Complete Works of Talbot Mundy, page 1144
When Gurwicz came back to New York with a finger missing and the best part of six months’ pay in his pocket — they had put him on a salary within a week of his arrival at the automobile factory — I offered to put him up. It seemed possible that the tension might grow a little acute, and I wanted to be on the scene when the trouble started.
He was as much in love with Kitty as ever, and hardly ever left my flat, he was so anxious to be in when she called. He talked about her until I lost my temper, and then sat on a chair in the corner and thought about her, and in the end she had to remind him that his career was still to make.
After that he used to stay out all day hunting a job, and one evening he told me that he had signed a contract to work for a man whose name was already world-famous as a maker and manipulator of aeroplanes.
He started work the following day without saying a word to Kitty, and it was I who broke the news to her. She grew serious at once, and said it was time to get busy. “He’s bound to make good,” she said, with a return of her old enthusiasm. “Now that he’s started on his chosen career, he’ll never look back. Remember it was I that goaded him into it.”
“Yes, but you haven’t got yourself out of it yet. I’ve a notion that that won’t be quite so easy. He’ll be back for his answer when the year’s up, and then look out for squalls!”
“Not he! He’ll be engaged to some one else. I know the girl already. The only thing is to arrange for them to meet at your flat.”
“Not if I know it. Gurwicz by himself was bad enough, but Gurwicz and his sweetheart billing and cooing round here would be too much altogether. This is your funeral, and you must stage-manage it. I’m not going to have anything to do with it at all. I’m merely a looker-on.”
She was angry with me, and called me a shirker, and lots of other things, but a few days afterward she invited me to dinner to meet Paul Gurwicz and a Miss Maud Gillespie — her niece or cousin or some such relation.
When I got to the restaurant she and Gurwicz were already there, and I was in time to hear Gurwicz tell her that his future as an aviator was already assured, I never knew a man who had less doubt as to his eventual success.
He went up in the air and waved his arms about in his usual emphatic way, but she seemed scarcely to be paying any attention to him. When he left off boasting to get his breath she told him for the first time who the fourth member of the party was to be.
“And I want you to look after her for me, Paul,” I heard her say. “It’s almost her first dinner away from home, and she’s dreadfully shy with strangers. I want you to draw her out and make her feel as though she were among friends. I’d ask him to do it, but he’s much too stupid.”
When she said “him” she meant me, and Gurwicz had the indecency to look as though he agreed with her; but the niece arrived before I could think of anything suitable to say in self-defense.
The girl was the absolute antithesis of Gurwicz. He was tall and very thin. She was of medium height, at the most, and plump. Never having seen her mother, it was of course only guesswork, but I was prepared to swear that by the time she was forty she would be fat.
He had blond hair that stood up straight on end as so many Germans wear it; her hair was very dark-brown — almost black, He was a visionary, a dreamer — with the strength and ambition to make his dreams come true; she was a woman of the domestic type, who would only dream when she had indigestion.
Even then she would only dream that her house was not in order. She was no more shy than a domestic cow is shy. She was a ruminant.
He was restless and ambitious; she was placid. He had a face that was positively ugly, redeemed, though, by the obvious intelligence that flashed and flickered over it incessantly, and only slumbered when he slept; she was good-looking in a sleepy, wax-madonna sort of way, but her expression never varied.
They were utterly unlike.
And yet, from the way that Kitty Crothers behaved, it seemed that this was the female that she intended should supplant her in the affections of Paul Gurwicz. She talked to me at one end of the table, and left the niece and Gurwicz alone at the other.
I tried once to engage the girl in conversation, but Kitty kicked me so violently on the shin that for the next few minutes I was hard put to it not to swear.
“I was only trying to make her feel as though she were among friends, it seems, though, she’s come to a game of football,” I remarked.
Kitty only laughed, and by the time my shin-bone had left off tingling Miss Gillespie was too busy listening to Gurwicz for me to be able to get a word in edgeways. He told her all the most interesting things he knew, and they were all about himself. She proved to be a good listener — a thing he had grown unaccustomed to of late. Instead of raillery and chaff and openly expressed unbelief he met with silent approval and wonder.
He found himself accepted for the first time in his life at his own valuation. Even Kitty Crothers, during her most valiant efforts to encourage him, had found it difficult to conceal her amusement at his egoism. But Miss Gillespie frankly considered him a superior being, and evidently felt more like burning incense to him than laughing at him.
So Gurwicz enjoyed himself, and the two of them forgot all about us. Gurwicz’s way home and mine lay together for part of the distance, and we walked it together. During the walk he asked me how old I supposed Mrs. Crothers was, and I snubbed him promptly and properly — with the fiat of a metaphorical shovel on his impudent mouth — but he scarcely noticed it.
I saw little of him after that, though I often saw his name in the papers as a daring and successful aviator and once, when I went to Belmont Park, I saw him make a flight. Miss Gillespie was there, too, and so was Kitty Crothers.
After the flight Gurwicz stood with his back toward us, talking to Miss Gillespie, and it was she who pointed us out and brought him over to speak to us. He was a trifle condescending, and I thought the least little bit in the world annoyed.
He paid more attention to me than he did to Mrs. Crothers, and I tried to drive him up to her gun by belittling his attempts to fly. But he avoided her carefully, enduring my raillery as the lesser of two evils, and Miss Gillespie glared defiance at me in a way that betokened more than a passing interest in him.
His relief when he was called away to attend to one of his machines was too evident to be mannerly, and I turned to Kitty with a smile and some little joke about ingratitude. To my amazement, she was on the verge of tears.
“Please take me away from here,” was all she would say, and I took her away, wondering.
“The little beast!” she burst out presently.
“Which of ’em?” I ventured.
“Paul, of course. I can’t blame her. I meant her all along to many him. She’s just what he needs. She’ll worship him, and be blind to his follies and conceit; and she’ll nurse him when he’s sick, and keep house for him, and think he’s a superior sort of god.
“Even if he beats her, she’ll forgive him. I’m not sure he won’t beat her! I almost hope he will! I’m sure he’s beast enough. Fancy his leaving me like that without a word of apology or regret!”
“But didn’t you want to marry ’em off`? Wasn’t that the idea all along?” I remarked inquiringly.
“Of course it was.”
“Well, you’ve got your own way, so what’s the trouble? There’s nothing left to do but choose the wedding presents. Mine’s going to be an art pepper- pot — a small one, to hold red pepper.”
“I believe I shall get mine at the ten-cent bazaar.”
“I would if I were you. But what are you so dreadfully annoyed about? You married him just as soon as you chose to the girl you picked out for him. I don’t see.”
“Oh, how stupid men are! Can’t you see that he broke loose before I intended him to, and not in the way I meant him to at all. Instead of my despising him, as I really did all along, he despises me. The little beast thinks I was in love with him, and that he turned me down. Oh, I could kill myself!”
“You will have better luck next time. You will have more experience, and will know how to manage the next campaign better.”
“Never again! Men aren’t worth the trouble. If you’re good to them and take an interest in them, they despise you for it, and imagine that you do it simply because you’re in love with their superior souls. They haven’t got any souls! Oh, I hate men!”
“Try keeping chickens, Kitty — they might be more grateful, and you’d have the satisfaction of wringing their necks if they weren’t.”
“I believe I shall follow your advice. I’d do anything that would help me to forget Paul Gurwicz.”
“Believe me, Kitty, we’ll forget him this evening at dinner. Come on, let’s get back to Broadway.”
THE HERMIT AND THE TIGER
I WENT to India to hunt tigers. But I came away looking for something else.
It was many months before I saw a tiger, in full moonlight, in the graveyard at Mount Abu in Rajputana, where the legends on more than half the tombstones read “from wounds inflicted by a tiger.” He was insolent, arrogant, splendid, and I think he knew I watched him. At intervals he stood snarling and muttering as if he sneered at the names on the tombs of the men who had died of wounds from his ancestors’ fangs. It was a weird experience. I had no rifle. I could only watch.
Another man also watched, squatting like an idol on the cemetery path. He was a turbaned, smoothshaven Hindu, clothed in white, and he betrayed no fear. The tiger, moving carelessly; with his great weight slouched below his shoulder blades, went straight toward him. But he appeared to me to take no notice of the tiger. The brute walked past him, almost touching him, and then leaped the cemetery wall and vanished. But when I approached the Hindu, he got up and ran. To this day, I don’t know the answer to the questions I wanted to ask. But this subsequently happened:
I announced my intention to shoot a tiger. Being young, brash, ignorant, and very unwise, I made the announcement at the Club that was full of people who really knew India. They smiled. A friendly subaltern of my own age, who had been refused leave to go tiger-hunting, relieved his own bitterness and enlightened my ignorance, by request, after several drinks:
“You damned idiot, the tigers here are kept for Viceroys and Princes of Wales and Maharajahs. You haven’t a chance. They’ll never let you see a tiger. How? Easy. Someone will tip off the natives, and the tigers will be driven away before you can get anywhere near them.”
However, I was not without resources. I had a “boy,” a fifty-year-old, one- eyed Moslem, whose only noticeable virtue was pride of service. I explained the situation to him. After due reflection, he delivered a verdict that “our” honor was involved: honor might be restored at a cost of ten rupees for traveling expenses. He was absent four days and returned with a plan. He explained:
“Down on the plains below Abu they are all ignorant Hindus who believe in hundreds of gods. Sahibs, as a rule, are disrespectful to the gods. So if you, sahib, should show some respect, it would create a good impression and something might happen.”
He then told of a tiger that was killing men almost daily. He said a very distinguished personage had been appealed to, to come and shoot the tiger; and might come soon. But meanwhile men died daily.
We departed by stealth that night on pony-back. And as we took the moonlit trail that plunged downward through the jungle, the white-turbaned Hindu, whom I had seen in the cemetery several nights before, followed us, on foot, keeping his distance, down, down, downward toward the oven-hot plains.
The heat was atrocious. I lay most of the following day on a cot, in a place called a dâk bungalow, watching scorpions and snakes and rats. About four in the afternoon, I loaded my brand new double-barreled Express, which had never been fired, and followed my servant for a couple of miles through dry, sparse jungle. He kept coaching me over his shoulder and warning me how to behave at the journey’s end. So when we came to a beautiful little Hindu shrine, I sat down on a hot rock and let him pull my boots off. I approached the shrine barefooted, horribly afraid of scorpions and very skeptical.
The shrine was enclosed on three sides, but open in front. Against the rear wall was an image of an Indian god. With his back to the image, beside a small stone altar, sat a very ancient-looking hermit, with a long beard and long hair, wearing nothing but a loin-cloth. I squatted in the dust outside the shrine. The old hermit chanted a mantram — one of those beautiful Indian hymns that wail in a minor key toward Infinity. He bestowed what I believe was a blessing, in a language of which I understood not one word. I laid a small offering in the dust and backed away, more skeptical than ever, and humiliated. I had behaved like a fool. What had a hermit to do with a tiger?
But I had that mantram in my ears. I remember it now.
Angry, sitting down to have my boots pulled on, I caught sight of that white- robed Hindu; he was peering at me from between two trees. When I saw him, he ran. Presently, I started back toward the dâk bungalow, and had walked about two hundred yards, when I noticed some monkeys making a big fuss in the trees at the edge of a nullah. My servant whispered the ominous word “Bagh!” A moment later a tiger came up out of the nullah straight toward me. It was the man- eating tiger that had terrorized the countryside and that I had seen in Mount Abu cemetery. I killed him with the first bullet ever fired out of my new rifle: the first shot I had ever fired at big game.
Call that luck, if you like. But luck can’t account for the hermit. Luck doesn’t explain why the tiger walked straight to his death. There was a mystery. Was the key hidden in the mantram that the hermit sang before the image of his old stone god?
THE MAN FROM POONCH
IT was chilly and dark at the back of Daldeen Lai’s place. The distant lights of Simla, glimpsed now and then through a fluke in the mist, served to emphasize the loneliness and darkness. Nine men, scarcely visible to one another, squatted on the creaking balcony.
Yussuf Aroun raised a floor-board, using his toe for the purpose, and spat into eight hundred feet of dark nothing beneath him; it was less trouble than raising his head above the sheet of corrugated iron which broke the cold wind from the Himalayas. He spat with the emphasis of a Pathan who had made up his mind.
“By Allah and by my beard, all men from Poonch,” he said, “are sons of impudently unchaste mothers.”
But the man from Poonch said nothing. He was at the end of the balcony, with his back toward Simla and his face toward eight suspicious, hostile men. The solitary lantern cast a red glow on as much of his face as was not hidden in the horse-blanket that draped his head and shoulders. It touched, too, the silvery hilt of his long knife.
His eyes held the smouldering wrath of a panther’s. When he rolled himself a cigarette his tongue licked the edges of the paper as if tasting in advance difficulties that he knew how to enjoy. The most exciting challenge in the world is silence, and the man from Poonch seemed made of the intolerable stuff.
Seven shadows, that were Hillmen of seven unrelated blood-strains but with a language, a creed and some hatreds in common, stirred a little as their host rose. Water splashed in the darkness beneath. The wooden balcony squeaked as it swayed to the wind and the weight of Daldeen Lai’s cat-like footsteps, careful not to touch men as he passed them. He opened his house-door, entered, and shut it behind him swiftly; the light from it shone on some of the faces, for a moment. They were hook-nosed men in stinking sheep-skin jackets — black-bearded, with oily love-locks.
One laughed with a nervous high pitch:
“By Allah, men from Poonch can take a dive into the mist beneath us, just as easily as men from better places! What say you, brothers?”
Yussuf Aroun answered, deep-throated, deliberate:
“Nay! If he is false, a spy for the British, I slay him, because it is I who first suspected him and said so. By my beard, he shall die as many deaths in that case as he can draw breaths between a midnight and a midnight. He shall beg for the edge of a knife to cut him free from torment.”
But the man from Poonch continued to say nothing. The door opened again and Daldeen Lai squirmed himself through like a cat:
“A fool wanted the loan of a bicycle pump,” he said. “I told him he could push his bicycle.” He sat down.
“Now about this man from Poonch—”
When Daldeen Lai spoke Pushtu he abominably mispronounced it, and he knew the mispronunciation irritated those intolerant Hillmen, who despised him and his Hindu religion. That he made a point of not being religious merely increased their contempt. It was much more difficult for them to treat him civilly, than for him to endure their arrogance. But they shared his secret; and the secret gave him an authority that he did not choose to hazard by talking more than necessary. So he paused in his speech.
“Who believes such a tale as he tells?” asked Yussuf Aroun. “Taught him to fly in Ameliki, did they — he having made the Amelikins think he was one of themselves — Eh? Allah! I saw an Amelikin; he wore spectacles: he had a fat wife who found fault. He was less like this man than a horse is like a camel. Saucy and abominable are the men from Poonch, and I say this one is a liar. How do we know he can fly an air-ee-o-per-lane? Why won’t he tell us his name?”
The moon rose, revealing the tops of deodars in the ghosty white mist that streamed in the valley beneath. It silvered a wet crag that projected from the side of the ravine a hundred yards away.
“But somebody must fly for us,” said Daldeen Lai. “His is a probable story. Many besides he have been imprisoned for being suspected persons possessing pistol and no license. While he was in prison his family died of neglect and want, because the money-lender foreclosed. Is there anything unlikely about that? Why should he not seek vengeance on the British?”
“Allah! I doubt him,” said Yussuf Aroun.
