Читать книгу Black Light - Talbot Mundy - Страница 5

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The dusty moonlit road toward Cummings' bungalow led between slattern walls and ill-kempt gardens, through a grove of trees that had been blackened by the fires of vagrants and nibbled by goats into naked poverty —on past cheap pretentious cottages of Eurasians—past shuttered shops and littered byways where the Christians did business and a Catholic chapel, neat and lean and hungry-looking, raised a crucifix above a white iron roof. Then past the park, so called, where a caged tiger lay dreaming of life with his paws through the bars and his white teeth agleam in a grin of despair made monstrous by the moonlight. On past the club and the tennis courts—the mean hotel "for Europeans only," in a compound in which white-clad servants slept like corpses under trees that cast mottled shadows.

Joe was conscious of being followed. He supposed that the man with the basket of snakes, and the ayah, were taking advantage of his company for the protection it might give them; they kept far enough behind him not to intrude, near enough to be heard if they should cry for help, walking one on each side of the road like ghosts who did not like each other but were wafted on the same slow wind. He glanced over his shoulder at them only once or twice, afraid that if he glanced too often they might take that for an invitation to draw nearer. It occurred to him once that they might be spying on him. He stopped to see if they would stop. But they came on, so he dismissed the thought and continued on his way, his shoes white with dust and his thoughts black with boredom.

He resented being bored, it seemed so stupid. He knew that with his tastes and spiritual equipment he should find life fascinating. He was offended because he did not—even more offended because he vaguely understood the reason, and whose fault it was.

"There's nobody to blame but me," he muttered. Nevertheless, he knew that to throw up everything and leave his mother to find some other vizier of her despotism, would solve nothing. Running away would merely substitute for his mother's tyranny an even more degrading one of laziness and fear. It was not business he dreaded. He well knew there is poetry in commerce, art in high finance and music in the melody and flow of manufacture; as a matter of actual fact, and with only a few exceptions, he had found the conversation of artists even more platitudinous and dull than that of his business intimates.

"Bankers, bishops, band-wagon conductors—painters and musicians —doctors—scientists—politicians—writers —nearly all of 'em are paralyzed by public opinion. It kills 'em if they dare to stick their head out of the herd-thought and—got it, by God! I've got it! My mother is herd-thought individualized!"

He began to walk faster, with more resilience in his stride. He had begun to understand his enemy. "I've been tilting at windmills," he muttered. "No more windmills!" Once Joe Beddington had grasped the nature of a mistake he was not given to repeating it, although he would deliberately repeat one again and again until he understood it. He was built that way—so constituted. It was that that had made him suffer so beneath his mother's yoke. He had not understood her. He had sometimes thought she was a devil in a human skin. Not less frequently he had suspected himself of being one, since who else than a devil could hate his own mother? He had wasted breath and patience trying to argue with her. And he had feared her. "Might as well try to argue with the sea—be afraid of the sea.

"Public opinion? Wow! The thing to do with that stuff is to make it —mold it—navigate it. Look out for the tides and storms and currents. I can do it. Damn, I understand her now, I've been a blind superstitious idiot!"

He walked faster, leaving Chandri Lal and the ayah far behind him. He had forgotten the temple ceremony and the Yogi. He had forgotten Hawkes.

"She's public opinion. She's it, idealized. Greedy—fat— cunning—tyrannical—cruel—jealous—envious —intolerant—a hypocrite—a coward—opportunist —liar. She is all that—and yet she isn't. I've got to separate 'em in my mind. How come? That needs puzzling out."

He was excited. He had forgotten boredom. He had forgotten the dull inertia that usually crept into some corner of his brain when he thought of his mother. He had seen, as it were, a crack between her and her despotism, into which he could drive, he believed, his new-found wedge. It did not occur to him that he was using arguments familiar to king's sons, to rebels against the divine right of kings, and to all the archiconoclasts of history. It seemed to him he was the first discoverer of something new.

"Mother," he said to himself, "is a victim. It isn't she who uses power. Power uses her."

In a flash, as a man sees in a dream cause and effect and process simultaneously, he discerned the tactics and the strategy that he must use.

"Separate her from the power in my own mind. She's my mother. It isn't. It isn't a disease exactly, but call it one for the sake of clarity. It causes a disease. She's as good as mad this minute—mad with a cold intelligence that outwits anything human, her own humanity included. It's as merciless to her as to any one else; it makes her ridiculous as well as greedy—makes her stupid in her hour of triumph. Good God! How stupid I'vebeen. The thing for me to do, from now on, is to attack it, not her—and not to attack it like a damned fool and be overwhelmed. Guile—subtlety—" Absorbed in thought he walked beyond the lane between the bougainvilleas, where the sign-board bearing Cummings, the district collector's name, was clearly legible in the moonlight.

"God, but I'll need to be subtle!" He noticed he had walked too far, and turned back. "She's on its side. It's her God and her glory. Give her half a hint that I'm awake at last, and she'll kill me as she killed Dad. He was half awake before the end. I think he knew she killed him. She broke his will. That broke his health. She make him sign that trust deed and then put him on his back and hired three nurses." He laughed a little. "Funny I never thought of that before. How many doctors—five?—six? And they couldn't agree what to call the disease. I can name it for them. Octopus-itis! She strangled his will. He simply quit and left her victrix on a bloodless battle-field. Bloodless? He hadn't a drop of blood left in him. I wonder if he loved her. I don't. But I don't hate her any longer. And I won't quit. I'll be damned if I'll quit."

He turned up the lane between the bougainvilleas—a narrow curved lane rising steeply to the garden surrounding Cummings' bungalow. The gate was open; he made scarcely a sound as he entered because the dust lay deep on the tiles of the garden path. The bungalow faced eastward and the garden gate was to the south, so that he had to approach one end of the long verandah, where there was a screen of painted reeds to provide privacy; that and the shadows combined to make him invisible from the verandah or from the windows in front of the house. He had no intention of eavesdropping, but his mother's voice was too distinct not to be recognized; and to that he had been forced to listen since he was a child. It was a habit.

"What would life be without our illusions? And who knows that the illusions are not more genuine than what we think is real?"

Then the voice of Cummings: "Stark reality—stark reality— sordid grim reality—that is the life of a Government official, Mrs. Beddington. If I had one illusion left, I would not know what to do with it."

His mother: "When I was a little girl my dolls provided the illusion. I had a boy-doll that was the inspiration for most of my dreams. I have that doll even to-day, tucked away in a drawer. Sawdust, I suppose you will say —a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit—a yellow wig—a wax face, with the paint gone where I kissed it—diamond buckles made of cheap glass—one eye missing. But around that doll I built my dreams of a prince charming who should come into my life and make it romantic."

"Did he?"

"Not yet. I am like Queen Elizabeth, still hoping. Money, yes. Mr. Beddington possessed the gift of making money. He could think of nothing else. We were not romantic."

"Money, to me," said Cummings, "is the most romantic theme on earth. Money —the blood of nations—the key to independence—the essence of power. They tell you money can't buy happiness. I say it can."

Sharply: "Is that you, Joe?"

Joe mounted the steps. He merely nodded to Cummings—understood him, and lacked enough hypocrisy to pretend to feel more than tolerantly civil. But he stared at his mother. She was full in moonlight, all two hundred pounds of her, in a dress that he knew had made a modiste nearly frantic; she invariably wore out any one who waited on her; her gowns were trophies wrung from defeated artistes whose profit was gone in time and overtime, and whose bills were paid when Mrs. Beddington saw fit. Such ingrates sometimes even sued her.

She looked magnificent. Joe knew she had saved that dress for an "occasion." Her conversation, too, was the sort that she reserved for disarming strangers when she had drastic ends in view. He wondered what design she had on Cummings. He could see at a glance that she had pumped him to a point where she knew the exact limits of his imagination and could foresee to a fraction how he would react to any given impulse. She would presently provide the impulse—not that that made any difference, or was of the slightest interest to her son; but he could not help wondering why she should waste her arts on such a futile person.

"Ready to go to the hotel, Mother? Shall I call for the rickshaw?"

"Not yet. I was telling Mr. Cummings—" "Sit down, Beddington. Sit down and have a whisky with us. What's your hurry? You Americans are always on the run, and what on earth do you gain by it? I understand you even hurry to your funerals in a motor-hearse. I think that comical. If you hurried off to bed now, you would probably only lie awake inventing a way of doing twice as much in half the time to-morrow."

"Probably," said Joe. "The mistake, of course, that we made was to insist on independence. We ought to have kissed King George on both cheeks. Then we'd have been taught, like India, how to behave."

He was sorry at once that he had said it. Cummings was too futile to be worth snubbing and too dull to enjoy an argument with, but an argument now was inevitable; he had invited one; and, what made it worse, he could see that he had played into his mother's hand in some way. Desperately he sought to switch the conversation to another subject:

"Tell me about the nautch-girls at that temple."

Cummings jumped at that. He was the type that loves to display familiarity with subjects on which he can't be checked up every easily. It opened the way too, for a retort:

"Don't try making love to them. Be advised by me and control your curiosity and instincts, both, as long as you stay here."

Joe let that pass.

Cummings looked pleased with himself and exchanged a glance with Joe's mother. Middle-aged, fat bachelor he might be, but he knew how to give a younger man the right cue at the proper moment. He desired her to appreciate it, and apparently she did; she could disguise her feelings from almost any one except her son, who looked the other way. Joe yawned and Cummings cleared his throat:

"Those are very unusual nautch-girls. There are none other like them in India. Generally speaking, I regret to say, the Indian nautch-girls are a blot on the country's reputation. They're a problem very difficult for us to deal with. They're a social evil so protected by religious custom and priestly privilege that no government can do anything about it. They belong to the temple. They're married to trees or to graven images. Their morals generally speaking—judged, that is, by our standards—are —well—they haven't any."

"How are they recruited?" Joe asked.

"All sorts of ways. Many of them are the daughters of nautch-girls. Some are the daughters of well-to-do, high-caste Indians who dedicate them to the temple, usually along with an endowment. Some of them—the less privileged ones—are child-widows, who are given that means of escape from the otherwise deadly existence of the Hindu widow, who becomes the slave of her husband's parents. A few of them are the daughters of wealthy public prostitutes. As a rule they are all intensively trained, extremely highly educated in the legendary mysticism of the cult to which they are attached, good-looking—and more wicked than you could readily make yourself believe."

"Those girls I saw to-night," said Joe, "were marvelous. I've seen convent children in the States who looked much less spiritual. Loose women don't look as they did—at least, not any that I ever saw."

Cummings suppressed the interruption with a fatly important hand:

"I was coming to that. This temple is unique. It is very ancient and was formerly Buddhist. A century or so ago its Hindu priests were partly reconverted to the Buddhist teaching. Blending one traditional philosophy with another, as I understand it, they were able to discard the grosser forms of superstition and retain the essence of both teachings, with the result that something new and very remarkably good grew out of it. They retained the secrecy, but not the exclusiveness—to some extent the theory of caste, but not its system. I am told they sent some very highly educated priests to Europe to study the better known types of Christianity, from which they learned a great deal. To this day they are astonishingly tolerant of Christian missionaries. They own all the land hereabouts and could have made it next to impossible for Christian missionaries to obtain a foothold; but what they actually did was to let them have land for schools and so on at a rent so nominal that it amounted to a gift. They're funny. I believe they're trying to convert the missionaries. But they won't let any outsider inside their temple, and they're rather touchy about strangers witnessing their temple rites. They're on very good terms, by the way, with the Catholic priest, who has established a hospital, to which they contribute very liberally from the temple funds."

Mrs. Beddington purred. She almost looked like a well fed cat when there was a mouse to be coaxed within reach of her paws. Her bulk seemed all softly luxurious comfort. She exuded invitation and appreciation. Her son might recognize, even by lamplight, a certain hard glint in her eyes; but a mouse, such as Cummings, saw nothing but generous instincts oozing from a rather handsome widow.

"Oh, how fascinating, Mr. Cummings! What a wonderful life you must lead, with all this opportunity to study life's drama! Most of us waste our lives, don't we? You should write a book—truly you should."

"Ah!" remarked Cummings, but he deceived no one, not even himself. He was much too lazy mentally to write anything except a cut-and-dried report. However, he enjoyed the flattery. Joe wondered again why his mother possibly could wish to ensnare such a futile person—and again, from habit, not from sympathy, he straightway played into her hand.

"My mother loves to look into the guts of things," he volunteered.

Cummings blinked; he thought the expression coarse; he was already unconsciously taking the side of the mother against the son. "Your mother strikes me as a very able woman, if I may say so without offense. It's rare to find intelligence and great wealth under the same hat, so to speak. If I had had such a mother as yours, I think I would have had more of a career." The imputation that Joe Beddington was a loafer in his estimation was only vaguely veiled.

Joe glanced at his mother and smiled to himself. He changed the subject, abruptly:

"I'd like to see the inside of that temple."

"Impossible, my dear man, so it's no use wishing. But why see it? Gloom —dirt—images of gods on ancient walls—obscene— monstrous—stupid. There are lots of other places where you can see it all, price two rupees, and a picture post-card thrown in."

"You know, I suppose."

"I can guess. One doesn't live in India for twenty-five years without knowing what temples are like. Archeology, in my humble opinion, is an over-rated subject. It's like art in general, which got the Greeks nowhere —got China, Egypt, India nowhere. Art, I take it, is a sign of decadence. As soon as a nation takes up art it goes to pieces and gets conquered."

It was aimed, of course, at Joe. Joe's mother understood, and relished it.

"Joe, I think, would rather be an artist than a business man," she remarked. "He paints really quite beautifully when he has the time."

It was a favorite trick of hers to tempt confidence and sympathy by hinting that her only son was a disappointing person. She was equally ready at any moment to advertise him as the greatest genius alive. It all depended on the circumstances and the view-point of her victim. Joe wondered again what she could see worth conquering in Cummings; he knew that her perception was uncanny and her sense for intrigue and strategy Bismarckian; but why pick such a specimen as Cummings? Why waste genius? He gave it up.

"Let's go home to bed," he suggested, yawning. "Shall I shout for the rickshaw?"

Mrs. Beddington decided she would walk. Perhaps she wished to intimate to Cummings that she could walk in spite of her weight. Joe knew that she hated to have dust invade her shoes. However, it was only a short way to the hotel; if she should turn bad-tempered he could endure it during those few minutes. He nodded to Cummings—shook hands, since Cummings seemed to wish that —and waited at the foot of the verandah steps, signing to the sleepy rickshaw coolies to go along home. His mother was in no haste:

"A delightful evening. What a time we two had until that gloomy person interrupted us! Imagine my telling you all about my dolls! It must have been the magic of the moonlight and your hospitality. Some day you must tell me all about the princess you have cherished in your dreams—I believe you're as romantic as I am under that proconsular mask of yours."

Cummings almost writhed with pleasure at being likened to a grim proconsul. He had missed promotion. He was a little lucky if the truth were known, not to have been sent home last year on his half-pay.

"Romantic?" he answered. He would be anything to please her, but it was hard to think of phrases on the spur of the moment. "Ah, but I have never dared to speak of it."

"You shall tell me," said Mrs. Beddington. "Confess—you owe me that revenge. Besides, it will do you good to talk of it. Romance dies, if it is not shared with some one. And romance is good for all of us. Good night."

On the way home Joe kept silence until his mother paused to kick the dust out of her shoes, holding his shoulder to balance herself. "Joe," she remarked suddenly, "I wish you could be more polite to people. You were positively rude to that man. It was disgraceful. Why, you couldn't even shake hands without scowling."

"He's such an ass," Joe answered.

"He is nothing of the kind. I like him."

"Mother, you know he's an ass. What are you planning? To make him find that purely hypothetical cholera baby? I'll bet he bungles it. Probably he'll foist a sweeper's daughter on you—or perhaps a half-caste brat with rickets and a chi-chi accent. Then what?"

Mrs. Beddington removed her other shoe, shook out its contents, replaced it and then waited for her son to kneel and fasten up the strap.

"I have all along intended you should find that child," she answered. "It will give you a chance to use those wits you are so proud of. When I have a hunch I am never far wrong. I know the child lives. I know it, I know it. So you look for her, and use all your ingenuity. Meanwhile, I will cultivate Mr. Cummings, so that in case you have to overstep the boundaries a bit there will be some one to stand between you and the lawyers."

That was one of her pet expressions. It made Joe shudder, since it always meant that she was contemplating treachery of some kind that she would not even hint at until it would be too late to prevent her. He answered grimly:

"I have taken steps already."

"You speak as if I had asked you to cut your throat. Listen, Joe. I won't have you being sulky with me. I won't stand it for a minute. If there's one thing I will not endure, it's disloyalty. Your father knew you all right when he had that deed drawn. He knew what he was doing when he put that clause in giving me the right to cut you off by a stroke of a pen without a nickel. One would think, to see your long face, that you were jealous of a child you'd never seen."

Joe laughed. "Come on, Mother," he said, "there's pen and ink at the hotel. Cut me off and set me free. I'll be so grateful that—" She interrupted him. "Joe, I'm nervous. Can't you see I need comforting? Are you so mean you won't oblige me during the few years I have to live? Isn't it soon enough to be independent when I'm dead and gone? Do you wish me dead?"

He yielded—put his arm around her. She was as well as he was, and he knew it. She was insincere; he knew that also. But whenever she ceased threatening and coaxed him, there always stole over him that feeling of helplessness that was so like the effect of a drug that it made him feel worthless—even wicked. He had to take an antidote for it; when his mother had gone to bed he carried out a chair into the compound and made charcoal sketches of servants sleeping in the shadows under gaunt wind-twisted trees.