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

by Henry S. Whitehead

  It has always been one of my negative principles that annoyance over the details or over the outcome of any game of chance or skill should never be expressed. That sort of thing has always seemed to me absurd; indeed, inexcusable. Yet, I testify, I have, and increasingly as our acquaintance progressed, been so worked up over the cards when playing with the Lorriquer family, as to have to put the brakes down tight upon some expression of annoyance which I should later have regretted. Indeed, I will go farther, and own up to the fact that I have been badgered into entering into arguments with Mrs Lorriquer at the table, when she would make some utterly outrageous claim, and then argue – the only word for it is offensively – against the massed testimony of her opponents and her partner for the evening. More than once, Mrs Preston, under the stress of such an exhibition of temper and unreasonableness on her mother’s part, has risen from the table, making some excuse, only to return a few minutes later. I believe that on all such occasions, Mrs Preston took this means of allowing her annoyance to evaporate rather than express herself to her mother in the presence of a guest.

  To say that it was annoyance is to put it very mildly indeed. It was embarrassing, too, to the very last degree. The subjects upon which Mrs Lorriquer would ‘go up in the air’, as Mrs Squire once modernly expressed it, were always trivial; always unreasonable. Mrs Lorriquer, although a finished player in all respects, was, I think, always, as a matter of fact, in the wrong. She would question the amount of a score, for example, and, upon being shown the printed penalties for such score on the cover-page of the score pad, or from one of the standard books on the game, would shift over to a questioning of the score itself. The tricks, left on the table, would be counted out to her, before her eyes, by Colonel Lorriquer. Half-way through such an ocular demonstration, Mrs Lorriquer would interrupt her husband with some kind of diatribe, worthy of the mind of a person quite utterly ignorant of the game of Contract and of decent manners. She insisted upon keeping all scores herself, but unless this process were very carefully watched and checked, she would, perhaps half the time, cheat in favor of her own side.

  It was, really, outrageous. Time and time again, I have gone home from the Lorriquers’, after such an evening as I have indicated, utterly resolved never to play there again, or to refuse, as courteously as might be possible, to meet Mrs Lorriquer over a card-table. Then, the next day, perhaps, the other Mrs Lorriquer, charming, kindly, sweet-natured, gentle and hospitable, would be in such overwhelming, disarming evidence, that my overnight resolution would be dissipated into thin air, and I would accuse myself of becoming middle-aged, querulous!

  But this unaccountable diversity between the Mrs Lorriquer of ordinary affairs and the Mrs Lorriquer of the cardtable, outstanding, conspicuous, absurd indeed, as it was, was really as nothing when compared to Mrs Lorriquer’s luck at the cards.

  I have never seen anything like it; never heard, save in old-fashioned fictional tales of the person who sold his soul to Satan for invincibility at cards, of anything which could compare to it. It is true that Mrs Lorriquer sometimes lost – a single game, or perhaps even a rubber. But in the long run, Mrs Lorriquer, even on the lowest possible basis for expressing what I mean, did not need to cheat, still less to argue over points or scores. She won, steadily, inevitably, monotonously, like the steady propulsive motions of some soulless machine at its mechanical work. It was virtually impossible to beat her.

  We did not play for stakes. If we had, a goodly portion of my income would have diverted that winter to the Lorriquer coffers. Save for the fact that as it was the Colonel who played partners with me, it would have been Mrs Lorriquer, rather than the Lorriquer family, who would have netted all the proceeds!

  In bidding, and, indeed, in the actual playing of a hand, she seemed to follow no system beyond abject reliance on her ‘luck’. I have, not once, but many, many times, known her, for example, to bid two no-trump originally, on a hand perhaps containing two ‘singletons’, only to have her partner ‘go to three’ with a hand containing every card which she needed for the dummy. I will not specify, beyond this, any technical illustrations of how her extraordinary ‘luck’ manifested itself. Suffice it to say that Bridge is, largely, a mathematical matter, varied, in the case of four thoroughly trained players, by what is known as the ‘distribution’ of the cards. It is this unknown element of ‘distribution’ which keeps the game, in the hands of a table of experts, a ‘game of chance’ and not merely a mathematical certainty gaged by skillful, back-and-forth, informative bidding. To put the whole matter of Mrs Lorriquer’s ‘luck’ into a nutshell, it was this element of ‘distribution’ of the cards which favored her, in and out of season; caused her to win with a continuous regularity; never seeming to cause her to be pleased at her success and so lend to an evening at cards with her at the table that rather unsatisfactory geniality which even a child shows when it ‘gets the breaks’ at a game.

  No; Mrs Lorriquer was, while engaged in playing Bridge, a harridan, a disagreeable old vixen; a ‘pill’ as, I believe, I once heard the outraged Mrs Squire mutter desperately, under her breath!

  Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to allege that as against the Colonel and me, playing as partners for many evenings, the ‘distribution’ of the cards was adverse with absolute uniformity. I should hesitate to say that, positively, although my recollection is that such was the case. But, in the ordinary run of affairs, once in a while one of us would get a commanding hand, and, immune from the possibility of the ‘distribution’ affecting success, would play it out to a winning score for the time being. It was after one such hand – I played it, the Colonel’s hand as dummy – that I succeeded in making my bid: four hearts, to a game. I remember that I had nine hearts in my hand, together with the ace, king of clubs, and the ‘stoppers’ on one other suit, and finishing with something ‘above the line’ besides ‘making game’ in one hand, that my first intimation of a strange element in Mrs Lorriquer’s attitude to the game made itself apparent. Hitherto – it was, perhaps, a matter of a month or six weeks of the acquaintance between us – it had been a combination of luck and what I can only call bad manners; the variety of luck which I have attempted to indicate and the ‘bad manners’ strictly limited to such times as we sat around the square table in the center of the Lorriquers’ breezy hall.

  The indication to which I have referred was merely an exclamation from my right, where Mrs Lorriquer sat, as usual, in her accustomed place.

  ‘Sapristi!’ boomed Mrs Lorriquer, in a deep, resonant, man-like voice.

  I looked up from my successful hand and smiled at her. I had, of course, imagined that she was joking – to use an antique, rather mean-ingless, old-French oath, in that voice. Her own voice, even when scolding over the card-table, was a light, essentially feminine voice. If she had been a singer, she would have been a thin, high soprano.

  To my surprise, Mrs Lorriquer was not wearing her whimsical expression. At once, too, she entered into an acrimonious dispute with the Colonel over the scoring of our game-going hand, as usual, insisting on something quite ridiculous, the old Colonel arguing with her patiently.

  I glanced at Mrs Preston to see what she might have made of her mother’s exclamation in that strange, unaccustomed, incongruous voice. She was looking down at the table, on which her hands rested, a pensive and somewhat puzzled expression puckering her white forehead. So far as I could guess from her expression she, too, had been surprised at what she had heard. Apparently, I imagined, such a peculiar manifestation of annoyance on Mrs Lorriquer’s part was as new to her daughter as it was to me, still a comparative stranger in that family’s acquaintance.

  We resumed play, and, perhaps an hour or more later, it happened that we won another rather notable hand, a little slam, carefully bid up, in no-trump, the Colonel playing the hand. About half-way through, when it was apparent that we were practically sure of our six over-tricks, I noticed, being, of course, unoccupied, that Mrs Lorriquer, at my right, was muttering to herse
lf, in a peculiarly ill-natured, querulous way she had under such circumstances, and, my mind stimulated by the remembrance of her use of the old-French oath, I listened very carefully and discovered that she was muttering in French. The most of it I lost, but the gist of it was, directed toward her husband, a running diatribe of the most personal and even venomous kind imaginable.

  Spanish, as I was aware, Mrs Lorriquer knew. She had lived in the Canal Zone for a number of years, and elsewhere where the Colonel’s professional engagements as an engineer had taken them, but, to my knowledge, my hostess was unacquainted with colloquial French. The mutterings were distinctively colloquial. She had, among other things, called her husband in those mutterings ‘the accursed child of a misbegotten frog’, which is, however inelegant on the lips of a cultivated elderly gentlewoman, at least indicative of an intimate knowledge of the language of the Frankish peoples! No one else sensed it – the foreign tongue, I mean – doubtless because both other players were fully occupied, the Colonel in making our little slam, Mrs Preston in doing what she could to prevent him, and besides, such mutterings were common on Mrs Lorriquer’s part; were usual, indeed, on rare occasions when a hand at Bridge was going against her and her partner. It was the use of the French that intrigued me.

  A few days later, meeting her coming down the hill, a sunny smile on her kindly, good-humored face, I addressed her, whimsically, in French. Smilingly, she disclaimed all knowledge of what I was talking about.

  ‘I supposed you were a French scholar, somehow,’ said I.

  ‘I really don’t know a word of it,’ replied Mrs Lorriquer, ‘unless, perhaps, what “R.S.V.P.” means, and – oh, yes! – “honi soit qui mal y pense!” That’s on the great seal of England, isn’t it, Mr Canevin?’

  It set me to wondering, as, I imagine, it would have set anyone under just those circumstances, and I had something to puzzle over. I could not, you see, readily reconcile Mrs Lorriquer’s direct statement that she knew no French, a statement made with the utmost frankness, and to no possible end if it were untrue, with the fact that she had objurgated the Colonel under her breath and with a surprising degree of fluency, as ‘the accursed child of a misbegotten frog!’

  It seemed, this little puzzle, insoluble! There could, it seemed to me, be no possible question as to Mrs Lorriquer’s veracity. If she said she knew no French besides the trite phrases which everybody knows, then the conclusion was inevitable; she knew no French! But – beyond question she had spoken, under her breath to be sure, but in my plain hearing, in that language and in the most familiar and colloquial manner imaginable.

  There was, logically, only one possible explanation. Mrs Lorriquer had been speaking French without her own knowledge!

  I had to let it go at that, absurd as such a conclusion seemed to me.

  But, pondering over this apparent absurdity, another point, which might have been illuminating if foresight were as satisfactory as ‘hindsight’, emerged in my mind. I recalled that what I have called ‘the other Mrs Lorriquer’ was an especially gentle, kindly person, greatly averse to the spoiling of anybody’s good time! The normal Mrs Lorriquer was, really, almost softly apologetic. The least little matter wherein anything which could possibly be attributed to her had gone wrong would always be the subject of an explanation, an apology. If the palm salad at one of her luncheons or dinners did not seem to her to be quite perfect, there would be deprecatory remarks. If the limes from which a little juice was to be squeezed out upon the halved papayas at her table happened not to be of the highest quality, the very greenest of green limes that is, Mrs Lorriquer would lament the absence of absolutely perfect limes that morning when she had gone in person to procure them from the market-place. In other words, Mrs Lorriquer carried almost to the last extreme her veritable passion for making her guests enjoy themselves, for seeing to it that everybody about her was happy and comfortable and provided with the best of everything.

  But – it occurred to me that she never apologized afterward for any of her exhibitions at the card-table.

  By an easy analogy, the conclusion – if correct – was inevitable. Mrs Lorriquer, apparently, did not at all realize that she was a virtually different person when she played cards.

  I pondered this, too. I came to the conclusion that, queer as it seemed, this was the correct explanation of her extraordinary conduct.

  But – such an ‘explanation’ did not carry one very far, that was certain. For at once it occurred to me as it would have occurred to anybody else, her husband and daughter for choice, that there must be something behind this ‘explanation’. If Mrs Lorriquer ‘was not herself’ at such times as she was engaged in playing cards, what made her that way? I recalled, whimsically, the remark of a small child of my acquaintance whose mother had been suffering from a devastating sick-headache. Lillian’s father had remarked: ‘Don’t trouble Mother, my dear. Mother’s not herself this afternoon, you see.’

  ‘Well,’ countered the puzzled Lillian, ‘who is she, then, Daddy?’

  It was, indeed, in this present case, quite as though Mrs Lorriquer were somebody else, somebody quite different from ‘herself’ whenever she sat at the card-table. That was as far as I could get with my attempt at any ‘explanation’.

  The ‘somebody else’, as I thought the matter through, had three known characteristics. First, an incredibly ugly disposition. Second, the ability to speak fluently a language unknown to Mrs Lorriquer. Third, at least as manifested on one occasion, and evidenced by no more than the booming utterance of a single word, a deep, man-like, bass voice!

  I stopped there in my process of reasoning. The whole thing was too absurdly bizarre for me to waste any more time over it along that line of reasoning. As to the obvious process of consulting Colonel Lorriquer or Mrs Preston, their daughter, on such a subject, that was, sheerly, out of the question. Interesting as the problem was to me, one simply does not do such things.

  Then, quite without any warning, there came another piece of evidence. I have mentioned our St Thomas Cha-Chas, and also that Mrs Lorriquer was accustomed to visit the market-place in person in the interest of her table. The St Thomas Cha-Chas form a self-sustaining, self-contained community as distinct from the rest of the life which surrounds them in their own ‘village’ set on the seashore to the west of the main portion of the town as oil from water. They have been there from time immemorial, the local ‘poor whites’, hardy fishermen, faithful workers, the women great sellers of small hand-made articles (like the famous grass skirts) and garden produce. They are inbred, from a long living in a very small community of their own, look mostly all alike, and, coming as they did many years ago from the French island of St Bartholomew, most of them when together speak a kind of modified Norman French, a peasant dialect of their own, although all of them know and use a simplified variety of our English tongue for general purposes.

  Along the streets, as well as in the public market-place, the Cha-Cha women may be seen, always separate from the Negress market-vendors, offering their needlework, their woven grass baskets and similar articles, and the varying seasonal fruits and vegetables which they cultivate in their tiny garden patches or gather from the more inaccessible distant groves and ravines of the island – mangoes, palmets, sugar-apples, the strange-appearing cashew fruits, every variety of local eatable including trays of the most villainous-appearing peppermint candy, which, upon trial, is a truly delicious confection.

  Passing the market one morning I saw Mrs Lorriquer standing in a group of five or six Cha-Cha market women who were outvying one another in presenting the respective claims of various trays loaded with the small, red, round tomatoes in which certain Cha-Cha families specialize. One of the women, in her eagerness to attract the attention of the customer, jostled another, who retaliated upon her in her own familiar tongue. An argument among the women broke out at this, several taking sides, and in an instant Mrs Lorriquer was the center of a tornado of vocables in Cha-Cha French.

  Fearing
that this would be annoying to her, I hastened across the street to the market-place, toward the group, but my interference proved not to be required. I was, perhaps, half-way across when Mrs Lorriquer took charge of the situation herself and with an effectiveness which no one could have anticipated. In that same booming voice with which she had ejaculated ‘Sapristi!’ and in fluent, positively Apache French, Mrs Lorriquer suddenly put a benumbing silence upon the bickering market women, who fell back from her in an astounded silence, so sudden a silence that clear and shrill came the comment from a near-by Black woman balancing a tray loaded to the brim with avocado pears upon her kerchiefed head, listening, pop-eyed, to the altercation: ‘Ooh, me Gahd!’ remarked the Negress to the air about her. ‘Whoite missy tahlk to they in Cha-Cha!’

  It was only a matter of seconds before I was at Mrs Lorriquer’s side.

  ‘Can I be of any assistance?’ I inquired.

  Mrs Lorriquer glared at me, looking precisely as she did when engaged in one of her querulous, acrimonious arguments at the card-table. Then her countenance changed with a startling abruptness, and she looked quite as usual.

  ‘I was just buying some of these lovely little tomatoes,’ she said.

  The Cha-Cha women, stultified, huddled into a cowering knot, looked at her speechlessly, their red faces several shades paler than their accustomed brick-color. The one whose tray Mrs Lorriquer now approached shrank back from her. I do not wonder, after the blast which this gentle-looking little American lady had but now let loose upon them all. The market seemed unusually quiet. I glanced about. Every eye was upon us. Fortunately, the marketplace was almost empty of customers.

  ‘I’ll take two dozen of these,’ said Mrs Lorriquer. ‘How much are they, please?’