Hell's Hatches

by Lewis R. Freeman

I was horribly tired, both in mind and body, and hoped that, with a glass or two of absinthe to relax my nerves, I might be able to sleep at least through the heat of the noonday. Shifting into my pajamas,—after telling Suey, my China boy, that I would not want lunch and not to disturb me until I sent for him,—I crawled under the mosquito-net and tried to drop off. But it was no use. No sooner would I begin to doze than the expiring images of my thoughts would shuffle up and sharpen with a steel-clicking suddenness into the dread likeness of The Face, with its dilated eyes boring me to the spine.

At the end of a couple of hours of fevered tossing, I gave it up, threw off my pajamas, stepped to the low back-window ledge and took a header into the cool green pool below. The Face dissolved as the thrill of the refreshing embrace of the water ran through my blood, but only to return when, after donning a fresh suit of drills, I began a restless pacing of the floor of the big living-room—my studio. Always it flashed a pace or two ahead of me, floating backward as I advanced upon it and swinging with me at the end of the room. I could not wheel swiftly enough to lose it, and it made no difference whether my eyes were opened or closed. I tried it both ways.

It was in the course of an experimental lap I was trying with my hands over my eyes that I bumped into the big rectangle of canvas I had prepared in advance against the day I should be ready to start work on "The Saving of the Black-birder." Ten seconds later I was pawing over my colours with feverish haste. The idea swimming in my head had crystallized. It was, in effect: Put The Face on canvas and it will cease to haunt and harrow your mind. That sounded reasonable. Certainly The Face couldn't be in two places at once, and if I once got it anchored to the canvas I could cover it up when I wanted to get away from it. It would all depend upon how faithfully I did my work, something told me. If the face on the canvas was a replica of the other to a hair, to a line, to the fear in the hell-haunted eyes, then the phantom face would enter into it and become subject to my control. If not—then I would never know sleep nor peace while I continued to live.

No artist can ever have approached a task under empire of the flaming intensity I threw into this one. I was painting to save my reason, perhaps my life. That is not a figure of speech. I mean it quite literally, for I am convinced to this day that I stumbled upon the only path that would have led me clear of complete mental and physical collapse.

There was a rather remarkable coincidence in connection with the way I started to work. Nothing told me that those first nervous slashes of my brush signalized the beginning of a picture the fame of which was destined to reach the outposts of the civilized world before the year was out. All thought of "The Black-birder" was erased from my mind. I had no idea of a picture in my head. I was not even beginning to work upon a figure. I was only conscious that I was going to put all I had into the task of reproducing—recreating, if that were possible—with coloured pigments a phantom of my brain—a face—The Face.

I had no thought, I say, of beginning a picture. I sketched nothing in, not even the outline of the haunting shadow I was going to try to capture. A very few minutes after I began squeezing out colours onto my palette I was smearing them upon a patch of the big six-feet-by-ten expanse of woven cotton in front of me. The coincidence I have mentioned became apparent some weeks later, when I discovered that, of all the sixty square feet of canvas before me, the something less than one square foot upon which I concentrated my paint and energies for the next thirty hours chanced to be in exactly the place it had to be for the result of my effort to assume its proper place in a somewhat intricate composition. I will tell of that in due course.

Save for the strain of the terrible tension under which I worked, the task to which I had set myself proved absolutely the simplest I ever attempted. It seemed that I could not go wrong. It was not like painting a face from memory, nor yet like painting one from a model. It was more like colouring a photograph, for the image, terrible as life, was right there on the canvas at the end of my arm. At first, as I tried to visualize it at shorter range than the five or six feet at which it had been floating, it was a bit hazy; but presently my intense concentration of mind had its reward. The dreadful phantom drew nearer, increased in detail, and finally sharpened into clear focus at the tip of my brush. After that I became just a meticulously faithful retoucher, working in a trance.

It was toward the middle of the afternoon when Suey came in to ask if I was going to be home for dinner. He was becoming used to my queer ways, and, when I failed to take any notice of his reiterated query, came over and touched me on the shoulder. I "came out" with a start, but gathered my wits quickly. I told Suey that I should probably be working steadily for the next day or two and would want nothing to eat until I was finished. If he would bring me a bowl of cracked ice every hour and see that no one was allowed in to bother me, it would be all I should want of him. He replied with a laconic "Can do," and backed out toward the kitchen as though I had asked for curry-and-rice for dinner, or ordered something else equally rational and matter-of-fact.

I settled back into my spell of tranced concentration with scarcely an effort, working swiftly and surely, with never a pause. The "drawing" was all done for me, and even in the matter of colours there was no hesitation. Exactly the proper shade or tint drew my brush like a magnet; and always it was applied with telling effect.

The sunset shadows of the western hills were driving their black wedges across the satiny sheen of the light-flickering levels of the waving sugar-cane when I became aware that a sound I had been conscious of for some time had suddenly changed and intensified. If my mind had tried to catalogue the clear notes that had been floating in through the north window, it was probably to credit them to a certain bell-bird friend of mine who was in the habit of ringing his vesper chimes from a leafy chapel in the big bottle tree toward the end of the afternoon. But there was nothing bird-like in the quick staccato of eager yelps that had been responsible for bringing me, with ears and interest a-cock, out of my trance. "Dogs closing in for a kill," I muttered to myself, realizing that it had been the distant baying of hounds on a hot scent that I had confused with the more imminent chiming of my Austral bell-ringing neighbour. The sounds came from a long way off—probably from somewhere in the dense bush beyond the farther borders of the cane fields. It was a northerly hauling of the wind that brought them down to me so clearly. The air had been charged and electric all day, and the breaking up of the trade wind indicated that a hurricane was mustering its forces somewhere up among the Islands. I had not looked at the barometer on the veranda, but knew that it must be registering a considerable fall.