by Talbot Mundy
“Is all India like that?” he wondered.
As he rode Asoka out of the compound, with Ratty following on a smaller elephant with the grain and baled hay, Quorn munched at half a loaf of bread until Asoka raised his trunk and begged for what was left. He did his utmost to explain the situation to himself, but without much result. The strangeness of riding an elephant had not yet worn off. It was still weird to be obeyed by the enormous beast, particularly in the dark.
“Are all revolutions as crazy as this, I wonder? Are all politics like this? Are rats as important as tigers? There’s the big bugs at the League o’ Nations ragging one another like a lot o’ horse-thieves at a phoney poker layout. There’s armies, and navies, and kings and governments. There’s viceroys, and high commissioners, and special police, and telephones, and radio, and Lord knows what else. And here’s me and Moses and that babu pulling off a revolution! Are we? Or are we kidding ourselves? I suppose if revolutions was to go by rules, there’d be none. All the men on top ‘ud know what to expect, and they’d spike a thing before it happened. It’s the unexpectedness, maybe, that wins out — same as a bank going bust in a boom — or same as that guy shooting somebody at Sarajevo. Banks go bust in spite of bank examiners. But it’s a licker to me that the British aren’t wise to what’s going on here. What are their sly dicks doing? Where’s the gum-shoe gang? Why aren’t all their under-cover experts hopping to it? Are they all so busy on the track o’ Gandhi and the Afghans and the Bolsheviki that they’ve forgotten this neck o’ the woods? Let’s see — it was the British, wasn’t it, that let the Irish put one over on them. If they could let that happen — maybe the British aren’t such shucks at running empires as the book says.”
He was still pondering the problem, wishing he were better educated and trying to remember what a five-cent book had told him about hypnotism, which might explain why Gunpat Rao’s eyes kept staring at him from the gloom, when he overtook the babu. He did not feel hypnotized. He was in command of all his senses. He could see things and understand them. It was not like a dream. The great, lumbering van, unlighted, crawled along the middle of the street, a shadow amid shadows between trees and high walls. Moses was on the roof, lying flat on his hands, and when Quorn came close enough he crawled to the rear to talk, and there was nothing hypnotic about that either. The words made sense.
“It is precariouslee touch and go,” said Moses in a hoarse voice. “The tiger is not contented, and the shutters are not veree strong. It is a possibilitee that he will break out.”
Suddenly Asoka got the smell of tiger and became unruly. He would have smashed the rear end of the van in another minute. Quorn had to hurry him past the van and take the lead. He got a dim glimpse of the babu squatting on the pole between the oxen’s rumps with a tail in each hand, but after that Asoka kept him too busy to notice much else. The big brute made two or three spurts. The night air seeemed to make him mischievous, and a rap on the skull from the ankus only checked him momentarily; Quorn’s voice did better. He made the last spurt as he neared the mission. There was a small crowd, even at that hour, keeping watch on the mission gate. They fled unanimously. Even the Maharajah’s soldiers beat a retreat. Quorn got the elephant quiet at last by guiding him up to the gate and talking to him. Then a non-commissioned officer drew nearer and stood by the lantern where the soldier’s water-bottles and blankets were piled in a heap.
“Gunga sahib,” he said in a gruff, low voice. Apparently he recognized Quorn’s silhouette against the night sky; Asoka’s enormous bulk would complete the identification. Then, in the vernacular: “Is it true they have killed the babu? It is said he was slain by a thrown knife.”
Quorn answered scornfully. He could hardly see the man, but he recognized fear in his voice. He was feeling proud of having controlled his elephant. “Ask the babu. He’ll tell you. He’ll be here in a minute.”
“Was none slain?” asked the non-commissioned officer.
“Oh yeah. They killed a Maharajah’s secretary.”
“Who did?”
“The priests did. Then a cobra bit two of your men. They’re dead.”
“God is inscrutable,” said the soldier. “Who knows what next?”
Quorn hummed through his nose. He only remembered the words of the tune when he came to the end of the line: “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform—” It seemed somehow blasphemous, so he stopped humming. Then suddenly:
“Open that gate before this elephant gets vicious.”
So the gate swung open. Looking backward, by the light of the guard’s lantern on the ground, Quorn saw the babu almost lurch off his perch on the pole of the van. But he awoke in time. He turned the oxen. The non-commissioned officer stopped him and asked questions, but the babu appeared to answer curtly and drove in, followed by the other elephant. Then the gate slammed shut and all was dark again. Quorn with his flashlight saw to the chaining of both elephants and left them in charge of Ratty, who was perfectly contented. Ratty behaved like a man whose destiny depended on his being civil and obedient until tomorrow. Somebody had taken down the heavy wooden boarding that closed the passage to the inner courtyard. The babu drove the van into the passage. He and Moses unhitched the oxen and left it there; it almost exactly filled the passage; if the tiger should succeed in breaking through a shutter on either side, he would still be imprisoned by the walls of the building, and the ends of the van were much too solid to be broken by a tiger. Quorn had to crawl under the van to get through, and on the far side he found the babu talking to a stranger, who hurried away to do the babu’s bidding. The oxen were turned loose to shift for themselves and Moses had vanished. There were piles of chairs and tables in the courtyard and all sorts of packages. It looked like plunder. Not less than a dozen men emerged out of shadow and tried to have word with the babu; several seemed to be well armed. But the only one who held his attention for more than sixty seconds had no weapons. He looked like an unimportant person. He made what appeared to be a rather long report, and gave the babu a sheaf of papers. There were several lanterns dotted about, but the babu asked for Quorn’s flashlight and studied the papers.
“Bohut Atcha,” he exclaimed. Then he gave and repeated twice what evidently were important orders, and the unimportant looking person hurried away; a few moments later his head and shoulders appeared against the starlit sky as he mounted by a ladder. There was a back way out.
“A back way in, too,” Quorn reflected rather nervously.
“Now for tribulation,” said the babu. “Royalty is royal. If you have a top-hat you must keep it valeted.” He yawned. “Oh Krishna, I can’t endure an argument, and I am not a courtier. But come on!”
There was not much ceremony. Two men, whose decided air of breeding was not concealed by the shawls that hid their mouths, stood aside after one of them had rapped on a door near an open window, whence the sound of women’s voices came. The door opened instantly. The babu kicked off his slippers, and Quorn, not knowing what to do, started to pull off his turban, but the woman who had opened the door giggled at that, so he tried to put it back in place; however it had come unfolded, so he swore, and bunched it in his hand, and followed the babu. He decided he hated women.
There were ten or fifteen women in there, and it was immediately evident that the Princess did not lack friends in the city. They had furnished one of the Reverend John Brown’s hospital wards for her with huge cushions. There were curtains at the windows and some good rugs. The women were seated in a circle around the Princess, who had her back to a corner, but there were no men in the room. Quorn had never seen anyone look happier than she did, until he looked a little harder at her, and her eyes became Gunpat Rao’s. That infernal face was haunting him again. Two lamps, one on either side of the Princess, framed her in mellow light against the white wall. Gunpat Rao seemed to lurk behind her and look through her. She had a little desk on the floor, some papers, pen and ink —
“Playing at it,” Quorn thought. “Is she? A
m I secondsighted? Am I seeing the truth? Is she a devil behind that nice young lady looking face o’ hers?”
The babu bowed profoundly, but without that overdone obsequiousness that an eastern Princess might expect or that Quorn thought she might expect. It was a bow of confidential regard that recognized conventions. The Princess nodded, smiled, frowned a little, spoke a few words in her own language, and then changed to English, probably for Quorn’s edification. When she spoke the eyes of Gunpat Rao vanished.
“You are so late. We have all been busy, but it is terrible to wait here and not know what you are doing. Tell me — tell me! I am listening. But he looks tired. Make room for him, some one.”
“Gee,” thought Quorn, “she’s sociable!”
However, he changed his mind a moment later. He was left standing. No one offered him a seat of any kind; so he went and leaned his back against a curtained window, not exactly disrespectfully, but rather piqued, explaining to himself that he was more tired than he had realized. He could see Gunpat Rao again. The babu sat on an enormous cushion, facing the Princess and spoke to her rapidly in her own language, she and all her women listening so intently that they hardly breathed. Then, either because he wished Quorn to listen, or else because he wished her women not to understand, the babu began speaking in English:
“Utterly adorable sahiba, this babu is inexhaustibly human, and that is to say exhausitible. And we are up against it. All our tempo has been galley wested, if you know what that means. There are now too many in the secret. We must jazz this up like Jimmy-o, or else the secret will be spilled milk, and a cat out of a bag to cry about it. Secrets are not kept by secrecy but by thinking three moves in advance of our friends, who consequently can’t betray us to our enemies in time to do harm. We have got to do in one day what we thought to do in six or seven, because the telegraphist—”
“Has not the telegraph wire been cut?” she interrupted.
“Melodramatic sahiba, only bandits and authors of novels cut telegraph wires. A cut wire starts alarm and brings the military in a moment. The telegraphist has had delivered to him for despatch nine telegrams to British India, of which one is in code, addressed to mercantile firms. Those only hint at trouble. And there are two others in code, undoubtedly from secret agents giving detailed information. One is from a banker. Those that are in code were sent scrambled, so that they will mean nothing at the other end. Here are the others. You may read them.”
He passed to her the sheaf of papers that had been given to him when he entered the compound. She glanced over them quickly, frowning.
“So he despatched these?” she demanded.
“Yes and no. The hints of a political disturbance were eliminated. There have been eight telegrams from British India, mostly mercantile, and you will find those all together at the bottom of the pile. One is undecipherable. None of them has been delivered to its consignee. But the point is, that telegrapher is not a Bamjee. He is good, but not very intelligent; and goodness is not so useful as intelligence. The gooder a man is, the more ridiculous mistakes he makes. Tomorrow, or the next day, or the next at latest, British India will smell a rat, and ratiocination is a dam-sight better than being rat-catched by British soldiers. We must make this snappy. Snappiness, sahiba, is a gift that only Sleep can give us. I need eight uninterrupted hours of—”
“Eight hours?” She was scandalized. Youth and excitement mocked at the idea. Ruthlessness was in her. Quorn recognized it. She had not been kidding herself when she boasted of it in the little summer-house beside the fountain in the palace garden. “Two hours — I will give you two hours—”
But the babu interrupted. “Exquisite sahiba, this babu is too old to be tricked by chivalry or taught by eagerness. As Maharanee you may do as you jolly well dam-please, if the British will let you. But until you are Maharanee, I will do as I jolly well dam-please, because otherwise you never will be Maharanee. As an advocate of equal rights for anybody who can grab them, I condemn myself to sleep for eight hours, sentence to run consecutively.”
“But Babu-ji, so much might happen,” she objected. She appeared not to mind his impudence, and her women did not understand it, so it passed unchallenged.
“Happen? Let it happen!” said the babu. “It is better that you deal with it. You will hate me otherwise, and I hate to be hated except by people whom I hate too. There is no such bitter and humiliating hatred as that of a celebrity who owes all to a faithful benefactor. Do you think I wish to be a Bismarck? Make a few mistakes tonight. You go ahead and make them. I will try to turn them into pinch hits, so that you may know you are a better manager than I am. Thus we may retain a friendship that would otherwise become a tidbit for the cynics.”
“You are cruel to talk to me like that!” she answered. Her eyes blazed with anger. “Do you believe that of me?”
“Do you believe I am sleepy?” he answered, and her smile grew older, but the frown above her eyes was youngly resentful.
“You may sleep” — her voice was vibrant with anger— “until the end of time, if that is your wish! Surely I owe all to you. I am not ungrateful.” Then she clapped her hands three times, and when one of the men opened the door she gave cold-voiced orders that the babu was to have the best bed that could be provided, and that he was not to be disturbed— “not even if the place takes fire” she added. Then she gave the babu leave to go, and Quorn followed him. But she called Quorn back, and he stood for a minute in front of her, self-conscious because her women were all staring at him, until the sound of the babu’s footsteps ceased outside the window.
“Were you with him?” she asked then.
“Yes, Miss.”
“Did he talk with Gunpat Rao?”
“No, Miss.” Gunpat Rao’s eyes appeared again in front of Quorn’s face. They appeared to look through hers. He hated them. At the moment he felt he had no other friend in the world than the babu. And his friend had been treated damnably. He felt he hated women. This one was about to treat him also damnably. Her women watched, expecting that. He knew they would all giggle when he left the room.
“Somebody,” she said, “has turned him against me. Was it Gunpat Rao? Has he turned you also? Are you both afraid to work for me any longer?”
“No, Miss.” Quorn’s blood was rising. Nothing else than knowledge that he had no training in the ways of courts, or in the use of phrases suitable to well-bred women, kept him silent. Naturally she could see the anger in his eyes, and they were weird eyes. She misread it:
“Has a little danger frightened you?” she asked. “Or has his Highness my father made you promises? Or do you know something that the babu hasn’t told me, that has changed your judgment?”
“No, Miss.”
“What are you hiding from me?”
“Miss, if it’s a secret—” For another second, hesitating, Quorn bridled his temper. But again he saw the eyes of Gunpat Rao. Two of the women whispered to each other — One smiled. It made his blood boil. He threw off caution. “ — Let’s have it out and over with!” he went on. “I haven’t changed my judgment, not for half-a-minute. This here is a crazy proposition, lock, stock, barrel and ramrod. I don’t give a damn for who rules India or any part of it. I give less than a damn for being Gunga sahib. Elephants are swell, and murder’s lousy, that’s my judgment in a nutshell. But I made you a promise. I was dog-gone crazy; and I’m all that crazy, I’ll keep it, seeing I made it. But it was a three-way promise, Miss, and it included that there babu. He’s a white guy. Him and me are in on this together. If you let him out, that gives me the air as simultaneous as two sides of a rupee. So it’s up to you, Miss.”
He paused, more afraid of himself than of her. He would give her a piece of his mind, he knew, unless he could regain control of himself, and he saw no use in it. A heathen was a heathen, even if she did wear pretty dresses and behave like a modern young lady, lip-stick and all. She began to use her lip-stick, and he judged by that that she was thinking up a come-back, so he waited for
it, hoping she would use discretion.
“It has been told to me,” she said after a moment, “that Babu Chullunder Ghose needs money, being badly in debt, and that—” she paused perceptibly— “others know that and are making tempting offers to him.”
“Is that so, Miss?” Quorn took his pipe out, struck it on his heel, then, suddenly remembering where he was, stuck it back in his pocket. “Some folks ‘ud believe anything. I’d say that for a guy who thought about his pocketbook, that babu is a lot too free and easy with his sweet life. Pikers, if you know what they are, figure on their skins and comfort. He can take more chances in one day — damn-fool, crazy chances that a John J. Sullivan ‘ud flinch at — against knives and tigers and Lord knows what else — than I’ve seen taken in a year o’ Sundays. He can keep his temper, doing it, and that’s no mark of yellow either. If he’d give a damn for money-lenders, whether they went broke or not, I’ll eat my elephant. The babu’s okay. And he’s on the level. Money to him, I’ll bet you, is the same as fresh air; he can get it any time he needs it. Buy him? Miss, I’ll tell you. If there’s any way to buy that babu, it’s to offer him a chance to buck the League o’ Nations or the British Navy or J. P. Morgan, or the Japs or Mussolini. There ain’t enough money in all India to buy him — nor me either.”