Seabury Quinn: Restless Souls

“TEN THOUSAND small green devils! What a night; what an odious night!” Jules de Grandin paused beneath the theater’s porte-cochère and scowled ferociously at the pelting rain.

“Well, summer’s dead and winter hasn’t quite come,” I reminded soothingly. “We’re bound to have a certain

amount of rain in October. The autumnal equinox—” “May Satan’s choicest imps fly off with the autumnal

equinox!” the little Frenchman interrupted. “Morbleu, it is that I have seen no sun since God alone knows when; besides that, I am most abominably hungry!” “That condition, at least, we can remedy,” I promised,

nudging him from the awning’s shelter toward my parked car. “Suppose we stop at the Café Bacchanale? They usually have something good to eat.”

“Excellent, capital,” he agreed enthusiastically, skipping nimbly into the car and rearranging the upturned collar of his raincoat. “You are a true philosopher, mon vieux. Always you tell me that which I most wish to hear.”

They were having an hilarious time at the cabaret, for it was the evening of October 31, and the management had put on a special Halloween celebration. As we passed the velvet rope that looped across the entrance to the dining room a burst of Phrygian music greeted us, and a dozen agile young women in abbreviated attire were performing intricate gyrations under the leadership of an apparently boneless damsel whose costume was principally composed of strands of jangling hawk-bells threaded round her neck and wrists and ankles.

“Welsh rabbit?” I suggested. “They make a rather tasty one here.” He nodded almost absent-mindedly as he

surveyed a couple eating at a nearby table. At last, just as the waiter brought our bubbling-hot refreshment: “Regard them, if you will, Friend Trowbridge,” he whispered. “Tell me what, if anything, you make of them.”

The girl was, as the saying goes, “a knockout.” Tall, lissome, lovely to regard, she wore a dinner dress of simple black without a single hint of ornament except a single strand of small matched pearls about her slim and rather long throat. Her hair was bright chestnut, almost coppercolored, and braided round her small head in a Grecian coronal, and in its ruddy frame her face was like some strange flower on a tall stalk. Her darkened lids and carmined mouth and pale cheeks made an interesting combination.

As I stole a second glance at her it seemed to me she had a vague yet unmistakable expression of invalidism. Nothing definite, merely the combination of certain factors which pierced the shell of my purely masculine admiration and stock response from my years of experience as a medical practitioner — a certain blueness of complexion which meant “interesting pallor” to the layman but spelled imperfectly oxidized blood to the physician; a slight tightening of the muscles about the mouth which gave her lovely pouting lips a pathetic droop; and a scarcely perceptible retraction at the junction of cheek and nose which meant fatigue of nerves or muscles, possibly both.

Seabury Quinn: The Man in Crescent Terrace

BUT THIS is most pleasant, vraiment,” Jules told me as we reached the corner where the black-and-orange sign announced a bus stop. “The moteur, he is a convenience. Yes, Whiz-pouf! he takes you where you wish to go all quickly, and sifflement! he brings you back all soon. But where there is no need for haste — non. It is that we grow soft and lazy substituting gasoline for walking-muscle, Friend Trowbridge. Is it not better that we walk on such a lovely evening?”

The brief October dusk had deepened into dark as if a curtain had been drawn across the sky, and in the east a star sprang out and a cluster of little stars blinked after it. A little breeze came up and rustled faintly in the almost-leafless maples, but it seemed to me a faint sound of uneasiness came from them, not the comfortable cradle-song of evening, but a sort of restrained moaning.

And with the sibilation of the wind there came the sound of running footsteps, high heels pounding in a sharp staccato on the sidewalk with a drumming-like panic made audible. The diffused glow of a street showed her to us as she ran, hurrying with the awkward, knock-kneed gait of a woman unused to sprinting, casting fearful looks across her shoulder each few steps, but never slackening her terror-goaded pace. It was not until she was almost within touching distance that she saw us, and gave vent to a gasp of relief mingled with fright.

“Help!” she panted, then, almost fiercely, “run — run! He

— it’s coming....”

“Tenez, who is it comes, Mademoiselle?” de Grandin asked. “Tell us who it is annoys you. I shall take pleasure in tweaking his nose—”

“Run — run, you fool!” the girl broke in hysterically, clutching at my lapel as a drowning person might clutch at a floating plank. “If it catches me—” Her breathless words blurred out and the stiffness seemed to go from her knees as she slumped against me, flaccid as a rag-doll.

I braced her slight weight in my arms, half turning as I did so, and felt the warm stickiness of fresh blood soak through my glove. “De Grandin,” I exclaimed, “she’s been hurt —

bleeding—”

“Hein?” he deflected the sharp gaze which he had leveled down the darkened street. “What is it that you say — mordieu, but you have right, Friend Trowbridge! We must see to her — hola, taxi, à moi, tout vite!” he waved imperatively at the rattletrap cab that providentially emerged from the tree-arched tunnel of the street.

Seabury Quinn: Pledged to the Dead

The autumn dusk had stained the sky with shadows and orange oblongs traced the windows in my neighbors' homes as Jules de Grandin and I sat sipping kaiserschmarrn and coffee in the study after dinner. "Mon Dieu," the little Frenchman sighed, "I have the mal du pays, my friend. The little children run and play along the roadways at Saint Cloud, and on the Ile de France the pastry cooks set up their booths. Corbleu, it takes the strength of character not to stop and buy those cakes of so much taste and fancy! The Napoléons, they are crisp and fragile as a coquette's promise, the éclairs filled with cool, sweet cream, the cream-puffs all aglow with cherries. Just to see them is to love life better. They——"

The shrilling of the door-bell startled me. The pressure on the button must have been that of one who leant against it. "Doctor Trowbridge; I must see him right away!" a woman's voice demanded as Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, grudgingly responded to the hail.

"Th' docthor's offiss hours is over, ma'am," Nora answered frigidly. "Ha'f past nine ter eleven in th' marnin', an' two ter four in th' afthernoon is when he sees his patients. If it's an urgent case ye have there's lots o' good young docthors in th' neighborhood, but Docthor Trowbridge——"

"Is he here?" the visitor demanded sharply.

"He is, an' he's afther digestin' his dinner—an' an illigant dinner it wuz, though I do say so as shouldn't—an' he can't be disturbed——"

"He'll see me, all right. Tell him it's Nella Bentley, and I've got to talk to him!"

De Grandin raised an eyebrow eloquently. "The fish at the aquarium have greater privacy than we, my friend," he murmured, but broke off as the visitor came clacking down the hall on high French heels and rushed into the study half a dozen paces in advance of my thoroughly disapproving and more than semi-scandalized Nora.