Son of Power Part 28

But India was teaching him otherwise.

In the hills back of Poona he had met a murderer. That cat-scream at the last chilled him to the very centre of things. Cheetahs were malignant; no two ways about that. Skag hadn't failed. He never was better. There was no fear nor any lack of concentration in his work upon the cheetah beast. Any tiger he knew would have answered to his cool force, but the cheetah didn't.

It was the same with the big snake in the gra.s.s jungle. Skag had met fear there--something of monstrous proportion, more powerful than will, harder to deal with by a wide margin than any plain adjustment to death. It stayed with him. It was more formidable than pain. He had talked with Cadman about a peculiar inadequacy he felt in dealing with the snake--as if his force did not penetrate. Cadman knew too much to hoot at Skag's dilemma. The more a man knows, the more he can believe.

"It would be easier with a cobra than a constrictor," Cadman had said.

"You'd have to strike just the right key, son. This is what I mean: The wireless instruments of the Swastika Line answer to one pitch; the ships of the Blue Toll to another. . . . But I've seen things done--yes, I've seen things done in this man's India. . . . I saw a man from one of the little brotherhoods of the Vindhas breathe a nest of cobras into repose; also I have seen other brothers pa.s.s through places where the deadly little karait is supposed to watch and wait and turn red-eyed."

The more Skag listened and learned and watched in India, the more he realised that if he knew all there was to know about the different orders of holy men, all the rest of knowledge would be included, even the lore of the jungle animals. He had come into his own considerable awe through what he had seen in the forest with the priests of Hanuman, but things-to-learn stretched away and away before him like range upon range of High Himalaya.

Malcolm M'Cord was the best rifle-shot in India. The natives called him Hand-of-a-G.o.d. As usual they meant a lot more than a mere decoration. M'Cord was one of the big master mechanics--especially serving Indian Government in engine building--a Scot nearing fifty now.

For many years he had answered the cries of the natives for help against the destroyers of human life. Sometimes it was a mugger, sometimes a cobra, a cheetah, often a man-eating tiger that terrorised the countryside. There are many sizeable Indian villages where there is not a single rifle or short piece in the place; repeated instances where one pampered beast has taken his tolls of cattle and children of men, for several years.

The natives are slow to take life of any creature. They are suspicious toward anyone who does it thoughtlessly, or for pastime; but the Hindu also believes that one is within the equity of preservation in doing away with those ravagers that learn to hunt men.

In the early days M'Cord began to take the famous shoot trophies. Time came when this sort of thing was no longer a gamesome event, but a foregone conclusion. His rifle work was a revelation of genius--like the work of a prodigious young pianist or billiardist in the midst of mere natural excellence.

He had wearied of the game-bag end of shooting, even before his prowess in the tournaments became a bore. . . . So there was only the big philanthropy left. The silent steady Scot gave himself more and more to this work for the hunted villagers as the years went on. It sufficed. Many a man has stopped riding or walking for mere exercise, but joyously, and with much profit, taken it up again as a means to get somewhere.

It was Carlin who helped Skag to a deep understanding of her old friend, the Scot, and the famous bungalow in which he lived.

"It is 'papered' and carpeted and curtained with the skins of animals, but you would have to know what the taking of those skins has meant to the natives and how different it is from the usual hunter-man's house.

The M'Cord bungalow is a book of man-eater tales--with leather leaves."

Carlin, who had been one of M'Cord's favourites since she was a child, saw the man with the magic of the native standpoint upon him. . . .

With all its richness there was nothing of the effect of the taxidermist's shop about the place. Altogether the finest private set of gun-racks Skag had looked upon was in the dim front hall. Bhanah and Nels had a comfortable lodge to themselves, and there was a tiny summerhouse at the far end of the lawn that had been an ideal of Carlin's when she was small. The playhouse had but one door, which was turned modestly away from the great Highway. It was vined and partly sequestered in garden growths, its threshold to the west. The Scottish bachelor had turned this little house over to the child Carlin years ago, as eagerly as his entire establishment now. Yet the woman was no less partial to the playhouse than the child had been.

. . . They hardly saw the Scot. In fact it was only a moment in the station oval. Skag looked into a grey eye that seemed so steady as to have a life all its own and apart, in the midst of a weathered countenance both kindly and grim. . . . There was a tiny locked room on the south side of the bungalow, vividly sunlit--a room which in itself formed a cabinet for mounted cobras--eight or ten specimens with marvellous bodies and patchy-looking heads. . . . The place was heavily glazed, but not with windows that opened. Skag caught the hint before Carlin spoke--that the display might have a queer attraction for cobras that had not suffered the art of the taxidermist.

Skag turned to the girl as they stood together at the low heavy door, leading into the library. Something in her face held him utterly--something of wisdom, something of dread--if one could, imagine a fear founded on knowledge. . . . A brilliant mid-afternoon. Bhanah and Nels had gone to the stockades. Since the chase and rescue of Carlin, Nels and the young elephant Gunpat Rao were becoming friends--peculiar dignities and untellable reservations between them--but undoubtedly friends.

There was a kind of stillness in the place and hour, as they stood together, that made it seem they had never been alone before. Deep awe had come to Skag. As he looked now upon her beauty and health and courage, with eyes that saw another loveliness weaving all wonders together--he knew a kind of bewildered revolt that life was actually bounded by a mere few years; that it could be subject to change and chance. Thus he learned what has come to many a man in the first hours after bringing his great comrade home--that there must be some inner fold of romance to make straight the insistent torture at the thought of illness and accident and death itself--something somehow to enable a man to transcend all three-score and ten affairs and know that birth and death are mere hurdles for the runners of real romance.

. . . The sunlight brought out faint but marvellous gleamings from the serpents. It was as if every scale had been a jewel. . . . Skag looked closer. It wasn't bad mounting. It was really marvellous mounting. His eye ran from one to another. Every cobra's head had been shattered by a bullet. The broken tissues had been gathered together, pieced and sewn--the art of the workman not covering the dramatic effect entirely, yet smoothing the excess of the horror away.

". . . I've heard of cobras always, yet I never tire and never seem any nearer them," Carlin was saying. "I remember the word _cobra_ when I heard it the first time--almost the first memory. It never becomes familiar. They are mysterious. One can never tell the why or when about _them_. One never gets beyond the fascination. The more you know the more you prepare for them in India. It's like this--any other room would have windows that open. . . . Cobras have much fidelity.

We think of them as reptiles; and yet they are life-and-death-mates, like the best of tiger pairs. One who kills a cobra must kill two or look out--"

Carlin had strange lore about mated pairs; about moths and birds and other creatures (as well as men-things) finding each other and living and working together; about a tiger that had mourned for many seasons alone, after some sportsman had killed his female; about another rollicking young tiger pair that leaped an eight foot wall into a native yard in early evening, made their kill together of a plump young cow, and pa.s.sed it up and over the wall between them.

"The cubs were hungry," Carlin had said.

Still they did not leave the door-way of the cobra room. Skag saw that something more was coming. Once more he was drawn to the mystery of the holy men by her tale:

". . . I was a little girl. It was here in Hurda. . . . I had strayed away into the open jungle, not toward our monkey glen, but farther south where the trees were scarce. . . . Of course I shouldn't have been alone--"

Skag was staring straight at one of the cobras. Carlin turned and placed her hand upon his sleeve. She knew that he was fighting that old dread that had come upon him on the day of the elephant pursuit--a dread well enough founded, grounded upon many tragedies--of the pitfalls and menaces and miasmas of old Mother India; the infinite variety, craft, swiftness and violence of her deaths. (White hands were certainly clinging to Skag.) One's vast careless att.i.tudes to life are fearfully complicated when life means two and not the self alone.

"This isn't a horrible story--" she said.

He cleared his throat; then laughed.

"I'll get past all this," he muttered. "Go on, Carlin--"

"I heard a step behind," she said. "It was my uncle--the most wonderful of many uncles. I have not seen him since that day. He is a little older than my eldest brother--possibly thirty at that time--tall, dark, silent; a frowning man, but not to me. Even then he belonged to one of the little brotherhoods of the Vindhas--lesser, you know, in relation to the great brotherhoods of the Himalayas. In fact it is from the Vindha Hills that they move on when they are called--up the great way and beyond--"

Another of Carlin's themes--always the dream in her mind of climbing to the heights.

"We walked on together through one of the paths--some time I will show you. It was not like anyone else coming to find a child, or coming to take it back. A most memorable thing to a little one, this elaborate consideration from a great man. He did not suggest that I turn. He made himself over to my adventure."

She waited for Skag to see more of the picture from her mind than her words suggested:

"Ahead on the path--leisurely, like nothing else, a cobra reared, a king cobra, as great as any of these. He barred our way. There comes a penetrating cold from the first glance. It's like an icy lance to the centre of consciousness. Then I felt the man's presence beside me.

My confidence was that which only a child can give. What the mind knows and fears has too much dominion afterward. . . . The appalling power and beauty of the cobra fascinated me. I have never quite forgotten. There was a lolling trailing grace about the lifted length, the head slightly inclined to us, the hood but partly spread--something winged in the undulation, a suggestion of that which we could not see, faintly like the whir of a humming bird's wings. That is it--an intimation of forces we had not senses to register--also colours and sounds! . . . My hand was lost in the great hand. My uncle did not turn back. He was speaking. There was that about his tones which you had to listen for--a low softness that you had to listen to get. Yes, it was to the cobra that he spoke.

". . . There was never a poem to me like those words, but they did not leave themselves in continuity. I could not say the sentences again.

I seem to remember the vibration--some sense of the mysterious, kindred with all creatures--and a vast flung scroll of wisdom and poetry, as if the serpents had been a great and glorious people of blinding, incredible knowledges--never like us--but all the more marvellous for their difference! . . . And the cobra hung there, his eyes darkening under the gentleness of the voice--then reddening again like fanned embers. . . .

"Then I heard my uncle ask to be permitted to pa.s.s, saying that he brought no harm to the mother, undoubtedly near, nor to the baby cobras--only good-will; but that it was not well for a man and a little girl to be prevented from pa.s.sing along a man-path. . . . It was only a moment more that the way was held from us. There was no rising at all, to fighting anger. A cobra doesn't, you know, until actual attack. In leisurely undulations, he turned and entered the deeper growths. A moment later my uncle pointed to the lifted head in the shadows. One had need to be magic-eyed to see. We went on a little way and walked back. It was not that we had to pa.s.s--but that we must not be obstructed." . . .

This was the India that astonished Skag more than all hunter tales, more than any hunter prowess; but there were always two sides. . . .

The weeks were unlike any others he had ever known. The mystery deepened between him and Carlin. Almost the first he had heard of her was that she was "unattainable"--yet _they_ had known each other at once. . . . Still Carlin _was_ unattainable; forever above and beyond.

Such a woman is no sooner comprehended on one problem than she unfolds another; much of man's growth is from one to another of her mysteries.

And always when he has pa.s.sed one, he thinks all is known; and always as another looms, he realises how little he knows after all. . . .

A thousand times Skag recalled the words of the learned man who had spoken to Cadman and himself on their way to the gra.s.s jungle. "You will acknowledge love, but you will not know love until it is revealed by supreme danger. The way of your feet is in the ascending path.

Hold fast to the purposes of your own heart and you will come into the heights."

Could Carlin be more to him than now? . . . Yes, she was more to-day than yesterday. It would always be so. Love is always love, but it is always different. . . . Sometimes he would stay away from the bungalow for several hours. He was of a nature that could not be pleased with himself when he gave way tumultuously to the thing he wanted--which was continually to be in Carlin's presence. His every step in the market-place, or in the bazaar, had its own twitch back toward Malcolm M'Cord's bungalow; his every thought encountering a pressure of weight to hurry home.

Carlin was full of deep joys of understanding. One did not have to finish sentences for her. She meant India--its hidden wisdom. She had the thing called education in great tiers and folds. Skag's education was of the kind that acc.u.mulates when a man does not know he is being educated. . . . Certainly Carlin was unattainable--this was an often recurring thought as he learned Hindi from her and something of Urdu; the usages of her world, its castes and cults.

Down in the unwalled city one mid-afternoon, he finished certain errands and started for the bungalow. Had he let himself go, his feet would have stormed along. He laughed at the joy of the thing; and he had only been away since tiffin. Yet there was tension too--the old mystery. A man cannot feel all still and calm and powerful, when there has suddenly descended upon him realisation of all that can possibly happen to take away one so much more important than one's own life as to make contrast absurd. Skag was looking ahead into stark days, when he would be called upon to take big journeys alone into the jungle for the service. It was very clear there might be many weeks of separation . . . and now it was only a matter of hours. He was nearing the little gate. . . .

These are affairs men seldom speak about--seldom write; yet his experience was one that a mult.i.tude of men have felt vaguely at least.

There was a laugh about it, a sense of self-deprecation; but above all, Skag knew for the sake of the future that he must get himself better in hand against this incredible pull to the place where she was. It seemed quite enough to reach the compound or the gra.s.s plot and hear her step.

She was not at the gate. He halted. Malcolm M'Cord was expected home this day. He might have come. Surely he might give two such rare good friends a chance to have a chat together . . . in Malcolm's own house, too. Besides there was no better chance than now for a bit of moral calisthenics. Skag turned back. No one was very near to note that he was a bit pale. Still he was laughing. Even Nels, his Great Dane, would have thought him weird, he reflected. Had Bhanah been along, there could have been no possible explanation. . . . He was walking toward the city, but his eyes were called back again. Carlin had come to the gate. She held up her right arm full and straight--her signal always, such an impulse of joy in it.

He waved and made a broken sort of gesture toward Hurda, as if he had forgotten something. Minute by minute he fought them out after that--sixty of them, ninety of them, good measure, sixty seconds each, before he started at last to the bungalow again. The sun was low. The bazaars were but a little distance back, when he met Bhanah and Nels out for their evening exercise. . . . No, M'Cord-Sahib had not yet come. . . . Yes, all was quite well with the Hakima, Hantee-Sahiba, who was reading in the playhouse. . . .

Quite alone. Skag quickened, but repressed himself again. It was business for contemplation--the way Bhanah had spoken of Carlin as Hantee Sahiba, after her usual t.i.tle. . . . He heard the birds. The great Highway was deserted; the noise of the city all behind. . . . If he had merely "acknowledged love" so far, as the learned man had said--what must be the nature of the emotion that would reveal the full secret to him? Always when his thoughts fled away like this, his steps seized the advantage and he would find himself in full stride like a man doing road-work for the ring.

She wasn't at the gate this time. Just now Skag felt the first coolness of evening, the shadow of the great trees. . . . She did not come to the gate. His hand touched its latch and still he had not heard her voice. On the lawn path--in that strange lovely wash of light--he stood, as the sun sank and the afterglow mounted. This was always Carlin's hour to him--the magic moment of the afterglow. In such an hour in the outer paths of the tree jungle, they had spoken life to life.

"Malcolm M'Cord--is that you, Malcolm?"