The Curse of the “Star”

I

He sat in the high-ceilinged room at the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, stripped down to his shorts, the typing table set squarely under the overhead fan. As he worked at the last article the sweat dripped from his nose and his chin, falling onto the keyboard and onto the backs of his hands. Overhead the big fan blades whispered softly through the air and the ancient, defective electric motor buzzed with each revolution.

His body was leaned down by the months in China. His body and spirit both. The contract called for six articles. This was the last. The first one in the series had been glib, fresh, slightly sardonic.

But China infects a man with its own special sort of weariness. The top level politicians are fair game for irony. But the people, the incredible people, the courteous, smiling, child-like people — withered old women of thirty trotting under two hundred pound loads, the swollen-bellied, stick-legged children of famine, the boy-soldiers of twelve in gray quilted uniforms — a man who can deal with them in words of irony has an ineradicable smallness of soul.

Malcolm Atkinson had been catapulted from obscurity into fame by reason of the articles he had written on the Western Zone of Germany under the occupation forces. He had brought to international reporting a wry humor that very effectively impaled the blunderers, the greed-blinded.

And so he had been sent to China, accredited to the dwindling Nationalist forces, to work his savage magic on little men who were on the spot.

There was no more irony in Mal Atkinson. Not after retreating through famine areas to Yunan, after being evacuated to Assam, India, in a shuddering, wavering DC-3 carrying forty-six passengers — an air-weary plane that had once been operated by the CNAC.

He sat in the room at the Great Eastern in the incredible September heat and tried to put it all down, oblivious of the swarming traffic sounds from the road below. He wrote, not of the battles, not of politics — but of the little people he had seen. A father stripping bark from the trees to boil in ditch water and feed his children. A mongrel dog cornered by a pack of hungry children, whining away its last seconds of life. The armed man with plump dead rats for sale at fantastic prices.

He tried to put it all down. He didn’t preach, or point out lessons, or draw moral conclusions. He just wrote down the facts, the look, taste and smell of them. He kept himself going with black coffee, and he worked with something like fury. He wrote for thirty-eight hours and when at last it was finished, he read it over and knew that he had never done anything like it. It was so close to him that he could not tell if it were very good — or very bad. The New York editors would know.

Malcolm Atkinson prepared the airmail envelope, inserted the manuscript, sealed it and placed it on top of the typewriter. He stood up, dazed with weariness. A moment ago the manuscript had seemed to be the most important thing in the world. Now he hardly cared whether he mailed it or destroyed it. He had written from the heart, from a desire to make everyone understand what he had seen and what he had felt while seeing. Now it was done, and he felt that a certain portion of his life was done — as though something of his spirit had died along with the nameless ones who lay in the ditches in the famine area. He felt drained and purposeless.

He walked over to the bureau and picked up the copy of the cable he had received in answer to the one he sent announcing his safe arrival in India. The paper was limp and damp from the humidity.

It was an enormous effort to return to the typewriter and make a copy of a reply.

He went into the bathroom, filled the sink with the undrinkable Calcutta water and sloshed it on his face and head. It was a temporary relief. He stood up with the cool water running down his bare chest and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. China had made a difference. The scar tissue on his right shoulder was still pinkish red. That had been luck. The defective projectile had exploded in the mortar tube and he had been a scant fifteen feet away.

He was down to 160, a good twenty pounds lighter than the day he had arrived in Hongkong. His face had the yellowish tinge that atabrine gives and the whites of his eyes were muddy. New lines around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes were too deeply etched. His thirtieth birthday had passed, unnoticed, in China.

Mal had long since decided that his face was adequate, and nothing more. He would never be asked to pose for a whiskey ad. No distinction there. Just a look of lean, fine-drawn stubbornness and sensitivity. A fighter, not necessarily a winner. He rubbed a big hand through his cropped black hair and saw how much more gray had begun to show up at the temples.

He pulled on a pair of linen trousers, shouldered into a sports shirt, stuffed his bare feet into sandals and took the manuscript and cable down to the desk.

With those details attended to, he walked numbly back to his room, pulled the bed over under the fan, stripped and fell across it. It was like tumbling down a long, black-velvet staircase. He fell endlessly into the depths of sleep.

When he awakened he could not tell if it were dawn or dusk. By the volume of traffic sounds he guessed that it was dusk, but he did not know the day. Down at the desk they told him the day, and he realized that he had slept nearly twenty-eight hours. He was vastly hungry. He sat in the bar and had three gimlets, then took dinner out in the courtyard at a table where he could watch the dancers circling limply in the heat, as though condemned to some grotesque punishment.

Three tables away he noticed a party of five, two women and three men, obviously Americans. They were all a bit drunk — not obnoxiously so, but just enough so that their voices were the faintest bit louder than necessary.

The women were both attractive, and he found pleasure in looking at them, because it had been a long time since he had looked at a woman with the sure knowledge that she was freshly bathed and scented, clad in fresh clothes, with no insects in her hair or on her person.

All five were deeply tanned. One woman seemed to be about twenty-five. Her hair, piled high on her head, had the color and the gloss of the horse chestnuts he had gathered when he was a child. He could remember throwing the sticks up into the tree, then scrambling with the others for the nuts that fell, avoiding the sharp green spines as he split open the outer husk to disclose the nut inside, as burnished and perfect as the wood of the furniture which stood, solemn and silent, in the front room of his aunt’s home, the room into which he was forbidden to go.

The woman wore a pale aqua evening gown and he guessed that she had purchased it locally because the designer had borrowed from the Chinese to the extent of slashing the skirt at the right side from ankle to knee. Mal watched her as she danced with the oldest of the three men, a burly, bald-headed fellow whose rimless glasses sparkled in the subdued light. He wore a khaki bush jacket and trousers in strange contrast to the white mess jackets of the other two men and the evening gowns of the women.

The bald man perspired profusely as he danced, but the tall girl in the aqua dress seemed to remain fresh and cool. In mid set the orchestra broke into a rumba, and showed immediately that they could handle that type of music much more effectively than they could American jazz.

The couple came so close to Mal’s table, the stocky man holding the slightly taller woman at arm’s length, that Mal became aware of the musky perfume she wore. The dress was fitted closely around the slim waist and the hips. The man’s brown hand rested on the concavity of the waist just above the full swell of the left hip.

Mal watched them and then suddenly as they turned, he noticed their expressions. The girl wore a pronounced look of fear and distaste that came and went so quickly that he wondered if he imagined it. She held the upper part of her body rigid, but from the waist down her hips and thighs moved with the pronounced rumba rhythm.

The older man’s expression did not change. He had to look up a bit to look into her face. He wore a crisp gray line of mustache. He seemed to be laughing at her, and there was no mistaking the fact that it was a laugh of contempt.

He turned her so that she looked across his shoulder and, for a moment, into Mal’s eyes. She held his gaze for a second or two before she looked away. Soon the set ended and they went back to their table. His interest aroused, Mal looked more carefully at the others. The other woman was of an age, possibly a year younger than the taller girl. She had that disconcerting vividness that is so animal in content that the impact is like a blow. Black sleek hair, bold eyes, a slash of a red mouth, a face and body continually in motion, in flux. When she stood up to dance Mal saw that in spite of her look of plumpness, of a bit too much breadth of hip and depth of breast, her waist was extraordinarily slim. She was very light on her feet, very quick, and she laughed endlessly up into the face of one of the two younger men.

It is a lonely game in a public place to attempt to sort out the lives of strangers. The two younger men seemed to be of the same type. Tall, thick-shouldered, with the pale eyes, unreadable expressions and heavy mouths that tell unmistakably of a streak of brutality. Professional soldiers have that look.

The plump girl seemed to be spreading her attention equally between the two. When the bald-head spoke, the other four listened attentively. The five acted as though they were well accustomed to being with each other. They had found their pattern. The tall girl did not speak at all while at the table. The black-haired girl chattered on with no one paying any particular attention.

At eleven o’clock he felt his head grow heavy and his eyelids sag. He could no longer maintain his interest in the group at the other table. He went gratefully up to his room and slept until dawn.

The breeze that came in at the wide window with its deep sills was almost fresh. He put on a pair of clean shorts and sat on the sill, his back to the frame, and watched the grayness over the city slowly lighten. Two stories below beggars slept on the sidewalk wrapped in the grayish cotton which, during the day, would form their turbans. Sleepy hotel employees came out and screwed a section of fire hose to the polished brass outlet in the side of the hotel. The hose stiffened as the stream of water pulsed through it. They turned the hose on the sleeping beggars, who jumped to their feet, screamed curses and fled, wringing out the strips of cotton.

The long sleep had somehow made the flight from China seem like a dream. He remembered the old man who died on the plane, the way they had pulled the body back, stripped it, pushed it out to spin down to the green jungle floor of Burma far below. That, too, seemed like something he had read rather than seen.

He smoked and watched the city and wondered what he would do with his life. This was a time of taking inventory. He could not quite imagine going back to the glib, smart-aleck reporting that had been so satisfying before China.

After a leisurely breakfast he went to the river docks. It took him three hours in the heat and confusion, next to the stink of the river, to find what he wanted. It was Swedish registry, with an Irish first officer named Dolan. Dolan sported a long, wide, bristly beard the color of midnight flame.

“If it’s no hurry you’re in, lad, she may be your craft. How good a sailor are ye?”

Mal grinned. “Always sick the first day out. After that I’m okay.”

“The Bjornsan Star, lad, could work up a vicious pitch and roll in drydock, I do believe. But she’s a clean ship. You’ll find the grub good, but not fancy.”

“What did you say the ports of call will be?”

“After we get down this stinking river, we go to Colombo, then Perth, Melbourne, Wellington, Pago Pago, Honolulu and Port of Los Angeles. You’ll get a few days ashore each place, I should say.”

“I'm not after the sightseeing. I need a long rest.”

“And if ye’ll forgive me sayin’ it, you look as though you could use it, lad. There’s a good cabin empty. We’re running with a short crew this trip. No third officer, so I’ll have the second move into the third’s bunk and you can take the second’s cabin.”

“I don’t want to inconvenience anybody.”

Dolan leaned forward and there was a grin behind his beard. “Truth is, the Bjornsan Line is so hungry for a bit of passage money, you could have the old man’s cabin if he hadn’t already given it up. So go get your papers in order and I’ll have the passage agreement ready for you by the time you get back. Your hotel is probably cooler than this dutch oven, so say you come aboard at nine tonight. We go downriver on the tide change at ten-fifteen.”

At a few minutes before nine the Sikh taximan deposited Mal and his two heavy bags on the dock at the foot of the Bjornsan Star’s gangplank. Dolan was leaning on the rail overhead smoking a pipe. He waved at Mal, turned and roared a command in what could have been Swedish. Two blond sailors trotted down, grinned at Mal, shouldered the bags and went aboard, beckoning to him to follow them.

“Welcome aboard, lad,” Dolan said. “Follow the boys to your cabin and lock your stuff inside. Thieves have a nasty habit of sneaking aboard here. Then come on back topside and talk a while.”

The Bjornsan Star was a nondescript freighter of unknown breed. She sighed gently against the dock like a troubled old lady who dreaded the weary miles ahead. Below decks she smelled of fresh paint and oil. The companionway was spotlessly clean, freshly painted, but as hot as an oven.

By the time Mal got back out into the open air with the cabin key in his pocket, his clothes were sticking to him.

He went up to Dolan. “That’s a nice cabin.”

“You’ll find it comfortable, Mr. Atkinson. Ye have another name, I suppose. Call me Bob.”

“My name’s Mal, Bob.” They shook hands.

“What’s your trade, Mal?”

“Reporter. I’ve just come out of China.”

“A bloody horrible mess that must be. When I get some time I want you to tell me about it.”

A cargo floodlight affixed to the skeleton of what had been the wartime radar setup clicked on with blinding whiteness. Dolan sighed. “Now the old man’s getting anxious. Here he comes. Doesn’t speak a word of English.”

The captain walked around a hatch cover and came over to Dolan. He gave Atkinson an incurious glance. He was a wispy, dry-looking man with a hollow chest, blond hair gone gray, faded blue eyes and a suit of rumpled, food-spotted whites.

Dolan said something in which Mal heard the sound of his own name. The captain gave a curt, continental bow in Mal's direction. Dolan said, “This is Captain Paulus.”

Paulus pulled out a large old gold watch, said something in an irritable tone to Dolan, waved the watch face in front of Dolan’s eyes and stalked away. Dolan turned and spat down onto the dock, then in an oddly husky tone said, “An old fool who can’t pilot a rowboat in a mill pond. But his record’s spotless. Never lost a ship in forty-three years. Some have the luck and some don’t.”

Mal gave Dolan a quick look. In the glare of the floodlight the odd green eyes of the first officer were like the shadowy side of one of the big bergs from the Arctic ice pack. Standing next to him, Atkinson was once again startled at the size of the man. His breadth made him look stocky in spite of his better than six feet of height. The big hands, their backs covered with freckles and coarse red hair, were like one-gallon gourds.

“He’s worried about something?” Mal asked.

“The other passengers. They’ll make it all right. All their stuff’s aboard. I think that’s their car now. Yes. There they are.”

Mal stood beside Bob Dolan at the rail and looked down at the five people who clambered out of the touring-car taxi. They were foreshortened by the height, but he had no difficulty recognizing the three men and two women from the Great Eastern.

As the bald-headed man started to look up, Mal, with an instinctive reaction which surprised him, straightened up so that his face was not visible from below.

He heard the familiar babble of the plump black-haired girl, the quiet answer by one of the two husky young men. Dolan went to the head of the gangplank to welcome them aboard, and Mal walked out of the light down toward the fantail. Once in the deep shadows he leaned against the rail and watched the preparations for departure.

The pilot came aboard. Soon the lines were cast off. The soft guttural vibrations of the engines and drive shaft quickened as black water widened between the hull and the dock. The Bjornsan Star moved slowly out into the channel and headed down toward the sea. Sailors coiled and stacked the mooring lines and the floodlight clicked off so that the pilot could see the channel markers more clearly. The wind freshened on the side of Mal’s face as the teeming stench of Calcutta began to diminish astern of them.

Dolan was nowhere to be seen. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the faint glow of the stars, Mal picked his way toward the bow. Muddy water, frothed by the knifing of the bow, swept back along the hull. Forward, four large bulldozers, like big sleeping animals, were lashed to the deck, fore and aft of the forward hatch.

Once he reached the bow, he turned and looked up and back. He saw the compass light on the bridge shining faintly against the dark face of the native pilot, saw Paulus, frail beside Dolan. The bull-throated voice of the ship startled Mal with a long blast. Flames flickered from the low decks of the native craft moored to the river banks and he heard a snatch of plaintive Hindu song.

Now the voyage had started and he thought that in many ways a voyage, for a passenger, is like a serious illness. It is a freedom from all responsibility, and after a time, if the voyage lasts long enough, it is easy to forget all that went before it, easy to forget that it will ever end.

He leaned his back against the rail and hooked his elbows over it. The breeze had begun to dry his damp clothes. Then he saw a vague lightness moving toward him, moving carefully along the narrow spaces of the open deck. He could not make it out for a time and watched carefully until she was silhouetted against a patch of the lights on shore. He then saw that it was a tall woman, and he guessed that it was the one from the hotel.

When she was but five feet away he said, “Good evening.”

She gave a small startled cry and put her hand to her throat. She was close enough so that he could see that it was the girl from the hotel.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

She laughed nervously. “I just didn’t know anyone was up here. I wanted to cool off after that ghastly heat in the city. Are you one of the officers?”

“No. I’m a passenger, too. Malcolm Atkinson.”

She moved closer and leaned over the rail beside him. He turned so that they stood there, elbow to elbow.

“My name is Temble. Mrs. Roger Temble, Mr. Atkinson.”

“How do you do,” he said gravely. She put her hand for a moment in his. Her fingers were long and cool.

“Are you going to Australia?” she said.

“No. All the way to California.”

“Why, so are we! We had to take a little ship like this one because of all our equipment, you know.”

“Equipment?”

“I guess there’s no reason why you would know. My husband’s work is only well-known among his fellow scientists. He's a geologist and paleontologist. We’ve been on a small expedition to the Northwest frontier. It's never been adequately covered before, you know. It’s lasted seventeen months now.” She had begun to talk rapidly with an odd nervousness that made him uncomfortable. “Dr. Temble didn’t want me to come with him because of the unsettled conditions here in the East. He was just going to bring Dave Welling and Tom Branch with him this time, but I guess I made a nuisance of myself. The way wives will. So the doctor said I could come and bring along a girl friend. I asked Gina Farrow, and... would you have a light, please?”

Mal turned his back to the wind and cupped his hand around the flame of his lighter. She leaned forward, the cigarette trembling though she held it with both her lips and her fingers. As she did so she looked up into his face.

Her eyes widened with what he could only call terror and recognition. She turned and fled along the dark deck. He heard her bump painfully into a stanchion and go on without a sound. He was too surprised to call after her. He saw the glow of her cigarette on the deck at his feet. He picked it up and flipped it overboard.

Much later he went down to his cabin, adjusted the ventilator so that the breeze was directed into his bunk and went to sleep, still wondering about the odd behavior of Mrs. Temble. But sleep took him out of here and now — back into there and then — back into fear that awoke him, time and time again, with the taste of it on his lips.