Well, imagine me there on the balcony of the Semiramis, laughing at India, if you wish; perhaps at the Back Bay, perhaps at myself. I left the balcony, patted the drunken man on the shoulder, and stepped out of the hotel and into the smoky, purple night. The storm which had threatened earlier by the evening was melting into a quiet night of glowing violet, with a pale, sneering, negligent sort of a moon. A low, cool wind was blowing up from the River Hooghli.
I gave a mocking farewell bow in the direction of Park Street, the white man’s Calcutta, Government House, green tea and respectability, and turned east, sharp east, toward the patch of darkness, toward the Colootallah. I walked very steadily, as if I had a definite aim and object, turned on the corner of Park Street, and there a policeman, an English policeman, stopped me.
“Beg pardon, sir,” he said with that careful, Anglo-Saxon politeness, “you’re goin’ the wrong way, I fancy, sir. The hotel is over yonder, sir,” pointing in the opposite direction; and I laughed. I pressed a rupee into his ready hand. “Hotel, nothing!” I said. “I am going toward the Street of Charmed Life!”
“Right-o,” commented the policeman. “Some of these ’ere native streets do ’ave funny names, don’t they? But—beggin’ your pardon, sir—better ’ave a care. Those streets ain’t safe for a white man, least-ways at night.”
“Quite safe—for me!” I assured him, and I walked on, on and on, not caring where I went—away from the thoroughfares, through grimy little gardens in the back of opium dens where the brick paths were hollow and slimy with the tread of many naked, unsteady feet; then through a greasy, packed wilderness of three-storied houses, perfectly respectable Babu houses, from which a faint, acrid smell seemed to emanate; on, twisting and turning, through the Burra Bazaar and the Jora Bagan—you know the sections, don’t you, and their New York counterpart, the Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen—and then up into the crooked mazes of the Machua Bazaar—evil, filthy, packed.
On and on, farther and farther away, and at every corner, in every doorway, there were new faces, new types, new voices, new odors, until I came to the Colootallah.
How did I know I was there? Oh, I asked a native, decent sort he was, though he was a bit unsteady with opium, and, just like the English policeman, he advised me to go back to Park Street.
Perhaps he was right. For a moment I was quite sure that he was right, but I walked on, through streets that grew steadily more narrow. You know how narrow they can be, with a glimpse of smoky sky above the roofs revealing scarcely three yards of breadth, and all sorts of squirmy, squishy things underneath your feet, and shawls, and bit of underwear, and turban clothes hanging from the windows and balconies and flopping unexpectedly into your face, and beggars, and roughs, and lepers slinking and pushing against you, jabbering, quarreling, begging; and the roadway ankle-deep in thick slime, and a fetid stink hanging over it all like a cloud; and the darkness, the bitter darkness—black blotched, compact, except for a haggard moon-ray shooting down occasionally from above and glancing off into the canyon of the street from bulbous roof and crazy, tortured balcony.
By ginger, I was sick for a moment. I said to myself that there was a steamer sailing the next day—home and America via Liverpool—and I was about to turn when—
Wait a second.
Get first where I was, though you’ll never find the place. You’ll hear the reason why later on. You see, I had meanwhile turned up a narrow street; it was quite lonely there; not a soul, not a footstep, hardly a sound. They called the place then—mind you, I said then—Ibrahim Khan’s Gully. It was typical of its sort. Whitewashed walls without windows or doors, mysterious, useless-looking to right and to left; and straight in front of me, at the end of the gully, was another wall. It sat there at the end of that cul-de-sac like a seal of destiny, portentous threatening. The moon was pretty well behaved and bright just then, and so I looked at that wall. It impressed me.
It was perhaps ten feet high, and it seemed to be the support of some roof-top for it was crowned with rather an elaborate balustrade of carved, fretted stone. At a certain distance behind it rose another higher wall, then another, still higher, and so on; as if the whole block was terraced from the center toward the gully. To the left and right the wall stretched, gradually rising into the dark without a break, it seemed, and surmounted here and there by the fantastic outline of some spire or balcony or crazy, twisted roof, the whole thing a confounded muddle of Hindu architecture, with apparently neither end nor beginning—mad, brusk, useless—like a harebrained giant’s picture-puzzle.
There I stood and stared. I said to myself, “Back, you fool? Straight home with you to Boston, to the bound volumes of Emerson, to the mild cocktail—and I wonder who’ll win the mile at the Intercollegiate—” And then—and I remember it as if it was today, it was just in the middle of that thought about the mile race—I heard a voice directly above me.
It was a woman’s voice, singing in that quaint, minor wail of Eastern music. Perhaps you know the words. I have learned them by heart—
You are to me the gleam of sun
That breaks the gloom of wintry rain;
You are to me the flower of time—
O Peacock, cry again!
“Bravo, bravo!” I shouted. For you see I was only a fool of an outsider, looking into this night-wrapped, night-sounding India as I would look at a fantastic play, and then suddenly the song broke off, came another voice, harsh, hissing, spitting, the sound of a hand slapping bare flesh, and then a piercing shriek. A high-pitched, woman’s shriek that shivered the night air, that somehow shivered my heart.
I must help that woman, but—“Home you fool, you silly, meddling idiot.” said my saner ego “This is no quarrel of yours.” “Take a chance,” replied another cell in my brain. “Take a chance with chance! See what all this talk about a charmed life is!”
No, no, I decided the next moment it was mad. Impossible. A native house, a native woman—they were sacred. Not even the police would dare enter without a search warrant; and this was the Colootallah, the worst section of Calcutta; and I knew next to nothing about India, about the languages, the customs, the prejudices of the land, except what Roos-Keppel had told me.
“Hai-hai-hai!” came once more the piercing, woman’s wail: and right then I consigned Back Bay and safety first to the devil. I made for that wall with a laugh, perhaps a prayer.
A charmed life! By the many hecks, I’d find out presently I said to myself, as I jumped on a narrow ledge a few feet from the ground, from which I could clutch the top of the stone balustrade.
Up!
I swung myself into the unknown, balanced for the fraction of a second on the balustrade, then let myself drop. I struck something soft and bulky that squirmed swiftly away. Came a grunt and a curse—at least, it sounded suspiciously like a curse—then somebody struck a light which blinded me momentarily.
And at that very moment the bell from the Presbyterian Church in Old Court House Street struck the midnight hour.
CHAPTER III.
A FOOL’S HEART.
Oft have I heard that no accident or chance ever mars the march of events here below, and that all moves in accordance with a plan. To take shelter under a common bough or a drink of the same river is alike ordained from ages prior to our birth.
—From the letter of a Japanese Daimio to his wife before committing hara-kari
* * * *
Rapidly my eyes got used to the light. It came from a flickering, insincere oil-lamp held in the hands of an elderly Hindu, evidently the possessor of the soft and bulky body which I had struck when I had let myself drop.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, silently. I am quite sure we didn’t like each other. We didn’t have to say a single word to convince each other of the fact. He was an old man, but old without the slightest trace of dignity, he wore no turban, and that gave his shiny, shaven head a horribly naked look. On his forehead was a crimson caste mark—nasty-looking thing it was. His eyes were hopeles
sly bleared, his teeth were blackened with betel juice, his rough, gray beard was quite a stranger to comb or oil. He was a fat, ridiculous old man, with a ridiculous, squeaky little cough.
I burst out laughing, and I laughed louder when I saw the expression which crept into his red-rimmed eyes. Not that the expression was really funny. Rather this opposite. For it was one of beastly hatred, of savage joy, of sinister triumph. But, don’t you see, I wasn’t the Stephen Denton of half a year, why, of half an hour before. Right then I had forgotten all about America and Boston and regulation respectability. There seemed to be no home tradition to analyze and criticize and I belonged right there—to that flat rooftop, to the purple, choking night down below in Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, to India, to Calcutta. One blow of my fist, I said to myself, and that fat, ridiculous old savage would take an involuntary, headlong tumble from the balustrade to the blue, sticky mire of the gully. So I laughed.
But hold on. Don’t get the story wrong. I didn’t stand there, on that roof-top in the Colootallah, exactly thinking out all these impressions, detail for detail. They passed over me in a solid wave and in the fraction of a second, and, even as they swept through me, the lamp in the hands of the old man trembled a little and shot its haggard, dirty-white rays a little to the left, toward a short, squat, carved stone pillar quite close to the balustrade.
And there, breathing hard, clutching the pillar with two tiny, narrow hands, I saw a native woman—a young girl rather—doubtless she whom I had heard sing, then scream in pain. Red, cruel finger-marks were still visible on her delicate, pale-golden cheek.
Stephen Denton lit a cigar and blew out a series of rings, attempting to hang them on the chandelier, one by one.
You know (he said this with a certain, ringing, challenging seriousness) I fell in love right then and there. Sounds silly, of course. But it’s the truth. I looked at that Hindu girl, and I loved her. Such a—a—why, such a strange, inexpressible sensation came over me. It seemed suddenly that we were alone—she and I—on the roof-top in Calcutta—alone in all the world—
But never mind that I guess you know what love is.
She was hardly more than sixteen years old, and she dressed in the conventional dress of a Hindu dancer, in a sari—you know, the scarf which the Hindu woman drapes about her with a deft art not dreamed of by Fifth Avenue—of pale rose colored silk, shot with orange and violet and bordered with tiny seed-pearls. An edge of the sari hung over one round shoulder and the robe itself came just below the knee. Her face was small and round and exquisitely chiseled. Her hair was parted in the middle. It was of a glossy bluish-black, mingled with flowers and jewels, and the braids came down to her ankles. A perfume, sweet, pungent, mysterious, so faint as to be little more than a suggestion, hovered about her.
Well—I stared at her. Then I remembered my manners and lifted my hand to raise my hat. It wasn’t there. I must have dropped it when I negotiated the wall and the girl, seeing my action, understanding it, forgot her pain and laughed. Such a jolly silvery, exquisite little laugh.
Ever think of the psychology of laughter? To me it has always seemed the final proof of sympathy, of humanity, even. And so that laugh, from the crimson lips of this Hindu girl, finally did the trick. I forgot all about the fat old party with the caste mark and the bleary eyes, I walked up to the girl and offered her my hand, American fashion.
“Glad to meet you,” I said in English. It was a foolish thing to say, absolutely ridiculous, but just then I couldn’t think of anything else. You see, at midnight, on the roof-top of some unknown native house in the heart of the Colootallah, together with people of an unknown race and faith, of alien tradition, alien emotions, even—what would you have said?
I stuck to my native-born form of salutation and held out my hand. She gave me hers—it felt just like some warm, downy little baby bird—and replied in English, with a certain faint nuance of mockery, “Glad to meet you, sir,” and I grinned and was about to open up a polite conversation.
You see, momentarily I had really forgotten all about that bleary-eyed old scoundrel. But he recalled himself to me almost immediately—with an exceedingly rude and, considering his age, muscular push which shoved me to one side and the girl to the other.
There he stood between us, like an exageratedly hideous Hindu idol of revenge and hatred and lust and half a dozen other assorted beastly qualities, the lamp trembling in his clawlike hand. He pointed at me, addressing the girl in a mad, jerky, helter-skelter flood of Hindustani—I didn’t understand it—which caused the girl to pale and to shake her head vigorously. It was evidence that he was accusing her of something or other, and that she was denying the accusation indignantly. And then he commenced abusing her in English, doubtless for my benefit.
I was stuffing his mouth at once with my fist, but the girl signaled to me, frantically, imploringly, “No, no”—I saw her lips shaping the words and so, temporarily I kept me peace while the old Hindu proceeded to prove that he could translate Hindu abuse into very fair English.
“Ho!” he shouted at her. “Ho! thou daughter of unthinkable begatting! Thou spawn of much filth. Thou especially illegitimate and shameless hyena! Thou this and that and once more this! By Shiva and Shiva—I shall wrench thy wicked hide with the touchstone of pain and affliction! I shall—”
“Look here” I interrupted “you are getting entirely too fresh. Stow your line of talk, or—” and I made a significant gesture with my fist—would have hit him, too, if the girl had not signaled to me again—this time, and I don’t know what she wanted by it, pointing at her forehead and then back at the building which terraced toward the center of the block.
The Hindu man was too angry to notice the by-play. “O Calamity!” he went on. “O crimson shame! May Doorgha, the great goddess, cut out thy heart and feed it to a mangy pig! What shameless doings are these—O thou bazaar woman—to send word to thy lover—to have him come here, to this house, and at night? Didst thou think that I would be asleep? Thy lover—” he spat out, “and he a man of the accused foreign race, an infidel, an eater of unclean food, a cannibal of the holy cow, a swinish derider of the many gods! He—thy lover! Ah! by the Mother of the Elephant’s Trunk—thy portion shall be the pain which passeth understanding!” Suddenly he turned and addressed himself to me, “and as for thee—for thee—” He was so choked with fury that the words were gurgled and died in his throat. He positively did not know whom to insult or bully first, the girl or me. Like Balaam’s Ass, he stood there, undecided, and finally he made up his mind to attend first to the girl.
“Thou—” came an unmentionable epithet, unmentionable even among Hindus, and you know how extravagant their abuse is inclined to be, then he turned on her. His right hand still held the trembling lamp. He struck out with his left. She tried to evade him—slipped—I was too late to come to her rescue—only a glancing blow, but she fell, bumping her head smartly against the stone pillar.
She gave a pitiful little moan—and was unconscious.
Then I got mad.
I rushed up to him, lunged, and missed. You see, the old beggar danced away from me with a certain sharp, twisting agility which I wouldn’t have believed possibly in that aged, obese body of his. Also, I had to be careful—on that confounded roof-top. No use tumbling over the balustrade and breaking my neck. That wouldn’t have helped the girl any. The only chance I had was to get him against the wall on the side opposite the gully—a torn-down wall occasionally connecting the rooftop with the next layer on that maze of buildings.
Finally I managed to drive him toward the wall. I had him cornered. He stood there—the lamp still flickering in his right, its ray sharply silhouetting him against the spectral white stucco. I was quite fascinated for a moment, looking at him. The idea flushed into my brain that I was looking into the visage of something monstrous, impossible. The beastly bald skull, the caste mark, the fat, wide-humped shoulders, suggested that which was scarcely human and, struck by a sudden burst of horror, I stared
into that dark, inscrutable countenance.
Then he opened his mouth—in a low voice he said something of what was going to happen to me. It had something to do with one of his beastly, many-armed gods—I didn’t understand the allusion at the time. At all events, he pointed at the caste mark on his forehead and—
You see, I am a slow, careful sort of fighter. I hate to waste a blow. Furthermore, up to then we had all been comparatively quiet. I didn’t care to make too much noise. And I had him cornered. So, instead of rushing up like a noisy avalanche, I poised myself on my toes, squared my shoulders, drew back my right arm—and then I nearly lost the whole game.
For, quite suddenly, he brought his left hand to his mouth. He was about to shout—for help, I suppose. And then I hit him, right between the eyes. By ginger, it was a wallop.
You see, I was quite mad; and even in that fleeting moment, when I had really no time to register sensations, I could feel his skin break beneath my knuckles, the soft, pulped flesh—the blood squirting up—and, darn it, I liked the feeling!
Stephen Denton gave a strange smile.
Rather bestial, don’t you think? But then I told you I was a different man—there, on that roof-top, with purple India whispering about me—than I had been half an hour before.
Well, the old Hindu fell, unconscious, by the side of the girl. The lamp dropped from his hand. I tried to catch it, could not, and over the balustrade it went in a fantastic curve of yellow sparks, and down into the blue slime of Ibrahim Khan’s Gully where it gave a little protesting sshissh and guttered out.
So there I was, on that confounded roof-top, in utter silence, utter darkness—the moon had hidden behind a cloud-bank—and within a few feet of me was the unconscious form of the girl—the Hindu girl—with whom I had fallen in love—and I knew neither her name, nor her faith—nor anything at all about her. An adventure, don’t you think? An adventure—to me. Fantastic, twisted, incredible! And, a few hours before, I had imagined that the greatest adventure that could ever happen to me would be to catch a fifty pound salmon and get away with the tale of it!
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 7