Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (9 page)

‘That’s a curious thing, Gerald,’ said Morley, reflectively, in his peculiarly deep and mellow voice. ‘My poor mother always – well, simply
abominated
the name. I suppose that’s how come I got it fastened on me – because she disliked it! You see, when I was born – it was in New York, in Roosevelt Hospital – my mother very nearly died. She was not a very big or strong person, and I was – er – rather a good-sized baby – weighed seventeen pounds or something outrageous at birth! Queer thing too – I nearly passed out during the first few days myself, they say! Undernourished. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it. Yet, that was the verdict of three of New York’s foremost obstetricians who were in on the case in consultation.

‘Well, it seems, when I was about ten days old, and out of danger, my father came around in his car – it was a Winton, I believe in those days or perhaps, a Panhard – and carted me off to be baptized. My mother was still in a dangerous condition – they didn’t let her up for a couple of weeks or so after that – and chose that name for me himself, so “Williamson” I’ve been, ever since!’

We had a really very pleasant time together. Morley was popular with the St Thomas crowd from the very beginning. He was too sensible to mope, and while he didn’t exactly rush after entertainment, we went out a good deal, and there is a good deal to go out to in St Thomas, or was in those days, two years ago, before President Hoover’s Economy Program took our Naval personnel out of St Thomas.

Morley’s geniality, his fund of stories, his generous attitude to life, the outstanding kindliness and fellowship of the man, brought him a host of new friends, most of whom were my old friends. I was delighted that my prescription for poor old Morley – getting him to come down and stay with me that winter – was working so splendidly.

It was in company with no less than four of these new friends of Morley’s, Naval Officers, all four of them, that he and I turned the corner around the Grand Hotel one morning about eleven o’clock and walked smack into trouble! The British sailorman of the Navy kind is, when normal, one of the most respectful and pleasant fellows alive. He is, as I have observed more than once, quite otherwise when drunk. The dozen or so British tars we encountered that moment, ashore from the Sloop-of-War
Amphitrite
, which lay in St Thomas’s Harbor, were as nasty and truculent a group of human-beings as I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. There is no telling where they had acquired their present condition of semi-drunkenness, but there was no question whatever of their joint mood!

‘Ho – plasterin’ band o’ brass-hat — — !’ greeted the enormous cockney who seemed to be their natural leader, eyeing truculently the four white-drill tropical uniforms with their shoulder insignia, and rudely jostling Lieutenant Sankers, to whose house we were
en route
afoot that morning, ‘fink ye owns the ’ole brasted universe, ye does.
I’ll
show ye!!’ and with that, the enormous bully, abetted by the salient jeers of his following which had, somehow, managed to elude their ship’s Shore Police down to that moment, barged head first into Morley, seizing him first by both arms and leaving the soil-marks of a pair of very dirty hands on his immaculate white drill jacket. Then, as Morley quietly twisted himself loose without raising a hand against this attack, the big cockney swung an open hand, and landed a resounding slap across Morley’s face.

This whole affair, of course, occupied no more than a few seconds. But I had time, and to spare, to note the red flush of a sudden, and I thought an unprecedented, anger in Morley’s face; to observe the quick tightening of his tremendous muscles, the abrupt tensing of his long right arm, the beautifully-kept hand on the end of it hardening before my eyes into a great, menacing fist; the sudden glint in his deep-set dark-brown eyes, and then – then – I could hardly believe the evidence of my own two eyes – Williamson Morley, on his rather broad pair of feet, was trotting away, leaving his antagonist who had struck him in the face; leaving the rest of us together there in a tight little knot and an extremely unpleasant position on that corner. And then – well, the crisp ‘quarter-deck’ tones of Commander Anderson cut through that second’s amazed silence which had fallen. Anderson had seized the psychological moment to turn-to these discipline-forgetting tars. He blistered them in a cutting vernacular in no way inferior to their own. He keel-hauled them, warming to his task.

Anderson had them standing at attention, several gaping-mouthed at his extraordinary skill in vituperation, by the time their double Shore Police squad came around the corner with truncheons in hand; and to the tender mercies of that businesslike and strictly sober group we left them.

We walked along in a complete silence, Morley’s conduct as plainly dominating everything else in all our minds, as though we were five sandwich-men with his inexcusable cowardice blazoned on our fore-and-aft signboards.

We found him at the foot of the flight of curving steps with its really beautiful metal-wrought railing which leads up to the high entrance of Lieutenant Sankers’s house. We went up the steps and into the house together, and when we had taken off our hats and gone into the ‘hall’, or living room, there fell upon us a silence so awkward as to transcend anything else of the kind in my experience. I, for one, could not speak to save my life; could not, it seemed, so much as look at Morley. There was, too, running through my head a half-whispered bit of thick, native, negro, St Thomian speech, a dialect remark, made to herself, by an aged negress who had been standing, horrified, quite nearby, and who had witnessed our besetting and the fiasco of Morley’s ignominious retreat after being struck full in the face. The old woman had muttered: ‘Him actin’ foo save him own soul, de mahn – Gahd keep de mahn stedfas’!’

And, as we stood there, and the piling-up silence was becoming simply unbearable, Morley, who quite certainly had not heard this comment of the pious old woman’s, proceeded, calmly, in that mellow, deep baritone voice of his, to make a statement precisely bearing out the old woman’s contention.

‘You fellows are wondering at me, naturally. I’m not sure that even Canevin understands! You see, I’ve allowed myself to get really angry three times in my life, and the last time I took a resolution that nothing, nothing whatever, nothing
conceivable
, would ever do it to me again! I remembered barely in time this morning, gentlemen. The last time, you see, it cost me three weeks of suspense, nearly ruined me, waiting for a roughneck I had struck to die or recover – compound fracture – and I only tapped him, I thought! Look here!’ as, looking about him, he saw a certain corporate lack of understanding on the five faces of his audience.

And, reaching up one of those inordinately long arms of his to where hung an old wrought-iron-barrelled musket, obviously an ‘ornament’ in Sankers’s house, hired furnished, he took the thing down, and with no apparent effort at all, in his two hands, broke the stock away from the lock and barrel, and then, still merely with his hands, not using a knee for any pressure between them such as would be the obvious and natural method for any such feat attempted, with one sweep bent the heavy barrel into a right-angle.

He stood there, holding the strange-looking thing that resulted for us to look at, and then as we stood, speechless, fascinated, with another motion of his hands, and putting forth some effort this time – a herculean heave which made the veins of his forehead stand out abruptly and the sweat start up on his face on which the mark of the big cockney’s hand now showed a bright crimson, Williamson Morley bent the gun-barrel back again into an approximate trueness and laid it down on Sankers’ hall table.

‘It’s better the way it is, don’t you think?’ he remarked, quietly, dusting his hands together, ‘rather than, probably to have killed that mucker out of Limehouse – maybe two or three of them, if they’d pitched in to help him.’ Then, in a somewhat altered tone, a faintly perceptible trace of vehemence present in it, he added: ‘I think you should agree with me, gentlemen!’

I think we were all too stultified at the incredible feat of brute strength we had just witnessed to get our minds very quickly off that. Sankers, our host for the time-being, came-to the quickest.

‘Good God!’ he cried out, ‘of course – rather – Oh, very much so, Old Man! Good God! – Mere bones and cockney meat under those hands!’

And then the rest of them chimed in. It was a complete, almost a painful revulsion on the part of all of them. I, who had known Morley most of my life, had caught his point almost, as it happened, before he had begun to demonstrate it; about the time he had reached up after the old musket on the wall. I merely caught his eye and winked, aligning myself with him as against any possible adverse conclusion of the others.

This, of course, in the form of a choice story, was all over St Thomas, Black, White, and ‘Coloured’ St Thomas, within twenty-four hours, and people along the streets began to turn their heads to look after him, as the negroes had done since his arrival, whenever Morley passed among them.

I could hardly fail to catch the way in which my own household reacted to this new information about the physical strength of the stranger within its gates so soon as the grapevine route had apprized its dark-skinned members of the fact. Stephen Penn, the house-man, almost never looked at Morley now, except by the method known among West Indian negroes as ‘cutting his eyes’, which means a sidewise glance. Esmerelda, my extremely pious cook, appeared to add to the volume of her crooned hymn-tunes and frequently muttered prayers with which she accompanied her work. And once when my washer’s pick’ny glimpsed him walking across the stone-flagged yard to the side entrance to the West gallery, that coal-black child’s single garment lay stiff against the breeze generated by his flight towards the kitchen door and safety!

It was Esmerelda the cook who really brought about the set of conditions which solved the joint mysteries of Morley’s father’s attitude to him, his late wife’s obvious feeling of dread, and the uniform reaction of every St Thomas negro whom I had seen in contact with Morley. The
dénouement
happened not very long after Morley’s demonstration in Lieutenant Sankers’s house that morning of our encounter with the sailors.

Esmerelda had been trying-out coconut oil, a process, as performed in the West Indies, involving the boiling of a huge kettle of water. This, arranged outdoors, and watchfully presided over by my cook, had been going on for a couple of days at intervals. Into the boiling water Esmerelda would throw several panfuls of copra, the white meat dug out of the matured nuts. After the oil had been boiled out and when it was floating, this crude product would be skimmed off, and more copra put into the pot. The final process was managed indoors, with a much smaller kettle, in which the skimmed oil was ‘boiled down’ in a local refining process.

It was during this final stage in her preparation of the oil for the household that old Esmerelda, in some fashion of which I never, really heard the full account, permitted the oil to get on fire, and, in her endeavors to put out the blaze, got her dress afire. Her loud shrieks which expressed fright rather than pain, for the blazing oil did not actually reach the old soul’s skin, brought Morley, who was alone at the moment on the gallery reading, around the house and to the kitchen door on the dead run. He visualized at once what had happened, and, seizing an old rag-work floor mat which Esmerelda kept near the doorway, advanced upon her to put out the fire.

At this she shrieked afresh, but Morley, not having the slightest idea that his abrupt answer to her yells for help had served to frighten the old woman almost into a fit, merely wrapped the floor-mat about her and smothered the flames. He got both hands badly burned in the process and Dr Pelletier dressed them with an immersion in more coconut oil and did them up in a pair of bandages about rubber tissue to keep them moist with the oil dressing inside, so that Morley’s hands looked like a prize-fighter’s with the gloves on. These pudding-like arrangements Dr Pelletier adjured his patient to leave on for at least forty-eight hours.

We drove home and I declined a dinner engagement for the next evening for Morley on the ground that he could not feed himself! He managed a bowl of soup between his hands at home that evening, and as he had a couple of fingers free outside the bandage on his left hand, assured me that he could manage undressing quite easily. I forgot all about his probable problem that evening, and did not go to his room to give him a hand as I had fully intended doing.

It was not until the next day at lunch that it dawned on me that Morley was fully dressed, although wearing pumps into which he could slip his feet, instead of shoes, and wondering how he had managed it. There were certain details, occurring to me, as quite out of the question for a man with hands muffled up all but the two outside fingers on the left hand as Morley was. Morley’s tie was knotted with his usual careful precision; his hair, as always, was brushed with a meticulous exactitude. His belt-buckle was fastened.

I tried to imagine myself attending to all these details of dress with both thumbs and six of my eight fingers out of commission. I could not. It was too much for me.

I said nothing to Morley, but after lunch I asked Stephen Penn if he had assisted Mr Morley to dress.

Stephen said he had not. He had offered to do so, but Mr Morley had thanked him and replied it wasn’t going to be necessary.

I was mystified.

The thing would not leave my mind all that afternoon while Morley sat out there on the West gallery with the bulk of the house between himself and the sun and read various magazines. I went out at last merely to watch him turn the pages. He managed that very easily, holding the magazine across his right forearm and grasping the upper, right-hand corner of a finished page between the two free fingers and the bandage itself whenever it became necessary to turn it over.