Part 17

"Yes, isn't it? And utterly forsaken. Mr. Radcliffe found it somewhere with a rope and a brickbat round its neck. That's why I thought you'd like it. At first, I meant to get you something first-rate--a thoroughbred with a pedigree--and then I thought you'd like this better. You see, it's a sort of memorial to Wickie. You know what people do when some one dies whom they love--they build something or endow something--something the dead person would like. Well, I think Wickie would like you to adopt that puppy."

He looked at her. There was a real tenderness in her eyes as they met his. He fancied that her lips were not quite steady.

"If you say so, it must be so," he said. "Wickie loved you. You knew all about him."

"We knew all about each other." She hesitated and then asked, "You'll keep my puppy?"

"Rather! It's been horribly lonely--I've wanted someone to give my scraps to----"

"The best bits! Oh, I know you, Tristram Sahib!"

They both laughed. And suddenly the constraint between them had gone. He busied himself eagerly, preparing Wickie's old sleeping quarters, filling the tin feeding-plate with recklessly collected puppy dainties.

"Wickie'll be jolly glad," he said, in his boyish way. "He'd hate me to be lonely. And it's been lonely without him."

"Yes, I know." She went and stood by his table, playing idly with the letters which lay heaped upon it. "And there's something I want to ask in return--a sort of farewell gift. Make this a real day for us both--give me a good time--humour me. Let us be real with each other--sincere, just as we really are and feel. A sort of feast of honesty and fellowship. Will you?"

He stood beside her, looking down at her from his great height.

"Our day of days?"

"The day of our lives."

He flushed deeply under his tan, but he met her eyes steadily. A subtle change had come into his feeling for her. He could not have explained it--it was an odd sense of quiet nearness, of understanding. And she, too, seemed different. At other times she had been in earnest, but not as now. There had always been that curious detachment in her, as though she stood apart and laughed at life and herself. Now for a moment, at least, she had ceased to be an onlooker.

"Very well--we'll make each other a present," he said. "A day off from the world--something we won't account for to anybody." All at once he became recklessly happy. "I'll go and collect food," he said. "The pup can stay here and play _locum tenens_."

He came back presently from the kitchen. His sleeves were still rolled up, but he carried a basket under one arm and wore his helmet rakishly at the back of his head. Seeing him, the gravity passed like a mist from her eyes.

"Oh, you caricature of Hercules!" she jeered at him. "Tell me, have you ever worn decent clothes in your life?"

"Sometimes. I have to squeeze into regimentals on occasions--or into a frock-coat. You wouldn't know me--I look a regular freak."

"H'm! and what do you think you look like now?"

"Ariel shouldn't mock at Caliban," he retorted gaily.

"Even when Caliban throws Ariel's portrait out of the window." She pointed to the empty place on the table. "Have I sunk so far below your thought of me, Major Tristram?"

He became serious in a moment, but without embarrassment. She had a sudden pleasure in him as he came and stood beside her--in his bigness, in his sheer unconsciousness of himself and his strength. She felt oddly compassionate, too--the awestruck compassion of a Bruennhilde for a young Siegfried.

"No," he said. "But I was a boy, at least, in thought and feeling--and you were a boy's dream. Now I am a man and you are a reality. It would have been an impertinence of me to have kept you."

She shook her head.

"There's more in it than that, Tristram Sahib."

"Yes," he assented gravely. "A great deal more."

They remained together an instant, looking down at the empty place as though it held a secret significance for them both; then Tristram turned to the door and made a little grandiloquent bow of introduction. His eyes had lost their seriousness and laughed at her. "Behold, the day awaits us!" he said.

They went out side by side into the glowing morning. The stream of pilgrims had grown denser and filled the street, beating up against the mud huts on either side and spilling over into the open doorways. And there was a thrill and fever in the air which gathered force, as at the cross-roads one stream poured into another and swirled and eddied in the effort to break a passage. Shrieks and cries, the beating of drums, the harsh calls of the mendicants, the tramping of thousands of feet, the swirl of dust which could not rise for the pressure of the struggling bodies--a mad whirl of sound and colour. Tristram turned to the woman beside him.

"Do you mind--can you face it?"

She laughed a little, with a repressed exultation.

"This is the tarantella as I danced it--the beginning before the madness comes--the rising of the tide. Can't you feel it beating in your blood?"

A fresh band, headed by a swaying banner, pushed its way through the leaderless crowd, and after that, carried on the shoulders of four sweating, staggering men, the image of the Triumvirate.

The sun poured down over the roofs and glittered fierily on the three faces of the god. They had been gilded afresh for the occasion, and the hand which had laboured at their features had not failed in its simple craftsmanship. Benevolence, cruelty, and an unutterable serenity stared over the heads of the tossing multitude. The idol swayed from side to side in its passage, and, as it caught the rays of the sun, gleamed with a living, sinister brightness. There were wreaths of faded flowers on the base of the altar, and there was white dust everywhere. The crowd surged closer, holding up its hands to it in greeting. Their lifted faces showed neither reverence, nor fear, nor hope, but a kind of frenzy seeking its outlet.

Slowly, triumphantly, the image rocked on its way towards the river, a spot of sullen fire on the breast of an ever-changing sea of colour. Like a dangerous backwash, the mob closed in, sweeping it forward and leaving behind a sudden relaxation--a breaking-up of the sea into a hundred drifting particles. It was the passing of a mad dream. The sun blazed on to the peaceful bustle. The note of frenzy died down. The old fakir had crawled on his knees into the shade and held out his wooden bowl, bleating monotonously.

"Alakh! Alakh!"

A merchant came out from his hiding-place in a cowshed and exhibited his wares. The hovel opposite revealed itself as a cook-shop, where the hungry could buy pulse-puffs and dough-cakes and sweets of a hundred kinds. A sherbet-seller pitched his tent a few doors lower down and clinked his coloured glasses alluringly. An ascetic, with the face of a mediaeval saint, sold gilt-papered corks from champagne bottles as sacred charms of marvellous efficacy.

Sigrid Fersen looked up into her companion's face and they both laughed, scarcely knowing why, but swept away by a childish pleasure in the swiftness of the change, in the naive _volte face_ of these simple folk, who a minute before had trampled upon each other in a paroxysm of religious frenzy and now wandered wide-eyed and eager amidst all these bewildering fascinations.

And perhaps, as the deep secret source of their pleasure, was the knowledge that the day was young and wholly theirs.

"I want to buy something," she said gaily. "Why should we be superior? It's our feast, too. And who knows if their values are not as good as ours? if their faith in champagne corks isn't as effective as our superstitious belief in the mysterious horrors compounded by an honourable Dakktar Sahib!" She shot him a demure, malicious glance. "Come, I am going to buy recklessly!"

A bright-eyed boy beckoned them to the tray behind which he watched cross-legged and eager, like a handsome, bewitching spider. It was not in vain that he had bright eyes or that he sold wares dear to the hearts of women. The merchant in cheap stuffs from Manchester, and even the sherbet-seller, watched him sourly as the soft-footed, timid women hovered about him pricing his coveted treasures.

Now he looked up, showing his white teeth in a smile of innocent welcome.

"Gifts for the Mem-Sahib--and gifts for him whom Mem-Sahib loves."

Sigrid knelt down in the dust beside his tray, and rummaged through the medley of his stock. Ear-rings, bracelets, amulets, glass beads, vulgar trophies of Western taste--paste diamond brooches stuck on cardboard and labelled rolled gold--these last displayed with almost passionate pride, and here and there a scornfully suppressed relic of days when Manchester and Birmingham were not. Tristram stood beside her and watched her. He had the feeling that all this had happened before, years ago, and that this companionship of a day was just a link in a long, unbroken chain of days. It was so simple, so natural. He felt no constraint, scarcely any excitement, just an all-pervading peace. They had always known each other, always shared their days, their thoughts, and desires. He did not think about it. It filled his senses with a well-being, a rare and exquisite content.

She gave an exclamation and held up something in the palm of her little hand. He took it from her. It was a bracelet made of seven threads of seven different colours and bound with a silver clasp. The boy-merchant shrugged scornfully.

"It is nothing--nothing, Mem-Sahib."

"Do you remember?" she asked.

He nodded--not looking at her now.

"The Rani Kurnavati----"

"Yes--that night when we sat by the moonlight and Ayeshi told us her story----" She laid an extravagant sum on the tray. "There, that is all I want."

The amazed merchant gasped his blessings after her. She walked on, threading her way through the aimless crowd, inspecting her purchase with a thoughtful pleasure.

"I wanted to give it you," Tristram protested, aggrievedly.

"And I didn't want you to," she retorted. "You have given me enough, Major Tristram."

Her solemn reversion to his title amused him. He watched her smilingly as she snapped the bracelet about her wrist.

"What have I given you?"

"The cup. Have you forgotten? I was so miserable because I forgot to thank you. I'd never been remorseful in my life before, but I was remorseful about that."

"I'm sorry. Remorse is ghastly. And I hadn't expected thanks."

"You didn't expect to live. Ought I to give the cup back?"

"No."

"But your mother----?"

"I have told her," he said gravely.

They reached the confines of the village. The high grass had been trampled down under the passing of a monstrous animal. Through the dazzling blaze of sunlight they could see a black mass swarming along the banks, a huge, writhing octopus whose tentacles groped towards the temple with greedy, hurrying persistency. And in the midst of it, like a restless, menacing eye, the Triumvirate flashed backwards and forwards in evil, delirious triumph.

"They're bringing up their offerings now," Tristram said, rather grimly. "The Snake God and his retinue will have food enough for months to come. It's a queer thing--no one has seen these serpents in the memory of man, and yet it's true enough that native sceptics who have ventured inside the jungle have either never returned or come out raving madmen. There is madness connected with the whole thing--a kind of delirium which we English don't understand. It's in their blood, just as it's in the blood of some families to respond to supernatural influences which others don't even feel. Anyhow, we'd better keep clear of them today."

"I have made my plan," she answered, with sedate authority.

He knew now where she was going. They made their way in silence down the length of the river, touching the monster only there where its tentacles reached up to the temple, and came at last to the green-shadowed backwater. Tristram held aside the branches of the trees for her to pass through, and their eyes met.

"Isn't this a fitting place to celebrate our day?" she asked, "--here, where a certain romantic Hermit beheld a vision and was not afraid?"

"Visions are not terrifying," he answered.

"But the reality----?"

She did not seem to expect an answer. The boughs of the trees had swung back into their place. They stood together at the edge of the water, looking down into its tangled depths, listening to the silence. Nothing had changed. It was as though time had fallen asleep, and they were still living in that first day of their meeting. The dense foliage of the trees walled them in from the heat and glare and tumult. The dull murmur that came to them from time to time seemed no more than the soughing of a rising wind. The peace of it laid itself upon their senses like a cooling hand.

They sat down in the fresh grass, talking softly and only a little, fearing to disturb the sleeping spirit of the place. Tristram unpacked his basket and produced the day's provisions, over which they laughed subduedly. It appeared that he was cook as well as doctor, and she made wry faces over the probable ingredients of his dough-cakes. For her humour had lost its keenness and had become very young and a little tremulous. He responded loyally and easily. There was no constraint between them, no sense of trouble. They were comrades together, responding light-heartedly to the appeal of the sunlight, and the flowers burning brightly in the cool shadows. They did not know as yet that their real life lay beneath the surface of that easy comradeship in a great stillness where their own voices did not penetrate.

But that stillness mastered them at last, flowing quietly and mightily over their broken, careless talk. The sunlight, falling aslant through the trees touched the green stem of a high palm and began its upward journey. Tristram watched it. He had slipped lower down the bank, where he could see his own bulk shadowed darkly in the water and the pale, ghostly reflection of the woman behind him. At first, he had lain full length on his elbow looking at her frankly, fearlessly, as she sat above him, her hands clasped about her knees, her fair small head bent a little from the light, so that her eyes seemed dark and more serious than her lips. Now he had turned away from her and watched the passing of the sunbeam. A kind of panic had gripped him. The time was passing. He had begun to realize dimly that what they had set out to do was impossible--a defiance of the law of life. A day cannot be set apart from its fellows either for joy or sorrow. It is bound up with them by whatever menace or promise they hold, and the menace of yesterday and tomorrow touched him like the breath of a chill wind.

He pointed out on to the water and saw that his hand shook. His pulses had begun to beat heavily, thickly.

"The lotus-flower has gone," he said.

"It is dead. It's so long ago--it seems only yesterday to us. Do you remember asking me if I wanted it? You were glad because I let it live out its life."

"How did you know that?"

"I knew that you loved living things."

"Isn't that a love common to us all?"

She gave a short laugh out of which the joyful irresponsibility had died.

"Men love ideas--the fetishes of their intellects. Or they love their cabbage-patch, or their country. Life and humanity are nothing to the majority. But you cared--for everything." It was a long time before she spoke again, and then her voice had changed. It sounded languid--indifferent. "It must be terrible to kill," she said.

He stirred, drawing himself up.

"The unforgettable sin," he said.

"Unforgettable? Have you ever known any one who had killed----?"

"Yes. It was worse than killing. He smashed his man--crippled him for life."

"Perhaps he didn't care."

"He cared desperately. He thought of life as I do----"

She laughed again.

"Another Tolstoyan! Well, he was punished, I suppose."

"Oh, yes, he was punished. Not by the law. He had no belief in that Fetish of Justice--an eye for an eye. His life was of value--to another. Of what use would it have been to have smashed it with the rest? He found the only way to make good the damage he had done--and he took it."

He spoke firmly, as a man does who has fought through to a clear issue. He heard her move--he fancied that she had held out her hand as though to touch him, and that her hand had dropped.

"Perhaps he was mistaken," she said. "Some one once said to me there is a curse on us--that we are damned to destroy. Perhaps the life he took was justly taken--perhaps it was a bad, valueless life----"

He turned impetuously, with an intensity of feeling far removed from his previous impersonal deliberation.

"You can't tell," he said. "That's the ghastly part of it--you can't tell. You find a piece of broken glass on your road. You grind it under foot or throw it away and think you've done your fellow creatures a service. And then a child comes along crying for its lost treasure. It doesn't matter that you were justified. The thing had its value, after all, and you smashed it. You hurt someone----"

"Some one is always hurt," she interrupted.

A mist of passionate introspection passed from his eyes, and he saw her face--very pale, with a blue shadow about the lips. He started, almost touching her.

"You're ill--tired----!" he stammered.

"A little--it was the heat and the crowd----"

He looked at the light on the green stem of the palm, as though to a warning hand. It had reached the end of its journey and had grown dim. He got up, holding himself desperately erect. "It's the end of the Feast," he said, "the end of our day."

But she shook her head broodingly.

"You can't tell that either--only the gods know the end, Tristram Sahib."

* * * * *

Something had wrapped itself about their senses. They had talked of impersonal things and--save for that one break of his--without emotion. But the emotion had been there, below the surface, crushed out of sight by an effort of the will which left them no physical consciousness. It walled them within themselves as the trees and dense foliage walled them in from the heat and tumult.

Thus the storm broke on them without warning. It had risen little by little with the dull boom of an angry sea. They had heard nothing. But there had been a silence so tense, so prolonged that they looked at each other, wondering, waiting, though they did not know it, for the scream that ripped through, tearing down the barriers of their unconsciousness, forcing a breach through which the full fury of the sound bore down upon them.

Sigrid had risen instantly to her feet.

"Tarantella!" she breathed. "Tarantella!"

He did not wait to speak. He pushed through the undergrowth, not knowing that she had followed him. On the fringe of the coppice he turned and found her at his elbow.

"Something's happened," he said briefly. "We can't stay here--we've got to get back to the village----"

She nodded. A minute before she had looked ill, almost broken. Now the colour burnt in her cheek, she held herself lightly, strongly, and her eyes shone as they swept the scene before them.

"Shall we get through?"

"I don't know--I don't know what's happened. It may be nothing----"

"You don't believe that yourself. It is something. Anyhow, we've got to try for it----"

The fear was in him, not in her. Even then, striding at her side, bracing himself for whatever lay before them, he wondered at her, thrilled at the joyous adventurousness in her. Her head was erect and she was smiling faintly. The howling of the frantic, demented mob which swept backwards and forwards across the plain did not seem to touch her. He felt how, with the coolness of a general, she was measuring the distances, their chances. He saw the tightening of her lips and that she had measured rightly.

"If it's us they're mad with, it will be a close finish," she said, with a low laugh.

He scarcely heard her. He was watching the men and women who overtook them and ran past. Their faces were unknown to him. They looked back at him---with the wild-eyed curiosity of animals. As yet it was only curiosity. They were as ignorant as himself as to the passion which had broken through the crust of restraint and now raged in a mad whirlpool between the temple and the river. But the infection of frenzy was upon them. They muttered as they ran past--broken sentences in a dialect which he could not understand. They were pilgrims from distant provinces. He knew that they were in the majority and that he could have no hold over them. They would sweep the rest with them--even his own people.

The sprawling mass of life which had hugged the bank of the river turned and rolled back. In an instant, it had blocked the narrow passage on which he had based his hope of escape. He could see the golden effigy swaying madly above the crowd like a bright, sinister barque on a black, raging sea, now flung back, now forward, but still drawing steadily nearer. Through the wild uproar of voices the dull thud of a drum persisted. It was as though in that frenzied movement there was a purpose--a blind, demented will to an end.

He stopped short.

"We can't go on--it's too late--we must make a dash back and try for the bridge----"

"It is too late," she answered simply.

He saw then what she had seen. They were cut off. From left and right, the streams of hurrying men and women converged upon them, sweeping them forward as an Atlantic roller tosses driftwood on its crest. For an instant they were separated. He fought his way savagely back to her side, and caught her to him with the roughness of panic.

She looked up at him, smiling tranquilly, inscrutably. "Afraid, Tristram?"

"Yes--horribly--hideously--if I had lost you----"

"You didn't. I'm not afraid."

"I can't forgive myself----"

"Why should you? I am very happy."

"We must keep together. Give me your hand."

She gave it him. He remembered how it had lain in his once before, how the splendid vitality and strength of it had thrilled him. It thrilled him now, it burnt like fire through his nerves. They stood facing each other, holding their ground, swept into a moment's oblivion of all else but themselves. There was exultation in that grave, brief contemplation. The panic had died out of the man's eyes. He no longer pitied her or feared for her. He felt the joy of their new, fierce comradeship.

"If it were only myself--I could be glad----"

"Be glad!" she cried back. "Isn't it worth it?"

A wave of frantic humanity forced them forward. They held together. He heard her laugh--the eager, triumphant laugh of men in the glory of battle. "No one can separate us now!" she said.

"No one!" he answered gladly.

He knew it was true. Nothing, so it seemed to him, could break the steel link of their hands. But he had grown calmer. He had got to save her. The instinct which damns the weak acceptance of annihilation burnt up clearly in him. He gave ground to the force behind him, keeping his feet with the utmost exertion of his strength, striving to force a passage towards the village. It was a vain effort. Faces were turned to him. He read their expression. The mere curiosity had become distrust--a furtive antagonism as yet unarmed with purpose. A fakir, wild-eyed, bespattered with filth, his emaciated arms flung up in imprecation, leered up at him.

"Kill! Kill! Kill!"

It was no more than a whisper. But it passed from lip to lip. They were pushed on, the circle about them tightening in a strangling noose. For all her courage, he knew that the woman beside him was weakening. He heard her voice, strained and breathless.

"Don't let me go under--don't let me go under----"