Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Miss, is it as bad as that?” Quorn asked.

  She eyed him steadily. “If I could go mad,” she said after a moment, “then perhaps I could endure this existence. But I can’t go mad. I only suffer. So it is better to act madly, and to win free or take the consequences.”

  “Very well, Miss.” Quorn made up his mind that instant. It occurred to him that life would not be comfortable in the knowledge that she had failed for lack, perhaps, of something he might have done about it, though he had no idea what. “I can act as crazy as a March hare too, I reckon. But I’m no hero. Don’t expect it of me. I’m an ignorant man, and I’m timid. As much as it’s in me to do, I’ll see you through your trouble.”

  “I thank you, Gunga sahib.” There was wisdom in her. She said nothing about compensation. But she looked excited.

  Quorn turned to the babu. “Watch your step,” he recommended. “Trip up, and you’ll reckon with me, if it’s my last act.”

  “Now what? Quickly!” said the Princess, intervening to prevent the stab of answering wit that might have led to anger. “What do I do?”

  “Write a letter to the Jains, O Song of heaven. Ask them to present to you the tiger that you hear embarrasses their magnanimity. Invite them to deliver same carnivorous obscenity to bearer, who is faithful but anonymous. Suggest that their immediate necessities might stir your regal generosity if you should know their nature. Sign your name and seal the letter; then let this babu entrust it to an unknown messenger.”

  She wrote, her eyes aglow with curiosity. Her lips were set firm. Her chin was reckless.

  “Read it,” she said. Then: “Couldn’t you have asked them? Don’t you know them?”

  “Yes, sahiba. But they know me. Jains are pious people. Piety implies a critical mistrust of realism such as motivates this impiously contemplative student of their views! But oh, how much they will enjoy a letter! Now I kiss feet. I beg leave to go like bat in blazes.”

  “Go if you must. But what next?”

  “Hush, hush! Secrecy is so important that I let my lips not know what my imagination hatches! Trust us!” He included Quorn in a retreating gesture of conspiracy and mutual esteem, then bowed his way out backward, pulling Quorn too.

  “Come on,” he commanded. “It is better to be hot than Hollywooded. In a minute, she would melt our reticence like Myrna Loy in movies. She is wonderful, but it is better she should fret than ruin spontaneity with too much reason. Cold feet come of hot enthusiasm overfed with facts, I tell you. Where did you put the gateman’s shudder-maker?”

  “Stuck it in the bushes.”

  “Get it then and give it to me. Get the key too.”

  Quorn obeyed. He overtook the babu in the gate-house. The babu unlocked the door and cut the prisoner loose with the sword. It was as sharp as a razor. He returned it to the victim, who was still half-dazed.

  “There, take it,” he commanded. “Show your gratitude, you carrion! Had I not spoken for you, gone was your job! I spoke, however, and the Princess has forgiven you for being such a badmash — such a beshirm! Silence — do you understand me? Speak of it — think of it — even remember it — and I will tell the Maharajah you habitually pass in visitors! Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sahib.”

  “Will you speak of it?”

  “Nay, sahib.”

  “And when I knock another time, will you admit me?”

  “Yes, sahib.”

  The babu turned to Quorn. “Embarrass him with riches. Give him a glare and a growl and rupees ten. Then get your elephant and go home. I will see you after midnight, near the wall behind Asoka’s picket.”

  XI

  “They Will Say Now That Asoka Is Not Blesséd.”

  It takes much time for ancient India to become commonplace, so that a man can accept what he sees and understand his own reaction to events. For the first time in his experience Quorn felt life flowing through him, colorful and vivid. Yet he felt like a man in a day-dream. It was natural, and yet it was not. It was strange, mysterious, incredible, yet real. It was even terrifying. It felt as if sudden death, from unknown causes, might occur now — in an hour — in a day. More than a day ahead was unimaginable. Philadelphia was somewhere in a half-remembered former life, vivid enough at moments but impossible to correlate with this experience.

  The most puzzling part of it was that it seemed so natural to ride through swarming streets on an obedient elephant. To avoid being stared at, he lay prone on the elephant’s neck, but even so he excited interest. The name Gunga sahib was on all men’s lips. It seemed to him that there was rather less enthusiasm than there had been — rather more watchful waiting, as if the crowd anticipated something they were warned would happen. Once or twice he thought he noticed sly smiles of the wait and see sort, and they made him shudder. But the sensation of swaying along so high above the crowd, and of being important, yet feeling unimportant, of understanding none of it, yet feeling himself to be essential to it all, so swamped all else that thought was almost in abeyance. It was no use reasoning about unreasonable things. Babu — Maharajah — palace — Princess — elephants — there was nothing to compare them with. It wasn’t even like the movies. It was least of all like digging graves in Philadelphia and reading books by men, who, he began to suspect, knew not much after all.

  “Realism?” he said to himself. Almost all the writers of the five-cent books are realists, or rationalists, or materialists, or Reds. “I wonder. Is there such a thing as being so incredulous you can’t see truth until it hits you for a home run?”

  Things seemed real when he reached the compound. It was known already who was Master of the Elephants, though no one told from whom the information came, and no one would confess to having seen the babu. Moses was in the compound waiting for him, ostentatiously exuding flattery, but curiously careful how he phrased congratulations.

  “Oh, I am overjoyed, sir! Oh, I know how absolutelee wonderful it must feel. And the salaree is no doubt most remunerative. Affluence is so nice. I am hoping, though, your honor’s resignation from the mission is not written just yet?”

  “Why the hell should you care?” Quorn asked. “You ain’t fired. You follow me. Might happen you’d rate five or so a month more money if you pull yourself together.”

  “I am veree grateful.” Moses’ one eye somehow qualified the gratitude with doubt. “It was a thought I had, that possiblee — your honor — I mean — is there a hurree?”

  “What the hell are you driving at?” “There is so little to do at the mission.”

  “Don’t I know it?”

  “It is comfortable — it is cleaner at the mission. Will your honor sleep here?”

  Quorn glanced at the shed where he had had his first drink with Chullunder Ghose. There was room for a cot. There was a veranda — two armchairs — and quantities of water. He was not a man who craved luxury, as Moses knew well. But Moses’ oriental half was on the qui vive.

  “Here are manee not so veree conscientious people. Could you not deputize me to be the mission caretaker? Then the safe if not so profitable position would be still yours, should this eleephantine change appear unfortunate.”

  “I get you.” Quorn was quick enough to see the drift of that idea. “You want my job at the mission in case I’m murdered — that it?”

  “There are jealousees and so forth,” said Moses. “Possiblee your honor does not comprehend them all.”

  “Luckily for you, I’m deaf o’ one ear,” Quorn answered. “Take my tip and hold your jaw. You’ll learn in plenty o’ time about my job at the mission.”

  He went the round. He inspected the elephants one by one, examining their feet. The circus men in Philadelphia had told him that elephants’ feet are their weakness. He had often watched the job of paring corns with a chisel and mallet. He knew exactly what to look for, and he was not so naïve as to think that the mahouts were conscientious. He found plenty of fault, but he needed Moses to interpret, since his own vocabulary lacked as
yet the technical expressions that mahouts use.

  Presently he invaded the store-shed and discovered quantities of oil. He ordered the elephants oiled that morning. Moses repeated the order unenthusiastically. No move was made to obey. And then Quorn noticed that he was receiving no obedience at all. No elephant was down, having his corns cut; they were all standing, and the mahouts stood by as if expecting something.

  “Tell’em,” he said to Moses, “if they don’t hop to it, there’ll be hell here such as they ain’t used to. Wait a minute. Tell me first what’s the big idea. What’s eating ’em?”

  “They wait,” said Moses, “for the heathen cereemonee. This is the day on which the high priest always blesses all the elephants.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You did not ask,” said Moses.

  “How soon?”

  “Presentlee.”

  Exasperated, but suppressing the temptation to declare war there and then on anything that challenged his authority, Quorn strolled to his chair beside Asoka, filled his pipe and sat down.

  “You stay by,” he ordered Moses. “Soon as this here high priest has strutted his stuff, I’ll strut mine; and I’ll need you so there won’t be no mistake about my meaning. Fetch a chair and sit beside me.”

  They were seated there together when a band of weirdly unfamiliar music struck on Quorn’s ears. It resembled, more than anything else he knew, the din of carnival, heard from a couple of streets away, when ten or a dozen mechanical instruments, all playing different tunes, are working full blast. All the elephants began to sway as if their lives depended on it. The mahouts raised their hands to their foreheads and bowed. Quorn tilted back his chair, one leg crossed over the other, and assumed the air of brassy and contemptuous indifference with which he would have looked on at a procession of the Knights of Pythias. But as the procession came into the compound he had hard work not to betray his curiosity.

  He would not have believed that such a person as that high priest existed, if his own eyes had not seen him. Magic, in Quorn’s imagination, meant Houdini or the conjurer who “filled in” at the picture palace back in Philadelphia. Black magic was boloney — something that the suckers fell for, and that ignorant European peasants gradually sloughed off when they emigrated to the U.S.A. He had heard of Wops who still believe in the evil eye; and he had read in the paper that witches now and then still haunt the rural districts of even enlightened Pennsylvania. But there was nothing to it. Five-cent books had made him positive on that point. Spiritualism was even less than boloney, it was hooey; and in fact all mysticism came under the general heading of horse-feathers — not to be taken seriously by any man of sanity and self-respect.

  Yet — here was this high priest! And it wasn’t a circus, in spite of all the elephants and costumes. It wasn’t music that the band played — not in Quorn’s ears. Music was Sousa’s marches, one-step, two-step, fox-trot, and “The Gang’s All Here.” This was mystery stuff that made a fellow’s backbone curdle and reduced his thinking process to a sort of frenzy, as if static were coming over fifty radios at once and he were trying to pick out Mac- Namee’s description of a prize-fight. That high priest was a chocolate-creamy maniac from some kids’ story book. But was he? Bughouse Bill was Quorn’s name for him, instantly invented — never to be substituted; in sheer self-defense, he would call that expert Bughouse Bill forever. For he surely was an expert, and Quorn knew he was — feared him — hated him — shrunk, within himself, away from him, and outwardly insulted him with slightly over-done indifference. Quorn’s eyes saved his face; they were too saturnine to betray horror, even when he knew the high priest saw him and was watching him sideways. Moses, solar topee in his hand, stood up respectfully, unable to endure the strain of Quorn’s contemptuous attitude.

  “Sucker!” said Quorn. But Moses bowed his head.

  The high priest, all in white, with shaven head and naked breast and belly, stalked the earth like death’s grandfather. Surely he invented death — begat it! His ascetic body, rib by rib, was unreality electroplated on an idea! His movements were stealthy and hypnotic thought, expressed in cautious action, arrogant but ten times as alert as a leopard’s. He had high cheek-bones. His eyes were as agate as Quorn’s but touched with red, lashless. He had no eyebrows. His heavy eyelids were as wrinkled as walnut-shells; his eyes peered steadily out from under them like an alligator’s.

  As he passed each elephant he raised his right hand casually, barely as high as his shoulder. Six robed priests behind him swung their censers then, exactly to the same height, toward the indicated beast that swayed at its picket. There was a sudden cloud of incense smoke. Obedient to its mahout each elephant in turn acknowledged, with an upraised trunk, its individual blessing, and the band blared ritual disharmony that indicated godly recognition of the act and deed. Thirty-five or forty temple ministrants in white robes, following the men with censers, chanted nasally like irritated wasps. As many nautch girls, naked-bellied but arrayed in savage copper-purple splashed on naked skin, clashed their anklets and sang like harpies snarling through tinny megaphones. They looked to Quorn like birds of prey. He suspected them of being cannibals. They brought back to his mind, too, stories he had read of goings-on when Rome was learning about vice in Syria. They hardly danced; theirs was a movement more resembling waves — a spastic surge, repeated and repeated. It aroused the puritan antagonism that was close to the surface of Quorn’s self-taught skepticism.

  As the high priest reached Asoka, Quorn’s eyes met his for perhaps one second. Then the priest’s hand went up and the censers swung. Asoka stood still; he was not even swaying. He was used to await the order when the priests went by, and Quorn gave none. He had resumed his swaying by the time the nautch girls reached him. Quorn was still considering the high priest’s stare, detesting it and steeling the strength of prejudice, accepting enmity — enjoying it. He noticed, though, that all the nautch girls stared at him and Asoka.

  “That is terrible,” said Moses. “They will say now that Asoka is not blesséd.”

  “Me an’ you are missionaries. We’ll baptize him,” Quorn retorted irritably. He was having to restrain himself. A man who might be a priest or something of the sort, who had been following the procession, had detached himself and was drawing nearer. He was grinning, but the grin was wry and lean, and he was making gestures that suggested anything but laughter. They were hardly ceremonial. They might be deaf-and-dumb signs, comprehensible to anyone who knew that alphabet. Indifference was difficult to keep up under that ordeal. Moses, frankly terrified, caught at the back of Quorn’s chair:

  “Oh, do be respectful to him! Do be sensible!” he muttered.

  “If he wants my goat, he’s got to get it he-man fashion,” said Quorn. “If he gets it, he’ll know it.”

  “But he is a personage!”

  “Shucks!”

  The personage approached. One of his gestures was to spread two fingers of his right hand and to point them straight at Quorn’s eyes. He approached then within about two strides, so that Quorn got the smell of the incense on his garments. But he spoke to Moses, looking straight at Moses — spoke so rapidly that Quorn couldn’t catch one word he uttered. Then he passed on, following the procession, walking normally as if his act were finished.

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How come then you’re terror-stricken? Tell me.”

  “No, no, sir, I did not understand him.”

  “That so? Then you’re fired for lying. How much do I owe you? Draw your money and get the hell from here.”

  “But sir, I am a poor man. Don’t be angree — I am veree much upset. I—”

  “Come across or quit. No argument. What did he tell you?”

  “Sir, if he had said it of me, I would go away from here so rapidlee I—”

  “Shoot, I say! What did he tell you?”

  “It is veree bad luck, sir, to tell such superstitious sayings. Should I
say it, I should have to go to confession to a priest. But how can I? There is no priest in Narada.”

  “Bad luck, eh?” said Quorn. “You’d better confess to me, you sucker! See here, me and you’ve been tolerable friendly. But you see this?” Knotted knuckles stopped within a foot of Moses’ nose. “You talk, or you’ll learn what bad luck is. You’ll need a set o’ new front teeth and a job too. Come on.”

  “Sir, he said — oh, no, I dare not say it!”

  “Come on!”

  “Sir, he said — before the moon is full, your spirit shall incarnate in a worm within the belly of a dog that has mange and rabies.”

  “Is that all? Hell, I thought he’d threatened me!”

  “Sir, it is superstitious magic, but so veree dangerous that—”

  “Shucks. You go and bring my dinner. Cut along now, and forget I talked rough. After dinner you can find a porter and fetch my cot here. You sleep at the mission till I tell you what next.”

  Moses went off in a hurry. He would have been useless anyhow to talk to the mahouts — too nervous. Quorn was curious to find out whether he could make mahouts, who had seen him cursed, obey him. He knew well, everyone of the mahouts had seen and understood. He half expected to have to make some bloody-nosed examples, and he wondered how far it was safe to go. Not having seen a knife used as an argument against authority, nor ever having had to analyze his food, he was not afraid of knives or poison. But he did not want to begin with a general strike on his hands. He rather hoped the miserable head mahout would come and beg for re-instatement; as a subordinate, well-watched and disciplined, he might be useful, for a while at any rate.

  However, there was another surprise awaiting him. He was obeyed on the instant. The mahouts went to work in a hurry. Every elephant in the compound, including Asoka, was given a thorough grooming. The mahouts appeared to think a priestly cursing had increased Quorn’s potency for evil so that it was unsafe to disobey him in the slightest detail. Letting well enough alone, he invaded the shed and made a list of all the stores; and by the time that Moses brought his dinner he was feeling good-tempered — almost unsuspicious.