Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Henry S. Whitehead

  When quizzed about his dry-rubs, Morley always answered with his unfailing good-nature, that it was a principle with him. He believed in the dry-rub. He avoided difficulty and criticism in this strange idea of his, as it seemed to the rest of us, because Ernie Hjertberg, whose word was law and whose opinions were gold and jewels to us boys, backed him up in it. Many of the older athletes, said Ernie, preferred the dry-rub, and a generation ago nobody would have thought of taking a shower after competition or a workout. So it became a settled affair that Williamson Morley should dry-rub himself while the rest of us revelled under our cascades of alternate hot and cold water and were cool and comfortable while Morley at least looked half-cooked, red, and uncomfortable after his plain towellings!

  It was, too, entirely clear to the rest of us that Morley’s dry-rubs were taken on principle. That he was a bather – at home – was entirely evident. He was, besides being by long odds the best-dressed fellow in a very dressy, rather ‘fashionable’ New York City school, the very pink and perfection of cleanliness. Indeed, if it had not been for Morley’s admirable disposition, self-restraint, and magnificent muscular development and his outstanding athletic preëminence among us – our football teams with Morley in were simply invincible, and his inordinately long arms made him unbeatable at tennis – the school would very likely have considered him a ‘dude’. A shot-putter, if it had been anybody else than Morley, who, however modestly, displays a fresh manicure twice a week at the group-critical age of fifteen or sixteen is – well, it was Morley, and whatever Morley chose to do among our crowd, or, indeed any group of his age in New York City in those days, was something that called for respectful imitation – not adverse criticism. Morley set the fashion for New York’s foremost school for the four or five years that he and Gerald Canevin were buddies togther.

  It was when we were sixteen that the Morley divorce case shrieked from the front pages of the yellow newspapers for the five weeks of its lurid course in the courts.

  During that period I, who had been a constant visitor at the house on Madison Avenue where Williamson, an only son, lived with his parents, by some tacit sense of the fitness of things, refrained from dropping in Saturdays or after school hours. Subsequently, Mrs Morley, who had lost the case, removed to an apartment on Riverside Drive. Williamson accompanied his mother, and Mr Morley continued to occupy the former home.

  It was a long time afterwards, a year or more, before Williamson talked of his family affairs with me. When he did begin it, it came with a rush, as though he had wanted to speak about it to a close friend for a long time and had been keeping away from the topic for decency’s sake. I gathered from what he said that his mother was in no way to blame. This was not merely ‘chivalry’ on Williamson’s part. He spoke reticently, but with a strong conviction. His father, it seemed, had always, as long as he could remember, been rather ‘mean’ to the kindest, most generous and whole-souled lady God had ever made. The attitude of Morley senior, as I gathered it, without, of course, hearing that gentleman’s side of the affair, had always been distant and somewhat sarcastic, not only to Mrs Morley but to Williamson as well. It was, Williamson said, as though his father had disliked him from birth, thought of him as a kind of inferior being! This had been shown, uniformly, by a general attitude of contemptuous indifference to both mother and son as far back as Williamson’s recollection of his father took him.

  It was, according to him, the more offensive and unjust on his father’s part, because, not long before his own birth, his mother had undergone a more than ordinarily harrowing experience, which, Williamson and I agreed, should have made any man that called himself a man considerate to half the woman Mrs Morley was, for the rest of his natural life!

  The couple had, it appeared, been married about five years at the time, were as yet childless, and were living on the Island of Barbados in the Lower Caribbean. Their house was an estate-house, ‘in the country’, but quite close-in to the capital town, Bridgetown. Quite nearby, in the very next estate-house, in fact, was an eccentric old fellow, who was a retired animal collector. Mr Burgess, the neighbor, had been in the employ for many years before his retirement due to a bad clawing he had received in the wilds of Nepaul, of the Hagenbecks and Wombwells.

  Mr Burgess’s outstanding eccentricity was his devotion to ‘Billy’, a full-grown orang-utan which, like the fellow in Kipling’s horrible story, Bimi, he treated like a man, had it at the table with him, had taught the creature to smoke – all that sort of thing. The negroes for miles around were in a state of sustained terror, Williamson said.

  In fact, the Bimi story was nearly reënacted there in Barbados, only with a somewhat different slant. We boys at school read Kipling, and Sherlock Holmes, and Alfred Henry Lewis’s Wolfville series those days, and Bimi was invoked as familiar to us both when Williamson told me what had happened.

  It seems that the orang-utan and Mrs Morley were great friends. Old Burgess didn’t like that very well, and Douglas Morley, Williamson’s father, made a terrific to-do about it. He finally absolutely forbade his wife to go within a hundred yards of Burgess’s place unless for the purpose of driving past!

  Mrs Morley was a sensible woman. She listened to her husband’s warnings about the treachery of the great apes, and the danger she subjected herself to in such matters as handing the orang-utan a cigarette, and willingly enough agreed to keep entirely away from their neighbor’s place so long as the beast was maintained there at large and not, as Mr Morley formally demanded of Burgess, shut up in an adequate cage. Mr Morley even appealed to the law for the restraint of a dangerous wild beast, but could not, it appeared, secure the permanent caging of Burgess’s strange pet.

  Then, one night, coming home late from a Gentlemen’s Party somewhere on the island, Mr Morley had walked into his house and discovered his wife unconscious, lying on the floor of the dining-room, most of her clothing torn off her, and great weals and bruises all over her where the orang-utan had attacked her, sitting alone in a small living-room next the dining-room.

  Mrs Morley, hovering between life and death for days on end with a bad case of physiological shock, could give no account of what had occurred, beyond the startling apparition of ‘Billy’ in the open doorway, and his leap towards her. She had mercifully lost consciousness, and it was a couple of weeks before she was able to do so much as speak.

  Meanwhile Morley, losing no time, had dug out a couple of his negroes from the estate-village, furnished them with hurricane-lanterns for light on a black and starless night, and, taking down his Martini-Henry elephant gun, and charging the magazine with explosive bullets, had gone out after the orang-utan, and blown the creature, quite justifiably of course, into a mound of bloody pulp. He had, again almost justifiably, it seemed to Williamson and me, been restrained only by his two Blacks disarming him lest he be hung by the neck until dead, from disposing of his neighbor, Burgess, with the last of the explosive cartridges. As it was, although Morley was not a man of any great physical force, being slightly built and always in somewhat precarious health, he had administered a chastising with his two hands to the fatuous ex-wild animal collector, which was long remembered in His Majesty King Edward’s loyal colony of Barbados, B.W.I.

  It was, as Williamson’s maternal grandmother had confided to him, almost as though this horrible experience had unhinged Mr Morley’s mind. Williamson himself had been born within a year, and Douglas Morley, who had in the meantime sold out the sugar estates in which most of his own and his young wife’s money had been invested, had removed to New York where he instituted a Bond Brokerage business. This Williamson had inherited two years after his graduation from college, at the time of his father’s death at the rather premature age of forty-seven.

  Douglas Morley, according to his grandmother’s report and his own experience, had included his son in the strange attitude of dislike and contemptuous indifference which the devastating experience with the orang-utan had seemed to bring into existence.

&nb
sp; We were not out of school when Mrs Douglas Morley died, and Williamson went back to the Madison Avenue house to live with his father.

  Mr Morley had a kind of apartment built in for him, quite separate from his own part of the house. He could not, it seemed, bear to have Williamson under his eye, even though his plain duty and ordinary usage and custom made it incumbent on him to share his home with his son. The two of them saw each other as little as possible. Williamson had inherited his mother’s property, and this his father administered for him as I must record to his credit, in an admirably competent and painstaking manner, so that Williamson was already a rich man well before his father’s death about doubled his material possessions.

  I have gone into this detail largely because I want to accentuate how extremely regrettable, it seemed to me, was Sylvia’s unaccountable attitude, which I have described, to one of the best and kindliest fellows on earth, after a childhood and youth such as he had been subjected to because of some obscure psychological slant of a very odd fish of a father for which, of course, he was in no way responsible himself.

  Well, now Sylvia was gone, too, and Williamson Morley was once more alone in the world so far as the possession of near relatives went, and free to do about as he pleased.

  His one comment, now that he was presumably settled down with me for the winter, about his late wife, I mean, was a very simple one, unconnected with anything that had been said or even alluded to, in answer to my carefully-phrased first personal word of regret for his loss.

  ‘I did everything I knew how, Gerald.’

  There was a world of meaning, a résumé of quiet suffering, patiently and I am sure bravely, borne in those few and simple words so characteristic of Williamson Morley.

  He did, once, refer to his mother during his visit with me, which lasted for several months. It was apropos of his asking my help in classifying and arranging a brief-case full of papers, legal and otherwise, which he had brought along, the documentation connected with a final settlement of his financial affairs. He had disposed of his bond-brokerage business immediately after his wife’s death.

  There were various family records – wills, and suchlike – among these papers, and I noted among these as I sorted and helped arrange them for Morley, sitting opposite him at the big table on my West gallery, the recurring names of various kinsfolk of his – Parkers, Morleys, Graves, Putneys – but a total absence of the family name Williamson. I had asked him, without any particular purpose, hardly even curiosity over so small a matter, whether there were not some Williamson relatives, that being his own baptismal name.

  ‘That’s a curious thing, Gerald,’ said Morley, reflectively, in his peculiarly deep and mellow voice. ‘My poor mother always – well, simply abominated the name. I suppose that’s how come I got it fastened on me – because she disliked it! You see, when I was born – it was in New York, in Roosevelt Hospital – my mother very nearly died. She was not a very big or strong person, and I was – er – rather a good-sized baby – weighed seventeen pounds or something outrageous at birth! Queer thing too – I nearly passed out during the first few days myself, they say! Undernourished. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. Yet, that was the verdict of three of New York’s foremost obstetricians who were in on the case in consultation.

  ‘Well, it seems, when I was about ten days old, and out of danger, my father came around in his car – it was a Winton, I believe in those days or perhaps, a Panhard – and carted me off to be baptized. My mother was still in a dangerous condition – they didn’t let her up for a couple of weeks or so after that – and chose that name for me himself, so “Williamson” I’ve been, ever since!’

  We had a really very pleasant time together. Morley was popular with the St Thomas crowd from the very beginning. He was too sensible to mope, and while he didn’t exactly rush after entertainment, we went out a good deal, and there is a good deal to go out to in St Thomas, or was in those days, two years ago, before President Hoover’s Economy Program took our Naval personnel out of St Thomas.

  Morley’s geniality, his fund of stories, his generous attitude to life, the outstanding kindliness and fellowship of the man, brought him a host of new friends, most of whom were my old friends. I was delighted that my prescription for poor old Morley – getting him to come down and stay with me that winter – was working so splendidly.

  It was in company with no less than four of these new friends of Morley’s, Naval Officers, all four of them, that he and I turned the corner around the Grand Hotel one morning about eleven o’clock and walked smack into trouble! The British sailorman of the Navy kind is, when normal, one of the most respectful and pleasant fellows alive. He is, as I have observed more than once, quite otherwise when drunk. The dozen or so British tars we encountered that moment, ashore from the Sloop-of-War Amphitrite, which lay in St Thomas’s Harbor, were as nasty and truculent a group of human-beings as I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. There is no telling where they had acquired their present condition of semi-drunkenness, but there was no question whatever of their joint mood!

  ‘Ho – plasterin’ band o’ brass-hat — — !’ greeted the enormous cockney who seemed to be their natural leader, eyeing truculently the four white-drill tropical uniforms with their shoulder insignia, and rudely jostling Lieutenant Sankers, to whose house we were en route afoot that morning, ‘fink ye owns the ’ole brasted universe, ye does. I’ll show ye!!’ and with that, the enormous bully, abetted by the salient jeers of his following which had, somehow, managed to elude their ship’s Shore Police down to that moment, barged head first into Morley, seizing him first by both arms and leaving the soil-marks of a pair of very dirty hands on his immaculate white drill jacket. Then, as Morley quietly twisted himself loose without raising a hand against this attack, the big cockney swung an open hand, and landed a resounding slap across Morley’s face.

  This whole affair, of course, occupied no more than a few seconds. But I had time, and to spare, to note the red flush of a sudden, and I thought an unprecedented, anger in Morley’s face; to observe the quick tightening of his tremendous muscles, the abrupt tensing of his long right arm, the beautifully-kept hand on the end of it hardening before my eyes into a great, menacing fist; the sudden glint in his deep-set dark-brown eyes, and then – then – I could hardly believe the evidence of my own two eyes – Williamson Morley, on his rather broad pair of feet, was trotting away, leaving his antagonist who had struck him in the face; leaving the rest of us together there in a tight little knot and an extremely unpleasant position on that corner. And then – well, the crisp ‘quarter-deck’ tones of Commander Anderson cut through that second’s amazed silence which had fallen. Anderson had seized the psychological moment to turn-to these discipline-forgetting tars. He blistered them in a cutting vernacular in no way inferior to their own. He keel-hauled them, warming to his task.

  Anderson had them standing at attention, several gaping-mouthed at his extraordinary skill in vituperation, by the time their double Shore Police squad came around the corner with truncheons in hand; and to the tender mercies of that businesslike and strictly sober group we left them.

  We walked along in a complete silence, Morley’s conduct as plainly dominating everything else in all our minds, as though we were five sandwich-men with his inexcusable cowardice blazoned on our fore-and-aft signboards.

  We found him at the foot of the flight of curving steps with its really beautiful metal-wrought railing which leads up to the high entrance of Lieutenant Sankers’s house. We went up the steps and into the house together, and when we had taken off our hats and gone into the ‘hall’, or living room, there fell upon us a silence so awkward as to transcend anything else of the kind in my experience. I, for one, could not speak to save my life; could not, it seemed, so much as look at Morley. There was, too, running through my head a half-whispered bit of thick, native, negro, St Thomian speech, a dialect remark, made to herself, by an aged negress who had been standing, horrified, quite nea
rby, and who had witnessed our besetting and the fiasco of Morley’s ignominious retreat after being struck full in the face. The old woman had muttered: ‘Him actin’ foo save him own soul, de mahn – Gahd keep de mahn stedfas’!’

  And, as we stood there, and the piling-up silence was becoming simply unbearable, Morley, who quite certainly had not heard this comment of the pious old woman’s, proceeded, calmly, in that mellow, deep baritone voice of his, to make a statement precisely bearing out the old woman’s contention.

  ‘You fellows are wondering at me, naturally. I’m not sure that even Canevin understands! You see, I’ve allowed myself to get really angry three times in my life, and the last time I took a resolution that nothing, nothing whatever, nothing conceivable, would ever do it to me again! I remembered barely in time this morning, gentlemen. The last time, you see, it cost me three weeks of suspense, nearly ruined me, waiting for a roughneck I had struck to die or recover – compound fracture – and I only tapped him, I thought! Look here!’ as, looking about him, he saw a certain corporate lack of understanding on the five faces of his audience.

  And, reaching up one of those inordinately long arms of his to where hung an old wrought-iron-barrelled musket, obviously an ‘ornament’ in Sankers’s house, hired furnished, he took the thing down, and with no apparent effort at all, in his two hands, broke the stock away from the lock and barrel, and then, still merely with his hands, not using a knee for any pressure between them such as would be the obvious and natural method for any such feat attempted, with one sweep bent the heavy barrel into a right-angle.