“You are,” he announced ponderously, “about to hear the greatest dramatic soprano of this century. Rosa Ponselle and Elisabeth Rethberg were passable. There was something to be said for Lillian Nordica and Lena Geyer. But listen!” And he slid the needle into the first groove.
“Dr. Verner—” I started to ask for footnotes; I should have known better.
“Dear boy . . . !” he murmured protestingly, over the preliminary surface noise of the aged pressing, and gave me one of those twinkles of bluest blue which implied that surely only a moron could fail to follow the logic of the procedure.
I sat back and listened. Irma listened too, but the eyes of the others were soon longingly intent on foils and chisel. I listened casually at first, then began to sit forward.
I have heard, in person or on records, all of the venerable names which Dr. Verner mentioned—to say nothing of Tebaldi, Russ, Ritter-Ciampi, Souez and both Lehmanns. And reluctantly I began to admit that he was right; this was the dramatic soprano. The music was strange to me—a setting of the Latin text of the Our Father, surely eighteenth century and at a guess by Pergolesi; it had his irrelevant but reverent tunefulness in approaching a sacred text. Its grave sustained lilt was admirable for showing off a voice; and the voice, unwavering in its prolonged tones, incredible in its breath control, deserved all the showing off it could get. During one long phrase of runs, as taxing as anything in Mozart or Handel, I noticed Irma. She was holding her breath in sympathy with the singer, and the singer won. Irma had let out an admiring gasp before the soprano had, still on one breath, achieved the phrase.
And then, for reasons more operatic than liturgical, the music quickened. The sustained legato phrases gave way to cascades of light bright coloratura. Notes sparkled and dazzled and brightness fell from the air. It was impeccable, inapproachable— infinitely discouraging to a singer and almost shocking to the ordinary listener.
The record ended. Dr. Verner beamed around the room as if he’d done all that himself. Irma crossed to the piano, struck one key to verify the incredible note in alt upon which the singer had ended, picked up her music, and wordlessly left the room.
Slavko had seized his chisel and the fencers were picking up their foils as I approached our host. “But Dr. Verner,” I led with my chin. “The Stambaugh case . . .”
“Dear boy,” he sighed as he readied the old one-two, “you mean you don’t realize that you have just heard the solution?”
“You will have a drop of Drambuie, of course?” Dr. Verner queried formally as we settled down in his more nearly quiet inner room.
“Of course,” I said. Then as his mouth opened, “ ‘For without Drambuie,”’ I quoted, “ ‘the world might never have known the simple solution to the problem of the mislaid labyrinth.’ ”
He spilled a drop. “I was about to mention that very fact. How . . . ? Or perhaps I have alluded to it before in this connection?”
“You have,” I said.
“Forgive me.” He twinkled disarmingly. “I grow old, dear boy.”
Ritualistically we took our first sip of Drambuie. Then:
“I well remember,” Dr. Verner began, “that it was in the autumn of the year 1901 . . .
. . . that the horror began. I was then well established in my Kensington practice, which seemed to flourish as it never had under the ministrations of its previous possessor, and in a more than comfortable financial position. I was able at last to look about me, to contemplate and to investigate the manifold pleasures which a metropolis at once so cosmopolitan and so insular as London proffers to the unattached young man. San Francisco of the same period might perhaps compare in quality; indeed my own experiences here a few years later in the singular affair of the cable cabal were not unrewarding. But a man of your generation knows nothing of those pleasures now ten lustra faded. The humours of the Music Halls, the delights of a hot bird and a cold bottle shared with a dancer from Daly’s, the simpler and less expensive delights of punting on the Thames (shared, I may add, with a simpler and less expensive companion)—these claimed what portion of my time I could salvage from my practice.
But above all I was devoted to music; and to be devoted to music meant, in the London of 1901, to be devoted to—but I have always carefully refrained from the employment of veritable and verifiable names in these narratives. Let me once more be discreet, and call her simply by that affectionate agnomen by which my cousin, to his sorrow, knew her: Carina.
I need not describe Carina as a musician; you have just heard her sing Pergolesi, you know how she combined nobility and grandeur with a technical agility which these degenerate days associate only with a certain type of light soprano. But I must seek to describe her as a woman, if woman she may be called.
When first I heard the tittle-tattle of London, I paid it small heed. To the man in the street (or even in the stalls) actress is still a euphemism for a harsher and shorter term, though my experience of actresses, extending as it has over three continents and more than my allotted three score and ten years, tends to lead me, if anywhere, to an opposite conclusion.
The individual who stands out from the herd is the natural target of calumny. I shall never forget the disgraceful episode of the purloined litter, in which the veterinarian Dr. Stookes accused me of—but let us reserve that anomaly for another occasion. To return to Carina: I heard the gossip; I attributed it to as simple a source as I have indicated. But then the evidence began to attain proportions which the most latitudinarian could hardly disregard.
First young Ronny Furbish-Darnley blew out his brains. He had gambling debts, to be sure, and his family chose to lay the stress upon them; but his relations with Carina had been common knowledge. Then Major Maclvers hanged himself with his own cravat (the Maclvers tartan, of course). I need hardly add that a Maclvers had no gambling debts. Even that episode might have been hushed up had not a peer of so exalted a name that I dare not even paraphrase it perished in the flames of his ancestral castle. Even in the charred state in which they were recovered, the bodies of his wife and seven children evinced the clumsy haste with which he had slit their throats.
It was as though . . . how shall I put it? . . . as though Carina were in some way a “carrier” of what we had then not yet learned to call The Death Wish. Men who knew her too well hungered no longer for life.
The press began to concern itself, as best it might with due regard for the laws of libel, with this situation. Leading articles hinted at possible governmental intervention to preserve the flower of England from this insidious foreigner. Little else was discussed in Hyde Park save the elimination of Carina.
Even the memorable mass suicides at Oxford had provided no sensation comparable to this. Carina’s very existence seemed as much in danger as though Jack the Ripper had been found and turned over to the English people. We are firm believers in our English justice; but when that justice is powerless to act, the Englishman aroused is a phenomenon to fear.
If I may be pardoned a Hibernian lapse, the only thing that saved Carina’s life was . . . her death.
It was a natural death—perhaps the first natural action of her life. She collapsed on the stage of Covent Garden during a performance of Mozart’s Cost fan tutte, just after having delivered the greatest performance of that fantastic aria, Come scoglio, that a living ear has heard.
There were investigations of the death. Even my cousin, with an understandable personal interest, took a hand. (He was the only one of Carina’s close admirers to survive her infection; I have often wondered whether this fact resulted from an incredible strength or an equally incredible inadequacy within him.) But there was no possible doubt that the death was a natural one.
It was after the death that the Carina legend began to grow. It was then that young men about town who had seen the great Carina but once began to mention the unmentionable reasons which had caused them to refrain from seeing her again. It was then that her dresser, a crone whose rationality was as uncertain as her still
persistent terror was unquestionable, began to speak of unspeakable practices, to hint at black magic as among milady’s avocations, to suggest that her utterance (which you have heard) of flights of notes, incredibly rapid yet distinct, owed its facility to her control and even suspension of the mortal limitations of time.
And then began . . . the horror. Perhaps you thought that by the horror I meant the sequence of Carina-carried suicides? No; even that lay still, if near the frontier, within the uttermost bounds of human comprehension.
The horror passed those bounds.
I need not ask you to envision it. You have beheld it. You have seen clothing sucked dry of its fleshy tenant, you have seen the haberdasher’s habitation sink flabbily in upon itself, no longer sustained by tissue of bone and blood and nerves.
All London saw it that year. And London could not believe.
First it was that eminent musicologist, Sir Frederick Paynter, FRCM. Then there were two young aristocrats, then, oddly, a poor Jewish peddler in the East End.
I shall spare you the full and terrible details, alluding only in passing to the Bishop of Cloisterham. I had read the press accounts. I had filed the cuttings for their very impossibility (for even then I had had adumbrations of the concept which you now know as The Anatomy of Nonscience).
But the horror did not impinge upon me closely until it struck one of my own patients, a retired naval officer by the name of Clutsam. His family had sent for me at once, at the same time that they had dispatched a messenger to fetch my cousin.
As you know, my cousin enjoyed a certain fame as a private detective. He had been consulted in more than one previous instance of the horror; but I had read little of him in the press save a reiteration of his hope that the solution lay in his familiar dictum: “Discard the impossible; and whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true.”
I had already formulated my now celebrated counter-dictum: “Discard the impossible; then if nothing remains, some part of the ‘impossible’ must be possible.” It was thus that our dicta and ourselves faced each other across the worn and outdated naval uniform on the floor, complete from the gold braid on its shoulders to the wooden peg below the empty left trouser leg, cut off at the knee.
“I imagine, Horace,” my cousin remarked, puffing at his blackened clay, “that you conceive this to be your sort of affair.”
“It is obviously not yours,” I stated. “There is something in these vanishings beyond—”
“—beyond the humdrum imagination of a professional detective? Horace, you are a man of singular accomplishments.”
I smiled. My cousin, as my great-uncle Etienne used to remark of General Massena, was famous for the accuracy of his information.
“I will confess,” he added, “since my Boswell is not within earshot, that you have occasionally hit upon what satisfies you, at least, as the truth in some few cases in which I have failed. Do you see any element linking Captain Clutsam, Sir Frederick Paynter, Moishe Lipkowitz and the Bishop of Cloisterham?”
“I do not.” It was always discreet to give my cousin the answer which he expected.
“And I do! And yet I am no nearer a solution than . . .” His pipe clenched in his teeth, he flung himself about the room, as though pure physical action would somehow ameliorate the lamentable state of his nerves. Finally he paused before me, looked sharply into my eyes and said, “Very well. I shall tell you. What is nonsense in the patterns shaped by the reasoning mind may well serve you as foundation for some new structure of unreason.
“I have traced every fact in the lives of these men. I know what they habitually ate for breakfast, how they spent their Sundays, and which of them preferred snuff to tobacco. There is only one factor which they all possess in common: Each of them recently purchased a record of the Pergolesi Pater Noster sung by . . . Carina. And those records have vanished as thoroughly as the naked men themselves.”
I bestowed upon him an amicable smile. Family affection must temper the ungentlemanly emotion of triumph. Still smiling, I left him with the uniform and the leg while I betook myself to the nearest gramophone merchant.
The solution was by then obvious to me. I had observed that Captain Clutsam’s gramophone was of the sapphire-needled type designed to play those recordings known as hill-and-dale, the vertical recordings produced by Pathe and other companies as distinguished from the lateral recordings of Columbia and Gramophoneand-Typewriter. And I had recalled that many hill-and-dale recordings were at that time designed (as I believe some wireless transcriptions are now) for an inside start, that is, so that the needle began near the label and traveled outward to the rim of the disc. An unthinking listener might easily begin to play an inside-start record in the more normal manner. The result, in almost all instances, would be gibberish; but in this particular case . . .
I purchased the Carina record with no difficulty. I hastened to my Kensing-ton home, where the room over the dispensary contained a gramophone con-vertible to either lateral or vertical recordings. I placed the record on the turntable. It was, to be sure, labeled INSIDE START; but how easily one might overlook such a notice! I overlooked it deliberately. I started the turntable and lowered the needle . . .
The cadenzas of coloratura are strange things in reverse. As I heard it, the record naturally began with the startling final note which so disheartened Miss Borigian, then went on to those dazzling fioriture which so strengthen the dresser’s charge of time-magic. But in reverse, these seemed like the music of some undiscovered planet, coherent to themselves, following a logic unknown to us and shaping a beauty which only our ignorance prevents us from worshipping.
And there were words to these flourishes; for almost unique among sopranos, Carina possessed a diction of diabolical clarity. And the words were at first simply Nema . . . nema . . . nema . . .
It was while the voice was brilliantly repeating this reversed Amen that I became literally beside myself.
I was standing, naked and chill in the London evening, beside a meticulously composed agglomeration of clothing which parodied the body of Dr. Horace Verner.
This fragment of clarity lasted only an instant. Then the voice reached the significant words: olam a son arebil des men . . .
This was the Lord’s Prayer which she was singing. It is common knowledge that there is in all necromancy no charm more potent than that prayer (and most especially in Latin) said backwards. As the last act of her magical malefactions, Carina had left behind her this record, knowing that one of its purchasers would occasionally, by inadvertence, play it backwards, and that then the spell would take effect. It had taken effect now.
I was in space . . . a space of infinite darkness and moist warmth. The music had departed elsewhere. I was alone in this space and the space itself was alive and by its very moist warm dark life this space was draining from me all that which was my own life. And then there was with me a voice in that space, a voice that cried ever Eem vull! Eem vull! and for all the moaning gasping urgency in that voice I knew it for the voice of Carina.
I was a young man then. The Bishop’s end must have been swift and merciful. But even I, young and strong, knew that this space desired the final sapping of my life, that my life should be drawn from my body even as my body had been drawn from its shell. So I prayed.
I was not a man given to prayer in those days. But I knew words which the Church has taught us are pleasing to God, and I prayed with all the fervor of my being for deliverance from this Nightmare Life-in-Death.
And I stood again naked beside my clothes. I looked at the turntable of the gramophone. The disc was not there. Still naked, I walked to the dispensary and mixed myself a sedative before I dared trust my fingers to button my garments. Then I dressed and went out again to the shop of the gramophone merchant. There I bought every copy in his stock of that devil’s Pater Noster and smashed them all before his eyes.
Ill though I could afford it, even in my relative affluence, I spent the next few weeks in combing Lon
don for copies of that recording. One copy, and one only, I preserved; you heard it just now. I had hoped that no more existed . . .
“. . . but obviously,” Dr. Verner concluded, “your Mr. Stambaugh managed to acquire one, God rest his soul . . . and body.”
I drained my second Drambuie and said, “I’m a great admirer of your cousin.” Dr. Verner looked at me with polite blue inquiry. “You find what satisfies you as the truth.”
“Occam’s Razor, dear boy,” Dr. Verner murmured, associatively stroking his smooth cheeks. “The solution accounts economically for every integral fact in the problem.”
“But look,” I said suddenly. “It doesn’t! For once I’ve got you cold. There’s one ‘integral fact’ completely omitted.”
“Which is . . . ?” Dr. Verner cooed.
“You can’t have been the first man that thought of praying in that . . . that space. Certainly the Bishop must have.”
For a moment Dr. Horace Verner was silent. Then he fixed me with the Dear-boy-how-idiotic! twinkle. “But only I,” he announced tranquilly, “had realized that in that . . . space all sound, like the Our Father itself, was reversed. The voice cried ever Eem vull! and what is that phonetically but Love me! backwards? Only my prayer was effective, because only I had the foresight to pray in reverse phonetics.”
I phoned Abrahams to say I had an idea and could I do some checking in the Stambaugh apartment?
“Good,” he said. “I have an idea too. Meet you there in a half hour.”
There was no Abrahams in the corridor when I got there; but the police seal was broken and the door was ajar. I went on in and stopped dead.
For the first moment I thought it was still Stambaugh’s clothes spread out there. But there was no mistaking Inspector Abrahams’ neat gray plainclothes—with no Abrahams in them.
The Compleat Boucher Page 48
