The Charmed Life | Page 7

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 a common bough or a drink
of the same river is alike ordained from ages
prior to our birth.
--From the letter of a Japanese Daimio to his wife before committing hara-kari
RAPIDLY my eyes got used to the light. It came from a flickering, insincere oil-lamp held in the hands of an elderly Hindu, evidently the possessor of the soft and bulky body which I had struck when I had let myself drop.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, silently. I am quite sure we didn't like each other. We didn't have to say a single word to convince each other of the fact. He was an old man, but