“from happiness is born sorrow; out of joy and sorrow doth fear arise.”
And now within the eyes of the rickshaw-man had already appeared
sorrow, and fear, and malice. He had grown daft from running, had more
than once, with sad weariness, turned around toward his tormentor; he
breathed heavily, putting behind him with his long legs the broad,
well-laid road of the Place. At the setting of the sun this Place is
vast, empty and melancholy. Having done with business, the Englishmen
stroll here before dinner, are driven in costly horse equipages, or
drive their wives, mistresses, and children; play tennis and football;
and admire the ocean and the magnificent beauty of the tropical
sunset,--a sunset not like that of their own land. The rickshaw-man ran
on, looking wildly upon these sinewy, red-haired men in short white
trunks and gay sweaters, who careered over the Place of their own free
will, racing after one another with all their might, jumping up after
the soaring balls and kicking them resoundingly with the rough tips
of their heavy shoes. The sun was sinking; the sky above the setting
sun was growing green; a light, downy cloud, that had been lurking in
the skyey depths, became entirely roseate.... “Carlton Hotel!” in a
lifeless voice said the Englishman, who had all the time been sadly
and drowsily gazing toward the west, upon the ocean, upon its softly
murmurous surge, scattering into heliotrope foam upon the bowlders on
shore.... The rickshaw-man, as he ran, would bare his teeth; by now
he wanted to gnaw this man who had driven him so hard,--but it was
impossible not to run: the Englishman, without changing the expression
of his drowsily sad face, more and more often prodded the rickshaw-man
with the tip of his cane. And besides, the rickshaw’s beatific
exaltation had already passed into something else,--into a tense
submissiveness, into a coma of ceaseless running. All the hotels in the
Fort were filled up, and the Englishman lived in a common one beyond
Slave Island,--and now the rickshaw-man once more ran past the banyan
tree, under which he had sat down this very morning in his greed of
earning money from these merciless and enigmatic white men, in his
obstinate hope of happiness. Once more the familiar gardens, one after
another; the stone enclosures; the Dutch-tile roofs of bungalows,--low,
squat, by comparison with the trees spreading over them.... Having run
into the yard of one such bungalow, the rickshaw-man rested for half an
hour near the terrace, while the Englishman was changing his clothes
for dinner. His heart was pounding like a poisoned man’s, his lips
had blanched, the features of his dark brown face had grown sharper,
his splendid eyes had grown still blacker and wider, the rag upon his
head had become so saturated that he snatched it off and flung it far
from him. The odour of his heated body had become unpleasant,--it was
now the odour of warm tea mixed with cocoanut oil, and some other,
spirituous, ingredient, such as would be produced by taking and rubbing
a cluster of ants in one’s hands.
Meanwhile the sun had set. An elderly maiden was half-lying under
the awning of the terrace in a rocker, reading a prayer-book by the
remaining daylight. Having caught sight of her from the street, there
noiselessly entered the yard a mute Hindu of Madura,--a tall, dark old
man, as thin as a skeleton, with gray hair curling upon his chest and
abdomen, in a beggar’s turban, in a long apron of stuff that had at one
time been red and crossed with yellow stripes. Upon his arm the old man
carried a closed basket of palm-wattle. Walking up to the terrace, he
salaamed subserviently, putting his hand to his forehead, and sat down
upon the ground, lifting up the cover of the basket. Without looking at
him, the woman reclining in the rocker waved him away with her hand.
But he was already taking a bamboo flute out of his belt. And at this
point the rickshaw-man jumped to his feet, and in an inexplicable
fury yelled loudly at him. The old man, too, jumped up, slammed shut
the basket, and, turning about, ran toward the gates. But, for a long
while, the eyes of the rickshaw-man were round,--altogether as with
that fearful creature whom he pictured to himself,--slowly, like a
tightly wound cord, crawling out of the basket and hissingly puffing
out its throat, that glimmered with a blue sheen.
The darkness was falling rapidly,--it was already dark when the
Englishman, freshly laved, came out upon the terrace in his white
dinner jacket, and the rickshaw-man submissively darted toward the
shafts. The Englishman called out briskly the name of the place he was
to run to,--and who knows if his order found no eerie echo in the heart
of the rickshaw-man? It was already night, and an exceptionally hot
one,--as always before the oncoming of the rainy season; a night still
more fragrant than the day. Still denser had grown the warm and cloying
aroma of musk, blended with the odour of the warm earth, pinguid with
the humus of flowers. It was so dark in the gardens through which the
rickshaw-man was running that only by his heavy breathing and by the
scanty light of the little lantern upon the shaft, could one gather
that he was bearing down upon one. Then, beneath the black canopies
of the trees, came the faint glimmering of the rotting lagoon; and
next,--red lights lengthily reflected in it. The big two-storied house
in which the agent lived shone through and through in this tropical
blackness with the openings of its windows. It was dark in the
compound. A large number of rickshaw-men, their bodies blending into
the darkness and their loin cloths showing dimly white, had come into
this compound with those who had been invited. And the large balcony,
open toward the lagoon, was aglow with candles in glass chimneys,
clustered about with countless thrips; it was dazzling with the cover
of the long table, set with china, bottles, and pails of ice, and was
white with the dinner jackets of the people sitting at it, who ate,
drank, and without a moment’s silence, even though restrainedly, spoke
deep down in their throats, as bare-footed corpulent servants, that
looked like wet-nurses, waited upon them, their bare soles rustling.
And an enormous punkah of Chinese matting, attached by one edge to the
ceiling, swayed and swayed over their heads, brought into motion by
Malayans sitting behind a partition that did not reach to the ceiling,
and kept pouring a constant current of air upon the diners, upon their
cold and clammy foreheads. Rickshaw-man number seven dashed up to the
balcony. Those seated at the table greeted the newly arrived guest with
glad murmuring. The guest jumped out of the little carriage and ran up
into the balcony. As for the rickshaw-man, he started off at a gallop
to go round the house, in order to get again to the gates, into the
compound, to the other rickshaws. And, as he was turning the corner
of the house, he suddenly recoiled, as though he had been struck with
a stick: standing near an open and illuminated window on the second
story,--in a small Japanese kimona of red silk, in a triple necklace
of rubies, in broad bracelets of gold upon her round arms,--looking
upon him with round shining eyes was his bride: that very girl-woman
with whom he had agreed, already a half-year back, to exchange balls
of rice! She could not see him below, in the darkness. But he had
recognized her instantly,--and, having staggered back, stood stock
still on the spot.
He did not fall down, his heart did not burst asunder,--it was too
young and strong. Having stood for a minute or so, he sat down on the
ground, under an age-old fig-tree, whose entire top, like a tree of
paradise, burned and flickered with the dust of fiery-green sparks. For
a long time did he gaze upon the dark round little head, upon the red
silk that loosely embraced the little body, and upon the arms, raised
as she patted her hairdress, of her who stood framed in the window. He
squatted on his heels until she had turned about and had gone into the
recesses of the room. And when she had disappeared he instantly jumped
to his feet, caught the shafts that had been lying on the ground, and
flew like a bird through the yard and out of the gates; again did he
start running, on and on,--this time knowing unerringly whither he
was running, and wherefore, and now himself directing his suddenly
liberated will.
“Awake, awake!” clamoured within him the thousands of soundless voices
of his mournful ancestors, mouldered for hundreds of generations in
this paradisaical earth. “Shake off thee the seductions of Mara, the
dream of this brief life! Is sleep for thee,--thou who hast been
empoisoned with venom, pierced through with an arrow! An hundredfold
doth he suffer who hath that which is an hundredfold dear; all
sorrows, all complaints, come from love, from the attachments of the
heart,--therefore, slay thou them! Not for long shalt thou be in the
tranquillity of rest; anew and anew, in a thousand incarnations, shalt
thou be put forth by this thy land of Eden, the shelter of the first
men who had come to know desire. But still this brief rest shall come
to thee, thou that hast too early run forth upon the path of life,
passionately setting out after happiness, and that hast been wounded
by the sharpest of all arrows,--by the yearning for love and for new
inceptions in this ancient universe, where from time out of mind the
conqueror stands with a heavy sole upon the throat of the conquered!”
The lights of the open air stalls of Slave Island appeared under the
canopies of the trees whose tops were interlaced. The rickshaw-man
hungrily ate in one of these stalls a small bowl of rice over-spiced
with pepper, and then darted on. He knew where the old man from
Madura lived, who had an hour ago entered the yard of the hotel: he
dwelt with his nephew, at his large fruit store, in a low house with
wooden columns. The nephew, in a dirty European suit of duck, with an
enormous mane of black twining wool upon his head, was dragging in the
baskets of fruits into the interior of the store, his eyes puckering
from the smoke of a cigarette that had stuck to his lower lip. He
paid no attention to the insane appearance of the perspiring, heated
rickshaw-man. And the rickshaw-man silently hopped up under the shelter
of the awning, among the pillars, went to the left, and with his foot
pushed a small door behind which he hoped to find the old mute. In his
perspiring hand he was clutching a treasured gold-piece, which, while
he was still running, he had taken out of a leather pouch that hung at
his belt, beneath his apron. And the gold-piece speedily did its work.
When the rickshaw-man jumped out again, he bore a large cigar box,
tied with a cord. He had paid a great price for it, but then, it was
not empty: that which it contained was struggling, writhing, knocking
against the lid with its tensed coils, swishingly.
Why did he take the little carriage along with him? For take it along
he did,--and at an even, powerful pace flew for the shore of the ocean,
toward Gull Face Place. The place was empty; darkly did it extend into
the distance under the light of the stars. Beyond it were scattered
the small and infrequent lights of the Fort, and against the sky was
slowly turning the watch-tower of the lighthouse, with its reflectors,
throwing fumid stripes of white light in the direction of the roadstead
only. The rickshaw-man felt a faint cool breeze blowing from the ocean,
whose drowsy murmur was barely audible. Having reached at a run the
shore, the middle of the road, the rickshaw-man for the last time threw
down the slender shafts, into which at such an early age, but not for
long, life had harnessed him, and sat down,--this time not upon the
ground, but on a bench; sat down without fear, as though he were a
white resident.
In giving a whole pound to the Hindu, he had demanded the smallest
and the strongest, the most death-bearing one. And it was,--besides
having a faery beauty, being all in black rings, with green edgings,
with a dark blue rounded head, with an emerald stripe back of its head,
and with a funereal tail,--it was, despite its small size, unusually
powerful and malignant; but now, after it had been coiled up in a
smelly wooden box, it was especially so. It coiled convulsively, like
a steel spring; it writhed, rustled, and knocked against the lid of
the box. And he rapidly untied, unwound the cord.... However, who
knows just how he did it? Were his hands steady, or did they tremble?
Was he rapid, resolute, or no? And did he waver long after untying the
cord? Did he gaze for long at the murmurous dark ocean, upon the faint
starlight, upon the Southern Cross, the Crow, upon Canopus? Did he
bare his teeth in a canine snarl in the direction of the residential
quarter, in the direction of the rich hotel with its entrance shining
in the distance? Most probably, he had at once unhesitatingly opened
the box, and had laid his left hand firmly upon those springy coils,
icy as a dead body, that were writhing in the box; he was bitten right
in the palm.
And that bite is intolerably searing,--it is like the shock of
an electric current, and transpierces a man’s entire body with
untold pain, with such torture that after feeling it even monkeys
cry out piteously and burst into sobs,--childish, passionate,
despairingly-imploring. The rickshaw-man, most probably, did neither
cry out nor burst into sobs; full well did he know what he had set
out to do. But there is no doubt that, having felt this fiery shock,
he turned a pin-wheel on the bench, and that the box flew aside. And
then, instantly, a bottomless darkness spread out beneath him, and
all things darted off somewhere upward, obliquely: the ocean, and the
stars, and the lights of the hotel. The surging of the ocean went
to his head,--and ceased abruptly: a dead faint always occurs after
such a shock. But after such a faint a man always comes quickly to
himself,--seemingly only to be nauseated, until blood comes, and to be
again plunged into non-being. There are several of these death-swoons,
and each one of them, breaking a man, making him gasp, tears away human
life, in parts; thought, memory, vision, hearing, pain, grief, joy,
hatred,--and that ultimate, all-embracing thing which is called love,
the yearning to encompass within one’s heart all the universe, seen and
unseen, and to bestow it anew upon some other.
* * * * *
Some ten days later, on a dark, sultry dusk before a thunder-storm,
two pair of oarsmen were racing in a small boat through the harbour of
Colombo, toward a great Russian steamship that was about to sail for
Suez. The passenger whom rickshaw-man number seven had once carried was
half-reclining in the boat. The steamer was already booming with the
rattling of the rising anchor chain, when, getting near the enormous
iron wall of the ship’s side, he ran up the long trap-ladder to the
deck. The captain at first flatly refused to take him on board: the
steamer carried freight only, he declared; the agent had already gone
away,--the thing was impossible. “But I beg you,--very, very much!”
retorted the Englishman. The captain looked at him with wonder; he was
apparently strong, energetic, but there was the tint of an unwholesome
tan upon his face, while the eyes behind the glistening spectacles were
unmoving, seeming to see nothing, and perturbed. “Wait until the day
after to-morrow,” said the captain; “there will be a German mail-packet
then.” “Yes, but to spend two more nights at Colombo would be very
hard for me,” answered the Englishman. “This climate exhausts me,--my
nerves trouble me. Besides that, the German packet, as is always the
case, will be packed to overflowing, whereas I desire to be alone. I
am done up by these Ceylon nights, by insomnia, and by all that which
a nervous man experiences before thunder-storms at dusk. But just
glance at this darkness, at these clouds that have obscured the horizon
everywhere: the night will again be a horrible one, the rain season
has, properly speaking, already set in....” And, with a shrug of his
shoulders, upon reflection, the captain gave in. And a minute later the
Senegalese, thin as eels, were already dragging up the trap-ladder a
trunk covered with shining black leather, all gay with vari-coloured
labels and marked with red initials.
The surgeon’s vacant cabin, which was put at the disposal of the
Englishman, was very small and stuffy; but the Englishman found it
splendid. Having hurriedly disposed his things about it, he passed
through the dining cabin up to the deck. Everything was rapidly sinking
in the darkness. The ship had already weighed anchor and was heading
for the open sea. To the right, other ships, with lights on their
masts, seemed to be sailing toward them,--these were the lights of the
Fort. To the left, under the high taffrail, the shifting level expanse
of the dark water rushed toward the low shore, toward the mounds of
coal, and the dark density of the groves of slender trunked palms that
were beyond the coal mounds. The water still bounded the darkness
and the mournfulness of the clouds, and its shifting rapidity made
one’s head reel. Constantly veering, constantly increasing, a humid,
nauseatingly-fragrant wind was blowing from somewhere. The taciturn
clouds suddenly burst into such an abysmal pale-blue light, that, lit
up by it, in the very depth of the forest, the trunks of the palms and
bananas, and the Senegalese huts underneath them, flashed upon the
vision. The Englishman blinked in affright; he looked over his shoulder
upon the pallid jetty with the little red light at the end of it, by
now seemingly sailing upon his left; he looked at the leaden-hued ocean
in the distance, beyond the jetty,--and quickly started back for his
cabin.
The old steward, a man irritated with fatigue, needlessly suspicious
and observant, peeped in several times behind the curtain of the
Englishman’s cabin before dinner. The Englishman was sitting on a
folding canvas chair, holding a thick leather-bound note-book on his
knees. He was writing in it with a gold-tipped pen, and his expression,
whenever he raised his face, his spectacles flashing, was dull, and,
at the same time, wondering. Then, having put his pen away, he went
off into a brown study, as though he were listening to the surging
and swishing of the waves, ponderously rushing by on the other side
of the cabin wall. The steward passed by, swinging a clamorous little
bell. The Englishman got up and stripped himself naked. Having sponged
himself off with water and eau-de-cologne from head to foot, he shaved,
clipped evenly his short, bushy moustache, painstakingly smoothed down
with military brushes his straight black hair, parting it at a slant,
put on fresh linen and his dinner jacket, and went to dinner with his
habitual firm, soldierly bearing.
The ship’s personnel, who had long since been seated at table and
had been swearing at him for his lateness, met him with exaggerated
politeness, showing off before one another with their knowledge of
English. He responded with a restrained, but not a lesser, politeness,
and hastened to add that he liked the Russian cuisine very much,
that he had been in Russia, in Siberia.... That, in general, he had
travelled a great deal, and had always borne up splendidly on his
travels, which, however, could not be said of his last stay in India,
in Java and Ceylon; here his liver was affected, his nerves were
upset,--he had even come to eccentricities: such, for example, as that
which he had shown an hour ago when he had so suddenly appeared on
the steamer.... At coffee he regaled the ship’s men with cognac and
_liqueurs_; he fetched a box of thick Egyptian cigarettes and put it
on the table, open, for common use. The captain, a man still young,
with clever and steady eyes, who endeavoured to be a European in all
things, began a conversation about the colonial problems of Europe,
about the Japanese, about the future of the Far East. Listening
attentively, the Englishman objected or agreed. He spoke well, and
not at all with simplicity, but as though he were reading aloud from
a well-written article. And at times he would suddenly grow quiet,
still more attentively trying to catch the swish of the waves beyond
the open door. The thunderstorm had been left behind. Long since the
chain of Colombo’s lights, that for a long while had been playing
like diamonds, had sunk into black velvet. Now the steamer was in
infinite darkness, in the void of ocean and of night. The dining cabin
was situated on deck, under the captain’s bridge, and the darkness
was etched in an intense black within the open doors and windows: it
seemed to be standing and gazing in into the brightly lit dining room.
A humid breeze blew out of this darkness,--the humid, free breath of a
something free since the start of time,--and its freshness, reaching
those seated at table, made them feel the odour of the tobacco smoke,
of the hot coffee, and of the liqueurs. But at times the electric
light would suddenly fail,--the doors and the windows then became
gleaming pale blue quadrangles; the blue abyss of abysses, noiseless
and unutterably expansive, spread out around the steamer; the running
swell of the watery spaces gleamed; the horizons were flooded with a
blackness as of coal,--and thence, like the grievous murmur of the
Creator Himself, still plunged in primordial chaos, came to their ears
the roll of thunder,--muffled, sombre and triumphant, shaking all
things to their foundation. And at such times the Englishman seemed to
be frozen on the spot for a moment.
“This is really frightful!” said he in his lifeless but steady voice
after a flash especially blinding. And, getting up from his place, he
walked up to the door that gaped into the darkness. “Very frightful,”
said he, as though he were talking to himself. “And the most frightful
thing of all is that we do not think, do not feel, and cannot, have
forgotten how to feel the full frightfulness of this.”
“What, precisely?” asked the captain.
“Why, just this for example,” answered the Englishman, “that under
us and around us is that bottomless depth, that shifting trough of
the sea of which the Bible speaks with such awesomeness.... Oh,” said
he sternly, looking intently into the darkness, “both far and near,
everywhere, the furrows of foam flare up, flaming with green, and the
darkness surrounding this foam is lilac-black, the colour of a raven’s
wing.... Is it a very eerie thing to be a captain?” he asked gravely.
“Why no, not at all,” answered the captain with assumed nonchalance.
“It’s a tiresome business, and responsible, but, in reality not very
complicated.... It is all a matter of habit....”
“Better say,--of our callousness,” said the Englishman. “To be standing
there, up on your bridge, at whose sides these two great eyes,--the
green and the red,--look out, blurred, through their thick glass, and
to be sailing somewhere into the darkness of night and water, extending
for thousands of miles around,--it is madness! But, however, it is no
better,” he added, again glancing out of the door, “it is no better, on
the other hand, to be lying below in a cabin, beyond whose exceedingly
thin wall, near your very head, beats and rolls this bottomless
deep.... Yes, yes,--our reason is just as feeble as the reason of a
mole; or, rather, still more feeble, for in the case of a mole, of an
animal, of a savage, instinct, at least, has been preserved; whereas
with us, with Europeans, it has degenerated, is degenerating!”
“However, moles do not navigate over the entire terrestrial globe,”
answered the captain smiling. “Moles do not enjoy the benefits of
steam, of electricity, of wireless telegraphy. Do you wish to hear me
speak with Aden right now? And yet it is a ten days’ sail from here.”
“And that, too, is frightful,” said the Englishman, and cast a stern
glance through his spectacles at one of the engineers who had started
laughing. “Yes, that too is very frightful. For we, in reality, do not
fear anything. We do not fear even death properly: neither life, nor
sacred mysteries, nor the depths that surround us, nor death,--neither
our death nor that of others! I am a colonel of the British Army, a
participant of the Boer War; I, commanding cannons to be fired, used to
kill men in hundreds; and here I am, not only neither suffering nor
going out of my mind because I am a murderer, but never even thinking
of these hundreds.”
“What about the beasts, and the savages,--do they think of such
things?” asked the captain.
“The savages believe that things have to be so, whereas we don’t,” said
the Englishman, and became silent; he started pacing the dining room,
trying to step as firmly as he could in his dancing shoes.