By the hoof of the Wild Goat up-tossed
From the Cliff where She lay in the Sun,
Fell the Stone
To the Tarn where the daylight is lost;
So She fell from the light of the Sun,
And alone.
Now the fall was ordained from the first,
With the Goat and the Cliff and the Tarn,
But the Stone
Knows only Her life is accursed,
As She sinks in the depths of the Tarn,
And alone.
Oh, Thou who hast builded the world!
Oh, Thou who hast lighted the Sun!
Oh, Thou who hast darkened the Tarn!
Judge Thou
The sin of the Stone that was hurled
By the Goat from the light of the Sun,
As She sinks in the mire of the Tarn,
Even now--even now--even now!
--_From the Unpublished Papers of McIntosh Jellaluidin_.
"Say is it dawn, is it dusk in thy Bower, Thou whom I long for, who
longest for me? Oh, be it night--be it"--Here he fell over a little
camel-colt that was sleeping in the Serai where the horse-traders and the
best of the blackguards from Central Asia live; and, because he was very
drunk indeed and the night was dark, he could not rise again till I helped
him. That was the beginning of my acquaintance with McIntosh Jellaludin,
When a loafer, and drunk, sings "The Song of the Bower," he must be worth
cultivating. He got off the camel's back and said, rather thickly,
"I--I--I'm a bit screwed, but a dip in Loggerhead will put me right again;
and, I say, have you spoken to Symonds about the mare's knees?"
Now Loggerhead was six thousand weary miles away from us, close to
Mesopotamia, where you mustn't fish and poaching is impossible, and
Charley Symonds' stable a half mile farther across the paddocks. It was
strange to hear all the old names, on a May night, among the horses and
camels of the Sultan Caravanserai. Then the man seemed to remember himself
and sober down at the same time. We leaned against the camel and pointed
to a corner of the Serai where a lamp was burning.
"I live there," said he, "and I should be extremely obliged if you would
be good enough to help my mutinous feet thither; for I am more than
usually drunk--most--most phenomenally tight But not in respect to my
head. 'My brain cries out against'--how does it go? But my head rides on
the--rolls on the dunghill I should have said, and controls the qualm."
I helped him through the gangs of tethered horses and he collapsed on the
edge of the veranda in front of the line of native quarters.
"Thanks--a thousand thanks! O Moon and little, little Stars! To think that
a man should so shamelessly ... Infamous liquor too. Ovid in exile drank
no worse. Better. It was frozen. Alas! I had no ice. Good-night. I would
introduce you to my wife were I sober--or she civilized."
A native woman came out of the darkness of the room, and began calling the
man names; so I went away. He was the most interesting loafer that I had
had the pleasure of knowing for a long time; and later on, he became a
friend of mine. He was a tall, well-built, fair man, fearfully shaken with
drink, and he looked nearer fifty than the thirty-five which, he said, was
his real age. When a man begins to sink in India, and is not sent Home by
his friends as soon as may be, he falls very low from a respectable point
of view. By the time that he changes his creed, as did McIntosh, he is
past redemption.
In most big cities, natives will tell you of two or three _Sahibs_,
generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who live more
or less as such, But it is not often that you can get to know them. As
McIntosh himself used to say, "If I change my religion for my stomach's
sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to missionaries, nor am I anxious
for notoriety."
At the outset of acquaintance McIntosh warned me, "Remember this. I am not
an object for charity, I require neither your money, your food, nor your
cast-off raiment. I am that rare animal, a self-supporting drunkard. If
you choose, I will smoke with you, for the tobacco of the bazars does not,
I admit, suit my palate; and I will borrow any books which you may not
specially value. It is more than likely that I shall sell them for bottles
of excessively filthy country liquors, In return, you shall share such
hospitality as my house affords. Here is a charpoy on which two can sit,
and it is possible that there may, from time to time, be food in that
platter. Drink, unfortunately, you will find on the premises at any hour:
and thus I make you welcome to all my poor establishment."
I was admitted to the McIntosh household--I and my good tobacco. But
nothing else. Unluckily, one cannot visit a loafer in the Serai by day.
Friends buying horses would not understand it. Consequently, I was obliged
to see McIntosh after dark. He laughed at this, and said simply, "You are
perfectly right. When I enjoyed a position in society, rather higher than
yours, I should have done exactly the same thing. Good heavens! I was
once"--he spoke as though he had fallen from the Command of a
Regiment--"an Oxford Man!" This accounted for the reference to Charley
Symonds' stable.
"You," said McIntosh, slowly, "have not had that advantage; but, to
outward appearance, you do not seem possessed of a craving for strong
drinks. On the whole, I fancy that you are the luckier of the two. Yet I
am not certain. You are--forgive my saying so even while I am smoking your
excellent tobacco--painfully ignorant of many things."
We were sitting together on the edge of his bedstead, for he owned no
chairs, watching the horses being watered for the night, while the native
woman was preparing dinner. I did not like being patronized by a loafer,
but I was his guest for the time being, though he owned only one very torn
alpaca-coat and a pair of trousers made out of gunny-bags. He took the
pipe out of his mouth, and went on judicially, "All things considered, I
doubt whether you are the luckier. I do not refer to your extremely
limited classical attainments, or your excruciating quantities, but to
your gross ignorance of matters more immediately under your notice. That,
for instance," he pointed to a woman cleaning a samovar near the well in
the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the water out of the spout in
regular cadenced jerks.
"There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she was
doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what the Spanish
Monk meant when he said--
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Arian frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp--
and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes. However, Mrs.
McIntosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the fashion of the
people of the country--of whom, by the way, you know nothing."
The native woman dipped her hand in the dish with us. This was wrong. The
wife should always wait until the husband has eaten. McIntosh Jellaludin
apologized, saying--
"It is an English prejudice which I have not been able to overcome; and
she loves me. Why, I have never been able to understand. I foregathered
with her at Jullundur, three years ago, and she has remained with me ever
since. I believe her to be moral, and know her to be skilled in cookery."
He patted the woman's head as he spoke, and she cooed softly. She was not
pretty to look at.
McIntosh never told me what position he had held before his fall. He was,
when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was rather more of
the first than the second. He used to get drunk about once a week for two
days. On those occasions the native woman tended him while he raved in all
tongues except his own. One day, indeed, he began reciting _Atalanta in
Calydon_, and went through it to the end, beating time to the swing of the
verse with a bedstead-leg. But he did most of his ravings in Greek or
German. The man's mind was a perfect rag-bag of useless things. Once, when
he was beginning to get sober, he told me that I was the only rational
being in the Inferno into which he had descended--a Virgil in the Shades,
he said--and that, in return for my tobacco, he would, before he died,
give me the materials of a new Inferno that should make me greater than
Dante. Then he fell asleep on a horse-blanket and woke up quite calm.
"Man," said he, "when you have reached the uttermost depths of
degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to you of
no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the Gods; but I make no
doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in the garbage."
"You were abominably drunk if that's what you mean," I said,
"I _was_ drunk--filthily drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you
have no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-hatch
you have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how lightly I am
touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for I do not even feel
the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance! Believe
me my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the
lowest--always supposing each degree extreme."
He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and
continued--
"On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have killed,
I tell you that I cannot feel! I am as the Gods, knowing good and evil,
but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not?"
When a man has lost the warning of "next morning's head," he must be in a
bad state. I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his hair
over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the
insensibility good enough.
"For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it _is_ good and most
enviable. Think of my consolations!"
"Have you so many, then, McIntosh?"
"Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm which is essentially the weapon of a
cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and literary
knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking--which reminds me that
before my soul went to the Gods last night, I sold the Pickering Horace
you so kindly loaned me. Ditta Mull the clothesman has it. It fetched ten
annas, and may be redeemed for a rupee--but still infinitely superior to
yours. Secondly, the abiding affection of Mrs. McIntosh, best of wives.
Thirdly, a monument, more enduring than brass, which I have built up in
the seven years of my degradation."
He stopped here, and crawled across the room for a drink of water. He was
very shaky and sick.
He referred several times to his "treasure"--some great possession that he
owned--but I held this to be the raving of drink. He was as poor and as
proud as he could be. His manner was not pleasant, but he knew enough
about the natives, among whom seven years of his life had been spent, to
make his acquaintance worth having. He used actually to laugh at
Strickland as an ignorant man--"ignorant West and East"--he said. His
boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts,
which may or may not have been true--I did not know enough to check his
statements--and, secondly, that he "had his hand on the pulse of native
life"--which was a fact. As an Oxford Man, he struck me as a prig: he was
always throwing his education about. As a Mohammedan _faquir_--as McIntosh
Jellaludin--he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several
pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things worth
knowing; but he would never accept any gifts, not even when the cold
weather came, and gripped the poor thin chest under the poor thin
alpaca-coat. He grew very angry, and said that I had insulted him, and
that he was not going into hospital. He had lived like a beast and he
would die rationally, like a man.
As a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia; and on the night of his death
sent over a grubby note asking me to come and help him to die.
The native woman was weeping by the side of the bed. McIntosh, wrapped in
a cotton cloth, was too weak to resent a fur coat being thrown over him.
He was very active as far as his mind was concerned, and his eyes were
blazing. When he had abused the Doctor who came with me, so foully that
the indignant old fellow left, he cursed me for a few minutes and calmed
down.
Then he told his wife to fetch out "The Book" from a hole in the wall. She
brought out a big bundle, wrapped in the tail of a petticoat, of old
sheets of miscellaneous note-paper, all numbered and covered with fine
cramped writing. McIntosh ploughed his hand through the rubbish and
stirred it up lovingly.
"This," he said, "is my work--the Book of McIntosh Jellaludin, showing
what he saw and how he lived, and what befell him and others; being also
an account of the life and sins and death of Mother Maturin. What Mirza
Murad Ali Beg's book is to all other books on native life, will my work be
to Mirza Murad Ali Beg's!"
This, as will be conceded by any one who knows Mirza Murad Ali Beg's book,
was a sweeping statement. The papers did not look specially valuable; but
McIntosh handled them as if they were currency-notes. Then said he
slowly--
"In despite the many weaknesses of your education, you have been good to
me. I will speak of your tobacco when I reach the Gods. I owe you much
thanks for many kindnesses. But I abominate indebtedness. For this reason,
I bequeath to you now the monument more enduring than brass--my one
book--rude and imperfect in parts, but oh how rare in others! I wonder if
you will understand it. It is a gift more honorable than.... Bah! where is
my brain rambling to? You will mutilate it horribly. You will knock out
the gems you call Latin quotations, you Philistine, and you will butcher
the style to carve into your own jerky jargon; but you cannot destroy the
whole of it. I bequeath it to you. Ethel.... My brain again! ... Mrs.
McIntosh, bear witness that I give the _Sahib_ all these papers. They
would be of no use to you, Heart of my Heart; and I lay it upon you," he
turned to me here, "that you do not let my book die in its present form.
It is yours unconditionally--the story of McIntosh Jellaludin, which is
_not_ the story of McIntosh Jellaludin, but of a greater man than he, and
of a far greater woman. Listen now! I am neither mad nor drunk! That book
will make you famous."