Robert Chambers - The Gay Rebellion

"I don't know… Do you?"

"I don't know… You mustn't cry. Put your head down – here. You mustn't be distressed."

"I am, dreadfully."

"You mustn't be."

"I can't help it – now."

"Could you help it if you – loved me?"

"Oh, no! Oh, no! It would distress me beyond measure to – to love you. Oh, it must not be – it must not happen to me – "

"It is already happening to me ."

"Don't let it! Don't let it happen to either of us! Please – please – "

"But – it is happening all the while, Amourette."

She drew a swift, startled sigh.

"Is that what it is that is happening to me, too, Mr. Sayre?"

"Yes. I think so."

"Oh, oh, oh !" she sobbed, hiding her face closer to his shoulder.

"Amourette! Darling! Dea – "

"L-listen. Because now I've got to tell you all about the disappearance of those perfectly horrid young specimens of physical perfection. And after that you will abhor me!"

"Abhor you ! Dearest – dearest and most divine of women!"

"Wait!" she sobbed. "I've got myself and you into the most awful scrape you ever dreamed of by falling in love with you at first sight!"

And she turned her face closer to his shoulder and slipped one desperate little hand into his.

ABOUT two o'clock that afternoon Sayre rushed into camp with his scanty hair on end.

Langdon, who had been attempting to boil a blank-book for dinner, gazed at him in consternation.

"What is it? Bears, William?" he asked fearfully. "D-d-don't be f-f-frightened; I'll stand by you."

"It isn't bears, you simp! I've just unearthed the most colossal conspiracy of the century! Curtis, things are happening in these woods that are incredible, abominable, horrible – "

" What is happening?" faltered Langdon, turning paler. "Murder?"

"Worse! They've got Willett and the others! She admitted it to me – "

"Hey?"

"Willett and Carrick and the others!" shouted Sayre, gesticulating. "They've caught 'em all! She said so! I – "

"They? She? Who's caught what? Who's 'they'? What it is? Who's 'she'? What are you talking about, anyway?"

"Amourette told me – "

"Amourette? Who the deuce is Amourette?"

"I don't know. Shut up! My head's spinning like a gyroscope. All I know is that I want to marry her and she won't let me – and I believe she would if I had a reliable hair-restorer and wasn't near-sighted – but she ran away and got inside the fence and locked the gate."

"Are you drunk?" demanded Langdon, "or merely frolicsome?"

" I don't know. I guess I am. I'm about everything else. What do I know about anything anyway? Nothing!"

He began to run around in circles; Langdon, having seen similar symptoms in demented cats, regarded him with growing alarm.

"I tell you it's an outrageous social condition which tolerates such doings!" shouted Sayre. "It's a perfectly monstrous state of things! Nine handsome men out of ten are fatheads! I told her so! I tried to point out to her – but she wouldn't listen – she wouldn't listen!"

Langdon stared at him, jaw agape. Then:

"Quit that ghost-dancing and talk sense," he ventured.

"Do you think that men are going to stand for it?" yelled Sayre, waving his hands, "ordinary, decent, God-fearing, everyday young men like you and me? If this cataclysmic cult gains ground among American women – if these exasperating suffragettes really intend to carry out any such programme, everybody on earth will resemble everybody else – like those wax figures marked 'neat,' 'imported,' and 'nobby'! And I told Amourette that, too; but she wouldn't listen – she wouldn't lis – My God! Why am I bald?"

He swung his arms like a pair of flails and advanced distractedly upon Langdon, who immediately retreated.

"Come back here," he said. "I want to picture to you the horrors that are going on in your native land! You ought to know. You've got to know!"

"Certainly, old man," quavered Langdon, keeping a tree between them. "But don't come any closer or I'll scream."

"Do you think I'm nutty?"

"Oh, not at all – not at all," said Langdon soothingly. "Probably the wafers disagreed with you."

"Curtis, wouldn't it rock any man's equilibrium to fall head over heels in love with a girl inside of ten minutes? I merely ask you, man to man."

"It sure would, dear friend – "

"And then to see that divine girl almost ready to love you in return – see it perfectly, plainly? And have her tell you that she could learn to care for you if your hair wasn't so thin and you didn't wear eye-glasses? By Jinks! That was too much! I'll leave it to you — wasn't it?"

Langdon swallowed hard and watched his friend fixedly.

"And then," continued Sayre, grinding his teeth, " then she told me about Willett!"

"Hey?"

"Oh, the whole thing is knocked in the head from a newspaper standpoint. They've all written home. They're married – or on the point of it – "

"What!"

"But that isn't what bothers me. What do I care about this job, or any other job, since I've seen the only girl on earth that I could ever stay home nights for! And to think that she ran away from me and I'm never to see her again because I'm near-sighted and partly bald!"

He waved his arms distractedly.

"But, by the gods and demons!" he cried, "I'm not going to stand for her going hunting with that man-net! If she catches any insufferable pup in it I'll go insane!"

Langdon's eyes rolled and he breathed heavily.

"Old man," he ventured, kindly, "don't you think you'd better lie down and try to take a nice little nap – "

Sayre instantly chased him around the tree and caught him.

"Curt," he said savagely, "get over the idea that there's anything the matter with me mentally except love and righteous indignation. I am in love; and it hurts. I'm indignant, because those people are treating my sex with an outrageous and high-handed effrontery that would bring the blush of impotent rage to any masculine cheek!"

"What people?" said the other warily. "You needn't answer till you get your wits back."

"They're back, Curt; that twelve-foot fence of heavy elephant-proof wire which we noticed in the forest day before yesterday isn't the fencing to a game park. It encloses a thousand acres belonging to the New Race University. Did you know that?"

"What's The New Race University?" asked Langdon, astonished.

"You won't believe it – but, Curtis, it's a reservation for the – the p-p-propagation of a new and s-s-symmetrically p-p-proportioned race of g-g-god-like human beings! It's a deliberate attempt at cold-blooded scientific selection – an insult to every bald-headed, near-sighted, thin-shanked young man in the United States!"

"William," said the other, coaxingly, "you had better lie down and let me make some wafer soup for you."

"You listen to me. I'm getting calmer now. I want to tell you about these New Race women and their University and Amourette and Reginald Willett and the whole devilish business."

"Is there – is there really such a thing, William? You would not tell me a bind like that just to make a goat of me, would you?"

"No, I wouldn't. There is such a thing."

"Did you see it?"

"No, I – "

"How do you know?"

"Amourette told me – shamelessly, defiantly, adorably! It was organised in secret out of the most advanced and determined as well as the most healthy, vigorous, and physically beautiful of all the suffragettes in North America. One of their number happened to own a thousand acres here before the State took the rest for its park. And here they have come, dozens and dozens of them – to attend the first summer session of the New Race University."