Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

“War! Hear him, brothers! Talk is talk, but there will be no war until India grows too fat to breathe — unless the past be remembered and we make one for ourselves!”

  There was silence for a while, if a change of sounds is silence. The Delhi mud sticks as tight as any, and the kneading of it from out of horse-hair taxes most of a trooper’s energy and full attention. Then, the East being the East in all things, a solitary; trooper picked up the scent and gave tongue, as a true hound guides the pack.

  “Who is she?” he wondered, loud enough for fifty men to hear.

  From out of a cloud of horse-dust, where a stable helper on probation combed a tangled tail, came one word of swift enlightenment.

  “Yasmini!”

  “Ah-h-h-h!” In a second the whole squadron was by the ears, and the stable-helper was the center of an interest he had not bargained for.

  “Nay, sahibs, I but followed him, and how should I know? Nay, then I did not follow him! It so happened. I took that road, and he stepped out of a tikka-gharry at her door. Am I blind? Do I not know her door? Does not everybody know it? Who am I that I should know why he goes again? But — does a moth fly only once to the lamp-flame? Does a drunkard drink but once? By the Guru, nay! May my tongue parch in my throat if I said he is a drunkard! I said — I meant to say — seeing she is Yasmini, and he having been to see her once — and being again in a great hurry — whither goes he?”

  So the squadron chose a sub-committee of inquiry, seven strong, that being a lucky number the wide world over, and the movements of the risaldar- major were reported one by one to the squadron with the infinite exactness of small detail that seems so useless to all save Easterners.

  Fifteen minutes after he had left his quarters, no longer in khaki uniform, but dressed as a Sikh gentleman, the whole squadron knew the color of his undershirt, also that he had hired a tikka-gharry, and that his only weapon was the ornamental dagger that a true Sikh wears twisted in his hair. One after one, five other men reported him nearly all the way through Delhi, through the Chandni Chowk — where the last man but one nearly lost him in the evening crowd — to the narrow place where, with a bend in the street to either hand, is Yasmini’s.

  The last man watched him through Yasmini’s outer door and up the lower stairs before hurrying back to the squadron. And a little later on, being almost as inquisitive as they were careful for their major, the squadron delegated other men, in mufti, to watch for him at the foot of Yasmini’s stairs, or as near to the foot as might be, and see him safely home again if they had to fight all Asia on the way.

  These men had some money with them, and weapons hidden underneath their clothes; for, having betted largely on the quail-fight at Abdul’s stables, the squadron was in funds.

  “In case of trouble one can bribe the police,” counseled Nanak Singh, and he surely ought to know, for he was the oldest trooper, and trouble everlasting had preserved him from promotion. “But weapons are good, when policemen are not looking,” he added, and the squadron agreed with him.

  It was Tej Singh, not given to talking as is rule, who voiced the general opinion.

  “Now we are on the track of things. Now, perhaps, we shall know the meaning of field exercises during the monsoon, with our horses up to the belly in blue mud! The winds of all the world blow into Yasmini’s and out again. Our risaldar-major knows nothing at all of women — and that is the danger. But he can listen to the wind; and, what he hears, sooner or later we shall know, too. I smell happenings!”

  Those three words comprised the whole of it. The squadron spent most of the night whispering, dissecting, analyzing, subdividing, weighing, guessing at that smell of happenings, while its risaldar-major, thinking his secret all his own, investigated nearer to its source.

  CHAPTER 2

  Have you heard the dry earth shrug herself

  For a storm that tore the trees?

  Have you watched loot-hungry Faithful

  Praising Allah on their knees?

  Have you felt the short hairs rising

  When the moon slipped out of sight,

  And the chink of steel on rock explained

  That footfall in the night?

  Have you seen a grey boar sniff up-wind

  In the mauve of waking day?

  Have you heard a mad crowd pause and think?

  Have you seen all Hell to pay?

  YASMINI bears a reputation that includes her gift for dancing and her skill in song, but is not bounded thereby, Her stairs illustrated it — the two flights of steep winding stairs that lead to her bewildering reception- floor; they seem to have been designed to take men’s breath away, and to deliver them at the top defenseless.

  But Risaldar-Major Ranjoor Singh mounted them with scarcely an effort, as a man who could master Bagh well might, and at the top his middle-aged back was straight and his eye clear. The cunning, curtained lights did not distract him; so he did not make the usual mistake of thinking that the Loveliness who met him was Yasmini.

  Yasmini likes to make her first impression of the evening on a man just as he comes from making an idiot of himself; so the maid who curtsies in the stair-head maze of mirrored lights has been trained to imitate her. But Ranjoor Singh flipped the girl a coin, and it jingled at her feet.

  The maid ceased bowing, too insulted to retort. The piece of silver — she would have stooped for gold, just as surely as she would have recognized its ring — lay where it fell. Ranjoor Singh stepped forward toward a glass-bead curtain through which a soft light shone, and an unexpected low laugh greeted him. It was merry, mocking, musical — and something more. There was wisdom hidden in it — masquerading as frivolity; somewhere, too, there was villainy — villainy that she who laughed knew all about and found more interesting than a play.

  Then suddenly the curtain parted, and Yasmini blocked the way, standing with arms spread wide to either door-post, smiling at him; and Ranjoor Singh had to stop and stare whether it suited him or not.

  Yasmini is not old, nor nearly old, for all that India is full of tales about her, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. In a land where twelve is a marriageable age, a woman need not live to thirty to be talked about; and if she can dance as Yasmini does — though only the Russian ballet can do that — she has the secret of perpetual youth to help her defy the years. No doubt the soft light favored her, but she might have been Ranjoor Singh’s granddaughter as she barred his way and looked him up and down impudently through languorous brown eyes.

  “Salaam, O ploughman!” she mocked. She was not actually still an instant, for the light played incessantly on her gauzy silken trousers and jeweled slippers, but she made no move to admit him. “My honor grows! Twice — nay, three times in a little while!”

  She spoke in the Jat tongue fluently; but that was not remarkable, because Yasmini is mistress of so many languages that men say one can not speak in her hearing and not be understood.

  “I am a soldier,” answered Ranjoor Singh more than a little stiffly.

  “‘I am a statesman,’ said the viceroy’s babu! A Sikh is a Jat farmer with a lion’s tail and the manners of a buffalo! Age or gallantry will bend a man’s back. What keeps it straight — the smell of the farmyard on his shoes?”

  Ranjoor Singh did not answer, nor did he bow low as she intended. She forgot, perhaps, that on a previous occasion he had seen her snatch a man’s turban from his head and run with it into the room, to the man’s sweating shame. He kicked his shoes off calmly and waited as a man waits on parade, looking straight into her eyes that were like dark jewels, only no jewels in the world ever glowed so wonderfully; he thought he could read anger in them, but that ruffled him no more than her mockery.

  “Enter, then, O farmer!” she said, turning lithely as a snake, to beckon him and lead the way.

  Now he had only a back view of her, but the contour of her neck and chin and her shoulders mocked him just as surely as her lips were making signals that he could not see. One answer to the signals was the tittering of tw
enty maids, who sat together by the great deep window, ready to make music.

  “They laugh to see a farmer strayed from his manure-pile!” purred Yasmini over her shoulder; but Ranjoor Singh followed her unperturbed.

  He was finding time to study the long room, its divans and deep cushions around the walls; and it did not escape his notice that many people were expected. He guessed there was room for thirty or forty to sit at ease.

  Like a pale blue will-o’-the-wisp, a glitter in the cunning lights, she led him to a far end of the room where many cushions were, There she turned on him with a snake-like suddenness that was one of her surest tricks.

  “I shall have great guests tonight — I shall be busy.”

  “That is thy affair,” said Ranjoor Singh, aware that her eyes were seeking to read his soul. The dropped lids did not deceive him.

  “Then, what do you want here?”

  That question was sheer impudence. It is very well understood in Delhi that any native gentleman of rank may call on Yasmini between midday and midnight without offering a reason for his visit; otherwise it would be impossible to hold a salon and be a power in politics, in a land where politics run deep, but where men do not admit openly to which party they belong. But Yasmini represents the spirit of the Old East, sweeter than a rose and twice as tempting — with a poisoned thorn inside. And here was the New East, in the shape of a middle-aged Sikh officer taught by Young England.

  He annoyed her.

  Ranjoor Singh’s answer was to seat himself, with a dignity the West has yet to learn, on a long divan against the wall that gave him a good view of the entrance and all the rest of the room, window included. Instantly Yasmini flung herself on the other end of it, and lay face downward, with her chin resting on both hands.

  She studied his face intently for sixty seconds, and it very seldom takes her that long to read a man’s character, guess at his past, and make arrangements for his future, if she thinks him worth her while.

  “Why are you here?” she asked again at the end of her scrutiny.

  Ranjoor Singh seemed not to hear her; he was watching other men who entered, and listening to the sound of yet others on the stairs. No other Sikh came in, nor more than one of any other caste or tribe; yet he counted thirty men in half as many minutes.

  “I think you are a buffalo!” she said at last; but if Ranjoor Singh was interested in her thoughts he forgot to admit it.

  A dozen more men entered, and the air, already heavy, grew thick with tobacco smoke mingling with the smoke of sandal-wood that floated back and forth in layers as the punkahs swung lazily. Outside, the rain swished and chilled the night air; but the hot air from inside hurried out to meet the cool, and none of the cool came in. The noise of rain became depressing until Yasmini made a signal to her maids and they started to make music.

  Then Yasmini caught a new sound on the stairs, and swiftly, instantly, instead of glancing to the entrance, her eyes sought Ranjoor Singh’s; and she saw that he had heard it too. So she sat up as if enlightenment had come and had brought disillusion in its wake.

  The glass-bead curtain jingled, and a maid backed through it giggling, followed in a hurry by a European, dressed in a white duck apology for evening clothes. He seemed a little the worse for drink, but not too drunk to recognize the real Yasmini when he saw her and to blush crimson for having acted like an idiot.

  “Queen of the Night!” he said in Hindustani that was peculiarly mispronounced.

  “Box-wallah!” she answered under her breath; but she smiled at him, and aloud she said, “Will the sahib honor us all by being seated?”

  A maid took charge of the man at once, and led him to a seat not far from the middle of the room. Yasmini, whose eyes were on Ranjoor Singh every other second, noticed that the Sikh, having summed up the European, had already lost all interest.

  But there, were other footsteps. The curtain parted again to admit a second European, a somewhat older man, who glanced back over his shoulder deferentially and, to Yasmini’s unerring eye, tried to carry off prudish timidity with an air of knowingness.

  “Who is he?” demanded Ranjoor Singh; and Yasmini rattled the bracelets on her ankles loud enough to hide a whisper.

  “An agent,” she answered. “He has an office here in Delhi. The first man is his clerk, who is supposed to be the leader into mischief; they have made him a little drunk lest he understand too much. I have sent a maid to him that he may understand even less.”

  The second man was closely followed by a third, and Yasmini smothered a squeal of excitement, for she saw that Ranjoor Singh’s eyes were ablaze at last and that he had sat bolt upright without knowing it. The third man was dressed like the other two in white duck, but he wore his clothes not as they did. He was tall and straight. One could easily enough imagine him dressed better.

  His quick, intelligent grey eyes swept over the whole room while he took two steps, and at once picked out Yasmini as the mistress of the place; but he waited to bow to her until the first man pointed her out. Then it seemed to Ranjoor Singh — who was watching as minutely as Yasmini in turn watched him — that, when he bowed, this tall, confident-looking individual almost clicked his heels together, but remembered not to do so just in time. The eyes of the East miss no small details. Yasmini, letting her jeweled ankles jingle again, chuckled to Ranjoor Singh.

  “And they say he comes from Europe selling goods,” she whispered. “The fat man who is frightened claims to be a customer for bales of blankets. Since when has the customer been humble while the seller calls the tune? Look!”

  The second arrival and the third sat down together as she spoke; and while the second sat like a merchant, nursing fat hands on a consequential paunch, the third sat straight-backed, kicking a little sidewise with his left leg. Ranjoor Singh saw, too, that he kept his heels a little more than a spur’s length off from the divan’s drapery.

  “Listen!” hissed Ranjoor Singh.

  Yasmini wriggled closer, and pretended to be watching her maids over by the window.

  “That man who came last,” said the risaldar-major, “has been told that thou art like a spider, watching from the middle of the web of India.”

  “Then for once they have told the truth!” she chuckled.

  “In the bazaar he asked to be shown men of all the tribes, that he might study their commercial needs. He was told to come here and meet them; and these were sent for from the caravanserais. Is it not so?”

  “Art thou thyself for the Raj?” asked Yasmini.

  “I lead a squadron of Sikh cavalry,” said Ranjoor Singh, “and you ask me am I for the Raj?”

  “The buffalo that carries water for the office lawn is for the Raj!” said Yasmini.

  “Then he and I are brothers.”

  “And he, yonder — what of him?” She was growing impatient, for the tune was nearly at an end, and it would be time presently for her to take up the burden of entertainment.

  “He will ask, perhaps, to speak with a Sikh of influence.”

  “Sahib, ‘to hear is to obey,’” she mocked, rising to her feet.

  “Listen yet!” commanded Ranjoor Singh. “Serve me in this matter, and there will be great reward. I, who am only one, might die by a dagger, or a rope in the dark, or ground glass in my bread; but then there would be a squadron, and perhaps a regiment, to ask questions.”

  “Perhaps?”

  “Perhaps. Who knows?”

  He spoke from modesty, sure of the squadron that he loved so much better than his life, but not caring to magnify his own importance by claiming the regard of the other squadrons, too. But Yasmini, who never in her life went straight from point to point of an idea and never could believe that anybody else did, supposed he meant that one squadron was in his confidence, whereas the rest had not yet been sounded.

  “So speaks one who is for the Raj!” she grinned.

  Playing for profit and amusement, she never, never let anybody know which side she had taken in any game. There
fore she despised a man who showed his hand to her, as she believed Ranjoor Singh had done. But she only showed contempt when it suited her, and by no means always when she felt it.

  The minor music ceased and all eyes in the room were turned to her. She rose to her feet as a hooded cobra comes toward its prey, sparing a sidewise surreptitious smile of confidence for Ranjoor Singh that no eye caught save his; yet as she turned from him and swayed in the first few steps of a dance devised that minute, his quick ear caught the truth of her opinion:

  “Buffalo!” she murmured.

  The flutes in the window wailed about mystery. The lights, and the sandal- smoke, and the expectant silence emphasized it. Step by step, as if the spirit of all dancing had its home in her, she told a wordless tale, using her feet and every sinuous muscle as no other woman in all India ever did.

  Men say that Yasmini is partly Russian, and that may be true, for she speaks Russian fluently. Russian or not, the members of the Russian ballet are the only others in the world who share her art. Certainly, she keeps in touch with Russia, and knows more even than the Indian government about what goes on beyond India’s northern frontier. She makes and magnifies the whole into a mystery; and her dance that night expressed the fascination mystery has for her.

  And then she sang. It is her added gift of song that makes Yasmini unique, for she can sing in any of a dozen languages, and besides the love- songs that come southward from the hills, she knows all the interminable ballads of the South and the Central Provinces. But when, as that evening, she is at her best, mixing magic under the eyes of the inquisitive, she sings songs of her own making and only very rarely the same song twice. She sang that night of the winds of the world which, she claims, carry the news to her; although others say her sources of information speak more distinctly.

  It seemed that the thread of an idea ran through song and dance alike, and that the hillmen and beyond-the-hills-men, who sat back-to-the-wall and watched, could follow the meaning of it. They began to crowd closer, to squat cross-legged on the floor, in circles one outside the other, until the European three became the center of three rings of men who stared at them with owls’ solemnity.