“My first thought was of The Goddess!”
As if he had had, from the beginning, an eye to what would be the proper dramatic effect, when he got so far, Lawrence, with a hasty movement towards the daïs, struck the crimson screen, so that it came clattering forward on to the floor. Extending his arms on either side of him, he cried: “Behold! The Goddess!”
I do not know what the others were prepared to find revealed, nor even what it was which I had myself expected. There had been in my mind a vague anticipation of some incredible horror; something neither human nor inhuman, neither alive nor dead. What I actually did see occasioned me, at first sight, a shock of surprise. A moment’s reflection, however, disclosed my own stupidity. Much that had gone before should have prepared me for exactly this. Only my mental opaqueness could have prevented my seeing to what Lawrence’s words directly pointed. And yet, after all, this that I saw did not provide an adequate explanation; did not, for instance, shed light on what I had seen in my dream.
The downfall of the screen had revealed an idol; apparently a Hindoo goddess. She was squatted on what looked like an ebony pedestal, perhaps a foot or eighteen inches from the floor. The figure was nearly four feet high. It represented a woman squatting on her haunches. Her arms were crossed upon her breast, her fingers interlaced. Two things struck me as peculiar. One, that the whole figure was of a brilliant scarlet; the other, that its maker had managed to impart to it a curious suggestion of life. To this fact Lawrence himself drew our attention.
“You see how alive she is? She only needs a touch to fill her with impassioned frenzy. It is for that touch that she waits and watches.”
It was exactly what I had myself observed. The figure needed only some little thing to give it at least the semblance of actual life. I could not make out of what substance it was compounded; certainly neither of wood nor stone.
“As Philip came at me across the room I moved towards The Goddess. ‘Take care,’ I said. ‘Don’t be a fool! Don’t you see that there’s a lady here?’ He did not; or if he did he showed no signs of doing so. I doubt even if he saw The Goddess. It was his way. In his fits of passion he was like some maddened bull; he had eyes only for the object of his rage. ‘I’ll kill you!’ he kept on muttering, in a voice which fury had made husky. ‘Don’t be an ass!’ I cried. But he was an ass. Presently there came the rush which I was looking for. He went for me as the bull goes for the toreador. And instead of me he met The Goddess. It had to be, or I should not have lived to tell the tale.
“As it chanced The Goddess was between us. I had in my fingers this little cord—you see I have it here. My scarlet beauty was an obstacle of which he took no account at all. He made as if he would dash her into splinters and scatter them about the room. But The Goddess is not so easily to be brushed aside. As he rushed at her she leaped at him—like this.”
Suddenly throwing out his arms he cried, in a loud voice, “Take me, for I am yours, O thou Goddess of the Scarlet Hands.”
How exactly it all happened, even now I find it hard to say. As Lawrence sprang forward, the figure rose to its feet, and in an instant was alive. It opened its arms; from its finger-tips came knives. Stepping forward it gripped Lawrence with its steel-clad hands, with a grip from which there was no escaping. From every part of its frame gleaming blades had sprung; against this cheval-de-frise it pressed him again and again, twirling him round and round, moving him up and down, so that the weapons pierced and hacked back and front. Even from its eyes, mouth, and nostrils had sprung knives. It kept jerking its head backwards and forwards, so that it could stab with them at his face and head. And, all the while, from somewhere came the sound of a woman’s laughter—that dreadful sound which I had heard in my dream.