Trevelyan Street used to be four blocks long, but now it is only three, and its aft end is blocked by the abutment of an overpass. (Do you find the words Dead End to have an ominous ring?) The large building in the 300 block used to be consecrated to worship by the Mesopotamian Methodist Episcopal Church (South) but has since been deconsecrated and is presently a glue warehouse. The small building contains the only Bhuthanese grocery and deli outside of Asia; its trade is small. And the little (and wooden) building lodges an extremely dark and extremely dirty little studio which sells spells, smells, and shrunken heads. Its trades are even smaller.
The spells are expensive, the smells are exorbitant, and the prices of its shrunken heads—first chop though they be—are simply inordinate.
The studio, however, has a low rent (it has a low ceiling, too), pays no license fee—it is open (when it is open) only between the hours of seven P.M. and seven A.M., during which hours the municipal license department does not function—and lacks not for business enough to keep the proprietor, a native of the Andaman Islands, in the few, the very few things, without which he would find life insupportable: namely curried squid, which he eats—and eats and
eats
—baroque pink pearls, which he collects, and (alone, and during
the left phase of the moon) wears; also live tree-shrews. Some say that they are distantly cognate to the primates and, hence, it is supposed, to Man. Be that as it may. In their tiny ears he whispers directions of the most unspeakable sort, and then turns them loose, with great grim confidence. And an evil laugh.
The facts whereof I speak, I speak with certainty, for they were related to me by my friend Mr. Underhand; and Mr. Underhand has never been known to lie.
At any rate, at least, not to me.
“A good moonless evening to you, Underhand Misterjee,” says the proprietor, at the termination of one lowering, glowering afternoon in Midnovember, “and a bad evening indeed to those who have had the fortune to incur your exceedingly just displeasure.” He scratches a filthy ear-lobe with a filthy finger.
—Midnovember, by the way, is the month which was banished from the Julian Calendar by Julian the Apostate; it has never appeared in the Gregorian Calendar: a good thing, too—
“And a good evening to you, Dr. Bhumbo Singh,” says Mr. Underhand. “As for
them-Ha
Ha!” He folds his thin and lilac-gloved hands over the handle of his stalking-crutch. Even several so-called experts have declared the handle (observed by light far less dim than that in the shop of Bhumbo Singh) to be ivory: they are wrong: it is bone, purely bone … . Or perhaps one would better say, impurely bone … .
“Ha Ha!” echoes (Dr.) Bhumbo Singh. He has in fact no right at all to this distinguished family name, which he has assumed in dishonor of a certain benevolent Sikh horse-coper who in a rash and malignly constellated hour took the notion to adopt him.
Now to business; “A spell, Underhand Sahib?” he next asks, rubbing his chin. His chin bears a dull-blue tattoo which would strike terror to the hearts and loosen the strings of the bowels of the vilest ruffians in Rangoon, Lahore, Peshawar, Pernambuco, and Wei-hattahatta yet unhanged, save, of course, that it is almost always by virtue of dust, the inky goo of curried squid, and a hatred of water akin
to hydrophobia, totally invisible. “A spell, a spell? A nice spell? A severed head?”
“Fie upon your trumpery spells,” Mr. Eevelyn (two
es
) Underhand says easily. “They are fit only for witches, warlocks, and Boy Scouts or Girl. As for your severed heads, shrunken or otherwise: Ho Ho.”
He puts the tip of his right index finger alongside of the right naris of his nose. He winks.
Dr. Bhumbo Singh attempts a leer, but his heart is not in it. “They cost uncommon high nowadays, even wholesale,” he whines. And then he drops commercial mummery and simply waits.
“I have come for a smell, Doctor,” Underhand says, flicking away with the tip of his stalking-crutch a cricket scaped from the supply kept to feed the tree-shrews. Dr. Bh. Singh’s red little eyes gleam like those of a rogue ferret in the rutting season.
Underhand gives his head a brisk, crisp nod, and smacks his pursed lips. “A smell, subtle, slow, pervasive. A vile smell. A puzzling smell. A smell of seemingly ubiquitous provenaunce, and yet a smell which has no spoor. An evil smell. One which will, eventually, and to infinite relief, diminish … diminish … all but vanish … and then, rising like a phoenix from its bed of fragrant ashes, stalk abroad like a pest—worse, far worse than before …
“A smell disgusting beyond disgust …
”
A slight shiver passes through Dr. (he has neither right nor title to this title, but who would dare deny it him? The AMA? The last platform which they could have occupied together even in combat was also occupied by Albertus Magnus.) passes through Dr. Bhumbo S.’s filthy, meagre frame. His tongue protrudes. (It is true that he can, when moved to do so, touch with it the tip of his rather
retrousse
nose; if it is also true that he can—and does—catch flies with it like a toad or chameleon, Mr. Underhand has not found the matter meet communicating to
me.)
His tongue withdraws. “In short, most valued customer, what is now requisite is a smell which will drive men mad.”
“‘Men,’ Dr. Bhumbo Singh?
‘Men?’
I said nothing of men. The
word never issued from my mouth. The concept, in fact, never formed in my mind.” Bhumbo shakes with what may be a malarial spasm, but is probably silent laughter.
“I have just the thing,” he says. “I have the very thing. The price is purely
pro forma,
the price is minimal, the price is 1500 golden gold pieces, of the coinage of Great Golconda. Per ounce.”
Underhand’s brows raise, descend, meet. “‘Of the imprint of Great Golconda’? Why, even the very schoolboys know that Golconda-gold was so exceedingly pure that it might be eaten like jam, which is why so few of its coins now remain. Damme, damme, Dr. Bhumbo Singh, if this is how you treat and charge your most valued customers, it is no wonder that you have so few.” A mass of filth, matted together with cobwebs, slowly floats from the invisible ceiling to the unspeakable floor; is ignored.
The merchant shrugs. “Not even for my own brother, sir, am I willing to prepare the smell for less.” Considering that Bhumbo’s own (and only) brother, Bhimbo, has spent the last seven and one half years laden with chains in the sixth sub-basement of the gaol privily kept by that ugly, obese, and evil old woman, Fatima, Dowager Begum of Oont, without Bhumbo offering so much as two rupees two pice in ransom, this is quite probably the truth. “However, out of my great regard and respect for you personally and my desire to maintain the connexion, I shall not require you to purchase the full ounce. I shall sell it you by the drachm or scruple.”
“Done, Bhumbojee, done!” cries Mr. Underhand. He thumps the stalking-crutch upon the filthy, filthy floor. The tree-shrew utter shrill little yipples of annoyance, and Bhumbo gives them crickets: they subside, aside from making nonverbal, crunching noises.
Nearby on the overpass a truck or lorry rumbles past; in its wake the frail building trembles, causing at least one of the shrunken heads to roll from side to side and grind its teeth. No one pays it mind. “Be pleased to return hither, then, Underhand Effendi, on (or, it may be, a trifle after) the Gules of December,” Bhumbo Singh says. Then grows just a trifle uncertain. “‘December,’ the giaours call the next half-past-a-month ‘December,’ do they not?”
Eevelyn Underhand (two
es
) rises to go. “They do indeed. They have a high festival therein.”
“They do, they do?” cries Bhumbo Singh. “I had not known. —What a thing it is to be wise!” He accompanies his customer to the dirty, dirty door with many bows, obeisances, and genuflections. Customer, having perfunctorily placed his foot once on Bhumbo’s nasty neck, is long gone by the time the last of these is finished.
Gone, long gone, and the distant echo of the penny-whistle (on which he is wont to play the grace-notes to the Lament For Nana Sahib as he walks his spidery way through such dank ways and dark) long gone as well … .
In the next sundry weeks, either Bhumbo Singh or his very simulacrum is seen in a multitude of exceedingly diverse places. Abattoirs know him for brief moments; wool-pulleries and tanneries as well. He is seen to cast handsful of the Semi-silent Sands of the Hazramawut (or Courts of Death) at the window-panes of Abdulahi al-Ambergrisi (who sells asafoetida as well): and the Abdulahi (an Yezid of the Yezidi-folk) to open, blench, withdraw, thrust out by means of a very long-handled net an ampula of what-it-may-be. The Bhumbo—and if it be not he, who be it?—is observed out of the corners of eyes to scramble under the wharf at the Old Fish Market (condemned, since, by the Board of Health). He visits, also, the hovels of one or two and never more than three foreign folk who formerly fared at sea in tropic clime and who live now in tumbled sheds on the farther sides of disused dumps and show their ravaged faces only to the faces of the ravaged moons.
And on the nights when the moon is dark, he scrambles through ointment factories, in search of flies.
Now and then he whispers, and, did one dare come close and nigh, one would hear him calculate in somewise as this: “Such-andsuch a number of golden gold-pieces! with some I shall buy me more baroque pink pearls and with some I shall buy me more curried squid and some I shall lay away to gloat upon and others—nay! one lone other!—shall I give to Iggulden the Goldbeater to beat me gold-leaf
so soft and wide and thin: half of this I shall lay for a strangle-mask upon the face of a certain real-estate ‘developer’ and tother moiety shall She-Who-Makes-Sweetmeats roll round hot comfits and pasties and pastries for me and when this has melted like yellow butter I shall eat of them nor shall I invite even one other to join me and afterwards I shall lick my twelve fingers till they be somewhat clean … .”
Then he chuckles … a sound like the bubbling of thick hot grease in the foetid try-pots of a cannibal feast.
Meanwhile, and what of Mr. Underhand?
Mr. Underhand meanwhile makes visits, too: but of a more sociable nature: Mr. Underhand pays
calls
.
“Oh. Undy. It’s
you,
” says a woman through the chink in the well-chained door. “Whadda
you
want?”
“Gertrude, I have brought you, this being the first of the month, the sum mulcted of me by the terms of our bill of divorcement,” says he. As always.
He passes money through the crack or slit between doorjamb and door. Rapidly she riffles through it; asks, “Is this all I’m gonna get?” As always.
“No,” sighs he, “I fear me not. It is, however, all that you are going to get in this or any other one month of the year; it being the extortionate amount wrested from me by compound, I do not say ‘collusion,’ between your attorneys and the judge upon the bench. Gertrude: good night.”
He turns and departs. She makes a sound between her palate and her sinuses which experience has instructed she intends for scorn: then: cluntch-cluntch … thuckle-thuckle … the night-bolts. Cloonk. The door.
Mr. Underhand, an hour later, bathed and bay-rum’d and clothed in his best-of-best. Spats upon his glittering shoes. Hat and gloves and cane in one hand. Flowers in the other.
“Eevelyn,” she says, hand to her gleaming, glittering throat. “What a lovely surprise. What quite lovely flowers. Oh, how nice.”
“May I come in. My dear.”
“Why of course. Need you ask. Now I shan’t be lonely. For a while. Eevelyn.” They kiss.
A wide glance he swiftly casts round. Then asks, “Do I interrupt your dinner?”
She
looks about the apartment. Her expression is one of mild surprise. “‘Dinner’? Oh. That. Just a simple bowl of lobster salad on a heart of chilled iceberg lettuce. Chervil. Cress. A few spoons of caviare. Sweet butter, just a dab. A hard-cooked egg, cut fine.
Kümmelbrot.
And the smallest bottle of Brut. All far too much. But you know how Anna spoils one. You will join me.”
He looks round, again. Crystal. Tapestry. Petit-point. Watteau. Chippendale. Asks: “You are not expecting—?”
“Oh, no. No. Not now. Shall we have some music. We shall have some music.”
They do.
They dance.
They dine.
They drink.
They talk.
They—
They do not.
“Heavens, the time. You must go now Eevelyn.”
“Then you are expecting—?”
How her fingers glitter as she raises them to indicate what words alone cannot. “Eevelyn. I do not. Know. I never. Know.—Go, my sweetest dearest one.”
He picks up hat, gloves, cane. “How is it that I never—”
She places ring-crusted fingers across his livid lips. “Hush. Oh. Hush. The noblest kindest most generous man I know will never grumble. He will be understanding. Patient. A kiss before we part.”
The Andaman Islander peers a moment through gummy eyeslits. Which now widen in recognition. “Underhand Sahib!”
“And whom else did you expect? Fat Fatima, perhaps?”