In The Permanent Way Part 15

"The d.i.c.kens she is," blurted out my companion, somewhat abashed for the time. Perhaps that was Sambo's intention. At any rate I have no means of knowing if he spoke the truth or not. Indeed, looking back on it all, I scarcely seem to know what really happened, and what must have been sheer fancy. Only this remains clear; a growing antagonism between these two, a growing disinclination on Bannerman's part to do anything but lounge away his days.

"Can't help it, my dear fellow," he would say, "it's the air, or something. If I had a shepherd's pipe I'd play it. And as for flowers!

Do you know some one puts a bunch of them on my pillow every night. I believe it's the milkmaid!"

There were flowers, too, garlanded round his door, while just over the way those ominous splashes of red on Ishwara's feet seemed to grow deeper and deeper.

At last I put the case baldly and crudely before him. Something was going on which I didn't understand, which might get him into mischief at any moment, and I appealed to his good sense to put the Siwaliks between him and a temptation which seemed to have fascinated him. He laughed, admitted the fact, and yielded; the more readily because our time was almost up.

For the first two days he was rewarded by success in the lower reaches; possibly--since fish shy at novelty--because we used a native Noah's Ark, our own boat remaining in the backwater till we could send coolies to fetch it. On the third he left the river early on plea of a headache. As he had been in wild spirits all day, quoting the _Prem Sagar_ and singing French songs, I half thought he was going in for fever, the day being exceptionally hot. But on my return at dusk the servants asked if I would wait dinner for the sahib or not. Beset by immediate misgivings I rushed into his tent, where I found a slip of paper impaled like a bait on some tackle lying on the table.

"Off to the divine milkmaid! Don't wait. _Vogue la galere!_"

"How far?" I asked Sambo breathlessly.

"Twenty _kos_ by the road--the sahib borrowed the police inspector's mare--not half that over the hills. But the moon is late, and the snakes love the dark."

If it had been the darkness of Egypt I had no choice but to follow, and half an hour afterwards I was stumbling along after Sambo. Even by daylight the hills, heat-cracked, rain-seared, strewn with sharp rocks, were bad walking; on a dark, hot night, with the snakes' eyes gleaming from the stones, they were horrible--most horrible. The straight fingers of the stiff candelabra bushes pointing up and up, the gnarled stunted trees growing into strange shapes, reminding one involuntarily of those antediluvian animals whose bones lie buried all along the Siwaliks. A cold sweat of suspense lay upon my forehead despite the scorching blast tearing down the ravines; scorching yet laden with the scent of earth, as from a new-made grave.

"There has been rain in the hills beyond," said Sambo's voice out of the dark. I lost sight of him constantly, and at the best of times he was little more than another weird shape among the shadows. "Holy Maha-deo! Have a care, _Huzoor!_ Let the snake pa.s.s in peace!"

As he spoke something curved over my instep. Such things take the nerve out of a European; but I stumbled on, peering into the darkness, trying to think of Bannerman's danger, and not of that next step and what it might bring. But it came at last--just as we dipped into a cooler, moister glen, where I could hear the flying foxes hovering from tree to tree--a slither of the foot, and then a spiral coil up my leg gripping the muscles tight. My shriek echoed from the heat-hardened, resounding rocks until the whole hillside seemed peopled by my fear; and even when Sambo, stooping down, uncoiled the snake and threw it into the darkness, I could scarcely realise that I was none the worse for having put my heel on a viper's head. My nerve seemed gone, I could not move except at a snail's pace.

"Time speeds," came Sambo's voice again. "The moon rises but the clouds gather. If the _Huzoor_ would only not mind----"

"I'd mind nothing if I could see--see as you seem to do," I muttered, ashamed yet aggrieved.

"That is it," he replied, "the _Huzoor_ cannot see, and the holy snakes do not know him as they know me. If the sahib will let me put the caste mark on his forehead as it is on mine he need not fear. It can do no harm, _Huzoor_."

True; besides the very idea by suggesting confidence might restore it.

"Lest the dust should fall into the _Huzoor's_ eyes," said the voice softly, and I felt long thin fingers on my eyelids; then something on my forehead, cold and hard, cold and hard like a ring---- The effect of such pressure when the eyes are closed is always confusing, and I felt as if I was dozing off when the same soft voice roused me.

"The _Huzoor_ can see now."

I opened my eyes with a start as if from sleep. Had the moon risen or whence came that pale light by which I saw--what did I not see?

Everything, surely, that had been created since the world began; the tiny watersprites in the half-stagnant pools, the flying motes in the dim air. Or did I dream it? Did I only feel and know that they were there, part of those endless, endless aeons of life and death in which I was a unit.

"Sambo," I gasped feebly, but there was no answer. Where was I? By degrees memory returned. This must be the Gayatri glen, for there, at the further end, stood the great image of the dread Maha-deo where the pilgrims wors.h.i.+pped; and surely the odd light came from that gleaming cat'seye on its forehead? Surely, too, the snakes curled and swayed, the outstretched hands opened and shut? My own went up to my forehead in my bewilderment, when, suddenly, the light seemed to fade, till I could just see Nilkunta's blue throat as he stood beside me.

"The _Huzoor_ has scratched his forehead; the blood trickles from it.

See, I have brought a _tulsi_ leaf. There! that is better." I felt the coolness between my eyes, and something of my bewilderment seemed to pa.s.s away.

"It is the Gayatri, _Huzoor_, and yonder is Maha-deo. He is but half-way, so we must press on. The sahib can see now; there is no fear."

None. Yet did I see them, or was I only conscious of that teeming life in the jungles? Of the tiger crouching by our path, the snakes slipping from it, the deer standing to watch us, and strangest of all, those shapes hiding in the dim shadows--undreamt-of monsters, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl? Was it a dream? or--the idea brought a faint hysterical laugh--was it the Zoological Gardens and the British Museum rolled into one?

"We must cross the river, _Huzoor_," said the dim form flitting before me; "Buniah-man sahib will have taken the boat."

I suppose it was the usual rope bridge swung across the narrowing chasm of the river, but it seemed to me that night as if I walked on air. Below me, not ten feet from the lowest curve of the loop, was the Ganges, wrinkled and seamed, slipping giddily eastwards: overhead, a stream of clouds speeding eastwards also.

"She rises fast," muttered Sambo. "_Mai_ Gunga is in a hurry to-night."

The whole world was in a hurry. I seemed to hear flying feet keeping time with our own. Not an instant's pause was there even for breath until we reached the last declivity above the little oasis of the valley. The moon had risen, but the clouds hurrying across her face gave greater uncertainty to the scene; still I could see a woman's figure standing with widespread arms by the edge of the rising river.

I could see a man sending a boat across the shallows with mighty strokes. And above the growing rush of the water I could hear two murmuring voices, which seemed to fill the world with soft antagonism.

"_Ooma! Ooma!_" from the hills; "_Radha! Radha!_" from the valley.

These were calling to the woman, and, as in a dream, I seemed to remember and understand; Radha, the queen of pleasure; Ooma, the mother of the universe. Krishna's mistress, and Siva's wife!

I looked round for Sambo. He was gone; so I ran on alone feeling there was no time to be lost. My foot slipped and I fell heavily. But I was up again in a second unhurt, save, perhaps, for that scratch on my forehead, whence I could feel the blood flowing as I dashed into the shadow of the banyan tree. Merciful heaven! what was this? A glare as of noonday, and two radiant forms with a cowering woman between them!

between the chaplets of skulls and the chaplets of flowers. And behind them was an empty plinth! Before I had time to realise what I saw, came shouts and cries, a _melee_ and a scuffle. Armed men ran out of the shadows, and then Sambo's voice was insistent, "Run, sahib, run!

'Tis your only chance. The boat--the boat!" Then some one hit me over the head from behind, and when I came to myself I was lying in the bottom of the boat. Bannerman was standing beside me shaking his fist impotently at the twinkling lights on the bank, and Sambo sat aft steering as best he could; for the oars had gone and we were racing with the flood towards the rapids. They had bound up my head with something, but I still felt stunned, and the rush of the rising river surged in my ears through the thin planks as I lay. So perhaps it was only my fancy that those two sat talking, talking, arguing, arguing, about the old, old problems.

Till suddenly I sat up to the clear sound of Sambo's voice.

"It is not to be done, _Huzoor_. We are in the hands of fate. If death comes, it will come, but it will end in birth."

The answer was that half-jeering laugh I knew so well. "I'll chance it, Nil-kunt; I don't believe you."

Bannerman had stripped to the skin, and stood forward looking at the narrowing rush of the river. I could see the great logs of wood, swept from the hill-forests above, dancing along beside us on the curved surface of the stream--so curved by the very force of the current that as our boat, steered by Sambo's skill, kept the centre, the dim banks slid past below us. Across them, just ahead, a curved thread not four feet, now the flood had risen, above the water. The rope bridge! Then I understood.

"Don't!" I cried feebly. "No man--can--withstand the force--of the stream."

He crooked his knees beneath the thwarts and held up his arms.

"Don't----" I cried again.

The boat slackened for an instant; for an instant only. Then it shot on, leaving Bannerman clinging to the rope--shot on round the bend, leaving him hanging there between birth and death. But Sambo never took his watchful eyes off those merry, dancing logs, which meant destruction.

The horror of it all was too much. I fainted. When consciousness returned, Sambo, grave and composed, was bending over me. We were drifting fast into the backwater before my own bungalow, and behind us, looking spectral in the first glint of dawn, lay the great bridge, the flare of the watch-fires on its piers telling of the severity of the flood.

"The _Huzoor_ is at home," said the man quietly; "if Buniah-man sahib had taken my advice he would have been at home also."

We had been a whole day and night on the river; but he seemed no more fatigued than I, who had escaped all the suspense. For the rest, no trace remained of the adventure save an oval scratch on my forehead surrounding the faint vestiges of something like an eye.

"It is the mark of Siva," said my servant piously--he had come down with haste by rail to bring the news of my death--"doubtless he took the _Huzoor_ under his protection; for which I will offer a blood oblation without delay."

Bannerman's body was never found; but some months after, when I was inspecting foundations, I heard the kingfisher's cry, and the familiar cloop of a dive at the further side of the pier. Then Sambo, Rudra, Nilkunta--whatever you please to call him--showed his yellow-brown face above the yellow-brown flood bearing a ring in his mouth: a _Palais Royal_ affair--two diamond hearts transfixed by a ruby arrow.

I had seen Bannerman wear it a hundred times, but I had never seen the inscription engraved inside.

"Thy lips, oh! beloved Life, are nectar."

It was a quotation from the _Krishna_ or _Prem Sagar!_