Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  He relapsed into silence as solid as concrete. He exuded silence. He was its image, its expression. Even the ayah ceased from importunity, since even she in her hysteria could recognize finality. She began to abuse Hawkes, including Joe within the scope of a tempest of words.

  “What does she say?”

  “She accuses you and me, sir, of having stopped that Yogi just when he was coming to the point. She says for you to take your money back, it’s bad-luck money.”

  Joe turned away. He felt he had had enough of unreality for one night, yet he grudged returning to the real. The ascending moon, grown pale, was whitening walls and blackening the shadows; even he himself felt like a bone-white ghost, the more so because his foot-fall made no sound in the dry dust. He knew that to talk to his mother would produce a sort of psychic anticlimax that he could not explain, and for which she would have no sympathy. It was at such moments that he knew he hated her; the hatred was kin to fear; the fear, if not prenatal, something she had fastened on him with her will when he was a suckling. At the age of eight and twenty a man had no right, he knew, to be under any one’s dominance. He had an iron will of his own; he was notoriously uncontrollable by any one except his mother. Her stronger will, compelling his, was what enabled her, unseen, to guide the destinies of interwoven trusts so intricate that even governments were helpless to prevent.

  It was only at night, and at times like this when life seemed like a dream, that he was really conscious of the grudge he owed his mother and of a secret sense of shame that he must obey her always. True, he had often resisted her. He could withstand her tantrums. The bludgeoning abuse with which she browbeat servants, secretaries and even the firm’s attorneys to obedience, made no impression on him. He could laugh. It was when she was quiet and determined, when she grew kittenish and motherly by turns, and above all when she pretended to need his advice that he grew aware of the numbness somewhere in his conscience and an impulse to obey her that was irresistible. He had long ago ceased to attempt to resist that.

  It had been only to oblige his mother that he undertook this idiotic search for some one who, for all the proof he had, had not been born. They had nothing but rumor to go on, and a twenty-year rumor at that. It was one of his mother’s incredible lapses into sentimentality that she mistook for philanthropic zeal.

  Such thoughts flash through a man’s mind in a moment. Habit, as it were, presented them en masse, along with their product in the shape of disgust and an impulse to escape from them. Activity of mind or body was the only possible way of escape — learn, discover, do something — now, swiftly. That accounted for Joe’s sudden forays at a tangent after odds and ends of stray clues into other people’s business — swift questions that made some men think him an inquisitive butter-in; while others thought the habit indicated some form of degeneracy, as if he could not concentrate on one thing at a time.

  “Why did you hit that Poonchi?” he demanded, turning disconcertingly on Hawkes. “Who is he?”

  Hawkes resented it, yet hardly cared to show resentment — yet at any rate. Only those who meet millionaires every day of their lives understand that there is nothing to be gained by yielding to their arrogance; and besides, as a soldier, the habit of answering all questions promptly was as well developed in him as evasiveness was; he could answer questions fluently and instantly but keep the essential information to himself.

  “A spy of the Rajah of Poonch-Terai.”

  “Has he any right here?”

  “Damned if I know. A man’s rights in this country are mostly what he can get away with. If he’d been up to no mischief he’d have hit back, he wouldn’t have run.”

  “Have you any idea what sort of mischief?”

  “That’s not difficult to guess, sir.”

  “Guess for me. I’m curious.”

  “Sir, when a man lurks in the shadows where he’s uninvited, and runs when he’s hit, you can bet he was after either plunder or a woman. Where’s the plunder hereabouts? He’d have hit back, wouldn’t he, if it had been his own woman or a woman for himself that he was after? Q. E. D. he was a pimp; it’d be sinful not to chase him off the lot.”

  “Did you say he belongs to the Rajah of Poonch-Terai? But Poonch-Terai is several hundred miles from here.”

  “Maybe, sir. But the Rajah isn’t. He’s what they call a Maharajah — a nineteen-gun salute man so rich he needn’t trouble himself to pay his debts.”

  “You mean that spy was trying to get women for him — for his harem?”

  “Draw your conclusions. Why not? They’re always doing it. The Rajahs haven’t much else to think about. They’ve other folks to collect the taxes for them and rule their district. They can’t play polo and get drunk all the time. They pretty soon get weary of a woman, so they’re always wanting new ones; and if there happens to be one they can’t get, that’s the one woman in the universe they’ve got to have.”

  “And that’s why you’re here?”

  “Me and those Bengali troopers.”

  Joe smiled. Hawkes stiffened.

  “Which of you loves the lady?”

  Soldiers have to learn to sweat their tempers; only generals may grow apoplectic; Hawkes, as a sergeant, grinned appropriate complaisance and instantly made up his mind to take the one revenge available to a poor man faced by a rich one’s impudence. He could bleed him. He could act the sycophant and make it pay. The point Joe had missed, and that Hawkes knew he had missed, was a certain vaguely evasive element of mystic chivalry connected with that night-watch by a British sergeant, several Indian troopers and, to make the mixture triply unconventional, a Yogi. What Joe had probably forgotten, if he ever knew it, was that the poor have a way of despising the rich for what they regard as ignorant ill-manners.

  “Did you wish me to look for that girl you spoke about, sir?

  “Yes. You’ve one chance in a hundred million.”

  “Make it worth my while, sir.”

  “Very well. A thousand if you find her.”

  “A thousand pounds, sir — right-o, that’s fair enough.” Beddington had meant rupees; Hawkes knew that. “I’ll have to hire a spy or two as well, sir, and I can’t afford to pay them out of pocket. I suppose you’ll pay legitimate expenses? If you can let me have some money now, sir — ?”

  Joe gave him three hundred rupees in paper money.

  “Thanks, sir. I’ll account for it, of course. The district collector asked me to bring you up to his bungalow afterward. If you’ll wait half a minute while I explain to those troopers, I’ll see you on your way, sir.”

  But Joe had sensed the intention to lay siege to his pocketbook. The rich like being “worked,” when they are aware of it, about as keenly as eels like being skinned alive. Generosity is one thing, submission to extortion something else.

  “No thanks. I know the way. I’ll walk. Will you tell the sais to take my horse home?”

  “Very well, sir. Do you mind telling Mr. Cummings that I offered? Otherwise he might not understand.”

  Joe nodded, too displeased to trust himself to speak. Cummings had ordered him spied on, had he? What did the ass suspect him of? Souvenir hunting? Sacrilege? “I wonder,” he thought, “who invented the lie that Government service develops genius? They’re most of ’em pay-roll parasites, who’d be a failure in any other walk in life — grafters or else incompetents — or both.”

  The midnight of a wave of discontent submerged him. He was far more of a poet than a pirate — hated piracy, from too intimate knowledge of his mother’s methods — hated most its subtler intricacies — liked open black-jack methods better as more honest. In such moods a poet is gloomier than any other mortal; and the gloomiest of poets is one who is tied to the chariot wheels of a Jupiter Chemical Works and a bank, by the spidery threads of a trust deed. Worse yet, when the spider in the center of it is his mother, because he must rebel, in despair, against nature herself who has ruled that a filial instinct shall be sometimes overwhelming, and maternal instinct not
invariably sweet with the odor of selflessness.

  “Damn!” he remarked aloud, and turned toward the Yogi for a last stare. Suddenly he strode into the pool of moonlight in front of the rock where the Yogi sat apparently in meditation. “Old Man — or ought I to call you Holy One?”

  “Like unto like,” said the Yogi. “Call me what you feel like calling me, that I may know you better. What you see in me is a reflection of that part of you that you desire to hide from others; the remainder of me is, to you, invisible.”

  “Be generous then. Show me some of it.”

  “I can’t,” said the Yogi. “Can I educate you in a minute? It has taken me not less than a million lives on earth to learn the little that I know now. That little does not include the art of changing you instantly into a seer.”

  “I’m blue,” said Joe. “I’m as blue as a hungry nigger. You seem to enjoy life. How do you do it?”

  “If you can see that I enjoy it, that is something.”

  “Come on, take a peep into my future. I’m about desperate. I feel like putting a bullet into my brain. Nevertheless, I know I won’t do that.”

  “Are you afraid to?”

  “No. If I were afraid I’d do it, I’d so despise myself for being afraid. I can’t see anything ahead for me but more and more melancholy — more and more of a kind of existence I hate, with less and less chance to escape it. To put it bluntly I’m in hell.”

  “O man from Jupiter!”

  “That’s what you called me before. What do you mean exactly?”

  “You would not understand if I told you. In part, I mean this: Jupiter — Gemini rising: a disturbing influence. You are in hell, to make you boil and put forth. You are a thunder-bolt that might, indeed, be quenched amid a seething sea of trouble; but no umbrella nor any information can withstand you. You are an influence that will burst into another’s life. And you will raise that other to an equal height with yours, or you will struggle upward to that other’s height, or you will strangle yourself and that other, like two camels caught in one rope.”

  “When?”

  “You are at the threshold.”

  “I feel as if I had my back toward hope and ambition and were wandering off into a wilderness.”

  “You are an egg that is about to hatch. The tight shell yields.”

  “Yogi, I feel like Orestes. You know who he was? He slew his mother.”

  “That Greek legend is a symbolism and an allegory. Orestes destroyed a tyranny, not a woman; and the hounds of his conscience were changed into heralds of happiness.”

  “But Clytemnestra died,” said Joe.

  “As I might also, did I interfere with thunderbolts,” the Yogi answered. “Listen to me: Darkness is the womb whence Light is born. No-hope is the matrix out of which Hope burgeons. Discontent is a growing pain; it is the pangs of roots imprisoned in clefts of a rock that shall crush them or be burst asunder. Cowards cry out and shrink and their roots die under them. But strong souls reach into the Silence for more energy, though it brings more pain; they seek relief from pain by bursting that which hurts. It is they whose branches ultimately reach the sky and become a cool bower such as the birds of Wisdom love.”

  “Am I a coward?” Joe asked.

  “You have been. What you are now is your own affair. And what you shall be is the outcome of what you do with what you are; it is the consequence of what you are and what you do. You have my leave to go and leave me to my laughter at the simpleness of things.”

  CHAPTER III. “Cut me off and set me free. I’ll be so grateful...”

  The dusty moonlit road toward Cummings’ bungalow led between slattern walls and ill-kempt gardens, through a grove of trees that had been blackened by the fires of vagrants and nibbled by goats into naked poverty — on past cheap pretentious cottages of Eurasians — past shuttered shops and littered byways where the Christians did business and a Catholic chapel, neat and lean and hungry-looking, raised a crucifix above a white iron roof. Then past the park, so called, where a caged tiger lay dreaming of life with his paws through the bars and his white teeth agleam in a grin of despair made monstrous by the moonlight. On past the club and the tennis courts — the mean hotel “for Europeans only,” in a compound in which white-clad servants slept like corpses under trees that cast mottled shadows.

  Joe was conscious of being followed. He supposed that the man with the basket of snakes, and the ayah, were taking advantage of his company for the protection it might give them; they kept far enough behind him not to intrude, near enough to be heard if they should cry for help, walking one on each side of the road like ghosts who did not like each other but were wafted on the same slow wind. He glanced over his shoulder at them only once or twice, afraid that if he glanced too often they might take that for an invitation to draw nearer. It occurred to him once that they might be spying on him. He stopped to see if they would stop. But they came on, so he dismissed the thought and continued on his way, his shoes white with dust and his thoughts black with boredom.

  He resented being bored, it seemed so stupid. He knew that with his tastes and spiritual equipment he should find life fascinating. He was offended because he did not — even more offended because he vaguely understood the reason, and whose fault it was.

  “There’s nobody to blame but me,” he muttered. Nevertheless, he knew that to throw up everything and leave his mother to find some other vizier of her despotism, would solve nothing. Running away would merely substitute for his mother’s tyranny an even more degrading one of laziness and fear. It was not business he dreaded. He well knew there is poetry in commerce, art in high finance and music in the melody and flow of manufacture; as a matter of actual fact, and with only a few exceptions, he had found the conversation of artists even more platitudinous and dull than that of his business intimates.

  “Bankers, bishops, band-wagon conductors — painters and musicians — doctors — scientists — politicians — writers — nearly all of ’em are paralyzed by public opinion. It kills ’em if they dare to stick their head out of the herd-thought and — got it, by God! I’ve got it! My mother is herd-thought individualized!”

  He began to walk faster, with more resilience in his stride. He had begun to understand his enemy. “I’ve been tilting at windmills,” he muttered. “No more windmills!” Once Joe Beddington had grasped the nature of a mistake he was not given to repeating it, although he would deliberately repeat one again and again until he understood it. He was built that way — so constituted. It was that that had made him suffer so beneath his mother’s yoke. He had not understood her. He had sometimes thought she was a devil in a human skin. Not less frequently he had suspected himself of being one, since who else than a devil could hate his own mother? He had wasted breath and patience trying to argue with her. And he had feared her. “Might as well try to argue with the sea — be afraid of the sea.

  “Public opinion? Wow! The thing to do with that stuff is to make it — mold it — navigate it. Look out for the tides and storms and currents. I can do it. Damn, I understand her now, I’ve been a blind superstitious idiot!”

  He walked faster, leaving Chandri Lal and the ayah far behind him. He had forgotten the temple ceremony and the Yogi. He had forgotten Hawkes.

  “She’s public opinion. She’s it, idealized. Greedy — fat — cunning — tyrannical — cruel — jealous — envious — intolerant — a hypocrite — a coward — opportunist — liar. She is all that — and yet she isn’t. I’ve got to separate ’em in my mind. How come? That needs puzzling out.”

  He was excited. He had forgotten boredom. He had forgotten the dull inertia that usually crept into some corner of his brain when he thought of his mother. He had seen, as it were, a crack between her and her despotism, into which he could drive, he believed, his new-found wedge. It did not occur to him that he was using arguments familiar to king’s sons, to rebels against the divine right of kings, and to all the archiconoclasts of history. It seemed to him he was the first discovere
r of something new.

  “Mother,” he said to himself, “is a victim. It isn’t she who uses power. Power uses her.”

  In a flash, as a man sees in a dream cause and effect and process simultaneously, he discerned the tactics and the strategy that he must use.

  “Separate her from the power in my own mind. She’s my mother. It isn’t. It isn’t a disease exactly, but call it one for the sake of clarity. It causes a disease. She’s as good as mad this minute — mad with a cold intelligence that outwits anything human, her own humanity included. It’s as merciless to her as to any one else; it makes her ridiculous as well as greedy — makes her stupid in her hour of triumph. Good God! How stupid I’vebeen. The thing for me to do, from now on, is to attack it, not her — and not to attack it like a damned fool and be overwhelmed. Guile — subtlety—” Absorbed in thought he walked beyond the lane between the bougainvilleas, where the sign-board bearing Cummings, the district collector’s name, was clearly legible in the moonlight.

  “God, but I’ll need to be subtle!” He noticed he had walked too far, and turned back. “She’s on its side. It’s her God and her glory. Give her half a hint that I’m awake at last, and she’ll kill me as she killed Dad. He was half awake before the end. I think he knew she killed him. She broke his will. That broke his health. She make him sign that trust deed and then put him on his back and hired three nurses.” He laughed a little. “Funny I never thought of that before. How many doctors — five? — six? And they couldn’t agree what to call the disease. I can name it for them. Octopus-itis! She strangled his will. He simply quit and left her victrix on a bloodless battle-field. Bloodless? He hadn’t a drop of blood left in him. I wonder if he loved her. I don’t. But I don’t hate her any longer. And I won’t quit. I’ll be damned if I’ll quit.”

  He turned up the lane between the bougainvilleas — a narrow curved lane rising steeply to the garden surrounding Cummings’ bungalow. The gate was open; he made scarcely a sound as he entered because the dust lay deep on the tiles of the garden path. The bungalow faced eastward and the garden gate was to the south, so that he had to approach one end of the long verandah, where there was a screen of painted reeds to provide privacy; that and the shadows combined to make him invisible from the verandah or from the windows in front of the house. He had no intention of eavesdropping, but his mother’s voice was too distinct not to be recognized; and to that he had been forced to listen since he was a child. It was a habit.