The Stone Image | Page 5

midnight found me in bed, wooing Morpheus
in no uncertain nasal tones.
Two o'clock, though, found me awake; very wide awake.
I sat up in bed. The big, white November moon, swimming easily in a
surf of frothy clouds, splashed an intermittent spray of silver light over
the bedroom's 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