Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (12 page)

BY WORD OF MOUTH

Not though you the tonight, O Sweet, and wail,

A spectre at my door.

Shall mortal Fear make Love immortal fail –

I shall but love you more,

Who, from Death’s house returning, give me still

One moment’s comfort in my matchless ill.

Shadow Houses

This tale may be explained by those who know how souls are made, and where the bounds of the Possible are put down. I have lived long enough in this India to know that it is best to know nothing, and can only write the story as it happened.

Dumoise was our Civil Surgeon at Meridki, and we called him ‘Dormouse,’ because he was a round little, sleepy little man. He was a good Doctor and never quarrelled with any one, not even with our Deputy Commissioner who had the manners of a bargee and the tact of a horse. He married a girl as round and as sleepy-looking as himself. She was a Miss Hillardyce, daughter of ‘Squash’ Hillardyce of the Berars, who married his Chiefs daughter by mistake. But that is another story.

A honeymoon in India is seldom more than a week long; but there is nothing to hinder a couple from extending it over two or three years. India is a delightful country for married folk who are wrapped up in one another. They can live absolutely alone and without interruption – just as the Dormice did. Those two little people retired from the world after their marriage, and were very happy. They were forced, of course, to give occasional dinners, but they made no friends thereby, and the Station went its own way and forgot them; only saying, occasionally, that Dormouse was the best of good fellows though dull. A Civil Surgeon who never quarrels is a rarity, appreciated as such.

Few people can afford to play Robinson Crusoe anywhere – least of all in India, where we are few in the land and very much dependent on each other’s kind offices. Dumoise was wrong in shutting himself from the world for a year, and he discovered his mistake when an epidemic of typhoid broke out in the Station in the heart of the cold weather, and his wife went down. He was a shy little man, and five days were wasted before he realised that Mrs Dumoise was burning with something worse than simple fever, and three days more passed before he ventured to call on Mrs Shute, the Engineer’s wife, and timidly speak abouthis trouble. Nearly every household in India knows that Doctors are very helpless in typhoid. The battle must be fought out between Death and the Nurses minute by minute and degree by degree. Mrs Shute almost boxed Dumoise’s ears for what she called his ‘criminal delay,’ and went off at once to look after the poor girl. We had seven cases of typhoid in the Station that winter and, as the average of death is about one in every five cases, we felt certain that we should have to lose somebody. But all did their best. The women sat up nursing the women, and the men turned to and tended the bachelors who were down, and we wrestled with those typhoid cases for fifty-six days, and brought them through the Valley of the Shadow in triumph. But, just when we thought all was over, and were going to give a dance to celebrate the victory, little Mrs Dumoise got a relapse and died in a week, and the Station went to the funeral. Dumoise broke down utterly at the brink of the grave, and had to be taken away.

After the death Dumoise crept into his own house and refused to be comforted. He did his duties perfectly, but we all felt that he should go on leave, and the other men of his own Service told him so. Dumoise was very thankful for the suggestion – he was thankful for anything in those days – and went to Chini on a walking-tour. Chini is some twenty marches from Simla, in the heart of the Hills, and the scenery is good if you are in trouble. You pass through big, still deodar forests, and under big, still cliffs, and over big, still grass-downs swelling like a woman’s breasts; and the wind across thegrass, and the rain among the deodars say – ‘Hush – hush – hush.’ So little Dumoise was packed off to Chini, to wear down his grief with a full-plate camera and a rifle. He took also a useless bearer, because the man had been his wife’s favourite servant. He was idle and a thief, but Dumoise trusted everything to him.

On his way back from Chini, Dumoise turned aside to Bagi, through the Forest Reserve which is on the spur of Mount Huttoo. Some men who have travelled more than a little say that the march from Kotegarh to Bagi is one of the finest in creation. It runs through dark wet forest, and ends suddenly in bleak, nipped hillside and black rocks. Bagi dâk-bungalow is open to all the winds and is bitterly cold. Few people go to Bagi. Perhaps that was the reason why Dumoise went there. He halted at seven in the evening, and his bearer went down the hillside to the village to engage coolies for the next day’s march. The sun had set, and the night-winds were beginning to croon among the rocks. Dumoise leaned on the railing of the verandah, waiting for his bearer to return. The man came back almost immediately after he had disappeared, and at such a rate that Dumoise fancied he must have crossed a bear. He was running as hard as he could up the face of the hill.

But there was no bear to account for his terror. He raced to the verandah and fell down, the blood spurting from his nose and his face iron-grey. Then he gurgled –‘I have seen the
Memsahib!
I have seen the
Memsahib!
’

‘Where?’ said Dumoise.

‘Down there, walking on the road to the village. She was in a blue dress, and she lifted the veil of her bonnet and said – “Ram Dass, give my
salaams
to the
Sahib
,and tell him that I shall meet him next month at Nuddea.” Then I ran away, because I was afraid.’

What Dumoise said or did I do not know. Ram Dass declares that he said nothing, but walked up and down the verandah all the cold night, waiting for the
Memsahib
to come up the hill, and stretching out his arms into the dark like a madman. But no
Memsahib
came, and, next day, he went on to Simla cross-questioning the bearer every hour.

Ram Dass could only say that he had met Mrs Dumoise, and that she had lifted up her veil and given him the message which he had faithfully repeated to Dumoise. To this statement Ram Dass adhered. He did not know where Nuddea was, had no friends at Nuddea, and would most certainly never go to Nuddea, even though his pay were doubled.

Nuddea is in Bengal, and has nothing whatever to do with a Doctor serving in the Punjab. It must be more than twelve hundred miles south of Meridki.

Dumoise went through Simla without halting, and returned to Meridki, there to take over charge from the man who had been officiating for him during his tour. There were some Dispensary accounts to be explained, and some recent orders of the Surgeon-General to be noted, and, altogether, the taking-over was a full day’s work. In the evening Dumoise told his
locum tenens
,who was an old friend of his bachelor days, what had happened at Bagi; and the man said that Ram Dass might as well have chosen Tuticorin while he was about it.

At that moment a telegraph-peon came in with a telegram from Simla, ordering Dumoise not to take over charge at Meridki, but to go at once to Nuddea on special duty. There was a nasty outbreak of cholera at Nuddea, and the Bengal Government being short-handed, as usual, had borrowed a Surgeon from the Punjab.

Dumoise threw the telegram across the table and said – ‘Well?’

The other Doctor said nothing. It was all that he could say.

Then he remembered that Dumoise had passed through Simla on his way from Bagi; and thus might, possibly have heard first news of the impending transfer.

He tried to put the question and the implied suspicion into words, but Dumoise stopped him with – ‘If I had desired
that
,I should never have come back from Chini. I was shooting there. I wish to live, for I have things to do … but I shall not be sorry.’

The other man bowed his head, and helped, in the twilight to pack up Dumoise’s just opened trunks. Ram Dass entered with the lamps.

‘Where is the
Sahib
going?’ he asked.

‘To Nuddea,’ said Dumoise softly.

Ram Dass clawed Dumoise’s knees and boots and begged him not to go. Ram Dass wept and howled till he was turned out of the room. Then he wrapped up all his belongings and came back to ask for a character. He was not going to Nuddea to see his
Sahib
dieand, perhaps, to die himself.

So Dumoise gave the man his wages and went down to Nuddea alone, the other Doctor bidding him good-bye as one under sentence of death.

Eleven days later he had joined his
Memsahib
;and the Bengal Government had to borrow a fresh Doctor to cope with that epidemic at Nuddea. The first importation lay dead in Chooadanga dâk-Bungalow.

THE RECURRING SMASH

In himself, Penhelder was not striking. His worst enemies did not call him ugly, and his best friends handsome. But friends and enemies alike were interested in his Fate, which was unique. When he was three years old, he interrupted some moving operations with a pair of mottled chubby legs and bled, as his nurse said at the time ‘all round the hay-field in quarts.’ In his sixth year, he started on a voyage across the horse-pond: his galley being a crank hurdle, which, in mid-ocean, turned turtle, and but for the pig-killer, who happened to pass that way, he would certainly have been drowned. At nine years of age, he sat upon a wall like Humpty-Dumpty – a high wall meant to protect an apple-orchard – and like Humpty-Dumpty, fell, fracturing his collar bone. About this time, his family noticed the peculiarity of his Fate and commented upon it. Three years later, being at a Public School, Penhelder dropped from the trapeze in the gymnasium and broke one of the small bones in his leg. It was then discovered that every one of his previous accidents had occurred between the months of May and June. Penhelder was apprised of this and bidden to behave more seemly in the future. His conduct was without flaw or reproach till his fifteenth year, when the school dormitories caught fire and Penhelder, escaping in his nightgown, was severely burnt on the back and legs. He enjoyed the honour of being the only boy who had been touched by the flames. This saddened him and his family, but more especially his old nurse, who maintained that ‘her boy,’ as she lovingly called Penhelder, was ‘cast’ – a provincialism for bewitched. At eighteen he found himself in London. What he did then does not come into this story.

The end of a thirsty summer night, and indulgence in waters, to Penhelder, of entirely unknown strength, was, for some hours, a felon’s cell and ‘forty shillings or a month.’With the guilelessness of youth Penhelder had given his real name, and had the satisfaction of seeing it not only in the police reports of
The Times
but – and here the type was used much larger than his modesty demanded – in the market town weekly newspaper as well. It may be mentioned that Penhelder was the only one caught of a riotous gang. At one and twenty, Penhelder set foot in India, a solemn and serious boy, whose mind had been darkened by the shadow of his Fate. He was overheard by a man who afterwards came to know him intimately, muttering, as he set foot on the Apollo Bunder in the blazing May sunshine: ‘I hope it won’t be anything
very
serious’. It was not, but the Doctor said that it might have been
most
serious; and that young men who paraded Bombay in small hats deserved instant death instead of severe sunstroke merely.

Penhelder crept up-country to his station, and, in a weak moment told the story of his Fate even more circumstantially than has been set forth here. From that day he became an object of unholy interest to the gilded youth of the Army within a two hundred mile radius. They looked, like the islanders of Melita, that he should ‘fall down dead suddenly’, but their watch was in vain.

Late June of his twenty-fourth year saw Penhelder almost the sole occupant of a deserted station. But there were witnesses to attest the strange tale that follows. At dinner at the Club, one of the glass shades of a hanging lamp cracked with the heat, and a huge fragment fell hatchetwise across Penhelder’s left wrist, cutting it to the bone. ‘I told you so’, said Penhelder drearily, as the blood spurted over the tablecloth. The rest of the Company held their peace, for they remembered that for the past month Penhelder had been prophesying disaster of some sort to himself. The wound was a serious one and nearly ended in blood poisoning.

Three years later, Penhelder took warning in time, and as May drew near, retired into his own house and lived then thelife of an eremite. ‘If anything happens now’, said he, ‘it will be the roof falling in, and I don’t mind that. It will put me out of my misery’. But Penhelder had miscalculated. In summer it is necessary to drive to office. Penhelder hired an enormous ticca-gharri of dutch gallest beam, and unquestioned solidity, and yoked thereto the soberest horses that he could find. The turnout something resembled an ambulance in search of wounded, but Penhelder was deaf to the voice of sarcasm. What he demanded was safety. He secured it. It took him half an hour to reach his office, but he secured it. June had nearly ended and, in his delight, he stopped, ere going into his office, to pat the neck of one of the horses. There is a hideous description in
Lorna Doone
of great John Ridd tearing out the muscle of his enemy’s arm as though it had been orange pulp. The horse, indeed, tore out nothing, but he clung like a leech to the inner arm of Penhelder, high up and close to the armpit. A lighted match forced him to open his jaws, but Penhelder had fainted, and it was then months before he mixed with his friends – a moody, melancholy man, perplexed with the foreshadowing of his next visitation. ‘It’s not murder I object to’, said Penhelder, ‘it’s mangling’.

Time, chance and the Government parted me from Penhelder for many years, and he gradually faded out of my mind. But we met at Bombay a few weeks ago. I was introduced to Mrs Penhelder, a large lady. My friend’s face was drawn and haggard. I learnt that he was going Home for his health’s sake. ‘Have you – have you’, I whispered ‘had any return of – broken your run of bad luck that is to say?’ Penhelder hesitated for a moment. Then he drew me aside, ‘I’ve broken it’, he said, ‘But I married
her
on my thirtieth birthday. May the twenty-second it was’. And since that date I have in vain been trying to discover what on earth my friend Penhelder meant.