The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (16 page)

Bently’s curiosity was stimulated. Torch in hand he surmounted the obstruction, and peered into a gulf of black darkness. He seemed on the verge of a great precipice, the limits and bottom of which the torchlight failed to reach. From far beneath he fancied he caught a splash of water tumbling over a rocky bed, and strange echoes floated upward, but he could see nothing. It was an appalling abyss, which, for all he knew, might sink into the foundations of the earth.

Suddenly he received a violent push from behind, accompanied by a muttered curse hurled from the Rajah’s lips. Bently tumbled forward, and, in doing so, threw out an arm wildly to save himself. It caught the barrel of the Rajah’s rifle, swept it from his grasp, and hurled it clattering into the chasm beneath. Bently promptly followed the Rajah’s rifle down a steep crumbling slope to what would have been certain death, had his own rifle not brought him up with a jerk by becoming lodged to half its length between two rocks. As it were, there he hung in midair with the buttress of his rifle for his only support. A shower of following pebbles swept on down into nothingness.

For some moments he remained almost stunned by the peril of the situation, but presently his mind began to gather in the slender chances of escape. He had apparently been brought up with his back against a side-wall of rock and with one foot resting on a narrow projection. Reaching out a hand, and groping with it, he discovered that the narrow projection was one of a flight of irregular steps cut in the rock and leading upward. If a hazardous foothold, he presumed it had been used at some period, and decided to attempt its course.

He balanced himself carefully, and disengaging his rifle, crept slowly upward step by step. Once his foot slipped, and he almost fell, but throwing himself inward he found he had stumbled into the entrance of a narrow passage. That meant safety from the chasm at any rate, and he gave vent to a huge breath of relief. His next act was to test the springs of his rifle, and so far as he was able to judge in the darkness he was further gratified to find that it was uninjured. Then he went cautiously forward, guiding his progress by a hand on the side-wall. Presently he came to a broad flight of steps partly choked up with fallen debris. Climbing up this, he emerged into the grotto of the temple.

Then he drew back suddenly. A coughing snarl echoed through the cavern. Bently softly moved behind the stone image of a god, and looked out from its shadow. From a clift in the roof of the temple a stream of moonlight fell within, and toned with silver the yellow body and velvet stripes of a monster tiger. It also shone upon the prostrate forms of the Rajah and his Rajput retainer, held beneath the huge paws of the Lord of the Jungle. Again the coughing snarl echoed through the temple. The eyes of the beast flashed with a savage thirst for blood as it lowered its head to plunge its fangs into the throat of one of its victims.

Bently raised his rifle to the shoulder, took steady aim, and fired. A terrific roar shook the stone gods, a gigantic convulsion seized upon the body of the tiger as it rolled over. Bently fired again, and then strode from his place of concealment. Another shot at closer range finished the death struggle of the tiger. Its last breath went forth in a choking growl of defiance.

It took but a cursory examination to convince Bently that both the Rajah and the Rajput were past rendering any account of their treachery on this earth, and a lack of response to his shouts made it plain that the Rajah’s retainers had promptly bolted when the tiger unexpectedly returned. The Rajah and the Rajput had thus been left to encounter the powerful beast unarmed.

How Bently regained the Residency was a matter he was unable to explain except by instinct, but daylight had already broken when he reached the compound. Then he acted with swift decision.

He sent orders for the Rajah’s retainers to appear at the Residency for an investigation, which eventually led to a thorough exploration of the temple. By another entrance the bottom of the abyss was gained, and sundry relics discovered there proved how the Rajah had relieved himself of the undesirable presence of those who had interfered with his dubious proceedings.

S
OMETHING
N
EW

  ell me something new,” she moaned, twisting in his arms on the sofa. “Say or do something original—and I’ll love you. Anything but the wheezy gags, the doddering compliments, the kisses that were stale before Antony passed them off on Cleopatra!”

“Alas,” he said, “there is nothing new in the world except the rose and gold and ivory of your perfect loveliness. And there is nothing original except my love for you.”

“Old stuff,” she sneered, moving away from him. “They all say that.”

“They?” he queried, jealously.

“The ones before you, of course,” she replied, in a tone of languid reminiscence. “It only took four lovers to convince me of the quotidian sameness of man. After that, I always knew what to expect. It was maddening: they came to remind me of so many cuckoo clocks, with the eternal monotony of their advances, the punctuality of their compliments. I soon knew the whole repertory. As for kissing—each one began with my hands, and ended with my lips. There was one genius, though, who kissed me on the throat the first time. I might have taken him, if he had lived up to the promise of such a beginning.”

“What shall I say?” he queried, in despair. “Shall I tell you that your eyes are the unwaning moons above the cypress-guarded lakes of dreamland? Shall I say that your hair is colored like the sunsets of Cocaigne?”

She kicked off one of her slippers, with a little jerk of disgust.

“You aren’t the first poet that I’ve had for a lover. One of them used to read me that sort of stuff by the hour. All about moons, and stars, and sunsets, and rose-leaves and lotus-petals.”

“Ah,” he cried hopefully, gazing at the slipperless foot. “Shall I stand on my head and kiss your tootsie-wootsies?”

She smiled briefly. “That wouldn’t be so bad. But you’re not an acrobat, my dear. You’d fall over and break something—provided you didn’t fall on me.”

“Well, I give it up,” he muttered, in a tone of hopeless resignation. “I’ve done my darndest to please you for the past four months; and I’ve been perfectly faithful and devoted, too; I haven’t so much as looked corner-wise at another woman—not even that blue-eyed brunette who tried to vamp me at the Artists’ Ball the other night.”

She sighed impatiently. “What does that matter? I am sure you needn’t be faithful unless you want to be. As for pleasing me—well, you did give a thrill once upon a time, during the first week of our acquaintance. Do you remember? We were lying out under the pines on the old rag that we had taken with us; and you suddenly turned to me and asked me if I would like to be a hamadryad…. Ah! there is a hamadryad in every woman; but it takes a faun to call it forth…. My dear, if you had only been a faun!”

“A real faun would have dragged you off by the hair,” he growled. “So you wanted some of that caveman stuff, did you? I suppose that’s what you mean by ‘something new.’”

“Anything, anything, providing it is new,” she drawled, with ineffable languor. Looking like a poem to Ennui by Baudelaire, she leaned back and lit another cigarette in her holder of carved ivory.

He looked at her, and wondered if any one female had ever before hidden so much perversity, capriciousness, and incomprehensibility behind a rose-bud skin and harvest-coloured hair. A sense of acute exasperation mounted in him—something that had smouldered for months, half-restrained by his natural instincts of chivalry and gentleness. He remembered an aphorism from Nietzsche: “When thou goest to women, take thy whip.”

“By Jove, the old boy had the right dope,” he thought. “Too bad I didn’t think to take my whip with me; but after all, I have my hands, and a little rough stuff can’t make matters any worse.”

Aloud, he said: “It’s a pity no one ever thought to give you a good paddling. All women are spoiled and perverse, more or less, but you—”

He broke off, and drew her across his knees like a naughty child, with a movement so muscular and sudden that she had neither the time nor the impulse to resist or cry out.

“I’m going to give you the spanking of your life,” he growled, as his right hand rose and descended…. The cigarette holder fell from her lips to the Turkish carpet, and began to burn a hole in the flowered pattern…. A dozen smart blows, with a sound like the clapping of shingles, and then he released her, and rose to his feet. His anger had vanished, and his only feeling was an overpowering sense of shame and consternation. He could merely wonder how and why he had done it.

“I suppose you will never forgive me,” he began.

“Oh, you are wonderful,” she breathed. “I didn’t think you had it in you. My faun! My cave-man! Do it again.”

Doubly dumbfounded as he was, he had enough presence of mind to adjust himself to the situation. “Women are certainly the limit,” he thought, dazedly. “But one must make the best of them, and miss no chances.”

Preserving a grim and mysterious silence, he picked her up in his arms.

T
HE
F
LIRT

  omeone introduced him to her as she stepped from the surf at the bathing beach. She was blonde as a daffodil, and her one-piece suit of vivid green clung to her closely as a folded leaf to the flower bud. She smiled upon him with an air of tender and subtle sadness; and her slow, voluptuous eyelids fell before his gaze with the pensive languor of closing petals. There was diffidence and seduction in the curve of her cheek; she was modest and demure, with an undernote of elusive provocation; and her voice was a plaintive soprano.

Twenty minutes later, they sat among the dunes at the end of the beach, where a white wall of sand concealed them from the crowd. Her bathing suit, only half-dry, still clung and glistened; but their flirtation had already ripened and flourished with an ease that surprised him.

“Surely I knew you in ancient Greece,” he was saying. “Your hair retains the sunlight of the Golden Age, your eyes the blue of perished heavens that shone on the vale of Tempe. Tell me, what queen or goddess were you? In what fane of chalcedony, or palace of ebony and gold did I, a long-forgotten poet, sing before you the hymns or lyrics of my adoration? … Do you not remember me?”

“Oh, yes, I remember you,” she said, in her plaintive soprano. “But I was not a queen or a goddess: I was only a yellow lily, growing in a forest glade on the banks of some forgotten stream; and you were the faun who passed by and trampled me.”

“Poor little flower!” he cried, with a compassion he did not need to feign. It was impossible to resist the dovelike mournful cadence of her voice, the submissive sorrow and affection of her gaze. She said nothing, but her head drooped nearer to his shoulder, and her lips took on a more sorrowful and seductive curve. Even if she were not half so lovely and desirable, he felt that it would be unpardonably brutal not to kiss her…. Her lips were cool as flowers after an April rain, and they clung softly to his, as if in gratitude for his tenderness and pity….

The next day, he looked for her in vain among the bathers at the beach. She had promised to be there—had promised with many lingering kisses and murmurs. Disconsolate, remembering with a pang the gentle pressure of her mouth, the light burden of her body so loath to part from his arms, he strolled toward the dune in whose shelter they had sat. He paused, hearing voices from behind it, and listened involuntarily, for one of the voices was
hers. The other, low and indistinct, with a note of passion, was a man’s voice…. With the dove-like soprano whose tones were so fresh and vibrant in his memory, he heard her say:

“I was only a yellow lily, growing in a forest glade by the banks of some forgotten stream; and you were the faun who passed by and trampled me.”

T
HE
P
ERFECT
W
OMAN

  nce there was an idealist who sought for the Perfect Woman. In the course of his search, which lasted many years, and was thorough and painstaking, he acquired the reputation of a rake, and lost his youth, his hair, his illusions, and most of his money. He made love to actresses, ingénues, milkmaids, nurses, nuns, typists, trollops, and married women. He acquired an expert knowledge of hairpins and lingerie, and much data on feminine cussedness. Also, he sampled every known variety of lipstick. But still he failed to find the Ideal.