Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “It is to the north?” I asked.

  “Half-way between Kandy and Anuradhapura,” said he.

  “You have been there?”

  Michael nodded his head, or rather bowed it. For there was a reverence in his gesture.

  “Once. It is very wonderful. It stands high above the forest and aloof.”

  “The very place then,” I cried. “I’ll meet you there at eleven in the morning.”

  I shot the clutch in and started. The best of the day had gone and I had eighty-four miles to cover. I was in a desperate hurry now, for I had suddenly become aware that I must reach Anuradhapura before dark. The Brazen Palace was a very long way from the top of Adam’s Peak, no doubt, but a fact overlooked till this moment had disclosed itself whilst Michael was speaking and with every minute took on a more enormous importance. Nga Pyu and Nga Than and Muhammed Ghalli had money. They had sold the stolen sapphire. They were rich. If they wanted to travel swiftly, they could. If they knew where Imogen and Pamela Brayburn had sought refuge, they would. And away in the north of the island were those two girls alone and defenceless against them and confident that the eighty-four miles between Kandy and the Buried City meant safety. I drove down from the hills in a panic to the flat country and on through a land of shining green.

  Chapter 11 The Magic Pipe

  BUT I DID not, after all, see the Brazen Palace; nor the great moonstone at the steps to the Queen’s door; nor the oldest tree in the world. A tyre burst on account of the great heat when I had been an hour upon the road, and at four o’clock in the afternoon I was still some thirty-odd miles this side of Anuradhapura. The road ran through the heart of the jungle between shrubs of scarlet lantana. Creepers with great flowers like painted trumpets laid their stranglehold upon the trees, and butterflies more richly blue than Imogen’s sapphire flickered in squadrons through the sunlight and the forest gloom. The car was running silently and to my surprise I heard suddenly from somewhere upon my left, but very near at hand, the music of a pipe. It sounded oddly in that lonely place and perhaps, had there been no further reason, I should still have slowed down my car in spite of the hurry I was in. But the music had a singularly delicate and airy pitch. There was an enchantment in it, a purity and — I have no other word — a singleness, and in addition a compulsion, so that I must go gently and listen as I went. Thus, I thought, Paris must have piped upon Ida. I peered into the forest but the undergrowth was so thick and so blazed with colour that my eyes could not pierce the screen. I drove on again and after a few yards the road swung round to the left in a wide curve, and I lost the music. But I came upon a long, low, rest-house, set back behind a white gate in a green twilight. The tallest tamarinds I had ever seen sheltered it and only here and there through the thick foliage broke a lance of gold. No halting-place more charming could be imagined; and as I looked at it, I used Pamela’s phrase:

  “You can ‘ave the Brass Palace. It’s here that I should find Imogen.”

  On the instant a voice in front of me cried: “Stop!” and there, in the middle of the road, stood Pamela Brayburn, with a kodak in her hands. I stopped the car, slipped out of my long dust-coat, got out, and crossed to her.

  “You are staying here?” I cried.

  “Yes.”

  “You and Imogen?”

  “Yes. We took a car and came here yesterday.”

  I was immensely relieved. The two girls were safe. The shadow which had hung over my spirits vanished as swiftly as the shadow of the Peak.

  “But I might have missed you!” I cried.

  “And whose fault would that have been?” she exclaimed unpleasantly.

  “Mine?” I asked. “I like that! I was to join you at Anuradhapura.”

  Pamela drew in a long breath.

  “Heaven keep me from falling in love, if it’s going to make me such a simpleton!” she prayed earnestly.

  I felt that I was growing red. I think that I shouted at her.

  “Who says that I am a simpleton?”

  Pamela hardly let me finish the sentence.

  “No one, little boy,” she rejoined. She seemed to be exasperated. “No one has any need to. It’s sticking out like an ectoplasm at a séance.”

  She changed her style then and attacked me.

  “Why didn’t you come with us to Anuradhapura?” she cried.

  I was indignant. Pamela was too unreasonable for words.

  “How could I?” I exclaimed. “You made it impossible. The moment I suggested that we might spend a day or so at Kandy — —”

  “Looking at an old horse’s tooth!” she interrupted irreverently.

  “ — You both cried in one voice: ‘We’re off the first thing in the morning to see the bo-tree’.”

  “We neither of us could have said anything so ridiculous,” said Pamela.

  “Well, words to that effect,” I answered. “It seemed obvious that you wanted to be rid of me.”

  Pamela shook a finger at me triumphantly.

  “That’s vanity — that is,” she said. “But men are terribly vain.”

  I laughed — sardonically is the right word.

  “Men don’t examine themselves in looking-glasses all day.”

  “They daren’t,” said Pamela. “They’d cut their throats if they did.”

  I laughed. It only amounted to a snigger after all, and it seemed even as a snigger rather contemptible even to me. Pamela leaned towards me with a superfluity of kindliness.

  “Did you ever,” she asked, “see any of those pictures which newspapers are always publishing of men in the eighties and early nineties — men with big sprawly beards and short frock-coats and stiff straw hats — boaters you call them, I think.”

  “Awful!” I said, falling into her trap.

  “Yes, awful,” she agreed. “But are you quite sure that the awfulness ended with that era? To put it plainly — may I put it plainly?” Her voice was full of honey.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Looking at things objectively, aren’t men awful now? Spats, for instance. Will you consider spats, Martin, as a method of adornment? Big feet in shiny boots and glaring white spats to wrap them up and crinkly trousers above them? Are you really sure, looking down through the ages, that men aren’t always awful?”

  I felt myself to be a fit subject for pathos. For whenever I was not worried out of my life by Imogen, I was quarrelling with Pamela. But I had the better of her in this argument. I could afford to laugh disdainfully.

  “My dear Pamela, you must go to Burma,” I said.

  Pamela answered rudely.

  “To get my wits polished,” said she sarcastically.

  “To learn a very bitter home truth,” I rejoined. “You will have to be re-born a man as a first step towards entering into the Great Peace.”

  “Then give me the Great Hullaballoo!” said Pamela.

  I must admit that as I looked her slim figure up and down, I recognised a certain attractiveness in her appearance which made me doubt the desirability of Buddha’s rules. However, it seemed that there was nothing to be gained by pursuing the controversy. I had put Pamela in her place — or I had not. I should get no change out of it anyway. I started off briskly upon a different topic.

  “Anyway, Pamela, I hope that you enjoyed yourselves in Anuradhapura.”

  “We didn’t,” Pamela answered uncompromisingly. “We haven’t enjoyed ourselves since you deserted us at Kandy — —”

  “Well, of all the — —” I could not go on. Pamela’s serene distortion of the truth took my breath away.

  “Except,” she continued, “for one hour this afternoon when a conjurer with several cobras in a bottle turned up here and made them dance for us.”

  “Cobras!” I exclaimed. I have hated all snakes all my life, anyway.

  “Cobras de capello,” Pamela repeated firmly. “They were charming. He blew a little pipe and they wiggled their heads about and they lay flat on the ground when he told them to, and he beat the ground close t
o them with his stick and they never moved. He was a magician.”

  I stood up straight.

  “I heard his pipe, I think, just before I came round the corner there.”

  “Then he was repeating his performance for the chauffeur and the servants behind the bungalow,” said Pamela. “He had finished with us an hour ago.”

  I looked back along the road. Yes, it bent round the bungalow to its front. I could not hear a sound of the piping where I stood. No doubt he had repeated his performance in the service quarters behind.

  “An hour ago? Where’s Imogen, then?” I asked.

  “She went to lie down in her room as soon as the snake-charmer had finished,” Pamela answered. She looked at me, her eyes hard with accusation. “Imogen didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Oh!”

  But I must suppose that I expressed in that exclamation distress and not contrition. For again she shook a finger and there was steel in her voice now as well as in her eyes.

  “Of course she didn’t.”

  My heart made a foolish jump. She had missed someone, then. Who? It was not for me to say.

  “Why didn’t she sleep?” I asked, as innocent as a man could be.

  Pamela flung up her hands.

  “Have you no idea why we bolted from Kandy?”

  Yes, I had an idea to account for that — an idea which had only lost its terror since I had found the two girls safe in this forest bungalow. But I could not see what in the world that could have to do with Imogen’s inability to sleep at Anuradhapura.

  “Then you did bolt!” I cried.

  “Then you knew we had bolted,” cried Pamela.

  “No, I didn’t,” I returned hotly. “I may be an idiot but I don’t cart my friends. I hadn’t a suspicion that you were bolting until this morning. Even now it’s only a suspicion.”

  Pamela looked at me for a few moments.

  “Very well. If you’ll drive your car into the enclosure and secure a room — we’re alone here now, but some other party of tourists may come along at any moment — I’ll tell you.”

  I got into the car again, drove between the gate-posts and handed over my baggage to the keeper of the rest-house, whilst Pamela followed me.

  “It’s just as well that you should know before Imogen joins us,” she said. We sat down in long chairs on the verandah. Pamela drank lemonade, I something with lemon in it and no “ade.” We sat in cool shadows. Far away great rocks like huge uncut blue jewels cropped up above a sea of green and gold. The very peace of the scene was enough to take the heart of terror out of any tale however terrible. And the danger was over. I stretched out my legs on the long wooden arm of the chair. Pamela was here. Imogen was asleep. I was at my ease. But I was sitting up straight before she had half finished her story of what had actually happened on Adam’s Peak and I was on my feet when she had reached the end.

  “You told us over dinner at Hatton of the marvellous resemblance of Imogen’s sapphire to the sapphire of your friend, Crowther. But you weren’t comfortable. You were afraid, and fear’s horribly contagious. Although we both made light of the resemblance we were a little frightened, too. And we had more reason to be frightened than you. Yes, we had. For you had pointed out before two men in the street who were talking Burmese. And we had seen those two men outside the shop in Kandy where Imogen bought the sapphire. Now they were outside our hotel at Hatton. We were alarmed.”

  I interrupted her here.

  “Yet Imogen wore the sapphire the next morning when we climbed the mountain,” I said.

  “I know. You see she had worn it always, ever since she had bought it, and not to wear it now was to own to fear. And Imogen didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t bravado. It was a feeling that once you acknowledge fear, you’re likely to crumble altogether. Can you follow that? So she wore it. No doubt she thought, too, that since you were with us we should be safe” — Pamela put her nose in the air— “the poor simp!”

  “Well, you were safe,” said I indignantly.

  “Hansard reports at these words, sardonic cheers from the Opposition,” Pamela continued. “Do you remember that when we stepped out on to the Peak we stood in front of a great bonfire to warm ourselves?”

  “I do.”

  “Has it dawned upon you — but it must have; you’re as quick as a little snake, aren’t you? Then it must have dawned upon you that as Imogen slipped on her cloak — and honest to goodness, I’ve never seen a cloak so clumsily held in all my long life — the sapphire was showing at her throat.”

  “I did notice that,” I exclaimed. “I buttoned Imogen’s coat high under her chin on purpose.”

  “But too late,” said Pamela.

  It was then that I began to sit up in my chair.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Opposite to her on the far side of the bonfire,” Pamela explained, “were the two men who spoke Burmese. Something of a shock, eh?” Pamela nodded her head at me. She was serious, like one who has seen a great danger just avoided. “You see? The two men outside the shop at Kandy when Imogen came out with the chain round her neck, then outside the hotel at Hatton, then on the top of the mountain — and your story of the sapphire. Imogen hadn’t a doubt that your friend’s sapphire had been stolen and sold and was to be stolen again. But even then she was only afraid. She hadn’t a suspicion as to how for the second time it was to be stolen.”

  For a moment I did not answer. I saw the broad surface of the mountain-top, the flames of the bonfires licking the black air, the waves of red colour lighting up the throng of dark faces and white robes. I drew Imogen and Pamela again to the empty space at the precipice’s edge. I cried:

  “Then the pilgrim who stumbled against Imogen — —”

  “He was one of the two. He didn’t stumble at all. He was making sure of her and of the sapphire. If you hadn’t been there close beside her, he would have made sure.”

  “How?”

  “He took her by the ankle and flung her forward off her feet.”

  “What!” I cried.

  “Nothing could have been more deliberate than that stumble. The man wasn’t trying to save himself. His hand closed round Imogen’s ankle as tight as a band and she was thrown — up and out.”

  And the third man — the man from Ratnapura, was waiting below the overhang at the foot of the precipice. I did not mention the third man to Pamela, partly because I did not wish the two girls to visualise any more clearly than they already did the cruel murder from which Imogen had been saved, but chiefly because I was marvelling at Imogen’s courage and spirit. Of the three of us, she was the only one who had a suspicion — and she was certain — that an attempt had been made upon her life. She must have seen herself whizzing downwards, must have felt in all her nerves the smash of bone and flesh upon the pent-house slope of rock, the destruction in a moment of her grace and beauty.

  “And yet Imogen never said a word.”

  There she had stood whilst the dawn broke and the shadow ran out over jungle and sea, and hung there, and raced back again into the mountain. There Imogen had stood without a glance behind her, and so far as I could remember without a tremor of her hand upon my arm.

  “Oh, Imogen was in a panic,” Pamela explained. “But we were alone up there, Imogen, you and I — just the three of us on a terrace crowded with fanatics. She dared not be afraid. She had to keep her head.”

  “Bless her, she did!” I answered.

  How long had we stayed after the attempt upon the Peak? An hour? An hour and a half? We had certainly not started down until the day was broad. Then there was a rickety ladder against a cliff to be descended and a traverse across the face of the rock and a pathway of rough, steep rock steps through a cavern of trees, which made a twilight even of noonday.

  “Even afterwards she didn’t make a sign, didn’t say a word, of the ordeal she had been through!”

  I pictured her again lying upon her back after breakfast, the smoke of her cigarette floating
upwards under the trees.

  “There was no use in talking about it,” said Pamela. “Talking about it meant fear, and fear mustn’t be. That’s Imogen’s creed. Once be afraid and you have nothing under your feet. You’re a straw in the air. You must show yourself you’re not afraid and then perhaps you won’t be. That’s why Imogen wore the sapphire up the mountain. You must show everybody else, too, that you’re not afraid, otherwise you will be. That’s why she wouldn’t let me ask you to come along with us to Anuradhapura. You must come on your own suggestion entirely.”

  “You didn’t give me much encouragement,” I grumbled.

  “You were too prickly for words,” Pamela rejoined calmly. “And after all, in my day young men didn’t want encouragement. We couldn’t keep them off with a gatling gun.”

  “Said she modestly,” I added.

  But I was not proud of my performance or my perspicacity at our dinner in the Hatton Hotel. I was anxious to get away from the subject altogether.

  “Well, however much you may blame me, you were all right at Anuradhapura,” I said comfortably.

  “Were we?” Pamela asked. “Oh, I am so glad to know that!”

  “Weren’t you?” I asked anxiously.

  I could never be sure whether to take her words as a statement of fact or a provocation to battle.

  “Then why are we here?” she demanded, and with a sweep of her arm she dramatised the isolation of the bungalow. “What do you take us for, Martin? Shy nudists?”

  “I do not,” I said firmly. “I can’t accept the ‘shy’.”

  Pamela laughed. Then in a quieter voice she explained: “We were followed to Anuradhapura” — and I jumped.

  “By the same men?”

  Pamela nodded.

  “The two men of Kandy and Hatton and the mountain. I don’t suppose we were difficult to trace. The servants at the hotel in Kandy knew. So did the people at the garage where we hired our car. Imogen saw them at Anuradhapura from the balcony outside her window the night before last. They were standing on the grass outside the hotel. The light from a lamp fell upon their faces.”