Part 1 (1/2)
ALFRED HITCHc.o.c.k PRESENTS.
FEAR AND TREMBLING.
CONTENTS.
THE FORMS OF FEAR - ALFRED J. HITCHc.o.c.k.
Ca.s.sIUS - HENRY S. WHITEHEAD.
THE TARN - HUGH WALPOLE.
LITTLE MEMENTO - JOHN COLLIER.
OH, WHISTLE, AND I'LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD - M. R. JAMES.
ONE SUMMER NIGHT - AMBROSE BIERCE.
TELLING - ELIZABETH BOWEN.
THE JAR - RAY BRADBURY.
THE BAD LANDS - JOHN METCALFE.
GHOST HUNT - H. R. WAKEFIELD.
SKULE SKERRY - JOHN BUCHAN.
THE RED ROOM - H. G. WELLS.
THE SACK OF EMERALDS - LORD DUNSANY.
THE NIGHT REVEALS - WILLIAM IRISH.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..
ALFRED HITCHc.o.c.k.
THE FORMS OF FEAR.
They tell me - I have never had occasion to experiment - that ”there is more than one way to skin a cat.” I know, by reason of many delightfully quaking hours while equipped with slippers and easy chair, that there are a good many ways to induce s.h.i.+very sensations in a reader.
It doesn't take a ghost story, necessarily; fear has many forms, and the spectral tale has lost the monopoly it once enjoyed. That type was, perhaps, written most effectively by M. R. James, and I have included here his wonderfully t.i.tled, ”Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad,” as well as ”Ghost Hunt,” which H. R. Wakefield gives a distinctively modern twist.
The eleven other stories, however, produce s.h.i.+vers of other, widely varying kinds. The malignant creature which attacks the terrified servant night after night in Henry S. Whitehead's ”Ca.s.sius” high-lights a fine example of the strange-beast theme. Ambrose Bierce's little shocker, ”One Summer Night,” is typical of this writer's bold delineation of brutality and callousness; its grave-robbing scene, with the ghoulish enterprise illumined by fitful lightning flashes, is appropriately eerie.
Our fear of the unknown, of elemental nature, gives us some terrifying moments in John Buchan's ”Skule Skerry” when the venturesome scientist, alone on the tiny islet, realizes he is close to ”the world which has only death in it” and, shuddering, stands ”next door to the Abyss - that blanched wall of the North which is the negation of life.” John Metcalfe takes us to ”The Bad Lands,” where ordinary things become charged with ”sinister suggestion” and the scenery develops ”an unpleasant tendency to the macabre” - small wonder that it evokes a dream in which, with Brent Ormerod, we walk ”up and up into a strange dim country full of signs and whisperings and somber trees, where hollow breezes blow fitfully and a queer house set with lofty pines s.h.i.+nes out white against a lurid sky.” Br-rrr! And, accompanying H. G. Wells's foolhardy young hero into ”The Red Room,” we discover, with him, that it contains not ”haunts,” but simply Fear - black Fear.
Along with Hugh Walpole's evildoer, we cringe under the terrible whips of conscience in ”The Tarn.” In contrast, Elizabeth Bowen presents in ”Telling” a killer whose mind is incapable of knowing remorse for his b.l.o.o.d.y deed, but only a dim comprehension that at last he has found Something he can do - Something that others cannot. The havoc wrought by a twisted mind holds us enthralled in ”The Night Reveals,” William Irish's account of a man who finds he does not really know his wife; and John Collier, in ”Little Memento”, affords us a brief but memorable peek into the machinations of a devious and morbid old man.
Lastly, two tales which are far, far different from each other, but in their own ways equally effective. When you read Lord Dunsany's ”The Sack of Emeralds,” forget the real world and surrender yourself to his magic as he tells us of ”one bad October night in the high wolds, with a north wind chaunting of winter,” when an old man, his face hopeless, totters along under the weight of a heavy sack; listen to the click, clack, clop coming nearer in the darkness, first faintly, then louder and louder, at last to reveal the rider: a figure wearing a sword in a huge scabbard, looking blacker than the darkness - Ray Bradbury, whose unique talent for horror-writing is beginning to receive just recognition, makes us share with his simple swamp folk their awe at the silent thing slos.h.i.+ng in ”The Jar”; like them we ask, ”Wonder what it is? Wonder if it's a he or a she or just a plain old it?”
Whether you like your s.h.i.+vers old-fas.h.i.+oned or newfangled, or both, you should get plenty of them from these pages!
ALFRED HITCHc.o.c.k.
HENRY S. WHITEHEAD.
Ca.s.sIUS.
My houseman, Stephen Penn, who presided over the staff of my residence in St. Thomas, was not, strictly speaking, a native of that city. Penn came from the neighboring island of St. Jan. It is one of the ancient West Indian names, although there remain in the islands nowadays no Caucasians to bear that honorable cognomen.
Stephen's travels, however, had not been limited to the crossing from St. Jan - which, incidentally, is the authentic scene of R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island - which lies little more than a rowboat's journey away from the capital of the Virgin Islands. Stephen had been ”down the Islands,” which means that he had been actually as far from home as Trinidad, or perhaps, British Guiana, down through the great sweep of former mountaintops, submerged by some vast, cataclysmic, prehistoric inundation and named the Bow of Ulysses by some fanciful, antique geographer. That odyssey of humble Stephen Penn had taken place because of his love for s.h.i.+ps. He had had various jobs afloat and his exact knowledge of the houseman's art had been learned under various man-driving s.h.i.+p's stewards.
During this preliminary training for his life's work, Stephen had made many acquaintances. One of these, an upstanding, slim, parchment-colored Negro of 30 or so, was Brutus h.e.l.lman. Brutus, like Stephen, had settled down in St. Thomas as a houseman. It was, in fact, Stephen who had talked him into leaving his native British Antigua, to try his luck in our American Virgin Islands. Stephen had secured for him his first job in St. Thomas, in the household of a naval officer.
For this friend of his youthful days, Stephen continued to feel a certain sense of responsibility; because, when Brutus happened to be abruptly thrown out of employment by the sudden illness and removal by the Naval Department of his employer in the middle of the winter season in St. Thomas, Stephen came to me and requested that his friend Brutus be allowed to come to me ”on board-wages” until he was able to secure another place.
I acquiesced. I knew Brutus as a first-rate houseman. I was glad to give him a hand, to oblige the always agreeable and highly efficient Stephen, and, indeed, to have so skillful a servant added to my little staff in my bachelor quarters. I arranged for something more substantial than the remuneration asked for, and Brutus h.e.l.lman added his skilled services to those of the admirable Stephen. I was very well served that season and never had any occasion to regret what both men alluded to as my ”very great kindness!”
It was not long after Brutus h.e.l.lman had moved his simple belongings into one of the servants'-quarters cabins in my stone-paved yard that I had another opportunity to do something for him. It was Stephen once more who presented his friend's case to me. Brutus, it appeared, had need of a minor operation, and, Negro-like, the two of them, talking the matter over between themselves, had decided to ask me, their present patron, to arrange it.
I did so, with my friend, Doctor Pelletier, chief surgeon, in charge of our Naval Station Hospital and regarded in Naval circles as the best man in the Medical Corps. I had not inquired about the nature of Brutus's affliction. Stephen had stressed the minor aspect of the required surgery, and that was all I mentioned to Doctor Pelletier.
It is quite possible that if Doctor Pelletier had not been going to Puerto Rico on Thursday of that week, this narrative, the record of one of the most curious experiences I have ever had, would never have been set down. If Pelletier, his mind set on sailing at 11:00, had not merely walked out of his operating-room as soon as he had finished with Brutus a little after 8:00 that Thursday morning, left the dressing of the slight wound upon Brutus's groin to be performed by his a.s.sistants, then that incredible affair which I can only describe as the persecution of the unfortunate Brutus h.e.l.lman would never have taken place.
It was on Wednesday, about 2 p.m., that I telephoned to Doctor Pelletier to ask him to perform an operation on Brutus.
”Send him over to the hospital this afternoon,” Pelletier had answered, ”and I'll look him over about five and operate the first thing in the morning - if there is any need for an operation! I'm leaving for San Juan at eleven, for a week.”
I thanked him and went upstairs to my siesta, after giving Stephen the message to Brutus, who started off for the hospital about an hour later. He remained in the hospital until the following Sunday afternoon. He was entirely recovered from the operation, he reported. It had been a very slight affair, really, merely the removal of some kind of growth. He thanked me for my part in it when he came to announce dinner while I was reading on the gallery.
It was on the Sat.u.r.day morning, the day before Brutus got back, that I discovered something very curious in an obscure corner of my house-yard, just around the corner of the wall of the three small cabins which occupy its north side. These cabins were tenantless except for the one at the east end of the row. That one was Brutus h.e.l.lman's. Stephen Penn, like my cook, washer, and scullery maid, lived somewhere in the town.
I had been looking over the yard which was paved with old-fas.h.i.+oned flagging. I found it in excellent condition, weeded, freshly swept, and clean. The three stone servants' cubicles had been recently whitewashed and glistened like cake icing in the morning sun. I looked over this portion of my domain with approval, for I like things s.h.i.+pshape. I glanced into the two narrow air s.p.a.ces between the little, two-room houses. There were no cobwebs visible. Then I took a look around the east corner of Brutus h.e.l.lman's little house where there was a narrow pa.s.sageway between the house and the high wall of antique Dutch brick, and there, well in toward the north wall, I saw on the ground what I first took to be a discarded toy which some child had thrown there, probably, it occurred to me, over the wall at the back of the stone cabins.
It looked like a doll's house, which, if it had been thrown there, had happened to land right side up. It looked more or less like one of the quaint old-fas.h.i.+oned beehives one still sees occasionally in the conservative Lesser Antilles. But it could hardly be a beehive. It was far too small.
My curiosity mildly aroused, I stepped into the alley way and looked down at the odd little thing. Seen from where I stopped it rewarded scrutiny. For it was, although made in a somewhat bungling way, a reproduction of an African village hut, thatched, circular, conical. The thatching, I suspected, had formerly been most of the business end of a small house-broom of tine twigs tied together around the end of a stick. The little house's upright ”logs” were a heterogeneous medley of little round sticks among which I recognized three dilapidated lead pencils and the broken-off handle of a toothbrush. These details will serve to indicate its size and to justify my original conclusion that the thing was a rather cleverly made child's toy. How such a thing had got into my yard unless over the wall, was an unimportant little mystery. The little hut, from the ground up to its thatched peak, stood about seven inches in height. Its diameter was, perhaps, eight or nine inches.