Читать книгу Black Light - Talbot Mundy - Страница 8

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Joe always had hated to dine with his mother alone. Fortunately there was a bottle of not-so-bad Madeira. Joe's mother drank two-thirds of it. Joe kept filling her glass; she sometimes became good-tempered when she drank too much—she even let pass opportunities to poison hope with cynicism. So he kept on pouring and did not even mention Annie Weems. There was a sort of silent laughter deep within him. He was so absorbed by his own line of thought that he had to jerk himself out of it to listen to his mother. It was never safe not to listen to her.

"Mr. Cummings told me, by the way, that it's useless to try to find the Wilburforce's child. If she's alive, which he doubts, she'd be beyond hope of redemption—probably Mahommedan or Hindu, with three or four half-caste children of her own already and an inferiority complex like a stray cat's. He says white children raised by natives in this climate lose all sense of honesty and moral stamina. She'd be too old to be educated and too familiar with vice to be safe with anybody's children. I can't see myself taking that sort of young person back to the States with us, even if the immigration people would permit it. I believe we'd better leave her to the gods, as Mr. Cummings phrased it. What do you propose to do to-night?"

"Moonlight sketches."

He said that through his teeth, with eyelids lowered. He cracked nuts swiftly, finding one at last that he could pass to her: "Here you are— all the way from Brazil—but don't ask why." He knew her capable, because she knew he loved sketching, of inventing something else for him to do—for instance, find a doctor for imaginary, agonizing ailments. He had hard work not to betray relief when she seemed hardly to notice his answer—although he knew she weighed it and passed judgment on it before almost casually saying what, in turn, she wished him to believe.

"I'm so tired—I suppose I ought to go to bed. However, Mr. Cummings wants to show me photos of the Delhi Durbar, taken years ago. I think I'll take the rickshaw and submit to being shown."

Joe knew she was lying, although he had no doubt that Cummings wished to show his photographs. A creepy feeling down his spine warned him that she meant to make her own inquiries about the Wilburforce child and to set in motion means of legally disproving in advance the girl's identity, in case she should turn up and prove embarrassing. Thoroughly, through and through, he understood his mother's vanity and cruelty. The unfamiliar new laughter he had found within himself mocked the very nervousness that caused it.

He summoned the rickshaw, helped his mother into it and even delayed her by making her look at the violet mystery of shadows under the trees and on the compound wall. "I'd give a year's salary to be able to get that color right with oil or pastel."

"You will be a fool with money to your dying day," she retorted. "Don't disturb me if you're out late. I expect to return early and go straight to bed. Come to my room after breakfast in the morning."

And then Hawkes came, astride a Waler mare that he had borrowed, leading an Arab gelding. He was smoking his short pipe and there was about him an air of genial recklessness that was probably due to thoughts about the thousand pounds, but it suggested adventure and Joe's mood grew luxuriously free from responsibility. He told himself he did not give a damn what happened that night. He ordered two whiskies and spilled his own in the dust while Hawkes drank.

The Arab gelding moved with silky smoothness and the night was a-swim with impalpable dust made luminous by starlight. There were soft sounds at uncertain intervals, but for the most part a mystic silence enveloped everything. It was another universe, in which anything might happen except the rational and real. It seemed comfortingly familiar, and his own voice sounded, friendly fashion, like the voice of some one else—some fellow full of confident amusement.

He asked Hawkes the familiar question, that, from Greenwich Village to Darjiling, always crops up on a dark night amid strange surroundings.

"Did you ever come to a place where you knew you had never been before, yet the place was perfectly familiar and you recognized every detail of it?"

"Sure, sir, lots o' times. Once when I went with a girl near Woking and we came to a clump o' deodars. I hadn't never been in India in those days. But I saw those deodars, and smelt 'em, and I felt it was a place I'd seen. I knew what was around the corner, so to speak, and where there was a waterfall —and mountains 'way away beyond it. Funny, 'cause there ain't a waterfall near Woking and the only thing that even hints at mountains is the Surrey Downs, about eight hundred feet high. Pretty soon I forgot it. She was a girl who made a man forget things—scrumptious, but too expensive for a soldier's income. And besides, I had to be back in barracks before midnight. Anyhow, I forgot them deodars. Forgot myself, too."

"Well, what of it?" Joe rather resented sharing mystic interludes with Hawkes. He was half afraid the man would bring him back to earth with inane explanations.

"This, sir: three years later I was in India, and I was always a one for getting myself transferred to places I'm curious to see. That's quite a trick. I'm not a soldier, I'm a tourist with a liking to have my expenses paid by Government. So, 'fore long, me and Simla makes acquaintance. Presently, ten days leave; and I go pony riding, acting nursemaid to a subaltern who wants to see the sights. The subaltern goes sick with collywobbles in his tummy along o' being careless. Them Hills, as they call 'em, are tough on amateurs unless they watch their stummicks. Camp— and I've time on my hands. A full moon—deodars—and I go walking. There she is! The very sight I'd seen that night at Woking— waterfall, mountains—mist in a valley—everything. And mind you, I say, everything. There was a woman there, the very spitting image of the girl I'd loved in Woking, only this one wasn't white and couldn't speak a word of any language I knew. But she knew me as sudden as I knew her, and we stood there grinning at each other until a savage with a long knife came and took her away, she looking back at me over her shoulder. How do you account for that, sir?"

"Can't. There's no accounting for lots of things that happen. What's the noise behind us?"

"Nothing but your bodyguard, I reckon."

Joe drew rein. A moment later the sound of pattering footsteps ceased. He turned back, legged his horse into a shadow, stopped again to listen— heard labored breathing. Hawkes, drawing rein beside him, chuckled and lifted a heel to knock the ashes from his pipe.

"Come on out o' there, Amal, nobody won't hurt you."

There was a moment's pause and then the ayah stepped out from the darkness, followed after a moment by Chandri Lal. Hawkes turned a pocket flashlight on the woman; her breast was heaving and her nostrils trembled.

"Ask what in hell does she follow me for?"

Hawkes spoke to her, but she merely looked dumbly determined, nervous grin and sulky defiance alternating. There was something about her that was irritating but nevertheless respectable. Joe felt toward her as he might toward an uninvited lost dog that had adopted him.

"She won't let up, sir. Some people might try whipping her, but I'm not that kind and I don't think you are. We might gallop a bit, but we'd only make her suffer. She'd follow. She'd track us. She'd catch up. What's the odds? She's harmless."

Joe tried English: "What do you want, Amal?"

Silence. Joe's hand, feeling for support as he leaned back in the saddle to ease himself, discovered that the numnah was an over-size one that protruded about a foot behind the polo-saddle. It suggested a rather amusing notion.

"Tell her, if she's so set on following, I'll save her all the trouble. She may climb up behind if she isn't afraid."

"She, sir—she's afraid o' nothing that'd scare you and me. Her kind keep a whole seraglio of fears that couldn't scare us in a month o' Sundays. How about it, Mother?" He translated Joe's invitation.

The ayah hesitated. Chandri Lal whispered—pushed her. The whites of the ayah's eyes were like green glass in the glare of the flashlight. She struck Chandri Lal with her elbow to silence him, grinned—stepped up to Joe's stirrup. Chandri Lal lent her the use of his shoulder. She was up behind Joe in a moment, gripping with strong legs that made the Arab restless, and with a hand under Joe's arm-pit that lay like a threat on his heart; he could feel his heart beating beneath it.

"Who said anything about you, you devil?" Hawkes legged the Waler mare away from Chandri Lal.

"Can't you take him up behind you?"

"He's got them blasted cobras with him in a basket. I don't know which gives me the creeps most, he or they. Besides, he don't belong to her. He's like a leech or a louse. He's a blooming parasite, that's what he is. He's like one o' them whimpering jackals that follow a tiger."

"Ask her if she wants him."

Hawkes asked. Joe could feel the ayah's laughter; it was soundless but there was plenty of it. She spoke, though, with what sounded like anger.

"She says he's none o' her business."

"Let's go."

They began to trot, Chandri Lal following with the end of a cloth in his teeth and one hand balancing the big flat basket on his turban. Ten minutes later, when they passed a pool of light that flowed from the open door of a Eurasian's bungalow, he was still following, his bare feet padding silently in deep dust and the basket bobbing up and down like a piece of machinery.

The warmth of the ayah's body against Joe's back excited him in a way that his brain could not analyze. She kept that left hand on his heart and her right hand on his shoulder. It was as if a current flowed between them —not of electricity—a current of thought. Partly, perhaps, because his mother, not he, possessed all the family wealth, he had often told himself that possessions do not constitute importance; and as the arbiter of the destiny of hundreds of employees from vice-president downward he had very often in his own mind minimized his own importance, in order to avoid the stings of conscience on account of arbitrary cruelties that his mother had compelled him to inflict. He was only a cog in a huge machine. In theory he could readily agree with the doctrine that no individual is more important than another. Nevertheless, if he had occasion to pass judgment and act on it, he would have considered himself as a matter of fact a great deal more important than the ayah. He was now uncomfortably conscious of importance which, apparently, she had and he had not. He could not have explained it. He was merely aware of a condition.

Small groups of Eurasian loafers and Hindus gathered in doorways or around flickering firelight; their mocking, obscene laughter yelped at the sight of a sahib carrying a native woman up behind him. It was much too dark for any one to guess that she was old and undesirable; her figure was young; as a silhouette observed against crimson bonfire-light, her bare legs dimly outlined on the horse's flank and her right arm on his shoulder, she probably looked bacchanalian—beautiful—suggestive. However, he was defiant; he rather hoped he might be seen by some one of his own race, on whom his scorn would not be wasted. All the same, the ayah's vibrant warmth and the pressure of her hand on his heart made him feel disturbed and unpleasantly creepy; and for that reason, not because of onlookers, he wished he had told her to mount behind Hawkes.

They skirted the small city, passing a slaughter-house where foul birds roosted restlessly along the ridge of a near-by roof. Then they turned to the right through mean streets, where men and women slept in sheeted rows on pallets on the sidewalk to avoid the infernal heat of the unventilated rooms. Just as the moon was rising a street widened, became near-respectable and flowed like a spreading estuary into a paved square that had flower-beds in the midst, and a fountain, and a few well-tended trees. Along the far side was a high stone wall and a sentry-box to one side of an iron-bossed wooden gate that had spikes at the top. There was a roof behind the wall—a neat, plug-ugly thing of corrugated iron, painted white. In moonlight it looked like the corpse of a roof.

"What's that place?"

"The jail," Hawkes answered. He slowed to a walking pace, and the ayah vaulted to the ground, as active as an ape; Joe tried to see which way she went, but she vanished into shadow; it was several seconds before he saw her running toward a group of people who appeared to be holding an argument within the shadow of the wall, beside the sentry-box. A small door in the wide gate opened and a man stepped out who seemed to be an officer. He shut the gate behind him.