He staggered blindly, trying to gain his balance on the uneven rocks. With arms arched he crushed and rubbed his head free of its loathsome blanket and saw that the water was but waist deep and falling rapidly. Through the lightening darkness he could make out the whirlpool which told where, at the end of the tunnel he had been digging, the wall had given way before the pressure from within. Even as he looked the last of the water swashed out, and stooping down, he caught a glimpse of daylight. On hands and knees he crept through the opening and emerged to the free sweep of the hills, soft and dripping and peaceful against the background of the retreating storm.
For minutes he lay there, a sodden, shaken figure, looking out across that far-flung view with hollow eyes from which the stare of horror slowly faded. Then he got to his knees, his feet, and drew a great, shuddering breath. His eyes dropped to the slope immediately before him, strewn with scores of drowned spiders.
“Well,” he said shakily, “it looks as though there are enough here for all the museums in the world. I’ll make a good haul while I’m about it.”
With swollen, bruised hands, he began gathering up the draggled bodies and piling them beside a rock.
THE HAT OF EIGHT REFLECTIONS
By JAMES MAHONEY
From Century
ONE REFLECTION
WITH his rusty, black felt hat in his hand and oblivious of passers-by, Ventrillon stooped before the shop window until the reflection of his finely chiselled young face came into place, with the forehead of the image nicely adjusted into the crown of the hat behind the clear plate glass. It was a magnificent hat, an elegant hat, a formidable hat, a hat which was all there was of chic, a genuine, glistening stove-pipe hat, a véritable chapeau à huit reflets—an authentic hat of eight reflections—and the Ventrillon in the glass was wearing it. The effect was amazing.
“But why should it surprise me,” said Ventrillon, “when such is my present character? C’est idiot!”
For not only was this shabby young man contorting himself before the shop window the youngest prize winner of the spring Salon, but that afternoon he was going into society; for the first time, it is true, and into a very curious stratum of it, but society even so. Nevertheless, though he had spent the last of the three hundred francs of his prize money on an elegantly tailored costume of morning coat and striped trousers, he had expected to wear the rusty, broad-brimmed black felt he held in his hand. But as he marvelled at the effect of his reflection in the window, the hat before him became essential. It was the final touch, and it is the final touch which is vital.
And yet, once he appeared on the boulevards in such a hat, he would never dare to face his comrades at the Closerie des Lilas again.