by Talbot Mundy
“Very well,” she answered, “but I don’t quite trust you altogether.”
“Flickering of false dawn! Or is it true that wisdom wakens?”
“I doubt you intend to let me play fair.”
“But I insist on it,” he answered. “All I ask is, let me make the rules, and keep them secret. If you play according to another person’s rules, you have less than a fifty-fifty chance, because you can’t compel him to obey his own rules. And if he knows your rules, he has more than a fifty-fifty chance. A fifty-fifty chance is much too much to give one’s adversary, and a lot too little for oneself. This isn’t cricket, with time out for tea. As proof of one’s nobility it might be dignified, perhaps, to give one’s adversary one chance in a hundred thousand — but retain that on deposit as a hostage for his good behavior. An adversary is an adversary. You should be a Christian. If he kisses you on one cheek, punch him on the other.”
“I was thinking of friends, not adversaries,” she answered. “I would rather die than betray a friend, I have so few of them. I am not in the least afraid of dying. I will not send anybody into deadly danger for me that I don’t share.”
“I am afraid then,” said the babu, “you are destined to be great. As Japanese would say: ‘am sorrow for you!’”
“I have no wish to be great.”
“Then you are great. This confidential adviser pities you. Improbably you may be fortunate enough to die before you are discovered. Otherwise, you will learn what lonely disillusion greatness is. However, let us get you going! All this talk of principles is very entertaining, but it isn’t war. C’est magnifique, mais what the hell, sahiba? Time is ruthless.”
“So am I!” Her voice struck full on a natural note; it was neither flattened by overemphasis, nor sharpened by the slightest effort to persuade; it stated fact, unqualified. “I, too, am ruthless. I am no romantic figurehead that people are to die for. I am not a lie in a chastity belt that lives off others’ chivalry. Let danger be. I love it. I accept men’s willingness to share my danger, if they see fit. And the death they die is their death, very honorable if they die as brave men. But I die too. I die with them. My danger is mine, and I ask no odds from destiny. I challenge it. Let destiny be proven. I will not accept what others win, unless I share all risks.”
“Mere morals,” said the babu.
“It is what I will,” she answered.
“Then you make me trust you, most intelligent sahiba, which is what I dreaded. This babu, investigating all philosophies, discovered nothing he could trust in all the universe except a good sport. Sportess is even gooder. I will have to trust you to deprive me of timidity. O dreadful thought! Timidity has saved me from so many bad imbroglios! But self-contempt is something I have known too intimately ever to embrace again — unless scared like a found-out high financier or something.”
“Are you afraid of death, babu-ji?”
“Very,” he answered. “There is so much still to un- learn! It is only as one ages that the opportunities appear to upset youth’s dogmaticism! If that Gunga sahib doesn’t come soon—”
“I’m here.” Quorn stepped up on to the well-head rim. He stared down at the Princess; she was seated on a chair amid the tangled shrubbery, looking as unlike a movie princess as anything he could imagine. She looked like just a nice young lady, with a frown above her eyebrows and an unself-conscious air of intellectual audacity. The babu squatted on a stone bench near by, looking mischievous. “I listened in,” said Quorn. “It weren’t good manners, but I done it, and I’ll trust both o’ you. That’s final. What next?” Then he jumped down and stood with his back to the well, awaiting orders, wondering what Moses could be saying to the women who were grouped, unveiled, around him near an open door. It wasn’t sensible; it wasn’t even sane as far as judgment indicated, but Quorn had drawn a mental line, and turned a page. It was blank. He, too, would challenge destiny and see what destiny could write.
XVI
“But A Legend Must Be Legendary.”
“Nothing next,” said the babu. “All will be simultaneous, unless my intuition has a fit of relativity — which may be. Einstein demonstrated Space-Time infinite non sequitur of experientia docet. This adorable sahiba is square root of minus one of this equation. Si vis bellum para pacem. That means dog eat dog in any case.”
“What’s Moses doing?” Quorn asked.
“Being flattered by the ladies. Inferiority complex being liquidated in a sea of indescribable emotions. He is being rendered irresponsible, in order that utility may transpire. Anesthetic, that’s all.”
“Mr. Quorn,” said the Princess; and since it was the first time she had called him by his right name, Quorn felt suddenly self-conscious.
“Yes, Miss?”
“You have interviewed his Highness? I suppose he said he intends to be in ignorance of what is doing, but it must be done before the Resident arrives?”
“How did you know that, Miss?”
“Because I know him. He pretended to be ignorant of an attempt made late last night to have me thrown off the palace roof. That was the priests’ way—”
“Bughouse Bill’s way,” said the babu.
“ — of preventing me from doing what I will do. That is why I came here. His Highness thought that if the priests should murder me, he might be able to accuse them of it and excite the rabble to an act of vengeance that would rid him of priestly tyranny.”
“The proletariat is vox particularly dei at the moment,” said the babu. “That is Greek for propaganda has its uses.”
“He’s a fatherly sort of a gent, his Highness seems to be,” Quorn ventured.
“Yes,” said the Princess, “fatherly. He has a young wife, so he hopes to have a son one of these days. Naturally, he supposes I would have the son poisoned.”
“Would you?” Quorn asked. He was deadly serious. He wished to know.
“Why poison?” she answered. “Poison always seems to me such a servile way of doing things. I like rebellion, open and honest. I intend to end this reign of stupidity. If he should have a son, that son would perpetuate it for one more unnecessary generation. Things would go from bad to worse; because, if the son should succeed as a minor, he would get more than ever into the power of the priests. So I am not in favor of his having a son.”
“Miss, how will you prevent it?” Quorn asked.
“Dead men don’t beget sons.”
“Miss — you mean to murder your own father?”
“Oh no. Murder isn’t intelligent. It’s stupid. Only stupid people think of it. But people who oppose themselves to big ideas have a way of dying. It is like getting in the way of a determined elephant. I have a big idea.”
“She means, it has her,” said the babu.
“Miss, if I was you,” said Quorn, “I’d send a telegram. I’d have the British here so quick there’d be nothing to it. They’d come with a flock of airplanes. I don’t figure the British are the special people that they kid ‘emselves they are, not by a long shot. But I’ll say this: they’re on the level when it comes to dirty murder, and I don’t mean maybe. They’d protect you, even if it cost your old man all his money.”
She shook her head. “The British are in need of friends, not fed cats, if they are to hold India for one more generation. I am not a fed cat. I will catch my own mice. If I win this — you may think perhaps Narada isn’t much. But is a pawn much? Do you play chess? I used to play it with my governess. I won many a game by having a pawn on the right square, when my opponent was thinking about nothing but kings and bishops. I can bargain with the British if I play this carefully. But I must take a big risk to begin with.”
She looked astonishingly unoriental, although her eyes were splendid and liquidly luminous. True, her skin was darker than the ordinary, and her cheek-bones were perhaps a fraction higher than those of Western women. She was not exactly pretty; in fact she was not pretty at all. Quorn decided she was almost plain on close examination. But she was damned good looking.
She was knit of one piece, slight, small, not athletic but alert and active looking. Above all, she looked intelligent. And when she smiled, one felt the smile was humorous, not malicious, but wise. The smile made her look older than she was. The frown that came and went above her eyebrows made her look younger.
“She’s a swell girl,” Quorn thought to himself. And he knew, without letting the thought take form, that what enabled her to command his loyalty was not the end she had in view. He didn’t care a damn about that. It was the fact that he, whom women usually drew away from with apparently instinctive horror when they saw his eyes, was privileged to have the confidence of this one, who, to him, seemed consequently better than them all. She knew his eyes were not a satyr’s. Therefore he knew she was on the level. That was his limit of praise. He thought of God as on the level, when he thought about God at all, which was not very often.
“Okay, Miss, and I’m for you. But I still think your best bet is the British. I’d hate like hell to have to buck that outfit. They’re no diplomats, I grant you. But diplomacy don’t bother ’em. They just go after what they want and get it, same as Soaker when he’s working off a peeve.”
“He means Asoka,” said the babu.
“And they do their diplomating afterwards,” Quorn added. “Soaker’s here, Miss. I can come and go; so I can get a howdah, and then feed him good, and bring him back here. I can set you down at rail-head inside four-and-twenty hours, I reckon — you and quite a raft o’ladies, if you want to bring ’em. You could fix a dicker with the British, I don’t doubt. I’ve read of Maharajahs being treated same as Jimmy Walker — him o’ New York. Maybe you never heard of him. He was resignated recent. Maybe the British ‘ud give your pa the air and set you on the thrown, as peaceable as pulling teeth.”
He stopped because it appalled him to be listened to with such diffident attention. The mere manners with which she heard him to a finish made him so self-conscious that he actually blushed beneath the tan. The babu chuckled. He noticed it, and that restored his poise a little. But he had said his say. He waited for the Princess.
“People who are set on thrones,” she answered after several seconds, “are—”
“Like fools financed by bankers,” said the babu. “They work, and the bankers bankidoodle-i-do. Verb sap.”
“Not Lenin — I don’t like Lenin,” said the Princess, “but Mussolini, Mustapha Kemal and Venezelos set me my example. They dared everything and won. They did impossible things. Nothing worth having is won by letting other people do it for you. One has to see an opportunity and seize it.”
“Steve Brodie took a chance,” said the babu, nodding. “That is U.S.A. American for carpe diem, which is algebra for toujours l’audace. And that is Admiral Nelson K.C.B. with telescope to blind eye. The precedents are all in favor of it.”
“Gunpat Rao is the adversary,” said the Princess. The babu interpreted:
“Bughouse Bill,” he said, and smacked his lips like a bishop enjoying a quotation from one of the naughtier odes of Horace. But like Queen Victoria on an historic occasion, the Princess was not amused.
“Gunpat Rao is enraged,” she continued, “by the coincidence that you and I should fit the Gunga sahib story so astonishingly well. It is only an old legend which the priests have used for centuries to entertain the ignorant and keep them pious. It has become an article of faith.”
“Like Prohibition,” said the babu, “and George Washington’s cherry tree, and Free Trade.”
“The people have been taught to believe it, because it was harmless and it was easy to point a simple moral,” said the Princess.
“But a legend must be legendary,” said the babu, “and that is the hell of it. A simple moral is a complicated issue, same as bird-lime to a pigeon, when a legend turns up like a Rip Van Winkle. You and this Sahiba have between you sprung a Mary Baker Eddy on them. Bughouse Bill must now repudiate the Gunga sahib story, or admit that miracles are still on tap. And he must certify them, or submit to proletarian ribaldry, the same as Christian bishops saying age of miracles is over. Predicament and propaganda are the male and female parents of a crisis. This babu as midwife certifies the crisis is delivered, healthy and vigorous — yelling — parents also thriving.”
“Gunpat Rao,” said the Princess, “tried to have me murdered last night. He may try it again, because he is desperate. He knows that if I gain the throne I will make an end of his pretensions. It is he or I, and no quarter asked or given. That is why I chose this place, where I can’t be hit by missiles from the road.”
Quorn scratched the birth-mark on his forehead. “I wonder,” he said, “was it Bughouse Bill who had ’em pitch a tile at my head? I don’t take that guy too serious. I wisht I threw a cabbage at him when he came and sprayed the elephants.”
The babu chuckled. “Cabbages,” he said, “are a corollary of kings, but Bughouse Bill is somewhat subtler than a cabbage. You have seen him on the day when precedent compels him to appear in public. That blessing of the elephants is a ceremony as ancient as the Lord Mayor’s show. He hates it, but he has to do it. Otherwise he spends his whole life in the temple precincts. But they say of him that if a woman sneezes in the palace, Gunpat Rao knows it. So he knows what this sahiba says about him. The hostility is mutual. He loves his enemy on both cheeks. So we have to chuck a tiger at him, not a cabbage.”
“Let me talk,” said the Princess. “You make him think you are not serious. It is this way, Mr Quorn. There are two temples with a bridge connecting them. Together they are known as Kali’s Breasts because they stand on low hills separated by a hollow. Both are very ancient, but the older is really Siva’s temple. The one which is not so old is Kali’s.”
“Yes,” said Quorn, “I seen ’em.”
“It is a part of the Gunga sahib story,” she continued, “that the Gunga sahib died this way: after he had rescued Sankyamuni of the legend, he was ordered by the gods to take her to Siva’s temple, where there was a tiger of such ferocity that none dared to approach him. She had to lead that tiger across the bridge into Kali’s temple. Being guarded by the gods, she did it.”
“That,” explained the babu, “is symbolical of something, same as Daniel in den of lions, only more so.”
“The Gunga sahib waited for her on his elephant,” the Princess continued. “He watched her cross the bridge and disappear into the other temple. Then he grew afraid. So he got down from his elephant to go and help her. And the elephant thought he was running away, so the elephant slew him.”
“Symbolizing something,” said the babu.
“But the legend goes on,” said the Princess, “that the gods felt sympathetic, since they knew the Gunga sahib’s real motive. So they commanded that in course of time — and certain gods are said to hold the keys of time — he, she and the elephant, all three should be reborn; and that then she should lead the tiger back across the bridge from Kali’s temple into Siva’s, where a cage is always waiting. Thus the Gunga sahib may redeem his fair name, and the elephant may be forgiven.”
“Symbolizing something else again,” the babu added.
“That the legend might be vital and important,” said the Princess, “some say for a thousand years, but certainly for many centuries, the priests have always kept a very savage tiger in a cage in Kali’s temple. When the tiger dies, they get another. They of Kali’s temple say the tiger symbolizes—”
“Something,” said the babu, “it is always something.”
“They of Siva’s temple say not.”
“Bughouse Bill bets both ways,” said the babu.
“I have undertaken,” said the Princess, “to enact that legend.”
“Miss,” said Quorn, “do you mean you intend to lead a tiger by the scruff across that bridge?”
“I have demanded my right to do it,” she answered.
“This is 1932, Miss. Such things ain’t done.”
“And the legend says,” she went on, “that when that shall happen, then Sankyamuni shal
l become the ruler of Narada.”
“Propaganda indicated?” asked the babu. “Oh no! Fat- head such as I am would be likely to miss that one.”
“Gunpat Rao either has to—”
“Bluff or show cards,” said the babu.
“He must let me try it or be laughed at. And the crowd is naturally very eager. Some believe and some doubt. Some are scornful. Some, but not many, are taking Gunpat Rao’s part and urging him to denounce me and forbid the attempt. But on the whole the people differentiate between religion and the priests, and the majority would very gladly see a—”
“Waterloo for Bughouse Bill. Am for it also,” said the babu. “Now you understand undoubtedly that tiger which the Jains have made religious. Rabbit out of hat is nothing to it. We have got to swap a doubtfully religious tiger for a hellish certainty and trust to luck. Have you a rabbit’s foot?”
“The point is, Gunga sahib,” said the Princess, “would you rather have a double? I have read the magazines of Hollywood. I understand that all the stars have doubles for dangerous events. I must have you for what are called the close-ups, because no one else in all Narada looks exactly like the Gunga sahib. And besides, you can manage Asoka. But once inside the temple courtyard where they keep their savage tiger we could see a double for the really dangerous business. You see, we dare not leave the savage tiger in his cage. He has to vanish. We can’t shoot him. A shot might be heard by the crowd outside. It will be difficult. You see—”
Quorn interrupted. “Miss, I think maybe you didn’t understand my meaning. Are you going to tackle that proposition?”
“Oh yes. Why not? I have nothing to lose. If I die, I am dead. I prefer that to a living death and finally to die of dreadful living. But you—”