Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

Craig checked an exclamation of impatience. There had been no need to confess his hidden hand in the matter after all! He wished he had not admitted it. So many folk were willing to accuse missionaries of interfering in politics; Ommony was doubtless like the rest.

  However, he could not withdraw the confession. Explanation seemed the wise course.

  “You see, Mr. Ommony, something had to be done. The Maharajah is a weak man, alternately in the hands of his prime minister and a Hindu priest. Between them those two control the destinies of all these people.”

  Ommony’s eyes twinkled. He had his own ideas of destiny and people, but he did not say anything.

  “The priest is my deadly enemy. That is, of course, what you might expect,” Craig went on. “You can hardly blame him. If I win, he loses. Converts to my religion mean increasing decay of his. I’d like to be his friend, but he won’t let me.”

  Ommony contrived to look grave, but it was difficult.

  “Have you offered to make friends with him?” he asked, looking the other way.

  “Oh yes. I was aboveboard. I even offered to pay his son’s expenses to America, so he might see for himself what Christianity and civilization mean. But the man is so enwrapped in superstition and a sense of Brahminical importance that there’s no penetrating his conceit. I gave it up.”

  “I have to confess we’re enemies. I’m sorry. He offends me in all ways possible, and I try to act with forbearance, but fact is fact.”

  Ommony looked frankly at his host, sizing him up, considering the automatic, educated humor that would laugh at the accepted jokes and frown at all uncensored ones — the obstinate courage — the enthusiasm that no flood might quench — the perfect orthodoxy — the manners that were one thing and the man that was another — all clearly written on the fine, too serious face. He knew that he and that man would never enjoy the same paradise; but he hoped to find a means of getting on with him in this world, in that city, for the present.

  “Something had to be done,” Craig continued. “It was no use talking to the Rajah, for I tried it. Each time the poor wretch entertained me he had to spend a week at the priest’s dictation resanctifying himself. My very presence was pollution.”

  “So I tried the diwan. He’s open to argument, and you can’t say that for either priest or Rajah. The diwan is jealous of the priest — that’s natural — resents all interference of the Church in politics. As an American I was able to agree with him in that respect without reservation. I made it clear my friendship might be worth his while.”

  Ommony laughed outright — one clear, “Hah!”

  “What amuses you?” asked Craig.

  “The Church in politics. Go on.”

  “I told the diwan what this State needs is forestry. Christ, and then forestry. The British confer knighthoods on men who put through great public improvements. I happen to know he is anxious for knighthood.”

  “I assured him there are means at my disposal of calling the attention of Government to any good or evil he might do. Then I suggested that by public forestry on an extensive scale he could not only serve his own case but inevitably injure the priest’s. He saw it. The diwan has astuteness in a measure.”

  He paused for Ommony to ask the inevitable question. But Ommony judged it sufficient that he beat back laughter.

  “Every tree cut down in this State pays a small tax to the priests — small, but in the aggregate immense,” Craig went on after a dramatic pause. “So it is to the priest’s interest that trees should be cut — to the diwan’s and the people’s to grow trees and conserve them.”

  It was Craig’s turn to look critically at Ommony. It occurred to him to wonder how his guest was taking this confession. Some twinge of an uneducated conscience not yet dead, antedating his appointment as a missionary, perhaps, suggested that his guest might have opinions and a right to them. But as far as he could judge he had given no offense yet. Ommony, rubbing the dog’s ear, strode beside him looking politely interested.

  “The diwan is like all Orientals,” he went on. “I could only get him to agree with me on condition he had his own way. He had heard of you. It was a case of you or nobody. If I could get you, then he was willing to defy the priest and go in for forest conservation seriously.”

  “And what were you to get out of this?” asked Ommony, controlling his voice but twitching the hound’s ear so hard that she whimpered.

  “Personally nothing, but the mission a great deal — those little, inconsiderable favors that amount to so much in the long run — an occasional visit by the diwan — recognition by the Maharajah in the form of a small financial contribution, just for the sake of the principle involved. Above all the discontinuance of picketing. They are not to sit at the gate and hound my converts through the streets. The local papers are to discontinue scurrilous abuse of me and to cease telling lies about my methods. No pressure of any kind is to be brought to bear on any of our converts. Don’t you think now I was justified in using influence to get you sent down here?”

  “You’re your own judge,” Ommony answered.

  He hated to be asked to pass judgment on other men’s mistakes.

  “I mean can you forgive me for—”

  Ommony laughed curtly.

  “You’re not responsible for any move of mine,” he answered. “They told me you were trying to pull wires. I looked into it and applied for the transfer.”

  Craig looked at him again, and stroked his chin, and wondered.

  “I know the diwan rather well. He’s a friend of mine,” said Ommony, and Craig continued wondering.

  CHAPTER 2. “They conceded fish.”

  Craig presently felt his feet. Did he, Craig, not know all the wires he pulled, the influences he had brought to bear, the patience he had exercised to bring this essay into forestry to pass? Ommony, in his judgment, could no more have withstood the pressure than could any other cog in the immense machine of Indian government.

  Ommony, he decided, was a vain man — one of those who, rather than confess themselves a part of a machine, must boast that they control it. Knowledge of human nature and of how to play on it is nearly the most valuable tool in any missionary’s kit. Craig glanced at Ommony now with a changed expression in his eye, believing that he understood him.

  Thenceforth he showed the mechanism of his mission in intimate detail, asking Ommony’s advice wherever room might be for improvement and frequently where none was, and Craig knew it. As he had said, progress was slow; energy had had to find an outlet in perfecting processes rather than in caring for floods of converts, which in point of fact were non-existent. Four-and-twenty converts was the total, and even Craig admitted their conversion was a question of degree.

  But there was a laundry, a carpentry, a printing-office, a loom, and appurtenances for weaving homespun, and a school, besides the raw, new-fangled chapel dwarfed by the roof of a thousand-year-old Hindu temple that overshadowed it from beyond the compound wall. On the gravel path leading to the chapel door the image of a Hindu god cast its black reflection, like Pulcinella pulling snooks.

  Craig did not see it. Craig would rather have died than have confessed to seeing it. Ommony kept his thought about it to himself, suppressing the unbidden smile lest Craig, who was disturbed by the dog’s efforts to enter the chapel, should draw wrong conclusions.

  One wrong conclusion was enough for that first morning, but how should Ommony upset it without offense? He was perfectly aware of Craig’s intention to flatter him into a frame of mind useful to the mission. Had Ommony not turned the same trick scores of times, changing a race-conscious, self-assertive junior into someone who could love trees? You can learn more about human nature in a forest than in teeming cities, and Ommony knew Craig disbelieved his statement about his coming of his own free will. But how should he convince him? Was the effort worth it? What would be the consequence?

  “You say the diwan is your friend?” Craig asked as they turned toward the house again.

  He tri
ed to make it sound as if he thought the assertion true; but men who have listened for a lifetime to the voices that come down-wind through forests are not easy to deceive as to hidden meanings. Ommony was sorry he had made the statement, but he nodded.

  “That’s excellent,” said Craig.

  It was all he did say on the subject just then. Men were trooping through the gate to gather Ommony’s belongings and carry them to the royal guest-house. There was a pompous Hindu officer in charge, walking as if the mission gravel did dishonor to his boot-soles, bent on making much of Ommony and snubbing Craig. Ommony shook hands and introduced him, forcing him to be polite to Craig, gaining the Hindu’s admiration for his own tact but missing what he intended. Craig drew him aside.

  “I appreciate your motive, but kindly don’t force me to shake hands with that man again. He’s one of my most malignant enemies. He’ll brag now all over town that—”

  Ommony cut him short by turning to say good-bye to Elsa. She emerged from the veranda smiling so serenely that for a moment Ommony was almost fooled. Only the undisguisable acid in her voice re-warned him.

  “Come again — come often, Mr. Ommony. When you yearn to be understood, and for home comforts, and to hear your own language, you’ll know where to find us.”

  So she thought she understood him. Hell! Ommony set his teeth as he rode the Maharajah’s fat horse, sent for his discomfort and greater honor. He would rather be understood by the devil than by Mrs. Craig just yet! He suspected possibilities, but they were latent. Her own incomprehension, it seemed likely to him, would be the only safeguard for anyone who came within her reach — that, and perhaps the limitations of her too narrow orbit. She would dominate or die — use or usurp — control or conquer and then tread underfoot! She was dynamic mastery imprisoned! Good-looking as the deuce!

  “So she started the ball, eh? I thought the diwan was telling the whole truth in his letter! Men-women? Give me animals and trees! We men are all fools!”

  He rode through streets whose history was fading in the days when Rome first built a fort beside the Thames and called the fever-stricken mound Londinium — past buildings where a lore lies hidden that is foolishness to modern wisemen, but compared to which their most amazing calculations would be as journalese to Sappho — past pagodas never penetrated by the profane, not even by all-conquering warriors, who might else have destroyed what they could not understand; alongside waterways where ships they say were Solomon’s once lay at anchor, loading gold, apes, peacocks, and the rest of the trash he prized; through awninged marts where modern mock enamelware displayed itself indecently beside the craftsmanship of self-respecting days; into the realm of elephants, where big, stake-hobbled brutes ceased dusting to salute at the command of a mahout; and beyond them to a triangle between three roads on which was set the guest-house, hidden by flowering trees and hedged in by a living fence of clipped bamboo.

  It was a place quite fit for an emperor, if an emperor had brains enough to know it.

  There, beneath the stone gate-arch on which the gods were carved in pictographs, whose inner meaning only a rare few still preserve, the diwan waited, white from head to foot — turban, hair, beard, clothing, shoes — his bronze skin looking handsomer in contrast, and his smile as gentle and as humorous as that of the too-naked god who posed in stone overhead.

  “My friend, my friend,” he said in English as Ommony dismounted, “I cannot say how you are welcome.”

  “You needn’t.”

  “No, I think you know.”

  They entered the garden on foot together, the old diwan accepting Ommony’s arm to lean on and the serving-men absorbing reverence for future use — that being India’s ancient way; it has nothing to do with petty larceny and perquisites, that flourish equally and side by side with it; those are the weeds in India’s Eden, encouraged, as her flowers are neglected nowadays.

  They called each other sahib; for how else should five-and-forty years address five-and-seventy, or five-and-seventy answer a member of the conquering race? And, as was right, Ommony asked first the conventional questions concerning the Maharajah’s health. He learned that in His Highness’s condition there was “no change.”

  Conventions all observed, they sat and were unconventional — as much as India can be — on the deep veranda of the guesthouse in among sar and teak trees, sipping weak tea for politeness’ sake, and for the sake of privacy selecting the corner that gave them full view of the house and garden. They were seen by a hundred observing eyes, but could not be overheard, even by the Christian gardener employed there to flatter Craig.

  “He is what he himself would call ‘the limit,’ that Mr. Craig,” said the diwan. “He insults me daily without knowing it. In intention he is merely galvanic; he would like to charge new life into us as they charge the battery of His Highness’s motorboat. In effect, however, he is paralyzing!”

  “As bad as that, Kalambi sahib?”

  “Worse! I have spared you the infliction of the truth! You have seen his wife? She, who rules him, sought to govern me through my wife. She wrote, inviting herself to visit my wife ‘in the seclusion of the zenana,’ as she expressed it. I replied that the seclusion was too genuine at this time to be broken without unpredictable consequences. She answered accusing me of hypocrisy and marital tyranny — also of opening my wife’s letters, which she claimed was illegal. But when I explained that my wife had been dead for more than twenty years she did not apologize.”

  Ommony sat back in the long chair facing the diwan and chuckled silently. “Her sort don’t,” he answered. “What did she do?”

  “I don’t know, sahib. But I received a call from the British Resident, who said he had been requested by the Secretary of State to suggest that I might with propriety use less prejudice in my relations with the wives of missionaries!”

  “Good God!” Ommony exploded.

  “There was a garden-party at the mission soon afterward, so I attended it to prove how little prejudice I have. And they were very kind; they let bygones be bygones; they made it obvious they had forgiven me. They gave me cakes I did not dare to eat, and much advice I would not take if death were to be the consequence of rejecting it. To avoid argument I asked to be shown the garden; and I talked to them a little of the knowledge of trees that I garnered years ago from you in your forest. I wish I had torn my tongue out rather!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I gave that woman an idea, and it would have been safer to give dynamite and fuses to some of the converts she and her husband keep about the place! They learned — I regret to say from me — that some of the Hindu temple revenues are raised by a tax on tree-felling — a tax imposed centuries ago to conserve the forests; paradoxically it has wasted them.

  “Craig and his wife seized at once on that chance to wage war on our Hindu hierarchy. That very evening Craig came and promised me a knighthood, as if he had the dispensing of the King of England’s favors. He did not know that I have refused a knighthood from every Viceroy since Dufferin.”

  “Didn’t you hit back?” Ommony asked.

  “I did. I lent them an elephant. I said — which was true — that the royal and ancient way of showing the Maharajah’s favor is to do that. The chief mahout, of course, enlarged on the details of an elephant’s rations. Contractors in receipt of hints delivered quantities of hay and grain together with their bills.

  “Craig had to call on me and ask my influence in getting the loan of the elephant withdrawn with as little offense to His Highness as possible. I did so on condition that he should likewise grant me peace. He promised. He is honest. But he could not keep a promise he did not understand.”

  “How long did he let you alone?” wondered Ommony.

  “Until next morning. He came then, alleging gratitude in that I had withdrawn the elephant, and offering in return to help me with all his influence in the matter of the forestry! He showed me a telegram he had received — of which I could have shown him the copy that I received
before his reached him! — saying his friends had already taken the matter up in Simla.”

  “He had the impudence to say that a knighthood was hanging from ungrown trees for me to pluck, and that all I had to do was to grow the trees and take it. He considered that a pleasantry, I know, because he laughed at it. He added that since His Highness had felt friendly enough to lend an elephant, he ought to be easy to convince. He even offered to go to His Highness with me and give me the benefit of his eloquence.”

  He paused to let Ommony finish laughing. He would have preferred that he should not laugh, but he understood that the West can do that and be sympathetic. The East does not mix emotions.

  “At what point did I come in?” asked Ommony at last.

  “When Craig had written anonymously to the papers demanding a commission to investigate the decimation of our trees. He persuaded friends of his to do the same. There began to be editorials about it.

  “You must understand — no doubt you do — that the priests, headed by Parumpadpa, were hard after me all this while. They resented less the attempt to cut their revenues than the scarcely-veiled attack on their authority, and they threatened me with expulsion from office unless I could drive forth this missionary out of our coasts.

  “The threat to me was comparatively easy of fulfilment. It was impossible to drive out Craig. I believe that I am useful to the State and that my resignation would be detrimental. I can guess who would be appointed in my place, and what advantage those priests would take of him. So what could I do but temporize?”

  Ommony nodded. He could have finished the tale himself, but the diwan continued:

  “I at last persuaded Parumpadpa and his priests that one course remained, and that I alone could take it. If you, with whom I boasted I have influence, could be persuaded to come here and inaugurate the forestry regime, then we should have a man with us whose breadth of experience and tolerance might solve the problem without disaster. Otherwise—”

  He paused, preferring that Ommony should imagine alternatives; but Ommony fell back on rule of seniority and manners, and the diwan had to finish his own sentence.