by Talbot Mundy
Mirrors are mighty puzzling things, unless you are accustomed to manipulating them. If you don’t believe that, just arrange a piece of paper so that you can see it in a mirror, and without looking at the paper, but observing its reflection in the glass, try to draw a square and then to cross the square with diagonal lines. It was quite a long time before I had figured out that those mirrors were so arranged that a person looking into one of them from one angle would get a full view of anyone who happened to be in the room.
It wasn’t so difficult after that to discover that the point from which the view was to be had was in the middle of the wall above where I was sitting, so that I had my back to the view-point and face toward the light. I chose another chair and examined that wall. There were two mirrors, draped with magnificent eastern hangings, and between them a thing shaped like a Persian shield, only instead of being solid it was pierced to form an intricate pattern. Anyone could see easily through its interstices, provided there were a corresponding hole in the wall behind it, but he would have to be standing on a support of some kind, because the lower edge of the shield was more than six feet from the floor. I returned to the first chair and set my foot on it, with the idea of examining the shield more closely, and it was exactly at that instant that the Chinese butler opened the door to announce that Swami Pananda would see me. He saw my foot on the chair, but made no comment.
I was ushered into a large, square room, hung like the first with Eastern draperies but containing very little other furniture. A magnificent carpet covered the entire floor, and at one end of the room were a short couch and an armchair made of teak.
Against the wall on my left, at a point that corresponded with the Persian shield in the anteroom was a gilded image of the Buddha, an enormous thing more than eight feet high, and the large plate-glass windows opposite suffused it with light, making it the one outstanding object in the room. The whole effect was sumptuous, yet magnificently simple and produced a far from disagreeable impression.
Pananda was seated on the couch, and rose to meet me. He was a rather fat man but not flabby, dressed in semi-Indian clothes of yellow silk — a sort of comfortable compromise between the easiness of India and Western notions about decorum. He wore yellow silk socks and yellow, soft, morocco-leather slippers, but no jewelry whatever. For the rest, he was a mild-looking person with remarkable brown eyes, a rather bulging, broad forehead half-concealed under a yellow silk turban, and a smile that was winning, to say the least of it.
“Welcome, Mr. Ramsden. Pray take that easy chair. So you came to talk to me, but I shall do most of the talking, if you permit. You saw through my little device for analyzing visitors; my Chinese butler interrupted your investigation; it’s part of his business to keep an eye on strangers. You’d be interested, I dare say, to see how the arrangement works; the head of the Buddha swings outward on a hinge — look!”
He got off the couch and showed me, pressing a very simple swing catch behind the Buddha’s ear. The whole head swung forward like the leaf of a door, disclosing the rear of the Persian shield through a small hole in the wall.
“You see? By standing on the Buddha’s lap I can observe anyone in the next room from every angle. I often have a lot of quiet amusement, watching visitors unknown to themselves. The longer I keep them waiting, the more completely they give themselves away as a general rule. Then they come in here and tell me silly little lies about themselves and other people. I introduce themselves to themselves for the first time usually. They go away astonished. Sometimes I charge them a big fee, sometimes not, depending on the circumstances. I shall not charge you anything, for instance.”
“I had no intention of paying you a fee,” I answered.
“I know you hadn’t. You came here to investigate me. My brother, you’re a very easy man to read; rather honest, but not nearly as honest as you think you are; a hunter — you have done a lot of killing in your time; a resolute man, and a very faithful friend — those are your two strong points; not quarrelsome, but combative — too willing to settle any argument by strength and brute force. You are one of the strongest men physically, and even in some ways mentally, whom I have met in recent years. As for your present purpose — you came to talk to me about Mrs. Aintree. Am I right?”
“How did you know that?” I demanded.
“Oh, that’s very simple. I notice you’re not a policeman; you have none of the earmarks of the hired investigator, and I confess that puzzled me for a while. But I put two and two together, you know; that’s my business, and I’m an old hand at it. Look at this.”
I read the words “Isobel Aintree” in a bold, thick handwriting at the foot of a letter that he pulled out of his pocket.
“Isobel Aintree is disturbed,” he explained. “She’s beginning to be sorry that she left my fold — I give lessons, you know. She called me on long-distance, and I went to see her in that apartment she has leased in New York. She wanted advice. Ha-ha! They all come back to their teacher in the end! She told me something of her great plans, and begged me to tell her how to manage an individual named Gulad, who seems to be giving her a lot of trouble. I interviewed this Gulad, and he was very angry with her for having summoned me. He accused her of talking too much, and gave me to understand that she had been especially indiscreet toward a man whose name he didn’t mention, but who he said came to see her one evening. That man was obviously yourself!” He eyed me humorously as if he expected me to see the connection and enjoy the joke. But I didn’t.
“I recognized you at once,” he said. “She learned that arrangement of mirrors in a room from me. When you sat down in my anteroom I noticed that you recognized the same arrangement. I had quite a little fun observing how long you took to puzzle out the sequence of reflections from mirror to mirror. Gulad had described to me an individual fairly well answering your description. I have in my pocket a letter from Mrs. Aintree, in which she complains that some agency in no way connected with the police is — to use her eloquent description — camping on her trail. She states that all her former friends have been cross-questioned, and her whole past has been inquired into, and begs me to answer no questions in case that anyone should apply to me. When my butler brought your card I added all that together, and the total amounted to Mr. Jeff Ramsden here to ask questions about Mrs. Aintree. Not very clever, was I, after all?”
“Do you intend to answer my questions?” I asked him.
“Certainly. Why not? And now you are wondering just how much credence you can place in my answers. Hah! My friend, if you had studied people as scientifically as I have, you would never wonder at my being able to read your thought in that way. Your emotions flit over your face one after another like the pictures on a screen, Mr. Ramsden. Well, as your expression suggested a moment ago, I am something of a mountebank, it is true, but a rather more than usually honest one. I used to be an altruist, as I thought, pure and simple, but have awakened since to consciousness of a vein of absurdity underlying all my efforts to improve the human race.
“My diligent and more promising pupils mostly deserted me in a half-taught condition, as Mrs. Aintree did, for instance, and set up in opposition, sometimes even going so far as to denounce me as an impostor. The stupid pupils simply wouldn’t learn, and what they did learn often disagreed with them. So I have been gradually discontinuing to teach, and devote myself nowadays more to giving advice to folk in difficulties, sometimes for a fee, and sometimes gratuitously. I make the rich ones pay, believe me! To that extent I am a mountebank. I frequently charge for performing tricks as simple as the one I played on you just now. On the other hand, I believe I do no harm in the world, and I know I have frequently done good.”
“No harm in the world?” I retorted. “You admit that you taught that Aintree woman, and then turned her loose to—”
“Pardon me, my friend, I did not turn her loose. She left me in peculiarly irritating circumstances, and not only set up an opposition class of her own but told lies about me. She accu
sed me of immoralities and I don’t know what else. However, I bear no malice. Malice, my friend, poisons whoever entertains it rather than the one against whom it is supposedly directed, and one of the first lessons I teach is the absurdity of harboring malice.
“When she sent for me the other day I went at once. And I gave her some very good advice. It was so good, and so disagreeable, that she did not offer to pay my expenses to New York and back — not that I would have accepted the money; but she did not know that I would not accept. One of my first principles is never to accept money from anyone whom I have not helped or am unable to help. There is no helping her in her present mood; she is headed toward disaster.”
“You might save a lot of trouble for other people,”I suggested, “by helping to speed her disaster before she involves too many in it.”
“I would hardly do that,” he answered. “Good does not come out of evil, although the opposite argument looks plausible at times. The confidences of my pupils, or of people in distress who come to me for advice, are absolutely sacred. It must be obvious that I could not conduct my activities on any other basis. I would go to prison before I would violate a confidence. But a pupil who is disloyal, and who uses my teachings corruptly, as Mrs. Aintree, for instance, does, forfeits in a degree the right to be treated in that manner; in a degree, please understand me, only in a degree.”
“You said you would answer my questions about her.”
“I did. But my answers will depend upon the questions. I did not tell you in what way I will answer them. Suppose you try me with a sample question to begin with.”
“Very well,” I said. “Who is coaching Mrs. Aintree? It isn’t Gulad, for he’s a rather ordinary smart-Aleck; and the scope is much too vast for any woman of her caliber. Who is directing her from behind the scenes?”
“Shrewd!” he remarked. “Much too shrewd for you, in fact, my friend! Obviously she is not the only one who receives coaching! Someone else suggested that question to you. Am I right?”
“Yes. But who is coaching Mrs. Aintree?”
“It is no breach of confidence to answer that,” he said meditatively. “Bhopal Gosh — a Hindu — more or less a countryman of mine.”
“A teacher like you?”
“Not at all like me; but a teacher nevertheless. He has also been known as ‘The True Mahatma,’ ‘The Golden Guru,’ ‘The Buddha Redivivus’ — and by some of his American reporter critics as ‘The Perfect Piece of Cheese.’ He has other self conferred titles, too many to remember. I believe that in his heart, to himself in private, he candidly admits that he is the wisest man on earth. He once had the effrontery to make to me proposals that were laughable. I am not ambitious, unless to bring a little comfort into a distressed world, and I gave him what I believe was very good advice — in this room; he was sitting in that armchair. My advice enraged him. He is an immensely powerful man physically. I should say he is even more muscular than you are. He has a temper like a typhoon. I had my work cut out, to escape from the interview uninjured, and before he left he swore to make me sorry I had ever met him.
“Well, Mr. Ramsden, I am not given to regretting experiences. They are the chief part of our education. But I knew that that man would destroy me if he could. It was for me to prove that he could not destroy me. He commenced a campaign against me by propaganda, which was less difficult to deal with than if it had been more subtle. At that time he, too, was conducting classes in Boston, charging prodigious fees and appealing in the main to women, which made it rather easy for him to approach my women-pupils indirectly and win some of them away from me.
“Mrs. Aintree was the first to go, and she took several others, five of whom are still with her. She has subjected those five to her arrogant will, by making believe to possess inspired knowledge that is really far beyond her present power of attainment. She is a great play-actor. I made the mistake of teaching her too much psychology before her character was ready to digest such dangerous knowledge; and Bhopal Gosh, who is a man without any conscience but with a rare ability, proceeded to cram her foolish head with much more of the same sort; so that she has become a creature who is clever and foolish by fits and starts.
“She mistrusts Bhopal Gosh, because no one can have intimate dealings with him without discovering his crude dishonesty of purpose; but she respects his knowledge and his adroitness, to use the least objectionable word that seems applicable. And she is certainly afraid of him. He has taken good care that she shall be afraid of him. That is his invariable method. He has excited her ambition and fed it; and now he makes her believe that with one stroke of the wand, so to speak, he can throw her in the discard and deprive her of all chance to attain the influence over people that she yearns for.”
“Why should she come to you for advice, if she thinks so highly of Bhopal Gosh?” I asked.
“Because he has left her in New York with rather more responsibility than she can manage. Mere ambition, Mr. Ramsden, doesn’t confer ability. She has what Freud might call the emperor-complex. She seeks to dominate, and knows enough to take the first steps toward her goal. But the first steps are the easiest and the most deceptive; they lead to a stage of bewilderment, which she has reached. And in that peculiar stage of mind she sent for me to give her good advice, having so far lost her sense of right and wrong under Bhopal Gosh’s tuition that she actually believed I would help her to consummate his evil purposes in his absence. She said that as my former pupil she was entitled to advice from me. Well, so she is. I gave her some; but she is very far from taking it.”
“Where has Bhopal Gosh gone,?” I asked him.
“That might be difficult to discover. He is one of those crafty individuals who expects his victims to tell him all their secrets as a point of good faith between pupil and teacher, but who keeps his own counsel perfectly. He makes his preparations a long while ahead. The mere fact that he has started on a journey, let us say westward, is no proof that the East is not his real objective. He has made a tremendous amount of money, because some of his pupils have been successful in business, and it has been easy for him to get inside knowledge of stock exchange transactions. One of his pupils, who afterwards went to prison, was in the confidence of one of the largest brokers in Boston. So he is able to pay for what he cannot obtain in other ways.”
“Do you suppose he has gone abroad?”
“Possibly. He started for West Virginia, where this P.O.P. society of Mrs. Aintree’s had its beginnings. If he has gone abroad from there he probably applied for his passport and booked his steamer passage months ago.”
I stared at Pananda for more than a minute.
“And now you are wondering,” he said, “whether it is jealousy of Bhopal Gosh that makes me talk of him in this way, and just how far my information may be trusted. I hardly blame you. Every human being is dishonest — with himself, if not with other people; when we overcome dishonesty we shall cease to be humans and become something better. But I am doing my best for you, and that is very likely better than you could get elsewhere on the particular subject of which we are talking. I am not jealous of Bhopal Gosh. It would annoy him intensely to know that I pity him, yet that is the fact. However, I pity a great deal more the unfortunates who have been inveigled under his control. You may believe implicitly every word I have told you about him.”
“I dare say you could tell me a great deal more?” I suggested.
“Possibly. I could tell you a great deal more about some of his victims, if that were permissible. But you see my position. I am already half a charlatan, because I descend to such tricks as that hole in the wall behind the Buddha’s head. I would be wholly a charlatan if I betrayed confidences made to me in good faith. The truth of the whole matter is that I am a lazy man, extremely willing and, in many cases, able to give comfort to others, but fond of my own comforts also. You would like me to enter the lists with you against Bhopal Gosh and Mrs. Aintree. That thought has been hovering across your mind for several minutes. I shall disappo
int you, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve got work out of lazier men than you,” I answered.
“I don’t doubt it. But you see, they weren’t clever men. You can’t get work out of a clever man who doesn’t wish to work. I am rather clever, and besides, I have no wish to avenge myself on Bhopal Gosh. Revenge is too costly altogether, and not worth while.”
“Aren’t you interested in protecting Bhopal Gosh’s victims?” I demanded. “He and this Aintree woman are planning to throw the world into the devil of a mess.”
“My interest lies only in helping those who actually come to me for help,” he answered. “You came to me. I have tried to help you. But my gifts are limited. I can give you advice, but not material assistance.”
“Have you heard anything about some stolen gold plates?” I demanded.
“Oh yes. Mrs. Aintree told me all about them. If you wish me to talk of them you must tell me everything that you know about them first. Then I shall be able to determine how much I can say to you without infraction of others’ confidences.” So I told him, beginning with Brice’s story and ending with an account of the meeting at “Fifty-ninth and Ninth,” New York.
“Very interesting,” Pananda exclaimed at last. “Most deeply interesting. There is very little that I can add to your information, but I can give you some good advice. Those plates are, comparatively speaking, harmless in the hands of the Abyssinian Gulad or of Mrs. Aintree, because they both lack the necessary brains to use them to the full advantage. But in the hands of Bhopal Gosh — they would be worse than poison gas and dynamite combined! If you can prevent his getting them, you will be rendering the world a service. Bhopal Gosh is possessed of devilish ingenuity. He knows perfectly well how to excite men’s passions by an appeal to their religious instincts or their superstition. Those plates would better be destroyed than in the hands of Bhopal Gosh.”