The Plattner Story and Others Read online

  POLLOCK AND THE PORROH MAN

  It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the TurnerPeninsula that Pollock's first encounter with the Porroh man occurred.The women of that country are famous for their good looks--they areGallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days ofVasco de Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man, too,was possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition.(It's a curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousinseating men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At anyrate,the Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been amere low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock,using his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at hisdeltoid muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and, firing, hit the manin the hand.

  He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wallof the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under hisarm at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in thesunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling withthe excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had allhappened in less time than it takes to read about it.

  The woman was quite dead, and having ascertained this, Pollock went tothe entrance of the hut and looked out. Things outside were dazzlingbright. Half a dozen of the porters of the expedition were standing upin a group near the green huts they occupied, and staring towards him,wondering what the shots might signify. Behind the little group of menwas the broad stretch of black fetid mud by the river, a green carpetof rafts of papyrus and water-grass, and then the leaden water. Themangroves beyond the stream loomed indistinctly through the blue haze.There were no signs of excitement in the squat village, whose fence wasjust visible above the cane-grass.

  Pollock came out of the hut cautiously and walked towards the river,looking over his shoulder at intervals. But the Porroh man hadvanished. Pollock clutched his revolver nervously in his hand.

  One of his men came to meet him, and as he came, pointed to the bushesbehind the hut in which the Porroh man had disappeared. Pollock hadan irritating persuasion of having made an absolute fool of himself;he felt bitter, savage, at the turn things had taken. At the sametime, he would have to tell Waterhouse--the moral, exemplary, cautiousWaterhouse--who would inevitably take the matter seriously. Pollockcursed bitterly at his luck, at Waterhouse, and especially at the WestCoast of Africa. He felt consummately sick of the expedition. Andin the back of his mind all the time was a speculative doubt whereprecisely within the visible horizon the Porroh man might be.

  It is perhaps rather shocking, but he was not at all upset by themurder that had just happened. He had seen so much brutality during thelast three months, so many dead women, burnt huts, drying skeletons, upthe Kittam River in the wake of the Sofa cavalry, that his senses wereblunted. What disturbed him was the persuasion that this business wasonly beginning.

  He swore savagely at the black, who ventured to ask a question, andwent on into the tent under the orange-trees where Waterhouse waslying, feeling exasperatingly like a boy going into the headmaster'sstudy.

  Waterhouse was still sleeping off the effects of his last dose ofchlorodyne, and Pollock sat down on a packing-case beside him, and,lighting his pipe, waited for him to awake. About him were scatteredthe pots and weapons Waterhouse had collected from the Mendi people,and which he had been repacking for the canoe voyage to Sulyma.

  Presently Waterhouse woke up, and after judicial stretching, decidedhe was all right again. Pollock got him some tea. Over the tea theincidents of the afternoon were described by Pollock, after somepreliminary beating about the bush. Waterhouse took the matter evenmore seriously than Pollock had anticipated. He did not simplydisapprove, he scolded, he insulted.

  "You're one of those infernal fools who think a black man isn't a humanbeing," he said. "I can't be ill a day without you must get into somedirty scrape or other. This is the third time in a month that you havecome crossways-on with a native, and this time you're in for it with avengeance. Porroh, too! They're down upon you enough as it is, aboutthat idol you wrote your silly name on. And they're the most vindictivedevils on earth! You make a man ashamed of civilisation. To think youcome of a decent family! If ever I cumber myself up with a vicious,stupid young lout like you again"--

  "Steady on, now," snarled Pollock, in the tone that always exasperatedWaterhouse; "steady on."

  At that Waterhouse became speechless. He jumped to his feet.

  "Look here, Pollock," he said, after a struggle to control his breath."You must go home. I won't have you any longer. I'm ill enough as it isthrough you"--

  "Keep your hair on," said Pollock, staring in front of him. "I'm readyenough to go."

  Waterhouse became calmer again. He sat down on the camp-stool. "Verywell," he said. "I don't want a row, Pollock, you know, but it'sconfoundedly annoying to have one's plans put out by this kind ofthing. I'll come to Sulyma with you, and see you safe aboard"--

  "You needn't," said Pollock. "I can go alone. From here."

  "Not far," said Waterhouse. "You don't understand this Porrohbusiness."

  "How should _I_ know she belonged to a Porroh man?" said Pollockbitterly.

  "Well, she did," said Waterhouse; "and you can't undo the thing. Goalone, indeed! I wonder what they'd do to you. You don't seem tounderstand that this Porroh hokey-pokey rules this country, is its law,religion, constitution, medicine, magic.... They appoint the chiefs.The Inquisition, at its best, couldn't hold a candle to these chaps.He will probably set Awajale, the chief here, on to us. It's lucky ourporters are Mendis. We shall have to shift this little settlement ofours.... Confound you, Pollock! And, of course, you must go and misshim."

  He thought, and his thoughts seemed disagreeable. Presently he stood upand took his rifle. "I'd keep close for a bit, if I were you," he said,over his shoulder, as he went out. "I'm going out to see what I canfind out about it."

  Pollock remained sitting in the tent, meditating. "I was meant for acivilised life," he said to himself, regretfully, as he filled hispipe. "The sooner I get back to London or Paris the better for me."

  His eye fell on the sealed case in which Waterhouse had put thefeatherless poisoned arrows they had bought in the Mendi country. "Iwish I had hit the beggar somewhere vital," said Pollock viciously.

  Waterhouse came back after a long interval. He was not communicative,though Pollock asked him questions enough. The Porroh man, it seems,was a prominent member of that mystical society. The village wasinterested, but not threatening. No doubt the witch-doctor had goneinto the bush. He was a great witch-doctor. "Of course, he's up tosomething," said Waterhouse, and became silent.

  "But what can he do?" asked Pollock, unheeded.

  "I must get you out of this. There's something brewing, or things wouldnot be so quiet," said Waterhouse, after a gap of silence. Pollockwanted to know what the brew might be. "Dancing in a circle of skulls,"said Waterhouse; "brewing a stink in a copper pot." Pollock wantedparticulars. Waterhouse was vague, Pollock pressing. At last Waterhouselost his temper. "How the devil should _I_ know?" he said to Pollock'stwentieth inquiry what the Porroh man would do. "He tried to killyou off-hand in the hut. _Now_, I fancy he will try something moreelaborate. But you'll see fast enough. I don't want to help unnerveyou. It's probably all nonsense."

  That night, as they were sitting at their fire, Pollock again tried todraw Waterhouse out on the subject of Porroh methods. "Better get tosleep," said Waterhouse, when Pollock's bent became apparent; "we startearly to-morrow. You may want all your nerve about you."

  "But what line will he take?"

  "Can't say. They're versatile people. They know a lot of rum dodges.You'd better get that copper-devil, Shakespear, to talk."

  There was a flash and a heavy bang out of the darkness behind thehuts, and a clay bullet came whistling close to Pollock's head. This,at least, was crude enough. The blacks and half-breeds sitting andyarning round their own fire jumped up, and someone f
ired into the dark.

  "Better go into one of the huts," said Waterhouse quietly, stillsitting unmoved.

  Pollock stood up by the fire and drew his revolver. Fighting, at least,he was not afraid of. But a man in the dark is in the best of armour.Realising the wisdom of Waterhouse's advice, Pollock went into the tentand lay down there.

  What little sleep he had was disturbed by dreams, variegated dreams,but chiefly of the Porroh man's face, upside down, as he went out ofthe hut, and looked up under his arm. It was odd that this transitoryimpression should have stuck so firmly in Pollock's memory. Moreover,he was troubled by queer pains in his limbs.

  In the white haze of the early morning, as they were loading thecanoes, a barbed arrow suddenly appeared quivering in the ground closeto Pollock's foot. The boys made a perfunctory effort to clear out thethicket, but it led to no capture.

  After these two occurrences, there was a disposition on the part ofthe expedition to leave Pollock to himself, and Pollock became, forthe first time in his life, anxious to mingle with blacks. Waterhousetook one canoe, and Pollock, in spite of a friendly desire to chatwith Waterhouse, had to take the other. He was left all alone in thefront part of the canoe, and he had the greatest trouble to make themen--who did not love him--keep to the middle of the river, a clearhundred yards or more from either shore. However, he made Shakespear,the Freetown half-breed, come up to his own end of the canoe and tellhim about Porroh, which Shakespear, failing in his attempts to leavePollock alone, presently did with considerable freedom and gusto.

  The day passed. The canoe glided swiftly along the ribbon of lagoonwater, between the drift of water-figs, fallen trees, papyrus, andpalm-wine palms, and with the dark mangrove swamp to the left, throughwhich one could hear now and then the roar of the Atlantic surf.Shakespear told in his soft, blurred English of how the Porroh couldcast spells; how men withered up under their malice; how they couldsend dreams and devils; how they tormented and killed the sons ofIjibu; how they kidnapped a white trader from Sulyma who had maltreatedone of the sect, and how his body looked when it was found. And Pollockafter each narrative cursed under his breath at the want of missionaryenterprise that allowed such things to be, and at the inert BritishGovernment that ruled over this dark heathendom of Sierra Leone. Inthe evening they came to the Kasi Lake, and sent a score of crocodileslumbering off the island on which the expedition camped for the night.

  The next day they reached Sulyma, and smelt the sea breeze, but Pollockhad to put up there for five days before he could get on to Freetown.Waterhouse, considering him to be comparatively safe here, and withinthe pale of Freetown influence, left him and went back with theexpedition to Gbemma, and Pollock became very friendly with Perera,the only resident white trader at Sulyma--so friendly, indeed, that hewent about with him everywhere. Perera was a little Portuguese Jew, whohad lived in England, and he appreciated the Englishman's friendlinessas a great compliment.

  For two days nothing happened out of the ordinary; for the most partPollock and Perera played Nap--the only game they had in common--andPollock got into debt. Then, on the second evening, Pollock had adisagreeable intimation of the arrival of the Porroh man in Sulyma bygetting a flesh-wound in the shoulder from a lump of filed iron. Itwas a long shot, and the missile had nearly spent its force when ithit him. Still it conveyed its message plainly enough. Pollock sat upin his hammock, revolver in hand, all that night, and next morningconfided, to some extent, in the Anglo-Portuguese.

  Perera took the matter seriously. He knew the local customs prettythoroughly. "It is a personal question, you must know. It is revenge.And of course he is hurried by your leaving de country. None of denatives or half-breeds will interfere wid him very much--unless youmake it wort deir while. If you come upon him suddenly, you might shoothim. But den he might shoot you.

  "Den dere's dis--infernal magic," said Perera. "Of course, I don'tbelieve in it--superstition--but still it's not nice to tink datwherever you are, dere is a black man, who spends a moonlight night nowand den a-dancing about a fire to send you bad dreams.... Had any baddreams?"

  "Rather," said Pollock. "I keep on seeing the beggar's head upside downgrinning at me and showing all his teeth as he did in the hut, andcoming close up to me, and then going ever so far off, and coming back.It's nothing to be afraid of, but somehow it simply paralyses me withterror in my sleep. Queer things--dreams. I know it's a dream all thetime, and I can't wake up from it."

  "It's probably only fancy," said Perera. "Den my niggers say Porroh mencan send snakes. Seen any snakes lately?"

  "Only one. I killed him this morning, on the floor near my hammock.Almost trod on him as I got up."

  "_Ah!_" said Perera, and then, reassuringly, "Of course it isa--coincidence. Still I would keep my eyes open. Den dere's pains in debones."

  "I thought they were due to miasma," said Pollock.

  "Probably dey are. When did dey begin?"

  Then Pollock remembered that he first noticed them the night after thefight in the hut. "It's my opinion he don't want to kill you," saidPerera--"at least not yet. I've heard deir idea is to scare and worrya man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and baddreams, and all dat, until he's sick of life. Of course, it's all talk,you know. You mustn't worry about it.... But I wonder what he'll be upto next."

  "_I_ shall have to be up to something first," said Pollock, staringgloomily at the greasy cards that Perera was putting on the table. "Itdon't suit my dignity to be followed about, and shot at, and blightedin this way. I wonder if Porroh hokey-pokey upsets your luck at cards."

  He looked at Perera suspiciously.

  "Very likely it does," said Perera warmly, shuffling. "Dey arewonderful people."

  That afternoon Pollock killed two snakes in his hammock, and therewas also an extraordinary increase in the number of red ants thatswarmed over the place; and these annoyances put him in a fit temperto talk over business with a certain Mendi rough he had interviewedbefore. The Mendi rough showed Pollock a little iron dagger, anddemonstrated where one struck in the neck, in a way that made Pollockshiver, and in return for certain considerations Pollock promised him adouble-barrelled gun with an ornamental lock.

  In the evening, as Pollock and Perera were playing cards, the Mendirough came in through the doorway, carrying something in a blood-soakedpiece of native cloth.

  "Not here!" said Pollock very hurriedly. "Not here!"

  But he was not quick enough to prevent the man, who was anxious to getto Pollock's side of the bargain, from opening the cloth and throwingthe head of the Porroh man upon the table. It bounded from there on tothe floor, leaving a red trail on the cards, and rolled into a corner,where it came to rest upside down, but glaring hard at Pollock.

  Perera jumped up as the thing fell among the cards, and began in hisexcitement to gabble in Portuguese. The Mendi was bowing, with the redcloth in his hand. "De gun!" he said. Pollock stared back at the headin the corner. It bore exactly the expression it had in his dreams.Something seemed to snap in his own brain as he looked at it.

  Then Perera found his English again.

  "You got him killed?" he said. "You did not kill him yourself?"

  "Why should I?" said Pollock.

  "But he will not be able to take it off now!"

  "Take _what_ off?" said Pollock.

  "And all dese cards are spoiled!"

  "_What_ do you mean by taking off?" said Pollock.

  "You must send me a new pack from Freetown. You can buy dem dere."

  "But--'take it off'?"

  "It is only superstition. I forgot. De niggers say dat if dewitches--he was a witch-- But it is rubbish.... You must make de Porrohman take it off, or kill him yourself.... It is very silly."

  Pollock swore under his breath, still staring hard at the head in thecorner.

  "I can't stand that glare," he said. Then suddenly he rushed at thething and kicked it. It rolled some yards or so, and came to rest inthe same position as before, upside down, and looking
at him.

  "He is ugly," said the Anglo-Portuguese. "Very ugly. Dey do it on deirfaces with little knives."

  Pollock would have kicked the head again, but the Mendi man touchedhim on the arm. "De gun?" he said, looking nervously at the head.

  "Two--if you will take that beastly thing away," said Pollock.

  The Mendi shook his head, and intimated that he only wanted one gun nowdue to him, and for which he would be obliged. Pollock found neithercajolery nor bullying any good with him. Perera had a gun to sell (ata profit of three hundred per cent.), and with that the man presentlydeparted. Then Pollock's eyes, against his will, were recalled to thething on the floor.

  "It is funny dat his head keeps upside down," said Perera, with anuneasy laugh. "His brains must be heavy, like de weight in de littleimages one sees dat keep always upright wid lead in dem. You will takehim wiv you when you go presently. You might take him now. De cards areall spoilt. Dere is a man sell dem in Freetown. De room is in a filtymess as it is. You should have killed him yourself."

  Pollock pulled himself together, and went and picked up the head. Hewould hang it up by the lamp-hook in the middle of the ceiling of hisroom, and dig a grave for it at once. He was under the impression thathe hung it up by the hair, but that must have been wrong, for when hereturned for it, it was hanging by the neck upside down.

  He buried it before sunset on the north side of the shed he occupied,so that he should not have to pass the grave after dark when he wasreturning from Perera's. He killed two snakes before he went tosleep. In the darkest part of the night he awoke with a start, andheard a pattering sound and something scraping on the floor. He sat upnoiselessly, and felt under his pillow for his revolver. A mumblinggrowl followed, and Pollock fired at the sound. There was a yelp, andsomething dark passed for a moment across the hazy blue of the doorway."A dog!" said Pollock, lying down again.

  In the early dawn he awoke again with a peculiar sense of unrest. Thevague pain in his bones had returned. For some time he lay watching thered ants that were swarming over the ceiling, and then, as the lightgrew brighter, he looked over the edge of his hammock and saw somethingdark on the floor. He gave such a violent start that the hammockoverset and flung him out.

  He found himself lying, perhaps, a yard away from the head of thePorroh man. It had been disinterred by the dog, and the nose wasgrievously battered. Ants and flies swarmed over it. By an oddcoincidence, it was still upside down, and with the same diabolicalexpression in the inverted eyes.

  Pollock sat paralysed, and stared at the horror for some time. Thenhe got up and walked round it--giving it a wide berth--and out of theshed. The clear light of the sunrise, the living stir of vegetationbefore the breath of the dying land-breeze, and the empty grave withthe marks of the dog's paws, lightened the weight upon his mind alittle.

  He told Perera of the business as though it was a jest--a jest to betold with white lips. "You should not have frighten de dog," saidPerera, with poorly simulated hilarity.

  The next two days, until the steamer came, were spent by Pollock inmaking a more effectual disposition of his possession. Overcominghis aversion to handling the thing, he went down to the river mouthand threw it into the sea-water, but by some miracle it escaped thecrocodiles, and was cast up by the tide on the mud a little way upthe river, to be found by an intelligent Arab half-breed, and offeredfor sale to Pollock and Perera as a curiosity, just on the edge ofnight. The native hung about in the brief twilight, making lower andlower offers, and at last, getting scared in some way by the evidentdread these wise white men had for the thing, went off, and, passingPollock's shed, threw his burden in there for Pollock to discover inthe morning.

  At this Pollock got into a kind of frenzy. He would burn the thing. Hewent out straightway into the dawn, and had constructed a big pyre ofbrushwood before the heat of the day. He was interrupted by the hooterof the little paddle steamer from Monrovia to Bathurst, which wascoming through the gap in the bar. "Thank Heaven!" said Pollock, withinfinite piety, when the meaning of the sound dawned upon him. Withtrembling hands he lit his pile of wood hastily, threw the head uponit, and went away to pack his portmanteau and make his adieux to Perera.

  That afternoon, with a sense of infinite relief, Pollock watched theflat swampy foreshore of Sulyma grow small in the distance. The gap inthe long line of white surge became narrower and narrower. It seemedto be closing in and cutting him off from his trouble. The feeling ofdread and worry began to slip from him bit by bit. At Sulyma belief inPorroh malignity and Porroh magic had been in the air, his sense ofPorroh had been vast, pervading, threatening, dreadful. Now manifestlythe domain of Porroh was only a little place, a little black bandbetween the sea and the blue cloudy Mendi uplands.

  "Good-bye, Porroh!" said Pollock. "Good-bye--certainly not _au revoir_."

  The captain of the steamer came and leant over the rail beside him, andwished him good-evening, and spat at the froth of the wake in token offriendly ease.

  "I picked up a rummy curio on the beach this go," said the captain."It's a thing I never saw done this side of Indy before."

  "What might that be?" said Pollock.

  "Pickled 'ed," said the captain.

  "_What?_" said Pollock.

  "'Ed--smoked. 'Ed of one of these Porroh chaps, all ornamented withknife-cuts. Why! What's up? Nothing? I shouldn't have took you for anervous chap. Green in the face. By gosh! you're a bad sailor. Allright, eh? Lord, how funny you went!... Well, this 'ed I was tellingyou of is a bit rum in a way. I've got it, along with some snakes, in ajar of spirit in my cabin what I keeps for such curios, and I'm hangedif it don't float upsy down. Hullo!"

  Pollock had given an incoherent cry, and had his hands in his hair. Heran towards the paddle-boxes with a half-formed idea of jumping intothe sea, and then he realised his position and turned back towards thecaptain.

  "Here!" said the captain. "Jack Philips, just keep him off me! Standoff! No nearer, mister! What's the matter with you? Are you mad?"

  Pollock put his hand to his head. It was no good explaining. "I believeI am pretty nearly mad at times," he said. "It's a pain I have here.Comes suddenly. You'll excuse me, I hope."

  He was white and in a perspiration. He saw suddenly very clearly allthe danger he ran of having his sanity doubted. He forced himselfto restore the captain's confidence, by answering his sympatheticinquiries, noting his suggestions, even trying a spoonful of neatbrandy in his cheek, and, that matter settled, asking a number ofquestions about the captain's private trade in curiosities. The captaindescribed the head in detail. All the while Pollock was struggling tokeep under a preposterous persuasion that the ship was as transparentas glass, and that he could distinctly see the inverted face looking athim from the cabin beneath his feet.

  Pollock had a worse time almost on the steamer than he had at Sulyma.All day he had to control himself in spite of his intense perceptionof the imminent presence of that horrible head that was overshadowinghis mind. At night his old nightmare returned, until, with a violenteffort, he would force himself awake, rigid with the horror of it, andwith the ghost of a hoarse scream in his throat.

  He left the actual head behind at Bathurst, where he changed shipfor Teneriffe, but not his dreams nor the dull ache in his bones.At Teneriffe Pollock transferred to a Cape liner, but the headfollowed him. He gambled, he tried chess, he even read books, buthe knew the danger of drink. Yet whenever a round black shadow, around black object came into his range, there he looked for the head,and--saw it. He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growingtraitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in,his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, was all part of afilmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and ahorrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical facethrough that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that hewould get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burnhis hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.

  So, struggling grim
ly and silently with his excited imagination,Pollock reached England. He landed at Southampton, and went on straightfrom Waterloo to his banker's in Cornhill in a cab. There he transactedsome business with the manager in a private room, and all the while thehead hung like an ornament under the black marble mantel and drippedupon the fender. He could hear the drops fall, and see the red on thefender.

  "A pretty fern," said the manager, following his eyes. "But it makesthe fender rusty."

  "Very," said Pollock; "a _very_ pretty fern. And that reminds me.Can you recommend me a physician for mind troubles? I've got alittle--what is it?--hallucination."

  The head laughed savagely, wildly. Pollock was surprised the managerdid not notice it. But the manager only stared at his face.

  With the address of a doctor, Pollock presently emerged in Cornhill.There was no cab in sight, and so he went on down to the western endof the street, and essayed the crossing opposite the Mansion House.The crossing is hardly easy even for the expert Londoner; cabs, vans,carriages, mail-carts, omnibuses go by in one incessant stream; toanyone fresh from the malarious solitudes of Sierra Leone it is aboiling, maddening confusion. But when an inverted head suddenly comesbouncing, like an indiarubber ball, between your legs, leaving distinctsmears of blood every time it touches the ground, you can scarcely hopeto avoid an accident. Pollock lifted his feet convulsively to avoidit, and then kicked at the thing furiously. Then something hit himviolently in the back, and a hot pain ran up his arm.

  He had been hit by the pole of an omnibus, and three of the fingersof his left hand smashed by the hoof of one of the horses--the veryfingers, as it happened, that he shot from the Porroh man. They pulledhim out from between the horses' legs, and found the address of thephysician in his crushed hand.

  For a couple of days Pollock's sensations were full of the sweet,pungent smell of chloroform, of painful operations that caused him nopain, of lying still and being given food and drink. Then he had aslight fever, and was very thirsty, and his old nightmare came back. Itwas only when it returned that he noticed it had left him for a day.

  "If my skull had been smashed instead of my fingers, it might have gonealtogether," said Pollock, staring thoughtfully at the dark cushionthat had taken on for the time the shape of the head.

  Pollock at the first opportunity told the physician of his mindtrouble. He knew clearly that he must go mad unless somethingshould intervene to save him. He explained that he had witnesseda decapitation in Dahomey, and was haunted by one of the heads.Naturally, he did not care to state the actual facts. The physicianlooked grave.

  Presently he spoke hesitatingly. "As a child, did you get very muchreligious training?"

  "Very little," said Pollock.

  A shade passed over the physician's face. "I don't know if you haveheard of the miraculous cures--it may be, of course, they are notmiraculous--at Lourdes."

  "Faith-healing will hardly suit me, I am afraid," said Pollock, withhis eye on the dark cushion.

  The head distorted its scarred features in an abominable grimace. Thephysician went upon a new track. "It's all imagination," he said,speaking with sudden briskness. "A fair case for faith-healing, anyhow.Your nervous system has run down, you're in that twilight state ofhealth when the bogles come easiest. The strong impression was toomuch for you. I must make you up a little mixture that will strengthenyour nervous system--especially your brain. And you must take exercise."

  "I'm no good for faith-healing," said Pollock.

  "And therefore we must restore tone. Go in search of stimulatingair--Scotland, Norway, the Alps"--

  "Jericho, if you like," said Pollock--"where Naaman went."

  However, so soon as his fingers would let him, Pollock made a gallantattempt to follow out the doctor's suggestion. It was now November.He tried football, but to Pollock the game consisted in kicking afurious inverted head about a field. He was no good at the game. Hekicked blindly, with a kind of horror, and when they put him back intogoal, and the ball came swooping down upon him, he suddenly yelledand got out of its way. The discreditable stories that had driven himfrom England to wander in the tropics shut him off from any but men'ssociety, and now his increasingly strange behaviour made even his manfriends avoid him. The thing was no longer a thing of the eye merely;it gibbered at him, spoke to him. A horrible fear came upon him thatpresently, when he took hold of the apparition, it would no longerbecome some mere article of furniture, but would _feel_ like a realdissevered head. Alone, he would curse at the thing, defy it, entreatit; once or twice, in spite of his grim self-control, he addressed itin the presence of others. He felt the growing suspicion in the eyes ofthe people that watched him--his landlady, the servant, his man.

  One day early in December his cousin Arnold--his next of kin--came tosee him and draw him out, and watch his sunken yellow face with narroweager eyes. And it seemed to Pollock that the hat his cousin carriedin his hand was no hat at all, but a Gorgon head that glared at himupside down, and fought with its eyes against his reason. However,he was still resolute to see the matter out. He got a bicycle, and,riding over the frosty road from Wandsworth to Kingston, found thething rolling along at his side, and leaving a dark trail behind it. Heset his teeth and rode faster. Then suddenly, as he came down the hilltowards Richmond Park, the apparition rolled in front of him and underhis wheel, so quickly that he had no time for thought, and, turningquickly to avoid it, was flung violently against a heap of stones andbroke his left wrist.

  The end came on Christmas morning. All night he had been in a fever,the bandages encircling his wrist like a band of fire, his dreams morevivid and terrible than ever. In the cold, colourless, uncertain lightthat came before the sunrise, he sat up in his bed, and saw the headupon the bracket in the place of the bronze jar that had stood thereovernight.

  "I know that is a bronze jar," he said, with a chill doubt at hisheart. Presently the doubt was irresistible. He got out of bed slowly,shivering, and advanced to the jar with his hand raised. Surelyhe would see now his imagination had deceived him, recognise thedistinctive sheen of bronze. At last, after an age of hesitation,his fingers came down on the patterned cheek of the head. He withdrewthem spasmodically. The last stage was reached. His sense of touch hadbetrayed him.

  Trembling, stumbling against the bed, kicking against his shoes withhis bare feet, a dark confusion eddying round him, he groped his way tothe dressing-table, took his razor from the drawer, and sat down on thebed with this in his hand. In the looking-glass he saw his own face,colourless, haggard, full of the ultimate bitterness of despair.

  He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of hisexperience. His wretched home, his still more wretched schooldays,the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfishdishonour leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, allits squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to thehut, to the fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the riverto Sulyma, to the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his franticendeavours to destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. Itwas a hallucination! He _knew_ it was. A hallucination merely. For amoment he snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on thebracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at him.... With thestiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb ofhis arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.