Miss Jéromette

The advent of the sexual revolution, or whatever it chooses to call itself, has brought with it the promise of equal rights in equal endeavours – a noble aim, regardless of its feasibility.  It is not so much that men and women cannot or should not be equal; in intellectual matters there is no distinction apart from what detractors will impose.  Rather, we face the age-old question of the physical equality that cannot be, simply because man will always carry an advantage of violence that cannot be reciprocated by his female counterpart.  As a result, two unbalanced sides will necessarily obtain, as in this story. 

The initial conceit involves two brothers sitting together one lonely night after dinner and poring over "a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form."  True crime has always fascinated us because our repulsion contains some elements of attraction and curiosity, as much the case one hundred thirty-five years ago as it is today.  It is the second brother, the non-reader in this case and a clergyman, who turns pale upon beholding the book as it reminds him of a famous trial from his youth, a trial in which the accused was ultimately acquitted.  And what does the clergyman aver about this wicked time?  "I know this," he said, "the prisoner was guilty."  They speak no more about what happened, although the clergyman also indicates that there were "circumstances connected with that trial which were never communicated to the judge or the jury."  Only on his deathbed does he become more voluble and reveal what he had concealed within his heart for almost an entire adult life.    

It is many summers ago when his brother "was on [his] way to India" that the preacher, from whose perspective the tale is now recounted, has completed his studies at this university.  He chose law instead of his father's preference, which would have been for his son to join the clergy, and with this familial disappointment hanging as a black cloud over his everyday existence, he regales himself on what he can of the urban and urbane existence his choice permits ("I had no serious intention of following any special vocation.  I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of a London life").  One fine evening, walking through the public gardens that can only be properly enjoyed at high summer, he hears a foreign female voice warning an unseen male to take his leave.  He steps in and averts further confrontation (the perpetrator, in any case, is drunk and quickly accompanied off the grounds by a policeman), and then turns his attention to the voice and the shape from which it emanates:

Her figure was slight and small: she was a well-made miniature of a woman from head to foot.  Her hair and her eyes were both dark.  The hair curled naturally; the expression of the eyes was quiet, and rather sad; the complexion, as I then saw it, very pale; the little mouth perfectly charming.  I was especially attracted, I remembered, by the carriage of her head; it was strikingly graceful and spirited; it distinguished her, little as she was and quiet as she was, among the thousands of other women in the Gardens, as a creature apart.     

Other colors are added to her portrait: she is impoverished, "resigned to her lonely life among strangers," and without her parents for many years now.  She is French, of course, and yet, particularly in one cruel instance, "her temperament had little of the liveliness which we associate in England with the French nature."  They begin what could loosely be termed a courtship, although their relationship at every moment becomes more and more tenuous owing to the presence of another man in her life.  Our narrator asks as timid lovers tend to ask while being very afraid to know, and learns next to nothing: "He might be living, or he might be dead.  There came no word of him, or from him."  It is only when the narrator's mother, on her own deathbed, presses him to change his vocation that he quits Jéromette, abetted by the fact that she has just received a letter confirming that her love will soon return.

Unless you rank among the most ingenuous of readers what happens next cannot really be spoiled by commentary.  Our narrator, now indeed a man of the cloth, is appointed to a benefice in the West of England.  His steady income does not satisfy him, so he takes on a few students in need of help to gain entrance into the prestigious universities whose names their families covet.  The first two students are harmless teenagers, but then our narrator gives a sermon at his church about "the discovery of a terrible crime" which has held England in its thrall.  After this passionate lecture, of which, alas, we are given but a quoteless summary, the narrator receives a note written in pencil from a young man, "a member of my congregation, a gentleman," who wishes to see him as soon as the preacher has an opportunity.  The man leaves his own father's name as a reference, and it is verified as belonging to "a man of some celebrity and influence in the world of London" – the world, we remember, that our narrator wishes he had never left.   They meet and the narrator tells us all we need to know:

The women, especially, admired his beautiful light hair, his crisply-curling beard, his delicate complexion, his clear blue eyes, and his finely shaped hands and feet.  Even the inveterate reserve in his manner, and the downcast, almost sullen, look which had prejudiced me against him, aroused a common feeling of romantic enthusiasm in my servants' hall.  It was decided, on the high authority of the housekeeper herself, that 'the new gentleman' was in love – and more interesting still, that he was the victim of an unhappy attachment which had driven him away from his friends and his home.

The man in question is in his late twenties and yet has never been a college student.  And how could this be?  A dissolute life of excess is the hardly contrite explanation.  But our clergyman has been trained to detect human motivations in the depths of our being, and we can say without fear of perjury that, with this fellow, he does not like what he sees. 

Without going further, it is remarkable how the narrator is presented with both sides of an equation, but at different times and from the perspective of different professions, so that the fabulous structure of an otherwise simple tale becomes more involving without becoming more intricate.  Collins is most famously the author of two other works, a superb if overly long novel of suspense and one of the great literary mysteries of the nineteenth century, both of which can be recommended without reservation.  To Collins's great credit, there is little difference in style between the passages that develop his characters and the passages that develop his plots.  The same sure, curious hand instructs all forces to act and obey his whims.  I have always told myself that my predilection for Victorian storytelling has to do with the comity of its personages, who act with full acknowledgment of the laws of both beauty and morality, even if at certain times they choose to transgress them.  There is a gallantry to our clergyman narrator, an odd adherence to basic human goodness that should not strike us as odd at all.  But in our times of cynicism and vulgarity, little space is allotted to the simple virtues that we have not only taken for granted, but cast by the wayside with no small contempt.  That is not the reason, mind you, that I have omitted the story title's second half – the reason for that was its sounding a bit too quaint for my taste.  Far more quaint, however, than the notion of falling in love with a woman whose soul is hopelessly and dangerously possessed by another.  That tale, I think, we all know far too well. 

The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance

Dreams are among the most belabored of subjects because their mystery is belied by how simple they appear to be.  How often have we remembered a phrase or occurrence in the middle of a rather ordinary day then understood that it was the memory of a dream not of reality?  How often has a dream spoken in truth about feelings and thoughts that we could not reveal in our daily interaction?  Let us forget once and for all the psychobabble that has stunk in rotting heaps for decades only to be recycled and gain in stench: life cannot be reduced to the primitive symbols of the unimaginative and the neurotic.  On the contrary, life is to be enjoyed in the plenitude of its secrets by those fortunate enough to be granted enough of it.  So if you love what magic life may hold, you can imagine what awaits us in death, which brings us to this terrible little tale.

Our narrator has the distinct advantage of anonymity and the even greater advantage of being able to stagger the details of his story in four personal letters.  What the recipient Robert, ostensibly his brother, thinks of these epistles is never revealed.  The subject matter is their Uncle Henry, a Rector in what appears to be Cambridgeshire, where our narrator has decided to head.  Upon arrival, he asks around regarding Uncle Henry's movements then registers the following composition:

The facts are these.  On Friday the 19th, he went as usual shortly before five o'clock to read evening prayers at the Church; and when they were over the clerk brought him a message, in response to which he set off to pay a visit to a sick person at an outlying cottage the better part of two miles away.  He paid the visit, and started on his return journey at about half-past six.  This is the last that is known of him.

And who expected him in that cottage, visited subsequently for the sake of reconnaissance by the narrator?  One man who was "very weak," and a wife and children who "of course, could do nothing themselves."  Uncle Henry seemed normal to these witnesses, wore his bands in glory, and traipsed happily back homewards after his work of consolement was accomplished.  The narrator indicates that he himself ventured out in an attempt to trace his uncle's course, but only during the day, as he "was not in trim for wandering about unknown pastures, especially on an evening when bushes looked like men, and a cow lowing in the distance might have been the last trump."  He interrupts his letter-writing for a visit from the curate with the heartfelt observation that had Uncle Henry appeared on that copse "carrying his head under his arm," he would have been little surprised.

The oddness of Uncle Henry’s last hours cannot be gainsaid, and how odd could they possibly have been?  The narrator enters the King’s Head with the hopes of a detective; he is informed, with no small acrimony, that his Uncle was particularly unkind to the barkeep soon before his disappearance.  On Christmas Day proper, the narrator and the selfsame hosteler take to the greens anew, and after questioning some women and "pointing with his stick, to distant cattle and labourers," the old fellow declares the resources exhausted.  Later that night, the narrator meets a tramp who proves to be equally uninformed.  In the course of conversation, however, the tramp produces this classic puppet set which triggers in our narrator one of the greatest nightmares in literature:

I believe someone once tried to re-write Punch as a serious tragedy; but whoever he may have been, this performance would have suited him exactly.  There was something Satanic about the hero.  He varied his methods of attack: for some of his victims he lay in wait, and to see his horrible face – it was yellowish white, I may remark – peering round the wings made me think of the Vampyre in Fuseli's foul sketch.  To others he was polite and carneying – particularly to the unfortunate alien who can only say Shallabalah – though what Punch said I never could catch.  But with all of them I came to dread the moment of death.  The crack of the stick on their skulls, which in the ordinary way delights me, had here a crushing sound as if the bone was giving way, and the victims quivered and kicked as they lay.  The baby – it sounds more ridiculous as I go on – the baby, I am sure, was alive.  Punch wrung its neck, and if the choke or squeak which it gave were not real, I know nothing of reality. 

The stage got perceptibly darker as each crime was consummated, and at last there was one murder which was done quite in the dark, so that I could see nothing of the victim, and took some time to effect.  It was accompanied by hard breathing and horrid muffled sounds, and after it Punch came and sat on the foot-board and fanned himself and looked at his shoes, which were bloody, and hung his head on one side, and sniggered in so deadly a fashion that I saw some of those beside me cover their faces, and I would gladly have done the same.  But in the meantime the scene behind Punch was clearing, and showed not the usual house front, but something more ambitious – a grove of trees and the gentle slope of a hill, with a very natural – in fact, I should say a real – moon shining on it.  Over this there rose slowly an object which I soon perceived to be a human figure with something peculiar about the head – what, I was unable at first to see.  It did not stand on its feet, but began creeping or dragging itself across the middle distance towards Punch.

The only regret I have about this amazing passage is that it cannot, for space and other reasons, be included in its entirety.  And while the detail about Punch stopping to fan himself after his massacre may rank among most the chilling in this master's works, one should be more worried about the dream's even more disgusting conclusion.  Suspicions grow like copses on those darkest of winter nights that once echoed with Pagan festivals, those nights on which all kinds of hairies and nasties surfaced without the slightest peep of a trump.  Then again, maybe someone simply gave poor Uncle Henry the hairy eyeball.

The Willows

Probably the phrase most commonly associated with this famous story is "primordial terror" – and you will not have to wait long to discover why.  Despite this near-consensus, the story lacks clarity as to the origin of the powers that exist along the uninhabited stretches of this fabled river.  Are we dealing with superstition or the crevices of psychological horrors that so often beset those long without substantial human contact?  What precisely are the intentions of the forces involved?  Why does the narrator's Swedish companion leer at him as if contemplating a decision?  And there are many decisions to be made when mankind's nearest enclave lies two days away.

Our narrator and his Swedish friend embark on one of the more ambitious canoeing itineraries in Europe, only to find themselves somewhere between Vienna and Budapest in "a region of singular loneliness and desolation."  While the adventuresome among us would not hesitate to delight in such a trip, we should also recall the time and place: the turn-of-the-century Hapsburg Empire.  Only two decades later would a controversial tract, based predominantly on late nineteenth-century sources, be published, and theories as to pre-Christian cults would be bandied about by both scholars and dilettantes, providing endless fodder for fantastic fiction and speculative anthropology alike (the tract itself, a dull and subpar work, need not concern us).  I would aver, however, that all these details are quite irrelevant.  The tone of The Willows presupposes a terrestrial evil, ostensibly sylvan in nature, that will haunt every uncolonized patch of the earth until it is safely uprooted or razed – and even that much might not be enough to extinguish it.  We are not dealing so much with witchcraft and its spells as the bestowers of that magic, great beings who seem to lurk, at certain moments of dark and treacherous night, behind the titular plant life:

These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive.

The resemblance to a mass of grovelling worshippers is hardly coincidental, as is the notion of a lack of dignity among these myrmidons.  They are simply following orders, and those orders may or may not contain instructions for securing a sacrifice.  It is a bromide of the modern atheist to reject religion and its deities because they "demand worship," something for which, of course, no greater being would ever bother asking.  Yet this observation is less callous than insipid.  The greatest among us, and here I mean our fellow species, the lords of mammals and all other beasts, will oftentimes bask in the glory of their accomplishments; but just as often do we laud them without their knowledge.  We find gods among our own because we are born to gaze upon the heavens and wonder about their secrets.  Ultimately, only the basest of dictators wish their boots licked and their imprecations regurgitated as law and commandment.  Real gods will gain our following through the simple method of awe.

Which brings us back to our willows.  As our duo progresses they encounter a plethora of omens: an otter, initially thought dead because "it had looked exactly like the body of a drowned man," with gleaming yellow eyes; a man "standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar ... at a tremendous pace," who will call out to the strangers then make them the sign of the Cross; and then the telltale traces at their very campsite.  The latter will include perforations in the sand that gain in width and depth as the story advances, as well as an eerie sound that cannot be readily explained.  Our narrator is clearly of the Romantic bent, and for that reason, among others, does he cherish his Nordic partner for his "stolid, practical nature," and for being "not imaginative."  Just consider his horror, then, as his once-impassive friend becomes increasingly brooding and perturbed, even going so far as to talk in conspiratorial whispers and warn the narrator "not to think" as "our thoughts make spirals in their minds."  There is also the matter of an unplaceable noise that is neither birdsong nor heathen paean – but of the two some wicked combination:

The curious sound that I have likened to the note of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of the night with a faint, continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct notes.  At one time it was behind and at another time in front of us.  Sometimes I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again from the clumps on our right.  More often it hovered directly overhead like the whirring of wings.  It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front, at our sides and over our heads, completely surrounding us.  The sound really defies description.  But nothing within my knowledge is like that ceaseless muffled humming rising off the deserted world of swamps and willows.

Another author once deemed The Willows "the greatest weird tale ever written," and for good reason.  The atmospheric resonance of the trees and their setting does more than suggest the pagan gods that may still masquerade as our own; the hollow woods, bars of black against black, the wind that seems to be reveling in its own abilities, the encroachment of countless pattering steps – all of this is the vital stuff of nightmares beyond immediate explanation.  We recall anew that most frightening proposition in deadest night: the horror of not knowing what is occurring yet knowing why.  That is the conscience of the guilty, of those who have committed unspeakable acts and sense that their comeuppance may be waiting behind their eyelids.  Which is not to say that our men have done anything wrong except, perhaps, one thing:

We allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some kind of special passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic – a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

We know that the Swede has "no imagination" – and then we come to know something utterly opposed to that presumption.  Perhaps then either one of the travellers could explain what happened to their second oar.  An oar, one notes, that could be very handy for a ferryman.

Under the Pyramids

When I first encountered the name of this author in the context of this film, I quite logically assumed it to be a pseudonym; I would marvel at one of literature's finest aptronyms only much later.  And while Re-animator horrified me as a child, I did not approach Lovecraft for many years for the simple reason that he was always recommended to me by the oddest among my classmates.  His creations appeared to inhabit the same escapist realm as the machinations of endless role-playing games and works of high fantasy, epitomized by the writings of this famous author.  Now I never played Dungeons and Dragons and other such time-gobblers, nor could I really read much Tolkien without drifting off in inattention.  But Lovecraft has gained in appeal, as in the terrible weirdness of this story. 

Our narrator is alleged to be none other than this renowned illusionist, which will explain presently the odd course of events.  Seeking a respite from his fame, Houdini and his wife travel to Egypt before the discovery of this tomb, with the mystery surrounding its ancient secrets at its hoopla's height.  Equally secret and equally publicized was Houdini's identity, which he takes pains to conceal until at length a mediocre magician evokes the perfectionist in the master and prods him to reveal his skills.  This proves to be a fateful error of pride.  Houdini finds a tour guide in "a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced, and relatively cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh, called himself 'Adbul Reis el Drogman,' [and] appeared to have much power over others of his kind."  Abdul Reis takes the foreigners on a broad tour of Egypt's sacred sites, and the descriptions regale themselves on lush details apparently only gleaned from academic and travel books – a most incredible feat of literary imagination.  He glimpses the Libyan desert, thinks himself again in "the extinct capital Memphis," and contemplates what had been erased from the countenance of the most famous of all monoliths and replaced four thousand five hundred years ago by King Khephren.  And it is in this last monument that Houdini senses an implacable power:

Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those terrible unseeing eyes.  On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince.  It was then that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at – depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon.  Then, too, it was I who asked myself an idle question whose hideous significance was not to appear for many an hour.

Combine these observations with Houdini's anxiety regarding what a German team of archaeologists might be hiding from public consumption, "a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons," and you have what is plainly known as a conundrum, and what others may view as a conspiracy.  A conspiracy of what, precisely?  Conspiracy is hardly the right term; rather, it is the perception which has crossed far greater minds than Houdini's that the original civilizations may have worshipped things not altogether benevolent to the affairs of man.  These thoughts are safely stowed away by nightfall as the Houdinis retreat to their hotel.  At which point, of course, the illusionist begins another adventure.

A militant anti-spiritualist and among the least susceptible to the wiles of mediums and necromancers, Houdini the historical figure might never have been affected by the arcana of Ancient Egypt in the way his ghostwritten counterpart suffers and muses.  So when Lovecraft's Houdini decides to reenter the night in the company of the unscrupulous Abdul Reis – Arabic for "slave of the leader" – the latter gets into a scuffle whose only resolution turns out to be a fistfight on the raised mesa of the Great Pyramid.  From there we proceed to an inevitability that someone like Houdini would surely have foreseen, and what happens could be deemed a nightmare, although it is depicted in colors and sounds unlike what we might encounter in the peaceful darkness of sleep:

From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before.  That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum.  In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling, and beating, I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth – a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies.  The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching.  Then – and may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the likes from my ears again – I began to hear, faintly and far off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.

Passages like these challenge the claims – buttressed by statements from Lovecraft himself, a notorious obfuscator – that our author did not believe in anything beyond himself, but let us not digress.  The fictional Houdini by dint of his reputation suddenly endures a test that the historical Houdini might not have survived, and we gain an impression of an ending that will not satisfy the reader (I must admit I guessed that we would wake up on a stage in one of Houdini's European parlors).  Lovecraft's prose is worthy of Houdini's legerdemain, and we would do well to accept that some tricks are not available for mass explanation.  Nor should we forget just how far the Sphinx's feet extend.        

The Captain of the Polestar

The man becomes a greater mystery every day, though I fear that the solution which he has himself suggested is the correct one, and that his reason is affected.  I do not think that a guilty conscience has anything to do with his behavior.  The idea is a popular one among the officers and, I believe, the crew; but I have seen nothing to support it.  He has not the air of a guilty man, but of one who has had terrible usage at the hands of fortune, and who should be regarded as a martyr rather than a criminal.

Perhaps I am naturally suspicious of those described as well-read because it implies that reading an indefinite amount of books can convert an average human being into an extraordinary one.  Yet man cannot learn on reading alone.  Life in its myriad tragedies and triumphs must imbue a learned person with perspective on his shelves that cannot be gained if he never abandons their side.  The dialogue of two Victorian lovers will only sound stilted if one has heard two contemporaries mutter sweet nothings; the desperation of frustrated dreams and private pain will only resound if the reader can reflect upon his own losses; and the postmodern, relativist nonsense that masquerades as deep thinking will only be exposed to the mind who knows the history of letters and also knows garbage when he smells it.  That is not to say, of course, that we should succumb to the adolescent habit of masking the cast of fiction with faces from our own reality.  One finds, I think, certain faces and manners – be they of people we know personally, those of certain celebrity, or odd amalgams not immediately traceable – particularly enchanting, and it is they who become our regulars, our fetished players.  We may even discover that we are haunted by images beyond our ken summoned only as fiction dictates – which brings us to this tale of unease.     

Our narrator is John McAlister Ray, Jr. (which may remind readers of the usher to this novel), a skeptical man of science who apparently learned nothing from his father, also a doctor, who appears towards the story's end in very unusual circumstances.  Ray is commissioned for reasons still unclear to us to an Arctic whaler commanded by Captain Craigie.  There are some gestures in the direction of this magnificent work – Craigie's bizarre,  almost pathological obsession with reaching a certain point in the trajectory, his seeming insouciance for the welfare of his crew, and his sudden outbursts of violent rage – but they are quickly subsumed under the carapace of another tale: a ghostly white figure  floating over the seas of ice has been sighted by several members of the fifty-man company.  Craigie is "remarkably well read" and has "the power of expressing his opinion forcibly without appearing to be dogmatic"; he also has a particular hue to him that may or may not mark his character:

A man's outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within.  The captain is tall and well-formed, with a dark, handsome face and a curious way of twitching his limb, which may arise from nervousness or be simply an outcome of his excessive energy.  His jaw and whole cast of countenance is manly and resolute, but the eyes are the distinctive feature of his face.  They are of the very darkest hazel, bright and eager, with a singular mixture of recklessness in their expression, and of something else which I have sometimes thought was more allied with horror than with any other emotion.

How eyes can be "of the very darkest hazel" and yet "bright" at the same time comprises one of the conventions of art that may confuse those who only read to pass the time or those who never read anything at all.  Somewhere, from among the thousands of faces we have gazed upon and their twinned portals, we can imagine exactly what the effect of these eyes might be.  What we cannot imagine is what they conspire to behold in both sleep and waking hours.

The secret of the Polestar's skipper may not really be a secret at all.  The atmosphere created is so conducive to terror, however, that we are almost obliged to take the whole series of events – if that is the right word – at face value, something that Ray is very hesitant to do.  Our story evolves in journal entries that monitor the crew's dwindling supplies and mounting anxiety.  Ray even misses the birthday of his fiancée, his beloved Flora to whom no one could possibly compare, while the sailors lament Craigie's extended circuit because herring season, the most profitable time of the year, begins in short order.  It is here that Ray comes across an item of unavoidable interest in the captain's quarters:

It is a bare little room, containing a washing-stand and a few books, but little else in the way of luxury except some pictures on the walls.  The majority of these are small cheap oleographs, but there was one watercolor sketch of the head of a young lady which arrested my attention.  It was evidently a portrait, and not one of those fancy types of female beauty which sailors particularly affect.  No artist could have evolved from his own mind such a curious mixture of character and weakness.  The languid, dreamy eyes, with their drooping lashes, and the broad, low brow, unruffled by thought or care, were in strong contrast with the clean-cut, prominent jaw and the resolute set of the lower lip.  Underneath it in one of the corners was written M.B., aet. 19.  That anyone in the short space of nineteen years of existence could develop such strength of will as was stamped on her face seemed to me at the time to be well-nigh incredible.  She must have been an extraordinary woman.

Could Ray be thinking specifically of his own favorite?  Perhaps the attitude conveyed so unambiguously by the artist may explain what we learn as our story resolves itself into a certain coherence.  That is, if you consider what happens in one of the planet's most silent regions to be resolved.