The Thing from the Lake Part 13

I laughed with her. Certainly no convent would harbor my lady of marvelous tresses and magical perfume, of wild fancies and heretical theories. That thought of mine was indeed far afield. But where, then, was I next to seek?

I made a detour and used some strategy to gain a view of the Senator's daughters. They proved to be brunettes who wore their locks cropped after the fas.h.i.+on of certain Greenwich villagers. My disappointment was not great; my lady was not suggestive of a boarding-school miss. But I had hoped to find somewhere a trace of the copper-bronze head whose royalty of hair I had shorn as the traitors sh.o.r.e King Childeric's Gothic locks.

I drove home with a sense of blankness upon me. Suppose she never came again? Suppose the episode was ended? Not even freedom from the Thing could compensate for the baffled adventure.

Think of the lame feller with an Adventure!

CHAPTER X

"Plato expresses four kinds of Mania--Firstly, the musical; secondly, the telestic or mystic; thirdly, the prophetic; and fourthly, that which belongs to Love."--PREFACE TO ZANONI.

For myself, I have always found that excitement stimulates imagination.

There are others, I know, who can do no creative work except when all within and without is lulled and calm. Perhaps I have too much calm as an ordinary thing! That evening, when I went to my room, lighted my lamps and closed my door, I stood alone for awhile breathing the mingled sweetness of the country air and the pomander ball. In that interval, there came to me, complete and whole as a gift thrust into my hand, the melody which an enthusiastic publisher since a.s.sured me has reached every ear in America.

As to that extravagant statement, I can only measure by the preposterous amount of money the melody has brought me. Perhaps there is a magic about it. For myself, I cannot hear it--ground on a street-organ, given on the stage, played on a phonograph record or delicately rendered by an orchestra--without feeling again the exaltation and enchantment of that night.

I flung myself down at my writing-table, tossing my former work right and left to make room for this. If it should escape before I could set it down! If the least of those airy cadences should be lost!

At three o'clock in the morning I came back to realization of time and place. The composition was finished; it stood up before me like a flower raised over-night. Eight hours had pa.s.sed since I sat down to the work, after dinner. I was tired. As I began to draw into a pile the sheets of paper I had covered with notes, weariness gripped me like a hand.

Eight hours? If I had shoveled in a ditch twice that long I could have felt no more exhausted. Yielding to drained fatigue of mind and body, I dropped my head upon the arms I folded upon the table. My hot, strained eyes closed with relief, my stiff fingers relaxed. Rest and content flowed over me; my work was done, and good.

Rest pa.s.sed into sleep, no doubt.

The sleep could not have been long, for not many hours remained before dawn. When I started awake and lifted my head, I found the room in darkness. A perfume was in the air, and the sense of a presence scarcely more tangible than the perfume. Even in the first dazed moment, I knew my lady had come again.

"Do not rise!" her murmuring voice cautioned me. "Unless you wish me to go?"

"No!"

"I am here because I promised to come. It was not wise of you to ask that of me."

"Then I prefer folly to wisdom," I answered, steadying myself to full wakefulness. "Or, rather, I am not sure that you can decide for me which is which!"

"Why? After all, why? Just--curiosity?"

"You, who speak so learnedly of magic and sorcery," I retorted, smiling under cover of the darkness, "have you never heard of the white magic conjured by a tress of hair, a perfume ball, and a voice sweeter than the perfume? An image of wax does not melt before a witch's fire so easily as a man before these things."

"My hair pleased you?" she questioned navely.

"Or so easily as a woman melts before admiration!" I supplemented. "I am delighted to prove you human, mystic lady. Please me? Could anyone fail to be pleased with that most magnificent braid? But how can either you or I forgive the cruelty that took it from its owner? Why did you cut it off?"

"So little of it! And I did not know you, then."

"Little? That braid?"

"It reached below my knee, now it is but little less," she answered with indifference. "We all have such hair."

I gasped. My imagination painted the picture of all that s.h.i.+ning richness enwrapping a slim young body. It was fantastic beyond belief to sit there at my desk, beneath my fingers the tools of sober, workaday life, and stare into the dark room that held the reality of my vision.

She was there, but I could not rise and find her. She was opposite my eyes, but my promise forbade me to touch the lamp and see her.

"Who are 'we'?" I slowly followed her last sentence.

A sigh answered me. On the silence, a memory floated to me of the story she had told while I held her prisoner that first night:

"_The woman sits in her low chair. The fire-s.h.i.+ne is bright in her eyes and in her hair. On either side, her hair flows down to the floor._"

Yes, by legend young witches had such hair; sylphs, undines and all of the airy race of Lilith. I thrust absurdities away from me and offered a quotation to fill the pause:

"'I met a lady in the meads'

'Full beautiful; a faery's child.'

'Her hair was long, her foot was light,'

'And her eyes were wild.'"

She did not laugh, or put away the suggestion. When I had decided that she did not mean to reply, and was seeking my mind for new speech to detain her with me, she finally spoke what seemed another quotation:

"'A spirit--one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom Josephus and Michael Psellus of Constantinople may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.' Have you read the writings of the learned Jew or of the Platonist, you who are so very bold?"

"Neither," I meekly admitted. "But neither ancient gentleman could convince me that you are unhuman."

Her answer was just audible:

"Not I--but, It!"

Now I was silenced, for dreadful and uncanny was that whisper in the dark to a man who had met here in this room What I had met.

"Tell me more of this Thing without a name," I urged, mastering my reluctance to evoke even the idea of what the blood curdled to recall.

"Why does It hate me?"

"What can I tell you? Even in your world, does not evil hate good as naturally as good recoils from evil? But this One has another cause also!" She hesitated. "And you yourself? How have you challenged and mocked It this very night? Here, where It glooms, you have dared bring the high joy of the artist who creates? Oh, brave, brave!--he who could await alone the visit of the Unspeakable, in the chamber into which the Loathsome Eyes have looked, and write the music of hope and beauty!"

I started, with a hot rush of surprise and pleasure. She had heard my work. She approved it. More than that, not to her was I the lame fellow who ought to get a better man to drive his car!

"Nor should you, who have two worlds of your own," she added in a lower tone, "doubt the existence of many both dark and bright. Go, then, out of this haunted place where a human madness broke through the Barrier.

Be satisfied with the victories you have had. Let the visits of the Dark One fade into mere nightmare; and know I am no more a living woman than Franchina Descartes."

"Who was she?"

"Have you not read that early in the seventeenth century there appeared in Paris the philosopher Descartes, accompanied by the figure of a beautiful woman? She moved, spoke, and seemed life itself; but Descartes declared she was an automaton, a masterpiece of mechanism he himself had made. Yet many refused to believe his story, declaring he had by sorcery compelled a spirit to serve him in this form. He called her Franchina, his daughter."

"And the truth?"

"I have told you all the record tells. She was soon lost. Descartes took her with him upon a journey by sea; when, a storm arising, the superst.i.tious captain of the vessel threw the magic beauty into the Mediterranean."