A quick word from de Grandin gave Dr. Wolf his cue, and taking up his travel-beaten bag the young Indian let himself out of the house and paused on the porch. For a moment I saw his silhouette against the glass panel of the door, then a sudden movement carried him out of my line of vision, and I turned to watch the stairs down which I knew Idoline Chetwynde would presently come to perform her unholy rites of secret worship.
The ticking pulse-beats of the little ormolu clock on the mantelpiece sounded thunderous in the absolute quiet of the house; here and there a board squeaked and cracked in the gradually lowering temperature; somewhere outside, a motor horn tooted with a dismal, wailing note. I felt my nerves gradually tightening like the strings of a violin as the musician keys them up before playing, and tiny shivers of horripilation pursued each other down my spine and up my forearms as I sat waiting in the shadowy room.
THE LITTLE FRENCH CLOCK struck twelve sharp, silvery chimes. It had arrived, that hideous hour which belongs neither to the day which is dead nor to the new day stirring in the womb of Time, and which we call midnight for want of a better term. The moon’s pale visage slipped slowly into view through the panes of the window behind the Indian statue and a light, faltering step sounded on the stairs above us.
“Mon Dieu,” de Grandin whispered fervently, “grant that I shall not have made a mistake in my calculations!” He half rose from his chair, gazing fixedly at the lovely, unconscious woman walking her tranced march toward the repellent idol, then stepped softly to the front window and tapped lightly on its pane with his fingertips.
Once again we saw Idoline Chetwynde prostrate herself at the feet of the black statue; once more her fluttering, breathless voice besought the evil thing to take her soul and destroy her body; then, so faint I scarcely heard it through the droning of the praying woman’s words, the front door gave a soft click as it swung open on its hinges.
Young Dr. Wolf, once Johnny Curly Wolf, medicine man of the Dakotahs, stepped into the moonlit hall.
Now I understood why he had hidden himself in the shadows of the porch when he left the house. Gone were his stylishly cut American clothes, gone was his air of well-bred sophistication. It was not the highly educated, cultured physician and student who entered the Chetwynde home, but a medicine man of America’s primeval race in all the panoply of his traditional office. Naked to the waist he was, his bronze torso gleaming like newly molded metal from the furnace. Long, tight-fitting trousers of beaded buckskin encased his legs, and on his feet were the moccasins of his forefathers. Upon his head was the war-bonnet of eagle feathers, and his face was smeared with alternate streaks of white, yellow and black paint. In one hand he bore a bullhide tom-tom, and in his deep-set, smoldering eyes there burned the awful, deadly earnestness of his people.
Majestically he strode down the hall, paused some three or four paces behind the prostrate woman, then, raising his tom-tom above his head, struck it sharply with his knuckles.
Toom, toom, toom, toom! the mellow, booming notes sounded, again and still again. Bending slightly at the knees, he straightened himself, repeated the movement, quickened the cadence until he was rising and sinking a distance of six inches or so in a sort of stationary, bobbing dance. “Manitou, Great Spirit of my fathers!” he called in a strong, resonant voice. “Great Spirit of the forest dwellers and of the people of the plains, hear the call of the last of Thy worshipers:
Hear my prayer, O Mighty Spirit,
As I do the dance before Thee,
Do the dance my fathers taught me,
Dance it as they danced before me,
As they danced it in their lodges,
As they danced it at their councils
When of old they sought Thy succor.
Look upon this prostrate woman,
See her bow in supplication
To an alien, wicked spirit.
Thine she is by right of lineage,
Thine by right of blood and forebears.
In the cleanly air of heaven
She should make her supplication,
Not before the obscene statue
Of god of alien people.
Hear my prayer, O Mighty Spirit,
Hear, Great Spirit of my fathers,
Save this woman of Thy people,
Smite and strike and make impotent
Demons from across the water,
Demons vile and wholly filthy,
And not seemly for devotion
From a woman of Thy people.
The solemn, monotonous intoning ceased, but the dance continued. But now it was no longer a stationary dance, for, with shuffling tread and half-bent body, Johnny Curly Wolf was circling slowly about the Hindoo idol and its lone worshiper.
Something—a cloud, perhaps—drifted slowly across the moon’s face, obscuring the light which streamed into the hall. An oddly shaped cloud it was, something like a giant man astride a giant horse, and on his brow there seemed to be the feathered war-bonnet of the Dakotahs. The cloud grew in density. The moon rays became fainter and fainter, and finally the hall was in total darkness.
In the west there sounded the whistling bellow of a rising wind, shaking the casements of the house and making the very walls tremble. Deep and rumbling, growing louder and louder as it seemed to roll across the heavens on iron wheels, a distant peal of thunder sounded, increased in volume, finally burst in a mighty clap directly over our heads, and a fork of blinding, jagged lightning shot out of the angry sky. A shivering ring of shattered glass and of some heavy object toppling to a fall, a woman’s wild, despairing shriek, and another rumbling, crashing peal of thunder deafened me.
By the momentary glare of a second lightning-flash I beheld a scene stranger than any painted by Dante in his vision of the underworld. Seemingly, a great female figure crouched with all the ferocity of a tigress above the prostrate form of Idoline Chetwynde, its writhing, sextuple arms grasping at the woman’s prone body or raised as though to ward off a blow, while from the window looking toward the west there leaped the mighty figure of an Indian brave armed with shield and war-club.
Johnny Curly Wolf? No! For Johnny Curly Wolf circled and gyrated in the measures of his tribal ghost-dance, and in one hand he held his tom-tom, while with the other he beat out the rhythm of his dance-music.
It was but an instant that the lightning showed me this fantastic tableau, then all was darkness blacker than before, and a crashing of some stone thing shattered into half a thousand fragments broke through the rumble of the thunder.
“Lights! Grand Dieu, lights, Friend Trowbridge!” de Grandin screamed in a voice gone high and thin with hysteria.
I pressed the electric switch in the hall and beheld Johnny Curly Wolf, still in tribal costume, great beads of sweat dewing his brow, standing over the body of Idoline Chetwynde, the hall window-panes blown from their frame and scattered over the floor like tiny slivers of frozen moonlight, and, toppled from its pedestal and broken into bits almost as fine as powder, the black statue of Kali, Goddess of the East.
“Take her up, my friend,” de Grandin ordered me, pointing to Mrs. Chetwynde’s lifeless body. “Pick her up and restore her to her bed. Morbleu, but we shall have to attend her like a new-born infant this night, for I fear me her nerves have had a shock from which they will not soon recover!”
All night and far past daylight we sat beside Idoline Chetwynde’s bed, watching the faint color ebb and flow in her sunken checks, taking heedful count of her feebly beating pulse, administering stimulants when the tiny spark of waning life seemed about to flicker to extinction.
About ten o’clock in the morning de Grandin rose from his seat beside the bed and stretched himself like a cat rising from prolonged sleep. “Bon, très bon!” he exclaimed. “She sleeps. Her pulse, it is normal; her temperature, it is right. We can safely leave her now, my friends. Anon we shall call on her; but I doubt me if we shall have more to do than wish her felicitations on her so miraculous cure. Meantime, let us go. My poor, forgott
en stomach cries aloud reproaches on my so neglected mouth. I starve, I famish, I faint of inanition. Behold, I am already become but a wraith and a shadow!”
JULES DE GRANDIN DRAINED his third cup of coffee at a gulp and passed the empty vessel back for replenishment. “Parbleu, my friends,” he exclaimed, turning his quick, elfin smile from Dr. Wolf to me, “it was the beautiful adventure, was it not?”
“It might have been a beautiful adventure,” I agreed grudgingly, “but just what the deuce was it? The whole thing’s a mystery to me from beginning to end. What caused Mrs. Chetwynde’s illness in the first place, what was the cause of her insane actions, and what was it I saw last night? Was there really a thunderstorm that broke the black image, and did I really see—”
“But certainly, my excellent one,” he cut in with a smile as he emptied his cup and lighted a cigarette, “you did behold all that you thought you saw; no less.”
“But—”
“No buts, if you please, good friend. I well know you will tease for an explanation as a pussy-cat begs for food while the family dines, and so I shall enlighten you as best I can. To begin:
“When first you told me of Madame Chetwynde’s illness I knew not what to think, nor did I think anything in particular. Some of her symptoms made me fear she might have been the victim of a revenant, but there were no signs of blood-letting upon her, and so I dismissed that diagnosis. But as we descended the stairs after our first visit, I did behold the abominable statue in the hall. ‘Ah ha,’ I say to me, ‘what does this evil thing do here? Perhaps it makes the trouble with Madame Idoline?’ And so I look at it most carefully.
“My friends, Jules de Grandin has covered much land with his little feet. In the arctic snows and in the equatorial heat he has seen the sins and follies and superstitions of men, and learned to know the gods they worship. So he recognized that image for what it was. It is of the goddess Kali, tutelary deity of the Thags of India, whose worship is murder and whose service is bloodshed. She goes by many names, my friends: sometimes she is known as Devi, consort of Siva and daughter of Himavat, the Himalaya Mountains. She is the Sakti, or female energy of Siva, and is worshiped in a variety of forms under two main classes, according as she is conceived as a mild and beneficent or as a malignant deity. In her milder shapes besides Devi, ‘the goddess,’ she is called also Gauri, ‘the yellow,’ or Uma, ‘the bright.’ In her malignant forms she is Durga, ‘the inaccessible,’ represented, as a yellow woman mounted on a tiger, Chandi, ‘the fierce,’ and, worst of all, Kali, ‘the black,’ in which guise she is portrayed as dripping with blood, encircled with snakes and adorned with human skulls. In the latter form she is worshiped with obscene and bloody rites, oftener than not with human sacrifice. Her special votaries are the Thags, and at her dreadful name all India trembles, for the law of the English has not yet wiped out the horrid practice of thaggee.
“Now, when I beheld this filthy image standing in Madame Chetwynde’s home I wondered much. Still, I little suspected what we later came to know for truth, for it is a strange thing that the gods of the East have little power over the people of the West. Behold, three hundred thousand Englishmen hold in complete subjection as many million Hindoos, though the subject people curse their masters daily by all the gods whom they hold sacred. It seems, I think, that only those who stand closer to the bare verities of nature are liable to be affected by gods and goddesses which are personifications of nature’s forces. I know not whether this be so, it is but a theory of mine. At any rate, I saw but small connection between the idol and our sick lady’s illness until Friend Trowbridge told me of her strain of Indian ancestry. Then I say to me: ‘Might not she, who holds a mixture of aboriginal blood in her veins, become affected by the strength of this heathen goddess? Or perhaps it is that fused blood is weaker than the pure strain, and the evil influence, of the Black One may have found some loophole in her defense.’ One thing was most sure, in Madame Chetwynde’s house there was clearly the odor of Eastern incense, yet nowhere was there visible evidence of perfume save such as a dainty woman of the West might use. Me, I sniffed like a hound while examining her, and kissed her fingers twice in farewell to make sure. This incense which were so all unaccounted for did puzzle me.
“You recall, Friend Trowbridge, how I questioned her maid about the punk smell, and how little satisfaction I got of her. ‘There is going on here the business of monkeys,’ I tell me as we leave the house. And so I make a print of the front door key that we may enter again at our convenience and see what is what.
“Eh bien, my friends, did we not see a sufficiency the following night when we beheld Madame Idoline fall forward on her face and make a voluntary offer of her soul and body to the Black One? I shall say so.
“‘How to overcome this Eastern fury?’ I ask me. ‘The excellent Katy Rooney have bathed her in holy water, and the blessed fluid have burned and sizzled on her so infamous head. Clearly, the force of Western churches is of little value in this case. Ah, perhaps she have attacked Madame Chetwynde through her strain of primitive blood. Then what?’
“Mort d’un chat, all suddenly I have it! At the dinner in New York I have met the young Dr. Wolf. He is a full-blood Indian and, he have told me, a medicine man of his people, as well. Now, if this woman’s weakness is her Indian blood, may not that same blood be her strength and her protection as well? I hope so.
“So I persuade Monsieur Wolf to come with me and pit the strength of his Great Spirit against the evil force of Kali of the Thags. Who will win? Le bon Dieu alone knows, but I have hopes.”
For a moment he regarded us with a quizzical smile, then resumed:
“The Indian of America, my friends, was truly un sauvage noble. The Spaniard saw in him only something like a beast to be enslaved and despoiled; the Englishman saw in him only a barrier to possession of the new country, and as such to be swept back or exterminated; but to the Frenchman he was a noble character. Ha, did not my illustrious countrymen, the Sieurs La Salle and Frontenac, accord him his just dues? Certainly. His friendship was true, his courage undoubted, his religion a clean one. Why, then, could we not invoke the Indians’ Great Spirit?
“We know, my friends, or at least we think we know, that there is but one true God, almighty and everlasting, without body, parts or passions; but does that same God appear in the same manner to all peoples? Mais non. To the Arab he is Allah; to many so-called Christians He is but a sort of celestial Santa Claus; I greatly fear, Friend Trowbridge, that to many of your most earnest preachers He is little more than a disagreeable old man with the words ‘Thou Shalt Not!’ engraved upon His forehead. But, for all these different conceptions, He is still God.
“And what are these deities of heathendom?” He paused, looking expectantly from one of us to the other, but as we made no reply, proceeded to answer his own question: “They are nothing, and yet they are something, too. They are the concentrated power of thought, of mistaken belief, of misconception. Yet, because thoughts are truly things, they have a certain power—parbleu, I think a power which is not to be sneezed upon. For, years, for centuries, perhaps, that evil statue of Kali has been invoked in bloody and unseemly rites, and before her misshapen feet has been poured out the concentrated hate and wickedness of countless monkey-faced heathens. That did indue her with an evil power which might easily overcome the resistance of a sensitive nature, and all primitive peoples are more sensitive to such influences than are those whose ancestors have long been agnostic, however much and loudly they have prated of their piety.
“Very good. The Great Spirit of the Indian of America, on the other hand, being a clean and noble conception, is one of the manifestations of God Himself. For countless generations the noble Red Man had clothed him with all the attributes of nobility. Shall this pure conception of the godhead go to waste? No, my friends, ten thousand times no! You can not kill a noble thought any more than you can slay a noble soul; both are immortal.
“And so I did prevail upon the good Wolf
to come with us and summon the massed thought and belief of his great people to combat the massed thought of those despicable ones who have made them a goddess in the image of their own uncleanness of mind. Nom d’une anguille, but the struggle was magnificent!
“You, mean to tell me that I actually saw the Great Spirit, then?” I demanded incredulously.
“Ah bah, my friend,” he replied, “have I not been at pains to tell you it was the massed, the concentrated thought and belief of all the Indians, of today and for countless generations before today, which our good Wolf invoked? Mordieu, can I never convince you that thought, though it be immaterial, is as much a thing as—as for example, the skull in your so thick head?”
“But what about Mrs. Chetwynde’s maid?” I asked, for deep in my mind there lurked a suspicion that the woman might know more of the unholy sights we had seen than she cared to tell.
“Quite right,” he replied, nodding gravely. “I, too, suspected her once. It was because of that I induced the excellent Katy to return to Madame Idoline’s service and spy upon her. I discovered much, for Katy, like all her race, is shrewd, and when she knows what is wanted she knows how to get it. It appears the maid was fully aware of her mistress’ subjection to the Black One, but, though she understood it not, so deep was her devotion to Madame her mistress that she took it on herself to cast obstacles in our way lest we prevent a continuance of Madame’s secret worship. Loyalty is a great, a wonderful thing, my friends. That poor woman was shocked by the spectacle of her beloved mistress casting herself before the thing of stone, but the bare fact that her mistress did it was justification enough for her. Had she been asked to do so by Madame Chetwynde, I firmly believe she would have joined in the obscene devotions and given her own body and soul to the Black One along with that of her deluded mistress whom she adored.”
“Well—I’ll be—But look here—” I began again, but:
“No more, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin commanded, rising and motioning to Dr. Wolf and me. “It is long since we have slept. Come let us retire. Me, parbleu, I shall sleep until your learned societies shall issue profound treatises on the discovery of a twin brother to that Monsieur Rip Van Winkle!”
The Horror on the Links Page 49