The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (17 page)

One day, to continue the weary tale, he lost whatever reason his experiences had left (or given) him; and, seized with the fury of a fiercer mania, threw a Charlotte Russ at the perfectly nice debutant with whom he was drinking. Two days later he received a membership in a home for the Mentally Exalted. Whether his insanity came from disappointment, excess, prohibition, booze, or a Streptococcic infection, the M.D.’s were never quite able to determine.

On his way to the asylum, guided by two stalwart keepers, he saw a rubber doll in a shop window, and fell in love with it like a college-boy with a soubrette. He had the price of the doll in his purse, so the keepers kindly permitted him to buy it, and bring it with him to enliven his sojourn in the Refuge for the Ecstatic.

“Gee, ain’t he the nut?” they grinned.

However, he was happy at last, and did not mind. He believed he had found the Perfect Woman.

He still believes it, for the doll (one of the squeekless and unmechanized kind) has never said or done anything to disillusion him. He loves it with an absolute and ideal devotion, and believes his love is returned. He is perfectly happy.

A
P
LATONIC
E
NTANGLEMENT

  hey were sitting a fairly proper distance apart, on their favorite moss-grown boulder, at the end of the leaf-strewn autumn trail they had taken so often.

“Do you know that people are talking about us?” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, failing on a mournful cadence almost inaudible, and he moved nearer, to catch the faint silver of its tones. As always, he found something vaguely pleasurable in the nearness of the plump olive neck under its coil of unbobbed hair, and the tender oval cheek that was exquisitely innocent of rouge.

“We have been seen together too often,” she continued, with trouble and sadness in the droop of her eyelids, in the fall of her voice. “This town is full of cats, like all villages, and they are all the more willing to tear me in shreds because I am living apart from my husband. I am sorry, Geoffry … because our friendship has meant so much to me.”

“It has meant much to me, too, Anita,” he responded. He felt disturbed and even a little conscience-stricken. It had been very pleasant, in his loneliness, to call upon her with increasing frequency throughout the summer, and to take these little walks in the autumn woods, now that the air was cooling and the leaves were aflame with saffron and crimson. It had all been so harmless and platonic, he assured himself—the natural drifting together of two lonely people with certain tastes in common. But assuredly he was not in love with her nor she with him: his attitude toward her had always been rather shy and respectful, and it was she who had somehow increased the familiarity of their friendship by subtle and imperceptible degrees. Indeed, had she not urged him, he would never have had the boldness to call her by her first name. She was a little the older and much the maturer of the two.

“Those horrid tattle-cats!” she went on, raising her voice in a silver burst of indignation. “If they would only be content to do their ripping and rending and clawing behind my back! But some of them must always come and tell me about it—‘My dear, I think you ought to know what people are saying!’” She made an exquisite little
moue
of disgust. He reflected, not for the first time, that her mouth was eminently kissable; but, being a somewhat shy and modest young man, and not at all in love with her, he put the thought away as speedily as he could.

“What will your husband do if he hears the gossip?” he queried cautiously.

“Oh, George wouldn’t care.” Her tone was reckless, with an undertone of contempt. “As long as I leave him alone, he will leave me alone…. He wouldn’t have the decency to give me a divorce; but, on the other hand, he is too indifferent to make trouble. George doesn’t matter, one way or the other: what I hate and dread is this dirty small-town gossip; I feel as if unclean hands were pawing me all the time.”

Shuddering a little, she pressed against him, ever so gently. Her mournful eyelids fluttered, and she gave him a brief and almost furtive glance, in which he could read nothing but sadness. She lowered her eyes hastily, as tears crept out and hung on the thick lashes.

“Oh! it is hateful—hateful!” There was a melodious break in her voice. “I don’t know what to do…. But I can’t give up seeing you, Geoffry; and you don’t want to give me up, do you?”

“Of course not,” he hastened to reassure her. “But I can’t see what all the excitement is about. We are good friends, of course, but—” He broke off, for she was sobbing openly, seeming not to hear him. Somehow—he never quite knew how it all happened—her head fell on his shoulder, and her white arms, clinging forlornly and tenaciously, were about his neck. Slightly terrified, in a turmoil of sensations that were by no means unpleasant, he returned the embrace and kissed her. It seemed to be the thing to do.

Afterwards, as she rearranged the coil of her disordered hair, she murmured:

“I have always loved you, Geoffry…. It simply had to happen, I suppose…. Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you.” He put the correct period to his reply with another kiss. After all, what else could he say or do?

T
HE
E
XPERT
L
OVER

  om is terribly in love with you, Dora. He’d stand on his head in a thistle-patch if you told him to. You won’t find a better provider in Auburn.”

“Yes, I know Tom is fond of me. But, Annabelle, he is such a complete dud when it comes to love-making. All he can say is: ‘Gee, but you’re pretty, Dora,’ or: ‘I’m sure crazy about you,’ or: ‘Dora, you’re the only girl for me.’”

“I suppose Tom isn’t much on romantic conversation. But what do you expect? Most men aren’t.”

“Well,” sighed Dora, impatiently, “I’d really like a little romance. And I can’t see it in Tom. He’s about as romantic as potatoes with onions. Everything about him is so obvious and commonplace—even his name. And when he tries to hug me, he makes me think of a grocer grabbing a sack of flour.”

“All the same, there are worse fish in the sea, dearie.”

Dora Cahill, a dreamy-looking blonde, and her bosom-friend, Annabelle Rivers, a vivacious and alert brunette, were sitting out a dance at Rock Creek hall. Tom Masters, the object of their discussion, who was Dora’s escort, had been sent off to dance with one of the wallflowers. Dora was a little tired, and, as usual, more than a little bored. She knew that Tom’s eyes, eager and imploring, were often upon her as he whirled past in the throng on the dance-floor; but vouchsafing him only an occasional languid glance, she continued to chat with Annabelle.

“I wish I could meet a real lover,” she mused—“someone with snap and verve and technique—someone who was eloquent and poetic and persuasive, and could carry me away, in spite of myself.”

“That kind has usually had a lot of practice,” warned Annabelle. “And practice means that they have the habit.”

“Well, I’d rather have a Don Juan than a dumbbell.”

“You can take your choice, dear. Personally, I’d prefer something dependable and solid, even if he didn’t scintillate.”

“Pardon me, Miss Cahill.” The two girls looked up. The speaker was Jack Barnes, a man whom Dora knew slightly; another man, whom she was sure she had never seen before, stood beside him.

“Permit me to introduce my friend, Mr. Colin—Lancelot Colin,” said Barnes. Dora’s eyes met the eyes of the stranger, and she acknowledged the introduction, a little breathlessly. Her first thought was: “What a heavenly name!” and then: “What a heavenly man!” Mr. Colin, who stood bowing with a perfect suavity and an ease that was Continental rather than American, was really enough to have taken away the breath of more than one girl with romantic susceptibilities. He was dark and immaculate, with the figure of a soldier and the face of an artist. There was an indefinite air of gallantry about him, a sense of mystery, of ardour and poetry. Dora contrasted him with Tom, who was broad and ruddy, and about whom there was nothing to excite one’s imagination or tease one’s curiosity. She was frankly thrilled.

Annabelle was now included in the introduction, but, beyond a courteous murmur of acknowledgment, the newcomer seemed to show no interest in her. His eyes, large and full-lidded, with a hint of weariness and sophistication in their brown depths, were fixed with a sparkling intensity upon Dora.

“May I have the pleasure of dancing with you, Miss Cahill?” His voice, a musical and vibrant baritone, completed the impression of a consummately romantic personality.

Dora consented, without her usual languid hesitation, and found herself instantly whirled away in the paces of a fox-trot. She decided at once that Mr. Colin was a superb dancer; also that he was what is commonly known as a “quick worker,” for no sooner were they on the floor than he murmured in her ear:

“You look as if you had just stepped out of a bower of roses. I’ve been watching you all evening, and I simply had to know you.”

“There really isn’t much about me that is worth knowing.” Dora gave him her demurest smile.

“Ah! but you are wonderful!” rhapsodized Mr. Colin. “Your eyes are the blue of mountain lakes under a vernal sky, your cheeks are softer than wild rose petals. And you dance like a dryad in the April woods.”

He continued in the same strain, so eloquently and to such good effect that Dora was convinced by the end of the dance that she had found the expert lover for whom she had been expressing her desire to Annabelle only a few minutes before. When the music stopped, and Mr. Colin suggested that they go for a few minutes’ stroll in the moonlight, she assented readily, and she did not even notice the disconsolate Tom, who followed them with a look of glum and glowering astonishment.

Outside, the large and mellow moon of a California May was just freeing itself from the tree-tops. Automobiles were parked all about the country dance-hall, and in some of them low murmurs and laughter were audible.

“We could sit in my car,” observed Mr. Colin, pointing out a stylish roadster. “But you’d rather take a little walk, wouldn’t you? It would be more romantic, somehow.”

He had accurately gauged her preferences, for Dora had a poetic streak in her nature, and loved moonlight and idyllic surroundings. When they paused, a minute later, in a grassy meadow encircled by oaks and alders, she felt that one of her dearest dreams was coming true. How often she had pictured to herself a moonlight stroll with a handsome and fervent and eloquent lover!

“I adore you! I loved you madly from the very first moment that I saw you tonight!” There was a convincing ardor in his low tones, and Dora thrilled.

“But how can you? You don’t know anything about me.” Dora made the usual feminine demurs. She was already more than half in love with Mr. Colin, and wholly in love with romance; but she knew, or had been told, that men were prone to despise immediate conquest or concession.

He caught her in his arms, pouring out passionate and half-incoherent words, and would have kissed her; but she turned her lips aside and resisted firmly; and after a little he did not persist. He was learned in the ways and reactions of women, and he knew that it was something more than the moonlight that had softened her lips and brightened her eyes. He could afford to wait. So he contented himself with taking her hand and pressing his lips to it with a fervor and a courtliness of gesture that were new to Dora’s experience. From that moment she adored him.

Both were a little silent as they returned to the dance-hall. But the air was full of vibrant potentialities, of things unsaid and undone as yet, but not to be long deferred. Another fox-trot, and still another, in the course of which Mr. Colin managed to say some more charming things.

“Will you go riding with me tomorrow afternoon?” he queried. “More than one nook of Arcady could be explored in an afternoon.”

“Yes,” breathed Dora, assenting to the observation as well as to the question.

It was now late in the evening, and the gay throng of dancers and onlookers had begun to thin out.

“It is time for me to go home,” said Dora, “so I’ll have to say goodnight.” She had become aware, as one who awakens partially from a blissful dream, that Tom was hovering gloomily somewhere in the near background.