The Devil's Making

by Seán Haldane

  * * *

  The alienist’s house was a small, neat, yellow painted box behind a white fence, in a side road off Fort Street between the town and the houses of the rich. A discreet and private place. Comings and goings could be observed by no neighbour, since opposite, on the hillside, was one of Victoria’s typical outcroppings of rock and twisted arbutus, impossible to build on or make a garden on. Anyone turning into the street could be taking a way through to the other streets further North. Yet few people would in fact do so. It was not a thoroughfare. During my visit, not a single person passed by, so far as I could tell. There was no sound of voices from the street, or of creaking cart wheels.

  I was standing in the alienist’s consulting room: a typical small square farmhouse room, with fireplace and two windows, pink curtains hooked back, and a layer of opaque muslin ‘drapes’. I had informed myself that this had been the house of a homesteader who had taken to drink until his wife had forced him to return to England. McCrory had bought it, taking out a mortgage from a Jew whom I would interview later.

  On the walls were framed certificates with gothic lettering and gold seals – a licentiate and doctorate in medicine from the University of Virginia, made out to Richard McCrory. Perhaps this ‘Yankee’ was in fact a Southerner disgusted by the Confederate loss who had come all the way North and West. There was also a large chart of the human skeleton, and another of the musculature, with all parts labelled although they were of neutral sex – those parts were not depicted. Rather pretentious, I thought. A doctor should not need such charts. They must be there to make an impression. Like the porcelain head on a special marble topped stand, with the contour mapping of phrenology: bumps of righteousness, hope, generosity and so on. There was a desk and table oddly bare of papers except for a few journals in two neat stacks: The Phrenologist, and The Zooist – a journal I had head of. I glanced through one. It was on Mesmerism, put out by the Edinburgh surgeon Eliotson who was well known as the inventor of the stethoscope.

  A high bookshelf was crammed full. Herbalist manuals, medical texts, works of Mesmer in French and Latin (these looked in mint condition and I suspected they had never been read), a book on Mesmerism by Eliotson, more copies of The Zooist, Herbert Spencer’s huge Principles of Psychology which I had looked at some years before in Oxford and found unreadable. Galton on heredity. Mill’s longwinded book on the rights of women. On the lighter side there were books of travels among the Indians, Eskimo, Australian aboriginals, Maori, Annamese, Javans. A shelf of novels: Dickens, Thackeray, Washington Irving, and many romances of a female kind – odd, since the alienist had no wife – by Mrs Hemans, Aphra Benn, and others whose names were new to me but whose contents, as I rifled through a few, were approximately the same: large eyed heroines pursued by heavy-breathing, fascinating sheiks, rajahs, princes and diplomats. There were of course the inevitable, for an American – even a Southerner – Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson’s turgid verse was the only poetry on the shelves. My eye took in a miscellany of religious texts of the evangelistic sort. Finally, on the bottom shelf, on their sides, there were atlases and marine charts of Vancouver Island, Washington Territory, and the British Columbia coast. I looked through these briefly for annotations or pencil marks, but there were none.

  I glanced around the room again. McCrory’s Chinese servant, who had let me in, dressed exotically in a blue silk robe, was standing patiently just inside the door. Like one of the Indians in his immobility, I thought, but the face was entirely different in that it had a fixed smile of obsequiousness, which by compressing the cheeks upwards hid the eyes behind narrow slits. Did the Chinese face make the social manners, or the manners the face? I wondered. The kind of thing to interest Charles Darwin. I glanced again at the bookshelves. No, there was no Darwin. No Buffon, or Lyell, or Huxley. The man may have been a doctor but there was no scientific interest except for Galton and Spencer, which any educated man might be expected to have. Perhaps for McCrory, phrenology and Mesmerism were science enough.

  There was a long settee of the usual kind, black horsehair – but with exotic red and gold cushions and a red quilt embroidered with gold thread. Near it was a table with the usual paraphernalia of the doctor’s office, old fashioned listening horn, stethoscope, auscultator, smelling salts. Where would the man’s travelling bag be? Near the desk on the floor. I crouched down and opened it. Listening horn, smelling salts, bandages in rolls, ointments. A small wooden case of surgical instruments: scissors, scalpels, knives, curved scraping-blades.

  I turned my attention to the desktop again. The blotting paper pad was spotted and blotched here and there with purple ink, but there were no reversed words such as a fictional detective would have delighted to read with a mirror. There was an elaborate tray for pens and ink, of the latest style, in ormolu and brass, with the usual equipment. The desk drawers were not locked. In the upper ones were notepads, paper, prescription pads, the catalogues of pharmacists in San Francisco. Nothing surprising. I picked up a cheque book from the Bank of British Columbia. Figures but no names on the stubs. I dropped it in my pocket. In the bottom drawer were several small sealed cardboard boxes, and one which was unsealed. I opened it, but did not recognise the articles in it. I picked one out and held it up to the light of the window. It was a rolled round disc of yellowish parchment, dusted with fine powder. I began to unroll it, then stopped. A sheath! I felt embarrassed. I had never seen one of these things before. I put it carefully back in the box, now noticing a discreet label on the side: ‘One doz. A1 quality Lambskin Condoms.’ The box contained seven. Condom must be a new word. Absent-mindedly I wondered at its derivation but could think of none. I came back to reality, and tapped the box, looking at the Chinaman.

  ‘Dr McCrory was not married?’

  ‘Naw.’ The Chinaman smiled more, and bobbed up and down slightly.

  ‘Did he have a mistress?’

  ‘Mistress? Lee not know word ‘mistress’.’

  At least a thousand of the three thousand Chinese in town were called Lee. I wondered, even, whether his way of talking, with ‘mistress’ pronounced ‘mistless’, was a self-parody – the stage Chinaman. Not all ‘Celestials’ in Victoria were incapable of prouncing ‘r’.

  ‘Lady friend?’ I asked.

  ‘Naw.’ Lee’s smile did not budge. ‘No lady friend.’

  ‘Then why these?’

  ‘Lee not know.’

  I put the box back in the drawer. ‘Show me his bedroom please.’

  Lee bowed and led me out to the stairs, stepping aside for me, then following. There were three rooms upstairs, the first with simply a bed and a chair. ‘Guest room’ Lee volunteered, but when I asked him about guests he said there were never any. There was a store room, bare except for two steamer trunks. I opened them and rifled through them. More books in one. Clothes in the other: brocaded waistcoats, pantaloons with silk stripes down the sides. The man was a typical American swell. Good quality linen underwear. Silk shirts neatly folded.

  In McCrory’s bedroom, in a wardrobe, were more shirts, trousers, jackets and coats, and a dozen or so pairs of high quality shoes. The bed was neatly made. A dressing table had a triple looking glass – an innovation I had never seen. My face looked uncouth in profile, my beard scruffy above the unbuttoned neck of my police tunic.

  There was a wash-stand with the usual accoutrements: beard-trimmer, brushes, and a hair-catcher made by female hands – the kind of thing wives or daughters gave as presents. I began going through the chest of drawers beside the bed. Underclothes. A pistol: Colt 45, heavy as a rock, loaded but with the chamber opposite the breech empty and the safety catch on. A box of cartridges. He presumably had not felt he needed this on his excursions to Cormorant Point to pick herbs with.…

  I closed the drawers, then went over to the window and looked out at the trees across the road. Downstairs I had glanced into the kitchen, laundry room, and the waiting room, which was normal enough, with American reviews and the usual American pirated
issues of the Quarterly and Blackwoods. What sorts of patients did the alienist receive?

  ‘Why no appointment book?’ I said.

  ‘Appointment book?’

  ‘Book with list of patients. Where book?’ Oh God, I was now talking a kind of pidgin English to Lee.

  ‘No book.’

  ‘How did he see patients then? How many a day?’

  ‘Patients?’

  ‘Look, Mr Lee, I don’t want to waste my time. You’ll come to the police station with me anyway, and make a deposition. If necessary we shall find an interpreter. Don’t pretend you know less English than you do.’ I was surprised at my own rudeness, but told myself that I was tired from my long walk the night before.

  ‘Lee not pretend,’ the man said, still smiling. ‘Lee do best. Dr McCrory not keep appointment book. He see two patients, three patients a day. He know when they come. He keep all in head.’ Lee tapped his temple.

  ‘Why no appointment book?’

  ‘Lee not know.’

  ‘Why no letters from patients, no medical notes? Have you tidied these up?’

  ‘Naw. Lee not tidy up. Lee leave everything exactly as is. Doctor not keep notes. Not like paper.’

  ‘Doctor receive letters?’

  ‘Not many letters. After reading, burn them.’

  ‘Burn them? All?’

  ‘Doctor not like paper. Doctor alienist,’ Lee said carefully. ‘Phrenologist. Doctor see people privately, very privately.’

  ‘You know the names of any patients?’

  ‘Lee never say. Strictly confidential. But not know. Doctor never say names to Lee.’

  ‘But would you recognise them? Know their faces?’

  ‘Lee easily confused white people faces.’

  I almost laughed. ‘Woman? Man?’ I asked.

  ‘Some women. Some men.’

  I felt hot and bothered standing in a dead man’s bedroom talking to this Chinaman. I turned and left the room. Lee followed me downstairs. I went back into the consulting room for a final look. Nothing much I had not noticed. As before, Lee stood just inside the doorway.

  ‘You liked Dr McCrory?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Like? Not like, like – no difference. Good master. Pay four dollahs a day.’

  Somewhat more than my own salary. And why not?

  ‘You went to the Indian camp with the doctor?’

  ‘One time.’

  ‘You walked, or took horses?’

  ‘Walk. Nice day, not far.’

  ‘And why did the doctor visit the Indians? Or, first, how did he know they were there?’

  ‘Everybody know Indians at Cormorant Point. Often Indians come down. Trade. Doctor interested in medicines, herbs, plants. He look for Indian medicine man.’

  ‘How about Chinese medicine?’ I interrupted, trying to put Lee off balance. ‘He was interested in that too?’

  ‘Of course. He come with Lee to Chinatown, buy medicine. Seahorse, jellyfish, ginseng, rhinocerous horn.’ Seeing me puzzled, Lee added, ‘In powder, for medicine.’

  ‘What are those medicines for?’

  ‘Seahorse for long life, wisdom. Jellyfish for blood. Ginseng, long life, much life. Rhinocerous horn for make children.’

  ‘Make children?’

  ‘Congress, man-woman. Make man big, strong, last long time.’

  I almost asked, ‘Why last a long time?’ then realized what it meant. ‘Where are these medicines now?’ I asked.

  ‘In kitchen. I show you.’ Lee led the way into the kitchen. I had already given it a look over – stove, table and chairs, chopping blocks and cleavers, shelves of tinned and dry food, bins of grain and potatoes. What I had thought was a very large collection of spices was a kind of medical dispensary. The bottles were labelled on the top, paper stuck onto their corks, which is perhaps why I had not noticed. Valerian, fenugreek, tiger lily – scores of names of plants.

  ‘The plants Dr McCrory bought from the Indians. What were they for?’ I asked.

  ‘Make sleep. Make strong. One like rhinocerous horn.’

  ‘Who did he get them from?’

  ‘Squaw, chief’s wife.’

  ‘She took him into the forest to search for them?’ I had a pained feeling, thinking of the lambskins in the desk drawer and of what I knew of Indian morals. But why did I want these Indians to be innocent?

  ‘Not when Lee there, not first time. Maybe after. He bring back plants each time.’

  ‘What else did he do on the first visit?’

  ‘Talk with chief – chief called Wiladap.’

  ‘Wiladzap,’ I corrected.

  ‘Wiladzap. He knew all about breath of life. Animal magnetism. Ch’i.’

  ‘Ch’i?’

  ‘Chinese word for breath of life.’

  ‘And the Indians were friendly?’

  ‘No. At first not want to talk much. Doctor disappointed. He say to Lee he go back again, talk more, bring more dollahs – not bring Lee. He think Indians frightened Lee’s yellow face.’ Lee was still smiling broadly.

  ‘And he went always alone? No one else with him?’

  ‘First time Lee. Then by self.’

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘All right. You must come with me now, to make a deposition. Just one more thing: show me where you live.’

  Lee shifted slightly on his feet, looking oafish. ‘Too humble for see,’ he said, playing stage-Chinaman again.

  I lost my patience. ‘Stop the play acting. Show me where you live.’

  Lee led the way out of the back door from the kitchen. His quarters were in a shed, near the outhouse, in an overgrown fenced garden – once presumably the vegetable plot of the failed English colonist. Lee pushed the door open. Small, lit by one window, with only a bed, wardrobe, table and chairs. It was indeed humble, but clean and not unpleasant. There was a smell of incense. There were some burned joss sticks in an enamelled vase. Some fine pottery on a shelf.

  I looked under the bed. There was a carpet bag which I pulled out and opened. In it were some fine silks. In one of them was wrapped a knife with a curved blade about six inches long. The blade looked too narrow to have made those wounds in McCrory – more suitable for filleting, I thought callously – but I re-wrapped it in its silk and dropped it in my capacious tunic pocket. Lee was looking at me with the same smile. ‘I have to take this,’ I said, ‘for examination.’

  ‘Everybody have knife.’

  ‘Of course. I have one myself. Now what about this?’

  In the bottom of the bag was a tin money box, locked, quite heavy to lift out.

  ‘Do you have the key?’

  Lee reached into a fold of his blue robe, brought out a big key ring, and held it out to me, pushing one key forward.

  I opened the box. In it were 20 gold sovereigns, and a quantity of silver dollars – 80 or so.

  ‘You save your pay?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lee nodded his head vigorously. ‘Send home to China, venerable father, mother.’ He bowed.

  ‘And where did the doctor keep his money?’

  ‘In pockets.’

  I held up the moneybox and looked at the manufacturer’s address on the bottom.

  ‘San Francisco,’ I said. ‘Where the doctor came from.’

  ‘San Francisco, many Chinaman,’ Lee replied, quick as a shot.

  I could not help smiling. I decided to leave it at that. I went back to the house for a few copies of The Zooist and a book on Medical Physiology, which I thought might come in useful. I waited while Lee locked up shed and house, then we walked down town together.

  * * *

  I am left uneasy by Lee. He is a caricature Chinaman. I suppose the nickname Celestial is based on such caricatures: the smiling face telling you that all is serene. “God’s in his heaven, All’s right with the world” as boring old Robert Browning put it. But if Lee is a caricature who else is? Parry is a caricture Welshman – all sound and fury. I dare say Freezy is a caricature ‘Injun
’, decapitating his squaw, for effect. Begbie and Pemberton are caricature English and Anglo-Irish, respectively. The Captain of the Ariadne! And I suppose I am the caricature Oxford man of the 1860s, all agony and doubt. But is Darwin a caricature? Is Wiladzap? Wiladzap draws me to him. He is himself, not a caricature. But the others – Parry, perhaps even Pemberton (I hope not) see him as the noble savage gone wrong, as all noble savages around here have gone wrong. They have Freezy’s example.

  Perhaps we all have to be caricatures. As we stand for something – the navy, our country, the law, the church – we become actors on the stage of the world. But what when we are not acting? Although I am Acting-Sergeant Hobbes when on duty – and not all the time when on duty, as I have my thoughts to myself – I am still Chad. There are times when we don’t act. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Pemberton together in bed – why do I think of that? – don’t act. Or Begbie when he is up in the Cariboo, living rough. Were Lukswaas and I acting last night when we were like children imitating the sounds of birds?

  What was McCrory acting? The alienist. The magician. His library was just a lot of stage props. His researches in the forest for herbs were for more stage props. But was he acting when he was killed? Who killed him? A savage. So someone – Wildazap or some other Indian, gone mad in the blood-rush of acting the medicine-man – lost his senses and became a force detached from being man or even animal – and stabbed him, bit his arms, slashed his flesh, cut off his member, stuffed it into his still living mouth. Why? I was taught in Jurisprudence about mens rea, ‘the mind in the thing’. In Common Law you cannot convict of murder unless you can demonstrate mens rea. If a man is insane and he doesn’t know what he is doing he can only be convicted of manslaughter. Hence the necessity for Pemberton and Parry to find a reason why Wiladzap killed McCrory. McCrory was attempting to seduce his wife – therefore Wiladzap killed him. He cut off that member that had dared rise at the sight of his wife, and stuffed it into the disgusting mouth that had blabbered of seduction. And as for the extra bits, the biting of the arms, the slashing across the belly, they were just the mad rage of the savage. But the law cannot have it both ways: either Wiladzap had mens rea and ruthlessly killed McCrory, or he was a raving mad, savage witch-doctor. Not both. Yes both. The law in Victoria can have it both ways. Detective Constable Chad Hobbes is not a good enough lawyer – he is not a lawyer at all! – to argue this one. And who – McCrory or Wiladzap – was the witch-doctor?