by Talbot Mundy
Dorje was almost speechless. Raw-edged nerves were irritating him until he had no will remaining to be brought to bear on any problem but his need of the drug that had dropped in the marshes of Koko Nor. He hardly knew who Grim was.
“Making ready to bolt?” Grim asked him.
I believe it was the English words that rallied his will power. The effort to understand them rallied memory, and memory supported will. He became furious.
“Where’sh my ship?”
“Gone,” Grim answered. “Where are your babus?”
Ten or twelve words Dorje spoke then, in a language that I don’t know. But Grim understood him. Grim spoke English; I suppose he wished us to follow the conversation:
“Yes. I promised. I am your ally until your babus are defeated.”
Dorje answered him in the other language. Grim replied:
“Better make haste. Do you wish them to steal your thunder?”
Rage then. The rage of a maniac intellect that knows its slaves have stolen what it built. A hurricane of words. His spidery legs trembled. He turned on the Chinaman — struck him with a bronze rod that was used for stirring charcoal in the brazier; and the Chinaman died like a flame that has burned its last drop of oil. Another hurricane of words. Grim answered him:
“That is talk. If I am to destroy them, I will not wait until soma is brewed. I don’t need it.”
Dorje sneered. He said another dozen words.
“Very well,” Grim answered. “Tell me where the switch is.”
Dorje hesitated.
“Jeff — you kill him!”
Jeff stepped forward. Dorje backed away in front of him. He went into a panic. He began to gibber. Grim restrained Jeff with a raised hand.
“Where is the switch?”
Three monks came in with bottles in their hands and Dorje came out of his panic like a felon who has been reprieved. The monks set down the bottles on the table and retired.
“You may have that afterwards,” said Grim. “Where is the switch?”
Dorje spoke to Vasantasena, but she stood motionless. She and Grim were pledged companions. She would make no move unless he made it with her. Dorje lost patience. He spoke to Grim in English:
“I told her. She knowsh where that ish. Let her show you.”
“Yes,” said Grim, “and very likely you are lying. The agreement is that you and I shall work together until there is an end of all your babus. Jeff, give me one of those bottles.”
Jeff went to the table and picked up one of them and brought it. Grim passed it to Vasantasena:
“You may have that after I have seen that switch. And if you get back here alive, you may then mix all the soma you care to. Meanwhile, Jeff — you kill him if he wastes another minute.”
Dorje — tigerish new cunning in his eyes, and lees of will power succoring his lean legs — started for the door. We all followed, Grim and Vasantasena leading, and Chullunder Ghose came hurrying from the room behind the dais, munching something; he had a load of the stuff that looked like German sausage. I picked up the gold plate that the Chinaman had let fall when he died of Dorje’s blow with a bronze rod.
Three times, I think, Dorje planned to summon help; he hesitated as we passed the doors of cells where men like monks were working. But Jeff, with that sword in his hand, was too near. Dorje had to keep on leading until we reached that window with the shutter taken off its hinges. He would have led on down the corridor where probably there was a surprise in store for us, had not Vasantasena spoken.
“This is the shortest way,” said Grim; and Dorje, once more hesitating, stepped out through the window. We could see the airship, like a smudge of hazy opal-grey against the starlit sky. It seemed not to be moving.
Dorje led along the roof toward the northern end. Grim spoke. Vasantasena nodded.
“Wait!” Grim commanded.
Dorje faced about and stared. Grim took Jeff’s sword. There was a buttress near us; it supported the wall of the set-back. With the sword Grim signed to Dorje to back into the corner it offered. He believed he was about to die then and he did not like it. But Grim faced us:
“You fellows go now. This is my job.”
“Lead along,” said Jeff. “We’re coming.”
Grim looked hard at him. I think he was trying to fight back his emotion. Jeff was his oldest friend.
“D’you want my place?” he asked. “I didn’t think, Jeff, that you’d — Your job is to try if I fail. You—”
Jeff cut in on him. “Good-bye, old man.” They shook hands. It was my turn, and I felt I had no right to speak when Jeff was silent; so I also shook hands, saying nothing. Grim turned toward Chullunder Ghose and held his hand out.
“Jimmy sahib, this babu—” His voice broke. “Jimmy, this babu will—”
“I understand you. Good-bye, babu-ji. You’re a damned good scout. Keep your eye on the ball, that’s all there is to it.”
Grim shoved him away. I believe he was prouder of the manhood he had found in our babu than of almost anything else he had ever done.
“And now you chaps, if I should pull this off, get back to India. If you can take that airship perhaps science will forgive us if we wreck the rest.” He met Jeff’s eyes again. “Get as far away as possible, as quickly as you can, then wait and have a crack at it if I fail.” Jeff turned away. We made no attempt to persuade Vasantasena to come way with us; she would no more have come than a Hindu widow of a hundred years ago would have accepted a reprieve from suttee. It would have been an insult to suggest it to her.
I lowered Jeff over the wall until his feet were on the ladder — then the babu — and Vasantasena lowered me, but she ignored my good-bye. At the bottom we ran — in the direction of the airship — past the hangar — out through freezing shadows between low alluvial dunes, until Chullunder Ghose was winded and we had to wait for him. He lay down, panting. Then we all three stared back at the roofs where we had left Grim.
We could see them — three black shadows silhouetted by the blue light and the starlight at the far end of the long wall. They were fighting. Grim had Dorje in his arms. He had carried him that far, struggling like a windmill. He carried him out of sight around the corner while we watched.
Jeff spoke: “Grim may fail yet. Better wait here. I’m next.”
I quoted Grim: “As far away as possible, as quickly as you can!”
“All right. Let’s wait a mile away.”
We were less than a mile away; our backs were turned, and we were towing along the babu at a steady jog between us, when the earth shook. We were shaken off our feet. Seconds before sound reached us every fragment of Dorje’s monastery and all its suburbs blew up in an incandescent splendor. It was shot with spears of flame that resembled lightning. Clouds of the stored-up poison gas rolled upward and shone like opal and mother o’ pearl as they were rent apart by hundreds of explosions underneath them. Then the thunder of it reached us, and a blast of hot wind drove us to take cover behind the shoulder of a dune. Huge lumps of masonry fell fifty yards away. Then silence and when we crawled up on the dune there was only a crimson furnace, shot with green and indigo, where Dorje’s citadel had been, and where Grim went with Vasantasena to their chosen death.
Jeff swore: “The toughest job Jim ever gave a man was when he made us leave him. Damn — I hope he understood me. Do you think that soma had dulled his feelings?”
“It had sharpened them,” I answered.
Then the airship came. It flew low, slowly, like a big fish looking for its prey. We pulled off coats and waved them from the summit of the sand dune. We were seen — or I think we were seen. It encircled us once. It came lower, within fifty yards of us. Then suddenly it turned and vanished northward. There were no lights, and it showed no signal.
“To the moon!” said Chullunder Ghose. “I hope they make it! In previous incarnation she was doubtless somebody important on the moon! However, self was d’Artagnan! We have Tibet to cross — by God on flat feet! We have Jim
my Jimgrim’s orders to return to India. Dammit — Rammy sahib, you’re next; I elect you leader! There, the south is that way. Lead on before I—” But he did. He could not help himself. Jeff broke next, and then I did.
Arm-in-arm together, we three turned our backs on Jimgrim’s funeral pyre and started on the bitterest, most melancholy trail there is. There was a wind that howled behind us from the Kwen-Lun ranges; and the leagues of the Roof of the World stretched out in front of us in darkness made more dreary by the contrast of the stars. That night we built a cairn beside the swamps of Koko Nor. There is a legend on it; Jeff did that, and broke his pocket-knife by using it to carve the stone. One word. A rather good man’s name. No date. No comments:
JIMGRIM
THE END
JUNGLE JEST
CONTENTS
EPISODE ONE
CHAPTER 1. “All right, I’ll remember.”
CHAPTER 2. “Twenty-five years later.”
CHAPTER 3. “I’ll prove to you that there’s not much wrong with Mahommed Babar.”
CHAPTER 4. “Fear and the heart of a fool are one.”
CHAPTER 5. “Loyalty to whom — to what?”
CHAPTER 6. “Engage the enemy more closely.”
CHAPTER 7. “I am the High Court judge.”
CHAPTER 8. “The benefit of the doubt.”
CHAPTER 9. “I will lead!”
CHAPTER 10. “Hostages.”
CHAPTER 11. “Yours truly, John Linkinyear.”
CHAPTER 12. “Mahommed Babar wants a cavalry saber.”
CHAPTER 13. “To-night I will write down how ye did.”
CHAPTER 14. “But they stole no Hindu women?”
CHAPTER 15. “That kind of talk is always true.”
CHAPTER 16. “Tomorrow a big victory!”
CHAPTER 17. “I am a rebel.”
EPISODE TWO
CHAPTER 1. “There isn’t a king, crowd, or parliament that could make me the enemy of a man whom I approve.”
CHAPTER 2. “How is Ommony exempt?”
CHAPTER 3. “Foolishness to frighten hawks.”
CHAPTER 4. Peria Vur.
CHAPTER 5. “Hah! He is Perr-r-other-o-o-oh!”
CHAPTER 6. “I’m going to kick you out of this!”
CHAPTER 7. “A cur, never!”
CHAPTER 8. Colonel John Tregurtha, V.C., D.S.O., Etc.
CHAPTER 9. “I will do anything you ask of me, Bahadur.”
CHAPTER 10. “I’m glad it’s you, Tregurtha!”
CHAPTER 11. “Ommony was right in some respects.”
CHAPTER 12. “What’ll you do?”
CHAPTER 13. “Let the man alone!”
CHAPTER 14. “You exceeded your authority!”
CHAPTER 15. “My country is the forest!”
CHAPTER 16. “A man’s death is the most a man may ask!”
EPISODE THREE
CHAPTER 1. “Slow but sure — the Lord providing foresters”
CHAPTER 2. “They conceded fish.”
CHAPTER 3. “Hail, Parumpadpa!”
CHAPTER 4. “My name is Craig!”
CHAPTER 5. “By Jiminy, we’ll now grow trees!”
CHAPTER 6. “The priests did this.”
CHAPTER 7. “Silence, please, Memsahib!”
CHAPTER 8. “Sir William Molyneux will blame your priests!”
CHAPTER 9. “Obey the priests!”
CHAPTER 10. “To the Queen’s taste!”
CHAPTER 11. “Think it over!”
CHAPTER 12. “How’s the situation?”— “Ticklish!”
CHAPTER 13. “Good dog, Di!”
CHAPTER 14. “She euchred the Ephesians!”
EPISODE ONE
CHAPTER 1. “All right, I’ll remember.”
Someone began to pray in a nasal snarl, and a stallion squealed for breakfast, but the sun did not get up, and seven or eight thousand other horses that knew the time ignored the stallion’s appeal as phlegmatically as several hundred men cold-shouldered the religious argument. It was better to sleep than pray. Better to sleep than squeal for breakfast. That was all about it.
Horse or human, at a horse-fair let him rest who can. There is little enough peace in the world, and none at Dera Ismail Khan when the snow has left the passes and the foot-hills. There is horse-fair, holiday and hocus-pocus — money, maybe, and murder certainly; but no peace.
The stars had done a night’s work and were fading away before the chill wind that blows the dawn along. To the northward the sky rested dimly on the dark mass of the Himalayas, and there was one warm light that marked the sentry-post by the bridge over the Jumna, but that was a long way off and made the darkness bigger and more bleak.
There was a smell magnificent, and one other light that moved. A man swinging a lantern walked among the rows of low tents, cautiously avoiding pegs and stooping at intervals to examine sleeping men who had taken advantage of tent-flies or piled baggage. But they were smothered head and all under blankets, and though he prodded one or two of them occasionally with a long stick that he carried ostensibly against dogs, he failed in his search.
Finally another dark form stepped from a shadow between two tents and cautioned him. This second man was obviously a Pathan policeman, and by the contrast between the two men you could tell, even in darkness, that the first was white. The white man swore, grumbled, and retreated to his own tent. Then suddenly the Lord of Light touched a mountaintop with an electric finger. Color was born and danced on the snow through a billion prisms. The wind increased quarrelsomely, and the camp awoke, each living being in it aware of emptiness and appetite.
Of such stuff music is made. Add the smoke of new dung-fires to the stamping and snorting of horse-lines. Send the whine of morning prayer through that, and the shouts of the saises dragging sacks of grain — then presently the steady munching as the beasts get fed, and you have a tune, if you know what that is. It contains no jazz — nothing syncopated — but a leisurely suggestion of long trails and a hum to the effect that life means business. Now and then the staccato thump as a hoof lands home punctuates the rhythm. Mares, whinnying, provide high notes that are nearly as eloquent as the mew of sea-gulls.
Music of the long leagues — immeasurable spaces — horse — and the smell magnificent of cooking and dung and unwashed men; tobacco, forage and dry grain in gunny-bags. That is Dera Ismail Khan when the passes open in the spring.
The white man was there to buy army remounts. That was, a quarter of a century ago, and his name does not matter, for he was no hero and never had been. Besides, he is dead and has probably learned his lesson. He belonged to that school of white man that asserts pride of race with boot and fist, demands obsequiousness, and is obsequious — the snob. Maybe the devil made them when the Creator’s back was turned.
To him, as he sat in his canvas chair in the door of his tent, came ex- Rissaldar Mahommed Babar, leading a boy by the hand. It is not thought unmanly for a warrior of that land of battles to lavish affection on his male child, but the sight of it raised the white man’s gorge, and he omitted to return the stately greeting — although a viceroy had more than once gone out of his way to shake hands with Mahommed Babar.
“Curse you! Why didn’t you come yesterday?”
“I came the day before yesterday at sunset.”
The rissaldar’s face did not betray that he had noticed insolence. It hardly mattered, for none could overhear. The camp was alive and a-hum with too many noises for one mean man’s ill-temper to attract attention, and the small boy knew no English. True pride is hardly ever self-assertive.
“You lie,” said the white man. “I hunted the whole camp over for you. All last night I poked among the shadows looking for your one-legged servant. Just for you and your dilly-dallying I got ordered out of the lines by a bloody Pathan policeman! I won’t listen to your lies!”
“Surely not, sahib, since I tell none. I arrived as I said. The boy fell ill. My man and I nursed him.”
“And kept me waiting! T
hat’s another obvious lie. Look at the brat — there’s nothing whatever the matter with him!”
“I have another son, who—”
“That’ll do! You’ve kept me waiting while you’ve rigged the market against me. You promised to get the horses cheap! Kick that brat into the horse- lines and go to work now! I expect the best horses twenty percent cheaper than last year. Fail me if you dare, and take the consequences! Hurry! Don’t stand there looking at me!”
Rissaldar Mahommed Babar continued to look for thirty seconds, saying nothing. His only reason for promising to help had been desire that the army of the Raj, whose salt he had eaten, and in whose ranks he had fought, should have the pick of the horses available. Year after year for ten years since he retired on pension he had performed the same friendly office of advising the remount buyers. But one white man is no more like another necessarily than horse resembles horse, and he stood considering the difference before he turned and led his son away.
That was altogether too much for the white man’s patience. He had to be cringed to, and had not been. Instead, saises, horse-dealers of a dozen tribes, and even a camp constable saluted the rissaldar as he began threading his way through the horselines. The white man picked up a tent-peg, which is an awkward missile, threw it at the rissaldar, missed him, but hit his son. The boy yelped — once — and bit the cry in halves — remembering what he owed his stock. The rissaldar turned to face the white man, and all that end of the camp grew curiously still. It is neither safe nor wise to strike back in a conquered land. It would be even less sensible than hitting a policeman in London or New York. Yet everybody knew the limit had been overstepped.
“Are you afraid to strike me, that you throw things at the child?” the rissaldar demanded. He used a tongue that every hanger-on in that camp understood, and the white man got to his feet, picking up his riding-whip.
“Afraid of you?” He walked close with his lower jaw thrust out. “Take that!”
He struck with the heavy riding-whip, and the rissaldar made no attempt to parry the blow, which fell on his shoulder and brought blood welling up through the cotton shirt under a semi-military tunic. The blow had opened an old wound.