“Very—rotten,” Traherne replied, “and sad.”
“Got anything more to say for Major Crespin?”
“Yes. This. When I was a boy at Harrow, one of the small boys, about the youngest there, Antony Crespin was my fag-master. He was jolly decent to me. He wasn’t much at schools, but every one liked him, masters as well as boys. He was prime at sports; and at everything he had the pluck of a dozen, and he was absolutely straight, and scrupulously fair always. But he always had a hunted look in his eyes. I saw it then, shaver though I was, without understanding it in the least. I understand it now. And I knew—I don’t know how I knew, but I did—that Crespin was unhappy.”
Colonel Agnew hitched impatiently in his chair. All this did not interest him in the remotest. But he did not interrupt. Traherne had listened to his story, he’d listen to Traherne’s. Colonel Agnew too was scrupulously fair always. But he scowled, and his white eyebrows met in their ominous beetling.
“And I knew one other thing about him. He almost never spoke of his people. But I knew, don’t know how again, that he worshiped his mother, and very much less than worshiped his father. He had a photo of Mrs. Crespin—his mother—over his bed. I believe he said his prayers to that picture, and, if he didn’t, he said them about it. It was the photograph of a very beautiful woman, “Mother”—only that—written across one corner. He used to write to her all the time—oftener than any other boy wrote to any one. I used to post his letters often—mostly they were not thin ones—not those to his mother, and I didn’t often have any others to post for him. She came to see him two or three times while he and I were both there—he left long before I did. He was older than I, and going into the Army, of course—they never stay at public school long, as you know. I used to think he half lived for those visits. His joy when he knew that she was coming, and his pride and devotion when she did come—I remember it! She was as beautiful as her picture, sir—and she seemed as fond and proud of him as he was of her. He took me home with him for a week-end once. His people’s place was not very far. They gave me a ripping time—the Saturday. We got there early Saturday morning. I didn’t take to Mr. Crespin—couldn’t have said why not: he was decent to me. But I thought there was an undertone of boorishness in the way he spoke to his wife, a mean look in his eyes—nothing much, couldn’t put my finger on it—I was pretty much of a kid—but I seemed to get it. And I felt sure that Tony and his mother were happier together when Mr. Crespin was not there. And the half-impression I’d got at Harrow that Tony had no special love for his father was considerably deepened, and I gathered too—couldn’t have said how, and couldn’t now—that the boy did not respect the man. Sunday was all right—till dinner. Mrs. Crespin looked queer when she came into the drawing-room, her hair was beautifully done, I remember, kid as I was, wondering how long it had taken her maid to do it, and her gown was A-1, and she smelled of some delicious scent as she moved—almost too much of it, and I thought she had too much powder on, and oughtn’t to have used any, her skin was so beautiful—just like milk, I’d noticed, out in the sunshine when we’d played tennis. By the time we’d finished fish herfacewas red, and Tony’s was the color of chalk. He talked, how he talked, poor devil!—and I can see the love in his eyes now when he looked at his mother. Mr. Crespin scarcely spoke, but made a capital meal, and watched his wife with a bad smile on his face all the time. Before the poultry was served, I understood—couldn’t help it. Her voice was thick, her hand unsteady, and her face flamed. She didn’t eat much, but she drank—I know now that she couldn’t help it—and her husband twice reminded the butler to fill her glass! When she pushed back her chair, and rose to leave us, she lurched. Tony drew his mother’s arm through his, and led her from the room as if she had been a queen! He didn’t come back till very late. When he did, he didn’t stay long. And he didn’t sleep that night, as he had the night before, in the room I did. We left at an unearthly hour on Monday—had to, of course—and I didn’t see Mrs. Crespin to say good-by.”
Colonel Agnew cleared his throat. “Do you mean?” he began. “Do you believe——”
“I believe, sir, that Antony Crespin’s mother was a nice woman who needed help she didn’t get, or a chance and peace to help herself in, as I believe that Major Crespin needs help that I can perhaps give him and help him to help himself—which is the only help that amounts to anything in such cases——”
“I tell you——” Agnew broke in hotly.
But the physician in his own turn too interrupted. “That you and Crossland have given him every possible chance, done your best, and done it generously? I am sure of that, sir. But the thing is very difficult. No ailment, except insanity, is less understood, or more persistently bungled—by doctors, the best of them,” he added quickly.
The Colonel smiled grimly. “But you wouldn’t bungle it?”
“God knows,” Dr. Traherne said humbly. “I’d try not.”
“Isn’t it hopeless always?”
“Not always. Even insanity is healed, fairly often, in spite of criminally wrong treatment.”
“You think he inherited it?”
“I think he inherited a tendency, perhaps, or—more probably a possibility. I do not believe that it is congenital. I do not for one moment believe that that poor lady drank until something drove her to it—after her marriage, and probably after her boy’s birth. And I think it very likely that Tony Crespin took his first drink too much when he heard of his mother’s death.”
“And thewomen? Inherited from the other side, I suppose?”
“I can’t say, sir. Alcohol itself fathers that lapse very often. And the thing itself is rather too common to lay it overconfidently at any one father’s door.”
“Yes,” Agnew agreed sadly. “Did he say anything?”
“Tony? To me, about what had happened at his home, sir? Not one word—on the way back to Harrow, or after. But—I saw him suffer—then and after. Once a lot of fellows were talking—were talking about the thousand and one things that boys at school do—and got on to what ought to be forgiven, and what, if anything, ought not—no matter how repented and all that. Crespin did not join in and, of course, I didn’t. I was fagging, making their toast and so on. But after they’d gone, he said to me that there was one thing he’d kill for. And when I said, ‘What?’ he said he’dkillany one, no matter who it was, that ever said or thought a rough word of his mother. And there was murder in his eyes, sir. I thought he meant it as a warning to me. I think it was. He needn’t have done it. I took an oath to myself that Monday morning on the train, going back to school, that no word of it’d ever pass me, and that I’d do my best to forget it. No word ever has before, and I’ve told it now for him.”
“Ever see her again?” Agnew asked, as he again marched off stiffly to the open window.
“Twice,” Traherne told him. “She came to Harrow twice after that before Tony went to Sandhurst. If Tony had treated her like a queen on her other visits, I can’t describe how he treated her those two times. I couldn’t help feeling thathewas trying to apologize to her—to make up to her for it. Colonel Agnew, Antony Crespin loved his mother with a love very few women ever get—a love that ought to make up to a woman for almostanything.”
Colonel Agnew, with his back to Traherne, drew out his handkerchief, and—sneezed.
Dr. Traherne waited for Agnew to speak.
“I almost wish,” the older man said slowly, after a time, “that his wife knew—what you’ve just told me.”
Traherne nodded. “But we can’t tell her, sir. And Major Crespin never will. And probably no one in India knows but you and me and him—perhaps no one else living now, knows or remembers. But his Colonelknowsnow, sir,” he added rising and going to the man at the window.
Agnew swung round on him. “What do you want me to do, doctor? What the blue blazes can I do? Guest night! Damn!”
“I ask you to pass it over, sir—this once more—to give Major Crespin a goodish long leave—not too long—and leave the rest to me—let me try out my plan.”
“Two generals—one from the U. S. A.!” Colonel Agnew almost bleated.
“Yes—awkward,” Traherne admitted.
“Damned awkward,” the Colonel said curtly.
“But they’ll not say a word, sir. They were eating your salt. Let me tackle them. General Harland is awkward, I’ll admit. I wish he hadn’t been there.”
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” the Colonel said miserably.
“Yes! But General Harland is not in command of your district, sir. You can’t ask him to wink at your not reporting it. But I can. I think I can get him toaskyou not to report it. And you are in command here, sir.”
“You think you can do a lot, don’t you?” Agnew snorted.
“I can speak as aphysician, sir,” Traherne said persuasively. “And the General is no end of a good fellow—every one says so. And then I’ll tackle the Bishop—”
“Oh, damn the Bishop!” the Colonel said. “No—I’ll consult General Harland myself, Traherne. It’s up to me. I don’t give a damn which of us tackles the Bishop. But General Tyler—our American guest—that’s whathurts, Traherne—that an officer of another service saw—one of mine—what General Tyler saw last night!”
“Yes, I know, sir. But hewasyour guest. He’s one of the best too. It’s safe forever with him.”
“Oh, Lord,” the Colonel chuckled wretchedly, “and America’s just gone dry!”
“General Tyler hasn’t gone particularly dry, sir,” Dr. Traherne reminded him. “He took claret at dinner. And His Majesty’s health went down him in fizz. And he had a stiff peg with me at two o’clock this morning.”
“Good Lord, Traherne! Where?”
“At my digs, sir. General Tyler and I took Major Crespin home—to my bungalow, and saw to him, both of us. General Tyler was no end sorry about it. He was sorry for you, sir. He was sorrier for Crespin. Said so. He’s all-wool-and-a-yard-wide—a saying of his own countrymen’s, sir.”
There was a pause.
Colonel Agnew went back to the writing-table, and took up the dispatch, and tore it into very small bits before he threw it into the big waste-paper basket. Then he kicked the basket.
“Boy!” he bellowed.
“Topee,” he snapped when the bearer appeared. “You go prescribe for the Bishop, if you like,” he said to Traherne. “I’m off to eat humble pie to the General—General Harland. After tiffin, I’ll call on General Tyler, and ask him to come to the Club and lick me at poker.”
“He will, sir,” Traherne laughed.
“By God, he shall,” Colonel Agnew said.
And a few days later Traherne and Crespin went off after game.
Sometimes Traherne thought he was winning, or, as he put it, that Crespin was. At others he thought he was losing.
Crespin came back to his regiment, and back to old failures and stumbles sometimes. But neither man ever quite gave it up. Colonel Agnew looked the other way more than once. He grumbled and threatened a great deal. And he prayed—but that he kept strictly to himself.
Lucilla Crespin grew whiter and colder. Iris and Ronald grew bonnier and chubbier—and their mother loved them more and more, gay and tender always with them, their beloved saint and tireless playmate. And Traherne, as he watched her with them, had almost more in his heart, and his strong tingling man’s blood, than his resolve and endurance could match. But they held. He often wondered if Mrs. Crespin knew what he felt—guessed it at all, any of it—but the woman, if she did, gave no sign.
Crespin recovered and lapsed—lapsed and recovered. And the regiment, watching, wondered how long the “old man” was going to put up with it—and so did the entire station.
And the Colonel wondered himself, and told Dr. Traherne so, more than once. And always the physician pleaded, “A little longer, sir!”
“How is it going to end?” Agnew demanded one day.
“Before long, in one of two ways,” Traherne said, “assuredly. He will win out now, or he’ll die. He is very much better of his failing. But his nerves are about frazzled, and his body won’t stand too much more. Let him keep his uniform, sir. I’ll see that he doesn’t openly disgrace it. I promise you that. Let himfitit once more, or let him die in it. That will mean a great deal to him. Take it from him, and I give you my word his game is up.”
At which Colonel Agnew “damned” Dr. Traherne, and yielded to him.
Agnew, too, often wondered if Mrs. Crespin knew what Traherne felt towards her. The Colonel had no doubt.
Whether Mrs. Crespin knew all, little or nothing, Major Crespin knew now; and, knowing his own handicap and the other man’s worthiness, was bitterly, blackly jealous.
That mended nothing, helped nothing, and retarded and impeded much.
The children and their ayah and bearer had been sent to Pahari about a month before Major Crespin’s leave was due, nearly two years after the American General had broken Colonel Agnew’s regiment’s bread, and honored its salt. Dr. Traherne watching, without seeming to, thought he saw a breakdown threatening. At such times to get Crespin away and out of sight was always his first concern; it sometimes averted, and—the next best thing—it always hid.
Traherne had a new “bus,” a costly, beautiful “flyer,” of which he was boyishly proud. There was a good deal of boy still in Dr. Basil Traherne in spite of his natural gravity and his thirty-five years. The boy persists longest in the biggest men.
He urged the Crespins to let him fly them to Pahari, where they proposed to spend their not long leave with Iris and Ronald in the cool of the hills. Mrs. Crespin was eager to fall in with Traherne’s suggestion, and Major Crespin, a little to their surprise, agreed to it placidly; for the last two years scarcely had improved things between Crespin and Traherne, and had distinctly made them worse between husband and wife. And Major Crespin had almost as little flair for aircraft adventure as his Colonel had.
It is said that the offender never forgives. Certainly it is quite explicitly hard for the one in the wrong to do so. And it takes more spiritual asset than continued alcohol often leaves. Antony Crespin was not ungrateful to Dr. Traherne for the physician’s ministrations that “next morning,” and on several others that had followed it. But the memory rankled. And he made it harder and harder for the physician to succor and brace him, or to keep up the show of a cordial friendship, which in India Crespin never much had felt, and which Traherne on his part found wearing steadily thin. The physician’s interest in his “case” never slackened or wavered, but the man’s liking for the man very nearly went. He stood to his merciful professional guns undauntedly—but he did it not a little grimly.
The curly-cue thing that your doctor writes at the head (or if he’s a “big man,” has printed there—to save him the trouble) of the prescription he instructs you to have made up at the chemist’s, and take inside you three times a day before meals, is a prayer to Apollo. “Grant health, O Apollo!” It seems almost a scandal, a medical lapse and neglect, that every physician does not write it himself, and put his thought and heart into it as he does; and seems too a trifle surprising in these piping days of spiritual-healing and psycho-all-sorts-of-things. Every physician aims to give the same professional devotion—of course!—to the patient who does not attract his personal liking as to the patient who does. But, because doctors are only human, even the most truly vocated rarely quite succeed. Dr. Traherne tried determinedly to give Crespin the same care and help that he had while his old affection for him still held—and the physician succeeded as well as the man could. But Crespin’s continued, though perhaps on the whole rarer and less, misconducts and his growing surliness and peevishness, rasped Traherne’s patience and turned his once sincere liking to a feeling very different. And his growing love and longing for the woman whom Crespin’s name still claimed, and whose coldness and aloofness towards her husband visibly grew from month to month, made any real feeling of friendship for Crespin impossible now to Basil Traherne. His memory of Tony Crespin, Harrow boy and fag-master, was tender and beautiful still. But it grew faint, or, at least, more remote, and even a little blurred—and rarely vividly associated with the heavy, flushed, dulled-eyed Major Crespin whose wife Traherne pitied and desired.
That is how it stood with them, as the new aeroplane imperceptibly rose from the flat beyond the parade-ground, into the velvet-blue, and flew towards the Himalayas.
Odd places and peoples lie—for the most part unsuspected by the rest of the world—tucked away solitary and secure in the uncharted wilds beyond the Himalayas: tiny isolated kingdoms, each knowing naught but itself, and unknown of all others, strongholds of primitive peoples and of old primitive ways, elaborately customed, impregnably individual—wonderful, incalculable domains to which few white travelers journey, from whose sullen bourne none return.
The Himalayas are cut and gashed by a thousand fissures and natural passes, and between those loopholes in the great mountain range lie many a hidden principality, cupped in mountains and rocks as impenetrably as the lair of some skilful outlaw often is safe from the utmost vigilance of the police of the American Northwest.
Such was the Kingdom of Rukh: its prince keeping his state, his people keeping their ways, exactly as they did long before the days of Genghis Khan, speaking their own guttural language, worshiping their own gods, obeying their prince in all ways and their priests in some—for their prince was more to them, more loved, more feared, tenfold more obeyed than all their small man-made heaven of gods. Who were they? What were they? Whence had they come? What was their place in the great interknit mosaic of mankind? None can say. To trace them quite definitely to any outside kinship were hopeless. Yet most of their faces were somewhat Mongolian, with here and there one more of Aryan type—always in some tribesman of power and place.
It was an absolute monarchy, if ever earthly sway and power were absolute—if the word “absolute” itself has any justification of veracity.
The Raja of Rukh ruled with an unquestioned despotism no Western monarch dreams of, and of which but few in the past ever have dreamed, and none ever has attained.
So often is Asian princeship thus that it would call for no remark in telling of Rukh, were it not for one odd fact. Of all the natives of little Rukh, this almost omnipotent ruler was the sole one who had smirched his birthright, and sinned against the more-than-religion of the race. For the Raja had traveled, he had broken strange, unconsecrated breads, eaten strange, polluted meats. He had lived in Europe, and now in the fortress-home to which he had come back to his own he in his own person mingled—superficially at least—ways of Europe with the ways of his fathers. At this his people had wondered a little, but not one had doubted or questioned, unless indeed Toluk Yap, the high priest, doubted now and then. And not even Toluk Yap ever had questioned. For the Raja was god in Rukh, and the gods but satellites of his power and rank.
Too, all that he occasionally did, ate, or wore that might have hinted to you or to me of Pall Mall or the Champs Elysées, seemed to his enslaved, docile people but an eccentricity of his individuality. It might have stood to them for defilement, his occasional aping of European ways, and have disgruntled and lashed them to cut-throat fury and open rebellion, had they sensed it for what it was. But that they could ill do, since they did not know or suspect that there was a Europe. He had been away, and he had come back to them; that was all they knew; and that he had come back was all they cared.
He had brought back with him one grotesque curio at which they gaped for a time, and then ignored with stolid disgust as far as they could: a white ape of a man—if it was a man—who, little heed as they paid it, gave them their first unformed film of idea that somewhere beyond the mountains that bounded and ended their world there were places on the earth that were bleached—where trees and reptiles, rocks and sky, if trees, reptiles and stones and sky there were, all were bleached white by the torture and misfortune of existing so far from Rukh, as the tawn of the leopard was sometimes bleached by the lash of the high Himalayan cold.
Such prolonged absence as this Asian prince had allowed himself well might have cost him his throne. Scarcely a monarch of Europe—with cables and cinemas to remind them—would dare to leave his people so long, and it seems a far rasher thing for a prince to risk whose kingship and throne lay on the more quickly shifting sands where every prime minister is a would-be supplanter, almost every half-brother a usurper at core. But Rukh had known whom to trust and entrust, and had known when to go, and when to come back.
Unknown to the geographers of the Occident, unsuspected in Whitehall and Westminster, the Kingdom of Rukh lay snug in the mountains as it has, perhaps, since Adam was young. And its despot’s rule was absolute. The King could do no wrong. For the Royal House stood by the people, and the people stood by the Royal House in the Kingdom of Rukh.
A grim and dun-colored place it was, a region of gaunt and almost treeless mountains, all of them bleak, barren and gray of tone except where the clear atmosphere lent them some tint of its hot blue. Clinging fiercely to the fierce mountain wall, a mile or more away from the temple precincts, was a vast barbaric palace, its long stretches of glum unbroken masonry crowned and relieved by endless arcades and turrets; not two alike, yet all in key and consonance—a fortress-palace telling of centuries of human labor, of long generations of wealth and lordship. How many brown hands had lifted it up stone by stone, how many brown muscle-knotted backs had bent and strained at its making, is beyond compute. Millions of peasants must have been born to its hewing and heaving and making, and have died at it. Here in its desert of rocks, its forest of mountains, it spoke of suzerainty irresistible and unresisted as nothing in the West, and little in the East, does, a suzerainty so enormous, impossible ever in Europe, almost unprecedented in Asia, that it well-nigh told a human power the one thing that human power never is: omnipotent.
In almost the one level place in the principality was builded the temple, and housed the gods. This level place was small, a scant platform of earth wedged between two masses of rock. In the rock on the East the cave-temple had been roughly hewn. The thick, ungainly pillars, rudely carved, paint centuries old still showing faintly here and there, served to divide the cave roughly into three parts. Between the pillars in the middle section was a seated stone figure, a six-armed goddess, forbidding, ferocious of aspect, colored face, arms and rough indicated robes a dark and sinister green. On a low slab of altar before her feet newly severed heads of six or seven goats still reeked from the priestly knife, blood still warm clotting about them, and one—the last knifed—still twitched and shivered in symbol of recent pain. Untidy and moldering wreaths and handfuls of flowers decorated the temple’s honeycombed walls, and lay on its spattered floor. Blood dripped on marigolds, and bats flew cautiously here and there. How flowers had been come by in this desolate place of gaunt, bare rock, it were hard to guess. But the floral offerings were there. And there were gardens in Rukh, almost miracles of one man’s compulsion and his people’s persistence. The Raja had his gardens in the keeps of his palace, the priests and a petted woman or two had theirs contrived in some split in the mountains of rock, places of verdure and bloom as artificial as the hanging gardens of Babylon, and much more surprising. And the Raja had his runners. What the Raja of Rukh would, he commanded; what he commanded was fulfilled.
The open space before the open temple formed between the two rock-masses a rudely paved forecourt to the temple. It was bordered by a sparse company of smaller idols, weather-proof, it’s to be hoped, and probably too comparatively insignificant to be housed with the six-armed monstrosity in the blood-spattered, bat-infested cave. Three round-headed stone posts stood near the outer lesser gods, and were painted green—whether in an economy of paint left over from the great Green Goddess, or in the wearing of her livery, were idle guesswork for a Westerner.
Mountain paths wound off behind the rock, and through the low, listless shrubs that grew impassively beside them, long narrow paths winding in every direction, that the overlord’s runners might hasten the quicker and surer wherever he willed.
There were few words in Rukh as a rule. The people worked too hard to talk overmuch. Their temple rites were nearly their only social gatherings; and the temple rites watched and done, they were wont to disperse almost in silence, lumbering stolidly back to labor, food or sleep.
But to-day the worshipers were lingering excitedly in the courtyard, watching wide-eyed something up in the air, a great gray and silver bird of prey, a strange fish-like bird with amazing markings of blue and red on its silver belly—only the ordinary identification of such birds, but neither Arabic nor Roman numerals were common sights in Rukh—a horrible monster bird of prey whose like they never had seen or heard tell of, never had dreamed of when nightmares tossed their hard-earned sleep; and it was swooping down on them with a hideous cracking whizz.
“Oo-ae!” a native cried.
“Oo-ae!” another sobbed.
“Oo-ae! Oo-ae!” they all cried then in mingled gutturals of dismay and despair.
It was a pathetically hideous group of unkempt, squat, frightened hillsmen, high-cheeked, rather Mongol in type, strong-limbed, stupid of face (not Mongol in that), adding nothing of color to the dark drab place, for their rough, almost unmade garments were somber and dark. A man of higher stature and better garments stood amongst them, his skin was lighter, his features more of Aryan type, his eye-sockets wider, more open, an embroidered fur cap on his head, a marigold stuck in its beads. He had some evident authority over them—Yazok the temple priest—for when one turned to flee:
“Na-yam!” ordered the priest, and the man did not go. A braver raised his weapon—they most of them were armed—and again Yazok commanded “Na-yam!” and the fellow let his lifted arm and the weapon he held fall to his side.
On and down swooped the monster bird. The priest watched it, silent and motionless, but with a tense look of acrid dislike on his face, and a glance of patient contempt now and then to the huddled, shivering group which drew closer and closer together, pressing farther away to the edge of the place, closer and closer to him, ejaculating, “Oo-ae! Oo-ae!”
The bird had lit.
It had finished its flight just back of the temple. One terrible talon—or was it the tip of its great wing?—projected threateningly over the mass of rocks at the west. The aeroplane that had risen from Dehra Dun so surely and lightly, while the band had played “Good-by, I’m going to leave you now,” had made a forced landing on the inhospitable slope of unknown Rukh, a landing so imperatively forced that almost it might be termed a crash.
Lucilla Crespin came into sight first, but Traherne was first on the ground. Crespin climbing down rather awkwardly hesitated a moment at a difficult point, his foothold not too wide or secure, the available foothold below an uncomfortable distance to a man of his weight. India does not treat us all alike, we who invade her, not even our soldier-men. Punjabi soldiering had not kept Antony Crespin fit. Lucilla had known it for years; observant, clear-eyed, badly sensitive where those who were hers were concerned, she had watched the sag and the bloat come and gain almost day by day. But as she stood and looked at him now, it struck her anew, and more sharply than it had done before, sickened her even more than it had done in those two bitter hours of her fresh wifehood’s disillusion when she had realized shudderingly the twin rotten fissures in a husband’s being.
Women and wine! Both had branded and slackened him. She wondered which had spoiled and twisted him most. She knew which had tortured her the more. The “pegs” he had sipped and drained too often, too early, too late, and too strong, had disgusted and “turned” her clean, wholesome flesh the more. But the women had tortured her far more cruelly than his cups had. They had “turned” her soul and poisoned her heart. The drinking she held a weakness—contemptible but not unpitiable—innate, inherited, uncontrollable perhaps, but the infidelities that had affronted her pride, bowed her head, curdled the milk in her young mother-breasts, she held a personal meanness and unforgivable crime, a hideous responsibility that lay forever at his door. It is so that women judge—forgiving, condoning every masculine folly and sin that is no direct reflection and slight to her.
This was not the man she had married—that almost obese, flush-faced Crespin standing irresolutely there a little above her. No. But it was what had been he, and it was the human being to whom she was indissolubly bound. The fetter cut into her being. But she kept her pact—now as ever.
“Take care, Antony!” she cried brightly, as he was about to risk it and jump. “Let Dr. Traherne give you a hand.”
“Yes!” Traherne echoed. He already had gained the lower ground, surefooted and cool.
“Hang it all,” Crespin shook his wife’s suggestion and the other man’s proffered assistance off with a testy impatience that spurred his own faulty physical courage, “I’m not such a crock as all that.” He jumped as he spoke, jumped heavily, but landed safely enough.
Lucilla gave a little sigh of relief; she scarcely could have told herself how far it was sincere, how far acting—her wifehood was so permeated by acting now.
Traherne turned away from Antony, and a something of pity passed across the younger man’s eyes; he understood, as she did not, that Lucilla’s words had hurt Crespin—and he pitied him. He still judged Antony more fairly than Mrs. Crespin did, more fairly than she could, or many women can.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Crespin?” There was just enough concern in his voice and in his glance, and not an iota too much. Less would have been a boorishness, more must have been a caress. “Not very much shaken?”
“Not a bit!” she laughed.
“It was a nasty bump,” the pilot said ruefully.
“You managed splendidly,” the woman defended heartily.
“Come on, Lu,” Crespin interrupted; “sit on that ledge, and I can swing you down.”
Perhaps Basil Traherne doubted it, for he too went a step nearer and held out his hand, saying, “Let me—”
She put her hands impartially in theirs, and jumped lightly down, sayings “Thanks,” as impartially.
The natives watching the strange newcomers with wonder and fear, began to chatter eagerly among themselves. If the big bird of prey had seemed uncanny and awesome, these strange creatures it had disgorged as it dashed to its death, scarcely seemed less so. All three were protected and disfigured with flying-helmets and leather aviation coats—odd enough sights to European eyes when seen for the first time. What must they not have looked to those untraveled natives of isolated, rock-bound Rukh!
The priest turned and said a word to one of the gape-mouth crowd—a lithe, sinewy youth more scantily clad than the others, a grotesque cipher, picked out in red, green and ochre, branded on one gleaming shoulder, and but for his rag of loin-cloth, stripped for his master’s running, which was his office in life. The priest spoke, and the runner instantly made off at great speed towards the distant castle.
The travelers had taken off their helmets now, and a new murmur of wonder ran through the little cluster, while a half look of intelligence just showed on the priest’s face.
“That last ten minutes was pretty trying,” Major Crespin said, in the tone of a man who half apologizes, half defends some premeditated deed he knows apt to be censured. “I don’t mind owning that my nerves are all of a twitter.” He fumbled inside his thick leather coat, and pulled out a flask. “Have a mouthful, Traherne?” he asked with a nonchalance a shade overdone, as he unscrewed it and poured out a generous dram.
“No, thank you,” Traherne said easily, helping Mrs. Crespin out of her coat.
“You won’t, I know,” Crespin said to his wife with a feebly jocular turn of the flask-top—now a cup—in her direction. “I will!” he drank off the brandy. “That’s better!” He refilled the cup and drank again. “And now, where are we, Doctor?”
“I have no notion,” Traherne confessed as he threw off his own coat.
“Let’s ask the populace,” Crespin suggested cheerfully. Traherne nodded, not too encouragingly, and Crespin went up to the still chattering crowd—in which the priest alone stood silent and grimly observant, watching the pale intruders intently through narrowing eyes. The natives shrank back in open fear as Crespin came up to them—all but the priest; he stood his ground, and even, at the half salutation the Englishman gave, salaamed slightly, but almost contemptuously.
Crespin spoke—in Hindustani—but it drew a blank. It was evident that Hindustani was as useless here as English or Norse. The priest listened blankly, and then in his turn poured forth a speech of some length—almost as long as it was guttural, voluble and heated, pointing dramatically now to the dusky incarnadined temple, now to the beetling palace.
Perhaps Mrs. Crespin and Dr. Traherne expected little from Crespin’s embassy, perhaps they were willing to wait patiently to hear from him its result. For they made no steps to follow him, and paid little attention, but stood together just where he left them.
“You were splendid all through,” Traherne said in a low, tense voice that said more than his words.
“I had perfect faith in you,” the woman answered, her eyes full and frank on his.
And his eyes thanked her. But he only said regretfully, “If I’d had another pint of petrol I might have headed for that sort of esplanade behind the castle up there. . . .”
“Yes, I saw it.”
“. . . and made an easy landing. But I simply had to try for this place, and trust to luck.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Lucilla said quickly, “but your skill that saved us.”
The sudden blood rushed over Traherne’s wind-browned face. It was more than she had said to him ever before—not the simple, conventional words, but the pride in him that pulsed in them, pride in him, and something too of a claiming. She did not know that, and he knew that she did not. But he heard and understood, and his heart lashed at his ribs, and was hurt. In all the few hard years of his service to her, man’s service never stinted, never underlined, no such open recognition of the hidden thing that lay between them had ever been told. He had known—from the first. But he had hoped and believed that she did not. Was he glad or sorry? He was both. His loyalty and friendship regretted, but his man’s nature leapt and was glad. When he had tried to hide Antony’s weakness from her, and to shield her from it—to keep it out of her presence, to drive it from her thoughts, when together they had strained and schemed, as they constantly had, to save Crespin from himself, and her and her children from the present shame and coming consequences of his sick misdoings, no word, no sign, had been let slip from him to her, or from her to him, acknowledging why he stood to her side. She often had spoken to him of Antony’s good qualities, never of Antony’s faults.
But now a barrier was down—only one of many, the others still held, but one—and she had let it fall. It usually is the woman who lets it fall.
“It wasn’t luck,” she repeated contemptuously. “It was your skill that saved us,” she added, and the change in her voice, the quick, white flame on her face, was confession and challenge—challenge the more compelling, confession the more complete, because the woman had made them unconsciously.
“You are very good to me,” Traherne said in a voice not too well under control. The woman looked at him quickly. Their eyes met, as they had not met before. His face quivered a little. And then the man’s eyes fell—not Lucilla’s.
To say that Traherne and Crespin were less than intensely perturbed at the situation in which they found themselves, and still worse in which they had landed the woman who was dear to them both, would be to wrong their intelligence—or any even mediocre intelligence. And these men had each more than average intelligence, mental equipment more acute and deeper than Crespin often had been credited with—for we most of us make the common and crass mistake of thinking that a mind, an intelligence, totally different from our own, is not so fine. Antony Crespin had punished and soiled his once fine body, almost hopelessly now, but, except for sheer physical nervousness that drugged it sometimes, he had not deeply injured his mind. He had been no carpet-soldier. Again and again, on active service, he had “made good,” as soldier and as man. Traherne was the better man, but Crespin was the better soldier—which was as it should be. It was Major Crespin’s business to make wounds, it was Dr. Traherne’s business to heal them—unless the other had done his work so well that no chance or cause of help was left.
They were thoroughly frightened, but they took it lightly, of course: they were British. And but for the woman’s being with them, they might even have found tingle and excitement not altogether unpleasant in the undeniable predicament. Lucilla made all the difference—she and, to Crespin, the two babies in Pahari. He was thinking of them as he turned back from his fruitless mission. And his mouth set hard and sharp, and his tongue felt dry and thick. But he sauntered idly enough across the small flagged courtyard, and said with a careless shrug:
“It’s no use—he doesn’t understand a word of Hindustani. You know Russian, don’t you, Doctor?”
“A little.”
“We must be well on towards Central Asia,” Crespin declared. “Suppose you try him in Russian. Ask him where the hell we are, and who owns the shooting box up yonder.”
“Right-o,” Traherne nodded. “It’s worth trying at least.”
Lucilla and Crespin followed a little behind him as he moved to the temple priest. And when he said something in Russian they saw that the priest’s face kindled. He pointed to the rock-hung castle, pointed down to the ground, and then with one magnificent, wide, sweeping gesture that seemed to take in not only the whole country, but to indicate title-deed to all the world, exclaimed:
“Rukh! Rukh! Rukh! Rukh!” in a herald voice that proclaimed that the fortress-like castle was Rukh, the ground they stood on Rukh, the cave-temple, the immense horn of metallic lacquer poised on a crag beyond the castle—the most unique and surprising thing in all the amazing picture—the sky above, all of creation that mattered or counted—Rukh, imperial, incomparable Rukh—Rukh, the apex of the world.
But for all that his statement meant to them Crespin said disgustedly, “What the deuce is he rooking about?”
“Goodness knows,” Traherne rejoined.
But the woman jumped to it.
“I believe I know!” she broke in. Crespin and Traherne gazed at her in surprise—her husband incredulous, Traherne very curious. “Wait a minute!” she commanded, searching her pockets excitedly—almost, in her quiet, well-bred English way, as excited as Yazok himself. “I thought I had the paper with me. I wish I could find it. But I did have it, and I did read it. I know I did. I read it in theLeaderjust before we started, that the three men who murdered the Political Officer at Abdulabad came from a wild region at the back of the Himalayas, called Rukh.”
“Yes,” Traherne told them, “now that you mention it, I have heard of the place.”
“Well, that’s something,” Crespin exclaimed. “Come, we’re getting on.”
“Perhaps,” the physician said under his breath, as he turned again to Yazok the priest and accosted him once more in a few Russian words, pointing interrogatively to the palace.
But the priest’s Russian was little, less than Traherne’s own, and Yazok had no intention of being over-communicative.
“Raja Sahib,” he said—so he had some smattering of Hindustani after all—“Raja Sahib,” he repeated several times; but that was all that he would say.
But those two familiar words told them a good deal of what they wished to know.
“Oh,” Crespin grunted, “it’s Windsor Castle, is it? Well, we’d better make tracks for it. Come, Lucilla.” He put his hand on her arm, and they turned to go.
But the priest barred their way, in a frenzy of excitement, pouring forth a wild torrent of, to them, quite unintelligible language.
Traherne intervened, speaking again in Russian, and it served to calm the hillsman measurably, though the native throng at his elbows still muttered and gesticulated threateningly. But Yazok listened, if surlily, and presently vouchsafed in reply a few Russian words which he spoke slowly and with evident difficulty.
“His Russian is even more limited than mine,” Traherne told the others, “but I gather that the Raja has been sent for, and will come here.”
“All right,” Crespin said wearily, “then we’d better await developments,” and, lighting a cigarette, seated himself on one of the green painted stones, and began to smoke with impatient patience.
Oriental Bedlam broke loose. Almost before the Englishman had gained his hard seat Yazok rushed on him wildly, caught at his shoulders, and with wild exclamations and fierce blazing eyes, hustled him off, and then, disregarding utterly the amazed and furious Major, salaamed low and penitentially to the stone, bent again and again with humble, deprecatory gestures, and a frightened hurricane of propitiatory formulas, an inchoate sing-song of throaty, guttural words that sounded half wailing woe, half cringing prayer. And the people no longer shrank away, but pressed towards Major Crespin brandishing fists and weapons, and storming determinedly, “Oo-ae, oo-ae, gak-kok-oo-ae, gak-gak!”
Crespin’s red face turned white in his anger, his tired eyes stiffened and flashed, and quicker than told his hand lay on his revolver-case. He still smoked on imperturbably, but Yazok was nearer death than he ever had been.
“Confound you, take care what you’re doing!” Crespin warned him, snapping the words out coldly from between clenched teeth. “You’d better treat us civilly or—”
Basil Traherne broke in. “Gently, gently, Major,” he begged with a hand on Crespin’s right arm. “This is evidently some sort of sacred enclosure, and you were sitting on one of the gods.”
“Well,” Crespin retorted with a vexed, contemptuous laugh, “damn him, he might have told me!”
Lucilla smiled for the first time, and drew close to her husband, but her eyes were frightened and her heart was pounding. But Lucilla Crespin matched her pluck with theirs—she who had the most to live for, and the most to make her welcome death.
“If he had,” Traherne expostulated, “you wouldn’t have understood. The fellow seems to be the priest—you see, he’s begging the god’s pardon.”
“If I knew his confounded lingo I’d jolly well make him beg mine,” Crespin retorted with a murderous scowl at the still penancing, groveling priest, as oblivious of them in the stress of his penitential perturbation as if they’d been three ants in a crack of the rocks.
“But you don’t know his lingo,” Mrs. Crespin said, rather as if she did not regret it, and moving away cautiously but curiously towards the other side of the enclosure.
“We’d better be careful not to tread on their corns,” Traherne urged. “We have Mrs. Crespin to think of.”
Antony’s face knotted and crimsoned again. “Damn it, sir,” he growled rudely, “do you think I don’t know how to take care of my wife?”
“I think you’re a little hasty, Major, that’s all,” Traherne replied pleasantly. “These are evidently queer people, and we’re dependent on them, you know, to get out of our hobble.”
Crespin scowled and smoked on moodily, but made no reply. Some men, and not bad sorts at that, who knew him as Traherne did, might have felt inclined to throttle him as he sat there, surly, quarrelsome and ungrateful—a positive menace to them all in their grave predicament, the man who had ruined the life of the woman Traherne loved—as far as one human being can wreck the life of another—who had spoiled her joy, sullied her mind, and made of her radiant young wifehood a sour memory that ached and reeked; the man whose bloated, degenerated being stood the only barrier between Traherne and the woman he longed for, as only clean, upright men of scrupulous life can long—if the roué but knew what he misses of nature’s greatest impulse!—the man to whom Traherne had ministered unflaggingly for hard, patient years, between whose self and its worst parts and the impending consequences of ill-doing Traherne had stood persistently. But Basil Traherne had no such impulse. Towards Antony Crespin he had no harsher feeling than pity and sympathy. He pitied Lucilla and grieved for her, but his pity and grief for the husband were more. For his science told him that the recreant man’s plight and misery were greater than the guiltless woman’s. The physicianknew. And he was true to his vocation—the vocation than which earth has none higher and finer. Traherne knew what Crespin’s lifelong handicap had been—ancestral taint, youth misguided and unprotected, and he did not judge the other who had succumbed to a strain and propensities that he himself, so circumstanced and tainted, might have succumbed to as completely and more. And, too, Traherne knew—for he had seen—as Lucilla willfully blind and incapacitated by nature never had seemed to see—how heroically Antony again and again had stood naked in Ephesus and fought his own soul beasts—knew and honored him for it. And the physician knew, as no lay mind can, the terrible provocation of torn, jumping nerves; and he sometimes, though without blaming her, wondered that Mrs. Crespin had not realized at least something of this. But nerves are the one part of masculine anatomy of which few women take any account, and of which such women as Lucilla Crespin take less than none—incapable always of intrinsic justice to the sex which they somewhat arrogantly judge by their own imperious and narrowed, if “nice,” standards, rather than by the measure nature has set. What Antony had done to her and her children she computed hotly over and over, but she gave less than a fair thought and pity to what he had done to himself, and made no mark at all of what he’d resisted. Dr. Traherne did, and he scanned Antony Crespin with a gentleness that was both masculine and splendid—and, because of his passion of heart, soul and body for the other’s wife, was heroic and fine. Lucilla Crespin would have been amazed could she have known how the scales of Traherne’s judgment weighed her and Antony against each other; and, being a woman, her resentment would have been more than her surprise.
Dr. Traherne loved Lucilla Crespin with the one man-love of his life; but he did not overrate her, and still less did he credit her with attributes and abilities that nature had denied her. For Major Crespin Traherne had little love left perhaps—but he hadsome, and far more than a meaner soul could have understood—and he had big, yearning pity. No matter how tender such men are to all womanhood, the wreck of manhood always must seem to such men as Traherne a deeper tragedy than any feminine suffering. And one thing else weighed with him on Crespin’s side of the balancing scales: Lucilla had and would hold the love and admiration of their children; Antony would lose it, if he lived. And Traherne sensed how intensely Crespin loved his youngsters. Lucilla did not. The Edelweiss keeps its admirable purity high up in the cold of the inscrutable Alps, the clover bloom is bruised and stained in the wayside dirt; but why praise the Edelweiss, why, in Heaven’s name, blame the clover “low i’ the dust”? Draggled and broken, the clover-head still gives a perfume, shows a color the unsmirched flower in the ice and snow forever lacks. And, if Traherne never forgot—what every physician knows—that “to step aside is human,” he not only pitied Crespin for all in the older man that was faulty and weak, he also liked and respected him for what was strong and good. And there was much.
Antony Crespin’s wife was unhappy; she needed no added heartache, but she might have been unhappier yet, had she seen her husband as Dr. Traherne saw him.
Certainly the world would be a far duller place if we all were as fair-minded as Basil Traherne, and if life carried no privilege and zest of censure. You’d be less contented and comfortable, if you did not think that you were better than I am, and I should be less comfortable and contented, if I did not know that I am better than you are.