If Crowther had used one false note or one fantastic phrase which suggested that his little speech had been made up to deceive us, if he had licked his chops over his bygone wickedness or dished up his repentance with a garnish of oil, I should have been very much obliged to him. We should have been free of him. But he was so simple and direct and effortless that no one could misdoubt him.
“It’s laid upon me, as a task, a penance. I would much rather go back to that safe harbour I had found at Pagan and sit down there and meditate until I got at the truth of the eternal laws and became blended with the ultimate soul. But it seems to me that all the passions and desires of that earlier life of mine, of which you, Mr. Legatt, know, are buried in the heart of that sapphire and may wake again unless I hang it once more high in its consecrated place.”
He looked so forlorn that I was not surprised to hear Imogen encouraging him.
“We will all help if we can,” she said.
“But what can we do?” I cried. “Tell us!” Yes, I too had somehow fallen under the old compulsion. “The sapphire has gone.”
“It will reappear,” said Crowther. “It will be sold again — not in Kandy, I think, but in Colombo.”
“To a passenger on a ship,” I added, and Crowther nodded.
That, without doubt, was the likeliest way of disposing of it. To offer it for sale for a second time in Kandy within so short a period might easily provoke enquiries. Colombo, with the great tourist liners coming in and going out, flinging ashore for a few hours their cargoes of wealthy sightseers eager for mementoes of their voyage — Colombo was the place now where the sapphire must be looked for.
“The first thing to do, then,” Pamela argued, “is to inform the police at Colombo.”
This was the common-sense point of view, but it ignored Crowther. The brotherhood of Buddha had nothing to do with the social framework. It brought no actions, fought in no wars, asked for nothing at any time from anyone. How in the world Crowther now hoped to get his sapphire back I could not imagine.
But it would not be by prosecuting a criminal.
“No,” he said.
Then he rose from his seat and inclined his head.
“As a man, I thank you all,” he said with a smile. “As a monk, I do not thank you. But I say that by your goodwill you have acquired merit which will surely be rewarded.”
He turned away from us more abruptly than any of us had expected. I think that he was alarmed by Pamela’s suggestion that we should call in the Civil power. Vague as, in many of its details, the creed he followed was, this, at all events, was clear. He could pursue no criminal and bear no witness against one. According to the immutable laws, the criminal would be punished without his puny help or ours. He walked across the terrace to the door of the first shrine, wherein lies hidden in the darkness the vast, recumbent image of Buddha the Saviour as he entered into his eternal rest.
But Michael Crowther was not the only one of the party to disappear. A group of visitors was clustered about the entrance to the Great-King Cavern, the glory of Dhambulla, and Pamela Brayburn joined herself on to it. In another moment the great double doors were opened and Imogen and I had the terrace to ourselves. It suddenly occurred to me that this might, perhaps — after all — not be my unlucky day. I stood up.
“Imogen!” I said.
“Yes?” said she, and in her turn she stood up.
I looked at her and she looked at me.
“Imogen!” I repeated.
She nodded her head. Then she laughed with a lovely lilt in her voice, a lilt of pure joy.
“I’ve got to be told,” she said. “Even in these days that’s necessary.”
“I love you,” I said. “I love you very dearly” — and she was in my arms. I could feel the throb of her heart against my breast and the sweetness of her lips upon mine. Blue mountains and green forest, the great pebble of Sigiri and the high terrace of Dhambulla — it was my lucky day.
* * * * *
Some time afterwards, how long I cannot tell, Pamela rejoined us. She looked at Imogen and she looked at me.
“My mother used to remark — —” she began, and I interrupted her.
“I have my doubts about your mother,” I said, nodding darkly.
Both the girls rounded upon me at once.
“Oh!” cried Pamela.
“For shame, Martin,” said Imogen.
“He’s calling me a war-baby,” exclaimed Pamela.
“I never heard anything so ridiculous! I said nothing of the kind.”
“Practically you did, Martin,” Imogen reproached me sorrowfully.
“I couldn’t have. Pamela’s too old. Much too old. Years and years too old.”
They did what they always did when I refused to be brow-beaten. They turned their backs on me and made derogatory allusions. This time it was about jungle-folk and how they must be uncouth. “But, of course,” said Pamela, “if he’d go up into trees and swing from branch to branch by his arms, he’d be too fascinating.”
I rose and walked down the slabs to the car. But they caught me up before I reached the bottom.
“Your Crowther’s a darling,” said Pamela. “He’s the first man I have ever heard say that it was meritorious to build the Westminster Aquarium.”
We lunched at the rest-house, drove over to Sigiri and came back to Dhambulla for the night. Imogen slipped her arm under mine as we sat in the car.
“What fun we’re having, Martin, aren’t we?” she cried. “A lot of foolish little jokes, silly to other people, lovely to us, because behind them there’s the great peace.”
Chapter 15 The Last of the Peak
IT WAS CURIOUS to notice how deep an impression upon so small an acquaintance Michael Crowther had made upon the minds of my companions. It was disturbing, too. For however loudly I might crow over our present freedom from the tyranny of his sapphire, I had all along a secret presentiment that its shadow would run out over our heads again; and this presentiment was, willy-nilly, strengthened by the clear recollection which the two girls retained of its owner.
We arranged to sail for home on the same ship in a fortnight’s time, and during the fortnight we travelled together, wandering from marvel to marvel of that glossy and multifarious island. But nothing that we saw effaced the picture of Uncle Sunday in his mufti; he was surrounded with so visible an aura of loneliness and disappointment.
We played a round of golf on the English-summer land of Nuwara Eliya, and as we sat at luncheon in the hotel, Imogen, after a few moments of silence, cried out in a little voice of exasperation:
“I never saw a face so thin.”
Pamela Brayburn explained it.
“Fastings and vigils and visions.”
“You’re all wrong,” I protested. “I once made that mistake. Pongyis don’t fast. They mustn’t fast. They mustn’t eat after midday — that’s true. But they can make up for it in the morning. They’ve got to keep fit.”
“To get their Blues, I suppose,” said Pamela sardonically.
“Well, Michael has got his, anyway,” I exclaimed.
“Oh, Martin!”
“Oh!”
Again those shocked interjections reproached me. I was not nice. But I didn’t care. I went on:
“And as for vigils, they don’t keep them. They have long, lovely nights of sleep without fatigue from yesterday or anxiety for to-morrow. They don’t even have the bother of undressing and no one knows better than two girls dolled up like you, how long that takes. And as for visions, if any one of them saw a ghost he’d be drummed out of the monastery in the morning.”
“Yes, darling,” said Imogen soothingly.
We drove down from Nuwara Eliya and bought tortoise-shell presents at Galle. And Imogen asked — and this, too, after an interval of two days:
“Why, then, is he so thin, Martin?”
“Because he’s like Martha,” I answered, “if it was Martha. He’s troubled about many things.”
“One
of those things we ought to have helped him to get back,” said Pamela; and that was that.
Towards the end of the fortnight we returned to the Galle Face Hotel outside Colombo, and went over, one afternoon, to bathe at Mount Lavinia amongst the catamarans. We were drinking tea in the garden of the hotel afterwards when I said:
“We could only have helped him to get it back by going to the police, and that he wouldn’t have at any price.”
Both girls burst out laughing with sheer pleasure.
“Now you’ve begun it, Martin,” cried Imogen; and to my surprise I had, indeed.
I had been wondering, now that we were again in Colombo, whether we should run across Michael and hear whether or no he had brought the thieves to bay and recovered his treasure. I had a sneaking hope that we should and an outspoken prayer that we should not. It was the prayer which was answered. We were in and out of the town for a couple of days and not one of us set eyes on him or the Indian or Nga Pyu or Nga Than. We embarked on the Motor Ship Rutlandshire of the Bibby Line and moved out of the harbour late in the afternoon. Imogen stood by my side on the upper deck. We saw Adam’s Peak rising up into the sky in a cleft of the mountains. We watched the evening clouds swathe it about and withdraw it from our eyes. Once I used to watch for it with a ridiculous eagerness. Now I was glad to see the last of it. For it seemed to me that with its shadow went the shadow of the sapphire.
There would be many years now before either Imogen or I saw it again, if ever we did see it.
“Yet we owe it a farewell,” said Imogen waving her hand towards it. “You saved my life upon that mountain, Martin.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Since I was up there with you, I was bound to do the little I could to look after you.”
Imogen slipped her hand under my arm.
“Those who look after people sometimes find that looking after ends in loving,” she said gently.
What she said was true, I think — at all events, so far as we were concerned. I looked back. I had seen her in London at dances, at dinner-parties, at theatres. I had never been in her immediate circle, but there had been a word or two here, a smile only, perhaps, there, a moment when her hand had rested on my arm as it did now. I had always known her for a friend as, I think, she had known me. But it had needed that moment above the precipice of Adam’s Peak, when she hung in my arm and her life depended upon the strength of it, to warn me that my great need was the need of her.
“Ends in loving,” I said. “And in being loved?”
Imogen laughed and said the most lovely thing which a man could hear.
“Oh, me? You were a little bit blind, Martin. I, on the other hand, used always to know you were about, when you were about.”
The island disappeared. The lights blazed forth upon the deck. The water, sparkling with points of fire, swished past the ship’s sides. The stars were strung like lamps across the sky.
“You and I, Imogen,” I said.
I thought with pity of the man who sought only to replace his offering on the spire of his pagoda and then meditate in a hopeful solitude upon the extinction of his soul.
* * * * *
We were four days out from Colombo. It was, and I suppose is, the practice of the Bibby Line to convert its fore-deck into a skittle alley. We were starting upon a competition which must end before we reached Suez. It was my turn and, owing to a happy lurch of the ship at the right moment, I knocked all the ninepins over with one shot. There was applause and I looked upwards to the higher deck as eager as any champion in a tourney that my lady should smile her acknowledgement of my prowess. But, alas! though many ladies hung over the forward rail, watching us for want of something better to do, my lady was not one of them. My first thought was:
“What a pity. I shall never do that again.”
My second had a touch of grievance.
“Imogen, darling, you might somehow have been there.”
My third was one of sheer amazement and dejection. The ship, I should say, had its full complement of passengers. Apart from the usual tourists, there were young men from the Burma Oil Corporation Settlement at Yenangyaung going home on leave, servants of the Forest Company, judges and barristers and Civil servants and commercial men with their wives; so that even now one had not got them all definitely recognised and named. Moreover, there was but one class so that we all had the run of the ship and it was possible for a passenger to find a corner upon one of the decks where he could remain unnoticed even by those assiduous people who go conscripting for the games. So for the first time since we had left Ceylon I saw Michael Crowther. He was leaning over the forward rail in a line of spectators and watching the players in the skittle-alley with a friendly amusement.
I did not seek him and I was careful not to say a word about him, but I had no hope that neither I nor my companions would remain free of him. He was my Old Man of the Sea and I began to think of him as clamped on to my shoulders for the rest of my life. I should have liked to have run across him in Colombo and to have learned that he had recovered his sapphire and was on his way back with it to Pagan. But since he was on our steamer he had not recovered it and he was chasing it certainly as far as Suez. And a day later Imogen ran across him. He had a cabin on the small after-deck and for the greater part of the day remained in his chair beside it. Imogen found me leaning over the forward rail.
“Martin, guess who’s on board?” she cried.
“I know,” I answered gloomily. “He saw me knock all those ninepins over with one shot.”
“When I didn’t,” Imogen added remorsefully. I suppose that I had told the story once or twice to her and had managed to suggest in telling it that a world could not be really well organised where such achievements were not inevitably witnessed by one’s womenfolk.
“You must come and talk to him,” said Imogen.
“I suppose that I must,” I answered.
“And shall we do it gracefully and with good manners, or shall we not?” said Pamela.
We did it at all events with what grace we could. We sought him out the next morning.
“I’m the bad ha’penny, Mr. Legatt,” he said.
“You’re going as far as Suez, I suppose,” I remarked.
“I’m going to England,” said he.
Michael Crowther, however, took no more pleasure in his destination than I did. England was another word in his vocabulary for failure and loneliness and cold.
“I have got to,” he said. “I ran those men down at Colombo. I did a bad thing. I threatened them with the law. They described to me, boastfully, how they had climbed the pagoda, failed to loosen the diamond and in the end must content themselves with my chaplet of gifts.”
“They had the sapphire still, then!” I cried.
“No,” Crowther answered. “They had sold it. A girl — very young — not twenty I should think — came off a ship on one of the Round-the-World voyages with a man — I should think a little older than you. They went along to the Galle Face Hotel for luncheon. Just outside the hotel the thieves offered them the sapphire with its platinum chain, and after the usual bargaining the man bought it and gave it to his companion.”
“You found out who they were?” I asked.
“One of the porters remembered them.”
“And you are following them?” Pamela asked.
“Yes.”
“Like the Saracen girl who only knew her lover’s Christian name,” I observed. “It doesn’t sound to me a likely proposition.”
“But didn’t the Saracen girl find him?” Crowther asked.
“One for his nob,” said Pamela softly.
“London was smaller in those days,” I returned.
“And we don’t even know that they were going to London,” said Imogen.
I was grateful to Imogen for her support against Pamela’s quite uncalled-for jape, but I definitely disliked the “we.” Imogen had obviously decided that we — she and I, at all events, and probably Pamel
a — were, upon our arrival in England, to spend our time and our efforts in searching through the country for a man and a girl who had bought a sapphire in Colombo.
“You know their names, perhaps?” Pamela asked.
“Yes, that’s about all I do know,” Crowther replied. “I got them from the hotel.”
“What was hers?” Imogen enquired.
Crowther looked doubtfully at Imogen. He was disinclined to answer. He shook his head.
“From what I could gather you wouldn’t be likely to know her, Miss Cloud,” he said rather stiffly.
It seemed a curious consequence of adopting the yellow robe that a devotee to American slang should become the primmest of Victorians. But he little knew Imogen who had a catholicity in her friendships which was apt to stagger even her own generation.
“You never can tell,” she remarked. “What’s her name?”
“Jill Leslie,” said Crowther.
“No, I don’t know her,” said Imogen.
“And what’s his?” I asked.
“Robin Calhoun.”
None of us knew a Robin Calhoun.
“Of course,” said Pamela, who really could leave nothing alone, “he might have been the girl’s uncle.”
For a second or two Michael Crowther tried desperately not to smile. But he failed. And having begun to smile he went on to laugh. There were moments when Michael became very human.
“He might,” he answered. “On the other hand he wasn’t. As I told you, I made discreet enquiries at the hotel. I did not, after all, navigate the Irrawaddy River for nothing. If I didn’t acquire merit I acquired knowledge, and you can take it from me that Robin Calhoun is not the uncle of Jill Leslie.”
The luncheon-gong was beaten at that moment.
Chapter 16 The Silent Room
WE TRAVELLED STRAIGHT through upon one ship to the Port of London, arriving there on the morning of the last day of April. Then we scattered with the usual indifference of our race to the fellow-passengers with whom accident had cooped us for a month; and comfortably confident that in a week’s time we should not recognise one another in the street. I drove with Imogen and her cousin across London to Paddington, saw them off to the West of England and returned to my own lodging in Savile Row. I had not seen Michael Crowther that morning, and what with a press of work and the arrangements for my wedding which we had agreed should take place at the end of the Season, for some time I hardly gave a thought to him at all. Moreover, Imogen’s parents opened their London house in Hill Street, and taking one thing with another I was a thoroughly busy man.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 650