The Charmed Life/Chapter V

by Achmed Abdullah

Nerves

E gaio il minuetto, ma tavolta piange
The minuet’s lift is merry, but sometimes a
song breaks through
—Fogazzaro

THERE was one thing more in the temple—a fine, soft, silk rug—and I rolled it into a tight pillow and slipped it under the head of the little Hindu girl. I had stretched her out on the floor.

You know—Stephen Denton continued, with a curious, hazy note of embarrassment in his pleasant voice—I am afraid that, at that moment, with the girl at my feet and the grinning idol above me—with the scented; whirling wreaths of incense-smoke floating about me—I had a certain revulsion of feeling.

I was not afraid. Nor was I exactly riled at that mad throw of the dice of fate which had chucked me there—into the dim, mysterious heart of the Colootallah, five centuries removed from the Hotel Semiramis, the Presbyterian Church, the English bobbies, and all the rest of trousered, hatted civilization. I didn’t mind that. Of course not! For, don’t you see, I loved that warm, little, girlish thing of gold and black and crimson at my feet. My love was one of those mighty, heaving, cosmic revolutions which will attempt and accomplish the impossible—it was one of those stony, merciless facts which no arguing and no self-searching can kick out of existence.

But I guess there is such a thing as loving in spite of one’s self—of love being a thing, a condition, a fact apart from the rest of one’s life.

Don’t you get me? Why, old man, remember what I told you of how the girl was dressed—in the costume of a tuwaif, a Hindu dancer—and here, grinning and jeering above my head, was the idol of Shiva in his incarnation at Natarajah, “Lord of the Dance”—and the connection seemed obvious! And, after all, my people did come over in the Mayflower—and there was that reproachful church-bell from Old Court House Street—just then it was tolling the quarter to one.

Nothing shocking in the art and motion of dancing. But you have seen Hindu dances— religious Hindu dances—haven’t you? You know the significance of the image of Natarajah, how in the night of Brahma nature is said to be inert and cannot breathe nor move nor dance till Shiva wills it; how Shiva rises from his stillness of meditation, crushes the dwarf of night and inertia, and, dancing on his prostrate body, sends through all matter the pulsing waves of awakening sound, preceding from the drum; how, in the richness of time, still dancing, he destroys all names and all forms by fire: and how then all emotions and a new rest come upon the earth.

A mad Hindu notion of bringing together the orderly swing of the spheres, the perpetual movement of atoms, the sensation of the human body, and evolution itself—all represented in the dancing figure of Shiva Natarajah—and in the whirling bodies of the nautch, the Hindu dancinggirls who are consecrated to the service of the gods!

You know the nature and meaning and gestures of those dances, don’t you? And there was the girl at my feet in her dancing costume, and the grinning idol above us—there was the memory of some of things which Roos-Keppel had told me about the crimes and vices and the unclean castes which center in the Colootallah; and how—as in the rest of the world—it is always woman who is used as the mainspring of intrigue and venal traffic—and I clenched my fists until the knuckles stretched white.

I looked at the girl—the light was dim, trembling, uncertain, but I could see the pale gold of her little face, the dusky, voluminous clouds of hair, the thick net of the eyelashes.

I touched her face, her shoulders—only for a fleeting second—for, don’t you see, to me she was holy, and somehow she was to me part of that temple—of the sacredness of that temple—yes— sacredness—and I mean it. A mad, bombastic, fantastic, cruel faith—that Hindu faith! I know it!

But faith, religion, just the same somehow trying to make the world better. I guess there isn’t a single religion which really tries to do harm.

Yes, sacred and inviolable she was to me— and I thought how she and the love of her had come to me, in the purple Indian night—precious, swift, unexpected, like a break of glimmering sunlight after a leaden gray day—and there leapt into my heart with the terrific and incalculable aim of lightning, the blinding longing for complete possession—and deliberately I disentangled myself from the jumble of bitter emotions which had come to me through the thought she was a nautch, consecrated to Shiva Natarajah.

The whole revolution of feeling had only lasted a few seconds. I said to myself that love— real love—has no time to consider and weigh the patterned dictates of abstract morality. Mine own life to make or to mar—and I considered that I would rather mar my life through love than make it through clammy indifference!

Temple girl or no temple girl, it was up to me to get her out of that building, out of the Colootallah, out of whatever shame and misery and disgrace life had meant to her before I had seen her for the first time, back there on the rooftop at the end of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully.

This time I had no choice of directions, for there was only one door out of the temple. Should I pick her up and step into the unknown? No—I decided the next moment—instead of carrying her, and thus burdening and slowing my progress, it would be better for me to scout ahead, to hunt about until I had discovered an avenue of escape.

When I had found that, I would come back to her and carry her to safety.

But there was the chance that the two Hindu watchmen on the roof-top might give up their fruitless search and come into this room. Too, there was the possibility of some Brahman priest entering the temple to attend to some of his sacerdotal duties. I would have to hide the girl.

But where? Remember, the room was empty of furniture and ornaments. I went the round of the walls, hunting for a closet, but found none. There was only the incense burner, and the huge idol of Shiva Nataajiht, the latter standing fairly close to the wall.

I walked around it more or less aimlessly.

and then I made a discovery quite an interesting discovery—discovery, too, with which, had I had time to use it for that purpose just then, I could have blown the thaumaturic reputation of that particular Hindu temple sky high.

I found that the lotus pedestal of the statue had an opening in the back; a sort of curved sliding door, three feet high and about seven broad, which was partly open. I stooped to investigate, and then I drew back in a hurry.

For sounds came from within. I suppose my nerves tingled a little, but you mustn’t forget that—though at the time the thought never entered my head; I was too busy—all the events of that mad night had been so unusual that I had really lost the common standards of judging and of fearing. So I let my nerves tingle all they wanted to, and I stooped down once more to discover the source and nature of those sounds.

The very next moment I knew, and I guess I was foolish enough to laugh. You see, the sounds which came from the inside of the pedestal were really quite peaceful and prosaic; they might have happened in quiet old Boston, for that matter.

Somebody in there was snoring—in a fat, contented, elderly way!

So I pushed the sliding-door to one side just as far as it would go. I looked, and sure enough, there, comfortably curled up on a litter of rugs and pillows and shawls. I saw the dim form of a portly Brahman priest sleeping with his mouth wide open, his curly white beard moving rhythmically up and down with the intake of his breath. Not a bad-looking old gentleman—quite peaceful and dignified. But that didn’t help him any just then; for here was the ideal hiding-place for my Daughter of Heaven.

I drew my knife, poised it neatly over his heart, and jerked him awake. “Keep quiet—- perfectly quiet!” I whispered to him. very much like a black-mustached villain in an old-fashioned melodrama. At the same moment he stirred, opened his eyes, heard my warning, he saw the Bowie—saw the point of it, if you will forgive my wretched pun—and, obeying my instructions, he rose and came out of the pedestal, a very incarnation of outraged, elderly pomposity Gosh, but that Brahman looked mad!

So far so good—here was a cozy little nest for my love—but what was I to do with Old Pomposity?

“What shall I do with you?” I finally asked him direct, and he replied with a stream of lowpitched and extremely foul abuse. That did not help any—neither him nor me nor the girl—and so, after considering a few seconds, I narrowed my question down to a choice of two things. I asked him, quite civilly and good-naturedly—I bore him no personal grudge, you see—what he preferred: to be killed outright, or to go down to the snake. Pretty tough on his nibs; but what could I do?. I needed the hollow pedestal, and I couldn’t afford to leave a live witness behind.

But he couldn’t see it my way, naturally. He threatened and cajoled and argued. He cursed me, my ancestors, my posterity, and my cow in the name of a dozen assorted Hindu deities—in the name of Vishnu and Shiva, Indra, Varuna, Agni, Surya, Chandra, Yama, Kamadeva, Ganesha, and what not! He had a surprising knowledge of Puranic theology; but finally he decided in favor of the snake! I could understand his choice; since he doubtless was the priest in charge of the temple, and thus sure to be on more or less friendly terms with the wiggly old reptile at the feet of Natarajah.

“All right—just as you wish,” I replied; and just for luck—also to make him a little more easy to handle—I fetched him a good hard blow on the side of the head which stretched him unconscious, gagged and tied him securely with some of the shawls from his couch, shoved him down into the cobra’s den, and pushed the stone slab shut.

Then I investigated the interior of the lotus pedestal. It was big enough to afford sitting and sleeping space to an average-sized human being, and—here is the discovery of which I told you, the discovery which would have raised no end of a row in orthodox Hindu theological circles—I saw that the statue was hollow, and that it could be reached by the occupant of the pedestal.

What for? Why? How? Why, old man, the day of miracles may have passed in the West— with biology and motor-cars and aeroplanes, and all that—hut not so in the eternal East! For there, handy to the occupant of the pedestal, was an assortment of ropes and levers and handles and pulleys which were connected with the different parts of Shiva Natarajah’s sacred anatomy. Push a lever here, pull a rope there—I tried it, you see— and the idol would lift a leg or wave one of his four arms or wag his beastly old head. There was even one bit of machinery—it was rather rusty and hard to move, as though it hadn’t been used for a long time—which allowed the whole statue, pedestal included, to move forward across the room—a very ingenious bit of machinery, a combination system of wheels and gliding planes—and the very thing for a smashing, twenty-four-carat miracle!

But the only miracle which mattered to me just then was the fact that, through a twist and jerk of Fate, I had come to Ibra him Khan’s Gully-and to the little Hindu girl. I picked her up and put her inside the pedestal, leaving the sliding-door slightly aslant to give her breathing space.

By ginger—Stephen Denton gave an embarrassed little smile—she looked pretty in there on that soft mass of pillows and shawls, and the dim light about her like a veil. You know those lines by Rabindranath Tagore, don’t you?

When ruddy lips blossom into smiles, black eyes pass stolen glances, Then it is the season, my poet, to make a bonfire of your verses.

And weave only heart with heart and hand with hand.

Oh, well— I bent down and kissed the little soft mouth—unconscious she was, and her thoughts dream-veiled, but there was something like an answering quiver on her lips as I touched them with mine—I crossed the width of the temple, opened the door, and stepped out on a corridor, bright-lit with swinging yellow lamps. It was really more than a corridor—more like a long hall, very high, with a vaulted ceiling—and, compared to the slime of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, compared to the oppressive gray reek and misery of the Colootallah compared even to the dignified bareness the temple, it seemed incongruous startling in its utter magnificence—as if it had been flung there, In the heart of that drab, twisted maze of buildings, to echo to the footsteps of—of what and whom?

You see, old man, right then I wondered. I was a little disturbed—with the dim terror of something awfully remote from and awfully inimical to my personality, my race, my life as it had been heretofore. For Roos-Keppel had told me—oh, a whole lot. He had told me how, in the days when he was still In the Bengal Civil Service, he had tracked one of the Indian seditionist secret societies—“Hail, Motherland!” it called itself straight down into the caste labyrinth of assassins and thieves and thugs and criminals of all sorts; how, in fact, the Babu gentry of the Hail, Motherland! had made a hard and fast alliance with the criminal castes, had fraternized with them in life, and in worship, and in death, both fighting the same enemy: the established government, the British raj. And this—all this—why, don’t you see? The temple of Shiva, god of high castes, here, in the heart of the low-caste Colootallah—the rattle and crackle of naked steel on the roof-top; and remember that the law against carrying and possessing weapons is as strictly enforced in Calcutta as the Sullivan Law in New York; and, then, as a final proof, it seemed to me, the dazzling, extravagant splendor of this corridor, this long, tall hall!

Up to a height of seven feet the walls were covered with stucco, white on white, ivory and snowy enamel skillfully blended with shiny-white lac, and overlaid with a silver-threaded spider’s web of arabesques, at exquisite as the finest Mechlin lace, and, of Sanskrit quotations in the deva-nagari script.

I reconstructed all this later on, in my memory, after—Stephen Denton pointed about the room—India had become part of my life, my whole life. The upper part of the walls above the white stucco, was a procession, a panorama of conventionalized Hindu fresco paintings—an epitome, a résumé of all Hindustan’s myths and faiths and legends and superstition’s, from the Chhadanta Jataka, the birth-story of the Sixtusked Elephant, most beautiful of all Buddhistic legends, to the ancient tale of Kaliya Damana, which tells how Krishna overcame the hydra Kaliya; from color-blazing designs picturing Rama, Sita, and Lakshman meditating in their forest exile, to a representation of Bhagirstha imploring Shiva to permit the Ganges to fall to the earth from his matted locks.

The tale of a nation’s life, a nation’s civilization and faith—yes, and crimes and virtues and sufferings, here in front of me, and the thought came over me—a true thought, I discovered afterward—that never white man had seen the like before, and I felt like an intruder, I had a faint feeling of misgiving. But what could I do? It was Hobson’s choice! I had to walk on!

So I moved along rapidly, down that everlasting corridor with all India’s gods jeering at me from the wall paintings, and looking left and right for a door, a window, or some other avenue of escape, at least of progress—when, very suddenly, I was startled into complete immobility—into a stark immobility of utter horror.

Directly in front of me, the corridor came to an end—or rather it broadened out, swept out into a circular hall—quite an impressive affair, the walls covered with slabs of the delicate, extravagant Indian stone carving that looks like sculptured embroidery, with splendid furniture of carved, black shishan wood, a profusion of enameled silver ornaments, and the floor covered with huge, squares of that white embroidery which the people hereabouts call chikam.

Of course, I didn’t see all that at first—took it in more gradually, for I told you that I was— oh—crushed under a sudden weight of gray, breath-clogging horror, and, in such moments of overwhelming emotion, the eyes search too eagerly, too furiously, to see properly at all; too, the light was flickering—shooting in curly, wavering streams from a swinging lamp and sending out shadows which ran about the walls and the ceiling like running water.

Stephen Denton leaned forward in his chair.

Tell me, have you ever felt the fascination of utter horror? Have you ever had a dream in which everything around you—the inanimate objects even—assume I shifting, wavering forms and loom about I you—bending and twisting and stretching toward you like cruel, misshapen arms? Have you ever feared Fear itself?

The thing which stirred me so profoundly? Yes, yes—I am coming to that—and I guess you’ll be disappointed.

For it was only a face.

Only a face—and yet—why, if I should try to tell you what I felt, what I really felt, I would involve myself in a maze of contradictions. There are some nervous reactions for which there are no words in our language: and, anyway. I survived it—that as well as what came after. I am sitting here now, across from you, talking to you—and up-stairs-—

Never mind. You’re getting impatient. Let me get back to my tale—