Читать книгу The Thunder Dragon Gate - Talbot Mundy - Страница 4

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ALL London was streaming homeward for the night. The limousine with its oddly assorted passengers sped along streets that were rivers of liquid fire, with the traffic incredibly borne on the surface. They stopped for several minutes at a wine shop favorably known to Mayor, whence Tom Grayne emerged with a brown paper parcel. Thence they headed for Kew and the River, where Tom gave intricate directions to the chauffeur, and at last they had to leave the limousine to thread their way on foot, in almost darkness, through pools of slush, beneath dripping eaves. O'Mally didn't seem to mind that his top hat was being ruined, but Mayor was plaintive; he had to be lent a hand along the slippery and rather rotten planking of a wharf. But at the end of the wharf was shelter.

Tom unlocked the door of what looked in the dark like a fish- or net-shed. But when he lighted a couple of oil lamps the place was cosy enough. There was a big stove; he had that going in a minute. There was everything a man of Tom Grayne's disposition needed, and nothing he didn't need. Bunks, cooking-pots, shelves of books, a sink, two tables, a few chairs, two big lockers.

"Umn! No woman, eh," O'Mally remarked.

"Good job, too," said Mayor. "Can you imagine the kind of woman Grayne would select?"

"He would choose an actress," said O'Mally. "Each of them would try to make the other famous and there'd be the usual divorce. Or am I in poor form this evening?"

"Some one died on you?" Mayor asked.

"This place," said Tom, "was rented by a retired sea captain, who fixed it up to suit himself. But some one thought he had money and murdered him. He died on that bunk with his throat cut, and I read about it in the paper—front-page illustration with an X to mark the spot, and so on—three-day mystery. I came to look and found the landlord sure he'd never get another tenant because people are afraid of ghosts. So I rented it cheap."

"And the ghosts?" asked Mayor.

Thö-pa-ga shuddered. Tom was already cooking supper. Coffee was on. A pot of stew was simmering and beginning to smell delicious. Tom laid the table. Mayor opened the paper package.

"I told you Chateau Yquem!"

"I liked the shape of those bottles better. It's Berncasteler Doktor '21. Help yourself."

O'Mally took the corkscrew from its nail on the wall and pulled a cork expertly. He shook down his clinical thermometer and inserted it in the neck of the bottle.

"Good enough," he remarked after a minute. "I am now in no hurry."

"No more patients?" Mayor asked. "Have they all found you out?"

"I am on vacation—first in nearly four years. I catch the eight o'clock boat train for Harwich to-morrow evening. Going to Moscow. A man of whom I'm jealous has cut off a dog's head and kept it alive for three days, during which it eats and reacts to sight and sound. That interests me. Where's a wine glass? These they?" He produced cut glasses from an old sea captain's wine chest. "Are they clean?"

"Boiled."

"What's that delicious smell?" asked Mayor.

"Lobster mulligan. Or do you mean the toasted barley? I eat barley. So, I think, will our friend."

Mayor was pulling off his boots and socks. Thö-pa-ga was doing nothing, saying nothing, seated on one of the bunks with the palms of his hands on the edge, as if he expected to have to jump up at a second's notice.

"May I have that dish-pan nearly full of hot water, and then some mustard," said Mayor. "Unlike O'Mally, I'm important. Serious things might happen if I were to catch a bad cold."

O'Mally filled a wine glass. "Yes," he said, "if you should die, and this mysterious gentleman from Tibet should take it into his head to disappear, they would confiscate the house you have pledged as security." He walked over to the Tibetan. "Drink this."

Thö-pa-ga shook his head.

"Abstainer? Never mind. It's medicine. Drink it"

"What do you suppose is wrong with him?" Tom Grayne asked, stirring the mulligan.

"I know," O'Mally answered. "It requires no thought whatever. Come along, young fellow—you understand English, don't you? Drink this."

The Tibetan hesitated, smiled wistfully and then suddenly obeyed. He swallowed the wine at a gulp. The wind howled under the eaves and he shuddered either at that or at the feel of the wine as it went down. O'Mally nodded.

"My professional advice would be: return as soon as possible to Tibet." He was watching Thö-pa-ga's eyes. "He will talk presently. He has been wanting to talk all the way from Bow Street. He has been thoroughly frightened, and he is suffering from—"

"Words of one syllable, please!" said Mayor. "I can use twenty-one-syllable Sanskrit words, but mine mean something." Mayor was sloshing his feet in the dish-pan and the steam from the hot mustard-and-water had dimmed his spectacles. He wiped them, to watch Thö-pa-ga.

"He is suffering from being too near sea level," said O'Mally. "If he really is from Tibet, he is used to a minimum altitude of twelve or fourteen thousand feet. It is as if he had taken to deep-sea diving without the proper physique and training. Barometric pressure for prolonged periods, plus a constitutional lack of resistance to micro-organisms that don't exist at high altitudes, produce a mental and physical change. But those are a vicious circle; one produces the other. He will die if he doesn't return to Tibet."

"I would rather die," Thö-pa-ga said suddenly, in good English. The wind howled. They all shuddered.

"Damn our English climate!" Mayor exclaimed. "They say it's worse in Tibet, but I don't believe it!" It wasn't the wind that had made him shudder. He knew that.

Tom Grayne struck the stew-pot with an iron spoon:

"Yesterday's mulligan, warmed up—canned soup added—homemade barley bread baked by a Stornoway fisherman's widow, New Zealand butter, American cheese, celery and white wine. Come and get it."

They drew up chairs to the table. Thö-pa-ga elected to eat mulligan. Tom Grayne munched barley alone.

"Wise enough, if you vary your diet now and then. But it's hell to be wise," said O'Mally. "Are you in training?"

"Yes, for Tibet. The important thing is not to eat too often. Discipline your belly."

"Don't forget the sugar. When do you go to Tibet?"

There was no time to answer. There came a peremptory knock at the door. It sounded authoritative, like a police man's, only there was a suggestion of deliberate rhythm, as if it might be a prearranged signal. A weird howl of wind drove squalling rain against the side of the hut. Beneath, the river sucked and splashed amid wharf-piles. Thö-pa-ga froze motionless.

"Now I understand why I came," O'Mally remarked. He poured wine for Thö-pa-ga. "This is very interesting."

Tom Grayne went to the door and opened a peephole. He could see nothing; it was all dark outside.

"Who's there?" he demanded.

No answer. No sound outside except wind and splash.

"Perhaps your chauffeur?"

"No," said O'Mally, "I sent him home. Can you open the door without cooling the stew?"

Mayor pulled a blanket from the bunk behind him and wrapped it around his knees. Tom Grayne tried to open the door only a few inches, against the wind. A hand seized it—wrenched it suddenly. A man crashed into him, thrusting him backward on his heels. The door slammed. It was Dr. Noropa, in his dripping black waterproof. He turned calmly and bolted the door.

"Give me some more of that excellent stew before he murders us," said Mayor.

O'Mally snorted: "Don't talk nonsense. Grayne can lick him. I can help, if necessary."

Thö-pa-ga neither moved nor seemed to breathe; he stared straight in front of him. He looked guilty of something and ready for death. There was silence for probably sixty seconds. Then, from the midst of a circle of rain from his dripping waterproof, the gaunt Noropa spoke:

"I come to tell you Thö-pa-ga is time-is-come. If you know what is shang-shang, you will let him alone. Thö-pa-ga must go home."

"Well, he should," said O'Mally. "But who are you?"

"I know who you are," Noropa answered. He looked at Mayor. "And I know who you are." Then, at last he met Tom Grayne's eyes. "You, who should know better, having been in Tibet, do you wish a shang-shang sending?"

"Yes. I never saw one. Send the thing by parcel post. Get out of here."

Noropa's death-like face betrayed no emotion. Tom Grayne slid the bolt and Noropa walked out, forcing the door open against the wind with such prodigious strength that he seemed hardly to have to exert himself.

The door slammed. Then suddenly Thö-pa-ga gulped wine and shook off silence. He seemed unconscious of O'Mally's professional critical gaze. His left hand rested on the table, but he seemed not even aware that O'Mally's fingers touched his wrist. He spoke, if to any one at all, to Mayor:

"You, who are kind to a stranger, you don't know. Me they will not kill. Because me they need for purposes. But you they will make away with by magical means. That is to say, if you befriend me. It is therefore not seemly for me to have friends, because I get them into trouble."

"Oh, come now, come," said Mayor. "The police at Bow Street showed me your record. You're an Oxford graduate. You surely don't believe in magic."

"You mean, you don't," said O'Mally. "Early environment, early associations, ill health, worry, nostalgia, and persecution—don't overlook that—readily produce receptivity to hypnotic suggestion. Those are words of one syllable, more or less. They're all in the dictionary. Have you caught cold?"

"No," said Mayor.

"That was magic. Before you were put into knickerbockers, your mother or your maiden aunt or your nurse told you a hot mustard foot-bath would prevent colds in the head. It won't, of course. But it did, didn't it? Don't interrupt him—go on talking, Thö-pa-ga. Who are you? Why are you in London?"

"I am of a sub-sept of the Josays Sept of the Kyungpo. It is a secret sub-sept, and my father, who was a nobleman, was Keeper of the Thunder Dragon Gate, of which you have never heard."

"Oh, yes, indeed we've heard of it," said Mayor. "Tom Grayne knows as well as you or I do, it's a figure of speech. It means a state of consciousness, through which the Arhants* have to pass on the Road to Enlightenment. It is referred to in the New Testament as the Eye of a Needle."

[ *Arhant, arhat (Sanskrit: enlightened one) —a Bhuddist who has realized certain high stages of attainment. The implications of the term vary based on the respective schools and traditions. ]

"That," said Thö-pa-ga, "is what you may have read in books, or what you have deduced. But what I know is other wise, and so I warn you. When my father had died and my mother was made to go into a nunnery, I wished never to become the Keeper of the Thunder Dragon Gate, although they said I had inherited my father's spirit and his duty also. There was an Englishman who came to Lhasa, a very kind man who represented the Indian Government. I ran away and asked that Englishman to give me work to do. He begged my freedom from the Dalai Lama. There was money. It was simple. I was sent to Oxford for an education, and I have it. But before I reached Oxford, he who had done me that great kindness was already dead—they said, of poison. And at Oxford there began to be a very soon beginning of a shang-shang sending not at all a mystery to me."

The blinded window-pane above the back of Mayor's head smashed suddenly—three distinct crashes of splintering glass. The wine bottle broke into a dozen pieces. The mulligan stew-pot fell off the stove to the floor. O'Mally stared at his top hat, on a nail on the wall. There was a hole through it.

"This is London, England," O'Mally remarked. "Or am I dreaming?"

Tom Grayne took a flash-light from the locker, leaned his weight against the wind-blown door and walked out.

"They will not kill me," said Thö-pa-ga, "because they need me for a purpose. But they will kill you—each of you and every one."

"Who are 'they'?" asked Mayor.

O'Mally reached for his top hat. "Exactly! Who are they? Does a shang-shang spit a soft-nose Webley bullet? Go on—don't interrupt him, Mayor—tell us. I wish now I weren't going to Russia."