Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (8 page)

That invincible good-nature I have spoken of, that easy-going way of slipping along through life letting people smack you and not smacking them back which was always characteristic of Williamson Morley, was, I should hasten to make clear, not in the slightest degree due to any lack of ability on Morley’s part to take care of himself, physically or otherwise. Quite the contrary! Morley had been, by far, our best athlete in school days. He held the interscholastic record for the twelve-pound shot and the twelve-pound hammer, records which, I believe, still stand. He was slow and a trifle awkward on his feet, it is true, but as a boxer and wrestler he was simply invincible. Our school trainer, Ernie Hjertberg, told me that he was the best junior athlete he had ever handled, and Ernie had a long and reputable record.

Morley went on with this in college. In fact, he became a celebrity, what with his succession of record-breaking puts of the sixteen-pound shot, and his tremendous heaves of the hammer of the same weight. Those two events were firsts for Haverford whenever their star heavyweight competed during his four years at that institution. He quit boxing after he had nearly killed the Yale man who was heavyweight champ in Morley’s Freshman year, in the first round. He was intercollegiate champion wrestler of all weights for three and one-half years. Watching him handle the best of them was like watching a mother put her baby to bed! Morley simply brushed aside all attempts to hammerlock or half-nelson him, took hold of his opponent, and put him on his back and held him there long enough to record the fall; and then got up with one of those deprecating smiles on his face as much as to say: ‘I hated to do that to you, old man – hope I didn’t hurt you too much.’

All through his athletic career at school, for the four years we were together there, he showed only one queer trait. That, under the circumstances, was a very striking one. Morley would never get under the showers. No. A dry-rub for him, every time. He was a hairy fellow, as many very powerfully-built men are, and I have seen him many a time, after some competition event or a strenuous workout at our athletic field or winter days in the gymnasium shining with honest sweat so that he might have been lacquered! Nevertheless, no shower for Morley! Never anything but four or five dry towels, then the usual muscle-kneading and alcohol rub afterwards – invariably with his track or gym shoes on. That, in its way, was another, and the last, of Morley’s peculiarities. From first to last, he never, to my knowledge, took off even for muscle-kneadings at the capable hands of Black Joe, our rubber, the shoes he had been wearing, nor, of course, the heavy woolen stockings he always wore under them.

When quizzed about his dry-rubs, Morley always answered with his unfailing good-nature, that it was a principle with him. He believed in the dry-rub. He avoided difficulty and criticism in this strange idea of his, as it seemed to the rest of us, because Ernie Hjertberg, whose word was law and whose opinions were gold and jewels to us boys, backed him up in it. Many of the older athletes, said Ernie, preferred the dry-rub, and a generation ago nobody would have thought of taking a shower after competition or a workout. So it became a settled affair that Williamson Morley should dry-rub himself while the rest of us revelled under our cascades of alternate hot and cold water and were cool and comfortable while Morley at least looked half-cooked, red, and uncomfortable after his plain towellings!

It was, too, entirely clear to the rest of us that Morley’s dry-rubs were taken on principle. That he was a bather – at home – was entirely evident. He was, besides being by long odds the best-dressed fellow in a very dressy, rather ‘fashionable’ New York City school, the very pink and perfection of cleanliness. Indeed, if it had not been for Morley’s admirable disposition, self-restraint, and magnificent muscular development and his outstanding athletic preëminence among us – our football teams with Morley in were simply invincible, and his inordinately long arms made him unbeatable at tennis – the school would very likely have considered him a ‘dude’. A shot-putter, if it had been anybody else than Morley, who, however modestly, displays a fresh manicure twice a week at the group-critical age of fifteen or sixteen is – well, it was Morley, and whatever Morley chose to do among our crowd, or, indeed any group of his age in New York City in those days, was something that called for respectful imitation – not adverse criticism. Morley set the fashion for New York’s foremost school for the four or five years that he and Gerald Canevin were buddies togther.

It was when we were sixteen that the Morley divorce case shrieked from the front pages of the yellow newspapers for the five weeks of its lurid course in the courts.

During that period I, who had been a constant visitor at the house on Madison Avenue where Williamson, an only son, lived with his parents, by some tacit sense of the fitness of things, refrained from dropping in Saturdays or after school hours. Subsequently, Mrs Morley, who had lost the case, removed to an apartment on Riverside Drive. Williamson accompanied his mother, and Mr Morley continued to occupy the former home.

It was a long time afterwards, a year or more, before Williamson talked of his family affairs with me. When he did begin it, it came with a rush, as though he had wanted to speak about it to a close friend for a long time and had been keeping away from the topic for decency’s sake. I gathered from what he said that his mother was in no way to blame. This was not merely ‘chivalry’ on Williamson’s part. He spoke reticently, but with a strong conviction. His father, it seemed, had always, as long as he could remember, been rather ‘mean’ to the kindest, most generous and whole-souled lady God had ever made. The attitude of Morley senior, as I gathered it, without, of course, hearing that gentleman’s side of the affair, had always been distant and somewhat sarcastic, not only to Mrs Morley but to Williamson as well. It was, Williamson said, as though his father had disliked him from birth, thought of him as a kind of inferior being! This had been shown, uniformly, by a general attitude of contemptuous indifference to both mother and son as far back as Williamson’s recollection of his father took him.

It was, according to him, the more offensive and unjust on his father’s part, because, not long before his own birth, his mother had undergone a more than ordinarily harrowing experience, which, Williamson and I agreed, should have made any man that called himself a man considerate to half the woman Mrs Morley was, for the rest of his natural life!

The couple had, it appeared, been married about five years at the time, were as yet childless, and were living on the Island of Barbados in the Lower Caribbean. Their house was an estate-house, ‘in the country’, but quite close-in to the capital town, Bridgetown. Quite nearby, in the very next estate-house, in fact, was an eccentric old fellow, who was a retired animal collector. Mr Burgess, the neighbor, had been in the employ for many years before his retirement due to a bad clawing he had received in the wilds of Nepaul, of the Hagenbecks and Wombwells.

Mr Burgess’s outstanding eccentricity was his devotion to ‘Billy’, a full-grown orang-utan which, like the fellow in Kipling’s horrible story,
Bimi
, he treated like a man, had it at the table with him, had taught the creature to smoke – all that sort of thing. The negroes for miles around were in a state of sustained terror, Williamson said.

In fact, the
Bimi
story was nearly reënacted there in Barbados, only with a somewhat different slant. We boys at school read Kipling, and
Sherlock Holmes
, and Alfred Henry Lewis’s
Wolfville
series those days, and
Bimi
was invoked as familiar to us both when Williamson told me what had happened.

It seems that the orang-utan and Mrs Morley were great friends. Old Burgess didn’t like that very well, and Douglas Morley, Williamson’s father, made a terrific to-do about it. He finally absolutely forbade his wife to go within a hundred yards of Burgess’s place unless for the purpose of driving past!

Mrs Morley was a sensible woman. She listened to her husband’s warnings about the treachery of the great apes, and the danger she subjected herself to in such matters as handing the orang-utan a cigarette, and willingly enough agreed to keep entirely away from their neighbor’s place so long as the beast was maintained there at large and not, as Mr Morley formally demanded of Burgess, shut up in an adequate cage. Mr Morley even appealed to the law for the restraint of a dangerous wild beast, but could not, it appeared, secure the permanent caging of Burgess’s strange pet.

Then, one night, coming home late from a Gentlemen’s Party somewhere on the island, Mr Morley had walked into his house and discovered his wife unconscious, lying on the floor of the dining-room, most of her clothing torn off her, and great weals and bruises all over her where the orang-utan had attacked her, sitting alone in a small living-room next the dining-room.

Mrs Morley, hovering between life and death for days on end with a bad case of physiological shock, could give no account of what had occurred, beyond the startling apparition of ‘Billy’ in the open doorway, and his leap towards her. She had mercifully lost consciousness, and it was a couple of weeks before she was able to do so much as speak.

Meanwhile Morley, losing no time, had dug out a couple of his negroes from the estate-village, furnished them with hurricane-lanterns for light on a black and starless night, and, taking down his Martini-Henry elephant gun, and charging the magazine with explosive bullets, had gone out after the orang-utan, and blown the creature, quite justifiably of course, into a mound of bloody pulp. He had, again almost justifiably, it seemed to Williamson and me, been restrained only by his two Blacks disarming him lest he be hung by the neck until dead, from disposing of his neighbor, Burgess, with the last of the explosive cartridges. As it was, although Morley was not a man of any great physical force, being slightly built and always in somewhat precarious health, he had administered a chastising with his two hands to the fatuous ex-wild animal collector, which was long remembered in His Majesty King Edward’s loyal colony of Barbados, B.W.I.

It was, as Williamson’s maternal grandmother had confided to him, almost as though this horrible experience had unhinged Mr Morley’s mind. Williamson himself had been born within a year, and Douglas Morley, who had in the meantime sold out the sugar estates in which most of his own and his young wife’s money had been invested, had removed to New York where he instituted a Bond Brokerage business. This Williamson had inherited two years after his graduation from college, at the time of his father’s death at the rather premature age of forty-seven.

Douglas Morley, according to his grandmother’s report and his own experience, had included his son in the strange attitude of dislike and contemptuous indifference which the devastating experience with the orang-utan had seemed to bring into existence.

We were not out of school when Mrs Douglas Morley died, and Williamson went back to the Madison Avenue house to live with his father.

Mr Morley had a kind of apartment built in for him, quite separate from his own part of the house. He could not, it seemed, bear to have Williamson under his eye, even though his plain duty and ordinary usage and custom made it incumbent on him to share his home with his son. The two of them saw each other as little as possible. Williamson had inherited his mother’s property, and this his father administered for him as I must record to his credit, in an admirably competent and painstaking manner, so that Williamson was already a rich man well before his father’s death about doubled his material possessions.

I have gone into this detail largely because I want to accentuate how extremely regrettable, it seemed to me, was Sylvia’s unaccountable attitude, which I have described, to one of the best and kindliest fellows on earth, after a childhood and youth such as he had been subjected to because of some obscure psychological slant of a very odd fish of a father for which, of course, he was in no way responsible himself.

Well, now Sylvia was gone, too, and Williamson Morley was once more alone in the world so far as the possession of near relatives went, and free to do about as he pleased.

His one comment, now that he was presumably settled down with me for the winter, about his late wife, I mean, was a very simple one, unconnected with anything that had been said or even alluded to, in answer to my carefully-phrased first personal word of regret for his loss.

‘I did everything I knew how, Gerald.’

There was a world of meaning, a résumé of quiet suffering, patiently and I am sure bravely, borne in those few and simple words so characteristic of Williamson Morley.

He did, once, refer to his mother during his visit with me, which lasted for several months. It was apropos of his asking my help in classifying and arranging a brief-case full of papers, legal and otherwise, which he had brought along, the documentation connected with a final settlement of his financial affairs. He had disposed of his bond-brokerage business immediately after his wife’s death.

There were various family records – wills, and suchlike – among these papers, and I noted among these as I sorted and helped arrange them for Morley, sitting opposite him at the big table on my West gallery, the recurring names of various kinsfolk of his – Parkers, Morleys, Graves, Putneys – but a total absence of the family name Williamson. I had asked him, without any particular purpose, hardly even curiosity over so small a matter, whether there were not some Williamson relatives, that being his own baptismal name.