CHAPTER II. The Story of the "Twin Death"

"It was nearly thirty years ago when I first saw that bracelet," Mr. Scarlett began in a strained voice. "I was only a boy then. It was brought to my father's house, at Bushire, by a Banyan jeweller—a friend of his—who showed it to him as one of the most marvellous and curious pieces of workmanship in the East. I remember how frightened I was to hear the stories he told of it, and to see them examining it.

"When the jeweller had gone, my father, who knew its history, told me that, when it was pulled off the arm which wore it, it would writhe and strike with the poisoned fangs in its head, and kill both the wearer and the person who tore it off.

"There is an Arab song, nearly two hundred years old, which sings of it. The song is about the woman who first wore it. She was the favourite wife of a murdered Sultan of Khamia, and fell alive into the hands of his Persian conqueror. He wanted to marry her because she was so beautiful, and she dared him, if he would win her, to tear the bracelet off her arm—dared him in front of his Court—and he was so mad with love that he did so, although he knew what would happen. The snake struck them both, and they died. In that Arab song she is supposed to sing several verses after the fangs struck her, but," Mr. Scarlett's voice trembled hoarsely, "I know that she had not time."

"You don't mean to tell us that this is the same one?" the Baron asked breathlessly.

"It is, sir. I wish it wasn't."

"But how did you get it?" he asked again.

"Let the gunner spin his yarn," I told him impatiently.

"Well," he went on, "it has always been worn by the chief wife of the Sultan of Khamia. It is her privilege to be the only wife who follows her husband at his death. She had to kill herself by tearing it off her own arm, and if her courage failed her a slave stood by to do it, and the two would die. The slave was not likely to fail her, for to die by 'the twin death' was supposed to be a sure way of attaining Paradise, and not many slaves ever thought that they would have the chance to get there.

"Some of this my father told me, and the rest, and many other things besides, I learnt afterwards from the Arabs up and down the coast. "I saw it next eight or nine years afterwards. I was an ordinary seaman in a gunboat lying off Muscat, and, happening to be ashore one afternoon, with nothing to do, I noticed that there was quite a crowd of natives gathered on the shore.

"They told me that the Sultan of Khamia was just going to embark on his way to Mecca, so I stopped to see him, knowing that he was the worst brigand and pirate in the whole of the Gulf, and wishing to see what kind of chap he was. "Presently he came down with a crowd of attendants to guard him—a fine-looking fellow he was—and after him followed some hooded cages or palanquins. Inside these, hidden from view, were, I knew, his favourite wives, accompanying him as far as Jeddah. Out of the first stretched a beautiful arm, and on it was that snake bracelet.

"I half expected to see it, and recognized it at once. You should have seen that crowd of natives give way and fall back. Everyone knew what it was, and what it meant. They edged away as if it was the devil himself. "The closed cages were taken on board a lighter; the lighter was towed out to a little steamer rolling in the mouth of the harbour between the two old Portuguese forts, and I soon forgot all about the bracelet.

"Five years afterwards fate brought me to the Gulf again. I was a petty officer in the gunboat Pigeon then, and everywhere we went we heard the name of Jassim, the now Khan of Khamia—the absolute despot of the south-western part of the Persian Gulf, the head of the Jowassim tribes of slavers and pirates, and the terror of the seas. Not a dhow dared leave any port without first paying tribute to him, and the tales of his atrocities made our blood boil with rage; because he was not satisfied with being master of the Gulf, but he'd swoop down on coast towns, demand tribute from them, and, if there was any resistance—even hesitation in paying—he would kill every man, woman, and child in ways so callously brutal that you could not imagine a human being capable of inventing them.

"His latest exploit had been to capture the whole fleet of pearl-fishing dhows and trading baggalows inside Muscat harbour. He filled them with his rascally followers—Bedouins chiefly—and thought himself strong enough to tackle the English.

"We soon heard that he was preparing to seize the pearl-fishing dhows which were then fitting out at Bahrein—under the English flag and the English guns of the fort there—to sail for the pearl banks, down south.

"The Pigeon and the old Sphinx were therefore ordered to search for Mr. Jassim and teach him a lesson.

"Well, after dodging in and out of the bays in that rocky coast, shoving our nose in, finding nothing, and shunting out again, we found him, one morning, anchored at the head of a shallow bay with all his fleet.

"Four hundred and twenty-two dhows we counted, their sloping masts and yards showing up like a forest against the shore. Every one of them was flaunting the red flag with a white border, the flag of the Jowassims. The whole place was a-flutter with them.

"At the top of the bay Jassim had built himself a fort, and lived there, we found out afterwards, in great style, with his harem, sheikhs' sons to wait on him, gold plates to eat off, and everything simply tiptop.

"Four hundred odd dhows were there, manned for the most part by dare-devil Bedouins, with a fair sprinkling of Beni Ghazril, Ballash, and Ahmed tribes—all low-caste tribes not too keen on fighting. Armed they were with old smooth bores—nine-pounders, there or thereabouts—and the little Pigeon was equal to taking on the lot if she could only have fetched in close enough; which she couldn't, as she drew too much water. We had to anchor five miles away from these dhows—five miles if a yard.

"Out came a sheikh or a khan—some big swell—to say that Jassim was only waiting for a change of wind to come out and eat us up. As it was blowing a steady shamel (you two gentlemen will know what that is before you've been out here long), blowing right into the bay, and not likely to ease down for two or three days, we didn't trouble about them trying to escape. Well, the skipper sent that sheikh chap back with a flea in his ear, and presently Jassim himself came along in a grand barge, flying the Turkish flag—like his cheek!—and as cool as anything comes up the side and gives our skipper two hours to clear out of it.

"The cheek of the man amused the skipper, who merely took him aft into his cabin, kept him there for two hours, talking and drinking coffee, showed him his watch and that the two hours had gone by, told him he would have hanged him had he not been flying the Turkish flag, and sent him back to his fleet. "The tide rising presently, we chanced our luck and moved in a bit closer. Directly we moved, those dhows, hundreds of them, let rip at us with their old pop-guns, the shot plunking into the water half-way, and not even the 'ricos' reaching us.

"That was just what the skipper was waiting for. He opened fire with our four-inch guns, keeping it up from four o'clock that afternoon till six, and setting a good many of the dhows on fire. Just before the sun went down, along came the old Sphinx, paddling furiously, and chipped in with her old-fashioned guns, till neither of us could see a thing to aim at, except flames occasionally. The whole bay was a mass of smoke from the dhows we had set on fire with our shells.

"It was a fine sight as the sun set behind the great mountains inshore, and the dark shadows of them came racing across the plain and the harbour, showing up the flames still more brightly.

"If you ever cruise along that coast don't miss that sight—the sight of those shadows as the sun sinks behind the mountains," Mr. Scarlett interrupted his yarn to tell us.

"Well, all that night we and the Sphinx fired occasionally to keep the Arabs' nerves on edge, and made all ready to send in every boat we possessed, at daybreak, to see what we could do.
"That was the longest day's work I ever did, and the worst—the worst," Mr. Scarlett hissed out, apparently waking up and altering his voice, as if he had been somebody else telling the yarn before, or as if he had suddenly turned over a fresh page in a book he was reading, remembered the terrible ending, and wanted to shut it up.

The Baron and I almost jumped out of our chairs.

"Yes, the worst. My God! it was the worst." He jumped to his feet, looked ashamed of himself, sat down, and went on to tell us in a strained voice, as though the ending was too terrible, how the crews of the Pigeon and Sphinx had pulled ashore in their boats, like midges round a horde of elephants. He said that two of the bigger dhows, placed end on end, would be nearly as big as the Victory.

We did not believe him.

He told us how, as one boat would clap alongside a huge towering dhow, her demoralized crew would clamber down the other side to their boats or jump overboard. The bluejackets had brought tins of paraffin, with which they set on fire each dhow they boarded, adding still further to the terror and disorder, until the crews of all those four hundred odd junks abandoned them and clustered at the edge of the shore, behind the walls of Jassim's fort, shouting bravely and shooting off their crazy rifles in defiance.

So the bluejackets left off their work of destruction, the boats pulled ashore together, the men wading as soon as their keels grated on the beach, whilst the Nordenfeldts and Gardner guns in their bows fired point-blank into the demoralized crowd of Arab scum. There must have been fifteen thousand of them on the beach; but panic broke out among them, and they melted away from the shore and from the fort, scurrying away inland in front of that handful of bluejackets until they had taken refuge in the defiles and crevasses of those barren mountains, where (as Mr. Scarlett told us) you could hardly believe it possible for a goat to live, but where they sought shelter like frightened sheep. When he had come to this point Mr. Scarlett paused a little, as if he was reluctant to go on. Then he started again hurriedly:

"And we came back, very slowly back, panting, our feet red-hot and our tongues swollen with thirst, the blazing sun on our backs. And we found Jassim squatting on his prayer mat on the sloping shore, his back turned to the sea and his burning ships, his face turned to the sun.

"A woman crouched at his feet.

"These two were alone, the only living things there; no other human being had stayed with him; she alone of all his harem and his people remained to share his fate. I was sent for to act as interpreter; and our skipper—a tender-hearted man—had pity on Jassim now that his power was absolutely broken, and gave him the choice of coming on board or staying where he was. Jassim chose to stay, answering proudly and defiantly, as though he was still lord of a powerful fleet, or as though his spirit was not broken. Then it was that I saw this hateful snake for the third time—it was on that woman's arm."

Mr. Scarlett's voice began to tremble, and as he coiled cross-legged on the deck, and put his hands to his forehead, we could see his dark, burning eyes gazing outboard, across the deck and the deck rails, to where the sea and the blackness of the night sky met each other, a dark rim beyond the moonlit sea surrounding the ship. His face was haggard and drawn, as if he saw what he was about to tell us.

"Yes, he was there! Jassim was there, his head bowed beneath a coarse burnous; and whilst the rest of us went away to loot the fort and destroy the guns, a seaman and myself were left as guard on those two.

"I spoke to him in his own tongue, told him to cheer up, that his luck was 'out' now, but that it was fate, and a better time would come. He seemed not to hear; he just sat gazing at the sun as it sank lower and lower towards the rim of the mountains, where all his men had disappeared; and his wife crouched moaning before him, putting a hand out now and again to touch him, just to remind him that she was there and suffering too. Presently she bared her left arm, and moaned to him not to allow himself to fall into the hands of the infidel, but to seek Paradise and take her with him, holding out her arm with the snake coiled round it, imploring him to pull it off and set them both free.

"Jassim never answered her, never looked down at her, never moved a muscle of his face, and never looked at that bracelet.

"But the sight of it was too much for the seaman left on guard. Poor fool! he thought it would be a fine curio, and before I could stop him he strode forward, bent down, and seized it.
"The woman gave one shriek of agony as he pulled it from her arm, and with an oath I saw him throw it down in the white sand, where it coiled and writhed, whilst he looked at the back of his hand and wiped away two tiny spots of blood.

"'Suck them, for God's sake, suck them! The thing's poisoned!' I yelled, and, springing to the woman, bent down and sucked two little marks on her arm just below the shoulder.

"Jassim never moved an eyelash.

"The woman jerked herself from me as if the touch of an infidel defiled her, and as if she courted death. She had scarcely dragged herself again to her knees before she began to writhe with pain, and her arm became a dusky swollen purple, spreading upwards over her shoulder as I watched.

"The seaman, cursing, was staggering down to the sea, but swayed and fell half-way, rolling convulsively, clawing at the sand and jerking himself towards the edge of the water.

"I could do nothing for either, and I could not take my eyes from that woman. She was appealing to Jassim to make the snake kill him, so that they should not be separated, and she implored him to hold her, so that she could die in his arms. Never a muscle did he move; and she cried piteously for him to look at her, just one look. But Jassim would not look at her. Her face was dusky now, her swollen tongue came out of her mouth, and in her agony her pride was broken, and she asked me for water. It was the last word she spoke, poor soul! I had some in my water bottle, so knelt down and held it to her lips. But she could not drink, so I poured a little into her mouth and over her face. Her dark eyes, dark as velvet they were, gave me one dumb look of gratitude; then the life went out of them and she was dead.

"As I knelt, Jassim must have stooped down and picked up the gold snake, for he suddenly flicked it round my arm, saying in a deep guttural voice: 'Blessed is the giver of water—above all men. Allah, the great, the compassionate, gave water to those that burned in Hell, even as thou gavest! Thy reward shall be great; only become a true believer, for this is the key of Paradise.'

"I jumped to my feet, half-dazed, and dared not touch the thing as it clung to me, snuggling tightly round my arm.

"The woman was dead. I ran to the sea; the bluejacket's body was moving gently as the tiny waves rolled in. I knew that he was dead, and I turned to implore Jassim to take it off if he knew how to do so without killing me. "As I turned, the lower edge of the sun touched the top of those awful mountains, and Jassim, crouching on his prayer carpet, a little patch of red on the sloping white beach, with the dead woman in front of him, suddenly raised himself to his knees, held wide his hands, and called: 'Allah ho Akhbar', as though summoning the faithful to prayer and his contemptible followers back to him.

"Then he prostrated himself, and, raising himself again, commenced: 'Bismillahi! Rahmanni! Raheem!' whilst I stood awed as he recited the prayer, till the upper rim of the sun disappeared, and those dark shadows came again down the sides of the mountains and along the waste of sands, rushing like evil spirits towards us....

"The first lieutenant was at my side shaking me. He had his hand on the snake, as if to take it.

"'What the devil do you mean by looting?' he said; but I gave a shriek, and sprang away, striking up his hand.

"As I retreated backwards, step by step, I told him what had happened. He did not believe me; he thought me mad—that I had a 'touch of the sun'. But he let me be, presently, and I covered that thing up with the sleeve of my flannel as best I could—and found myself back again on board the Pigeon. Perhaps I was mad, for I could never remember how I did get aboard, and I was on the sick list for many days, lying in a cot, covering the snake with my free hand, and moaning for people to let it be—so they told me afterwards."

The gunner stopped talking, breathed heavily, and wiped his forehead.

He began speaking in his ordinary composed way:

"Since then, thirteen years ago—aye, thirteen years it is next June—an unlucky year—that thing has coiled round my arm and never left it."

My chum's eye had been gradually starting more and more out of his head.

Now he gasped out:

"Never! Do you really mean it?"

"No, never," Mr. Scarlett groaned.

"But, man, a pair of long pincers seizing the head and neck and sliding a sleeve of thin tin or something like that underneath—next your skin—why, there are heaps of ways you could get it off—safe ways—if you really wanted to do so."

"Don't you think I've been tempted, sir; dozens of different ways have been suggested. All seemed safe, but there was just the chance that the thing would strike somewhere—and—and—I'd seen those two die, and put off trying for another day, till now I'm almost used to it.

"Look," the gunner said, pulling up his shirt sleeve and holding out his arm so that the moonlight showed the snake. "Watch its head!" and he very softly began to push one finger underneath a coil. As he did so, the head began to raise itself from his skin, and a tiny dark line, not visible before, showed across the end where the mouth was.

"Stop!" we both cried, perspiration pouring from me and running down my back, the Baron's mouth wide open with fear. "Take your finger away." And he uttered a hoarse, gasping laugh as he knew that at last we were convinced. He drew back his finger, and the head lay back again.

"Now you can guess why I don't want to come back to the Gulf. This bracelet is known to every Arab there. The Sultan of Khamia is certain to find out, sooner or later, that I have it, and then there will be an end to me. Why, sirs, he would give half his wealth to get it back, and once it becomes known that I have it he will get it somehow or other. Getting it, I must die."

"Man alive," the Baron cried, "why don't you try? A thin sheet of tin or something pushed under it, then seize the head with pincers! Why, man, it simply couldn't bite you! There'd be no risk whatsoever."

"But I can't," Mr. Scarlett almost moaned. "I can't face it. If anything did happen—I've seen those two die—remember that. It seems part of me now—thirteen years it has been there—and I've been brought up amongst Arabs—my mother was half an Arab, and there's something in my blood which won't let me try. It's fate—Kismet—and I dare not fly in face of that."

The Baron fell back in his chair hopelessly.

"Then why didn't you back out of coming here? Why didn't you explain?" I asked.

Then his manner changed again. He had come out of his dreams, and began talking hurriedly as if his lips were shaking.

"Truth is, gentlemen, I'm a born coward. I was too frightened to let on that I was frightened of coming out this way again. It's the same thing with many things I do. I'm too frightened to let on as how I'm frightened, and up to now things have gone all right. I'm a coward, sir, and I don't mind telling you," he said, turning to me. "We have to live together for the next two years—if I'm spared—and you'll find that out before you've known me many weeks, so you may as well know now. Feel my hand, sir!"

I felt it. It was cold and clammy and trembling. His dark face looked a ghastly mud colour.

"That's simply because I've been talking about it, and it reminds me of things which have been—and might be again."

"Come down below and have a brandy-and-soda," I said, and we took him down below, rather glad to get into the noisy glare of the smoking saloon, even though it was so hot.

We always slept on deck, the Baron and I, but that night, whether it was the heat or the effects of the gunner's story, precious little sleep did we get; so, after tossing about restlessly for an hour, we gave up trying, and leant over the deck rails and talked.

"I'm sure it would be as easy as winking," my chum said. "One could lash wire or even string round its head, so that the mouth could not open. The fangs couldn't come out then.

"I wonder what became of that man Jassim," he broke in presently. "He's probably dead, so no one could possibly know that the gunner has it. If he keeps it covered up he will be as safe as anything."

He gazed out over the sea, thinking.

"And probably what poison is left in it wouldn't kill a canary now," he burst out again—neither of us could take our minds off the snake. "Thirteen years ago! It must have lost its power by now."

We went to our beds after a time and tried to sleep. Baron Popple Opstein was soon snoring, but presently jumped up, shrieking, and I saw him trying to pull something off his arm.
I shook him until he woke up, very much ashamed of himself. He was perspiring like a drowned rat, and it made me feel queer and shaky. I did not like the mystery of the beastly thing. I had to live with the gunner and it. If he was going to fill me up with many more such stories, I should soon be frightened of my own shadow.