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, and 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 low-pitched 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. Then I 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—but 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 Ibrahim Khan’s Gully—in a low voice 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 superstitions, from the Chadanta Jataka, the birth-story of the Six-tusked 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 over
whelming 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 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 upstairs—
Never mind. You’re getting impatient. Let me get back to my tale—
CHAPTER VI.
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 doubtless 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, 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 a
t 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-and-that”—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.
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 10
