The Charmed Life/Chapter VI

by Achmed Abdullah

Out--And In

Our horses aren’t from Tartary, the land of
Tamerlane.
They come from river meadows, out beyond
the Southern Main
No lynx we bring for foxes,
No cheetahs for the deer;
With brown and while bedappled
Our English hounds are here.
The jackal he may kennel in the fields of
sugar-cane.
The pack is in and after him to drive him out
again.
—E. D.

ONLY a face, he continued, that of an old man, wrinkled, brown, immobile on a scrawny neck which was like the slimy stalk of some poisonous jungle flower, the body, arms, and legs wrapped in layers of thin muslin, sitting upright on a great chair of gray, carved marble.

I wish I could picture that face to you as I saw it—it would take the hand of a Rodin to clout and shape the meaning of it. The taint of death, the flavor of dread tortures which surrounded it, the face of a sensual, perverted, plague-spotted Roman emperor blended with the unhuman, meditating, crushing calm of a Chinese sage.

Why, man, I can see it even now—at times— heavy-jowled, thin-lipped, terribly broad across the temples—and with an expression in his whitish-gray-eyes like the sins of a slaughtered soul.

Compared to that face—to the solitary fact of that face’s existence, if you get me—all the little fears and trembling apprehensions which had come over me since I had swung across the wall at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully seemed ridiculous—as unimportant as the twittering of sparrows in a street gutter—and my adventures seemed dull and commonplace.

I had an idea that I spoke—some foolish, meaningless words of greeting. I am not sure if I did or not. For, during some moments, I sought in vain to steady my mind and my senses to the point of understanding, of intelligence, of observation.

All I could see and feel was the existence of these features in front of the grotesque, monstrous, unhuman—and I wanted to shriek—I wanted to beat them into raw, bleeding pulp!

Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of emotions, lasted only a moment. Perhaps it was contained in the fraction of the second it took me to pass from the corridor, properly speaking, into the hall. At all events, suddenly I was myself again. I remembered the girl—and the wondrous magic, the sweet, wild strength of the love I bore her.

Whatever the meaning of these sinister, immobile features—whatever the dread prophecy in these staring, unblinking, cruel eyes—I’d have to go through with my task—the task of fighting my way out of this house—and to carry the girl with me, unharmed. So I walked—up to that muslin-swathed body—to that horror of a face— Stephen Denton ashed his cigar. He was silent for perhaps a couple of minutes, and I did not press him to hurry up with his tale. It was so evident that he was trying to collect his thoughts—so evident too, that the remembrance of that moment was not a very pleasant one to him. But presently he looked up, with a return of his old full, jolly, magnetic smile; and he continued.

Yes—I jerked my wits into a fair semblance of nerve control and took a step forward—one step, two, three—slowly and deliberately—until I was within a foot of that face—and then—why, man, I laughed! It wasn’t a very cheerful laugh— rather a harsh,. ghastly, scraping sort of machination—but it saved, if not my life, then at least my sanity. For, quite suddenly. When I was within a foot of it, I realized that that face—that thing of dread and horror—was harmless. I realized, that it was not alive at all!

A statue? No, old man, guess again—you see, it was the face of a mummy—that’s why the body was wrapped in layers of muslin—and the eyes were of glass, cunningly painted. I said to myself that it was doubtful the mummified remains of some especially holy Brahman priest— and I felt quite a rush of affection for his deceased holiness—for at least he couldn’t hurt me; he couldn’t hurt the little girl who was all the world to me. I have an idea that I was about to pat the old mummy familiarly on the brown, wrinkled brow when— Wait? It’s so confoundedly hard to put it into words—you’ve got to feel it, as I felt it, that night.

You see, I heard a whisper—yes—I knew that wrinkled horror was dead, a mummy—and yet— why, I looked about the room—there was nobody there—and the mad thought came to me that the mummy had whispered!

Don’t you get me? I knew it was impossible—and—there it was; a whisper shadowy, fleeting, secretive! Of course it was ridiculous—and yet I was sure, in spite of my positive knowledge and in spite of the dictates of my sanity, that the whisper had come from the mummy. I don’t know why I should have thought so—ask a professor of psychology for the correct explanation—but the fact remains that I jumped back about three feet with a quickly suppressed cry of fear.

The whole impression lasted less time than it takes me to tell it. The very next second I had collected myself—had to, you see, since I didn’t want to lose my sanity—and with breath sucked in, head in one side my whole body tense and bunched, I tried to follow up the low sibilant tone waves—to locate the direction whence the whispering really came.

What? Did they plant a phonograph inside of that mummy? (Stephen Denton laughed at my question.) No! No! Can you imagine such a Western abomination as a phonograph near a Hindu temple—in the mummified body of a Hindu saint?

Of course not! The explanation was a hanged sight easier. The tone waves—the whispers— came, not from the mummy’s mouth—but from the mummy’s feet! So I stretched myself full-length on the floor, at the feet of his holiness, pressed my ears against the cold stone flags, and listened intently.

And I heard—two words, at first! They sort of remained with me, and made me feel uncomfortable and creepy all over again. For those whispered words were: “The Sahib!”

They stood out, those two words, in sharp, crass relief. “The Sahib!” Nothing more—and, subconsciously, I guessed—no! I knew, that it was I—Stephen Denton, Esquire, out of Boston— who was meant by that melodious and honorable appellation. For sahibs, at one o’clock in the morning, are a pretty rare article in the midst of the Colootallah!

The whispering continued, and I heard quite well. There was really no mystery to it—for, don’t you see, most of those old buildings in the Colootallah were built many years ago, and since Calcutta was a swamp in these days and since wood and stone were rare, they built their houses with hollow tiles imported from Persia via Delhi—and these tiles act very much like telephones—sending tone waves in straight lines and at a considerable distance.

I was grateful for that—and for one more Indian peculiarity—namely the number and diversity of the many Indian languages and dialects which forces Hindus from different parts of the country to speak in English. There were two men whispering—doubtless either thugs or seditionist, at all events men who hated the very name at England and yet they had to speak in English to each other, to make them intelligible.

Funny, wasn’t it?

I could hear just as plainly as through a telephone—with a perfect connection. The man who spoke first felt evidently peevish about the Sahib—about me. You should have heard the things he called me; not me alone, but also my father, my grandfather, most of my cousins and uncles and my whole family-tree straight down to Adam and Eve, and beyond, even. It seemed that he was appealing to the other man for help.

“Where is she? Where is she?” came the sibilant whisper; and then, with a splendid flow of Oriental imagery, “he—the Sahib—the this-andthat”— more epithets—”has stolen her—the apple of my eyes, the well of my love, the stone of my contentment! Ah!”—and distinctly, through the hollow tiles, I could hear something like a forced, hypocritical sob—“she is a. pearl among pearls— with lips like the crimson asoka flower, with teeth as virgin-white as the perfumed madhavi, with a voice like the mating-song of the kokila bird, with a waist as the waist of a she-lion, and with the walk of a king-goose! By Shiva and Shiva—and again by Shiva!”—here he got busy once more about my ancestry and character—“may that white-skinned, cow-eating, and unthinkably begotten foreigner boil slowly and very, very painfully in the everlasting fire which is vomited from the Jwalamukhi! May Garura pick out his eyes—first the left—and then the right! May Bhawani herself suck his filthy heart dry!”

A pause—then the other man’s voice: “But whom has the Sahib stolen, brother?” followed by the first man’s answer, “the Lady Padmavati!”

“Padmavati?” repeated the second man, in accents of utter, amazed, horrified incredulity, “Padmavati?”

Then silence—thick, heavy, palpable!

Say, continued Stephen Denton, can you imagine what a crash of silence can be like? Sounds paradoxical, don’t you think? But that’s exactly what followed the mentioning of the little girl’s name.

Silence—for one minute—two—three— rhythmically my heartbeats seemed to syncopate each dragging second while I lay there, my ear pressed against the stone flags, at the feet of that beastly old mummy.

I thought finally that the two speakers had perhaps gone away from wherever they were talking. I was about to rise, to continue in my search for an opening, a door or a window which would help my love and me to escape—when once more, insistent, sibilant, whispering, the tone waves glided through the hollow tiles.

It seemed to be the second man who was speaking.

“We must get him—the foreigner—the Christian—the cannibal of the Holy Cow! Quick—by the heavenly light of Chandra!” and he said it in such a deep, flat, strange voice that I felt something like the letting loose of fate—crashing, terrific—I felt an acrid flavor and taint of death and torture—a crimson undercurrent of gigantic, intolerable horrors!

Came the first man’s answering whisper: “Yes, for he is dangerous, as dangerous as Prithwi Pala, the servant of Indra the god, of whom the legends speak; and as for Padmavati—” again he was silent—came another flow of words, in Hindustani this time and thus unintelligible to me. But they seemed to be words of command, and they were followed by other voices, other words; then a sharp, ominous hissing and rattling of steel and the faint sound of quick-running feet.

They’re off, I said to myself, off and away and after me! I rose and looked to right and left. I guess I felt as a fox must feel when it hears the view-halloo of the chase and the baying of the hounds, with nothing in front but a bare hillside and far in the distance, a spinney which it can never reach.

For where was I to go? Where was I to hide myself?

Only one thing was certain. I could not let myself be caught in this hall nor in the abutting corridor, both bright with light. Back into the temple then—perhaps into the cobra den—a wild thought flashed through my head that I might have time to change clothes with the priest—a thought quickly given up, for what would I do with the priest himself?—other thoughts followed—but clear above them all rose the stony idea that, whatever happened, I must not lead the chase to the idol, the lotus pedestal where I had hidden the girl who was dearer to me than the dwelling of kings.

So I ran, with my thoughts gyrating madly, like swirling fog in the brain of a blind world, faster and faster! There was a noise in my temples like running water, like the wind in the wings of birds; it filled my head with huge, tenoring sound waves, and, as I came within sight of the temple door, the bell from the Presbyterian church boomed out—ba-nnnng—a quarter after one— like a gray seal of doom and despair!

Another rushing steps-already my hand was on the door-knob of the temple—already I was trying to subordinate my physical to my mental action, which seemed both muddled and frantic— for, you see, I know that presently I would have to be capable of one supreme effort of wit to save the girl and myself; battle and struggle it would be, and I did not refute the grim challenge of it; I did not blind myself to the balance of odds which would be against me.

Fight, and win or lose! Frenzied heroism?

Not a bit of it, old man: Simply the law of equal action and reaction—if I remember anything of my scientific course at college—applied to the dim, cruel heart of the Colootallah.

I had half turned the door-knob—and then— Stephen Denton leaned forward in his chair and, for the first time since he had commenced the recital of his mad adventures, he gesticulated—his right hand shot out tensely. dramatically.

And then from the walls, as if they had been parts of the walls, two men jumped at me, one from each side.

No, I saw no door, through, of course, there must have been one—two, rather. I only heard the metallic jarring and grating of rusty hinges, and, that same second, they were there, as if a sinister, supernatural power had visualized them from nothing and popped them out at me!

There they were—two men—with a crackle of naked steel—but wait! Get this right!

You see—and it sounds incredible, I know it!—but even in that fraction of a moment’s flash my eyes registered what those two men looked like. Strange, isn’t It? But I saw—I actually saw every detail of their persons, their costumes, their facial characteristics: their dark skin, their hooked noses, their broad, thin lips, their flashing purpleblack, narrow-lidded eyes, their beards, curled and twisted and parted in the dandified Rajput manner, their voluminous, white turbans, with clusters of emeralds, falling over their low, broad foreheads, and, high in the right hand of either, a curved scimitar!

Why, man, I even saw the curling. glittering lights on the points of their blades as they seemed to meet above my head like a double-barreled, curved guillotine!

All that, every last bit of it, I saw in that fleeting fraction of a moment, and, speak about quickness of perception, about rushing rapidity of wit, why— Stephen Denton was silent. His right hand was still in the air, as if it were trying to pluck the tense, incredible facts of his narrative from the atmosphere.

Quite suddenly, from up-stairs, came once more the twanging of a native guitar; that a soft, silvery woman’s voice, singing in Behari:

“. . . chare din ke gaile murga Mor ko ke aile . . .

Stephen Denton laughed. “You know the old song, don’t you?” he said. “The cock goes from home for four days only, and returns a peacock!”

Same with me that night—in the Colootallah—I left the Hotel Semiramis a plain, prosaic Back Bay Bostonian, and I returned—oh, you’ll see— you bet I returned, in spite of those flashing scimitars! Am I not here—in front of your eyes— in the flesh?

And he continued with another laugh.

Yes, the jarring of the doors, the fact of my being able to register what those two bewhiskered ruffians looked like, the ominous crackle of steel as the blades flickered about my head, my own quick-wittedness—all that passed and happened and surged on in a moment. I was too excited, probably to feel ordinary fear. Something flashed through me akin to fear, but, oh, different; there’s no word for it in our language; but with it flashed, also, a certain breathless, sullen audacity that’s it exactly; a sullen audacity—and I— Suddenly Stephen Denton burst into a roar of laughter.

Do you know what I did, old man? Can you guess it? No. no! I didn’t draw my Bowie-knife and give battle! Of course not! First of all, there wasn’t the time—for remember, the whole thing, from the jarring of the unseen door to the end of the little intermezzo, didn’t take more than two seconds; and, furthermore, what chance is there for a quiet Bostonian with a Bowie—a Bowie he isn’t used to handle, on top of it—against two big, hairy roughs with six yards of curved, razor-sharp steel between them? I’d have had as much chance against them with my Bowie as a regiment of volunteers armed with Civil War pop-guns against a battery armed with French forty-five millimeter guns!

What did I do? But I am coming to that, Don’t get impatient— You see—I ducked!

Yes, sir, I ducked! I threw myself flat on the floor before those two ruffians had a chance to realize what was happening—before they had time to put the brake on their brawny right arms.

Down came the two scimitars, and—yes, this time you guessed it—they hit each other, instead of hitting little me! They split each other’s turbaned skulls—zzzsh! through the voluminous layers of muslin—with rather a sickening, sharpcrunching noise—and there were two dead Hindus!

Say, man, speak about Tamerlane and George Washington and Napoleon—speak, about the Charmed Life—what?

I told you—haven’t I?—that from the moment of my swinging across the wall at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully—from the moment, rather, when I felt that my life was one with that of the little Hindu girl—my whole self seemed to have separated itself suddenly and completely from all that it had been in the past; it seemed to have lifted itself with a savage, tearing jerk from the pale, flat dumps of my past life and education and tradition—Boston, in other words—to the flashing, crazy limbos of this new, purple, mysterious India! I realized it, even at that moment, with the two dead men at my feet, one with his features, oh, set in an astonished sort of smile, as if wondering at the dark blood which was running lazily from the split skull to the floor; the other dead man’s face like a grinning Tibetan devil mask, with the lips drawn back a little over the gleaming, white teeth in an eerie grin, like the fangs of a wolf who sees the victim, jumps, then finds himself in a trap, smells death in the trap in the moment of killing!

Yes, all that I realized; not emotionally, for I seemed able perfectly to decompose the whole situation into a few and negligible elements, as I would decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics, and I was neither shocked nor even disgusted; and, mind you, this was the first time in my life I had seen death!

But, you see, I seemed to belong to India, to the terrible, corroding simplicity of India, and I felt like chanting a chant of victory. I felt a brutal, sublimely unselfconscious joy at the sight of those two sprawling, stark-contoured figures.

Rather beastly, don’t you think? But true! The next moment—for in that respect, too, the crouching, grim-clever instincts of all India had got into my blood—I looked about me, silently, carefully.

I said to myself that there might be more Hindus out after my scalp—for remember, first, I had heard two voices whispering. then a few sharp words of command. The Hindustani, and finally several more voices. I had run toward the temple, away from the lights, and I had evidently miscalculated. For if those two dead beggars had located me in the vicinity of the temple it was three to one to assume that the others would reason the same way.

Away from the temple, then! Back in the direction of the circular hall, in spite of the bright lights, as fast as my legs would carry me! So I ran, and as I ran there came to me the madding, paralyzing sensation that quite near me, inside the walls other footsteps were keeping parallel with my own, and I was afraid.

But only for a moment. The very next second the terror in my heart gave way to a feeling of indignation. I was cross, and I forgot all about that great, purple India which had picked me up and was shaping me into a molecule of its own strange, throbbing soul. You see, all my life I had been surrounded by the comfortable, machinemade, wire-drawn safeguards of Western life— police, laws, corporation counsels, prosecuting attorneys, municipal writs, regulation standards, regulation opinions. Fetishes I used to call them in my world-storming undergrad days; but I had relied on them. With all the rest of the Western world—socialists, anarchists, and I. W. W.’s included—I had always been in the position of a man who can demand and receive protection from the duly constituted authorities; and here I was suddenly up against life in the raw—in the bloodstained, quivering raw! I was up against a condition of society to which no law applied, no regulation, no standard known to me.

By ginger, I was mad with utter, impotent fury. Right then I would have liked to have an interview with some of those visionary jackasses who prate against constituted law; and then (Stephen Denton laughed) quite suddenly I quit kicking. Quite suddenly I became convinced once more that I had a charmed life, after all!

For by that time I had arrived again in the great circular hall where his holiness, the mummified Brahman Swami, was sitting in sinister state; and there, not too high up, I saw a window!

I made for it immediately, as a frightened cat makes for an open cellar; a running jump with every ounce of strength I possessed, I balanced myself precariously on the sill! I didn’t look down. Might have spoiled my nerve. I just closed my eyes and jumped, and I landed on a nice, thick, soft heap of ashes and cinders.

The moon had come from behind the bank of clouds and was drenching everything with tiny flecks of gold. I looked about me. I found myself in a long, narrow courtyard, with the window through which I had come to the left of me, a high wall with a door to the right, another wall, about fifteen feet high, in front, and in back a fantastic, twisted building which towered up in a wilderness of spires and turrets.

I had my choice of three ways, since I had no intention of returning to the hall whence I had jumped, naturally. Too, I discarded the building immediately; it looked, oh, too populous.

Remained the two walls. First I examined the one with the door. There was a crack in it and I looked through; it seemed to open out into the street— some street.

Did I try the door? Did I make for the street?

You bet I did not! Why?

But, man, there was the girl, back there somewhere in that maze of buildings; the girl who was all the world to me. No! I took the one remaining choice—the fifteen-foot wall in back of me.

At first I failed to discover anything by which I could mount; but at last, walking down the length of it, I came upon a shed with a heavy padlock on its wooden door, with its roof inclined at an angle against the wall. It was my only chance, and there was but one way to do it. I stepped back a few paces and took a running leap for the edge of the roof, jumping for the padlock. I tried three times. The third time I got my foot upon the padlock, and caught the edge of the wall with my hands. Exerting all my strength, I drew myself up, and where do you think I found myself?

I was back on the roof-top at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully! Quite alone, for when I groped beneath the balustrade where I had popped the old Hindu, bound and gagged, over an hour and a half before, I found the space empty.