THE WHITE WOLF

THE WHITE WOLF

by Franklin Gregory

IT WAS the boast of Pierre de Camp d'Avesnes that the wild fragrance of the perfume for which his name was celebrated could not be duplicated. Not in the five and one-half centuries his family had possessed the formula in their native France, nor the one hundred and fifty years since their escape to America, had the secret been lost.

Pierre used to explain about it, sitting in the overstuffed luxury of the Bankers and Manufacturers Club—his poorer eye, the one with the drooping lid, fixed wistfully on the fat cigars in the mouths of his economic-royalist auditors.

Old Henri Comte de Saint-Pol, had started the thing. He had been on the last of the Crusades with Louis IX, and later, knocking around in Zorzania only a score of years in advance of Marco Polo, had picked up the secret.

As a matter of course, the Comte de Saint-Pol, aside from hunting and making war, did nothing for himself. The manufacture was left in the hands of two dependent families, each halving the secret—and the labor. And the ladies and gentlemen of the house d’Avesnes henceforth possessed their individual odor, which became as distinctive to their line as their coat of arms.

Not a member of the club but had heard Pierre tell the story.

“We must have been a pretty stinking lot,” he would say, and would blow his nose with the large white handkerchief he stored in a tail pocket of his baggy suit coat. The very thought of himself using perfume was abhorrent.

He talked a good deal about his family; their estates along the Somme: their love of the hunt; how Gervase, his great-great-grand- father, escaped the Revolution and, after a two-month buffetting in an English brig, reached Philadelphia with no other capital than the family formula. But for some reason, and in spite of the luxuriant growth of the family tree, Pierre had never penetrated further back, conversationally, than old Henri. He did tonight.

It was Halloween. It was raining. Ben McCallister had gotten up and said he supposed he'd better drop over to the Bellevue for his daughter's party. Pierre had said Sara would be there, and McAllister left. Grillot (Biddle, Baker 8c Grillot, Bonds) watched him leave, then turned and stood at the tall, wide, heavily draped windows, peering out into the evening traffic of Broad Street. Behind the creases of his frown you would have thought he was pondering some heavy financial matter—the City Housing Authority’s $32,000,000 issue of debentures, perhaps, or the pawning of the Municipal Gas Works. As a matter of fact, he was simply watching the tracings left on the wet pavement by the tires of motor vehicles and wondering what happened to them when they disappeared. He said, suddenly, without turning his head toward the group of men sitting behind him: “It’s the night when witches walk.” “Witches don't walk, sir,” grunted Dr. Hardt. “They ride. Ghosts walk.”

Grillot said nothing; merely kept looking at the rain. Dr. Hardt added:

“Not that I ever saw one. But—’’

The others knew what the “but” meant. The massive psychiatrist referred to his own one-time interest in the occult.

There was a silence, of voices. Manning Trent, sinking back in his leather lounge chair and pulling at his corona, squinted at Pierre. He thought he saw that gleam in Pierre’s pale blue eyes which usually preceded one of his stories about his family. Yet there was something doubtful about the gleam this time; as if Pierre was giving more than ordinary thought to what he was going to say: or, more accurately, was weighing the advisability of saying it at all. Hanling, who manufactured beltings, saw the gleam, too.

He groaned, “Oh, Lord!”

He really didn't mean Pierre's stories ever bored him. It was simply his way of being funny. But his exclamation had the effect of prolonging the silence, of permitting the fleshy-faced Pierre to chew his thoughts into finer particles.

Pierre chewed. He fingered, as he always did when thoughtful, die big mole on his right cheek. He shifted his not inconsiderable bulk and he looked at Trent as if asking for some signal. He always did that. It was a little rite between the two men, attesting that their bond was somewhat closer than, with the others. Pierre’s eyes asked:

“Looking for an argument?”

And Trent, who always liked to hear Pierre argue about anything (indeed, every story Pierre told wound up with an argument better than the tale and Pierre never cared which side he took), nodded gently. Pierre picked at his mole.

Pierre said, “I never saw a ghost walk, either. I never saw a witch ride. But I’ve an ancestor. . . .”

Grillot, whose sharp financial brains were gambling on which of two raindrops would be first to reach the window sill, turned around.

“I don't believe.” Pierre said. “I’ve ever told you about old Hughes. He was one of the Comtes de Saint-Pol too. But considerably before old Henri’s time. My father—you remember Father, Manning—was pretty much ashamed of him. As if what somebody did a thousand years before you came along had anything to do with you.”

Hanling's nose wrinkled.

“A thousand? The last time I heard of your family, it was seven hundred.”

Trent said, “Let him alone, E.B.”

GROOVES appeared in Pierre’s wide forehead. He didn't like those interruptions.

“Well, say eight hundred, then. And I’ll say now, gentlemen, it's about as far back as I can trace my people, though I imagine old Hugues had a father, the same as the rest of us. Only . . . well, I've always thought it might be the Devil.

“I mean that. There probably wasn’t a crueler man ever lived. Nor more cowardly. And that goes for any of your present-day dictators. Men like Hugues always have enemies. Hugues had them by the dozen. 'Two of them were the Comte d'Auxi and the Comte de Beaurain-sur Canche.

“You can read about 'em in your history books. Hugues got Auxi and Beaurain on the run and they and their gang made a beeline for the Abbey of Saint-Riquier, That's at Ponthieu. northeast a bit of Abbeville on the Somme and pretty close to the English Channel. You'll find it on any map. Anyway, Hugues chased the two counts to the abbey, attacked it and burned it.” Pierre held a finger to his nose, “I was,” he said slowly, “on July 28, 1131. More than three thousand men, women and children were killed.”

Dr. Hardt croughed.

“Three thousand, sir? Look at what Hitler did to Warsaw and Rotterdam. Look at London!”

Pierre inclined his thick neck slightly.

“Yes, yes, of course. But there’s no law now. The church hasn’t any power. But it did then. At least, there were understandings. And one of them was you couldn’t attack the abbey. But Hugues didn't stop there. He continued to pillage Ponthieu. The abbot got away to Abbeville and sent a messenger to the king of France. Louis le Gros got up on his high horse and started after Hugues with an army. Hugues got scared and ran off to the Pope.

“Innocent thought it over, called in a few cardinals, and finally told Hughes he wasn't sure he could save his soul. But maybe . . . well, if Hugues built a new abbey . . . well, His Holiness would see what he could do.”

Hanling asked, “Did he?”

“He did. He built a bigger and better abbey and he endowed it with most of the family fortune. Cercamp, they called it. Hugues’ life was saved, and he thought his soul was, too.”

Dr. Hardt said. “Well, sir, wasn’t it?”

Pierre replied slowly. “I don't know. But it is known that for more than four hundred years it was not at rest. Hugues de Camp- d’Avesnes, Comte de Saint-Pol, haunted that district for generation after generation. He was seen time after time, always at night, slinking among the ruins of Saint-Riquier. He was not seen as a man. He was seen as a wolf, a huge, white wolf burdened with chains. And on still, dark nights they said you could hear his bay from the forest as if he were in pain.”

Grillot turned on the balls of his feet and stared out the window. It had stopped raining. He knocked his pipe against an ornamental iron ash stand. He said, gruffly, over his shoulder:

“You believe that?”

Pierre’s eyes sought those of Manning Trent. It was again that secret signal of understanding, a question in a glance, silently asking:

“Well, Manning, which side shall I take?”

Trent's nod was imperceptible to the others.

Grillot said, still not turning, “I mean, damn it, in a general way. Do you believe in ghosts?”

Pierre's answer was in his most irritating tone, that which the others had learned was an invitation to debate.

“It isn’t,” Pierre said with casual assurance, “a question of believing, at all. It’s simply a matter of accepting known historical facts.”

“Trash!” exclaimed Grillot, and he turned, facing from his towering height the bulky, seated Pierre.

“Stuff and nonsense,” Hanling said.

“Really, sir,” said Dr. Hardt, “isn’t that just a bit on the long side?”

“And how about the wolf?” Grillot demanded. “How’d anybody know it was this ancestor of yours?”

“Of course,” chided Hanling. “Now, if the wolf had looked like Hugues. . . .”

“As a matter of fact,” Pierre said, “the eyes did.”

MEANWHILE, at the McCallister ball, young David Trent sat alone, desperately handsome, marvelously at ease, slender, immaculate. His face was lean and long and it was hollow of cheek. The tanned skin was neither old nor young, but there were lines . . . adding, Sara thought, a touch of the dignity of experience. He wore a terse, dark mustache suggestive—and only suggestive—of the sinister: and his carelessly elegant evening dress was. unlike most of the others about him, an expression of marked personality.

That personality, so definitely present in his clothes and in his face, was still short of exact definition. There was in it a hint of other climes, almost of other ages and other worlds. And this hint of cosmopolitan quality was intensified by the features—a nose Greek and classical, hair black and Latin, eyes almost Oriental.

Once the eyes looked at Sara. She felt naked before them. Yet, half screened by narrowing eyelids, they burned with an understanding Sara never fancied could exist in any human. Uncomfortably she lowered hers.

“Who is he?” David Trent inquired in the studied drawl with which he had combated his early speech impediment. Sara could only shrug her bare white shoulders.

There were others at the McCallister party who wondered, too, as they passed his table. And even Mrs. Constance McCallister, here introducing her daughter Cecile to society, caught herself more than once glancing discreetly at the man. It would never do to let him know she did not recognize him.

An hour passed. And Sara and David danced and drank the McCallisters' champagne. Then, suddenly, for no reason apparent to her, Sara's spirit seemed to dry up. And with it dried up the spirit of this tropical garden into which the McCallister railroad gold had transformed the ballroom. The banks of misty green acacia lost their loveliness; the artificial waterfall grew less lively; the exotic fish in the pool at the base of the fall lost something of their beauty.

She noticed the strange man had left his table. She said:

“Cecile's party’s awfully dull.”

And Sylvia Ambler, sitting at their table, said with the crude forthrightness of the very young, “Let’s scram.”

Sylvia’s escort, Chick Hunt, thought it a good idea. And so did Ann Curtis and Beefy Collins. And Sara said, in an odd sort of voice;

“I know just the place to have our fortunes told. Halloween too. They say he’s grand.”

But afterwards, holding up her green chiffon gown to step into the Trent's car, Sara wondered how she knew. She had never been there before. She was certain of that. And when she had said, “They say he’s grand,” she wondered what she meant by “they.” She could not recall anyone having told her. And that troubled her; for usually her memory was tenacious.

She wondered, as Roger, the Trent chauffeur, stopped at a red traffic light, if it was another of those inexplicables which occasionally beset her, such a compulsion as sometimes reached out at her from God alone knew where. No, no. Not that. She must have read about him somewhere. She snatched eagerly at this solution. She must have read about him.

The car reached South Street, the Lenox Avenue of Philadelphia’s Harlem. Sara leaned forward and issued a curt instruction to Roger. The car turned east.

“My dear,” purred Ann. “You certainly seem to know your way down here.”

Sara's full red lips set.

Chick Hunt said, “Say, isn’t this where those arsenic murderers were?”

Sylvia shivered deliciously.

“Somewhere in here,” Beefy volunteered. “Farther east, I think.”

Passage was slow. Sidewalks were crowded; the street was filled with oddly assorted traffic; late hucksters’ wagons, trucks, long green trolley cars.

The street was still wet after the rain. And it was still dirty with the litter of the day. Cans of ashes and rubbish spilled over at the curbs. It was a Philadelphia street, Sylvia thought, What a godawful funny place! Funny idea for Sara. . . .

Ann thought, She’s so cold, so aloof, never really one for a lark like this!

Big, broad-shouldered David Trent frowned. Didn’t like the neighborhood. He pressed Sara’s smooth, cool hand.