Moon-Face and Other Stories | Page 4

John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind,
cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to
complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant
from the circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face
like a dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for
truly he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to
be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been
superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder
at the wrong time.
Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil
was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear,
definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some
period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one
who the very instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the
first moment of meeting, we say: "I do not like that man." Why do we
not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that we do not.
We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He
was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse
him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other
men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh
myself--before I met John Claverhouse.
But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the
sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me,
and would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or
sleeping it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my
heart-strings like an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping
across the fields to spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching
noonday glare, when the green things drooped and the birds withdrew
to the depths of the forest, and all nature drowsed, his great "Ha! ha!"
and "Ho! ho!" rose up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black
midnight, from the lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into
his own place, came his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my
sleep and make me writhe and clench my nails into my palms.
I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his
fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them
out again. "It is nothing," he said; "the poor, dumb beasties are not to
be blamed for straying into fatter pastures."
He had a dog he called "Mars," a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound
and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to
him, and they were always together. But I bided my time, and one day,
when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him
with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on
John Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and
his face as much like the full moon as it always had been.
Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning,
being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.
"Where are you going?" I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.
"Trout," he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. "I just dote on

trout."
Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up
in his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face
of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess
of trout, forsooth, because he "doted" on them! Had gloom but rested,
no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance
grown long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that
smile but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him
for existing. But no. he grew only more cheerful under misfortune.
I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.
"I fight you? Why?" he asked slowly. And then he laughed. "You are
so funny! Ho! ho! You'll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho!
ho!"
What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I
hated him! Then there was that name--Claverhouse! What a name!
Wasn't it absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven,