Imogen had turned out her light and had called Pamela into her room. Together they had recognised the two men, watched them from the darkness as they whispered together on the plot of grass below. The hotel was outside the city with a tiny park in front of it, and beyond this open space a high grove of rain-trees.
“I would have liked Imogen to throw the sapphire and the chain out to them and have done with it,” Pamela related. “But Imogen wouldn’t give in. She clasped the chain about her throat.”
The two girls had stayed in the same room that night, behind their locked doors, and kept watch in turn until the daylight came.
“It was no use complaining,” said Pamela. “We had no real evidence of the attack on Imogen on the mountain; we couldn’t even prove that we had been followed. We should just have looked like a couple of bright young spirits advertising themselves in the usual way. We had noticed this rest-house on the way to Anuradhapura. We went sightseeing in the morning as if we were settled in the place for some days. Then in the afternoon we bolted again.”
The rest-house was certainly a place of secrecy and peace. And yet was it not a trifle too secret — too peaceful? Here was the afternoon waning and never a glimpse of Imogen. I was beginning to be tormented by anxiety.
“How many men followed you to Anuradhapura?” I asked.
Pamela stared at me frowning.
“Two, of course. I told you two. The two outside the jeweller’s shop and outside the hotel at Hatton.”
“Yes, but there was a third,” I said.
“A third — accomplice?” Pamela asked, holding her breath.
“Yes. A man who was to come up to the foot of the Peak from Ratnapura — who was waiting at the foot of that precipice.”
Pamela started back in her chair. Then she rejected my statement.
“Too childish a plot!” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Too childish and too cruel. In fact, thoroughly Burmese.”
And whilst Pamela, her face pale, her forehead drawn, sat in startled silence, I said to myself: “Yes, but the third partner in this crime was not a Burman” — and suddenly I seemed to hear again the airy music of a pipe. I heard it only in my memory. For there could never be a deeper silence than the silence which here held bough and bird and the wind itself in thrall. In another hour the jungle would be shrill with cicadas, and the murmur of innumerable insects would throb with the thunder of a drum. But now there was silence and more than silence. There was suspense. Once, years before, in a clearing of the teak wood by the Irrawaddy and again in a street of Mandalay I had been conscious of it, a sharer in the expectancy which hushed all nature.
“Tell me!” I said. “Who was this conjurer with the cobras.”
“I don’t know.”
“A Cingalese?”
Pamela shook her head.
“No. He wore a turban. He told us that he was an Indian from Coromandel.”
It was then that I started to my feet.
“An Indian? Did he give you a name?”
“No.”
The two Burmese at Hatton and Muhammed Ghalli at Ratnapura. The two Burmese at Anuradhapura and Muhammed Ghalli at the forest bungalow. Snake-charming — not so rare a gift! Cingalese, Indians, Egyptians — who that has ever travelled hasn’t seen one of them at his work?
“You are so still,” said Pamela uneasily.
“Don’t you think,” I asked — and I tried to give to my voice the most level and commonplace of notes— “don’t you think that we might rouse Imogen?”
Apparently I had not succeeded. I did not look at Pamela lest my face should betray the terror of my heart. But I heard her draw in her breath in a long, fluttering sigh.
“You know her room, of course?” I said.
We both stood up, and with a pitiable mimicry of nonchalance we walked into the passage of the house.
Chapter 12 Fear and Imogen
ON OUR LEFT as we entered the bungalow was the big living-room. Once beyond it the corridor ran to right and left, like the cross-bar of a capital T. Pamela turned to the left, and facing us at the end of the building was a closed door.
“That’s Imogen’s room,” she said. “Mine is just this side of it beyond the living-room.”
We walked to it. My shoes were soled with crêpe rubber; Pamela’s light feet made no noise whatever. At the door we halted. It was so still that the sudden hum of a dragon-fly, flashing in from the verandah and out again with a gleam of metal, startled us both like artillery. Pamela stood for a moment with her hand at her heart, catching her breath; and I leaned back against the wall no better off. Pamela, indeed, was the first to recover.
“Imogen may be still asleep,” she said in a whisper; and very carefully she turned the handle of the door and pressed. But it did not open.
“It’s locked,” she said in the same low voice, and she leaned an ear against the panel. I saw a look of bewilderment overspread her face and she turned the handle back, so that the latch fitted again into its socket, without a sound. She drew back a step or two, and as I joined her she said:
“I don’t understand. Imogen’s there in the room, but she might have been running a mile.”
Could there be a statement more alarming? She might have been running a mile. That might mean unconsciousness, pain, terror — anything but natural sleep. In my turn I stepped forward, but my heart was beating so noisily that I could hear nothing else. I called quietly, my mouth against the panel of the door.
“Imogen! Imogen!”
I was answered by a sob and even that was subdued, as though someone listened, someone who was blind, and dangerous. I flung my shoulders against the door, but the lock held, and above the rattle and thud Imogen’s voice rose in a broken scream.
“Don’t, Martin! It’s no good! Please! Please!”
There was such urgency and such panic as I had never heard in human voice. If Imogen had held fear at arm’s length on Adam’s Peak, it had got her by the throat now — and by the limbs. For there had not been the sound of a movement within the room. I swung round to Pamela.
“Which way does Imogen’s window look?” I whispered.
“To the back of the bungalow,” said Pamela.
I was aghast. It was from the back of the bungalow that the thin, faint music of the snake-charmer’s pipe had reached my ears.
I called again through the door:
“Hold on, my dear, for a second,” and again Imogen’s voice ran up and down the scale of terror.
“No, Martin. You can’t do a thing!”
I beckoned to Pamela. We hurried back along the corridor and on to the verandah and round the corner of the rest-house to the rear of it. A great hedge of lantana shut us off from the outbuildings. In front of us was a window with its shutters closed. I moved forward and touched them. At the touch they fell apart. They had not been bolted from within — therefore not bolted at all; and the window was open. I looked into the room.
There was a bedstead on my right hand with its mosquito curtains folded on the top of the frame; and no one had rested on the bed. There was the usual furniture, a sun-helmet on a table, a mat by the side of the bed, a brown teak floor — and Imogen. I shall never forget the sight of her. She was standing upright against the wall opposite to the bed, with her arms a little outspread and the palms of her hands pressed against the panelling to keep herself upright. She had thrown off her hat. She was wearing a dark blue coat and skirt, with a white shirt, beige stockings and blue shoes to match her dress, and the shoes and her ankles were pressed tightly together, to occupy as little room as was possible. Her eyes were wide open and fixed upon some spot on the floor a yard or so in front of her. She was in a trance, if terror can cause a trance. For from head to foot she was bound fast by terror.
As the shutters opened she cast one swift glance towards them. Then her eyes went back to the floor.
“Martin,” she whispered. “Don’t move, Martin! It’ll strike if you do. He warned me. Move and
it’ll strike!”
And there was nothing at all on the floor.
I sprang over the window-sill.
“Imogen — —” I began.
“Keep away! Keep away!”
She had leaned a little forward and her voice rose to a scream. So I took a stride and stood deliberately on the very spot on which her eyes were fixed. For a second she giggled like a schoolgirl — I never heard a sound more distressing — and then, without any warning, slid sideways down the wall. I was just in time to catch her as she fell.
I carried her to the bed and laid her upon it. Then I unlocked the door and called to Pamela. Pamela bathed her forehead whilst I got some brandy from my flask; and in a few minutes Imogen opened her eyes. She looked at us both as if we were strangers. Next she made a mocking little grimace at us and reaching out her hand smoothed it down my arm and gave me a squeeze. Apparently she was now satisfied that she had done enough for us. For she turned over on her side with her back towards us, stretched out her slim long legs and immediately was fast asleep. I searched the room — it was easy enough with its bare floor and scanty furniture — and I found nothing. There was nothing there to find. Pamela pushed me out, managed, somehow, to undress her Sleeping Beauty and get her into bed. Imogen slept without a break in her slumber until the sun was high on the next morning. There had been no need for either of us to keep a watch. For the platinum chain with its sapphire pendant had gone.
“For good and all, I hope,” I said to Pamela Brayburn as we breakfasted together in the cool of the morning. I had no thought for Michael Crowther at that moment. Never before or since have I uttered a prayer more sincere.
“I, too,” returned Pamela, but her voice trailed off as if she hardly believed that good fortune so marvellous could befall us. “Imogen will tell us when she’s up.”
Upon Pamela Brayburn in her turn the shadow of the sapphire had spread its canopy.
Chapter 13 The Indian
WHAT HAD HAPPENED? Imogen, lying in a low and restful chair, told us a part of it on the verandah after luncheon. All that she knew she told, but it was not all that there was to be told; and we who listened had to put the rest of it together as best we could, in the belief that the commonplaces of one race are the miracles of another. Imogen’s long sleep had restored the colour to her cheeks and the buoyancy to her spirits. And if once or twice she flinched in her narrative, she recovered her spirits the next instant with a shake of the head which reminded me of a swimmer coming up into the sunlight after a deep dive beneath the water. She smoked a cigarette whilst she talked. Her mind was smoothed out. She, at all events, was now free from the shadow of the sapphire.
* * * * *
Imogen had stayed on the verandah after the snake-charmer’s departure. She and Pamela had discussed the performance, wondering whether the cobras were tame and whether their poison-ducts had been extracted; and what qualities a little rod of nagatharana could have so to frighten them; and if the dark, porous snake-stone which had been shown to them was a genuine antidote for a snakebite. The Indian was an old, unbelievably lean, tall man with a grizzled beard, who wore nothing in the way of clothes except a loin-cloth and a turban; and certainly there were twin scars upon his wrists and upon his breast which only the fangs of a serpent seemed able to account for.
“We were perhaps twenty minutes talking about these things,” said Imogen. “Not more. Then I got up and went away to my room. I was very sleepy.”
She opened the door or, more exactly, turned the handle and threw it open. The door was set in the wall opposite to the wall against which the bed was placed, and at the inner end of the room. It opened inwards and downwards, that is, towards the window. Thus, if you entered the room you had a wall upon your left, the window at the end of the room on your right, and the bed upon the right of the window at a diagonal with the door. Imogen, then, flung open the door and walked in. She had her solar topee in her hand and she laid it on a round table which stood against the upper wall opposite to the window. The window was open, but the shutters were closed, and since that side of the bungalow was in shadow and the eaves of the roof were wide, little more than twilight crept through the lattices into the room. Imogen, coming straight from the verandah and the prospect of a green ocean of forest shining in the sun, was for a second or two blinded. She stood still for the darkness to clear away, but it had not quite cleared when she began again to move. She took two or three steps towards the window in order to open the shutters. And something flickered behind her and quite noiselessly.
Imogen felt her heart jump into her throat. The Indian had been waiting for her, hidden behind the door. As she turned she saw him close the door and slide the bolt into its socket. She did not scream, although she was about to scream. For as her mouth opened something else flickered in the dusk of the room and Imogen’s heart whirled down within her. In the uncertain light it might have been taken for the neck and flat head of a swan; and it hissed as an angry swan will hiss. It was almost white, too, but it had the sheen of hard scales rather than the softness of down.
“Miss Sahib not to scream,” the Indian said softly. “Or I make cobra punish her.”
Imogen could not have screamed now. Her throat was dry, her nerves paralysed by terror. She had felt her heart leap into her throat as the Indian bolted the door; it stood still now in her horror of the snake. The passage of a minute had altered the world. She had walked lightly from the verandah, quite free from the anxiety of these last days. She had opened a door and fear bound her limbs, and death was an inch from her throat.
She was not aware that she had moved, but she found herself upright against the wall, between the window and the door, her small feet in the blue shoes making themselves smaller, the palms of her hands pressed against the panels to keep herself from falling. Had the cobra slithered an inch towards her across the floor, she must have fallen, and in falling must have screamed.
But the reptile merely swayed its head from side to side, a venomous flower upon a white stalk. In the gloom its eyes were bright as diamonds and held her, so that her eyes, too, must swing from side to side in a horrid slavery. Suddenly the sound of the Indian’s pipe, playing a music which was plaintive and yet had a cadence curiously voluptuous, was heard in the room. The music was low. It reached me in my car because I was just passing on that winding road the corner of the bungalow whence the music floated. The Indian was kneeling upon one knee facing the cobra and close by Imogen’s side. From the fold of his knee his little stick of nagatharana stuck out ready for use. And he piped. And Imogen, her wits all scattered, swung her head from right to left and from left to right in a synchronism with the head of the dancing cobra, brown eyes riveted upon diamond eyes glittering evilly beneath the expanded hood.
“I remembered, in a meaningless way,” said Imogen, “what I had read in books on the voyage to Ceylon. That the cobra — even the king-cobra with the silvery neck and head which this one had — was a coward; that little vedda boys would think nothing of capturing one and taming it; that cobras had been kept by Cingalese as house-dogs, fatal to thieves and harmless to the inmates. But with those little eyes glancing like fire-flies in the twilit room, yet never, like fire-flies, vanishing, I could not believe.”
The piping stopped. The Indian snatched his little stick from the grip of his knee and stretched it out. The cobra ceased to sway. It seemed to the girl clamped by her danger against the wall, that its eyes dimmed. It sank and uncoiled and with a thud its head hit the teak floor. It lay stretched out, a knotted branch fallen from a tree but a branch with eyes.
The Indian spoke in a low voice:
“The Miss Sahib will raise her hands gently and unclasp the jewel from her throat and drop it in my hand.”
Imogen obeyed him. He held the stick in his left hand over the snake’s head, and the palm of his right hand was cupped at Imogen’s side. Into that cup she dropped the sapphire and the Indian tied it in a knot of his loin-cloth, using but the right hand.<
br />
“I leave my cobra to guard the Miss Sahib,” he continued.
“Oh, no,” Imogen moaned, and at the sound of her voice the eyes of the reptile brightened.
“The Miss Sahib no speak, no move and no hurt. In a little whiles I call my servant and he follow.”
He chanted in a low sing-song some hymn or order which Imogen did not understand. Then he slipped out of the window as if he were a snake himself. He left the cobra behind him on the floor of the room — Imogen swore to it. When he opened the shutters, and let in for the flash of a second the afternoon light, she saw the snake like the bough of a silver birch — plain as plain could be against the rich brown of the teak planks. It remained there and never moved — just as she never moved. Imogen swore to it. It was on that same spot — again she swore to it — when near upon an hour later I threw open the shutters. It was there when she warned me not to move. It was there till the very moment when I stood on the exact spot where it was supposed to lie. I have known a man ride his camel knee-deep into the waters of a mirage before the water vanished and he rode over a desert of pebbles. In the same swift magical way the cobra had vanished from Imogen’s sight.
This was her story. At what point had the Indian lured his cobra back into his wicker-work bottle? Had he left it behind him and called to it to follow? Had he taken it away with him, and yet left her with the vision of it stretched on the floor like a branch and its diamond eyes claiming hers, binding her hand and foot in the paralysis of fear? None of us could answer these questions. We talked a little of the famous rope-trick and whether any living being had really seen it and of a wagon-load of illusions. But when we had comforted ourselves with our Western superiorities and proved that that which had been could not be, I retained, nevertheless, very vividly the terrible picture of a girl crucified by fear, her small white face and startled eyes fixed, as though they had been moulded in wax a second after an agonising death.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 648