Strange Conflict (28 page)

That, after all,' conceded the Duke, ‘is the one thing that
the Creator of Life has given without discrimination to every race, from the Tropics to the Arctic snows, and to everyone alike, however poor, ignorant or humble they may be; so it's hardly surprising that a people whose worldly possessions can, generally speaking, be tied up in a single blanket should regard as on object for worship this one pleasure which is within the reach of them all.'

‘Exactly.' Their new friend bowed, evidently much gratified by de Richleau's sympathetic understanding. ‘The Rada gods, as the deities of Health, Fertility and Sexual Virility, are therefore offered by their devotees such little luxuries as can be spared from their own meagre stores: perfumes, cornmeal, eggs, fruit, flowers, sweet liquors, cakes and olive-oil. To Dambala every offering must be made upon a white plate, and the sacrifice to him consists of a pair of white chickens—a hen and a cock.

‘The Petro gods, on the other hand, are propitiated mainly through fear or because a person wishes to do some evil to his neighbour. The Houngan, or priest, is a figure of dread in each village and he blackmails the whole community. There is, perhaps, a quarrel, and one party will go to the priest to have a ceremony performed which will cause his enemy to become sick and die. When without apparent cause the second party becomes ill his relatives know what has happened, so they go to the priest and offer a sum for another ceremony to be performed which will remove the curse. The first party is informed of this and offers a larger sum for the curse to be continued; and so it goes on, with the evil priest taking bribes from both sides until one finally outbids the other and the poor wretch who has been afflicted either recovers or dies.'

‘Have they really the power just to wish death on a man?' Richard asked.

‘Oh, yes. There is not the least doubt about that; but they also have a great knowledge of poisonous herbs, and often use these to bring about their fell design if the afflicted person seeks the protection of a rival Houngan.'

‘The people are nominally Catholics, aren't they?' de Richleau said. ‘So how do the Catholic priests view all this?'

Doctor Saturday spread out his long, slender hands. ‘In Haiti it is impossible for the uninitiated to say where Roman Catholicism ends and Voodoo begins.'

‘That's a pretty strong statement against the Roman Catholic Church,' remarked Rex.

‘No, no,' protested the Doctor; ‘I do not mean it that way. The good Fathers naturally abominate these practices and have been fighting them for centuries; but when you visit our towns and villages you will gain the impression that the whole population—even in the remotest hamlets— are most devout Catholics; whereas, in fact, this is not so at all.'

Marie Lou frowned. ‘I'm afraid I don't quite understand.'

‘It is this way. The Haitians are still very primitive; comparatively few of them as yet can even read or write. They have no written literature at all: only the oft-repeated folktales and ancient jests which they tell around their firesides; and they have no artists. In consequence, they have never yet produced anyone capable of drawing original pictures of the Voodoo gods which could be accepted as standard types, and long ago they devised the expedient of utilising pictures of Catholic saints as the representation of Voodoo Loa. For Dambala they adopted Saint Patrick, simply because there is always a snake in any picture of him. For Papa Legba they use a picture of John the Baptist, for Papa Loco a picture of Saint Joseph; and so on. The result is that all over the island you will see altars apparently devoted to the worship of the Catholic saints but actually used for a very different purpose.'

‘Do they have only gods in Voodoo or are there goddesses as well?' Marie Lou inquired.

‘I fear, Madame, that women still occupy a very low status among most Negro races,' replied the Doctor apologetically. ‘They are the chattels of men, who consider their purposes in life are to be possessed at will when young and to be used as beasts of burden when old, so it would be unnatural in the Haitians to prostrate themselves before female deities. Yet all the gods have their women as a natural attribute of prosperity and power, and to these, who are little more than handmaidens to the Loa, there is one extraordinary exception. This is a lady called Erzulie Frieda, who is a goddess in her own right, and she probably has more power to affect the destiny of men than any female deity who is worshipped throughout the world today.'

‘How terribly interesting,' murmured Marie Lou, and the Doctor went on:

‘She is often represented by the picture of the Virgin Mary, but she has nothing whatever in common with the Mother of Jesus Christ. To explain her best, I must ask you to imagine a living Venus who has the power to turn herself into a mortal woman and enter the beds of thousands of her worshippers every Thursday and Saturday night. She is always described by her lovers as a supremely beautiful young Mulatto, scrupulously clean, intoxicatingly perfumed, with a slim yet ripe body breathing insatiable desire, to which is coupled the accumulated knowledge and expertness in the arts of love of all the women who have ever lived.'

The Doctor paused to draw their attention to a shoal of flying-fish which were skimming from wave-crest to wave-crest within twenty feet of the windows of the launch's cabin, then when the shoal had passed he continued:

‘The cult of Erzulie is, I think, the most remarkable thing connected with Voodoo, because it is no question of an occasional ceremony or a devotion which can be taken up and dropped again at will. Every year thousands of young men in Haiti receive her call and they must answer it whether they will or no. At first they do not realise what has happened to them but fall sick and have troubled dreams. A youth glimpses rich female garments and smells lovely scents in his sleep, but there is nothing tangible that he can identify. Then either the Goddess appears more openly and excites his lust or he consults a priest, describing the symptoms of his illness, and the priest tells him that Erzulie has done him the honour to choose him as her lover.

‘Sometimes the young man is intensely distressed, as he may be in love with a mortal woman or happily married; but there is no escape for him if Erzulie has cast the eye of desire upon him. All sorts of ills befall him until he surrenders; but in most cases he does so quite willingly. For the reception of the Goddess he sets aside in his house a room with a spotless white bed, offerings of sweets and wine and flowers, and, under the pain of unbelievably horrible penalties no other woman is allowed to enter that room. He then goes through a special ceremony in which he
devotes himself to the Goddess and becomes her servitor for the rest of his life.'

‘If he has a wife, that's very hard on her,' remarked Marie Lou.

‘It is, indeed, Madame,' the Doctor agreed; ‘since Erzulie is the enemy of all women and is capable of inflicting the most grievous misfortunes—even death—upon any person who seeks to draw one of her lovers away from her. The jealousy of Erzulie Frieda is a terrible thing, and not a woman in Haiti, however strongly she might resent the loss of her own lover or husband, would dare to cross the Goddess.'

For a long time they talked on about the strange customs and beliefs of the superstitious, Voodoo-ridden Haitians, then of many other things as the sun gradually sank in the western sky and the launch raced on towards Port-au-Prince. Doctor Saturday proved a positive mine of information about the island; its people, flora, fauna and even fish. His large and extraordinarily white teeth flashed into a smile with great frequency and he was obviously most anxious to please. Richard did not like the way that the native crew cringed at the Doctor's every order, yet leapt to obey without uttering a word, but assumed that probably even the nicest Mulattoes treated their Negro servants little better than slaves. Marie Lou wished that their new friend would not make quite such frequent use of the spittoon just outside the cabin door. But they all considered themselves extremely fortunate in having been picked up by a man of his qualities and decided that if he was a fair sample of the upper-classHaitians the people had been much maligned.

Dusk was falling when the launch at last entered port and nosed its way in among a ramshackle collection of shipping. The great heat of the day was now long past, but the cool of the evening did little to alleviate the pain in the limbs of the Duke and his friends. Frequent applications of the Doctor's liniment had taken the worst sting out of their burns during the three-and-a-half-hour trip in the motor-boat, but they now felt as though they were being slowly grilled in front of a red-hot fire.

As all of them had been sunburnt on one occasion or other before, they knew the tortures that awaited them that night, and perhaps, in view of the seriousness of their burns,
for several days to come, so they endeavoured to regard their pain philosophically and take comfort from the fact that they were alive at all. But it was difficult for them to keep their minds off the burning glow which now suffused their scorched skin.

On the wharfside the Doctor summoned a rickety Ford to follow his own car, which was waiting for him. Piling into the two vehicles, they drove past the few pretentious brick buildings in the centre of the town, out through the marshy suburbs which surround it, where the only buildings were tumbledown shacks and squalid mud hovels, then for a couple of miles up into the hills until they reached a long, low house before the whole front of which ran a broad verandah. With an apology for preceding them Doctor Saturday led the way in and bade them welcome; while his black houseboys ran out to collect the fish which he had caught earlier in the day.

In the centre of the building there was one huge, lofty room which was open at both ends so that a current of air could move unimpeded right through it during the great midday heats. It was well but rather incongruously furnished in the ornate French style of the 1890's, but the books and radio-gramophone, together with its spotless tidiness, showed that the Doctor lived the life of a cultured European.

Pausing only to remove his panama, which revealed a fine head of curly, snow-white hair, he led them out, along the verandah, to a series of bedrooms; all of which were sparsely but neatly furnished, were equipped with Venetian blinds, and had fine-mesh wire frames over the windows to keep out the mosquitoes. He also showed them a shower-bath at the back of the house and a fitted basin with a geyser. Taking a pile of clean towels from a cupboard he said that he felt sure they would like to tidy themselves while he told his staff that he had guests who would be staying for some time and had extra places laid for dinner.

Immediately they were alone de Richleau called the others into his room. His face was exceptionally grave as he said:

‘God knows, I never imagined for one second that we'd ever be landed in such a hellish mess.'

‘Mess?' repeated Rex. ‘I reckon we've had a grand break.
The old Doc. seems a decent sort. He couldn't have been kinder; and this place is the Ritz compared with anything we'd find in that lousy town. Dammit, we were lucky enough to be picked up at all; but to have been picked up by a civilised old crooner, who wants us all to stay with him for keeps, seems super-luck to me.'

‘You fool!' snapped the Duke. ‘Haven't you realised that the whole of my impedimenta for our protection went down in the plane? We're in Haiti and our enemy must know that by now. The moment we go to sleep tonight we shall be utterly at the mercy of the evil entity we came here to fight.'

‘Hell's bells!' exclaimed Richard. ‘And I never gave the fact that you'd lost all your protective stuff a thought!'

‘I did,' said Marie Lou. ‘I've been worrying about it, on and off, the whole afternoon.'

Rex pulled a face. ‘Seems, then, that we're in one helluva jam.'

De Richleau spoke again with incredible bitterness. ‘Without the things to make a proper pentacle we shall be as defenceless as a group of naked people facing a battery of machine-guns.'

‘I was hoping you'd be able to get fresh supplies of most of the things in Port-au-Prince,' murmured Marie Lou.

The Duke shook his head. ‘Some of them, perhaps, but when we drove through it quarter of an hour ago you saw what a god-forsaken place it is. Only a herbalist or a first-class chemist could supply many of the items I require, and I doubt if there is either nearer than Kingston.'

‘Jamaica's all of two hundred miles,' muttered Rex.

‘You're thinking in terms of air travel. By water it must be nearer three hundred.'

Richard was calculating quickly. ‘If, down at the port, we could get a motor-schooner or a sea-going launch that does fifteen knots, we could make it in twenty hours.'

‘Sure,' agreed Rex. ‘And we'll get a boat all right. Thank God my wallet was on me when we crashed! Good American dollars will buy anything in this place.'

‘They would also buy a plane in Jamaica,' added the Duke.

‘A plane?' repeated Marie Lou. ‘What for?'

‘The return journey,' he replied quietly. ‘I mean to stay here and face the music while you others go to Kingston to get the things we need; but you must get back at the earliest possible moment, as I dare not sleep for an instant until you rejoin me.'

‘Greyeyes, you can't!' Marie Lou protested. ‘It would be absolute madness. Even if the rest of us succeeded in getting to Kingston in twenty hours we should need at least four or five hours there to buy the things and get a plane. Then there's the two-hours flight back. We couldn't possibly rejoin you much under thirty hours, and you've been awake about twelve hours today already. No. We must all leave here as quickly as we can and keep one another from falling asleep until we're able to erect a pentacle in Kingston.'

De Richleau gave a faint smile. ‘I think you ought to be able to make better speed than that. There must be boats here which do eighteen knots. If so, you could be in Kingston by one o'clock tomorrow. Four hours should be enough to get the things and two hours for your flight back. Allowing an extra hour for a slip-up somewhere, you'd still be able to rejoin me within twenty-four hours. I'm sorry, Princess; and I know the risk I'm running in taking on those extra few hours before you can return; but I've got to stay.'