Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (96 page)

‘That,’ said Pelletier, ‘is what I meant by the benefit of the doubt. Thinking about this for the moment in terms of the limitations, the incompleteness, of human knowledge and the short distance we have managed to travel along the road to civilization, I should say that there is – a responsibility.’

‘What shall I do – if anything?’ said I, a little taken aback at this downrightness.

Again Dr Pelletier looked at me for a long moment, and nodded his head several times. Then: ‘Burn the thing, Canevin. Fire – the solvent. Do you comprehend me? Have I said enough?’

I thought over this through the space of several silent minutes. Then, a trifle hesitantly because I was not at all sure that I had grasped the implications which lay below this very simple suggestion –

‘You mean – ?’

‘That if there is anything in it, Canevin – that benefit of the doubt again, you see – if, to put such an outrageous hypothesis into a sane phrase, the life, the soul, the personality remains unreleased, and that because of Camilla Macartney’s use of a pragmatic “magical” skill such as is operative today over there in the hills of Haiti; to name only one focus of this particular
cultus
– well, then . . . ’

This time it was I who nodded; slowly, several times. After that I sat quietly in my chair for long minutes in the little silence which lay between us. We had said, it seemed to me, everything that was to be said. I – we – had gone as far as human limitations permitted in the long investigation of this strange affair. Then I summoned my houseman, Stephen Penn.

‘Stephen,’ said I, ‘go and find out if the charcoal pots in the kitchen have burned out since breakfast. I imagine that about this time there would be a little charcoal left to burn out in each of them. If so, put all the charcoal into one pot and bring it out here on the gallery. If not, fix me a new charcoal fire in the largest pot. Fill it about half full.’

‘Yes, sar,’ said Stephen, and departed on this errand.

Within three minutes the excellent Stephen was back. He set down on the tile floor beside my chair the largest of my four kitchen charcoal pots. It was half full of brightly glowing embers. I sent him away before I went into the house to fetch the painting. It is a curious fact that this faithful servitor of mine, a
zambo
or medium-brown Negro, and a native of St Thomas, had manifested an increasing aversion to anything like contact with or even sight of the old picture, an aversion dating from that afternoon when he had discovered it, three years before, in the lumber room of my Santa Cruzian hired residence.

Then I brought it out and laid it flat, after clearing a place for it, on the large plain table which stands against the wall of the house on my gallery. Pelletier came over and stood beside me, and in silence we looked long and searchingly at Camilla Macartney’s panorama for the last time.

Then, with the sharp, small blade of my pocketknife, I cut it cleanly through again and again until it was in seven or eight strips. A little of the brittle old paint cracked and flaked off in this process. Having piled the strips one on top of another, I picked up the topmost of the three or four spread newspapers which I had placed under the canvas to save the table top from my knife point, and these flakes and chips I poured first off the newspaper’s edge upon the glowing embers. These bits of dry, ancient pigment hissed, flared up, and then quickly melted away. Then I burned the strips very carefully until all but one were consumed.

This, perhaps because of some latent dramatic instinct whose existence until that moment I had never really suspected, was the one containing the figure of Saul Macartney. I paused, the strip in my hand, and looked at Pelletier. His face was inscrutable. He nodded his head at me, however, as though to encourage me to proceed and finish my task.

With perhaps a trifle of extra care I inserted the end of this last strip into the charcoal pot.

It caught fire and began to burn through precisely as its predecessors had caught and burned, and finally disintegrated into a light grayish ash. Then a very strange thing happened –

There was no slightest breath of air moving in that sheltered corner of the gallery. The entire solid bulk of the house sheltered it from the steady northeast trade – now at three in the afternoon at its lowest daily ebb, a mere wavering, tenuous pulsing.

And yet, at the precise instant when the solid material of that last strip had been transmuted by the power of the fire into the whitish, wavering ghost of material objects which we name ash – from the very center of the still brightly glowing charcoal embers there arose a thin, delicate wisp of greenish blue smoke which spiraled before our eyes under the impact of some obscure pulsation in the quiet air about us, then stiffened, as yet unbroken, into a taut vertical line, the upper end of which abruptly turned, curving down upon itself, completing the representation of the hangman’s noose; and then, instantly, this contour wavered and broke and ceased to be, and all that remained there before our fascinated eyes was a kitchen charcoal pot containing a now rapidly dulling mass of rose-colored embers.

Mrs Lorriquer

The late Ronald Firbank, British author, apostle of the light touch in literary treatment, put grass skirts upon the three lady heroines of his West Indian book,
Prancing Nigger
, as all persons who have perused that delicate romance of an unnamed West Indian island will doubtless remember. In so dressing Mrs Mouth, and her two attractive daughters, Mr Firbank was only twelve thousand miles out of the way, although that is not bad for anybody who writes about the West Indies – almost conservative, in fact. I, Gerald Canevin, have more than once reassured timid female inquirers, who had heard of our climate, but who were apprehensive of living among ‘those savages and cannibals!’

I have always suspected that Mr Firbank, to go back for a moment to that gentleman before dismissing him and his book, got his light-touch information about the West Indies from a winter tour aboard one of the great trans-Atlantic liners which, winters, are used for such purposes in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and which, in St Thomas, discharge their hundreds of ‘personally conducted’ tourists in swarms upon our innocent, narrow sidewalks, transforming the quiet, Old World town into a seething, hectic market-place for several hours every two weeks or so during a winter’s season there.

For, truth being stranger by far than any fiction, there
are
grass skirts – on such occasions – on St Thomas’s streets; piles and stacks of them, for sale to tourists who buy them avidly. I know of no more engaging sight in this world than a two hundred and fifty pound tourist-lady, her husband in the offing, his hand in his money-pocket, chaffering with one of our Cha-Cha women with her drab, flat face and tight-pulled. pulled, straight hair knotted at the back, for a grass skirt!

It appears that, some years back, a certain iron-visaged spinster, in the employ of a social service agency, ‘took up’ the Cha-Cha women, seeking to brighten their lot, and, realizing that a certain native raffia grass had commercial possibilities, taught them to make Polynesian grass skirts of it. Thereafter and ever since there has been a vast plague of these things about the streets of St Thomas whenever a tourist vessel comes into our harbor under the skilled pilotage of Captain Simmons or Captain Caroc, our pilots.

I open this strange tale of Mrs Lorriquer in this offhand fashion because my first sight of that compact, gray-haired little American gentlewoman was when I passed her, in the very heart and midst of one of these tourist invasions, rather indignantly trying to get rid of an insistent vendor who seemed possessed to drape her five feet two, and one hundred and sixty pounds, in a five-colored grass skirt, and who would not be appeased and desist. As I was about to pass I overheard Mrs Lorriquer say, with both indignation and finality: ‘But, I’m not a tourist – I live here!’

That effectually settled the grass-skirt seller, who turned her attention to the tourists forthwith.

I had paused, almost unconsciously, and found myself face to face with Mrs Lorriquer, whom I had not seen before. She smiled at me and I smiled back.

‘Will you allow another permanent resident to rescue you from this mêlée?’ I inquired, removing my hat.

‘It is rather like a Continental
mardi gras
, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Lorriquer, taking my arm.

‘Where are you staying?’ I inquired. ‘Are you at the Grand Hotel?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Lorriquer. ‘We have a house, the Criqué place, half-way up Denmark Hill. We came down the day before yesterday, on the
Nova Scotia
, and we expect to be here all winter.’

‘I am Gerald Canevin,’ said I, ‘and I happen to be your very near neighbor. Probably we shall see a good deal of each other. If I can be of any assistance – ’

‘You have, already, Mr Canevin,’ said Mrs Lorriquer, whimsically.

I supposed at once she referred to my ‘rescue’ of her from the tourist mob, but, it seemed, she had something quite different in her mind.

‘It was because of some things of yours we had read,’ she went on, ‘that Colonel Lorriquer and I – and my widowed daughter, Mrs Preston – decided to spend the winter here,’ she finished.

‘Indeed!’ said I. ‘Then, perhaps you will allow me to continue the responsibility. When would it meet your convenience for me to call and meet the Colonel and Mrs Preston?’

‘Come any time,’ said Mrs Lorriquer, ‘come to dinner, of course. We are living very informally.’

We had reached the post-office, opposite the Grand Hotel, and here, doubtless according to instructions, stood Mrs Lorriquer’s car. I handed her in, and the kindly-faced, short, stout, little sixty-year-old lady was whirled away around the corner of the hotel toward one of the side roads which mount the precipitous sides of St Thomas’s best residential district.

I called the following afternoon, and thus inaugurated what proved to be a very pleasant aquaintanceship.

Colonel Lorriquer, a retired army engineer, was a man of seventy, extraordinarily well preserved, genial, a ripened citizen of the world. He had, it transpired on acquaintance, had a hand in many pieces of engineering, in various parts of the known world, and had spent several years on that vast American enterprise, the construction of the Panama Canal. Mrs Preston, whose aviator husband had met his death a few months previously in the exercise of his hazardous profession, turned out to be a very charming person, still stunned and over-burdened with the grief of her bereavement, and with two tiny child-ren. I gathered that it was largely upon her account that the Colonel and Mrs Lorriquer had come to St Thomas that winter. Being a West Indian enthusiast, it seemed to me that the family had used excellent judgment. There could be no better place for them under those circumstances. There is that in the charm and perfect climate of the Northern Lesser Antilles which heals the wounds of the heart, even though, as they say, when one stays too long there is Lethe.

We settled down in short order to a more or less intimate acquaintanceship. The Lorriquers, and Mrs Preston, were so to speak, ‘my sort of people’. Many mutual acquaintances developed as we became better acquainted. We found much in common.

I have set down all this preliminary portion of this story thus in detail, because I have wished to emphasize, if possible, the fact that never, in all my experience with the bizarre which this human scene offers to the openminded observer, has it occurred to me to find any greater contrast than that which existed between Mrs Lorriquer, short, stout, matter-of-fact, kindly little lady that she was, and the quite utterly incredible thing which – but I must not, I simply must not, in this case, allow myself to get ahead of my story. God knows it is strange enough not to need any ‘literary devices’ to make it seem stranger.

The Lorriquers spent a good deal of the time which, under the circumstances, hung upon their hands, in card-playing. All three members of the family were expert Auction and Contract players. Naturally, being quite close at hand, I became a fourth and many evenings not otherwise occupied were spent, sometimes at my house, sometimes at theirs, about the card-table.

The Colonel and I played together, against the two ladies, and this arrangement was very rarely varied. Occasionally Mrs Squire, a middle-aged woman who had known the Lorriquers at home in the States, and who had an apartment at the Grand Hotel for the winter, joined us, and then, usually, Mrs Preston gave up her place and Mrs Squire and I paired against the Colonel and his wife.

Even after the lapse of several years, I confess that I find myself as I write, hesitant, reluctant somehow, to set down the beginning of the strange discrepancy which first indicated what was to come to light in our innocent social relationship that winter. I think I can best do so, best open up this incredible thing, by recording a conversation between me and Mrs Squire as we walked, one moonlit midnight, slowly down the hill toward the Grand Hotel.

We had finished an evening at the Lorriquers’, and Mrs Lorriquer had been especially, a little more than ordinarily, rude over the cards. Somehow, I can not say how it occurred, we discussed this strange anomaly in our hostess, usually the most kindly, simple, hospitable soul imaginable.

‘She only does it when she plays cards,’ remarked Mrs Squire. ‘Otherwise, as you have said, Mr Canevin, she is the very soul of kindliness, of generosity. I have never been able to understand, and I have known the Lorriquers for more than ten years – how a woman of her character and knowledge of the world can act as she does over the card-table. It would be quite unbearable, quite utterly absurd – would it not – if one didn’t know how very sweet and dear she really is.’