The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Read online

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  THE MEGAPACK SERIES

  INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer

  WINGS

  LIGHT

  FEAR

  THE CHARMED LIFE

  FRAMED AT THE BENEFACTORS CLUB

  RENUNCIATION

  POKER

  THE YELLOW WIFE

  BISMILLAH!

  A YARKAND SURVEY

  THE INCUBUS

  PRO PATRIA

  PELL STREET BLUES

  THE MYSTERY OF THE TALKING IDOLS

  A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY

  THEIR OWN DEAR LAND

  THE STRONG MAN

  HIMSELF TO HIMSELF ENOUGH

  INTERLUDE

  AN INDIAN JATAKA

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Achmed Abdullah Megapack is copyright © 2013 by Wildside Press LLC.

  * * * *

  “Introduction” is copyright © 2004 by Wildside Press. “Wings” originally appeared in All-Story Weekly August 10, 1918. “Light” originally appeared in All-Story Weekly, May 18, 1918. “Fear” originally appeared in Detective Story Magazine, February 4, 1919. “The Charmed Life” originally appeared in All-Story Weekly, September 22, 1917. “Framed at the Benefactor’s Club” originally appeared in Detective Story Magazine, April 16, 1921. “Renunciation” originally appeared in Munsey’s Magazine, March 1919. “Poker” originally appeared in “The Yellow Wife” originally appeared in Munsey’s Magazine, July 1919. “Bismallah!” originally appeared in Argosy-Allstory Weekly, June 11, 1921. “A Yarkand Survey” originally appeared in The Argosy, July 20, 1918. “The Incubus” originally appeared in Blue Book Magazine, April 1920.“Pro Patria” originally appeared in People’s Favorite Magazine, December 10, 1918. “Pell Street Blues” originally appeared in Blue Book Magazine, March 1935. “The Mystery of the Talking Idols” originally appeared in Triple X, May 1929.“A Simple Act of Piety” originally appeared in All-Story Weekly, April 20, 1918. “Their Own Dear Land” originally appeared in Blue Book Magazine, January 1943. “The Strong Man” originally appeared in The Elks Magazine, July 1928. “Himself to Himself Enough” originally appeared in All-Story Weekly, March 15, 1919. “Interlude” originally appeared in Collier’s Weekly, May 7, 1927. “An Indian Jataka” originally appeared in The Ten-foot Chain (1920).

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Achmed Abdullah may seem an odd (and perhaps less-than-commercial) choice for an Author megapack, considering how little-known he is to modern readers. However, I am a big fan of his work, and I have been promoting him to anyone who will listen for the last decade or so. His fantasies and ghost stories are particularly well done—and the exotic settings he sometimes employs are better realized than most pulp writers’ visions of the Exotic East because (as his name may hint) he had lived in the places of which he wrote. If this is your first taste of his fiction, I can pretty well guarantee that it won’t be his last. (Check out all the novels by Achmed Abdullah that Wildside Press now has in print and see if you can resist snacking on one or two!)

  * * * *

  Over the last year, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has proved to be one of our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt, Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!).

  A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS

  The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

  If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  THE MEGAPACK SERIES

  The Adventure Megapack

  The Baseball Megapack

  The Boys’ Adventure Megapack

  The Buffalo Bill Megapack

  The Christmas Megapack

  The Second Christmas Megapack

  The Classic American Short Story Megapack

  The Classic Humor Megapack

  The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

  The Cowboy Megapack

  The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

  The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

  The Dan Carter, Cub Scout Megapack

  The Detective Megapack

  The Father Brown Megapack

  The Ghost Story Megapack

  The Second Ghost Story Megapack

  The Third Ghost Story Megapack

  The Horror Megapack

  The Macabre Megapack

  The Second Macabre Megapack

  The Martian Megapack

  The Military Megapack

  The Mummy Megapack

  The First Mystery Megapack

  The Penny Parker Megapack

  The Pulp Fiction Megapack

  The Rover Boys Megapack

  The Science Fiction Megapack

  The Second Science Fiction Megapack

  The Third Science Fiction Megapack

  The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

  The Penny Parker Megapack

  The Pinocchio Megapack

  The Steampunk Megapack

  The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

  The Tom Swift Megapack

  The Vampire Megapack

  The Victorian Mystery Megapack

  The Werewolf Megapack

  The Western Megapack

  The Second Western Megapack

  The Wizard of Oz Megapack

  AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

  The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

  The Edward Bellamy Megapack

  The E.F. Benson Megapack

  The Second E.F. Benson Megapack

  The B.M. Bower Megapack

  The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack

  The Wilkie Collins Megapack

  The Philip K. Dick Megapack

  The Jacques Futrelle Megapack

  The Randall Garrett Megapack

  The Second Randall Garrett Megapack

  The C.J. Henderson Megapack

  The G.A. Henty Megapack

  The M.R. James Megapack

  The Andre Norton Megapack

  The H. Beam Piper Megapack

  The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

  INTRODUCTION, by Darrell Schweitzer

  Achmed Abdullah. There was a time when his name was synonymous with romantic, exot
ic adventure. The byline of Achmed Abdullah appeared on numerous magazine stories and books. His English style was excellent, even poetic, but with a voice of authenticity that suggested that maybe this writer was an Arab or some other “Oriental.” All the better, in an era in which Lawrence of Arabia was one of the first media celebrities and Rudolph Valentino’s portrayal of The Sheik played to every woman’s daydreams.

  The truth is more complicated and even more exotic. Those who met Abdullah found him very British in speech, manner and ideas. Indeed, he had been educated at Eton and Oxford (and the University of Paris), and had served in the British Army in the Middle East, India, and China, but he was actually the son of a Russian Grand Duke, the second cousin of Czar Nicholas II. His Russian name was Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff (sometimes given as Romanowski). His Muslim name was Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan el-Durani el-Iddrissyeh. While the byline “Achmed Abdullah” was easy to remember and quite exotic, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a pseudonym, and he came by it legitimately. Admittedly “Achmed Adbullah” was more likely to sell books of Oriental adventure than “Alexander Romanoff.”

  Abdullah/Romanoff was born in 1881 and died in 1945. His birthplace is variously reported as Malta or Russia. What is certain is that after his army service, he embarked on a general literary career, writing novels and stories of mystery and adventure and some fantasy, with much of his work appearing in pulp magazines such as Munsey’s, Argosy, and All-Story. His first novel was The Swinging Caravan (1911), followed by The Red Stain (1915), The Blue-Eyed Manchu (1916), Bucking the Tiger (1917), The Trail of the Beast (1918), The Man on Horseback (1919), The Mating of the Blades (1921), and so on, all the way up to Deliver Us From Evil (1939). He edited anthologies, including Stories for Men (1925), Lute and Scimitar (1928), and Mysteries of Asia (1935).

  Among his fantasy volumes, the story collection Wings: Tales of the Psychic (1920) is most recommended by aficionados. His best-remembered and most famous work is the 1924 novelization of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s film, The Thief of Bagdad. As it has been reprinted many times over the years, clearly Abdullah’s Thief of Bagdad is more than a mere typing exercise. It is, after all, the novelization of a silent film, which meant the novelist had to be considerably more creative and invent most of the dialogue.

  Abdullah’s connection with Hollywood did not end with a novelization. He had written plays for Broadway, such as Toto (1921) and went on to do a number of screenplays, including Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), for which he and collaborators John Balderston and Waldemar Young shared an Academy Award. The film was based on the novel by Francis Yeats-Brown, but it is clear that Abdullah was eminently suited to the material.

  * * * *

  Achmed Abdullah’s works are the product of another era, when the British Empire was widely seen as a pinnacle of civilized achievement and native peoples were not supposed to aspire to nationhood. His outlook has much in common with that of H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, or Rudyard Kipling.

  Certainly he is an authentic and articulate voice of his era, and a first-rate storyteller. He published his autobiography in 1933, The Cat Had Nine Lives: Adventures and Reminiscences, detailing a real life as eventful as his fiction. He also was one of several authors who embodied the ideal of the adventure writer, who was himself expected to be an exotic figure, a world traveler, whose wild yarns were given a sense of reality from having been lived, rather than merely made up.

  WINGS

  Chapter I

  That Saturday night at the height of the London season when Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, made his initial bow to Belgravia in the salon of the Dowager Duchess of Shropshire, properly introduced and vouched for by Sir James Spottiswoode of the India Office, there wasn’t a man in the great scarlet and purple room, nor woman either, who did not look up quite automatically when the big, bearded, turbaned figure crossed the threshold and bent over the wrinkled, perfumed old hand of her grace.

  There wasn’t a person in that room—and people of all classes crowded the gossipy old duchess’s Saturday night at homes, from recently knighted, pouchy, sharp-voiced barristers to gentlemen of the bench who hid their baldness and their forensic wisdom under tremendous, dusty wigs, from the latest East African explorer returned from a six-months’ unnecessary slaughter, to the stolidest novelist of mid-Victorian respectability; from the most Parisianized Londoner to the most Anglified Parisian; from the latest shouting evangelist out of the State of Wisconsin to the ungodly Yorkshire peer who had varied the monotony of last year’s marriage to, and divorce from, a Sussex dairymaid by this year’s elopement with a Gaiety chorus-girl; from Mayfair Dives to Soho Lazarus—there wasn’t a person in all that mixed assembly who did not feel a shiver of expectation as the raja entered.

  Expectation of something.

  Waiting, tensely, dramatically, silently, for something.

  “Not waiting for something to happen,” Charlie Thorneycroft put it. “Rather waiting for something that had already happened, you know. Which of course is infernal rot and asinine drivel. For how in the name of my canonized great-grandaunt can you wait for the future of the past tense? But—there you are!”

  And Thorneycroft, of London, Calcutta, Peshawar, Melbourne, Capetown, and the British Empire in general, vaguely attached to some mythical diplomatic bureau in some unknown diplomatic capacity, would drop his monocle and look up with a sharp, challenging stare of his ironic gray eyes, as if expecting you to contradict him.

  It was not that the presence of a raja, or any other East Indian potentate or near-potentate was an unusual occurrence in London. Rajas are more common there than Nevada plutocrats at a Florida resort, or black-cocks on a Yorkshire moor. London is the capital of a motley and picturesque empire, and pink turbans soften the foggy, sulfurous drab of Fleet Street; lavender turbans bob up and down the human eddy of the Burlington arcades; green and red and white turbans blotch the sober, workaday atmosphere of East Croydon and Pimlico.

  Nor was it anything in Martab Singh’s appearance or reputation.

  For, as to the first, he was good-looking in rather a heavy, simple, bovine fashion, with two hundred pounds of flesh and brawn carried by his six foot two of height, his great, staring, thick-fringed, opaque eyes, his melancholy smile, and his magnificent beard, dyed red with henna, which was split from the chin down the center and then curled up on either side of his face so that the points, which touched his ridiculously small ears, looked like the horns of a combative ram.

  And as to his reputation and standing, Sir James Spottiswoode had vouched for it.

  There was also Charlie Thorneycroft’s drawling, slightly saturnine corroboration.

  “Tremendously swanky beggar in his own country,” he said to pretty, violet-eyed Victoria de Rensen. “Descendant of the flame on his father’s side, and related to the moon on the bally distaff. Cousin to Vishnu, Shiva, Doorgha, and what-not, and college chum to all the assorted and hideous divinities of the Hindu heaven. His principality is small, barren, poor. A mixture of rocks and flies and hairy and murderous natives. But he is the very biggest among the bigwigs of India. To two hundred million benighted Hindus he is the deity—Brahm, what?—all the gods rolled into one and topped by a jolly, crimson caste-mark. He’s the gods’ earthly representative, you know, Vic darling. Not only that. For”—he dropped his voice to a flat whisper—“this is the first time in the history of the world—hang it, before the history of the world—that a Maharaja of Oneypore has left his native soil.”

  “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Because by leaving India he pollutes his soul, he loses caste. And that’s just why I wonder—”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing!”

  Quite suddenly he looked up, and his long, white fingers gripped the girl’s arm nervously.

  “Did you feel—it?” he whispered.

  There was no need for an answer. Nor, really, had there been need for the question in the first place.

  For, as the
raja, arm in arm with Sir James Spottiswoode, stepped away from the door and farther into the room, it came.

  Nobody heard it. Nobody saw it or smelt it. Nobody even felt it, either consciously or subconsciously.

  But again, through the mixed company that crowded the duchess’s salon, there passed a shiver. A terrible, silent, hopeless shiver.

  Then noises: human noises, and the relief that goes with them. A distinct sound of breath sucked in quickly, of tea-cups clacking as hands trembled, of feet shuffling uneasily on the thick Turkish carpet, of the very servants, placidly, stolidly English, stopping in their rounds of hospitable duties, standing stock-still, silver trays gripped in white-gloved fingers, and staring, breathless, like pointers at bay.

  “Something—like great wings, rushing, rushing!” murmured Charlie Thorneycroft, dropping his usual slang like a cloak.

  “Like—wings—” echoed Victoria de Rensen with a little sob.

  Yet there was nothing formidable or sinister in the raja’s progress through the room, by the side of Sir James, who played guide, philosopher, and friend. A charming, childlike smile was on his lips. His great, opaque eyes beamed with honest, kindly pleasure. He bowed here to a lady, shook the hands of barrister and judge and artist, mumbled friendly words in soft, halting English, accepted a cup of tea from a servant who had regained his composure, and dropped into a low Windsor chair, looking at the people with the same melancholy, childlike expression.

  Very gradually the huge, voiceless excitement died. Once more servants pussyfooted through the salon with food and drink; once more the Paris cubist tore the artistic theories of the white-bearded Royal Academician into shreds; once more the Wisconsin evangelist bent to the ear of the Mayfair debutante and implored her to hit the trail of salvation; once more lion growled at lion.

  But Charlie Thorneycroft could not shake off the strange impression which he had received. He was still aware of the thing, whatever it was, and of the great rushing of wings. It came out of the East, from far across the sea, and it was very portentous, very terrible, very tragic.

  “I didn’t hear the wings!” he exclaimed later on. “Nor did I feel them. If I had felt or heard I wouldn’t have minded so, you know. I felt with them—and I was sorry for them, awfully, awfully sorry. No sense to that? Of course not. There wasn’t a bally ounce of sense to the whole wretched thing from beginning to end—and that’s the worst of it!”