Rendezvous with Horror & Nightmare Tales (2 in 1) Read online

  Some years later, when Strickland had married and was a church-going member of society for his wife's sake, we reviewed the incident dispassionately, and Strickland suggested that I should put it before the public.

  I cannot myself see that this step is likely to clear up the mystery; because, in the first place, no one will believe a rather unpleasant story, and, in the second, it is well-known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned.

  The Ninth Year

  By R. Edison Page

  To every regiment of Indian Native Infantry there are nine English officers; and in every nine years one of these must die. Promotion comes by a man's retiring, or by his removal to the Staff, to another regiment, or to civil employment; but once at least in nine years it comes by death. This is the belief: it may be founded on long-armed coincidence; or it may be that the High Gods of the East do indeed exact this toll.

  The history of the Fazlabad Infantry, for nearly a generation, in no way discredited this belief. The Adjutant had been murdered on parade seven years to the week before the Second in Command broke his neck at polo; and eight years later the Senior Wing Officer died of sunstroke. Since then more than eight years had passed, and Death had let them be. They gave him every chance: they lived hard; they fought hard; no jungle was so full of fever but they hunted through it; and between Seidkhasana and Mannargudi no more reckless set of men rode to pig in the dawn.

  Fate was not kind to Hubert Selby, nor for that matter to the regiment, when it sent him to join the Fazlabad Infantry. He was one of those large, soft-fleshed young men who never so much exercise hardens; and he took very little. He kept only one pony, for hacking; and detested every sport. But he dressed with a too conspicuous care; smoked a few cigarettes rather for pictorial effect than for pleasure; and drank very mild pegs. His complexion was white and opaque; his eyes, of a dull black, were prominent; his hair was black, and always sleek; what there was of his soft and scanty moustache was carefully trimmed; and the supercilious reserve of the woman-hunter was spread over his regular features like a varnish.

  His occupation was playing cards; and though he was no gambler, he was skilled in all games of chance. His recreations were reading French novels, and what is called in the army "Dolly-mopping." He was an incompetent officer, and as lazy as he was incompetent.

  It was natural that he should not be beloved by his brother-officers. He was not disagreeable with them: indeed, it would have taken a tougher man than Selby to be disagreeable with them; he learned even, painfully, not to be supercilious with them; but truly he was of another race. And, it is given to few to like a man whose pursuits they despise, whose work falls on their shoulders by day, while he empties their pockets by night.

  At the beginning of the ninth year after the death of Captain Davies, Selby became senior Wing Officer. In his new post also he did as little work as he could; and the mischief to which he devoted his abundant leisure, was the seeking an intrigue with a native woman of some position. This is the most dangerous of all games; for the Eastern methods of purging honour are sudden, secret, and deadly, while the Zenana lies without the pale of the Law of the British Empire. In the course of his search he had one or two narrow escapes, and no success worth the risk; but so far from teaching him wisdom they only whetted keener that amorous curiosity which is the moving principle of the woman-hunter's nature.

  One evening, at the end of the hot weather he rode out on his patient prowl; and turned his pony's head along the bank of the canal towards the bathing-ghâts, to take his pleasure watching the women bathe. Among the common folk in India there is no prejudice against mixed bathing, as long, to all seeming, as the bathers are not overburthened with clothing. About a mile from his goal he came upon a little country-house provided with a bathing-ghât of its own. The native of India is for the most part careless of privacy; in building the ghât the owner of the house had shown himself careless of the fact that it was necessary to cross the public road in going to and fro from it; and Hubert Selby came suddenly round the trees upon Rukmini changing, upon the edge of the ghât, the dripping Sāri in which she had been bathing—women of position bathe wholly covered—for a dry one. The setting sun poured its level rays across the plain, and burnished her wheat-coloured skin to gold; the admirable contours of her rounded limbs and bosom stood out clear and faultless against the purple background of the fields. Selby checked his pony, and sat staring at her beautiful face, his lips parted, in a breathless admiration. Then she saw him; caught the Sāri before her face with a little cry; and sank down, covering herself entirely with it from his eyes; but not before the vermilion streak down the parting of her hair had shown him that she was a married woman.

  Then he found his voice, and poured out at the little pyramid of drapery every burning word of the Indian lover he could remember. In the suddenness and surprise of the event he was somewhat incoherent; but his flattering sincerity was plain enough to Rukmini. He came soon to the end of his vocabulary; tired even sooner of pouring out his protestations at a motionless, silent Sāri; and was on the very point of dismounting when he saw some men coming down the canal bank, and started discreetly his pony on again. But he had lost his desire to visit the bathing-ghâts; he looked back to see Rukmini scuttle across the road into the house; turned his pony's head; and cantered home across the fields. His mind was full of the vision; and a hundred schemes for obtaining access to the beautiful creature ran through his mind. Even in his first extravagance he knew that he must be wary; for the size of her ornaments had left him in no doubt that she was the wife of a rich man: "of some beastly old bunniah," he said to himself; and likely to be carefully guarded.

  These hundred schemes, most of them impossible to absurdity, kept his mind at work until he had dressed for Mess. He came to it to find everyone at the pitch of joyful excitement: the Colonel had returned suddenly from Simla, before his leave was up indeed, with the news that the regiment was to hold itself in readiness to join the Shingarhi field force immediately the order came from headquarters. Everyone was very cheerful, and very noisy; no one stinted himself liquor; and after dinner a chance remark set going Burkle, the racing Adjutant, a young man whose irrepressible sporting instinct found occasion for a bet in everything on the earth, or off it.

  "By Jove! So it is!" he cried. "The ninth year's running; and nobody's gone to grass! What's the odds that we don't all of us escape old catch-em-alive-oh! this journey? I'm betting that we do."

  To their high spirits it seemed a very proper matter for a wager; half a dozen bets were offered and taken; and the usual wrangling about conditions followed. Then the fired imagination of the ingenuous Adjutant soared to proposing a sweepstake of a magnum of champagne apiece; but the Colonel dashed it from its height by demanding, with a somewhat brisk asperity, to be told what a dead man would do with eight magnums of champagne.

  During the days that followed everyone was busy indeed, bringing the regiment to the pitch of efficiency for the field. His lack of popularity, and his laziness in time of peace invested Selby's appointment to the duty of staying behind, in command of a small depot of recruits and the unfit, with such a propriety that no one was at the pains to condole with him; much less did anyone come forward, trembling lest he should accept it, with the quixotic offer to give up to him his chance of gaining a little glory at a great risk of a couple of inches of telegraph wire in the stomach. And, for himself, he forewent that chance of glory and the hardships of the campaign with an even mind, assured of leisure and freedom to devote himself to the chase. In spite of the press of work he found time to ride now and again past the house on the canal; and one evening he was sure that the veiled, motionless woman who had watched him from the flat roof was the pretty creature he had surprised.

  As he rode back into the Lines, in a pleasant satisfaction, he met the Colonel; and a little while after the Colonel said to the Adjutant, "I wonder wh
at mischief that young brute Selby is up to. I saw him ride in just now, licking his lips for all the world like an old maid's fat tom-cat who's been stealing cream."

  "There's no telling with that kind," said the Adjutant with an excellent air of worldly wisdom. "It maybe a woman; it maybe that he's invented a new kind of Blind Hookey."

  Resigned almost to cheerfulness, Hubert Selby saw the regiment march away in a fine gaiety to fight the Waziri in his dismal mountains. Its going left his evenings also, unoccupied by cards, free for the chase; two hours' leisurely work discharged his duties for the day. His idleness fed his fancy full. He learned soon that the house belonged to a well-to-do native who was absent, that only his wife, her woman, and an old man left in charge of them dwelt in it. He cast about for the necessary, the almost inevitable old woman. There is an Eastern proverb that one old woman will corrupt more women in a month than ten rakes in a year. Since his quarry did not live in the town, where old women abound, he had some difficulty in finding one. But at last, his sweeper learned from the lady's sweeper what old women visited her house; and Selby chose from among them a poor widow. This go-between brought to her task the usual rapacity, and a readiness for mischief only natural in an Indian widow who is treated like a dog by all around her till she loathes the human race. She brought to it, indeed, that last cunning, the cunning of the maltreated slave; found Rukmini softened by her husband's absence and Selby's assiduity, flattered by having awakened this passion in one of the Master-race; played upon her carefully trained animal propensities, uncontrolled by any moral sense, till she overcame her religious scruples against the defiling touch of a white man; and earned her rupees.

  Late one night Selby, assured that the old man in charge of it had been drugged, stole out of the Lines down to the house on the canal. There were no windows to the women's quarters; but he was not so inactive but that he could climb into the branches of the pipal tree which overhung the roof, and let himself down through one of the big air-holes in it, which serve as windows and ventilators, and are covered with stone slabs in bad weather, into Rukmini's chamber.

  In that dim light, in that heavily-scented, intoxicating air, with the sense of danger strong upon him, he found her even more beautiful and alluring than he had thought from his brief sight of her. The hours he spent with her passed in a luxurious dreaming which made his life by day infinitely tiresome; the secrecy and her beauty glutted his craving for cheap romance; and for weeks she held entirely his fancy. Then he began to tire, or rather to awake. Her dwarfed intelligence and her dwarfed soul rendered the interchange of any but the simplest ideas between them impossible; he grew aware that after all, she was no more than a charming animal; and her charm for him had gone. The unrestrained expression of her exuberant, exacting fondness, her furious outbursts of groundless, senseless jealousy alike wearied him. Then his aroused caution quickened the weakening of his passion: he learned that she was the wife of the Subadar Golaba, a native officer of his own regiment. He learned it by chance and so late, because having made up his mind that she was the wife of "Some beastly old bunniah," he had never thought to ask, and because it is a point of honour with a Hindu woman never to utter her husband's name.

  He was relieved, indeed, to hear that the regiment was on its way back; its return promised an early ending of the intrigue. But he made shift to be profuse in the expression of his bitter regret; for he feared lest Rukmini, in her reckless passion, might confess all to her husband, if she suspected ever so faintly that he had tired of her. Her grief at their coming separation was piteous; but in his weariness of her he was hard put to it to show an equal sympathy.

  They were indeed, and it was a poor consolation, both of them assured that their intrigue had been kept a secret. Therein they were wrong. A course of datura in his hookah of nights, while it deepened his sleep, had disordered the digestion of the old man in charge of the house; and he had cast about for the cause of his dyspepsia. He had not been long finding it. When he did, he was very careful to fill his hookah himself, and from a hidden store of tobacco which could not be tampered with. Then, feigning the deep sleep of the drugged, he watched; learned little by little all that was to be learned; and bided his time with old age's pulseless hatred of those who had tricked him.

  Some days before the return of the regiment, he borrowed a little money at 80 per cent from a grain-dealer, and set out to meet it, anxious indeed, to tell his version of the story of how he had been baulked in the discharge of his duty, to his patron, before anyone else who might have learned the secret, told theirs—an advantage called in the vernacular pesh-bandi, first move, and important in India above all countries. He met the regiment three days from home; sought out the Subadar; and made a clean breast of his failure. The Subadar fell upon him and beat him, but less severely than the old man had expected; then went to the Colonel, and obtained leave of absence on the plea of bad news from his home. He spent three days collecting kinsfolk and connections by marriage, and arrived with them at the house on the canal as the Fazlabad infantry marched into the Lines.

  The old man had been missed; but in her grief at the coming loss of her lover, and in her yet more desperate grief after he had bidden her farewell, a grief so intense as to raise her veritably to a higher plane of humanity, Rukmini had paid no heed to his disappearance. The old woman who had brought them together, who had lain across the threshold of her chamber to guard her secret, was wiser, and fled to hiding. Rukmini lived the few bitter, empty days in a firm assurance of her safety; but when she saw her husband and his train of relatives come trooping into the courtyard, a dreadful, sickening fear, more for her lover than herself, gripped her heart. She had barely the time to realise their danger; for, when she rose to greet her husband's mother, the women-folk of her kin fell upon her with cursing and reviling; and smothering her screams of anguish with a cushion, beat and tore and bit her till she lay senseless, a poor mangled wretch, with no trace of beauty left. Her husband and two brothers rescued her from their claws; and while his mother dismissed suavely and kindly her women-servants, who with the evil wisdom of their class fled in haste, throwing away the sweetmeats which had been given to them, they gagged her; stripped her of the rags of her garments and any ornaments the women had left; and bound her to a charpoy to await death.

  At Mess that night the English officers were but little less cheerful than they had been on the night which brought them word to prepare for active service. They had gained glory and medals; they had come, without the loss of one of them, through Ghazi rushes, awkward, scrappy skirmishes in the dark, and perpetual sniping; and the last night of the ninth year was running. Burkle, the Adjutant, with his unfailing, sporting accuracy, had made out that it expired at two o'clock on the morrow; and he was talking about it with a cheerfulness unpleasing to those of his brother-officers who would have to pay, and to those of them who had suffered in health from wounds, bad food and water, or the hardships of the campaign, and remembered uneasily the gamble on death with which they had gone forth to war.

  Selby was even more cheerful than Burkle. Though he drank but little, a curious, wild gaiety, quite foreign to his reserved, supercilious habit, was on him. It might have been relief that he too had come well out of his danger, the ended intrigue; it might have been pleasure at the thought of getting back to the cards he had so missed. He was at a loss to find words to express his joyous contempt of the silly superstition; he welcomed every poor joke with extravagant laughter; he made poor okes himself. The others began to believe that in their absence he had began to turn into a decent fellow. Even after his gaiety had been a little dashed by the refusal of all of them to play cards that night, on the ground of weariness, he went off to his quarters singing, very much out of tune, the chorus of a comic song.

  Between three and four in the morning there was a clamour in the Lines and a hurrying to and fro. A terror-stricken native who had been cooling Selby's sleep with a punkah, roused Burkle to tell him that his master had bee
n murdered; Burkle had rushed into his quarters to find him bathed in blood, and sobbing out his life from a gaping gash in the chest, which had cut his left lung nearly in half. At the sight of Burkle the wistful, helpless wonder had left the dying man's face; it had been contorted in the effort to speak through the blood which choked the channels of his speech; he had gasped "Ruk—Ruk—" and died.

  They turned out the men, and sought high and low for the murderer. They never found him, nor a trace of him; they could not guess even the motive of the crime. His servant, seeing that his master slept, had left the punkah to get a drink of water, which meant an absence of any time between ten minutes and an hour; he had come back to find his master dying. They were inclined to believe his story. There were no signs of disturbed attempt at robbery; there was no clue among the dead man's papers. Burkle could only say that his last words were something about "rook"; and the thought sprang to their minds, though no one uttered it, that it was an appropriate word in his dying mouth. Investigation in the Lines and in the Bazaar brought no scrap of evidence. They buried him at sunset, tried to persuade themselves, and assured one another that he was a very decent fellow.

  Two days later, a funeral procession wended its slow way from the Subadar Golaba's house to the burning-ghât. He was burying his young wife who had died after a very short illness and he showed an unusual lack of restraint in his grief. No one no Englishman at least, thought to connect the two funerals.