Book: Son of Power

W >> Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost >> Son of Power




Skag entered again. His movements were deliberate, but not stealthy.
He spoke softly to the creature on the floor--his voice lower than the
usual pitch, yet sinking often deeper still. The words were mere
nothings, but they carried the man's purpose of kindness--carried it
steadily, tirelessly. The great beast tried to rise as he stepped
closer. Skag waited, still talking. He had uncorked the canteen and
held it forward--his idea being not only that she would smell the water
but become accustomed to the thing in his hand. Each time he pressed a
bit nearer she struggled to rise toward him--Skag standing just out of
reach, tirelessly working with his mind and voice. He keenly
registered her pain and helplessness in his own consciousness and was
unwilling to prolong it, yet at the same time he had a very clear
understanding of the patience required to bring help to her.

It was fully a quarter of an hour before he bent close, without
starting a convulsion of fear and revolt in the huge fevered body upon
the rocky floor. Skag poured a gurgle of water upon the swollen
tongue, watching the single baleful tortured eye that held his face.
The water was not wasted, though not drunk, for it washed away some of
the poison formed of the fever and the thirst. Skag poured again and
for a second the great holding eye was lost to him and the tongue moved.

Thus he worked, permitting her fear and rage to rouse no answer in kind
from himself; talking to her softly, luring her out of fury into the
enveloping madness of her own great need.

He waited a moment and her tongue stretched thickly to draw to itself
the water on the rock; then he turned toward the cubs. They scurried
back deeper into the cave. He poured a gill or two of water into a
hollow of the rock and returned to the mother. Presently as he
moistened her tongue again, one of the little ones crept forward and
began to lap the puddle on the rock.

Skag smiled in the gloom. The others were presently beside the baby
leader. A few moments later Skag interrupted his ministrations to the
mother to fill the hollow for the kittens again. All this with less
than three pints of water--the work of a full half hour as he found
when he emerged to Nels and the light.

"It's only a beginning, old man. We've got to get more water. It's
five hours' march back to the pool where we camped. I'm gambling that
we're a lot nearer than that to the Nerbudda."

Nels' jubilation was stayed by the unfolding of fresh plans that were
not slow to dawn upon his eager mind. They hastened along the river
bed, continuing in the direction they had come. Skag was in a queer
elation, dropping a sentence from time to time. Suddenly he halted.
It had occurred to him to recall something his mind had merely noted
during the work in the cave. There was fresh meat there. He had not
looked close, but at least two partly devoured carcasses had lain in
the shadows.

"They were mighty thirsty, Nels," he muttered. "The mother dying of
thirst, but the little ones were only sultry compared. Yes, they're
old enough to tear at fresh meat. They weren't so bad off and there
was plenty of meat there. Only thirsty," he added thoughtfully.

It was clear to his mind that the tigress had been helpless at least
three days, possibly four. She could not have brought the game. There
was one conclusive reason--that the meat was in an altogether too fresh
condition to have been brought by the mother before she gave up. Skag
walked rapidly. They did not reach the Nerbudda, but sighted a village
back Horn the river bed after nearly two hours' walk.

They refilled the canteens and procured two water skins besides; also a
broad deep gourd which Skag carried empty. The man's difficulty was to
escape without assistance. A white man in his position was not
supposed to carry goatskin water bags over his shoulders. The boys of
the village followed him after the elders had given up, and Skag halted
at last to explain that this was an affair that would interest them
very much--when a teller came back to tell the story; but that this was
the doing part of the story and must be carried to its conclusion alone.

A little later in the nullah bed he fastened the canteen and the gourd
to Nels' collar, but continued to pack the two skins himself--a rather
arduous journey in full Indian daylight with between forty and fifty
pounds of water on his shoulders. It was four in the afternoon when
they neared the mouth of the lair and Nels was drooping again.

"Buck up, old man!" Skag said. "I'll go in for a while with the
thirsty ones. Then we'll make a camp and have some supper together."

Skag heard the hiss again as he entered the darkness, and the kittens
were not so still as before. Only a trifle less leisurely he
approached the mother. He knew that any strength that had come would
only feed her hostility so far; that a man was not to win the
confidence of a great mammal thing like this in a day. His first
impulse was to silence the kittens with a gourd of water, but he could
not bear to make the mother wait.

She raised her head against him as before, but the smell of the water
caught and altered her fury more swiftly this time. Skag saw the glare
go out from the great eye as the tortured mouth was cooled; and now the
hope grew within him that the tigress might actually be saved. He
talked softly to her as he poured drop by drop upon her tongue from the
side--the little ones pressing closer and closer. Even in the
convulsive trembling that took her body from time to time there was an
inflowing rather than the ebb of strength.

Presently he left her long enough partly to fill the big gourd for the
babies. He had scarcely drawn back before the first was at the edge.
Lapping was not enough for this infant. He wanted to cover himself;
apparently to overturn the dish upon himself. The others helped to
balance the gourd for a moment or two, but the massed effort became too
furious and over it went among them. Skag laughed. Only a portion was
wasted, for the kittens followed the little streams on the rock,
tonguing them as they moved and filled. He tried them again, only
covering the bottom of the gourd, but it was as swiftly overturned.
Still the young had drunk enough presently and went to tearing at the
meat in the deeper shadows.

Skag went back to the mother, still using the canteen for her.
Alternately now he dropped the water upon the wound in her shoulder.
There were hours of work here to soften the fever crust and establish
drainage. Some time afterward this work was stopped abruptly by the
warning of Nels at the door. Skag stood his canteen against a rock and
hurried forth. Nels stood at the mouth of the lair, his head turned up
the river bed. His eyes did not alter from their look of fixity as the
man emerged. The shoulder nearest Skag merely twitched a trifle, the
left paw lifting to the toes. Skag followed the Dane's eyes.

The great male himself stood stock-still in the centre of the river
bed, the carcass of a lamb having dropped from his mouth. So strange,
so vast and still, the picture, that it seemed dreamlike; the great,
round, sunny eyes unwinking--serious rather than savage--a dark-banded
thing of gold in the ruddy gold of late afternoon.

Skag was silent, the magic of the moment flowing into him. Nels had
not moved. Skag had been forced to walk round him to find room to
stand. They faced the big Bengali together for an instant, the man's
hand dropping softly to the dog's shoulder.

"The king himself, son," Skag whispered raptly. "He's the loveliest
thing in stripes. We'll have to look out for this fellow, Nels.
There's no fear in him. We're on his premises and the missus is sick
and needs quiet. He's apt to charge, and I can see his point of view.
We'll back down, son, and not obstruct the gentleman's door."

They couldn't have been three seconds clambering down the rocks to the
nullah bed, yet the male tiger was twenty feet nearer when they looked
up. Moreover, he had brought the lamb with him, and this time he kept
it in his mouth as he watched.

"We mustn't let him see our dark side again, Nels," Skag muttered.
"See if we can't stare as straight as he does. God, what a picture!
Yet I'm rather glad he's got that lamb. He must have brought it far.
Carrying out her orders doubtless. Only a great male would do that.
Oh, it's not that he cares for the babies, Nels. It's to please her
that he does it! And she's down and done, but running the lair!"

So Skag talked, hardly knowing what he said, keeping in touch with Nels
with his hand and holding the eyes of the royal beast that seemed to be
made of patience and poise and gilded beauty. Skag didn't step back,
but presently to the side, away from the mouth of the lair. The
tiger's counter movement was not to lessen the distance between them
this time, but to drop to his haunches, still holding his game. He
rocked a little on his hind feet, that ominous undulation which
portends the charge. Not more than ten seconds passed and no outward
change was apparent, yet there was a relief of tension in Skag's voice.

"It's the little lamb that saved us that time, Nels. I think we've
passed it--passed the crisis, my boy. We'll just stand by now and
measure patience with him."

It was two minutes before Skag ventured a further movement to the
right. The tiger made absolutely no counter this time. Skag now spoke
to Nels:

"You're doing beautifully, son."

The dog had stood by like part of himself. The droop and the quiver
that he had known twice that day when the man disappeared into the lair
had given way in the real test to unbreakable nerve and defiant heart.
Yet it was less the courage than his absolute obedience that entered
the man with a charge of feeling that instant. A minute later Skag
took another ten steps to the right.

In the deeper shadows, less than an hour afterward, he struck a match
to the little supper fire a hundred yards up the slope from the mouth
of the lair. Skag then loosened his hunting belt, dropping the weight
from him to the blanket with a sigh of content. The hardware had
chafed him all day and had only been really forgotten in the stresses
of action.

"I didn't pack that gun for tiger," he said softly. "Why, I would as
soon have shot our good Arab, Kala Khan, or put a bullet between Nut
Kut's eyes, as to stop that big fellow bringing young mutton home--to
please her! Won't Carlin love to hear that! Oh, yes, it's been a day,
son, one more day! I've loved it minute by minute, and you've
been--well, I can't think in words, when it comes to that."

The big fellow drowsed in the firelight, his four paws stretched evenly
toward the man.

In the morning and afternoon of the next two days Skag brought water to
the tigress and bathed her shoulder long. On the third day he could
not be sure that the male had left the lair until late afternoon, and
when he finally ventured to the mouth and his eyes grew accustomed to
the darkness within he saw that the tigress was watching him from the
deeper shadows--not prone, but on three feet.

He filled the gourd and weighted it with stones; then backed out.

"We're starting for Hurda to-night, son," he said to Nels. "I've left
her a drink or two, and by the time she needs more, she'll be able to
get to the river herself."


Carlin must have caught the reality of that moment of crisis from
Skag's telling--the moment when the male tiger might have charged but
didn't, because she succeeded in making Malcolm M'Cord see it, too.

"And you say there was no sign from the tiger, but that Hantee Sahib
knew when the instant was past?" the famous marksman repeated curiously.

Carlin nodded.

"But how did he know?"

"Ask him," she said.

"Huh," he muttered. "I might as well enquire of the Dane beastie."




CHAPTER XVI

_Fever Birds_

Carlin had been listless for a day or two. This was several weeks
after her forty-two hours on Mitha Baba. They were still living in
Malcolm M'Cord's bungalow. Skag woke in the night, not with a dream,
but rather with a memory. He was broad awake and recalled an incident
that had entirely escaped his day-thoughts for a long time. It had to
do with that hard-testing period, just after his meeting with Carlin,
when he had journeyed to Poona to confer with the eldest brother,
Roderick Deal, and had been forced to wait more than a month. In that
interval he had learned about hyenas at first hand, through the plight
of Beatrice Hichens and the children; also his servant Bhanah had come
to him, and the Great Dane, Nels; still it had been a vague stretch of
days, in retrospect.

It was during the return-trip to Hurda that the thing happened which
held him now as he lay broad awake. Toward twilight, as the train
halted at one of the civil stations, a white-covered cot was lifted
aboard. There was a kind of silence about that station. The mountains
were near on the left hand which was to the West. The white glare of
Indian day had softened into delicate rose. A haze of orange and
bronze lay upon the lower slopes of the mountains, magically enriching
the greens; and the blue against which the mountains were contoured,
was pure and immense and still. It was difficult to remember the fret
and pain and discolouration of a world bathed in so vast a peace. . . .

At first he thought that the body on the cot was in its shroud. The
hush about it and from the mountains touched him with a feeling that he
had not quite known before, the depth of it having to do with Carlin.
Then he saw, back of the natives who had lifted the cot, yet not too
near, the figure of an Englishman of the Military--standing quietly by,
as if casually ordering a platoon of soldiers in the duty of loading
the train. Now Skag looked at the man's face. It had nothing to do
with the lax grace of the officer's figure. This was the face of a man
who could endure anything without a cry--a narrow face, tanned and a
bit hard possibly from years of self-repression--a silent man,
doubtless loved for the _feeling_ around him, rather than because of
what he was accustomed to say or do--a face stricken now to the verge
of chaos--unchanging anguish of fear and loneliness and sorrow
imprinted from within. A strange white glow, that had nothing to do
with the tan, shone forth from the skin--etheric disruption, subtler
than the breakdown of mere cells. This man would put a bullet in his
brain if pressed too far, but he would not cry out. Just now he was
close to his limit.

Skag knew something of what passed in the English officer's heart,
because he himself was learning what love means. Before his hour with
Carlin in the afterglow, on their way back from the monkey glen, he
would never have dreamed that there was such feeling in the world; in
fact, he would have been unable to read the vivid story of it in the
officer's face. . . . So much in a second or two.

The cot had been partly lifted into the coach. The face now was
uncovered--the white wasted face of a lovely woman, a woman still
living; an utterly delicate face, telling the story of one who had
never met a rough impact from the world. It was as if there had always
been a strong hand between her and the grit and the grind of
world-affairs--first her father's and then the lover's. In the great
silence, the eyelids opened. It seemed that night and chill had
suddenly come in. The lips moved. The most mournful and hopeless
voice spoke straight into Skag's eyes:

"Oh, won't you please stop those fever birds!"


Skag supposed it an isolated sentence of delirium. He didn't
understand. There was a drive of drama or tragedy back of it, but his
mind did not give him details. He did not see the English officer
again. He did not know if he entered the train. One thing Skag knew:
Deep under that narrow masculine face there was a capacity for feeling
that this officer's men never saw; that his closest associates never
saw. The American reverenced the secret. . . . Sometimes during the
hushes of the night, when the train stopped for a moment, Skag lying
awake, heard the voice of the woman. There was a feeling from it
utterly strange to him. It carried him out of himself, as if he shared
something of her delirium and something of the man's agony.

The next day was one of the hardest that Skag ever lived, for Carlin
was not at Hurda to meet him. She had gone with a strange elephant
into the country. That was the day of the chase on the great young
elephant Gunpat Rao, the day in which the story of the monster Kabuli
unfolded. The face of the man at the mountain station and the sentence
of the woman were completely erased from his surface consciousness, as
the memory of an illness.

That was months away, and life had been very full in between. . . .


Carlin said she was just tired, when he went to her room in the
morning. She looked at him long. It suddenly came to him vaguely,
that she wasn't thinking; rather that her eyes were merely turned to
his face. A queer breathlessness came to him a little later, as her
head rolled to one side--such a sinking of weakness in the movement.
It reminded him with a shock that she had never seemed quite tireless
since that long ride on Mitha Baba's neck. But never before had her
face turned away from him.

And now he saw a certain inimitable loveliness of her. There were no
words to describe the last--only that it was Spirit made of all the
dusks and all the white fires. There was something little about her
that called an undreamed-of tenderness; and something superb and
mysterious, so vast that he could be held in it like a toy in the hands.

Burning Indian day was walled and curtained and barred from the place
where she lay. White of the walls, white of her face, white of the
pallet--the rest a breathless, ungleaming shadow that held a heat not
from the sun, as it seemed, but from the centre of the earth.

. . . Skag was away in timelessness and an unfamiliar space. This
space was not fixed to one dimension, but moved back and forth. As
Bhanah came to him, he saw more than Bhanah animate upon the
features--like someone who had belonged always, whom he had known for
ages, whom Carlin had always known. So many things struck him
differently now; as if they belonged not just to this crisis, but to a
crisis of eons.

Yet externals in the main were so trifling. Carlin didn't eat; people
seemed to take that as significant. Malcolm M'Cord came. Margaret
Annesley came. Horace Dickson's father came. Skag went to the bazaars
and back again. He went to the monkey glen. It was all a blur. Once
he caught himself walking on the great Highway-of-all-India; and once
deep in the jungle. He passed the civil surgeon of Hurda on his own
verandah; and someone said that the old "family doctor" was to come
from Poona. . . . Now he was in Carlin's room and Carlin was looking
at him. He saw her face the moment he entered the room, and the fact
that he had come in from the fierce daylight into the shadows did, not
seem to blur his eyes, even for a second.

Her people in the room--Bhanah, the ayah, the civil surgeon, Ian Deal
and someone else--but the line from her eyes to Skag was not crossed.
The heart of the man leaped from what he saw--the transcendent
understanding which needed no words; the look of all looks that meant
_herself_--a little lingering smile on the lips, the endless lure of
her wise eyes.

But all that was whipped away as he came three steps nearer her couch.
The wonder of it was not taken, but the old pain returned; rather, the
pain had been there all the time, but he had forgotten for a space. He
saw the ashen and frail face again and the inexpressible weariness of
her eyes, too tired to tell of it, too tired to stay! Then the face of
the English officer appeared for his eyes--hovering back of the people,
in a background of mountains. . . .

Carlin seemed listening. What she heard came out of a grey intolerable
monotony; but still her eyes held his. They seemed concentrated upon
some weakness of his nature--some dementia that had been before her for
years, that had confronted her in every highway of life, frightened
away every opportunity and spoiled every day. Her hand lifted just
slightly, the palm turned toward him:

"Oh, won't you please stop those fever birds?"


. . . Then one day Skag, standing in the darkened library, heard
Margaret Annesley and one of her friends speaking together in the
verandah.

"But does she really hear anything?" the friend asked.

"Oh, yes; though you never hear them unless you are ill with the fever."

"How strange and terrible, and is it a particular fever?"

"Jungle fever, dear. It comes to us sometimes of itself, but more
often after a shock. . . . Carlin's night in the dark--"

Skag's arm lifted in a curve to cover his face as if from a blow. . . .
Yet Margaret Annesley was not quite right; for he had learned to hear
what Carlin heard:

From far away very faint, curiously thin tones came to him; always
repeating one word, with an upward inflection, like a question. Every
repetition sounded the fraction of a degree higher than the last, till
they were far above the compass of any human voice:

"Fee-vur? fee-vur? fee-vur? fee-vur? -- -- --" and on and on.

When it began, quite low, he heard infinite patience in it; gradually,
it grew full of fear; then it climbed into a veritable panic of terror.

When it stopped at last, on a long distracted "u-u-u-r-r-r-r?"--he
heard the male bird's answer, sounding nearer, in deep tones of utter
hopelessness, with a prolonged descending inflection:

"Bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r!"--the
Indian word for fever, repeated only three times. Then the female
began again; so, day and night--night and day.

After he had once heard it, he could always hear it. So he learned
that they never rest. Always, by listening, he could hear it at some
point of its maddening scale--its insane assurance of the hopelessness
of jungle fever.


Skag faced the ultimatum. This was different. It had nothing to do
with his world of animal dangers. This was a slow devouring which he
could not touch nor stay. _Carlin was melting before his eyes_. . . .
The brothers had come in, one by one, from over India. (Margaret
Annesley had attended to that.) Skag met them, moved quietly about,
yet could not remember their faces one from another. He answered when
spoken to, but retained no registration as to whom he had spoken, or
what had been said. Sometimes he was alone for a few moments with
Carlin; and when her eyes were open he was appalled by the growing
sense of distance in them. Then before she spoke, he would hear what
she heard:

"Bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r!"

There were queer rifts of light in his mind, instants when he realised
that all the hard moments of the past had prepared him for this. He
saw clearly that he could not have endured, even to the present hour,
without every experience life had shown him--especially without the
difficult ones. He lived again the great moments--all the Indian
afterglows that were identified with Carlin--perfect lessons of mercy
she had taught him, through the very yearning of his own heart in her
presence to be worthy of days with her. Never useless words from
Carlin, but always the vivid meaning. He had been slow at first to see
how much more magic were their days together, because she paid for them
with a night-and-day readiness to go forth to the call of service to
others.

Yet through all, he was utterly, changelessly desolate. Not only
bitterness, but an icy bitterness, was upon all meaning and movement of
life. It was almost like a conspiracy that no part in ministration was
demanded of him by those who were now in his house. The doctors talked
to Miss Annesley or to the servants; the brothers came and went with
their fear and fidelity--but spoke to Skag of other things than the
illness. Still, in his heart a concept slowly formed--that he had
something which Carlin needed now; that this something had to do,
though it was different, with the power he used to change animals. It
seemed absurd even to think of this--with all these wise ones around
him, not perceiving it. They formed a barrier of their thoughts which
kept him from expression. He stood apart for hours as the days passed,
thinking of his part; and yet the icy bitterness held him from action.

Sometimes his heart seemed dying; chill already upon it. Again he
seemed filled with a strange vitality, other than his own. This
phenomenon frightened him more than the first, so that he would hurry
to look at Carlin lest the strength had come from her. He tried to
_think_ the strength back to her; to think all his own besides; but
there was no drive to his mind-work because he did not have faith in
himself.

At length came the night when the fever birds ceased for Carlin. Out
of a great soft depth of tone which no one but Skag had heard before
(which he had thought no other would hear until there was a baby in her
arms), her words came with unforgettable intensity:

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