The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Read online

  “Ride down there,” he said to the babu, pointing at a narrow valley to the west, black with trees and gnarled shrub, that cleft the land. “Wait until you hear from me. I fancy you’ll find some brother babu in the valley fattening his pouch and increasing his bank-account at the expense, of the Rajput villagers. He will give you food and drink and a roof over your head. Tell him anything you wish as long as you don’t tell him the truth.”

  “Of course I shall not tell him the truth,” replied the babu, slightly hurt. “Am I a fool or—”

  “An Englishman?” Thorneycroft completed the sentence. “Never mind. I am English. But I learned the art of deceit in Kashmere, the home of lies, and Youssef Ali, too, gave me some invaluable lessons.”

  And while the babu rode off to the valley, leading the other horse, Thorneycroft set off at a good clip toward Oneypore, which was becoming more distinct every minute as the morning mists rolled up and away like torn gauze veils. It was seven o’clock when he reached the western gate, an ancient marble structure, incrusted with symbolistic figures and archaic terra-cotta medallions, and topped by a lacy, fretted lotus-bud molding.

  Beyond, the city stretched like a flower of stone petals.

  Oneypore!

  The sacred city of Hindustan! The holy soil where the living descendants of the gods had ruled for over five thousand years—and one of them dead, on unclean, foreign soil—buried in unclean, foreign soil!

  An outcast! He, the descendant of Rama, an outcast!

  Oneypore! And it was a fascinating town, with crooked streets and low, white houses, cool gardens ablaze with mangoes and mellingtonia and flowering peepul-trees and, in the distance, a gigantic palace, built out of a granite hillside, and descending into the dip of the valley with an avalanche of bold masonry.

  Toward it, without hesitation, Thorneycroft set his face.

  He had to cross the Oneypore River, only second in holiness to the palace: the river which, for centuries, had been the last resting-place of thousands of Afghans and Rajputs massacred in the narrow streets of the city or slain in fierce combats outside its brown, bastioned walls. Sorrowing widows, in accordance with the marriage vows of their caste, had sought the solace of oblivion beneath its placid surface. Faithless wives and dancing girls had been hurled into the waters from the convenient battlements and windows of the palace.

  The river’s sinister reputation, in spite of its holiness, was such that though the natives bathed in its limpid depth they never, knowingly, allowed a drop of it to pass their lips. River of grim tragedies—and its hour of grim glory came when a Maharaja of Oneypore died, and when his corpse, attired in its most magnificent costume, the arms encircled by jeweled bracelets, shimmering necklaces of pearls and moonstones and diamonds descending to the waist, and a huge, carved emerald falling like a drop of green fire from the twisted, yellow Rajput turban, was carried out of the palace, through the streets of the town, sitting bolt upright on a chair of state, and back to the banks of the Oneypore River, where the body was burnt and its ashes thrown into the waters—while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while white-robed priests chanted longwinded litanies, while the conches brayed from the temples, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the sky in thick, wispy streams and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud above the glare of the funeral pyre that lit up the palace and told to all the world that another one of the divine race of Oneypore had gone to join Brahm, his kinsman.

  Brahm, his kinsman!

  And Martab Singh had mingled the bones of his dead body with those of the mlechhas, the foreigners, the barbarians, the Christians—on foreign, Christian soil!

  * * * *

  Something like a shudder of apprehension passed over Thorneycroft, but he kept sturdily on his way, returning the salutations with which the hook-nosed, saber-rattling, swaggering Rajputs greeted him because of his Brahman garb. He went up a steep ascent that led to the chowk, the outer courtyard of the palace, and the soldiers salaamed and stepped aside:

  “Enter, O holy one!”

  Like a man sure of his way, he passed through a low gate, through another courtyard crammed with human life, and into still another, which was lifeless except for the whir and coo of hundreds of blue-winged pigeons and for the figure of a very old priest, squatting on a goat’s-skin rug and deep in the perusal of a massive Sanskrit tome.

  Chapter V

  The old priest looked up when Thorneycroft approached, and the latter gave an involuntary start, though rapidly suppressed.

  In former years, pursuing his vague, mysterious diplomatic career in different parts of that immense block of real estate called the British Empire, but a good half of the time in India, he had heard about this priest, the Swami Pel Krishna Srina. He knew that the man was the prime minister, that before him his father held the same position, before his father his grandfather, and thus back for many generations. For the Brahmans of the house of Pel Srina were cousins in blood and caste to the reigning house of Oneypore, and like them descendants of the gods.

  Neither the maharaja nor his prime minister had ever taken much interest in the muddy, coiling politics of India. It was indifferent to them what particular foreign barbarian—English or Afghan or Mogul or Persian—was overlord of the great peninsula. They seemed satisfied with ruling the little rocky, barren principality, with the faded glory of the dead centuries, and with the decidedly theological and just as decidedly unworldly fact that the Oneypores were considered the living representatives of the gods by the vast majority of Hindus.

  Thus Thorneycroft had never taken the trouble of meeting Swami Pel Srina, and now, seeing him for the first time, he was startled out of his customary English calm.

  Nor was it a psychic impression. Here, in this sheltered courtyard—and for the first time since that day when the Maharaja of Oneypore had made his appearance in the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire—he was unaware, quite unaware of the silent, gigantic whirring of wings.

  What made him suck in his breath was the face of the swami.

  “I wish I could picture it to you as I saw it,” he said afterward. “It would take the hand of some mad cubist sculptor to clout the meaning of it. The features? No, no. Nothing extraordinary about them. Just those of an elderly, dignified, rather conceited Brahman. But the expression of the thin, compressed lips, the great staring, gray eyes! Gad! I am an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product. Thus I’m a jolly good Episcopalian, take me all round. But when I saw those eyes—oh—the whole cursed thing seemed suddenly rational, possible—inevitable even! Right then—Christian, Englishman, and public school product—I believed the absurd claim of the rajas and prime ministers of Oneypore that they were the descendants of Rama and Vishnu. It was all in those eyes that were staring at me. They looked—oh—unearthly—that’s the word!”

  Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of superstitious emotions lasted only a moment. Perhaps it was contained in the short time it took the swami to look up, to drop his book, and to raise a thin, high-veined hand with the words:

  “Greetings, brother priest!”

  At all events Thorneycroft was himself again. He bowed over the withered old hand and said—he had thought it all out carefully beforehand—that he had come to Oneypore to hear with his own ears, to see with his own eyes, the great miracle which the swami had performed.

  “Ah!” breathed the swami, and he did not altogether hide a faint accent of nervousness—“then—it has been talked about—in the south?”

  “No!” Thorneycroft replied quickly. “Not talked about. I do not even know what it is. But a voice came to me in the night—whispering, whispering; it was like the whirring of wings, and I followed, followed, followed! Straight on I followed until I came here, to Oneypore, to the palace, the courtyard, your presence, O swami! And now”—he really spoke the truth there, and he used to say afterward that it was doubtless the fact of his speaking the truth which made him so utterly convincing—“now the
whirring of wings has stopped. Now there is sweetness and peace as there was”—he shot the words out suddenly—“that day, a few weeks back, on the 15th of January!”

  “At what hour?” as suddenly asked the priest.

  “At twenty-eight minutes to midnight!” replied Thorneycroft, who had never forgotten the day nor the hour when the Raja of Oneypore had died in the salon of Her Grace of Shropshire.

  “Good!” said the swami, rising slowly and leading the way to a massive door.

  He drew a foot-long, skewerlike key from his waist-shawl, opened the door, and motioned Thorneycroft to enter.

  The gate clicked behind them.

  “Good!” he said again, stopped, and faced the other squarely. “You have wondered,” he went on, “as to the why and wherefore—you, to whom the voice of the miracle came in the night?”

  “Yes,” replied Thorneycroft in low accents, his heart beating like a trip-hammer. “I have wondered indeed. I knew the thing—was done. I heard the whirring of wings. I knew the raja died—”

  “But did he die, brother Brahman?” The swami looked at the Englishman, deep, brooding melancholia in his gray eyes. “Ahi! Did he die?” And he made a hopeless gesture and led on again through empty suites of rooms supported by double rows of pillars, past balconies which clung like birds’ nests to the sheer side of the palace, again through more rooms and up and down steep steps. Once in a while they encountered liveried, turbaned officials. But always the latter would salaam deeply and step aside.

  Finally he stopped in front of a door which was a great slab of tulip-wood inlaid with nacre and lac. He lifted his hand, and Thorneycroft noticed that it was trembling violently.

  “Brother Brahman,” he said, “Martab Singh was my kinsman, my friend, my king. He was cousin to me, and cousin to the gods. I loved him greatly, and for years, with me by his side, he stepped in the footsteps of his ancestors, in the way of salvation, the way of the many gods. Then one day—shall I ever forget it?—madness came to him. He, the Maharaja of Oneypore, he, the incarnation of Rama and Vishnu and Brahm himself, declared that the desire was in his nostrils to leave India. To leave the sacred soil! To go traveling in the far lands and see the unclean witchcraft of the foreigners, the Christians, the English, the mlechhas! Gently I spoke to him as I might to a child. This and that I told him, quoting the sacred books, the words of Brahm, our blessed Lord. ‘This is lust,’ I quoted, ‘born of the quality of rajas. Know this to be a great devourer, great sin, and the enemy on earth. As by smoke fire is enveloped, and the looking-glass by rust, as the womb envelops the unborn child, so by this it is enveloped. By this—the eternal enemy of the wise man, desire-formed, hard to be filled, insatiate—discrimination is enveloped. The senses and organs, the thinking faculty, as well as the faculty of judgment, are said to be its seat. It—enveloping the discriminative faculty with these—deludes the lord of the body!’ Thus I spoke to him, often, gently!”

  “And he? Martab Singh?”

  “Would laugh in his beard. He would say that, if Vishnu was his kinsman, so was Indra—and Indra was the god of travel. And so—”

  “He traveled? He went to England?”

  “No!”

  “No?” echoed Thorneycroft. He felt his hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind. His thought swirled back, and he remembered how the maharaja had entered the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire, how he had bowed over the withered old hand, how Sir James Spottiswoode, of the India Office, had vouched for him, how—

  “No?” he said again, stupidly.

  “No, by Shiva!” came the swami’s hushed voice. “He did not travel. He did not leave the sacred soil of India. He is—in here!” At the same time opening the door, drawing Thorneycroft inside, and shutting the door behind him.

  Chapter VI

  For a moment the Englishman was utterly lost, utterly confounded. He had thought. He had imagined. He had conferred with the babu and had spoken to him of priest-craft. But this—this—

  The whirring of wings, which he had not heard since he had entered the inner courtyard, was once, more, suddenly, upon him with terrific force, with the strength of sun and sea and the stars. He felt himself caught in a huge, invisible net of silent sound that swept out of the womb of creation, toward death, and back toward throbbing life. The whirring rose, steadily, terribly, until it filled the whole room from floor to ceiling, pressing in with ever-deepening strength. It was like the trembling of air in a belfry where bells have been ringing ceaselessly for days—but bells without sound, bells with only the ghost of sound—

  He feared it.

  It seemed to strike, not at his life, but at the meaning, the plausibility, the saneness of life.

  It took possession of his body and his soul, and forged them into something partaking of neither the physical nor the spiritual, yet at the same moment partaking of both—something that was beyond the power of analysis, of guessing, of shivering dread even.

  Quite suddenly it stopped, as caught in an air-pocket, and he became conscious of the swami’s pointing finger, and his low words:

  “Look there, Brother Brahman!”

  And, stretched on a bed of state in the far corner of the room, he saw the figure of Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, as he had seen him that first day in London, with his large, opaque eyes, the melancholy, childlike smile, the split, curled beard, the crimson caste mark.

  The figure was rigid. There wasn’t a breath of life. It was like a marvelously painted, lifelike statue—yet Thorneycroft knew that it was not a statue. He knew that it was the maharaja—the same maharaja whom, on the 15th of January, he had seen die in Marlborough House, whom he had seen buried in an English cemetery, with twenty files of Horse Guards flanking the coffin and all the gentry of the India Office rolling behind in comfortable carriages.

  “But—what—”

  He stammered. His voice seemed dead and smothered. He began to shake all over, feverishly; and again the whirring of wings rushed upon him, and again, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, an eternity later, he became conscious of the swami’s low, sibilant voice:

  “He wanted to travel. Nor could I dissuade him, and I—I loved him. Thus I said to him: ‘You yourself cannot leave the sacred soil of India. It would bring pollution unthinkable on yourself, on Hindustan, on the blessed gods themselves. But I am a master of white magic. I shall take your astral body from the envelope of your living body, and I shall breathe a spell upon it so that it shall be even as your living body, feeling, hearing, seeing, touching. Your astral self shall go to the land of the mlechhas—the land of the infidels—while your body, rigid as in death, shall await its return.’”

  “And—” whispered Thorneycroft.

  “So it was done. But I gave him warning that the spell would only last a certain number of days. On the 15th of January his astral self must be back, here, in the palace of Oneypore. On the 15th of January! Three times I gave him warning! And he promised—and—”

  “He broke the promise!”

  “Yes. His astral self was caught in the eddy of foreign life, foreign desires, foreign vices—perhaps”—he smiled with sudden kindliness—“foreign virtues. I waited. Day after day I waited. Came the 15th of January—and he did not return. For—”

  “His astral self died—in England. It was buried in foreign soil,” Thorneycroft interjected.

  “You have said it, Brother Brahman. And now”—he raised his hands in a gesture of supplication—“though I have prayed to Vishnu, who is my cousin, to Shiva, to Doorgha, to Brahm himself, though I have offered the slaughter of my own soul for the homeless soul of him whom I loved, the evil is done. He is neither dead, nor is he alive. His soul is a fluttering, harrowed thing, whirling about on the outer rim of creation, cursed by the gods, his kinsmen. His physical body is here—on this couch—and the spiritual self, his astral body is in foreign soil—sullied, sullied!”

  “And—there is no hope?”

  “Yes!” Again the swami smiled with sud
den kindliness. “There is hope—the shadow of hope. Perhaps some day the great wrong shall be forgiven by the gods. Perhaps some day they will cause the two parts of his body, his physical and his astral, to blend into one. Perhaps some day they will permit him to regain caste—and to die!

  “Daily I pray for it”—and, with utter simplicity, as he opened the door—“will you pray, too, brother priest?”

  Thorneycroft inclined his head. He was an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product.

  But he inclined his head.

  “Yes, swami,” he replied. “I will pray. Every day shall I pray!”

  And the door shut behind him with a little dry click of finality.

  LIGHT

  Beneath the sooty velvet of the New York night, Tompkins Square was a blotch of lonely, mean sadness.

  No light loungers there waiting for a bluecoat’s hickory to tickle their thin, patched soles; no wizened news vendor spreading the remnants of his printed wares about him and figuring out the difference between gain on papers sold and discount on those returned unsold; no Greek hawker considering the advisability of beating the high cost of living by supping on those figs which he had not been able to sell because of their antiquity; no maudlin drunk mistaking the blur in his whisky-soaked brain for the happy twilight of the foggy green isle.

  For Tompkins Square is both the soul and the stomach—possibly interchangeable terms—of those who work with cloth and silk and shoddy worsted, with needle and thread, with thimble and sewing-machine, those who out of their starved, haggard East-Side brains make the American women—the native-born—the best dressed in all the world. Sweatshop workers they are: men from Russia and Poland, men from the Balkans, from Sicily, Calabria, and Asia Minor; men who set out on their splendid American adventure, not for liberty, but for a chance to earn enough to keep body and soul together—and let the ward boss and the ward association attend to the voting, including the more or less honest counting of votes.

  Work—eat—sleep—and lights out at ten! Such is the maxim of the neighborhood, since lights cost money, and money buys food.