Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Hah! Ganesha!”

  Whack came down the ankus once again on the brute’s sore skull. Hook, knees, imprecations labored to change direction, even as the old gun- laying crews would work in the days of sail. Tippoo Sahib hove his rump and a restless tail to windward; and Ommony, grabbing Diana by the scruff with one hand, seized the elephant’s tail and jumped! Diana’s weight alone was enough to have destroyed his chance, but his hold on the short tail offset that, and when he let go and fell it was the hound’s elastic strength that saved him. He was up, and off, and away out of the path of the pursuing herd at the same instant that Tippoo Sahib’s forehead struck the wall above the narrow gate and toppled down a section wide enough to admit six elephants abreast.

  Thereafter there was damage done, and Ommony beheld the whole of it from the roof of Craig’s house, sitting between Craig and his wife, with the servants and the converts in a crowd behind them and Diana baying her disapproval to the skies.

  For he and the dog had burst into the mission just in time to rescue the Craigs and round up the whole outfit out of harm’s way. Only “John Ishmittee” with his broken leg in the little screened outhouse was left, like Lot’s wife. Elsa called to him, but he stayed to gather up absurd belongings, and from the roof they saw the splintering outhouse disappear under a blue-gray wave of wrath.

  The garden wall went down in sections like a dike when the sea gets through the weakest part. Three thousand tons — a thousand — the elephants poured in and milled, a blue-gray maelstrom, screaming as they cut their feet on things Craig had imported, and reducing just that piece of earth and all things on it to the state of a parade-ground-flat.

  It grew into a sort of tune. The big blue shoulders rose and fell in unison as they worked like washerwomen at the tub, their fool mahouts nodding to one another, each forever saying the same thing, and all as helpless as the wrack that rides on waves.

  “They have seen the Lord Ganesha. He has ordered it. He verily has ordered it.”

  Who had or had not ordered it made small difference to the Craigs just then. The elephants had broken in through the veranda screen, and the whole lower floor was a part with the gardena desert — a flat waste, much marked with trampled things whose part and purpose were no longer discernible. They heard the tear and twang of the grand-piano strings as one big brute drove a tusk in under them and ripped the lot to hell. The crash of glass and crockery was like the splash of spray.

  “I’m glad I built the walls well,” Craig said solemnly.

  No more than that one reminder, of all that married life with Craig had been, was needed to destroy the fence that Elsa had painstakingly erected around herself. It went down like the garden wall. He cared for nothing but the concrete wall that still stood! Her feelings, her emotions, her regrets, even her sympathy, escaped him altogether!

  He was glad, doubtless, that her body and the servants’ and the converts’ bodies were up there with life in them beside him on the roof; but the only thing that aroused his emotion to the point of speech was walls which stood!

  “I hate you!” she said simply.

  For a moment he thought she meant Ommony. That she should hate himself was so incredible that the thought failed to penetrate his understanding until her blazing dark eyes, looking straight at him, drove truth home.

  “Elsa, are you sane?” he asked. “In front of a stranger — Elsa, I’m surprised!”

  He might have used vitriol and have hurt her less. In front of a stranger! There was the whole point. That stranger understood her — knew — had known almost in the instant when they first met — that her married life and her mission field were dry bones draped. And in presence of the first man who had vision who had come into their lives, in the moment of heaped ruin when almost any excess of sentiment would have been excusable, he forgot her ten years’ labor side by side with him, her courage and encouragement, her guidance, her restraint, even her money thrown into the fight with his — and praised his masonry that stood!

  Not only that; he had not even the human charity to lie, as she herself had lied for ten lean years, and pretend that he held her dearer than bricks and mortar!

  “Smash!” she said bitterly between set teeth leaning over to watch the elephants. “Go on! Smash it all! I’m glad! I’m glad!”

  “Elsa!”

  Craig was scandalized; afraid, too, that perhaps he had an unhinged woman on his hands. Ommony turned away and walked to the far side of the roof, holding Diana by the scruff lest she jump into the maelstrom beneath and perish underfoot. As surely as the dog saw outrage to be opposed with teeth and noise he, Ommony, sensed a greater climax; and he knew that only silence and a view as wide and wakeful as the sun’s at dawn would be the least use.

  “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” he reflected; “yet — no king and his horses are the whole of it.”

  He began to pace the roof with hands behind him, followed by the dog, who only knew that where her laconic owner was solutions of all problems usually grew as if of their own accord. There was now a great crowd running from the streets to view the spectacle, and its voice was half a laugh, so blended with an angry undergrowl that not the cocksurest Christian would have mistaken it for friendly.

  “It might be worse,” Ommony reflected, looking down from a corner of the roof, first at elephants, then at men and veiled, shrill-voiced, excited women. “The crowd would have used fire. The brutes are merciful.”

  The mercurial Eastern mind had lost no seconds seizing on enlightenment. They understood below there that Craig and his household were suffering because the priests decreed it.

  But someone had confirmed that. There were runners in among them whispering the news from ear to ear that Parumpadpa had begged the loan of the royal elephants for this purpose, and that the stamping-out of Craig and his Christians was the Maharajah’s doing.

  “Hail, Motherland! Hail, Parumpadpa!”

  The cry went up from one voice. A hundred echoed it. A thousand rolled it up into a roar that thundered down-wind all along the water-front and set the city’s rift-raff by the ears — that element that never stirs away from water save when the looting tempts. Ommony heard trumpets blaring in the royal barracks, and turned to watch the Maharajah’s cavalry emerge through palm-trees for riot duty.

  But he did not see that. It was Elsa’s eyes he met, she standing not a yard away with fists clenched — calm — appearing enough otherwise, except that the line of her lips was harder and her eyes were brighter than most women’s are.

  “I believe you did that!” she said with a jerk of her head downward toward the elephants.

  Ommony was rather too wise to argue just then with any woman in such a mood.

  “There goes a life’s work — two lives’ work!” she went on. “Who are you, and what have you done? What do you amount to, that you should see our ruin?”

  He saw no reason to defend himself.

  “You think, because you have planted trees, you are fit to take pity on us possibly?”

  She ground her heel into the roof.

  “We have planted God’s word in the hearts of heathen! I believe you were jealous, and you ordered this!”

  Still Ommony did not answer. After all, he had planted a few score million trees, and the trees had grown. He believed that on their plane, in their degree, the trees have souls and life and consciousness; also that men who work have no need to assert themselves.

  “You’re a coward!” said Elsa Craig, and turned away from him.

  Her scorn provided him excuse for silence; not that he would have dreamed of denying her accusation. Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of cowardice. Those who were not cowards have been crucified, slain, tortured, burned, imprisoned, everyone. Ommony was no exception, and the only difference was that, knowing himself a little, he was not annoyed by plain speaking.

  He was a coward beyond doubt. He was afraid then. The elephant herd, and the mob that milled around them, mo
re vicious and less manly than the brutes, did not disturb him very much, for all they can do to a man is break or burn him and that, like the toothache, though it hurts, is presently over with. He would not have been afraid to go down among the elephants, provided anything might be gained by that. He feared nothing he could see.

  But as he had once told an intimate, his own Achilles’ heel was in the air. The trees had taught him. Only a long view lends itself to forestry, and Ommony could foresee consequences far beyond the scope of ordinary vision. Like the trees, imprisoned by the destiny of trees but free from haste, he knew of wolves and little foxes — serpents in the undergrowth and unseen fowl that roosted above the boughs — knew and could not prevent their goings and comings.

  He could see the hand of Parumpadpa’s priests in this affair as plainly as Belshazzar once saw writing on the wall. He knew it was war, not accident, although he was wrong in thinking the chief mahout had received his whisky from the priests.

  Knowing the nature of that kind of war, he knew there would be no quarter. Non-combatants would suffer like the rest; in fact there are no non- combatants when Church and politics join issue for the right to rule, although the majority imagine always they are on the fence, or above it all and out of it.

  The priests would no doubt seek to destroy his, Ommony’s, reputation. But that did not frighten him; that was not his Achilles’ heel. Long, long ago, when he first laid all ambition on India’s ancient altar and received in exchange for it the understanding that is only India’s gift, he learned that reputation is delusion. It meant nothing to him who received men’s credit for the work he had done. He had done the work, and that was all that mattered — except this: that he dared not fail.

  Whatever his hand attempted he had finished. That was his reward for self- elimination. But even as Achilles, dipped in Lethe to be made invulnerable, had to be held to earthy weaknesses by one link, so Cotswold Ommony. He dreaded failure. He was afraid to fail. It appeared to him worse than sin — which is, after all, mainly ridiculous, like the fools who couch their lances at its specter.

  As he saw life, the man who understands a little of the Law in force around him holds what he knows in trust. And since a thousand fall for one man’s failure, the price in irremediable consequences — what the East calls karma — is too high to pay, yet must be paid inevitably.

  So a man who thinks he knows himself a little — none may know more than that — should hesitate before he undertakes a task. Failure may whelm a million people, every quiver of whose agony must in the end be felt by him through whom affliction came.

  It is a law with compensations. There is the corresponding side to it. Alternatively he who sows shall reap. But just then Ommony saw nothing but the shadow, knowing he had undertaken the immeasurable task of bringing surcease to an ignorant swarm, that lay beneath the hoofs of raging creeds as surely as the garden and the mission floor lay under the pads of elephants.

  He wondered whether the trees he loved, in whose name he had come there, had taught him enough to know where to begin. At least he knew he would not attempt too much at a time.

  And he could see Craig, gray with misery, back turned to his wife, staring down at the ruin and the blue-gray brutes beneath him. Ommony went over to him.

  “I don’t pretend to understand or criticize the will of God,” said Craig, “but who shall pay me for all this?”

  It is difficult to comfort anyone who figures accident in terms of income unless you can show him money. Ommony could neither do that nor answer his question.

  Neither did he estimate the ruin as the will of God. Craig or no Craig, Ommony knew the driving force behind the mission and the certainty that as long as the West has dimes and quarters for the offertory plate, the East will not lack foreigners to assail her old philosophy; he knew, too, that an out-and-out victory for Parumpadpa and his priests would be as pregnant with evil consequences as men’s conquests always are. He smiled to think of Parumpadpa’s innocence — an old rogue gaging the West’s resistance in terms of elephants and whisky-primed mahouts.

  “I suppose you’re glad to see this work undone?” Craig asked bitterly, watching him.

  Undone it was. The elephants that had not won into the compound, but had had to satisfy themselves with overthrowing walls and making the surrounding huts and gardens into unsightly wilderness, were already coming back under control and being herded sulkily up-street. Sharp cries of mahouts and ankus- blows, now that there was no more harm to do, were gradually mastering the rest.

  What recently had been a blue-gray sea of heaving trunks and shoulders sprayed with white turbans of mahouts was breaking up into separate eddies that whirled and were borne away on another tide. In fours and fives and dozens they returned with an air of satisfied accomplishment to the great maidan outside the palace wall, where they began to line up as straight as infantry on parade.

  “I’m told this Feast of the Mahouts has never been a failure yet,” said Craig. “They attribute it to their beastly god Ganesha. Well — the Lord moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. At any rate, they’ll have to admit Ganesha fails them this time. There won’t be any feast now, that’s sure; nor any procession. I’m glad of it. Why do you laugh?”

  Ommony was not laughing. Nothing but a corner of a smile escaped him, and he regretted that. He knew, though he saw no use in telling Craig, that there would be all the greater feast and all the more processioning.

  What if the flowers and frills had been torn from a couple of hundred of the elephants? Was a Christian mission not obliterated? Had the Lord Ganesha not avenged himself by the feet and the knees of elephants? True, men, women, and children — some said a hundred — had gone down beneath the brutes’ stampede, but that was a thing to be blamed on Christians afterward.

  “You and your wife, of course, will stay with me in the Maharajah’s guest- house? You can’t stay here,” said Ommony.

  Craig looked sharply at him, not so much surprised as critical of motives.

  “Yes,” he said after a moment’s pause. “There’s nowhere else to go. We must.”

  “Come when you’re ready,” said Ommony, and whistled his dog.

  The elephants were not all gone yet, but he preferred the flattened garden even so.

  CHAPTER 4. “My name is Craig!”

  There is a fiction, more useful than a superficial view pretends, that royalty should be advised of events before any decision is taken. It gives the world breathing-space. It lends dignity and poise to what would else be nothing but a scramble — mad, mean, hysterical.

  “My friend,” said the old diwan from the arm-chair facing Ommony on the veranda where none might see him but the stork and the Christian gardener, and only Ommony could hear the quiet voice, “if you could only come with me!”

  “Why not?” asked Ommony.

  “Because, my friend, you shot dead one and badly wounded five of the royal elephants. Parumpadpa’s audience must wait until after mine, but he has already sent private word to the Maharajah. The priest’s version is that your pistol-shooting caused the stampede; therefore that you are alone responsible for the death of seventy people, and for the damage to the mission.”

  “That’s just why I should go with you,” Ommony answered.

  “No. The priests would accuse you in His Highness’s presence. You know how he is. He would only listen to the priests. Whatever you might say would fall before him like dead leaves blown against a fence. They have his ear.”

  “Take me with you,” Ommony insisted. “I’m evidence — saw it all — give him a first-hand account—”

  “He has had too many accounts,” the diwan answered. “The priests were ready with their version of it all before it happened. You must turn the tables on the priests. You cannot do that by simply telling a story different from theirs.”

  Ommony stood up and knocked the ashes from his pipe. He laughed a little dryly.

  “All right.”

  “Remember
!” he said. “I sent for you to work a miracle.”

  Ommony chuckled again. He had not a notion what to say to the Maharajah — only a second-hand version of what the priests’ messengers probably had said to him — that and the divan’s assurance that the immediate outlook was the worst imaginable.

  But he had the long view, backward as well as forward. It was his experience that, given will to do the right thing, Nature, Law, the Universe all must combine to put the answer in a man’s mouth, to set the stage for him — if necessary to produce new agencies. All nature abhors a vacuum. A need, of thought of things, is proof in advance of its supply.

  But he did not say that to the diwan, because the merely religious and the merely shrewd grow frightened at prospect of Reliance on the Unseen. It was wiser to look clever and pretend to having spare tricks up his sleeve.

  So they went to the diwan’s waiting carriage and drove for a mile down an ancient avenue, whose trees had seen a hundred Maharajahs of one lineage come and go. Then swiftly through that palace gate that only a diwan uses, and along between the sentries, armed with Snyder rifles lest ‘57 repeat itself.

  The priests would use another gate and another door. But a man stood on the steps who was trained in the ways of priests, and he whispered to the diwan as the old man ascended the palace steps leaning on Ommony’s arm.

  “There is bad news,” the diwan said to Ommony.

  But Ommony had been hearing bad news all his active days. His business in life had been withstanding it. Fire, flood, and famine all concern the man who rules a forest, and all of those are less destructive and less fearful than the rumor they send ahead of them.

  “Never mind it,” he said curtly. “Let’s go — see and judge for ourselves.”

  “I must warn you,” the diwan answered.

  It was no use Ommony protesting. He would rather not have known the details. All those things are only snares to hinder a man and spoil his aim and judgment. Look — see — act on intuition; that is the secret of resourcefulness. But the diwan had grown white-haired in the other school, that pits its wits against the enemy and plans in advance of the event.