The Spinners' Book of Fiction Part 23

"_Tuggur_!" cried the mate. He was getting nervous. Then all of a sudden--"_Brenti_!"

The crew stopped like a shot. Then they saw, too, and began to back water and turn, all pulling different ways and yelling: "_Prau hantu!...

sampar_! _...Sakit lepra! Kolera!... hantu!_"

As we swung, I saw what it was,--a little carved prau like a child's toy boat, perhaps four feet long, with red fiber sails and red and gilt flags from stem to stern. It was rocking there in our swell, innocently, but the crew were pulling for the schooner like crazy men.

I was griffin enough at the time, but I knew what it meant, of course,--it was an enchanted boat, that the priests in some village--perhaps clear over in New Guinea--had charmed the cholera or the plague on board of. Same idea as the Hebrew scapegoat.

"_Brenti_!" I shouted. The Malays stopped rowing, but let her run.

Nothing would have tempted them within oar's-length of that prau.

"See here, Sidin," I protested, "I go ash.o.r.e to meet the _kapala's_ men."

"We do not go," the fellow said. "If you go, Tuan, you die: the priest has laid the cholera on board that prau. It has come to this sh.o.r.e. Do not go, Tuan."

"She hasn't touched the land yet," I said.

This seemed to have effect.

"Row me round to that point and land me," I ordered. "_Hantu_ does not come to white men. You go out to the s.h.i.+p; when I have met the soldier-messengers, row back, and take me on board with the gifts."

The mate persuaded them, and they landed me on the point, half a mile away, with a box of cheroots, and a roll of matting to take my nap on.

I walked round to the clearing, and spread my mat under the canary tree, close to the sh.o.r.e. All that blessed afternoon I waited, and smoked, and killed a snake, and made notes in a pocket Virgil, and slept, and smoked again; but no sign of the bearers from the _campong_. I made signals to the schooner,--she was too far out to hail,--but the crew took no notice. It was plain they meant to wait and see whether the _hantu_ prau went out with the ebb or not; and as it was then flood, and dusk, they couldn't see before morning. So I picked some bananas and chicos, and made a dinner of them; then I lighted a fire under the tree, to smoke and read Virgil by,--in fact, spent the evening over my notes. That editor was a _pukkah_ a.s.s! It must have been pretty late before I stretched out on my matting.

I was a long time going to sleep,--if I went to sleep at all. I lay and watched the firelight and shadows in the _lianas_, the bats fluttering in and out across my patch of stars, and an ape that stole down from time to time and peered at me, sticking his blue face out from among the creepers. At one time a shower fell in the clearing, but only pattered on my ceiling of broad leaves.

After a period of drowsiness, something moved and glittered on the water, close to the bank; and there bobbed the ghost prau, the gilt and vermilion flags s.h.i.+ning in the firelight. She had come clear in on the flood,--a piece of luck. I got up, cut a withe of bamboo, and made her fast to a root. Then I fed the fire, lay down again, and watched her back and fill on her tether,--all clear and ruddy in the flame, even the carvings, and the little wooden figures of wizards on her deck. And while I looked, I grew drowsier and drowsier; my eyes would close, then half open, and there would be the _hantu_ sails and the fire for company, growing more and more indistinct.

So much for Certainty; now begins the Other. Did I fall asleep at all?

If so, was my first waking a dream-waking, and the real one only when the thing was gone? I'm not an imaginative man; my mind, at home, usually worked with some precision; but this,--there seems to be, you might say, a blur, a--film over my mental retina. You see, I'm not a psychologist, and therefore can't use the big, foggy terms of man's conceit to explain what he never can explain,--himself, and Life.

The captain tossed his cheroot overboard, and was silent for a s.p.a.ce.

"The psychologists forget aesop's frog story," he said at last. "Little swollen Egos, again."

Then his voice flowed on, slowly, in the dark.

I ask you just to believe this much: that I for my part feel sure (except sometimes by daylight) that I was not more than half asleep when a footfall seemed to come in the path, and waked me entirely. It didn't sound,--only seemed to come. I believe, then, that I woke, roused up on my elbow, and stared over at the opening among the bamboos where the path came into the clearing. Some one moved down the bank, and drew slowly forward to the edge of the firelight. A strange, whispering, uncertain kind of voice said something,--something in Dutch.

I didn't catch the words, and it spoke again:--

"What night of the month is this night?"

If awake, I was just enough so to think this a natural question to be asked first off, out here in the wilds.

"It's the 6th," I answered in Dutch. "Come down to the fire, Mynheer."

You know how bleary and sightless your eyes are for a moment, waking, after the glare of these days. The figure seemed to come a little nearer, but I could only see that it was a man dressed in black. Even that didn't seem odd.

"Of what month?" the stranger said. The voice was what the French call "veiled."

"June," I answered.

"And what year?" he asked.

I told him--or It.

"He is very late," said the voice, like a sigh. "He should have sent long ago."

Only at this point did the whole thing begin to seem queer. As evidence that I must have been awake, I recalled afterwards that my arm had been made numb by the pressure of my head upon it while lying down, and now began to tingle.

"It is very late," the voice repeated. "Perhaps too late----"

The fire settled, flared up fresh, and lighted the man's face dimly,--a long, pale face with gray mustache and pointed beard. He was all in black, so that his outline was lost in darkness; but I saw that round his neck was a short white ruff, and that heavy leather boots hung in folds, cavalier-fas.h.i.+on, from his knees. He wavered there in the dark, against the flicker of the bamboo shadows, like a picture by that Dutch fellow--What's-his-name-again--a very dim, shaky, misty Rembrandt.

"And you, Mynheer," he went on, in the same toneless voice, "from where do you come to this sh.o.r.e?"

"From Singapore," I managed to reply.

"From Singapura," he murmured. "And so white men live there now?--_Ja, ja_, time has pa.s.sed."

Up till now I may have only been startled, but this set me in a blue funk. It struck me all at once that this shaky old whisper of a voice was not speaking the Dutch of nowadays. I never before knew the depths, the essence, of that uncertainty which we call fear. In the silence, I thought a drum was beating,--it was the pulse in my ears. The fire close by was suddenly cold.

"And now you go whither?" it said.

"To Batavia," I must have answered, for it went on:--

"Then you may do a great service to me and to another. Go to Jacatra in Batavia, and ask for Pieter Erberveld. Hendrik van der Have tells him to cease--before it is too late, before the thing becomes accursed. Tell him this. You will have done well, and I--shall sleep again. Give him the message----"

The voice did not stop, so much as fade away unfinished. And the man, the appearance, the eyes, moved away further into the dark, dissolving, retreating. A shock like waking came over me--a rush of clear consciousness----

Humph! Yes, been too long away from home; for I know (mind you, _know_) that I saw the white of that ruff, the shadowy sweep of a cloak, as something turned its back and moved up the path under the pointed arch of bamboos, and was gone slowly in the blackness. I'm as sure of this as I am that the fire gave no heat. But whether the time of it all had been seconds or hours, I can't tell you.

What? Yes, naturally. I jumped and ran up the path after it. Nothing there but starlight. I must have gone on for half a mile. Nothing: only ahead of me, along the path, the monkeys would chatter and break into an uproar, and then stop short--every treetop silent, as they do when a python comes along. I went back to the clearing, sat down on the mat, stayed there by clinching my will power, so to speak,--and watched myself for other symptoms, till morning. None came. The fire, when I heaped it, was as hot as any could be. By dawn I had persuaded myself that it was a dream. No footprints in the path, though I mentioned a shower before.

At sunrise, the _kapala's_ men came down the path, little chaps in black mediaeval armor made of petroleum tins, and coolies carrying piculs of stuff that I wanted. So I was busy,--but managed to dismast the _hantu_ prau and wrap it up in matting, so that it went aboard with the plunder.

Yet this other thing bothered me so that I held the schooner over, and made pretexts to stay ash.o.r.e two more nights. Nothing happened. Then I called myself a grandmother, and sailed for Batavia.

Two nights later, a very singular thing happened. The mate--this one with the sharp eyes--is a quiet chap; seldom speaks to me except on business. He was standing aft that evening, and suddenly, without any preliminaries, said:

"Tuan was not alone the other night."

"What's that, Sidin?" I spoke sharply, for it made me feel quite angry and upset, of a sudden. He laughed a little, softly.