Against all fear; against the weight of what,
For lack of worse name, men miscall the Law;
Against the Tyranny of Creed; against the hot,
Foul Greed of Priest, and Superstition's Maw;
Against all man-made Shackles, and a man-made Hell--
Alone--At last--Unaided--
I REBEL!
No single, individual circumstance, but a chain of happenings in very
quick succession, brought about a climax, forcing the hand of Howrah
and his brother and for the moment drawing the McCleans, father and
daughter, into the toothed wheel of Indian action. As usual in India,
the usual brought about the unexpected, and the unexpected fitted
strangely into the complex, mysteriously worked-out whole.
Two days after Joanna left the mission house, through a hole made in the
thatch, the spirit of revolt took hold of Rosemary McClean again. The
stuffy, narrow quarters--the insolent, doubled, unexplained, but very
obvious, guard that lounged outside--the sense of rank injustice
and helplessness--the weird feeling of impending horror added onto
stale-grown ghastliness--youth, chafing at the lack of liberty--stirred
her to action.
Without a word to her father, who was writing reports that seemed
endless at the little desk by the shaded window, she left the
house--drew with a physical effort on all her reserve of strength and
health--faced the scorching afternoon wind, as though it were a foe that
could shrink away before her courage, and walked, since she had no pony
now, in any direction in which chance or her momentary whim might care
to lead her.
“I won't cry again--and I won't submit--and I'll see what happens!” she
told herself; and the four who followed her at a none-too-respectful
distance--two of the Maharajah's men in uniform and two shabby-looking
ruffians of Jaimihr's--grinned as they scented action. Like their
masters they bore no love for one another; they were there now, in fact,
as much to watch one another as the missionaries; they detected the
possibility of an excuse to be at one another's throats, and gloated
as they saw two messengers, one of either side, run off in a hurry to
inform the rival camps.
It was neither plan nor conscious selection that led Rosemary McClean
toward the far end of the maidan, where the sluggish, narrow, winding
Howrah River sucked slimily beside the burning ghats. When she realized
where her footsteps were leading her she would have turned in horror and
retreated, for even a legitimately roasting corpse that died before the
Hindoo priests had opportunity to introduce it to the flames is no sight
for eyes that are civilized.
But, when she turned her head, the sight of her hurrying escort
perspiring in her wake--(few natives like the heat and wind one whit
better than their conquerors)--filled her with an unexpected, probably
unjustifiable, determination not to let them see her flinch at any kind
of horror. That was the spirit of sahibdom that is not always quite
commendable; it is the spirit that takes Anglo-Saxon women to the
seething, stenching plains and holds them there high-chinned to stiffen
their men-folk by courageous example, but it leads, too, to things not
quite so womanly and good.
“I'll show them!” muttered Rosemary McClean, wiping the blown dust from
her eyes and facing the wind again that now began to carry with it the
unspread taint--the awful, sickening, soul-revolting smell inseparable
from Hindoo funeral rites. There were three pyres, low-smouldering,
close by the river-bank, and men stirred with long poles among the ashes
to make sure that the incineration started the evening before should be
complete; there was one pyre that looked as though it had been lit long
after dawn--another newly lit--and there were two pyres building.
It was those two new ones that held her attention, and finally
decided her to hold her course. She wanted to make sure. The smell of
burning--the unoutlined, only guessed-at ghastliness--would probably
have killed her courage yet, before she came close enough to really see;
but the suspicion of a greater horror drew her on, as snakes are said to
draw birds on, by merely being snakes, and with red-rimmed eyes smarting
from smoke as well as wind she pressed forward.
The ghats were deserted-looking, for the funeral rites of those who
burned were practically over until the time should come to scatter ashes
on the river-surface; only a few attendants hovered close to the fires
to prod them and occasionally throw on extra logs. Only round the
two new pyres not yet quite finished was anything approaching a crowd
assembled, and there a priest was officiously directing the laying of
the logs. It was the manner of their laying and the careful building
of a scaffold on each side of either pyre that held Rosemary
McClean's attention--called all the rebellious womanhood within her to
interfere--and drew her nearer.
Soon the priest noticed her--a cotton-skirted wraith amid the smoke--and
shouted to the guards behind; one of them answered, laughing coarsely,
and Rosemary understood enough of the dialect he used to grit her teeth
with shame and anger. The men left off building, and, directed by the
priest, came toward her in a ragged line to cut her off from closer
approach; she stood, then--examined the new pyres as carefully as she
could--walked to another vantage-point and viewed them sideways--then
turned her back.
“Oh, the brutes!” she ejaculated. There were tears in her voice, as well
as helpless anger. “There is not one devil, there are a million, and
they all live here!”
She looked back again once, trembling with an overmastering hate,
directed less at the priest who grinned back at her than at the
loathsome rite he represented. In two actual words, she cursed him.
It was the first time she had ever cursed anybody in her life, and the
wickedness of doing it swept over her as a relief. She revelled in it.
She was glad she had cursed him. Her little, light, graceful body that
had been quivering grew calm again, and she turned to hurry home with an
unexpected sense of having pulled some lever in the mechanism that would
bring about results. She neither knew nor cared what results, nor how
they were to happen; she felt that that curse of hers, her first, had
landed on the mark!
But she had come further than she thought. Distance, hot wind, and
emotion had exhausted her far more, too, than she had had time to
realize. Before a mile of the homeward journey had been accomplished,
she was forced against her stubborn Scots will to sit down on a big
stone by the roadside and rest, while the four that followed came up
close, grinning and passing remarks in anything but under-tones. If
the meaning of the words escaped her, their gestures left little to
be misunderstood. A crowd of stragglers drew together near the
four--laughed with them--took sides in the coarse-worded argument about
Jaimihr's known ambition--and shamed her into pressing on homeward.
But she was forced to rest again, and then again. Physical sickness
prevented her from obeying instinct, reason, will, that all three urged
her on. No false pride now told her to dare the insolence of the guards;
nothing appealed to her but the desire to hurry, hurry, hurry, and do
whatever should appear to need doing when she reached the mission house.
She had no plan in her head. She only knew that she had cursed a man,
and that the curse was potent. But her feet dragged, and her vitality
died down. It was sundown when she reached the mission house, and she
could hear the rising, falling, intermittent din of drums before she saw
her father in the doorway.
“Father!” She ran to him, and he caught her in his arms to save her from
falling headlong. “Father, there is going to be a suttee tonight! Hear
the drums, father! Hear the drums! It'll be tonight! That's to stop the
screams from being heard! Listen to them, father--two suttees, side
by side--I've seen the pyres and the scaffolds--do they jump into the
flames, father, from the scaffolds?--tell me! No-don't tell me--I won't
listen! Take me away from here--away--away--away--take me away, d'you
hear!”
He carried her inside, and laid her on the caned couch in the
living-room, looking like a great, big, helpless, gray-haired baby, as
any man is prone to do when he has hysteria to deal with in a woman whom
he loves.
“I cursed a man, father! I cursed a man! I did! I said 'Damn you!' I'm
glad!”
“Don't, little girl--don't! Lassie mine, don't! Never mind what you saw
or what you said--be calm now--there is something we must do; we must
act; I have determined we must act. We must act tonight. But we can't do
anything with you in this state.”
Slowly, gradually he calmed her--or probably she grew calm, in spite of
his attentions, for he was too upset himself to exercise much soothing
sway over anybody else. At last, though, she fell into a fitful sleep,
and he sat beside her, holding rigid the left hand that she clutched,
letting it stiffen and grow cold and numb for fear of waking her.
Outside a full moon rose majestically, pure and silvery as peace
herself, bathing the universe in blessings. And each month, when the
full moon rose above the carved dome of Siva's temple, there was a
ceremony gone through that commemorated cruelty, greed, poisoning,
throat-slitting, hate, and all the hell-invented infamy that suckles
always at the breast of stagnant treasure.
Since history has forgotten when, at each full moon, the priests of Siva
had gone with circumstantial ceremony to view the hoarded wealth tied up
by jealousy and guarded jealously in Howrah's palace. With them, as
the custom that was stronger than a thousand laws dictated, went the
Maharajah and his brother Jaimihr--joint owners with the priests.
There had not been one Maharajah, since the first of that long line, who
would not have given the lives of ten thousand men for leave to broach
that treasure; nor, since the first heir apparent shared the secret with
the priests and the holder of the throne, had there been one prince in
line-son-brother-cousin--who would not have drenched the throne with his
relation's blood with that same purpose.
Heir after heir could have agreed with Maharajah, but the priests had
stood between. That treasure was their fulcrum; the legacy, dictated by
a dead, misguided hand, intended as a war reserve to stay the throne of
Howrah in its need, and trebly locked to guard against profligacy, had
placed the priests of Siva in the position of dictators of Howrah's
destiny. A word from them, and a prince would slay his father--only
to discover that the promises of Siva's priests were something less to
build on than the hope of loot. There would be another heir apparent
to be let into the secret--another man to scheme and hunger for the
throne--another party to the bloody three-angled intrigue which kept the
Siva-servers fat and the princes lean.
Past masters of the art by which superstitious ignorance is swayed,
the priests could swing the allegiance of the mob whichever way they
chose--even the soldiers, loyal enough to their masters under ordinary
circumstances, would have rebelled at as much as a hint from holy Siva.
It was the priests who made it possible for Jaimihr to dare take
his part in the ceremony; without them he would not have entered his
brother's palace-yard unless five thousand men at least were there to
guard his back--but, if there was danger where the priests were, there
was safety too.
As the custom was, he rode to the temple of Siva first with a ten-man
guard; there, when the priests had finished droning age-old anthems to
the echoing roof, when his brother, the Maharajah, also with a ten-man
guard, had joined him, and the two had submitted to the sanctifying
rites prescribed, eleven priests would walk with them in solemn mummery
to the palace-entrance--censer-swinging, chanting, blasphemously acting
duty to their gods and state.
The moon--and that, too, was custom-rested with her lower rim one full
hand's breadth above the temple dome as viewed from the palace-gate,
when a gong clanged resonantly, died to silence, music of pipes and
cymbals broke on the evening quiet, and the strange procession started
from the temple door, the Maharajah leading.
Generally it passed uninterrupted over the intervening street to the
palace-entrance, between the ranks of a salaaming, silent crowd, and
disappeared from view. This time, though, for the first time in living
memory, and possibly for the first time in all history, the unforeseen,
amazing happened. The procession stopped. Moon-bathed, between the
carved posts of the palace-gate, two people blocked the way.
The music ceased. The sudden silence framed itself against the distant
thunder of a hundred drums. The crowd--all heads bowed, as decreed--drew
in its breath and held it. A sea of pugrees moved as brown eyes looked
up surreptitiously--stared--memorized--and then looked down again. There
was no precedent for this happening, and even the Maharajah and the
priests were at a momentary loss--stood waiting, staring--and said
nothing.
“Maharajah-sahib!--I must interrupt your ceremony. I must have word with
you at once!”
It was Duncan McClean, bareheaded, holding his daughter's hand. They
had no weapons; they were messengers of peace, protesting, or so they
looked. No longer timid, but resigned to what might happen--they held
each other's hands, and blocked the way of Siva's votaries--Siva's
tools--and Siva's ritual.
Jaimihr whispered to his brother--the first time he had dared one
word to him in person for years--the high priest of the temple pressed
forward angrily, saying nothing, but trying to combine rage and dignity
with an attempt to turn the incident to priestly advantage. Surely this
was a crisis out of which the priests must come triumphant; they held
all the cards--knew how and when rebellion was timed, and could compare,
as the principals themselves could not do, Howrah's strength with
Jaimihr's. And the priests had the crowd to back them--the ignorant,
superstitious crowd that can make or dethrone emperors.
But some strange freak of real dignity--curiosity perhaps, or possibly
occasion--spurred desire to act of his own initiative and keep the high
priest in his place--impelled the Maharajah in that minute. Men said
afterward that Jaimihr had whispered to him advice which he knew was
barbed because it was his brother whispering, and that he promptly did
the opposite; but, whatever the motive, he drew himself up in all his
jewelled splendor and demanded: “What do you people wish?”
The McCleans were given no time to reply. The priests did not see fit
to let the reins of this occasion slip; the word went out, panic-voiced,
that sacrilege to Siva was afoot.
“Slay them! Slay them!” yelled the crowd. “They violate the sacred
rites!”
There were no Mohammedans among that crowd to take delight in seeing
Hindoo priests discomfited and Hindoo ritual disturbed. There came no
counter-shout. The crowd did not, as so often happens, turn and rend
itself; and yet, though a surge from behind pressed forward, the men in
front pressed back.
“Slay them! Slay the sacrilegious foreigners!” The yell grew louder and
more widely voiced, but no man in the front ranks moved.
The Maharajah looked from the company of guards that lined the
palace-steps to the priests and his brother and the crowd--and then to
the McCleans again.
He remembered Alwa and his Rangars, thought of the messenger whom he had
sent, remembered that a regiment of lance-armed horsemen would be worth
a risk or two to win over to his side, and made decision.
“You are in danger,” he asserted, using a pronoun not intended to convey
politeness, but--Eastern of the East--counteracting that by courtesy of
manner. “Do you ask my aid?”
“Yes, among other things,” Duncan McClean answered him. “I wish also
to speak about a Rangar, who I know is held prisoner in a cage in the
Jaimihr-sahib's palace.”
“Speak of that later,” answered Howrah. “Guard!”
He made a sign. A spoken word might have told the priests too much, and
have set them busy fore-stalling him. The guards rushed down the
steps, seized both McCleans, and half-carried, half-hustled them up the
palace-steps, through the great carved doors, and presently returned
without them.
“They are my prisoners,” said the Maharajah, turning to the high priest.
“We will now proceed.”
The crowd was satisfied, at least for the time being. Well versed in the
kind of treatment meted out to prisoners, partly informed of what was
preparing for the British all through India, the crowd never doubted
for an instant but that grizzly vengeance awaited the Christians who
had dared to remonstrate against time-honored custom. It looked for the
moment as though the high priest's word had moved the Maharajah to
order the arrest, and the high priest realized it. By skilful play and
well-used dignity he might contrive to snatch all the credit yet. He
ordered; the pipes and cymbals started up again at once; and, one by
one--Maharajah, Jaimihr, high priest, then royal guard, Jaimihr's guard,
priest again--the procession wound ahead, jewelled and egretted, sabred
and spurred, priest-robed, representative of all the many cancers eating
at the heart of India.
Chanting, clanging, wailing minor dirges to the night, it circled all
the front projections of the palace, turned where a small door opened on
a courtyard at one side, entered, and disappeared.