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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Weird Tales, January 1931, with "Passing of a God"
An uncanny story of surgery and dark rites
of the Black people in the land of Haiti.
"They knelt down around him on the floor of the living-room."
'YOU say that when Carswell came into your hospital over in Port au Prince his fingers looked as though they had been wound with string,' said I, encouragingly.
'It is a very ugly story, that, Canevin,' replied Doctor Pelletier, still reluctant, it appeared.
'You promised to tell me,' I threw in.
'I know it, Canevin,' admitted Doctor Pelletier of the U.S. Navy Medical Corps, now stationed here in the Virgin Islands. 'But,' he proceeded, 'you couldn't use this story, anyhow. There are editorial tabus, aren't there? The thing is too—what shall I say?—too outrageous, too incredible.'
'Yes,' I admitted in turn, 'there are tabus, plenty of them. Still, after hearing about those fingers, as though wound with string—why not give me the story, Pelletier; leave it to me whether or not I "use" it. It's the story I want, mostly. I'm burning up for it!'
'I suppose it's your lookout,' said my guest. 'If you find it too gruesome for you, tell me and I'll quit.'
I plucked up hope once more. I had been trying for this story, after getting little scraps of it which allured and intrigued me, for weeks.
'Start in,' I ventured, soothingly, pushing the silver swizzel-jug after the humidor of cigarettes from which Pelletier was even now making a selection. Pelletier helped himself to the swizzel frowningly. Evidently he was torn between the desire to pour out the story of Arthur Carswell and some complication of feelings against doing so. I sat back in my wicker lounge-chair and waited.
Pelletier moved his large bulk about in his chair. Plainly now he was cogitating how to open the tale. He began, meditatively: 'I don't know as I ever heard public discussion of the malignant bodily growths except among medical people. Science knows little about them. The fact of such diseases, though, is well known to everybody, through campaigns of prevention, the life insurance companies, appeals for funds—
'Well, Carswell's case, primarily, is one of those cases.'
He paused and gazed into the glowing end of his cigarette.
'"Primarily?"' I threw in encouragingly.
'Yes. Speaking as a surgeon, that's where this thing begins, I suppose.'
I kept still, waiting.
'Have you read Seabrook's book, The Magic Island, Canevin?' asked Pelletier suddenly.
'Yes,' I answered. 'What about it?'
'Then I suppose that from your own experience knocking around the West Indies and your study of it all, a good bit of that stuff of Seabrook's is familiar to you, isn't it?—the vodu, and the hill customs, and all the rest of it, especially over in Haiti—you could check up on a writer like Seabrook, couldn't you, more or less?'
'Yes,' said I, 'practically all of it was an old story to me—a very fine piece of work, however, the thing clicks all the way through—an honest and thorough piece of investigation.'
'Anything in it new to you?'
'Yes—Seabrook's statement that there was an exchange of personalities between the sacrificial goat—at the "baptism"—and the young Black girl, the chapter he calls: Girl-Cry—Goat-Cry. That, at least, was a new one on me, I admit.'
'You will recall, if you read it carefully, that he attributed that phenomenon to his own personal "slant" on the thing. Isn't that the case, Canevin?'
'Yes,' I agreed, 'I think that is the way he put it.'
'Then,' resumed Doctor Pelletier, 'I take it that all that material of his—I notice that there have been a lot of story-writers using his terms lately!—is sufficiently familiar to you so that you have some clear idea of the Haitian-African demigods, like Ogoun Badagris, Damballa, and the others, taking up their residence for a short time in some devotee?'
'The idea is very well understood,' said I. 'Mr. Seabrook mentions it among a number of other local phenomena. It was an old Negro who came up to him while he was eating, thrust his soiled hands into the dishes of food, surprised him considerably—then was surrounded by worshippers who took him to the nearest houmfort or vodu-house, let him sit on the altar, brought him food, hung all their jewelry on him, worshipped him for the time being; then, characteristically, quite utterly ignored the original old fellow after the "possession" on the part of the "deity" ceased and reduced him to an unimportant old pantaloon as he was before.'
'That summarizes it exactly,' agreed Doctor Pelletier. 'That, Canevin, that kind of thing, I mean, is the real starting-place of this dreadful matter of Arthur Carswell.'
'You mean—?' I barged out at Pelletier, vastly intrigued. I had had no idea that there was vodu mixed in with the case.
'I mean that Arthur Carswell's first intimation that there was anything pressingly wrong with him was just such a "possession" as the one you have recounted.'
'But—but,' I protested, 'I had supposed—I had every reason to believe, that it was a surgical matter! Why, you just objected to telling about it on the ground that—'
'Precisely,' said Doctor Pelletier, calmly. 'It was such a surgical case, but, as I say, it began in much the same way as the "occupation" of that old Negro's body by Ogoun Badagris or whichever one of their devilish deities that happened to be, just as, you say, is well known to fellows like yourself who go in for such things, and just as Seabrook recorded it.'
'Well,' said I, 'you go ahead in your own way, Pelletier. I'll do my best to listen. Do you mind an occasional question?'
'Not in the least,' said Doctor Pelletier considerately, shifted himself to a still more pronouncedly recumbent position in my Chinese rattan lounge-chair, lit a fresh cigarette, and proceeded:
'CARSWELL had worked up a considerable intimacy with the snake-worship of interior Haiti, all the sort of thing familiar to you; the sort of thing set out, probably for the first time, in English at least, in Seabrook's book; at the gatherings, and the "baptism," and the sacrifices of the fowls and the bull, and the goats; the orgies of the worshippers, the boom and thrill of the rata drums—all that strange, incomprehensible, rather silly-surfaced, deadly-underneathed worship of "the Snake" which the Dahomeyans brought with them to old Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
'He had been there, as you may have heard, for a number of years; went there in the first place because everybody thought he was a kind of failure at home; made a good living, too; in a way nobody but an original-minded fellow like him would have thought of—shot ducks on the Léogane marshes, dried them, and exported them to New York and San Francisco to the United States's two largest Chinatowns!
'For a "failure," too, Carswell was a particularly smart-looking chap, in the English sense of that word. He was one of those fellows who was always shaved, clean, freshly groomed, even under the rather adverse conditions of his living, there in Léogane by the salt marshes; and of his trade, which was to kill and dry ducks. A fellow can get pretty careless and let himself go at that sort of thing, away from "home"; away, too, from such niceties as there are in a place like Port au Prince.
'He looked, in fact, like a fellow just off somebody's yacht the first time I saw him, there in the hospital in Port au Prince, and that, too, was right after a rather singular experience which would have unnerved or unsettled pretty nearly anybody.
'But not so old Carswell. No, indeed. I speak of him as "Old Carswell," Canevin. That, though, is a kind of affectionate term. He was somewhere about forty-five then; it was two years ago, you see, and, in addition to his being very spick and span, well groomed, you know, he looked surprisingly young, somehow. One of those faces which showed experience, but, along with the experience, a philosophy. The lines in his face were good lines, if you get what I mean—lines of humor and courage; no dissipation, no let down kind of lines, nothing of slackness such as you would see in the face of even a comparatively young beachcomber. No, as he strode into my office, almost jauntily, there in the hospital, there was nothing, nothing whatever, about him, to suggest anything else but a prosperous fellow American, a professional chap, for choice, who might, as I say, have just come ashore from somebody's yacht.
'And yet—good God, Canevin, the story that came out—'
Naval surgeon though he was, with service in Haiti, at sea, in Nicaragua, the China Station to his credit, Doctor Pelletier rose at this point, and, almost agitatedly, walked up and down my gallery. Then he sat down and lit a fresh cigarette.
'There is,' he said, reflectively, and as though weighing his words carefully, 'there is, Canevin, among various others, a somewhat "wild" theory that somebody put forward several years ago, about the origin of malignant tumors. It never gained very much approval among the medical profession, but it has, at least, the merit of originality, and—it was new. Because of those facts, it had a certain amount of currency, and there are those, in and out of medicine, who still believe in it. It is that there are certain nuclei, certain masses, so to speak, of the bodily material which have persisted—not generally, you understand, but in certain cases—among certain persons, the kind who are "susceptible" to this horrible disease, which, in the prenatal state, did not develop fully or normally—little places in the bodily structure, that is—if I make myself clear—which remain undeveloped.
'Something, according to this hypothesis, something like a sudden jar, or a bruise, a kick, a blow with the fist, the result of a fall, or what not, causes traumatism—physical injury, that is, you know—to one of the focus-places, and the undeveloped little mass of material starts in to grow, and so displaces the normal tissue which surrounds it.
'One objection to the theory is that there are at least two varieties, well-known and recognized scientifically; the carcinoma, which is itself subdivided into two kinds, the hard and the soft carcinomae, and the sarcoma, which is a soft thing, like what is popularly understood by a "tumor." Of course they are all "tumors," particular kinds of tumors, malignant tumors. What lends a certain credibility to the theory I have just mentioned is the malignancy, the growing element. For, whatever the underlying reason, they grow, Canevin, as is well recognized, and this explanation I have been talking about gives a reason for the growth. The "malignancy" is, really, that one of the things seems to have, as it were, its own life. All this, probably, you know?'
I nodded. I did not wish to interrupt. I could see that this side-issue on a scientific by-path must have something to do with the story of Carswell.
'Now,' resumed Pelletier, 'notice this fact, Canevin. Let me put it in the form of a question, like this: To what kind, or type, of vodu worshipper, does the "possession" by one of their deities occur—from your own knowledge of such things, what would you say?'
'To the incomplete; the abnormal, to an old man, or woman,' said I, slowly, reflecting, 'or—to a child, or, perhaps, to an idiot. Idiots, ancient crones, backward children, "town-fools" and the like, all over Europe, are supposed to be in some mysterious way en rapport with deity—or with Satan! It is an established peasant belief. Even among the Mahometans, the moron or idiot is "the afflicted of God." There is no other better-established belief along such lines of thought.'
'Precisely!' exclaimed Pelletier. 'And Canevin, go back once more to Seabrook's instance that we spoke about. What type of person was "possessed"?'
'An old doddering man,' said I, 'one well gone in his dotage apparently.'
'Right once more! Note now, two things. First, I will admit to you, Canevin, that that theory I have just been expounding never made much of a hit with me. It might be true, but—very few first-rate men in our profession thought much of it, and I followed that negative lead and didn't think much of it, or, indeed, much about it. I put it down to the vaporings of the theorist who first thought it out and published it, and let it go at that. Now, Canevin, I am convinced that it is true! The second thing, then: When Carswell came into my office in the hospital over there in Port au Prince, the first thing I noticed about him—I had never seen him before, you see—was a peculiar, almost an indescribable, discrepancy. It was between his general appearance of weather-worn cleanliness, general fitness, his "smart" appearance in his clothes—all that, which fitted together about the clean-cut, open character of the fellow; and what I can only describe as a pursiness. He seemed in good condition, I mean to say, and yet—there was something, somehow, flabby somewhere in his makeup. I couldn't put my finger on it, but—it was there, a suggestion of something that detracted from the impression he gave as being an upstanding fellow, a good-fellow-to-have-beside-you-in-a-pinch—that kind of person.
'THE second thing I noticed, it was just after he had taken a chair beside my desk, was his fingers, and thumbs. They were swollen, Canevin, looked sore, as though they had been wound with string. That was the first thing I thought of, being wound with string. He saw me looking at them, held them out to me abruptly, laid them side by side, his hands I mean, on my desk, and smiled at me.
'"I see you have noticed them, Doctor," he remarked, almost jovially. "That makes it a little easier for me to tell you what I'm here for. It's—well, you might put it down as a 'Symptom'."
'I looked at his fingers and thumbs; every one of them was affected in the same way; and ended up with putting a magnifying glass over them.
'They were all bruised and reddened, and here and there on several of them, the skin was abraded, broken, circularly—it was a most curious-looking set of digits. My new patient was addressing me again.
'"I'm not here to ask you riddles, Doctor," he said, gravely, this time, "but—would you care to make a guess at what did that to those fingers and thumbs of mine?"
'"Well," I came back at him, "without knowing what's happened, it looks as if you'd been trying to wear about a hundred rings, all at one time, and most of them didn't fit!"
'Carswell nodded his head at me. "Score one for the medico," said he, and laughed. "Even numerically you're almost on the dot, sir. The precise number was one hundred and six!"
'I confess, I stared at him then. But he wasn't fooling. It was a cold, sober, serious fact that he was stating; only, he saw that it had a humorous side, and that intrigued him, as anything humorous always did, I found out after I got to know Carswell a lot better than I did then.'
'You said you wouldn't mind a few questions, Pelletier,' I interjected.
'Fire away,' said Pelletier. 'Do you see any light, so far?'
'I was naturally figuring along with you, as you told about it all,' said I. 'Do I infer correctly that Carswell, having lived there—how long, four or five years or so—?'
'Seven, to be exact,' put in Pelletier.
'—that Carswell, being pretty familiar with the native doings, had mixed into things, got the confidence of his Black neighbors in and around Léogane, become somewhat "adept," had the run of the houmforts, so to speak—"votre bougie, M'sieu"—the fortune-telling at the festivals, and so forth, and—had been "visited" by one of the Black deities? That, apparently, if I'm any judge of tendencies, is what your account seems to be leading up to. Those bruised fingers—the one hundred and six rings—good heavens, man, is it really possible?'
'Carswell told me all about that end of it, a little later—yes, that was, precisely, what happened—but that, surprising, incredible as it seems, is only the small end of it all. You just wait—'
'Go ahead,' said I, 'I am all ears, I assure you!'
'Well, Carswell took his hands off the desk after I had looked at them through my magnifying glass, and then waved one of them at me in a kind of deprecating gesture.
'"I'll go into all that, if you're interested to hear about it, Doctor," he assured me, "but that isn't what I'm here about." His face grew suddenly very grave. "Have you plenty of time?" he asked. "I don't want to let my case interfere with anything."
'"Fire ahead," says I, and he leaned forward in his chair.
'"Doctor," says he, "I don't know whether or not you ever heard of me before. My name's Carswell, and I live over Léogane way. I'm an American, like yourself, as you can probably see, and, even after seven years of it, out there, duck-hunting, mostly, with virtually no White-man's doings for a pretty long time, I haven't 'gone native' or anything of the sort. I wouldn't want you to think I'm one of those wasters." He looked up at me inquiringly for my estimate of him. He had been by himself a good deal; perhaps too much. I nodded at him. He looked me in the eye, squarely, and nodded back. "I guess we understand each other," he said. Then he went on.
'"Seven years ago, it was, I came down here. I've lived over there even since. What few people know about me regard me as a kind of failure, I dare say. But—Doctor, there was a reason for that, a pretty definite reason. I won't go into it beyond your end of it—the medical end, I mean. I came down because of this."
'He stood up then, and I saw what made that "discrepancy" I spoke about, that "flabbiness" which went so ill with the general cut of the man. He turned up the lower ends of his white drill jacket and put his hand a little to the left of the middle of his stomach. "Just notice this," he said, and stepped toward me.
'There, just over the left center of that area and extending up toward the spleen, on the left side, you know, there was a protuberance. Seen closely it was apparent that here was some sort of internal growth. It was that which had made him look flabby, stomachish.
'"This was diagnosed for me in New York," Carswell explained, "a little more than seven years ago. They told me it was inoperable then. After seven years, probably, I dare say it's worse, if anything. To put the thing in a nutshell, Doctor, I had to 'let go' then. I got out of a promising business, broke off my engagement, came here. I won't expatiate on it all, but—it was pretty tough, Doctor, pretty tough. I've lasted all right, so far. It hasn't troubled me—until just lately. That's why I drove in this afternoon, to see you, to see if anything could be done."
'"Has it been kicking up lately?" I asked him.
'"Yes," said Carswell, simply. "They said it would kill me, probably within a year or so, as it grew. It hasn't grown—much. I've lasted a little more than seven years, so far."
'"Come into the operating-room," I invited him, "and take your clothes off, and let's get a good look at it."
'"Anything you say," returned Carswell, and followed me back into the operating-room then and there.
'I had a good look at Carswell, first, superficially. That preliminary examination revealed a growth quite typical, the self-contained, not the "fibrous" type, in the location I've already described, and about the size of an average man's head. It lay imbedded, fairly deep. It was what we call "encapsulated." That, of course, is what had kept Carswell alive.
'Then we put the X-rays on it, fore-and-aft, and sidewise. One of those things doesn't always respond very well to skiagraphic examination, to the X-ray, that is, but this one showed clearly enough. Inside it appeared a kind of dark, triangular mass, with the small end at the top. When Doctor Smithson and I had looked him over thoroughly, I asked Carswell whether or not he wanted to stay with us, to come into the hospital as a patient, for treatment.
'"I'm quite in your hands, Doctor," he told me. "I'll stay, or do whatever you want me to. But, first," and for the first time he looked a trifle embarrassed, "I think I'd better tell you the story that goes with my coming here! However, speaking plainly, do you think I have a chance?"
'"Well," said I, "speaking plainly, yes, there is a chance, maybe a 'fifty-fifty' chance, maybe a little less. On the one hand, this thing has been let alone for seven years since original diagnosis. It's probably less operable than it was when you were in New York. On the other hand, we know a lot more, not about these things, Mr. Carswell, but about surgical technique, than they did seven years ago. On the whole, I'd advise you to stay and get ready for an operation, and, say about 'forty-sixty' you'll go back to Léogane, or back to New York if you feel like it, several pounds lighter in weight and a new man. If it takes you, on the table, well, you've had a lot more time out there gunning for ducks in Léogane than those New York fellows allowed you."
'"I'm with you," said Carswell, and we assigned him a room, took his "history," and began to get him ready for his operation.
'WE did the operation two days later, at ten-thirty in the morning, and in the meantime Carswell told me his "story" about it.
'It seems that he had made quite a place for himself, there in Léogane, among the Negroes and the ducks. In seven years a man like Carswell, with his mental and dispositional equipment, can go quite a long way, anywhere. He had managed to make quite a good thing out of his duck-drying industry, employed five or six "hands" in his little wooden "factory," rebuilt a rather good house he had secured there for a song right after he had arrived, collected local antiques to add to the equipment he had brought along with him, made himself a real home of a peculiar, bachelor kind, and, above all, got in solid with the Black People all around him. Almost incidentally I gathered from him—he had no gift of narrative, and I had to question him a great deal—he had got onto, and into, the know in the vodu thing. There wasn't, as far as I could get it, any aspect of it all that he hadn't been in on, except, that is, "la chèvre sans cornes"—the goat without horns, you know—the human sacrifice on great occasions. In fact, he strenuously denied that the voduists resorted to that; said it was a canard against them; that they never, really, did such things, never had, unless back in prehistoric times, in Guinea—Africa.
'But, there wasn't anything about it all that he hadn't at his very finger ends, and at first-hand, too. The man was a walking encyclopedia of the native beliefs, customs, and practises. He knew, too, every turn and twist of their speech. He hadn't, as he had said at first, "gone native" in the slightest degree, and yet, without lowering his White Man's dignity by a trifle, he had got it all.
'That brings us to the specific happening, the "story" which, he had said, went along with his reason for coming in to the hospital in Port au Prince, to us.
'It appears that his sarcoma had never, practically, troubled him. Beyond noting a very gradual increase in its size from year to year, he said, he "wouldn't know he had one." In other words, characteristically, it never gave him any pain or direct annoyance beyond the sense of the wretched thing being there, and increasing on him, and always drawing him closer to that end of life which the New York doctors had warned him about.
'Then, it had happened only three days before he came to the hospital, he had gone suddenly unconscious one afternoon, as he was walking down his shell path to his gateway. The last thing he remembered then was being "about four steps from the gate." When he woke up, it was dark. He was seated in a big chair on his own front gallery, and the first thing he noticed was that his fingers and thumbs were sore and ached very painfully. The next thing was that there were flares burning all along the edge of the gallery, and down in the front yard, and along the road outside the paling fence that divides his property from the road, and in the light of these flares, there swarmed literally hundreds of Negroes, gathered about him and mostly on their knees; lined along the gallery and on the grounds below it; prostrating themselves, chanting, putting earth and sand on their heads; and, when he leaned back in his chair, something hurt the back of his neck, and he found that he was being nearly choked with the necklaces, strings of beads, gold and silver coin-strings, and other kinds, that had been draped over his head. His fingers, and the thumbs as well, were covered with gold and silver rings, many of them jammed on so as to stop the circulation.
'From his knowledge of their beliefs, he recognized what had happened to him. He had, he figured, probably fainted, although such a thing was not at all common with him, going down the pathway to the yard gate, and the Blacks had supposed him to be "possessed" as he had several times seen Black people, children, old men and women, morons, chiefly, similarly "possessed." He knew that, now that he was recovered from whatever had happened to him, the "worship" ought to cease and if he simply sat quiet and took what was coming to him, they would, as soon as they realized he was "himself" once more, leave him alone and he would get some relief from this uncomfortable set of surroundings; get rid of the necklaces and the rings; get a little privacy.
'But—the queer part of it all was that they didn't quit. No, the mob around the house and on the gallery increased rather than diminished, and at last he was put to it, from sheer discomfort—he said he came to the point where he felt he couldn't stand it all another instant—to speak up and ask the people to leave him in peace.
'They left him, he says, at that, right off the bat, immediately, without a protesting voice, but—and here was what started him on his major puzzlement—they didn't take off the necklaces and rings. No—they left the whole set of that metallic drapery which they had hung and thrust upon him right there, and, after he had been left alone, as he had requested, and had gone into his house, and lifted off the necklaces and worked the rings loose, the next thing that happened was that old Pa'p Josef, the local papaloi, together with three or four other neighboring papalois, witch-doctors from nearby villages, and followed by a very old man who was known to Carswell as the hougan, or head witch-doctor of the whole countryside thereabouts, came in to him in a kind of procession, and knelt down all around him on the floor of his living-room, and laid down gourds of cream and bottles of red rum and cooked chickens, and even a big china bowl of Tannia soup—a dish he abominated, said it always tasted like soapy water to him!—and then backed out leaving him to these comestibles.
'He said that this sort of attention persisted in his case, right through the three days that he remained in his house in Léogane, before he started out for the hospital; would, apparently, be still going on if he hadn't come in to Port au Prince to us.
'But—his coming in was not, in the least, because of this. It had puzzled him a great deal, for there was nothing like it in his experience, nor, so far as he could gather from their attitude, in the experience of the people about him, of the papalois, or even of the hougan himself. They acted, in other words, precisely as though the "deity" supposed to have taken up his abode within him had remained there, although there seemed no precedent for such an occurrence, and, so far as he knew, he felt precisely just as he had felt right along, that is, fully awake, and, certainly, not in anything like an abnormal condition, and, very positively, not in anything like a fainting-fit!
'That is to say—he felt precisely the same as usual except that—he attributed it to the probability that he must have fallen on the ground that time when he lost consciousness going down the pathway to the gate (he had been told that passers-by had picked him up and carried him to the gallery where he had awakened, later, these Good Samaritans meanwhile recognizing that one of the "deities" had indwelt him)—he felt the same except for recurrent, almost unbearable pains in the vicinity of his lower abdominal region.
'There was nothing surprising to him in this accession of the new painfulness. He had been warned that that would be the beginning of the end. It was in the rather faint hope that something might be done that he had come in to the hospital. It speaks volumes for the man's fortitude, for his strength of character, that he came in so cheerfully; acquiesced in what we suggested to him to do; remained with us, facing those comparatively slim chances with complete cheerfulness.
'For—we did not deceive Carswell—the chances were somewhat slim. "Sixty-forty" I had said, but as I afterward made clear to him, the favorable chances, as gleaned from the mortality tables, were a good deal less than that.
'He went to the table in a state of mind quite unchanged from his accustomed cheerfulness. He shook hands goodbye with Doctor Smithson and me, "in case," and also with Doctor Jackson, who acted as anesthetist.
'CARSWELL took an enormous amount of ether to get him off. His consciousness persisted longer, perhaps, than that of any surgical patient I can remember. At last, however, Doctor Jackson intimated to me that I might begin, and, Doctor Smithson standing by with the retracting forceps, I made the first incision. It was my intention, after careful study of the X-ray plates, to open it up from in front, in an up-and-down direction, establish drainage directly, and, leaving the wound in the sound tissue in front of it open, to attempt to get it healed up after removing its contents. Such is the technique of the major portion of successful operations.
'It was a comparatively simple matter to expose the outer wall. This accomplished, and after a few words of consultation with my colleague, I very carefully opened it. We recalled that the X-ray had shown, as I mentioned, a triangular-shaped mass within. This apparent content we attributed to some obscure chemical coloration of the contents. I made my incisions with the greatest care and delicacy, of course. The critical part of the operation lay right at this point, and the greatest exactitude was indicated, of course.
'At last the outer coats of it were cut through, and retracted, and with renewed caution I made the incision through the inmost wall of tissue. To my surprise, and to Doctor Smithson's, the inside was comparatively dry. The gauze which the nurse attending had caused to follow the path of the knife, was hardly moistened. I ran my knife down below the original scope of the last incision, then upward from its upper extremity, greatly lengthening the incision as a whole, if you are following me.
'Then, reaching my gloved hand within this long up-and-down aperture, I felt about and at once discovered that I could get my fingers in around the inner containing wall quite easily. I reached and worked my fingers in farther and farther, finally getting both hands inside and at last feeling my fingers touch inside the posterior or rear wall. Rapidly, now, I ran the edges of my hands around inside, and, quite easily, lifted out the "inside." This, a mass weighing several pounds, of more or less solid material, was laid aside on the small table beside the operating-table, and, again pausing to consult with Doctor Smithson—the operation was going, you see, a lot better than either of us had dared to anticipate—and being encouraged by him to proceed to a radical step which we had not hoped to be able to take, I began the dissection from the surrounding, normal tissue, of the now collapsed walls. This, a long, difficult, and harassing job, was accomplished at the end of, perhaps, ten or twelve minutes of gruelling work, and the bag-like thing, now completely severed from the tissues in which it had been for so long imbedded, was placed also on the side table.
'Doctor Jackson reporting favorably on our patient's condition under the anesthetic, I now proceeded to dress the large aperture, and to close the body-wound. This was accomplished in a routine manner, and then, together, we bandaged Carswell, and he was taken back to his room to await awakening from the ether.
'Carswell disposed of, Doctor Jackson and Doctor Smithson left the operating-room and the nurse started in cleaning up after the operation; dropping the instruments into the boiler, and so on—a routine set of duties. As for me, I picked up the shell in a pair of forceps, turned it about under the strong electric operating-light, and laid it down again. It presented nothing of interest for a possible laboratory examination.
'Then I picked up the more or less solid contents which I had laid, very hastily, and without looking at it—you see, my actual removal of it had been done inside, in the dark for the most part and by the sense of feeling, with my hands, you will remember—I picked it up; I still had my operating-gloves on to prevent infection when looking over these specimens, and, still, not looking at it particularly, carried it out into the laboratory.
'Canevin'—Doctor Pelletier looked at me somberly through the very gradually fading light of late afternoon, the period just before the abrupt falling of our tropic dusk—'Canevin,' he repeated, 'honestly, I don't know how to tell you! Listen now, old man, do something for me, will you?'
'Why, yes—of course,' said I, considerably mystified. 'What is it you want me to do, Pelletier?'
'My car is out in front of the house. Come on home with me, up to my house, will you? Let's say I want to give you a cocktail! Anyhow, maybe you'll understand better when you are there, I want to tell you the rest up at the house, not here. Will you please come, Canevin?'
I looked at him closely. This seemed to me a very strange, an abrupt, request. Still, there was nothing whatever unreasonable about such a sudden whim on Pelletier's part.
'Why, yes, certainly I'll go with you, Pelletier, if you want me to.'
'Come on, then,' said Pelletier, and we started for his car.
The doctor drove himself, and after we had taken the first turn in the rather complicated route from my house to his, on the extreme airy top of Denmark Hill, he said, in a quiet voice: 'Put together, now, Canevin, certain points, if you please, in this story. Note, kindly, how the Black People over in Léogane acted, according to Carswell's story. Note, too, that theory I was telling you about; do you recollect it clearly?'
'Yes,' said I, still more mystified.
'Just keep those two points in mind, then,' added Doctor Pelletier, and devoted himself to navigating sharp turns and plodding up two steep roadways for the rest of the drive to his house.
WE went in and found his houseboy laying the table for his dinner. Doctor Pelletier is unmarried, keeps a hospitable bachelor establishment. He ordered cocktails, and the houseboy departed on this errand. Then he led me into a kind of office, littered with medical and surgical paraphernalia. He lifted some papers off a chair, motioned me into it, and took another near by. 'Listen, now!' he said, and held up a finger at me.
'I took that thing, as I mentioned, into the laboratory,' said he. 'I carried it in my hand, with my gloves still on, as aforesaid. I laid it down on a table and turned on a powerful light over it. It was only then that I took a good look at it. It weighed several pounds at least, was about the bulk and heft of a full-grown coconut, and about the same color as a hulled coconut, that is, a kind of medium brown. As I looked at it, I saw that it was, as the X-ray had indicated, vaguely triangular in shape. It lay over on one of its sides under that powerful light, and—Canevin, so help me God'—Doctor Pelletier leaned toward me, his face working, a great seriousness in his eyes—'it moved, Canevin,' he murmured, 'and, as I looked—the thing breathed! I was just plain dumbfounded. A biological specimen like that—does not move, Canevin! I shook all over, suddenly. I felt my hair prickle on the roots of my scalp. I felt chills go down my spine. Then I remembered that here I was, after an operation, in my own biological laboratory. I came close to the thing and propped it up, on what might be called its logical base, if you see what I mean, so that it stood as nearly upright as its triangular conformation permitted.
'And then I saw that it had faint yellowish markings over the brown, and that what you might call its skin was moving, and—as I stared at the thing, Canevin—two things like little arms began to move, and the top of it gave a kind of convulsive shudder, and it opened straight at me, Canevin, a pair of eyes and looked me in the face.
'Those eyes—my God, Canevin, those eyes! They were eyes of something more than human, Canevin, something incredibly evil, something vastly old, sophisticated, cold, immune from anything except pure evil, the eyes of something that had been worshipped, Canevin, from ages and ages out of a past that went back before all known human calculation, eyes that showed all the deliberate, lurking wickedness that has ever been in the world. The eyes closed, Canevin, and the thing sank over onto its side, and heaved and shuddered convulsively.
'It was sick, Canevin; and now, emboldened, holding myself together, repeating over and over to myself that I had a case of the quavers, of post-operative "nerves," I forced myself to look closer, and as I did so I got from it a faint whiff of ether. Two tiny, ape-like nostrils, over a clamped-shut slit of a mouth, were exhaling and inhaling; drawing in the good, pure air, exhaling ether fumes. It popped into my head that Carswell had consumed a terrific amount of ether before he went under; we had commented on that, Doctor Jackson particularly. I put two and two together, Canevin, remembered we were in Haiti, where things are not like New York, or Boston, or Baltimore! Those Negroes had believed that the "deity" had not come out of Carswell, do you see? That was the thing that held the edge of my mind. The thing stirred uneasily, put out one of its "arms," groped about, stiffened.
'I reached for a nearby specimen-jar, Canevin, reasoning, almost blindly, that if this thing were susceptible to ether, it would be susceptible to—well, my gloves were still on my hands, and—now shuddering so that I could hardly move at all, I had to force every motion—I reached out and took hold of the thing—it felt like moist leather—and dropped it into the jar. Then I carried the carboy of preserving alcohol over to the table and poured it in till the ghastly thing was entirely covered, the alcohol near the top of the jar. It writhed once, then rolled over on its "back," and lay still, the mouth now open. Do you believe me, Canevin?'
'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 openminded, 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....
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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