Special Messenger
By Robert W. Chambers
About five o’clock that evening, a Rhode Island battery rattled through the village and parked six dusty guns in a pasture occupied by some astonished cows. A little later, the cavalry arrived, riding slowly up the tree-shaded street and escorted by every darky and every dog in the countryside. The clothing of this regiment was a little out of the ordinary. Instead of the usual campaign headgear, the troopers wore forage caps strapped under their chins, heavy visors turned down, and their officers were conspicuous in fur-trimmed hussar tunics slung from the shoulders of dark-blue shell jackets.
Still, most unusual and most interesting of all, a mounted cavalry band rode ahead, led by a bandmaster who sat his horse like a colonel of regulars—a slim young man with considerable yellow and gold on his faded blue sleeves and an easy manner of swinging forward his heavy cut-and-thrust sabre as he guided the column through the metropolitan labyrinths of Sandy River. Sandy River had seen and scowled at Yankee cavalry before, but never before had the inhabitants had an opportunity to ignore a mounted band and bandmaster. There was, of course, no cheering; a handkerchief fluttered from a gallery here and there, but Sandy River was loyal only in spots, and the cavalry pressed past groups of silent people, encountering the averted heads or scornful eyes of young girls and the cold hatred in the faces of grey-haired gentlewomen, who turned their backs as the ragged guidons bobbed past. The village street rang with the clink-clank of scabbards and rattle of Spencer carbines.
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Robert W. Chambers
Robert William Chambers (May 26, 1865 – December 16, 1933) was an American artist and fiction writer best known for his book of short stories, The King in Yellow, published in 1895.
Biography
Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers (1827–1911), a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton (1842–1913). His parents met when his mother was twelve, and William P. was interning with her father, Joseph Boughton, a prominent corporate lawyer. Eventually, the two formed the law firm Chambers and Boughton, which continued to prosper after Joseph died in 1861. Robert Chambers’s great-grandfather, William Chambers (birth unknown), a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, was married to Amelia Saunders (1765–1822), a great-granddaughter of Tobias Saunders of Westerly, Rhode Island. The couple moved from Westerly to Greenfield, Massachusetts, and then to Galway, New York, where their son, William Chambers (1798–1874), was born. The second William graduated from Union College at 18 and then went to a college in Boston, where he studied medicine. Upon graduating, he and his wife, Eliza P. Allen (1793–1880), a direct descendant of Roger Williams, the founder of Providence, Rhode Island, were among the first settlers of Broadalbin, New York. His brother was the architect Walter Boughton Chambers. Chambers was first educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and then entered the Art Students’ League at around twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was a fellow student.
Chambers studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian from 1886 to 1893, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. On his return to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue magazines. Then, for reasons unclear, he devoted his time to writing and producing his first novel, In the Quarter, written in 1887 in Munich. His most famous, and perhaps most meritorious, effort is The King in Yellow, a collection of Art Nouveau short stories published in 1895. This included several famous weird short stories connected by the theme of a fictitious drama of the same title, which drives those who read it insane. E. F. Bleiler described The King in Yellow as one of the most important works of American supernatural fiction. It was also enormously admired by H. P. Lovecraft and his circle. Chambers returned to the weird genre in his later short story collections The Maker of Moons, The Mystery of Choice, and The Tree of Heaven, but none earned him as much success as The King in Yellow. Some of Chambers’s work contains science fiction elements, such as In Search of the Unknown and Police!!!, about a zoologist who encounters monsters.
Robert W. Chambers
