THE CURSE OF NENEK KABAYAN
“He’ll steal no more of my Old Jamaica,” exulted Briggs, flinging
himself into a chair by the table. “And that sniveling boy will give me
no more of his infernal lip! Skunks!” He picked up the bottle, still
containing a little rum, and poured a gulp of liquor down his throat.
“On my own ship!”
“Where are the cards, sir?” asked Filhiol. His voice, quivering, was
hardly audible.
“Petty game,” burst out the captain, “no good. Make it a real one, and
I’ll go you!”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Stakes worth playin’ for! Man-size stakes! You got money in Boston,
sir. Some fifteen thousand. I’ll play you for that, plus your wages
this voyage!”
“Against what, sir?”
“Against my share of the ship’s cargo, and my share of the _Silver
Fleece_, herself. And if I scuttle her, as scuttle her I may, in case
the insurance money foots bigger than the ship’s worth and the cargo, I
stake that money, too!”
The doctor pondered a moment, while Briggs pressed a hand to his thick
neck, redly swollen with heat and rum. Suddenly the captain broke out
again:
“That’s an A1 gamble for you, sir. When I land my West Coast natives at
San Felipe, and slip my opium into Boston, there won’t be a shipmaster
walk up State Street that will be better fixed than I’ll be.”
“Bring out the cards, sir,” answered the doctor. “But the kris goes in
as part of the wager?”
“Yes, damn it, and I’ll be generous,” slavered Briggs. He jerked open
the table drawer and fetched out a well-thumbed pack of cards, which he
flung on the green cloth. “I’ll put up a stake that’d make any man’s
mouth water, sir, if he _is_ a man! Though maybe you’re not, bein’ only
a sawbones!”
“What’s that, sir?”
“The yellow wench asleep in my berth—Kuala Pahang!”
“Done!” exclaimed Filhiol, humoring the ruffian to all possible limits,
till liquor and heat should have overcome him.
“Deal the cards, sir!” cried Briggs. “I may be a bucko, and I may be
drunk to-night, but I know a man when I see one. I’m not too drunk to
add your wages and your savin’s to my plunder. Deal the cards!”
Filhiol had just fallen to shuffling the pasteboards when a groan, from
behind the door of the captain’s private cabin, arrested his hand.
Frowning, he swung around. In his tensing hand the cards bent almost
double.
Briggs buffeted him upon the shoulder, with huge merriment.
“_She’s_ not dead yet, is she?” exulted he. “No, no, not yet. Even
though everybody in this devil’s hole claims the wenches will die
first, before they’ll be a white man’s darlin’.” His speech had become
so thick as to be hardly speech at all. “All infernal liars, sawbones!
She’s been here already two days, Topsy has. An’ is she dead yet? Not
very! No, nor not goin’ to die, neither, an’ you can lay to that!
Nor get away from me. Not while I’m alive, an’ master o’ the _Silver
Fleece_!”
The doctor’s jaw set so hard that his tanned skin whitened over the
maxillary muscles. Very vividly Filhiol still perceived the danger
of general mutiny, of mass-attack from Batu Kawan, of fire and sword
impending before the clipper could be got down-river and away. Come all
that might, he must cling to Briggs, warily, humoringly.
After all, what was one native girl, more or less? The doctor shuffled
the cards again, and dealt, under the raw light of the swinging-lamp. A
louder cry from the girl turned Briggs around.
“Damnation!” he blared, starting up. “If the wench gets to howling,
she’ll raise the town. I’m goin’ to shut her jaw, and shut it hard!”
“Quite right, sir,” assented the doctor, though his deep eyes glowed
with murder. “But, why not get under way, at once, drop down the river
to-night, anchor inside Ulu Salama bar till—”
Briggs interrupted him with a boisterous laugh.
“Even Reuben Ranzo, the tailor,” he gibed, “could give you points on
navigation!” He stared at Filhiol a moment, his face darkening; then
added harshly: “You stick to your pills and powders, Mr. Filhiol, or
there’ll be trouble. I won’t have anybody tryin’ to boss. Now, I’m not
goin’ to tell you twice!”
For three heartbeats their eyes met. The doctor’s had become injected
with blood. His face had assumed an animal expression. Briggs snapped
his thick fingers under the physician’s nose, then turned with an oath
and strode to his cabin door. He snatched it open, and stood there a
moment peering in, his face deep-lined in a mask of vicious rage.
“Captain Briggs!”
The doctor’s voice brought the ruffian about with a sharp turn.
“_You_ mutinous, too?” shouted he, swinging his shoulders, loose,
hulking, under the yellow silk of his jacket.
“By no means, sir. As a personal favor to me, however, I’m asking you
not to strike that girl.” The doctor’s voice was shaking; yet still he
sat there at the table, holding his cards in a quivering hand.
“You look out for your own skin, sawbones!” Briggs menaced. “The
woman’s mine to do with as I please, an’ it’s nobody’s damn business,
you lay to that! I’ll love her or beat her or throw her to the sharks,
as I see fit. So now you hear me, an’ I warn you proper, stand clear o’
me, or watch out for squalls!”
Into the cabin he lunged, just as another door, opening, disclosed a
sleepy-eyed, yellow-haired young man—Mr. Wansley, second-mate of the
devil-ship. Wansley stared, and the doctor stood up with doubled fists,
as they heard the sound of blows from within, then shriller cries,
ending in a kind of gurgle—then silence.
The doctor gripped both hands together, striving to hold himself. The
life of every white man aboard now depended absolutely on seeing this
thing through without starting mutiny and war.
“Get back in your cabin, Mr. Wansley, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed,
“or go on deck! The captain’s crazy drunk. If he sees you here,
there’ll be hell to pay. Get out, quick!”
Wansley grasped the situation and made a speedy exit up the
after-companion, just ahead of Briggs’s return. The captain banged his
cabin door, and staggered back to the table. He dusted his palms one
against the other.
“The black she-dog won’t whine again, for _one_ while,” he grinned with
white teeth through his mat of beard. “That’s the only way to teach
’em their lesson!” He clenched both fists, turning them, admiring them
under the lamp-light. “Great pacifiers, eh, sawbones? _I_ tell you!
Beat a dog an’ a woman, an’ you can’t go far off your course. So now
I’ll deal the cards, an’ win every cent you’ve got!”
“The cards are dealt, sir,” answered Filhiol, chalky to the lips.
“Yes, an’ you’ve been here with ’em, all alone!” retorted the captain.
“No, sir, that won’t go. Fresh deal—here, I’ll do it!”
He gathered the dealt hands and unsteadily began shuffling, while the
doctor, teeth set in lip, swallowed the affront. Some of the cards
escaped the drunken brute’s thick fingers; two or three dropped to the
floor.
“Pick ’em up, sir,” directed Briggs. “No captain of my stamp bends his
back before another man—an’ besides, I know you’d be glad to knife me,
while I was down!”
Filhiol made no answer. He merely obeyed, and handed the cards to
Briggs, who was about to deal, when all at once his hands arrested
their motion. His eyes fixed themselves in an incredulous, widening
stare, at the forward cabin door. His massive jaw dropped. A sound
escaped his throat, but no word came.
The doctor spun his chair around. He, too, beheld a singular
apparition; though how it could have got there—unless collusion had
been at work among the Malays in the waist—seemed hard to understand.
So silently the door had slid, that the coming of the aged native woman
had made no sound. Aged she seemed, incredibly old, wizen, dried;
though with these people who can tell of age? The dim light revealed
her barefooted, clad in a short, gaudily-striped skirt, a tight-wrapped
body-cloth that bound her shrunken breast. Coins dangled from her ears;
her straight black hair was drawn back flatly; her lips, reddened with
lime and betel, showed black, sharp-filed teeth in a horrible snarl of
hatred.
Silent, a strange yellow ghostlike thing, she crept nearer. Briggs
sprang up, snatched the rum-bottle by its neck and waited, quivering.
Right well he knew the woman—old Dengan Jouga, mother of Kuala, his
prey.
For the first time in years unnerved, he stood there. Had she rushed
in at him, screamed, vociferated, clawed with hooked talons, beaten at
him with skinny fists, he would have knocked her senseless, dragged her
on deck and flung her to the bund; but this cold, silent, beady-eyed
approach took all his sails aback.
Only for a moment, however. Briggs was none of your impressionable men,
the less so when in drink.
“Get out!” he shouted, brandishing the bottle. “Out o’ this, or by
God—”
The door, opening again, disclosed the agitated face of Texel, a
foremast hand.
“Cap’n Briggs, sir!” exclaimed this wight, touching his cap, “one o’
the Malays says _she_, there, has got news o’ Mr. Scurlock an’ the boy,
sir, that you’ll want to hear. He’s out here now, the Malay is. Will I
tell him to come in?”
“I could have you flogged, you scum, for darin’ to come into my cabin
till you’re called,” shouted Briggs. “But send the pig in!”
The bottle lowered, as Briggs peered frowning at the silent hag.
Uncanny, this stillness was. Tempests, hurricanes of passion and of
hate would have quite suited him; but the old Malay crone, standing
there half-way to the table, the light glinting from her deep
coal-black eyes, her withered hands clutching each other across her
wasted body, disconcerted even his bull-like crassness.
The seaman turned and whistled. At once, a Malay slid noiselessly in,
salaamed and stood waiting. Texel, nervously fingering the cap he held
in his hands, lingered by the door.
“Oh, it’s you again, Mud Baby, is it?” cried the bucko. “What’s the
news Dengan Jouga has for me? Tell her to hand it over an’ then clear
out! Savvy?”
“Captain, sahib, sar,” stammered Mahmud, almost gray with fear, every
lean limb aquiver with the most extraordinary panic. “She says Mr.
Scurlock, an’ boy, him prisoner. You give up girl, Kuala Pahang. No
givem—”
The sentence ended in a quick stroke of the Malay’s forefinger across
the windpipe, a whistling sound.
Briggs stared and swore. The doctor laid a hand on his arm.
“Checkmated, sir,” said he. “The old woman wins.”
“Like hell!” roared the captain. “I don’t know what the devil she’s
talkin’ about. If Scurlock an’ the boy get their fool throats cut, it’s
their own fault. They’re bein’ punished for mutiny. No girl here, at
all! You, Mud Baby, tell that to old Jezebel!”
Mahmud nodded, and slid into a sing-song chatter. The woman gave ear,
all the while watching Briggs with the unwinking gaze of a snake. She
flung back a few crisp words at Mahmud.
“Well, what now?” demanded Briggs.
“She say, you lie, captain, sar!”
“I _lie_, do I?” vociferated the bucko. He heaved the bottle aloft and
would have struck the hag full force, had not the doctor caught his
arm, and held it fast.
“My God, captain!” cried Filhiol, gusty with rage and fear. “You want
mutiny? Want the whole damned town swarming over us, with torch and
kris?”
Briggs tried to fling him off, but the doctor clung, in desperation.
Mahmud Baba wailed:
“No, no, captain! No touch her! She very bad luck—she Nenek Kabayan!”
“What the devil do _I_ care?” roared Briggs, staggering as he struggled
with the doctor. “She’s got to get out o’ my cabin, or by—”
“She’s a witch-woman!” shouted Filhiol, clinging fast. “That means a
witch, Nenek Kabayan does. If you strike her, they’ll tear your heart
out!”
Mahmud, in the extremity of his terror, clasped thin, brown hands,
groveled, clutching at the captain’s knees. Briggs kicked him away like
a dog.
“Get out, you an’ everybody!” he bellowed. “Doctor, I’ll lay you in
irons for this. Into the lazaret you go, so help me!”
The witch-woman, raising crooked claws against him, hurled shrill
curses at Briggs—wild, unintelligible things, in a wail so penetrantly
heart-shaking, that even the captain’s bull-like rage shuddered.
From the floor, Mahmud raised appealing hands.
“She say, give girl or she make _orang onto_ kill everybody!”
cried the Malay. “_Orang onto_, bad ghost! She say she make
_sabali_—sacrifice—of everybody on ship.” His voice broke, raw, in a
frenzy of terror. “She say Vishnu lay curse on us, dead men come out of
graves, be wolves, be tigers—_menjelma kramat_—follow us everywhere!”
“Shut your jaw, idiot!” shouted Briggs, but in a tone less brutal. The
man was shaken. Not all his bluster could blink that fact. The doctor
loosed his arm; Briggs did not raise the bottle, now, to strike. On and
on wailed Mahmud:
“She say _chandra wasi_, birds of ocean foam, poison us, an’ Zemrud,
him what keep life, leave us. She say blind face in sky watch you,
cap’n, sahib, an’ laugh, an’ you want to die, but you not die. She say
you’ life be more poison than _katchubong_ flowers—she say evil seed
grow in you’ heart, all life long—she say somethin’ you love, cap’n,
sar, somethin’ you love more than you’ life, sometime die, an’ you die
then but still you not die! She say—”
Briggs chewed and spat a curse and, turning to the table, sat down
heavily there. Astonished, Filhiol stared at him. Never had he seen the
captain in this mood. A wild attack, assault, even murder, would not
have surprised the doctor; but this strange quietude surpassed belief.
Filhiol leaned over Briggs, as he sat there sagging, staring at the
witch-woman still in furious tirade.
“Captain,” he whispered, “you’re going to give up the girl, of course?
You’re going to save Mr. Scurlock and the boy, and keep this shriveled
monkey of a witch from raising the town against us?”
Briggs only shook his head.
“No,” he answered, in a strange, weary voice. “She can’t have her, an’
that’s flat. I don’t give a damn for the deserters, an’ if it comes to
a fight, we got our signal-cannon an’ enough small-arms to make it hot
for all the natives between here an’ hell. The girl’s plump as a young
porpoise, an’ she’s mine, an’ I’m going to keep her; you can lay to
that!”
Mahmud, still stammering crude translation of the witch-woman’s
imprecations, crawled to Briggs’s feet. Briggs kicked the man away,
once more, and burst into a jangle of laughter.
“Get ’em all out o’ here, sawbones,” said he, his head sagging.
The life seemed to have departed from him. “I’m tired of all this
hullabaloo.” He opened his table drawer and drew out an army revolver.
“Three minutes for you to get ’em all out, doctor, or I begin
shootin’.”
In the redness of his eye, bleared with drink and rage, Filhiol read
cold murder. He dragged Mahmud up, and herded him, with Texel and the
now silent witch-woman, out the forward cabin door.
“_You_ get out, too!” mouthed the captain, dully. “I’ll have no
sawbones sneakin’ and spyin’ on my honeymoon. Get out, afore I break
you in ways your books don’t tell you how to fix!”
The doctor gave him one silent look. Then, very tight-lipped, he issued
out beneath the awning, where among the Malays a whispering buzz of
talk was forward.
As he wearily climbed the companion ladder, he heard the bolt go home,
in the cabin door. A dull, strange laugh reached his ears, with mumbled
words.
“God save us, now!” prayed Filhiol, for the first time in twenty years.
“God save and keep us, now!”