Collecting Delaware Books
Victor Thaddeus' First Story
Victor Thaddeus had his first short story published in the magazine Argosy All-Story Weekly in the issue for November 5, 1921. It is reproduced below. We have searched for any possible current copyrights and have found none. We would be pleased to know if one exists.
The day after Winston was found dead, a sailor entered the partners' Old Print and Antique Shop and sold Laverty a sandalwood doll.
Laverty took the doll home with him, thinking it would amuse his boy, Johnny, seven years old and sickly.
"What a funny little man!" cried Johnny. "Get me another one!"
Laverty looked inquiringly at his wife.
"The doctor says he is better. From now on he'll gain weight, and before the year is over he will be as strong as other boys of his age!" she said.
But before the year was over Johnny lay on his bed, the sandalwood doll clutched in hot hands that would soon be cold. He had gone downhill steadily, and was near the bottom at last.
Laverty went to his business, a dull ache about his heart. He had always thought of Johnny in a matter-of-fact way, as a necessary result of his marriage. It was astonishing to him how he missed the sick child. Sometimes he wondered if he was losing the interest in antiques that had been the dominant passion of his life. His grief took the form of a dislike for his wife, who grew thinner day by day until he could not understand why he had married her.
Johnny had inherited his bad health from her.
One evening, a year later. when he came home he found her cooking supper as usual, but she told him she felt very ill.
"I've never seen you well!" answered Laverty, curtly.
When she had washed the dishes she sat down on the other side of the table. Laverty, who watched her angrily, noticed that she did not read or sew, but sat with her head in her hands. Suddenly she lifted it, and asked:
"John, will you get me Johnny's doll, please?"
Laverty gave a brutal laugh.
"What's the matter with you?" He laughed again, louder this time, when she told him she thought she, was dying.
She rose unsteadily, and fetched the doll, her eyes brightening, and such a wonderful light transfiguring her face as she pressed the little bit of scented wood to her lips, that to Laverty she appeared years younger, and once again the pale, beautiful girl he had courted in the years gone by. She was smiling as she sank into the chair, and closed her eyes.
"Mary! Mary!" he cried, falling on his knees beside her, and taking her hands.
Now that Mary and Johnny were dead, Laverty sold his house, and went to live in the back of his shop, which he furnished richly, choosing the best and most beautiful his shop contained. The hearth of his fireplace was built of rare tiling. From the walls hung costly old prints and tapestries.
A cedar chest stood in one corner. On a Chinese table, with curious twisted legs, he placed the Byzantine casket which he had coveted so long and finally murdered Winston to obtain possession of. Above the casket hung a portrait of Mary and Johnny. Before it, squatted the sandalwood doll. These three things, the casket, the portrait, and the doll, were his most precious possessions, though sometimes he wondered if he valued the Byzantine casket as much now as he once had. At these times he would seize hold of it roughly and examine it with fierce critical eyes.
The Twelve Apostles held up the lid. The century-stained bronze was faced in places with an exquisite mosaic of colored stones, worked into figures. It was a rare thing, dating back to the eleventh century, when Constantinople was still the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Yet only the eye of a connoisseur could fully appreciate the antique beauty of the workmanship, and as Laverty turned it in his hands, imperceptibly his eyes would soften and his fingers relax.
Time passed. His business declined steadily. Fewer and fewer people frequented his shop. His old patrons deserted him. A fire destroyed his most valuable antiques. His bank failed.
One evening Laverty sat staring into the fire. Winter had passed into summer, arid summer into winter the snow fell in large, wet flakes. Ruin, bleak and terrible, confronted him. His stock of old prints and antiques had gone for a song. His lease had expired. The shop was sold to a building syndicate that had bought to the corner of the square, and intended to erect a large, modern structure. For one more week the shop remained his then he would be homeless, with a business that had melted away on the spot of its conception, and could never be reconstructed in a strange locality. He had become one of the world's failures. He was ill and tired.
So he sat there in a daze while the calamities of the past years marched before him like the events of an hour. He did not believe in fate, yet there was something he did not understand. Only a few years ago he had been happy, prosperous and ambitious.
He began to take an inventory of his scanty belongings, starting with the cedar chest, which he overturned, scattering the contents on the floor. On top of the pile there fell a photograph of Winston, an old forgotten photograph that sent his thoughts rushing into the past, and made him snatch the portrait of Mary and Johnny from the wall to feast his eyes upon it.
Then, laughing bitterly, he picked up the Byzantine casket. This thing that he had once hungered for seemed worthless to him now. A terrible anger against the dead man convulsed him he seized a hammer and smashed the Apostles into unrecognizable pieces of flat metal, while the mosaic flew off in little colored chips. He crushed the lid from its hinge, and flattened the cylinder, and then went to the door and flung what was left of the casket far up the alley. Then, snatching blindly at the table, he tore up Winston's picture, and threw it into the dying fire.
When he came to himself again, shivering, the fire was out. He went to the window. The snow was still falling in the white, silent streets. Horrified by his loneliness, he turned with a cry to the Chinese table with the twisted legs, to those images of his dead wife and child which were beyond the jurisdiction of death. Pressing the picture to his lips, he drew it slowly away from his staring eyes as he saw Winston regarding him thoughtfully, and he now realized that he had destroyed the wrong picture.
With trembling hands he crumpled the picture, and set fire to it with a match, dropping the ashes to the hearth, and grinding them with his heel. He looked at the empty place on the wall above the table, he looked at the table. Of the three precious things only one remained, and that was the little sandalwood doll Johnny had played with, and Mary had kissed before dying.
Falling asleep at last, he had a curious dream. He fancied himself a wanderer, journeying across a burning desert. The Sphinx and the Pyramids were in the distance, but, as he approached, the former changed into a sandalwood doll. Then the Pyramids changed also. Wherever he looked he saw great, crouching sandalwood dolls. The stars in the sky became tiny glittering ones. He himself seemed to be changing into one.
Waking, he found himself staring straight at the doll.
As he eyed it now, there was a certain terror in his eyes, for this grotesque image that he had prized so highly since Johnny's death had taken on a new and startling significance. He understood why misfortune had come to him. The sailor had brought a jinx with him, and the jinx was still here. His wife and child had both died holding the doll. As soon as he had brought it to the shop his business had started to decay, and the fire had come. One day he had carried it in his pocket to the bank. The bank had failed.
Out of natural, disconnected happenings Laverty's disordered mind reconstructed a supernatural chain of events. A devil had entered into his home, and killed his wife and his child, and his Lares and Penates and that devil was the little sandalwood doll he had grown to love so dearly.
Even now that he understood all, he could not hate the doll, for it still bore the imprint of Johnny's fingers, still exhaled a fragrant breath that reminded him of Mary. But he was afraid.
Dawn was breaking over the river when he went to the window, the sandalwood doll in his hand. Later in the day he gave the doll to a beggar with some money. Having done this, he felt a great relief. He was still a comparatively young man. He resolved to start life anew, to put the past behind him, to go into some other business, to make good, to be a success. So he put on his coat, and started up the street for a walk that he might collect his thoughts.
At the end of the square he came upon the doll lying in the gutter where the beggar had thrown it.
Fear seized Laverty and he stood trembling. Then he cursed the beggar. But he could not leave the doll lying there so close to his door. He picked it up and returned to the shop, telling himself on the way that he did not believe in spirits, and that an inanimate object could not exert any influence for either good or evil.
That afternoon he gave the doll to a friend. Then he went about the shop whistling. He broke up bread, and threw it to the sparrows in the court. The day seemed brighter, the air warmer, the snow was melting it would soon be spring.
The friend returned that same evening and gave Laverty the doll.
"I shouldn't have taken it!" he said, "You need everything you've got!"
Laverty could think of no answer. He put the doll in its old place on the Chinese table. The friend glanced toward the wall where the picture of Mary and Johnny had hung, pointed, and said:
"Getting ready to move, I see! What's the matter? Are you sick?" .
Laverty answered that he had never felt better in his life. But the man was skeptical as he left the shop.
"Laverty's in a bad way," he thought. "He's never had any luck since his partner took sick and died three years ago."
For over an hour Laverty remained in his room, staring at the doll not seated, but standing, with his back to the opposite wall, smoking furiously. Then he turned the face of the doll away it looked back at him from the mirror. He struck it from the table. It rolled beneath his feet. He wondered if he would ever be able to get rid of it, or if it would remain with him to his death.
Suddenly came the reaction, and sitting down he laughed loud and long at his childishness. His nerves were certainly in a bad condition when he started to believe in black magic. He had been smoking too heavily. This was the iron age, the horseless age, the machine age, the practical age, the common-sense age. The words comforted him. The rumble of surface cars encouraged him. The cry of a passing newsboy made him defiant. Neither ghosts of dead men nor evil spirits could exist nowadays.
The waterfront was only a few squares distant. Putting the doll in his pocket, he slipped out of the shop, and hurried down Walnut Street, passing under the Elevated and on to the piers.
The night was very clear, silent and beautiful. Up and down the Jersey shore glittered the lights of Camden. An old, scarred freighter, bound for Baltimore, loomed up through the darkness as a great, stately vessel, sailing slowly and majestically. The stars might have been holes pricked in a black shell encompassing the earth, beyond which shone the brilliance of an eternal, day.
Laverty found himself listening suddenly, his body tense, his mouth open — to the whistle of a ferry-boat.
"What's the matter with me?" he cried angrily. "I'll have to quit smoking altogether if this keeps up!
And he threw the sandalwood doll as far as he could throw it out from the pier into the black and white water.
On his way back to the shop he stopped at a lunch house for a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He felt cold, and was afraid he had caught a chill on the waterfront.
But the warmth restored his spirits. The people hurrying in, and sauntering leisurely out, stopping contentedly at the desk for matches and toothpicks, the bright lights and steaming dishes with their polished metal covers, the white tables, the cooks in the kitchen — every insignificant detail of his surroundings braced him like a tonic.
It was a matter-of-fact world after all a world in which man was the dominant creation. Business controlled it, man controlled business. There might be a God, the chances were there was not. Every rich man was a god, every poor man a fool. Money and the material things were the only ones that really lasted, As for ghosts of dead man, and jinxes — he laughed at his foolishness.
Yet, in his soul he realized that the sandalwood doll lying in the mud at the bottom of the Delaware was responsible for his elation.
The Old Print and Antique Shop cast a shadow of pale yellow upon the dim, deserted street as Laverty pushed open the door and went into the back room.
There, on the Chinese table, facing him, sat the sandalwood doll.
The door of the shop was opened a few minutes later by a sailor.
"Did you see the heathen doll?" he called as he rolled toward the rear room.
"It's a long, long time since you asked me to bring you the mate of the first for the kid, so he'd have a pair, and I guess the kid's grown into a boy now, but we've been away on a long, long cruise. And the natives don't like to part with 'em, because they're old idols of justice that the black men used to worship before they turned Christians and got civilized. They say they put the jinx on a murderer — Where are ye, sir?"
There was no answer.
Laverty lay on the floor. His legs struck the table as the sailor picked him up, overturning it, and sending something flinging into the fire that began to burn with a clear, bright flame.
By the light of the burning doll the sailor saw that Laverty was quite dead.