by Talbot Mundy
“Home.”
“May I see you home?”
“No, it would offend my escort. They are gentlemen who have foregone sleep after a long day’s soldiering merely because it pleases them to protect my dignity, as they express it. I must snub you rather than offend them. Life is a matter of choosing between predicaments.”
“May I see you again?”
“How can you avoid that, if that is destined?”
“You believe in destiny?”
“It makes no difference to destiny whether we believe or not. But you don’t believe? Then why not try going away? There are trains, camels, horses, motorcars — there are even airplanes. Take one. Then you will soon know whether destiny has other intentions.”
“You advise that?”
“Why not? It won’t hurt you. Good night.”
He thought her parting smile was wistful, although he was not sure. She and sadness seemed to have no bond in common, and yet — perhaps it was his own lack of pleasure in life that made him see her through a sad lense. Or perhaps it was moonlight. He could feel his heart thumping and it made him angry; he was a master of men and millions, not a silly emotional ass to be stirred out of his proper orbit by a girl’s smile. He wondered what color her eyes were. How little and light she looked; how tall and graceful when the ayah followed and touched her sari that she wore like a Roman toga; how small when the seven-man escort formed up two by two and tramped behind her, one man grunting gruff commands and giving them the tempo, sotto voce — left — left — left! Probably a thousand pounds or so of bearded bone and muscle, fit to fight its weight in anything that breathed. Tamed by a girl who walked like something flowing in the moonlight.
“Guess I’m going crazy.”
Joe turned about, and found Hawkes facing him. The jail door was shut and the sentry was pacing his beat with shouldered carbine. Chandri Lal, sweating and breathing heavily, drew near and squatted with his basket in front of Joe.
“How do you like her?” Hawkes asked.
“She’s surprising. What does that fool want now?”
“Nothing — I mean anything. Shall I kick him?”
“No. Tell him to go to the devil.”
Joe strode to where the horses waited with their reins tied to a grinning god’s leg by the fountain. In the shadow beneath the Waler’s belly the ayah crouched, shrugging herself.
“Damn you,” he told her, “you stink and you’re too much contrast. You offend my sense of harmony. Go home. Do you hear me? Beat it!”
But the ayah watched dumbly until he swung himself into the saddle; and when he rode away she followed, like a good dog padding, uncomplaining, in the dust.
CHAPTER VIII. “Do I get my money?”
Joe’s first reaction took the form of anger against Hawkes and Annie Weems. To have allowed a white girl to be brought up by Indian priests seemed to him criminal. To have contributed toward her education without denouncing the arrangement was conspiracy. Money-hunger, no doubt. Educate the girl to have contempt for money; then, when she comes of age and gets some, make her sign it all away before she wakes up. Old game. That’s the way religious institutions grow rich. Disappointment — no money after all — all right — beautiful, isn’t she? — marry her off to some fat scoundrel who will pay a stiff price.
“Are you satisfied, sir?”
Hawkes, riding alongside, eyed him almost wistfully. The moonlight, full in Hawkes’ face was like a Broadway spotlight advertising the price at which a commodity is practically given away — a thousand pounds — dirt cheap — and convenient easy payments if preferred. Commodity, however, rather evasively guaranteed.
“Satisfied of what?”
“Of her identity. Do I get my money?”
The sleepy Arab stumbled on a loose stone hidden in the dust, causing Joe to bite off the first few syllables of his answer:
“ — see mother about it.”
“All right, sir.”
Joe began to wonder what he should say to his mother. If he had had a thousand pounds of his own money he would probably have paid Hawkes there and then. But his mother’s habit was to make Joe pay the expenses out of his quite moderate income and to take her time before she reimbursed him — a system thoroughly characteristic of her. It enabled her to know what he did with his income; when he needed money he had to explain to her why he wanted it and to submit to lectures on extravagance. Of course, he had a big letter of credit with him, but if he drew against that his mother would know in no time. He might give Hawkes a check on a New York bank and write a letter asking the bankers to pay the check on presentation. But Hawkes would probably not know how to handle such a check and would almost certainly take it either to a native banker or to one of his officers, either of whom would start gossip circulating.
Lees of Joe’s many suppressions were boiling up and their fumes half-blinded him. The midnight of his discontent was worse than its moonless gloom had been. He had seen a new moon — come to think of it, the new moon was a suggestive symbol of her — beautiful — emerging suddenly out of obscurity after nights of darkness. And the glimpse had only made him feel more miserable. When they reached the hotel he was curt and something less than decently polite; he threw the reins to Hawkes and, hardly pausing to thank him, hurried to his room.
“See you some time to-morrow.”
He had a cot on the verandah on the side of the hotel that faced a line of low hills; there was nothing very alluring about them by full moonlight; they suggested to Joe’s mind dry bones of monsters that died of weariness. He turned his back to them and lay facing the wall, cursing the stuffy mosquito net that smelled of sour dust. Sleep repudiated him. He lay thinking, and his thought was broken into instalments by the gusts of native servants’ snoring and the irritating, hysterical barks of a jackal fossicking for filth. He wished he had stayed in New York — wished he had done anything but come to India.
He began to hate his mother, not because he thought the effort worth while but because it kept a more important thought veiled in the background; and he understood perfectly, too, that hatred of his mother was merely a form of self-contempt in a particularly ugly mask. He told himself, for at least the hundredth time that year, that if he were a man he would have cut adrift from his mother long ago; a man who would endure what he did for a pittance of fifteen thousand a year and the prospect of inheriting control of millions was not a real man, he was a coward — a spineless nincompoop. Nevertheless, although he writhed at his own accusation while he let its lash bite inward, he knew, but refused to admit, its gross unfairness. No son of his mother, tutored and dragooned from infancy by her, could escape from her toils without violence. She was a Clytemnestra, only to be overcome by being slain. Nero did it. Joe was no Nero, and he had no desire to be one.
Moonlight helped him to imagine endless ramifications of that theme, including theories of poetic justice, easier to contemplate than to believe really possible.
At three in the morning, by the alarm-clock of the man who had to take the mail-bag to the so-called midnight train, he sat up in a long-armed chair to face the problem of Amrita and his own reaction to that strange encounter near the prison gate. Even indignation at his mother failed to blot Amrita’s image from his mind. The color of her eyes still baffled him. The instant he let his thought have rein she sprang to life in his imagination, color, line and gesture. He had the artist’s faculty of summoning from vacancy a thing once seen. He could have drawn her there and then. His long strong fingers itched to do it, as they had never itched for money or for anything else he could remember.
It was rather a shock to discover what an inroad she had made into his consciousness. Perhaps surprise accounted for it; she was so totally different from any one he had supposed she might resemble. He yielded only very gradually, thought by thought, until he admitted to himself at last that she had made an impression on him far too deep to be accounted for by logical analysis. He liked her. He liked her strangely. He liked h
er far more than he had ever, in all his life, liked any one at first sight. He liked her so much that it made him angry to include her in the same thought with his mother.
What, he wondered, would his mother do with her — if — if — if his mother ever learned of her existence. Instantly, he knew his mother would begin to sharpen strategy. His mother had imagined some one of the “Orphant-Annie” type, who might be broken to her will and added to the list of sycophants. She would no more tolerate her as a high-spirited, intelligent and independent protegee than an old she-wolf will tolerate a new young female in the lair; her fangs might be better concealed than a wolf’s and not so sudden, but they would be much more cruel.
Well, it was none of his business. But that thought made him restless. He could make it his business, couldn’t he? Should he permit his mother to ruin that bright young girl, simply because she had dared to meet her son by moonlight and was possessed of attractive manners, charm and good-looks? Here was once when his mother should be outmaneuvered. But how?
Why tell her? Why not pull out on the afternoon train? Why not leave Amrita to the gods, as Cummings had suggested — futile fool! He hated to adopt that tame cat’s flatulent suggestion, but it seemed the best one after all. Joe had seen too many people ruined by his mother’s malice. He had rescued a few, although he had to do it treacherously, dropping warning hints that always were interpreted as glimpses of his own infernal cunning. It was no wonder the people he saved never liked him afterward — no wonder he had so few friends — such a host of discreet acquaintances.
Well, this could be one time when his mother need not know a thing about his strategy. Neither need the potential victim know. He would run no risks. He would never see the girl again and she should never guess who he was or how close she had come to the claws of an ogress.
“Ogress?” he said to himself. “Ogress? By God, I believe that’s what mother actually is. Catherine of Russia — Catherine de Medici — those two were gentle sheep compared to Kitty Beddington.”
He would write Hawkes a draft for a thousand pounds — say for five thousand dollars, payable on presentation in New York. He would hand it to him, to hold his tongue. He would get Hawkes’ written promise, ever more to hold his tongue. Hawkes would be afraid to talk until the draft was paid; payment might be stopped by cablegram unless the stipulation about silence was fulfilled. Meanwhile he would send a cablegram in code to New York and get the office to summon him home. His mother would have to go home too.
He liked the program, and the thought of home was pleasant in his psychic nostrils; so that when morning came he shaved with some contentment, whistled in his bath, dressed without as much as noticing the yellow-eyed servant who got in his way, packed his own trunk with methodical deliberation, and ate breakfast without swearing at the waiter. Then he went for a ride on a hotel hack to kill time until the ogress should be up and on the war-path. The word ogress amused him. Funny that he had not thought of her before in that light. The word unaccountably clipped her sting — clipped off the worst of it; he feared her far less as an ogress than as a natural human being. There was something even comical about the word.
It rather annoyed him to see the ayah, lean and tireless but a little sulky-looking, climb to high ground whence, he supposed, she intended to watch him. It annoyed him more to notice Chandri Lal with a basket of snakes on his head come trotting behind in the dust. He afforded Chandri Lal some exercise by cantering the raw-boned hack for several miles and returning to the hotel by a different route, remembering legends about Indians hounding people to their death by merely following them — following — saying nothing.
As he neared the hotel he began to consider how to get in touch with Hawkes in order to complete the business with him before train-time. He had a proper speech all set for Hawkes; what with that, and the quiet conceit that he was planning the most gentlemanly action of his life — he was feeling in fine humor.
So it rather dashed his spirits to see Chandri Lal and the ayah sitting side by side, a yard or two apart, beneath a tree in the hotel compound; they appeared to be laughing — perhaps at the snake-charmer’s knowledge of short-cuts across country, or perhaps at that other unpleasantly ominous sight that greeted him. Hawkes on a good-looking horse with a pipe in his mouth was riding away from the hotel; Joe’s mother was up and having breakfast on the verandah instead of in her room. There were three crows on the verandah railing. Three crows.
Joe’s instantly assumed air of nonchalance did not deceive his mother for a moment, any more than her wave of the hand and invitation to what she called coffee deceived him. It was some sort of coffee substitute, as much like the real thing as his greeting and hers. There was war between them, for the thousandth time, and both knew it, although both concealed it, as he sat down to sip at the Borgian brew that his mother mixed for him with her own bejeweled fingers.
“Did you enjoy your ride, my boy?”
“No, Mother.”
He forgot he had enjoyed it. Even had he not forgotten, he would probably have lied. He was half-panicky. Rebellion had come. He, Joe Beddington, had raised his standard, secretly as yet, but with a determination that seemed, even to him, out of all proportion to the issue; and he hardly knew yet what the issue was.
“Did you make nice sketches last night?”
“No. Mother, why stay on in this infernal hole? Let’s go. I’ve packed my trunk. Let’s take the afternoon train.”
He hit something and she almost blinked; but she was as skilful as a Mongol empress at hiding astonishment. Her answering voice was pitched a half-note lower than the normal, with its harshness in abeyance.
“Joe, dear, I have made all sorts of plans to photograph the caverns near here. I have even wired for an electric-light plant.”
“Wire and cancel it then. Here — I’ll send for a blank — I’ll write it for you.”
“No, Joe. Mr. Cummings has arranged for coolies and all kinds of assistance. He has even set men exploring to find passages that may have been forgotten for centuries. Even if I didn’t wish to make the photographs, I can’t be rude to Mr. Cummings.”
“I’ve known you rude enough when it suited you to be. Mother — why waste time on this damned wilderness when India is chock-a-block with things worth seeing? Order your electric-light plant shipped to Benares. There’s a place worth photographing.”
“No, Joe, every one has done Benares. Here I’ve a chance to get something unique. Who knows? I might find a sort of Tut-ankh-Amen’s tomb! At least I’ll have photos that no one else can duplicate.”
Neither of them even hinted at what was uppermost in both minds. Each knew that the other was masking the real objective. Habit lay strong on Joe; in the face of firm finality, as usual, he blustered to cover his search to discover an opening on the flank of the position — tactics taught him by his mother, and that she understood and read as swiftly as if he personally had explained them to her.
“Look here, Mater.” It was always mater, not mother, when Joe was angry. “I came on this idiotic tour to oblige you. I’ve put up with all the boredom of it, and I’ve done my best to see that you got all the enjoyment possible. Now it’s no more than fair that you should move on to oblige me. I hate this place. It’s on my nerves. I can’t sleep. Lay awake all last night. There isn’t a decent horse or a decent meal to be had, and there isn’t a decent man to talk to.”
Skilfully she heaped a little fuel on his fire. “Joe, dear, Mr. Cummings is very interesting.” She knew exactly what he thought of Cummings.
“That ass!”
She incited him a little further; he was check-mate now in one move:
“If you weren’t so self-opinionated you could improve your mind and learn a great deal by studying Mr. Cummings’ methods of administration. There is always something to be learned, everywhere. And with Mr. Cummings so obliging and willing to—” Joe exploded. “Damn Cummings! The very sight of him upsets me. Pompous imbecile! If he were any one, at his a
ge be wouldn’t be relegated to obscurity in a jerk-water hole like this. See here: there’s a limit to what I’ll endure, and I tell you, I’m through with this place. I’m going. I’ve packed my trunk. You’d better pack yours too and plan to take the afternoon train. Kiss Cummings on both cheeks and promise to send him some picture post-cards.”
“Very well, Joe. You take the afternoon train and amuse yourself somewhere else. I’ll stay on here and take my photographs. I think you’re right. You’re suffering from boredom. You go. I’ll stay.”
Check-mate! He knew now, Hawkes had told her about Amrita. He had been willing to leave the girl in the lap of the gods, as Cummings phrased it; but to his mother’s machinations — not exactly! Under his mother’s calmly observant eyes he instantly maneuvered to recover lost ground:
“Nonsense, Mater! How can I go and leave you here?”
“I am not exactly helpless, Joe. I even managed nicely before you were born. It wasn’t you who taught me how many beans make five.”
“I suppose you would like to be able to throw in my teeth for ever afterward that I left you on your own resources and at Cummings’ tender mercy?”
“Mr. Cummings is at least a gentleman. I think you had much better take the afternoon train, and not let Mr. Cummings bear you talk to me like that. Where do you propose to go from here?”
Joe ignored the question. Exasperated, he launched another — a shot at random: “Been talking to Cummings about me, have you? I suppose he told you I should have gone to an English public school.”
“Is there anything more natural than that I should talk about you?” she retorted.
“I don’t discuss you with strangers.” He knew he often did; and she, too, knew it.
“Why not? Are you ashamed of your mother?” He recognized defeat. He accepted it there and then by reaching for his hat and stalking off to chew the cud of solitary discontent. Defeat pro tem, at all events.
And not one word, by either of them, about Amrita who was uppermost in both their minds.