Chapter IV (3)

Olga fell on her knees, sobbing convulsively. She reached out her hands and reverently brushed aside the leaves that lay upon the grave, then started up, a cry of terror on her lips.

Within the depression, where she had scraped the leaves away, a human skeleton lay bleaching, stained almost to the colour of brown twigs. As they bent over they saw a skull, through the sockets of which rose the slender spires of a plant, covering it mercifully with clusters of purplish-blue flowers. A rusty iron cross lay beside it.

“That is--that is where she lay--when we came up,” quavered the old man. “She lay there----”

The women began to sob unrestrainedly, Kaisa’s voice wailing above the others. The men turned upon Black Eric, their sticks raised high, terror forgotten in a mighty wave of revenge that swept its fire over them.

“It isn’t true!” he gasped, his teeth clicking together. “It isn’t, I tell you! Haven’t we seen her--all these years? Didn’t we--see her--this----”

Before the look in their faces he slunk away. He stumbled past the hut, the thorny branches reaching out their hands, catching him, tearing his clothes. On down the path, his terrified flight impeded by the gnarled roots.

Behind him followed a human avalanche, great cries issuing from their throats, sticks raised, ready to strike. Silent Sven fought his way to the front, called them to silence. “Let him go!” His voice rang out. “Let him go! His fear will punish him, far, far more than we could punish him! It will follow him, as it has followed him all these years. But never again will it affect us, and _she_ is at rest!”

Before him, in the gap left by the branches, lay the river, coiling and twisting in the sun, a waiting, hungry look upon its face.

THE BAMBOO TRAP

BY ROBERT S. LEMMON

From _Short Stories_

“A letter, _patrón_.”

One corner of the mosquito bar that made of the tent fly an airy, four-walled room was lifted and a brown hand thrust in the envelope with its array of foreign postmarks and smudgy thumb-prints, all but concealing the familiar American stamp. Outside, the steady roar of the Chanchan River, softened by distance as it charged down the last pitches of the Andes on its way to the Gulf of Guayaquil and the Pacific, blended into a musical background for the messenger’s guttural voice.

John Mather laid down the birdskin on which he was working and reached eagerly for the missive. Any word from the outside world was a godsend here in the jungle--doubly so when it came in the form of a letter whose bulk proclaimed several pages of home news. He ripped open the flap with dexterous, capable fingers and flattened the folded sheets on the camp table before him among the litter of skinning tools, cotton, and specimen labels.

For a space he read absorbedly, sensing behind the cold impersonality of the typewritten words the analytical mind of the man who had dictated them. Not until he came to the last page did his expression change and a half frown pucker the corners of his eyes.

“Hell!” he growled. “Isn’t that the way of things? Just when I’m finishing up my collections here, too, and planning to catch the next steamer north. No Christmas at home this year! Let’s see--how many of the damn things does he say he wants?” He re-read the final paragraphs of the letter, mumbling them half aloud in the manner of one in whom many years of living alone in the back of the world’s beyond have bred the habit of self-conversation:

“The Department of Entomology is extremely desirous of securing
several specimens of the Cuabandan spider, to complete their
habitat group of insects from the high Andes. It seems that the
ones they intended to use proved to be rather poorly prepared and
could not be mounted satisfactorily.

“Also, I am in receipt of a letter from the International Museum in
Chicago offering to exchange a valuable collection of humming-bird
skins from Guatemala for a complete series of these same spiders.
You know how incomplete our Guatemalan material is, and therefore
how anxious I am to secure these specimens from Dr. Huston. He asks
that we furnish him with at least a dozen Cuabandans of both sexes,
and perhaps twice that number of immature ones.

“You will find the spiders inhabiting the slopes of the mountain
Chuquipata, probably between the 9,000-and 12,000-foot levels,
although reliable data on this point is impossible for me to
secure. The species is decidedly rare, and I can give you little
information to help you in your search. Beyond their appearance and
great size, with which you are perhaps familiar, and the fact that
they are carnivorous and often prey upon small birds, nothing is
really known of them. I shall depend upon you to remain in the
region long enough to gain at least an outline of their life
habits.

“I am sorry to have to give you this new assignment, Mather,
because I judge from your last letter that you have about finished
your field work on the west side of the mountains and are looking
forward to your return to New York. But I know that you will
appreciate my position and postpone sailing for the few additional
weeks which the Chuquipata expedition will entail.

“All good wishes to you from myself and the Staff.

“Sincerely yours,
“ELIOT A. RODGERS,
“_Curator of Ornithology_.”

Mather folded the letter thoughtfully and thrust it into the pocket of his flannel shirt. With the buttoning down of the flap he seemed to dismiss his irritation and become again the seasoned museum collector, taking each task as it comes and subjugating all personal desires to the duties of his calling. As he turned again to the half-skinned bird before him he summoned his Indian guide and general assistant in the terse Spanish fashion, “Pedro--_ven aquí!_”

“_Ahora sí, patrón_,” sing-songed the Quichua from the cooking lean-to near by. “_Yo no más!_” In a moment he stood before the white man, a squat, stolid figure with the humble eyes of a whipped dog.

Mather snipped the wing bones of the bird close to the body and stripped the skin down the neck and over the skull to the eyes, turning it inside out skilfully. A few crunching clips with his scissors separated head from neck and exposed the base of the brain. He set the raw body aside and commenced scooping out the clotted, grayish matter from the interior of the skull.

As he worked he spoke pointedly. “You know Chuquipata, Pedro?”

A grunt and nod signified the Indian’s assent. In the presence of the American his words were customarily few, a reticence inspired not so much by awe of his employer as by inherited fear of the whites handed down from the days of the first enslaving of his race by the Spanish _conquistadores_ four centuries ago.

“Rough country, isn’t it? _Muchas quebradas--no?_”

Another affirmative, more vehement this time. Then, “You not go there, _patrón_?”

Mather finished cleaning the birdskin, dusted its inner surface with arsenic and alum powder to cure and preserve it, and turned it right side out again.

“Yes, we go to Chuquipata in three days,” he answered as he shook the ruffled feathers into place and began filling out the skin with cotton. “You will go to the village to-morrow and get _cargadores_ to carry the outfit. Four good men I will need, Pedro. Or, if you can find them, two mules instead; pack animals are better than men, but there are not many to be had. See what you can do.”

He dismissed the man with a wave of the hand, and tied an identifying label to the crossed feet of his specimen. As carefully as if it were of the most fragile and costly porcelain he wrapped the tiny green and yellow effigy of the bird in cotton to hold it in shape until feathers and skin should dry, and added it to the rows of similar mummies in the tray of his collector’s trunk.

“That makes eight hundred from this region,” he commented as he made the entry in a record book. “Not bad for three months’ work, considering the weather I’ve had. It brings the total up to nearly two thousand for the whole trip, and several of the species are new to science, too. Well, I suppose I’ll have to let it go at that and begin to get ready for this Chuquipata hike. It’ll take nearly a day just to pick up my small mammal traps in the jungle around here.”

* * * * *

Toward the southward end of that semi-arid plateau which stretches for three hundred rolling miles between the East and West Cordillera of the Ecuadorian Andes lies a land that God forgot. High in the air it is, as men measure such things--a matter of two vertical miles above the slow lift of the Pacific out beyond the sunset. Tumbled and stark too, a dumping ground of the Titans, a scrap heap from the furnaces in which the world was made. For in ages far beyond the memory of man, volcanic peaks whose summits have long been smoothed by the erosion of the centuries belched forth their hot lava and ash and laid a blight upon the land. Ravine, hillock, mountain, wind-swept, gaunt, and all but uninhabited, magnificent in the splendour of their distances--such is the setting of Chuquipata to-day, and such will it remain until Vulcan kindles his forge anew.

Up into this sky-top world John Mather rode on a day as glittering and telescopically clear overhead as it was harsh and dusty underfoot--up out of the green rankness of the coast jungles into a land of illimitable space. To the condor swinging a thousand feet in air, his pack-train seemed like ants crawling in single file across a rugged boulder.

Where a ravine gashed the side of Chuquipata he pitched camp on a little grassy flat protected on three sides by the crumbly walls of the cut, and braced his tent pegs with rocks against the tugging of a wind that pounced down in unexpected gusts. Scrubby brush and the stunted, gnarly trees of the high altitudes straggled here and there, promising firewood in limited and smoky quantities. A score of feet from the tent door a brooklet tinkled under overhanging wire grass, ice-cold and diamond-clear. And above it all, stupendous in miles of waving, yellowish _páramo_, dwarfing men and camp to pigmy size, the mountain swept up and up into a cap of clouds.

When the equipment was unloaded, Mather dismissed his packers and their two mules, for he had no way of telling how long his search for the giant spiders might last, and there was no point in feeding idle mouths week after week. Only Pedro he retained, to do the camp chores and leave him entirely free for his collecting work. Besides, the Indian would be useful when, at the end of the stay, new carriers would have to be secured from one of the villages a day’s march away.

It was mid-afternoon before the camp was fully arranged and Mather set out for his first survey of the area he might have to cover as with a fine tooth comb. Hopeless enough it seemed, as he looked up at it from the ravine head, an appallingly vast and rugged haystack in which to search for one small needle. Were his quarry a bird that flew or an animal that ran, the task would not have looked so hopeless. But a spider, a crawling creature of the grass and brush, probably never coming into fair view--that was different.

He set to work methodically, covering every type of ground that lay between the points which his aneroid told him were eight and twelve thousand feet above the sea. Bunch grass, scrub, rocks, volcanic ash--he went over them all with keen and patient thoroughness but no success. Inquiries of Pedro and the occasional mountain Quichuas whom he met elicited no information of value; either his attempts to describe the creatures he sought were not understood, or the spiders were so rare that even the natives were unfamiliar with them. Evening after evening he returned wearily to camp, empty-handed save for a brace of mountain partridges or a few wild pigeons which he had shot for food, or the half-dozen smaller birds of which his collection stood in need.

“If I had only had some line on the habits of the beasts it would be easier,” he mused as he ate his cornbread lunch one day beside a stream that plunged down the mountain far to the north of where his camp lay. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know even whether they’re day or night feeders. About the only thing I’m sure of is that they’re not to be found on the south slope where I’ve been working. Pedro and I will have to move the outfit around to this side, I guess; the vegetation is quite different here--thicker and not so dried, as though it got more rain. I’ll take a look down this spur and then work back around the base. There may be a good camp site down that way.”

He picked up his gun and started to descend the ridge that dropped sharply toward a valley so far below that its brush and trees blended to a uniform sage-green carpet of marvellous softness. Rocks and beds of loose pumice that broke and slid treacherously as he crossed them covered the slope. He edged his way down cautiously, grasping the rare handholds of bush or tough grass, above him the blue spaces of the sky, the patchwork quilt of the world far-flung below.

A half-hour of this, and then the knife edge fanned out into a broader, easier descent across which trailing bamboo had spread an unbroken mat. As far as Mather could see on either side, and forward to the last steep pitch that dropped to the valley floor, that tangle of interlacing stems and offshoots extended, three feet or so above the ground and in some places strong enough to support a man’s full weight. Had a leafy cloth been woven to cover the mountain’s bareness it could not have more perfectly concealed what lay beneath.

“I’m not very keen to tackle that,” Mather muttered, halting at the edge of the tangle. “Too tough to smash through, and not quite tough enough to walk on--I’ve tried ground cane before.”

He looked back at the pitch he had just descended and shook his head.

“About six of one and half a dozen of the other, I guess. Damned if I’ll shin up that ridge again. Can’t work around the edge of this bamboo, either--those cliffs block me off. Well, here goes for a bad two hours’ work.”

He took the shells out of his gun, slung the weapon on his back so as to leave both hands free, and started down, choosing what appeared to be the least rugged part of the slope.

It was rough going. On hands and knees he would crawl along for a few yards over the bamboo, then strike a weak spot and smash through to the ground in a smother of leaves and hampering tendrils, scramble out and go on. By the time he was half way to the bottom of the valley he was soaked with perspiration and nearly fagged out. Only his indomitable will and the knowledge that to turn back now would be doubly impossible kept him going.

It was nearly sunset when he reached a comparatively level stretch beyond which the mountain dropped away suddenly as though to make up for lost time. Across this place the cane was unusually thick, and he was getting along quite well, when, a few yards short of the steep slope the supporting mat broke with a ripping, tearing noise and he slithered down sickeningly into hot, pitchy darkness. Then a crunching jar, red lights flickering before his eyes, and unconsciousness.

How long he lay insensible he could not tell. It must have been many hours, for when he came to he was stiff and sore and the blood from a long scratch across his wrist had dried. A thousand tiny hammers seemed beating on his brain, each stroke an ache that quivered through a nerve. Dazedly he tried to sit up, failed, and lay flat on his back, hands clutching at the ground as he fought for control of his twitching eyes.

Gradually things steadied, and he saw that he was in a sort of pear-shaped cave perhaps a dozen yards in diameter and half as high. Daylight filtered through a ragged hole at its apex, pitifully weak, but enough to disclose the mingled rocks and earth that formed the walls of the enclosure and the whitish, diseased-looking vines that twined up them to the opening.

“That’s where I fell through--that hole,” Mather croaked. “Yes--that hole--fell through--yes, _fell through_. I’ve got to--get out--up there.”

He wavered to his knees and waited grimly for the whirling in his head to abate.

“Now, let’s--see,” he whispered hoarsely, creeping toward the wall.

Twice he made the circuit of the cave, groping his way over boulders and loose débris that gave out a dank, nauseous odour. His hands pawed uncertainly at the walls, seeking firm holds, but finding nothing except the mass of vine stems, clammy and breaking at the first hard pull.

“Fool!” he growled at last. “I couldn’t get up there anyway. It slopes in. A man can’t climb on a ceiling. God!”

He slumped back and tried to think rationally.

“Let’s see, now. I was coming down the mountain, headed west. The steepest part was just ahead of me when I fell--forty-five-degree slope, about. Not more than twenty feet or so away. This hole, now--yes, it’s close to forty feet wide at the bottom--maybe five feet through to the face of the slant----”

He started up eagerly, the realization that he could burrow his way out clearing his brain and putting new life in his racked body. He reached for the sheath knife at his belt, the only digging tool he had. As he stood there with it in his hand a thought flashed over him that drove all the zest from his face.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he muttered. “_Which is the west side?_”

He looked about helplessly at the prison that hemmed him in. Somewhere, to right or left, ahead or behind, that mass of earth and rock must be comparatively thin, hardly more than a shell separating him from freedom and the broad reaches of the sky. If he could find that spot, strike that downhill side, he might be able to dig through to the outer world in a few hours. If he missed it, started work on the wrong side, his burrowing would only lead him deeper into the mountain, wasting his strength and the precious element of time. And between those two extremes, the heart-warming right and the hopelessly wrong, was no faintest clue to guide him to a decision. Yes, there was one--his compass, of course! Stupid not to have thought of that before; the surest possible proof. Everything was all right now.

He fumbled in the side pocket of his coat and drew out the instrument, a watchlike affair in a heavy nickel case. His first glance showed the needle bent crazily beneath the shattered glass, twisted and utterly ruined by the crash of his fall.

Mather’s face went hard as he tilted the broken thing in his hand, testing its uselessness with a sort of grim irony.

“So-o,” he said bitterly. “You’re about as much good to me as a piece of cheese, aren’t you? Or a chunk of lead--because I could eat the cheese. Well, I guess I’ll have to depend on Old Lady Luck to help me out. I may as well pick out a place that looks like easy digging, anyhow.”

He stumbled across the cave and began to pick a way at the wall where the earth was crumbly and yielded readily to knife and hands. A few inches in he struck rock. Working along it, he came finally to loose rubble, but the mass was too large for him to dislodge without starting a disastrous cave-in from above. He would have to try another place. And an hour had been wasted.

A second location was even less promising, but the third gave him hope. He burrowed on stubbornly, his fingers torn and bleeding from the sharp fragments of rock embedded in the soil like chips of glass, his muscles aching from their exertions in the cramped space which his progress created. Two feet, a yard--at this rate he ought to break through in a few more hours, unless he were working in the wrong direction. At thought of that contingency he redoubled his efforts, determined to end the uncertainty as soon as possible. And a few inches farther on he came squarely up against another boulder that defied every attempt to move it.

Exhausted and reeking with perspiration, he backed out of the hole and stretched full length on the floor of the cave. In a little while, when the cramps had left his back and shoulders, he would start in again. Yes, just a few minutes rest, and then--then he was roused from uneasy half-sleep by a slow, insistent rustling like a snake crawling through grass. He listened tensely, eyes closed in concentration, striving to locate its direction. The sound came closer, louder, on all sides of him, filling the cave with eerie whispers. Then suddenly it seemed to reach a focus close by, and a creeping hairy body brushed against his neck. With a leap he gained his feet, his eyes wide with horror.

The light in the cave had dimmed, but he could see that the walls were alive with huge spiders, thick-legged and hideous, their bodies as large as a sparrow’s and covered with straggly fuzz. Some were blackish in colour, others were a sort of cherry red. They were crawling sluggishly, as though gorged with food, down the vines that reached the opening above his head. A dozen had gained the floor; others were nearly there. Hundreds more were creeping in at the hole and groping for convenient stems down which to clamber.

With a shudder Mather knew--knew that here, in this dark prison, was the night shelter, the universal rendezvous, of the beasts he had come so far to catch. By day they hunted through the cane tangle that covered the mountainside, perfectly concealed and safe from all detection, and as night approached they convened here from all directions to take refuge from the rains which each night spilled across the land. They were gathering now, crawling, crawling with that infernal rustling sound----

“God!” he muttered. “And he said they were rare!” Full darkness came, bringing to John Mather the torture of eternal nightmare. With hands, coat, hat, he beat and crushed the furry hordes that swarmed over him. But for every one killed two more were ready to take its place; there seemed no end to their numbers. Their curved jaws clipped into him wherever his skin was exposed. Though he could see nothing in the pitchy darkness, an odour of decay told him that shreds of flesh from their victims of days before still clung to them, and the dread of blood-poisoning obsessed him. In a quiver of loathing and fear he fought on bitterly hour after hour, dropping into snatches of exhausted sleep only to struggle up again when the writhing burden on his face threatened to choke off his breath.

At last the blackness began to gray. Dawn was coming up over the mountains, and as the light strengthened, the spiders scattered, climbing the vines again to the open air and the sunshine. Singly and in battalions they went rank after rank up the stems of their living ladders. And as the last stragglers disappeared through the opening above him Mather sat with head sunk between his hands, fighting to retain a sanity that hung on the very edge of destruction.

It must have been midday before he pulled himself together enough to eat some of the emergency rations which were as much a part of his collecting outfit as his gun or butterfly net. The food helped to steady him, and presently he began moving about under the hole at the cave’s peak, trying to determine the points of the compass by the appearance of the scraps of sky he could see through the openings in the bamboo. A few minutes’ study convinced him of the hopelessness of this, for leaden clouds had blotted out the sun. So uniform was their mass that he could not even detect their own direction of movement, which, if he could have ascertained, would have served as a fairly accurate indication here in this land where the prevailing wind at the higher levels blows from the east.

“I’d better get back to my digging,” he told himself finally. “It’s the only chance, for Pedro would never find me among all those acres of cane, even if he knew enough to come this way to look. I didn’t tell him which way I was going, when I left camp.”

He groped his way into the tunnel he had started the day before and renewed his struggle with the rocks that blocked its end. He felt stronger now, and the physical work helped to shove into the background of his mind the horror that he knew the night would bring again. Perhaps he could break his way through before dark--a mere chance, but enough to add incentive to his labour.

By superhuman effort he worked out the largest rock at last, backed into the cave with it, and wriggled in again to the attack. Prying and digging with his knife, he burrowed on through earth that gave way more readily as he progressed. Sweat streamed from him unheeded; with each foot that he advanced the air in the tunnel grew warmer. A nauseating, steamy odour crept into it, so faint at first as to defy analysis, but increasing momentarily.

Presently Mather drew his hand back with an exclamation of surprise. His fingers had touched a rock so hot that it almost burned them.

“What the hell?” he growled, then lay still, thinking, his chest heaving as he gasped for breath.

Crushingly the explanation came to him: The burrow was leading into the mountain, straight forward toward those infernal caverns of molten lava and steam which underlie that whole mighty continental backbone from Cape Horn to Panama. Already he had dug far enough through the mountain’s outer shell to reach the heat that radiated from them.

Mather’s heart sank with the realization that all his work had gone for nothing. Then a great wave of hope swept over him as the thought came that out of this very failure sprang success, for since he had been digging toward the mountain’s centre, the opposite way must lead to light and life and freedom.

He wormed his way backward, gulping with relief as he reached the cooler air near the tunnel’s mouth. A few more wriggles, and his knee struck something that crushed flabbily under the pressure. Across one hand dragged a fat, rough body, paused and sent a tingle of pain up his forearm as he shook it off with a jerk. The spider army had returned. Through the endless hours of that second night of horror John Mather clung to two things with the desperation of a wave-buffeted man whose arm is crooked across a slippery, floating spar: the knowledge that daylight would bring relief from his tormentors, and the hope that before another evening drove them scurrying back to shelter he would have won his way through the cave wall. Every atom of will power, every drop of that fine essence of determination which some men call upon to carry them against impossible odds he threw into the mental struggle, knowing that to lose sight of his goal would mean gibbering madness.

And in the end he won. Taut and quivering as a plucked string, he sensed rather than saw that the crawling hosts were gone.

“Now!” he rasped, the sound of his own voice grating across his nerves. “Now you dig.”

He hurled himself savagely into the work, slashing and tugging at the hard-packed earth and stone opposite the mass of débris he had scooped out the day before. His knife wedged between two rocks and the blade snapped short off as he tried to extricate it. He cursed chokingly and hacked away with the haft, pitifully futile by comparison.

“Got to make it!” he muttered. “Got to make it to-day! I’ll go crazy--_crazy_, I tell you!”

Inch by inch, a foot, two feet, three, he won ahead through the darkness, driving his battered hands without mercy. Out there somewhere beyond that stubborn, unseen barrier against which he pressed were fresh air and the sane, unhampered sweep of God’s world. Behind, unspeakable gloom and torture more horrible than death. He must, he must keep going!

It was nearly noon when he stopped from sheer inability to do more and slithered back into the cave for a few minutes’ rest. For a moment he thought night was coming on, so dark was it as he emerged from the tunnel, but as he glanced up at the opening above his head he saw that the shadows came from masses of blue-black clouds that swirled together ominously and dropped lower even as he watched. A dull pulsing shook the air, as of huge drums thudding afar off. Lightning ripped across the clouds, so close that Mather heard its white-hot crackle an instant before the smash of the thunder beat against his brain. He threw an arm across his face to shut out the flash and what it revealed--thousands of noisome, hairy beasts that came scuttling on fat legs through the opening to take refuge from the storm.

Then it rained. The heavens opened and crashed down. A torrent of mud and water poured through the cave roof, ripping the opening to twice its former size. Like a huge bucket the cave caught and held the flood. Momentarily the water rose--to Mather’s ankles, his knees, his waist. The spiders struggled in it, dropping from walls and roof by dozens. They swarmed over him horribly as they fought with each other for safety on his body and head. He tried to brush them off, to drown them by sousing himself under the cascade that spilled down from above, but they clung to him like leeches.

The water was up to his chest, now. Presently he was swimming, his head a mass of spiders that thickened by the minute and nearly suffocated him. For an age he struggled, growing weaker and weaker, knowing that in the end he must sink under that chaotic mass. The thought of it nerved him to a few more feeble strokes, a final effort to rid his head of the clammy bodies. Then, miraculously, a clatter and splash of falling rocks and earth, a sucking sound as from a giant sluice pipe suddenly cleared, and his feet touched bottom.

He staggered blindly, trying to gain his balance on the uneven rocks. With arms arched he crushed and rubbed his head free of its loathsome blanket and saw that the water was but waist deep and falling rapidly. Through the lightening darkness he could make out the whirlpool which told where, at the end of the tunnel he had been digging, the wall had given way before the pressure from within. Even as he looked the last of the water swashed out, and stooping down, he caught a glimpse of daylight. On hands and knees he crept through the opening and emerged to the free sweep of the hills, soft and dripping and peaceful against the background of the retreating storm.

For minutes he lay there, a sodden, shaken figure, looking out across that far-flung view with hollow eyes from which the stare of horror slowly faded. Then he got to his knees, his feet, and drew a great, shuddering breath. His eyes dropped to the slope immediately before him, strewn with scores of drowned spiders.

“Well,” he said shakily, “it looks as though there are enough here for all the museums in the world. I’ll make a good haul while I’m about it.”

With swollen, bruised hands, he began gathering up the draggled bodies and piling them beside a rock.

THE HAT OF EIGHT REFLECTIONS

BY JAMES MAHONEY

From _Century_

ONE REFLECTION

With his rusty, black felt hat in his hand and oblivious of passers-by, Ventrillon stooped before the shop window until the reflection of his finely chiselled young face came into place, with the forehead of the image nicely adjusted into the crown of the hat behind the clear plate glass. It was a magnificent hat, an elegant hat, a formidable hat, a hat which was all there was of chic, a genuine, glistening stove-pipe hat, a _véritable chapeau à huit reflets_--an authentic hat of eight reflections--and the Ventrillon in the glass was wearing it. The effect was amazing.

“But why should it surprise me,” said Ventrillon, “when such is my present character? _C’est idiot!_”

For not only was this shabby young man contorting himself before the shop window the youngest prize winner of the spring Salon, but that afternoon he was going into society; for the first time, it is true, and into a very curious stratum of it, but society even so. Nevertheless, though he had spent the last of the three hundred francs of his prize money on an elegantly tailored costume of morning coat and striped trousers, he had expected to wear the rusty, broad-brimmed black felt he held in his hand. But as he marvelled at the effect of his reflection in the window, the hat before him became essential. It was the final touch, and it is the final touch which is vital.

And yet, once he appeared on the boulevards in such a hat, he would never dare to face his comrades at the Closerie des Lilas again.

They were a gay company of vagabonds: Sabrin, who worshipped Ventrillon like a mild-eyed dog; Clo-clo, whose golden ringlets outside her head would have compensated fully for the complete emptiness inside it even if there had not been her childlike adoration of Sabrin; Pinettre from Marseilles, whose passionate tenor he had heard so often seizing upon the stars above the terrace of the café, r-r-rolling the r’s of “Tor-rn a Sor-r-rento!” cow-eyed scarlet-mouthed Ginette, who always wept at Italian music; poor little Tric-trac, the poet, who invariably, when drunk, recited “Le moulin de mon pays,” the only poem he had ever managed to have published; Olga, the husky Russian girl, who invariably, when drunk, bussed Tric-trac resoundingly with what she called “little soul kisses”; Noiraud, the wag; Hélène, the inviolate; LePaulle, whose capital P was an affectation; Margoton, who had no taste--all of them penniless and none of them disturbed by that fact. For if one of them had the price of the beer, all drank. They had made the bomb together, ah, they had made the bomb! One would not soon forget that night when they had invaded the Cabaret of the Two Armadillos and had driven the regular clients into the streets by thundering with full lungs:

“Elle ne fait que des trucs comme ça--
Elle m’aime _pas_! Elle _m’aime_ PAS!”

pounding the tables with their beer mugs to the terrific rhythm of their music; nor yet those mad evenings when they raced arm-in-arm down the broad pavements of the Boulevard St.-Michel, startling the bourgeois and screaming with laughter.

He could conceal that damning morning coat beneath his well worn _imperméable_, but how could one conceal a hat of eight reflections and wear it? They would think that he had become a snob, they would say that his prize had mounted to his head, they would ridicule him, they would begin to misconstrue his every statement, they would take offence; for them the hat would amount to betrayal, and he knew that he would not be able to bear it.

But Ventrillon at that moment visualized himself entering the carved portals of a great house in the Avenue Victor Hugo, the whole effect of his newly bought elegance destroyed by the rusty black felt. It was indeed the final touch which was vital. “I am beginning to see,” said Ventrillon, “that though they are undeniably amusing, they are all a little vulgar. It appears that my taste is improving in advance.” But having spent the last franc of his prize money, in the whole wide world he possessed not a single perforated sou.

He crossed the Seine to his garret in the Rue Jacob, stripped off the clothes he wore, and carefully arrayed himself in the full splendour of his new garments. From the slim patent-leather shoes to the exquisitely tied cravat he was perfect. Then he went bareheaded into the streets.

When he reached the shop he hesitated not, but entered with an air of command.

“My hat has just blown off into the Seine,” he explained to the first clerk in sight. “Show me the best silk hat you have in the shop; and quickly, or I shall be late for my appointment.”

The clerk, after inquiring the head size of this elegant, bareheaded youth, produced a counterpart of the hat in the window.

Ventrillon put the hat on his head and adjusted it before a mirror.

“The fit is perfect,” he said, “though I had hoped for a better quality. But--I have no time to waste. You will place it on my account.” He turned to walk out of the shop.

The clerk came hurriedly, but politely, from behind the counter, and modestly touched Ventrillon’s elbow.

“Then monsieur has an account here?” he inquired.

“Of course,” said Ventrillon, impatiently, and with his fingertips dusted the sleeve the clerk had touched. “And have I not told you that I have an important appointment?”

The clerk adroitly interposed himself between Ventrillon and the door.

“But I do not know the name of monsieur,” he persisted, always polite.

“You do not know who I am!” cried Ventrillon, as if the statement were proof positive of an utter imbecility he had already suspected.

“I am afraid not, sir,” faltered the clerk.

Then Ventrillon’s voice, a huge baritone absolutely astounding from a throat so young, roared out to its full, thundering in the clerk’s ears and frightening him half out of his wits:

“_I am Odillon Ventrillon_, name of God!” shouted Ventrillon.

The clerk, who for some reason he has never fully understood was under the impression that this was the family name of the Prince of Monaco or perhaps the King of Spain, and murmured, “Oh, I demand a thousand pardons, sir,” has never been able to explain this affair to the complete satisfaction of the proprietor.

For, before the clerk could recover, Ventrillon had left the shop and, having dashed impudently past the ticket puncher, was well on his way in the Métro, wearing the hat of eight reflections. In the dark tunnel he could see his image facing him in the windows of the lighted car.

“Undoubtedly,” reflected Ventrillon, adjusting his lapels, “it is the final touch which is vital.”

ANOTHER REFLECTION

When a handsome young man commits a murder, forges a check, or sets his heart upon a hat of eight reflections, one may well say to oneself, “It is a woman.” And a woman it was; but it was Mme. Sutrin.

A work of art, upon obtaining a public success, however slight, becomes forthwith an irresistible magnet to its maker. Though every day had seen Ventrillon setting out to walk in the opposite direction, every day had found him at last somewhere in the neighbourhood of his prize-winning canvas in the Grand Palais.

It was there that he was discovered by Eugène Savillhac, an acquaintance who since his success had become his friend. In that portion of society smarter than good Savillhac was one of those hangers-on who boost their own stock by boosting the stock of others. It appeared, incredibly, that every one of the hundreds he knew was the most extraordinary person in Paris.

“Ah, there you are, _mon vieux_!” he cried. “What luck! The youngest prize winner of the spring Salon and the most extraordinary woman in Paris are under the same roof. It is the first duty of a celebrity to be known by Madame Sutrin.”

He indicated a large woman in black silk whose plain skirt, neither full enough to be picturesque nor scant enough to be fashionable, swayed like a peasant’s from side to side as she waddled briskly through the crowd. Before her marriage to Timoléon Sutrin, the rich sugar industrial, she had been the beautiful Simone d’Estray of the Opéra Comique; but her beauty had been of that drastic sort which perfectly represents the triumph of feminine mind over matter, and after her marriage, with her future secure, she had comfortably allowed herself to become what nature had always intended her to be--very fat and very ugly. But she had the faculty of retaining all her old friends and quickly making new ones, and her flamboyant _hôtel_ in the Avenue Victor Hugo was continually the scene of brilliant though somewhat dubious gatherings of boulevard celebrities, leavened with a scattering of those persons of real distinction who find delight in such society.

“Come, and I shall present you,” said Savillhac, and darted across the space, Ventrillon unenthusiastically trailing.

Smiling benevolently, Mme. Sutrin turned to face them. Her tight black bodice was pointed like a basque, and a large plastron of jet beads was applied down its generous front from the high collar about her neck to where her skirt was gathered in at her expansive waist. The unmistakable shadow of a coming event decorated her upper lip.

“Aha,” boomed Mme. Sutrin in the mighty bass which once had been a magic contralto, “and to what lady of the Opéra Comique do you want me to introduce you now?”

“Ah, madame,” said Savillhac, “you deceive yourself. I have brought a young man to introduce to you. The most extraordinary young man in Paris, in fact. My friend Ventrillon, the youngest prize winner of the spring Salon.” With a fine gesture he produced Ventrillon from invisibility.

Mme. Sutrin gasped as if struck in the face.

“_Bon dieu!_” she exploded at last, “Adonis!”

“Enchanted, madame,” murmured Ventrillon. “I am honoured----”

“Don’t waste a look like that on an old woman!” boomed Mme. Sutrin. “Young man, this world is badly arranged. Either I should have been born twenty years later, or you twenty years earlier. You should have known me in my youth. Both of us would have profited.

“I know nothing about painting,” she rumbled on, “and I do not like yours; but I like you, though your clothes are abominable. Come to my house Wednesday afternoon. It will be a dancing. Do you fox trot? But it does not matter. Smile at everybody the way you are smiling at me, and grow a moustache as soon as you can.” She turned to Savillhac. “If Gabrielle sees him, his fortune is made. You know how she goes in for the young ones. But those clothes will never do. I’ll wager he hasn’t a sou. But make him sell his bed and buy something that wouldn’t shame a cab driver.” Then abruptly she shook hands with both the young men and, swinging her skirts, waddled her way.

“A droll of a type,” commented Ventrillon.

“_Sacré nom de dieu!_” breathed Savillhac, staring at him aghast.

“Why--why--what is the matter?” stammered Ventrillon.

“You are invited to Madame Sutrin’s on Wednesday afternoon, and you say, ‘What is the matter?’ It is _you_ who are the droll of a type to ask it.”

“But of course I shall not go.”

“Then you will be an imbecile. It is the chance of your life. All Paris will be there. Does that mean nothing to you--_tout Paris_?”

_Tout Paris!_ A definite social unit, it is a social unit without definition. Many belong, but more do not. If one goes where _tout Paris_ goes, does what _tout Paris_ does, says what _tout Paris_ says, knows the people _tout Paris_ knows, does not know the people _tout Paris_ does not know, then one is of _tout Paris_. But if one is not of _tout Paris_, one can do none of these things. One does not know how. _Tout Paris_ is success, it is failure, it is the heights, it is the depths, and it is always seeking a new sensation. Without laws, it is of fashion the law, and is of the greatest importance; for if the newspapers say, “_tout Paris_ was there,” that settles the matter. But, above all, _tout Paris_ can applaud, and the applause of _tout Paris_ can more quickly than anything else fill the empty pockets. The pockets of Ventrillon were usually abysmally empty, as he again remembered.

“And do you not know who is this Gabrielle of whom she spoke?” Savillhac continued. “The great Gabrielle Belletaille herself, _nom de dieu_! The most extraordinary woman in Paris. And you heard what Madame Sutrin said? If the Belletaille becomes interested in you, she will soon introduce you to everybody of any importance. Think of the marvellous portraits you can paint, and the prices you can charge! Perhaps she may even allow you to paint _her_ portrait! Who knows? Then you will be in a position to refuse kings and queens.”

Gabrielle Belletaille, the prima donna of the Opéra Comique, was, as everybody knew, the idol of _tout Paris_. There was nobody like her. Where she led, _tout Paris_ followed. Where _tout Paris_ leads, all the world follows. Ventrillon stood for a moment silent. His clear, deep eyes held a wonder such as one sees in the eyes of those who pause upon the thresholds of strange palaces.

“But,” he said at last, “I shall not know what to say to her, even if I see her.”

“Say anything but the name of Fanny Max,” said well-posted Savillhac. “She is beginning to attract attention, and you can understand what that means to the Belletaille.”

“But----” said Ventrillon again. Ruefully he looked down at his own baggy corduroys, his cracking shoes, his threadbare coat, and the rusty, black felt hat he held in his hand. Then he considered the slimly clad, gray-striped legs of the impeccable Savillhac, the glistening footgear, the smart morning coat with a gardenia in its lapel, the shining top hat. Savillhac was fashion itself, the embodiment in one person of _tout Paris_. Ventrillon reflected.

“My prize has brought me three hundred francs,” he said. “Take me to your tailor. But I refuse to wear one of those hats. I should be assaulted in the Boulevard du Montparnasse.”

For it was not until he had seen his image in the plate glass of the shop window that his head was completely turned.

THIRD REFLECTION

In the Métro station of the Étoile, Ventrillon dusted his patent-leather shoes with his pocket handkerchief, shot his cuffs, tilted the hat of eight reflections to its most killing angle, and then sallied forth into the Avenue Victor-Hugo. Unfortunately, custom would not permit his wearing the hat in the salon of Mme. Sutrin. As he reluctantly surrendered it at the entrance his ears were assailed by an incredible noise, which increased in discordant violence as he neared the door of the salon.

The large room was crowded. The shining faces of a group of perspiring American blacks grinned with yellow teeth and rolled their white eyeballs above a variety of strange instruments that the Negroes were tormenting with wild, angular abandon of elbows and knees. To the barbarous compulsion of the bizarre rhythm a number of couples were moving about the floor, poising and posturing with the curious exotic dignity of the Parisian fox trot. In fashionable dishevelment smiling-eyed ladies sat about on chairs and ottomans, drinking tea; and miraculously tailored gentlemen of figures ranging from the concave to the convex stood balancing teacups in saucers.

The grace of his embarrassment fulfilling somehow the perfection of his garments, Ventrillon made an exquisite figure against the futurist splendour of Mme. Sutrin’s flamingo and purple portières. She saw him standing overwhelmed in the doorway, uttered a hoarse little shriek of delight and, in her tight gown of magenta velvet rushed with a sort of oscillating precipitation to take his hands. Names of the mighty poured into his ears as she introduced him at random to everybody within reach. But he was not long abashed. He was never long abashed. And, besides, to any man, as a wise American has said, the consciousness that he is well dressed is a consolation greater even than the consolations of religion.

Mme. Sutrin left him to the mercies of a group watching the dancing from the end of the room opposite the jazz band.

“This noise,” began Ventrillon, promptly, to a negligible lady beside him, “is it music?”

“Ah, no, monsieur,” confessed the lady; “but it is the fashion.”

“Then I must like it,” said Ventrillon.

“One has not met you before, I believe, monsieur?” said the lady.

“I have not been a success before,” said Ventrillon.

The lady laughed.

“Then you do not know anybody. I shall have to inform you. The little woman with the red hair near the door is Madame Ribot, the wife of the journalist. She has a wicked tongue; it is well to cultivate her. Her husband controls public opinion, and she controls him. The man behind her is the Minister of Public Services----”

A passing couple jostled the minister’s arm and, awkwardly, attempting to save it, he dropped his teacup. Crimson even to the barren scalp of his head, he stooped to mop with his handkerchief at the spilled tea in the lap of Mme. Ribot. The little red-haired woman smiled, clenched her teeth, and bided her time.

“Madame,” said Ventrillon, “I sit at your feet and learn. I had never before known that a Minister of Public Services could drop a teacup.”

The lady laughed again.

“Monsieur,” she said, “you are delicious. Look! The tall blonde who enters is the Belletaille----”

With a resounding metallic crash, the jazz band happened at that moment to stop short. Short of breath, the dancing couples separated. In the gap of the portières stood a lean, hawk-nosed woman in black, with a dead-white face of astonishing and fascinating ugliness. One shoulder was held higher than the other, one chalky hand rested with fingers wide-spread upon her uncorseted hip, and the other caressed at her waist the enormous bunch of scarlet amaryllis without which she was never seen. Everybody turned to look. The Belletaille, as usual, had achieved an entrance.

“‘Allo evreebodee!” she cried in English, showing all her fine white teeth. “Ah, there you are, my Marianne! Kiss me! And, oh, my dear Madame Sutrin, how pleased I am to come! _C’est épatant!_ A jazz band! _Bon dieu_, but it is ravishing! Aha! Théodule--_ça gaz?_” She had called the Minister of Public Services Théodule and asked him how he was in slang. “That,” thought Ventrillon, “is success.”

Taking for granted that everybody was overwhelmed with delight at seeing her, on she came, with a bow here and a handshake there, until in the centre of the room she halted abruptly.

“Théodule,” she cried, “I forgot to tell Madame Hortense to send up that gown this evening. Telephone her for me. And hasten, or the shop will be closed.” The Minister of Public Services obeyed and left the room.

Then she turned and on she came again. With the sinuous step of the walk she had learned at the Conservatoire, on and on, smiling, smiling, her eyelids painted sky blue, her alizarin lips smiling apart like something unreal, jingle by jingle, faintly clicking her high heels on the parquetry, on and on, smiling always, came the great Gabrielle Belletaille of the Opéra Comique.

Ventrillon had never before in his life made an effort to please, and now his mind refused to work. In fact, it was scattered into tiny little bits all over the salon of Mme. Sutrin. “What a marvellous subject to paint!” was the only idea his devastated brain could hold. He could do naught but stare at the extraordinary creature and breathe with difficulty. She was almost upon him.

Now she was speaking to him in that golden voice, a single intonation of which could break a thousand hearts, and was extending one of those chalk-white hands, a single gesture of which could from a thousand bodies draw a thousand souls.

“And this,” she was saying, “must be the Adonis of whom Madame Sutrin spoke.”

Ventrillon grasped his impudence and yearned for his breath and his voice; but everything he could conceive was either too long or too obvious, and with every fraction of a second it was swiftly becoming too late. One of those terrible tea-silences had fallen when nobody can think of anything more to say.

“Ah, Madame Venus,” he heard his voice stammer at last, resounding in his ears above the tinkle of teaspoons, as if he had been shouting, “n-n-not Adonis; for that f-foolish Adonis ran away!”