Читать книгу Old Ugly-Face - Talbot Mundy - Страница 11

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Elsa's bazaar-bought raincoat made a pool around her feet on the floor of Nancy Strong's hallway. The turbaned servant who hung up the raincoat and knelt to wipe her wet shoes clucked solicitous comment. He was used to all kinds of people—even well-bred, gently mannered people in inexpensive clothes, who came without warning in the rain, at unconscionable hours. But why no galoshes? Why were her shoes not wetter than they were? If she hadn't walked, how had she got there? The effort of suppressing the urge to ask questions so occupied his mind that he forgot his manners and left her standing in the hall while he switched on the light in the living-room and frugally added pine knots to the blazing fire.

The hall was lined on both sides with books in shelves about shoulder- high; on the wall above those were plainly framed photographs of ex-pupils of Nancy's school. Tibet, Nepal and every province of India were represented. On top of the shelves were statuettes, done in clay by the pupils and baked in the school kiln. Some of them were very revealing portraits of Nancy Strong as seen through the eyes of attentive, inquisitive Indian youth. No two alike —even remotely alike—and yet all unmistakably Nancy Strong in one mood or another.

Elsa felt relieved that Nancy wasn't there to receive her. She needed time, after a wild ride through the rain with Dr. Lewis in Bulah Singh's car, to subdue emotions that made her heart beat quickly and her head feel almost like someone else's, full of unfamiliar thought that she recognized nevertheless as her own. She admired Nancy Strong, but she was conscious of being on guard against her. She even liked her. But she didn't quite trust her. Not quite. There was something about Nancy that always made her feel shy and reserved. Perhaps it was the school-teacher quality. It was a superficial manner, because Nancy had no unpleasant mannerisms. It was more likely a habit of thought, concealed but evident to Elsa's sensitive perception. Her perception was much too sensitive. Elsa knew it. She was always much too careful, and perhaps afraid, of meeting other people's minds in unmasked conflict. Each time she had met Nancy hitherto she hid always felt vaguely antagonistic, almost sulkily disposed to cover up her own thought and talk superficially, which she could do very well when she wanted to. Sometimes Nancy even made her feel like a small animal that creeps into its hole and watches, listens, wonders what next?

So when the servant ushered her into the vast living room she made an effort of will to be natural, at ease, and confident of welcome. It didn't quite work. But she achieved some success. The servant seemed to notice it. He smiled at her as he fussed around rearranging ashtrays, watching her furtively, waiting for her to sit down before going to summon his employer. She chose a chair near the door. But the moment he left the room she got up again and looked about her, as it were feeling for Nancy's atmosphere in order to meet her on even ground.

There was surely no other room in the world quite like that one. In the middle of the long wall opposite the door was a huge stone fireplace. In a horseshoe around that, within an oblong barricade of bookshelves, were large old-fashioned, overstuffed armchairs, each with a footstool and a small end- table beside it. The fire shone hospitably through an opening between the bookshelves, which were placed back to back, so that books faced both ways, inward toward the fireplace and outward toward the room. Outside that homelike, snug enclosure the room resembled almost a museum, except for touches of humor and a sensation of being lived in. The carpet was from Samarkand, too good to tread on. The curtains were from Lhasa, Bukhara and Peking. The walls were hung with Tibetan sacred paintings and some of Nancy Strong's own, less sacred but strongly unsentimental watercolors, of which the most noticeable was a portrait of the late Dalai Lama. There were devil-masks, Tibetan weapons, bronze bells, dories, silk embroidery and weird musical instruments. At one end of the room was a black grand piano that threw everything else out of balance. Its top was a maze of framed photographs. Elsa went up and studied them, growing mentally more confused and uncertain of Nancy's point of view as she looked, and remembered chance remarks, and guessed, and tried to imagine Nancy Strong in such strangely assorted company.

Three were of Viceroys. There was Lord Kitchener in Commander in Chief's uniform. The ex-Kaiser, alongside Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher and the weirdly bearded Von Tirpitz. General Lord Allenby. An archbishop, a cardinal, two bishops. King George and Queen Mary. Senator Borah. General Smuts. Sun Yat-Sen. Gandhi. President Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt side by side. Mary Pickford, Will Rogers. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Sven Hedin. General Younghusband. And no less than eleven Indian ruling princes. All autographed, and many of them bearing written record of affection.

But the most remarkable object in the room stood alone, on a small teak table, exactly midway between the door and the fireplace. One had to walk around it to reach the opening in the oblong screen of bookshelves. It was a much enlarged head and shoulder portrait of the Ringding Gelong Lama Lobsang Pun, known in Tibetan and English, and to friend and enemy alike, as Old Ugly-face. The portrait started floods of memories pouring into Elsa's mind, although it had been obviously taken long before she met him, in the days when he was reasonably thin and coming to be recognized in Far East diplomatic circles as the new enigma.

There was a magnificent cat on the hearth, with its back to the fire in feline recognition of the fact that the rain had only temporarily ceased. He would turn his face to the fire again when the rain resumed. Meanwhile, he studied Elsa with Sphinx-like detachment. His face looked something like Lobsang Pun's in the silver-framed photograph. It was only a vague resemblance, but there it was. You could look at either of them and catch yourself thinking about the other—wondering how many birds the cat had killed—how many secrets Old Ugly-face knew.

Elsa went and sat down by the fire. She made friendly overtures to the cat. But the cat took no notice, any more than Lobsang Pun would have done. So she leaned back and stared at the fire, thinking about Lobsang Pun, as she last saw him, at the Thunder Dragon Gate in Tibet. But she began to see Bulah Singh's face, growing larger and larger amid the burning pine knots. That was no good. It didn't frighten her, but it made her feel vaguely guilty of forgetting something that she should remember—secretly guilty of liking a man whom really she intensely disliked. To throw off that sensation and get her mind on something else she turned sideways in the armchair to glance at the rows of books, pulling out a few at random from the nearest shelf behind her. Aristotle, Lord Derby's Homer, Plato, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. She returned them and tried again, kneeling on the chair to read the titles: the Upanishads, Freud, St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians in Greek, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, the Psalms in English, the second volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in German. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Tennyson, Browning, the Bhagavad-Gita, a whole set of Dickens, the Intimate Papers of Colonel House, a set of Shakespeare, Hitler's Mein Kampf in German, the Bible, the Koran—

Elsa heard the door open. She jumped out of the chair, hurriedly straightened her skirt and went and stood in the opening between the bookcases, silhouetted with her back to the firelight, feeling rather like a bewildered child and not at all sure she was welcome.