Quietly, treading softly, we mounted the veranda steps, slipped the Judas-key into the front door lock and let ourselves into Mrs. Chetwynde’s hall. “This way, if you please, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin ordered, plucking me by the sleeve. “If we seat ourselves in the drawing-room we shall have an uninterrupted view of both stairs and hall, yet remain ourselves in shadow. That is well, for we have come to see, not to be seen.”
“I feel like a malefactor—” I began in a nervous whisper, but he cut me off sharply.
“Quiet!” he ordered in a low breath. “Observe the moon, if you please, my friend. Is it not already almost peering through yonder window?”
I glanced toward the hall window before which the black statuette stood and noticed that the edge of the lunar disk was beginning to show through the opening, and long silver beams were commencing to stream across the polished floor, illuminating the figure and surrounding it with a sort of cold effulgence. The statue represented a female figure, gnarled and knotted, and articulated in a manner suggesting horrible deformity. It was of some kind of black stone or composition which glistened as though freshly anointed with oil, and from the shoulder-sockets three arms sprang out to right and left. A sort of pointed cap adorned the thing’s head, and about the pendulous breasts and twisting arms serpents twined and writhed, while a girdle of skulls, carved from gleaming white bone, encircled its waist. Otherwise it was nude, and nude with a nakedness which was obscene even to me, a medical practitioner for whom the human body held no secrets. As I watched the slowly growing patch of moonlight on the floor it seemed the black figure grew slowly in size, then shrunk again, and again increased in stature, while its twisting arms and garlands of contorting serpents appeared to squirm with a horrifying suggestion of waking into life.
I blinked my eyes several times, sure I was the victim of some optical illusion due to the moon rays against the silhouette of the statue’s blackness, but a sound from the stair-head brought my gaze upward with a quick, startled jerk.
Light and faltering, but unquestionably approaching, a soft step sounded on the uncarpeted stairs, nearer, nearer, until a tall, slow-moving figure came into view at the staircase turn. Swathed from breast to insteps in a diaphanous black silk night-robe, a pair of golden-strapped boudoir sandals on her little naked feet and a veil of black tulle shrouding her face, Idoline Chetwynde slowly descended the stairs, feeling her way carefully, as though the covering on her face obscured her vision. One hand was outstretched before her, palm up, fingers close together; in the other she bore a cluster of seven sticks of glowing, smoking Chinese punk spread fanwise between her fingers, and the heavy, cloyingly sweet fumes from the joss-sticks spiraled slowly upward, surrounding her veiled head in a sort of nimbus and trailing behind her like an evil-omened cloud.
Straight for the black image of the Indian goddess she trod, feeling each slow, careful step with faltering deliberation, halted a moment and inclined her head, then thrust the punk-sticks into a tiny bowl of sand which stood on the floor at the statue’s feet. This done, she stepped back five slow paces, slipped the gilded sandals off and placed her bared feet parallel and close together, then with a sudden forward movement dropped to her knees. Oddly, with that sense for noting trifles in the midst of more important sights which we all have, I noticed that when she knelt, instead of straightening her feet out behind her with her insteps to the floor, she bent her toes forward beneath her weight.
For an instant she remained kneeling upright before the black image, which was already surrounded by a heavy cloud of pink-smoke; then, with a convulsive gesture, she tore the veil from before her face and rent the robe from her bosom, raised her hands and crossed them, palms forward, in front of her brow and bent forward and downward till crossed hands and forehead rested on the waxed boards of the floor. For a moment she remained thus in utter self-abasement, then rose upright, flinging her hands high above her head, re-crossed them before her face and dropped forward in complete prostration once more. Again and again she repeated this genuflection, faster and faster, until it seemed her body swayed forward and back thirty or forty times a minute, and the soft pat-pat of her hands against the floor assumed a rhythmic, drum-like cadence as she began a faltering chant in eager, short-breathed syllables:
Ho, Devi, consort of Siva and daughter of Himavat!
Ho, Sakti, fructifying principle of the Universe!
Ho, Devi, the Goddess;
Ho, Gauri, the Yellow;
Ho, Uma, the Bright;
Ho, Durga, the Inaccessible;
Ho, Chandi, the Fierce;
Listen Thou to my Mantra!
Ho, Kali, the Black,
Ho, Kali, the Six-armed One of Horrid Form,
Ho, Thou about whose waist hangs a girdle of human skulls as if it were a precious pendant;
Ho, Malign Image of Destructiveness—
She paused an instant, seeming to swallow rising trepidation, gasped for breath a moment, like a timid but determined bather about to plunge into a pool of icy water, then:
Take Thou the soul and the body of this
woman prostrate before Thee,
Take Thou her body and her spirit, freely
and voluntarily offered,
Incorporate her body, soul and spirit into
Thy godhead to strengthen Thee in
Thine undertakings.
Freely is she given Thee, Divine Destroyer,
Freely, of her own accord, and without reservation,
Asking naught but to become a part of
Thee and of Thy supreme wickedness.
Ho, Kali of Horrid Form,
Ho, Malign Image of Destructiveness,
He, eater-up of all that is good,
Ho, disseminator of all which is wicked
Listen Thou to my Mantra!
“Grand Dieu, forgive her invincible ignorance; she knows not what she says!” de Grandin muttered beside me, but made no movement to stop her in her sacrilegious rite.
I half rose from my chair to seize the frenzied woman and drag her from her knees, but he grasped my elbow in a viselike grip and drew me back savagely. “Not now, foolish one!” he commanded in a sibilant whisper. And so we watched the horrid ceremony to its close.
For upward of a quarter-hour, Idoline Chetwynde continued her prostrations before the heathen idol, and, either because the clouds drifting across the moon’s face played tricks with the light streaming through the hall window, or because my eyes grew undependable from the strain of watching the spectacle before me, it seemed as though some hovering, shifting pall of darkness took form in the corners of the room and wavered forward like a sheet of wind-blown sable cloth until it almost enveloped the crouching woman, then fluttered back again. Three or four times I noted this phenomenon, then, as I was almost sure it was no trick of lighting or imagination, the moon, sailing serenely in the autumn sky, passed beyond the line of the window, an even tone of shadow once more filled the hall, and Mrs. Chetwynde sank forward on her face for the final time, uttered a weak, protesting little sound, half-way between a moan and a whimper, and lay there, a lifeless, huddled heap at the foot of the graven image, her white arms and feet protruding from the black folds of her robe and showing like spots of pale light against the darkness of the floor.
Once more I made to rise and take her up, but again de Grandin restrained me. “Not yet, my friend,” he whispered. “We must see the tragic farce played to its conclusion.”
For a few minutes we sat there in absolute silence; then, with a shuddering movement, Mrs. Chetwynde regained consciousness, rose slowly and dazedly to her feet, resumed her sandals, and walked falteringly toward the stairs.
Quick and silent as a cat, de Grandin leaped across the room, passed within three feet of her and seized a light chair, thrusting it forward so that one of its spindle legs barred her path.
Never altering her course, neither quickening nor reducing her shuffling walk, the young woman proceeded, collided with the obstructi
on, and would have stumbled had not de Grandin snatched away the chair as quickly as he had thrust it forward. With never a backward look, with no exclamation of pain—although the contact must have hurt her cruelly—without even a glance at the little Frenchman who stood half an arm’s length from her, she walked to the stairs, felt for the bottommost tread a second, then began a slow ascent.
“Très bon!” de Grandin muttered as he restored the chair to its place and took my elbow in a firm grip, guiding me down the hall and through the front door.
“What in heaven’s name does it all mean?” I demanded as we regained my car. “From what I’ve just seen I’d have no hesitancy in signing commitment papers to incarcerate Mrs. Chetwynde in an institution for the insane—the woman’s suffering from a masochistic mania, no doubt of it—but why the deuce did you try to trip her up with a chair?”
“Softly, my friend,” he replied, touching fire to a vile-smelling French cigarette and puffing furiously at it. “Did you help commit that poor girl to an insane asylum you would be committing a terrible crime, no less. Normal she is not, but her abnormality is entirely subjective. As for the chair, it was the test of her condition. Like you, I had a faint fear her actions were due to some mental breakdown, but did you notice her walk? Parbleu, was it the walk of a person in possession of his faculties? I say no! And the chair proved it. When she did stumble against it, though it must have caused her tender body much pain, she neither faltered nor cried out. The machinery which telegraphed the sensation of hurt from her leg to her brain did suffer a short-circuit. My friend, she was in a state of complete anesthesia as regarded the outward world. She was, how do you say—”
“Hypnotized?” I suggested.
“U’m, perhaps. Something like that; although the controlling agent was one far, far different from any you have seen in the psychological laboratory, my friend.”
“Then—”
“Then we would do well not to speculate too deeply until we have more pieces of evidence to fit into the picture-puzzle of this case. Tomorrow morning we shall call on Madame Chetwynde, if you please.”
We did. The patient was markedly worse. Great lavender circles showed under her eyes, and her face, which I had thought as pale as any countenance could be in life, was even a shade paler than theretofore. She was so weak she could hardly lift her hand in greeting, and her voice was barely more than a whisper. On her left leg, immediately over the fibula, a great patch of violet bruise showed plainly the effects of her collision with the chair. Throughout the pretty, cozy little cottage there hung the faint aroma of burnt joss-sticks.
“Look well, my friend,” de Grandin ordered in a whisper as we descended the stairs; “observe the mark you made behind the statue’s head no later than yesterday.”
I paused before the horrid thing, closed one eye and sighted from the tip of its pointed cap to the scratch I had made on the woodwork behind it. Then I turned in amazement to my companion. Either my eye was inaccurate or I had made incorrect measurements the previous day. According to yesterday’s marks on the woodwork the statue had grown fully two inches in height.
De Grandin met my puzzled look with an unwavering stare, as he replied to my unspoken question: “Your eye does not deceive you, my friend; the hell-hag’s effigy has enhanced.”
“But—but,” I stammered, “that can’t be!”
“Nevertheless, it is.”
“But, good heavens, man; if this keeps up—”
“This will not keep up, my friend. Either the devil’s dam takes her prey or Jules de Grandin triumphs. The first may come to pass; but my wager is that the second occurs.”
“But, for the Lord’s sake! What can we do?”
“We can do much for the Lord’s sake, my friend, and He can do much for ours, if it be His will. What we can do, we will; no more and certainly no less. Do you make your rounds of mercy, Friend Trowbridge, and beseech the so excellent Nora to prepare an extra large apple tart for dinner, as I shall undoubtlessly bring home a guest. Me, I hasten, I rush, I fly to New York to consult a gentleman I met at the Medical Society dinner the other night. I shall get back when I return, but, if that be not in time for an early dinner, it will be no fault of Jules de Grandin’s. Adieu, my friend, and may good luck attend me in my errand. Cordieu, but I shall need it!”
“DR. TROWBRIDGE, MAY I present Dr. Wolf?” de Grandin requested that evening, standing aside to permit a tall, magnificently built young man to precede him through the doorway of my consulting-room. “I have brought him from New York to take dinner with us, and—perhaps—to aid us in that which we must do tonight without fail.”
“How do you do, Dr. Wolf?” I responded formally, taking the visitor’s hand in mine, but staring curiously at him the while. Somehow the name given by de Grandin did not seem at all appropriate. He was tall, several inches over six feet, with an enormous breadth of shoulder and extraordinary depth of chest. His face, disproportionately large for even his great body, was high-cheeked and unusually broad, with a jaw of implacable squareness, and the deep-set, burning eyes beneath his overhanging brows were of a peculiarly piercing quality. There was something in the impassive nobility and steadfastness of purpose in that face which reminded me of the features of the central allegorical figure in Franz Stuck’s masterpiece, War.
Something of my thought must have been expressed in my glance, for the young man noticed it and a smile passed swiftly across his rugged countenance, leaving it calm again in an instant. “The name is a concession to civilization, Doctor,” he informed me. “I began life under the somewhat unconventional sobriquet of ‘Johnny Curly Wolf,’ but that hardly seemed appropriate to my manhood’s environment, so I have shortened the name to its greatest common divisor—I’m a full-blooded Dakotah, you know.”
“Indeed?” I replied lamely.
“Yes. I’ve been a citizen for a number of years, for there are certain limitations on the men of my people who retain their tribal allegiance which would hamper me greatly in my lifework. My father became wealthy by grace of the white man’s bounty and the demands of a growing civilization for fuel-oil, and he had the good judgment to have me educated in an Eastern university instead of one of the Indian training schools. An uncle of mine was a tribal medicine man and I was slated to follow in his footsteps, but I determined to graft the white man’s scientific medicine onto my primitive instruction. Medical work has appealed to me ever since I was a little shaver and was permitted to help the post surgeon at the agency office. I received my license to practice in ’14, and was settling down to a study of pulmonary diseases when the big unpleasantness broke out in Europe.”
He smiled again, somewhat grimly this time. “My people have been noted for rather bloody work in the old days, you know, and I suppose the call of my lineage was too strong for me. At any rate, I was inside a Canadian uniform and overseas within two months of the call for Dominion troops, and for three solid years I was in the thick of it with the British. When we came in I was transferred to the A.E.F., and finished my military career in a burst of shrapnel in the Argonne. I’ve three silver bones in each leg now and am drawing half-compensation from the government every month. I indorse the check over to the fund to relieve invalid Indian veterans of the army who aren’t as well provided with worldly goods by Standard Oil as I am.”
“But are you practising in New York now, Doctor?” I asked.
“Only as a student. I’ve been taking some special post-graduate work in diseases of the lungs and posterior poliomyelitis. As soon as my studies are completed I’m going west to devote my life and fortune to fighting those twin scourges of my people.”
“Just so,” de Grandin cut in, unable longer to refrain from taking part in the conversation. “Dr. Wolf and I have had many interesting things to speak of during our trip from New York, Friend Trowbridge, and now, if all is prepared, shall we eat?”
The young Indian proved a charming dinner companion. Finely educated and highly cultured, he was indued
with extraordinary skill as a raconteur, and his matter-of-fact stories of the “old contemps’” titanic struggle from the Marne and back, night raids in the trenches and desperate hand-to-hand fights in the blackness of No Man’s Land, of the mud and blood and silent heroism of the dressing-stations and of the phantom armies which rallied to the assistance of the British at Mons were colorful as the scenes of some old Spanish tapestry. Dinner was long since over and eleven o’clock had struck, still we lingered over our cigars, liqueurs and coffee in the drawing-room. It was de Grandin who dragged us back from the days of ’15 with a hasty glance at the watch strapped to his wrist.
“Parbleu, my friends,” he exclaimed, “it grows late and we have a desperate experiment to try before the moon passes the meridian. Come, let us be about our work.”
I looked at him in amazement, but the young Indian evidently understood his meaning, for he rose with a shrug of his broad shoulders and followed my diminutive companion out into the hall where a great leather kit bag which bore evidence of having accompanied its owner through Flanders and Picardy rested beside the hall rack. “What’s on the program?” I demanded, trailing in the wake of the other two, but de Grandin thrust hat and coat into my hands, exclaiming:
“We go to Madame Chetwynde’s again, my friend. Remember what you saw about this time last night? Cordieu, you shall see that which has been vouchsafed to few men before another hour has passed, or Jules de Grandin is wretchedly mistaken!”
Piling my companions into the back seat, I took the wheel and drove through the still, moonlit night toward the Chetwynde cottage. Half an hour later we let ourselves quietly into the house with de Grandin’s duplicate key and took our station in the darkened parlor once more.
The Horror on the Links Page 48