by Talbot Mundy
Again Bhima Ghandava refused to take offense. An old man’s querulousness seemed to mean no more in his philosophy than the barking of dogs a mile away. The absolute indifference to petulance offended Cyprian more than anger might have done and his feeble old hands fidgeted more nervously than ever on the chair-arms.
Jeremy, observing more intently than the others, crossed over and sat beside him. Cyprian laid a hand on his shoulder and ceased trembling. He was always more at ease with Jeremy to lean on.
“Suppose you tell the plan,” Ghandava suggested, sitting back in one of the deep armchairs.
In that attitude you could imagine him in rooms at Oxford or on a grass-bank under a big tree taking part in a village council. In fact you could imagine him doing almost anything except starting trouble.
Cyprian, seeming to draw strength from Jeremy, obliged himself to smile; but he was plainly subduing passion.
“Had I known, Ghandava, that you are connected with the Nine Unknown, I never would have come here. You know that,” he said, shaking his head at him.
“Yes, I know it,” said Ghandava. “That is why I never told you, friends though we have been. But now that you are here and know the fact, suppose we make the best of it?”
Ghandava was talking at the others now, through Cyprian. It was growing clear that Cyprian had made his mind up to withdraw. Ghandava, realizing that, was equally determined not to lose the men who, by an accident, had come within his orbit.
“The best?” said Cyprian squeakily. “You tell me you are employed by the Nine — in their confidence — and you ask me to tell you my plan for obtaining knowledge of them, and perhaps for capturing their books!”
Ghandava continued smiling, but if he had looked superior he would have lost the good-will of every man in the room, especially Jeremy. He was not aggressive; not on the defensive. He was more like a counsel called in to pass judgment on a problem, seeking the solution as he listened.
“You speak as if you had the right to the Nine’s books,” he answered quietly. “They would dispute that. From certain knowledge I assure you there is nothing on earth more impossible than for you to discover where the books are. You cannot even prove that the books exist!”
“Have you ever seen them?” Cyprian asked him dryly, suddenly motionless, watching under lowered, wrinkled lids.
Ghandava laughed.
“I have seen some books. How shall I know to which of them you refer?”
“All of them!” snapped Cyprian.
“My friend, I will tell you something,” said Ghandava. “There are hundreds of thousands of books, each one of which would come within your definition. There are libraries in crypts beneath the desert sands, that represent the knowledge of nations that disappeared before Atlantis took shape. There are books whose very alphabet fewer than nine men know, written in a language compared to which Sanskrit is a modern tongue. There are individual books among those that contain more true scientific knowledge than all the works of all the modern chemists and metallurgists put together. If you had all the books you would have no building big enough to contain a tenth of them. And if you were twenty years old you would not have time to learn the wisdom contained in one book — which book, however, it is not within your power to find.”
He spoke as one having authority. But he said no more than is commonly said in the East among men who look deeper than the daily press for fact, and who listen to the real news of the hemispheres that susurrates below or else above the bleatings and bull-boastings of such as sell what they call learning in the market-place. Cyprian, King and Grim, for instance, were not in the least surprised. Narayan Singh nodded. Chullunder Ghose assented less silently:
“I have prayed to the gods; I have even bestowed expensive presents on the gods, depriving unfortunate family of necessaries to that end. I have promised the gods, so often and so suppliantly that they cannot help having heard — if there are any gods! I have even told the priests the gist of my intentions, same being probable secret of failure down to date. If I can find one such said ancient book and sell same to American Museum, U. S. A., I will found orphanage with half of proceeds, and no questions asked as to orphans’ pedigree. Our Ali of Sikunderam may — Ouch! King sahib , please apply pole to proper purposes!”
“So it amounts to this,” Ghandava said. “If your purpose is to rid the world of an evil, I am at your services in so far as I agree with you what evil is. If you hope to intrude on those who have commissioned me, I must merely look on. I may possibly prevent you.”
“Let’s make a bargain then,” suggested Jeremy.
But Bhima Ghandava had no appetite for bargains.
He made a grimace more suggestive of contempt than anything he had said or done since they entered his house.
“I will do what I can do, freely,” he answered.
“We’re your guests. Outline what you will do,” Ramsden suggested.
Cyprian agreed to that. There was nothing to lose by listening to what Ghandava might intend. But the trouble was that he intended not to give away his hand.
“Father Cyprian had a plan,” he said, and folded his arms, leaning back to listen.
“Go on, Pop!” urged Jeremy. “Lead what you’ve got! Make him play higher or pass!”
Cyprian yielded, not as the men of the world yield, but with a sort of dry, implied assertion that surrender is a victory.
“We all discussed a plan — we had agreed — hadn’t we? — Jeremy to visit Benares — disguised — Chullunder Ghose to talk for him — Jeremy to be dumb fakir — do tricks — Take the coins of course — Display them — By their means attract attention of these rascals—”
“Attention of the rascals — excellent!” Ghandava commented.
“The others,” Cyprian continued, “Ramsden, King, Grim, Ali of Sikunderam and all his sons — go to Benares, too — disguised as Hindus, naturally. Watch. When Jeremy attracts attention of the enemy, they watch — they watch. You understand me? Very well then. That was the plan: To watch, and then track down the enemy.”
“I will help you to watch and track down the enemy,” Ghandava said, as a man might who is promising to vote the party ticket.
He was firm, and enthusiastic. Everyone in the room believed him, even Cyprian. But to believe is not perforce to consent.
“You understand? For my part, I have made no promises,” said Cyprian.
“I have asked none,” said Ghandava. “What I have to give, I give. When do you propose to start? How will you travel? Where will you stay when you reach Benares? I will do this for you,” he said, unfolding his arms and sitting forward. When he opened his mouth suddenly in that way the outlines of his jaw and chin showed distinctly through the gray beard and altered his whole appearance. He seemed to age enormously — to be as old as Cyprian — to know, from having suffered it, the whole of earth’s iniquity — and yet to have retained (perhaps, though, to have gained) a knowledge and assurance beyond human means of measuring. When he moved his mouth again, enumerating what he would do, the look of old-age vanished and he was almost on apparent footing with Ramsden and Narayan Singh.
“I will do these things for you; I will arrange for your protection—”
Cyprian snorted, as if he had taken snuff.
“How?” he demanded. “How?”
But Ghandava waved aside the interruption.
“I will give you permission to say you represent the Nine Unknown. That will lend authority to Mr. Jeremy’s claims to be a wizard!”
“We might say we represented the Nine Unknown without any one’s permission!” Cyprian objected acidly.
“You might . But without permission it would be very dangerous ,” Ghandava assured him; and again there was none in the room, not even Cyprian, who doubted.
Chullunder Ghose shivered and gasped like a fish out of water, and Narayan Singh, squatting on the floor, leaned forward that his eyes might look closer into Ghandava’s.
Not that Ghandava minded a
ny of those demonstrations. He seemed oblivious to praise as well as criticism of himself.
“I will provide you with means of traveling to Benares,” he went on.
“Oh for the wings of the spirit! Give us but a blessing, great Mahatma, and we shall be in Benares in a minute! Put power on us! Ouch!”
King returned the window-pole to its place at rest beside him, and Ghandava continued, ignoring the babu’s rhapsody:
“I will provide quarters for you in Benares. And a man shall guide you into secret places.”
“What in return for all this?” Jeff demanded.
“Nothing in return. I am proposing to help you in tracking down your enemy,” Ghandava answered.
“Protection? You spoke of protection,” said Cyprian. “How do you propose to do that? Black art?”
Ghandava smiled at him.
“The enemy will use black art,” he answered. “The enemy will destroy itself. At intervals it does. The hue and cry accumulates, and grows so great at last that the Nine protect themselves by letting ever such a little knowledge pass out into the hands of the enemy. They try to use it, and they die. There was Sennacherib — you have heard of him and his army of Assyrians? I could cite you fifty instances from history, and for every one such there are a thousand that men never heard of.”
“Then you mean, your Nine masters preserve their precious secrets merely for their own protection?” Cyprian demanded.
Mention of Sennacherib’s army and other Old Testament victims of imponderable forces roused him like a watch-dog guarding against trespassers. That was his field.
“No, but they protect the secrets, and the secrets them,” Ghandava answered. “I will show you why. If one of you will open the big album on that small table by the door you will find in it more than ten thousand newspaper clippings in more than twenty languages, every one of which is a direct statement of what the nations are preparing to do in the next war. You will see mention of gases that will decimate whole cities in an hour; or submarines that will render the seas not navigable, and so starve peoples; of airplanes carrying two-ton bombs loaded with such poison as will penetrate all known substances and kill men in agony; of guns with a range exceeding a hundred miles; of newly discovered methods of vibration that will shake whole cities into ruins; and of many other things, some even worse than those.
“The forces that the Nine Unknown can use are infinitely greater than any those war-devising idiots have dreamt of! Shall they trust their secret to the daily press? And shall they not defend themselves and their secret against the ambitious rogues who stop at nothing to possess themselves of what, if they had it, would put the whole world at their mercy? And they have no mercy, you know,” he added reminiscently, as if he had investigated and could bear true witness.
“Then you’re asking us to track down the enemy so that you may pounce on him? It that it?” asked Ramsden.
“My friend, I ask nothing!” Ghandava answered, leaning forward, laying both hands on his thighs for emphasis. “Those who have commissioned me, forever give without exacting or accepting a return.”
Narayan Singh nodded gravely.
“Sahib ,” he said, “that is a true speech. That is how a man may know that he deals with the Buddhas * and not with rogues. They give, because they will give , and ask nothing because none can recompense them.”
Cyprian snorted.
“How about the gold then — the gold they hoard like misers?”
“Did you ever part with gold to them?” Ghandava answered, with the first hint of tartness he had allowed to escape him.
Then, as if regretting that lapse, he crossed the floor and laid a hand on Cyprian’s on the chair-arm.
“My old friend, I will never harm you — never!” he said quietly. “You would like to rid the world of certain knowledge — or rather of the possibility of learning it, for the world is ignorant of its very nature. Well, those who have commissioned me are just as careful to keep that knowledge hidden. The difference is that we preserve it — you would burn it — that is all. There is no chance of its becoming known. But if you will be patient you shall glimpse what might happen if even a millionth part of the knowledge were made known to men not ready for it. You shall see a wonder, and then guess, if you will, what Caesar — who crucified a million Spaniards simply because he had the power and the inclination — would have done with poison gas! Thereafter, consider what the world to-day would do with even one of the secrets kept by those whom you have heard of as The Nine Unknown!”
Cyprian’s eyes were not dry, but a strong light came through the window; he pretended it was that. His lips moved silently. Then —
“I will burn all their books I can find!” he said in eighty-year falsetto.
“All you can find,” Ghandava answered, smiling.
“I will not go to Benares,” Cyprian announced.
He was trembling violently. He looked almost incapable of going home.
“Stay in my house. Search my library for forbidden volumes!” Ghandava urged him.
Cyprian stood up, steadying himself on Jeremy’s arm, then brushing Jeremy aside.
“These shall go!” he said. “To Benares! They shall go — and shall see. And if they see books, they shall bring them — bring them back — back to me. I will burn what they bring! Ghandava says he makes no demands. These made me a promise. All the books they find are mine to do with as I please!”
He looked about him, as if expecting to be contradicted. But it was true, they had made that promise. None answered.
“Now, make whatever plans you like!” said Cyprian, sitting down.
Jeff was still pondering the same perplexity, revolving it and overturning all the possibilities to find what lay beneath, just as he would have explored a mineral prospect.
“I don’t understand yet,” he objected, thrusting his lower jaw forward, meaning to understand if it took all day. “You ask nothing from us? You ask us to go to Benares, don’t you?”
“No,” Ghandava answered. “You were going to Benares.”
“What do you want us to do when we get there?” Jeff demanded.
“Nothing!” said Ghandava. “Yet your purpose was — in going there — I think — to get in touch with and to undo — will the word serve? — then to undo an organization calling itself the Nine Unknown. I have offered to help.”
“You say that it isn’t the Nine Unknown,” Jeff objected.
“Are you less intent on that account?” Ghandava asked. “When you came this morning you were anxious for an issue with your enemy. You have felt the teeth and talons of the underlings. You asked me for help in discovering the captains. I will help.”
“You propose to take advantage of us?” Jeff suggested. But his smile withdrew the sting.
“No more than you of me,” Ghandava answered. “We go the same way. Let us march together. There will never be a stage of the proceedings at which you are not at liberty to withdraw.”
“Accept that!” ordered Cyprian, pursing his lips up, nearly rising to his feet again, and sitting down.
They accepted, one by one, each meeting Ghandava’s gaze and nodding. That was the nearest they came to a pledge at any time.
“And, now,” Ghandava said, “we may as well bring in the prisoner again.”
Almost before the last word left Ghandava’s lips Chullunder Ghose squealed delightedly. Ghandava rang no bell. No gong announced his pleasure. Yet, exactly as he gave the wish expression the door at the end of the room opened wide and the green-lined chela entered, leading the prisoner as easily as a farm-hand leads a bull.
“Did you see that? Sahibs , did you notice—”
King prodded the babu into breathless silence. The prisoner turned with his back to the window and faced Ghandava, who observed him like a professor of entomology considering a wasp, not unkindly, almost with familiarity, wholly curious. The bronze man seemed no longer to be hypnotized.
“What shall be done with you?” Ghandava
asked.
The prisoner smiled loathsomely — a brute unable to see plain motives. “You can do nothing with me! Your law is you may not shed blood,” he answered.
“If I let you go, will you let these friends of mine go in peace to Benares?”
The bronze man hesitated. Then a smile of evil cunning added to the coarseness of his lips, and he drew himself up with an effort to seem princely.
“Yes,” he said in Hindi — arrogant, according favors. “That is granted.”
“Go then!” said Ghandava; and the green-lined chela led the giant out.
“Sleep now. You all need sleep,” Ghandava said, and none, not even Cyprian, objected when he showed them to cool rooms within thick walls where silence and soft mattresses held promise of delight. They all slept, saving Grim, who lay awake and thought of Ali of Sikunderam alone in the office with a prisoner.
CHAPTER XVII. “There will be no witnesses — say that and stick to it!”
UNITY is the profoundest law. Man, attempting little bush- league innovations imitates unconsciously the Infinite. So the custom is the same in Naples, or Palermo, or Chicago — Pekin — Delhi — Teheran — Jerusalem — who wages a vendetta does so on his own account, at his own risk, and he recognizes no higher law than his own will.
Police — all governments — are off-side — enemies in common, whom foes should unite to defeat. Whoso calls in the police is despicable in the eyes of friend and enemy alike.
And there is another rule, almost universal throughout nature. The unusual, the unexpected, the unconventional are fighting cues. The sparrow with white feathers, the man with new ideas, the fellow whose weapons are not en règle , alike must meet intense resentment. Fists in a land where daggers are the rule, are more heretical than ragtime in a synod. Heresy is provocation.
So there came to Ali of Sikunderam, in the office up the alley in the Chandni Chowk, a woman — veiled. Men say that was nothing exceptional in his experience. Seven sons by seven mothers are excuse for that witticism on which slander feeds, and scandal is self-multiplying — very breath in the nostrils of the scandalized. Nevertheless, it was nothing unusual for a veiled woman to be seen in that neighborhood. Scores — hundreds of them threaded the alley daily. None paid attention to this one as she climbed the crowded stairs, although that may have been partly because observant eyes — and in India all eyes are observant — might have noticed that several men in rather dingy yellow robes were watching her possessively from up and down the alley. No wise man insists on trouble in such circumstances.