Vintage Vampire Stories (29 page)

One day the station was startled by a report that the young officer had been found dead in a jungle in one of the valleys. He had been bitten by a cobra, so the report said, for there was a peculiar little blue mark at the side of his neck.

If the virtuous ones didn't actually it served him right, they thought it; and mumbled that the young officer had been dining somewhere not wisely but too well, and had mistaken the jungle for his bedroom, and gone to sleep, otherwise how did the cobra manage to bite him in the neck.

It seemed a plausible theory. Anyway it got over a difficulty, and it brought an unpleasant little scandal to a tragic and abrupt end. So the virtuous ones went about their many occupations again, and the atmosphere was purer when it was known that the sorceress had disappeared as mysteriously as she had come.

The next direct evidence we got was that under the name of Isabella Rodino the adventuress turned up in Rome, where she rented a small but expensive villa in the fashionable Via Porta Pia. Everyone who knows Rome knows how exclusive society is, but while Isabella Rodino made no attempt to be received by Roman society she attracted to her villa some of the male representatives of the best families in the city. Amongst these gentlemen was the scion of one of the oldest Roman houses.

Now it may be said boldly here, and that without any reflections, that the young gentleman of Rome, as of most other continental cities, are allowed a good deal more latitude than would be accorded to the same class in, say, cold-blooded, unromantic, prosaic, and commonplace London, whose soot and grime, somehow, seem to grind their way into people's brains and hearts. Anyway the young gentleman referred to, whose baptismal name was Basta, did not at first provoke any very severe criticism, but he was destined ultimately to give the Romans a sensation to talk about for the proverbial nine days, for one Sunday morning a humble fisherman, having some business on the Tiber, fished out of that classic river the stark body of the scion. Over Rome flew the news, and those who loved him, and looked to him to uphold the honour and dignity of his family, were horror stricken.

Now, it's a very curious thing that his distracted relatives firmly believed that the young prodigal had in a moment of remorse, after a night's debauch, flung himself into eternity via the Tiber, and so mighty was their pride that they used their wealth, their influence, and their power to stifle inquiry, and caused a report to be circulated that Basta had met his end through accident. It is not less curious that the family doctor who examined the body was of opinion that there was something mysterious about the lad's death, for he certainly had not died by drowning, and on one side of the neck was a peculiar little bluish puncture. But as the family persisted in their view, the doctor, not wishing to lose their influential patronage, observed a discreet silence.

A week later, however, an agent of the police called on Isabella Rodino, and did something more than hint that it was desirable that within twenty-four hours she should leave Rome as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. The result of this functionary's call was Isabella Rodino journeyed to Florence by that night's mail train. It was known that she only sojourned two days in the fair city on the Arno.

After that there is another hiatus of something like two years in her known career, and it is not easy to fill up. And this brings us to that fatal night in Wiesbaden, when ill-starred Jack Redcar met the enchantress on the hotel stairs. From that point to the moment when, her role being finished, she disappeared for ever from the ken of men, the reader of the story can fill in for himself. She played out her last act under the name of Annette. In selecting her many names she seemed actuated by a fine sense of poetic euphony, and in selecting her victims she was guided by a ‘damnable' discrimination.

‘Annette,' as we will now call her, was a human riddle, and she illustrates for the millionth time the trite adage that ‘Truth is stranger than Fiction,' besides which she presents the world with an object lesson in the study of the occult.

Hugh Raymond McCrae (1876-1958) was the son of Australian poet George Gordon McRae. He was educated at Hawthorn Grammar School and grew up in his father's literary circles, which he described in
My Father and My Father's Friends
(1935).

McCrae, who belonged to an artists' club called “The Prehistoric Order of Cannibals,” lived a Bohemian existence. He wrote “The Vampire” under the pseudonym “W. W. Lamble” for the November 1901 edition of
The Bulletin
, which had published his first poem in 1896.

H
ow well I remember my first love,—with her stuffed busks and her stuffed hair! We did not meet in the summer, nor in the green grass near running water, but in winter, under the pale glare of gas, in the wet street and among people.

She was complexionless, her face so bleached that her black eyes and red lips positively glared; yet she had a silky fascination for me. And her smooth, evil hands brought not only flesh into contact, but mind.

She said she was hungry. I had just drawn my month's earnings, and we went arm-in-arm to a little green-curtained restaurant. It was sufficiently evil-looking, the gas low, and the solitary waiter unobstreperous.

I was drunk. The fumes of the cheap Burgundy started an orchestra in my ears, and swelled the veins of my brain. The wind lifted the blind and blew my cigarettes in a whirring covey off the table. I stooped to pick them up, but the blood-strings in my throat stood out, and the room darkened to my eyes. The waiter noiselessly came to my assistance, replacing them on a plate and retaining a few slyly up his sleeve. But I said nothing, only looking at Marguerite and her long, folded fingers.

She ordered some oysters and, when they had come, I watched her squeeze a lemon-quarter into the shells and over the firm fish.

I seemed to be in a garden with Marguerite. The garden was full of lilies—tall, white lilies without a speck or mark; and everywhere amongst them were blue flies, trumpeting a buzzing with pleasure. Here and there a rich bee, with powdered legs, swayed on a flower, like a jewel in snow. The air was warm and soft as down, while the rounded sound of bubbling water poppled in the moss, between the bars of lily-stalks. A delicious sweetness of earth and honey mounted to my brain. I watched a butterfly, winged in old-gold and grey, as he flickered on a red tile under the steady shadow of a fern.

Gradually I grew aware of the subtle electrical hand upon my wrist—then of the eyes that made my mind hers, nay, my very soul. The small, piercing eyes, whose pupils diminished and enlarged, and enlarged and diminished, like the flame of a dying lamp. And every time the pupils diminished, they seemed to me two miser hands that gripped my brain and squeezed myself from me, like a water from cloth, opening only to grip again.

But the woman, in the body, was tall, and breasted like a young girl; her back was straight as an arrow, and her neck reared white as a rock-wave carrying the magnificent head on its summit. She had a broad brow, but somewhat slanting; a long, slight nose, an eagerly insolent mouth, and the eyes I have spoken of. Her hair, where it was loose, shimmered and shook as though over a heat-mist.

Presently she lifted her hands from my wrists, and I felt her fingers thrill through my temples, as she drew me towards her and kissed me on the lips. A song seemed to set up in the garden, and the lilies shot up like stars, swayed in the sky, meeting in an arch, and crossed in stormy rushes over our heads. The noise of the water rose clamorously, and a flight of coloured birds brushed my shoulder. A soft sensation went over the whole of my skin, like the dropping of a delicate veil.

And still she drew me closer.

I tried to resist, but, as in a nightmare, my arms remained limp and paralysed. Neither could I cry out. All at once, in the midst of a million kisses, she drew back her head, and, with a gasping laugh, pushed her red lips at my throat and bit me deep, even to blood.

In vain I beat her about the face, and plucked at her cheeks. She hung like a dog. With horrible little laughs and gurgles she greeted my impotent rage.

I put both hands to her forehead, and made to thrust her from me; but again my muscles failed. And she bit deeper.

Then the lilies withered down from the skies and lay stained and yellow on the earth. The butterfly lost its old-gold, and its wings and whole form broadened into a bat's. The soft ripple of the water changed to the purring of a flame, and bale fires leapt from every corner.

Still the woman tore at my throat.

My breath shortened, and I felt as though my skull were contracting and injuring my brain. Spasm after spasm shot through my head. Goaded to madness, I hurled my tormenter away, and as she returned to me, bloody-mouthed, I saw that she too had changed. Her eyes had sunk, her teeth were old and wasted to an appearance of cloves; her nose seemed flattened, and her hair thin. Her face was almost simian.

My strength failed me, and I staggered on my feet. “Marguerite,” I cried. “Woman! Devil! Vampire!”

And I fell clean to the ground, like a tree in a storm.

A great coldness rushed upon me, and an icy breath fanned my forehead. I could feel a pair of hands beneath my arm-pits. I was smothering. There was a bandage round my mouth.

I opened my eyes. There were stars—thousands of them—blinking and blinking, but below, turbid and swollen, lay the river without a light for miles.

The hands withdrew suddenly; and a man darted from me, fleeing up the steep stoned bank. It was the waiter of the restaurant. The bandage dropped off my jaw, and I could now understand the sweet scent of my garden dream.

My pockets were empty as the day when my clothes were made; that was a foregone conclusion.

Marguerite never again crossed my path. Yet I know that green-curtained restaurant, and some day I shall see her standing in the doorway. If she beckons, I must go to her.

Because I dare not refuse.

Philip Stewart Robinson (1847-1902), who was born in Chunar, India, pioneered Anglo-Indian studies. He was a journalist by trade who was best-known for his books about natural history. His most popular works include
In My Indian Garden
(1878),
Tigers at Large
(1884) and
The Valley of the Teetotum Tree
(1886).

In addition to the following vampire tale, he wrote two pseudo-vampire stories: “The Man-Eating Tree” appeared in his collection,
Under the Punkah
(1881), while “The Last of the Vampires” debuted in the
Contemporary Review
(March 1893) and was reprinted in 1889, along with “Medusa.”

“Medusa” debuted in
Tales by Three Brothers
(London: Ibister & Co., Ltd., 1889) which contains stories by Philip and his brothers Edward Kay Robinson and [Sir] Harry Perry Robinson, K.B.E. None of the fables are attributed to specific authors, but it is assumed that Philip wrote the following story.

I
t was on the 17th of June that the world read in its morning paper that James Westerby had died suddenly in his office at Whitehall on the preceding day. The world may still, if its memory be jogged a little, be able to remember that the cause of death was said to have been heart disease, the crisis having been accelerated by overwork. As to the sadness of the event, the newspapers of all political shades agreed.

James Westerby would have been a prominent man, even if he had not been an Under Secretary and one of the pleasantest speakers in the House of Commons. He was of the Westerbys of Oxfordshire, the last, I fear, of a fine old line. “Hotspur” Westerby, of revolutionary fame, was one of his ancestors, and the Under Secretary prided himself not a little on his resemblance to the old hero, whom Cromwell hated so cordially. His father's place is secure in the world of letters. James Westerby promised to be worthy of his blood. Still young (he died when he was thirty-nine), he had borne himself admirably in public position; and when he died there were not wanting some who spoke of his loss as a national calamity.

To me his death was a personal sorrow. I was, and had been since his appointment, fifteen months before, his private secretary ; and, previous to that again, for the twelve years since I came down from the 'Varsity we had been intimate friends, though he was some years my senior.

On the morning of that 16th day of June I was sitting at my desk as usual, between the ante-room and his private office. The last person who had been admitted to his presence was a lady, who, dressed in black and closely veiled, made at the time no distinct impression on my mind. The Under Secretary had refused admittance to some ten or twelve people that morning, but, on my handling him this lady's card, he told me to admit her. She was with him for, perhaps, half an hour. It must have been about 11 o'clock when she passed out. It was just 11:30 when I went into his office and found him dead in his chair.

Some of these facts—with many more or less imaginative details—were presented to the world by the morning papers, as already mentioned, of the 17th. But in no paper was any mention made of the veiled lady, for the altogether sufficient reason that no representative of any paper knew of the veiled lady's existence.

At about a quarter before twelve we were standing—two or three others of the higher employees of the department and myself—in my office, waiting for the arrival of the doctor. The door of the Under Secretary's private room was closed. In the excitement the doorkeeper in the ante-room had presumably deserted his post, for, seeing those to whom I was talking glance toward the outer door, I turned and found myself again confronting the veiled lady.

“Can I see Mr. Westerby once more?” she asked.

“Mr.Westerby, madam,” I answered, “is dead.”

She did not reply at once, but with both hands raised her veil as if to obtain a clearer view of my face, to see if I spoke the truth. In doing so, she showed me the most beautiful face that I have ever seen, or ever expect to see. One dreams of such eyes. Perhaps Endymion looked into them. But I have never hoped to see them in a woman's face. I scarcely remember that she murmured in a low, incredulous voice, the one word—

“Dead ?”

“He died, madam, suddenly, less than an hour ago.”

We had been standing as we spoke, within earshot of the others. She now drew back to where my desk stood, in the further corner of the room, whither I followed her.

“Was any one with him after I left, can you remember?” she asked.

“No madam, I had no occasion to go into his room for some little time after you went. When I did so, he was dead.”

It was some time before she spoke again; then—

“Excuse me,” she said, hesitatingly, “but I hope I shall not have to appear in connection with this.You can understand how very much I should dislike”—this with the faintest smile—“to have my name in all of the newspapers. Of course, if there is an inquest, and if my evidence can be of service, I shall have to give it. But it does not seem to me that anything I can say could be of importance. He was well when I saw him—that is all.”

Then, after a pause, during which I was silent: “If you can manage it so that my name will not be mentioned, I shall be very grateful to you,” she said. As she spoke, she drew one of her cards from a small black card case and handed it to me, adding, “and I hope you will call and let me have the pleasure of thanking you.”

I took the card and assured her that I would do what I could in her behalf. She lowered her veil again and left the room. I read the card now with more interest than I had the former one when taking it to my chief. It said:

MRS. WALTER F. TIERCE,

19, Grasmere Crescent,W.

Mrs. Tierce had hardly gone when the doctor came in, followed a moment later by a police inspector.

“Heart disease,” the doctor said. The inspector asked me a few questions and said that no inquest would be necessary.

I was hardly conscious at the time, I think, that I was telling the officer that no one had been with the Under Secretary for an hour before his death. Nor when it was over and I recognized what I had done, did my conscience disturb me much. It was a mere courtesy to a woman, such as any man would do if he had it in his power. Why should she be made to suffer because he chanced to die about the time that she happened to call upon him?

So the world next morning heard nothing of the veiled lady.

Within a month I was back in my old chambers in Lincoln's Inn trying to gather up the interrupted threads of legal studies—a task which would, perhaps, have progressed more rapidly if it had received my entire attention. As it was, however, work had to be content to divide my thoughts somewhat unequally with another subject—Mrs. Walter Tierce.

‘Mrs.Tierce was a widower. When I called at her home immediately after the funeral, she met me with delightful cordiality.

I called frequently after my first visit, and never met any other visitor at the house. It was difficult to understand how so charming a woman could live in a fashionable quarter of London in such complete isolation. But I had no desire that it should be otherwise.

At the age of thirty-five I had settled down, more or less reconciled to the belief that I should never marry. In theory, I have always maintained that it is the duty to himself and to society of every healthy man to take to himself a wife and assume the responsibilities of a householder before he is thirty years of age. A bachelor's life is an inchoate existence; a species of half-life at best—“like the odd half of a pair of scissors,” as Benjamin Franklin said. It is as the head of a family alone, with the care of others on his shoulders, that a man arrives at the possibility of his best development. This was my loudly proclaimed belief. And still I was unmarried. If one could only wake some morning and find himself married—in his own house, with a charming and domestic wife—perhaps with children! But the necessary preliminaries to arriving at that state terrified me. The difficulty of a selection (in the face of an apparently incurable incapability of falling seriously in love with any one individual) was appalling.

But now the picture of a home rose frequently before me, altogether pleasant to contemplate—a home in which two wonderful black eyes smiled at me across the breakfast tablecloth in the morning and were waiting to meet mine as I looked up from my reading in our library at night.

In fact, I was in love—at times. But there were also times when my condition seemed, on analysis, curiously unsatisfactory to myself, curiously contradictory. Especially was this the case immediately after being in Mrs. Tierce's presence, when there was a certain reaction. On leaving her home, I never failed to ask myself wonderingly, if I really loved her as a man should love a woman before asking her to be his wife. She filled all my thoughts by day and a large share of my dreams by night. Those eyes haunted me. In her presence I was helpless—intoxicated—a blind worshipper. I longed to touch her with my hands, to stroke the fabric of her dress or any object which her hands had recently touched. My whole being ached with very tenderness to approach more nearly to her—to be in contact with her—to caress her. The physical attraction of her presence was overmastering.

Fifteen minutes after leaving her, however, I would be dimly wondering if this was really love—the love that a husband should feel for a wife. This absolute submission of my individuality to hers—would it last through days and weeks and months of constant companionship? Through all the stress of years of wedded life? And if it did not, if my individuality asserted itself, and I became critical of her, what then?

Not that her beauty was her only attraction. On the contrary, few women whom I have ever met have impressed me more distinctly with their intellectuality.

But her most charming characteristic was a certain admirable self-possession and self-control. She seemed so thoroughly to understand herself and to know what was her right relation to things around her; and this without a suspicion of masculinity or of the business air. Never for a moment was there danger of her losing either her mental or emotional equilibrium.

In fact, she was adorable. But, though there was no point of view from which she did not seem to me to be entirely the most delightful thing that I had ever seen, I never failed to experience that same misgiving immediately after quitting her presence. It was as short-lived as it was regular in its recurrence. An hour later, as I sat in my chambers alone, her eyes haunted me once more.

Though I had never spoken of my love, she must have read it in my eyes a hundred times, nor apparently was the perusal distasteful to her.

I had been back in Lincoln's Inn now five months, and was sitting in my chambers one dark mid-afternoon in December. Had I been reading, I must have lit the gas. But there was light enough to sit and dream of her; light enough to see those eyes in the shadow of my book-case. My one clerk was away and would not return for an hour. So I dreamed uninterruptedly until a shuffling outside my office door recalled me to myself. It would have looked more business-like in the eyes of a client to have light enough in the room to work by, and I made a movement toward the matchbox. But there was no time. A knock at the door sounded and the door itself was thrown wide open. There was an interval of some seconds and then a figure entered, moving heavily and painfully with the aid of a crutch—a man and crippled, that was all that I could see.

The figure moved laboriously half way across the floor toward me. Then, standing on one foot, the visitor placed his crutch against the wall and allowed himself to drop heavily into a chair a few feet away from me, while I stood looking on, mutely anxious to render assistance but not knowing how to offer it.

After a short silence he spoke, simply pronouncing my name; not interrogatively, but as if to inform me that he knew to whom he was speaking and that his business was with me. I bowed in response, and with matter-of-fact business suavity asked what I could do for him.

He was silent for some moments, and as he sat fronting the window to which my back was turned, and through which came what small light there was in the office, I could see his face plainly enough. Not an old man, by any means, probably younger than myself, with features that must once have been handsome, and would be still but for the deep lines of sorrow or of pain. The figure, too, as he sat, looked full and healthy with nothing but a certain stiffness of pose to tell of its infirmity. At last he spoke, hurriedly, and in a hard, feverish-sounding voice.