Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “I will make you either kill me or else recognize the goodness that is in your own heart! I know what your genius is.”

  “All-wise!” she retorted. “What alchemy enables you to guess? If you had asked, I could not have answered. Is incredulity a sin? I am only a woman, unable to read my own heart. How should you read it, who are after all only a man, unable to govern your own?”

  “Only a man,” said Gup. “That isn’t a bad title. I accept it.”

  “I offered you ‘Cock o’ the North,’” she retorted. “It suits you better. You resemble Bruce or Wallace more than John Knox.”

  There was a curtain in the corner of the room behind Gup’s back, to his right, a thing like the walls, of silver peacocks. It was through that that the deaf-and-dumb maid carried plates and dishes. Her eyes glanced toward it and Gup noticed that she shook her head, but he thought she was shaking her head at his scorn of titles.

  “You had greater title to men’s homage when you sang for them,” he said, “and made them merry for a passing minute, than all the thrones in the world could ever give you. When I said that you sent men astray, I meant this: that I myself married the wrong woman solely because I saw, heard, chuckled with you and craved more of it. Scores of other fellows did the same. You were a decoy for the less lovely of your sex — a peacock (should I say a pea-hen?) acting as advertisement for sparrows! Your fault? Not a bit of it. Who has a right to blame you because men were fools? You dazzled ’em. And by gad, if we hadn’t all been dazzled, we had been dumb images! You are twice the woman now that you were then. You were wonderful then. You are lovable now.”

  “And you’re dazzled?” She laughed again, honestly — a rippling laugh, all pleasure, and as fearless of danger or its consequences as the light in her eyes was brave and lonely. Even if she did not know she was lonely, Gup knew. He had plumbed the depths of that stuff.

  “No!” he retorted. “I am not the fool I once was. I have paid in agony of mind and body for the right to say that, so I can say it without immodesty. But all Asia is full of fools, and you know it. In those days you were innocent and fools were dazzled at their own risk, because you had no designs on ’em. They paid the piper and you sang. But to-day you’re proposing to dazzle the fools and send ’em roaring down to death, for the sake of the peacock throne you see beyond a crimson battle-field or two. I am here to prevent that!”

  “You are rather a breath-taking person,” she said, watching the set of his shoulders and the angle of head and neck, that is earned, not bought by any one.

  “I will take more than your breath,” he said calmly. “I will take your dream of an empire from you.”

  “Does it occur to you that you are rather swift in your decisions — a trifle bold?” she asked.

  “Did you ask me to command your army because you suspected me of being slow and timid?” he retorted.

  She laughed again. “You tempt me. You do, indeed. I might perhaps forego a kingdom even for a republic — if you would command my army.”

  “Tempt you? I tempt nobody. Temptation is the stuff which butchers deluded fools for the sake of titles and a rent-roll.”

  She glanced at the curtain again and shook her head. “Brave words, Gup. By the way, why did they name you Gup?”

  “I had a dog by that name. He ran with the regiment. He died fighting an animal twice his size. The nickname stuck to me — no reason.”

  “No,” she said, raising a napkin to her lips, “there appears to have been no reason for it. Do you recall, about an hour ago, admitting you are at my mercy?”

  “Mercy was not mentioned.”

  “In my power then. Incorrigible Scotsman! Must I prove my power?” There was a threat on her lips but he interrupted it:

  “Yes. I haven’t heard you sing since the London days, when you sang and danced and made men’s hearts leap. That was power. All this other stuff is tawdry. Come where the music is and sing to me. Do you remember the song that made even old ladies rise at daybreak — until for pity’s sake you sang ’em another one about ‘taking it easy — easy, easy — what’s the use of rush?’ How did the other one go? He hummed it:

  “Up in the morning early, girly, dawn is on the dune, Come and avoid the hurly-burly, twitter the birds a tune!

  Trip the light fantastic, so elastic in the dew, Twiddle your toesies where the roses blush to see the view!”

  “Yes,” she said, “silly stuff, wasn’t it? But it used to stop the show. I’ve heard a Kroo-boy singing that song as he came up from the bunkers of a P. & O. and once I heard it sung by a Baluchi camel-trader on his way down the pass from Tashkent. They tell me the poor fellows sang it in the front-line trenches when they stood up to the knees in freezing water.”

  “They did,” said Gup. “I sang it with ’em. Go and change those clothes — put on something civilized — then let’s go into that big room and you sing it again for auld lang syne.”

  “I never sing nowadays,” she answered. “I haven’t sung since poor Jullunder’s heart broke and he went to see what honesty and high ideals buy you in the next world.”

  “That,” said Gup, “is what’s the matter with you! Sing again and you’ll have better dreams than war and a throne raised on a heap of skulls. Come along. Come and sing to me.”

  “Listen!” she said. “You’re a warrior yourself, with bishop’s boots on, and they don’t fit! You talk to me of honesty. Is there no splendor in it? No conquest of danger? No glorious aim at the impossible? No hitting it and pinning it to earth? No triumph? No imagination? No daring? No recklessness? Is honesty a mawky mess of platitudes on tinsel paper in a penny frame?”

  “It’s gra-a-an’ stuff,” said Gup, “but I can’t define it.”

  “And you talk of skulls, as if the world weren’t strewn so thick with them that you can’t step unless on dead men’s bones! There isn’t a government on earth that wasn’t born in the agony of war, just as you were born in your mother’s travail! War would do Asia good. It would make men out of mad philosophers. They have degenerated, because they are not allowed to go to war with one another.”

  “Piffle!” Gup retorted. “Come and sing.”

  His aim was as true as his eyes. He had seen her weakest point and shot his dart straight into it.

  “Piffle?” she said indignantly, and now there was no trace of humor in her eyes. “I appear to you ridiculous?”

  He glanced around at silver peacocks on the walls. “They’re gra-a-an’ birds — at what they’re good for. None better.”

  “You consider me—”

  “Adorable!”

  “ — a vain creature without—”

  “Peacocks can’t sing. Come and sing to me.”

  “So you refuse to take me seriously?”

  “I am deadly serious. What decent fellow isn’t when he sees a lovely woman shooting dice with the devil? You have made life worth living! I was like a dead man when I entered here. I couldn’t see the use of living. But from now on, watch me!”

  “Watch you? I wonder whether you suspect how minutely you have been watched?” She was showing him her worst now, and Gup knew it. He was no such fool as to suppose she was without flaw, and he was glad to see her weakness. He knew, too, she was not yet conquered. Not for nothing had he fought himself and schooled rebellious horses; he knew at least a little of the art of conquest. Besides, he knew he had a mean streak of his own, so he demanded perfection of no one else.

  “Why,” she asked him, “did you get up and get your revolver just now?”

  He laughed — two monosyllables. “That’s not an easy one to answer. I suppose that’s when I crossed my Rubicon. That and the money are all I have at the moment. When a man decides that he sees a life’s job looking him in the face, there’s an instinct that goes with it — an instinct to gather in all resources, no matter how small they are nor what they are. Something is better than nothing.”

  “You didn’t propose to yourself to threaten me with it?”

&
nbsp; “If I had proposed that to myself, I would have done it.”

  “Let me show you then what would have happened.”

  She stood up, so of course he did, his face grave and courteous but his eyes alight with humor that had not looked out from them since two-thirds of his regiment was wiped out at the Marne. He watched her walk toward the silver peacock curtain. Facing him, finely dramatic, her eyes sulky now with assumed indifference, she snatched the curtain open with a clashing of brass rings on an iron rod. Jonesey — the mullah bachelor of arts, the Moslem Welshman — stood there with his black beard on his chest and in his hand a British army service automatic. Behind him, with their backs against the passage wall, stood two slow-breathing Orakzai Pathans; they were armed with tulwars. Jonesey stepped into the room, the others after him.

  “That,” she said, “is what would have happened. At a sign from me — —”

  Gup interrupted her, but not with words. He took the Welshman by the neck and flung him back into the passage. Before the two Hillmen could draw their tulwars he crashed their heads together, pulled them suddenly toward him and then hurled them, too, staggering on their heels into the passage, where they fell on Jonesey.

  “Why not order them to use their weapons?” he asked calmly. “They are three to one.”

  “And you,” she said, “you refuse to fight? You won’t lead my army?”

  “Come and sing,” he answered. “That is something that you understand.”

  She bit her lip. Her breath came in excited gasps. His eyes were quiet. Hers blazed.

  “Yes,” she said, “go into the next room. I will join you. I will sing you something that I wrote and set to music. That will make you understand me better than any mere argument could. And after that — you shall have your twenty-four hours in which to answer me. If yes, good; then in turn I will answer you. If no, I shall be sorry, but so will you be.”

  Thus, since in utmost Chaos there is no

  Void vacant of those Great Twin Brethren,

  But Truth and Love are destiny and ebb and flow,

  Cause and effect, man and the life of men,

  Infinity in one, both Seeker and the Sought —

  One way remains — one dim veil to remove —

  One priceless price at which true victory is bought —

  One coin, one measure and one payment — love!

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “I prefer my victories to look less like a rout!”

  GUP strode into the great room, where there was yet no sign of morning through the tinted window-panes. Music was still coming from the balcony, but it was tired stuff without inspiration; the unseen musicians appeared to be merely killing time. Gup counted heads; there were eleven women in the room, of whom three were yawning and one was asleep; she awoke with a start. The dark-complexioned girl, who had met him in the door when he first entered, arose from a heap of cushions and came toward him, extending her right hand.

  “I am Harriet Dover to you,” she said, smiling. “I have an Indian name, too, but never mind that. I may not have even a head a month from now. Let’s not be formal.”

  “Formality is good for people who think they know just what’s going to happen, isn’t it?” said Gup.

  The others clustered and she introduced them — three with English names — a Russian — a fair-haired Swede or Norwegian; the rest were high-caste Indian women. One had the Brahmin caste mark on her forehead. They were all in Indian costume.

  “Take the throne,” said Harriet Dover. “We will sprawl around and worship.”

  “I might look like a comic opera king but I don’t sing well enough,” Gup answered.

  “Better take it. Men of your build don’t look dignified on scented cushions. If it should happen that we’re admiring the wrong man we’ll all be pretty little corpses in a row so soon that nothing will matter anyhow — not even ridicule.”

  They all smiled at that. They looked brave enough for anything and rather proud of being in rare danger.

  “You have been told, haven’t you, exactly what to say to me?” Gup suggested. “Say the rest of it. I’ll listen. Thanks, no, I’ll stand up.” He was already wondering whether he had not let himself move too swiftly in the other room; shock tactics are good, but he knew there is a proper time and place for them, as well as an inopportune moment and a wrong place. Inevitably, by a law as unavoidable as that of gravity, all captains of suddenness suffer reaction and wonder whether slow caution would not have been wiser after all. Slow men, in the same way, suffer pangs of selfdoubt, wishing they were swift. Only fools and fanatics have no doubts, it being out of the blinding dust of doubt that the artillery-wheels of destiny come rolling. Blucher arrived in a cloud of dust at Waterloo.

  Harriet Dover met Gup’s eyes and smiled in the Celtic way that is called inscrutable. Whatever that smile was intended to do, it made Gup suspicious of her. He sensed treachery, and he thought her eyes looked tired from too much thinking. “We are loyal,” she answered. “We are all in the same predicament. Why shouldn’t we use the same arguments?”

  “The predicament is?”

  “We are women!”

  “And the argument?”

  “We need a man though we hate to admit it. We can do any man’s job — except make women believe in us! We thought we could stir Moslem women, so that they, in turn, would stir their men. What happens is, we stir the men and make the women sullenly suspicious. We don’t need you to devise our strategy; three of us in this room know the theory of war at least as well as Sandhurst, or West Point, or the École Militaire can teach it. We don’t even need you to lead men into battle; a Joan of Arc can outlead a Julius Cæsar. But we need a spectacular man, to make women rally. We need a Rustum — an Iskander.”

  Gup knew the Himalayan superstition that the great Alexander of Macedon shall return to the world and lead the Hillmen to a holy war. He knew the theory that nothing is more sweet in Allah’s nostrils than the smoke of idolatrous cities — nothing more holy than Hillmen enriched by the plunder of India’s plains. He smiled as a man might who hears an old song repeated.

  “If you will stand like that, and smile like that, and let the Moslem women see you, India is ours,” said Harriet Dover.

  “I don’t want India,” he answered. “Do you?”

  “Not an India recivilized? Not an end of injustice and superstition? Abolition of caste! The release of four hundred million people — perhaps the release of all Asia from bondage to outworn ideas!”

  He smiled again. “Sweetness,” he suggested, “out of savagery? Sweet water from a bitter spring?”

  “Nonsense!” she retorted. “That is one of the old moth-eaten phrases that we intend to teach men to forget! Nobody in his senses imagines that more than a fraction of Asia is ready for self-rule. We will take those who are ready and make them rulers of the others, teaching the others gradually.”

  “Let’s see,” he said. “Aren’t they trying something of the sort in Russia? Why not watch the Russian experiment before trying it out on such a grand scale?”

  “Ours won’t resemble the Soviet system. Ours will be absolute monarchy, benevolent in aim and motive and observing rigid principles of right and wrong.”

  “If I knew right from wrong,” said Gup, “I might agree with you — or I might not — I don’t know.” Harriet Dover’s brown eyes darkened, and the line of her lips grew straighter. It began to be obvious who was the Ranee’s chief adviser.

  “What would your solution be?” she asked him.

  “I haven’t one,” said Gup.

  “You won’t command her army?”

  Something warned Gup not to answer. No man knows what intuition is. It sealed his lips. There began to come glimmer of morning through the tinted window-panes.

  Then the voice of Lottie Carstairs — strangely different from that of the ex-Ranee of Jullunder, though she was the selfsame woman; the voice was younger and had more mirth in it, although it vibrated with a thrill that might
mean nervousness. He turned to watch her enter through the door between the rooms, but her back was toward him; she was speaking between the curtains; some one in the other room was talking rapidly in a language that Gup hardly understood. The startling thing was, that she was dressed as Lottie Carstairs now — not in a stage costume but in something fresh from Paris and a Paris hat. Gup wondered why she had ever been willing to hide such legs within the shapeless folds of Moslem trousers.

  When she turned she was smiling. She was a vision in cream and pale blue, as radiant with life as he had ever seen her. He could almost have held out his arms to her, but the other women in the room made him self-conscious.

  “You look marvelous,” he said. “But the dress isn’t enough. Sing! Bring back the old days and the old ideals.”

  But her bright face clouded. Harriet Dover and the other women were silent, glancing at one another. Harriet seemed to gather the others’ discontent into her own dark eyes; she broke the silence:

  “What would happen to us all if you were seen in that kit?”

  Lottie Carstairs vanished. The ex-Ranee of Jull-under stood there in the same dress and the same high-heeled shoes. They were the same eyes, too, but they blazed indignantly, where less than a second ago fun had looked forth.

  “Stop that music!” she commanded. “It will drive me crazy! Send the musicians away! You may all go too,” she added, controlling herself with an effort. “Go to bed — go anywhere!”

  “If you are seen in that dress, it will be all over the hills, within a day or two, that you are only an impostor pretending to cherish their ideals. Here, use this,” said Harriet Dover. She took a sari of cloth-of-gold from the throne-chair and offered to drape it over the offending dress.

  “You may go! Did you hear me?” Lottie Carstairs snatched at the sari. It fell to the floor. She put her foot on it.

  Harriet Dover led the retreat, which was sullen and not graceful; but they turned and curtsied one by one as they filed out through the door by which Gup had entered when he first came. It looked like a climax of long-hidden irritation. There was an unseen struggle going on.