John D. MacDonald
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.
FIVE RECEIVED STOP EXCELLENT STOP AIRMAIL FINAL AND RETURN IMMEDIATELY STOP BIG ARGENTINE DEAL COOKING STOP
It was an enormous effort to return to the typewriter and make a copy of a reply.
AIRMAILED SIXTH TODAY STOP NEED REST STOP TAKING SLOWEST BOAT AVAILABLE STOP HOPE IT TAKES TWO MONTHS STOP
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.