Blood and Water and Other Tales (13 page)

Frank saw his chance; he was on his feet and down the stairs, and running at the assembled anemics. “You leave my mother alone!” he screamed. “You take your hands off her!” Kevin Pander, chuckling hoarsely, seized the child, then passed him to another man, who held him still and smothered his mouth with a fat white hand. There was jocular murmuring among the anemics about this, all conducted in a rich, slurry Berkshire dialect, while Kevin Pander began stropping his razor on a stout strip of leather nailed to a post. Virginia had also been muzzled by her captors; her limbs jerked and her eyes blazed with desperation as she struggled in vain to get close to her son.

Then the trellis was being hauled over and a number of men took hold of the two Clack-Hermans to steady them over the keg when their bodies began the series of involuntary spasms that predictably ensue when the carotid arteries are sliced. Close by, Ronald turned slowly on his hook. Kevin Pander touched the razor’s edge to his tongue. Apparently satisfied, he stepped forward. He was not smiling now. It was a tense moment, for it very much looked as though Clutch had failed, that he was going to be too late.

Congo Bill was in pretty bad shape when they brought him out of the forest, and it was generally agreed that a few more hours would have seen the end of him. He had the pygmies to thank, then, for saving his life. Fortified with quinine, he was shipped down the Congo to Leopoldville (as it was then called), where he rested up for some weeks before going on to the coast to board a liner for home. It was in Leopoldville that he bought the monkey. His prognosis was somewhat gloomy—periodic relapses were predicted, accompanied by general enfeeblement and, because of the large number of red blood cells destroyed in the successive paroxysms of fever, a chronic anemic condition. In fact, he could look forward to the life of a semi-invalid, and how Virginia would adapt to that was a cause of some anxiety to him as he crossed the Atlantic—though, as matters stand at this point, the question may well have been academic. He was also filled with deep regret that he would never again do anthropological fieldwork, never again set foot in the equatorial rain forest. Curious irony, he reflected, that the forest in which he had known his deepest tranquility was the same forest in which he had contracted the disease that drove him out forever.

An hour later Dr. George Gland stood in the public bar of the Blue Bat with a small man in a gray raincoat. This was a detective from the Berkshire County Constabulary, a man called Limp, and he was smoking a pipe. The trapdoor was up on its chains, and policemen and forensic experts moved silently and purposefully up and down the cellar stairs. The anemics had already been led away to waiting ambulances, bound, first, for the Royal Berkshire Hospital, where they would begin a course of painful injections of liver extract, which was how the disease was treated in 1934. The two men were watching Clutch, who sat at a table nearby with his great brown head in his hands, mourning the death of his master, whose drained corpse lay on the floor beneath a white sheet. Sad to say, Ronald was not the only corpse on the flagstone floor of the public bar; beside him lay Virginia, also sheeted, and beside her lay the pathetic remains of little Frank. Clutch had, in fact, come too late, and the three white sheets bore silent and tragic testimony to his failure. Suddenly Limp removed the pipe from his mouth and, turning to the doctor, pointed it at him, wet stem forward. “He had a girl!” he exclaimed.

“Who?”

“Pander,” said Limp. “Pander had a little girl—a cripple—she wore one of those boots.”

“An orthopedic boot?” said Gland. “A girl in an orthopedic boot?”

Upstairs, a uniformed policeman was knocking on Congo Bill’s locked bedroom door. Slowly the anthropologist was roused from his dream, which was almost over anyway. “Who is it?” he cried, irritably, in a hoarse whisper.

“Police. Open the door please, Dr. Clack-Herman.” Congo Bill sat up in bed, his withered, yellowing face pouched and wrinkled with annoyance and sickness and sleep. “What do you want?” he mumbled. “Open the door please, Doctor,” came the voice. “Wait.” Slowly he eased himself out of bed, sitting a moment on the edge of the mattress to get his breath. What on earth would the police want, in the middle of the night? He reached for his stick, and slipped his feet into a pair of slippers. His dressing gown lay tossed on a chair beneath the window. He levered himself up off the bed and shuffled across the room. Picking up his dressing gown, he glanced through the curtains. The moon had gone down, and it was the hour before the dawn, that strange, haunted hour between the blackness of the night and the first pale flush of sunrise, and the sky had turned an eerie electric blue. His eye was caught by a movement in the fields, and he saw that it was a girl, a young girl, far out among the glowing cornstalks and limping away from the inn toward a copse of trees that bristled blackly against the blue light on the brow of a distant low hill. Tiny as she was in the distance, he could make out, on her shoulder, the little black-and-white Colobus monkey. He frowned, as he tied the cord of his dressing gown. Why was she taking Frank’s monkey to the trees?

“Doctor.”

“I’m coming,” whispered Congo Bill, turning toward the door, faintly disturbed; “I’m awake now.”

September 21, 1985. I am an elderly gentleman of nervous disposition and independent means, and I live alone in a rambling Victorian house of which little needs to be said save that it stands close to Hampstead Heath and is colonized by a dense growth of English ivy. This house was built by my great-grandfather. It was completed in the summer of 1856, but he, poor man, never lived to sleep beneath its high-gabled roofs; for in a bizarre accident in the summer of that year he was kicked to death by his own horse. Mrs. Digweed comes in thrice a week to do for me, and I keep a dog, a senile chow called Khrushchev.

Thus begins the final volume of my uncle’s journal, found on his desk shortly after his tragic death earlier this month. You will not yet have read about the case, but as it will no doubt be sensationalized by the gutter press I will present the facts here. My uncle was Neville Pilkington, the distinguished art critic; he wrote the definitive critical study of Horta de Velde. He was found, hanged, in his study, and it was I who cut him down. Let me say this at the outset: I do not concur with the findings of the coroner’s inquest. I repudiate Dr. Max Nordau’s testimony, with its scurrilous implications regarding my uncle’s mental state. I suggest to you that this was no simple case of hereditary suicidal tendency; rather, that Max Nordau is guilty of gross professional misconduct, that he subjected my uncle to sustained verbal harassment, and that the effects of this harassment were so pernicious that my uncle was finally hounded, hectored, and driven to the grave! Moreover—but enough. Enough of this vulgar stridency. My outrage must not alienate your sympathy.

My uncle was a refined man, and a solitary aesthete; and on those rare occasions when he attended art-world functions he always cut a most singular figure. Dressed with impeccable restraint, always in dark glasses, slim and slight, his silver hair flowing over his shoulders, he hovered at the edge of society like a ghost. He had suffered serious burns as a young man, and the skin of his face and hands was all scar tissue. Perhaps this explains his reclusiveness. Perhaps, too, it explains why his mind took a mystical, not to say gothic, turn in the twilight of his life. Like Yeats, he came to believe in fairies; and his mysticism is, I think, evident in the journal entry which follows:

September 22. This afternoon a most extraordinary thing. Khrushchev and I out on the heath as is our wont, making our way down the path by the stream. The light was fading fast and the breeze soughing softly in the elms overhead. Darkness had not yet fully descended, but the trees and the water had begun to coalesce such that the separation of substance and absence was blurred and indistinct. It is precisely this atmosphere of tenebrous deliquescence which sounds within me the thanatoptic chord, I think because to a deteriorating psyche like my own the approach of night signals the imminence of its own impending darkness. At any rate, we were approaching the plank bridge when Khrushchev stiffened and began to growl.

You will detect the maudlin cast of the man’s reflections; but what, I wonder, will you make of this?

I stopped dead and peered into the gloom. After a moment I saw what it was that had alarmed the dog: some small animal was upon the bridge. I could see its eyes shining, but I was not yet close enough to identify the species. I advanced, not without caution, but with another step it seemed that we had come upon, not a wild animal, but a
child—
for the creature was sitting on the edge of the bridge and swinging its legs over the water. Khrushchev held back, growling softly. I drew close, and with a flick of my cigarette lighter briefly illuminated the scene.

To my immense surprise the creature on the bridge was not a child. It was a tiny man, with a well-trimmed, graying beard and an old-fashioned suit of some heavy tweed. He was smoking a cigar, but what was most remarkable was that he was
not more than fifteen inches high!

Again I flashed the cigarette lighter. His face was very familiar indeed, but I could not at that moment place it. “Good evening,” I said. “I believe we may have met. My name is Neville Pilkington.
”

“Guten Abend,”
said the tiny stranger in a high, piping voice.
“Ich bin Doktor Sigmund Freud.”

Allow me to break into the narrative here and briefly summarize a few comments Max Nordau made at the inquest. Neville Pilkington, he said, had been referred to him after complaining to his physician of sleeplessness, depression, and “queer spells.” During these so-called queer spells my uncle would apparently enter a hypnagogic state in which hideous sharp-edged instruments loomed out of a black mist and attempted to amputate parts of his body. These experiences were of course extremely disturbing to the old man, for they seemed at the time utterly real and authentic. He would “come to” after a few minutes, his heart dangerously excited and his whole body twitching and shivering with fright. Max Nordau described these events as “retributive delusions.” He suggested that my uncle felt guilt with regard to his own body, and that the sharp instruments were symbolic of self-punitive impulses long repressed. He had begun, he said, to conduct intensive psychotherapy sessions with my uncle, but it seems Neville’s psyche was well defended, and staunchly resisted the attempted penetrations of Nordau’s insights. The Freud hallucination, said Nordau, was a product of that defensiveness. It was one of the most vividly externalized manifestations of psychic resistance in the morbid personality that he’d encountered in his long clinical career.

Now, the image of Max Nordau blandly articulating this nonsense to a gullible courtroom is one I shall not quickly forget. Nordau is a plump, sleek man with one of those plummy, Old School voices that always intimidate the lower middle classes. He has greasy silver hair which is not cut frequently enough and resolves to oily curls on his fat, pink neck and pink, gleaming temples. He favors tweedy suits and meaningful ties, and when he reads from his notes dons silver-rimmed spectacles which make him seem academic, and further awes the shopkeepers, schoolteachers, and other respectables that normally make up a coroner’s jury. My uncle’s behavior subsequent to encountering the Freud seems eminently sane to me; but you can perhaps imagine the implications Nordau laid upon it.

I stepped back, brandishing my walking stick. “Stay where you are,” I said, and pointed the stick straight at him. The Freud seemed not at all dismayed; indeed, he began to skip along the path, waving his cigar in the air, twirling about and griming wildly in the gloom, and I felt sure he intended to leap on me like a monkey.

This I most emphatically did not wish, so when the little fellow ceased his gambols and ran straight at me with arms outspread I took action. “Hold?” I cried; then I lunged forward with my walking stick. But to my unspeakable horror, I felt the stick pass right through him—as though nothing were there but thin air!

I need not continue with this entry. Such is man’s terror of the preternatural that Neville, and Khrushchev, made for home with great alacrity; and when they had attained the security of the domestic hearth, the door was rapidly bolted and the curtains drawn against the night. And then—and this is a point that was not explored thoroughly enough at the inquest—my uncle did
not
attempt to contact Nordau. Instead, he did what any normal person would have done in the circumstances: he drank a number of large Scotch-and-sodas.

September 23. It’s hard to credit the events of last evening. I can hear Mrs. Digweed downstairs, andthe bustling of that good woman seems to restore me to my senses. A trick of the failing light; a nervous system fragile and overtired... clearly I need to get away. What if I’d been seen? An elderly gentleman standing
en garde
on a lonely footpath at dusk, lunging at some unseen mannikin with his walking stick—people have been committed for less! Not a word to Nordau, of course!

At one point during the inquest Nordau was asked why, in his opinion, Neville Pilkington had not told him of the appearance of the Freud. I shall attempt to reproduce
verbatim
the psychiatrist’s response:

Neville Pilkington suffered from a severe guilt complex which stemmed from unresolved conflicts in the psychosexual domain. These conflicts were so deeply buried that an extended psychotherapy was indicated. After only a few sessions, however, Mr. Pilkington realized, at a quite unconscious level I believe, that if he thoroughly excavated the areas we had begun merely to probe at, he would have to face certain memories, or certain truths about himself, that he had successfully avoided for several decades. The Freud of course obliquely symbolized myself and my profession, precisely what Pilkington was threatened by. His fear translated into a hallucinatory conflict with the very therapy that could free him of his guilt— but to acknowledge this meant to accept the progress of his treatment, and Pilkington could not yet afford to make that concession.