Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “But they didn’t,” he answered. “They killed Hookum Lal — beat him to death with lathies (sticks). It was only when the men who did that were arrested and thrown in jail that public opinion swung and our friend found himself in a tight place. The diwan arrested him to save his life.”

  “Mayn’t I tell him that?” said I.

  “I think not. If I’m any sort of hand at judging men he’d want to open the whole business from some Quixotic notion of duty. We want it closed.”

  “But the men who killed Hookum Lal?” I objected. “Are they to be scuppered behind his back? Mayn’t he put in a word for them?”

  The man in charge of the situation smiled at me. “That’s neither more nor less, than the point,” he said. “Your American friend would imagine they killed Hookum Lal out of regard for himself. As a matter of fact, however, five of the murderers were heavily in debt to Hookum Lal — two had been dispossessed of their homes by him, and three were the servants of the reigning rajah’s younger brother who recently tried to borrow money and was refused. It’s a complicated business.”

  “By Gad it is,” I agreed, and we both sat still for a quarter of an hour each, avoiding the other’s eyes. “All the same,” I said then, “if you’ll forgive my offering advice—”

  “No use!” he snapped, bringing his heels together. “He leaves India — of his own accord or of ours, it scarcely matters to us which. For his own sake, let him go of his own free will, knowing nothing: Say nothing to him! Yes, you may take him to Bombay.”

  So I went back to Ivan wondering how I should spend those next days in his company without divulging that I knew what he must not know. I went by way of the bazaar, to borrow money for him, and three hours had passed before I helped myself to a cigarette again beside him. I saw then there was a new light in his eye, and I suspect he read some change in mine. I had forgotten for the time the existence of another white man within reach, and Dan’s first words were like an electric shock.

  “Conant looked in,” he said. “He was rather drunk.”

  “Good Lord!” I gasped. “Has Conant told you — now, look here, Dan, don’t be a fool — let me tell you something else—”

  “What’s the use?” he sneered. “It took a drunken man to show me my mistake — you’re sober. I came out into the world to look for what I call the Real Red Root, and all I’ve done is try to tamper with the result of twice- two’s-five. I’m off now back to God’s country — where a man can look without burning his eyes. Show these people a new idea, and they’d try to eat it — believe me. it ‘ud upset their stomachs too! Their God’s their belly. I’m no camomile tea for soothing stomach aches!”

  “I wish I understood you,” I admitted. “Did Conant tell you—”

  “He told me everything, and a lot more.”

  “And you’re willing to go?”

  “Wish I could start this minute! Come with me!”

  “I’m to take you to Bombay — I mean go with you. You don’t travel under arrest.”

  “Come to America.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh,” I said airily, “for one thing I shall come back here and do what I can for those poor devils who murdered Hookum Lal.”

  He laughed. “Camomile tea for the colliwobbles!” he said grimly. “They’ll swallow all you’ll give ’em! After that they’ll have the colliwobbles worse than ever!”

  “All the same,” said I.

  “Yes,” he interrupted, “I know — I’d have said the same thing once. I fought for the Boers once. I was willing to stay here forever, once. I’ve seen a great light. I’m going home.”

  From a man who had prayed once to sacrifice his friend in battle for the sake of dim ideals this was drab and disillusioning. I suppose my face showed it, for he dropped the scornful note and laid a hand on my shoulder.

  “You’re in a rut,” he said, “and you like the rut, old man. I’m in the ditch, and I don’t like it. But a ditch is better than a rut for lots of reasons; there’s more room, for one thing. For another, it’s not respectable and you aren’t supposed to stay in — nobody minds which side of it you step out; and when you do step out you can see which way the ruts run, and keep away. You don’t understand that, either, do you? Well, it’s a national failing to want to set the world right — and a national duty for that matter. The mistake I’ve made was in cussing at other people’s ruts instead of gouging new ones; I cussed, and edged over, and they ditched me. Stay in your rut, and be comfy, and good luck to you — I’m off!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I shall miss you.”

  “Follow me when you do!” he retorted. “I shall blaze a trail.”

  “And the great report?” said I.

  “Belongs with the Boer Army and the Southern Confederacy and pipe dreams in the land of Twice-two’s-five! Finish it, and then forget it! It won’t set the world on fire. You’ll get more out of it than anyone.”

  I did not doubt that was true.

  So I traveled to Bombay, in a manner in charge of him, and we did not talk much. To have hunted, and journeyed, and quarreled, and played with a man; more than, all that to have worked with him and come to his rescue when his honor seemed involved is to weave such a harness of affection as the human finds it hard to break. We were friends all right. We scarcely said good bye on the steamer, and I turned my back on him before the steamer left, with a feeling of tragedy. Yet I was not sure that I was right and he wrong, which made it worse. He had undermined my self-content.

  I finished the report, after they had hanged Hookum Lal’s murderers, and took no more joy in one conclusion than the other. Then, in the course of wandering, I hunted tigers, because in some ridiculous way a tiger seemed to represent jealousy. I was not jealous of women in the least, but I ached when dread told me some iconoclast in pants would tempt Dan Ivan and rob him of his vision.

  The first letter he sent me enclosed a draft for what he owed without a word of thanks, which was as it should be. Had he wasted ink on that sort of gratitude I should have known that friendship was already dwindling into mere acquaintance; so I took heart of grace and grew more contented. Not until the fifth or sixth letter (and the intervals were long) did any new phase declare itself. He began then to mention week-ends spent at somebody’s country house, and in some vague way I gathered her father was well-to-do.

  When he married I resisted the desire to travel round the world and see him. I never met a man more sure than he to make a reasonable woman happy, but an evening’s talk with me, I thought, might likely reawaken wanderlust. So I gave the woman time. The “great report” being finished, I got a commission to study the subject of draught oxen, and set out to travel the length and breadth of India again.

  His letters grew if anything more regular. I could not detect a trace of the notorious married man’s inclination to drop youth’s friendships and slide backward into morbid middle age. Yet, there was something in every letter that evaded comprehension — something, neither marriage nor parenthood, that put new strength into his thoughts.

  Time after time I wrote asking an explanation, but he ignored the questions. He never even told me what might be the nature of his business, although it grew more and more evident as one year followed another that something vast had spurred and engaged his whole energy.

  I scanned book-lists vainly, in the thought that authorship might have claimed him. Failing a clue there I turned toward politics, and, trying to glean from Anglo-Indian and European papers intelligible glimpses of American public life, decided cryptograms were easier and lit fires with the puzzles journalists had made. Yet curiosity grew, and Dan’s letters began to grow fewer, with less and less in them of information.

  I did not exhaust the subject of draught oxen, because that is an illimitable realm (unlike the visible supply of beasts); but as the yearning to see Dan grew uncontrollable I turned in at last a report of kinds and claimed leave of absence (which was granted, without pay). Ha
ving a job of my own to return to I was surely at liberty to track Dan down, and so that experience became mine of crossing two oceans to where men reason with the blue sky for a limit, and rather often speak their thoughts. It was more potent than new wine, and for three months I wandered, wondering.

  Dan had done none of the things I imagined for him, and that very fact kept me from going to him at once. His name seemed too often on men’s lips, on trains and in hotels, and a sort of false shame bred hesitation. I thought it might seem I was sponging off him, and I think perhaps I would have returned to India without seeing him at all had not word of his troubles reached me. I could not resist seeing how he met them now-a-days, so I took train almost across the continent with a telegram in advance of me to make my coming known.

  It was a wild, grim region where I alighted in the rain at dawn, and the crew who manned the narrow-gauge spur-track train that met me looked like incarnate spirits of the place. I sat on the edge of a tip-truck surveying the panorama of iron mountains (remembering I had first met Dan beside an iron-colored stream) until a lump of ore whipped by my ear, and the man with a gun on the truck next behind advised me with pungent metaphor to hide myself. After that I lay on iron dust hidden by the truck side until we brought up with shrieking brakes in the midst of a grim town, set on the rim of a gaping wound in Mother Earth. Never having seen anything like it, I let myself be led unprotesting down street after street of endless ugly shacks.

  It looked like a town with no more ideals than beauty. One whole street of shacks had been burned quite recently and their charred frames wept in the rain like skeletons of lost ambition. At one end was a bare pole that might have borne a flag, and tattered rags were trodden in the mud near-by in proof of what its purpose had been. I picked up one rag and carried it along.

  When I came on Dan at last he was standing by a gaunt iron-ore building labelled Offices. There was a man-height wall above the roof and a man with a rifle paced behind it, for I could see his hat and the rifle barrel. I gathered Dan’s hunting days were not yet altogether over.

  “You’re welcome!” he said, snatching a word with me, just as he snatched my hand between orders that he emphasized with swinging list.

  “I see you’re in trouble again,” I said, going to what looked like the heart of things at once to save time.

  “Not a bit of it!” he laughed. “I’m in my element!”

  There wasn’t a doubt of that. Voice, eye and bearing were those of a man at man’s work. Men who could scarcely speak English some of them, came running to get his orders and hurried to obey, understanding him and one another.

  “What have you got?” said I, “and when did you get it?”

  “I’ve a wife and two sons,” he answered; but I knew that wasn’t the answer, and he knew I had not meant that: Marriage with him had been the rounding out of his private life, no more, no less.

  “What is here that’s good?” I asked, “that you look so pleased with yourself?”

  “Can’t you see it?” he asked.

  “I saw this as I came along,” said I, and I showed him the torn strip from his national flag I had brought with me.

  “There’s a big one up there they can’t reach,” he said, laughing and glancing at the roof where a big flag bellied in the driving rain. “If that had been a white flag, or a black, or a red one they’d have hung garlands on it. They tore it down and trod on it because it stands for what’ll get them in the end, and they know it, yet don’t understand.”

  “If I had any authority here,” I said, “they’d understand in short order what it meant to dishonor the flag of the land they live in!”

  “But it isn’t the land they live in,” he answered. “Only about one in a thousand of ’em has even seen America in the distance!”

  “Talk sense!” I urged him, and he laughed.

  “A man lives where his heart is,” he answered, smiling with that same far vision in his eye that first made me respect him. “Thousands and thousands are born under this flag who neither know where America is nor what it means. I didn’t know. How should I? How should they? I was born over here, but I never lived in America until I’d hunted, and hunted, and found the root of things. America is my country now, and no man can put me out of it or make me afraid. It’s no joke, man, that America is God’s country! Heaven and America are one!”

  “This looks more like hell,” I said, illustrating what I meant with a sweep of the arm that took in treeless chasms, red chaos, and machinery that burrowed insect-like into creation’s very womb.

  “Hell’s wherever you dig and grovel for the Root!” he laughed. “Heaven’s the fruit of digging!”

  “Did you dig your Root out of that great hole?” I asked him. “I know you’ve dug money out of it, but —

  “No,” he interrupted: “I dug it from the first place I tried — from my own heart, red and bloody. Do you know why I left America — I mean in the beginning?”

  “Unless memory fails,” I said, “There was something about love without a hint of lust—”

  “That’s it! Love is the right word after all.” Lust is the mirage. Most of that flag-burning brigade can sing, “My country” with a fine fervor — know the words better than I do! Trouble with ’em is, each one’s thinking of something different while he sings — beans, perhaps meat seven days a week — pianos on the installment plan — oh, anything! Yet they’re here because they know there’s something better than their understanding grasps yet; and because they’ve crossed seas to find it, they surely shall!”

  “Meanwhile they take your wages and burn your property!”

  “They’ll build it again!” he laughed. “Just yet they’ve nothing to sacrifice, and they feel the lack.They’ve run away from gods of property and boundaries, so they burn what they find of that sort over here.”

  “To stay this side — I mean to be one of you — would I have to carry a torch and tread on flags?” I asked.

  “Of course not. You’ve made your sacrifice. Will your heart not burn for what you’ve left? I didn’t know it, but what drove me out of America on my travels was a sense of guilt! I’d nothing to give! Do you bring nothing with you? America demands a sacrifice from each one of us.”

  “What sign shall follow them that believe?” I asked him.

  “A simple one. When you learn to love so well that you begin to see heaven through the blood and tears, you’re on the fair way to become American. You are one when you know at last America’s a state of mind! You’ll be ready then to fight and die for what you know, and you’ll feel tolerant of all the poor who haven’t learned that yet! But there’s no peace till you reach that point. Heaven and America are one! Are you afraid?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not afraid.”

  “Will you come on in?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.” I felt like taking off my shoes, as used to be required on Sinai.

  THE BELL ON HELL SHOAL

  JOE MOLYNEUX told this story. We were sprawling on my rug on a Florida beach, staring at Hell Shoal, where the big new bell-buoy swam. The gulls and terns were waiting for the tide, half asleep on the abandoned hulk of Sharpe’s million-dollar yacht.

  It had been a nearly new yacht when it went on Hell Shoal. Never less than arrogant in his reactions, Sharpe had insulted Providence forthwith by ordering the biggest bell-buoy in the world. He had set it, with or without the government’s permission, well to seaward of that graveyard of incautious ships. No ordinary bell was good enough for Sharpe in that mood. He had consulted Molyneux, who introduced Ramon Turner.

  Ramon Turner cast the bell and then vanished without waiting for his money. Molyneux and I had come to listen to the bell; but, like many other things that Sharpe had ordered made, it was apparently too big. It needed waves to make it boom. No sound came.

  There had been a hue and cry — a nine days’ wonder about Ramon Turner. I asked Molyneux what he supposed had become of him? Molyneux stared at me for about a minute be
fore he answered. Then he broke into the story suddenly, beginning ‘way back at the tap-root of it, so that I did not at first understand that he was answering my question.

  You see, he began, I collect bells. I have wandered all over the world collecting them. They amuse and interest me. I can tell, by the sound of an ancient bell, pretty nearly its date and who cast it; also, sometimes, what is in it besides metal. Have you noticed that bells have character? At certain periods of history it was the custom, when an important bell was cast, to sacrifice a man by flinging him alive into the molten metal. That was called giving a soul to the bell — soul — virtue — character — one or the other, and no matter which. Have you ever noticed that some bells die, and some don’t?

  I first met Ramon Turner in a shop near the British Museum where young artists could occasionally sell their work at bread-and-cheese prices or better. I resist temptation to buy young men’s stuff; it is so easy to be led astray by youth with a torch and a plausible line of revolt. However, that day, on one of the display pedestals, there was a bronze statuette that almost undermined my resolution. The statuette is on my writing table now, although I didn’t buy it. When it was put up for auction there were no bids. It was returned to the pedestal, so I examined it again. It was a nude figure of a woman, about eighteen inches high, posed very casually, carrying a Chinese sunshade. Quite an ordinary subject, but magnificently handled. It conveyed a kind of concentration of emotion. It was a statement in bronze of something almost absolute. I had never seen anything like it and I was debating whether or not to make a private offer for it, when a voice said from behind me: “It’s yours since you like it so much.”

  I turned and looked into the face of Ramon Turner. He had gone to pieces by the time you met him — in fact long before you met him. But even so, with that straw-coloured beard and those haunted eyes he was charming enough, in his own way, wasn’t he? I mean when you could break through his reserve. He had come to look of recent years like a nihilist in second-hand reach-me-downs. But in those days, I assure you, he was handsome and so full of life and vigour that he arrested attention; clean and clean-shaven; fine intellectual features; insolently amused by such important things in life as he thought trivial; alert; intelligent. I liked him at the first glance. At the second glance I liked him better. But I did not make the mistake of thinking he would be an easy man to get along with in the event that his ideas should differ from one’s own. He smiled — you remember his smile, how curiously boyish and yet twisted by torment it was? And he remarked, as if he and I had known each other for a lifetime: “You see, you know living metal. These fools here know nothing but the bargain price of dead stuff. Vultures!”