The Devil's Making

by Seán Haldane

  ‘Did Wiladzap come to Victoria to fetch you?’

  Aemilia laughed, rather wildly. ‘I don’t know for sure. He didn’t tell them. It was a trading expedition, that’s all, to find new markets. Lukswaas says he wants me back. He has had slave girls, of course, and sired children on them whom he could acknowledge and raise to his level if he felt like it. But he has not done this. He ‘dreams’, as Lukswaas put it, of me. She says that when they arrived at Cormorant Point he told the women who go from farm to farm seeking housework, to keep an eye out for me. They always remember a face, by the way. Lukswaas recognized me at once, even though I was dressed as a man and she had not seen me since she was nine. She thinks he meant to search for me once they got really settled in at the camp. I would have known last night! – if he had got free. I told Lukswaas to tell Wiladzap he could send a messenger for me if he wanted. I waited up all night! I was ready to take the buggy to wherever they were, and to take William too. But it’s my fault, all this mess!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When I heard a band of Tsimshian had camped on the peninsula I was terrified. I thought at once it must be him. I suppose I had half-wished, half-feared such a thing might happen one day. So I sent McCrory to spy on them.’

  ‘That’s why he went…’

  ‘He would have anyway. He loved Indians because he could buy valuable herbs from them for almost nothing, and because they told him things which by their standards are commonplace but which he could use in his practice. I told him to find out, without asking of course, if Wiladzap was there, and to report to me on what he looked like, what his mood was. Wiladzap is extremely intelligent but he’s as temperamental as a child…’

  ‘Wait. McCrory knew about Wiladzap? You had already told him your story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I must ask you to tell me everything about your relationship with McCrory.’

  ‘It’s an ugly story – much uglier than the Tsimshian, even with their canoe-full of heads. Uglier, in its own way, than my father’s death which was at least sudden!’ Aemilia was transported by her own vehemence, and stopped short.

  ‘Go on, please.’

  ‘I’ll try. I can talk to you, Chad. But please, if this must become public, censor it, won’t you? Like Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare. Bowdlerize it, won’t you? Because to you I’d rather tell exactly. We’ve been close – though My God it fizzled out, didn’t it – as it had to. We’ve been with them. Anyway I want you to tell me what you think of my tale of McCrory.’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘All right. He turned up in Victoria last year as you know, and he made a great impression on Mamma. She went to see him. Not, ostensibly, about her “nerves”. About mine. My melancholia. I had refused to go. I had told her only a charlatan could pretend to cure melancholia, since it was the result of life. Emotional conditions are not diseases.

  ‘But eventually I went to see McCrory. To keep Mamma happy. I was not sure why she was so urgent that I go. I don’t understand human motives, and certainly not hers. Could it be that she was drawn to him, and did not want to be, so threw me in his way instead? I wondered that even at the time. I went. He was a charming man, of course – a bit of a ruffian under the gloss, one sensed, but then that can be charming too. He was extraordinarily sure of himself. When I told him my objections to coming – not that he was a charlatan, but that emotional states were the results of life, not diseases – he said “Aha! You must think I’m a charlatan to attempt to cure such things!” Then he explained that even physical diseases were the results of blockage in the flow of life – or universal fluid, animal magnetism and so on and so forth – through the body. Emotional states could cause these blockages too, he said. In short, he disarmed every criticism, often before it was made, but at the same time accepted completely that I was critical, that I had doubts.

  ‘I had never met a doctor like him. You can see that part of his appeal was that his pseudo-scientific jargon described things I had learned from Wiladzap! Of course there is a “breath of life”, and a flow of it through our body. Any Tsimshian “halayeet” works to dissolve the blocks to this flow, although he may see them as places where evil spirits are encamped. So I was impressed by McCrory. I went into treatment. The lying on the couch. The breathing deeply. The magnetic passes. You know it all, I suppose.’

  ‘How about what one lady described to me as “the electric testicules”?’

  Aemilia laughed rather nervously and for a moment I regretted having been so forward. But she went on. ‘I wonder who that was? No, don’t tell me. Thank-you, you make it easier for me. Yes, the electric testicules. To which I did not react at all – I mean electrically. I withdrew my hand, sat up, and asked him what in God’s name he meant by this. With characteristic aplomb he buttoned his trousers and explained. There was a special concentration of magnetism in that area, and so forth. Then he said it was clear from my reaction that although I was annoyed, I was not an innocent woman. He said he had already deduced that my melancholia and what he called my “hysterical” symptoms – such as aches and pains and dizziness and oppression around the heart – were the result of an early awakened sexual impulse that had not been satisfied … At the time I did not know something I know now: that he had seen my mother privately on every trip she had made into town, and that they were in the way of becoming pretty intimate – I’ll explain later. So of course she had told him something of my story. He was able to tell me little things about myself which he presented as the result of clinical deduction, but which of course were not. This was over many appointments. I had fallen under his spell enough to come back regularly. I, who am always so critical! But usually my criticism has frightened people: they feel it as sharp, and they shrink from it. It was wonderful to have a man receive barbed remarks from me with perfect calm.

  ‘Meanwhile the magnetic treatments continued and they were very stirring – in my intimate female parts, although he was only making passes in the air and never actually touched me. So after a while I, who had abjured men, was in a perfect state of emotional and sexual crisis about this man whom I did not find handsome or cultivated and whom in fact I found vulgar. Not that I should ever have embarked on an “affaire” with him…’ Aemilia seemed lost for words.

  ‘But,’ I said, to make it easier for her, ‘what about “magnetation”, “male continence”, and so forth?’

  ‘Did he do that with everyone?’ Aemilia looked horrified.

  ‘I don’t know. They are practices which originate in the Oneida Community in New York, where McCrory spent some time. A Christian Communist sect – so called “perfectionists”’.

  ‘How vile. Yes. He told me of an aspect of possible treatment which would surely assuage my tensions and “hysterical symptoms”. I would undress and lie under a sheet with my eyes closed and he would, without lifting the sheet in such a way as to expose me, insert his – “self” was how he put it. Shielded by a lambskin membrane (I had never heard of such things) which would prevent any accidental conception. Not that the aim of this treatment was his own pleasure! He swore it would not entail much movement on his part and certainly not a “spending”, if you know what I mean. Also the membrane would prevent contact of our skins directly and thus preserve the propriety and the medical nature of the treatment. It was not, he assured me, an act of lust or even love that he had in mind – although of course he liked and respected me. It was a way for the universal fluid, through this conduit as it were, to establish its balance. The coupling of two organisms, he said, served its purpose in lust and in love, in marriage and in procreation; but it had another function, which was to establish a magnetic equilibrium, through the opposition of the male and female poles: this function I might benefit from without the perils of an illicit relation with a man … And so on! I think I tell you all his suave glozings and explanations in a way to excuse myself.’

  ‘It’s not necessary.’

  ‘Because of course I gave in! As Byron put it in
the poem: “and saying she would ne’er consent, consented.” And the experience was something as he said, in that he held to his end of the bargain, as it were, and went no further – never, so far as I could tell, did he experience pleasure or ecstasy for himself. Unless he did so stealthily, like a snake within that cursed sheath which was – you know – strangely cool, as if all warmth to it came from me. Uggh! But my melancholia did abate, and the aches and pains. I wonder if it was merely that I had something to fill my life, and a sense of doing something unconventional, and of occult power, on my visits to him.

  ‘Then something happened on his part. He began to want to see me more often. For the treatment, you understand. And then when in a treatment he suddenly leaned forward and took me in his arms! I shrieked and pushed him away, and of course he apologized. He said he was falling in love with me! Well, the scales fell from my eyes and I saw him for what he was: a man like all the others. This of course was what his superhuman, as it seemed, control of himself in the treatments had made him not seem.

  ‘So I stopped the treatments, and felt no worse for it, although a little wiser in the ways of the world, and self-disgusted at having let myself be used. Yet he had begun coming to the farm on Sundays as a family friend, and this continued. I teased him and ribbed him in front of others and he took it in good part, so I ended up not exactly disliking him. We used to take little walks together around the house. He liked getting out, even under an umbrella in the winter rain, and so do I. He would confide in me even about his patients, although not usually mentioning their names, as if wanting me to see him as an ordinary struggling human, not as the magician he had wanted me to see at first. In a moment of candour I once told him he was no better than a prostitute. I said “you are nothing more than the masculine equivalent of a fricatrice.” Nasty word that, fricatrice, with its implications of rubbing, and I wanted to hurt him. “But”, I said, “when a woman is a fricatrice she knows it: only a man would deceive himself that he was a healer or a daring pioneer of science, while being a fricatrice…” And he said – lyrically – that perhaps he was prostituting himself, but healing required sacrifices: the doctor had no hope of a cure unless he gave something of himself…’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Mamma! I have only this week found out exactly what was going on – by dint of the most appalling screaming matches between us. She is in a state of terror that you or someone else will find out about her and McCrory and that this will come to the ears of Mr Quattrini who is worth hundreds of thousands and a Catholic and views her as a saint! Orchard Farm has been an inferno this past week!

  ‘Of course I shouldn’t tell you about Mamma but I shall, because it bears on my case. In a word: she was McCrory’s mistress, almost from the beginning. No nonsense about “treatments” and lambskin sheaths. She is past child-bearing, and although ten to fifteen years older than he, it would seem she was an avid and greedy partner in … You see? My mother whose reverence for my father, for ‘what he would have thought of the betrayal’ if I had gone back to my Indian because my animal lusts had been awakened! Mamma calls a spade a spade “en famille” I assure you, in spite of the smelling salts and flutters…’ Aemilia’s voice trailed off, and she looked so upset that I decided to change the subject.

  ‘You must tell me everything you know about George Beaumont.’

  Aemilia’s eyes widened. ‘Is it he? Is it really he?

  ‘I think so. What do you know?’

  ‘Very little. He met McCrory here. They became thick, would see each other often. Poor George had some kind of affliction … Oh Lord! Chad, must I be honest? I’m sounding like a woman of the street. McCrory told me of course, mentioning George by name. George could not become excited, in the physical sense. When he lay with a woman he became angry. McCrory was even afraid that one day George would kill a woman! So he wanted to cure George, and last time we talked he said he had a plan for George. He said one other odd thing. I had asked him about his visit to Cormorant Point and I had, I’m afraid, teased him about being “my spy”. He laughed and said he didn’t mind being a spy, since he too had a spy – “our friend George”, he said. But he would say no more. He liked to be mysterious, of course.’

  ‘You know nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing. Conversations about George were usually tempered by the fact that he was nearby paying court to Letitia.’

  ‘And Firbanks? You know about his…? I stopped, out of discretion or fed upness.

  ‘Yes. His … what I believe the French call ‘chaude-pisse’ – I read that in a book. McCrory told me to make sure the little rat did not get really close to Cordelia – of which of course there was no chance.’

  ‘Aemilia. Why did you … I mean why did we do what we did yesterday?’

  ‘It was not really part of the plan. But once I saw you had a horse and could get back to town quickly, I knew there was no other way I could keep you. And I wanted to do it. I still sort of want to, though as before it might not work, and I hardly dare…’

  ‘Why – hardly dare?’ I felt choked with an emotion I could not understand, as if I could love Aemilia after all.

  ‘I knew you had been with Lukswaas. By the way it was me whom you met…’

  ‘I know. Young man in straw hat.’

  ‘I was going to Cormorant Point because of our talk the day before. I had realized that you had lost confidence in finding the murderer, and poor Wiladzap would be dead before long. At first a certain part of me was glad he had been arrested. ‘See how the mighty are brought low’, sort of thing. And honestly I had a sort of hope for you. I liked you and I thought if any man could understand my story and forgive, you might. You’re such a prig, but honest and good-hearted. Though I don’t love you. You don’t love me?’

  ‘Something very like it, but not it.’

  ‘We should marry, you know. We’d be very well suited. We don’t love each other. But perhaps that doesn’t matter in marriage. And we’ve had a similar experience with – with them. I think yesterday for a moment I had the idea: Chad and I can make love and escape from them – escape all that violence and danger. But we couldn’t. You can’t escape from Lukswaas, now, anymore than I can escape from Wiladzap. And maybe that’s as it should be. They are both good people!’

  ‘Lukswaas. You were telling me that you went to see her.’

  ‘Yes, because I knew that if nothing was done to get Wil out of jail he’d be hanged as soon as nothing. I had provoked you into admitting it. At one point I had thought I would be glad to be rid of him. But when you really admitted it would be the end for him, I knew I had to do what I could to get him out. So I thought of the obvious scheme. Nothing is unknown in Victoria. The story of Seeds the Jailer’s wife running off with a miner is an old one. And I guessed he would be tempted. And whisky would keep the prisoners quiet. So it was my scheme. I arrived at the camp, having seen you, and was told Lukswaas was ill. She had just got back from being with you and was desperate. I tried to explain to her that if you had known she was a virgin you would never have put a finger on her, and on the other hand you must have felt terrible being involved with another man’s wife. She agreed you felt terrible about something. But she said she would never want to see you again. All right. We made our plan. That’s all. I’m sorry you got back in time – unless you do get the murderer. But if it’s poor George!’

  ‘Why poor George?’

  ‘Well, he is poor George. If he killed McCrory he must have been driven beyond endurance.’

  ‘Why did you say earlier that many people might have killed McCrory? From your account, everybody liked him. He could get away with anything. Even you, although you said earlier that it was an ugly story, seem to have ended up on the best of terms with him. You asked me earlier to tell you what I think. I think it’s amazing that you could allow that relation with McCrory to happen…’

  ‘Don’t judge me, Chad. And don’t be jealous: I know you don’t love me but I can see from your face that y
ou’re angry, in that way men feel when a woman they are attached to doesn’t see through another man. But how could I have seen through McCrory? He had an answer to every objection, he was so suave … but I’m excusing myself. Yes, it was my fault. What happened between us was evil – more so by far than if we’d had a real sexual affaire! That shocks you … But it was evil to have a sexual congress which was so stealthy, so unconsummated. I think I put up with him afterward because he had exposed to me an evil part of myself: we were like conspirators. After all, if he had deceived himself that his lust for me was really a medical treatment, I had deceived myself in the same way. But it was even worse: we each must have known we were deceiving ourselves. At moments I knew clear as day that, treatment or no treatment, I just wanted a man in my … I was using him too! But God how I loathed him as I did so. Then I used him as a spy on the Tsalak. Which was equally vile…’

  ‘Don’t torment yourself about it. After what you went through…’

  ‘No, I must accept that I was vile. As he was vile. You, for example, are a prig. I mean it kindly: you are, for a man, over-concerned with virtue. But a man like McCrory exudes a sort of false virtue no matter what he does. You could not cheat people, or lie to them, or promise falsely and betray them, and at the same time be convinced of your own virtue. McCrory could. Perhaps it’s the Yankee in him: I don’t even believe he was from Virginia – more likely New England or New York. You know the Yankee attitude: whatever a man does is not judged in itself, or by how it makes him feel in his heart, but by its success. McCrory’s treatments were a success in his estimation, so they were beyond question. I once asked him, as I thought nastily, whether he really believed in the animal magnetism. ‘Of course I do’, he said. ‘Because I know it works.’ I think there is something evil in that. Because I have a point of comparison: Wiladzap. Wiladzap did not ‘believe’ in the breath of life, he lived it. And he would never touch someone he was asked to heal unless he had gone into a kind of retreat, for hours at least and I believe at times for days, and purified himself by washing scrupulously, and fasting; and if he did not receive the answer to the problem in the form of a song – what we might call a poem containing a magical formula – he would not try to cure it. He did not, like McCrory, have an answer to everything.’