Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Now you talk like Hawkesey or Mr. Cummings. You know better than that Joe. In one sense, of course, you never left New York at all; your body lay there fast asleep. But is your soul in your body — ever? Did any one ever find a soul inside a body?”

  “You mean, it was my soul that came to you?”

  “You are your soul. What else are you? It was your soul that sent your image to me, because I was too bewildered and dense and scared to understand you otherwise. We get bewildered, Joe, and think our bodies are ourselves, in the same way that a man with a new suit thinks he has changed his nature; and we get even more bewildered when we remember only glimpses of the truth, because the one offsets the other, so that people think we are mad because we seem illogical and can’t explain ourselves. That is why people Like Beethoven and Rodin and Queen Elizabeth and Joan of Arc are thought mad and the critics can see nothing but their inconsistencies. How can a great soul talk to a critic who thinks his brain and body are himself?”

  Joe smiled; he was feeling weak again; strong excitement had carried him so far, but he was almost aching to be back in bed between four walls, where he could wait for life to come and strengthen him.

  “It all sounds reasonable, darling, when you say it. But I’d like to see a bum check met along those lines. Isn’t a fact a fact?”

  “Of course it is. And we’re all here in the world to deal with facts and overcome them. That is how our souls grow. I don’t know what a bum check is. Is it a mistake of some sort?”

  “Oftener than not a pretty serious mistake.”

  “Then it’s something nobody would make if he remembered always what he is.”

  “You mean, if he remembered his balance.”

  “Yes, his balance.”

  “I mean his balance at the bank.”

  “He would remember that, too, if he knew who he is.”

  “All right, dear. I can’t argue it; it’s too mysterious for me. But answer me two riddles, will you? Plain questions and plain answers that a chap can understand without getting swamped in infinity.”

  “If I can.”

  “Where’s my mother? What’s she doing? And how has anybody kept her away from me or prevented her from taking me to a hospital?”

  Rita chuckled. “Your mother is having what she calls a love-affair with Mr. Cummings. She intends to marry him, and they say he has already written home to have his pedigree traced back to Charlemagne or some one. He imagines himself a beau sabreur and a preux chevalier. He neglects his work to trot around with her to caverns; and I think they both hope you won’t get well too soon.”

  “But didn’t she raise Cain when I was stabbed?”

  “She tried to. In fact, she did. But you couldn’t be moved or disturbed. And neither she nor Cummings knew that this is not really a part of the temple to which nobody can be admitted without esoteric tests. She wanted to send in Doctor Muldoon. The priests saw fit not to admit her, or Muldoon either. They agreed to let a Hindu doctor come in once a day to report that you are receiving proper treatment. And they agreed to let her enter just once, to observe you through the open window, on condition that she kept silence and went straight out again. However, because she was good and did keep silence, they rewarded her by letting her walk out through one of the ancient passages; so she is bragging now about being the only white woman who has ever been into the temple, and she is posing as rather an authority on Hindu gods.”

  “Aren’t you a white woman?”

  “Not according to her. And she says Annie isn’t either. Some one has told her — probably Poonch-Terai — that Weems is a contraction from Waheem-issa, which might be the Moslem name of a half-caste ancestor. She says that is why Annie gets along so well with natives; and Cummings, of course, echoes everything she says. The Hindu doctor came in daily for a while, although he apologized for coming, because if there’s anything in India that’s notorious it is the skill of our Yogi-physician; and after a while he left off coming because he said there was no excuse for it, and Annie sent a daily bulletin instead. But your mother is breathing fire and brimstone against whoever it was who stabbed you; and she has even threatened to try to have the temple raided unless the culprit is forthcoming. She sends flowers for you every day, but they are not nice flowers, they are charged with malice, so we throw them on the rubbish heap. We have plenty of flowers charged with good vibrations, and of the right color, not too strongly scented.”

  “That explains that. Now the other question. Why did old Ram-Chittra Gunga, dressed up like a peacock, come here with six other near-Methuselahs and ask me questions that had neither head nor tail to ’em? What was he driving at?”

  “You.”

  “Plain words, dear. You promised.”

  “Joe, Ram-Chittra Gunga has no need to question you or anybody else to discover your character. He can read you as you and I read books, only he reads with more intelligence. But the law says seven men must hear the answers of whoever sounds the challenge.”

  “I’ve challenged no one.”

  “Do you think not? You might as well say that I challenged no one when I came here in Amal’s arms. Is a man with a knife in his back not a challenge?”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Joe, dear, any one in all the world has a full right to enter the crypt of this temple and to be born into the Mystery, as the phrase is, if he cares to challenge and can pass the scrutiny.”

  “But I didn’t challenge. I’m not at all sure that I care to be born, as you call it. Rita, darling, I’m a dam’ bad joiner. I’m not even a Mason or a grandjuryman or a lord high hocus-pocus of the order of the Tin Can. All I want is you, out of this nest of mystery — you, and a chance to repay your old Yogi and his friends for all their kindness.”

  “Joe, dear, nobody can make you enter. Nobody can even urge you. You must make your own decision.”

  “Let’s decide it now, then. I’ll remain outside — grateful for the compliment and all that sort of thing, but too fond of facts to wish to lose myself in a maze of esoteric symbolism. It’s beyond my mental grasp. I can’t rise to it.”

  He suddenly felt sadness almost drown him, it was so intense. He set that down to weakness after too much conversation.

  “Joe, it’s time to return to your room,” she remarked; and he thought her voice seemed strangely far away and listless.

  “All right. I guess I’m tired out. Come closer. Won’t you put your arms around me once again and kiss me, before the bearers come?”

  “No, Joe, dear.”

  “Why not?”

  He felt so gloomy all at once that he could almost weep, if weeping had been worth the effort.

  “Joe, don’t ask me. I can’t answer — not now.”

  “Sweetheart, what in hell’s the matter?”

  “What in hell? Just hell, that’s all. Here come the bearers.”

  “Kiss me.

  “No, Joe.”

  Strong men came and carried him into the familiar room, where Annie Weems made his pillow comfortable, leaning over him to look into his eyes through horn-rimmed spectacles.

  “If you should fail,” she began, then changed her mind. Instead, she closed the shutters, so that dimness might send him to sleep.

  He wondered what she meant. Fail? Didn’t he love Rita? Hadn’t Rita said —

  He dozed off. Or perhaps he swooned. No difference.

  CHAPTER XXI. “There’s dirty work — dam’ black dirty work!”

  Joe awoke in the night with a feeling of crisis impending. He felt like a man in a death-cell awaiting the summons. The feeling that he was destined never again to see that room was so strong that he began to stare about him, peering through the shadows cast by the dim night-light. But even so, it was a long time before he noticed the old Yogi-astrologer, Ram-Chittra Gunga. The ancient of days was so motionless that he was hardly separable from the shadows, and even though Joe moved to attract his attention he made no response; he was like the shadow of an image seen in an in
k-dark pool. The silence was almost terrifying.

  “I’m awake,” Joe said at last. “I’d like to talk to you.” But his own voice startled him so that he almost wished he had not spoken. He experienced the weird sensation of having shattered, by speaking, an actual structure of silence that the Yogi had built up. The sensation was heightened by the old man’s movement; he appeared to look around him with a kind of patient disapproval at the shattered remnants.

  “Since you need speech, have it,” he answered after a long pause.

  Joe felt he should apologize. “If I could read your thought—” The Yogi interrupted him. “My son, if you could do that, you would not have needed this experience. Your soul has set you here, as some men’s souls set them in battle — because the soul needs education. It is the law, to which there never has been one exception, that as the soul asks it is given. Why not? Is infinity exhaustible? Is there not plenty for all?”

  “Do you mean I’m a marionette that struts and dances when my ignorant soul pulls unseen strings?”

  “You are your soul, my son. The rest of you is mere environment. But you identify yourself with flesh and bones, so you experience the suffering of flesh and bones.”

  “From which my soul learns what?”

  “Responsibility. I will explain it to you. There was a rich man who had two sons with whom he offered to divide his business. But the elder said, ‘It will be time enough when death shall overtake you; and may that be a long time hence, since you are kind and give me all I need without my troubling.’ And the elder went his way enjoying substance that he had not earned. But the younger said, ‘I am not yet wise enough to share so great a business; let me therefore learn it’. So his father set him down among his meanest men, and gave him all the tiresome tasks, and found fault, and instructed him, until he won his way by merit to the highest post and was his father’s right hand.

  “And then death came, and the two sons divided the heritage; and because the elder had first choice he took that portion that required least management; but the shares were equal; each was the employer of a thousand men. Then, presently, came tidal waves in the affairs of commerce that demanded skill and vast experience. The elder failed; a thousand men, their wives and their children justly blamed him that they had no bread and no employment. But the younger did not lack experience; and because he had labored with the lowest he knew well their need. He knew himself responsible. He toiled, he invented, he guided; he gave of his knowledge and skill, having plenty to give. So he saved that day; a thousand men, their wives and their children justly praised him that they had bread and honorable work to do.

  “Now answer me: when death shall overtake those two men, so that they recognize themselves as two immortals who have shed their mortal limitations, which shall be the greater? He who saved that day, or he who lost it? He who knew himself responsible, or he who thought a thousand and their wives and children were responsible to him?”

  “It’s no riddle,” Joe answered. “The younger obviously is the better man.”

  “There is only one riddle that is hard to answer,” said the Yogi. “It is, why will men not understand that they receive exactly what they ask? Who is there who demands not proof, with every breath he breathes, that he is fitted for better than that which he has, be it health or knowledge, power or possessions? But bow few are they who stand up to the proving and make no complaint! Nevertheless, I tell you, they who fail in this life must return to it, like bad steel tossed again into the furnace. Shall the Lords of Life entrust such souls with tasks they have not proved that they can do?”

  “So you think I’m being tested?”

  “Does it occur to you to think otherwise?”

  “Who is testing me?”

  “You are testing yourself.”

  “That sounds absurd. Did I choose my mother?”

  “Who else chose her? Did she not provide for you the very chains you had to learn to break? If you are strong enough, then break them; but if not, then be born again and again until at last you learn.”

  “I can’t help wondering why your interest in me.”

  “You challenged. You lay at my gate with a knife in your lungs; and who am I that I should dare to let that challenge pass?”

  “I think I understand that. Well, you’ve treated me with absolutely priceless courtesy and kindness. I’m beginning to think I can best repay you by going away as soon as possible, to save you from further trouble on my account.”

  There was a long pause while the Yogi turned that over in his mind. Their voices had awakened Annie Weems, who came in to see what the matter might be.

  “This is my watch, and you have my leave to sleep,” the Yogi told her, rather rudely Joe thought, so she retired again, saying nothing. “There is no such fool,” the Yogi added, “as a half-wise woman. She would have bidden you be silent in your hour when sun and moon and Jupiter all pull together for you.”

  “It’s incomprehensible to me,” said Joe, “that a man of your philosophical bent and high intelligence should take any stock in astrology. I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “It makes no difference to astrology what you believe or disbelieve, my son. Nor does it matter if a million fools are cheated by a thousand rogues in astrology’s name. Would you go to a defeated litigant to learn law, or to an infidel to learn religion? Nevertheless, you learn astrology from cheap-jacks who could not foretell to-morrow’s weather; and you cackle the conceited unbelief of scientists who never studied it. Now is your hour. I am a pilot telling you the tide flows with you and the wind is fair.”

  “Will you answer questions?”

  “If they are such as concern the pilot.”

  “All right. Tell me then why Rita suddenly grew sad this afternoon and left me as if she and I are doomed never again to see each other?”

  “Whence comes that thought? Have you tested it? May it not be a true thought?”

  Joe raised himself up on his elbow. He spoke with cold restraint that sounded ten times more convincing than emphasis:

  “If it is true, I will make truth work to prove itself. I love Rita and I have told her so. She has said she loves me, and I believe her. I will not be easy to be rid of.”

  “Very easy. Nothing else is possible unless you change your course. For she goes one way, you another.”

  “Do you believe I would go to New York and leave her at the mercy of Poonch-Terai?”

  “He is not incompetent, that Maharajah. Neither is your mother an incompetent. Nor is Cummings without resources. They three together have Amrita in one trap and you in another. And there is no escape from either trap by any way that you know.”

  “Do you mean, you know a way?”

  “I said, I am a pilot.”

  “All right, guide me. Do you mean, you know my mother’s plans and Poonch-Terai’s?”

  “How else should I guide you?”

  “Have you talked with them? How do you know their plans?”

  “My son, have I for nothing endured this existence of flesh and bones and foolishness? Have I observed and seen and studied to no purpose? Do I not know all the ways of evil, which indeed are few and not original, though they are subdivided into millions of subtle methods? Have I not, in countless lives, done evil — that I might learn to avoid it? I tell you, no mouse can escape from a trap, and no tiger can burst from a net, by sheer strength. Neither can indignation help him. Pride avails him nothing. Malice makes him only as one weak force against many strong ones. Nay, nay; he must first learn cunning, that he may use their malice against themselves.”

  “Can you teach that?” Joe asked. He felt curious. He took no stock in Oriental cunning, but he felt strangely drawn toward the old man and unaccountably inclined to trust him.

  “Have I not said twice, I am a pilot?”

  “All right, teach me.”

  “None can teach. None can teach even arithmetic. None can do more than pilot forth that knowledge that awaits within. It awaits its opportun
ity to burst forth like the sap in springtime.”

  “Very well. I hoist the signal for a pilot. Step aboard.”

  “There is a fee for pilotage.”

  “Ah! I suspected it.”

  “There is nothing for nothing in all this universe. Each least vibration earns its recompense. If you accept my pilotage there is no escaping the liability.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Money? Or some other kind of payment?”

  “I don’t know. Who am I that I should weigh such matters? And with what scales should I weigh them? I have lived long in this body, but I have yet to see such pilotage as mine repaid with money. Nor have I ever demanded payment for myself. Nor would I accept it for myself, because I have no need.”

  “I’m trying hard to understand you, but you seem to me to talk in circles. First I must pay. Then you won’t accept payment. Frankly, I much prefer paying for what I receive.”

  “It is because I know that as well as certain other qualities you have that I am interested in you. But until you asked me of your own free will to guide you through the dangers that I foresee I had no right to give you more than sympathy; not a finger might I raise to guide you one way or another. And until I warned you that you will have to pay the full fee for the guidance I incurred the risk that I myself must pay it, and pay, it might be, double, because the pilot has double responsibility. Again I warn you: if you go your own way you will miss your goal because of ignorance, and you will pay for ignorance, which is expensive. But if you accept my guidance you will pay for knowledge — or the knowledge will consume you as the rust eats iron. When you lay wounded at my door you were a challenge that I did not dare to overlook. I accepted it. Now it is my turn to challenge. Do you dare to accept my guidance? Think before you answer.”

  Then a strange thing happened. The Yogi made no movement that Joe could see, but the light went out as if an unseen hand had pinched the wick. For a while he could see nothing, although his skin tingled and he felt as if dozens of unseen eyes were staring at him. Then he saw purple where the Yogi sat, although it was not exactly light because it cast no shadow and illuminated no object. But as he watched it, it became the Yogi’s outline, although he could not see the man himself, and the space within the outline slowly became suffused with colored light like tongues of flame, in a pattern that vaguely resembled plated armor or the scales of a gigantic fish. There was no sound.