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Title:      Old Ugly-Face
Author:     Talbot Mundy
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0300961.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          July 2003
Date most recently updated: July 2003

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Old Ugly-Face
Author:     Talbot Mundy





To Collier Young
     Lest distance dim good fellowship





Our hearts know better than to envy men,
Still less their women, who by tongue and pen
With soulless ideology declare: "What dies
Is all we live for.  Violence and lies,
Our high aims justify.  The ends we seek
Are things, more things.  The poor and weak,
Unnourished in the headlong race to pay
New debts to evil while we toil and pray
To politics for wealth--do they not, day by day
Receive, of our good charity, their bread?
Are we not wonderful?"
          We are. We are.
               And yet,
There was a Voice that more than hinted how
By means more manly than we practice now
A wide world's consciousness can lose its dread
Of drifting toward endless death:--instead
New visioned, may create a world at last
Worth loving for its future, not its past.





PART ONE

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
               --Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "Ulysses"


Set in Tibet, the story concerns a group of men and women who are
vitally involved in an exciting situation in that forbidden land
of towering mountain peaks and age-old secrets.  The Dalai Lama
had died, and the choice of a successor to the most influential
position in Tibet is a matter of utmost concern to the agents of
various foreign governments and to Tom Grayne, unofficially
representing the United States, Andrew Gunning, his free-lance
friend, and Elsa Burbage, in Tibet under unusual circumstances.
Above all, the future of Tibet lies in the hands of the Most
Reverend Lobsang Pun, known as Old Ugly-Face, a wrinkled, stout
Tibetan prelate of uncertain age, a genuine mystic whose mission
in life is to preserve the seeds of sanity in a world gone mad.
Grayne and Gunning are both in love with Elsa, and out of this
conflict between life-long friends arises a drama of absorbing
interest--a drama intensified by international intrigue, treachery,
unbelievable courage in the face of the greatest adversity, and
the prodigious efforts of Old Ugly-Face to win control of the newly
appointed Dalai Lama.





I.



Things seemed vague that evening.  Darjeeling felt as if it were
somewhere over and beyond its own sensational horizon.  The damp
stone monastery walls had lost reality, as if thought were the
substance and thing its shadow.  Andrew Gunning strode along the
white-walled passage, beneath flickering brass lamps, between
pictures of Buddhist saints.  The thin, worn carpet on the stone
flags muted his heavy foot-fall into rhythmic thuds that pulsed
like heartbeats, regular, and strong, but strangely detached,
unreal.  An outdoor man, sturdily built, he looked as if his
passion were as strong as his muscles and equally under control.
He looked obstinate, cautious, capable of proud and perhaps patient
but swiftly vigorous anger.  As a first impression that was accurate
enough and no injustice done.  But he was not a man who readily
revealed himself to strangers.  He could keep his thoughts to
himself.  Second and later impressions of him always left observers
a bit puzzled.

He knocked on the ancient cedar door at the dark end of the passage
and waited listening, exactly, and in the same mood as he would
have listened for an animal's cry in the forest, or for the telltale
murmur of changing wind in the distance.  Good ears, well shaped,
not too tightly packed against a studious-looking head.  A thatch
of untidy tawny hair, inherited from some Viking ancestor who
raided Britain before the Normans landed and who doubtless found
Roman-Northumbrian wenches an agreeable change from the shrews of
the Baltic night.  American born.  Unclannish.  Habitually slightly
parted lips.  Well-bred narrow nostrils.  Easy shoulders;  a neck
so strong that it looked careless.  Sensible eyes.  A plain man,
therefore dangerous.  Only simple people could predict what Andrew
Gunning might do.  Complicated people seldom understood what he
had done or was doing at the moment.

Because the monastery was built centuries ago, in the days when
Darjeeling was a fortress city of war-torn Sikkim, the deodar-cedar
door was a foot thick.  He had to knock twice.  And because the
rain splashed musically through an open window, and the monastery
mood discouraged shouting, he was answered at last by the sound
of a small bronze bell.  An historic bell.  Its temperate G would
have gone lost in the thunder of camps or the hum of affairs.  For
fifty years, five hundred years ago, it had invited silence while
a Wise Saint meditated on the mystery of man:  whence, whither,
why.  A most excellent bell.

Andrew opened the door into a plain arrangement of ideas;  the
comfort of ideas in right relation to each other.  A white-walled
room, so nearly square that its size made no impression;  it was
good to be in, and that was enough.  Two windows, one facing eternal
snow, the Himalayas, the Roof of the World, Tibet; but that window
was closed for the night by a shutter of cedar and curtained with
woven wool from somewhere north of Tang La Ra.  The other window,
ten by two and iron-barred against the curiosity of innocence (the
Tantric Buddhist monks are innocent, and consequently naughty),
opened on the rain-splashed inner courtyard.  There were glimpses
through it of wet-bronze legged monks about their communal duties,
with their skirts tucked into their girdles.  Some of them were
singing; merry-minded fellows, curiously indifferent to rain and
icy wind, but venially sinfully inquisitive about the female
occupant of Cell Eleven.  They were only preserved from the
cardinal sin of impudence by the all-seeing eye of Brother Overseer
Lan-shi Ling who looked down on their labors from the covered gallery,
reminding them, when necessary, that though the eye and the ear may
sin, it is the soul which pays.  O brothers, look ye neither to the
right nor left.  The path leads upward!

Elsa lay curled on a Scots plaid steamer rug that had been stained
by travel.  It was spread over big flat cushions stuffed with the
swans-down that lies like wind-blown blossom on the shore of Lake
Manasarowar--sacred wild swans and a sacred lake.  The cushions
were piled on a throne built of blocks of holy basalt from a
mountain whose name no Tibetan will utter (lest the ever-watchful
dugpas should overhear and find and desecrate the mountain's
holiness).  That throne on which Elsa sprawled was really a guest
bed reserved for visiting Lord Abbots who occasionally come, with
secret news, and solemn meekness, but implacably critical zeal,
to bestow their blessing on the monastery or to refuse approval,
as the case may be.  Hearts had been broken in that room, from
that throne;  personal destinies had crumbled in the calm impersonal
fire of visiting Lord Abbots' views of what is sinful and what isn't.
Centuries old though the monastery is, Elsa Burbage was the first
woman ever to have crossed the threshold of the inner courtyard.
She was well aware of that.  At the moment it was almost the only
excuse for self-confidence that she could use as a shield against
despair.  The eleventh chamber on the north side had been hers
for a number of weeks.  It was she who had named it Cell Eleven
for luck and brevity.  Its real name, all one word in Tibetan,
is Countless-thousands--of--times--blessed--place--of--meditation--
piously--reserved--for--wisdom-loving-holy-lamas-from-blessed-
mountains-conferring-sanctity-and-merit-by-their-benevolent-presence.
That, of course, is a far better name than Cell Eleven, but it takes
too long to say.

Elsa smiled at Andrew Gunning, but she didn't speak for a few
moments.  She and he had no need to toss words at each other.
Kindness can be as irritating as pity.  So can courtesy.  Such
formalities as unfriendly or suspicious people have to impose on
themselves and each other had gone downwind months ago, blown by
the bitter winds of Tibet and by the more subtle but even less
merciful forces of human extremity.  There remained a comradeship
that speech could easily blaspheme but could neither enlarge
nor explain.

Andrew sat down on a stone ledge near the open window. The ledge
was covered with snow leopard skin, a comfortless upholstery;
but Tibetans don't care for physical comfort, don't even know what
it is;  and snow leopard skin is a very valuable, so they say,
provision against sly earth currents that intrude into a meditator's
thought and undo virtue, as the termites undo buildings in the dark.
Andrew leaned his back against the whitewashed wall, and he didn't
say anything either.  He just looked at Elsa, schooling himself
not to feel sorry for her because he loathed the spiritual snobbery
that drools that sort of insolence.

The glow from a charcoal brazier colored Elsa's pale face and
made her eyes, beneath the dark hair, look much bigger than they
actually were;  it made them gleam with unnatural light that
suggested visions and dreams, like a cat's eyes when it stares
at the hearth.  The effect of unreality was increased by the leap
of candlelight and by the Tibetan paintings on silk that loomed
amid a mystery of shadows on the white walls.  It was Andrew who
spoke first:

"Not so long ago, just for looking like that, they'd have burned
you for a witch."

"Burning sounds dreadful, but it must be soon over," she answered.
"Do you suppose it's worse than feeling useless and disillusioned?"

He scowled suddenly and smiled slowly:  "It's the first time I've
heard you use words like that."

"I never felt quite like this before.  Not quite like it."

Andrew Gunning's method was to kill out pity and to mask what
sympathy he felt beneath brusqueness: "Feel like cracking?" he asked.

"It seems to have happened.  I want to say what I mean.  But I
can't.  It's as if I had been an insect all along without knowing it."

Andrew looked as cautious, alert and careful as if he were still--
hunting some animal of whose ways he was ignorant.  He had a
presentiment.  He was going to be asked what he couldn't answer,
and told what he didn't want to know.  So he said what he did know:

"Life is a fight.  The more sensitive you are, the worse it hurts.
But you can't cure man or horse with hard names.  You have to think
straight and know what you're fighting about."

"Andrew, I did it.  I've done it.  I lost.  I said insect because
insects wear their skeletons outside and their personalities inside.
They're armor-plated.  But when they crack--"

"Then they grow a new shell or they die."

"It isn't so easy to just die and be done with it.  Andrew, I've
reached a jumping-off place, but there's nowhere to jump to.  I'm
not complaining.  I'm telling you because there's no one else to
tell.  Even song doesn't sound good any more.  Tomorrow isn't.
There's only a string of dried yesterdays."

He showed his teeth in a friendly belligerent grin:  "So it's
Andrew.  You call me Andy when you think I'm stupid.  Drew, when
we're talking on even terms.  Andrew, when you need help.  But
it won't work.  I'm feeling the way you do, as near as a man can
feel the way a woman does.  I was in the chapel just now.  Same
ritual.  Same monks, solemnity, beauty and all the rest of it.
It felt as flat as canned stuff."

"Then you do understand what I mean."

"No.  When you use a word like insect to explain your feelings--
damned if I understand."

"Drew, your inconsistencies hide something so strong that I'm
almost afraid of it sometimes.  I am now."

"No call for you to be scared of me.  Inconsistencies?  What do
you mean?"

"You know what I mean.  I've heard you use real bad language--
Tibetan and English--that would make a Billingsgate fish-porter's
hair curl."

"Maybe.  But that was for tactical reasons, to get a pack-train
moving or something of that sort.  And besides, I'm not a woman."

She laughed.  "Drew, did anyone ever accuse you of being effeminate!
Please, Andrew!  What I meant is, that if you'll raise that iron
visor of yours and really listen, it would be such a comfort.  But
if that's selfish, and you'd rather--"

"Talk away.  I'm interested."

"I want to talk to the real you."

"Go ahead.  Shoot.  But don't talk down to me.  I hate that."

"Down to you?"

"Yes.  Don't use language aimed at cracking my mental resistance.
I'm in a sympathetic mood, if that means anything.  I'd like to
understand.  Words like insect don't apply.  You're not a louse."

"Andrew, you've been so generous to me that--"

"That line heads in nowhere, either.  I did what you'd have done
if things had been the other way around.  So let's call that past
history and carry on."

"--so generous, and so unselfish, that I haven't dared, I don't
think I've even wanted, to impose on you any more.  Besides, I
understand perfectly that just physical things like forced marches
and danger, and even metaphysical things like ditching your whole
year's plans because a friend is in trouble--"

"I didn't have any plans, so I didn't ditch 'em.  I was letting
Tom Grayne do the head work."

"--means no more to you than a change of the wind, or a change
of diet.  You actually like it.  I know that.  I know too--I
understand perfectly--that you enjoyed that dreadful ordeal in
the blizzard--"

"You and I shared that.  What else could I have done than what
I did?  Don't let's talk about it."

"You did impossible things.  You brought me alive out of death.
But that doesn't give me the right to ask you to do something
even more difficult."

He smiled reminiscently.  There isn't anything more difficult,
in terms of ordinary human experience, than to act man-midwife
to a girl whose first baby is born in a blizzard that blows the
tent away at sixteen thousand feet above sea level.  If he had
been a doctor--but he wasn't.  Elsa and child survived, and he
was secretly so proud of that test of his own resourcefulness
that he couldn't speak of it.  He even disciplined the smile
into a kind of up-wind stare.

"Andrew, don't laugh at me, please.  I want to talk to the man
who pulled me through that."

"You've the right to," he answered. "You came through, colors
flying.  Shoot the works."

But Elsa found it hard to begin.  She was afraid of seeming
unwilling to face the future.  But she did fear the future.  And
she was afraid to raise Andrew Gunning's visor.  She had seen him
in action, in emergency, in crisis.  She had seen him tempted,
bewildered, baffled, half starved and almost overwhelmed by
exhaustion;  but always, in anger, in defeat, mistaken effort,
success, nothing less than a man.  She knew almost none of his
motives, not even his real reason for joining Tom Grayne in Tibet.
She knew almost none of his secrets.  She was afraid to guess at
them for fear her guess might prove true.  So she was silent for
at least five minutes, afraid of what Andrew Gunning might think
of her, if she should go on talking.  The silence was as loaded
with thought as the leaping shadows were full of hue from the
charcoal and flickering candlelight.  Elsa made two or three
attempts to begin, but Andrew gave her no encouragement.  The
words died on her lips.

A bell on the monastery roof reminded the monks to do something
or other.  It drew attention to the silence.  Gusty wind flickered
the candles.  Andrew got up and put more charcoal on the brazier,
resumed his seat on the snow leopard skin and waited.  It was he
who spoke first:

"Begin, why don't you?  What's the trouble?"

"I told you.  You objected to the word insect.  My shell is broken.
I'm afraid.  That's the trouble."

"I'm scared, too," he answered.  "Everybody gets scared once in
so often.  But would you trade places with any other girl?"

"Andrew, I'd love to!  But I don't believe it would be fair to
trade places."

Andrew rose to the occasion guardedly:  "See here, Elsa; you haven't
got to live in Brooklyn, or Blackheath, or Chicago, or Tooting Beck.
You don't have to go to cocktail parties and pink teas, or listen
to radio yawp--or argue about dialectics with intellectual asses
who think envy is inspiration and that Karl Marx is Jesus.  You're
not leading a secondhand life.  You don't have to care a damn
what mugwumps think.  You needn't say yes to the axe-grinders.
What more do you want?  Everybody gets afraid at some time or other."

"Andrew, I want to talk about things that one doesn't discuss."

"Well," he said, "I knew that.  Why don't you begin?"

"Are you sure you don't mind?"

"Of course I mind.  I hate it.  You're going to try to drag out
your secret thoughts and smear them on the wall for me to look at.
You'll come closer to doing it than most people could.  I suppose
it's the end of friendship.  You'll never forgive me for knowing
what you've never told Tom."

"How do you know I've never told Tom?"

Andrew grinned.  He pulled out his clasp knife and a hunk of
hundred-year-old cedar from his hip pocket, shifted his position
away from the flickering candle toward the steady glow of the
charcoal brazier and resumed the whittling of a head of Chenrezi
where he had left off the day before.  Elsa watched him with
emotions that ranged from baffled anger to despair.  They were
all one emotion, but they felt like wild dogs tearing at her:
stark torture.  However, there was no one but Andrew Gunning who
could understand what she wanted to tell, what she must tell,
even at the risk of friendship.

"Won't you leave off carving that thing, Andrew?"

"No.  You'll find it easier if I look at this instead of you.
Besides, it helps me to think.  Go ahead.  Talk."  He went on
carving, turning the thing in his hands to study the planes in
the glow from the brazier, puckering his eyes, remembering the
statue of Chenrezi in the monastery chapel.

"Drew, I'm a failure.  I'm not even a tragic failure.  Merely a
flop--no dignity:"

He sharpened the point of his knife on a pocket hone and resumed
the carving of the Lord Chenrezi's smile.

"Andrew, please listen.  I've come to the end of everything, at
twenty-three.  No more destiny.  Nothing.  I took my future in
my own hands, and everything I had, and all I knew and was and
could become.  And I took all chances and--and--offered it up."

"You had a perfect right to," he answered.  "Everybody has to do
that when he's fed up with cant and rant and humbug and gets a
glimpse of something worth going after.  You're no exception."

"But it didn't work out, Andrew.  It was like Cain's sacrifice.
It wasn't acceptable."

"Okay.  Kill Abel.  That's the historic retort.  It won't get
you far.  But try it.  It's one degree better than killing your
own faith."

"I don't mind about me.  And I've no faith left."

"You mean no humor, don't you?  That's just secondhand talk.  Have
you been reading Swinburne again?  About weariest rivers winding
somewhere safe to sea?  He was drunk when he wrote it."

"Oh well.  Yes.  I do mind--having let Tom down--having put you
to all this inconvenience.  I can still feel.  Yes.  I still have
faith in some people.  But not in me any longer.  Instead of being
the help I thought I'd be, and that Tom thought I'd be, I'm worse
than a total loss.  I'm a liability.  Yes, you're right, I do mind
about me."

Andrew glanced at her.  She was dry-eyed.  No sign of hysteria.
She had drawn the steamer rug over her knees and was staring at
the glowing brazier.  She didn't even look quite hopeless.  She
was hoping for a new view, and she hoped he had it.

"I've talked defeat," he said, "plenty of times."

"You?  You, Andrew!  To other people?"

"No.  To myself.  That's worse.  But it never was true.  I never
really meant it.  See here, Elsa;  merely looking at one angle,
you're not a run-of-the-mill, college-educated product.  You've
got ideas."

"I wish I hadn't.  Ideas only give you a headache and make you
dangerous to other people."

"You're not stuck in a social rut.  You don't feel bound by the
latest fashion in ideology or--"

"I wish I did!  I wish I liked that kind of thing!  I wish I could
make myself be herd-minded and believe what other people believe,
and do what they do, and like it.  I wish I were a Fascist or a
Communist--something genuinely coarse and gross and stupid!  Andrew,
with all my heart I wish it!"

"If you feel that way, why consult me?" he retorted, looking
obstinate.  He turned the head of Chenrezi upside down and whittled
savagely at the rough base.  "I think you're well off."

"You mean in having no future?"

"Carve your own future."  He hacked at Chenrezi.

"I'll have to. But it will be as lifeless as what you're doing
now with your knife and a piece of wood."

"Piffle!  This isn't lifeless.  I've a genius for this kind of
thing.  What's more, I do good live thinking while I'm working
at it.  But my talent can't hold a candle to yours.  For instance,
you're the only woman in the world who can translate ancient Tibetan
intelligently.  What's wrong with that?  You've plenty of it to do.
Here you are, safe as a saint in a--"

"Yes, yes, I've counted my blessings and added plenty per cent!
Andrew, please!  Don't talk as if you're trying to sell me a plot
in a cemetery!  I don't have to be told that I might as well be
in the British Museum.  I've been working all day long at translation.
I'd go mad if I didn't."

"Having luck with it?"

"Yes.  The more wretched I feel, the easier it comes.  The only
real labor is writing it out--can't write fast enough."

"You mean it's like automatic writing?  I know a man in New York
who wrote a darned good novel that way."

"No.  It isn't a bit like that.  I look at the Tibetan writing
and all at once it means something in English.  I don't know how
to explain it.  It's like reading music notes at sight and being
able to transpose them into a different key without thinking
about it.  Of course, it isn't really like that, but--why don't
you let me talk of what I want to talk about!"

Andrew held up Chenrezi's head and studied the curve of a nostril.
"It doesn't seem to me you have much kick coming," he answered.
"There's any number of real people who would almost sell their
souls for the gift that you came by without even having to work
for it."

She laughed.  "If you think I didn't work for it, you guess again,
Andrew!  Tibetan wasn't a gift, as you call it.  I earned that
honestly, and love it.  It's the other part that I hate.  It's a
curse.  As a child it got me into so much trouble that I left
home when I was sixteen.  I almost didn't have any friends.  It
brought me nothing but grief, and mistrust, and misery, until I
met Tom in the British Museum Library.  After that, it began to
be wonderful, because Tom--"

"Yes.  Tom told me about it."

"Andrew, let me tell it.  You've only heard Tom's version.  He
told the truth, but not all the truth.  He can't possibly have
told my side of it, because he never knew it. I don't believe he
even guessed it."

"Tom's a pretty shrewd guesser. "

"I know.  But how could Tom possibly guess what even I didn't know,
about me, until--until I had torn it right out of myself, and forced
myself to look at it?  Tom isn't clairvoyant.  Sometimes I think
you are.  But Tom isn't.  So he can't possibly have told you all
about me."

Andrew shut his clasp knife.  "All right," he said.  "You tell it.
I'll listen.  If I don't believe you,  I'll say so."

"Andrew, if you don't believe me, then that will be the end of
friendship.  Because I'm going to be merciless--I mean to me.  It
may be the last time that you and I will ever talk together
intimately.  I don't want to pry into your secrets.  I do want
to tell mine."

Andrew studied his carving of Chenrezi's head for half a minute.
Then he put it into his pocket and stared at Elsa.  The rain
splashed in the courtyard.  The guttering candlelight half hid
her amid trembling shadows.  A slight, small girl of twenty-three,
in a black tailored shirt.  Dreamy intelligent eyes.  Something
like a feminine version of Michelangelo's David.

"Go ahead," said Andrew.  "Sling your pebble at Goliath, but try
not to hit me.  If there's anything I hate it's being told what
I'd sooner not know.  I'm a hell of a good hater."

"I suppose you'll hate me.  Will you please try not to.  I'm going
to risk it, but--"

"If you won't let well enough alone, go to it.  I won't interrupt."

But interruption came.  It seemed timed to the second, as if
someone's daimon didn't want a veil drawn aside.  It was simple
scheduled monastery routine, but it felt like a hint from destiny.





2.



The interruption was a thudding on the thick door.  It sounded
far off, almost alarming.  But when Elsa touched the bronze bell
it turned out to be only two wrinkled old Tibetan monks.  One was
the Abbot's physician.  The other brought tea in a brass urn--
buttered tea stewed and salted, that isn't so awful once you're
used to it.  The smiling old doctor professed not to know why
there were three cups.  It was not his business.  He had brought
medicine for Elsa.  He poured it from a silver vial into a spoon
of rhinoceros horn, opened his own mouth by way of suggestion,
pushed the spoon halfway down Elsa's throat and turned it until
she gagged and swallowed the horrible stuff.  He watched her cough,
crossing his fingers, murmuring sacred words to ward off devils.
Then he murmured a blessing, stowed the utterly unsanitary spoon
into an inner pocket, corked the vial, smiled at Andrew Gunning
with a shrewd, almost monkey-like glance of his deeply set dark
eyes and walked out, whirling his prayer wheel, followed by the
monk with the brass tray.  When the door thudded shut Andrew seized
the opportunity to change the subject:

"So you're still on the sick list?"

"No, I'm quite well.  But Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po insists that I'm
still full of devils that need driving out.  He says it was devils
that killed my baby.  So he sends his doctor three times a day.
If I should refuse to swallow that nasty stuff, I don't know what
would happen."

"You'd be a fool to refuse.  Old Mu-ni Gam-po knows his magic.
Some of our modern doctors get the same results by a different
method.  There's not much choice between a stupid M.D. and an
ignorant magician.  Either will kill you.  And the good magician
or the good M.D. will cure you, if your soul wants to stay in
your body."

"Souls can be cruel to bodies," she answered.  "Mine is cruel.  It
insists on staying in me.  Andrew, you pour the tea, will you? I
can't reach it without getting up."

He filled two cups, then went and peered through the window bars
before resuming his seat.

"No eavesdroppers," he said. "Not at the moment."

"Did you think there might be?"

"Yes.  There's at least one monk who reports to Bulah Singh.  You
know what that means.  C.I.D. Confidential--indiscreet--dirty.
Bulah Singh reads your mail before you get it--if you get it.
However, I hope you've changed your mind about talking.  It's
always better to say nothing."

"You make it difficult, Andrew.  I believe you're hiding something."

"Well," he answered, "I guess that's true. But it needn't stop you
from telling me the worst, if you feel you've got to.  Go on.
You're heartsick and scared.  You think you can cure it by offering
me to the gods, if there are any gods."

"Not you, Andrew.  But if I lose your friendship--"

"Same thing!  But go to it.  What's all this that Tom Grayne
doesn't know?"

"Andrew, I met Tom for the first time in the British Museum Library.
I was studying Tibetan because I like it, and so few other people
study it, and because it's difficult, and because Professor Mayor,
who happens to be my uncle, is in charge of the Tibetan section.
I didn't know then that Professor Mayor had anything to do with
the secret service.  But later he asked me to help Tom decipher
some difficult letters that were written in a kind of shorthand.
I have a talent for that kind of thing.  It isn't brain work;  it's
a kind of clairvoyance.  One thing led to another.  Tom found me
useful.  I didn't know then that Tom was in the pay of the American
State Department."

"He wasn't," said Andrew.  "He never has been, and he isn't.  The
American State Department isn't crazy.  It hasn't any money to
spend on people like Tom and me.  On top of that, it wouldn't
choose to be caught with the goods.  I'm unpaid.  Tom gets bare
expenses and a pittance from a member of the United States Senate
who likes to know what he's talking about.  If Tom's information
should happen to reach the State Department, that's nobody's business."

"Andrew, let me tell it, please."

"Okay.  But tell it right.  You went off on the wrong foot.  You
met Tom.  You and he got married.  Then what?"

"Tom wasn't in love with me."

"Yes he was."

"And I wasn't in love with Tom."

"Yes you were."

"Andrew, you're observant and kind and sometimes wonderfully
intuitive, but this is something that you haven't understood.
Onlookers never do understand that kind of thing.  You weren't
even an onlooker, not in the beginning.  You had never even heard
of me, and you only knew Tom by hearsay, until you met us in Tibet.
And by that time, things were different.  In the beginning Tom
was in love with his job and with nothing else in the world.  He
was heartwhole, and ruthless--scrupulously  faithful."

"Tom has gray iron scruples, but no morals," said Andrew.  "Tom's
sentimental bigot."

"Tom is the most intensely moral man I ever met."

"I guess we're at odds about definitions.  We may mean the same
thing.  Go ahead."

"Tom found me useful.  I had enough money to pay my own expenses.
I'm healthy, and active, and I'm so small that I don't tire a horse
the way some people do.  I don't care a bit about luxuries, and I
can keep my temper and hold my tongue.  So Tom offered to take me
to India."

"Yes," said Andrew.  "I know all about that.  There was a homesick
Tibetan in London named Tho-pa-ga.  Tom wanted to take Tho-pa-ga
to Tibet, and he wanted you along to supply the feminine touch.
Tom told me all about it.  You did such a good job that when the
Tibetans kidnapped Tho-pa-ga to make him Keeper of the Thunder
Dragon Gate, they kidnapped you along with him to keep up his
spirits.  Tom went in pursuit, and the Lama Lobsang Pun saved the
lot of you in the nick of time.  Tho-pa-ga turned out to be a
miserable flop, all pious melancholy and no backbone.  In love with
you, wasn't he?"

"Tho-pa-ga," said Elsa, "was just an overgrown and overeducated
moon-calf who needed a nurse."

Andrew nodded.  "Tom made a bloomer that time.  Tho-pa-ga was a
ruinous man to bet on.  Bound to let you down.  In England he was
homesick for Tibet.  As soon as he reached Tibet, he was homesick
for England.  Tom was a fool to waste time on him.  Tho-pa-ga's
religion was such a mixture of magic and sentimentality, all glued
into a rotten mess by a kind of superstitious fatalism, that he
couldn't possibly have
been a success in a key position.  No one respected him.  The only
friends he made were political Tibetan monks who spotted him for
an easy mark.  So of course he was poisoned.  Anybody could have
foretold that.  And the business of preventing Tibet from being
saved from herself by the Japs and Russians had to begin all over
again.  That was why I was sent from Shanghai to find you and Tom."

"Andrew, if you really don't want to hear my side of it, why not
simply refuse to listen, instead of trying to get me to talk about
something else?  Just say so.  Just go out and leave me alone.  Then
there'll be no one left except Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po.  But--"

"You been talking to him?"

"Yes. He cast my horoscope, from five or six different aspects."

"Did he show you the result?"

"Yes.  But I can't read a horoscope.  Looking at it gave me a
sensation of danger and fear and abject fatalism that I knew I
shouldn't have.  But Mu-ni Gam-po wouldn't explain it, beyond
saying something about Uranus and Neptune in the twelfth house,
with afflicted Venus, and Sun rising in Aries.  I don't know
what that means.  He wouldn't let me tell him what I'm trying
to tell you."

Andrew laughed dryly:  "Mu-ni Gam-po is wiser than I am! Go ahead.
Tell me about the afflicted Venus.  Crucify her!"

"I've done it, Andrew, but I didn't think it was that at the time.
Tom married me secretly in England, in a spirit of scrupulous
fair play.  I was so in love with the idea of not being a grub
any longer--of getting away from England and all that smug
mediocrity, and credulous skepticism, and stupid, stuffy
pretense of being something that you're not--I was so excited
by the thought of traveling in India and being really useful--
that I would have done whatever Tom asked me to do.  It was his
idea, our getting married."

Andrew grinned--glanced at her.

"It was Tom's idea!  I never dreamed of it until he suggested it.
He had a double motive."

"Yes.  Tom's ambidextrous.  He lets his left hand know what his
right hand's doing.  But lets nobody else know."

"Tom wanted to protect me, in case anything should happen to him.
He also wanted me to have the right to open his strongbox in the
bank vault.  Those were his motives."

"Let's leave that lie.  Tom and you got married secretly. And you
weren't in love with each other.  Then what?"

"I fell in love with Tom.  This is the part that isn't easy to tell."

"Remember! I haven't asked you to tell it."

"No, Andrew. But I must tell someone.  Mu-ni Gam-po won't listen.

"I guess he knows it without being told.  He's wise.  The more
he knows, the less he says.  But why not try Nancy Strong at the
Mission School?  Nancy is a hard-bitten old soldier with a heart
like Mary Magdalene's and the guts of a grenadier.  She'd even
have a good cry with you, if that's how you feel.  Then she'd tell
you something worse out of her own experience, and you'd have a
good laugh and feel better."

"She's a woman, Andrew.  No woman could understand.  She'd only
see my side of it;  and I can see that too well already.  I want
you to listen because you'll see Tom's side of it."

"Didn't Tom see his side of it?"

"Of course he did.  But, Andrew, did you ever try to get Tom to
complain, or to blame anyone else for what happened to him, or
to cry over spilt milk, or to lock a door after the horse has
bolted--or to do any of those wishy-washy things that ordinary
people do? Tom is--"

"You're right there.  Tom isn't ordinary.  He's ornery, if you
know what that means.  Nancy Strong should have married him."

That changed Elsa's mood for a moment.  She couldn't help laughing.
Nancy Strong was old enough to be Tom Grayne's mother.  Not even
Tom Grayne would have a chance against her in a tussle of wills.
Even Government fears Nancy.

"It will come easier now you're laughing," said Andrew.  "Tell
the funny part first.  Go ahead."

"It's no joke, Andrew.  It's all disillusionment and anticlimax.
Even being kidnapped and carried off, and being cold and hungry
in the mountains and in danger of being killed--and not knowing
what had happened to Tom, but just hoping he would turn up--and
then seeing him suddenly--and all the fighting at the Thunder
Dragon Gate--every least tiny bit of it was wonderful and clean
and good.  It was life.  It felt like being blown on a big wind,
and something new every minute.  After Tom had helped Lobsang Pun
to seize control of the monastery, it was even fun when that old
despot turned us out to go and shift for ourselves.  Lobsang Pun
washed his hands of us.  And Tom took the trail of the Japanese
secret agents, taking me with him because there was nothing else
he could do about it.  Those were hard times, but they were
utterly wonderful.  We crossed the border of Sinkiang;  and we
were in touch with the exiled Tashi Lama twice before they
poisoned him."

"They'll poison Tom one of these days," said Andrew.  "He'll find
out just one thing too many.  Then he'll begin to wonder what
disagreed with him."

"I did all the cooking," said Elsa.

"That's nothing.  They poison the meat before it's killed.  If
you don't eat meat, they poison the salt and tea and sugar.  They
put poison in the dust that blows into your cup.  Tibetans are
real nice people, but they don't like you to know more than's
good for their peace of mind.  That's what Tibetans are after--
peace of mind."

"I wish I had some!  Andrew, listen to me.  I betrayed Tom. Not
he me. I betrayed him."

"Tell it if you must.  But don't say I asked for it.  I'll believe
it or not, as I see fit."

"Ours was an absolutely hard and fast agreement.  We hadn't
pretended to be in love with each other.  I was to be Tom's
assistant, and to obey orders.  Tom made the stipulation, and I
agreed to it instantly, that there was to be no love-making and
no man and wife stuff.  Ours was simply a temporary arrangement
for business purposes.  Either of us was to be free to divorce the
other as soon as there was no longer any reason for being married."

Andrew put all the malice he could into a slowly broadening grin.
"I've heard of lots of folks," he said, "who believed they were
stronger than sex.  I've even fallen for that presumption once
or twice myself.  You're not the first--not by a long way.  It's
disillusioning, but human.  I've never spoken to Tom about women.
And of course everybody knows he's an iron-willed man.  But I'd
have betted all I've got.  I'd have laid odds."

"Laid what odds?"

"Tom Grayne and you--or any other eligible woman--"

"What do you mean by eligible woman?"

"I mean any woman worth going overboard for.  Tom and she, alone
together, week after week, month after month, sharing the same
tough time, growing more and more into each other's confidence--
hell, I don't care what the previous agreement might be.  She'd
fall for Tom.  She'd have to."

"Well, Andrew, you're wrong.  Tom fell for me.  I did it--five
nights after we camped in that cave where you found us."

"That means a couple of months before I got there."

"Yes.  You stopped it."

"Me?  What had I to do with it? It was none of my business."

"No.  But your arrival brought Tom to his senses.  And me, too.
Me especially.  What I want you to understand is--"

"Sure, you've said that.  I'm not mentally deaf."

"Before you came, Tom was depressed by a sense of failure.
Everything seemed to have gone wrong.  Our Tibetans were behaving
badly.  Some deserted.  Others brought in false reports and were
getting insolent.  Tom and I weren't hitting it off the way we
had done, because my clairvoyance wasn't as clear as usual.  It
was all about Europe instead of Tibet.  What I did see about Tibet,
Tom didn't believe.  When spies came in and talked to him I couldn't
get any clear picture of what they were thinking about.  That made
Tom irritable.  It seemed to me we were drifting apart, and that
Tom was sorry he had brought me with him.  I made up my mind to
change that by putting things on a more human basis."

"There's nothing new about that," Andrew remarked.  "That's old
stuff.  Everybody does it."

"Does what?"

"Camouflages natural behavior under a lot of phony excuses."

"Andrew, please don't try to tell me I couldn't have helped it.
I know better.  I don't want to be pitied.  I want advice.  I knew
what Tom needed, or I thought I did.  He was lonely and worried
and more nearly afraid than I've ever seen him.  So that night,
after the Tibetans had gone into the other cave, I crept into Tom's
bed and made him believe it was I who needed him. I seduced him."

"And is that what Tom doesn't know?"

"Of course Tom doesn't know it.  He thinks I was just a weak woman
who yielded to his natural physical yearning for a mate.  At times
like that things happen.  It's super-physical and super-mental.
The physical act is irresistible.  But it never entered Tom's
head that it wasn't his fault."

"And of course it never entered your head," said Andrew, "that
every time a Tibetan woman has made overtures to Tom he has
compared her with you and sent a mental SOS in your direction
that you responded to without knowing it."

"I did know it.  My eyes were wide open. I knew Tom would lose
his job if he were ever suspected of woman weakness.  He's like
a priest in that respect.  He's trusted because--"

"Oh boloney!" Andrew interrupted.  "That's just Tom's alibi.  He
kids himself.  He made that up.  He's scrupulous and sentimental
about his job.  The job comes first.  It suits him to believe that
getting tangled with a woman--any woman--would destroy his efficiency.
So he invented that hokum about Spartan celibacy.  He has read a
lot of tripe, too, about sublimation of sex."

"'Why do you say tripe?  Andrew, there are hundreds of thousands
of people who have no sex life, and don't want it, and are better
off without it--priests, monks, nuns--there was Newton, who invented
calculus--and my uncle, Professor Mayor--and the Lama Lobsang Pun--
and there's Mu-ni Gam-po and all the monks in this monastery--and
all the saints since history began--"

"Tom Grayne is no saint," said Andrew.  "He's strong.  He has
energy and an iron will.  He's on the level in the sense that he
would stay bought if anyone could buy him, but nobody can.  That's
a number one rating.  But he's no genuine ascetic.  He trains
himself to live hard and to abstain from tobacco and drink and
women for the same reason that a professional athlete does.  It
pays dividends--not cash, but something he likes far better.  That
isn't asceticism.  If Tom thought that the opposite of chastity
would improve his intelligence he'd turn whore-master, scrupulously,
without the slightest moral twinge.  He might hate it.  But he'd
do it."

"Don't you believe I corrupted him?"

Andrew laughed.  His eyes narrowed.  His grin widened.  He clasped
his hands and laid his elbows on his thighs and looked at Elsa
with amusement that hid neither from him nor from her the fact
that anger lay near the surface now, banked up, growing strong
under restraint.  Suddenly it broke loose.  He stood up.

"Elsa, don't be a damned fool.  You corrupted Tom about as much
as champagne could corrupt carbolic acid.  The way a bird corrupts
quicklime--or a rose corrupts the northeast wind."

"You're talking as if Tom were your enemy.  Don't you like him?"

"You bet I like him.  But he doesn't fool me.  Neither do you."

"I don't want to fool you.  I betrayed Tom."

"Now you've said it, are you going to cover up?  Or will you
answer questions?"

"I want to tell you the truth, Andrew, so that you will answer
my questions."

"Okay.  Answer this one first.  Did Tom ever say he loved you?"

"Yes.  But don't you know the difference between loving and being
in love?"

Andrew sat down again.  "When did it happen?  I mean, when did
Tom say it?"

"It happened--I mean Tom said it at the Thunder Dragon Gate, before
Lobsang Pun sent us away."

"And what did you say?"

"I don't remember what I said.  I was utterly happy.  I didn't
care where we went nor what we did--until I suddenly remembered
the bargain.  I knew Tom would remember it too.  So I spoke of
it first, because I didn't want to embarrass him by speaking of
it when it might be almost too late."

"What did Tom say?"

"He was relieved.  I knew he would be.  And he was."

"Yeah, I don't doubt it.  All Tibet to wander around in.  No
immediate impulse, and plenty of time.  About three quarters of
Tom's method is to start things moving and then wait and see."

"Please, Andrew!  It's so difficult to tell, and I do so want you
to believe me."

"I know what you want me to believe."

Andrew enjoyed the luxury at last of letting violence flow up the
veins of his neck and along his forearms.  There was just a hint
of hardening muscle beneath the candle shadow on his cheek.  Unknown
to himself he looked ready to kill what he hated.  Elsa noticed it.

"Andrew, you hate me for being the problem I am, and I don't blame
you one bit.  But be generous.  Try to understand me.  And then
give me good advice, don't Pollyanna me.  I want you to help me
to face the music."

"What are you trying to be?  A she-dictator staging an election?
I vote the way I'm told to, and eat crow if you're wrong?  Is
that it?"

"No, Andrew.  But the facts are plain and I want you to know them
before you give me advice.  I seduced Tom.  I swore I wouldn't,
but I did.  As a result I became pregnant, in a cave, in Tibet,
nearly a thousand miles away from any possible help.  No woman
has a right to do that to a man.  If you hadn't turned up, Tom
would have been in a much worse dilemma than he is in now.  And
it's bad enough now.  Perhaps I ought to have just let myself die.
I could have done that, because I was very close to death several
times. It would have saved trouble for everybody."

"Stay in your own bracket and don't try to talk like a beaten
drab," said Andrew.  "You can't play coward well enough to convince
yourself, let alone me."

"It isn't easy to play coward--one can only think about it, with
people like Tom and you doing things," she retorted.  "Who else
in the world but you would have said yes without a second's
hesitation when Tom asked you to take me to Darjeeling--nearly a
thousand miles, and winter coming on--and not your business!"

"Any man would have done it."

"You think too highly of men!  The point is that you did it, Andrew.
And my baby was born in the snow.  And you fought the blizzard and
death and made miracles and stood by like a great big angry angel,
and did what couldn't be done, and saved the baby and me, and
brought both of us alive to Darjeeling.  It wasn't your fault that
the baby died--here, in the monastery."

"Nor your fault either.  That was bad luck."

"It was Tom's baby."

"Seems to me it was your baby."

"It was Tom's one possible excuse to forgive me for what I'd done to
him.  And the baby is dead.  Now what?  Tell me, Andrew.  What now?"

"You're overrating Tom's cussedness," he answered.  "Tom isn't as
hard as all that."

"Andrew, if the baby had lived there would have been no mystery
about what to do.  Tom's baby and mine.  Quite simple.  I'd have
been the mother of Tom's baby.  But now what am I?  Nothing but a
liability--a millstone fastened secretly to Tom's neck--a danger
to him.  A handicap--a nuisance--an expense--an obstacle."

Andrew grinned savagely.  "�Who filled the butchers' shops with big
green flies?"' he quoted.  "Sure.  You haven't any rights whatever."

"Listen, Andrew, please.  I know what my legal rights are.  I can
go to Mexico or somewhere like that and divorce Tom, just as
secretly as we got married.  That was part of our agreement.  But
I want you to tell me Tom's side of it.  Tom is all alone in Tibet
and I can't consult him.  I can't even get a message to him.  I've
tried telepathy again and again.  Sometimes I can see him
clairvoyantly.  But I get no response.  Tom isn't clairvoyant--
at any rate, not consciously he isn't."

"Tom has Grade A hunches," said Andrew.  "What does he think
those are?"

"There you go again, trying to get me off the subject!  It isn't
Tom's hunches that trouble me.  It's Tom's sense of duty.  Tom
feels he has a duty to me.  I know he does.  Andrew, put yourself
in Tom's place, and then tell me--"

"Can't be done.  Besides, I wouldn't be in Tom's place for a million."

"What shall I do, that won't make Tom feel cheap or guilty, and
that won't make him feel he should throw up his job and--"

She stopped speaking suddenly.  Andrew was on his feet again.  Anger
burst through reticence.  His face, in the glow from the brazier,
was almost exactly as she remembered it in the blizzard-blown
campfire light when the tent was torn loose in the gale and her
baby was being born.

"God damn it!" he said suddenly.  "Can't you fight back!"

"You mean fight Tom?"

"I mean fight that God-damned lousy theoretical suggestion stuff
that makes you blame yourself for every situation that you don't
like!  The sun rises--praise the Lord!--God's in his heaven and
all's well with the world.  But when night comes--that's your fault!
Bad weather--that's absolute, infallible, incontrovertible proof
that you're a sinner!  Damn that superstition about sin in the
Garden of Eden!"

"Andrew, I'm not superstitious!  I'm not!  I am not!"

"Aren't you?  `And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because
thou hast done this:  upon thy belly shall thou go, and dust
shall thou eat all the days of thy life.'  Do you believe that
or don't you?"

"I asked you to tell me what Tom really thinks."

"How the hell do I know what he thinks!  Damn his eyes, I'm telling
you what I think!  You and he are not theories, or any bilge like
that.  You're not a legend.  You're human beings.  If you love
each other--"

"Andrew, I can't come between Tom and his duty."

"Duty my eye!  Don't you rate?  Haven't you a soul to call your
own?  Is it less than his? Haven't you faith in your own vision?
It was good enough, wasn't it, to pull up stakes and cash your
savings and pitch your future into Tom's kit and go wandering where
nine hard-gutted hellions out of ten wouldn't dream of daring to go!
And now you talk about being licked by a lousy suggestion that you're
a traitress!  God!  Sure.  Yes.  I'll tell you the answer--"

He paused because Elsa was no longer looking at him.  Her attention
had become fixed on something else.  A quiet cough made him turn
suddenly.  The old Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po had entered unheard.  He
stood in shadow, black-robed, frail-looking, blinking through a
parchment maze of wrinkles that were probably a smile, probably
kindly, but beyond any doubt whatever were a mask revealing nothing
that he did not wish to reveal.  He spoke in English:

"May I listen to the wonderful answer?  But may I first have tea,
if there is any tea left in the urn?  Let us all drink.  Anger
and tea so seldom mingle.  Wisdom sometimes fills the nest from
which the bird of anger flew."





3.



Andrew recovered reticence, and alertness with it. The arresting
fact was that the Lord Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po had entered the room,
contrary to custom, unannounced, unaccompanied.  Andrew concentrated
full attention on the fact.  He watched the Abbot help himself to
tea and drink it noisily, Tibetan fashion.  The old man wasn't
likely to say what he meant;  one had to spot hints, and they
wouldn't be too plain.  Elsa watched Andrew, wondering whether he
got the same impression she did.  There was emergency in the air.
The swaying shadows felt loaded with secret crisis.  It was like
a dream, in which unrelated things happen.  A gong boomed at the
far end of the corridor, muted by silence and by the thick door
and the splashing of rain through the open window.  Mu-ni Gam-po
moved his prayer wheel with a hardly perceptible wrist motion,
twirling perhaps a hundred benedictions.  Then he blinked at
Andrew and spoke in Tibetan:

"Angry answer being now arrested on the lips of emotion, opportunity
to gather knowledge before leaping blindly may be indicated."

"We were talking about duty and sin," said Andrew.  He felt he
had to say something.

"There is danger in another's duty--also duty in another's danger,"
the Abbot remarked.  "Sin is the result of conceit;  it has no
other basis.  To discuss it is to argue about nothing, with vain
words, in a void created by imagination."

The Lord Abbot sat down on the seat that Andrew had vacated.  He
motioned to Andrew to take the teak chair on the far side of the
brazier between himself and Elsa.  The old man looked almost Chinese,
roguish and yet unworldly;  humorous but serious nevertheless;
humble, gentle, and yet full of dignity.  After a minute's silence
he spoke again in Tibetan, in a voice creaky with age but curiously
vibrant with the unselfconscious habit of authority.

"Self-revelation, self-expression, seldom is attainable by such
beginners as ourselves.  It is invariably wise through meditation
to permit reflection to reveal reality.  We thus perceive ourselves
in one another.  Wisdom lives in silence."

Fact number two had presented itself.  The Very Reverend Lord Abbot
Mu-ni Gam-po was suggesting in his own elaborate way that a time
for not talking too much was at hand and that the reasons within
reasons for discretion would reveal themselves, if one only would
have patience.  And even patience was not strained too much.  The
gong boomed again at the far end of the corridor.  A moment later
the thick door opened.  A monk moved in, barefooted, silent.  He
stood flicking his beads.  The Lord Abbot nodded.  The monk opened
the door wider.  Footsteps on carpeted stone came echoing forward.
The atmosphere, the feel of things changed subtly.  The dream
sensation vanished.  Something more like actuality replaced it.
Dr. Morgan Lewis walked in and the monk closed the door, standing
with his back to it.  For a moment the flicking of the monk's
beads was the only sound in the room, very distinctly heard against
the splashing of rain in the outer night as Dr. Morgan Lewis glanced
from one face to the other.

"Kind of you to let me come," he remarked, bowing to Mu-ni Gam-po
and then to Elsa.  Then he strode forward and shook hands with
Andrew Gunning, carefully because a finger joint was missing from
his right hand.  Andrew had a reputation for sometimes forgetting
his strength.  One eyebrow perpetually higher than the other gave
Lewis a quizzical look that was increased by untidy graying red
hair, carefully clipped and groomed but always being ruffled by
his restless fingers.  He was a man of fifty with scars on his
face and a wry, skeptical smile.  But of what he was skeptical
didn't appear.

"Well, what's the news?" he asked suddenly.

No one answered.  Mu-ni Gam-po produced horn-rimmed spectacles
with large lenses which he polished carefully before putting them on.

"I seem to have interrupted you at prayers," said Lewis.  "Let me
join in--I've brought the smell of hell with me--from Delhi.  I
snaffled a week's leave.  Just got here--at least, that's the story.
Must I operate to start the conversation flowing?  How are you, Elsa?"

"Thank you, Dr. Lewis, I'm incredibly well."

Lewis stuck a monocle into his right eye.  He was wearing a
careless-looking tweed suit, but by a strange kind of
circumstantial magic the scrap of glass in his eye suggested
military uniform and official secrets.  It made him look dapper,
smart, almost impudent.  He walked toward Elsa.

"Good girl.  Been obeying orders.  Sleep.  Rest.  Plain food.  But
take a tip from me and don't get well too quickly."

He sat down beside Elsa, on the edge of the basalt throne, where
he could watch Andrew Gunning beyond the brazier and be watched
by Mu-ni Gam-po.  His right hand drummed a signal on his knee in
full view of the horn-rimmed spectacles.  The Lord Abbot asked
in English:

"Not too quickly?  Does my patient need other treatment?"

"Well, I'll tell you," said Lewis.  "As you know, I happened to
be in Darjeeling soon after she arrived from Tibet a couple of
months ago.  I took the opportunity at that time to--"

Elsa interrupted.  "Doctor, you came all the way from Bombay, by
airplane, just to make sure I was getting proper treatment.  That's
true, isn't it?  Please don't try to make generosity seem like
an accident!"

Lewis glanced at her swiftly, then at Mu-ni Gam-po.  He grinned
wryly.  "I admit that the Government paid for the plane.  It's
less than once in a thousand years that a girl of your age suddenly
arrives from Tibet and knows how to hold her tongue.  Besides, you
sent for me."

"Dr. Lewis, I didn't!"

Lewis adjusted his monocle.  He glanced at Mu-ni Gam-po, and at
Andrew Gunning, then stared at Elsa.  "Young lady, we're among
friends.  Strictly between ourselves, I got your telepathic message.
It was my first convincing evidence of clairvoyance.  I said:
convincing evidence.  Tell the truth now, you asked me to come!"

"But I didn't!  You were the only doctor I knew in all India.  And
I was ill and unhappy.  They told me my baby was dying.  So I
remembered you, and thought about you, and--"

"And I saw and heard you," said Lewis.  "Clear case of telepathy--
but I'd be drummed from the medical ranks if I dared say so in
public.  The baby was dead before I got here.  They'd call that
proof that I'm a liar.  But we pulled you through your trouble.--
Tell me:  what impression do you get now?"

Elsa hesitated:  "You don't mean things in Europe?  Hitler? Mussolini?"

"God forbid!" said Lewis.  "What do you see here--now?"

"I've a strong impression that you're warning me of danger."

"Well, now.  That's damned interesting."

"Did I guess right?"

"It wasn't guesswork.  You saw it.  Let's put it this way, talking
in words of one syllable because I wish to be understood.  One
man's meat is another's poison.  Facts are nothing but symbols of
a metaphysic that we don't understand.  Science, medicine included,
is a scandalously overrated system for misinterpreting ascertained
facts.  And as a medical man it's my duty to say that Mu-ni Gam-po's
medicine is an unscientific mixture of herbs that aren't in the
pharmacopoeia and its use would be illegal in any civilized country."

"I don't want to be rude," Elsa answered, "but Mu-ni Gam-po's
medicine made me feel well, and yours didn't."

Lewis laughed.  He caught the Lord Abbot's eye, and the Lord Abbot
smiled.  Lewis shook his fist at the Lord Abbot.  "Charlatan!"
he said.  "Quack!  Heretic!  Johnson used to let you dose him, and
now where's Johnson?  Gone!  Gone home to England, where he'll die,
one of these days, just as surely as my name's Morgan Lewis."

Andrew Gunning almost upset the brazier.  "Johnson?  Of the
Ethnographic Survey?  Gone?  You mean he's left India?"

"Yes," said Lewis.  "Irish promotion.  Sent home in a hurry to
advise the India Office and be made a baronet and be snubbed to
death.  I'll send flowers--perhaps cabbages.  I didn't like him,
but he was a very first-class man."

Andrew looked worried.  "Who has taken Johnson's place?" he demanded.

"For the time being," said Lewis, "there's an abhorrent vacuum in
process of being naturally filled with rumors.  Bulah Singh is
playing locum tenens, acting-Satan so to speak, but not as likely
as he thinks he is to inherit the throne of hell.  He lacks the
incorruptible integrity.  Bulah Singh might try to snatch some
credit for himself by getting after unorthodox practitioners of
medicine.  You see, if Bulah Singh could tamper with Mu-ni Gam-po's
medicine and create a scandal, he might sell his own brand of
brimstone and treacle.  I advise you to change doctors, young woman.
Do you get what I mean?"

"No." Elsa stared at him, worried.  "You're talking nonsense just
to test my ability to read thought.  But it doesn't work.  I don't
know what you mean."

"I'll try again," said Lewis.  "Bulah Singh is rather competent
but can't be trusted to deny himself the luxury of malice.  He's
a great man for detail--studies such curiosities as smoke against
snow on the sky line and the contents of the loads of ponies getting
ready to go northward.  He thinks tactics and strategy are the
same thing."

"Thanks," said Andrew.

Lewis readjusted the monocle, stared at Andrew and continued.
"Bulah Singh is a rather cat-like fellow.  I should say his weak
point is that he might watch a mouse hole too long.  He might
even watch two or three mouse holes.  If the mouse used something
other than a hole in a wall, Bulah Singh's patience might make
him look more like a stone Sphinx than an active cat.--By the way,
do you find the view good from the monastery roof?"

"Grand view," said Andrew, "except when it's hidden by clouds;
and that's most of the time."

"I am told," said Lewis, "that lots of people are watching for signs
of the coming of spring.  You've no news, I suppose, from Tibet?"

"It's got whiskers," said Andrew.  "Came by the long route.  Runner
to Sinkiang. Radio to Shanghai, spatchcocked into Chinese bulletins
intended for a Jap who has a Chinese mistress in Macao.  Steamer
to Hongkong.  Third-class passenger to Pondicherry.  Last lap secret."

Lewis grinned: "I could tell you the secret!"

"When in doubt, don't," said Andrew.  "What do you want to know?
I'll tell you."

"You say it's old news? Even if it's ugly news, I can face it."
Lewis stressed three of the words with more than necessary emphasis.
Then he felt Elsa's pulse with a professionally absent-minded air
of having nothing else to do.

Andrew grinned. "That's a good cue.  Right.  Old Ugly-face is said
to be a fugitive from Lhasa.  He's reported to have lost his fight
to control the young Dalai Lama and has had to go into hiding."

"Chapter one," said Lewis.  "Chapter two, I suppose, gives more details."

"Sort of regular subscriber, aren't you?  Yes, there's more of it,
seeing it's you.  Ram-pa Yap-shi, the Lord Abbot of Shig-po-ling,
is top dog at the moment.  He got away from Lhasa with the young
Dalai Lama and all the cash in the treasury.  He has fortified
himself at Shig-po-ling, and has offered a big reward for the
capture of Ugly-face dead or alive."

"That checks perfectly," said Lewis. "What else?"

"Not much else.  Have you heard of Ambrose St. Malo?"

"Who is he?"

"I asked because I thought perhaps you know," said Andrew.  "I've
been warned to watch out for him."

"Ambrose St. Malo, eh?  Where is he?"

"Somewhere in Tibet."

"That's vague."

"So is he vague."

"Bad egg?"

"Rotten.  I'm told he stinks."

Lewis stood up. "Well," he said, "don't catch a chill on the
monastery roof.  And as for you, young lady, take my advice and
change medicine.  Mu-ni Gam-po's mysterious stuff isn't good for
you any longer.  You've had enough of it--more than enough.  Try
a change."

"But where should I go?"

"Try Nancy Strong.  Even Bulah Singh wouldn't dare to fossick in
Nancy Strong's medicine chest.  Well, so long.  See you again soon.
Thanks for the information."

He bowed before Mu-ni Gam-po to let the old Abbot touch the crown
of his head with a special blessing.  Andrew Gunning noted that
they whispered to each other.  Lewis walked out and the monk shut
the door.  Elsa spoke in a horrified whisper:

"Andrew!  Why did you do it!  Why did you tell him!"

The Lord Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po got up and bestowed a murmured blessing.
The attendant monk opened the door, followed the Lord Abbot out and
left the door slightly ajar.  Andrew closed it tight and listened
for a moment.

"Andrew, why did you tell Dr. Lewis--?"





4.



Andrew's face glowed red as he poked at the coals in the brazier
with bronze tongs.  He carefully placed lumps of charcoal in the
burned-out spaces and then stood away from the fumes.

"Snow!" said Elsa.  "Blizzards!--Rain!--Wind!--I can see them."
There was a change in her voice.  "Sometimes it's easy to tell
what you're thinking about, Andrew.  Only sometimes.  Not often."

He turned and faced her.  "Yes.  It's too early.  But that was
the last call.  Now or never."

"Marching orders?"

"Yes.  You heard him.  Morgan Lewis was warning me to get going
if I don't want to be stopped by Bulah Singh."

"But, Andrew, why did you tell Dr. Lewis what you did, about Lobsang
Pun and the Abbot of Shig-po-ling!  Those are Tom's secrets.  Tom
warned you to tell no one except--"

"Except Johnson.  But you heard that too.  Johnson has gone--home
to England.  If Morgan Lewis hasn't taken Johnson's place, as head
of the Tibetan section of the secret intelligence, I miss my guess
badly.  But Bulah Singh doesn't know yet--or I guess not--I think
that's what Lewis meant."

"But Dr. Lewis is in charge of a hospital--"

"Johnson was in charge of the Ethnographic Survey.  There weren't
fifty people in the world who knew what Johnson's real job was.
Probably not more than ten people know about Lewis--yet."

"But shouldn't you have known for sure before you--"

"Nothing for nothing in this world, Elsa.  Pay as you go.  Grabbing
at something for nothing is the sure sign of a man who can't be
trusted.  Lewis told me his news, so I told him mine, although he
knew it before I told him.  He even knew about Ambrose St. Malo.
The secret intelligence trick is to check one report against the
other.  One rumor, or even one fact means nothing;  but if three,
four, five, six rumors all check, that's different."

"But, Andrew, should you have told how you get your news?"

"Why not?  Lewis wanted to know where Tom is.  So I gave him a
chance to put two and two together."

"But why tell him where Tom is?"

"Because he offered to help me to reach Tom."

"But, Andrew, he didn't.  I heard everything he said."

"Elsa, sometimes you're so naive that it's hard to remember how
smart you can be when you're in the mood.  If Lewis doesn't mean
to help me to get into Tibet, why in thunder do you think he'd tip
me off that Bulah Singh is on the watch to prevent me?"

"But if Dr. Morgan Lewis has become the head of the secret
intelligence, surely he can give orders to Bulah Singh, can't he?
He can tell Bulah Singh to look the other way, while you--"

"Don't be ridiculous.  If Morgan Lewis should make that mistake,
Bulah Singh would obey the letter of the orders, but he'd watch
more alertly than ever.  From then on, he'd have an insider's
nuisance value.  Nine-tenths of the secret intelligence trick is
to keep your subordinates mystified.  Bulah Singh has orders to
prevent anyone from getting into Tibet.  Those are standing,
routine orders.  But I'll get through.  And Bulah Singh will be
reprimanded;  if he's ready for the trash can he'll be transferred
and left wondering who did it to him.  But he'll know why.  Bulah
Singh should have let old Mu-ni Gam-po alone.  I'll bet that's
where he slipped up.  Mu-ni Gam-po is a philosopher who thinks in
terms of centuries and has a sense of humor.  Bulah Singh is a
modern wise-guy who thinks he knows all the answers.  Calls himself
a skeptic.  Actually he's a superstitious fool."

"Bulah Singh superstitious?"

"Sure.  That's why he's so eager to prove he isn't."

"I think you're being overconfident, Andrew.  Bulah Singh has the
reputation of being anything but a fool."

Andrew governed his voice down to the note that flatly indicated
patience.  "You who can read thoughts!  Can't you read between
words?  Lewis told us, as plainly as he dared, that Bulah Singh
has been trying to get Mu-ni Gam-po into trouble for letting me
use the monastery roof to watch for smoke signals telling when
the pass is open into Tibet.  That's why I call Bulah Singh a fool."

"But, Andrew, isn't it true that you--"

"Sure!  And Bulah Singh fell for it--hard!  Fell, too, for the
ponies in the monastery stable."

"Well, they're your ponies.  I think you're--"

Andrew stopped her with a gesture.  "Listen:  my ponies have been
getting fat all winter, nearly a hundred miles from here.  The
loads are ten miles away from the ponies.  The men are ten miles
away from the loads."

"But, Andrew, it was only three days ago that I saw a big heap of
loads with your name on them, piled up in two empty stalls in the
stables in this monastery!"

Andrew grinned:  "I don't know whether Mu-ni Gam-po knows my name
is on them.  Those are monastery loads--routine supplies for Tibet.
Bulah Singh's spy will be watching those loads, and watching for
my smoke signals too, long after I'm over the border, unless I miss
my guess about Morgan Lewis."

"But if you're not really watching for smoke signals, how will
you know when the snow has melted enough to make it possible to
get through?"

"That was Bompo Tsering's job.  He's done it.  He brought word last
night that there's only one bad place left, and that's negotiable."

"Where is Bompo Tsering?"

"He was ten miles away from the ponies, being watched by one of
Bulah Singh's undercover men, who has lost most of his pay to Bompo
Tsering at a game that they play with a board and sheeps' knuckle-
bones.  Just now Bompo Tsering is buying odds and ends and fretting
to get away tonight instead of tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?  You might have told me, Andrew.  I never guessed you'd
be going so soon.  When Dr. Lewis spoke of my staying with Nancy
Strong, I had a presentiment.  But--"  She left off speaking,
staring at the brazier.

Andrew didn't answer.  He paced the floor, clenching a wrist behind
his back and stepping accurately on the cracks between the flagstones.
After a minute or two he stood facing the narrow window and watched
the rain in the courtyard, wondering what the devil to say to Elsa.
Worse than that, he was wondering what the devil to say to Tom
Grayne when he should reach him, nearly a thousand miles away, up
over the Roof of the World.  Elsa interrupted his train of thought:

"Andrew, if Dr. Morgan Lewis has become the head of the secret
intelligence, and if Mu-ni Gam-po knows it, or even suspects it,
why should Dr. Lewis have talked in riddles?  Why couldn't he say
things plainly?"

Andrew turned his back to the window.  He answered almost absent-
mindedly, because he was still trying to think what to say to her:
"The monk who admitted Morgan Lewis and remained in the room is a
spy who reports to Bulah Singh.  That's why."

"Oh."

"See here, Elsa."

"Yes, Andrew. What is it?"

"What we were talking about just now."

"You mean about your going away tomorrow?  I'd rather not talk
about it."

"No.  Before that."

"You mean before Mu-ni Gam-po and Dr. Lewis came in?"

"Yes.  Have you written a letter for me to take to Tom Grayne?"

"Of course I have.  I tore up a dozen attempts.  But I got it
finished two days ago.  It's wrapped in oiled silk.  Shall I give
it to you now?"

"No.  What did you write to him?"

"More than twenty pages, Andrew, both sides of the paper."

"If you don't care to tell me what you wrote, okay, it's none of
my God-damned business.  That suits me.  I'll deliver the letter
and say nothing."

"Andrew, you may read the letter if you want to."

"I don't want to."

Elsa uncurled herself, rearranged the cushions and sat nearly
upright.  Her eyes looked hunted.  "Nearly half the letter," she
said, "is about the baby.  After that I told Tom what I have told
you.  I told Tom he is free.  I told him he needn't worry about
me any more.  His papers will be quite safe in the bank vault in
London, and I'll leave the key with Professor Mayor.  I told him
how sorry I am to have caused him so much distress, and that he
mustn't blame himself because it was absolutely all of it my
fault.  And--"

Andrew strode toward her:  "That's what I'd have betted you'd
done!"  He sat down on the edge of the basalt throne exactly
where Lewis had sat, glaring, and scowling so that his eyes were
hardly visible beneath the lowered eyebrows.  Then he suddenly
controlled himself, pulled out the head of Chenrezi, resumed
carving it and didn't speak until he knew his voice was steady.
It almost seemed as if he was speaking to the carved face of Chenrezi:

"Elsa, I'm going to talk to you as a friend if it's the last time."

"That's what I asked you to do."

"You're not playing it straight."

"What do you mean, Andrew?  I'm dishonest?"

"Why ask for advice, and insist on telling me the lowdown, when
you'd shot your bolt already?  Do you call that playing it straight?
If you've done it, you've done it.  So why ask me?  Do you want
to be told you're a Virgin Mary suffering for the sins of the world?
All right, I'll--"

"You are too cruel, Andrew.  I suppose I asked for it, but you
might at least--"

"Pull my punches?  I won't.  I hate cruelty.  But what do you call
what you're doing?  Go ahead, give it a name!"

"You said you'd tell me the answer!"

"Yes, but I didn't know then that you'd written to Tom and told
him, from a thousand miles away, where he gets off.  I only guessed
it.  Guesses don't cut ice."

Elsa stared at him wide-eyed.  He waited for her to speak.  She
couldn't.  She was almost afraid of him.  Her parted lips and
bewildered eyes might have checked him if he hadn't been carving
that piece of wood.  He continued, without looking at her.

"Tom never lied to you, did he?"

"No, never."

"Do you love each other?"

"I would never have conceived his baby if I didn't love him."

"But you don't love him now?  Or are you letting Lovelace do your
thinking:  `I could not love thee, dear, so much, lov'd I not
honor more'--and all that piffle?"

"Andrew, what do you want me to do?  I'm thought out.  I don't
know what to think.  If you're going away, you might at least--"

"Do your thinking for you? Not I!  And I won't yes you either.  But
see here.  I'll use your phrase.  You offered yourself--"

"Yes, like millions of other women, to an ideal--to an idea!"

"Boloney! You offered yourself to Tom Grayne.  Tom accepted.  If
you've told me the truth, you've no right to run out on him.  It's
unfinished business."

Elsa broke down at last, sobbing quietly, trying to hide the sound
from Andrew, counting on the flickering shadows and the male's
natural gift for not noticing things.  If he should guess she was
crying he might suspect her of trying to arouse pity.  He knew she
was crying.  But he knew her too well to entertain any such suspicion
as that.  Pretending not to notice, he told her bluntly, almost
brutally, what she wanted to tell him:

"You're disillusioned.  You feel helpless.  You can't help Tom by
staying here:  you're too closely watched by Bulah Singh.  You can't
claim you're married, because that might get Tom in trouble.  No
one here knows who was your child's father;  half of Darjeeling
suspects me.  You've roughed it long enough with Tom, on the Roof
of the World, to know you'd die of constipated bitterness in the
pink-tea world you came from.  You'd hate like hell to go back to
that.  Your bit of an income would keep you off the dole.  It 'ud
pay bus fares and a library subscription.  You could go to the
cinema once or twice a week.  You might even stand outside
Buckingham Palace and watch the King go by.  And you might get a
job teaching school--but there'd be an inspector from the Board
of Education to make sure you didn't teach the kids that there's
any other standard of value than money, or any other viewpoint
than a mugwump's."

"Yes, Andrew.  Yes.  Yes.  Is that the answer?"

"I'm going soon.  When I'm gone, you'll be alone."

"Lonely as a ghost!"

"Mu-ni Gam-po is sympathetic, but he mistrusts women.  And Nancy
Strong is a woman, so you don't trust her.  You don't get along
with women."

"Andrew, that isn't true."

"Yes, it is."

"You know nothing about it.  You've never seen me with other women.
How could you possibly know?"

"I'm telling you.  You listen.  What pulled you through bearing a
child in a blizzard at sixteen thousand feet above sea level wasn't
so much your guts as what you used 'em for.  Don't forget.  I was
in on that episode."

"How could I ever forget?"

"You just wouldn't be licked because you were fighting back at
the whole damned traditional curse that was laid on women when
some Levite, who had returned from Babylon to Jerusalem under Ezra,
rewrote the Book of Genesis.  You were fighting the Apostle Paul
and the whole army of phony feminists.  Do you want to tell me
you can stand the company of women who yowl for sex equality and
bet their sex against the field like any two-tailed penny in a
crooked two-up joint?  They nearly all do it.  The political ones
are the worst."

"But there are other kinds of women, Andrew."

"Yes, and you're one of the others.  You're clairvoyant.  You
can see--"

"Andrew, I hate it!  Don't pretend that's any good!  It's a curse!
It isn't even reliable.  I can't use it when I want to, when it's
needed, when it might help other people.  It comes and goes,
almost always at the wrong time.  It makes me a stranger.  People
think it's uncanny.  They pester me to tell their fortunes--
especially other people's fortunes--and when I refuse they think
I'm keeping back something too evil to tell.  But if I do tell
what I see, because I forget not to, they think I'm a witch in
league with Satan--Oh, go away, Andrew!  Go away!  Leave me alone!
I'm very, very grateful for all you've done.  But there's nothing
more you can do.  I'm sorry I inflicted all this on you.  It
wasn't fair."

"Nothing's fair," he answered.  "Nobody is.  We're all liabilities,
some of us doing our best, which isn't much.  This world is the
only hell we'll ever know.  We've got to take it and make the best
of it, because we can't leave it.  It isn't a case of devil take
the hindmost.  The devil gets the front men first as the general
rule, and gets all of us sooner or later."

"You believe in the devil?"

"Sure I do.  You and I and all the rest of us are all one devil."

"I have never heard you even mention God, except when you're angry.
Do you believe in God?"

"I don't believe in anything that I believe in," he answered.
"Anything that we believe in is pretty sure to be wrong.  But I
know there's God. That's different.  What you know can't hurt you.
What do you know?"

"Oh, I've left off caring!  No!  There's no God!  No Christ!  Nothing!
Go away, Andrew.  I'll pack up and go to Nancy Strong's house.  Mu-ni
Gam-po will send my things after me.  Please come and say good-bye
before you leave for Tibet, and--"She sat suddenly bolt upright,
possessed by a new idea.  "Andrew!  If I burn that letter
--that I wrote for you to give to Tom--will you--will you tell
him instead?"

"No. I won't.  That was a hell of a letter to write to a man."      

He got to his feet.  "Where is it?"

Elsa hesitated.  Suddenly she got up and went to the writing table
where her English translation of Tibetan folios lay piled in a heap.
She took the letter from a leather folder.  It was wrapped in
oilskin and heavily sealed.  She stood holding it between the
fingers of both hands, looking thoroughbred--slim, mettlesome,
beginning to be very angry.  Andrew stood still, watching.

"You're proud, aren't you, Andrew?  You're too proud to have a
hand in what looks to you like cowardice.  Your pride is cruel.
You're hard.  But I can be as hard as you are.  So very well:  I
will burn the letter.  Then you shall tell me the answer."

"Now you're talking," said Andrew.

"No, I'm not.  I'm burning my bridges, once more, for the last time."

Andrew stepped aside and watched her lay the letter on the hot
coal in the brazier.  The burning silk stank;  so did the sealing
wax;  it made her gasp, but even that didn't conceal from Andrew
the fact that her expression changed while she watched the letter
turn to ashes . At last she met his eyes, across the brazier.

"Andrew--just now you were thinking about the snow in the passes
toward Tibet and what the spring storms will be like.  I saw your
mental picture--all the long trail--all of it--all in a moment."

"That's nothing," he answered.  "Lots of people could do
that.  What else?"

"You weren't alone on the trail."

"Of course I wasn't.  Don't be silly.  There'll be Bompo Tsering
and the rest of the Tibetan gang.  There'll be ponies, and--"

"There was someone else--shadowy--someone who didn't belong, and
yet did belong.  It's hard to explain.  It's as if the others,
and the ponies, and the loads, and the trail are all fixed in our
mind and quite clear, including even the men's characters and the
ponies' temperaments.  But the other person was vague, as if you
weren't sure, or didn't like the idea, or--"

"Who was it?" he demanded.

"Andrew!  I've no right to ask this.  It isn't fair.  It isn't
even reasonable.  Will you let me go with you to Tibet?"

"Okay."

"Andrew, are you--"

"I said yes.  The hell of it is, it means three extra ponies and
maybe a couple of extra yaks to carry fodder for the ponies, and
an extra tent, and your rations.  It'll be harder to get away,
and there'll be trouble about staying where they don't like
women--and--"

"Oh, I know.  It's impossible!  Andrew, I shouldn't have asked.
I know I shouldn't have."

"You can't play it straight anyhow else, if you can stand the
journey.  Can you stand it?"

"Andrew, I can stand anything!  I'm as strong as a horse.  Really
I am.  I'm all over it--quite well again.  Andrew, honestly if I
didn't know I could make it I wouldn't--"

"Okay.  It'll be tough going."

"Don't I know it!  But I did it before when I was heavy with child.
It should be easier this time.  But what will Tom say?"

"That's Tom's business."

"Tom told me to stay in Darjeeling."

"Yeah.  I heard him.  But he asked me to do the best I can for you.
I said I would.  So that's that.  I'll go and see about those
extra ponies before Bulah Singh gets wise to us."

"One minute, Andrew!  Please wait!  How about Dr. Morgan Lewis?
What will he say?"

"We'll find that out soon enough.  He won't be so easy as Bulah
Singh.  Can't fool Lewis.  But he's on the level.  I'm betting he's
the new Number One in Johnson's place.  If I'm right, we're in luck."

"Andrew, you're the kindest and most astonishing man in the world.
What can I say that--"

"Say nothing.  Just do as you're told and you'll be all right."

"Very well, Andrew.  I know it's no use thanking you for anything.
From now on I'm taking orders.  You give them.  Am I to go to
Nancy Strong's house?"

"Sure.  Lewis tipped us off about that."

"Very well.  But Nancy will ask questions, and she'll know what
kind of questions to ask."

"Answer her questions.  Make sure no one overhears you, that's
all.  I'll see Mu-ni Gam-po on my way out and get him to sleight-
of-hand you out of here by the back way, so that Bulah Singh won't
know about it.  He'll know Morgan Lewis has been here.  So we'd
better keep the curtains drawn and send out a rumor you've had a
relapse.  I'll attend to all that.  How long will it take you to
pack your things?"

"Fifteen--twenty minutes."

"Go to it.  Keep under cover at Nancy Strong's until you hear from
me again.  I'll send saddlebags to Nancy's, and you'll have to get
her to buy any extras you'll need.  Leave your manuscripts with
Mu-ni Gam-po.  Nancy Strong will take care of anything else you
have to leave behind.  Will you trust me to buy you a traveling kit?"

"Andrew, is there anything you can't be trusted to do?"

His expression made her wish she hadn't said it.  He always shook
off flattery, and even genuine praise and gratitude, as if the
thought of it hurt him.

"Give me one of your boots," he answered.  "I'll take that with
me for, the right size."

Elsa produced a felt boot from a chest.  Andrew wrapped it in a
woolen shawl and tucked it under his arm.

"All right.  Then I'll get going and attend to things.  I'm glad
you're coming."

"You're glad I'm coming?  Andrew, please don't think you have to
say that kind of thing.  I'm--"

"You go to Nancy Strong's and be ready to start at a moment's
notice, any hour, day or night.  No letters, remember.  No
telegrams.  No good-byes for Bulah Singh to listen in on."

"Trust me.  I wouldn't dream of it."

"There's nothing else, is there?"

"Yes, just one other thing.  Andrew, I know you don't like
sentimental scenes, so I won't make one.  And besides, I'm so
grateful to you that I couldn't say it anyhow.  But--but--"

"Oh, that's all right.  You keep your head and hold your tongue
and you'll be all right.  See you later."

Andrew walked out, leaving her standing beside the brazier, staring
after him, wondering.  The door slammed.  The coals in the brazier
sank.  A bell summoned the monks to chapel.  Silence became a
dimension of dim-hued existence.  With the faculty that she hated,
of visualizing absent people so clearly that they seemed more real
than when they were actually present, she saw Andrew Gunning now,
exactly as he had stood a few moments ago beside the brazier
talking to her.  But, as in a dream when time and space coalesce
without confusion, she could simultaneously see him by the window,
and on the edge of the basalt throne, carving Chenrezi's head,
fencing verbally with Morgan Lewis, scowling at some of her own
remarks.  And there was Bulah Singh, the Sikh Chief of Police,
gazing at her.  Simultaneously there was Tom Grayne, hundreds of
miles to the northward, solitary, in a cave, in Tibet.  And she
knew Tom was thinking of her.  He was angry--unhappy--uncertain
and--so it seemed to her vision--ashamed.

She dragged out a battered suitcase and began packing.





5.



At the end of the rain-swept courtyard Andrew mounted the stairs
and tried to interview Mu-ni Gam-po.  But at the corner of the
long gallery, where the passage turned off to the Abbot's apartment,
he was told by a smiling monk that blessed meditation must not be
disturbed.  That was a plain diplomatic evasion.  He could hear
voices.  Whoever was meditating in the Abbot's apartment was doing
it noisily with at least three voices.

Andrew paced the wooden gallery.  His footsteps echoed across the
courtyard.  He was consequently watched by monks, whose gift for
grapevine gossip was as well developed as if they had been prisoners
in a penitentiary.  He was a scandal, the butt of guesswork.  The
usual bells rang.  The routine two-by-two and to-and-fro processions
of monks through the courtyard arch continued--mysterious goings
and comings, whose mystery was how humans could endure such routine.

It left off raining.  A few stars appeared.  The moon broke through
hurrying clouds and was reflected like a stream of pure gold on
the dark wet courtyard paving-stones.  Lonely.  Beautiful. Unreal.
Andrew fought for a grip on reality--an enormously difficult thing
to do in a crisis, in which the only certainty was that nothing
was certain.  Facts were dead things, meaning whatever one chose
to make them mean.  Ideas were playing havoc with the facts.
Somewhere between fact and idea lay reason.  But even reason was
a mess of contradictions.  The reason why he had simply, naturally,
intuitionally recognized the rightness of taking Elsa back to Tom
Grayne was smothered and contradicted by plausible, logical matter
of fact.

"Intuition is right.  Logic is wrong--or there'd never be anything
new.  Yes there would, though.  There's a logic of intuition."

So thought Andrew, with the part of him that did think.  Part of
his mind was musing on the trail toward Tibet--wind-swept passes
twenty thousand feet above sea level--chasms and crags and the
merciless rivers that shout like fighting devils between cliffs
where eagles build their nests beneath a turquoise sky.  He hated
Tibet--loved it because he hated it, hatred and love being one.
No need to think.  He could half close his eyes and remember, just
as clearly as one sees the Himalayan panorama from the Singalila
Ridge.  He knew all the known difficulties, and knew there were
thousands more that he couldn't imagine.  He could see what he
did know, all in one picture:  Tibet;  Elsa;  Tom Grayne.  Those
were facts that must interpret themselves--or be interpreted by
the light of an idea that hadn't yet dawned on reason.  Andrew
himself was a fact;  a self-contradictory, curious fact--pitiless,
generous, skeptical, credulous, all in one.  A lover of conflict.
A hater of quarrels.  A poet, who had never written one line of
poetry nor sung one song of his own making, yet who knew he was
a poet.  Paradoxical lover of lofty views that made him veil his
thought with blunt, ungracious words.  That much he knew of himself
and could laugh at--at least smile at.  He could see himself as a
remarkably comical fellow, to be handled with alert discretion
because there was a streak in him that he knew no more about than
other people did and that caused him to surprise himself.  He wasn't
thinking about that;  but he saw it, mentally, while he tried to
concentrate on what to say to Mu-ni Gam-po.

The mental picture and conflict were interrupted suddenly by voices
in the door of Mu-ni Gam-po's antechamber.  He was instantly alert,
but he continued pacing the gallery until he reached the head of
the stairs.  There he turned in no hurry and retraced his footsteps;
becoming angry, not because he recognized the men coming toward
him but because he had been too stupid not to expect them.  Morgan
Lewis, side by side with the Chief of Police Bulah Singh, in step
together, laughing, joking--strangely military-looking figures
in the cloistered dimness, though they were not in uniform.  There
was only one electric light, in an enameled frame, on a beam of
the gallery roof.  All three came to a halt under it, sharply
limned against the shadows, facing one another.  Morgan Lewis
produced his monocle, screwed it into his eye--a symptom--a
gleaming symbol of urbane artfulness.  Bulah Singh merely nodded,
staring at the bundle under Andrew's arm that concealed Elsa's boot.

"This saves no end of looking for you," said Lewis.  "Not on your
way to see Mu-ni Gam-po, are you?"

"Sure.  Is he in?"

"Yes.  But don't waste time trying to see him.  He's busy.  Bulah
Singh has brought some matters to his attention that will occupy
him for several hours.  You know Bulah Singh, don't you?"

"Sure."  Andrew smiled because the lamplight shone full in his face
and the Sikh was watching him intently.

"You should know each other better," said Lewis.  "Both of you are
good talkers.  Why not get together some time?  Oh, by the way,
Gunning, I asked Mu-ni Gam-po about that translation.  He said he'd
attend to it.  So if that's what you wanted to see him about you
needn't trouble."

The Sikh watched Andrew's face but Lewis distracted attention by
dropping his monocle--caught it in the palm of his hand--tossed
it two or three times, and replaced it in his eye.

"One of these days you'll be shot for doing that," the Sikh
remarked.  "Someone will mistake it for a signal and he'll plug
you in the gizzard."

"I must cure myself of habits," Lewis answered.  "The good habits
are the worst ones."

"Are you walking my way?"  Andrew asked, addressing both men.
"I think I'll go to the hotel and maybe turn in."

"We're important people.  We've a car," said Lewis.  "We'll give
you a lift.  It's Bulah Singh's car but--"

"Perfectly delighted," said the Chief of Police, sounding as if
he meant it.  "Let's go.  As a matter of fact, if Mr. Gunning can
spare the time, I'd like a chat with him."

It was a command, not an invitation.  There was malice in the
Sikh's dark eyes.  Andrew ignored that.

"Come and have a drink at the hotel," he suggested.

"Yes. I'm thirsty."

They walked together to the stairhead, Andrew on the outside,
watching Lewis for a signal.  Lewis made none.  They tramped down
the stone steps side by side, jumped one by one across the puddle
at the foot of the stairs, drew abreast again and awoke the monastery
echoes as they marched in step toward the archway that divided
outer and inner courtyards.  Not a word.  Not a hint.  Not a sign.
Not even the monocle now;  it had returned to Lewis's vest pocket.
Andrew broke the silence:

"Lewis, you'll join us of course for a drink?"

"No.  Not this time.  I've a case to look up--very interesting case.
Called in for consultation.  So I think I'll drop you two at the
hotel and send the car back for Bulah Singh--that's to say, if
Bulah Singh will permit."

"Why, certainly."  The Sikh appeared off guard and anxious to please.
"Just tell the driver where to take you."

No one spoke again until they had tramped through the long dark
archway and halfway across the outer courtyard.  Then Bulah Singh
spoke in a casual tone of voice that didn't quite conceal a
tart sub-flavor:

"Lots of ponies in the monastery stables.  Your loads are stowed
here, aren't they, Gunning?"

"It saves renting a godown," Andrew answered.  "I took the precaution
of having the loads marked with my name, to prevent misunderstanding."

The Sikh was about to say something but Morgan Lewis interrupted:
"By the way, if you're in no hurry, Bulah Singh, I'd like to keep
your car until the consultation's over.  Is that putting too much
strain on your good nature?"

"Keep it as long as you please," said the Sikh.  "Gunning will
have to endure my company until you bring the car back, that's all."

Andrew suspected guile, but he did not glance at Morgan Lewis, lest
Bulah Singh should also draw conclusions.  The Sikh seemed unconscious
of possible ulterior motive beneath Lewis's innocent air.

"Gunning and I should find plenty to talk about," he remarked.  "I
look forward to it."  He very evidently did look forward to it.

Andrew got into the waiting car, in the narrow street outside the
monastery front gate, aware of a new admiration for Morgan Lewis.
"Translation" obviously meant that Elsa would be spirited away to
Nancy Strong's house out of Bulah Singh's reach--she--Elijah in a
chariot of petrol.  And Lewis had cleverly jockeyed the Chief of
Police into a corner, to be entertained and encouraged to talk
while Lewis used unseen wires--perhaps telephone wires.  Lewis
was trusting him--perhaps trying him out.  One false move, one
ill-considered remark, and Bulah Singh might close the passes in
spite of anything Lewis could do.  Lewis probably had no executive
authority, whereas the Sikh did have.  Then worse would happen.
Tom Grayne would be left without support or supplies, helpless,
useless, more than nine hundred miles away over the Roof of the World.

It was abundantly clear to Andrew that the Government was willing
he should recross the forbidden frontier into Tibet--but that the
Sikh wasn't in on the deal--not yet, at any rate--and there was
conflict beneath the surface.





6.



Bulah Singh despised all amateurs.  He was himself a professional
in every sense of the word.  He had taken courses in criminology
in Germany and France;  had written, for important quarterlies,
a number of praiseworthy papers on the history and development of
crime in India.  He believed he had peered beneath the mask of
consciousness and understood the underlying automatic metaphysical
mechanics of human behavior.  He had dabbled in Karl Marx, Freud,
Adler, Watson and Cesare Lombroso.  He regarded himself as an
atheist, but he had studied many religions diligently because of
their obvious bearing on the problem of what people believe and
are likely to do.  Intellectually vain, he was equally vain of
his appearance, careful to look as little like a policeman as
possible.  He didn't even look like a Sikh.  He never wore a
uniform if he could help it, bought his soft felt hats in Vienna
and his clothes in London.  A powerful, lean, clean-shaven, rather
dark-skinned man with magnificent teeth and dark brown eyes that
sometimes suggested gentleness and humor.  It was his mouth, when
he wasn't consciously controlling it, that betrayed him;  it
revealed cruelty, deliberately studied, intellectually built into
the structure of his thought.

He sat down in a long armchair in the room next to Andrew's
bedroom and was at pains to pretend to observe his surroundings.
In a secret file at police headquarters there was a list of every
single object in the room.  In the same file were copies of all
Andrew's recent correspondence, together with a not quite accurate
account of his activities since the day he was born.  Andrew
guessed as much;  he had detected finger marks on rifled documents;
and besides, he was quite familiar with the means by which police
in all the countries of the world inform themselves and one another.
He held the whiskey bottle poised over a tumbler and raised one eyebrow.

"Up to the pretty," said Bulah Singh.  "Not too much soda.  No ice."

Andrew tossed Elsa's boot through the bedroom door and sat down
facing him, after making sure that there was no one lurking in
the corridor.  That trick worked.  The Sikh fell for it--boasted:

"Don't be nervous.  One of my men is at the head of the stairs
to make sure we're not interrupted.  I planned this conversation."

"Very thoughtful of you."

"I have had to think about you."  Bulah Singh lighted a cigarette,
blew the smoke through his nose, crossed his knees and selected
the English method of disarming frankness.  "You have me puzzled."

"Sometimes I'm a puzzle to myself," said Andrew.

Bulah Singh stuck to the brusque British method.  "Come now.  No
metaphysics.  I'm a practical man.  So are you.  Let's lay cards
on the table, faces upward."

Andrew's smile was as disarming as the Sikh's assumed frankness:
"Okay. Suits me.  You first."

Bulah Singh's eyes betrayed a flash of resentment.  He was used
to being feared and diffidently treated.  He forgot for a tenth of
a second to govern the line of his mouth.  He led the ace of trumps:

"The frontier into Tibet is closed," he remarked, adding after a
second's pause:  "tight as a drum."

Andrew followed suit with a little one:  "I've heard it's your
business to see that no one gets through."

"Yes.  Not even a native Tibetan can return home without my leave.
When the passes are open--that won't be long now--there'll be
quite an exodus.  There are two ways to get permits.  The wise
ones will come to my office.  The unwise ones will regret their
lack of discretion."

Andrew offered no comment.  He lighted his pipe.

"It's my impression," said Bulah Singh after a moment's silence,
"that it's your immediate ambition to rejoin Tom Grayne in Tibet."

"I've thought of doing it," said Andrew.  "But do you appreciate
what a journey it would be by way of China, with China being raped
by the Japanese?  It would take at least six months--perhaps longer.
It would cost like hell, too."

"Ah.  But how about returning by the way you came?"

Andrew's smile widened:  "Are you suggesting that I'm fool enough
to try to escape your vigilance?"

"Tom Grayne was one of Johnson's pets," said Bulah Singh, tasting
his whiskey.  "That's how Tom Grayne got through."  He watched
Andrew's face narrowly, under lowered eyelids, over the top of
the glass, then set the glass down slowly on the small brass-topped
table beside the chair and continued:  "Johnson is no longer with
us.  His worst fault was that he couldn't train a successor.  The
job is vacant.  There are several candidates."

"Are you one of them?"

The Sikh avoided the question.  "You are no tenderfoot," he remarked.
"I think that is the correct word.  You know as well as I do that
reciprocity and mutual concessions are the secret of all bargains."

Andrew agreed:  "Sure. Nothing for nothing."

Bulah Singh sipped whiskey without looking at him.  No need to look;
he had his victim interested.  All that remained was to jiggle
the bait:  "Suppose I tell what I know," he suggested.  "Then you
tell what you know.  Something might come of it."

"Swell."

"You are clever, Andrew Gunning, or I wouldn't waste time talking
to you.  Beneath that air of almost brutal directness you're as
smart as a fox.  But even foxes make mistakes.  I happen to know
that Tom Grayne is somewhere near Shig-po-ling, short of provisions.
You want to take provisions to him.  I have had to speak to the
Abbot Mu-ni Gam-po about those loads of yours.  If they should be
moved from the monastery stable without my permission it would be
awkward for Mu-ni Gam-po."

Andrew looked serious:  "Glad you mentioned it.  The old Abbot
has been kind to Elsa Burbage.  Kind to me, too.  I'd hate to
make trouble for him."

Bulah Singh nodded:  "Mu-ni Gam-po can't afford any more mistakes.
He has been playing with fire for too many years.  His method is
shopworn--amateurish.  His political sagacity is sticky with religion.
It belongs to a dead era that has been decomposing since the World
War and was buried at last when Johnson of the Ethnographic Survey
left for England.  Johnson was a typical B.S.I.--bigot, stupid,
incorruptible.  A reactionary."

"I never met him," said Andrew.

"So I understand.  Johnson was trained, if you care to call it
training, in the days when Whitehall's grip on India was strong.
He was an amateur, with all the faults that go with it.  Too many
irons in the fire.  No concentration.  You're aware, I suppose,
that the B.S.I. controls the Foreign Office?  Actually it secretly
rules the British Empire.  It's even independently financed, from
Persian oil wells.  Well--there's a strong undercurrent in favor
of changing all that, at least as concerns India.  A professional--
Indian by birth--responsible to Delhi, not Whitehall--do you get me?"

"Sure," said Andrew, gravely courteous.  "Changes are going on
everywhere.  Who'd heard of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, twenty
years ago?  I guess it's simply a matter of the right man, at the
right moment, with the right information and the right idea."

Bulah Singh blew a smoke ring and pushed his finger through it,
indicating bull's-eye, first shot, and time to be careful.  "I
could use some information about Tibet," he remarked.

Andrew accepted the opening:  "Yes, whoever could swing Tibet
would be powerful.  He could upset any political calculations.
But are you young enough?  And have you the backing in India?"

"I have detractors. I have enemies," said Bulah Singh.  "Envy,
jealousy,  malice are inseparable from politics.  Very few people
can be impersonal when it comes to making political appointments.
As for impartiality, that consists in understanding neither side
of a problem.  Some very influential people, who call themselves
impartial, and perhaps believe it, are opposed to the principle
of putting an Indian into a key position, no matter what his
qualifications.  Their prejudices masquerade as principles.  But
I'm a realist.  Hard facts are what interest me."

"What facts do you want to know?" Andrew asked.

"Well--for instance--" he blew smoke through his nose "--who pays you?"

"No one.  I've a private income.  I'm a free lance."

Bulah Singh's eyes hardened:  "Ummnn.  If I believed that, it might
possibly simplify matters.  But the fact is, you're an agent of
the United States Department of State, or else of the Treasury,
or the Army or Navy, or possibly even the Postal Department.  Who
sent you from Shanghai to Shig-po-ling?"

"The same man who pays Tom Grayne," Andrew answered.

Bulah Singh sipped at his drink thoughtfully.  "I know who pays
Tom Grayne," he said after a moment.

"Swell.  Then we needn't discuss it."

"You are unpaid?  That is very interesting, if true.  Have you
any idea why the American Government should be interested in what's
going on in Tibet?  As a private citizen, unpaid, I suppose you
feel free to discuss that?"

"Well," said Andrew, "since you ask me, it's my guess that the
American Government doesn't give a good God-damn what's happening
in Tibet.  You'll have to take that or leave it. I believe it's
the truth."

The Sikh sneered.  "It is one hundred per cent true that you can't
cross the border into Tibet--without my leave.  You'd better talk."

"Well," said Andrew, "if my opinion's any use to you, I'd say that
our Army and Navy are watching Japan.  Why shouldn't they?  If
they know what Japan's commitments and intentions are they can
bear 'em in mind.  If the Japs win, the Far East cat jumps one way.
If the Chinese win, it jumps the other way.  Forewarned is forearmed."

"Forewarned is what you are now," said Bulah Singh.  If you want
special favors--"

"I don't," said Andrew.

"If you don't want special inconvenience, and even special arrest,
under special regulations, devised for the special purpose of
preventing unauthorized or seditious acts--I advise you to tell
me plainly why Tom Grayne is interested in the infant Dalai Lama,
and what his and your interest amounts to."

"That's a long story," said Andrew.  "You know, of course, how
they go about getting a new Dalai Lama?"

Bulah Singh betrayed a flash of impatience.  But he appeared to
decide that Andrew wasn't quite ripe yet for plucking.  "Yes,"
he said after a moment, "I have made a study of that.  Such
superstitions are more revealing than even Frazer points out in
his Golden Bough.  Have you read that?"

"Some of it," said Andrew.  "I read two or three volumes and
got bored."

"A study of Frazer explains why Hitler is inventing a new religion
for the Germans;  and why he attacks Christianity."

"What's your point?" asked Andrew.  "What are you driving at?"

Bulah Singh's eyes were excited, but he talked on patiently:  "The
Tibetan superstition, that a dead Dalai Lama reincarnates almost
instantly into the body of a newborn child, would be comical if it
weren't actually, when it's well analyzed, the same old myth that's
at the root of all religion.  Of course in practice it sets up a
vicious circle because of the human craving for power.  Poison is
the obvious corollary;  any criminologist could foretell that.  The
men behind the scenes poison a Dalai Lama and set up a Council of
Regents, who then claim supernatural guidance and in due course
they discover a child into whose body the poisoned victim is supposed
to have reincarnated.  They take the child away from his mother and
control him until just before he comes of age.  Then again they
poison him, and begin all over.  That makes it very nice for the
Council of Regents."

"You seem to know as much about it as I do," said Andrew.  "Why
don't you come to the point?  I won't betray your confidences."

The Sikh stared.  He was startled:  "Pardon me," he said.  "Let's
understand each other.  It is your confidences that won't be
betrayed--provided they're of value to me."

Andrew laughed.  "The difficulty is, I know no more than you do.
However, here's the low-down, for what it's worth.  If you know
it already, say so, and I'll stop talking.  The Council of Regents
in Lhasa, with one exception, are political crooks with phony
religious credentials.  For centuries it has been the first
principle of the Tibetan political game to play off the Dalai
Lama against the Panchen Lama, and make rivals of them, instead
of co-rulers as they're supposed to be.  But now there's neither
Dalai nor Panchen Lama.  A few years ago, you remember, they
chased the Panchen Lama into exile in China, because he was too
incorrigibly honest.  After that, they poisoned the best Dalai
Lama that Tibet ever had.  That gave the ball to the political gang.
So they staged the usual circus, scoured the countryside and
discovered a newborn child whom they identified as the Dalai Lama's
successor.  The Panchen Lama imposed his official veto.  But the
Regents treated that as a joke because they had chased him out of
Tibet and he couldn't come back.  He died in exile quite recently.
So the new infant Dalai Lama's divine right to the throne of Tibet
stands unchallenged.  He has a propaganda value."

"He has more than that," said the Sikh.

"Call it poker, if you prefer the word."  Andrew was warming up.
"The point is that China, Japan and Russia realize his potential
value.  They are employing some of the cleverest secret agents in
the world, and almost unlimited money, to gain political control
of Tibet.  Tibet is not the obvious key, but it's the real key to
the control of Asia.  And the key to Tibet is the infant Dalai Lama.
Have I made that clear?"

"Yes.  That's a good precis.  But there's nothing secret about it,"
said Bulah Singh.  "It even appeared in the American newspapers.  I
have the clippings.  What else do you know?"

"Probably no more than you know," said Andrew.  "The self-appointed
Council of Regents in Lhasa have been bribed alternately by Russian,
Japanese and Chinese agents, and supplied with weapons and so on.
They've been fed so much bull and boloney and lying propaganda
that they're three parts crazy.  They'd rather cut each other's
throats than come in out of the wet.  They all thought  themselves
Machiavellis, but now they feel more like hayseeds in a gyp-joint.
There was only one member of the Council who ever rated as a real
number one man.  No doubt you've heard of him.  They gave him the
works.  Damned near killed him.  Chased him out of Lhasa.  He's
in hiding."

Bulah Singh's eyes narrowed.  He interrupted.  Which one do you
refer to?"

"I don't know him personally.  Never met him," said Andrew.  "Tom
Grayne knows him well."

"Ah."  The Sikh's eyes glittered.  "Then Elsa Burbage also knows him?"

Andrew noticed the tactical change of attack.  He sensed the sudden
lunge of directed thought, like a rapier under his guard.

"Dr. Lewis could tell you," he answered.  He knew it wasn't a clever
answer, but it gave him a second in which to think and recover.

The Sikh followed up:  "I am asking you, not Lewis."

"Yes. I heard you."

"Is the man you mean the Ringding Gelong Lama Lobsang Pun?"

"If you know him, why ask me?"  Andrew retorted.

The Sikh nodded then demanded suddenly:  "Where is the infant
Dalai Lama?  Do you know?"

"You may have later news than mine," said Andrew, "but what happened
is this: the Abbot of Shig-po-ling is no more a genuine Abbot than
you or I, but he's one of the Regents--his right name is Ram-pa
Yap-shi.  He carried off the infant Dalai Lama to the fortified
monastery at Shig-po-ling, where he is dickering with Russian and
Japanese agents.  Perhaps with Chinese agents too.  Presumably he'll
sell out to the highest bidder."

The Sikh nodded:  "That isn't news, but it's true.  Physical
possession of the infant Dalai Lama would be a bargain at any price,"
he remarked.  "How old is he?"

"He must be about five years old by now."

"Still young enough.  The Jesuits were right about catching them
young.  Mussolini is following suit.  So are Stalin and Hitler--
training infants.  So is Nancy Strong, God damn her!  Teach the
child, the man obeys.  Sow now and reap the Future.  The child is
father to the man.  Educated by Japan, the Dalai Lama would be
Japanese.  Educated by a Russian expert, he would become more
Russian than Stalin himself.  What is Tom Grayne doing?"

Andrew grinned genially:  "If I knew, I'd tell you."

"You do know. You have means of communication with Tom Grayne in Tibet."

Andrew stiffened.  "If he and I corresponded by mail, you'd have
no need to ask questions, would you?"

The Sikh also stiffened.  He had finished feinting.  He commenced
actual assault.  Its violence was hypnotic:  "You correspond by
way of Sinkiang, Hongkong and Macao.  Smart work, but not secret
from me.  You have another, much more secret means.  Cooperate,
in that, with me--or take the consequences."

"I don't think I get you," said Andrew.

"No?  I will drop you a hint."

"Go to it."

"Did you ever hear that during the World War the German High Seas
Fleet put to sea, not long before the Battle of Jutland, simply
and solely to find out whether it was true, as they suspected,
that the British Admiralty had occult means of reading the German
secret signals?"

"No, I never heard of that.  I don't believe it," said Andrew.

"Don't you!  Then read what Admiral Bacon says about it in his
life of Lord Fisher.  I can lend you the book."

"I don't care if it's in fifty books.  I don't believe it," said Andrew.

Bulah Singh smiled importantly:  "Von Tirpitz and Ludendorff did
believe it.  Why?  Because they themselves were also trying to use
occult means, in competition with the British secret intelligence."

"How do you know that?"

"I knew Ludendorff--after the war.  But before the war, I was one
of the secret observers appointed to watch the staff of the German
Crown Prince when he came to India.  Do you know why the Crown
Prince was obliged to leave India so suddenly?"

"I was in short pants in those days," said Andrew.  "I was learning
all about Santa Claus and George Washington and the Cherry Tree,
and how the doctor brings newborn babies in a handbag."

"Members of the Crown Prince's staff," said Bulah Sing, "were
discovered attempting to establish a telepathic link with Indian
seditionists for propaganda purposes in time of war.  It was I who
caught them at it.  The Crown Prince was given his walking orders,
and the Germans never did get beyond the experimental stage."

"That kind of thing is darned easy to say," Andrew remarked.  "I
should say it's less easy to prove."

"Impossible to prove!"  The Sikh's eyes glowered like an angry dog's.
"That is its value!  Its virtue!  Its importance.  That is why you
get away with it!  That is why you and I can't deal on ordinary terms.
There must be guarantees.  How do you wish to return to Tibet?"

"No orders yet," said Andrew eyeing him hard.  "I've been wondering
whether some of my correspondence has been held up."

The Sikh accepted the challenge:  "Oh, I'll be quite frank about
that.  Your mail goes through the usual channels.  The one you
received from the United States last Tuesday was in code.  I read it.
It was signed `Hofstedder.'  It said something about taking a walk
that suggested a possible double meaning.  That's why I asked where
you're hoping to go."

"I have the letter in my pocket," Andrew answered.

"Well, see here, Gunning.  Let's suppose that the dice should be
loaded a bit in your favor.  Let's suppose you should slip over
the border discreetly without any risk of being caught.  Would
you reciprocate?"

"How?  In what way?"

"In any way I stipulate."

Andrew grinned.  "That's a tall order.  You'd better explain."

Bulah Singh stood up.  He lighted another cigarette.  He half
closed his eyes.  He came closer to Andrew, standing over him,
looking down at him.  His mouth didn't look like a man's any longer;
it suggested a gash made by a surgeon's knife.  He held his voice
down to a flat monotone.

"I've got you by the short hair, Andrew Gunning.  There's no India
Office visa on your passport.  There's the little matter of Elsa
Burbage to be explained.  And there are those loads at the monastery.
Taking a walk is exactly you are going to do--in either of two
directions.  Agree with me, and over the Roof of the World with
you.  Otherwise, take the first boat from Calcutta or Bombay.  Which
is it?"

The knuckles of Andrew's fingers that clutched the chair-arm turned
white under the pressure of self-control.  The professional Bulah
Singh should have noticed it, but he seemed not to.  Andrew knew
that Morgan Lewis had purposely left him alone with the Sikh.  He
couldn't risk anger.  He glanced at his watch, at the door, at the
window;  made a rather amateurish effort to look furtive, realized
that the Sikh saw through that, changed it to a skeptical grin
that was far more effective, and said:  "Sit down.  Help yourself
to a drink.  Let's talk things over."





7.



Elsa's bazaar-bought raincoat made a pool around her feet on the
floor of Nancy Strong's hallway.  The turbaned servant who hung
up the raincoat and knelt to wipe her wet shoes clucked solicitous
comment.  He was used to all kinds of people--even well-bred,
gently mannered people in inexpensive clothes, who came without
warning in the rain, at unconscionable hours.  But why no galoshes?
Why were her shoes not wetter than they were?  If she hadn't walked,
how had she got there?  The effort of suppressing the urge to ask
questions so occupied his mind that he forgot his manners and left
her standing in the hall while he switched on the light in the
living room and frugally added pine knots to the blazing fire.

The hall was lined on both sides with books in shelves about
shoulder-high;  on the wall above those were plainly framed
photographs of ex-pupils of Nancy's school.  Tibet, Nepaul and
every province of India were represented.  On top of the shelves
were statuettes, done in clay by the pupils and baked in the
school kiln.  Some of them were very revealing portraits of Nancy
Strong as seen through the eyes of attentive, inquisitive Indian
youth.  No two alike--even remotely alike--and yet all unmistakably
Nancy Strong in one mood or another.

Elsa felt relieved that Nancy wasn't there to receive her.  She
needed time, after a wild ride through the rain with Dr. Lewis in
Bulah Singh's car, to subdue emotions that made her heart beat
quickly and her head feel almost like someone else's, full of
unfamiliar thought that she recognized nevertheless as her own.
She admired Nancy Strong, but she was conscious of being on guard
against her.  She even liked her.  But she didn't quite trust her.
Not quite.  There was something about Nancy that always made her
feel shy and reserved.  Perhaps it was the school-teacher quality.
It was a superficial manner, because Nancy had no unpleasant
mannerisms.  It was more likely a habit of thought, concealed but
evident to Elsa's sensitive perception.  Her perception was much
too sensitive.  Elsa knew it.  She was always much too careful,
and perhaps afraid, of meeting other people's minds in unmasked
conflict.  Each time she had met Nancy hitherto she hid always
felt vaguely antagonistic, almost sulkily disposed to cover up her
own thought and talk superficially, which she could do very well
when she wanted to.  Sometimes Nancy even made her feel like a
small animal that creeps into its hole and watches, listens,
wonders what next?

So when the servant ushered her into the vast living room she made
an effort of will to be natural, at ease, and confident of welcome.
It didn't quite work.  But she achieved some success.  The servant
seemed to notice it.  He smiled at her as he fussed around rearranging
ashtrays, watching her furtively, waiting for her to sit down before
going to summon his employer.  She chose a chair near the door.  But
the moment he left the room she got up again and looked about her,
as it were feeling for Nancy's atmosphere in order to meet her on
even ground.

There was surely no other room in the world quite like that one.
In the middle of the long wall opposite the door was a huge stone
fireplace.  In a horseshoe around that, within an oblong barricade
of bookshelves, were large old-fashioned, overstuffed armchairs,
each with a footstool and a small end-table beside it.  The fire
shone hospitably through an opening between the bookshelves, which
were placed back to back, so that books faced both ways, inward
toward the fireplace and outward toward the room.  Outside that
homelike, snug enclosure, the room resembled almost a museum, except
for touches of humor and a sensation of being lived in.  The carpet
was from Samarkand, too good to tread on.  The curtains were from
Lhasa, Bokhara and Peking.  The walls were hung with Tibetan sacred
paintings and some of Nancy Strong's own, less sacred but strongly
unsentimental watercolors, of which the most noticeable was a
portrait of the late Dalai Lama.  There were devil-masks, Tibetan
weapons, bronze bells, dories, silk embroidery and weird musical
instruments.  At one end of the room was a black grand piano that
threw everything else out of balance.  Its top was a maze of framed
photographs.  Elsa went up and studied them, growing mentally more
confused and uncertain of Nancy's point of view as she looked, and
remembered chance remarks, and guessed, and tried to imagine Nancy
Strong in such strangely assorted company.

Three were of Viceroys.  There was Lord Kitchener in Commander in
Chief's uniform.  The ex-Kaiser, alongside Admiral of the Fleet
Lord Fisher and the weirdly bearded Von Tirpitz.  General Lord
Allenby.  An archbishop, a cardinal, two bishops.  King George and
Queen Mary.  Senator Borah.  General Smuts.  Sun Yat-Sen.  Gandhi.
President Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt side by side.  Mary Pickford,
Will Rogers.  The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.  Sven Hedin. General
Younghusband.  And no less than eleven Indian ruling princes.  All
autographed, and many of them bearing written record of affection.

But the most remarkable object in the room stood alone, on a small
teak table, exactly midway between the door and the fireplace.  One
had to walk around it to reach the opening in the oblong screen of
bookshelves.  It was a much enlarged head and shoulder portrait of
the Ringding Gelong Lama Lobsang Pun, known in Tibetan and English,
and to friend and enemy alike, as Old Ugly-face.  The portrait started
floods of memories pouring into Elsa's mind, although it had been
obviously taken long before she met him, in the days when he was
reasonably thin and coming to be recognized in Far East diplomatic
circles as the new enigma.

There was a magnificent cat on the hearth, with its back to the
fire in feline recognition of the fact that the rain had only
temporarily ceased.  He would turn his face to the fire again when
the rain resumed.  Meanwhile, he studied Elsa with Sphinx-like
detachment.  His face looked something like Lobsang Pun's in the
silver-framed photograph.  It was only a vague resemblance, but
there it was.  You could look at either of them and catch yourself
thinking about the other--wondering how many birds the cat had
killed--how many secrets Old Ugly-face knew.

Elsa went and sat down by the fire.  She made friendly overtures
to the cat.  But the cat took no notice, any more than Lobsang Pun
would have done.  So she leaned back and stared at the fire, thinking
about Lobsang Pun, as she last saw him, at the Thunder Dragon Gate
in Tibet.  But she began to see Bulah Singh's face, growing larger
and larger amid the burning pine knots.  That was no good.  It
didn't frighten her, but it made her feel vaguely guilty of
forgetting something that she should remember--secretly guilty
of liking a man whom really she intensely disliked.  To throw off
that sensation and get her mind on something else she turned
sideways in the armchair to glance at the rows of books, pulling
out a few at random from the nearest shelf behind her.  Aristotle,
Lord Derby's Homer, Plato, Science and Health, by Mary Baker Eddy.
She returned them and tried again, kneeling on the chair to read
the titles:  the Upanishads, Freud, St. Paul's Epistles to the
Corinthians in Greek, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, the Psalms in English,
the second volume of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in German.  The Tibetan
Book of the Dead, Tennyson, Browning, the Bhagavad-Gita, a whole
set of Dickens, the Intimate Papers of Colonel House, a set of
Shakespeare, Hitler's Mein Kampf in German, the Bible, the Koran--

Elsa heard the door open.  She jumped out of the chair, hurriedly
straightened her skirt and went and stood in the opening between
the bookcases, silhouetted with her back to the firelight, feeling
rather like a bewildered child and not at all sure she was welcome.





8.



Something happened to the room when Nancy Strong entered and closed
the door behind her, glancing around swiftly before she looked at
Elsa.  She even brought the grand piano into harmony with all the
rest of it.  Gray-haired, gray-eyed, gallantly old-fashioned, even
dowdy.  She wore one of those dependable brown wool frocks that
Department Stores can be trusted to ship to customers of twenty-five
years' standing.  Woolen stockings.  Tidy ankles.  Scarred knuckles.
Hands like a horseman's.  Her face had no room left on it for
ugliness, there was so much character.  She was beautiful from
having faced trouble and stood up to it and beaten it, times
without number.  A stormy-weather woman, matter-of-fact in her
greeting of Elsa:

"Why did you get up?  Sit down again.  How did you get here?"

She took a chair beside Elsa facing the fire.  The cat leaped
into her lap.

"Dr. Morgan Lewis brought me, in a car belonging to the Chief
of Police."

"Is the man mad?  Did he let Bulah Singh's chauffeur know where
you are?"

"Oh no.  He sent the Indian chauffeur away on an errand and drove
the car himself.  He set me down before we reached the front gate,
so as not to be seen."

"Take off your shoes and dry your feet at the fire.  Does Mu-ni
Gam-po know you've left the monastery?"

"Yes, I feel sure he knows.  He sent his doctor and two other monks
to lead me through a tunnel I've never seen before to a building
quite a long way off, and out through a door in a wall to where Dr.
Lewis was waiting with the car."

"And your luggage?"

"The monks will bring it.  It was being wrapped in burlap, to look
like bundles of rags for the carpet makers, when I came away."

"No need to worry about that then.  It will be in the godown before
midnight.  Well, I suppose this means that Andrew Gunning has his
marching orders."

Elsa nodded, too excited to answer.  There was no need to say that
she was going with Andrew.  The news exuded from her.  Nancy Strong
shook her head so vehemently that a couple of hairpins fell out and
she had to rearrange her gray mane.  She spoke with a hairpin in
her teeth:

"That man Morgan Lewis is worse than Johnson.  Much worse.  There's
no limit to Lewis's masculine romanticism.  The weaker sex should
set us women an example of restraint.  But they don't.  They know
we're realists.  They egg us on to do the things they can't do.
Lewis is dangerous.  It's too bad that we can't get along without
dangerous men."

Elsa rallied to the challenge of injustice:  "Dr. Lewis isn't
responsible for my going back to Tibet.  He thinks I'm going to
stay here with you."

Nancy Strong's face flickered with the humor that had made her
famous as a teacher beyond praise.  "Do you think he believes you
could teach my orphans to make carpets?" she asked.  "Lewis is a
Welsh romanticist whose ancestors were Druids.  He would rather
turn the corners than come straight to the point.  He thinks ten
minutes' notice is too much."

Elsa protested, a bit hotly:  "Shouldn't I have come?  I understood
that you knew all about it.  Dr. Lewis asked me to come here
because Bulah Singh has been spying on Mu-ni Gam-po.  I'm not sure,
but I think Mu-ni Gam-po asked Dr. Lewis to smuggle me out of
the monastery."

"My dear, you are more than welcome.  If you hadn't come here, I
would have felt sorry.  Stay as long as you please.  But you must
stay indoors because Morgan Lewis has spread a rumor that you've
had a relapse.  I've already heard it over the phone from two
infallible gossips.  You're supposed to be in bed, in the dark,
at the monastery, behind curtained windows, suffering from fever
due to overwork translating Tibetan folios.  You may even be dead
by tomorrow, if Morgan Lewis is in good form and tongues wag
fast enough."

"But if Bulah Singh should discover the truth, what then?" Elsa
asked, suddenly frightened by the thought.

Nancy Strong noticed it:  "Don't feel afraid of Bulah Singh, my
dear.  He is a mere policeman who would love to be a story-book
devil.  He would skin truth for its hide and tallow, if he knew how."

"Isn't he Chief of Police?"

"Yes."

"Can't he interfere with Andrew, if he finds out?"

"Perhaps.  He is said to have some talent for police work.  But he
suffers from intellectual indigestion.  And he is as superstitious
as an old-fashioned witch