THE PASSING OF THE MASTER-GIRL
And of the rest of the deeds of the Master-Girl, and of her extreme
wisdom, foresight and daring, what shall I say? Time would fail me to
tell of her dealings with the White Wolves and the Beaver Totem, the
Elks and the Red Clouds, and twenty tribes more; yea, and how she,
moved thereto by memories of early humiliations, crossed the ranges in
force and wiped out her old people the Little Moons; as to which grim
deed I desire to express no opinion. Human nature, even nowadays, is
queer, nor was it less queer in the Days of Ignorance. Let us admit
that a warfare begun in self-defence was carried on for conquest. Her
new weapon, her generalship carried all before her, and in her day
the Sun-and-Moon Totem waxed great, throve and multiplied, became a
dominant clan, pushing back the hunting and war parties of all other
names for a month's journey and more. Nor was it a brief episode, for
this woman, the Great Chieftainess, as men called her during her life,
and for long after, ruled her tribe for so many seasons that if a man
were asked to tell how long, that man must hold up his two full hands
six times, and yet show three fingers beyond ("three _whole men_ and
three _toes_" by Eskimo count). So many times did the black-cock go
a-lekking during the reign of the Master-Girl.
In her day every man of her tribe had not less than two wives. Yea,
even her husband; for being childless herself, she, loving her Pŭl-Yūn
with an exigeant and emulous love, was minded to see him with a larger
family of young braves and girls to his name than any other man of
the Totem, and to this end supplied him with wives whom she picked
and trained: conjugal arrangements distressing to us moderns, but
still existing among the Primitives of the Aurès Mountains in Southern
Algeria, and which in the case of Pŭl-Yūn and Dêh-Yān in no wise
lessened the reverence which the husband paid to the wife of his youth,
nor the more exacting and jealous love with which she returned his
affection.
Moreover, did she not arm and train an especial force of women
archers?--women who hunted by moonlight?--These, and the Good Wolves
of their training, were the camp-guard, both of the home stockade at
the quarries whither the tribe removed, and of the flying camps in
war-time. Sorely dreaded were they by the foemen of other Totems,
as well for their close and accurate shooting as for their midnight
raids, for the men of the Old Stone Are dreaded to go among dark woods
for good and sufficient reasons, and having this fear engrained in
their beings, had imagined and come to believe in a-many strange and
dismal Things which haunted the dark beside those upon which an axe
could bite, which beliefs are held, or at least acted upon, by not a
few of their descendants to this hour (albeit by daylight they will in
nowise allow that they feel any nervousness at all, nor will admit that
Anything whatsoever exists to warrant it).
This Amazon force was recruited from among the fleetest and hardiest of
the unmarried girls. Admission to its ranks was jealously restricted
and hedged about according to the manner of savages by secret and
severe initiatory ceremonies celebrated by virgin priestesses under the
light of the New Moon, in forest retreats, to which no man was ever
admitted.
And to this, Pŭl-Yūn, war-chief and arch-priest of the rival Sun-Disc
cult, was brought to consent, an admission of the moral ascendency of
the Master-Girl which will not be lost upon the discerning reader.
She would seem to have had a great time of it, but of her many
campaigns (as of those of Kai Khosroo and of Genghis Khan and other
conquerors whose exploits were too complete to be recorded) no faintest
hollow whisper has come down to us. The chronicles of the First
Woman-Chief (what a wealth of richly-embroidered incident is lost to
mankind!) were writ in that earliest cuneiform script, the arrow-head,
upon that most perishable of materials, the bodies of her foemen.
It may be surmised that the movements of the tribes whom her conquests
dispossessed may account for some of the otherwise inexplicable
migrations and settlements of peoples ignorant of the bow, the
Australian to wit, and the still lower Tasmanian.
Proudly she lived, ruling her household vigorously and strictly, nor
did her masterfulness decrease with advancing age.
* * * * *
And what of the end? what of the final scene which closes in and rounds
off the longest and most eventful of lives?
To them it came suddenly. Pŭl-Yūn, grey, hale, unbent, had grown
somewhat silent, husbanding breath and powers which he had private
reasons to suspect were failing, albeit no man of his body-guard had
yet seen his doubt reflected in the silent side-glancing face of a
fellow.
The summer heats were upon the land, a great drought, the tall
and stalwart elder had overtaxed himself in the noon-day sun at a
game-driving. When the evening meal was cooked, he did not eat. Dêh-Yān
urged uselessly. All that night he was restless, dreaming, speaking
in his sleep, but not of enemies, no, for this the keenly-solicitous
wife, holding her breath, listened in vain. To whom might she lay this
sickness?--a bewitching, obéah-work doubtless, but, for ten days' march
in any direction was there a man who dared think in his inmost heart
evil of the great chief? No, there was none in all that region that
peeped or moved the wing.
Who in her household then? She brooded, vainly pondering. All the
next day her man lay silent, refusing the various foods which she
prepared with her own hands. At sunset she summoned the clan; her
subject wives, their handmaidens, daughters and slaves sate around the
silent hut: beyond the royal enclosure in a wider ring squatted the
body-guard, his sons and grandsons, and the staunchest of the braves of
the tribe, grizzled ring-men upon whose scarred, brown chests shifted
and glittered the trophies of forty battles. They squatted mute, hand
over mouth, knowing well what was a-doing inside, jealous, remorseful,
anxious; someone should die for this!--yes, to the fire with her,
though she were the beauty of the tribe, or with him, if he were the
best archer of them all!
Dêh-Yān came forth and perambulated the concourse, a V-shaped sprig
of the witch-hazel in her hands; seven times she went through them
and about them, but the twig turned to none. Rhabdomancy had failed
her. Silently she had come, silently she went, still an-hungered for
vengeance, and still unsatisfied re-entered the dark hut.
"It is none of our people," she said, but there was no reply from the
sick man. Her breath came short, she approached, touched, felt him. He
was dead--dead of the broken heart which kills silently and swiftly
so many gallant savages when stricken with one of the mysterious
sicknesses for which they know no remedies and for which they cannot
account.
Going forth she dismissed the assembly, bade the women of the royal
household still their tongues and their children, and returning to the
dark wigwam squatted all night beside her dead, revolving many things.
Once her courage wavered and her faith in herself. "Husband! Chief! _Is
this my doing?_"
But, for the main of her vigil the heart within the woman was
insurgent. She had ruled too long without the physical or spiritual
touch of restraint to brook an injury even from Death himself. Too
proud to weep, and too self-contained to give vent to the passion of
pent wrath which burnt her bosom, she crouched dumb and suffering
whilst the constellations wheeled across the black vault overhead--her
whole nature yearning desperately for her lost mate.... _Give me back
my man!_
Just before the dawn-streak she must have slept, for a voice and a
presence were in the hut, her husband's; but not as she had hoped to
see and to hear him, with a clear doom-word as to whom she was to hold
to account for his death; no, nor as she had known him these many
years, a grey, massive familiar figure. He returned to her smiling and
bland, youthful, exquisitely beautiful and young, the happy bridegroom
of her youth, who had been the first to hail her as chieftainess of
the tribe. She exclaimed with rapture, spread her arms for him, and--he
was gone. She was alone with the corpse.... "_He needs me!_" she said.
"Wait for me, Pŭl-Yūn. I will not be long!"
In one moment her resolve was taken. All her life had been a series
of swiftly-taken intuitive decisions, this was the last. The drowsing
watchers without found her standing in the rift of the hanging skins
before the doorway. "Wood," was her word. "Bring wood--much wood, let
every man, woman and child bring a faggot, dry and fit. Your lord is
a-cold and I am minded to warm him."
There was something terrible in the calmness and intensity of her face,
although the words were wild enough, for, what shall a man need with a
stack of dry kindling at midsummer?
"This will surely be a very great and sore burning," muttered this one
and that as they went their ways to the forest. Hardly dared man or
woman look one upon another, so heavily lay upon all the dread of an
accusation of witchcraft, of having commerced with the Unseen Powers of
Darkness to the hurt of their chief.
This is the canker of savage life, the haunting, still-impending secret
terror that walketh in darkness, from which few uncivilised communities
are long free.
Of this the Sun-and-Moon-Men had known little or nothing for the space
of four generations. The dominant personality of the Master-Girl had
brooked no interference from self-chosen mystery-mongers; sixty years
of splendid health, unshaken by wound or accident, had afforded scant
openings for the medicine-man. As High-Priestess of the Moon-rite she
had been a law unto herself and to her people, nor had her unbroken
sequence of success in war provided occasions for witch-smellings
or human sacrifices. Yet, as in the southern Europe of our day the
habit of delation has survived the Inquisition, so among the people
of her tribe oral tradition of the dread ritual persisted, the rusted
and long-disused machinery for exorcism and inquest for necromancy
lay ready to hand, and might be put together and set a-working at any
juncture, should authority but crook its little finger in signal. Yes,
now was the time, and before night a score of their best warriors and
handsomest women might be expiating the crime of "overlooking" the
dying chief.
Deep-rooted indeed must be this antique belief, since it died out
in our England only within human memory (if it be truly dead) and
still survives in the Celtic Fringe. The sensitive, impressionable
poetical Welshman is a thousand years nearer to his past than his
fellow-subject of King Edward across Offa's Dyke. In broad daylight,
nay, by gas-and-candle-light, the man is as we, and in one or two of
the arts is more than we; he professes, and truly believes, some
evangelical creed, and glances askance at the superstitious mummeries
of the detested Establishment; but, let sickness, sorrow or misfortune
strike him, and, in the deep overhung country lanes, or by the hearth
whilst mountain winds rumble in the stone chimney, he begins to doubt.
The Old Faith, the doggerel charms, the scraps of nurse-lore, may there
not be something in them after all? He can whisper his misgivings to
his brother Celt in their native speech, it seems natural, possible,
probable, but, to a question put to him in the English he stiffens, or
more probably puts on that impenetrable air of simplicity which has
baffled the keenest seeker for folk-lore.
As for his cousin across St George's Channel, is it yet ten years since
a poor epileptic woman was held down and burned to death upon her
own hearthstone by her husband, family and neighbours with atrocious
circumstances, and according to some immemorial rite which might have
been lifted straight from Mashonaland or the days of the Cave Men?
Heavy of heart the wood-collectors departed upon their quests, heavy
of heart, but light of heel. Woe to the laggard who hung back, to the
woman whose bundle was small, or who seemed to fear, and to avoid
the eye of the great chieftainess. Before mid-day every faggot was
ready--where should the pile be built?--_where were the stakes?_
Dêh-Yān, hollow-eyed and of an ominous mien, paced the circle,
took note of the burdens, then, whilst all throats grew tight and
dry, and all breaths thickened, their ruler with regal wave of
arm bade bear the wood to the inner stockade and pile it round
the royal wigwam. There was a general movement to carry out her
orders, this was no time for questioning. Whilst this black mood
of their chieftainess held, and whilst her mate lay silent within
(sick?--possessed?--overlooked?--forespoken?--not _dead_, oh, surely
not dead!) at such a juncture, with the air thick with doubt and
suspicion, prompt, blind, implicit obedience was safest. What this last
order meant who could guess? Many were guessing. What might come next,
who dare surmise?--yet all were surmising.
Dêh-Yān had withdrawn within the wigwam: crouched there in the gloom
she heard the crackle and snap of piled brush. The small place was
dominated by the presence of mortality in dissolution. Her mind was
divided, half with her dead, half turned jealously towards the workers
without. She felt that they were listening--knew their minds and the
workings of them, knew that hopes of respite were dawning, glancings
forward, previsions of a possible sequel other than the one which
each feared. One event was coming home to them, the super-sensitive
faculties of the savage at full strain could get no tidings of the
chief who had withdrawn himself from his braves for two days. This
absence, this silence spoke but one word--Death!
Then, as she mused, something moved in the darkness behind her with
the quiet, unbreathing, soft sinuosity of a snake. Turning swiftly
she pounced and caught--a slim ankle! Her captive lay mute, panting
thickly, shuddering strongly. Dêh-Yān without speaking ran an open hand
over the features, followed out the limbs, and beside the relaxed hand
lay something which she had not handled for many a year, reminiscent of
her far-away youth, her own personal fire-sticks, long disused.
"This is little Fallow-Doe," she said softly and without anger, naming
her dead lord's favourite grand-daughter, "but, what does young
Fallow-Doe here? unbidden in the place of death?"
"O mother," whimpered the girl, "I knew--I could not help it--I
thought--yes, I have eyes too--thou art leaving us! Oh, do not forsake
thy children! What shall we do?--To whom shall we look? Yes, _He_
there is dead--we know; but, how we know not. All must die. Our times
come. Maybe his time came. I do not think that any of the tribe bore
a black heart towards him. But, O my mother, if it is Obi (and thou
knowest best), charge whom thou wilt. Charge _me_! I will die for him,
though my heart is as white as a full moon; but, oh, do not leave us!"
The mourning widow withheld her answer, and when the word came, it was
breathed softly and motherly. "Little girl, thy heart is white, I know
it; but no whiter than the hearts of the rest. Get thee gone now by the
way thou camest, and say nothing of thy coming hither until the third
day at evening."
The child slipped eel-like under the tent-skirts and into the
loosely-piled faggots. Dêh-Yān patted the space left vacant and smiled,
for the fire-sticks were gone too. She arose, gravely smiling, and took
from a skin wallet that hung high a pair of round stones, dense and
very heavy, and struck them softly one against the other, and lo! the
darkness was lightened with pale green sparks, for these were nodules
of pyrites, her latest discovery, and one which would die with her to
be rediscovered in later times. "You will not fail me, I think," she
murmured, and began to arrange the tinder, crooning the first notes of
her death-song to herself as she worked.
Wave after wave of memory flowed in upon her out of the long-forgotten
past, and with each some trait of her dead husband travelled towards
her, towered and subsided. Battle touches, his shield before her,
himself exposed, his shout of triumph rang in her ears as her shaft
went home. Or a hot, breath-catching moment in the life of a big-game
huntress, a lioness with ears laid to her skull, and with head, neck,
back and tail in one level tawny line, broke covert and made for her
snarling, and again it was Pŭl-Yūn who had stridden between her and
the wrinkled black lips. She saw him leap the fence of the enclosure
and throw himself in the path of the stampeding herd of buck, when the
leaders of the driven mob swerved in the very jaws of the _hopo_ and
were breaking back. What a man he had been! yes, they had lived, they
two!
And about the time that the heat of the day began to wane, the watching
tribe heard her voice raised in song within the royal wigwam, and
certain duller sounds as of soft stones pounded, and, whilst all
strained eye and ear, fearing the approach of the unknown with hearts
high in their throats, the afternoon sunshine was dimmed by a thin
smoke, and above the ridge of the wigwam, where the poles crossed,
the air grew glassy like troubled water. Then, whilst the dry sticks
crackled, and here and there a green one spat, the pale flame that
is invisible in the sunlight turned the wood grey and shrivelled the
skin hangings. The death-chant pealed intermittently from within,
interrupted by coughing, but ever resumed. Soon the whole pile was
alight, and on every side the crowd, though pressed upon from outside,
was driven back by the heat.
"And, oh, I _did_ steal these--And I _did_ pray her not to leave us!"
wept Fallow-Doe.
Strong shudders shook the throng of watchers. Wild men, whose
grandsires this woman (think--a woman!) had brought to heel, whose
fathers she had trained to the bow and schooled in her battle tactics,
wept, actually wept!
For the chieftainess whose death-song arose fitfully and faintly above
the roar of the flame, had been more than a great warrior; the dead
chief had been that, a giant in fight, terrible at the axe, with a
rush and a shout like the charge and the roar of a rutting stag. But,
she! how put it?--at once desperate and cautious, patient as a waiting
heron, sudden in attack as the same bird when its uncoiled neck drives
home the dagger-beak! Other leaders were pricked to hot decisions by
the approach of unsuspected peril, she, for so long their pride and
marvel, had planned her battle ere the tassels hung upon the hazel and
won it after the nuts were ripe--yea, and ever upon ground of her own
choice. Did the Lynxes pounce at dawn, or the Sitting Bulls await her
coming, 'twas all one, the event fell as she had foretold. (Wail, ye
women!) Other tribes swarmed disorderly to the onset and closed with
clamour and confusion; she had taught her braves the true method of
advancing silently and in line; she too, had drilled them (at what
pains and with what sternness!) to a battle formation already described
(subsequently re-invented by a later savage genius--Tchaka), compelling
her centre to mark time until her convergent horns had enveloped the
headlong foe and the killing began to a general shout of "_O Moon!_"
Each of her battles had been an antedated Cannæ. Tribe after tribe
(names now to the young draft), scornful of woman-led warriors, had
charged cheering into her traps and perished, for no quarter was given
in the Stone Age, nor had the Master-Girl a use for a living enemy.
(Groan, ye men, nor spare your tears for once, though the children and
women see that your cheeks are wet!)
The groaning of the braves deepened, the keening of the women grew
shrill, but from the core of the heat where the naked wigwam-poles,
stripped now of their gear, were blazing above the pyre like torches,
came never a sound.
All through that afternoon the tribe watched and waited. The sun sank
to her couch blood-red, and laying her broad face upon a hill-shoulder,
forbore, as minded to see the last of her priest. The fire was burning
itself out, but was still too hot to approach. A circular rampart of
glistering whiteness lay there with the air shuddering above it. Some
of the ash retained the shape of bavin and faggot, more was flaky and
formless as snow, but pulsing through it came rosy flushes from the
glowing heart within. But, ah, in the centre-space where the wigwam had
stood, the Great Father and the Great Mother of their people, they,
who but two days since had stood for Authority, Strength, Courage and
Wisdom, were now white calcined bones!
It was then that a wonder and a portent appeared, for the tribe raising
scorched faces from the dreary place of burning, beheld one half of the
sky steeped as it were with blood, and the Sun, their Goddess, wading
therein, whilst near to her, and within that ensanguined field stood
the first presence of the young Moon, a bow of palest green.
Then did the eldest son of the dead arise, and with solemnly-uplifted
hands salute the Twin Totems. "Ye are there," he cried. "We hail ye
both, Heavenly Watchers over your children!"
EPILOGUE
Darkness enwrapped him, comfortably soft, thick and warm. He neither
knew nor cared how long he had lain in it, nor if at any time he
had ever known other conditions. He was just a motionless atom, or
congeries of atoms, without ambitions, cares or resentments; yet
withal, a modicum of self-knowledge.
For instance, certain black marks outstanding from a dull luminosity
over against him connoted definite ideas of origin and locality.
IGHTHAM FISSURES, such were the marks, thick, heavy, distinct lettering
in brownish black, output of a small hand-press used for printing
museum labels. (Oh, it was all known to him, the oddness consisted in
his knowing so much and no more, nor feeling any especial curiosity for
information unexpressed by these symbols.)
Then, by gradual but sensible degrees, the intensity of the darkness
yielded; and, as layer after layer was lifted from him, or washed off,
he recognised himself more fully. He was a Calcareous Accretion--(more
black typing showed)--He was being treated with weak acid baths.
There were hopes entertained of the result. (He overheard Someone say
so.) He began to be interested in his own case; these accretions were
little granular nodules found among the old dead earth of the clefts
and fissures of the Ightham chalk; dead earth which had slipped down
these rifts in the dead-and-gone long-ago when they were natural
pitfalls in the surface of an Arctic tundra. In winter their dangers
would have been hidden by the sheet of drifted snow through which
an unwary reindeer calf had fallen to its doom. (He remembered that
reindeer calf, also the Arctic fox which was tempted down by the
meat; and the lemming which was chased down by the stoat, and how
neither fox, lemming nor stoat ever got out again). In summer insects
fell in, and his own case filled him with mild speculative hopes. The
acid was fining him down, his chalky envelopes were leaving him, coat
after coat. Oh, there was something inside--a something which was
probably interesting--possibly a New Fact! (Here anticipation awoke in
him.) Suppose, now, the chitinous core of him when washed clean and
dissolved out should be recognisably _Bombus hyperboreus_, the big
bumble-bee of the Arctic, the one so rare in collections, the insect
which seems almost immune to frost, and goes booming from one little
frozen flower-bell to another during the brief northern summer whilst
snowflakes eddy round it! Such a find would be valuable, and New!
Confirmatory as to climatic conditions, too.
"_M'yess!_" Someone was speaking above him, someone's finger pressed
his wrist; he distinguished the ticking of a watch. He opened his eyes.
"_W-What is all this?_" and behold that underbred, uninteresting young
doctor was looking down upon him with the subdued pride with which a
medical man regards a case which will do him credit. (He had put a
solid fortnight of holiday into it, for which, as he knew well, he
could not legally recover a sou).
The Professor--(he was now the Professor again, and all the black
marks, labels and Ightham-Fissure-Business were gone)--found himself
bursting with a huge, novel experience, which it behoved him to get
into writing if he died for it.
"P-pencil and paper--please."
* * * * *
And, eventually, he was allowed to have his way.
COLSTONS LIMITED, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH