On an Odd Note Read online

  The few that thought of the matter said: “They’ll track that money down. It’s got to be somewhere, and they’ll trace it. The FBI will throw out a net.” But in point of fact, Little Dominic and MacGinnis being dead, no one had a clue to its whereabouts. It was buried treasure.

  For years previous to the execution of Rurik Duncan, Dr. Holliday had been performing fabulous feats of eye surgery. To him the grafting of corneal tissue from the eye of a man recently dead to the eye of a living child was a routine affair which he regarded much as a tailor regards the stitching of a collar—good sewing was essential, as a matter of course, but the thing had to fit. And, somewhat like certain fierce tailors of the old school, he was at once savagely possessive, devilishly proud and bitterly contemptuous of the craft to which he was married. I know an old tailor who never tired of sneering at himself, who would have nothing to do with his fellow craftsmen because they were, in his opinion, mere tailors; but who ordered King Edward VII to get out of his shop and stay out, because His Majesty questioned the hang of a sleeve. Dr. Holliday was a man of this character—dissatisfied, arbitrary, unsatisfying, ill-natured, impossible to please. He had something like a contemptuous familiarity with the marvelous mechanism of the human eye, but would allow nobody but himself to talk lightly of it. He became famous when he grafted his first cornea. When the reporters came to interview him he appeared to be angry with the world for admiring him.

  Irritable, disdainful, his face set in a look of intense distaste, and talking in an overemphasized reedy voice, he could make the most casual remark offensive. Reminded of his services to humanity, Dr. Holliday said, “Human eyes, sheep’s eyes—they are all one to me. As eyes, a fly’s eyes are far more remarkable. Your eye is nothing but a makeshift arrangement for receiving light rays upon a sensitive surface. A camera with an automatic shutter, and damned inefficient at that. They do better in the factories. I have repaired a camera. Well?”

  A reporter said, “But you’ve restored sight, Dr. Holliday. A camera can’t see without an eye behind it.”

  Dr. Holliday snapped, “Neither can an eye see, as anybody but an absolute fool must know.”

  “Well, you can’t see without your eyes,” another reporter said.

  “You can’t see with them,” said Dr. Holliday. “Even if I had the time to explain to you the difference between looking and seeing, you have not the power to understand me; and even if you had, how would you convey what you understood to the louts who buy your journal? Let it be sufficient for me to say, therefore, that the grafting of a cornea, to one who knows how to do it, is probably less difficult than an invisible darning job done to hide a cigarette burn in your trousers. Vision comes from behind the eye.”

  One of the reporters who wrote up things like viruses and astronomy for the Sunday supplement said: “Optic nerve—” at which Dr. Holliday swooped at him like a sparrow hawk.

  “What do you know about the optic nerve, if I may ask? Oh, I love these popular scientists, I love them! Optic nerve. That’s all there is to it, isn’t it? A wiring job, so to speak, eh? Plug it in, switch it on, turn a knob—is that the idea? Splice it, like a rope, eh? My dear sir, you know nothing about the tiniest and most insignificant nerve in your body, let alone how it is motivated—and neither do I, and neither does anybody else. But you will suck on your scientific jargon, just as a weaning baby sucks on an unhygienic rubber pacifier. It is an impertinence, sir, to talk so glibly to me! ‘Optic nerve’—as if I were a chorus girl! Can you name me thirty parts, say, of the mere eye—just name them—that you talk with such facility of optic nerves? Have you considered the extraordinary complexity of the optic nerve? The microscopic complications of cellular tissues and blood vessels?”

  The reporter, abashed, said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Holliday. I was only going to ask if it might be possible—I don’t mean in our time, but some time—really to graft a whole eye and, as you put it, splice an optic nerve?”

  In his disagreeable way, unconsciously mocking the hesitancy of the reporter’s voice—this was another of his unpleasant mannerisms—Dr. Holliday said, “Yes sir, and no sir. One thing is impossible and that is to predict what may or may not be surgically possible or impossible in our time. But I can tell you this, sir, as expert to expert: it is about as possible to graft a whole eye as it might be to graft a whole head. As every schoolboy must know, nervous tissue does not regenerate itself in the vertebrate, except in the case of the salamander in whom the regenerative process remains a mystery.”

  A lady reporter asked, “Aren’t salamanders those lizards that are supposed to live in fire, or something?”

  Dr. Holliday started to snap but, meeting the wide gaze of this young woman, liked her irises and, gently for him, explained, “The salamander resembles a lizard but it is an amphibian, with a long tail. An amphibian lives both in and out of water. Have you never seen a salamander? I’ll show you one . . .” And he led the way to an air-conditioned room that smelled somewhat of dead vegetation, through which ran a miniature river bordered with mud. In this mud languid little animals stirred.

  A man from the south said, “Heck, they’re mud-eels!”

  At him Dr. Holliday curled a lip, saying, “Same thing.”

  The Sunday supplement man said, “Dr. Holliday, may I ask whether you are studying the metabolic processes of the salamander with a view to their application—”

  “No, you may not.”

  The lady reporter said, “I think they’re cute. Where can I get one?”

  Majestically, Dr. Holliday called to an assistant: “Everington, put a couple of salamanders in a jar for the lady!”

  Next day there were photographs of a salamander in the papers, and headlines like this:

  HEAD GRAFT NEXT?

  MYSTERY OF SALAMANDER

  After that Dr. Holliday would not speak to anybody connected with the press and was dragged into the limelight again only when he grafted the right eye of Rurik into the head of a four-year-old boy named Dicky Aldous, son of Richard Aldous, a wealthy paint manufacturer of Greenwich, Connecticut.

  It was not one operation, but eight, over a period of about six weeks, during which time the child’s eye was kept half-in and half-out of a certain fluid which Dr. Holliday has refused to discuss. The Sunday supplement writer, the “sensationalist,” has hinted that this stuff is derived from the lizard-like amphibian salamander which, alone among vertebrates, has the power to regenerate nervous tissue. It is not for me to express an opinion in this matter. Only I will insist that sensationalists all too often are right.

  Jules Verne was a sensationalist; and now we are discussing man-powered rockets to the moon. H.G. Wells was a sensationalist; but there really are such things as heavier-than-air aircraft, automatic sights and atomic bombs. I, for one, refuse to discount the surmises of the Sunday supplement man who put it as a conjecture that Dr. Holliday was using, as a regenerative principle, some hormone extracted from the humble salamander. Why not? Alexander Fleming found penicillin in the mold on lemon rind. Believe me, if it were not for such cranks, medicine would still be witch-doctoring, and brain surgery a hole in the head to let the devils out.

  Anyway, Dr. Holliday grafted Rurik Duncan’s right eye into the head of the four-year-old Dicky Aldous. It is not true that the father, Richard Aldous, paid Dr. Holliday a hundred thousand dollars for the operation; Mr. Aldous donated this sum, and more, to the Holliday Foundation, of which every schoolboy has heard.

  To state the facts baldly: when the bandages were lifted, Dicky Aldous, born blind, could see out of his new right eye. The left remained sightless; but with the right the child could clearly discriminate objects. The lady reporter made quite a piece out of his first recognition of the color blue.

  The Sunday supplement man, in whose bosom still rankled Dr. Holliday’s rudeness, wrote an article suggesting that the delicate tissues of the human eye might be seriously altered by the tremendous shock of electrocution which, since it involves the entire nervous
system, necessarily affects the optic nerve.

  Dr. Holliday, after a few outbursts, became silent. It was noted that he was frequently found to be in consultation with the English brain specialist, Mr. Donne, and Dr. Felsen, the neurologist. Paragraph by paragraph the case of Dicky Aldous dropped out of the papers.

  It was simply taken for granted that it was possible to graft a living eye. Other matters came up to occupy our attention—Russia, the hydrogen bomb, Israel, the World Series—and the fly-trap of the public mind closed upon and digested what once it had gapingly received as “The Dicky Aldous Miracle.”

  But this is far from being the end of the story. As an old friend of Richard Aldous and his family I was privileged to witness subsequent events. And since, now, it can do no harm and might do some good, I feel that I have the right to offer the public a brief account of these events.

  Richard Aldous was a third-generation millionaire; genteel, sensitive, a collector of engravings. His wife, whom he had met in Lucca, was an Italian princess—finely engraved herself, and almost fanatically fastidious. Tourists used to wonder how it was possible for a sensitive, highbred Italian aristocrat to live in a palazzo surrounded with filth. Actually there is nothing to wonder at—the explanation is in the three wise monkeys, procurable at any novelty store. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil—and there you are, divorced from humanity. In extreme cases stop your nose, having previously sprinkled yourself with strong perfume.

  As you can imagine, therefore, little Dicky Aldous in his fifth year was a child who was being brought up by his mother in complete ignorance of the ugliness that exists in the world. The servants in the Aldous house had been selected rather than simply employed—examined, as it were, through a magnifying glass—generally imported from Europe, expense being no object. Dicky’s nurse was a sweet-natured English gentlewoman. From her he could have heard nothing but old-fashioned nursery songs—sung off-key, perhaps, but kindly and innocuous—and no story more dangerous than the one about the pig that wouldn’t jump over the stile. The housekeeper was from Lucca; she had followed her mistress six years previous, with her husband, the butler. Neither of them could speak more than two or three phrases in English. Mrs. Aldous’s maid, Beatrice, also was an Italian girl, a wonderful needlewoman and hairdresser but totally ignorant of the English language. Indeed, she seldom spoke any language at all—she preferred to sing, which the little boy liked, being blind.

  Here were no evil communications to corrupt the good manners of poor Dicky Aldous.

  Yet one day, about a month after the sensational success of Dr. Holliday’s operation had been fully established, the English nurse came down from the nursery to make the required announcement that Master Dicky was asleep, and there was something in her manner which made the father ask, “Anything wrong, Miss Williams?”

  Rachel Williams, the English nanny, didn’t like to say, but at last she burst out—that somebody must have been teaching little Dicky to use bad language. She could not imagine who might be responsible. Closely pressed, she spelled out a word or two—she could not defile her tongue by uttering them whole—and Aldous began to laugh. “Tell me now, Miss Williams, what is the name of Mrs. Aldous’s maid?”

  “Beatrice,” said Miss Williams, pronouncing the name in the Italian style.

  “And what’s the diminutive? How does Mrs. Aldous generally address her?”

  “Bici,” said the nurse.

  “When Dicky first saw the light, bless his heart, where did you tell him it came from?”

  “Why, Mr. Aldous, from the sun.”

  “Work it out, Miss Williams, and I think you’ll arrive at the origins of most of this so-called ‘bad’ language.”

  All the same, when the nurse was at supper, Mr. Aldous went to the nursery where his son lay sleeping. On the way into the room he met his wife hurrying out, evidently on the verge of tears. She said, “Oh Richard, our boy is possessed by a devil! He just said, in his sleep, ‘For crying out roud, cease, you rousy sandwich!’ Where did he ever hear a word like ‘cease’?”

  Her husband sent her to bed, saying, “Why, darling, little Dicky has had to suffer the impact of too many new sensations, too suddenly. The shock must be something like the shock of being born. Rest, sweetheart.” Then he went into the nursery and sat by the child’s crib.

  After a little while, stirring uneasily in his sleep, speaking in the accents of the gutters of the West, Dicky Aldous said quite clearly, “Ah, shup! Aina kina guya rat!”—distinguishable to his father as: ‘Ah, shut up! I ain’t the kind of guy to rat!’

  Then, tossing feverishly from side to side and talking through his milk teeth, his face curiously distorted so that he spoke almost without moving his lips, Dicky Aldous said, in baby talk with which I will not trouble your eyes or distract your attention by writing it phonetically: “. . . Listen, and get it right, this time, you son-of-a . . .” He added a string of expletives which, coming from him, were indescribably shocking. Perhaps horrifying is the better word because you can understand shock, being aware of its cause; but horror makes no sense. That is why it is horrible—there lies the quintessence of nightmare, in the truth divorced from reason.

  Typically, the first thing Richard Aldous thought of was Henry James and “The Turn of the Screw.” How could this innocent child be saying words he could not possibly have heard in his tiny life? Now Mr. Aldous began to suspect the doctors, who are notoriously loose of language off the record among themselves. But presently, in a tense whisper, while the entire face of the child seemed to age and alter, Dicky said, “Dom, you take the big .45; Mac, take the cut-down, snub-nose, blue-barrel .38. What for? Because I’m telling you. A big gun looks five times bigger on a runt like Little Dominic. Get me? And a blue belly-gun looks twice as dangerous in the mitt of a big lug like Mac. Me, I take the Luger, because one look at a Luger, you know it’s made for business. . . . But empty, I want ’em empty. . . . C’mon, let’s have a look at that magazine, Dom. . . . Mac, break me them barrels. . . . Good! . . . You got an argument, Dom? Okay, so have I. I ain’t got no ambition to graduate to be Number One, and in Montana, brother, they hang you up. . . . Okay, okay, call it unscientific, but you’ll do as I say; because, believe me, this job’ll be pulled using those things just for show. My weapon is time. Cease, Dominic. . . . Gimme a feel of that .45. Empty. Good, let it stay like that. . . . Okay, then, I want this straight, I want this right from the start. We’ll go over this again. . . .”

  Then Dicky Aldous stopped talking. His face reassumed its proper contours, and he slept peacefully.

  Mr. Aldous met Miss Williams on the stairs. “It’s worrying me to death,” she said. “I cannot for the life of me imagine where Dicky-darling picked up the word ‘cease.’ ”

  Mr. Aldous said, “I think, just for a few nights, Miss Williams, I’ll sleep in his room.”

  And so Mr. Aldous did. To be accurate, he lay down on the nurse’s bed, and stayed awake, listening. He made careful notes of what poor Dicky said in his sleep—and many of the things the child said were concerned with visual memory, which the boy could not have had, since he was born blind.

  “. . . They’s a whole knot o’ cottonmouths on the island past Miller’s Bend. What’ll you give me if I show you? What, you never seen a cottonmouth? Give me something and I’ll show you. It’s a snake, see, a great big poison snake, and it’s got a mouth like it’s full of cotton, and poison teeth longer’n your finger. C’mon, give me what you got and I’ll show you the cottonmouths,” Dicky said, his voice growing uglier. “. . . What d’you mean, you ain’t got nothing? You been wasting my time? Ever learn the Indian twist, so you can break a growed man’s elbow? All right, boy, I’ll show you for free. . . . Oh, that hurts, does it? Too bad. A bit more pressure and it’ll hurt you for keeps—like that. . . . You still ain’t got nothing to see the cottonmouths all tangled in a knot? . . . Oh, you’ll get it, will you? You’d better. And you owe me an extra dime for learning you the Indian twist. . .
. No sir, just for wasting my time I ain’t going to show you them cottonmouths today—not till you bring me twenty cents, you punk, you. And then maybe I’ll show you that nest o’ diamond back rattlesnakes at Geranium Creek. But if you don’t deliver, Malachi Westbrook—mind me now—I’ll show you the Seminole jaw-grip. That takes a man’s head clear off. And I’ll show it to you good, Malachi. Yes sir, me and Teddy Pinchbeck will sure show you good! Mind me, now; meet me and Teddy Pinchbeck at the old Washington boathouse eight o’clock tomorrow morning, and bring Charley Greengrass with you. He better have twenty cents with him, too, or else. . . .”

  Mr. Aldous wrote all this down. At about three o’clock in the morning Dicky said, “Okay, kids. You paid up. You’re okay. Okay, I’ll just borrow Three-Finger Mike’s little old boat, and Teddy Pinchbeck and me’ll take you and Charley Greengrass to look at them cottonmouths. Only see here, you kids, me and Teddy Pinchbeck got to pole you way past Burnt Swamp, and all the way to Miller’s Bend. That’ll cost ’em, won’t it, Teddy? . . . You ain’t got it? Get it. And stop crying—it makes me nervous, don’t it, Teddy? And when I’m nervous I’m liable to show you the Indian hip-grip, so you’ll never walk again as long as you live. You mind me now! . . .”

  Dicky said no more that night. At about nine o’clock in the morning Mr. Aldous made an appointment with a psychologist, one Dr. Asher who, finding himself caught on the horns of this dilemma—carte blanche and an insoluble problem—double-talked himself into one of those psychiatric serials that are longer than human patience. But what was Dr. Asher to say? Little Dicky Aldous had no vision to remember with; there was nothing in his head upon which juvenile imagination might conceivably fall back.

  It was by sheer accident that Mr. Aldous met a lieutenant of detectives named Neetsfoot to whom he confided the matter, hoping against hope, simply because Neetsfoot had worked on the Rurik Duncan case.