by Talbot Mundy
But it suited his purpose to see her home himself. It was in line with his acquisitiveness. She was the only desirable thing that his money had not yet bought him, and to have her with him on the front seat of his car — not yet his, but yet no other man’s; his when he chose to ask — gave him more delight than he had ever gained from actual possession of anything. Sammy on a seat behind would add to his enjoyment, and would serve to prevent the necessary other girl from interjecting conversation.
For all that he despised humanity so heartily, he liked the crowd to notice Margaret Brunton when she rode with him, and he had been conscious of a distinct feeling of irritation when the break-neck international polo game had drawn all eyes from her and her eyes away from him.
He had no interest in the game now. He believed in winning, and once won, the game ceased to interest him; he could not keep his attention on the last two chukkers, nor see any sense in waiting for the finish. He sat still and watched Margaret Brunton sideways, gloating — if the truth were known — over the thought of his ultimate possession of her, but to all outward seeming just a little bored, and quite indifferent.
Limb for limb — line for clean-bred line — he might have been blood-brother to any of the eight who were giving every good, grim ounce they owned on the drumming grass below. Those men were his crowd; the British four, too, would have acknowledged him their social equal as readily as his own countrymen did. And yet none of the eight could have been really his intimate. There was an egotism about Burberton that seemed to check and dry up the opening confidence of everyone, except Margaret Brunton and Sammy Howe — just as they two were like rays of sunshine to the rest of the world. Either team would have talked polo to Burberton as to an expert, and would have turned away at the first opportunity to be happy with Miss Brunton or Sammy, neither of whom knew a solitary thing about it.
It was perhaps his trouble, after all, that Norman Burberton knew too much and loved too little. He imagined that he loved the girl beside him, whereas all he did do was to know, from practised observation, that she was the sweetest, best-looking woman within his social horizon. And anybody could have told him that, without any of his worldly, thirty-year-old cynicism to help make comparisons.
He watched her appraisingly; as she leaned forward beside him; silhouetted against the black of someone’s coat beyond, she might have been a cameo. Even Sammy — something of an Apollo on his own account, and every inch of him a dandy — suggested references to “Beauty and the Beast;” Burberton compared their features, as a connoisseur of jewels might judge one stone against a better one — and he looked like a connoisseur. They looked like happy children, all appreciative.
When the whistle shrilled at last and the blowing ponies trotted off the field to thunders of applause, Margaret Brunton sat still.
“Lord, look at the crowd!” said Burberton. “Why didn’t we get away sooner?”
She looked at Sammy first, and then critically from him to Burberton, as if she were wondering where the difference lay; her lips were still slightly parted, her cheeks still glowing, her eyes still bright with the excitement of the game. So were Sammy’s.
“I wouldn’t have missed one minute of it! We can wait here until most of the crowd has gone, and then Mr. Howe has promised to bring one of the English team and introduce him.”
“Heavens!” smiled Burberton, not ill-humoredly. He managed to infer a compliment. “Sammy’s getting useful! Go on, Sam — fetch him.”
Sammy, who sensed something in the atmosphere that was not absolutely peaceful — something faintly distasteful to his sunny disposition — was glad enough to go.
“Where did he meet any of the other team?” asked Burberton.
“When he was in India, I think. There must be something wonderful about that country. Mr. Howe came back quite different from what he was before he went away — and look at those officers! I’m told they learned all their polo in India. They certainly did learn how to lose like gentlemen.”
“Do you mean that our fellows — ?”
“Our fellows won.”
“I don’t see how that makes them—”
“They are ‘our fellows,’ and I’m glad they won. I always did think well of ‘our fellows,’ as you call them; and now I think even better of them. It makes me wonder how good they would be if they could all take a turn in India.”
“India’s got nothing to do with it!” said Burberton, with the air of a man of thirty who knows all there is to know. “Those four men are just natural-born polo-players — gentlemen — and they met a better team.”
“I’d like to look at India,” said Margaret, musingly.
“Why not?” Burberton pricked up astonishingly. When an idea came to him, one could recognize his father’s son. He glanced left and right — made sure that Sammy was not on the way back yet — and settled down, as a man sits tight down in the saddle when he means to test his horsemanship.
“I’ve wanted to say this for a long time — been waiting for a chance to say it — didn’t want to be banal and say the usual sort of things, and didn’t want to do the usual thing, either. You’ve given me the idea.”
“Wait!” said Margaret. “I think I know what you are going to say. I don’t want you to say it. And yet — Norman — I would rather listen to you saying it than to any other man.”
He did not answer. That was Burberton senior again. The old man had been famous for the art with which he reserved his verbal fire.
“I’m not comparing you, Norman, with any of those four men who played. If I could compare you with anybody, I would not have been seen about with you so much. But—”
“But what?”
“Every single one of those four men — and Mr. Howe besides — has got something which you haven’t. You could get it — you could get it if you tried.”
“What is it?”
She shook her head. “Can’t you see?”
“If I could see something I wanted I would get it or go broke in the attempt. I was going to mention something that I want very much — and mean to have — when you cut me short.”
“Do you really mean to have it?”
He nodded. “You know I do!”
“Then find out what the other is and get it first. The rest will be easy!”
“I hate riddles!” he answered irritably. “Won’t you tell me the answer?”
“You’ll have to see it for yourself. I don’t think I can make it clear to you. Only this — you’ll have to find out that the world’s worth living in before it will be worth living in, and before you can help make some one else’s life worth living too. I want you to find it out for yourself. I’m sure Mr. Howe found it in India, for I saw the change in him when he came back. And now I’ve seen these four men play and lose, and I know they came from India, and — I may be wrong, but it has made me think.”
“I can’t see what you’re driving at,” said Burberton.
“I know you can’t. I want you to be able to see. You can’t find it here, for you’ve got too much money and too many friends. Do you know anyone in India?”
“Not a soul.”
“Perhaps that would be a good thing. I don’t think Mr. Howe knew anybody — at all events until he got there.”
Now there are few things more exasperating to a man of mettle — and Burberton had more than the ordinary — than to be compared to his own disadvantage with a man whom he considers his inferior, in wealth and brain and pluck and sportsmanship and savoir faire. He liked Sammy Howe. He very nearly loved him. But he did it patronizingly.
“I’m getting tired of hearing about Sam!” he answered.
“And I’m getting very tired of waiting for him! There’s Mrs. Boileau — look, she’s beckoning. I’m going to ask her to take me home in her car — where’s Mildred? There she is — now will you go and explain to Mr. Howe that I couldn’t wait? And — and — won’t you wait for him and take him home afterward?”
Burberton, with the perfe
ctly good grace that he knew well how to draw on over a feeling of discomfiture, walked with her to Mrs. Boileau’s side, and later helped her into Mrs. Boileau’s huge blue touring-car.
“Got to wait for Sammy Howe,” he explained, and not even that sharp-eyed scenter-out of social happenings could draw the least deduction from his manner. Sammy Howe, ten minutes later, was the first to get a glimpse below the surface.
“Come on home, you interminable ass!” Burberton growled, seizing Sammy by the elbow.
“Why? Won’t she wait? He’ll be out directly.”
“She’s gone with Mrs. Boileau.”
Sammy did not raise his eyebrows — nor did he ask questions. The first remark of any kind came from Burberton, who was making new hole-records in the speed law of the state; and he did not speak until the city was in sight.
“Know anyone in India?” he asked.
“Yes. Know one man well. Why?”
“Give me an introduction to him, will you?”
Now Sammy’s eyebrows did rise.
“What’s the use?” he asked. “My man’s not a nabob.”
“I asked it as a favor.”
“Are you going to India, then?”
“What else would I want the introduction for?”
“Will you go and see him if I give it to you?”
“What else would I do with it?”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“It’s yours. You’ll like him if you stay long enough. Chap called Ommony. When d’you go?”
“By the first ship that leaves New York!” swore Burberton.
§ II.
SO Norman Burberton began to study India — from the wrong end; and for six toe-on-heel, hard-riding months he liked it. Men discovered he could ride and shoot as well as any of them, so things were pushed his way. He saw nothing of the mechanism — nothing of the insistent, sleepless maw that drains everlastingly the cleanest blood of England and gives back nothing but ideals. All he saw was surface glamour, and subsurface poverty, and new ways of killing time that interested him until the novelty wore off.
He stuck pig in Guzerat and quitted himself handsomely; a man who can do that may be forgiven six of all the seven sins, and his name went up and down the land in front of him. But it was all the same thing that he had known before, in a different setting — amusement, with a bad taste at the end of it.
He killed his tiger from the back of a rajah’s elephant; shot a rhino (and few but royalty and viceroys may do that); shot quail; saw panthers fight to a ghastly, gory finish in a walled arena (that was in a native state, where Government had barely seeped into the roots of things); drank deep, as a welcome guest should, in the Gunners’ Mess at Poona; and stood, at the end of it all, unawed and dissatisfied, in front of the Taj Mahal by moonlight.
It was not the mystery of India that appealed to him; he did not care for it, nor even realize it. It was another mystery.
These men — and most surely they were men — who drank with him and laughed with him, and rode neck and neck with him and risked their lives; who showed him a hundred kinds of hospitality the West knows nothing of; who spoke his language — drawled with the drawl that he had cultivated — and drew his arbitrary line between what was sport and what was not — regarded him exactly as he had regarded his own world back at home. They accepted him because he was there and “a pretty decent sort,” but that was all. There was not one man of all of them who was really interested in him, or who so much as lifted the curtain for a minute from the heart of things that held them all except himself.
And he could not find the heart of things, however hard he tried. They had no secrets from him, or none that he could lay his finger on. He heard them talking “shop” in the club rooms after dinner, and they were selfish and querulous and jealous of one another, just like other men. Few of them admitted any love for India. Most if not all of them were men who could have earned a more than decent living anywhere, at almost anything they chose, and many of them were men of considerable private means.
He saw men sickening with fever and anemia, and all the other ailments that the Indian sun draws out of the polluted soil, and he saw other men who had sickened and gone home, and returned again for more. And he learned there was nothing in it for anybody except a pension — should he live to draw it.
They liked or hated one another; but they always understood. And invariably — always — all the time — drunk or sober — they treated him as some one who could not begin to understand.
“I suppose you’re going to write a book on India when you get back home?” asked a judge of the Punjab High Court.
It was the dozenth time that he had been asked that question.
“Would you read it if I did?”
“Certainly. It’s good to see ourselves as others see us — keeps our perspective right. I get clippings regularly from the American papers, and they make even better reading than the London ones. Now — what is your impression of the country?”
But Burberton did not answer him. He was conscious of being rather liked, but laughed at. At home, he had been neither liked nor laughed at, and he had not cared. Now he cared and was angry, because his cynicism wouldn’t work. It annoyed him that these men who were certainly no better than himself should treat him as outside the pale of understanding. And why should thev be sarcastic?
“What is your impression of America?” he retorted, when he had given his irritation time to fade away.
“I’ve been there six times,” said the judge. “I generally go home that way round. It’s the only country in the world that could have produced you.”
“You don’t like Americans?”
“What is an American? I like you.”
“I’d like very much to find out what holds you all here — you, for instance. You — none of you — like India.”
“Like it? India’s a beastly country to live in for any length of time — drains the life-blood out of you.”
“Then what keeps you here?”
“You’ve been all up and down the country. D’you mean to say you haven’t found that out yet? What are you going to do next?”
“Home, I think. No — I’ve a promise to keep first — a man named Ommony to visit — ever hear of him?”
“Not Ommony of the Woods and Forests by any chance? Visit him by all means — he’ll give you the answer if anybody can.”
“Who or what is he, exactly?”
“Exactly? Why, he’s Ommony of the Woods and Forests. Go and visit him and see.”
“How do I get there?”
“Train — about five hundred miles — change at Ahmadabad for Tikpur — tonga sixty miles to the edge of the reservation — then ride, unless the tonga road is through the forest already — ride and find him.”
§ III.
HE knew now how alone he was. He realized, as the squeaky tonga jolted him along the new-made road, that loneliness — and nothing else — had been the trouble with him He was a specimen to other people — just as others had invariably been to him. Good, grown men looked at him, and dined and rode and talked with him, and did not care. He knew, now, that he wanted them to care.
And as he realized his loneliness, the border of the forest swallowed him and road and tonga, and the silence settled down on him as if he had been dead long ages. The trees and the outskirt changed to greater trees; the sky became patchwork spots of blue between the branches, and the tonga-driver ceased his singing — tried to begin again — and stopped. Only the clip-clop of the ponies’ feet and the shrilling of the oil-less wheels disturbed the stillness; and the view was shut off by endless rows of giant tree-trunks that leaned back like a cordon of policemen to restrain the bursting verdure.
“I’ll go — and stay one night — and come away again,” swore Burberton. “Two days of this would drive me mad!”
But he drove for two days through the forest, until he could have shrieked at the gloom and silence. At night he stayed i
n a log-cabin that a road-builder had left there. Once or twice in the night he heard the baying of a distant wolf-pack; and once — as he walked the stamped-earth floor — he paused and listened to a footfall. Something heavy, with soft feet, came and seemed to listen, and went away. After that the only sound was of the moths that fluttered round his lantern, and when morning came there was a track down the middle of the floor where he had paced it. He would not wait for breakfast; he wanted to gallop back into the sunshine, and would have done it; only the tonga ponies could not gallop, and it was a day’s drive either way. So he drove on.
By midday of the second day the New York that he knew and hated seemed to have been paradise, and the only hell was here among the trees. Ommony must be the arch-administrator of hell, and Margaret Brunton, who was lost to him, the Queen of Heaven. He dreaded meeting Ommony — hated him before he heard him speak or saw him — hated himself for being such an idiot as to leave luxury and sport and company for this — and fell asleep.
It was a devil that awoke him — a devil with muddied hair that reached down to his shoulders, with a tiger’s claw suspended from his neck, and barely a rag of clothing — a red devil with a long knife tied to his waist, who glowed in the setting sun that shone huge and angry in a gap between the trees. The devil tugged at him, and Burberton descended from the tonga like a man who dreamed. For a second he entertained a wild idea of shooting, but his guns were cased and underneath the tonga seat.
“Are you Burberton?” a deep, mellow voice called from among the trees. “Come along. I’m glad to meet you.”
He followed the voice, and found a straight-backed man who leaned against a tree and looked like part of it; his helmet and coat and puttees were all weather-stained, as if Mother Nature had made them too. He said nothing further, but shook hands and turned his back and led the way along a forest path. Burberton glanced back, with a thought for his guns and gear.
“Nobody steals anything hereabouts,” said Ommony — who had not looked; he had heard the turn — he was a forester.
“Wouldn’t dare, I suppose?”