Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Why do you tell me all this?” Deborah asked.

  “Because, my dear, the cat’s out of the bag. The Gnani knows that a secret he has kept for many years cannot be kept much longer. The existence of oil near Erinpura is guessed by too many people. The Gnani doesn’t want the oil in the hands of princes or wealthy Indians who would use Western methods without Western experience and simply superadd efficiency to an autocracy that is already bad enough. Nor does he want it in the hands of the Indian government, who would like the revenue but would find themselves enormously embarrassed by it, in a way they can’t forsee, but he can. It would lead to revolution.

  “But the Indian government can be trusted to keep a very careful eye on alien concessionaires, who could be taxed and controlled and prevented from acquiring political power, as no English or Anglo-Indian firm could be, with its influential friends in Parliament.

  “The Gnani looked you over. He decided you have energy enough and ignorance enough. Experts are always dangerous, because nobody can teach them. And he knows all about your father’s visit to Simla to finance the irrigation project. He doesn’t pretend to know what the outcome of that will be, but he thinks your father will succeed.”

  “How did he find out?” asked Deborah.

  “From the Parsee in Galloway’s office, who made all the short-hand notes of conversations. There, I shouldn’t have told you that! Do you see how desperately difficult it is for the Gnani to find some one he can trust? I blurted that out without thinking!”

  “I won’t talk,” said Deborah.

  “Well, I hope you won’t. If you do, you’ll ruin Framji.”

  “So the Gnani is trying to run India?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Bisbee, “but did you read Thucydides at school? Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. The Gnani knows things, and he has to put his knowledge into practise or he’d die. That is why we ought to be frightfully careful what is taught to children. What they have learned they can’t help doing. The Gnani knows what is best for India—”

  “Or thinks he knows!” said Deborah.

  “The most the best of us can do is think,” said Mrs. Bisbee. “Who knows how to think? How many independent thinkers are there? I know only one — the Gnani. There are others, of course, but I haven’t met them; and apparently not many of them write books. The point is this: On the strength of what I’ve told you, are you willing to wire to your father in Simla requesting him to insist on the control of all the oil in Rajputana, if discovered, as the price of his financing the irrigation project?”

  “Yes,” said Deborah. “He’ll do that anyhow. But I’ll wire and remind him. What about John Duncannon, though? He’s after the oil for Turner Sons and Company. You’ve promised him—”

  Mrs. Bisbee interrupted, laughing.

  “Deborah, there isn’t one possible situation that the mind of man can invent that hasn’t complications and a problem for solution! I don’t think the Gnani cares a rap whether John Duncannon gets the oil or you do. He rather likes John Duncannon, although he shot one of his favorite tigers; he likes him because he didn’t shoot when the crowd at the temple attacked him. I should say it’s a race between you and John Duncannon, with the odds decidedly on you, because your father has the council’s ear at Simla. Now let’s write that telegram; I’ll send it by a runner down to Abu Road to save our signaller up here from gossiping.”

  CHAPTER IX. The Gnani of Erinpura

  Norman Galloway was as limited as any human being must be who has devoted all the best years of his life to one obsession; and, being a distinctly first-class man, he was as broad as that obsession, which, in his case, was the length and breadth of Rajputana. He knew hardly more of Europe than does the ordinary well-to-do American who travels now and then and reads the current magazines. His long leave was usually spent in London where he did the round of museums, art galleries and concerts, striving to keep touch with Western civilization; after which he plunged back into Rajputana and resumed his job.

  He was a man of few illusions about human nature, although that had not made him cynical. He realized that one man can, and usually does, contain within himself the hero and the brute. And so with governments. He did not fool himself with the conceit that the British government of India was, is or ever can be sound in principle, particularly permanent, or even popular; but it was the best that he and a lot of other determined men could make it. His attitude, so far as any formula could express, was:

  “Here we are. Now what are we going to do about it?”

  His own particular doing had to be along the line of preventing friction, which called for tact, imagination and firmness. He did not for one minute dally with the notion that he might be an agent of enlightenment and progress. Such talk might suit politicians and the newspapers, but that was too far from the truth to cause him to waste breath on it.

  “If people can’t rule themselves, they get ruled,” was his judgment of the situation. “If we weren’t here there’d be the French or Dutch or Japanese.”

  He was not one of those enthusiasts who think their own bureaucracy is perfect. He knew better; and it gave him a peculiar delight to upset all the calculations of the heaven-born who rule the roost in Simla, provided he could do it without damage to the government machine.

  More than all else, and in common with ninety percent of his brother officials, he despised and hated Parliament, along with all the “interfering nobodies” who made use of backstairs influence to “betray India” for their own short-sighted purposes. He was speechless on the subject, choked when he tried with blasphemously worded phrases to express his scorn of the control of India from Whitehall.

  So he helped to further Pennyweather’s project with a light heart and a chuckle, hoping that, if nothing more should come of it, at least it might upset the dignity of some of the “I ams” who gave themselves such airs in London. It might stampede them into doing something; or again, there was no knowing what influences Pennyweather could command; he had sent a perfect stream of coded cable-grams; New York might use financial pressure in some complicated way; the power in England might have to yield to Pennyweather in order to prevent a raid on the exchange or to obtain terms for the renewal of a loan. Like most men, Galloway was vague about high finance, but he knew it was a state of warfare waged with treasury bills, bank balance and promissory notes. He let it go at that, laughed and sent for Framji.

  “News from Sivaji?” asked Galloway.

  “Not a word, sir. I sent him to Tonkaipur with fourteen days’ allowance. No message. Nothing.”

  “I’ll go myself,” said Galloway. “May as well go tonight. Leave you in charge. Oh, and by the way, Framji—”

  The Parsee secretary stood with folded hands, a picture of bland gentleness, the muscles of his face prepared to broaden in an automatic smile or droop, as his superior’s mood might indicate.

  “Keep an eye on that American, Duncannon. Don’t interfere with him openly. Obstruct. He has a hunting permit; if he starts out again to use it you can manage to have his porters run away. Anything like that — just hold him up and wear him out. Americans are an impatient brood; all that’s necessary is to keep ’em waiting and look stupid when they crack jokes, not see the point of their anecdotes, and never tell them anything. They blow up then and go back to the U.S.A. to tell the world they’re glad they weren’t born foreigners. Just keep him champing until I return.”

  The Parsee let the least imaginable flicker of a smile disturb the calmness of his face and bowed.

  “And then there’s Miss Deborah Pennyweather,” Galloway went on. “She’s staying with Mrs. Bisbee and that’s bad. Can’t afford to offend Miss Pennyweather, on account of her father’s negotiations; but I’ll send word around that she’s not to have a permit to go wandering in native states and no authority to suspend them in any particular instance. She’ll raise a yell, of course, and I may have to go through the far
ce of reprimanding you; but that won’t be the first time, or the tenth, and I think we understand each other. Mrs. Bisbee, you know, is thick with the Gnani of Erinpura. There’s something brewing. He’s been prowling around with his tigers, as if there weren’t graves enough already in Mount Abu cemetery. Some one may have blabbed to him about the irrigation project. Probably the telegraph clerk or one of the Public Works Department assistant secretaries.”

  Framji’s face looked suitably distressed by the suggestion. He permitted a discreet sigh to escape him. Galloway’s expression softened, as if he were appreciating a good faithful dog.

  “Watch Mrs. Bisbee. Watch her! If the Gnani is against the irrigation project, she might try to use influence behind the scenes at Simla. Don’t hesitate to interfere if she — has she a hunting permit?”

  “Yes,” said Framji.

  “How ancient is it?”

  “It was issued three or four years ago. I am not sure.”

  “Well, there you are. There’s your excuse. If she starts off into the country, have some one ask to see her hunting permit. Don’t do it yourself — send a policeman. If she says she isn’t going hunting, that won’t matter; a time-expired permit is excuse enough to rope her in. She can be told she should apply for a new one and you can manage to hold that up until I get back. If necessary, let a clerk or some one lose the printed forms.”

  “When will you be back?” asked Framji.

  “I don’t know. I’m going to find out what’s under the smoke at Tonkaipur and why Sivaji hasn’t sent us word. Oh, and by the way, drop a hint in Prince Rundhia Singh’s ear. Let him know where I’ve gone. He’ll pack up and follow to watch me and that’ll keep him out of mischief.”

  Galloway rode off that night with a string of ponies at his back, assured that he had left behind him an assistant who could be implicitly relied on. In fairness, as he told himself, to Framji he had set a dozen traps at one time or another but had never caught the man, so now he trusted him, sometimes with secret information that he never would have dreamed of sharing with officials of his own race.

  So although, as he had said to Framji, he was aware of trouble brewing and was not at all sure what exasperating complications might ensue from it, he travelled all night long with the contented feeling that comes only from confidence in an assistant at the rear. It enabled him to enjoy the night as the ponies and silent servants picked their way down the mountain trail that led through the stirring jungle toward Hanadra on the plain below.

  He knew himself peculiarly fortunate. Not many of the overworked and nowadays increasingly insulted members of the many branches of the Indian government could spend as much time in the open as himself. Under the rich, dark, jeweled sky, with jungle breathing all around him, and the night sounds of the beasts to listen to, he could forget the trivialities of bicker and intrigue and revel in the feel of being one with nature that is nowhere to be felt so intimately as in India where pantheism has existed in the consciousness of millions for so many centuries that it is as much a part of the surroundings as the smell, the climate and the color of earth and sky. A man grows steeped in it, and though it changes no predicaments and modifies no inconveniences, yet it does change his own attitude toward them.

  They are very rare, and not affection-winning men, who feel no charm, no magic, no contentment in the bloom of an Indian night. The patient trudge of laden animals, the yelp of jackals, now and then the weird cry of a leopard; the sighing of a cool wind in the dried-out trees; the smell of bears, the sight of smaller animals that run from view and pause at the edge of the jungle to stare curiously, the high squeak of bats and the silent swiftness of their flight from gloom into the gloom, make not a mystery so much as an at-oneness in which a man feels sure of the benevolence of nature.

  When the dawn peered mauve above the skyline and the birds awoke among the dry trees of Hanadra, Galloway was hardly the same man who had so recently and rather cynically talked with Framji the Parsee. No item of his task was changed; no fact or string of fact had vanished from his mind, and he was still the conscious agent of a watchful, nervously efficient government; but he saw things as one in the midst of them rather than from Olympian official heights, and even the old chowkidar who kept the lonely rest-house, greeted him with almost a suggestion of familiarity beneath the outward abject motions of respect.

  There was a meal to be cooked before the sheer hard work of sleeping through the heat of an Hanadra day, and while Galloway’s cook wrought wizardry with canned ingredients, the chowkidar, ape-eyed and wrinkled, squatted at Galloway’s feet on the veranda regaling him with gossip of the countryside.

  “The maharajah’s elephant — that big one, Runjeet is the brute’s name — was must and slew the mahout’s child. There was a great tamasha, and when Runjeet returned to his right mind he was punished by being disgraced to pull the dung-wagon. Whereat he broke the dung-wagon and a man’s leg and three shop-fronts. Whei-yeh, but he is proud, and it was not fair to punish him for what he did when he was must! He broke into the granary and spilled millet out of all the heaped sacks, nor could they tempt him out with sugar-cane, and they were afraid to use torches lest the granary be burned. They had to send for the Gnani, and he calmed him, going in alone. He was in there three hours, and he came out leading Runjeet by the trunk, saying that since Runjeet had slain a child he must himself endure that karma, possibly for many lives to come; but that since they had offended him unjustly for what he did when out of his mind, they should make amends at once lest karma fall on them likewise. So Runjeet once more bears the great howdah and has had his tusks gilded.”

  Which brought the conversation to the point where Galloway could ask a question without silencing his informant.

  “Did the very holy Gnani bring his tigers with him?”

  “Nay. Or men say not. I was not there. Men say that since the American shot one of his three tigers he is very careful of the remaining two. Or it may be they might have scared Runjeet into a greater frenzy, he being already more indignant than a typhoon. But who am I to speak concerning that? I know nothing of tigers. I haven’t seen them. There are no tigers. Nay, it is an old wives’ tale.”

  “So I always supposed,” answered Galloway. “What became of the skin of the tiger the American shot?”

  “I know nothing of it. Nay, how should I know? I saw nothing. I heard nothing. When they brought the sahib I was sleeping. At night they brought him and they laid him on the bed within there. Then a man aroused me and I was set to pulling at the punkah-cord. Then his servants came in great fear, and after they had looked at him and talked a while, and taken off his clothes and put a night-suit on him, they ran away, bidding me not cease to pull the punkah.”

  “Who brought him here?” asked Galloway.

  “I know not. I know nothing. He was a generous sahib; he paid ten times over what I had the right to demand.”

  “Was it the Gnani’s servants?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Was the very holy Gnani with them?”

  “Who is he? I never heard of him! Nay, sahib, I know nothing. There has been talk by evil-minded men who seek to undermine me in the sahib’s favor, making up a story about some great one who never lived! Doubtless the American sahib’s servants, sons of evil mothers, who ran away and left him, made up a story to blame me for their own wrong-doing! Nay, I never heard of such a person as a Gnani — hah-hah-hah! — beyond all doubt the sahib jests with me; and I am an old man, having few teeth left. It takes a younger one to know a jest when he first hears it! Gnani! Hah-hah-hah! Will the sahib tell me, who ever heard of a Gnani? What is it?”

  So that clue closed itself, and Galloway knew better than to waste time trying to reopen it. He breakfasted; his servants hung wet sheets to cool the air inside the bungalow, and he slept until mid-afternoon. Then on again, riding ahead of the pack-train, perfectly aware that by that time all the countryside had been warned that he was on the prowl. His next stop was at Erinpura, wh
ere he arrived a little after midnight and pitched camp, there being no government dak.

  The place he chose to camp in was between a group of splendid neem-trees and a dried-out river course. His tent was pitched on rising ground, from which, by moonlight, he had a view, across the sandy, wide depression that would become a torrent in the rainy season, of an ancient temple, partly in ruins, that raised a ragged roof against the velvet background of the sky. It was one of the forbidden temples never desecrated by the white man’s foot, although there was a plan of its interior, drawn by a Punjabi spy, reposing somewhere in the Secret Survey files. Galloway had seen that plan and memorized it; it had appeared to be a very ordinary temple, but the details of the cavern underneath it had been only vaguely sketched and it was considered doubtful whether the spy had really seen anything below the level of the ground floor. His own story was that he had been into the cavern but had had to feel his way in almost total darkness, measuring its size by counting footsteps.

  It was a temple of the god Vitthal, a benevolent and gentle deity, “receiver of the ignorant and destitute of understanding,” and not in any way connected with the ghastly, and as commonly indecent, Saivism. There are legends that the temple once belonged to Buddhists in the dim dawn of legendary history; and that when the Buddhists grew too rich and lost their inspiration Jains succeeded them; both peace-loving philosophers. But there is another legend underlying that and full of interest to men like Galloway, to the effect that once the crypt below the temple was a robber’s cave and that the robber was converted from his evil ways by Vitthal — who was never heard of as a god until about the thirteenth century.

  That robber, whose name is forgotten, is remembered as the “Red Flame of Erinpura.” If he ever had existence outside men’s imagination he was doubtless much in need of spiritual commune with the gentler Powers. It was said he owned a furnace “ever burning without fuel” into which he flung his victims, but that the god closed up his furnace, putting out the fire and sealing the approach to it forever.