Atavar; a Craig Kennedy novel

Front matter

Class

Book _

Cowi^ht^

Epilogue

Recessive

Love

Prologue

V

* r

1*

‘ I

•.

^ A

■'ll f •

I

A

PROLOGUE

SHADOWS

^What more could one want than we have be¬ fore us?^^ With a sweep of the arm Kennedy in¬ cluded the gloriously moonlit heaven, the wide expanse of ever-restless sea, and all about the fragrant perfume of roses blended with the night smell of sod beneath us and the whiff of salt from the sea.

In my easy beach chair I lolled back, stretched my legs indolently, shifted my pipe, then plunged my hands into my pockets as I grinned at Craig.

^‘A girl,^^ I shot back tersely.

Craig laughed. He drew back one arm in a feint as if he would knock me for a sea-goal, then laughed again. ^Well, I think I could be happier, too, with a case to think about.’^

‘^A case of what? There’s enough of everything here in the Bahamas—at the right price, too! . . . A case! Like a cow with a cud! . . .You should have brought a crime along—to chew on!” I paused and surveyed what the sweep of his arm had indicated. ^‘Craig, it is great! The night seems so quiet and peaceful—almost as if nothing could dis¬ turb its placidity. You would scarcely think that gentle rolling surface of water under the moon 3 could be the same whose towering waves washed our deck in the storm when we were coming down.”

^^Or may wash it again only a few hours after we start back tomorrow!”

We were silent for a few minutes. From the ball¬ room of the hotel the gentle strains of a slow and languorous waltz were wafted gently toward us. At least there seemed perfect content about us.

I suggested that we take a little stroll through the hotel gardens, which were terraced down to the beach. Walls and borders of walks were a riot of roses. Little graded slopes covered with honey¬ suckle arrested attention by their sweetness.

Suddenly, darting ahead of us, crossing our path in the silvery moonhght, we saw a snake flash out and disappear in the shrubbery. Only the moon¬ light shimmering bright on its white belly indicated the direction of its travel.

“Every Eden seems to have its snake, too!” I exclaimed.

“Is that the best you can do?” chided Craig.

We neared the steps to the beach. He stopped. “Sh-h! I hear voices—quarreling. ... I think I recognize one. . . . What is it about?”

In a bower we paused. It was soon that we got our answer, violent oaths, daring threats answered in the cool, cutting accents of a man of cultivation who held himself down even in his moments of anger.

One did not have to go far in Nassau or any¬ where else in the Bahamas to hear something about rum-running. This was no exception. But there was more than that to it, far more.

o

“It’s Roger Gerard/’ Craig whispered, “I thought I recognized the voice.”

I nodded as I identified the smooth accent of a classmate at the university whom we had both loved.

“If one thing happens to that girl—if her future happiness is blasted—in any way—^by you, Hawtrey, my greatest pleasure will be going to the chair for shooting you down for the dog that you are! I am not afraid of you—and I love her!”

A laugh and a countering oath was the only reply of the man addressed as Hawtrey.

“I’ll tell you right now, I know about the trip planned for to-morrow to the cave on Sea Isle. My ultimatum is: I am going with you! I am not afraid of you—^but I am afraid for Natalie!”

Suddenly it seemed by a crackling of driftwood that Hawtrey had aimed a blow at Roger, but that the other had adroitly dodged it. “You’ll not go! I’ll break your damned head for you!”

Roger had swung himself into position, it seemed, to retaliate, and Kennedy was nudging me to be ready to leap out in case of need, when a girl, a slim creature of fairy lightness, a bit of thistledown, glided down the terrace steps so quickly and so lightly that we had no chance to see her face, only a crown of golden hair and the scent of violets, as she whisked past us in the shadow of the shrubs.

She stood lightly poised on the bottom steps and called sharply, “Roger! Guy! What does this mean?”

Roger Gerard took a quick step toward her and bowed. But Hawtrey took her arm even as Roger was bowing. For a moment, from his action, one might have thought he was going to run away with her.

We could not see the girl’s face, but for a second it was apparent that she encouraged Hawtrey’s tenderness to her, as if she felt the spell of his strength. But when Roger looked at her, with his soul in his voice and in his eyes, she seemed to lean then toward him for protection.

“Let me go with you to the cave to-morrow, Natalie.” Roger was persuasive, deferential, eager. He swallowed hard, it seemed, as he added, “Hawtrey will be a sport—and let me join your party— if you say so.”

“Surely! I want you in the party, Roger!” The girl said it promptly. But was there an uncon¬ scious ring of disappointment in the voice, as of one who invites his conscience to accompany him?

There was a sentence or two with Hawtrey as he smothered his resentment and agreed. Then I heard him again, always in the lead of the other fellow.

“Oh, Natalie ... I have these little spurs, golden spurs, to give you . . . just a reminder of these happy hours since we have been here to-day— and of others to come. I bought them at that little curio shop in the town on the island. They are very unusual and you are a very unusual girl. What could be more fitting?”

I could just make out that with a tender laugh Hawtrey was passing a little case to Natalie.

“There are three of them—clasps for the ribbons on your shoulders. . . . Allow me.” I could imagine the mocking look at Roger’s face as Haw¬ trey stepped forward and gently fastened them in the laces on Nat aliens shoulders. When his fingers had finished the task they lingered, lovingly. For Roger moved suddenly and Hawtrey resumed his old position.

^There! There are two of them. The third— may I keep, myself—wear myself , , ,

Natalie acquiesced.

‘‘How did you know I was here?’’ asked Roger of her.

“I inquired when I missed you. One of the waiters told me you had been hunting for Mr. Hawtrey since dinner. ... So I came along, too.”

She leaned forward and slipped a little hand through the arm of Roger and Hawtrey, on either side, and led them back up the slope to the hotel, chatting excitedly about the trip to the pirates’ cave on the morrow—the morrow when we should be on our way back to the States on the very boat that had brought them down.

As Craig and I stood there alone, the voices dying out in the distance, I remarked, “Well, it may have been a bromide about the snake in Eden—but if I am any judge that man Hawtrey is the snake in the love garden of that little girl’s heart!”

Craig continued looking after them. “Did you notice how she thrilled when they were talking about that cave on Sea Isle^—and her remark that tradition associated it with one of her ancestors in the days of the Spanish Main? Love garden of her heart . . . That little girl suffers from recessive love. . .

“Recessive?” I repeated.

“Recessive—is a character,” he answered, slowly.

^'that goes back through a dominant strain to an ancestor/'

We stood looking down the shore. In the distant town, along the wharves I could hear activity, ac¬ tivity that recalled the earlier remarks we had over¬ heard, of the rum-running, the great industry now of the islands.

The night, the air, the sea, had put Kennedy into the mood of moralizing.

‘The last generation was better than this—just as this will be better than the next!"

He waited for me to attempt to controvert him, but I knew better. He went on, “For the simple reason that our society is crumbling under the very weight of civilization. Science is great. But it makes a few great. It crushes the many. Why? Because the many cannot keep their simplicity of self in the complexity of things! . . . Think that over again. ... All the luxury of civilization does not make the one thing needful—character!"

“They are trying hard enough to make character —in the way that they see it," I returned, indicating the sounds that had been reminiscent of rum-run¬ ning. “True, they now say: Give us twenty years to do it. Might not the reformers save your civiliza¬ tion—if they were let alone?"

Kennedy shook his head slowly and ominously. “Really, Walter, I have the greatest sympathy for the misguided iDlue-law reformer. Vaguely he is striving for a very admirable object. Unfortunately, though, neo-Puritanism is feeding the flame of the very fire it endeavors to quench. See! They tried to force on us prohibition. They have given us rum-running. . . . They have sat on the safetyvalve. . . . And the boiler is at high pressure . . . trembling ... on the point of explosion . .

The music from the hotel was wafted down to us again. I could see in my mind’s eye the dance floor—and the girl—with the two men.

Kennedy has an uncanny deductive faculty of reading one’s thoughts, sometimes. He seemed to continue where he left off.

^There are the seeds of tragedy in the life of a girl who can stir the passions of men hke that!”

Chapter I Desire

“What's your reaction on the dance craze, Ken¬ nedy?"

“Why—I can take it—and I can leave it alone, Roger—just hke Scotch and lobster Newburgh— and love. Now, you take Walter, here, he special¬ izes in all four. Ask him; he knows."

Roger Gerard smiled half quizzically at Craig, half seriously at me, and waited, until I felt it incumbent at least to say something although I saw that it was Craig whom Roger was leading.

“Reaction? Dance craze?" I repeated. “Oh, I. think the dance craze is just like prohibition . . . and suffrage . . . and censorship . . . and short skirts—just another way in which the female half of the population is trying to rule the male half."

Gerard smiled. But he didn't come back. He fussed with his synthetic rickey. Once he shot a covert glance at Kennedy, then fell to squeezing the very oil out of the skin of half a lime. I felt that somehow I had struck a “complex" in the psycho¬ analyst himself. But just what it was I didn't know.

We were lolling in the library of the old Gerard house on the west side of Washington Square where the outposts of Greenwich Village make contact with the relics of retreating aristocracy of a past 13 generation. Roger Gerard had been a classmate of ours at the university.

The library was the show spot of the mansion. All around three sides of the walls, except where leaded-glass windows cut in, were shelves filled with rare sets and first editions, tomes of science and art collected for well over a century. I had never seen a finer library in a private collection.

The library was high ceilinged and great care had been taken with the fighting. On the wall over to one side of the huge fireplace at the end of the room seemed placed a bank of fights under the molding and projecting out a little way from it. The fights were off. Under them hung in soft folds a drapery of black velvet. It reached to the baseboard and seemed to be the only really somber object in the room. I wondered what it was and I saw that it also aroused Craig^s curiosity.

A few wonderfully carved ivories and exquisite pieces in bronze were the only ornaments. The glow from the fireplace, the rich coloring of the rugs, and the leather and gilt bindings of some of the books lent a subdued brightness to the room that was in keeping with its suggested quietness and elegance.

A davenport was drawn up before the fireplace and its appeal had been irresistible to me. The chairs were easy and made for a man to use. Ken¬ nedy sprawled in intellectual laziness in one just diagonally across the end of the wide fireplace from the davenport. Gerard stood leaning against the other side of the fireplace. The butler had just set down a tinkling tray on a tabouret between Ken¬ nedy and myself.

^What a difference in a few years remarked

Roger, contemplatively, as his eyes roved to his diploma framed over one bookshelf. ^^Here's Craig, our leading criminologist, Walter, our journalist, and Roger, more or less dilettante doctor and psycho¬ analyst. If I were class prophet again I suppose I would psychoanalyze all the fellows—Kennedy, the man hunter—paleolithic type. . . . Jameson, artistic, of the neolithic. . .

^^Gerard . . . neolithic also . . . Nordic . .. blond . . . dolichocephalic,^’ supplied Kennedy.

Roger smiled. ^‘Neolithic, yes ... an old bonescratcher from the cave-art days; . . . old saw¬ bones. Well, you see, in this house my father had been a doctor when the old university was down here across the square, and my grandfather an artist and writer. So I took up medicine—finally the med¬ icine of the mind, the new psychology. It seemed to offer the only hope of solving the problem of Natalie’s nature.” He was rambling on abstractedly.

^^I felt that you were leading up to something.”

Roger drew himself up sharply. ^‘Yes . . . per¬ haps . . . my real reason for renewing the friend¬ ship, Kennedy, at this time . . . one of my cases. It has to do with Natalie Lisle, the little solo dancer who is to appear in the great spectacle, ‘Astarte’ at the American Opera.”

He was speaking rapidly, emotion suppressed. ^Wou know, or perhaps you don’t know, her father and mine were old cronies—^had adjoining estates up in Dutchess County before the plebeian rush to the country set in. Natalie and I were brought up together.”

Gerard paused and contemplated a dwindling cube of ice in his glass, turning it around and around. Then with a carelessness of manner he was far from feeling he set the glass on the carved mantelshelf over the fire, brushed some cigar ashes from his coat, and finally took a quiet step or two toward the vel¬ vet hanging almost directly in front of Kennedy. As if steeling himself to do so, he deliberately pulled aside the velvet hanging with one hand as the other fumbled for the switch that controlled the little bank of light overhead.

Head well back, a rapt expression on his face, he stood before a life-sized painting of a very beautiful girl. In the soft light there was magical depth and definition at once, almost stereoscopic.

Turning quickly, Roger shot out, 'There is my future happiness ... or hell, Kennedy! I have lived for her ... I have studied for her. ... I would die for her. ... If I don’t solve her problem soon her happiness may be wrecked. Do you notice anything about this portrait that is unusual?”

"Tell me first who painted it. It is a gem.” Craig was plainly excited as he rose and fingered the velvet drapery which Roger had lifted from the picture while he studied the face.

"I did . . . in odd moments from memory and a few sketches I have. I’ll show you those later. You know, fellows, I paint when I am tired.” Sadly smiling. "She doesn’t know. She wouldn’t allow it. She has never sat for me . . . consciously. I have stolen the sketches at odd moments . . . and my heart has given me the rest. Look at it again, Craig. Tell me what you see in the face.” He was almost pleading. "Never mind the art value of it. I would never part with it, of course. It is priceless to me. And it is only because I am in dire need of help for her that I show it—even to such good friends as you and Walter.’’

^What do I see in the face of that girl?” repeated Craig. “I see desire . . . for love . . . for happi¬ ness. There’s a witchery of feature, a yearning ex¬ pression of the eyes that the flapper to-day does not have. There is no sham in those eyes. She is all girl. . . . But, Roger, I see a haunting fear, a strange wonder and terror in one so young. Did you put it there ... or is it there, really? Is she in trouble?”

''Yes—and if we don’t help her soon, she will be in more. Yes, I put it there ... I mean, I tried to portray it. It is really there ... at times. . . . My God, Kennedy, if I ever needed your friendship, I need it now!” He clutched Craig’s shoulder.

Kennedy studied the face. Rebellious curls steal¬ ing over a perfect oval contour[. Lips slightly parted, revealing teeth of pearly white.

"She has a temper, hasn’t she, Roger—and tem¬ perament?”

<‘Yes —at times she has the temper of a tigress ... at times ... at times . . . mostly in the night¬ time . . . temper and temperament, yes. Craig, that is the problem. Listen.”

He let go the velvet folds and paced back and forth across the broad tiled hearth, speaking in a low tense tone.

"I have studied the question of dual personality probably more profoundly than any of a half dozen of the leading specialists in that intricate and mys¬ terious psychological field. . . . But . . . Natalie ... in herself is a different case from any that has ever been recorded. Even the most fanciful flights of the fiction writers have not hit upon anything exactly similar to her case. I get no help from Mr. Belasco’s ^The Case of Becky.’ Neither is she a feminine Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nor is she quite like the unfortunate young man in Kipling’s Tinest Story in the World.’ ”

He paused a moment before the velvet hanging and drew it aside that the face might emphasize what he was saying.

^To begin with, there are what I call Natalie’s paleolithic dreams, dreams of the Stone Age, dreams in which she is Gel, as she calls herself in some gib¬ berish jargon—Gel pursued by two paleolithic men from the caves and carried off by them. . . . Dag, a third troglodyte, of the later paleolithic, as nearly as I can make out, pursues, battles with the two, and, being cleverer than either, kills one and beats off the other—wins Gel. Dag, you see, the late paleo¬ lithic man, conquers the earher paleohthic and car¬ ries off the early neolithic girl. Gel.”

Still holding the drapery aside from the face, the eyes of which were momentarily taking on a new meaning, he went on:

“But the real problem is what I call Natalie’s megalithic dreams, her ^Dream Dance,’ in the moon¬ light, as if in the days when Druid Stonehenge was new.

“When she was in her early girlhood Natalie was a problem to her father, a scholarly gentleman of fortune and breeding, son of the old banker, Douglas Lisle, to him and to my father, Doctor Gerard, the family physician. Natalie’s moods were a cause of constant study not unmixed with alarm. But neither her father nor mine came within a thousand miles, or rather years, of hitting on the clew to her rather erratic conduct.

^Tor instance, they could not understand her ex¬ cessive somnolence in the forenoon, nor her exces¬ sive activity with the falling of night. And when the two kindly old gentlemen found the scantily clad girl dancing eerie dances among the moon shadows on summer nights or climbing over dizzy roofs, they decided that she was a somnambulist. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Kennedy, believe it or not, in reality, as I see it, Natalie was wide-eyed awake. She was actually under the nightroaming dance spell of an earlier existence!’^

Kennedy said nothing, but it was plain that his alert mind was busy on a new and unheard-of problem.

^^She was a strange little girl, then,’^ remarked Roger, reminiscently, as he gently let fall the velvet screen over the portrait, ^^several years younger than I, as you must have guessed, and I think I was about the youngest in our class, was I not?’^

Kennedy nodded, but it was an abstracted nod, rather to encourage the psychoanalyst to tell his own story, as one who said, ^‘Physician, heal thyself.^^

‘Tond as I was of her, I remember I would feel an instinctive dread steal over me when Natalie and I were alone together when the shadows began to lengthen and the irresistible desire to dance wild, sensuous dances came over her. . . .

“I shall never forget one wild night when I fol¬ lowed her in anxiety and came upon her riding bareback upon the king stag that led the deer with which her father’s park was stocked—a beautiful picture that only my fear for her safety led me to interfere with. For a time after that Natalie and I were estranged. In fact I returned home at dawn scratched and bleeding and with marks of human teeth pocking my arms and neck, a circumstance that I would not explain, even under threats from my father. Shortly after that I was sent away to college to begin training for my medical career, which I later bent around toward psychoanalysis and the mind.”

Gerard pulled a silken cord and his butler padded in, replenished the glasses, and padded out again without a word.

^Then father died—and Guy Hawtrey bought our place, next to Natalie's. About the same time Gordon Gaunt bought the place to the north of the Lisles. I went abroad to study with Jung and Freud, then in Berlin, finally in Paris. I came back to find Natalie a bit fascinated and very much afraid of a struggle that had grown up between Hawtrey and Gaunt over her. She is . . . yet.”

Gerard banged his glass down so that it cracked. ^^Craig,” he exclaimed, ‘‘I have had to watch those neighbors of Natalie laying siege to the treasure house that belongs to me. Natalie is mine! And they are trying to outbid each other at every turn. Hawtrey understands what I call her ^night' tem¬ perament—I am afraid. Neither of these men is the man for her.

^^She is a child of nature. A recent whim is rais¬ ing rare and beautiful orchids. She isn't content to wear them; she must grow them. In the daytime she spends hours with them.” He hfted a sketch portfolio and shoved some sketches in Craig's direction. have won some attention and consideration by painting her prize orchids when they bloom, and I have earned all the consideration IVe got and more. The orchid house is the hottest and dampest part of the conservatory.

^Tt beats the devil the way Gaunt helps his case alone with her. Only yesterday Natahe called me up in great excitement. Gaunt had presented her with an orchid plant that was valued at several thou¬ sand dollars. Just fancy ... a little surprise, you know. And would 1 come over and paint it, as the bud would probably be opened by to-morrow. Then when I'm sweating in that damned conserva¬ tory, I suppose I am to use my art to bolster his suit! And if I don't go, what about my own?"

Gerard walked violently across the room a couple of times, rang viciously for the butler, and all but accused him of breaking his glass.

^^Hawtrey is the problem, though. Last week he gave Natalie a wonderful polo pony and now every evening—confound this daylight saving!—she is trying to break her neck with this gift—and what worries me most is that Hawtrey is with her a good deal of the time. I wish he'd break his! Between polo ponies and orchids, where do I come in? I scrapped one motor boat because it wasn't fast enough for her, the Nomad', then another, the Nomad 11. I'm having Nomad III built, the fastest and biggest speed cruiser I can get. But it isn't ready for delivery yet . . . quite. I know her pas¬ sion for the restless, rolling, dancing sea. I thought I might make an appeal to the 'night' Natalie and the 'day' Natalie at once—but if it's money wins, why, it's two to one against me!"

''Who is this Gaunt?'' asked Kennedy.

"Gaunt? Gaunt belongs to that class of suddenly rich that the papers call profiteers, but I incline to think have an inherited capacity to take money away from other people in one way or another. He does it with oil."

"And Hawtrey?"

"The source of Hawtrey's fortune—well—to be perfectly frank, you just swallowed some of it rum running—^started with a chap named Carfax, Norman Carfax, a distant cousin of Natalie, by the way. It's good stuff, eh? But sometimes it sticks in my throat. Hawtrey had a quarrel with Carfax not long ago over his wife, Dorothy Carfax. I be¬ lieve Carfax revenged himself by taking up with a little dancer. Fay Blythe, another flam© of Hawtrey’s. Carfax!"

Gerard gritted his teeth. "Listen to this. There was a wonderful swimming pool on the Lisle place. By the side of it there used to be a pergola. This was a couple of years ago, when Carfax and Hawtrey were so thick.

"It was one of Natalie’s favorite spots on the es¬ tate. In June it was a bower of roses, a joy to every sense. There she would go at night when the moon was young and dance on the broken flag stones that paved the pergola of roses. Clad in filmy draperies, she would dance the night through.

"She would lean over the pool and watch the shadows darting here, there, never still. Natalie danced with her whole body. Gleefully she would pose and express some wild desire or sinuously wave her beautiful arms and expressive hands. Her hands would almost talk. She. would bow; her shadow would bow. Then with a merry laugh she would leap high and shoot out one graceful limb. Almost, in the night shadows, it would seem as if she were wafted along in the air as she floated down on the other, then rose again, ever varying and repeating the eerie grace of her dance. She loved the shadows.

^^One night she saw her cousin, Norman Carfax, watching her. Her mood changed. He was older than herself and she resented his spying. Intensely angry, but concealing it, she continued to dance bhthely around the lip of the pool, through the per¬ gola, over the broken flags, stopping to bend grace¬ fully over the water, cupping her hands to fling it high in the air.

^^She did this several times until she neared the place where her cousin was concealed, near the edge of the pool. Suddenly with a quick dart she was back in the shrubbery that bent over nearly to the water. Before he was aware of her intention. Carfax was in the pool. With a mocking laugh she danced off across the meadows, toward the deer park. Carfax could not swim very well and it might have been serious, but he managed to pull himself out. Cousin . . . Carfax . . . ugh! Smart—upstart—society!” Roger ground out.

For a full five minutes we listened to a tirade from Gerard on the twisted triangles of Hawtrey, the Carfaxes, and Fay Blythe, on Dorothy and Fay cast off by Hawtrey, and Norman Carfax double-crossed in love and the money game, both, by him.

‘TFs smart society, all right,” wound up Gerard,— ^^smart dinners, smart drinks, smart dances. I used to think the ffhree D’s,^ as I call them, were a safety valve that let off a good deal of moral steam harmlessly. But I guess some of our reforming friends have sat on the safety valve until the pressure is ungodly terrific. At least, there’s a lot of damn smart deviltry in the dining, drinking, and dancing of this set!”

I began to feel that Gerard, the psychoanalyst, was betraying his own complexes as he talked, a re¬ action against '"smart” society of to-day as ex¬ emplified by Hawtrey, the girl-crazy, passion-struck; by Gaunt and by Carfax, and l3y the women, Dorothy Carfax and Fay Blythe.

They interfered with him, in his plans for Natalie, to solve the mystery of her strange unconscious personahty and conform it to the normal line of happi¬ ness. Hence his reaction. Was that his inferiority complex? I felt at least they would ghbly say so— that is, if they knew enough of the new science that was being smattered so thickly around them.

"So, you see, when I returned from abroad,” Gerard went on to tell of his battle for the true Natalie, "I reahzed that in my absence she had fallen more deeply in the power of this upstart society. I knew it because by my studies I had gained a deeper insight into the secret springs of life. I knew the relation that such as Hawtrey, Gaunt, and Carfax bore to the "dream dance’ com¬ plex in the unconscious mind of Natalie. Such peo¬ ple held a mastery over that side of her dual nature.