The Potter's Thumb Part 44

'_Om mani padma hom_.'

What did it really mean, that invocation used by so many millions? What was the mystic jewel in the lotus? Something fair but far, no doubt, such as all religions promise. And then with a rush came the thought that Gwen would stand beside them on the morrow, fair and near!

The echo of his pony's galloping feet made that throbbing in the bazaar pause an instant as if to listen. Pause and go on when he had pa.s.sed.

The darkened houses of his friends rose up beside him and were left behind; the Club with its still twinkling arches, the garden where Chandni sat gossiping and waiting her chance to kill his faith wantonly. All these he pa.s.sed. Awake or sleeping he must be near Gwen for an instant--must bid her goodnight before the day came.

The chiming, echoing gong from the secretarial office rang twelve, clear; then the others began. Here and there from the various centres of law and order, many-voiced from the ma.s.sive pile of the distant city. He was too late then, yet not too late; for there was a light still in the little front room, despoiled of its prettiness now and littered with boxes. She was awake, busy like Rose over the morrow.

'Gwen!' he called to her softly, for the chick was down, the door half closed.

'My dear Dan!' Her voice, as she opened it and came hurriedly into the verandah, was full of amused horror and half-vexed kindness. 'Do go away, there's a dear! I never heard of such a thing, never! And the hotel is crammed full of people!'

'It's only to wish you many happy returns of the day, dear!' he whispered fondly. 'When I've done that I'll go content. Who wouldn't be content with you, Gwen? And yet I wouldn't spare an inch of it all--I couldn't. Gwen! do you remember the day your bearer was cleaning the lamps out here, and we were sitting on the sofa?--odd, isn't it, how one remembers these things all in a jumble, the one with the other--and I said to you--the very words come back to me, dear, every one of them--"You might be bankrupt of everything, Gwen, of everything save yourself, and I'll give you credit for it all the same." Do you remember, dear? Well, I've come to take the promise back. You've spoilt me, Gwen, I can't do it.'

'I--I don't understand,' she said faintly. 'I wish you would go, Dan.

We can talk of it to-morrow--afterwards.'

'To-morrow! Why's it's to-day already, our wedding-day! And if I can't keep the promise, am I not bound to take it back while I can? Not that I'm afraid--that is why I've come, to tell you, selfish brute that I am--that is why I want it all--every sc.r.a.p of your beauty, your goodness. I'll take nothing else, dear, now; for I know it's yours, and what is yours is mine by right!'

She had grown very pale, and a sort of terror came into her eyes.

'Ah Dan! what is the use of talking? I give you all I can. My best--I can't do more--it isn't kind----' she broke off almost impatiently, and yet she did not move from his clasp.

'Not kind, when I know what the best means? And yet, Gwen, it just comes upon me now that I couldn't stand it--if--if it were not so--not after this midsummer night's dream--of madness, if you will! Yes, dear, I'm going--I am indeed. But, Gwen--it's an idle fancy--and yet if there was anything it would be better to tell me now. You're not angry at the thought--it's only a thought. See, give me one kiss--just one, to be an answer for always.'

What right, she asked herself fiercely, had she to hesitate? What possible right, standing as she did on the threshold of a new life, _where no one could possibly know?_ And so she was back on the low levels among the ordinary considerations of convenience and safety as she kissed him. But the touch of her lips sent his blood surging through his heart and brain; and without another word, another look, he turned and left her--content, absolutely content. Love, pity, friendship, pa.s.sion, had all combined to raise him to the uttermost limit of vitality. He might come near it perhaps in the future; he was not likely ever to reach it again--not even without Chandni waiting to tell him the truth on his return to the odd little house at the other end of the station.

He neither knew nor cared where he was going; but his pony, tired of these incomprehensible wanderings, set its galloping hoofs on the shortest road home--that is to say, through the densely-wooded grounds of the Residency. Along a gra.s.sy ride or two, across a short cut they sped. Dan forgetting even his joy in the keen effort of steering a runaway through the trees; a runaway unheld, free to go as fast, nay, faster than it chose, yet obedient to that grip to right or left. It was a mad ride, a mad rider--yet a masterful one, wrestling imperiously with that other will, when the gloom grew as the trees thickened, and darkness and danger came together in the hot night, prisoned by the dense foliage above. Dan, looking down at the pony's heaving flanks as it paused, wearied by its short, sharp, unavailing struggle against his strong hands, felt flushed and hot. Not wearied,--he could not be that on such a night,--but glowing, palpitating, excited; drunk almost as if with wine. But yonder stood a remedy in that long, low-thatched roof, supported on brick pillars, and hung round with heavy bamboo screens.

Dan laughed as he slid to the ground, thinking of the twelve feet of clear cool water running fresh and fresh into the big swimming-bath at the one end, and out at the other to irrigate the green levels of the garden. Fresh and fresh all through the scorching summer weather, when life held no greater pleasure than to feel that cool water close in round the hot limbs. Frequented then, morning and evening, though deserted and empty through the colder months. Only the day before Dan's smooth dark head had come up from its depths rejoicing, and now the thought of it was luxury itself when the blood was beating in his temples, and racing at fever heat through his veins. More than once coming home at night, after careless, reckless enjoyment, he had stopped here, as he did now, to try the water-cure--as he had tried it in the ca.n.a.l at Hodinuggur.

'I need it to-night if ever I did,' he said half aloud. ''Tis the wine of life has got into my head.'

It was dark--almost too dark inside; that was because the fools had put down all the screens, when, on the contrary, they should be opened by night to let in the fresh air. He told himself that he would speak to the Secretary of the caretaker's neglect; yet how would that be since he would never see him again?

Yes! it was the last time! and how many times had he not gone down red-hot from the spring-board as he would do now, to come up out of the dark water a new man, with all the evil tempers and the p.r.i.c.kly heat quenched out of him?--sure, as a regenerating element, fire wasn't in it with water! A leap in the dark indeed! But that was what life was, and he was not afraid of it.

The little bars of moonlight shining through the c.h.i.n.ks between the bamboos came so far on the smooth white floor, then the soft depth of darkness where the cool water should be, and above it Dan poised for a second.

'_I come! Mother of all!_'

The oft, old-repeated cry rang joyously up into the roof, followed by a strange, dull thud, and silence--dead silence.

The bath had been emptied that morning for the cold weather, and Dan Fitzgerald was lying face downward on the hard cement with a broken neck.

Dead! Dead, without a word, a sigh, or a regret! And Chandni, growing tired of patience, went home to the bazaar, grumbling at her ill-luck, telling herself she might still write, if it were worth while.

But Dan was beyond her spite, beyond other things which, even without that spite, might have killed the best part of him.

Yet even in romance the sixth commandment outweighs all the others. The novelist may maim and degrade, may bear false witness against his own creations and filch from them the very characteristics which he has given them, in order to make degradation happy, but he must not kill; death in the verdict of the world being the only real tragedy.

So at any rate seemed the opinion of most people when in the early morning the gardeners coming to their work found Dan's pony drowsing, half asleep, still tethered to a hibiscus bush, whose great blossoms--in topsy-turvy fashion--showed rosy-red in death and snowy-white in life.

It was terribly sad, they said; an unredeemed tragedy, cruel, needless; altogether a manifestation needing much true Christian faith; one of the accidents of real life, so exasperating because so causeless, so inartistic because so unnecessary. These and many other comments the mourners made as, when the funeral was over, they returned home; and so, it being Sunday morning, went to church, where they sang 'Jerusalem the Golden' piously.

Only Rose lingered, her kind, soft hands laying the half-dead lotus like sentinels on the grave; for Gwen's pure white cross of gardenia had, at her request, been buried on the coffin.

'I can't somehow be so sorry,' she said to Lewis, between her sobs. 'He was so happy that last night. I seem to see his face still.'

But the man caught his breath in hard. There was a verse which would ring in his ears, his heart; for he had helped to lift poor Dan, and it had come to memory then--

'Broken in pieces like a potter's vessel.'

Yet, after all, what did it matter? but Rose must never know. In such things he would stand between her and needless pain.

And Gwen? She, as the phrase goes, bore up wonderfully. Not that she did not love the dead man dearly, but because she did love him. For odd as it may seem--topsy-turvywise, perhaps, like the hibiscus flowers--she had the same consolation as Rose Tweedie.

'I did not tell him,' she said to herself as she lay in her darkened room. 'He was happy to the last. I did my best--I did my best.'

So she cried softly; and so, once more, she escaped from her own remorse, and was comforted.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Both for the reader's and writer's sake it is never fair to end a story as you would end a play in a situation, for the former tries--vainly it may be--to present life even in its trivialities, the latter only in its more dramatic moments. So, though there is little more to tell, save what might easily be filled in by the reader's own imagination, it would give a false impression of the real value of poor Dan Fitzgerald's tragic death, were the curtain to come down upon the rest of the _dramatis personae_ in the first bewilderment and sorrow which such unexpected and causeless accidents must always arouse. As a matter of fact, there is no grief which pa.s.ses sooner from the daily life than that caused by death, especially when a real and unselfish love has existed between the dead and the living. The mind, after the first physical sense of loss has spent itself, refuses to believe in the extinction of a feeling which, in its own experience, has survived death, and so is comforted not by forgetfulness but remembrance.

Besides, it is false art to end any history embracing the life of more than one person with the balance in favour of pain. For were this so in reality, pain would cease to be pain and become pleasure, because it would then be the normal condition of life; since it is clearly to be demonstrated physiologically and psychologically that it is in the disintegration of reminiscent habit that the phenomena of pain arise.

Indeed, in the mind, pain is incredible, impossible, unless we have first formed the habit of pleasure; since it consists essentially in privation.

Therefore the novelist who wishes to give a true picture of life will always leave his puppets content. Nor does this limit the field unduly, since it is clearly as much the duty and privilege of the writer to present new sources of content to his readers, as it is for him to present them with scenes, or situations, or characters of which they have no previous knowledge. Because Jones thinks the soul of bliss is incarnate in roast-beef and plum-pudding, is that any reason why the more ethereal Brown should be denied his cup of nectar? or that the philosophic Robinson, seeing that birth and death are alike inscrutable phenomena, should refuse empirically to believe that the one is joyful and the other sorrowful?

But the public seems to think differently; 'Oh don't kill him, or her, or them,' it says cheerfully, 'let them enter into life halt, and maimed, and blind. What does anything matter so long as they have the average number of breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners allotted to humanity, and can thus go down to their graves in the fulness of time with the pleasing consciousness that their funeral _cortege_ is followed by a Noah's ark, consisting of the ghosts of the animals they have devoured?' For the world sides with Esau, who bartered away his birthright for a mess of pottage. And good pottage is, no doubt, warming, comforting, consoling. Yet some people who have it not are happy; for instance, the two hundred and odd millions of India--but then to them Birth and Death are alike the pivot on which the wheel of life spins.

So thought the potter of Hodinuggur. So had thought his fathers who lay buried in the dust beside him, and though the old man had no son to step on to the treadles when his feet slipped from them, the wheel span steadily, and the women of the village, as they rung the temper of the water-jars before they bought them, nodded their heads saying--'Fuzl is a good potter. Look you, it comes with a man's birth. When he goes, we shall have to send for another. Meroo thinks he can make them, because the Sirkar taught him when he was three years in jail for cattle-thieving. But it takes more than three years to make a potter.'

Still Fuzl Elahi showed no signs of going; on the contrary, he seemed to have a firmer hold on life than ever, as if Time had stood still for him. Rose Gordon remarked on the fact to her husband as they sat side by side one day on the old log. They had been married nearly a year, and he had brought her out for change of air on one of his inspection tours--for he had given up the Secretaryship on his marriage in favour of greater quiet and more freedom.

'It is so strange, Lewis,' she said, 'you and I coming back, so changed. And so many things have changed! even the palace scarcely looks itself with that dreadful sort of Swiss chalet Dalel has built for Beatrice Norma tacked on to the ruins of the old tower. And George and Dan are dead, and the water is running in the cut yonder as if there had never been any tragedy about preventing it from running. Yet the village, with the potter sitting in the topmost house, is just the same.'

Lewis Gordon smiled. 'You never read Megasthenes' account of his travel through India in the year B.C. 300 or you wouldn't be surprised. It might have been written today; for these people do not change except under pressure from without, and then they disintegrate suddenly. But the old man seems to me more sane than he was--more at rest. No doubt Azizan's death----'

The familiar name caught the potter's ear and he looked up from his work.