Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  The crowd heard nothing, because the crowd itself was making too much noise. But the crowd saw, which was the all important point. It saw the great gate close behind Asoka, as if destiny had turned a page and was about to write new history. Perhaps it was Chullunder Ghose who put the thought in some one’s mind. He was certainly not in the palace grounds when the gate closed. At any rate, somebody started a shout going, and it caught on, in little explosions, until the whole crowd roared in unison and the Maharajah’s brandied face grew darker with concern.

  “Bande Sankyamuni! She is free! She is free! This time the Gunga sahib did it! She is free! She is free!”

  Less than a dozen priests and half-a-dozen members of the crowd had managed to follow behind Asoka before the gate was shut tight by the Maharajah’s servants. The priests had promptly grouped themselves around the Maharajah, to prevent him from feeling or appearing too important. He turned toward them, and they were as baffled as he was. He spoke a few words and they answered in whispers. Then he shrugged his shoulders. He appeared not altogether unhappy. He sent somebody running toward the palace, and went on talking with the priests until a group of women from the royal zenanah came and waited on the Princess. Quorn made Asoka kneel. The Princess almost jumped into the arms of veiled, excited women who flung a silken sheet around her and then hurried her away.

  Quorn remained on Asoka’s neck. He doubted what to do next. But he knew exactly what to do when he saw the Maharajah start toward him. He would hold his tongue. He would not tell what had happened. It was none of his business.

  The Maharajah came as close as he could get. He ex-amined Quorn’s eyes. For a minute at least, they stared straight at each other in silence, Quorn’s resentment gaining, until at last the Maharajah spoke, in good plain English, awkwardly pronounced:

  “Well, well. You’re a strange coincidence. You realize, of course, that you’d be an impossible nuisance in Narada? You must go home. How much shall I give you?”

  That was the first really great moment of Quorn’s life. lt was the first time that anyone ever had offered to bribe him. Instinct warned him that heroics was the one thing to avoid.

  “This elephant’s in trouble, sir,” he answered. “I’ve a contract job here, I’m not going to the States, so forget it. You protect this elephant, and I won’t trouble you. If they should shoot him—”

  “Shoot him?” said the Maharajah. “I would kill the man who did it! You must go home.”

  Quorn fell on silence, closing his lips grimly.

  “But you see,” said the Maharajah, “you don’t know India. It mightn’t be healthy for you after this. There are more ways of dying than there are of living. Has that thought occurred to you?”

  “As long as I mind my job I reckon I’ll be safe enough,” Quorn answered, and the Maharajah stared at him again at least a minute. Then he lighted a cigar, strode to and fro a dozen paces and resumed the stare.

  “You’re a damned strange coincidence,” he said at last. “Can you manage that elephant? Can you return him to his picket? All right, do it. I will send a man to talk to you tomorrow.”

  Somebody opened the gate. Asoka arose and headed homeward, passing through the dense crowd outside like an alibi through circumstantial evidence. The crowd roared. Hundreds followed through the winding streets. But there was new news; something else was stirring, and by the time they reached the compound where the other elephants stood swaying at their pickets Quorn had no more than a following of small boys and a few dozen caste-less women. Some police drove them away. The head mahout attempted to get rid of Quorn as easily. Quorn smiled. He could show an eye-tooth when he did that.

  “You send a man for my servant,” he answered. “Moses is to fetch my supper here and bring a cot too. I sleep here. You understand that? Right alongside of Asoka. Now don’t argue. Do it. Would you care to kiss that?” He showed the man the tightened knuckles of his left fist. “Something’s happened to me,” he remarked to himself, as he watched the head mahout despatch a messenger for Moses. “Somehow it’s the same day. But I’m not the same man.”

  VI

  “Soft Snap Now Is Staring At You,

  But You Can’t See.”

  Sunrise discovered Asoka munching an enormous loaf of hot bread and Quorn drinking tea on a chair within ten feet of him. He was reading a five-cent book entitled Maxims of Napoleon. He had no use whatever for the Corsican. He considered him a scoundrel. What puzzled and intrigued him was that such a scoundrel should have been so philosophically wise.

  “A guy who didn’t have to be a king, but went and was one — a guy who might ha’ been a poet, but who went and was a politician — a guy who could have had it easy, and who went to Roosia — just imagine that — was crazy. He was as crazy as this here elephant was yesterday. He ran amok through Europe. Yet he talked wise. Get this one: ‘It is much wiser to despise the judgments of certain men than to seek to demonstrate their insignificance and versatility.’ True, ain’t it? Yet the guy who said it lets the English ship him off to St. Helena jes’ as simple minded as a communist asking the cops for board an’ lodging! — It ‘ud be like me if I should ask that balm for an introduction to an easy billet.”

  That last thought was brought into being by the sight of Chullunder Ghose on pony-back, riding toward him. Quorn stuffed the booklet in his pocket and studied the man. He noticed that the pony was tired. The babu needed shaving. He dismounted without betraying fatigue, but his eyes looked as if he might have been up all night. Somebody brought him a chair. He demanded a cup and saucer and drank some of Quorn’s tea while they stared at each other in silence.

  “I wouldn’t trust you,” the babu said at last, “with one small secret. You’re a moralist. You believe in right-eousness. Same is the excuse which solemn nobodies depend on to explain their unscrupulous acts. You are a prig with irreligious eyes — in other words a fraud. I get you.”

  “What would you call yourself?” Quorn retorted, charging his pipe with his thumb.

  Chullunder Ghose finished the tea and then stared at the leaves in the teacup before he answered:

  “Mark Twainian definition fits me as its own skin fits a herring. An honest man, said Mark Twain, is a hellion who will stay bought. That is what is known as verb sap.”

  “Uh-huh? Some one bought you lately?” Quorn asked.

  “No, not lately,” said the babu. “I could find no purchaser. So I bought myself — long ago. I paid a high price. And I have stayed bought like any other trouble that was in the market.”

  Quorn stared, smoking, leaning on his elbows. He signed to a mahout to bring grass for Asoka.

  “Go on,” he said. “Are you the man that Maharajah said he’d send to talk to me? I’m listening, but I’m believing nothing.”

  “Good, then I can tell the truth.” Chullunder Ghose opened his black sunshade and balanced it over his shoulder against the rising sun. That gave him an advantage; he could watch Quorn’s face, whereas his own was in shadow — not that Quorn cared. “The truth is only dangerous when somebody believes it,” he went on. “I was cheap at the price, and the price was a high old time, by Jiminy. I have had it. And there is worse to come.”

  “Says you.”

  “Yes, best time ever. Good time depends on upsetting equilibrium of status quo and vested interests, like bull in china-shop. Everything else is mere morality. You had a good time yesterday. So did the elephant.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Yes you did. You didn’t know it, that’s all. Soft snap now is staring at you, but you can’t see.”

  “I can see you’re a crook,” Quorn answered.

  The babu nodded. “That is what exasperates me,” he admitted. “You have enough intelligence to see that, yet you lack imagination. You, with your advantages! Excuse me if I smile. It is to save myself from weeping for you hypocritically. Hypocrisy is the only vice I don’t permit myself.”

  “Advantages? Me?” Quorn thumbed his pipe and lighted it again. “If y
ou knew, you wouldn’t talk such boloney. I was a poor lad. Mother took in laundry. Since I was fourteen I’ve had one mean job after another, on account that my eyes scared even me when I looked in a looking-glass. I’ve got me a sort of education, but it gets me nowhere. You don’t know what tough luck is.”

  “Perhaps not,” said the babu. “I was only failed B.A., Calcutta University. I was expected to raise a family on Rupees thirty-five per month less fines for indiscretions. Am indiscretionist by nature. Solemn stupidity stirs my soul to Rabelaisian amusement. There were so many fines in consequence that I was owing the treasury money every pay-day. I assure you a sense of humor is a bad thing for a failed B.A., in a country ruled by white man’s burden-bearers. Once the English get to India they seem to think that Rudyard Kipling wrote them; so unless you can get them to laugh at themselves they are so self-conscious that they creak like rusty bed-springs. Only one in two dozen can laugh at himself; that makes all the rest regard him as a bounder, so he has no influence. It was no use. I had to eschew respectability, and I have been happy ever since, all things by turns and nothing long, like U.S.A. American politics. I have been wayside conjurer — secret service agent — salesman of spells and potions — twice to the United States as lecturer on magic — twice deported on the ground of too hot competition with the native clergy — twice to Tibet — twice around the world. I know eight languages, Charlie Chaplin, Trotsky, Aimee Semple MacPherson and Albert Einstein. I have owned a hundred thousand dollars in actual money for several months. I have been in jail in seven countries. I have had a Chinese mistress and a Jewish secretary. I have been the intimate friend of men and women who walked this earth like gods. And I have been patronized by pompous and expensive nobodies. I have been to a garden party at Buckingham Palace, where I was mistaken for a Maharajah. I have been up in airplanes, and down in submarines. I have been condemned to death twice by angry governments and kissed on both cheeks by a Frenchman. I was run out of Russia, bare-footed over the snow through a forest, on an empty stomach. I have dined on ortolans in Paris, on rotten eggs in Pekin, and on raw wind to the northward of Lhassa.”

  “You seem to have seized your opportunities,” said Quorn incautiously.

  “They seized me.” Chullunder Ghose paused. “I was a tidbit in their talons.” He paused again. “But never saw I such an opportunity as this one.”

  “Purchasing agent, eh? I don’t doubt there’s graft. Watch out you don’t lose your job.”

  Chullunder Ghose smiled, as one would at a child who spoke ingenuously. “Graft?” he answered. “Graft is for such as would cheat themselves at solitaire! Myself am cosmic opportunist, eager for gargantuan enjoyment. Graft is mouse-trap bait. It catches little mice like moralists and hypocrites, who are the self-same leopard with the spots exaggerated. No self-respecting immoralist could condescend to be a grafter. Graft is a system of petty rewards for pikers, such as noblemen, politicos and similar mistakes of nature. Graft is self-humiliation on the easy payment plan. Are you a grafter?”

  “No,” said Quorn, “I never had a chance to graft but once. I passed that chance up. Not that it’s any o’ your business.”

  “Graft,” remarked the babu, “is the grave of opportunity. But perhaps you don’t know a verb sap when you see one. Did you ever hear of the boy who struck the winning blow at Bunker Hill?”

  “No, never heard of him.”

  “Have you heard of the cow that kicked the lamp that burned the house that Jack built? Have you seen Chi- cago? All due to a cow! Have you seen London? All due to a baker’s ash-box — Pudding Lane to Pie Corner, all one ash-heap — all one cosmic opportunity. But perhaps you don’t know history? Have you heard of Mahatma Gandhi’s false teeth? He has had them made for him in prison by an expert dentist, as a signal that he means to starve himself to death. What do you think of that one?”

  “I’d call that contrariness o’ disposition.”

  The babu looked grieved by such stupidity. “Contrariness,” he said, “is your complaint, Gandhi is a G. B. Shaw in bathing trunks without the whiskers to get in his way. He would rather die than lose, and he looks like losing, so why not die spectacularly? But if he wins, he’s in training for dinner; he’ll need teeth, so he gets some good ones. Gandhi is pure paradoxist. You are prudish, Pollyanna minded quidnunc. You have been in training during many lean years to embrace an opportunity, and here is opportunity. You seem to think it is an opportunity to fiddle while India burns! You are a cow with a lamp all ready to be kicked, but you let it burn you instead of the barn! You have a chance to be a corner-stone of history. You can be laid with dignity, good humor and perhaps with profit. You prefer to be a Maharajah’s goat, deported to save him trouble!”

  That was a shrewd thrust. Quorn stiffened at the thought of that indignity.

  “What’s your lay-out?” he demanded. And he knocked out his pipe on the heel of his boot — a symptom that the babu noticed, analyzed and remembered for future reference. For the moment the babu merely remarked:

  “It seems a pity they should shoot this elephant.”

  Quorn swallowed that too, hook, line and sinker. “Who says who’ll do that? The Maharajah said he’d kill any one who dared try to shoot him.”

  “O-o-oh?” exclaimed the babu. “O-o-o-h! So you’re as innocent as all that? You should go back to the U.S.A. United States and vote for prohibition! Do you really believe — that the word of a prince — in a tight place — is a rain-check? It is as breakable, I tell you, as the Ten Commandments! It is as worthless as a bankrupt’s promissory note! It is worth exactly as much as a priest’s forgiveness! That a man with such eyes as yours should be so innocent! Oh, what a life! What disillusionments! What waste of energy and plasm, that evolution, in a billion years, should breed no better than the face of Gunga sahib with the brains of a lump of institution pudding! That I should live to see it! Ignominy!”

  “Whose ignominy?” Quorn demanded. He was skeptically curious. His wits were in low gear, racing to ascend to heights of more Olympian comprehension.

  “Mine — mine — mine!” said the babu, almost tearfully. “Should I give a damn for your ignominy? Besides, you haven’t any. To have ignominy, one must have intelligence and self-respect. It is otherwise as marmalade to moonshine — neither is even aware of the other. Oh, the shame — the shame of it! I said to her, you have imagination. I staked my intelligence on it. I said: ‘sahiba, there are no gods. There is no such thing as destiny. There is a word that covers this, which only Germans or the Chinese could appreciate — Comicosmiccoincidentalfortuity. The Law of Improbability, that governs the drawing of sweepstake tickets, has functioned. Unworthy aggregates of atoms though we are, Humor has attracted to us some one who would rather die than double-cross your Highness.’ She did not know what double-cross means. I told her that to you the word means worse than alimony, worse than bugs in boarding-houses. I said ‘Ben Quorn will desert neither you nor the elephant, whatever happens.’ Oh well — I eat ashes. It is not the first time.”

  “I believe you’d double-cross your own self, you’re that crooked,” Quorn answered. “I wouldn’t take your word for twice two. But she’s a right nice young lady. I wouldn’t see harm done to her, if I could help it. But I’d have to have her word on it. I wouldn’t take yours. Have you come from her or from the Maharajah?”

  “Am diplomatist,” the babu answered. “Same means double-headed eagle looking both ways, sitting on two horns of a dilemma and on both sides of a fence. It isn’t easy. However, the word is all over the City that you are Gunga sahib. It is very funny. The Maharajah was drunk when he met you at the palace gate. But he was not yet too drunk; and I had whispered to him. So he asked those priests who forced their way in, whether or not you are Gunga sahib. They said Yes, because they had no time to think; the crowd was demonstrating, and I was outside telling the crowd what words to yell. It happened he was very angry with the agents of the Maharajah of Bohutnugger, who have been giving themselves great airs a
nd demanding too much money. Therefore what I whispered to him sunk in. Being drunk enough, he sent a scandalously unimportant messenger to tell those agents they may go home, seeing that his precious daughter is now next thing to a goddess and therefore much too good for such a brute as Bohutnugger.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Quorn asked. “She doesn’t have to marry Bluebeard. Sounds all right to me.”

  “Oh? Does it? Can’t a Maharajah sober up? He has been interviewing priests all night long. Priests don’t like miracles that happen. They prefer miracles that are said to have happened, somewhere else and long ago. They see the difficulties. This babu is Difficulty-specialist — fathead maybe, but first-class fisherman in troubled water — up all night long spreading propaganda, promising the people celebrations, fireworks, a procession, free food, all the elements of jubilee. And they forget it will be paid for from the taxes. Also have been sending messages to her by female courier. Consequently, she demands her freedom. She demands elaborate establishment of precedent. She insists she shall ride through the streets of Narada unveiled, escorted by the troops. And the priests forbid it. Why not? They stand to lose everything. They say that you and the elephant ought to be killed. She should be made so sacred that no one ever may see her again. They have a holy hole to put her into, down under the temple crypt, where several saints have earned immortality by being lousy and hungry.”

  Quorn relighted his pipe. “The hell they say it. Well, I reckon I can die game. Him and me” — he glanced at old Asoka, who was calmly tossing tufts of hay on to his head and shoulders— “him and me can cut loose any time we’re minded. Bring on your priests; I’ll talk to ’em. But how about the lady? Is that father o’ hers so skeered o’ priests he’ll hand her over?”

  The babu shook his head. “It’s no use,” he said sadly. “I couldn’t trust you. I must send word to her to be brave. She will die dreadfully, but death is nothing.”