The Accursed (33 page)
L
ate one afternoon in March 1906, Josiah Slade visited his former professor Pearce van Dyck at his home on Hodge Road, having been invited
For a particular purpose, Josiah! Please come.
In his retreat from social life, since Annabel’s death, Josiah had several times declined invitations from the van Dycks, as from other Princeton residents; though he’d been informed of the birth of a son and had sent a congratulatory note to Professor and Mrs. van Dyck, he had not seen either in some time.
(The birth of a son, to Johanna van Dyck! All of Princeton was buzzing
But Mrs. van Dyck is not young!)
(For the record, Johanna van Dyck was forty-one years old at the time of the birth, in February 1906. Pearce van Dyck, forty-six.)
(Yes, and for the record, too: I will say no more about this birth, or the unexpected pregnancy that preceded it. Where my objectivity as a historian is an issue, I must err on the side of caution.)
Josiah was greeted at the door by Professor van Dyck, who was looking somewhat sallow-skinned, and whose starched white cotton shirt was open at the collar. Where ordinarily Professor van Dyck was impeccably groomed, his gray-streaked goatee trimmed short and his thinning hair faultlessly parted on the left side of his head, this afternoon he appeared just slightly disheveled, and seemed to be breathless.
“Josiah! Thank God, you are safe.”
“Safe? Why would I not be—safe?” Josiah laughingly replied, though perhaps Pearce’s remark was not meant to be amusing.
“Come in, quickly! Please.”
Dr. van Dyck shut the door behind Josiah, and ushered him into the dark interior of the house, to his study overlooking a topiary garden of dripping evergreens, that had overgrown to partly shadow the windows. Josiah was struck by the
silence
of the austere old house, where he’d been half-expecting to hear a baby’s excited babble.
When Henrietta Slade learned that Josiah was going to visit the van Dycks, she’d persuaded him to take a gift for the baby, which she’d purchased at the Milgrim Shop in town, and which was wrapped in charming pale-blue paper; Josiah had not seen the gift, but had been told it was a cashmere baby blanket. When Josiah handed the box to Dr. van Dyck, with murmured congratulations, the elder man took it from him distractedly, and set it on a table, atop
The Journal of Metaphysics.
“If you are wondering where Mrs. van Dyck is, the fact is—Mrs. van Dyck is not here. She has gone.”
“ ‘Gone’? Where?”
“Wherever it is women go, with their newborn infants. To avoid ‘contamination’—it is said.” Pearce laughed almost gaily. “Will you sit down, Josiah? And will you have some sherry?”
Pearce hastily tidied up a clutter of papers, books, monographs, and sheets of stiff white cardboard on his desk and surrounding tables. Josiah perceived that the philosophy professor was immersed in a project of some kind involving diagrams and geometric figures.
“In fact, Johanna has gone less than a mile—to her mother, on Battle Road. And it will not be a permanent move, I am confident.”
Josiah could think of no reply to this announcement. He had no idea what his former professor meant by “contamination” and could not bring himself to ask.
Dr. van Dyck’s manner was curiously ebullient, though his eyes were red-rimmed and his color distinctly unhealthy; repeatedly, he coughed, and held a handkerchief to his mouth. There had been a rumor that Pearce van Dyck had succumbed to bronchitis, or emphysema, or a sub-tropical disease originating in South Asia; but Josiah was too reserved to ask a former professor about anything so intimate as his health.
The van Dyck house did seem darker than Josiah recalled, unless this was a consequence of the overcast late-winter afternoon, already shifting to dusk. One of the smaller mansions on Hodge Road, set back behind a grim cobblestone wall, the van Dyck house was an austere French Normandy house, with a steep front roof like a frowning brow, and shaggily overgrown trees and shrubs surrounding it.
“It’s kind of you to congratulate me, Josiah,” Dr. van Dyck said, with a smiling sigh, “on the birth of a son, I think you must mean? Yet—as you may one day discover—it is not so much to do with
me,
as with
her.
So much less the
father,
than the
mother.
”
Josiah smiled uncertainly. Was his former professor being riddlesome, in the way of Socrates?
“Well, there is nothing to be embarrassed about. I have gone through all that—I have worked my way through it. Whatever the ‘infant son’s’ origins—it is a
fait accompli
now. In any case, it is all only natural—that is to say, Nature. As the Thomists would elaborate—a manifestation of
natural law
.” Dr. van Dyck poured sherry into two glasses, and handed one to Josiah. On a low marble table was a silver platter heaped with tiny crustless sandwiches, chocolate crescents, and the like, that the housekeeper had prepared, Dr. van Dyck said, with “particular enthusiasm,” knowing that his young friend Josiah Slade was coming to visit.
“It’s well that Johanna is away, so that we men can speak frankly for once. This phenomenon of the Curse in our midst—that stares us all in the face, like a deadly basilisk—this, we must discuss.”
“ ‘Curse’—?”
“Of course, Josiah. What otherwise is it, erupting in our midst, since last June, except a Curse?”
Dr. van Dyck spoke in a lowered voice. Suddenly overcome by a fit of coughing, he pressed a handkerchief to his mouth.
Josiah had accepted the glass of sherry from his companion, but had not lifted it to his lips. A sensation of heat rushed over him; he felt both shame and dismay; thinking what a blunder it had been, to emerge from his monkish seclusion, for
this
.
Many times, Josiah had thought in such terms. A curse had fallen upon his family. No doubt, others had been thinking so, too. Yet
Curse
had not yet been uttered, in his hearing at least. He didn’t know if he felt relief, or a stunned sort of shock.
“But here, we have help, Josiah. The possibility of help.”
Dr. van Dyck was showing Josiah several books, volumes of short stories—
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Homes,
by Arthur Conan Doyle. And a single volume—
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
At first, Josiah couldn’t comprehend what his former professor was saying with such urgency, that the
ratiocination
of Sherlock Holmes was needed in Princeton, to combat the “curse,” or the “horror.”
“Since you last visited me, Josiah, much has changed in my life. I’ve set aside my philosophical speculations in favor of a Holmesian pragmatism, which has produced exciting results, I think. I’ve made a close study of all of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, which overlap, to a degree, on the biographical profile of the detective, and present a remarkable vision of the world, as a forest of ‘clues’—not an underbrush of gnarled ‘philosophies’ in hopeless competition with one another. What is required is pragmatic logic, that seems to be missing in daily life.”
Dr. van Dyck was leafing through the collections of stories, speaking to Josiah in the way of a distracted lecturer, who drifts from his subject, and returns to it, with a startled smile; as Josiah made an effort to listen politely, for he could not behave otherwise with his former, so much admired professor.
He is mad. The professor is mad. And you? Why have you not slit your throat by now, coward?
It was horrible, a “voice” of Josiah’s had followed him—even here.
AS A CALLOW YOUTH
of just-eighteen, Josiah Slade had enrolled in Pearce van Dyck’s large lecture course at the university, drawn by its curious title—“A Brief History of Metaphysics.” He had not ever heard the word
metaphysics
before, and knew but the rudiments of
physics,
from his preparatory schooling.
Quickly, the freshman had become one of the professor’s rapt admirers, for, though small of frame, with a filmy halo of gray silken hair about his head, and a high, reedy voice, Dr. van Dyck lectured brilliantly on such subjects as Zeno’s paradox, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Kant’s categorical imperative, and Hume’s epistemological theories; he shone nearly as lustrously behind the podium as Woodrow Wilson himself. (In fact, the diminutive philosopher had inherited Dr. Wilson’s mantle in being elected, for three successive years, the university’s “most popular” professor. ) (For the record, as Dr. Wilson would certainly wish me to add, Woodrow Wilson enjoyed this singular honor for
seven consecutive years
as a professor of jurisprudence and political history, during the time of Dr. Patton’s administration.) And Pearce van Dyck’s distinction was the more meaningful since he had a reputation for expecting a great deal of his students, and grading them severely.
The discipline of philosophy had excited Josiah at the time, for he thought it a singular pleasure to be
forced
to think, as one is not urged to think as a religious person; though it seemed that Dr. van Dyck was, at bottom, a Platonist, as well as a (non-dogmatic) Christian, he liked to engage quick-witted students in dialogues and debates on any subject: the nature of the Universe, for instance—whether it be
in aeternum,
or not; the nature of the Deity—whether all corners of the Universe are suffused with His grace, or merely some, or none; and the nature of Mankind—whether Original Sin was our basic truth, or rather Rousseau’s vision of noble savagery and innocence.
One notable morning during a philosophy lecture, Josiah Slade had raised his hand to ask Professor van Dyck a question of the kind a bright, earnest freshman might ask: “How is it possible, sir, and why should it be possible, that God allows evil in His creation?” And Professor van Dyck retorted dryly: “Young man, if you could but express that question precisely, with no misuse of terms, you would discover that you had answered it for yourself.”
It was at about this time that a controversy raged over doctrinal matters in the Presbyterian Church, that involved Reverend Winslow Slade. Josiah knew little of the details but understood that the Princeton Theological Seminary had succeeded in coercing the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of America into bringing to trial Dr. Charles Augustus Briggs of the Union Theological Seminary on charges of
heresy;
a decision that provoked a good deal of heated discussion, and much bitterness. Dr. Briggs, it was claimed, was held to be soft on Biblical Criticism; and highly amusing on the subject of the “scholastic theology” taught down at Princeton—an “intellectual backwater” as Briggs sneered. (Indeed, it was boasted by both the theological seminary at Princeton and by the university, that, in Dr. Patton’s words, no “new ideas” would be introduced into the curriculum or into the administration thereof, so long as he held office.)
These matters, Josiah thought disagreeable; but then, he’d discovered that a traditional way of thinking, whether of theology, intercollegiate sports, or the eating clubs on Prospect Avenue, was disagreeable to him; and it was wisest for him to detach himself from such controversy, and focus upon his studies, which included courses in science, history, English literature, as well as math and philosophy; he would earn his B.A. degree as his parents wished, and continue to pursue his own knowledge, and think his own unruly thoughts. It had long been hoped within the family that Josiah would “follow in his grandfather’s footsteps”—that is, he would enter the Princeton Theological Seminary and prepare for a career in the ministry—but this fantasy soon evaporated, as the young man’s natural skepticism emerged, after a reading of Sir James Frazier’s controversial hodgepodge of pagan customs
The Golden Bough.
Now, in Professor van Dyck’s study, with a sound of continuous dripping from the eaves outside the leaded windows, Josiah was attentive to the elder man’s words, for he’d anticipated something valuable from his visit, and not a dismaying waste of time. But the elder man was speaking now wistfully, and not altogether coherently: “I will concede, Josiah, that I was utterly astonished, and disbelieving—for what has happened in my life cannot—‘scientifically’—have happened. Though it is no secret through Princeton, how very much Johanna and I had wanted a family; and now that we have been married for nearly twenty years, we had almost—well, we had, in fact—given up hope. In a way, I had grown complacent in my disappointment. I had resigned myself, you see, to be the last of my line.” For a brooding moment Dr. van Dyck stared into the fireplace, in which a small, smoldering fire emitted a grudging heat; it seemed almost to Josiah that he’d forgotten Josiah’s presence, but after a pause he continued, in a faint voice: “As to Johanna, she had resigned herself, too—of course. Johanna is so very—sensible. Then, when it happened—by ‘it’ I mean the miracle—that my wife was, as the quaint expression has it,
with child
—we did not know what to think, and whether to be overjoyed, as others were on our behalf, or—deeply disturbed. For—not to embarrass you, Josiah, and not to embarrass myself—it has been some time, several years at least, since my wife and I have shared the same bedchamber . . . Yet, the miracle did occur; the baby is born; Pearce van Dyck is the ‘father’—which is a happy thought, I believe.” Again, Dr. van Dyck lapsed into silence, finishing his glass of sherry.
Josiah swallowed hard. What had his former professor revealed to him? That there was—there could be—some question of the paternity of the newborn van Dyck child; that something was mysteriously amiss, that must be designated “miracle”?
Josiah did not want to think
Both mothers gave birth last month. Both mothers—accursed?
Josiah shuddered though the room was over-heated from the smoldering fire. The smell of woodsmoke made his nostrils pinch.
“But now, Josiah. ‘Ratiocination—our salvation.’
That
is my motto now, no longer
Cogito, ergo sum.
”