The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  But, just then, I didn’t even consider the whole mad sequence of events in the light of adventure. It seemed all perfectly sane, perfectly possible—preordained, in a way—and I thought and acted with the utmost self-assurance and deliberation.

  Was I afraid, you ask? I was not. Honestly! Sounds silly, bragging, doesn’t it? But it’s the truth. Of course I realized that my position was ugly. You see, there was that blotchy, purple darkness all about me, and a terrific, breathless silence—and what was I to do? Back across the wall? Into Ibrahim Khan’s Gully—and a run for the Hotel Semiramis? Sure, I could have jumped down. I had learned the trick in gym work, back at college—to land on my toes, slightly bending my back and my legs.

  But I didn’t take that chance. I could not. For there was the girl, and I loved her. She was dear to me—very dear—dearer than my life, my salvation—dearer—what’s the old saying?—yes, dearer than the dwelling of kings! Carefully, slowly I crept across to her side, for I didn’t want to step on the old Hindu. I didn’t want to recall him from his trance before I was ready for him, before I had decided exactly what to do.

  I stooped down and touched the girl’s soft little face. The touch went through me like an electric thrill. What was I to do? She was breathing, but quite unconscious. I had no way, no time to revive her.

  Should I take her with me across the balustrade? Impossible. I couldn’t drag her into the gully like a bag of flour, nor was it feasible for me to go down first—wouldn’t be able to reach and lift her from below.

  I was sure of only one thing. I wouldn’t leave without her—without her I wouldn’t leave that roof-top, the Colootallah, nor Calcutta, nor India.

  I loved her. I wanted her. I would die for her. The source of that rash courage will ever be to me an inexplicable mystery. For, don’t you see, I had always lived a perfectly sheltered life back in Boston, with the antimacassars and the walnut furniture and the volumes of Emerson and Thoreau. But I had resolved to take that girl with me. No more, nor less!

  So I squatted there, by the side of the girl, considering. It is strange how trivial things impinge on the consciousness in such moments with a shock of something important, immense. There was just a slight noise—a soft tckk-tckk-tckk—but, somehow, I knew what it was. It was the noise of a scorpion scuttling across the roof—to the left of me—towards the old Hindu.

  I knew just exactly what would happen—tried my best, with a sharp hiss, to prevent it—but it did happen. The little scorpion, if, indeed, it was one—perhaps it was only a mouse—scurried across the old Hindu’s face—startled him into consciousness.

  He sat up. He gave a shout for help—just one shout. I was one top of him the very next second—but I could not clutch that shout out of the air—it echoed and reverberated among the terraced walls, sharp, metallic. It tore through the gloom like the point of a knife.

  I had him down on his back again in the twinkling of an eye, had him gagged securely with my handkerchief and the heavy leather gloves I carried in my pocket. Working feverishly, I tore the silk scarf from the girl’s shoulder, tore off my coat, my necktie—and had him tied before he knew what was happening to him.

  Then I sat up and listened. With a little gray thrill of horror I realized that the cry for help had been heard, that the crisis was upon me. Far in the bowels of that crazy mass of terrace buildings I heard confused voices—footsteps.

  Tap-tap-tap—naked feet stepping gingerly on cold stone slabs.

  A dozen questions leaped to my brain. What could I do? How? The old man—myself—the girl—Yes! The girl whom I loved. At that moment I longed for two things, two things of Western civilization: a revolver and a box of matches. But I had neither the one nor the other about me. All I had was a knife, a pretty good knife, too, very much like an old-fashion Bowie. I had bought it the day I left America, in a spirit of jest, rather than with the expectation of using it.

  The footsteps came nearer and nearer from the direction of the wall which connected the rooftop with the next building. I looked about me, for a place to hide the girl, to hide myself.

  And the old man! Over the wall with him, I decided brutally, and I dragged at his feet—he was heavy, very heavy—and then I desisted. For the footsteps came nearer, ever nearer; also excited voices in an unintelligible language.

  For a moment the voices were drowned in a round, metallic burst of sound. Banng! came the bell from the Presbyterian Church in Old Court House Street, tolling the quarter after midnight. Then, when the tolling had trembled away, came once again the sounds—nearer, nearer—voices, footsteps, and also a faint crackling of steel, the swish of a scabbard scraping across stone flags.

  And the darkness was about me like a heavy, woolen garment.

  Stephen Denton smiled, quizzically, incongruously.

  Don’t you see? He continued when he saw the expression of surprise on my face, the thing was really quite funny. The adventure itself seemed to me—oh, sort of inevitable, like a Greek drama: and as to the darkness—why, old man, that moon there behind the cloud-bank reminded me of some dear old chaperone at a ball at Magnolia. Prime her with a ball of knitting wool, a glass of near-soft punch, and pop her into a nice warm conservatory, and she’ll remain there until the band plays “Good Night, Ladies” and not bother the young. Get it? So it was with that moon. Kept away, left everything blotchy, dark side off by itself. Me and the girl, and the old man and the whole damned rooftop.

  Yes, I thought of all that at the time. But I acted, even as I thought, as if I had two sets of nerve-controls, working separately from each other. I moved about in the darkness, feverishly, searching for some hiding-place big enough to hold one or all of us—the footsteps and the voices were coming nearer all the time—and finally I discovered that the balustrade, built out towards the roof-top, formed a sort of box for a length of about six feet. Did I put the girl inside? You bet your life I did not! I told you I wasn’t going to leave her ever again. I stuck the old man inside, handled him as I would a bundle of useless, dirty rags; and the next moment, with the strength and haste of desperation, I picked up the unconscious girl, and, holding her in my arms, I squeezed myself behind the carved stone pillar against which she had been leaning when I had burst upon the scene. The place was just large enough to hold us—me and her—pressed tight against me.

  Of course, the whole thing took less time than it takes me to tell it.

  So, there I was, holding that little Hindu girl in my arms—and—why, man, I loved her—unless the repetition of that detail bores you—my arms touched the soft curves of her young shoulders.

  It was quite dark, as I told you. But there, resting on my left arm, was her little face, like an opening flower. Only a slip of a girl, her youthful incompleteness just a lovely sketch for something larger, finer, more splendid—just a mass of happy, seductive hints, with the high-lights yet missing.

  That’s it! You guessed it first time! I kissed her—either my last kiss on this earth I said to myself; or if there was any truth in that charmed life hope, my first kiss—given, taken rather, in real love.

  And, as I pressed her closer against me in the ecstasy of the moment—you see, I had forgotten all about the approaching footsteps, I am such a careless fellow—I felt as if something was giving way behind me. Quickly I squirmed, a few inches to the right—there wasn’t so very much room, and at the same moment a door opened up in the wall in back of the pillar, leading up from somewhere in that crazy maze of a building.

  The swing of the door missed me by a fraction of an inch—I sucked in my breath—and two men came out on the roof-top carrying naked blades.

  No! I didn’t see the blades, but both, one after the other, scraped against me, cutting through trousers and underwear like razors.

  They wounded me slightly, but I made neither motion nor outcry. For there, in my arms, was the girl who was dearest to me in all the world; and so, just for luck, I bent down and kissed her again.

  CHAPTER IV.


  DEPTHS.

  Vainly the heart on Providence calls, such aid to seek were hardly wise

  For man must own the pitiless law the sways the globe andsevenfold skies

  —From the Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi

  * * * *

  What saved me then was the Oriental negligence, the Oriental carelessness as to details, which is—and that’s my own discovery—the only thing that is keeping India and the rest of Asia in the rear of Western progress.

  An American watchman, hearing a cry for help, might possibly have forgotten his gun. But never his lamp! With these two Hindus it was just the opposite; armed to the teeth they were, judging from the swish and crackle of steel which syncopated their movements about the roof-top, but they carried neither lamp, nor candle, nor even a match. They moved about there in the dark, searching, groping, tapping, and were, of course, very much astonished when they didn’t find anybody. I was sure that the old ruffian in the cupboard beneath the balustrade nearly caused his eyes to pop out of his head with effort to shout out to them, to tell them where he was. But my gloves were a good gag—with a fine, healthy, tannic acid taste to them, I guess.

  Yes, they were astonished and amazed. At least, I gathered as much from the guttural exclamations. They called on a variety of Hindi deities to be witness to their predicament, but the native gods weren’t helping much that night. Just then, a little black-and-yellow box of Swedish matches—prosaic, matter-of-fact Occidental matches—would have beaten Shiva, Vishnu, Lakshmi, and Parvati herself into a cocked hat.

  But those two steel-rattling fools did not know it. They just groped about, and searched, and cursed a little, and finally they seemed to decide that, though they themselves had come to the roof-top via the only aperture that led out from the building itself, there was only one other way—from Ibrahim Khan’s Gully, across the balustrade—the way I had taken. So one of them swung over the wall. I heard him land on his feet, with a little soft plop, like some great cat, and with a metallic, grating noise as the tip of his scabbard bumped against the ground; and a moment later I heard him down below, walking up and down, up and down, as if he was patrolling the Gully.

  By this time I was getting decidedly uncomfortable. The front of me was all right, with that little soft, warm bundle of humanity held tight in my arms. But the back of me! Pressed against the confounded stone wall, with about an inch of sharp bronze door-hinge boring into a choice spot of my anatomy! It was that which I minded. Funny, don’t you think? There I was, balancing precariously on the edge of the unknown, and it wasn’t my ultimate fate which I feared. I didn’t even think of it. The only thing that mattered was that one little pang of pain in the small of my back.

  A smile flickered on Stephen Denton’s lips. It was not exactly a smile of amusement, nor altogether a smile of triumph. Anyway, here’s how he continued:

  I was pretty good at college football, sort of solid and reliable; I played tackle straight through my lessons—didn’t slip and slide and run about the side-lines.

  Don’t you get me? Well, put it this was, then:

  I went in for the sound and heavy and recognized in learning, and didn’t care much for apologies. Regular chief in the tribe of the Philistines I was! Psychology? That was a word always on the lips of some of my classmates, as an excuse, an explanation for almost anything. I didn’t care for it at all.

  I always thought that a psychologist is like a man who is looking for his spectacles and finally finds them on his own nose, after looking on everybody’s else’s nose—the sort of a man who loses his spectacles—what? By putting them in the wrong place? Why, no! By putting them in the right place! That’s how he loses them! Well, I didn’t. I wasn’t a psychologist, nor any other sort of intellectual, self-analytical jackass. Perhaps I was too stupid—and it turned out to be lucky for me that night, on the flat roof-top in the heart of Colootallah, with every wickedness and crime and cruelty and superstition in India floating and breathing and bunching somewhere about me in the purple, choking darkness, with my love in my arms! For—as I should and would have done had I been a junior Münsterberg—I did not stop to dissect and label the psychology of fear and apprehension, as exemplified in myself.

  Perhaps I didn’t have the time. All I meant to do—I had made up my mind to do—was to get rid of the pain in my back, and to get the little girl somewhere where there wouldn’t be a witless hairbreadth of destiny between her life and mine.

  But how?

  Of course, my first inclination was to assault the Hindu who had remained behind—I could hear him breathe, near me, in the gloom—in fact, to kill him. Yes, to kill him! Remember, I told you I was beginning to feel myself part of the Colootallah scenery, including the—ah!—primeval emotions of that charming neighborhood. But, if I was a caveman in emotions, I was also a caveman in instinctive, safety-first cunning. I said to myself that I could not kill without making a noise—and there was my Hindu’s sidekick prowling about in the Gully. What then? I could not stay all night behind the pillar, even supposing the pain in my back should cease. For, in another few hours, it would be morning, and before that old lady Moon might get it into her head almost any time to pop out from behind her banks of clouds and treat us to a silver bath.

  No hope in front of me, thus! But in back of me there was a door, the only solid nail on which to hang my plan. If it had been door enough to let the two Hindu out on the roof-top, it was bound to be door enough to let me away from the roof-top.

  I acted on that idea as soon as I thought of it. The door was still ajar. Quite noiselessly, the girl in my arms, I squirmed around the edge of it, and I felt steps under my feet.

  Right then I drew a good, long breath—the first in about three eternities, it seemed to me—and I eased the strain on my muscles by letting the warm little burden in my arms slip down until the tips of her toes touched the ground.

  What—did I lock the door behind me? You bet your life I did—not!

  There was a latch, and I could have barred those snooping beggars out, but what possible good would that have done? Sooner or later they were bound to give up their search and to report to whomever had sent them; and their suspicions would only have increased if they had found that somebody had locked them out. No, I left the door open, and, once more pressing the little Hindu girl tight against my chest, I groped my way down the stairs, slowly, carefully, perhaps a couple of dozen steps, worn, slippery and hollow by the tread of naked feet, down, straight down.

  There was not even the faintest ray of light. But I held to my course, the burden in my arms getting heavier every second, carefully setting foot before foot, and finally landing dead against the wall. I gave my forehead a terrific bump and jarred my whole body. It was providential that the girl didn’t regain consciousness, for just then I should have had a devil of a time explaining to her.

  Presently, by groping tentatively here and there, I discovered that I had debouched on a narrow landing which stretched right and left. What now? I had to turn somewhere, and I chose the left, for no particular reason. But I have often since wondered what would have happened, how the whole thing would have ended, had I gone the other way, although a few minutes later I decided that my eventual choice of directions had been singularly unfortunate.

  Still, in the end, it didn’t turn out that way.

  You see (Stephen Denton made a vast, circular gesture) here I am, and—Never mind, old man. Let me resume my muttons.

  He laughed at the word.

  Muttons with a vengeance! If not muttons, then at least goats; same family of ruminant animals, aren’t they? For, as I walked down, the landing a perfectly brutal, goatish smell seemed to drift from the unknown goal toward which I was making. I wondered if on top of all the other sanitary iniquities the Hindus were in the habit of keeping pens in the middle of their living-houses. But I wasn’t going to let a smell, any smell, swerve me from my course. Goats or no goats, I walked on, on for several minutes along the outside which twisted and
turned, rose and dipped like some crazy stone snake, and all the time I felt the pat-pat-pat of the little girl’s heart-beats, softly beating, against my own heart, as if trying to blend, to mix with it.

  Once I stopped. For, from a great distance it seemed, the bell of the Presbterian church on Old Court House Street was tolling the half-hour; and I, don’t you see—I was going away from the bell, from the church and all it implied—civilization, Christianity, safety—away from Boston and mild cocktails and Phi Beta Kappa! “Come back!” tolled the bronze-tongued bell, and the sounds of it seemed to pour through the glassy, grooved floor as though from cellars and tunnels where they lay stored beneath the house, beneath the Colootallah, beneath all India. They sang and trembled about me: “Come back, come back!” But I—

  Well, I told the fool bell to go chase itself. I kept on—yes, in the general direction of that brutal odor.

  Presently, though the smell increased in intensity, in a certain unspeakable corroding acidity, it seemed to become less goatish; but, too, it seemed to hold some vague horror.

  Doesn’t seem reasonable, does it, to be afraid of a smell? But I was, in a way; and heretofore I hadn’t been afraid at all! Of course, I controlled my nascent fear immediately. Had to, you see, with all the world’s treasures to my arms. But I was in a peculiar state of mind. I put my feet down carefully, but mechanically, and my mind seemed suddenly detached from my bodily sensations, as if it was trying to grope ahead of my body into the dark, to warn, to reassure. Somehow I felt that I had stepped into a hollow; not a hollow of the earth, but one of time.

  Still I kept on, and all at once it seemed to me that the smell was directly in front of me, coming from below my feet. I groped in the dark—I had come to the end of the corridor—but there was a door set slant-ways into the wall. There was a handle. I gripped it. The door opened easily. I stepped inside, and the door shut behind me with a little dull, soft thud of finality.