The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  Chapter II

  Such was the entrée of the Maharaja of Oneypore into London society; and for three weeks, to a day, an hour, a minute—“Hang it! To a bally second!” Charlie Thorneycroft commented—the impression which had accompanied him into the salon of Her Grace of Shropshire clung to him.

  Not that people feared or mistrusted him.

  There was nothing personal about it, and indeed the man was kindness itself. He could not pass by beggar, by effusive, tail-wagging street cur, or by mewing, rubbing, dusty, ash-bin cat, without giving what he thought was demanded of him—money or caress or soft word.

  Nor was it because he was too foreign. For he improved his English rapidly, and, well-bred, a gentleman, it did not take him long to master European social customs, including the prejudices. He tried his best to become Western, in every sense of the word, and to that end he abandoned his Hindu dress, his turban, his magnificent jewels. He even shaved off his split, henna-stained beard, and there remained nothing about him reminiscent of his native land except the expression in his eyes—melancholy, ancient, tired; more the eyes of a race than those of an individual—and the vivid, crimson caste-mark painted on his forehead.

  It seemed rather incongruous, topping, as it did, his correct English clothes tailored by a Sackville Street craftsman.

  * * * *

  Then, at the end of three weeks, the aura of suspense, the aura of waiting for something that had already happened which hovered about him, disappeared quite as suddenly, and quite as terribly as it had come.

  It was on the occasion of a ball given at Marlborough House, and the rooms were gay with fluffy chiffon and stately brocades, with glittering uniforms, and the sharp contrast of black and white evening dress. The orchestra, hidden behind a palm screen, sobbed a lascivious Brazilian tango. Paired off, the young danced and flirted and laughed. So did the middle-aged and the old. In the buffet-room the majordomo was busy with the preparation of the famous Marlborough champagne-punch.

  At half past eleven the raja entered, together with Charlie Thorneycroft, who had attached himself to him, and at once the usual enormous shiver brushed through the assembly, like a wedge of ferocious, superhuman evil, with a hidden thunder of unguessed-at immensity. People stopped still in the middle of a dance-step. The music broke off with a jarring discord as a B-string snapped. The Marchioness of Liancourt swooned against a priceless Sèvres vase and sent it splintering to the waxed floor. The majordomo dropped his mixing-ladle into the silver punch-bowl.

  Remote, gigantic, extended, the impression of voiceless fear gathered speed. It gathered breath-clogging terror. It stabbed the regions of subliminal consciousness.

  Strident yet unheard, huge yet unseen, torrential yet non-existent, it swelled to a draft of sound—“sound beyond the meaning of the word—words are so inadequate—sound which you could not hear!” Thorneycroft put it—that sucked through the rooms with the strength of sky and sea and stars, with the speed of splintering lances thrown by giants’ hands, with a passionate, tragic leaping and yearning that was as the ancient call of Creation itself. It flashed outward with a wrenching, tameless glory and savagery that fused all these London molecules of humanity into one shivering whole.

  Two minutes it lasted, and at exactly twenty-eight minutes to twelve Thorneycroft, obeying a peculiar impulse, looked at his watch, and he never lived to forget the time nor the date: the 15th of January, 1913—the nameless impression passed into the limbo of unremembered things.

  It passed as enormously—by contrast—as it had come. It passed with an all-pervading sense of sweetness and peace: of intimate sweetness, too intimate peace. It passed with a wafting of jasmine and marigold perfume, a soft tinkling of far-away bells, and the muffled sobs of women coming from across immeasurable distances.

  The raja smiled.

  He raised a high-veined hand in salutation. Then he trembled. He gave a low sigh that changed rapidly into a rattling gurgle. His eyes became staring and glassy. His knees gave way, and he fell straight back, dead, white-faced, the crimson caste-mark on his forehead looking like some evil thing, mocking, sardonic, triumphant.

  “God!” Thorneycroft bent over the rigid form, feeling the heart that had ceased beating. He spoke a quick word, and servants came and carried out the body.

  But the people who crowded the rooms seemed quite unaware that death had stalked among them. Suddenly a wild wave of gaiety surged through the house. They laughed. They chattered. They jested. They clinked glasses. The orchestra led away with a Paris waltz that was as light as foam.

  That night champagne flowed like water. Half a dozen love-affairs were finished, another half-dozen begun. Scandal was winked at and condoned. Gaiety, the madness of Bacchanalian gaiety, invaded every nook and cranny of Marlborough House, invading the very servants’ hall, where the majordomo balanced the third upstairs parlor-maid on his knees and spoke to her of love in thickly dignified terms.

  Two days later Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, descendant of the many gods, was buried in state, with twenty file of Horse Guards flanking the coffin, and all the purple-faced gentry of the India Office rolling behind in carriages, dressed in pompous black broadcloth and smoking surreptitious cigars.

  On the same day Charlie Thorneycroft called on Victoria de Rensen, kissed her pouting lips, and told her in his vague manner that he was off to India.

  Chapter III

  India came to Charlie Thorneycroft as it had come to him a dozen times: with a sudden rush of splendor, flaming red, golden tipped, shot through with purple and emerald-green, and hardly cloaking the thick, stinking layer of cruelty and superstition and ignorance that stewed and oozed beneath the colorful surface. He knew it all, from the Rajput gentleman’s stately widow who gives herself to the burning pyre in spite of British laws to the meanest half-caste money-lender who devils the souls of sporting subalterns amid the flowering peepul-trees of Fort William barracks; and so he yawned his way from the moment when the big P. and O. liner nosed kittenishly through the sucking sand-banks of the Hoogly to the Hotel Semiramis.

  There he had a lengthy and whispered conversation with a deputy commissioner recently returned from Rajputana, who bowed low and spoke softly in spite of the fact that Thorneycroft was his junior by twenty years and seemed to have no especial diplomatic rank or emoluments.

  All the next morning he yawned away the hours that creep to the sweating west, took a late train for the north, and continued his bored progress through twelve hundred miles of varied scenery.

  He had no eye for the checker-board landscape of neat Bengal, nor for the purple and orange tints of the Indian sky that changed the far hills into glowing heaps of topaz, the scorched ridges into carved masses of amethyst and rose-red. Rajputana, gold and heliotrope, sad with the dead centuries, the dead glory, interested him not.

  His thoughts were far in the north, near the border, where Rajput and Afghan wait for a renewal of the old, bitter fight for supremacy when Britain shall have departed; and still, waking and sleeping, he could feel—he could feel with—the silent whirring of immense wings—“like the wings of a tortured soul trying to escape the cage of the dust-created body,” he put it with a lyric soaring that clashed incongruously with his usual horsy slang.

  The whirring of wings!

  And there was some accent in it of secret dread, of terrible, secret melancholy, deeper than his soul could perceive, his brain could classify. The terror of a mighty struggle was behind it: a mighty struggle awfully remote from individual existence and individual ambition and life, individual death even. It partook of India itself: the land, the ancient races, the very gods.

  The farther north he traveled the more strongly grew the shapeless, voiceless impression. At times, suddenly, a light flashed down the hidden tunnels of his inner consciousness, and made visible for one fleeting second something which he seemed too slow o comprehend.

  A whisper came to him from beyond the rationally knowable.

  * *
* *

  And so, two days later, he dropped from the train at a small up-land station that consisted of a chaotic whirlwind of stabbing sand, seven red-necked vultures squatting on a low wall and making unseemly noises, a tumble-down Vishnative shrine, and a fat, patent leather-slippered babu, who bowed before Charlie Thorneycroft even lower than the deputy commissioner had done, called him Protector of the Pitiful, and otherwise did him great honor.

  “All right, all right!” came Thorneycroft’s impatient rejoinder. “I see that you got my cable. Is the bullock-cart ready?”

  “Yes, heaven-born!” And the babu pointed at the tonga, the bullock-cart, that came ghostlike out of the whirling sandstorm.

  “Good enough.” He swung himself up. “Ready. Chuck the bedding and the ice in the back. Let her go!” he said to the driver, who had his jaws bandaged after the manner of desertmen, and the tonga started off, dipping and plunging across the ridges like a small boat in a short sea.

  The babu squatted by Thorneycroft’s side, talking softly, and again the Englishman yawned. But this time there was a slight affectation in his yawn, and affectation, too, as of one weaving close to the loom of lies, in his words:

  “Yes, yes. I fancy it is the old story. Some jealous wildcat of a hill woman—”

  “No, heaven-born!” cut in the babu. He winked his heavy-lidden eyes slowly as if to tell the other that he was “on.” “This time it is different. This time there is no woman’s jealousy brewing unclean abominations behind the curtains of the zenana. This time it is—”

  “Priestcraft?”

  “You have said it, sahib!” came the babu’s reply in a flat, frightened whisper.

  “All right!” Thorneycroft gave a short, unpleasant laugh. “Let’s go to Deolibad first and call on my friend Youssef Ali.” And a few words of direction to the driver, who grunted a reply, jerked the heads of the trotting animals away from the north and toward the northwest, and plied their fat sides with the knotted end of his whip.

  All night they drove. They rested near a shallow river. But they did not tarry long. They watered the team, rubbed them down with sand, and were off again.

  It was a long, hot drive. The silence, the insolent nakedness of the land, the great, burning sun lay on Thorneycroft’s soul like a heavy burden. Time and again he was conscious of the whirring of wings, and with each league it seemed to lay closer to the ears of his inner self. It seemed born somewhere in the heart of the purple, silver-nicked gloom that draped the hills of Rajputana.

  The babu, too, was conscious of it. His teeth clicked. His body trembled, and he looked at the Englishman, who looked back at him.

  Neither spoke. Something utterly overwhelming enfolded them. For the whirring was at once of enchanting peace and sweetness, and of a mournful, tragic, sobbing strength that was like the death of a soul.

  Once the babu put it into words:

  “Like the death of a soul—”

  “Shut up!” Thorneycroft whispered, and then silence again but for the pattering hoofs of the bullocks.

  There were few signs of life. At times a gecko slipped away through the scrub with a green, metallic glisten. Once in a while a kite poised high in the parched, blue sky. Another time they overtook a gigantic cotton-wain drawn by twenty bullocks about the size of Newfoundland dogs.

  Then, late one night, they reached Deolibad. They passed through the tall southern gate, studded with sharp elephant-spikes, paid off their driver, walked through the mazes of the perfume-sellers’ bazaar, and stopped in front of an old house.

  Three times Thorneycroft knocked at the age-gangrened, cedarwood door, sharp, staccato, with a long pause between the second and third knocks, and then again three times in rapid succession.

  It was as if the ramshackle old house were listening in its sleep, then slowly awakening. Came the scratch of a match, a thin, light ray drifting through the cracks in the shutters, a shuffling of slippered feet, and the door opened.

  A man stood there, old, immensely tall, immensely fat, an Afghan judging from his black silk robe and his oiled locks, holding a candle in his right.

  He peered at the two figures in front of him. Then he broke into high-pitched laughter and gurgling words of greeting.

  “Thorneycroft! Thorneycroft, by the Prophet! Young heart of my old heart!”

  And in his excitement he dropped the candle clattering to the ground and hugged the Englishman to his breast. The latter returned the embrace; but, as the Afghan was about to renew his flowery salutations, cut them short with:

  “I need your help, Youssef Ali.”

  “Anything, anything, child! I will give you any help you ask. I will grant you anything except sorrow. Ahi! These are like the old days, when you, with your mother’s milk not yet dry on your lips, rode by my side to throw the dragnet of the British Raj’s law around the lying priests of this stinking land. Heathen priests of Shiva and Vishnu, worshiping a monkey and a flower! Aughrrr!” He spat.

  Thorneycroft laughed.

  “Still the old, intolerant Youssef, aren’t you? All right. But I don’t need much. Simply this—and that—” He crossed the threshold side by side with the Afghan and followed by the babu. He said a few words, adding: “I hear that you are a much-married man, besides being an amateur of tuwaifs, of dancing-girls. So I’m sure you will be able to help me out. I could have gone to the bazaar and bought the stuff. But there are leaky tongues there—”

  It was Youssef’s turn to laugh.

  “A love affair, child? Perhaps with the daughter of some hill raja?”

  “No. Not love. But life—and death. And perhaps—” He was silent. There was again the giant whirring of wings. Then he went on: “Perhaps again life! Who knows?”

  “Allah knows!” piously mumbled Youssef. “He is the One, the All-Knowing. Come with me, child,” he went on, lifting a brown-striped curtain that shut off the zenana. “Sitt Kumar will help you—a little dancing-girl whom”—he coughed apologetically—“I recently encountered, and whose feet are just now very busy crushing my fat, foolish old heart. Wait here, O babu-jee!” he said to the babu, while he and the Englishman disappeared behind the zenana curtain.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then a woman’s light, tinkly laughter, a clacking of bracelets and anklets, a rapid swishing of linen and silk.

  Again the woman’s light laughter. Her words:

  “Keep quiet, sahib, lest the walnut-dye enter thy eye!” And ten minutes later the zenana curtains were drawn aside to admit once more the Afghan, arm in arm with a middle-aged, dignified Brahman priest, complete in every detail of outer sacerdotal craft, from the broidered skull-cap and the brilliant caste-mark on his forehead to the patent-leather pumps, the open-work white stockings, and the sacred volume bound in red Bokhara leather that he carried in his right hand.

  “Nobody will recognize you,” said Youssef.

  “Good!” said the Brahman in Thorneycroft’s voice. “And now—can you lend me a couple of horses?”

  “Surely. I have a brace of Marwari stallions. Jewels, child! Pearls! Noble bits of horseflesh! Come!”

  He led the way to the stable, which was on the other side of his house, and sheltered by a low wall. He lit an oil-lamp, opened the door, soothed the nervous, startled Marwaris with voice and knowing hand, and saddled them.

  He led the horses out, and Thorneycroft and the babu mounted.

  “Where to?” asked the Afghan. Thorneycroft waved his hand in farewell.

  “To Oneypore!” he replied. “To interview a dead raja’s soul!” He turned to the babu. “We must hurry, O babu-jee! Every minute counts!”

  And he was off at a gallop, closely followed by the other.

  Chapter IV

  The night was as black as pitch, but Thorneycroft rode hard.

  He figured back.

  The Maharaja of Oneypore had died on the fifteenth of January. Today was the tenth of February. Twenty-five days had elapsed since the raja’s death.

  Would he b
e in time?

  “Come on, babu-jee!” he cried, and rode harder than ever.

  Once his stallion reared on end and landed stiffly on his forefeet, nearly throwing him. But that night he could not consider the feelings of a mere horse. He pressed on the curb with full strength and brought his fist down between the animal’s ears; and, after a minute or two of similar reasoning, the Marwari stretched his splendid, muscled body and fell into a long, swinging fox-trot.

  The road to Oneypore was as straight as a lance and fairly good. They rode their horses alternating between a fast walk and a short hand gallop.

  Thorneycroft had not eaten since noon of the preceding day, and was tired and hungry. But he kept on. For there was something calling him, calling him, from the ragged hills that looped to the east in carved, sinister immensity; and through the velvety gloom of the night, through the gaunt shadows of the low, volcanic ridges that trooped back to Deolibad and danced like hobgoblins among the dwarf aloes, through the click-clanketty-click of the stallions’ pattering feet, there came to him again the whirring—like a tragic message to hurry, hurry.

  * * * *

  Morning blazed with the suddenness of the tropics. The sun had hardly risen, but already it was close and muggy. A jaundiced heat veiled the levels—foretaste of the killing, scorching heat of March and April—and the birds, true weather prophets, the parrots and the minas, the tiny, blue-winged doves and the pert, ubiquitous crows, were opening their beaks with a painful effort and gasping for air—another week, and they would be off for the cool deodars of the higher hills.

  In the distance a dark mass was looming up: Oneypore—and the horses were about to give in. Their heads were bowed on their heaving, lathering chests, and they breathed with a deep, rattling noise.

  Thorneycroft dismounted and stretched his cramped legs.