The Phantom Rickshaw Read online

  Some of the dak-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in their compound—witnesses to the ‘changes and chances of this mortal life’ in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the northwest. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib’s service not a khansamah in the province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes and you repent of your irritation.

  In these dak-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to live in dak-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I lived in ‘converted’ ones—old houses officiating as dak-bungalows—where nothing was in its proper place and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken pane. I lived in dak-bungalows where the last entry in the visitors’ book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-kid’s head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober travelling missionaries and deserters flying from British regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dak-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dak-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.

  In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr Besant’s method of handling them, as shown in The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories. I am now in the opposition.

  We will call the bungalow Katmal dak-bungalow. But that was the smallest part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dak-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dak-bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy and the windows were nearly black with grime. It stood on a by-path largely used by native sub-deputy assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forest; but real Sahibs were rare. The khansamah who was nearly bent double with old age, said so.

  When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy-palms outside. The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.

  The day shut in and the khansamah went to get me food. He did not go through the pretense of calling it ‘khana’—man’s victuals. He said ‘ratub’, and that means, among other things, ‘grub’—dog’s rations. There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had forgotten the other word, I suppose.

  While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down, after exploring the dak-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition-walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps—only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.

  For bleak, unadulterated misery that dak-bungalow was the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy-palms rattled and roared. Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing and a hyena stood afar off and mocked them. A hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead—the worst sort of Dead. Then came the ratub—a curious meal, half native and half English in composition—with the old khansamah babbling behind my chair about dead and gone English people and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains.

  It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.

  Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense.

  Just when the reasons were drowsy with bloodsucking I heard the regular—‘Let-us-take-and-heave-him-over’ grunt of doolie-bearers in the compound. First one doolie came in, then a second and then a third. I heard the doolie dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of my door shook. ‘That’s some one trying to come in,’ I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was the gusty wind. The shutter of the room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner door opened. ‘That’s some sub-deputy assistant,’ I said, ‘and he has brought his friends with him. Now we’ll talk and spit and smoke for an hour.’

  But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his luggage into the next room. The door shut, and I thanked Providence that I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. There was never a sign of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard, in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly mistake—the whir of a billiard ball down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break. No other sound is like it. A minute afterwards there was another whir, and I got into bed. I was not frightened—indeed I was not. I was very curious to know what had become of the doolies. I jumped into bed for that reason.

  Next minute I heard the double click of a cannon and my hair sat up. It is a mistake to say that hair stands up. The skin of the head tightens and you can feel a faint, prickly bristling all over the scalp. That is the hair sitting up.

  There was a whir and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one thing—a billiard ball. I argued the matter out at great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs—all the furniture of the room next to mine—could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards. After another cannon, a three-cushion one to judge by the whir, I argued no more. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have escaped from that dak-bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the game grew clearer. There was a whir on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room. And the next room was not big enough to hold a billiard-table!

  Between the pauses of the wind I heard the game go forward—stroke after stroke. I tried to believe that I could not hear voices; but that attempt was a failure.

  Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see—fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat—fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? This is a fine Fear—a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The very improbability of billiards in a
dak-bungalow proved the reality of the thing. No man—drunk or sober—could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a ‘screw-cannon’.

  A severe course of dak-bungalows has this disadvantage— it breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed dak-bungalow-haunter: ‘There is a corpse in the next room, and there’s a mad girl in the next one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,’ the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque or horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.

  This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts. A rational person fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would, be above such superfluities. I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.

  After a long long while, the game stopped, and the door banged. I slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept awake. Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.

  When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely and inquired for the means of departure.

  ‘By the way, khansamah,’ I said, ‘what were those three doolies doing in my compound in the night?’

  ‘There were no doolies,’ said the khansamah.

  I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below.

  ‘Has this place always been a dak-bungalow?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said the khansamah. ‘Ten or twenty years ago I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard-room.’

  ‘A how much?’

  ‘A billiard-room for the Sahibs who built the Railway. I was khansamah then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to come across with brandy-shrab. These three rooms were all one, and they held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening. But the Sahibs are all dead now, and the railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul.’

  ‘Do you remember anything about the Sahibs?’

  ‘It is long ago, but I remember that one Sahib, a fat man and always angry, was playing here one night, and he said to me: ‘Mangal Khan, brandy pani do,’ and I filled the glass, and he bent over the table to strike, and his head fell lower and lower till it hit the table, and his spectacles came off and when we—the Sahibs and I myself—ran to lift him he was dead. I helped to carry him out. Aha, he was a strong Sahib! But he is dead and I, old Mangal Khan, am still living, by your favour.’ That was more than enough! I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyse the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop-land between myself and that dak-bungalow before night-fall. The Society might send their regular agent to investigate later on.

  I went into my own room and prepared to pack after noting down the facts of the case. As I smoked I heard the game begin again,—with a miss in balk this time, for the whir was a short one.

  The door was open and I could see into the room. Click— click! That was a cannon. I entered the room without fear, for there was sunlight within and a fresh breeze without. The unseen game was going on at a tremendous rate. And well it might, when a restless little rat was running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling-cloth and a piece of loose window-sash was making fifty breaks off the window-bolt as it shook in the breeze!

  Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard balls! Impossible to mistake the whir of a ball over the slate! But I was to be excused. Even when I shut my enlightened eyes the sound was marvellously like that of a fast game.

  Entered angrily the faithful partner of my sorrows, Kadir Baksh.

  ‘This bungalow is very bad and low caste! No wonder the Presence was disturbed and is speckled. Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honour has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and, the work of a dirty man.’ Kadir Baksh did not say that he had taken from each gang two annas for rent in advance, and then, beyond my earshot, had beaten them with the big green umbrella whose use I could never before divine. But Kadir Baksh had no notion of morality.

  There was an interview with the khansamah, but as he promptly lost his head, wrath gave place to pity and pity led to a long conversation, in the course of which he put the fat Engineer-Sahib’s tragic death in three separate stations—two of them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dog-cart.

  If I had encouraged him the khansamah would have wandered all through Bengal with his corpse.

  I did not go away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the night, while the wind and the rat and the sash and the window-bolt played a dingdong ‘hundred and fifty up’. Then the wind ran out and the billiards stopped, and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine, hall-marked ghost story.

  Had I only stopped at the proper time, I could have made anything out of it.

  That was the bitterest thought of all!

  At the End of the Passage

  FOUR MEN, THEORETICALLY entitled to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked for them—101o of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay the gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky, sun nor horizon—nothing but a brown-purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.

  From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground without wind or warning, flung themselves table-clothwise among the tops of the parched trees and came down again. Then a whirling dust-devil would scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break and fall outward, though there was nothing to check its flight save a long low line of piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of huts made of mud, condemned rails and canvas and the one squat four-roomed bungalow that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge of a section of the Gandhari state line then under construction.

  The four men, stripped to the thinnest of sleeping-suits, played whist crossly, with wranglings as to leads and returns. It was not the best kind of whist, but they had taken some trouble to arrive at it. Mottram, of the Indian Survey, had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from his lonely post in the desert since the previous night; Lowndes, of the Civil Service, on special duty in the political department, had come as far to escape for an instant the miserable intrigues of an impoverished native state whose king alternately fawned and blustered for more money from the pitiful revenues contributed by hard-wrung peasants and despairing camel-breeders; Spurstow, the doctor of the line, had left a cholera-stricken camp of coolies to look after itself for forty-eight hours while he associated with white men once more. Hummil, the assistant engineer, was the host. He stood fast, and received his friends thus every Sunday if they could come in. When one of them failed to appear, he would send a telegram to his last address, in order that he might know whether the defaulter was dead or alive. There be very many places in the East where it is not good or kind to let your acquaintances drop out of sight even for one short week.

  The players were not conscious of any special regard for each other. They squabbled whenever they met; but they ardently
desired to meet, as men without water desire to drink.

  They were lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness. They were all under thirty years of age—which is too soon for any man to possess that knowledge.

  ‘Pilsener,’ said Spurstow, after the second rubber, mopping his forehead.

  ‘Beer’s out, I’m sorry to say, and there’s hardly enough soda-water for tonight,’ said Hummil.

  ‘What filthy bad management!’ snarled Spurstow.

  ‘Can’t help it. I’ve written and wired; but the trains don’t come through regularly yet. Last week the ice ran out—as Lowndes knows.’

  ‘Glad I didn’t come. I could ha’ sent you some if I had known, though. Phew! it’s too hot to go on playing bumblepuppy.’

  This was a savage growl at Lowndes, who only laughed. He was a hardened offender.

  Mottram rose from the table and looked out of a chink in the shutters.

  ‘What a sweet day!’ said he.

  The company yawned unanimously and betook themselves to an aimless investigation of all Hummil’s possessions—guns, tattered novels, saddlery, spurs and the like. They had fingered them a score of times before, but there was really nothing else to do.

  ‘Got anything fresh?’ said Lowndes.

  ‘Last week’s Gazette of India, and a cutting from a home paper. My father sent it out. It’s rather amusing.’

  ‘One of those vestrymen that call ’emselves MPs again, is it?’ said Spurstow, who read his newspapers when he could get them.

  ‘Yes. Listen to this. It’s to your address, Lowndes. The man was making a speech to his constituents, and he piled it on. Here’s a sample: ‘And I assert unhesitatingly that the Civil Service in India is the preserve—the pet preserve—of the aristocracy of England. What does the democracy—what do the masses—get from that country, which we have step by step fraudulently annexed? I answer, nothing whatever. It is farmed, with a single eye to their own interests, by the scions of the aristocracy. They take good care to maintain their lavish scale of incomes, to avoid or stifle any inquiries into the nature and conduct of their administration, while they themselves force the unhappy peasant to pay with the sweat of his brow for all the luxuries in which they are lapped.’ Hummil waved the cutting above his head. ‘’Ear! ’ear!’ said his audience.