Cursed

“Do you know how much it’s going to cost me, sir?”

“Search me!”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars, sir.”

“You’re kidding!”

“That will do, sir, for that kind of language in hearing of our family dead!”

“Excuse me, gramp – I forgot myself!” Hal apologized, feigning contrition. “You don’t mean to tell me McLaughlin has the nerve to ask that much – and can collect it?”

“He asked five hundred, but Dr. Filhiol’s help reduced the claim. I’ve agreed to pay. That’s a hard blow to me, Hal, but there’s far worse. I got a letter from the college this morning that carried away all canvas. It brought me heavy, bad news, Hal!”

“I thought so,” said Hal moodily, his eyes fixed on the close-trimmed grass. “It was bound to come! I’m fired from college!”

“And yet you went gallivanting off with Laura, and never even reported it to me!”

“I knew you’d find it out soon enough. Yes, I’m on the shelf with the rest of the canned goods!”

“Dishonorably discharged from the service, sir! And for what cause?”

“How do I know what that sour old pill, Travers, has framed up on me?” demanded Hal angrily. “He’s the kind of guy that would make murder out of killing a mosquito. If a fellow takes a single drink, or looks at a skirt – a girl, I mean – he’s ready to chop his head off!”

“Is, eh?” demanded the old captain sternly. “So you deny having been drunk and disorderly, having committed an assault on a proctor, having stolen the money I sent you for your bill, and having cheated in examinations? Here in this place of solemn memories you deny all that?”

“I – I – ” Hal began, but the tale of his misdemeanors was too circumstantial for even his brazen effrontery.

“You deny it, sir?”

“Oh, what’s the use, gramp?” Hal angrily flung at him. “Everything’s framed up against me! I’m sick of the whole thing, anyhow. College is a frost. I never fell for it at all. You tried to wish it on me, when everything I wanted in the world was to go to sea. It’s all true. Let it go at that!”

“So then, sir, I still have a heavy bill at college to pay, besides the disgrace of your discharge?”

“Oh, I suppose so! I’m fired. Glad I am! Glad I’m done with the whole damned business!”

“Sir! Mind your tongue!”

“I’m glad, I tell you!” The boy’s face seemed burning with interior fires, suddenly enkindled. “I quit everything. Give me a boat, gramp – anything that’ll sail – a twenty-five footer, and let me go! I don’t ask you for a dollar. All I ask is a boat. Give me that, and I swear to God I’ll never trouble you again!”

“A boat, Hal? What do you mean, sir?” Startled, the captain peered at him.

“Oh, God!” Hal cried with sudden passion. “A boat – that’s all I want now! I’m dying here! I was dying in college, choking to death by inches!” He stood up, raised his head, and flung his arms towards the sea. He cried from his black heart’s depths:

“Let me go! Oh, let me go, let me go!”

“Go? Go where?”

“Lord, how do I know? All I want is to go somewhere, away from here. This place is cursed! I’m cursed here, and so are you, as long as I’m around!”

“Cursed, Hal?” whispered the captain, tensely. “What gives you that idea?”

“I know it! This village bounded on one side by nothing and on the other by a graveyard – I can’t stand it, and I won’t! Let me go somewhere, anywhere, out to sea, where it’s calling me out over beyond there!” He gestured mightily at the lure of the horizon. “Let me go out past the Silken Sea, beyond the Back of the Wind!”

Panting a little he grew silent, with clenched fists, face flushed and veins swollen on neck and brow. The old man, staring, shivered at sound of the strange Malay words, now suddenly spoken again after half a century – words that echoed ghostlike in the empty chambers of the past. He peered at Hal, as at an apparition. His face, pale under its weather-beaten tan, drew into lines of anguish.

“Let me go!” the boy flung at him again. “You’ve got to let me go!”

“Sit down, sir!” the captain made shift to answer. “This is sheer lunacy. What, sir? You want to give up your career, your family, everything? You want to take a small boat and go sailing off into nowhere? Why, sir, Danvers Asylum is the place for you. No more such talk, sir; not another word!”

“I don’t care what you say, I’m going, anyhow,” Hal defied him. “I’m not going to rot in this dump. It’s no place for a live man, and you know it!”

“You’ve got no money to be buying boats, Hal! No, nor no skipper’s papers, either. By the Judas priest, sir, but you’re crazy! You’ll be talking piracy next, or some such nonsense.”

“I don’t care what I talk,” the boy retorted. “I’m sick of this! I’m through! I’m going to live, and be myself, and be – ”

“You’ll be a corpse or a jail-bird, if that’s the course you’re sailing!” the captain cut in. “This is a civilized world you’re living in now.”

“Civilized! My God, civilized! That’s all I hear – civilized! When you were my age were you always civilized? Were you kept on dry land instead of going to sea? Were you buried in college, learning damned, dry rubbish?”

“Dry rubbish? Your Oriental studies dry rubbish?”

“I don’t have to go to college for those! What you know of the East, did you learn it out of books? You did not! You learned it out of life! Learned it yourself, ‘somewhere east of Suez.’ Well, the temple-bells are calling me, too; and yet you pen me up in this crabbed little New England village, where they don’t even know there are temple-bells! It’s choking me to death, I tell you!” He caught at his throat, as if striving for air. “But you don’t understand. You’re old now, and you’ve ‘put it all behind you, long ago and far away,’ and now you ask me to be civilized!”

“You mean to tell me, sir,” the captain asked, his voice trembling, “that you’d abandon me, after the way I’ve worked for you? You’d abandon the family and the home? You’d leave that good, pure girl, Laura, just for a whim like this? I appeal to you, my boy, in the name of the family – ”

“It’s no use, grandfather. You’ve got to let me go!” Unmoved he heard the old man plead:

“Have you no love for me, then? I’m in my declining years. Without you what would be left? I’ve lived for you, Hal, and in the hope of what you’d be some day. I’ve hoped you’d marry Laura – I’ve dreamed of grandchildren, of new light in the sunset that’s guiding me to the western harbor. I’ve wanted nothing but to give the end of my life to you and for you, Hal – nothing but that!” In the captain’s eyes gleamed a tear. Hal, noting it, felt secret scorn and mockery. “I’m willing to overlook everything that’s past and give you a fresh start. God knows, I’d gladly lay down my life for you! Because, Hal – you know I love you, boy!”

Hal glanced appraisingly at the entreating old figure on the bench, at the white head, the tear-blurred eyes, the trembling outstretched hands. To what point, he wondered with sinister calculation, could he turn this blind affection to his own uses? He kept a moment’s silence, then said in a tone that skilfully simulated humilitude:

“I suppose I am a fool to have such thoughts, after all. What is it you want me to do?”

“First, I want you to get off the lee shore. I’ll pay your debts, Hal, and clear you. There are other colleges, and as for McLaughlin, the money and apology will satisfy him.”

“Apology? What apology?”

“Oh, he demands an apology from you, you understand?”

“He does, eh? Like – h-m! Well, I suppose I can do that.” Hal kept his lying tongue to the deception now essential to the success of his plans.

“Finely spoken, sir, and like a man!” exclaimed Captain Briggs, with sudden joy and hope. “I knew you’d come to it. You’re sound at heart, boy – sound as old oak. You’re a Briggs, after all!”

“When do I have to make this apology?” asked Hal, with a searching look. “Not right away?”

“No. I’m going to pay the money this afternoon. In a day or two you can go aboard the schooner – ”

“The schooner? You mean I’ve got to see him there?”

“Well, yes. You see, he insists on the apology where the assault was done. You’re to give it in front of all the crew. I know that’ll be hard sailing, against stiff winds of pride, but you’ll come through. You’ll prove yourself a man, for your own sake as well as Laura’s and mine, won’t you?”

Hal’s fists were clenched tight as he answered:

“Yes, of course. I’ll go through.” His eyes were the eyes of murder, but the old captain saw only his boy coming back to him again, dutiful and ready for a new start in life. “I’ll do it, sir. Count on me!”

“Your hand, sir!”

The captain’s hand met his grandson’s in a grip that, on one side, was all confidence and love; on the other, abysmal treachery and wickedness. Hal said as the grasp loosened:

“I’m asking only one little favor of you.”

“What’s that, boy?”

“Till this thing is all settled, let’s not talk about it any more. No more than is strictly necessary. Please don’t discuss it with the doctor, or with Ezra!”

“Ezra knows nothing. The doctor may talk a little, but I’ll discourage it. From now on, Hal, there’ll be very little said.”

“If you see Laura – ”

“Not a word to her. And from now on, Hal, you’re going to make amends for what you’ve done, and live it down, and prove yourself a man?”

“Why, sure!”

“You mean that, boy?”

“Of course I mean it! What shall I swear it on? The blue-throated Mahadeo of the Hindus, or Vishnu the Destroyer, or Ratna Mutnu Manikam, the Malay Great God of Death? All three, if you say so!”

The captain shivered again, as if the cold breath of ghosts from far, terrible graves had suddenly blown upon him.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Hal,” said he tremulously. “Just give me your word of honor. Will you?”

“Yes, sir!”

“As a gentleman?”

“As a ‘gentleman – unafraid!’”

Captain Briggs got up from the bench among the tombs and put his tired old arm through the strong, vigorous one of Hal, with a patriarchal affection of great nobility.

“Come, boy!” said he, happy with new hopes. “Come, we must be getting under way for Snug Haven – for the little home you’re going to be so worthy of and make so happy. The home where, some of these fine days, I know you’ll bring Laura to comfort and rejoice me. Come, boy, now let’s be going down the hill!”

Together he and Hal made their way toward the gate in the old stone wall, warm in the sunlight of June.

A smile was on the captain’s time-worn face, a smile of joy and peace. Hal was smiling, too, but with mockery and craft and scorn.

“That’s the time I handed it out right and stalled him proper!” he was thinking as they started down the winding path amid the sumacs and wild roses. “He’s easy, gramp is – a cinch! Getting moldy in the attic. He’ll fall for anything. Now, if Laura’d only been as easy! If she had– ”

Heavily, but still smiling, the old man leaned upon Hal’s arm, finding comfort in the strength of the lusty young scion of the family which, save for this one hope, must perish.

“God has been very good to me, after all!” the captain thought as they went down the hill. “I feared God was going to punish me; but, after all, He has been kind! ‘My cup runneth over – He leadeth me beside the still waters,’ at last, after so many stormy seas! Sunset of life is bringing peace – and somewhere my Pilot’s waiting to tell me I have paid my debt and that I’m entering port with a clean log!”

And Hal? What was Hal thinking now?

“Cinch is no name for it! The old man’s called off all rough-house for a day or two. One day’s enough. Just twenty-four hours. That’s all – that’s all I need!”

CHAPTER XXXI

THE SAFE

Though a freshening east wind was now beginning to add a raw salt tang to the air, troubled by a louder suspiration of surf, and though the fluttering of the poplar-leaves, which now had begun to show their silvery undersides, predicted rain, all was bright sunshine in the old man’s heart.

The drifting clouds in no wise lessened the light for Captain Briggs. Nodding flower and piping bird, grumbling bee and brisk, varnished cricket in the path all bore him messages of cheer. His blue eyes mirrored joy. For, after all that he had suffered and feared, lo! here was Hal come back to him again, repentant, dutiful and kind.

“God is being very good to me after all,” the old captain kept thinking. “‘His mercy endureth forever, and He is very, very good!’”

Dr. Filhiol, sitting at the window of his room, up-stairs, watched the captain and Hal with narrowed eyes that harbored suspicion. His lips drew tight, but he uttered no word. Hal, glancing up, met his look with instinctive defiance. Boldness and challenge leaped into his eyes. Filhiol understood his threat:

“Keep yourself out of this or take all consequences!”

And again the thought came to the doctor:

“What wouldn’t I give to have you for a patient of mine? Just for one hour!”

The captain and Hal disappeared ’round the ell, in which Filhiol had his room; but even after he had lost them to sight, he sensed the fatuous self-deception of the old man and the cruel baseness of the young one. Hal’s overstrained effort at good fellowship grated on the doctor’s nerves with a note as false as his forced smile. He longed to warn the captain – and yet! How could he make Briggs credit his suspicions? Impossible, he realized.

“Poor captain!” he murmured. “Poor old captain!” And so he sat there, troubled and very sad.

He heard their feet on the porch, then heard Hal coming up-stairs, alone. Along the passageway went Hal, muttering something unintelligible. Presently he returned down-stairs again and went into the yard. Filhiol swung his blinds shut. Much as he hated to play the spy, instinct told he must.

Hal now had his pipe, and carried books and paper. With these he sat down on the rustic seat that encircled one of the captain’s big elms – a seat before which a table had been built, for al fresco meals, or study. He opened one of the books and began writing busily, while smoke curled on the breeze now growing damp and raw. Even the doctor could not but admit Hal made an attractive figure in his white flannels.

“Pure camouflage, that study is,” pondered the doctor. “That smile augurs no good.” Down-stairs he heard Briggs moving about, and pity welled again. “This is bad, bad. There’s something in the wind, I know. Tss-tss-tss! What a wicked, cruel shame!”

Down in the cabin, Captain Briggs’s appearance quite belied the doctor’s pity. Every line of his venerable face showed deep content. In his eyes lay beatitude.

“Thank God, the boy’s true-blue, after all!” he murmured. “Just a little wild, perhaps, but he’s a Briggs – he’s sound metal at the core. Thank God for that!”

He opened the top drawer of his desk, took out a little slip of paper that helped refresh his memory, and approached the safe. Right, left, he turned the knob, as the combination on the paper bade him; then he swung open the doors, and pulled out a little drawer.

“Cap’n Briggs, sir!”

At sound of Ezra’s voice in the doorway, he started almost guiltily.

“Well, what is it?”

“Anythin’ you’re wantin’ down to Dudley’s store, sir?”

“No, Ezra.” The captain’s answer seemed uneasy. Under the sharp boring of Ezra’s steely eyes, he quailed. “No, there’s nothing.”

“All right, cap’n!” The old cook remained a moment, observing. Then with the familiarity of long years, he queried:

“Takin’ money again, be you? Whistlin’ whales, cap’n, that won’t do!”

“Ezra! What d’you mean, sir!”

“You know, cap’n, we’re gittin’ mighty nigh the bottom o’ the locker.”

“You’re sailing a bit wide, Ezra!”

“Mebbe, sir.” The honest old fellow’s voice expressed deep anxiety. “But you an’ me is cap’n an’ mate o’ this here clipper, an’ money’s money.”

The voices drifting out the open window brought Hal’s head up, listening. The doctor, peering through the blinds, saw him hesitate a moment, peer ’round, then cross the lawn to where, screened by the thick clump of lilac-bushes, he could peek into the room.

“Money’s money, cap’n,” repeated Ezra. “We hadn’t oughta let it go too fast.”

“There’s lots of better things in this world than money, Ezra,” said the captain, strangely ill at ease.

“Mebbe, sir, but it takes money to buy ’em,” the cook retorted. “I ain’t a two-dollar-worry man fer a one-dollar loss, but still I know a dollar’s a good little friend.”

“Happiness is better,” affirmed the captain. “What I’m going to spend this money for now will bring me happiness. Better than all the money in the world, is being contented with your lot.”

“Yes, sir, if it’s a lot of money, or a corner lot in a live town. I think there’s six things to make a man happy. One is a good cook an’ the other five is cash. However, fur be it from me to argy with you. I got to clear fer Dudley’s, or there wun’t be no dinner.”

Ezra withdrew.

“It’s that damn McLaughlin, I betcha,” he pondered. “I got an intuition the cap’n’s got to pay him heavy. Intuition’s a guess, when it comes out right; an’ I’ll bet a schooner to a saucepan I’m right this time. If I was half the man I used to be, it wouldn’t be money McLaughlin’d be gittin’, but this!” Menacingly, he doubled his fist.

Captain Briggs took from the safe a packet of bills and counted off four hundred dollars. This money he put into his wallet. Hal watched every move; while above, from behind the blinds, Dr. Filhiol observed him with profound attention.

“We are getting a bit low in the treasury,” admitted the captain, inspecting the remainder of the cash. “Only a matter of seven hundred and fifty left, to stand us till January. A bit low, but we’ll manage some way or other. Sail close to the wind, and make it. After all, what’s a little money when the boy’s whole life is at stake?”

He put the remaining bills back and closed the safe. To the desk he walked, dropped the combination into it and shut it, tight. Silently Hal slid back to his seat under the elm, and once more set himself to writing.

Filhiol peered down at him with animosity.

“A nice little treatment of strychnine or curaré might make a proper man of you, you brute,” he muttered, “but, by the living Lord, I don’t think anything else could!”

CHAPTER XXXII

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!”