“Wait a minute, Bill,” I said. “I’m a good waiter, and all of that. But I’m getting mighty curious. When do I see you, and what do you want me to do in the meantime?”
When he answered his voice was as grave as I’d ever heard it.
“Alan, sit tight until I can lay the cards before you. I don’t want to say more now, but trust me, there’s a good reason. I’ll tell you one thing, though. That interview of yours is another hook—and I’m not sure it isn’t baited even better than mine.”
That was on Tuesday. Obviously, I was puzzled and curious to a degree. So much so that if it had been anybody but Bill who had sat me down in my little corner chair and told me to be quiet, I would have been exceedingly angry. But Bill knew what he was about—I was sure of that. So I stayed put.
On Wednesday, Dick was buried. I went over my notes and started the first chapter of my book on Moroccan sorceries. Thursday night, Bill called up.
“There’s a small dinner party at Dr. Lowell’s tomorrow night,” he said. “A Dr. de Keradel and his daughter. I want you to come. I’ll promise you’ll be interested.”
De Keradel? The name had a familiar sound. “Who is he?” I asked.
“Rene de Keradel, the French psychiatrist. You must have read some of his—”
“Yes, of course,” I interrupted. “He took up some of Charcot’s hypnotic experiments at the Salpetriere, didn’t he? Carried them on from the point where Charcot had stopped. Left the Salpetriere under a cloud some years ago. Subjects died, or he was too unorthodox in his conclusions, or something?”
“That’s the chap.”
I said: “I’ll be there. I’d like to meet him.”
“Good,” said Bill. “Dinner’s at 7:30. Wear your dinner jacket. And come an hour ahead of time. There’s a girl who wants to talk to you before the company comes, as we used to say.”
“A girl?” I asked, astonished.
“Helen,” said Bill with a chuckle. “And don’t you disappoint her. You’re her hero.” He hung up.
Helen was Bill’s sister. About ten years younger than I. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years. An impish sort of kid, I recalled. Eyes sort of slanting and yellow brown. Hair a red torch. Gawky when I saw her last and inclined to be fat. Used to follow me around when I was visiting Bill during college vacations, and sit and stare at me without speaking until it made me so nervous I stuttered. Never could tell whether it was silent adoration or sheer deviltry. That was when she was about twelve. Nor could I forget how she had led me, apparently innocently, to sit on a subterranean nest of hornets; nor the time when, going to bed, I had found it shared by a family of garter snakes. The first might have been an accident, although I had my doubts, but the second wasn’t. I had dumped the snakes out the window and never by word, look, or gesture referred to it, having my reward in the child’s bafflement at my reticence and her avid but necessarily mute curiosity. I knew she had gone through Smith and had been studying art in Florence. I wondered what she had grown to be.
I read over some of de Keradel’s papers at the Academy of Medicine Library next day. He was a queer bird without doubt, with some extraordinarily arresting theories. I didn’t wonder that the Salpetriere had eased him out. Stripped of their scientific verbiage, the framework of his main idea was startlingly like that expounded to me by the Many-Times-Born Abbot of the Lamasery at Gyang-tse, in Tibet. A holy man and an accomplished wonder-worker, a seeker of knowledge along strange paths, what would be loosely called by the superstitious—a sorcerer. Also by a Greek priest near Delphi whose Christian cloak covered a pure case of pagan atavism. He offered to demonstrate his hypothesis, and did. He nearly convinced me. Indeed, visualizing again what he had made me see, I was not sure that he hadn’t convinced me.
I began to feel a strong interest in this Dr. de Keradel. The name was Breton, like my own, and as unusual. Another recollection flitted through my mind. There was a reference to the de Keradels in the chronicles of the de Carnacs, as we were once named. I looked it up. There had been no love lost between the two families, to put it mildly. Altogether, what I read blew my desire to meet Dr. de Keradel up to fever point.
I was half an hour late getting to Dr. Lowell’s. The butler showed me into the library. A girl got up from a big chair and came toward me with hand outstretched.
“Hello, Alan,” she said.
I blinked at her. She wasn’t so tall, but her body had all the lovely contours the sculptors of Athens’ Golden Age gave their dancing girls. The provocative dress of filmy black she wore hid none of them. Her hair was burnished copper and helmeted her small head. The heavy chignon at the nape of her neck showed she had resisted the bob. Her eyes were golden amber, and tilted delicately. Her nose was small and straight and her chin rounded. Her skin was not the creamy white that so often goes with red heads, but a delicate golden. It was a head and face that might have served as the model for one of Alexander’s finest golden coins. Faintly archaic, touched with the antique beauty. I blinked again. I blurted:
“You’re never—Helen!”
Her eyes sparkled, the impishness that my experience with the hornets had set indelibly in my memory danced over her face. She took my hands, and swayed close to me; she sighed:
“The same, Alan! The same! And you—oh, let me look at you! Yes, still the hero of my girlhood! The same keen, dark face—like—like—I used to call you Lancelot of the Lake, Alan—to myself of course. The same lithe, tall, and slender body—I used to call you the Black Panther, too, Alan. And do you remember how like a panther you leaped when the hornets stung you?” She bent her head, her rounded shoulders shaking. I said: “You little devil! I always knew you did that deliberately.”
She said, muffled:
“I’m not laughing, Alan. I’m sobbing.”
She looked up at me, and her eyes were indeed wet, but I was sure not with any tears of regret. She said:
“Alan, for long, long years I’ve waited to know something. Waited to hear you tell me something. Not to tell me that you love me, darling—No, No! I always knew that you were going to do that, sooner or later. This is something else!”
I was laughing, but I had a queer mixed feeling, too.
I said:
“I’ll tell you anything. Even that I love you—and maybe mean it.”
She said:
“Did you find those snakes in your bed? Or did they crawl out before you got in?”
I said again: “You little devil!”
She said:
“But were they there?”
“Yes, they were.”
She sighed contentedly:
“Well, there’s one complex gone forever. Now I know. You were so damned superior at times I just couldn’t help it.”
She held her face up to me:
“Since you’re going to love me, Alan, you might as well kiss me.”
I kissed her, properly. She might have been fooling with me about having been her girlhood hero, but there was no fooling about my kiss—nor the way she responded to it. She shivered and laid her head on my shoulder. She said, dreamily: “And there’s another complex gone. Where am I going to stop?”
Somebody coughed at the doorway. Somebody else murmured, apologetically: “Ah, but we intrude.”
Helen dropped her arms from around my neck, and we turned. In a way, I realized that the butler and another man were standing at the door. But all I could focus my eyes upon was the girl—or woman.
You know how it is when you’re riding in the subway, or at the theater, or at a race track and suddenly one face, for some reason or no reason, thrusts itself out from the crowd, and it’s as though your mental spotlight were turned on it and every other face gets misty and recedes into the background. That often happens to me. Something in the face that stirs some old forgotten memory, no doubt. Or stirs the memory of our ancestors whose ghosts are always peering through our eyes. Seeing this girl was like that, only far more so. I couldn’t see anything else—not even Hele
n.
She had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, or rather eyes of a curious deep violet. They were big and unusually wide apart, with long curling black lashes and slimly penciled black eyebrows that almost met above her high-arched but delicately modeled nose. You felt, rather than saw, their color. Her forehead was broad, but whether it was low I could not tell, for it was coifed with braids of palest gold, and there were little ends of hair that curled up all over her head, and they were so fine and silken that the light in the hall shining through them made a queer silver-gilt aureole around her head. Her mouth was a bit large, but beautifully formed and daintily sensuous. Her skin was a miracle, white, but vital—as though moon fires shone behind it.
She was tall almost as I, exquisitely curved, deep bosomed. Her breasts echoed the betrayal of her lips. Her head and face and shoulders came like a lily out of the calyx of a shimmering sea-green gown.
She was exquisite—but I had swift understanding that there was nothing heavenly about the blue of her eyes. And nothing saintly about the aureole about her head.
She was perfection—and I felt a swift hatred against her, understanding, as the pulse of it passed, how one could slash a painting that was a masterpiece of beauty, or take a hammer and destroy a statue that was another such masterpiece if it evoked such hatred as that which I, for that fleeting moment, felt.
Then I thought:
Do I hate you—or do I fear you?
It was all, mind you, in a breath.
Helen was moving by me, hand outstretched. There was no confusion about Helen. Our embrace that had been interrupted might have been a simple handshake. She said, smiling and gracious:
“I am Helen Bennett. Dr. Lowell asked me to receive you. You are Dr. de Keradel, aren’t you?”
I looked at the man who was bending over her hand, kissing it. He straightened, and I felt a queer shock of bewilderment. Bill had said I was to meet Dr. de Keradel and his daughter. But this man looked no I older than the girl—if she was his daughter. True, the silver in the gold of his hair was a little paler; true, the blue of his eyes had not the violet-purple of hers…
I thought: But neither of them has any age! And on top of that I thought, rather savagely: What the hell’s the matter with me anyway?
The man said:
“I am Dr. de Keradel. And this is my daughter.”
The girl—or woman—seemed now to be regarding both Helen and me with faint amusement. Dr. de Keradel said with, I thought, curious precision:
“The, Demoiselle Dahut d’Ys,” he hesitated, then finished—“de Keradel.”
Helen said:
“And this is Dr. Alan Caranac.”
I was looking at the girl—or woman. The name of Dahut d’Ys fingered half-forgotten chords of memory. And as Helen named me, I saw the violet eyes dilate, become enormous, the straight brows contract until they met above the nose in a slender bar. I felt the glance of her eyes strike and encompass me. She seemed to be seeing me for the first time. And in her eyes was something threatening—possessive. Her body tensed. She said, as though to herself: “Alain de Carnac…?”
She glanced from me to Helen. There was calculation in that glance, appraisal. Contemptuous indifference, too—if I read it aright. A queen might so have looked upon some serving wench who had dared to lift eyes to her lover.
Whether I read the glance aright or not, Helen evidently got something of the same thought. She turned to me and said sweetly:
“Darling, I’m ashamed of you. Wake up!”
With the side of her little high-heeled slipper she gave me a surreptitious and vigorous kick on the shin.
Just then Bill came in, and with him a dignified, white-haired gentleman I knew must be Dr. Lowell.
I don’t know when I had ever been so glad to see Bill.
CHAPTER III
THEORIES OF DR. DE KERADEL
I gave Bill the old fraternity high-sign of distress, and after introductions he bore me away, leaving the Demoiselle Dahut to Helen and Dr. de Keradel with Dr. Lowell. I felt an urgent need for a drink, and said so. Bill passed me the brandy and soda without comment. I drank a stiff brandy neat.
Helen had bowled me off my feet, but that had been a pleasant upset, nothing that called for any alcoholic lever to right me. The Demoiselle Dahut had been an entirely different matter. She was damned disconcerting. It occurred to me that if you compared yourself to a ship bowling along under full sail, with your mind as a capable navigator and through charted seas, Helen was a squall that fitted normally into the picture—but the Demoiselle was a blow from a new quarter entirely, heading the ship into totally strange waters. What you knew of navigation wouldn’t help you a bit.
I said:
“Helen could blow you into Port o’ Paradise but the other could blow you into Port o’ Hell.”
Bill didn’t say anything, only watched me. I poured a second brandy. Bill said, mildly:
“There’ll be cocktails and wine at dinner.”
I said: “Fine,” and drank the brandy.
I thought:
It’s not her infernal beauty that’s got me going. But why the hell did I hate her so when I first saw her?
I didn’t hate her now. All I felt was a burning curiosity. But why did I have that vague sense of having long known her? And that not so vague idea that she knew me better than I did her? I muttered:
“She makes you think of the sea, at that.”
Bill said: “Who?”
I said: “The Demoiselle d’Ys.”
He stepped back; he said, as though something was strangling him:
“Who’s the Demoiselle d’Ys?”
I looked at him, suspiciously; I said: “Don’t you know the names of your guests? That girl down there—the Demoiselle Dahut d’Ys de Keradel.”
Bill said, rather dumbly:
“No, I didn’t know that. All Lowell introduced her by was the de Keradel part of it.”
After a minute, he said: “Probably another drink won’t hurt you. I’ll join you.”
We drank; he said, casually:
“Never met them till tonight. De Keradel called on Lowell yesterday morning—as one eminent psychiatrist upon another. Lowell was interested, and invited him and his daughter to dinner. The old boy is fond of Helen, and ever since she came back to town she’s been hostess at his parties. She’s very fond of him, too.”
He drank his brandy and set down the glass. He said, still casually:
“I understand de Keradel has been here for a year or more. Apparently, though, he never got around to visiting us until those interviews of mine and yours appeared.”
I jumped up as the implication of that struck me. I said:
“You mean—”
“I don’t mean anything. I simply point out the coincidence.”
“But if they had anything to do with Dick’s death, why would they risk coming here?”
“To find out how much we know—if anything.” He hesitated. “It may mean nothing. But—it’s precisely the sort of thing I thought might happen when I baited my hook. And de Keradel and his daughter don’t exactly disqualify as the sort of fish I expected to catch—and especially now I know about the d’Ys part. Yes—especially.”
He came round the table and put his hands on my shoulders:
“Alan, what I’m thinking wouldn’t seem as insane to you, maybe, as it does to me. It’s not Alice in Wonderland, but Alice in Devil-land. I want you tonight to say anything that comes into your head. Just that. Don’t be held back by politeness, or courtesy, or conventions or anything else. If what you want to say is insulting—let it be so. Don’t bother about what Helen may think. Forget Lowell. Say whatever comes into your mind. If de Keradel makes any assertions with which you don’t agree, don’t listen politely—challenge him. If it makes him lose his temper, all the better. Be just alcoholic enough to slip out of any inhibitions of courtesy. You talk, I listen. Do you get it?”
I laughed and said:
“In vi
no veritas. But your idea is to make my vino bring out the veritas in the other party. Sound psychology. All right, Bill, I’ll take another small one.”
He said: “You know your limit. But watch your step.”
We went down to dinner. I was feeling interested, amused, and devil-may-care. The image I had of the Demoiselle was simplified to a mist of silver-gold hair over two splotches of purple-blue in a white face. On the other hand, Helen’s was still the sharp-cut antique coin. We sat down at table. Dr. Lowell was at the head, at his left de Keradel, and at his right the Demoiselle Dahut. Helen sat beside de Keradel and I beside the Demoiselle. Bill sat between me and Helen. It was a nicely arranged table, with tall candles instead of electrics. The butler brought cocktails and they were excellent. I lifted mine to Helen and said:
“You are a lovely antique coin, Helen. Alexander the Great minted you. Someday I will put you in my pocket.”
Dr. Lowell looked a bit startled. But Helen clinked glasses and murmured:
“You will never lose me, will you, darling?”
I said:
“No, sweetheart, nor will I give you away, nor let anybody steal you, my lovely antique coin.”
There was the pressure of a soft shoulder against me. I looked away from Helen and straight into the eyes of the Demoiselle. They weren’t just purple-blue splotches now. They were the damnedest eyes—big, and clear as a tropic shoal and little orchid sparks darted through them like the play of the sun through a tropic shoal when you turn over and look up through the clear water.
I said:
“Demoiselle Dahut—why do you make me think of the sea? I have seen the Mediterranean the exact color of your eyes. And the crests of the waves were as white as your skin. And there was sea-weed like your hair. Your fragrance is the fragrance of the sea, and you walk like a wave—”
Helen drawled:
“How poetic you are, darling. Perhaps you’d better eat your soup before you take another cocktail.”
I said:
“Sweetheart, you are my antique coin. But you are not yet in my pocket. Nor am I in yours. I will have another cocktail before I eat my soup.”
The A. Merritt Megapack Page 179