The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  Whatever the psychical reason, the physical was clear. The whole thing had happened and passed in a moment. The jarring noise—the realization that the muslin had saved our lives—then silence.

  Again I looked at the ceiling, at the trees. They could not work past the minute obstacle. And I thanked God—and then I bent once more over the girl, to continue my interrupted kiss, and at the same moment she gave a little sob and opened her eyes.

  I guess she must have recognized me immediately. She must have remembered the scene on the roof-top. For she wasn’t a bit frightened. She just looked at me and smiled, and then, in a few rapid words, I told her what had happened—from the moment the old ruffian on the roof-top had struck her the glancing blow to the moment when I had come to this room, her unconscious form in my arms.

  I did not tell her about the trees, about this devil’s devising of a room. For I loved her, don’t you see, I did not want to worry her, and, momentarily at least, we were safe. Also—and I know you’ll think me mad—when I saw her open her eyes—when I saw that soft, sweet expression in her face as she looked at me and recognized me, the idea, the thought—no!—the all-fired, eternal conviction came to me that God was in His Heavens after all—that I bore the Charmed Life—that, somehow, we would get out of this room, this house, this maze of buildings—out of the Colootallah!

  So I told her everything up to the moment when I had crossed the threshold when I had stretched her beneath the trees, and I wound up with a few simple words.

  Stephen Denton blushed a little.

  What were those words? Can’t you guess them? They were the same words which are spoken in every known and unknown language, a million times each day, in every country, in every city and village.

  I said: “I love you! Will you be my wife?”

  And she replied in English, in soft, beautiful English: “Would you marry a dancing-girl, a nautch, sahib?”

  “You bet your life!” I replied, with ringing conviction in my voice. “I’d marry you if you were—”

  “The Lady Padmavati?” she interrupted me, mockingly, and then I remembered how I had heard that same name whispered through the hollow tiles at the feet of the mummy. I remembered the sensation, the utter amazement, which the mentioning of that name had caused.

  Still, “the Lady Padmavati” meant nothing to me, and so I asked her straight out who she was, and she told me.

  I guess you know, Stephen Denton continued; you must have read about it in the newspapers, how one of the Hindu revolutionary secret societies had been trying to bully the Raja of Nagapore into joining their ranks, or, at least, contributing a handsome bunch of money: how the Raja—very pro-British he—had refused, and how his only child, a daughter, had been kidnapped. Well, to make a long story short, Padmavati was the daughter of the Raja of Nagapore. Those ruffians had stolen her and were training her for the temple worship of Shiva Natarajah.

  “And,” she wound up her tale, “I have made a vow that whoever rescues me him I shall—”

  The rest of her sentence was drowned in a loud, metallic noise. At the same moment was a rush of cool air. I looked up. The door had been flung wide open, and there round-eyed, utterly amazed, stood—my old friend, the Brahman!

  I doubt if it took me more than a hundredth part of a second to collect my thoughts, to realize my position. “Quick,” I whispered to the girl. She rose, catching my arm. We jumped across the threshold! He stood there, mute, and I laughed.

  “Miscalculated a little, didn’t you, you fat Brahman ruffian?” I asked in a low voice. “Told me to sit beneath the trees and meditate on Life and Death—and meanwhile you’d turn a crank and supply the latter, eh? All right—” Suddenly I grabbed him and pushed him into the steel room—he was quite limp—didn’t even fight—“now it’s your turn to meditate, and mine to move the crank, and I guarantee you there isn’t going to be any torn slip of muslin this time—inside of twenty minutes you’ll be as flat as a flounder!” And I scooted out of the room and shut the door. Of course, I had no intention of really crushing him to death—crafty, treacherous old beggar though he was—and though he had come back, doubtless, to have a good look at our flattened-out remains—the gory-minded Brahman gray-beard! But, after all, though India had crept into my blood, I was still an American, a Westerner. I could have killed him with knife or bullet, killed him outright, you see, without too much compunction. But to slowly squeeze him to death—oh, I couldn’t do it.

  And, too, don’t you see, old man, the whole thing was a bluff, anyway. How did I know where to go—how to find the crank or whatever it was which set the machinery into motion? I simply figured on the chance that the Brahman would be too badly scared to see through my bluff. And, to make it appear more real, I took out my Bowie-knife and scraped the door on the outside, to make him think the machinery was jarring and snapping into motion.

  Faintly, from within, I could hear his agonized moaning and sobbing.

  I felt Padmavati’s soft little hand on my arm. “But, dearest”—she whispered, and I understood, though she didn’t finish her sentence.

  “It’s all right, darling,” I returned. “I am not going to hurt Old Pomposity more than I have to. Don’t you worry about him!” and I continued scraping at the steel door until the moaning and sobbing had ceased. Then, very gently, I opened the door. I looked in.

  The Brahman had fallen in a dead faint. His light-brown face had turned ashen-gray.

  I shook him awake. He came out of his trance with a start. He clutched my legs, he kissed the hem of my robe, my hands, and whatever parts of my anatomy he could reach. “Sahib, Heaven-Born, Protector of the Pitiful!” he groaned. “In the name of the many true gods—do not—do not—”

  “All right!” I said, “I won’t, you obese fraud—but—”

  “Oh, Shining Pearl of Equity and Mercy!” he interrupted me with another outpouring of Oriental imagery. “Oh, Great King! Accept the vow of my gratitude! Hari bol! Krishna bol! Vishnu bol! Let the mighty gods be witnesses to my gratitude! May earth and life be to you as a wide and many-flowered road! May the clay of the holy river Vaiturani be rubbed on your body after your death—”

  “That’s exactly it!” I cut in. “After my death! And I don’t intend to die—and, if you are as grateful as I am inclined to believe from your protestations, show me a way out of here—quick!”

  He rose. Three times he bowed. Then he spoke, solemnly, “I will, Heaven-Born! Follow me!” and he turned to go.

  “Can I believe you this time?” I asked.

  “Courage is tried in war, sahib,” replied the Brahman; “integrity in the payment of debt and interest; friendship in distress; the faithfulness of a wife in the day of poverty; and a Brahman’s loyalty in the hour of death. Sahib, follow me!”

  And I did—arm in arm with the girl—for, somehow, I felt that the old priest was speaking the truth.

  So he led us through halls and rooms, up and down stairs worn hollow and slippery with the tread of naked feet, along corridors, on and on, with here and there a stop, a whispered word from the Brahman to keep perfectly quiet, a silken rustling of garments in some nearby room where people were still awake, with once in a while a hushed, distant voice, and twice the steely impact of a scabbard-tip bumping the stone flags as some unseen, prowling watchman of the night passed somewhere on his rounds; on and on we passed, and we never met a single human being. I hardly noticed the direction. For I was talking to Padmavati.

  She gave a low, throaty laugh. Just then we were passing through a long, dark hall.

  “Remember, sahib,” she asked, “what I was saying just before the priest opened the door? I did not finish the sentence. Let me finish it now. I said that I have made a vow that whoever rescues me, him I shall—”

  “You shall—marry!” I interrupted her, catching her in my arms and seeking her lips with mine.

  I believe, Stephen Denton continued after a short pause, that science holds it impossible to measure eternity. It
is the same thing with the great, deep joy—the huge, pulsing, bewildering elation which comes to man once—once in his life—when he loves, and when he feels that his love is returned. It is—oh, well, perhaps you know it yourself, perhaps you can fill in the details from your personal experience—the hot, exquisite knocking of the blood, the whispering rhythm of the dear, soft body you hold pressed against your own, the gigantic sounds of harmony which fill your soul—your sudden new, golden life as it seems to disentangle itself from the bunched, dark whole of humanity into a great, radiant simplicity.

  Love—the first minutes of true love—and you can’t measure them! At least I couldn’t—that night. I pressed Padmavati close against me; mechanically, I set foot before foot, following the priest; and then, a second later, we ascended a staircase which seemed vaguely familiar to me.

  The Brahman pushed open a door, we crossed a threshold—and there we were—

  Once more on the roof-top, with the moon slowly fading in the distant sky before the faint rose-blush of dawn!

  The Brahman walked straight up to the carved stone balustrade and pointed down at Ibrahim Khan’s Gully.

  “I have kept my word, sahib,” he said, “There is the street—a jump—the turning of a street corner or two—and you will find Park Street! You will find your own world, your own people!” He bowed, then he turned to the girl. “And you, Padmavati—great was the injustice done to you. You were carried away from the palace of your father! You were forced here, into this building, to learn how to dance before Shiva Natarajah! Yes, great was the injustice of it; and yet, can you wipe out blood with darkening blood? Will a wrong right a wrong?”

  “A wrong?” she asked. “What wrong?”

  “The sahib, Padmavati!” he replied. “You are following the sahib, a foreigner, a Christian, and you are—” he halted.

  “Yes,” she said after a short pause, “I am the Princess Padmavati. I am the daughter of the Maharajah of Nagapore. I am a Rathor of Kanauj, claiming kinship with the flame, and my mother is a Tomara of Delhi, claiming kinship with the sun! I am a descendant of the gods!” She drew up her little figure in a passion of pride. “My people have lived here—they have ruled this great land of Hindustan for over three thousand years! Never have we mixed our blood with the blood of foreigners! And yet—”

  “And yet—what?” anxiously asked the priest, and she continued with a low, silvery laugh.

  “And yet there is love, wise priest!” And she turned to me. “Jump, beloved,” she whispered, “jump—and I shall follow!”

  I jumped without waiting for another word—down into Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, landing safely on my feet. The next second her little lithe figure was balanced on the edge of the balustrade. I stretched my arms wide—she jumped—I caught her—just as the bell from the Presbyterian church in Old Court House Street tolled—binng-bunng—two o’clock!

  Yes, mused Stephen Denton, a descendant of the gods, she, the daughter of a race who ruled this land before history dawned on the rest of the world—and I, from Boston, with memories of the antimacassars, mild cocktails, Phi Beta Kappa, and—

  FRAMED AT THE BENEFACTORS CLUB

  CHAPTER I.

  WHERE THINGS HAPPEN.

  Acting on a headlong impulse, he called on Martyn Spencer. His motive was typical of Blaine Ogilvie’s character and life as he had lived it these last ten years, since he had left college. Marie Dillon, Spencer’s distant cousin, had told him of the latter’s return to New York, a few months back, after a decade spent away from America, and had given him his address.

  “Marie,” Ogilvie had said, “he’s the very man for me.”

  “To do what?”

  “To help me.”

  “Do you really need help as badly as all that?”

  Ogilvie wasn’t a very good liar. He tried his best, though.

  “Really, dear,” he said, “don’t you worry. I am all right. I—”

  “Please, Blaine! Be truthful with me! That’s our agreement, you know—the truth—always—be it pleasant or unpleasant.”

  Ogilvie sighed. “The truth is always unpleasant! Fact is—I am not starving yet!”

  “I don’t like that ‘yet.’”

  “Nor do I, Marie!” Ogilvie laughed. But, deep down, he was serious and just a little frightened. Life, financially, had not been kind to him of late. “That’s why I have to do something—something that pays. And, too, after we’re married, I don’t want you to wear summer hats all during the winter!”

  “Of course not,” she replied with a smile. “But why appeal to Spencer?”

  “Why not? I’ve tried all the men I know. But there isn’t a chance. Business is rotten, and they’re discharging people right and left. But Spencer was always a regular whirlwind at getting the coin. And he and I used to be friends.”

  “All right, dear, ask him. It can’t do any harm.”

  “Indeed not. Press your darling little thumb for me. D’you mind?”

  * * * *

  He found Martyn Spencer much the same man he had known at college: debonair, yet with an undertone of acrid sarcasm, quick of speech and repartée, yet curiously lumbering of gesture, direct in his opinions, yet at times with a queerly footling manner of commenting on life and life’s problems. This was the Spencer he had known at college, and this was the Spencer whom he saw again today, in his wainscoted, cigar-flavored office, on top of the Macdonald skyscraper. Now the man was surrounded by a perfect array of steel filing cabinets, safes, noiseless typewriters, switchboards, marceled stenographers, and relays of private secretaries in immaculate, sober, pin-striped worsted, with an almost episcopal unction of voice.

  The man’s face, too, was as it had always been: massive-jowled, dead white, and with an exaggerated beak of a nose, the smoke-blue eyes set close together beneath hooded, fleshy lids. If there was a change in him, Blaine Ogilvie did not notice it at first. Of course he had heard rumors about Spencer, but he had dismissed them. Not that he disliked gossip, since he had the average healthy male’s appetite for the intriguing cross sections and cross currents of conflicting personalities.

  But the rumors that had drifted through occasionally, via commercial traveler, returned globe-trotter or explorer, missionary on sabbatical leave, or rust-spotted freighter’s skipper, from the exotic lands where Spencer was said to be piling up a shocking total of millions, were both too grim and too fantastic for the prosy twentieth century. Romance in business had died with Dutch patroons and Spanish privateers, Ogilvie used to say, and he would dismiss the tales with an incredulous laugh, as did the rest of New York that had known Martyn Spencer in the old days.

  Ogilvie laughed now at the very thought.

  Spencer had always been congenitally a money getter, nothing else, even at college. He seemed to have reached the height of his ambition. The man breathed moneyed success, a very surfeit of it.

  Ogilvie, who had announced his coming over the telephone, had been civilly inspected and scrutinized by the private secretary in the outer office, by another private secretary—the first’s twin brother as to well-cut clothes, pompadoured hair, and straw-colored mustache—in the inner office, and then Martyn Spencer greeted him with a hearty handshake and a fat, crimson-and-gold banded Havana.

  “Ten years since we have seen each other, eh, Blaine?” he asked.

  “Every day of it, Martyn!”

  A rapid gathering-up of broken threads and college gossip, inquiries, as perfunctorily polite as perfunctorily answered, about the fortunes, marriages, and divorces of Tom “This” and Mabel “That” followed. Then suddenly, characteristically, Ogilvie came to the point.

  “Martyn,” he said, “I want a job.”

  “Why?”

  “Simplest reason in the world. I need it.”

  “Broke?”

  “Well—bent all out of shape! Don’t you need a handsome, industrious, and intelligent junior partner—or office boy?”

  “I don’t need as much as a scrubwoman.”r />
  “I beg your pardon!” Ogilvie said stiffly.

  “Come, come. Don’t fly off the handle. I am sorry, but honestly I don’t need anybody.”

  “Seem to have a lot of affairs here?” Ogilvie pointed through the glass partition at the humming outside office.

  “Affairs is right, but I am winding them up. I am going to retire from business.”

  “Rather young to do that, aren’t you?”

  “At times I feel seven years older than the hills!” Spencer passed a pudgy hand across his round, dead-white face. The hand trembled a little.

  The other rose. “Sorry I bothered you, old man.”

  “Don’t go yet. Perhaps I can help you.”

  “I wish you would. Really—I need it.”

  “What sort of a job do you want?”

  “Anything—anywhere—where I can earn a decent living.”

  “What do you know? What can you do?”

  “I’ve been to war. I can drill a company and—”

  “I know, I know!” Spencer interrupted impatiently. “You can kill people according to the most scientific and up-to-date methods. But there’s nothing to that. The world is still groggy. That last round lasted too long. What else do you know?”

  “I have a smattering of languages—French, German, Spanish—”

  “Which means that you can order a dinner without precipitating a riot between the Alsatian chef and the Polish head waiter, and that you can get the point of a joke in a French comic paper. Nothing to that. One can get any number of bright young Europeans at eighteen per, who can stenog and talk fluently in half a dozen languages. What else can you do?” he continued inexorably.

  Ogilvie considered for quite a while.

  “I am reckless,” he replied.

  “Hardly a paying quantity. What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well—marry money.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve an aunt in Chicago who’ll introduce you to the right sort of girl. Marrying off people is her particular avocation.”