Part 7 (1/2)
Clad now in this added glory, the groom waited, like the tethered heifer, looking furtively at his circle of well-wishers. His little, shriveled mother came and squatted close behind him, toboggan-fas.h.i.+on, and flung a fold of her cloth over his back. Then she waved various things three times over his head: a stone grain-crusher, a bra.s.s bowl of water, and tossed rice and pellets of dough in the four directions. Red paint was put on her toes and feet and caste marks on her son.
Meanwhile the dancer had begun and his musicians were in full swing; but of these I shall speak later. The groom was backed into an elaborate head-dress, a high, open-work affair of long wired beads with dangling artificial flowers. First it was placed on the mother's head and then on the turban of the long-suffering young man. An outflaring of torches and a line of white-robed and turbaned coolies from the other end of the street of six houses roused the groom and his friends to new activity.
He climbed upon one of the men, straddling his neck, and what appeared to be a best man, or boy, mounted another human steed. They were then carried the few feet to the house of the bride, the s.h.i.+ny, black-rubber soles of the filched tennis shoes sticking absurdly out in front. A third man carried a bundle,--very small, to which no one seemed to attach much importance,--which was said to contain clothes for the bride.
After an undignified dismounting, the groom squatted by a new rice-and-maize square and removed his shoes and socks, to his own evident relief and Sam's renewed excitement. Then coppers pa.s.sed to the priest and many symbolic gifts were put in the groom's hands; some of these he ate, and others he laid in the square. Whenever money pa.s.sed, it was hidden under sweet-smelling frangipani blossoms, or temple-flowers, as they are called in India. The bride's mother came out and performed numerous rites to and around the groom; finally, a small person in white also achieved one or two unimportant things and disappeared.
While we waited for some culminating event, the groom stood up, skilfully lit a cigarette through the meshes of the dangling head-dress, and walked with his friends to the porch of the opposite house, where he squatted on the earthen floor in the semi-darkness. Then came Persad and announced, ”Marriage over; man wait until daylight, then carry off bride to honeymoon house”--the 'dobe hut plastered all over with the imprints of hundreds of white, outspread fingers and palms.
The marriage over! This was a shock. The critical moment had come and pa.s.sed, eluding us, and Budhany, the little bride, had appeared and vanished so hurriedly that we had not recognized her.
The dancer had throughout been the focus of interest for me. There was no perfunctory work or slurring over of the niceties of his part, and his sincerity and absorption inspired and stimulated his four a.s.sistants until they fairly lost themselves in _abandon_ to the rhythm and the chant. His name was Gokool and he had come up from one of the great coastal sugar plantations. Nowhere outside of India had I seen such conscientious devotion to the dancer's work.
Rammo the tent-boat captain played the cretinous violin; he it was who never tired of bringing us giant _buprestids_ and rails' eggs, and whose reward was to watch and listen to our typewriter machine through all the time that he dared prolong his visit to our laboratory. Dusrate played the tiny clinking cymbals; Mattora, he of the woman's voice, held the torch always close before the dancer's face; while the drummer--the most striking of them all--was a stranger, Omeer by name. Omeer, with the double-ended tom-tom in a neck-sling, followed Gokool about, his eyes never leaving the latter's face. Little by little he became wholly rapt, absorbed, and his face so expressive, so working with emotion, that I could watch nothing else.
Gokool was a real actor, a master of his art, with a voice deep, yet s.h.i.+fting easily to falsetto quavers, and with the controlled ability of emphasizing the slightest intonations and delicate semi-tones which made his singing full of emotional power. He got his little orchestra together, patting his palms in the _tempo_ he wished, then broke suddenly into the wailing, dynamic, abrupt phrases which I knew so well.
Had not my servants droned them over my camp-fires from Kashmir to Myitkyina, and itinerant ballad-singers chanted them from Ceylon to the Great Snows!
Gokool's dress was wide and his skirt flaring, so that, when he whirled, it stood straight out, and it was stiff with embroidery and scintillating with tinsel. From his sleek, black hair came perfume, that musky, exciting scent which alone would summon India to mind as with a rub of Aladdin's lamp. His anklets and bracelets clinked as he moved; and suddenly, and to our Western senses always unexpectedly, he would begin the swaying, reeling motion, almost that of a cobra in hood.
Then after several more phrases, chanted with all the fire and temperamental vigor which marks Hindu music, he would start the rigid little muscular steps which carried him over the ground with no apparent effort, though all the time he was wholly tense and working up into that ecstasy which would obsess him more and more. His songs were of love and riches and war, and all the things of life which can mean so little to these poor coolies.
Exhausted at last, he stopped; and I found that I too suddenly relaxed--that I had been sitting with every muscle tense in sympathy.
Gokool came and gave me a salaam, and as he turned away for a hand-hollowed puff of hemp I spoke a little word of thanks in his own tongue.
He looked back, not believing that he had heard aright. I repeated it and asked if he knew ”Dar-i-Parhadoor,” this being my phonetic spelling of a certain ballad of ancient India.
”Koom, sahib,” he said; and kneeling touched my foot with his head.
Then we talked as best we could, and I found he was from the Hills, and knew and adored the Parhadoor, and was even more homesick for the Great Snows than I. But once something had snapped in his head and he could not work in the sun, and could dance but rarely; so now he earned money for his daily rice only and could never return.
Then he gathered his musicians once more and sang part of the majestic Parhadoor, which is full of romance and royal wars, and has much to do with the wonders of the early Rajputs. And he sang more to me than to the groom, who neither looked nor listened, but kept busy with his clothes.
Out of all the pressing throng a little coolie boy came and squatted close, and his eyes grew large as he listened to the tale, and from time to time he smiled at me. He had once brought me a coral snake, but I could not call him by name. Now I knew him for the one unlike the rest,--worthy perhaps of a place in my memory roll of supercoolies,--who worked at weeding day after day, like the rest of the men, but who thought other thoughts than those of Mahabol and Guiadeen. I wished I had known of him sooner.
So Gokool sang to us two, the coolie boy and me, a song of ancient India, and danced it by moonlight here in this American jungle, and I dotted his dancing circle with pence, and a few bits, and even a s.h.i.+lling or two. And Gokool thanked me with dignity. And his face will long remain vivid, tense with feeling, forgetful of all but the loud-cadenced phrases, the quavering chant which broke in and out of falsetto so subtlely that no Western voice may imitate it. And I like to think that he enjoyed dancing for a sahib who loved Lucknow and the old ballads. And so we parted.
After I cached the vampire lantern behind its intrenched bulwark of books and magazines, I leaned far out of a window and thought over the night's happenings. It was long after midnight, and the steady throb of the tom-tom still kept rhythm with the beat of my temples, and I gave myself up to the lure of the hypnotic monotone.
One thought kept recurring--of the little girl far back in the dark depths of the wattled hut. She was so little, so childish, and her part that evening had been so slight and perfunctory, not as much as that of any of the other women and girls who had slovenly performed the half-understood rites. She had brought us milk regularly, and smiled when we wished salaam to her.
She knew less of India than I did. Guiana, this alien land, as humid and luxuriant as the Great Plains were dry and parched--this was her native country. And this evening was her supreme moment; yet her part in it had not seemed fair. She would have liked so much to have worn that pink dress which made her future husband a caricature; she would have adored to place the s.h.i.+ning, tinseled head-dress on her black hair--more with a child's delight than a woman's. And now she would live in a house of her own, and not a play-house, and obey this kind-faced young man--young, but not in comparison with her, whose father he could have been. And she would have anklets and bracelets and a gorgeous nose-b.u.t.ton if he could save enough s.h.i.+llings,--I almost said rupees,--and ultimately she would go and cut gra.s.s with the other women, and each day take her little baby astride her hip down to the water and wash it, as she, so very short a time ago, had been washed.
And so, close to the wonder windows, we had seen a marriage of strange peoples, who were yet of our own old Aryan stock; whose ceremonies were already ancient when the Christians first kept faith, now transported to a new land where life was infinitely easier for them than in their own overcrowded villages; immigrants to the tropical hinterland where they rubbed elbows with idle Africans and stolid Red Indians. And I was glad of all their strange symbolic doings, for these showed imagination and a love of the long past in time and the distant in s.p.a.ce.
I wished a good wish for Budhany, our little milkmaid, and forgot all in the sound, dreamless sleep which comes each night at Kalac.o.o.n.
VIII
THE CONVICT TRAIL
I am thinking of a very wonderful thing and words come laggardly. For it is a thing which more easily rests quietly in the deep pool of memory than stirred up and crystalized into words and phrases. It is of the making of a new trail, of the need and the planning and the achievement, of the immediate effects and the possible consequences. For the effects became manifest at once, myriad, unexpected, some sinister, others altogether thrilling and wholly delightful to the soul of a naturalist.
And now, many months after, they are still spreading, like a forest fire which has pa.s.sed beyond control. Only in this case the land was no worse and untold numbers of creatures were better off because of our new trail.