The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

This sudden, dominating impulse the man strongly resisted, but while he held it thus, he feared it. It was like those bizarre impulses which sometimes seize on the human mind and which, while we know them to be wild and fantastic, we feel that if we remain we shall presently accomplish them. He was glad when the girl spoke.

"I love the sea," she said. Her face was lifted, the breath of the water seemed to move the cloudy mass of her hair gently, as though it wished to caress it. "It makes me feel that all the things which we are taught are only old wives' tales, nevertheless, after all, are somehow true. Before the sea, I believe that the witches and the goblins live. I believe the genii dwell in their copper pots. I believe that somewhere, in the out-of-the-way places of the world, they all remain—these fairy people."

She turned slowly toward her companion.

"Tell me," she said, "when you have traveled through the waste places of the earth, have you never come on a trail of them? Have you never found a magician walking in the desert? Or have you never looked into the open door of a hut, in some endless forest, and seen a big yellow-haired witch weaving at a loom; or in the bed of some dried-up river, a hideous dwarf, squatting on a rock, boiling a pot of water?"

"I have never found them," said the man.

"No," said the girl, "you would never find them. One never does find them, I suppose. But, did you never nearly find them? Did you never, in some big, lonely land at night, when everything was still, did you never catch some faint, eerie murmur, some wisp of music, some vague sound?"

"I have heard," replied the man, "far out in the Sahara, in that unknown country beyond the Zar'ez, which is simply an ocean of huge motionless billows of sand, at night in the endless valleys of this dry sea, I have heard the beating of a drum. No one understands this tiny, fantastic drumming. It is said to be the echo of innumerable grains of sand blown against the hard blades of desert grasses, but no one knows. The Arabs say it is the dead. I suppose it is a sort of sound mirage."

"Oh, no," replied the girl, "it is not the dead; I know what it is. It is the little drums of the fairy people traveling in the desert, hunting a land where they may not be disturbed. We have driven them out of the forest, and away from the rivers and the hills. Poor little people, how they must hate the hot yellow sand, when they remember the cool wood, and the bright water, and the green hills! I am sure that if you had crept out toward that sound you would have seen the tiny drummers, in their quaint scarlet caps, beating their little drums to awake the fairy camp, and you would have seen the moon lying on this camp, and the cobweb tents, and all the little carts filled with their household things."

The fresh salt air seemed to vitalize her face; her eyes, big, vague, dreamy, looked out on the sea; her hands were in her lap; her body unmoving. She was like a child absorbed in the wonder of a story.

"But the others," she said, "the magicians and the witches and the wicked kings and the beautiful princesses, they would live in cities. Have you not nearly found these cities? Have you not seen the turrets and the spires and the domes of them mirrored in the shimmering heat of some far-off waste horizon? Or have you not looked up suddenly in some barren country of great rocks and beheld a walled town with fantastic towers and then, when you advanced, found it only a trick of vision? That would be one of their cities."