Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  But men who are known only by the work they do, and have no press notices, may enjoy the ancient pageantry. Cotswold Ommony leaned back under a moving canopy of colored stars in a stern seat that had been a royal throne; and his enormous dog Diana stood in the bows, rigid as a carving, baying whenever the temple bells ashore offended her. She looked like a figurehead — part of the boat.

  There was a temple to every fifty yards of water-front, with palaces behind them and between. Branch water-lanes led at random amid fields and villages, and along all shore-fronts danced the new-moon-shaped lateens. There was no moon; but the stars seemed overcharged with light, and the Milky Way was awash with liquid fire.

  Down in the boat’s waist, where the guns stuck up between the blanket- roll and leather bags, sat Ommony’s two servants. And forward, in the break below the little deck on which Diana the wolf-hound stood, was Toto, her attendant, expert at extracting fleas and thorns, eighteen years old and regarded in his own home circle as a made man. In deference to Ommony and the great Diana — not of Ephesus — he had postponed his wedding until this present wandering was over.

  For Ommony was of the old school, miscalled feudal by its modern critics. Who served him, he served. It was as sure as that tomorrow’s sun would shine that Cotswold Ommony would never leave India to draw his pension with even a dog-boy behind him unprovided for. Men knew that, although Ommony had never said it, and he was waited on accordingly.

  They swung along a water-lane in which the stars and every shore-light were a million times reflected. The jewels of Indian legend and the mystery of Indian custom based on fifty thousand years of fact were all about them, nothing inscrutable to men with eyes, but dark, annoying and unreal to all who think the West will conquer the East in the long run.

  Because they thought and lived in terms of an eternity far older than the stars, they rowed the stars down, unwearied, and the great hound in the bow stood shimmering gold in the rays of the rising sun, betraying at last what men and animals call life. She swayed her tail with mannerly reserve when another boat shot forth from a landing beside temple-steps and ranged alongside.

  “Mr. Ommony? I’m Craig. I’m glad to meet you.”

  A tall, good-looking man with iron-gray hair that was longer and fuller than Englishmen wear theirs as a rule, dressed in white drill and a soft gray Stetson hat, stood up in the stern of the other boat and offered his hand.

  “I’ve heard of you,” said Ommony with truth.

  He had heard much of many missionaries, and as to this man had had warning.

  “Fine!” said Craig. “I’ve heard of you, too. They tell me you’re the best forester in India. As soon as we knew you were coming we made a room ready at the mission. Mrs. Craig will try to make you comfortable. She has looked forward to this. You’re the first white man to stay with us since the Committee of Inspection three years ago. I tell you, man, you’re welcome!”

  “You’re good,” said Ommony. “I’ll come to breakfast but I can’t stay.”

  Craig’s face fell. Ommony, eyeing him soberly under the brim of the helmet he had donned at sunrise, divined unseen causes and subsurface currents. He was glad he had refused the invitation. Reason rallied to acclaim the intuition. But he liked the look of his would-be host well enough to offer an excuse, and was glad he could do it without much stretching of the truth.

  “You see, Mr. Craig, I’m loaned by the Woods and Forests. It’s the Maharajah’s duty to lodge me properly, and he’d feel hurt if I ignored that. You know how these princes are.”

  Howard Craig knew too well — knew, too, that Ommony was not giving his whole reason. Dame Rumor is a jade, but sometimes just, and he had heard of this middle-aged man with a head so well set on his neck and a rather belligerent expression not nearly hidden by a grizzled, short beard, that he dared to decline any offer, princely entertainment not excepted.

  “Mrs. Craig will be disappointed,” he said; but Ommony had also heard of Mrs. Craig, and he betrayed no symptoms of relenting.

  He has been accused of hating women — a manifest absurdity, as will appear.

  At the quay, where there were great iron rings as old as the days of Hiram Abiff, set in stonework that none knew who laid in place, Craig had a swarm of mission-servants and hangers-on waiting to pick up Ommony’s belongings. Ommony demurred.

  “The Maharajah’s men—”

  “May come to the mission,” Craig interrupted. “You’re a white man—”

  “Born in London,” Ommony admitted.

  “And a Christian—”

  Ommony raised his eyebrows. Having had no breakfast, he declined that argument.

  “ — It’s only right you should receive our hospitality. We’re one color, if of a separate flag, Mr. Ommony; and you may feel need of the moral support of your religion before you’re through here. The superstitious darkness of this native State is indescribable.”

  “I’ll wager you’ve tried to describe it,” Ommony answered, smiling, tucking under his arm the rifle that he never allowed to be touched by any one except himself and one jungli — in this instance left behind. “Come here, Diana. Never bite this man. You understand me?”

  The great hound looked at Craig and sniffed him, slowly swaying her tail, puzzled but obedient. The boatmen, who had orders, but were growing used to missionary ways, watched Ommony, hoping he would steer them out of a predicament. He read the dumb perplexity.

  “Any one ill at the mission?” he asked.

  “Nothing that need frighten you,” Craig answered. “Nothing contagious. Only a man with a broken leg and a—”

  Ommony, interrupting, turned away from him and spoke to the head boatman in a tongue few missionaries know — and they not Protestants:

  “Pay compliments to diwan sahib. Say I go to mission house to do what is possible for man with broken leg. Ask diwan sahib graciously to send men for my luggage after breakfast.”

  The boatmen grinned. The diwan was the Maharajah’s representative. Their Maharajah was a poor thing possibly, but theirs, and they preferred him above all the advance agents of penny plain religions, their own being two-pence, colored, and prodigiously more comforting to the eye and ear, establishing, for instance, that their Maharajah was descended from the gods, the moon specifically; and they grinned because Ommony had recognized the royal prerogative. With the aid of a suitable lie or two they could now assure their prince that all due precedence had been observed. They ran off full of laughter, and Craig vaguely resented it.

  “You can’t tell whether they’re laughing at us or at something else,” he complained.

  “That’s easy — us!” said Ommony. “Don’t you think we’re laughable — teaching our great-grandmother to suck eggs?”

  “You mean — ?” asked Craig.

  “Let’s not keep Mrs. Craig waiting,” Ommony suggested. Craig was silent, wondering at this sturdy fellow with a gun under his arm, who strode beside him as if down forest-lanes, and spoke like one who knew men. Craig had heard a world of things of Ommony, some good, some bad. A human being then undoubtedly. A man, they said, who feared no government and no superior, but whom a million ignorant villagers looked up to, preferring his pronouncements to the law. Not an anarchist then, nor a totally bad man, for of their own free will folk do not submit to rogues. He knew too well how hardly they submit themselves even to imported righteousness and sacrament. Not a wholly good man, Craig decided, although not dissolute; none of the marks of vicious living were impressed on him. Wanton possibly. Too prone to trust his own opinion and to forfeit that of others for the sake of independence. A free-thinker. Godless? Well, he hoped not.

  And Ommony, who had received official warning about Craig, pursued the even tenor of his way unprejudiced. He had heard too often of other men being warned against himself to attach the slightest importance to unproven hearsay. Each man obscurely knew that as far as things had gone he liked the other, but that was to be expected of Ommony, who liked or detested. Craig kep
t reservations. Ommony crossed each bridge as he came to it.

  And even more reserved than her husband was Mrs. Craig, emerging from the screened veranda of a tidy, thatched house, smiling a welcome and wondering what the guest was going to bring into her life. Strangers can so easily upset things. She was almost glad — hardly able to look disappointed — when Craig blurted out that Ommony would only stay for breakfast; and she fell back on scolding Craig to cover her embarrassment. Why had he brought the luggage from the boat if Mr. Ommony wanted it elsewhere?

  She was younger than Craig and equally good-looking, but her seriousness rather had the air of being laid on and then bitten in, whereas his was natural. She was thirty, or thereabouts. Ten years earlier she might have laughed without warning and without assuring herself first that it was right to laugh. If so, she would have been a very pretty woman.

  There were signs of dimples, not yet quite ironed out by duty. She had violet eyes, expressive of much thought, not all of it somber; lips that ought to have been kissed — and may have been when Craig was wooing, but not much since; a line of hair cut straight across her forehead above level eyebrows; and feet that could have danced. Not that Ommony is any dancer, except for policy and exercise and his partner’s sins; he merely observed a natural fact.

  She had a trim, light figure, brown hair, and once on a time was no doubt called a “sweet girl” by her elders in Curlew, Oklahoma. Craig had never satisfied himself that sweetness is not vice.

  “The man we sent up a palm-tree to watch for your boat said there was a golden calf in the bow. Breakfast’s ready,” she added pleasantly. “Does the golden calf eat breakfast? Does she come into people’s houses? What a simply adorable dog!”

  Diana was commanded to make friends while Craig frowned thoughtfully. Ommony recalled to mind the patient with a broken leg and asked to see him.

  “Why, are you a doctor?” Elsa Craig demanded.

  “A tactician.”

  Ommony saw her raise her eyebrows at her husband; but she led the way promptly to a cool, screened outhouse in the rear of the compound, where a convert from one of the basest forms of Hinduism lay at ease.

  Ommony hardly looked at the man. He seemed to think the details of the case irrelevant. The clean, sweet-smelling room made no perceptible impression; he was more interested in Diana’s nose sniffing against the screen from outside than in the carefully written card at the foot of the bed. He turned on Elsa Craig in the midst of her description of the case and interrupted:

  “If anybody asks you, please say I came first thing to see the patient.”

  “But you haven’t looked at him! You’re not even listening to his history!”

  She was piqued. Even unenthusiastic fishermen like boasting of the taken fish.

  “I’ll make the man remember me,” said Ommony, and dug down in his pocket.

  “No, no!” she objected instantly. “We don’t allow that! This is not one of those missions. Presents are against the rule. They come because they want to be Christians, or they stay away. We don’t bribe them to come here. Rather we expect them to contribute.”

  “Good,” said Ommony, continuing to dig and thumbing loose a ten-rupee note. “Nobody has ever given this man a tip?”

  “Not since he came here.”

  “Then he’ll certainly remember me!”

  He gave the man the ten rupees and met the obsequious salaam with a steady gaze that was unforgettable because it was the stare of intelligence making use of an inquiring mind. The stranger with a shut mind and blown-in-the- glass convictions is the one whose features and conversation men forget.

  “Who are you that you should break our rule?” Elsa Craig demanded irritably.

  “Only you can break yours. I observed my own. You can’t make rules for me,” he answered, and she saw laughter in his eyes, although his face was sober.

  He was not mocking her, he was amused.

  “Love of money is the—” she began to quote resentfully.

  “You should have kept me out if you didn’t want your convert corrupted,” he assured her; then, looking again at the patient: “I’m Ommony sahib. Come and see me when you’re well.”

  Elsa Craig, indignant, led the way out. She knew in her heart that what she resented was his having brushed aside a falsehood she had schooled herself to accept as truth. She did not mind his ruthless recognition of essentials, but she did mind his applying it to herself and her affairs. He had no right to doubt her husband’s converts. And his first words, outside in the garden among the well-kept palms and flowers, only increased her anger.

  “That’s a bad rascal you have in there. Don’t trust him!”

  “Then why do you want him to come and see you?”

  “So he’ll remember my visit. What’s his name?”

  “It was on the card. John Ishmittee. He can’t say Smith.”

  “What in heaven — ?”

  Ommony stopped, turned and stared at her — not rudely, and she knew it. He was just astonished.

  “He had another name. He had a past,” she answered. “When he adopted a true religion he asked us to change his name, and we arranged it legally. He had a right to turn his back on all the past.”

  Ommony nodded, conceding all the claims of tolerance in full, but not of incongruity or humbug.

  “Our backs are to what’s behind us,” he admitted. “He’s facing a future, though.”

  “Is that why you bribed him?” she retorted acidly.

  “Yes. Pay men in their own coin or they’re not bought. Your coffee smells like a breath of Allah’s heaven!”

  She felt herself thaw, and resented that, too. If he had said simply “heaven” and had omitted “Allah” she could almost have forgiven him the earlier offenses; because not even the viceroy — and surely no bishop’s wife — enjoyed such coffee as she set on the table. It was her connecting link with home, departing youth, and memories that she was never willing to let quite die, although they hurt. Whoever praised her housekeeping, and her coffee above all, touched the cord in her that had not hardened.

  “Are you a Moslem?” she objected.

  “Ask Allah that!” he answered with a curt laugh. “We’ll all be surprised to discover what we really are when our time comes.”

  She froze again, suspecting that he knew, or that he thought he knew, what she was, though he had said no word that hinted it. She even knew he was sympathetic. He was like a surgeon, who cut deep and then looked under the bandages.

  She felt that he had peered into the depths of her thought and understood, and that he was sorry for her and no more inclined to be ruled by her limitations than an eagle is to wear blinkers. The little conventional lies that he tolerated for the sake of courtesy meant no more to him than the big ones that he challenged on sight. Without saying a word, he seemed to her to have challenged her whole overlaid philosophy, which she had been ten years studying and smoothing, until she herself hardly knew it any longer for a lie.

  No living man could do that and not be her enemy. No man could be her enemy and not sustain defeat if victory were in her. She smiled the little, hard, too-knowing smile that had cost her the love of a man in the States and married her to a missionary, who believed that sex was something to be ashamed of. She thought that Ommony did not see the smile. Her husband saw it, standing in the door of the heavily screened veranda, and imagined they were friends already. He prided himself on never entertaining jealousy — on always recognizing facts — on imperturbable good-humor.

  “Eatmetights!” he called to them. “Wheats! Ham and — ! Let’s play we’re in the West!”

  Ommony played with him. They sat down vis-a-vis and traded reminiscences, Ommony making fun of his own misadventures in the States, that time he used a saved-up leave in search of forestry and found none.

  But Elsa Craig — although they praised her coffee — was depressed; not one suggestion that her husband might have made could have had more unfortunate results that morning. To
play at being in the West — to recall old times — on top of Ommony’s surgery — was torture, no less. She was cross to the servants and gave all her breakfast to Diana, much to Ommony’s concern.

  “That dog’s on a diet,” he cautioned her. “They’re hard to raise in this climate. One meal a day—”

  She was glad. She was not mean enough to wage war on the dumb beast, but it was very good to cause Ommony even slight distress. She left off feeding the dog, not to oblige the master, but because she admired the animal, making mental note that it tortured Ommony to see mismanagement he might prevent.

  “How long do you expect to be here?” she asked him.

  “Several months.”

  She was glad again. In time and with persistence one can make pain felt. She was almost, and on the surface quite, good-tempered when the meal was done and it was Craig’s turn to show Ommony about the mission.

  There was no risk of the Maharajah sending men for his luggage yet, for that was Southeast India — a native State — just warming up for the monsoon. Men were as lethargic as the flies.

  “Many converts?” Ommony asked as they strode off side by side with the dog’s nose between them, making free with Ommony’s hand, thanking him for lawless ham and eggs provided by the enemy.

  “Few. Slow progress. Slow but sure,” Craig answered. “I have never tried for fireworks. Competition isn’t keen here. No other Protestant denominations. I don’t have to make a big superficial showing to get money. My private income helps out. Slow but sure’s my motto — slow but sure, Mr. Ommony, the Lord providing.”

  “Providing foresters, for instance?”

  Ommony looked straight at Craig. There was no evading his directness, although it was that and nothing more — no resentment — nothing sly — a straight question.

  “Yes, sir, the Lord providing foresters — or one at any rate,” Craig admitted. “You knew?”

  “I know now.”