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?