Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Mercy to man and beast. It isn’t merciful to let men die in sin. That foul stuff leaves, the way it entered, through the body. Two hours’ flogging!”

  The minute he saw Tom and Elsa he roared with laughter. They went up and bowed.

  “Shang-shang?” he demanded.

  “Your Eminence, the last one is dead,” Tom answered.

  “Chou Wang-Naosuki?”

  “Dead, too. Thö-pa-ga is safe in the chapel.”

  “Yes, I knowing it.”

  “I have the honor to present my wife, Your Eminence.”

  “Oo-ha-ha-ha-hah! Tum-Glain, what your doing in Tibet? Get out! Go home!”

  Tom laughed. He liked Lobsang Pun. He struck his right hand on his pocket.

  “Your Reverend and Holy Eminence,” he said, “has surely not forgotten that permit to travel wherever I please in Tibet.”

  “What your wanting?”

  “Ponies. Provisions. An outfit. Men — I might take Dowlah’s, if Your Eminence can’t spare a few. I will follow the trail of the Japs. I want a messenger to-morrow morning, to carry my mail to Mu-ni Gam-po in Darjeeling.”

  Lobsang Pun stared at Elsa. His big beak of a nose twitched and his eyes almost disappeared into a maze of wrinkles. He smiled at her. He chuckled.

  “You? “he demanded.

  “Tom says I have won my spurs, Your Eminence. I am his wife. I will go where he goes.”

  “Tum-Glain! Oo-ha-ha-ha-hah! What about that Chinese woman?”

  “Send her packing,” Tom answered. “Send her to India.”

  Lobsang Pun objected. “Better mercifully two hours’ flogging. Beat the sin out. Save her a million years in hell.”

  Tom grinned: “Your Eminence’s magnanimity is famous. But I beg you, as a personal favor to me, not to waste it on that woman. Please let her go.”

  Lobsang Pun looked scandalized. His eyes glared autocratic indignation.

  “What your wanting, Tum-Glain? Two women? One not enough for you? Your being too sinful. My letting Su-li Wing go, unadmonished by two hours’ whipping, if Thö-pa-ga requesting. Otherwise, my blessing her with suitable rebuke.”

  “Very well,” Tom answered, “I will plead with Thö-pa-ga. By the way, Your Eminence, the money in Rajah Dowlah’s pocket belongs to Abdul Mirza, who’s a good old honest fellow with a lean purse. May he have it?”

  “Yes, my sending to him.”

  “And I think you’ll find a letter, bearing your signature—”

  “Forged!”

  “That he took from the Bön magician—”

  “Oo-ha-ha! I have it! See? I have it. — Now you, Tum-Glain, now your knowing Thunder Dragon Gate, your going to the moon next? Tum-Glain! Elsa! Oo-hah-ha-ha-ha-hah!”

  THE END

  OLD UGLY FACE

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  The first edition’s cover

  DEDICATION

  TO COLLIER YOUNG — LEST DISTANCE DIM GOOD FELLOWSHIP

  Our hearts know better than to envy men,

  Still less their women, who by tongue and pen

  With soulless ideology declare: “What dies

  Is all we live for. Violence and lies,

  Our high aims justify. The ends we seek

  Are things, more things. The poor and weak,

  Unnourished in the headlong race to pay

  New debts to evil while we toil and pray

  To politics for wealth — do they not, day by day

  Receive, of our good charity, their bread?

  Are we not wonderful?”

  We are. We are. And yet ...

  There was a Voice that more than hinted how

  By means more manly than we practice now

  A wide world’s consciousness can lose its dread

  Of drifting toward endless death: — instead

  New visioned, may create a world at last

  Worth loving for its future, not its past.

  INTRODUCTION

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Ulysses”

  Set in Tibet, the story concerns a group of men and women who are vitally involved in an exciting situation in that forbidden land of towering mountain peaks and age-old secrets. The Dalai Lama had died, and the choice of a successor to the most influential position in Tibet is a matter of utmost concern to the agents of various foreign governments and to Tom Grayne, unofficially representing the United States, Andrew Gunning, his free-lance friend, and Elsa Burbage, in Tibet under unusual circumstances. Above all, the future of Tibet lies in the hands of the Most Reverend Lobsang Pun, known as Old Ugly-Face, a wrinkled, stout Tibetan prelate of uncertain age, a genuine mystic whose mission in life is to preserve the seeds of sanity in a world gone mad. Grayne and Gunning are both in love with Elsa, and out of this conflict between life-long friends arises a drama of absorbing interest — a drama intensified by international intrigue, treachery, unbelievable courage in the face of the greatest adversity, and the prodigious efforts of Old Ugly-Face to win control of the newly appointed Dalai Lama.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Things seemed vague that evening. Darjeeling felt as if it were somewhere over and beyond its own sensational horizon. The damp stone monastery walls had lost reality, as if thought were the substance and thing its shadow. Andrew Gunning strode along the white-walled passage, beneath flickering brass lamps, between pictures of Buddhist saints. The thin, worn carpet on the stone flags muted his heavy foot-fall into rhythmic thuds that pulsed like heartbeats, regular, and strong, but strangely detached, unreal. An outdoor man, sturdily built, he looked as if his passion were as strong as his muscles and equally under control. He looked obstinate, cautious, capable of proud and perhaps patient but swiftly vigorous anger. As a first impression that was accurate enough and no injustice done. But he was not a man who readily revealed himself to strangers. He could keep his thoughts to himself. Second and later impressions of him always left observers a bit puzzled.

  He knocked on the ancient cedar door at the dark end of the passage and waited listening, exactly, and in the same mood as he would have listened for an animal’s cry in the forest, or for the telltale murmur of changing win
d in the distance. Good ears, well shaped, not too tightly packed against a studious-looking head. A thatch of untidy tawny hair, inherited from some Viking ancestor who raided Britain before the Normans landed and who doubtless found Roman-Northumbrian wenches an agreeable change from the shrews of the Baltic night. American born. Unclannish. Habitually slightly parted lips. Well-bred narrow nostrils. Easy shoulders; a neck so strong that it looked careless. Sensible eyes. A plain man, therefore dangerous. Only simple people could predict what Andrew Gunning might do. Complicated people seldom understood what he had done or was doing at the moment.

  Because the monastery was built centuries ago, in the days when Darjeeling was a fortress city of war-torn Sikkim, the deodar-cedar door was a foot thick. He had to knock twice. And because the rain splashed musically through an open window, and the monastery mood discouraged shouting, he was answered at last by the sound of a small bronze bell. An historic bell. Its temperate G would have gone lost in the thunder of camps or the hum of affairs. For fifty years, five hundred years ago, it had invited silence while a Wise Saint meditated on the mystery of man: whence, whither, why. A most excellent bell.

  Andrew opened the door into a plain arrangement of ideas; the comfort of ideas in right relation to each other. A white-walled room, so nearly square that its size made no impression; it was good to be in, and that was enough. Two windows, one facing eternal snow, the Himalayas, the Roof of the World, Tibet; but that window was closed for the night by a shutter of cedar and curtained with woven wool from somewhere north of Tang La Ra. The other window, ten by two and iron-barred against the curiosity of innocence (the Tantric Buddhist monks are innocent, and consequently naughty), opened on the rain-splashed inner courtyard. There were glimpses through it of wet-bronze legged monks about their communal duties, with their skirts tucked into their girdles. Some of them were singing; merry-minded fellows, curiously indifferent to rain and icy wind, but venially sinfully inquisitive about the female occupant of Cell Eleven. They were only preserved from the cardinal sin of impudence by the all-seeing eye of Brother Overseer Lan-shi Ling who looked down on their labors from the covered gallery, reminding them, when necessary, that though the eye and the ear may sin, it is the soul which pays. O brothers, look ye neither to the right nor left. The path leads upward!

  Elsa lay curled on a Scots plaid steamer rug that had been stained by travel. It was spread over big flat cushions stuffed with the swans-down that lies like wind-blown blossom on the shore of Lake Manasarowar — sacred wild swans and a sacred lake. The cushions were piled on a throne built of blocks of holy basalt from a mountain whose name no Tibetan will utter (lest the ever-watchful dugpas should overhear and find and desecrate the mountain’s holiness).

  That throne on which Elsa sprawled was really a guest bed reserved for visiting Lord Abbots who occasionally come, with secret news, and solemn meekness, but implacably critical zeal, to bestow their blessing on the monastery or to refuse approval, as the case may be. Hearts had been broken in that room, from that throne; personal destinies had crumbled in the calm impersonal fire of visiting Lord Abbots’ views of what is sinful and what isn’t. Centuries old though the monastery is, Elsa Burbage was the first woman ever to have crossed the threshold of the inner courtyard. She was well aware of that. At the moment it was almost the only excuse for self-confidence that she could use as a shield against despair. The eleventh chamber on the north side had been hers for a number of weeks. It was she who had named it Cell Eleven for luck and brevity. Its real name, all one word in Tibetan, is Countless-thousands — of — times — blessed — place — of — meditation — piously — reserved — for — wisdom-loving-holy-lamas-from-blessed-mountains-conferring-sanctity-and- merit-by-their-benevolent-presence. That, of course, is a far better name than Cell Eleven, but it takes too long to say.

  Elsa smiled at Andrew Gunning, but she didn’t speak for a few moments. She and he had no need to toss words at each other. Kindness can be as irritating as pity. So can courtesy. Such formalities as unfriendly or suspicious people have to impose on themselves and each other had gone downwind months ago, blown by the bitter winds of Tibet and by the more subtle but even less merciful forces of human extremity. There remained a comradeship that speech could easily blaspheme but could neither enlarge nor explain.

  Andrew sat down on a stone ledge near the open window. The ledge was covered with snow leopard skin, a comfortless upholstery; but Tibetans don’t care for physical comfort, don’t even know what it is; and snow leopard skin is a very valuable, so they say, provision against sly earth currents that intrude into a meditator’s thought and undo virtue, as the termites undo buildings in the dark. Andrew leaned his back against the whitewashed wall, and he didn’t say anything either. He just looked at Elsa, schooling himself not to feel sorry for her because he loathed the spiritual snobbery that drools that sort of insolence.

  The glow from a charcoal brazier colored Elsa’s pale face and made her eyes, beneath the dark hair, look much bigger than they actually were; it made them gleam with unnatural light that suggested visions and dreams, like a cat’s eyes when it stares at the hearth. The effect of unreality was increased by the leap of candlelight and by the Tibetan paintings on silk that loomed amid a mystery of shadows on the white walls. It was Andrew who spoke first:

  “Not so long ago, just for looking like that, they’d have burned you for a witch.”

  “Burning sounds dreadful, but it must be soon over,” she answered. “Do you suppose it’s worse than feeling useless and disillusioned?”

  He scowled suddenly and smiled slowly: “It’s the first time I’ve heard you use words like that.”

  “I never felt quite like this before. Not quite like it.”

  Andrew Cunning’s method was to kill out pity and to mask what sympathy he felt beneath brusqueness: “Feel like cracking?” he asked.

  “It seems to have happened. I want to say what I mean. But I can’t. It’s as if I had been an insect all along without knowing it.”

  Andrew looked as cautious, alert and careful as if he were still — hunting some animal of whose ways he was ignorant. He had a presentiment. He was going to be asked what he couldn’t answer, and told what he didn’t want to know. So he said what he did know:

  “Life is a fight. The more sensitive you are, the worse it hurts. But you can’t cure man or horse with hard names. You have to think straight and know what you’re fighting about.”

  “Andrew, I did it. I’ve done it. I lost. I said insect because insects wear their skeletons outside and their personalities inside. They’re armor- plated. But when they crack—”

  “Then they grow a new shell or they die.”

  “It isn’t so easy to just die and be done with it. Andrew, I’ve reached a jumping-off place, but there’s nowhere to jump to. I’m not complaining. I’m telling you because there’s no one else to tell. Even song doesn’t sound good any more. Tomorrow isn’t. There’s only a string of dried yesterdays.”

  He showed his teeth in a friendly belligerent grin: “So it’s Andrew. You call me Andy when you think I’m stupid. Drew, when we’re talking on even terms. Andrew, when you need help. But it won’t work. I’m feeling the way you do, as near as a man can feel the way a woman does. I was in the chapel just now. Same ritual. Same monks, solemnity, beauty and all the rest of it. It felt as flat as canned stuff.”

  “Then you do understand what I mean.”

  “No. When you use a word like insect to explain your feelings — damned if I understand.”

  “Drew, your inconsistencies hide something so strong that I’m almost afraid of it sometimes. I am now.”

  “No call for you to be scared of me. Inconsistencies? What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. I’ve heard you use real bad language — Tibetan and English — that would make a Billingsgate fish-porter’s hair curl.”

  “Maybe. But that was for tactical reasons, to get a pack-train moving or something of that sort
. And besides, I’m not a woman.”

  She laughed. “Drew, did anyone ever accuse you of being effeminate! Please, Andrew! What I meant is, that if you’ll raise that iron visor of yours and really listen, it would be such a comfort. But if that’s selfish, and you’d rather—”

  “Talk away. I’m interested.”

  “I want to talk to the real you.”

  “Go ahead. Shoot. But don’t talk down to me. I hate that.”

  “Down to you?”

  “Yes. Don’t use language aimed at cracking my mental resistance. I’m in a sympathetic mood, if that means anything. I’d like to understand. Words like insect don’t apply. You’re not a louse.”

  “Andrew, you’ve been so generous to me that—”

  “That line heads in nowhere, either. I did what you’d have done if things had been the other way around. So let’s call that past history and carry on.”

  “ — so generous, and so unselfish, that I haven’t dared, I don’t think I’ve even wanted, to impose on you any more. Besides, I understand perfectly that just physical things like forced marches and danger, and even metaphysical things like ditching your whole year’s plans because a friend is in trouble—”

  “I didn’t have any plans, so I didn’t ditch ’em. I was letting Tom Grayne do the head work.”

  “ — means no more to you than a change of the wind, or a change of diet. You actually like it. I know that. I know too — I understand perfectly — that you enjoyed that dreadful ordeal in the blizzard—”

  “You and I shared that. What else could I have done than what I did? Don’t let’s talk about it.”

  “You did impossible things. You brought me alive out of death. But that doesn’t give me the right to ask you to do something even more difficult.”

  He smiled reminiscently. There isn’t anything more difficult, in terms of ordinary human experience, than to act man-midwife to a girl whose first baby is born in a blizzard that blows the tent away at sixteen thousand feet above sea level. If he had been a doctor — but he wasn’t. Elsa and child survived, and he was secretly so proud of that test of his own resourcefulness that he couldn’t speak of it. He even disciplined the smile into a kind of up-wind stare.