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THE DISTURBING CHARM
BY BERTA RUCK
Author of "In Another Girl's Shoes," "The Three of Hearts," "The Years
for Rachel," etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
EDWARD C. CASWELL
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
TO
THE EVER GAY
AND GALLANT MEMORY
OF
WARREN FENN-SMITH
SECOND LIEUTENANT ROYAL FLYING CORPS
SHOT DOWN WITH HIS OBSERVER IN ACTION
JANUARY 18, 1918, AGED 18
"They carry back bright to the Coiner the mintage of man,
The lads who will die in their glory and never be old"
Housman
[Illustration: _Here he found himself kneeling on the carpet at Olwen's
feet._]
CONTENTS
PART I
I THE COMING OF THE CHARM
II THE ACCEPTING OF THE CHARM
III THE LAUNCHING OF THE CHARM
IV THE CHARM BEGINS TO WORK
V FURTHER PLANS FOR THE CHARM
VI THE CLUTCHING OF THE CHARM
VII THE SPREADING OF THE CHARM
VIII THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT BY THE CHARM
IX UNFORESEEN EFFECT OF THE CHARM
X DIVAGATIONS OF THE CHARM
XI THE FEASTING OF THE CHARM
XII MOONLIGHT AND THE CHARM
XIII WILD-FIRE AND THE CHARM
XIV CLOUDS UPON THE CHARM
XV THE LOSING OF THE CHARM
XVI THE COUNTER-CHARM
XVII DROP-SCENE
PART II
I THE CHARM NEGLECTED
II THE LAST ALLIES
III RECOVERY OF THE CHARM
IV THE VOICE OF THE CHARMER
V THE BEST GIRL-FRIEND
VI THE CHARM REMEMBERED
VII PETROL AND THE CHARM
VIII RATIONS AND THE CHARM
IX CHAMPAGNE AND THE CHARM
X HER BRIDAL NIGHT
XI HIS BRIDAL NIGHT
XII SHRAPNEL AND THE CHARM
XIII VIGIL
XIV HOME AND THE CHARM
XV THE CHARM ACKNOWLEDGED
POSTSCRIPT. THE CHARM CONFESSED
ILLUSTRATIONS
Here he found himself kneeling on the carpet at Olwen's feet
"It all came again. Oh, Lord! I thought I was crashing--"
She stood there as if frozen and said "Away from here!" and in her heart
exclaimed, "Away from him!"
And there was nothing to tell them what it was, the Sachet of the
Disturbing Charm
PART I
CHAPTER I
THE COMING OF THE CHARM
"Yet I am bewitched with the rogue's company; if the rascal had
not given me medicines to make me love him, I'll be hanged; it
could not be else; I have drunk medicines."
Shakespeare.
The letter said:
"_... And this discovery, sent herewith, will mark an Epoch in
the affairs of the world!_
"_Half the trouble in that world arises from the fact that
human beings are continually falling in Love_ ... with the
wrong people. _Sir, have you ever wondered why this should
be?_"
The old Professor of Botany stood looking at this mysterious typewritten
letter, addressed to him, with the rest of his large mail, at the hotel
in Western France where he was staying in the fourth autumn of the War
with his young niece and secretary. He smiled as he came to the last
words. "Had he ever wondered!" How many nights of his youth had been
wasted in stormily "wondering----?" Strangers who write to celebrities
do stumble on intimate matters sometimes.
He read on:
"_Why should one girl set her affections upon the man who of
all others will make her the worst possible husband? All her
friends foresee, and warn her. She herself realizes it vaguely.
But to her own destruction she loves him. What has caused this
catastrophe? Some small and secret Force; one microbe can
achieve a pestilence._"
"Yes, indeed," murmured Professor Howel-Jones, nodding his massive old
white head. He had been on the point of tossing the letter into the
waste-paper basket, but something made him read on.
"_Another young man, why must he desire the one pretty woman
who can never give him happiness? She is 'pure as ice, chaste
as snow' ... dull as ditch-water; he, full of fire and dreams.
He swears he'll teach her to respond to Passion; marries her.
Another tragedy!_"
How like himself again, the Professor mused, going back to the days when
he had worn his Rugby International cap with more pride than he now wore
his foreign degrees. That memory set him staring out of the big
balconied window of his room, over the wide French lagoon, past the
barrier of sandhills with their pointing phare, to where, miles away,
the irregular white line of the Atlantic rollers crashed and spouted on
the reefs. They had been crashing out those thunderous questions to the
sands on his football days, they would be tossing their appeals to the
sky long after his learning and his Nobel Prize were forgotten. Why,
then, should an anonymous correspondent remind him of old unrest?
For all that, he went on reading:
"_Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By
seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of
good or evil, the Love-germ. All through the ages Man has
recognized its existence; the ancients with their philtres and
amulets. Shakespeare embodies it in an herb. We moderns accept
it as an enigma; have you never heard it said of a woman_, 'She
is not actually pretty, but she has the Disturbing Charm,
whatever it is'?"
"The Disturbing Charm!" ... Ah, he knew it! _She_ had possessed it, the
girl he had never married, the girl who had passed him over for his
brother the sea-captain, and who had become the mother of Olwen, his
niece. Olwen would be coming in a few minutes to straighten and sort all
those drifts of paper on the roomy work-table which no hand but hers, in
the whole of the hotel, was allowed to touch. He thought, half-amusedly:
"Better not let that little Olwen get hold of this letter."
The letter ended:
"_Sir, you shall not be worried with technicalities. Believe
only this, that the life study of the writer of this letter has
at last been crowned with success. In the small packet enclosed
there is sealed up the result of years of Research, with
directions for its use. The inventor lacks courage for
experimenting. But you, learned Sir, you, the gifted author of
'The Loves of the Ferns,' will not shrink from responsibility
in the cause of Science._
"_Should you wish to procure more of the invention, there is
enclosed the address of a box at a newspaper office where you
may apply._
"_With all good wishes from_
"_Your obedient servant_,
"_The Inventor._"
A deep genial laugh broke from the old man's wide chest.
He threw the letter and its enclosure on to the table, on the top of his
notes for the chapter on "Edible Fungi."
"Mad--sentimental mad!" he commented. "Most lunatics think themselves
inventors, that's why most inventors are considered lunatics." He drew
up a chair and began making hay of the papers before him, in search of
the other file of notes.
The large room which the Professor had had cleared of the bed and most
of the other furniture was full of air and sunshine and of that polished
cleanliness which few English rooms achieve. White walls and parquet
floor shone like mirrors, mirrors like diamonds; the glass of the open
windows was clear as the morning air that lay between the hotel and the
pine-forest on the one side, the lagoon on the other. The resinous sigh
of the pines mingled with the warm, lung-lifting breath of the sea. It
was a glorious morning--too glorious for work indoors....
Professor Howel-Jones looked hard at his notes, but for once he scarcely
saw them. He knew that the letter he had just read was the work of a
sentimental lunatic, but for all that it had set a string vibrating. As
the old man sat there, his brown eyes abstracted under the thatch of
hair as white as seeding clematis, he looked like some clean-shaven
modern Druid seeing visions. He did, at that moment, see a vision.
* * * * *
He saw an endless procession of those people who have loved or married
(or both) the wrong person.
He saw the lads who have chosen out of their class; barmaids, "bits of
fluff."
He saw the girls who have married out of their generation.
He saw the flirts, who wear an attachment as they wear a hat, tied for
life to the affection that is true as steel. (Dreadful for both of
them!)
Also the young men who treat Love as a cross between a meal and a
music-hall joke, plighted to the shy idealists.
He saw the Bohemian married to the curate.
Likewise the attractive young rake, fettered to the frump.
He saw the women born for motherhood, left lonely spinsters for want of
charm to attract.
He saw the mothers who sighed for freedom, resenting the nursery.
He saw the Anything, wedded to the Anything _But_.
Yes; he saw for that moment nothing but the wholesale gigantic Blunder
of the mis-mating of the world.
* * * * *
No doubt it was all crystallized for him in one tender image; Olwen's
dead mother, the girl he should have married. He sighed and smiled.
"Pity there's no putting things right, as that lunatic suggests," he
thought. "There would be an invention worth boasting about! Wireless
wouldn't be in it, or X-rays. Pity it isn't all true...."
A tap at the door interrupted his musings. The softest of girl's voices
asked, "Are you ready for me, Uncle?"
"Yes!" he called out, jerking himself back into the world of realities.
"Come in, Olwen."
Olwen Howel-Jones came in.
A small, but daintily made girl of nineteen. Just a handful of softness
in a skimpy one-piece frock. A pale, three-cornered morsel of a face set
off by sleek hair as black as her little French boots. Large eyes that
seemed sometimes brown, sometimes grey; a mouth tremulous, but vivid as
a red carnation--such was Olwen. She brought a ripple of Youth into that
bare temple of Science that was her uncle's study. Something else she
brought--a breath of tension, of impatience. A man would have passed it
over; not so a woman. Already one woman in the hotel had said to
herself, "I wonder who it is that child's so desperately in love with?"
Had she been in the room at the moment, that woman might have seen the
answer to her question flame suddenly into the young girl's face as she
stepped up to the table by the window. Under the balcony there was a
sound of footsteps. Olwen pushed aside a great jar full of arbutus that
stood at the further edge of the table.
"That's in your light, Uncle," she said.
The Professor's back was to her as the figures passed quickly out from
below the balcony. He caught a glimpse of the two wounded British
officers swinging off towards the _plage_. He caught the gleam of
scarlet on khaki; heard a snatch of the rather husky boyish laughter of
one of them; a scrap talk of the other. In a resonant voice with that
particularly dominant form of accent, Scots with a dash of Canadian,
there floated up through the clear morning air this somewhat arrested
announcement:
"I'm the finest judge of women in Europe."
This the Professor caught, vaguely. What he did not catch was the
sudden, still alertness into which there seemed to spring the whole body
of the girl behind him. She was "aware" from head to foot; her white
throat seemed to stretch, her whole being to strain; listening. The
footsteps passed, the husky charming laugh of the one, the loud
confident voice of the other.... Life relaxed again in Olwen;
mechanically her hands began sorting papers. No; the Professor had not
noticed, her male relatives being avowedly the worst observers of a
girl's psychology ... even had he seen, he probably would not have
guessed which of the two young men who had gone by was responsible for
that sudden transitory illumination of his niece's face; whether it was
the black-eyed Staff Captain who had lost an arm, or the blonde R.F.C.
pilot who had been shot down last April.... Well, they'd both gone now;
nothing more of them to be seen until the _dejeuner_....
Olwen dragged her eyes back to the disorder of the writing-table; she
tossed up her head with a rather forced sprightliness, and laughed.
"_What_ a mess! Worse than ever, and I'd put everything so beautifully
tidy last night! You _are_ dreadful!"
"Never mind, Olwen _fach_," he said, with a hand on her shoulder. "There
won't be much work done this morning. I'm going into the woods. Just
hand me my specimen-case ... ah, here. And file the June numbers of that
Danish magazine--where on earth did I put 'em?--ah, there. Then there
are a couple of letters to copy into the book, and that's all. You can
come on and find me; I shall be where we went yesterday with Mrs.
Cartwright and that young What's-his-name, the flying officer."
He set aside the two letters to be copied, planting upon them, as a
paper weight, one of the enormous pine-cones that he had picked up in
the forest. Then he slung on his specimen-case, took up his indented
grey hat, smiled and nodded to the girlish figure at the table, and went
out.
Olwen, left alone, stretched her arms over her head. "_Oh!_" she sighed,
desperately. She moved the jar of arbutus into place again; picked out a
spray, dark-leafed, berried with scarlet and orange, tried it against
the dull serge of her frock. Then she tilted her chair back so that she
could just see herself in one of the gilt-framed mirrors. It showed her
a forlorn little face.
"He'd never _look_ at me, I know," she told herself.
She thrust the spray of arbutus back into water and turned to her work
listlessly enough.
* * * * *
Half an hour later the listlessness had finished.
A miracle had begun to work!
For the Professor's niece and secretary was pouring breathlessly over a
letter that she had found on the table under a file of notes for J.
Howel-Jones's great work on Agarics.
With shining credulous eyes she turned from that typewritten letter to
the little packet that had been enclosed in it. Then she turned to the
letter again. She read:
"_Half the trouble in the world arises from the fact that
human beings are continually falling in love_ ... with the
wrong people."
She read the astonishing suggestion:
"_Each of us knows a list of these stories. How avert them? By
seeking out and planting only in the right soil the root of
good or evil, the Love-germ._"
She read further, this profoundly hopeful comment:
"_Have you never heard it said of a woman_, 'She is not pretty,
but she has the disturbing charm, whatever it is'?"
Finally she read this, the sentence that set her trembling:
"_In the small packet enclosed there is sealed up the result of
years of Research, with directions for its use._"
It lay in her hand, the packet which she had taken up as gingerly as if
it had been turpinite, or something else capable of blowing her out
through the window and past the long wooden pier, across the sparkling
_Baissin_, over the sandhills with their lighthouse and into the Bay of
Biscay where those rollers foamed and roared....
The old Scientist had said "Madness!" This girl longed to accept every
word of it; partly, perhaps, because every loving woman secretly
believes there must be some Power of this kind, could she but find
it--the power to compel the love she covets. Here it was.
Hastily she broke the wrapping; it disclosed an inner packet and a
paper. In small characters there was written on the paper:
DIRECTIONS FOR USE.
"This charm must be worn, _hidden_, about the person of him or
her who wishes to test its efficacy.
"It may be hidden about the dress or person of someone who does
not know of its properties; its power will work, nevertheless.
"A small portion of the charm will suffice.
"Constant use does not wear away its power."
Olwen, bending closely over the inner packet, sniffed at the pleasant
musky scent that rose from it.
"_Oh!..._" she breathed.... Were those steps outside the passage?... She
sprang up.... Swiftly, almost guiltily, she dragged down the low collar
of her frock; she thrust the packet and paper into her bosom. They
crackled against the soft mauve ribbons of her underbodice.
"Supposing I'd _got_ it!" she thought, and her whole heart lifted. She
pressed her hands to her breast.
Supposing that under her own small and fevered hands (dimpled, faintly
stained from the carbon of her typewriter) she held it, that recipe for
setting right the Blunder of the world! Ah, if she'd got hold of it
really, the Love-germ, the microbe of mischief and delight!
The Disturbing Charm itself!
_Then_ what would come of it?