WINGS
I
That Saturday night at the height of the London season when Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, made his initial bow to Belgravia in the salon of the Dowager Duchess of Shropshire, properly introduced and vouched for by Sir James Spottiswoode of the India Office, there wasn't a man in the great scarlet and purple room, nor woman either, who did not look up quite automatically when the big, bearded, turbaned figure crossed the threshold and bent over the wrinkled, perfumed hand of Her Grace.
There wasn't a person in that room—and people of all classes crowded the gossipy old duchess s Saturday night at homes, from recently knighted, pouchy, sharp-voiced barristers to gentlemen of the bench who hid their baldness and their forensic wisdom under tremendous, dusty wigs; from the latest East African explorer returned from a six-months unnecessary slaughter, to the stolidest novelist of mid-Victorian respectability; from the most Parisianized Londoner to the most Anglified Parisian; from the latest shouting evangelist out of the State of Wisconsin to the ungodly Yorkshire peer who had varied the monotony of last year's marriage to, and divorce from, a Sussex dairymaid by this year's elopement with a Gaiety chorus-girl; from Mayfair Dives to Soho Lazarus—there wasn't a person in all that mixed assembly who did not feel a shiver of expectation as the raja entered.
Expectation of something.
Waiting tensely, dramatically, silently, for something. "Not waiting for something to happen," Charlie Thorneycroft put it. "Rather waiting for something that had already happened, you know. Which of course is infernal rot and asinine drivel. For how in the name of my canonized great-grandaunt can you wait for the future of the past tense? But—there you are!"
And Thorneycroft, of London, Calcutta, Peshawar, Melbourne, Capetown, and the British Empire in general, vaguely attached to some mythical diplomatic bureau in some unknown diplomatic capacity, would drop his monocle and look up with a sharp, challenging stare of his ironic gray eyes, as if expecting you to contradict him.
It was not that the presence of a raja, or any other East Indian potentate or near-potentate was an unusual occurrence in London. Rajas are more common there than Nevada plutocrats at a Florida resort, or black-cocks on a Yorkshire moor. London is the capital of a motley and picturesque empire, and pink turbans soften the foggy, sulfurous drab of Fleet Street; lavender turbans bob up and down the human eddy of the Burlington Arcade; green and red and white turbans blotch the sober, workaday atmosphere of East Croydon and Pimlico.
Nor was it anything in Martab Singh's appearance or reputation. For, as to the first, he was good-looking in rather a heavy, simple, bovine fashion, with two hundred pounds of flesh and brawn carried by his six foot two of height, his great, staring, thick-fringed, opaque eyes, his melancholy smile, and his magnificent beard, dyed red with henna, which was split from the chin down the center and then curled up on either side of his face so that the points, which touched his ridiculously small ears, looked like the horns of a combative ram.
And as to his reputation and standing, Sir James Spottiswoode had vouched for it.
There was also Charlie Thorneycroft's drawling, slightly saturnine corroboration.
"Tremendously swanky beggar in his own country," he said to pretty, violet-eyed Victoria de Rensen. "Descendant of the flame on his father's side, and related to the moon on the bally distaff. Cousin to Vishnu, Shiva, Doorgha, and what-not, and college chum to all the assorted and hideous divinities of the Hindu heaven. His principality is small, barren, poor. A mixture of rocks and flies and hairy and murderous natives. But he is the very biggest among the bigwigs of India. To two hundred million benighted Hindus he is the deity—Brahm, what?—all the gods rolled into one and topped by a jolly, crimson caste-mark. He's the gods earthly representative, you know, Vic darling. Not only that. For"—he dropped his voice to a flat whisper—"this is the first time in the history of the world—hang it, before the history of the world—that a Maharaja of Oneypore has left his native soil."
"Why shouldn't he?"
"Because by leaving India he pollutes his soul, he loses caste. And that's just why I wonder—"
"What?"
"Oh, nothing!"
Quite suddenly he looked up, and his long, white fingers gripped the girl's arm nervously.
"Did you feel—it?" he whispered.
There was no need for an answer. Nor, really, had there been need for the question in the first place.
For, as the raja, arm in arm with Sir James Spottiswoode, stepped away from the door and farther into the room, it came.
Nobody heard it. Nobody saw it or smelt it. Nobody even felt it, either consciously or subconsciously.
But again, through the mixed company that crowded the duchess's salon, there passed a shiver. A terrible, silent, hopeless shiver.
Then noises: human noises, and the relief that goes with them. A distinct sound of breath sucked in quickly, of tea-cups clacking as hands trembled, of feet shuffling uneasily on the thick Turkish carpet, of the very servants, placidly, stolidly English, stopping in their rounds of hospitable duties, standing stock-still, silver trays gripped in white-gloved fingers, and staring, breathless, like pointers at bay.
"Something—like great wings, rushing, rushing!" murmured Charlie Thorneycroft, dropping his usual slang like a cloak.
"Like—wings—" echoed Victoria de Rensen with a little sob.
Yet there was nothing formidable or sinister in the raja's progress through the room, by the side of Sir James, who played guide, philosopher, and friend. A charming, childlike smile was on his lips. His great, opaque eyes beamed with honest, kindly pleasure. He bowed here to a lady, shook the hands of barrister and judge and artist, mumbled friendly words in soft, halting English, accepted a cup of tea from a servant who had regained his composure, and dropped into a low Windsor chair, looking at the people with the same melancholy, childlike expression.
Very gradually the huge, voiceless excitement died.
Once more servants pussyfooted through the salon with food and drink; once more the Paris cubist tore the artistic theories of the white-bearded Royal Academician into shreds; once more the Wisconsin evangelist bent to the ear of the Mayfair débutante and implored her to hit the trail of salvation; once more lion growled at lion.
But Charlie Thorneycroft could not shake off the strange impression which he had received. He was still aware of the thing, whatever it was, and of the great rushing of wings. It came out of the East, from far across the sea, and it was very portentous, very terrible, very tragic.
"I didn't hear the wings!" he exclaimed later on. "Nor did I feel them. If I had felt or heard I wouldn't have minded so, you know. I felt with them—and I was sorry for them, awfully, awfully sorry. No sense to that? Of course not. There wasn't a bally ounce of sense to the whole wretched thing from beginning to end—and that's the worst of it!"
II
Such was the entrée of the Maharaja of Oneypore into London society; and for three weeks, to a day, an hour, a minute—"Hang it! To a bally second!" Charlie Thorneycroft commented—the impression which had accompanied him into the salon of Her Grace of Shropshire clung to him.
Not that people feared or mistrusted him. There was nothing personal about it, and indeed the man was kindness itself. He could not pass by beggar, by effusive, tailwagging street cur, or by mewing, rubbing, dusty, ash-bin cat, without giving what he thought was demanded of him—money or caress or soft word.
Nor was it because he was too foreign. For he improved his English rapidly, and, well-bred, a gentleman, it did not take him long to master European social customs, including the prejudices. He tried his best to become Western, in every sense of the word, and to that end he abandoned his Hindu dress, his turban, his magnificent jewels. He even shaved off his split, henna-stained beard, and there remained nothing about him reminiscent of his native land except the expression in his eyes—melancholy, ancient, tired; more the eyes of a race than those of an individual—and the vivid, crimson caste-mark painted on his forehead.
It seemed rather incongruous, topping, as it did, his correct English clothes tailored by a Sackville Street craftsman.
Then, at the end of three weeks, the aura of suspense, the aura of waiting for something that had already happened which hovered about him, disappeared quite as suddenly, and quite as terribly as it had come.
It was on the occasion of a ball given at Marlborough House, and the rooms were gay with fluffy chiffon and stately brocades, with glittering uniforms, and the sharp contrast of black and white evening dress. The orchestra, hidden behind a palm screen, sobbed a lascivious Brazilian tango. Paired off, the young danced and flirted and laughed. So did the middle-aged and the old. In the buffet-room the majordomo was busy with the preparation of the famous Marlborough champagne-punch.
At half past eleven the raja entered, together with Charlie Thorneycroft, who had attached himself to him, and at once the usual enormous shiver brushed through the assembly, like a wedge of ferocious, superhuman evil, with a hidden thunder of unguessed-at immensity.
People stopped still in the middle of a dance-step. The music broke off with a jarring discord as a B-string snapped. The Marchioness of Liancourt swooned against a priceless Sèvres vase and sent it splintering to the waxed floor. The majordomo dropped his mixing-ladle into the silver punch-bowl.
Remote, gigantic, extended, the impression of voiceless fear gathered speed. It gathered breath-clogging terror. It stabbed the regions of subliminal consciousness.
Strident yet unheard, huge yet unseen, torrential yet non-existent, it swelled to a draft of sound—"sound beyond the meaning of the word—words are so inadequate—sound which you could not hear!" Thorneycroft put it that sucked through the rooms with the strength of sky and sea and stars, with the speed of splintering lances thrown by giants hands, with a passionate, tragic leaping and yearning that was as the ancient call of Creation itself. It flashed outward with a wrenching, tameless glory and savagery that fused all these London molecules of humanity into one shivering whole.
Two minutes it lasted, and at exactly twenty-eight minutes to twelve Thorneycroft, obeying a peculiar impulse, had looked at his watch, and he never lived to forget the time nor the date: the 15th of January, 1913—the nameless impression passed into the limbo of unremembered things.
It passed as enormously—by contrast—as it had come. It passed with an all-pervading sense of sweetness and peace: of intimate sweetness, too intimate peace. It passed with a wafting of jasmine and marigold perfume, a soft tinkling of far-away bells, and the muffled sobs of women coming from across immeasurable distances.
The raja smiled.
He raised a high-veined hand in salutation. Then he trembled. He gave a low sigh that changed rapidly into a rattling gurgle. His eyes became staring and glassy. His knees gave way, and he fell straight back, dead, white-faced, the crimson caste-mark on his forehead looking like some evil thing, mocking, sardonic, triumphant.
"God!" Thorneycroft bent over the rigid form, feeling the heart that had ceased to beat. He spoke a quick word, and servants came and carried out the body.
But the people who crowded the rooms seemed quite unaware that death had stalked among them. Suddenly a wild wave of gayety surged through the house. They laughed. They chattered. They jested. They clinked glasses. The orchestra led away with a Paris waltz that was as light as foam.
That night champagne flowed like water. Half a dozen love-affairs were finished, another half-dozen begun. Scandal was winked at and condoned. Gayety, the madness of Bacchanalian gayety, invaded every nook and cranny of Marlborough House, invading the very servants hall, where the majordomo balanced the third up-stairs parlor-maid on his knees and spoke to her of love in thickly dignified terms.
Two days later Martab Singh Maharaja of Oneypore, descendant of the many gods, was buried in state, with twenty file of Horse Guards flanking the coffin, and all the purple-faced gentry of the India Office rolling behind in carriages, dressed pompous black broadcloth and smoking surreptitious cigars.
On the same day Charlie Thorneycroft called on Victoria de Rensen, kissed her pouting lips, and told her in his vague manner that he was off to India.
III
India came to Charlie Thorneycroft as it had come to him a dozen times: with a sudden rush of splendor, flaming red, golden tipped, shot through with purple and emerald-green, and hardly cloaking the thick, stinking layer of cruelty and superstition and ignorance that stewed and oozed beneath the colorful surface. He knew it all, from the Rajput gentleman's stately widow who gives herself to the burning pyre in spite of British laws, to the meanest half-caste money-lender who devils the souls of sporting subalterns amid the flowering peepul-trees of Fort William barracks; and so he yawned his way from the moment when the big P. and O. liner nosed kittenishly through the sucking sand-banks of the Hoogly to the Hotel Semiramis.
There he had a lengthy and whispered conversaton with a deputy commissioner recently returned from Rajputana, who bowed low and spoke softly in spite of the fact that Thorneycroft was his junior by twenty years and seemed to have no especial diplomatic rank or emoluments.
All the next morning he yawned away the hours that creep to the sweating west, took a late train for the north, and continued his bored progress through twelve hundred miles of varied scenery.
He had no eye for the checker-board landscape of neat Bengal, nor for the purple and orange tints of the Indian sky that changed the far hills into glowing heaps of topaz, the scorched ridges into carved masses of amethyst and rose-red. Rajputana, gold and heliotrope, sad with the dead centuries, the dead glory, interested him not.
His thoughts were far in the north, near the border, where Rajput and Afghan wait for a renewal of the old, bitter fight for supremacy when Britain shall have departed; and still, waking and sleeping, he could feel—he could feel with—the silent whirring of immense wings—"like the wings of a tortured soul trying to escape the cage of the dust-created body," he put it with a lyric soaring that clashed incongruously with his usual horsy slang.
The whirring of wings!
And there was some accent In it of secret dread, of terrible, secret melancholy, deeper than his soul could perceive, his brain could classify. The terror of a mighty struggle was behind it: a mighty struggle awfully remote from individual existence and individual ambition and life, individual death even. It partook of India itself; the land, the ancient races, the very gods.
The farther north he traveled the more strongly grew the shapeless, voiceless impression. At times, suddenly, a light flashed down the hidden tunnels of his inner consciousness, and made visible for one fleeting second something which he seemed too slow to comprehend.
A whisper came to him from beyond the rationally knowable.
And so, two days later, he dropped from the train at a small up-land station that consisted of a chaotic whirlwind of stabbing sand, seven red-necked vultures squatting on a low wall and making unseemly noises, a tumble-down Vishnavite shrine, and a fat, patent-leather-slippered babu, who bowed before Charlie Thorneycroft even lower than the deputy commissioner had done, called him Protector of the Pitiful, and otherwise did him great honor.
"All right, all right!" came Thorneycroft's impatient rejoinder. "I see that you got my cable. Is the bullock-cart ready?"
"Yes, heaven-born!" And the babu pointed at the tonga, the bullock-cart, that came ghostlike out of the whirling sandstorm.
"Good enough." He swung himself up. "Ready. Chuck the bedding and the ice in the back. Let her go!" he said to the driver, who had his jaws bandaged after the manner of desertmen, and the tonga started off, dipping and plunging across the ridges like a small boat in a short sea.
The babu squatted by Thorneycroft's side, talking softly, and again the Englishman yawned. But this time there was a slight affectation in his yawn, and affectation, too, as of one weaving close to the loom of lies, in his words:
"Yes, yes. I fancy it is the old story. Some jealous wildcat of a hill woman—"
"No, heaven-born!" cut in the babu. He winked his heavy-lidded eyes slowly as if to tell the other that he was "on." "This time it is different. This time there is no woman's jealousy brewing unclean abominations behind the curtains of the zenana. This time it is—"
"Priestcraft?"
"You have said it, sahib!" came the babu's reply in a flat, frightened whisper.
"All right!" Thorneycroft gave a short, unpleasant laugh. "Let's go to Deolibad first and call on my friend Youssef Ali." And a few words of direction to the driver, who grunted a reply, jerked the heads of the trotting animals- away from the north and toward the northwest, and plied their fat sides with the knotted end of his whip.
All night they drove. They rested near a shallow river. But they did not tarry long. They watered the team, rubbed them down with sand, and were off again.
It was a long, hot drive. The silence, the insolent nakedness of the land, the great, burning sun lay on Thorneycroft's soul like a heavy burden. Time and again he was conscious of the whirring of wings, and with each league it seemed to lay closer to the ears of his inner self. It seemed born somewhere in the heart of the purple, silver-nicked gloom that draped the hills of Rajputana.
The babu, too, was conscious of it. His teeth clicked. His body trembled, and he looked at the Englishman, who looked back at him.
Neither spoke. Something utterly overwhelming enfolded them. For the whirring was at once of enchanting peace and sweetness, and of a mournful, tragic, sobbing strength that was like the death of a soul.
Once the babu put it into words:
"Like the death of a soul—"
"Shut up!" Thorneycroft whispered, and then silence again but for the pattering hoofs of the bullocks.
There were few signs of life. At times a gecko slipped away through the scrub with a green, metallic glisten. Once in a while a kite poised high in the parched, blue sky. Another time they over took a gigantic cotton-wain drawn by twenty bullocks about the size of Newfoundland dogs.
Then, late one night, they reached Deolibad, They passed through the tall southern gate, studded with sharp elephant-spikes, paid off their driver, walked through the mazes of the perfume-sellers bazaar, and stopped in front of an old house.
Three times Thorneycroft knocked at the age-gangrened, cedarwood door, sharp, staccato, with a long pause between the second and third knocks, and then again three times in rapid succession.
It was as if the ramshackle old house were listening in its sleep, then slowly awakening. Came the scratch of a match, a thin, light ray drifting through the cracks in the shutters, a shuffling of slippered feet, and the door opened.
A man stood there, old, immensely tall, immensely fat, an Afghan judging from his black silk robe and his oiled locks, holding a candle in his right hand.
He peered at the two figures in front of him. Then he broke into high-pitched laughter and gurgling words of greeting.
"Thorneycroft! Thorneycroft, by the Prophet! Young heart of my old heart!"
And in his excitement he dropped the candle, which clattered to the ground, and hugged the Englishman to his breast. The latter returned the embrace; but, as the Afghan was about to renew his flowery salutations, cut them short with:
"I need your help, Youssef Ali."
"Anything, anything, child! I will give you any help you ask. I will grant you anything except sorrow. Ahi! These are like the old days, when you, with your mother's milk not yet dry on your lips, rode by my side to throw the dragnet of the British Raj's law around the lying priests of this stinking land. Heathen priests of Shiva and Vishnu, worshiping a monkey and a flower! Aughrrr!" He spat.
Thorneycroft laughed.
"Still the old, intolerant Youssef, aren't you? All right. But I don't need much. Simply this—and that—" He crossed the threshold side by side with the Afghan and followed by the babu. He said a few words, adding: "I hear that you are a much-married man, besides being an amateur of tuwaifs, of dancing-girls. So I'm sure you will be able to help me out. I could have gone to the bazaar and bought the stuff. But there are leaky tongues there—"
It was Youssef's turn to laugh.
"A love affair, child? Perhaps with the daughter of some hill raja?"
"No. Not love. But life—and death. And perhaps—" He was silent. There was again the giant whirring of wings. Then he went on:
"Perhaps again life! Who knows?"
"Allah knows!" piously mumbled Youssef. "He is the One, the All-Knowing. Come with me, child," he went on, lifting a brown-striped curtain that shut off the zenana. "Sitt Kumar will help you—a little dancing-girl whom"—he coughed apologetically—"I recently encountered, and whose feet are just now very busy crushing my fat, foolish old heart. Wait here, O babu-jee!" he said to the babu, while he and the Englishman disappeared be hind the zenana curtain.
There was a moment's silence. Then a woman's light, tinkly laughter, a clacking of bracelets and anklets, a rapid swishing of linen and silk.
Again the woman's light laughter. Her words:
"Keep quiet, sahib, lest the walnut-dye enter thy eye!" And ten minutes later the zenana curtains were drawn aside to disclose once more the Afghan, arm in arm with a middle-aged, dignified Brahman priest, complete in every detail of outer sacerdotal craft, from the broidered skull-cap and the brilliant caste-mark on his forehead to the patent-leather pumps, the open-work white stockings, and the sacred volume bound in red Bokhara leather that he carried in his right hand.
"Nobody will recognize you," said Youssef.
"Good!" said the Brahman in Thorneycroft's voice. "And now—can you lend me a couple of horses?"
"Surely. I have a brace of Marwari stallions. Jewels, child! Pearls! Noble bits of horseflesh! Come!"
He led the way to the stable, which was on the other side of his house, and sheltered by a low wall. He lit an oil-lamp, opened the door, soothed the nervous, startled Marwaris with voice and knowing hand, and saddled them.
He led the horses out, and Thorneycroft and the babu mounted.
"Where to?" asked the Afghan.
Thorneycroft waved his hand in farewell.
"To Oneypore!" he replied. "To interview a dead raja's soul!" He turned to the babu. "We must hurry, O babu-jee ! Every minute counts!"
And he was off at a gallop, closely followed by the other.
IV
The night was as black as pitch, but Thorneycroft rode hard.
He figured back.
The Maharaja of Oneypore had died on the fifteenth of January. To-day was the tenth of February. Twenty-five days had elapsed since the raja's death.
Would he be in time?
"Come on, babu-jee!" he cried, and rode harder than ever.
Once his stallion reared on end and landed stiffly on his forefeet, nearly throwing him. But that night he could not consider the feelings of a mere horse. He pressed on the curb with full strength and brought his fist down between the animal's ears; and, after a minute or two of similar reasoning, the Marwari stretched his splendid, muscled body and fell into a long, swinging fox-trot.
The road to Oneypore was as straight as a lance and fairly good. They rode their horses alternating between a fast walk and a short hand gallop.
Thorneycroft had not eaten since noon of the preceding day, and was tired and hungry. But he kept on. For there was something calling him, calling him, from the ragged hills that looped to the east in carved, sinister immensity; and through the velvety gloom of the night, through the gaunt shadows of the low, volcanic ridges that trooped back to Deolibad and danced like hobgoblins among the dwarf aloes, through the click-clanketty-click of the stallions' pattering feet, there came to him again the whirring—like a tragic message to hurry, hurry.
Morning blazed with the suddenness of the tropics. The sun had hardly risen, but already it was close and muggy. A jaundiced heat veiled the levels—foretaste of the killing, scorching heat of March and April—and the birds, true weather prophets, the parrots and the minas, the tiny, blue-winged doves and the pert, ubiquitous crows, were opening their beaks with a painful effort and gasping for air—another week, and they would be off for the cool deodars of the higher hills.
In the distance a dark mass was looming up: Oneypore—and the horses were about to give in. Their heads were bowed on their heaving, lathering chests, and they breathed with a deep, rattling noise.
Thorneycroft dismounted and stretched his cramped legs.
"Ride down there," he said to the babu, pointing at a narrow valley to the west, black with trees and gnarled shrub, that cleft the land. "Wait until you hear from me. I fancy you'll find some brother babu in the valley fattening his pouch and increasing his bank-account at the expense of the Rajput villagers. He will give you food and drink and a roof over your head. Tell him anything you wish as long as you don't tell him the truth."
"Of course I shall not tell him the truth," replied the babu, slightly hurt. "Am I a fool or—"
"An Englishman?" Thorneycroft completed the sentence. "Never mind. I am English. But I learned the art of deceit in Kashmere, the home of lies, and Youssef Ali, too, gave me some invaluable lessons."
And while the babu rode off to the valley, leading the other horse, Thorneycroft set off at a good clip toward Oneypore, which was becoming more distinct every minute as the morning mists rolled up and away like torn gauze veils. It was seven o'clock when he reached the western gate, an ancient marble structure, incrusted with symbolistic figures and archaic terra-cotta medallions, and topped by a lacy, fretted lotus-bud molding.
Beyond, the city stretched like a flower of stone petals.
Oneypore!
The sacred city of Hindustan! The holy soil where the living descendants of the gods had ruled for over five thousand years—and one of them dead, on unclean, foreign soil—buried in unclean, foreign soil!
An outcast! He, the descendant of Rama, an outcast!
Oneypore! And it was a fascinating town, with crooked streets and low, white houses, cool gardens ablaze with mangoes and mellingtonia and flowering peepul-trees and, in the distance, a gigantic palace, built out of a granite hillside, and descending into the dip of the valley with an avalanche of bold masonry.
Toward it, without hesitation, Thorneycroft set his face.
He had to cross the Oneypore River, only second in holiness to the palace: the river which, for centuries, had been the last resting-place of thousands of Afghans and Rajputs massacred in the narrow streets of the city or slain in fierce combats outside its brown, bastioned walls. Sorrowing widows, in accordance with the marriage vows of their caste, had sought the solace of oblivion beneath its placid surface. Faithless wives and dancing girls had been hurled into the waters from the convenient battlements and windows of the palace.
The river's sinister reputation, in spite of its holiness, was such that though the natives bathed in its limpid depth they never, knowingly, allowed a drop of it to pass their lips. River of grim tragedies—and its hour of grim glory came when a Maharaja of Oneypore died, and when his corpse, attired in its most magnificent costume, the arms encircled by jeweled bracelets, shimmering necklaces of pearls and moonstones and diamonds descending to the waist, and a huge, carved emerald falling like a drop of green fire from the twisted, yellow Rajput turban, was carried out of the palace, through the streets of the town, sitting bolt upright on a chair of state, and back to the banks of the Oneypore River, where the body was burnt and its ashes thrown into the waters—while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while white-robed priests chanted long-winded litanies, while the conches brayed from the temples, and while the smoke from many ceremonial fires ascended to the sky in thick, wispy streams and hung in a ruddy, bloodshot cloud above the glare of the funeral pyre that lit up the palace and told to all the world that another one of the divine race of Oneypore had gone to join Brahm, his kinsman.
Brahm, his kinsman!
And Martab Singh had mingled the bones of his dead body with those of the mlechchas, the foreigners, the barbarians, the Christians—on foreign, Christian soil!
Something like a shudder of apprehension passed over Thorneycroft, but he kept sturdily on his way, returning the salutations with which the hook-nosed, saber-rattling, swaggering Rajputs greeted him because of his Brahman garb. He went up a steep ascent that led to the chowk, the outer courtyard of the palace, and the soldiers salaamed and stepped aside:
"Enter, O holy one!"
Like a man sure of his way, he passed through a low gate, through another courtyard crammed with human life, and into still another, which was lifeless except for the whir and coo of hundreds of blue-winged pigeons and for the figure of a very old priest, squatting on a goat's-skin rug and deep in the perusal of a massive Sanskrit tome.
V
The old priest looked up when Thorneycroft approached, and the latter gave an involuntary start, though rapidly suppressed.
In former years, pursuing his vague, mysterious diplomatic career in different parts of that immense block of real estate called the British Empire, but a good half of the time in India, he had heard about this priest, the Swami Pel Krishna Srina. He knew that the man was the prime minister, that before him his father had held the same position, before his father his grandfather, and thus back for many generations. For the Brahmans of the house of Pel Srina were cousins in blood and caste to the reigning house of Oneypore, and like them descendants of the gods.
Neither the maharaja nor his prime minister had ever taken much interest in the muddy, coiling politics of India. It was indifferent to them what particular foreign barbarian—English or Afghan or Mogul or Persian—was overlord of the great peninsula. They seemed satisfied with ruling the little rocky, barren principality, with the faded glory of the dead centuries, and with the decidedly theological and just as decidedly unworldly fact that the Oneypores were considered the living representatives of the gods by the vast majority of Hindus.
Thus Thorneycroft had never taken the trouble of meeting Swami Pel Srina, and now, seeing him for the first time, he was startled out of his customary English calm.
Nor was it a psychic impression. Here, in this sheltered courtyard—and for the first time since that day when the Maharaja of Oneypore had made his appearance in the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire—he was unaware, quite unaware of the silent, gigantic whirring of wings.
What made him suck in his breath was the face of the swami.
"I wish I could picture it to you as I saw it," he said afterward. "It would take the hand of some mad cubist sculptor to clout the meaning of it. The features? No, no. Nothing extraordinary about them. Just those of an elderly, dignified, rather conceited Brahman. But the expression of the thin, compressed lips, the great staring, gray eyes! Gad! I am an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product. Thus I'm a jolly good Episcopalian, take me all round. But when I saw those eyes—oh—the whole cursed thing seemed suddenly rational, possible—inevitable even! Right then—Christian, Englishman, and public school product—I believed the absurd claim of the rajas and prime ministers of Oneypore that they were the descendants of Rama and Vishnu. It was all in those eyes that were staring at me. They looked—oh—unearthly—that's the word!"
Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of superstitious emotion lasted only a moment. Perhaps it was contained in the short time it took the swami to look up, to drop his book, and to raise a thin, high-veined hand with the words:
"Greetings, brother priest!"
At all events Thorneycroft was himself again. He bowed over the withered old hand and said—he had thought it all out carefully beforehand—that he had come to Oneypore to hear with his own ears, to see with his own eyes, the great miracle which the swami had performed.
"Ah!" breathed the swami, and he did not altogether hide a faint accent of nervousness—"then—it has been talked about—in the south?"
"No!" Thorneycroft replied quickly. "Not talked about. I do not even know what it is. But a voice came to me in the night—whispering, whispering; it was like the whirring of wings, and I followed, followed, followed! Straight on I followed until I came here, to Oneypore, to the palace, the courtyard, your presence, O swami! And now"—he really spoke the truth there, and he used to say afterward that it was doubtless the fact of his speaking the truth which made him so utterly convincing—"now the whirring of wings has stopped. Now there is sweetness and peace as there was"—he shot the words out suddenly—"that day, a few weeks back, on the 15th of January!"
"At what hour?" as suddenly asked the priest.
"At twenty-eight minutes to midnight!" replied Thorneycroft, who had never forgotten the day nor the hour when the Raja of Oneypore had died in the salon of Her Grace of Shropshire.
"Good!" said the swami, rising slowly and leading the way to a massive door.
He drew a foot-long, skewerlike key from his waist-shawl, opened the door, and motioned Thorneycroft to enter.
The gate clicked behind them.
"Good!" he said again, stopped, and faced the other squarely. "You have wondered," he went on, "as to the why and wherefore—you, to whom the voice of the miracle came in the night?"
"Yes," replied Thorneycroft in low accents, his heart beating like a trip-hammer. "I have wondered indeed. I knew the thing—was done. I heard the whirring of wings. I knew the raja died—"
"But did he die, brother Brahman?" The swami looked at the Englishman, deep, brooding melancholia in his gray eyes. "Ahi! Did he die?" And he made a hopeless gesture and led on again through empty suites of rooms supported by double rows of pillars, past balconies which clung like birds nests to the sheer side of the palace, again through more rooms and up and down steep steps. Once in a while they encountered liveried, turbaned officials. But always the latter would salaam deeply and step aside.
Finally the swami stopped in front of a door which was a great slab of tulip-wood inlaid with nacre and lac. He lifted his hand, and Thorneycroft noticed that it was trembling violently.
"Brother Brahman," he said, "Martab Singh was my kinsman, my friend, my king. He was cousin to me, and cousin to the gods. I loved him greatly, and for years, with me by his side, he stepped in the footsteps of his ancestors, in the way of salvation, the way of the many gods. Then one day—shall I ever forget it?—madness came to him. He, the Maharaja of Oneypore, he, the incarnation of Rama and Vishnu and Brahm himself, declared that the desire was in his nostrils to leave India. To leave the sacred soil! To go traveling in the far lands and see the unclean witchcraft of the foreigners, the Christians, the English, the mlechhas! Gently I spoke to him as I might to a child. This and that I told him, quoting the sacred books, the words of Brahm, our blessed Lord. 'This is lust,'I quoted, 'born of the quality of rajas. Know this to be a great devourer, great sin, and the enemy on earth. As by smoke fire is enveloped, and the looking-glass by rust, as the womb envelops the unborn child, so by this it is enveloped. By this—the eternal enemy of the wise man, desire-formed, hard to be filled, insatiate—discrimination is enveloped. The senses and organs, the thinking faculty, as well as the faculty of judgment, are said to be its seat. It—enveloping the discriminative faculty with these—deludes the lord of the body! Thus I spoke to him, often, gently!"
"And he? Martab Singh?"
"Would laugh in his beard. He would say that, if Vishnu was his kinsman, so was Indra—and Indra was the god of travel. And so—"
"He traveled? He went to England?"
"No!"
"No?" echoed Thorneycroft. He felt his hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind. His thought swirled back, and he remembered how the maharaja had entered the salon of the Duchess of Shropshire, how he had bowed over the withered old hand, how Sir James Spottiswoode, of the India Office, had vouched for him, how—
"No?" he said again, stupidly.
"No, by Shiva!" came the swarm's hushed voice. "He did not travel. He did not leave the sacred soil of India. He is—in here!" At the same time opening the door, drawing Thorneycroft inside, and shutting the door behind him.
VI
For a moment the Englishman was utterly lost, utterly confounded. He had thought. He had imagined. He had conferred with the babu and had spoken to him of priestcraft. But this—this—
The whirring of wings, which he had not heard since he had entered the inner courtyard, was once more, suddenly, upon him with terrific force, with the strength of sun and sea and the stars. He felt himself caught in a huge, invisible net of silent sound that swept out of the womb of creation, toward death, and back toward throbbing life. The whirring rose, steadily, terribly, until it filled the whole room from floor to ceiling, pressing in with ever-deepening strength. It was like the trembling of air in a belfry where bells have been ringing ceaselessly for days—but bells without sound, bells with only the ghost of sound—
He feared it.
It seemed to strike, not at his life, but at the meaning, the plausibility, the saneness of life.
It took possession of his body and his soul, and forged them into something partaking of neither the physical nor the spiritual, yet at the same moment partaking of both—something that was beyond the power of analysis, of guessing, of shivering dread even.
Quite suddenly it stopped, as caught in an air-pocket, and he became conscious of the swami's pointing finger, and his low words:
"Look there, Brother Brahman!"
And, stretched on a bed of state in the far corner of the room, he saw the figure of Martab Singh, Maharaja of Oneypore, as he had seen him that first day in London, with his large, opaque eyes, the melancholy, childlike smile, the split, curled beard, the crimson caste mark.
The figure was rigid. There wasn't a breath of life. It was like a marvelously painted, lifelike statue—yet Thorneycroft knew that it was not a statue. He knew that it was the maharaja—the same maharaja whom, on the 15th of January, he had seen die in Marlborough House, whom he had seen buried in an English cemetery, with twenty files of Horse Guards flanking the coffin and all the gentry of the India Office rolling behind in comfortable carriages.
"But—what—"
He stammered. His voice seemed dead and smothered. He began to shake all over, feverishly; and again the whirring of wings rushed upon him, and again, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, an eternity later, he became conscious of the swami's low, sibilant voice:
"He wanted to travel. Nor could I dissuade him, and I—I loved him. Thus I said to him: 'You yourself cannot leave the sacred soil of India. It would bring pollution unthinkable on yourself, on Hindustan, on the blessed gods themselves. But I am a master of white magic. I shall take your astral body from the envelope of your living body, and I shall breathe a spell upon it so that it shall be even as your living body, feeling, hearing, seeing, touching. Your astral self shall go to the land of the mlechhas—the land of the infidels—while your body, rigid as in death, shall await its return.'"
"And—" whispered Thorneycroft.
"So it was done. But I gave him warning that the spell would last only a certain number of days. On the 15th of January his astral self must be back, here, in the palace of Oneypore. On the I5th of January! Three times I gave him warning! And he promised—and—"
"He broke the promise!"
"Yes. His astral self was caught in the eddy of foreign life, foreign desires, foreign vices perhaps"—he smiled with sudden kindliness—"foreign virtues. I waited. Day after day I waited. Came the 15th of January—and he did not return. For—"
"His astral self died—in England. It was buried in foreign soil," Thorneycroft interjected.
"You have said it, Brother Brahman. And now"—he raised his hands in a gesture of supplication—"though I have prayed to Vishnu, who is my cousin, to Shiva, to Doorgha, to Brahm himself, though I have offered the slaughter of my own soul for the homeless soul of him whom I loved, the evil is done. He is neither dead, nor is he alive. His soul is a fluttering, harrowed thing, whirling about on the outer rim of creation, cursed by the gods, his kinsmen. His physical body is here—on this couch—and the spiritual self, his astral body, is in foreign soil—sullied, sullied!"
"And—there is no hope?"
"Yes!" Again the swami smiled with sudden kindliness. "There is hope—the shadow of hope. Perhaps some day the great wrong shall be forgiven by the gods. Perhaps some day they will cause the two parts of his body, his physical and his astral, to blend into one. Perhaps some day they will permit him to regain caste—and to die! Daily I pray for it"—and, with utter simplicity, as he opened the door—"will you pray, too, brother priest?"
Thorneycroft inclined his head. He was an Englishman, a Christian—and a public school product.
But he inclined his head.
"Yes, swami," he replied. "I will pray. Every day will I pray!"
And the door shut behind him with a little dry click of finality.