Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers. Robert W. Chambers
purrs!’ I asked myself as I entered the elevator and was shot down to the first floor. ‘I’ll not put up with this sort of thing much longer – how in the name of all that’s foxy did he know that I went to the mountains? I suppose he thinks I’m lazy because I don’t wish to be boiled to death. How did he know about the dance at Cranston’s? Old cat!’
The roar and turmoil of machinery and busy men filled my ears as I crossed the avenue and turned into the City Hall Park.
From the staff on the tower the flag drooped in the warm sunshine with scarcely a breeze to lift its crimson bars. Overhead stretched a splendid cloudless sky, deep, deep blue, thrilling, scintillating in the gemmed rays of the sun.
Pigeons wheeled and circled about the roof of the gray Post Office or dropped out of the blue above to flutter around the fountain in the square.
On the steps of the City Hall the unlovely politician lounged, exploring his heavy underjaw with wooden toothpick, twisting his drooping black moustache, or distributing tobacco juice over marble steps and close-clipped grass.
My eyes wandered from these human vermin to the calm scornful face of Nathan Hale, on his pedestal, and then to the gray-coated Park policeman whose occupation was to keep little children from the cool grass.
A young man with thin hands and blue circles under his eyes was slumbering on a bench by the fountain, and the policeman walked over to him and struck him on the soles of his shoes with a short club.
The young man rose mechanically, stared about, dazed by the sun, shivered, and limped away. I saw him sit down on the steps of the white marble building, and I went over and spoke to him. He neither looked at me, nor did he notice the coin I offered.
‘You’re sick,’ I said, ‘you had better go to the hospital.’
‘Where?’ he asked vacantly. ‘I’ve been, but they wouldn’t receive me.’
He stooped and tied the bit of string that held what remained of his shoe to his foot.
‘You are French,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you no friends? Have you been to the French Consul?’
‘The Consul!’ he replied, ‘no, I haven’t been to the French Consul.’
After a moment I said, ‘You speak like a gentleman.’
He rose to his feet and stood very straight, looking me, for the first time, directly in the eyes.
‘Who are you?’ I asked abruptly.
‘An outcast,’ he said, without emotion, and limped off thrusting his hands into his ragged pockets.
‘Huh!’ said the Park policeman who had come up behind me in time to hear my question and the vagabond’s answer; ‘don’t you know who that hobo is? – An’ you a newspaper man!’
‘Who is he, Cusick?’ I demanded, watching the thin shabby figure moving across Broadway toward the river.
‘On the level you don’t know, Mr Hilton?’ repeated Cusick, suspiciously.
‘No, I don’t; I never before laid eyes on him.’
‘Why,’ said the sparrow policeman, ‘that’s “Soger Charlie”; – you remember – that French officer what sold secrets to the Dutch Emperor.’
‘And was to have been shot? I remember now, four years ago – and he escaped – you mean to say that is the man?’
‘Everybody knows it,’ sniffed Cusick, ‘I’d a-thought you newspaper gents would have knowed it first.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked after a moment’s thought.
‘Soger Charlie—’
‘I mean his name at home.’
‘Oh, some French dago name. No Frenchman will speak to him here; sometimes they curse him and kick him. I guess he’s dyin’ by inches.’
I remembered his case now. Two young French cavalry officers were arrested, charged with selling plans of fortifications and other military secrets to the Germans. On the eve of their conviction, one of them, Heaven only knows how, escaped and turned up in New York. The other was duly shot. The affair had made some noise, because both young men were of good families. It was a painful episode, and I had hastened to forget it. Now that it was recalled to my mind, I remembered the newspaper accounts of the case, but I had forgotten the names of the miserable young men.
‘Sold his country,’ observed Cusick, watching a group of children out of the corner of his eyes, ‘—you can’t trust no Frenchman nor dagoes nor Dutchmen either. I guess Yankees are about the only white men.’
I looked at the noble face of Nathan Hale and nodded.
‘Nothin’ sneaky about us, eh, Mr Hilton?’
I thought of Benedict Arnold and looked at my boots.
Then the policeman said, ‘Well, so long, Mr Hilton,’ and went away to frighten a pasty-faced little girl who had climbed upon the railing and was leaning down to sniff the fragrant grass.
‘Cheese it, de cop!’ cried her shrill-voiced friends, and the whole bevy of small ragamuffins scuttled away across the square.
With a feeling of depression I turned and walked toward Broadway, where the long yellow cable-cars swept up and down, and the din of gongs and the deafening rumble of heavy trucks echoed from the marble walls of the Court House to the granite mass of the Post Office.
Throngs of hurrying busy people passed up town and down town, slim sober-faced clerks, trim cold-eyed brokers, here and there a red-necked politician linking arms with some favourite heeler, here and there a City Hall lawyer, sallow-faced and saturnine. Sometimes a fireman, in his severe blue uniform, passed through the crowd, sometimes a blue-coated policeman, mopping his clipped hair, holding his helmet in his white-gloved hand. There were women too, pale-faced shop girls with pretty eyes, tall blonde girls who might be typewriters and might not, and many, many older women whose business in that part of the city no human being could venture to guess, but who hurried up town and down town, all occupied with something that gave to the whole restless throng a common likeness – the expression of one who hastens toward a hopeless goal.
I knew some of those who passed me. There was little Jocelyn of the Mail and Express; there was Hood, who had more money than he wanted and was going to have less than he wanted when he left Wall Street; there was Colonel Tidmouse of the 45th Infantry, N.G.S.N.Y., probably coming from the office of the Army and Navy Journal, and there was Dick Harding who wrote the best stories of New York life that have been printed. People said that his hat no longer fitted – especially people who also wrote stories of New York life and whose hats threatened to fit as long as they lived.
I looked at the statue of Nathan Hale, then at the human stream that flowed around his pedestal.
‘Quand même,’ I muttered and walked into Broadway, signalling to the gripman of an uptown cable-car.
II
I passed into the Park by the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street gate; I could never bring myself to enter it through the gate that is guarded by the hideous pigmy statue of Thorwaldsen.
The afternoon sun poured into the windows of the New Netherlands Hotel, setting every orange-curtained pane a-glitter, and tipping the wings of the bronze dragons with flame.
Gorgeous masses of flowers blazed in the sunshine from the grey terraces of the Savoy, from the high grilled court of the Vanderbilt palace, and from the balconies of the Plaza opposite.
The white marble façade of the Metropolitan Club was a grateful relief in the universal glare, and I kept my eyes on it until I had crossed the dusty street and entered the shade of the