by Talbot Mundy
Quorn stood up. He faced the babu. He put his pipe in his pocket. He clenched his fists. He thrust aside the babu’s sunshade, so that they could see each other.
“Look here,” he demanded, “who — said — who — can’t — trust — me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said the babu. “Danger is danger. Fear is fear. Why not admit it?”
“God damn your soul to hell,” said Quorn. “You name your bet! I’ll show you who’s afraid of priests, or you or anyone!”
“Perhaps you are not afraid of me, because I am a benevolent elderly gent,” said the babu. “And perhaps you are not yet afraid of the priests, because you are ignorant. But you are afraid of that elephant, because you know he is dangerous. You would not dare to ride him to the city and let me show you something.”
“Is that so?” Quorn answered.
VII
“When Was A Throne Less Valuable
Than A Naughty Daughter?”
There was nothing the head mahout could do about it, except sulk, vow vengeance, and then put on his best clothes and walk to the palace to complain that his honor was dead. Quorn had ordered a pad put on Asoka, and the helpers had not dared to disobey him. He mounted, with the babu on the pad behind him looking beneath his sunshade like a fat, benignant deity, and off they went toward the city. Quorn was silent — more scared than he was willing to admit, even to himself. He made no comments on the babu’s chatter. Not guessing that inscrutable aloofness was the surest means of involving himself deeper in the toils of an ancient legend, he did not even acknowledge the crowd’s obeisances. He hoped they might grow tired of demonstration if he took no notice. He was wondering about his job at the mission, and watching the elephant. Asoka obeyed perfectly, but Quorn was skeptical and on the alert for symptoms of another outbreak, at the same time mildly appreciative of the babu’s courage. Surely there could not be many people who would have taken a ride on that elephant after the previous day’s tantrum.
“Did you ever see a tiger?” asked the babu, chatting away like a fat old woman at a picnic. “They are outsize pussy cats that look like fire on four legs. They have 54 fangs. They have claws and they can use both, believe me. But they are not as dangerous as elephants. An elephant has intellect, and he can crush like an Englishman snubbing an upstart.”
Quorn had seen plenty of tigers in circuses. They had never meant much to him, and he betrayed no interest in them now. He wasn’t specially interested in the English either; they were all of them pretty much George the Thirds, except the ones who dropped their aitches, and those were all on the dole. His attention was fully occupied. The streets were crowded and narrow; numbers of fools appeared almost to wish that Asoka would trample them. It was a phase of Oriental superstition that Quorn had never quite believed was true, although he had read about the Car of Juggernaut and similar relics of antiquity that stir emotional excess. He had heard too of the unarmed crowds that hurl themselves against the armed police in ecstasies of “passive” protest. He discovered, however, that if he shouted they would clear the way; his voice, if he pitched it carefully, held almost as much mysterious authority as his goat-like eyes did. Against his will he had been obliged to wear yesterday’s turban, because he had had no time to buy a new helmet and he was afraid of the sun. The babu had bound the turban on properly and had slyly touched his forehead with a little carmine, so that he looked exactly as the day before, except for a clean shirt, open at the neck, revealing sun-burned skin. He had no idea where they were going. He doubted the wisdom of going anywhere at the babu’s instigation. However, he let the babu direct him toward a part of the city he had not yet seen, and, doubting the outcome, hoped it might not be too awful.
“To estimate effectiveness of diplomatic dodges,” said the babu, “one should multiply the speed by the unexpectedness, then add the square of one’s opponent’s tendency to be conservative. Divide that by the number of fools who are in your confidence, and then you know the odds against you. If it figures as odds on, change the plan immediately. Odds on chances usually fail because Perversity is same as Destiny, and Destiny is what you call horse-feathers. Odds on chances also are corrupters of imagination. I intend to introduce you to a Derby-sweepstake-ticket shot — about a million to one.”
Gambling was out of Quorn’s line. He had never even won a raffle. If he had any opinion about it at all, he would probably have said gambling is wicked or antisocial. But the subject did not interest him. He continued calling to the crowd to get out of the way.
“Perversity,” remarked the babu, “being omnipresent, sits on fence and saddens prospects quite impartially. You and I are not monopolists of evil. Enemy shares same fifty-fifty. Thus it happens there is no one at the Residency, which is good for us and bad for crackpots who believe in cricket — same being English for puss-in-the-corner according to Hoyle, who was a doctrinaire. And doctrinaires are like Napoleon’s cannon that stuck in the mud en route to Waterloo. A British Resident, just now, would be a Blücher in the wrong box. He would put out the fire and filch the chestnuts. God in gray silk reach-me-downs would be a tolerant and unconventionally easy-going look-the-other-wayish humorist compared to the kind of British Resident they send to this sort of place. There is a new one coming. I have never heard of him. But I will bet you he is some one they have relegated to obscurity until he can be pensioned in usual course. They need their good men to resist the passive calm that Gandhi whooped up. A good Englishman is an incorruptible opportunist with iron bowels and a sense of humor. But this will be a middle-class Englishman, with middle-class morals and a middle-class horror of innovations and responsibility for same. He will have middle-class notions of dignity. He will say no with an air of firmness, to everything, because he is afraid to say yes. He will know eight antediluvian jokes and he will tell them tiresomely. He will disapprove of you, of me, and of everything else that is irregular. So we have thirteen days in which to play Perversity against the bank. Winner take all. I wish you kindly to observe that carving.”
They were half-way down a long street that is called the Pul-ke-nichi, meaning “underneath the bridge.” It is the street where the fortune tellers and the nostrum sellers do a roaring business, in between the offices of money-lenders and the lairs of ladies of the oldest trade on earth. It is a narrow, smelly, noisy, interesting street. The ancient stone bridge crosses from one temple to another, and the street dives under it in gloom that could hide a hundred murderers, but they are only cripples and homeless pariahs who sleep there. The bridge is beautiful, because time has smoothed it and obliterated all the builder’s sins of over-decoration. The two temples that it connects are together known as Kali’s Bosom, because they stand on two, low, rounded hillocks. But the bridge has been blocked at either end for centuries. The rival priesthoods quarreled. Grass has grown in the cracks of the limestone. Doves build their nests on the shoulders of gods and goddesses that face each other inward from the parapets on either side. It is an act of impiety nowadays to cross the bridge; men even smear a little carmine on the wall before they pass beneath it, lest ill luck happen. It is said all sorts of evil spirits haunt the neighborhood where priests have excommunicated one another.
Carved on one side of the ancient limestone arch, where slanting sunlight stabbed into the smelly gloom, there was a figure of a tiger being led into what looked like a temple doorway. He was being led by a lady. The lady wore jeweled anklets. The tiger had on a collar, and she led him with her left hand. In her right hand were flowers. Quorn halted Asoka to stare at the carving, and that caused quite a sensation in the crowded street. The babu, flourishing his sunshade, delivered what appeared to be a lecture to the crowd. It was received with rapt attention.
“Now let’s go,” said the babu finally. “Enough is just a leetle too much. Always omit the explanation if you wish to stir imaginations. Forward!”
They passed under the bridge and emerged in sunlight, Quorn observing over-shoulder that the babu’s words were bein
g repeated to fresh arrivals on the scene. There was almost a mob back there; it was too interested or excited to pay any attention at all to the incompetent police.
“Vox populi vox dei,” said the babu. “That means anyone who cares may make the laws, if I may cultivate the superstitions.”
Then at last Quorn spoke to him: “Your time’s up. Either you talk horse, or else get down and walk. You hear me?”
“First talk tiger,” said the babu. “You have seen the carving of that virgin on the bridge. She is the self-same Princess Sankyamuni whom the Gunga sahib rescued. It is part of the same legend, that after the elephant slew the Gunga sahib she was thrown into a tiger’s den within a courtyard of this temple on your right hand. But it is said she tamed the tiger. It is said she led him forth, across the bridge, into that other temple on your left hand. Do you get the sweet significance?”
“Not yet,” said Quorn. “You talk. I’ll listen.”
“I was just now telling all those people not to let the priests deceive them. I informed them that the priests are jealous and will say you are not the real Gunga sahib, nor is she the real Sankyamuni. I suggested, however, that if she is the real Sankyamuni they will soon know it, because of course she will fulfil all the prophetic legend, not only half of it.”
Quorn came out of his mood; he was horrified out of it. “You mean she has to tame a tiger?”
“You must,” said the babu, “unless she is to be eaten.”
“Then she gets et,” Quorn conceded.
The babu sighed, then continued: “In that temple on your right hand is a very sacred tiger, said to be so savage that only his keeper can approach his cage, which is set in the opening of a passage leading to the crypt, said passage consequently being free from trespass. Don’t you see how eagerly the priests will leap at the suggestion that the real Sankyamuni should tame that tiger? Let her lead him across the parapet, into that temple beyond the bridge, and thus fulfil the legend. Priests are always reasonable.”
“Is she silly ass enough to try it?” Quorn asked.
“If she doesn’t,” said the babu, “love’s young dream of liberty is what a Russian calls kaput, like Five-Year Plan statistics. And unless she does same sooner than the British Resident arrives, she will be stopped before she starts — and you will be deported as a fraud who tampered with the local superstitions.”
Quorn forgot his incredulity. “Hell,” he demanded, “will her father let her do it?”
“Will he not! When was a throne less valuable than a naughty daughter?” asked the babu. “Morals are elastic. It is only economics that are intransigent. Her father will try to bargain with the priests for quid pro quo-ish terms which either side will hope to force the other to observe, and he will then get beautifully pie-eyed.”
“But it’s murder,” said Quorn.
“No, it’s morals,” the babu corrected. “Anything done in the name of religion is moral. Didn’t you know that? And besides, the Maharajah will conservatively give a little money to the gods to make a miracle. He doesn’t believe in miracles. But he does believe in Lord God Alibi — like Admiral Nelson seeing signals.”
“Aren’t the British Christians?” Quorn demanded. “How about it, when the missionaries hear o’ this?”
“The Maharajah will refer them to the story about Abraham and Isaac,” said the babu.
“That won’t get him nowhere.”
“Very likely not. He knows a Christian’s religion is the same as anybody’s — words adroitly strung together to excuse mendacity. But did you ever know a criminal who did not over-play his knowledge?”
Quorn conceived a sudden idea. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll let you in on this. You and I’ll split the credit. Let’s hit the pike. It’s only seventy miles to rail-head, and this elephant’s fit to make that in a day and a night. Let’s get to rail-head and send a hell of a long telegram to the British, at Delhi or wherever they keep their head man. That’ll stop it. There’ll be troops here in a jiffy.”
“Look at me,” the babu answered. “Look quick. Do I look like a fool?”
“You look crooked. I could see that, and I said so, first time me and you met,” Quorn retorted.
“But do I look simple? Do I look like a reformer — or a tittle-tattle-tell-tale — or a player of penny-a-hundred Old Maid? Listen to me: I have been a thousand things, and three of them were good enough to live for. But I have never yet been a Prime Minister. I intend to be one. Do you think I would let a respectable ignoramus with ratty morals stand in my way for a minute? Krishna! Disillusionize yourself!”
“I’m mission caretaker. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Me and tigers don’t mix,” Quorn retorted.
“Nevertheless,” said the babu, “we have given that head mahout plenty of time to reach the palace and complain against you. I should say the Maharajah will immediately order you deported. You will be assassinated on your way to rail-head.”
“Why should I be murdered?” Quorn asked, angrily because he could feel he was losing confidence.
“To prevent you from sending telegrams!” the babu answered. “As for me, in my opinion, murder would be too good for a moralist who would leave a lovely woman to be given the works, as will happen to her if you fail her.”
“Damn your eyes, stop calling me a moralist!”
“Stop being one.”
“Does that there Maharajah mean to shoot this elephant?”
“He will do as the priests instruct him, unless you are sensible.”
“What d’you mean, sensible?”
“Trust me.”
“Nothing doing.”
“Listen: self am soloist on harp of opportunity. Emotional attachment to yourself, or admiration of your brains is not a motive that emasculates my purpose. As for you, to hell with you, unless you have some guts and affability. You get that? Get this also. To succeed, I have to make you useful.”
“Meaning tigers?”
“Meaning telepathic insight into such malignity as might destroy your usefulness to me. You yokel! Can I have my cake and eat it? Can I throw away my ace of trumps and win the rubber? Can I let you down and set myself up?”
“What then?”
“We are going to the palace. We will speak to the Maharajah. Trust me, and I promise you a red-hot time, by Jiminy, plus self-approval, which is Nature’s niftiest reward. Oppose me, and I guarantee you self-contempt, opprobrium, oblivion and Amen. Am a good prognosticator.”
“You’re a good slick promiser,” said Quorn. “Promises are easier broke than kept. Can you save this elephant?”
“He is damned if I don’t,” said the babu.
“Shucks — I’ll try you. Save the elephant, and I’ll trust you one move more. Make good again, and I’ll trust you again. Take that or leave it.”
“I accept — your manners are so gracious,” said the babu. “I will show you fun as long as you are on the level—”
“Cut that,” Quorn growled over-shoulder. “Which way to the palace?”
VIII
“At Your Own Risk!”
The Maharajah never received anyone within the palace, except political priests and perfumed ladies. He had had an overdose of priests and almost no sleep. The very mention of a woman made him blasphemous. So he decided to tackle the problem of public immorality and went to the lodge in the grounds to give audience and grind out justice. Unconscious realism made him wear a yellow turban that morning, with brownish spots that suggested the state of his liver. He found himself immediately besieged by petitioners begging for compensation for damage done by the royal elephant on the previous day. There had been plenty of time to use imaginations and to suborn witnesses. The total amount of the claims was almost astronomical. The Maharajah’s temper had become volcanic by the time Asoka swayed along the sunlit drive between the splendid beds of cannas and came to a casual standstill.
“There the brute is,” said the Maharajah. “You may have him. Shoot him — sell him — ski
n him alive — he’s all you get. The law is, that you can’t claim higher compensation than the value of the instrument that caused the damage.”
That was not the law, nor was it justice, and the claimants knew that. But they also knew the Maharajah’s offer was a trifle less outrageous than their own exaggerated total. There was plenty of room for negotiation.
Time was no object. It is Eastern custom that a ruler shall be democratically liberal of audience even if free with insulting epithets and furiously unjust. The entire crowd squatted on its hunkers to await the drama of debate and the gradual seesaw evolution of an artful compromise.
Chullunder Ghose descended by Asoka’s tail, onehanded, as active as a pot-bellied Japanese wrestler. His little black sunshade looked like an absurd parachute. He closed it with a flourish, faced the marble balustrade of the audience lodge, and bowed to the Maharajah as profoundly as if the divine right of kings were his whole religion.
“You swag-bellied rogue, what evil news have you brought?” the Maharajah demanded, and his secretaries grinned at one another. Quorn felt thoroughly ill at ease. What chance had either he or the elephant if the babu was out of favor? The secretaries seemed confident, and glad of it, that the babu would be sharply reprimanded, if not worse. But the babu’s mellow baritone went booming along the three-foot pavement that split the crowd down the midst like parted hair. The native language lends itself to melodrama. Vowels open gates of grandeur for the consonants to tramp through like a bristling army on the march.
“O Heavenborn, I bring important tidings! It is not this babu’s privilege to spread abroad what wisdom may prefer to guard with silence.”
The Maharajah scowled. “I’m busy,” he answered haughtily.
“Forever caring for this people’s needs!” the babu ventured, marvelously tinting flattery with pastel-shaded ridicule. “Time is busy also.”
“Time should have tripped your mother. You would have been better still-born,” said the Maharajah.