Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “I’ve heard India spoken of as dead,” he remarked after a while. “Gad! Look at that color against the darkness!”

  “If Ranjoor Singh is dead, I’m going to know it!” said Colonel Kirby. “And if he isn’t dead, I’m going to dig him out or know the reason why. There’s been foul play, Warrington. I happen to know that Ranjoor Singh has been suspected in a certain quarter. Incidentally, I staked my own reputation on his honesty this afternoon. And besides, we can’t afford to lose a wing commander such as he is on the eve of the real thing. We’ve got to find him!”

  Once or twice as they flashed by a street-lamp they were recognized as British officers, and then natives, who would have gone to some trouble to seem insolent a few hours before, stopped to half-turn and salaam to them.

  “Wonder how they’d like German rule for a change?” mused Warrington.

  “India doesn’t often wear her heart on her sleeve,” said Kirby.

  “It’s there tonight!” said Warrington. “India’s awake, if this is Delhi and not a nightmare! India’s makin’ love to the British soldier-man!”

  They tore through a city that is polychromatic in the daytime and by night a dream of phantom silhouettes. But, that night, day and night were blended in one uproar, and the Chandni Chowk was at flood-tide, wave on wave of excited human beings pouring into it from a hundred by-street’s and none pouring out again.

  So the risaldar drove across the Chandni Chowk, fighting his way with the aid of whip and voice, and made a wide circuit through dark lanes where groups of people argued at the corners, and sometimes a would-be holy man preached that the end of the world had come.

  They reached Yasmini’s from the corner farthest from the Chandni Chowk, and sprang out of the carriage the instant that the risaldar drew rein.

  “Wait within call!” commanded Kirby, and the risaldar raised his whip.

  Then, with his adjutant at his heels, Colonel Kirby dived through the gloomy opening in a wall that Yasmini devised to look as little like an approach to her — or heaven — as possible.

  “Wonder if he’s brought us to the right place?” he whispered, sniffing into the moldy darkness.

  “Dunno, sir. There’re stairs to your left.”

  They caught the sound of faint flute music on an upper floor, and as Kirby felt cautiously for his footing on the lower step Warrington began to whistle softly to himself. Next to war, an adventure of this kind was the nearest he could imagine to sheer bliss, and it was all he could do to contrive to keep from singing.

  The heavy teak stairs creaked under their joint weight, and though their eyes could not penetrate the upper blackness, yet they both suspected rather than sensed some one waiting for them at the top,

  Kirby’s right hand instinctively sought a pocket in his cloak. Warrington felt for his pistol, too.

  For thirty or more seconds — say, three steps — they went up like conspirators, trying to move silently and holding to the rail; then the absurdity of the situation appealed to both, and without a word said each stepped forward like a man, so that the staircase resounded.

  They stumbled on a little landing after twenty steps, and wasted about a minute knocking on what felt like the panels of a door; but then Warrington peered into the gloom higher up and saw dim light.

  So they essayed a second flight of stairs, in single file as before, and presently — when they had climbed some ten steps and had turned to negotiate ten more that ascended at an angle — a curtain moved a little, and the dim light changed to a sudden shaft that nearly blinded them.

  Then a heavy black curtain was drawn back on rings, and a hundred lights, reflected in a dozen mirrors, twinkled and flashed before them so that they could not tell which way to turn. Somewhere there was a glass-bead curtain, but there were so many mirrors that they could not tell which was the curtain and which were its reflections.

  The curtains all parted, and from the midst of each there stepped a little nutbrown maid, who seemed too lovely to be Indian. Even then they could not tell which was maid and which reflections until she spoke.

  “Will the sahibs give their names?” she asked in Hindustani; and her voice suggested flutes.

  She smiled, and her teeth were whiter than a pipe-clayed sword-belt; there is nothing on earth whiter than her teeth were.

  “Colonel Kirby and Captain Warrington” said Kirby.

  “Will the sahibs state their business?”

  “No!”

  “Then whom do the sahibs seek to see?”

  “Does a lady live here named Yasmini?”

  “Surely, sahib.”

  “I wish to talk with her.”

  A dozen little maids seemed to step back through a dozen swaying curtains, and a second later for the life of them they could neither of them tell through which it was that the music came and the smell of musk and sandal- smoke. But she came back and beckoned to them, laughing over her shoulder and holding the middle curtain apart for them to follow.

  So, one after the other, they followed her, Kirby — as became a seriously-minded colonel on the eve of war — feeling out of place and foolish, but Warrington, possessed by such a feeling of curiosity as he had never before tasted.

  The heat inside the room they entered was oppressive, in spite of a great open window at which sat a dozen maids, and of the punkahs swinging overhead, so Kirby undid his cloak and walked revealed, a soldier in mess dress.

  “Look at innocence aware of itself!” whispered Warrington.

  “Shut up!” commanded Kirby, striding forward.

  A dozen — perhaps more — hillmen, of three or four different tribes, had sat back against one wall and looked suspicious when they entered, but at sight of Kirby’s military clothes they had looked alarmed and moved as if a whip had been cracked not far away. The Northern adventurer does not care to be seen at his amusements, nor does he love to be looked in on by men in uniform.

  But the little maid beckoned them on, still showing her teeth and tripping in front of them as if a gust of wind were blowing her. Her motion was that of a dance reduced to a walk for the sake of decorum.

  Through another glass-bead curtain at the farther end of the long room she led them to a second room, all hung about with silks and furnished with deep-cushioned divans. There were mirrors in this room, too, so that Kirby laughed aloud to see how incongruous and completely out of place he and his adjutant locked. His gruff laugh came so suddenly that the maid nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “Will the sahibs be seated?” she asked almost in a whisper, as if they had half-frightened the life out of her, and then she ran out of the room so quickly that they were only aware of the jingling curtain.

  So they sat down, Kirby trying the cushions with his foot until he found some firm enough to allow him to retain his dignity. Cavalry dress-trousers are not built to sprawl on cushions in; a man should sit reasonably upright or else stand.

  “I’ll say this for myself,” he grunted, as he settled into place, “it’s the first time in my life I was ever inside a native woman’s premises.”

  Warrington did not commit himself to speech.

  They sat for five minutes looking about them, Warrington beginning to be bored, but Kirby honestly interested by the splendor of the hangings and the general atmosphere of Eastern luxury. It was Warrington who grew uneasy first.

  “Feel as if any one was lookin’ at you, sir?” he asked out of one side of his mouth. And then Kirby noticed it, and felt his collar awkwardly.

  In all the world there is nothing so well calculated to sap a man’s prepossession as the feeling that he is secretly observed. There was no sound, no movement, no sign of any one, and Warrington looked in the mirrors keenly while he pretended to be interested in his little mustache. Yet the sweat began to run down Colonel Kirby’s temples, and he felt at his collar again to make sure that it stood upright.

  “Yes,” he said, “I do. I’m going to get up and walk about.”

  He paced the length o
f the long room twice, turning quickly at each end, but detecting no movement and no eyes. Then he sat down again beside Warrington; but the feeling still persisted.

  Suddenly a low laugh startled them, a delicious laugh, full of camaraderie, that would have disarmed the suspicion of a wolf. Just as unexpectedly a curtain less than a yard away from Kirby moved, and she stood before them — Yasmini. She could only be Yasmini. Besides, she had jasmine flowers worked into her hair.

  Like a pair of bull buffaloes startled from their sleep, the colonel and his adjutant shot to their feet and faced her, and to their credit let it be recorded that they dropped their eyes, both of them. They felt like bounders. They hated themselves for breaking in on such loveliness.

  “Will the sahibs not be seated again?” she asked them in a velvet voice; and, sweating in the neck, they each sat down.

  Now that the first feeling of impropriety had given way to curiosity, neither had eyes for anything but her. Neither had ever seen anything so beautiful, so fascinating, so impudently lovely. She was laughing at them; each knew it, yet neither felt resentful.

  “Well?” she asked in Hindustani, and arched her eyebrows questioning.

  And Colonel Kirby stammered because she had made him think of his mother, and the tender prelude to a curtain lecture. Yet this woman was not old enough to have been his wife!

  “I-I-I came to ask about a friend of mine — by name Risaldar — Major Ranjoor Singh. I understand you know him?”

  She nodded, and Kirby fought with a desire to let his mind wander. The subtle hypnotism that the East knows how to stage and use was creeping over him. She stood so close! She seemed so like the warm soft spirit of all womanhood that only the measured rising and falling of her bosom, under the gauzy drapery, made her seem human and not a spirit. Subtly, ever so cunningly, she had contrived to touch a chord in Colonel Kirby’s heart that he did not know lived any more. Warrington was speechless; he could not have trusted himself to speak. She had touched another chord in him.

  “He came here more than once, or so I’ve been given to understand,” said Kirby, and his own voice startled him, for it seemed harsh. “He is said to have listened to a lecture here — I was told the lecture was delivered by a German — and there was some sort of a fracas outside in the street afterward. I’m told some of his squadron were near, and they thrashed a man. Now, Ranjoor Singh is missing.”

  “So?” said Yasmini, arching her whole lithe body into a setting for the prettiest yawn that Kirby had ever seen. “So the Jat is missing! Yes, he came here, sahib. He was never invited, but he came. He sat here saying nothing until it suited him to sit where another man was; then he struck the other man — so, with the sole of his foot — and took the man’s place, and heard what he came to hear. Later, outside in the street, he and his men set on the Afridi whom he had struck with his foot and beat him.”

  “I have heard a variation of that,” said Kirby.

  “Have you ever heard, sahib, that he who strikes the wearer of a Northern knife is like to feel that knife? So Ranjoor Singh, the Jat, is missing?”

  “Yes,” said Kirby, frowning, for he was not pleased to hear Ranjoor Singh spoken of slightingly. A Jat may be a good enough man, and usually is, but a Sikh is a Jat who is better.

  “And if he is missing, what has that to do with me?” asked Yasmini.

  “I have heard — men say—”

  “Yes?” she said, laughing, for it amused her almost more than any other thing to see dignity disarmed.

  “Men say that you know most of what goes on in Delhi—”

  “And — ?” She was Impudence arrayed in gossamer.

  Colonel Kirby pulled himself together; after all, it was not for long that anything less than an army corps could make him feel unequal to a situation. This woman was the loveliest thing he had ever seen, but ...

  “I’ve come to find out whether Ranjoor Singh’s alive or dead,” he said sternly, “and, if he’s alive, to take him away with me.”

  She smiled as graciously as evening smiles on the seeded plains, and sank on to a divan with the grace it needs a life of dancing to bestow.

  “Sahib,” she said, with a suddenly assumed air of candidness, “they have told the truth. There is little that goes on in Delhi — in the world — that I can not hear of if I will. The winds of the world flow in and out of these four walls.”

  “Then where is Ranjoor Singh?” asked Colonel Kirby.

  She did not hesitate an instant. He was watching her amazing eyes that surely would have betrayed her had she been at a moment’s loss; they did not change nor darken for a second.

  “How much, does the sahib know already?” she asked calmly, as if she wished to spare him an unnecessary repetition of mere beginnings.

  “A trooper of D Squadron — that’s Ranjoor Singh’s squadron — was murdered in the bazaar this afternoon. The risaldar-major went to the morgue to identify the body — drove through the bazaar, and possibly discovered some clue to the murderer. At all events, he is known to have entered a house in the bazaar, and that house is now in flames.”

  “The sahib knows that much? And am I to quell the flames?” asked Yasmini.

  She neither sat nor lay on the divan. She was curled on it, leaning on an elbow, like an imp from another world.

  “Who owns that house?” asked Kirby, since he could think of nothing else to ask.

  “That is the ‘House of the Eight Half-Brothers’,” said Yasmini. “He who built it had eight wives, and a son by each. That was ages ago, and the descendants of the eight half-brothers are all at law about the ownership. There are many stories told about that house.”

  Suddenly she broke into laughter, leaning on her hand and mocking them as Puck mocked mortals. A man could not doubt her. Colonel and adjutant, both men who had seen grim service and both self-possessed as a rule, knew that she could read clean through them, and that from the bottom of her deep, wise soul she was amused.

  “I am from the North,” she said, “and the North is cold; there is little mercy in the hills, and I was weaned amid them. Yet — would the sahib not better beg of me?”

  “How d’ye mean?” asked Kirby, surprised into speaking English.

  “Three days ago there came a wind that told me of war — of a world-war, surely not this time stillborn. Two years ago the same wind brought me news of its conception, though the talk of the world was then of universal peace and of horror at a war that was. Now, tonight, this greatest war is loose, born and grown big within three days, but conceived two years ago — Russia, Germany, Austria, France are fighting — is it not so? Am I wrong?”

  “I came to ask about Ranjoor Singh,” said Colonel Kirby, twisting at his closely cropped mustache.

  There was a hint of iron in his voice, and he was obviously not the man to threaten and not fulfill. But she laughed in his face.

  “All in good time!” she answered him. “You shall beg for your Ranjoor Singh, and then perhaps he shall step forth from the burning house! But first you shall know why you must beg.”

  She clapped her hands, and a maid appeared. She gave an order, and the maid brought sherbet that Kirby sniffed suspiciously before tasting. Again she laughed deliciously.

  “Does the sahib think that he could escape alive from this room did I will otherwise?” she asked. “Would I need to drug — I who have so many means?”

  Now, it is a maxim of light cavalry that the best means of defence lies in attack; a threat of force should be met by a show of force, and force by something quicker. Kirby’s eyes and his adjutant’s met. Each felt for his hidden pistol. But she laughed at them with mirth that was so evidently unassumed that they blushed to their ears.

  “Look!” she said; and they looked.

  Two great grey cobras, male and female, swayed behind them less than a yard away, balanced for the strike, hoods raised. The awful, ugly black eyes gleamed with malice. And a swaying cobra’s head is not an easy thing to hit with an automatic-pistol bul
let, supposing, for wild imagination’s sake, that the hooded devil does not strike first.

  “It is not wise to move!” purred Yasmini.

  They did not see her make any sign, though she must have made one, for their eyes were fixed on the swaying snakes, and their brains were active with the problem of whether to try to shoot or not. It seemed to them that the snakes reached a resolution first, and struck. And in the same instant as each drew his pistol the hooded messengers of death were jerked out of sight by hands that snatched at horsehair from behind the hangings.

  “I have many such!” smiled Yasmini, and they turned to meet her eyes again, hoping she could not read the fear in theirs. “But that is not why the sahib shall beg of me.” Kirby was not too overcome to notice the future tense. “That is only a reason why the sahibs should forget their Western manners. But — if the pistols please the sahibs—”

  They stowed their pistols away again and sat as if the very cushions might be stuffed with snakes, both of them aware that she had produced a mental effect which was more to her advantage than the pistols would have been had they made her a present of them. She gave a sudden shrill cry that startled them and made them look wildly for the door; but she had done no more than command a punkah-wallah, and the heavy-beamed punkah began to swing rhythmically overhead, adding, if that were possible, to the mesmeric spell.

  “Now,” she said, “I will tell a little of the why of things.” And Colonel Kirby hoped it was the punkah, and not funk, that made the sweat stream down his neck until his collar was a mere uncomfortable mess. “For more than a year there has been much talk in India. The winds have brought it all to me. There was talk — and the government has known it, for I am one of those who told the government — of a ripe time for a blow for independence.

  “There have been agents of another Power, pretending to be merchants, who have sown their seed carefully in the bazaars. And then there were natives in the pay of the merchants who had word with native sowars, saying that it is not well to be carried over sea to fight another’s quarrels. All this the government knew, though, of course, thou art not the government, but only a soldier with a ready pistol and a dull wit.”