Part 10

A twinkle crept into Orrington’s usually expressionless eyes. “I must apologize to you, Reynolds, or perhaps to your father, for so mistaking the circumstances of your youth. You have, at all events, lived down the opprobrium of inherited wealth. You’ve supported yourself quite nicely ever since I’ve known you.”

“As I remarked earlier,” Reynolds went on pompously, but in better humor, “I have never thought it wise for young men to embark on the literary life without sufficient means to live in comfort until they can establish their reputations. In my own case I should never have undertaken to do so.”

His declaration of principle seemed to restore him to complete self-satisfaction, and it must have seemed to him the proper cue for exit. As he was already standing, he was in a position to shake hands with Orrington and me rather condescendingly; and he took himself off with the swagger of conscious invincibility. I think he bore us no malice.

Orrington looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “I told you I needed you to save my life,” he said. “I hadn’t any notion, though, that this kind of thing would happen. I’m sorry to have let you in for such a scene.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” I answered. “It has been rather amusing and—well—illuminating.”

Orrington chuckled. “The devil tempted me, and I didn’t resist him unduly. As a matter of fact, it has been quite as illuminating to me as to you. I’ve been wishing for a dozen or fifteen years to try out the experiment.”

“What experiment?” I was puzzled.

“Oh, putting it up to Reynolds, of course. I’ve wondered why he did it and why he didn’t do it and, moreover, how he did it.”

“If you got light on a complication like that, you did better than I did. Do you mind explaining?”

“Reynolds has explained sufficiently, hasn’t he? Of course I knew long ago that he faked his story, but—”

“Then you knew it was Reynolds?” I interrupted.

“Knew? Of course I knew. Later, of course, much later. I never inquired, as I told you, but I spotted him after he made his first big hit. The man who had hired him to do those articles bragged about it to me—said he’d given him his start, but allowed me some credit for establishing the connection. I blinked, but didn’t let on I hadn’t known that Reynolds and my supposedly starving young author were one and the same person. By that time, of course, everybody was fully aware that Reynolds had emerged from heavily gilded circles of dulness. I don’t know why I’ve never had it out with him before. I suppose I shouldn’t have sailed in to-day if he hadn’t been so snippy about the boy of whom I was telling you. I couldn’t stand that.”

“I’m afraid,” I ventured to say, “that it won’t do Reynolds any special good.”

Orrington rose ponderously from his chair and spread his hands in a fantastic gesture of disclaim. “Who am I,” he asked, “to teach ethics to a genius who is also a moralist—‘with perhaps a cosmic significance’? The devil tempted me, I tell you, and I fell, for the sake of a little fun and a little information. I’ve never known Reynolds’s side of the story. Lord, no, it won’t do him any good. All the same, it will take him a week to explain to himself all over again just why he acted with perfect propriety in not acknowledging my little boost. I dare say his book may be a few days later on account of it, and I shall have to nurse Speedwell through an attack of the fidgets. A dreadful life, mine! No wonder the business man is tired. You ought to thank God on your knees every night that you haven’t been sitting all day in a publisher’s office.”

He held out his hand very solemnly, and very solemnly waddled across the big room, nodding every now and then to acquaintances who smiled up at him as he passed.

IN MAULMAIN FEVER-WARD

_By_ GEORGE GILBERT _Copyright, 1918, by The Story-Press Corporation._

Flood-time on Salwin River, Burma! _Pouk_ trees and _stic-lac_ in flower. By day the rush, the roar of water fretting at the knees of Kalgai Gorge, above which the Thoungyeen enters the main current. And the music of the elephants’ bells as they come along the track bound down or mayhap up to work in the teak forests. By night the languorous scent of the _serai_ vines luring the myriad moths, the wail of the gibbons, the rustle of the bamboos chafing their feathery leaves together in the winds that just falter between rest and motion.

At Kalgai the traders pause in going up or down, over or across. From everywhere they come, and coming, stay to chaffer, to chat, cheat, scheme, love—aye and even slay! Why not? It’s life—raw life!

Take away the medicine. Give me rice curry and chicken and fish cooked with green bamboo tips and sourish-sweet _pilou_ of river mussels. And then a whiff of _bhang_ or black Malay tobacco that the gypsies of the sea smuggle in....

My name? Paul Brandon will do. My father was a Stepney coster. Mother? Oh, a half-caste Mandalay woman. Yes, they were married at the mission. He took her home. I was born in London. But I ran away; came East....

Don’t mind if I babble, ma’am. And forgive me if I pull at the sheets. Or if the sight of a white woman, old, patient, trying to be kind to me, makes me shy. When my head clears, I’m white; when the fever mist comes over my brain, I see things through my brown mother’s eyes.

Thanks for fixing the ice pack on my head. No, that mark on my forehead is not from an old bruise. A Karen-Laos woman put it there with her tattoo needles. It has a meaning. It is the Third Eye of Siva.

Thanks for pulling-to the shade. Those bamboo things the yellow and brown folk use are not shades. They are full of holes where the weaving is that holds them together. Why, you can see through them—see the most unbelievable things....

Oh, yes, the mark on my forehead. A girl put it there with her needles. Now that you touch it, it _is_ sore. Well, so would _your_ head be sore if a giant python had smashed his wedge-shaped head in death stroke against your wrinkled brow, executing the Curse of Siva.

How long have I been in Maulmain?... A week? Well, I won’t be here another. But it’s queer how a man will drift—to his own people.

Thanks for the little morphine pills. Yes, I know what they are. Give me a dozen, and they may take hold. A man who has smoked _bhang_, black Malay tobacco and opium, and who has drunk _bino_ isn’t going to be hurt by sugar pills. They only wake me up, steady me.

Why didn’t I know Pra Oom Bwaht was a liar?...

――――

Karen town on Thoungyeen River! Temple bells chiming or booming through the mystic, potent dusk; mynah-birds scolding in the _thy-tsi_ trees. Frogs croaking under the banyans’ knees in the mud. Women coming to worship in the temples—women with songs on their full red lips and burdens on their heads—and mighty little else on them. And the fat, lazy priests and the monks going about, begging bowls in hand, with their _cheelahs_ to lead them as they beg their evening rice.

Thanks for the lime juice, ma’am. Let me talk. It eases me.

To Karen town on Thoungyeen River—Karen town with its Temple of Siva—I came long before the rains. This year? Mayhap. Last? What do the dead years matter now?

To Karen town I brought wire rods for anklet-making, cloths, mirrors, sweetmeats—an elephant’s load. Once there, I let my elephant driver go.

Three days of good trade I had, and my goods were about gone, turned into money and antique carved silver and gold work. At the close of the third day, as I sat in front of the _zana_, smoking, smoking, smoking, listening to the buzz of the women and children, Pra Oom Bwaht came.

He was tall for a Karen man of the hills, all of five foot two. The Karen plainsmen are taller. He sat a space beside me in silence—sure mark of a man of degree among such chatterers.

“Have you seen the temples of Karen?” he asked finally.

Lazily I looked him over. He was sturdy—a brave man, I thought. He had a cunning eye, a twisty mouth, and in his forehead’s middle a black mark showing harsh against his yellow skin.

“What’s that?” I asked him, touching the mark. He winced when I did it.

“Dread Bhairava,” he said, using the Brahman word for Siva, Queen of the Nagas. He was a snake-worshiper, then. Mighty little of these people or their talk or dialects I don’t know.

“Come with me, white trader?” he asked me. “I am Pra Oom Bwaht.”

Idly I went. So, after visiting the other temples, we came to the Temple of Siva, perched on its rocks, with the river running near and its little grounds well kept. It was the hour of evening worship. The worshipers, mostly women, were coming in with votive offerings.

But among them all there was a Laos girl, shapely as a roe deer, graceful, brown, with flashing black eyes and shining black hair neatly coiled on top of her pretty head, and with full red lips. As she passed, Oom Bwaht just nudged me—pointed. She turned off at a fork of the path, alone.

I glanced at Pra Oom Bwaht. His twisty mouth was wreathed in a smile.

“She lives at the end of that little path,” he tempted. “She is Nagy N’Yang.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

He nodded again and went away. I turned down the side path after the Laos girl....

There was a full moon that night. About the middle of the night we came up the path to the temple again, the Laos girl and I.

“Come,” she had said to me when I had asked her for my heart’s desire, “come to the temple, and I can prove it is folly.”

So we came. The temple door was open. The priests were gone—no one has to watch a Naga temple at night. The dread of Siva is enough to protect it.

A rift in the temple roof let in a shaft of white moonlight. It struck upon the image of Siva. The image was seated on a white ox, carved of some white stone. A sash around the image was made up of human heads; it had six arms, each covered with carved snakes that were so lifelike they seemed to writhe in the wavering light. In the middle of the god’s forehead was the mark of the third eye—the scar of Siva.

We went slowly down toward the image. Before it was a huge chest. Nagy N’Yang motioned me to sit on it. She sat beside me. Again I pleaded with her for my heart’s desire.

She pushed me away.

“You are afraid to be near me,” I mocked.

“Hush,” she pleaded. “I am afraid—of yielding to you.”

I moved to clasp her, my heart leaping at her confession. She smote her little hands sharply together. I heard a shuffling of softly shod feet in the passage behind the image.

Wat Na Yang, chief priest of the temple, stood before us with his yellow robes, his yellow skin, his hands calmly folded across his paunch. “What seek ye, children?” he asked.

“The way of love,” I laughed. I plunged my hand into my robe and felt the gold against my middle.

In the great chest on which we sat something awoke to life. I heard a stir, a rustle, a noise as of straining.

“Nagy speaks,” the priest warned.

I felt the Laos girl shudder by my side.

“What is it?” I asked. I stood up. A creeping horror came over me.

Nagy N’Yang sprang up as I did and flung back the lid of the great chest with a strength I had not expected. Out over her shoulder shot a long coil, then another. When she stood erect in the moon-glow, a great rock python was wrapped about her matchless form. The mark of Siva on her forehead gleamed against her ivory brow like an evil blotch, yet it did not take from her beauty, her alluring grace; nor did the immense bulk of the python bear her down.

“The great serpent knows his own,” whispered the yellow priest. He pointed with his fat forefinger. I saw the red tongue of the python play over the ivory bosom of the girl.

Yet I did not shudder. It seemed fitting. They were so in harmony with their surroundings.

The eyes of the python blazed in the moon-glow like rubies of the pigeon-blood hue, then like garnets, then like glow-worms; then they sank to a lower range of colors and finally to rest. He was asleep under her caresses. She patted his wedge-shaped head, soothing him. Ah, that it had been my head she thus fondled!

Suddenly Nagy N’Yang seized the great serpent just back of the head, uncoiled it from her with a free, quick succession of movements and cast it into the great chest again. Then, with a curious indrawing of the breath, as if relieved from a nerve strain, she sat down on the chest.

“Well have I seen,” I said to her. “But little do I understand.”

“I may not wed,” she said. “I am Siva’s.”

“I can kill the snake—”

The thing in the chest stirred its coils uneasily.

“Be silent!” commanded the fat priest. “Would you slay little N’Yang?”

I shuddered. A great bat came in through the rift that let in the moon-glow. In the trees over the temple a gibbon wailed in his sleep like a sick child—“_Hoop-oi-oi-oi_”!

Wat Na Yang extended his arm before him in a gesture of dismissal.

“Go!” he commanded. Then he placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

Nagy N’Yang stood up, bowed her head and went down the path the moonbeams made, went into the shadow near the door, and out.

The fat priest sat down on the chest beside me. The mottled terror in the chest was still again.

“She was wed,” the priest began, “but on her wedding-day we claimed her. Her husband cannot claim her. But if some one unwittingly kills the great python, she will be free. It must be some one not a friend of the husband. No one will kill the python here. She is temple-bound for life—”

The bulk inside thrilled to life again. I heard the scales rustling as the great coils rose and fell.

“Go, you!” he ordered. “The goddess likes you not. Even if you take the girl, I can call her back or kill her by touching her flesh with a single scale from the Naga in the chest.”

He walked with me to the door. At the portal we stood for a space, silent.

The tiled entrance was flooded with moonlight. In the middle of it a cobra lay, stretched out, seemingly asleep—a small cobra, deadly none the less.

“You see,” the gross priest said, pointing to the deadly serpent there. “Nagy’s spirit watches you here, too. But the girl she did not harm.”

Filled with some spirit of Western bravado I could not stifle, I stepped close to the cobra and stamped on its head.

“That for all scaly serpents!” I jeered at him. I stood on the cobra’s head while it lashed out its life.

The fat yellow priest watched me, and I could see hatred and horror struggle for mastery on his face.

Coming close to me he began to talk in long, rolling sentences, of which I here and there caught a word. But I caught the sense of what he was saying.

Oh, yes—the fat priest. It was there, in front of the temple, that he put on me, in Sanskrit, the Curse of Siva, ending:

“With gurgling drops of blood, that plenteous stream From throats quickly cut by us—”

I laughed at him, threw a yellow coin at his face, kicked the dead cobra into the door of the temple—and went down the path toward the Laos girl’s hut.

At the hut door she sat, silent, wonderful.

“Come!” I commanded.

“Where?” she asked.

“To Kalgai town by Salwin River,” I answered. I took her in my arms.

Yes, I took her! Why not? She was mine, wasn’t she? Yes, I took her! Not down the Thoungyeen River or the road along it. Why? We feared pursuit. Five miles below Karen a little hill stream comes to the Thoungyeen River. I never heard its name. We went up that to its springs and then along to the Hlineboay Chuang.

We traveled slowly, afoot, on cattle-back, on elephant-back—as the hill-folk could take us, or as we cared to go. Nagy N’Yang at first was moody, but as we left her own village far behind and got among the greater hills, she was gayer and gayer. I think when we came to Shoaygoon Plains she was happy. I was. It was in Shoaygoon _zana_ that I let her tattoo my forehead with the mark of Siva, to please her and quiet her superstitious fears. It was wrong, yes, for all-whites; but for me, with a brown mother? Mayhap not....

And so we came to Kalgai in Kalgai Gorge, and the rains were not yet come.

We were early. The traders’ huts were not filled. Only a few were taken. A Eurasian here, a Russian there, a Tibetan there, and yonder a Chinese.

So I had my choice of the best places and picked the best house in the gorge—on the rock spit that juts into the gorge’s biggest bend over the whirlpool.

The house we took was of teak beams and bamboo. For a few gold coins I had its use, entire, with its mats, pots, kettles.

There was a little shilly-shallying of trade, which I did not get into. Traders came up and down and across. I didn’t care for traffic just then.

Nagy N’Yang was happy, she told me. I believed it. She went about her little household tasks neatly.

“After the big rains,” I told her, “we two take boat for Maulmain and beyond.” I was due for a trip up past Rangoon for temple brasses and carved ivory. The air was heavy with the promise of the first of the rains.

“Where you go, I go,” she laughed, stuffing my mouth with rice and fish.

She cuddled closer to me on the eating mat we had spread out.

A shadow fell across the open doorway. She screamed.

It was Pra Oom Bwaht, who smiled down on us with his twisty smile.

“Welcome,” I said.

He came in boldly and sat down.

“You went quickly from Karen,” he said simply.

I could feel my Laos girl wince as she leaned against me. I clutched the dagger inside my robe.

Pra Oom Bwaht smiled his twisty smile.

“How come you here?” I demanded.

“Why should I not?” he asked. “Especially to see my sister—” He pointed to Nagy N’Yang.

She sighed and laughed a little nervous laugh.

“I did not know,” I said, “that she was your sister. You are welcome to our poor house.”

Pra Oom Bwaht smiled again, got up and stalked out. As he went, the first patter of the rains came, beating up the dust in the space before the door for a few seconds, then laying it all in a puddle of mud again as a great dash of fury came into the storm. But it was only the first baby rain, not enough to make Kalgai whirlpool talk out loud.

I turned to Nagy. She was staring out into the storm.

“I didn’t know he was your brother,” I said to her.

“All Laos are brother and sister,” she replied.

Well, I’ve found it best to keep out of native feuds and family jangles. “Some old village quarrel back of it,” I thought.

――――

All night it rained, and in the morning the river was talking to the cliffs in a louder voice. And the water was up and coming. Bits of drift were floating.

Among the traders I found Pra Oom Bwaht settled in a little hut off by himself. He had scant store of Karen cloths, Laos baskets, some hammered brass. He was sitting on a big box, and it was covered with a mat woven of tree-cotton fiber. He arose to meet me and came to the door.

“Let us chat here,” he said. “I like the sun better than the shade.”

It was queer to deny me a seat beside him, I thought; but I let it pass. I was not paying much attention to details then.

So we sat in the doorway and watched the rain and heard the river talking to Kalgai Gorge. Trade was slack and would be until the greater rains came bearing boats and rafts from above and over and beyond, from up the river and the little rivers coming into it.

I could make nothing of Pra Oom Bwaht, I say. I left him and went out to chaffer a bit.

“Who knows the Karen fool?” Ali Beg, just down from Szechuan after trading rifles to Chinese Mohammedans for opium, demanded of me from the door of his own place.

“Why?” I asked.

“He trades like a fool, letting a rupee’s worth go for a pice.”

“Let him,” I laughed, “so long as he keeps away from me.”

“And yours?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Come in and drink of tea with me,” he invited.

So I went in and we sat eye to eye, face to face, across his little teakwood table, each squatting on his heels, and drank tea and talked of many things.

“Now that we have said all the useless things, tell me what is at the bottom of thy heart,” Ali demanded. Up there the important things are kept for the dessert of the talk.

He was an old friend, with his coal-black eyes, great hairy arms and rippling black beard.

“Thus it was, heart of my soul,” I said, laying hold of a lock of his beard up under his green turban, in token of entire truth-telling. “Thus it was”—and I tugged at the lock of beard. So I told him the tale, from the time of my going to Karen until the time of my coming to Kalgai town and the arrival of Pra Oom Bwaht.

He sat a long time in silence.

Then he reached into his robe and drew out a fine dagger of Sikh smithy work, hammered, figured on the blade, keen, heavy of hilt; in the tip of the handle a ball of polished steel, hollow and filled with mercury. It was a throwing knife.

“Take this,” Ali urged. “I taught thee how to cast it at a foe years ago when we first went up the great river together. I go from here to-night by boats toward Maulmain. It will fall out with thee as it will fall out.”

I took the dagger because it was Ali’s gift, not because I was afraid. Why should I fear anything that walked on two legs or four? Even though it wore a tail or horns?

At nightfall I went back to my house on the rock spit. The stream was roaring now—like a baby lion.

Nagy N’Yang was sitting in the open doorway as I came up the path. I saw she had her chin in her hand and was thinking deeply.

“I saw him,” I made answer to the question in her eyes.

“Did he receive you well?”

“Except that he did not have me to sit beside him on his big trader’s box in his hut, but took me to the doorway to talk. It was not friendly.”

“Aha!” Just like that—soft, thoughtful.

“But what do I care for him, with his Karen cloths or hammered brass?” I chattered at her. “Come to me, Sweet One of a Thousand Delights.”

――――

So the days and the evenings and nights went by, and the greater rains followed the lesser. The river crept up and up and up, roaring now to the cliffs, like old lions.

Then came a day when on going home at eve I stooped at the river’s brim near the house we had on the rock spit, and felt of the water. It was chilled. “The flood is full,” I thought. I had felt the snow-chill from the Tibetan Himalayas in hoary Salwin’s yellow flood. When that comes, the utmost sources of the world have been tapped for flood water.

“The river will begin to fall to-morrow,” I told Nagy N’Yang when I came into the place. “We will go soon after, when the big trading is over.”

She smiled at me. Then she patted with her soft hand the place where she had tattooed on my brow the mark of the third eye of Siva. It was healed.

“I care not where we go, or if we go or stay, so long as you are with me,” she whispered, close against my side.

After the evening meal we sat in the doorway and heard the river talking. Often the big whirlpool sighed or moaned.

“It will almost cover our rock spit,” I said. I knew by the lift of it by day and the noise of it by night that the flood was a mighty one and would spend its chief force that night.

She nodded and nestled closer to me.

Out of the shade before us a greater shade silently loomed.

“I greet you, my sister and brother,” Pra Oom Bwaht said, standing before us.

Nagy N’Yang shivered against my side. I felt the dagger under my robe.

A single beam from our brazier inside struck across his twisty face. He stretched out his hand toward Nagy N’Yang.

“A gift for my sister,” he said.

She half reached her hand out, took it back, reached again and took it back; then, as if impelled by a force too strong to resist, reached again. Into her palm dropped something that shone for a tiny space in the yellow gleam of the brazier’s ray. She shut her hand—caught it to her breast. I thought it was a tiny golden bangle—then.

“Come,” said Pra Oom Bwaht. “Let us walk apart for a moment. I have family matters to talk over. Your husband will permit.”