The Mating of the Blades/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
Telling how Romance comes to those who accept it, asking no questions, and how a grown man returns to life, as a newborn child.
The very next moment, with startling suddenness, Hector passed from the stage of boyish, awkward, rather petty embarrassment to one of tremendous, voiceless excitement.
Not for the slightest fraction of a second did he lose his grip on his natural, perceptive faculties, did he forget his sober English commonsense. On the contrary, straight through, his five senses worked harmoniously together. Even while his eyes saw on a low taboret not far from him the ancient blade which had been his “Open Sesame!” ever since he had left the house of his ancestors, while his hand, almost automatically, picked it up and returned it to his pocket, his brain flashed the message that he should ask this tiny, picturesque bit of Oriental womanhood bluntly to tell him what she meant by her mysterious words.
Already his lips had shaped the query: “What do you …?” when, instantaneously, an abstruse something in his soul surged up and submerged the tail end of his sentence in a bizarre, yet deliberate decision, realization rather, that he must accept whatever Fate had in store for him unquestioningly.
He bowed low before the princess.
“I, too, have waited long,” he said, “waited long for the wooing of swords!”
And, strangely, incongruously, though at the time there was no sense to him in his own words, he felt, he knew, that he was not telling a lie, that he was not acting a part, that a hidden, yet enormously vital element of his inner consciousness had dictated the words—out of a terribly intense, terribly ancient, terribly prolonged yearning.
Neither then, nor during the baroque, twisted adventures of the weeks to come, did he stop to analyze why thus, without a question, without a concise doubt, without a demand for explanation, without natural, normal curiosity even, he bowed his head before this strange Fate that had come to him out of the purple Indian night—with a young Oriental princess' soft kiss, with her dim words about Brother and Sister and the Wooing of Swords.
Later on, he would try to explain it out of existence by saying that the romance, the flaming spirit of the moment, had carried him away as the wind carries away brittle leaves; that his old life was dead, that here beckoned the cresset of a new life which he must follow, untrammeled by the past, untrammeled even by the desires and doubts and natural reactions of the past.
And this attempt at explanation was palpably wrong; was the bitter fruit of his racial English inhibition to be as logical and inquisitive and truth-seeking in psychic, as he was in mental and physical, matters. Had it not been for this racial inhibition, this artificial, typically Anglo-Saxon restraint, he would have told himself that, the very moment he saw Aziza Nurmahal, the very moment he heard her fantastic, incongruous greeting, the impression came to him that he had lived through all this before and that the answer to it was not in the princess' life, not in his own, not in any one individual's puny, negligible existence, but in the throbbing, eternal life of Asia.
He would have told himself that which, sub-psychically, he knew to be the truth: namely, that this Asia was not a mere Continent, steaming and flaunting and sweating beneath the coppery sun of the tropics, not a mere geographical or political term, but a Being; a giant Being, with pulses and feelings and motley ambitions of its own; and that he, Hector Wade, Englishman out of Sussex, and reputed card-cheater, was an integral part of this Being.
Thus his subconscious thoughts, those thoughts which he was ashamed to shape even in the secrecy and close intimacy of his own soul; while the princess clapped her hands and, a moment later, a tall, elderly Moslem, green turbaned, simply dressed, came into the room. There was something about him, less an actual, physical resemblance, than in his easy charm of manner and the strange, attractive mingling of kindliness and shrewdness that glistened in his eyes and played about his lips, which reminded Hector of Ali Yusuf Khan.
Aziza Nurmahal ran up to him, and took both his hands in hers.
“The saheb has decided, Mehmet Iddrissy Khan,” she said, vivaciously, joyously. “He, too, has waited long for the wooing of swords!”
She turned to the Englishman as if asking him to confirm her words, and the latter suppressed a grim, sardonic smile.
The wooing of swords—he thought to himself—rather like some dashed Greek tragedy chorus, and about as intelligible to him, chiefly considering that he had never been exactly tophole at the classics!
But, what reason did he have to vent his mocking, unhappy humor on these people, who trusted him, surely trusted him, since they had let him, the saheb, the Christian, the foreigner, who was an outcast from his own land, into the jealously guarded intimacy of their Oriental household—and at night—with no credentials except an ancient weapon with a blurred, golden pattern on hilt and blade? And there was something so anxiously appealing in the girl's hooded, sable eyes, something so pathetically expectant in Mehmet Iddrissy Khan's shrewd, gray, gold-flecked eyes, and, finally, something in his own soul, so abstrusely compelling and jubilantly reckless, that his spoken words gave no inkling of the ironic thoughts that had flashed through his mind.
“Yes!” he said, looking straight at the others.
And he added, in purring, gliding Persian metaphor, in that cannily hyperbolic manner dear to turbaned and maddeningly annoying to hatted humanity:
“What I could not find in the written book, the blade whispered to me. My eyes were red and swollen with the revel of pain and despair, my soul was a bloated and useless thing, my life a blackened crucible—but the blade flashed free, and I heard the muffled, sobbing drums of victory!”
“Rather neatly turned, that!” he said to himself, with a fleeting recurrence to his disturbing, saturnine mood, while Mehmet Iddrissy Khan raised lean, brown hands.
“Praise Allah!” he said, sonorously. “Praised be Allah, the Just, the All-Seeing, the All-Powerful, the King of the Day of Judgment, the Holder of the Scales of Mercy and of Wisdom with the Strength of His Hands, the Opener of the Locks of Souls with the golden Keys of His Understanding!”—and, in that typically Oriental way which so distresses Europeans and which permits its possessor to pass rapidly, without jarring break and without the slightest feeling of ludicrousness or self-consciousness, from a gorgeously epic or religious height to the level, drab plane of constructive, logically reasoning practicability:
“Time presses, saheb. When wilt thou be ready to start for the North, for Central Asia?”
“To-night,” replied Hector, “this very minute,” thinking with bitter satisfaction that there was nothing West of the Howrah Bridge or East of Fort William to keep him in Calcutta except—yes!—he added in his mind, then with the spoken word:
“Passport! What about a passport? I talked to Rivet-Carnac to-day and …”
“Insh'allah!” Mehmet Iddrissy Khan cut through the sentence with a wagging, derisive thumb on which twinkled a great star sapphire.
“The little, little, little jackal howls,” he said, sententiously, metaphorically, “but—tell me—will my old buffalo die therefore?”
And, while Hector laughed at the simile and the princess looked from one of the two men to the other, smiling, very much with the satisfied air of a hostess who has introduced two congenial souls to each other, he continued:
“Doubtless Rivet-Carnac saheb is fifteen devils—and a pig. But we—we of the North …”
“We are sixteen pukka devils—without as much as the pig's smell!” softly interrupted Hector to whom the half forgotten lore of bazaar jests and bazaar quips and slang was returning with every minute.
“Good, by the teeth of God!” exclaimed the older man, hugging the Englishman to his thick chest. “Thou art a man after my own heart—a twister of words! A turner of neat phrases! And—an honest man! For only an honest man can twist words for the right purpose! Thou hast a good head on thy shoulders—”
"And a good head has a thousand hands,” suggested the princess.
“Rightly said, rejoicer of hearts! A thousand hands—and each bearing a gift or a sword for Tamerlanistan! But, to return to Rivet-Carnac, to return, by the same token, to the jackal—and the pig, there may be no passport for Hector Wade. Yet—what need will there be of passports and talk and babble of passports to a young prince of the Gengizkhani clan, returning to his own land, vouched for by myself, a respectable and wealthy man and a member of the Legislative Council of the Calcutta Municipality, decorated, deservedly, with the Star of the Indian Empire? A young prince, furthermore, who travels in the retinue of the ruling princess of Tamerlanistan! The jackal—and the pig—will bow their filth-scabbed necks. And the British Raj will also bow—for Central Asia is Central Asia …”
“And the Russian squints down from the North!” smiled Hector. “I understand!”
“As I knew thou wouldst! And now, follow me, young heart of my old heart, and”—running a sly hand over the other's flannel-clad shoulder—“we'll change these foreign clothes of yours into a dress more befitting a prince of the Gengizkhani.”
Three hours later, with the sudden young sun of the tropics splintering out of the east and all Calcutta awakening and sitting up to its daily round of abusing itself, the Government, and the weather. Hector Wade was sitting in a low victoria drawn by a brace of squealing, shaggy, rat-like, up-country ponies. He was dressed as became a rollicking, rich young Central Asian prince come to Calcutta to see the sights, to buy useless goods and, perchance, get drunk on foreign wine; from immense, black Persian lamb cap to yellow leather slippers with coquettishly upturned toes, from richly embroidered waistband, with the hilt of the ancient blade showing grimly above it, to open work silk socks in hopeful cerise, from the foppish sprig of rose-geranium behind his left ear to the great, flat-cut canary diamond that twinkled on his thumb. By his side sat the Princess Aziza Nurmahal in a traveling sari of gray- and green-striped muslin, the soft flower of her face “veiled against the inquisitive glances of this stinking Southland,” to quote Mehmet Iddrissy Khan who had bid them good-by on the threshold of his house in the Colootallah.
They were followed by another roomy carriage that held a dozen of the princess' chattering, giggling, betel chewing servants under the command of Mahsud Hakki, a huge, crimson-turbaned Nubian eunuch who performed his office with a great deal of pompous dignity and without the slightest sense of humor—which latter failing had no effect whatsoever on the servants, who talked to each other and, when the carriage pulled up at the railway station, to their mistress, with all the startling, democratic familiarity of the Orient; too, with all the primitive indelicacy in regard to matters physical of that same Orient.
Talking loudly and pointing shameless and decidedly grimy fingers, they mentioned, in Hector's plain hearing, that he—“Al Nakia” they called him and the Englishman hunted in vain through his Persian and Behari vocabulary to find what the word meant—would be a fairly good-looking man, only:
“Thy nose is too thin, like the rawhide whips the Tajik caravan men use to spank their lean camels' lean buttocks, and thy belly is like a flattened purse!” remarked a toothless, withered hag who had the princess' jewels in her care; while a grizzled, gnarled old Persian woman, who was entrusted with Aziza Nurmahal's compact silver-and-enamel traveling water pipe, said, passionlessly, as one stating a fact known to all the world:
“If, when I was young and my heart had never a crack, a man such as thou, Al Nakia, had whispered words of passion in my ear, I would have told him to first fill his gullet with rich meats, and then I would have said to him …”—something decidedly improper which sent everybody, including the princess and half-a-dozen stray Calcutta natives of various castes and complexions, into fits of riotous, Asiatic laughter; and Hector himself joined—was rather glad of it, in fact, for it proved that these people had accepted him as one of their own, that to them he was not the saheb who must be kowtowed to in public and cruelly, mercilessly derided and parodied in private.
Then a wave of excitement, inside the station, while they squabbled with the railway porters and guards and ticket punchers over baggage and ice and bedding and hubble-bubbles and baskets of food and goglets of water and a number of mysterious, strongly scented packages, which the railway officials declared could under no circumstances be stowed away into the “te-rain, the valuable property of the honorable saheb-log's railway company—no, no!—under no conditions whatsoever!” while the Tamerlani servants swore by all the Saints of Shia Islam and by a variety of rather more worldly oaths that, come what may, everything would be stowed away where they could see it.
“For we know well you thieving, lousy Southern piglings—you eaters of unclean abominations—you cursed worshipers of a flower and a ring-tailed monkey! You could steal food from between our lips, and our insides would be none the wiser! Away, spawn of leprous gutter rats, indelicate, especially unbeautiful, and lacking in refinement! This is a princess from the North traveling in state with her own people—a pukka princess—and not a sniveling, unimportant Maharanee from the South. Away!”
“It is against regulation seventeen, paragraph eight!” cried a Babu railway clerk, brown faced, agate eyed, very fat and oily, and clad in white gauze which, considering his fantastic bodily contours, gave him a grotesque and not at all decent appearance. “Regulation says that …”
And he was promptly and vituperatively told what to do with the regulation, with the book which included it, the saheb who had written it; and when, in a magnificent flight of Bengali imagination, the Babu swore by Shiva and Vishnu and Brahm that the Viceroy himself insisted on this particular rule in regard to baggage being carried cut to the letter, the keeper of the princess' jewels told him, in a stage whisper, that, the very next time she came to Calcutta, she would call on the Viceroy and make him eat stick!
Hector, meanwhile, had been talking to Aziza Nurmahal who, in answer to his question, replied that Al Nakia was a Tartar word, the aboriginal language of Tamerlanistan, and that it meant “The Expected.”
“Expected—by whom?” puzzled Hector.
“But surely thou knowest—why—” She seemed a little surprised. “Expected—according to the ancient prophecy! Expected—to seal the wooing of swords!”
“More mystifying, unintelligible wooing of swords stuff!” thought Hector, while the princess complicated matters yet more by saying:
“These servants can be trusted. They were my father's slaves. They know all about thy blade”—touching its hilt where it protruded from Hector's waist shawl—“and, too, about the other blade!”
“The other blade!” thought Hector. “As if this one wasn't enough.”
Then, with a loud voice:
“One thing is sure. I shall have to stop this incipient racial war if we intend to take the train.”
He gave a few rapid, decisive orders to both the railway officials and the servants. The latter triumphantly piled all the baggage, including a screeching, mangy parrot in a rickety bamboo cage which the pipe woman had bought the last moment from a grinning, splay-footed jungly-Bhil, into a first-class compartment, very much to the disgust of its occupant, a majestic Anglo-Indian lady with a Wellingtonian beak who decided to write a letter about it to the Times of India as soon as she reached her husband's hill station. Everybody went aboard, the princess in one compartment with one woman servant and the eunuch who, immediately, pulled down the rattan window shades tight, the rest of the servants in a second compartment, and Hector himself in a third, alone but for the company of one of the princess' people, a red-faced, stony-eyed Tartar who at once squatted on his haunches, at Hector's feet, stuffed his huge mouth full with finely cut pan and promptly fell asleep.
Fifteen minutes earlier, the Eurasian station master had shouted himself hoarse with:
“All aboard the te-rain—for Lahore, Rawalpindi, and the North!”
Fifteen times he had blown his shiny, official silver whistle.
Fifteen minutes it had taken to solve the quarrel between the railway people and the Tamerlani; fifteen more to rescue some of the former from the hands of a party of ruffianly, drunken Rajputs whom they had tried to overcharge.
And yet another fifteen minutes elapsed before the train finally got under way with a wheezy cough.
For this was India, this was the East, to whom all Time, including railway time tables, also including the eternities, is only a matter of yawn and stretch and shrug, and to whom hurry is an ungentlemanly pastime of Western barbarians.
On then, to the North!
Through the stark, swollen, heat-scorched yellowness of Bengal, with fleeting glimpses of blue-garbed natives tilling the fields and patient buffaloes turning the water wheels and once in a while a squat, shimmering city seen vaguely through the delicate tracery of the trees!
A night and a day and another night, during which Hector saw nothing of the princess who, since there were Christians and Hindus and Eurasians, foreigners all, aboard, was respecting the proper customs of purdah and harem, of veil and woman's seclusion under the Nubian's jealous eyes, but who sent him frequent, joyful, hopeful messages through the servants who brought him food … while the train rolled out into the Indian desert, between white, rush-tipped hillocks, with the fantastic, red granite mountains of Rajputana stabbing the far horizon with twisted peaks.
A strange land, a motley land, which Hector had not seen since he was a child. A land of too much color, gold and heliotrope and lake and purple, picked out with glaring white high lights, nicked with sulphur yellow and glaucous green, and edged with chocolate brown and luminous blues.
But Hector Wade had no eyes for the landscape. For—was it impulse? Was it instinct—or imagination?
He did not know. Did not even try to analyze.
He only knew that a great, portentous voice was calling to him across the distance, from the North beyond the snow-bound Afghan mountain passes, and it called with the language of the past—and the future … with the steely, swishing sob of crossing blades.
A puissant and compelling force surged through him. It came from the outside, springing, nevertheless, from something of which he was a living, throbbing part, suffusing him with deep, triumphant joy … and it was, suddenly, with an almost physical shock, that he realized how with every mile the West, England, his old life, his old interests, his old customs and reactions and prejudices, were slipping away from him … they—and Jane Warburton! The girl who was dearer to him than the dwelling of kings!
He loved her—and now he had lost her, for ever, and his heart was like a house without any light, where his desires and passions wandered about, like lonely children lost in the dark …
“Next stop Rawalpindi!” came the Eurasian railway guard's strident voice. “Change trains there for Peshawar and the North!”
Oh, well—Hector shrugged his shoulders, as if already the fatalistic East had submerged his soul—it had to be.
His old life was dead, and his new life had begun. And it must be untrammeled—by the past, the likes and dislikes, the endeavors and ambitions of the past.
Untrammeled even by—the love of the past?
No, no! His love could never be of the past. It was of the present, the future, all shoreless eternity. His love was a living thing, would ever be a living thing, come what may.
Why, he couldn't do without Jane. She was the breath of life itself to him and …
Hector Wade kicked himself in the shin.
“I am a silly ass,” he remarked, at a little wayside station, to a crimson necked vulture that was sitting on a low wall, flopping its dirt-gray wings and making improper noises in its scrawny throat. “Hector Wade is dead and forgotten. There is only Al Nakia left!”
“Al Nakia!”
He repeated the word aloud, and the Tartar servant sat up and rubbed his sleepy eyes.
“Didst thou call, my lord?” he asked.