Hell! said the Duchess

by Michael Arlen

  Wingless said: “You are not Mary Dove.”

  Her grey eyes were wide open and radiant and delighted. But he dared not meet them, concentrating as hard as he could on the lovely lips so fearfully disfigured.

  She said: “Of course I’m not, you child.”

  “You are Xanthis Axaloe.”

  “Now,” she said, “you are just being silly. You saw him in that nice bathing-costume and you felt enough of me when I was in your arms to know that we couldn’t reason­ably be one and the same person.”

  He glanced towards the window, wondering where Icelin was. Dear God, he must have help.

  “You are Xanthis Axaloe,” he repeated. “I don’t know how, but you are.”

  “La-de-da,” she said, “so Pan and Ishtar have become one, have they? And Priapus and Venus? Well, maybe. The march of science, of course, is irresistible. But what kind of magic can it be, my love, that can change a man into a woman so desirous of love and so capable, as you will find out, of fulfilling her desire?”

  Terrified as a child in a dark room, he set his teeth and tried to reason himself back to sanity. What would happen to him alone with this woman if he cracked under the strain and fell quite into her power? He thought of the ripped and mutilated corpses which had marked Jane the Ripper’s amor­ous adventures in London. And that was the fulfilment of her desire.

  He had turned sideways to her, not to look at her, when suddenly he felt her mov­ing towards him. A wave of panic which he made no attempt to control impelled him across the room to the window, as far away from her as he could get. Trembling, he sat on the sill and took out Crust’s automatic and held it on his knees. Then, emboldened by the distance between them, he dared to look at her. She was smiling at him with a queer tolerant smile which somehow struck him as a more fearful thing even than all her amorousness. He could not tell why this was so until he realised that he sometimes would smile just that way at a dog he must punish for misbehaviour.

  “Now,” she said very gently, “the half of my desire is over.”

  He managed to grin, and felt a little the better for it.

  “I hope,” he said, “I can rely on that. What I simply cannot make out is: why the bathing-costume? First on Axaloe and then on you. And why the same bathing-costume?”

  “My love,” she said, “because it’s so con­venient. Of course it’s very tight for Xanthis but it really looks very nice on me. Would you like to see it, darling?”

  “I promise you,” said Wingless, “that if you say ‘darling’ just once again I shall drill a hole in you with this gun.”

  She laughed Mary’s dear laugh so natur­ally that he, who had fancied he was cured of the delusion that she really was Mary, felt himself withering with horror again.

  “You are a silly boy,” she said. “So you want to kill all the evil in the world, do you? And with a gun? It’s really surprising what great faith men put in guns. My child, there is very much less evil in pagan ecstasy than in the filthy ingenuity that goes to the making of one toy revolver.”

  He said: “I know you are a murderess. I know you are a madwoman. But who are you?”

  Then she cried out in a loud voice dif­ferent from Mary’s or from any other voice he had ever heard: “This is better than the old way. There is more delight. Oh, there is much more.”

  He said: “What was the old way? Who are you?” Then he heard her moving and he looked up and was lost. The two black bright points were glittering in his conscious­ness. He could not lift the automatic.

  She cried out: “I am nameless.”

  Her face was so bright that his eyelids seemed to burn. But he could not close them.

  She cried out: “I am nameless. I am soul­less. I am eternal.”

  There was a narrow knife in her hand, and her fingers caressed the slender blade. He could not move.

  “You can’t imagine,” she said, in that voice of hers so strange to his ears that he wondered if she was not speaking a forgotten language, “you can’t imagine what a fool I once was. Do you know that I used to bore myself sitting for years upon years within stone images while people worshipped me and the priests sacrificed youths and maidens by opening their throats and cutting out their hearts. It may have been fun for the priests, but you can imagine I was bored to death.”

  He forced himself to say: “You are no more than an evil madman who has found some godless means of changing his body.”

  “It is more polite, my love, to speak in symbols. Let us say that I am sin incarnate and sin triumphant. Let us say that I was born before the beginning and shall outlive the end. Let us say that the serpent is the father and mother of all the worms that men become. I don’t in the least mind you think­ing that I am no more than a scientist with evil powers. After all, research should al­ways be encouraged. But you will change your mind, my love, in the delicious agonies before your death.”

  A voice from the garden behind him said something. There was a tremble in Icelin’s voice. Wingless could not hear what he said, could not answer. He prayed to God to give Icelin the courage to come in and dis­tract the two bright black points of the monster’s eyes from him. Then Icelin came in.

  Wingless shouted: “Don’t look at her, man.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  She was so calm and so self-possessed that Icelin, pale though he himself was, could not but look at his friend with sur­prise. Wingless, his shirt sticking to him with sweat, strove to attain even a small degree of composure. At Icelin’s entrance the woman seemed instantly to dwindle to her ordinary stature. And her unbearable radi­ance was put out like a light, so that now it was none other than Mary Dove who sat so calmly on a tapestried footstool by the empty fireplace. He realised, having seen that face transfigured, that he could never again think of the real Mary as anything but merely pretty. The woman, quite undisturbed by a second man’s presence, sat playing idly with the narrow shining knife. Icelin’s eyes goggled at it.

  Wingless said: “You came just in time, Icelin. Take no notice of her now. I think maybe we’ve got her at last.”

  Icelin said: “The Duchess is in the nursing-home. I spoke to the doctor himself. She could not have moved if she had wanted to, because she is dying.”

  “Of course,” Mary’s voice said idly from the woman’s mouth.

  Icelin, wetting his lips, said: “The doctor doesn’t know why. She seems to be dying of nothing more than weakness. And fear. She lies with her eyes closed because she says that when they are open she sees nothing but two black bright points and she says that she is quite certain there is a snake in the room.”

  Wingless said: “Maybe we shall deal with that snake presently. What about the girl?”

  “Monica Snee has confessed to helping the man Axaloe. He found means of meet­ing her after his first call at Grosvenor Square, and she became his mistress. At first she thought he was nothing more than an anarchist. Then she says she found he was some kind of a god or what-not. She dith­ered a good deal about the ecstasy of the circle. And she’s got snakes on the brain, too. She said he picked on the Duchess because sin triumphant must wear the body of the most chaste. She concealed him in the house several times, and on two occasions borrowed the Duchess’s clothes for him.”

  “I returned them,” said the woman gently, “and without so much as a spot of blood on them, either. Though I must say that that attractive young man I met on the Tottenham Court Road was——”

  Wingless said: “What about Crust?”

  “There’s the devil to pay. A wrecking mob has got out of hand, and the county police have all they can do to keep them from burning every big house in the neigh­bourhood. And they are all screaming for the Duchess’s head on a plate.”

  Wingless said: “Nothing would please us more than to let them have it, but they’d never believe it wasn’t the real Duchess.”

  “But you’ll have to give it to them, won’t you?” the woman asked softly. “Or would you like to let me go upstairs to my labora­
tory for five minutes?”

  Then she looked for the first time directly at Icelin, who still stood with his back to the closed door.

  Wingless said: “Don’t look at her, you fool. She’ll put one of us against the other before we know it. Icelin, I’ll have a talk with Crust’s sister-in-law if ever we get out of this house alive. This chap Axaloe seems to have discovered that there are not only fairies at the bottom of the garden but that he can change himself into one.” He turned to the woman, keeping his eyes low. “Is it your idea that I can’t kill you?”

  “When you do, my love, you will kill yourself.”

  Wingless said: “I’ll take that risk. I have an idea that Mary will live if she no longer feels that there is a snake in her room.”

  “In her bed,” said the woman. “That’s why she is dying of horror.”

  Wingless said: “I shall kill you because I’d rather die than live with the thought that such a thing as you can walk in the sunlight.”

  “Silly!” smiled the woman. “I am soul­less. I am not made by God. How can you kill me? I always come back, for I am that which was born before the beginning and shall outlive the end.”

  And she was looking hungrily at Icelin.

  Wingless said: “You had better tie a hand­kerchief round your eyes, Icelin. Hell’s like an ice-box to our girl friend when she starts one of her mild flirtations. Now when I make a grab at her, do as you are told. This is an execution, and we’ll have time to ask forgiveness later.”

  Icelin, trying in vain to blink his eyes away from the woman, said sharply; “We can’t, man. It’s murder, whatever she is. And if you try it, I shall stop you. A fine stink it would make when it was known that Scotland Yard had helped to murder a criminal.”

  Wingless said: “I am going to kill this thing in the shape of a woman and you are not going to stop me.”

  The woman’s slender gracious figure rose from the stool. With an idle gesture she laid the knife on the table, and then she turned to Wingless. She stretched out her long white arms.

  Icelin said: “O God, look at her!”

  Wingless knew what effect the woman’s transfigured unearthly beauty was making on his friend. Then he felt her evil radiance scorching him, and he fought very power­fully with the fear and disgust that stopped him from touching her. Suddenly Icelin began yelling like a madman and as in a dream Wingless saw him fighting frantically with the monster. But Wingless was in the grip of a sweet and overpowering languor and even when Icelin finally managed to drag the vampire’s teeth from his throat it seemed to him a very distasteful thing that he must move. Only Icelin’s sobs aroused him. The woman, now utterly inhuman in the climax of her fearful enjoyment, sat astride Icelin’s body on the floor with her knees pressed ecstatically into his sides, crooning an incantation in an unknown tongue which was like a rushing wind through trees. Wingless, tying his hand­kerchief round his torn throat, gripped her round her slender middle. He could overcome his repulsion only by closing his eyes, and he found himself thinking of the time when as a small boy he had hurled him­self on a bigger boy with his eyes tight shut because he was afraid. Icelin managed to wriggle away from beneath the thing, but it was all the two powerful men could do to hold her down. Her snake-like convulsions between their hands were very horrible to them and continued even when Icelin had tied her feet together.

  Then they carried her to the divan against the far wall. Neither man dared look at her lovely face, and both felt ashamed as they tied her slender wrists together behind her back. In this room these men had seen the traditional walls of human life broken down, yet they could not free themselves from the trivial conventions which men and women have built for their self-protection.

  Wingless took out his automatic. The woman was smiling so gentle a smile that Icelin could not bear to look and turned away. Her grey eyes looked up with pas­sionate delight at the fair man towering above her. He pressed the muzzle of the automatic down into the flesh below her breast-bones and, his eyes closed, pulled the trigger twice. In the terrible silence that followed the crash he could hear Icelin’s sob­bing breath. The smell of smoke and burn­ing cloth enveloped him. Very afraid of looking down at what he had done, he stood frozen. Then Icelin gave a fearful scream and Wingless, forcing himself to open his eyes, saw Axaloe’s stern dark features form­ing mistily over the woman’s fair face. Axaloe’s deep icy eyes were smiling with sardonic amusement.

  “You fool,” he said. “I am eternal. But you shall die.”

  Then such a rage possessed Wingless that nothing Icelin could say or do could stop his passion to destroy. Icelin kept on shout­ing: “Let him change, man. We must arrest him and find out how. . . .”

  His great hands encircling Axaloe’s throat, Wingless pressed down for what seemed to him an eternity. Axaloe, opening his mouth wide in his dying agony, spoke a sentence in a language that sounded like a rushing wind. Wingless, at last unloosening his hands, turned blindly away and lurched to the door.

  He said: “We’ve got to burn this house and all that’s in it. I’ll get some petrol from the car.”

  Icelin did not answer. His face crumbling with horror, he pointed towards Axaloe’s body, and at the same time Wingless felt himself submerged in a stench so vile that no man’s senses could bear it. Without glancing round he dashed out of the house, Icelin at his heels. They ran on, out of the garden and down the lane, until they had left the stench of corruption behind them.

  “The monkey-house at the Zoo,” Icelin gasped, “multipled ten thousand times.”

  Wingless had stopped dead and was look­ing at his hands, first at their palms and then turning them over.

  He said: “I didn’t turn round. What was it?”

  Icelin said: “It wasn’t a body.”

  “What was it?”

  Icelin started walking on, almost running. Wingless remained where he was, still look­ing at his hands. Then he raised them to his nostrils. Icelin, setting his teeth, came back.

  “Come on, man. Let’s get it over. Though I wonder if we can face that stench again.”

  Wingless said: “What was it, Icelin? I didn’t look round. What did you see?”

  “I can’t tell you. I want never to think of it again. I’ll go mad if I do.” Then Icelin said: “There wasn’t a body. There was that white dress floating in something greyish that slopped over on to the floor. . . .”

  The corners of Wingless’s mouth twitched.

  “O Christ,” he whispered, “was that what I touched?”

  Icelin said: “Let’s forget it, man. Let’s try.”

  They walked on to the car, and Wingless got out a spare tin of petrol. Icelin looked curiously at his friend’s grey face. Wingless unstopped a tin and very carefully poured some of the petrol over first one hand and then the other.

  Icelin said: “What’s that for?”

  Wingless gave him the tin, then rubbed his moist hands hard together for several seconds. Then he raised them to his nostrils again, and sniffed.

  Icelin said: “What the hell’s the matter?”

  Wingless gave him a long searching look. His eyes were cold, like a stranger’s.

  “You don’t smell anything, Icelin?”

  “Here? Thank God, no. Only petrol.”

  Wingless nodded thoughtfully, and dug his hands deep into his pockets as though he wanted them out of sight. Icelin, holding the tin carefully, turned towards the house.

  “We’ll have to face it again, Wingless, beastly though it is. We have to burn that house and the thing in it. The police will report that Jane the Ripper burned herself to death, and the public will damn well have to believe it or not as they like.”

  Wingless said: “You’ll have to do it alone. I am not coming. I’m through. You can take the car when you’ve finished.”

  Icelin stared at him.

  “What are you going to do, Wingless?”

  “I don’t know. Leave me alone.”

  He turned and walked down the lane t
o­wards Leatherhead. For a long time Icelin stared after the tall figure of his friend. Wingless walked very clumsily with his hands deep in his pockets. And it was many weeks before Icelin, or any friend of his, saw Colonel Wingless again. But Icelin’s servant, who was a friend of the Colonel’s servant, occasionally gave him reports.

  It appeared that Wingless was obsessed with the idea that his hands exuded an un­bearable stench of corruption. It was a certainty, not an idea. This odour made his body, and particularly his hands, unbearable to him. No one could smell this but himself, but he was positive that his servants and the doctors whom he consulted said this only out of kindness. He sat indoors all day long with his hands wrapped in perfumed cloths. But this did no good, and he steamed the skin from his hands. He described this smell which pursued him from his own person day and night as being like that of the monkey-house at the Zoo multiplied ten thousand times. He would not see even Mary Dove who, her health almost regained, lived in even greater seclusion than before and was venerated by all gentlefolk for the shameful misfortunes that had so nearly destroyed her.

  Some five months later Colonel Wingless blew his brains out. He left no message of any kind. His many friends must always mourn the pitiful end of a loyal friend, a fearless rider to hounds, and a very gallant gentleman.

  THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Arlen was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian in Bulgaria in 1895 to an Armenian merchant family. In 1901, his family moved to England, where Arlen went on to attend school at Malvern College. He enrolled as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh but did not stay long, deciding instead to move to London and make a living by writing. His earliest magazine contributions were under his birth name, but with the publication of his first book, London Venture (1920), he adopted the pen name of Michael Arlen, and in 1922 when he was naturalized as a British subject, he legally changed his name to Michael Arlen.

  Arlen’s first books enjoyed some success, but his 1924 novel The Green Hat was a runaway worldwide bestseller. The novel was adapted for the stage on Broadway and in London’s West End and was the basis for a silent Hollywood film starring Greta Garbo. The Green Hat made Arlen rich and famous almost overnight, and he became an international celebrity.