Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers. Robert W. Chambers
cool woods and meadows in Bronx Park, far from the stifling air of the city, far from the infernal noise of the Fifth Avenue omnibuses.
A noble stag stared at me from his enclosure among the trees as I passed down the winding asphalt walk. ‘Never mind, old fellow,’ said I, ‘you will be splashing about in the Bronx River next week and cropping maple shoots to your heart’s content.’
On I went, past herds of staring deer, past great lumbering elk, and moose, and long-faced African antelopes, until I came to the dens of the great carnivora.
The tigers sprawled in the sunshine, blinking and licking their paws; the lions slept in the shade or squatted on their haunches, yawning gravely. A slim panther travelled to and fro behind her barred cage, pausing at times to peer wistfully out into the free sunny world. My heart ached for caged wild things, and I walked on, glancing up now and then to encounter the blank stare of a tiger or the mean shifty eyes of some ill-smelling hyena.
Across the meadow I could see the elephants swaying and swinging their great heads, the sober bison solemnly slobbering over their cuds, the sarcastic countenances of camels, the wicked little zebras, and a lot more animals of the camel and llama tribe, all resembling each other, all equally ridiculous, stupid, deadly uninteresting.
Somewhere behind the old arsenal an eagle was screaming, probably a Yankee eagle; I heard the ‘tchug! tchug!’ of a blowing hippopotamus, the squeal of a falcon, and the snarling yap! of quarrelling wolves.
‘A pleasant place for a hot day!’ I pondered bitterly, and I thought some things about Jamison that I shall not insert in this volume. But I lighted a cigarette to deaden the aroma from the hyenas, unclasped my sketching block, sharpened my pencil, and fell to work on a family group of hippopotami.
They may have taken me for a photographer, for they all wore smiles as if ‘welcoming a friend’, and my sketch block presented a series of wide open jaws, behind which shapeless bulky bodies vanished in alarming perspective.
The alligators were easy; they looked to me as though they had not moved since the founding of the Zoo, but I had a bad time with the big bison, who persistently turned his tail to me, looking stolidly around his flank to see how I stood it. So I pretended to be absorbed in the antics of two bear cubs, and the dreary old bison fell into the trap, for I made some good sketches of him and laughed in his face as I closed the book.
There was a bench by the abode of the eagles, and I sat down on it to draw the vultures and condors, motionless as mummies among the piled rocks. Gradually I enlarged the sketch, bringing in the gravel plaza, the steps leading up to Fifth Avenue, the sleepy park policeman in front of the arsenal – and a slim, white-browed girl, dressed in shabby black, who stood silently in the shade of the willow trees.
After a while I found that the sketch, instead of being a study of the eagles, was in reality a composition in which the girl in black occupied the principal point of interest. Unwittingly I had subordinated everything else to her, the brooding vultures, the trees and walks, and the half indicated groups of sun-warmed loungers.
She stood very still, her pallid face bent, her thin white hands loosely clasped before her. ‘Rather dejected reverie,’ I thought, ‘probably she’s out of work.’ Then I caught a glimpse of a sparkling diamond ring on the slender third finger of her left hand.
‘She’ll not starve with such a stone as that about her,’ I said to myself, looking curiously at her dark eyes and sensitive mouth. They were both beautiful, eyes and mouth – beautiful, but touched with pain.
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