The Charmed Life | Page 3

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, irreproachably timid, if you get the idea.
Stephen Denton smiled reminiscently. Preordained, too, it seemed. Preordained from the mild cocktail before dinner to the hoary place on the bench I was expected to grace some day. I had every reason to be happy, don't you think? And I was happy. Quite!
And then I smelled a whiff of