The Charmed Life | Page 3

clean
morally and physically. His laughter was fresh. His complexion was
healthy--and yes, I continued my thoughts, he seemed happy,
supremely, sublimely, enviably happy!
"Sorry I kept you waiting," came his voice from the farther door as he
came into the room, dressed in the flowing, comfortable house robe of
a wealthy native gentleman.
He must have read my gyrating, unspoken thought. Perhaps I stared a
little too inquisitively at his face, for the tell-tale sign of the sordid
tragedy which I suspect. For he smiled, a fine, thin smile, and he
pointed to the Sanskrit inscription, reading the words out loud and with
a certain gently exalted inflection as if his tongue, in forming the
sonorous words, was tasting a special sort of psychic ambrosia.
"Recall, O Mind, thy deeds--recall, re--"
"Well," I blurted out, brutally, tactlessly, before I realized what I was
doing, "What is the answer--to this and that and this?" pointing, in turn,
at the Indian furniture, the inscription, his dressing robe, and, though
the stone-framed window, at the native houses which crowded the
garden on all sides.

He smiled. He was not the least bit angry, but frankly amused, like a
typical, decently-bred American who can even relish a joker at his own
expense. "You're an inquisitive beggar," he commenced, "but I'll tell
you rather than have some gossiping cackling hen of a deputy assistant
commissioner's mother-in-law tell you the wrong tale and make me
lose your friendship. You see," he continued. with an air as if he was
telling me a tremendous secret, "I am Stephen Denton."
"Well," I asked, "what of that?" The name meant nothing to me."
"What? Have they already forgotten my name? Gosh, that's bully! In
another year they will have forgotten the tale itself! You see," he
continued, dropping into one of the divans and waving me down beside
him, "I'm the guy whom the kid subalterns over at the British barracks
call 'the man with the charmed life.'
I gave a cry--of surprise, amazement, incredulity. For I had heard
tales--vague, fantastic, incredible. "You--" I stammered, "you--are--"
"Yes," he laughed, "I am that same man. Care to hear the story?"
"You bet!" I replied fervently, and that very moment , came once more
the sound of laughter from up-stairs--soft, tinkling, silvery--
Chapter II
The Call
I broke the night's primeval bars
I dared the old abysmal curse
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!
--Rupert Brooke
STEPHEN DENTON interrupted his tale now and then with shrewd

and picturesque sidelights on native life, customs, and characters which
proved now deep he had got below the skin of India. But I shall omit
them here--doubtless at a future date, he himself will embody them in
the great book on India which he is writing--and, in the following, I
shall only give the pith of his incredible tale. I only regret that there is
no way of reproducing his voice with the printed word-- his happy,
frank voice, unmistakably American in its intonations, yet once in a
while with a quaint inflection which showed that he had begun to think
at times in Hindustani.
You see, he commenced, it was all originally Roos-Keppel's
doing--fault, if you prefer to call it that. Roos-Keppel--"Tubby"
Roos-Keppel-- you must have met him over at the jockey club, or in the
evening , in the Eden Gardens, driving about in his old-fashioned
C-spring barouche-- big, paunchy, brick-faced Britisher, who won the
Calcutta Sweepstakes--in 1900. Why everybody in India knows the tale,
how a sudden, mad prosperity went to his head; how he gave up his job
in the Bengal Civil Service, and painted Calcutta crimson for three
years; how he lost his hold on everything, including himself;
everything that is, except his hospitality, his fantastic ideas, his
infectious, daredevil madness.
I met him the day after I got here. How did I get here? Why? When?
Well, two years to-morrow, to answer your last question first, and as to
why and how, there's a native proverb which says that fate and
selfexertion are half and half in power.
I came here on a sight-seeing trip after I'd got through Yale. I had
money of my own, my parents were dead, there was nobody to say no--
and I had an idea it would do me good to get a nodding acquaintance
with the world and its denizens before I settled down in the Back Bay
section--yes--you guessed it--originally I'm just that sort of a
Bostonian.
Everything back home--with the dear old, white-haired lawyer, who
was my guardian, and his little plump spinster sister who kept house for
him, and the black walnut furniture and the antimacassars and the

bound volumes, of Emerson and Longfellow and Thoreau--it seemed
all so confounded safe and sure. Even timid. Respectably,