The Devil Man

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Dr Alan Mainford was at the age when even a night call from an unknown patient had in it the stuff of adventure. Dixon brought round the pony trap and offered a few bitter comments on the weather, the hour, the difficulty of harnessing the cob by the light of a lantern which the wind blew out every few minutes, and, above all, and most insistently, the futility of obeying every summons that comes out of the night.

"The old doctor used to say. 'If they can't last till mornin' I can't save 'em tonight'—that's what the old doctor used to say," he said darkly.

Dixon was stocky and bow-legged, as became a groom. On the finest summer morning he would have been disgruntled, for it was his habit to complain.

"The old doctor—" he began again.

"Blow the old doctor!" said Alan.

"He's dead," said Dixon, hurt and reproachful.

"Of course he's dead—your grousing killed him."

Dixon never liked the word "grousing"; it was an army word and outlandish. He resented Alan's three years of service as an army doctor, did his best to hide from the world that his employer had ever had that experience. It was a tradition of the medical profession in the year 1875 that army doctors were without quality, and Dixon had been brought up in the traditions of the profession.

Alan took the reins in his hand and looked up and down the dreary street. Snow and sleet were driving down from the north-west; the gas- lamps were dim nebulae of foggy light.

"Thank Gawd I rough-shod him yesterday." said Dixon, his mind, as ever, on the impatient and rather annoyed animal between the shafts. "Mind that hill near the Cross—he's fresh tonight, poor little feller." He held the horse's head as Alan stepped up into the trap, wrapped a leather covered rug waist-high about him and sat on the driver's seat.

"All right—let go his head." The cob slipped, recovered, found his feet and his gait and went swiftly down the white-covered road. Wet snow beat into Alan's face, blinding him. Clear of Banner Cross the street lights vanished, and he drove into a black void which the faint light of his trap lamps did little to illuminate.

Happily, the cob knew the road, knew, in his peculiar way, every hedge, every isolated house. Where the road turned sharply he checked of his own will; he fell into a walk at every sharp rise and picked his way cautiously down every declivity.

Alan dreamed his waking dreams, which were in the main as fantastical and unreal as the shadows about him. He dreamed of a day when the railroad would run to the least village; perhaps there would some day be road locomotives on the lines of traction engines and steam rollers, but less cumbersome and cheaper. Perhaps a time would come when every man would have his own little engine which ran at incredible speeds—twenty miles an hour possibly—along every highway.

He hoped Mrs Stahm's servants would be able to give him tea or coffee—the latter for choice. The Germans made good coffee, or was she Swedish? He had seen her often, riding in the foreign-looking victoria with her coachman and her footman on the box, a dark-eyed, inscrutable woman of uncertain age. Nobody knew her; his small circle of friends used to speculate upon her identity and wonder what brought her to the outskirts of Sheffield and the loneliness of Brinley Hall, until they learnt that she was the widow of a Swiss engineer who had invented a new steel which was yet in its experimental stage. Apparently she lived near to the scene of the experiments, not because her interest in her husband's invention was academic or sentimental, but because she herself had had something of a scientific training. Young Dibden, whose father was senior partner of the firm that were trying out the invention, spoke of her with respect.

"By gad, she's clever! A woman, too...! You wouldn't expect a woman to know anything about the chemistry of steel, but she does. Got the process from A to Z...told Furley that he was old-fashioned...what was the word? Archaic! But she's odd—deuced odd. None of the women likes her—they loathe her. She doesn't ask 'em to tea and they don't ask her. She makes 'em shiver, and by heavens she makes me shiver too!" Alan grinned into the dark night. Would Madame Stahm make him shiver? He saw humanity from his own peculiar angle. Men and women could be majestic and terrifying and all the things that impress, but usually they were never really interesting until he was called in to see them: rather pitiful creatures who had shed their majesty and were neither impressive nor awe- inspiring.

The cob went at a steady gait, clop-clopping through the snow covering of the road. Once he shied at something Alan could not immediately see. Snatching up the pony, he brought him to the centre of the road and, as he did so, he saw the figure which had startled the animal: the shape of a man trudging through the street. He shouted abusively in a harsh voice. Alan heard the word "lift", but he was giving no lifts that night. There were some queer people in this neighbourhood—burglaries had been numerous; it was not a night to invite any unknown pedestrian to share the trap.

His gloved hands were stiff and numbed with cold when he turned the cob's head towards the two stone pillars that flanked the drive. It wound up through an avenue of anaemic-looking trees to the big house. No lights showed in any of the windows.

Stiffly he descended, gathered up the reins...

"I'll take the horse." Alan almost jumped. The voice came from the darkness of the porch. Now he was dimly aware, not only of the figure in the dark porch, but that the door of the house was open. The hall was in darkness.

The man spoke again in a language which Alan did not understand. It sounded like one of the Scandinavian tongues. A second man came shambling into the open and went to the cob's head.

"He will stable the horse and look after him, doctor. Will you come this way?" Suddenly the lantern he was carrying threw out a strong yellow beam. Electricity was in the days of its infancy, and this was the first hand-lamp that Alan had ever seen—the famous Stahm lamp that was an object of curiosity for many years afterwards.

They passed into the hall, and the heavy door closed behind them.

"One moment—I will strike a lucifer and light the gas," said the guide.

Mainford waited. A match spluttered, and in a second the hall was illuminated.

The guide was a man of forty. He was well, even foppishly dressed. The long, yellow face was framed in side whiskers; there hung about him the nidor of stale cigar smoke.

"Before you go up, doctor,"—he stood squarely between Alan and the broad staircase which led to the upper part of the house—"let me tell you that Madame is not ill—not ill as you would say that a person is ill, eh?" English was not his native tongue, Alan realized. Though his accent was pure, the construction of his sentences, no less than his choice of words, betrayed him.

"She has storms in her brain; fears of death groundless. She is too clever. In a woman that is terrible. For a long while she will go on, but sometimes there comes to her a sense of...bafflement. There is no such word, eh? But you understood. Good! A wall confronts her. She screams, she tries to climb up, she tries to burrow beneath, she tears at the stones with her pretty fingers. Absurd! Wait, I say, and the wall she will vanish. Mind"—he tapped his narrow forehead—"always mind will triumph! In such times the nasty little man can soothe her. You know him? I am sure you know him. Ach! Such a man! But the good Lord makes them in all shapes and sizes." He went on, hardly stopping to find his breath, and all the time his long, white hands gesticulated every emphasis.

"What is the matter with her now?" asked Alan, a little bewildered to discover that "Madame" was not ill. It was a cool greeting after a six- mile drive on a stormy night. He did not trouble to wonder who this man was, or in what relationship he stood to his patient. Such matters did not greatly interest him. The name of his companion and his profession he was to learn immediately.

"Hysteria—no more. It is alarming, but I would not have sent for you. Madame thinks she will die. A doctor and a priest and the nasty little man. The priest, no! She shall not die, but she shall be ill if I do not bring her relief. I am Baumgarten—engineer. Dr Stahm was my master—I his disciple. Eckhardt was also his disciple. He is dead. All thieves die sometime. He died in America of consumption. There is a God!" Abruptly he turned and walked up the stairs, Alan, carrying the bag he had taken from underneath the seat of the trap, following. Who was Eckhardt? Why the malignant satisfaction that he had died so painfully? Eckhardt was a thief; what had he stolen?

At the head of the stairs was a wide landing. The walls were hung with tapestries; there was a suggestion of luxury, of immense wealth, and with it went an air of neglect and decay. There was a certain mustiness about the house which betokened a total disregard for fresh air or ventilation. Two of the tapestries hung crookedly; Alan saw that they were supported en loops of string from tenpenny nails driven into the panels.

"This way, my dear sir." Baumgarten opened a recessed door and they passed, not into a bedroom, as Alan had expected, but into a great drawing- room. Though from the centre of the black ceiling hung a gas chandelier, where three yellow flames were burning within glass globes, it was almost as if he had walked into the outer dark. The walls, the carpets, the curtains were papered or draped in black. The furniture, when he could pick it out, was upholstered and lacquered in the same gloomy hue. The only relief to this manufactured gloom was the woman in pale green velvet who sat on the raised dais at one end of the long room, and the white-clad nurse who stood by her side, watching Alan with a relief in her eyes which she did not attempt to disguise.

It was not on the patient, but on the nurse, that Dr Mainford's attention was riveted. In her simple uniform she looked like some exquisite creature of the Renaissance with her dull gold hair which the nurse's bonnet could not hide, and her slim, perfectly poised figure. The exquisite moulding of her face, the red rose lips, the firm little chin, the ivory whiteness of her skin, left him breathless.

He knew most of the nurses in Sheffield, but this was a stranger to him.

"Well, well, well." It was Baumgarten's impatient voice. "There is madame to be seen, is it not?" And then, almost with a wrench, Alan turned his attention to the woman in green. It was difficult to believe that she was human. Her face was an enamelled white, the dark eyes stared ahead of her; she seemed oblivious of her surroundings, of his presence, of anything that was earthly.

From her face, plastered thick with powder, he could not judge her age. It was only when he saw the hands, tightly clenched on the arms of her velvet chair, that he judged her to be over fifty. She sat, stiff, motionless, bolt upright, her chin raised, her face expressionless. About her neck was a great circle of green stones. From their size he was satisfied they could not be emeralds; but here he was mistaken. A big emerald ring glittered on one finger. About each arm was bracelet upon bracelet, until she glittered from wrist to elbow.

Alan experienced a queer sense of embarrassment as he went to her and tried to take her hand. The clutching fingers could not be pried loose from their grip. He pushed up the jewelled circles, found her pulse and took out his watch. The pulse was faint but regular.

"Are you feeling ill?" he asked.

Madame Stahm made no answer, and he looked at the nurse inquiringly.

"She has been like this for nearly an hour," said the girl in a low voice. "I have tried everything. It looks like a cataleptic seizure, but Mr Baumgarten says it is not unusual and that she will recover in time. She was taken ill last night at about seven," she went on. "It was dreadful!"

"Screaming?" She nodded. He heard her quick sigh.

"Yes...dreadful. Mr Baumgarten was alarmed. But the attack passed off, and he thought it was over. At eleven o'clock it came on again, worse." She did not take her eyes from his when she spoke, and he saw in them the shadow of fear, which is very rarely met with in the eyes of a woman of her profession.

"What is your name?" he asked.

"Jane Garden. I am from St Mary's Hospital in London. I've been here a month." She glanced past him towards Baumgarten, who stood motionless, his head bent, a frank and unabashed listener.

Alan stooped and looked at the woman's eyes. They were set; the pupils were pin-pointed, and he made a little grimace.

"It is either hysteria or drugs—" he began.

"Neither—fool!" It was the green woman who almost snarled the words, and he was so startled that he dropped the stethoscope he was fitting.

She did not move, did not even turn her eyes in his direction. Only the thin lips moved.

"You have no sense, no brains! You see only material things! You do not examine the soul! I project myself into the infinite, and you say 'hysteria'! I walk with Stahm and his shadow, Eckhardt, and you say 'drugs'! I live in the shades, I go out of the world, and you feel my pulse and listen to my heart and say; 'Ah, well, she is mad.'"

And then the dead figure came to life. He saw the bosom rise as she inhaled a deep breath; the eyes moved slowly in his direction. The figure became suddenly alive.

"Who sent for this man? Who sent for him?" She almost screamed the words.

"I sent for him," said Baumgarten calmly. "You said you were dying, you asked for a doctor, a priest and the ugly man. Here is your doctor. The ugly man is coming—the priest, no." She began speaking rapidly to him in a language which was neither Scandinavian nor German. One word gave him the clue. They were talking in Russian. Both Baumgarten and Madame Stahm were Russian by birth, he discovered later.

The first part of her speech was obviously a flood of abuse; but gradually her voice and manner grew calmer, and the thin lips curled in a smile. When she turned to the doctor and spoke her manner was entirely changed.

"Most stupid of me, doctor," she said, so graciously that he was staggered. "I have these—what is the word?—fits! Hysteria? It is possible. But drugs—I do not think I have taken drugs—no, Baumgarten?" He shook his head slowly, his eyes upon her.

"That is the truth," she said. "Now you shall feel my pulse." She held out her hand almost gaily, and Alan's fingers closed upon a wrist that pulsated so strongly that it might not have been the same woman he had examined a few seconds before.

"It is hysteria possibly. I am a great trial to all my friends. But then, what woman is not? You are psychic, doctor?" It was a word not very commonly used, and he frowned.

"Psychic? Do you mean seeing spooks and things?"

"Spooks and things," she repeated with an ironic little smile. "Eh? That is your idea of the psychic? Well, perhaps you are right, doctor. My nerves are bad." She turned abruptly to Baumgarten. "The ugly man, is he coming?"

Baumgarten looked at his watch. "He should be here," he said, and went out of the room.

Madame Stahm regarded her professional caller with a quizzical smile. "You do not know my nasty little man, I suppose? Or does everybody know him? He is a seer. People do not believe so, but he has divinity!"

Alan for the moment was not interested in psychic things, or even ugly men who had divine qualities. He was intensely practical. "Don't you think you should undress and go to bed?" he said. "I can give you a bromide draught which can be made up at the chemists—there is one at the village two miles away."

She laughed a low, amused laugh.

"You say I take drugs, so you give me more, eh. That is funny!"

"Rest will be very good for you," he said.

The nurse started from her contemplation of Alan. "It will be very good for you," she urged. "You remember, I suggested a sleeping draught—"

"A sleeping draught, ach!" Madame Stahm snapped her jewelled fingers. "No, will have my ugly man and he will rest me. Jane doesn't like my ugly man."

There was no need for the girl to confirm this—her face told the story. The squeak of the door handle made Alan Mainford turn, and then he saw Madame's seer.