Chapter VII: Introduction (5)

Orrington laughed contentedly. “No. That’s the missing conclusion, but I’m not sorry to have given him a show. Besides, what I did wasn’t such a noble sacrifice, after all. Having basked in your admiration for a moment, I can afford to tell you. I’m not an accomplished hypocrite, and I’d hate to begin at my age. Let me tell you what happened.”

I felt aggrieved. Had Orrington been working on our feelings for his private amusement merely? “You said there wasn’t any conclusion,” I growled.

“Don’t get huffy,” Orrington returned imperturbably. “The story hasn’t any ending, as I warned you. Only my part in it turned out rather amusingly. I hope I shouldn’t be fatuous ass enough to brag about the incident if there were anything in it that demanded bouquets. I suspect the bubble of noble actions often bursts just as mine did.”

“What do you mean?” asked Reynolds—reasonably enough, I thought.

“Only this,” Orrington went on. “It turned out that the people who had offered to let me do the articles were tremendously impressed by my turning them down. The letter I wrote them must have been a corker. Somehow or other they got the notion that I was a very busy man and a person of importance. They ought to have known better, of course, but they evidently adopted that silly idea. They talked about me to their friends and cracked me up as a coming man. The upshot of it was that I began to be tempted with most flattering offers of one sort and another—before long I had my choice of several things. My self-constituted backers were rather powerful in those days, so it was useful to be in their good books. I left my moribund magazine and got so prosperous that I began to grow fat at once. Serene obscurity has been my lot ever since; and I’ve never got rid of the fat.”

“That’s a happy ending,” I remarked lazily. “It’s very like a real conclusion. What more do you want?”

“Oh, for the sake of argument, I’d like to prove that I was right and that Reynolds’s theory is all wrong.”

“I’m exceedingly glad that it turned out so well for you,” said Reynolds unctuously. “Then the young man whom you assisted didn’t need to feel quite so much under obligation to you as we’ve been thinking?”

I was outraged. Reynolds was a great gun in literature, at least in the opinion of himself and a huge circle of readers. He was also a dozen years older than I. At the same time, I couldn’t allow him to disparage what Orrington had done, merely because Orrington made light of it.

“You will observe,” I said with some heat, “that the effect on Orrington was purely secondary and fortuitous. Orrington didn’t know he could possibly gain by it when he took the bread out of his own mouth to feed the young cur. I hope, for my part, that the fellow eventually starved to death or took to digging ditches.”

Reynolds sat up very straight. His black eyes snapped with anger. “He didn’t,” he burst out. “I happen to know him.”

“You know him!” I exclaimed, while Orrington goggled.

“Yes.” Reynolds had grown very red, but he looked defiant. “Since I’ve been attacked like this, I may as well tell you. Not that I think it’s anybody’s business but my own. Orrington didn’t suffer by what he did.”

“You don’t mean—” I began.

“I mean just what I say—no less and no more. I was the man in question, and I admit that I ought to have thanked Orrington for his kindness. I meant to, of course; but I set to work at once on those articles that have assumed such importance in our discussion, and I was very busy. I had to make them as good as I knew how. I assumed, naturally, that I had merely received a useful tip from a man who didn’t care for the job. I’ve always assumed that till this afternoon. I wanted the job badly, myself.”

“Oh, well!” Orrington put in soothingly. “It doesn’t matter, does it? I’ve explained that the incident really set me on my feet. You don’t owe me anything, Reynolds. If I’d been a complete pig and kept the chance for myself, I’d probably have been much worse off for it. You needed it much more than I did, evidently.”

To my surprise, Reynolds was not quieted by Orrington’s magnanimous speech. Instead, he jumped up in a passion and stood before us, clinching and unclinching his fists like a small boy before his first fight.

“That isn’t the point,” he said in a voice so loud that various groups of men scattered about the room looked toward us with amusement. “I admit that I was glad of the opportunity to do the articles, but I was by no means in such straits as you suppose. So much for the critical sense for which you have such a reputation!” He turned on Orrington with a sneer.

Orrington remained very calm. He seemed in no wise disturbed by the fury of Reynolds’s tirade, nor by his insufferable rudeness, but puffed at a cigarette two or three times before he replied. “It’s a poor thing, critical sense,” he murmured. “I’ve never been proud of what mine has done for me. But you must admit that I paid you a pretty compliment, Reynolds, in believing that your story was founded on real experience. I don’t see why you need mind my saying that it wasn’t much of a yarn. Nobody need be sensitive about something he did twenty years back.”

“I don’t care a hang what you thought about the story then, or what you think of it now,” Reynolds snapped. “You might, however, grant the existence of imagination. You needn’t attribute everything anybody writes to actual experience. I never went hungry.”

So that was where the shoe pinched! Reynolds insisted on being proud of his prosperity at all stages. I laughed. “You’ve missed something, then,” I put in. “The sensation, if not agreeable, is unique. Every man should feel it once, in a way. A couple of times I’ve run short of provisions, and I assure you the experience is like nothing else.”

“That’s different,” said Reynolds a little more quietly. “I’m not saying that I owe nothing to Orrington. I acknowledge that I do, and I admit that I ought to have acknowledged it twenty years ago. I was anxious at the time to get a start in the world of letters, and I was looking for an opening. Orrington’s suggestion gave me my first little opportunity; but it certainly didn’t save my life.”

“Then it was all imagination, after all,” Orrington said gently. “What a mistake I made!”

“Of course it was all imagined!” Reynolds protested, and he added naïvely: “I was living at home at the time, and I had a sufficient allowance from my father.”

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.”

I wanted her to protest, but she did not. She got up calmly and went with him out onto the rock spit. I was between them and the mainland. They could not go away by river. No harm would come to her, it seemed. “Some tribal custom to be attended to,” I thought. It is best not to be too curious about such matters up among the hills of Burma and Siam, ma’am. If you are, your wife suffers, not you.

For a long time I could hear them talking out there in the dark, with the river talking in between whiles. Once I heard a sound like a great sigh or sobbing moan. “The whirlpool at the river’s bed,” I thought, “taking in a great tree or raft.”

Soon after that the back mat of the house lifted, and I thought they had come in by that way. I sat, peering into the gloom inside, ready to greet them, when something crashed on to the back of my head and I forgot for a time.

I came back to memory in a daze and feeling much pain in my head. The brazier flared beside me. Bending over me was Pra Oom Bwaht, with a knife in his hand.

“Son of a pig!” he said.

“Where is Nagy N’Yang?” I asked.

He smiled at me—his cursed twisty smile.

“On the river’s brink she waits, bound to a great teak log lodged at the end of the spit,” he cried hoarsely. “When the flood comes to its full, she will float away—”

I spat full into his face. I thought it would make him slay me.

He wiped the spittle from his chops calmly. When an Oriental takes an insult calmly, beware! There is more to come.

“She was my wife,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Was or is, it makes no difference to me,” I stormed. “She is mine now.”

“She is Siva’s,” he jeered. “Think you that as she swirls down into the whirlpool at the river’s bend the great river python, mother of all the pythons, will not take her? Placed I the yellow scale of Nagy in her hand for naught?”

I shuddered. The legend of the great river python at Kalgai Gorge had been told to me oft. It slept in the great pool where the whirlpool formed in flood-time and only came out for prey when the depths were stirred by a monstrous flood such as this one, the natives said.

“Why did you tell me she was your sister?” I demanded.

“We made it up, she and I. She was wedded, as the priest told you, but to me. I was listening in the bamboos when you planned your trip here from Karen that night after the priest cursed you from the door of Siva’s temple. I heard him curse you and saw you turn down the path to our hut. If you had slain the python in the temple, without me helping, she would have been freed. We planned that you should make love, a little. Enough so you would kill the great snake and win her from it; I to come after and take her. But you won her whole heart, curse you—”

Up went his hand to slay. While he had raved and chattered at me, my head had been clearing. As he stiffened for the death stroke, I reached for the down-coming hand and caught his wrist—the wrist whose sinewy muscles were driving the knife home. I held his arm back. He clutched for my throat with his other hand. We strove, and I rolled him and came on top. Up I surged, dragging him with me. With one awful thrust I sent him crashing against the wall.

He had barely come to rest against the teak beams before his hand went up and I dodged—just as his knife whizzed past my ear. Plucking the great dagger of Ali Beg from my bosom, I cast it, in the manner of the Inner Mongolian Mohammedans. The great blade plunged forward. I had pinned him to the wall as a butterfly collector pins a specimen to a card in his collecting box.

I stepped forward to get my dagger. Pra Oom Bwaht, his throat full of blood, his heart seared with black hatred, glared at me.

“The Curse of Siva remain on you and yours....”

So he died.

Plucking my dagger from him, I kicked over the glowing brazier and raced for the rock spit’s end as he crashed down—mere battered clay.

As I came to it, the last of the rain for the night whipped my face, reviving me. The moon peeped forth. There was no teak log there!

Another rift in the clouds made plain my error. The flood was over all former flood-marks. The teak log, as the moon’s second peep showed, was on the point of rocks, but they were now in the stream, many paces from the present shore-line. The log, caught on the jagged stones, hung and swayed. It was just on the point of going out. I could see a dark mass, midway of the log. “It is Nagy N’Yang,” I thought. The hut was blazing now from the brazier’s scattered coals, giving me plenty of light.

I glanced about the rock spit. A few paces to the right something black showed in the gloom. I went to it quickly, hoping to find a boat. It was a great chest. Feeling for the key or handle, I clutched a catch. I turned it, threw up the lid, just as the moon came forth.

Out of the depths of the box reared a great python, hissing horribly. I recoiled in terror. The box, as I saw in the moon-glow, was the snake box of Karen temple, the one in which Nagy N’Yang’s serpent had been kept.

Pra Oom Bwaht had had it carried to Kalgai Gorge and also to our rock spit that night to suit some of his own black schemes of vengeance. His bearers had carried the box unwittingly. While I trembled, the great snake glided to the river’s brink and disappeared. I now had the big chest and thought to use it as a rough boat to rescue my love.

Then I turned to view the teak log again. I tugged at the chest. It was too heavy for me. Another fitful rift of moonlight came, and I saw the giant teak log sway. Without waiting for more ill fortune, I plunged into the river and swam through the swirling eddies for the log.

I just made it. But at the touch of my numbed finger on its root ends, it started. The mere touch was enough to set it adrift. I clutched, caught a root fiber, held, edged along the rootlet till I had a better hold, drew myself up on to the root end of the huge log—and then heard the sobbing moan of Kalgai whirlpool.

Already we were at the pool’s edge. The log began to whirl and sway. I made a prayer for my Laos girl, that she might be unconscious during the plunge below. If she were, she would live, as she would not be breathing. As for me, I felt I could hold my breath the two minutes necessary. I often had seen the logs go down the suck-hole and come up. The average time was two minutes for that. What happened to them under the pool I had no means of knowing. I hoped to be able to cling to the log. The girl was bound fast.... The log up-ended and went down!

We swirled through great depths, and often I felt us hit against rocks and other logs in the lower silences. At the pit’s bottom there seemed no sound, but on the way down and up there was a great roaring. It seemed that my lungs would burst. But I kept my breath, having, as you see, great lung space. We began to rise, and as I felt it, something slowed us down. I felt weak and was about to drop off when something bound me to the great log, pressing me tightly against the mass of roots. So we shot into the moonlight.

I was wrapped in the folds of the mighty python, who had thrown a coil about the tree-trunk in the lowest depths of the pool! That immense weight it was that had kept us from emerging sooner. We had come up below the maelstrom upon emerging.

My right arm was free. I reached my belt with it and found my dagger there. In the moonlight, over the coils of the monster, I could see the ivory-white face of my Laos girl as she lay out on the huge log like a crushed lily. I could not tell if she still lived or had died.

The motion of reaching for my dagger aroused the python. It thrust its head back toward my face, questing with its tongue, that queer organ with which it sees in the dark. I felt the darting, forked terror on my dripping features. The python threw back its coil a bit and thrust at my forehead with its wedge-shaped head, using the python’s death stroke. I had still sense enough to draw my head to one side, but not before the hornlike, rounded head-front had dazed me with a glancing blow on the brow, where the mark of Siva had been tattooed by Nagy N’Yang.

Again I saw the beast draw back its head for a surer stroke. As it struck, I held the dagger true in front of its oncoming head. The force of the blow, not my strength, caused the blade of the dagger to sink into the immense, hard, tense neck-muscles, through and through. The snake, furious with pain, stricken to death, in one awful convulsive struggle cast itself into the raging Salwin, taking the dagger of Ali Beg with it. Why it did not take me down in its coils, I know not....

Yes, I _am_ sweating now. I feel better. My head is clearer....

I wish Nagy N’Yang were here to lay her cool, ivory-white hand on my forehead where the python’s wedge-shaped head crashed against mine—on the black mark of Siva....

But my fever is breaking.

Yes, I feel easier, much easier....

Yes, that is all of my story....

What? Ali Beg found us together on a giant teak log at the river’s bend at Maung Haut, where he had stopped to trade? And, tightly clasped in Nagy’s hand was something strange? Show it me!

It is the belly scale of a great river python.

_Burn it! Hold the night taper flame to it! Ah, that ends the fat priest’s evil spell!_

Where is Ali Beg? Here! And Nagy? Here, too!!

Wheel our cots together, ma’am!

Only let me clasp her hand again. Thanks; _it is warm; she is alive_!

No; we won’t go up-country again. Why? Because when our first child comes, I want it born outside—out from under the shadow of the dread Curse of Siva!

THE FATHER’S HAND

_By_ G. HUMPHREY From _The Bookman_ _Copyright, 1918, by Dodd, Mead, and Company._ _Copyright, 1919, by George Humphrey._

The Dean and I were sitting after dinner discussing the shortage of students at Oxford since the war began.

“You have no idea,” he was saying, “how strange it is to lecture to a class of four or five when one has been accustomed to forty or fifty. This morning, for instance....”

“Well, Dean,” I put in, “after the war there will be no lectures on Latin poetry. The times are changing.”

The old man threw back his head, and his silvery beard waved in the candle-light.

“Listen,” he began, “you remember the passage where a father was trying to carve a picture of his son’s death?”

“_Bis patriae manus cecidere_,” I quoted. “Twice the hands of the father fell. Icarus, was it not, for whom his father had made wings, and who flew too near the sun and fell down to earth?”

He nodded. “_Bis patriae manus cecidere_—twice the father’s hands fell to his sides. In our village in the first few months of the war, there came an old man, a refugee from Alsace-Lorraine. By profession, he was a monument carver, and out of the exercise of his craft he had acquired a considerable familiarity with what one might call Phœnix-Latin, the kind that is only called into being when ‘Our Esteemed Fellow-Townsman’ dies. He had all the pedant’s love for the language. Often he would exchange tags with me when I met him in the street.

“‘_Quomodo es?_ How are you,’ he would laugh in the tiny general store, to the mystification of the little spectacled proprietress.

“‘_Bene, domine_,’ was my grave answer,—‘Very well, sir.’

“Soon he became very popular in the village, though he was regarded as something of a crank. It appeared that he was of the old days when Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the French. Of his private affairs we could learn nothing, except that he had married young and that his wife had died at the birth of a son. When he was questioned about his early life, he would affect not to understand—‘_Je ne comprend pas, m’sieu_’—this and a shrug of the shoulders was all that we could get out of him.

“Well, the old fellow prided himself on his excellent eyesight, and in the fairly frequent air raids, he refused to go into shelter, preferring instead to remain lying down on the hill outside the village, where he would watch the hostile aeroplane pursued by our guns until it became a speck in the distance toward London. Then he would trudge back again.

“‘The pigs are gone,’ he would reassure us in our cellars, shaking his fist at the sky. ‘Ah the _cochons_! _Sus Germanicus!_’ and we would crawl out again into God’s air, pleased to see him and knowing that there was no longer any danger even if the ‘all clear’ signal had not yet sounded. For he was always right. He knew from bitter experience.

“One day I saw him in conference with the little knot of sailors that presided over our anti-aircraft defences. He was pointing to the sky rather excitedly and telling them in his broken English something about aeroplanes and ‘it is necessaire that they pass so,’ at the same time indicating a track of sky.

“‘What is it?’ I asked the petty officer.

“‘He’s got an idea for bringing down the Germans,’ explained the man, twitching his thumb rather contemptuously toward my old friend. ‘He says they always pass over that point above the headland before they turn to London. I never noticed it myself, but there may be something in it. I’ll tell the captain.’

“‘_En hostes_,’ cried the old man in Latin to me, pointing to the place. ‘Behold the enemy. It is quite necessaire that he pass by here what you call the landmark, is it not? The German precision, _toujours_ the same.’

“I laughed and took him by the arm, down to the village, marvelling at the intense hatred with which he spat out the words. ‘The German pigs,’ he muttered as we went along. ‘They have my country.’

“Soon after there came another raid. We heard the gunfire, without paying much attention to it, so customary had it become. When the safety siren was heard, we all went back to our occupations as usual. I wondered why the old fellow had not appeared, and began to grow anxious, thinking he might have been killed. I was just setting out to look for him when I caught sight of him running toward me over a ploughed field, stopping every other moment to pick up his battered black hat, and looking, even at a quarter of a mile, as if he was full of news of some kind. When he came within a hundred yards or so, still running, he shouted something at me, raising his hands to the sky and then pointing to the earth.

“‘_Fuit Ilium_,’ I heard. ‘Troy is fallen. The German is destroyed. They have him shot, so,’ and he brought his arm from above his head to the ground in a magnificently dramatic sweep.

“‘What is it?’ I asked as I reached him.

“Perspiring and mopping his face with the tricolor handkerchief that some would-be wag had given him, he told his tale. The gunners had taken his advice, and fired at the spot he told them, and a German aeroplane had actually been brought down.

“That week the village was jubilant, and my old friend found himself suddenly a hero. The local papers brought out a long account of the affair, with a leader about the ‘victim of German autocracy, whom we are proud to shelter in our midst. With the courage that we know so well in our brave allies, he stayed out unprotected and discerned the weak spot in the foe’s armor. We are proud of our guest.’ It was, indeed, a proud time for our refugee.

“The naval authorities took over charge of the wrecked aeroplane, and the remains of the fallen aviator were gathered together to be buried the following week in the village cemetery. We were a simple, kind-hearted community, far away in the country, and many of the villagers had themselves sons fighting at the front. So we decided that the village should erect a simple tombstone over the fallen enemy—the resolution being made, I suspect, chiefly as the result of a sermon of the worthy pastor, who pointed out that the dead man was more sinned against than sinning, that he was the victim of the German system, and that we ought not to think bitterly of a fallen foe who died at what he conceived to be his duty.

“The next question was as to the inscription. The old Frenchman brought out a book, which he explained was the ‘_Vade mecum_ for cutters of tombs.’ From it he produced a marvellous quotation, which he said came from Seneca. He was listened to now with respect, but I could see that the idea was not popular. No one liked to oppose him, until I finally remarked that something simpler would perhaps be better, and suggested, ‘Here lies a fallen German,’ with the date. The old refugee was obviously very reluctant to give up his wonderful epitaph, but my reading was clearly the favorite, and it was adopted in the end. The obvious man to do the carving was the old stonecutter who had brought down the aeroplane. He was given the commission.

“The burial took place, and the village went back to its normal routine, the old man being supposed to be working on the inscription.

“It was about the time of the discussion of the epitaph that the relics from the recent raid were exposed for view in the little museum at the school. There was no address found on the body, and almost the only personal effect that had survived the terrible fall was a photograph of a woman, young and fair-haired, with the inscription, ‘Meine Mutter,’ which I translated to the admiring villagers as meaning, ‘My Mother.’ Nothing else. I went to tell the old Frenchman and ask him if he had seen the curiosities. I found him sitting in the garden of the cottage where he lived, in the little shed he called his workshop, where the tombstone had been brought. To my surprise, he was lying on the ground, and beside his open hand lay a chisel.

“‘What is it?’ I asked him.

“He started up when he saw me. ‘I was tired,’ he answered confusedly. ‘_Fatigatus opere_, weary with labor. _N’est-ce-pas?_’ and his poor old face relapsed into a sad attempt at a smile.

“‘But you have not begun to labor,’ I answered, trying to joke away an impending feeling of tragedy that I but dimly understood. ‘Why do you not do the work?’

“‘Ah, I cannot. My hands are old, and I can no more.’