He pulled up half a minute at that, and glared all round the table to see how we took it. We aren’t whales exactly on falling in love with unmarried girls in our Mess. The Colonel doesn’t hold with it, and he’s quite right. But none of us moved a finger, and Tick went on.
‘She was absolutely the most perfect girl on the face of this earth; and I’d knock any beggar’s brains out who denies it’–(None of us wanted to, I give you my word) – ‘Upon my soul, I meant marrying her if she would only he’ taken me. And she did. O Heaven, she did! She has accepted me!’ Tick covered his face with his hands and went on like a lunatic. I fancied he’d got a touch of the sun, or that the peg-tumbler of port was beginning to work. Then he started off on a fresh tack, while we were staring at one another and wondering what on earth was coming next.
‘Do any of you fellows recollect the Club Ball at Mussoorie this year?’ Curiously enough not one of us had been up of the Mess; but you may be certain that we knew all about the Ball –(By the way, take us all round and we’re the best dancers in India; but that’s neither here nor there.) Some one said ‘Yes’; and Tick went on again – ‘It happened there! It happened there! I had arranged beforehand that she was to give me four or five dances and all the extras. She knew long before that, I think, that I loved her; and I as good as told her before the dance began that I intended proposing. It was the first extra – there were going to be three that evening – that I had arranged to sit out with her and tell her how I loved her. We had beendancing together a good deal that evening, until she began to complain of a pain in her side, and then we sat out in the verandah.’
Tick shovelled his hand through his hair and rolled his eyes about, more like a maniac than ever, and we sat tight and filled up our glasses quietly without saying anything.
‘At the end of the last pukka waltz she went into the cloak room, because her slipper-elastic had become slack – I heard her explain that to the man she was dancing with – and I went out into the verandah to think over what I had got to say. When I turned round I saw her standing at my side: and before I had time to say anything she just slipped her arm through mine and was looking up in my face. “Well, what is it that you’re going to say to me?” said she. And then I spoke –though honestly I was a little bit startled at the way she herself led up to the point, as it were. Lord only knows what I said or what she said. I told her I loved her, and she told me she loved me. Look here! If a man among you laughs, by love, I’ll brain him with the decanter!’
Tick’s face was something awful to look at just then – a dead white with blue dimples under the nostrils and the corners of the mouth. He looked like a corpse that had been freshly dug up – not too freshly, though. I never saw anything more beastly in my life – except once at the front. Then he brought his hand down on the table in a way that made the dessert plates jump, and almost howled – ‘I tell you I proposed to her, and she accepted me. Do you hear? She accepted me!’
Well, that didn’t strike us as anything particularly awful. I’ve been accepted once or twice myself; but it didn’t turn me into more than an average lunatic for the time being.
Tick dropped his voice somewhere into his boots – at least it sounded awfully hollow and unearthly – ‘Then as the extra stopped she got up to go away from the sofa we’d been sitting on, and I asked her to stay. She told me that she was going to her next partner. I said, “Look here, darling, who is your next partner if it isn’t me, for ever and ever? Sit down and let us wait till your chaperone is ready!”“My chaperone is ready, dear”, said she, “and I must go to her. But rememberthat you are my next partner for ever and ever. Amen. Good-bye.”
‘Before I could say anything she had run out of the verandah and into the ball-room. I stopped to look at the moon and to thank my stars I was so lucky as to win her. Presently a man I knew hurried by me with a rug out of one of the dandies. My heart was so full I just pulled him up where he stood, and said: “Congratulate me, old boy! She’s accepted me. I’m the happiest fellow on earth!” Now everyone in Mussoorie knew pretty well that I meant business with the girl; but instead of congratulating me the man just let the rug drop and said, “O my God!”
‘What’s the matter?’ said I. ‘Were you sweet on her yourself, then? All right, I’ll forgive you. But you’ll congratulate me, won’t you?
‘He caught me by the arm, and led me quietly into the ball-room, and then left me. Everybody was clustered in a mob round the cloak-room door; and some of the women-folk were crying. A couple of ’em had fainted. There was a sort of subdued hum going out, and everyone was saying: “How ghastly! How shocking! How terrible!” I leant up against a door-post and felt sick and faint, though I didn’t know why. Then the fellow who had taken the dandy-rug came out of the cloak-room and spoke to one of the women.’
Tick had nearly emptied the decanter by this time; and I looked up and down the Mess. I could see two or three of the men looking awfully white and uncomfortable. My hair began to feel cold, as if draughts were blowing through it. I don’t mind owning to that. Tick went ahead: –
‘The women – she was an utter stranger – came up to speak to me, and she told me that my little girl had gone into the cloak room at the end of the last dance before the extras came on, complaining of a pain in her side. She had sat down and died of heart disease as she sat! This was at the end of the last pukka waltz. Do you hear me? I tell you it was at the end of the last pukka waltz.’
(I don’t know much about printing presses; but if you printer fellows have got any type big enough and awfulenough to give any idea of the way in which Tick said that, you are seven pounds better than I thought.)
I felt as if all the winds in the Hills were crawling round my hair. You know that cold, creepy feeling at the top of the scalp, just when the first dropping shots begin, and before the real shindy starts. Well, that was how I felt – how we all felt, in fact – when Tick had finished and brought down his hand again on the table.
We shifted about as if our chairs were all red-hot, trying to think of something pleasant to say. Tick kept on repeating: ‘It was at the end of the last pukka waltz!’Then he’d stop for a bit, and rock too and fro; and ask us what he was to do. Whether ‘a betrothal to a dead woman was binding in law,’ and so on – sometimes laughing and sometimes chucking his head about like my second charger when the curb-chain’s tighter than it should be.
It may sound awfully funny to read now; but I assure you sitting round the Mess table with Tick’s white and blue face in front of one, and Tick’s awful way of laughing and talking in one’s ears, the fun did not dawn on us until a long while after. And even then we weren’t grateful.
Our Colonel was the first to move. The old man got up and put his hand on Tick’s shoulder, and begged him, for his own sake, not to take it to heart so much. Said that he was unwell and had better go to his own quarters. Tick chucked up his head and regularly yelled – ‘I tell you I have seen it with my own eyes. I wish to Heaven it had been a delusion.’ All this time the Colonel was soothing him down, just as you or I would gentle a horse; and the other Johnnies stood round and mumbled something about being awfully sorry for his trouble, and that, if they had known it, they would have dropped pulling his leg like a shot. Whether it was too much liquor, or whether Tick really had seen a ghost, we didn’t stop to think. He was so awfully cut up no one could have helped being sorry for him.
Well, I and another Johnnie went with him over to his quarters, and Tick chucked himself down on the charpoy and buried his face in the pillow; and his shoulders shook as if hewere sobbing like a woman. The other Johnnie turned the lamp down, and we left him and went back to Mess. There we sat up the rest of the night, the lot of us, bukhing about ghosts and delusions, and so on. We were all pretty certain that Tick hadn’t got the ‘jumps’ or anything foolish of that kind, because he was as steady as a die in these things – couldn’t have played to win unless his head had been fairly cool, you know. Finally we decided that there wa
s no need to tell anyone outside the Mess about the night’s business, and that we were all awfully sorry for Tick. I want to remind you that I was sitting tight all this time. I thought of the Custom’s mark on the bearskins and browsed quietly over a peg. About parade time we went to bed. Tick turned up awfully haggard and white on parade.
He took the down train to Lahore that day and cleared out, he didn’t tell us where to, on a few days’ leave. We did not look at his quarters. Three of us went over to the Club that afternoon, and the first thing a man asked us was ‘What we thought of it?’ Then all the Johnnies in the smoking-room began to laugh, and then they began to roar. It seems that that blackguard Tick had been over to the Club directly after parade and told all the men there about his yarn overnight, and the way we’d sucked it in from the Colonel downwards. It was all over Pindi before nightfall; and you may guess how they chaffed us about ‘pukka waltzes’ and men with ‘dandy rugs’ and whether a ‘betrothal to a dead woman was binding in law.’ Just you ask one of the 45th that question and see what happens! When we three rode back to Mess I can tell you we didn’t feel proud of ourselves. There was a regular indignation meeting on, and everybody was talking at the top of his voice. Fellows who had just come in from polo, or from making calls, had all been told of it; and they wanted Tick’s blood.
The whole blessed business was a berow from beginning to end, and we had believed it! We moved over to Tick’s quarters to begin by making hay there. Nothing except the chairs and the charpoy (and those belonged to Government) had been left behind.
Over the mantelpiece a double sheet of notepaper had been pinned, and above this, in letters about two foot high, waswritten in charcoal on the wall – ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau.’ The Beast had carefully written out the whole yarn from beginning to end, with stage directions for himself about yelling and looking half mad, in red ink at the sides. And he had left that behind for our benefit.
It was a magnificent ‘sell’; but nothing except Tick’s acting would have pulled it off in the perfect way it went. We stopped dead, and just pondered over the length and the breadth and the thickness of it. If we’d only thought for a minute about the improbability of a woman dying at a Mussoorie ball without the whole of Upper India knowing it we might have saved ourselves. But that’s just what we didn’t do. And if you’d listened to Tick you’d have followed our lead.
Tick never came back. I fancy he had a sort of notion it wouldn’t have been healthy for him if he had. But we’ve started a sort of Land League – what do you call it? Velungericht? – in our Mess; and if we come across him anywhere we’re going to make things lively for him. He sent in his papers and went down to Pachmarri; where it seems he really was engaged to a girl with money – something like two thousand a year, I’ve heard – married her, and went home. Of course he had spent his three months’ leave at Pachmarri too. We found that out afterwards.
I don’t think I should have taken all that trouble and expense (for the Mess room is full of those horns and heads) to work out a sell like that, even if it had been as grand a one as ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau.’
P.S. – Just you ask any of us if ‘a betrothal to a dead woman is binding in law,’ and see what happens. I think you’ll find that I have written the truth pretty much.
IN THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO
A stone’s throw out on either hand
from that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange:
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company tonight,
For we have reached the Oldest land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.
From the Dusk to the Dawn
The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognise it by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass the grocer and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower story with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun, and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman’s house and given to Janoo by a soldier. To-day, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwardes’ Gate, and than he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits – outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient andmore or less honourable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the North-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary for the four principal tenants in the House of Suddhoo. Then there is Me of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.
Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest of them all – Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie – except Janoo. She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.
Suddhoo’s son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo’s anxiety and made capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son’s health. And here the story begins.
Suddhoo’s cousin’s son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should be conferring an everlasting honour on the House of Suddhoo if I went to him. I went; but I think, seeing how well off Suddhoo was then, that he might have sent something better than an ekka, which jolted fearfully, to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy April evening. The ekka did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh’s Tomb near the main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo, and he said that by reason of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant-Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and the state of my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes, in the Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.
Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that there was an order of the Sirkar against magic, because it was feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I don’t know anything about the state ofthe law; but I fancied that something interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the Government it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the State practised it themselves. (If the Financial Statement isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.) Then, to encourage him further, I said that, if there was any jadoo afoot, I had not the least objection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean jadoo – white magic, as distinguished from the unclean jadoo which kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorceror of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could be removed by clean jadoo;and, of course, heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little jadoo in
the Western line, and would go to his house to see that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already; and the jadoo of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was cheap, he said, considering the greatness of his son’s danger; but I do not think he meant it.
The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter’s shop-front, as if someone were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way upstairs told me that the jadoo had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the jadoo-workwas coming off in their rooms, because more was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a free-thinking turn of mind. She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his son’s nameover and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards were, up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still.
Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase. That was the seal-gutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two huqas that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale blue-green flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees: Janoo with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal-cutter.