He turned to me.
‘Get out!’ he said.
‘What?’ I asked.
He shoved his pistol muzzle in my face.
‘You’ve fifty thousand dollars in bank bills in your pockets,’ he said. ‘It’s a half a mile down that road to a railway station. Do you understand English? Get out!’
I got out.
The car shot forward into the morning fog and was gone.
IV
He was silent a long time.
‘What did you do then?’ I asked.
‘Headed for New York,’ he said, ‘and got on a drunk. When I came round I had barely eleven thousand dollars. I headed for Cook’s office and bargained for a ten thousand dollar tour of the world, the most places and the longest time they’d give for the money; the whole cost on them. I not to need a cent after I started.’
‘What date was that?’ I asked.
He meditated and gave me some approximate indications rather rambling and roundabout.
‘What did you do after you left Cook’s?’ I asked.
‘I put a hundred dollars in a savings bank,’ he said. ‘Bought a lot of clothes and things and started.
‘I kept pretty sober all round the world because the only way to get full was by being treated and I had no cash to treat back with.
‘When I landed in New York I thought I was all right for life. But no sooner did I have my hundred and odd dollars in my pockets than I got full again. I don’t seem able to keep sober.’
‘Are you sober now?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ he asserted.
He seemed to shed his cosmopolitan vocabulary the moment he came back to everyday matters.
‘Let’s see you write what I tell you on this,’ I suggested, handing him a fountain-pen and a torn envelope, turned inside out.
Word by word after my dictation he wrote.
‘Until you hear from me again
Yours truly,
No Name.’
I took the paper from him and studied the handwriting.
‘How long were you on that spree?’ I asked.
‘Which?’ he twinkled.
‘Before you came to and had but eleven thousand dollars left,’ I explained.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know anything I had been doing.’
‘I can tell you one thing you did,’ I said.
‘What?’ he queried
‘You put four packets, each of one hundred hundred-dollar bills, in a thin manila clasp-envelope, directed it to a New York lawyer and mailed the envelope to him with no letter in it, only a half sheet of dirty paper with nothing on it except: ‘Keep this for me until I ask for it,’ and the signature you have just written.’
‘Honest?’ he enunciated incredulously.
‘Fact!’ I said.
‘Then you believe what I’ve told you,’ he exclaimed joyfully.
‘Not a bit I don’t, I asseverated.
‘How’s that?’ he asked.
‘If you were drunk enough,’ I explained, ‘to risk forty thousand dollars in that crazy way, you were drunk enough to dream all the complicated nightmare you have spun out to me.’
‘If I did,’ he argued, ‘how did I get the fifty thousand odd dollars?’
‘I’m willing to suppose you got it with no more dishonesty on your part,’ I told him, ‘than if you had come by it as you described.’
‘It makes me mad you won’t believe me,’ he said.
‘I don’t,’ I finished.
He gloomed in silence.
Presently he said:
‘I can stand looking at him now,’ and led the way to the cage where the big blue-nosed mandril chattered his inarticulate bestialities and scratched himself intermittently.
He stared at the brute.
‘And you don’t believe me?’ he regretted.
‘No, I don’t,’ I repeated, ‘and I’m not going to. The thing’s incredible.’
‘Couldn’t there be a mongrel, a hybrid?’ he suggested.
‘Put that out of your head,’ I told him, ‘the whole thing’s incredible.’
‘Suppose she’d seen a critter like this,’ he persisted, ‘just at the wrong time?’
‘Bosh!’ I said. ‘Old wives’ tales! Superstition! Impossibility!’
‘His head,’ he declared, ‘was just like that.’ He shuddered.
‘Somebody put drops in some of your drink,’ I suggested. ‘Anyhow, let’s talk about something else. Come and have lunch with me.’
Over the lunch I asked him:
‘What city did you like best of all you saw?’
‘Paris for mine,’ he grinned, ‘Paris forever.’
‘I tell you what I advise you to do,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, his eyes bright on mine.
‘Let me buy you an annuity with your forty thousand,’ I explained, ‘an annuity payable in Paris. There’s enough interest already to pay your way to Paris and leave you some cash till the first quarterly payment comes due.’
‘You wouldn’t feel yourself defrauding the Eversleighs?’ he questioned.
‘If I’m defrauding any people,’ I said, ‘I don’t know who they are.’
‘How about the fire?’ he insisted. ‘I’ll bet you heard of it. Don’t the dates agree?’
‘The dates agree,’ I admitted. ‘And the servants were all dismissed, the remaining buildings and walls torn down and the place cut up and sold in portions just about as it would have been if your story were true.’
‘There now!’ he ejaculated. ‘You do believe me!’
‘I do not!’ I insisted. ‘And the proof is that I’m ready to carry out my annuity plan for you.’
‘I agree,’ he said, and stood up from the lunch table.
‘Where are we going now?.’ he inquired as we left the restaurant.
‘Just you come with me,’ I told him, ‘and ask no questions.’
I piloted him to the Museum of Archaeology and led him circuitously to what I meant for an experiment on him. I dwelt on other subjects nearby and waited for him to see it himself.
He saw.
He grabbed me by the arm.
‘That’s him!’ he whispered. ‘Not the size, but his very expression, in all his pictures.’
He pointed to that magnificent, enigmatical black-diorite twelfth-dynasty statue which represents neither Anubis nor Seth, but some nameless cyno-cephalus god.
‘That’s him,’ he repeated. ‘Look at the awful wisdom of him.’
I said nothing.
‘And you brought me here!’ he cried. ‘You meant me to see this! You do believe!’
‘No,’ I maintained. ‘I do not believe.’
V
After I waved a farewell to him from the pier I never saw him again.
We had an extensive correspondence six months later when he wanted his annuity exchanged for a joint-life annuity for himself and his bride. I arranged it for him with less difficulty than I had anticipated. His letter of thanks, explaining that a French wife was so great an economy that the shrinkage in his income was more than made up for, was the last I heard from him.
As he died more than a year ago and his widow is already married, this story can do him no harm. If the Eversleighs were defrauded they will never feel it and my conscience, at least, gives me no twinges.
Sorcery Island
WHEN I REGAINED consciousness I was on my feet, standing erect, near enough to my burning aeroplane to feel the warmth radiated by the crackling flames with which every part of it was ablaze; far enough from it to be, despite the strong breeze, much more aware of the fierce heat of the late forenoon sunrays beating down on me from almost overhead out of the cloudless sky. My shadow, much shorter than I, was sharply outlined before me on the intensely white sand of the beach; which dazzling expanse, but a few paces to my right, ended abruptly in an almost straight line, at a little bank of about eight inches of exposed blackish loam, beyond which was dense tropical veget
ation gleaming in the brilliant sunshine. Not much farther away on my left were great patches, almost heaps, fathoms long, yards wide and one or even two or three feet high of unwholesome looking grayish white slimy foam, like persistent dirty soap-bubbles, strung along the margin of the sparkling dry sand, between it and the swishes of hissing froth that lashed lazily up from the sluggish breakers in which ended the long, broad-backed, sleepy swells of the endlessly recurrent ocean surges. As there was no cloud in the dark blue firmament, so there was no sail, no funnel-smoke in sight on the deep blue sea. Overhead, against the intense blue sky, whirled uncountable flocks of garishly pink flamingoes, some higher, some lower, crossing and recrossing each other, grotesque, flashing, and amazing in their myriads.
To my scrutinizing gaze, as to my first glance, it was manifest that there was no indication of wreckage, breakage or injury to any part of my aeroplane visible through the flames now fast consuming it. No bone of me was broken, no ligament strained. I had not a bruise on me, not a scratch. I did not feel shaken or jarred, my garments were untorn and not even rumpled or mussed. I conjectured at once, what is my settled opinion after long reflection, that I, in my stupor or trance or daze or whatever it was, had made some sort of a landing, had unstrapped myself, had clambered out of the fuselage, had staggered away from it, and had fainted; and that, while I was unconscious, some one had set fire to my aeroplane.
As I stood there on the beach I was flogging my memory to make it bridge over my interval of unconsciousness and I recollected vividly what had preceded my lapse and every detail of my sensations. I had been flying my aeroplane between the wide blue sky unvaried by any cloud, and the wide blue sea, unbroken by any sign of sail, steamer or island. Then I descried a difference of appearance at one point of the horizon forward and on my right and steered towards it. Soon I made sure of a low island ahead of me.
Up to that instant I had never, in all my life, had anything resembling a delusion or even any thoughts that could be called queer. But, just as I made certain that I was approaching an island, there popped into my head, for no assignable reason, the recollection of the flock of white geese on my grandmother’s farm and of how I, when seven years old or so, or maybe only six or perhaps even younger, used to make a pet of an unusually large and most uncommonly docile and friendly white gander, used to fondle him, and, in particular, used to straddle him and fairly ride about on him, he flapping his wings and squawking.
While I was wondering what in the world had made me think of that gander, all of a sudden, as I neared the island and would soon be over it, I had an indubitable delusion. Instead of seeing before me and about me the familiar parts of my aeroplane, I seemed to see nothing but sky and sea and myself astraddle of an enormous white gander, longer than a canoe, and bigger than a dray horse; I seemed to see his immense, dazzlingly white wings, ten yards or more in spread, rhythmically beating the air on either side of me; I seemed to see, straight out in front of me, his long white neck, the flattened, rounded top of his big head, and the tip of his great yellow bill against the sky; what was more, instead of seeing my knees clad in khaki, my calves swathed in puttees and my feet in brown boots, I seemed to see my knees in blue corduroy knickerbockers, my legs in blue ribbed woolen stockings, against the white feathers of that gigantic dream-gander’s back, and my feet sticking out on either side of him encased in low, square-toed shoes of black leather, of the cut one sees in pictures of Continental soldiers or of Benjamin Franklin as a lad, their big silver buckles plain to me against the blueness of the ocean far below me.
After being swallowed up in this astounding hallucination, which I vividly recalled, I remembered nothing until I came to myself, standing on the beach by what was left of my blazing aeroplane.
While struggling to recollect what I could remember and trying to surmise what had happened during my unconsciousness, I had been surveying my surroundings. On one hand I saw only the limitless and unvaried ocean from which came the cool sea-breeze that fanned my left cheek and stirred my hair under the visor of my cap; on the other opened a wide, flat-floored valley, bounded by low hills, the highest, at the head of the valley, not over ninety feet above sea-level, crowned by a huge palatial building of pinkish stone, its two lofty stories topped by an ornate carved balustrade above which no roof showed, so that I inferred that the roof was flat. The hills shutting in my view on either side, lower and lower towards the sea, were rounded and covered with a dense growth of scrubby trees, not quite tall enough to be called forest. Close to the beach and hills, on each side of the valley, was what looked like a sort of model garden village. That on my right, as I faced inland, was of closely-set one-story cottages, bowered in flowering vines, under a grove of handsome, exotic-looking trees. The other, which I saw beyond the slackening flames above the embers of my aeroplane, was of roomy, broad-verandahed, two-story villas, generously spaced, beneath magnificent young shade-trees, mostly loaded with brilliant flowers.
As I was looking at the valley, the villages, the palace on the hill-top and from one to the other, with now and then a glance overhead at the hosts of wheeling flamingoes, I thought I had a second hallucination. I seemed to see, along a path through the riotous greenery, a human figure approaching me, but, when it drew near and I seemed to see it more clearly, I felt that it must be a figment of my imagination.
It was that of a tall, perfectly formed and gracefully moving young man. But, under the scorching rays of that caustic sunshine he was bare-headed and his shock of abundant, wavy and brilliantly yellow golden hair was bobbed off short below his ears like the hair of Italian page-boys in early Florentine and Venetian paintings. His eyes were very bright and a very light blue, his cheeks rosy, his bare neck pinkish. He was clad only in a tight-fitting stockinet garment of green silk, something like the patent underwear shown in advertising pictures. It looked very new, very silky and very green, and as unsuitable as possible for the climate, for its long, clinging sleeves reached to his wrists and the tight legs of it sheathed him to his ankles. His feet were encased in high laced shoes of a very bright, and apparently very soft, yellow leather, with (I was sure he was an hallucination) every one of the five toes of each formed separately.
Just as I was about to rub my eyes to banish this disconcerting apparition, I recognized him and saw him recognize me.
It was Pembroke!
His face, as he recognized me, did not express pleasure; what mine expressed, besides amazement, I could not conjecture. All in a flash my mind ran over what I knew of him and had heard. We had first met as freshmen and had seen little of each other during our life as classmates. Pembroke, at college, had been noted as the handsomest student of his day; as the youngest student of his class; as surrounding himself with the most luxurious furnishings, the most beautiful and costly pictures, bronzes, porcelains and art objects ever known in the quarters of any student at our college; as very self-indulgent, yet so brilliantly gifted that he stood fifth or sixth in a large class with an unusual proportion of bright students; as daft about languages, music and birds, and, frequently descanting on the wickedness and folly of allowing wild bird-life to be all-but exterminated; as so capricious and erratic that most of his acquaintances thought him odd and his enemies said he was cracked.
I had not seen him since our class dispersed after its graduation and the attendant ceremonies and festivities. I had heard that, besides having a very rich father, he had inherited, on his twenty-first birthday, an income of over four hundred thousand dollars a year and a huge accumulation of ready cash; that he had at once interested himself in the creation of refuges for migratory, rare and picturesque birds; that his fantastic whimsicalities and eccentricities had intensified so as to cause a series of quarrels and a complete estrangement between himself and his father; that he had bought an island somewhere and had absorbed himself in the fostering of wild bird-life and in the companionship of very questionable associates.
He held out his hand and we shook hands.
&n
bsp; ‘You don’t seem injured or hurt at all, Denbigh,’ he said. ‘How did you manage to get out of that blazing thing alive, let alone without any sign of scratch or scorch?’
‘I must have gotten out of it before it caught fire,’ I replied. ‘I must have gone daffy or lost my wits as I drew over your island. I have no idea how I landed or why. The whole thing is a blank to me.’
‘You are lucky,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘to have landed at all. If your mind wandered, it is a miracle you did not smash on the coral rocks on the other side of the island or on one of the outlying keys, or fall into the ocean and drown.
‘However, all’s well that ends well. Nothing can be salvaged from the wreckage of your conveyance, that is clear. What you need is a bracer, food, rest, a bath, sleep, fresh clothes and whatever else will soothe you. Come along. I’ll do all I can for you.’
I followed him past the remnants of my aeroplane, along the beach, to the group of villas. Close to them and to the beach was a sort of park or open garden, with fountains playing and carved marble seats set here and there along concrete walks between beds of flowers, shrubberies, and trim lawns, all canopied by astonishingly vigorous and well-grown ornamental trees.
As we approached the nearest villa I saw a family group on its veranda, obviously parents and children; also I heard some one whistling ‘Annie Laurie’ so exquisitely as to evidence superlative artistry. As we passed the entrance to the villa I was amazed to recognize Radnor, another classmate. But, as he ran down the steps to greet me, I reflected that there was nothing really astonishing in a man as opulent as Pembroke having as dependable a physician as he could engage resident on his island nor anything unnatural in his choosing an acquaintance.
‘Denbigh,’ said Pembroke, ‘has dropped on us out of the wide blue sky. His aeroplane has been demolished, so he’ll sojourn with us a while.’
‘You don’t seem to need me,’ Radnor commented, conning me. ‘I see no blood and no indications of any broken bones. Can I patch you up, anywhere?’
The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics) Page 23