# The Black Key

Extracted from Century magazine, New York, Vol. 96, 1918, pp. 33-45. Accompanying illustrations by Hamlin Gardner omitted.
The Black Key
By Joseph Hergesheimer
Author of "Three Black Pennies"
JERRY ANNIS lay flat in the tender fastened to the Gar, gazing through a water-glass into depths no less transparent and hardly more shadowed than the air. Comfortably posted against the wheel-box of the ketch, John Woolfolk watched the other with the faintly superior patience of one to whom such spectacles were a commonplace. The Gar floated without a quiver on the clear flood, under the lee of the island where they had anchored for the night. The island was small, and rose in a compact grove of dark palms on a green sky; inshore, beyond the wide, faintly roseate water, the coast-line of Florida drew a minute silhouette of tropical foliage between the separate elements. An obscure change had taken place in the light, which, without being actually dusk, heralded the vanishing of the sun. A faint chill settled like impalpable dew. Halvard, the sailor, squatting forward, was filling the riding-light.
Both Jerry Annis and Woolfolk wore disreputable white flannels, stained canvas sneakers, and had unconfined throats; but there the similitude ended. Woolfolk was dark, with a lined, almost haggard, face and somber eyes; while Annis was as young as possible at twenty-seven, with a candid gaze, crisp, small mustache, and afresh, pleasant mouth. At present he had been burned red by the sun and wind, and that gave him an aspect of ruddy health, partly contradicted by traces of weariness about his eyes.
Still, John Woolfolk decided, the younger was a different man from the Jerry Annis who had met the Gar at St.Augustine, in search of release from the penalty of a too protracted application to the practice of medicine. His nervous being was almost rehabilitated; he had n't taken his pulse for ten days, and he had entirely given up the other vaguely unpleasant tests of his condition. Woolfolk had made an exception for Annis, the first person to live on the Gar since the former, eight years before, had deserted the society of countries and cities for the solitude of waterways and the sea. He had been fond of Jerry, and although that capability had been burned out of him at the time of his paramount disaster, in this particular case an echo, like the faint memory of an obligation, had persisted, moving him, at the news of Annis's break-down, to invite him aboard the Gar.
A faint wind stirred, dulling the surface of the water, and a sibilant clatter came from the island palms as dry and metallic as the rubbing of rusted tin. Halvard attached the lantern to the jib-stay; the sails were covered with orderly brown canvas, the ketch was immaculately dressed for the night. The wind died away, the water was again clear, although darker, and Woolfolk, without mechanical assistance, could see to the bottom of their anchorage. There was an endless movement of sub-aqueous life: purple-black plants waved vivified filaments, curving and seeking through the still water; jelly-like tendrils quivered from ledges of live coral; treacherous coils, serried with sharp spines, flung out like ropes at swimming particles; dull, flaccid shapes stirred; the mud was agitated like smoke, submerged in slime.
That activity, Woolfolk lazily thought, separated only ten feet from all the Gar held and expressed, was in reality twenty, fifty million years distant. It was the beginning. Out of the unclean ferment of the sea particles of motion had fastened, survived, on beaches, reached upward. Out of it had evolved his despair, Jerry's overstrung sensibilities. The discrepancy, he added pessimistically, between the effort and the result was ludicrous. He gazed with an increasing interest at the blindly predatory, the instinctively propagating, existence that had been the physical base of so much or so little.
Primitive fishes floated by, with grotesque, cage-like heads and attenuated bodies, repulsive in form and color, things all mouth, spasmodically opened and shut. A new distaste for the spectacle possessed John Woolfolk; it was, despite unthinkable reaches of time, too close to him. Suddenly it seemed fatally easy for one to sink, the other to rise, one possibility as potent of horror as the other. In the middle of his thought a larger stir was evident at the bottom, a cloud of mud rolled up, hung foully in the crystalline depths, and out of it shouldered a larger, more repulsive shape than any he had before seen. The fish continued to rise in a groping, sluggish manner, until it nearly scraped the keel of the Gar—a loathsome, leathery sack, with a bony head and dull, immobile eyes. Its filmed gaze stared directly up at John Woolfolk, and he was aware of a voluntary contraction of his scalp, a fantastic and illogical hatred that almost resembled fear. It stayed for a perceptible space, hardly below the surface, darkly livid, distended; then, with the contraction of its pouch, it sank back until it was once more indistinguishable in the ooze.
Woolfolk moved sharply to his feet.
"Come on board, Jerry" he directed; "leave all that filthy past."
The other rose reluctantly, pulled the tender in, and jumped lightly up to the deck. He was a powerful young man, with compact shoulders and narrow hips. A perpetual undergraduate, Woolfolk told himself at the other's boyish superfluity of energy; but at the same time a good man, a courageous and clean spirit.
Paul Halvard had put up the table hinged to the center-board-casing, and was ready with supper. Woolfolk and Jerry sat on the berth-ledge that followed each side of the ketch, and silently addressed themselves to a delicately white-and-pink boiled crawfish that had weighed over two pounds. They ended with the Gars inevitable figs in clear syrup, drank the last drop of superlative black coffee, and emerged into the cockpit, where they subsided into long canvas chairs and the haze of rolled cigarettes.
The twilight had definitely fallen, the depth of water was obscured, and the sky had faded from green to primrose. The wind had returned, strengthened, and the clatter of the palms on the island was incessant. The latter uprose in a solid black bulk on the translucent dusk, and in the premature night of the intermingled trunks a light glimmered.
"Most of these keys have inhabitants of some sort," Woolfolk replied to Annis's surprise; "native conchs, wreckers, niggers, and fishing-camps. A mail-and-supply boat gets around every two weeks or month. They are really remarkable places of retreat or simple life for pirates, criminals, conchs, or the merely rich. I 've been tempted, too."
An expression of deep earnestness and determination came over Jerry Annis's mobile countenance. He leaned forward, speaking with grave emphasis:
"I have made up my mind to say something to you that you may resent. It 's possible you 'll stop me before I 'm half through; but I hope you won't. I am not merely meddling in a general, impotently benevolent way, and you know I 'm not vulgarly curious or impertinent. Think of what I say, if you can, as only scientific, although dictated by a real affection.
"John, I want you to drop this solitary existence and come back with me to your old, normal path." He silenced the other's instant objection with a gesture of authority. "I insist on finishing, and I am qualified to advise—no, warn—you. I know that you had a terrific shock in the death of your wife only two weeks after you were married, and it was natural for you to pull out, leave every association behind. I thought at the time that the Gar, with your knowledge and love of the sea, and a companion like Halvard, pure gold, was a godsend. It was then; but you have been out long enough, perhaps too long.
"Whatever the people may be on these isolated fragments of decaying coral, man is a gregarious animal; he needs the companionship, the stimulus, of his kind, and without it he is apt to get ratty. I realize what it meant in the way of personal sacrifice for you to take me on the ketch, and I don't need to tell you what it has done for me; but I am trying to show my gratitude in a way more difficult than perhaps you realize. John, there were two sick men on this boat; now there is one, and I am well.
"Not sick in the simple, physical weight of the term," he particularized; "you are as splendid an example of sheer man as I 've ever seen. I mean psychic illness, slight, but such conditions have incalculable reflexes; they determine almost every area of the human entity. They can increase until the whole brain is involved and darkened permanently. I notice that when we make a port you send Halvard or me ashore for any necessities; you shrink from even casual contact with people, and your thought is almost entirely centripetal. That 's all wrong; in fact, it is a damnable weakness. I don't shrink from telling you that it's even cowardly."
"You had better stop, Annis," Woolfolk told him coldly. "A complete silence in regard to—to the past, my wife's death, was implied by my having you here. Any thing other is an unwarranted intrusion."
"Then," Jerry Annis replied, "I 'm willing to intrude. You may put me ashore in the morning. If you can't listen to an impersonal discussion of your mental condition, you 're worse than I thought. You simply cannot keep this up; your brain is too vivid. The good qualities in men destroy them quite as often as the bad; where a human clod will flourish and grow fat, a more sensitive organization will beat itself to death. If you don't leave this, if you don't occupy yourself with something outside the circle of your own unhappy memories, you 'll go smash. It will be different from a comparatively comfortable sickness; you will be tormented out of reason with horrors utterly beyond words, sink into a living blackness without a gleam."
John Woolfolk thought again of the repulsive life lifting toward him from the bottom of the watery pass, and of the pictured converse ease with which such humanity as his might go down. His resentment of Jerry Annis's speech perished before the eager kindliness of the other's face, his insistent honesty and affection.
"I hope you exaggerated the danger in your medical enthusiasm," he replied. "A definite quality died in me with Ellen; but the injury has not been progressive. You will remember I was always a more or less solitary lot, and in the Gar I have only returned to a natural inclination after a short excursion into different, happier fields. But this may interest your clinical mind: where women are concerned I have had a complete reversal of the normal feeling of attraction. They repel me almost in exact proportion to their charm for the ordinary male. Old hags and the hopeless female I do very nicely with; but if a woman is good-looking or charged with the animal magnetism politely called charm, she rouses the most violent opposition, almost disgust, in me. Then, for your comfort, Jerry, and I 'm greatly obliged, I 'll add that this is n't as strong as it was; I think I can feel it diminishing. Only the more extreme cases move me now, and you know that exceptionally beautiful or compelling women are rare."
A silence followed in which the moon, lightly detached from the obscured, watery horizon, soared up like a pale-vermilion paper lantern. As it rose it changed from a colored disk to the source of a flood of bright, pallid radiance. It sharply revealed every detail of the Gar's hull and rigging, cast an inky shadow from Halvard's stolid bulk, seated on the forward deck, and illuminated an island, grouped and towering palms, like cast-iron.
"Funny thing, the legend of the malignant moon," Annis observed; "and yet it has an inherited actuality. Ancient, primitive people were more responsive to the elemental rhythms of existence than ourselves. The lunar brightness was of tremendous importance in stirring the early nervous system—queen of the dark and all that."
A new sound vibrated faintly across the water from the island, a low, repeated splash and dripping.
"A boat is putting off," Woolfolk said. Halvard rose and leaned against a mainstay, watching the advance of a small skiff clumsily rowed by a single occupant. As the latter drew near a coil of dead-black hair was visible, a rich sheen of orange silk.
"It 's a woman!" Jerry Annis exclaimed in his facile, youthful excitement.
"No," Woolfolk corrected him, "it 's a Chinaman."
The skiff came alongside, the oars were unskilfully unshipped, and the figure rose, grasping the Gar's mahogany rail. A flat Oriental face confronted them like a placid mask in yellow clay.
"Lady sick," he said; "gentleman please come and look."
"Get up on deck," John Woolfolk commanded curtly. The other scrambled over the side, clutching the painter of his boat. In the flood of moonlight he was an extravagant figure of shimmering and gorgeous color. The vivid orange coat was embroidered on its flowing edges with silver and peacock green; his loose silk trousers were absolute blue, and his Oriental slippers were crimson threaded, and crusted with gold. A thin gold chain, a badge of servitude, hung about his neck, and carved black stone ornaments depended from the lobes of his ears.
"Who is sick?" Woolfolk demanded.
"Lady," the Chinaman glibly repeated. "Miss Saphron. Gentleman please come see. Give a lot of money."
"Some damned neurasthenic," Woolfolk said, turning to Jerry Annis; "look at her man. Send her word to take a bromide, and let 's go below."
"But she might really be badly off," Annis protested. "I 'll have to go—a doctor. You can see that. Extraordinary place to come on a patient. I wish I 'd brought my bag. Suppose she will be safer without it," he added humorously.
"Halvard," John Woolfolk called reluctantly, "row Doctor Annis ashore. Take the Chinaman in the tender and tow his skiff. You have a whistle, Jerry; signal when you want to come on board."
The moonlight increased in brilliancy, sinking into the water, its gay luster dulling the ceaseless sparkle of phosphorescence about the water-line of the Gar, Halvard sculled, standing, from the island, and left the oars in the tender against Dr. Annis's return. A deep melancholy folded John Woolfolk; the present took on the aspect of a dark frame for the bright visions of the past, of a girl smiling at him in a tennis skirt and striped girdle. His memories of Ellen, he realized, were of thrilling purity; she was an embodiment of young and gracious perfection, the fragrant spirit of a white rose. She had been killed in an instant, thrown back from a cocking-cart, and covered forever from his sight. Yet he saw her now clearly; he was aware of the elevation of his senses, the rapt feeling of a plane far above the clay, that her actual presence had always brought him. It was as strong now, in the exotic anchorage far from the green lawns and budding maples of their short joy, as if she stood again with her hand in his. A great part of his bitterness had gone; out of the tragedy of his love a faint, but perceptible, beauty was unfolding. His conceptions of life and death merged one into the other; something died, went back into the earth;the harsh lines vanished momentarily from his gaunt face; a flood of peace, like the still tide of the inlets and sea, flowed about him.
He moved after an hour, descended the short flight to the cabin, and inspected the chronometer. Jerry should have been back before this. John Woolfolk returned to the cockpit, his chair, and his memories. But the latter were now broken by conjectures about Jerry Annis. He wondered if he, too, should go ashore, if Annis needed additional assistance. Although the latter had virtually recovered from the ill effects of overwork, he regretted any professional strain put upon the young doctor at present. Another hour passed. Halvard had not moved from a position against the windlass.
The moon swung steadily up and out, the shadows on the Gar moved slowly from starboard to port. Woolfolk's uneasiness increased. He vainly endeavored to relax his tension, send Halvard to his berth, and definitely postpone thoughts of Jerry until morning. He was, finally, unable to sit still, but tramped up and down the raised, narrow deck space. John Woolfolk was gazing toward the island when the sound of a whistle floated out from that black wedge in the luminous night. The signal was weak and fluttering, and broke off suddenly in the middle.
Halvard immediately came aft and dropped into the tender. A fever of impatience, a vague, inexplicable dread, seized Woolfolk. "Hurry," he called after the boat slipping away over the silver expanse.
He saw Halvard reach the island, but there the tender was lost in obscurity. Almost immediately, however, it shot back into the refulgent light, with the sailor rowing in a panic of haste. He blundered inexcusably in coming alongside the ketch, scraping away the paint, and clattered his oars inboard. John Woolfolk could see no trace of Annis, but Halvard cried out, "Give him an arm."
He bent over the side, the man raised a supine weight, and Woolfolk stepped back with Jerry Annis limp on his shoulder. The latter's face was the color of skimmed milk. John Woolfolk swore at the mischance that had apparently given the doctor an exhausting duty at such an inopportune time. He laid him in a long-chair, and without speech went down for whisky.
Annis mechanically parted his lips for the stimulant; a faint flush responded, and his eyelids fluttered open and shut with incredible rapidity over dilated pupils. John Woolfolk studied him with grim concentration. His pulse was abnormally fast and shallow; but his reflexes—one knee was crossed loosely over the other—responded.
"Well?" Woolfolk demanded sharply, facing the sailor.
"There 's nothing well to it," that person surprisingly responded. "Mr. Woolfolk, I would n't go ashore on that island again to-night for all Norway; I wouldn't go if you ordered me." He spoke slowly and spat into the water.
"Where did you find Doctor Annis?"
"Lying just inside the line of palms, where it was as black as charcoal. A little more and he 'd be there yet for all of me. My inwards shut up like a mate's fist."
"What nonsense is that?" Woolfolk angrily demanded. "The moon 's affected your brain."
"Sir," Halvard said, "there was something hanging over him like a bird. It stayed until the tender grounded, and then fluttered away through those damned palms. I hope God drowns me before I ever have another turn like that."
"You fool," Woolfolk savagely replied, "it was a bar of light among the trees."
"Mr. Woolfolk, sir, excuse me for being forward, but can we find another anchorage? I 'll break the ketch out as smooth as glass. It 's as easy to sail now as by day. We can make our way in by the mainland."
"Go forward," the master commanded curtly. "The superstitious ass!" he thought. Jerry Annis turned his face from the moonlight and muttered unintelligibly. A fine, glistening sweat appeared on his brow, and an expression of agonized emotion contorted his features. He lifted his arms before him, as if to repel a near presence. His arms fell heavily, his head sank forward. John Woolfolk thought he was dead. But after a minute he partly revived; his gaze, comparatively steady, met the other's.
"John," he breathed faintly.
"Don't talk," Woolfolk replied. He turned and went below, where he made up Jerry Annis's berth. Then he carried his companion in, undressed him, and put him under blankets. Jerry's hands and feet were deathly cold. A lamp, burning in gimbals by the hatchway, cast an unwavering glow over the contracted cabin. John Woolfolk sat on the engine-box, studying the closed eyes and white countenance against the white pillow. Jerry Annis's condition was totally unlike his former overwrought state. Then nervous excitement, strain, had predominated; now he was utterly exhausted, drained of vigor. At times a spasm of pain crossed his face. He twisted away from an imaginary presence hanging over him, and Woolfolk saw under Annis's ear, close to the base of his neck, a livid scar. He bent over the other, examining it. The mark was over an inch long, a narrow, purplish abrasion, immediately surrounded by a clotted, red area of distended pores. He touched it lightly, and Jerry Annis responded with a broken cry of such acute horror that Woolfolk fell back on the center-board. The latter brusquely sought his medicine-box, and, securing the hypodermic case, dissolved a minute tablet in a spoonful of water, drew it into his syringe, and forced the sedative into the other's shoulder. Then he extended his long body on his unmade berth and waited wakefully for the dawn and Jerry's returning consciousness.
At sunrise John Woolfolk stripped and dropped into the profound jade water. He returned from his swim with a renewed freshness of mind and body, to find Jerry awake and propped up on an elbow. The latter smiled at him affectionately, but Woolfolk strictly enforced silence until he had made a cup of coffee on the vapor-stove in the forward cuddy.
"Now," he said, when the other had finished the steaming black liquid, "what is all this damn nonsense, with you fainting like a girl and scraping your neck?"
Jerry Annis, with a quick, almost furtive movement, covered his throat.
"Did I do that?" he asked. "Perhaps I 'm not as normal yet as we had hoped." He avoided Woolfolk's keen gaze; his breathing again grew rapid, irregular, as if he was laboring under intense excitement. He was, John Woolfolk decided, for some unthinkable reason, lying. At this Woolfolk was aware of an increasing, cold anger. Annis's features were more drawn than when he had joined the ketch, almost a month before, at the height of his nervous collapse. All the accomplishment of the tranquil weeks, the hard, physical labor, John Woolfolk's efforts, had been upset. His condition now, the latter realized, was extremely precarious. He debated the attitude it would be best for him to assume, and decided on a continuation of utmost severity.
"I take it for granted," he stated, "that you bruised your throat in a fall, or on a tree-trunk in the dark. That is unimportant. What I demand is an entire account of whatever brought you to this state."
"Nothing unusual," Jerry Annis affirmed. "I simply collapsed, I suppose—got back into harness too soon. Lord above, what a pulse!"
The conviction persisted that he was adding lie to lie. But for what reason? Woolfolk changed his point of attack.
"Why were you had ashore?" he queried. "What was the matter with this Miss—Miss Saphron?"
A relieved expression possessed Annis at this turn to a familiar ground.
"An involved appendix," he replied; "really a violent attack. Not much to do, of course, but advise an early operation. I made a temporary ice-pack. Miss Saphron is leaving for Miami in a day or so." He studied Woolfolk furtively.
"When did your syncope come on?"
"Afterward; yes—when I was leaving the house. I got off the path—tried to signal. It 's good to be back here," he added in a sudden, uncontrollable emotion—"back with you safe."
The last was a curious word in connection with the ordinary discharge of a physician's duty.
"Halvard had an idea he saw some one with you, but who left as he pulled in. Who are about the house?"
"Just Miss Saphron, a companion, enormously fat, and the Chinaman, M'gu."
Halvard appeared at the hatch with a sullen countenance, and John Woolfolk moved aside from the preparations for breakfast. He went up on deck; after along interval Jerry Annis followed, his throat covered by shirt-collar, and wearing a worsted coat. He shivered, although the day was already ablaze with a fiery sun. Annis walked slowly, and performed the morning ablutions with movements of utter weariness; but he was palpably recovering. He laid a hand on John Woolfolk's shoulder.
"I 've been a frightful nuisance," he said regretfully.
The other repressed for the moment his questioning. After breakfast Halvard stubbornly remained aft by the jigger-mast, obviously waiting for a desired order. But Woolfolk, annoyed, ignored the sailor, and the latter finally moved away, muttering. Even in the scintillating day the island remained a place of black shadows, metallic foliage. Not a sign of life was visible except a blue drift of smoke from a hidden chimney. John Woolfolk sat somberly thinking, and Jerry rested extended on the deck. At times there were involuntary twitchings of his hands and facial muscles. He said:
"The collection of instincts and emotions huddled in the human frame is rather appalling. Bundles of inherited qualities that go back God knows where—to astonishing forests and naked savagery and further to beasts. Ignorance is a fine thing for the ordinary mortal. There is a great deal that it is better for him not to understand. There are some strange things walking about to-day in chiffon and fur, in white and scarlet ribbons and little silk slippers. Disease, John, the worst kind, is an isolation of one trait, a link in a normal chain, and its exaggeration into an entire energy of emotion."
"Halvard," John Woolfolk called, "loose the sails, break out the anchor. I must get into Miami to-day." Halvard's head and shoulders emerged from the forward hatch.
"You 'll have to see this first," he replied; "there 's a leak in the gas-tank."
Woolfolk hurriedly dropped through the opening to the storage space partitioned from the cabin. There, as the sailor had indicated, he found a widening moisture by the gasolene-container. It was, however, unimportant, and assisted by Halvard, he soldered the flaw. For the moment, cramped below, he forgot about Jerry Annis. But once more on deck, mopping his dripping face, he turned aft. Jerry, apparently had gone into the cabin.He called, but there was no answer. He hurried to the cabin, thinking to find the other again unconscious, perhaps dead; instead, he was gone.
Woolfolk hurriedly called for Halvard.
"The doctor 's not on board, " he explained. He glanced over the stern. "And the tender is missing." The sailor looked out under a thick palm at the island.
"There she is," he cried, "untied, and drawing off the point."
The other followed his gesture and saw the small boat rocking slowly out from the shore toward a farther pass where the tide was sucking out to sea. Without command, Halvard drew off his shoes. He swam deliberately, but strongly, toward the drifting tender, his broad, glistening shoulders leaving a subsiding wake. Halvard finally overtook the boat, clambered in, and rowed it back to the Gar.
"He 's gone," he stated with a pallid finality visible under a leathery tan.
"Hold the tender," Woolfolk commanded. He went below and found a small, blue automatic pistol. Then, "Row me in," he directed, lowering himself to the sailor's side. He thought Halvard would refuse. The latter was clearly victimized by fright.
"Mr. Woolfolk," he begged, "stay off that black key. The doctor 's gone. I saw that in his own eyes this morning. Ordinarily I would n't leave a dog—"
"Give way!" Woolfolk interrupted harshly. The tender moved slowly forward. He felt again a vague, unpleasant tightening of his scalp, the repulsion from the reasty fish emerging out of its slime.
A widening cloud filled the brilliancy of noon, and a rising wind drew in from the Gulf Stream. A small landing had been built against a black expanse crawling with innumerable fiddler-crabs, and John Woolfolk walked sharply up the boards that led into the palms. The sear foliage clashed and ground like iron plates, and, in the morass of saw-grass on each side landcrabs, blotched with crimson and bright blue, made a scuffling that might have been a dry echo of the stir above. An odor of active decay hung heavily over iridescent mud and the smooth trunks of the palms; a cocoanut dropped with a soft plop into the mire; clouds of flies hovered in the minute, glistening hum of invisible wings.
He came suddenly on a broad, low house, with deep eaves and an outside gallery painted dark red. Some chairs were gathered near the entrance, a dull, black satin wrap drooped upon the floor, but there was no sign of immediate life. The gallery creaked under his vigorous stride, and a screen-door shivered in its frame before his knock. After a momentary pause a gay glimmer of silks, at the farther end of the shadowed corridor within, resolved itself into the Chinaman. Woolfolk demanded:
"Doctor Annis. Tell him that I am from the Gar."
"No here," the other answered placidly. He half turned, as if to retreat. An illogical anger flooded John Woolfolk. He wrenched open the screen, dragging the hook from the wood, and caught the Chinaman by a snake-like shoulder.
"Doctor Annis came ashore to attend a woman in this house," he proceeded. "What do you mean—no here? The key is n't three hundred yards across. Get some one else, a Miss Saphron, if that 's her name." He thought he had the shoulder securely, but with no perceptible effort the other slipped from his grasp.
"Doctor no here," he said again rapidly. "Came last night, yes, but no to see since. Miss Saphron leave word not to bother. You crazy man, break down house; get fixed." The Chinaman was plainly not intimidated, but advanced his countenance with cold menace between the long, black ear-rings.
There was a further creaking from the stair at one side, and an appallingly fat woman, with a diminutive, painted mouth, descended. As soon as she saw Woolfolk in the hall a soft smile spread over her cushioned face, an elephantine, feminine affectation at once ridiculous and vaguely repulsive. She stepped, too, with a mincing air, a levitation of her grotesque bulk, an effort of grace, which should have been only laughable, but which contrived to add to a total impression of obscure power.
"Miss Saphron?" he demanded.
"She is out just at present," the companion returned. "She walks like that, and no one is to disturb her. She is here, you see, for a rest."
"I want to speak to Doctor Annis," he proceeded. "He came ashore perhaps an hour ago. Tell him Mr. Woolfolk 's here."
"But the doctor is n't," the woman assured him. "And such a nice young man, but thin. Not since last night. Oh,"—she clasped her fingers, ringed in fat—"I hope he has n't been drowned. The currents are dreadful' swift about the island."
"He is not the sort to fall out of a boat," Woolfolk replied. "Perhaps he is with Miss Saphron now. See, please." The other drew the Chinaman away, whispering.
"M'gu will ask," she stated shortly. "Come in here." She led him into a sitting-room furnished with the luxurious trifles of a hyper-civilization. A small grand piano had on the rack a tone poem by Richard Strauss; the chairs were elaborately woven of coffee-colored reeds into the semblance of peacocks and inlaid with polished shells; there was a purple-black Chinese rug with sprawling characters like enormous scarlet spiders; a table held an impressive gold cigarette-box; some yellow-paper romances in French; "Justine," a volume by Huysmans; the brightly colored page of Le Rue; and a somber, heavy book bound in powdery calf, the latter marked with a long cigarette-holder in green amber.
"I am Miss Gooch," the fat woman informed him, sinking into a reed chair that perceptibly sagged under her weight. She caught his gaze, and attempted to hold it with a sentimental leer. The marked volume, he saw, was Foxe's "Book of Martyrs." He absently opened it at the amber tube, disclosing a sinister, spotted copper engraving of a man undergoing the torments of the rack. In the modern interior of ease and sensuous color the picture of old, savage bigotry, of insane spleen, was strangely shocking, unnatural, inexplicable. It affected him with a small, but acute, feeling of distaste, and he irritably pushed away the musty work. His mental disturbance increased. Suddenly he realized that it no longer came from the book; it was growing upon him with the approach of something from without. At last he recognized the cause of the unpleasant sensation filling him with mingled revulsion and faint dread: it was the emotion he now experienced in the presence of women unusually compelling to the normal man, the heritage of the shock of Ellen's tragic accident He had never before experienced it to such an overwhelming degree. Standing beyond the table from the door his muscles grew rigid, his mouth closed in a hard line, his narrowed gaze challenged the corridor without.
There was a low, sibilant stir, and a slight, white-faced woman stood before him, her shoulders wrapped in sheer folds of a finely spun, vividly scarlet scarf. It flowed like blood over bare arms like rubbed ivory, and dropped in a fringe on her lacy skirt. He saw, in addition, that she had eyes as black as pools of ink, that her hair was hardly less dark, a resplendent luxurious coil above her broad, low brow. Her mouth, a mere drawn, red thread, was elevated on a pointed and out-thrust chin.
"You are—" she said in a surprisingly resonant voice, masculine in its slightly harsh vibration.
"John Woolfolk," he replied. "Where is Doctor Annis?"
She elevated her brows; faint purplish lines curved above her wide gaze.
"You have almost an air of threat," she corrected him. "We have seen no doctor lately. I am told that you broke the fastening of my door, too. Really—" she paused, advanced into the room. Two other facts about her struck him, that she had marvelously delicate, tapered hands, and that there was a dark, reddish smudge at the side of her mouth. His attention, for no perceptible reason, remained directed upon the last. "However," she added, "I shall excuse you." She studied him profoundly, intimately. "Please, a chair."
She sank into a comfortable place, drawing the rippling, sanguinary folds of the scarf through her hands; but John Woolfolk remained standing, somber and rigid. Impressions continued to join those already realized. Her narrow feet in black slippers were like wasps, wickedly sharp and graceful. There was a faint scent resembling that of overripe peaches, a constricting air of prussic acid. His distaste increased in palpable waves like flashes across his eyes. He was possessed by the conviction of a surprising need for caution; something was extremely wrong. Outside the metallic clashing of the palms increased; he could hear the scuffling of the vivid crabs under the house, which was raised on piles.
The fat woman, Miss Gooch, laughed nervously.
"What can he think we did with his doctor?" she demanded.
"What?" the other added. She drew a long, sharp breath.
"He was n't well," Woolfolk stated; "perhaps he is about the key, exhausted. He came back last night in an extraordinary state."
"You might look," Miss Saphron said in the manner of an insolent challenge. He had an insane feeling that such a search would reveal nothing. Jerry Annis, just as Halvard had insisted, was gone.
"I shall make a thorough investigation," he stated.
"And when it 's over, come back for dinner," she told him. A small spot of color burned in her plaster-white cheeks; the odor of prussic acid grew stronger. His loathing almost broke into a violent repudiation of the invitation. She rose and moved to the table that separated them, leaning forward on her hands. "Come back," she whispered insistently. The smudge, so near, resembled— He was falling under the spell of a morbid obsession. She swayed toward him, and in that moment he had an impulse to kill her with the automatic pistol under his hand.
In the effort to combat this insidious temptation, he lowered his gaze to the bright litter on the table; the cigarette-holder had rolled from its place to the floor, Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" lay beside a questionable ultra-modern drawing. The portent of the former seemed to rise in a choking dust through its moldering leather; it appeared to materialize in a lurid and smoky horror, and envelop the tense face of Miss Saphron. She recalled the pointed countenance of medieval prints, thin and cruel. The contending palms sounded like chains and the crackling of fagots. He stood hypnotized, frigid. The other woman had disappeared. The scarf seemed to float in a scarlet blot before his gaze; it touched him, dragged across his face, his throat. There was a swift prickling of fingers.
"A thorough investigation," he repeated mechanically. He put out an arm as if to wipe away a red cobweb, fell back. Miss Saphron retreated to the piano, half turned from him, her slight body sharply drawn against the elongated, black box. He had an immediate duty to perform—oh, yes, search for Jerry Annis among the crabs. Arousing himself with an effort, John Woolfolk walked unsteadily out of the house.
He began a thorough investigation among the rusty cabbage-palmettoes and patches of saw-grass. Halvard, he saw, had taken the tender out a length from the shore and anchored. Woolfolk was suddenly adverse to the sailor's assistance. However vain his task seemed for one man, he did n't want the other to come on what might be found. He proceeded with a savage industry, a painful forcing of his way through clumps like knives; he sank in muck almost to his knees. In vain.
Finally, at the opposite side of the island, he halted. A gray edge of dead coral drew across a deep pass through which the tide was sucking, solidly blue. It was deep almost immediately; beyond was the lighter stain of shallows; and far out across the broad expanse of water he could trace the course of the funneling current.
As he stood, haggard with exhaustion, torn with spines and soiled from the sticky, black mud, a triangular fin swept in close by the island; there was a long glimmer of white belly, and a blue shark swept by. It had paused so near that he could see the small, dull eyes, the serrated teeth beneath the leathery snout. The shark turned and flashed back. There was another; three, four. He said aloud, stupidly:
"Jerry."
The knife-like fins maintained a constant agitation of the water; they came to the surface, rolled, and plunged. A feeling of sickness swept over John Woolfolk. He said to himself, in the unreasoning manner of the last few hours, that he need look for Annis no farther. He moved back, tripped, and barely saved himself from an ugly fall. But when he straightened up a smeared and dabbled object was in his hands. Jerry Annis's coat, crusted, wet, caked with blood.
He gazed at it a long while, slowly realizing what, in such a state, it indicated. Then his whirling emotions were assembled in a single, orderly purpose. He took out his pistol, held it lightly, almost lovingly, in one hand, while in the other he carried the coat. John Woolfolk steadily returned toward the house. He passed by the kitchen, with a glimpse of the orange jacket of the Chinaman, walked deliberately up on the gallery, and let himself into the corridor.
A shrill exclamation sounded from the shadow of the stairs; but he ignored it, and turned into the sitting-room. As he advanced, Miss Saphron rose to meet him. He held out the coat, with the pistol advanced, his finger hovering on the trigger.
"Why did you kill him?" he asked. "Why and how?" If he had expected any cowering on the woman's part, any terrified denial, he was completely surprised. Suddenly her face was suffused with color; she moved toward him with a low gasp; drew near with her arms outheld, with a glitter of half-closed eyes, a glimmer of immaculate teeth. Unconsciously he fell back before her advance; it shocked him so completely that he forgot the weapon in his hand, his determination. His shoulder struck against the door-frame; then he was in the corridor, with his back against the screen leading to the outer gallery. An icy, unutterable fear dominated him.
There was another movement; he saw Miss Gooch with staring eyes. He must stop that slight figure. He fired blindly. There was a lurching fall, and he was outside. A large, prostrate body half turned in the fore of the corridor; he realized that he had shot the companion. John Woolfolk had one clear vision of the other woman hovering with eager, pointed hands over the puddle of flesh and blood, and then he turned and fled down the boards that led to the water. He ran in a complete surrender to a panic of pure, thrilling dread, his footfalls mingling with the rattling foliage and dry scrambling of crabs. Above the dissolving cloud a pallid ray of moonlight fell back upon the blackness of the house.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1954, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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