On the Face of the Waters Part 9

Mrs. Gissing had guessed right. The man in the Afghan cap was Jim Douglas, who found the disguise of a frontiersman the easiest to a.s.sume, when, as now, he wanted to mix in a crowd. And he would have said "Bravo" a dozen times over if he had thought the little lady would like to hear it; for her quick denial of the possibility of insult had roused his keenest admiration. Here had spoken a dignity he had not expected to find in one whom he only knew as a woman Major Erlton delighted to honor. A dignity lacking in the big brave boy beside her; lacking, alas! in many a big brave Englishman of greater importance. So he had risked detection by that sudden "Bravo!" Not that he dreaded it much. To begin with, he was used to it, even when he posed as an out-lander, for there was a trick in his gait, not to be Orientalized, which made policemen salute gravely as he pa.s.sed disguised to the tent. Then there was ignorance of some one or another of the million shibboleths which divide men from each other in India; shibboleths too numerous for one lifetime's learning, which require to be born in the blood, bred in the bone. In this case, also, he had every intention of a.s.serting his race by licking one at least of the offenders when the show was over. For he happened to know one of them; having indeed licked him a few days before over a certain piece of bone. So, as the crowd, accepting the finale of one amus.e.m.e.nt placidly, drifted away to see another, he walked over to the tent in which the discomforted caricaturists had found refuge. It was a tattered old military bell-tent, bought most likely at some auction with the tattered old staff uniform. As he lifted the flap the sound of escaping feet made him expect a stern chase; but he was mistaken.

Two figures rose with a start of studied surprise and salaamed profoundly as he entered. They were both stark naked save for a waistcloth, and Jim Douglas could not resist a quick glance round for the discarded costumes. They were nowhere to be seen; being hidden, probably, under the litter of properties strewing the squalid green-room. Still of the ident.i.ty of the man he knew Jim Douglas had no doubt, and as this one was also the nearest, he promptly seized him by the both shoulders and gave him a sound Western kick, which would have been followed by others if the recipient had not slipped from his hold like an eel. For Jhungi, Bunjarah, and general vagrant, habitually oiled himself from head to foot after the manner of his profession as a precaution against such possible attempts at capture.

His a.s.sailant, grasping this fact, at any rate, did not risk dignity by pursuit; though the man stood salaaming again within arm's length.

"You scoundrel!" said Jim Douglas with as much severity as he could command before the mixture of deference and defiance, innocence and iniquity, in the sharp, cunning face before him. "Wasn't the licking I gave you before enough?"

Jhungi superadded perplexity to his other show of emotions. "The Huzoor mistakes," he said, with sudden cheerful understanding. "It was the miscreant Bhungi, my brother, whom the Huzoor licked. The misbegotten idler who tells lies in the bazaar about bones and sacks.

So his skin smarts, but my body is whole. Is it not so, Father Tiddu?"

The appeal to his companion was made with curious eagerness, and Jim Douglas, who had heard this tale of the ill-doing double before, looked at the witness to it with interest. That this man was or was not Jhungi's co-offender he could not say with certainty, for there was a remarkable lack of individuality about both face and figure when in repose. But the nickname of Tiddu, or cricket, was immediately explained by the jerky angularity of his actions. Save for the faint frostiness of sprouting gray hairs on a shaven cheek and skull he might have been any age.

"Of a truth it was Bhungi," he said in a well-modulated but creaky voice. "Time was when liars, such as he, fell dead. Now they don't even catch fevers, and if they do, the Huzoors give them a bitter powder and start them lying again. So, since one dead fish stinks a whole tank, virtuous Jhungi, being like as two peas in a pod, suffers an ill-name. But Bhungi will know what it means to tell lies when he stands before his Creator. Nevertheless in this world the master being enraged----"

"Not so, Father Tiddu," interrupted Jhungi glibly, "the Huzoor is but enraged with Bhungi. And rightly. Did not we hide our very faces with shame while he mimicked the n.o.ble people? Did we not try to hold him when he fled from punishment--as the Huzoor no doubt heard----"

Jim Douglas without a word slipped his hand down the man's back. The wales of a sound hiding were palpable; so was his wince as he dodged aside to salaam again.

"The Huzoor is a male judge," he said admiringly. "No black man could deceive him. This slave has certainly been whipped. He fell among liars who robbed him of his reputation. Will the Huzoor do likewise?

On the honor of a Bunjarah 'tis Bhungi whom the Huzoor beats. He gives Jhungi bitter powders when he gets the fever. And even Bhungi but tries to earn a stomachful as he can when the Huzoors take his trade from him."

"The world grows hollow, to match a man's swallow," quoted Tiddu affably.

The familiar by-word of poverty, the quiet mingling of truth and falsehood, daring and humility in Jhungi's plea, roused both Jim Douglas' sense of humor, and the sympathy--which with him was always present--for the hardness and squalidness of so many of the lives around him.

"But you can surely earn the stomachful honestly," he said, anger pa.s.sing into irritation. "What made you take to this trade?" He kicked at a pile of properties, and in so doing disclosed the skeleton of a crinoline. Jhungi with a shocked expression stooped down and covered it up decorously.

"But it is my trade," he replied; "the Huzoor must surely have heard of the Many-Faced tribe of Bunjarahs? I am of them.'

"Lie not, Jhungi!" interrupted Tiddu calmly, "he is but my apprentice, Huzoor, but I----" he paused, caught up a cloth, gave it one dexterous twirl round him, squatted down, and there he was, to the life, a veiled woman watching the stranger with furtive, modest eye. "But I,"

came a round feminine voice full of feminine inflections, "am of the thousand-faced people who wander to a thousand places. A new place, a new face. It makes a large world, Huzoor, a strange world." There was a melancholy cadence in his voice, which added interest to the sheer amaze which Jim Douglas was feeling. He had heard the legend of the Many-Faced Tribe, had even seen clever actors claiming to belong to it, and knew how the Stranglers deceived their victims, but anything like this he had never credited, much less seen. He himself, though he knew to the contrary, could scarcely combat the conviction, which seemed to come to him from that one furtive eye, that a woman sat within those folds.

"But how?" he begun in perplexity. "I thought the Baharupas [_Lit_.

many-faced] never went in caravans."

Tiddu resumed the cracked voice and let the smile become visible, and, as if by magic, the illusion disappeared. "The Huzoor is right. We are wanderers. But in my youth a woman tied me to one place, one face; women have the trick, Huzoor, even if they are wanderers themselves.

This one was, but I loved her; so after we had burned her and her fellow-wanderer together hand-in-hand, according to the custom, so that they might wander elsewhere but not in the tribe, I lingered on.

He was the father of Jhungi, and the boy being left dest.i.tute I taught him to play; for it needs two in the play as in life. The man and the woman, or folks care not for it. So I taught Jhungi----"

"And brother Bhungi?" suggested his hearer dryly.

A faint chuckle came from the veil. "And Bhungi. He plays well, and hath beguiled an old rascal with thin legs and a fat face like mine into playing with him. Some, even the Huzoor himself, might be beguiled into mistaking Siddu for Tiddu. But it is a tom-cat to a tiger. So being warned, the Huzoor will give no unearned blows. Yet if he did, are not two kicks bearable from the mulch-cow?" As he spoke he angled out a hand impudently for an alms with the beggars' cry of "_Alakh_," to point his meaning.

It was echoed by Jhungi, who, envious of Tiddu's holding the boards, as it were, had in sheer devilry and desire not to be outdone, taken up the disguise of a mendicant. It was a most creditable performance, but Tiddu dismissed it with a waive of the hand.

"_Bullah!_" he said contemptuously, "'tis the refuge of fools. There is not one true beggar in fifty, so the forty-and-nine false ones go free of detention as the potter's donkey. Even the Huzoor could do better--had I the teaching of him."

He leaned forward, dropping his voice slightly, and Jim Douglas narrowed his eyes as men do when some unbidden idea claims admittance to the brain.

"You?" he echoed; "what could you teach me?"

Tiddu rose, let fall the veil to decent dignified drapery, and fixed his eyes full on the questioner. They were luminous eyes, differing from Jhungi's beady ones as the fire-opal differs from the diamond.

"What could I teach?" he re-echoed, and his tone, monotonously distinct to Jim Douglas, was inaudible to others, judging by Jhungi's impa.s.sive face. "Many things. For one, that the Baharupas are not mimics only. They have the Great Art. What is it? G.o.d knows. But what they will folk to see, that is seen. That and no more."

Jim Douglas laughed derisively. Animal magnetism and mesmerism were one thing: this was another.

"The Huzoor thinks I lie; but he must have heard of the doctor sahib in Calcutta who made suffering forget to suffer."

"You mean Dr. Easdale. Did you know him? Was he a pupil of yours?"

came the cynical question.

Tiddu's face became expressionless. "Perhaps; but this slave forgets names. Yet the Huzoors have the gift sometimes. The Baharupas have it not always; though the father's h.o.a.rd goes oftenest to the son. Now, if, by chance, the Huzoor had the gift and could use it, there would be no need for policemen to salute as he pa.s.ses; no need for the drug-smokers to cease babbling when he enters. So the Huzoor could find out what he wants to find out; what he is paid to find out."

His eyes met Jim Douglas' surprise boldly.

"How do you know I want to find out anything?" said the latter, after a pause.

Tiddu laughed. "The Huzoor must find a turban heavy, and there is no room for English toes in a native shoe; folk seek not such discomfort for naught."

Jim Douglas paused again; the fellow was a charlatan, but he was consummately clever; and if there was anything certain in this world it was the wisdom of forgetting Western prejudices occasionally in dealing with the East.

"Send that man away," he said curtly, "I want to talk to you alone."

But the request seemed lost on Tiddu. He folded up the veil impudently, and resumed the thread of the former topic. "Yet Jhungi plays the beggar well, for which Fate be praised, since he must ask alms elsewhere if the Huzoor refuses them. For the purse is empty"--here he took a leathern bag from his waistband and turned it inside out--"by reason of the Huzoor's dislike to good mimics. So thou must to the temples, Jhungi, and if thou meetest Bhungi give him the sahib's generous gift; for blows should not be taken on loan."

Jhungi, who all this time had been telling his beads like the best of beggars, looked up with some perplexity; whether real or a.s.sumed Jim Douglas felt it was impossible to say, in that hotbed of deception.

"Bhungi?" echoed the former, rising to his feet. "Ay! that will I, if I meet him. But G.o.d knows as to that. G.o.d knows of Bhungi----"

"The purse is empty," repeated Tiddu in a warning voice, and Jhungi, with a laugh, pulled himself and his disguise together, as it were, and pa.s.sed out of the tent; his beggar's cry, "_Alakh! Alakh!_"

growing fainter and fainter while Tiddu and Jim Douglas looked at each other.

"Jhungi-Bhungi--Bhungi-Jhungi," jeered the Baharupa, suddenly, jingling the names together. "Which be which, as he said, G.o.d knows, not man. That is the best of lies. They last a body's lifetime, so the Huzoor may as well learn old Tiddu's----"

"Or Siddu's?"

"Or Siddu's," a.s.sented the mountebank calmly. "But the Huzoor cannot learn to use his gift from that old rascal. He must come to the many-faced one, who is ready to teach it."

"Why?"

Tiddu abandoned mystery at once.

"For fifty rupees, Huzoor; not a _pice_ less. Now, in my hand."

Was it worth it? Jim Douglas decided instantly that it might be. Not for the gift's sake; of that he was incredulous. But Tiddu was a consummate actor and could teach many tricks worth knowing. Then in this roving commission to report on anything he saw and heard to the military magnate, it would suit him for the time to have the service of an arrant scoundrel. Besides, the pay promised him being but small, the wisdom of having a second string to the bow of ambition had already decided him on combining inquiry with judicious horse-dealing; since he could thus wander through villages buying, through towns selling, without arousing suspicion; and this life in a caravan would start him on these lines effectively. Finally, this offer of Tiddu's was unsought, unexpected, and, ever since Kate Erlton's appeal, Jim Douglas had felt a strange attraction toward pure chance. So he took out a note from his pocket-book and laid it in the Baharupa's hand.

"You asked fifty," he said, "I give a hundred; but with the branch of the neem-tree between us two."

Tiddu gave him an admiring look. "With the sacred '_Lim ke dagla_'