Complete Works of Talbot Mundy, page 653
“Thanks, sir, I’ve had breakfast. And if I’d tell the news myself you might think I was lying.”
“There would be nothing abnormal about that. I’m quite used to disbelieving people.”
“Yes, sir. And I want my thousand pounds. I’d like to take you straight to the source where I got my information.”
“What information?”
“The identity and present whereabouts of that young woman that you spoke of last night.”
Habit froze Joe’s face at once. He had learned from his mother. Show her, black on white, a soundly reasoned statement and she would pitilessly and without shame rend it until no one but herself believed it even worth another moment’s thought. “Remember this, Joe: if it’s good, it won’t be worse for being doubted. The more you can make others doubt it, the cheaper it’s yours in the long run. So don’t believe any one — anything, until you’ve seen all sides of it. Make others sick of hanging on. That’s business.” He had learned in the end to doubt her also. A mere stranger such as Hawkes had no chance to get under his guard.
“I have letters to write. Sorry.”
Hawkes, a trifle over-eager to persuade him, made a wrong move: “Sir, you saw me punch a man last night. His gang is after that young woman.”
“Sounds bad. As I told you, if she’s fallen too far down the social scale my mother would not be interested.”
Hawkes saw his mistake. He decided to show his own quality and see what came of it.
“All right, sir. I’ve done my part. Here’s that three hundred you gave me for expenses. I don’t need it.”
He laid the money on the table. Joe let it stay, with the corner of one eye watching Hawkes; it might be Hawkes’ way of suggesting a tip. But Hawkes stepped away from the table.
“Send for me, sir, any time you wish. I’ll tell your servant where to find me.”
“Why not tell your news?” Joe asked him.
“No, sir. If you’ll take it straight as man to man — it may sound fishy, but it’s fact — I wouldn’t take a thousand pounds to be called a liar by you or any one.”
Joe had seen senators sell their souls for that price. He had bought the souls, and found them not worth buying.
“I will pay you ten pounds for your news,” he answered.
“Keep it, sir. As one man to another, you agreed to pay a thousand pounds if I find the girl.”
“All right. Bring her to me.”
“Not so easy. If I fetched her, supposing she’d come, who’s to prove she’s it? No, sir, proof first — that’s fair. Then when you set eyes on her I get my thousand and no argument.”
Joe still suspected him. However, he heard his mother’s voice. She was getting up, and finding fault. He knew that mood. He leaped at anything to escape her.
“All right, I’ll go with you.” He caught the proprietor’s eye.
“Two horses!”
“Ek particularly dum!” Hawkes added. “Make it sudden.”
That Hindu had noticed the interrelation of speed and profit when providing for Americans. With the tail of his turban flying, scandalized crows on the wing, and the pariah dogs in flight in front of him, he scooted across the compound to the stable, where a needy relative-contractor kept starved horses and well fed flies. Long before Mrs. Beddington’s voice announced through an open window that her shoes were no place for cockroaches, two unenthusiastic horses drooped in front of the verandah. Joe was swift; in another moment he and Hawkes, at a comfortless trot in the dust outside the compound wall, could hear her doing her worst to make the universe all wretched. Joe shuddered:
“Always that way when she has done dirt. Justifies herself by torturing some other helpless human. Then she’ll feed the pariah dogs on buttered toast and gyp the peddlers out of half their junk. By the time I return she’ll feel pious and want me to take her to call on missionaries.”
He hardly noticed where Hawkes was leading him. He remembered passing a squadron of native cavalry out exercising horses — might not have remembered it except that he was glad their officers did not halt to talk to him — as likely as not damned decent fellows who would invite him to call on the mess. He could enjoy meeting them if it weren’t for his mother; she would insist on their being introduced to her. She would probably make their mess a gift of some useless ornament picked up in Kashmir. She would ask the Colonel’s confidential advice about his, Joe’s, character. He understood her game from a to izzard — understood, yet could not defeat it. She was his mother, worse luck. There are limits to what conscience will let a man do to his mother, even if he hates her, for accumulated reasons.
Knowing resentment would give him a headache he tried to interest himself in the streets and the early traffic. They had reached the heart of the native city almost before he realized it. He remembered now that there were things to see in this place. There were said to be architectural wonders — freaks that had set the antiquarians at loggerheads with thousands of years of differences between their estimated dates. He began to notice some of them — amazing carvings on patched walls at the end of mean streets, old and new all fitted into one another as if an earthquake, or perhaps a dozen earthquakes had flattened the city and, after each cataclysm, men had rebuilt with the old material. One image that he saw was upside down — a dozen tons of it incorporated in a wall whose greater part was almost modern brick — perhaps a thousand-year-old brick, or even more recent than that.
It was a hodge-podge city. Corrugated iron side by side with ancient masonry and carved teak blackened by the course of centuries. Trees in which monkeys sported. Sacred trees a-flutter with scraps of rag and colored paper to remind some godlet of a bribe paid and a promise taken, in return, for granted. Walls without windows. Shops all unglazed window, with a wall behind them. Thatch, tile, rotting canvas — and a roof here and there whose ponderous calm suggested destiny perceived and understood by conjurers in stone. A Moslem mosque, chaste and pearl-gray in the shadows of high trees, frowned at from a hundred feet away by the obscene divinities carved on the gloom of a Hindu temple. Stinks — and then a breath of Oriental perfume — spices, dry dung and the horizonless scent of piles of gunny-sacks. An elephant or two — incessant streams of laden asses — bullock-carts — innumerable sweating porters, threading their way through a crowd whose black umbrellas cheapened sunlight. Vivid colors splashed on shadow — dark holes — dinginess drowned in golden light where clouds of parakeets as green as emeralds shot screaming from tree to tree — veiled women — unveiled girls with white teeth dipping brass jars at a fountain — Ford cars — insolent policemen swinging yellow clubs. And then, when they paused at a trough that was a godlet’s lap, to let the horses drink, none else than Chandri Lal, his flat, round basketful of cobras on his head. The ayah, draped in dingy black, was less than half a street behind him.
“How in hell did those two follow, at the speed we’ve come?”
“The same as rats, sir. They know scores of shortcuts where a horse can’t get through.”
“What are they spying on me for?”
“They’re not spying. It’s the jackal system. Follow a tiger long enough and something happens. It’s like that piece in the Bible, sir, about the woman and her importunity — except that those two don’t know what they want. What turns up can’t be worse than what they’ve got, that’s all.”
Joe doubted it. He half suspected Hawkes of having told those two to follow, and he was still in a mood to be quarrelsome. He had an acrid comment hesitating on his teeth, when a bheestee went by swishing water from his goatskin mussuk. Just as no man can slay even himself in the presence of one of Leonardo’s paintings, so none can harbor hatred with the smell in his nostrils of freshly sprinkled dry earth. Perfectly unconscious of the cause, Joe let his natural tolerance creep up like sap and he decided that to be a circus for whoever chose to stare at him was better fun than doing nothing. He, too, was a spectator, growing curious.
“Let’s go.”
Hawkes led through by-ways to a sunlit court, whose paving stones were masonry from ancient walls. Grass grew here and there between the cracks. In places, faintly visible, were carvings worn smooth by the tread of centuries. The buildings were all ancient, except one, a little lower than the rest, that occupied a corner and was white, in contrast to the gray-green dinginess of all the others. It had awnings, striped red and yellow, and the two-story wall that faced the street was pierced with as many windows as a colonial house in Salem. The windows had muslin curtains, clean and trim. The flat roof was entirely tented over and hung with a line of paper Chinese lanterns.
“Here we are,” said Hawkes. He hitched the horses to a big hook near the front door. “Can you guess what that is, sir? That’s a hook off a siege-gun carriage that was drawn by elephants at Plassy. There’s a story to it; but maybe she’ll tell you herself.”
He used his swagger-cane to beat a tattoo on the brass-bound teak front door. Then he lifted the latch and the top half opened.
“Anybody home?”
A parrot answered— “Cup o’ caw-fee — Polly want a cup o’ caw-fee?” Then footsteps on a tiled floor. Suddenly a smell of lavender, and some one in larkspur-light-blue linen stood framed in the door like a painting, with dimness behind her.
“Hawkesey! Well, come in. My house is a mess; you must excuse it — but you soldiers notice everything.”
She had snow-white hair brushed well back from her forehead and pinned in an old-fashioned knot. Her eyes were almost baby-blue; they mocked the thin line of a mouth that seemed to disapprove of such amusement as those eyes insisted on enjoying. She had the calm chin of a fighter who fights seldom, having also diplomatic skill and self-restraint besides unconquerable courage. She wore a gold chain and a locket. The sleeves at each wrist were pinned with old cameo brooches. Wrinkled, used but well-kept, very shapely hands. She was not more than five feet tall and slightly built — sixty years of age or thereabouts, but upright as an arrow and, beyond words, beautiful. She drew the lower latch and glanced at Hawkes’ boots as she swung the half-door open. Hawkes kicked the wall and flicked the dust off with his handkerchief.
“Mr. Beddington — Miss Annie Weems.”
She bowed, appraising Joe, then suddenly shook hands, as if the blue eyes had discovered something that the lips refused to tell. They were a wee mite stern, those lips — a bit convinced, perhaps, of masculine infidelity, deplorable but comprehensible and not beyond forgiveness.
“My school,” she said, turning to lead the way in. She turned as neatly as they used to in the days of quadrilles and crinolines. “To-day’s a holiday. No pupils to tidy up. You mustn’t look.”
They followed her across a red-tiled floor that was as clean as the floor of a dairy. There were benches of scrubbed wood, mats folded and piled in a corner, a blackboard, a desk and a chair and rows of book-shelves. There was not even dust in the beams of sunlight slanting through the windows. Nothing seemed soiled or out of place, and nothing even faded except the flowers; those were yesterday’s — the only hint of Asia; all the rest was neat New England, even to the ribboned cat that came and rubbed against Joe’s trousers legs.
“There, Kitty likes you. I have never known her to make a mistake.”
She led past a grandfather clock in a passage that contained a dresser made of maple-wood, its shelves loaded with Derby chinaware, into a room that might have been a parlor in a Massachusetts village, except that there were no stuffed birds in glass cases and no samplers. There was a piano built not less than half a century ago and varnished to match the maple chairs and gate-leg table. Flowers everywhere — framed paintings of New England landscapes — a parrot perch with seed and water-cups at either end. Rag rugs on a polished teak floor. Nothing lacking but a fireplace — and in place of that a white stone altar carved with long-stemmed lotus-flowers, built into the strong foundations of the house by pious Hindus, and now used by the cat as a snoozing place between two long-stemmed Copenhagen vases.
“You wish to question me?”
She chose the armchair near the window and sat facing Joe and Hawkes, hands in her lap. Joe hesitated. Since she put it that way he felt he had no right to question her. Hawkes intervened:
“Miss Weems has run a private school here since — how long is it, Miss?”
“Twenty-seven years.”
“Anyhow,” said Hawkes, “for seventeen years or more I believe she has known the girl you’re looking for.”
Miss Weems sat silent, mouth firm, eyes alight with interest and something else that might have been excitement. Joe crossed his legs and began calmly:
“One and twenty years ago — about — I don’t remember dates — Carrie Morgan, who was my mother’s youngest bridesmaid, married a young professor of botany named Owen Wilburforce and came to this part of India. We were informed she gave birth to a daughter; she is supposed to have written to that effect to an aunt in Charleston, but the letter has been lost. She and her husband are supposed to have died of cholera not long afterward, and their effects were said to have been burned in a raid by dacoits, who set fire to the house they lived in. But there was a plausible, undocumented story that an ayah — said to have been a wet-nurse — carried away the baby and concealed it. The girl should now be twenty years old, more or less. Hawkes appears to believe that you know a young woman who might be that one. And that you even have what you consider proof of her identity. Is that so?”
Annie Weems looked straight at him and blinked. She produced a plain white hemstitched handkerchief and touched her lips. She glanced at the cat — at the parrot — and back at Joe. Her eyes were steady now; it was her lips that seemed to tremble, and there was a catch in her throat; she swallowed before answering:
“It may be.”
CHAPTER V. “Amrita is a sort of Joan of Arc.”
It felt like Sunday. From without there were only a few sounds; some one, probably a servant, moved about a courtyard. A crow cawed on a near-by roof. Annie Weems picked up her reading spectacles from beside the book on the table, tried them on, and put them down again.
“About the proof, Miss?” Hawkes suggested.
“Judas Iscariot once sold Jesus,” she retorted.
Slapped down, as it were, Hawkes prodded his boot with his swagger-cane. Joe felt curiously pleased, but cautious.
“Hawkes,” he said, “will be paid a stipulated sum if the girl is produced along with proof of her identity. That was the agreement. But it might not be wise to let her know who she is, unless she knows already; nor who is looking for her — you see, my mother has no actual obligation. Do you get my meaning?”
“No, sir.” Annie Weems understood perfectly. Joe knew she did. However she was entitled to insist on clarity.
“I mean,” he said, “she may be better off in India. Having been brought up in this country among colored people, she might be like a fish out of water in the United States. If she should happen to learn she is being looked for, she might jump to false conclusions. She has no legal claim on us — none whatever.”
“You would like to look her over, so to speak, without her knowing why?”
“That’s it,” said Joe.
“You would need to be far more clever than I have any right to suppose you are,” Annie Weems answered. “She is neither deaf, dumb, blind nor unintelligent. I have had her in this school, at intervals, for nearly sixteen years. I have not yet learned how to deceive her, or to keep her uninformed about anything that has stirred her interest. However, you can try.”
“Does she talk English?” Joe asked nervously. “I mean—” “You are afraid of a chi-chi accent? If she has one I can’t detect it. Of course, my ear may be ruined by long association with Indian children. But I taught her to sing at this piano. She has recited, and acted, most of the female parts from Shakespeare, in this room. She has also read such parts of the Bible as are fit for decent folk. I can’t detect a trace of accent.”
“How long have you known she was not an Indian child?” Joe asked her.
“From the beginning.”
“Did no one else know?”
“Others did. Some temple priests, for instance. She has been partly brought up in the temple. The priests have been very kind to her.”
“Couldn’t you have saved her from that?” Joe asked. He kept the note of horror from his voice, but it found means to express itself — vibration, probably.
“You would have had me turn her over to the Government?”
“I suppose, something of that sort.”
“They would have sent her to one of the Government schools, or to a mission orphanage,” said Annie Weems.
“Are those so terrible!”
“Prisons.” She pursed her lips. “They are sometimes sanitary. They are places where children are taught to be hypocrites — cowardly thinkers, thoroughly mistrusting anything that has spiritual value. I tried to save her from that fate — so have the priests.”
“Is she a Christian?”
“I know no way of answering that. You must wait until you get an opportunity to ask God, that is to say, if it is any of your business.”
Annie Weems was becoming belligerent; the blue eyes glistened with enjoyment of the pugnacity at the corners of her mouth. Joe declined combat. He had tact enough to retire gracefully, and sense of strategy enough to leave that kind of conversation to his mother.
“She sounds interesting,” he said. “I don’t doubt she is a credit to your care and teaching. I would like to see her at your convenience. Meanwhile, Hawkes said something about proofs of her identity.”
Annie Weems glanced at Hawkes, who nodded and stood up, hesitated and then started for the front door.
“See that she cleans her feet, and don’t admit that person with the cobras. I will not have them or him in my house.”
“Yes, Miss.”
Hawkes strode out. His clean white uniform looked somehow dirty in that spotless room. But that, perhaps, was produced by suggestion; if one could judge by his eye and the set of his mouth, the reference to Judas Iscariot had bitten more than skin-deep.
