Where the Pavement Ends Part 17

"I tell thee, Shway, I did not follow at all. At the appointed time I came and thou wert here. The talk and all things else come in their order."

"So and so. And what else is to come, thinkest thou?"

"At sunset to-day," said the other quietly, "at big-bell time, I am to slay thee in this chapel under the Slanted Beam."...

Cloots loosened his collar. He had had a bit of a start. He had been surprised into rather nervous speech. But he recovered himself. Merely he was aware of a slight oppression, due, no doubt, to the scented fumes in this inclosed s.p.a.ce. Also, he took occasion in lowering his hand to run one finger lightly down the front of his green twill shooting jacket so that the b.u.t.tons were slipped and the lapels left open. "Art mad?" he inquired. "What babble is this, Moung Poh Sin?" he rasped abruptly.

"Stand away from that door, dog! Remove--stand off!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not budge.

Now, there are ways and ways of regarding the native within the areas of white empery. As a sort of inferior and obedient jinn, supplied by Providence and invoked by a gesture to fetch and to carry at need. As a specimen of the genus h.o.m.o, also inferior and obedient, but quite quaint and decorative too, and really rather useful, you know, in his place. Or again, less commonly, as an elder member of the family, with resources and subtleties of his own which may or may not be inferior, and which may or may not lead to obedience, but which lie as far outside the chart of the Western mind as a quadratic complex lies outside a postage stamp.

This last view is not popular, and when brought home to the invader has proved at times extremely discomposing.

Moung Poh Sin was a squat, middle-aged person about half the size of Cloots, with a flat and serious face resembling a design punched laboriously on a well-worn saddle flap. There was a little about him to be called either quaint or decorative. His bare, rugged chest under the narrow-edged coat; his st.u.r.dy, misshapen legs to which the silk _pasoh_ lent scanty disguise; the slitted eyes that held a glint of the green jade from his own hills--all his features were rude and resistant. And he came by them in the way of average after his kind, for he was part Kachin, which is the warlike strain of the upcountry and the breed of dacoits and raiders from the dawn of history.

Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he would have said, in his smoky little village. And to appearance the fellow had not changed a hair from the simple, untaught, somewhat hard-bitten but altogether undistinguished headman of Apyodaw. He was just what he had always been. Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing clarity that he did not know him in the least--could never have known him. For this native, who was a very ordinary native, had withdrawn himself, after the immemorial manner of the native on his own occasions, beyond every index of temper or purpose: fear, respect, rage, hate, injured pride, or lacerated honor; impatience, vindictiveness, greed--or doubt.

Cloots could not fathom Moung Poh Sin. He could not follow the thought process of Moung Poh Sin. Worst of all, he could not divine those elements from which Moung Poh Sin had borrowed such absolute and amazing a.s.surance. It made him cautious.

"Softly," he said. "Softly a while. There is some folly here. Name the business."

"There is no business, Shway. Only a debt."

"All debts of money were long ago settled between us."

"It is not money, Shway. Only my house is empty; my hearth is cold. My heart is both cold and empty. There is no one under my roof to husk the paddy, or to cook, or to sing, or to drive away evil spirits with laughter. There will never be any fat babies rolling about the mats or swinging in the basket at my home while the mother tells the _Sehn-nee_, the cradle song. Once I had a treasure in my house, Shway. Where is that treasure now?"

"Meaning thy daughter, Moung Poh Sin?" asked Cloots directly to show himself quite cool and firm. "Meaning Mah Soung, thy daughter?"

"Mah Soung is dead," said the headman.

"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth between the walls with his word. He glanced swiftly toward the kneeling maiden by the altar in the dim taper light, and for all his control he could not repress the strangest flicker of fancy. She looked very like Mah Soung. Very like. Some tilt of the head, some odd, soft line of the shining tress over the ear started a poignant dart of memory, caught his breath sharp. It was in just such a place as this, he recalled, in pursuit of just such an idle, colorful adventure, that he first had found Mah Soung....

But then--he told himself hastily--he had seen Mah Soung die. Who but he had seen her die? She had died with her adoring eyes and her slender yellow fingers uplifted to him as this girl's eyes and fingers were lifted to the sacred image.

A curious qualm took him, one of those turns of sick uncertainty that now and then seek out and wring the nerve of any white man who ventures a bit too far off white man's ground.

He was still staring as the worshiper rose from the mat, placed her water lily reverently on the altar and with obeisance and the murmured invocation that begins "Awgatha, by this offering I free me from the Three Calamities," faced about and glided in silence between Cloots and Moung Poh Sin and so on and out of the chapel and out of their ken forever.

She did not notice either man. She was quite unconscious of them. They had spoken in a hill dialect, all incomprehensible to her.... She was not Mah Soung, of course--though Cloots wiped a brow gone damp and chill.

"I have learned," continued the headman of Apyodaw--"I have learned how my child died--"

Cloots regained his speech in a curt laugh.

"What is that to me, old man? Yesterday's rice is neither eaten nor paid for twice."

"There remains, however, Shway, every man's account with the _nats_ and such guarding spirits as may be; and their just pay is taken always in due course."

"Do they ask more than thee for a daughter? Thy payment was the highest market rate, at least--But again I say, stand aside. I weary of thee, Moung Poh Sin."

But Moung Poh Sin did not move.

"There is not much longer to wait," he said, neither grim nor humorous, simply unvarying. "The sun already has dipped. Soon the big bell speaks when all will be paid."

And in fact it became clear to Cloots that this affair would have to be solved on the spot. He was not minded to stand any more of it nor to leave Moung Poh Sin in train to repeat such performances. He had lost that perfectly ripping new love toy of a girl. A very jolly evening had been ruined for him, and his confident balance most inexplicably and painfully shaken. And here this insignificant relic of a discarded past was undertaking to block his steps. This flute-toned, slab-faced little heathen was presuming to threaten him, to name the moment when a superior white, with his strength and his vision, with his civilized capacity for perceptions and enjoyments, should suddenly cease to be....

He shifted both fists easily to his belt and took a watchful survey of the figure by the doorway--and he did some rapid calculating.

Outside on the platform between west and east, between flame and dark, Shway Dagohn showed now like one cutting from a jasper opal. Each flake and streak of coloring had mellowed. And, with that, all sounds seemed mellower too, as if they came more resonantly on the burdened air.

Everywhere, all about, the paG.o.da bells were ringing: bells of bronze and silver and gold, bells hammered by devout and l.u.s.ty celebrants, bells insistently jangled by begging priests, bells that tinkled and sighed to any stray breeze. And the whole tide of color and of sound was drawing to an end, a definite climax: presently the tropic night would fall like a curtain, and presently the huge central bell, Mahah Ganda, "the great sweet voice" which is the voice of a continent, would bestir itself ever so slightly for an instant at the touch of its monstrous battering-ram and wake brazen thunder far and wide.

Cloots reckoned that he had perhaps five minutes before the stated limit. It was to be a sort of test, as he saw and accepted. He would have to decide how well, after all, he did understand the ancient half of the earth to which he and others like him went swaggering as conquerors and masters. He would have to demonstrate which of the various ways and ways and just how seriously he was going to take this ancient people and their self-sufficing and queerly keyed formulas, so strange and vivid and charming. And whether he was going to be laid under some kind of psychic blackmail every time he chose to s.n.a.t.c.h a delicious interpretation.

If he meant to be quite sure of that essential white superiority of this, the time had come to make it good.

He smiled again as he swung the right lapel of his twill jacket a little farther to the right....

"Moung Poh Sin," he began, almost amiably, "with the rest of these matters which seem so well and so fully known to thee, is it also known where I have been since I went away?"

"No, Shway."

"Now, as it chanced, I went to the Salween country; even up into Yunnan, the Cloudy South. And there, in those wild parts, I hunted the painted leopard and the fishing cat and the tiger cat and other such, as I have done before.... Thou hast seen me shoot?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Rememberest thou, perhaps, how once at Apyodaw in a merry mood, to show my skill and for a jest, I shot away one by one the six strings from a minstrel's harp?"

"Yes, Shway."

"And again, how with the short gun I slew a pigeon on a housetop and tore the head from its body?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Then, for the third and the last time, I warn thee to get clear of that door and of me--and to keep clear, Moung Poh Sin. I have been patient and tolerant, marveling too much at thy insolence to be rightly angered.

But I have had enough. By every law of the land and by common privilege of my kind, thy life is forfeit to me for daring to breathe these threats. And it was a pity of thy cunning, and a flaw in thy information, not to have learned whence I came--and whether I would be likely to come from a place like Yunnan unarmed, Moung Poh Sin!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not stir.

"That can make no change, Shway. My own life is of no moment, and thine is surely forfeit, as I told thee--here by the Slanted Beam when the sun sets. What will be will be. It is written."