I
Old Jaap Visser was mad. Out there on the island of Marken, in the
Zuyder Zee, he was the one madman, and a curiosity. The little
boys--all born web-footed, and eager as soon as they could walk to
toddle off on their stout little Dutch legs and take to the water--used
to run after him and jeer at him. An underlying fear gave zest to
this amusement. The older of them knew that he could lay a strange
binding curse upon people. The younger of them, resolving this concept
into simpler terms, knew that he could say something that would
hurt more than a spanking; and that would keep on hurting, in some
unexplained but dreadful way, beyond the sting of the worst spanking
that ever they had known. Therefore, while they jeered, they jeered
circumspectly. Out in the open--on the brick-paved pathways which
traverse the low marsh-land and unite the little knolls on which are
the villages: the Hafenbeurt (where the harbour is), the Kerkehof, and
the Kesbeurt--butter would not melt in their small Dutch mouths when
they met him. But when they had him at their mercy among the houses
of one or another of the villages things went differently. Then they
would yell "Old Jaap!" "Mad old Jaap!" after him--and as he turned upon
them would whip off their sabots, that they might run the more lightly,
and would dash around corners into safety: with delightful thrills of
dread running through their small scampish bodies at the thought of the
curse that certainly was flying after them, and that certainly would
make them no better than dead jelly-fish if they did not get around the
corner in time to ward it off! And old Jaap would be left free for a
moment from his tormentors, brandishing his staff in angry flourishes
and shouting his strange curse after them: "May you perish in the wrath
of the Zuyder Zee!"
The young men and women of Marken, who never had known old Jaap save
as a madman, felt toward him much as the children did; though as
they got older, and came to understand the cause of his madness and
the effectiveness of his curse, their dread of him was apt to take
on a more serious cast. Even Krelis Kess, a notorious daredevil in
all other directions, and for a long while one of old Jaap's most
persistent tormentors, came in the end to treat him with a very
obliging civility. But then, to be sure, Marretje de Witt was old
Jaap's granddaughter--and everybody in Marken knew that this gentle
Marretje, because of her very unlikeness to him it was supposed, had
made capture of Krelis Kess's much too vagrant heart. One person, it
is true, did dissent from this view of the matter, and that was Geert
Thysen--who declared that Krelis was too much of a man really to care
for a pale-faced thing fit only to marry another oyster like herself.
And Geert's black eyes would snap, and her strong white teeth would
show in a smile that was not a pleasant one as she added: "A live man
who knows the nip of gin-and-water does not waste his time in drinking
weak tea!" But then, to quote the sense of the island folk again,
everybody in Marken knew that to win Krelis's love for herself Geert
Thysen would have given those bold black eyes of hers, and would have
said thank you, too!
Among the old people of Marken, who had known old Jaap before his
madness came upon him, a very different feeling prevailed. They dreaded
him, of course, because they knew what his curse could accomplish; but,
also, they sorrowed for him--remembering the cruel grief which had come
upon him in his youth suddenly and had driven him mad. Well enough,
they said, might he call down his strange curse upon those who angered
him, for twice had he known the bitterness of it: when death, and again
worse than death, had struck at that which was dearer than the very
heart of him through the wrath of the Zuyder Zee.
It all had happened so long back that only the old people had knowledge
of it--in the great storm out of the Arctic Ocean which had driven into
the Zuyder Zee the North Sea waters; and there had banked them up,
higher and higher, until the whole island of Marken was flooded and
half the dykes of the mainland were overrun. Old Jaap--who was young
Jaap, then--was afloat at his fishing when the storm came on, and his
young wife and her baby were alone at home. In her fear for him she
came down from the Kerkehof, where their home was, to the Hafenbeurt;
and there, standing upon the sea-wall that shelters the little harbour,
watching for him, was the last that ever was seen of her alive. When
his schuyt came in she had vanished--caught away by the up-leaping sea.
That was bad enough, but worse followed. A month later, when he was
at his fishing again--glad to be at work, that in the stress of it he
might a little forget his sorrow--his net came up heavy, and in it was
his dead wife.
[Illustration: "HE WAS A CRAZED MAN"]
Then it was that his madness fell upon him. By the time that he was
come back to Marken--sailing his schuyt for a long night through the
dark waters with that grewsomely ghastly lading--he was a crazed man.