The Stone Image | Page 5

polished floor. Outside the window the wind set up a shrewish scolding in the branches of the tall chestnut which grew beside the house, and up the stairs drifted the acrid, unmistakable perfume of burning joss sticks.
I looked at Betty's bed. The covers were thrown back and there was the dint of her head in the center of her pillow; her kimono hung in its accustomed place across the back of her slipper chair. But Betty was nowhere to be seen. "That infernal incense again!" I exclaimed as I scrambled out of bed and hurried to the stairway. "There's something devilish going on in this house."
Half a dozen angry strides took me to the stairhead; two more carried me to the curve of the steps. There I paused, looking down into the evilly grinning face of the stone image. Before it was Betty, clad only in her pajamas and straw bedroom sandals, lighting the last of seven joss punks set fanwise in a vase upon the floor. The stick took fire and sent its writhing coil of smoke upward to the idol's head, and Betty, with her hands crossed over her breast, her body bent nearly double, retreated three steps, paused, and groveled to the floor; rose and backed away five more steps, repeated the genuflection; then rose to her full height, rigid as a carven thing herself.
Hands held stiffly at her sides, she continued to stare fixedly into the monster's agate eyes as she slipped her little pink-and-white feet from their straw sandals and took one step forward barefoot. Raising her hands, palms forward, till they reached the level of her ears, she went to her knees and bent slowly forward till hands and forehead rested on the floor. Once, twice, three times she did this slowly; then her prostrations increased in speed until the soft thud-thud of her head and hands against the floor was like the ticking of a slowmovement clock.
As she swayed forward and back in this act of mad adoration she recited gaspingly:
O Fo, the Mighty,
O Fo, the Powerful,
O Fo, who holdest the thousand-starred heavens as a sunshade in thy hand,
O Thou who governest the moon and the tides,
O Thou who placest the mighty winds upon the great seas,
O Thou who bendest the skies above the earth,
Have pity upon me.
O Fo, who orderest the sun and all the lights of heaven,
O Fo, who makest the lions to roar and the little beasts to keep silence,
O Fo, who bindest in the lightnings with thy grasp and whose voice is the thunder of the clouds,
O Fo, who standest upon the white mountaintops and liest down in the green valleys,
O Fo, who driest up the rivers with thy wrath and encompasseth the dry land with thy floods,
I lay myself before thee.
Inch by inch she had crawled on her knees to the idol's base, and that stone abomination, that misbegotten son of Eastern heathenism, leered triumphantly down while Betty--my Betty--put her soft little lips to its misshapen feet.
"Hell and furies!" I yelled, covering the distance intervening between Betty and me in a single leap. "I'll smash that damned image if it's the last act of my life."
Before I put my iconoclastic threat into execution I bent above the wretched woman crouching on the floor, mad enough with berserker rage to grind her underfoot.
I seized her by the shoulders and wrenched her upright, ready to shake her as an ill-tempered terrier worries a rat. But my vengeance died stillborn. Betty's eyes stared unseeingly into mine; her face had the set, unwitting expression of one in a hypnotic trance. She was sound asleep with her eyes open; bound fast in the fetters of somnambulism.
"Betty! Betty, dear," I whispered contritely, drawing her slender little body to me and nursing her head against my shoulder.
A shiver ran through her, and her hands gripped my arm till the polished nails bit into my flesh through the sleeve of my robe as she nestled her face close to my breast. "Oh, Phil! Phil, dear, I've had such a terrible dream," she whimpered. "Put your arms around me tight, dear; I'm so frightened." And her hot tears wet through the silk of my robe.
With a sobbing, hysterical Betty to comfort and pacify and carry upstairs to bed, I had no time for smashing images that night, but before Betty went to sleep, with my hand cuddled in both of hers, we agreed to oust the stone demon from the house before another night.
Getting rid of a statue, however, especially one like ours, is often more easily discussed than accomplished. First, the thing weighed nearly two hundred pounds; second, it was fragile to an unbelievable degree and had to be handled as carefully as high explosive; lastly, it had cost us nearly five hundred dollars--and wasn't entirely