The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories
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 dâk-bungalow. I listened, and with each listen the
game grew clearer. There was 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 dâk-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 dâk-bungalows has this disadvantage--it
breeds infinite credulity. If a man said to a confirmed
dâk-bungalow-haunter:--“There is a corpse in the next room, and there’s
a mad girl in the next but 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 dâk-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 dâk-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 favor.”
That was more than enough! I had my ghost--a firsthand, authenticated
article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research--I would
paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty
miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dâk-bungalow before
nightfall. 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 marvelously 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 honor 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 has no notions 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 dogcart.
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 ding-dong
“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!
THE STRANGE RIDE OF MORROWBIE JUKES
Alive or dead--there is no other way.
--_Native Proverb._
There is, as the conjurers say, no deception about this tale. Jukes by
accident stumbled upon a village that is well known to exist, though
he is the only Englishman who has been there. A somewhat similar
institution used to flourish on the outskirts of Calcutta, and there is
a story that if you go into the heart of Bikanir, which is in the heart
of the Great Indian Desert, you shall come across not a village but a
town where the Dead who did not die but may not live have established
their headquarters. And, since it is perfectly true that in the same
Desert is a wonderful city where all the rich money lenders retreat
after they have made their fortunes (fortunes so vast that the owners
cannot trust even the strong hand of the Government to protect them,
but take refuge in the waterless sands), and drive sumptuous C-spring
barouches, and buy beautiful girls and decorate their palaces with gold
and ivory and Minton tiles and mother-n’-pearl, I do not see why Jukes’s
tale should not be true. He is a Civil Engineer, with a head for plans
and distances and things of that kind, and he certainly would not take
the trouble to invent imaginary traps. He could earn more by doing his
legitimate work. He never varies the tale in the telling, and grows
very hot and indignant when he thinks of the disrespectful treatment
he received. He wrote this quite straightforwardly at first, but he has
since touched it up in places and introduced Moral Reflections, thus:
In the beginning it all arose from a slight attack of fever. My work
necessitated my being in camp for some months between Pakpattan and
Muharakpur--a desolate sandy stretch of country as every one who has had
the misfortune to go there may know. My coolies were neither more nor
less exasperating than other gangs, and my work demanded sufficient
attention to keep me from moping, had I been inclined to so unmanly a
weakness.
On the 23d December, 1884, I felt a little feverish. There was a full
moon at the time, and, in consequence, every dog near my tent was baying
it. The brutes assembled in twos and threes and drove me frantic. A few
days previously I had shot one loud-mouthed singer and suspended his
carcass _in terrorem_ about fifty yards from my tent-door. But his
friends fell upon, fought for, and ultimately devoured the body; and, as
it seemed to me, sang their hymns of thanksgiving afterward with renewed
energy.
The light-heartedness which accompanies fever acts differently on
different men. My irritation gave way, after a short time, to a fixed
determination to slaughter one huge black and white beast who had been
foremost in song and first in flight throughout the evening. Thanks to
a shaking hand and a giddy head I had already missed him twice with both
barrels of my shot-gun, when it struck me that my best plan would be to
ride him down in the open and finish him off with a hog-spear. This, of
course, was merely the semi-delirious notion of a fever patient; but I
remember that it struck me at the time as being eminently practical and
feasible.
I therefore ordered my groom to saddle Pornic and bring him round
quietly to the rear of my tent. When the pony was ready, I stood at his
head prepared to mount and dash out as soon as the dog should again lift
up his voice. Pornic, by the way, had not been out of his pickets for a
couple of days; the night air was crisp and chilly; and I was armed
with a specially long and sharp pair of persuaders with which I had been
rousing a sluggish cob that afternoon. You will easily believe, then,
that when he was let go he went quickly. In one moment, for the brute
bolted as straight as a die, the tent was left far behind, and we were
flying over the smooth sandy soil at racing speed.
In another we had passed the wretched dog, and I had almost forgotten
why it was that I had taken the horse and hogspear.
The delirium of fever and the excitement of rapid motion through the