The Dain Curse

by Dashiell Hammett

  “Owen is dead.”

  She didn’t ask, she said it; but there was no way of treating it except as a question.

  “No.” I sat down in the nurse’s chair and fished out cigarettes. “He’s alive.”

  “Will he live?” Her voice was still husky from her cold.

  “The doctors think so,” I exaggerated.

  “If he lives, will he—?” She left the question unfinished, but her husky voice seemed impersonal enough.

  “He’ll be pretty badly maimed.”

  She spoke more to herself than to me:

  “That should be even more satisfactory.”

  I grinned. If I was as good an actor as I thought, there was nothing in the grin but good-humored amusement.

  “Laugh,” she said gravely. “I wish you could laugh it away. But you can’t. It’s there. It will always be there.” She looked down at her hands and whispered: “Cursed.”

  Spoken in any other tone, that last word would have been melodramatic, ridiculously stagey. But she said it automatically, without any feeling, as if saying it had become a habit. I could see her lying in bed in the dark, whispering it to herself hour after hour, whispering it to her body when she put on her clothes, to her face reflected in mirrors, day after day.

  I squirmed in my chair and growled:

  “Stop it. Just because a bad-tempered woman works off her hatred and rage in a ten-twenty-thirty speech about—”

  “No, no; my step-mother merely put in words what I have always known. I hadn’t known it was in the Dain blood, but I knew it was in mine. How could I help knowing? Hadn’t I the physical marks of degeneracy?” She crossed the room to stand in front of me, turning her head sidewise, holding back her curls with both hands. “Look at my ears—without lobes, pointed tops. People don’t have ears like that. Animals do.” She turned her face to me again, still holding back her hair. “Look at my forehead—its smallness, its shape—animal. My teeth.” She bared them—white, small, pointed. “The shape of my face.” Her hands left her hair and slid down her cheeks, coming together under her oddly pointed small chin.

  “Is that all?” I asked. “Haven’t you got cloven hoofs? All right. Say these things are as peculiar as you seem to think they are. What of it? Your step-mother was a Dain, and she was poison, but where were her physical marks of degeneracy? Wasn’t she as normal, as wholesome-looking as any woman you’re likely to find?”

  “But that’s no answer.” She shook her head impatiently. “She didn’t have the physical marks perhaps. I have, and the mental ones too. I—” She sat down on the side of the bed close to me, elbows on knees, tortured white face between hands. “I’ve not ever been able to think clearly, as other people do, even the simplest thoughts. Everything is always so confused in my mind. No matter what I try to think about, there’s a fog that gets between me and it, and other thoughts get between us, so I barely catch a glimpse of the thought I want before I lose it again, and have to hunt through the fog, and at last find it, only to have the same thing happen again and again and again. Can you understand how horrible that can become: going through life like that—year after year—knowing you will always be like that—or worse?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “It sounds normal as hell to me. Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”

  She took her face out of her hands and smiled shyly at me, saying:

  “It’s funny I didn’t like you before.” Her face became serious again. “But—”

  “But nothing,” I said. “You’re old enough to know that everybody except very crazy people and very stupid people suspect themselves now and then—or whenever they happen to think about it—of not being exactly sane. Evidence of goofiness is easily found: the more you dig into yourself, the more you turn up. Nobody’s mind could stand the sort of examination you’ve been giving yours. Going around trying to prove yourself cuckoo! It’s a wonder you haven’t driven yourself nuts.”

  “Perhaps I have.”

  “No. Take my word for it, you’re sane. Or don’t take my word for it. Look. You got a hell of a start in life. You got into bad hands at the very beginning. Your step-mother was plain poison, and did her best to ruin you, and in the end succeeded in convincing you that you were smeared with a very special family curse. In the past couple of months—the time I’ve known you—all the calamities known to man have been piled up on you, and your belief in your curse has made you hold yourself responsible for every item in the pile. All right. How’s it affected you? You’ve been dazed a lot of the time, hysterical part of the time, and when your husband was killed you tried to kill yourself, but weren’t unbalanced enough to face the shock of the bullet tearing through your flesh.

  “Well, good God, sister! I’m only a hired man with only a hired man’s interest in your troubles, and some of them have had me groggy. Didn’t I try to bite a ghost back in that Temple? And I’m supposed to be old and toughened to crime. This morning-after all you’d been through—somebody touches off a package of nitroglycerine almost beside your bed. Here you are this evening, up and dressed, arguing with me about your sanity.

  “If you aren’t normal, it’s because you’re tougher, saner, cooler than normal. Stop thinking about your Dain blood and think about the Mayenne blood in you. Where do you suppose you got your toughness, except from him? It’s the same toughness that carried him through Devil’s Island, Central America, and Mexico, and kept him standing up till the end. You’re more like him than like the one Dain I saw. Physically, you take after your father, and if you’ve got any physical marks of degeneracy—whatever that means—you got them from him.”

  She seemed to like that. Her eyes were almost happy. But I had talked myself out of words for the moment, and while I was hunting for more behind a cigarette the shine went out of her eyes.

  “I’m glad—I’m grateful to you for what you’ve said, if you’ve meant it.” Hopelessness was in her tone again, and her face was back between her hands. “But, whatever I am, she was right. You can’t say she wasn’t. You can’t deny that my life has been cursed, blackened, and the lives of everyone who’s touched me.”

  “I’m one answer to that,” I said. “I’ve been around you a lot recently, and I’ve mixed into your affairs enough, and nothing’s happened to me that a night’s sleep wouldn’t fix up.”

  “But in a different way,” she protested slowly, wrinkling her forehead. “There’s no personal relationship with you. It’s professional with you—your work. That makes a difference.”

  I laughed and said:

  “That won’t do. There’s Fitzstephan. He knew your family, of course, but he was here through me, on my account, and was actually, then, a step further removed from you than I. Why shouldn’t I have gone down first? Maybe the bomb was meant for me? Maybe. But that brings us to a human mind behind it—one that can bungle—and not your infallible curse.”

  “You are mistaken,” she said, staring at her knees. “Owen loved me.”

  I decided not to appear surprised. I asked:

  “Had you—?”

  “No, please! Please don’t ask me talk about it. Not now—after what happened this morning.” She jerked her shoulders up high and straight, said crisply: “You said something about an infallible curse. I don’t know whether you misunderstand me, or are pretending to, to make me seem foolish. But I don’t believe in an infallible curse, one coming from the devil or God, like Job’s, say.” She was earnest now, no longer talking to change the conversation. “But can’t there be—aren’t there people who are so
thoroughly—fundamentally—evil that they poison—bring out the worst in—everybody they touch? And can’t that—?”

  “There are people who can,” I half-agreed, “when they want to.”

  “No, no! Whether they want to or not. When they desperately don’t want to. It is so. It is. I loved Eric because he was clean and fine. You know he was. You knew him well enough, and you know men well enough, to know he was. I loved him that way, wanted him that way. And then, when we were married—”

  She shuddered and gave me both of her hands. The palms were dry and hot, the ends of her fingers cold. I had to hold them tight to keep the nails out of my flesh. I asked:

  “You were a virgin when you married him?”

  “Yes, I was. I am. I—”

  “It’s nothing to get excited about,” I said. “You are, and have the usual silly notions. And you use dope, don’t you?”

  She nodded. I went on:

  “That would cut your own interest in sex to below normal, so that a perfectly natural interest in it on somebody else’s part would seem abnormal. Eric was too young, too much in love with you, maybe too inexperienced, to keep from being clumsy. You can’t make anything horrible out of that.”

  “But it wasn’t only Eric,” she explained. “Every man I’ve known. Don’t think me conceited. I know I’m not beautiful. But I don’t want to be evil. I don’t. Why do men—? Why have all the men I’ve—?”

  “Are you,” I asked, “talking about me?”

  “No—you know I’m not. Don’t make fun of me, please.”

  “Then there are exceptions? Any others? Madison Andrews, for instance?”

  “If you know him at all well, or have heard much about him, you don’t have to ask that.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But you can’t blame the curse with him—it’s habit. Was he very bad?”

  “He was very funny,” she said bitterly.

  “How long ago was it?”

  “Oh, possibly a year and a half. I didn’t say anything to my father and step-mother. I was—I was ashamed that men were like that to me, and that—”

  “How do you know,” I grumbled, “that most men aren’t like that to most women? What makes you think your case is so damned unique? If your ears were sharp enough, you could listen now and hear a thousand women in San Francisco making the same complaint, and—God knows—maybe half of them would be thinking themselves sincere.”

  She took her hands away from me and sat up straight on the bed. Some pink came into her face.

  “Now you have made me feel silly,” she said.

  “Not much sillier than I do. I’m supposed to be a detective. Since this job began, I’ve been riding around on a merry-go-round, staying the same distance behind your curse, suspecting what it’d look like if I could get face to face with it, but never getting there. I will now. Can you stand another week or two?”

  “You mean—?”

  “I’m going to show you that your curse is a lot of hooey, but it’ll take a few days, maybe a couple of weeks.”

  She was round-eyed and trembling, wanting to believe me, afraid to. I said:

  “That’s settled. What are you going to do now?”

  “I—I don’t know. Do you mean what you’ve said? That this can be ended? That I’ll have no more—? That you can—?”

  “Yeah. Could you go back to the house in the cove for a while? It might help things along, and you’ll be safe enough there. We could take Mrs. Herman with us, and maybe an op or two.”

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  I looked at my watch and stood up saying: “Better go back to bed. We’ll move down tomorrow. Good night.”

  She chewed her lower lip, wanting to say something, not wanting to say it, finally blurting it out:

  “I’ll have to have morphine down there.”

  “Sure. What’s your day’s ration?”

  “Five—ten grains.”

  “That’s mild enough,” I said, and then, casually: “Do you like using the stuff?”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for my liking or not liking it to matter.”

  “You’ve been reading the Hearst papers,” I said. “If you want to break off, and we’ve a few days to spare down there, we’ll use them weaning you. It’s not so tough.”

  She laughed shakily, with a queer twitching of her mouth.

  “Go away,” she cried. “Don’t give me any more assurances, any more of your promises, please. I can’t stand any more tonight. I’m drunk on them now. Please go away.”

  “All right. Night.”

  “Good night—and thanks.”

  I went into my room, closing the door. Mickey was unscrewing the top of a flask. His knees were dusty. He turned his half-wit’s grin on me and said:

  “What a swell dish you are. What are you trying to do? Win yourself a home?”

  “Sh-h-h. Anything new?”

  “The master minds have gone back to the county seat. The red-head nurse was getting a load at the keyhole when I came back from feeding. I chased her.”

  “And took her place?” I asked, nodding at his dusty knees.

  You couldn’t embarrass Mickey. He said:

  “Hell, no. She was at the other door, in the hall.”

  20

  THE HOUSE IN THE COVE

  I got Fitzstephan’s car from the garage and drove Gabrielle and Mrs. Herman down to the house in the cove late the following morning. The girl was in low spirits. She made a poor job of smiling when spoken to, and had nothing to say on her own account. I thought she might be depressed by the thought of returning to the house she had shared with Collinson, but when we got there she went in with no appearance of reluctance, and being there didn’t seem to increase her depression.

  After luncheon—Mrs. Herman turned out to be a good cook—Gabrielle decided she wanted to go outdoors, so she and I walked over to the Mexican settlement to see Mary Nunez. The Mexican woman promised to come back to work the next day. She seemed fond of Gabrielle, but not of me.

  We returned home by way of the shore, picking a path between scattered rocks. We walked slowly. The girl’s forehead was puckered between her eyebrows. Neither of us said anything until we were within a quarter of a mile of the house. Then Gabrielle sat down on the rounded top of a boulder that was warm in the sun.

  “Can you remember what you told me last night?” she asked, running her words together in her hurry to get them out. She looked frightened.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me again,” she begged, moving over to one end of her boulder. “Sit down and tell me again—all of it.”

  I did. According to me, it was as foolish to try to read character from the shape of ears as from the position of stars, tea-leaves, or spit in the sand; anybody who started hunting for evidence of insanity in himself would certainly find plenty, because all but stupid minds were jumbled affairs; she was, as far as I could see, too much like her father to have much Dain blood in her, or to have been softened much by what she had, even if you wanted to believe that things like that could be handed down; there was nothing to show that her influence on people was any worse than anybody else’s, it being doubtful that many people had a very good influence on those of the opposite sex, and, anyway, she was too young, inexperienced, and self-centered to judge how she varied from the normal in this respect; I would show her in a few days that there was for her difficulties a much more tangible, logical, and jailable answer than any curse; and she wouldn’t have much trouble breaking away from morphine, since she was a fairly light user of the stuff and had a temperament favorable to a cure.

  I spent three-quarters of an hour working these ideas over for her, and didn’t make such a lousy job of it. The fear went out of her eyes as I talked. Toward the last she smiled to herself. When I had finished she jumped up, laughing, working her fingers together.

  “Thank you. Thank you,” she babbled. “Please don’t let me ever stop believing you. Make me believe you even if—No. It is true. Make
me believe you always. Come on. Let’s walk some more.”

  She almost ran me the rest of the way to the house, chattering all the way. Mickey Linehan was on the porch. I stopped there with him while the girl went in.

  “Tch, tch, tch, as Mr. Rolly says.” He shook his grinning face at me. “I ought to tell her what happened to that poor girl up in Poisonville that got so she thought she could trust you.”

  “Bring any news down from the village with you?” I asked.

  “Andrews has turned up. He was at the Jeffries’ place in San Mateo, where Aaronia Haldorn’s staying. She’s still there. Andrews was there from Tuesday afternoon till last night. Al was watching the place and saw him go in, but didn’t peg him till he came out. The Jeffries are away—San Diego. Dick’s tailing Andrews now. Al says the Haldorn broad hasn’t been off the place. Rolly tells me Fink’s awake, but don’t know anything about the bomb. Fitzstephan’s still hanging on to life.”

  “I think I’ll run over and talk to Fink this afternoon,” I said. “Stick around here. And—oh, yeah—you’ll have to act respectful to me when Mrs. Collinson’s around. It’s important that she keep on thinking I’m hot stuff.”

  “Bring back some booze,” Mickey said. “I can’t do it sober.”

  Fink was propped up in bed when I got to him, looking out under bandages. He insisted that he knew nothing about the bomb, that all he had come down for was to tell me that Harvey Whidden was his step-son, the missing village-blacksmith’s son by a former marriage.

  “Well, what of it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what of it, except that he was, and I thought you’d want to know about it.”

  “Why should I?”

  “The papers said you said there was some kind of connection between what happened here and what happened up there, and that heavy-set detective said you said I knew more about it than I let on. And I don’t want any more trouble, so I thought I’d just come down and tell you, so you couldn’t say I hadn’t told all I knew.”

  “Yeah? Then tell me what you know about Madison Andrews.”