"Deaths?"
"Oh, yes. If a man knows he's been marked down to die, he dies."
"The power of suggestion, I suppose."
"Presumably. "
"But that doesn't quite satisfy you?"
"No - not quite. There are cases difficult of explanation by any of our glib Western scientific theories. The stuff doesn't usually work on Europeans (though I have known cases). But if the belief is there in your blood, you've had it!" He left it there.
I said thoughtfully: "I agree with you that one can't be too didactic. Odd things happen even in this country. I was at a hospital one day in London. A girl had come in - neurotic subject, complaining of terrible pain in bones, arms, etc. Nothing to account for it. They suspected she was a victim of hysteria. Doctor told her cure could be effected by a red-hot rod being drawn down the arm. Would she agree to try it? She did.
"The girl turned her head away and screwed up her eyes. The doctor dipped a glass rod in cold water and drew it down the inside of her arm. The girl screamed with agony. He said 'You'll be all right now.' She said 'I expect so, but it was awful. It burned.' The queer thing to me was - not that she believed that she had been burned, but that her arm actually was burned. The flesh was actually blistered everywhere the rod had touched it."
"Was she cured?" Despard asked curiously.
"Oh, yes. The neuritis, or whatever it was, never reappeared. She had to be treated for the burned arm, though."
"Extraordinary," said Despard. "It goes to show, doesn't it?"
"The doctor was startled himself."
"I bet he was..." He looked at me curiously.
"Why were you really so keen to go to that sйance last night?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Those three women intrigue me. I wanted to see what sort of show they would put up."
Despard said no more. I don't think he believed me. As I have said, he was a perceptive man.
Presently I went along to the vicarage. The door was open but there seemed to be no one in the house.
I went to the little room where the telephone was, and rang up Ginger.
It seemed an eternity before I heard her voice.
"Hallo!"
"Ginger!"
"Oh, it's you. What happened?"
"You're all right?"
"Of course I'm all right. Why shouldn't I be?"
Waves of relief swept over me.
There was nothing wrong with Ginger; the familiar challenge of her manner did me a world of good. How could I ever have believed that a lot of mumbo jumbo could hurt so normal a creature as Ginger?
"I just thought you might have had bad dreams or something," I said rather lamely.
"Well, I didn't. I expected to have, but all that happened was that I kept waking up and wondering if I felt anything peculiar happening to me. I really felt almost indignant because nothing did happen to me."
I laughed.
"But go on - tell me," said Ginger. "What's it all about?"
"Nothing much out of the ordinary. Sybil lay on a purple couch and went into a trance."
Ginger gave a spurt of laughter.
"Did she? How wonderful! Was it a black velvet one and did she have nothing on?"
"Sybil is no Madame de Montespan. And it wasn't a black mass. Actually Sybil wore quite a lot of clothes, peacock blue, and lots of embroidered symbols."
"Sounds most appropriate and Sybil-like. What did Bella do?"
"That really was rather beastly. She killed a white cock and then they dipped your glove in the blood."
"Oo - nasty... what else?"
"Lots of things," I said.
I thought that I was doing quite well. I went on:
"Thyrza gave me the whole bag of tricks. Summoned up a spirit - Macandal was, I think, the name. And there were coloured lights and chanting. The whole thing would have been quite impressive to some people - scared 'em out of their wits."
"But it didn't scare you?"
"Bella did scare me a bit," I said. "She had a very nasty-looking knife, and I thought she might lose her head and add me to the cock as a second victim."
Ginger persisted:
"Nothing else frightened you?"
"I'm not influenced by that sort of thing."
"Then why did you sound so thankful to hear I was all right?"
"Well, because -" I stopped.
"All right," said Ginger obligingly. "You needn't answer that one. And you needn't go out of your way to play down the whole thing. Something about it impressed you."
"Only, I think, because they - Thyrza, I mean - seemed so calmly confident of the result."
"Confident that what you've been telling me about could actually kill a person?"
Ginger's voice was incredulous.
"It's daft," I agreed.
"Wasn't Bella confident, too?"
I considered. I said:
"I think Bella was just enjoying herself killing cocks and working herself up into a kind of orgy of ill wishing. To hear her moaning out 'The Blood... he blood' was really something."
"I wish I'd heard it," said Ginger regretfully.
"I wish you had," I said. "Frankly, the whole thing was quite a performance."
"You're all right now, aren't you?" said Ginger.
"What do you mean - all right?"
"You weren't when you rang me up, but you are now."
She was quite correct in her assumption. The sound of her cheerful normal voice had done wonders for me. Secretly, though, I took off my hat to Thyrza Grey. Bogus though the whole business might have been, it had infected my mind with doubt and apprehension. But nothing mattered now, Ginger was all right. She hadn't had so much as a bad dream.
"And what do we do next?" demanded Ginger. "Have I got to stay put for another week or so?"
"If I want to collect a hundred pounds from Mr Bradley, yes."
"You'll do that if it's the last thing you ever do. Are you staying on with Rhoda?"
"For a bit. Then I'll move on to Bournemouth. You're to ring me every day, mind, or I'll ring you - that's better. I'm ringing from the vicarage now."
"How's Mrs Dane Calthrop?"
"In great form. I told her all about it, by the way."
"I thought you would. Well, good-bye for now. Life is going to be very boring for the next week or two. I've brought some work with me to do - and a good many of the books that one always means to read but never has the time to."
"What does your gallery think?"
"That I'm on a cruise."
"Don't you wish you were?"
"Not really," said Ginger... Her voice was a little odd.
"No suspicious characters approached you?"
"Only what you might expect. The milkman, the man to read the gas meter, a woman asking me what patent medicines and cosmetics I used, someone asking me to sign a petition to abolish nuclear bombs and a woman who wanted a subscription for the blind. Oh, and the various flat porters, of course. Very helpful. One of them mended a fuse for me."
"Seems harmless enough," I commented.
"What were you expecting?"
"I don't really know."
I had wished, I suppose, for something overt that I could tackle.
But the victims of the Pale Horse died of their own free will... no, the word free was not the one to use. Seeds of physical weakness in them were developed by a process that I did not understand.
Ginger rebuffed a weak suggestion of mine about a false gas meter man.
"He had genuine credentials," she said. "I asked for them! He was only the man who gets up on a ladder inside the bathroom and reads off the figures and writes them down. He's far too grand to touch pipes or gas jets. And I can assure you he hasn't arranged an escape of gas in my bedroom."
No, the Pale Horse did not deal with accidental gas escapes - nothing so concrete!
"Oh! I had one other visitor," said Ginger. "Your friend Dr Corrigan. He's nice."
"I suppose Lejeune sent him."
"He seemed to think he ought to rally to a namesake. Up the Corrigans!"
I rang off, much relieved in mind.
I got back to find Rhoda busy on the lawn with one of her dogs. She was anointing it with some unguent.
"The vet's just gone," she said. "He says it's ringworm. It's frightfully catching, I believe. I don't want the children getting it - or the other dogs."
"Or even adult human beings," I suggested.
"Oh, it's usually children who get it. Thank goodness they're away at school all day - keep quiet, Sheila. Don't wriggle.
"This stuff makes the hair fall out," she went on. "It leaves bald spots for a bit but it grows again."
I nodded, offered to help, was refused, for which I was thankful, and wandered off again.
The curse of the country, I have always thought, is that there are seldom more than three directions in which you can go for a walk. In Much Deeping, you could either take the Garsington road, or the road to Long Cottenham, or you could go up Shadhanger Lane to the main London - Bournemouth road two miles away.
By the following day at lunchtime, I had sampled both the Garsington and the Long Cottenham roads. Shadhanger Lane was the next prospect.
I started off, and on my way was struck by an idea. The entrance to Priors Court opened off Shadhanger Lane. Why should I not go and call on Mr Venables?
The more I considered the idea, the more I liked it. There would be nothing suspicious about my doing so. When I had been staying down here before, Rhoda had taken me over there. It would be easy and natural to call and ask if I might be shown again some particular object that I had not had time really to look at and enjoy on that occasion.
The recognition of Venables by this chemist - what was his name - Ogden? - Osborne? - was interesting, to say the least of it. Granted that, according to Lejeune, it would have been quite impossible for the man in question to have been Venables owing to the latter's disability, yet it was intriguing that a mistake should have been made about a man living in this particular neighbourhood - and a man, one had to admit, who fitted in so well in character.
There was something mysterious about Venables. I had felt it from the first. He had, I was sure, first-class brains. And there was something about him - what word could I use? - the word vulpine came to me. Predatory - destructive. A man, perhaps, too clever to be a killer himself - but a man who could organize killing very well if he wanted to.
As far as all that went, I could fit Venables into the part perfectly. The mastermind behind the scenes. But this chemist, Osborne, had claimed that he had seen Venables walking along a London street. Since that was impossible, then the identification was worthless, and the fact that Venables lived in the vicinity of the Pale Horse meant nothing.
All the same, I thought, I would like to have another look at Mr Venables. So in due course I turned in at the gates of Priors Court and walked up the quarter mile of winding drive.
The same manservant answered the door, and said that Mr Venables was at home. Excusing himself for leaving me in the hall, "Mr Venables is not always well enough to see visitors," he went away, returning a few moments later with the information that Mr Venables would be delighted to see me.
Venables gave me a most cordial welcome, wheeling his chair forward and greeting me quite as an old friend.
"Very nice of you to look me up, my dear fellow. I heard you were down here again, and was going to ring up our dear Rhoda this evening and suggest you all come over for lunch or dinner."
I apologized for dropping in as I had, but said that it was a sudden impulse. I had gone for a walk, found that I was passing his gate, and decided to gate-crash.
"As a matter of fact," I said, "I'd love to have another look at your Mogul miniatures. I hadn't nearly enough time to see them properly the other day."
"Of course you hadn't. I'm glad you appreciate them. Such exquisite detail."
Our talk was entirely technical after this. I must admit that I enjoyed enormously having a closer look at some of the really wonderful things he had in his possession.
Tea was brought in and he insisted that I partake of it.
Tea is not one of my favourite meals but I appreciated the smoky China tea, and the delicate cups in which it was served. There was hot buttered anchovy toast, and a plum cake of the luscious old-fashioned kind that took me back to teatime at my grandmother's house when I was a little boy.
"Homemade," I said approvingly.
"Naturally! A bought cake never comes into this house."
"You have a wonderful cook, I know. Don't you find it difficult to keep a staff in the country, as far away from things as you are here?"
Venables shrugged his shoulders. "I must have the best. I insist upon it. Naturally - one has to pay! I pay."
All the natural arrogance of the man showed here. I said dryly: "If one is fortunate enough to be able to do that, it certainly solves many problems."
"It all depends, you know, on what one wants out of life. If one's desires are strong enough - that is what matters. So many people make money without a notion of what they want it to do for them! As a result they get entangled in what one might call the money-making machine. They are slaves. They go to their offices early and leave late; they never stop to enjoy. And what do they get for it? Larger cars, bigger houses, more expensive mistresses or wives - and, let me say, bigger headaches."
He leaned forward.
"Just the getting of money - that is really the be-all and end-all for most rich men. Plough it back into bigger enterprises, make more money still. But why? Do they ever stop to ask themselves why? They don't know."
"And you?" I asked.
"I -" He smiled. "I knew what I wanted. Infinite leisure in which to contemplate the beautiful things of this world, natural and artificial. Since to go and see them in their natural surroundings has of late years been denied me, I have them brought from all over the world to me."
