Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Otherwise, there will be bloodshed — murder — poison — and perhaps religious war. Our Hindus are indignant that Moplahs should have slaughtered their co-religionists a day or two’s march away. They are still more indignant at having been prevented by the British from retaliating. It would be too easy to arouse them beyond control. The consequences—”

  “Would be on the knees of influences known as gods, who are less controllable than we are,” Ommony conceded gravely. “Well?”

  “The simplest course,” said the diwan, “would be to kill Craig. A missionary sent in place of him might prefer fish to forestry. And as to indemnity, the temple funds would care for that. The Maharajah would apologize beautifully. There are even Christians in the mission who might be trusted to do the murdering, although they are not very trustworthy.”

  “But the difficulty there is that I dislike bloodshed from conviction — from within — outward — wholly. I believe I have sufficient influence remaining to prevent it.”

  “And it would be impossible to foresee any except the immediate consequences. So we must save Craig’s life, although I think he is as much a menace as that other idiot who fired the shot at Sarajevo.”

  Ommony felt like a cat in the sun. Not one non-Aryan in a hundred million ever listened to the unmasked thoughts of the real ruler of an ancient Indian State. The key to their thoughts can not be won by force or influence, nor by any other means than friendship. He nodded, unlike Craig, for instance, who would have launched forth an unnecessary diatribe on murder.

  “You mustn’t expect me to side with you against Craig,” he answered guardedly.

  “If I had wanted — ah — the sort of man who would do that, I would not have asked the Woods and Forests to lend you for a while,” said the diwan dryly. “A second course that has been suggested to me would be to have Parumpadpa murdered. A skillfully conducted preliminary secret propaganda might produce anarchy within the hierarchy in that event.”

  “In fact, the suggestion was made to me indirectly by an individual who would welcome my assistance in snatching for himself the office of chief priest — although what his friendship would be worth afterward I don’t know. But there again we cannot foresee the indirect consequences. We might cry for Parumpadpa back again. The people would.”

  “It is true that Parumpadpa is no altruist. But he has no brains. And in his place there might be inflicted on us a priest with brains, than which there is no worse calamity.”

  A green cloud of parakeets flashed screaming between them and the sun, as if Nature herself felt forced to comment on that instructive saying. A great tame stork by a fountain untucked his other foot, stood to attention, nodded solemnly and went to sleep again. Diana, down below the veranda, raised her head from between enormous paws and growled.

  “Suggestion three?” asked Ommony.

  “Was made by the priests. It was that every alien forester sent here should be beaten to death by a mob. You understand, it would be very easy to arouse the mob on religious grounds. And if a Hindu were to be sent he could be killed with even less difficulty; there would be scores of ways of getting him into trouble. That was another reason why I begged for you to be sent here: it occurred to me you would be much more difficult to kill.”

  Ommony lighted his pipe. He had to do something to disguise his reaction to that compliment.

  “What do you consider the solution?” he asked.

  “You, my friend, are the solution. You have been invited here to that end. Whatever may be the limiting terms of your official instructions, privately you have carte blanche from me. You are to accomplish the incredible, as I have seen you do before.”

  “In the name of Craig and his accomplices — who came here uninvited — it has been ruled that we may cut down no more trees. People who are so poor that one pice is a consideration have been ordered not to pay the infinitely tiny wood-tax. They may purchase fuel instead at seven times the former price from neighboring unrestricted States. And we are to plant trees, although where has not been specified. There are no public lands available unless we take away the grazing-grounds—”

  Ommony interrupted him with a gesture of impatience — the rebellion of an open mind, that recognized no real impossibilities, against prejudgment.

  “An old story, Kalambi sahib. There are always fifty reasons for cutting trees, a hundred more for not replanting them — and politics. That’s worse.”

  “Worse than religion?”

  “Tell me about Parumpadpa.”

  “The temple chests are overflowing. Therefore he thinks more of power than of money just at present.”

  “Yet you say he has no brains?”

  “None whatever, sahib. He is the perfect embodiment of abstract sanctity without a concrete reason. He presides over his Church as our Maharajah presides over his government; only to the Church there are no restrictions. Consequently the priests can make Parumpadpa do anything, whereas I can only advise my Maharajah to act constitutionally.”

  “What is Parumpadpa’s weakness?” Ommony demanded.

  “Vanity! That is why he heads the Church so ably. His subordinates flatter him, and he obeys.”

  “What’s his strength?”

  “The fact that there has been no war in this State for many generations. The people are not afraid of the threat of it. They do not know what it means. They would be very easy to excite and very difficult to subdue. They believe that Parumpadpa is their friend against these foreigners who increase the cost of fuel. Moreover, the priests stand well with His Highness, who is deeply devout and who is respected by the people because of his devotion.”

  “Then why didn’t you advise him to answer the Secretary of State that he should mind his own business? Why not refuse point-blank to interfere with forestry conditions?”

  “My friend, because at the time when this man Craig began his assault on our peace there was a question of fishing rights at issue between the British Raj and ourselves — highly important from the point of view of our improvident people; unimportant to the British, except as a tactical advantage. They conceded fish and demanded forestry.”

  Ommony knocked out his pipe and chuckled.

  “Craig’s a real calamity, eh? He has brains.”

  “He or someone with him,” said the diwan darkly. “But he has no heart,” he added, “and the heart, my friend can conquer cleverness.”

  CHAPTER 3. “Hail, Parumpadpa!”

  Parumpadpa and his priests played the opening gambit, urged by circumstances out of their control.

  The waiting game is best when your resources are an unknown quantity to your opponent. Leave initiative to him; block him without disclosing your own hand, forever riding on his shoulders, as it were, and tiring him more fatally the more he struggles. The East, and peculiarly India, understands that method.

  But it was conceded in priestly councils — not held in crypts in which the Yogi brood over old mysteries, but in a temple back room like a vestry — that Ommony’s arrival on the scene had forced their hand.

  For instance, there were rumors, spreading swiftly on excitement’s wings, that on the bows of Ommony’s boat a golden god had stood, shaped like nothing ever known in Indian cosmogony. Some said his skin was tongues of flame, and others that his voice was like far-away thunder.

  The boatmen — having held a consultation, too, where a Frenchman sold forbidden beverage — were suspected of collaboration in another rumor that whomever the new god touched was blessed and could pass along the blessing. The boatmen had all had contact, and were charging a rupee, a person to be touched in turn; which was bad enough.

  But worse was that it all redounded to Ommony’s credit. They would make a god of him next, with leave to plant or cut trees anywhere!

  “We must do something,” said Parumpadpa oracularly, having ascertained that his technical subordinates were of that opinion. He was a very learned- looking man, whose long robes, long beard, long gray hair descending to his shoul
ders, and long ascetic nose would have gained respect for him in any decent society, provided he kept still. The diwan’s judgment of him notwithstanding, he had brains enough to appreciate his own stupidity. None could ever accuse him of responsibility for failure, or refuse him credit for success, because with priests, just as with other folk, the strongest faction wins, and he led deftly from the rear.

  So Parumpadpa’s, “We must do something,” amounted in effect to a question, “What shall we do?”

  There followed hours of a to-and-fro discussion, in which all theories had an airing, including those of murder; but none was found acceptable because Parumpadpa could not detect as much as a nucleus around which a faction might form with encouragement. The spy, who told the diwan of it afterward, said there seemed to be as many plans as priests.

  But at last a man stood up, whose name was Jannath. It was he who had suggested to the diwan that Parumpadpa might be murdered, profitably to himself and perhaps, too, to the diwan. Jannath, pouring sarcasm from bitter lips, offered a plan that should break Craig’s heart if nothing else, and volunteered to execute it.

  That suited Parumpadpa, who detected sufficient jealousy of Jannath to make it quite safe to intrust him with the opening act of war. The first move is always the butt of condemnation. Even if it succeeds beyond all expectation, jealousy is sure to find fault with it.

  And Parumpadpa was aware of Jannath’s overtures to the diwan. The diwan had told him, to make politics more pleasant for all concerned.

  “Let us hear Jannath’s great plan,” he commanded with sufficient sneer to establish later on if necessary his own claim to have disapproved it in advance.

  Jannath, on his mettle, spoke of elephants and of the Feast of the Mahouts, to occur within the week. He spoke so eloquently that he convinced them. Parumpadpa sensed a big majority in favor.

  “Jannath shall try his plan,” said Parumpadpa. “Let the chief mahout be sent to me.”

  The chief mahout, an illiterate, almost casteless, wholly superstitious member of the useful underworld, would have been sufficiently enraptured to be interviewed by the high priest’s subordinate. But Jannath was only given permission to be present at the interview for the purpose of bearing subsequent blame; and between them he and Parumpadpa reduced the chief mahout to a state of doddering acquiescence, in which he would have been willing to eat hot coals if so commanded; for never before in the history of that State had a chief mahout been granted an interview by the chief priest. He was the most blessed mahout in history. Thenceforward anyone who should seek his favor would have to pay double the former price. He went forth wondering, owned soul and body by the hierarchy, and beat his wife to assist her understanding.

  Jannath had shown genius, for elephants are the most uncertain of all beasts and none can predict what they will or will not do, except their mahouts on occasion. When, as at the Feast of the Mahouts, you have nearly a thousand elephants in procession through crowded, narrow streets, on their way to be blessed at a temple, and winding thence, afterward, in ever-increasing circuits until the whole city shall have seen their flower-draped hugeness, the chance for trouble could hardly be improved. A cracker will start elephants stampeding. A small dog’s bark, a drum with unaccustomed note, a shadow on a wall that should not be there, will madden them beyond control.

  Mahouts may not be blamed for the custom, as old as the throne itself, of conferring on strangers the privilege of riding the royal elephants on the day of the feast. Mahouts are untouchables, who might grow heady if allowed a feast unto themselves; so in the beginning honored strangers were imposed on them — at the stranger’s risk — for the same reason that the Maharajah always stayed away. Strangers were the skeletons at the feast. The Maharajah’s absence was the false note inserted to act as a sedative.

  On this occasion the only suitable skeletons available were the British Resident and Ommony. The Resident had toothache, or said so, and in place of himself sent his helmet and a case of “presentation” whisky to the chief mahout, who accordingly was drunk before the gambit opened, as Ommony was first to learn — unless you count the elephants: they miss nothing.

  The mahout, rebuked suitably, insisted it was Ommony who was drunk, that being a sahib’s right condition; he further asserted that the elephant was father of typhoons, progenitor of earthquakes, causer of calamities —

  Wherefore would the sahib please be seated?

  Ommony took his place in the howdah with misgiving, and as an afterthought whistled Diana, thinking the great hound would be safer up there than in the street and less likely to cause trouble. The mahout drank copiously from a bottle draped in cotton cloth and, remarking that doubtless all was well beyond the stars, whacked the elephant’s skull with the butt end of the ankus. That elephant’s name was Tippoo Sahib, and he has made a heap of history more than once. He arose and wandered forth a little too moist at the trunk end, as if he too had been imbibing the forbidden drink.

  And animals no less than men ask only to be led. The hundred monsters in the palace grounds were used to following Tippoo Sahib, just as their mahouts were used to following their chief without much argument. So, though the time was not yet and the orchestra that should have played weird music had hardly set its ancient instruments in place, the rank and file of the mahouts, all self-conscious in their clean white clouts and turbans, allowed their charges to wheel into column and shuffle in Tippoo’s wake.

  Several people shouted, and a native officer galloped up in an effort to head the procession off. But the chief mahout, like an avalanche once under way, was capable of anything but turning back. Down came the heavy ankus drum-fashion. Tippoo Sahib, blowing the Rogues’ Riot Call through a slobbery trunk, went forward through the orchestra, destroying two drums en route.

  Priests’ instructions were aflame in the mahout’s mind. They might have burned themselves to ashes there had one of those two drums not circled Tippoo’s forefoot like a napkin-ring. It irritated him beyond endurance. Stamp how he would, the loose, annoying ring would not drop off. In some way he connected it with the ankus blows that rained on him, and irritation burgeoned into wrath. The great brute trumpeted again, and this time most of the royal herd answered him.

  “Set me down!” said Ommony.

  But it was too late, and he knew it. One of those events had had its birth that like a dynamite explosion must increase. They will not go back into the shell. Their only end is in development, which a man may guide but not prevent, and he who gets in the way of them is nothing.

  There was a high wall shutting in the courtyard surrounding the palace, and a great arched gate, through which six elephants might march abreast. Tippoo went straight for the gate at a speed not lessened in the least by Diana’s barking, and the whole herd quickened into a mob behind, not knowing and not caring why, but simply following and in a hurry to catch up.

  And even so there might have been no disaster, for a drunken mahout’s and an elephant’s thoughts are x, the unknown quantity. But outside the gate there were nearly nine hundred more thick-skinned anachronisms, each with a feast-keeping man on his neck, all drawn up ready for entertainment and decked in sufficient finery to grace even that occasion. There were torn draperies and broken chains; elephants were plucking at each other’s trappings and their own; mahouts were becoming angry. There was nearly enough friction to start a fire before even Tippoo came trumpeting through the gate, making men’s skin creep and terrifying every animal within a mile.

  But a hundred more rioted in Tippoo’s wake. The gate grew chock-a-block with struggling brutes, and even great blocks of masonry were shifted by the thrust against them. The panic spread like fire.

  Ommony watched it helpless, clinging to Diana, who seemed to believe that by barking and jumping she might accomplish something.

  The chief street of the city lay ahead like a bow-string taut between point and point of the curving water-front, and all the countryside in gala dress was packed between the shop-fronts, l
eaving hardly a lane for sober elephants — none whatever for emergency. Tippoo went down that cramped opening full speed ahead, and a thousand monsters raced for first place in pursuit. At one point there were ten of them neck and neck, and the crowd had nowhere to turn to escape them.

  The unknown quantity of reason in the mahout’s mind, inflamed by the presentation whisky, worked like an engine with the governor released. Turning once, he saw the helpless mob of men and women go down under the pell-mell avalanche of brutes. He heard Ommony’s pistol; for the one lean chance was to kill an elephant or two and scare the others to wheel and retreat. But who, from a howdah on the back of a screeching, living earthquake, can hit the eyes of elephants in panic, with a .38 automatic? Ommony hit one, and did well. He might as well have shot to stop the monsoon.

  Ommony had done his utmost, and had no more cartridges. But if the sahib was disturbed enough to shoot, why then should a reasoning mahout, the confidant of chief priests and the instructor of royal elephants, not show his capacity under emotion?

  “Ganesha!* Hah!” [* The Elephant-god]

  What enemy hath done this thing? Who but a Christian missionary — Craig — could have — would have — would have dared to spoil the Feast of the Mahouts, that had been a famous feast each year since the gods themselves last walked on earth with men? Great — oh, great and wise — were the priests who had warned him in advance that the elephant folk might know enough to trample Craig underfoot this day!

  Whack! came down the heavy ankus on Tippoo Sahib’s skull. Where was it — that mission garden, where the priests had warned him Craig was growing trees by means of which to impose his hated creed on a folk whose gods were plenty good enough, and kind, and not too critical?

  Lo and behold, the garden of the mission! Lo, the foreign looking trees mocking their betters over the top of the garden wall! Lo, the gate! An arched gate! Too narrow and too low to pass an elephant!