Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 4 (1923-04).djvu/35

The conclusion was inevitable: Someone had assisted me into my room, and removed a part of my clothing.

I became conscious of a penetrating odor—the odor of violets.

Was it the woman? I remembered her, now; laughing lips, merry brown eyes and all. "Brown Mouse," I had called her.

Who was she? Was she real, or just a fancy of my own? The coat and shoes argued that she was very real indeed. I wondered if she was someone I knew, but could not believe it so. I had to give it up; my mental condition did not sanction lucid thought.

That night, and the next, and the next, I returned home more like my old self—the self of the stairway—than I had been in months, but I saw nothing of the woman whom I could think of only as the "Brown Mouse."

Then, one night a week after our first encounter, I saw her again. She knelt on the rug before the grate in my room, tugging at my shoes; one of them came off, and a wad of bank notes fell out. She looked up at me with a face that was white and drawn—pinched; she started to speak, then, getting up, she placed the bills in a dresser drawer. I found them there the next morning,

The odor of violets was strong in the room.

How she came and when she went, I could not recall. Just one glimpse of her, there on the rug, was all my memory would yield.

During the week that followed, I fairly haunted the old building, actually making myself offensive peering into the faces of the women who came and went. Nothing came of it. I could not rid myself of the thought of her; at night she haunted my dreams. During the next month I was conscious that she had been with me upon at least four occasions; a new picture of her would flit across my mind, elusive, as always; or the odor of violets would saturate my senses. Needless to say, I was not myself upon any of those occasions.

On one of those scarcely remembered visits she had wept—pleaded with me; but what it was she pleaded for, or who the object of it was, I could not remember. I could recall, though, that she no longer smiled—and I wondered.

On a night six weeks after I first saw the Brown Mouse, as I still thought of her, I came home —bad, very bad. Worse than I had ever been before. When I awoke, the following morning, I knew that she had been with me the night before; her presence, typified by the violet perfume, still lingered. I strove to bring her back to me, as she must have looked when there, but my brain was too dead—too sodden. Then I realized that my hand was gripping something tightly; it was a slip of paper, covered with writing in a fine hand. My eyes, attaining a normal focus, I read:

"The Brown Mouse will not come again. It is afraid, terribly afraid, and it is going—away. Perhaps, if it had been possible for you to have helped me, you would, I know you would. That night, when the money fell from your shoe—Oh, how I was tempted! I needed it so! Hunger makes us do such strange things, It cheapens virtue—destroys it. But it shall not cheapen or destroy mine! Oh, if a 'mouse' could indulge a human hope, it would be that you will draw back from the abyss before it is too late! May it hope that you will?"

No heading, no signature—gone!

I leaped out of bed.

What did the Brown Mouse fear? Was she afraid of me? Or was it something else that threatened her?

My brain reeled dizzily; I felt very ill. Try as I would, I could not fathom the meaning of the words she had written.

Curse the day the Green Goddess of Dreams first laid her cloying lips on mine!

Was the Brown Mouse afraid of me? Oh, no, no, no! I wouldn't harm her for the world! But—

I read the letter again, and understood!

Starving—going down in the unequal battle of feminine frailty pitted against the world—she had sought help from me. And I was in no condition to help anyone—not even myself!

Money? I could have given her that—would have beggared myself for her! Then a terrible thought shot through my brain!

Could it be that she was afraid of herself, as I had often been of myself? And did she contemplate the easy way out, as I, too, had contemplated it? Was that what she meant when she said she was going away?

Slipping into a dressing gown, I ran out into the corridor. I would find the janitor; he would know if she lived in the building. He had denied all knowledge of her when I questioned him before, but now he would tell, or I would choke the words out of him!

At the rear of the long hall I stopped suddenly. From a partly opened doorway came the odor of violets—strong, sickeningly strong!

With mad longing to find her, and to protect her from that thing she feared—no matter what it might be—I pushed the door ajar and entered.

The room was in darkness, save where the light from behind me trailed across the floor, and out of the gloom something leaped at me. It was the sickening odor of violets, so intense it seemed to my distraught mind a thing alive!

I stepped further into the room, and something swayed before me—something white and vague; then it took form in the semi-darkness.

A slender, white body, scarcely veiled by the shapeless gauze thing about it, swung gently to and fro beneath the chandelier—one rigid, white foot reaching downward as if seeking something to rest upon!

Someone shrieked. Long afterwards I knew that it was I. Blindly I fell beneath the swaying figure under the chandelier. I took the rigid foot into my hands and breathed upon it, trying to warm it—muttering, over and over, broken, senseless, useless words!