“The Blood Fetish” by Morley Roberts

Outside the tent the forest was alive and busy, as it is for ever in the tropics of Africa. Birds called with harsh strange notes from dark trees, for, though the forest was even more full of creeping shadows, the sun had not yet sunk beyond the western flats through which the Kigi ran to the sea. Monkeys chattered and howled: and beneath this chorus was the hum of a million insects, that voice of the bush which never ceases. The sick man in the tent moved uneasily and looked at his companion. 

‘Give me something to drink, doctor,’ he said. 

The doctor supported his head while he drank.

‘Were there any of your drugs in it?’ asked the patient. 

‘No, Smith,’ said the doctor. 

‘My taste is morbid,’ said Smith. ‘I shan’t last long, old chap.’ 

Dr Winslow looked out into the forest, into the night, for now it was night very suddenly. 

‘Nonsense,’ said Winslow. ‘You’ll live to take your collection home and be more famous than you are now.’ 

‘Am I famous?’ asked Simcox Smith. ‘I suppose I am in my way. I’m thought to know more than most about this country and the devilish ways of it. Every one acknowledges that, or everyone but Hayling.’ 

He frowned as he mentioned the name. 

‘He’s no better than an ignorant fool,’ he remarked. ‘But we see strange things here, doctor.’ 

The doctor sighed. 

‘I suppose so,’ he said, ‘but what fools we are to be here at all.’ The dying man shook his head. 

‘No, no, I’ve learnt a lot, old chap. I wish I could teach Hayling. I meant to, and now I can’t. He’ll spend all his time trying to discredit my—my discoveries.’ 

‘Lie quiet,’ said the doctor, and for long minutes Simcox Smith and the anthropologist said nothing. He lay thinking. But he spoke at last. 

‘I’ve not bought that thing from Suja,’ he said. 

‘Don’t,’ said Winslow. 

‘You think it’s fraud?’ 

‘I’m sure of it,’ said Winslow. 

Simcox Smith laughed. 

‘You are as bad as Hayling.’ 

He put out his hand and drew Winslow closer to him.

‘Suja showed me what it did,’ he said. ‘I saw it myself.’ 

‘On what?’ asked Winslow quickly. 

‘On a prisoner, one who was killed when you were away.’ ‘And it did—’ 

‘Did something! My God, yes,’ said the anthropologist, shivering. ‘What?’ asked the doctor curiously, but with drawn brows. 

‘He grew pale and it got red. I thought I saw the wrist,’ said Simcox Smith. ‘I thought I saw it. I did see it.’ 

Winslow would have said it was all a delusion if Smith had been well. He knew how men’s minds went in the rotten bush of the West Coast. He had seen intellects rot, and feared for his own. 

‘Oh,’ said Winslow. 

The sick man lay back in his bed. 

‘I’ll buy it and send it to Hayling.’ 

‘Nonsense,’ said Winslow; ‘don’t.’ 

‘You don’t believe it, so why shouldn’t I send it? I will. I’ll show Hayling! He’s a blind fool, and believes there are no devilish things in this world. What is this world, old chap, and what are we? It’s all horrible and ghastly. Fetch Suja, old chap.’ 

‘Nonsense, lie down and be quiet,’ said Winslow. 

‘I want Suja, the old rascal, I want him,’ said Smith urgently. ‘I must have it for Hayling. I’d like Hayling or some of his house to grow pale. They’ll see more than the wrist. Oh God! What’s the head like?’ 

He shivered. 

‘I want Suja,’ he said moaning, and presently Winslow went out and send a boy for Suja, who came crawling on his hands and knees, for he was monstrously old and withered and weak. But his eyes were alive. They looked like lamps in a gnarled piece of wood. He kneeled on the floor beside Smith’s bed. Smith talked to him in his own tongue that Winslow could not understand, and the two men, the two dying men, talked long and eagerly while Winslow smoked. Suja was dying, had been dying for twenty, fifty years. His people said they knew not how old he was. But Smith would die next day, said Winslow. Suja and Smith talked, and at last they came to an agreement. And then Suja crawled out of the tent. 

‘Get me a hundred dollars out of my chest,’ said Smith. ‘And when I am dead you will give him my clothes and blankets; all of them.’ 

‘All right if you say so,’ said Winslow. He got the hundred dollars out, and presently the old sorcerer came back. With him he brought a parcel done up in fibre and a big leaf, and over that some brown paper on which was as label in red letters,’ With great care’. It was a precious piece of paper, and not a soul thereabouts but Suja would have touched it.The red letters were some dreadful charm, so Suja had told the others. 

‘This is it,’ said Suja. 

‘Give him the money,’ said Smith eagerly. 

He turned to Suja and spoke quietly to him in his own tongue. ‘It’s not mine, Suja, but John Hayling’s. Say it.’ 

Winslow heard Suja say something, and then he heard the words, ‘Shon ’Aylin’.’ 

Simcox Smith looked up at Winslow. 

‘He gives it to Hayling,Winslow,’ he said triumphantly. 

‘Is that part of the mumbo jumbo?’ asked Winslow, half contemptuously. But somehow he was not wholly contemptuous. The darkness of the night and the glimmer of the lamp in the darkness, and the strange and horrible aspect of the sorcerer affected him. 

‘Shon ’Aylin’,’ mumbled Suja, as he counted his dollars. 

‘Yes, it’s part of it,’ said Smith. ‘It won’t work except on the one who owns it and on his people. It must be transferred. We have it to the slave who died.’ 

‘It’s a beastly idea,’ said Winslow. 

‘You’ll send it for me,’ said Smith. ‘You must.’ 

‘Oh, all right,’ said Winslow.

With trembling hands Smith put the packet into a biscuit tin. Old Suja crept out into the darkness. 

‘I believe anything with that old devil in the tent,’ said Winslow. Smith giggled. 

‘It’s true, and it’s Hayling’s. I always meant to send it to him, the unbelieving beast,’ he said. ‘I wish I was going to live to see it.You’ll send it,Winslow?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘You promise on your word of honour?’ insisted Smith. 

Reluctantly enough, Winslow gave his word of honour, and Smith was satisfied. And at ten o’clock that night he died in his sleep. 

Winslow packed up all his papers and collections, and sent him down to the coast by carriers and canoe. The packet containing the fetish which Smith had bought from the ancient sorcerer he sent by post to England. He addressed it to A.J. Hayling, 201 Lansdown Road, St John’s Wood. By this time Winslow had recovered his tone. He believed nothing which he could not see. He was angry with himself for having been affected by what Smith and old Suja had said and done. 

‘It’s absurd, of course,’ said Winslow, with bend brows. He added, ‘but it’s a beastly idea.’ 

When he sent the fetish away he wrote a letter to go with it, saying that Simcox Smith had often spoken to him of his rival in England. He described briefly what had occurred at the time of Smith’s death, and gave some brief details of old Suja. He was obviously very old, and all the natives for miles round were frightened of him. Nevertheless, there was, of course, nothing in the thing. Latterly the climate and overwork had obviously affected Smith’s mind. ‘I should not sent it if he had not made me promise to do so on my word of honour,’ wrote Winslow. 

He dismissed the matter from his mind, and the parcel and letter went home by the next Elder Dempster boat. 

Mr Hayling was rather pleased than otherwise to hear of Simcox Smith’s decease, although he said ‘poor fellow,’ as one must when a scientific enemy and rival dies. They had quarreled for years when they met at the Societ’s rooms, and had fought in the scientific journals. Hayling was an anthropological Mr Gradgrind. He wanted facts, and nothing but facts. He believed he was a Baconian, as he knew nothing of Bacon. It had never occurred to him that there was any mystery in anything. There was nothing but ignorance, and most men were very ignorant. The existence of men, of things, of the universe, of matter itself, were all taken for granted by him, in the same way they were taken for granted by the average man. What made Simcox Smith (who had a penchant for metaphysics) once jokingly called the Me-ness of the Ego was an absurdity. It was idiocy. When a man begins to think what made himself an Ego and what constitutes ‘Me’, he is on the verge of insanity unless he is a great philosopher. 

‘Simcox Smith is an ass,’ said Hayling, quite oblivious to the fact that Smith had done good work in many directions and offered some conjectural hypotheses to the world which had much merit and might some day rank as theories. ‘Simcox Smith is an ass. He believed in occultism. He believed, I am prepared to swear, in witchcraft. He mistook the horrible ideas of a savage race for realities. Would you believe it, he even said that everything believed in utter and simple faith had a kind of reality? He said this was a law of nature!’ 

Obviously Simcox Smith had been mad. But some easily affected and imaginative people said it was a dreadful idea, just as Winslow had said the notion of Suja’s blood fetish was a beastly one. Imagine for an instant that the idea was true! It meant that the frightful imaginations of madmen had a quasi existence at least! It meant that there was a dreadful element of truth (for who knew what truth was?) in any conceived folly. A man had but to imagine something to create it. One of Smith’s friends really believed this. He was an atheist, he said, but he believed (in a way, he added, as he laughed) that mankind had really created a kind of anthropomorphic deity, with the passions and feelings attributed to him by belief and tradition. No wonder, said this friend of Smith’s, that the world was a horrible place to anyone who could grasp its misery and had ears for its groans. 

It must be acknowledged that this idea of Simcox Smith’s was a horrible one. It really affected some men. One tried it on a child (he was very scientific, and believed in his experiments he could more or less control) and the child saw things which threw it into a fit and injured it for life.

Nevertheless, it was a very interesting experiment, for something happened to the child (there were odd marks on it) which looked like something more than suggestion, unless it all true that we hear of stigmata. Perhaps it is, but personally I have an idea (I knew Smith) that there is something in his damnable creating theory. 

But to return to Hayling. He got the parcel from the Coast, and he read Winslow’s letter. 

‘Poor fellow,’ said Hayling; ‘so he’s dead at last. Well, well! And what is this that he sends? A blood fetish? Ah, he thinks he can convert me at the last, the poor mad devil.’ 

He opened the parcel, and inside the matting and the leaves, which smelt of the West Coast of Africa (the smell being muddy and very distinctive to those who have smelt it), he found a dried black hand, severed at the wrist joint.There was nothing else, only this hand. 

‘Humph,’ said Hayling, who had nerves which had never been shaken by the bush and the fevers of the bush, and had never heard black men whispering dreadfully of the lost soulds of the dead. ‘Humph.’ 

He picked it up and looked at it. It was an ordinary hand, a right hand, and there was nothing remarkable about it at first. On a further look the nails seemed remarkably long, and that gave the hand a rather cruel look. Hayling said ‘humph,’ again. He examined it carefully and saw that it was very deeply marked on the palm. 

‘Very interesting,’ said Hayling. Curiously enough (or rather it would have been curious if we didn’t know that the strongest of us have our weak spots), he had a belief or some belief in palmistry. He had never acknowledged it to a soul but a well-known palmist in the west of London. ‘Very interesting. I wonder what Sacconi would say of these lines?’ 

Sacconi was the palmist. He was an Irishman. 

‘I’ll show it to Sacconi,’ said Hayling. He packed it up in its box again and put it in a cupboard, which he locked up. He dismissed the matter, for he had a good deal to do. He had to write something about Simcox Smith, for instance, and he was working on totemism. He hardly thought of the dried hand for some days.

Hayling was a bachelor, and lived with a niece and a housekeeper. He was a nice man to live with unless one knew anything about anthropology and totems and such like, and Mary Hayling knew nothing about them whatever. She said ‘Yes, uncle dear,’ and ‘No, uncle dear,’ just as she ought to do, and when he abused Simcox Smith, or Robins-Gunter, or Williams, who were rivals of his, she was always sympathetic and said it was a shame. 

‘What’s a shame?’ said Hayling. 

‘I don’t know, dear uncle,’ said Mary Hayling. 

And Hayling laughed. 

Then there was the housekeeper. She was fair, stout and ruddy, and very cheerful in spite of the fact that skulls and bones and specimen things in bottles made her flesh creep. She knew nothing whatever about them, and wondered what they mattered. Why Mr Hayling raged and rumbled about other men’s opinions on such horrid subjects she didn’t know. However, she took everything easily, and only remonstrated when the fullness of the house necessitated skulls being exposed to public view. The passage even had some of them and the maids objected to dusting them, as was only natural. Hayling said he didn’t want’em dusted, but what would any housekeeper who was properly constituted think of that? She made the girls dust them, though she herself shivered. She even saw that they wiped glass bottles with awful things inside them. She and the housemaid cleaned up Mr Hayling’s own room and opened the cupboard where the hand was. The girl gave a horrid squeak as she put her hand in and touched it. 

‘O, law, ma’am, what is it?’ asked Kate. 

‘Don’t be a fool, girl,’ said Mrs Farwell, with a shiver. ‘It’s only a hand.’ 

‘Only—oh Lord! I won’t touch it,’ said the girl. ‘There’s a dead mouse by it.’ 

‘Then take out the dead mouse,’ said the housekeeper. The girl did so, and slammed the cupboard door to and locked it. The mouse was a poor shriveled little thing, but how interesting it would have been to dead Simcox Smith neither Kate nor the housekeeper knew. It went into the dustbin as if it did not bear witness to a horror.

That afternoon Mrs Farwell spoke to Hayling. 

‘If you please, sir, there’s a hand in that cupboard, and I couldn’t get Kate to clean it out.’ 

‘A hand! Oh yes, I remember,’ said Hayling. ‘The girl’s a fool. Does she think it will hurt her? How did she know it was there? I wrapped it up. Some one’s been meddling.’ 

‘I don’t think so, sir,’ said Mrs Farwell, with dignity. ‘She is much too frightened to meddle, and so am I.’ 

‘Mrs Farwell, you are a fool,’ said Hayling. 

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mrs Farwell. When Mrs Farwell had sailed out of the room Hayling opened the cupboard and found the hand out of its package. 

‘Some one has been meddling,’ growled Hayling.‘They pretend that they are frightened and come hunting here to get a sensation. I know ‘em. They’re all savages, and so are all of us. Civilization!’ 

He gave a snort when he thought of what civilization was. That is an anthropological way of looking at it. It’s not a theological way at all. 

He looked at the hand. It was a curious hand. 

‘It’s contracted a little,’ said Hayling. ‘The fist has closed, I think. Drying unequally. But it’s interesting; I’ll show it to Sacconi.’ 

He put the hand into its coverings, and took it that very afternoon to Sacconi. 

Personally Hayling believed in chiromancy. As I have said, it really was his only weakness. I never used to believe it when he argued with me, but now I have my doubts. When Sacconi took the thing into his own white and beautiful hands and turned it over to look at the palm, his eyebrows went up in a very odd way. Hayling said so. 

‘This, oh, ah,’ said Sacconi. His real name was Flynn. He came from Limerick. ‘This is very odd—very–’ 

‘Very what?’ asked Hayling. 

‘Horrible, quite horrible,’ said Sacconi.

‘Can you read it, man?’ 

Sacconi grunted. 

‘Can I read the Times? I can, but I don’t. I’ve half the mind not to read this. It’s very horrible, Hayling.’ 

‘The devil,’ said Hayling;‘what d’ye mean?’ 

‘This is a negro’s hand.’ 

‘Any fool can see that,’ said Hayling rudely. 

‘A murderer’s hand.’ 

‘That’s likely enough,’ said Hayling. 

‘A cannibal’s hand.’ 

‘You don’t say so!’ said Hayling. 

‘Oh, worse than that.’ 

‘What’s worse?’ 

Sacconi said a lot that Hayling denounced as fudge. Probably it was fudge. And yet— 

‘I’d burn it,’ said Sacconi, with a shiver, as he handed it back to Hayling, and went to wash his hands. ‘I’d burn it.’ 

‘There’s a damn weak spot in you, Sacconi,’ said the anthropologist. ‘Perhaps,’ said Sacconi, ‘but I’d burn it.’ 

‘Damn nonsense,’ said Hayling. ‘Why should I?’ 

‘I believe a lot of things you don’t,’ said Sacconi. 

‘I disbelieve a lot that you don’t,’ retorted Hayling. 

‘You see, I’m a bit of a clairvoyant,’ said Sacconi. 

‘I’ve heard you say that before,’ said Hayling, as he went away. 

When he got home again he put the hand in the cupboard. He forgot to lock it up. And he locked the cat up in his room when he went to bed. 

There was an awful crying of cats, or a cat, in the middle of the night. But cats fight about that time.

And when Kate opened the door of Hayling’s working-room in the morning she saw the hand upon the hearthrug, and gave a horrid scream. It brought Mrs Farwell out of the drawling room, and Hayling out of the bathroom in a big towel. 

‘What the devil—’ said Hayling. 

‘What is it, Kate?’ cried Mrs Farwell. 

‘The hand! the hand!’ said Kate. ‘It’s on the floor.’ 

Mrs Farwell saw it. Hayling put on his dressing-gown, and came down and saw it, too. 

‘Give that fool a month’s notice,’ said Hayling. ‘She’s been meddling again.’ 

‘I haven’t,’ said Kate, sobbing. And then Mrs Farwell saw the cat lying stretched out under Hayling’s desk. 

‘It was the cat. There she is,’ said Mrs Farwell. 

‘Damn the cat,’ said Hayling. He took Kate’s broom and gave the cat a push with it. 

The cat was dead. 

‘I don’t want a month’s notice,’ said Kate, quavering. ‘I’ll go now.’ 

‘Send the fool off,’ said Hayling angrily. He took up the cat, of which he had been very fond, and put it outside, and shut the door on the crying girl and Mrs Farwell. He picked up the hand and looked at it. 

‘Very odd,’ said Hayling. 

He looked again. 

‘Very beastly,’ said Hayling. ‘I suppose it’s my imagination.’ He looked once more. 

‘Looks fresher,’ said Hayling. ‘These fools of women have infected me.’ 

He put the hand down on his desk by the side of a very curious Maori skull, and went upstairs again to finish dressing.

That morning the scientific monthlies were out, and there was much of interest in them that Hayling forgot all about the hand. He had an article in one of them abusing Robins-Gunter, whose views on anthropology were coloured by his fanaticism in religion. ‘Imagine a man like that thinking he is an authority on anything scientific,’ said Hayling. It was a pleasure to slaughter him on his own altar, and indeed this time Hayling felt he had offered Robins-Gunter up to the outraged deity of Truth. 

‘It’s a massacre,’ said Hayling; ‘it’s not a criticism—it’s a massacre.’ 

He said ‘Ha-ha!’ and went to town to hear what others had to say about it. They had so much to say that he remained at the club till very late, and got rather too much wine to drink. Or perhaps it was the whisky-and-soda. He left his working-room door open and unlocked. 

Kate had gone, sacrificing a fortnight’s wages. Mrs Farwell said she was a fool. Kate said she would rather be a fool outside that house. She also said a lot of foolish things about the hand, which had a very silly effect upon the housekeeper. For how else can we account for what happened that night? Kate said that the beastly hand was alive, and that it had killed the cat. Uneducated superstitious girls from the country often say things as silly. But Mrs Farwell was a woman of nerves. She only went to sleep when heard her master come in. 

She woke screaming at three o’clock, and Hayling was still so much under the influence of Robins-Gunter’s scientific blood and the club whisky that he didn’t wake. But Mary Hayling woke and so did the cook, and they came running to Mrs Farwell’s room. They found her door open. 

‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ screamed Mary Hayling. She brought a candle and found Mrs Farwell sitting up in bed. 

She was as white as a ghost, bloodlessly white. ‘There’s been a horrible thing in my room,’ she whispered. 

The cook collapsed on a chair; Mary Hayling say on the bed and put her arms round the housekeeper. 

‘What?’ 

‘I saw it,’ whispered Mrs Farwell. ‘A black man, reddish black, very horrible—‘

She fainted, and Mary laid her down. 

‘Stay with her,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll go and wake my uncle.’ 

The cook whimpered, but she lighted the gas and stayed, while Mary hammered on Hayling’s door. He thought it was thunderous applause at a dinner given him by the Royal Society.Then he woke. 

‘What is it?’ 

Mary opened the door and told him to get up. 

‘Oh, these women,’ he said. 

His head ached. He went upstairs cursing and found Mrs Farwell barely conscious. 

The cook was shaking like a jelly, and Hayling thrust her aside. He had some medical training before he turned to anthropology, and he took hold of the housekeeper’s wrist, and found her pulse a mere running thread. 

‘Go and bring brandy,’ said Hayling, ‘and fetch Dr Sutton from next door.’ 

He was very white himself. So far as he could guess she looked as if she were dying of loss of blood. But she didn’t die. Sutton, when he came in, said the same. 

‘She’s not white only from fainting, she’s blanched,’ he declared. 

He turned back her nightgown, and found a very strange red patch on her shoulder. It was redder than the white skin, and moist. He touched it with a handkerchief, and the linen was faintly reddened. He turned and stared at Hayling. 

‘This is very extraordinary,’ he said, and Hayling nodded. 

He tried to speak and could not. At last he got his voice. It was dry and thick. 

‘Don’t you think the patch is the shape of a hand?’ asked Hayling. ‘Yes, rather,’ replied Sutton; ‘somewhat like it, I should say.’ 

They were all in the room then: Mary Hayling and the cook. There was no other person in the house. They could have sworn that was a fact. They heard a noise below. 

‘What’s that?’ asked Hayling. 

‘Someone gone out the front door, sir,’ said the trembling cook. ‘Nonsense,’ said Hayling. 

But the door slammed. When he ran down he found no one about. He went upstairs again shaking. For he had looked for something in his own room and had not found it. 

The next day there was a curious paragraph in all the evening papers. 

‘The freshly severed hand of a negro was picked up early this morning in Lansdown Road, St John’s Wood, just outside the residence of the well known anthropologist, Mr A.J. Hayling. The police are investigating the mystery.’ 

But Hayling destroyed the article in which he proposed to massacre the poor credulous Simcox Smith.