_The Monkey Glen (Continued)_
In the lull Carlin appeared to have no thought of going back to Hurda.
The younger priest made her comfortable with dry leaves. Skag brought
a log for her to lean against. For the first time she appeared to
notice that he was not one of the priests of Hanuman. . . . She did
not speak. Dusk was falling. At intervals she would look into his
face. The priests brought fruit and chapattis. Delicate sounds of a
wide stillness began to steal through the shadows. Creatures of the
forest crept out from their lairs and called, one to another. Down
towards the river a tiger coughed; and there was a shiver along the
branches where the monkeys sat. The priests had merely glanced at each
other. Carlin had not seemed to hear.
Three torches were kept blazing through the night, and by their light
the girl gave medicine and nourishment to the wounded one from time to
time. She did not speak to Skag, who often sat before her for an
interval, but she would occasionally look into his face, her eyes
dwelling with a curious calm upon him.
In the morning the wounded one was conscious. That day the suffering
wore upon him, and they brought wet leaves as the sun rose higher and
kept them changed beneath him, for coolness. . . . The fever left him
after the heat of noon. Not until then, did Carlin look upon Skag and
speak at the same time.
"Have I seen you before? . . . Who are you?"
When Skag heard himself answer, he realised his voice had something in
it he had never known before.
. . . That afternoon Carlin went back to Hurda, but came again for an
hour late in the afternoon. The next morning early, she came once more
and Skag was there. That afternoon, the elder priest said:
"He will live."
"Yes," Carlin repeated softly.
"But you don't seem glad," Skag said.
She was looking back toward the city.
"I was wondering if I could make them see what it means to spend the
afternoon in the jungle with a rifle."
"Couldn't they understand that this work of yours has delivered your
cousin from death?"
"Oh, no, they would laugh at that. They would remind me that I have
always been strange. Even if my cousin lost his life, they would not
learn. The priests would be called fanatics and would be made to
suffer and all the monkey-peoples--"
Skag could see that.
"Why do you not leave them?"
"Oh, I do not hate my people. I have many brothers, real men; and then
you must know English Government does wonderful things."
They were starting back toward the city leaving the two priests. Most
strangely, as no one Skag had ever met, Carlin could see the native and
the English side of things. He felt that Cadman would say this of her,
too. He wanted sanction on such things, because he felt that already
his judgment was not cold--on matters that concerned her. Everything
about her was more than one expected. She seemed to have an open
consciousness, which saw two or all sides of a question before speech.
A great weakness had come upon Skag. It was in his limbs and in his
voice and in his mind. It had not been so when the priests were near,
nor when there was work to do. Now they were alone; the jungle was
vast with a new vastness. The girl was taller and more powerful--her
sayings veritable, equitable. There were golden flashes among the rich
shadows of her mind, like the cathedral dimness of the jungle on their
right hand as they walked, slanting shafts of sunlight raining through.
They walked slowly. Skag reflected that since his first sight of the
sambhur, he had watched and done nothing. All his life had been like
that. Yet this girl watched and worked, too. She loved the English
and the natives, too. She had skilled hands, a trained body, a
cultured mind--certainly a wonderful mind, as full of wonder as this
jungle, with a sacred river flowing through.
Moreover, she could ask questions like Cadman--the spirit of things.
He told her of his mother, of his running away from school when he
first saw the animals at Lincoln Park Zoo, how they enveloped him, so
that he thought nothing but of them, lived only for animals later as a
circus trainer, and had come to India to see the life of the wild
creatures outside of cages. . . . His tongue fumbled in the telling.
"But I do not see yet, why the priests of Hanuman let you go with
them--"
"Nor I," said Skag.
"But they know you are not an animal-killer--"
They walked rather slowly. . . . Night was upon them when they reached
the edge of the jungle and heard voices. The back of Skag's hand
nearest Carlin was swiftly touched and she whispered breathlessly:
"My people. They are coming for me--good-bye---"
The last few words had been just for him; the tone might have come up
from the centre of himself.
Skag was alone, but he did not hurry into the city. There was more in
the solitude than ever before, more mystery in the jungle, more in the
dusty scent of the open road. Greater than all, in spite of all
doubting and realisation of insignificance, there was unquestionably
more in himself.
Early the next morning, Skag was abroad in the city and saw the two
priests of Hanuman approach Ratna Ram. They raised their hands in
silent greeting as he came near and immediately arose and turned toward
Carlin's bungalow. Skag was glad to follow, when they signified he
might, for the thing at hand was his own deep concern. There was a
catch in his throat as Carlin appeared on the verandah. Her eyes met
Skag's before she spoke to the priests.
"Is he worse?"
The elder spoke for both, as is the custom:
"Peace be on thee, thou of gentle voice and skillful hands. We greet
thee in the name of Hanuman; and are come, to render up to thee the
forfeit life, even according to our covenant; for thou hast saved the
wounded king, and he will not die. Behold the cloth with the shape of
the foreigner's sign in it; this we held for a token that the
foreigner's life was ours: this we render now to thee. His life is
thine and not ours."
The old man laid the silk kerchief at Carlin's feet.
Skag had thought the danger over yesterday, but he saw that the young
Englishman's life held in ransom, had only just now been returned to
the girl. . . . That forenoon was the time to Skag of the great
tension. Carlin had stood for a moment longer than necessary on the
verandah, after the priests had turned away. It was as if she would
speak--but that might signify anything or nothing. It was just a point
that made the hours more breathless now, like the sentence of quick low
tones last night, when the voices of her people were heard at the edge
of the jungle. Were these everything or nothing--glamour or life-lock?
Often he remembered that her eyes had sought his to-day, even before
looking to the priests for news.
He stood at the edge of the jungle at high noon. The city was filmed
in heat. Faint sounds seemed to come out of the sky. Skag was
watching one certain road. The trance of stillness was not broken. He
turned back into the green shade. . . . He would not delay in Hurda.
He would not linger. His friend Cadman had been gone for some days.
Yet about going there was a new and intolerable pain.
Skag forced himself back from the clearing. He felt less than himself
with his eyes fixed upon that certain road; a man always does when he
wants something terribly. Still he did not enter the deep jungle. At
last he heard a step. He turned very slowly, not at all like a man to
whom the greatest thing of all has happened. . . . Carlin had come and
was saying:
". . . I heard voices in the house this morning when you came. Someone
was listening, so I could not speak. . . . Something keeps
growing--something about our work in the jungle. I want to go to the
monkey glen again--now."
It was like unimaginable riches. There were moments in which he had
counterpart thoughts for hers in his own mind; as if she spoke from
another lobe of his own brain. Her words expressed himself.
"I thought you would be here," she told him presently. "I wanted to
see you again."
She was flushed from crossing the broad area tranced in noon heat; and
now the green cool of the jungle was sweet to her, and they were close
together, but walking not so slowly as last night. . . . Loneliness
came to them when they reached the empty place where the wounded one
had lain in the shelter of the rock. They felt strangely excluded from
something that had belonged to them. All the wide branches above were
empty. Still that was only one breath of chill. Tides of life brimmed
high between them; they had vast mercies to spare for outer sorrows.
"He may not have done so well after being moved," she whispered.
Skag was thinking of the cough he had heard. The monkeys had
understood that. . . . Just now the younger of the two priests of
Hanuman appeared magically. There was quiet friendliness deep in his
calm, desireless eyes.
"All is well," he told them. "They have carried their king to a yet
more secret place, where we may not--"
He did not finish that sentence but added: "Only we who serve them may
go there. All is well. They would not have moved him, had they not
been sure that life was established in him."
The priest did not linger. Then Carlin wanted to know everything--how
India had called Skag at the very first. . . . Was it all jungle and
animal interest; or was he called a little to the holy men? Did he not
yearn to help in the great famine and fever districts; long to enter
the deep depravities of the lower cities with healing?
Skag had listened in a kind of passion. Wonderful unfoldment in regard
to these things had come to him from Cadman Sahib, but as Carlin
touched upon them, they loomed up in his mind like the slow approach to
cities from a desert. Carlin's eyes, turned often to his, were like
all the shadows of the jungle gathered to two points of essential dark,
and pinned by a star veiled in its own light.
"I thought it was only the wild animals that called to me, but now I
know better," he said. "And my friend Cadman, who has gone, opened so
much to me. He often spoke of the holy men, until one had to be
interested--"
Carlin halted and drew back looking at him with a kind of still
strength all her own.
"You do not know that the natives think _you_ are something of the
kind?"
"I--a holy man?"
"I heard them speak of you last night. You see they have heard of your
deliverance of the Grass Jungle people."
Skag was learning how wonderfully news travels in India.
"Of course, it was all easy to believe, after what I saw--"
"What did you see?" he asked.
"That the two priests of Hanuman permitted you to follow them here--"
Then Carlin verified what Cadman had said, that the priests make no
mistakes in these things. . . . Presently Skag was listening to
accounts of Carlin's life. He was insatiable to hear all. In some
moments of the telling, it was like a phantom part of himself that he
was questing for, through her words. Her story ran from the Vindhas to
the Western Ghat mountains, touching plain and height and shore (but
not yet High Himalaya), touching tree jungle, civil station, railway
station and cantonments; stories including a succession of marvellous
names of cities and men; intimations that many great servants of India
and England were of her name; that she had seven living brothers, all
older; all at work over India. Finally Skag heard that Carlin had
spent eight years in England studying medicine and surgery, and again
that the natives called her the _Gul Moti_, which means the Rose Pearl;
or _Hakima_, which means physician. But her own name was Carlin!
When they came back to the edge of the jungle again, it was the hour of
afterglow. Its colours entered into him and were always afterward
identified with her. Carlin left him, laughingly, abruptly; and Skag
was so full of the wonder of all the world, that he had not thought to
ask if he should ever see her again.
As night came on, Skag thought more and more of the parting; and that
there had been no words about Carlin's coming again. He felt himself
living breathlessly towards the thought of seeing her; and it was not
long before this fervour itself awoke within him a counter resistance.
Manifestly this pain and yearning and tension--was not the way to the
full secret. As carefully stated before, Skag approved emphatically of
the Now. The present moving point was the best he had at any given
time. He thought a man should forget himself in the Now--like the
animals.
Yet the hours tortured. That night had little sleep for him, and the
marvels of Carlin--face and voice, laugh, heart, hand--grew upon him
contrary to all precedent. This was a battle against all the wild
animals rolled into one; most terribly, a battle because there seemed
such a beauty about the yearning which the girl awoke in him.
He was abroad early next day. The thought had come, that she might
find him in the jungle at noon or soon afterward as yesterday. As the
dragging forenoon wore on, Skag was in tightening tension. He hated
himself for this, but the fact stubbornly remained that all he cared
for in the world was the meeting again. It seemed greater than
he--this agony of separation. It brought all fears and
self-diminishing. It told him that Carlin would run from him, if she
knew he wanted her presence so. He knew her kind of woman loves
self-conquest--the man who can powerfully wait and not be victimised by
his own emotions. . . .
So it was that Skag fled from himself, when there was still a half hour
before noon. He could not meet her, longing like this.
There was sweat on Skag's forehead as his limbs quickened away from the
place of meeting yesterday. The more he left it behind, the more sure
he became that Carlin would come. It seemed he was casting away the
one dear and holy thing he had ever known--yet it resolved to this:
that he dared not stand before her with his heart beating as if he had
run for miles and his chest suffocating with emotions--the very
features of his face uncertain, his voice unreliable. . . . If a man
entered the cage of a strange tiger, as little master of himself as
this--it would be taking his life in his own silly hands. Skag
couldn't get past this point, and he had a romantic adjustment in his
mind about Carlin and the tiger--one all his own.
Deeper and deeper into the jungle he went, along the little river, but
all paths appeared to lead him to the monkey glen; and there he sat
down at last and remembered all that Alec Binz had told him about
handling himself in relation to handling animals, and all that Cadman
Sahib had told him from the lips of wise men of India . . . but all
that Skag could find was pain--rising, thickening clouds of pain.
He kept seeing her continually as she entered the jungle (walking so
silently and swift, her face flushed from crossing the open space this
side of the city in the terrible heat of noon)--and then not finding
him there. Something about this hurt like degrading a sacred thing,
but he didn't mean to. He repeated that he didn't mean to hurt
her. . . . Then suddenly it occurred to him that it was all his own
thinking about her coming at noon. There had been no word about it.
She might not have thought of coming again. This was like a cold
breath through the jungle. It was as intolerable as the other thought
of her disappointment.
. . . There was an almost indistinguishable _slithering_ of soft pads
in the branches. Skag looked up suddenly and the air seemed jerked
with a concussion of his start. The monkeys were back. They had been
watching, the branches filling. When he looked up, the whole company
stirred nervously.
Skag laughed. It was good. There was but one formulated thought--that
Carlin would be glad to hear this; she would appreciate this. The
return of the monkeys had a deep significance to Skag, because he had
really first seen the wonder of Carlin just here--working over the
wounded one. The immediate tree-lanes were filled with watchers in
suffocating tension then. It was curiosity now--nothing covered, but
playful. Skag wished he could chant like the priests, for the
monkey-folk. He wished he had many baskets of chapattis to spread out
upon the grasses for them. . . . As he sat, face-lifted, he heard that
tiger-cough again.
The monkeys huddled a second--it was panic--then they melted from
sight. It was like the swift blowing away one by one, of the top
papers of a deep pile on a desk.
Skag was now essentially absorbed. It couldn't be a mistake. The
monkeys knew. He himself knew from days and nights with the big cats.
There was no cough just like that. It was in a different direction
from before, back toward the city this time, but as before, muffled and
close down to the riverbed. . . . Nothing of the cub left in that
cough; neither was there hurry or hunger or any particular rage or
fear. A big beast finishing a sleep, down in some sandy niche by the
river; a solitary beast full of years, a bit drowsy just this moment,
and in no particular hurry to take up the hunt. Such was the picture
that came to Skag with a keen kind of enjoyment. The thrill had lifted
his misery for a minute. This was something to cope with. It took
away the heart-breaking sense of inadequacy.
It wasn't the thrill of a hunt that animated Skag. The fact is, he
hadn't even a six-shooter along. This was the closeness of the real
thing again--the deep joy, perhaps, of testing outside of cages once
more, the power that had never failed. And just now along the river
and beyond the place where the cough came from--Carlin was coming!
The last of the monkeys had flicked away. Skag arose and held his hand
high, palm toward her. She beckoned, but still came forward. Skag
moved without haste, but rapidly. All the beauty and wonder of Carlin
was the same; it lived in his heart, integrate and unparalleled as
ever, but some power had come to him from the cough of the tiger.
Around all the fear, even for her life, was the one splendid
thing--that she had followed him into the monkey glen.
She was nearing the place where the cough had come from, yet Skag did
not run. A second time he held up his hand, palm outward, but she
still came forward laughing.
"You ran from me?"
"I did not think of you coming so far--to-day."
Skag had stepped between her and the river, turning her toward the
city, but Carlin drew back.
"I have come so far. I want to go to our--to the monkey glen!"
She was watching him strangely. Skag understood something that moment:
that he might know of Carlin's delight through her eyes, of all joy and
good that he might bring, but that he should never know from her eyes
if he brought hurt. Skag put this back into the deep place of his mind.
"All right. We'll go back," he said. "They were here--the whole
troupe. Just a minute ago, they swung away--"
He saw for an instant her wonderment that he had come alone. She would
have been very glad to see the monkey people again; she could not quite
see why she should have missed this; she did not understand his
words--that he had not expected her to follow into the glen.
She was sitting down on her own log, but he stood. Skag was driven to
speak. The need had now to do with one of his favourite words. It was
a matter of _equity_ that he speak. The words came in a slow ordered
tone:
"I was waiting for you there--back at the edge of the jungle--but it
came to me that I was not ready."
Carlin had been looking away into the three-lanes. Her eyes came up to
his.
"Not ready?" she said.
"All night I could only remember one thing--"
"What thing?"
"That you had not told me you would come again."
Carlin's shoulders lifted a little. She cleared her throat, saying:
"I thought of it."
"This morning the idea occurred that you might come to the jungle at
noon--like yesterday, but the hours wouldn't pass after that. I met
something different that would not be quiet--"
"Where?"
"I mean in myself."
Carlin's eyes widened a little, but she only said:
"Oh!"
"It would not rest. I could not wait in calm. I was afraid you
wouldn't come--yet I was afraid of your coming. My face worked of its
own accord, and my words would not say what I knew--"
"When was that?"
"It was worse when I reached the jungle a little before noon and began
to watch for you."
"And--you ran away?"
"I was not good to look upon."
"But you are not like that now--quite controlled--like blue ice--"
Skag turned his eyes slowly back the path by the river where the cough
had come from.
"I am better now," he said.
"I wonder if anyone ever thought of running away like that?"
"It is not a good feeling to be at the mercy of oneself," Skag said.
Carlin caught a quick breath. There was a steadiness in his eyes. It
was steadier than anything she knew. The light of it was so high and
keen that it seemed _still_.
"Nothing like this has happened before," he said quietly.
Carlin arose. Their eyes met level.
"Everything is changed," he went on. "It was like a grief that you
were not here--when the monkeys came in. . . . I'm not right. I did
not know before that a girl was part of me. It was all animals before.
I'm not ready--but I will be! You are good to listen, but really you
had to--"
Carlin let her lids fall a second.
"I mean I couldn't stop when it started."
There was silence before he finished: "I know everything better. I
know all the creatures better--all the cries they make. And yet I'm
less--I'm only half--"
It was then her hand came out to him.
"Does it mean anything to you?" he asked.
"Yes--"
"_Does it mean everything to you--too?_"
Her voice trailed. It was closer. It was everywhere. It was like a
voice coming up from his own heart:
"Yes, everything--especially because you could run away. . . . But
I--came!"
They were walking toward Hurda among the shadows, Skag closer to the
river. . . . The night was coming with a richness they had never
seen--tinted shadows of purple, orange and rose--almost a living gleam
to the colours; the evening air cool and sweet.
Carlin told him that her family must understand and be considered and
give approval. . . . There was an eldest brother in Poona who must be
seen. . . . All arrangements must be made with him. Skag said he
would go to Poona at once. . . .
They were lingering now at the edge of the jungle; its spices upon them
in the dry air.
". . . And I will wait here in Hurda," Carlin was saying. "You may be
gone many days. You may not find him at once, and you will have to
wait at Poona, but I shall know when you come. The train coming _up_
is before noon. Listen! You will not find me at the bungalow. No,
that would not be the way for us. . . . This will be perfect. I will
be waiting for you--our place--back in the monkey glen."
"It is the perfect thought, but you must not go back there alone," he
said. "I had not meant to tell you now, but it was that--made me
steady--a tiger back there. He gave me nerve for your coming--a good
turn it was, the most needful turn! . . . Yes, a tiger lying down on
the river margin, as we talked--do not go in deeper, when I am
away. . . . And on the day I come, meet _me here_ at the edge of the
jungle and we will go in there to our place--together."