by Talbot Mundy
“Andrew, don’t laugh at me, please. I want to talk to the man who pulled me through that.”
“You’ve the right to,” he answered. “You came through, colors flying. Shoot the works.”
But Elsa found it hard to begin. She was afraid of seeming unwilling to face the future. But she did fear the future. And she was afraid to raise Andrew Gunning’s visor. She had seen him in action, in emergency, in crisis. She had seen him tempted, bewildered, baffled, half starved and almost overwhelmed by exhaustion; but always, in anger, in defeat, mistaken effort, success, nothing less than a man. She knew almost none of his motives, not even his real reason for joining Tom Grayne in Tibet. She knew almost none of his secrets. She was afraid to guess at them for fear her guess might prove true. So she was silent for at least five minutes, afraid of what Andrew Gunning might think of her, if she should go on talking. The silence was as loaded with thought as the leaping shadows were full of hue from the charcoal and flickering candlelight. Elsa made two or three attempts to begin, but Andrew gave her no encouragement. The words died on her lips.
A bell on the monastery roof reminded the monks to do something or other. It drew attention to the silence. Gusty wind flickered the candles. Andrew got up and put more charcoal on the brazier, resumed his seat on the snow leopard skin and waited. It was he who spoke first:
“Begin, why don’t you? What’s the trouble?”
“I told you. You objected to the word insect. My shell is broken. I’m afraid. That’s the trouble.”
“I’m scared, too,” he answered. “Everybody gets scared once in so often. But would you trade places with any other girl?”
“Andrew, I’d love to! But I don’t believe it would be fair to trade places.”
Andrew rose to the occasion guardedly: “See here, Elsa; you haven’t got to live in Brooklyn, or Blackheath, or Chicago, or Tooting Beck. You don’t have to go to cocktail parties and pink teas, or listen to radio yawp — or argue about dialectics with intellectual asses who think envy is inspiration and that Karl Marx is Jesus. You’re not leading a second-hand life. You don’t have to care a damn what mugwumps think. You needn’t say yes to the axe- grinders. What more do you want? Everybody gets afraid at some time or other.”
“Andrew, I want to talk about things that one doesn’t discuss.”
“Well,” he said, “I knew that. Why don’t you begin?”
“Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course I mind. I hate it. You’re going to try to drag out your secret thoughts and smear them on the wall for me to look at. You’ll come closer to doing it than most people could. I suppose it’s the end of friendship. You’ll never forgive me for knowing what you’ve never told Tom.”
“How do you know I’ve never told Tom?”
Andrew grinned. He pulled out his clasp knife and a hunk of hundred-year- old cedar from his hip pocket, shifted his position away from the flickering candle toward the steady glow of the charcoal brazier and resumed the whittling of a head of Chenrezi where he had left off the day before. Elsa watched him with emotions that ranged from baffled anger to despair. They were all one emotion, but they felt like wild dogs tearing at her: stark torture. However, there was no one but Andrew Gunning who could understand what she wanted to tell, what she must tell, even at the risk of friendship.
“Won’t you leave off carving that thing, Andrew?”
“No. You’ll find it easier if I look at this instead of you. Besides, it helps me to think. Go ahead. Talk.” He went on carving, turning the thing in his hands to study the planes in the glow from the brazier, puckering his eyes, remembering the statue of Chenrezi in the monastery chapel.
“Drew, I’m a failure. I’m not even a tragic failure. Merely a flop — no dignity:”
He sharpened the point of his knife on a pocket hone and resumed the carving of the Lord Chenrezi’s smile.
“Andrew, please listen. I’ve come to the end of everything, at twenty- three. No more destiny. Nothing. I took my future in my own hands, and everything I had, and all I knew and was and could become. And I took all chances and — and — offered it up.”
“You had a perfect right to,” he answered. “Everybody has to do that when he’s fed up with cant and rant and humbug and gets a glimpse of something worth going after. You’re no exception.”
“But it didn’t work out, Andrew. It was like Cain’s sacrifice. It wasn’t acceptable.”
“Okay. Kill Abel. That’s the historic retort. It won’t get you far. But try it. It’s one degree better than killing your own faith.”
“I don’t mind about me. And I’ve no faith left.”
“You mean no humor, don’t you? That’s just secondhand talk. Have you been reading Swinburne again? About weariest rivers winding somewhere safe to sea? He was drunk when he wrote it.”
“Oh well. Yes. I do mind — having let Tom down — having put you to all this inconvenience. I can still feel. Yes. I still have faith in some people. But not in me any longer. Instead of being the help I thought I’d be, and that Tom thought I’d be, I’m worse than a total loss. I’m a liability. Yes, you’re right, I do mind about me.”
Andrew glanced at her. She was dry-eyed. No sign of hysteria. She had drawn the steamer rug over her knees and was staring at the glowing brazier. She didn’t even look quite hopeless. She was hoping for a new view, and she hoped he had it.
“I’ve talked defeat,” he said, “plenty of times.”
“You? You, Andrew! To other people?”
“No. To myself. That’s worse. But it never was true. I never really meant it. See here, Elsa; merely looking at one angle, you’re not a run-of-the-mill, college-educated product. You’ve got ideas.”
“I wish I hadn’t. Ideas only give you a headache and make you dangerous to other people.”
“You’re not stuck in a social rut. You don’t feel bound by the latest fashion in ideology or—”
“I wish I did! I wish I liked that kind of thing! I wish I could make myself be herd-minded and believe what other people believe, and do what they do, and like it. I wish I were a Fascist or a Communist — something genuinely coarse and gross and stupid! Andrew, with all my heart I wish it!”
“If you feel that way, why consult me?” he retorted, looking obstinate. He turned the head of Chenrezi upside down and whittled savagely at the rough base. “I think you’re well off.”
“You mean in having no future?”
“Carve your own future.” He hacked at Chenrezi.
“I’ll have to. But it will be as lifeless as what you’re doing now with your knife and a piece of wood:”
“Piffle! This isn’t lifeless. I’ve a genius for this kind of thing. What’s more, I do good live thinking while I’m working at it. But my talent can’t hold a candle to yours. For instance, you’re the only woman in the world who can translate ancient Tibetan intelligently. What’s wrong with that? You’ve plenty of it to do. Here you are, safe as a saint in a—”
“Yes, yes, I’ve counted my blessings and added plenty per cent! Andrew, please! Don’t talk as if you’re trying to sell me a plot in a cemetery! I don’t have to be told that I might as well be in the British Museum. I’ve been working all day long at translation. I’d go mad if I didn’t.”
“Having luck with it?”
“Yes. The more wretched I feel, the easier it comes. The only real labor is writing it out — can’t write fast enough.”
“You mean it’s like automatic writing? I know a man in New York who wrote a darned good novel that way.”
“No. It isn’t a bit like that. I look at the Tibetan writing and all at once it means something in English. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like reading music notes at sight and being able to transpose them into a different key without thinking about it. Of course, it isn’t really like that, but — why don’t you let me talk of what I want to talk about!”
Andrew held up Chenrezi’s head and studied the curve of a nostri
l. “It doesn’t seem to me you have much kick coming,” he answered. “There’s any number of real people who would almost sell their souls for the gift that you came by without even having to work for it.”
She laughed. “If you think I didn’t work for it, you guess again, Andrew! Tibetan wasn’t a gift, as you call it. I earned that honestly, and love it. It’s the other part that I hate. It’s a curse. As a child it got me into so much trouble that I left home when I was sixteen. I almost didn’t have any friends. It brought me nothing but grief, and mistrust, and misery, until I met Tom in the British Museum Library. After that, it began to be wonderful, because Tom—”
“Yes. Tom told me about it.”
“Andrew, let me tell it. You’ve only heard Tom’s version. He told the truth, but not all the truth. He can’t possibly have told my side of it, because he never knew it. I don’t believe he even guessed it.”
“Tom’s a pretty shrewd guesser.”
“I know. But how could Tom possibly guess what even I didn’t know, about me, until — until I had torn it right out of myself, and forced myself to look at it? Tom isn’t clairvoyant. Sometimes I think you are. But Tom isn’t. So he can’t possibly have told you all about me.”
Andrew shut his clasp knife. “All right,” he said. “You tell it. I’ll listen. If I don’t believe you, I’ll say so.”
“Andrew, if you don’t believe me, then that will be the end of friendship. Because I’m going to be merciless — I mean to me. It may be the last time that you and I will ever talk together intimately. I don’t want to pry into your secrets. I do want to tell mine.”
Andrew studied his carving of Chenrezi’s head for half a minute. Then he put it into his pocket and stared at Elsa. The rain splashed in the courtyard. The guttering candlelight half hid her amid trembling shadows. A slight, small girl of twenty-three, in a black tailored shirt. Dreamy intelligent eyes. Something like a feminine version of Michelangelo’s David.
“Go ahead,” said Andrew. “Sling your pebble at Goliath, but try not to hit me. If there’s anything I hate it’s being told what I’d sooner not know. I’m a hell of a good hater.”
“I suppose you’ll hate me. Will you please try not to. I’m going to risk it, but—”
“If you won’t let well enough alone, go to it. I won’t interrupt.”
But interruption came. It seemed timed to the second, as if someone’s daimon didn’t want a veil drawn aside. It was simple scheduled monastery routine, but it felt like a hint from destiny.
CHAPTER 2
The interruption was a thudding on the thick door. It sounded far off, almost alarming. But when Elsa touched the bronze bell it turned out to be only two wrinkled old Tibetan monks. One was the Abbot’s physician. The other brought tea in a brass urn — buttered tea stewed and salted, that isn’t so awful once you’re used to it. The smiling old doctor professed not to know why there were three cups. It was not his business. He had brought medicine for Elsa. He poured it from a silver vial into a spoon of rhinoceros horn, opened his own mouth by way of suggestion, pushed the spoon halfway down Elsa’s throat and turned it until she gagged and swallowed the horrible stuff. He watched her cough, crossing his fingers, murmuring sacred words to ward off devils. Then he murmured a blessing, stowed the utterly unsanitary spoon into an inner pocket, corked the vial, smiled at Andrew Gunning with a shrewd, almost monkey-like glance of his deeply set dark eyes and walked out, whirling his prayer wheel, followed by the monk with the brass tray. When the door thudded shut Andrew seized the opportunity to change the subject:
“So you’re still on the sick list?”
“No, I’m quite well. But Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po insists that I’m still full of devils that need driving out. He says it was devils that killed my baby. So he sends his doctor three times a day. If I should refuse to swallow that nasty stuff, I don’t know what would happen.”
“You’d be a fool to refuse. Old Mu-ni Gam-po knows his magic. Some of our modern doctors get the same results by a different method. There’s not much choice between a stupid M.D. and an ignorant magician. Either will kill you. And the good magician or the good M.D. will cure you, if your soul wants to stay in your body.”
“Souls can be cruel to bodies,” she answered. “Mine is cruel. It insists on staying in me. Andrew, you pour the tea, will you? I can’t reach it without getting up.”
He filled two cups, then went and peered through the window bars before resuming his seat.
“No eavesdroppers,” he said. “Not at the moment.”
“Did you think there might be?”
“Yes. There’s at least one monk who reports to Bulah Singh. You know what that means. C.I.D. Confidential — indiscreet — dirty. Bulah Singh reads your mail before you get it — if you get it. However, I hope you’ve changed your mind about talking. It’s always better to say nothing.”
“You make it difficult, Andrew. I believe you’re hiding something.”
“Well,” he answered, “I guess that’s true. But it needn’t stop you from telling me the worst, if you feel you’ve got to. Go on. You’re heartsick and scared. You think you can cure it by offering me to the gods, if there are any gods.”
“Not you, Andrew. But if I lose your friendship—”
Same thing! But go to it. What’s all this that Tom Grayne doesn’t know?”
“Andrew, I met Tom for the first time in the British Museum Library. I was studying Tibetan because I like it, and so few other people study it, and because it’s difficult, and because Professor Mayor, who happens to be my uncle, is in charge of the Tibetan section. I didn’t know then that Professor Mayor had anything to do with the secret service. But later he asked me to help Tom decipher some difficult letters that were written in a kind of shorthand. I have a talent for that kind of thing. It isn’t brain work; it’s a kind of clairvoyance. One thing led to another. Tom found me useful. I didn’t know then that Tom was in the pay of the American State Department.”
“He wasn’t,” said Andrew. “He never has been, and he isn’t. The American State Department isn’t crazy. It hasn’t any money to spend on people like Tom and me. On top of that, it wouldn’t choose to be caught with the goods. I’m unpaid. Tom gets bare expenses and a pittance from a member of the United States Senate who likes to know what he’s talking about. If Tom’s information should happen to reach the State Department, that’s nobody’s business.”
“Andrew, let me tell it, please.”
“Okay. But tell it right. You went off on the wrong foot. You met Tom. You and he got married. Then what?”
“Tom wasn’t in love with me.”
“Yes he was.”
“And I wasn’t in love with Tom.”
“Yes you were.”
“Andrew, you’re observant and kind and sometimes wonderfully intuitive, but this is something that you haven’t understood. Onlookers never do understand that kind of thing. You weren’t even an onlooker, not in the beginning. You had never even heard of me, and you only knew Tom by hearsay, until you met us in Tibet. And by that time, things were different. In the beginning Tom was in love with his job and with nothing else in the world. He was heartwhole, and ruthless — scrupulously faithful.”
“Tom has gray iron scruples, but no morals,” said Andrew. “Tom’s sentimental bigot.”
“Tom is the most intensely moral man I ever met.”
“I guess we’re at odds about definitions. We may mean the same thing. Go ahead.”
“Tom found me useful. I had enough money to pay my own expenses. I’m healthy, and active, and I’m so small that I don’t tire a horse the way some people do. I don’t care a bit about luxuries, and I can keep my temper and hold my tongue. So Tom offered to take me to India.”
“Yes,” said Andrew. “I know all about that. There was a homesick Tibetan in London named Tho-pa-ga. Tom wanted to take Tho-pa-ga to Tibet, and he wanted you along to supply the feminine touch. Tom told me all about it. You did such a good job tha
t when the Tibetans kidnapped Tho-pa-ga to make him Keeper of the Thunder Dragon Gate, they kidnapped you along with him to keep up his spirits. Tom went in pursuit, and the Lama Lobsang Pun saved the lot of you in the nick of time. Tho-pa-ga turned out to be a miserable flop, all pious melancholy and no backbone. In love with you, wasn’t he?”
“Tho-pa-ga,” said Elsa, “was just an overgrown and overeducated moon-calf who needed a nurse.”
Andrew nodded. “Tom made a bloomer that time. Tho-pa-ga was a ruinous man to bet on. Bound to let you down. In England he was homesick for Tibet. As soon as he reached Tibet, he was homesick for England. Tom was a fool to waste time on him. Tho-pa-ga’s religion was such a mixture of magic and sentimentality, all glued into a rotten mess by a kind of superstitious fatalism, that he couldn’t possibly have been a success in a key position. No one respected him. The only friends he made were political Tibetan monks who spotted him for an easy mark. So of course he was poisoned. Anybody could have foretold that. And the business of preventing Tibet from being saved from herself by the Japs and Russians had to begin all over again. That was why I was sent from Shanghai to find you and Tom.”
“Andrew, if you really don’t want to hear my side of it, why not simply refuse to listen, instead of trying to get me to talk about something else? Just say so. Just go out and leave me alone. Then there’ll be no one left except Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po. But—”
“You been talking to him?”
“Yes. He cast my horoscope, from five or six different aspects.”
“Did he show you the result?”
“Yes. But I can’t read a horoscope. Looking at it gave me a sensation of danger and fear and abject fatalism that I knew I shouldn’t have. But Mu-ni Gam-po wouldn’t explain it, beyond saying something about Uranus and Neptune in the twelfth house, with afflicted Venus, and Sun rising in Aries. I don’t know what that means. He wouldn’t let me tell him what I’m trying to tell you.”
