Chapter 6

An Audit by the Gods
 

Loud laughed the gods (and their irony was pestilence;

Pain was in their mockery, affliction in their scorn.

The ryotwari cried

On a stricken countryside,

For the scab fell on the sheepfold and the mildew on the corn).


 

"Write, Chitragupta!* Enter up your reckoning!

Yum** awaits in anger the assessment of the dead!

We left a law of kindness,

But they bowed themselves in blindness

To a cruelty consummate and a mystery instead!

 
 

"’Write, Chitragupta! Once we sang and danced with them.

Now in gloomy temples they lay foreheads in the dust!

To us they looked for pleasure

And we never spared the measure

Till they set their priests between us and we left them in disgust.

 
 

"Fun and mirth we made for them (write it, Chitragupta!

Set it down in symbols for the awful eye of Yum!)

But they traded fun for fashion

And their innocence for passion,

Till they murmur in their wallow now the consequences come!

 
 

"Look! Look and wonder how the simple folk are out of it!

Empirics are the teachers and the liars leading men!

We were generous and free -

Aye, a social lot were we,

But they took to priests instead of us, and trouble started then!"

 

[* In Hindu mythology Yum is the judge of the dead and Chitragupta
writes the record for him.]

"Peace, Maharajah sahib! Out of anger came no wise counsel yet!"

Tom Tripp had done exactly what Yasmini ordered him. Like his dog
Trotters, whom he had schooled to perfection, and as he would have
liked to have the maharajah’s guards behave, he always fell back on
sheer obedience whenever facts bewildered him or circumstances
seemed too strong.

Yasmini had ordered him to report to the maharajah a chance encounter
with an individual named Gunga Singh. Accordingly he did. Asked
who Gunga Singh was, he replied he did not know. She had told him
to say that Gunga Singh said the Princess Yasmini was at the commissioner’s
house; so he told the maharajah that and nothing further. Gungadhura
sent two men immediately to make inquiries. One drew the commissioner’s
house blank, bribing a servant to let him search the place in Samson’s
absence; the other met the commissioner himself, and demanded of
him point-blank what he had been doing with the princess. The question
was so bluntly put and the man’s attitude so impudent that Samson lost
his temper and couched his denial in blunt bellicose bad language.
The vehemence convinced the questioner that he was lying, as the
maharajah was shortly informed. So the fact became established beyond
the possibility of refutation that Yasmini had been closeted with Samson
for several hours that morning.

Remained, of course, to consider why she had gone to him and what
might result from her visit; and up to a certain point, and in certain cases
accurate guessing is easier than might be expected for either side to
a political conundrum, in India, ample provision having been made for
it by all concerned.

The English are fond of assuring strangers and one another that spying
is "un-English"; that it "isn’t done, you know, old top"; and the surest
way of heaping public scorn and indignation on the enemies of England
is to convict them, correctly or otherwise, of spying on England secretly.
So it would be manifestly libelous, ungentlemanly and proof conclusive
of crass ignorance to assert that Samson in his capacity of commissioner
employed spies to watch Gungadhura Singh. He had no public fund
from which to pay spies. If you don’t believe that, then ponder over a
copy of the Indian Estimates. Every rupee is accounted for.

The members of the maharajah’s household who came to see Samson
at more or less frequent intervals were individuals of the native community
whom he encouraged to intimacy for ethnological and social reasons.
When they gave him information about Gungadhura’s doings, that was
merely because they were incurably addicted to gossip; as a gentleman,
and in some sense a representative of His Majesty the King, he would
not dream, of course, of paying attention to any such stuff; but one
could not, of course, be so rude and high-handed as to stop their talking
even if it did tend toward an accurate foreknowledge of the maharajah’s
doings that was hardly "cricket."

As for money, certainly none changed hands. The indisputable fact
that certain friends and relatives of certain members of the maharajah’s
household enjoyed rather profitable contracts on British administered
territory was coincidence. Everybody knows how long is the arm of
coincidence. Well, then, so are its ears, and its tongue.

As for the maharajah, the rascal went the length of paying spies in British
government offices. There was never any knowing who was a spy of
his and who wasn’t. People were everlastingly crossing the river from
the native state to seek employment in some government department
or other, and one could not investigate them really thoroughly. It was
so easy to forge testimonials and references and what not. One of
Samson’s grooms had once been caught red-handed eavesdropping
in the dark. Samson, of course, took the law into his own hands on
that occasion and thrashed the blackguard within an inch of his treacherous
life; and in proof that the thrashing was richly deserved, some one
reported to Samson the very next day how the groom had gone straight
to the maharajah and had been solaced with silver money.

It was even said, although never proved, that the fat, short-sighted
young babu Sita Ram who typed the commissioner’s official correspondence
was one of Gungadhura’s spies. There was a mystery about where he
spent his evenings. But his mother’s uncle was a first-class magistrate,
so one could not very well dismiss him without clear proof. Besides,
he was uncommonly painstaking and efficient.

One way and another it is easy to see that Gungadhura had a deal of
dovetailed information from which to draw conclusions as to the probable
reason of Yasmini’s alleged visit to the commissioner. One false
conclusion invariably leads to another, and so Samson got the blame
for the secret bargain with the Rangar stable-owner, with whose connivance
Yasmini had contrived to keep a carriage available outside her palace
gates. Her palace gates having closed on the carriage now, the guards
would pay attention that it stayed inside, but there was no knowing how
many riding horses she might have at her beck and call in various khans
and places. Doubtless Samson had arranged for that. Gungadhura
sent men immediately to search Sialpore for horses that might be held
in waiting for her, with orders to hire or buy the animals over her head,
or in the alternative to lame them.

As for her motive in visiting the commissioner, that was not far to seek.
There was only one motive in Sialpore for anything—the treasure. No
doubt Samson lusted for it as sinfully and lustily and craftily as any one.
If, thought Gungadhura, Yasmini had a clue to its whereabouts, as she
might have, then whoever believed she was not trafficking with the
commissioner must be a simpleton. The commissioner was known
to have written more than one very secret report to Simla on the subject
of the treasure, and on the political consequences that might follow on
its discovery by natives of the country. The reports had been so secret
and important that Gungadhura had thought it worth while to have the
blotting paper from Samson’s desk photographed in Paris by a special
process. Adding two and two together now by the ancient elastic process,
Gungadhura soon reached the stage of absolute conviction that Yasmini
was in league with Samson to forestall him in getting control of the
treasure of his ancestors; and Gungadhura was a dark, hot-blooded,
volcanic-tempered man, who stayed not on the order of his anger but
blew up at once habitually.

We have seen how he came careering down-street just in time to behold
Yasmini’s carriage rumble into her stone-paved palace courtyard. After
ordering the guards not to let her escape again on pain of unnamed,
but no less likely because illegal punishment, he rode full pelt to the
temple of Jinendra, whence they assured him Yasmini had just come,
and his spurs rang presently on the temple floor like the footfalls of
avenging deity.

Jinendra’s priest welcomed him with that mixture of deference and
patronage that priests have always known so well how to extend to
royalty, showing him respect because priestly recognition of his royalty
entitled him in logic to the outward form of it—patronage because, as
the "wisest fool in Christendom" remarked, "No bishop no king!" The
combination of sarcastic respect and contemptuous politeness produced
an insolence that none except kings would tolerate for a moment; but
Jinendra’s fat high priest could guess how far he dared go, as shrewdly
as a marksman’s guesses windage.

"She has betrayed us! That foreign she-bastard has betrayed us!"
shouted Gungadhura, slamming the priest’s private door behind him
and ramming home the bolt as if it fitted into the breach of a rifle.

"Peace! Peace, Maharajah sahib! Out of anger came no wise counsel yet!"

"She has been to the commissioner’s house!"

"I know it."

"You know it? Then she told you?"

The priest was about to lie, but Gungadhura saved him.

"I know she was here," he burst out. "My men followed her home."

"Yes, she was here. She told."

"How did you make her tell? The she-devil is more cunning than a cobra!"

Jinendra’s high priest smiled complacently.

"A servant of the gods, such as I am, is not altogether without power.

I found a way. She told."

 

"I, too, will find a way!" muttered Gungadhura to himself. Then to the
priest: "What did she say? Why did she go to the commissioner?"

"To ask a favor."

"Of course! What favor?"

"That she may go to Europe."

"Then there is no longer any doubt whatever! By Saraswati (the goddess
of wisdom) I know that she has discovered where the treasure is!"

"My son," said the priest, "it is not manners to call on other gods by
name in this place."

"By Jinendra, then! Thou fat sedentary appetite, what a great god thine
must be, that he can choose no cleverer servant than thee to muddle
his affairs!
While you were lulling me to sleep with dreams about a clue to be found
in a cellar, she has already sucked the secret out from some cobra’s
hole and has sold it to the commissioner! As soon as he has paid her
a proportion of it she will escape to Europe to avoid me—will she?"

"But the commissioner refused the desired permission," said the priest,
puffing his lips and stroking his stomach, as much as to add, "It’s no
use getting impatient in Jinendra’s temple. We have all the inside
information here."

"What do you make of that?" demanded Gungadhura.

The priest smiled. One does not explain everything to a mere maharajah.
But the mere maharajah was in no mood to be put off with smiles just
then. As Yasmini got the story afterward from the bald old mendicant,
whose piety had recently won him permission to bask on the comfortable
carved stones just outside the window, Gungadhura burst forth into
such explosive profanity that the high priest ran out of the room. The
mendicant vowed that he heard the door slam—and so he did; but it
was really Gungadhura, done with argument, on his way to put threat
into action.

The mildest epithet he called Yasmini was "Widyadhara," which meant
in his interpretation of the word that she was an evil spirit condemned
to roam the earth because her sins were so awful that the other evil
spirits simply could not tolerate her.

"It is plain that the commissioner fears to let her go to Europe!" swore
Gungadhura. "Therefore it is plain that she and he have a plan between
them to loot the treasure and say nothing. Neither trusts the other, as
is the way of such people! He will not let her out of sight until he can
leave India himself!"

"He has promised to send European memsahibs to call on her," said
the priest, and the maharajah gnashed his teeth and swore like a man
stung by a hornet.

"That is to prevent me from using violence on her! He will have frequent
reports as to her health! After a time, when he has his fingers in the
treasure, he will not be so anxious about her welfare!"

"There was another matter that she told me," said the priest.

"Repeat it then, Belly-of-Jinendra! Thy paunch retains a tale too long!"

"Tripe, the drill-master, is a welcome guest at the house built by Jengal Singh."

"What of it?"

"He may enter even when the sahibs are away from home. The servants
have orders to admit him."

"Well?"

The priest smiled again.

"If it should chance to be true that the princess knows the secret of
the treasure, and that she is selling it to the commissioner, Tripe could
enter that house and discover the clue. Who could rob you of the
treasure once you knew the secret of its hiding-place?"

It was at that point that the maharajah grew so exasperated at the thought
of another’s knowledge of a secret that he considered rightly his own
by heritage, that his language exceeded not only the bounds of decorum
but the limits of commonplace blasphemy as well. Turning his back
on the priest he rushed from the room, slamming the door behind him.
And, being a ruminant fat mortal, the priest sat so still considering on
which side of the equation his own bread might be buttered as to cause
the impression that the room was empty; whereas only the maharajah
had left it. And a little later the babu Sita Ram came in.

Gungadhura was in no mood to be trifled with. He knew pretty well
where to find Tom Tripe during any of the hours of duty, so he cornered
him without delay and, glaring at him with eyes like an animal’s at bay,
ordered him to search the Blaine’s house at the first opportunity.

"Search for what?" demanded Tripe.

"For anything! For everything! Search the cellar; search the garden;
search the roof! Are You a fool? Are you fit for my employment? Then
search the house, and report to me anything unusual that you find in it! Go!"

After several stiff brandies and soda Gungadhura then conceived a plan
that might have been dangerous supposing Yasmini to have been less
alert, and supposing that she really knew the secret. He spent an evening
coaching Patali, his favorite dancing girl, and then sent her to Yasmini
with almost full powers to drive a bargain. She might offer as much as
half of the treasure to Yasmini provided Gungadhura should receive
the other half and the British should know nothing. That was the one
point on which Patali’s orders permitted no discretion. The whole
transaction must be secret from the British.

Reporting the encounter afterward to her employer Patali hardly seemed
proud of her share in it. All the information she brought back was to
the effect that Yasmini denied all knowledge of the treasure, and all
desire to possess it.

"I think she knows nothing. She said very little to me. She laughed at
the idea of bargaining with Englishmen. She said you are welcome to
the treasure, maharajah sahib, and that if she should ever find its hiding-place
she will certainly tell you. She plays the part of a woman whose spirit is
already broken and who is weary of India."

Having a very extensive knowledge of dancing girls and their ways,
Gungadhura did not believe much more than two per cent. of Patali’s
account of what had taken place, and he was right, except that he grossly
overestimated her truthfulness. And even with his experienced cynicism
it never entered his head to suppose that Patali was the individual who
warned Yasmini in advance of the preparations being made to poison
her by Gungadhura’s orders. Yet, as it was Patali’s own sister who made
the sweetmeats, and tampered with the charcoal for the filter, and put
the powdered diamonds in the chutney, it was likely enough that Patali
would know the facts; and as for motives, dancing girls don’t have them.
They fear, they love, they desire, they seek to please. If Yasmini could
pluck heart-strings more cleverly than Gungadhura could break and bruise
them, so much the worse for Gungadhura’s plans, that was all, as far
as Patali was concerned.

For several days after that, as Yasmini more than hinted in her letter to
Tess, repeated efforts were made to administer poison in the careful
undiscoverable ways that India has made her own since time immemorial.
But you can not easily poison any one who does not eat, and who drinks
wine that was bottled in Europe; or at any rate, to do it you must call in
experts who are expensive in the first place as well as adepts at blackmail
in the second. Yasmini enjoyed a charmed life and an increasing appetite,
Gungadhura’s guards attending to it however, that she took no more
forbidden walks and rides and swims by moonlight to make the hunger
really unendurable. Supplies were allowed to pass through the palace
gate, after they had been tampered with.

Finally Gungadhura, biting his nails and drinking whisky in the intervals
between consultation with a dozen different sets of priests, made up
his mind to drastic action. It dawned on his exasperated mind that every
single priest, including Jinendra’s obese incumbent, was trying to take
advantage of his predicament in order to feather a priestly nest or forward
plans diametrically opposed to his own. (Not that recognition of priestly
deception made him less superstitious, or any less dependent on the
priest; if that were the way discovery worked, all priests would have
vanished long ago. It simply made him furious, like a tiger in a net,
and spurred him to wreak damage in which the priests might have no hand.)

Whisky, drugs, reflection and the hints of twenty dancing girls convinced
him that Jinendra’s priest especially was playing a double game; for
what was there in the fat man’s mental ingredients that should anchor
his loyalty to an ill-tempered prince, in case a princess of wit and youth
and brilliant beauty should stake her cunning in the game? Why was
not Yasmini already ten times dead of poison? Nothing but the cunning
inspired by partnership with priests, and alertness born of secret knowledge,
could have given her the intelligence to order her maids to boil a present
of twenty pairs of French silk stockings—nor the malice to hang them
afterward with her own hands on a line across her palace roof in full
view of Gungadhura’s window!

Hatred of Yasmini was an obsession of his in any case. He had loathed
her mother, who dared try to wear down the rule that women must be
veiled. Even his own dancing girls were heavily veiled in public, and
all his relations with women of any sort took place behind impenetrable
screens. He was a stickler for that sort of thing and, like others of his
kidney, rather proud of the rumors that no curtains could confine. So
he loathed and despised Yasmini even more than he had detested
her mother, because she coupled to her mother’s Western notions
about freedom a wholly Eastern ability to take advantage of restraint.
In other words she was too clever for him.

On top of all that she had dared outrage his royal feelings by refusing
to be given in marriage to the husband be selected for her—a fine, black-
bristling, stout cavalier of sixty with a wife or two already and impoverished
estates that would have swallowed Yasmini’s fortune nicely at a gulp.
Incidentally, the husband would have eagerly canceled a gambling debt
in exchange for a young wife with an income.

There was no point at which Yasmini and himself could meet on less
than rapier terms. Her exploits in disguise were notorious—so notorious
that men sang songs about them in the drinking places and the khans.
And as if that were not bad enough there was a rumor lately that she
had turned Abhisharika. The word is Sanskrit and poetic. To the ordinary
folk, who like to listen to love-stories by moonlight on the roofs or under
trees, that meant that she had chosen her own lover and would go to
him, when the time should come, of her own free will. To Gungadhura,
naturally, such a word bore other meanings. As we have said, he was
a stickler for propriety.

Last, and most uncomfortable crime of all, it seemed that she had now
arranged with Samson to have English ladies call on her at intervals.
Not a prophet on earth could guess where that might lead to, and to
what extremes of Western fashion; for though one does not see the
high-caste women of Rajputana, they themselves see everything and
know all that is going on. But it needed no prophet to explain that a
woman visited at intervals by the wives of English officers could not
be murdered easily or safely.

All arguments pointed one way. He must have it out with Yasmini in
one battle royal. If she should be willing to surrender, well and good.
He would make her pay for the past, but no doubt there were certain
concessions that he could yield without loss of dignity. If she knew
the secret of the hiding-place of the treasure he would worm it out of her.
There are ways, he reflected, of worming secrets from a woman—ways
and means. If she knew the secret and refused to tell, then he knew
how to provide that she should never tell any one else. If she had told
some one else already,—Samson, for instance, or Jinendra’s priest—
then he would see to it that priest or commissioner, as the case might be,
must carry on without the cleverest member of the firm.

But he must hurry. Poison apparently would not work and he did not
dare murder her outright, much as he would have liked to. It was
maddening to think how one not very violent blow with a club or a knife
would put an end to her wilfulness forever, and yet that the risk to
himself in that case would be almost as deadly as the certainty for her.
But accidents might happen. In a land of elephants, tigers, snakes,
wild boars and desperate men there is a wide range for circumstance,
and the sooner the accident the less the risk of interference by some
inquisitive English woman with a ticket-of-admission signed by Samson.

An "accident" in Yasmini’s palace, he decided would be nearly as risky
as murder. But he had a country-place fifty miles away in the mountains,
to which she could be forcibly removed, thus throwing inquisitive
Englishwomen off the scent for a while at any rate. That secluded
little hunting box stood by a purple lake that had already drowned its
dozens, not always without setting up suspicion; and between the city
of Sialpore and the "Nesting-place of Seven Swans" lay leagues of wild
road on which anything at all might happen and be afterward explained away.

As for the forcible abduction, that could best be got around by obliging
her to write a letter to himself requesting permission to visit the mountains
for a change of air and scenery. There were ways and means of obliging
women to write letters.

Best of all, of course, would be Yasmini’s unconditional surrender,
because then he would be able to make use of her wits and her information,
instead of having to explain away her "accident" and cope alone with
any one whom she might already have entrusted with her secret. There
should be a strenuous effort first to bring her to her senses. Physical
pain, he had noticed, had more effect on people’s senses than any
amount of argument. There had been a very amusing instance recently.
One of his dancing girls named Malati had refused recently to sing
and dance her best before a man to whom Gungadhura had designed
to make a present of her; but the mere preliminaries of removing a
toe-nail behind the scenes had changed her mind within three minutes.

Then there were other little humorous contrivances. There is a way
of tying an intended convert to your views in such ingenious fashion
that the lightest touch of a finger on taut catgut stretched from limb to
limb, causes exquisite agony. And a cigarette end, of course, applied
in such circumstances to the tenderer parts has great power to persuade.

As to accomplices, those must be few and carefully chosen. Alone
against Yasmini he knew he would have no chance whatever, for she
was physically stronger than a panther, and as swift and graceful. But
there are creatures, not nearly yet extinct from Eastern courts, known
as eunuchs, whose strongest quality is seldom said to be mercy, and
whose chief business in life is to be amenable to orders and to guard
with their lives their master’s secrets. Three were really too many to
be let into such a secret; but it had needed two to hold Malati properly
while the third experimented on the toe-nail, and Yasmini was much
stronger than Malati; so he must chance it and take three.

The only remaining problem did not trouble him much. The palace
guards were his own men, and were therefore not likely to question
his right to ignore the first law of purdah that forbids the crossing of
a woman’s threshold, especially after dark, unless she is your property.
Besides, they all knew already what sort of prowl-by-night their master
was, and laws, especially such laws, were, made for other people, not
for maharajahs.