The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith (18 page)

“I wish that tonight were eternal—or that it were already tomorrow,” murmured Mr. Colin, with a gallant bow and a glance full of ardor and passion that caused Dora to flush and the waiting Tom to grit his teeth quite audibly.

“Say, who is that fellow anyway?” Tom demanded when he and Dora were seated in his Buick and were on their way back to Auburn.

“A Mr. Lancelot Colin.” For ears duller even than Tom’s, the unwonted warmth and softness of her tone would have betrayed something of the inward thrill with which she uttered the syllables.

“Never heard of him. Must be a newcomer,” Tom snorted, and stepped on the gas. The way in which the car leapt forward was more eloquent of his mood than many words. He said nothing more till they were inside the town limits. Then:

“Do you like him?” he snapped.

“Very much.” Dora’s tone was sweet and tranquil. She ignored Tom’s bruskness. Her thoughts were far away, in a delicious land of glamour and romance and perpetual moonlight.

Tom relapsed into sulky silence, and nothing more was said till they stopped in front of Dora’s home.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” Tom observed. “What are you planning to do? I’d like to take you for a drive.”

“I’m sorry, Tom, but I’ve already made an engagement.”

“With that Colin bird, I suppose.”

“Tom, you are really quite rude tonight.”

“Sorry,” he grumbled, in a tone that was scarcely apologetic. “Well, I guess I’d better be going. Good night.” And he drove away at a speed that was somewhat in excess of the official limit.

Sunday morning came and passed for Dora in a mellow haze of sunlit dreams, of golden glowing anticipations. With the early afternoon arrived Mr. Colin, in his roadster. Dora was in the front yard among her mother’s roses when he drove up and got out, immaculately dressed as on the previous evening, and, to Dora’s romantic eyes, even more handsome and dashing.

“I suspected that you dwelt among roses,” he said, as he came up the garden walk and bowed in his courtier fashion. “Now I know it.”

Dora dimpled. “Who taught you to be so gallant, kind sir?”

“You have taught me—you alone.”

“I don’t see how I could teach anything to anyone.”

“You can inspire—and that is the best kind of teaching.”

“You must come in and meet my parents,” said Dora, a little later. “You can talk to them while I powder my nose.”

Dora’s mother and father, both stout and staid and placidly middle-aged, gave Mr. Colin a welcome that was tinged with little more than the usual amount of interest that they manifested toward her beaux. For them, he was merely one more possible suitor of a girl who seemed uncommonly “choosy” and difficult to marry off. Perceiving that he was handsome, obviously a gentleman, and apparently well-to-do, they surveyed him with a regard that was hopeful rather than otherwise—but not too hopeful.

“Mr. Colin is going to take me for a ride,” announced Dora. She went upstairs to perform the perennial feminine rite of re-powdering her nose, which, to a superficial masculine eye, would have seemed little in need of such ministrations. When she returned, Mr. Colin was chatting agreeably and successfully with her parents, who appeared to look upon him with increased favor. It was evident that he was really a clever young man.

When they were seated in the roadster, he said with a mysterious air: “I know a perfectly wonderful place where I shall take you. But you aren’t to know where it is beforehand.”

“How heavenly!” breathed Dora. “I’m sure it will be wonderful.”

“For me, any place would be fairyland with you. But when one can have the ideal companion and the ideal setting, then true perfection is to be attained. Life can offer no more.”

He turned the car northward on the Colfax road. As they drove along, she turned the conversation to himself with feminine deftness. He told her that he had artistic ambitions, possessed independent means, and had come to Auburn with the idea of painting a few landscapes of the local scenery, which he had visited and explored years before and of which he had become much enamored. He was from San Francisco, where his people lived. His father, he explained, was a wealthy realtor and was none too favorably disposed toward his artistic ambitions. His mother, however, was on his side.

Dora was fascinated. She had never known an artist, and all that Mr. Colin told her served to confirm the romantic interest that he had aroused.

“Well, I think that’s really enough about myself,” he laughed. “Now let’s talk about something worth while.” He began to ply her with compliments, which, to Dora’s ear, were marvellously poetic; but, for the time, he did not speak of the passion he had avowed on the previous evening.

Now they had left the highway and were traveling a narrow side-road that ran toward Bear River. This was soon abandoned for a still narrower road that turned and twisted among brush-oak, chaparral and manzanita. Presently Mr. Colin turned the car aside in a grassy meadow, in front of a grove of tall pines. Except for the road, there was no trace of human life.

They left the car and plunged into the pine grove for several hundred yards. Suddenly, and, for Dora, quite unexpectedly, they came upon a little glade in which there grew a solitary redwood. Here they might have been a hundred miles from civilization, in the midst of the primeval mountain forest, for any evidence to the contrary. Sunlight sifted goldenly through the pine-tops, and a jay scolded them from somewhere in the dark-green branches. Dora exclaimed with delight.

There was a fallen log at hand to provide them with a seat, and of this they availed themselves at Mr. Colin’s suggestion.

“Do you like this?” The very tone of his query was a caress.

“I adore it.”

“And I adore you. Say that you love me a little, Dora.”

“I like you very much.”

“Can’t you do better than that?” He was very close beside her and his breath was in her hair as she half-averted her face, fearing that he would see the traitorous softness of her eyes, the tender flush of her cheeks.

“We hardly know each other, Lancelot.”

“I know you well enough to realize that no one else could ever make me feel what I feel for you.” His arm was about her now, and she did not resist. She had intended to make him wait, to prolong the wooing; but now, in a flash, her will to do so had fled, and all her thoughts seemed to dissolve in a delicious langour.

With a gentle hand he turned her face toward him, and kissed her—a long, passionate, full-blooded kiss, that seemed as if it could never end. Finally she withdrew her lips and hid her face against his shoulder.

“Do you love me?” he whispered, almost fiercely.

“Yes, I love you.”

Two weeks had passed for Dora in a golden and fire-shot mist of romance. At first she was very happy, with the sensation of treading on air that sometimes accompanies the first stages of a great emotion. There were many long walks, rides and cosy evenings with Mr. Colin, who was manifestly a model of devotion and ardor. For some reason, which he told her he would explain later, he had wished to delay the announcement of their engagement; and he had hinted that it would be at least a year before he would be in a position to marry. This had not troubled her—she had been too happy not to trust her lover implicitly. But of late he had appeared self-absorbed and not quite so unfailingly attentive as at first. She wondered, anxiously, if he were growing a little tired. Even when he told her that he was at work upon a new painting which he hoped would mark a real achievement, she was not entirely reassured. She had seen some of his pictures—amateurish watercolors, not lacking in a certain shallow feeling for tonal harmony—and had thought them quite wonderful. She tried to content herself with his explanation, reflecting that an artist must work, after all, even if he were in love.

One day, in the Auburn post-office, she came upon Mr. Colin chatting gaily with her friend Annabelle, who was smiling at him with all of her wonted animation. Dora was a little surprised, remembering that he had shown no interest in that vivacious brunette on the evening when they had met at Rock Creek. Absorbed entirely in her lover, she had seen little of Annabelle since that occasion.

“Hello, dearie,” warbled Annabelle. “I was just asking Mr. Colin what had become of you. You and he seem to have pre-empted each other entirely, and no one else has a look-in.”

“I have been busy,” said Dora, vaguely.

“I know all about that,” laughed Annabelle. “I’ll say you have. Well, so long.” She walked away with a mirthful glance that included both, but lingered somehow a little longer upon Mr. Colin than upon Dora.

“Since when have you been chumming with Annabelle?” Dora turned to her lover with mock-earnestness.

“I’d hardly call it that.” His tone was negligent. “She asked me about you, and I was trying to be civil. She’s really quite amusing, though.”

Dora thought little of the incident; but one afternoon, a few days later, it occurred to her that she would really like to see Annabelle; also, that Annabelle might well be feeling neglected. She was still vaguely discontented, and troubled by Mr. Colin’s fits of preoccupation and by something that was almost absent-minded about his kisses and gallantries. She felt the need of renewing her old friendship with Annabelle, who had always cheered her in hours of depression or boredom.

The Rivers home was on the other side of Auburn from where Dora lived. She sauntered slowly through the winding streets under the shade of elms and maples and eucalypti, and went in at the familiar picket-gate. She was going down the garden-path to the house when she heard Annabelle’s voice nearby, in an arbor that was thickly covered with Cherokee rose-vines, now in full flower. She could not see Annabelle or her companion, but the words came clearly:

“I thought you were in love with Dora…. Now behave … or I’ll tell on you.” There followed a voluptuous giggle, and then the voice of a man, Mr. Colin’s vibrant baritone:

“Your lips are too sweet for anything but kisses. You look as if you had always lived in a rose-arbor.”

“If Dora heard you say that….”

“Why be always mentioning Dora, when we have you to talk about? … And when there are better things to do even than talk?”

“Now you behave… or….” The sentence was cut short by the unmistakable sound of a kiss.

Dora had the sensation of stumbling blindly among ashes and ruins when she left the garden of Annabelle’s home. By an automatic rather than conscious impulse she closed the gate behind her as quietly as she could. Her throat was dry, and she could scarcely control the tears that welled beneath her eyelids. Somehow, she reached her home, and flung herself on the sofa in the sitting-room.

She began to weep. Her parents were away, and for this she was vaguely thankful. No one would see her in the first overwhelming shock of her grief and disillusionment.

An hour later the telephone rang, and she sprang automatically to answer it. The voice was that of Tom Masters, whose occasional gruff but recurrent invitations she had refused ever since her meeting with Mr. Colin.

“Say, Dora, how about the dance at Rock Creek next Saturday night?” There was an almost forlorn stubborness in his tone. “I thought I’d ring up and ask.”

“Oh, all right, Tom, I guess I can go with you.”

T
HE
P
ARROT

  he pawnshop was so crowded with unredeemed articles, that neither electricity nor sunlight could dissipate fully the murk of its doubtful corners. The windows were always unwashed and the cobwebs were unswept. It was even darker and grimier than usual, on this late afternoon of April; and the sea-fog that had inundated San Francisco was visibly mingled with the dust that hovered always in its air. No one who was unfamiliar with the place would have noticed the parrot, which occupied a perch in the corner farthest from the door. The bird was in one of its taciturn moods, and had apparently forgotten its extensive repertoire of thieves’ argot, water-front oaths, and Jewish idioms, for it had not spoken a word since morning.

“Vell, Micky Horgan, vot you vant?” The huge, swarthy, furtive-looking person thus hailed by Jacob Stein, the proprietor, was better known as Black Mike to the local underworld and police circles. He was peering about uncertainly for Stein, who was stooping behind the counter. The Jew was so small and dingy that he blended in with his surroundings as if he had taken on a sort of protective coloration.

“I want one hundred dollars.” Horgan’s voice was a peremptory growl.

“For vot should I gif you so much money?”

“For this.” Horgan took an amber necklace from his coat-pocket and laid it on the counter, where it gleamed like a circle of solidified sun-rays.

Stein peered at the necklace through his heavy-rimmed goggles and shook his head with a vehement grimace.

“I gif you fifteen,” he said dubiously.

“The hell you will. That’s real amber. I didn’t swipe it from any hall-bedroom, either. And I’m offering it mud-cheap because I’ve got to have a hundred bucks to-night.”

Stein came out from behind the counter and began to expostulate.

“For vot you take me? No one buys amber. I’m a poor man, and I haf a family. Fifteen tollars I gif you, but no more.”