“Speaking of that,” said Tommy, piercingly, without knowing in the least what he was referring to, “Speaking of that—”
“As I was saying,” said Professor Tatto. But Tommy would not yield. The plates were being taken away. It was time for salad.
“Speaking of that,” he said again, so loudly and strangely that Mrs. Culverin jumped and an awkward hush fell over the table. “Strange, isn’t it, how often fact copies fiction?” There, he was started. His voice rose even higher. “Why, only to-day I was strolling through—” and, word for word, he repeated his lesson. He could see Tibault’s eyes glowing at him, as he described the funeral. He could see the Princess, tense.
He could not have said what he had expected might happen when he came to the end. But it was not bored silence, everywhere, to be followed by Mrs. Dingle’s acrid, “Well, Tommy, is that quite all?”
He slumped back in his chair, sick at heart. He was a fool and his last resource had failed. Dimly he heard his aunt’s voice, saying, “Well, then—” and realized that she was about to make the fatal announcement.
But just then Monsieur Tibault spoke.
“One moment, Mrs. Dingle,” he said, with extreme politeness, and she was silent. He turned to Tommy.
“You are — positive, I suppose, of what you saw this afternoon, Brooks?” he said, in tones of light mockery.
“Absolutely,” said Tommy sullenly. “Do you think I’d—”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Monsieur Tibault waved the implication aside, “but — such an interesting story — one likes to be sure of the details — and, of course, you are sure — quite sure — that the kind of crown you describe was on the coffin?”
“Of course,” said Tommy, wondering, “but—”
“Then I’m the King of the Cats!” cried Monsieur Tibault in a voice of thunder, and, even as he cried it, the house-fights blinked — there was the soft thud of an explosion that seemed muffled in cotton-wool from the minstrel gallery — and the scene was fit for a second by an obliterating and painful burst of fight that vanished in an instant and was succeeded by heavy, blinding clouds of white, pungent smoke.
“Oh, those horrid photographers,” came Mrs. Dingle’s voice in a melodious wail. “I told them not to take the flashlight picture till dinner was over, and now they’ve taken it just as I was nibbling lettuce!”
Some one tittered a little nervously. Some one coughed. Then, gradually the veils of smoke dislimned and the green-and-black spots in front of Tommy’s eyes died away.
They were blinking at each other like people who have just come out of a cave into brilliant sun. Even yet their eyes stung with the fierceness of that abrupt illumination and Tommy found it hard to make out the faces across the table from him.
Mrs. Dingle took command of the half-blinded company with her accustomed poise. She rose, glass in hand. “And now, dear friends,” she said in a clear voice, “I’m sure all of us are very happy to—” Then she stopped, open-mouthed, an expression of incredulous horror on her features. The lifted glass began to spill its contents on the tablecloth in a little stream of amber. As she spoke, she had turned directly to Monsieur Tibault’s place at the table — and Monsieur Tibault was no longer there.
Some say there was a bursting flash of fire that disappeared up the chimney — some say it was a giant cat that leaped through the window at a bound, without breaking the glass. Professor Tatto puts it down to a mysterious chemical disturbance operating only over M. Tibault’s chair. The butler, who is pious, believes the devil in person flew away with him, and Mrs. Dingle hesitates between witchcraft and a malicious ectoplasm dematerializing on the wrong cosmic plane. But be that as it may, one thing is certain — in the instant of fictive darkness which followed the glare of the flashlight, Monsieur Tibault, the great conductor, disappeared forever from mortal sight, tail and all.
Mrs. Culverin swears he was an international burglar and that she was just, about to unmask him, when he slipped away under cover of the flashlight smoke, but no one else who sat at that historic dinner-table believes her. No, there are no sound explanations, but Tommy thinks he knows, and he will never be able to pass a cat again without wondering.
Mrs. Tommy is quite of her husband’s mind regarding cats — she was Gretchen Woolwine, of Chicago (you know the Woolwines!) — for Tommy told her his whole story, and while she doesn’t believe a great deal of it, there is no doubt in her heart that one person concerned in the affair was a perfect cat. Doubtless it would have been more romantic to relate how Tommy’s daring finally won him his Princess — but, unfortunately, it would not be veracious. For the Princess Vivrakanarda, also, is with us no longer. Her nerves, shattered by the spectacular denouement of Mrs. Dingle’s dinner, required a sea-voyage, and from that voyage she has never returned to America.
Of course, there are the usual stories — one hears of her, a nun in a Siamese convent, or a masked dancer at Le Jardin de ma Sœur — one hears that she has been murdered in Patagonia or married in Trebizond — but, as far as can be ascertained, not one of these gaudy fables has the slightest basis in fact. I believe that Tommy, in his heart of hearts, is quite convinced that the sea-voyage was only a pretext, and that by some unheard-of means, she has managed to rejoin the formidable Monsieur Tibault, wherever in the world of the visible or the invisible he may be — in fact, that in some ruined city or subterranean palace they reign together now, King and Queen of all the mysterious Kingdom of Cats. But that, of course, is quite impossible.
The Red Brain
by Donald Wandrei
One by one the pale stars in the sky overhead had twinkled fainter and gone out. One by one those flaming lights had dimmed and darkened. One by one they had vanished forever, and in their places had come patches of ink that blotted out immense areas of a sky once luminous with stars.
Years had passed; centuries had fled backward; the accumulating thousands had turned into millions, and they, too, had faded into the oblivion of eternity. The earth had disappeared. The sun had cooled and hardened, and had dissolved into the dust of its grave. The solar system and innumerable other systems had broken up and vanished, and their fragments had swelled the clouds of dust which were engulfing the entire universe. In the billions of years which had passed, sweeping everything on toward the gathering doom, the huge bodies, once countless, that had dotted the sky and hurtled through unmeasurable immensities of Space had lessened in number and disintegrated until the black pall of the sky was broken only at rare intervals by dim spots of light — light ever growing paler and darker.
No one knew when the dust had begun to gather, but far back in the forgotten dawn of time the dead worlds had vanished, unremembered and unmourned.
Those were the nuclei of the dust. Those were the progenitors of the universal dissolution which now approached its completion. Those were the stars which had first burned out, died, and wasted away in myriads of atoms. Those were the mushroom growths which had first passed into nothingness in a puff of dust.
Slowly the faint wisps had gathered into clouds, the clouds into seas, and the seas into monstrous oceans of gently heaving dust, dust that drifted from dead and dying worlds, from interstellar collisions of plunging stars, from rushing meteors and streaming comets which flamed from the void and hurtled into the abyss.