In The Permanent Way Part 5

"Don't be afraid, sir: it's black as pitch, but I knows where old Meditation comes by instinck, I do a.s.sure you. One hour an' seventeen minutes from the distance signal with pressure as it oughter be.

Hillo! there's the whistle and the baboo a-waving. Off we goes!"

As we flashed past a red light I looked at my watch.

"Don't you be afraid, sir," he said, again looking at his. "It's ten to ten now, and in one hour an' seventeen minutes on goes the brake.

That's the ticket for _Shivers_ and _Martha Davy_; though I am a _Wishnyou Lucksmi_." He paused a moment, and as he stood put his hand on a stanchion to steady himself.

"Very much of a _Wishnyou Lucksmi_," he went on with a shake of the head. "I've 'ad a drop too much and I know it; but it ain't fair on a fellar like me, 'aving so many names to them, when they're all the same--a eatin' an' drinkin' lot like me. There's Christen[10]--you'd 'ave thought he'd 'ave been a decent chap by 'is name, but 'e went on orful with them _Gopis_--that's Hindu for milkmaids, sir. And Harry[11]--well, he wasn't no better than some other Harrys I've heard on. And Canyer,[12] I expect he could just about. To say nothin' of _Gopi-naughty_;[13] and naughty he were, as no doubt you've heard tell, sir. There's too many on them for a pore fellar who don't set store by 'is spiritooal nater; especially when they mixes themselves up with _Angcore_[14] whisky, an' ginger ale."

[Footnote 10: _Kristna_.]

[Footnote 11: _Hari_.]

[Footnote 12: _Kaniya_.]

[Footnote 13: _Gopi-nath_. These are all names of Vishnu in his various Avatars.]

[Footnote 14: _Encore_.]

His blue eyes had a far-away look in them, and his words were fast losing independence, but I understood what he meant perfectly. In that brief glimpse of the big bazaar I had seen the rows of Western bottles standing cheek by jowl with the bowls of _dolee_ dye, the sour curds and sweetmeats of _Holi_-tide.

"You had better sit down, Craddock," I said severely, for I saw that the fresh air was having its usual effect. "Perhaps if you sleep a bit you'll be more fit for work. I'll look out and wake you when you're wanted."

He gave a silly laugh, let go the stanchion, and drew out his watch.

"Don't you be afraid, sir! One hour and seventeen minutes from the distance signal. I'll keep 'im out o' 'arm's way, an' willing to the end of the chapter."

He gave a lurch forward to the seat, stumbled, and the watch dropped from his hand. For a moment I thought he might go overboard, and I clutched at him frantically; but with another lurch and an indistinct admonition to me not to be afraid, he sank into the corner of the bench and was asleep in a second. Then I stooped to pick up the watch, and, rather to my surprise, found it uninjured and still going.

Craddock's words, "ten minutes to ten," recurred to me. Then it would be twenty-seven minutes past eleven before he was wanted. I sat down to wait, bidding the native stoker keep up the fire as usual. The wind was simply shrieking round us, and the sand drifted thick on Craddock's still, upturned face. More than once I wiped it off, feeling he might suffocate. It was the noisiest, and at the same time the most silent, journey I ever undertook. Pandemonium, with seventy times seven of its devils let loose outside the cab; inside Craddock asleep, or dead--he might have been the latter from his stillness. It became oppressive after a time, as I remembered that other still figure, miles down the track, which was so strangely bound to this one beside me. The minutes seemed hours, and I felt a distinct relief when the watch, which I had held in my hand most of the time, told me it was seventeen minutes past eleven. Only ten minutes before the brake should be put on; and Craddock would require all that time to get his senses about him.

I might as well have tried to awaken a corpse, and it was three minutes to the twenty-seven when I gave up the idea as hopeless. Not that it mattered, since I could drive an engine as well as he; still the sense of responsibility weighed heavily upon me. My hand on the brake valve trembled visibly as I stood watching the minute hand of the watch. Thirty seconds before the time I put the brake on hard, determining to be on the safe side. And then when I had taken this precaution a perfectly unreasoning anxiety seized on me. I stepped on to the footboard and craned forward into the darkness which, even without the wind and the driving dust, was blinding. The lights in front shot slantways, showing an angle of red ballast, barred by gleaming steel; beyond that a formless void of sand. But the centre of the permanent way, where that figure would be sitting, was dark as death itself. What a fool I was, when the great circle of the fly-wheel was slackening, slackening, every second! And yet the fear grew lest I should have been too late, lest I should have made some mistake. To appease my own folly I drew out my watch in confirmation of the time. Great G.o.d! a difference of two minutes!--two whole minutes!--yet the watches had been the same at the distance signal?--the fall, of course! the fall!!

I seemed unable to do anything but watch that slackening wheel, even though I became conscious of a hand on my shoulder, of some one standing beside me on the footboard. No! not standing, swaying, lurching----

"Don't!" I cried. "Don't! it's madness!" But that some one was out in the darkness. Then I saw a big white figure dash across the angle of light with outspread arms.

"Now then, sonny! yo're in the way--the permanent way."

The inspector paused, and I seemed to come back to the sliding whir of the trolly wheels. In the distance a semaph.o.r.e was dropping its red arm and a pointsman, like a speck on the ribbon, was at work shunting us into a siding.

"Well?" I asked.

"There isn't anything more. When a whole train goes over two men who are locked in each other's arms it is hard--hard to tell--well, which is _Shivers Martha Davy_, and which is _Wishnyou Lucksmi_. It was right out in the desert in the hot weather, no parsons or people to object; so I buried them there in the permanent way."

"And those are tombstones, I suppose?"

He laughed. "No; altars. The native _employes_ put them up to their saint. The oval black upright stone is Shiva, the Destroyer's _lingam_; those splashes are blood. The flat one, decorated with flowers, is the _salagrama_[15] sacred to Vishnu the Preserver. You see n.o.body really knew whether old Meditations was a _Saiva_ or a _Vaishnava_; so I suggested this arrangement as the men were making a sectarian quarrel out of the question." He paused again and added:

[Footnote 15: A fossil ammonite.]

"You see it does for both of them."

The jar of the points prevented me from replying.

ON THE SECOND STORY

It was a three-storied house in reality, though time had given it the semblance of a fourth in the mud platform which led up to its only entrance. For the pa.s.sing feet of generations had worn down the levels of the alley outside, and the toiling hands of generations had added to the level of the rooms within, until those who wished to pa.s.s from one to the other had to climb the connecting steps ere they could reach the door.

The door itself was broad as it was high, and had a strangely deformed look; since nearly half of its two carven stone jambs were, of necessity, hidden behind the platform. These stone jambs, square-hewn, roughly-carven, were the only sign of antiquity visible in the house from the alley; the rest being the usual straight-up-and-down almost windowless wall built of small purplish bricks set in a mortar of mud.

It stood, however, a little further back in the alley than its neighbours, so giving room for the mud platform; but that was its only distinction.

The alley in its turn differed in no way from the generality of such alleys in the walled towns where the houses--like trees in a crowded plantation--shoot up shoulder to shoulder, as if trying to escape skywards from the yearly increasing pressure of humanity. It was, briefly, a deep, dark, irregular drain of a place, shadowful utterly save for the one brief half hour or so during which the sun showed in the notched ribbon of the sky which was visible between the uneven turretings of the roof.

Yet the very sunlessness and airlessness had its advantages. In hot weather it brought relief from the scorching glare, and in the cold, such air as there was remained warm even beneath a frosty sky. So that the mud platform, with its possibilities of unhustled rest, was a favourite gossiping place of the neighbourhood. All the more so because, between it and the next house, diving down through the _debris_ of countless generations and green with the slime of countless ages, lay one of those wells to which the natives cling so fondly in defiance of modern sanitation and water-works. But there was a third reason why the platform was so much frequented; on the second story of the house to which it belonged stood the oldest Hindu shrine in the city. How it came to be there no one could say clearly. The Brahmins who tended it from the lower story told tales of a plinthed temple built in the heroic age of Prithi Raj; but only this much was certain, that it was very old, and that the steep stone ladder of a stair which led up to the arched alcoves of the ante-shrine was of very different date to the ordinary brick one which led thence to the third story; where, among other lodgers, Ramanund, B.A., lived with his widowed mother.

He was a mathematical master in a mission school, and twice a day on his way to and from the exact sciences he had to pa.s.s up and down the brick ladder and the stone stair. And sometimes he had to stand aside on the three-cornered landing where the brick and stone met, in order that the women coming to worship might pa.s.s with their platters of curds, their trays of cressets, and chaplets of flowers into the dim ante-shrine where the light from a stone lattice glistened faintly on the damp oil-smeared pavement. But that being necessarily when he was on his way downstairs, and deep in preparation for the day's work, he did not mind a minute or so of delay for further study; and he would go on with his elementary treatise on logarithms until the tinkle of the anklets merged into the giggle which generally followed, when in the comparative seclusion of the ante-shrine, the veils could be lifted for a peep at the handsome young man. But Ramanund, albeit a lineal descendant of the original Brahmin priests of the temple, had read Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill; so he would go on his way careless alike of the unseen women and the unseen shrine--of the mysteries of s.e.x and religion as presented in his natural environment.

There are dozens of young men in India now-a-days in this position; who stand figuratively, as he did actually, giving the go-by to one-half of life alternately, and letting the cressets and the chaplets and the unseen women pa.s.s unchallenged into the alcove, where the speckled light of the lattice bejewelled their gay garments, and a blue cloud of incense floated sideways among the dim arches.

And Ramanund was as good a specimen of this new India as could be found, North or South. Not of robust physique--that was scarcely to be expected after generations of in and in breeding--but of most acute intelligence, and, by virtue of inherited spiritual distinction, singularly free from the sensual, pa.s.sive acquiescence in the limitations of life which brings content to the most of humanity. He was, by birth, as it were, a specialised speculative machine working at full pressure with a pure virtue escapement. As President of a Debating Club affiliated with the "Society for the General Improvement of the People of India," he was perhaps needlessly lavish of vague expressions such as the individual rights of man; but then he, in common with his kind, have only lately become acquainted with the ideas such phrases are supposed to express, and have not as yet learnt their exact use--that being an art which history tells needs centuries of national and individual struggle for its attainment.

Be that as it may, even in the strict atmosphere of the Mission School, Ramanund's only fault was that he had a.s.similated its morality and rejected its dogma. In the orthodox Hindu household upstairs, over which his widowed mother ruled severely, his only crime was that he refused to replace a wife, deceased of the measles at the age of six, for another of the good lady's choosing. For that other matter of slighting the shrine downstairs is too common now-a-days in India to excite any recrimination; its only effect being to make the women regard the rule which forbids their eating with the men folks, as a patent of purity, instead of a sign of inferiority; since it is a safeguard against contamination from those who, when beyond the watch of secluded eyes, may have defiled themselves in a thousand Western ways.

Regarding the wife, however, Ramanund was firm, despite the prayers that his mother offered before the G.o.ddess downstairs for his deliverance from obstinacy. He used to accompany her sometimes on this errand so far as the three-cornered landing, and then with a smile proceed on his way to the exact sciences. Even the clang of the great bell which hung in front of the idol within tip-toe touch of the worshipper, as it used to come pealing after him down the stairs, proclaiming that the G.o.ddess' attention had been called to a new pet.i.tioner, did not bring a comprehension of facts to his singularly clear brain. Those facts being, that, rightly or wrongly, the flamboyant image of Kali _devi_[16]--which his ancestors had tended faithfully--was being besieged by as fervent a mother-prayer as had been laid before any divinity--or _dev_-inity as the word really stands.