From this group a burly figure, that of Captain the Honorable William McMillin, detached itself and accosted Mr Palgrave. The captain, administrator of Great Fountain Estate over on Santa Cruz, here for the day on some estate business for his kinsmen the Comyns family who all lived in Scotland and for whom he managed their Santa Crucian sugar interests, had been as a freshly commissioned Cornet of Horse, one of Wellington’s officers more than fifty years before, at Waterloo. The old gentleman invited Mr Palgrave to a bottle of the Carlsburg beer, and the two Britons, provided with this refreshing beverage, sat down to talk together.
In their armchairs the two made a notable appearance, both being large-bodied, florid men, and the aged captain wearing, as was his custom on state occasions, his ancient scarlet military coat. Outside the great open French windows, the band members on the gallery, between pieces, made themselves heard as they arranged their music. Save for the bandmaster, Erasmus Petersen, a Dane, all were Negroes. Through the windows came minor musical sounds as a slide was shifted in an alto horn or as little runs and flutings tested the precision of a new tuning. In the midst of this, delicately, almost incidentally, the oboist ran his swart fingers over his silver keys, breathed into his instrument. A rippling, muted little quickstep came through the windows.
Weelum Palgrave is a Cha-Cha, b’la-hoo!’
Mr Palgrave suddenly shifted in his armchair. Then he remembered that he could not appear to notice this deliberate slap in the face, and, though suddenly empurpled, he sat quiet. He collected his wits, invited the captain to dinner that evening, and excused himself.
Claude, attentive for once, noted his emergence below, extricated his barouche, reached the steps where the two wooden-soldierlike gendarmes were saluting his master.
‘Home!’ said Mr Palgrave, acidly, stepping into the carriage.
That evening Mr Palgrave opened his grief to his fellow Briton, as to a person of assured position and integrity, the consul-general’s face quite purple between his vexation and the bottle of sound burgundy he had consumed at dinner.
The captain took his consul-general’s annoyance lightly.
‘Man, man!’ he expostulated. ‘Ye’re no so clearly accustomed to “Quashee” and his ways as mysel’, I do assure you. Why – there’s a song about me! My field-hands made it up, years ago. It runs:
Mars’ McMillin la’ fo’ me,
Loike him la’ to Waterloo!
‘And it means that I command them – that is to “la”, Mr Palgrave – the same as I gave commands at Waterloo – there were a precious few, I do assure you, sir. I was no more than a cornet at the time, my commission not two weeks old.’ The captain proceeded to pooh-pooh the Quashee songs as reason for serious annoyance.
But his explanations left Mr Palgrave cold.
‘Your Negroes do not – er – insist upon your returning to the Low Countries to fight Waterloo all over again!’ was his bitter comment. That suggestion that he return to Trebizond had bitten deep.
He had Trebizond on his mind when he was retiring that night and it is not strange that he went back there where he had spend two profitable years before being assigned to Charlotte Amalia, in his dreams. Somehow, as the strange distortion of the dream-state provides, he was identified with the sage Firdûsi, a great hero of Armenian legend, that same Firdûsi who had defied a Shah of Persia and refused to compose a history of his life at the imperial command.
Identified with Firdûsi, of whom he had heard many tales, Mr Palgrave suffered imprisonment in his dreams; was, like Firdûsi, summoned again and again into the Presence, always with refusal on his lips; always to be sent back to a place of confinement of increasing comfortlessness.
At last Palgrave-Firdûsi returned to an empty cell where for days he sat on the earthen floor, refusing to yield, to stultify himself. Then, on a gray morning, his jailer entered leading a blind slobbering Negro who sat on the floor opposite him. For an interminable period he suffered this disagreeable companionship. The Black was dumb as well as blind. He sat there, day after day, night after night, cross-legged on the hard floor.
At last Palgrave-Firdûsi could stand it no longer. He howled for his jailer, demanded audience. He was led to the throne room, his resolution dissipated, his one overwhelming desire to acquiesce – yes, yes; he would write – only let him be free of that slobbering horror which mewed to itself with its blank slab of a mouth. He threw himself face down before the throne.
The impact of his prostration awakened him, shivering, in his great mahogany bed. The moonlight of the Caribbees poured through the opened jalousies of the airy bedroom high on the hillsides of Charlotte Amalia: and through the open windows came eerily – it was three o’clock in the morning – the very ghost of a little lilting refrain in the cracked voice of some aged man:
Him go back – to Trebizond.
Mr Palgrave groaned, rolled over in bed so that his better ear was undermost, sought to woo sleep again.
But now it was impossible to sleep. That tune – that devilish, that damnable tune – was running through his head again, tumultuously, to the small-drum throbbing of his heart. He groaned and tossed impatiently, miserably. Would morning never come?
In a gray dawn Mr Palgrave rose from an unrefreshing bed, tubbed himself half-heartedly. His face, as he looked at it in his shaving-mirror, wielding his Wednesday Wade & Butcher, seemed gray and drawn; there was no color in his usually choleric cheeks. The servants, at this hour, would not have arrived. There would be no morning tea ready.
At a little before seven, fully dressed, Mr Palgrave descended the staircase to his office below. He sat down at his orderly desk, listening to the shuffle of early-morning bare feet outside there on the earthen hillside roadway before his fine house; to the clipped, grave snatches of the Creole speech of the Blacks; to the occasional guffaws of the Negroes about their early-morning occasions; gravely erect; carrying trays, fruits, great tins of cistern-water, atop kerchiefed heads.
Mechanically he reached for his writing-materials, dipped a pen in an inkwell, commenced to write. He wrote on and on, composing carefully, the edge of his mind engaged in listening for the song out there on the roadway. He discovered that he was tapping out its cadence with his foot on the scrubbed pitch-pine flooring underneath his desk: oóm – bom, bom; oóm – bom, bom; oóm – bom, bom; oóm – bom, bom!
He finished his letter, signed it meticulously, blotted it, folded it twice, then heard the latch of the remote kitchen door snap. He rose, walked into the dining-room, and spoke through the inner kitchen door to Melissa his cook who had just arrived.
‘Make me some tea at once, if you please.’
‘Yes, sar.’ It was the dutiful, monotonous, unhurried voice of old Black Melissa as she motivated herself ponderously in the direction of the charcoal barrel in the kitchen’s corner.
Mr Palgrave reflectively mounted the stairs to his bed-room. He was putting a keen edge on his Wednesday razor – he used a set of seven – before it dawned upon him that he had already shaved! He returned the razor to its case. What could be the matter with him? He looked musingly into his shaving-mirror, passed a well-kept hand reflectively over the smooth cheeks into which the exercise of moving about and up and down the stairs had driven a little of his accustomed high color. He shook his head at his reflection in the glass, walked out into the upper hallway, redescended the stairs, once more entered his office.
What was this?
He frowned, stared, picked up from the desk the letter he had finished ten minutes before, examined it carefully. It was, unquestionably, in his own handwriting. The ink was barely dry. He laid it back in its place on the desk and began to pace the room, slowly, listening to Melissa’s slow movings-about in the kitchen, to the arrival of other servants. He could hear their clipped greetings to the old cook.
Wondering at himself, at this strange mental world where he found himself, he seated himself firmly, judicially, in his ample desk chair, picked up the letter, read it throug
h again with an ever-increasing wonderment. He laid it down, his thoughts turning, strangely to Trebizond.
And Mr Palgrave could not, for the life of him, recall writing this letter.
He was still sitting there, staring blankly at nothing, his brows drawn together in a deep frown, when Claude came in to announce tea prepared in the dining-room. ‘Tea’, in St Thomas, Continental fashion, is the name of the morning meal. ‘Breakfast’ comes at one o’clock. Mr Palgrave’s cook had prepared amply that morning, but not bacon and eggs, nor even Scotch marmalade, availed to arouse him from his strange preoccupation.
After ‘tea’ he sat again at his desk alone until ten o’clock, when his privacy was invaded by two sailors from a British vessel in the harbor, with consular business to transact. He gave these men his careful attention; later, his advice. He walked out with them an hour later, turned up the hill and strolled about the steep hillside streets for an hour.
It was nearly high noon when he returned. He passed the office, going upstairs to refresh his appearance after his walk. It was blistering hot outdoors under the May noon sunlight drenching the dusty roadways.
When he went into his office half an hour later he saw the letter once more. It was enclosed now, in an official envelope, addressed, too, in his own unmistakable hand-writing, duly stamped for posting. Again, he had no slightest recollection of having done any of these things. He picked up the letter intending now to tear it across and then across again and fling the bits of paper into the waste-basket. Instead he sat with it in his hands, curiously placid, in an apathetic state in which he seemed not even to think. He ended by placing it in his coat pocket and was immediately afterward summoned to the one o’clock ‘breakfast’ in the dining-room.
When he awakened from his siesta that afternoon it was near four o’clock. He remembered the letter at once. He rose, and before his afternoon bath examined the coat pocket. The letter was not in the pocket. He decided to look for it on the desk later.
In half an hour, fresh and cool now after his bath, he descended the stairway and went straight into his office. The letter was on his mind, and, frowning slightly, he stepped toward the immaculately neat desk. He drew down his lip under his teeth in a puzzled expression. The letter was not on the desk.
The arrival of callers summoned him into the drawing-room. He did not give any thought to the letter again until dinner-time and then he was at the top of Government Hill at one of the British houses and could only postpone his desire to find and destroy it.
The letter failed to turn up, and the next day came and passed, and the next after it, and the days stretched into weeks. He had almost forgotten the letter. It cropped up mentally now and then as a vague, half-remembered annoyance. Things were going better these days. The song and its varied accompaniments of drum-tapping, whistling, humming of the nearly soundless tune, the encompassing annoyance it had caused him – all these things seemed to have dropped out of the hearing, and consequently out of the mind of the consul-general. He felt, as he half realized, somewhat more at home now in Charlotte Amalia. Everybody, it appeared, was perfectly courteous to him. The atmosphere of vague hostility which had vaguely adumbrated his surroundings was gone, utterly dissipated. The charm of the town had begun to appeal to this sophisticated traveler of the earth’s surfaces.
Then one morning among the letters which the Royal Mail steamer Hyperion had brought into the harbor the night before he discerned an official communication from his superiors in London.
He opened it before any of his other letters, as was natural.
The Under-Secretary had written granting his urgent request to be sent back to Trebizond. He was requested to take immediate passage to any convenient Mediterranean port and to proceed thence direct to the Armenian capital. It was, at the moment, agreeable to the consular service that he should be there. Suggestions followed in the letter’s text, designating various policies to be pursued.
He finished the many sheets of thin onion-skin paper, folded the letter and laid it on the desk, and sat, staring dully at his inkwell. He did not want to go back to Trebizond. He wanted to remain here. But – he had no choice in the matter. He cudgeled his brains warily. He recalled his singular apathy at the time when his letter – written, it seemed, as though subconsciously – had disappeared. He had not wanted to write that letter. He recalled that there had been confusion in his mind at the time – he could not, he recalled, remember the actual writing, nor sending it after it was written. There was something very strange here, something – unusual! Indubitably he had applied for transfer to Trebizond. To Trebizond he was ordered to go!
Charlotte Amalia, that coy Latin-brunette of a town with her coquetteries and her too-garish coloring, and her delicate beauties – Charlotte Amalia had schemed for his departure, forced his hand, driven him out. He sat there, at his desk, thinking, ruefully, of many things. Then his pride came to his rescue. He remembered the slights which had been put upon him, those intangible slights – the almost formless little tune with its absurd, gibberish words; the tapping of pans; the rattle and boom of the hill drums, those detestable night drums on which these stupid-looking, subtle blackamoors were always and forever, and compellingly, tapping, tapping, tapping.
And before very long Mr Palgrave, who did not believe in magic and who pooh-poohed anything labeled ‘eery’ or ‘occult’ as absurd; who believed only in unmistakable matters like sound beef and County Families and exercise and the integrity of the British Empire and the invariable inferiority of foreigners – Mr Palgrave came to see that in some fashion not accounted for in his philosophy Charlotte Amalia had played him a very scurvy trick – somehow.
Bestirring himself he began to examine the inventory which he kept of his household gear; many belongings without which no British gentleman could be expected to exist. He indited to the harbor-master a cold, polite note, requesting notice of the arrival of vessels clearing for Mediterranean ports or ports on the Black Sea – Odessa for choice – and he began to formulate, in his small, precise hand-writing, the list of duty-calls which must be made before his departure. In the pauses between these labors he wrote various polite, stiff notes, and in the very midst of such activities Claude summoned him to midday breakfast.
Leading the way to the dining-room after this announcement, Claude paused at the office doorway, turned a deprecating face to his employer.
‘Yes?’ said Mr Palgrave, perceiving that Claude wished to address him.
‘Yo’ is leave us, sar,’ said Claude, with courteous absence of any inflection or emphasis on his words which would indicate that he was asking a question.
‘Yes – I am leaving very shortly,’ replied Mr Palgrave unemotionally. He added nothing to this statement. He was a stiff master to his servants, just but distant. Servants had their place and must be kept in it, according to Mr Palgrave’s scheme of life.
That night, his sleep being rather fitful, Mr Palgrave noted that the drums were reiterating some message, insistently, up in the hills.
Neither Claude, who as coachman-butler had the closest contact with his employer of any of the house servants, nor, indeed, old Melissa nor any of the others, made any further remark to their employer concerning his departure. This took place three days later, on a Netherlands vessel clearing for Genoa; and Mr Palgrave was probably the very last person in St Thomas who would have asked any personal question of a servant.
Yet he wondered, when it occurred to him – and that was often – just how Claude had known he was leaving.
The Black Beast
and other Voodoo Tales
The Black Beast
Diagonally across the Sunday Market in Christiansted, on the island of Santa Cruz, from the house known as Old Moore’s, which I occupied one season – that is to say, along the southern side of the ancient marketplace of the old city, built upon the abandoned site of the yet older French town of Bassin – there stands, in faded, austere grandeur, another and much larger old house known
as Gannett’s. For close to half a century Gannett House stood vacant and idle, its solid masonry front along the marketplace presenting a forlorn and aloof appearance, with its rows of closely shuttered windows, its stones darkened and discolored, its whole appearance stern and forbidding.
During that fifty years or so in which it had stood shut up and frowning blankly at the mass of humanity which passed its massive bulk and its forbidding closed doors, there had been made, by various persons, efforts enough to have it opened. Such a house, one of the largest private dwellings in the West Indies, and one of the handsomest, closed up like this, and out of use, as it transpired upon serious inquiry, merely because such was the will of its arbitrary and rather mysterious absentee proprietor whom the island had not seen for a middle-aged man’s lifetime, could hardly fail to appeal to prospective renters.
I know, because he has told me so, that the Rev. Fr Richardson, of the English Church, tried to engage it as a convent for his sisters in 1926. I tried to get a season’s lease on it myself, in the year when, failing to do so, I took Old Moore’s instead – a house of strange shadows and generous rooms and enormous, high doorways through which, times innumerable, Old Moore himself, bearing, if report were believable, a strange burden of mental apprehension, had slunk in bygone years, in shuddering, dreadful anticipation . . .
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 60
