Publisher's Synopsis
John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones wideapart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference, flattenedagainst the very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps thatis why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believedthe earth to be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have beensuperstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at the wrongtime.Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me whatsociety 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. Weall experience such things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see acertain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed; andyet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: "I do not like that man." Why do we notlike him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that we do not. We have taken adislike, 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 alwaysgleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah I how it gratedon my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did notbother 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 couldirritate 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 dayit came whooping across the fields to spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under theaching noonday glare, when the green things drooped and the birds withdrew tothe 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 lonelycross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came his plagueycachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe and clench my nailsinto my pal
