Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (79 page)

‘I have always said that I would believe anything on proper evidence,’ said I, slowly, ‘and I would be the last to question a statement of yours, Pelletier. However, although I have, as you say, looked into some of these things perhaps more than most, it seems, well – ’

Doctor Pelletier said nothing. Then he slowly got up out of his chair. He stepped over to a wall-cupboard and returned, a wide-mouthed specimen-jar in his hand. He laid the jar down before me, in silence.

I looked into it, through the slightly discolored alcohol with which the jar, tightly sealed with rubber-tape and sealing-wax, was filled nearly to the brim. There, on the jar’s bottom, lay such a thing as Pelletier had described (a thing which, if it had been ‘seated’, upright, would somewhat have resembled that representation of the happy little godling ‘Billiken’ which was popular twenty years ago as a desk ornament), a thing suggesting the sinister, the unearthly, even in this desiccated form. I looked long at the thing.

‘Excuse me for even seeming to hesitate, Pelletier,’ said I, reflectively.

‘I can’t say that I blame you,’ returned the genial doctor. ‘It is, by the way, the first and only time I have ever tried to tell the story to anybody.’

‘And Carswell?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been intrigued with that good fellow and his difficulties. How did he come out of it all?’

‘He made a magnificent recovery from the operation,’ said Pelletier, ‘and afterward, when he went back to Léogane, he told me that the Negroes, while glad to see him quite usual, had quite lost interest in him as the throne of a “divinity”.’

‘H’m,’ I remarked, ‘it would seem, that, to bear out – ’

‘Yes,’ said Pelletier, ‘I have always regarded that fact as absolutely conclusive. Indeed, how otherwise could one possibly account for –
this
?’ He indicated the contents of the laboratory jar.

I nodded my head, in agreement with him. ‘I can only say that – if you won’t feel insulted, Pelletier – that you are singularly open-minded, for a man of science! What, by the way, became of Carswell?’

The houseboy came in with a tray, and Pelletier and I drank to each other’s good health.

‘He came in to Port au Prince,’ replied Pelletier after he had done the honors. ‘He did not want to go back to the States, he said. The lady to whom he had been engaged had died a couple of years before; he felt that he would be out of touch with American business. The fact is – he had stayed out here too long, too continuously. But, he remains an “authority” on Haitian native affairs, and is consulted by the High Commissioner. He knows, literally, more about Haiti than the Haitians themselves. I wish you might meet him; you’d have a lot in common.’

‘I’ll hope to do that,’ said I, and rose to leave. The houseboy appeared at the door, smiling in my direction.

The table is set for two, sar,’ said he.

Doctor Pelletier led the way into the dining-room, taking it for granted that I would remain and dine with him. We are informal in St Thomas, about such matters. I telephoned home and sat down with him.

Pelletier suddenly laughed – he was halfway through his soup at the moment. I looked up inquiringly. He put down his soup spoon and looked across the table at me.

‘It’s a bit odd,’ he remarked, ‘when you stop to think of it! There’s one thing Carswell doesn’t know about Haiti and what happens there!’

‘What’s that?’ I inquired.

‘That – thing – in there,’ said Pelletier, indicating the office with his thumb in the way artists and surgeons do. ‘I thought he’d had troubles enough without
that
on his mind, too.’

I nodded in agreement and resumed my soup. Pelletier has a cook in a thousand.

Hill Drums

When Mr William Palgrave, British consul-general at St Thomas, Danish West Indies, stepped out of his fine residence on Denmark Hill, he looked, as one local wit had unkindly remarked, ‘like an entire procession’! It could not be denied that handsome Mr Palgrave, diplomat, famed author of travel articles in the leading British magazines, made at all times a vastly imposing appearance, and that of this appearance he was entirely conscious.

One blazing afternoon in May, in the year of Grace, 1873, he came in stately fashion down the steps before his house toward his open carriage, waiting in the roadway below. On the box Claude, his Negro coachman, sagged down now under the broiling sun, conversed languidly with one La Touche Penn, a street loafer whose swart skin showed through various rents in a faded, many-times-washed blue dungaree shirt. Seeing the consul-general descending, Claude straightened himself abruptly while La Touche Penn slouched away, the white of an observant, rolled eye on Mr Palgrave.

As this ne’er-do-well strolled nonchalantly down the hill – the hard soles of a pair of feet which had never known the constriction of shoes making sandpaper-like sounds on the steep roadway – he whistled, softly, a nearly soundless little tune. Claude tightened his reins and the small, grass-fed, somnolent carriage-horses plucked up weary heads, ending their nap in the drowsy air. That was how Mr Palgrave liked to find his appointments – in order; ready for their functions. Mr Palgrave – so another St Thomas wit – was not unlike the late General Braddock whose fame is in the American histories; in short, a bureaucratic martinet whose wide travels, soon to bring him greater fame as the distinguished author of
Ulysses,
had failed signally to modify a native phlegmatic bluntness.

He came down the steps, a resplendent figure of a fine gentleman, dressed with a precise meticulousness in the exact mode of the London fashion, and, glancing after the furtive wastrel now well down the hill road, he caught the whistled tune. As he recognized it he frowned heavily, pursing his lips into a kind of pout which went ill with his appearance of portly, well-nourished grandeur. This accomplished diplomat was fastidious, easily annoyed. Not to put too fine a point upon it, he did not like St Thomas.

For one thing he disliked feminine names for places, and the capital town in those days was called Charlotte Amalia, after one of Denmark’s queens. It was a coquette of a town, a slender brunette of black eyes and very red lips and cheeks; a Latin brunette of the smoldering, garish type; a brunette who ran to mantillas and
coquetteries
and very high heels on her glistening slippers.

Various times had Mr Palgrave in his blunt manner compared to Charlotte’s disadvantage her alleged beauties with the sedate solidity of his last post, Trebizond in Armenia, whence he had come here to the Caribbean. At first these animadversions of his had been lightly received. Charlotte Amalia was a tolerant lass. This was, perhaps, only a strange variety of British banter! Society had let it go at that; would probably have forgotten all about it. But then the consul-general had made it plain, several times, that he had meant quite literally exactly what he had said. At that Charlotte, though still tolerantly, had been annoyed.

Finally he had been – unconsciously (Charlotte granted that quite definitely) – offensive. He had said certain things, used certain terms, which were – inadvisable. The way he used the word ‘native’, society agreed, was bad diplomacy, to put it mildly. Society continued, because he was a Caucasian and because of his official position, to invite him to its dinners, its routs, its afternoon teas, its swizzel parties. Government House took no notice of his ineptitudes, his comparisons.

The British families, and there were many of these permanently resident in St Thomas – Chatfields, Talbots, Robertsons, MacDesmonds – were, of course, the backbone of his social relationships. Some of them tried to give him hints when they saw how the wind was veering against him and wishing their own diplomatic representative to be clear of criticism, but these well-intentioned efforts slipped off Mr Palgrave’s uncompromising broad back like water from a duck’s!

Then he had really put his foot in it. The leading English magazine to which he was a valued contributor brought out an article by him – on Charlotte Amalia. Here the already famous author of travel articles had commented, in cold print, and disparagingly, upon the society of which he was, for the time being, an integral part. He had, too, been so injudicious as to compare Charlotte Amalia with Trebizond, vastly to the advantage of the Armenian capital. Trebizond, if the man had any sentiment in him, must, at that period, have seemed very attractive in retrospect.

It was chiefly the British West Indians who took in the magazine, but there were a few others. The news of the article spread like wildfire. Extra copies, at Lightbourn’s store, were quickly exhausted. Other copies were ordered. Extant copies were worn dog-eared from frequent readings of that
faux pas
. It finished Mr Palgrave in Charlotte Amalia.

A consul-general, and of Great Britain, can hardly be ignored in a comparatively small community. Nevertheless Charlotte Amalia now drew in her perfumed skirts in no unmistakable gesture. There was, of course, nothing overt about this gesture. Charlotte was far too subtle, far too polite and sophisticated after the Continental manner, for anything crude; anything, that is, smacking of the consul-general’s own methods! But there was an immediate difference, a delicate, subtle difference, which, as the weeks progressed, was to make its impact upon the consciousness of William Palgrave, through his thick mental epidermis, in a very strange manner indeed.

For it had penetrated elsewhere than to the very outer edges of St Thomas society. It had got down to Black Quashee himself, down through the various intervening social strata – minor officials, a few professional persons, shopkeepers, artisans – down to Quashee in his tattered shirt; shoeless, carefree Quashee, at the very bottom of Charlotte Amalia’s social scheme.

Early that spring, at the time when house servants become mysteriously ill and have to be relieved of their duties for a few days, and the Rata drums, Fad’er, Mama, and Boula de Babee, may be heard to roll and boom nightly from the wooded hills in the island’s interior, and the Trade Winds’ changing direction leaves an almost palpable curtain of sultriness hanging over the hot, dry town on its three hillsides; in those days when the burros’ tongues hang out of dry mouths along dusty roads and the centipedes come into the houses out of the dust and street dogs slink along blazing sidewalks in the narrow slits of house-shade under the broiling sun of late May-time – then, as the Black People came trickling back into the town from their three- or four-day sojourn in the hills when they make the spring songs – then it was that the Honorable William Palgrave began to be conscious of a vague, partly realized annoyance, an annoyance which seemed to hang in the air all about him.

As he lay on his handsome carved mahogany bedstead during an early-afternoon
siesta
; as he sat in his cool shaded office before his great desk with its dispatch-boxes in orderly rows, as he dressed for dinner after his late-afternoon bath – taken in the tin tub which he had lugged about the diplomatic world for the past eighteen years – at such times the new annoyance would drift to him in whispers, on the dull wings of the sultry air so hard to breathe for one of his portly habit.

It was a sound-annoyance, a vague, thin, almost imperceptible thing. It was a tune, with certain elusive words; words of which he heard recurrent bits, snatches, snippets, incidental mere light touches of a delicate, withering sarcasm – directed toward him as a child might blow thistle-down with faint derisive intent in the direction of somebody who has managed to incur its dislike.

The St Thomas Negroes, so it became borne in upon Mr Palgrave’s understanding, had ‘made a song on’ him.

It was a characteristic, quickstep kind of song; something in the nature of a folksong. Of these there are various examples, like the one wherein the more urban St Thomian makes fun of his Santa Crucian neighbor by alleging that: ‘De Crucian gyurl don’ wish dey skin’, and which ends on the rollicking chorus: ‘Wash yo’self in a sardine-tin!’

In the course of the weeks in which he was obliged to listen to it, Mr Palgrave came to recognize the tune, and even a few of the words, which, because of almost incessant repetition, had been forced, though with a delicacy that was almost eery, upon his attention. The tune went to the lilt of the small drum – Boula, de babee – somewhat as follows.

The words, of which there were many, resolved themselves, so far as his appreciation of them was concerned, into two first lines, and a refrain, thus: