Robert W. Chambers

Police!!!

Warsaw 2022

Contents

Foreword

Preface

The Third Eye

The Immortal

1

2

The Ladies of the Lake

1

2

3

One Over

1

2

3

4

Un Peu D’amour

The Eggs of the Silver Moon

Foreword

Give me no gold nor palaces

Nor quarts of gems in chalices

Nor mention me in Who is Who

I’d rather roam abroad with you

Investigating sky and land,

Volcanoes, lakes, and glacial sand

I’d rather climb with all my legs

To find a nest of speckled eggs,

Or watch the spotted spider spin

Or see a serpent shed its skin!

Give me no star-and-garter blue!

I’d rather roam around with you.

Flatten me not with flattery!

Walk with me to the Battery,

And see in glassy tanks the seals,

The sturgeons, flounders, smelt and eels

Disport themselves in ichthyic curves–

And when it gets upon our nerves

Then, while our wabbling taxi honks

I’ll tell you all about the Bronx,

Where captive wild things mope and stare

Through grills of steel that bar each lair

Doomed to imprisonment for life–

And you may go and take your wife.

Come to the Park with me;

I’ll show you crass stupidity

Which sentences the hawk and fox

To inactivity, and locks

The door of freedom on the lynx

Where puma pines and eagle stinks.

Never a slaver’s fetid hold

Has held the misery untold

That crowds the great cats’ kennels where

Their vacant eyes glare blank despair

Half crazed by sloth, half dazed by fear

All day, all night, year after year.

To the swift, clean things that cleave the air

To the swift, clean things that cleave the sea

To the swift, clean things that brave and dare

Forest and peak and prairie free,

A cage to craze and stifle and stun

And a fat man feeding a penny bun

And a she-one giggling, “Ain’t it grand!”

As she drags a dirty-nosed brat by the hand.

To Louise Jocelyn

All the pretty things you say,

All the pretty things you do

In your own delightful way

Make me fall in love with you,

Turning Autumn into May.

Every day is twice as gay

Just because of you, Louise!

Which is going some, you say?

In my dull, pedantic way

I am fashioning my lay

Just because I want to please.

Just because the things you say,

Just because the things you do

In your clever, charming way

Make me fall in love with you.

That is all, my dear, to-day.

R.W.C.

Christmas, 1915.

Preface

On a beautiful day in spring as I was running as hard as I could run pursued by the New York police and a number of excited citizens, my mind, which becomes brilliantly active under physical exhilaration, began to work busily.

I thought about all sorts of things: I thought about hard times and financial depression and about our great President who is in a class all alone with himself and soon to become extinct; I thought about art and why there isn’t any when it’s talked about; I thought of macro-lepidoptera, of metagrammatism, monoliths, manicures, and monsoons.

And all the time I was running as fast as I could run; and the faster I ran the more things I thought about until my terrific pace set my brain whizzing like a wheel.

I felt no remorse at having published these memoirs of my life–which was why the police and populace were pursuing me, maddened to frenzy by the fearless revelation of mighty scientific truths in this little volume you are about to attempt to read. Ubicumque ars ostentatur, veritas abesse videtur!

I thought about it clearly, calmly, concisely as I fled. The maddened shouts of the prejudiced populace did not disturb me. Around and around the Metropolitan Museum of Art I ran; the inmates of that institution came out to watch me and they knew at a glance that I was one of them for they set up a clamor like a bunch of decoy ducks when one of their wild comrades comes whirling by.

“Police! Police!” they shouted; but I went careering on uptown, afraid only that the park squirrels might club together to corner me. There are corners in grain. Why not in–but let that pass.

I took the park wall in front of the great Mr. Carnegie’s cottage at a single bound. He stood on his terrace and shouted, “Police!” He was quite logical.

The Equal Franchise Society was having a May party in the park near the Harlem Mere. They had chosen the Honorable William Jennings Bryan as Queen of the May. He wore low congress-gaiters and white socks; he was walking under a canopy, crowned with paper flowers, his hair curled over his coat collar, the tips of his fingers were suavely joined over his abdomen.

The moment he caught sight of me he shouted, “Police!”

He was right. The cabinet lacked only me.

And I might have consented to tarry–might have allowed myself to be apprehended for political purposes, had not a nobler, holier, more imperative duty urged me northward still.

Though all Bloomingdale shouted, “Stop him!” and all Matteawan yelled, “Police!” I should not have consented to pause. Even the quackitudinous recognition spontaneously offered by the Metropolitan Museum had not been sufficient to decoy me to my fellows.

I knew, of course, that I could find a sanctuary and a welcome in many places–in almost any sectarian edifice, any club, any newspaper office, any of the great publishers’, any school, any museum; I knew that I would be welcomed at Columbia University, at the annex to the Hall of Fame, in the Bishop’s Palace on Morningside Heights–there were many places all ready to receive, understand and honour me.

For a sufficiently crippled intellect, for a still-born brain, for the intellectually aborted, there is always a place on some editorial, sectarian, or educational staff.

Try It!

But I had other ideas as I galloped northward. The voiceless summons of the most jealous of mistresses was making siren music in my ears. That coquettish jade, Science, was calling me by wireless, and I was responding with both legs.

And so, at last, I arrived at the Bronx Park and dashed into the Administration Building where everybody rose and cheered me to the echo.

I was at home at last, unterrified, undismayed, and ready again as always to dedicate my life to the service of Truth and to every caprice and whim of my immortal mistress, Science. But I don’t want to marry her.

Magna est veritas! Sed major et longinquo reverentia.

The Third Eye

Being a few deathless truths concerning several mysteries recently and scientifically unravelled by a modest servant of Science.

Quo quisque stultior, eo magis insolescit.

Although the man’s back was turned toward me, I was uncomfortably conscious that he was watching me. How he could possibly be watching me while I stood directly behind him, I did not ask myself; yet, nevertheless, instinct warned me that I was being inspected; that somehow or other the man was staring at me as steadily as though he and I had been face to face and his faded, sea-green eyes were focussed upon me.

It was an odd sensation which persisted in spite of logic, and of which I could not rid myself. Yet the little waitress did not seem to share it. Perhaps she was not under his glassy inspection. But then, of course, I could not be either.

No doubt the nervous tension incident to the expedition was making me supersensitive and even morbid.

Our sail-boat rode the shallow torquoise-tinted waters at anchor, rocking gently just off the snowy coral reef on which we were now camping. The youthful waitress who, for economy’s sake, wore her cap, apron, collar and cuffs over her dainty print dress, was seated by the signal fire writing in her diary. Sometimes she thoughtfully touched her pencil point with the tip of her tongue; sometimes she replenished the fire from a pile of dead mangrove branches heaped up on the coral reef beside her. Whatever she did she accomplished gracefully.

As for the man, Grue, his back remained turned toward us both and he continued, apparently, to scan the horizon for the sail which we all expected. And all the time I could not rid myself of the unpleasant idea that somehow or other he was looking at me, watching attentively the expression of my features and noting my every movement.

The smoke of our fire blew wide across leagues of shallow, sparkling water, or, when the wind veered, whirled back into our faces across the reef, curling and eddying among the standing mangroves like fog drifting.

Seated there near the fire, from time to time I swept the horizon with my marine glasses; but there was no sign of Kemper; no sail broke the far sweep of sky and water; nothing moved out there save when a wild duck took wing amid the dark raft of its companions to circle low above the ocean and settle at random, invisible again except when, at intervals, its white breast flashed in the sunshine.

Meanwhile the waitress had ceased to write in her diary and now sat with the closed book on her knees and her pencil resting against her lips, gazing thoughtfuly at the back of Grue’s head.

It was a ratty head of straight black hair, and looked greasy. The rest of him struck me as equally unkempt and dingy–a youngish man, lean, deeply bitten by the sun of the semi-tropics to a mahogany hue, and unusually hairy.

I don’t mind a brawny, hairy man, but the hair on Grue’s arms and chest was a rusty red, and like a chimpanzee’s in texture, and sometimes a wildly absurd idea possessed me that the man needed it when he went about in the palm forests without his clothes.

But he was only a “poor white”–a “cracker” recruited from one of the reefs near Pelican Light, where he lived alone by fishing and selling his fish to the hotels at Heliatrope City. The sail-boat was his; he figured as our official guide on this expedition–an expedition which already had begun to worry me a great deal.

For it was, perhaps, the wildest goose chase and the most absurdly hopeless enterprise ever undertaken in the interest of science by the Bronx Park authorities.

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