The Charmed Life | Page 7

quarreling, begging;
and the roadway ankle-deep in thick slime, and a fetid stink hanging
over it all like a cloud; and the darkness, the bitter darkness-- black
blotched, compact, except for a haggard moon-ray shooting down
occasionally from above and glancing off into the cañon of the street
from bulbous roof and crazy, tortured balcony.

By ginger, I was sick for a moment. I said to myself that there was a
steamer sailing the next day--home and America via Liverpool--and I
was about to turn when--
Wait a second.
Get first where I was, though you'll never find the place. You'll hear the
reason why later on. You see, I had meanwhile turned up a narrow
street; it was quite lonely there; not a soul, not a footstep, hardly a
sound. They called the place then--mind you, I said then--Ibrahim
Khan's Gully. It was typical of its sort. Whitewashed walls without
windows or doors, mysterious, useless-looking to right and to left; and
straight in front of me, at the end of the gully, was another wall. It sat
there at the end of that cul-de-sac like a seal of destiny, portentous
threatening. The moon was pretty well behaved and bright just then,
and so I looked at that wall. It impressed me.
It was perhaps ten feet high, and it seemed to be the support of some
roof-top for it was crowned with rather an elaborate balustrade of
carved, fretted stone. At a certain distance behind it rose another higher
wall, then another, still higher, and so on; as if the whole block was
terraced from the center toward the gully. To the left and right the wall
stretched, gradually rising into the dark without a break, it seemed, and
surmounted here and there by the fantastic outline of some spire or
balcony or crazy, twisted roof, the whole thing a confounded muddle of
Hindu architecture, with apparently neither end nor beginning--mad,
brusk, useless--like a harebrained giant's picture-puzzle.
There I stood and stared. I said to myself, "Back, you fool? Straight
home with you to Boston, to the bound volumes of Emerson, to the
mild cocktail--and I wonder who'll win the mile at the Intercollegiate--"
And then--and I remember it as if it was to-day, it was just in the
middle of that thought about the mile race--I heard a voice directly
above me.
It was a woman's voice, singing in that quaint, minor wail of Eastern
music. Perhaps you know the words. I have learned them by heart--

You are to me the gleam of sun
That breaks the gloom of wintry rain;
You are to me the flower of time--
O Peacock, cry again!
"Bravo, bravo!" I shouted. For you see I was only a fool of an outsider,
looking into this nightwrapped, night-sounding India as I would look at
a fantastic play, and then suddenly the song broke off, came another
voice, harsh, hissing, spitting, the sound of a hand slapping bare flesh,
and then a piercing shriek. A high-pitched, woman's shriek that
shivered the night air, that somehow shivered my heart.
I must help that woman, but--"Home you fool, you silly, meddling
idiot." said my saner ego "This is no quarrel of yours." "Take a
chance," replied another cell in my brain. "Take a chance with chance!
See what all this talk about a charmed life is!"
No, no, I decided the next moment it was mad. Impossible. A native
house, a native woman--they were sacred. Not even the police would
dare enter without a search warrant; and this was the Colootallah, the
worst section of Calcutta; and I knew next to nothing about India, about
the languages, the customs, the prejudices of the land, except what
Roos-Keppel had told me.
"Hai-hai-hai!" came once more the piercing, woman's wail: and right
then I consigned Back Bay and safety first to the devil. I made for that
wall with a laugh, perhaps a prayer.
A charmed life! By the many hecks, I'd find out presently I said to
myself, as I jumped on a narrow ledge a few feet from the ground, from
which I could clutch the top of the stone balustrade.
Up!
I swung myself into the unknown, balanced for the fraction of a second

on the balustrade, then let myself drop. I struck something soft and
bulky that squirmed swiftly away. Came a grunt and a curse--at least, it
sounded suspiciously like a curse--then somebody struck a light which
blinded me momentarily.
And at that very moment the bell from the Presbyterian Church in Old
Court House Street struck the midnight hour.
Chapter III
A Fools Heart
Oft have I heard that no accident or chance
ever mars the march of events here below, and
that all moves in accordance with a plan. To
take shelter under