by Talbot Mundy
“Is there any doubt about the title to the Panch Mahal?” Strange asked abruptly.
“None,” said Ommony.
“The rajah says the priests of some temple or other assert a claim to it under a verbal deed of gift, said to have been made by one of this man’s ancestors.”
“It isn’t legal. They couldn’t establish it in court.”
“If I should buy the place, what could they do?”
“Depends on your state of mind. If you’re nervous or superstitious —
“No!” Strange snorted. “Is that all? No risk of riots?”
“Oh, no.”
“Any risk of the central government objecting?”
“Why should they? It’s the rajah’s private property. If you buy it it’s yours.”
“Will you witness the cash payment and memorandum of agreement?”
“I don’t mind.”
So Jeff and the rajah were summoned into the little file-decked office, and a heap of paper money changed hands that made the rajah’s eyes glisten in spite of himself, and whetted an amazing appetite for more.
“Bought sight unseen,” said Strange. “Now I’ll look the place over. You say it’s furnished?”
The rajah nodded.
“How soon can we go?”
“I’ve only one fresh horse,” said Ommony. “If the rajah’s horse is fit for the return journey he might show you the way at once. Jeff and I can bring along your bag later, if that suits you.”
The rajah was not given to considering horseflesh. Strange considered nothing but his own objective. They two left within the hour, the rajah chattering to Strange like a schoolboy trying to entertain the principal on a picnic.
“How shall we follow without horses?” Jeff demanded. “Yours is dog-tired, and the sore-backed one in the stable isn’t up to my weight.”
But the resources of him who overlords an Indian forest are more ample than appears. Ommony gave orders, and a man went like the wind. Within the hour there came an elephant that knelt at the foot of the verandah steps, and into the howdah went Strange’s bag, and Jeff’s, and Ommony’s, along with food enough for several days’ emergency. Two servants draped themselves in picturesque discomfort on the great brute’s rump. Jeff and Ommony piled in with rifles and shot-guns, and word began to spread in widening rings that the sahibs were off on a hunting trip. The mahout exploded harsh impulse; the mountain moved; the howdah swayed; and they were off.
Men carry their emotions with them, and they are more contagious than disease. There is nothing about a ride on the back of an old cow-elephant to bring good-humour and amusement to the surface, nor yet to drown them under gloom. Ommony’s high spirits shone forth and aroused Jeff to a similar frame of mind. The trap was sprung at last. The forest-devouring ogre had wallowed in. He was jubilant, and in a half-hour Jeff was singing too, trolling out deep bass harmonies that made the mahout and the servants, clinging like apes on perches, thrill and stir until they nearly fell to earth. All India loves a deep voice and a man of muscle.
And because sleep is less an anodyne than a result of poise and the relapse of worry — midway swing of the pendulum, as it were — Ommony fell asleep after a time, curled up with his legs over the hawdah side, dreaming of things a man can’t imagine except at sea, or on the heaving top of an elephant. Bed is a lair of commonplace. Sleep under moving skies, amid experience, and learn! He had a new eye — new confidence when he awoke, having dreamt he saw the wheels and works of Destiny.
He left the elephant resting in the shade of teak trees near the rajah’s palace wall, and entered through the side gate into the garden, where he found Zelmira in the summer-house.
“Quick!” he said, laughing. “Nets and cords! Your biggest veil, and best foot forward! Tiger’s in the trap!”
She ran to her room and came back with head and shoulders wrapped in an enormous motor-veil. You could hardly see her smiles through it, but the thrill was obvious.
“Where’s Charley?” Ommony demanded.
“He’s hopeless. Since the box came he is like a dog with a bone. Nothing else matters. He’s deserted me.”
“Good boy, Charley. We’ll pick him up en route.”
They climbed on the protesting elephant, who argued reasonably that forty miles and a day’s work were the same thing. But the iron ankus overruled protest, and by the time they picked up Charley at the tool-hut the elephant had decided to swing along and get the journey over with. Conversation became next to impossible, as the howdah swung like a small boat in a sea-way and the dusty track payed out behind.
“Is the machine in shape?” asked Ommony.
“I’ve fixed her so she — whoops! Look out!”
Charley hung overside in the spasms of mal de mer, and there was no more conversation to be had from him, except once when he demanded to walk. But when they stopped and let him down he had grown so weak that even with a rope to hold he could not trot alongside; so they had to pick him up again and let him sprawl and suffer.
“What’s your rush?” he demanded through a haze of vertigo. But the explanation was wasted on him; he did not even try to listen to it.
“We’ve got to keep Strange in. Scare him.”
“He’ll pick a quarrel with the rajah when he learns where I’m staying!” Zelmira prophesied.
“So much the better. The rajah’s out of it now. Paris and the white lights for him until the money’s spent!”
Ommony, not all wise — only wise enough to know the probability of guessing wrong — spoke with more assurance than he felt. He had noticed the glint in the rajah’s eye when the money changed hands; he understood the lure of that stuff and the risk of treachery. He was silent for the last hour while the elephant, complaining of aching feet, deliberately made the howdah lurch to inconvenience her living burden. Even the servants were feeling seasick when at dusk the walls of the Panch Mahal came in view, with clouds of screaming parakeets swooping between them and the setting sun. There, by a big tree out of sight of the gate, they all got down except Zelmira, taking out all the luggage except Strange’s bag.
“Take it to him as if it were the most natural thing in the world,” said Ommony; and Zelmira laughed down from the howdah. “If he doesn’t ask where you’re staying, volunteer the information.”
The elephant moved on, seeming to swim in golden dust against the sunset glow with walls of opal for a background. Men built a gorgeous cage for their beloved in the days when that Panch Mahal first rose among primitive trees. At evening it resembles a pearl of prodigious price well set in emerald greenery. Its roofs are domes its walls aged colour, stained and softened and subdued until the whole is lovelier than oyster shells on wet sea-beaches. The screaming of parakeets pierced but failed to break the silence; and in that stillness the elephant’s tired footfall sounded like the beat of muffled drums.
Dame Destiny was at her task, but Ommony proposed to watch her, she being a jade who works her will regardless of laggards. “Here’s opportunity,” she seems to say, and passes on, recalling nothing, changing nothing of her plan, ignoring prayer, not even pausing in her path to laugh at those who clutched and missed. So he is wise who waits alert.
Ommony took the wall and followed that, a shadow casting shadow on the opal, going softly until he reached the corner of the high, projecting gate-arch where the branches of tall trees over-hanging from within combined with the gloaming to make impenetrable gloom.
The elephant was kneeling in the road before the gate. The mahout hammered on old wood with his ankus-butt and the blows rang out like pistol-shots, disturbing parakeets by thousands, sending them screaming in green clouds. But for a long, long time there was no answer. Then, when Ommony, imagining miscues, had thought of all the accidents that might have happened, and knew for certain Strange had gone elsewhere — and the forest was doomed — and his own career was ended — Strange himself came, not to the door, but angrily looking down from above it through an opening in the arch.
Then his quarrelling eye observed a lady on an elephant, and there was pause. He stood still like a baron up above his own portcullis, with stomach thrust out easily over the belt and one hand stroking at his black beard.
“Who are you?” he demanded at last, a second time.
“I’ve brought your bag. I was asked to,” Zelmira called back, grateful for the light behind her that made her no more than a silhouette.
“I can’t see your face.”
“You’re not intended to. That’s why I’m veiled.”
“Your voice sounds familiar.”
“Hadn’t you better come down and get your bag?”
“How does it happen you’re bringing it?”
“Mr. Ommony asked me to.”
“Where’s he?”
“Down the road. He thought I’d get here sooner. Won’t you come down for the bag?”
There were supposed to be servants — caretakers anyhow — somewhere in the building. But even Strange was hardly crude enough to keep her waiting while he should go in search of them, and then find the rajah and get his command interpreted. He grumbled something half under his breath, and started down. Ommony withdrew deeper into the dark angle of the wall.
After a minute’s fumbling at the gate-bolts Strange emerged, and with his chin thrust out and upward — eyes half-closed because of the last rays of sunset — laid a hand on the howdah.
“I can’t see you through that veil,” he said testily.
“You should know me without that, Meldrum!”
“Zelmira!”
“Certainly!”
She drew back the veil and laughed at him. There was nothing that resembled pleading in her method. It was challenge pure and simple, and amusement — even, perhaps, a hint of ridicule.
“How did you get here?” he demanded. By his tone of voice he might have been owner of India from the Hindu Koosh to Comorin.
“By train from Delhi. I’m visiting the Rajah of Chota Pegu. Any objection?”
“How do you propose to get back there tonight?” he demanded, and she laughed outright, for it was the first symptom of his caring even with qualification about anybody else than Meldrum Strange.
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” she answered. “This elephant is tired to death. If the rajah were here—”
“This isn’t his place. I’ve bought it.”
“Oh.”
“That’s the situation.”
“Very well. I’ll sit here until Mr. Ommony comes.”
“How do you happen to know Ommony?”
“I know him quite well. Mr. Ommony expects his sister, you know.”
“Let’s hope she comes!” said Strange, in a voice of absolute disgust. “You need a sensible companion!”
“She may be there this evening. If so, I expect to visit with them.”
So that refuge was cut off! The only line of retreat left open to Strange was away by rail from Chota Pegu station. But in the course of the afternoon men had actually come with carts to carry off the furniture. He had to stay in the neighbourhood and watch, if he hoped to save the very bricks from being stolen. He rubbed his chin, pulled out a cigar, and stuck it between his teeth.
“What’s the game, Zelmira?” he demanded. “Listen, girl you only compromise yourself by visiting with rajahs and tagging me. It won’t get you anywhere. I’m here on business. Now — be sensible, Zelmira. Maybe it’s inconvenient at the moment — so—”
He paused. He was feeling diffident for nearly the first time in his whole career. Suddenly he blurted out the rest of the sentence, in a hurry to get it over with.
“ — let me give you a cheque for expenses, and you go home!”
Zelmira’s eyes were seen to twinkle, even in deepening twilight with her back to the sunset afterglow.
“Do you think that’s polite, Meldrum? Are you afraid of me?” she asked, as merrily as Titania.
He snorted indignantly, because he was afraid of her. Presumably the strongest of us, like Napoleon, have qualms on the eve of our Waterloo. He hesitated, which is always fatal, dallying with brutal ruthlessness in the one hand, courtesy in the other.
Something within him, that he judged was weakness, tipped the scale.
“Well, come inside and wait for Ommony,” he grumbled.
“I can stay out here,” she answered.
“No, come on in.”
He offered his hand to help her down out of the howdah, and presently ushered her in through the ancient gate. The elephant rose and hurried off to somewhere where hundredweights of food were to be had, and Ommony turned back along the wall to where Charley and Jeff and the servants waited.
“Has Chullunder Ghose come?” he asked.
Creaking of wheels in the distance and a string of quaint, complaining oaths announced the babu on the way.
“Oh, you oxen! You are snails reincarnated!” Whack! Whack! “You failed to learn. You shall be snails again Pigeons shall eat you!” Whack! Whack! “Oh, my Karma! What a villain I was formerly that I must endure these consequences now!”
He drew abreast, and the shadows of the men beneath the tree so startled him that he nearly fell from the ox-cart.
“And she said, at the Panch Mahal, yet here they wait. Inaccuracy, O thy name is woman! Orders from a woman are a bellyache — incomprehensible wind and weariness!”
“Have you brought what she told you to?” Ommony demanded.
“Everything plus! Whatever Charley sahib placed in boxes in hut is now here, plus.”
“Plus what?”
“Plus instructions from Lord God Almighty priests of Siva! This babu has received more orders in space of four-and-twenty hours than agency of deity creating universe from protoplasm to humanity, all included. Job not worth it, either. No emolument!”
Ommony and Charley checked over what was in the cart, and Ommony, leaving the servants behind, showed the way to what had once been elephant stalls at the rear of the Panch Mahal. Five brick arches stood in a row intact, and one of them had been boarded up before and behind to make a barn of sorts. There Jeff unloaded cases of paraphernalia, setting them down very carefully under Charley’s supervision. There in the bat-flitting gloom they left Charley alone.
“And now for the really difficult part!” grinned Ommony. “Come on.”
IX.— “TIGER!”
There is a kind of glamour about decadence until it dips too low. Refraction in the unclear atmosphere of low ideals blurs the outline, coaxing imagination to see beauty where none is. Age, toning everything and introducing beauty of its own, imposes charm that glorifies even battlefields, and dead bones please when they are dead enough. So the Panch Mahal was a wonder in its way. They built it for living women two full centuries after Shah Jehan conceived the Taj at Agra for a dead one; and it resembled the Taj as an oleograph by John Smith is said to be “after Rembrandt.”
They improved on the Taj, of course, since civilization and modernity are one. They made it practical, affording space for merrymaking and eliminating austere waste. The money had been sunk in spaciousness instead of exquisite refinement; plaster (peeling now) aped marble walls; and in place of the clean sublimity of line and curve, obscene gods grinned. But in the flickering lamp-light Strange’s new possession seemed passing fair enough.
Strange was sitting in a courtyard, on a stone bench by a dry fountain, with Zelmira laughing at him from the lap of an immoral-looking deity, when Ommony and Jeff walked in.
“Here’s Jeff and his bag,” said Ommony, and raised his hat, nodding to Zelmira. She grinned, and lamp-light shone on her white teeth.
Jeff bade the servants follow him, and wandered off to look for quarters, with an old campaigner’s eye for comfort, and a great dislike for more intrigue than he could anyway avoid.
“How did you get here?” Strange demanded.
“I’ve a bullock-cart. Where’s the rajah?”
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br /> “Lord knows. Can’t find him or servants.”
“We’ve brought some food and Jeff’s man; he can cook supper.”
“Can you take Madame Poulakis back to the palace?” Strange demanded, in a voice of iron. Food was not to be considered in a class with peace.
“If she don’t mind riding in a bullock-cart.”
“That settles it then,” said Strange, and Zelmira exploded laughter into her handkerchief. The man was frank, whatever else.
“Won’t you show us the place?” Ommony wondered.
“Some other time. Come to-morrow.” Strange did not add the word ‘alone’, but he implied it, and Zelmira could hardly get down from the god’s lap for smothered laughter. She, if none else, was enjoying the game.
“Good-bye!” said Strange, and held his hand out, but she curtsied mockingly instead of taking it, and he did not even follow to the gate to see them away in the bullock-cart. By the way he chewed at a cigar and scratched his chin, he was perplexed.
“Chacun a son gout!” said Ommony, who loves to air bad French. “He’s yours! But I can’t think why you want him.”
“Oh, he’s gold!” Zelmira answered. “Gold when you scratch him!”
“I know! But his heart’s brass, and in his boots this minute!”
Strange must have guessed already he was cornered. The rajah had even taken away both horses, but that fact only transpired when someone stopped the squeaking bullock-cart. The oxen shied, as they should not have done, for the man was in Hindu costume — bare legs and a turban, with a white man’s undershirt, and several yards of cotton cloth around his middle. But his first words explained the oxen’s instinct, that detects meat-eating races by the smell street-widths away.
“Everything’s here and it works!” said Charley’s voice.