Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/33

Rh his equals in rank. Where did he get off treating us like a lot of railway porters? Let him read his London Daily Mail and be damned to him!

Stories of the front and service of communications lines, of base hospitals, Paris, Brest and Saint-Nazarire sped the time till we passed Epernay and the air grew cold with a hard bitterness while the fog congealed to sleety rain that spattered like thrown sand against the window and gushed down the glass like the back-wash of a sullen tide. The window casing somehow rattled loose from its sides, and a current of chilled air, with now and then a spit of sleet, came straight against me. After several ineffectual efforts to right matters I turned the collar of my trench coat up about my ears, slid down until I rested on the extreme end of my spine, and sought forgetfulness of my discomfort in sleep.

Conversation had died down to monosyllables, even apKern seemed drained dry of wisecracks, and Amberson rose lurching from his seat. "See you in the morning—I hope," he rumbled, jerking at the leather cord that worked the single light in the compartment. For a moment the globe glowed with fading incandesccnce, then we were smothered in Cimmerian darkness.

Was it a trick of tired nerves, the retention of the light-image upon my retina in the dark? I wondered. Somehow, it seemed to me that as night flattened on the window and the blackness closed about us the orange eyes of the girl sitting opposite me glowed with a sort of smoky, sulphurus luminance like those of a cat, in the gloom. The impression lasted but a moment. Either she had lowered her lids or my eyes had grown accustomed to the lack of light, and I was staring sightlessly into a shadow as impenetrable as a velvet curtain.

Memory was scratching at my brain, softly but insistently as a cat demanding admission to a room. Miss Waltrous' face was poignantly familiar to me and, dimly, I connected it with something vaguely unpleasant.

I tried to fit the pieces of the mental picture-puzzle together, assembling keywords, fumbling with my thoughts. The riddle of her strange familiarity—that persistent thought, "I've seen her somewhere"—was within reach of my brain if only I could get the facts in proper perspective, I was sure. Her name: Fedocia Watrous. Did its syllables strike some note of memory? No. Try again: That face, that sweet, pale oval face, almost too perfect in its symmetry, the long red lips of that red, sensitive mouth, those glowing orange eyes and hair as russet as the leaves of a copper-beech in autumn; she came from Philadelphia—I had it! The triumph of remembering brought me up right in my seat, I almost snapped my fingers in delight. Not faintly, but clear-cut as a motion picture flashed upon a screen, I saw that scene in Fairmount Park. I was in my final year of internship and, as always, short of money, had gone to the zoo for the afternoon. Beside the monkey cage a boy and girl stood idly. Through closed lids I could see them perfectly with my mind's eye, the lad in baggy trousers rolled high above his ankles to display bright socks, a V-necked sweater with the F that showed he was an athlete at Friends' School; the girl in Peter Thompson suit, hatless, her small proud head aflame with copper hair as sweetly poised as a chysanthemumchrysanthemum [sic] upon its stalk. They had a bag of sugar cookies and had tossed one to the ravenous little rhesus monkeys swarming up the bars. One of the greedy little simians fastened on a cake fragment with its hand, then, not content, seized another with its hand-like foot, leaped to an overhanging perch and proceeded to feed itself, nibbling first from the bit clutched in its hand, then from the fragment grasped in its prehensible foot.