Fancies and Goodnights

INCIDENT ON A LAKE

Mr. Beaseley, while shaving on the day after his fiftieth birthday, eyed his reflection, and admitted his remarkable resemblance to a mouse. «Cheep, cheep!» he said to himself, with a shrug. «What do I care? At least, I wouldn't except for Maria. I remember I thought her kittenish at the time of our marriage. How she has matured!»

He knotted his thread-like necktie and hurried downstairs, scared out of his life at the thought of being late for breakfast. Immediately afterwards he had to open his drugstore, which then, in its small-town way, would keep him unprofitably busy till ten o'clock at night. At intervals during the day, Maria would drop in to supervise, pointing out his mistakes and weaknesses regardless of the customers.

He found a brief solace every morning when, unfolding the newspaper, he turned first of all to the engaging feature originated by Mr. Ripley. On Fridays he had a greater treat: he then received his copy of his favourite magazine, Nature Science Marvels. This reading provided, so to speak, a hole in his otherwise hopeless existence, through which he escaped from the intolerable into the incredible.

On this particular morning the incredible was kind enough to come to Mr. Beaseley. It came in a long envelope and on the handsome note paper of a prominent law firm. «Believe it or not, my dear,» Mr. Beaseley said to his wife, «but I have been left four hundred thousand dollars.»

«Where? Let me see!» cried Mrs. Beaseley. «Don't hog the letter to yourself in that fashion.»

«Go on,» said he. «Read it. Stick your nose in it. Much good may it do you!»

«Oh! Oh!» said she. «So you are already uppish!»

«Yes,» said he, picking his teeth. «I have been left four hundred thousand dollars.»

«We shall be able,» said his wife, «to have an apartment in New York or a little house in Miami.»

«You may have half the money and do what you like with it,» said Mr. Beaseley. «For my part, I intend to travel.»

Mrs. Beaseley heard this remark with the consternation she always felt at the prospect of losing anything that belonged to her, however old and valueless. «So you would desert me,» she said, «to go chasing about after some native woman? I thought you were past all that.»

«The only native women I am interested in,» said he, «are those that Ripley had a picture of — those with lips big enough to have dinner plates set in them. In the Nature Science Marvels Magazine they had some with necks like giraffes. I should like to see those, and pygmies, and birds of paradise, and the temples of Yucatan. I offered to give you half the money because I know you like city life and high society. I prefer to travel. If you want to, I suppose you can come along.»

«I will,» said she. «And don't forget I'm doing it for your sake, to keep you on the right path. And when you get tired of gawking and rubbering around, we'll have an apartment in New York and a little house in Miami.»

So Mrs. Beaseley went resentfully along, prepared to endure Hell herself if she could deprive her husband of a little of his Heaven. Their journeys took them into profound forests, where, from their bare bedroom, whose walls, floor, and ceiling were austerely fashioned of raw pine, they could see framed in every window a perfect little Cezanne, with the slanting light cubing bluely among the perpendiculars of pine trees or exploding on the new green of a floating spray. In the high Andes, on the other hand, their window was a square of burning azure, with sometimes a small, snow-white cloud like a tight roll of cotton in a lower corner. In the beach huts on tropical islands, they found that the tide, like an original and tasteful hôtelier, deposited a little gift at their door every morning: a skeleton fan of violet seaweed, a starfish, or a shell. Mrs. Beaseley, being one of the vulgar, would have preferred a bottle of Grade A and a copy of The Examiner. She sighed incessantly for an apartment in New York and a house in Miami, and she sought endlessly to punish the poor man for depriving her of them.

If a bird of paradise settled on a limb above her husband's head, she was careful to let out a raucous cry and drive the interesting creature away before Mr. Beaseley had time to examine it. She told him the wrong hour for the start of the trip to the temples of Yucatan, and she diverted his attention from an armadillo by pretending she had something in her eye. At the sight of a bevy of the celebrated bosoms of Bali, clustered almost like grapes upon the quay, she just turned around and went straight up the gangplank again, driving her protesting husband before her.

She insisted they should stay a long time in Buenos Aires so that she could get a permanent wave, a facial, some smart clothes, and go to the races. Mr. Beaseley humoured her, for he wanted to be fair, and they took a suite in a comfortable hotel. One afternoon when his wife was at the races, our friend struck up an acquaintance with a little Portuguese doctor in the lounge, and before long they were talking vivaciously of hoatzins, anacondas, and axolotls. «As to that,» said the little Portuguese, «I have recently returned from the headwaters of the Amazon, where the swamps and lakes are terrific. In one of those lakes, according to the Indians, there is a creature entirely unknown to science: a creature of tremendous size, something like an alligator, something like a turtle, armour-plated, with a long neck, and teeth like sabres.»

«What an interesting creature that must be!» cried Mr. Beaseley in a rapture.

«Yes, yes,» said the Portuguese. «It is certainly interesting.»

«If only I could get there!» cried Mr. Beaseley. «If only I could talk to those Indians! If only I could see the creature itself! Are you by any chance at liberty? Could you be persuaded to join a little expedition?»

The Portuguese was willing, and soon everything was arranged. Mrs. Beaseley returned from the races, and had the mortification of hearing that they were to start almost immediately for a trip up the Amazon and a sojourn on the unknown lake in the dysgenic society of Indians. She insulted the Portuguese, who did nothing but bow, for he had an agreeable financial understanding with Mr. Beaseley.

Mrs. Beaseley berated her husband all the way up the river, harping on the idea that there was no such creature as he sought, and that he was the credulous victim of a confidence man. Inured as he was to her usual flow of complaints, this one made him wince and humiliated him before the Portuguese. Her voice, also, was so loud and shrill that in all the thousands of miles they travelled up the celebrated river he saw nothing but the rapidly vanishing hinder parts of tapirs, spider monkeys, and giant ant-eaters, which hurried to secrete themselves in the impenetrable deeps of the jungle.

Finally they arrived at the lake. «How do we know this is the lake he was speaking of?» Mrs. Beaseley said to her husband. «It is probably just any lake. What are those Indians saying to him? You can't understand a word. You take everything on trust. You'll never see a monster. Only a fool would believe in it.»

Mr. Beaseley said nothing. The Portuguese learned, from his conversation with the Indians, of an abandoned grass hut, which in due time and after considerable effort they located. They moved into it. The days passed by. Mr. Beaseley crouched in the reeds with binoculars and was abominably bitten by mosquitoes. There was nothing to be seen.

Mrs. Beaseley succeeded in taking on a note of satisfaction without in the least abating her tone of injury. «I will stand this no longer,» she said to her husband. «I've allowed you to drag me about. I've tried to keep my eye on you. I've travelled hundreds of miles in a canoe with natives. Now I see you wasting our money on a confidence man. We leave for Para in the morning.»

«You may, if you wish,» said he. «I'll write you a check for two hundred thousand dollars. Perhaps you can persuade some native in a passing canoe to take you down the river. But I will not come with you.»

«We will see about that,» said she. She hadn't the faintest intention of leaving her husband alone, for she feared he might enjoy himself. Nevertheless, after he had written out the check and given it to her, she continued to threaten to leave him, for if he surrendered, it would be a triumph, and if he didn't, it would be another little black cross against him.

She happened to rise early one morning and went out to make her ungrateful breakfast on some of the delicious fruits that hung in profusion all around the hut. She had not gone far before she happened to glance at the sandy ground, and there she saw a footprint that was nearly a yard wide, splayed, spurred, and clawed, and the mate to it was ten feet away.

Mrs. Beaseley looked at these admirable footprints with neither awe nor interest — only annoyance at the thought of her husband's triumph and the vindication of the Portuguese. She did not cry out in wonder, or call to the sleeping menfolk, but only gave a sort of honking snort. Then, picking up a sizeable palm frond, this unscrupulous woman obliterated the highly interesting footprints, never before seen by a white person's eyes. Having done so, she smiled grimly and looked for the next, and she wiped out that one, too. A little farther on she saw another, and then still one more, and so on, till she had removed every trace down to the tepid lip of the lake, where the last was printed at the very edge of the water.

Having obliterated this final trace, Mrs. Beaseley straightened up and looked back toward the hut. «You shall hear of this,» she said, addressing her sleeping husband, «when we are settled down at Miami and you are too old to do anything about it.»

At that moment there was a swirl in the water behind her and she was seized by a set of teeth which quite exactly resembled sabres. She had no leisure to check up on the other points mentioned by the Portuguese doctor, but no doubt they came up to specification. She uttered one brief scream as she disappeared, but her voice was hoarse by reason of the strain she had put on it during the previous weeks, and her cry, even if it had been heard, could easily have been confused with the mating call of the Megatherium, thought to be extinct. In fact, the last surviving Megatherium emerged from the jungle only shortly afterward, looked around in all directions, shrugged his shoulders resignedly, and went back the way he had come.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Beaseley awoke, noted the absence of his wife, and finally went and woke the Portuguese. «Have you seen my wife?» said he.

«Really!» said the little Portuguese, and went to sleep again.

Mr. Beaseley went out and looked around, and at last returned to his friend. «I'm afraid my wife has run away,» said he. «I have found her footprints leading down to the lake, where she has evidently encountered some native in a canoe and persuaded him to transport her down the river. She was always threatening to do so in order to take a small house at Miami.»

«That is not a bad town,» said the Portuguese, «but in the circumstances perhaps Buenos Aires is better. This monster is a great disappointment, my dear friend. Let us go back to Buenos Aires, where I will show you some extraordinary things — in quite a different line of course — such as your Ripley has never dreamed of.»

«What an agreeable companion you are!» said Mr. Beaseley. «You make even city life sound attractive.»

«Well, if you get tired of it, we can always move on,» said the little Portuguese. «I know some tropical islands where the girls — though their lips are not designed to hold dinner plates — are nevertheless marvels of nature, and their dances are wonders of art.»