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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  Young Dacre stared at him, almost gulped with surprise when he replied to so unusual a question: ‘Of course, Lord Carruth; certainly, sir. Your word of honor – Mr Canevin to corroborate! Of course such a thing would not be necessary, sir. Good Heavens! Of course, I’d believe anything you chose to say, sir, like the Gospel itself.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Rand, smiling gravely, ‘if it is agreeable to Mr Canevin, I think we shall change our minds and remain to luncheon with you. There is something I think you should know, and the period of luncheon will just give us time to tell you the circumstances behind our arrival here at about the right time for our business this morning.’

  Rand looked over at me, and I nodded, eagerly.

  ‘Splendid!’ said Sir Harry Dacre, rising alertly and ringing the bell for the butler. ‘I had, of course, been awfully keen to know about that. Hardly cared to ask, you know.’

  ‘My reason for suggesting that we tell you,’ said Rand gravely, ‘goes rather deeper than merely satisfying a very reasonable curiosity. If by doing so we can accomplish what I have in mind, it will be, my dear fellow, a more important service in your behalf than ridding you of that Wertheimer.’

  The butler came in and our host ordered the places set. Then, very soberly, he inquired: ‘What, sir, if I may venture to ask, is the nature of that service?’

  Rand answered only after a long and thoughtful interval.

  ‘It may seem to you a rather odd answer, Dacre. I want to clear up in your mind, forever, the truth of what the religion we hold in common – the religion of our ancient Anglican Church here in England – teaches us about the souls in Paradise . . . ’

  The Ravel Pavane

  In order to recount suitably the extraordinary case of the pianist Marie Boutácheff, it becomes necessary that I should set out first, in their order, certain facts. These are not without interest and are essential to its complete understanding. They have to do with the effects of sound upon a highly sensitive organism.

  I first met Miss Boutácheff in the early Spring of the year 1928. I had come over from Santa Cruz, the southermost of the Virgin Islands, to St Thomas, the colony’s capital, after a Winter’s residence on the other island. It was my intention to remain in St Thomas for about three weeks, to see the Spring tennis tournaments and for the renewal of social relationships with my friends in the capital. Then, about the first of June, I planned to take ship for continental United States, there to remain until my return to the Caribbean the following Autumn.

  Miss Boutácheff had been spending the Winter in St Thomas, where she had been induced to come by several women friends, all painters. These friends of hers, as Rachel Manners, the landscapist assured me, had brought her, ‘two jumps ahead of a nervous breakdown’ from overwork, to our West Indian climate of spice and balm for the purpose of restoring her shattered health.

  Miss Boutácheff, at that time very well known to and very greatly admired by a select circle of artistic people, was a serious artist, a pianist of great promise. She had, in fact, already ‘arrived’ professionally. She had given successful concerts in New York and elsewhere. She was a tall, blonde, rather slender woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, of that type which possesses enormous nervous energy coupled with a relatively low degree of physical vitality. She appeared, too, to be entirely free of that drawback which so frequently accompanies the make-up of people seriously engaged in the arts, and commonly named ‘the artistic temperament’. In a very marked degree she possessed the intangible assets of charm and personality.

  We took to each other at once. Miss Boutácheff had read everything of mine, she assured me. I had heard much about her and had even attended two of her concerts in Aeolian Hall. She had been making every effort not to think of music for five months!

  ‘Hasn’t that let your technic down?’ I asked her.

  ‘No, I do not think so. I hope not! You see, I have been using a clavier – a silent keyboard – all winter. That, being merely mechanical, does not trouble me. In fact it is soothing, restful. It is only sound, Mr Canevin, that – excuse me, if you please; let us talk of something else if you don’t mind.’

  It was I, as it happened, who started her later on, to ‘thinking of music’ again.

  We were discussing Pelléas et Mélisande, and we got a little at cross-purposes because, to her, Pelléas et Mélisande meant the music of Claude Debussy and such performances as that splendid one of Mary Garden and the notable cast in that great seven nights’ performance of the Hammerstein production in New York City; while to me, from the writer’s viewpoint, most prominent was the written text of the story as it came from the hands of Maeterlinck. This, of course, as I might have known, Marie Boutácheff thought of merely as the libretto. We recognized at once that we were discussing two different problems of artistic expression.

  ‘I grant you,’ said she, ‘that I do not know accurately the Maeterlinck text! I have never even read it through once. The story, yes, of course I know that; in a general way, as one knows the “plot” of any opera. One has to remember, though, that Maeterlinck is a symbolist. I confess I do not know, exactly, what he is trying to express in his “opus”. I think it is jealousy; but, perhaps, it’s something else! To be frank, Mr Canevin, I never gave the subject any particular thought.’

  ‘From the writer’s viewpoint,’ I put in, ‘it is difficult to know what he is up to! It has never been clear to me, for example, just why, at the very beginning, the castle doorkeeper is discovered struggling with a refractory door; or why the maid servants are assembling for the purpose of pouring water on the threshold! It is, undoubtedly, symbolism – it could hardly be anything else. But – what, please, does it symbolize?’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea!’ said Marie Boutácheff, and we laughed together understandingly. Then she told me about a little group of six pieces by the composer Arnold Schönberg. She told me how she had studied these very carefully; and failed utterly to ‘get’ what the composer was trying to express. It was ‘overtonal’ composition, much, in fact, like Debussy’s in Pelléas et Mélisande.

  Then she proceeded (I recall clearly how the experience she related interested me then and later) to tell me how she had noticed their inclusion in a program played by the very famous virtuoso Orféo Mattaloni. The six little pieces required only a few minutes to play through. They were little scraps of expression; ideas; chiefly interwoven phrases. She had gone to hear Mattaloni play them. She wanted, she said, to see if she could understand the composer’s meaning by listening to them. She described her experience at that concert –

  ‘Mattaloni paused just before that number on his program. He came down to the front of the platform and said to that big audience – it was in Carnegie Hall – “I beg that you will humor me! Keep silent, please, quite silent, between the numbers of this suite I am now going to play. No comment at all, if you will be so kind! I have studied them with the very greatest care. I will try to play them for you as they must be played. When I have finished all six – four minutes for them all – then, of course, such comment as you please.”

  ‘Then he sat down and played the six pieces through, very beautifully. He is a very great artist. They are, really, quite simple little things. And, do you know, perhaps it was merely my frame of mind at the moment, my “temperament” if you will! – I had come deliberately to find out Schönberg’s meaning, you will remember – I closed my eyes and did not open them until Mattaloni had finished the six. I knew them all, of course, intimately. I had played them many, many times. Well I “got” six little pictures, Mr Canevin, like sketches; little, sharp, cleanly-etched line-drawings. Street, vista, sunset, a church! It was really extraordinary.

  ‘And then when he had finished, there was quite an outbreak from the audience – boos; hisses even; applause, too; little murmurs and cheerings; several people in tears from their emotional reactions. The booings and hisses were for the composer; not for Mattaloni! He sat there and looked around at us, and smiled,
inscrutably. That was all.

  ‘Then he went on with his program; a very fine one. Everybody was delighted with it and it got very favorable notices in all the next morning’s newspapers.

  ‘But, here is the odd part of it, Mr Canevin: I “went behind”; Sylvia Manners, who was with me, and I; and I said to him: “There is a question I wish to ask you, Orféo. Tell me: had you those images – I named them all – or, if you do not mind my asking you, were you merely playing it, as Schönberg wrote it down, with that inimitable technic which is yours alone?”

  ‘That pleased Mattaloni. He said: “I am very glad you have asked me that, Marie. No, not at all. No ‘images’. I ‘see’ nothing; nothing whatever in them; no pictures. And, believe me, I have studied the things adequately – months of work and thought and consideration upon that little suite which requires only four minutes to play through, and which gives you ‘sketches’ as you say; and, which gave part of this audience what they think is reason to hiss Arnold Schönberg! It is curious, is it not? No, they mean nothing, nothing whatever to Orféo Mattaloni, except – perhaps, because of their technical construction – a set of little children’s plaything-puzzles!” ’

  As for me, I could only shake my head over this account of Miss Boutácheff’s experience. I appreciate the Moderns: Ravel, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Debussy; and the others. And yet, I should be the same as Signor Mattaloni. I do not, I fear, often understand what they mean to convey. It naturally interested me to learn that so great a musician as Mattaloni felt the same way about such compositions.

  After a slight pause, and meaning merely to make conversation, I remarked, ‘You know Mattaloni well, then, Miss Boutácheff?’

  Miss Boutácheff forgot her convalescence. Her delicate, rather beautiful face lighted up with a sudden animation. She looked straight into my eyes.

  ‘He is a very great artist,’ she said. ‘Yes, Mr Canevin, I know him very well.’ Then at once she began to speak of Rachel Manners’s remarkable work, a long series of highly-colored, florid, glowing canvases, drenched with light, made that winter under the dazzling West Indian sun; paintings which have since brought her fame.

  It was not until I had had the opportunity somewhat to digest this peculiar susceptibility of Miss Boutácheff’s for ‘musical images’ that she told me about the effect which another musical composition always had upon her.

  This was Maurice Ravel’s Pavane. The Ravel Pavane is a well-known composition, though rarely performed at concerts; and I think I need say no more about it here than that it is a very ‘modern’ musical treatment of an antique Italian dance. It is, to me, very beautiful. I imagine most audiences like it, even though it must be classed as purely intellectual music.

  Marie Boutácheff said that one movement of this composition – the final movement which follows the Grave Assai, the suspended pause occuring on page six of the standard Schirmer edition – she had never, really, heard with what might be called her outward ears. When that movement began, that is, with anybody else playing the Pavane, and she listening, she ‘passed out,’ and, instead of hearing anything, got instead the mental sensation of seeing a picture. Near the conclusion of this particular movement, this ‘picture’ would disappear out of her consciousness, and she would again ‘hear’ the very end of the composition in a perfectly ordinary and normal manner.

  She knew what were the musical sounds involved in this portion of the Pavane. She had played it herself many times and had studied it intensively. She always ‘heard’ every note clearly when she played it herself. So far in her career she had only practiced it. She had never included the Ravel Pavane in any of her own programs.

  She knew, mentally, when hearing it played by somebody else, the precise sequence of the notes and chords, but, even when playing it herself, despite being able to hear every note, she nevertheless in some curious fashion ‘passed out’ in the same place and ‘came to’ in the same place.

  Also – and here I could perceive the really strange element in the phenomenon – the seeing impression was a growing and an increasing one.

  In other words, every time Marie Boutácheff ‘saw’ the picture which that particular section of the Ravel Pavane brought into her mind, that picture was more intense, clearer in its details, more real.

  The ‘picture’ began with her outside the arched doorway which led into a vast ballroom in which the Pavane was being danced. She stood on a smooth marble flooring of square black and white tiles, looking in at the dancers.

  Repetition had made it possible for her to get a clear and detailed idea of the appearance of the dancers; and every time she ‘saw’ the Pavane, she was a trifle nearer the entrance-way.

  She had never been able to see all the dancers; only those just inside the arched doorway. But – there were other persons inside the ballroom around the corner, to her right, of whose presence there she was, somehow, certain.

  Of the presence of those others she was thoroughly convinced. Delicate little snatches of conversation, in quaint, antique Italian, came out to her from the grouped dancers, as they made their formal bows to each other there inside the ballroom. Even odors as of some long-forgotten perfumes, floated out to her; scents of camphire and of bergamot. There was, too, in this composite set of sensations evoked by this portion of the Pavane, the feeling of a light, warm breeze, stirring the curtains of the gracious room; a little breeze which wafted itself out into the hallway where she stood looking in; entranced; breathless with an ever-increasing, almost heart-breaking longing to get into the ballroom – standing outside there on the cool, smooth, black and white marble tiles.

  I have mentioned that Ravel’s Pavane is rarely performed in public. But, not long after I got back to the Continental United States that Spring, having been on the lookout for its possible inclusion in some belated, end-of-the-season program, I discovered that Harold Bauer was to play the Ravel Pavane at his last concert, and I bought a ticket and went to Carnegie Hall for the particular purpose of hearing it.

  It was a delightful, although a somewhat startling, experience!

  Of course I had a certain psychological preparation for what happened. I was prepared, after what Marie Boutácheff had told me, to get mentally some kind of an ‘image’. I got one! The little pause, noted in the musical score as Grave Assai, did, actually, give me a mental picture. I could ‘see’ it, intellectually, as it were (I had no clearly-defined visualization which could be literally described as a picture); four couples, dancing, as though at some distance; whether distance in space or time I can scarcely say. There were eight of the dancers in my ‘picture’; four demure ladies, all young; four cavaliers attending them through the dance; handing them about the square figures of those sedate, grave measures, with a distinctively mediaeval courtesy; with gallant, studiously languid, bows.

  Bauer gave a magnificent performance throughout. In the Pavane he accentuated the rhythm, bringing out, as Ravel clearly intends, the sense of an orchestra. I could clearly distinguish the violins, sawing along through the dignified cadences of the mellow old dance-measures. I was sure I could hear, too, in those marvellously harmonized dissonances wherein the composer speaks to the intellect in overtonal groupings of notes, the viola da gamba, gravely sobbing out the measured beats of melodic ictus – óne, two, thrée, four; óne, two, thrée, four.

  It was a very interesting experience. I understood after it very much more clearly what Marie Boutácheff had meant to convey to me.

  Very soon after the Bauer concert Marie Boutácheff, her health now greatly improved, came back to New York.

  She called me up the day after her arrival, about ten in the morning. The New York musical season was over. It was well along in June, and those persons who, like myself, were for any reason lingering in the great city, were complaining of the heat. Marie asked me to come to tea at her studio the next day. When I got there, about four o’clock, several other people had already arrived. More came in after me. The tone of the gathering was congratu
latory. These were Marie’s friends, and they were outspokenly glad to see her so greatly restored. I, even, came in for a measure of their approval, as a person somehow associated with the place which had wrought such a salutary change.

  Orféo Mattaloni was one of her guests. He was, it came out, to sail for Europe on the third or fourth day following.

  At Marie’s suggestion, hastily imparted between two admirable musical performances – and somewhat to my surprise, for I was only one of her new friends as compared with all these older and more intimate ones – I remained after the others had gone. She came back to me after seeing her other friends out of the studio, to where I sat on an enormous divan placed along the west wall of the big room. She was smiling and holding out her hands impulsively, as though I had only that moment arrived.

  ‘O, Mr Canevin, it is indeed good to see you!’ she cried, and settled herself beside me. Then at once she put into words what was in her mind, and I understood why she had asked me to remain.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, eagerly, and turning an illuminated face towards me, ‘I’ve had the most remarkable experience! It was only a day or so after you had sailed from St Thomas. There was an entertainment for the Municipal Hospital, a benefit. Probably you saw the notices before you left. They asked me to play. It was rather short notice, but I was quite willing, very happy indeed, really, to do that for them. I was feeling very well, you see. There was no program, no precise list of what was to be played. It was of course a very informal affair.

  ‘I played several things; things I imagined the audience would appreciate. They liked them, and I was requested, near the end, to play again.

  ‘I played the Ravel Pavane, Mr Canevin.’ She paused, her eyes like stars.

  ‘Mr Canevin – it was remarkable – extraordinary!!