Hussein

by Patrick O'Brian

  He knew enough about the snakes by now to be able to give a creditable performance with them, so that even if his story-telling did not go well, he would have still something to do.

  There was a Sikh soldier in the carriage, and he told Hussein that his regiment was about to march from Lahore in a few days’ time to relieve another regiment on the North-West Frontier garrisons.

  Hussein decided to follow the regiment, travelling as he and his master had often done, in the baggage-train.

  Nine

  The road seemed endless: the regiment’s band played in front, and behind, in a dense cloud of dust, tramped the native followers. Hussein, luckier than most, sat in a bullock cart trying to piece together a tale in his own mind to tell in the evening.

  He referred again and again to Abd’Arahman’s book, but it consisted mostly of anecdotes and jests, none of them long enough for a story that was to earn him his bed and his supper, to say nothing of food for the cobras. If it came to the worst they would always be satisfied with a few mice, but he liked to give Vakrishna something better. Indeed, he had become quite attached to the snake, and he carried Vakrishna, as Feroze Khan had done, about his waist, or sometimes hanging limply round his neck, like a singular necklace.

  Very slowly the sun sank from noon-height to the horizon: then quite suddenly it seemed it vanished and only the after-glow remained. As the sky darkened to purple, the tents of the regiment sprang up like mushrooms, and fires blazed.

  Still the story refused to form itself in Hussein’s mind, so he waited until the soldiers had fed, and then went round to the officers’ quarters. He knew that he could only do this once in each march, for no one would pay to see the same thing twice in the course of a few weeks. Nevertheless the story refused to come, and he wanted some money; so having corrupted the colonel’s khitmutgar in the usual way, he set down his baskets and began.

  All went well, particularly the way in which Vakrishna cunningly writhed in the sand. At the end, one of the officers — a very young one — asked whether Hussein could do the rope trick.

  ‘By all means, Sahib,’ replied Hussein, with an eye to the main chance, ‘but I should have to be provided with three chickens, a long rope made from swal, and a small basket with tobacco in it.’

  ‘But why on earth the chickens and the tobacco?’

  ‘Ah, Huzoor, that is a mystery that I may not reveal.’

  ‘Are you sure you could do it if you had these things? And would you be photographed doing it?’

  ‘Is there a moon in the sky, Sahib? I am the pupil of no less a one than Garwhal Ali, who could vanish at will. A paltry seven rupees would buy these things, and I would not ask any payment, trusting to your Honour’s generosity alone.’

  ‘Well, here are your seven rupees: come round to my tent at noon halt to-morrow.’

  ‘The blessing of the Prophet on your house, Huzoor; may your wife bear you seven tall sons and seven daughters like peris.’

  None of the other officers spoke: everyone has to learn about the rope trick: no one will ever be persuaded that it does not exist.

  Hussein salaamed to the ground, and gathered up his belongings: in the shade he met the khitmutgar again. This worthy man’s hand was outstretched. Hussein sighed, and placed a rupee in it, then he vanished into the night. He got a lift in a peasant’s cart and by morning he was in Agra again, a day’s march from the regiment.

  In Agra he found that there was a sort of union among the story-tellers. Feroze Khan had belonged to it, but Hussein did not, and when he had told a tale in the market-place, he found himself surrounded by about a dozen men, all demanding how he had dared to encroach upon their preserves. They were only pacified by the whole of the contents of Hussein’s bowl, but then they told him that he could become a member of their guild.

  He went with them to a house, where several other story-tellers and snake-charmers were gathered. He found that it was the custom of the guild that each member should tell his best tale and give it for the free use of the other members.

  They fed — remarkably richly, too — and then two men who had just come from Mecca, where they had made the hadj, told two of the best stories that they had heard in their pilgrimage. After they had done, Hussein was told to tell his tale.

  He knew that he could not use one of Feroze Khan’s, as they would be sure to know it, and for a little time his invention quite left him. Suddenly he thought of Vakrishna, and the curious way in which he had been stolen, so he told it as a story, with a great deal of embroidery: sometimes he strayed into pure fiction, but on the whole he kept to the main facts that the old man had told him.

  When he had done, he produced the white cobra, adding: ‘And here is the proof.’

  ‘Shabash!’ cried the story-tellers, and they gave him mint tea.

  He learnt a great deal about the ways in which the guild forced alien story-tellers out of their own territory, and how they spread their tales, of which there were a very great number, some of which had been in circulation since time immemorial.

  From Agra Hussein went south again in the train of another regiment. He made his way quite well for a time by telling his stories and by snake-charming, and then he heard from Abd’Arahman, who wrote to tell him the news of Haiderabad. The letter, with which was enclosed one from Sashiya, filled him with a great longing for Haiderabad, and the familiar things which he missed.

  Within a month he was in Haiderabad again, having walked nearly all the way. He found the old letter-writer in his accustomed place in the bazaar, and he sat before him. Until Hussein spoke, the old man did not recognise him, for wandering up and down had made him look considerably older; moreover, he was dressed as one from the north. Abd’Arahman was overjoyed to see him, and wept the easy tears of old age. When they had finished their greetings, Hussein asked whether the old man had seen Sashiya recently.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I saw her three days ago; she said that she had been dreaming of your return.’

  Later Hussein sought out the old woman who sold herbs, and charged her with a message for Sashiya. Then he wandered out of the town towards the elephant lines; to his great surprise, Hussein found that there was no one left there whom he had known. New elephants and new mahouts had taken possession; one of the mahouts told him that they had replaced the previous occupants a few weeks ago, and that the other elephants had gone to Sivapore, where there was work for them. Hussein went disconsolately back to the town and killed time until sundown, when he could see Sashiya. As he was wandering through one of the bazaars, a small boy touched him on the arm. Hussein turned; it was the fakir’s boy.

  ‘What will you give me', said the boy, ‘if I tell you something very important to you?’

  ‘Tell me, and then I may reward you.’

  ‘You must pay first. Let it be a rupee.’

  ‘Here are two pice; what is it?’

  ‘One more, and I will tell you.’

  ‘Very well, shaitan-ka-butcha, but it will be an unfortunate day for you if it is not important.’

  ‘It is. Three Pathans have been following you for the last hour. Do not look round, but pretend to abuse me, and walk on.’

  Hussein felt a cold shiver go down his back; he cursed the boy exhaustively, and walked slowly on, keeping always among the crowded streets.

  He made towards the Krishnavi bazaar, and he saw Abd’Arahman sitting at his desk. He made a sign to the old man to follow him, but the letter-writer did not grasp it at first. Hussein had to walk three times past him before the old man understood. They walked among the crowds together for some time, and then Hussein very quickly turned into an eating-house, where there were many people. As they sat over their coffee Hussein told the old man what the boy had told him.

  ‘You must not be in this town at night-fall,’ said the old man, much perturbed. ‘I myself will tell Sashiya what has happened, and you will go by a train to some other place, and wait until it is safe to return.’

  Just then se
veral men came in, and one of them stumbled over Hussein’s foot; he fell, and arose full of oaths. He hit at Hussein, and tried to catch his turban. Two other men joined in the outcry, and closed round Hussein. There was a glint of steel, and Hussein fell to the ground with a scream. The three men ran from the eating-house, and were swallowed up in the crowd.

  They picked up Hussein, and endeavoured to restore him. In a little while he opened his eyes and swore. The knife had not gone very deep; it had been partially checked by the coiled body of Vakrishna.

  Hussein sat up, and felt for the cobra; it was limp, and when he pulled Vakrishna out from beneath the folds of his clothes, the snake was dead.

  Abd’Arahman bound up Hussein’s wound with a strip of his turban, and after a little while they were able to go on. The knife, after it had gone through the snake, had glanced against Hussein’s shoulder-blade, and although it had made an ugly wound, it had not gone deep.

  They went slowly towards the station, and sat among the crowds in the waiting-rooms for a long while. Then Hussein asked the old man to go to the fakir’s hut and bring back the boy. When the boy arrived, Hussein gave him the limp body of Vakrishna, and told him that if it were discovered in the bed of the head of the family of the late Kadir Baksh, Abd’Arahman would give him a rupee. This would be a very fine counter-attack, as a dead snake in one’s bed is an incredibly unlucky thing.

  The boy went, and they discussed where Hussein should go. ‘If I go to Sivapore I shall find many of the mahouts who know me,’ said Hussein, ‘and perhaps they will help me until I am able to go about my ways again.’

  Three days later Hussein was there, and in the elephant lines he found many of his old friends, and they, for the sake of their craft, kept him for that length of time that his wound took to heal. To his great disappointment Hussein did not find Jehangir among the elephants for three of them had been drafted away to the north, and Jehangir was among them. The talk ran that they were joining the baggage-train of the Sixth Dogras at Panilat, so Hussein, with what little money he had left, and with that which his friends gave him, journeyed thither.

  In the train, however, Hussein became very ill, and they carried him off the train at a small village, where he lay in the waiting-room for some time. A wandering sanyassi chanced to be there also; he was a man whom Hussein had encountered when he had been with Feroze Khan in Peshawar. This man was also a snake-charmer, or rather, he added snake-charming to his general equipment as a jadoo-wallah. Finding that Hussein’s impedimenta consisted largely of a snake-basket, he became interested, and stayed by him until he was well. Hussein was very hardy, and he threw off the fever in about six hours, and the sanyassi applied certain herbs to his wound that did it a great deal of good, more especially as they were accompanied by various charms.

  For a week Hussein was fairly ill, but the sanyassi and he managed to acquire a good deal of nourishment at the expense of the faithful and devout, so at the end of that time they were able to take the road again. Hussein had lost track of the Dogra regiment in whose train were the elephants, so he went on with the sanyassi towards the hills. They parted at Sihkri, because the sanyassi encountered a band of holy men who were going to Benares, and he wished to go with them, but Hussein did not. Hussein bought a number of trained snakes and a mongoose from the sanyassi, and went on his way towards the hills.

  The mongoose was called Jellaludin, on account of his whiskers; he was both fat and lazy, but he was an amiable beast, and Hussein became quite attached to him. The mongoose was quite accustomed to Hussein’s three tame cobras, all of whom had their fangs drawn, but the sight of a strange snake made the hair rise all along his back.

  At length Hussein arrived among the hills; there he picked up another acquaintance whom he had known when he was with Feroze Khan, and from this man he learnt an admirable way of using his snakes. Hussein put it into practice; this was the manner of it: first he would make the acquaintance of some tradesmen who knew all about the white people, and from them Hussein would learn which of the sahibs had wives; then he would go to the houses of those sahibs and bribe the khansamah to let him give a performance in the compound. After the performance he would announce that he felt the presence of snakes in the house itself, and if this made a suitable impression upon the white people, he would offer to come back in the evening to catch the snakes — for a modest fee, of course. Then he would go round to the servants’ quarters, and get them, with a promise of commission, to secrete his tame snakes in the house. One — the largest — he would always have put in the bedroom, another in the bathroom, and the third in any conveniently dramatic place. Towards sundown he would return, looking important, with a sack for the snakes, his flute, and Jellaludin.

  In the house he would go from room to room, sniffing; when he came to the bedroom he would assure the mem-sahib that there was a cobra in the room, and, having produced Jellaludin from a fold in his clothes, he would play on his squeaky, globular flute, while the mongoose ranged round the room. When he felt that the tension had reached its climax, Hussein would change his tune, and the well-trained cobra would glide out from beneath the pillow and swell out its hood, hissing furiously. Then Jellaludin, who knew his part quite well, would dart at the snake and leap at its head; before any harm could be done, however, Hussein would rush at the cobra, and bundle it into his sack.

  After he had gone from room to room, and collected his snakes, he could be practically sure of about four rupees from the grateful white people, and more if they were newcomers, but at least half of his reward had to go to the servants as commission.

  When there was a child in the house he could be certain of at least ten rupees, for if he had heard that there was a child, he would borrow trained snakes from any fakirs he knew who possessed them, so that he could produce as many as ten of them from all around the child’s cot before its mother’s horrified eyes. This was particularly well paid, though of course the commission to the servants and the fakirs was higher.

  Sometimes Hussein was rather put off his stroke by Jellaludin, who could not always distinguish between the strange tame snakes and the snakes that he was really supposed to kill: also, towards the end of a long performance, when he had apparently slain as many as a dozen snakes to the accompaniment of furious leaping in the air, he became rather tired, owing to his fatness, and was not quite as spectacular as Hussein could have wished; but on the whole things went off very satisfactorily.

  Now it came to Hussein’s ears when he was in Simla that the wife of the District Magistrate of Jullundur was known to be extremely fearful of snakes, and that her husband was very wealthy. This he heard from a sanyassi who had borrowed Jellaludin for a day; the mendicant had also remarked that the magistrate had two children. So Hussein, who had got all that he could reasonably hope for from the white people in Simla, packed up his flute, his snakes and his few other belongings in an old piece of cloth, and calling Jellaludin from the thatch of his hut, he set off south. After a certain time had passed he arrived at Jullundur, and there he sought out a friend of his, a sadhu who dealt in curses of all kinds. From the sadhu Hussein borrowed no fewer than nine several serpents, ranging from a small but venomous krait to an immense hamadryad cobra. They were all well trained, and Hussein spent a whole day in getting Jellaludin used to them. All his usual preliminaries went well, and one evening four days after his arrival in Jullundur he began to extract snakes from the magistrate’s house.

  He had various less spectacular snakes scattered in the usual places, and he had at least six in the nursery of the magistrate’s children. He came to this room last of all, and when he had played his flute for a little the snakes began to come out into the open. One flopped from a tear in the ceiling-cloth, two more came from a rat hole in a corner, and the great hamadryad came from under one of the cots. At first everything went well, and Hussein had most of the snakes in his sack before he noticed that Jellaludin was not doing his part very well; indeed, he looked quite languid. The mongoos
e was so slow in dealing with the big cobra that before Hussein could very well say that Jellaludin had finished with it, another snake came out, and the white people, who were watching, became most uneasy.

  Then another snake came out from the hole in the wall where the punkah came through, and the white man swiped at it with his riding-crop, killing the unfortunate snake by breaking its back. Hurriedly bundling the other two into his sack, Hussein cursed the magistrate bitterly in Urdu. Unhappily the magistrate knew the tongue perfectly, and replied in the same language; then he clapped his hands to call the servants, whom he told to throw Hussein out of the house.

  This was done, and in the doing two of the snakes were hurt. The dead snake was the small blue krait belonging to the sadhu; it was said to be very valuable on account of the tricks it could perform. When the sadhu heard of its death he cursed Hussein root and branch; he also exacted ten rupees by way of compensation.

  Hussein blamed Jellaludin bitterly, for if he had done what he had to do quickly, instead of being lazy, everything would have been well, and the sahib would have given him at least fifteen rupees; saying this, Hussein cuffed the mongoose repeatedly, and threatened to throw him down a well. Jellaludin felt the disgrace most keenly, and went off his feed, with the result that he became quite thin.

  Fortunately Hussein had saved his own three cobras, so he was able to keep going by performing with them, although the sadhu had taken all his resources.

  Ten

  He left Jullundur as soon as possible. He was not at all alarmed by the sadhu’s curses, for the red-bearded fakir of Haiderabad had given him an amulet against all curses, and he was supremely confident in its power. Some time later he turned up at Benares, where he hoped to pick up some information from the hosts of mendicants and priests who thronged the holy city.