Levison stood in the doorway — but my God!
He was as big as ever — they hadn’t whittled any of him away — but he was naked, and without a hair on him anywhere. His skin, where it wasn’t blue with ropemarks, was baby-pink and chafed. They had shaved him clean.
My gaze went up to his head, and I got another shock. Every hair had been scraped off or plucked out, even to his eyebrows, and his naked head sat upon his immense body like a pimple. There wasn’t a quart of it. There was just enough to hold his big beaked nose and his ears, which stood out like palm leaves now that they weren’t supported by hair. Below his loose mouth, his chin was nothing but a sloping down into his burly throat, and the damned thing trembled like a hurt baby’s. His eyes, not shadowed now by shaggy brows, were weak and poppy. A gorilla with a mouse’s head wouldn’t have looked any funnier than Levison without his hair; and the anger that purpled him made him look sillier still. No wonder he had hidden himself behind whiskers!
Dinihari was the first to laugh — a rippling peal of pure amusement. Then I laughed, and Unga and Jeffol. But it wasn’t our laughter that beat Levison. We could only have goaded him into killing us. Old Ca’bi turned the trick. The laughter of an old woman is a thing to say prayers against, and Ca’bi was very old.
She pointed a finger at Levison and screeched over it with a glee that was hellish. Her shriveled gums writhed in her open mouth, as if convulsed with mirth of their own, her scrawny throat swelled and she hopped up and down on her bony feet. Levison forgot the rest of us, turned toward her, and stopped. Her thin body shuddered in frenzies of derision, and her voice laughed as sane people don’t. You could almost sec it — metal lashes of laughter that coiled round his naked body, cut him into raw strips, paralyzed his muscles.
His big body became limp, and he pawed his face with a hand that jerked away as if the touch of the beardless face had burnt it. His knees wobbled, moisture came into his eyes, and his tiny chin quivered. Ca’bi swayed from side to side and hooted at him — a hag gone mad with derision. He backed away from her, cringing back from her laughter like a dog from a whip. She followed him up — laughed him through the sleeping-room door, laughed him back to the far side of the sleeping-room, laughed him through the thin wall. A noise of rippling as he went through the thatch, and a splash of water.
Dinihari stopped laughing and wiped her wet face with her sleeve. Her eyes were soft under Jeffol’s cold gaze.
“Your slave (patek) rejoices,” she cooed, “that her master has recovered his anting-anting and is strong again.”
“Not so,” Jeffol said, and he unbent a little, because she was a woman to want, and because a Moro loves a violent joke. “But there is much in the book of the Christian (neserani kitab). There is a talc the missionary (tuan padri) told me of a hairy one named Sansão, who was strong against his enemies until shorn of his hair. Many other magics (tangkal) are in the book for all occasions.”
So that damned Langworthy was at the bottom of it!
I never saw him again. That night I left the island in Levison’s yawl with the pick of his goods. He was gone, I knew, even if not in one of the sharks that played round the point. His house would be looted before morning, and I had more right to his stuff than the Moros. Hadn’t I been his friend?
Ruffian’s Wife
Sunset Magazine, October 1925
Margaret Tharp habitually passed from slumber to clear-eyed liveliness without intermediate languor. This morning nothing was unusual in her awakening save the absence of the eight o’clock San Francisco boat’s sad hooting. Across the room the clock’s hands pointed like one long hand to a few minutes past seven. Margaret rolled over beneath the covers, putting her back to the sun-painted west wall, and closed her eyes again.
But drowsiness would not come. She was definitely awake to the morning excitement of the next-door chickens, the hum of an automobile going toward the ferry, the unfamiliar fragrance of magnolia in the breeze tickling her cheek with loose hair-ends. She got up, slid feet into soft slippers, shoulders into bathrobe, and went downstairs to start toast and coffee before dressing.
A fat man in black was on the point of leaving the kitchen.
Margaret cried out, catching the robe to her throat with both hands.
Red and crystal glinted on the hand with which the fat man took off his black derby. Holding the doorknob, he turned to face Margaret. He turned slowly, with the smooth precision of a globe revolving on a fixed axis, and he managed his head with care, as if it balanced an invisible burden.
“You — are — Mrs. — Tharp.”
Sighing puffs of breath spaced his words, cushioned them, gave them the semblance of gems nested separately in raw cotton. He was a man past forty, with opaquely glistening eyes whose blackness was repeated with variety of finish in mustache and hair, freshly ironed suit, and enameled shoes. The dark skin of his face — ball-round over a tight stiff collar — was peculiarly coarse, firm-grained, as if it had been baked. Against this background his tie was half a foot of scarlet flame.
“Your — husband — is — not — home.”
It was no more a question than his naming her had been, but he paused expectantly. Margaret, standing where she had stopped in the passageway between stairs and kitchen, was still too startled not to say “No.”
“You’re — expecting — him.”
There was nothing immediately threatening in the attitude of this man who should not have been in her kitchen but who seemed nowise disconcerted by her finding him there. Margaret’s words came almost easily. “Not just — I expect him, yes, but I don’t know exactly when he will come.”
Black hat and black shoulders, moving together, achieved every appearance of a bow without disturbing round head’s poise.
“You — will — so — kindly — tell — him — when — he — comes — I — am — waiting. I — await — him — at — the — hotel.” The spacing puffs prolonged his sentences interminably, made of his phrases thin-spread word-groups whose meanings were elusive. “You — will — tell — him — Leonidas — Doucas — is — waiting. He — will — know. We — are — friends — very — good — friends. You — will — not — forget — the — name — Leonidas — Doucas.”
“Certainly I shall tell him. But I really do not know when he will come.”
The man who called himself Leonidas Doucas nodded frugally beneath the unseen something his head supported. Darkness of mustache and skin exaggerated whiteness of teeth. His smile went away as stiffly as it came, with as little elasticity.
“You — may — expect — him. He — comes — now.”
He revolved slowly away from her and went out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind him.
Margaret ran tiptoe across the room to twist the key in the door. The lock’s inner mechanism rattled loosely, the bolt would not click home. The warmly sweet fragrance of magnolia enveloped her. She gave up the struggle with the broken lock and dropped down on a chair beside the door. Points of dampness were on her back. Under gown and robe her legs were cold. Doucas, not the breeze, had brought the breath of magnolia to her in bed. His unguessed presence in the bedroom had wakened her. He had been up there looking with his surface-shining eyes for Guy. If Guy had been home, asleep beside her? A picture came of Doucas bending over the bed, his head still stiffly upright, a bright blade in his jeweled fist. She shivered.
Then she laughed. Little silly! How conceivably could Guy — her hard-bodied, hard-nerved Guy, to whom violence was no more than addition to a bookkeeper — be harmed by a perfumed, asthmatic fat man? Whether Guy slept or Guy woke, if Doucas came as an enemy, then so much the worse for Doucas — a fleshbound house dog growling at her red wolf of a husband!