by Talbot Mundy
She threw away her cigarette and lighted another one.
“But this’ll never be the end of it,” Duncannon argued. “He’ll go on holding it over you until—”
“Oh, no, he won’t,” she interrupted. “Two can play at that game. I could have him in prison very easily, and he knows me as I know him. It isn’t a question of my being afraid of him. I’m not. He couldn’t harm me half as much now as he could have then; it would only make a nine days’ scandal if he told now what he knows, whereas then it would have caused dreadful trouble and perhaps disgrace to half a dozen people. He has kept his promise. I will keep mine. I pay, babuji.”
Chullunder Ghose sat smiling placidly. Whenever John Duncannon moved he turned calm eyes toward him. Occasional emotions crossed his face but in the moonlight Deborah could not interpret them; to her he seemed an almost absolute enigma. What she understood still less was Mrs. Bisbee’s repeated insistence on the babu’s honesty.
It was surprising but not incomprehensible that she should be willing to talk as she did to John Duncannon. Anyone, even in the dark, could tell that John was honest — voice, gesture, speech, everything about him was manly. But to talk in that way to the babu in John’s presence, and with herself by invitation listening —
Suddenly it occurred to Deborah that Mrs. Bisbee might be playing an extremely deep game. Was she trying to trap the babu? If so, the babu had been very careful not to walk into the trap. He had made no threats that could be turned against him on a witness stand. It was Mrs. Bisbee herself who had done all the talking. She had suggested yielding to a threat before the threat was actually voiced. She had confessed in the presence of witnesses to unnamed guilt of which the babu knew, but the babu had said nothing to commit himself. When he did speak it was in terms of praise of her.
“Not many memsahibs play game onside,” he remarked. “This babu would remove hat if same were natural habiliment. Having removed slippers on entering house, no further nudity would meet favor. My salaams!”
He bowed with both hands to his forehead, bending himself forward gracefully in spite of his enormous stomach.
“Then you mean you will arrange the matter with the Gnani?” Duncannon asked.
“I will do what I can,” said Mrs. Bisbee. “I will be glad to have settled with Chullunder Ghose.”
“When?”
“As soon as possible. Are you staying at the hotel? I will send you a message.”
“I don’t like it,” he said bluntly.
“Don’t be silly,” she answered, rising to shake hands with him. “It happens to be fortunate for you, that’s all. Good night. You’ll hear from me as soon as possible.”
Ducannon gestured to the babu, who did not stir.
“Come on!” he commanded.
“Am obese but intelligent person,” said Chullunder Ghose. “Situation is complicated now. Differential characteristics, impulse and inhibition. Civilized veneer is not thick. Impulse urges you to beat me savagely. Inhibition counsels this babu to keep away from you, not liking licking. Skin thin, very. Verb. sap. Go away and dream of oil-wells, sahib; you will feel less angry in the morning.”
“Come along, I tell you!”
“White man’s burden!” said the babu, sighing, rolling up his eyes. “Inscrutable, oh, how inscrutable is Providence! Gentleman from land of conquered West Indians, seeking to steal march on East Indians for oil with which to enrich men who are too rich already, is appointed by deity mentioned on dollars to teach me morality — with whip! My aunt!”
“Are you coming?” asked Duncannon.
“Subject to motion of previous question. You will restrain impulsions of indignant virtue? You will not debauch your passionate peculiarities by whipping this babu?”
“I promise. Come on.”
“Am trustfully obedient. As brains of international partnership, however, must make all precautions in advance. Muscle can’t think. Obesity, restraining acrobatic yearnings, forces the imagination into less objective channels. Preferable, very. Yes, sahib, am coming, am in great haste. Pray precede me. Hell is paved with good intentions. I will keep behind. Otherwise, temptation irresistible, perhaps!”
The babu got to his feet with surprising agility, bowed to Mrs. Bisbee and gestured with his right hand toward the door into the house. Mrs. Bisbee clapped her hands and called out to the butler who began lighting lamps in the front hall, leaving the big sitting-room in darkness. Deborah shrank back into the corner of the window-seat, but as John Duncannon went into the house she saw the babu whispering to Mrs. Bisbee, who nodded and appeared to smile. Then the babu followed Duncannon and the two strode heavily toward the front door, where the butler let them out.
A moment later Mrs. Bisbee came and sat down beside Deborah.
“How much did you hear?” she asked.
“All of it.”
“How shocked were you?”
The butler came in to light the lamps, so Deborah did not answer. The man walked around the room on bare feet with a light taper, making miracles, his starched white clothing taking on the hues of lamp-shades as awakened shadows danced and shifted and the harmony of decoration leaped out of the gloom.
“You like music? I will play for you,” said Mrs. Bisbee, and went to the piano.
She seemed to be in an amused, contented mood and played airs out of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance,” once or twice humming them but making no attempt to sing. She played for about fifteen minutes and then broke off suddenly.
“I would give a lot to know exactly what you think of me,” she said, with her hands in her lap, turning the piano stool so as to face Deborah.
“Ditto!” Deborah answered. “Read me first.”
“Oh, you’re quite easy. Modern aristocracy, tolerant of very nearly anything except restraint and cant, busy creating your own cant and your own code, which seem quite new to you but are as old as Moses; full of energy, which is what makes aristocracy, just as wealth eventually kills it; quite honest according to your light; plucky, affectionate, proud, contemptuous of humbug but as full of it as any other human being; healthy, rather reckless but too shrewd to risk anything except physical danger, which you enjoy. You’re one of the new race that’s being born into America and you neither think nor feel in the way the older races do, which makes it almost impossible for you to understand me, for instance.”
Deborah laughed at her. She liked being called an aristocrat and, being what she was, denied the charge indignantly.
“Aristocracy’s played out! I wouldn’t be a duchess if you’d give me half of Europe to pay taxes for! Come now, I’ve got more sense than that!”
“Now me,” said Mrs. Bisbee, “raw — no reservations! If I’d thought you a ninny I’d have said so.”
“Well, you’re unmoral,” said Deborah, “not immoral. You just haven’t any. You can see straight, although one eye’s crooked and you do things because you want to do them, not because they’re right or wrong. I don’t believe you think there is any right or wrong.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” said Mrs. Bisbee. “But never mind. Go on.”
“Well, you like to play with dynamite. I don’t mean real dynamite; that wouldn’t interest you. Abstract dynamite, the sort of stuff they talk in Greenwich Village. And you’re awfully courageous in a queer, cold way that makes my flesh creep. I think you have dabbled in art — your house looks like it — and I’m sure you’ve studied metaphysics and philosophy. You have brains, and I dare say you’re an agnostic or believe you are; but I think you’ve been bitten ‘way down deep by the bug of Oriental mysticism, and you’ll either go mad or land in prison the way the swamis do when they find themselves like fish out of water in the U.S.A. I think you’re flattered because natives of the country make a fuss of you, just as some of our fool Americans flatter swamis. I think John Duncannon gave you the right steer when he advised you to tell that babu to go plumb to hell!”
Mrs. Bisbee chuckled.
“Superficial,
but not bad,” she commented. “From what the Gnani said of you I rather thought you’d read deeper.”
“From what the Gnani said of me?” asked Deborah. “He’s never seen me.”
“Oh, yes he has! He sent Prince Rundhia Singh to lead you out toward Deulwara, that morning when the tigers’ prints were on the tennis-court. He looked you over carefully. Did you offer him money?”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Deborah. “That old beggar by the wayside? No, I didn’t give him anything; he was gone before I could.”
“He told me you pitied him,” said Mrs. Bisbee.
“What if I did? He didn’t know it. I never said a word to him. I wanted him to drive the ponies down toward us, and—”
“Didn’t they come?” asked Mrs. Bisbee.
“Yes. But were you there?”
“No. Rundhia Singh told me that part.”
“Oh. So you know that rotter?”
“Not particularly well. But he thinks he is an inside man, and now and then he carries messages. The Gnani has to make use of all sorts of people.”
“You, for instance?”
“Yes, me,” said Mrs. Bisbee. She seemed proud of it.
Deborah looked keenly at her. She began to feel thrilled. Her disrespect for mysticism did not lessen her curiosity. Being a guest in Mrs. Bisbee’s house began to feel like going to a murder trial, which does not imply sympathy with murder, at any rate not on the surface.
“Now you’d like to know what Chullunder Ghose knows about me,” said Mrs. Bisbee, “wouldn’t you?”
“You don’t have to tell me,” said Deborah. “John’s attitude was right.”
“My dear girl, I do have to tell you.”
“Why? Because I’m your guest? That’s ridiculous.”
“Yes, if that were the reason. But I need your confidence, so I must give you mine. Are you curious?”
“No!” said Deborah, jerking her jaw forward.
“Liar!” laughed Mrs. Bisbee. “I never saw more curiosity in anybody’s eyes in all my life! Now tell me: Why did you come to India?”
“To look for oil. I’ve told you that already. I’m beginning to be sorry I did. I don’t want to be entangled in a lot of confidences. I don’t mean anything rude by that. I mean, we’re strangers to each other and—”
“You’re afraid,” said Mrs. Bisbee. “But never mind. How did you learn of the oil?”
“From Swami Ullagaddi Hiralal.”
“You know him fairly well?” asked Mrs. Bisbee.
Deborah nodded.
“What do you think of him?”
“Four-flusher. Hot-air ballyhoo. Soap-box philosopher in need of money. Ignorant, incompetent, conceited ass looking out for bigger asses than himself, who’ll feed him in return for hokum. He’s in Sing Sing Prison.”
“Poor catspaw!” said Mrs. Bisbee. “Do you think he had enough iron in him to think for himself of going to America?”
“Did you put him up to it?” asked Deborah. Her voice turned icy cold.
“No. Rundhia Singh did. Rundhia Singh tried to buy Abercrombie’s report from him. Then he tried to get it by foul means, but Ullagaddi Hiralal knows all about poison and was careful. He went to Bombay, where he served for a while as spy for the police, so it was not easy to assassinate him; and nobody knew where he’d hidden the documents. But Rundhia Singh’s men kept after him with a cock-and-bull story about an American millionaire and promised him a good share of the proceeds if he’d help locate the oil. It was that that put the idea of America into his head. He travelled first-class; as a tourist, and I understand he was clever enough to get his passport awfully well visaed, so I suppose they let him land without much difficulty. When Rundhia Singh heard of it he was in a towering rage and went to the Gnani for advice. They always go too late to the old man, like people going to confession after they’ve committed sin, instead of acting wisely and then going for encouragement. The Gnani doesn’t care a rap for their personal problems; he’s only interested in the big, broad sweep of things. His wisdom is a treasure that he holds in trust for the whole of humanity. When they do go to him he gives them advice that, if they follow it, will serve the general good. He’s a genuine Gnani, a Knower. You can’t fool him — and he never tries to gather up spilt milk. He doesn’t preach, either. He says it’s for them to find out from experience what life is all about. So when they come to him with personal odds and ends he handles them from the point of view of universal politics, if that means anything to you.”
“How does the government like him?” asked Deborah.
“It doesn’t! But it doesn’t interfere with him.”
“They don’t dare?”
“Oh, yes, they dare. But they’re most of them gentlemen. They try to be wise, and people who keep on trying never fail to learn, little by little. But they have no direct dealings with the Gnani, so, as my husband is a government official, I have sometimes managed to — well — to save the government from making a mistake.”
“Is that what Chullunder Ghose knows?”
Mrs. Bisbee nodded.
“When I was in that railway accident it was midnight and there was no help within thirty miles. It was in the monsoon; the signals were down and the line was washed away. It was a small mixed train, of the kind they run on branch lines in the mofussil, and I was the only first-class passenger. There were ten or eleven natives in the third class and every one was killed, except myself and one small boy. He ran for help. I was pinned under an axle, and I suppose I’d lain there about two hours with the water swirling around me, when the Gnani came. The boy had brought him.
“He cut my leg off. I believe he used an ax. And he left my leg lying there under the train. The break-down crew discovered it an hour or two later. There were all sorts of theories about what had happened to me. The Gnani carried me to his own crypt underneath the temple at Erinpura. I was unconscious, of course. He took care of me there for several weeks. He let me send word to my husband secretly, but he threatened that if anybody else learned where I was he would have me put out and let them take me to a European hospital. I chose to stay. It may sound wild to you, but I enjoyed it!”
“Didn’t the pain torture you?” asked Deborah. “I have an aunt who runs a hospital at Ahmednuggar. I’ve stayed there. I know about native surgery and medicine!”
“No pain. Not much discomfort,” said Mrs. Bisbee.
“Did he hypnotize you?”
“No. He says that’s wicked. So it is. He applied remedies, and I’ll show you tonight what he did to my leg. You won’t find better surgery if you hunt the whole world over. He was simply marvellous — the gentlest, holiest old humorist you can imagine. Luckily for me I talk the language like a native, so I was able to understand him. But he didn’t talk much, not very much. It was his trick to say something at exactly the right time, as if in answer to your thoughts, that won me. He seemed to creep into your soul, and sometimes it hurt; that was when he was angry at what he found there. But he was always sorry afterward when he had been angry, and he could heal up the ache inside as if he had put drops on it the way he put them on the stump of my leg.”
“Any women there?” asked Deborah.
“Not one. But he was gentler than a woman.”
Mrs. Bisbee paused for phrases to convey her meaning. It was several minutes before she went on speaking.
“Did it ever occur to you how impossible it would be to put hatched chickens back into the shell? Well, I was like that when the Gnani sent me back to my husband. I hadn’t consciously aspired to anything. But I had grown and everything was different. I loved my husband just as much as ever. More, I dare say. But he knew I had grown. He could see it. He is one man in a thousand. He never tried to change me back again. He saw that what were right and wrong to him — rightly right and wrongly wrong to him — were simply different aspects of absurdity to me. All my values had changed, although I was more convinced of the difference between right and wrong than ever.
&
nbsp; “It was my husband’s idea that I should take this bungalow. I couldn’t keep myself from interfering with his work. I could see solutions that he couldn’t; and though he very often admitted I was right, he’s a covenanted official and he has to act according to the rules. I did outrageous things, for which the Gnani scolded me. I was like one of those religious fanatics who want to compel every one to think and act as they do. I did dishonest things, and on one occasion it was Chullunder Ghose who saved me and my husband and several others from disgrace. It was all my fault.
“There was a lawsuit, one of those cruel ones, in which the courts are powerless to do the right thing because witnesses had been bribed and terrorized. There was a decent, honorable ryot who was going to be turned out of house and holding, and everything really hinged on the evidence of one individual, who had been well bribed by the plaintiff and who hated the defendant. I won’t make a long story of it; but my husband was to try the case, and he knew from the way I argued with him about it that I was more than interested.
“I persuaded Chullunder Ghose to make away with that important witness. He wasn’t killed, you understand, but he vanished; and though he has turned up since, he doesn’t tell what happened to him. Chullunder Ghose would accept no money from me, but he made that bargain that you overheard just now. And since then I have learned enough from the Gnani not to try to wriggle out of bargains.
“You see, when you learn things from a Knower like the Gnani, you’re like a growing child; you find yourself possessed of faculties that you don’t know what to do with. That is why such people as the Gnani are frightfully careful whom they teach, and not to teach them too fast. It’s much easier to learn to walk a slack wire than to use newly discovered intelligence. It runs away with you. You have to learn to practise the most drastic self-control or else you ditch yourself and everybody else. That’s why clever people are so much more dangerous than plodding, patient, stupid ones.”