The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (22 page)

The nightingales might not care overmuch what became of the rose once the nightingale had finished her work of art, but they would probably want the girl to receive and cherish it even though she sent the student packing. In all likelihood, the nightingales would end the tale with the observation that the girl pinned the rose to her own breast, and that, until it withered, her head was filled with an inaudible song, whose wonder and beauty could never be recalled to her mind by any of the jewels she was later to wear in its stead.

Were rose-trees actually capable of the powers of speech and decision that the fable credits to them, they would undoubtedly tell the tale differently again. No true rose-tree would suck the life out of a nightingale for no better reason than to provide a love-token for a human being. From the viewpoint of the tree, the only possible motive for its action would be frankly vampiric.

The rose-tree version of the fable would make the nightingale a hapless victim of a cunning and convoluted snare, and she would not be the only victim of the scheme. The rose-trees would begin the story at any earlier point, crediting their own kind with the suggestive whisper that first inspired the girl to state her fee. The student’s lament, and the nightingale’s response, would be intermediate stages in the plot, which would come to its climax when the girl accepted her bribe. Her cruelty in spurning her lover would then be mirrored by the triumph of the vampire rose as it grasped her breast with its avid thorns, and drew new life from her heart.

In the rose-tree version, of course, the rose would not begin to wither until the girl had withered and died herself. Even then, it would probably be plucked from her breast by some other romantic fool, incapable of realizing that beauty is essentially a snare, which tempts the unwary to clasp savage thorns to their innermost souls.

Fortunately or unfortunately, nightingales and rose-trees are devoid of intelligence; for them, at least, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral tale. As for humans, they are free to shape and reshape tales to every purpose and meaning they can contrive to imagine.

THE TITAN UNWRECKED

or, Futility Revisited

Having narrowly avoided an iceberg on her third return trip, the
Titan
had fulfilled all the expectations entertained of her. She had, as anticipated, established the promptitude and regularity of a railway train in shuttling back and forth between New York and Southampton, making the distance between Sandy Hook and Daunt’s Rock well within her six-day schedule almost without fail. When she set out westbound from Southampton Water on the evening of Boxing Day in the year 1900 she carried a full complement of passengers, whose expectations of celebrating the dawn of a new century on the night before their disembarkation in New York generated a mood of unparalleled cheerfulness and hopefulness from the moment she slipped anchor.

The
Titan
’s passenger-list was the customary deep cross-section of Anglo-American society, ranging from a duke and several millionaires in the finest staterooms to two thousand hopeful emigrants in steerage, but the significance of the voyage—the last Atlantic crossing of the nineteenth century—had attracted an unusually high proportion of romantics of every stripe, including a large company of Frenchmen who had come from Cherbourg to join the ship, and a considerable number of writers—true literary men as well as newspaper reporters—in search of inspiration.

Certain elements of the
Titan
’s cargo were equally exotic, or so it was rumored. In addition to the usual mundane treasures, her secure hold was said to contain the entire contents of a recently-looted Egyptian tomb, and an exotic biological specimen of mysterious nature and origin had allegedly been brought from the Isle of Wight with only hours to spare before the hour of departure. Few, if any, of the crew had actually see these alleged marvels, although many more had seen a large collection of coffin-like boxes that had been stowed in the main luggage-hold, and a series of crates containing an elaborate array of what appeared to be electrical and acoustic apparatus, which had been carefully packed away in the space reserved for fragile items.

Because the purser had a mischievous sense of humor, almost all of the writers found themselves seated at the same table in the first-class dining-room for the evening meal whose serving began while the ship was rounding Land’s End. The main course was the breasts of pheasants and partridges shot in the run up to Christmas Eve and hung over the festive season; the legs were, as usual, directed to the second-class dining room, while the offal was added to the sausage-meat reserved for steerage rations. The writers eyed one another suspiciously, all of them anxious for their relative positions on the highest literary ground, and each one wondering who among them would be first to describe the
Titan
as a “ship of fools.”

“I, for one,” said Mr. Henley, seemingly by way of breaking the tension, “will not be sorry to see the very end of the so-called
fin de siecle
. I have had my fill of decadence, and I feel sure that the new century will be a vigorous and prosperous era, in which there will be a new alliance between the manly and aesthetic virtues—an alliance that will revolutionize moral and intellectual life, and quicken the march of progress.”

This bold assertion caused some offence to M. Lorrain, whose consumptive cough suggested that New York might be only a stopping-point for him,
en route
to the warm, dry air of Arizona or Nevada. “The century may change,” he said, softly, “but the faltering steps of civilization will not recover their sturdy gait by means of optimism alone. We are products of the nineteenth century ourselves; there is a sense in which the
Titan
is already a ghost-ship, whose parody of life is but painted artifice.”

M. Lorrain’s immediate neighbors, Mr. Huneker and Mr. Chambers, nodded in polite but half-hearted assent, but stronger support was provided by Mr. Vane. “We are indeed ghosts without knowing it,” he said, dolefully, “sailing to judgment while in denial, afraid to confront our sinful souls.”

“Well, I feel perfectly fine,” said a reporter from the
Daily Telegraph
. “And I’m with Henley. The Boer War is won, the siege of the Peking legations is lifted, the Empire is in the best of health....” His colleague from the
Daily Mail
took up the refrain: “Oscar Wilde’s rotting in Paris; Lillie Langtry’s on her way to New York aboard this very vessel, without her new husband in tow; Sherlock Holmes is busy investigating the robberies at Asprey’s of Bond Street and St. James’s Palace, and all’s right with the world.”

“Is Miss Langtry really aboard?” asked Miss Lee, who was the only woman at the sixteen-seater table. She had to turn around to squint myopically through her eyeglasses at the captain’s table, some twenty yards away.

“If it was my fellow Frenchman who robbed Asprey’s,” M. Apollinaire observed, “your famous detective will be frustrated for once. Arsene Lupin will show him a clean pair of heels.”

“Was it Lupin who looted Asprey’s?” said M. Jarry. “If so, then it must have been Fantomas who burgled St. James’s Palace. The principle is the same, of course; they will both be safe in Paris by now, drinking absinthe with dear Oscar.”

“I fear that you are wrong,
messieurs
,” said M. Feval
fils
. “The unprecedented nature of the double crime strongly suggests that neither Lupin nor Fantomas—nor even the two of them in combination—could have planned and executed it. The coup was undoubtedly the work of the brothers Tenebre.”

“The brothers Tenebre have not been heard of since your father’s time!” Apollinaire protested. “And they were English, in any case. They merely masqueraded as Frenchmen.”

“Not at all,” said M. Feval. “They are such masters of disguise that one must penetrate far more layers than that to reach their true identities. At bottom, they are personifications of sin itself, just as Mr. Holmes is a personification of intellect, while d’Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac are personifications of gallantry.”

“We shall not see
their
like again,” murmured Mr. Huneker, not entirely regretfully.

“Don’t you believe it!” said the man from the
Daily Mail
. “There’s a personification of gallantry sitting not twenty yards away, right up there at the captain’s table between Mr. Edison and the foreign fellow.”

“Count Lugard,” supplied his colleague from the
Telegraph
. “A Transylvanian, I believe. Old Hearst seems to have taken a dislike to him—can’t think why.”

“I recognize Tom Edison, of course,” said Mr. Robertson, “but I don’t know your paragon of gallantry. Who are the four young ladies lined up with them, though? They seem to be putting old Rockefeller and his chum Carnegie in a very sweet mood, and poor Lillie in the shade.”

“Three of them are the count’s daughters, I believe,” M. Feval said. “The fourth is traveling with Quatermain—his ward, I presume. Her name is Ayesha.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Chambers. “So the
Mail
’s model of gallantry is Allan Quatermain, the legendary discoverer of King Solomon’s Mines. I thought he was dead.”

“The rumor was exaggerated, apparently,” Mr. Twain put in. “Happens all the time.”

“Didn’t he claim to be something of a coward in his account of the Kukuanaland expedition?” Huneker asked.

“Typical British modesty, my dear sir,” said the
Mail
reporter. “Being American, you wouldn’t understand that. The man’s a shining example to us all—the perfect embodiment of the Imperialist creed.”

“With men like him at its beck and call,” the
Telegraph
man added, “who can possibly doubt that the Empire is destined to rule the world in the twentieth century as it has in the nineteenth?”

“Every last one of us,” murmured M. Lorrain, too softly to be heard by any but his immediate neighbors—who were, of course, in complete sympathy with his judgment.

* * * *

Meanwhile, at the captain’s twelve-seater table, the alleged hero in question was looking around in all apparent satisfaction, while the count from Transylvania was whispering confidentially in his ear.

“My friend,” the count was saying, “I cannot thank you enough for directing my attention away from Carfax Abbey towards the farther horizon. You are absolutely right—to take a creaky sailing ship for a port like Whitby would have been utter madness, when there is a vessel like this to carry my precious cargo. It was well worth the wait—and there are two thousand peasants down below, you say, crammed into their bunks like veal in crates?”

“No trouble at all, my dear chap,” Quatermain replied, magnanimously. “Had it not been for your suggestion of the ingenious trick of carrying the soil of our homeland with us, carefully secreted in the hold, Brother Ange and I might have been anchored to the Great Hungarian Plain indefinitely. You and I have given one another the precious gift of liberty, whose torch-bearing statue and glorious motto we shall salute side by side as we sail into New York while the century fades into oblivion.”

“What motto is that?” asked the count, curiously.

“Do as thou wilt,” Quatermain replied. “It is the American Dream.”

“Your charming ward assures me that you’re an excellent storyteller, Mr. Quatermain,” Captain John Rowland broke in, as he refilled his whisky-glass. “Not just the tale of how you discovered Solomon’s mines, she says, but any number of other ripping yarns. I hope you’ll entertain us with a few of them during the crossing.” “Ayesha flatters me, as always,” Quatermain told him. “I’m afraid that my accounts of elephant-hunting and the many lost races of Africa’s dark heart have grown a little stale by now. They are unable to compete, in the nascent modern era, with Dr. Watson’s accounts of the amazing ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes—not to mention those delightful ghost stories Mr. James tells. Ah, if only they were with us, we should certainly be obliged to rescue them from the oblivion of the writers’ table! Perhaps we should invite Mr. Twain to join us one evening—he’s said to be a dab hand with a tall tale, I believe.”

“If we ask Mr. Chambers nicely,” Mrs. Hugo de Bathe—the former Lillie Langtry—put in, “he might revert to his old self and favor us with another account of
The King in Yellow
.”

“We don’t allow fellows like that on
this
table, Miss Langtry,” Andrew Carnegie said.