Amazing Stories, Vol. 3, No. 2 — page 51: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

146 AMAZING never overcome her now, as he had hoped and prayed. But the might still ampress her! From that idea he expanded. He might impress her profoundly—he might impress her so that she. should for evermore regret her treatment of him. The thing that she must realize before everything else was his magnanimity. His magnanimity! Yes! he had loved thet with amazing greatness of heart. He had not seen it so clearly before—but of course he was going to leave ther all his property. He saw it instantly, as a tling determined and inevitable. She would think how good he was, how spaciously generous; surrounded by all that niakes life tolerable from his hand, she would recall with infinite regret her scorn and coldness. And when she sought expression for that regret, she ‘would find that occasion gone forever, she should be met by a locked door, by a disdainful stillness, by a white dead face. He closed his eyes and remained for a space imagining himself that white dead face. From that. he passed to other aspects of the matter, but his determination was assured. He meditated elaborately before he took action, for the drug he had taken inclined him to a lethargic and dignified melan- choly. In certain respects he modified details. If he left all his property to Elizabeth it would imclude the yoluptuously appointed room he occupied, and for many reasons he did not care to leave that to her. On the other hand, it had to be left to some one. In his clogged condition this worried him extremely. In the end he decided to leave it to the sympathetic exponent of the fashionable religious cult, whose con- versation had been so pleasing in the past. “He will understand,” said Bindon with a sentimental sigh. “He knows what Evil means—he understands something of the Stupendous Fascination of the Sphinx of Sin. Yes—he will understand.” By that phrase it was that Bindon was pleased to dignify certain unhealthy and undignified departures from sane conduct to which a misguided vanity and an ill-controlled curiosity had led him. He sat for a space, thinking how very Hellenic and Italian and Neronic, and all those things, he had been. Even now—might one not try a sonnet? A penetrating voice to echo down the ages, sensuous, sinister, and sad. For a space he forgot Elizabeth. In the course of half an hour he spoiled three phonographic coils, got a headache, took a second dose to calm him- self, and reverted to magnanimity and his former design. — At last he faced the unpalatable problem of Denton. Tt needed all his newborn magnanimity before he could swallow the thought of Denton; but at last this greatly misunderstood man, assisted by his sedative and the near approach of death, effected even that. If he was at all exclusive about Denton, if he should display the slightest distrust, if he attempted any specific exclusion of that young man, she might—muisunderstand. Yes— she should have her Denton still. His magnanimity must go even to that. He tried to think only of ‘Eliza- beth in the matter. He rose with a sigh, and limped across to the tele- phonic apparatus that communicated with his solicitor. Tn ten minutes a will duly attested and with its proper thumb-mark signature lay in the solicitor’s office three _ \ STORIES miles away. still. Suddenly he started out of a vague reverie and pressed an investigatory hand to his Bide: Then he jmped eagerly to his feet and rushed to the telephone. The Euthanasia Company had rarely been called by a client in a greater hurry. And then for a space Bindon sat very O it came at last that Denton and his Elizabeth, against all hope, returned unseparated from the labor servitude to which they had fallen. Elizabeth came out from her cramped subterranean den of metal- beaters and all the sordid circumstances of blue canvas, as one comes out of a nightmare. Back towards the sunlight their fortune took them; once the bequest was known to them, the bare thought of another day’s lham- mering became intolerable. They went up long lifts and stairs to levels that they had not seen since the days of their disaster. At first she was full of this sensation of escape; even to think of the underways was intolerable; only after many months could she begin to recall with sympathy the faded women who were still below there, murmuring scandals and remi- niscences and folly, and tapping away their lives. Her choice of the apartments they presently took expressed the velhemence of her release. They were rooms upon the very verge of the city; they had a roof space and a balcony upon the city wall, wide open to the sun and wind, the country and the sky. And im that balcony comes the last scene im this story. It was a summer sunsetting, and the hills of Surrey were very blue and clear. Denton leaned upon the balcony regarding them, and Elizabeth sat by his side. Very wide and spacious was the view, for their balcony hung five hundred feet above the ancient level of the ground. The oblongs of the Food Company, broken here and there by the ruins—grotesque little holes and sheds—of the ancient suburbs, and inter- sected by shining streams of sewage, passed at last into a remote diapering at the foot of the distant hills. There once had been the squatting-place of the children of Uya. On those further slopes gaunt machines of unknown import worked slackly at the end of their spell, and the hill crest was set with stagnant wind vanes. Along the great south road the Labor Com- pany’s field orere in huge wheeled mechanical ve- hicles, were hurrying hack to their meals, their last spell finished. And through the air a dozen little pri- vate aeropites sailed down towards the city. Familiar scene as it was to the eyes of Denton and Elizabeth, at would have filled the minds of their ancestors with incredulous amazement. Denton’s thoughts fluttered towards the future in a vain attempt at what that scene might be in another two hundred years, and, recoiling, turned towards the past. : He shared something of the growing knowledge of _ the time; he could picture the quaint smoke-grimed — Victorian city with its marrow little roads of- “beaten - earth, its wide common-land, ill-organized, il-built suburbs, and irregular enclosures; the old countryside of the Stuart times, with its little villages and its petty — London; the England of the monasteries, the far older — England of the Roman dominion, and then before that COM|CIOOL<S CON we