IN THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO

(Rudyard Kipling: Collected Sketches.)

A stone’s throw out on either hand

From that well-ordered road we tread,

And all the world is wild and strange;

Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite

Shall bear us company to-night,

Wherein the Powers of Darkness range,

--From the Dusk to the Dawn.

The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four

carved windows of old, brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize

it by five red handprints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the

whitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass, the bunnia, and a

man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting, live in the lower

story with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The

two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun and a little

black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman’s house and

given to Janoo by a soldier. To-day, only Janoo lives in the upper

rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in

the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his

son, who sells curiosities near the Edwards’ Gate, and then he slept

under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his

cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of

head messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will

make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy

will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth

worth showing, and he has outlived his wits--outlived nearly everything

except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are

Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or

less honorable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical

student from the Northwest and has settled down to a most respectable

life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortionate and an

adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living

by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you know as much

as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of Suddhoo.

Then there is Me, of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at

the end to explain things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the

cleverest of them all--Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie--except Janoo.

She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo’s son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo

was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo’s anxiety and made

capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in

Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son’s health. And here the

story begins.

Suddhoo’s cousin’s son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to

see me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I

should be conferring an everlasting honor on the House of Suddhoo if I

went to him. I went; but I think, seeing how well-off Suddhoo was then,

that he might have sent something better than an ekka, which jolted

fearfully, to haul out a future Lieutenant-Governor to the City on a

muggy April evening. The ekka did not run quickly. It was full dark

when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh’s Tomb near the

main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo and he said that, by reason

of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a

Lieutenant-Governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about

the weather, and the state of my health, for fifteen minutes, in the

Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.

Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him

that there was an order of the Sirkar against magic, because it was

feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn’t

know anything about the state of the law; but I fancied that something

interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being

discouraged by the Government, it was highly commended. The greatest

officials of the State practised it themselves. (If the Financial

Statement isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.) Then, to encourage him

further, I said that, if there was any jadoo afoot, I had not the least

objection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that

it was clean jadoo--white magic, as distinguished from the unclean

jadoo which kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted

that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me,

in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorcerer

of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick

son in Peshawar more quickly than the lightning could fly, and that

this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had

told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could

be removed by clean jadoo; and, of course, heavy payment. I began to

see exactly how the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood

a little jadoo in the Western line, and would go to his house to see

that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together;

and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had paid the seal-cutter between

one hundred and two hundred rupees already; and the jadoo of that night

would cost two hundred more, which was cheap, he said, considering the

greatness of his son’s danger; but I do not think he meant it.

The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived.

I could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter’s shop-front,

as if some one were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over,

and while we groped our way up stairs told me that the jadoo had

begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the

jadoo-work was coming off in their rooms, because there was more space

there. Janoo is a lady of a freethinking turn of mind. She whispered

that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that

the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was

nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the

room in the half light, repeating his son’s name over and over again,

and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in

the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the

recess of the bow-windows. The boards were up, and the rooms were only

lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I

stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the

staircase. That was the seal-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the

terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo

to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for

the red glow from the two huqas that belonged to Janoo and Azizun.

The seal-cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on

the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on

to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of something

metallic, and then shot up a pale, blue-green flame near the ground.

The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner

of the room with the terrier between her knees; Janoo, with her hands

clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down,

quivering--and the seal-cutter?

I hope I may never see another man like that seal-cutter. He was

stripped to the waist, with a wreath of white jasmine as thick as

my wrist around his forehead, a salmon colored loin-cloth round his

middle, and a steel bangle on each ankle. This was not awe-inspiring.

It was the face of the man that turned me cold. It was blue-gray in the

first place. In the second, the eyes were rolled back till you could

only see the whites of them; and, in the third, the face was the face

of a demon--a ghoul--anything you please except of the sleek, oily old

ruffian who sat in the day time over his turning lathe downstairs. He

was lying on his stomach with his arms turned and crossed behind him,

as if he had been thrown down pinioned. His head and neck were the only

parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the

body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the center

of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin,

with a pale blue-green light floating in the center like a night light.

Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How

he did it I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine

and fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion. The head

seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurl

of the laboring back muscles. Janoo from the bed was breathing seventy

to the minute; Azizun held her hands before her eyes; and old Suddhoo,

fingering at the dirt that had got into his white beard, was crying to

himself. The horror of it was that the creeping, crawly thing made no

sound--only crawled; and, remember, this lasted for ten minutes, while

the terrier whined, and Azizun shuddered, and Janoo gasped, and Suddhoo

cried.

I felt the hair lift at the back of my head, and my heart thump like a

thermantidote paddle. Luckily, the seal-cutter betrayed himself by his

most impressive trick and made me calm again. After he had finished

that unspeakable crawl, he stretched his head away from the floor as

high as he could, and sent out a jet of fire from his nostrils. Now

I know how fire-spouting is done--I can do it myself--so I felt at

ease. The business was a fraud. If he had only kept to that crawl

without trying to raise the effect, goodness knows what I might not

have thought. Both the girls shrieked at the jet of fire and the head

dropped, chin down on the floor, with a thud; the whole body lying

then like a corpse with its arms trussed. There was a pause of five

full minutes after this, and the blue-green flame died down. Janoo

stooped to settle one of her anklets, while Azizun turned her face

to the wall and took the terrier in her arms. Suddhoo put out an arm

mechanically to Janoo’s huqa, and she slid it across the floor with her

foot. Directly above the body and on the wall, were a couple of flaming

portraits, in stamped paper frames, of the Queen and the Prince of

Wales. They looked down on the performance, and, to my thinking, seemed

to heighten the grotesqueness of it all.

Just when the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over

and rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay

stomach up. There was a faint “plop” from the basin--exactly like the

noise a fish makes when it takes a fly--and the green light in the

center revived.

I looked at the basin, and saw, bobbing in the water the dried,

shrivelled, black head of a native baby--open eyes, open mouth and

shaved scalp. It was worse, being so very sudden, than the crawling

exhibition. We had no time to say anything before it began to speak.

Read Poe’s account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying

man, and you will realize less than one-half the horror of that head’s

voice.

There was an interval of a second or two between each word, and a sort

of “ring, ring, ring,” in the note of the voice like the timbre of a

bell. It pealed slowly, as if talking to itself, for several minutes

before I got rid of my cold sweat. Then the blessed solution struck me.

I looked at the body lying near the doorway, and saw, just where the

hollow of the throat joins on the shoulders, a muscle that had nothing

to do with any man’s regular breathing, twitching away steadily. The

whole thing was a careful reproduction of the Egyptian teraphim that

one reads about sometimes; and the voice was as clever and as appalling

a piece of ventriloquism as one could wish to hear. All this time the

head was “lip-lip-lapping” against the side of the basin, and speaking.

It told Suddhoo, on his face again whining, of his son’s illness, and

of the state of the illness up to the evening of that very night. I

always shall respect the seal-cutter for keeping so faithfully to the

time of the Peshawar telegrams. It went on to say that skilled doctors

were night and day watching over the man’s life, and that he would

eventually recover if the fee to the potent sorcerer, whose servant was

the head in the basin, was doubled.

Here the mistake from the artistic point of view came in. To ask for

twice your stipulated fee in a voice that Lazarus might have used

when he rose from the dead, is absurd. Janoo, who is really a woman

of masculine intellect, saw this as quickly as I did. I heard her say

“Asli nahin! Fareib!” scornfully under her breath; and just as she said

so, the light in the basin died out, the head stopped talking, and we

heard the room door creak on its hinges. Then Janoo struck a match,

lit the lamp, and we saw that head, basin and seal-cutter were gone.

Suddhoo was wringing his hands and explaining to anyone who cared to

listen, that if his chances of eternal salvation depended on it, he

could not raise another 200 rupees. Azizun was nearly in hysterics in

the corner; while Janoo sat down on one of the beds to discuss the

probabilities of the whole thing being a bunao, or “make-up.”

I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter’s way of jadoo; but

her argument was much more simple: “The magic that is always demanding

gifts is no true magic,” said she. “My mother told me that the only

potent love-spells are those which are told you for love. This

seal-cutter man is a liar and a devil. I dare not tell, do anything or

get anything done, because I am in debt to Bhagwan Dass, the bunnia,

for two gold rings and a heavy anklet. I must get my food from his

shop. The seal-cutter is the friend of Bhagwan Dass, and he would

poison my food. A fool’s jadoo has been going on for ten days, and

has cost Suddhoo many rupees each night. The seal-cutter used black

hens and lemons and mantras before. He never showed us anything like

this till to-night. Azizun is a fool, and will be a purdahnashin soon.

Suddhoo has lost his strength and his wits. See now! I had hoped to get

from Suddhoo many rupees while he lived, and many more after his death;

and behold, he is spending everything on that offspring of a devil and

a she-ass, the seal-cutter!”

Here I said: “But what induced Suddhoo to drag me into the business? Of

course I can speak to the seal-cutter, and he shall refund. The whole

thing is child’s talk--shameful--senseless.”

“Suddhoo is an old child,” said Janoo. “He has lived on the roofs these

seventy years and is as senseless as a milch-goat. He brought you here

to assure himself that he was not breaking any law of Sirkar, whose

salt he ate many years ago. He worships the dust off the feet of the

seal-cutter, and that cow-devourer has forbidden him to go and see his

son. What does Suddhoo know of your laws or the lightning-post? I have

to watch his money going day by day to that lying beast below.”

Janoo stamped her foot and nearly cried with vexation; while Suddhoo

was whimpering under a blanket, and Azizun was trying to guide the

pipe-stem to his foolish old mouth.

* * * * *

Now the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the

charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under

false pretenses, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal

Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform

the police. What witnesses would support my statement? Janoo refuses

flatly, and Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly--lost

in this big India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own

hands, and speak to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that not only

would Suddhoo disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning

of Janoo, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the bunnia. Suddhoo

is an old dotard; and whenever we meet mumbles my idiotic joke that the

Sirkar rather patronizes the Black Art than otherwise. His son is well

now; but Suddhoo is completely under the influence of the seal-cutter,

by whose advice he regulates the affairs of his life. Janoo watches

daily the money that she hoped to weedle out of Suddhoo taken by the

seal-cutter, and becomes daily more furious and sullen.

She will never tell, because she dare not; but I am afraid--unless

something happens to prevent her--that the seal-cutter will die of

cholera--the white arsenic kind--about the middle of May. And thus I

shall have to be privy to a murder in the House of Suddhoo.