Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Super Pack #2. Уильям Хоуп Ходжсон
cap off and shook her hair, I saw that it was close-cropped, almost like a man’s, and riotous with curls.
I cast a glance at apKern, sitting two seats from her, and he must have read the malice in my eyes, for almost instantly he sounded off.
“See this?” he tapped the dispatch case that rested on his knees. “Lot o’ valuable dope in here; list o’ suspected enemy agents and so forth I’m takin’ up to Treves. ‘Captain apKern,’ the general says to me, ‘I’ve got some very confidential documents to go to Germany. They’re so secret that I daren’t trust ‘em to an ordinary courier. Only a man of proved sagacity, indomitable courage, and more than usual cleverness can be entrusted with these papers, Captain. You’re going up to Treves, aren’t you?’
“‘Sure, General,’ I tells him. I’m fed up with all this work in Paris; want to get where there’s a chance for action, so I’m joinin’ the M.P.’s at Treves. I’ll be happy to accommodate you by taking those papers, and you need fear nothing. They’ll be safe with me as if—’”
“‘You published ‘em in the New York Times,’” completed Amberson sarcastically.
I glanced across the narrow aisle at the girl. She was joining in the laugh that followed Amberson’s deflation of apKern. Her lips were opening like a flower, and a smile glowed in her orange eyes. “Lovely!” I whispered to myself. “Perfect—” as I eyed the long sweet line from her waist to knee, from knee to ankle, the small gentle bosom and the long slim hands and feet—“she’s just perfect.”
The guard blew his absurd tin trumpet, and we slid out of the station, past the platform bright with French officers in fur coats or long capes of horizon blue, like birds of brilliant plumage among the somber O.D. of our own and British uniforms, through the blinking lights that marked the station yard and out into the fog-blurred night.
The train had a wagon-restaurant, and presently the girl went forward, followed in a moment by apKern, Weinberg, and Amberson. I’d lunched late at the Café de la Paix and had no wish for food, so settled back in my seat with a copy of the Bystander.
Our coach was German, taken over by the Allies, and a sign phrased with Teutonic arrogance stared at me from the farther wall of the compartment with the information that such indiscretions as smoking or falling from the window were stringently verboten under penalty of heavy fine. I grinned at it. I was an American soldier on my way to conquered territory. Presently their officers would be saluting me as I walked down the street, their civilians crowding to the curb to give me sidewalk-room. Their signs meant nothing to me, and I broke out a packet of Fatimas.
“Smoke?” I proffered the pack to my silent companion.
“No,” he returned shortly, never glancing up from his paper, and with renewed irritation I realized that he had not added “thank you,” to his refusal.
In a little while the diners came back from their meal, on the best possible terms with each other, and I was duly presented to Miss Felicia Watrous of Philadelphia. Moved by common courtesy, I bent to catch the aloof infantryman’s eye, intending to introduce him. For just a moment he looked up at me above his paper, and I was fairly chilled by the cold challenge in his agate stare. To hell with him! All of us, except Amberson who was a major, were his equals in rank. Where did he get off treating us like a lot of railway porters? Let him read his London Daily Mail and be damned to him!
Stories of the front and service, of communications lines, of base hospitals, Paris, Brest, and Saint-Nazarire sped the time till we passed Epernay. The air grew cold with a hard bitterness while the fog congealed to sleety rain that spattered like thrown sand against the window and gushed down the glass like the backwash of a sullen tide. The window casing somehow rattled loose from its sides, and a current of chilled air, with now and then a spit of sleet, came straight against me. After several ineffectual efforts to right matters, I turned the collar of my trench coat up about my ears, slid down until I rested on the extreme end of my spine, and sought forgetfulness of my discomfort in sleep.
Conversation had died down to monosyllables. Even apKern seemed drained dry of wisecracks, and Amberson rose lurching from his seat.
“See you in the morning—I hope,” he rumbled, jerking at the leather cord that worked the single light in the compartment. For a moment the globe glowed with fading incandescence, then we were smothered in Cimmerian darkness.
Was it a trick of tired nerves, the retention of the light-image upon my retina in the dark? I wondered. Somehow, it seemed to me that as night flattened on the window and the blackness closed about us the orange eyes of the girl sitting opposite me glowed with a sort of smoky, sulphurus luminance like those of a cat in the gloom. The impression lasted but a moment. Either she had lowered her lids or my eyes had grown accustomed to the lack of light, and I was staring sightlessly into a shadow as impenetrable as a velvet curtain.
Memory was scratching at my brain, softly but insistently as a cat demanding admission to a room. Miss Waltrous’ face was poignantly familiar to me and, dimly, I connected it with something vaguely unpleasant.
I tried to fit the pieces of the mental picture-puzzle together, assembling keywords, fumbling with my thoughts. The riddle of her strange familiarity—that persistent thought, “I’ve seen her somewhere”—was within reach of my brain if only I could get the facts in proper perspective, I was sure. Her name: Felicia Watrous. Did its syllables strike some note of memory? No. Try again: That face, that sweet, pale oval face, almost too perfect in its symmetry; the long red lips of that red, sensitive mouth; those glowing orange eyes and hair as russet as the leaves of a copper-beech in autumn; she came from Philadelphia—
I had it!
The triumph of remembering brought me up right in my seat, I almost snapped my fingers in delight. Not faintly, but clear-cut as a motion picture flashed upon a screen, I saw that scene in Fairmount Park. I was in my final year of internship and, as always, short of money, had gone to the zoo for the afternoon. Beside the monkey cage a boy and girl stood idly. Through closed lids I could see them perfectly with my mind’s eye, the lad in baggy trousers rolled high above his ankles to display bright socks, a V-necked sweater with the “F” that showed he was an athlete at Friends’ School; the girl in Peter Thompson suit, hatless, her small proud head aflame with copper hair as sweetly poised as a chrysanthemum upon its stalk. They had a bag of sugar cookies and had tossed one to the ravenous little rhesus monkeys swarming up the bars. One of the greedy little simians fastened on a cake fragment with its hand, then, not content, seized another with its hand-like foot, leaped to an overhanging perch and proceeded to feed itself, nibbling first from the bit clutched in its hand, then from the fragment grasped in its prehensile foot.
“Look there!” the lad exclaimed as he nudged his companion. “Lookit that glutton feedin’ his face with hands and feet. Bet you couldn’t do that!”
The innocent remark was devastating in effect. The girl seemed suddenly to lose all strength and wilted brokenly against the railing set before the cages. Her face was twisted in mute agony, her brow was glistening with sweat, her cheeks had gone pale with a pallor that passed white and seemed gray verging on green. And from the tortured mask of stricken features, her eyes seemed to beg for pity.
I ran to offer her my help, but she smiled away my kindly meant assistance. “A—little—faint,” she murmured in a voice that shook as if it took her last remaining ounce of strength to speak. “I’ll—be—all—right.” Then, with the frightened boy assisting me, we got her to the red-wheeled dog-cart waiting by the fountain, and he had driven her away.
That had been in 1910—nine years ago. I had been a barely-noticed bystander—a member of the audience of her brief drama—she had been the star of the short tragedy. No wonder she had failed to recognize in the uniformed medical officer the callow intern who had helped her.
Was there, I asked myself as I leaned back against the hard, uncomfortable cushions of the German railway coach, some connection between the lad’s reference to her inability to feed herself with her foot and her collapse, or had she been seized with a fainting spell? If she had, it sounded like a cardiac affection;