The Achmed Abdullah MEGAPACK ®. Achmed Abdullah

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СКАЧАТЬ thrown by giants’ hands, with a passionate, tragic leaping and yearning that was as the ancient call of Creation itself. It flashed outward with a wrenching, tameless glory and savagery that fused all these London molecules of humanity into one shivering whole.

      Two minutes it lasted, and at exactly twenty-eight minutes to twelve Thorneycroft, obeying a peculiar impulse, looked at his watch, and he never lived to forget the time nor the date: the 15th of January, 1913—the nameless impression passed into the limbo of unremembered things.

      It passed as enormously—by contrast—as it had come. It passed with an all-pervading sense of sweetness and peace: of intimate sweetness, too intimate peace. It passed with a wafting of jasmine and marigold perfume, a soft tinkling of far-away bells, and the muffled sobs of women coming from across immeasurable distances.

      The raja smiled.

      He raised a high-veined hand in salutation. Then he trembled. He gave a low sigh that changed rapidly into a rattling gurgle. His eyes became staring and glassy. His knees gave way, and he fell straight back, dead, white-faced, the crimson caste-mark on his forehead looking like some evil thing, mocking, sardonic, triumphant.

      “God!” Thorneycroft bent over the rigid form, feeling the heart that had ceased beating. He spoke a quick word, and servants came and carried out the body.

      But the people who crowded the rooms seemed quite unaware that death had stalked among them. Suddenly a wild wave of gaiety surged through the house. They laughed. They chattered. They jested. They clinked glasses. The orchestra led away with a Paris waltz that was as light as foam.

      That night champagne flowed like water. Half a dozen love-affairs were finished, another half-dozen begun. Scandal was winked at and condoned. Gaiety, the madness of Bacchanalian gaiety, invaded every nook and cranny of Marlborough House, invading the very servants’ hall, where the majordomo balanced the third upstairs parlor-maid on his knees and spoke to her of love in thickly dignified terms.

      Two days later Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, descendant of the many gods, was buried in state, with twenty file of Horse Guards flanking the coffin, and all the purple-faced gentry of the India Office rolling behind in carriages, dressed in pompous black broadcloth and smoking surreptitious cigars.

      On the same day Charlie Thorneycroft called on Victoria de Rensen, kissed her pouting lips, and told her in his vague manner that he was off to India.

      Chapter III

      India came to Charlie Thorneycroft as it had come to him a dozen times: with a sudden rush of splendor, flaming red, golden tipped, shot through with purple and emerald-green, and hardly cloaking the thick, stinking layer of cruelty and superstition and ignorance that stewed and oozed beneath the colorful surface. He knew it all, from the Rajput gentleman’s stately widow who gives herself to the burning pyre in spite of British laws to the meanest half-caste money-lender who devils the souls of sporting subalterns amid the flowering peepul-trees of Fort William barracks; and so he yawned his way from the moment when the big P. and O. liner nosed kittenishly through the sucking sand-banks of the Hoogly to the Hotel Semiramis.

      There he had a lengthy and whispered conversation with a deputy commissioner recently returned from Rajputana, who bowed low and spoke softly in spite of the fact that Thorneycroft was his junior by twenty years and seemed to have no especial diplomatic rank or emoluments.

      All the next morning he yawned away the hours that creep to the sweating west, took a late train for the north, and continued his bored progress through twelve hundred miles of varied scenery.

      He had no eye for the checker-board landscape of neat Bengal, nor for the purple and orange tints of the Indian sky that changed the far hills into glowing heaps of topaz, the scorched ridges into carved masses of amethyst and rose-red. Rajputana, gold and heliotrope, sad with the dead centuries, the dead glory, interested him not.

      His thoughts were far in the north, near the border, where Rajput and Afghan wait for a renewal of the old, bitter fight for supremacy when Britain shall have departed; and still, waking and sleeping, he could feel—he could feel with—the silent whirring of immense wings—“like the wings of a tortured soul trying to escape the cage of the dust-created body,” he put it with a lyric soaring that clashed incongruously with his usual horsy slang.

      The whirring of wings!

      And there was some accent in it of secret dread, of terrible, secret melancholy, deeper than his soul could perceive, his brain could classify. The terror of a mighty struggle was behind it: a mighty struggle awfully remote from individual existence and individual ambition and life, individual death even. It partook of India itself: the land, the ancient races, the very gods.

      The farther north he traveled the more strongly grew the shapeless, voiceless impression. At times, suddenly, a light flashed down the hidden tunnels of his inner consciousness, and made visible for one fleeting second something which he seemed too slow o comprehend.

      A whisper came to him from beyond the rationally knowable.

      * * * *

      And so, two days later, he dropped from the train at a small up-land station that consisted of a chaotic whirlwind of stabbing sand, seven red-necked vultures squatting on a low wall and making unseemly noises, a tumble-down Vishnative shrine, and a fat, patent leather-slippered babu, who bowed before Charlie Thorneycroft even lower than the deputy commissioner had done, called him Protector of the Pitiful, and otherwise did him great honor.

      “All right, all right!” came Thorneycroft’s impatient rejoinder. “I see that you got my cable. Is the bullock-cart ready?”

      “Yes, heaven-born!” And the babu pointed at the tonga, the bullock-cart, that came ghostlike out of the whirling sandstorm.

      “Good enough.” He swung himself up. “Ready. Chuck the bedding and the ice in the back. Let her go!” he said to the driver, who had his jaws bandaged after the manner of desertmen, and the tonga started off, dipping and plunging across the ridges like a small boat in a short sea.

      The babu squatted by Thorneycroft’s side, talking softly, and again the Englishman yawned. But this time there was a slight affectation in his yawn, and affectation, too, as of one weaving close to the loom of lies, in his words:

      “Yes, yes. I fancy it is the old story. Some jealous wildcat of a hill woman—”

      “No, heaven-born!” cut in the babu. He winked his heavy-lidden eyes slowly as if to tell the other that he was “on.” “This time it is different. This time there is no woman’s jealousy brewing unclean abominations behind the curtains of the zenana. This time it is—”

      “Priestcraft?”

      “You have said it, sahib!” came the babu’s reply in a flat, frightened whisper.

      “All right!” Thorneycroft gave a short, unpleasant laugh. “Let’s go to Deolibad first and call on my friend Youssef Ali.” And a few words of direction to the driver, who grunted a reply, jerked the heads of the trotting animals away from the north and toward the northwest, and plied their fat sides with the knotted end of his whip.

      All night they drove. They rested near a shallow river. But they did not tarry long. They watered the team, rubbed them down with sand, and were off again.

      It was a long, hot drive. The silence, the insolent nakedness of the land, the great, burning sun lay on Thorneycroft’s soul like a heavy burden. Time and again he was conscious СКАЧАТЬ