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another thing to play with the brain-pan of a scientist, honored and revered,
a man almost a friend.
Mainwaring turned absolutely livid. His beard moved. You know how a cat's fur
erects? That way; his beard curled and writhed with the frightful feeling that
was upon him. Sweat started on his brow. He reached out and laid the skull on
the smoking stand, his fingers shaking. Then he came to his feet.
"I think," he said, taking a deep breath and shaking his head, "I think--it's
too much for me to stomach. I--I don't like these ghastly stories."
He left us abruptly, striding out of the smoking room. Larsen looked after
him,then turned his dark eyes upon me. I had set the other skull with the
first.
"Gave him quite a turn, didn't it?" said Larsen. His voice was cold, brittle.
"Confound you!" I answered, nettled. "It gave me a turn. It'd give anybody a
turn!"
"Take a cigar," said Larsen, extending one. "There's a bit more to the
story."
I took the weed, but made a gesture of protest.
"Never mind the rest of the story," I said. "You're too cursed fantastic as a
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storyteller, Larsen. I don't fancy this Grand Guignol stuff myself in the
least!"
Larsen smiled. "I must confess, my dear fellow, that I told a beastly lie. If
you'd examine those bowls, you'd see they are about a hundred years old--the
patina shows it. I bought 'em at the lamasery. Bonner and Stickley were
decently buried."
At this, you may judge how I stared at him!
"Well," I said, angered at the way he had played on my nerves, "all I have to
say is that you told a lie in rotten bad taste! Those two men were friends of
yours, weren't they? Then--"
"That," he interposed cryptically, "was why I told the lie."
I did not understand in the least. There was a restrained tension in his
manner that puzzled me. His fingers were nervous on his cigar.
At this instant we heard a sharp sound punctuating the steady throb of the
ship's engines--a sharp, bursting sound about which could be no mistake. It
was a shot.
"Ah!" Larsen came to his feet and took the two brown skull-bowls in his hand.
"Ah! There is the rest of the story, old man, as I promised."
"What the devil d'you mean?" I exclaimed.
"That was our friend Mainwaring--shothimself . I thought he'd do it. That's
why I told the lie in question. You see, Mainwaring was not his real name. His
real name was--Creighton."
And Larsen departed, leaving me to enjoy my cigar as best I could.
THE SINGER IN THE MIST
At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells,
And I have trod strange highroads all my days,
Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways.
I grope for stems of broken asphodels;
High on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells,
I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze;
And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze
To talk with demons in the granite hells.
Seas crash upon dragon-guarded shores,
Bursting in crimson moons of burning spray,
And iron castles open to me their doors,
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And serpent-women lure with harp and lay.
The misty waves shake now to phantom oars--
Seek not for me; I sail to meet the day.
--Robert E. Howard
EXOTIQUE
Thy mouth is like a crimson orchid-flow'r,
Whence perfume and whence poison rise unseen
To moons aswim in iris or in green,
Or mix with morning in an Eastern bow'r.
Thou shouldst have known, in amaranthine isles,
The sunsets hued like fire of frankincense,
Or the long noons enfraught with redolence,
The mingled spicery of purple miles.
Thy breasts, where blood and molten marble flow,
Thy warm white limbs, thy loins of tropic snow--
These, these, by which desire is grown divine,
Were made for dreams in mystic palaces,
For love, and sleep, and slow voluptuousness,
And summer seas afoam like foaming wine.
--Clark Ashton Smith
* * * *
* * * *
UNDER THE FLAME TREES
byH. de Vere Stacpoole
I was sitting in front of Thibaud's Café one evening when I saw Lewishon,
whom I had not met for years.
Thibaud's Café, I must tell you first, is situated onCoconut Square,Noumea
.Noumea has a bad name, but it is not at all a bad place if you are not a
convict. Neither is New Caledonia, take it all together, and that evening,
sitting and smoking and listening to the band and watching the crowd, and the
dusk taking the flame trees, it seemed to me for a moment that Tragedy had
withdrawn, that there was no such place as the Isle Nou out there in the
harbor and that the musicians making the echoes ring to theSambre-et-Meuse
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were primarily musicians, not convicts.
Then I saw Lewishon crossing the square by the Liberty Statue and attracted
his attention. He came and sat by me, and we smoked and talked while I tried
to realize that it was fifteen years since I had seen him last and that he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]