The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK ®. Achmed Abdullah
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 sudden 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.
Thus Tompkins Square on that night, as on all nights, was sad and dark and tired and asleep. Just the scraggly, dusty trees, the empty benches, and a shy gleam of the half-veiled moon where it struck the fantastic, twisted angle of a battered municipal waste-paper receptacle, or a bit of broken bottle glass that was trying to drown its despair in a murky puddle.
On the north side of the square stood the tenement house with the lighted window—like a winking eye—directly beneath the roof, high up. The house was gray and pallid; incongruously baroque in spots, distributed irregularly over its warty façade, where the contractor had got rid of some art balconies and carved near-stone struts left over from a bankrupt Bronx job. It towered over the smug red-brick dwellings—remnants of an age when English and German were still spoken thereabouts—with thin, anemic arrogance, like a tubercular giant among a lot of short, stocky, well-fleshed people; sick, yet conscious of his height and the dignity that goes with it.
* * * *
He saw the lighted window as he crossed the square from the south side, and sat down on one of the benches and stared at it.
Steadily he stared, until his eyes smarted and burned and his neck muscles bunched painfully.
For that glimmering light, gilding the fly-specked pane, meant to him the things he hated, the things he had cheated and cursed and ridiculed—and, by the same token, longed for and loved.