Part 28 (1/2)

But India was teaching him otherwise.

In the hills back of Poona he had met a murderer. That cat-scream at the last chilled him to the very centre of things. Cheetahs were malignant; no two ways about that. Skag hadn't failed. He never was better. There was no fear nor any lack of concentration in his work upon the cheetah beast. Any tiger he knew would have answered to his cool force, but the cheetah didn't.

It was the same with the big snake in the gra.s.s jungle. Skag had met fear there--something of monstrous proportion, more powerful than will, harder to deal with by a wide margin than any plain adjustment to death. It stayed with him. It was more formidable than pain. He had talked with Cadman about a peculiar inadequacy he felt in dealing with the snake--as if his force did not penetrate. Cadman knew too much to hoot at Skag's dilemma. The more a man knows, the more he can believe.

”It would be easier with a cobra than a constrictor,” Cadman had said.

”You'd have to strike just the right key, son. This is what I mean: The wireless instruments of the Swastika Line answer to one pitch; the s.h.i.+ps of the Blue Toll to another. . . . But I've seen things done--yes, I've seen things done in this man's India. . . . I saw a man from one of the little brotherhoods of the Vindhas breathe a nest of cobras into repose; also I have seen other brothers pa.s.s through places where the deadly little karait is supposed to watch and wait and turn red-eyed.”

The more Skag listened and learned and watched in India, the more he realised that if he knew all there was to know about the different orders of holy men, all the rest of knowledge would be included, even the lore of the jungle animals. He had come into his own considerable awe through what he had seen in the forest with the priests of Hanuman, but things-to-learn stretched away and away before him like range upon range of High Himalaya.

Malcolm M'Cord was the best rifle-shot in India. The natives called him Hand-of-a-G.o.d. As usual they meant a lot more than a mere decoration. M'Cord was one of the big master mechanics--especially serving Indian Government in engine building--a Scot nearing fifty now.

For many years he had answered the cries of the natives for help against the destroyers of human life. Sometimes it was a mugger, sometimes a cobra, a cheetah, often a man-eating tiger that terrorised the countryside. There are many sizeable Indian villages where there is not a single rifle or short piece in the place; repeated instances where one pampered beast has taken his tolls of cattle and children of men, for several years.

The natives are slow to take life of any creature. They are suspicious toward anyone who does it thoughtlessly, or for pastime; but the Hindu also believes that one is within the equity of preservation in doing away with those ravagers that learn to hunt men.

In the early days M'Cord began to take the famous shoot trophies. Time came when this sort of thing was no longer a gamesome event, but a foregone conclusion. His rifle work was a revelation of genius--like the work of a prodigious young pianist or billiardist in the midst of mere natural excellence.

He had wearied of the game-bag end of shooting, even before his prowess in the tournaments became a bore. . . . So there was only the big philanthropy left. The silent steady Scot gave himself more and more to this work for the hunted villagers as the years went on. It sufficed. Many a man has stopped riding or walking for mere exercise, but joyously, and with much profit, taken it up again as a means to get somewhere.

It was Carlin who helped Skag to a deep understanding of her old friend, the Scot, and the famous bungalow in which he lived.

”It is 'papered' and carpeted and curtained with the skins of animals, but you would have to know what the taking of those skins has meant to the natives and how different it is from the usual hunter-man's house.

The M'Cord bungalow is a book of man-eater tales--with leather leaves.”

Carlin, who had been one of M'Cord's favourites since she was a child, saw the man with the magic of the native standpoint upon him. . . .

With all its richness there was nothing of the effect of the taxidermist's shop about the place. Altogether the finest private set of gun-racks Skag had looked upon was in the dim front hall. Bhanah and Nels had a comfortable lodge to themselves, and there was a tiny summerhouse at the far end of the lawn that had been an ideal of Carlin's when she was small. The playhouse had but one door, which was turned modestly away from the great Highway. It was vined and partly sequestered in garden growths, its threshold to the west. The Scottish bachelor had turned this little house over to the child Carlin years ago, as eagerly as his entire establishment now. Yet the woman was no less partial to the playhouse than the child had been.

. . . They hardly saw the Scot. In fact it was only a moment in the station oval. Skag looked into a grey eye that seemed so steady as to have a life all its own and apart, in the midst of a weathered countenance both kindly and grim. . . . There was a tiny locked room on the south side of the bungalow, vividly sunlit--a room which in itself formed a cabinet for mounted cobras--eight or ten specimens with marvellous bodies and patchy-looking heads. . . . The place was heavily glazed, but not with windows that opened. Skag caught the hint before Carlin spoke--that the display might have a queer attraction for cobras that had not suffered the art of the taxidermist.

Skag turned to the girl as they stood together at the low heavy door, leading into the library. Something in her face held him utterly--something of wisdom, something of dread--if one could, imagine a fear founded on knowledge. . . . A brilliant mid-afternoon. Bhanah and Nels had gone to the stockades. Since the chase and rescue of Carlin, Nels and the young elephant Gunpat Rao were becoming friends--peculiar dignities and untellable reservations between them--but undoubtedly friends.

There was a kind of stillness in the place and hour, as they stood together, that made it seem they had never been alone before. Deep awe had come to Skag. As he looked now upon her beauty and health and courage, with eyes that saw another loveliness weaving all wonders together--he knew a kind of bewildered revolt that life was actually bounded by a mere few years; that it could be subject to change and chance. Thus he learned what has come to many a man in the first hours after bringing his great comrade home--that there must be some inner fold of romance to make straight the insistent torture at the thought of illness and accident and death itself--something somehow to enable a man to transcend all three-score and ten affairs and know that birth and death are mere hurdles for the runners of real romance.

. . . The sunlight brought out faint but marvellous gleamings from the serpents. It was as if every scale had been a jewel. . . . Skag looked closer. It wasn't bad mounting. It was really marvellous mounting. His eye ran from one to another. Every cobra's head had been shattered by a bullet. The broken tissues had been gathered together, pieced and sewn--the art of the workman not covering the dramatic effect entirely, yet smoothing the excess of the horror away.

”. . . I've heard of cobras always, yet I never tire and never seem any nearer them,” Carlin was saying. ”I remember the word _cobra_ when I heard it the first time--almost the first memory. It never becomes familiar. They are mysterious. One can never tell the why or when about _them_. One never gets beyond the fascination. The more you know the more you prepare for them in India. It's like this--any other room would have windows that open. . . . Cobras have much fidelity.

We think of them as reptiles; and yet they are life-and-death-mates, like the best of tiger pairs. One who kills a cobra must kill two or look out--”

Carlin had strange lore about mated pairs; about moths and birds and other creatures (as well as men-things) finding each other and living and working together; about a tiger that had mourned for many seasons alone, after some sportsman had killed his female; about another rollicking young tiger pair that leaped an eight foot wall into a native yard in early evening, made their kill together of a plump young cow, and pa.s.sed it up and over the wall between them.

”The cubs were hungry,” Carlin had said.

Still they did not leave the door-way of the cobra room. Skag saw that something more was coming. Once more he was drawn to the mystery of the holy men by her tale:

”. . . I was a little girl. It was here in Hurda. . . . I had strayed away into the open jungle, not toward our monkey glen, but farther south where the trees were scarce. . . . Of course I shouldn't have been alone--”

Skag was staring straight at one of the cobras. Carlin turned and placed her hand upon his sleeve. She knew that he was fighting that old dread that had come upon him on the day of the elephant pursuit--a dread well enough founded, grounded upon many tragedies--of the pitfalls and menaces and miasmas of old Mother India; the infinite variety, craft, swiftness and violence of her deaths. (White hands were certainly clinging to Skag.) One's vast careless att.i.tudes to life are fearfully complicated when life means two and not the self alone.

”This isn't a horrible story--” she said.