2

Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is

a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite

Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the

wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton

and Court Streets* lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are

mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nine￾teenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that

alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call

'Dickensian'. The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian,

Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another,

and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far dis￾tant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to

answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous

organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter pic￾ture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes

of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can

trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the

buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of

original art and background in bits of detail here and there-a worn

flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative col￾umns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and

rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now

and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the

households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the bl~s￾phemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel

shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional

furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and

swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick

their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek

rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the conta￾gion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence,

and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible

offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the

smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most

abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is

not to the neighbourhood's credit, unless the power of concealment

be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave

it-or at least, than leave it by the landward-side-and those who are

not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.

Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more

terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by

priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united

imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under

lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive

patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual

observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's shud￾der the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked

young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of

morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in

leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily

on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or

indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and

sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at

the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They

chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associ￾ates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread

of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical and ancient pattern

utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and

haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police.

They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and

primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps

from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and

definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular suspicion of

order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read

in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch Cult in Western Europe;*

and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among

peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assem￾blies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the

Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and

Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian￾Asiatic magic and fertility-cults* were even now wholly dead he

could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the mut￾tered tales some of them might really be.

It was the case of Robert Suydam* which took Malone to the heart

of things in Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient

Dutch family, possessed originally of barely independent means, and

inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grand￾father had built in Flatbush when that village was little more than a

pleasant group of Colonial cottages surrounding the steepled and

ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish

gravestones.* In his lonely house, set back from Martense Street

amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and brooded for

some six decades except for a period a generation before, when he

had sailed for the old world and remained there out of sight for

eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but few

visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and

receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor

rooms which he kept in order-a vast, high-ceiled library, whose

walls were solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic,

and vaguely repellent aspect. The growth of the town and its final

absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam,

and he had come to mean less and less to the town. Elderly people

still pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the recent popula￾tion he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white

hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes and gold-headed cane earned

him an amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know him

by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indir￾ectly as a really profound authority on medieval superstition, and had

once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the

Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, * which a friend had quoted from

memory.

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