Penguin Book Of Indian Ghost Stories (11 page)

‘I am here, young man, from the fire have I come, believe me
or not. I am here to bid you farewell for I will never see you two together again. I send an elephant to show your animal the way. My fire dies down, I must replenish it again with my body. Farewell.’

The fire immediately glowed brighter, the tiger skin was again empty and from the depths of the forest, the breaking of boughs and the trumpeting of an enraged elephant gave us an idea why the jogi had hurried us away.

The
tharoo
turned our elephant and hurried us out. As we neared the edge into lesser darkness, for the first time we perceived that the jogi had not failed us in providing a guide.

Two years after, when taking the short cut between Gyabari and Kurseong, I saw the sadhu sitting near the monolithic monuments of the
Lepchas.
I saluted him and was about to pass on when he stopped me.

‘Your friend?’ he simply asked.

‘Dead,’ I answered.

‘It is as I foretold. I was not to see you two together again. Pass on for you will only be in time to catch your train and without a meal you must do until you reach your abode. We will meet again on Mahakhal’s Hill.’

Truth to tell I was glad to get away, for since our experience in the Darjeeling Tarai, the very thought of the fire-jogi made my flesh creep. I had seen many extraordinary things in my life, but like the chowkidar, said to myself, ‘This thing I have never seen.’

I hurried up the hill and was only in time to catch the train I had left at Gyabari.

Hilton Brown

Whatever may be obscure or questionable about this history, there is nothing either the one or the other in the record of the establishment known once as ‘Sammy’s Hotel’ and thereafter as the ‘Scandal Bay Mahal’. On no material point concerning it is there any divergence of opinion.

To those who travel between England and the Orient, whether on duty or on pleasure, Scandal Bay is a well-known milestone. It is one of those places, not infrequent in the Far East and the Far West, which after remaining unchanged for some two thousand years have changed out of all recognition in as many days. Thirty years ago—twenty years ago almost—Scandal Bay was a strip of delightful beach on the South-West coast of India, a fishing village and Sammy’s Hotel. Today it is a strip of delightful beach, a fishing village and the stark remains of the Scandal Bay Mahal. In the interval the Mahal has come, prospered, perished.

Two questions arise. In the first place—why was it called Scandal Bay, which is not and never can have been a native name? That I can answer but I will not, because there are still in these parts many friends and even relatives of the principal lady involved in the transaction. It is, in any case, quite a separate story. The second question—what caused the change in its destinies?—I can answer readily and will. Eight miles south of Scandal Bay is Kalashi which was, until the beginning of this century a third-rate port visited only by coasting steamers which lay far out and negotiated with the shore through the medium of lighters. Then came Barrow—the great Sir Alexis Barrow—and discovered that there existed at Kalashi the material for a first-class harbour where all the big east-going liners could call. As happens when the dreamer is big
enough and has big enough friends, his dream took shape. The oriental traveller put in at Kalashi after the wearisome landless trek across the Arabian Sea and found it a place of no amenities. As did the rare old-time resident of Kalashi, he chartered a vehicle and drove north to Scandal Bay where he found a divinely-appointed bathing beach and an infernally-appointed hotel masquerading in the mouldering remains of a forty-year-old bungalow. He clamoured for better things and a Bombay syndicate descended on the place, bought up the descendant of the original ‘Sammy’ and scrapped the bungalow. Hence rose the ‘Mahal’ which had a glorious dining-room open on three sides, European sanitation and I know not all what. For some years the oriental traveller swarmed to it.

Now for the proper understanding of this tale it is necessary to go back a little—back to the original Sammy. Sammy was the butler of one Maclagan who was collector of the district of Quilay for twelve years somewhere in the eighties and nineties. His name may have been Ramaswami or Muniswami or Thambuswami or any other Swami and when Maclagan, retiring in the fullness of the years, pensioned him off and set him up in the little bungalow at Scandal Bay which he, Maclagan, in those spacious days had built, the place may have been called Ramaswami’s Hotel or Thambuswami’s. In those days there was no such place as Scandal Bay, for the Scandal had not happened; it was called Kapil, as the fishing village is called still. In those days again Kalashi was a place of no importance and the few Europeans who inhabited it—there may have been a dozen and a half all told—were mainly agents of Madras firms and shipping companies. To such ‘Ramaswami’ and ‘Thambuswami’ were inconvenient mouthfuls; they shortened him presently and by accepted usage to Sammy. And in the nineties and in the early years of this century the thing to do at the weekend was to make up a select party—it had to be select because Sammy’s accommodation was limited in the extreme—and drive down to Scandal Bay (which was then just earning its name) and bathe and play cards and drink such liquor as Sammy provided. Wild nights there have been on that gentle moonlit beach while the villagers of Kapil went about their peaceful ways.

At the dead-centre between century and century, Kalashi was at its very lowest ebb. Trade was bad; one or two agencies had closed down, one or two steamship lines had ceased to call. The Government had transferred the collector’s headquarters from Kalashi to Amay, dealing thereby an almost fatal blow. Barrow still tarried in the womb of time and nobody had yet seen the enormous protective advantages of the great sheering headland the local Europeans called Noah’s Ark. The place was dying—was almost already dead. At this time the European population—leaving out the Missionaries who do not come into this tale—was reduced to a bare half dozen of whom four were old and established friends. These were Brent, the Agent of the Asiatic Bank; Hartle and Macrae, merchants; and the strange man Ranken, whom they called The Doctor, was not an old man—not more than forty and I think he must have established himself rather by force of personality than by any real length of residence. He was an institution in the Kalashi Club when Macrae first saw it; and in these days he used sometimes to be called ‘The Major’, but he discouraged this and it dropped. Whether or not he was ever a major I cannot say; he was indeed a doctor, but if you ask me why a doctor of any qualifications at all should choose to settle in a place of the miserable prospects and pretensions then appertaining to Kalashi, again I cannot say. He had doubtless his own reasons. He was, as I have said, a man of about forty, very tall, in good hard condition in spite of what he drank and a fine horseman. He had unruly reddish hair and an unkempt moustache, a dissolute mouth and nostrils and a wild uncertain eye. There is an enlarged photograph of him, said to be a very good likeness, in the Kalashi Club; it used to be in the billiard room but men took to saying that the uneasy eyes of it spoiled their breaks and it hangs now in an obscure dark corner just outside the bar. If you take it into the light and look at it you will see a man hag-ridden and tormented from within who made things worse for himself by trying too hard to make them better.

Weekend after weekend, by unalterable routine, Brent, Hartle, Macrae and Ranken drove down to Scandal Bay and commandeered Sammy’s till Monday. They left Kalashi after tiffin on
Saturdays and drove down in separate
jatkas
—a most uncomfortable method but part of the game. The
jatkas
raced and the last man in paid for the Saturday night’s dinner. All Sunday they bathed in the sea and played whist, which passed with the later night into poker. They did not go to bed at all on Sunday night—this at least was the theory of the game—but played till dawn, bathed, breakfasted and went back to Kalashi and such work as awaited them. They drank, I imagine, colossally. This they did fifty-two weeks in the year; none of them ever went away even in the depth of the hot weather; none of them had any womenkind—at any rate of his own race; if strangers came to Kalashi they were not encouraged to join the Four. As a four they cornered Sammy’s and—this is important indeed from the point of view of this story—but for them Sammy’s must have closed and perished.

You may call them four very bad men or you may call them four extraordinary asses—it is according to your point of view. You might also call them, as I am inclined to call them, four tragic and pitiable figures. Brent, if left to himself, would have spent his Sundays as a naturalist; he was very interested in birds and wanted to take up Indian butterflies. Hartle, if he had had any money and if circumstances had been different, would have married a nice honest girl and spent his Sundays in a nursery. Neither of them really cared for the weekends at Sammy’s in their hearts. Macrae had reached the appalling stage when a bottle of whisky represented all the remaining entertainment and all the possible adventure the world could still offer him; but even he would have drunk that bottle contentedly in the Kalashi Club and would not have driven out eight miles into a wild region of combing breakers and singing coco-palms to do it. It was Ranken, The Doctor, that wild uneasy spirit, that man without rest, who dominated the other three. It was Ranken who said that, come what might, they must spend their weekends at Sammy’s; and sick or ill, hot weather or cold, monsoon rain or April sunshine, to Sammy’s they went. It was Ranken really who kept Sammy’s going.

To Sammy’s these four went without break for perhaps two years; then, as so often happens in India, established custom disintegrated very suddenly. It began with a terrible Saturday
afternoon, a nightmare of an afternoon. The
jatkas
were racing as usual and it was a very close thing—a neck and neck finish down the last slight gradient into Kapil. Half-way down it the left wheel of Macrae’s
jatka
came off, and the resulting smash would have done credit to a Roman chariot race. The driver flew clear but Macrae and the
jatka
and the pony went over and over and over. The Doctor did what he could, but a fractured skull is a fractured skull and there ended Macrae.

It broke up Hartle, ever too soft of nature for these wild doings. Macrae’s head and face had been unspeakably battered in the smash; and in the stark sunshine of a March afternoon, the blood and the dust and the sweat and the pony with a broken leg waving and kicking horribly must have been a dreadful sight enough. Hartle said he could not stop seeing it; he took to drinking—real drinking—for a couple of days at the end of which time he was picked out of a ditch by a missionary to whom thenceforward he transferred his allegiance. Whether or not Ranken, The Doctor, would have tried to find another two men in place of Hartle and Macrae I do not know: at all events things were settled by the sudden transfer of Brent to a distant agency. A man was sent in his place and a man was sent in Macrae’s place but they were both youngsters and Ranken, for all his unease, for all his desperate need of comrades and subalterns, was no seducer of boys. Besides, the fourth man was still to seek.

‘I like four,’ said Ranken, as he had said it many a time. ‘It’s a good number. If you can’t get a four, then keep to yourself.’ This, in view of what I shall have to tell, seems important. At any rate Ranken put his preaching into practice, for he quitted Kalashi and lived, day in day out, alone by himself at Sammy’s.

The Recording Angel, whose business it is to know all things, must know what sort of life Ranken lived during those weeks at Sammy’s; but there are matters of which it is better for mortals to know little. Whatever he was or had been, he was a man of education and intelligence; how then did he get through these endless days from the hour when the chirupping squirrels—Sammy’s was infested by squirrels—roused him at dawn till the more merciful hour when the unclouded crimson disc of the sun
went down into the sea? He drank, no doubt; but he was a man on whom drink took little effect. His conversation could at times, they said, be brilliant; but he is indeed a brilliant talker who can converse for weeks with himself. The Recording Angel must know also what it was that tormented him; what past dreadfulness, what loss or folly, what commission or omission it was that left him fevered and in perpetual unease. That I do not myself know—nor did anybody—but I will wager that it had full play at him during these weeks. He had craved his company, his ‘four’ and he sat alone at Sammy’s from morning till night—and very possibly from night till morning—looking out upon a most beautiful blue and most absolutely empty sea. What weeks these must have been!

I have said ‘weeks’ repeatedly, and of course it could hardly last for more. However it may be with the dead, the living at least are not called upon to endure hell. Ranken, The Doctor, who was at one time also called The Major, and of whose past no man knows more than that it horrified himself unbearably, took pistol and finished it on the top front veranda of Sammy’s Hotel on the 17th of May, 1901. I don’t know what else he could have done.

Sammy’s—or rather Sammy’s son, for the original Sammy was long since gathered to his fathers—wept bitterly and not altogether from motives of self-interest. Brent, Hartle and Macrae had loved Ranken after their fashion—Sammy too after his.

‘Master always very kind to me,’ wailed Sammy, ‘And always he is coming to our hotel. Always he is bringing friends. Too many peoples coming. Aiyo! Who will come now? Aiyo! How I will live!’

Four months later came Barrow, the great Sir Alexis of harbour fame, and solved Sammy’s problem among others more considerable.

Of the enormous, the incredible metamorphosis that befell Kalashi—the piers, groins, moles, jetties, cranes, railway-lines and swinging bridges that emerged out of nothing at the bidding of Sir Alexis—I have no call to write. I am concerned solely with the metamorphosis that befell Sammy’s Hotel.

The original Sammy was a good, capable, efficient butler; at any rate Maclagan, who was no doubt a man of some discernment, appears to have thought so. His son, on whom the title of Sammy devolved, may even have risen to cook’s matey; but easy days came upon him too young and with fatal results. There being no rent to pay and the staff being furnished almost entirely by the family, quite occasional visitors sufficed to run Sammy’s at a profit; and a single weekend, as conceived by the Four and spent by them, kept all the Sammy’s in comfort and plenty for some time. Those regular weekends, week after week for a couple of years, demoralized Sammy altogether. Moreover, the Four were that beau ideal and delight of the Indian servant—a master who is prepared to establish a procedure and stick to it without deviation for an indefinite period. I imagine the Four’s dinner hardly altered: ‘Clear Soup, Fry Fish, Chops, Malabar Pudding, Ramkin Toast,’ probably served them time after time after time. To drink, whisky and ‘bilewater’. As a result, Sammy had no occasion to learn and never did in fact learn the rudiments of running a hotel. When the Harbour opened and the boom came, he at first expected great things; then found it all rather a nuisance. Strange Europeans appeared, clad and speaking as he had never known; tendering English money; asking for the most impossible and incomprehensible things; grumbling over deficiencies nobody had ever noticed before. It was all work, work, work and never anybody satisfied; and if they paid blindly and one made big money—who wanted all that money? Sammy found himself sighing for the comfortable sufficiency of the old days and for the Four contented with their unvarying routine.