The Vampire of Vespuccia

1

As the petty sounds of the Earth's vermin are hushed when thunder rolls through the vast dome of heaven, so in the huge auditorium, each man of the packed thousands held his breath while the orator flung forth his peroration.

The gestures of the tiny black-frocked figure of Judge Sterling produced a weird impression from being the sole movements in that abyss of stillness; from the tiers of boxes he had the effect of a marionette. But his voice seemed impersonal, a force of nature; his last phrase fulminated with terrors more awful than Sinai's; it was a brutal and contemptuous defiance of the hostile multitude whom he had come to address.

"God will look after our rights if we look after our righteousness."

It was the time and the place that vitalised this pious platitude, challenged the tiger of murder in every heart. For Judge Sterling was no longer a judge; he had resigned a week earlier, that he might be free to throw himself into the ranks of the few fanatics who were protesting against the policy of the President of the United States of America, a policy endorsed almost unanimously by Congress, backed by Wall Street, popular throughout the country, patently profitable to all parties—and yet a violation of the principles of Justice. The rights of the little republic of Vespuccia should be no less sacred than those of its big neighbour; and it was the annexation of Vespuccia which the President had proposed—on this policy he relied for reelection.

The action of Judge Sterling was a bolt from the blue. He had always been respected for his learning, acumen, integrity and independence; but he had never been active in politics. His friends said plainly that he must have gone mad. He had published his letter of resignation—a curt scathing scorpion—hired the biggest auditorium in the city where his opponents were strongest, and enabled them to match their many against his one.

Sterling threw himself back in to his chair, exhausted. Sweat streamed upon his broad and noble forehead, down his high-boned and hollow cheeks, past his thin straight firm mouth, over his resolute square jaw. He had spoken; let the mob lynch him if they liked.

But not a murmur moved in the throng. The echoes of that passionate prophet-plea died away in to a shuddering silence. Every man fixed his eyes upon the President—a phantom of pallor motionless in his box. It was for him alone to pick up the gauntlet which his oldest and staunchest colleague had thrown down with such tempestuous suddenness. But the keenest sight and spirit in the crown could make no guess as to what thoughts vibrated behind that bloodless mask, those fixed inscrutable eyes.

A man started suddenly to his feet. In that silence, the slight sound caught every ear. The audience turned angrily towards the interrupter, shocked at his insolent action/ They saw a Herculean figure, tangled grey curls rioting on its head, its satyr face convulsed by a savage impulse: and they understood. For the giant was Pitt Campbell the banker, the President's closest confidant, his spokesman on many an occasion when discretion or propriety forbade the Head of the State to speak in his own person.

The banker was a formidable personality; his relentless energy and uncompromising directness had made him one of the most masterful men in the country. He had been the backbone of the campaign on behalf of the policy which Sterling had attacked. The audience allowed his right to speak. But at his first sentence they began to doubt their senses.

"Mr. President," boomed Campbell, his bass bellowing with brutal violence across the hall, "I know when I'm licked. We can't afford to play a dirty trick. Me for the penitents' bench! Boys, let's play the game. Three cheers for Judge Sterling, and the Square Deal!"

His hearers sat as if they had been turned to stone. Not a voice answered his appeal. What would the President do, now that his most trusted ally had turned against him without a word of warning? His blank white face never twitched; but he rose slowly to his feet, and after appearing to hesitate for a few moments, turned on his heel, and left the box. At the action, there broke out, simultaneously in several parts of the hall a volley of cat-calls and derisive yells. Through them cut coldly the hush rasp of Senator Cross: "Yah, yellow dog! Hurrah for Fair Play and our next President, Ford Sterling!"

The impulse swept the mutable mob into impetuous ardour. They forgot every motive that had brought them altogether; they were stampeded into surrender. They stormed the platform; they bore Judge Sterling through the streets on their shoulders, shouting as they marched. Campbell, coolly contemptuous of crowd-psychology, collected a few of the most important men, and convened a conference in his office. In an all-night sitting this committee created a new political party, promulgated a new programme, organised a nationwide machine, and planned a whirlwind campaign of oratory and pamphleteering. A month later the 'Sterling ticket' crashed like a cloudburst upon the polls, and the 'crazy crank' who had challenged the community single-handed was the ideal and the idol of his fellow-citizens.

2

Vespuccia is a group of islands in the tropics; they are mountainous and inhospitable, sparsely inhabited by settlers, principally of French and Irish blood, aristocratic rebels against Sansculottism in the one case and Dublin Castle in the other. They had used republican forms to express the patriarchal institutions, by which they governed a contented and prosperous community of mulattos. Few ever emigrated from those enchanted islands; few ever visited their coasts. For Vespuccia was economically independent, and commercially insignificant. Neither the products of labour, nor those of the land, offered inducements to the energy of exploitation. But at the period of this story, two accidents had conferred sudden importance upon the republic. The opening of the Panama Canal, the revolutions in naval strategy which followed the invention of new types of warships both floating and flying, the experience of the Japanese-American and the Anglo-Russian Wars; these had combined to make the possession of the Vespuccian Islands essential to the command of the sea. Secondly, the McNab-Sullivan motor had made an epoch in mechanics. It depended on utilising the release of atomic energy by the action of the Q-rays of Reuss; and these rays could only be generated by Lord Forsinard's 'photoanalytic battery' in which Hydrofluoric acid acted on alternating plates of Vulcanite and Spinthrium. This rare metal had been discovered and isolated by Moncoco and Mont de Pierre in a specimen of bordellite, where it exists as the silicate in minute quantities; but, recognising its extreme utility, they continued their researches, and found, three years later, that in the collite of Culvit the Spinthrium had been mistaken for the inert Oranium, and really formed (as the sulphate) 69% of the mineral. Now collite, though it is found in Sicily, Iona and elsewhere, occurs in negligibly small deposits; but it forms the most extensive strata of the mountains of Vespuccia.

This new motor was consequently of no more than theoretical importance unless Vespuccia vitalised it by supplying collite. The overtures of several governments to obtain a concession which would have secured the mechanical hegemony of the world to the successful suitor were rejected point-blank by the President of Vespuccia and his Council. They were apprehensive of sharing the fate of the Crust in Baudelaire's prose poem, torn and trampled in the contest of two ragamuffins. Vespuccia stood firm, and invoked the League of Nations to uphold its sovereignty.

England, after vainly applying persistent pressure and exhausting her diplomatic resources, suddenly reversed her helm, and swore to stand by the little republic. The other principal competitor was the United States, whose demands became consistently more imperious, especially after the disasters of the Japanese War had made it clear that Vespuccia was an essential link in the chain of naval defence.

The President, originally elected by a minority, and daily losing popularity by his alleged alliance with inhumane and unscrupulous plutocracy, determined to stake everything on a single throw, and to make the annexation of Vespuccia the fulcrum of the lever by which the people might be moved to renew his lease of office. His campaign had met with success unexampled—until the fatal moment when Ford Sterling had smashed the entire structure single-handed, with one stroke of the sword on whose blade was inlaid this motto: 'Straightness is strength.'

Among the hundred odd millions that populated the United States with so many specimens of our species, there were probably no more than a dozen Vespuccians to rejoice in the escape of their native land. Of these, it may be that the majority had forgotten patriotism in the pursuit of prosperity; but the heart, in one breast, beat hard with elation, with ecstatic, extravagant pride, almost insanely intense. One might have supposed that its owner's mind attributed the enormous event to its own machinations. The absurdity of any such idea is apparent when we summon this patriot to the stage of this story; the footlights show the figure not of a political genius, a power in finance, or a diplomat of superlative subtlety, but, on the background of a wooden shack in a cotton-patch, that of a yellow-skinned hag with a narrow forehead, a toothless grin wrinkling her dirty cheeks as she fixes her only eye—a black patch covers its fellow—upon the fragments of a newspaper whose columns are lurid with the 'landslide' in favour of Vespuccian independence.

Had anyone cared to ask the name of this outcast, old at thirty-five, she would have confessed to 'Marguerite Parnell'; possibly adding that 'Mad Maggie' is good enough for her neighbours. All (as she had no shame in admitting) shun her, except the lowest class of men, who visit her now and then in the course of a bout of drunkenness.

She might be induced to boast that one man loves and respects her: her son, Paul, a Washington lawyer. He is a marked man at twenty-one, with the reputation of having the most brilliant brain that ever added honour to Harvard, and the most fascinating and dominating personality that ever found the art of leadership as natural as swimming is to salmon. Paul Parnell, for all that, finds only one meaning in life; he knows ho motive but devotion to the mother that bore him and bred him, that trained him with concentrated craft and cunning to accomplish her own private purpose in life, the formulation in fact of the phantom created by her insanity, in whose features were mixed the unreasoning patriotism of a serf, the crude ambition of a megalomaniac, and the venomous vengeance of an egoist who would like to destroy the universe every time it reminds him that he is not the almighty and absolute arbiter of events. Yet, insane though she might be, ignorant and obscene as she was, Marguerite Parnell had divined one of the secrets of power. She had insisted on living in misery, vile among vile associates, though she possessed a fortune which enabled her to send Paul to the best schools, and to Harvard, equipped with a spending allowance which put him on terms of equality with the sons of magnates.

Marguerite Parnell grinned over her newspaper with the air proper to a murderer perusing an account of his crime in which the facts are so false, the deductions so misleading, that no misgiving mars his confident chuckle at having outwitted society. Yet in her glance there shot a nobles shaft than mere triumph; one might rather compare its message with the thought of some successful statesman who had achieved his aim so subtly that no man suspects its authorship, or even understands what has happened, much less how. She glowed with the sense of secret power, of superiority such as creative genius has over its puppets, and of that superb self-satisfaction which is peculiar to the feeling that one has fulfilled one's purpose in life, that it has been worth while to embrace the adventure, with all its shame and agony, its daily despair, and its foredoomed death by Death.

The wrinkled woman set a soiled slipper on the disdained newspaper as a lively whistle reached her ears. She threw a scarf over her skinny shoulders, smoothed back her straggling hair, readjusted her patch on aesthetic principles, plastered the ochre cheeks with powder, smeared the thick purplish lips with carmine, and went to the door to meet her son. She had not seen him for two months—nearly three. The boy walked heavily and unsteadily up the mud by-path; but his spirit was bubbling with gladness. His mother took him in her arms with passionate pride and joy, as if the animal instinct for the son were intensified by some spiritual impulse such as a statesman might experience on the return of the soldier whose victories had vindicated his policy. She led him to her bed, laid him down, and covered him up like a child; then mixed him a posset of hot milk and corn whiskey, with the yolks of two raw eggs stirred into it—a pinch of heroin and three drops of Tabasco Sauce completed this hell-broth, which she called 'Easter Egg-nogg' on account of its potency in resuscitating the human male. She drank with her son to the toast 'Vengeance and Vespuccia.' The young man's physical exhaustion soon disappeared; he insisted on sitting up. He began to tell his adventures, leaning eagerly forward with a flame in his velvet-black eyes, while his mother crouched on a rug at his feet, and drank his words, with her nostrils twitching with excitement, and her fingers plucking feverishly at the fringe of her shawl.

3

Paul Parnell spoke with few interruptions. But when he rolled out Sterling's final phrase, whose fame now rang in the house—'God will look after out rights if we look after our righteousness'—the painted lips of his mother parted, and she laughed, a loud, lewd, horrible laugh. "God's truth!" she cackled, "good for that damned old liar! And a pity he didn't think of it ten years ago!"

Pitt Campbell's intervention brought a sneer to her lips. "The cowardly crook!" she cried. Her son laughed lightly back: "The man whose moral courage and integrity are graven in American history!"

His eyes flashed strangely as he described the Presidential surrender, the chalk-white pallor and nervous collapse of the man; in their triumph were mingled horror and grim fear, as well as some perverse form of amused disgust. But Marguerite had closed her eyes; she shook with a spasm of Satanically evil ecstasy.

Paul proceeded to describe the details of the campaign, the strategy of the 'Party of Righteousness,' and the triumphs of their Totem, the Bison. But his hearer seemed to have lost her interest; she rocked herself slowly to and fro with half-shut eyes, musing and muttering.

She sat up suddenly, and snapped: "What about Sing Sing?"

"He came out last week, pretty sick; I took him to Saratoga Springs to feed up; I guess he'll be right along in a week or so."

"Ah!" was the only comment.

"Some one coming!" cried Paul, whose quick ear had heard a step on the path. He went to the door.

"Talk of the Devil!" he laughed. For it was the man of whom they had been talking, feeble beyond the right of his fifty years, that came into the hut a minute later, and mingled his tears and embraces with those of Paul and his mother.

The newcomer accepted a cigar from the young lawyer, and the two men discussed trivial things while Marguerite prepared a meal. Not until they had eaten did the conversation become serious; then, bolting the door, the yellow woman bade the two men settle themselves while she told the story of the past ten years.

"I shall begin," she said quietly to the ex-convict, "with the day I came to Washington—two years before your trial for murder and arson."

4

"There have been two Devils at my elbow all my life; the Beauty which made me a Queen at twelve, a siren at thirteen, a strumpet a year later, and a mother within six months of that. The other was my Brain, incredibly cunning, and insanely intense. My brain drove me to desert Vespuccia for a world worthy of its ambition; and my beauty allured the first victim that counted for more than comfort and cash; you both know who I mean—the creature whose cheeks and liver are whiter than the House from whose doors I have just kicked him!

"Through that cur, though, I met Ford Sterling; and met love. I loved, soul and sense, for the first and last time. That love became flesh—Ford Sterling is your father, Paul!"

She took two slips of paper from the packet and threw them on the table. The men read them, stupefied. One witnessed the marriage of Marguerite Parnell to Ford Sterling; the other the birth of Paul Sterling eleven months later.

"But my brain rebelled against Love; all my pride and happiness were nothing to me, to the gnawings of my insane craving to make mischief in the world. I had instinctively insisted on keeping my marriage a secret from everybody; when I came to live in Washington I pretended to be a rich Creole; I hired a high-class chaperone, and saw Ford only by stealth. Paul was brought openly to me, with a story that my widowed sister had died and left her son in my charge. Ford Sterling forged documents to prove it; there they are!"

She threw a docket on the table.

"The moment I realised that my husband was in my power, my love dropped dead like a shot dove. I smelt a new mouse, and set my claws in that hulking fool, Pitt Campbell. The verminous creature was yellow all through, a sneak and a thief. In my hands he was soft clay; his gross animal instincts made him my dog. He gave himself into my power, body and soul; there are the proofs that would put him in jail for the rest of his rotten life!"

With a gesture of repulsion, the thin fingers of Marguerite Sterling flung a thick envelope before her hearers.

"I worked wildly and craftily, like the madwoman I am. I never wasted a week. I made myself mistress of men's fate; the woman they took to be a sensual sorceress was insensible to aught but the pleasures of power. I have trampled down my temperament; no saint ever conquered himself to serve God as I did to serve the Devil within me. It was rarely that I allowed myself to indulge even in the raptures of hate. But when that yellow dog thought he would kennel in the White House, I remembered that he had been too clever for me. I had no power over him. It was an insult. I set traps for him. His midnight visits to me? The sly cur had arranged for an alibi, and for men to swear that some other man had been guilty. I could only ruin myself—and he would save me the pains unless I obeyed him. I was then that I thought of the old witch that nursed me, her Voodoo: I gathered the herbs that she had told me, sure, faithful, silent friends to hatred; I made the ointment, harmless to woman, fatal to man; and the next time that he celebrated his victory over me, its price was the poison that has left his face bloodless and taught his nerves to betray him in his need."

The ex-convict gasped like a fish thrown in a boat; he stared wildly at the impassive face of the woman before him.

"He won through the acute stage after six weeks of desperate struggle; and his first care was to revenge himself on me. But too many men were in my power; he soon found out that overt action would not avail him. But having become the Governor of his State, he had the police under his thumb; he set their thugs to beat me up in broad daylight on the high road; they left me after breaking two ribs and an arm, smashing my teeth, and gouging my eye. The Devil of my Beauty quit me; but he left the Devil of my Brain far stronger now that he possessed me wholly and solely. I sold my house in Washington and came to live in this nigger shack. The only one of my friends that followed me was you, my friend, Jack Mason!"

Tears filled the old man's eyes. "You did not know my nature or my story; you loved me purely and unselfishly; or, rather, you loved the image of your ideal that your senses fooled you into seeing in me. I played on that devotion with all the devilish art that my despair could command. I tricked your truth into the service of my revenge; you thought yourself the chosen weapon of Eternal Justice, the champion of Innocence, when you swore to bring that reptile to a reckoning! Once more, his vigilance outwitted me: he feared me more than ever; his spies never lost your trail. They invented a motive for you to set fire to Phillbrock's farm; they arranged for you to be present on the appointed night; and they blackjacked the boy whose corpse was found in the burned barn."

The sombre hatred of her eyes was tinged with a faint gleam of human pity; she quenched it with an angry gesture of scorn at what her insane mind considered weakness.

"I concentrated all my efforts upon making Paul the minister of my revenge. He has never caused me a moment of fear lest he might fail me. I cared not a jot for you, Jack Mason; your sentence meant to me only one more defeat, one more humiliation, at the hands of the man I hated.

"In these lonely years I suppose that my mind began to lose its grip. I lived in the memory of my childhood; Vespuccia became to me like a heaven from which I had been exiled. When Paul told me last year of the proposal to annex it, I was inflamed, like some ancient prophetess; wrath gave me genius; I passed a wild-eyed wakeful night; in the morning I had planned every detail of my campaign of patriotism, which would at the same moment glut my private vengeance and my lust for secret power.

"My first step was to make the position of the President politically untenable. I sent Paul to interview the British Ambassador, armed with the evidence—here, in this letter with the red seals!—that he had sold diplomatic secrets to the Stein group of bankers. He gave it to me as a pledge of confidence—my price for the mechanical mummeries he called love. Paul learnt that England had withdrawn from her designs on Vespuccia because Sir William Waghorn had found Spinthrium in enormous quantities in the mineral assolite whose deposits are so extensive throughout Warwickshire. The McNab-Sullivan motor had been secretly adapted by the Government to the uses of war; England was assured of a walk-over in the next conflict. I instructed Paul to return to the Embassy the next morning, to convince my onetime lover that it was idiotic to allow America the opportunity of equalising matters by annexing Vespuccia. A week later we learnt that the British Government was as purblind as usual, and refused to interfere. I put my foot down, and force the Ambassador to present a forged ultimatum at the White House, saying that the annexation of Vespuccia would be regarded as an unfriendly act by the Court of St. James!

"There was no course open to the President but to climb down. I employed Paul to interview various victims and explain the situation. I selected my husband to succeed that mongrel in the White House; I had long since forgiven him for preferring his 'right' to this 'righteousness' by claiming from me the same conjugal duties which had ceased to interest me. I put up Pitt Campbell to be the bell-weather of the political flock; and planted the most leather-hinged of my late lovers at points of strategic importance in the auditorium to start the stampede. The President, knowing from the start that he was beaten, even apart from the action of his fellow-citizens, was forced to accept the humiliating role that I assigned to him. For myself, I have maintained my position of never using my power for personal profit; but I am glad to think that on this one occasion, I demanded the instant release of my loyal, my much-injured friend—Jack Mason! You are free to finish the task by doing justice upon the scoundrel who sent you up the Hudson!"

Jack Mason rose. "Never! Two wrongs don't make a right. I pity him. I forgive him."

The woman uttered an appalling shriek. "Then I am baffled after all in the very hour of victory. The Devil deserts me. My life is blasted at the root! Earth is no longer tolerable; I will go back where I belong—in Hell!" She caught up the carving-knife from the cracked dish, set its point to her throat, and collapsed, a crumpled mass, into her chair.

5

The lady rose and stretched herself. "Ten minutes of nine!" she exclaimed in a totally altered tone. "We ought to get back to Atlanta."

Jack Mason and Paul rose from their seats respectfully; one held open the door, while the other took a furred mantle from a closet, and adjusted it to the shoulders of 'Mad Maggie' as she removed the facial sections of her make-up.

"By the way, get me a youngish actress for next week," the eminent novelist said, stepping into her automobile; "she has to have eloped with you, Paul; you are the chauffeur of the Duke of Durham—that's the papers this morning."

The men bowed in understanding silence.

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