The Opal, and Other Stories Read online

  Then the very next day after this frightful event he had had to use all his persuasive powers to get the representatives of Castan’s Panoptikon out of his house, who wanted to see the little monster, and engage it for their next international exhibition.

  Perhaps it was one of these people who (in a gesture rather designed to diminish his joy in fatherhood even more) had suggested to him that perhaps his wife had deceived him, for shortly after this he had rushed off to the Police – who were not only not disinclined to accept the odd silver item as a Christmas present but had indeed gained their promotions largely through the assiduous pursuit of characters they deemed suspicious.

  So it was barely eight weeks later when the news came out that Councillor Cinibulk had cited a certain Dr. Max Lederer for adultery. The public prosecutor naturally took the case up with the approval of the Police, even though there was no in flagranti evidence.

  The case took a most interesting turn. The prosecution based its argument on the striking resemblance between the little monster, mewling naked in a pink cradle, and Dr. Max Lederer.

  ‘You will observe, my lords, in particular, the lower jaw and the bandy legs, to say nothing of the low forehead (if one may call it that at all). Note, too, the protruding eyes, and the bigoted and brutish expression on the child’s face, and compare the whole with the features of the defendant,’ said counsel. ‘If then you can have any doubt of his guilt...!’

  ‘Nobody will try to deny a certain resemblance,’ broke in the defence, ‘I must, however, particularly emphasise that this resemblance does not derive from any relationship between father and child; it resides rather in a mutual resemblance to a chameleon. If anyone here is guilty, it is the chameleon, and not the defendant! Bandy legs, my lords, pop-eyes, my lords, even a lower jaw such as that...’

  ‘Come to the point, sir!’

  Counsel for the defence gave a deferential bow. ‘In brief my lord, I would like to call upon expert zoological witnesses.’

  After a brief discussion the court dismissed the application with the comment that it had first been decided that expert testimony would be accepted only from those whose profession was the pen. The prosecutor had risen to his feet once more to embark on a new speech, when the defence counsel (who had been deep in consultation with his client) vigorously intervened to draw the court’s attention to the child’s feet, with the words:

  ‘My lords, I have just observed that the child has on the soles of its feet some of those spots usually described as birthmarks. Could they not have a paternal, and not, as is commonly supposed, a maternal origin? I beg you most humbly to order an examination: let Herr Cinibulk and Dr. Lederer remove their shoes and socks – and we can perhaps resolve the riddle of paternity in no more than a moment.’

  Councillor Cinibulk went very red, declaring that he would rather withdraw his accusation than do anything of the kind. He calmed down only when he was given permission to wash his feet first outside.

  The defendant Max Lederer was the first to remove his socks.

  As his feet became visible, a roar of laughter echoed round the courtroom, for what was revealed were claws, bifurcated claws indeed, like a chameleon’s.

  ‘That’s no good: they’re not feet at all,’ muttered the prosecutor in annoyance, flinging down his pencil.

  Defence counsel at once drew the Bench’s attention to the fact that it must now be clearly out of the question to suppose that so fine a figure as Frau Cinibulk could possibly have enjoyed intimacy with such an ugly brute. The Court, however, took the view that, after all, the accused would have had no cause to remove his boots in the course of the offence in question.

  ‘Tell me, doctor’ said Counsel, turning quietly towards the medical officer, whose good friend he was, under cover of the continuing uproar, ‘tell me, couldn’t you make a case for mental derangement on the basis of the defendant’s pedal deformity?’

  ‘Of course I could – I can do anything: I was a regimental doctor, after all. But we should wait until the city councillor returns.’

  But there was no sign of Councillor Cinibulk and he did not return.

  The word went round that they would have to wait a long time, and the hearing would have had to be adjourned altogether if the optician Cervenka had not come forward from among the bystanders and given the affair a new twist.

  ‘I can no longer stand aside and see an innocent man suffering: I place myself voluntarily under arrest for disturbing the nocturnal peace. It was I who created that apparition in the sky. Using two spotlights, or ‘sun-microscopes’ - a marvellous new invention of mine – I projected beams of decomposed, and therefore invisible light into the sky. Where the beams met they became visible, creating that bright disk. The apparent chameleon was simply a small magic-lantern image of Dr. Lederer projected on the clouds, because I had left my own at home. I had, you see, once taken a picture of Dr. Lederer in the sauna, out of curiosity; if Frau Cinibulk caught sight of this image in her heavily expectant condition, it is quite understandable how the child should come to resemble the defendant.’

  Then the usher entered, announcing that indeed the soles of the city councillor’s feet were beginning to show patches resembling birthmarks, but that the scrubbing would have to continue in case they might yet be washed off.

  The court, however, decided not to wait for a result. The defendant was freed for lack of evidence.

  The Opal

  The opal on Miss Hunt’s finger excited general admiration.

  ‘I inherited it from my father, who was an old Bengal hand. It used to belong to a Brahman,’ she said, stroking the big gleaming stone with her fingertips. ‘You only see such fire in Indian jewels – whether it is the way they are cut, or a trick of the light, I don’t know, but sometimes the shine has a kind of movement about it, restless, like a living eye.’

  ‘Like a living eye,’ repeated Mr Hargrave Jennings thoughtfully.

  ‘Does that remind you of something, Mr Jennings?’

  They talked about concerts, balls, the theatre, all sorts of things, but the conversation kept coming back to the Indian opal.

  ‘I could tell you something about these stones – these so-called stones,’ Mr Jennings conceded at last, ‘but I fear Miss Hunt would find that the pleasure she enjoys in her ring would be spoiled for ever. But if you care to wait a moment, I’ll look out the manuscript from my papers.’

  The party waited in great suspense.

  ‘Are you ready? What I’m going to read is an extract from my brother’s travel notebook – we decided at the time not to publish our experiences.

  So. “Near Mahabalipur the jungle comes down in a narrow strip nearly to the sea. The waterways have been canalized by the government from Madras almost to Trichinopoly, but the Interior is unexplored wilderness, impenetrable and a hotbed of fever.

  Our expedition had just arrived, and the dark-skinned Tamil servants were unloading the tents, crates and the rest of the baggage from the boats, in order to have them carried by native porters to the cliff-top town of Mahabalipur, through the maze of rice-paddies, out of whose rippling sea of green odd groups of Palmyra palms rose like islands.

  Colonel Sturt, my brother Hargrave and I immediately took up residence in one of the little temples cut (or rather carved) out of the living rock, which are a true marvel of old Dravidian architecture.

  The unexampled work of Indian piety, they must have borne witness to centuries of hymns sung in praise of the great saviour by his inspired devotees – now they serve the Brahman cult of Shiva, along with the seven sacred pagodas with their tall pillared halls hewn out of the rocky ridge above.

  Dank mists rose from the plain, hanging over the rice-paddies and meadows, and blurring the rainbow outlines of the homeward-plodding buffaloes harnessed into their rough-built Indian carts. An odd mixture of light and mysterious gloom, that lay heavily on the senses, like a magic haze of jasmine and lilac blossoms lulling the soul into dreams.

  Our Mahratt
a sepoys in their wild and picturesque costumes and red and blue turbans pitched their camp in the ravine below the path up to the rocks, while up above the crash of the waves echoed from the open halls of the pagodas strung out in a line along the coast, like a bellowing sea-hymn in praise of Shiva, the universal destroyer.

  As dusk fell behind the hills and the night wind began to blow through the old halls the sound of the waves swelled up to us even louder and more thunderous.

  The servants had brought torches to our temple and then gone down again to their people in the village. We set out to explore all the nooks and corners by the flickering light. Numerous dark passageways ran through the rock, and fantastic statues of gods in dancing poses, palms out-stretched and with fingers curled in mysterious gestures, cast their shadows across the entrances, guarding the threshold.

  How few people they are, who know what mysteries of unimaginable depth, beyond the comprehension of us Westerners, are signified by these bizarre figures in their sequence and relation to one another, and by the number and height of the pillars and lingams!

  Hargrave showed us one such ornament set up on a pedestal, a staff with twenty-four knotted ropes tied along its length, each cord hanging down on either side and divided at the ends: a representation of the human spinal cord. Nearby were images illustrating the ecstasies and transcendental states opened up to the yogi on his path towards miraculous powers, as he fixes his thoughts and feelings on each successive section of the staff.

  This Pingala, great river of Sun,’ explained Akhil Rao, our interpreter, in his broken English.

  Colonel Sturt caught my arm. ‘Quiet! - d’you hear that?’ We tensed and listened for a sound in the direction of the passage obscured by a colossal statue of the goddess Kali Bhairab.

  The torches crackled – otherwise nothing.

  A lowering silence, raising the hair on our necks as our very souls quivered, trembling for that fearful lightning bolt that would stab like an explosion into our lives, and, inescapably, startle all the fatal spectres of the Unknown out of their dark corners and hiding places.

  At such moments fear gasps from the rhythmic hammering of one’s heart like words, resembling the awful gob-blings of the deaf and dumb: Eugh -gain, eugh -gah, eugh -gain.

  But we strained our ears in vain – everything was silent.

  ‘It sounded like a shriek from the bowels of the earth,’ whispered the Colonel.

  I had a sense that the great statue of Kali Bhairab, the cholera demon, was on the move. The monster’s six arms trembled in the uncertain light of the torches, and her black and white painted eyes rolled like a madwoman’s.

  ‘Let’s get out into the open, by the entrance,’ suggested Hargrave. This is a frightful place.’ The town among the rocks lay spread out in the green light like a petrified incantation. The moon shone across the sea in a broad stripe, a huge glowing sword, its point vanishing in the distance. We lay down to rest on the platform. There was no wind, and soft sand had accumulated in quiet corners.

  But sleep was hard to find.

  The moon rose higher in the sky, and the shadows of the pagodas and the stone elephants shrivelled across the the white rock surface until they were no more than fantastic toad-shapes.

  ‘Before the Moguls came, all these statues are supposed to have been loaded with jewels,’ said Colonel Sturt suddenly to me: ‘emerald necklaces, eyes made of onyx and opal He spoke quietly, unsure whether I was asleep.

  I made no reply.

  Suddenly we all started awake in terror. A horrible scream had issued from the temple – a brief howl or a kind of laugh, echoing like metal, or breaking glass.

  My brother tore a chunk of blazing wood from its place on the wall and we forced ourselves to go down the passageway into the darkness. There were four of us – what had we to fear?

  Hargrave soon threw his torch down, for the corridor opened out into an artificially cut but roofless defile, where the moon cast a harsh illumination, leading us on into a grotto.

  The light of a fire was visible behind the pillars. We made our way forward in the shadows.

  Flames were rising from a low sacrificial altar, and in their glow a fakir could be seen swaying from side to side, hung about with strings of bones and dressed in the multicoloured rags of a devotee of Bengali Dhurga.

  He was in the middle of reciting an incantation, and in the manner of a dancing dervish was rolling his head rapidly from left to right and then back and forth, his white teeth glinting in the light, and all the time emitting a kind of sobbing whimper.

  Two decapitated corpses lay on the ground at his feet: by their clothing we recognised them at once to be the bodies of two of our sepoys. It must have been their death-cries that had echoed so dreadfully up to us.

  Colonel Sturt and the dragoman threw themselves on the fakir, but in the same instant he flung them off and they staggered against the wall.

  The strength residing in this emaciated ascetic was quite unimaginable, and before we could run to their aid he had already reached the grotto entrance.

  We found the severed heads of the two Mahrattas behind the stone.” Mr Hargrave Jennings folded his paper together, adding, ‘There’s a page missing here, but I can tell you the end of the story. The expression on the faces of the victims was beyond description. My heart still misses a beat when I think of the horror that overcame us all. It would be wrong to call it fear in those fellows’ features – it was more like a mad, distorted grin. Their lips and nostrils were drawn up, the mouth wide open, and the eyes – the eyes – it was awful; imagine, the eyes, popping out, showed neither iris nor pupil, but they shone and glistened – just like the stone here on Miss Hunt’s ring.

  And when we examined them more closely, you could see that they had turned into genuine opals.

  A chemical analysis later gave the same result. But how those eyeballs could have changed into opals is still a total mystery to me. I asked a High Brahman about it, and he said it could be done with tantras, and that the process was almost instantaneous, starting from the brain – but who is going to believe that! He added that all Indian opals come from the same source, and that they bring bad luck to anyone who wears them, since they are all exclusively and for ever dedicated to the goddess Dhurga, the destroyer of all organic life.’

  The listeners sat dumbfounded, spellbound by the story.

  Miss Hunt played with her ring.

  ‘Do you think opals really bring bad luck for that reason, Mr Jennings?’ she said at last. ‘If you do, do please destroy the stone!’

  Mr Jennings took a sharp iron paperweight from the table and hammered gently at the opal until it shattered into shimmering pearly shards.

  The Man in the Bottle

  Melanchthon was dancing with the Bat, whose costume represented her in an inverted position. The wings were folded close to the body, and in the claws she held a large gold hoop upright, which gave the impression that she was hanging, suspended from some imaginary point. The effect was grotesque, and it amused Melanchthon very much, for he had to peep through this gold hoop, which was exactly on a level with his face, while dancing with the Bat.

  She was one of the most original masks – and at the same time one of the most repelling ones – at the fête of the Persian prince. She had even impressed his highness, Mohammed Darasche-Koh, the host.

  ‘I know you, pretty one,’ he had nodded to her, much to the amusement of the bystanders.

  ‘It is certainly the little marquise, the intimate friend of the princess,’ declared a Dutch councilor in a Rembrandt costume.

  He surmised this because she knew every turn and corner of the palace, to judge by her conversation. And but a few moments ago, when some cavalier had ordered felt boots and torches so that they might go down into the courtyard and indulge in snowballing, the Bat joined them and participated wildly in the game. It was then – and the Dutchman was quite ready to back it with a wager – that he had seen a well-known bracelet on her wrist.


  ‘Oh, how interesting,’ exclaimed a Blue Butterfly. ‘Couldn’t Melanchthon discover whether or not Count Faast is a slave of the princess?’

  ‘Don’t speak so loud,’ interrupted the Dutch councilor. ‘It is a mighty good thing that the orchestra played the close of that waltz fortissimo, for the prince was standing here only a moment since.’

  ‘Better not speak of such things,’ whispered an Egyptian, ‘for the jealousy of this Asiatic prince knows no bounds, and there are probably more explosives in the palace than we dream. Count de Faast has been playing with fire too long, and if Darasche-Koh suspects–’

  A rough figure representing a huge knot dashed by them in wild flight to escape a Hellenic warrior in shimmering armor.

  ‘If you were the Gordian knot, Mynherr, and were pursued by Alexander the Great, wouldn’t you be frightened?’ teased the inverted Bat, tapping the Dutchman coquettishly on the end of the nose with her fan.

  ‘The sharp wit of the pretty Marquise Bat betrays her,’ smiled a lanky Satan with tail and cloven foot. ‘What a pity that only as a Bat are you to be seen with your feet in the air.’

  The dull sound of a gong filled the room as an executioner appeared, draped in a crimson robe. He tapped a bronze gong, and then, resting his weight on his glittering cudgel, posed himself in the center of the big hall.

  Out of every niche and lobby the maskers streamed toward him – harlequins, cannibals, an ibis, and some Chinese, Don Quixotes, Columbines, bayaderes and dominoes of all colors.