Winds of the World
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Talbot Mundy >> Winds of the World
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12 Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tom Allen, Charles Franks
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THE WINDS OF THE WORLD
By TALBOT MUNDY
THE WINDS OF THE WORLD
Ever the Winds of the World fare forth
(Oh, listen ye! Ah, listen ye!),
East and West, and South and North,
Shuttles weaving back and forth
Amid the warp! (Oh, listen ye!)
Can sightless touch--can vision keen
Hunt where the Winds of the World have been
And searching, learn what rumors mean?
(Nay, ye who are wise! Nay, listen ye!)
When tracks are crossed and scent is stale,
'Tis fools who shout--the fast who fail!
But wise men harken-Listen ye!
YASMINI'S SONG.
CHAPTER I
A watery July sun was hurrying toward a Punjab sky-line, as if weary
of squandering his strength on men who did not mind, and resentful of
the unexplainable--a rainy-weather field-day. The cold steel and
khaki of native Indian cavalry at attention gleamed motionless
between British infantry and two batteries of horse artillery. The
only noticeable sound was the voice of a general officer, that rose
and fell explaining and asserting pride in his command, but saying
nothing as to the why of exercises in the mud. Nor did he mention why
the censorship was in full force. He did not say a word of Germany,
or Belgium.
In front of the third squadron from the right, Risaldar-Major
Ranjoor Singh sat his charger like a big bronze statue. He would have
stooped to see his right spur bettor, that shone in spite of mud, for
though he has been a man these five-and-twenty years, Ranjoor Singh
has neither lost his boyhood love of such things, nor intends to; he
has been accused of wearing solid silver spurs in bed. But it hurt
him to bend much, after a day's hard exercise on a horse such as he
rode.
Once--in a rock-strewn gully where the whistling Himalayan wind was
Acting Antiseptic-of-the-Day--a young surgeon had taken hurried
stitches over Ranjoor Singh's ribs without probing deep enough for an
Afghan bullet; that bullet burned after a long day in the saddle. And
Bagh was--as the big brute's name implied--a tiger of a horse,
unweakened even by monsoon weather, and his habit was to spring with
terrific suddenness when his rider moved on him.
So Ranjoor Singh sat still. He was willing to eat agony at any time
for the squadron's sake--for a squadron of Outram's Own is a unity to
marvel at, or envy; and its leader a man to be forgiven spurs a half-inch
longer than the regulation. As a soldier, however, he was careful
of himself when occasion offered.
Sikh-soldier-wise, he preferred Bagh to all other horses in the
world, because it had needed persuasion, much stroking of a black
beard--to hide anxiety--and many a secret night-ride--to sweat the
brute's savagery--before the colonel-sahib could be made to see his
virtues as a charger and accept him into the regiment. Sikh-wise, he
loved all things that expressed in any way his own unconquerable
fire. Most of all, however, he loved the squadron; there was no
woman, nor anything between him and D Squadron; but Bagh came next.
Spurs were not needed when the general ceased speaking, and the
British colonel of Outram's Own shouted an order. Bagh, brute energy
beneath hand-polished hair and plastered dirt, sprang like a loosed
Hell-tantrum, and his rider's lips drew tight over clenched teeth as
he mastered self, agony and horse in one man's effort. Fight how he
would, heel, tooth and eye all flashing, Bagh was forced to hold his
rightful place in front of the squadron, precisely the right distance
behind the last supernumerary of the squadron next in front.
Line after rippling line, all Sikhs of the true Sikh baptism except
for the eight of their officers who were European, Outram's Own swept
down a living avenue of British troops; and neither gunners nor
infantry could see one flaw in them, although picking flaws in native
regiments is almost part of the British army officer's religion.
To the blare of military music, through a bog of their own mixing,
the Sikhs trotted for a mile, then drew into a walk, to bring the
horses into barracks cool enough for watering.
They reached stables as the sun dipped under the near-by acacia
trees, and while the black-bearded troopers scraped and rubbed the
mud from weary horses, Banjoor Singh went through a task whose form
at least was part of his very life. He could imagine nothing less
than death or active service that could keep him from inspecting
every horse in the squadron before he ate or drank, or as much as
washed himself.
But, although the day had been a hard one and the strain on the
horses more than ordinary, his examination now was so perfunctory
that the squadron gaped; the troopers signaled with their eyes as he
passed, little more than glancing at each horse. Almost before his
back had vanished at the stable entrance, wonderment burst into words.
"For the third time he does thus!"
"See! My beast overreached, and he passed without detecting it! Does
the sun set the same way still?"
"I have noticed that he does thus each time after a field-day. What
is the connection? A field-day in the rains--a general officer
talking to us afterward about the Salt, as if a Sikh does not
understand the Salt better than a British general knows English--and
our risaldar-major neglecting the horses--is there a connection?"
"Aye. What is all this? We worked no harder in the war against the
Chitralis. There is something in my bones that speaks of war, when I
listen for a while!"
"War! Hear him, brothers! Talk is talk, but there will be no war
until India grows too fat to breathe--unless the past be remembered
and we make one for ourselves!"
* * * * *
There was silence for a while, if a change of sounds is silence. The
Delhi mud sticks as tight as any, and the kneading of it from out of
horsehair taxes most of a trooper's energy and full attention. Then,
the East being the East in all things, a solitary; trooper picked up
the scent and gave tongue, as a true hound guides the pack.
"Who is _she_?" he wondered, loud enough for fifty men to hear.
From out of a cloud of horse-dust, where a stable helper on
probation combed a tangled tail, came one word of swift enlightenment.
"Yasmini!"
"Ah-h-h-h!" In a second the whole squadron was by the ears, and the
stable-helper was the center of an interest he had not bargained for.
"Nay, sahibs, I but followed him, and how should I know? Nay, then I
did not follow him! It so happened. I took that road, and he stepped
out of a _tikka-gharri_ at her door. Am I blind? Do I not know
her door? Does not everybody know it? Who am I that I should know why
he goes again? But--does a moth fly only once to the lamp-flame? Does
a drunkard drink but once? By the Guru, nay! May my tongue parch in
my throat if I said he is a drunkard! I said--I meant to say--seeing
she is Yasmini, and he having been to see her once--and being again
in a great hurry--whither goes he?"
So the squadron chose a sub-committee of inquiry, seven strong, that
being a lucky number the wide world over, and the movements of the
risaldar-major were reported one by one to the squadron with the
infinite exactness of small detail that seems so useless to all save
Easterns.
Fifteen minutes after he had left his quarters, no longer in khaki
uniform, but dressed as a Sikh gentleman, the whole squadron knew the
color of his undershirt, also that he had hired a _tikka-gharri_, and
that his only weapon was the ornamental dagger that a true Sikh wears
twisted in his hair. One after one, five other men reported him nearly
all the way through Delhi, through the Chandni Chowk--where the last
man but one nearly lost him in the evening crowd--to the narrow place
where, with a bend in the street to either hand, is Yasmini's.
The last man watched him through Yasmini's outer door and up the
lower stairs before hurrying back to the squadron. And a little later
on, being almost as inquisitive as they were careful for their major,
the squadron delegated other men, in mufti, to watch for him at the
foot of Yasmini's stairs, or as near to the foot as might be, and see
him safely home again if they had to fight all Asia on the way.
These men had some money with them, and weapons hidden underneath
their clothes; for, having betted largely on the quail-fight at
Abdul's stables, the squadron was in funds.
"In case of trouble one can bribe the police," counseled Nanak
Singh, and he surely ought to know, for he was the oldest trooper,
and trouble everlasting had preserved him from promotion. "But
weapons are good, when policemen are not looking," he added, and the
squadron agreed with him.
It was Tej Singh, not given to talking as is rule, who voiced the
general opinion.
"Now we are on the track of things. Now, perhaps, we shall know the
meaning of field exercises during the monsoon, with our horses up to
the belly in blue mud! The winds of all the world blow into Yasmini's
and out again. Our risaldar-major knows nothing at all of women--and
that is the danger. But he can listen to the wind; and, what he
hears, sooner or later we shall know, too. I smell happenings!"
Those three words comprised the whole of it. The squadron spent most
of the night whispering, dissecting, analyzing, subdividing,
weighing, guessing at that smell of happenings, while its risaldar-major,
thinking his secret all his own, investigated nearer to its source.
Have you heard the dry earth shrug herself
For a storm that tore the trees?
Have you watched loot-hungry Faithful
Praising Allah on their knees?
Have you felt the short hairs rising
When the moon slipped out of sight,
And the chink of steel on rock explained
That footfall in the night?
Have you seen a gray boar sniff up-wind
In the mauve of waking day?
Have you heard a mad crowd pause and think?
Have you seen all Hell to pay?
CHAPTER II
Yasmini bears a reputation that includes her gift for dancing and
her skill in song, but is not bounded thereby, Her stairs illustrated
it--the two flights of steep winding stairs that lead to her
bewildering reception-floor; they seem to have been designed to take
men's breath away, and to deliver them at the top defenseless.
But Risaldar-Major Ranjoor Singh mounted them with scarcely an
effort, as a man who could master Bagh well might, and at the top his
middle-aged back was straight and his eye clear. The cunning,
curtained lights did not distract him; so he did not make the usual
mistake of thinking that the Loveliness who met him was Yasmini.
Yasmini likes to make her first impression of the evening on a man
just as he comes from making an idiot of himself; so the maid who
curtsies in the stair-head maze of mirrored lights has been trained
to imitate her. But Ranjoor Singh flipped the girl a coin, and it
jingled at her feet.
The maid ceased bowing, too insulted to retort. The piece of silver--
she would have stooped for gold, just as surely as she would have
recognized its ring--lay where it fell. Ranjoor Singh stepped forward
toward a glass-bead curtain through which a soft light shone, and an
unexpected low laugh greeted him. It was merry, mocking, musical--and
something more. There was wisdom hidden in it--masquerading as
frivolity; somewhere, too, there was villainy-villainy that she who
laughed knew all about and found more interesting than a play.
Then suddenly the curtain parted, and Yasmini blocked the way,
standing with arms spread wide to either door-post, smiling at him;
and Ranjoor Singh had to stop and stare whether it suited him or not.
Yasmini is not old, nor nearly old, for all that India is full of
tales about her, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. In a land where
twelve is a marriageable age, a woman need not live to thirty to be
talked about; and if she can dance as Yasmini does--though only the
Russian ballet can do that--she has the secret of perpetual youth to
help her defy the years. No doubt the soft light favored her, but she
might have been Ranjoor Singh's granddaughter as she barred his way
and looked him up and down impudently through languorous brown eyes.
"Salaam, O plowman!" she mocked. She was not actually still an
instant, for the light played incessantly on her gauzy silken
trousers and jeweled slippers, but she made no move to admit him. "My
honor grows! Twice--nay, three times in a little while!"
She spoke in the Jat tongue fluently; but that was not remarkable,
because Yasmini is mistress of so many languages that men say one can
not speak in her hearing and not be understood.
"I am a soldier," answered Ranjoor Singh more than a little stiffly.
"'I am a statesman,' said the viceroy's babu! A Sikh is a Jat farmer
with a lion's tail and the manners of a buffalo! Age or gallantry
will bend a man's back. What keeps it straight--the smell of the
farmyard on his shoes?"
Ranjoor Singh did not answer, nor did he bow low as she intended.
She forgot, perhaps, that on a previous occasion he had seen her
snatch a man's turban from his head and run with it into the room, to
the man's sweating shame. He kicked his shoes off calmly and waited
as a man waits on parade, looking straight into her eyes that were
like dark jewels, only no jewels in the world ever glowed so
wonderfully; he thought he could read anger in them, but that ruffled
him no more than her mockery.
"Enter, then, O farmer!" she said, turning lithely as a snake, to
beckon him and lead the way.
Now he had only a back view of her, but the contour of her neck and
chin and her shoulders mocked him just as surely as her lips were
making signals that he could not see. One answer to the signals was
the tittering of twenty maids, who sat together by the great deep
window, ready to make music.
"They laugh to see a farmer strayed from his manure-pile!" purred
Yasmini over her shoulder; but Ranjoor Singh followed her unperturbed.
He was finding time to study the long room, its divans and deep
cushions around the walls; and it did not escape his notice that many
people were expected. He guessed there was room for thirty or forty
to sit at ease.
Like a pale blue will-o'-the-wisp, a glitter in the cunning lights,
she led him to a far end of the room where many cushions were, There
she turned on him with a snake-like suddenness that was one of her
surest tricks.
"I shall have great guests to-night--I shall be busy."
"That is thy affair," said Ranjoor Singh, aware that her eyes were
seeking to read his soul. The dropped lids did not deceive him.
"Then, what do you want here?"
That question was sheer impudence. It is very well understood in
Delhi that any native gentleman of rank may call on Yasmini between
midday and midnight without offering a reason for his visit;
otherwise it would be impossible to hold a salon and be a power in
politics, in a land where politics run deep, but where men do not
admit openly to which party they belong. But Yasmini represents the
spirit of the Old East, sweeter than a rose and twice as tempting--
with a poisoned thorn inside. And here was the New East, in the shape
of a middle-aged Sikh officer taught by Young England.
He annoyed her.
Ranjoor Singh's answer was to seat himself, with a dignity the West
has yet to learn, on a long divan against the wall that gave him a
good view of the entrance and all the rest of the room, window
included. Instantly Yasmini flung herself on the other end of it, and
lay face downward, with her chin resting on both hands.
She studied his face intently for sixty seconds, and it very seldom
takes her that long to read a man's character, guess at his past, and
make arrangements for his future, if she thinks him worth her while.
"Why are you here?" she asked again at the end of her scrutiny.
Ranjoor Singh seemed not to hear her; he was watching other men who
entered, and listening to the sound of yet others on the stairs. No
other Sikh came in, nor more than one of any other caste or tribe;
yet he counted thirty men in half as many minutes.
"I think you are a buffalo!" she said at last; but if Ranjoor Singh
was interested in her thoughts he forgot to admit it.
A dozen more men entered, and the air, already heavy, grew thick
with tobacco smoke mingling with the smoke of sandal-wood that
floated back and forth in layers as the punkahs swung lazily.
Outside, the rain swished and chilled the night air; but the hot air
from inside hurried out to meet the cool, and none of the cool came
in. The noise of rain became depressing until Yasmini made a signal
to her maids and they started to make music.
Then Yasmini caught a new sound on the stairs, and swiftly,
instantly, instead of glancing to the entrance, her eyes sought
Ranjoor Singh's; and she saw that he had heard it too. So she sat up
as if enlightenment had come and had brought disillusion in its wake.
The glass-bead curtain jingled, and a maid backed through it
giggling, followed in a hurry by a European, dressed in a white duck
apology for evening clothes. He seemed a little the worse for drink,
but not too drunk to recognize the real Yasmini when he saw her and
to blush crimson for having acted like an idiot.
"Queen of the Night!" he said in Hindustani that was peculiarly
mispronounced.
"_Box-wallah!_" she answered under her breath; but she smiled
at him, and aloud she said, "Will the sahib honor us all by being
seated?"
A maid took charge of the man at once, and led him to a seat not far
from the middle of the room. Yasmini, whose eyes were on Ranjoor
Singh every other second, noticed that the Sikh, having summed up the
European, had already lost all interest.
But there, were other footsteps. The curtain parted again to admit a
second European, a somewhat older man, who glanced back over his
shoulder deferentially and, to Yasmini's unerring eye, tried to carry
off prudish timidity with an air of knowingness.
"Who is he?" demanded Ranjoor Singh; and Yasmini rattled the
bracelets on her ankles loud enough to hide a whisper.
"An agent," she answered. "He has an office here in Delhi. The first
man is his clerk, who is supposed to be the leader into mischief;
they have made him a little drunk lest he understand too much. I have
sent a maid to him that he may understand even less."
The second man was closely followed by a third, and Yasmini
smothered a squeal of excitement, for she saw that Ranjoor Singh's
eyes were ablaze at last and that he had sat bolt upright without
knowing it. The third man was dressed like the other two in white
duck, but he wore his clothes not as they did. He was tall and
straight. One could easily enough imagine him dressed better.
His quick, intelligent gray eyes swept over the whole room while he
took two steps, and at once picked out Yasmini as the mistress of the
place; but he waited to bow to her until the first man pointed her
out. Then it seemed to Ranjoor Singh--who was watching as minutely as
Yasmini in turn watched him--that, when he bowed, this tall,
confident-looking individual almost clicked his heels together, but
remembered not to do so just in time. The eyes of the East miss no
small details. Yasmini, letting her jeweled ankles jingle again,
chuckled to Ranjoor Singh.
"And they say he comes from Europe selling goods," she whispered.
"The fat man who is frightened claims to be a customer for bales of
blankets. Since when has the customer been humble while the seller
calls the tune? Look!"
The second arrival and the third sat down together as she spoke; and
while the second sat like a merchant, nursing fat hands on a
consequential paunch, the third sat straight-backed, kicking a little
sidewise with his left leg. Ranjoor Singh saw, too, that he kept his
heels a little more than a spur's length off from the divan's drapery.
"Listen!" hissed Ranjoor Singh.
Yasmini wriggled closer, and pretended to be watching her maids over
by the window.
"That man who came last," said the risaldar-major, "has been told
that thou art like a spider, watching from the middle of the web of
India."
"Then for once they have told the truth!" she chuckled.
"In the bazaar he asked to be shown men of all the tribes, that he
might study their commercial needs. He was told to come here and meet
them; and these were sent for from the caravanserais. Is it not so?"
"Art thou thyself for the Raj?" asked Yasmini.
"I lead a squadron of Sikh cavalry," said Ranjoor Singh, "and you
ask me am I for the Raj?"
"The buffalo that carries water for the office lawn is for the Raj!"
said Yasmini.
"Then he and I are brothers."
"And he, yonder--what of him?" She was growing impatient, for the
tune was nearly at an end, and it would be time presently for her to
take up the burden of entertainment.
"He will ask, perhaps, to speak with a Sikh of influence."
"Sahib, 'to hear is to obey,'" she mocked, rising to her feet.
"Listen yet!" commanded Ranjoor Singh. "Serve me in this matter, and
there will be great reward. I, who am only one, might die by a
dagger, or a rope in the dark, or ground glass in my bread; but then
there would be a squadron, and perhaps a regiment, to ask questions."
"Perhaps?"
"Perhaps. Who knows?"
He spoke from modesty, sure of the squadron that he loved so much
better than his life, but not caring to magnify his own importance by
claiming the regard of the other squadrons, too. But Yasmini, who
never in her life went straight from point to point of an idea and
never could believe that anybody else did, supposed he meant that one
squadron was in his confidence, whereas the rest had not yet been
sounded.
"So speaks one who is for the Raj!" she grinned.
Playing for profit and amusement, she never, never let anybody know
which side she had taken in any game. Therefore she despised a man
who showed his hand to her, as she believed Ranjoor Singh had done.
But she only showed contempt when it suited her, and by no means
always when she felt it.
The minor music ceased and all eyes in the room were turned to her.
She rose to her feet as a hooded cobra comes toward its prey, sparing
a sidewise surreptitious smile of confidence for Ranjoor Singh that
no eye caught save his; yet as she turned from him and swayed in the
first few steps of a dance devised that minute, his quick ear caught
the truth of her opinion:
"Buffalo!" she murmured.
The flutes in the window wailed about mystery. The lights, and the
sandal-smoke, and the expectant silence emphasized it. Step by step,
as if the spirit of all dancing had its home in her, she told a
wordless tale, using her feet and every sinuous muscle as no other
woman in all India ever did.
Men say that Yasmini is partly Russian, and that may be true, for
she speaks Russian fluently. Russian or not, the members of the
Russian ballet are the only others in the world who share her art.
Certainly, she keeps in touch with Russia, and knows more even than
the Indian government about what goes on beyond India's northern
frontier. She makes and magnifies the whole into a mystery; and her
dance that night expressed the fascination mystery has for her.
And then she sang. It is her added gift of song that makes Yasmini
unique, for she can sing in any of a dozen languages, and besides the
love-songs that come southward from the hills, she knows all the
interminable ballads of the South and the Central Provinces. But
when, as that evening, she is at her best, mixing magic under the
eyes of the inquisitive, she sings songs of her own making and only
very rarely the same song twice. She sang that night of the winds of
the world which, she claims, carry the news to her; although others
say her sources of information speak more distinctly.
It seemed that the thread of an idea ran through song and dance
alike, and that the hillmen and beyond-the-hills-men, who sat back-to-
the-wall and watched, could follow the meaning of it. They began to
crowd closer, to squat cross-legged on the floor, in circles one
outside the other, until the European three became the center of
three rings of men who stared at them with owls' solemnity.
Then Yasmini ceased dancing. Then one of the Europeans drew his
watch out; and he had to show it to the other two before he could
convince them that they had sat for two hours without wanting to do
anything but watch and listen.
"So _wass!_" said one of them--the drunken.
_"Du lieber Gott--schon halb zwolf!"_ said the second.
The third man made no remark at all. He was watching Ranjoor Singh.
The risaldar--major had left the divan by the end wall and walked--
all grim straight lines in contrast to Yasmini's curves--to a spot
directly facing the three Europeans; and it seemed there sat a
hillman on the piece of floor he coveted.
"Get up!" he commanded. "Make room!"
The hillman did not budge, for an Afridi pretends to feel for a Sikh
the scorn that a Sikh feels truly for Afridis. The flat of Ranjoor
Singh's foot came to his assistance, and the hillman budged. In an
instant he was on his feet, with a lightning right hand reaching for
his knife.
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