A Journey to Disgrace

Introduction What you are about to read below is a story and a testament to the weakness that resides in all men and upon which the female of the species, should she be of a certain sadistic and wanton frame of mind, preys to make of us what she will. Be that something a lover, a husband, a father or a slave. The story that found its way into my hands during the autumn of 1929 is, I say with little fear of being contradicted, as intriguing as it is repulsive - the latter undoubtedly so. It is also a testament to the presence in our world of unseen, and certainly unsuspected, spiritual and metaphysical phenomenon which, in the wrong hands, can wreak havoc in the lives of others. Phenomena we, in our pampered Western climes, cossetted by the advances of science and its smug logic in regard of the supernatural and other mysteries, tend to disregard as no more than the creation of less developed cultures or writers of a somewhat “fanciful” bent. An attitude we take, as you are about to learn, at our own peril. I have done my utmost to ascertain the facts behind the journal and its keeper and, to the best of my knowledge, what you will read is, if nothing else, a journal of personal truth revealing one man’s destruction as a person of relatively high mind and morals at the hands of a mother and daughter from the Indian Subcontinent. A mother and a daughter this writer for one had not suspected could exist outside some of the more outlandish depictions – some of them my own – of the fairer s*x. An outlandish depiction that will, I am sure, shock you as it has shocked me. Shocked me so much, in point of fact, that I find it difficult to gaze upon the women who share the same native lineage as this depraved pairing of mother and daughter with any degree of equanimity - nonsensical as I know such a generalisation to be in regard of the womanhood of one entire street; let alone a land and a subcontinent. The journal that is about to confound any preconceptions you may have in respect of an Englishman’s natural and God-given superiority – a conceit I myself have paid lip-service to in my past fiction without ever truly believing its substance – came into my hands, aptly enough, during my writing of a short-story with which you may now be familiar titled “The Death Voyage”. My preoccupation with which explains why yet another year saw itself turn before I saw my way clear to send these words, and those of the journal itself, to my publisher. A journal that had been handed to and passed on to me in turn by an acquaintance in the Foreign Office during a spell of tenure in the Indian coastal port of Madras – or “Chennai, to give the location its ancient and local name. Unlike the tale I tell in “The Death Voyage”, however, the cruise upon which the keeper of the journal embarked would involve no death of a physical kind. Of that keeper’s pride, spirit, and very manhood, however, you will be left in no doubt in respect of the condition to which it was reduced by his two demonic tormentors in female form. That, is quite another matter from my own tale and one, moreover, that does not make for easy reading. With this in mind, I would ask of you who read this in our more open-minded year of 1930 - and just as our embattled hero will ask himself in the few words with which he introduces his journal - to look deeper than the unavoidable and understandable reaction of horror and disgust his tale, along with the seemingly easy way he succumbed to events we all must find abhorrent, inspire in both our hearts and our minds. For I must confess that I also found myself, and for long periods of his journal, in a frame of mind that was not disposed to look kindly upon the man and was all but on the verge of dismissing him as no more than a poseur whose own weakness and lack of true masculinity and substance had finally found him out in the shape of two heinous and perverse examples of Indian womanhood. However, the more I read, and the more I applied thought that was not of the reactive and less analytical kind to the situation in which he found himself and his own response to it, the more I began to question myself and my own preconceptions. How many of us, after all, can say we know ourselves? Truly, I mean. Here, in our blessedly fertile and secure homeland, safe from the horrors of hunger and tyranny that shape so many of those colonies we have tried with mixed success to bless with a little of what we take for granted, can we truly say that we have confronted anything of either a physical or spiritual nature that has called into question all of those qualities we take as read and believe ourselves to be possessed? What you will read below, I say with no intention to be a sensationalist but with complete seriousness, will challenge many of those notions we take for granted in respect of the superiority of one gender over the other and one nation over another. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Crowborough February 1930