All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (10 page)

"Oh—no. I've given up tobacco. A nasty catarrh this past winter decided me. But I can't seem to wean myself from the battered old briar."

"Purely as a physician I couldn't help speculating about the condition of your fingers. Would it be hereditary?"

"It's the Massengill family affliction. Crops up every third generation, sparing neither male nor female. All that money going on and on forever, must pay for it in some wise, I reckon."

"Another man would wear gloves day and night."

"I'm long since past feeling any sense of shame about my lack of nails. Quite trivial, really, although my fingers can be easily damaged. Of course it was hell growing up, the hazing, the gratuitous cruelties, but school's out now."

After a few moments Mary Burgess completed the exchange of confidences by saying, "I was thought somewhat odd myself. Cutting open frogs to see what made them tick was not a ladylike thing to do. But I was never on an equal footing with girls my age. I couldn't interest myself in their airs and silly conceits. I began my medical training in 1904—after five years and many attempts to be enrolled."

"A singularly lonely enterprise, I should imagine."

"Yes. But I was determined to have a useful life. Whether or not anyone wanted me."

She made a turn into a crooked lane just off the High Street of Nuncheap and stopped at the second of an unjoined row of two- and three-story houses with overstepping gables that looked down on a cattailed mere. Steam was issuing from under the bonnet of the little roadster.

"Damn! It's the radiator again."

"Why don't you see to your patients, then? My chauffeur and I will have a look. Medwick is marvelous tinkering with engines."

"Thank you—my lord."

A pat of solder from the commodious repair kit which Medwick carried everywhere in the Rolls sealed the trickly radiator of Mary Burgess's car. Twenty minutes later his lordship was admitted to the parlor of the doctor's quarters on the second floor of the house by an ancient Scots housemaid who carried on an incomprehensible dialogue with herself while largely ignoring him.

The parlor had sunny windows and betrayed Mary Burgess's passion for needlepoint and illuminated manuscripts. Lord Luxton whiled away the remaining time by trying to identify vague medicinal vapors rising from the surgery: camphor, iodine, sulfur depuratum. The rose garden just below the half-opened windows was doing famously. Swans coasted on the mere. In this pleasant backwater he felt part of another century; the war that visited England almost on a daily basis was far from his mind. Then the appearance of a flock of Hampden twin-engine bombers in ragged formation on the horizon, heading inland to Driffield, brought him back to the complexities of his chosen service. Luxton, uneasy, rattled the stem of his pipe between his teeth and thought about Dr. Eustace Holley,

Mary Burgess appeared, followed by the muttering housemaid, who was pushing a cart. The doctor said, with a geniality that seemed foreign to her, "I'm afraid I have nothing more savory to offer than tinned biscuit. The shortages, you know."

"You needn't apologize."

She bustled about getting him settled. They faced each other from matching settees that bracketed the hearth. The sun was on the ceiling, turning a deep orange. Mary Burgess had scrubbed her face. It glistened like parchment despite the irritable punctuation of many moles, blobs of ink from a nib pen. Why did she tolerate them, he wondered, or were they inoperable? She'd changed her dress, from dark gray to a medium shade of blue, possibly the gayest article of clothing she owned. Her eyes had a noticeably high, nimbused shine, as if she'd resorted to something powerful as morphia to settle her nerves.

Lord Luxton wondered if her evening tonic might not be habitual, then felt bad about the inference. After all, a close friend had died today, and despite her professional detachment she must have suffered to see him so disfigured.

She had asked if he would mind the wireless, which was now distantly playing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree [with anyone else but me]." Luxton smiled as he sipped his tea and jiggled one foot in time to the swing rhythm of the popular song.

"You've recently received the George Cross," Mary Burgess said.

"Well, yes, as a matter of fact."

She nodded. "It was in the
Pictorial
, which a patient of mine happened to have with him today. So I couldn't help noticing, you see—there was rather a large photograph."

"Yes, yes, haven't seen the article myself."

"How long have you been at it? Poking at these unexploded bombs?"

"Two—well, should say a little longer than two years now."

She said with her granite-jawed candor, "You've overstayed then. You'll be killed."

His lordship smiled broadly. "Oh, no. I've no intention of being killed."

"Hmm. Let me make it clear how greatly I admire your courage. You've matched yourself against incalculable odds, and you'll continue, no doubt, until you're no longer needed. It's the only sort of courage that matters. Eustace was a man not unlike yourself. One of a handful of physicians pitted against the immense, hostile, soul-rotting hulk of Africa."

Luxton was grateful that the subject had changed so abruptly. "How long were you acquainted with Dr. Holley?"

"Nearly twenty-two years."

Now
there
was a surprise. "That's how long he was in residence at Hawkspurn House?"

"Yes."

"Then he was still rather a young man when he—"

"Went mad? He was just shy of his forty-fourth year, and in his prime."

"So Dr. Holley was a lunatic," Lord Luxton said, with a doleful shaking of his head.

Unexpectedly she smiled. "I said he went mad, but he came around with proper rest and treatment. He was perfectly lucid for most of the years I knew him. He had his sinking spells and peculiarities—don't we all? But a more charming, knowledgeable, sensitive man I shall never meet." Her cup rattled on the rim of her saucer; an emotion had caught her by surprise. But her voice continued without a tremor.

"It took time and patience on my part to win his confidence. There were things he could not, would not, talk about, including the practice of medicine. It was my misfortune at the time to suffer from shingles. One day while I was making a routine visit to Hawkspurn House he observed that I was in torment and insisted on making a diagnosis. I humored him. He suggested an infusion principally of chaulmoogra oil, a great rarity obtainable only from India, and gave me the name of a supplier in Switzerland. The treatment worked a miracle. From time to time thereafter when I had a patient with a condition difficult to clear up I'd mention the case to Eustace. But," she concluded, smug and pining at the same time, "he made no more recommendations."

"Obviously, though he'd recovered his faculties, he no longer cared to practice medicine."

"Eustace was lame, as you undoubtedly observed, and never very strong again physically, certainly not strong enough to withstand months in the forests of the K'buru. Nor could he support any unusual demands on his emotions."

"No family?"

"He had a son," said Mary Burgess. "When I last saw him he was still very thin from the effects of a serious head injury, complicated by malaria. That was in autumn, 1921."

"Living now?"

"Yes. Jackson writes to me twice a year to inquire after the health of his father."

"Writes? Doesn't visit?"

"That would be much too painful for him," she said, staring at Lord Luxton.

"Painful? how d'you mean?"

"All because of one of Eustace's—peculiarities. He believed his son was dead, and that he was responsible. An attempt was made to reunite them in 1921, after Jackson returned from his long sojourn
en dispensaire
in Kisantu. He was nearly eighteen years of age. But Eustace refused to see him. He kept repeating, 'My son is dead. I killed him. I did it to save us all.' Quite naturally the boy was shattered. In just over a year's time he'd lost his mother and younger sister! Now he was being obsessively rejected by his father, whom he deeply loved."

"Incredible."

"At last we arranged for Eustace to meet Jackson face-to-face—'accidentally,' as it were. We hoped the shock would restore his memory. It had no such effect: not a flicker of recognition. The matter was hopeless. Even Jackson soon realized his father was lost to him as well."

"What was the meaning of Dr. Holley's obsession?"

"'It's difficult to say. Not much is known about the tragedy of Tuleborn
é
. Jackson's own memory has always been drastically incomplete. If Eustace knew precisely what happened there, he never said a word to anyone."

"Not even to you."

"That is correct."

"And what was this—tragedy of Tuleborné? I gather it's somewhere in Africa—"

"Tuleborné, I'm told, no longer exists. And no Negro of the forest will venture within a mile of its former location. In 1909, when Eustace was posted to Africa by the Fullerites, Tuleborné was a thriving village on the upper reaches of the K'buru River system of French Equatorial Africa, just north of the equator and some two hundred miles from the sea. In addition to sawmills and timber enterprises, there were a mission station, school and hospital already in existence at Tulebom. Dr. Holley added greatly to the hospital facilities during his stay of more than a decade in the forest. He had with him his wife and son, who was six years old at the time. Several months later Mrs. Holley went back to England to await the birth of a daughter. When this child was almost a year old, Eustace took his first and only leave of absence, and the family was reunited.

"They all returned to Tuleborné in the spring of 1912, where they remained. They seem to have been reasonably happy despite the hardships and confinement. The children were educated at the mission school. At an early age Jackson demonstrated a talent for medicine, and was of considerable value to his father as he grew older. There was nothing they wanted except to be of service. But, despite the best of motives, they were defeated in the end."

"How?"

"Nowadays the white man can live for rather long periods of time in tropical Africa. He can protect himself from the sun and the damp, from insects and animals and even the power of the primeval forest itself, which when unchecked obliterates the hardiest niche of civilization in a matter of months. But once he is confronted by superstition and its attendant evils, then he must fall back or die. What do you know about Africa, my lord?"

"Virtually nothing. Oh, I devoured Rider Haggard and Sir Richard Burton in my youth."

"Then you've read
She
?"

"Engrossed and palpitating, like any twelve-year-old boy with a lust for romantic adventure."

"Matriarchies are not unknown in primitive societies. The Great Mother of antiquity was both priest and sorcerer. As for the so-called white goddesses of popular novels and movie serials, there is some basis in fact. Haggard, who for a time was in colonial service in the Transvaal, may have heard tales of a white woman who actually ruled a tribe of warriors feared everywhere along the notorious Slave Coast. Captains of slave ships, masters of barracoons claimed to have dealt with her. The warriors were members of a secret society, such as the 'leopard men' of Dahomey and Gabon, but their ruling deities happened to be river spirits—crocodiles, hideous antediluvian shapes, reptilian figures of evil. We know, of course, that natural violence in a world ruled by fetish easily becomes savagery, and then the direst forms of cruelty—human sacrifice; anthropophagy; women and children slaughtered to provide a draft of blood.

"It's said that Gen Loussaint not only survived in a territory noted for the toll it exacts from all races, but that she became quite as powerful as Haggard's fictional Ayesha. As cruelty became her pleasure and one bloodthirsty excess led to another, she grew inhumanly alluring, a fabulous creature not only of this earth but of the dark side of the
anima mundi
in which dwell the gods she propitiated."

"Interesting. And how much of this hearsay is one to accept?"

"I have spent several years investigating. The facts are few. Gen Loussaint was the eldest daughter of the soldier-explorer Trojan Loussaint. She was born in Chartres in 1736. From her earliest years she was a gifted athlete, an adventuress, a soul unfettered by the inhibitions of her sex or the expectations of society. Physically she had a very beautiful complexion which in later years the tropic sun could not wither nor darken, auburn hair and the disturbing, somewhat baleful eyes of a bitch wolf. She possessed odd talents, such as the ability to simultaneously copy a line of poetry with both hands, the right hand producing a mirror image of what the left was writing. As a child she had profound religious experiences. She spoke in tongues. She would not eat where anyone could observe her. She was temperamentally unsuited to master the intellect of a genius. She had a terrifying sense of humor and never forgave a slight. Other children avoided her company. Her father, who could deny her nothing, despairingly called her
la folle petite la plus sympathique
. Their relationship may have been an unnatural one. On the occasion of Trojan Loussaint's search for the headwaters of the K'buru in 1755 Gen accompanied him. She was disguised as a young officer and served as her father's adjutant, going by the name of Jules."