Part 17 (2/2)

By this time all our party gathered round the colonel, who held the drawing. Narayan uttered an exclamation, and stood still, the very image of bewilderment past description.

”I know the place!” said he, at last. ”This is Dayri--Bol, the country house of the Takur-Sahib. I know it. Last year during the famine I lived there for two months.”

I was the first to grasp the meaning of it all, but something prevented me from speaking at once.

At last Mr. Y---- finished arranging and packing his things, and approached us in his usual lazy, careless way, but his face showed traces of vexation. He was evidently bored by our persistency in seeing a sea, where there was nothing but the corner of a lake. But, at the first sight of his unlucky sketch, his countenance suddenly changed.

He grew so pale, and the expression of his face became so piteously distraught that it was painful to see. He turned and returned the piece of Bristol board, then rushed like a madman to his drawing portfolio and turned the whole contents out, ransacking and scattering over the sand hundreds of sketches and of loose papers. Evidently failing to find what he was looking for, he glanced again at his sea-view, and suddenly covering his face with his hands totally collapsed.

We all remained silent, exchanging glances of wonder and pity, and heedless of the Takur, who stood on the ferry boat, vainly calling to us to join him.

”Look here, Y----!” timidly spoke the kind-hearted colonel, as if addressing a sick child. ”Are you sure you remember drawing this view?”

Mr. Y---- did not give any answer, as if gathering strength and thinking it over. After a few moments he answered in hoa.r.s.e and tremulous tones:

”Yes, I do remember. Of course I made this sketch, but I made it from nature. I painted only what I saw. And it is that very certainty that upsets me so.”

”But why should you be upset, my dear fellow? Collect yourself! What happened to you is neither shameful nor dreadful. It is only the result of the temporary influence of one dominant will over another, less powerful. You simply acted under 'biological influence,' to use the expression of Dr. Carpenter.”

”That is exactly what I am most afraid of.... I remember everything now.

I have been busy over this view more than an hour. I saw it directly I chose the spot, and seeing it all the while on the opposite sh.o.r.e I could not suspect anything uncanny. I was perfectly conscious... or, shall I say, I fancied I was conscious of putting down on paper what everyone of you had before your eyes. I had lost every notion of the place as I saw it before I began my sketch, and as I see it now.... But how do you account for it? Good gracious! am I to believe that these confounded Hindus really possess the mystery of this trick? I tell you, colonel, I shall go mad if I don't understand it all!”

”No fear of that, Mr. Y----,” said Narayan, with a triumphant twinkle in his eyes. ”You will simply lose the right to deny Yoga-Vidya, the great ancient science of my country.”

Mr. Y---- did not answer him. He made an effort to calm his feelings, and bravely stepped on the ferry boat with firm foot. Then he sat down, apart from us all, obstinately looking at the large surface of water round us, and struggling to seem his usual self.

Miss X---- was the first to interrupt the silence.

”Ma chere!” said she to me in a subdued, but triumphant voice. ”Ma chere, Monsieur Y---- devient vraiment un medium de premiere force!”

In moments of great excitement she always addressed me in French. But I also was too excited to control my feelings, and so I answered rather unkindly:

”Please stop this nonsense, Miss X----. You know I don't believe in spiritualism. Poor Mr. Y----, was not he upset?”

Receiving this rebuke and no sympathy from me, she could not think of anything better than drawing out the Babu, who, for a wonder, had managed to keep quiet till then.

”What do you say to all this? I for one am perfectly confident that no one but the disembodied soul of a great artist could have painted that lovely view. Who else is capable of such a wonderful achievement?”

”Why? The old gentleman in person. Confess that at the bottom of your soul you firmly believe that the Hindus wors.h.i.+p devils. To be sure it is some deity of ours of this kind that had his august paw in the matter.”

”Il est positivement malhonnete, ce Negre-la!” angrily muttered Miss X----, hurriedly withdrawing from him.

The island was a tiny one, and so overgrown with tall reeds that, from a distance, it looked like a pyramidal basket of verdure. With the exception of a colony of monkeys, who bustled away to a few mango trees at our approach, the place seemed uninhabited. In this virgin forest of thick gra.s.s there was no trace of human life. Seeing the word gra.s.s the reader must not forget that it is not the gra.s.s of Europe I mean; the gra.s.s under which we stood, like insects under a rhubarb leaf, waved its feathery many-colored plumes much above the head of Gulab-Sing (who stood six feet and a half in his stockings), and of Narayan, who measured hardly an inch less. From a distance it looked like a waving sea of black, yellow, blue, and especially of rose and green. On landing, we discovered that it consisted of separate thickets of bamboos, mixed up with the gigantic sirka reeds, which rose as high as the tops of the mangos.

It is impossible to imagine anything prettier and more graceful than the bamboos and sirka. The isolated tufts of bamboos show, in spite of their size, that they are nothing but gra.s.s, because the least gush of wind shakes them, and their green crests begin to nod like heads adorned with long ostrich plumes. There were some bamboos there fifty or sixty feet high. From time to time we heard a light metallic rustle in the reeds, but none of us paid much attention to it.

Whilst our coolies and servants were busy clearing a place for our tents, pitching them and preparing the supper, we went to pay our respects to the monkeys, the true hosts of the place. Without exaggeration there were at least two hundred. While preparing for their nightly rest the monkeys behaved like decorous and well-behaved people; every family chose a separate branch and defended it from the intrusion of strangers lodging on the same tree, but this defence never pa.s.sed the limits of good manners, and generally took the shape of threatening grimaces. There were many mothers with babies in arms amongst them; some of them treated the children tenderly, and lifted them cautiously, with a perfectly human care; others, less thoughtful, ran up and down, heedless of the child hanging at their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, preoccupied with something, discussing something, and stopping every moment to quarrel with other monkey ladies--a true picture of chatty old gossips on a market day, repeated in the animal kingdom. The bachelors kept apart, absorbed in their athletic exercises, performed for the most part with the ends of their tails. One of them, especially, attracted our attention by dividing his amus.e.m.e.nt between sauts perilleux and teasing a respectable looking grandfather, who sat under a tree hugging two little monkeys. Swinging backward and forward from the branch, the bachelor jumped at him, bit his ear playfully and made faces at him, chattering all the time. We cautiously pa.s.sed from one tree to another, afraid of frightening them away; but evidently the years spent by them with the fakirs, who left the island only a year ago, had accustomed them to human society. They were sacred monkeys, as we learned, and so they had nothing to fear from men. They showed no signs of alarm at our approach, and, having received our greeting, and some of them a piece of sugar-cane, they calmly stayed on their branch-thrones, crossing their arms, and looking at us with a good deal of dignified contempt in their intelligent hazel eyes.

The sun had set, and we were told that the supper was ready. We all turned ”homewards,” except the Babu. The main feature of his character, in the eyes of orthodox Hindus, being a tendency to blasphemy, he could never resist the temptation to justify their opinion of him. Climbing up a high branch he crouched there, imitating every gesture of the monkeys and answering their threatening grimaces by still uglier ones, to the unconcealed disgust of our pious coolies.

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