They believed, firmly, that whoso saw Pan after nightfall, that one died instantly. Therefore, when a person is seized with a blind, unreasoning fear; even to this day, we say he has a panic. Of what consequence is this? Remember, my friend, the young lady whom we did meet as we approached this house told us she had seen Pan’s face grinning at her from out the bushes as she bathed. Is it not so?”
“I guess so,” I answered, putting my head back on my improvised pillow and preparing to sleep while he talked.
But he shook my shoulder with a sharp, imperative gesture. “Listen, my friend,” he besought, “when I did go out of doors to smoke my cigarette, I met one of those beautiful young women who frequent this temple of the new heathenism, and engaged her in conversation. From her I learned much, and some of it sounds not good to my ears. For instance, I learn that this Professor Herman Judson is a much misunderstood man. Oh, but yes. The lawyers, they have misunderstood him many times. Once they misunderstood him so that he was placed in the state’s prison for deceiving gullible women with fortune-telling tricks. Again he was misunderstood so that he went to the Bastille for attempting to secure some money which a certain deceased lady’s heirs believed should have gone to them—which did go to them eventually.”
“Well, what of it?” I growled. “That’s no affair of ours. We’re not a committee on the morals of dancing masters, are we?”
“Eh, are we not so?” he replied. “I am not entirely sure of that, my friend. I fear we, too, are about to misunderstand this Professor Judson. Some other things I find out from that young lady with the Irish nose and the Greek costume. This professor he has founded this school of dancing and paganism, taking for his pupils only young women who have no parents or other near relations, but much money. He is not minded to be misunderstood by heirs-at-law. What think you of that, hein?”
“I think he’s got more sense than we gave him credit for,” I replied.
“Undoubtlessly,” he agreed, “very much more; for also I discovered that Monsieur le Professeur has had his school regularly incorporated, and has secured from each of his pupils a last will and testament in which she does leave the bulk of her estate to the corporation.”
“Well,” I challenged, giving up hope of getting my sleep till he had talked himself out, “what of it? The man may be sincere in his attempt to found some sort of aesthete cult, and he’ll need money, for the project.”
“True, quite true,” he conceded, nodding his head like a China mandarin, “but attend me, Friend Trowbridge; while we walked beneath the stars I did make an occasion to take that young lady’s hand in mine, and—”
“You old rake!” I cut in, grinning, but he shut me off with a snort of impatience.
“—and that was but a ruse to feel her pulse,” he continued. “Parbleu, my friend, her heart did race like the engine of a moteur! Not with emotion for me—never think it, for I did talk to her like a father or uncle, well, perhaps more like a cousin—but because it is of an abnormal quickness. Had I a stethoscope with me I could have told more, but as it is I would wager a hundred dollars that she suffers a chronic myocarditis, and the prognosis of that ailment is always grave, my friend. Think you a moment—what would happen if that young girl with a defective heart should see what she took to be the face of the great god Pan peering at her from the leaves, as the lady we first saw declared she did? Remember, these children believe in the deities of old, my friend.”
“By George!” I sat bolt upright. “Do you mean—you don’t mean that—”
“No, my friend, as yet I mean nothing,” he replied evenly, “but it would be well if we emulated the cat, and slept with one eye and both ears open this night. Perhaps”—he shrugged his shoulders impatiently—“who knows what we may see in this house where the dead gods are worshiped with song and the dance?”
A MARBLE PAVEMENT IS A poor substitute for a bed, even when the sleeper is thoroughly fatigued from a long day’s tramp, and I slept fitfully, troubled by all manner of unpleasant dreams. The forms of lithe, classically draped young girls dancing about a fire-filled urn alternated with visions of goat-legged, grinning satyrs in my sleep as I rolled from side to side on my hard bed; but the sudden peal of devilish laughter, quavering sardonically, almost like the bleating of a goat, was the figment of no dream. I sat suddenly up, wide-awake, as a feminine scream, keen-edged with the terror of death, rent the tomblike stillness of the early morning, and ten white-draped forms came rushing in the disorder of abject fright into the room about us.
Torches were being lighted, one from another, and we beheld the girls, their tresses unloosed from the classic fillets which customarily bound them, their robes hastily adjusted, huddled fearfully in a circle about the glowing urn, while outside, in the moonless night, the echo of that fearful scream seemed wandering blindly among the evergreens.
“Professor, Professor!” one of the girls cried, wringing her hands in an agony of apprehension. “Professor, where are you? Chloë’s missing, Professor!”
“Eh, what is it that you say?” de Grandin demanded, springing up and gazing questioningly about him. “What is this? One of your number missing! And the professor, too? Parbleu; me, I shall investigate this! Do you attend the young ladies, Friend Trowbridge. I, Jules de Grandin, shall try conclusions with whatever god or devil accosts the missing one!”
“Wait a minute,” I cautioned. “The professor will be here in a moment. You can’t go out there now; you haven’t any gun.”
“Ha, have I not?” he replied sarcastically, drawing the heavy, blue-steel pistol from his jacket pocket. “Friend Trowbridge, there are entirely too many people of ill repute who desire nothing more than the death of Jules de Grandin to make it safe for me to be without a weapon at any time. Me, I go to investigate.”
“Never mind, sir,” the smooth, oily voice of Professor Judson sounded from the door at the rear of the room as he marched with short-legged dignity toward the altar. “Everything is all right, I assure you.
“My children,” he turned to the frightened girls, “Chloë has been frightened at the thought of Pan’s presence. It is true that the great god of all Nature hovers ever near his worshipers, especially at the dark of the moon, but there is nothing to fear.
“Chloë will soon be all right. Meantime, let us propitiate Pan by prayer and sacrifice. Thetis, bring hither a goat!” He turned his small, deep-set eyes on the young girl we had met as we entered the grounds, and waved a pudgy hand commandingly.
The girl went white to the lips, but with a submissive bow she hurried from the room, returning in a moment leading a half-grown black goat by a string, a long, sharp butcher-knife and a wide, shallow dish under her free arm.
She led the animal to the altar where the professor stood, gave the leading string into his hand and presented the sacrificial knife, then knelt before him, holding the dish beneath the terrified goat’s head, ready to catch the blood when the professor should have cut the creature’s throat.
It was as if some beady, madness-compelling fume had suddenly wafted into the room. For a single breathless moment the other girls looked at their preceptor and his kneeling acolyte with a gaze of fear and disgust, their tender feminine instincts rebelling at the thought of the warm blood soon to flow, then, as a progressive, contagious shudder seemed to run through them, one after another, they leaped wildly upward with frantic, frenzied bounds as though the stones beneath their naked feet were suddenly turned white-hot, beating their hands together, waving their arms convulsively above their heads, bending forward till their long, unbound hair cascaded before their faces and swept the floor at their feet, then leaping upward again with rolling, staring eyes and wantonly waving arms. With a maniac shriek one of them seized the bodice of her robe and rent it asunder, exposing her breasts, another tore her gown from hem to hips in half a dozen places, so that streamers of tattered linen draped like ribbons about her rounded limbs as she sprang and crouched and sprang again in the abandon of her voluptuous
dance.
And all the while, as madness seemed to feed on madness, growing wilder and more depraved each instant, they chanted in a shrill, hysterical chorus:
Upon thy worshipers now gaze,
Pan, Pan, Io Pan,
To thee be sacrifice and praise,
Pan, Pan, to Pan.
Give us the boon of the seeing eye,
That we may behold ere yet we die
The ecstasies of thy mystery,
Pan, Pan, Pan!
Repeated insistently, with maniacal fervor, the name “Pan” beat against the air like the rhythm of a tom-tom. Its shouted repetition seemed to catch the tempo of my heart-beats; despite myself I felt an urging, strong as an addict’s craving for his drug, to join in the lunatic dance, to leap and shout and tear the encumbering clothing from my body as I did so.
The professor changed his grip from the goat’s tether to its hind legs. He swung the bleating animal shoulder-high, so that as it held its head back its throat curved above the dish held by the girl, who twitched her shoulders and swayed her body jerkily in time to the pagan hymn as she knelt at his feet.
“Oh, Pan, great goat-god, personification of all Nature’s forces, immortal symbol of the ecstasy of passion, to Thee we make the sacrifice; to Thee we spill the blood of this victim,” the professor cried, his eyes gleaming brilliantly in the reflection of the torches and the altar fire. “Behold, goat of thy worshiper’s flock, we—”
“Zut! Enough of this; cordieu, too much!” de Grandin’s furious voice cut through the clamor as a fire-bell stills the noise of street traffic. “Hold your hand, accursed of heaven, or by the head of St. Denis, I scatter your brains in yonder dish!” His heavy pistol pointed unwaveringly at the professor’s bald head till the terrified man unloosed his hold upon the squirming goat.
“To your rooms, my little ones,” de Grandin commanded, his round, blazing eyes traveling from one trembling girl to another. “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Evil communications corrupt good manners—parbleu, Monsieur, I do refer to you and no one else—” he glowered at the professor. “And you, Mademoiselle,” he called to the kneeling girl, “do you put down that dish and have nothing to do with this sacrifice of blood. Do as I say. I, Jules de Grandin, command it!
“Now, Monsieur le Professeur,” he waved his pistol to enforce his order, “do you come with me and explore these grounds. If we find your great god Pan I shall shoot his evil eyes from out his so hideous head. If we do not find him, morbleu, it were better for you that we find him, I damn think!”
“Get outa my house!” Professor Judson’s mantle of culture ripped away, revealing the coarse fibre beneath it; “I’ll not have any dam’ Frenchman comin’ around here an’—”
“Softly, Monsieur, softly; you will please remember there are ladies present,” de Grandin admonished, motioning toward the door with his pistol. “Will you come with me, or must I so dispose of you that you can not ran away until I return? I could most easily shoot through one of your fat legs.”
Professor Judson left the altar of Pan and accompanied de Grandin into the night. I do not know what took place out under the stars, but when the Frenchman returned some ten minutes later, he carried the inert form of the eleventh young woman in his arms, and the professor was not with him.
“Quickly, Friend Trowbridge,” he commanded as he laid the girl on the pavement, “give me some of the wine left from our supper. It will help this poor one, I think. Meantime”—he swung his fierce, unwinking gaze about the clustering circle of girls—“do you young ladies assume garments more fitted for this day and age, and prepare to evacuate this house of hell in the morning. Dr. Trowbridge and I shall remain here until the day, and tomorrow we notify the police that this place is permanently closed forever.”
IT WAS A GRIM, hard task we had bringing the unconscious girl out of her swoon, but patience and the indomitable determination of Jules de Grandin finally induced a return of consciousness.
“Oh, oh, I saw Pan—Pan looked at me from the leaves!” the poor child sobbed hysterically as she opened her eyes.
“Non, non, ma chère,” de Grandin assured her. “’Twas but a papier-mâché mask which the so odious one placed in the branches of the bush to terrify you. Behold, I will bring it to you that you may touch it, and know it for the harmless thing it is!”
He darted to the doorway of the temple, returning instantly with the hideous mask of a long, leering face, grinning mouth stretched from pointed ear to pointed ear, short horns rising from the temples and upward-slanting eyes glaring in fiendish malignancy. “It is ugly, I grant you,” he admitted, flinging the thing upon the pavement and grinding it beneath his heavily booted heel, “but see, the foot of one who fears them not is mightier than all the gods of heathendom. Is it not so?”
The girl smiled faintly and nodded.
DE GRANDIN WAS OUT of the house at sunup, and returned before nine o’clock with a fleet of motor cars hastily commandeered from a roadhouse garage which he discovered a couple of miles down the road. “Remember, Mesdemoiselles,” he admonished as the cars swung away from the portico of the temple with the erstwhile pupils of the School of Neopaganism, “those wills and testaments, they must be revoked forthwith. The detestable one, he has the present copies, but any will which you wish to make will revoke those he holds. Leave your money to found a vocal school for Thomas cats, or for a gymnasium for teaching young frogs to leap, but bequeath it to some other cause than this temple of false gods, I do implore you.”
“Ready, sport?” the driver of the car reserved for us demanded, lighting a cigarette and flipping the match toward the temple steps with a disdainful gesture.
“In one moment, my excellent one,” de Grandin answered as he turned from me and hurried into the house. “Await me, Friend Trowbridge,” he called over his shoulder; “I have an important mission to perform.”
“WHAT THE DICKENS DID you run back into that place for when the chauffeur was all ready to drive us away?” I demanded as we bowled over the smooth road toward the railway station.
He turned his unwinking cat’s stare on me a moment, then his little blue eyes sparkled with a gleam of elfin laughter. “Pardieu, my friend,” he chuckled, “that Professor Judson, I found a trunkful of his clothes in the room he occupied, and paused to burn them all. Death of my life, I did rout him from the premises in that Greek costume he wore last night, and when he returns he will find naught but glowing embers of his modern garments! What a figure he will cut, walking into a haberdasher’s clothed like Monsieur Nero, and asking for a suit of clothes. La, la, could we but take a motion picture of him, our eternal fortunes would be made!”
Restless Souls
“TEN THOUSAND SMALL GREEN devils! What a night; what an odious night!” Jules de Grandin paused beneath the theater’s porte-cochère and scowled ferociously at the pelting rain.
“Well, summer’s dead and winter hasn’t quite come,” I reminded soothingly. “We’re bound to have a certain amount of rain in October. The autumnal equinox—”
“May Satan’s choicest imps fly off with the autumnal equinox!” the little Frenchman interrupted. “Morbleu, it is that I have seen no sun since God alone knows when; besides that, I am most abominably hungry!”
“That condition, at least, we can remedy,” I promised, nudging him from the awning’s shelter toward my parked car. “Suppose we stop at the Café Bacchanale? They usually have something good to eat.”
“Excellent, capital,” he agreed enthusiastically, skipping nimbly into the car and rearranging the upturned collar of his raincoat. “You are a true philosopher, mon vieux. Always you tell me that which I most wish to hear.”
They were having an hilarious time at the cabaret, for it was the evening of October 31, and the management had put on a special Halloween celebration. As we passed the velvet rope that looped across the entrance to the dining room a burst of Phrygian music greeted us, and a dozen agile young women in abbreviated attire were
performing intricate gyrations under the leadership of an apparently boneless damsel whose costume was principally composed of strands of jangling hawk-bells threaded round her neck and wrists and ankles.
“Welsh rabbit?” I suggested. “They make a rather tasty one here.” He nodded almost absent-mindedly as he surveyed a couple eating at a nearby table.
At last, just as the waiter brought our bubbling-hot refreshment: “Regard them, if you will, Friend Trowbridge,” he whispered. “Tell me what, if anything, you make of them.”
The girl was, as the saying goes, “a knockout.” Tall, lissome, lovely to regard, she wore a dinner dress of simple black without a single hint of ornament except a single strand of small matched pearls about her slim and rather long throat. Her hair was bright chestnut, almost copper-colored, and braided round her small head in a Grecian coronal, and in its ruddy frame her face was like some strange flower on a tall stalk. Her darkened lids and carmined mouth and pale cheeks made an interesting combination.
As I stole a second glance at her it seemed to me she had a vague yet unmistakable expression of invalidism. Nothing definite, merely the combination of certain factors which pierced the shell of my purely masculine admiration and stock response from my years of experience as a medical practitioner—a certain blueness of complexion which meant “interesting pallor” to the layman but spelled imperfectly oxidized blood to the physician; a slight tightening of the muscles about the mouth which gave her lovely pouting lips a pathetic droop; and a scarcely perceptible retraction at the junction of cheek and nose which meant fatigue of nerves or muscles, possibly both.
Idly mingling admiration and diagnosis, I turned my glance upon her escort, and my lips tightened slightly as I made a mental note: “Gold digger!” The man was big-boned and coarse-featured, bullet-headed and thick-necked, and had the pasty, toad-belly complexion of one who drinks too much and sleeps and exercises far too little. He hardly changed expression as the girl talked eagerly in a hushed whisper. His whole attitude was one of proprietorship, as if she were his thing and chattel, bought and paid for, and constantly his fishy eyes roved round the room and rested covetously on attractive women supping at the other tables.
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 10
