A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fearand half wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to bank between the stone facings, and the faraway spurs went out in spouts of foam. Mother Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of chocolate-coloured water was her messenger. There was a shriek above the roar of the water, the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung round the abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher against the dim sky-line.
‘Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do. Now she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!’ said Peroo, watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. ‘Ohé! Fight, then! Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out.’
But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first downstream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer, plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his work.
When day came the village gasped. ‘Only last night,’ men said, turning to each other, ‘it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!’
And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs upstream were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and downstream the pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when it touched a pier.
‘Big flood,’ said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood as he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her now, but not very much more; and if by any of a thousand chances there happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry his honourto the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was marking the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him food, but he could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge’s failure would hurt his assistant not a little, but Hitchcock was a young man with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant everything – everything that made a hard life worth the living. They would say, the men of his own profession— he remembered the half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart’s big water-works burst and broke down in brick heaps and sludge, and Lockhart’s spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp’sfacethree weekslater,whentheshame had marked it. His bridge was twice the size of Hartopp’s, and it carried the Findlayson truss as well as the new pier-shoe – the Findlayson bolted shoe. There were no excuses in his service. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that stood or fell. He went over it in his head, plate by plate, span by span, brick by brick, pier by pier, remembering, comparing, estimating, and recalculating, lest there should be any mistake; and through the long hours and through the flights of formulas that danced and wheeled before him a cold fear would come to pinch his heart. His side of the sum was beyond question; but what man knew Mother Gunga’s arithmetic? Even as he was making all sure by the multiplication-table, the river might be scooping potholes to the very bottom of any one of those eighty-foot piers that carried his reputation. Again a servant came to him with food, but his mouth was dry, and he could only drink andreturn to the decimals in his brain. And the river was still rising. Peroo, in a mat shelter-coat, crouched at his feet, watching now his face and now the face of the river, but saying nothing.
At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards the village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the boats.
Presently, he returned, most irreverently driving before him the priest of his creed – a fat old man, with a grey beard that whipped the wind with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder. Never was seen so lamentable a guru.
‘What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry grain,’ shouted Peroo, ‘if squatting in the mud is all that thou canst do? Thou hast dealt long with the Gods when they were contented and well-wishing. Now they are angry. Speak to them!’
‘What is a man against the wrath of Gods?’ whined the priest, cowering as the wind took him. ‘Let me go to the temple, and I will pray there.’
‘Son of a pig, pray here!Is there no return for salt fish and curry powder and dried onions? Call aloud! Tell Mother Gunga we have had enough. Bid her be still for the night. I cannot pray, but I have served in the Kumpani’s boats, and when men did not obey my orders I—’ A flourish of the wire-rope colt rounded the sentence, and the priest, breaking from his disciple, fled to the village.
‘Fat pig!’ said Peroo. ‘After all that we have done for him! When the flood is down I will see to it that we get a new guru. Finlinson Sahib, it darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been eaten. Be wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on an empty belly, Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will do.’
‘The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it.’
‘Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?’ said Peroo, laughing. ‘I was troubled for my boats and sheers before the flood came. Now we are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all weariness, besides thefever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing else today at all.’
He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and thrust it into Findlayson’s hand, saying, ‘Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more than opium – clean Malwa opium!’
Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand, and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least a good guard against fever – the fever that was creeping upon him out of the wet mud – and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.
Peroo nodded with bright eyes. ‘In a little – in a little the Sahib will find that he thinks well again. I too will—’ He dived into his treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier, and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson stood with his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about one of the piers – the Seventh – that he had not fully settled in his mind. The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one and at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound, rich and mellow in his ears, like the deepest note of a double-bass – an entrancing sound upon which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.
‘A tree hit them. They will all go,’ cried Peroo. ‘The main hawser has parted. What does the Sahib do?’
An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson’s mind. He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and angles – each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was the master-rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet would reassemble itself in the backwater beh
ind the guard-tower. But why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he hastened down the bank? It was necessary to putthe Lascar aside, gently and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and, further, to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so difficult. And then – but it was of no conceivable importance – a wire rope raced through his hand, burning it, the high bank disappeared, and with it all the slowly dispersing factors of the problem. He was sitting in the rainy darkness – sitting in a boat that spun like a top, and Peroo was standing over him.
‘I had forgotten,’ said the Lascar slowly, ‘that to those fasting and unused the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go to the Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great ones. Can the Sahib swim?’
‘What need? He can fly – fly as swiftly as the wind,’ was the thick answer.
‘He is mad!’ muttered Peroo under his breath. ‘And He threw me aside like a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat cannot live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to look at death with a clear eye.’
He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through the mist at the nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson, the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of all time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and perceived that he was perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that a man could surely step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs apart to keep his balance – this was the most important point – would be borne with great and easy speed to the shore. But yet a better plan came to him. It needed only an exertion of will for the soul to hurl the body ashore as wind drives paper; to waft it kite-fashion to the bank. Thereafter – the boat spun dizzily – suppose the high wind got under the freed body? Would it tower up like a kite and pitch headlong on the faraway sands, or would it duck about beyond control through all eternity? Findlayson gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it seemed that he was on the edge of taking the flight before he had settled all his plans. Opium has moreeffect on the white man than the black. Peroo was only comfortably indifferent to accidents. ‘She cannot live,’ he grunted. ‘Her seams open already. If she were even a dinghy with oars we could have ridden it out; but a box with holes is no good. Finlinson Sahib, she fills.’
‘Accha! I am going away. Come thou also.’
In his mind Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was circling high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot. His body – he was really sorry for its gross helplessness – lay in the stern, the water rushing about its knees.
‘How very ridiculous!’ he said to himself, from his eyrie; ‘that – is Findlayson – chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be drowned, too. Drowned when it’s close to shore. I’m – I’m on shore already. Why doesn’t it come along?’
To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and that body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the reunion was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the body. He was conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding prodigiously, as one strides in a dream, to keep foot-hold in the swirling water, till at last he hauled himself clear of the hold of the river, and dropped, panting, on wet earth.
‘Not this night,’ said Peroo in his ear. ‘The Gods have protected us.’ The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried stumps. ‘This is some island of last year’s indigo crop,’ he went on. ‘We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk carefully.’
Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself, with world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had built a bridge – a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining seas; but the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under heaven for Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of man.
An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to be seen on the little patch in the flood – a clump of thorn, a clump of swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul overshadowing a Hindoo shrine, from whose dome floated a tattered red flag. The holy man whose summer resting-place it was had long since abandoned it, and the weather had broken the red-daubed, image of his God. The two men stumbled, heavy-limbed and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set cooking-place, and dropped down under the shelter of the branches, while the rain and river roared together.
The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as a huge and dripping Brahminee Bull shouldered his way under the tree. The flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the insolence of head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow crowned with a wreath of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap that nigh swept the ground. There was a noise behind him of other beasts coming up from the flood-line through the thicket, a sound of heavy feet and deep breathing.
‘Here be more beside ourselves,’ said Findlayson, his head against the tree-pole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.
‘Truly,’ said Peroo thickly, ‘and no small ones.’
‘What are they, then? I do not see clearly.’
‘The Gods. Who else? Look!’
‘Ah, true! The Gods surely – the Gods.’ Findlayson smiled as his head fell forward on his chest. Peroo was eminently right. After the Flood, who should be alive in the land except the Gods that made it – the Gods to whom his village prayed nightly – the Gods who were in all men’s mouths and about all men’s ways? He could not raise his head or stir a finger for the trance that held him, and Peroo was smiling vacantly at the lightning.
The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp earth. A green Parrot in the branches preened his wet wings and screamed against the thunder as the circle under the tree filled with the shifting shadows of beasts. There was aBlack-buck at the Bull’s heels – such a buck as Findlayson in his faraway life upon earth might have seen in dreams – a buck with a royal head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming straight horns. Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green eyes burning under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the dead grass, paced a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.
The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the darkness a monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his neck and shoulders.
Other shadows came and went behind the circle, among them a drunken Man flourishing staff and drinking-bottle. Then a hoarse bellow broke out from near the ground. ‘The flood lessens even now,’ it cried. ‘Hour by hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!’
‘My bridge,’ said Findlayson to himself. ‘That must be very old work now. What have the Gods to do with my bridge?’
His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar. A Crocodile – the blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger of the Ganges – dragged herself before the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left with her tail.
‘They have made it too strong for me. In all this night I have only torn away a handful of planks. The walls stand! The towers stand! They have chained my flood, and my river is not free any more. Heavenly Ones, take this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank! It is I, Mother Gunga, that speak. The Justice of the Gods! Deal me the Justice of the Gods!’
‘What said I?’ whispered Peroo. ‘This is in truth a Punch-ayet of the Gods. Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and I, Sahib.’
The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and th
e Tigress, her ears flat to her head, snarled wickedly.
Somewhere in the shadow a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed to and fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on the snarl.
‘We be here,’ said a deep voice, ‘the Great Ones. One onlyand very many. Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra. Kali has spoken already. Hanuman listens also.’
‘Kashi is without her Kotwal tonight,’ shouted the Man with the drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the island rang to the baying of hounds. ‘Give her the Justice of the Gods.’
‘Ye were still when they polluted my waters,’ the great Crocodile bellowed. ‘Ye made no sign when my river was trapped, between the walls. I had no help save my own strength, and that failed – the strength of Mother Gunga failed – before their guard-towers. What could I do? I have done everything. Finish now, Heavenly Ones!’
‘I brought the death; I rode the spotted sickness from hut to hut of their workmen, and yet they would not cease.’ A nose-slitten, hide-worn Ass, lame, scissor-legged, and galled, limped forward. ‘I cast the death at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease.’
Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.
‘Bah!’ he said, spitting. ‘Here is Sitala herself; Mata – the smallpox. Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?’
‘Small help! They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out on my sand-bars, but their work went forward. Demons they are, and sons of demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for their fire-carriage to make a mock of. The Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!’
The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly, ‘If the Justice of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things, there would be many dark altars in the land, mother.’
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 40
