Manly Wade Wellman - Judge Pursuivant 02 Read online

  "Ret. legal practise, 1919." So he did not remain in his early profession, even though it promised so well. What then? Turn back for the answer. "Ph.D., Oxford, 1922." His new love was scholarship. He became an author and philosopher. His interests included the trencher-I had seen him eat and drink with hearty pleasure-the study hall, the steel blade.

  What else? "Protestant"-religion was his, but not narrowly so, or he would have been specific about a single sect. "Independent"-his political adventures had not bound him to any party. "Unmarried"-he had lived too busily for love? Or had he known it, and lost? I, too, was unmarried, and I was well past thirty. "Address: Low Haven"-a country home, apparently pretentious enough to bear a name like a manor house. Probably comfortable, withdrawn, full of sturdy furniture and good books, with a well-stocked pantry and cellar.

  I felt that I had learned something about the man, and I was desirous of learning more.

  On the evening mail I received a envelope addressed in Jake Switz's jagged handwriting. Inside were half a dozen five-dollar bills and a railway ticket, on the back of which was scribbled in pencil: "Take the 9 a.m. train at Grand Central. I'll meet you at the Dillard Falls Junction with a car. J. Switz."

  I blessed the friendly heart of Sigrid's little serf, and went home to pack. The room clerk seemed surprised and relieved when I checked out in the morning, paying him in full. I reached the station early and got on the train, securing a good seat in the smoking-car. Many were boarding the car, but none looked at me, not even the big fellow who seated himself into position at my side. Six years before I had been mobbed as I stepped off the Twentieth Century Limited in this very station-a hundred women had rent away my coat and shirt in rags for souvenirs-

  "Would you let me have a match, Mr Connatt?" asked a voice I had heard before. My companion's pale blue eyes were turned upon me, and he was tucking a trusty-looking. pipe beneath his blond mustache.

  "Judge Pursuivant!" I cried, with a pleasure I did not try to disguise. "You here-it's like one of those Grand Hotel plays."

  "Not so much coincidence as that," he smiled, taking the match I had found. "You see, I am still intrigued by the paradox we discussed the other night; I mean, the riddle of how and when Ruthven was set down. It so happens that an old friend of mine has a cabin near the Lake Jozgid Theater, and I need a vacation." He drew a cloud of comforting smoke. "Judiciously I accepted his invitation to stay there. You and I shall be neighbors."

  "Good ones, I hope," was my warm rejoinder, as I lighted a cigarette from the match he still held.

  By the time our train clanked out of the subterranean caverns of Grand Central Station, we were deep in pleasant talk. At my earnest plea, the judge discussed Lord Byron.

  "A point in favor of the genuineness of the document," he began, "is that Byron was exactly the sort of man who would conceive and write a play like Ruthven."

  "With the semi-vampire plot?" I asked "I always thought that England of his time had just about forgotten about vampires."

  "Yes, but Byron fetched them back into the national mind. Remember, he traveled in Greece as a young man, and the belief was strong in that part of the world. In a footnote to The Giaour-you'll find his footnotes in any standard edition of his works-he discusses vampires."

  "Varduk spoke of those who fancied Byron to be the devil," I remembered.

  "They may have had more than fancy to father the thought. Not that I do not admire Byron, for his talents and his achievements; but something of a diabolic curse hangs over him. Why," and Pursuivant warmed instantly to the discussion, "his very family history reads like a Gothic novel. His father was 'Mad Jack' Byron, the most sinful man of his generation; his grandfather was Admiral 'Foulweather Jack' Byron, about whose ill luck at sea is more than a suggestion of divine displeasure. The title descended to Byron from his great-uncle, the 'Wicked Lord,' who was a murderer, a libertine, a believer in evil spirits, and perhaps a practising diabolist. The family seat, Newstead Abbey, had been the retreat of medieval monks, and when those monks were driven from it they may have cursed their dispossessors. In any case, it had ghosts and a 'Devil's Wood.'"

  "Byron was just the man for that heritage," I observed.

  "He certainly was. As a child he carried pistols in his pockets and longed to kill someone. As a youth he chained a bear and a wolf at his door, drank wine from a human skull, and mocked religion by wearing a monk's habit to orgies. His unearthly beauty, his mocking tongue, fitted in with his wickedness and his limp to make him seem an incarnation of the hoofed Satan. As for his sins-" The judge broke off in contemplation of them.

  "Nobody knows them all," I reminded.

  "Perhaps he repented," mused my companion. "At least he seems to have forgotten his light loves and dark pleasures, turned to good works and the effort to liberate the Greeks from their Turkish oppressors. If he began life like an imp, he finished like a hero. I hope that he was sincere in that change, and not too late."

  I expressed the desire to study Byron's life and writings, and Pursuivant opened his suitcase on the spot to lend me Drinkwater's and Maurois' biographies, a copy of the collected poems, and his own work, A Defense of the Wickedest Poet.

  We ate lunch together in the dining-car, Pursuivant pondering his choice from the menu as once he must have pondered his decision in a case at court. When he made his selection, he devoured it with the same gusto I had observed before. "Food may be a necessity," quoth he between bites, "but the enjoyment of it is a blessing."

  "You have other enjoyments," I reminded him. "Study, fencing-"

  That brought on a discussion of the sword as weapon and symbol. My own swordsmanship is no better or worse than that of most actors, and Pursuivant was frank in condemning most stage fencers.

  "I dislike to see a clumsy lout posturing through the duel scenes of Cyrano de Bergerac or Hamlet" he growled. "No offense, Mr Connatt. I confess that you, in your motion-picture interpretation of the role of Don Caesar de Bazan, achieved some very convincing cut-and-thrust. From what I saw, you have an understanding of the sport. Perhaps you and I can have a bout or so between your rehearsals."

  I said that I would be honored, and then we had to collect our luggage and change trains. An hour or more passed on the new road before we reached our junction.

  Jake Switz was there as he had promised to be, at the wheel of a sturdy repainted car. He greeted us with a triumphant story of his astuteness in helping Elmo Davidson to bargain for the vehicle, broke off to invite Pursuivant to ride with us to his cabin, and then launched into a hymn of praise for Sigrid's early rehearsals of her role.

  "Nobody in America seems to think she ever made anything but movies," he pointed out. "At home in Sweden, though, she did deep stuff-Ibsen and them guys-and her only a kid then. You wait, Gib she'll knock from the theater public their eyes out with her class."

  The road from the junction was deepset between hills, and darkly hedged with high trees. "This makes the theater hard to get at," Jake pointed out as he drove. "People will have to make a regular pilgrimage to see Holgar play in Ruthven, and they'll like it twice as well because of all the trouble they took."

  Pursuivant left us at the head of a little path, with a small structure of logs showing through the trees beyond. We waved good-bye to him, and Jake trod on his starter once more. As we rolled away, he glanced sidewise at me. His crossed eyes behind their thick lenses had grown suddenly serious.

  "Only one night Sigrid and I been here, Gib," he said, somewhat darkly, "and I don't like it."

  "Don't tell me you're haunted," I rallied him, laughing. "That's good press-agentry for a horror play, but I'm one of the actors. I won't be buying tickets."

  He did not laugh in return.

  "I won't say haunted, Gib. That means ordinary ghosts, and whatever is here at the theater is worse than ghosts. Listen what happened."

  5. Jake's Story

  SIGRID, with Jake in attendance as usual, had left New York on the morning after Varduk's readin
g of Ruthven. They had driven in the car Jake had helped Davidson to buy, and thus they avoided the usual throngs of Sigrid's souvenir-demanding public, which would have complicated their departure by train. At Dillard Falls Junction, Varduk himself awaited them, having come up on a night train. Jake took time to mail me a ticket and money, then they drove the long, shadowy way to the theater.

  Lake Jozgid, as most rural New Yorkers know, is set rather low among wooded hills and bluffs. The unevenness of the country and the poverty of the soil have discouraged cultivation, so that farms and villages are few. As the party drove, Varduk suggested an advantage in this remoteness, which suggestion Jake later passed on to Judge Pursuivant and me; where a less brilliant or more accessible star might be ignored in such far quarters, Sigrid would find Lake Jozgid to her advantage. The world would beat a path to her box office, and treasure a glimpse of her the more because that glimpse had been difficult of attainment.

  The theater building itself had been a great two-story lodge, made of heavy logs and hand-hewn planks. Some sporting-club, now defunct, had owned it, then abandoned it when fish grew scarce in the lake. Varduk had leased it cheaply, knocked out all partitions on the ground floor, and set up a stage, a lobby and pew-like benches. The upper rooms would serve as lodgings for himself and his associate Davidson, while small outbuildings had been fitted up to accommodate the rest of us.

  Around this group of structures clung a thick mass of timber. Sigrid, who had spent her girlhood among Sweden's forests, pointed out that it was mostly virgin and inquired why a lumber company had never cut logs here. Varduk replied that the property had been private for many years, then changed the subject by the welcome suggestion that they have dinner. They had brought a supply of provisions, and Jake, who is something of a cook in addition to his many other professions, prepared a meal. Both Sigrid and Jake ate heartily, but Varduk seemed only to take occasional morsels for politeness' sake.

  In the evening, a full moon began to rise across the lake. Sitting together in Varduk's upstairs parlor, the three saw the great soaring disk of pale light, and Sigrid cried out joyfully that she wanted to go out and see better.

  "Take a lantern if you go out at night," counseled Varduk over his cigar.

  "A lantern?" Sigrid repeated. "But that would spoil the effect of the moonlight."

  Her new director blew a smooth ring of smoke and stared into its center, as though a message lay there. Then he turned his brilliant eyes to her. "If you are wise, you will do as I say," he made answer.

  Men like Varduk are masterful and used to being obeyed. Sometimes they lose sight of the fact that women like Sigrid are not used to being given arbitrary commands without explanation. She fell silent and a little frigid for half an hour-often I had seen her just as Jake was describing her. Then she rose and excused herself, saying that she was tired from the morning's long drive and would go to bed early. Varduk rose and courteously bowed her to the stairs. Since her sleeping-quarters, a cleverly rebuilt woodshed, were hardly a dozen steps from the rear of the lodge building itself, neither man thought it necessary to accompany her.

  Left alone, Varduk and Jake carried on an idle conversation, mostly about publicity plans. Jake, who in the show business had done successfully almost everything but acting, found in his companion a rather penetrating and accurate commentator on this particular aspect of production. Indeed, Varduk debated him into a new attitude-one of restraint and dignity instead of novel and insistent extravagance.

  "You're right," Jake announced at length. "I'm going to get the releases that go out in tomorrow's mail. I'll cut out every 'stupendous' and 'colossal' I wrote into them. Good night, Mr Varduk."

  He, too, trotted downstairs and left the main building for his own sleeping-room, which was the loft of an old boat-house. As he turned toward the water, he saw a figure walking slowly and dreamily along its edge-Sigrid, her hands tucked into the pockets of the light belted coat she had donned against possible night chills, her head flung back as though she sought all of the moonlight upon her rapt face.

  Although she had wandered out to the brink of the sandy beach and so stood in the open brightness, clumps of bushes and young trees grew out almost to the lake. One tufty belt of scrub willow extended from the denser timber to a point within a dozen feet of Sigrid. It made a screen of gloom between Jake's viewpoint and the moon's spray of silver. Yet, he could see, light was apparently soaking through its close-set leaves, a streak of soft radiance that was so filtered as to look murky, greenish, like the glow from rotting salmon.

  Even as Jake noticed this flecky glimmer, it seemed to open up like a fan or a parasol. Instead of a streak, it was a blot. This extended further, lazily but noticeably. Jake scowled. And this moved lakeward, without leaving any of itself at the starting-point.

  With its greatening came somewhat of a brightening, which revealed that the phenomenon had some sort of shape-or perhaps the shape was defining itself as it moved. The blot's edges grew unevenly, receding in places to swell in others. Jake saw that these swellings sprouted into pseudopodal extensions (to quote him, they "jellied out"), that stirred as though groping or reaching. And at the top was a squat roundness, like an undeveloped cranium. The lower rays of light became limbs, striking at the ground as though to walk. The thing counterfeited life, motion-and attention. It was moving toward the water, and toward Sigrid.

  Jake did not know what it was, and he says that he was suddenly and extremely frightened. Yet he does not seem to have acted like one who is stricken with fear. What he did, and did at once, was to bawl out a warning to Sigrid, then charge at the mystery.

  It had stolen into the moonlight, and Jake encountered it there. As he charged, he tried to make out the details; but what little it had had of details in the darkness now went misty, as its glow was conquered in the brighter flood of moonglow. Yet it was there, and moving toward Sigrid. She had turned from looking across the water, and now shrank back with a tremulous cry, stumbling and recovering herself ankle-deep in the shallows.

  Jake, meanwhile, had flung himself between her and what was coming out of the thicket. He did not wait or even set himself for conflict, but changed direction to face and spring upon the threatening presence. Though past his first youth, he fancied himself as in fairly tough condition, and more than once he had won such impromptu fist-fights as spring up among the too-temperamental folk of the theater. He attacked as he would against a human adversary, sinking his head between his shoulders and flinging his fists in quick succession.

  He got home solidly, against something tangible but sickeningly loose beneath its smooth skin or rind. It was like buffeting a sack half full of meal. Though the substance sank in beneath his knuckles, there was no reeling or retreat. A squashy return slap almost enveloped his face, and his spectacles came away as though by suction. At the same time he felt a cable-like embrace, such as he had imagined a python might exert. He smelled putrescence, was close to being sick, and heard, just behind him, the louder screaming of Sigrid.

  The fresh knowledge of her danger and terror made him strong again. One arm was free, and he battered gamely with his fist. He found his mark, twice and maybe three times. Then his sickness became faintness when he realized that his knuckles had become slimy wet.

  A new force dragged at him behind. Another enemy… then a terrible voice of command, the voice of Varduk:

  "Let go at once!"

  The grasp and the filthy bulk fell away from Jake. He felt his knees waver like shreds of paper. His eyes, blurred without their thick spectacles, could barely discern, not one, but several lumpy forms drawing back. And near him stood Varduk, his facial phosphorescence out-gleaming the rotten light of the creatures, his form drawn up sternly in a posture of command.

  "Get out!" cried Varduk again. "By what power do you come for your victim now?"

  The uncouth shapes shrank out of sight. Jake could not be sure whether they found shelter behind bushes and trees or not; perhaps they actually faded i
nto invisibility. Sigrid had come close, stepping gingerly in her wet shoes, and stooped to retrieve Jake's fallen glasses.

  "We owe you our lives," she said to Varduk. "What were those-"

  "Never mind," he cut her off. "They will threaten you no more tonight. Go to your beds, and be more careful in the future."

  This was the story that Jake told me as we drove the final miles to the Lake Jozgid Theater.

  He admitted that it had all been a desperate and indistinct scramble to him, and that explanation he had offered next morning when Varduk laughed and accused him of dreaming.

  "But maybe it wasn't a dream," Jake said as he finished. "Even if it was, I don't want any more dreams like it."

  6. The Theater in the Forest

  JAKE'S NARRATIVE did not give me cheerful expectations of the Lake Jozgid Theater. It was just as well, for my first glimpse of the place convinced me that it was the exact setting for a play of morbid unreality.

  The road beyond Pursuivant's cabin was narrow but not too bad. Jake, driving nimbly over its sanded surface, told me that we might thank the public works program for its good condition. In one or two places, as I think I have said already, the way was cut deeply between knolls or bluffs, and here it was gloomy and almost sunless. Too, the woods thickened to right and left, with taller and taller ranks of trees at the roadside. Springtime's leafage made the trees seem vigorous, but not exactly cheerful; I fancied that they were endowed with intelligence and the power of motion, and that they awaited only our passing before they moved out to block the open way behind us.

  From this sand-surfaced road there branched eventually a second, and even narrower and darker, that dipped down a thickly timbered slope. We took a rather difficult curve at the bottom and came out almost upon the shore of the lake, with the old lodge and its outbuildings in plain view.