Ber-Bulu

by Dashiell Hammett

 

[illustration: She wasn't exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn't belong to a man you were afraid of.]

Ber-Bulu

By Dashiell Hammett

SAY it happened on one of the Tawi Tawis. That would make Jeffol a Moro. It doesn't really matter what he was. If he had been a Maya or a Ghurka he would have laid Levison's arm open with a machete or a kukri instead of a kris, but that would have made no difference in the end. Dinihari's race matters as little. She was woman, complaisant woman, of the sort whose no always becomes yes between throat and teeth. You can find her in Nome, in Cape Town, and in Durham, and in skin of any shade; but, since the Tawi Tawis are the lower end of the Sulu Archipelago, she was brown this time.

She was a sleek brown woman with the knack of twisting a sarong around her hips so that it became part of her—a trick a woman has with a potato sack or hasn't with Japanese brocade. She was small and trimly fleshed, with proper pride in her flesh. She wasn't exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn't belong to a man you were afraid of. That was when she was Levison's.

She was Jeffol's first. I don't know where he got her. Her dialect wasn't that of the village, but you couldn't tell from that. There are any number of dialects down there—jumbles of Malay, Tagalog, Portuguese, and what not. Her sarong was a gold-threaded kain sungkit, so no doubt he brought her over from Borneo. He was likely to return from a fishing trip with anything—except fish.

Jeffol was a good Moro—a good companion in a fight or across a table. Tall for a Moro, nearly as tall as I am, he had a deceptive slimness that left you unprepared for the power in his snake-smooth muscles. His face was cheerful, intelligent and almost handsome, and he carried himself with a swagger. His hands went easily to the knives at his waist, and against his hide—sleeping or waking—he wore a sleeveless fighting-jacket with verses from the Koran on it. The jacket was his most prized possession, next to his anting-anting.

His elder brother was datto, as their father had been, but this brother had inherited little of either his father's authority or his father's taste for deviltry. The first had been diluted by the military government, and Jeffol had got most of the second. He ran as wild and loose as his pirate ancestors, until Langworthy got hold of him.

Langworthy was on the island when I came there. He hadn't had much luck. Mohammedanism suited the Moros, especially in the loose form they practised. There was nothing of the solemn gangling horse-faced missionary about Langworthy. He was round-chested and meaty; he worked with dumb-bells and punching-bag before breakfast in the morning; and he strode round the island with a red face that broke into a grin on the least excuse. He had a way of sticking his chin in the air and grinning over it at you. I didn't like him.

He and I didn't hit it off very well from the first. I had reasons for not telling him where I had come from, and when he found I intended staying a while he got a notion that I wasn't going to do his people—he called them that in spite of the little attention they paid him—any good. Later, he used to send messages to Bangao, complaining that I was corrupting the natives and lowering the prestige of the white man.

That was after I taught them to play blackjack. They gambled whenever they had anything to gamble for, and it was just as well that they should play a game that didn't leave too much to luck. If I hadn't won their money the Chinese would have, and, anyway, there wasn't enough of it to raise a howl over. As for the white man's prestige—maybe I didn't insist on being tuaned with every third word, but neither did I hesitate to knock the brown brothers round whenever they needed it; and that's all there is to this keeping up the white man's prestige at best.

A COUPLE of years earlier—in the late '90s—Langworthy would have had no difficulty in getting rid of me, but since then the government had eased up a bit. I don't know what sort of answers he got to his complaints, but the absence of official action made him all the more determined to chase me off.

“Peters,” he would tell me, “you've got to get off the island. You're a bad influence and you've got to go.”

“Sure, sure,” I would agree, yawning. “But there's no hurry.”

We didn't get along together at all, but it was through my blackjack game that he finally made a go of his mission, though he wouldn't be likely to admit it.

Jeffol went broke in the game one night—lost his fortune of forty dollars Mex—and discovered what to his simple mind was the certain cause of his bad luck. His anting-anting was gone, his precious luck-bringing collection of the-Lord-knows-what in a stinking little bag was gone from its string round his neck. I tried to buck him up, but he wouldn't listen to reason. His security against all the evils of this world—and whatever other worlds there might be—was gone. Anything could happen to him now—anything bad. He went round the village with his head sagging down until it was in danger of being hit by a knee. In this condition he was ripe fruit for Langworthy, and Langworthy plucked him.

I saw Jeffol converted, although I was too far away to hear the talk that went with it. I was sitting under a cottonwood fixing a pipe. Jeffol had been walking up and down the beach for half an hour or More, his chin on his chest, his feet dragging. The water beyond him was smooth and green under a sky that was getting ready to let down more water. From where I sat, his round turban moved against the green sea like a rolling billiard-ball.

Then Langworthy came up the beach, striding stiff-kneed, as a man strides to a fight he counts on winning. He caught up with Jeffol and said something to which the Moro paid no attention. Jeffol didn't raise his head, just went on walking, though he was polite enough ordinarily. Langworthy fell in step beside him and they made a turn up and down the beach, the white man talking away at a great rate. Jeffol, so far as I could see, made no reply at all.

Facing each other, they suddenly stopped. Langworthy's face was redder than ever and his jaw stuck out. Jeffol was scowling. He said something. Langworthy said something. Jeffol took a step back and his hand went to the ivory hilt of a kris in his belted sarong. He didn't get the kris out. The missionary stepped in and dropped him with a hard left to the belly.

I got up and went away, reminding myself to watch that left hand if Langworthy and I ever tangled. I didn't have to sit through the rest of the performance to know that he had made a convert. There are two things a Moro understands thoroughly and respects without stint—violence and a joke. Knock him round, or get a laugh on him, and you can do what you will with him—and he'll like it. The next time I saw Jeffol he was a Christian.

In spite of the protests of the datto, a few of the Moros followed Jeffol's example, and Langworthy's chest grew an inch. He was wise enough to know that he could make better progress by cracking their heads together than by arguing the finer theological points with them, and after two or three athletic gospel-meetings he had his flock well in hand—for a while.

He lost most of them when he brought up the question of wives. Women were not expensive to keep down there and, although the Moros on that particular island weren't rolling in wealth, nearly all of them could afford a couple of wives, and some were prosperous enough to take on a slave girl or two after they had the four wives their law allowed. Langworthy put his foot down on this. He told his converts they would have to get rid of all except the first wives. And of course all of his converts who had more than one wife promptly went back to Allah—except Jeffol.

He was in earnest, the only idea in his head being to repair the damage done by the loss of his anting-anting. He had four wives and two slaves, including Dinihari. He wanted to keep her and let the others go, but the missionary said no. Jeffol's number one wife was his only real wife—thus Langworthy. Jeffol almost bolted then, but the necessity of finding a substitute for his anting-anting was strong in him. They compromised. He was to give up his women, go to Bangao for a divorce from his first wife, and then Langworthy would marry him to Dinihari. Meanwhile the girl was turned over to the datto for safe keeping. The datto's wife was a dish-faced shrew who had thus far prevented his taking another wife, so his household was considered a safe harbor for the girl.

Three mornings after Jeffol's departure for Bangao we woke to find Levison among us. He had come in during the night, alone, in a power-yawl piled high with wooden cases.

Levison was a monster, in size and appearance. Six and a half feet high he stood and at a little distance you took him for a man of medium height. There were three hundred pounds of him bulging his clothes if there was an ounce—not counting the hair, which was an item. He was black hair all over. It bushed out from above his low forehead to the nape of his neck, ran over his eyes in a straight thick bar, and sprouted from ears and great beaked nose. Below his half-hidden dark eyes, black hair bearded his face with a ten-inch tangle, furred his body like a bear's, padded his shoulders and arms and legs, and lay in thick patches on fingers and toes.

He hadn't many clothes on when I paddled out to the yawl to get acquainted, and what he had were too small for him. His shirt was split in a dozen places and the sleeves were gone. His pants-legs were torn off at the knees. He looked like a hair-mattress coming apart—only there was nothing limp or loose about the body inside of the hair. He was as agile as an acrobat. This was the first time I had seen him, although I recognized him on sight from what I had heard in Manila the year before. He bore a sweet reputation.

“Hello, Levison,” I greeted him as I came alongside. “Welcome to our little paradise.”

He scowled down at me, from hat to shoes and back, and then nodded his immense head.

“You are—”

“I'm not,” I denied, climbing over the side. “I never heard of the fellow, and I'm innocent of whatever he did. My name is Peters and I'm not even distantly related to any other Peters.”

He laughed and produced a bottle of gin.

THE village was a double handful of thatched huts set upon piles where the water could wash under them when the tide was in, back in a little cove sheltered by a promontory that pointed toward Celebes. Levison built his house—a large one with three rooms—out near the tip of this point, beside the ruins of the old Spanish block-house. I spent a lot of time out there with him. He was a hard man to get along with, a thoroughly disagreeable companion, but he had gin—real gin and plenty of it—and I was tired of nipa and samshu. He thought I wasn't afraid of him, and that error made it easier for me to handle him.

There was something queer about this Levison. He was as strong as three men and a vicious brute all the way through, but not with the honest brutality of a strong man. He was like a mean kid who, after being tormented by larger boys, suddenly finds himself among smaller ones. It used to puzzle me. For instance, old Muda stumbled against him once on the path into the jungle. You or I would simply have pushed the clumsy old beggar out of the way, or perhaps, if we happened to be carrying a grouch at the time, knocked him out of the way. Levison picked him up and did something to his legs. Muda had to be carried back to his hut, and he never succeeded in walking after that.

The Moros called Levison the Hairy One (Ber-Bulu), and, because he was big and strong and rough, they were afraid of him and admired him tremendously.

It was less than a week after his arrival when he brought Dinihari home with him. I was in his house when they came in.

“Get out, Peters,” he said. “This is my dam' honeymoon.”

I looked at the girl. She was all dimples and crinkled nose—tickled silly.

“Go easy,” I advised the hairy man. “She belongs to Jeffol, and he's a tough lad.”

“I know,” he sneered through his beard. “I've heard all about him. The hell with him!”

“You're the doctor. Give me a bottle of gin to drink to you with and I'll run along.”

I got the gin.

[Illustration: Levison was a monster in size and appearance. Six and a half feet he stood; there were three hundred pounds of him—not counting the hair, which was an item. He was black hair all over. Below his half-hidden dark eyes, black hair bearded his face in a ten-inch tangle and furred his body like a bear's. The Colt in Jeffol's hand was too large and too steady for even a monster like Levison to jump at. Dinihari was the only one of us who moved.]

I WAS with Levison and the girl when Jeffol came back from Bangao. I was sprawled on a divan. On the other side of the room the hairy man was tilted back in a chair, talking. Dinihari sat on the floor at his feet, twisted round to look up into his face with adoring eyes. She was a happy brown girl. Why not? Didn't she have the strongest man on the island—the strongest man in the whole archipelago? And in addition to his strength, wasn't he as hairy as a wanderoo, in a land where men hadn't much hair on face and body?

Then the door whipped open and Jeffol came in. His eyes were red over black. He wasn't at home in Christianity yet, so he cursed Levison with Mohammedan curses. They are good enough up to a certain point, but the climax—usually pig—falls a bit flat on western ears. Jeffol did well. But he would have done better if he had come in with his knives in his hands instead of in his twisted sarong.

The hairy man's chair came down square on its legs and he got across the room—sooner than you would think. Jeffol managed to loosen a kris and ripped one of Levison's arms from elbow to wrist. Then the Moro was through. Levison was too big, too strong, for him—swept him up, cuffed weapons out of hand and sarong, took him by arm and thigh and chucked him out of the door.

Dinihari? Her former lord's body hadn't thudded on the ground below—a nasty drop with the tide out—before she was bending over Levison's hairy arm, kissing the bleeding slit.

Jeffol was laid up for a week with a twisted shoulder and bruised back. I dropped in to see him once, but he wasn't very cordial. He seemed to think I should have done something. His mother—old toothless Ca'bi—chased me out as soon as she saw me, so my visit didn't last long. She was a proper old witch.

The village buzzed for a day or two, but nothing happened. If Jeffol hadn't gone Christian there might have been trouble; but most of the Moros held his desertion of the faith against him, and looked on the loss of Dinihari as just punishment. Those who were still Christians were too tame a lot to help Jeffol. His brother the datto washed his hands of the affair, which was just as well, since he couldn't have done anything anyway. He wasn't any too fond of Jeffol—had always been a bit envious of him—and he decided that in giving up the girl at the missionary's request, Jeffol had surrendered ownership, and that she could stay with Levison if she wished. Apparently she did so wish.

Langworthy went to see Levison. I heard of it a few minutes later and paddled like mad out to the house. If the missionary was going to be smeared up I wanted to see it. I didn't like the man. But I was too late. He came out just as I got there, and he limped a little. I never found out what happened. I asked Levison, but if he had done all the things he told me the missionary wouldn't have left standing up: The house wasn't upset, and Levison didn't have any marks that showed through his hair, so it couldn't have been much of a row.

Jeffol's faith in Christianity as a substitute for an anting-anting must have been weakened by this new misfortune, but Langworthy succeeded in holding him, though he had to work night and day to do it. They were together all of the time—Langworthy usually talking, Jeffol sulking.

“Jeffol's up and about,” I told Levison one day. “Better watch your step. He's shifty, and he's got good pirate blood in him.”

“Pirate blood be damned!” said Levison. “He's a nigger and I can handle a dozen of him.”

I let it go at that.

THOSE were good days in the house out on the point. The girl was a brown lump of happiness. She worshipped her big hair-matted beast of a man, made a god of him. She'd look at him for hour after hour with black eyes that had hallelujahs in them. If he was asleep when I went out there, she'd use the word beradu when she told me so—a word supposed to be sacred to the sleep of royalty.

Levison, swept up in this adoration that was larger than he, became almost mellow for days at a time; and even when he relapsed into normal viciousness now and then he was no crueler to her than a Moro would have been. And there were times when he became almost what she thought him. I remember one night: We were all three fairly drunk—Levison and I on gin, the girl, drunker than either of us, on love. She had reached up and buried her brown fists in his beard, a trick she was fond of.

“Hold on!” he cried, kicking his chair away and standing up.

He reared up his head, lifting her from the floor, and spun round, whirling her through the air like a kid swinging on a May-pole. Silly, maybe. But in the yellow lamplight, his beaked nose and laughing red mouth above the black beard to which her fists clung, her smooth brown body slanting through the air in a ripple of gay waist and sarong, there was a wild magnificence to them. He was a real giant that moment.

But it's hard for me to remember him that way: my last picture of him is the one that sticks. I got it the night of Jeffol's second call.

He came in late, popping through the door with a brand-new service Colt in one hand and a kris in the other. At his heels trotted old Ca'bi, his mother, followed by broken-nosed Jokanain and a mean little runt named Unga. The old woman carried a bundle of something tied up in nipa leaves, Jokanain swung a heavy barong, and Unga held an ancient blunderbuss.

I started up from where I was sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Unga centered the blunderbuss on me.

“Diam dudok!”

I sat still. Blunderbusses are wicked, and Unga had lost twelve dollars Mex to me three nights before.

Levison had jerked to his feet, and then he stopped. The Colt in Jeffol's hand was too large and too steady for even a monster like Levison to jump at. Dinihari was the only one of us who moved. She flung herself between Jeffol and Levison, but the Moro swept her out of the way with his left arm, swept her over into a corner without taking eyes or gun from the hairy man.

Old Ca'bi hobbled across the floor and peeped into each of the other rooms.

“Mari,” she croaked from the sleeping-room door.

Step by step Jeffol drove Levison across the room and through that door, Ca'bi going in with them. The door closed and Unga, holding me with the blunderbuss, put his back against it.

Dinihari sprang up and dashed toward him. Jokanain caught her from behind and flung her into her corner again. Beyond the door Levison roared out oaths. Ca'bi's voice cackled excitedly in answering oaths, and in orders to her son. Bind (ikat) and naked (telanjang) were the only words I could pick out of the din. Then Levison's voice choked off into silence, and no sound at all came from the sleeping-room.

In our room there was no motion. Dinihari sat still in her corner, staring at her feet. Unga and Jokanain were two ugly statues against two doors. The chatter of flying foxes busy among the cottonwoods and the rustling of thatch in a breeze heavy with the stink of drying tripang were the only things you could hear.

I had a dull, end-of-the-road feeling. A Moro is a simple son of nature. When he finds himself so placed that he can kill, he usually kills. Otherwise, it runs in his head, of what use is the power? It's a sort of instinct for economy. I suspected that Levison, gagged, was being cut, in the Moro fashion, into very small bits; and, while my death might be less elaborate, I didn't doubt that it too was on the cards. You don't last long among the Moros once you let them get the bulge on you. If not tonight, some young buck will cut you down tomorrow night, just because he knows he can do it.

Half an hour or more went by slower than you would think it could. My nerves began bothering me: fear taking the form of anger at the suspended activity of the trap I was in; impatience to see the end and get it over with.

I had a gun under my shirt. If I could snake it out and pot Unga, then I had a chance of shooting it out with Jeffol and Jokanain. If I wasn't fast enough, Unga would turn loose the blunderbuss and blow me and the wall behind me out into the Celebes Sea, all mixed up so you couldn't say which was which. But even that was better than passing out without trying to take anybody with me.

HOWEVER, there was still gin in the bottle beside me, and it would make the going easier if I could get it in me. I experimented with a slowly reaching hand. Unga said nothing, so I picked up the bottle and took a long drink, leaving one more in it—a stirrup cup, you might say. As I took the bottle down from my mouth, feet pattered in the next room, and old Ca'bi came squeezing out of the door, her mouth spread from ear to ear in a she-devil's grin.

“Panggil orang-orang,” she ordered Jokanain, and he went out.

I put the last of the gin down my throat. If I were going to move, it would have to be before the rest of the village got here. I set the empty bottle down and scratched my chin, which brought my right hand within striking distance of my gun.

Then Levison bellowed out like a bull gone mad—a bellow that rattled the floor-timbers in their rattan lashings. Jeffol, without his Colt, came tumbling backward through the door, upsetting Unga. The blunderbuss exploded, blowing the roof wide open. In the confusion I got my gun out—and almost dropped it.

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 see 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 ripping 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 tale the missionary (tuan padri) told me of a hairy one named Sansāo, 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?