by Talbot Mundy
He thought so intently about the babu that he rode through the palace gate without even seeing the soldiers. Did he like the babu? Did he trust him? Was the babu for the Maharajah or against him?
“Who knows who’s what hereabouts? That little lady is a hot tomater, but she’s on the level or I’ll eat this elephant. But that there babu? Is it his game to make a goat o’ me, and grab the jack, and beat it? Mebbe. She and me are for it, that’s a ring cinch. Wisht I knew more local politics. Them priests are to be let kill her, and mebbe me too — prob’ly me too, come to think of it. That gives loving poppa an excuse to soak it to the priests, the same as politics in Philadelphia. You fix a crime on a guy when he hogs more ‘n his share o’ the graft. That proves you’re a paragon o’ civic virtue actuated by a love o’ duty. And the voters fall for it. Me and she’ll be martyrs, and the crowd’ll howl for priest’s heads. Fat lot o’ good that’ll do us. I weren’t cut out for the martyr racket. How about that babu?”
Somehow or other, the more he thought about the babu, the more convinced he became he could trust him. It would be rather like trusting a lunatic. You never knew what crazy stuff the man would say next; or what he would do next — such as turning up, for instance, with a tiger, in a wooden cage, at midnight, needing chickens at a moment’s notice.
“Nutty? I’ll say he is. But smart. And dammit, somehow I can’t figure him electing for the Maharajah as against that nice young lady. If he’s slated for a ride the same as me and her, they’ll maybe have to work to put it over on us. Here goes anyhow; I got to trust him. Ain’t no other way out.”
XV
“Are You Afraid Of Death, Babu-Ji?”
When he arrived again at the compound, Quorn was told by one of the mahouts that all the elephants should go down to the river that day for a swim. It was the custom. Since they had been thoroughly oiled the previous day he saw no sense in it; but it seemed a good way to get them all off his mind for the morning, so he gave permission for all except Asoka and one helper, who was at great pains to explain why Asoka became suddenly ill-tempered.
“He knows they will swim. He will go also. One week — ten days he will be indignant, and none can manage him.”
“He’s spoiled, that’s all the matter. You leave him to me,” Quorn answered. He had an idea. But he went first to examine the tiger. The door in the wall was locked, so he used a ladder to reach a branch that overhung the wall, and climbed down by the big tree on the far side. When he peered in, the tiger was sleeping, flat on its side in the darkest corner.
“Tame,” he thought, “but how tame does a tiger get? There’s a mark on his neck where that one’s worn a collar.”
He climbed back, after observing that the tiger’s shed was in a field of barely two acres, surrounded by a high wall with a solid wooden double gate at the far end. New wheel-marks led to the gate, so that was evidently how the tiger had been brought there. But why? He returned the ladder to its hooks on the wall, and bound it carefully in place with wire to prevent anyone else from whetting curiosity by that means.
“As a detective,” he thought to himself, “I’d be a first- class flop. It beats me.”
Then he turned attention to Asoka, who was straining his chain and behaving like an outraged baby. When the helper approached he tried to rush the man.
“Stand aside and leave me to it,” Quorn commanded. He took a horse-whip and cracked it. “Buddy,” he said, “you’ve got to learn it pays to trust me. I know where to hit you where it hurts, so quit your bluffing. Sit down. On your hunkers. Sit up.”
Asoka obeyed. He could beg like a dog, and he looked ridiculous with this trunk straight upright; he appeared to be hanging by it from an invisible hook in the sky. The absurdity strengthened Quorn’s assurance. So he made the great brute kneel. And after that he took a long chance, to the horror of the helper. He went close, vaulted on to Asoka’s neck and ordered him to stand up.
“Loose him,” he commanded. “Now you lead along toward the mission.”
So the helper walked ahead, continually looking backward in fear for his life. But there was no more difficulty, and the victory, such as it was, did Quorn good. It made him feel there were at any rate four tons of potential murder that knelt and obeyed and were good at the word of command. Inferiority seemed less his own particular personal attribute. Nature was full, after all, of inferior things. The ugly silence of a few by-standers, who watched him furtively as he passed through the smelly streets, and the remarks that a few others shouted after him, took no effect, unless to strengthen obstinacy. And he felt contemptuous, too, of applause and obsequious reverence, of which there was much more than of critical sneering. None of it made much impression on him. He was seeing India through new eyes, and himself in a new perspective.
“Mebbe gladiators felt like this when they were marching in to give the works to one another. Funny, I’m not skeered or excited. But I’m not pleased either. I’m ugly, that’s what I am. That’s my mood. I get me. Giving me the works’ll come expensive. Morals? That babu don’t know what he’s talking about. I’m not a moralist. I’m ugly — just plain ornery and out for trouble. Yeppy. I allow I’ve had enough o’ being blind man to a bunco steerer. Me for knowing what’s what. Show down. This here life’s as personal to me as anyone’s. Whoever gets mine, gets it bobcat inconvenient. I’ve been too good natured, that’s what. And it don’t pay. That’s the trouble with these heathen; they get things put over on ’em by their rulers and the British just because they’re easy mannered. I’m a looker out for Number One from now on.”
But he felt like a Number One exhibit as he neared the mission gate. The babu had not exaggerated. There were thousands in the street, and on the scrap of common land that faced the mission wall. The greater number were all seated, awaiting events with eastern patience — a sea of turbans under black umbrellas. They roared a greeting to him, but they were onlookers, not demonstrators, and nearly all of those remained seated. But there was a crowd near the gate being held back by a platoon of the Maharajah’s men, who had to use the butts of their rifles to club a gangway for Asoka. There appeared to be some fanatics among that lot — very wild eyed — utterly indifferent to blows. It was they who held the attention of the soldiers, so that the helper got by with the elephant. Their officer shouted to the helper to stay outside; but he had to face about at once to deal with a rush of sweating enthusiasts who tried to force their way in when the gate opened, so the helper got by. Once inside, Quorn turned Asoka about and made him shove the gate shut with his forehead. Then the din died down a little. But Quorn had a feeling of narrow escape, from what he did not know, but it was nothing pleasant.
In the midst of the mission courtyard was a pond with sides of heavy masonry. It probably had been a spectacular affair before the palace buildings were stripped of all their pagan ornament and put to moral uses. It was full of water still, but totally neglected, and the frogs made merry amid tangled reeds and matted lotus roots.
“Set me down,” Quorn commanded, and Asoka lifted him to earth. “Now see what comes o’ trusting me, you big stiff. In you go, and cool off.”
So Asoka, for the second time, associated Quorn with comfort at the end of dusty boredom. Quorn found a broom in the yard and bade the helper scrub the big brute. “Scrub him pukka.” Then he lighted his pipe and made a survey of the situation.
“Can’t bust in on ladies. Better size this up a minute.”
It was almost like a great abandoned hotel — buildings on three sides of a courtyard with the doors and windows boarded up. The padlock on the big front door was still in place; there was no sign of anyone having trespassed. Moses was nowhere visible. The little back door of the gate-house was locked. Quorn hammered on it, but there was no answer. No sign of the babu. Noises in the street, and the tremendous splashing of Asoka in the pond, made it impossible to be sure that no sound came forth from the buildings, but the place seemed as dead as bygone history.
“Didn’t I sa
y there’s no knowing what she or that babu’ll be up to next?”
Quorn walked the entire length of the buildings, listening at boarded doors and windows. One great solid square of boarding closed the end of a passage that led to where the Reverend John Brown had made a hospital of former servant’s quarters — or perhaps they had been the lairs of dancing girls. At any rate, there was another courtyard, back behind the main buildings, that Quorn had only visited once, when he first came, because there was nothing there worth guarding — empty rooms in long rows, looted long ago of every scrap of furniture they had once contained. He remembered seeing a few empty bottles and a broken bedspring. He remembered dying pomegranate trees, and shrubbery that had survived somehow or other without attention. Come to think of it, he and Moses had unscrewed that massive boarding that blocked the passage, and had had the devil’s own job to set it up again. They had had to call in help. The easiest way to get through now would be to employ the elephant as a battering ram. But if the Princess was on the far side, how did she get there? Suddenly he remembered that a cellar had been used by Moses as a place for storing vegetables. He had never visited the cellar — always had a notion that there might be cobras in it; and he had a horror of snakes.
Moses, he knew, had always reached the cellar by a stone trap-door that could be lifted by a rope and pulley on the outer wall, close to the gate-house. He walked over there and tried the rope. It was a heavy haul, and the rope was none too trusty looking. However, the stone trap came up gradually, hinged on a pivot near its middle; and a dark hole yawned with dampish, greenish limestone steps that led into gloom that made Quorn shudder. For the moment he forgot he had decided to be tough.
“If I set here and wait for that babu, he’ll come,” he argued.
But the thought of sitting there and waiting brought to mind that crowd outside that also sat and waited.
“They’ll wait eight days for a sight o’ what next. I’ve eight days to strut my stuff or be et by a tiger or something. Snakes are bad, but waiting’s worse.”
He tied the rope to a ring to keep the stone trap open and admit the daylight. Then he went down the steps with his whip in his hand, expecting to have to use it to kill cobras. The steps led down to a passage, whose floors and walls and roof were limestone blocks; and it was not particularly dark; there was light at the far end. The dampness evidently came from the pond in which Asoka wallowed; water dripped from the roof where the passage passed under the pond. On his left, at the foot of the steps was Moses’ sack of vegetables.
“Breeds are breeds, no matter where you find ’em. I suppose that sucker never spoke o’ this because I never asked him! God, what a country.”
He went ahead gingerly. More than midway of the passage, fifty feet beyond the spot where water dripped, there was a stone door. It looked like a big rough monolith upended to support the roof. But a semicircular ridge in the mud on the floor betrayed that it had recently been opened. It appeared to swing on pivots set in hollows in the masonry at top and bottom. There were footprints in the mud; he could make them out distinctly even in that dimness.
“Nice place for a mission!” he reflected. “Dirty work could go on, and nobody wiser. What was the name o’ that telegraph guy who looted the mission and then died? Bamjee? Probably Bamjee took the loot out down this passage and through that door. And let’s see — wasn’t I warned Chullander Ghose had fallen heir to all o’ Bamjee’s secrets?”
Mistrust of the babu re-arose in his mind with the overwhelming logic of a mathematical equation. It appeared as nothing less than madness to imagine that the babu could be anything but a scoundrel. He had very likely murdered Bamjee for the sake of the mission plunder. Bamjee’s bones might lie beyond that stone door. Quorn tried to find a way to open it. If he could, he might learn something to his own advantage — something to the disadvantage of the babu. He spent several minutes examining the cracks and looking for a lock of some sort, but, not knowing what to look for, his search was half-hearted, perfunctory, finally a mere reflex action. He was thinking, faster than he had thought yet since he came to Narada, and with greater concentration. And the thoughts made his blood run cold, as they marched on his brain like ghosts in step, one following another, damning him, and dooming him, and leaving no hope.
“I’m a sucker. All I ever knew about this mission is what they told me in Philadelphia. Likelier than not they lied to me about it. I should ha’ known there was something fishy about my getting the job so easy. Second place, that Maharajah probably has damned good reasons why he don’t want missionaries here. But he wants this mission. He can maybe get it if he gets me into trouble. Scupper me umbrageous, and he takes charge in the name o’ protecting the place; and once in, who’s to put him out? Maybe Bughouse Bill and his gang want the place as bad as the Maharajah does. As I was told it, it was they who claimed the treaty right and made the missionaries shut down. That’s two parties that want it. And now she’s here. Maybe it’s worth having. Who knows? Maybe she wants it as bad as any of ’em. And she’s his daughter. There’s not much she’d stop at, if she takes after him:
By the babu’s account, her mother weren’t what you might call of a easy disposition. That young woman ‘ud have me murdered, like as not, with no more squeams about it than a U.S. Immigration officer deporting aliens to starve in Europe. Maybe she’s agin the Maharajah; but she got out o’ that palace suspicious easy. Maybe they’re collusioning. He sends soldiers to protect her. Next thing is to get me into trouble — frame me into acting lawless, so I can be bumped off. Then the troops march in. — Or, maybe again, she is agin him. That’s imaginable. She and the babu cook it up between ’em to involve me in a heap o’ trouble. Somehow they make use o’ me to trip up Bughouse Bill and trick the Maharajah. Seems they’re all afraid of this here Resident, whoever he is. Maybe he’s a kind of Federal Bank examiner, who can walk in and ask for the keys o’ the situation anytime he pleases. Me, I get mine just before this Resident arrives, I reckon. Then she and the babu get the mission. Maybe he gets his too. What for? God knows. But I’m the goat, and I don’t like it. It ain’t natural. Maharajahs and princesses and high priests are none o’ my business. I’m a decent, God-fearing democrat. I wisht I was in Philadelphia.”
He almost turned back. In the little room in the gatehouse were his savings, suit-case and a change of clothes. He could break down the door and get in. In the pond overhead was the elephant; on the back of Asoka he could reach rail-head faster than anyone could follow. The only serious danger would be the telegraph wire; it might be possible to turn out villagers to intercept him before he could reach the frontier. But it was only ten miles from the frontier to rail-head, where there was a white officer with some Indian policemen. It was very tempting. Panic almost had him in its grip. But it is strange what influences actually makes men do, or not do, things that argument could not persuade them to consider.
“I can’t leave that guy Moses in the lurch. They’d bump him off to stop him telling what he maybe knows. Got to find him first.”
Ahead he went, gingerly, fearful of snakes amid the debris. It was slippery in places. There were quantities of loose stone on which it would be easy to twist an ankle. He was not a noisy fellow; self-consciousness connected with his eyes had taught him never to be self-assertive; so that, what with being scared and thoroughly suspicious, he was almost silent until he reached the foot of the steps at the end of the passage and blinked upward at a patch of dazzling bright blue sky. It was then that he first heard voices — recognized the babu’s voice, and heard his own name. But he could not pick out any other words distinctly. So he crept up the steps with the stealth of a cat on the prowl after birds.
He remembered now. In the midst of the neglected shrubbery there was a big round well-head, boarded over. And beside the well-head was an open tank, of masonry peculiarly shallow. He remembered wondering why any one should have gone to the trouble to build such a tank only a couple of feet deep. He could see now t
hat the floor of the tank was nothing but a roof above the stairway, and that the stairway opened into the well-head. The opening into the well-head had been blocked with rubble, and whoever knocked that out to make an opening had thrown most of the rubble down the well; but some of it had fallen into the passage below the steps, and that accounted for the ankle-twisters he had had to avoid. From the opening in the side of the well-head to the top there was a wooden ladder, set there recently. It was a new ladder; its iron nails were not yet rusty. The big round wooden cover of the well was raised on end and held in that position by a rope that passed over the ancient iron gallows over which the bucket-ropes originally passed. It was that cover that served as a shield, preventing Quorn from being seen as he climbed to the top of the ladder and listened. He heard the voice of the Princess:
“Babu-ji, you are too suspicious. If I always talk with you in English, it will make my ladies think I mistrust them.”
“Don’t you?” asked the babu. “It is bad enough to have to trust me. You have got to learn to trust absolutely nobody unless you have to. Everybody else has got to learn to trust you. But that is different. It is the difference between wisdom and folly. Trust not, that you may be trusted. That is verb sap of the sappiest supreme quintessence of eternal wisdom.”
“Can’t I trust the Gunga sahib?”
“Yes, you can,” the babu answered. “So can I get in the way of a cannon when it goes off. I can trust it to abolish all my interest in subsequent events. But why do it? Coruscating and adorable but obstinate sahiba, can’t you see that if you make him trust you he is then dependable, but if you trust him you are left dependent on his whimsies, morality, obsessions, prejudices, pride and sundry unpredictable but deadly tendencies to act up? Dammit, how you argue! As your confidential adviser I must be permitted now and then to get a word in edgewise.”