Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “If I slew them, as they deserve, there would be none to do the work,” said Dawa Tsering. “Why not offer them money, thou? Never fear — I will win it back from them at dice!”

  Ommony offered money, but the Tibetans only showed their teeth in wider grins than ever. There was nothing to do but wait until they were pleased to move, and they did not do that until the sun was over the highest ridges by a full hour and a wind had blown new banks of mist into the ravines. Then suddenly, as if they had received a message through the ether, they began to pack the ponies and were off in no time without a word of explanation.

  The hills lay in parallel waves that must be crossed diagonally, as a boat offers its shoulder to a rising sea. To the northward the huge range of the Himalayas made itself felt but was invisible; there was a sense of impending immensity, increased by the curtain of cloud that drifted between earth and Heaven. Wherever passes gaped between the shoulders of the mountains, dense white clouds flowed down along them, looking like incredibly swift glaciers. Half of the time the rump of the pony ahead was just discernible through the mist, but once in a while some trick of wind would reveal enormous vistas that a man could hardly contemplate and keep his balance.

  But the ponies were content to climb hour after interminable hour, and Dawa Tsering sang about the wind-swept hills of Spiti as they rose and descended through every imaginable plane of vegetation, from steamy bottoms where dense jungle stifled them, up through bamboo and rhododendron to where oaks and maples flourished — up beyond those to the fir-line — up again until the firs gave out and raw wind rolled the clouds around them straight from Kanchenjunga — then down again into the suffocating tropics, where wood-ticks fell on them and a man’s hands were kept constantly busy picking leeches off the ponies and Diana had to be gone over carefully three times within the hour.

  They crossed rock-cluttered torrents over bamboo bridges that swayed and danced under the weight of one pony at a time, and bivouacked again at midnight in the clouds, where icy wind shrieked through the chinks of a deserted herdsman’s hut; then descended two hours after dawn into a steaming cauldron where black water quarreled on its way through aromatic jungle.

  Never a sign of the Lama’s party, although they passed stone chortens* every mile or so, and cairns built by pilgrims, to which every passer by had stuck little prayer-flags to flutter the eternal formula “Om mani padme hum.” There were messages on bits of paper from one pilgrim to another, weighted down with stones near some of the chortens, but none that the Lama had left.

  And there were unaccountable delays. At times the two Tibetans seemed to think they had come too fast and, after a whispered consultation, unloaded the ponies whether they appeared to need a rest or not. The ponies rolled on sky-hung moss-banks within a dozen feet of the edge of an abyss, and the Tibetans chewed oily seed by the handful, offering Ommony some, and pointing out good places to sit down when he showed impatience. Dawa Tsering flicked at the edge of his knife with a suggestive thumb-nail, but they laughed at that, too, showing him a tough tree, dwarfed by the wind, that he could cut down if he needed exercise. In their own good time they started off again without excuse or argument, usually singing hymns to pacify the spirits of the mountains.

  As he drew near Tilgaun Ommony’s thought dwelt more on Hannah Sanburn than on the Lama and Samding. Aware now that for twenty years she had kept a secret from him, in spite of mutual respect and confidence that in every other way he could think of had been almost absolute, he wondered how to tackle her about it. He did not care to know even a part of her secret without letting her know that he knew it.

  There had been times when he had seriously thought of asking Hannah Sanburn to become his wife; other times, when the thought that he could hardly live at the mission without marrying her had been all that kept him from resigning his forestry job and spending the remainder of his life in active duty as a trustee at Tilgaun. He was too confirmed a bachelor not to flinch from matrimony when he reasoned out all the pros and cons, but in the back of his head there was a conviction that Hannah Sanburn would not refuse, if he should ask her. But he also had known, any time these past ten years, that he never would ask her to marry him unless — he wondered what the reservation was; he had never quite defined it.

  Hunted through his mind and pinned at last into a corner, up there thirteen thousand feet above sea-level with a view of Kanchenjunga to adjust mere human problems to their right proportion, he realized that he would marry Hannah Sanburn — gladly enough — at any time — if by doing so he could solve a difficulty from which she could not otherwise escape.

  He was almost convinced that there was a page in Hannah Sanburn’s life which needed very careful protecting; something which called for limitless generosity. He had no use for generosity that hedged itself within conventional limits. He liked his freedom and the habit of consulting no one’s inclinations but his own in private matters, that becomes almost second nature in an independent man of forty-five, but he knew he could forego all that and be a reasonably companionable married man, if his interpretation of the law of friendship should impose that course on him. To Cottswold Ommony friendship was the highest law; no conceivable claims could outweigh it; Hannah Sanburn was his friend; there was nothing to argue about. But he hoped — without much confidence, but he hoped — that she was not in the predicament he guessed her to be in; suspecting that, since she had kept him in the dark for twenty years, she could quite easily have fooled Mrs. Cornock-Campbell, who notoriously believed the best of every one.

  He rather dreaded meeting her — very much dreaded the inevitable interview; and although he fretted to overtake the Lama he was much more patient with delay than he might otherwise have been, leaving untried a good many methods with which he might have persuaded the Tibetans to hurry. He salved his conscience by grumbling aloud to them and sotto voce to Dawa Tsering, but there was not much energy in his complaints.

  At last, toward the end of the fourth day out, they topped a fifteen- thousand-foot rise and looked over a sheer ravine, where eagles perched, toward Tilgaun that nestled in a valley with a Lamaist monastery perched on a crag three thousand feet above it. The mission buildings glowed warm in the westering sun — one instance where a rich man’s money had been spent on art as well as altruism, with good manners and respect for other men’s historical associations, such as missionaries commonly dispense with. The graceful contour of the buildings and the color of the carved stone matched the panorama. There was no assertiveness, no challenge. The Tibetan roof-lines paid acknowledgment to older art on crag and cliff around them. Without beauty there is no beatitude. Old Marmaduke, who tortured thirty million dollars from protesting pigs, had somehow learned that; so the mission buildings were a monument to beauty, not to his ambition or his zeal.

  Ommony was thrilled by the sight, as always on his rare visits. All the way down the winding track, that looked so short and actually was a half-day’s journey, he recalled the days when Marmaduke had hurled Chicago business methods into battle with obstruction, subtly raised against him by foes that were easy enough to identify but undiscoverable when it came to issues. Rajahs, all the missionaries, all the Indian priesthood, politicians and the press had joined in opposing the project, occasionally praising, always preventing.

  Even the banks, that levied toll on Marmaduke’s long purse, had invented difficulties. There were strikes of labor-gangs (imported in the teeth of government obstruction) because money for the pay-roll did not arrive punctually. There had been personal attacks on Marmaduke — three bullets, and a dose of ground glass in his food, in addition to assaults on his reputation. Missionaries had declared (and perhaps believed) that he was a satyr who sought to corrupt young innocents. Consignments of supplies, machinery and what-not else had failed to reach the destination, or had arrived so smashed as to be useless. Marmaduke had grinned, continued grinning, and had won, dying with his boots on six months after Hannah Sanburn was installed in charge, hoping, as th
ey laid him on a stretcher, that the pigs he had slain for sausage-meat might have most of the credit; since it was they who made the mission possible.

  His will, in which he appointed a Tibetan Lama chief trustee, had been a nine days’ wonder, partly because of its novelty, but mostly because that masterly provision introduced an international element, which made it next to impossible for politicians to undo the work. Tibet as a military power cannot be taken seriously: but it is noteworthy that not even “big business” has succeeded in controlling its government or in penetrating its frontiers. The backing of the Dalai Lama is worth more, in some contingencies, than a billion dollars and a million armed men. (There is a European parallel.)

  And the Tashi Lama* is to the Dalai Lama as is the differential calculus to the simple rule of three, only if anything rather more so.

  CHAPTER XXIV. Hanna Sanburn

  My son, the wise are few; for Wisdom very seldom pleases, so that they are few who seek her. Wisdom will compel whoever entertains her to avoid all selfishness and to escape from praise. But Wisdom seeks them who are worthy, discovering some here and there, unstupified and uncorrupted by the slime of cant, with whom thereafter it is a privilege to other men to tread the self-same earth, whether or not they know it.

  — from The Book of the Sayings of Tsiang Samdup

  THERE is a narrow bridge, swung high above a noisy stream, that forms the only practicable gate to Tilgaun. On the Tilgaun side is a high mound that resembles a look-out post, with a big prayer-flag on top that might be the defiant emblem of an army. The track leads below that mound, across a hollow, and climbs again toward the mission, more than a mile away.

  As Ommony rode across the bridge behind the leading Tibetan he was aware of faces peering from the top of the mound beside the prayer-flag. When he was midway over the bridge the faces disappeared. When he reached the foot of the mound there were six Bhutani mission girls standing in a row on the rim of the hollow.

  They wore the Marmaduke Mission costume, which is made from one piece of daffodil-yellow fabric woven on the mission looms. Their hair was decked with flowers, and they were laughing, that being a part of old Marmaduke’s legacy, he having had a notion that to laugh with good reason, is two-thirds of an education. The other third is harder to acquire, but comes much easier because of laughter; or so said Marmaduke, who had considered many pigs, that perished.

  They were not so poised and self-reliant as the Lama’s dancing girls, but they looked marvelously better than the common run of Hill women, and as different from ordinary mission converts as a live trout is from a dead sardine. At a glance it was obvious that nobody had told them they were heathen in their blindness; somebody had shown them how to revel in the sunshine and to wonder at the wine-light of gloaming. It was conceivable that they had studied nature’s mirth instead of watching frogs dissected with a scalpel, and had learned to be amused with each existing minute rather than to meditate on metaphysical conundrums.

  But they had their heritage nevertheless. Their eyes were on Dawa Tsering. It was just as well that there were six of them together.

  Dawa Tsering, gasconading on pony-back with his feet within nine inches of the ground, called two of them by name, inquired about a third who was not there, and asked whether they had forgotten him.

  “I know a good way to remind you who I am!” he boasted, and got off the pony to act the satyr among wood-nymphs. Ommony checked him curtly. He protested:

  “I tell you, Ommonee, the gods make free with women and the devils do the same! It is ridiculous to pretend we are better than gods and devils. What are women for, do you suppose?”

  It was so that they discovered who Ommony was. In that Bhat-Brahmin costume covered by a sheepskin coat and without his beard they had not recognized him. All six looked at him sharply, hesitated, glanced at the sky, accepted that as an excuse, and ran, gathering up the yellow robes and showing copper-colored legs, their long hair streaming in the wind behind them.

  “Why are they afraid of you?” asked Dawa Tsering. “Are you such a terror among women as all that?”

  “It was the rain,” said Ommony. But he knew better. The girls were giggling.

  The sky had clouded over suddenly, and in a moment, on a blast of icy wind, the rain came down in sheets that cut off the view of the mission buildings. The ponies turned their rumps to it and stood, heads down, tails blown tight under. Diana whimpered and took refuge under the end of the bridge, where Ommony joined her; there was no hope of getting the ponies to move until the storm passed. It turned to hail and swept the bridge like concentrated musketry, lightning and terrific, volleying thunderclaps heightening the illusion.

  Twenty minutes later, when the sky cleared as suddenly as it had clouded and the setting sun shone on drifts of melting hail, Ommony saw the drenched girls leave the shelter of a rock and scamper for the mission gate. He did not doubt for one fraction of a moment that they had been sent by Hannah Sanburn to the bridge-end to keep a look-out for him. Discontented — it was aggravating to be treated as a potential enemy — he rode on prepared to see the Lama hurrying away ahead of him.

  However, Hannah Sanburn met him in the gate and laughed at his disguise. He judged she was relieved, not annoyed to see him. There was all the old friendliness expressed on her New England face. Boston, Massachusetts — Commonwealth Avenue or Tremont Street — stood out all over her, even after twenty years of Tilgaun. She was dressed in tailored serge with a camel-hair overcoat turned up to her ears. A wealth of chestnut hair, beginning to turn gray, showed under a plain deerstalker hat. She had not lost one trace of her New England manner — not a vestige of her pride. No weakness, but a firm and comprehending kindness dwelt on the almost manly forehead, at the corners of her mouth and in the grand gray eyes.

  “All alone?” asked Ommony, dismounting, shaking hands. He liked her laughter; it was wholesome, even if she did look quizzically at his jaw and chin that she had never seen before without the modifying beard.

  “Yes, Cottswold. You’re a day late. Tsiang Samdup left this morning.”

  “Why?” he asked bluntly.

  She did not answer but looked straight at Dawa Tsering, nodded, smiled at his sheepish grin, and walked straight up to him.

  “Give me your knife,” she said quietly, and took it from him almost before he guessed what she intended. He made no effort to prevent, but sat still on his pony, looking foolish. “You shall have that back if you behave yourself, not otherwise. If you look twice at one of the mission girls I will order the blacksmith to break your knife in two. You understand me?”

  She made friends with Diana next, saying hardly a word but lifting her by the forelegs to see whether the feet were injured by the long march. The hound accepted her authority as promptly as Dawa Tsering did.

  Stroking Diana’s head with one shapely, rather freckled hand, ordering the Tibetans to lead the ponies to the stable, she led the way into the stone- paved courtyard. Cloistered buildings of worn gray stone formed three sides of it, and in the midst there was an oval mass of flowers, damaged by the hail but gorgeous in the last rays of the setting sun.

  There was a room reserved for Ommony’s exclusive use, in a corner facing that front courtyard, and though he had never used it oftener than once in three years it had always been kept ready for him. Another room, used less seldom, was reserved for Tsiang Samdup in the corner opposite.

  “Mr. McGregor sent your clothes by messenger. You’ll find them all unpacked and cared for — lots of hot water — I’m sorry you can’t grow a beard in fifteen minutes! Come to my room when you’re ready. I’ll take the dog.”

  Ommony shut himself into the room to smoke and think. He dreaded the coming interview more and more, the longer he postponed it — realized that what he most detested, in a world full of discordances, was to have to account for his actions to anyone else. “Marriage might be all right,” he muttered, “if women would govern themselves and concede men the same privilege.”


  He let an hour slip by before he presented himself in Hannah Sanburn’s private room — a long room over an archway leading to an inner cloister, bow-windowed on both sides, paneled in teak, with a blazing fire at one end. The crimson curtains had been drawn; the shaded oil lamps cast a warm glow over everything; a square table had been spread near the fire and Hannah Sanburn was making toast, stepping back and forward cautiously across Diana, who had made herself thoroughly at home on the hearthrug. Old Montagu’s portrait, life-size, head and shoulders, smiled at the scene from the end-wall, the flickering firelight making his shrewd, peculiarly boyish features seem almost ready to step out of the frame and talk.

  It was more difficult than ever to put her to the question in that atmosphere. She had changed into a semi-evening dress, that aged her a little but added an old-worldly charm. It would be difficult to imagine a hostess whom one would less like to offend, and the arrival of bacon and eggs on a silver tray carried by a seventeen-year-old Bhutani girl provided welcome excuse for delay.

  Hannah Sanburn seemed entirely unembarrassed and, if she noticed Ommony’s air of having something on his mind, she concealed the fact perfectly, talking about the events of the mission in a matter-of-fact voice, relating difficulties she had overcome, outlining plans for the future, avoiding anything that might lead to personal issues.

  “I don’t know how much good we’re doing-sometimes I think scarcely any,” she said at last. “We rear and educate these girls. The best ones, of course, stay on for a while as teachers. But they all get married sooner or later and lapse into the old ways. It will be a century at least before this school begins to make much visible impression.”