Plain Tales from the Hills

  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 to-night, 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 fourcarved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognizeit by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on thewhitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass, the bunnia, and aman who says he gets his living by seal-cutting, live in the lower storywith a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upperrooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun and a little black-and-tanterrier that was stolen from an Englishman's house and given to Janoo bya soldier. To-day, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleepson the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He usedto go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son, who sellscuriosities near the Edwardes' Gate, and then he slept under a real mudroof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a sonwho secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messengerto a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me aLieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will cometrue. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing,and he has outlived his wits--outlived nearly everything except hisfondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris,Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honorableprofession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from theNorth-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewherenear Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an adulterator. Heis very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cuttingpretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much as is necessary ofthe 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 explainthings. So I do not count.

  Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was thecleverest 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 Suddhoowas troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo's anxiety and madecapital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend inPeshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son's health. And here thestory begins.

  Suddhoo's cousin's son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to seeme; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I shouldbe conferring an everlasting honor on the House of Suddhoo if I went tohim. I went; but I think, seeing how well-off Suddhoo was then, that hemight have sent something better than an ekka, which jolted fearfully,to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a muggy Aprilevening. The ekka did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulledup opposite the door of Ranjit Singh's Tomb near the main gate of theFort. Here was Suddhoo and he said that, by reason of my condescension,it was absolutely certain that I should become a Lieutenant-Governorwhile my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and thestate of my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes, in theHuzuri Bagh, under the stars.

  Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him thatthere was an order of the Sirkar against magic, because it was fearedthat magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn't knowanything about the state of the law; but I fancied that somethinginteresting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic beingdiscouraged by the Government it was highly commended. The greatestofficials of the State practiced it themselves. (If the FinancialStatement isn't magic, I don't know what is.) Then, to encourage himfurther, I said that, if there was any jadoo afoot, I had not the leastobjection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing thatit was clean jadoo--white magic, as distinguished from the unclean jadoowhich kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted that thiswas just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me, in jerksand quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorcerer of thecleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick son inPeshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and that thisnews was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had toldSuddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could beremoved by clean jadoo; and, of course, heavy payment. I began to seehow the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little jadooin the Western line, and would go to his house to see that everythingwas done decently and in order. We set off together; and on the waySuddhoo told me he had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred andtwo hundred rupees already; and the jadoo of that night would cost twohundred more. Which was cheap, he said, considering the greatness of hisson's danger; but I do not think he meant it.

  The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. Icould hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter's shop-front, as ifsome one were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and whilewe groped our way upstairs told me that the jadoo had begun. Janoo andAzizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the jadoo-work wascoming off in their rooms, because there was more space there. Janoo isa lady of a freethinking turn of mind. She whispered that the jadoo wasan invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter wouldgo to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fearand old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half light,repeating his son's name over and over again, and asking Azizun ifthe seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his ownlandlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carvedbow-windows. The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tinylamp. 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-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrierbarked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow outthe lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glowfrom the two huqas that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cuttercame in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan.Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed to one of the beds with ashudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up apale blue-green flame near the ground. The light was just enough to showAzizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier betweenher knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat onthe bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal-cutter.

  I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He wasstripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as mywrist round his forehead, a salmon-colored loin-cloth round his middle,and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring. It wasthe face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-gray in the firstplace. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could onlysee the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face ofa demon--a ghoul--anything you please except of the sleek, oily oldruffian who sat in the day-time over his turning-lathe downstairs. Hewas lying on his stomach, with his arms turned and crossed behind him,as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the onlyparts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to thebody, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centreof the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin,with a pale blue-green light floating in the centre like a night-light.Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. Howhe did it I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spineand fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion. The headseemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurlof the laboring back-muscles. Janoo from the bed was breathing seventyto the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes; and old Suddhoo,fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard, was crying tohimself. The horror of it was that the c
reeping, crawly thing made nosound--only crawled! And, remember, this lasted for ten minutes, whilethe terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoocried.

  I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like athermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by hismost impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished thatunspeakable triple crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor ashigh as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now, Iknew how fire-spouting is done--I can do it myself--so I felt at ease.The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl withouttrying to raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not havethought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the headdropped, chin down, on the floor with a thud; the whole body lying thenlike a corpse with its arms trussed. There was a pause of five fullminutes after this, and the blue-green flame died down. Janoo stooped tosettle one of her anklets, while Azizun turned her face to the wall andtook the terrier in her arms. Suddhoo put out an arm mechanically toJanoo's huqa, and she slid it across the floor with her foot. Directlyabove the body and on the wall, were a couple of flaming portraits, instamped paper frames, of the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They lookeddown on the performance, and, to my thinking, seemed to heighten thegrotesqueness of it all.

  Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over androlled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomachup. There was a faint "plop" from the basin--exactly like the noisea fish makes when it takes a fly--and the green light in the centrerevived.

  I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water, the dried,shrivelled, black head of a native baby--open eyes, open mouth andshaved scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawlingexhibition. We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

  Read Poe's account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man,and you will realize less than one-half of the horror of that head'svoice.

  There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sortof "ring, ring, ring," in the note of the voice, like the timbre of abell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutesbefore I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me.I looked at the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where thehollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothingto do with any man's regular breathing, twitching away steadily. Thewhole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphin thatone read about sometimes and the voice was as clever and as appalling apiece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the headwas "lip-lip-lapping" against the side of the basin, and speaking. Ittold Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son's illness and ofthe state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I alwaysshall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the timeof the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors werenight and day watching over the man's life; and that he would eventuallyrecover if the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was the head inthe basin, were doubled.

  Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask fortwice your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have usedwhen he rose from the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman ofmasculine intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say "Aslinahin! Fareib!" scornfully under her breath; and just as she said so,the light in the basin died out, the head stopped talking, and we heardthe room door creak on its hinges. Then Janoo struck a match, lit thelamp, and we saw that head, basin, and seal-cutter were gone. Suddhoowas wringing his hands and explaining to any one who cared to listen,that, if his chances of eternal salvation depended on it, he could notraise another two hundred rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in thecorner; while Janoo sat down composedly on one of the beds to discussthe probabilities of the whole thing being a bunao, or "make-up."

  I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter's way of jadoo; buther argument was much more simple:--"The magic that is always demandinggifts is no true magic," said she. "My mother told me that theonly potent love-spells are those which are told you for love. Thisseal-cutter man is a liar and a devil. I dare not tell, do anything, orget anything done, because I am in debt to Bhagwan Dass the bunnia fortwo gold rings and a heavy anklet. I must get my food from his shop. Theseal-cutter is the friend of Bhagwan Dass, and he would poison my food.A fool's jadoo has been going on for ten days, and has cost Suddhoomany rupees each night. The seal-cutter used black hens and lemons andmantras before. He never showed us anything like this till to-night.Azizun is a fool, and will be a pur dahnashin soon. Suddhoo has losthis strength and his wits. See now! I had hoped to get from Suddhoo manyrupees while he lived, and many more after his death; and behold, heis spending everything on that offspring of a devil and a she-ass, theseal-cutter!"

  Here I said:--"But what induced Suddhoo to drag me into the business?Of course I can speak to the seal-cutter, and he shall refund. The wholething is child's talk--shame--and senseless."

  "Suddhoo IS an old child," said Janoo. "He has lived on the roofs theseseventy years and is as senseless as a milch-goat. He brought you hereto assure himself that he was not breaking any law of the Sirkar, whosesalt he ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of theseal-cutter, and that cow-devourer has forbidden him to go and see hisson. What does Suddhoo know of your laws or the lightning-post? I haveto watch his money going day by day to that lying beast below."

  Janoo stamped her foot on the floor and nearly cried with vexation;while Suddhoo was whimpering under a blanket in the corner, and Azizunwas trying to guide the pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth.

  . . . . . . . . .

  Now the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to thecharge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money underfalse pretences, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian PenalCode. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons, I cannot informthe Police. What witnesses would support my statements? Janoo refusesflatly, Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly--lost in thisbig India of ours. I cannot again take the law into my own hands, andspeak to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that, not only would Suddhoodisbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janoo, who isbound hand and foot by her debt to the bunnia. Suddhoo is an old dotard;and whenever we meet mumbles my idiotic joke that the Sirkar ratherpatronizes the Black Art than otherwise. His son is well now; butSuddhoo is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter, by whoseadvice he regulates the affairs of his life. Janoo watches daily themoney that she hoped to wheedle out of Suddhoo taken by the seal-cutter,and becomes daily more furious and sullen.

  She will never tell, because she dare not; but, unless somethinghappens to prevent her, I am afraid that the seal-cutter will die ofcholera--the white arsenic kind--about the middle of May. And thus Ishall have to be privy to a murder in the House of Suddhoo.