THE READING OF THE CURSE
The kitchen door slammed. Ezra, turning the corner of the house, paused
to gaze with admiration at Hal.
“Hello, Master Hal, sir,” said he. “Always studyin’, ain’t you?” Voice
and expression alike showed intense pride. Above, Filhiol bent an ear
of keenest attention. “Ain’t many young fellers in this town would be
workin’ over books, when there’s petticoats in sight.”
“You don’t approve of the girls, eh?” asked Hal with a smile. A smile
of the lips alone, not of the eyes.
“No, sir, I don’t,” answered Ezra with resentment—for once upon a time
a woman had misused him, and the wound had never healed. “They ain’t
what I call good reliable craft, sir. Contrary at the wheel, an’ their
rig costs more ’n what their hull’s wu’th. No, sir, I ain’t overly fond
of ’em.”
“Your judgment’s not valid,” said Hal. He seemed peculiarly expansive,
as if for some reason of his own he wanted to win Ezra to still greater
affection. “What do _you_ know about women, an old bach like you?”
“I know!” affirmed Ezra, coming over the lawn to the table. “Men are
like nails—when they’re drove crooked, they’re usually drove so by a
woman. Women can make a fool of almost any man, ef nature don’t git a
start on ’em.”
Hal laughed. A certain malevolent content seemed radiating from him.
Lazily he leaned back, and drew at his pipe. “Right or wrong, you’ve
certainly got definite opinions. You know your own mind. You believe in
a man knowing himself, don’t you?”
“Ef some men knowed themselves they’d be ashamed o’ the acquaintance,”
opined Ezra. “An’ most women would. No, sir, I don’t take no stock
in ’em. There ain’t nothin’ certain about love but the uncertainty.
Women ain’t satisfied with the milk o’ human kindness. They want all
the cream. What they expect is a sealskin livin’ on a mushrat salary.
Love’s a kind of paralysis—kind of a stroke, like. Sometimes it’s
only on one side an’ there’s hope. But ef it gits on both sides, it’s
hopeless.”
“Love makes the world go ’round, Ezra!”
“Like Tophet! It only makes folks’ heads spin, an’ they _think_ the
world’s goin’ ’round, that’s all. Nobody knows the value of a gold-mine
or a woman, but millions o’ men has went busted, tryin’ to find out!
Not fer me, this here lovin’, sir,” Ezra continued with eloquence. “I
never yet see a matrimonial match struck but what somebody got burned.
Marriage is the end o’ trouble, as the feller says—but which end? I
ask you!”
“You needn’t ask _me_, Ezra; I’m no authority on women. There’s a nice
little proverb in this book, though, that you ought to know.”
“What’s that, Master Hal?”
“Here, I’ll find it for you.” Hal turned a few pages, paused, and read:
“‘_Bounga sedap dipakey, layou dibouang._’”
“Sufferin’ snails! What _is_ that stuff, anyhow? Heathen Chinee?”
“That’s Malay, Ezra,” Hal condescended. The doctor, listening, felt
a strange little shiver, as of some reminiscent fear from the vague
long-ago. Those words, last heard at Batu Kawan, fifty years before,
now of a sudden rose to him like specters of great evil. His attention
strained itself as Hal went on:
“That’s a favorite Malay proverb, and it means: ‘While the flower is
pleasing to man, he wears it. When it fades, he throws it away.’”
“Meanin’ a woman, o’ course? Uhuh! _I_ see. Well, them heathens has
it pretty doggone nigh correct, at that, ain’t they? So that there is
Malay, is it? All them twisty-wisty whirligigs? An’ you can read it
same as if it was a real language?”
“It _is_ a real language, Ezra, and a very beautiful one. I love it.
You don’t know how much!” A tone of real sincerity crept into the
false camaraderie of Hal’s voice. Filhiol shook his head. Vague,
incomprehensible influences seemed reaching out from the vapors of
the Orient, fingering their way into the very heart of this trim New
England garden, in this year of grace, 1918. The doctor suddenly felt
cold. He crouched a little closer toward the blinds.
“Holy halibut, Master Hal!” exclaimed Ezra in an awed tone, peering at
the book. “What a head you got on you, sir! Fuller o’ brains than an
old Bedford whaler is o’ rats!”
“You flatter me, Ezra. Think so, do you?”
“I know so! Ef I’d had your peak I wouldn’t of walloped pots in a
galley all my natural. But I wan’t pervided good. My mind’s like a pint
o’ rum in a hogshead—kind of broad, but not very deep. It’s sort of
a phonograph mind—makes me talk a lot, but don’t make me say nothin’
original. So that’s Malay, is it? Well, it’s too numerous fer _me_.
There’s only one kind o’ Malay I know about, an’ that’s my hens. They
may lay, an’ then again they may not. That’s grammatical. But this
here wiggly printin’—no, no, it don’t look reasonable. My eye, what a
head! Read some more, will you?”
“Certainly, if you like it,” said Hal, strangely obliging. “Here’s
something I’ve been translating, in the line of cursing. They’re great
people to curse you, the Malays are, if you cross them. Their whole
lives are full of vengeance—that’s what makes them so interesting.
Nothing weak, forgiving or mushy about _them_!” He picked up the paper
he had been writing on, and cast his eyes over it, while Ezra looked
down at him with fondly indulgent pride. “Here is part of the black
curse of Vishnu.”
“Who’s he?”
“One of their gods. The most avenging one of the lot,” explained Hal.
The doctor, crouching behind the blinds, shivered.
“Gods, eh? What’s this Vishnu feller like?” asked Ezra, with a touch of
uneasiness. “Horns an’ a tail?”
“No. He’s got several forms, but the one they seem most afraid of is a
kind of great, blind face up in the sky. A face that—even though it’s
blind—can watch a guilty man all his life, wherever he goes, and ruin
him, crucify him, bring him to destruction, and laugh at him as he’s
dying.”
“_Brrr!_” said Ezra. He seemed to feel something of the same cold
that had struck to the doctor’s heart—a greater cold than could be
accounted for by the veiling of the sun behind the clouds now driving
in from the sea, or by the kelp-rank mists gathering along the shore.
“You make me feel all creepylike. You’re wastin’ your time on such
stuff, Master Hal, same as a man is when he’s squeezing a bad lemon or
an old maid. None o’ that cursin’ stuff fer me!”
“Yes, yes, you’ve got to listen to it!” insisted Hal maliciously.
Ezra’s trepidation afforded him great enjoyment. “Here’s the way it
goes:
“‘The curse of Vishnu, the great black curse, can never end
unsatisfied when it has once been laid upon a human head. Beyond the
land it carries, and beyond the sea, beyond the farthest sea unsailed.
Beyond the day, the month, the year, it carries; and even though the
accursèd one flee forever, in some far place and on some far day it
will fall on him or his!’”
“Great grampus!” cried the old man, retreating a little with wide eyes.
“That’s _some_ cussin’, all right!”
The doctor sensed an insistent fear that would not be denied. What if
old Captain Briggs should overhear this colloquy? What if Ezra should
repeat to him these words that, now arising from the past, echoed with
ominous purport? At realization of possible consequences, Filhiol’s
heart contracted painfully.
“Damn you, Hal!” thought he, peering out through the blinds. “Damn you
and your Malay books. If any harm comes to the captain, through you,
look out!”
“Some awful cussin’,” Ezra repeated. “I wouldn’t want to have no sech
cuss as that rove onta _me_! You b’lieve that stuff, do ye?”
“Who am I to disprove it?”
“Ain’t there no way to kedge off, ef you’re grounded on a cuss like
that?”
“Only one, Ezra, according to this book.”
“What way’s that?”
“Well,” and Hal once more glanced at the paper, “well, this is what the
book says:
“‘The curse must be fulfilled, to the last breath, for by Shiva and
the Trimurthi, what is written is written. But if he through whom
the curse descendeth on another is stricken to horror and to death,
then the Almighty Vishnu, merciful, closes that page. And he who
through another’s sin was cursed, is cleansed. Thus may the curse be
fulfilled. But always one of two must die. _Tuan Allah poonia krajah!_
It is the work of the Almighty One! One of two must die!’”
“Gosh!” ejaculated Ezra. “I reckon that’ll be about enough fer me,
Master Hal. Awful, ain’t it?”
“Don’t like Malay, after all?” laughed Hal.
“Can’t say as I’m pinin’ fer it. But you got some head on you, to
read it off like that. I s’pose it’s all right in its way, but I
don’t relish it overly, as the feller said when he spilled sugar on
his oysters. Well,” and he glanced at the lowering clouds and the
indrifting sea-fog that with the characteristic suddenness of the north
shore had already begun to throw its chilly blanket over the world,
“well, this ain’t gittin’ to Dudley’s store, is it? Lord, sir, what a
head you got on you!”
With admiring ejaculations the old man started down the path once more.
The doctor, filled with stern thoughts, remained watching Hal, who had
now gone back to his writing.
“What a fatality!” pondered the doctor, unable to suppress a certain
superstitious dread. Not all his scientific training could quite
overcome the deep-rooted superstition that lies in the bottom of every
human heart. “The black curse of Vishnu again, with this new feature:
‘_One of two must die!_’ What the devil does all this mean now?”
A crawling sensation manifested itself along his spine. Silent shapes
seemed standing behind him in the corners of the room darkened by
the closing of the blinds. Trained thinker though he was, he could
not shake off this feeling, but remained crouching at the window, a
prey to inexplicable fear. The words Hal had spoken, echoing along
dim corridors of the past, still seemed vibrating in his heart with
unaccustomed pain.
“Nonsense!” he growled at last. “It’s all nonsense—nothing but a sheer
coincidence!” He tried to put the words away, but still they sounded in
his ears: “_One of two must die! Always one of two must die!_”
Another thought, piercing him, brought him up standing with clenched
fists.
“If the captain ever gets hold of that idea, what then? If he ever
does—_what then_?”
Brooding he paced up and down the room, limping painfully, for without
his cane he could hardly walk even a few steps. And almost at once
his fear curdled into hate against the sleek, white-flanneled fellow,
sitting there under the elm, calmly translating words that might mean
agony and death to the old grandsire.
Filhiol’s mind became confused. He knew not what to think, nor yet
which way to turn. What events impended? He recalled the way Hal had
peered stealthily into the cabin, and how he had then slid back to his
seat under the elm. Was Hal plotting some new infamy? What could be
done to warn the captain, to make that blindly loyal heart accept the
truth and act upon it?
Tentacles of some terrible thing seemed enmeshing both Filhiol and the
old captain—some catastrophe, looming black, impossible to thrust
aside. But it was not of himself that Filhiol was thinking. Only the
image of the captain, trusting, confident, arose before him.
Filhiol set his teeth in a grimace of hate against the figure at work
out there under the big elm.
“I’ve probably done my share of evil in this world,” thought he, “but
I could wipe it all out with one supremely good action. If I could put
an end to _you_—”
All unconscious, Hal continued at his work. As he wrote, he smiled a
little. The smile was sinister and hard.
What thoughts did it reflect?