The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 14
SO it was Mr. and Mrs. Winnery (née Fosdick) who were destined in the end to use the four bathtubs installed by the Princess d'Orobelli for her retirement from the world. The very face of the villa had been changed and the bleak, barren and mournful air which once had invested it was gone forever. Like the countenances of ladies who have had their faces lifted it appeared new and pleasant without losing altogether its engaging air of antiquity and experience. The garden was all in order now and where only sour and brilliant green moss had once grown there were now banks of flowers which actually grew with all the extravagance described in the tourist circulars on the subject of Brinoë. And Mr. Winnery, now that he was no longer forced to live in Brinoë, found it a lovely place. In the long summer twilights he and the pregnant Mrs. Winnery walked slowly up and down the long colonnades of mottled plane trees talking together in sudden bird-like bursts of intimacy of the days before they were brought together by the death and the miracle of Miss Annie Spragg. Neither of them had ever known any intimacy before and its discovery enchanted them.
She also told him a great deal more about Aunt Henrietta, each day thinking up fresh horrors to relate. She expressed surprise at the fact that Aunt Henrietta had never found him guilty of improper or suggestive advances. It was a kind of madness with her; Aunt Henrietta always believed that men were making improper remarks in her presence or staring at her or attempting flirtations. It was true, said Gertrude Winnery, that the seeress had been pinched once in the museum of Pompeii by a guide who had seen her only from the rear. There had been a tremendous and most embarrassing scene until her honor was vindicated by the arrest of the terrified little man, who discovered abruptly that he had pinched a tornado. Yes, thought Mrs. Winnery, she was a little mad on the subject of her attractions.
On their return Mr. Winnery took for his study the room which the seeress had called her boudoir, and there he installed four large crates of confused notes, copyings and false starts which represented Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena. In this room he spent morning after morning struggling to bring order out of chaos while Mrs. Winnery occupied herself with the delights of keeping house for herself, instead of someone else. But his heart seemed to fail him and the combative interest which had once animated the colossal work appeared to have suffered a decline. At length, in despair, as if he had been a writer of detective mysteries, who must somehow bring the story to a close, he made a summary of the facts and information for and against the miraculous element in the case of Miss Annie Spragg. It included all the information he had been able to collect both in Brinoë and Winnebago Falls. It seemed the only way to end the whole muddle.
He began by setting down the elements which appeared to him to be subject to a reasonable explanation. He wrote:
1. The Church appears to have been entirely right in quietly discrediting the so-called miracle. The scars on the body of Miss Annie Spragg appear neither to have been of miraculous origin nor to have appeared at the moment of her death, but clearly were the scars of wounds inflicted upon her at some time before the brutal murder of her brother at Winnebago Falls. It is on record that they were seen at the time of her examination in connection with the murder. The agency which inflicted the wounds will probably never be known, although it seems likely that they were inflicted by her brother, Reverend Uriah Spragg, a religious fanatic, as a punishment for some sin she had committed and in the hope of redeeming her soul. (See old Puritan law for the branding of women caught in adultery.)
2. The Church also appears to have been right in its quiet assumption that the visitation of Saint Francis to Sister Annunziata was not of a miraculous character but only an hallucination due to her period of life and to definite physical causes together with the discovery of what to her poor weak mind appeared to be evidence of the miraculous and authentic Stigmata.
3. On the surface there appears to be nothing which might indicate that Miss Annie Spragg was anything but an eccentric old maid of the kind found frequently enough in small towns and religious communities. It must be remembered that she was the daughter of Cyrus Spragg, the Prophet, and the sister of Uriah Spragg. The one was an over-sexed and lecherous old man and the other a religious fanatic.
4. The story of Bestia and the strange happenings there with Peppina and the goats may be explained, if they ever occurred at all, simply as the eccentricities of a half-mad old woman, magnified and embellished by the imaginations of superstitious and ignorant peasants and of a woman (Signora Bardelli, the janitress) who was, either sincerely or insincerely, a devotee of the Black Arts. That Miss Annie Spragg was in any way responsible for the subsequent behavior of the girl Peppina seems unlikely. The character of the girl from childhood was clearly that of an epileptic and a moral imbecile and of one destined from birth to end her career in a brothel.
5. The testimony of the nun Sister Annunziata and the priest Father Baldessare (later killed in a riot in Milan where he was mistaken by Fascists for a Communist) is highly unreliable owing to the unbalanced character of the nun's mind and the general stupidity of the priest who appears to have been the dupe of various people throughout his life.
6. The brutal murder of Reverend Uriah Spragg could have been committed by a passing tramp or by one of his own flock in a fit of hatred or religious insanity.
7. The apparently miraculous disappearance of Cyrus Spragg, the Prophet, from the Temple at New Jerusalem lends itself to a much simpler solution than that put forth by his son Obadiah (that he was carried to heaven in a chariot of fire). It seems more likely that he was killed by the hot-blooded suitor of the pretty Maria Weatherby and that his body was buried secretly the same night by his two elder sons who then endeavored to carry out an imposture for the continued profit of themselves and their brothers and sisters. (In this they failed through a lack of the Prophet's vigor.) There is no evidence of an effort made to find and bring to justice the Kentuckian, Alonzo. Such a procedure would possibly have been embarrassing to the impostors by establishing the fact that the Prophet really was dead.
8. The behavior of Shamus Bosanky and the visions he had may be explained as due to epilepsy, of which he was clearly a victim. There is nothing unusual in his visions of Heaven, God, Saint John the Shepherd and the Angels, for he had heard of all these things from the priests and from old Mary Bosanky, who was of a strongly superstitious and religious temperament.
9. There is nothing unusual in Miss Annie Spragg's choice of Italy as a place of retreat after the death of her brother. Italy is filled with eccentric old ladies whose youth was starved for all the romantic and operatic background which Italy supplies with such extravagances.
Conclusion. All of these elements seem to fall within the category of the natural and appear strange only as they are subject to the imaginations, the prejudices and the superstitions of the various witnesses involved.
On the other hand (wrote Mr. Winnery), there are certain elements which do not lend themselves to any reasonable solution. Among these are,
1. The statement of the undertaker of Winnebago Falls that the wounds on the body of Reverend Uriah Spragg were like those which might have been made by some pronged instrument such as the sharp horns of a goat. The skull had been pierced in three places by some sharp instrument. But it must be remembered that the black he-goat of Miss Annie Spragg was already dead at the time of the murder, having been killed that very morning by Uriah Spragg himself with a hatchet. Together with this element, there is also the fact that although the murder was committed on the open prairie in broad daylight with no shelter of any kind nearer than three miles and that although the body was still warm when found by Maria Hazlett, no one was seen and no trace of anyone was ever discovered near the spot. Nor was any weapon ever found.
2. The story told by Shamus Bosanky to Ed Hasselman and Maria Hazlett of the orgies which took place in the marsh at Meeker's Gulch. Shamus Bosanky had heard of God and the Angels and the Saints from the priests and from his mother, but it seems impossible that he had ever heard of pagan gods either from the priests or from a mother who could neither read nor write. Therefore he could scarcely have imagined such a story, save by some obscure and scarcely believable trick of atavism. Nor does it seem possible that the story was invented by the woman Maria Hazlett, who, brought up in a poorhouse and scarcely able to read or write, had certainly never heard of Dionysus or Bacchus. The Hazlett woman, now nearly seventy years old, appears to be a simple countrywoman with an extraordinary attachment for the soil and for the drunken old man to whom she devoted her entire life.
3. The incident of Miss Annie Spragg's return at dawn from Meeker's Gulch accompanied by the black he-goat. This could be said to have been only the hallucination of the drunken milkman but for the discovery in the bedroom of Miss Annie Spragg of the chains and the crude handcuffs with which her brother chained her up at night.
4. The fact that from among all the saints Shamus Bosanky chose instinctively as his patron Saint John the Shepherd.
5. The most singular and astonishing fact of all, that Shamus Bosanky ran out into the storm to meet his death at the very moment when Miss Annie Spragg lay dying in the Palazzo Gonfarini on the other side of the world. Her own death occurred in the early morning of the fifteenth of August. At midnight of the fourteenth Shamus Bosanky vanished into the storm from the shanty by the railroad in Winnebago Falls. It appears that he went directly to Meeker's Gulch as to a rendezvous, for it was here that he was found later by the Hazlett woman, who alone seems to have known where to look for him. Allowing for the difference in time between Brinoë and Winnebago Falls, the deaths must have occurred at almost the same moment. (Note. This fact leads one to believe that if the elements of time and space were always taken into consideration in such cases there might emerge a whole and very strange new world filled with undiscovered relationships.)
Note. Many other minor and contributory incidents have by the passage of time been lost in an obscurity from which it is scarcely possible to resurrect them for proper scientific examination. Among these may be noted the origins of the Prophet, Cyrus Spragg, and the strange disappearance of Michael Bosanky, in the so-called bottomless pond at Lakeville, Iowa.
One other curious fact came to light some time after Mr. Winnery had established himself at the Villa Leonardo. He had been walking one morning in the garden after breakfast turning over and over in his mind the puzzling evidence he had just set down on paper, when he found himself suddenly before the statue, reading with some dim portion of his mind the inscription which began, "Dans la damnation le feu est la moindre chose, etc., etc." All at once he was aware that the face of the statue possessed a similarity to the face of someone he had known in life, and for a long time he stood there studying the sensual and vigorous countenance, attempting to relate it to some face which hovered elusively as a ghost in the back of his consciousness. And then all at once he turned sharply about and hastened back to his study where he took down from a box a faded daguerreotype. Armed with this he descended again to the garden and stood for a long time comparing the face in the daguerreotype with that of Priapus, God of Fertility.
When he returned at last to the villa, he took up his note book and made in it the last entry he was ever to make in the strange case of Miss Annie Spragg.
The strangest of all the facts (he wrote) is the likeness between the face of the statue found in the garden of the Villa Leonardo and the face in the daguerreotype portrait made of Cyrus Spragg on the day the Prophet retired into the temple at New Jerusalem, never to be seen again by any man. The daguerreotype (secured by the author after much difficulty from the daughter of one of the original Spraggites and therefore possibly a daughter of the Prophet himself) has faded with age, but not sufficiently to weaken the certainty that the face of Cyrus Spragg, the Prophet, and the face of the image of Priapus are the same face.
He told Mrs. Winnery that the whole affair appeared hopelessly muddled and inexplicable, and that the solution was scarcely worth any further expenditure of his valuable time. Secretly he had a sense of it pointing toward something but what this was he could not say. He did not tell Mrs. Winnery that in attempting to solve one mystery he had simply confronted another and more terrifying one which neither scientists nor prophets nor saints had ever solved in all the centuries of the world's recorded existence. It made Mr. Winnery seem to himself small and insignificant and impertinent, and being a vain man, he did not care to have his wife share this discovery.
Out of all the muddle only one thing seemed to emerge clearly—that there was in the affair the evidence of some colossal struggle between all that was Christian and all that which Signora Bardelli described as "older than the church, older than Christianity itself" and that humanity was the battle ground upon which the two ancient elements waged their colossal and endless conflict. The Church of Rome, he thought (though he did not confide this even to Mrs. Winnery), was right just as it had been right in the question of Miss Annie Spragg's spurious miracle. It appeared to attempt a compromise.
He had discovered that a Primitive Methodist had been buried in consecrated ground by mistake but only he knew this for a certainty and he saw no reason to disturb the eternal rest of a poor eccentric old maid. Besides, such a thing did not seem to him to be a matter of any great importance. He bowed before the mystery and, feeling somewhat ashamed of himself for his impertinence, packed away in crates in the cellar of the Villa Leonardo, the vast accumulation of notes, copyings and false starts which represented Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena. This cellar he found, as he had supposed, to be of Etruscan construction.
But the next day he began with singular energy a new work. This time it was not a scientific undertaking but a historical romance teeming with local color. It was called Riccardo and Giuliana and the setting was Brinoë in the time of the Renaissance. The hero, Riccardo, was a man, fifty-three years old, who had spent his life in the service of the Dukes of Brinoë. The heroine, Giuliana, was a young girl of thirty-five who had been kept a prisoner since childhood in a lonely villa in the valley behind Monte Salvatore by an aunt who concealed a taste for sadism beneath a reputation for great piety. Among the subsidiary characters were Michangelo, Leonardo, Machiavellia, Lucrezia Tuornabuoni, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Botticelli, Fra Lippo Lippi (who supplied the comic relief) and a few others. In the end Riccardo rescued Giuliana and they were married amid celebrations in which the joyous and carefree natives of Brinoë and all the foreigners living there took part. He told Mrs. Winnery that he thought he had found at last the proper medium for the expression of his literary talents. During the last month or two of her pregnancy he read aloud to her chapter after chapter as they were completed.
She was confined six weeks earlier than they had expected. It was the month of October when the goatherd Pietro kept a perpetual heap of offerings before the statue in the garden and it was Sister Annunziata who brought him, pacing up and down in the ancient garden, before the statue, the news that he was the father of twin boys. They no longer kept Sister Annunziata shut up because her madness seemed of a harmless nature and madness was a thing never taken seriously in Italy. She simply believed that Miss Annie Spragg was an unappreciated saint and that Saint Francis was her guardian and companion day and night. In a vague gesture of gratitude toward the pagan gods of fertility, Mr. Winnery made a rich gift of money to Sister Annunziata's convent. It was used to restore abominably a series of famous frescoes by Gozzoli, which had faded almost into oblivion. So in the end Aunt Bessie's money came to embellish a non-conformist chapel in Bloomsbury and a Roman Catholic convent in Brinoë.
Mr. Winnery has completed his romance, for which he was granted the very rare honor of an interview with the Dictator and he has been made a Knight of the Order of Saint Trevizius and a member of three societies of historical research having to do with Brinoë. Mrs. Winnery is about to have a third child and they are very happy in the Villa Leonardo and are likely to remain its tenants for years to come, for the retirement of the Principessa d'Orobelli grows each year more and more remote in its possibilities. The statue in the garden has never troubled them as it troubled others because they are by nature a pair of innocents.
Often as they drive happily into Brinoë, with the nurse and the twins on the seat opposite them, they pass the house of Signora Bardelli, lying close against the wall of the monastery, where Father d'Astier sought refuge. The retired janitress does a splendid business with the bed of Miss Annie Spragg and has grown quite rich. There has even been talk of offering her a medal for her efforts in behalf of the apparently new but really ancient movement toward greater fertility of Italy. Mr. and Mrs. Winnery bow to greet her pleasantly, for Mr. Winnery came in the end to the conviction that any belief which brought comfort to the human race had its own place in the divine scheme of things.
Frequently the Winnerys drive to the Campo Santo of Monte Salvatore to carry flowers from the garden of the Villa Leonardo to the grave of Miss Annie Spragg. They have never forgotten that their meeting was due to her and they are grateful to her for so much happiness. They always find there other flowers and sometimes branches of green olives and even melons and fruit, for there remain scores and even hundreds among the poor and humble and superstitious who continue stubbornly to regard her as a saint.
Florence
October, 1926
Socoa, B. P., France
July, 1928
The end
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