by Talbot Mundy
“Before you go, Mahommed Babar, go into my bedroom and take anything you need,” said Ommony. “You understand, anything! There’s money in the dressing- table drawer.”
“Perhaps I will not go at all, sahib. I came to discuss that.”
“Sit down then. Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not safe to ask the servants — I’ll get what I can myself.”
Ommony went into the dining-room, returning with a tin of biscuits, water, butter and some cheese, locking the door again behind him.
“Now?”
“These Moplahs, sahib — the handful who rebelled with me until the end. They were so discouraged finally that they decided to hand me over as the price of their own pardon. You know there is a price on my head?”
“Yes, I know that.”
“Pardon me if I eat and talk at once, sahib. The time is short. These Moplahs were in rebellion before I came, but I became their leader.”
“Led like a soldier and prevented outrages!”
“Yes, sahib, that too was my doing. The British have called me a traitor, because I was once in their army, and have condemned me to death unheard. Nevertheless, if it had not been for me there would have been ten times as much outrage as there has been. I will die a rebel! I deny the right of any foreign government to outlaw me. But I will bargain. The British may have me, and hang me if they like, against their guarantee to pardon that last handful of mine. It is about that I came — to ask you, sahib, to intercede for them, and to conduct negotiations in case I must surrender.”
“It is less than an hour since I promised to intercede for them in any way I can,” said Ommony. “They won’t betray you.”
“But the British will punish them unless they betray me,” Mahommed Babar objected.
“How can they betray you?” Ommony answered. “There is all this forest. Take what you need when my back is turned, and work your way northward over the border into the mountains—”
Ommony checked himself. He could see he was wasting words, suggesting the impossible.
“They could betray me,” said Mahommed Babar simply. The men who ask fewest questitons find out most. Ommony asked none, understanding that his guest would have made no such statement unless the facts were damning and indisputable.
“Your last handful have promised to help you when Allah provides the opportunity,” he commented, and Mahommed Babar smiled in the way a man does who has listened to large promises before. He did not look cynical, nor yet credulous.
“Well, sahib, to be hanged is disagreeable, and life imprisonment would be a thousand times worse than death. The question is, can you keep me informed of developments without getting your good self in trouble?”
Ommony nodded.
“There is a reward of ten thousand rupees for my head, sahib. I am proclaimed a traitor. They might do things to you, if—”
The two men’s eyes met over the smoky lamp.
“There isn’t a king, crowd, or parliament that could make me the enemy of a man whom I approve,” said Ommony.
“Strategically you’re a pawn against the whole back row. But you’re brave, Mahommed Babar, and—”
“Sahib — Ommony sahib — I wish you would think twice. I want you not to feel you owe me anything because I saved your life on one occasion—”
“Tchutt!” Ommony interrupted scornfully with snapping fingers. “It was your plain duty. If I thought you held that over me I would kick you out of the house. Now — what is there exactly that I can do? If I hold too much communication with you they’ll have me watched and trap you easily.”
“Sahib, there is a high pole by the chicken-run, on which your honor hoists foolishness to frighten hawks. If an old boot should hang there I would put the leagues between us. If two boots I would make great haste. But if I should see an old cane chair-seat swinging in the wind I would understand that I may rest. And I would come if I should see a cooking-pot.”
“All right,” said Ommony.
“And letters, sahib — I shall need to mail them.”
Ommony shook his head. “You may take pens, ink, paper, postage-stamps, whenever I’m not looking. I’ll deliver any letter from you to the Government. But—”
“I understand, sahib. I will find a way.”
There came a knock at the door.
“The butler,” said Ommony. “Dinner. I must dress. Now, you know my house — where everything is — money, medicine, clothes, boots, writing- paper. Bear in mind that I’ll be useless to you from the moment I’m suspected of befriending you. Go out by the window. There’ll be a bag of things to eat on the veranda every night — take it or leave it. Good night, and good luck to you, Mahommed Babar!”
Ommony opened the door. Dinner was not ready after all. It was the steward, not the butler, who had knocked and gone away again.
CHAPTER 2. “How is Ommony exempt?”
All wars, all rebellions end the same way, with civilians and soldiers at loggerheads. The Moplahs had “come in,” thanks to courage and good strategy as the soldiers believed, owing to force of circumstances as a committee of civilians insisted. But, as the Moplahs themselves explained it, because they had had enough. Either way it left plenty to argue about.
There was the usual division between men who advised drasticism — dubbed “Dotheboys,” to their enormous indignation; others who believed in reconciliation — known as Sister Susies; and a third party mixed of civilians and military who were for moderation on the whole, with incidental and severe exceptions. They were known as the one-two-three brigade, because they talked a lot of nonsense about concrete and the way to lay foundations of enduring amity.
But all were agreed on one point, even if they reached agreement by a dozen different ways.
“The king-pin’s missing. We’ll soon have the work to do all over again unless we get Mahommed Babar!”
But none knew how to get him.
There was a council held in a great marquee pitched on a hill near the compounds where the prisoners loafed in tents and ate three meals a day. The British never let prisoners starve, although they send them to places like the Andamans and break their hearts. Opposing arguments were led by a Fellow of Oxford University, who contended that if the reward were increased some one would probably poison Mahommed Babar sooner or later; a financial genius, who was for equipping selected Moplah prisoners with firearms and forgiving them on condition they should hunt Mahommed Babar down — thus saving ten thousand rupees; and a soldier, who proposed the scandalous notion that Mahommed Babar should be treated honorably.
“Offer him personal indemnity if he will come in surrender and behave!”
The soldier’s name was Tregurtha. He himself had been treated honorably on occasion, for he wore the V.C. ribbon. Nevertheless, the proposal was howled, sniffed, laughed at, snorted at, but found a seconder and reached the dignity of a debate. No matter what the legal members said about the impropriety of overlooking treason, three soldiers and several civilians kept harking back to the theory of treating a brave man bravely as a remedy for ill-will.
“Some of you talk as if you would have poisoned Botha and Smuts!”
“Piffle! Mahommed Babar is a foreigner — Peshawar way — what business has he in the South? Besides, he was in the army. So was his father. He’s a traitor — ate our salt — that puts him beyond the pale, you know.”
“What price George Washington and Lafayette?”
“D’you want to put him in their class?”
“Certainly! Why not!”
“Oh, let’s talk sense. He’s just a dacoit with more brains than usual. Any other Government in the world would run him to earth and hang him.”
“Treason, gentlemen, is treason. Always recognized as a crime in a class by itself. It is treason to compound treason — to overlook it — or to permit it to exist unchallenged. The nation that tolerates treason commits suicide.”
“Cromwell, George Washington, de Valera—
”
“Order! Order!”
The leader of the drastic “Dotheboys” made up his mind to spike the milk- and-water party’s guns once and for all by making them absurd.
“Suppose we concede the absurd principle of compounding treason, admitting forever our weakness and all that kind of thing — which I don’t, mind you, for a minute. How are we to get in touch with this renegade? An outlaw — a runaway at large in an enormous forest — who is to tell him he may come in and be kissed on both cheeks? Perhaps some bright genius — ha — ha!”
“Easier than you think,” retorted a man with a monocle. “The lot who stuck with Mahommed Babar to the end came in day before yesterday. I examined ’em. I asked ’em where Mahommed Babar is, and they said they’d promised Ommony they wouldn’t tell.”
“Say that again, will you!” (From the chair.)
“Promised Ommony they wouldn’t tell. Said he’s Ommony’s friend and that Ommony insisted on it. Get that? He insisted. All said the same thing. They brought along a letter from Ommony, in which he volunteered himself as their next friend. I’ll bet anybody one month’s pay that Cotswold Ommony can get word to Mahommed Babar within the day. Who’ll take me?”
That brought up for discussion Ommony’s merits and demerits, which are an inexhaustible subject. Some men began telling anecdotes and had to be brought to order; several others agreed that it was just like Ommony’s impudence to interfere; and there was one man, Parkinson Macaulay, who bided his moment skillfully and brought on climax.
“Can anybody tell me under what dispensation Mr. Ommony has dealings with traitors?” he asked.
The question was put in a penetrating voice that brought silence more swiftly than the chairman’s gavel. Eyes met over the table. Most men present knew Macaulay and his reputation. Some had felt his steel, and had official wounds that rankled. None liked him.
“Harboring your country’s enemies, holding communication with the enemy, trafficking with the enemy — treason! How is Ommony exempt? I ask for information.”
At the end of a considerable silence a man who hated Macaulay more bitterly than most spoke up for Ommony. But as everybody understood his motive none cared to be associated with that effort and the defense fell flat. Macaulay resumed the offensive:
“I suggest that Mr. Ommony should be asked to come here and explain,” he said acidly; and everybody knew what that meant. He had once tried a tilt with Ommony and met defeat. He would like exceedingly to have him at his mercy answering questions for an hour or two.
Colonel John Tregurtha laid his hands palm-downward on the table, leaned his weight on them, and spoke in a voice like a woman’s. But for the fact that he wore the V.C. ribbon along with a dozen more you might have supposed he was afraid.
“This committee will not lend itself to the pursuit of private quarrels as long as I’m on it,” he announced. “If Mr. Macaulay wishes to see Cotswold Ommony charged with treason or anything else, let him prove reasonable suspicion first — and in the proper place — or else charge him over his own signature.”
The only man in the marquee who had no remarks to make or opinions to offer was the officer directing the Intelligence. After one casual reference to the fact that there ought to be a bar with assorted drinks provided, which was frowned on by the chair as irreverent, Colonel Arthur Prothero subsided into a condition of perspiring coma, from which he appeared to awake once or twice to make notes on the backs of envelopes.
He looked less intelligent than anybody in the room — even than himself; for from behind, although massive, he appeared alert and the back of his head was shaped like a thinker’s. But he had small, protruding, lobster’s eyes, a drooping mustache, whose ends came nearly to his chin; a low, creased forehead, and a cave-man way of stooping forward, as if he were always a little the worse for alcohol.
It was a case of almost perfect natural camouflage. His own contention — printed in brochure CXaaF21 and filed in the Royal Society’s archives as well as in the Intelligence Department records — is that the appearance of cleverness is really stupidity’s mask. Real brains, he says, need no advertisement and therefore Nature goes to no pains to develop a brainy type. A look of stupidity, says he, is the safest mask for brains to work behind; therefore beware of the stupid-looking man. And just as a hermit crab covers itself with odds and ends, and a leopard has brilliant coloring to disguise its craftiness, the really stupid fellow is sure to look handsomely intellectual.
That, he goes on to explain, is how all countries are so abominably governed. The crowd that used formerly to support the knight in the handsomest suit of armor with the gaudiest crest and plumes nowadays votes for the man who looks brainy, who invariably has no brains worth mentioning, and it ignores the owners of carefully camouflaged intelligence, who are clever enough to keep in the background and enjoy life instead of being public slaves.
He cites himself as an instance. His photograph is on the flyleaf of the brochure, side by side with drawings of the heads of a dozen notoriously stupid, intellectual-looking statesmen, who have been dead long enough for the depths of their folly to be understood. In contradistinction to them he cites himself as having avoided matrimony, as having a profession that keeps him out of the public eye; as being a man without a master to the extent that that is humanly possible. For almost nobody can give him orders, and he is in position to wreck the career of anyone — and as being paid by the public without the public having a word to say as to his activities. Not even the police may interfere with him. Yet, as he confesses with naive amusement, he resembles from in front a caricature of a drunken satyr, and in profile so that the warts show on his left cheek — the average man’s notion of what a Prussian sergeant-major ought to look like.
As he remarks at the end of chapter one of the brochure: If he had not brains in more than usual degree, how should he have attained to such a height in his profession, be without a home or other dull encumbrances, possess ample private means accumulated through the Stock Exchange, and keep the finest cook in India?
He was much too clever to remain in that committee marquee, where he knew his advice would not be listened to, but, if given, might be held against him subsequently.
He stayed long enough to get his name down on the minutes — so as to be able to share the credit or repudiate the whole thing as he might subsequently see fit. Contrived to offend the right people, which is always profitable, picked the kernel out of the nut, as it were, and had himself called forth by an underling, in the same way that doctors have themselves summoned away from assemblages that bore them.
Outside, with one button of his tunic unfastened to make room for curry and rice in which his cook that morning had excelled himself, Colonel Prothero interviewed Major Bean and Captain Tilley, whom he had thoughtfully trained to do most of the work and take all of the blame for anything that went wrong.
“Something has turned up that may be important,” he explained. “I shall be gone some time. Perhaps a day or two. You fellows carry on. Nothing’ll come of this cackle in the tent. When they’ve talked ‘emselves dry they’ll agree on some idiotic scheme. All you need do is flatter Macaulay and just carry on as usual. I’ll need Lal Rai.”
Lal Rai was human — although some doubted it — was meticulously clean as to his person, and as to his raiment, such as it happened to be at the moment, most abominably unclean. Lacked certain fingers, some toes, most of his teeth, a portion of his nose and upper lip, one eye, but none of his born impertinence — and reminded the casual observer more of a stray terrier than of any other living thing. It was not that he looked like a terrier, for he did not. Presumably he thought like one. At any rate, the impression contrived to be conveyed to the observer’s mind. Born in Calcutta slums, he had traveled, and in the end united all the tongues he had tried to learn into a sort of shorthand pidgin-English of his own invention.
He stood in front of Colonel Prothero without self-abasement, listened without reverence to instructio
ns tersely conveyed in Bengali, nodded, neglected to salute. Put away in the fold of his turban an order scribbled by the colonel, and presently departed up the railway on a hand-car shoved by half a dozen coolies, who looked like bronze statues of Krishna but had not sense enough between them to avoid working hard for a lazy man.
Lal Rai came in due course to the station to Ommony’s forest home. Left his coolies there unfed to bivouac against the up-turned hand-car; and just as evening fell set forth along the track to Ommony’s bungalow, where he arrived about the time when Ommony sat down to dinner; and, cautiously avoiding the front of the house and the neighborhood of dogs, presented himself at the servants’ quarters.
As he looked almost supernaturally stupid just then they were at no pains to investigate him, but let him cool his heels in the porch outside the kitchen door, where, from behind the mask of unintelligence, he saw and summed up everything that could be seen and calculated.
The ultimate result of that was that he paid no further attention to the kitchen staff, but betook himself to the door of the steward’s one-room hut, where the steward presently stumbled over him and only ceased from cursing to discover that it might be wise to listen for a while instead. Lal Rai had a way with him when minded, and a terse habit of expression picked up from department officers. They went into the steward’s hut, where Lal Rai ate enormously and the steward weighed pros and cons.
The pros had it. Until midnight Lal Rai listened to accounts of happenings and speeches in meticulously tiny detail repeated again and again. Even what a man did with his fingers while he spoke was told and made a note of. And at midnight Lal Rai went away, finding his way by moonlight to the station, where he slept on the one seat on the platform until dawn.
CHAPTER 3. “Foolishness to frighten hawks.”
Colonel Arthur Prothero arrived shortly after dawn in a special car attached to a dawdling freight train. The car was shunted into the only siding, and he remained in it until his cook had prepared one of those breakfasts that make all earth look cream and rose-color, and every task worth while. Then, for the sake of digestion, he started on foot for Ommony’s bungalow rather than send and ask for a conveyance.