H. P. Lovecraft - The case of Charles Dexter Ward

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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written January 1 to March, 1927

Published May and July 1941 in Weird Tales, Vol. 35, No. 9 (May 1941), 8-40;

Vol. 35, No. 10 (July 1941), 84-121.

'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an

ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the

fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke

Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without

any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust

whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.'

- Borellus

I. A Result and a Prologe

From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there

recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles

Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving

father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark

mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and

peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves

quite baffled by his case, since it presented oddities of a general

physiological as well as psychological character.

In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years

would warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the

face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged

normally acquire. In the second place, his organic processes shewed a certain

queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel.

Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was

lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly

prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no

relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological.

The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the

tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive

birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest

a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In

general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had

become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.

Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to

any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was

conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had

it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was

Ward's family physician, affirms that the patient's gross mental capacity, as

gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity, had

actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was always a scholar and

an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew the

prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the

alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to

the hospital, so powerful and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the

evidence of others, and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of

information as distinguished from his intelligence, was he finally placed in

confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader

and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted; and shrewd

observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted that he would not be

long in gaining his discharge from custody.

Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his

growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his

future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible

discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues. Willett,

indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case. He

was the last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged from that final

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conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when

Ward's escape became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the

unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of

sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth

was undeniably gone. Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though

he seems strangely easier in mind than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel

that he would like to say more if he thought any considerable number would

believe him. He had found Ward in his room, but shortly after his departure the

attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door the patient was not there,

and all they found was the open window with a chill April breeze blowing in a

cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them. True, the dogs howled

some time before; but that was while Willett was still present, and they had

caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once

over the telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr.

Waite called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both

disavowed any knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely

confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained,

and even these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact which

remains is that up to the present time no trace of the missing madman has been

unearthed.

Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from

the venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled

every corner of his parents' old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the

hill. With the years his devotion to ancient things increased; so that history,

genealogy, and the study of colonial architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship

at length crowded everything else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are

important to remember in considering his madness; for although they do not form

its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its superficial form. The

gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all related to modern

matters, and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive though

outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit

questioning; so that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to

a former age through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that

Ward seemed no longer interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it

appears, lost his regard for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final

efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern

world which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain. That

this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to hide; but it was clear

to all who watched him that his whole programme of reading and conversation was

determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and of the

ordinary practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to

have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in the schools of

our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view of his vitally impaired

range of data, the escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of

today; the dominant opinion being that he is "lying low" in some humble and

unexacting position till his stock of modern information can be brought up to

the normal.

The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr.

Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's

last year at the Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of

the past to the study of the occult, and refused to qualify for college on the

ground that he had individual researches of much greater importance to make.

This is certainly borne out by Ward's altered habits at the time, especially by

his continual search through town records and among old burying-grounds for a

certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen, some of

whose papers he professed to have found behind the panelling of a very old house

in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, which Curwen was known to have built and

occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919-20 saw a

great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian

pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at home

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and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather's

grave.

From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his

verdict on his close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain

frightful investigations and discoveries which he made toward the last. Those

investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him; so that his voice

trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when he tries 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.

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

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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 homes on high terraces. The small

wooden houses averaged a greater age here, for it was up this hill that the

growing town had climbed; and in these rides he had imbibed something of the

colour of a quaint colonial village. The nurse used to stop and sit on the

benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the child's first

memories was of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and

far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment,

and violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds

and purples and curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood

out in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break

in one of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.

When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently dragged

nurse, and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that almost

perpendicular hill he would venture, each time reaching older and quainter

levels of the ancient city. He would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes

Street with its bank walls and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street

corner, where before him was a wooden antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair of

doorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal

farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of

Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan elms cast a

restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long

lines of the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and

classic portals. On the eastern side they were set high over basements with

railed double flights of stone steps, and the young Charles could picture them

as they were when the street was new, and red heels and periwigs set off the

painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming so visible.

Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old "Town

Street" that the founders had laid out at the river's edge in 1636. Here ran

innumerable little lanes with leaning, huddled houses of immense antiquity; and

fascinated though he was, it was long before he dared to thread their archaic

verticality for fear they would turn out a dream or a gateway to unknown

terrors. He found it much less formidable to continue along Benefit Street past

the iron fence of St. John's hidden churchyard and the rear of the 1761 Colony

House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington stopped.

At Meeting Street - the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other periods -

he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the

highway had to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the west, glimpsing

the old brick colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient

Sign of Shakespeare's Head where the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was

printed before the Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist Church of

1775, luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian roofs and

cupolas hovering by. Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became better,

flowering at last into a marvellous group of early mansions; but still the

little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west, spectral in their

many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked

old water-front recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot vice and

squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with such surviving

alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign,

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Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.

Sometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young Ward would venture down

into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps,

twisted balustrades, swarthy faces, and nameless odours; winding from South Main

to South Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers still

touched, and returning northward at this lower level past the steep-roofed 1816

warehouses and the broad square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773 Market House

still stands firm on its ancient arches. In that square he would pause to drink

in the bewildering beauty of the old town as it rises on its eastward bluff,

decked with its two Georgian spires and crowned by the vast new Christian

Science dome as London is crowned by St. Paul's. He like mostly to reach this

point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the Market House

and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around the

dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor. After a long

look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for the sight, and then he

would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up the

narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams would begin to peep out in

small-paned windows and through fanlights set high over double flights of steps

with curious wrought-iron railings.

At other times, and in later years, he would seek for vivid contrasts; spending

half a walk in the crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the

hill drops to the lower eminence of Stampers' Hill with its ghetto and negro

quarter clustering round the place where the Boston stage coach used to start

before the Revolution, and the other half in the gracious southerly realm about

George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets, where the old slope holds

unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in

which so many fragrant memories linger. These rambles, together with the

diligent studies which accompanied them, certainly account for a large amount of

the antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern world from Charles Ward's

mind; and illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful winter of

1919-20, the seeds that came to such strange and terrible fruition.

Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first change,

Charles Ward's antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid.

Graveyards held for him no particular attraction beyond their quaintness and

historic value, and of anything like violence or savage instinct he was utterly

devoid. Then, by insidious degrees, there appeared to develop a curious sequel

to one of his genealogical triumphs of the year before; when he had discovered

among his maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen,

who had come from Salem in March of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of

highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.

Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a certain 'Ann

Tillinghast, daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt. James Tillinghast,' of

whose paternity the family had preserved no trace. Late in 1918, whilst

examining a volume of original town records in manuscript, the young genealogist

encountered an entry describing a legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs.

Eliza Curwen, widow of Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old

daughter Ann, her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground 'that her Husband's

name was become a public Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after his

Decease; the which confirming an antient common Rumour, tho' not to be credited

by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past Doubting.'

This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of two leaves which had

been carefully pasted together and treated as one by a laboured revision of the

page numbers.

It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hitherto

unknown great-great-great-grandfather. The discovery doubly excited him because

he had already heard vague reports and seen scattered allusions relating to this

person; about whom there remained so few publicly available records, aside from

those becoming public only in modern times, that it almost seemed as if a

conspiracy had existed to blot him from memory. What did appear, moreover, was

of such a singular and provocative nature that one could not fail to imagine

curiously what it was that the colonial recorders were so anxious to conceal and

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forget; or to suspect that the deletion had reasons all too valid.

Before this, Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph Curwen

remain in the idle stage; but having discovered his own relationship to this

apparently "hushed-up" character, he proceeded to hunt out as systematically as

possible whatever he might find concerning him. In this excited quest he

eventually succeeded beyond his highest expectations; for old letters, diaries,

and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere

yielded many illuminating passages which their writers had not thought it worth

their while to destroy. One important sidelight came from a point as remote as

New York, where some Rhode Island colonial correspondence was stored in the

Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really crucial thing, though, and what in Dr,

Willett's opinion formed the definite source of Ward's undoing, was the matter

found in August 1919 behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court.

It was that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose end was

deeper than the pit.

II. An Antecedent and a Horror

Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what Ward heard

and unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible

individual. He had fled from Salem to Providence - that universal haven of the

odd, the free, and the dissenting - at the beginning of the great witchcraft

panic; being in fear of accusation because of his solitary ways and queer

chemical or alchemical experiments. He was a colourless-looking man of about

thirty, and was soon found qualified to become a freeman of Providence;

thereafter buying a home lot just north of Gregory Dexter's at about the foot of

Olney Street. His house was built on Stampers' Hill west of the Town Street, in

what later became Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this with a larger one,

on the same site, which is still standing.

Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem to grow

much older than he had been on his arrival. He engaged in shipping enterprises,

purchased wharfage near Mile-End Cove, helped rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713,

and in 1723 was one of the founders of the Congregational Church on the hill;

but always did he retain his nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty

or thirty-five. As decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite

wide notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy

forefathers, and practised a simplicity of living which did not wear him our.

How such simplicity could be reconciled with the inexplicable comings and goings

of the secretive merchant, and with the queer gleaming of his windows at all

hours of night, was not very clear to the townsfolk; and they were prone to

assign other reasons for his continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the

most part, that Curwen's incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to

do with his condition. Gossip spoke of the strange substances he brought from

London and the Indies on his ships or purchased in Newport, Boston, and New

York; and when old Dr. Jabez Bowen came from Rehoboth and opened his apothecary

shop across the Great Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar, there was

ceaseless talk of the drugs, acids, and metals that the taciturn recluse

incessantly bought or ordered from him. Acting on the assumption that Curwen

possessed a wondrous and secret medical skill, many sufferers of various sorts

applied to him for aid; but though he appeared to encourage their belief in a

non-committal way, and always gave them odd-coloured potions in response to

their requests, it was observed that his ministrations to others seldom proved

of benefit. At length, when over fifty years had passed since the stranger's

advent, and without producing more than five years' apparent change in his face

and physique, the people began to whisper more darkly; and to meet more than

half way that desire for isolation which he had always shewn.

Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude of other

reasons why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a

plague. His passion for graveyards, in which he was glimpsed at all hours, and

under all conditions, was notorious; though no one had witnessed any deed on his

part which could actually be termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a

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farm, at which he generally lived during the summer, and to which he would

frequently be seen riding at various odd times of the day or night. Here his

only visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged

Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the wife of a

very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood. In

the lead-to of this house was the laboratory where most of the chemical

experiments were conducted. Curious porters and teamers who delivered bottles,

bags, or boxes at the small read door would exchange accounts of the fantastic

flasks, crucibles, alembics, and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room; and

prophesied in whispers that the close-mouthed "chymist" - by which they meant

alchemist - would not be long in finding the Philosopher's Stone. The nearest

neighbours to this farm - the Fenners, a quarter of a mile away - had still

queerer things to tell of certain sounds which they insisted came from the

Curwen place in the night. There were cries, they said, and sustained howlings;

and they did not like the large numbers of livestock which thronged the

pastures, for no such amount was needed to keep a lone old man and a very few

servants in meat, milk, and wool. The identity of the stock seemed to change

from week to week as new droves were purchased from the Kingstown farmers. Then,

too, there was something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding

with only high narrow slits for windows.

Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's town house in Olney

Court; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man must have been

nearly a century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless

attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took the peculiar precaution of

burning after its demolition. Here there was less mystery, it is true; but the

hours at which lights were seen, the secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners

who comprised the only menservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the

incredibly aged French housekeeper, the large amounts of food seen to enter a

door within which only four persons lived, and the quality of certain voices

often heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable times, all combined

with what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the place a bad name.

In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed; for as the

newcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading life of the town, he

had naturally made acquaintances of the better sort, whose company and

conversation he was well fitted by education to enjoy. His birth was known to be

good, since the Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introduction in New

England. It developed that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very early life,

living for a time in England and making at least two voyages to the Orient; and

his speech, when he deigned to use it, was that of a learned and cultivated

Englishman. But for some reason or other Curwen did not care for society. Whilst

never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve that

few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane.

There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance, as if he

had come to find all human beings dull though having moved among stranger and

more potent entities. When Dr. Checkley the famous wit came from Boston in 1738

to be rector of King's Church, he did not neglect calling on one of whom he soon

heard so much; but left in a very short while because of some sinister

undercurrent he detected in his host's discourse. Charles Ward told his father,

when they discussed Curwen one winter evening, that he would give much to learn

what the mysterious old man had said to the sprightly cleric, but that all

diarists agree concerning Dr. Checkley's reluctance to repeat anything he had

heard. The good man had been hideously shocked, and could never recall Joseph

Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed.

More definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste and breeding

avoided the haughty hermit. In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English

gentleman of literary and scientific leanings, came from Newport to the town

which was so rapidly overtaking it in standing, and built a fine country seat on

the Neck in what is now the heart of the best residence section. He lived in

considerable style and comfort, keeping the first coach and liveried servants in

town, and taking great pride in his telescope, his microscope, and his

well-chosen library of English and Latin books. Hearing of Curwen as the owner

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of the best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call, and was

more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been. His

admiration for his host's ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin, and

English classics were equipped with a remarkable battery of philosophical,

mathematical, and scientific works including Paracelsus, Agricola, Van Helmont,

Sylvius, Glauber, Boyle, Boerhaave, Becher, and Stahl, led Curwen to suggest a

visit to the farmhouse and laboratory whither he had never invited anyone

before; and the two drove out at once in Mr. Merritt's coach.

Mr. Merritt always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at the farmhouse,

but maintained that the titles of the books in the special library of

thaumaturgical, alchemical, and theological subjects which Curwen kept in a

front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a lasting loathing.

Perhaps, however, the facial expression of the owner in exhibiting them

contributed much of the prejudice. This bizarre collection, besides a host of

standard works which Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly

all the cabbalists, daemonologists, and magicians known to man; and was a

treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology. Hermes

Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber

Investigationis, and Artephius's Key of Wisdom all were there; with the

cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully's Ars

Magna et Ultima in Zetsner's edition, Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's

Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius's De Lapide Philosophico crowding them close.

Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned

pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the

Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad

Arab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some

years previously after the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little

fishing village of Kingsport, in the province of the Massachussetts-Bay.

But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted

by a mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downwards a

badly worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and

interlineations in Curwen's hand. The book was open at about its middle, and one

paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of

mystic black-letter that the visitor could not resist scanning it through.

Whether it was the nature of the passage underscored, or the feverish heaviness

of the strokes which formed the underscoring, he could not tell; but something

in that combination affected him very badly and very peculiarly. He recalled it

to the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his diary and once trying

to recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley till he saw how greatly it

disturbed the urbane rector. It read:

'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an

ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the

fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke

Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without

any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust

whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.'

It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, that

the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen. Sailors are superstitious

folk; and the seasoned salts who manned the infinite rum, slave, and molasses

sloops, the rakish privateers, and the great brigs of the Browns, Crawfords, and

Tillinghasts, all made strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the

slim, deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop

entering the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and

supercargoes on the long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwen's

own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel

riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It was, in a

way, the frequency with which these sailors were replaced which inspired the

acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which the old man was held. A crew

would be turned loose in the town on shore leave, some of its members perhaps

charged with this errand or that; and when reassembled it would be almost sure

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to lack one or more men. That many of the errands had concerned the farm of

Pawtuxet Road, and that few of the sailors had ever been seen to return from

that place, was not forgotten; so that in time it became exceedingly difficult

for Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would

desert soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence wharves, and their

replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great problem to the

merchant.

By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and

daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be

named, understood, or even proved to exist. The last straw may have come from

the affair of the missing soldiers in 1758, for in March and April of that year

two Royal regiments on their way to New France were quartered in Providence, and

depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion.

Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with

the red-coated strangers; and as several of them began to be missed, people

thought of the odd conditions among his own seamen. What would have happened if

the regiments had not been ordered on, no one can tell.

Meanwhile the merchant's worldly affairs were prospering. He had a virtual

monopoly of the town's trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and cinnamon, and

easily led any other one shipping establishment save the Browns in his

importation of brassware, indigo, cotton, woollens, salt, rigging, iron, paper,

and English goods of every kind. Such shopkeepers as James Green, at the Sign of

the Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells, at the Sign of the Golden Eagle across

the Bridge, or Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near New

Coffee-House, depended almost wholly upon him for their stock; and his

arrangements with the local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and

horse-breeders, and the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime

exporters of the Colony.

Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the

Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the

new brick one - still standing at the head of its parade in the old main street

- was built in 1761. In that same year, too, he helped rebuild the Great Bridge

after the October gale. He replaced many of the books of the public library

consumed in the Colony House fire, and bought heavily in the lottery that gave

the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted Town Street their pavement of great

round stones with a brick footwalk or "causey" in the middle. About this time,

also, he built the plain but excellent new house whose doorway is still such a

triumph of carving. When the Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr. Cotton's

hill church in 1743 and founded Deacon Snow's church across the Bridge, Curwen

had gone with them; though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now, however, he

cultivated piety once more; as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown him into

isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharply

checked.

The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet

certainly not less than a full century old, seeking at last to emerge from a

cloud of fright and detestation too vague to pin down or analyse, was at once a

pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible thing. Such is the power of wealth and

of surface gestures, however, that there came indeed a slight abatement in the

visible aversion displayed toward him; especially after the rapid disappearances

of his sailors abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to practice an

extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again

caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and manoeuvres

at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of food consumption and

cattle replacement remained abnormally high; but not until modern times, when

Charles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library,

did it occur to any person - save one embittered youth, perhaps - to make dark

comparisons between the large number of Guinea blacks he imported until 1766,

and the disturbingly small number for whom he could produce bona fide bills of

sale either to slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to the planters of the

Narragansett Country. Certainly, the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred

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character were uncannily profound, once the necessity for their exercise had

become impressed upon him.

But of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight.

Curwen continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact of his

continued air of youth at a great age would have been enough to warrant; and he

could see that in the end his fortunes would be likely to suffer. His elaborate

studies and experiments, whatever they may have been, apparently required a

heavy income for their maintenance; and since a change of environment would

deprive him of the trading advantages he had gained, it would not have profited

him to begin anew in a different region just then. Judgement demanded that he

patch up his relations with the townsfolk of Providence, so that his presence

might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation, transparent excuses or

errands elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness. His

clerks, being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no one

else would employ, were giving him much worry; and he held to his sea-captains

and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of ascendancy over them - a

mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit of information very pertinent to their

welfare. In many cases, diarists have recorded with some awe, Curwen shewed

almost the power of a wizard in unearthing family secrets for questionable use.

During the final five years of his life it seemed as though only direct talks

with the long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the data which he had

so glibly at his tongue's end.

About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain

his footing in the community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to

contract an advantageous marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose

unquestioned position would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may be

that he also had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside

the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half after his

death caused anyone to suspect them; but of this nothing certain can ever be

learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and indignation with which any

ordinary courtship of his would be received, hence he looked about for some

likely candidate upon whose parents he might exert a suitable pressure. Such

candidates, he found, were not at all easy to discover; since he had very

particular requirements in the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social

security. At length his survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best

and oldest ship-captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named

Dutee Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every

conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Capt. Tillinghast was

completely under the domination of Curwen; and consented, after a terrible

interview in his cupolaed house on Power's Lane hill, to sanction the

blasphemous alliance.

Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been reared as

gently as the reduced circumstances of her father permitted. She had attended

Stephen Jackson's school opposite the Court-House Parade; and had been

diligently instructed by her mother, before the latter's death of smallpox in

1757, in all the arts and refinements of domestic life. A sampler of hers,

worked in 1753 at the age of nine, may still be found in the rooms of the Rhode

Island Historical Society. After her mother's death she had kept the house,

aided only by one old black woman. Her arguments with her father concerning the

proposed Curwen marriage must have been painful indeed; but of these we have no

record. Certain it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of

the Crawford packet Enterprise, was dutifully broken off, and that her union

with Joseph Curwen took place on the seventh of March, 1763, in the Baptist

church, in the presence of the most distinguished assemblages which the town

could boast; the ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor. The

Gazette mentioned the event very briefly. and in most surviving copies the item

in question seems to be cut or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after

much search in the archives of a private collector of note, observing with

amusement the meaningless urbanity of the language:

'Monday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant, was married

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file:///F|/rah/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft/The%20Case%20of%20Charles%20Dexter%20Ward%20by%20H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.txtTheCaseofCharlesDexterWardbyH.P.LovecraftTheCaseofCharlesDexterWardbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenJanuary1toMarch,1927PublishedMayandJuly1941inWeirdTales,Vol.35,No.9(May1941),8-40;Vol.35,No.10(July194...

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H. P. Lovecraft - The case of Charles Dexter Ward

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