by Talbot Mundy
“All right, sir, I’ll be frank too. If it’s unlawful, the answer’s no. If it’s dirty, it’s no. If it’s merely risky — yes, provided the pay fits the risk. If it’s difficult, so much the better.”
“It probably is difficult. I want to find some one whose name I don’t know, and whose age I can only guess approximately. She may be dead, but if she is I want to see proof. She may know who she is; she may not.”
“Woman, eh? White?”
“United States American of Scotch, Welsh and Irish ancestry.”
“Age?
“Roughly, twenty-one.”
“Present information?”
“None whatever — except that her parents died in this district, of cholera, about twenty-one years ago.”
Hawkes whistled — sharp — flat — then natural. There was a distinct pause. Then, in a normal voice:
“Sounds vague enough. I can try, sir.”
“The parents of this child had a Goanese butler — a man named Xavier Braganza — who also died of cholera. But before he died he told a Catholic missionary and several other people that the native wet-nurse — the ayah as he called her — had carried the child away and vanished. But — and this is about all the clue we have — he added that the ayah was an idolatrous heathen without a trace in her of any sort of virtue, who would probably keep the child in hiding until old enough for sale.”
“About twenty-one years ago, sir, this district was almost wiped out by cholera. Nearly all the white officials died. Records got lost and stolen — some o’ them got burned — the dacoits came down from the hills and plundered right and left, taking the cholera back with ’em, so that it spread into Nepaul. Almost anything a man can think of might have happened.”
“There’s one reason why I want this search kept quiet. Possibly the child was sold into a harem or something worse. If so, and we find her, it might be a lot too late to help her. Do you understand me? There might be legal difficulties, even if her character weren’t rotted to the core. It might be useless or even cruel to give her a hint of who she is.”
A quarter-tone change in Hawkes’ voice suggested alertness and a vague suspicion: “Any money coming to her?”
“Of her own? No. Her mother, though, was my mother’s youngest bridesmaid. There was a very strong friendship between them. If this girl should be found, and should prove to be not too far socially and morally sunk my mother would see to it that she should never lack for money.”
“Hell’s bells! Fairy godmothers are always other people’s luck,” said Hawkes. “Myself, I was an orphan once, and butter wouldn’t have melted in my mouth, I was that sweet and guileless. Any one who’d claimed me might ha’ raised me for a duke and done a proud job. I could ha’ rolled in millions and done credit to the money. However, they raised me in a London County Council Institute, and it weren’t a bad place either. When I was old enough I was sent to sea on a training-ship, to the tune of a heap o’ blarney about Nelson o’ the Nile — and Admiral Sir Francis Drake — and Britain needs no bulwarks. I served three years apprenticeship, and I’m still wondering what Nelson found that made life tolerable. So I quit the sea and joined the army — and here I am, what might have been a millionaire, if only millionaires had sense and knew a promising orphan when they see one. Hide up now, sir. — Nautch is coming.”
“Why hide?”
“Well, sir, it’s like some husbands with their wives. The husband knows — you bet he knows, but all he asks is not to catch her at it; he’s conventional, but he’s tolerant; so, if she’ll give him half a chance, he’ll look the other way. Same here; there are about as many eyes in this here dark as there are mosquitoes; they know we’re here, and it’s against their law and custom; but they’re good, kind-hearted folks, so if we act half respectful o’ their prejudices they’ll take care to seem to look the other way. Get right down in the ditch, sir — no, no snakes, I saw to that — if you should lie on that piece o’ sacking and set your elbows on the bank you’ll get a good view.”
A gong sounded and Hawkes knocked his pipe against his boot to empty it. There came a surging of excitement from the trees, where probably a thousand Hindus shuffled for position. They seemed to try to make-believe they were in hiding, as if tradition had made that a part of the ritual; they resembled a stage ambush. The moon had risen until shadow of dome and wall were short enough to leave a dusty road uncovered, pale, with undetermined edges. The temple wall where the Yogi sat beside his beehive hut was already bathed in light and the Yogi no longer looked like a bas-relief, nor even like a statue; he sat motionless, but he looked human, although indifferent to the woman who lay flat on the earth in front of him still sobbing her petition:
“Speak, thou holy one, thou man of wisdom!”
In a side-mouth whisper Hawkes interpreted her words to Joe.
Music — strange stuff that made Joe Beddington’s spine tingle — music with a rhythm no more obvious at first than that of wind in the trees or water flowing amid the boulders of a ford. It was several minutes before the musicians appeared from around the curve of the high wall — a group of about twenty men in long loin-cloths, naked from the waist up, not even marching in step but nevertheless appearing to obey one impulse. On either side of them, in single file, walked a line of lantern bearers with the lanterns hung on long sticks. There were only two small drums; the remainder were weird wind-instruments, creating a timeless tune that seemed to have no connection with another system of sounds from an unseen source, which nevertheless insisted on the ear’s attention and in some way emphasized the melody.
Then came priests — not less than fifty of them, draped in saffron colored linen but each man’s naked belly gleaming in the moonlight. They bore all sorts of mysteries of many shapes, including some that resembled chalices of jeweled gold. There were censers, too, and a reek of incense made from pungent gums whose smell stirred imagination more commandingly than ever pictured symbols did. More lantern bearers in a group — and then the sistra and some things like castanets, creating that sea of sound which underlay and permeated the music. It was pleasing but not satisfying; it stirred an unfamiliar emotion and awakened nerves not normally self-assertive. Beddington spared one swift glance along the lane of moon-white dust and saw that the music had stirred the waiting Hindus to the verge of hysteria; they were leaping like shadows of flames on a wall; he himself felt an impulse to do something of the sort. Only a habit restrained him. His will urged. He wanted to do it.
“Ever hear of magic?” Hawkes asked in a whisper. “That’s it. But that’s not half of it. Watch what’s coming.”
In one sense it was utterly impossible to watch what came; the eye refused obedience; it was hypnotic motion controlled with such consummate skill that it stirred more psychic senses than the onlooker ever knew he had. Instead of seeing about a hundred dancing women draped in filmy pale-blue stuff like jeweled incense smoke, and chanting as they danced, their bare feet silent in the dust, their ankles clashing with golden bracelets, Beddington’s imagination leaped to grapple with those mysteries the dance was meant to symbolize. It was no dance in the ordinary meaning of the word, and yet it made all other dancing seem like stupid repetition of a common catch-phrase. This was as exciting and elusive as the flow of life into the veins of nature. It was as maddening as a fight between strong men or as the sea-surf pounding on a moonlit reef. It was as difficult to watch as one wave in a welter with the wind across the tide. Its movement seemed inevitable — timed — yet so much more than three-dimensional that no one pattern could include it and no eye could define its rhythm. Something in the fashion of the firefly dance, it seemed to link the finite with the infinite.
Beddington forced himself to speak. He was afraid of his own emotions and aware of impulse to obey them. Down the lane of moonlight he could see the Hindus making, as he phrased it, asses of themselves. He did not propose to let hysteria swallow him too.
“My God, Hawkes, I’ve seen a temple nautch or two, a
nd durbar nautches by the dozen. They were all the bunk. I’d heard of things like this but — this is beyond reason. It’s—” “Impossible, ain’t it?” said Hawkes. “But it’s true all the same. And it’s nothing to what goes on inside the temple.”
“How do you know?”
“Oh, I’ve heard tell.”
Hawkes was lying, and Joe knew it, but he let that pass. He had an eye for line and color and an ear for music; vaguely he had always thought the three were varying aspects of one supersensual phenomenon, but now he understood it — though he could not have told how he did. He was in the grip of excitement that made him want to laugh and cry and swear, all in one meaningless spasm. There was more beauty visible at one time, forced on his attention, than his untrained senses and his prisoned intellect could endure without reeling. He could hear a voice that might, or might not be his own — he did not know, chanting in Greek elegiacs, lines from Homer’s Iliad that he had not looked at since he left the university. And then climax — perfect and beyond words incomparable.
Borne on a litter by four white bulls, on a throne beneath a peacock canopy formed by the spread of the bird’s tail, sat the high priest in his vestments, bearing in his hands a globe of carved crystal containing a light like a jewel. At each corner of the four-square platform of the litter stood a young girl as if supporting the canopy. One breast of each was showing. They were draped in crimson filmy stuff that dimmed while it revealed their outlines. The four bulls and their burden were surrounded and followed by a waving mystery of peacock-feather fans and colored lights that inter-blended in the smoke of incense and the rising dust. They appeared to be towed, bulls and all, by the stream-like motion of the nautch-girls, as if magic had harnessed poetry by unseen traces, guiding it with reins invisible. Then, like a guard of nature forces, four by four, a hundred priests came marching, each disguised in mask and robe suggesting one of the four mystic elements of Fire, Air, Earth and Water. Silence. Dust ascending in the moonlight. And then Hawkes spoke:
“They’ll be back about three in the morning. Would you swap that for the stage o’ Drury Lane, sir? It don’t mean nothing to me. And yet it means so much that I feel like turning pious. It’s the thirteenth time I’ve seen it. Twice I saw it in the monsoon, with the girls all slick and wetted down with rain until the lot of ’em seemed naked — mud as slippery as oil, and not a foot set wrong — wind and rain in their faces — moon under the clouds and branches blowing off the trees. They liked it, if a grin means anything. What would you say it all means?”
“Damned if I know.” Joe crawled out from the ditch and straightened himself, rubbing an elbow that had “gone to sleep” from resting on the sun-baked earth. “They probably don’t know either. The meaning of things like that gets lost in the course of centuries. Do you suppose all those red jewels glowing on the high priest’s robe are genuine rubies?”
“So they say, sir. Why not?”
“Who is that?”
Hawkes hesitated, and disguised the hesitation by spitting into the embers of the fire.
“There’s all sorts, sir, connected with the temple.”
A woman — quite young, if the set of her shoulders and the grace of her motion were any criterion — came along the path the procession had taken. She was heavily veiled. As she passed the Yogi she saluted him with both hands to her eyes, but he took no notice.
The ayah knelt to her, murmuring what seemed like praises and, seizing the end of her sari, pressed it to her lips. She took a little notice of the ayah — not much. She seemed more inclined to notice Hawkes, but Hawkes deliberately turned his back toward her. Joe laughed.
“Scared of women?”
“Can’t be too careful, sir.”
Six of the native troopers strode forth from the shadow, halted, formed up two deep, waited for the girl — then, one of them giving the gruff command, they trudged off, two in front of her, four following. She might have been their prisoner, except that the escort looked too proud, and she too sure of herself. It seemed to Joe that she was staring at him through her veil; however, he, too, thought it better to be careful. He walked over to where the Yogi sat as motionless as stone and stared at him instead.
The ayah clutched at Joe’s legs, imprecating or else begging, it was hard to tell which. Chandri Lal ran forward to prevent her, but the Yogi stopped him with a monosyllable.
“What does she want?” Joe asked him.
The Yogi answered in English: “She wants instruction.”
“Why not give it to her?”
The Yogi stared — smiled — spoke at last, in a deep voice, rich with humor:
“Give? Do you give always what is asked? o’ man from Jupiter!”
CHAPTER II. “You are an egg that is about to hatch”
Joe stared. The Jupiter Chemical Works, of which his mother owned control by virtue of a trust deed drawn with much more foresight and determination than the Constitution of the United States, is notorious and he understood that perfectly. He was used to seeing his name in newspapers that denounced him one day as a wealthy malefactor and the next day, when he made a donation to something or other, praised him as a pioneer in the forefront of civilization — so used to it that he had ceased to laugh. He had ceased, too, to concern himself about it, having long ago learned that the son of a trust deed drawn by his mother’s lawyers in her favor is as helpless as the husband of a reigning queen. He could not even hire and fire the men who wrecked the company’s rivals, bribed and blackmailed politicians, cheated law and obliged him to take public blame for what they did, while his mother banked the dividends. He understood the hatred and the flattery of crowds, and could even sympathize. But it puzzled him that a nearly naked Yogi, all those thousands of miles away from New York, should know his business. It was like a slap in the face.
“Why do you call me that?” he demanded.
“The strongest line on your forehead is that of Jupiter,” the Yogi answered. “It is long, strong, straight — and it is deepest when you smile, which is as it should be. But you were born with the rising sign of Gemini. If it had been Aries, no mother, nor any woman, nor any combination of men, however masterful, could have held you fettered. Even as it is, you are no woman’s plaything.”
Joe shrugged his shoulders. He was not his mother’s plaything, simply and only because she did not know how to play. She had no more sense of fun in her than Clytemnestra; no more lyrical delight in unreality than a codfish. Owner of banks and trusts and factories, all did her bidding or else learned the discontent of being toads under a roller.
And he could swear on his oath, as a man who had tried it, that astrology was stark, unmitigated bunk. He had studied it, using Newton’s method. For his own amusement he had tried it on the rhythmic rise and fall of stock exchange quotations, and he found it rather less reliable than broker’s tips, or than the system with which idiots lose their money at Monte Carlo.
“Smile!” said the Yogi. “Always smile when we ignorant folk offend your honor’s wisdom!”
Hawkes intervened. As showman for the night he felt his pride involved again. “Say,” he objected, “has some one fed you lemons? Here’s a gentleman who’s acted generous. He’s paid his money, no matter who you gave it to. Now act honest and do what he paid for. Tell his fortune.”
“Do you demand that?” asked the Yogi, staring at Beddington.
“Tell hers,” he answered. The ayah was clutching his ankles again.
“I will tell it to you,” said the Yogi. “It was you who paid, and it is true I accepted the money, although I did not keep it. Should you in turn tell her what I tell you, that is your responsibility. I advise — I warn you not to, that is all.”
“How in hell can I tell her? I don’t know her language.”
“Telling what should not be told — and hell — are as cause and effect,” said the Yogi. “She is a fool, that ayah. You will look far for a fool who has greater faith and charity. But who can make a fool wise?”
“Are you wise?” Joe asked him.
“No,” said the Yogi, “but wiser than she is — and wiser than you, or you would not have asked me. That fool — that charitable, faithful fool desires to know what shall become of her child, who now no longer is a child, but full grown and aware of the blood in her veins, and of her sex, and of the sin of inertia. A riddle is better than speech misunderstood, so I will speak in riddles. This shall happen to her: a war within herself — a worse than ever soldiers wage with bayonets. She shall be torn between the camel of her obstinacy, the horse of her ambition, the mule of her stupidity, and the elephant of her wisdom. When those four have pulled her enough apart, a devil may enter into her, or ten devils — or perhaps a benign spirit — who knows? It depends on at least a hundred thousand million influences, each one of which in former lives she wove into her character. Do you understand that? No, of course you don’t. Nevertheless, I have answered you. So go away and think about it. Doubt it — deny it — believe it — mock — swear — take or leave it — it is all one to me. I have told you the truth.”
Chandri Lal was whispering to the ayah. Apparently he knew English — possibly enough to misinterpret what he heard. At any rate he understood the ayah and her hunger for information, which was hardly keener than his own craving for money. She had money.
“Heavenborn,” he began, “Holy one!” Then, seeing that the Yogi took no notice of him, he addressed Hawkes in the vernacular. Hawkes, nothing loath, interpreted:
“He says,” said Hawkes, “that ayah wants to know, shall her child be a queen — a royal ranee?”
“Tell her,” suggested Beddington.
“She can be,” said the Yogi. “I have cast her horoscope. If she is brave, she can be a queen over herself. She has resources and a struggle is impending. Nay — I will say no more. I am in debt to that fool woman for necessities. Shall I repay her with speech that will stick like a barb in her heart? Shall I use my wisdom to unbridle folly? Nay, nay. There is a time for silence.”