The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | Page 3

to write of them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20 would
ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence which culminated in
the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes from personal observation that
a finer distinction must be made. Granting freely that the boy was always ill-balanced
temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his responses to
phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the early alteration marked the actual
passage from sanity to madness; crediting instead Ward's own statement that he had
discovered or rediscovered something whose effect on human though was likely to be
marvellous and profound. The true madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after
the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip to strange
foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and

secret circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly
indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable conditions; after
the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after the patient's memory
commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his physical aspect underwent the
subtle modification so many subsequently noticed.
It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness, that the nightmare
qualities became indubitably linked with Ward; and the doctor feels shudderingly sure
that enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial
discovery. In the first place, two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's
ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy once shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a page
of the Curwen diary, and each of the documents had every appearance of genuineness.
The hole where Ward claimed to have found them was long a visible reality, and Willett
had a very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings which can scarcely be
believed and can never perhaps be proved. Then there were the mysteries and
coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and the problem of the Curwen
penmanship and of what the detectives brought to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and
the terrible message in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained
consciousness after his shocking experience.
And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous results which the doctor obtained
from a certain pair of formulae during his final investigations; results which virtually
proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time
that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge.
2
One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something belonging as much to
the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and with a
considerable show of zest in the military training of the period, he had begun his junior
year at the Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home. The old main building,
erected in 1819, had always charmed his youthful antiquarian sense; and the spacious
park in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for landscape. His social
activities were few; and his hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his
classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the
State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John Carter
Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened Shepley
Library in Benefit Street. One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and
blond, with studious eyes and a slight droop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a
dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.
His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to recapture
from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the
centuries before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous
hill that rises just east of the river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he
could look dizzily out over all the clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits
of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and

from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled
him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years before that the
town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along the shady,
sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with
narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their
generous yards and gardens.
He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on the steep
hill, and with all its eastern