Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “I’ve a notion,” he said presently, “to buy a tract of desert in Nevada or somewhere, and plant such a forest as this.”

  “Money won’t do it,” said Ommony.

  “Oh, you can always hire brains.”

  “But not knowledge. Once a man knows, he’s his own man.”

  “Well, they hired you, didn’t they?”

  “Who did?”

  “The Indian Government.”

  “Not at all. I offered them my services — years ago — for just so long as I believe I can be useful.”

  “They pay you.”

  “No. The forest pays me. When I cease to row my own weight and over, I’ll resign.”

  Strange was piqued, but interested.

  “Well: suppose I offer you double what you’re getting here to come and superintend my forest?”

  “You can’t. You haven’t got it to offer.”

  Strange began to feel like a patient in one of those rest-cure resorts, where rest consists in humouring the whims of other inmates.

  “What do you mean?” he blustered.

  “If you’ll stay a month, I’ll show you.”

  A month! Strange wondered whether he could endure it a week. It was not the wilderness that got on his nerves; for all his life he had been a solitary man, brooding alone over plans and power. He was used to the ‘Come, and he cometh; go, and he goeth’ of Rome’s centurion, with reason neither asked nor given. Difference of opinion was a trumpet-call to battle, in which the strongest will won. There were men, such as Grim and Ramsden, whom he hired to tell the truth to him and to apply their brains. To them he listened, but always of his own free will, with a feeling he was getting something for his money. This man: who did not even own the forest, yet was so visibly unimpressed by the power of invested millions, irritated him.

  “This timber’s growing to waste here,” he said abruptly.

  “The next generation will need it,” said Ommony.

  “The next generation will govern themselves, let’s hope.”

  “Yes, we all hope that.”

  It was on the tip of Strange’s tongue to say something discourteous about the British having not so long to rule in India. But it filtered vaguely through his mind that Ommony wouldn’t care, and, he knew better, from experience, than to waste sharp comment on indifference.

  “Then why grow trees for them?” he asked.

  “Why not?” said Ommony.

  Strange could not answer him, or saw the uselessness of answering. He was cheek by jowl with a fanatic, it seemed to him and he made a praiseworthy effort to change the flow of thought.

  “Well, let’s shoot a tiger,” he said abruptly. “You promised me one at breakfast. Are they as dangerous as they’re said to be, or is that another of these—”

  “The one I’ll let you shoot is,” Ommony answered; and Strange looked at him sharply again, aware of a hidden meaning, or a double meaning — something he detested. Yet he couldn’t lay his finger on it.

  “How so?” he demanded.

  “Tigers are like people. Decent tigers are like decent people, only on a lower plane. They only kill for food, and let alone what they can’t use. A few of them are greedy, and kill too much. Some are lazy, and kill cattle, which is stealing. Sometimes you can drive those and make them go to work. They’ve a right to be tigers, just as we’ve a right to be men, and left to themselves, but watched, they work out a destiny that possibly we can’t understand. Now and then I think I understand it. They turn criminal at times, though. Man-killers. Nobody’s fault but theirs then. Shortshrift.”

  “You’re after a man-killer?”

  “Yes.”

  “This morning?”

  “Get him within the month,” said Ommony.

  Strange was more than ever puzzled. “I should think you’d put your whole force on a man-killer. Go after him, and get him before he can do anymore harm. Why not?”

  “If you have him where he can’t do harm, why hurry?” answered Ommony.

  “Oh, you have him rounded up where he can’t escape?”

  “He might escape, but I hope not. No. I didn’t round him up. He wandered out of his territory into an environment that he thinks he understands, but doesn’t. We’ll have fun with him.”

  “I should call that dangerous.”

  “Perhaps. For him. He won’t kill men while we have him under observation. This is the lookout rock.”

  Ommony sent the stag-hound first up the well worn trail that circled to the summit, to make sure there were no bears or leopards to misinterpret the intrusion. He went next, springing up quickly, leaving Strange to scramble slowly after him. He had talked all the tiger he chose to just then.

  For about five minutes, panting on the summit, Strange took in the view of a forest like a raging sea arrested in mid-turmoil. Waves and waves of green, and purple where the shadows were, so shook and seemed to plunge in the breath of a light wind; that a man could think dead tree-tops were the rigging of sunken ships. There were rocks like islands. On the far horizon was a bank of clouds for shore. Kites wheeled like darkened sea-gulls; and the murmur of the wind among the trees was like the voice of “many-sounding ocean.”

  Size — all enormousness — was something that appealed to Meldrum Strange. He could think in millions as he stood there, and it pleased him. Sight of all those myriads of living things, governed, as he sensed it, by one man, there for one purpose, under his hand, available, awaiting one word by a man with brains, to be swept into the jaws of Titan industry and pulped, sawed, planed, bent into profitable use by folk who couldn’t grow a tree or even buy a whole one — thrilled him.

  “How many of these were here when you came?” he demanded.

  “Very few. Just scattered copses.”

  “Grew them all, eh!”

  “No, they grew themselves. Nature attends to all that, if you coax her.”

  “This ‘ud be a good place to start an industry. This interests me. I must interview the Government about it. Cheap labour. A railway. Only a hundred miles or so from the coast. We could ship this stuff. No small proprietors to bother with. It looks like opportunity. What’s the Government thinking of, I wonder?”

  “The next generation,” said Ommony.

  “Good Lord, man! The British won’t be here. There’ll be an Indian Government by that time, grafting and playing politics. They’ll waste, destroy, ruin—”

  “That’s their look out. It won’t be cut in my day.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  Strange was himself again. He stood with arms folded on his breast and the old light burning in his eyes — devouring light, that could not see use in unexploited profit. His brain was already figuring in terms of import duties, labour, and exchange sea — freight — subsidies — and a market where the men who put in number nineteen bolts all day long must have what they can pay for ready-made.

  He looked again at Ommony — made a new appraisal. Mad, of course. A fanatic. Yet a man of one idea is like a horse in harness. You can use him. He can be a strong cog in the intricate machine. The punishing grind, that kills or makes a rebel of the fellow who can see both sides of anything, only spurs a fanatic to further effort. He might use Ommony. No doubt flattery —

  “A man needs genius at this business, as at everything else, if he’s to succeed. You’re wasted here now. You’ve done it. You should go ahead. A man on half your salary could carry on, while you devote yourself to—”

  “That’s my ambition,” Ommony interrupted. He was tired already of the subject Strange had broached. “I’d like to spend my whole time studying trees. But my plan would cost too much.”

  “There’s no such thing as too much, if it’s a sound plan,” Strange assured him.

  “The Government’s hard up. Can’t afford experiments. They’d listen to me if they had the money, but India’s poor.”

  “Good Lord! Turn this into money then!”

  “Trees have never been studied properly. As y
ou see, they grow themselves, given a chance and the right location. My theory is that all the waste land in the world might be turned into forests at very small expense, if we only took the right precautions first and studied the thing from the beginning. It’s the first part — travel, observation, comparative analysis, experiment on a sufficient scale that would prove too costly.”

  Strange made a motion with his tongue, almost suggestive of changing a quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other.

  “You say the Government would listen to you. Value your advice, eh? Well: advise them to give me a concession to exploit this forest. If it comes off, look to me for help in the other matter. Think what it would mean.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  Diana the stag-hound was growling in a sort of subterranean undertone, not more than loud enough for Ommony to hear, He glanced to his right, where an enormous teak tree, mother of the grove around her, reached three-quarters as high as the rock. An almost naked jungli in a gap among the lower branches caught his eye and signalled. Ommony’s eye followed the line of the jungli’s arm.

  “That might be your tiger,” he said quietly.

  “Where? Show me!”

  Strange clutched his rifle that he had leaned against a corner of the rock, and looked over Ommony’s shoulder, trying to get the line.

  “You see a rock about a hundred yards from the base of this one — shaped roughly like an egg at this end. Carry your eye to the right from that. Now: d’you see a patch of brown leaves with light and shadow playing on them? Part’s lighter than the rest — more gold in it. You get that? That’s your tiger. He’s looking up at us. It’s a very difficult shot indeed from here.”

  “I used to shoot well once. I’ll have a crack at him.”

  Strange aimed, and hesitated. The light played tricks with his unaccustomed eye. It was almost as if the shadow were limpid water, with little patches of sunlight dancing on it. The angle was awkward and the rifle heavy. He stepped back behind the rock and rested the weapon on a projecting corner.

  “Now!” he said, and began to aim again. “Is he still there? I’ve lost sight of him.”

  “Still there, looking up at you.”

  “Curse that dog! She’ll scare the brute away!”

  “Better shoot then.”

  “He’s moving, isn’t he?”

  “That was his head that moved. He’s standing head-on toward you. He’s heard us talking. His tail’s twitching now. Can you see it? He’ll make his mind up in a minute. Better be quick. You’ll likely kill him if you hit him at this angle.”

  Strange fired.

  “Too late, and a yard wide — to the right and beyond him,” said Ommony. “Well, perhaps he’ll take the hint. Some do.”

  “I wonder if this foresight’s any good,” said Strange, battling with irritation. “Was that the man-eater?”

  “No. One at a time. That was only a greedy brute that kills more than he needs. Too bad you missed him, but he gets another chance.”

  “You don’t tell me you can recognize one tiger from another in that light, through the branches! How d’you know he isn’t hit, and hiding down there?”

  “It’s part of my business to know that sort of thing,” said Ommony, and glanced at Diana. She was lying down licking herself. “That tiger’s a quarter of a mile away by now, and still going.”

  “I’d like to look,” said Strange. “I didn’t see him go. I don’t believe he did.”

  “All right. Go down and look. You’ll be perfectly safe. I’ll sit here and smoke while you hunt for him,” said Ommony. But he made a signal to the jungli, who dropped from a lower branch and kept an eye on Meldrum Strange as one would watch a new unusual animal.

  III.— “PERHAPS A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW”

  Ommony sat smoking and smiling to himself but he was dreadfully afraid. The smile was hard at the corners. No woman feared for her child, or fought on occasion more shiftingly for it, than he for that forest. His heart was in it. He would have said his soul was in it, too. Several times he had had to counter-sap and mine against the assault of British capitalists. The American was likely to be more resourceful, that’s all. He knew the blindness of the money-giant, and its cruelty; its over-riding tactics, and the almost insignificance of ordinary honesty opposed to it.

  He had not told Meldrum Strange that nearly all the mother-trees were teak. He had not dared. But Strange would find that out. And he had a notion that it would be better to inform a wolf that there were lambs in a certain valley.

  True, Strange was supposed to have retired from the ranks of industry. But there are said-to-be-tamed wolves. Who trusts them? King, Grim, Ramsden were as good men as there are. But so is fire good, until employed by an incendiary. Strange’s eleventh hour resolution to reform the world by the weight of his manoeuvred money was only wolf-eat-wolf at best; to judge from Charley and Jeff Ramsden’s accounts, the again-to-be-protected people had preferred to protect themselves in the ancient way from uninvited interference. Strange was bitter with ingrowing disappointment. Nothing in the circumstances was likelier, thought Ommony, than that in the twinkling of an eye new internationally interwoven system of bureaux of impertinent information should be changed into the thousand-fanged heads of an industrial monster. A wolf is a wolf. A man who is afraid imagines things.

  In one sense Ommony’s mood was mischievous. It amused him to see a “money baron” stripped of his pretensions, naked, as it were to an observing eye. In less than a month he thought he could have fun with Meldrum Strange — quiet fun, it would do Strange no harm, possibly some good, certainly amuse himself. But fear for his forest overcame all other emotions.

  He knew how sensitive the Government would be to suggestions. Already one of the main planks the revolutionary agitators’ platform was the British Government’s alleged neglect of Indian industry. The western disease of exploitation for exploitation’s sake had its spores in, and was spreading. Big Business had its eye on three hundred millions of possible “wage-earners.” The first thing to go would be the trees. They always go first.

  You may much more safely burn a decent fellow’s house and take his money than undo the work he has laid his hand to. Whatever is indecent in him comes to the surface then. There was a change in Ommony’s eye. His teeth bit deeper into the notch on the horn mouthpiece of his pipe, and Diana, dumb but all-observing, came closer to lay a shaggy head on his knee and wonder what next?

  Ommony did not move when he heard a rifle shot. He was surprised that Meldrum Strange should have gone so far in so few minutes, but supposed the man’s enthusiasm for the chase, or his rage at having missed, was making a fool of him. Now, no doubt, he was shooting at rustling undergrowth. Next, he would lose himself. But there was more than one jungli on the job to hunt him back, and it would be rather amusing afterwards to compare Strange’s version of it all with theirs. A man who is lost in the jungle, too, imagines things.

  Ten minutes later he did not even look up when Diana pricked her ears, and he heard Jeff Ramsden’s unmistakable heavy footsteps clambering the look-out rock. He was not afraid of anything Jeff might do, without Strange to persuade him and direct.

  “Sorry, old man,” said Jeff from behind leaning on a rifle, “I’ve made a bloomer. Charley and I found what we supposed were leopard tracks and followed them to about half a mile here, and I fired at a glimpse in the thicket. Hit a tiger, and he got away into the undergrowth Charley’s watching the place, and I came to I make my peace with you.”

  Ommony got to his feet.

  “Did you call the dogs off?”

  “Yes. They’re tied up beside Charley.”

  “We’ll go get the tiger. Where did you him?”

  “It looked like a rib shot.”

  “Did you see Strange?”

  “No.”

  They strode down the track together, where wheel-marks came to an end and the fire-lane advantage of rock on which nothing would grow — then plunged out of that wide opening
into a narrow lane made by wild elephants and kept growing up again by Ommony’s patrol; out of that into a maze of criss-cross tracks, along which Jeff led with a hunter’s instinct; at last into a natural clearing entered by a dozen trails, near the of one of which Charley sat on a fallen tree beside the two dogs.

  “No sound of him,” said Charley. “But the dogs seem to think he’s in there.”

  Something Charley said after that made Jeff laugh, and the deep note boomed along the glade.

  “Hey! Where are you?” shouted another voice, and Ommony chuckled. From about a hundred yards away there came a noise greater than that of ten tigers as a heavy man thrust his way against dry branches.

  “Better go rescue him, hadn’t I?” asked Jeff. “He’s in safe hands.”

  “Send Diana.”

  “No, he’d think she was a wild beast and shoot her. I’ll manage it.”

  Ommony put two fingers to his teeth and whistled. Within the minute a jungli appeared in an opening and stood waiting without any visible emotion. Ommony spoke words unintelligible to the others and the jungli disappeared.

  “Is he in there, Di?” said Ommony, and the staghound began nosing, but not growling, near the edges of the thicket, into which Jeff and Charley agreed the tiger had escaped. Diana barked once, and looked puzzled, but continued not to growl at all.

  “He’s in there. I think he’s dead,” said Ommony.

  “Shall we try?” asked Charley, from the depths of inexperience.

  “No. Wait.”

  Strange emerged into the opening, pushed by one jungli, pulled by another.

  “These savages are tearing me to pieces!” he objected. “Why are you here? I thought you to wait for me on the look-out rock.”

  “We think there’s a dead tiger,” Charley piped up.

  The intention was good. He meant to direct Strange’s irritation away from Ommony toward himself. He did banish the irritation. Strange’s face suddenly shone with triumph. He left fingering in his torn jacket.