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.