Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (3 page)

HARI DAS WRIGGLED LIKE A WET DRAKE THROUGH THE
festering streets of Chinatown. It was noon hour. His greasy, blue-black hair fell in somber ringlets over the military collar of his drab uniform. He looked about him with the eyes of a Martian. The advertisements, plastered like wallpaper on a house-front here and there, reminded him of the wrappers on firecrackers which he had glimpsed in the cluttered shopwindows of Bombay. Pool parlors filled with grimacing, gesticulating figures in shirt sleeves, glimpsed through tiny rectangles of window-pane clouded with grime and grease. A sweetish, sickening odor of decay emanating from the open doors of meat and vegetable stores, loaded with strange, forbidding viands that made a sophisticated appeal to alien palates. Stiff shellacked carcasses of fowl and pigs, some intact, some mutilated and dismembered, hung in the windows like curios in an antique shop. He stared
frankly and unconcerned at the stolid forms behind the windows which blinked with grave insolence at the inquisitive world without: grave, imperturbable figures, their yellow mouths glued to long-stemmed bamboo pipes from whose metal bowls thin wreaths of smoke curled up, saturating the air with reek of camel’s dung.

It was Hari Das’s second day as a telegraph messenger. Removing his visored cap, he examined the batch of telegrams deposited therein. Satisfied that they were properly routed, he sat down on a doorstep and began to munch a banana.

A crowd of ragamuffins quickly gathered. He finished the banana and threw the peels over the heads of the assembled urchins with the cautiousness that Mr. Rockefeller exhibits when, on his birthday, he distributes brand-new dimes.

“Git a haircut!” yelled one youngster.

“Take off that uniform!”

Hari laughed good-naturedly—a rare Burgundian laugh that mocked the famine and pestilence in India. As the self-appointed “Redeemer of Mankind” in this twentieth century he felt that mirth was his most effective weapon. He never hesitated to employ it.

The street gamins swarmed about him like flesh flies. “Get the hell out of here,” he shouted, settling comfortably on his elbow as he sprawled lazily over the doorstep. Still the devils persisted in hanging about him. Their gibes were menacing.

“Go on, beat it!” he screamed in a shrill voice. “Or I’ll give you a kick in the pants.”

Pleased with his ready command of an alien argot, he fished in his inside pocket and commenced the perusal of a pamphlet entitled “An Open Letter to Lloyd George.” The extreme elation which he made no attempt to suppress, as he read this alarming manifesto, may be pardoned when it is understood that the reader of the document was himself the author. He chuckled now and then as he reread a felicitous passage, wholly oblivious of the surrounding spectators. If it were possible for a mere mortal to conceive the glee of our anthropomorphic deity upon that day when his miraculous task of creation was ended, when he settled
back upon his celestial throne, and gazing abstractly upon his work, pronounced it good, then one might appreciate the unholy joy of this Aryan messenger gloating over his philippic to Lloyd George, Supreme Satanic Majesty.

Occasionally he paused in his reading to fix with the eye of a mesmerist the ornamental figure of a maroon dragon on a balcony across the street. To Hari Das it could as well have been the sapphire tip of Mount Everest, or the proud, stoical figure of Liberty shimmering in verdigris on Bedloe’s Island. What gave him pause was the sudden reflection of the ironical situation he found himself in at this moment. The proud inheritor of a great culture, a descendant and representative of the Aryan race, sitting on a doorstep in America, in Chinatown no less, dressed as a menial, regarded as “chandala” … an object of curiosity in an alien land.

He reviewed the fruits of his first two months in America: a new slant on sex, a strong sympathy for the Negro, contempt for Nordic supremacy, increasing fears of acquiring a venereal infection (to say nothing of pyorrhea and hemorrhoids), pride in his growing familiarity with the native idiom, with slang and profanity. He thought of his intended studies at Columbia. They seemed far away, and about as useful as a totem pole. What could he do, in America, with a degree of “Doctor of Philosophy”? Get married with it and become a streetcar conductor? Vague, unfinished thoughts of the life he had abandoned occupied him. He wondered listlessly if he would ever go back to India and settle down to the business of driving out the British fleas.

“Hey, you,” he chirped pleasantly, “what time is it?”

This query was drowned in an ocean of sneers and guffaws.

Hari grinned, not knowing how else to meet this Gentile world, and stretched leisurely in full view of the public.

Cried a voice: “Say, mutt, what
are
you? Where do you come from?”

The term “mutt,” connoting in its restricted sense “telegraph messenger,” was unknown to him. But he accepted with fiery exclusiveness the challenge of his origin. Proudly, taut as a
bronze statue of Demosthenes, he drew himself up. His black eyes glittered with the keenest amusement as he prepared to “repeat” his maiden speech to the American public. He felt like that great French sot who, in his eloquence, exclaimed: “Take elegance and wring its neck.”

“Young roughnecks,” he commenced, “you see before you this noon, in this glorious land of equality and fraternity, a representative of the greatest culture the world has ever known. I consider it a privilege, a
rare
privilege”—his “rare” is impossible to reproduce—”to be permitted to answer the question which the young lout before me has just propounded. I am a son of India, you joyous vagabonds … a son of that vast empire which stretches from the Himalayas to the coral tip of Ceylon. A nation of three hundred million souls, speaking a hundred different tongues, worshiping a thousand unknown gods.... The most precious jewel in the wallet of that predatory monster, the British government.”

A few young Chinamen in American dress swelled the ranks of his audience. Toward these Hari flung his ropes of pearls.

“Men of the Orient, I greet you! Followers of Confucius, disciples of the Great Gautama, I have a message for you … a message for all mankind, black or white, red or yellow.” His teeth gleamed white and strong in the bright sunlight. “Men of Cathay, behold in me the Promised Redeemer … the new Savior of the World! O men, nothing surprises me more than the vague, diverse, often contradictory popular conceptions of the coming of Christ. Do you expect the man from the moon to descend on earth and be your ruler? Men of the twentieth century, I think you will have sense enough to recognize this fact: scattered far and wide are the genuine credentials in the Bible, entitling me to the role I aspire to play—’the scroll and the book written within and without, speaking a foreign language, lisping and smattering, publishing peace, and so on and so on....’ Even a cursory review of the Bible, with a view to establishing my identity with the Promised One, will convince the skeptic of the force of my claims.... The very stupendousness of my task,
that is
,
evolving order out of the present chaos, is its simplicity. If I appear to be
paradoxical, I am none the less truthful. I do not know how far I shall be able to satisfy the cravings of the world.” (Sic!)
“
The world has thoroughly disappointed me
....
However, the modern Christ does not claim to be infallible. You smile.” (A mere oratorical gesture … no one understood what he was talking about.) “I am human, all too human. These petty human weaknesses are, however, overshadowed and eclipsed by human greatness, human loftiness inherent in this frail body.…
Either I am crazy or the world is crazy
.”

This mellifluous exordium was cut short by the approach of Officer Mulligan. That scion of the law grabbed Hari’s emaciated arm and squeezed it viciously.

“What’s all the fuss?” he inquired savagely.

“He’s a nut!” yelled someone.

A swarm of Chinamen in blue and black silk vestments suddenly appeared and pressed close about Officer Mulligan. They seemed whimsically pleased over the prospect of an arrest.

Officer Mulligan brandished his club. “Back up, you slit-faced buggers!”

The sea of yellow faces remained calm and tranquil. No one budged.

“Whaddayagotta say?” A still more vicious squeeze apprised Hari Das that Officer Mulligan was not jesting.

“Wot wuz de
eye
dear? Doncha know yuh gotta have a permit ter make a speech? Wotderhell wuz yer squawkin’ about, hah? Gwan and deliver your messages.”

The rudeness of Officer Mulligan was exasperating. It smacked of petty British officialdom.

“I beg your pardon, Officer, if I have broken any of the statutes. You may well see, I am a stranger here.”

Officer Mulligan gave indications of softening. The fiery young orator softened, too, at the thought of spending another three days in jail. He was not totally ignorant, as he pretended, of American institutions.

Sensing Officer Mulligan’s leniency, Hari Das felt impelled to risk a final clause about “free speech.” He was immediately rebuffed.

“Can
that stuff,” bellowed Officer Mulligan.

“I beg your pardon?”

“
Cut it
, I said. Doncha un’erstand English?”

“I ought to,” Hari replied with affected politeness. “I was educated at Oxford.” He allowed the full significance of this to sink into Officer Mulligan’s thick-micked skull. Then he continued, after the manner of a rajah settling an ancient score with Anglo-Saxon brigands. “It’s possible, Officer, that there are some Americanisms which I don’t understand. That’s
my
fault, I assure you. A few more weeks, I daresay, and I’ll understand your dialect.”

“D-I-A-L-E-C-T?” Officer Mulligan handled the word as if it were a stick of dynamite. His brain became active, in its unatrophied area, and corroborative parallels of suspicion began to assemble like the parts of a Ford car under the nimble hands of a gang of mechanics. At the police station there was a West Indian Negro janitor. He had the same suave accent, the polished diction, and the copious jargon of the culprit confronting him. Ergo, this was a West Indian nigger! Still, officer Mulligan was perplexed by the long, straight, black hair, by the aquiline features, by the delicate, sensitive skull of his victim. It dawned on him as he scratched his head that perhaps his knowledge of ethnological differences was limited. Nevertheless, he had to be convinced.

“Where do you come from?” he asked bluntly.

“I am a Hindu,” Hari answered with dignity.

“You’re not a nigger, then?”

“Not precisely … the difference is a specious one.”

“Hey, don’t try to high-hat me. Come down off yer perch, young fella, or I’ll lay this across yer backside, see?”

Hari saw with some misgivings the emblem of the sanctity of the law. He had felt the weight of that emblem two weeks after his arrival in America. He had no desire to repeat the experience. In a few rapt words he made it clear to his inquisitor that he regarded himself beyond all question of a doubt as an insignificant, worshipful atom of society—”a little unused to the free and easy ways of America.”

“That’s done. We won’t go into that,” said Officer Mulligan. “You’re in the United States now,
remember
!
Don’t go shootin’ off yer mouth too much….”

Hari started to thank him for this gratuitous piece of advice.

With high impatience Officer Mulligan raised a large, hairy paw and stuck it squarely in front of Hari’s face.

“You’ve got the gift of gab all right, you black bastard. Now get this! I wanta treat yer right. I’m gonna setcha straight …
DON’T GO MAKIN’ STUMP SPEECHES AROUND HERE ON MY BEAT, UN’ERSTAND? 
It won’t do you no good. If yuh got anything on yer chest, look me up and spill it to me, see? Don’t practice on these Chinks. They don’t know wotderhell it’s all about,
get me
?”

An amused expression hovered over Hari’s features.... Should he explain his mission to Officer Mulligan, his newfound friend? Doubts assailed him. After all, would Officer Mulligan relish the advent of a black Messiah? He stole a glance at the smooth, hard club which Officer Mulligan twirled so innocently. Associations connected with the club defeated the idea of salvation-mongering. On the whole, he thought Officer Mulligan was a very decent fellow. Further than that, Officer Mulligan had a right to worship as he pleased. Withal he was certain that Officer Mulligan understood his rights.

Now that the difficulties attending the introduction had been smoothed out, he felt like continuing the conversation with this emissary of the law. But, for once, he was at a loss to know just what tack to pursue—the injustice of the British rulers, or Ireland’s economic dilemma?

Officer Mulligan relieved him of further cogitations.

“Where’s yer messages?” he exclaimed.