Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (80 page)

Weelum Palgrave is a Cha-Cha, b’la-hoo!

Him are a koind of a half-a-Jew

Then the refrain:

Him go back to Trebizond.

There were, in these apparently Mother Goose words, various hidden meanings. ‘B’la-hoo’, a contraction from ‘bally-hoo’, is the name of a small, hard-fleshed, surface-water fish, not unlike the flying-fish in consistency, and living, like its winged neighbor, on the surface of deeps. As used in the verses it intensified ‘Cha-Cha’. A Cha-Cha – so-called, it is currently believed in St Thomas, because of the peculiar sneezing nasality with which these French poor-whites enunciate their Norman French – is one of a peculiarly St Thomian community, originally emigrés from St Bartholomew’s, now so thoroughly inbred as to look all alike – brave and hardy fishermen who cannot swim, West Indian poor-whites of the lowest class, like the Barbadian ‘red-legs’. A Cha-Cha B’la-hoo means a particularly Cha-Charish Cha-Cha; an indubitable Cha-Cha. The application of such a term to the consul-general meant that he was of the lowest sort of humanity the St Thomian Negro could name.

Being ‘half-a-Jew’ did not at all mean that Mr Palgrave partook, as the hearer might easily imagine, of any characteristics believed to inhere in the co-religionists of Moses and Aaron. The phrase had a far deeper – and lower – significance than that. The significant portion of it was that word ‘half’. That, stated plainly, meant an aspersion upon the legitimacy of Mr Palgrave’s birth. It was, that epithet, essentially a ‘
tu quoque
’ type of insult –
you’re another
! It referred directly to one of Mr Palgrave’s mordant aspersions upon the quality of the St Thomians, or, rather, upon the class, the Negroes, which was now retaliating. It was not the usual custom of these Negroes to marry. It had not been their custom in Africa. Their Danish overlords did not compel it here. Why should this foreigner, this
Bukra
of the double-chin, cast his aspersions upon them? How was he concerned? Not at all, was Black Quashee’s obvious reply, according to the logic of the situation. His equally obvious retort, to drum-beats, was:

Him are a koind of a half-a-Jew!

But – the real gist of the retort, compared to which these glancing blows at his self-esteem were mere thrusts of the
banderillo
, goads – was the refrain:

Him go back to Trebizond.

It was not, precisely, a command. It was still less a statement of accomplished fact. Mr Palgrave had not gone back to his esteemed Armenian post, Mr Palgrave had no intention whatever of applying to Downing Street for a transfer back there. It was – a suggestion.

It was that refrain which La Touche Penn had been whistling as he walked demurely away down the glaring white road under the blazing sunlight. Mr Palgrave stared angrily after the slouching figure; stared after it, an uncompromising scowl upon his handsome, florid features, until it disappeared abruptly around a sudden turn halfway down the hill. Then he mounted the step of his barouche and settled himself in the exact center of the sun-heated leather cushion, a linen dust-cloth over his knees.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and later, at five o’clock, it was Mr Palgrave’s intention to call at Government House. Governor Arendrup was receiving that afternoon, as he did once a month, but between now and then there was an interval of an hour and a half which the consul-general meant to spend in making duty calls.

Claude, very erect, drove carefully down the hill, turned the sharp corner around which La Touche Penn had disappeared, and thence, by a devious route, descended the slight slope leading to the chief thoroughfare along the sea’s edge. Here he turned to the left, passed that massive structure, the Grand Hotel, driving between it and Emancipation Park, turned once more to the left, and soon the wiry little carriage-horses were sweating up one of Charlotte Amalia’s steepest hills. They moved carefully around hair-breadth turns guarded by huge clumps of cacti, and at last emerged near the summit of Government Hill. Claude stopped before the entrance to a massive residence perched atop a still higher rise in the land.

Mr Palgrave climbed steps to the stone and cement terrace of this house and gave to the expressionless black butler his card for Mrs Talbot. The servant took his stick and hat and led the way up a flight of stairs to Mrs Talbot’s drawingroom. As the consul-general mounted behind his ebony guide he became aware of a tap-tapping, a light sound as though made by the fingers of a supple hand on a kitchen pan. The tapping went: ‘oóm-bom, bom; oóm-bom, bom; oóm-bom, bom’, over and over, monotonously. Accompanying this beat was a light, almost childish, voice; one of the black maids, probably, in some distant portion of the great house. The tune was the tune La Touche Penn had been whistling as he slouched down the hill. Mr Palgrave mentally supplied the words.

Weelum Palgrave is a Cha-Cha, b’la-hoo!

Him are a koind of a half-a-Jew –

Him go back to Trebizond!

It was maddening, this sort of thing. It should not be allowed. Here, in Mrs Talbot’s house! A choleric red disfigured Mr Palgrave’s handsome face as he walked into the drawing-room. It took him several minutes to reassume his accustomed urbanity.

Something Mrs Talbot said, too, was annoying.

‘I am sure I cannot say where I acquired the idea, Mr Palgrave, but – somehow – it came to me that you were not remaining with us; that you were expecting to go back; to Armenia, was it not?’

‘I have no such intention – I assure you.’ Mr Palgrave felt himself suddenly pink in the face. He used his handkerchief. May, in this climate, is very warm, Mrs Talbot hoped he would not mind the summer heat.

‘We find the sea bathing refreshing,’ she had vouchsafed.

Mr Palgrave did not outstay the twenty-minute minimum for a duty call. As he descended the broad stairway he heard the tap-tapping once more, but now the words accompanying it were muted. There was no song. He found himself repeating the doggerel words to the tapping of that damnable pan.

Him go back to Trebizond.

Absurd! He should do nothing of the sort. Only fancy – blackamoors! To suggest such a thing – to him! He descended the steps to the roadway, a picture of complacent dignity.

A tiny barefooted black child strolled past, an empty kerosene-tin balanced on her kinky, kerchiefed head. The child, preoccupied with a wilted bougainvillea blossom which she held between her hands, hummed softly, a mere tuneless little murmur, barely audible on the freshening Trade Wind of mid-afternoon. Mr Palgrave, his perceptions singularly sensitive this afternoon, caught it, however. His directions for the next call were given to black Claude almost savagely.

Precisely at five he mounted the steps of Government House. He was saluted in form by the pair of Danish
gendarmes
, in their stiff Frederick the Great uniforms, from each side of the doorway. He subscribed his name and titles in the visitors’ book. He gave up his hat and stick to another saluting
gendarme
, and mounted the interior stairway to the great drawing-room above.

Here all St Thomas society congregated monthly at the governor’s reception, and with those who had arrived on time this afternoon the drawing-room was half filled. The Governor’s Band, outside on the east end of the iron gallery which runs along the front of Government House, started up an air. Officers, officials, the clergy, the town’s gentry, the other resident consuls, and the ladyfolk of all these, passed solemnly in review before the governor, stiff in his black clothes, shaking hands formally in his box-like frock coat, his spotless white kid gloves.

Mr Palgrave, still ruffled from his afternoon’s experiences, greeted His Danish Majesty’s representative in this loyal colony with a stiffness quite equal to the governor’s, and passed within. Ladies seated at both ends of a vast mahogany table in the dining-room dispensed coffee and tea. Mounded along the table’s sides stood great silver trays of ‘spread’, half-sandwiches of white and brown bread covered with cheese, with preserves, with ground meats, with
liver-pastei
. At the sideboard Santa Cruz rum, made in the colony, French brandy imported from Martinique, and Danish beer in small bottles and served with fine pieces of ice in the glasses, were being rapidly dispensed by liveried Negro servants to a crowd which stood eight deep.

From this group a burly figure, that of Captain the Honorable William McMillin, detached itself and accosted Mr Palgrave. The captain, administrator of Great Fountain Estate over on Santa Cruz, here for the day on some estate business for his kinsmen the Comyns family who all lived in Scotland and for whom he managed their Santa Crucian sugar interests, had been as a freshly commissioned Cornet of Horse, one of Wellington’s officers more than fifty years before, at Waterloo. The old gentleman invited Mr Palgrave to a bottle of the Carlsburg beer, and the two Britons, provided with this refreshing beverage, sat down to talk together.

In their armchairs the two made a notable appearance, both being large-bodied, florid men, and the aged captain wearing, as was his custom on state occasions, his ancient scarlet military coat. Outside the great open French windows, the band members on the gallery, between pieces, made themselves heard as they arranged their music. Save for the bandmaster, Erasmus Petersen, a Dane, all were Negroes. Through the windows came minor musical sounds as a slide was shifted in an alto horn or as little runs and flutings tested the precision of a new tuning. In the midst of this, delicately, almost incidentally, the oboist ran his swart fingers over his silver keys, breathed into his instrument. A rippling, muted little quickstep came through the windows.

Weelum Palgrave is a Cha-Cha, b’la-hoo!’

Mr Palgrave suddenly shifted in his armchair. Then he remembered that he could not appear to notice this deliberate slap in the face, and, though suddenly empurpled, he sat quiet. He collected his wits, invited the captain to dinner that evening, and excused himself.

Claude, attentive for once, noted his emergence below, extricated his barouche, reached the steps where the two wooden-soldierlike
gendarmes
were saluting his master.

‘Home!’ said Mr Palgrave, acidly, stepping into the carriage.

That evening Mr Palgrave opened his grief to his fellow Briton, as to a person of assured position and integrity, the consul-general’s face quite purple between his vexation and the bottle of sound burgundy he had consumed at dinner.

The captain took his consul-general’s annoyance lightly.

‘Man, man!’ he expostulated. ‘Ye’re no so clearly accustomed to “Quashee” and his ways as mysel’, I do assure you. Why – there’s a song about
me
! My field-hands made it up, years ago. It runs:

Mars’ McMillin la’ fo’ me,

Loike him la’ to Waterloo!

‘And it means that I command them – that is to “la”, Mr Palgrave – the same as I gave commands at Waterloo – there were a precious few, I do assure you, sir. I was no more than a cornet at the time, my commission not two weeks old.’ The captain proceeded to pooh-pooh the Quashee songs as reason for serious annoyance.

But his explanations left Mr Palgrave cold.

‘Your Negroes do not – er –
insist
upon your returning to the Low Countries to fight Waterloo all over again!’ was his bitter comment. That suggestion that he return to Trebizond had bitten deep.

He had Trebizond on his mind when he was retiring that night and it is not strange that he went back there where he had spend two profitable years before being assigned to Charlotte Amalia, in his dreams. Somehow, as the strange distortion of the dream-state provides, he was identified with the sage Firdûsi, a great hero of Armenian legend, that same Firdûsi who had defied a Shah of Persia and refused to compose a history of his life at the imperial command.

Identified with Firdûsi, of whom he had heard many tales, Mr Palgrave suffered imprisonment in his dreams; was, like Firdûsi, summoned again and again into the Presence, always with refusal on his lips; always to be sent back to a place of confinement of increasing comfortlessness.

At last Palgrave-Firdûsi returned to an empty cell where for days he sat on the earthen floor, refusing to yield, to stultify himself. Then, on a gray morning, his jailer entered leading a blind slobbering Negro who sat on the floor opposite him. For an interminable period he suffered this disagreeable companionship. The Black was dumb as well as blind. He sat there, day after day, night after night, cross-legged on the hard floor.

At last Palgrave-Firdûsi could stand it no longer. He howled for his jailer, demanded audience. He was led to the throne room, his resolution dissipated, his one overwhelming desire to acquiesce – yes, yes; he would write – only let him be free of that slobbering horror which mewed to itself with its blank slab of a mouth. He threw himself face down before the throne.