body by means of a strong cord, some object which I could only guess to be a heavy one, for the purpose of sinking me to the bottom of the hole.

"Oh! good heavens, George, if I could only make you understand one tithe of what I felt in that agonized moment! The inertness of a half-death was pressing on my brain like an iron weight; and yet I was fully conscious of my own helplessness, and of the sounds of earth around me. I could hear the lonely soughing of the night air among the branches that waved in the darkness above me, and through the leafy branches of which I could see faintly the twinkle of far away stars. I could hear the sad ripple of the water far down below the steep brink where I lay, as some overhanging limb dip-dipped into it with the swaying motion of the wind; and more than all—louder than all, could I hear the quick, hard breathing of the murderer above me, as he bound my helpless form with his accursed rope.

"I couldn't think: I tried to pray, but ineffectually. Oh, it was dreadful. I knew that my moments were numbered, and already I seemed to feel the suffocating water pressing me down— down to eternity, while my weighted body was dragged helplessly to the slimy bottom of my last resting-place.

"There was no longer any necessity that I should feign death, for I was as helpless as any dead man could be, save only that my mind was alive to my position, and my brain maddened with a sense of my hopeless condition.

"All at once I remembered that I had a knife in my pocket, and it was as if a ray of heaven had entered my almost bloodless heart. George, do you remember us reading Dumas' tale of the prisoner's escape from the terrible Château D'If? He was sewn up in a sack and a weight attached to his feet, and he was thrown into the sea from the high rocks near the chateau. Bat he had purposely provided himself with a knife and managed to extricate himself from his shroud before he was stifled by the waves. What if I could manage to do the same? There was no terrible depth of air for my helpless body to cleave. Was there a shadow of a hope for me!

"As this thought surged painfully through my brain, Schwitz rose to his feet; the task was completed.

"There was no time for consideration now, and, with one last effort, I lifted my arm and plunged my hand into my pocket. I had gained the knife, opened it, and held it with a grip like death, ere the assassin had drawn a long breath, and once more stooped over me, and gathered me up roughly in his arms with a hideous strength. A moment more, and I was flung out into the darkness—was gasping for breath in the swiftly-divided air— met the water with a deathly rush, and was sinking down, down coldly, like a stone, to oblivion.

"I can hardly tell you how I cut the rope that bound the iron to my waist; it was all done with the instinct of desperation. However, it could not have been many seconds ere I found myself, weak and panting, and gasping for breath at the surface, and grasping for life the heavy branch that I had heard but a little before dipping desolately in the dark water.

"Weak and trembling as I was, and hard as I found it to retain my clutch of the yielding branch, I knew that the least noise would betray me. My limbs seemed freezing, and my helpless hands incapable of a moment's grasp, when my quickened sense of hearing caught the sound of a horse's feet quickly leaving the scene of my terror. The murderer was gone, and I managed to crawl along the branch; and at last finding grass beneath my feet, I fell forward on my face and wept, and prayed, and offered up such thanksgiving as my almost inanimate frame could devise.

"And there I lay, without once thinking what I should do, or how punish the wretches who had treated me so vilely. I was conscious only that I had escaped, and was thankful, when a quick sound of wheels nearing the water fell upon my ear. It ceased almost close to me, and voices, in no low tone, greeted my gladdened senses.

"'It used to be here, at any rate; turn the lamp this way, Mac. Oh, I'm sure the water is here, I can feel the cold air of it. Damn it! What have we here?'

"The speaker had seen me lying at his feet, and a picture of wretchedness I must have appeared. Two men stooped over me, and ruddy, although with a softness of voice more in accordance with my condition than their own natures, asked me what had brought me there and thus.

"'I have been strangled and thrown into the water for dead,' I managed to whisper. 'For God's sake, and if you have the hearts of human beings, take me out of this, or they will find me again.'

"I remember no more— I fainted; and it was many miles distant that I once more became conscious. The rest of my story is soon told, my friends. It was into the care of two noted bushrangers I had fallen, and they were on their hurried route to the border. They dared not, had they been ever so much inclined, stop to get any assistance for me; and in one of their rocky hiding-places I remained until but a week ago, entirely helpless, and a hoverer between life and death. My story won their commiseration, and when I was once more able to travel, they furnished me with a horse, and means, to return and punish the would-be murderers. I came for vengeance, and to recover my gold, and I have found my brother."

And the young man stretched out his hand and grasped that of the brother who had sought him so far and so hopelessly.

"You shall win both!" I exclaimed, starting to my feet; "if man's help can do it, you shall have both revenge and your gold! Come, Thomson, I want a yarn with you, and, if you take my advice, you two young men will turn in and get all the rest you can; you both need it."

The tale of this poor young fellow's sufferings made a deep impression on me, and intensified, if possible, my feelings of hatred against the vile woman I had come to entrap. There was no need of watch or trap now, it was true, since such a witness had arisen from the dead, as it were, to testify against her; but I couldn't be satisfied with simply going in my official capacity and arresting her and her accomplice for murder. I wanted to see more of her— to observe the wiles of the enchantress which she used as nets to entrap the unwary traveler. Besides, I had the death or loss of the man whose fate I had come especially to ascertain to lay at her door, and prove against her, if I could, and so I could not rest until my course of action was commenced.

It was yet early in the evening, and it did not take too long to assume my disguise, which was simply the complete dress of a man of fashion with every evidence of wealth about it that custom would permit of my displaying; and in less than an hour the sergeant and I were on our way to the Bridge Hotel. Our plans were all laid, at least so far as we could lay any, where so much depended on chance, and no lover ever felt the road longer between him and his inamorata than I did that which separated me from Mrs. Henry.

"I hope there will be no travelers to take her attention off," I said. "I do hope that she will take a fancy to me, just such a fancy as she took to poor Edward Mansfield— the she devil!"

No wonder I spoke strongly, humanity could not help it after having listened to the lad's sad tale.

"There is little danger of company," answered Thomson; "but very rarely indeed is the Red Room called upon. By George, I want to overhaul that room, Sinclair! I have many a time admired the rich appearance of it when, on rare occasions, I have been admitted to the adjoining luxurious drawing-room; but you are sure to get it made over to your use; rich fellows like you are sure to be patronized."

And my mate's jolly laugh sounded strangely in the quiet bush. It was not long ere our quick pace brought us to the door of the Bridge Hotel, and we dismounted. Our horses were taken in charge by a man whose appearance the darkness did not permit me to examine, but a whisper from my companion assured me that it was Schwitz, the midnight murderer.

"Welcome, gentlemen! Welcome to the Bridge Hotel! Ah! It is you, Thomson; I'm delighted to see you! Pray, bring the gentleman in."

Those were the first words I heard Mrs. Henry utter, and in a voice as sweet and clear as the sound of a silver bell. She had one of those rare musical voices that linger long in the memory— one that once heard will repeat itself to the memory years after, with a freshness unaffected by time. And such a face and form! As she stood there under the full blaze of a brightly-burning lamp, with her lips wreathed in a winning smile, and face aglow with welcome and expectation, I thought I had never seen such a beautiful creature. Her portrait had scarcely prepared me for such a soft, lovable expression as seemed incorporated with every lovely feature; and yet—and yet she was a murderess!

"I have brought you a gentleman that would be lost at the camp, Mrs. Henry," observed the sergeant as we entered— "an old friend who has, although so fortunate, not forgotten the unlucky policeman. But we can't be all rich, Mrs. Henry, and the station is no place for a gent accustomed to such comforts as Mr. Murray, Mrs. Henry, Mr. Murray. He is going to stop a week or so, Mrs. Henry, and I know you can give him rooms fit for a prince."

"Faith, Thompson, you'll have to spend your time with me then, instead of me passing it with you," I said, as I bowed gallantly to the hostess. "The attractions of the Bridge Hotel will be greater than those of old friendship, I foresee."

"I hope so," responded Mrs. Henry, frankly, presenting her hand to my clasp.

It was a soft, warm, and jeweled hand, but I shuddered as I forced myself to press it warmly; yet the pressure increased the rich colour of Mrs. Henry's cheeks. "How strange that such a creature should still know how to blush!" I thought, as her eyes fell beneath a gaze that I tried to make as ardent as possible.

"I shall have the pleasure of showing you to your rooms. You are not going to leave us, Mr. Thomson?"

"I am sorry to say I must not stay now, but I'll be down bright and early in the morning;" and bidding us good-night, the sergeant took himself away, and left me to form my own opinion of the fascinating criminal.

And I formed it; but no words can describe my varied feelings as I sat for hours in her society within the enchanted precincts or the richly-furnished sitting-room, from which opened the terrible Red Room. It was impossible— utterly impossible, to resist the influence of a manner in which every allurement of tone and gesture and apparent sweetness assisted to overcome. She was fascination— its very self-possessor of the terrible fatal power of the brilliant serpent, that forces to destruction the victims of its gleaming eyes. In spite of my knowledge of this woman's character—in spite of the bloody memories that enveloped her as a mantle—in spite of the shudder that occasionally awoke me as from a dream, only to sleep again but too willingly, I was overpowered by this woman's presence, won by her sweet, affectionate voice, and bewildered by the liquid eyes that looked deeply into mine.

It was with an effort that I at last dragged myself away, and entered the Red Room, escorted by my fair hostess.

"I hope you will be comfortable here," she said laughingly, as she placed a candlestick on the luxuriously-appointed and lace-draped toilet; "and indeed you must be, unless, indeed, a ruffled heart as well as the couch want making!"

"And how else?" I exclaimed, seizing both fair hands as she was leaving the chamber— "how can it be else? Who could rest after spending an evening with you?"

"Flatterer!" she answered, bending towards me as I drew her with both hands, but trying to disengage herself at the same time, "Flatterer! There now— let me go!"

"Until to-morrow. Thank heaven, only for a few hours!" I said passionately, as I released her, and she closed the door behind her rustling silks.

Yes, it's true! On my word as a man, it's as true as that I tell it! And I was in earnest; my blood was at fever heat, and my brain on fire with the glamour this accursed woman had cast over me. But it was quickly over; no sooner had the door closed and the influence of her presence been withdrawn, than I became faint with very shame for my own weakness, and fell like a child for support against the door that separated me from her.

There I leaned, and the red hue of the chamber seemed to cry out murder against me; the crimson Turkish carpet, the deep-red satin paper, with its cornice of gold, that decorated the walls; the heavy satin damask curtains that clouded the windows and fell around the couch like palls; all seemed to cry out blood against me, who had so soon forgotten the murderer in the woman, and found delight in her smile! I tell you I was faint, and had it not been for death, I would have lain down upon that bed for the rest that my sinking body required.

That couch! My God! who could rest there? Where the dying victims had writhed in agony, and from whence had gone up to heaven such aspirations for mercy and for vengeance. Could any human being sleep in such a haunted room? I went over to the splendid mirror and looked at my white, damp face, and the disordered hair, and the diamonds that gleamed and glistened in my shirt and on my fingers, and an idiotic wonder possessed me if I was myself at all, and had not been transformed by the spell of a sorceress into something infinitely worse than herself.

"I'm mad!" I thought, "Or I'm a coward! But this must not be. Rouse up, man, and do your work! Remember poor Edward Mansfield!"

I passed a most miserable and wretched night, sitting in a deep arm-chair, where I longed for light and morning as I had never longed before. Let a man be ever so little of a coward, he must feel uncomfortable in such a position. When the candle had burned itself out the darkness was intense, and every sound startled. I knew that midnight had witnessed murder in that fated chamber, and that I was myself at the mercy of the assassins every moment, but I did not fear attack as yet, since I had exhibited nothing to tempt their cupidity sufficiently, yet a strange horror drove sleep far away for hours.

But at length I slept, and was awakened by a peculiar knock at the door. I knew the signal, and admitted young Edward Mansfield.

"Is it so late?" I asked. "And Thomson and your brother?"

"Are outside. All is prepared." The lad was pale as death, and he trembled violently as he looked on the bed of crimson hue, "My God, what I suffered there!" was his exclamation, as he fell into a seat.

Hurriedly, I freshened my toilet a little, and leaving Edward in the chamber, I went out.

How comfortable everything looked in the handsome sitting-room! A bright fire burned in the grate, and close to it was drawn a breakfast-table set for two, and glittering with whiteness of china and gleaming of plate and damask of linen. We were to breakfast together then— my enslaver and I. Ah!

I passed out towards the other building— for that in which I had slept was an attached cottage entirely shut out from the hotel save by one door of communication. In the bar I found Thomson and George Mansfield, who had his face as much concealed as possible, to hide his likeness to his brother. Schwitz was attending in the bar— a heavy-faced man, with a suspicious, silent manner, and a furtive look, that would have told against him anywhere.

"I leave Schwitz to you," I said to Thomson in a low tone; "and for God's sake, don't let him escape. Cheer up, Mansfield— we are near the end."

Hastily swallowing the drink which my friend had ordered—and of which, truth to say, I stood much in need— I returned to the breakfast-room to meet Mrs. Henry just entering the door. How fresh and lovely she looked! Attired in a floating muslin, with every addition in lace and ornament that could add to the attraction of her appearance, her beauty was almost irresistible, had I not been so fearfully changed from the fool of the previous night. Even as it was, it went hard with me to meet the winning, and apparently sincere smile with which I was greeted, and to know that my act was about to drive smiles from that face forever.

"Ah! You are then up, Mr. Murray. I have been quite longing for your appearance. I thought you squatter gentlemen were very early risers. Shall we have breakfast? But how pale you do look! I am afraid you have rested badly."

She said this with that dangerous conscious smile that had so fettered and bewildered me the previous evening. There was in her arch look an evident allusion to my complimentary words on parting at the bedroom door, but she met no answering look in my stony face. I was adamant once more. God knows what she saw in my face to arouse her conscience however, but she did see something, and her face grew pale as a corpse as she still gazed at me, with the light fading out of her eyes, and an unspeakable terror growing into them.

"You have not slept," she murmured, unconsciously as it were.

"No, I have not slept," I answered, bending down over her, and looking more closely into the trembling woman's face. "Could you sleep in there?"

And I pointed with my finger at the door of the Red Room.

She did not answer; she only raised her hand and clutched convulsively at her white throat, as if she were choking.

"Come with me," I continued, "and I will show you the thing that kept me from sleeping in your red chamber."

And I led her helplessly to the door of the bedroom, and almost lifted her inside.

Edward Mansfield was sitting in the scarlet arm chair opposite the door as I pushed the murderess in before him; but at the first sight of the heartless fiend, he started to his feet, and held out both hands, as if to ward her off. As for Mrs. Henry, who doubtless saw in Edward's pale face, contrasted as it was by the deep red of the dimly lighted apartment, that of one risen from the dead, she threw up her arms in the very extremity of terror, and cried out a cry sufficient to curdle the blood in a fainthearted man's veins.

"Oh, God! The dead— the dead— the dead!"

"No, the living!" I interposed— "the living whom He has preserved by an almost miracle to work out His earthly vengeance against the murderer. There Edward, the criminal is secured."

And I clasped the handcuffs on the rounded wrists I had so lately admired.

She never spoke afterwards, at least during the day and night which followed. She was as one crushed under the weight of Almighty justice. I doubt if, from the moment of her arrest she was ever fully conscious of all the horrors of her position, but only as one who lived in a terrible dream, from which only a violent and fearful death awaited her.

Long ere this scene in the Red Room was enacted, Schwitz had been secured, and acted the part of the absolute coward, pleading for mercy, whining, sobbing, tearing his hair, and accusing his accomplice of inciting him to do it all. He confessed to everything, and revealed murders that had never been suspected. With his assistance, a goodly "plant" was discovered buried in a secure place, and with the rest, Edward's bag intact.

Sergeant Thomson had the satisfaction of overhauling the secret of the chamber of horrors, when a most complicated arrangement of machinery to assist the work of murder was brought to light. The back of the bed was indeed moveable, and the cord, that terminated the sleeping victim's life almost instantaneously, was worked by a small windlass, that the fair hand of Mrs. Henry had often turned. Altogether it was a frightful trap, and enough to make the greatest believer almost lose faith in the humanity which could practice such cruelty for gold.

The murderers were both hung. Schwitz was believed to have died of fear before the drop fell, and his partner in guilt suffered as one utterly unconscious of what is passing around her. Pray turn over the leaf, and hide that fear-recalling face in the "Detective's Album."

_________________

8: The Devil's Wager

William Makepeace Thackeray

1811-1863

First appeared in The National Standard, and Journal of Literature, Science, Music, Theatricals, and the Fine Arts, 1833; reprinted in Fraser's Magazine in 1836. This text from the anthology Devil's Stories, 1921. It is said to be Thackeray's first published story.

IT WAS THE hour of the night when there be none stirring save church-yard ghosts— when all doors are closed except the gates of graves, and all eyes shut but the eyes of wicked men.

When there is no sound on the earth except the ticking of the grasshopper, or the croaking of obscene frogs in the pool.

And no light except that of the blinking stars, and the wicked and devilish wills-o'-the-wisp, as they gambol among the marshes, and lead good men astray.

When there is nothing moving in heaven except the owl, as he flappeth along lazily; or the magician, as he rideth on his infernal broomstick, whistling through the air like the arrows of a Yorkshire archer.

It was at this hour (namely, at twelve o'clock of the night,) that two beings went winging through the black clouds, and holding converse with each other.

Now the first was Mercurius, the messenger, not of gods (as the heathens feigned), but of demons; and the second, with whom he held company, was the soul of Sir Roger de Rollo, the brave knight. Sir Roger was Count of Chauchigny, in Champagne; Seigneur of Santerre, Villacerf and autre lieux. But the great die as well as the humble; and nothing remained of brave Roger now, but his coffin and his deathless soul.

And Mercurius, in order to keep fast the soul, his companion, had bound him round the neck with his tail; which, when the soul was stubborn, he would draw so tight as to strangle him wellnigh, sticking into him the barbed point thereof; whereat the poor soul, Sir Rollo, would groan and roar lustily.

Now they two had come together from the gates of purgatory, being bound to those regions of fire and flame where poor sinners fry and roast in saecula saeculorum.

"It is hard," said the poor Sir Rollo, as they went gliding through the clouds, "that I should thus be condemned for ever, and all for want of a single ave."

"How, Sir Soul?" said the demon. "You were on earth so wicked, that not one, or a million of aves, could suffice to keep from hell-flame a creature like thee; but cheer up and be merry; thou wilt be but a subject of our lord the Devil, as am I; and, perhaps, thou wilt be advanced to posts of honour, as am I also:" and to show his authority, he lashed with his tail the ribs of the wretched Rollo.

"Nevertheless, sinner as I am, one more ave would have saved me; for my sister, who was Abbess of St. Mary of Chauchigny, did so prevail, by her prayer and good works, for my lost and wretched soul, that every day I felt the pains of purgatory decrease; the pitchforks which, on my first entry, had never ceased to vex and torment my poor carcass, were now not applied above once a week; the roasting had ceased, the boiling had discontinued; only a certain warmth was kept up, to remind me of my situation."

"A gentle stew," said the demon.

"Yea, truly, I was but in a stew, and all from the effects of the prayers of my blessed sister. But yesterday, he who watched me in purgatory told me, that yet another prayer from my sister, and my bonds should be unloosed, and I, who am now a devil, should have been a blessed angel."

"And the other ave?" said the demon.

"She died, sir— my sister died— death choked her in the middle of the prayer." And hereat the wretched spirit began to weep and whine piteously; his salt tears falling over his beard, and scalding the tail of Mercurius the devil.

"It is, in truth, a hard case," said the demon; "but I know of no remedy save patience, and for that you will have an excellent opportunity in your lodgings below."

"But I have relations," said the Earl; "my kinsman Randal, who has inherited my lands, will he not say a prayer for his uncle?"

"Thou didst hate and oppress him when living."

"It is true; but an ave is not much; his sister, my niece, Matilda—"

"You shut her in a convent, and hanged her lover."

"Had I not reason? besides, has she not others?"

"A dozen, without a doubt."

"And my brother, the prior?"

"A liege subject of my lord the Devil: he never opens his mouth, except to utter an oath, or to swallow a cup of wine."

"And yet, if but one of these would but say an ave for me, I should be saved."

"Aves with them are rarae aves," replied Mercurius, wagging his tail right waggishly; "and, what is more, I will lay thee any wager that no one of these will say a prayer to save thee."

"I would wager willingly," responded he of Chauchigny; "but what has a poor soul like me to stake?"

"Every evening, after the day's roasting, my lord Satan giveth a cup of cold water to his servants; I will bet thee thy water for a year, that none of the three will pray for thee."

"Done!" said Rollo.

"Done!" said the demon; "and here, if I mistake not, is thy castle of Chauchigny."

Indeed, it was true. The soul, on looking down, perceived the tall towers, the courts, the stables, and the fair gardens of the castle. Although it was past midnight, there was a blaze of light in the banqueting-hall, and a lamp burning in the open window of the Lady Matilda.

"With whom shall we begin?" said the demon: "with the baron or the lady?"

"With the lady, if you will."

"Be it so; her window is open, let us enter."

So they descended, and entered silently into Matilda's chamber.

THE YOUNG LADY'S eyes were fixed so intently on a little clock, that it was no wonder that she did not perceive the entrance of her two visitors. Her fair cheek rested in her white arm, and her white arm on the cushion of a great chair in which she sat, pleasantly supported by sweet thoughts and swan's down; a lute was at her side, and a book of prayers lay under the table (for piety is always modest). Like the amorous Alexander, she sighed and looked (at the clock)— and sighed for ten minutes or more, when she softly breathed the word "Edward!"

At this the soul of the Baron was wroth. "The jade is at her old pranks," said he to the devil; and then addressing Matilda: "I pray thee, sweet niece, turn thy thoughts for a moment from that villainous page, Edward, and give them to thine affectionate uncle."

When she heard the voice, and saw the awful apparition of her uncle (for a year's sojourn in purgatory had not increased the comeliness of his appearance), she started, screamed, and of course fainted.

But the devil Mercurius soon restored her to herself. "What's o'clock?" said she, as soon as she had recovered from her fit: "is he come?"

"Not thy lover, Maude, but thine uncle— that is, his soul. For the love of heaven, listen to me: I have been frying in purgatory for a year past, and should have been in heaven but for the want of a single ave."

"I will say it for thee tomorrow, uncle."

"Tonight, or never."

"Well, tonight be it:" and she requested the devil Mercurius to give her the prayer-book, from under the table; but he had no sooner touched the holy book than he dropped it with a shriek and a yell. "It was hotter," he said, "than his master Sir Lucifer's own particular pitchfork." And the lady was forced to begin her ave without the aid of her missal.

At the commencement of her devotions the demon retired, and carried with him the anxious soul of poor Sir Roger de Rollo.

The lady knelt down— she sighed deeply; she looked again at the clock, and began—

"Ave Maria."

When a lute was heard under the window, and a sweet voice singing—

"Hark!" said Matilda.

"Now the toils of day are over,

And the sun hath sunk to rest,

Seeking, like a fiery lover,

The bosom of the blushing west—

"The faithful night keeps watch and ward,

Raising the moon, her silver shield,

And summoning the stars to guard

The slumbers of my fair Mathilde!"

"For mercy's sake!" said Sir Rollo, "the ave first, and next the song."

So Matilda again dutifully betook her to her devotions, and began— "Ave Maria gratia plena!" but the music began again, and the prayer ceased of course.

"The faithful night! Now all things lie

Hid by her mantle dark and dim,

In pious hope I hither hie,

And humbly chant mine ev'ning hymn.

"Thou art my prayer, my saint, my shrine!

(For never holy pilgrim kneel'd,

Or wept at feet more pure than thine),

My virgin love, my sweet Mathilde!"

"Virgin love!" said the Baron. "Upon my soul, this is too bad!" and he thought of the lady's lover whom he had caused to be hanged.

But she only thought of him who stood singing at her window.

"Niece Matilda!" cried Sir Roger, agonizedly, "wilt thou listen to the lies of an impudent page, whilst thine uncle is waiting but a dozen words to make him happy?"

At this Matilda grew angry: "Edward is neither impudent nor a liar, Sir Uncle, and I will listen to the end of the song."

"Come away," said Mercurius; "he hath yet got wield, field, sealed, congealed, and a dozen other rhymes beside; and after the song will come the supper."

So the poor soul was obliged to go; while the lady listened, and the page sung away till morning.

"MY VIRTUES have been my ruin," said poor Sir Rollo, as he and Mercurius slunk silently out of the window. "Had I hanged that knave Edward, as I did the page his predecessor, my niece would have sung mine ave, and I should have been by this time an angel in heaven."

"He is reserved for wiser purposes," responded the devil: "he will assassinate your successor, the lady Mathilde's brother; and, in consequence, will be hanged. In the love of the lady he will be succeeded by a gardener, who will be replaced by a monk, who will give way to an ostler, who will be deposed by a Jew pedlar, who shall, finally, yield to a noble earl, the future husband of the fair Mathilde. So that, you see, instead of having one poor soul a-frying, we may now look forward to a goodly harvest for our lord the Devil."

The soul of the Baron began to think that his companion knew too much for one who would make fair bets; but there was no help for it; he would not, and he could not cry off: and he prayed inwardly that the brother might be found more pious than the sister.

But there seemed little chance of this. As they crossed the court, lackeys, with smoking dishes and full jugs, passed and repassed continually, although it was long past midnight. On entering the hall, they found Sir Randal at the head of a vast table, surrounded by a fiercer and more motley collection of individuals than had congregated there even in the time of Sir Rollo. The lord of the castle had signified that "it was his royal pleasure to be drunk," and the gentlemen of his train had obsequiously followed their master. Mercurius was delighted with the scene, and relaxed his usually rigid countenance into a bland and benevolent smile, which became him wonderfully.

The entrance of Sir Roger, who had been dead about a year, and a person with hoofs, horns, and a tail, rather disturbed the hilarity of the company. Sir Randal dropped his cup of wine; and Father Peter, the confessor, incontinently paused in the midst of a profane song, with which he was amusing the society.

"Holy Mother!" cried he, "it is Sir Roger."

"Alive!" screamed Sir Randal.

"No, my lord," Mercurius said; "Sir Roger is dead, but cometh on a matter of business; and I have the honour to act as his counsellor and attendant."

"Nephew," said Sir Roger, "the demon saith justly; I am come on a trifling affair, in which thy service is essential."

"I will do anything, uncle, in my power."

"Thou canst give me life, if thou wilt?" But Sir Randal looked very blank at this proposition. "I mean life spiritual, Randal," said Sir Roger; and thereupon he explained to him the nature of the wager.

Whilst he was telling his story, his companion Mercurius was playing all sorts of antics in the hall; and, by his wit and fun, became so popular with this godless crew, that they lost all the fear which his first appearance had given them. The friar was wonderfully taken with him, and used his utmost eloquence and endeavours to convert the devil; the knights stopped drinking to listen to the argument; the men-at-arms forbore brawling; and the wicked little pages crowded round the two strange disputants, to hear their edifying discourse. The ghostly man, however, had little chance in the controversy, and certainly little learning to carry it on. Sir Randal interrupted him.

"Father Peter," said he, "our kinsman is condemned for ever, for want of a single ave: wilt thou say it for him?"

"Willingly, my lord," said the monk, "with my book;" and accordingly he produced his missal to read, without which aid it appeared that the holy father could not manage the desired prayer. But the crafty Mercurius had, by his devilish art, inserted a song in the place of the ave, so that Father Peter, instead of chanting an hymn, sang the following irreverent ditty:—

"Some love the matin-chimes, which tell

The hour of prayer to sinner:

But better far's the mid-day bell,

Which speaks the hour of dinner;

For when I see a smoking fish,

Or capon drowned in gravy,

Or noble haunch on silver dish,

Full glad I sing mine ave.

"My pulpit is an ale-house bench,

Whereon I sit so jolly;

A smiling rosy country wench

My saint and patron holy.

I kiss her cheek so red and sleek,

I press her ringlets wavy.

And in her willing ear I speak

A most religious ave.

"And if I'm blind, yet heaven is kind,

And holy saints forgiving;

For sure he leads a right good life

Who thus admires good living.

Above, they say, our flesh is air,

Our blood celestial ichor:

Oh, grant! mid all the changes there,

They may not change our liquor!"

And with this pious wish the holy confessor tumbled under the table in an agony of devout drunkenness; whilst the knights, the men-at-arms, and the wicked little pages, rang out the last verse with a most melodious and emphatic glee. "I am sorry, fair uncle," hiccupped Sir Randal, "that, in the matter of the ave, we could not oblige thee in a more orthodox manner; but the holy father has failed, and there is not another man in the hall who hath an idea of a prayer."

"It is my own fault," said Sir Rollo; "for I hanged the last confessor." And he wished his nephew a surly goodnight, as he prepared to quit the room.

"Au revoir, gentlemen," said the devil Mercurius; and once more fixed his tail round the neck of his disappointed companion.

The spirit of poor Rollo was sadly cast down; the devil, on the contrary, was in high good humour. He wagged his tail with the most satisfied air in the world, and cut a hundred jokes at the expense of his poor associate. On they sped, cleaving swiftly through the cold night winds, frightening the birds that were roosting in the woods, and the owls that were watching in the towers.

In the twinkling of an eye, as it is known, devils can fly hundreds of miles: so that almost the same beat of the clock which left these two in Champagne found them hovering over Paris. They dropped into the court of the Lazarist Convent, and winded their way, through passage and cloister, until they reached the door of the prior's cell.

Now the prior, Rollo's brother, was a wicked and malignant sorcerer; his time was spent in conjuring devils and doing wicked deeds, instead of fasting, scourging, and singing holy psalms: this Mercurius knew; and he, therefore, was fully at ease as to the final result of his wager with poor Sir Roger.

"You seem to be well acquainted with the road," said the knight.

"I have reason," answered Mercurius, "having, for a long period, had the acquaintance of his reverence, your brother; but you have little chance with him."

"And why?" said Sir Rollo.

"He is under a bond to my master, never to say a prayer, or else his soul and his body are forfeited at once."

"Why, thou false and traitorous devil!" said the enraged knight; "and thou knewest this when we made our wager?"

"Undoubtedly: do you suppose I would have done so had there been any chance of losing?"

And with this they arrived at Father Ignatius's door.

"Thy cursed presence threw a spell on my niece, and stopped the tongue of my nephew's chaplain; I do believe that had I seen either of them alone, my wager had been won."

"Certainly; therefore, I took good care to go with thee; however, thou mayest see the prior alone, if thou wilt; and lo! his door is open. I will stand without for five minutes when it will be time to commence our journey."

It was the poor Baron's last chance: and he entered his brother's room more for the five minutes' respite than from any hope of success.

Father Ignatius, the prior, was absorbed in magic calculations: he stood in the middle of a circle of skulls, with no garment except his long white beard, which reached to his knees; he was waving a silver rod, and muttering imprecations in some horrible tongue.

But Sir Rollo came forward and interrupted his incantation. "I am," said he, "the shade of thy brother Roger de Rollo; and have come, from pure brotherly love, to warn thee of thy fate."

"Whence camest thou?"

"From the abode of the blessed in Paradise," replied Sir Roger, who was inspired with a sudden thought; "it was but five minutes ago that the Patron Saint of thy church told me of thy danger, and of thy wicked compact with the fiend. 'Go,' said he, 'to thy miserable brother, and tell him there is but one way by which he may escape from paying the awful forfeit of his bond.'"

"And how may that be?" said the prior; "the false fiend hath deceived me; I have given him my soul, but have received no worldly benefit in return. Brother! dear brother! how may I escape?"

"I will tell thee. As soon as I heard the voice of blessed St. Mary Lazarus" (the worthy Earl had, at a pinch, coined the name of a saint), "I left the clouds, where, with other angels, I was seated, and sped hither to save thee. 'Thy brother,' said the Saint, 'hath but one day more to live, when he will become for all eternity the subject of Satan; if he would escape, he must boldly break his bond, by saying an ave.'"

"It is the express condition of the agreement," said the unhappy monk, "I must say no prayer, or that instant I become Satan's, body and soul."

"It is the express condition of the Saint," answered Roger, fiercely; "pray, brother, pray, or thou art lost for ever."

So the foolish monk knelt down, and devoutly sung out an ave. "Amen!" said Sir Roger, devoutly.

"Amen!" said Mercurius, as, suddenly, coming behind, he seized Ignatius by his long beard, and flew up with him to the top of the church-steeple.

The monk roared, and screamed, and swore against his brother; but it was of no avail: Sir Roger smiled kindly on him, and said, "Do not fret, brother; it must have come to this in a year or two."

And he flew alongside of Mercurius to the steeple-top: but this time the devil had not his tail round his neck. "I will let thee off thy bet," said he to the demon; for he could afford, now, to be generous.

"I believe, my lord," said the demon, politely, "that our ways separate here." Sir Roger sailed gaily upwards: while Mercurius having bound the miserable monk faster than ever, he sunk downwards to earth, and perhaps lower. Ignatius was heard roaring and screaming as the devil dashed him against the iron spikes and buttresses of the church.

________________

9: The Motor-Burglar

A Development of the Age of Petrol

Richard Dehan

Clotilde Graves, 1863-1932

From The Cost of Wings and other stories, 1914.

"A QUITE remarkable case of coincidence, dear fellars— a parallel without precedent," said Hambridge Ost to a select circle of listeners in the smoking-room of the Younger Sons' Club, "is that the giant plate-burglary successfully accomplished at Lord Whysdale's shooting-box in Deershire on Tuesday last by a party of three polite persons traveling in a large, roomy and handsomely-appointed pale blue 'Flygoer' automobile, was echoed, so to put it— on Friday by a colossal robbery at the seat of my cousin, Lord Pomphrey; the defrauding persons being also, in that case, a trio of civil-spoken and well-dressed strangers, occupying a light green 'Runhard' of twenty-eight horse-power with a limousine body and singularly brilliant nickel fittings. The most remarkable point on one side, and one which has given cause for the noisy derision of the profanum vulgus— do you foller me?— being that Lord Pomphrey— I regret to add— assisted and abetted by the humble individual now speaking, actually assisted the thieves to get clear off with his property, includin' an Elizabethan beaker with a cover, out of which the Virgin Monarch graciously quaffed a nightcap of the cordial called 'lambswool' when staying at The Towers during a Royal progress in the year 1566, and a silver tea-kettle and punch-bowl presented by the tenants on the late Earl's coming-of-age, with a cargo of other valuables, out of which I had the melancholy privilege of rescuing one Queen Anne Apostle spoon.

"My cousin Wosbric, between attacks of his hereditary gout, is an ardent golfer. Residing at his Club during the absence of Lady Pomphrey and the family in the Tyrol, he takes every feasible opportunity of cultivating his skill and renewing his enthusiasm for the game, the intricacies of which, dear fellars, I may own I have never been able to master. To me, when a large, cheerful, whiskered man, dressed in shaggy greenish clothes, with gaiters, announces, rubbing his hands, which are invariably encased in woolen mitts, that he has taken his driver twice going to the twelfth hole; did not altogether mishit either shot, and yet was not up to the green, because the wind bore down like a Vanguard omnibus;— to me nothing wildly incredible or curious has been said. The large man in the shaggy clothes is talking a shibboleth I do not and never could understand, dear fellars, if I bent my whole intelligence— considered by some decent judges not altogether contemptible— to the task, until the final collapse of the present Social System. But, nevertheless, Lord Pomphrey is partial to the company of this humble individual upon his golfing days, and to me the Head of my House— d'ye foller me?— in mentioning a preference issues a mandate. Enveloped in a complete golfing costume of Jaeger material, surmounted by two fur-lined overcoats, the pockets of the under one containing two patent 'keep-hot' bottles of warm and comforting liquids— coffee and soup— which aid to maintain the temperature of the outer man at normal, before being transferred to the inner individual— I manage to defy the rigors of the English climate and support the exhaustion consequent upon indulgence in the national game of North Britain. My walking-stick is convertible into a camp-stool; the soles of my thick boots are protected by goloshes, a peaked cap with flaps for the ears crowns my panoply; and, place in the mouth of the individual thus attired one of Dunhill's 'Asorbal' cigarettes, each of which is furnished with a patent hygienic mouthpiece-filter which absorbs the deleterious oil of nicotine, and catches the stray particles of tobacco— d'ye foller me, dear fellars?— which otherwise find their way into the system of the smoker— and the picture is complete.

"The run by road from the Club doorsteps to Cluckham Pomphrey, where the Fargey Common Golf-links equal any that our country can boast, faithful copies of the eighteen best holes in the world having been carefully made under the supervision of Lord Pomphrey— the run can be made within four hours. We started. I had received the Fiery Cross from my kinsman, so to put it, in a laconic note, running: 'Golf to-morrow if the weather keeps up and the gout keeps down.— Yours, Pomphrey.' We started in a mild drizzle, at six-thirty. Our car, a 'Rusher,' of twenty-six horse-power, with a detachable top and glass driving-screen, behaved excellently. Driving through Cluckham, our county town— it happened to be market-day!— we accidentally converted a lamb into cutlets; but the immolated creature, as it chanced, being the property of one of my cousin's farmer-tenants, the casualty passed over with fewer comments than generally ensue. Bowing to several well-known yeomen and county land-holders, my cousin and myself alighted at the Pink Boar, kept by an old retainer of the family, took a light but nourishing ante-luncheon or snack of a couple of raw eggs beaten up with whisky, and proceeded on our way to the Fargey Common Links.

"A mile from The Towers, whose picturesque battlements could be descried, dear fellars, embosomed, as it were, in surroundin' trees, we encountered some motorists upon the road in quite a regrettable plight. Their car, a large, light green 'Runhard' of twenty-eight horse-power, was drawn up by the roadside;— quite an arsenal of tools glittered in the wintry rays of the sun, spread out upon an india-rubber sheet, and what had occurred was plain to the meanest automobiling capacity. A tire had exploded after a long, stiff climb of the steep hill, a notable feature in our county landscape— the descent of which we were about to negotiate. And the spare tire, after being attached, had proved to be leaky beyond repair.

"Fellar-feeling, dear fellars!— would have moved any fellar of you to foller our example. We raised our hats, the three strangers in the 'Runhard' car politely returning the salutation; we offered aid, and met with grateful acceptance. Larger than our own locomotive— the 'Runhard' wheels were of exactly the same diameter— the 'Runhard' tires were 'Fridolines,' like our own. We offered our spare tire, it fitted to a miracle. We were overwhelmed with the grateful acknowledgments of its three polite proprietors.

" 'You will at least permit me to pay for the tire!' pleaded the gentleman who appeared to take the lead. As Lord Pomphrey refused, with the courtly wave of the hand that distinguishes this thirteenth wearer of the coronet, he continued: 'For you do not know— you never can know!— how inestimable a service your lordship has rendered us!'

"Wosbric was known, then. He elevated his eyebrows in polite surprise. Not being able to discern the features of the strangers behind their cap-masks and goggles, he could not recall ever having met them before. Then the second polite stranger, who was even more polite than the first, explained in a slight American accent the reason of his companion's recognition of Lord Pomphrey. 'We have, like many other tourists,' he said, 'recently enjoyed the privilege of going over your lordship's antique and noble family pile. In the hall, the feudal stateliness of which especially appealed to me as an American citizen, hangs a portrait of your lordship taken, in company with a gold-hilted sword and a red velvet curtain, as Lord-Lieutenant of the County.'

"Lord Pomphrey bowed. 'As Lord-Lieutenant of the County,' I put in. 'Quite so. The likeness is agreed to be a striking one. And as you have viewed the other treasures of The Towers, I presume you did not miss the large oak cabinet of Jacobean silver plate— magnificent and unique as having belonged to Queen Anne of Denmark— which stands at the end of the smaller library behind the large Chinese screen?'

"The polite strangers looked at me and then at Lord Pomphrey and then at each other. A cloud passed over the bright intelligent eyes that shone through their motor-goggles as they sorrowfully shook their heads.

" 'We missed that cabinet!' said the first polite stranger, with a sigh.

" 'I guess we did!' said the second.

" 'Just like wot I calls our beastly, blooming luck!' sighed the third stranger who was sitting in the car, and who, though polite, was not in the least a refined sort of person. As all three of them seemed unfeignedly depressed, Lord Pomphrey, who is the soul of hospitality, begged them to return to The Towers, accept refreshment, and examine under his personal superintendence, the magnificent contents of the oak cabinet in the second library.

" 'We thank your lordship profoundly!' said the first polite stranger, bowing, 'but we are unable to accept your invitation!' He bowed again, and got into the car.

" 'And we shall never cease to regret, I guess,' said the second, 'that we have missed the most valuable item of your lordship's collection of silver heirlooms. But we have garnered many precious momentos'— it struck me at that moment that there were a great many waterproof-covered bundles in the 'Runhard' car, and as he spoke he patted one of these affectionately— 'of our visit to this country which must serve to sweeten life for us when we are far away. And with these we must endeavor to be content!'

"He too bowed, dear fellars, and got into the car. The machinery began to splutter at a touch upon the lever.

" 'Let 'er rip, Cocky,' advised the third stranger; 'we ain't got none too much of a start with this yere tire a-busting. So long!' he said, and like an arrow from a bow, so to put it, dear fellars, the large, light green 'Runhard' leapt forward and was out of sight in an instant. We proceeded in the 'Rusher' toward our destination.

"Presently, dear fellars, we met two large, hot, county constables on bicycles. They did not recognize us, so great was their haste. Their large boots vigorously trod the pedals, their bulky, blue-uniformed figures were crouched over the handle-bars as they pounded up the hill from Cluckham Pomphrey. We wondered whither they might be going? We questioned what agricultural breach of the peace, what local felony, had spurred them to such an unusual display of energy. We found out.

"For at the next bend of the road, dear fellars, we encountered quite a little cavalcade of hot and red-faced, or pale and panting persons. The steward from Pomphrey Towers in his T-cart, the head-bailiff from Pomphrey Towers on his cob, the coachman driving a light gig with two armed grooms on the back seat, an excited mob of stable-helpers and gardeners straggling along behind.... Even before they recognized us, those in the van of the pursuers shouted to us, asking if we had passed an automobile upon the road— a large, light green 'Runhard' containing three men?

"In a few gasped sentences, dear fellars, the ghastly truth stood revealed; the facts were laid bare to us. Pomphrey Towers had been, to employ the expression of the bailiff, 'cracked and burgled,' only an hour previously, of a quantity of silver articles and a mass of valuable plate. Lord Pomphrey and myself had met the burglars upon the road, had supplied them with the means of continuing their flight, had entered into conversation with them, and returned their polite farewells.

"We joined the pursuit, all thoughts of golf submerged in the bosom of Lord Pomphrey, beneath the boiling lava-flood of rage and indignation. To be robbed is bad; to be placed in the position of confederate to the robbers, unknowing aider and abettor of their nefarious flight, is maddening. The three polite individuals in the large, light green motor-car have not, up to the present, been traced. One small spoon of the Apostle-headed kind, found by the roadside where they replaced their own deflated tire, with that so generously bestowed upon them by Lord Pomphrey, is the only clue so far.

"A distressin' experience, dear fellars!— confoundedly so in the estimation of this humble individual. Thanks, I will take another of those long Dutch cigars and a Scotch, with Hebinaris'— the new mineral water, do you foller me?— with iridescent bubbles that snap at your nose. My love to you, dear fellars, and a Happy New Year!"

_______________

10: The Birth of a Masterpiece

Lucas Malet

Mary St. Leger Kingsley, 1852-1931

The Story-Teller, Jan 1922

Looking back on it from this distance of time— it began in the early and ended in the middle eighties— I see the charm of ingenuous youth stamped on the episode, the touching glamour of limitless faith and expectation. We were, the whole little band of us, so deliciously self-sufficient, so magnificently critical of established reputations in contemporary letters and art. We sniffed and snorted, noses in air, at popular idols, while ourselves weighted down with a cargo of guileless enthusiasm only asking opportunity to dump itself at an idol's feet. We ached to burn incense before the altar of some divinity; but it must be a divinity of our own discovering, our own choosing. We scorned to acclaim ready-made, second-hand goods. Then we encountered Pogson— Heber Pogson. Our fate, and even more, perhaps, his fate, was henceforth sealed.

He was a large, sleek, pink creature, slow and rare of movement, from much sitting bulky, not to say squashy, in figure, mild-eyed, slyly jovial and— for no other word, to my mind, so closely fits his attitude— resigned. A positive glutton of books, he read as instinctively, almost as unconsciously, as other men breathe. But he not only absorbed. He gave forth and that copiously, with taste, with discrimination, now and again with startlingly eloquent flights and witty sallies. His memory was prodigious. The variety and vivacity of his conversation, the immense range of subjects he brilliantly laboured, when in the vein, remain with me as simply marvellous. With us he mostly was in the vein. And, vanity apart, we must have composed a delightful audience, generously censer-swinging. No man of even average feeling but would be moved by such fresh, such spontaneous admiration! Thus, if our divinity melodiously piped, we did very radiantly dance to his piping. Oh! Heber Pogson enjoyed it. Never tell me he didn't revel in those highly articulate evenings of monologue, gasconade, heated yet brotherly argument, lasting on to midnight and after, every bit as much as we did! Anyhow at first. Later he may have had twinges, been sensible of strain; though never, I still believe, a very severe one. In any case, Nature showed herself his friend— his saviour, if also, in some sort, his executioner. When the strain tended to become distressing, for him personally, very simply and cleverly, she found a way out.

A background of dark legend only brought the steady glow of his— and our— present felicity into richer relief. We gathered hints of, caught in passing smiling allusion to, straitened and impecunious early years. He had endured a harsh enough apprenticeship to the profession of letters in its least satisfactory, because most ephemeral, form— namely journalism, and provincial journalism at that. This must have painfully cribbed and confined his free-ranging spirit. We were filled by reverent sympathy for the trials and deprivations of his past. But at the period when the members— numbering a dozen, more or less— of our devoted band trooped up from Chelsea and down from the Hampstead heights to worship in the studio-library of the Church Street, Kensington, house, Pogson was lapped in a material well-being altogether sufficient. He treated us, his youthful friends and disciples, to very excellent food and drink; partaking of these himself, moreover, with evident readiness and relish. Those little "help-yourselves," stand-up suppers in the big, quiet, comfortably warmed and shaded room revealed in him no ascetic tendency, though, I hasten to add, no tendency to unbecoming excess. Such hospitality testified to the soundness of Pogson's existing financial position; as did his repeated assertions that now, at last— praise heaven— he had leisure to do worthy and abiding work, work through which he could freely express his personality, express in terms of art his judgments upon, and appreciations of, the human scene.

We listened breathless, nodding exuberant approval. For weren't we ourselves, each and all of us, mightily in love with art and with the human scene? And hadn't we, listening thus breathlessly to our amazing master, the enchanting assurance that we were on the track of a masterpiece? Not impossibly a whole gallery of masterpieces, since Heber Pogson had barely touched middle age as yet. For him there still was time. Fiction, we gathered to be the selected medium. He not only meant to write, but was actually now engaged in writing, a novel during those withdrawn and sacred morning hours when we were denied admittance to his presence. We previsaged something tremendous, poetic yet fearlessly modern, fixed on the bedrock of realism, a drama and a vision wide, high, deep, spectacular yet subtle as life itself. Let his confreres, French and Russian— not to mention those merely British born— look to their laurels, when Heber Pogson blossomed into print! And— preciously inspiring thought— he was our Pogson. He inalienably belonged to us; since hadn't we detected the quality of his genius when the veil was still upon its face? Oh! we knew, bless you; we knew. We'd the right to sniff and snort, noses in air, at contemporary reputations because we were snugly awaiting the disclosure of a talent which would prick them into nothingness like so many bubbles, pop them like so many inflated paper bags, knock them one and all into the proverbial cocked hat!

Unfortunately youth, with a fine illogic, though having all the time there is before it, easily waxes impatient. In our eagerness for his public recognition, his apotheosis, we did, I am afraid, hustle our great man a little. Instead of being satisfied with his nocturnal coruscations— they brilliant as ever, let it be noted— we just a fraction resented the slowness of his progress, began ever so gently to shove that honoured bulky form behind and pull at it in front. We wanted the tangible result of those many sacred and secret morning hours during which his novel was in process of being formed and fashioned, gloriously built up. Wouldn't he tell us the title, enlighten us as to the theme, the scheme, thus allaying the hunger pangs of our pious curiosity by crumbs— ever so small and few— dropped from his richly furnished table? With exquisite good-humour, he fenced and feinted. Almost roguishly he would laugh us off and launch the conversation into other channels, holding us— after the first few vexatiously outwitted seconds— at once enthralled and delicately rebuked.

But at last— in the late spring, as far as I remember, of the second year of our devotion— there came a meeting at which things got pressed somehow to a head. Contrary to custom feminine influence made itself felt.

And here I pause and blush. For it strikes me as so intimately characteristic of our whole relation— in that earlier stage, at least— that I should have written all this on the subject of Heber Pogson without making one solitary mention of his wife. She existed. Was permanently in evidences— or wasn't it, rather, in eclipse?— as a shadowy parasitic entity perambulating the hinterland of his domestic life. She must have been by some years his junior— a tall, thin, flat-chested woman, having heavy, yellowish brown hair, a complexion to match, and pale, nervous eyes. Her clothes hung on her as on a clothes-peg. She affected vivid greens— as was the mistaken habit of Victorian ladies possessing the colouring falsely called "auburn"— but clouded their excessive verdure to neutrality by semi-transparent over-draperies of black. Harry Lessingham, in a crudely unchivalrous mood, once described her as "without form and void," adding that she "had a mouth like a fish." These statements I considered unduly harsh, yet admitted her almost miraculously negative. She mattered less, when one was in the room with her, than anything human and feminine which I, so far, had ever run across. And I was at least normally susceptible, I'm very sure of that.

As a matter of course, on our arrival at the blest house in Church Street, we one and all respectfully greeted her, passed, to put it vulgarly, the time of day with her. But there intercourse ceased. At some subsequent instant she faded out— whether into space or into some adjacent connubial chamber, I had no notion. I only realized, when the act was accomplished, that we now were without her, that she had vanished, leaving behind her no faintest moral or emotional trace.

But, on the occasion in question, she did not vanish. We fed her at supper. And still she remained— in the interests of social propriety, as we imagined, since for once the Pogson symposium included a stranger, an eminently attractive lady guest.

Harry Lessingham had begged to bring his sister with him. He told me of this beforehand, and I rejoiced. Lessingham had long been dear to me as a brother; while that Arabella should only be dear to me as a sister was, just then, I own, among the things I wished least. I craved, therefore, to have her share our happy worship. She had a pretty turn for literature herself. I coveted to see her dazzled, exalted, impressed— it would be a fascinating spectacle. Before I slept that night, or rather next morning, I recognized her coming as a disastrous mistake. For she had received insufficient instruction in ritual, in the suitable forms of approach to so august a presence as that of our host. She played round him, flickering, darting, like lightning round a cathedral tower, metal tipped. Where we, in our young male modesty, had but gently drawn or furtively shoved, she tickled the soft, sedentary creature's ribs as with a rapier point. And— to us agitated watchers— the amazing thing was, that Pogson didn't seem to mind. He neither rebuked her nor laughed her off; but purred, veritably purred, under her alternate teasing and petting like some big, sleek cat.

At last, with a cajoling but really alarming audacity, she went for him straight.

"Of course, dear Mr. Pogson, Harry has told me all about your wonderful novel," she said. "I am so interested, so thrilled— and so grateful to you for letting me join your audience to-night. But I want quite frightfully to know more. Speaking not only for myself, but for all who are present, may I implore a further revelation? Pray don't send us empty away in respect of the wonderful book. It would be so lovely while we sit here at your feet."

She, in fact, sat by his side, her chair placed decidedly close to his.

"If you would read us a chapter.... A chapter is impossible?"

Her charming, pliant mouth; her charming dancing eyes; her caressing voice— I won't swear even her caressing hands didn't, for a brief space, take part— all wooed him to surrender.

"Well, a page then, a paragraph? Ah! don't be obdurate. The merest sentence? Surely we may claim as much as that? Picture our pride, our happiness."

She enclosed us all in a circular and sympathetic glance, which ended, as it had started, by meeting his mild eyes, lingering appealingly upon his large, pink countenance.

Pogson succumbed. No, he wouldn't read; but, since she so amiably desired it....

"More than anything in all my life!" with the most convincing and virginal sincerity.

He thought he might rehearse a passage, which wasn't— as he gladly believed— altogether devoid of merit. He did rehearse it. And we broke into applause the more tempestuous because suspicion of a chill queerly lay upon us. A chill insidious as it was vague, disturbing as it was— wasn't it? we silently, quite violently, hoped so— ridiculously uncalled for.

"After all, that passage is thundering good, you know," Harry Lessingham announced, as though arguing with himself, arguing himself out of that same invidious chill, an hour later.

Arabella had refused a hansom, declaring herself excited, still under the spell, and so wanting to walk. Leaving the Church Street house, the three of us crossed into Campden Grove, with a view to turning down Campden House Road, thus reaching Kensington High Street.

"It was out of sight of the average— packed with epigram; worthy of all we've ever believed or asked of him. It takes a master of technique, of style, to write like that."

"Beloved brother, which of us ever said it didn't?" Arabella took him up sweetly.

Slender, light-footed, the train of her evening gown switched over her arm, beneath her flowing orange and white-flowered satin cloak, she walked between us.

"Why, it was good to the point of being inevitable. One seemed— I certainly did— to know every phrase, every word which was coming. None could have been other, or been placed otherwise than it was— and that's the highest praise one can give to anybody's prose, isn't it? One jumped to the perfect rightness of the whole— a rightness so perfect as to make the sentences sound quite extraordinarily familiar."

This last assertion dropped as a bomb between Lessingham and myself.

"By the way," the girl presently said, as our awkward silence continued, "has either of you happened to read, or re-read, Meredith's 'Egoist' just lately?"

Lessingham stopped short, and in the light of a neighbouring gas-lamp I saw his handsome, boyish face look troubled to the point of physical pain.

"What on earth are you driving at? What do you mean, Arabella— that Pogson is a plagiarist?"

"Don't eat me, Harry dearest, if I incline to use a shorter, commoner expression."

"A thief?"

"An unconscious one, no doubt," she threw off quickly, fearful of explosions, possibly, in her turn. "He may have been betrayed by his own extraordinary memory."

"But this is horrible, horrible," Lessingham cried. "All the names, though, were different."

Arabella appeared to have overcome her fear of explosions. Her charming eyes again danced.

"Exactly," she said. "That was the peculiar part of it, the thing which riveted my attention. He had— I mean the names of the characters and places were different— were altered, changed."

Lessingham stood bare-headed in the light of a gas-lamp. He ran the fingers of his left hand through his crisp fair hair, rumpling it up into a distracted crest. I could see, could almost hear, the travail of his honest soul. Loyalty, faith and honour worked at high pressure to hit on a satisfactory explanation.

Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.

"Why, of course," he cried, "it's as clear as mud. Pogson wasn't betrayed by anything. He did it on purpose. Don't you understand, you dear goose, you very-much-too-clever-by-half dear goose? It was simply his kindly joke, his good-natured little game. And we, like the pack of idiots which— compared with him— we are, never scented it. You pestered— yes, Arabella, most unconscionably pestered him to read an excerpt from his novel; and to pacify you he quoted a page from Meredith instead."

Harry Lessingham tucked his hand under the folds of the orange and white-flowered cloak, and taking the girl affectionately by the elbow, trotted her down the sloping pavement towards Kensington High Street.

"All the honours of war rest with Pogson," he joyfully assured her. "You made an importunate, impertinent demand for bread. He didn't mean to be drawn; but was too civil, too tender-hearted to put you off with a stone, so slyly cut you a slice from another man's loaf. Does it occur to you, my sweet sister, you've been had— very neatly had?"

"If it comes to that, Miss Lessingham by no means stands alone," I interrupted. "We've all been had, as you so gracefully put it, very neatly and very extensively had."

For though I trusted Lessingham's view was the correct one— trusted so most devoutly— I could not but regret the discomfiture of Arabella. Her approach to our chosen idol may have slightly lacked in reverence; she may, indeed, in plain English, have cheeked him. But she had done so in the prettiest, airiest manner. Pogson's punishment of her indiscretion, if highly ingenious, still struck me as not in the best taste. For was it not at once rather mean and rather cheap to make so charming a person the subject, and that before witnesses, of a practical joke?

If, after all, it really was a joke. That insidious, odious chill which earlier prompted my tempestuous applause, as I woefully registered, hung about me yet. Unquestionably Arabella Lessingham's visit to Church Street showed more and more, when I considered it, as a radical mistake! From it I date the waning of the moon of my delight in respect of both Pogson and herself. I had bowed in worship, equally sincere, though diverse in sentiment, before each; and to each had pledged my allegiance. To have them thus discredit one another represented the most trying turn of events.

For a full month I cold-shouldered the band, abjured the shrine, and avoided the lady. Then, while still morose and brooding, my trouble at its height, a cousin— in the third degree— rich, middle-aged, and conveniently restless, invited me to be his travelling companion. We had taken trips together before. This one promised fields of wider adventure— nothing less than the quartering of southern Europe, along with nibblings at African and Asiatic Mediterranean coasts. It was the chance of a life-time. I embraced it. I also called at the house in Church Street to make my farewells. I could do no less.

I have used the word "resigned" in describing Pogson. To-day that word notably covered him. Our friend appeared depressed; yet bland in his depression, anxious to mollify and placate rather than reproach. His attitude touched me. I hardly deserved it after my neglect— to which, by the way, he made no smallest reference. But as I unfolded my plans, he increasingly threw off his depression and generously entered into them. Would have me fetch an atlas and trace out my proposed itinerary upon the map. It included names to conjure with. These set wide the flood-gates of his speech. He at once enchanted and confounded me by his knowledge of the literature, art, history, of Syria, Egypt, Italy, Greece, and the Levant.

For the next three-quarters of an hour I had Pogson at his best. And oh! how vastly good that same best was! Under the flashing, multi-coloured light of it, he routed my suspicions; put my annoyance and distrust to flight. As he leaned back in the roomy library chair, filled to veritable overflowing by his big, squashy, brown-velvet jacketted person— Pogson had put on flesh of late; put it on sensibly, as I remarked, even during the few weeks of my absence— he reconquered all my admiration and belief.

As I rose to depart:

"Ah! you fortunate youth," he thus genially addressed me; "thrice fortunate youth, in your freedom, your enterprise, your happy elasticity of flesh and spirit! What won't you have to tell me of things actually seen, of lands, cities, civilizations, past and present, and the storied wonder of them, when you come back!"

"And what won't you have to read to me in return, dear Master," I echoed, eager to testify to my recovered faith. "By then the book will be finished on which all our hopes and affections are set. Ten times more precious, more illuminating than anything I have seen, will be what I hear from you when I come back!"

But, as I spoke, surely I wasn't mistaken in thinking that for an agitating minute the pinkness of Pogson's large countenance sickly ebbed and blanched. And while my attention was still engaged by this disquieting phenomenon, I became aware that Mrs. Pogson had joined us. Silently, mysteriously, she faded— the term holds good— into evidence, as on so many former occasions she had silently, mysteriously faded out.

Dressed in one of those verdant gowns, so dolorously veiled in semi-transparent black, she stood behind her husband's chair. Her eyes met mine. They were no longer nervous or in expression vague; but oddly aggressive, challenging, defiantly alight.

"Oh, yes," she declared, "by then Heber will have completed his great novel, without doubt."

When uttering his name, she laid a thin, long-fingered hand upon his rounded shoulder, and to my— little short of— stupefaction, I saw Pogson's fat, pink hand move up to seek and clasp it.

On me this action— hers soothing, protective; his appealing, welcoming— produced the most bewildering effect. I felt embarrassed and abashed; an indecently impertinent intruder upon the secret places of two human hearts. That any such intimate and tender correspondence existed between this so strangely ill-assorted couple I never dreamed.

I uttered what must have sounded wildly incoherent farewells and fled.
Of the ensuing eighteen months of foreign travel it is irrelevant here to speak. Suffice it that on my return to England and to Chelsea, the earliest news which greeted me was that Arabella Lessingham had been now five weeks married and Heber Pogson a fortnight dead. Lessingham, dear, good fellow, was my informant, and minded acquainting me, so I fancied, only a degree less with the first item than with the second.

For some considerable time, he told me, Pogson had been ailing. He grew inordinately stout, unwieldy to the extent of all exertion, all movement causing him distress. Suffocation threatened if he attempted to lie down; so that, latterly, he spent not only all day, but all night sitting in the big library chair we knew so well. If not actually in pain, he must still have suffered intolerable discomfort. But he never complained, and to the last his passion for books never failed.

"We took him any new ones we happened to run across, as you'd take a sick woman flowers. To the end he read."

"And wrote?" I asked.

"That I can't say," Lessingham replied. "There were things I could not make out. And I couldn't question him. It didn't seem to be my place, though I had an idea he'd something on his mind to speak of which would be a relief. It worried me badly. I felt sure he wanted to tell us, but couldn't bring himself to the point. He talked of you. He cared for you more than for any of us; yet— I may be all wrong— it seemed to me he was glad you weren't here. Once or twice, I thought, he felt almost afraid you might come back before— before it was all over, you know. It sounds rather horrible, but I had a feeling he longed to slink off quietly out of sight— for he did not dread death, I'm certain of that. What he dreaded was that life had some trick up her sleeve which, if he delayed too long, might give him away; put him to shame somehow at the last."

"And Mrs. Pogson?"

Lessingham looked at me absently.

"Oh! Mrs. Pogson? She's never interested me. She's too invertebrate; but I believe she took care of Pogson all right."

Next day I called at the house in Church Street. After some parley I was admitted into the studio-library. Neither in Mrs. Pogson nor in the familiar room did I find any alteration, save that the green had disappeared from her dress. She wore hanging, trailing, unrelieved black. And that a piece of red woollen cord was tied across, from arm to arm, of Pogson's large library chair, forbidding occupation of it. This pleased me. It struck the positive, the, in a way, aggressive note, which Mrs. Pogson had once before so strangely, unexpectedly, sounded in my presence.

I said the things common to such occasions as that of our present meeting; said them with more than merely conventional feeling and emphasis. I praised her husband's great gifts, his amazing learning, his eloquence, the magnetic charm by which he captivated and held us.

Finally I dared the question I had come here to ask, which had burned upon my tongue, indeed, from the moment I heard of Pogson's death.

"What about the novel? Might we hope for speedy, though posthumous, publication? We were greedy; the world should know how great a literary genius it had lost. Was it ready for press, as— did she remember?— she'd assured me it would certainly be by the time I came back?"

Mrs. Pogson did not betray any sign of emotion. Her thin hands remained perfectly still in her crape-covered lap.

"There is no novel," she calmly told me. "There never has been any novel. Heber did not finish it because he never began it. He did not possess the creative faculty. You were not content with what he gave. You asked of him that which he could not give. At first he played with you— it amused him. You were so gullible, so absurdly ignorant. Then he hesitated to undeceive you— in that, I admit, he was weak. But he suffered for his weakness. It made him unhappy. Oh I how I have hated— how I still hate you!— for I saved him from poverty, from hard work. I secured him a peaceful, beautiful life, till you came and spoilt it.... All the money was mine," she said.

_____________

11: The House of the Worm

Mearle Prout

Weird Tales Oct 1933

Mearle Prout wrote a handful of stories for Weird Tales in the mid-1930s. Nothing else is known.

FOR hours I had sat at my study table, trying in vain to feel and transmit to paper the sensations of a criminal in the death-house. You know how one may strive for hours— even days— to attain a desired effect, and then feel a sudden swift rhythm, and know he has found it? But how often, as though Fate herself intervened, does interruption come and mar, if not cover completely, the road which for a moment gleamed straight and white! So it was with me.

Scarcely had I lifted my hands to the keys when my fellow-roomer, who had long been bent quietly over a magazine, said, quietly enough:

"That moon— I wonder if even it really exists!"

I turned sharply. Fred was standing at the window, looking with a singularly rapt attention into the darkness.

Curious, I rose and went to him, and followed his gaze into the night. There was the moon, a little past its full, but still nearly round, standing like a great red shield close above the tree-tops, yet real enough…

Something in the strangeness of my friend's behavior prevented the irritation which his unfortunate interruption would ordinarily have caused.

"Just why did you say that?" I asked, after a moment's hesitation.

Shamefacedly he laughed, half apologetic. "I'm sorry I spoke aloud," he said. "I was only thinking of a bizarre theory I ran across in a story."

"About the moon?"

"No. Just an ordinary ghost story of the type you write. While Pan Walks is its name; and there was nothing in it about the moon."

He looked again at the ruddy globe, now lighting the darkened street below with a pale, tenuous light. Then he spoke: "You know, Art, that idea has taken hold of me; perhaps there is something to it after all…"

Theories of the bizarre have always enthralled Fred, as they always hold a romantic appeal for me. And so, while he revolved his latest fancy in his mind, I waited expectantly.

"Art," he began at last, "do you believe that old theory about thoughts becoming realities? I mean, thoughts of men having a physical manifestation?"

I reflected a moment, before giving way to a slight chuckle. "Once," I answered, "a young man said to Carlyle that he had decided to accept the material world as a reality; to which the older man only replied, 'Egad, you'd better!'… Yes," I continued, "I've often run across the theory, but— "

"You've missed the point," was the quick rejoinder. "Accept your physical world, and what do you have?— Something that was created by God! And how do we know that all creation has stopped? Perhaps even we— "

He moved to a book-shelf, and in a moment returned, dusting off a thick old leather-bound volume.

"I first encountered the idea here," he said, as he thumbed the yellowed pages, "but it was not until that bit of fiction pressed it into my mind that I thought of it seriously. Listen:

" 'The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." From what did He create it? Obviously, it was created by thought, imagery, force of will if you please. The Bible further says: "So God created man in His own image." Does this not mean that man has all the attributes of the Almighty, only upon a smaller scale? Surely, then, if the mind of God in its omnipotence could create the entire universe, the mind of man, being made in the image of God, and being his counterpart on earth, could in the same way, if infinitely smaller in degree, create things of its own will.

" 'For example, the old gods of the dawn-world. Who can say that they did not exist in reality, being created by man? And, once created, how can we tell whether they will not develop into something to harass and destroy, beyond all control of their creators? If this be true, then the only way to destroy them is to cease to believe. Thus it is that the old gods died when man's faith turned from them to Christianity.'"

He was silent a moment, watching me as I stood musing.

"Strange where such thoughts can lead a person," I said. "How are we to know which things are real and which are fancies— racial fantasies, I mean, common in all of us. I think I see what you meant when you wondered if the moon were real."

"But imagine," said my companion, "a group of people, a cult, all thinking the same thoughts, worshipping the same imaginary figure. What might not happen, if their fanaticism were such that they thought and felt deeply? A physical manifestation, alien to those of us who did not believe…"

And so the discussion continued. And when at last we finally slept, the moon which prompted it all was hovering near the zenith, sending its cold rays upon a world of hard physical reality.

NEXT morning we both arose early— Fred to go back to his prosaic work as a bank clerk, I to place myself belatedly before my typewriter. After the diversion of the night before, I found that I was able to work out the bothersome scene with little difficulty, and that evening I mailed the finished and revised manuscript.

When my friend came in he spoke calmly of our conversation the night before, even admitting that he had come to consider the theory a rank bit of metaphysics.

Not quite so calmly did he speak of the hunting-trip which he suggested. Romantic fellow that he was, his job at the bank was sheer drudgery, and any escape was rare good fortime. I, too, with my work out of the way and my mind clear, was doubly delighted at the prospect.

"I'd like to shoot some squirrels," I agreed. "And I know a good place. Can you leave tomorrow?"

"Yes, tomorrow; my vacation starts then," he replied. "But for a long time I've been wanting to go back to my old stamping-grounds. It's not so very far— only a little over a hundred miles, and"— he looked at me in apology for differing with my plans— "in Sacrament Wood there are more squirrels than you ever saw."

And so it was agreed.

SACRAMENT WOOD is an anomaly. Three or four miles wide and twice as long, it fills the whole of a peculiar valley, a rift, as it were, in the rugged topography of the higher Ozarks. No stream flows through it, there is nothing suggesting a normal valley; it is merely there, by sheer physical presence defying all questions. Grim, tree-flecked mountains hem it in on every side, as though seeking by their own ruggedness to compensate this spot of gentleness and serenity. And here lies the peculiarity: though the mountains around are all inhabited— sparsely, of course, through necessity— the valley of the wood, with every indication of a wonderful fertility, has never felt the plow; and the tall, smooth forest of scented oak has never known the ax of the woodman.

I too had known Sacrament Wood; it was generally recognized as a sportsman's paradise, and twice, long before, I had hunted there. But that was so long ago that I had all but forgotten, and now I was truly grateful to have been reminded of it again. For if there is a single place in the world where squirrels grow faster than they can be shot, it is Sacrament Wood.

It was midafternoon when we finally wound up the last mountain trail to stop at last in a small clearing. A tiny shanty with clapboard roof stood as ornament beside the road, and behind it a bent figure in faded overalls was chopping the withered stalks of cotton.

"That would be old Zeke," confided my companion, his eyes shining with even this reminder of childhood. "Hallo!" he shouted, stepping to the ground.

The old mountaineer straightened, and wrinkled his face in recognition. He stood thus a moment, until my companion inquired as to the hunting; then his eyes grew dull again. He shook his head dumbly.

"Ain't no hunting now, boys. Everything is dead. Sacrament Wood is dead."

"Dead!" I cried. "Impossible! Why is it dead?"

I knew in a moment that I had spoken without tact. The mountaineer has no information to give one who expresses a desire for it— much less an outlander who shows incredulity.

The old man turned back to his work. "Ain't no hunting now," he repeated, and furiously attacked a stalk of cotton.

So obviously dismissed, we could not remain longer. "Old Zeke has lived too long alone," confided Art as we moved away. "All mountaineers get that way sooner or later."

But I could see that his trip was already half spoiled, and even fancied he was nettled with me for my unfortunate interruption. Still, he said nothing, except to note that Sacrament Wood was our next valley.

We continued. The road stretched ahead for some distance along the level top. And then, as we started the rough descent. Sacrament Wood burst full upon our view, clothed as I had never before seen it. Bright red, yellow, and brown mingled together in splashes of beauty, as the massive trees put on their autumnal dress. Almost miniature it appeared to us from our lookout, shimmering like a mountain lake in the dry heat of early fall. Why, as we gazed for a moment silently, did a vague thought of uncleanness make a shudder pass through my body? Was I sensitive to the ominous words of the old mountaineer? Or did my heart tell me what my mind could not— that the season was yet too early to destroy every trace of greenery, and replace it with the colors of death? Or was it something else?— something not appealing to the senses, nor yet to the intellect, but yet sending a message too strong to be dismissed?

But I did not choose to dwell long upon the subject. The human mind, I have long known, in striving to present a logical sequence of events, often strains the fabric of fact for the sake of smoothness. Perhaps I really felt nothing, and my present conceptions have been altered by subsequent events. At any rate, Fred, although unnaturally pale, said nothing, and we continued the descent in silence.

NIGHT comes early in the deep valley of Sacrament Wood. The sun was just resting on the high peak in the west as we entered the forest and struck camp. But long after comparative darkness had come over us, the mountain down which we had come was illuminated a soft gold.

We sat over our pipes in the gathering dusk. It was deeply peaceful, there in the darkening wood, and yet— Fred and I were unnaturally silent, perhaps having the same thoughts. Why were the massive trees so early shorn of leaves? Why had the very birds ceased to sing? Whence came the faint, yet unmistakable odor of rottenness?

A cheery fire soon dispelled our fears. We were again the two hunters, rejoicing in our freedom and our anticipation. At least, I was. Fred, however, somewhat overcame my feeling of security.

"Art, whatever the cause, we must admit that Sacrament Wood is dead. Why, man, those trees are not getting ready for dormance; they are dead. Why haven't we heard birds? Bluejays used to keep this place in a continual uproar. And where did I get the feeling I had as we entered here? Art, I am sensitive to these things. I can feel a graveyard in the darkest night; and that is how I felt as I came here— as if I was entering a graveyard. I know, I tell you!"

"I felt it, too," I answered, "and the odor, too… But all that is gone now. The fire changes things."

"Yes, the fire changes things. Hear that moaning in the trees? You think that is the wind? Well, you're wrong, I tell you. That is not the wind. Something not human is suffering; maybe the fire hurts it."

I laughed, uncomfortably enough. "Come," I said, "you'll be giving me the jimmies, too. I felt the same way you did; I even smelt the odor, but the old man just had us upset. That's all. The fire has changed things. It's all right now."

"Yes," he said, "it's all right now."

For all his nervousness, Fred was the first to sleep that night. We heaped the fire high before turning in, and I lay for a long while and watched the leaping flames. And I thought about the fire.

"Fire is clean," I said to myself, as though directed from without. "Fire is clean; fire is life. The very life of our bodies is preserved by oxidation. Yes, without fire there would be no cleanness in the world."

But I too must have dropped off, for when I was awakened by a low moan the fire was dead. The wood was quiet; not a whisper or rustle of leaves disturbed the heavy stillness of the night. And then I sensed the odor… Once sensed, it grew and grew until the air seemed heavy, even massive with the inertia of it, seemed to press itself into the ground through sheer weight. It eddied and swirled in sickening waves of smell. It was the odor of death, and putridity.

I heard another moan.

"Fred," I called, my voice catching in my throat.

The only answer was a deeper moan.

I grasped his arm, and— my fingers sank in the bloated flesh as into a rotting corpse! The skin burst like an over-ripe berry, and slime flowed over my hand and dripped from my fingers.

Overcome with horror, I struck a light; and under the tiny flare I saw for a moment— his face! Purple, bloated, the crawling flesh nearly covered his staring eyes; white worms swarmed his puffed body, exuded squirming from his nostrils, and fell upon his livid lips. The foul stench grew stronger; so thick was it that my tortured lungs cried out for relief. Then, with a shriek of terror, I cast the lighted match from me, and threw myself into the bed, and buried my face in the pillow.

How long I lay there, side, trembling, overcome with nausea, I do not know. But I slowly became aware of a rushing sound in the tree-tops. Great limbs creaked and groaned; the trunks themselves seemed to crack in agony. I looked up, and saw a ruddy light reflected about us. And like a crash of thunder came the thought into my brain:

"Fire is clean; fire is life. Without fire there would be no cleanness in the world."

And at this command I rose, and grasped everything within reach, and cast it upon the dying flames. Was I mistaken, or was the odor of death really less? I hauled wood, and heaped the fire high. Fortunate indeed that the match I had thrown had fallen in the already sere leaves!

When next I thought of my companion the roaring blaze was leaping fifteen feet in air. Slowly I turned, expecting to see a corpse weltering in a miasma of filth, and saw— a man calmly sleeping! His face was flushed, his hands still slightly swollen; but he was clean! He breathed. Could I, I asked, have dreamed of death, and of the odor of death? Could I have dreamed the worms?

I awoke him, and waited.

He half looked at me, and then, gazing at the fire, gave a cry of ecstasy. A light of bliss shone for a moment in his eyes, as in a young child first staring at the mystery of cleansing flame; and then, as realization came, this too faded into a look of terror and loathing.

"The worms!" he cried. "The maggots! The odor came, and with it the worms. And I awoke. Just as the fire died… I couldn't move; I couldn't cry out. The worms came— I don't know whence; from nowhere, perhaps. They came, and they crawled, and they ate. And the smell came with them! It just appeared, as did the worms, from out of thin air! It just— became! Then— death! I died, I tell you— I rotted— I rotted, and the worms— the maggots— they ate… I am dead, I say! DEAD! Or should be!" He covered his face with his hands.

HOW we lived out the night without going mad, I do not know. All through the long hours we kept the fire burning high; and all through the night the lofty trees moaned back their mortal agony. The rotting death did not return; in some strange way the fire kept us clean of it, and fought it back. But our brains felt, and dimly comprehended, the noisome evil floundering in the darkness, and the pain which our immunity gave this devilish forest.

I could not understand why Fred had so easily fallen a victim to the death, while I remained whole. He tried to explain that his brain was more receptive, more sensitive.

"Sensitive to what?" I asked.

But he did not know.

Dawn came at last, sweeping westward before it the web of darkness. From across the forest, and around us on all sides, the giant trees rustled in pain, suggesting the gnashing of millions of anguished teeth. And over the ridge to eastward came the smiling sun, lighting with holy clarity the branches of our wood.

Never was a day so long in coming, and never so welcome its arrival. In a half-hour our belongings were gathered, and we quickly drove to the open road.

"Fred, you remember our conversation of a couple of evenings ago?" I asked my companion, after some time of silence. "I'm wondering whether that couldn't apply here."

"Meaning that we were the victims of— hallucination? Then how do you account for this?" He raised his sleeve above his elbow, showing his arm. How well did I remember it! For there, under curling skin and red as a brand, was the print of my hand!

"I sensed, not felt, you grip me last night," said Fred. "There is our evidence."

"Yes," I answered, slowly. "We've got lots to think of, you and I."

And we rode together in silence.

When we reached home, it was not yet noon, but the brightness of the day had already wrought wonders with our perspective. I think that the limitation of the human mind, far from being a curse, is the most merciful thing in the world. We live on a quiet, sheltered island of ignorance, and from the single current flowing by our shores we visualize the vastness of the black seas around us, and see— simplicity and safely. And yet, if only a portion of the cross-currents and whirling vortexes of mystery and chaos could be revealed to our consciousness, we should immediately go insane.

But we can not see. When a single cross-current upsets the calm placidness of the visible sea, we refuse to believe. Our minds balk, and can not understand. And thus we arrive at that strange paradox: after an experience of comprehensible terror, the mind and body remain long upset; yet even the most terrible encounters with things unknown fade into insignificance in the light of clear day. We were soon about the prosaic task of preparing lunch, to satisfy seemingly insatiable appetites!

And yet we by no means forgot. The wound on Fred's arm healed quickly; in a week not even a scar remained. But we were changed. We had seen the cross-current, and— we knew. By daylight a swift recollection often brought nausea; and the nights, even with the lights left burning, were rife with horror. Our very lives seemed bound into the events of one night.

Yet, even so, I was not prepared for the shock I felt when, one night nearly a month later, Fred burst into the room, his face livid.

"Read this," he said in a husky whisper, and extended a crumpled newspaper to my hand. I readied for it, read where he had pointed.

MOUNTAINEER DIES

Ezekiel Whipple, lone mountaineer, aged 64, was found dead in his cabin yesterday by neighbors.

The post-mortem revealed a terrible state of putrefaction; medical men aver that death could not have occurred less than two weeks ago.

The examination by the coroner revealed no sign of foul play, yet local forces for law and order are working upon what may yet be a valuable clue. Jesse Layton, a near neighbor and close friend of the aged bachelor, states that he visited and held conversation with him the day preceding; and it is upon this statement that anticipation of possible arrest is based.

"God!" I cried. "Does it mean— "

"Yes! It's spreading— whatever it is. It's reaching out, crawling over the mountains. God knows to where it may finally extend."

"It's coming from the wood," I said.

"It's in the wood. It centers in the wood. It must be a terrible new disease. But— yes, God only knows to where it may finally extend."

"No. It is not a disease. It is alive. It's alive, Art! I tell you, I felt it; I heard it. I think it tried to talk to me."

For us there was no sleep that night. Every moment of our half-forgotten experience was relived a thousand times, every horror amplified by the darkness and our fears. We wanted to flee to some far country, to leave far behind us the terror we had felt. We wanted to stay and fight to destroy the destroyer. We wanted to plan; but— hateful thought— how could we plan to fight— nothing? We were as helpless as the old mountaineer…

And so, torn by these conflicting desires, we did what was to be expected— precisely nothing. We might even have slipped back into the even tenor of our lives had not news dispatches showed still further spread, and more death.

Eventually, of course, we told our story. But lowered glances and obvious enbarrassment told us too well how little we were believed. Indeed, who could expect normal people, with normal experiences, to believe the obviously impossible? And so, to save ourselves, we talked no more, but watched in dread from the side-lines the slow, implacable growth.

IT WAS midwinter before the first town fell in the way of the expanding circle. Only a mountain village of half a hundred inhabitants; but the death came upon them one cold winter night— late at night, for there were no escapes— and smothered all in their beds. And when the next day visitors found and reported them, there was described the same terrible advanced state of putrefaction that had been present in all the other cases.

Then the world, apathetic always, began to believe. But, even so, they sought the easiest, the most natural, explanation, and refused to recognize the possibilities we half outlined to them. Some new plague, they said, is threatening us, is ravaging our hill country. We will move away… A few moved. But the optimists, trusting all to the physicians, stayed on. And we, scarce knowing why, stayed on with them.

Yes, the world was waking to the danger. The plague became one of the most popular topics of conversation. Revivalists predicted the end of the world. And the physicians, as usual, set to work. Doctors swarmed the infected district, in fear of personal safety examined the swollen corpses, and found— the bacteria of decay, and— the worms. They warned the natives to leave the surrounding country; and then, to avoid panic, they added encouragement.

"We have an inkling of the truth," they said, after the best manner of the detective agency. "It is hoped that we may soon isolate the deadly bacterium, and produce an immunizing serum."

And the world believed… I, too, half believed, and even dared to hope.

"It is a plague," I said, "some strange new plague that is killing the country. We were there, first of all."

But, "No," said Fred. "It is not a plague. I was there; I felt it; it talked to me. It is Black Magic, I tell you! What we need is, not medicine, but medicine men."

And I— I half believed him, too!

SPRING came, and the encroaching menace had expanded to a circle ten miles in radius, with a point in the wood as a center. Slow enough, to be sure, but seemingly irresistible… The quiet, lethal march of the disease, the death, as it was called, still remained a mystery— and a fear. And as week after week fled by with no good tidings from the physicians and men of science there assembled, my doubts grew stronger. Why, I asked, if it were a plague, did it never strike its victims during the day? What disease could strike down all life alike, whether animal or vegetable? It was not a plague, I decided; at least, I added, clutching the last thread of hope, not a normal plague.

"Fred," I said one day, "they can't stand fire— if you are right. This is your chance to prove that you are right. We'll burn the wood. We'll take kerosene. We'll burn the wood, and if you are right, the thing will die."

His face brightened. "Yes," he said, "we'll burn the wood, and— the thing will die. Fire saved me: I know it; you know it. Fire could never cure a disease; it could never make normal trees whisper and groan, and crack in agony. We'll burn the wood, and the thing will die."

So we said, and so we believed. And we set to work.

Four barrels of kerosene we took, and tapers, and torches. And on a clear, cold day in early March we set out in the truck. The wind snapped bitterly out of the north; our hands grew blue with chill in the open cab. But it was a clean cold. Before its pure sharpness, it was almost impossible to believe that we were heading toward filth and a barren country of death. And, still low in the east, the sun sent its bright yellow shafts over the already budding trees.

It was still early in the morning when we arrived at the edge of the slowly enlarging circle of death. Here the last victim, only a day or so earlier, had met his end. Yet, even without this last to tell us of its nearness, we could have judged by the absence of all life. The tiny buds we had noted earlier were absent; the trees remained dry and cold as in the dead of winter.

Why did not the people of the region heed the warnings and move? True, most of them had done so. But a few old mountaineers remained— and died one by one.

We drove on, up the rocky, precipitous trail, leaving the bustle and safety of the normal world behind us. Was I wrong in thinking a shade had come over the sun? Were not things a trifle darker? Still I drove on in silence.

A faint stench assailed my nostrils— the odor of death. It grew and it grew. Fred was pale; and, for that matter, so was I. Pale— and weak.

"We'll light a torch," I said. "Perhaps this odor will die."

We lit a torch in the brightness of the day, then drove on.

Once we passed a pig-sty: white bones lay under the sun; the flesh was decayed and eaten away entirely. What terror had killed them while they slept?

I could not now be mistaken: the shade was deepening. The sun was still bright, but weak, in some strange way. It shone doubtfully, vacillating, as if there were a partial eclipse.

But the valley was near. We passed the last mountain, passed the falling cabin of the mountaineer who was the first to die. We started the descent.

Sacrament Wood lay below us, not fresh and green as I had seen it first, years before, nor yet flashing with color as on our last trip the autumn before. It was cold, and obscured. A black cloud lay over it, a blanket of darkness, a rolling mist like that which is said to obscure the River Styx. It covered the region of death like a heavy shroud, and hid it from our probing eyes. Could I have been mistaken, or did I hear a broad whisper rising from the unhallowed wood of the holy name? Or did I feel something I could not hear?

But in one respect I could not be wrong. It was growing dark. The farther we moved down the rocky trail, the deeper we descended into this stronghold of death, the paler became the sun, the more obscured our passage.

"Fred," I said in a low voice, "they are hiding the sun. They are destroying the light. The wood will be dark."

"Yes," he answered. "The light hurts them. I could feel their pain and agony that morning as the sun rose; they can not kill in the day. But now they are stronger, and are hiding the sun itself. The light hurts them, and they are destroying it."

We lit another torch and drove on.

When we reached the wood, the darkness had deepened, the almost palpable murk had thickened until the day had become as a moonlit night. But it was not a silver night. The sun was red; red as blood, shining on the accursed forest. Great red rings surrounded it, like the red rings of sleeplessness surrounding a diseased eye. No, the sun itself was not clean; it was weak, diseased, powerless as ourselves, before the new terror. Its red glow mingled with the crimson of the torches; and lit up the scene around us with the color of blood.

WE DROVE as far as solid ground would permit our passage— barely to the edge of the forest, where the wiry, scraggly growth of cedar and black-jack gave place to the heavy growth of taller, straighter oak. Then we abandoned our conveyance and stepped upon the rotting earth. And at this, more strongly it seemed than before, the stench of rottenness came over us. We were thankful that all animal matter had decayed entirely away; there only remained the acrid, penetrating odor of decaying plants; disagreeable, and powerfully suggestive to our already sharpened nerves, but endurable… And it was warm, there in the death-ridden floor of the valley. In spite of the season of the year and the absence of the sun's warmth, it was not cold. The heat of decay, of fermentation, overcame the biting winds which occasionally swept down from the surrounding hills.

The trees were dead. Not only dead; they were rotten. Great limbs had crashed to the ground, and littered the soggy floor. All smaller branches were gone, but the trees themselves remained upright, their naked limbs stretched like supplicating arms to the heavens as these martyrs of the wood stood waiting. Yet in even these massive trunks the worms crawled— and ate. It was a forest of death, a nightmare, fungous forest that cried out to the invaders, that sobbed in agony at the bright torches, and rocked to and fro in all its unholy rottenness.

Protected by our torches, we were immune to the forces of death that were rampant in the dark reaches of the wood, beyond our flaring light. But while they could not prey upon our bodies, they called, they drew upon our minds. Pictures of horror, of putridity and eldritch nightmare thronged our brains. I saw again my comrade as he had lain in his bed, over a half-year before; I thought of the mountain village, and of the three-score victims who had died there in one night.

We did not dare, we knew, to dwell on these things; we would go insane. We hastened to collect a pile of dead limbs. We grasped the dank, rotten things— limbs and branches which broke on lifting, or crumbled to dust between our fingers. At last, however, our heap was piled high with the dryest, the firmest of them, and over all we poured a full barrel of kerosene. And as we lit the vast pile, and watched the flames roar high and higher, a sigh of pain, sorrow and impotent rage swept the field of death.

"The fire hurts them," I said. "While there is fire they can not harm us; the forest will burn, and they will all die."

"But will the forest burn? Will they let it burn? They have dimmed the sun; they have even dimmed our torches. See! They should be brighter! Would the forest burn of itself, even if they let it alone? It is damp and rotten, and will not burn. See, our fire is burning out! We have failed."

Yes, we had failed. We were forced to admit it when, after two more trials, we were at last satisfied beyond any doubt that the forest could not be destroyed by fire. Our hearts had been strong with courage, but now fear haunted us, cold perspiration flooded our sick, trembling bodies as we sent the clattering truck hurtling up the rocky trail to safety. Our torches flared in the wind, and left a black trail of smoke behind us as we fled.

But, we promised ourselves, we would come again. We would bring many men, and dynamite. We would find where this thing had its capital, and would destroy it.

And we tried. But again we failed.

There were no more deaths. Even the most obstinate moved from the stricken country when spring came and revealed the actual presence of the deadly circle. No one could doubt the mute testimony of the dead and dying trees that fell in its grip. Fifty, a hundred or two hundred feet in a night the circle spread; trees that one day were fresh and alive, sprouting with shoots of green, were the next day harsh and yellow. The death never retreated. It advanced during the nights; held its ground during the day. And at night again the fearful march continued.

A condition of terror prevailed over the populations in adjoining districts. The newspapers carried in their columns nothing but blasted hopes. They contained long descriptions of each new advance; long, technical theories of the scientists assembled at the front of battle; but no hope.

We pointed this out to the terror-ridden people, told them that in our idea lay the only chance of victory. We outlined to them our plan, pleaded for their assistance. But, "No," they said. "The plague is spreading. It began in the wood, but it is out of the wood now. How would it help to burn the wood now? The world is doomed. Come with us, and live while you can. We must all die."

No, there was no one willing to listen to our plan. And so we went north, where the death, through its unfamiliarity and remoteness, had not yet disrupted society. Here the people, doubtful, hesitant, yet had faith in their men of science, still preserved order, and continued in industry. But our idea received no welcome. "We trust the doctors," they said.

And none would come.

"FRED," I told him, "we have not yet failed. We will equip a large truck. No! We will take a tractor, a huge machine that will run even through the forest. We will do as we said. Take more kerosene, and dynamite; we will destroy it yet!"

It was our last chance; we knew that. If we failed now, the world was indeed doomed. And we knew that every day the death grew stronger, and we worked fast to meet it.

The materials we needed we hauled overland in the truck; more torches, dynamite, eight barrels of kerosene. We even took two guns. And then we loaded all these in an improvised trailer behind the caterpillar, and started out.

The wood was dark now, although it was not yet midday when we entered. Black as a well at midnight was the forest; our torches sent their flickering red a scant twenty feet through the obstinate murk. And through the shivering darkness there reached our ears a vast murmur, as of a million hives of bees.

How we chose a path I do not know; I tried to steer toward the loudest part of the roar, hoping that by so doing we would find the source itself of the scourge. And our going was not difficult. The tractor laid down its endless track, crushing to paste beneath it the dank, rotting wood which littered the forest floor. And from behind, over the smooth track crushed through the forest, lumbered the heavy trailer.

The gaunt, scarred trees, shorn of every limb, stood around us like weird sentinels pointing the way. And, if possible, the scene grew more desolate the farther we proceeded; the creaking trunks standing pole-like seemed more and more rotten; the odor of death around us, not the sickening odor of decay, but the less noxious yet more penetrating smell of rottenness complete, grew even more piercing. And It called and drew. From out of the darkness it crept into our brains, moved them, changed them to do its will. We did not know. We only knew that the odor around us no longer nauseated; it became the sweetest of perfumes to our nostrils. We only knew that the fungus-like trees pleased our eyes, seemed to fill and satisfy some long-hidden esthetic need. In my mind there grew a picture of a perfect world: damp, decayed vegetation and succulent flesh— rotting flesh— upon which to feed. Over all the earth, it seemed, this picture extended; and I shouted aloud in ecstasy.

At the half-involuntary shout, something flashed upon me, and I knew that these thoughts were not my own, but were foisted upon me from without. With a shriek, I reached to the torch above and bathed my arms in the living flame; I grasped the taper from its setting and brandished it in my comrade's face. The cleansing pain raced through my veins and nerves; the picture faded, the longing passed away; I was myself again. If only we had obeyed the call, gone forth into the shrilling forest! Yet, always after that, we could feel the obscene mind toying with ours, trying still to bend us to its purpose. And I shuddered when I recalled that those thoughts could well have been those of a worm!

Then, suddenly, above the roar from without and the steady beat of our engine, we heard a human chant. I idled the motor, jerked out the gears. Clear on our ears it smote now, a chant in a familiar, yet strangely altered tongue. Life! In this region of death? It was impossible! The chant ceased, and the hum among the poles of trees doubled in intensity. Someone, or something, rose to declaim. I strained my ears to hear, but it was unnecessary; clear and loud through the noisome darkness rose its high semi-chant:

"Mighty is our lord, the Worm. Mightier than all the kings of heaven and of earth is the Worm. The gods create; man plans and builds; but the Worm effaces their handiwork.

"Mighty are the planners and the builders; great their works and their possessions. But at last they must fall heir to a narrow plot of earth; and even that, forsooth, the Worm will take away.

"This is the House of the Worm; his home which none may destroy; the home which we, his protectors, have made for him.

"O Master! On bended knee we give thee all these things! We give unto thee man and his possessions! We give unto thee the life of the earth to be thy morsel of food! We give unto thee the earth itself to be thy residence!

"Mighty, oh, mighty above all the kings of heaven and of earth is our lord and master, the Worm, to whom Time is naught!"

Sick with horror and repulsion, Fred and I exchanged glances. There was life! God knew what sort, but life, and human! Then, there in that forest of hell, with the odor, sight, and sound of death around us, we smiled! I swear we smiled! We were given a chance to fight; to fight something tangible. I raced the motor, snapped the machine into gear and pushed on.

And one hundred feet farther I stopped, for we were upon the worshippers! Half a hundred of them there were, crouching and kneeling, yes, even wallowing in the putrefaction and filth around them. And the sounds, the cries to which they gave vent as our flaming torches smote full upon their sightless, staring eyes! Only a madman could recall and place upon the printed page the litanies of hate and terror which they flung into our faces. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; but nowhere this side of the pit of hell itself can be heard the raucous cries that issued from their straining throats as we grasped our tapers and raced toward them. A few moments only did they stand defiantly in our way; the pain of the unaccustomed light was too much for their sensitive eyes. With shrill shouts of terror they turned and fled. And we looked about us, upon the weltering filth with which we were surrounded, and— smiled again!

For we saw their idol! Not an idol of wood, or stone, or of any clean, normal thing. It was a heaped-up grave! Massive, twenty feet long and half as high, it was covered with rotting bones and limbs of trees. The earth, piled there in the gruesome mound, shivered and heaved as from some foul life within. Then, half buried in filth, we saw the headstone— itself a rotting board, leaning askew in its shallow setting. And on it was carved only the line: "The House of the Worm."

The house of the worm! A heaped-up grave! And the cult of blackness and death had sought to make of the world one foul grave, and to cover even that with a shroud of darkness!

WITH a shriek of rage I stamped my foot upon the earth piled there. The crust was thin, so thin that it broke through, and nearly precipitated me headlong into the pit itself; only a violent wrench backward prevented me from falling into the pitching mass of— worms! White, wriggling, the things squirmed there under our blood-red, flaring light, writhed with agony in the exquisite torture brought to them by the presence of cleansing flame. The house of the worm, indeed…

Sick with loathing, we worked madly. The roar of the alien forest had risen to a howl— an eldritch gibber which sang in our ears and drew at our brains as we toiled. We lit more torches, bathed our hands in the flame, and then, in defiance of the malign will, we demolished the quivering heap of earth which had mocked the form of a grave. We carried barrel after barrel of fuel, and poured it upon the squirming things, which were already spreading out, rolling like an ocean of filth at our very feet. And then, forgetting the machine which was to take us to safety, I hurled the box of black powder upon them, watched it sink through the mass until out of sight, then applied the torch. And fled.

"Art! The tractor— the rest of the oil we need to light our way out— "

I laughed insanely, and ran on.

A hundred yards away, we stopped and watched the spectacle. The flames, leaping fifty feet in air, illumined the forest around us, pushed back the thick unnatural gloom into the heavy darkness behind us. Unseen voices that howled madly and mouthed hysterical gibberish tore at our very souls in their wild pleading; so tangible were they that we felt them pull at our bodies, sway them back and forth with the unholy dance of the rocking trees. From the pit of foulness where the flames danced brightest, a dense cloud of yellow smoke arose; a vast frying sound shrilled through the wood, was echoed back upon us by the blackness around. The tractor was enveloped in flames, the last barrel of oil spouting fire. And then—

There came a deep, heavy-throated roar; the pulpy ground beneath our feet waved and shook; the roaring flames, impelled by an irresistible force beneath them, rose simultaneously into air, curved out in long sweeping parabolas of lurid flame, and scattered over the moaning forest floor. The powder!

The house of the worm was destroyed; and simultaneously with its destruction the howling voices around us died into a heavy-throated whisper of silence. The black mist of darkness above and about shook for a moment like a sable silk, caught gropingly at us, then rolled back over the ruined trees and revealed— the sun!

The sun, bright in all his noonday glory, burst out full above us, warming our hearts with a golden glow.

"See, Art!" my companion whispered, "the forest is burning! There is nothing now to stop it, and everything will be destroyed."

It was true. From a thousand tiny places flames were rising and spreading, sending queer little creepers of flame to explore for further progress. The fire, scattered by the explosion, was taking root.

We turned, we walked swiftly into the breath of the warm south wind which swept down upon us; we left the growing fire at our backs and moved on. A half-hour later, after we had covered some two miles of fallen forest and odorous wasteland, we paused to look back. The fire had spread over the full width of the valley, and was roaring northward. I thought of the fifty refugees who had fled— also to the north.

"Poor devils!" I said. "But no doubt they are already dead; they could not endure for long the brightness of the sun."

AND so ends our story of what is perhaps the greatest single menace that has ever threatened mankind. Science pondered, but could make nothing of it; in fact, it was long before we could evolve an explanation satisfactory even to ourselves.

We had searched vainly through every known reference book on the occult, when an old magazine suddenly gave us the clue: it recalled to our minds a half-forgotten conversation which has been reproduced at the beginning of this narrative.

In some strange way, this Cult of the Worm must have organized for the worship of death, and established their headquarters there in the valley. They built the huge grave as a shrine, and by the over-concentration upon worship of their fanatical minds, caused a physical manifestation to appear within it as the real result of their thought. And what suggestion of death could be more forceful than its eternal accompaniment— the worms of death and the bacteria of decay? Perhaps their task was lessened by the fact that death is always a reality, and does not need so great a concentration of will to produce. At any rate, from that beginning, that center, they radiated thought-waves strong enough to bring their influence over the region where they were active; and as they grew stronger and stronger, and as their minds grew more and more powerful through the fierce mental concentration, they spread out, and even destroyed light itself. Perhaps they received many recruits, also, to strengthen their ranks, as we ourselves nearly succumbed; perhaps, too, the land once conquered was watched over by spirits invoked to their control, so that no further strength on their part was required to maintain it. That would explain the weird noises heard from all parts of the forest, which persisted even after the worshippers themselves had fled.

And as to their final destruction, I quote a line from the old volume where we first read of the theory: "If this be true, the only way to destroy it is to cease to believe." When the mock grave, their great fetish, was destroyed, the central bonds which held their system together were broken. And when the worshippers themselves perished in the flames, all possibility of a recurrence of the terror died with them.

This is only our explanation, and our belief. But Fred and I do not wish to engage in scientific debate; we only wish an opportunity to forget the chaotic experience which has so disrupted our lives.

Reward? We had our reward in the destruction of the vile thing we fought; yet to that satisfaction an appreciative world has added its wealth and its favor. These things we are thankful for and enjoy; what man does not? But we feel that not in adulation nor yet in pleasure lies our ultimate recovery. We must work, must forget the experience only by assiduous toil; we are stamping the horror, if not from our minds, at least from our immediate consciousness. In time, perhaps…

And yet we can not entirely forget. Only this morning, while walking in the fields, I came across the dead carcass of a wild beast lying in a furrow; and in its thin, decaying body was another life— a nauseous, alien life of putrescence and decay.

__________________

12: Spirit-Led

Ernest Favenc

1845-1908

From Tales of the Austral Tropics, 1893

IT WAS the hottest day the Gulf had seen for years. Burning, scorching and blistering heat, beating down directly from the vertical sun, in the open, radiating from the iron roof which provided what was mistakenly called shade. In the whole township there was not a corner to be found where a man could escape the suffocating sense of being in the stoke-hole of a steamer.

The surroundings were not of a nature to be grateful to eyes wearied with the monotony of plain and forest. The few stunted trees that had been spared appeared to be sadly regretting that they had not shared the fate of their comrades, and the barren ironstone ridge on which the township was built gave back all the sun's heat it had previously absorbed with interest.

Two men who had just come in from the country swore that where they crossed the Flinders the alligators came out and begged for a cold drink from their water-bags; and the most confirmed sceptic admitted the existence of a material hell. Naturally there was little or no business doing and, just as naturally, everybody whose inclination pointed that way went "on the spree."

Amongst those who had not adopted this mode of killing old father Time were two men in the verandah of the Royal Hotel. (When Australia becomes republican it is to be presumed that a 'Royal' will cease to be the distinguishing feature of every township.)

The two men in question were seated on canvas chairs in the verandah, both lightly attired in shirt and trousers only, busily engaged in mopping the perspiration from their streaming faces, and swearing at the flies.

"Deuced sight hotter lounging about here than travelling," said Davis, the elder of the two; "I vote we make a start."

"I'm agreeable," replied his companion; "the horses must be starving out in the paddock. We shall have a job to get Delaine away, though; he's bent on seeing his cheque through."

"That won't take long at the rate he's going. He's got every loafer in the town hanging about after him."

"Hullo! what's that?" said the other, as the shrill whistle of a steam launch was heard. "Oh! of course, the steamer arrived at the mouth of the river last night; that's the launch coming up. Shall we go down and see who is on board?"

The two men got up and joined the stragglers who were wending their way across the bare flat to the bank of the river. The passengers were few in number, but they included some strangers to the place; one of whom, a young-looking man with white hair and beard, immediately attracted Davis' attention.

"See that chap, Bennett?" he said.

"Yes, Dick, who is he?"

"Some years ago he was with me roving for a trip; when we started he was as young-looking as you, and his hair as dark. It's a true bill about a man's hair going white in one night. His did."

"What from? Fright?"

"Yes. We buried him alive by mistake."

"The deuce you did!"

"He had a cataleptic fit when he was on watch one night. The other man— we were double-banking the watch at the time— found him as stiff as a poker, and we all thought he was dead, there was no sign of life in him. It was hot weather— as bad as this— and we couldn't keep him, so we dug a grave, and started to bury him at sundown. He came to when we were filling in the grave; yelled blue murder, and frightened the life out of us. His hair that night turned as you see it now, although he vows that it was not the fright of being buried alive that did it."

"What then?"

"Something that happened when he was in the fit, or trance. He has never told anybody anything more than that he was quite conscious all the time, and had a very strange experience."

"Ever ask him anything?"

"No; he didn't like talking about it. Wonder what he's doing up here?"

By this time the river bank was deserted; Davis and Bennett strolled up after the others and when they arrived at the Royal, they found the hero of the yarn there before them.

"Hullo, Maxwell," said Davis, "what's brought you up this way?"

Maxwell started slightly when he saw his quondam sexton; but he met him frankly enough although at first he disregarded the question that had been asked.

In the course of the conversation that followed Maxwell stated that he was on his way out to the Nicholson River, but with what object did not transpire.

"Bennett and I were just talking of making a start to-morrow, or the next day. Our cattle are spelling on some country just this side of the Nicholson. We can't travel until the wet season comes and goes. You had better come with us."

"I shall be very glad," replied the other, and the thing was settled.

Bennett had been looking curiously at this man who had had such a narrow escape of immortality, but beyond the strange whiteness of his hair, which contrasted oddly with the swarthy hue of his sunburnt face, and a nervous look in his eyes, he did not show any trace of his strange experience. On the contrary, he promised, on nearer acquaintance, to be a pleasant travelling companion.

The summer day drew to a close, the red sun sank in the heated haze that hovered immediately above the horizon, and a calm, sultry night, still and oppressive, succeeded the fierce blaze of the day-time. The active and industrious mosquito commenced his rounds and men tossed and moaned and perspired under nets made of coarse cheese-cloth.

The next morning broke hot and sullen as before. Davis had risen early to send a man out to the paddock after the horses, and was in the bar talking to the pyjama-attired landlord.

"You'll have to knock off his grog or there'll be trouble," he said; "he was up all last night wandering about with his belt and revolver on, muttering to himself, and when a fellow does that he's got 'em pretty bad."

"I'll do what I can, but if he doesn't get drink here he will somewhere else," replied the other reluctantly.

"Then I'll see the P.M. and get him to prohibit his being served. It's the only way to get him straight."

At this moment the subject of their remarks entered the bar— a young fellow about five or six and twenty. He was fully dressed, it being evident that he had not gone to bed all night. The whites of his eyes were not blood-shot, but blood-red throughout, and the pupils so dilated that they imparted a look of unnatural horror to his face.

"Hullo, Davis," he shouted; "glad to see a white man at last. That old nigger with the white hair has been after me all night. The old buck who was potted in the head. He comes around every night now with his flour-bag cobra all over blood. Can't get a wink of sleep for him. Have a drink?"

His speech was quite distinct, he was past the stage when strong waters thicken the voice; his walk was steady, and but for the wild eyes, he might have passed for a man who was simply tired out with a night's riding or watching.

The landlord glanced enquiringly at Davis, as if to put the responsibility of serving the liquor on him.

"Too early, Delaine, and too hot already; besides, I'm going to start to-day and mustn't get tight before breakfast," said the latter soothingly.

"O be hanged! Here, give us something," and the young fellow turned towards the bar, and as he did so caught sight of Maxwell who had just come to the door and was looking in.

The effect of the dark face and snow-white hair on his excited brain was awful to witness. His eyes, blazing before, seemed now simply coals of fire. Davis and the landlord turned to see what the madman was looking at, and that moment was nearly fatal to the newcomer. Muttering: "By — —  he's taken to following me by daylight as well, has he? But I'll soon stop him;" he drew his revolver and, but that Davis turned his head again and was just in time to knock his hand up, Maxwell would have been past praying for. The landlord ran round the bar, and with some trouble the three men got the pistol from the maniac, who raved, bit, and fought, like a wild beast. The doctor, who slept in the house, was called, and, not particularly sober himself, injected some morphia into the patient's arm, which soon sent him into a stupor.

"By Jove, Davis, you saved my life," said Maxwell; "that blessed lunatic would have potted me sure enough only for you. Whom did he take me for?"

"He's in the horrors, his name is Delaine, and he's out on a station on the tableland. They had some trouble with the blacks up there lately, and, I suppose, it was the first dispersing-match he had ever seen. There was one white-haired old man got a bullet through his head, and he says he felt as though his own father had been shot when he saw it done. He's a clergyman's son; of course he drinks like a fish and is superstitious as well."

"I trust they'll lock him up until I get out of the town; but I'll remember your share of this. Wait until we get away and I will tell you what brought me up here, but don't ask me any questions now. Is your friend Bennett to be trusted?"

"In what way? Wine, women or gold? I don't know about the first two, but the last I can answer for."

"It's a secret. Possibly connected with the last."

"I hope so, I want some bad enough. I think I know where to put you on to a couple of good horses, and then we'll make a start."

ii

THE stove-like township is three days journey away; four men, Davis, Bennett, Maxwell, and a blackfellow are camped for the night by the side of a small lagoon covered with the broad leaves of the purple water-lily. In the distance the cheery sound of the horse-bells can be heard, and round the fire the travellers are grouped listening to Maxwell who is telling the tale he has never yet told.

"When I fell down on watch that night and became to all appearance a corpse, I never, for one instant, lost either consciousness or memory. My soul, spirit, or whatever you like to call it, parted company with my body, but I retained all former powers of observation. I gazed at myself lying there motionless, waited until my fellow-watcher came around and awakened the sleeping camp with the tidings of my death, then, without any impulse of my own, I left the spot and found myself in a shadowy realm where all was vague and confused. Strange, indistinct shapes flitted constantly before me; I heard voices and sounds like sobbing and weeping.

"Now, before I go on any further, let me tell you that I have never been subject to these fits. I never studied any occult arts, nor troubled myself about what I called 'such rubbish.' Why this experience should have happened to me I cannot tell. I found I was travelling along pretty swiftly, carried on by some unknown motive power, or, rather, drifting on with a current of misty forms in which all seemed confusion.

"Suddenly, to my surprise, I found myself on the earth once more, in a place quite unknown to me.

"I was in Australia— that much I recognised at a glance— but where abouts?

"I was standing on the bank of a river— a northern river, evidently, for I could see the foliage of the drooping ti-trees and Leichhardt trees further down its course. The surrounding country was open, but barren; immediately in front of me was a rugged range through which the river found its way by means of an apparently impenetrable gorge. The black rocks rose abruptly on either side of a deep pool of water, and all progress was barred except by swimming. The ranges on either hand were precipitous, cleft by deep ravines; all the growth to be seen was spinifex, save a few stunted bloodwood trees.

"What struck me most forcibly was that in the centre of the waterhole, at the entrance of the gorge, as it were, there arose two rocks, like pillars, some twelve or fifteen feet in height above the surface of the water.

"Below the gorge the river-bed was sandy, and the usual timber grew on either bank. At first I thought I was alone, but, on looking around, I found that a man was standing a short distance away from me. Apparently he was a European, but so tanned and burnt by the sun as to be almost copper-coloured. He was partially clothed in skins, and held some hunting weapons in his hand. He was gazing absently into the gorge when I first noticed him, but presently turned, and, without evincing any surprise or curiosity, beckoned to me. Immediately, in obedience to some unknown impulse, I found myself threading the gloomy gorge with him, although, apparently, we exercised no motion. It was more as though we stood still and the rocks glided past us and the water beneath us. We soon reached a small open space or pocket; here there was a rude hut, and here we halted.

"My strange companion looked around and without speaking, drew my attention to a huge boulder close to the hut and on which letters and figures were carved. I made out the principal inscription. 'Hendrick Heermans, hier vangecommen, 1670.' There were also an anchor, a ship and a heart, all neatly cut. I turned from these records to the man. He beckoned me again, and I followed him across the small open space and up a ravine. The man pointed to a reef cropping out and crossing the gully. I looked at it and saw that the cap had been broken and that gold was showing freely in the stone. The man waved his hand up the gully as though intimating that there were more reefs there.

"Suddenly, sweeping up the gorge came a gust of ice-cold wind, and with it a dash of mist or spray. Looming out of this I saw for a moment a young girl's face looking earnestly at me. Her lips moved. 'Go back. Go back!' she seemed to whisper.

"When I heard this I felt an irresistible longing to return to my discarded body and in an instant gorge, mountains and all my surroundings disappeared, and I found myself in the twilight space battling despairingly on, for I felt that I had lost my way and should never find it again.

"How was I to reach my forsaken body through such a vague, misty and indeterminate land? Impalpable forms threw themselves in my path. Strange cries and wailings led me astray, and all the while there was a smell like death in my nostrils, and I knew that I must return or die.

"O, the unutterable anguish of that time! Ages seem to pass during which I was fighting with shadows, until at last I saw a sinking sun, an open grave, and men whose faces I knew, commencing to shovel earth on a senseless body.

"Mine!

"I had felt no pain when my soul left, but the re-entrance of it into its tenement was such infinite agony, that it forced from me terrible cries that caused my rescue from suffocation."

Maxwell paused, and the other two were silent.

"You will wonder," he resumed, "what all this has to do with my present journey. I will tell you. You remember Milford, a surveyor up here, at one time he was running the boundary-line between Queensland and South Australia for the Queensland Government. A year ago I met him, and we were talking about the country up this way. In running the line he had to follow the Nicholson up a good way, until finally he was completely blocked. He described to me the place where he had to turn back. It was the waterhole in the gorge with the two rock-like pillars rising out of the water."

Again there was silence for a while, then Davis said musingly.

"It's impossible to pronounce any opinion at present; the coincidence of Milford's report is certainly startling. But why should this sign have been vouchsafed to you? Apparently this being you saw was the ghost of some old Dutch sailor wrecked or marooned here in the days of the early discovery of Australia. Had you any ancestors among those gentry?"

"Not that I am aware of," returned Maxwell, "but if we find the place we shall certainly make some interesting discovery, apart from any gold."

"And the girl's face?" enquired Bennett.

Maxwell did not answer for a minute or two.

"I may as well tell you all," he said then; "I was in Melbourne, after I saw Milford, and I met a girl with that same face, in the street. Strange, too, we could not help looking at each other as though we knew we had met before. That meeting decided me on taking the trip up here. Now, that is really all. Are you ready for the adventure?"

"I should think so," said Davis; "we have fresh horses at the camp, and nothing to do with ourselves for three months or more. Please God, on Christmas Day we'll be on Tom Tiddler's ground picking up gold in chunks."

"One question more," put in Bennett. "Have you ever had any return of these trances or cataleptic fits?"

"Never since, not the slightest sign of one."

iii

THERE WAS no doubt about the strange proof or coincidence, whichever it should turn out to be. The three men stood on the bank of the Nicholson River gazing at the gorge and the waterhole, from the bosom of which rose the two upright pillars of rock. Two weeks had elapsed since they were camped at the lagoon.

"It is the same place," muttered Maxwell, and, as the overwhelming horror of his fight through shadowland came back to him, he leant on his horse's shoulder and bowed his head down on the mane.

Bennett made a sign to Davis and both men were silent for a while, then Davis spoke—

"Well, old man, as we are not possessed of the supernatural power you had when you were last here, we'll have to get over that range somehow."

Maxwell lifted his head. "We shall have to tackle the range, but I expect we shall have a job to get the horses over. How about leaving them here in hobbles and going up on foot?"

"Not to be thought of," replied Davis; "why, the niggers' tracks just back there in the bed of the river, are as thick as sheep-tracks. The horses would be speared before we got five miles away. I know these beggars."

"That's true," said Bennett.

Davis eyed the range curiously for some time. "There's a spur there that we can work our way up, I think," he said at last, indicating with his hand the spot he meant. The other two, after a short inspection, agreed with him. It was then nearly noon, so the horses were turned out for a couple of hours' spell, a fire lit and the billy boiled.

"What could have led your Dutch sailor up this way?" said Davis as, the meal over, they were enjoying an after-dinner pipe.

"That is what has puzzled me. I have read up everything I could get hold of on the subject of Dutch discovery and can find no record of any ship visiting the Gulf about that date," replied Maxwell.

"There may have been plenty of ships here, of which neither captain nor crew wanted a record kept. Those were the days of the buccaneers," said Bennett.

"Yes, but with the exception of the ship Dampier was on board of, they did not come out of their way to New Holland," returned Maxwell.

"The Bachelor's Delight and the Cygnet were on the west coast, as you say; why not others who had not the luck to be associated with the immortal Dampier?"

"True; but the Dutch were not noted as buccaneers. However, plenty of ships may have been lost in the Gulf of which all record has disappeared. The question is, what brought the man up into this region?" said Davis.

"I firmly believe we shall find the clue to that secret, when we find the ravine. It seems incredible that a shipwrecked or marooned man should have left the sea-coast, whereon was his only hope of salvation and have made south into an unknown land, through such a range as this."

"Well, boys, we'll make a start for it," said Davis, jumping up; and the party were soon in their saddles.

The range proved pretty stiff climbing, and they were so often baulked, and forced to retrace their steps, that it was sundown before they reached the top.

IT WAS a desolate outlook for a camp. A rough tableland of spinifex— evidently extending too far for them to attempt to go on and descend the other side before darkness set in— lay before them.

"Nothing for it but to go on and tie the horses up all night," said Bennett. Fortune, however, favoured them; in about a mile they came on a small patch of grass, sufficient for the horses, and as their water-bags were full, they gladly turned out.

For a time the conversation turned on their expectations for the morrow, but gradually it dropped, as the fire died down. One by one the stars in their courses looked down through the openings of the tree-tops on the wanderers sleeping below, and silence, save for the occasional clink of a hobble, reigned supreme until the first flush of dawn.

"Well, Maxwell," said Davis, as they were discussing breakfast, "hear anything from your old Dutch navigator last night?"

"No, but I had some confused sort of dream again about this place; I thought I heard that voice once more telling me to 'go back'. But that, of course, is only natural."

"I think we are close to the spot," remarked Bennett. "When I was after the horses this morning I could see down into the river, and there appeared to be an open pocket there."

Bennett proved right. In half-an-hour's time they were scrambling down the range, and soon stood in an open space that Maxwell at once identified.

Naturally everybody was slightly excited. Although at first inclined to put the story down to hallucination, the subsequent events had certainly shaken this belief in the minds of the two friends. Maxwell silently pointed to the boulder; there was something carved on it, but it was worn and indistinct. Two centuries of weather had almost obliterated whatever marks had been there.

"They were fresh and distinct when I saw them," said Maxwell, in an awed voice.

By diligent scrutiny they made out the inscription that he had repeated, but had they not known it the task would have been most difficult. The words had not been very deeply marked, and the face of the boulder fronting north-west, the full force of the wet seasons had been experienced by the inscription.

"This is a wonderful thing," said Davis. "There can be no doubt as to the age of that."

"Let's go up the ravine and look for the reef and then get back as soon as possible. I don't like this place. I wish I had not come," returned Maxwell.

They left the packhorses feeding about and rode up the gully, taking with them the pick and shovel they had brought. "It was here, I think," said Maxwell, looking around; "but the place seems altered."

"Very likely the creek would change its course slightly in a couple of hundred years, but not much. That looks like an outcrop there."

"This is the place," said Maxwell, eagerly, "I know it now, but it is a little changed."

The three dismounted, and Davis, taking the pick, struck the cap of the reef with the head of it, knocking off some lumps of stone. As he did so a wild "Holloa!" rang up the gully. All started and looked at each other with faces suddenly white and hearts quickly beating. There was something uncanny in such a cry rising out of the surrounding solitude.

"Blacks?" said Bennett, doubtfully. Davis shook his head. Once more the loud shout was raised, apparently coming from the direction of the inscribed rock.

"Let's go and see what it is, anyway," said Davis— and they mounted and rode down the gully again, Bennett, who had picked up a bit of the quartz, putting it into his saddle-pouch as they rode along.

Maxwell had not spoken since the cry had been heard, his face was pale and occasionally he muttered to himself, "Go back, go back!" The packhorses were quietly cropping what scanty grass there was; all seemed peaceful and quiet.

"I believe it was a bird after all; there's a kind of toucan makes a devil of a row— have a look round old man," said Davis to Bennett, and they both rode up and down the bank of the river, leaving Maxwell standing near the rock where he had dismounted. Nothing could be seen, and the two returned and proposed going up the gully again.

"You fellows go and come back again, I want to get out of this— I'm upset," said Maxwell, speaking for the first time in a constrained voice.

Davis glanced at his friend. "Right you are, old man, no wonder you don't feel well; we'll just make sure of the reef and come back. If you want us, fire your pistol; we shan't be far off."

The two rode back to their disturbed work and hastily commenced their examination of the stone. There was no doubt about the richness of the find, and the reef could be traced a good distance without much trouble. They had collected a small heap of specimens to take back, when suddenly the loud "Holloa!" once more came pealing up the gully followed instantly by a fainter cry and two revolver-shots.

Hastily mounting, the two galloped back.

The packhorses, as if startled, were walking along their tracks towards home, followed by Maxwell's horse with the bridle trailing; its rider was stretched on the ground; nothing else was visible.

Jumping from their horses they approached the prostrate man. Both started and stared at each other with terror-stricken eyes. Before them lay a skeleton clad in Maxwell's clothes.

"Are we mad?" cried Davis, aghast with horror.

The fierce sun was above them, the bare mountains around, they could hear the horses clattering up the range as if anxious to leave the accursed place, and before them lay a skeleton with the shrunken skin still adhering to it in places, a corpse that had been rotting for years; that had relapsed into the state it would have been had the former trance been death. Blind terror seized them both, and they mounted to follow the horses when an awful voice came from the fleshless lips: "Stay with me, stop! I may come back; I may—"

Bennett could hear no more, he stuck the spurs in his horse and galloped off. Davis would have followed but he was transfixed with terror at what he saw. The awful object was moving, the outcast spirit was striving desperately to reanimate the body that had suddenly fallen into decay. The watcher was chained to the spot. Once it seemed that the horrible thing was really going to rise, but the struggle was unavailing, with a loud moan of keenest agony and despair that thrilled the listener's brain with terror it fell back silent and motionless. Davis remembered nothing more till he found himself urging his horse up the range. The place has never been revisited.

IN AN asylum for the insane in a southern town there is a patient named Bennett, who is always talking of the wonderful reef he has up North. He has a specimen of quartz, very rich, which he never parts with day or night. He is often visited by a man named Davis, who nursed him through a severe attack of fever out on the Nicholson. The doctors think he may yet recover.

_______________

13: The Garage Crime

Anonymous

Sunshine Advocate (Victoria) 8 Jan 1932

THIS IS the real story of the garage crime that thrilled the country, mystified the police, and then collapsed.

"Arrest the murderer!" cried the newspapers. "Arrest the murderer!" cried the public. And Scotland Yard remained silent, as is its wont. As silent as Scotland Yard remained John Stubbins, the man who had carried out the crime to his own satisfaction.

He read the newspapers, listened to the talk in trains, trains, and buses, and waited until the Police would produce the body he had left in the garage. He knew he was safe. He had committed the perfect crime. If he were arrested, he could produce evidence that would put the police to confusion and secure his acquittal.

Not that he ever expected it would go to the length of a charge. He had left no evidence that would produce a charge. But he had left Thomas Mellsor in that garage for the police to find and for Mellsor's friends to bury.

Mellsor had had no notion that Stubbins hated him or intended to kill him. The two were business friends— competitors, yet on good terms. Neither of them was married, but both of them were looking towards the same girl. Neither of them had made his mark in their common profession, but both of them were climbing. If there were any difference between them, it was that Stubbins was a swift thinker, but a slow worker, while Mellsor was a plodder in thought and a thorough worker.

On Saturday afternoon they had gone for a run in Mellsor's car to talk over a financial deal. It was Mellsor who had invited Stubbins to come for the run. The business they were discussing had to be completed within the next few days.

While they were motoring the brilliant idea of how to kill Mellsor came to Stubbins. They returned to the suburb where Mellsor lived as evening descended. The valley of the Thames was covered with a grey mist. As they drove towards the lock-up garage Mellsor turned to Stubbins.

"What do you think?" he asked. "I've suggested that we work together on this deal. What do you say?"

"I'll tell you after we have stabled your bus," replied Stubbins. "I'm deuced thirsty, aren't you?"

They had reached the side street it where the garage was built between the backs of two tall houses. A small Inn stood at the corner of the street. As the car stopped before the garage door Stubbins got out.

"I'm going for a Guinness," he said. "I'll bring one back for you."

"Thanks," said Mellsor. "I could do with one to wash the dust out of my throat."

When Stubbins came back with two bottles Mellsor was standing beside the car bonnet. He had taken off his coat and was rolling up his sleeves. The engine was still running.

"Just a minute, Stubbins," he said. "I'm looking for that rattle she developed on the way back. I'll just take a peep at the engine." He lifted a spanner and went to the radiator, lifting the side flap and peering inside. Stubbins was pouring out the drinks, he came over and handed a foaming tumbler to Mellsor.

"Drink up," he said. "You've all night to look for' the rattles. Cheerio!"

"Cheerio!" said Mellsor, talking the tumbler and almost emptying it at a  draught. "Say, that's queer— funny taste in that stout—" He reeled and the spanner dropped from his hand and clattered on the stone floor. Then he crumpled up.

Stubbins caught him is he flopped to the floor.

"That dope will not leave any trace after a few hours," he muttered, "It's the real cure for insomnia, but there won't be any insomnia to cure you of, Mellsor, when I've done."

Then Stubbins carried out the rest of his plan. It was simple, yet very cunning.

HE had thought it all out on the journey. The dope he had slipped into the drink was powerful enough, if its after-effects were harmless. He had used it on himself often enough, for he had suffered from insomnia. First, he pulled on his gloves and washed out Mellsor's tumbler at the garage tap. He rinsed the glass well. Then he emptied the two bottles of stout down the sink, leaving a. little in the glass from which he had drunk. He took this glass, after he had wiped its sides, pressed the fingers of the unconscious man on it, and set it back on the shelf besides the empty bottles.

Next, he took a bag of tools and laid it beside the car, near Mellsor, placing a pair of pliers on the running-board. Then he shut the garage windows. He now went over to the car and disconnected a sparking-plug. Then he started up the engine. Even with the disconnected plug it ran all right, the exhaust breathing out the gas which was to complete the crime he had planned.

Stubbins, however, did not want Mellsor to die quickly. He wanted it to appear that he had been overcome, had fallen down, and had been killed by the poisonous carbon monoxide gas, as had happened in one or two recent cases. For that reason he did not accelerate the engine. If he did so, Mellsor would be dead before Stubbins reached his own rooms. Stubbins did not want that. His alibi needed time; or, if not his alibi, his explanations and, at worst, his defence.

The garage was a fairly large one, and the car had been backed in. The vapor was being sent from the exhaust towards the back wall. It would lie on the paved floor and smother Thomas Mellsor within an hour, or even within half an hour. Already the first whiffs were having their effect on Stubbins himself. He went out of the garage, closed the doors, leaving the light blazing, and walked away.

He slept well that night. The next day he called on a friend and spent the day with him. This was part of his plan. On Monday morning he bought a newspaper as usual on hiss way to the railway station. The news he sought was in the Stop Press. The body of Thomas Mellsor had been found beside his car, and the police were investigating the case. The evening papers gave space to the story of the finding of Mellsor's body: but they differed in their statements. One said the body had been found by a policeman. Another that Mellsor had died in the police station.

Next morning the newspapers gave little more information, but all agreed that a crime had been committed, and recalled the unsolved murder mysteries of the last ten years.

"There has been no murder!" answered the police. "The body was found, but we are convinced there has been no murder." That was all.

Stubbins sat tight, waiting for the evening newspapers. They came out, and, to his relief, there was no big headline. There was not even a paragraph about Mellsor's death. Not a line, not a word. The matter was finished, closed, he was safe. The stupidity of the police had triumphed over the imagination of the newspaper correspondents.

For a few more days Stubbins sat tight. At the end of a week he moved. All danger was past. There had not even been an inquest; not a question had been put to him. He could do now what he had killed Mellsor to do. He could steal the man's work as he had taken his life. All that was necessary was to manipulate certain documents Mellsor had given him to study. By erasing here, adding there, explaining this and incorporating that, he would have turned Mellsor's labors to his own advantage.

He erased, added, altered, and incorporated. It took him some days, but he managed it very successfully. He approached the people with whom he had planned to negotiate, They were willing, eager to come to terms. He made an appointment to sign the necessary deeds. He went to the appointment cheerily, happily, for he was now to reap the reward of his perfect crime, Stubbins was shown into the large room where the papers were ready for his signature. He signed with a flourish, and stretched out his hand for the price of his labors.

Then the door opened, and Stubbins gave a shout. Facing him was the man he had killed in the garage.

Behind Mellsor were two detectives. "No," said one, as he fastened the handcuffs on Stubbins' wrists, "Mr. Mellsor did not die in the garage. One of our men saw a light in the place, opened the door, and found him suffering from the effects of gas poisoning. He was given plenty of milk, and that cured him. But we let the newspapers go ahead, only denying that there had been a murder, because there hadn't been one. Then, when they attacked us, we asked them not to refer to the affair until we gave them the true story."

"The true story!" gasped Stubbins.

"Yes, the true story. Mr. Mellsor told us he was positive he had been drugged; and we advised him to lie low and we'd watch your moves.

"The reason he isn't dead is that the petrol tank of the car was practically empty when you started the engine. The draught from under the door kept the vapor to the back of the garage. It's attempted murder and fraud that will be charged against you, so come along."

________________

14: A Desperate Choice

Guy Thorne

C Ranger Gull, 1876-1923

Daily News (Perth, W. Aust) 16 Aug 1911

'SO NOW,' said Mr. Solomon, the chairman of the Suburban Theatres Company, Ltd., 'everything is arranged and you will be in sole charge of the Crown Theatre from this time forward. I know you'll do your best for the company, Mr. Wilson.'

Mr. Horatio Wilson bowed.

'I shall do my very best, sir,' he answered, 'you may rely upon it I haven't been knocking about the provinces for ten years as an acting manager in number two towns without knowing when a good thing comes my way at last . Not much!'

'Well of course,' said Mr. Solomon, genially, 'it is certainly a big rise in the profession, and to manage a big suburban theatre with success leads to even greater promotion. The company controls four West End theatres, and -don't forget it, dear boy. You've signed the contract?— that's all O.K, and here's your copy. Have a cigar and something to wet the deal.'

Outside, in Shaftesbury Avenue, the rain was falling with steady persistency, and London was as grim and dismal as may be upon a soaking autumn afternoon. But the private office of great theatrical emperor, Mr. Ben Solomon, was warm and luxurious.

A bright fire of logs burnt in the grate; the chairs were padded with crimson leather and fitted themselves comfortably to the curves and angles of the figure, the carpet was soft and thick, while dozens of stage beauties looked down in photographic splendour from the walls.

Mr. Solomon, tall, portly, and handsome, went to a cupboard and took from it a bottle, the neck of which was wrapped in gold-foil, and a couple of glasses. As the wine creamed out the firelight sparkled in the facets of the enormous diamond ring he wore upon the little finger of his left hand.

Horatio Wilson, thirty-five, clean shaven, and with a typical actor's face, registered an inward vow that some day he too would sport just such another ring as the great man was wearing.

'Then you'll go down to the theatre to-night?' asked Mr. Solomon.

'I think it would be best to take charge to-night,' answered the new manager. 'There is no reason to wait until to-morrow, even though you've given me the post so suddenly. I suppose the theatre staff know?'

'They knew first thing this morning,' said Mr Solomon. 'Very  well, go down to-night. After all, there's nothing like getting into harness at the earliest possible moment. Well, so long. Remember, do well for me, and I'll do well' for you.'

AS WILSON descended the steps from the office, smoking the excellent cigar which Mr. Solomon had given him, he knew himself to be one of the happiest men' in London' at that moment. What did it matter if London was wet and dreary? The sunshine in his heart irradiated everything, and . everything was brighter than a brilliant afternoon in June. After long years of drudgery, lack of recognition, poverty even, he had suddenly been discovered by some of the watchful agents of the great company.

Unknown to himself, his work had been carefully noted, his record inquired into. And then, hey presto: a sudden summons to the headquarters in Shaftesbury-avenue, a few words from the great Solomon, and he stood, for the first time in his professional career, upon Solid Rock!

At this very moment, as he turned into Piccadilly Circus, he was no longer a touring actor and manager for someone else, a mere second-in-command, a servant liable to be dismissed at a fortnight's notice. Under the Suburban Theatres Company, he was the sole manager of the great Crown Theatre at Hackney. A large staff was under his entire control and within the four walls of the well-known house he was absolute king.

He saw himself in a few hours, standing in the foyer in resplendent evening dress with an eye on the box office, counting the house from an empty box, receiving local pressmen courteously in his private room, or strolling, round behind to have . a' chat with the well-known comedian who was playing at the Crown Theatre that week. It was a blissful vision, and, better, than all, it was no dream, but a vision which, in a few hours, must automatically come true!

Yes, there could be few happier men in London at that moment, and the greatest reason of all for joy was— Mabel!

Mr. Horatio Wilson hailed a taxicab.

'Drive, to 100, Theatre-street, Kensington-road,' he said. He was going to Mabel now; he had promised to have tea with her and her sister Gertie yesterday. But that was before he found Mr. Solomon's letter, marked 'Urgent,' waiting for him at the Actors' Association.

Mabel hadn't the remotest idea of his good fortune. She didn't know that now there was nothing in the world to prevent her immediate marriage to him.  Here was a situation after an actor's own heart, and even as the cab drew up at the door of the sisters' lodging Horatio Wilson was mentally rehearsing his part and arranging the scene to come.

Mabel and Gertie Churchill were 'comediennes,' and did a sprightly song and dance turn at the lesser music-halls. They were exceedingly popular with their audiences, and both ardently hoped for an engagement in the West End of London. They were charming girls — cheerful, hardworking, economical, and steady— and they intended to get married at the first possible opportunity Mabel had now promised herself to Wilson for nearly two years; but both of them had prudent instincts, and resolved to wait until they were in a decent position to marry, and set up a home, and had accumulated something in the bank against a rainy day.

Horatio dismissed his cab, rang the bell, and was admitted at once. Mabel was alone, seated at a little piano, and trying over a song as her lover entered, while the tea-table was drawn cosily up to the fire, and a plate of muffins kept warm in the fender. She was a tall 'dashing' sort of girl, with a beautiful and supple figure, black hair, bright blue eyes, and ted lips curved in a full, sensuous bow.

'Dear boy!' she cried in a loud, musical voice, and, throwing her arms round Horatio's neck, gave him two resounding kisses, one on each cheek, 'so glad you've come: Gertie will be down in a minute What a beast of a day. I say, what d'you think, such a bit of luck!'

Wilson started— so Mabel had some news too! He hoped, he almost hoped, that it was not going to eclipse his own. That would quite the scene and he wanted all 'the fat' himself in the act.

He was speedily relieved. The news, interesting as it was, bore no comparison to his own. The Sisters  Churchill  were engaged to give a turn after supper at a special night of the Peculiar Club— that famous' Bohemian society to which so many celebrities belonged.

'Apart from the members,' Mabel said breathlessly, 'there are only three paid turns, and we're one of them. Isn't it splendid? It will mean a West End show certain, if all goes well. All the theatrical journalists will be there, and most of the managers of the halls.'

'Topping, darling!' said Horatio, quite carried away by the girl's enthusiasm, and forgetting all the little set speeches he had made in the cab. 'Splendid. And I've got news, too! Better than yours even. Hurry up and get your things ready, and we can be married this day month!'

Mabel gave a shriek. 'What is it?' she shouted. 'Tell me! Tell me, quick!'

'I've got a theatre! A two years' certain contract with Solomon himself, and; every chance of promotion at the end of it! In me, fair maiden, you behold the new director of the Crown Theatre, Hackney, who enters upon, his duties this very night!'

At that moment Miss Gertie Churchill came dancing into the room, and the news was told her.

'Well,' she said, her pretty face beaming with congratulation, 'things are humming, and no mistake. Pity it isn't a hall, Horatio, then you could give me a chance.'

'Oh, yours will come soon, Gertie. The family's struck the vein right and good. We're all going to be stars now. I expect you and Mabel will knock them silly to-night.'

'Oh! Mabel's told you, then. Isn't it a chance? I wish you were going to be, there.'

'Oh! I wish you could, old boy,' Mabel chimed in. 'Is it absolutely necessary for you to take up the management of the Crown to-night?'

'I'm afraid it is, Mabel dear,' Wilson replied. 'I told Solomon that I preferred to do so, and he seemed pleased. I can't go back, on my word, now. It would be making a bad start. Of course, if I'd known of this show of yours to-night I'd have cried off. I know a good many members of the Peculiar Club. I could easily have got a card, I'm sure.'

'Well, it's no use crying over spilt milk,' Mabel said, philosophically, 'and It isn't much to grumble about, considering everything. What time will you be finished?'

'I can't exactly say, dear,' Horatio answered; 'fairly late, I expect. There'll be a lot to see to on my first night down there, The show will be over a little before eleven; but I may be half an hour after that.'

'Oh! That's not so bad,' Gertie said. 'Of course, you won't be, in time— or I expect not — to see our show; but you can come to the club and fetch us. It'll be a very late affair. They don't sit down to supper till eleven, because a lot of the boys are playing at the different theatres We shan't get home till morning, I expect. In fact, we are going to have a sleep till about nine— after tea.'

'I'll tell you what I'll do,' the actor said suddenly, 'it's worth the extra expense on an occasion like this. I'll get through my work as quickly as I can, and I'll have a taxi-cab waiting. That ought to bring me to the club door a little after midnight. I may still be in time for your show. If not, then I can take you home and hear all about it, at any rate.'

SHORTLY AFTER, Mr. Wilson bade the girls good-bye, and, in the highest possible spirits, sought the Strand and Mime Lane for an hour before setting out for Hackney. In the haunts of the mummers he tasted to the full the joys of his new position. In the Bodega and Rules, those informal clubs of the rank and file of the stage, he enjoyed a triumph. He was a popular man, ever ready to help a brother in distress, and was known to everyone.

The warm-hearted actors crowded round him with their congratulations and if he had accepted what he was pressed to take, it is highly probable that the Crown Theatre would never have seen him at all that night. But the young man's head was very firmly screwed upon, his shoulders. Mr. Solomon never left anything to chance, and chose his men with discrimination— and again and again he reiterated, 'Thanks, not now, old boy; another time,' in answer to the frequent 'Just one with me to celebrate the occasion '

He broke away at last and went to the bed-sitting-room he occupied in a quiet street off the Strand, where he changed into evening clothes.

'I really must run to a fur coat this winter,' he thought. 'Proper thing for the manager. Can't do without it. In fact I wonder what's the cheapest I could get one for?  Old Solomon ought to provide them, by Jove!'

Wilson arrived at the theatre about a quarter to seven, and was greeted in the foyer by the assistant manager with great empressement. The tall commissionaire at the entrance saluted him; the clerk in the box-office called him 'Sir' in an anxious voice; and even the pert girl attendants with their sheaves of programmes giggled and tossed their heads no longer as he passed by, but cast down their eye's and tried to look innocent and modest for once.

It was the same upon the stage The stage manager for the touring company that was occupying the boards of the theatre that week— a man whom Wilson knew slightly— shook hands with him effusively. The great Mr. Snell himself, who was making up in the star dressing-room, called him 'dear old boy,' and proffered champagne; and as for the carpenters and scene shifters, they ran about like busy ants as they set the opening scene of the comedy under the eye of the new chief.

It was air eminently flattering and satisfactory, and Wilson felt at least two inches taller, and began instinctively to speak with a certain brusqueness, a ring of command in his voice.

When he had been all over the theatre, and the orchestra was already half-way through the overture, he suddenly turned to the assistant manager, who was conducting him.

'Good gracious!!' he said, 'I've forgotten one thing, and so've you, Mr. Howard. I've not seen my own private room yet!'

Mr. Howard smiled. 'I was coming to that, Mr. Wilson,' he said. 'Unfortunately, in this theatre— you know, it is an old one— the manager's room is right at the top of the building. It's nice and quiet and out of the way, of course, and it's connected by telephone with every part of the building and outside. But it's some way up to it— on the top floor of all, above the dressing-rooms.'

'Well, I shall have to put up with it, I suppose,' Wilson answered. 'But it's an inconvenient situation.'

'You can always use the room behind the box-office for interviews and so on,' said the assistant. 'Mr. Cox, the late manager, always did. The upstairs room he kept simply for his private work, and when he wished to be alone. The safe is there. But it won't be like this for long, Mr. Wilson. In the spring, after the pantomime, the house is going to be redecorated, and there will be a good many structural alterations too. Then you will have your own room on a level with the stairs. I've seen the plans.'

'I must do the best I can, till then,' Horatio answered, trying, and not very successfully, to infuse his voice  with a grumbling note— so proud and pleased was he with all he saw.

'And now, Mr. Howard, before the first act's over, suppose we go into the bar and drink to our harmonious working together in the future.'

On the best of terms with each other, the two men strolled into the long bar at the back of the dress circle, now empty save for the attendant Hebes and a programme girl, who was arranging, boxes of chocolates upon a tray.

'Here's to a long and prosperous management of the Crown, Mr. Wilson.'

'Chin-Chin!'

WILSON was alone in his room at the top of the theatre. Everyone had gone away, the performance, had been over for three-quarters of an hour, but some extremely important business letters had arrived by the evening post, and must be attended to at once. He had sent the stage-door keeper home, unwilling to keep the man any longer from his supper, and was quite alone in the big theatre.

He could shut the stage-door and lock it after him when he had turned out the electric light in the room where he was, and the one in the entrance passage on the ground floor. The taxicab that was to take him to the Peculiar Club was waiting at an adjacent hotel, but before he left the theatre Wilson conscientiously determined to polish off the work which lay before him, even at the cost of his own personal inclination.

He wrote steadily for half an hour, checked some accounts, and then, looking at his watch, found that it was a little after twelve. He stretched himself, lit a cigarette, and picked up his overcoat. How hot it was! He had felt uncomfortable while writing. Now he was actually streaming with perspiration.

'My liver must be out of order,' he thought, when suddenly he stopped dead in the centre of the room. There was a pricking at his nostrils, a bitter taste ran up his nerves to his brain, he smelt something curious. Then, swiftly, he became aware. Through the cracks of the door, and from the space beneath it, thin streams of yellow smoke were beginning to curl into the room, and his ears suddenly caught a distant sound of muttering, like a lot of angry men locked up in a cellar— like shouts 'heard off' in a melodrama.

It was now extremely hot, as hot as the last room in a Turkish bath, and the noise was like the roar of an advancing train. The man's eyes grew, wide with terror, his lips trembled, he swayed as one about to fall. He reeled to the door and opened it.

There was a fierce red glare upon the white-washed walls— a glare which played and eddied through the clouds of black smoke, and filled the narrow landing with a hideous radiance. He put his hand upon the iron rail and withdrew it with a groan. There was a blister upon it. Then he staggered back into the room and closed the door. There was absolutely no possibility of escape. In five or six minutes at most— perhaps much less— the flames must reach him. He threw open the window, and the room immediately cleared itself of smoke. Down below was a dark, narrow passage, without a sign of life, but already he could hear the excited shouts of a crowd on the other side of the theatre.

Death had come at last! But how should he die? Not, surely, in the red horror on the other side of the door! No! better a thousand times to be dashed to pieces on the cold flags far down below— anything but the red horror!

Mabel!

He would never see her again. She would never know that he died sending out all his love when in one last great effort, that as he fell her name was on his lips. She would never know. Oh, for one moment of farewell!

Then a thought flashed into his brain with tearing force, a last hope! There was just one hope that he might say good-bye before he died— for his agonised eyes had fallen, upon the telephone instrument upon the wall by the window.

Science had given him a chance!

He lifted the receiver and pressed it to his ear, and almost immediately, thin, clear, and far away, he heard the answering 'Hullo!' With a tremendous effort— there was not a second for explanation— he steadied his voice, and, gave the number of the Peculiar Club. There was a distant rumble, a clink— how quick they were!— and he heard the voice of the hall porter at the club.

'Miss Mabel Churchill? In a tremendous hurry? Yes, sir, she's finished her turn. I'll tell her at once.'

The panels of the door fell in, the red flames came roaring through the door, blazed up and vanished.'

'That you, dear, boy?'

'So it's all over, darling, darling of my heart! There's no chance. It will be done in a minute! But, I had to say good-bye. I love you; remember me. Good-bye!'

He heard a sudden clang, the sound of a heavy fall— voices.

Farewell!

He rushed to the window to end it all, and the flames caught at his coat as he fled. For a second he sat upon the ledge, thinking of her, sending her his last love in this world. Then he turned round to let himself drop; for he could not face the leap. The flames roared over his head in a canopy, lighting up all the abyss.

And by their light, within a few inches of his left foot, he saw a narrow, iron ladder clamped to the wall, and running right down to the ground. It was the permanent fire escape, placed there by order of the London County Council, and in two minutes Wilson was in the street.

'A VERY pretty wedding,' said Mr. Solomon to his friend and partner, Mr. Cohen, as the two gentlemen with white roses in their buttonholes, walked towards the Carlton about lunch-time, some five weeks afterwards.

'Very,' answered Mr. Cohen.

'Capital feller that Wilson. Near squeak for it, though, down at Hackney!'

'It was, though all's well that ends well. The old house was capitally insured, and we shall have a new and modern theatre there without it costing us a penny.'

'And you'll put Wilson back there, I suppose?'

'Not much, my boy. An inferior man'll do well enough there. Wilson's going to the Frivolity, where we open next month with "Farewell." '

______________

15: Trapped

Richard Ashe King

1839-1932

Petersburg Times (Sth Aust) 24 Aug 1894

Irish writer, a former Anglican minister in Ireland, who left the Church, moved to London and turned to fiction. He wrote a great many rather sentimental popular novels, mostly set in Ireland.

'HE'S a tyrant, and bully, and brute!' cried Jim Corbett, a young private, lately joined to his sweetheart, Mary Barry, whose winsome face was overshadowed by the bad news Jim had just communicated to her as they sat side by side in the twilight upon the common.

'But why wouldn't he let you, Jim, as he let Slicer?'

'Why wouldn't he ? Because he wouldn't; that's why. Because he wouldn't. He said there were baggages enough attached to the regiment, and he wouldn't have another trollop, and— and all kinds of bad names he called you.'

'Called me?'

'Called you all— all the women of the regiment who were on the strength, and you too. He isn't a gentleman, nor a man— nor a man!' cried Jim, excitedly, and almost in the same breath he whispered, 'There he is!'

'Is that him ? The Colonel?'

'Ay !' he rejoined, with a yet more vehement curse.

'Jim,' she gasped, with a sudden inspiration, ' suppose I went and axed him myself ?'

'You !'

'Why not? A cat may look at a king,' replied Mary with a saucy toss of her head.

'Begor! they say he can't resist a purty face,' replied Jim, as much to himself as to his sweetheart ; for he was half converted to her audacious idea of asking the Colonel what that officer had already, and roughly, refused himself, to sanction his marriage to Mary

'There's no harm in trying anyway; we can't be worse off than we are,' Mary said, rising; and making after the Colonel, who was crossing the common for a night's heavy play with his friend Hillman. Soon overtaking him, she began, in her soft Cork brogue, 'Plase, yer honor—'

'Halloa!' cried the Colonel, turning upon her a look of gross admiration. 'By George !' he cried, as she dropped her eyes in confusion at the sort of admiration ex-pressed in his. 'And what can I do for you, my dear?'

'Plase, yer honour, I'm Mary Barry.'

'Mary Barry?'

'Her that Jim Corbett was axing ye about, yer honour,' she faltered, blushing scarlet, not so much in shyness for the kind of favor she was about to ask, as in shame for the kind of look the Colonel gave her— the insulting leer of a Satyr.

'So you want to be married, my dear? Very anxious, eh? Very anxious? By George, so should I, if I was that lucky scamp Corbett. And what would you give to be married to him, Mary ? A kiss ? It's cheap at a kiss. Just one, my dear ?' he said, after reassuring himself, by a hasty glance on each side of him that they were alone in the gathering darkness.

' Don't sir, don't for God's sake ! Jim is—'

But the warning was smothered by the kisses the Colonel gave her. He had taken her in his arms, and he held her there till a staggering blow from Jim released her.

'You —you scoundrel!' gasped the Colonel. 'You shall pay for this! Strike your Colonel ! By——! I'll court martial you! You'll get five years for it, my man!'

But even as he spoke the Colonel knew that he daren't make a court-martial matter of it to his own exposure and disgrace. It would have been better far for Jim if he had; since a strong hint from his commanding officer to the sergeant of his company was enough to make Jim's life a burden to him. He was harassed to madness by petty, daily, stinging, and incessant impositions and punishments, all of which he duly and justly set down to the vindictive malice of the Colonel.

Little wonder, therefore, that poor Jim, whose tongue and temper were not always under control, used threats at all times and in all places, and to all men, against both the sergeant and the Colonel, but especially against the Colonel.

One day, under the usual provocation, he was relieving his feelings by a burst of strong language against the Colonel, whom he stigmatised as a cur and coward who deserved to be licked like a dog, and would die a dog's death, when one of the men cried, 'Hush!' Corbett, on looking round, perceived Lieutenant Massy, who had always shown a kindly interest in him as a fellow townsman.

'Look here, Corbett, just keep that tongue of yours quiet, or you'll get into trouble before you know where you are!' Massy said.

Jim saluted, stammered an apology, and asked permission to make a private statement to the lieutenant.

It was then for the first time that Massy heard of the offence and of its provocation, for which the Colonel through the sergeant was persecuting Corbett incessantly.

'You're a deal too ready with your fist, Corbett,' cried Massy, in a tone of irritation, addressed to Jim, but meant for the Colonel. And with your tongue too, my man. Suppose anything happened the Colonel, who has no end of enemies, words like those I just heard you use would go near to hang you.'

NOT MORE than three days later Massy had good reason to remember his ominous words, for the Colonel was found one morning in the barrack yard stabbed through the heart. He had evidently been felled from behind with the butt of a rifle, and then stabbed to the heart with its bayonet. His soldier servant, whom he always now took with him to his friend Hillman's, upon the pretext that his services were required to wait at table there, but really as an escort, declared he had been dismissed by the Colonel upon their entering the barrack yard, and that he had heard no sound of any sort, either of a blow, of a cry, or of a struggle.

As the Colonel was, perhaps, the most deservedly unpopular officer in the entire British army, suspicion would hardly have attached itself so certainly to Corbett but for two damning pieces of circumstantial evidence. Corbett's bayonet was found not stained, or smeared merely, but dyed with blood, and the Colonel's watch and chain were found concealed in the ticking of his bed. Only lieutenant Massy declined to consider this evidence conclusive against a man who was known to entertain and to express such a murderous feeling towards Colonel Steadman as Jim Corbett. As, contended the Lieutenant, no murderer, however unnerved, would forget to wipe off such easily erasable evidence of the crime, the probability was that the real criminal, in order to divert evidence from himself to Corbett had both smeared Jim's bayonet with blood and thrust the Colonel's watch into his bed ticking.

Everyone else, however, argued that nearly murderers committed in their confusion follies of a like incriminating kind, and also that a man so passionate and so feather-brained as Corbett would be more than usually likely to lose his head under the circumstances, to the neglect of the most obvious precautions. But Massy was as little convinced of Jim's guilt as poor Mary Barry, to whom Jim sent him as a comforter when the Lieutenant asked him was there anything he could do for him.

'There's my little girl,' said poor Jim, with a sob. 'She'll take it hard, sir. If you'd see her, and say I never done it, I'd thank ye kindly, yer honour.' And this simple message the Lieutenant carried to her endorsing it strongly with his own assurance of Jim's innocence.

'God bless yer honour! God in Heaven bless ye!' Mary said, when she could speak at all. 'Sure Jim wouldn't hurt a fly, barren' he was in a passion. He'd no more sthrike a man from behind in cold blood and thin shtale his watch than ye would yerself, beggin' yer honour's pardon!'

Of this, as I say, Massy was convinced himself, but how to convince others of it, and save an innocent man from the gallows?

Shortly after his return that morning, from his interview with poor Mary, to the barracks, a rumour run through all ranks that Lieutenant Massy had employed the most lynx-eyed and sagacious of detectives to make a minute examination of the scene of the murder, which had been guarded from intrusion ever since the discovery of the body. Hardly had this rumour gone the rounds than it was followed by another to the effect that a most singular and decisive clue had been found.

What was this clue? It ought, of course, to have been kept a profound secret, since its disclosure might put the murderer on his guard ; nevertheless, through the indiscretion of one of the sentinels who were set to guard the scene of the murder, the secret leaked out. It seems that on the ground— which here was unpaved and sodden with rain— there were footmarks— distinct from those of the Colonel— of a boot having peculiarities so singular and decided as, declared the detective, would alone go a long way to hang its wearer. Accordingly the entire regiment was to be paraded that afternoon in the barrack yard to have their boots examined by the detective.

Before that parade came off, however, the murderer was discovered ! Lieutenant Massy had given the non-coms strict orders to look out for the first man who attempted to change his boots, and Simpson, the late Colonel's servant and escort, was caught changing those he wore for a cast off pair the Colonel had given him. The corporal set to watch, acting according to his orders took the boots and carried them off, apparently for inspection by the detective; but once outside the door he laid the boots down and applied his eye to the keyhole. Through it he saw Simpson shove his bed hastily aside, kneel on the floor, and proceed to hammer home with the handle of a bayonet a nail in a loose board.

Not many minutes later the detective carrying the boots and hammer, and accompanied by Lieutenant Massy and the corporal, entered the room and proceeded without a word to start the plank Simpson had just fastened down. Under it were found an I.O.U. of Hillman's and a large sum of money in notes and gold— the Colonel's heavy winnings at play— for which he had been murdered. The lynx-eyed detective and his singular and certain boot-mark clues were a wily invention of Massy's to entrap the murderer.

_______________

16: Disinherited

Richard Ashe King

Western Mail (Perth) 16 Feb 1895

SHE HAD BEEN more than an hour on the lookout for him through the blurred and grimy window of their dingy London lodging before he came in sight at last.

His springless step, his bowed shoulders and bent bead, his haggard eyes, fixed sightless upon the pavement, told the same tale of failure that they had told for many a weary week.

Nevertheless, the face with which she greeted him was cheery— at least, in expression. In itself it was a sadder face than even his, since a deeper trouble looked out through the great grey eyes, which seemed to devour it— so much larger did they look against the pinched, pale, faded cheek— as stars loom larger through the fading twilight. For had not she been the cause of the blasting of his prospects?

If she had declined to marry him, or even had insisted upon the postponement of the marriage till his father had consented to it, or till he had been made independent of his consent by his father's death, all would then have gone well with him.

Mark was not only the eldest-born, but also his father's favourite son; and all the wiles of his crafty stepmother would have failed to supplant him by her own son, Gilbert, if Mark had not hopelessly offended his father by his marriage to her poor vicar's daughter.

'The same old story, darling,' Mark said when he had entered with her their miserable room and had kissed her, taking her sweet wistful face between his two hands, with a kind of reverential tenderness. 'There are a score or more applicants for every place, and each with a hotter chance, and better right to a better chance than I. What can I do? I declare I am fit only to be a docker or coal-porter, and it's what I'll have to come to,' he groaned, sinking wearily into a chair.

'You are tired, dear, that's it,' she said, soothingly, pressing his head against her breast with one hand, and with the other softly stroking his hair. 'You've had nothing to eat since breakfast.'

He shook his head and then added in explanation of his having bought nothing to eat.

'I had to take to the underground at last; I was so done up.'

'And I have such a wretched tea for you, dear. She— she's been very unpleasant,' she sobbed, breaking down in spite of herself at the recollection of the low abuse the landlady had poured out upon her, in the presence, of the servant, and in the hearing of another lodger, because the rent was in arrears.

He said nothing; but, as her cheek was now resting on his bowed head, she felt him grind his teeth in impotent rage and a fierce despair. Then she repented of her selfish confidence.

'It's her way; she didn't really mean anything, Mark; and— and besides, I am not quite well,' she stammered.

'Lucy! Lucy! What have I brought you to?' he moaned, burying his head in is hands.

'You? It is I who have ruined your life, Mark. If only— but I cannot wish it undone ever for your sake, dearest-not for your sake even!'

For answer he folded her in his arms and whispered as he kissed her, 'If we have nothing else, we have each other, which is more to us than all else,'

For the next few minutes they were wrapt high above the sordid, suffering, desperate present, and were recalled to it only and as from a dream by a knock at the door.

'Come in.'

'Please, ma'am, a telegram,' the servant said, just opening the door sufficiently to thrust in a grimy hand holding out the pink envelope.

Lucy hurried to the door, took the envelope and brought it to Mark, who tore it open, expecting it to be a favourable answer to one of his numberless applications for employment.

'It's from Martha!' he exclaimed and then proceeded to read the message 'Your father is dying. Come at once. All depends upon it.'

Martha was Martha's old nurse, who was always on the lookout for his interests, and had never despaired of his restoration to his father's favour.

'Mark! You must go!'

'Yes, dear; of course. I shall not lose a moment. Poor father!'

He started up and hurried from the room for his hat; but at the hall door he turned round abruptly to cry to Lucy who had followed him:

'But I have got no money for my fare.'

'Oh! I forgot!'

'Perhaps the landlady—?'

Lucy shook her head most decidedly.

'Then I must pledge something, dear.'

' There's hardly anything of any value left, Mark. Oh! what shall we do?'

However they got together what was left and available— only a handful of well worn clothes, which Mark carried off to the nearest pawn office.

But here he was offered something less for it than the amount of his third class fare to Westwich, and he had therefore to hurry off to another with no better success. At a third, however, by taking off his waistcoat and adding it to the heap, he obtained a few pence over the fare, with which he made all haste on foot to Paddington.

It took him in his exhausted state nearly an hour and a half to walk the five miles to the terminus, and he reached it only to find that the last train to Westwich was gone.

As he had had nothing to eat since breakfast, and had been all day upon his feet, he was so utterly done up that this last cruel disappointment quite crushed him. He dropped down upon a bench and stared straight before him for au hour or more, without seeing anything, or thinking anything definite— his stunned mind being only conscious of a blank, black despair.

At length he rose to return to Poplar, but found himself so weak that he had to spend some of his hard got pittance of money upon food.

LEAVING him to his weary trudge back to Poplar, let us go with his thoughts to the bedside of his dying father.

Old Mr. Apjohn had been struck down so suddenly that he had time to do little more than disinherit Mark. Like many men, he had in health such a superstitions, horror of making a will, that all his wife's continual coaxings could not induce him to put the business into the hands of his lawyer.

Convinced at last that he would make a will only when in extremis, she had got her own legal adviser to draw up for her in the tersest form in which a valid will could be compressed a document leaving everything to her in trust for her son.

This she copied out upon an ordinary sheet of letter paper, to give an unplanned impromptu appearance to the business, and got the dying man to sign it in the presence, as witnesses, of the butler and of her maid.

Just then the doctor appeared, and Mrs. Apjohn put away the will hurriedly and guiltily into a blotter. Before the doctor had finished his examination, she was called away to minister to the wants of her son, who had just arrived; and upon the doctor's leaving the room no one remained in it but old Martha, Mark's nurse and faithful guardian.

'Your son, Mark, is dying in Lunnon of want, do you hear?' cried the old woman, excitedly, in the dying man's ear. 'And what will you say to her mother when you meet her beyond? Listen to this—"

I have been brought up to do nothing, and of course can get nothing to do."

'Who brought him up to do nothing, and then flung him out to die of starvation upon the Lunnon stones? Who? And what will ye say to his mother when she axes ye, as she will, after her boy? Will ye dare say, "I left him to an old servant to keep him alive a little longer." Hear you this,' she cried, again reading from Mark's letter. ' "Dear old Martha, thank you for the money. I have to take it for I cannot see my wife starve under my eyes. We were literally starving when it reached us, having had nothing for two days but a little bread and tea." Hear ye that! What'll ye say to his mother? What'll ye say to her when she crys to ye, "My boy ! my boy!" '.

'Paper!' grasped the old man, trying to raise himself in bed. Martha took a sheet of paper from the blotter.

'Write— write it down!' gasped he, glaring at her with burning eyes. 'I leave my son, Mark, £1,000 a year for his life— only for his life,' he added. 'Witnesses.'

Martha hurried out of the room to get the same witnesses that had signed the other will. At the door she met Mrs. Apjohn.

'Please, ma'am,' she said, desperately, 'He wants to leave Master Mark something.'

'That's what you have been doing!' cried Mrs. Apjohn furiously. 'Leave the room and leave the house! And never enter it again!'

Seizing the old woman by the shoulder she thrust her with violence out of the door, which she shut sharply behind her. Striding then to the bedside of the dying man, she saw on the coverlet the codicil in Martha's writing with the ink still wet. Taking it up she read it, and then, fixing a look of almost brutal defiance on her dying husband she held the sheet of paper to the candle and burned it under his eyes.

Tho shock seemed to shake the last sands of life more quickly through tho glass, for the eyes fixed on the burning paper suddenly glared, the jaw dropped and his triumphant widow stood alone in the room.

NEXT MORNING Mark was too ill to make another attempt to get to Westwick and all but too ill to quit his bed. Weeks of privation, exhaustion, and poignant mental agony had so weakened him that this last blow prostrated him.

When the landlady burst in upon him about mid-day and almost screamed without any preface, 'Come! Out of this you go this day. I am not going to keep you when I pay rates to the parish to keep you, Mark looked up in piteous helplessness at his wife, stirring that usually meek little woman to sudden rage. 'Leave the room!' she cried, advancing upon the astounded Mrs. Taggart so threateningly that she retreated precipitately to the door.

'Pay me your rent then!' she screamed from her safe position, taking care that the whole house should hear. 'Pay me your tent!'

'Pay you your rent then!' echoed Martha, elbowing Mrs. Taggart roughly out of her way. 'Do you know who you're speaking to, woman? A gentleman who could buy up your whole street to-morrow and never miss the money— there!'

Having made this announcement also in the hearing of the whole house, the worthy Martha slammed the room door in Mrs. Taggart's face, and turned to inform Mark that, as his father had died intestate, he, as eldest son, was heir to the property.

For the will disinheriting Mark, of Mrs. Apjohn's dictation, was at the other side of the opposite leaf of the sheet of paper which that good lady had burned, as containing a codicil in his favour.

_______________

17: La Belle Dame Sans Souci

Peter Cheyney

1896-1951

Modern Woman, Nov 1948

Collected in No Ordinary Cheyney, 1948 (Available free from Roy Glashan's Library)

THE time has come, I feel, to relate the rather extraordinary events which led to the death of my friend Michael O'Shaughnessy, whose body— as you will doubtless remember— was found in a coppice in the grounds of Honiton Place on the Somersetshire border. The finest brains of Scotland Yard were unable to trace the murderer. Nothing ever came to light except a one-legged sailor from the Argentine who gave himself up for the murder in order— as he put it— "to get a nice rest from his wife," and who was promptly sent about his business when it was discovered that he was in an intoxicated condition in Lambeth at the time of the tragedy.

The medical evidence shows that my friend Michael had been murdered with a large-bore pistol, and as he had few friends and such relations as he possessed merely regarded the whole business as rather vexing, the matter was left where it was.

Michael O'Shaughnessy was a very charming and attractive man of thirty-five years of age and the fact that he was rather bored with life has nothing to do with this story except that he believed, and often told me, that there is little romance in these utilitarian days; that life is indeed inclined to be weary, flat, stale and unprofitable. The ideal of beautiful woman, he would say, was falling into desuetude. And he would invite me to observe their lot. They stand all day in queues, he said, and thereby acquire large feet; they lack cosmetics and thereby acquire red noses. They waste their nerves, temper and their sweetness in obeying or evading the hundred and one controls that restrict normal life. And, as their men folk are much too busy getting into or keeping out of the black market to spare any time at all in the consideration, much less the practice, of the finer technique of romance, life, thought O'Shaughnessy, was almost redundant.

His background was interesting. He had been born in England of Irish and French parentage. He was temperamental in a queer way. When war broke out in '39 he had been only twenty-six years of age and was learning to be an architect.

He enjoyed the war. To him, it spelled adventure and romance. That tense atmosphere of excitement, which on occasion could make even a doodle-bug seem interesting, brought with it a certain glamour which appealed to him. Naturally, he fought for his country, and as an officer in a cavalry regiment whose light tanks were famous at the Battle of Alamein, he achieved experience, and a philosophy which stood him in good stead during his life and, I must confess, at the moment of his death.

He was tall. His face was inclined to be thin; his figure elegant. He had the soft eyes and high cheekbones of his Irish ancestry; the charm of manner and ease in conversation of the French— his mother's— side of the family. He liked to laugh, but was not averse from weeping if it would get him any place. He was attractive because... well, he couldn't help being attractive.

So much for my murdered friend. Having introduced him to you, I can now recount the events which took place on the night of his death.

AT nine o'clock on the night of the 30th January 1948, Michael O'Shaughnessy, who was spending the week-end at the Moat Farm in a romantic and secluded part of the country, the name of which cannot possibly matter, decided to go for a walk. For some reason he was, on this particular evening, a little affected by some peculiar quality in the moonlight. There was something curiously romantic and attractive about it and, walking down the lane which turned into the road that led towards the county border, he noticed, or fancied he noticed, a strange radiance on fields, trees and hedges cast by this full, brilliant and, as it were, tantalising moon.

He walked for some twenty minutes; decided to smoke a cigarette. But he found, when the time came to light it, that a small breeze had sprung up. So he stepped off the road into the little wood that fringed it and, after a minute or two, found himself in a small clearing, at one end of which was a felled tree. He liked this place, sat down on the tree, lit his cigarette and gave himself up to ruminations on the past, present and future.

Quite suddenly he became aware that he was not alone. Sitting on the other end of the tree was the portly figure of a middle-aged gentleman dressed in a suit of shepherd's plaid check. He was smoking a very small cigar and now and then, for some reason best known to himself, he wiped the corner of his mouth delicately with a lady's fine suède glove which he produced from his waistcoat pocket.

O'Shaughnessy gazed at this apparition; wondered how he had arrived on the scene. And he began to get an odd impression that he knew this person; that he had seen him before in several places; that, in fact, he had seen him and talked to him in Alamein on the night before the attack, wearing a battle jacket; and somewhere else, wearing something else.

The new-comer turned his head towards O'Shaughnessy, removed his bowler hat courteously and said: "Good evening, Sir. My name is Krasinsky. I think you know me."

"I believe I do." O'Shaughnessy smiled disarmingly. "But I cannot for the life of me place you."

"Men never can," said the other, "because I am one of those nebulous kinds of person who get about considerably. Some men think I am their conscience; others apprehend me as a sort of astral body driving about the place warning people. They think a thousand things about me."

"Exactly," said O'Shaughnessy. "But forgive me—  I'm rather puzzled by your sudden arrival here. I didn't see you come through the wood."

"I didn't," said Mr. Krasinsky. "I arrive at any place where I wish to be without appreciable effort. And I wanted to be here because I think I should tell you the story of a young friend of mine who looked somewhat like you. He was staying in this part of the world at one time, and circumstances led him, one evening, to a certain mansion not half a mile from here."

O'Shaughnessy nodded. "You mean Honiton Place; I've heard about it. In point of fact I'd intended to walk there tonight."

"A most interesting house," said Krasinsky. "Would you care to listen to my story? I think you ought to."

A pleasurable feeling of anticipation stole over Michael O'Shaughnessy. He felt, for some quite inexplicable reason, that the story which Krasinsky proposed to tell him was bound up with his— O'Shaughnessy's— life.

He said: "I should like very much to hear it."

"I'll tell it to you," said Krasinsky, "and I'll make it as short as possible because I observe"— he looked at the moon—  "that time is getting on. Well then, my young friend, whom I will call Armand Dulac, was staying at the Moat Farm, and one night he decided to go for a walk. He walked down this roadway and half a mile further on found the fork in the road. The right side ran away over the hills and disappeared into the horizon. The other, which he took, led him straight to the entrance, gates of Honiton Place.

"When he reached them Armand stood by these antique, wrought-iron gates awhile and contemplated the broad parkland that spread out before him. It was dotted with rhododendron bushes, shrubberies and trees. Beyond these, at the top of some terraces, lay the large, historic building. He found it most attractive in the moonlight, which was as bright as it is tonight....

"But," continued Krasinsky, "he was struck by one thing. He had heard the house spoken of as uninhabited; yet the darkness was interrupted, in one single corner on the second floor, by three lighted windows. Who, he wondered, could possibly be the occupants of such a place, at such a time.

"Now curiosity was a strong point with him, as it is with most young men, so he followed the carriage-drive, mounted the terraces and approached the house. When he got there the entrance doors were, he was amazed to find, open, and he walked through large and imposing portals into the hall. There he received a second surprise, for the moonlight, flooding through high stained glass windows, disclosed that, far from being empty, the wide hall before him was furnished with what seemed to be costly antique furniture. Valuable oil-paintings graced the walls and here and there delightful figures, carved in bronze or marble, looked down at him stonily.

"He stood in the middle of this hall possessed by a strange, and possibly odd, desire to know more about the place. Then he concluded that as he had found the doors open it was his duty to find his way up to the apartment, the windows of which were lighted, and to inform the occupant who might, he thought, be the caretaker, that the entrance doors were unlocked."

Krasinsky inhaled from his small cigar which, however much he smoked it, never seemed to grow any smaller. He continued: "Armand then ascended the flight of wide marble stairs on the other side of the hall and presently found himself in the first floor gallery which surrounded the hall. The walls of this gallery were lined from floor to ceiling with mirrors, and it was only after some time and by the aid of the moonlight that he discovered the glass knob on one of the mirrors.

"He turned the knob. The door opened. Armand stepped through and closed the mirror door behind him. He was facing a curving carpeted staircase and, without more ado, began to walk up it. At the top was a small landing and on the other side a translucent glass door. Inside this glass door there was a softly diffused light which intrigued him. He opened the door and went in.

"Now," said Krasinsky, "I shall have a little difficulty in describing to you the atmosphere in which my young and enterprising friend found himself. He was in a corridor, thickly carpeted, and furnished with rare furniture and pictures. There was a strange atmosphere about the place— a suggestion of the most delightful perfume— a certain fascinating languor in the air which touched something within him. At the end of the corridor he saw a door ajar. He approached it, knocked, and a voice said: 'Come in....' "

Krasinsky smiled. "Are you interested, Mr. O'Shaughnessy?"

O'Shaughnessy nodded. "I'm more than interested. I'm enthralled. Please go on."

"I should explain to you," said Krasinsky, "that the words 'Come in' are two very ordinary words. In point of fact they are spoken by millions of people all over the world in all sorts of circumstances every day. But these two words were different. I would like to be able to describe to you," said Krasinsky, stroking the head of a baby white owl which had curved down and settled on his hand, "the quality of the voice which uttered them; the low and vibrant tone; the superb and complete enunciation of the two words, but I am afraid that I have not sufficient vocabulary. Let it suffice that my young friend was so entirely shattered at hearing these two words so beautifully spoken that he felt a little weak in the knees. It was only after a minute's hesitation that he was able to push open the door and step into the room."

"And what did he find there?" asked O'Shaughnessy.

"I will tell you," answered Krasinsky. "The room was long, with a low ceiling. The walls were of a rather mysterious shade of grey, but the lighting which was concealed above them gave them an even more mysterious colour. Opposite to him, beside a large log fire which glowed brightly, was a lady. It was she who had said 'Come in'." Krasinsky sighed heavily. "Armand gazed at her with eyes that almost popped from their sockets because never in his life had he seen a woman with so much beauty, with so much allure... well, so much everything..." murmured Krasinsky, spreading his hands, at which the white owl flew away.

"Her face was superbly modelled. Her hair was auburn and fell about her shoulders. Her eyes, which were of an exquisite shade of hazel, regarded him coolly. But it was her mouth which fascinated Armand. It is impossible," said Krasinsky, "quite impossible for me to describe the tremulous beauty of her mouth." He paused and drew on his cigar; then: "Armand stood there and eventually was able to speak. He said: 'I'm sure you'll forgive me for coming here but I was walking in these parts and, inspecting the house, noticed that the front doors were open. I thought I'd better come in and tell you.'

"She said very softly: 'How nice of you. Wouldn't you like a drink? And please sit down.' Armand sat down. He found it impossible to take his eyes from her. He watched the superb grace with which she moved to a nearby table; poured out the whisky and soda; brought it to him. When she came near him he trembled at her proximity because there came to his nostrils a suggestion of such exquisite perfume that his senses were inclined to reel.

"He took the drink from her. He said hoarsely— and as he spoke the words it was almost as if someone else were speaking— 'I don't think I've ever seen anybody quite as lovely as you are. I don't think I've ever seen anyone who speaks or moves as exquisitely as you do. I think I adore you.' "

Krasinsky sighed again. "Don't you think that was rather charming?" he asked.

O'Shaughnessy started. "I think it was utterly charming," he said in his agreeable voice. "What happened then?"

Krasinsky continued: "The lovely lady was not at all surprised at this declaration of love," he said. "She returned to her couch, sat down and regarded my young friend Armand with her large, melting hazel eyes. She examined him carefully from top to toe. Then she nodded her head and smiled. She said in the same ravishing voice: 'How strange that you should say that, because I have thought about you for a long time. I have sat here night after night hoping that somebody that looked like you would come here and talk to me. That is why I had the front doors left open. I think I shall always love you.' "

Krasinsky exhaled cigar smoke. "Now what do you think of that?" he asked.

O'Shaughnessy shook his head. "I can't think," he said. "Go on."

Krasinsky went on: "Imagine the stupor into which this declaration from the lady threw Armand. He found himself unable to move, to speak or think. He would have sat there, I have no doubt, permanently, but for one thing...."

"What?" asked O'Shaughnessy impatiently.

"This," said Krasinsky. "The lady moved a little. Then she got up. She stood in front of the fire, looking at him. Then she said softly, and with a most delightful smile: 'Come here, my darling.' "

Krasinsky regarded his finger-nails. "He went there," he said. "And at this moment, presumably by some occult influence, the lights went out."

He stopped speaking. From the other end of the tree-trunk came a long sigh.

Krasinsky drew on his small cigar. "It was just after midnight," he said quietly, "when Armand Dulac, having taken a lingering farewell of his most beautiful companion, left the apartment and began to descend the curving staircase that led to the gallery below. As he reached the bend in the stairs he stopped and his jaw sagged a little, for approaching him rapidly, no less than two stairs at a time, was a very large, stalwart, black-bearded and burly gentleman whose normal ferocity of countenance was barely concealed by a frosty smile.

"This person stopped three stairs below Armand and regarded him with undoubted hostility, tinged with curiosity. Armand moved to the side of the stair. He said: 'Good evening.' The other gentleman, who was immaculately dressed in a dinner suit, said: 'I hope it will be, sir.' His accent was unmistakably Polish. He went on: 'I observe that you are leaving my wife's apartment. I shall be grateful if you will return with me in order that we may indulge in a little talk. Don't you think,' he added sternly, 'that a little explanation might be in order, having regard to the time, the circumstances, my absence and my wife's predilection for love?'

"Armand shrugged his shoulders. What could he say?" asked Krasinsky, regarding O'Shaughnessy with equanimity. "So he allowed the Polish gentleman to pass him and followed him docilely into the apartment, along the exotic corridor, past the drawing-room, the door of which was open; then to the right past another open door, through which the large gentleman put his head and said politely: 'Good evening, my dear'. Then to the end of a smaller corridor, through a door and into a comfortable and well-furnished library.

"Armand stood in the middle of the room whilst his host pulled two large arm-chairs in front of the fire. He accepted one and sat down. The Polish gentleman sat in the other. He beamed. He said: 'Sir, my name is Count Alexis Michalovski.'

"Armand said: 'I'm charmed to meet you. I am Armand Dulac.'

" 'Excellent,' said the Count. 'Now having presented ourselves to one another we can indulge in a little conversation. It will be quite obvious to you, sir, that I have brought you back here for the purpose of killing you. I return to my wife's apartment at midnight to find you leaving with an expression of equanimity on your face which can only be likened to that of a cat which has swallowed a canary— the canary being, in this case, the wife of my bosom. It will be obvious to you as a gentleman that this situation is not possible. Therefore you must die. Do you understand?'

"Armand thought that life was sufficiently sweet, having regard to what had happened earlier in the evening, to make some effort to prolong it. So he said: 'Sir, I should like to tell you that you are making a very grave error. At ten o'clock this evening I did not know of the existence of your wife; I had barely heard of the existence of this house. I did not imagine it was inhabited. I came out for a walk. I came through the iron gates because in the moonlight I thought that this mansion looked old, romantic and interesting. I saw that there were three lighted windows on the second floor; then I noticed that the front doors were open. I looked into the hall and I saw that there were some valuable pictures, antiques, and so on, there. I concluded that it was my duty to tell the caretaker or whoever occupied the mansion that the front doors were open and that any burglar could have entered and stolen what he wanted.'

"The Count fingered his moustache. He said: 'I am not certain that some burglar has not done exactly that thing, even if his interest was not in pictures.' He paused to regard Armand for a long time. 'You know, Mr. Dulac,' he continued, 'I'm rather inclined to believe your story. You have about you an air of innocence and truth. Also, I am reminded of my grandfather.'

" 'Indeed,' said Armand. The more prolonged the conversation, he thought, the more his chances of life.

" 'Yes, indeed,' said the Count. 'My grandfather—  Count Alexandrei Michalovski— was exceedingly partial to Englishmen. When I was a little boy he used to talk to me about "the word of an Englishman." In those days it was considered to be extremely good.'

"The Count got up from his chair; began to walk about the room with long strides. 'I am inclined to believe your story, Mr. Dulac. In fact, I will go so far as to say that I do believe it. I hope my acknowledgment of your veracity pleases you.'

" 'Yes, indeed,' said Armand with a sigh. 'I'm most grateful to you, sir. Naturally, I expected to be believed because I was telling the truth.' He added under his breath: 'May God forgive me'.

"The Count said: 'Very well then, all that remains is for me to wish you a very good evening.' Armand got up. They walked down the corridor into the main passage towards the entrance to the apartment. The Count held the door open. He said: T wish to tell you this, sir: I have decided that I will believe what you say, mainly because I like the shape of your face and also because in some vague way you remind me of my grandfather. But I should also tell you that if I ever see you inside this house again I shall, with pleasure and with a certain horse-pistol which I possess, without one moment's hesitation, murder you. Do you understand?'

"Armand said: 'I understand perfectly.'

" 'Then, good night, Mr. Dulac,' said the Count. 'As you go down the stairs you will observe on the landings, double electric light switches. The upper ones illuminate the floor before you; the lower one on each landing turns out the light above you, so that you will have no difficulty in finding your way out.' He turned away, closed the door behind Armand and disappeared.

"Armand sighed. He thought that not only was there a little romance left in life, but also a certain amount of luck. He began to descend the curving staircase but, slightly disturbed, and incoherent in his mind at the events of the evening, as he got to the bottom he switched the wrong switch, so plunging the staircase behind him and the gallery in front of him into darkness. Worse, he found himself unable to find the switch again, and he stood there, on the threshold of the wide gallery surrounded by mirrors, not knowing literally or metaphorically which way to turn. For the moon had disappeared and the place was dark with an inky darkness.

"Armand considered the situation. He thought that if he could find the flight of marble stairs that led to the main hall, he could grope his way down, and once there surely, he concluded, it would be a matter of time before he found the entrance doors."

Krasinsky exhaled cigar smoke. "Do you not find this a very interesting story, Captain O'Shaughnessy?" he enquired.

O'Shaughnessy started. "I am very much interested," he said. "I don't know why but I've never been quite so much interested in my life."

"That," said Krasinsky, "is comprehensible. I will continue. Our friend Armand then took a few cautious and diffident steps in the direction, as he thought, of the marble stairway. But just at this moment he tripped over some small projection, fell forward, shot over the edge of the balustrade and pitched head foremost into an immense Grecian urn which stood immediately beneath the gallery almost as if it intended itself as a receptacle for him."

Krasinsky shrugged his shoulders. "He must have struck his head slightly against the side as he fell," he said, "for at this moment an even inkier darkness engulfed him and he lay in the bottom of the urn unconscious...."

O'Shaughnessy experienced a peculiar feeling. He could no longer see the figure of Krasinsky at the other end of the tree-trunk. He could no longer see anything. He thought that the moon must have gone behind a cloud. He felt vaguely bemused and bewildered. His head ached. He found himself for some reason no longer sitting on the tree-trunk but lying in a recumbent position. He put out his hands, to discover that they touched stone walls which were cold. He sat up in amazement. What had happened? He felt in his pocket for his cigarette lighter; found it; snapped it on.

With the aid of the light he looked about him. Utter astonishment overcame him because, believe it or not, he found himself sitting in the bottom of what he took to be an immense vase for no earthly reason that he could think of. He got up. With difficulty, in spite of his agility, he managed to scramble out of the vase; to drop down on the other side. Now the moon came out again.

He was standing at the side of just such a large hallway as Krasinsky had described to him a short while before. But what was this? What was he doing in this place? How had he arrived here? Obviously, this was the scene of Armand Dulac's adventure which Krasinsky had recounted. Dreamily, O'Shaughnessy remembered it. But what had he to do with this place? Why should he be here?

He moved towards the wide flight of marble stairs, sat down and considered the matter. Either he was mad or he was sane. If he was sane he must somehow have dreamed the encounter with Krasinsky; dreamed the whole of the story which Krasinsky had told him— the story of Armand Dulac.

He remembered exactly what had happened. He had been taking a walk; had stepped off the road into the clearing to light a cigarette; had sat down on the tree-trunk where he met Krasinsky. He shrugged his shoulders. There was no use in going over it. Here he was and what was he going to do?

He began to smile. His native curiosity asserted itself. Surely, thought he, if I know this place because Krasinsky or somebody told me of it; if I know it well enough to be here, then the rest of the story must be true. O'Shaughnessy remembered the description of the mirrored gallery on the first floor, the concealed door with the glass knob which led to the curving staircase by which one reached the apartment of the lovely lady. He thought: Why not see if such a gallery exists; if such a door with its attendant glass door-knob exists?

The moon through the stained glass windows was helpful. He ascended the wide marble stairs. At the top he found himself in the mirrored gallery. He walked slowly round, searching the reflecting walls for the doorknob. After ten minutes, with a sigh of relief, he found it. He pulled the knob. The door opened and he stepped through on to the stairway. He ascended the stairs slowly.

At the top he knew he would find a glass door. All he had to do was to push it open. At the end of a corridor, if he remembered rightly, was Madame's drawing-room and next to it her bedroom. He reached the top of the staircase, opened the glass door. He stepped into the corridor. To his nostrils came the vague and exotic perfume that Krasinsky had mentioned.

O'Shaughnessy walked slowly along the passage. He had reached the end; was considering tapping on the door in front of him, when at the end of the shorter passage a door opened and, framed in the doorway, he saw the figure of the Count.

Here was something which he had not anticipated. His heart jumped a little; but he regained confidence when he saw that the Count was smiling.

"I am very glad to see you again," said that gentleman. "Won't you come in?"

O'Shaughnessy moved slowly down the short passage and into the library. The Count closed the door and indicated the arm-chair in front of the fire.

"I am extremely surprised to see you back so soon, Mr. Dulac," he said. "I warned you what would happen, didn't I?"

O'Shaughnessy said: "I'm afraid you are making a mistake, Count. My name is not Dulac. My name is Michael O'Shaughnessy. I came out for a walk and— "

"Nonsense," said the Count. "How did you know the geography of this house? You knew, sir, because you are Armand Dulac and you were here less than an hour ago. In this room you told me a story which I desired to believe. I believed it at that time, although, after you had gone and I had looked into my wife's bedroom and observed the seraphic expression on her face, I decided I had made a mistake in believing you.

"And now, after my warning, you have the effrontery to return. You know exactly what is going to happen to you?"

O'Shaughnessy thought: This really isn't so good. But he was overcome by a sense of the strangest philosophy. He knew what the Count had threatened to Armand Dulac. He knew that the same threat menaced himself— more especially as the Count was certain that he was Dulac. And was that to be wondered at?

O'Shaughnessy gave it up. He said: "I presume you are referring to the horse-pistol, sir?"

The Count nodded amiably. "Exactly," he said. "I should like to show it to you." He moved to an old carved cupboard in the corner of the room, opened it, produced an immense horse-pistol. "This pistol, Sir, belonged to my grandfather, of whom I spoke—  that one who was so well inclined towards Englishmen. It is a large pistol and takes an extremely large ball. But I assure you you need not fear that. I am a crack shot and death, I believe, is practically instantaneous. Would you care to stand up, as I hate to shoot at sitting targets?"

O'Shaughnessy stood up. He said: "If you will pardon the interruption, Count, I think you will agree that a man who is about to die has a right to ask one favour."

"Certainly," said the Count with a smile. "If it is possible. What do you want?"

O'Shaughnessy said: "We have a proverb in this country that one might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It is quite useless for me to point out to you that I am not Armand Dulac because I quite understand that it would be impossible for you to believe that. If I were you I should not believe it myself, because it seems to me that some rather extraordinary occult forces have been at work. However, to return to the favour I wish you to grant me. In the circumstances, and having regard to what is in your mind, I do not think it would do you any harm to permit me merely to take a farewell glance at your most beautiful wife, who is, I believe, asleep. That is all I ask."

"But why not?" said the Count with a smile. "I grant this favour willingly. I will await your return expectantly."

O'Shaughnessy murmured his thanks, left the library, walked down the passageway and pushed open the door of the bedroom. He looked in.

Lying in the middle of the wide bed, on which was a coverlet of embossed green velvet, lay the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in his life. Her bosom rose and fell with extreme regularity; her slightly parted lips showed exquisite teeth.

O'Shaughnessy gazed at her in wonderment; then, with a slight sense of dread, he realised that he must go. He smiled at her. He said softly: "Good-night, my dear."

She moved a little. She murmured sleepily: "Good-night, darling."

O'Shaughnessy sighed and turned away.

In the library, the Count was standing in front of the fire, a whisky and soda in one hand, the horse-pistol in the other.

He asked: "How do you think she looked?"

"Unutterably delightful," said O'Shaughnessy. "I should like to tell you, sir, that I think it was worth it. I no longer fear death."

"That," said the Count, "is the spirit. Would you care to help yourself to a whisky and soda?" He indicated the sideboard.

O'Shaughnessy went to the sideboard. Turning his back on the Count in the process, he mixed a stiff whisky and soda. He knew that as the glass touched his lips the Count would fire the pistol, and that would be the end of Captain Michael O'Shaughnessy.

He raised the glass slowly towards his mouth. Then several things happened simultaneously. The door opened and the lady, in a lace robe, stood framed in the doorway. She said to the Count: "Alexis... must you do this...? It always makes such a noise..."

At the same moment O'Shaughnessy heard the report of the pistol; dropped the glass; crashed to the floor.

This then was death! Darkness descended upon him.

O'SHAUGHNESSY opened his eyes. He lay flat on his back looking up at the moon. After a little while he sat up. He found himself leaning against the felled tree-trunk in the clearing. He was alive. He had not been shot.

He began to laugh. The whole thing, of course, was unutterably ridiculous. The whole thing had been a dream. He remembered some time ago coming into the clearing and sitting on the felled tree-trunk and lighting light a cigarette. He had, he supposed, fallen asleep during the few seconds that had elapsed before he had fallen off the log— those few seconds which can be so extended to aeons of time in dreams. He had dreamed the whole thing; had dreamed the meeting with Krasinsky, the gentleman in the check suit who had sat on the other end of the tree; he had dreamed the story of Armand Dulac and the mysterious house and the lighted windows; he had dreamed of finding himself there; of the Count, the horse-pistol and the very lovely lady.

A hell of a dream, thought O'Shaughnessy. It had been so realistic that he had almost lived it.

He got up, brushed some dry leaves from his clothes. He lit a cigarette. Life, he thought, was not so unromantic after all, even if romance only occurred in dreams.

He crossed the clearing; found the road; began to walk up it. It was a line night and the moonlight was still cold and hard. O'Shaughnessy stepped out manfully. Ten minutes' walking brought him to a fork in the road. The right fork ran away over the hills; disappeared over the horizon.

Dimly, O'Shaughnessy remembered Krasinsky in the dream, telling him about that fork.

He took the left road. In three minutes' time he found himself face to face with old, wrought-iron gates. He walked through. Before him, at the end of the long carriage drive, cleaving a large park, stood a house. It was large and old, and it was in darkness except that, on the second floor, three windows at the corner were lighted.

Slowly, almost in spite of himself, O'Shaughnessy began to walk along the carriage drive towards the house. He mounted the terraces and approached the entrance. He thought: It is quite impossible that I shall find the doors open.

He found the doors open. He went in. The moonlight, flooding through the stained glass windows, showed him a hall which he knew— the hall which Krasinsky had described to him in the dream....

Or was it a dream....?

Slowly he crossed the hall, began to mount the flight of wide marble stairs that led upwards to the mirrored gallery. If the dream had been true, he thought, somewhere in that mirrored gallery was a door with a glass knob. He looked at the wall.

In front of him was the glass knob.

He put out his hand and pulled the knob towards him. The door opened. He went through. Before him lay the curving staircase leading upwards to the glass door.

He sighed happily. Slowly, smiling to himself, he began to ascend the stairs towards the glass door....

________________

18: The Beach

Charles G. Norris

Charles Gilman Norris 1881-1945

Cosmopolitan Sep 1934

American novelist and Playwright

RHODA DARLING sat shelling peas in the kitchen of her home, a small upstairs flat on Guerrero Street, San Francisco. Her dark curling hair was disheveled and there was a vacant stare in her dark eyes which were like two shining round velvety disks in the midst of her pallid face.

She felt sick and forlorn. A chest cold had hung on tenaciously for weeks, a barking cough kept her awake nights, the damp foggy weather still clung to the city after a cold and miserable April and May, and here it was June and as yet there was no lifting of the depressing morning and evening mists or the sharp wind which brought the chill scud in daily from the ocean. In addition to this, her father, a skilled draftsman, who had been employed ever since she could remember by one of the best-known architectural firms in San Francisco, had been laid off indefinitely with the beginning of the year, and was now a pitiful object in his idleness.

Rhoda's mother, a chronic invalid, fretted over her husband's joblessness and made matters worse by upbraiding him. Aunt Julia, who tended her invalided sister, and took charge of the kitchen and the house, reflected the others' gloom, and went slip-slapping about her work in loose slippers, no longer the cheery, gossipy soul whose company Rhoda usually enjoyed.

The girl herself had scarcely turned twenty, and for a happy year after high-school graduation and a six months' course at a secretarial school had held what she now recognized as a thrilling position as a stenographer in a large paint and varnish manufacturing plant, but she too, the previous fall, had been sacrificed to the need of general economy, and had been dismissed. She had failed to find another job. And now, Rhoda knew, the bank savings were dwindling and her father had had to make some arrangement by which his premium for the year would be covered with the life insurance company. Life was very drear.

Rhoda was pretty. She was more than pretty; she was ornamental. At least, she had been considered so before this wretched cold had seized her during the wet days of winter. A certain comeliness, voluptuousness, had come to her during the few months she had been employed by Simon & Fitch. She had filled out; her complexion had cleared; she had matured richly. But that was all gone now. She had lost weight and color; she looked emaciated, sallow. The racking cough gave her no peace. She was aware that her mother and aunt whispered of pneumonia and tuberculosis, and that they watched her apprehensively.

Well, she thought, as she finished the last of her pea-shelling, she wouldn't mind becoming really ill; for herself, she didn't care. But she didn't want to cause any additional worry for her daddy, who had enough to worry about as it was.

Her mind strayed to her friends. Fairly popular at school, she had found herself distinctly popular at Simon & Fitch among the other clerks, and even with some of the executives. Jake Fitch, the Old Man's nephew, certainly had had a "crush" on her, and Jimmy Ingram, head of the sales department, had been more or less serious in his attentions, but Rhoda had been interested neither in Jake Fitch nor in Jimmy Ingram. She was infinitely more interested in life, and she had just begun to enjoy it, when almost a third of the employees had been laid off, she among them, and the devastating cold had come down upon her.

She saw none of her friends any more. Jimmy had telephoned once or twice, but had lost interest when she had met his overtures apathetically. No one came to see her, or wrote her a letter, or called her up. No one except Hortense Mayo, of course. Hortense, known to everyone as "Babbie," was Rhoda's best friend, but Babbie had a job in a candy store now; the hours were long and Rhoda did not see her more than once a week.

"Come along, Lovey, let's get things started." Aunt Julia came slip-slapping into the kitchen and began to rattle pans. Rhoda rose wearily to lend a hand in the dismal process of preparing an uninteresting meal.

Presently she heard her father come in. There was a tired sound to his step to which they all had grown accustomed since the beginning of the year. He went first to visit his wife, and their murmured words reached the kitchen fitfully, the man's dull, lifeless bass, the woman's fretful treble.

RHODA and her aunt went automatically about the work, neither speaking. It was so different, thought the girl, from what it had been when she had been full of office gossip, and her aunt had sent her into gales of laughter by her sharp, witty comments. Rhoda watched Aunt Julia now grinding a piece of rump steak through the meat grinder, turning the handle laboriously.

The girl took the plate from beneath the vent when her aunt had finished, patted the hashed meat into round disks and dropped them into a sizzling frying pan.

Meals were served in the kitchen now. It was brighter than the cheerless dining room and eating in it was more economical; it saved light and tablecloths and other small items; more especially it saved work. They ate on an oilcloth-covered table, and this in due course of time, tonight, was set; Aunt Julia announced laconically she was ready, and Rhoda called her father. She kissed him when he came in, gently stroking the back of his gray head as she put her arms about his neck.

"Well, Rhody, how's everything?" he asked automatically.

"Oh, fine!" she answered in the same way. He drew out a chair from the table and sat down heavily.

Placing his dinner before him, she poured his tea and sat down beside him with her own plate. Now she was aware she must make an effort, be conversational and cheerful. Only twenty minutes of exertion, half an hour at the most, she reminded herself. He would be off to bed then, or he'd go out to the Checker Club, or sit and talk with her mother.

BUT TONIGHT there was an unexpected diversion. The doorbell suddenly clamored. Rhoda went to pull the lever in the wall which released the front door at the foot of the stairs.

Babbie Mayo came running up the flight, breathlessly catching her friend by her arms when she reached the top. Rhoda, enchanted to see her, led her to the kitchen, where she sank into a chair, laughing and gasping.

"Oh, my dear— wait! I've been running," she panted.

Rhoda thought she looked very pretty in her agitation. Babbie was inclined to be colorless, but now her excitement had brought color to her pale cheeks. She swept off her hat and shook back her rather straight molasses-colored hair; her eyes were shining. "Babbie," said Aunt Julia, "you mustn't run upstairs like that, child. You'll die in one of these spasms."

"Oh, but Miss Brett, wait! You haven't heard yet! I'm going south for a whole month down to Santa Ramona Beach, and I want to take Rhoda with me! She can go, can't she,  132

Mr. Darling? It isn't going to cost either of us a cent!"

For Rhoda the black skies burst into a fountain of stars. Adventure—adventure! Babbie hurried on:

"My married sister has a bungalow down there. Her husband's got to go to Mexico on a business trip—he won't
be back until August, and Lou wrote me.

she wanted me and my brother Frank to come down and stay with her. But Frank's going off on a packing trip up into the Sierras, so I sent her a telegram asking if I could bring Rhoda instead, and she wired back 'Yes by all means,' and Frank says we can use his car so we can start right away.

"She can go, can't she, Mr. Darling? It will do her worlds of good."

"Would you like it, Rhody?" Mr. Dar- ling asked.

Rhoda felt her heart dancing with joy and excitement. "But I haven't a blessed stitch to my name——" she began, her face one broad smile.

"You don't need a thing down there," Babbie interrupted. "You just lie round in your bathing suit all day, and get the most beautiful tan. And at night, any old gingham or white dress will do. Lou's bungalow's hardly more than a cabin. Y'ever been to Santa Ramona Beach? Oh, my dear, it's the gayest, swankiest, loveliest place in the world! We'll have a perfectly grand time!

"We'll motor down," rushed on Babbie; "it's nearly as far as Los Angeles; we can make it in one day if we leave early in the morning. Oh, I'm so excited!"

Conversation rushed on: interjections, questions, answers, excited repetitions. Rhoda felt the first spark of animation she had known in weeks. She found herself laughing almost hysterically.

In the midst of the clamor, there was a sharp call from the sick room. "What're you all gabbling about out there? I never heard such a racket!"

Rhoda dragged Babbie to her mother's room. Mrs. Darling lay in bed, her back propped by pillows. Her face was soft and wrinkled; there was a  perpetual frown between the brows, and lines of discontent and pain marked the mouth.

SHE LISTENED with nervous jerky nods to Babbie's excited plan, and Rhoda, watching her mother's face, saw the frown deepen. Her heart sank. But to her amazement, her mother was grudgingly approving.

"It may do you lots of good, Rhody. You'll get rid of that cough down there. The Pritchards live there. I haven't seen May Pritchard for years but they're awful nice folks and'll be real pleasant to you. You'll like Mrs. Pritchard. They say the beach is a pretty place, nice and warm. You're a sweet girl, Babbie, to think of it."

So it was all arranged: Thursday morning the two girls would start for the south; Rhoda would go to Babbie's house the night before with her bag and suit- case, and they would make an early getaway next day, reaching Santa Ramona before dark.

The intervening days were a mad whirlwind of preparation. Rhoda laundered her two white dresses, mended her stockings, whitened her shoes. She had an old bathing suit, and to go with it she bought a rubber cap. Sunday night she kissed her mother's flabby cheek and her aunt's hard, dry one, and betook herself to her friend's house.

The next morning by seven o'clock they were on their way, driving through mists of drifting fog beneath a leaden sky. But by the time they were passing Belmont, some twenty-five miles south of the city, there were glimpses of blue ahead and the promise of sunshine and clear heavens. It was glorious to be riding along perfectly paved roads with the hills, rapidly losing their last traces of spring green, rolling graciously to right and left.

Palo Alto, San Jose, Gilroy, were left behind; Salinas, Babbie observed, marked the first leg of the journey, and this they passed before ten o'clock. Then came the flatter country with bare rises of hills to east and west and fewer towns. The weather was perfect now, hot and softly beguiling.

IT was a long day, but an agreeable excitement routed fatigue. A sense of adventure ahead exhilarated the girls; holiday was in the air; something thrilling lay in wait.

"I'm so happy," Rhoda said, "that I feel I'm doing something wrong, some- thing I shouldn't. I can't help worrying about Pa and Mom and Aunt Julia. I was kind of mean to run off and leave them."

Babbie dismissed this with a wave of her hand and began to tell Rhoda about her sister and what a hard-working man she had married.

They talked incessantly about everything: roadside signs; men they knew; family troubles. At Paso Robles they lunched at a drug store and were on their way again through gracious tree-covered country. At Gaviota Pass they had their first glimpse of the ocean— a shining glinting sheet of polished metal, losing itself in a diaphanous mist horizonward.

Santa Ramona Beach lies beside the sea some thirty miles from Los Angeles and is reached from that city by the intervening mountains over the Cahuenga Grade. It has two substantial piers, a casino, a board walk, and a fine stretch of white beach, a mile or more in length, where the sea in long, curving waves comes rolling in, and slides up its smooth hard-packed shingle in lines of frothy foam.

Santa Ramona is superbly situated with craggy, granite-topped mountains in its rear, and rocky barriers to north and south. The roads from three directions dip down into the luxuriant valley where it lies, and if in the town a bit of garishness meets the eye now and then, it is mostly hidden by the lush growth of palms, banana trees and peppers which line its streets and shade its walls. At first glance the impression is that Santa Ramona is one of the loveliest of seaside towns.

Such was Rhoda Darling's feeling as Babbie piloted her car through its tree- bordered streets to her sister's cabin, a block or so from the beach.

It was six o'clock when the girls drew up in front of Lou's door. Babbie said to her companion with a smile of satisfaction:

"There you are, Miss Darling; four hundred and fifty-five miles without a scratch or a breakdown. But oh, Lord, am I tired!"

At the sound of the stopping car, Lou Simpson rushed out on the vine-covered porch. Babbie sprang to the ground and hurled herself into Lou's arms.

The older sister was not yet thirty, a pretty woman with fair hair like Babbie's, an animated face and an eager, nervous manner. Warmly she welcomed Rhoda.

"Oh, I'm so glad you brought her," she kept repeating to Babbie. "We three are going to have heaps of fun!"

Suitcases were jerked from the rear seat of the car; there was confusion, excited chattering, running back and forth; the car was nosed into the door- less shed in the rear and after some hurried scrubbing and brushing, Babbie and Rhoda drew up their chairs at Lou's prettily appointed table and their hostess produced dinner. It was a hilarious feast, with much talk of home and mutual friends, full of excited enthusiasm about the beach. It was the most marvelous place in the world, Lou declared.

"Oh, my dears, the thrill of showing it to you! Almost everyone you ever heard of comes here. Joan Atwell was down with a party of friends over the weekend, and John Batchellor keeps his yacht right off the end of Tubbs' wharf, and you know those Anstruther people from Burlingame, Babbie? They own the Oriental Steamship Company, and I think his brother is president of some big Frisco bank— she's down here, Mrs. Anthony Anstruther, I mean. They have taken a house and have the jolliest par- ties.

"Oh, and then besides all the people, it's so gay, and everybody has so much fun. You just lie around in the sand all day, and you eat your lunch in your bathing suit and everybody gets to know everybody else. I blew myself to a big beach umbrella when I heard you girls were coming down. We'll christen it to-morrow."

It was not until she was drying the dishes, as Babbie handed them dripping to her from the sink, that Rhoda felt the first tinge of tiredness. She was grateful when the last of the cleaning up and putting away was over, and they could go out to the porch and sink into easy canvas chairs.

Overhead and toward the west, the blueness of the early night sky merged imperceptibly into amber, which in turn warmed to delicate saffron. Beyond the single line of cottages which separated Lou's home from the sand dunes, there rose a rhythmic pound and roar.

Rhoda, listening, turned a puzzled face to Lou. The mute question brought a gay, delighted laugh from Babbie's sister.

"Why, you goose! Don't you know what that is? That's the beach!"

Rhoda had her first glimpse of it the next day.

It was thrilling to wake luxuriously in her comfortable iron cot the next morning. The sunshine was streaking in through the open half-window above her head. Babbie's bed, on the other side of the room, was empty, and Rhoda could hear the agreeable clatter of china and pans kitchenward; could smell the delicious odor of toasting bread and coffee.

Slipping on a wrapper, her feet in Japanese sandals, she padded out to the kitchen to join the girls. Both cried a welcome, and told her breakfast would be ready in a "jiffy."

Lou was full of plans for the day. They were to get into their bathing suits by ten o'clock, and clad in beach shoes and kimonos, go down to the sands. They needed towels, combs, a bag of oranges, a bottle of some kind of special preparation which would speed tanning and prevent sunburn, and she proposed they negotiate the unwieldy umbrella down to the beach by their own efforts.

"I don't know anyone who could help us get it down there, but once we're there, Tom Rudd will lend us a hand. Tom's the life guard, and he's terribly nice. He does all sorts of things for me; he's a great pal."

Babbie and Rhoda assured her there would be no trouble about the umbrella, they could handle it easily, and long before ten o'clock the breakfast dishes were washed and put away, the beds made, the milk bottles put out on the back porch, the bungalow set to rights, and the three girls prepared to don their bathing suits. When Babbie's eyes fell upon Rhoda's suit she frowned, exclaiming:

"Where in the name of all that's holy did you find that Mother Hubbard? I'm sorry," she hurried on as she saw the quick flush come to Rhoda's cheeks. "I didn't mean that, of course, but it is— you must admit, it's a bit old-fashioned.

"Lou," she called, "come here a minute." And when Lou appeared the two sisters eyed the abashed Rhoda as she stood in her high-necked, full-skirted outfit as if she were a curiosity.

GLIMPSING her darkened face, put her arm about her. "My dear, don't worry; it will do for today, but we'll have to dig up something a little— a little more up-to-date for you by tomorrow. Here," she said, throwing aside her crépe kimono, "this is the sort of thing women wear down here."

Rhoda drew a quick breath at sight of the costume.

The suit had no skirt; instead, there were a pair of trunks laced with white tapes over the hips and a gay handkerchief knotted loosely behind the neck, folded crisscross-fashion over the breasts and tied about the waist. It was scanty but becoming, for Lou had a fine figure, slim hips and well-shaped legs.

"You see," Lou continued, "you wear a kimono, a beach robe or beach pajamas most of the time, and you don't take them off— unless you want to— until you go in the water. This is nothing to what you'll see. Some of the women parade up and down in skin-tight affairs, and even in silk, but of course when they wear silk they don't get them wet."

Babbie's costume was similar to her sister's, but not so pronounced. There were straps across her back, the suit covered her breasts and there was a brief skirt which fell from a trim belt to the edge of her short trunks.

"Well, I guess I've a lot to learn," Rhoda said, somewhat awkwardly, and Lou added quickly:

"I guess you have, but it's going to be fun."

They made their way to the beach, lugging the clumsy umbrella, carrying their towels and toilet articles and the bag of oranges. Rhoda had wondered a little if she and her companions would be conspicuous, weighted as they were, and in such scanty attire, but now she saw dozens of others unconcernedly meandering along the street clad and loaded in similar fashion. No one seemed in the least self-conscious.

She was about to comment upon this, when a hedge, which had obstructed the view, abruptly came to an end and suddenly the beach lay before her.

Involuntarily she gasped. She had never seen a beach like this one— a beach so white, so broad, so alive with color.

She could not take it in all at once. Lou and Babbie, toting the umbrella, marched ahead of her, their feet sinking ankle-deep in the soft sand. She followed, half stumbling, her eyes roving. They tramped steadily for some minutes; then the sisters threw down their burden, and Lou surveyed the surroundings.

"We might go a bit farther," she said. "I don't want to get too near the swell end. You know what I mean? I'd rather watch 'em than be part of 'em... Now I wonder where's Tom Rudd, or someone to give us a hand." She scanned the beach.

"He'll be along," she continued. "We can get things ready." She proceeded to spread a gay Italian rug on the sand, and to extract a book and a couple of magazines from the roomy canvas bag she had been carrying.

Rhoda, fascinated, looked about her.

Again she was impressed by the brilliant splashes of color which everywhere spotted the glistening background of white sand. Color ran rampant from the striped awnings shading the porches of the casino to the gay tops of the opened umbrellas which dotted the beach. Palms and the drooping leaves of bananas in a broad band of green skirted the edge of the panorama, and here and there through this verdant foliage one caught glimpses of the pink and blue facades of plaster houses with their red-tiled roofs, and above these rose precipitously the tawny sides of rugged mountains.

Nearer, sprawled on the sand, grouped beneath the giddy-topped sheltering umbrellas or strolling from one gathering to another, moved the bathers in scarlets and blues and purples and greens and yellows— robes, pajamas, capes and sweaters, or, when these were laid aside, brief bathing suits of equally brilliant shades. Children dug busily where the sand was wet, filling their pails, building forts; youths tossed tennis and beach balls to one another on the edge of the tide, while older men— men with bronzed shoulders and bronzed muscular arms— sprawled at the feet of pretty women who were reclining against canvas-backed rests, or themselves lay prone upon the sand, their backs exposed to the sun.

There was little noise, Rhoda thought. Only the murmur of subdued chat and laughter, the muffled shouts of the ball-tossers, the rhythmic tumble of the waves, and the wash of the breakers. Riot of color, grace of movement, beauty, youth, romance, graciousness and a beguiling warmth; of these Rhoda was poignantly conscious.

She drew down her coolie coat, threw herself down on the warm sand, spread wide her arms, turned face and body to the glorious sun and drew a deep breath of felicity and contentment.

THE GIRLS were fussing with their things, murmuring busily near by like the early morning chirping of birds, and Rhoda still lay stretched out on the sand, eyes closed, arms flung wide, her thirsty body drinking in the glorious heat, when a deep voice close at hand startled her and brought her to a sitting posture.

"I've been looking for you," it said. "You're late this morning, aren't you?"

A bronzed young man, wearing a white sailor's cap, its stitched brim down, had joined them. Across his chest woven into the material of a faded red bathing suit were the words "Life Guard." Rhoda gazed at him round-eyed. His shoulders were almost black from the sun; his arms and legs had been burned a deep coppery-bronze.

As she watched him talking to the girls, opening the clumsy umbrella, driving its staff firmly into the sand, she saw he was young— not more than twenty-two or -three. She studied his face. His eyebrows and hair were tawny, the deep bronze of his skin making the color noticeable. A small nose, a small mouth displaying white glistening teeth when he smiled— and he smiled, Rhoda thought, in an oddly fascinating way. It was a slow smile, the upper lip drawing tautly across his teeth, showing their fine, even structure. She thought him one of the handsomest men she'd ever seen.

"Miss Darling, Mr. Tom Rudd," Lou said, introducing him. "Miss Darling is a friend of Babbie's; she is down here visiting us for a month."

The young man nodded, smiled briefly, continued talking to Lou, but every now and then, Rhoda noticed with a curious excitement at her heart, his look wandered in Babbie's direction.

He went away after a time, and Rhoda sat gazing out at the curling breakers. A mood of sensuous contentment had wrapped her about when Lou roused her.

"Come on, now; it's time for a dip; it's almost twelve. If we go now we'll be dry by the time we are ready for lunch."

Rhoda rose, threw aside her cotton coolie coat and fitted a rubber cap snugly over her flyaway hair. As she did so, a shiver of self-consciousness swept over her. Her bathing suit was horribly out-of-date and horribly unbecoming. If Tom Rudd chanced to see her!

What had Babbie called her costume? An old Mother Hubbard! Yes, it was that; an old Mother Hubbard, and she a dowdy, awkward schoolgirl. Babbie could have him if she wanted to. No, she couldn't, either! She'd make him notice her, at any rate. She threw up her head, squared her shoulders and waded unflinchingly into the churning water.

"Oh, every woman's mad about him," Lou said lightly that evening as they were loitering over the last of the dinner. "Tom's one of the attractions, one of the sights, you could almost say, of Santa Ramona Beach. He's been here for three or four summers now. All the women fall for him. It's part of the show we have down here. He knows all about it too, the devil!"

"Oh, do you think so?" Babbie asked. "He behaves himself remarkably well, just the same. You never notice any monkeyshines about him."

"He has to behave himself," Lou stated, "but I don't think that's the reason. I believe it's because he's sick of the way women run after him, and he's smart, too; he knows if he pays any particular one especial attention, the rest will get sore, and he'd be out of luck. As it is, every last one of them is after him. Tom's stuck on himself; he's as vain as a peacock... Hi, Rhoda, where are you going?"

"Oh, I just thought maybe I'd go to bed. I'm kind of tired."

"Of course you are."

"Say, Lou—"

"What?"

"You said something... How much does a nice-looking bathing suit cost? I mean, a smart one."

"Oh, that's right. Babbie and I must fit you out tomorrow. We'll go over to Epstein's the first thing in the morning; he's the store in Santa Ramona. We'll pick you out something dashing."

It was apricot color. Except for two shoulder straps which crossed between the shoulder blades, the back of it was open to Rhoda's waist. There was a brief pair of trunks which were almost skin-tight, and a skirt which buttoned about the waist to be removed for vigorous swimming. There was a cap to match, a rubber helmet molded on its exterior with a design which resembled carefully marcelled hair. It made Rhoda look as if her hair were bright orange. The effect was charming, and decidedly startling. There was a cape, too— a generous garment of the same shade and material. She pleaded with the sales-girl to let her have just the suit, but when refused, Lou insisted upon making her a present of the cape.

Early in the afternoon the three girls made their way to the beach. Rhoda had been half fearful of conspicuousness, but combating this dread was a delicious sense of being attractively garbed. Her blood tingled. As she made her way across the sand, she felt almost as if she were a star making her first entrance in a Ziegfeld Follies show.

It was a Saturday and the beach was crowded. Rudd was nowhere to be seen. The girls settled themselves on the sand not far from the spot they had occupied the previous day. Lou scanned the bathers and the groups near at hand, but Tom was not to be seen. She and Babbie tramped to the casino to fetch the umbrella from the stack piled beside the base of the casino's porch, and as they started back, carrying it across their shoulders, a young bather offered his assistance, bore the clumsy thing back to the spot where Rhoda waited, opened it and set it up.

The newcomer was nice, Rhoda thought, as he introduced himself in a polite way; he was not in the least fresh, and the girls told him their names in return. He had curly blond hair, a fair, clean complexion and pleasant blue eyes. Rhoda was aware he was studying her with what she hoped might be admiration, when she saw Tom Rudd coming.

"They caught a shark off Tubbs' Wharf this morning," he said to Lou. "He was a big fellow and they had a lot of fun getting him in; you missed it."

"A shark!" Rhoda exclaimed.

"Yes, but not a man-eater." He turned to answer, but at glimpse of her, he stopped abruptly. A change of expression swept across his face. "Not a man- eater," he continued after the hesitating moment. "You don't get man-eaters up here in these waters. Barracudas sometimes, and they can be nasty, too. They'll take a nip out of a person's leg quicker'n a wink, but they don't come inshore, and there's no danger unless you swim 'way out. Do you swim?" he asked Rhoda.

SHE FELT herself blushing, a paralyzing sensation of hot blood rising in a suffocating tide, pouring up through her body, up into her cheeks, her head. She grew dizzy; the sunlight blurred. She had no voice to answer him.

"Does she?" Rudd asked Lou.

"Do you, Rhoda?" Lou demanded in turn. "I don't know whether she does or not," she continued, addressing Rudd; "she only got down here yesterday, and all we did yesterday was to splash about."

They seemed to be waiting for her to speak. Rhoda raised her eyes, and found the blond young man who had helped with the umbrella looking at her steadily.

"I do a little," she said, speaking to him. "But I'd like help."

"Come on, then," he invited. "Let's go. Want to?"

"I'd love it." Sudden energy came to her.

She rose, loosened the skirt from about her waist, tossed it to the sand, reached out her hand to his extended one, and together they raced to meet the sea.

The water in a rushing wall of foam swirled up about their waists as a comber broke and came boiling toward shore. Rhoda had never been out so far before. She cried out in alarm and exaltation.

"Scared?" her companion asked.

She nodded, laughing with excitement, not daring to look at him. Her eyes were fixed on an oncoming wave.

"Don't let it bother you," he reassured her; "I'll take good care of you. But maybe you'd better go over there and take hold of the rope."

A stout rope supported by floats connected a bather's raft to the shore. He guided her to it, and she took a firm grasp.

"Yes, that's better," she admitted. "Just wait until I get used to it, and I shan't mind."

"You could pull yourself hand over hand out to the raft."

"Oh, I'd be afraid."

"Oh, come on. You only have to go a little bit at a time. Watch the breakers, and pull yourself along. Nothing can happen to you!" he told her.

More confidence did come to her after a time.

"You swim, don't you?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, but just at first—"

"You aren't kidding me?"

"How do you mean?" She glanced at him, puzzled.

"Oh, you know— the way some girls pretend. 'Come-on' stuff."

"I think not," she said coldly. Her emotion of fear Was so genuine, she was angry he should think she was pretending. She wished she could get back to shore, but the approach of a huge wave drove other thoughts from her mind.

"Oh," she cried. "Oh— oh— oh!"

"Steady now; just hold on."

The water crashed a few yards in front of them and came rushing down upon her, pouring over her head, submerging her. She hung on to the rope with desperation. She felt the boy's arm about her, and emerged, blinking.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" he asked. "Come on, now; let's get a little nearer the raft. This is a bad place here. It's where the waves break, and if you get a little farther out, it will be safer."

She pulled herself hand over hand through the water as he suggested, but suddenly another mountain of water loomed above her, blotting out the sky and world; a great green arc curved over her head and with a deafening roar, crashed down on her. She felt herself seized in a giant's grip; her body was wrenched this way and that, her hands were torn from their hold, she was jerked, twisted, tossed, driven head down, deeper and deeper, flung back, flung down again, rolled over; her head violently struck the sand, there was a wrench to her neck, then blankness.

A stab in her chest brought back consciousness; she sucked in air with great pain; opened her eyes.

The beach before her in violent brightness blinded her. She shut her eyes quickly, aware now that she was being carried toward shore in a man's arms. Water trickled from her mouth; she coughed.

"Oh!" she sobbed in sharp agony.

"You're all right now, " the man said.

"My neck; I hurt it."

"We'll have you okay in a minute or two." He gathered her limp body to him more firmly. This was some other man— not the one with whom she had been in the surf. She glanced up, and Tom Rudd smiled reassuringly into her puzzled eyes. Comfort, peace came to her. She turned her face against his chest, and shut her eyes again.

He strode with her through the churning water and up the sand. She could hear people asking questions, Tom's "Oh, she's all right." And then there were Babbie and Lou. Tom laid her down gently, and the girls were bending over her, taking off her cap, wiping her hands and face. A crowd gathered.

Tom knelt at her side, watching her, patting her limp hand. Her companion of the surf was there, too, an intense look of concern on his face. With an effort she sat up, and laughed weakly.

"Okay?" Tom asked. He took her hand and held it. She looked into his bronzed, anxious face, and a wave of love for him swept over her,

"Thank you," she said. Her eyes watered, but she continued looking at him through the mist.

"Oh, that's my job," he said, smiling his slow smile. "Fortunately, I happened to be watching you when I saw the wave coming. It was a big one."

"It knocked me under, too," her late companion said hastily. "I made a grab for you, but it swept me off my feet, You aren't hurt, are you?"

He "Only my neck," Rhoda said, rubbing it.

"You want an ambulance?" Tom asked.

"Heavens, no!" she said impatiently.

"Here," she continued, holding out her hands to the two men beside her, "give me a lift."

TOM CAUGHT her, and she drew herself to her feet. The circle of faces about her swam. She felt dizzy. She wished they would all go away. She turned appealingly to Tom, but at the moment there was a diversion. Someone of importance arrived— a woman, elderly, imperious.

"This the young lady, Cas?" she asked the blond boy. "How is she?"

"All right, Aunt Meg," he answered. "She just got a bad tumble, that's all. It shook her up a bit."

"My dear, how do you feel?" the woman said.

"Oh, I'm quite all right," Rhoda said, smiling feebly.

"I'm Mrs. Anstruther," the woman said; "I'm Cas' aunt. You must let me send you home in my car. Oh, yes, yes, yes; it's right here. Run and get it, Cas— and Roberts will take you home, You've someone with you?"

"Oh, yes; this is my friend, Miss Mayo, and her sister, Mrs. Simpson. I'm staying with them."

Mrs. Anstruther turned to Lou. "Live near?"

"Oh, yes, just a step or two."

"Well, you must let me send this child home. She's had a bad tumble. I'd feel better about it, if you'd let her use the car."

"But truly, Mrs. Anstruther—"

"Now, now. You let an old lady do what she likes."

She turned to a companion; several friends formed a group about her.

"Find out the young lady's address, will you, Harry? I shall want to send flowers and find out how she's getting along. I don't know how much Cas was to blame."

"Oh, but truly, Mrs. Anstruther, I was just holding on to the rope and he was there right beside me."

"Maybe, maybe, but if it hadn't been for Tom Rudd here, we might have had a serious accident. That was nicely done, Tom. You certainly live up to your job."

"Just happened to be looking on, Mrs. Anstruther—  I saw Cas and the young lady. "

"What's your name, my dear?"

"Rhoda Darling."

"Nice name, and I'm glad nothing's wrong with you."

Cas and a liveried chauffeur appeared.

"There you are, Roberts. Take this young lady home, will you?"

"Yes, ma'am; I have the car just there."

"Oh, but honestly, Mrs. Anstruther, I'd much prefer to walk. If Mr. Rudd and your nephew could give me a hand—"

"Very well; you see her home, Cas, and don't you leave until you find out she's all right."

"I think—" Tom Rudd began. He looked at Rhoda and held out his arms. She met his glance, and with a quick motion he caught her up and carried her across the sand. Cas stumbled along beside him, and Lou and Babbie followed.

"A great fuss about nothing," thought Rhoda, but it wasn't altogether unpleasant to be the center of so much interest. The rumor spread up and down the beach that Caswell Ashton, Mrs. Anthony Anstruther's nephew, had taken a girl out into the surf and she had very nearly drowned; would have, if it had not been for Tom Rudd. Friends of Lou Simpson came flocking to her bungalow to find out about her guest.

Rhoda, lying comfortably in bed, resting after her shake-up, could hear the murmur of the sympathetic voices on the porch. The slight mishap assumed absurd proportions of importance. Rhoda presumed it was because of Mrs. Anstruther's interest, and Mrs. Anstruther evidently was the social dictator of Santa Ramona Beach. Caswell Ashton was there after lunch, bringing flowers and books and magazines from "Aunt Meg."

"It's terribly sweet of her, Mr. Ashton, but you can see for yourself..."

"I know, but she likes it."

"But truly there isn't any need."

"She wants me to bring you over for tea as soon as you're about again."

"Really? I should be scared to death."

"Don't worry; I'll protect you. We've got to be good friends out of the whole thing, haven't we?"

"Oh, yes; I hope so."

She glanced at him; there was a funny look in his eyes. Involuntarily she smiled. He flushed, stooped, lifted her hand, kissed it, and went away.

"I wonder," she mused, "if young Mr. Caswell Ashton is getting a case."

He might or might not be, but there was no doubt that she was getting one herself, though not on Mr. Caswell Ashton. Tom Rudd occupied her thoughts continually. It had been merely exciting at first, but her feeling for him had passed that now. There was something about the man that devastated her.

There was no imaginable argument of Lou's— had Rhoda confided in her— or of anyone's who was sensible and wise, and who had her interest at heart, which she did not put to herself. Tom Rudd was an adventurer who played around with women— a life guard at a beach resort!—who was smugly aware that he was a heartbreaker, that every woman in the place was crazy about him, and who was already aware that he had one more impressionable girl at his feet!

Rhoda writhed. She remembered how he had held her in his arms. There had been something about the way he did it which proved to her the type he was and yet she thrilled at the recollection of his arms about her, the touch of her cheek against his firm smooth skin, the feel of her limp body against his hard, strong one. Oh, she was a fool, but what was there to do about it? From the very first minute she had seen him, talking to Lou, she knew she had fallen in love.

Oh, it wouldn't last. She'd get over it. She simply wouldn't let it become serious. No, it was only great fun, she kept telling herself, to be in love like this, and she didn't care if every woman in Santa Ramona Beach was in love with him, too! Yet... oh, what of it? She wasn't going to lose her head, even if she had lost her heart.

He came to see her late in the afternoon. Her neck was still sore from the hard thump she had received, but otherwise she felt entirely herself, yet it was  rather fun to play the invalid, and she submitted to Lou's suggestion to lie amid pillows on a straw couch which Lou, with Babbie's help, dragged to the porch.

Tom had donned flannels, a blue coat, and a cap. The conventional clothes made him seem commonplace— just an ordinary young man. Yet there was the bronzed face and the enchanting smile. Rhoda's heart was pounding as he came up the steps, showing his fine, flashing teeth with the upper lip stretched tightly across them.

"Well, you don't look as if you were a cripple," he said, taking her hand.

"I'm not." Her voice failed her; she had to clear her throat. She laughed. "Just shamming."

"She's been awfully spunky," Babbie stated.

"Everybody down on the beach is asking about you."

"It's absurd," Rhoda protested. "You'd think I'd been snatched from a watery grave! Not,' she went on hurriedly, "that I don't appreciate what you did, Mr. Rudd."

" 'Tom' to you, please, Miss Darling."

"And 'Rhoda' to you, Tom," she countered, coloring.

"Okay, Rhoda."

"I do think there would have been more to it. I mean, I might have been tumbled about much more severely if you hadn't been so prompt."

"Well, as a matter of fact, I was kind of sore—"

"Sore?"

"Yes; sure. You went off with Cas Ash- ton. I wanted to take you out into the surf myself, and then you went off with him, and I was kind of sore, so I was keeping my eye on the two of you. That's how I happened to be so Johnny-on-the spot."

"I'm sincerely grateful. But you'd think from the fuss people are making—"

"Everybody saw it. Guess that's the reason. It's the first excitement like that we've had."

Presently Lou came out to join them. "Hello, Tom," she greeted him casually; "going to stay for supper? I've got salad and apple strudel."

"WELL,  I—" He looked at Rhoda and Rhode looked back, her eyes inviting him. "Got a date," he said.

"Can't you break it?"

"Fraid I can't."

"I'll bet it is with a gal," Babbie observed promptly.

Rhoda hated her.

Tom laughed, showing his white teeth. "We-ell," he admitted with a deprecating shrug. "You know how it is."

"I know how you are!" Lou said. "Well, come around any time. There's no sense in trying to date you."

Rhoda felt suddenly it would be more than she could bear if he did not stay for the meal. "Oh, stay!" she said impulsively, the color rushing to her cheeks.

He met her glance, twisted his jaw awkwardly, then smiled his flashing smile. "I'll break it," he said. "I'll have to go and telephone."

"We have one."

"Won't do. I'll— I'll have to go, but I'll be back in about twenty minutes. That okay?"

"Certainly— and I tell you, Tom, bring something back with you to shake up, will you? I haven't a drop."

"Leave it to me."

He was gone and the three women stood looking after him. No one spoke for a long moment.

"Fascinating devil," Babbie observed.

"My heavens, yes, and has he got a yen for Rhoda here! You want to look out for him, Rhoda."

"Don't be silly."

"Don't you be silly; I'm warning you."

"Oh, I can take care of myself. But come on," she said, rising with a happily beating heart. "Let's get things ready. I'm so glad he's coming back."

"Say, listen here," Babbie said; "I'm not going to hang around tonight and cramp your style. Oh, don't talk to me! Tom likes you all right, and you like him. I've got eyes in my head. Lou and I will go to the movies, and you stay here and entertain your boy friend— but don't get too crazy about him. Lou's right."

"In the wintertime? You mean when I'm not down here at the beach? Well, I'm swimming instructor at an athletic club in Los Angeles. I've only had the job for a year. Before that I was in the movies."

"You acted in them?" Rhoda asked.

"Well, as an extra mostly," Tom answered, "but when they wanted any swimming stunts pulled off, they got me. I used to double occasionally for some of the stars when they had to dive or jump in the ocean."

It was nearly nine o'clock. Lou and Babbie had departed an hour before for the theater, and Rhoda and Tom were sitting on the porch. She lay in her low chair and Tom sat on the top tread of the steps with his back against a post, sipping a concoction of gin and ginger ale. In the hot night Rhoda could smell the salt of the sea. She thought: "I've never been so happy." Her eyes lingered on the back of Tom's head, and she noted the curve of his cheek and the line of his strong neck.

"And what do you intend to do? I mean— you know— make of yourself?"

He laughed. "Well, I had ambitions once. I went to U.S.C. for a while. A lady I used to know wanted me to go to college and was paying my tuition. And then something happened—"

"What?" She could hear him laugh again.

"Oh, there was nothing doing between us, but her husband thought there was— he wouldn't let me see her any more, and wouldn't let her give me any more money. You see, I've got my mother to support."

"Oh, your mother's living?"

"Sure. We live in Glendale."

"And that— I mean, the necessity of taking care of your mother keeps you from going on with your studies and becoming what you want?" she pursued.

"Something like that," he answered carelessly. "Oh, I haven't got any kick coming. I have a pretty good time. There's a lot of gravy in this job."

"You mean here at the beach?"

"Sure. It's a racket."

"I don't understand."

"You wouldn't, but it is. You don't do a damn thing but lie around on the sand and talk to the ladies."

"But that isn't very— very—" Rhoda floundered. "I mean, that isn't going to get you anywhere, is it?" she finished.

"Aw, it will do for a while. But say," he said, "what's all the lecture about? You haven't told me a thing about yourself. What do you do for a living? All I know about you is that you're Lou Simpson's friend and come from Frisco. What I want to know is, are you engaged to be married or are you in love with some fellow?" He leaned toward her.

Rhoda winced. "No," she said in a restrained tone, "I'm not engaged."

"Well, is there some particular guy?"

She did not answer for a moment. She said: "I live with my parents on Guerrero Street in San Francisco, and about a year ago I had a job with Simon and Fitch. I was a stenographer there. 'Bout six months ago, they fired me."

"What was the matter? Did you get into trouble?"

"Oh, no. They were reducing their staff and as I was one of the new ones, they let me go."

"What're you going to do now?"

"Haven't the faintest idea. Another job, I suppose."

"But not to hang round on the beach, get tanned in the sun, and have a good time— zat it?" There was an edge to his tone.

"I'm sorry, Tom," she said. "I didn't mean to be personal."

He said sulkily: "Well, you know, jobs aren't hanging round like apples on a tree these days. I've got to live and I've got to take care of my mother."

"I'm sorry," she repeated penitently. She wanted to believe him. Lou and Babbie were prejudiced. He must be fine and good and simple. He just strutted about on the beach, playing a part, because that was what was expected of him. It must have been what he meant when he called it a racket.

Neither spoke for a time. Tom tipped his glass, drained it, set it down, lighted a cigaret, and Rhoda studied his frowning face in the glare of the match light. He threw the match away, rose.

"Come on," he said. "Let's go for a walk down to the beach. Feel like it?"

"I'd love it," she agreed readily. "I'll just change my shoes."

At the moment the telephone shrilled sharply. She hurried to answer it.

"Hello; may I inquire how Miss Darling is? This is Caswell Ashton."

"Oh, how do you do, Mr. Ashton? This is Rhoda Darling speaking."

"It is! Thought you were sick. Say, how do you feel? I expected you'd be in bed, and my aunt wanted me to inquire—"

"Oh, I'm all right, thank you. Truly. And thank Mrs. Anstruther for her interest. It's awfully kind of her."

He hesitated. "Well, say, when am I going to see you? Could I come over in the morning? I'd like to say hello."

"Certainly. I'd love to see you. I don't know what my friends' plans are; I think they'll go down to the beach as usual. Better phone and find out if I'm home. They've both gone to the movies, and I won't know till they come back."

"Gone to the movies and left you alone?"

"Oh, surely; there's nothing the matter with me."

"I suppose you wouldn't like to take a little spin with me in my car? I could be over in two minutes."

"Oh," Rhoda gasped, "not tonight! I've been in bed, you know."

"Of course ...I just thought— well, I'll see you in the morning. I'll phone about ten. That be too early?"

"No, indeed."

She hung up the receiver. Her eyes found the porch. Tom stood leaning against the post. He turned as she pushed open the screen door.

"Is that that guy, Cas Ashton? It's none of my business, but I'd just like to know."

"Yes, that was Mr. Ashton."

"What's he snooping round you for?"

"Why"— she hesitated, confused— "I think he was just interested, that's all."

The man shrugged; snapped away his cigaret. "Humph," he said. "I could tell you something about that bozo, and about his lady aunt, Mrs. Anstruther, too, for that matter. They're all a pack of snobs. Well, come on; let's go down and see if the Pacific is still there."

"I THINK he's terribly nice."

"Who?" Rhoda asked.

It was Sunday morning. Babbie and Rhoda were on the bungalow porch. Lou was inside pottering about the kitchen.

"Mr. Cheeseborough— Cas' friend."

"He's nice-looking, but I don't think he's got the class that Cas has."

"That's just because Cas is head over heels about you, and you think Cas is pretty nice yourself."

"Well, I do like him."

"But not as much as you do Tom Rudd," Babbie gibed.

Rhoda, flushing, said hurriedly: "Do you know what their plan is?"

"You know as much as I do. It was Cas who asked you. Pete said—"

"Oh, you've got to calling him Pete, have you?"

"Mr. Cheeseborough, then, if you prefer, smarty."

"Well, what did he say?"

"He said they'd call for us today about eleven or eleven-thirty in Cas' car— and say, isn't it a beauty? And we'd motor down to some place about an hour's drive from here and lunch."

The girls had been ten days at Santa Ramona Beach. To Rhoda it seemed weeks; she knew almost everybody in the place, and in her life had never experienced such happiness. Her slight accident had made her an object of general interest. She was known as "that pretty girl who was nearly drowned."

Both Tom Rudd and Cas Ashton were frankly attentive to Rhoda. For a while it had been embarrassing. She had acquired two suitors; Babbie none. Cas had taken Rhoda to tea at his aunt's luxurious, rambling hacienda, had escorted her to a cocktail party there one afternoon, had driven her out to the La Honda Country Club for luncheon— and had not included Babbie in any of these invitations.

There was no particular reason why he should, and yet Rhoda had begun to feel the discrimination uncomfortably, or to imagine it. Was there a distinction drawn between herself and Lou Simpson and Lou's sister? Mrs. Anstruther did not ask for them, what they were doing, or how faring. She was a trifle condescending to Rhoda herself, but that was her way, Rhoda observed, with almost everyone, even with Caswell. Her nephew was her guest visiting her from New York. Rhoda suspected his money was scarce, and that most of what he possessed came from his wealthy relative, even to the blue racer in which he dashed about Santa Ramona.

On the last occasion, the one on which he had taken her to the country club, Rhoda had been especially out-of-sorts. She had not wanted to go. She would have preferred lunching on the beach with Lou and Babbie. Tom would have joined them and she realized fully now that she was happy only when Tom was near, or when she knew she was to see him soon. Not that she did not like Cas Ashton. She liked him very much. He had a sunny disposition, a delicious sense of humor, and he was fine, well-bred.

That quality drew her. He was the "finest" young man she had ever known, a gentleman to the finger tips. Different from Tom with his uncouthness, his braggadocio, his conceit. But Tom was strong, powerful, vital and— God knew!— handsome. Cas was good-looking, too, but he possessed for Rhoda none of Tom's appeal.

On the day of the luncheon, she felt strongly that Cas should have invited Babbie, and she intimated as much. It  was then that Cas had told her of Peter Cheeseborough, his roommate at Yale. Pete was arriving from New York by plane on the day following the next, and he was going to be with Aunt Meg—  oh, until they both went East again toward the end of the month.

"We'll take care of Babbie," Cas promised her. "Gee, you know, Rhoda, I can't see anybody but you, and it wouldn't be any fun having Babbie along every time we went out together. But now when Pete's here, it will be different. I'll fix it. He and Babbie ought to hit it off together. They're the same type."

Cas' prediction turned out to be correct. Pete's plane got in at the Los Angeles airport on a morning two days later. Cas met him, drove him over to Santa Ramona and the same day telephoned Rhoda to ask if he and Pete could call for the girls about nine or ten o'clock that evening and take them dancing at the casino. It was an especially happy time. Rhoda never had liked Cas so much and she was pleased with his friend, who was immediately attracted by Babbie.

It was for the following morning that the motor ride and luncheon had been proposed, and the girls were discussing the plan as they sat on Lou's porch in the Sunday sunshine.

Rhoda was thinking that she wouldn't see Tom, not until evening; perhaps not then.

Babbie, following her thoughts, said: "You won't see Tom today."

Rhoda felt a tell-tale blush reddening her cheeks. "I know," she admitted; "I was just thinking that." After a little, as Babbie said nothing, she observed: "Perhaps it's just as well."

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, we-e-l-l-l-l..." She made a gesture.

"Do you really care so much?" Babbie asked.

"I'm afraid so," Rhoda admitted.

"You're one of a hundred," Babbie told her.

A moment passed while the girl made no reply; then she flung up her head impatiently, and rose to her feet. "I can't help it," she said. "I'm not going to be a fool; I'm never going to let him know! That's why I say perhaps it's just as well...

"Oh, don't think I'm so easy," she went on, after a moment... "My goodness, Babbie, can't a woman fall for a man without making a holy show of herself? I'm not going to, at any rate. I don't care if you know I'm in love with Tom Rudd. I am. I'm glad of it. But Ill never let him kiss me. I'll never let him get fresh."

JUAREZ is a half-American, half-Mexican fishing village some fifty miles south of Santa Ramona Beach. It is off the highway on a side road that zigzags down the face of a cliff, and because it is difficult to reach retains much of its original Mexican character. The houses are more or less tumble-down shacks, homes of fishing-folk; the main thoroughfare is dusty and ill-kept; swarthy Mexican children tumble in and out of doorways, and a stale odor of drying fish permeates the air.

There is, however, a hotel called the Princeton Inn, which is well run and where an unexpectedly excellent table d'hôte may be had for a dollar, and it was there on this particular Sunday morning that Cas Ashton and Pete Cheeseborough took Rhoda and Babbie. It was a happy hour. Peter had them in gales of laughter. Rhoda decided she liked him, and it was obvious that Babbie more than liked him.

After the luncheon they found their way down to the rocks which lay in volcanic convolutions along the shore. The tide was at ebb and great ledges of black basalt lay uncovered, pock-marked with thousands of small basins, each a perfect aquarium in itself, where sea urchins and anemones, crabs and strange spiny creatures pursued a mysterious existence. Rhoda was fascinated; she and Cas explored one pool after another.

Babbie and Peter went their own way. Rhoda could see their distant figures upon a point of ledge, Peter giving Babbie a hand as she sprang across a crevice in the rocks. After that one glimpse of them, she lost them entirely. She was absorbed, kneeling with Cas beside one of the magic pools where an abalone would close its hard shelly lip upon the point of a stick and their combined strength could not pull it out.

He told her about Chinese fishermen whose fingers were sometimes caught in an abalone's iron grip and who had been drowned as the tide came in, unable to free themselves. They dropped tiny shells into the yawning mouth of a green-and-purple sea anemone and watched it curl together its widespread fringes. Their heads were close together as they peered into the pools; their hands touched; more than once his arm went about her. He was holding her so, and watching her face as she bent over a basin's edge, when he said gravely:

"My God, girl, I love you."

There was something in his tone that made Rhoda's heart stand still. She continued to look into the pool, and gulped spasmodically, as she managed:

"Do you, Cas?"

Stirred by his tenseness and his nearness she hardly more than whispered it; his arm about her drew her closer.

"Rhoda," he said again, "I love you." His lips found her hair. "Do you love me, Rhoda?" he whispered.

"I don't know," she told him softly.

"I think it's been from the very first," he said; "the minute my eyes fell on you. I haven't been able to get you out of my mind!"

Her own thoughts flew to Tom. Looking into Cas' beseeching eyes, she was thinking of Tom. Yes, that was the way it was with her— Tom, from the very first.

"You like me?" Cas begged.

"Oh, yes," she said with feeling.

"But you don't love me, is that it?"

"I'm not sure," she said vaguely.

"I'll make you," he told her with emphasis. "You haven't had a chance to know me yet. My God, Rhoda, if gentleness and kindness and friendship and devotion can win a girl, you've got to fall for me! You don't. know what I've been through since knowing you! I've never had anything like this happen to me before— and it will never happen again. I tell you, I'm bowled over... I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't do a single thing without thinking of you!"

It was all very boyishly expressed, but it carried weight, and again she was stirred. It was just the way she felt about Tom. Why couldn't it have been Tom who was saying these things to her? Tom! Tom! A giddiness, a madness took hold of her when she thought of him.

After a time they retraced their steps across the rocks. Babbie and Peter were nowhere to be seen. Cas hallooed for them but his voice would not carry.

"They'll come back to the car. We might as well wait for them there."

The automobile had been left in one of the motor sheds connected with the inn. Cas suggested that he drive it out onto the road and place it where Peter and Babbie would be sure to see it.

"They'll know we're waiting for them," he said.

But she knew he was not thinking of Babbie and Peter. He opened the door of the back seat, and immediately it was closed, he put his arm around her. Rhoda took off her hat and nestled into the curve of his embrace. He spoke of the future; he spoke of marriage; he told her he was eager to leave college and accept a position in his uncle's San Francisco office. "You see, then we could be married right away and you'd still be near your people. We'd rent a house down in Burlingame near Aunt Meg's. Oh, you'd love it down there. We'd have all sorts of fun."

It sounded attractive. Why couldn't she say yes? She wished she could. She liked him— liked him very, very much. She thought of her father and mother, and how wonderful it would be to go home and tell them she was going to marry Caswell Ashton, the nephew of Mrs. Anthony Anstruther of Burlingame. How happy it would make them in the midst of all their trouble.

Rhoda's problem, they would say, was solved; she would marry wealth, have position; they need no longer worry about her, and perhaps she would be able to help them financially, at least until her father found work again. Why couldn't she turn up her face now to Cas' eager lips and tell him she loved him and she'd marry him whenever he said the word? But back there, 'way off in her mind somewhere, was the shadowy figure of Tom Rudd with that haunting smile of his, the upper lip stretched tightly across his even, glistening teeth. It wouldn't let her do it. Tears misted her eyes and she turned her face against Cas' shoulder as they began to fall, fumbling for her handkerchief.

"Why, you're crying, dearest! Why, what— my dearest, what is it?"

There was the sound of approaching steps. "Hello, there! Waiting long? Sorry, Skeets, if we've held up the show. Babbie and I got a good soaking."

Rhoda dashed the tears from her eyes. What was it? How did it happen? Oh, they'd just gone out too far on the rocks and a wave had caught them.

"I only got my shoes and skirt wet," Babbie said. "Pete got it the worst. Just look at him!"

His trousers and shoes showed they had been drenched.

"It's nothing," he protested. "Let's get home and change. Want me to drive, Cas? I'll make it in a jiffy."

The others scrambled into the front seat.

"He's a demon driver," Cas told Rhoda. "Well, go to it, old man, but don't do any showing off."

Evidently that was just what Peter proposed to do. He turned the car around and set off for Ramona Beach at terrific speed.

Sixty, sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five— Rhoda's eyes were hypnotized by the speed dial.

"Say, Pete," Cas called out, "there's traffic laws in this state."

Peter slowed down somewhat, but the car still rushed onward at terrific speed. So Rhoda thought, but she kept telling herself that these boys must know what they were about and that she was too apprehensive.

She was thinking so for the hundredth time, when the car rounded a sharp curve; the highway was broad but on the outer shoulder was a wide border of fine loose gravel. As they hit this, in a wide sweep, the wheels of the car lost traction, and began to skid. Peter fought desperately to hold the car to the road. He hung on for a hundred, two hundred feet, getting nearer and nearer the edge.

"Here we go!" cried Cas.

Rhoda felt the car slipping, sliding, sliding; there was a whole minute when it seemed to hang suspended in the air. Then it went over. A terrific crash, the rending sound of steel and shattering glass. She felt herself flung violently upward, downward, from one side to the other. Cas' arms clutched her; then the door to which she clung burst open and she was thrown out. There were sharp, hurting branches, a bush, a stunning blow; her breath was knocked from her. A long moment of agony came as she struggled for her breath; then she lay still, moaning.

The others! She must do something; they needed her, perhaps. Babbie . She made an effort to rise, and there was great pain in her side and shoulder.

A man bent over her. "Are you all right? My God!" he said.

Rhoda sank back, and the branches of the bush scratched her face. She could hear people calling, the scattering of stones as men scrambled down the hill.

Somebody lifted her carefully. There were gentle arms about her.

"My God, Rhoda!" said Tom Rudd.

She opened her eyes, and he was holding her, his face twisted with emotion. She gave a little gasp, and began to cry. He gathered her up, others helping; slowly they bore her up the hill. She was assisted into a car; hands held her; one shoulder hurt. They laid her in the back seat; Tom got in beside her. He put his arms about her, and she lay gratefully in his embrace.

"Lady's name, Rudd?" A traffic officer peered into the window.

"Oh, never mind that, George. Publicity's no good. If you have to know, you can find me. I want to get her to the Emergency in a hurry."

"No, no," Rhoda protested, making an effort. "Take me home. I'm all right."

"Oh, you don't know. Let the doctors have a look at you. Something wrong inside, maybe. Leave it to me, Rhoda."

She sank into his arms again, and he gathered her close. The car started to move. Some other man was at the wheel.

"The others?" Rhoda whispered.

"We don't know. Nobody's killed; Babbie's only cut up a bit. It was a bad spill. The car rolled over three times. There're twenty men down there helping. They're doing everything they can; you just lie quiet. I'll take care of you."

"I love you, Tom," Rhoda said simply.

He turned her face up to his, and kissed her softly, tenderly. She gave him her lips, hardly conscious, knowing only that here was the man she loved; he was taking care of her.

"Sweetheart," he whispered. They kissed again. "I always seem to be res- cuing you," he said with a brief laugh. "I ran into Glendale today— Sunday I have off— to see my mother, and I wasn't five minutes behind you when I saw Cas' car ahead, and saw it go over the cliff. What a damn fool the kid is!"

"Pete was driving," Rhoda said defensively.

"I don't care who was driving. They took that curve at sixty, and it was a damn bit of recklessness. You had a mighty lucky escape, do you know that? If that door hadn't opened and pitched you out, you'd have gone over with the others."

"Babbie hurt?"

"Can't tell. She's cut up a good deal about her face; she was unconscious."

"Oh!" Rhoda began to sob again.

She lay then quietly crying, her head against Tom's breast; he held her closely.

THE car jolted and swayed. Rhoda realized she was hurt more than she had thought. The jounces sent shooting pains through her shoulder; her side ached.

"Tom darling"— she looked up at him— "will we ever get there?" In spite of her pain, her lips invited his, and he kissed her again, tenderly, lingeringly.

"Baby," he whispered. "Only a few minutes now. I love you, too."

She sighed and sank into his arms.

Presently they were at the hospital, and at once there were white-uniformed attendants, internes, orderlies, nurses, all helping her. They carried her upstairs on a stretcher, and in a minute or two she found herself in a hospital room; nurses were undressing her. Tom left her. Going, he said:

"I'll find out about Babbie and report straight to Lou. Don't worry, Baby."

Rhoda had a badly bruised shoulder and side. Her hip and arm turned a royal black and blue, but besides the bruise and the shock, no harm had been done. But Babbie had been cut severely about the head and neck. The glass from the broken windshield had lacerated her face. Several stitches had to be taken in her scalp. But there were no sprains or breaks.

The boys took the worst of it. Cas had an arm and his collar bone broken. Peter had been thrown against the wheel; his front ribs had been splintered; there were internal injuries. Mrs. Anstruther telegraphed his mother to come West.

Rhoda was able to leave the hospital at the end of the third day. Babbie would have to remain for at least a week. All were anxious that her face should not be scarred, and the doctors gave reasonable assurance of this, provided she remained quietly in the hospital until the lacerations had healed.

It was a tremendous relief to Rhoda to be at home again, with Lou taking care of her, bringing her trays of good things to eat, and Tom dropping in two or three times a day. Everyone said it was a lucky escape, but that to Rhoda seemed a perfectly obvious statement. You always said that after an accident.

To herself she said that the accident and terrible experience— as far as she was concerned— had been worth while a thousand times over, since it had brought her Tom's love. She lived in an ecstasy of joy for the moments when he came into the room where she was lying and took her in his arms and kissed her' with soft, lingering, tender lips.

She did not believe it possible for anyone to know such happiness as hers. To think that of all the women who had run after him, she— a little humble stenographer— had been the one to capture him! This paragon, this Greek god, this man among men whom the whole world admired! Little Rhoda Darling! It was too marvelous to be true!

"Rhoda, I can't let you go on like this without saying something to you." Lou was speaking; she had come in for Rhoda's breakfast tray.

The girl had been out with Tom the night before; her first venture since her return from the hospital. They had gone down to the beach, where in the darkness in a hollow of sand she had lain for an hour in his arms.

"Oh, Tom, Tom," she had whispered, staring up in the dimness of the night to study his face, "you do love me, don't you? You're not making fun of me?"

"Baby, Baby," he had assured her, "how can you doubt me? Sweetheart, there's never been anyone like you before. I adore you. I'd die for you. Ah, Rhoda, you must believe me. This is the real thing. No kidding."

And here was Lou the next morning, settling herself on the side of Rhoda's bed to preach her a sermon of warning and admonition. She knew what Lou was going to say before she opened her mouth. She listened with tightly pressed lips. After a time, she stopped her.

"I know what I'm about, Lou," she said. "I know everything you've been saying is true. But I love Tom Rudd and I'm satisfied he loves me as well. We're going to be married as soon as he gets a job— I mean, as soon as the summer's over, and he can find a position either in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Lou, don't worry about me. You've been awfully sweet, and are awfully sweet. I don't care how many women have been in love with Tom or how many he's cared for. I know he loves me and means to marry me. I'm going to write my father tonight and tell him. Tom and I are going to get married just as soon as we can. I love him madly, and I don't care who knows it."

And with that she burst into tears and turned her face to the wall.

Lou picked up the breakfast tray and left the room without further word.

Rhoda went to see Babbie the same day at the hospital, and told her the news: she and Tom Rudd were engaged! Wasn't it too utterly unbelievable?

Babbie, her face still swathed in bandages, had none of her sister's misgivings. "Oh, I'm delighted, dearest.  Tom's wonderful. You'll make a grand couple— about the two handsomest things that ever got married! Your children ought to be—"

"Oh, hush!" Rhoda stopped her, laughing.

BUT WHILE she was at the hospital she must pay visits to both Peter and Cas. She was allowed to look in only for a moment at Peter. He lay in a darkened room, his mother beside him. His self-reproach at sight of her was so poignant that Rhoda felt the less he saw of her the better. His mother followed her into the corridor, pressed her hands, and kept saying:

"Thank our merciful Father, my dear; thank Him on your bended knee as I do on mine. My poor, poor boy."

If that was hard enough to bear, her visit to Cas was worse. When she came into the room, it caught at her heart to see how his face lighted up.

"Rhoda!" He stretched out his eager hand to her, and as soon as the nurse had gone. "My dearest! ... Sweetheart! A kiss for an old cripple— please!"

She gave him her cheek, but he would have none of it, and she must give him her lips for a moment with an uncomfortable feeling that it wasn't fair to Tom. But it was Cas who concerned her the more. Tom wouldn't mind, she felt sure, if she kissed Cas while he lay here in the hospital, but Cas himself... That was different, and it was going to be very hard. How tell him? How break the. news?

What was more disturbing, he had told his aunt about her. Mrs. Anstruther said nothing, but Rhoda knew she knew, There was a slight coolness in her manner now which formerly had been warm and hearty, though always patronizing, Of course, Mrs. Anstruther would hardly approve her nephew marrying a nonentity like Rhoda Darling. It was plain she blamed herself for her first cordiality, the interest she had shown the day of Rhoda's tumble in the waves. Now she was graciously civil, but friendliness had disappeared.

Rhoda came to dread her visits to the hospital. Cas wanted her to sit close to the bed, where he could hold her hand, his eyes feasting on her face.

"How stupid all this is," he would com- plain, "lying here when I could be out doing something with you. He says next Thursday he's going to put my shoulder and arm in a cast and I'll be a cripple for a month, but I'm going to spend every minute of it with you ... Oh, Rhoda, Rhoda, Rhoda, you make me so happy! You're such an adorable darling! They certainly chose your last name well for you. You do love me, don't you? You're not making fun of me?"

The very words she'd used to Tom! This was all crazy! ... Did Tom feel no more for her than she did for this boy? Was there another woman in Tom's life for whom he secretly yearned and of whom he was afraid to tell her?

"What's the matter, Rhoda? Aren't you feeling well?"

"Oh, yes, I'm all right. I just get a little dizzy now and then."

"You aren't tiring yourself by coming here, are you? Dearest, if I was only up and about to take care of you. You're having a dull time, I know, but I' be out on Thursday, and I'm never, never going to let you out of my sight.

"Dad will be back— well, he ought to be in Paris by the fourth of next month, and then I'm going to cable him. You see, he and Mother are somewhere out in the Orient. They left Shanghai about ten days ago and are bound for Trieste. You'll love Dad; he's a peach, and you'll love Mother too, only she's very quiet and gentle. But Esmé! Esmé's my sister. She's a whirlwind. She's up at Janet Lloyd's ranch in Wyoming.

"You know Janet Lloyd, the actress? She's a great friend of Esmé. She asked Esmé to spend this whole summer with her at her place, and they wanted me to go too, but I'm not much for roughing it; I like the beach and I'm damn fond of Aunt Meg. You'll like all the family, especially Esmé. She'll be here— I expect to meet her in Frisco sometime next month, or maybe September. She's coming down to visit Aunt Meg.

"I want to get in touch with her before we make any wedding plans. Dad always listens to Esmé, and what Esmé says goes. I know she's going to adore you, and when she knows how desperate I am, and how I want to settle down and go to work ... My uncle— that's Anthony Anstruther, Aunt Meg's husband— he's been wanting me to go into his Oriental Steamship Company ever since I was a kid. There's no children in the Anstruther family, you know, and I suppose he wants me to carry on. I've been sort of dallying with the idea, but I thought I'd finish at Yale first— but now, to hell with it. I want to marry you!"

Babbie was allowed to leave the hospital presently. For Rhoda it was a great joy to have her home again. There leaving him to the mercy of sirens who flaunted their bodies before him all day long. Not yet, at any rate.

She put the thought of the day of departure from her as far as possible. The immediate problem was Cas. He must be told, she must do it, and it was going to be the hardest job of her life.

On a sudden inspiration she decided to speak to Tom about it. He would buck up her spirits, strengthen her resolution.

He listened to her with a curious lack of expression, and once she thought his lip curled in something like a sneer.

"You see, Tom, he's been awfully sick, and his arm hurts him so he can't sleep at night—"

"Well, why did you let him think you cared for him in the first place?"

"I didn't."

"Yes, you did; you must have given him' some sort of a say-so for him ever to think you cared for him."

"Oh, yes," Rhoda admitted in sudden confusion, "but that was before I knew about you; before I knew about us."

"*En why didn't you tell him pronto and tell him to go roll his hoop?"

"He was in the hospital then—and I was, too. I didn't get a chance."

"You had plenty of chances the first time you saw him."

"I know." Rhoda hung her head.

"And you have had plenty of chances every time you've seen him, and you've been going to see him every day! I don't think that's being very square with me, Rhoda."

"Oh, Tom!" The tears came in a rush. He made no motion for a moment; then he caught her in his arms.

"Hush, Baby. Don't go on that way." He kissed the tears on her upturned face. Presently on a long quivering intake of breath, she asked:

"Then you think I ought to tell him right away?"

"You bet your life I do."

"Can I tell him about us?"

"Well, why not?"

"I mean, that we're engaged and're going to be married right away, as soon as you get a job?"

He held her away from him, scanning her face, a frown darkening his own. "Say, looka here, Rhoda. What's all this bunk about me you've been saying to Lou Simpson?"

SHE SAW he was angry, and in amazement she shook her head.

"Oh, you know," he went on aggressively.

"I truly don't, Tom."

"Yes, you do. You've been pumping her as to whether I meant business or not, and if I was any kind of a fellow to get a good job, and all that rot."

Only her puzzled eyes answered him.

"Well," he explained, "Lou came to me the other day and wanted to know about me; asked me a lot of questions, whether I was fooling with you or not, and if I honestly cared. It made me damned mad. There's nothin' I've done, Rhoda, that ought to make you think I'm not being square with you."

"Did Lou Simpson do that?" Rhoda demanded, indignation rising.

"Sure. I thought you put her up to it"

"Never."

"Well, where did she get the idea?"

"What idea?"

"About us— about my getting a job up in San Francisco this fall?"

"Well, I told her that. I told her we were engaged and were going to get married as soon as you could afford it. That's right, isn't it, Tom?"

"Sure; but why advertise it all over the place?"

"Why, I didn't— I haven't; I just told Lou, that's all. She knew I was going out all the time with you. She could see how much I cared. I had to tell her, but I think she had an awful nerve to go to you with any such questions. I'll give her a piece of my mind!"

"Oh, forget it," Tom said abruptly, good-natured again. "'S long as you're sure I'm nuts about you, Baby."

"You are, aren't you, Tom?"

"You bet your life."

She looked deeply into his eyes and he folded her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. "Baby," he murmured.

It was a moment or two before she could speak. "You do love me?"

"What do you think? You're adorable," he whispered. "You're glorious. There never was any girl like you, Rhoda. You're just like a beautiful sun-ripened peach. You're— you're luscious. And I'm just going to eat you alive," he said suddenly, burying his face in her neck, kissing her cheek, her temple, her hair.

"Tom, Tom." She was frightened. She pushed him from her.

"God, I love you!" he said fiercely.

She held him from her, smiling. "And I can tell Cas about us? I've got to tell him today, if you think best."

"Well, sure; go ahead."

"That we're going to be married soon— I mean, this year sometime."

"Yeah; sure!"

Her face went suddenly grave. going to be awfully hard."

"Why?" He drew out the syllable.

"Because he cares so. He thinks I'm going to marry him as soon as his sister Esmé comes home from some ranch."

The man scowled. 'Well, you'll have to set him right, and do it damn quick," he said brusquely.

"Okay," she said hurriedly. "I'll tell him this very afternoon when I see him."

IT WAS even harder than she anticipated. The boy's face went white. He lay in bed, propped up by pillows, and it was as if she had struck him in the face. His chin quivered.

Rhoda sobbed hysterically. "Oh, Cas, Cas, Cas, I'm so sorry! Oh, Cas, Cas."

"Oh, don't worry, Rhoda. It isn't going to kill me; I'll get over it. I'm not going to blow my brains out or cut my throat, but— but it's pretty staggering— it's so— so unexpected," he finished hopelessly. Then: "Well, if you love him, you love him— and that's all there is to it. You can't help it. You can't help it any more than I can help loving you."

"Oh, Cas, Cas."

"Ah, don't you care, dear. I don't want to rub it in. You've been a good sport, and it must have been tough coming in here day after day, pretending—"

"Oh, Cas!"

"Well, you see, what kind of knocks me is that— I don't know— I'd made such fine resolutions; I mean, for myself. I was going to buckle down to work and be good. I've been sort of drifting around for years, and the old man was getting sore. You were just the right kind of incentive for me. I wrote and told Esmé all about it. Gee!" He drew a long breath of pain. "It's going to be rotten having to tell her it's all off."

She dropped to her knees beside his cot; she caught his hand and pressed her wet cheek against it. For a long time she knelt so.

"Well," he said, pressing her fingers at length, "there's no use prolonging the agony— either for you or for me. The doc says I can get out of here tomorrow, and I'll beat it right away. I don't want to stay round here and be seeing you. Or him," he added, on a quick intake of breath. "Let's say good-by now, and Rhoda, I wish you all the luck in the world."

Blindly she kissed his hand, and sobbing, groped her way to the door. "Good-by, Cas; I'll never forget you."

That was the end. Babbie told her the next day Cas had gone. Peter gave her the news. He was angry about the way Rhoda had treated his friend; he believed she had led him on, or at least had let him believe she returned his affection when she should have told him about Tom. Babbie could make no headway with him. Rhoda suspected that they had quarreled, and that somehow Cas' bitter disillusionment affected Peter's feelings for Babbie. He told her he was going to join Cas as soon as the doctors let him go. There was no talk of his coming back or of keeping up their friendship. Babbie cried, and Rhoda felt more miserable than ever.

ONE OTHER who began to treat Rhoda with coldness was her own hostess. In a moment of thoughtlessness Rhoda had demanded of Lou why she had gone to Tom to question him about a matter which she implied was none of Lou's business. Lou listened with lips which grew more and more tightly pressed together. At length she observed that she had thought she had been acting as Rhoda's friend, and had left the room. After that she was no more than politely civil to her, and Rhoda realized that her stay at Santa Ramona Beach was rapidly coming to an end. Babbie, after Peter's loss of interest, began to talk of returning to San Francisco, and Rhoda knew that only a day or two remained for her.

With a heavy heart she told Tom the fact when he called for her that evening to take her to the movies.

"It will have to be the day after to-morrow, I'm afraid," she said, clinging to his arm, as they walked toward the theater.

"Aw, nix," he said, scowling.

"I've got to," Rhoda said miserably.

"Why, what for?" he demanded.

"You knew I had to go back, Tom."

"Well, I know, but not— not until the end of the summer."

She shook her head wretchedly and they walked on. Their time together was almost at an end. One more day, one more night, and that was all. When were they to meet again? When would she see him?

Suddenly it seemed to her she clearly recognized the type of man he was—the type who indolently would let, the weeks and months drift by and make no move to bring about their marriage. She sagged heavily upon his arm, and a breath, half sob, half moan, escaped her.

"Aw, honey dear," he said consolingly. He patted the small white fingers that clutched his coat sleeve.

They went into the theater and groped their way in the dark to seats midway between aisles so that others would not crowd past them. He slipped his arm about her and she rested her head against his shoulder. She was happy and contented, leaning against him.

The picture was over all too soon. The lights blared up, the organ boomed an exit march, and Tom helped her to her feet; led her to the street.

The night was warm; myriad of stars.

"Let's wander down by the beach," Tom said.

They strolled along the streets in the direction of the sea. There was a heavy smell of lush foliage in the air, and once when they found themselves in the shadow of a pepper tree, Tom put his arms about her and held her to him with his lips tight to hers for a long minute.

"I can never let you go," he whispered.

"I never want you to let me go," she whispered back.

Presently they found themselves plowing across the hummocky dunes. Shortly the sand grew firm under their feet. The waves came rolling toward them in curving arches.

"Come on over here where we can sit down. It's a swell night, isn't it?"

He led her to a place they had often been before. A shed, where a lifeboat was kept for ready launching, hid them from view and they could comfortably rest their backs against its wall. Tom gathered her to him without delay. Their lips clung together for one, two, three— ten seconds. The girl felt herself wilting, wilting in his strong embrace. Floating, floating, sinking, dropping, dying, dying.

"Rhoda, darling," he whispered passionately, "it's hard to be satisfied with just kisses. You're going to be away for a hell of a long time. I'm not going to see you. This is our last night, sweetheart. I want you terribly— all of you."

She drew back from his whispering lips. "Oh, no."

"Don't you love me enough?"

"Oh, yes, I do. That's the trouble."

"But Rhoda, we'll be married in a little while."

"No, Tom, it's because I love you too much. We might feel differently toward each other afterwards. You might hate me."

"Nonsense!"

"Well, I might feel differently toward you."

"But you couldn't. You love me, don't you?"

"You know I do, Tom."

"Don't you want me as I want you?"

"I guess so," she admitted, breathless and confused.

"Well, then." He drew her closer.

"No, Tom, please," she said desperately.

He hesitated. "Aw, hell." He sank back and drew away from her.

She sat up and looked out across the serried ranks of the white-tipped combers as they came toward the shore. Her heart was breaking. This was perhaps their last night together. She'd blame herself when she was back in San Francisco that she hadn't done everything to make him happy. But something held her back, stopped her. There would be no going back— being a girl again!

"Come here," he said, almost roughly. He caught her about the shoulder and drew her down into the circle of his arm. He kissed her forehead. "You know," he was saying, his lips in her hair, "I couldn't love you any more if I was legally your husband. I'm practically that now."

"We might get married tomorrow and keep it a secret," she said impulsively. It stopped him.

"Aw, nix," he said. "You have to wait three days in California; I mean, you have to apply for a license three days before you can get married. And anyhow, what's the use of getting hooked up now? Your folks would be sore as the devil at me if they found out. And I'm certain my old lady would. But I'll be damned if I can see why a sensible girl like you has to be so finicky."

A spasm convulsed her as his hand touched her flesh. With a wrench she broke free from him.

"Aw, hell!" He rose to his feet, brushing the sand from his clothes. "Come on," he said surlily. "I'll take you home." There was something terrible in his voice. Its coarseness stabbed her.

"You don't have to," she said with spirit.

He did not answer her. He jerked his head toward the town. "Come on; let's get going."

She swallowed convulsively. Then she reached for her hat, put it on, and strode toward the lighted street. Neither spoke. Rhoda held her head high, walking stiffly, her shoulders flung back. A terrible anger was mounting in her. The very citadel of her soul had been sacked; she, Rhoda Darling, had somehow been degraded, hoodwinked, flouted. There was no danger of tears. The edges of her teeth were clenched together, her mouth drawn in a hard, thin line.

AS SHE approached Lou's bungalow, imperceptibly she quickened her steps. The moment was at hand, coming quickly nearer and nearer, when she would know whether or not she had been a fool, whether or not the man she loved with the great love of her life was nothing but a cad— a vain, strutting weakling with a vicious soul and heart.

She strode forward. They reached the steps. The moment had arrived. But the girl did not falter, nor hesitate, nor turn her head, nor vouchsafe her companion a glance. She mounted straight to the screen door, flung it wide, went in. Without a word of farewell, Tom Rudd turned away into the night.

Babbie was reading in bed when Rhoda entered their room. She looked up in surprise at Rhoda's sternness.

"Babbie," said Rhoda, seating herself on the narrow bed, "do me a great favor, will you? Let's start home tomorrow."

"Why, surely," Babbie said, puzzled. "But what about— what about Tom?"

Rhoda knew her face was white. Again there came a spasm in her throat. "It's all over; it's ended. Don't ask me anything more tonight. I'll tell you the whole story tomorrow— every bit of it. But now I'm too— too upset."

"You mean it's all over between you; that you— you're never going to see him any more?"

"Never again, Not in my right senses," Rhoda said fiercely.

"Oh, my dear!" the other said, aghast.

"I know. It's pretty awful. I suppose I'll live through it. I suppose I'll one day be able to look myself in the face."

"Oh, but Rhoda, what happened?"

"I'll tell you everything tomorrow. Lou was right about him, but I don't want her to know it's all off until after we go."

"But oh, my dear, I was just thinking… what a pity!"

"Don't pity me. I don't deserve it."

"I wasn't thinking of you."

"Well, he's the lowest, rottenest skunk."

"I wasn't thinking of Tom Rudd."

Rhoda questioned her with a glance.

"I was thinking of Caswell Ashton."

Rhoda stared at her friend. "Yes," she said slowly, "I thought of him. I sent him away; I ruined my own life for nothing."

IT WAS good to be home again. Rhoda clung to her father, her head pressed to his chest.

"Why, honey, did you have a good time?" he said. "You certainly look better; never seen you looking so well."

That might be so. Outwardly perhaps, Rhoda conceded, but inside she was sick, dying.

Aunt Julia observed her shrewdly and said nothing for a week. Then, when they were alone one day, she remarked dryly: "Guess you're really glad to be home again."

Rhoda nodded.

" 'Tain't all beer and skittles being young and pretty, is it?"

"Not all beer and skittles," the girl repeated.

"Well, Rhoda, those things pass. They don't make much difference in the long run. I had several affairs when I was your age, and one I'd like to have died for— just because I made a darned fool of myself."

Rhoda felt the blood flooding her cheeks, and a wave of love for the little gray-haired woman rose in her heart.

Her mother was just as Rhoda had left her. She would never be any better. The complaining voice whimpered through the house all day.

Rhoda's father was at work again. He had secured a position in a public accountant's office, and was even more cheerful than in the old days when every morning he had to report to his drafting board. His happiness at being at work once more affected them all.

Disturbing and what she regarded as calamitous news awaited Babbie upon her return. Her father, who for years had been in the freight department of the Southern Pacific Company, was to be transferred to Portland as district freight agent, and on the first of September he was going north and taking his family with him.

"Forever, I suppose," Babbie raged to Rhoda. "I don't want to go to Portland! I don't want to go any place! I've spent all my life here in San Francisco, all my friends are here, and it's just going to be awful!"

Rhoda was sorry to see Babbie go. She was the one link with the chapter of her life that had devastated her soul.

It was harder than she had expected to get back to normal living and thinking. She had anticipated wakeful nights; she had anticipated heartaches and hours of despair. She had prepared herself for these, but she had not foreseen the utter dullness of existence, the blankness of empty days.

Locked up in her chest, too, was that dreadful feeling of degradation, that humiliating realization of having made an utter fool of herself, of having kicked her happiness in the face and sent away a man who would have opened the gates of heaven to her; dismissed him, cruelly hurt him because of a silly high-school girl's infatuation with a life guard! She writhed every time she thought of it. Yet even though her eyes were opened now, there lingered persistently the memory of Tom's arms, the feel of their great clean strength about her, the tender, clinging pressure of his lips on hers.

She knew now that Tom had never seriously meant marriage. Not that he deliberately intended to seduce her. He was not that kind. She recognized the type of man he was quite clearly. He was an amiable drifter with no particular object in life beyond having a pleasant, agreeable time. He had no intention of involving himself with the responsibilities of a wife and a household.

Three or four times a week Rhoda went downtown and sought the employment agencies, inquired at one place or another where an extra stenographer might be needed or a salesgirl employed, returned home to scan the "Help Wanted" columns in the newspapers. She was eager to get to work again— any kind of work which would absorb her thoughts and her energies, keep her mind off her everlasting self-contumely, regret and longing.

There was little to do to fill her days, and she took to helping a dressmaker over on Valencia Street in order to have something to do. Mrs. Barns the family had known for a long time. She had made ginghams and dimities for Rhoda's high-school days. Rhoda begged to he allowed to come in to sew so she might learn something useful. She didn't want any pay for the work.

Within a week of her return from Santa Ramona Beach, she wrote Lou Simpson a lengthy letter. In it, she told, without sparing herself, the story of her wretched experience with Tom, stated how deeply she regretted her flare-up and the unkind things she had said. Lou replied generously.

"There's no use trying to tell anything to a girl in love," Lou wrote. It made Rhoda wince, but she reminded herself, truth hurts.

She answered, and had another letter, telling her that Lou's husband was back from Mexico, and then in about three weeks a shorter communication:

"I thought you'd be interested to know," scribbled Lou, "that your late boy friend of the beach is being named as co-respondent in a divorce case which John Tattler is bringing against his wife. It's going to cramp his style, I'm afraid."

Rhoda read the letter several times, scowled at it, then tore it to shreds and scattered them out of the window. The old wound started to bleed again. It would never heal, she was afraid. Tom Rudd! He had been so sweet! She had loved him so dearly! Some other woman— other women!— had him now. Faithless, contemptible, despicable, a vain weakling— but she loved him! If he should walk into the room at that moment, she knew she would fly into his arms, to feel again their sinewy strength about her, and his thin, loving lips on hers!... Oh, God, help her to forget!

She read of Mrs. Anthony Anstruther's activities in the social notes of the newspapers, constantly. She ran her eye over the Society Column every morning. Once she found Cas' name.

Mrs. Anthony Anstruther's nephew, Mr. Caswell Ashton, who has made many friends during his stay here and at Santa Ramona Beach this summer, has returned to his studies at Yale.

PRESENTLY THERE were frequent references to Miss Esmé Ashton: Miss Ashton, who had been spending several months with Janet Lloyd, the stage and motion-picture star, at the actress' ranch in Wyoming, was now visiting her aunt in Burlingame, where she would probably remain until the first of the year. There was the usual round of luncheons, dinners and dances, and in the lists of those present the name of Miss Esmé Ashton invariably was mentioned.

Rhoda read all of it with an aching heart. Her name might so easily have been mentioned as glibly among the society items. She and Esmé would have been inseparable. Her sister-in-law! Rhoda sometimes gasped in pain when it came over her in a sudden rush what she had missed— for a life guard!

Life could be cruel, Rhoda mused youthfully. No torture ever conceived by the Inquisition, she believed, was com- parable to hers. Was there no end to the nightmare? Was she ever to know peace again? Was she ever to recapture sanity, normal living, happy moments?

She envied Babbie. Babbie had gone away where she could begin life anew, where she need not be constantly reminded of her own stupidity! She, Rhoda, could have been so happy with Cas; she would have learned to love him.

Why, she loved him even now! Fool— fool— fool! For the rest of her life she must call herself that: Fool— fool— fool!

"NOW listen here, Rhoda, I don't know that there's a thing in it, but if you're interested you might try. Myra said there was an opening, that's all I know. It's in the Sports Department."

Mrs. Barns was talking. She referred to her sister Myra who was a fitter at Romonoff's. Romonoff's was the fashionable ladies' shop in San Francisco. Its smart building on Post Street was an excellent example both inside and out of the art moderne.

"You know what Romonoff's is, of course," Mrs. Barns commented. "Well, Myra's been a fitter there— oh, land, I guess ever since the place opened. You've heard me speak of Myra?"

Rhoda nodded.

"Well, I was over at Myra's last night, and I don't know how we got round to it, but I got talking about you, and I told her how pretty you were and how anxious you was to get something to do and how I thought you were real capable, and then Myra told me about this position. She says Mr. Walker's the man you want to ask for. They're taking on more help, you know, on account of this NRA business. It mayn't be any more than part time."

"Oh, I shouldn't care. If it was only a start. Do you think I ought to go down there right now, Mrs. Barns? It's only quarter past three, and I could go home and dress and be there by four."

"Well, you do what you think best about it, Rhody."

Rhoda rose to her feet. "I think Ill take a chance. If I don't go now I'll be worrying about it all night."

She hurried home, and in twenty minutes was trundling along on a trolley car headed for the shopping district.

She had not thought about Mr. Walker or what her reception might be like. She expected little: a brusque business man with a probable indifferent refusal of her application. She had been rebuffed so many times. But Mr. Walker was extremely affable, and interested in finding the right girl for Romonoff's Sports Department which was being enlarged. Rhoda evidently was the type he sought.

"Well, Miss Darling, we can't start you off with more than seventy a month and two percent of your sales. Our Sports Department is new; we plan to develop it into something important. Just now it's linked up with the Misses Department— blouses, sweaters, scarfs— that sort of thing. By and by I want to put it in a section by itself. Sales are small; I mean, twenty dollars would be the probable maximum of a sale. Your profits can't be much, but it's a beginning. You might go further and soon be getting more. That will depend upon you. When can you start in?"

Rhoda smiled at him brightly. "To-morrow morning, if you like."

"Good. A little before nine, and report to Miss Blethen on the second floor."

Rhoda flew home. She felt she could have danced every step of the way. Seventy dollars a month and two per cent on sales!

"It's just unbelievable, that's all! I didn't think there was that much money in the world."

And Romonoff's proved to be no disappointment. She flung herself with passionate energy into her work. She learned her stock thoroughly. That was the way to become a good saleswoman. She could talk; she knew about clothes; she was attractive. The stock she must learn inside and out.

Miss Blethen, cold and suspicious at first, thawed under the girl's pathetic anxiety to please.

There were other girls at Romonoff's whom Rhoda soon learned to like, and with whom she lunched. Life was suddenly thrilling, absorbing, vital. As the rush of the holidays came and went and the New Year brought the hint of an early spring, again and again she would pause to ask herself whether or not she was the same girl who had once believed her head so bowed she could never lift it again; whether or not she was the same Rhoda Darling who had seriously considered a leap from an Oakland ferryboat as the easiest way to end the misery of her soul. Well, she had learned something, perhaps, but she would always remember the devastating fires through which she had passed.

IN FEBRUARY, Janet Lloyd came to the Columbia Theater, in a new play, "Turn-style;" in which she had made a hit in New York during the previous spring and fall. Rhoda went the first night alone. She scanned the packed house, hoping she might identify Mrs. Anstruther or Miss Esmé Ashton, but there was no one she recognized. She thought Miss Lloyd clever and extremely beautiful.

The following Saturday noon, Rhoda was just about to go for her luncheon when the elevator stopped at her floor and out of it rushed Mrs. Rossiter who belonged to the "Gowns," on the floor above. Mrs. Rossiter was considered one of Romonoff's best saleswomen, but Rhoda had not exchanged a dozen words with her and was therefore surprised when the lady hurried over to her.

Mrs. Rossiter was flustered. "Miss Darling, will you do me the greatest favor? Will you model a gown for me? Miss Janet Lloyd, the actress, is upstairs. She needs an evening gown in a hurry, has to wear it tonight at a ball somebody's giving her after the theater.

"Now, there's a Poiret model we've just got in," rushed on Mrs. Rossiter. "It's the most gorgeous thing we've got and I know Miss Lloyd will take it if she sees it modeled. It's just my luck to have both Marjorie and Violet out—  Violet's sick and Marjorie went out five minutes ago for her lunch— and there isn't a soul in the place. I tried to persuade Miss Lloyd to slip the gown on, but she hasn't time on account of the matinée, and she says she'd like to see it modeled. So I thought of you. You're just her type and just her figure, you know. Will you be an angel and help me out? You'd just be saving my life!"

"Of, course," Rhoda said willingly. "I saw Miss Lloyd Monday night. She's lovely, and you flatter me—"

"Well, come along. I'm so 'fraid she'll get away."

Mrs. Rossiter dragged her to the elevator, whisked her into the dressing room upstairs. The gown hung on a hanger— a cream satin, the skirt em- broidered in pale pink and creamy pearls, sleeveless, V-necked in front, low in the back, with a great sweeping train of lustrous satin. It was the most beautiful gown Rhoda had ever seen in her life.

"Came in only yesterday," Mrs. Rossiter murmured, as she put the soft gracious folds over Rhoda's head. The gown fell into place on her shoulders and hips as if made for her.

"I knew you were a perfect thirty-six, and when Miss Lloyd said that was her size, I thought right away of you. You look ravishing, my dear! If I don't sell that gown now to Janet Lloyd, my name isn't Kate Rossiter. My dear, I'll buy you roses, candy, a lunch, anything you want, if I do. Now, you fix your hair while I go out and keep her patient. You know where the stage is? There at that door. All you have to do is just walk up and down; I'll do the talking." And she departed hastily.

Rhoda had another look in the full-length mirror. The vision of herself in the gorgeous dress made her breast rise on a great breath. Just to wear it once, to have the feel of it on your back, to have others see you in it— Miss Janet Lloyd, of all people! She tucked the last few stray hairs at the back of her neck in place, and then, with head high, stepped out on the raised platform, and slowly, regally, descended the short flight to the auditorium and advanced to the group of figures in the corner.

"Oh, it's beautiful!" a woman beside Miss Lloyd said in a hushed whisper.

But suddenly there was a man's harsh exclamation: "Rhoda!"

She froze. Caswell Ashton had risen to his feet and was holding out his hand.

SHE FELT herself paling, felt the blood rush with a surge back to her heart. She gave him her extended fingers.

"Esmé! This is Rhoda! This is Miss Darling! Rhoda, this is my sister, and Miss Janet Lloyd. My dear, what in the world are you doing here?"

"I'm employed here— in the Sports Department. Mrs. Rossiter asked me— she came downstairs just a minute ago—"

Kate Rossiter came to her assistance. There was a rapid confusion of talk.

"The gown is stunning."

"I didn't know what had become of you. How long've you been here?"

"I thought you were in Yale."

"No, I never went back." His face sobered for a moment. "I joined Dad in London," he went on; "I've been fooling round Europe a bit, and I've just come out here to say hello to Esmé— and Miss Lloyd."

Rhoda flashed the actress a look. Oh, was that it? Janet Lloyd and Cas Ashton! So... .

"What did you say the price was?"

Mrs. Rossiter mentioned it.

"That is a good deal. I don't know that I want it that bad."

"Well, golly, I'd like to make Miss Darling here a present of it. You're the most gorgeous creature in it, Rhoda, I've ever seen in my life."

"Yes, my dear, it does become you." This was Esmé with a friendly smile. Rhoda warmed to her; she had always known she and Esmé would get on together.

"If it would fit her, it would fit me. What do you weigh, my dear?"

"A pound less than I do," Miss Lloyd said after Rhoda had told her. "What do you think, Esmé?"

"Get it; it's stunning. You'll make the hit of your life in it tonight and knock old Senator Perkins clear off his feet. What do you care for an extra hundred or two?"

Janet Lloyd laughed, fingered the soft lustrous material. Mrs. Rossiter began her sales patter. Rhoda lifted her eyes and found Cas' hungry ones intent upon her. Their eyes clung together for a moment, then Rhoda turned to display the dress once more, her heart beating.

"I'll take it, then. You'll send it over to the St. Francis? It must be there by this evening— by six, even though I shan't wear it until after the theater."

"Oh, surely, Miss Lloyd."

"And we've got to rush, Esmé dear, if we're going to lunch with Mildred and get back to the theater."

"You coming, Cas?"

"Well, I thought— I don't know." His eyes sought Rhoda's. "You're not married?" he asked, low.

She shook her head.

"Engaged?"

"No, that's all over. That's passed out of my life forever."

His eyes searched hers. "Did you say you were going out to lunch?"

"Yes."

"Esmé! I think I'll have a bite with Rhoda. We've got a lot to talk about. I'll meet you at the theater at two- thirty. How's that?"

"Run along. And thank you, Miss Darling. Cas has talked about you a lot. I hope we shall meet again."

"Oh, yes, let me thank you, too," chimed in Miss Lloyd with a gracious smile.

"You will lunch with me?"

"Yes, if you like."

"Oh, Rhoda! I can't believe it. I must be dreaming. Tell me again it's all over between you and— him. You know I just couldn't stand it— to be fooled; to think maybe, perhaps..."

She looked soberly into his eyes. "It's all over— forever and forever."

His face lighted with a boyish grin. "Oh, go take that damn thing off," he said, "and come to lunch with me."

"My dear, I owe. you the loveliest pair of stockings, the best-looking hand bag— anything you like; all you have to do is go pick it out," Mrs. Rossiter said. "Isn't Janet Lloyd a dear?"

But Rhoda was not listening. She was thinking of the somewhat faded serge suit she had worn downtown that day. She wished it had been the silk with the smart little bolero jacket.

They went to the Pig 'n Whistle, and sat at a little table in a far corner.

"Rhoda, Rhoda, to think after all these months... Why didn't you write me, let me know?"

The waitress clapped the plates of fruit salad down at their elbows.

"I knew all along he was a rotter."

The waitress poked the menu in front of Cas' eyes. He waved her away.

"Dearest, I don't know what you think of me, but I've thought about you every day since. I may have imagined I was in love down there at the beach, but since then I've known I was and am—"

"Excuse me, sir, was there anything else?"

Cas looked up at the girl in cap and apron beside their table. She frowned crossly. Cas gave her his happiest smile.

"Oh, nothing more, thank you... You know I thought of writing Babbie's sister. You called her Lou, but for the life of me I couldn't remember her last name."

"Simpson."

"That was it! Simpson."

One o'clock came and went. The hands of the clock pointed past two, and still they leaned their elbows on the table and murmured, their food hardly touched, the man's eyes riveted upon the face opposite, the girl raising hers now and then to meet his look, a tremulous smile upon her lips, her heart tripping to a happy beat.

"I must get back. This is dreadful. Miss Blethen will skin me."

"What do you care? You're going to quit there in a few days."

"Oh, am I?"

"Well, aren't you?"

She gave him a long happy look. "I don't know," she said evasively.

HE WAS at the employees' entrance when she came out at quarter to six.

"I thought you'd never come. Esmé's waiting for us to join her for tea at the St. Francis. Janet Lloyd's gone to her room to lie down. She never dines or takes anything between shows on Saturday. Esmé's waiting for us."

"I wish I looked better."

"You look gorgeous."

"Oh, you know I don't. I've got on my oldest rags."

"She says you're the most stunning thing in the world."

"Cas, behave yourself."

"Well, she's crazy about you."

"She only saw me for two minutes!"

"She's heard me rave about you for six months. She's always saying what a pity it was."

"Pity? How d'you mean?"

"That I lost you. She's told me a hundred times that you were just the kind of girl I needed. She's smart, Esmé is."

"But she may not like me now."

"Come along and see."

Over the teacups, Rhoda felt the eyes of the woman steadily upon her, but every time she raised her own to meet them, she found them smiling. Toward the end of the hour, Esmé reached across the table and laid her hand on Rhoda's and gave her fingers a quick pressure.

"You're sweet," she said. "And now I must get along. I promised Janet to look in on her. You two stay here, and Cas, suppose I telephone Aunt Meg and tell her I'm keeping you in town tonight and that I simply can't spare you to go to her dinner."

"Esmé, you're a peach! You're wonderful!" He turned to Rhoda. "You'll dine with me? We'll go to a show, a movie, or just sit and talk."

"Oh, but Cas, I'll have to go home and see my father, and my aunt, and— and my mother."

"Well, let me tag along. They've got to know me sooner or later."

"Oh, Cas, you're just— just dreadful!"

"Dreadful? I'm in love."

"Look, Rhoda, will you marry me? No more shilly-shallying."

"I— I think so."

"You've got to 'know so.'"

"Are you sure, Cas?"

"Positive. My dear, you don't know what I've been through."

"I know, but I'm thinking of Esmé and your aunt."

"They'll adore you."

"I'm afraid."

"Afraid of what? Of me?"

"No, not of you."

"Then what do you care? Esmé is the only one that matters and she thinks you're swell."

"How do you know?"

"Because she told me so tonight."

"When?"

"I telephoned her in Janet's room when you were in the dressing room at the restaurant. She said— I'm telling you the truth— 'Get her if you can, Cas; I think she's too good for you.'"

"Oh, Cas!"

"Well, that's what she said— and Esmé knows."

"And Mrs. Anstruther?"

"Well, if I'm willing to settle down and go into Uncle Tony's steamship business, he'll make her walk a chalk line. Anyhow, she thinks a lot of you."

"Yes," said Rhoda incredulously, "I know just how much."

"But my God, Rhoda, you're not marrying Aunt Meg!"

"If I did marry, it would be her nephew."

"Would it?"

"Um-hum."

"Sure?"

"Positive."

He swept her into his arms, and closed her mouth with his. He released her on a great breath. "My darling! Not 'Rhoda Darling' any more. Just my darling!"

___________________

Table of Contents

- 1: The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall / John Kendrick Bangs

- 2: My Only Murder / Ernest Favenc
- 3: Paul's Case / Willa Cather
- 4: Uncle James's Golf Match / "Sapper"
- 5: How to Get Things Done / Robert Benchley
- 6: Two Aces / Henry Leverage
- 7: The Red Room / "Waif Wander"

- 8: The Devil's Wager / William Makepeace Thackeray

- 9: The Motor-Burglar / Richard Dehan

- 10: The Birth of a Masterpiece / Lucas Malet

- 11: The House of the Worm / Mearle Prout
- 12: Spirit-Led / Ernest Favenc
- 13: The Garage Crime / Anonymous
- 14: A Desperate Choice / Guy Thorne
- 15: Trapped / Richard Ashe King
- 16: Disinherited / Richard Ashe King

- 17: La Belle Dame Sans Souci / Peter Cheyney

- 18: The Beach / Charles G. Norris