Guns of the Gods: A Story of Yasmini's Youth, Talbot Mundy [book club books .TXT] 📗

pass the word along. 'No obedience from priests, no priests at the coronation ceremony!—It's my belief from about two hours' observation that we've got a maharajah now with guts, if you'll excuse my bad French, please, ma'am."

"What does it matter to you, Tom, whether he is good or not?" Yasmini asked mischievously. Isn't there a rumor that the English won't allow any but the native-born instructors after this?"

"Ah, naughty, naughty!" he laughed, shaking a gnarled forefinger. "I thought it was your voice in the crowd. Your Ladyship 'ud like to have me all nervous, wouldn't you? Well—if Tom Tripe was out of a job tomorrow, the very first person he'd apply to for a new one would be the Princess Yasmini; and she'd give it him!"

"What have you in your hand?" Yasmini asked.

"Gungadhura's turban that he wore the night when Akbar chased him down the street."

Yasmini nodded, understanding instantly.

Five minutes later, after a rousing stiff night-cap, Tom took his leave.
They heard his voice outside the window:

"Trotters!"

The dog's tail beat three times on the veranda.

"Take a smell o' this!"

There was silence, followed by a growl.

"If he comes,—kill him! D'ye understand? Kill him! There—there's the turban for you to lie on an' memorize the smell! Kill him! Ye understand?"

A deep growl was the answer, and Tom Tripe marched off toward the stables for his horse, whistling Annie Rooney, lest some too enthusiastic watcher knife him out of a shadow.

"When I am maharanee," said Yasmini, "Tom Tripe shall have the title of sirdar, whether the English approve of it or not!"

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Creator caused flowers to bloom in the desert and buried jewels in the bosom of the earth. That is lest men should grow idle, wallowing in delights they have, instead of acquiring merit in the search for beauty that is out of reach. —Eastern Proverb

"Making one hundred exactly."

Technically, Yasmini was as much maharanee of Sialpore as she would ever be, the moment that the fourteen-gun salute boomed out across the river. For the English do not recognize a maharanee, except as courtesy title. The reigning prince is maharajah, and, being Hindu, can have one wife or as many as he pleases. Utirupa and Yasmini claimed to have married themselves by Gandharva rite, and, had she chosen, she could have gone to live with him that minute.

But that would not have paid her in the long run. The priests, for instance, whom she despised with all her character, would have been outraged into life-long enmity; and she knew their power.

"It is one thing," she told Tess, "to determine to be rid of cobras; but another to spurn them with your hand and foot. They bite!"

Then again, it would not have suited her to slip quietly into Utirupa's palace and assume the reins of hidden influence without the English knowing it. She proposed taking uttermost advantage of the purdah custom that protects women in India from observation and makes contact between them and the English almost impossible. But she intended, too, to force the Indian Government into some form of recognition of her.

"If they acknowledge me, they lock swords with every woman in the country. Let them deny me afterward, and all those swords will quiver at their throats! A woman's sword is subtler than a man's."

(That was the secret of her true strength in all the years that followed. It was never possible to bring her quite to bay, because the women pulled hidden strings for her in the sphere that is above and below the reach of governments.) So she moved back into her own palace, where she received only Tess of all the Anglo-Saxon women in India.

"Why don't you keep open house to English women, and start something?"
Tess asked her. But Yasmini laughed.

"My power would be gone. Do you fight a tiger by going down on all-fours with him and using teeth and claws? Or do you keep your distance, and use a gun?"

"But the English women are not tigresses."

"If they were, I would laugh at them. Trapping tigers is a task the jungle coolies can attend to well! But if I admit the English women into my palace, they will come out of curiosity. And out of pity, or compassion or some such odious emotion they will invite me to their homes, making an exhibition of me to their friends. Should I be one of them? Never! Would they admit other Indian women with me? Certainly; any one I cared to recommend. They would encourage us to try to become their social equals, as they would call it, always backing away in front of us and beckoning, we striving, and they flattered. No! I will reverse that. I will have the English women striving to enter our society! They shall wake up one day to discover there is something worth having that is out of reach. Then see the commotion! Watch the alteration then! Today they say, when they trouble to think of us at all, 'Come and visit us; our ways are good; we will not hurt you; come along,' as the children call to a kitten in the street. Then they will say, 'We have this and that to offer. We desire your good society. Will you admit us if we bring our gifts?' That will be another story, but it will take time."

"More than time," Tess answered. "Genius."

"I have genius. That is why I know too much to declare war on the priests. I shall have a proper wedding, and priests shall officiate, I despising them and they aware of it. That will be their first defeat. They shall come to my marriage as dogs come to their mistress when she calls— and be whipped away again if they fawn too eagerly! They will not dare refuse to come, because then war would be joined, and I might prove to people how unnecessary priests are. But they are more difficult to deal with than the English. A fat hypocrite like Jinendra's high priest is like a carp to be caught with a worm, or an ass to be beaten with a stick; but there are others—true ascetics—lusting for influence more than a bellyful, caring nothing for the outside of the power if they hold the nut— nothing for the petals, if they hold the seed. Those men are not easy. For the present I shall seem to play into their hands, but they know that I despise them!"

So great preparations were made for a royal wedding. And when Samson heard that Yasmini was to be Utirupa's bride he was sufficiently disgusted, even to satisfy Yasmini, who was no admirer of his. Sita Ram's account of Samson's rage, as he explained the circumstance to Willoughby de Wing, was almost epic.

"Damn the woman! And damn him! She's known for a trouble-maker. Simla will be asking me why on earth I permitted it. They'll want to know why I didn't caution Utirupa and warn him against that princess in particular. She's going to parade through the streets under my very nose and in flat defiance of our government, just at the very time when I've gone on record as sponsor for Utirupa. I've assured them he wouldn't do an ill-advised thing, and I specifically undertook to see that he married wisely. But it was too early yet to speak to him about it. And here he springs this offense on me! It's too bad—too bad!"

"You'll be all right with Simla," said Willoughby de Wing. "Dig up the treasure and they'll recommend you for the K. C. B., with the pick of all the jobs going!"

"They don't give K. C. B.'s to men in my trade," Samson answered rather gloomily. "They reserve them for you professional butchers."

He was feeling jumpy about the treasure, and dreaming of it all night long in a way that did not make the waking fears more comfortable. A whole company of sappers bad been sent for; and because of the need of secrecy for the present, a special appropriation had had to be made to cover the cost of lumber for the tunnel that Dick began, and that the sappers finished. They had dug right up to the pipal trees, and half-killed them by tunneling under their roots along one side; but without discovering anything so far, except a few old coins. (The very ancient golden mohur in the glass case marked "Sialpore" in the Allahabad Museum is one of them.) Now they were going to tunnel down the other side and kill the ancient trees completely.

Being a man of a certain courage, Samson had it in mind—perhaps— to send the map to an expert for an opinion on it. Only, he hated experts; they were so bent always on establishing their own pet theory. And it was late—a little late for expert opinions on the map. The wisest way was to keep silent and continue digging, even if the operation did kill ancient landmarks that one could see—from across the river, for instance.

And, of course, he could not refuse to recognize the wedding officially and put on record the name, ancestry and title of the maharajah's legal first wife. Nor could he keep away, because, with amazingly shrewd judgment, Yasmini had contrived the novelty of welding wedding and coronation ceremony and festival in one. Instead of two successive outbursts of squandering, there would be only one. It was economic progress. One could not withhold approval of it. He must go in person, smile, give a valuable present (paid for by the government, of course), and say the proper thing.

One modicum of consolation did ooze out of the rind of Samson's situation. It would have been no easier, be reflected, to say the right thing at the right time at the coronation ceremony, especially to the right people, if that treasure should already have been dug up and reposing in the coffers of the Indian Government. After a certain sort of bargain, one's tongue feels unpleasant in one's cheek.

Sialpore, however, was much more taken up with preparations for the colossal coronation-wedding feast than with Samson's digging. Yasmini went on her palace roof each day to see how the trees leaned this and that way, as the earth was mined from under them. And Tom Tripe, standing guard on the bastion of the fort to oversee the removal of certain stores and fittings before the English should march out finally and the maharajah's men march in, could see the destruction of the pipal trees too. So, for that matter, could Dick Blaine, on the day when he took some of the gang and blocked up the mouth of the mine on the hill with cemented masonry—to prevent theft; and cursed himself afterward for being such a fool as to brick up his luncheon basket inside the tunnel, to say nothing of all the men's water bottles and some of their food and tools. But nobody else in Sialpore took very much notice of Samson's excavation, and nobody cared about Dick's mine.

Every maharajah always tries to make his wedding and coronation ceremonies grander, and more extravagant and memorable than anybody's else have been since history began; and there are plenty whose interest it is to encourage him, and to help him do it; money-lenders, for instance. But Utirupa not only had two magnificent ceremonies to unite in one, but Yasmini to supply the genius. The preparations made the very priests gasp (and they were used to orgies of extravagance— taught and preached and profited by them in fact.)

Once or twice Tess remonstrated, but Yasmini turned a scornfully deaf ear.

"What would you have us do instead? Invest all the money at eight per cent., so that the rich traders may have more capital, and found an asylum where Bimbu, Umra and Pinga may live in idleness and be rebuked for mirth?"

"Bimbu, Umra and Pinga might be put to work," said Tess. "As for mirth, they laugh at such unseemly things. They could be taught