Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers

After a while I rose and walked back to make a sketch or two of the lions and tigers. I avoided the monkeys – I can’t stand them, and they never seem funny to me, poor dwarfish, degraded caricatures of all that is ignoble in ourselves.

‘I’ve enough now,’ I thought; ‘I’ll go home and manufacture a full page that will probably please Jamison.’ So I strapped the elastic band around my sketching block, replaced pencil and rubber in my waistcoat pocket, and strolled off toward the Mall to smoke a cigarette in the evening glow before going back to my studio to work until midnight, up to the chin in charcoal gray and Chinese white.

Across the long meadow I could see the roofs of the city faintly looming above the trees. A mist of amethyst, ever deepening, hung low on the horizon, and through it, steeple and dome, roof and tower, and the tall chimneys where thin fillets of smoke curled idly, were transformed into pinnacles of beryl and flaming minarets, swimming in filmy haze. Slowly the enchantment deepened; all that was ugly and shabby and mean had fallen away from the distant city, and now it towered into the evening sky, splendid, gilded, magnificent, purified in the fierce furnace of the setting sun.

The red disk was half hidden now; the tracery of trees, feathery willow and budding birch, darkened against the glow; the fiery rays shot far across the meadow, gilding the dead leaves, staining with soft crimson the dark moist tree trunks around me.

Far across the meadow a shepherd passed in the wake of a huddling flock, his dog at his heels, faint moving blots of gray.

A squirrel sat up on the gravel walk in front of me, ran a few feet, and sat up again, so close that I could see the palpitation of his sleek flanks.

Somewhere in the grass a hidden field insect was rehearsing last summer’s solos; I heard the tap! tap! tat-tat-t-t-tat! of a woodpecker among the branches overhead and the querulous note of a sleepy robin.

The twilight deepened; out of the city the music of bells floated over wood and meadow; faint mellow whistles sounded from the river craft along the north shore, and the distant thunder of a gun announced the close of a June day.

The end of my cigarette began to glimmer with a redder light; shepherd and flock were blotted out in the dusk, and I only knew they were still moving when the sheep bells tinkled faintly.

Then suddenly that strange uneasiness that all have known – that half-awakened sense of having seen it all before, of having been through it all, came over me, and I raised my head and slowly turned.

A figure was seated at my side. My mind was struggling with the instinct to remember. Something so vague and yet so familiar – something that eluded thought yet challenged it, something – God knows what! troubled me. And now, as I looked, without interest, at the dark figure beside me, an apprehension, totally involuntary, an impatience to understand, came upon me, and I sighed and turned restlessly again to the fading west.

I thought I heard my sigh re-echoed – but I scarcely heeded; and in a moment I sighed again, dropping my burned-out cigarette on the gravel beneath my feet.

‘Did you speak to me?’ said some one in a low voice, so close that I swung around rather sharply.

‘No,’ I said after a moment’s silence.

It was a woman. I could not see her face clearly, but I saw on her clasped hands, which lay listlessly in her lap, the sparkle of a great diamond. I knew her at once. It did not need a glance at the shabby dress of black, the white face, a pallid spot in the twilight, to tell me that I had her picture in my sketch-book.

‘Do – do you mind if I speak to you?’ she asked timidly. The hopeless sadness in her voice touched me, and I said, ‘Why, no, of course not. Can I do anything for you?’

‘Yes,’ she said, brightening a little, ‘if you – you only would.’

‘I will if I can,’ said I cheerfully; ‘what is it? Out of ready cash?’

‘No, not that,’ she said, shrinking back.

I begged her pardon, a little surprised, and withdrew my hand from my change pocket.

‘It is only – only that I wish you to take these,’ – she drew a thin packet from her breast – ‘these two letters.’

‘I?’ I asked astonished.

‘Yes, if you will.’

‘But what am I to do with them?’ I demanded.

‘I can’t tell you; I only know that I must give them to you. Will you take them?’

‘Oh, yes, I’ll take them,’ I laughed, ‘am I to read them?’ I added to myself, ‘It’s some clever begging trick.’

‘No,’ she answered slowly, ‘you are not to read them; you are to give them to somebody.’

‘To whom? Anybody?’

‘No, not to anybody. You will know whom to give them to when the time comes.’

‘Then I am to keep them until further instructions?’

‘Your own heart will instruct you,’ she said, in a scarcely audible voice. She held the thin packet toward me, and to humor her I took it. It was wet.

‘The letters fell into the sea,’ she said. ‘There was a photograph which should have gone with them but the salt water washed it blank. Will you care if I ask you something else?’

‘I? Oh, no.’

‘Then give me the picture that you made of me to-day.’

I laughed again, and demanded how she knew I had drawn her.

‘Is it like me?’ she said.

‘I think it is very like you,’ I answered truthfully.

‘Will you not give it to me?’

Now it was on the tip of my tongue to refuse, but I reflected that I had enough sketches for a full page without that one, so I handed it to her, nodded that she was welcome, and stood up. She rose also, the diamond flashing on her finger.

‘You are sure that you are not in want?’ I asked, with a tinge of good-natured sarcasm.

‘Hark!’ she whispered; ‘listen! – do you not hear the bells of the convent!’

I looked out into the misty night.

‘There are no bells sounding,’ I said, ‘and anyway there are no convent bells here. We are in New York, mademoiselle’ – I had noticed her French accent – ‘we are in Protestant Yankee-land, and the bells that ring are much less mellow than the bells of France.’

I turned pleasantly to say good-night. She was gone.

III

‘Have you ever drawn a picture of a corpse?’ inquired Jamison next morning as I walked into his private room with a sketch of the proposed full page of the Zoo.

‘No, and I don’t want to,’ I replied, sullenly.

‘Let me see your Central Park page,’ said Jamison in his gentle voice, and I displayed it. It was about worthless as an artistic production, but it pleased Jamison, as I knew it would.

‘Can you finish it by this afternoon?’ he asked, looking up at me with persuasive eyes.

‘Oh, I suppose so,’ I said, wearily; ‘anything else, Mr Jamison?’

‘The corpse,’ he replied, ‘I want a sketch by tomorrow – finished.’

‘What corpse?’ I demanded, controlling my indignation as I met Jamison’s soft eyes.

There was a mute duel of glances. Jamison passed his hand across his forehead with a slight lifting of the eyebrows.

‘I shall want it as soon as possible,’ he said in his caressing voice.

What I thought was, ‘Damned purring pussy-cat!’ What I said was, ‘Where is this corpse?’

‘In the Morgue – have you read the morning papers? No? Ah, – as you very rightly observe you are too busy to read the morning papers. Young men must learn industry first, of course, of course. What you are to do is this: the San Francisco police have sent out an alarm regarding the disappearance of a Miss Tufft – the millionaire’s daughter, you know. Today a body was brought to the Morgue here in New York, and it has been identified as the missing young lady – by a diamond ring. Now I am convinced that it isn’t, and I’ll show you why, Mr Hilton.’

He picked up a pen and made a sketch of a ring on a margin of that morning’s Tribune.

‘That is the description of her ring as sent on from San Francisco. You notice the diamond is set in the centre of the ring where the two gold serpents’ tails cross!

‘Now the ring on the finger of the woman in the Morgue is like this,’ and he rapidly sketched another ring where the diamond rested in the fangs of the two gold serpents.

‘That is the difference,’ he said in his pleasant, even voice.

‘Rings like that are not uncommon,’ said I, remembering that I had seen such a ring on the finger of the white-faced girl in the Park the evening before. Then a sudden thought took shape – perhaps that was the girl whose body lay in the Morgue!

‘Well,’ said Jamison, looking up at me, ‘what are you thinking about?’

‘Nothing,’ I answered, but the whole scene was before my eyes, the vultures brooding among the rocks, the shabby black dress, and the pallid face – and the ring, glittering on that slim white hand!

‘Nothing,’ I repeated, ‘when shall I go, Mr Jamison? Do you want a portrait – or what?’

‘Portrait – careful drawing of the ring, and, er, a centre piece of the Morgue at night. Might as well give people the horrors while we’re about it.’

‘But,’ said I, ‘the policy of this paper—’

‘Never mind, Mr Hilton,’ purred Jamison, ‘I am able to direct the policy of this paper.’

‘I don’t doubt you are,’ I said angrily.

‘I am,’ he repeated, undisturbed and smiling; ‘you see this Tufft case interests society. I am – er – also interested.’

He held out to me a morning paper and pointed to a heading.

I read: ‘Miss Tufft Dead! Her Fiancé was Mr Jamison, the well known Editor’.

‘What!’ I cried in horrified amazement. But Jamison had left the room, and I heard him chatting and laughing softly with some visitors in the press-room outside.

I flung down the paper and walked out.

‘The cold-blooded toad!’ I exclaimed again and again; ‘—making capital out of his fiancée’s disappearance! Well, I – I’m d—nd! I knew he was a bloodless, heartless, grip-penny, but I never thought – I never imagined—’ Words failed me.

Scarcely conscious of what I did I drew a Herald from my pocket and saw the column entitled: ‘Miss Tufft Found! Identified by a Ring. Wild Grief of Mr Jamison, her Fiancé.’

That was enough. I went out into the street and sat down in City Hall Park. And, as I sat there, a terrible resolution came to me; I would draw the dead girl’s face in such a way that it would chill Jamison’s sluggish blood, I would crowd the black shadows of the Morgue with forms and ghastly faces, and every face should bear something in it of Jamison. Oh, I’d rouse him from his cold snaky apathy! I’d confront him with Death in such an awful form, that, passionless, base, inhuman as he was, he’d shrink from it as he would from a dagger thrust. Of course I’d lose my place, but that did not bother me, for I had decided to resign anyway, not having a taste for the society of human reptiles. And, as I sat there in the sunny park, furious, trying to plan a picture whose sombre horror should leave in his mind an ineffaceable scar, I suddenly thought of the pale black-robed girl in Central Park. Could it be her poor slender body that lay among the shadows of the grim Morgue! If ever brooding despair was stamped on any face, I had seen its print on hers when she spoke to me in the Park and gave me the letters. The letters! I had not thought of them since, but now I drew them from my pocket and looked at the addresses.

‘Curious,’ I thought, ‘the letters are still damp; they smell of salt water too.’

I looked at the address again, written in the long fine hand of an educated woman who had been bred in a French convent. Both letters bore the same address, in French:

CAPTAIN D’YNIOL

(Kindness of a Stranger.)

‘Captain d’Yniol,’ I repeated aloud, ‘confound it, I’ve heard that name! Now, where the deuce – where in the name of all that’s queer—’ Somebody who had sat down on the bench beside me placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

It was the Frenchman, ‘Soger Charlie’.

‘You spoke my name,’ he said in apathetic tones.

‘Your name!’

‘Captain d’Yniol,’ he repeated; ‘it is my name.’

I recognized him in spite of the black goggles he was wearing, and, at the same moment it flashed into my mind that d’Yniol was the name of the traitor who had escaped. Ah, I remembered now!

‘I am Captain d’Yniol,’ he said again, and I saw his fingers closing on my coat sleeve.

It may have been my involuntary movement of recoil – I don’t know – but the fellow dropped my coat and sat straight up on the bench.

‘I am Captain d’Yniol,’ he said for the third time, ‘charged with treason and under sentence of death.’

‘And innocent!’ I muttered, before I was even conscious of having spoken. What was it that wrung those involuntary words from my lips, I shall never know, perhaps – but it was I, not he, who trembled, seized with a strange agitation, and it was I, not he, whose hand was stretched forth impulsively, touching his.

Without a tremor he took my hand, pressed it almost imperceptibly, and dropped it. Then I held both letters toward him, and, as he neither looked at them nor at me, I placed them in his hand. Then he started.

‘Read them,’ I said, ‘they are for you.’

‘Letters!’ he gasped in a voice that sounded like nothing human.

‘Yes, they are for you – I know it now—’

‘Letters! – letters directed to me?’

‘Can you not see?’ I cried.

Then he raised one frail hand and drew the goggles from his eyes, and, as I looked I saw two tiny white specks exactly in the centre of both pupils.

‘Blind!’ I faltered.

‘I have been unable to read for two years,’ he said.

After a moment he placed the tip of one finger on the letters.

‘They are wet,’ I said; ‘shall – would you like to have me read them?’ For a long time he sat silently in the sunshine, fumbling with his cane, and I watched him without speaking. At last he said, ‘Read, Monsieur,’ and I took the letters and broke the seals.

The first letter contained a sheet of paper, damp and discolored, on which a few lines were written:

My darling, I knew you were innocent—

Here the writing ended, but, in the blur beneath, I read:

Paris shall know – France shall know, for at last I have the proofs and I am coming to find you, my soldier, and to place them in your own dear brave hands. They know, now, at the War Ministry – they have a copy of the traitor’s confession – but they dare not make it public – they dare not withstand the popular astonishment and rage. Therefore I sail on Monday from Cherbourg by the Green Cross Line, to bring you back to your own again, where you will stand before all the world, without fear, without reproach.

ALINE.

‘This – this is terrible!’ I stammered; ‘can God live and see such things done!’

But with his thin hand he gripped my arm again, bidding me read the other letter; and I shuddered at the menace in his voice.

Then, with his sightless eyes on me, I drew the other letter from the wet, stained envelope. And before I was aware – before I understood the purport of what I saw, I had read aloud these half effaced lines:

‘The Lorient is sinking – an iceberg – mid-ocean – good-bye – you are innocent – I love—’

‘The Lorient!’ I cried; ‘it was the French steamer that was never heard from – the Lorient of the Green Cross Line! I had forgotten – I—’

The loud crash of a revolver stunned me; my ears rang and ached with it as I shrank back from a ragged dusty figure that collapsed on the bench beside me, shuddered a moment, and tumbled to the asphalt at my feet.

The trampling of the eager hard-eyed crowd, the dust and taint of powder in the hot air, the harsh alarm of the ambulance clattering up Mail Street – these I remember, as I knelt there, helplessly holding the dead man’s hands in mine.

‘Soger Charlie,’ mused the sparrow policeman, ‘shot his-self, didn’t he, Mr Hilton? You seen him, sir – blowed the top of his head off, didn’t he, Mr Hilton?’

‘Soger Charlie,’ they repeated, ‘a French dago what shot his-self’; and the words echoed in my ears long after the ambulance rattled away, and the increasing throng dispersed, sullenly, as a couple of policemen cleared a space around the pool of thick blood on the asphalt.

They wanted me as a witness, and I gave my card to one of the policemen who knew me. The rabble transferred its fascinated stare to me, and I turned away and pushed a path between frightened shop girls and ill-smelling loafers, until I lost myself in the human torrent of Broadway.

The torrent took me with it where it flowed – East? West? – I did not notice nor care, but I passed on through the throng, listless, deadly weary of attempting to solve God’s justice – striving to understand His purpose – His laws – His judgments which are ‘true and righteous altogether.’

IV

‘More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold. Sweeter also than honey and the honey-comb!’

I turned sharply toward the speaker who shambled at my elbow. His sunken eyes were dull and lustreless, his bloodless face gleamed pallid as a death mask above the blood-red jersey – the emblem of the soldiers of Christ.

I don’t know why I stopped, lingering, but, as he passed, I said, ‘Brother, I also was meditating upon God’s wisdom and His testimonies.’

The pale fanatic shot a glance at me, hesitated, and fell into my own pace, walking by my side. Under the peak of his Salvation Army cap his eyes shone in the shadow with a strange light.

‘Tell me more,’ I said, sinking my voice below the roar of traffic, the clang! clang! of the cable-cars, and the noise of feet on the worn pavements – ‘tell me of His testimonies.’

‘Moreover by them is Thy servant warned and in keeping of them there is great reward. Who can understand His errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. Then shall I be upright and I shall be innocent from the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight – O Lord! My strength and my Redeemer!’

‘It is Holy Scripture that you quote,’ I said; ‘I also can read that when I choose. But it cannot clear for me the reasons – it cannot make me understand—’

‘What?’ he asked and muttered to himself.

‘That, for instance,’ I replied, pointing to a cripple, who had been born deaf and dumb and horridly misshapen – a wretched diseased lump on the sidewalk below St Paul’s Churchyard – a sore-eyed thing that mouthed and mowed and rattled pennies in a tin cup as though the sound of copper could stem the human pack that passed hot on the scent of gold.

Then the man who shambled beside me turned and looked long and earnestly into my eyes. And after a moment a dull recollection stirred within me – a vague something that seemed like the awakening memory of a past, long, long forgotten, dim, dark, too subtle, too frail, too indefinite – ah! the old feeling that all men have known – the old strange uneasiness, that useless struggle to remember when and where it all occurred before.

And the man’s head sank on his crimson jersey, and he muttered, muttered to himself of God and love and compassion, until I saw that the fierce heat of the city had touched his brain, and I went away and left him prating of mysteries that none but such as he dare name.

So I passed on through dust and heat; and the hot breath of men touched my cheek and eager eyes looked into mine. Eyes, eyes, that met my own and looked through them, beyond – far beyond to where gold glittered amid the mirage of eternal hope. Gold! It was in the air where the soft sunlight gilded the floating motes, it was under foot in the dust that the sun made gilt, it glimmered from every window pane where the long red beams struck golden sparks above the gasping gold-hunting hordes of Wall Street.

High, high, in the deepening sky the tall buildings towered, and the breeze from the bay lifted the sun-dyed flags of commerce until they waved above the turmoil of the hives below – waved courage and hope and strength to those who lusted after gold.

The sun dipped low behind Castle William as I turned listlessly into the Battery, and the long straight shadows of the trees stretched away over greensward and asphalt walk.

Already the electric lights were glimmering among the foliage although the bay shimmered like polished brass and the topsails of the ships glowed with a deeper hue, where the red sun rays fall athwart the rigging.

Old men tottered along the sea-wall, tapping the asphalt with worn canes, old women crept to and fro in the coming twilight – old women who carried baskets that gaped for charity or bulged with moldy stuffs – food, clothing? – I could not tell; I did not care to know.

The heavy thunder from the parapets of Castle William died away over the placid bay, the last red arm of the sun shot up out of the sea, and wavered and faded into the sombre tones of the afterglow. Then came the night, timidly at first, touching sky and water with gray fingers, folding the foliage into soft massed shapes, creeping onward, onward, more swiftly now, until color and form had gone from all the earth and the world was a world of shadows.

And, as I sat there on the dusky sea-wall, gradually the bitter thoughts faded and I looked out into the calm night with something of that peace that comes to all when day is ended.

The death at my very elbow of the poor blind wretch in the Park had left a shock, but now my nerves relaxed their tension and I began to think about it all – about the letters and the strange woman who had given them to me. I wondered where she had found them – whether they really were carried by some vagrant current in to the shore from the wreck of the fated Lorient.

Nothing but these letters had human eyes encountered from the Lorient, although we believed that fire or berg had been her portion; for there had been no storms when the Lorient steamed away from Cherbourg.

And what of the pale-faced girl in black who had given these letters to me, saying that my own heart would teach me where to place them?

I felt in my pockets for the letters where I had thrust them all crumpled and wet. They were there, and I decided to turn them over to the police. Then I thought of Cusick and the City Hall Park and these set my mind running on Jamison and my own work – ah! I had forgotten that – I had forgotten that I had sworn to stir Jamison’s cold, sluggish blood! Trading on his fiancée’s reported suicide – or murder! True, he had told me that he was satisfied that the body at the Morgue was not Miss Tufft’s because the ring did not correspond with his fiancée’s ring. But what sort of man was that! – to go crawling and nosing about morgues and graves for a full-page illustration which might sell a few extra thousand papers. I had never known he was such a man. It was strange too – for that was not the sort of illustration that the Weekly used; it was against all precedent – against the whole policy of the paper. He would lose a hundred subscribers where he would gain one by such work.

‘The callous brute!’ I muttered to myself, ‘I’ll wake him up – I’ll—’

I sat straight up on the bench and looked steadily at a figure which was moving toward me under the spluttering electric light.

It was the woman I had met in the Park.

She came straight up to me, her pale face gleaming like marble in the dark, her slim hands outstretched.

‘I have been looking for you all day – all day,’ she said, in the same low thrilling tones – ‘I want the letters back; have you them here?’