In The Permanent Way Part 3

Out in the open now, with the paling light of dawn behind him and a drunken Hindu trooper riding at him with a cry of "_Ram! Ram!_" So they dared to give an idolatrous cry, those Hindu dogs whose aid had been sought to throw off the yoke--who would soon find it on their own shoulders. A step back, a mighty slash as the horse sped by, maddened by bit and spur, a stumble, a crash, and an old man, with a strange bundle at his back, was hacking insanely at his prostrate foe. No more, "_Ram, Ram_," for him; that last cry had served as the death-farewell of his race and creed.

On again, with a fiercer fire in the eyes, through the great tufts of tiger-gra.s.s isolating each poor square of G.o.d's earth from the next, and making it impossible to see one's way. On and on swiftly, forcing a path through the swaying stems, whose silvery ta.s.selled spikes above began to glitter in the level beams of the rising sun.

Then suddenly, without a word of warning, came an open sandy s.p.a.ce, a brief command.

"Halt!"

So soon! It was nearer by a mile than he had expected, and there was no chance of flight; not unless you made that burden on your back a target for pursuing bullets. A fair mark, in truth, for the half dozen or more of rifles ready in the hands of the cursed infidels.

"Who goes there?" came the challenge in the cursed foreign tongue. He gave one sharp glance towards the picket, and bitter hatred flared up within him; for there was not even a _sahib_ there who might, perchance, understand. Yet there was no doubt, no doubt at all, even to his confused turmoil of feeling, as to "who came there." A foe! a foe to the death when this was over! So with a shout came his creed:

"_Allah akbar wa Mahomed rusool_."

Then in a sort of gurgle, as he fell forward on his face, it finished in "_Deen! Deen! Deen!_"

"Nicked 'im, by gum! Nicked the ole beast neat as a ninepin," said one of the picket.

"Wonder wot he come on for like that?" said another.

"B----y ole Ghazi, that's wot he was," put in a third. "They gets the drink aboard, an' don't care for nothing but religion--rummy start, ain't it? h.e.l.lo! wot's that?--a babby, by the Lord!"

For the shock of Deen Mahomed's fall had awakened the child.

As they drew it from the blanket, the sun tipped over the tiger-gra.s.s, and fell on its golden curls.

_Shub'rat_ was over.

"I wonder wot 'e were a-goin' to do with it?" remarked the inquirer, turning the dead body over with his foot, and looking thoughtfully at the face, fierce even in death. But no one hazarded a theory, and the Finger of Fate had left no mark on the high, narrow forehead. But the Night of Record was over for it also.

IN THE PERMANENT WAY

I heard this story in a rail-trolly on the Pind-Dadur line, so I always think of it with a running accompaniment; a rhythmic whir of wheels in which, despite its steadiness, you feel the propelling impulse of the unseen coolies behind, then the swift skimming as they set their feet on the trolly for the brief rest which merges at the first hint of lessened speed into the old racing measure. Whir and slide, racing and resting!--while the wheels spin like bobbins and the brick rubble in the permanent way slips under your feet giddily, until you could almost fancy yourself sitting on a stationary engine, engaged in winding up an endless red ribbon. A ribbon edged, as if with tinsel, by steel rails stretching away in ever narrowing lines to the level horizon. Stretching straight as a die across a sandy desert, rippled and waved by wrinkled sand hills into the semblance of a sandy sea.

And that, from its size, must be a seventh wave. I was just thinking this when the buzz of the brake jarred me through to the marrow of my bones.

"What's up? A train?" I asked of my companion who was giving me a lift across his section of the desert.

"No!" he replied laconically. "Now, then! hurry up, men."

Nothing in the wide world comes to pieces in the hand like a trolly.

It was dismembered and off the line in a moment; only however, much to my surprise, to be replaced upon the rails some half a dozen yards further along them. I was opening my lips for one question when something I saw at my feet among the brick rubble made me change it for another.

"Hullo! what the d.i.c.kens is that?"

To the carnal eye it was two small squares of smooth stucco, the one with an oval black stone set in it perpendicularly, the other with a round purplish one--curiously ringed with darker circles--set in it horizontally. On the stucco of one were a few dried _tulsi_[3] leaves and grains of rice; on the other suspicious-looking splashes of dark red.

[Footnote 3: Marjoram.]

"What's what?" echoed my friend, climbing up to his seat again.

"Why, man, that thing!--that thing in the permanent way!" I replied, nettled at his manner.

He gave an odd little laugh, just audible above the first whir of the wheels as we started again.

"That's about it. In the permanent way--considerably." He paused, and I thought he was going to relapse into the silence for which he was famous; but he suddenly seemed to change his mind.

"Look here," he said, "it's a fifteen mile run to the first curve, and no trains due, so if you like I'll tell you why we left the track."

And he did.

When they were aligning this section I was put on to it--preliminary survey work under an R.E. man who wore boiled shirts in the wilderness, and was great on "Departmental Discipline." He is in Simla now, of course. Well, we were driving a straight line through the whole solar system and planting it out with little red flags, when one afternoon, just behind that big wave of a sand hill, we came upon something in the way. It was a man. For further description I should say it was a thin man. There is nothing more to be said. He may have been old, he may have been young, he may have been tall, he may have been short, he may have been halt and maimed, he may have been blind, deaf, or dumb, or any or all of these. The only thing I know for _certain_ is that he was thin. The _kala.s.sies_[4] said he was some kind of a Hindu saint, and they fell at his feet promptly. I shall never forget the R.E.'s face as he stood trying to cla.s.sify the creature according to Wilson's _Hindu Sects_, or his indignation at the _kala.s.sies'_ ignorant worship of a man who, for all they knew, might be a follower of Shiva, while they were bound to Vishnu, or _vice versa_. He was very learned over the _Vaishnavas_ and the _Saivas_; and all the time that bronze image with its hands on its knees squatted in the sand staring into s.p.a.ce perfectly unmoved.

Perhaps the man saw us, perhaps he didn't. I don't know; as I said before, he was thin.

[Footnote 4: Tent pitchers, men employed in measuring land.]

So after a time we stuck a little red flag in the ground close to the small of his back, and went on our way rejoicing until we came to our camp, a mile further on. It doesn't look like it, but there is a brackish well and a sort of a village away there to the right, and of course we always took advantage of water when we could.

It must have been a week later, just as we came to the edge of the sand hills, and could see a landmark or two, that I noticed the R.E.

come up from his prismatic compa.s.s looking rather pale. Then he fussed over to me at the plane table.

"We're out," he said, "there is a want of Departmental Discipline in this party, and we are out." I forget how many fractions he said, but some infinitesimal curve would have been required to bring us plumb on the next station, and as that would have ruined the R.E.'s professional reputation we harked back to rectify the error. We found the bronze image still sitting on the sand with its hands on its knees; but apparently it had shifted its position some three feet or so to the right, for the flag was fully that distance to the left of it. That night the R.E. came to my tent with his hands full of maps and his mind of suspicions.

"It seems incredible," he said, "but I am almost convinced that _byragi_ or _jogi_, or _gosain_ or _sunyasi_, whichever he may be, has had the unparalleled effrontery to move my flag. I can't be sure, but if I were, I would have him arrested on the spot."

I suggested he was that already; but it is sometimes difficult to make an R.E. see a Cooper's Hill joke, especially when he is your superior officer. So we did that bit over again. As it happened, my chief was laid up with sun fever when we came to the bronze image, and I had charge of the party. I don't know why, exactly, but it seemed to me rough on the thin man to stick a red flag at the small of his back, as a threat that we meant to annex the only atom of things earthly to which he still clung; time enough for that when the line was actually under construction. So I told the _kala.s.sies_ to let him do duty as a survey mark; for, from what I had heard, I knew that once a man of that sort fixes on a place in which to gain immortality by penance, he sticks to it till the mortality, at any rate, comes to an end. And this one, I found out from the villagers, had been there for ten years. Of course they said he never ate, or drank, or moved, but that, equally of course, was absurd.