Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “He means,” explained Amrita, “that a venerable Yogi taught him.”

  “He wasn’t pious,” Hawkes objected.

  “Venerable people never are,” she answered, fingering the keys. She struck chords like Stravinsky’s — several in quick succession to a startling tempo. “Venerable people laugh with God instead of making faces at Him. That Yogi who taught you, Hawkesey—” “Swag-bellied old corner-man, as full of repartee as a big drum’s full o’ thunder.”

  “ — is an ex-subadar-major of Bengal cavalry. They say he can talk with tigers and that wild birds come when he calls them.”

  “Do you believe that?” Joe asked.

  “Why not? It isn’t difficult. But it’s bad for the birds and tigers. They learn to trust people. Do you trust people?”

  Annie Weems returned into the room, a wee mite ruffled, mastering indignation.

  “Scream,” Amrita suggested. But she suddenly left the piano and sat on the arm of Annie Weems chair. “Was she as cruel as all that?”

  “She accused me of raising you for blackmail purposes.”

  Joe flushed with shame. “Did she use those words?” he asked.

  “No. She merely said that she is blackmail-proof but that if I care to talk with her attorneys she will give me their address.”

  Joe swore under his breath.

  “Explode!” Amrita urged. “You man from Jupiter, one of these days you will kill some one, or else some one will kill you. You vibrate like hell with the lid shut, as Hawkesey would say.”

  “Hell?” said Hawkes. “My dreams of affluence — ten centuries — a thousand quid—” He eyed Joe sideways. Joe observed him without comment. Amrita observed both of them.

  “Are you a mean man?” she asked suddenly. “You don’t look it.”

  Joe stared at her. “Damned if I know,” he answered. He continued to stare. She returned it. He perfectly understood that she was in some way reading his character. He did not mind. He felt no impulse to deceive her as a man normally does when a woman tries to understand him. He could see the color of her eyes at last — deep blue with a hint of violet. He wondered whether she was really beautiful or whether he was prejudiced and perhaps not seeing accurately.

  “I would like to paint your portrait,” he said abruptly.

  “Why? If you are really skilful you can only paint your own opinion of me.”

  “Are you afraid of my opinion?”

  “I’m afraid you might produce a lie and hate that. Next, you’d hate me. Painters become enamored of their models, but they end by kicking them out-of-doors.”

  “Are you afraid of my falling in love with you?”

  “One can only fall out of love, not into it. One might as well talk of falling on to horse-back or falling up a mountain. Love? Climb and find it! Wings — you need wings and speed and courage to come within a million miles of love. That’s closer than most folk come. Most of them catch their mates with traps or quicklime and then cage them and say Sing! Those fall hard, and it hurts them. Didn’t you fall hard enough this morning?”

  “Who taught you to be cynical?”

  She laughed. Hawkes almost jeered. Annie Weems glanced at the clock and excused herself, saying she had a new cook who needed attention. She paused in the door of the passage that led to the kitchen:

  “Rita cynical?”

  “Cynical!” Hawkes echoed. “Shall I show the cook potatoes a la Kaiser Bill?” He followed Annie Weems into the kitchen.

  “So it offends them to hear you called cynical?”

  “They think it’s funny.”

  She settled down into the armchair. Joe decided she was genuinely beautiful. She reminded him of some one — some actress — he couldn’t remember who.

  “Are you a fatalist?” he asked her suddenly.

  “That is like asking me, am I a fool. Destiny is — whether or not we believe it. Fate is what overtakes fatheads.”

  Joe winced. He did not like her to use Hawkes’ phrases. Was he jealous of Hawkes? He wondered. It might not be a bad idea to pay Hawkes that thousand pounds — he might quit the army — leave India. But —

  “Do you know Maharajah Poonch-Terai?” he asked.

  “Indeed I do. Fate.”

  “Your fate?”

  “Trying to masquerade as destiny.”

  “I can’t see any difference.”

  “There isn’t much. It’s like the difference between day and night, that’s all. Opposite sides of one idea.”

  “We are slaves of destiny?”

  She laughed. “We are slaves of fate, if we don’t rebel against it. I’m a rebel. Aren’t you?”

  Joe did riot wish to think about his mother just then.

  “Was I destined to fall from a horse this morning?”

  “Fated. Destiny is our servant. We create destiny. Fate is created for us by the things we do or don’t do.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Fate did! And destiny saved you. Something you did to some one else, in this life or another one, produced its exactly measured consequences and—” “It was Poonch-Terai who bunted into me — on purpose.”

  “That makes no difference, except to him. He set new consequences cycling on their course; he will have to meet them whenever the clock strikes, and it is sure to strike at an inconvenient moment. Possibly you injured him some time.”

  “I never met the man before.”

  “How do you know? Can you prove you didn’t? What were you, and where were you, before you were born, say, thirty years ago? However, possibly you didn’t injure him. You did wrong to some one, or you wouldn’t have had wrong done to you this morning. On the other hand, you had built up destiny. Fine things — splendid, noble, magnanimous things you did in former lives, or possibly in this one, built up forces that saved you. Probably you call it accident, but it makes no difference what you call it. Names don’t alter cases. What does make a difference, is, how you behaved when it happened. If you had turned on Poonch-Terai and beaten him, you would have set new consequences cycling for yourself. That is what was meant by turn the other cheek; you not only learn self-control and build up character but you also pay forgotten debts and create new destiny with which to meet fate when it happens. It’s like the difference between having money in the bank, at compound interest, and incurring debts at compound interest. Every time you pay a debt you make a friend, and the quicker you pay the less it costs you.”

  Joe smiled. “Rather a complicated scheme of things.”

  “So is astronomy, complicated. So are biology — chemistry — law. And yet it’s all divinely simple. Reread history and see whether it doesn’t fit what you call the complicated scheme of things. Try to make it not fit; you can’t without distorting all the facts.”

  “Do you mean, for instance, that I’ve met you in a former life?”

  “Of course you have. Lots of times, in lots of former lives.”

  “And my mother?”

  “Certainly. You can’t create an intimate relation such as that by accident. It must have taken millions of incidents to bring you two to a point where you could help each other best in just that way.”

  “Help each other? Lord God! Wait until you know her!”

  “Let me think of an illustration. Don’t you think it helped the English to be bullied by the Tudors and the Stuarts? Didn’t it make them wake up? What but pressure made the colonies win their independence? Do you know what pressure does to certain sorts of seed? You were born your mother’s child because you were ready to stand just that test. There is no injustice — nowhere in all the universe — not for a moment.”

  Joe laughed outright. “If you’d ever run a bank, or a business, or fought a law-suit; or if you’d ever seen my mother sack a raft of her employees; or if you know how laws are forced through legislatures—” “Justice — every atom of it including all the injustice! No one escapes his exact deserts or lacks his opportunity to learn. Those on whom what seems to be injustice is inflicte
d would do, if not the same thing, something like it — its equivalent — if they had the power and the temptation. They are learning the feel of the sting of injustice — learning not to inflict it. The first shall be the last and the last shall be first. The unjust judge is reborn to a life in prison on a false charge. The usurer spends a life or two in debt. The cheat gets cheated. The cruel man suffers cruelty. Each to the fate his deeds have caused — and each one to the destiny that he himself has earned.”

  “But what’s the purpose of it?”

  “Character. We seem unable to learn except by experience.”

  “And the end of it all?”

  “Nobody knows. But even the materialists, who are blinded by matter — probably to make them hopeless, so that they will be forced in the end to wake up and to tear away the bandage from their own eyes — even they assure us that nothing in all nature is wasted. It is logical to deduce that we ourselves are not wasted.”

  “Nothing is finally wasted,” Joe agreed. “I know that. When we’re dead we decompose and are reabsorbed into nature. That’s law. Law itself must have a cause. I can grasp that much. Most of us call the cause God. It happens I believe in God; the arguments against the omnipresence of a First Cause seem to me ridiculous. Finite calculations can’t measure infinity and we can prove, for instance, that infinity squared is equal to the square root of infinity plus or minus anything you please — which knocks the props from under logic, with which, nevertheless, we prove the existence of a calculus that transcends logic. So I’m wide open to believe anything — except that some super-intelligence doesn’t direct the Universe. All the same, if what you say is true, or even half true — and I admit it sounds plausible — there ought to be something that at least looks like proof of it. How can you prove, or pretend to prove, that you, for instance, have lived more than one life in this world?”

  “I can prove it as easily as you can prove that you are sitting here, or that the sun shines,” she answered.

  “I’d be interested.

  “Possibly your time has come to wake up. If it has, there isn’t a force in all the universe that can prevent you. If it hasn’t, I could pile proof on proof and you could no more understand it than Pilate could understand Jesus. Did you ever try to teach a blind man about color? Or a tone-deaf person about music? Or a dog about poetry? It’s sometimes easiest to teach the dog. — Or did you ever try to teach a criminal the principles of ethics? It can’t be done, until experience ripens us. Then we can’t help learning, because that kind of intelligence evolves within us.”

  “Lunch,” said Annie Weems, appearing in the door. “We don’t call it tiffin. It’s plain New England lunch.”

  “And taters a la Kaiser Bill.” Hawkes peered over her shoulder. “You pull ’em from the pot before they’re cooked, then chill ’em. Subsequent you treat ’em handsome on a hot grid. Then add applesauce and condiments to suit, with Dutch cheese — grated. Yum-yum!”

  CHAPTER XIII. “I am not in the world to learn cowardice, but courage.”

  Lunch was astonishing. It felt like the first real family meal in which Joe had ever taken part. Hawkes, at the end of the table, making jokes about the food and telling anecdotes from far-off barracks about brass hats’ lapses from dignity, seemed part of it. It was impossible to realize that Rita, in a Sears-Roebuck summer frock and with her hair looking as if Pan had run his fingers through it, was the same girl who had sung to prisoners by moonlight. The light was different in the dining-room; it made her eyes look mischievous and her lips luscious. Joe wondered why Hawkes had not tried to seduce her. Perhaps Hawkes had. Perhaps he had succeeded. He felt a sudden pang of jealousy. Then something that he supposed was racial pride distressed him as he wondered how so beautiful a girl could possibly have been raised in an Indian temple and remain a virgin. He pondered that a long time, taking privilege of silence on account of his headache. He studied Annie Weems. It seemed to him she was a woman who knew secrets — and could keep them.

  He hoped Amrita was a virgin, but supposed it didn’t matter; nobody nowadays troubled about that trifle. Nevertheless, he already felt so much like one of the family that he almost had a right to know. He wondered whether she would tell the truth if he should ask her. He smiled at himself. Being human, he would believe a confession of guilt; a claim to virginity would leave him incredulous. Better not ask. Might embarrass her. All the same, he would give a lot to know what went on in an Indian temple.

  The hell of it was that his mother would make insinuations difficult to disprove. She would pound away at it, perpetually harping on the same string. He supposed, if his mother had been first to find the girl, it might be different; she would almost certainly have tried, in that case, to subdue and enslave her, tempting her first with a glimpse of what money can do, then gradually imposing insolence on insolence until the victim surrendered — he had seen her kill a girl in that way; the doctors had called it anemia, which it probably was, but Joe knew what had caused it.

  She would kill this girl too, if she as much as suspected he thought well of her. And, what was more, she already did suspect. She would stop at nothing — at nothing — no limit. How could he take the girl’s part without first arriving at an understanding with her? Should he quit before the fight began and let his mother wreak her savagery unimpeded? He smiled at the thought of it — smiled with his eyes too, as he recognized suddenly how swift and absolute his own revolt against his mother had been, and how determined he was to protect Amrita. Was he in love with her? He wondered.

  “What amuses you?” asked Annie Weems.

  “Something I want to ask you afterward.”

  That was the right idea. He had not meant to say it; it had slipped out; but he was glad he had said it. Annie Weems was the kind of woman you could talk to intimately without risk of betrayal. She might not say much, but she would listen; and what she did say would be something a man might bet on. Damn that fellow Hawkes; he could make his wise-cracks, couldn’t he, without leaning so close to Amrita’s chair? To offset Hawkes’ impertinence Joe started telling stories of his own, and he could do that admirably when he made the effort. His stories were a mite too heavy on their feet, he knew that, but they were interesting; he had worked hard at the accomplishment, to help overcome the prejudice against himself as his mother’s son. He could talk Hawkes out of the limelight. He did.

  As they left the dining-table Annie Weems, low-voiced, invited him to join her in the schoolroom. However, he had to postpone that tete-a-tete. The doctor came — Tobias Fetherstonehaugh Muldoon M.D. — a trifle husky from his morning quart of Scotch, but steady on his feet and primed with virtue. Annie Weems was civil but he snubbed her.

  “I will see the patient alone,” he said abruptly.

  Annie Weems opened the door of a small room furnished with a couch and two chairs. Joe walked in. Muldoon closed the door behind him — paused — opened it again suddenly — then slammed it.

  “Never know who’s listening in a place like this.” Joe made no comment. He studied the man’s dishonest nose.

  “Your mother was so insistent that I put off another patient. May I see your tongue a moment? Pulse, please. Temperature — under the tongue and keep the lips shut.” Silence, during which antagonism grew. Then: “Thank you. Nothing much the matter. You’ve had a dam’ bad shaking up, but you’re young and strong. Just take things easy for a few days. Mild cathartic. I will send you something from the dispensary.”

  Joe awaited his mother’s message. He could not imagine her sending this man to him without putting words in his mouth. At her best she was as subtle as a howitzer. The two men stared until the silence grew awkward and Muldoon screwed up courage:

  “I’d get out of here, if I were you. You might find yourself badly compromised. Chi-chis — know what I mean?”

  Joe did, but he pretended ignorance.

  “Eurasians — touch o’ the tar-brush — strange people — dam’ dishonest as a rule — no character — inherit
the vice of black and white, with the virtues of neither.”

  “What about it?”

  “She’s Eurasian. Thought you ought to know it.”

  “Who? Miss Weems?”

  “No. Can’t accuse Miss Weems of that exactly. I mean the Rita person. Dam’ good-looking wench with dark hair, dark eyes and dark intentions, you may take my word for it. Nod as good as a wink to a blind horse — be on your guard — blackmail — very plausible, I don’t doubt — conspiracy — h-sssh! — don’t say a word.”

  Joe said none — waited. There was an awkward pause before Muldoon renewed the assault:

  “This is confidential, of course. Keep it to yourself. That pretty little Rita person is the daughter of a British Tommy and a half-breed whore in the bazaar, who died of cholera.”

  “You’ve proof of that?” Joe asked. His voice had changed perceptibly. He was leading his witness, thawing toward him slightly on the surface, tempting him to deeper indiscretion.

  “Never can prove a thing when you want to in this dam’ country. She’s a psychic — know what that is? It’s a form of psychosis not uncommon among Chi-chis. Fortune-tellers call it second sight. Old as the hills — old as the Delphic Oracle — nothing more nor less than an over-developed and vaguely spiritualized sex-instinct overbalancing a character weakened by superstition and a craving to be important.”

  “Have you examined her?”

  “Can’t say I have. Don’t care to. Can’t be bothered. Dam’ stuff’s too familiar. But why are we standing? You should relax yourself at every opportunity for the next few days. That’s better — sit slack. Privately, between you and me, it might do you no harm to get a bit drunk to-night, but don’t tell your mother I recommended it. Come around to my bungalow and we’ll pull a cork together.”

  “Good of you, I’m sure.”

  Another pause. “Why, no, I’ve not examined her, but the girl’s notorious. Too bad we haven’t an institution where she could be properly looked after, but the government can’t afford that kind of luxury. The case might yield to careful treatment, though I doubt it — there’s a religious complex there — sings mystical hymns in the jail-yard at midnight.”