Burmese Silver

Preface

In this novel of pre-War Burma a Lieutenant-Governor of that country is mentioned, and a Governor of Bengal makes a brief appearance. For those who believe all fiction is biographical or autobiographical, let me confess that I have never met a Lieutenant-Governor of Burma and that my encounters with Governors of Bengal have been formal. My two Excellencies, then, are no one who ever lived. They are just Excellencies.

I could not excise all names beginning with Mac and preserve verisimilitude, since I have a skipper and an engineer. I have therefore kept these names, though sure that many Macs have visited Burma. I never met any of them.

E.T.

Boars Hill,
Oxford.
August 12th, 1936.

Release

Chapter I

I

You were unlikely to notice him, met in others’ company. You would be right in dismissing him as a man whose future could hold no surprises for him, and nothing of much importance for anyone else. That air of having held authority meant nothing, in a land where it came to every manager of a considerable firm. He doubtless had a good job, with a pension in the offing.

Only if you strayed into closer examination, when there happened to be hardly any others present, were you likely to notice the wrinkling round the eyes, and the sunken pits of their old burning. And might see the final unconscious gesture which gives a man’s whole self away—a manner of standing aside from these others whose minds were working with such vivacity, whose lips were so eagerly busy. You might see also the movement—or less than movement, a quiet acquiescence of body and brain, which took up release, as a dying man takes up the cup of forgetfulness.

Yet even this does not give the sense of detachment that he took with him. You might be conscious of a spirit watching at a window—at that moment, it might be, a window opening on to your own all-absorbing house of life.

Thirty years of service were finished. The dragging round of farewells and last foregatherings was finished. Friendships were folded up and laid aside in memory.

His goods could wait in his agents’ godowns, until he returned to take passage to England. He waited now for the B.I. ship that sailed to Rangoon this evening.

This Burmese trip was a holiday, wisely and sensibly accepted. But it was also a fool’s errand, and Clive Powell faced unhappily the reception he was likely to meet. Twenty-eight years of silence had passed between them, and he would have to confront again the unreasoning resentment which had blazed up in Gabriel’s answer to his last letter that had been answered at all.

Ass that he had been, in that letter which God knows had been written out of mere distress and kindness, to lapse into its one clumsy sentence! “Whatever others may say has been proved against you, it makes no difference to my feelings.” The reply had come blastingly back. “Damn what you call your feelings! You’ve listened to what you coolly say ‘has been proved against me’, and that’s enough! Damn your infernal patronage! Damn your charitable feelings! Damn the lot of you!”

He had written back protesting against the twisting of what he had said into what he had not said and had been careful not to say. No answer had come, to this or to any letter that followed it.

II

At Clive’s leave-taking, His Excellency expressed the regret which all classes and races felt. He spoke movingly of India’s loss. An immense pathos came into his tones, as he visualised the veiled woman of our cartoonists, her sari draped about her head, weeping as yet another of her champions went to his rest and pension.

“If you’d hang on for another year or two, Powell, I’d try to get you on to the Land Commission that’s to be set up. That would mean a K, of course, for a man of your distinction and seniority. And afterwards———”

His Excellency hesitated. Clive knew what he was thinking of saying. There was a Member of Council whose health could hardly last out much longer. There would be a vacancy, and—and—and.

But half-promises are better not made. Clive had been passed over at the last vacancy. And it wasn’t as if the choice must be made from his province. Other Presidencies had their men who had earned promotion. The Viceroy had his own fancy civilians.

Clive said only that he wanted to go. It was time that younger men took the places of men of his generation. He had had his “whack of power and authority, and India had given him a good time”.

He was sorry to go. Still, to go when our time comes is the law.

His Excellency sympathetically pressed his hand. The poor chap was all broken up by Letty Powell’s death last year. Come to think of it, what use was a K to a man whose wife and only child had died?

“I daresay you’re right. Only you leave a gap which we shall find very hard to fill. In these times of stress and multiplying perplexities it has been no small thing for the Head of this Administration to feel that in the upper circles of the Service there are men of your proved sagacity and experience, and sympathy with the rightful aspirations of the people of India—while prompt” (His Excellency was careful to add) “to check the manifestations of mere discontent and a disloyal unscrupulous agitation.”

The flicker of a smile almost showed in the tired face, like the all but imperceptible lift of the earth above some creature whose instinct swiftly bids it remain below ground after all. Clive felt it as a tribute that His Excellency had strayed into something resembling the vernacular which men ordinarily spoke. Usually he stayed on the platform of rotund eloquence which was his spiritual home. And rightly. Where would His Excellency’s well-deserved name for statesmanship be, if he ploughed a less majestic, less resounding way, through a land less heavily draped with never-lifting fog? You knew they were somewhere there, those deep massive meanings—as the cave-man trembling outside primeval swamps knew behind their steaming curtain of impressive noisy darkness the ponderous plashing tread of mastodon and ichthyosaurus.

“Your decision”, H.E. concluded, smiling kindly and wisely, “is a very sensible one. You are quite right to take a holiday, and you will find Burma a most delightful and picturesque country, with delightful and—and—picturesque people. Rather like the Japanese. In fact”, said His Excellency, who had never seen either Burma or Japan, “I always say that Burma is the Japan of the Middle East. Also, the Italy of the East. It will be a welcome change after India, and I hope it will set you up. I have written to Sir John Craven-Simpson about you, and his Government are going to look after you. So bon voyage, now and when you finally sail. Write to me when you feel inclined. There is no one whose counsel and advice I shall value more.”

III

Going down the steps of Government House, Clive was overtaken by Sir Robertson Chesters, K.C.I.E. Chesters had the Secretaryship of Mines and Fisheries which most people expected Powell to get, when it fell vacant three months previously. His appointment was all right, and Clive bore no regret for it, though he knew the common impression that it had contributed its pricking of pique towards his resignation.

Chesters had first learnt his job under Powell, as Assistant Collector, and learnt it briskly and efficiently. Afterwards, without any learning at all, by a gift of nature he had drafted the finest and most elaborate Minutes that even Bengal had produced in the last fifty years.

“I slipped out from H.E. when you came. But I told them to let me know when you had finished together. You and I must have our own special private last word.”

They walked to the gates.

Then what Clive was dreading happened. Chesters probed this rumour that he was planning to visit the officially dead.

“Look here, Powell! what’s this yarn about your going to look up Raja Gabriel? You’re not, are you?”

“Yes. I am,” admitted Clive reluctantly. “We were at Wren’s together, and at Oxford before that. We came out together——”

“Oh, quite. And you were friends, and all that— Travers was a lively chap, in many ways a most attractive chap—of course we didn’t know what he was all the time doing!—until the crash came. Well, of course, after that you and he couldn’t stay friends, naturally.”

“You’ve got it wrong,” said Clive, almost rudely. “It was Travers who dropped me. He would answer no letters.”

“That shows some sense of decency in him, anyway. But why look him up now?”

“I want to.”

Chesters pondered this.

“Of course I remember you used to be frightfully keen on him. I rather liked him myself. It was a most appalling pity he went wrong the way he did. My God!” said Sir Robertson reminiscently. “But it was the most awful smash anyone has come since the good old days of John Company and the shaking of the pagoda tree!”

The ghost was anxious to depart, and sick of this paraphernalia of life and soul saving—of nurse and doctor and priest, all claiming the spirit eager only to be gone.

“I suppose you know that Buddhawbwe is all head-hunters’ country. All unadministered territory. Craven-Simpson’ll never let you go up there. It’ll mean a punitive expedition if anything happens—all because your fair locks are dangling from some jungly maiden’s belt!”

“That’s all right. I know about all that.”

“You won’t go, then.”

“Yes, I shall go. But there’ll be no punitive expedition. I’ll go at my own risk. After all, if Travers can live up there, why can’t I go there?”

“Well, Travers lives there, because he’s gone mad. The best thing that could happen to him, too! And the best country for it to happen in! He did the right thing when he took himself off to Burma—the land where everyone makes his own relations! Jolly good scheme, that! We used to have it in this country.”

“I know,” said Clive patiently.

At the gates they waited aimlessly, each uncertain how to say the severing word. The Sikh sentry kept nervously saluting every time Sir Robertson Chesters looked his way.

“Oh, damn the fellow! he’s like a Jack-in-the-box! Look here, Powell, we’re all worried about you! You’ll never stand the journey at your time of life. H.E. said he was sure the yarn was all rot and that you had too much sense and experience to go off on a jaunt like this one.”

“I can’t understand how it got about,” said Clive, nettled at last. “I told H.E., simply because I didn’t want any nonsense of trying to stop me when I reached Burma. However” (he smiled), “we’d better cut the agony short and say good-bye.”

They shook hands, and went different ways. Trying to salute both simultaneously, the sentry nearly dislocated his neck and nearly committed harakiri at the same moment.

Chesters apologised to His Excellency for being so long away. “I really had to argue with poor old Powell, sir. He means it, about going to visit Raja Gabriel. I wonder if his brain’s beginning to be affected. It shows it’s about time he went home.”

“Well; we’ve done our best to stop him. If Craven-Simpson after my letter lets him go———”

His Excellency made an expansive gesture. The ball had got past him, to the boundary, and he signalled hopelessness.

Then he grew suddenly grave. “I wonder if Clive Powell’s as simple as he seems. I wonder if he knows what’s going forward in Raja Gabriel’s country? If he means to shake the pagoda tree good and hard for himself?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Sir Robertson Chesters, genuinely shocked. “Powell’s as simple as a child, he is really. I was his Assistant for two years, and I know him through and through.”

“Isn’t that rather a lot to say of anyone?”

“Not of Clive Powell, sir,” replied Chesters confidently.

His Excellency looked doubtful.

IV

For the little that was left of the morning, Clive sauntered along Chowringhee, and did a little desultory shopping. He bought a book or two, for steamer and train reading: a box of cheroots: a few handkerchiefs. He looked at the people, in a detached manner he had never experienced before.

He saw above the busy street the feathery wisp of what he took to be the dying moon. She was looking down in the same detached fashion, and there was a secret understanding between her and him. She singled him out of all this polyglot mob, and was saying, “I know that you are leaving this incarnation, that your youth and dreams are here, and that you will presently go to what has become an alien land, to die there, and to die very quickly.”

”Ah, Moon of my Delight who know’st no wane,
The Moon of Heaven is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me—in vain!”

Then he banished such maudlin broodings. Melodrama and self-pity were not in his line; nor did he take himself and his destiny very seriously. Only, these thoughts fitted in with his gently elegiac mood—a mood not unhappy or deep, but allowing him the unusual luxury of letting himself imagine for a moment that the universe took him more gravely than he took himself, and was looking on him, and on him alone, just while the whim lasted.

V

Nurse and doctors and priest let the ghost go at last, they vexed him no longer. The Akyab was sailing at nine this night; and, by a coincidence, that pleased him, it was Clive’s fifty-sixth birthday. India had had the best of him; and her soil was keeping all that he cared about.

After an afternoon rest, he roused himself to strip off soaking shirt and duck trousers, and fling cold water over his body. Then he dressed, putting by the superfluous assistance of John the Madrasi, whom (because of his knowledge of Burmese) he had engaged to cook and valet for him. Repulsed as he rushed forward to help in drawing on trousers and fastening braces, John stood unhappy and disapproving by. However, he brightened up when he took the day’s wet garments, to wash on the voyage to Rangoon.

Clive dined early, and made his way to the Akyab.

After the steamer had started, he remained on deck awhile, watching the river’s ripples and splashes of sudden light, the banks glimmering or blackening with openings and massings of jungle. Hugli was lapsing heavily to her nuptials with the ocean, a giantess going to her mate; and Bengal reeled into the backward darkness.

Then he lay awake, in his cabin, listening to the soft rush of water outside. He had lain awake a great deal in these last few years.

After Letty died, in the loneliness that had come upon his life he had seemed to withdraw from this existence to the borders of another, and to be waiting for steps to enter from it. The steps had come.

Small things at first. Trivial disquiets, yet somehow bearing with them the witness that they were not the ordinary physical ailments which the body presently shakes off. He had ignored them, and gone on doing his work, the only thing he could do. Then had come experiences more troubling, and he had seen a doctor and been told that he needed furlough, finally that he needed to retire altogether.

Last of all, he had been told, and by no doctor, that his life was over. He remembered, as if there had been no other hour in his whole life, the hour when he had first wakened to the certainty that his illness was mortal. It had been just such an hour as this—one of deep darkness, a great while before the kokils would begin crying in the Indian dawn. He had lain awake, not in any severe pain, but with the inescapable certainty that his span of life and work was ending. After that, he had seen another doctor, had forced his knowledge on him, had been X-rayed, had been told what he knew already.

“Of course, if you like you can be operated on, Mr. Powell. I should go home for it, though.”

“Will it do any good?”

“One never knows. Sometimes—for a while——”

“I understand. How long do you give me?”

“Eighteen months. More or less.”

“How long can I lead a normal life, do you think? Can I travel?”

“Yes. For a while. Six months, say. You’ll have to go carefully, of course. Rest every third or fourth day or so. Otherwise, you’ll use up the six months in three, or even two.”

“Thank you. Six months will do me nicely. And now—do you mind, doctor?—you’ll help me keep my secret, won’t you?”

“Of course. Now that you realise you must go home. I couldn’t have kept silent if you’d tried to carry on, of course. But from now on it’s your affair and no one else’s.”

Eighteen months, more or less. Less, if God were good to him. Six months of normal life—they were all he needed or wanted. Afterwards, he was indifferent to what might happen.

Chapter II

I

At Mandalay, Clive found His Excellency had gone to Maymyo. But Sir Charles Haymann was obviously deputed to say all that was in His Excellency’s mind.

“You can’t get higher than Homalin. That’s the furthest the river steamers go. And they go only when the river is full.”

“I understand it is possible to steam six days further—another hundred miles or so. That it has been done. That it is not infrequently done.”

“Only by small launches, doing exploration work.”

Clive said nothing. No offer of a lift on a Government launch was coming his way. Not that he expected it, or had even dreamed of it! Still, there are such launches, and they often pass up and down on business.

“We take no responsibility for anything that happens in unadministered territory.”

“I’m asking no one to take any responsibility. But I happen to know that men—Europeans—have gone into unadministered territory. Missionaries; Police officers.”

“Oh, quite. There were those two Germans—or were they Hungarians?—who went seven years ago. Looking for gold, or jade mines, or something,” said Haymann with studied evasiveness.

“There is jade there,” said Clive, as if thinking aloud.

Haymann started; then looked at Clive from suspicious eyes.

“Oh, quite. Quite. There are also”, he said grimly, “head-hunters. Those two Johnnies’ heads are now adorning some sort of sawbwa’s palace, up behind Sarameti. Nicely shrunken, and preserved with some sort of juice that they use for extra special heads, white men’s and so on. But on a perfectly beautiful background of lac and tinsel. These jungly potentates have a wonderful artistic sense, and revel in the use of contrast.”

“So Government will do nothing for me?”

“Oh, dash it, I won’t say that, Powell. We’ll give you chits and all that. But that’s as much as we can do. I’m afraid you’ll find it’ll amount to nothing. The truth is, H.E. and all of us don’t like the idea of your going on this—well, to be quite frank; I hope you don’t mind?”

“Not a bit.”

“Well, on this perfectly mad trip. You see, Powell, it isn’t as if you were just some ordinary fool of a tourist out for local picturesqueness—some damned idiot of a writer hoping to do some cheap exploring and make a fuss about it. Or even as if you were some junior officer. You happen to be a senior and distinguished member of the Government of another province “

“I’ve resigned,” Clive reminded him.

“But hang it all! you can’t resign! Men in our position”, said Sir Charles generously, “never do resign—in the opinion of the natives. If you get scuppered, what they’ll think is that a sahib of the first importance has been done in. And if we don’t send a punitive expedition (and I tell you frankly, we aren’t going to send one), then where’s our prestige? We’ve let a sahib—and not just some junior or non-official sahib—have his head taken as a trophy, and we daren’t do anything! Think it out, Powell! You’ve been in high responsibility yourself, and know exactly what that means.”

Clive returned to his basic argument. “Travers lives there.”

“Yes. He lives there because he is mad. Or worse. And he lives there as a Raja. As a sawbwa, an independent kind of comic opera king. I don’t mind telling you, Government is by no means satisfied as to what may be going on in what he is pleased to call his territory. We hear rumours,” said Sir Charles darkly. “And we don’t like them. We may have to be sending our own exploration commission up there some time or other, to take tea with Raja Gabriel. Why”, he concluded boisterously, “for all we know, Raja Gabriel head-hunts himself. Think of it, Powell! Your head, a month from now, may be the centre-piece above the door of your old friend’s wigwam!”

“I shan’t fuss about what may happen to my head when I’ve finished with it.”

“Oh, quite. Quite. But why not keep it as long as you can?”

II

With over thirty years of official life behind him, Clive listened not merely to the overtones of Haymann’s remonstrance, but to its undertones and half-conscious hints.

Yet he did not hear these at first, for he was listening only to what he knew was coming, objections to his project on the grounds of danger to himself and embarrassment to Government, which he tried to meet in his own mind. To the former he was indifferent, and in any case thought it over-assessed. Savages—at any rate, some savages—were like some volcanoes. They had long periods of quiescence. They did not head-hunt at all hours of their waking existence, and even into their dreams. They head-hunted when religion or custom or a mistress demanded it. At other times, as he put it to himself, “They collect beads or red flowers to stick in their hair, and they chat pleasantly with you and grin back.”

Perhaps. In any case, it did not matter.

As for the embarrassment to Government, he did not exaggerate that, either. If he died of fever or accident, Government would be exonerated. If he were killed, the story would reach them first in some untruthful report which they could, if they wished, accept as correct. When the facts did ultimately filter out, it would be into a region—the Upper Chindwin valley—as large as Scotland and with a mere sprinkling of inhabitants at wide intervals along the river front. No newspapers, and hardly any Europeans. Very few Burmans, for that matter. Why should one doubtful death beyond their borders trouble this handful of fishermen, cultivators, hunters, and British Bombay-Burma Company employees? Government could see to it that it did not trouble them.

But he had begun to sense, as the interview progressed, that behind the facade of what Haymann said openly was a stiffer opposition to his going than was admitted. There was, he began to see (and was amazed when he saw it) a conviction that his one motive for what he was doing was a blind and a pretence. Behind the diplomatic bluffness of Haymann’s man-to-man reasoning with him was suspicion, and even a disapproving respect. The suspicion looked at him, like the eyes of some beast of prey suddenly picked out in the inner blackness of a cave, and when discovered concentrating all attention on themselves. What was it that he was now suspected of being up to? Had that suspicion been fastened upon him, even before he left Bengal—had it shown itself, cautiously and cryptically, in the interview he had had with His Excellency in Calcutta, and that following one with Chesters?

What was it that Gabriel was darkly thought to be doing, that might some day soon entail a mission to take tea with the offender?

Clive thought much about it, and it was the background of his days of delay till the Chindwin steamer was due to leave Monywa. It lived with him while he did his tourist devoirs manfully, exploring the Arakan Pagoda and contributing his ten rupees for more gold leaf to be stuck on the giant Buddha there, or going over the tawdrily brilliant palaces of Thibaw and his Queen.

Chapter III

I

At six a.m., Clive caught the train which was to dawdle away in ten hours the fifty miles between Mandalay and Monywa.

At the height of the drawn-out fuss of starting, a weedy excited man in the late twenties flung into his carriage. He threw himself about as if challenging something, he was not certain what. Took a quick look at Clive, then was unnecessarily ingratiating. Asked whether this corner was taken or that rack wanted. Clive courteously made it clear that his small amount of kit was all disposed of, and that he could sit in only one of the four corners.

Before the station’s gates stood an excessively cheery group. A bright-faced baby who might be twenty-one was talking noisily to a man of perhaps forty, who was standing beside a pony. The others were friends of both parties.

Clive’s companion pushed to the window. “Look! There’s a bloody young ass who’s going to drop a packet!”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Why, that bloody young fool has taken on Steve Garratt’s bet that he can race this bloody train on his pony, to Monywa.”

“Well, can he?”

“Of course he can! Steve’s been cleaning up good and proper off bloody young fools like that boy, for the last half-dozen years. He took five hundred dibs off an ass in the I.C.S., only two months ago. I wonder how much young Babyface has on against him? Someone ought to tell the young swine. Yet I don’t know. If a fellow’s a b.f., he’s got to be educated somehow.”

At last the whistle blew in earnest, and with final gusts of laughter the disputants separated. Babyface ran to his train; the rider stood ready with reins gathered up; friends stood between counting “One! two! No, not yet! Wait, Steve, old boy! She hasn’t begun to shake a wheel yet.” The train suddenly heaved, hesitated, then started an unmistakable roll. Steve sprang into the saddle, as Babyface and the umpires shouted his release; and he was off at a sharp trot.

II

Time, which for Clive had been standing still, now took a jump backward, a whole century, perhaps more.

Since he came to Burma, about him had eddied a flood of ribald emancipated talk. Legends were freely told of the greatest in the land, without dread of contradiction or process for libel. Around him were the morals of the age when West and East had first met, and ethics and conventions had curtsied to the new conditions.

“You new to this country?” asked Clive’s companion.

“Yes.”

“Globe-trotter?”

“No. On holiday from India.”

“Well, I’d go carefully if I were you. Oh, I don’t mean anything offensive. Mind you, the women are charming. They’re not like the women you get in India.”

“The people’s manners seem to me perfect,” said Clive irrelevantly.

“They are. Just perfect. Jack Burman’s a gentleman. And Jill Burman’s a lady. But their morals! My God! but they’re bloody! You take any of those girls you’ve seen sitting in the bazaar at Mandalay. Try saying something offensive to her——”

“Why the devil should I?” asked Clive; and then laughed.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you to take it like that. I only meant—supposing you did! You’d have all her male relations down on you like a pack of tigers, to avenge the insult. But so long as you keep to polite language you can do what you like. What do you think of that?”

“I think”, said Clive reflectively, “that it’s a thing it’s useful to know.”

Followed a dissertation on “sahibs that are sahibs”, by one who ranked himself highly as a particularly terror-striking example of the genre; and a spate of abuse of Indians, delivered with omniscience and virulence, that kept Clive gazing hard at the scenery.

Yet it ended in almost kindliness, as Clive, to change the subject, drew his attention to a happy group in a village beside the track. “Oh, that’s Jack Burman all over! As cheery as a sandboy! You simply can’t treat Jack Burman as a native. Jack’s always been as good as his master here, and Jack Burman treats you as his equal. You can be perfectly friendly and familiar with him, and he’ll never take the least advantage of you. Only, mind you, you must keep your hands off him. He won’t stand being hit—not by anyone.”

“You seem to think”, said Clive smiling, “that I’ve come here prepared to run amuck with both hands.”

“Oh, I was only telling you these people aren’t like Indians. You going far, by the way? This isn’t a regular globe-trotter’s beat, you know.”

“Monywa. Kindat. Maybe beyond.”

“Ah! Now if you really could get beyond! Up in the beyond there’s a chap who calls himself the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe—Raja Gabriel everyone else calls him. He’s a sahib. Was in the I.C.S. himself once, somewhere in India. But he came the most awful cropper. They say he’s the only I.C.S. fellow that’s ever been sacked. If you asked about him in India, I daresay you’d hear of him.”

“I have heard of him.”

“Well, he didn’t like it. Being sacked, I mean. So he kicked the dust of India off his feet, and came and made himself a Raja up in the head-hunters’ country out here.”

Amarapura ruins released a shower of inaccurate information about Burma’s kings. Finally, as the train came in sight of the Irawadi ferry, Clive’s companion, on his dignity but unable to refrain from imparting knowledge, said:

“I’m getting out here. But I’ll tell you one more thing about Raja Gabriel. There’s going to be trouble up in his country! Bloody soon! There are fellows who damn well mean to get a finger in his pie, that he’s been keeping to himself all these years.”

III

Babyface tumbled from his carriage, to find Steve and his pony waiting. The two sportsmen greeted each other effusively, and there was an interval for liquid refreshment.

Clive knew the Babyfaces and sportsmen of his own world pretty intimately. He was more interested in the pageant of a people who were so different from those among whom he had spent his life in India.

The scene was like what he supposed the Inland Sea of Japan must be, and His Excellency’s words in Calcutta now seemed inspired. Ricestraw-hatted boatmen poled their craft over that glorious island-dotted expanse—the Irawadi, up whose central channel a dreadnought could steam to Mandalay. Hills pagoda-crowned looked down on a diminutive folk disporting themselves. A host of tiny girls were swimming, lifting their faces to shake the water out of their eyes and mouths and to laugh upward at the watching passengers. Porpoises mingled with them, turning over and over in the solemn fashion in which they spend their catherine-wheel-revolving lives.

Now and again, a boat butted against a swimmer’s head. It seemed to cause her no inconvenience, and was taken as a great jest. Everything was a great jest. Best of all was when a boat passed under the ropes between the landing-stage and the shore, whisking a boatman’s hat into the river or nearly decapitating its owner. At the shallow edges were one or two older women, bathing, or drying out their hair and clothes.

On the landing-stage a daughter of Herodias danced, not for money, but for sheer devilish fun. She bobbed up against Clive, who was watching the swimmers. She roared with glee, and the crowd roared with her.

The ferry took them over at last. And beside them swam those heavenly laughing children. Dived and ducked, and outdid the river-pigs for skill and aquatic ease. Drove the water off their faces, and favoured the ferried ones with saucy grins. At Sagaing, which is another ruined former capital, the train resumed its labours, and Steve Garratt and his steed their race.

IV

Clive gained a new companion, a sallow little Eurasian hardly out of his teens, who was consumed with curiosity as to why this elderly man was travelling to Monywa, and wondered whether, and when, he dared speak, and force an acquaintance.

The chance came as Clive was shaken out of his serenity by the vast Irawadi mosquitoes. One settled on his cheek, and he slapped at it. His companion was all over him with friendliness.

“My word, man, but these mosquitoes are bad! Terrible things! They will get you some way or other, you may bet your bottom boots on that! Have you ever been up the Chindwin?”

“No, I’ve never seen it even. Fine river, they tell me.”

“Oh, it is nothing! Nothing beside the Irawadi. But it is terribly wild, man. My people, they are so sorry that I am being sent there. To such a Godforsaken hole! They say——”

Clive was sure that they said a great deal, on any topic that presented itself. He had seen their farewells at Sagaing Station. Family affection, or at any rate its outward signs and expressions, is a virtue that accompanies warmer blood than ours.

Clive slapped at another mosquito, which brought the conversation back to where it started.

“Up the Chindwin there are terrible mosquitoes. Far worse than these, man! They are the size of teapots and they bark like dogs. They will have your blood, whatever you do, you may bet your bottom dollar on that!”

Encouraged by Clive’s smiling, his companion introduced himself. “My name is Marjoribanks. Augustus Cholmondeley—you pronounce it Chumley, you know; and Marjoribanks is Marshbanks. Augustus Chumley Marshbanks. We are a very old family. My people—in England, now—well, I wouldn’t like to tell you how important they are. The King himself knows them well. Yes, really well. We are a very old Scotch family, you see. But my mother and sisters—they like living out here, for my mother was here when Burma was independent. She was a great favourite with King Thibaw, you see. They always called me Gussie.”

“My name is Powell,” said Clive.

“Well, Mr. Powell——”

“Powell.”

“Oh, thank you so much. Well, Powell, if you are new to this country, there are ever so many things I can tell you, Powell.”

There were. Gussie prattled on, while Clive’s emancipated eyes watched the plains dance slowly past. They were a scrub forest of thorns and giant cacti, variegated with frequent torches of the Flame of the Forest, and with time-wrecked pagodas. Grave meditative companies of cranes and adjutants stood on the open patches.

There was a break at one considerable station, and here a group of dark-eyed damsels were awaiting Gussie. As the train moved off again, they waved compendiously and often.

“They are wishing you, Powell,” said Gussie.

So Clive wished back.

Chapter IV

I

Somewhere out of sight, Steve Garratt and his unfortunate pony sweated away the remaining forty miles, which the train, intolerably tedious, did in eight hours. As it steamed at last into Monywa, they were awaiting its arrival; and Babyface seemed less happy, as he and Steve went off together.

Instructed by the invaluable Gussie, Clive took his kit on bullock-carts to the Chindwin steamer, where he left it in charge of John the Madrasi, whom he ordered to prepare a hot bath. Then he went for a walk. Gussie accompanied him.

The cactuses and thorns had vanished, for groves of trees, which grew round the village and filled the recesses of the hills. They deepened the silence. Everything was still, except a procession of Burmese girls moving along the river’s eastern bank.

They were laughing gaily, but in low tones. Clive seeing their brightness of varying silk, and the pink bamboo-orchids and scarlet lilies in their black hair, thought he had never seen colours so pricked and sharpened together, to such perfect artistry. Sunset completed the scene, in an explosion and conflagration of splendour, burning through the woods and laying a rubied path across the stream, whose surface a cool steady breeze was ruffling.

As Clive and Gussie passed through the village, the peacefulness continued. Smiles were on every face; smiles and perfect silence. Even the children played in perfect stillness. Clive began to wonder if he would not rather have been unaccompanied by Gussie, who talked on and on, in an appealing infantile fashion.

The European Club was an enclave shaded by lofty tamarinds and bushes hung with long fluted yellow bells. Clive, who had come so unprepared, for the first time in his life trusting himself to tides and winds of destiny, might pick up here a wisp of news. “I’m going in here,” he said. “Come along, Marshbanks.”

Gussie shrank back in horror. “No. My bosses might be there, and they wouldn’t like it.”

Of course. Ass, to forget that a Eurasian clerk can never be part of “the station”! Clive went in, and Gussie returned.

Four men were seated together, in easy chairs, smoking pipes or cheroots, with pegs on small tables beside them. All four were silent, had obviously been silent for a great while, and might be silent for a great while longer. All four looked stiffly at Clive, and their eyes were expressionless.

He plunged in mid-topic. “I’m looking for a man called Travers. Gabriel Travers, I shall be grateful for any hint as to how to reach him.”

If he had gone up to one of these statuesque compatriots, and had exploded a squib down his neck, Clive would have startled them less. Their eyes focussed into needle-points of questioning.

The object of their scrutiny gazed back, for what seemed a time, times, and half a time again.

Then four voices spoke simultaneously.

“What will you have to drink, sir?”

Clive was travel-stained and dusty, more like some pseudo-European nondescript than he would have cared to know. But his brevet was recognised; he was of “station” rank.

He accepted a soft drink. He sat down. And waited, acknowledging the ritual of silence which the place imposed.

II

What followed should have been told in poetry, in some ballad of long ago. It seemed recital rather than living action. The group sat obviously in some kind of after-existence, “all silent and all damned”.

“Aye, I can tell you,” said a dry emotionless voice. “The best way would be to come up on my launch. I’ll give you a bairth as far as Kindat, and maybe faither. After that—well, we’d have to have a crack aboot it.”

“I’ve taken passage on the Moulmein” answered Clive. “But it’s awfully kind of you. Thank you very much.”

“Why, to tell the truth, I’d be glad of a bit of companionship. It’s a thing we don’t get too much of oot here—in a country as big as Scotland, and wi’ less than fifty white men in it.”

“Do you know Travers?” asked a second man gravely.

“I haven’t seen him for getting on for thirty years.”

“Thairty years! think o’ that now!” said the skipper. “Thairty years is a deal of time for you to be bothering to want to see anither fellow again.”

“There are a good many men who would like to see Travers just now,” said the third man.

The fourth man—a man of about thirty-two or so; his face suspicious and watchful, his eyes cautious and withdrawn—had said nothing. He now rose and left them. It seemed to Clive that there was a lightening of tension as he went.

“He was my closest friend before things went wrong,” said Clive simply. “It has not been my fault that the thirty years have gone by without any word between us.”

The Scots skipper thawed out completely. “If you won’t come wi’ me—by the way, what’s your name? Mine’s MacKenzie. Rob MacKenzie.”

Introductions were effected all round.

“I’m sorry,” said Clive. “I’d like to come. But I’ve been travelling up with a fellow whose knowledge of the country has been rather useful to me, to be quite frank. And it seems shabby to leave him now, when he might like a bit of companionship.”

“Why, for that matter, I’m not sure but that I might be able to find a bed for both of you.”

“He’s a Eurasian.”

“I—see. Well, since you canna take my offer, perhaps you’ll remember my name. I’ll be seeing you at Kindat, I reckon. Maybe I can be of some use to you there.”

“Thank you very much. I’ll be glad of help. And advice. This country’s new to me, you see.”

“It’s a vera queer country. Deefficult and strange to them that’s new to it. You’ll be a veesitor here, then? But no, you said you once knew Travers.”

It was only fair to meet the curiosity of those three pairs of eyes. They had each told him what they were—Scots skipper and merchant, Bombay—Burma Company employee, Captain employed in the Police. The man who had gone was Civil Service.

“I was in the I.C.S.,” said Clive.

“You were! Then that’s how you come to know Travers!”

“Yes. We were the same year in the Service. Good night, gentlemen.”

“Good night,” said the others. All rose to say it. Clive drifted out, aware of eyes wondering and questioning as they followed him.

“I.C.S. of thairrty years’ service,” said MacKenzie. “Coming to look up an old pal who was sacked. And won’t accept a berth because a Eurasian he’s picked up may be lonely and maybe a bit hurt if he leaves him!”

The River

Chapter I

I

Henceforward, day after day, as the Moulmein ploughed her path up the divinely lovely river, an ever-changing beauty unfolded. Broad sandbanks, crowded with waterfowl, sunned themselves above the surface. Sometimes fields shaded all round with palms and plantains stretched to the horizon. Most often of all, towering headlands, each crested with its pagoda, and hills densely forested and brilliantly aflame with scarlet flowers, shut them in. Here and there rose a lonely talipat palm, thrusting up its crown and death of glory—the phoenix on her pyre and bed of new existence. Cocopalms waved their graceful frondage.

As they pushed ever upstream, the forest showed itself alive with beast and bird. Otters swam after the steamer, and lifted enquiring fearless heads. Deer plunged past in the coverts. Jungle fowl strutted in flocks, as if the woods were one vast barnyard.

The Bonnie Lassie, the launch whose owner had offered Clive a trip, ran swiftly by them and was soon out of sight.

“That’s good,” said McAndrew, the seventeen-stone Ulsterman who commanded the Moulmein, when Clive drew his attention to the otters. “I know where they are. I’ll have a shot at them when I come down.”

II

Gussie’s talk, to one less tolerant, might have seemed sordid and monotonous. The talk of those who are struggling for mere existence is sordid; and to those with ample rent-rolls or Government posts by right of ancestry must seem depressing and mean.

Clive, however, was here to learn and listen, as never before. Out of this life into another (if another awaited him) he could at least carry understanding. After his periods as student, householder and administrator, his time for education had come. Education of the self by the self, the only education that matters.

Gussie told of his for-years-baffled struggles to get Government employment. How this opening had been blocked, how that prospect had vanished. How at last he had got this temporary job, to help in the Chindwin postal service, for two months only.

It was Major Balfour—you must have heard of him, man! Why, he was the famous Major Balfour who was here all through the time of the early occupation, when all these hills that we are coming to were simply full of dacoits. And they were, Oh, so cruel! Why, man, they used to fill their prisoners up with kerosene oil, and then set a match to them! They used to——”

Yes, Clive had heard all this, and cut it short by saying so.

“Well, Major Balfour was a great friend of mother’s. Mother—she was, well, she was famous for her beauty. We are of a very old Scotch family, you know. Oh, well, she helped Major Balfour often against his dacoits, because mother knew the country, you see, and all about the dacoits and their ways—mother was a great favourite with King Thibaw, a great favourite—and she was a favourite with Major Balfour, and so he wrote from his place in Scotland to the Lieutenant-Governor and to other high men out here, and so I have got this post. But it is only temporary, and the pay is very poor. Only a hundred rupees a month.”

III

The Moulmein was a floating bazaar, its lower decks crowded with Burmans bringing onions, hurricane lamps, preserved fish, to sell in the jungly fastnesses. Downstream past them drifted long broad bamboo rafts, each bearing a hut, inhabited by families taking down to Monywa and further, to Pakokku, lac and wax and jade and forest products. After marketing these, they would break up their floating tabernacle and sell it as firewood; and return upstream on an Irawadi Flotilla steamer, bringing the luxuries they had purchased.

There are worse lives being lived on this planet. Day after day to drift on this mighty river, a thousand miles from the sea yet dwarfing our puny Thames or reed-thin Severn—to hear the sip-sop of the friendly water, and feel it cool against your toes—to see the trapped tiny fishes swimming in the swamps which your raft carries! Burma should one day have its poets for the outside world, if it be true that “beauty born of murmuring sound” passes into the brain. Here children’s earliest memories moved in a wavering tapestry to soft low music.

Halted at some hamlet, the Moulmein would run close inshore—there was almost always deep water up to the edges—and the men would oversee their women shifting and shoving to land the heavy packages. The village belles, their tresses done up Japwise and with bright flowers set in them, would stand under their grass parasols and advise the elderly women how to carry their loads. Children splashed round the steamer; and everyone jested at work as the Creator’s funniest invention.

McAndrew, apparently not fearing to make the Moulmein sag wildly over, leant his seventeen stone against the rail, spat out the remnants of his cheroot, and observed, “Last week a fellow begged from me—it’s very unusual for a Burman to beg, except at one of their show temples, where they’ve all got darned greedy. He begged; and I asked him why he didn’t work. He said, ‘I can’t work any longer now. You see, my wife’s gone blind.’ That’s the way Jack Burman does his work.”

There was one drawback only, Clive felt, his mind drinking in deep draughts of peacefulness. This preserved fish which Jack Burman must have with his curry—the whole of this exquisite land was permeated by the world’s most appalling odour.

IV

Gussie continued Clive’s education.

“Mother was a great favourite with King Thibaw. A really great favourite. All my sister’s toys were of silver, and my aunt was allowed a hundred two-anna bits a day as pocket-money. We were all great favourites. King Thibaw—of course, Government says he was a very bad man, and of course,” admitted Gussie loyally, “he was. In a way, that is. Though he was very nice, too, mother always says. But he did not always behave quite well. One day, mother says, he was flirting with a princess. Queen Supayalat came suddenly round from her special palace, and she caught him at it, and she seized him by the hair—this way—and she said, ‘Come here, you utter rascal.’ She used a very bad word, mother says. ‘What do you mean by behaving in this disgraceful fashion?’ she asked him. He was mad, for he thought that poor mother had reported his conduct. So he took a sword, and rushed to mother’s room. Mother was developing some photographs, so she said, ‘Don’t come in here! You’ll spoil all my photographs.’ Besides, poor mother was very timid, you see, and the big sword frightened her. Just then the Queen Dowager rushed up, and she said to him, ‘Why do you misbehave in this way? You are the King of Burma, the greatest king in the whole earth, and it is disgraceful that you should carry on with princesses in this way! You must learn to behave better.’ So he agreed, and the Queen Dowager took his sword from him. You see, he was very angry, because by law he was entitled to have four queens, the Queen of the North and the Queen of the South and the Queen of the East and the Queen of the West. And also as many concubines as he wished. But his Queen Supayalat was very jealous and very unkind, and she would not let him have all his rights. But he had some very nice ways, mother always says, and used to talk quite sensibly sometimes.”

“What was your mother at Thibaw’s palace?” Clive at last felt at liberty to ask.

“Oh, she was a sort of maid of honour.”

“I see.”

“She was a great favourite,” Gussie added hastily. “You see, we are a very old Scotch family. The King of England himself knows us. That is true. Quite true, I tell you. So mother was—yes, what you call a maid of honour. And if the King or the Queen wanted any stores in, bacon or ham or anything of that kind, mother used to get them up from Rangoon.”

“Your mother must have been very useful.”

“Oh, she was of great use. You are quite right, Powell. King Thibaw often used to come and ask her advice—oh, about many things. Sometimes when Queen Supayalat was angry with him. But Queen Supayalat did not like that when she found out, so mother asked him not to do so so often. For Queen Supayalat, you understand, she could be very cross when she thought that Thibaw was not behaving quite right. Mother says, she has seen her pull him by his hair right from one side of his audience-chamber to the other.”

Gussie clung to Clive with a gentle affection and gratitude, which their object found sometimes embarrassing, except that he could not be embarrassed any longer.

Clive found, however, that there were outlying parts of his more immediately personal domain, which even now he preferred to keep to himself. For instance, he found that he himself was accustomed to a higher standard of hygiene than that which had been inherited (presumably) from the vanished majesty of Burma and his court. Gussie wore the same things day and night, and naively advised Clive to adopt the practice. “It will save you from catching cold, Powell. And if you catch cold on this Chindwin river, then you will get malaria, you may bet your bottom boots on that.” Gussie also cleaned his teeth with unfiltered Chindwin water, scooped up from where the steamer had been moored for the night. This practice also he recommended to his friend, and was shocked by the extravagance which used soda-water (a rupee a bottle) for the purpose.

Once John the Madrasi, who was constantly doing witty things, so mixed up their things together, in the little deck washing-place that they shared, that Clive had put his paste on a brush and had all but put it in his mouth when he noticed that it was Gussie’s. Appalled at the narrowness of his escape, he told Gussie.

“I shouldn’t have minded,” Gussie assured him his face glowing with affection. It seemed to Clive that he had missed the point.

Chapter II

I

At the night-halts, any European within easy distance came aboard, for such a change of diet as the steamer dinner could provide (it included at any rate soda to your whisky), and for the chance of meeting others of his race.

They had such a gathering at Mingin, where the Moulmein moored under forest-and-pagoda-crowned precipices. In all, a baker’s dozen sat down to dinner. It was on deck, under towering cliffs, the star-shot shimmering water lapsing by in dusky music.

McAndrew was absent, because of an accident. His engineer, McIntyre, made his apologies for him. The giant skipper had been down in the hold, looking at the cargo. The hold abounded with scorpions, and one of these he must have brought up. He made its acquaintance, as he was changing his blackened garments. “He was juist drawin’ his troosers on, and it fastened on his backside, and nipped him right in the cheek. He did holler!”

“Bad luck,” said the Bomburmans. It was agreed that the reptile must have accompanied him from the hold.

A polished wildness of talk sped the time away.

These Bomburmans were selected as being gentlemen, who could represent their Company in a nation of gentlemen, and if there were cause stand up to Government officials and get concessions for their business. Disposed in malarious places, to survey the forests and direct the teak felling when the floods came, they died freely. Life on the Upper Chindwin was apt to seem more of a mist-procession than even elsewhere.

They took themselves seriously, as representing some sort of standard of sahibdom. There were other whites in this Chindwin valley—“Yankee oildrillers,” Clive was told. “The most highly paid labour in the world. Nine hundred rupees a month. But we have no truck with them, we don’t have them in our clubs. They’re tough fellows. Jack Burman hates them. They think they can knock him about.”

But tolerance was the key-note of these swift-slipping lives. It extended even to Jack Burman’s deplorable laziness, which has thrown such a monkey-wrench into the white man’s self-imposed duty of getting quickly and abundantly rich. “Damn it all, you can’t blame him if he doesn’t want to work! Why should he? The country’s so rich that it hardly needs even coaxing. Jack Burman shoves a stick in the soil, and five minutes later it’s chucking mangoes and custard-apples at him!”

“Ye-es,” said another. “Though, mind you, there are others who are not going to let him sit pretty and collect all the stuff he wants, without working. These Indians are coming over by every ship to Rangoon! The struggle for existence is beginning here already; and when you’ve got it properly, Jack Burman won’t be quite the little gentleman he now is. He can be a fair devil when he’s cornered.”

II

Next to Clive sat a young Bomburman named Montgomery. He moved listlessly and tiredly; but now he wakened up, and set the pace of the talk, giving it his own bold personal charm and also a smutty undertone that yet held nothing you could take hold of.

Then someone spoke of Kalewa, where the Moulmein had been the night before. Of Kalewa, where the Mitthya runs in, and dips murderously under the Chindwin, like a submerged brute of prey. Its tiny cemetery had recently gathered another victim.

“When we were planting poor old Gadby, I noticed the other graves. There’s one of another poor devil who was drowned there, a young signaller about twenty years ago; and one of a fellow called Travers—de la Cour Travers—who died in 1888, in the occupation. Wasn’t that about the time that Raja Gabriel came into these parts?”

Clive escaped his own notice, and then was astounded. “No,” he blurted out. “Travers came in 1883.”

Every eye was on him. “Was he any relation of this other Travers, sir? The one whose grave is at Kalewa?”

“None whatever.”

“That’s what I was wondering,” said the man who had spoken about it. “While we were planting Gadby, as I say, I noticed the name, and I said to myself, ‘By Jove, I wonder if that fellow was anything to do with old Raja Gabriel?’”

“Did you know Raja Gabriel?” Clive was asked next.

“I knew him—I met him sometimes—thirty years ago, in India.”

“Were you in some service, sir?”

“I was in Travers’s own service. The I.C.S. But I haven’t seen him since he—since he left the Service.”

“By Jove, that’s a good one!” burst out Montgomery. “Left the Service!” He subsided, aware that he had taken more liquor than was sensible.

A silence fell. Men were wondering why Clive was here. He did not look an adventurer.

However, that was his own business. Someone started the whisky on its rounds again. It might bring enlightenment.

“Bad luck on your Service, sir—having a showdown like that of Raja Gabriel’s!” said one.

Montgomery broke out afresh, with another wild laugh. “Lovely yarns I heard, from a chap I met in Calcutta once! About Raja Gabriel in the days when he was a mere commoner, just an ordinary member of the mere Heaven-born!”

“He was never so very ordinary, let us hope,” said his neighbour, with a sly look at Clive.

“No, by Gad! He ought to have been out here, not in Bengal! I’m told that when he was on tour some darkish lad would come up to him, and say, ‘Mother asked me to remember me to you, father’. And Raja Gabriel would be interested at once, and say, ‘Dear me, my boy! Now who is your mother?’ And the chap would say, and Gabriel would say, ‘Well, well, well! I remember her so well. She was such a pretty girl. Yes, one of the sweetest I have ever known. And how is your dear mother, my dear boy?’ ‘Not very well off, sir, I’m sorry to say.’ ‘I’m so sorry to hear that. So sorry to hear your dear mother isn’t doing well. Here’s fifty rupees for you, my dear boy. Now don’t be selfish and greedy with it, but be sure to give some of it to your dear mother, with my love. Now good-bye, my dear boy. I’m so glad to have got to know you. Remember me to your dear mother. I remember her as a very sweet girl, a perfectly lovely girl’.”

Since Gabriel’s Indian service reached to something less than four years, these tales were in the realm of myth. But Clive checked himself from a second explosion.

When the laughter had subsided, Montgomery went on, “I heard that after he was sacked the Indians were all indignant. They said he was the best magistrate they’d ever had. The only one who really understood them, and was sympathetic. I’m told that Calcutta Corporation——”

“There was no Calcutta Corporation then!” Clive burst out, drawing the company’s eyes; and some were troubled by his look. Montgomery, however, was too successfully launched on the flood of legend to notice anything.

“Anyway, some gang or gathering of babus. They passed a protest, saying, ‘Mr. Travers Esquire, I.C.S., came into our hearts and homes. He was one with the bosoms of our families’.”

Again that carefree laughter which follows on the jest which he who runs can read—and read the more readily when whisky has loosed the knots and sinews of his understanding.

“He certainly did that!”

“He certainly did that!”

“He hung on in Calcutta,” said Montgomery, “for a couple of months, I’ve been told, furiously protesting. And living in the most expensive Indian-owned hotels, whose proprietors wouldn’t let him pay a pice! He could have lived for the rest of his days as the guest of the Indian people, if he’d wanted—instead of coming out here to make himself king of the cannibals!”

“Took regular bribes, didn’t he?”

“Oh, a proper tariff for all appointments. Quite right, the natives said. ‘When an officer has paid for his appointment, we know that he cares about having it and will do the work well’.”

The hoot of an owl came out of the darkness. The bird must have flown by or over the vessel.

Montgomery looked up, startled. Beside the rails at the far end, a Burmese girl had appeared, and leant against them. She was in a rose-red silken dress, and her whitened face was set off in the dimness by her black tresses and the scarlet wood-lily stuck in them. A ship’s lantern threw a half-light over her.

Montgomery rose. “By Jove, I’ve got to go,” he said, laughing. “I’m going to catch it. I promised to cut down the drink. Damned if I can do it with all you gay young fellers about!”

“‘Come, all you gay young fellows,’ he started to sing, ‘that drink your whisky clear!
For I’m the rolling rag of poverty and the son of a gambolier!’”

He clutched his chair to recover himself—half-filled his just-emptied glass with a spurt of soda-water, and dashed it over his face. Then, unexpectedly, to Clive, in a low tone, frightened and remorseful, he said,. “I’m sorry, sir. I forgot that Raja Gabriel was your friend. But the yarns were just gup, sir. No one believes them—at least, believes the whole of them. We have to fool ourselves with some sort of rot or other, to save ourselves from going mad.”

“That’s all right,” said Clive shortly.

Montgomery looked still more troubled. The precocious gamin-fashion knowingness that this life of dice-with-death had given him in less than two years since he left his public school vanished, and he was a terrified child. In a voice lower yet, he said, “I’ve just noticed that there are thirteen of us, and the first who gets up will be the first to die. Oh, well,” (despairingly), “I know I shall be the first anyway.”

“No,” said Clive to himself. “You won’t be the first. But I think you’ll be the second.” Then cursed himself for speaking daggers, and not even noting what he was doing. The boy’s face had lost all colour as he stumbled off.

The girl had disappeared, almost in the moment of her coming.

A silence fell on those who remained. Then McPherson said, “I wonder what Monty’s guid auld mither, the Dowager Lady of that name, would say if she knew how her laddie was living oot here, where’s there’s no laws of God and man, but only the laws of carnal appetite and need.”

“I wonder what my dad, the Archdeacon, would say if he knew about—well, about my own little home from home,” laughed another fellow. “And the dads and maters of all of us here present.”

The subject seemed distasteful, excused only by the speaker’s excess of hilarity. McPherson closed the discussion by saying solemnly, “I wis goin’ on to say that—whatever the Dowager Lady Monty would say—and it would be a damn guid mouthful, and damn guid earful for her erring Monty—that little Burmese lassie’s the only one who can save her boy from pushing up the Chindwin daisies inside of anither six months. She’ll save him if she can, and she’s goin’ to do her damnedest, just because he happens to be her man and she’s fond of him. Women,” he concluded, “are the same all the world over, I reckon. And if you’re theirs, they’ll save you from digging your ain grave before they’ve done wi’ you. If they can!”

III

Clive’s face had also gone out during the discussion. It was not that he minded (except in a first momentary flare-up of annoyance, which he quickly suppressed) the play of mocking tongues about his friend. Nor did he fool himself that Gabriel had ever been an ascetic. If he had ever been tempted so to idealise him, memory would have stared the image out of existence. That lordly acceptance of men’s homage and women’s worship—that charm of face and carriage which together were surely too much for any man to be cursed with—they were never meant to go with asceticism. Before ever he had become Raja Gabriel, he had been “King Travers”—from the first and instantaneously.

But Clive simply did not know. He fell back on the formula which had made the chasm between them: “whatever other men say has been proved against you”.

This was all that was left of the once so vivid days when he and Gabriel had been friends together. Public school and Oxford, the exciting trip out, long days of talk and shikar, the intimate eager closeness of communion, the certainty and pride with which either assured all who cared to listen of the dazzling gifts and future of the other—all had faded out and vanished. Not three minds knew that these things had ever been; and of the two that did know, one was about to die out from such dimness of being as was still his, and the other hated the memory and had buried it. Their lives had gone into a void, and all that remained was an impish dance of mocking legends, a riot of squalid amusement.

IV

The party broke up at last, and Clive did what no sane man would do, but a ghost may do with impunity. He made his way ashore, and up a path which led to the summit of the steepest hill.

It was past midnight. The cone of infinity was heightened in depth by the mountains. A ring of stars had dropped down to where they peered over a crest, like the eyes of some couching wood-spirit. A glimmer suffused the sky.

The stricken McAndrew, still feeling the scorpion’s fangs, rose from his bunk and went from cabin to “cellar”, to mix himself a drink. He saw his passenger going ashore, and rubbed his eyes with astonishment. Then they set bright and hard in crapulous ecstasy. “So he’s that sort, is he! Naughty old man! Can’t get it in the Civil Service in India, so comes over to Burma!”

McAndrew was not the only person to draw this conclusion. Night, according to Comus and his numerous followers in every age, was meant for one thing only. Clive paused on a bridge over a tiny gulley, and a Burmese woman whose age and physical beauty (or lack of it) were cloaked by darkness, came up to him. She pointed to the woods, saying, “One anna. One anna.”

The man she addressed was in a dream. She came right up to him, incredulous that she could have been mistaken. Then their faces met full. His, passionless in the narrow sense, was filled with pity and sorrow. She had seen that face before, many times, but not on a living man, certainly not on a living Englishman.

To the Burman earth is the home of demons, and the woods at night throw out ravening beings who take what shape they choose, until the moment comes to fling it off and seize the fool they have lured within reach of their hands. Night and Clive’s silence frightened the woman. She bowed tremblingly, as he passed on, leaving her on the bridge—now prostrate, like the women before the Image in the Arakan Pagoda. She had seen Maitreya, the Buddha who is to come again; and she went home, awed and shaking, to spread her news.

In this Chindwin wilderness the only paths are those hewn through the jungle—which is not like the sparse and thorny jungle of India, but is tall and majestic and nailed and clamped and matted together with ropes of the climbing rattan. Apart from the paths, only the axe can slowly smash a way, a step or two gradually.

Clive kept the path, not heeding the rustles that told him how busy and watchful the night was. It wound upward until it brought him before a pagoda. These are scattered freely over the immeasurable forest. They were built by bygone piety for their own sake and not necessarily for worship; often neglected since, they are there until time and the weather rot them. In their front are guarding leogryphs and the great bell with its striker beside it. Their tops are hung with a ring of gilded leaves, that make for men a never-stilled music of prayer.

Mind’s and body’s tiredness were enveloping the Englishman like a cloak, lulling to sleep the dweller in the innermost. He had made a compact with death, that if he did not struggle but quietly waited for his coming, for these last few months he would be left free—as the daughter of Jephtha was left free, to wander over her native hills. But hints and messages kept passing across this quietness, and they had come to-night.

He found himself in front of the image of the Lord Buddha. Some roosting bird flew quickly out of a crack made by a peepul tree in the statue’s shoulder, and Clive heard a rustling away, of some snake perhaps. Statue and living man gazed at each other, the face that was impassive and the face that was resigned and withdrawn. The universe was looking at one man, and inviting him to rise above his preoccupation with himself, and even with his friend and their meeting that was to come—into the indifference with which it regarded him and all earthly affairs.

It was not hard for Clive to respond. He crept into that indifference, like a wild creature taking shelter in a rock from a tempest; and was at rest again. He knew that he and his destiny were of no importance whatever; and, accepting that, he saw that he was of no importance even to himself. There was no spirit anywhere that cared about him; and he was content to realise this.

Chapter III

I

Hour after hour the water lapsed by. The rafts with their huts and happy occupants floated down. Gay craft came, poled or sail-borne or merely drifting, bright with dragon prows and splashes of colour and with plumes of the splendid Javanese peacock. Deer bounded away from the steamer’s wash, and otters looked up inquisitively as it swept over them.

At Kalewa, Clive learnt more about the social life of his countrymen, from an Army Sergeant who was travelling as far as Kindat. An interesting man, who seemed not quite real. He was, and did, all the things that a novelist hardly dare represent his characters as being and doing. He had a musical comedy moustache: a musical comedy brigand’s beetling shaggy brows: glaring eyes and thunderous voice. He dropped and inserted aitches. These gifts were being wasted on the Upper Chindwin.

They met first at tea, when without preamble or introduction the Sergeant fixed Clive fiercely with his gaze, and shouted. “’Ere, what about hall this prayin’ for China? Do you ’old with it?”

China was in deep waters, as so often; and her President, who had been educated in a mission school, had electrified Christendom by asking for its prayers.

Clive, about to pour himself some mild tea, hesitated. He had not really come to grips with the problem. There had seemed to him no harm in the request. Poor China had long been a deserving object of intercession to whatever Powers there may be, that care about mankind and our sufferings.

“’Ere, be honest about it! Tell me—do you ’old with it?”

Startled, Clive admitted that on the ’ole ’e did ’old with it; and was still more startled to notice that he had dropped his own aitches.

Sergeant Harris was indignant. “Well, Hi don’t ’old with it. Why should we do these ’ere little favours for them?”

Clive could think of nothing better to say than, “Well, they’ve asked us to pray for them.”

Put that way, it seemed impolite to refuse.

Sergeant Harris did not see it that way. “And what if they ’ave harsked us? Is that any reason why we should go a-lowerin’ hof the Hempire—just a-cause they’ve ’ad the HIMPUDENCE to harsk us?”

“We’ve done some pretty rotten things to them in the past—without being asked,” Clive reminded him.

Here Sergeant Harris got completely out of hand. “And so they ’ave to hus!” he bellowed. “Hi shan’t forget the things they done to me when Hi were in China! ’Ere Hi’ve been haway in these ’ere China ’ills for height weeks, and when Hi comes down Hi ’ears as ’ow Bishops and hother Nonconformist Ministers ’ave been a-prayin’ for China! And they harsks me to do it has well! Hi calls it a lowerin’ hof the Hempire, to do them these ’ere little favours just to please them! You won’t catch me a-prayin’ for China!”

China therefore had to struggle along without Sergeant Harris’s prayers. As all the world knows, she has done it very badly.

II

After tea, sitting out on the deck, with poor Gussie timidly and discreetly keeping his distance (for with reason he regarded all pure-blooded whites as creatures horned and taloned; and Clive, the one miraculous exception, he treated with humble affectionateness), the Sergeant, mollified by a pipe, told of some of the cruel things the Chinese had done to him. He had been in the looting of the Summer Palace, and nursed a deep secret sorrow.

“’Ere! ’Ow much would you say a jade idol was worth? About so ’igh!” (He indicated an image about two feet in length.) He knocked out the ashes, previous to refilling his pipe, and looked round sternly, awaiting answer.

“Fifty pounds?” Clive hazarded.

Sergeant Harris groaned. “Fifty quid! More like a thousand! Hi never see a thing so lovely! Hi caught a Chink runnin’ hoff with it round a corner, and Hi gave ’im a clout over the ’ead for it, and took it from ’im. Hand then one of these dealers as were a-follerin’ hus about, ’e met me, and ’e said ’e’d give me forty quid for it. Hand Hi, bein’ a hidiot, let ’im ‘ave it! Forty quid! Hand it were worth a cool four ’unnerd, hif not a thousand! Hoh dear, dear, dear me!”

Clive thought he had done not so badly, and tried to comfort him. But when the spirit is stricken, words are a teasing levity.

“Hoh, hit’s no huse talkin’ habout what’s gone hand done with! Hit honly makes the ’eart feel bitter! Say, Hi could tell you things about that time when we looted Pekin! Silver simply wasn’t no huse. Men found it too ’eavy for their ’aversacks, hand just chucked hit ha way. Then you ’ad to watch for the military police. They could be ’ard on a man, they could! There was three hofficers Hi knew of, who got ’old of a solid gold bell from a temple. Hi’m telling you straight, Hi am! Well, they got ’old of a Hay Tee cart, and covered it hover with a bit of sacking, hand one of them led the mule. Hit looked funny, that—a hofficer ’aving ’old of a ’airy! Then one of them said, ‘This ’ere ain’t no good,’ ’e says. ‘Damn silly we all three look, and we shall get nabbed, sure as sin! Let’s break the bell hup, hand divide it fair and square.’ Well, they all said, ‘Right!’; hand some’ow or other thay got ’old of some dynamite, hand they tried to blow it to pieces. Hit made the most happalling row you ever ’eard, so that they hall ran and ’id, thinking the police must ’ave ’eard. Hafter a while they crep’ out, hand nothink ’ad ’appened, except that the mule ’ad run haway, hand busted the Hay Tee cart! The bell was hintact, same as hever. It ’ad just taken two or three ’oly jumps, hand landed hon top of a bush. So they caught the ’airy hagain—took ’em pretty near till dark to do it—and they patched hup the cart, what had got pretty well damaged, what with the mule jumping hover ’igh precipices, hupward-like, same as you can see a salmon jumping hup them, and they went hon hagain. Presently they ’ad to get past a military policeman, and that gave two on ’em the blue funk. They were hafraid of being stopped, see? So they crep’ haway, and waited, ’iding, to see what would ’appen. But the third feller—’e were a bold feller, and no mistake!—’e just went hon with ’is ’airy and ’is Hay Tee cart, with that great ’ump in the middle hand the bit of sacking hover it, and ’e walked right past the policeman and no questions harsked! It’s worth while bein’ a hofficer,” he ruminated.

“What happened afterwards?”

“Oh, hafterwards? Why, nothin’, ’cept that the other two never saw their friend again,” he chuckled. “Hi can tell you his name. No, blest if Hi ’aven’t gone and forgotten it! Hi shall be forgettin’ me own name next!”

“Never mind,” said Clive.

“But Hi do mind! Why, ’e was the one that did best in the ’ole Harmy! A hofficer in a Welsh regiment, ’e was. Smart chap, too! The military police were always awatchin’ ’im, because they knew ’e ’ad more loot than ’arf a dozen of the next fellers put together. But they never caught ’im, nor set heyes on the hevidence. Bless you, hit was all hunder ’is bed! Wherever he went, ’e ’ad a ’ole dug by his batman right hunder where he slep’. None of hus was goin’ to tell on ’im, naturally, ’e being such a sportsman. Real nice feller ’e was, hand believed in the Hempire! ’e knew ’ow to treat Chinks, ’e did! ’e didn’t pray for ’em, not ’e! ’e knew better ways of ’andling snakes!”

The conversation was skating dangerously near a vivid sorrow. Clive hastily deflected it. “I suppose everyone did pretty well out of the loot?” he said. “I mean, every nation.”

“Ho, no! Not heveryone! The Russians now—they were real brutal with their men. Their discipline could be something hawful! There was a Russian soldier stole a lady’s bicycle, hat Tientsin. Hi was the lance-corporal who took ’im hoff to General Alexieff. The man was shot within five minutes hof our gettin’ there.”

They were passing a village, and another procession of Burmese girls filed by on the bank—a rainbow-coloured brightness and sun-dashed gaiety. The Sergeant viewed the sight distastefully, and frowned again.

“What do you think of all this ’ere livin’ with them hawful creechers?” he asked.

Clive made the usual justifications. “It’s about as decent as that kind of thing ever is. You send young fellows out here into intense loneliness, on pay which could never support an English girl, and into places where no English girl could live. These girls look after their health——”

“Ho, do they?”

It was depressing, arguing to this unbelieving accompaniment. However, Clive had a case to put, though it seemed to him a poorish one. Justice—abstract justice—demanded that he put it, to the best of his ability.

“Of course I don’t know as much about it as you do. But—to take the money side of the question only—isn’t it true that the girls take charge of their cash and housekeeping for them, and that when the partnership breaks up they render an absolutely honest account, taking nothing but their pay and perhaps a present? And you must grant that they don’t lose caste with their own people, either, for the country and their religion recognise temporary marriages as perfectly decent and honourable. If there’ve been children, their own village takes them over, and the Burmese bring them up as good Burmans, and even take a pride in them. At least, that’s the way men talk out here.”

The neglected Gussie, so long silent, broke in here from his distant deck-chair. “That’s not true, Mr. Powell,” he said, in his earnestness forgetting the elaborate suppression of the “Mr”. “It’s only half-true. Your people are not fair to the children at all! I could tell you things! There was a colonel I knew of, in Mandalay, and he had two girls, fine-looking girls they were, and oh, just as light as if they were like us. You could hardly tell they were half-Burmese, unless you were ever so close. And their father had them educated just like European girls, in the very best schools you have out here and at Rangoon University, and taught riding and dancing and tennis, and just everything. Then he got married in England and came out again, and these girls called to see him, naturally, since he was their father. But his wife was so shocked that she left him the very same day, and went back to England, and the poor fellow went and shot himself, because he was out of his mind. Yet he had been a good father to those girls, and they loved him very dearly. That is the way your people treat these children for whom you are responsible! And many of the Burmese, they say, ‘If their own fathers despise them why should we respect them?’ So they are not treated as decent human beings by the Burmese either. You have been told all wrong, Mr. Powell!”

He rose, spluttering with misery and rage, and made his way to his cabin. Sergeant Harris looked after him in astonishment. Then he smiled grimly.

“That poor devil, ’e knows somethin’ about it, ’e certainly does! And they’ve been astuffin’ of you good and proper, judgin’ by what you’ve just been talkin’! Hi says about it what Hi says about prayin’ for China, after hall the Chinks ’ave done to hus—nasty bits of work the Chinks har, and you can take it from one ’oo knows ’em through hand through, ’avin’ fought in their ’orrid country, where these very fellers has is now harskin’ me to pray for ’em did their very ’ardest (Hi give you my word!) to do me hin! Hi calls sleepin’ with these women a lowerin’ hof the Hempire. When Hi meet ’aughty hofficials on my rounds, ’oo Hi knows is keepin’ one of these girls, Hi feels like apunchin’ hof their ’eads, instead of salutin’ and sayin’ ‘Sir!’ When my regiment first come to Burma, Hi can’t tell you ’ow hexcited all the chaps were. ‘Burma!’ they kep’ on sayin’. ‘We’re hagoin’ to Burma, where we shall ’ave the loveliest women in the ’ole world to sleep with!’ But when we gets ’ere, he concluded, with grievance in his voice, “what do we find? Loveliest women in the ’ole world? Hi never set heyes on such hugly creechers! You may well say, Pray for ’em!”

The Moulmein was close in to the bank now, the deep water lying there. It was moving parallel with a village. A number of women—not girls in flashing garments, but matrons for whom life (so far as it ever is for the Burmans) was real, life was earnest—were sitting in single file, one behind the other. The Sergeant pointed to them triumphantly.

“There!” he said. “Hi’m never hagoin’ to call hany nation civilized whose women can’t catch their hown lice!”

Chapter IV

I

At Kindat, the Moulmein’s journey ended.

Clive, since Government help had been flatly refused, planned to stay in the official rest-house until he could make his own arrangements. Luckily, he had plenty of money. He was without relations that mattered, and he had not time left in which he could spend even a tithe of it. At no other period of his life would he have contemplated a condition so planless, or considered it other than lunacy. But now he trusted to destiny; his own powers as steersman were ended, and he must trust the river and whatever river-god guided its downflow.

He was looking ashore to the long sandy stretch where coolies and Burmans were waiting for the Moulmein to pull in close, when he heard his name, and turned to be greeted by Skipper MacKenzie, of The Bonnie Lassie. That launch was alongside.

“You’d have done better for yourself, Mr. Powell, if you’d taken my offer of a trip wi’ me in my launch. I’ve been here three days already—and, to tell the truth, I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Powell.”

“Waiting for me?”

“Aye. Didn’t you tell us, in the Club at Monywa, that you were going into Raja Gabriel’s country? There’s no way you can get even near that, unless I take you. Or so it seems to me!”

“But you are not going anywhere near Travers’s place, are you, Captain MacKenzie?”

“It depends on what you call near. And that’s all a matter of comparison, I’m thinking. In Scotland, now, we reckon anything under a dozen miles as reasonably near, while in England, they tell me, you reckon that fit only for a railway journey. But oot here—well, if I can get you within a couple of hundred miles of Raja Gabriel’s country, why, I’m thinking I’ve got you near it! So now, if you’ll get your fellow to put your things together and shift them on to The Bonnie Lassie, you and I can start our trip, Mr. Powell.”

“Can you take me as far as Homalin?”

“Homalin’s naething. Why, even this lurching old tub that you’ve just come on could take you as far as Homalin. The Bonnie Lassie’ll take you anither hundred and fifty miles higher, to a place they call Hkamti. You’ll not get beyond that by watther, for there’s rapids and big falls.”

Clive was overcome with surprise and gratitude. “But, I say, Captain MacKenzie——”

“Since you and me’s going to be shipmates for a matter of a week or close on it, you’ll say juist MacKenzie, Mr. Powell, and I’ll be saying juist Powell.”

“Of course. But I say, I must first of all come to a business arrangement, since you have been so unexpectedly kind as to help me in this way.”

“We’ll see aboot that later. But I’m going up to Hkamti myself, for my ain guid purposes, and I’m a bit sick of making the journey by myself. So we’ll look on your company as the main payment I’m wanting. The rest,” he said decidedly, “we’ll airgue later, if you don’t mind, Mr. Powell. For, to be frank wi’ you, I’m wanting to be off to Hkamti these three days and more, and have only been staying for you and this crawling old travesty of a boat. The river’s not so full as it should be by rights, this time of year.”

Clive hesitated. “You’ll think I’m mad, coming up to try to see a friend somewhere in head-hunters’ country, in the way I have come——”

“Aye. I think you mad, right enough. It’s the reason why I want to help you. I’ve known offeecials enough in my time, and they’ve all been a damn sight too sane to care aboot auld friends who’ve gone wrang. They’ve cared only aboot the friends who have gone richt, to the kind of places where they could help ither friends.”

The two men smiled at each other, and in that moment they became friends. “Yes, but——” Clive began.

“If you don’t mind, Powell, we’ll airgue anything else that’s on your mind, while your man’s shifting your things.”

“Of course.” Clive gave John the Madrasi his instructions. His kit was already packed, and they began moving it to The Bonnie Lassie.

“This gets me nearer, right away, than I had ever hoped,” said Clive. “I had my arrangements made to settle down at Homalin, until I could get coolies together. But how shall I get from that place you mentioned?”

“Hkamti? H-k-a-m-t-i. The H is silent, as in the English you speak in London, where they make a sad mess of the language, from all I hear tell. Well, there are ways,” said MacKenzie drily. “You’re not the only one that has tried to get to Raja Gabriel’s country. For that matter, I’m thinking you’ll find you are not the only one that’s trying to get there now, at this vera meenit! But we’ll talk of that on the journey. Now you and me’ll be getting upstream as fast as The Bonnie Lassie’ll take us.”

II

Clive’s attention was caught by poor Gussie, disconsolate at parting from the only distinguished friend he had ever had, and apprehensive at the sight of Kindat, the scene of the labours that lay before him. Gussie was trying to attract Clive’s notice, to say good-bye.

MacKenzie’s attention was caught also. “Is that the fellow for whose sake you wadna take a trip in The Bonnie Lassie, when I offered it you?”

“Yes. He’s been most useful and helpful all the way up.”

”Has he now? That gies me an idea. But first of all, what’s puir Gussie doing up here? Gussie, my man,” he called, “come your ways here. We’ve questions to pit to you.”

Gussie came with alacrity. MacKenzie went straight to the point.

“What are you doing here, at Kindat?”

Half eagerness, half shame, Gussie told him. “Major Balfour—you know, Major Balfour who’s gone home now—he was a great friend of mother’s——”

“Aye, I ken all aboot Major Balfour and your mither. But I asked you, What are you doing here? So you maun cut short your tales of your mither, Gussie. You see, man, I’ve got to be moving as quick as ever I can get away.”

“Major Balfour got me a job to help in the Postal Service,” said Gussie, subsiding as bidden.

“Did he now? Pairmanent?”

(Sullenly) “For two months.”

“And the pay?”

“A hundred rupees a month.”

The man of action made up his mind simultaneously. Seeing before him two defenceless lambs about to go out, each into his own separate wilderness, he decided that their case would be bettered if they went together.

“That man of yours, Powell—that John fellow. He’s no airthly guid, for all that I can see.”

“Not much,” Clive admitted. “But he can cook, after a fashion.”

“So can Gussie here. Can you not?”

Gussie could cook, and owned it.

“John knows Burmese,” said Clive.

“Gussie knows it better. And what’s more, unless I’m gravely mistaken, Gussie knows the stuff they talk where you’d be going now. It’s almost a kind of Chinese. You’d better take Gussie on, and leave your John feller here until you come back. Gussie’s a guid lad—I ken him well—and he’ll be mair use to you by far. Mr. Powell’ll give you a hundred and feefty rupees a month for two months, Gussie, and all expenses till you come back. Now—wull you gang with Mr. Powell?”

“But——”, began Gussie and Clive simultaneously.

MacKenzie stopped them both, with a majestic upraised hand. ‘Bide here, Gussie, while I explain to Mr. Powell. I’ll talk to you after.”

He drew Powell apart. “You’re mad, if you won’t mind my frankness wi’ you, Powell, unless you take Gussie. He knows the stuff they talk, and you maun have an interpreter. The lad’s honest. Now you can easily pay him the sum I said, to make it worth his while. And it’ll be worth your while, too, I give you my word.”

“I’m thinking about Marshbanks’s prospects.”

“Prospects! Why, if the puir lad stays he has na any. I know how he got this job—if you can call it a job—and I know the man who pushed him into it. That Major Balfour fellow has had to push too many Gussies into small jobs here and there, dotted all over Burma, wherever he went. They’re tired of him oot here, and he’s tired of pushing Gussies. The more shame, that he should be a Scot like myself! But he’ll no push much langer, for he’s auld and slowly going, they tell me. Even the strongest aik dies at last,” he said with a sigh, “and all the little aiks maun manage without its shade. Gussie’ll have his job here for the twa months it’s promised him, and then he’ll be oot again, and for guid! Listen, Powell. How are you going to get any further, when once you reach as far as I can get you?”

“I don’t know,” Clive admitted ruefully. “My idea was to get as far as I could, and then, as the chance came, further. My money arrangements are satisfactory—Government had to help me there, they couldn’t be sticky over that. And I thought——”

“Aye, you thought that, having the money, you could—if you exercised time and patience—get where you wished. Well, you’ll find we can do something for you. When you get to Hkamti you’ll find your arrangements all ready for you to go further.”

Clive looked bewildered.

“Aye. You don’t suppose I’ve been juist sitting here, wasting these three days while waiting for you to saunter up on that auld malingerer! But I’ll explain to you presently what I’ve taken the liberty of doing in your name. What I want to say now is that I maun get on. Take Gussie; and if he looks after you I promise he shan’t lose. I’m wanting a Burmese-knowing clerk on my ain ship, and he can help me as we gang up; and if I like him and you find he does you weel, Gussie shall have the job. He’ll find it better than popping in and oot of tiny Government holes, until they get sick of him or he gets too auld.”

MacKenzie would hear no further word. Gussie was engaged, and given one hour in which to write abounding letters to a numerous female acquaintance. John the Madrasi was left at Kindat, on a retaining fee (his salary) with no duties except to await Clive’s return. He wailed at the prospect of being deserted; but he had been wailing all the way upstream, at the fact of coming at all. MacKenzie briefly directed him to where he would find other Indians living; and with dire threats of his fate if he were not here when his master returned John was marooned, well content at heart.

Chapter V

I

So Gussie entered on a new career; and quietly and thankfully fell back from Clive’s existence for a while. He would have felt it presumption to force himself on MacKenzie, whose manner was that of a kindly father to a child whose wits were not of the wisest. Clive and MacKenzie both, without any overt or conscious withdrawal on anyone’s part, became two ageing men together. Their pasts were buried, and youth and young manhood had taken their confusion of hopes and fears into graves that concerned no one else. Each was going his way in utter detachment. Gussie helped as Clive’s “secretary”, and found occasional things to do.

Imperceptibly—yet over stretches unmistakably—the landscape changed. Westward, the mountains as a rule came closer, and were steep-up walls, with a thatch of forest. Sometimes the air sagged with a heavy curtain of flower-scents let down from this unending unexplored wilderness that filled up the valleys with its plumage of green. The world was growing cooler. It was also growing ever brighter. Its birds were flashing-winged, and its trees alive with warm-hued squirrels. Orange orchards began to appear, and red-spired monasteries. Then copses and wide spinneys of bamboos and wild plantains. Mists descended, and a light drizzling rain hung often over the river.

Presently the mountains temporarily moved away and made an opening, through which a snow-topped range showed itself, with, in the centre, Sarameti, the highest peak of Western Burma. A coldness as of dawn in April blew towards them.

This was on the fifth day out from Kindat. Clive was standing at the rail, staring, when MacKenzie joined him.

“I wull lift up my eyes to the hills,” said the skipper quietly. “There’s no Simla or Darjeeling or Maymyo up there, Powell. Naething but the Lord’s etairnal silence, which wull be His again when time is ended and He’s shut of the hail lot of us, whom He must aften wonder why on airth he ever created.”

MacKenzie presently added, “I do a deal of reading while I gang up and down this river, year following year, and nigh always by myself. There’s naething else to do, you ken, except watch the river and the jungles—and that’s a thing I do, too.”

“Reading must be a wonderful help to you.”

“Aye. But it’s come to be only the one book. It’s the Bible I read, and keep on reading.”

This information for some reason somewhat startled Clive. But he instantaneously readjusted his reactions. Of course. The Book of books. John Wesley had always said that he was homo unius libri. John Wesley was a very different man from MacKenzie; very different indeed. But then, the Book of books was meant for all mankind, so doubtless it suited this man also, this quiet sceptical-seeming grey cloud of a mariner. You never can tell.

Then MacKenzie surprisingly added, “Of course I mean the Auld Testament. Not the New Testament—that’s a silly book.”

He had to go off at this moment. The Bonnie Lassie being about to enter a dangerous reach of narrows and currents. But that evening, as they sat at dinner together, he spontaneously reopened the matter.

In the dusk, a flight of birds swept by them, like a rustle of leaves for sudden sibilance. “Behold the fowls of the air,” he quoted. “For they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Aye! But how does he feed them, Powell? As you ken, and I ken, he feeds some of them with the flesh and bluid of ithers of them. That’s why I hold with the Auld Testament. The men that wrote that book kenned that this warld’s one where David prospers, and Uriah the Hittite gets murdered and naething said or done—except that a puir bairn that was forced on his widow has to die. You can consider the lilies all you like, and it’ll no help you any. It was a young man that never married, and kenned naething of life, that advised men and women that way. The warld isna run on Y.M.C.A. lines.”

Clive’s mind acquiesced. Mind and body were too much at peace to be troubled one way or the other.

MacKenzie continued. “Not but what there is something in the warld that’ll help you—and, if you find it, it wull grip you fast, so that naething can hurt you further. But you find it with trouble and suffering and infeenite sorrow. And when you have found it it isna God A’mighty at all, but someone that’s in the business, just as you are. His mind is guid, in the main, and he’ll save you wi’ himself, if you no expect tae much from him. For there’s ither than purely guid mind in the universe, and he canna help himself all that he wad.”

II

Gabriel was discussed between them, and Clive asked, as one troubled by the world’s clacking tongue, about his friend’s way of life.

MacKenzie merely repeated his favourite epigram. “The British Empire hasna been run on strictly Y.M.C.A. lines, Powell.”

“I know that.”

“I know that in your ain auld service you’ve a way of thinking it has—it’s no guid for a man to be where you folk are all your days, with everyone telling you what wise and fine fellows you are, and what an unmitigated blessing your rule has brought to the puir distracted East.”

“It isn’t my way of thinking,” said Clive.

“I ken that. Which is why I’m telling you that Travers—nae doot, and I’m not denying it—has done things (like ithers oot here) that are not strictly according to the rubric as laid down for Christian men that live in England or Scotland and have comfortable bank balances and sure jobs and plenty of friends to back them. I’d tell you more, except that you’re best left to yourself, for I see you’ve had the sense to come expecting naething except what shows itself in its ain guid time. So I’ll no say one single thing that might plant the seeds of some wrang notion in you.”

Clive, rebuffed, asked about the head-hunters who had been held up as such a peril; and here MacKenzie was more communicative.

“There’s none active and practising in Travers’s ain country. He said he’d hunt their ain heads off their shoulders, if they brought any ithers’ heads into his territory, and proved that he meant it, as he means maist things that he takes the trouble to say. But they’re all through these hills where you’re going. Nagas they call them here; and Was up yonder. There’s two kinds of these Was: what they call the wild Was—they take your head off your shoulders, and no leave asked or given—and tame Was, who buy their heads, and pay a fair market valuation, or dig them out of graves. But they’ll leave you alone, both Was and Nagas. If I wasna sure of that, I’d never let you gang on this trip, that’s mad enough on all accounts. But they know you’re on your way to Travers; and if there’s one thing that even the wildest Wa dreads mair than the Airth-Spirit, it’s Raja Gabriel. The Was that he found in his ain kingdom when he came there were of the wildest sort you’ll find anywhere. But they’ve sat vera still ever since, and the Airth-Spirit has had puir porridge. She gets her occasional goat or buffalo, I don’t doubt, but never her human skull, except on the quiet.”

“Tell me about the people that Travers brought with him.”

“Aye, his Fringanas.”

“Meaning foreigners, I suppose? They told me in Mandalay it was a corruption of feringi.”

“That’s what they say. Two centuries ago, there was a Burmese king cleared out a swarm of French and Portuguese pirates on his coasts, and took the survivors up into the country. There are places where you’ll find them now, Burmans neither one thing nor the ither, Powell. The maist of them settled and made a kind of human island in the southern end of those hills between the Chindwin and the Irawadi. Then, when Travers came first to Burma, he saw Thibaw. Thibaw wasna keen on seeing men like your auld friend just then. Things were getting towards trouble between him and the British, and when he saw Travers——. Do you remember Travers well, Powell?”

“He was the most masterful man I ever met. He expected to lead always.”

“You’re right. He expected to lead. And he did lead. Thibaw, who was none such a fool as it suits us to say—not in all things, anyhow—saw all this—as you say, it didna take much seeing—and he gave Travers leave to do what he liked, or could, in the Fringanas’ country, hoping that he wad vanish there and be never seen or heard of mair. It was little enough that he or his troops had ever been able to do with these Fringanas. But your auld friend had a way with him. He liked them, and what was mair important, the Fringanas’ Sawbwa liked him. What was maist important of all, the Sawbwa’s daughter liked him. She married him that same year juist before her fayther’s death. It’s her daughter you’ll find is ‘the tiger’s teeth and spring’, as they say, in Buddhawbwe now. Travers had ither wives, they say, and ither children. But there’s only one child that has mattered, or that matters now.”

MacKenzie seemed about to say more of her, but decided to keep the course he had started on. “The war came between Thibaw and the British, and Travers didna choose to stay where he wad presently have his ain countrymen—and amang them, maybe, some of his ain auld colleagues—on his vera doorstep, claiming his land, and maybe stripping his title off him. Perhaps, too, he didna wish to be chased on his ain hills as a dacoit, with a dacoit’s ending if caught. He had a guid many reasons why he didna wish to be too close to his ain folk again. So he and his Fringanas went north, and his priests found a piece of Buddha’s tooth for him, lying amang the stones of one of those burrns on the hills yonder “

“Buddha’s tooth?” asked Clive, incredulous.

“A piece of hard stane, aboot the length of my little finger” (MacKenzie illustrated). “Travers himself says it’s a tooth, right enough, or part of a tooth, of some enormous beast that worked ravage on these mountains in the morning of time. But his priests say it belonged to the dental apparattus of Buddha, for which they’ve a vera high respect, Powell, and by reports of ither teeth of his that they have elsewhere he deeply desairves it. So that’s why they called Travers’s capital Buddhawbwe. There’s a lake there, and they’ve got a kirk for the tooth beside its shore, and they say that the lake and all in it and near it is holy, and none is to be sae hardy as to lift a finger against them. But now I must give an eye to The Bonnie Lassie again. We’ll continue our talk further, Powell.”

III

When they did continue it, MacKenzie said,—“And now it’s my turn, Powell, to ask you aboot Travers. When you knew him first, was there anything that made men think he might have had some connection with the people of India?”

“You mean, some Indian blood in him?”

“I do mean that.”

Clive hesitated. This was a matter he had often thought about. He said at last, “There was a darkness came into his cheeks when he was angry, and something darker than darkness into his eyes. But it wasn’t anything much. What was stranger, and more striking, was that his mind seemed to work as the minds of Indians did. You know what I mean, MacKenzie—every nation has its own ways of finding a track that other nations cannot follow.”

MacKenzie agreed. “It’s like the tracks the birds find through the air—I’ve seen it often and often, watching them as I went up and down this river. Tracks which I’ve seen them keep from tree to tree, though to us in anither element it was all the same air, and naething to mak them hurry in one channel mair than anither. And in the watther the otters, I’ve nae doot, have their ain tracks, by reason of some current or ither that only a fish or an otter could feel.”

“That’s it. Gabriel seemed able to travel along the tracks that Indians’ minds took.”

“He can still. But did you ever hear anything that might explain it?”

“He used to say there was a Travers, an adventurer, who served in Sindhia’s armies, more than a century ago. The Mahrattas made him a dependent Raja of the country they considered their border—so far as they ever had a border—where Orissa and Bengal meet to-day. They still have traditions of Ettraverse Saheb. He had to hold the marches against all comers. It was into this very district that Gabriel was sent as acting collector, in his first independent charge, and I remember his excitement and joy. He wrote to me that they were his people, and that they knew it and admitted it. We used to pull his leg about this ancestor, or alleged ancestor, and joke about Rajput princesses and his great-great-grandfather.”

“I’m thinking, it wad have been better—for all concairned—if perhaps the story had been taken a bit mair seriously.”

“Why, to tell the truth, I was too busy myself with my own district, and—you see, it was just about then that I got married—to pay as much attention as I see now I ought to have done. We wrote to each other occasionally, Gabriel and I, after he was sent to Ratangiri—the capital of this old Mahratta principality I was telling you about. But we met only once, before the crash came and all was over. Queerly enough, I can see now that it was exactly then that I went off the track, as regards his mind and mine, thinking that, both of us being English, of course we necessarily thought the same way.”

“Whereas I doot vera much if Travers and the rest of you were ever even in the same warld!”

“He and I certainly weren’t in this incident. I happened to find myself within twenty miles of him, so I rode over and spent a couple of nights with him, and we got in a day’s shooting. We were coming back about sunset, and were just outside Ratangiri, when Travers suddenly became faint. It hadn’t been a particularly hot day—on the contrary, rather cool. It was mid-March, I remember, and at that time of the year in Bengal we have a chance of a day or two of thunder and some rain. I thought Gabriel had somehow got a touch of sun, and I was very upset, and put him in the shade of a huge peepul tree, all among the little clay horses that they had there for the spirit that inhabited it, and I rushed off to a house to get some water. It was the house of the biggest Brahmin in the place. He sent out some water, and came with me himself, for they all thought a lot of Travers. When we came to the tree, we saw him lying there still pretty sick, though he had come to; and, to our amazement, behind him there was the largest cobra I’ve ever seen, with its hood expanded and swaying about over his head. Travers half-started up when he saw us, and the snake, which is the most astounding thing I’ve ever known happen, dropped on its coils and slipped quietly back out of sight. The entire village turned out then, and heard the story—which was quite true, for a wonder. The old Brahmin said that it was the sign the gods always give, of royal blood. That beyond doubt this Ettraverse Saheb was the rightful heir to Raja Ettraverse of Ratangiri. Apparently, all their dynasties carry this as a kind of divine hall-mark that they are genuine—there’s always a yarn that at some time or other the heir has been forgotten or overlooked and left lying in the jungle, where a cobra has always come and manifested his rank by holding its hood over him. The next thing we heard was that the whole district had organised some vast reception of Travers, which I suppose turned his head. He wrote to me in immense excitement, that he had discovered the evidence of what had always been a family tradition. When the war of 1803 broke out between the British and the Mahrattas, Lord Wellesley sent orders to all British who were serving with the enemy to come over. Travers’s great-grandfather thought that would be a mean and disloyal trick. But he remained neutral, at any rate; and Wellesley, when he annexed Orissa, took his kingdom into Bengal, and solemnly promised he should keep it in perpetuity. But when Raja Travers died of cholera, leaving Gabriel’s grandfather a baby, the British Government ignored their promise and annexed Ratangiri with the rest of Orissa, though a pension was given to the baby’s mother——”

“Was she British? I mean, no native blood?”

“I’m—not sure. Not quite sure, MacKenzie. As you know, things were pretty mixed in those days.”

“Aye. As in Burma now.”

“Anyway, the baby turned up in England, with a pension and a mother who passed as British. And that’s all I ever heard, until I got this letter of Gabriel’s. I didn’t answer it at once. In fact, I believe I never did answer it, and I see now that he must have taken it as unfriendly of me, because I was the one person he had told about finding this evidence. My not answering was sheer accident—you know how things happen. I remember now, Gabriel wrote another very queer letter, about his not being one of ‘your I.C.S. babus’, as he tactfully put it; and about going to resign his position and ‘take his rightful place as a ruling Prince’. And we heard all sorts of stories, about his acting as a ruling Prince, accepting gifts and—accepting other things. There was a sudden flare-up and a crash, and all sorts of stories about, though of course there was never any public enquiry or anything made public at all. But Gabriel left the service. I found myself wretched with the feeling that I had been no use to him just when he needed friendship most. All through absorption in my own affairs!”

MacKenzie was sympathetic. “Travers was wrang to think he could get the twentieth-century British Government to go back on anything that was done mair than a hundred years ago. And I think they’re wise, to keep the airth’s foundations—such as they are—as they are. From their ain point of view, that is, which is all you’ll get anyone or any Government to consider.”

IV

The river had long stretches of straightness now, where such a speed and power had come down that they had cut a direct path. The forests changed to mainly evergreen. The mists hung closer. Rain came in frequent downpours, not in drizzles only. Monsoon or no monsoon, there is always a certain amount of rain hanging about in the valley, where it passes into the higher mountains.

The Bonnie Lassie, her master explained, had never before gone so far except in the flood season. She had to feel her way nervously, and for days together there was little time for theological or political discussion.

Clive now understood that, as Raja Gabriel’s agent and factor through many years, MacKenzie was in constant communication with Buddhawbwe, by intermediate trivial scattered hamlets as well as by the head of navigation, to which they were steaming. How close was this communication he began to see, when Mackenzie told him that at Hkamti he would find everything ready to take him into the interior.

“I’ve sent word that your coolies are to be ready for you, Powell, and we’ll settle their rates of pay when we get to Hkamti and have a crack with their headman. And I’ve a flag of the Sawbwa’s—of Travers’s, you ken—that’ll keep you safe through the country of those head-hunting Was that I told you aboot. So—barring illness or Acts of God—you’ll get to Buddhawbwe. I’ll no go so far as to say you’ll be welcome when you get there. But you’ll no be turned away. You’ll maybe not see Travers himself——”

“In which case my journey has failed.”

“That’s as it may be! It’s a risk you must take, Powell. It’s a risk, you’ll find, which ithers are taking. However, I’ve written to the Princess, and you’ll get her help, which will bring you to her father, if anything will.”

“You’ve written to the Princess?”

“Aye. To Princess Pradita. By rights, Princess Perdita. It’s her father’s name for her—from Shakespeare, you ken. It means, they tell me, a girl that’s been lost. And a guid name for her, too, for she’s lost, if ever any child was. They call her Pradita; or, more often, just Princess Dita. But I thought you’d heard that your auld friend had daughters.”

“I certainly had.”

“Well, she’s the one of them that matters. You’ll take an open mind to her, as to her father. And you’ll treat her as being English, like yourself.”

“Does she speak English?”

“Her father’s brought her up as English. She’s to be his heir, you see, and he’s kept her closest to his ain thought. She spent a year at school in Paris, and anither two years in England.”

V

On the first of May The Bonnie Lassie steamed to the eastern shore of forest-wrapt Hkamti.

MacKenzie emerged from his cabin, carrying a bundle like a wrapt-up umbrella, and pointed to a group on the sands.

“Your escort, Powell. And now” (he unravelled his bundle, and showed a flag) “do you see this red flag, with a beast dancing on it? You’d call it in Europe a hill antelope rampant. It’s Travers’s standard, that’s going to keep you safe when the wild Was are all sorrowing to think what a fine head that man has and what a shame and sin it is that they daurna give it to Her Majesty the Airth-Goddess. I’m sending it with your guard yonder, Powell. They’ve ponies and a palanquin for you. So take my advice, and push on. You’ve those hills” (pointing to the mountain wall that shut the whole eastward direction) “to go over, and ither hills as well.”

“It looks pretty dismal,” Clive agreed. “As if there were whole reservoirs of rain all gathered ready to drop on those ridges!”

MacKenzie nodded. Then he pointed westward, to mountains no less towering. “Once the pukka monsoon breaks, those hills over yonder, between us and India, are one streaming curtain of watther. They tell me there’s a place where they’ve had nine hundred inches of it in one year. No one’s ever taken a gauge oor side, or I wager we’d beat that record. It’s not so bad to eastward, where you’re going, Powell. But it’s bad enough, even when it’s best! So be wise, and let your fellows step oot!”

Clive promised.

“There’s anither thing. You’ll no be taking life for your ain pleasure, will you? It wad mak a vera bad impression on those that will be your hosts.”

Clive said quietly, “I take no life for my own pleasure.”

“I was sure of that. But I just asked. You see, Powell, oor British God is one that doesna care how full of misery we make his warld, so long as it isna misery that breaks his Sabbath. Which is why we’ll never get these puir heathen Buddhists to believe that we’ve any religion—that they’d call religion—at all! And maybe they’re right. And maybe we’re wrang; and maybe one day the Christian God will show he’s none so bad as his servants make him oot to be. ‘Blessed are the mairciful, for they shall obtain maircy.’ It’s little maircy we have the right to expect, in a warld where we show none to ithers! To my mind, we’ll no get a decent God, that’s guid and fair-minded, to fash himself to make wars and slaughters to cease, so lang as he sees we think pain to oorselves is vera vera hard, and pain to helpless ither creatures something we can inflict and think no mair aboot!”

Then he shouted, “Gussie!”

Gussie came up.

“You’ve to hear me give Mr. Powell my final last word. I sent word ahead, by one of my men, that he was to have a palanquin. You’ve to see that he uses it, Gussie. There’s no shame in it, when men come to oor age, Powell. It’s how they travelled in auld days, and you’ll find it quickest. You’ve strength no langer, so pride of strength you must throw far from you. And you’ll remember, Gussie, and no let Mr. Powell kill himself, when I’ve given him in your chairge!”

Gussie promised, and went off to his duties.

Then the theologian and friend waked up in one, in MacKenzie’s parting words. “And now it’s a’ but a dream, Powell—the forests we’ve looked at, and the snows we’ve stared at together, and the clacks we have had, with the watther slipping past. But I’m thinking it isna all so entirely over. You see—after what I said aboot the New Testament being a silly book I did some thinking by myself, and it seemed to me I had been none so fair to it. I began thinking aboot oor Lord’s words to the Sadducees—you remember, Powell, aboot God being no a God of the dead but of the living——”

“When they asked Him about the woman who had been wife to seven husbands? Whose wife would she be in the Resurrection?”

“Aye. And oor Lord, you remember, replied with all that aboot God being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I’ve started thinking aboot those words, and I see now that they’re not a mere quibble, as I used to think they were. But a vera profound airgument, if you take them rightly. God isna the God of mummies or auld corpses laid away with preservatives and scents to keep them from stinking; he’s no more interest in such junk than we have oorselves. But, granted the existence of anything like Pairsonality at the top of things, it’s vera hard to believe that that Pairsonality wad let the lower forms of Pairsonality fade away and vanish. I canna believe it! There’s mind in us, which means that there’s mind ootside us. And if it’s mind, then it kens what mind is worth—which is more than the hail of this show of things that glides away each autumn and glides back again next spring. And naething but mind matters! Goodbye, Powell; and I’ll take you down the river again after you’ve been wi’ Raja Gabriel.”

So they parted, with their friendship keeping a link between them.

The Way to Raja Gabriel’s Country

Chapter I

I

Their way thrust up steep walls of densely forested mountain; and again as steeply down, into ravines tropical in vegetation and closeness of air. They ascended and descended, between cool moist regions of fog and warm steaming lushness. The paths were slipping screes or a dim streak across wet herbage.

Clive brooded much on the mysterious care that had gone to his comfort. It gave him heart for the meeting that lay ahead, even when his mind most misgave him and insisted that this kindness was irreconcilable with the fierce pride that he remembered.

Relays of bearers swung him along, so that, even on these cruel gradients, they managed their fifteen or twenty miles daily.

At night he and Gussie slept on some zayat. Buddhist piety has studded Burma with these rest-hostels, as with pagodas; so that even in forest depths the traveller comes on both, and finds free shelter and a place for worship. These zayats are platforms, with roofs though no sides. They might, and often were, in the loneliest wilderness, so that it was plain that tiger and bear and all wild lives took their use of them—which was as the merciful heart of the Founder of Buddhism would have wished. But usually they were in some tiny hamlet, which gave Clive the satisfaction of providing a rarely seen diversion. Practically all his toilet had to be done in public; and the hill women sat in rows before the zayat, puffing at cigars and watching. It was embarrassing. But when you must plunge you must plunge. He plunged accordingly. All self-esteem was being stripped from him, that he might return naked to the universe that had sent him forth naked.

It gave him moments of grim sardonic smiling, to imagine how he must seem to his watchers—a quarry carrying a “head” of such splendour—a many-tined, widely palmated antler, which for some mad bad reason they were forbidden to take from its wearer! Perhaps that was why they sat so still. It was tantalising, to see such a trophy wasted when it would be so easy to pluck it. Your big game hunter feels similar agonies of frustration in the Zoological Gardens. “Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow!” Mr. Edwin Montagu, when he visited the Calcutta Gardens, had to shoot crows and bats.

II

The woods wept quietly, their heads mist-shrouded. They resolved themselves into one gigantic grief, an ogress sobbing silently by herself.

In the depths to which they descended, the flowers and butterflies were of a frightening beauty and brightness. The vegetable world seemed to merge in the animal, and almost to pass to it and from it at will. That immense leaf, which suddenly shut up on unsuspected hinges, and showed under-wings of more than peacock dyes, was an insect. This mottle of purple on leathery thickness, from which you shrank because it looked to be living, was the matted base of an orchis. You stared at the living greenness at foot of the wet rock, and it slowly unfolded into the deliberate sluggish stirrings of a snake that knows its venom keeps it from the necessity of briskness in escaping; or a portion of the herbage humped itself up into an iguana and slipped away.

Then from all this they would go in a few hours to heights where the air, though as clammy as in the depths, was sharply chill, and where clouds boiled in deep ravines beside the crumbling treacherous pathway. Out of invisibility came the sound of streams racing far below, muffled by the distance it had had to climb; and of cataracts falling in still loftier regions above them.

The silence, league on league, was menacing. Yet they became used to this also, and with fatalism began to believe they would get through it and past its unfriendliness. Raja Gabriel doubtless knew a spell for this, too.

As they pierced their way inland, it rained; and rained a great deal. The lichen beards of the oaks became saturated dripping sponges. The orchids and many-coloured creepers and epiphytes gained a new flashing brightness that overglassed their own. A steaming rose from the grass and sod.

The zayats, for the most part, were in dry patches to be free of that pest of the mountains, the leeches. These came flickering and feeling towards the blood they smelt coming their way. Attenuated threads of greed, blindly swaying on the ends of leaves and twigs, and then racing towards the feast. Clive’s bearers at every pause had to loosen them with the application of rock salt or tobacco juice, and their feet were blood-splashed.

Gussie rode, carrying an ancient mighty blunderbuss, of which Clive felt more terror than of the wilds. He looked apprehensively round the towering hills and thick woods. Clive realised the courage that inspired him when he realised his fears also. How Gussie had ever ventured up into this fastness of head-hunting folk—of tribes savage and unapproachable, preferring to steal up on you if there were to be any meeting at all—he hardly understood. MacKenzie must have talked to Gussie to some purpose.

Yet the few people that they saw, though bold and aloof in countenance and manners, offered no harm. They showed, indeed, profound reverence for the serow banner and the insignia of Raja Gabriel. Some spell must have been laid on them, which they had no choice but to obey.

The forest demons also seemed to obey it. The escort lit large fires at night, and lay beside them, with some of their number keeping watch. There were sometimes periods of wild terror among the ponies, and attempts to stampede. Strange coughs came from the darkness, and more than once the oaring of tigers shook the hills. The wilderness was full of creatures that never showed themselves. Some instruction, however, had been laid on them, such as for a favoured few has been laid on the denizens of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Devils and goblins did not appear, they lurked in the depth and let the caravan go by.

The caravan passed by the demons’ houses sometimes: nats’ shrines, at the entrance to the villages or, occasionally, in places far from any village. They were adorned with flowers, gifts of coconuts, skulls of serow or deer or takin or buffalo.

Clive began to guess that this road, from Buddhawbwe to the Chindwin, in some way or other was kept open by Gabriel, as the British keep open a way from India to Central Asia. Evidently there was some understanding, by which the head-hunters did what they thought right when once away from the road, but let a ribbon of comparative safety run unmolested through their territory. Perhaps this was why they came on no human skulls hung up in any shrine. They did once, however, see a body lying at no great distance from the path. Its head had been removed, and quite recently. The trunk was thrown aside as no further use to anyone, in much the same careless manner that picnickers in Europe throw orange peel down a green bank and leave it there.

Clive astonished his escort by insisting on the poor shell’s burial. Reluctantly they dug a grave; and placed the trunk with hands crossed over its severed neck.

“You see”, Gussie explained, “that is to show that the man was very sorry when his head was taken. He will feel ashamed in the world of spirits when he has to go about without his head. So he will always be trying to hide what has happened. That is why his hands are crossed where his head should be—to show that we have understood. So the ghost will be pleased and will not follow us to do us harm. Because he realises that we are sympathetic—really and deeply sympathetic.”

III

They came to immense rhododendron forests, whose tops made a crimson roof. Clive never forgot the moment when they first entered this region. At a bend of the path they encountered three hillmen who came round the mountain’s shoulder, each wearing in the glossy blackness of his hair a freak of dazzling red. They themselves then rounded the corner—and the rhododendron forests had begun.

Sometimes the bearers hour after hour ran through a curtain of never-thinning rain. Sometimes through swaying mists, that held pockets of drizzling downpour, where they themselves loomed ghostlike, flinging giant shadows as the sun caught their silhouettes against a wall of fog. At other times, for a while the sun shone undiminished and unshorn, and the path smoked, and the runners grew hot and bothered.

On the tenth day, they climbed on to alpine meadows, at a height which Clive estimated must be above nine thousand feet. The air was sweet with azalea scents. A copse of azaleas and rhododendrons, dwarfish like the copse of hazels that sometimes supplants oaks in an English woodland, bordered a brook that sparkled through a grass of blossoms—primulas, tall golden cowslips, globeflowers, buttercups, saxifrages, monkshood, yellow arun lilies, aconites, green-belled fritillaries.

IV

The bearers grew surpassingly cheerful, and their grunting encouragement of themselves soared into exultant singing, which was presently answered from the hill-sides. From the valley beyond this one came a muffled explosion. They crossed the brow, and stood on the edge of a wide gentle fold on the mountains, and saw Buddhawbwe.

A naked ridge of rocks—like rows of teeth or the cristated mane of an all-but-buried prehistoric giant lizard—ran entirely round a slight depression, a shallow bowl let down in the country’s summit. Most of the depression was filled with a forest of splendid walnut trees, but in front of where the road topped the ride ran an open wide avenue, to a lake and to a plain on its further side. The plain was dotted with houses of a considerable hamlet, or of what for this high region was a large city.

Clive had heard of this walnut forest. He had heard of the lake also. There is only one fairy lake deep sunken in the Burmese mountains. This is the lake where the human race began: where the primeval pair slew the ogre that infested it, and by that deed learnt what virtue dwells in a dripping head hung up where the sun and the dwellers in the higher world can see it. It was a sore point with the Was that here, in the very heart of their race and religion, they should be forbidden to take heads. Four great peaks stood at the valley’s corners; and above each peak concentrated a soft fleece of never-lifting cloud, “the nats’ couches”, where they reposed and glassed themselves in the mirrors below. The dark waters are a sanctuary for all that swim in their depths or float on their surface. The primeval pair, their begettings and slayings finished, lurk there as two monstrous golden fish, whose eyes see into every cranny; or disport themselves on the cliff above as birds. It is easy to see why it is wrong, as well as supremely dangerous, to take any life here.

On the lake’s further shore lay a strip of marsh, and beyond it a green meadow plot. These necessarily pushed the hamlet to a little distance from the water. Above the hamlet, and below the encircling ridge, was a projecting sheltered spur, which held the Raja’s Palace and the tiny domestic town that served it and had grown up round it. The ridge itself was crowned with a line of blockhouses, for sentinel and defence.

The day was drawing to sunset. Pinnacles of the Palace and attendant buildings, hung with metallic ornaments shaking in the breeze of evening, were shiningly lovely. A sheet of golden light had been let down from the sky.

Another gun was fired, no doubt to indicate the appearance of strangers on the eaves of this valley. Gliding down from the rim, Clive’s cortège padded swiftly and happily along the lake’s southern shore. Then they rounded it, and began to climb a steep path, which soon changed into a good road, that was made for carriages as well as foot and equestrian traffic.

The village of Buddhawbwe was left on one side, and they drew near the Palace, a knot of rambling houses. But rambling does not here carry its connotation of untidiness. They were rambling, only in the sense that some wilderness that has grown up into flowering luxuriance is rambling. They rose out of a mass of azalea and other low bushes, and were themselves almost a kind of flowers.

The neat little buildings of teak and bamboo, crowned with a ruffled sequence of wave-like roofs, combined suggestions of shrine and pilgrim resting-place—an airy disappearance into tenuity and fragility—a spangle of brightness lifted (and hardly lifted) out of the sunken ocean of blossoming quietness washing round them. The impression of insubstantiality was still further heightened by the tinsel and variously hued glass strewn in lavish Burmese fashion through the red-grey wood fabric. It was a picture fairyland—to an adult intolerable, but to happy or childish minds perfection.

The mountain mists trailed a tattered cloak of invisibility;, or half-invisibility, through whose threadbare patches the buildings’ fabulous air deepened. They became spirit-palaces, marching into the foreground of human vision at will, dematerializing at will.

The streets of the mountain capital were filled with widely contrasted figures: some carried still the jungle’s wildness, and its dark shadows in their hair and complexion; others moved as though their far-off ancestors had been rulers in a civilised city. Saffron-clad monks reminded Clive that it was a spiritual metropolis to which he had come.

Chapter II

I

The escort stopped at a small group of buildings, that stood apart from the tallest buildings of all. On a terrace in front of them, the bearers put Clive’s palanquin down, and signified that they had reached the end of their labours. They stood there; and their passenger stepped out, and looked curiously up at the golden serows rampant above the roofs and doorways.

After a short parley Gussie announced his findings.

“This is Raja Gabriel’s Guest-House, Mr. Powell. You and I are to wait in that room there. They say they will put our things in that other house, where we are to sleep, while we wait in that room.”

“What are we to wait for? To see Mr. Travers?”

“They do not say. I think it may be so. On the other hand—perhaps not. Shall I let these fellows take out your things and mine, Mr. Powell?”

“Yes. That will be all right, Gussie.”

“I think so, too. These fellows know that if they so much as steal one cloth, and if you say one word about it, then their Raja will have them crucified. They are in terrible fear, Mr. Powell, of Raja Gabriel. All the same, I will see where they put our things.”

Clive compensated his bearers and escort, horrifying Gussie by his lavishness. “If you are so generous we shall surely be murdered, you and I, when we go back! These people will all think that we are so rich!”

“Well, Gussie, I for one wouldn’t have liked the job of carrying another fellow up and down those paths, and often in pelting rain!”

“You are quite right, Mr. Powell. But you must remember, there is a great difference between these fellows and us. They are not accustomed to seeing money. I do not suppose they thought that the whole world contained even twenty rupees, until to-day! Now there is no telling what they will think!”

II

Clive left Gussie by the stuff, and entered a room obviously furnished for such occasional outlandish guests as himself. He had murdered his capacity to be astonished, so that it no longer cried out even in his sleep. He accepted these chairs and that couch, and even the row of English books.

They were a queer mixture, the books—as if they had been stolen from some steamship company’s waiting-room, in some mid-world port! The Soul of a Turk stood cheek by jowl with The Soul of George Washington. Three men in a Boat neighboured The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. There were the usual reminiscences of society ladies and big game butchers: two volumes of sermons: Maurice Hewlett’s Restharrow. A Bible, of course.

Something for every taste, in fact.

On the walls were pictures, in whose arrangement a spirit of contempt and mockery had worked. It stared at you full, when you saw how the two opposing shorter walls were hung. The spirit of contempt and mockery was revealed here, in a vivid unmasking; scorn and sheer anger had run riot.

One wall held the very saturnalia of brainless sentimentalism and saccharinity. There were sporting pictures (we all know their kind), presenting Merrie England with a background of adoring peasantry. A picture of “Old Virginny”, a flutter of lace and kindness and all the other right ingredients of regret-laden legend, including faithful Sambo and Mammy in the wings. Two examples of the appalling art of G. F. Watts, R.A., O.M., from rim to rim signed with the clarty smudge of pseudo-mystical commonplace.

And, opposing this wall, a contrast that deliberately insulted, a splendour exultantly pagan, flauntingly Burmese. Unfairly so. From the West had been selected all that might most shame us if our civilisation were shown on its artistic side to an Athenian of Pericles’ age. The East’s abundance of florid or sheerly silly art, the daubs of its popular religion, the imitative stuff of its modern painters, the idiocy of its eroticism, were quietly ignored. Instead, there were stark expressionist paintings, by men who had worked, untutored, out of simple and immediate knowledge of Nature and their own minds.

At the very centre, drawing all attention by its horrible yet heart-breaking power, was one picture. Clive, went up to it. It was styled “The Crucifixion”. It was obviously by some artist who was not Christian, and who had merely been told the story. The crucifixion was of the old Burmese and Japanese kind, the victim being tied to the cross with ropes and then transfixed with spears. There is terror in this death, but not—if we reckon by man’s appalling record of penalties inflicted—outstanding pain. But the picture’s outstanding quality was that the artist had obviously witnessed a crucifixion.

The door opened, and a man of about sixty entered.

III

He was dressed in Burmese fashion, in what Clive was to learn was the Sawbwa’s livery: silken robes, gold-coloured except for green serows embroidered on them. He walked in the strange toddling fashion one sees so often (though why?) in Scots from their country’s western seaports. He was below middle height: compactly and largely built. His expression was measureless suspicion and disapproval.

This expression was fixed on Clive. Clive said,”I have come hoping to see Mr. Travers.”

The accents that answered were Scots; as Clive might have expected, MacKenzie’s countrymen had established for themselves a close preserve in this vast wedge of unknown country, with all its possibilities. It was a marvel that he, a mere Englishman, had been allowed to come here at all—still more, that a Scot should have made it feasible.

“Ye’ll no mind waiting.”

It was said defiantly; whether you mind or not, you are going to wait, until there has been thorough research into your character and aims.

Then, “I maun get her Highness’s wull.”

“But I want to see Mr. Travers. Mr. Gabriel Travers.”

“Aye, aye. His Highness the Sawbwa, you mean. But you maun ken, no one can see his Highness unless her leddyship first sees what they want.”

“But Mr. Travers and I are old friends.”

“Nae doot. But his Highness has had no less than three auld friends have called in the last aught years. By a singular coeencidence they had maist all lost their monies by an accident, and they thought his Highness might provide them something to set up their declining years. When they found he wad na do that, then perhaps he wad gie them their costs back to India, and a bit over—for auld acquaintance’ sake, that as the poet says should never be forgot.”

“You surely don’t suppose——?” Clive paused in his astonishment.

His colloquist looked him over carefully. Then he admitted, grudgingly but with some respect, “No, sir, I don’t suppose. I can see you’re no that sort. But you ken, there are beggars and beggars come to his Highness. There are some come that are beggars for more substantial matters than just a handful of rupees. Particularly now. This last week, for example——”

He closed down his revelations abruptly, and looked at Clive challengingly. Clive met the challenge squarely.

“Yes?” he asked. “This last week?”

“Nay” (drily). “If it’s no entered your mind yet, what some folks is after, there’s no call that I should pit it there. So I’ll just tak’ your ticket—your card, ye ken—to her Highness, and see what the leddy says.”

Clive had not thought he would need cards, calling on the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe, but by good luck there were some in his case. As he took one out, he said, amused, “I’m interested in these old friends of his Highness who thought they might perhaps raise their steamer fares back to India—and maybe a bit over. Did they succeed?”

“They did. From her leddyship—her Highness, I should say. But they didna carry their loot awa’.”

“What happened?”

“That’s telling more than need be told, I reckon—yet! But if you’ll give me your card, sir, I’ll see what her leddyship thinks.”

“Murdoch!” rang out a voice, startling them both. They turned, and Clive saw what he knew must be her leddyship in person.

“Murdoch!” she repeated. “You get older, but you never get more sensible! This is the gentleman we were expecting. The gentleman that Captain MacKenzie sent word about.”

Murdoch’s manner changed immediately. “If Captain MacKenzie spoke for the gentleman, your Highness——”

“I told you he spoke for him,” she said impatiently. “And now will you cease troubling Mr. Powell with your absurd suspicions, and see that everything is ready for him in the guesthouse?”

She dismissed him, and he went off grumbling to himself. “Absurd suspeecions! Aye, but they’re no that absurd, I’d have your leddyship know. Absurd sus-peecions!” His voice trailed off as he went, unwillingly, through the door. It was plain that he had not yet—even under stringent ordering—taken Clive altogether out of the category of cadgers and adventurers.

It did not vex Clive. He knew the East well enough—that is, the Indian and Burmese part of the East—to know that to every European outside official circles the stigma of adventurer attaches. The Administration has seen to that, remembering its own beginnings. Having ceased to be an official, since he had stayed on in the East he had become ipso facto a suspected adventurer.

Chapter III

I

He remembered afterwards points of light: the challenging defiance of her eyes, and the single blood-red ruby worn on her forehead. The ruby shone the more fiercely, because of the pallid gold skin beneath it. It took on, before the watcher had time for any reflection, a symbolical prominence.

“You are Mr. Powell?” She came forward, with outstretched hand.

He remembered MacKenzie’s warning. “You’ll treat her as being English, like yourself.” There was going to be no difficulty in doing this—as yet.

He said, “Yes. I am. And before I say anything else I want to thank you for the kindness with which you have made arrangements for my reception here. I had no right to expect it, coming without an invitation.”

She was pleased, and her pleasure called up her Burmese blood. “It is nothing, Mr. Powell. After all, when an old friend of my father’s——”

She hesitated, as if questioning and uncertainty assailed her. Her loose silken jacket—golden, but without the green embroidered serows—seemed to accentuate her appearance of slightness, almost of insect evanescence, an appealing fragility and brightness. Clive was noticing more now.

Clipping her words a little, she sometimes halted to find a word. This, and her quick flitting movements, made her seem foreign. But the lines of her face and long slender neck had nothing foreign about them. Clive had seen such lines on many a face, of the kind that crowd our fashionable sports grounds. Their counterpart is what the outside world considers “the public school type” of young man’s or boy’s face. When Perdita’s head was lifted in pride or happiness, the eye asked no change in the picture.

“Yes,” he said eagerly, “I am an old friend of Mr Travers’s. And I am so glad that he knows I am coming——”

“Yes”, she said, with a sudden turn to evasiveness in her voice, “he knows you are coming. At least, he has been told.”

“And that”, he continued, “he has shown his willingness to meet me again.”

“For that”, she said coolly, throwing herself down on the couch and by a gesture inviting him to be seated, “he has not yet shown that. The arrangements for your journey were made, as I expect you know, by Captain MacKenzie. If you will pull out the drawer in the little table beside you, Mr. Powell, you will find cigars—cheroots—cigarettes.”

“Thank you. I have given up smoking.”

A servant brought in a tray, with glasses and a bottle of some light-coloured liquid. As he was pouring Perdita said, “I can recommend this, Mr. Powell. It is a kind of light wine we make in our hills. If you are a judge of wines——”

“I am afraid I am not.”

“In that case, you must accept my judgment. My father has a valley where he grows his own grapes, and this wine is made from them, and it is—light and good. I learnt something about wines, when I was in France. In fact, I learnt some things in France that I did not entirely forget even in England afterwards.”

“Captain MacKenzie told me you were at school in England.”

“But I was in France first.”

“Did you like France?”

“No. Not so much.”

“But France is very beautiful.”

“Ye-es. But not so—so beautiful as Burma. Not so beautiful as our hills here.”

“I think”, he said in his new-found enthusiasm, “no country could be so beautiful as Burma. But still—France!”

“Yes,” she said. “You English are very docile. In some things you are too docile. You do not think for yourselves. And the French, they have bullied the rest of Europe into thinking that what they say is true. That is it has a special distinction. That it is cleverer than what other people think and say. That it has in it esprit, some lightness which you other heavy Europeans cannot hope to get. France has been like a quick-tempered beautiful woman who will not let any man contradict her or have any difference of opinion from her. And so she has bullied the other nations into repeating after her, France is wise, France is beautiful, France is the only true civilisation, and the other countries must be glad to exist for her and to suffer for her. Yes”, she admitted, “France is beautiful. But beauty is not everything.”

“Then what did you find wrong? To me it seems dreadful, that you should have found anything wrong at all,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back. “That is because you are a man. But to a woman France does not seem so—so beautiful. You see, she is too feminine. It is like being with nothing but other women all the time.”

“And you did not like that?”

She shook her head. “It has been my life here. I liked it—not so much.”

Clive was afraid to ask how she had liked his own country. Shake off illusions as we may—even confront the end of this dream of living, as he now did, about to walk out of time for ever—there still remains a stiff reluctance to hear others speak slightingly of our race and land.

However, the question obviously had to be asked. After a long pause he said, “And my own country?”

“I liked some of your people. Not all.”

“Naturally. I myself like only some of my people. What did you not like in England?”

She shrugged her shoulders and was evasive. “Ah you have all those places in your minds, where you have not moved for—five—hundred—years!” This with immense vigour.

He smiled. “Is it as long as all that?”

“I think that in some things it is longer. But come!” She rose suddenly. “I have been forgetting that you must be very tired, Mr. Powell. Captain MacKenzie told us you were not so well. You must go to your rooms and rest before dinner.”

Clive was not yet accustomed to the fact that his every movement was under supervision. Perdita rose, making no gesture that he noticed. A door opened. A servant entered, and, bowing low to his mistress and to Clive, conducted the latter across a courtyard, to his quarters, from this house, which was only reception-room and dining-room.

Raja Gabriel’s Country

Chapter I

I

Gussie was in Clive’s room, in his capacity as secretary-valet. He was fussing. “They are not habituated to receiving high officials here. I do not like the way they have put your bed, Mr. Powell.”

“Why, what’s wrong with it?”

“Why, it is so close to the window, that the moment it grows light you will feel it and be waked up.”

“I want that, Gussie. I want it as I have never wanted it before.” Then, smiling at his follower’s affectionate busyness, “I hope they have made you as comfortable as they have made me.”

“Oh, I am all right, Mr. Powell. But”—(his voice sank to a whisper, and he glanced cautiously round)—“it is exceedingly dangerous here.”

“What! with an Englishman as the Raja! and that charming young girl as the place’s mistress!”

“Ah, she is charming, no doubt! But she is the queen of head-hunters and savages!”

Gussie had his own separate arrangements. He said to Clive presently, “There are two other guests, Mr. Powell.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Of course. They are very well known. One of them is a high Government official. He must have come up the river very fast, in the Government launch. The other man has come over the mountains, from China. But he is well-known in Burma also. He is usually in Burma, though sometimes he is in China.”

Reflecting that he would find out soon who these very well-known personages were, Clive returned to the guest-house where he had been first received, and entered its dining-room. He found there two men, who looked up as he came in.

One wore a stiff dislike which he made no effort to conceal. The other had a hard-bitten jaunty manner: the grimace of impudence making the best of this mockery of a world, and not too careful to conceal even awareness of its own disreputable share in it. He was the professional good fellow, who can be so much professional else. “Since we’re all on the same business,” he began.

His companion disclaimed this. “I have sufficiently told you, Mr. Lidgett, that Government will refuse to sanction any arrangements you may manage to make here. You will kindly not persist in your assumption that the Government’s Representative is on a par with adventurers seeking concessions.”

His glance included Clive in this summary, and Clive found himself resenting it; and perception of his resentment stiffened the other’s anger.

Lidgett, however, with at least the elementary courtesy which Englishmen out East automatically extend to those whom they recognise (or by whom they themselves hope to be recognised), huddled the quarrel to an armistice.

“My name is Lidgett. Jake Lidgett. This gentleman, since he won’t introduce himself, is Mr. Charles Barron, of the Mandalay Secretariat.”

“My name is Powell.”

“Well, since we’re likely to be some time together, we may as well be friendly.” He poured out a glass of what Clive understood to be the Buddhawbwe speciality. “A fair field and no favour!”

Barron had risen in anger, and remained standing. He barely returned Clive’s greeting. As servants entered with food, he seated himself at a side table. He meant to keep his dignity unembarrassed by association with non-officials.

Clive tried to be fair, discouraging his resentment. He knew the type in India; but was surprised to find it in Burma, where survived something of the airy amateur spirit, that expects emergencies where files and regulations are useless and you must improvise, and do it quickly. However, a Service is a service, as the name implies. “The steel framework” is the harshest criticism that has ever been applied to the Civil Service; and Barron was a rib of that framework. He disciplined himself, and expected others to accept discipline from him. The world contained the Service and its subjects. Everyone else was an interloper and potential criminal.

Lidgett settled down to courteous enquiries of Clive’s journey hither. Rain had started just after sunset, and it was now pouring hard. He opined that it was a good thing Clive had just—or almost—raced the monsoon.

He was interested in Clive’s previous history. His questions, throwing wide a masterly cast all round the central theme of his curiosity, quite obviously felt after Clive’s present business.

Clive did not try to hide it; and by his frankness plainly puzzled his questioner all the more. Jake was polite; and, after the manner of his kind when not forced into a fight, ingratiating. He was also incredulous. At the end, sheer bewilderment swam up, and remained in possession of the field. Towards the meal’s finish Clive caught him looking at himself fixedly. “You’re the cleverest devil I ever came across”, the look was saying, “for all that you seem such a softy and perfect gent!”

They were sitting back in easy chairs afterwards, and Jake was smoking a cheroot. “What about a game of bridge, Powell?” he asked.

“Bridge?” Clive involuntarily lifted his brows towards Barron, ostentatiously aloof, smoking to the accompaniment of his own majestic silence.

“Yes. We could pick up another two fellows somewhere. That is, if like myself you’re not particular about the colour of their skins. Did you never hear the yarn that Raja Gabriel, when he was a young district officer in Bengal, taught his cook and syce and water-carrier to play whist, so that he could always get a game when alone on tour?”

Clive remembered this had been one of Gabriel’s renowned eccentricities.

“Well, do you think His Highness the Sawbwa hasn’t taught his slaves here? We might presently, when she has learnt to appreciate our company, persuade Her Highness the Princess to join us. And then, perhaps, with the three of us here——”

A look from Barron quelled the liberty of supposing any such thing. Jake scuttled back. “I hear”, he said blandly, “you brought some sort of Eurasian attendant, Powell. What about it? Pick up a fourth player somehow, and then you and I can take on the liabilities of our two partners or let them cancel each other out?”

It was evidently to be a match of wits—and luck—between Jake and him.

Jake’s recently acquired respect of Clive, however, and dread of his hidden cunning, postponed a decision. “No, I won’t to-night, after all, if you don’t mind, Powell. I’ve been imbibing a bit freely—in honour of your arrival to join our festive and chatty little party. You’d flay me alive, and take me back to Burma earning my way as your coolie. Another night we’ll do it.”

Barron rose and stalked off. Clive also presently excused himself.

II

As men and women often do in their last year, Clive lay long awake. The night, watchful and reticent, seemed the projection of thought from Mind sitting apart from the world it had created. It was not intense or fiercely flickering, as human thought is. It was static, as a dream or a picture at which we look.

His powers imperceptibly ebbing and life’s finish a mark visible in the thinning distance, he passed from his body and entered again his happiest years. He savoured again their mental and physical vigour: the crisp exciting winter dawns: spring’s sweetness of mango blossom hanging his paths with pockets of unexpected fragrance: day’s hot departure, in sudden tiny gusts blowing up from the ground—as a ghost may be supposed to vanish from the body that has lain in the dead exhaustion of illness: the monsoon’s explosive shattering assault. It had been a wonderful life, that life as a district officer in the uplands where the Gangetic plain climbs into Central India. It had contained all that man can ask in these fleeting earth-days.

Power, the happiness of longing to use it to save others and the chance to use it daily: health of spirit and brain and body: it had contained all these. It had contained companionship: race-meetings occasionally, or games at Calcutta or Midnapur or Kharagpur, visits to one or other of these towns to make up a cricket or rugger team. On one of these trips he had met Lettice.

After he married her, he remembered vividly the two years when a settlement officers’ camp had been near them. How she had enjoyed the gaiety, the communal eagerness and activity! The camp had brought another bride, and the two young women divided their kingdom equably. Perhaps the time had not been so entirely happy for him, for less than six months after his marriage had been the dreadful trouble about Gabriel, which the Service had felt so keenly, having no record of anything like it before. Clive’s well-meaning attempt to keep some sort of bridge open had failed, and the silence had started. Five months later, his son had been born, and his work—which led to a comparatively late commissionership, and then, when it was too late for anything to matter, to his brief splendour as an acting Member of Council—had gradually wrapt him in his own interests and problems.

His mind subsided on to the evening when his and Letty’s life had closed. They had been giving a tennis party, the Commissioner and his wife. A servant had come up with a cablegram on a salver. Clive had excused himself a moment, had opened it unthinkingly, and had read that Pat had died at Cambridge. They had been expecting him to come out to his father’s service that next autumn. This was nearly six years ago, and Letty had survived it for almost five years.

“Men must endure,” his mind kept reiterating. Must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither; and how much else, all that God chooses to send between that coming and going! His heart seemed about to break anew, remembering how Letty had endured, her valour and forlorn pretence of hope and strength, lest her husband’s hope and strength, too, should go. But he had had to watch her passing from him, as we watch horror happening, knowing that we can do nothing but wait for it to end. She had died seven months before that midnight when he learnt that God at last had shown mercy on him also.

Towards dawn the rain began again, and he heard it, “the rustle of the eternal rain of Love”. As he lay listening, on these hill-tops beyond the world, his soul took comfort from its security. That kindness of which religious men had written had come to him as well, though he had not been (but he was not sure of this) himself a religious man. Something or someone—the Power that guides things, or in some moments appears to guide them, so that they are not sheerly and altogether haphazard—had shut him at last in its pavilion. Nothing could hurt him; neither hope nor fear could again trouble him.

His last thought was of Lady Falkland, after her husband’s death in battle: how every night she thanked God that he had brought reunion a day nearer. His own reunion drew inexorably and silently nearer: either in another life, or in the grave’s eternal stillness. And nothing mattered any longer.

“Now that my Love lies sleeping,
There’s neither good nor bad.
I gave it into her keeping—
Everything I had.”

Chapter II

I

Next morning was one of mist everywhere. The rain had ceased, and given place to a noise of drops coagulating and tumbling off the forest-leaves, of cascades and rivulets hurrying on their work of draining the mountains before the monsoon started its duties again. It was a world of coolness and dimness, and muffled voices whose speakers could not be seen.

Breakfast was at the usual late hour of India, not earlier than eleven. Clive’s companions continued their manners of the previous evening. Barron looked lost without a morning paper or a chaprasi waiting on a veranda with files; Clive felt remorse for his twinge of amusement at seeing a fellow-spirit so naked. But he understood. Unfortified by the comfort of print—of course, print of an authorised and finely deliberate responsibility of tone—how was one to know what to think or where to look? It was a strange land, of hill-demons chuckling as they made their way through an insidious cloud-region.

Jake, on the other hand, seemed able to dispense with print and chaprasi both. He had been cheered by a night of excellent sleep, and he was evidently prepared to dice or play cards with all the world. He looked more like a cockney sparrow than ever, yet with claws and beak of a hawk in reserve.

Presently Murdoch entered.

“Her leddyship’s wishes to you, gentlemen,” he announced. “And what would you be thinking to do this day?”

Barron burst out angrily. “Miss Travers knows perfectly well that I intend to see her father. She and he have wasted three days of my time already.”

“That’s my case also,” observed Lidgett. “Though, being a person of less importance than our friend here, I would not put it in quite such a hot-tempered fashion.”

“You mean, I presume,” said Murdoch, turning to Barron, “that you would hae an audience of His Highness the Sawbwa?”

“I mean no such nonsense. I said Mr. Travers when I arrived, and Mr. Travers is what I intend to go on saying.”

The girl had come in unobserved. “Then you can continue to go on saying it, Mr. Barron,” she said, stepping forward.

Lidgett and Barron were slow in rising to their feet. Their minds, too, were slow in adjusting themselves to the fact that she did not regard herself as just a Eurasian girl. Clive happened to be standing considerably apart from the main group.

“Mr. Travers”, said Barron, “has never been recognised by the Burmese Government.”

“He needs no recognition. He was here before the British conquered Burma. His title was his, by the will of the lesser chiefs of all this higher Chindwin; and by express grant from King Thibaw, when Thibaw was an independent Emperor.”

Barron was disconcerted; and the other two felt a discomfort of their own, as well as some reflection of his. However, he said, “If Mr. Travers was made Sawbwa by grant of Thibaw, when we conquered Burma he passed under our suzerainty.”

She hesitated, as if feeling that she lost ground by coming down to the plane of his argument. But she decided to do it. Perhaps she knew his statement must be met some time or other.

“My father had nothing to do with Thibaw when the British came. He had asserted his independence, and won it—in the campaign of 1884. He had driven Thibaw’s troops out of all the Upper Chindwin, almost to Homalin, before he withdrew again into his own territory. He had forced out of Thibaw what no British Government ever forced out of a Burmese King! He forced him to admit, in a formal treaty, that he had cancelled his claims to lands that the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe had wrested from him. No!” she cried. “Not wrested from him, for that would make us aggressors as if we were Europeans! They had nothing to do with Thibaw—nothing whatever! It was he who was the invader. And we beat him back, till he was glad to cry for peace!”

“I never heard of it,” he muttered.

She was too excited with her own theme to bother about this. “It was my father’s influence that helped your people, more than once. He saved your Bombay Burmans from being crucified at Kindat, when your war with Thibaw had first broken out.”

“It was Johnstone who saved them,” he said. “He came over from Manipur.”

“If my father had not sent word from Buddhawbwe they would have been dead long before Johnstone crossed the hills! We saved their lives—my father saved them—because they were his own people. And what has been his reward? Ever since, your Government has been trying to steal into his territory—to worm itself into control of our riches and to make these valleys what other parts of the world that were once beautiful have been made. You call it civilising. You call it developing backward lands.”

He bent forward, and with an elaborate pose of dignified nonchalance shook off into a tray his cigar ash, before bothering to reply.

“You have kept me waiting here,” he said at last. “Kept the Representative of the British Government waiting while you decided what was needed to keep up the pride of this absurd Court of yours.”

“You have waited exactly three days. If you were visiting—and unasked—any prince in the whole world, however small—three days would be a very short time to wait for his convenience! And if you refused him his just title, you would wait for ever—as you shall do here!”

“That’s all right,” broke in Lidgett ingratiatingly. “I’m not a fellow to stand on ceremony, Miss Travers. I want to see the Sawbwa. To see His Highness. If His Highness will give me a few minutes I have a proposal to put before him, whose immense advantages His Highness is bound to see.”

He succeeded in drawing her attention to himself. He mistook her look for interest, and thought the time propitious to stress his tolerance and readiness to humour the foolish rest of mankind. “What I mean is, you won’t find all of us so sticky as Mr. Barron. I guess, if your father is established here as king, why, then, he is king here.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, yes. Of course. And I don’t see any harm in admitting his title. After all—that’s a matter for him and the British Government to sort out between them—some time or other. I’ll call him His Highness, certainly. Can I see the Sawbwa? Just for a few minutes! Just for a matter of half an hour, say? You’ll find it”, he concluded, with what he meant to be an enticing smile of goodwill and enormous benevolence and power, “well worth his while. It would be well worth your while, too, Miss Travers. Well worth the while of all of you!”

During this surprising address her face was a study. The speaker’s manner began with seedy gallantry, and deepened into an insufferable succulence. When he made his moving announcement of his willingness—without prejudice to anything that might ultimately happen—to acknowledge the Sawbwa’s rank, she lifted her brows in amazement. She turned from him in contempt, and did not seem to hear his peroration.

She spoke to Barron instead. And she made it evident that she had dismissed the question at issue between them.

“If there is anything you want, would you please write it in that book?” She indicated a “Guests’ Wish-Book”, lying on a table. “Perhaps you would like to do something to amuse yourself for the rest of this morning?”

“Since you choose to keep me waiting”, he said heavily, “I may as well potter round and see if I can get a bit of shooting.”

This seemed to astonish her most of all. “You mean—you want to go out and kill things? Animals? Birds? Living creatures?”

“Certainly. What else is there to do?”

“I should have thought”—she moved her hands quickly, expressively—”there was everything. Except that!”

She hesitated. Then, with a contempt beyond anything she had shown towards the unfortunate and well-meaning Jake, she concluded, “Certainly. You shall have your men, and you shall—oh, by all means, you shall amuse yourself in the way to which you are accustomed!”

He was pleased; and he thought he might now make concessions. “I quite understand that Mr. Travers may find himself a bit puzzled to know what to do, with a whole mob of people pestering him simultaneously.” After this tactful reference to Clive and Lidgett, he added reassuringly, “Tell him things will sort themselves out, once he’s regularised his position by a talk with me. I’ll see him tonight, after dinner; if that’ll suit him it’ll suit me.”

“It is not usual, I think”, she said quietly, “for any guest, however welcome, to dictate to his host when that host shall discuss business with him.”

“You don’t seem”, he said with severity, “to understand the position. Your father—has got to see the Representative of the British Government. And he thinks he can keep me kicking my heels here! Can keep an Ambassador—if you like to put it that way——”

“An Ambassador!” she exclaimed. Then repeated it. “An Ambassador!”

“Certainly,” he said. “The Ambassador of the British Government.”

“You shall have your shooting,” she told him, stiffening to a rigidity of contempt. “And when you get back to Mandalay you shall take this message, Ambassador! from His Highness my father, but from me his daughter—that the British Government is too great a Government to be able to afford to be represented by anyone but gentlemen. That is all.”

And indeed, it had been as she said. He had lost dignity, by standing on what he considered his dignity, with what he chose to regard as a half-caste girl of no importance. Her entrance had taken him unawares, and he had not readjusted his mind from its supposition that she would be a mere post-box between him and her father. Before he knew it he had slipped into a discussion, in which all the going had been made by an opponent whose measure he had not troubled to take.

She went out, not hurriedly or disconcertedly, but with a leisure that paused for one moment by the window, to peer at the hills opposite, to see if the rain were immediately returning.

She had neither looked at Clive, nor spoken to him.

II

Barron also went out presently. His face was still scarlet and angry.

“God I what a bloody fool the chap is!” exclaimed Lidgett. “He’ll never get a thing out of these people now! Well, all the better for you and me, Powell; we have the field to ourselves. I say, you might let me have a guess at the show you are representing. I’ll tell you mine, in fair exchange. We might manage to do some sort of a deal for our respective principals, pooling the place between us, now that the British Government, through its excellently tactful Ambassador, has for the time being eliminated itself.”

“I’m representing nobody,” said Clive.

“I didn’t mean to say that you had a Company definitely fixed up yet. All I meant was, What sort of backing had you in your mind, for—for when you had seen Raja Gabriel and fixed up your business for a beginning? If it’s the——” (he named a well-known Scots-American combine, by which Clive guessed that his own employers, whoever they were, were fearing competition from this quarter), “they’re no go. Absolutely no good at all! They dropped a frightful lot over that Java-Siam show they tried to start, and they’re lying low while they lick their burnt fingers.”

Clive thought to himself, that the Scots-American combine were not the only people who were “lying” and lying pretty low. First at this pun, and then at the discovery that his mind was growing aware more and more of the comedy of human existence and losing its long heavy obsession with life’s solemnity, he smiled to himself. Jake noted it quickly, as it was his habit to note all surface manifestations; he immediately misinterpreted it—again, as it was his habit to misinterpret what he saw.

“Oh, all right, Powell,” he said with forced good humour. “You’re a deep dog, you are. I can see that. Only, I warn you, if you insist on playing your own hand I’ll play mine, and we’ll see who’s the better player! I like you, Powell”, he said, changing the subject, “and I see that you understand these people, just as I understand them. That was very wise of you, not to say anything, while Barron was making a God-almighty ass of himself. And I’ve noticed, you understand that Jack Burman, even if he’s only semi-Jack-Burman up in these jungly hills, and a household slave at that, has his dignity. He isn’t like the Indian, who’s accustomed to being kicked and cuffed all these centuries. These fellows, though they make a lot of fuss about their Buddhism and their gentleness, used to be the most awful bloodthirsty ruffians. They used to go over the hills into Arakan and Assam and Bengal, and bring back slaves and loot, after raising piles of corpses wherever they came. I like your manner to them, Powell. It’s the right manner—though, if you don’t mind my saying so, being after all a fellow who’s knocked about in Burma itself for donkeys’ years, it’s just a wee bit too gentle, too much like an English gentleman talking to fellows whom he regards as his equals. Well, since there’s nothing else doing, I may as well go and have a lay-down. Unless”, he added, “you’re interested in card tricks. There are some jolly good ones I could show you.”

Clive was sure there were. He said, politely, that he was not very interested in card tricks.

“Well, there are some card games also, that two can play together. You and I must have some games, Powell. Time’s going to hang heavily here, with nothing to do except eat and sleep and watch the rain. Damn it, it’s started pouring again! Won’t do Barron’s shooting much good.”

III

After he had gone out, Clive moved over to the bookshelf. There seemed nothing very exciting there. He was running a desultory glance over what there was, when he heard his name.

“Mr. Powell, sir.”

He rose from his stooping position, and confronted Murdoch.

“Her leddyship’s compliments to you, sir, and would you spare her a few minutes in her ain office.”

Clive followed him, to what he afterwards learnt was an annexe to the Sawbwa’s own palace. Here the Princess received him, in an office whose use for business was testified by a desk and chairs of Western make. But the room was also a riot of flowers; vases and bowls encrusted over with dragons and creatures celestial and uncelestial stood everywhere. Figures carved in teakwood guarded the desk and a couple of small tables. The floor was covered with a carpet adorned with serows, green on a mainly golden field.

One of the tables was before him; and an English literary magazine happened to lie open on it, at the reproduction of a picture of naiads and sea-gods, above the lines:

“Marinel’s former wound is healed;
He comes to Proteus’ hall;
Where Thamys does with Medway wed,
And feasts the sea-gods all.”

It seemed a good omen. He himself had come to Proteus’ hall, to the haunts of the most changeable and incalculable man he had ever known. His wound might find healing here, by God’s goodness, and old troubles be laid to sleep.

His eyes strayed to a small bookcase, whose contents seemed almost equally divided into French and English, all carefully and specially bound, under the supervision of a taste that knew its own individual path to effectiveness of beauty. He wondered if the books were much read, or were there for adornment only.

As he was trying to pick out a few titles, the Princess entered.

“Mr. Powell, I wanted to say how sorry I am that you should have been troubled by that foolish scene this morning. I was exceedingly sorry that any gentlemen—that any friend of my father’s—should have been present.”

“I was only sorry that you should have been put in such a difficult position.”

“But I did not speak—did not speak—to you! I was—so angry! And now”, she smiled, and held out her hand, “will you forgive me? I have asked you to come, so that I may say that I meant no sort of rudeness to you, and may ask what there is—I am afraid that there is not much, in this poor place that is all mountains and forest—but still, what is there we can do that will make you happy and comfortable until my father can see you?”

“You have already done all I need—and far more than I need.”

“You say that because you are so kind. Captain MacKenzie wrote about you.”

“But how could he? I came up from Kindat with him, and he could not have written—although, of course, I know he had those three days when he was waiting for me at Kindat, in which he made arrangements for my journey. But until we were companions on his launch he knew nothing about me.”

“Oh, you are quite wrong. He knew a great deal, and Captain MacKenzie does not make mistakes. Did he not see you at Monywa?”

“Why, yes. But that was for only five minutes in the Club.”

“I think that five minutes, even in a Club, is quite sufficient, Mr. Powell, to know some men! Five minutes would be quite enough to know your Mr. Barron! Five minutes in his office! It is because you have had so many Englishmen like him, who have given many many Indians and Burmans five minutes in their office, that our hearts are now so sore.”

“I do not remember anything that I said to Captain MacKenzie. Oh, yes, I told him that I wanted to see an old friend—before” (he added to himself, so that she hardly caught it) “it was too late.”

“Captain MacKenzie does not make mistakes,” she repeated. Then, with a shade of anxiety and doubtfulness, “He was quite right, was he not? That you do not want our jade—our silver—our rubies? All these things for which men kill one another and make themselves worse than beasts!”

He could not help smiling at the sight of the sudden childishness that had come so appealingly into her face. It was begging him not to destroy an illusion. “I want nothing of your jade or your silver or your rubies, Princess Perdita. I want only to see your father, before I go away again and do not trouble you or him any further.”

“I will try to arrange that,” she said simply. “But you must wait. It will not be easy. He knows you are here, and—and—he says he will not see you. Only, Captain MacKenzie said he must see you, and I think—I am not sure—that he will see you. If you will wait.”

“I will wait, Princess Perdita.”

“No”, she said, with a younger manner yet, almost confidingly, “to you I must be just Dita. You are my father’s old friend. To these others—yes Princess Pradita and Her Highness. And now you have only to say what you would like, Mr. Powell, and if we can give it you shall have it. You do not want shooting?” she asked, again with that anxiety.

“God! no,” he said; and they both smiled, as friends who for the first time have found that they are friends.

“Then everything is yours!” she said excitedly. “Since you want nothing, then nothing can be denied to you! These hills, these people who are my subjects, this guest-house, it is all yours! And if you will wait, and will trust me, then my father, I am sure, will see you. You will come out with me when I have time, Mr. Powell, and let me show you the things that we have in our country!”

He reminded himself of Mackenzie’s warning. “You’ll treat her as English, like yourself.” In part, he repeated to himself, she was English; in the larger half of her mind and spirit, inherited from her father and built up in companionship with him, she was English. She had been in part educated in the West; and to one so educated and made, to be a jungle princess must have drawbacks. There has been a cult of sheikhly and aboriginal virtue of recent years; but sheer valiant simple man and woman unadulterated by civilisation, can be very monotonous. Her eager wistful face was a witness to the deadness of her life here.

“If you’ll be gentle with me, and remember that I am not young and vigorous like yourself, I shall be very very happy to come with you.”

“I will remember,” she assured him. “Captain MacKenzie” (he seemed to be her oracle) “told me you were not so well.”

IV

The three visitors did not meet again until evening, and Clive rested. His reserves were low, he found himself watching them sooner than he had expected. He could look for no replenishing, even for a brief flare-up of vitality before the end.

Barron’s sport went badly, as Lidgett had predicted. It was a wild gusty day, of dense walls of water suddenly precipitated, of wisps of rain twisted and tossed, as if invisible players were flinging them from hand to hand. Barron lost himself—misled deliberately, he was sure, and may have been right—and was bogged in dismal desperate regions that held not a single shootable creature. In the futility of wrath, returning wet and savage, he had slaughtered two finches. The look of exchanged derision with which his coolies picked them up and showed them to each other had not escaped him.

Clive said little; and left, after a poor attempt at dining. Barron remained apart, gloomily silent, beginning to feel ridiculous rather than stately. Presently, with elaborate indifference, he walked up to the side-table which held the Sawbwa’s drinks and cigars.

He found Lidgett at his elbow. “That poor old boy isn’t long for this world, if he isn’t careful,” observed Jake. “It’s just suicide, his coming up here.”

“Then why need he come?”

The question was Barron’s first gesture of acknowledgment that Lidgett existed in any world that he could notice, and Lidgett was eager to take hold of it.

“I suppose it’s natural for everyone, to keep an eye out for the main chance. Even for an old boy like that.” He reached for a bottle of whisky. “I suppose that fellow MacKenzie keeps Travers’s cellar supplied?”

“Probably.”

“He must have made a pretty good thing out of the connection, one way and another, all these years. And he’s managed—trust a Scot!—to get a brother Scot settled here as major-domo!”

Barron scowled, remembering the scene of the morning.

Jake cocked his wary glance. He said casually, “You can’t help admiring Powell. He’s got guts, at his age and in his state of health, coming up into country like this!”

“It remains to be seen whether he’s got guts that’ll get him out of it again.”

“All the same—one takes off one’s hat to him.”

“I take off nothing to him. He’s a damned adventurer,” said Barron rudely, “and has no business here.”

“I—see! Like myself, I suppose?”

“Yes. If you want to get it straight!”

“Oh, quite. Quite. Nothing like politeness between Britons alone together in a strange country, where anything might happen to them.”

“You asked me my opinion.”

“Quite. And I didn’t need to ask. But don’t go on being a damn fool, Barron! I suppose it’s to my interest to watch you mess your business up, as in a way it gives me a better chance with mine. On the other hand, not being an utter idiot I know that even if I get my concessions I can’t work them if Government chooses to oppose them.”

“You see that at last!”

“Course I see it. Saw it from the first. But I wasn’t going to admit it, so long as you were acting the Heaven-Born turning up its nose at a mere son of earth and dust! Now listen to me. It’s about this fellow Powell.”

Barron wavered. Powell’s name, however, decided him. He sat down, therefore. But on the rim of his chair, as a proof that he had sat down in protest.

“Powell’s no fool”, said Jake, “though it suits his game to seem one. They wrote about him from Bengal, before he came, didn’t they? Well, they didn’t say he was a fool, did they?”

Barron was telling nothing. Jake dropped this line of research. It had been worth trying, however. Everything is worth trying.

“Listen, Barron, and see if this isn’t sense. The Government can’t work any mining concessions itself, can it? In fact, it doesn’t want to work them. Only—by hook or by crook—it’s got to see that the concessions to these Buddhawbwe mines—and believe me, the amount of stuff in this country is something stupendous “

“We know that.”

“Exactly. And you know, as I know—oh, I’ve got my ways of knowing; I haven’t been living by my wits for twenty years and more without making my connections—some of them outside Burma, for that matter——”

A gleam in Barron’s eyes told Jake that he knew this. After all, it was from the Chinese side that the latter had just now come.

Jake hastily changed the subject again. He was a gentleman who did this a great deal. “You and I know, Barron, that Britain isn’t the only country interested in what’s in these hills.”

“America is interested,” said Barron meaningly. He thoughtfully squirted a little more soda in his whisky.

Jake had his own reasons for knowing this, which he preferred to suppress for the time being. “Naturally!” he said. “Well, what was I saying? Your job is to prevent control passing into—well, into undesirable hands——”

Barron’s countenance plainly indicated that he considered the hands in front of him, at that moment jiggling round the last two inches of a peg in its glass, to shake some kick out of the expiring soda, eminently undesirable. However, Jake was not one to allow personal considerations to hamper him in doing business. He drained his glass, and proceeded to help himself to a fresh peg.

“My job”, he continued, “is to bring off a deal for the people I’m working for.”

“Who are they?”

“Oh, well—the Company isn’t exactly fixed up. Not yet.”

“Quite. But you haven’t told me who your people are. I’m not saying I don’t know already——”

Jake wondered if he did, and for a minute each faced the other, trying to bluff and to call bluff.

Barron decided to waive the point; it remained doubtful. “It will help me if I am told frankly whom we are being asked to support.”

“Of course! Of course I’m going to be frank with you, Barron. I wouldn’t ask for your backing, otherwise.”

“Well?” (Sharply) “Who are your people?”

Jake drained his glass at one draught, and felt he needed another. “They’re the—they’re the—well, it’s mainly Lazenby’s set.”

“American money!”

“But, damn it! how can you help it—with the international silver market as it is?”

“As a patriotic Englishman, I’d like to help it!”

“Of course. So would I. So would every decent man. Damn it, Jake Lidgett has his faults. I’m not setting up to be a saint or a General Gordon or anything of that sort. But no one’s ever been able to deny that I’m an Englishman through and through—an Englishman of the deepest dye.”

This touching appeal left the other unmoved. Reaching his glass and one hand to the siphon, he squirted in a bit more soda; held up his glass between him and the light: watched the beaded bubbles wink: and then repeated, “American money!”

“Oh, not all, Barron!”

“Practically all.”

“Oh, only a small part of it. Besides, they’re the people who’ve got the money and are on the spot. The people who are ready. Our people aren’t.”

“You mean”, thought Barron, again looking through his glass at the central light, as if it brought illumination, “they are the people who’ve been employing you, since you got sacked by your last British employers—for good and sufficient reasons, and sufficiently well understood, even if not openly divulged.” But he said nothing of this.

“Damn it all, what does it matter? I shall be their manager up here, when they open the Buddhawbwe silver mines. And I’m British, aren’t I? The old flag, the old country—best country in whole wide world!” Jake said impulsively. “Everything to poor old Jake Lidgett!” His eyes filled with tears. “Englishman of deepest dye! Shake hands, Barron! Both Englishmen of deepest dye. Both Englishmen—lonely in savage country—with savage king—and Powell—unscrupulous adventurer. Powell not Englishman of deepest dye. Not like us.”

Even the stoniest-hearted must have been touched at last. Barron, though he looked unmoved, consented to accept the preferred hand.

This comradely kindness proved too much for the lonely adventurer. It was more—far more—than he could bear. Jake threw his head on his hands and burst into a flood of tears. Bitter tears.

Then he looked up, and resolutely wiped them away. “Must pull self together. Serious business. Serious danger. For Jake Lidgett and friend Barron. Against unscrupulous adventurer. Fellow Powell.”

But Barron had left him.

An hour later, Murdoch, going his rounds to see if all was right, found Lidgett asleep.

Chapter III

I

While Jake and Barron were together in stately discussion and carousal, Gussie was in Clive’s bedroom. He had come in hurriedly, alarmed by what the slaves of the guest-house reported. Clive laughed at him, and assured him his indisposition was nothing. But he was touched by Gussie’s simplicity and affection.

Gussie, his fears quieted, remained talking, and Clive gained some valuable information.

“You see, Mr. Powell, those fellows in there” (his disrespectful reference to Jake and Barron) “they will make every kind of mistake, because they do not understand the people. That Mr. Barron—everyone in all Burma could have told you that he is the very worst official that the Government could have sent to deal with a man like Raja Gabriel.”

Clive believed this; and wondered, audibly, why he had been sent.

“Ah!” said Gussie, looking very wise in the lamplight. “Why is it that Government always sends its worst men, on these errands which are so very difficult, Mr. Powell? It is because they look on everything as just something to fit into the work of the Service! It is to help towards promotion! So they look round, and they ask themselves, ‘Now, who is there who is due for promotion, for a chance to distinguish himself?’ Then, naturally., the Viceroy or Governor sees someone whom he sees every day, and he says, ‘Of course! That is the man! It is his turn to have some chance of distinction.’ So this man is sent, and he gets a C.I.E., or something of that sort. Perhaps a step-up-on-the-rung-of-the-official-ladder,” said Gussie, speaking rapidly, as always when his tongue found it had hold of the opening word of one of the stock phrases of orator or journalist. “That is it. A step-up-on-the-rung of-the-official-ladder.”

“Then you had heard of Mr. Barron before you met him here?”

“Of course! He is famous all over Burma, for his rudeness to everyone he thinks beneath him and for his conceit of himself! But you must not suppose that he is rude to the heads of the Government. Oh no! To them he is the Mr. Barron whose manners are always so pleasant and good——”

Clive found himself doubting it. Though of course to agree with those whom Providence has set in authority above us is an essential part of good manners.

“And whose opinions are so wise—because, you see, Mr. Powell, his opinions are always the same as those of the Government. Major Balfour—he used to say of men like this Barron——”

What Major Balfour used to say of men like Barron, Clive never learnt. The recollection seemed to stagger Gussie, and he suddenly saw that he ought not to inflict the remark on a gentleman. He dropped the subject, which was no doubt as well.

His face took on an exquisite look of wistful childlike wisdom. “I will tell you what I think Government should have done, Mr. Powell. And when you get back you must tell them, for they will listen to you, for you have been a great official yourself and undoubtedly your advice will have much influence.”

“What should Government have done, Gussie?”

“Oh, it is what they should do now—after Barron has failed, as he is bound to fail, and after he has left things between Government and Raja Gabriel much worse than before. Mr. Powell, there is only one man who will be able to set things right then.”

“Major Balfour?” queried Clive, who was developing gifts of telepathy.

“You are quite right, Mr. Powell,” cried Gussie. “Major Balfour is at Edinburgh, in England. But I am sure he would come out once more, if he were asked, for an important task like this. I have told you about him, Mr. Powell—he was a great friend of my poor mother when he was out here before——”

Yes, Clive knew that Major Balfour had been a great friend of Gussie’s mother. He knew, too, that at the back of poor Gussie’s mind was the pitiful hope that if their patron could only return to the field where he had once exercised his remarkable gifts to universal applause, there might be jobs for Gussie and Gussie’s brothers and Gussie’s sisters’ husbands. Perhaps also a pension for his poor mother.

“Tell me about your mother, Gussie. And about Major Balfour.”

Gussie’s eyes filled with tears. “Why, mother was Scotch, you see, Mr. Powell. We are of a very old Scotch family, and when poor mother first came out to Burma——”

He checked, and there was evidently going to be a hiatus in his story. He recovered bravely, like a horse that decides that a slight swerving from sheer rectitude will take it over a lower patch of hedge. “You see, mother was with the colonel—and the colonel’s wife—of a regiment. She was like a friend to them, Mr. Powell, and she helped with their two children.”

But the saga of Gussie’s mother is no business of ours.

II

When Clive, tiring quickly, signified that he must sleep, Gussie, rising to go, returned to their talk’s beginning. “This Barron is making the very worst mistake of all. He does not remember that these people here are Buddhists.”

“The books”, said Clive drowsily, “call them head-hunters, and say that they are wild—savage—treacherous—and intractable.”

Gussie was shocked. “Oh, but that is quite wrong, Mr. Powell! It is not true of Buddhawbwe at all! Here all the people are very earnest Buddhists. And they say, What sort of a man is this Mr. Barron? He is clearly a man who has no law, for he spends the day doing nothing but trying to take life for his own pleasure. Of course,” conceded Gussie, going off at a tangent, “head-hunting is not a good thing. But it is done for very special reasons, you must understand, Mr. Powell. It is like what we do when it is St. Valentine’s Day or Christmas.”

“So I understand. You send your young lady a head, and she is pleased to know how brave you are. Isn’t that it, Gussie.”

“Of course. But she is also glad that you are so useful to her. You see, if you have no head she says, How can I marry you? There are evil spirits all round, and wicked men. And we shall have children, who will be too small and weak to fight. So you must come with a head, or with two heads; and then you can say, We shall have a head on each side of our front door to our house, and then the ghosts of these heads will protect the house. They will drive away all our enemies. So then she is very glad and she says, Well, I will marry you.”

Clive was interested. But he was sleepy. “Does Raja Gabriel never kill?” he asked.

“Not now. For you see, his people are Buddhists. They are not head-hunters in his kingdom any longer.”

“What happens when he has criminals?”

“Men, you mean? Oh, them he will kill, of course—if they have done very wicked things. But he says that birds and animals do not do wicked things, and that it is wrong to kill them for our pleasure. He stopped the fur trade with British Burma, many years ago. It is queer, but even Englishmen who get to know the people of this country well, they come to think as Raja Gabriel does. Major Balfour—he used to be a famous shikar. But in his last years he gave up shooting altogether. He said he had other things to do.”

“I’m sure he had.”

“But poor mother told me, That was only his excuse.”

As he prepared to go, Gussie added, “But the servants are all saying that Pole Sahib, who is wiser than Mr. Barron, is going to get what he wants.”

“What do they think that is?” asked Clive, turning over on his side.

“Jade and rubies. But above all, silver. That is what everyone is now wanting from Buddhawbwe. And they say, Pole Sahib will get it, because Princess Pradita loves him. They know that, though this morning she told Barron and the other man that she knew they were wicked and selfish men, she came to you afterwards and said that she knew you were good. They know that if they wish to stand well with her, then they must all pay great attention to you.”

“That’s nice,” said Clive. “Good night, Gussie.”

“Good night, Mr. Powell.”

Gussie took out the lamp. “I am leaving matches and a candle on that chair, Mr. Powell. If you wish for anything, I am in the next room. Princess Pradita said I was to sleep there.”

“Thank you, very much. Good night. You’re a good chap, Gussie.”

Chapter IV

I

Dawn began with a tremendous drumming and horn-blowing. Clive was lying listening and wondering, when Gussie entered, his eyes wide-open with excitement.

“Have you seen what is happening, Mr. Powell?”

“What is happening, Gussie?”

“Raja Gabriel is marching to meet the Chinese Ambassador. This afternoon the Ambassador will come to Buddhawbwe.”

Clive raised himself to look out. The plat beside the lake, he realised, was an official parade-ground. A warrior assemblage, foot and horse, packed it now. Points of weapons caught the light. At its centre moved a bright-flashing grove of banners, the Sawbwa’s bodyguard.

It was all fantastic. With some such clang and clatter Prester John might have set out to visit the King of Tartary’s daughter. He remembered the six months when he and Raja Gabriel had been neighbours in Calcutta, in Writers’ Buildings, very minor members of the Secretariat together. The pictures he recalled would not merge with those being made by the lake at this moment.

The noise continued without remission for about two hours. Then it seemed to be passing into the distance.

A clatter outside caused him this time to get up. He saw Perdita riding back from the gathering. Her escort were mounted on eager little ponies straining up the steep paths from the lake. High among the peaks to the left the army he had seen at dawn had reached a pass. It flickered momently on the summit and was gone.

He joined the other two at breakfast.

The breakfast things had been cleared away, and they were audibly wondering what the infernal row at dawn had been about, and if this clear patch were going to broaden into a tolerable day for once, when Perdita astonished them all by entering.

She astonished them still more, by going up to Clive as if he alone were in the room, and by speaking to him only. And astonished them most of all by what she said.

“Mr. Powell, if you can be patient for a few days longer I will try to arrange an interview for you with Mr. Travers.”

Clive thought (dismissing the idea as absurd) that he saw in her aggressively tilted face a gleam of mischievous pleasure in the surprise and vexation she was causing. “Mr. Travers”—with the lightest possible stress on that ”Mr.”

He did not know what to say in reply. She spoke again, therefore, and what she said was again meant for the others also. “His Highness the Sawbwa” (with cool deliberateness of phrase and intonation) “has gone on tour.”

In attack the element of surprise is everything. It had been used twice. The Princess used it for the third time, in her last remark, addressed to Clive only.

“Mr. Powell, if you can spare me the time, perhaps you would speak with me in my own office.”

With an inclination that appeared to include them all, while it left a suspicion that it had ignored two of them, she went out. Clive went out also.

II

“Well, Powell’s been making hay while the sun shone!” Jake exclaimed. “Mr. Travers! To him, Mr.—to us, if you please, His Highness the Sawbwa! Always His Highness the Sawbwa!”

“We’ll see if he’ll be His Highness long!” fumed Barron. “So this insolent slip of a half-caste girl thinks she can keep the Representative of the Government waiting, while she and her father show off their cheeky manners!”

“Still—if Powell gets the concession! I mean, after all he isn’t a mere freelance, like Jake Lidgett. He’s been one of the Heaven-born himself, and he’s retiring, and will have friends in the India Office. Don’t you see, he’ll get the support and backing he’ll want for his firm—whatever it is? Now listen, Barron. Since this girl’s so openly taken up Powell, it makes it more necessary than ever that all three of us should come to some agreement. If we insist on fighting each other, we shall only cancel each other out. And Raja Gabriel and Her Highness the Princess——”

“Princess!”

“What’s the sense of keeping on forgetting that her father maintains he’s an independent prince? Not one of your tame rajas! That he could call himself ‘His Majesty’ if he wanted! He claims that in Buddhawbwe his daughter is ‘Her Highness’, because he gave her that title!”

Barron’s comment was inaudible. However, he repeated it, toned down, as he strode angrily about the room. “If you combed these damned hills you’d find Highnesses—of her sort! as thick as fleas in a coolie’s blanket!”

“No doubt. Everyone knows that Raja Gabriel’s been a truly masculine potentate! The father of his people, or a good proportion of them! Still, this girl is the only child that he acknowledges. I don’t mind telling you, if she chooses to be ‘Her Highness’ she can be ‘Her Highness’, so far as I’m concerned. I can’t afford to have my trip for nothing. It cost me a pretty penny getting up here!”

Reminded of his cracked dignity, Barron mentally dusted it and put it back on the shelf. He subsided into taciturnity.

Jake, by old practice and long watchfulness, trained into perception of other men’s changing moods, saw he had lost ground, and must recover it by jollity. Then, if jollity failed, by some other method. His features took on a resolute cheerfulness.

Barron, however, jerked his shoulder, as if shaking off some unwelcome familiarity; and went out.

Lidgett caught him up, as he was commanding his orderly to get him coolies and beaters. “You going shooting again?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Well, if you ask me——”

“I don’t particularly ask you.”

“All right. All right. I was going to tell you something you might as well know.”

Barron waited, and Jake took this for encouragement enough. After all, one cannot afford to be touchy on points of personal dignity.

“I was going to say that it seemed to me that this was where you made your mistake with this girl yesterday. When you said you were going out shooting.”

“What had that to do with her infernal impudence?”

“If you ask me, Everything. She asked what you would like to do to amuse yourself. And you said you would go shooting.”

“Naturally.”

“Naturally nothing!”

“It’s the usual way a gentleman amuses himself.”

Jake chuckled. “Only if he’s a Christian gentleman. Here we are among Buddhist gentlemen—more or less. I’ll tell you something I once saw. A school inspector, a chap just out from home, came to Pakokku when I was visiting there, to look over the monks’ educational work. He seemed a nice affable chap, and no side to him; and he and they got on no end. Until the evening, when they asked him if they might get up some Burmese show to entertain His Honour. And His Honour said, Thanks very much and all that, but he was rather tired. So he thought, if they didn’t mind, he’d go off somewhere with his gun for an hour or two, and then have dinner and turn in. That tore it. Tore everything.”

“Because he did exactly what anyone would have done!”

“Ah, but you see, he came to them, not as a magistrate or soldier or some other job that they recognise as pretty impious, but as a teacher. A member of what they consider a sacred profession. They looked on him as practically a monk. And then he went off to end the day by killing things! It seemed to them as it would seem to us if the Archbishop of Canterbury came and took a service, and then strolled off with a tart.”

“If there’s one thing”, observed Barron ponderously, “that always makes me feel sick, it’s a man trying to be witty.”

“I’m sure it does! That’s why you miss such a damned lot! All right! Have it your own way!”

“I happen to be a member of one of those professions you were kind enough to stigmatize as pretty impious!”

“Ah, but you called yourself an Ambassador! Another sacred profession! And then said you meant to go shooting! So this girl’s face filled up with contempt and horror!”

Yes, it had done that, and it was not pleasant to remember.

“She can feel all the contempt and horror she likes. I didn’t come to the East to pander to superstition.”

Jake watched him as he strode off. “Well,” he said to himself aloud, “if you’re set that way, that no one’s going to teach you anything, all right! All right! You’ll get nowhere with natives if you’re not what they consider a gentleman—by their ideas, not yours!”

As usual, he was exactly half right. Perdita, as he had seen, had dismissed Barron as no gentleman by Buddhist notions.

But she had also dismissed Lidgett, as no gentleman by anyone’s notions.

Chapter V

I

It was not in her office that Her Highness saw Clive now, but in an anteroom, where he had to wait a short time. She apologized for this when she came. “If you will be kind to me for just five minutes longer, Mr. Powell, and will wait in here——”

From the lakeside rose a confused jangling and banging. She paused to listen to it. It seemed to amuse her.

Then she looked questioningly at him. “I forgot to ask you, Mr. Powell, if you would go with me to a village five miles away. You see, while the Sawbwa is absent I am Princess Regent, and I must go wherever he would have had to go. I have ordered a palanquin for you. Though of course, if you wish you can ride. That will be far better, of course.”

“No,” he said. “Your arrangement is best. Though it will mean that you must go slowly—ever so slowly, you will think it.”

“Then we can talk,” she said briskly, and left him.

She proved as good as her word, and presently a servant, using “basic Hindustani”, notified him that the Kumari was ready.

He found her mounted, with a wild-looking escort. They made their way down the hill, and along the lake’s soft margin, a meadow of march-flowers, saxifrage and primulas and immense kingscups. The escort preceded them, a moving spinney of nodding plumes.

Presently the cavalcade skirted a reedy inlet, before moving away from the lake. Clive commented on the flocks of waterfowl, that kept whirring up as they passed by.

“You are thinking what a fine place for shooting!” she said.

He laughed. “As a matter of fact, the thought did flash through my head. Though I myself have long ceased to care for sport.”

“It is what your Mr. Barron is thinking. He has seen that this lake is full of things that he thinks were put here only for men like him to kill. After yesterday, when he could kill only two small birds, so that our coolies have been laughing at him, he sent me a message that he was going to shoot over what he called the State Preserves. I understood what he meant, and I told him that this lake is sacred, and that His Highness the Sawbwa looks on these birds and other creatures as his subjects whom he must protect, just as these men and women are his subjects. But he did not choose to pay any attention to this, since the Sawbwa is not here, but only a girl. So just now, after his breakfast, he told his Sikh orderly that he would come down here, just as I knew he would. But I had men watching to see what he was going to do, and I sent my people down here with trumpets and bells and drums, to frighten everything away.”

And indeed, as they had passed beside it, they had gone by groups of music-makers, temporarily resting from their labours till the Princess had ridden by, and doing obeisance in the mud and meadow-flowers.

“He will be very angry and disappointed, and he will have to go where he went the other day—above on those hills, where he will kill only a small bird or two, as he did yesterday. But I know”, she cried, “that he will not rest now, until he has had his wish. It is now a matter of what he will call prestige. And then, when he has killed by this sacred water, my people will say, The lake spirits must have a life, to pay for those other lives. I hope it will be his life that will be paid to them!”

Her look of scorn and hatred frightened Clive. “Please leave the matter in my hands,” he begged. “Let me persuade him.”

“You can persuade him of nothing!” she cried. “Only death can persuade such men of anything! They have left their own law in a country that is very far off, and our law they despise as a law of savages. You will see. It will be as I say! Only death can persuade such men as he is!”

Presently she said, when they were again abreast, having risen to a softer broader stretch between bamboo thickets, “He has sent me a message about head-hunting and slavery. He says that what he calls the Supreme Government will have to demand that these evil practices are put down.”

“Well—if your father makes a treaty with us, as I hope he will——”

“Why? So that we may have men like your Barron sent here as Resident, to order us every day what we are to do!”

He evaded this. “You see, Dita, in this modern world, where the big countries are all growing closer together, it will soon be impossible for small independent countries to exist, except by having protection from one of the big countries.”

“I know that,” she said sullenly. “My father knows it also. But he says, ‘I will not become English again, after the way my own people treated me’.”

“But you see, Dita, it’s either England or China, where Buddhawbwe is, with Britain and China almost meeting.”

“Yes. And you know, do you not, that China says, ‘All Burma should be mine. And if England has stolen Burma from me, at least I can take Buddhawbwe from England—before England comes and steals its jade and rubies and silver’.”

“That is why, if I could see your father and he would listen to me, I should say to him, Make a treaty with the British Government. If he will trust me, I think I can promise him that the treaty will not trouble him for many years yet. That it will be twenty, thirty, forty years before the British even send a Resident. And all this time they will keep China from coming.”

“If you could do that——”

“I am sure I could. At least, I think I could.”

“We might be glad if that could happen,” she said simply.

The roughness of the way again divided the party into single file. When they could spread out, she said, “You have heard that the Viceroy of all that country beyond those hills has sent his Ambassador to my father? That my father has gone to receive him with due honour?”

“Yes. I heard something of that this morning. And I knew, of course, that China sometimes puts out absurd claims to suzerainty over Burma. But then, China claims suzerainty over so many places.”

This was true. China was like an amiable ambitious lunatic, asserting all kinds of distinction and authority. Our asylums are full of such: Popes and Queen Victorias, Alexanders and Caesars and Universal Monarchs. Poor China was hardly empress in her own domains, let alone Korea, Manchuria, Tibet, Burma, Siam, Cambodia, Formosa, Philippines, and Heaven knows what.

“It is more than claims,” she said, and her brows knit in annoyance and perplexity. “Do you not know that every cold weather the Burmese Government—your own Government—has to keep men employed on its own frontier, putting the boundary stones back in position? China has men whose work is always to be moving them, a mile, two miles, three miles, in from where they used to be. Then you have to put them back! My own father will presently have to leave Buddhawbwe for this very reason, to see that a line of his posts are set where they should be. He has also to see that his frontier guards are watchful. It is so very easy for them to grow dishonest—or frightened by the threats of the Chinese—and to pretend they do not see. Last winter he had two men shot for accepting bribes from the Chinese Viceroy over there.” She pointed northeastward.

“Shot!” he exclaimed.

“Yes. The Chinese Viceroy told them that if they did not do as he ordered, then—when China had taken over my father’s country—he would have them put to death with torture. They were very frightened. We found, too”, she added presently, “that they had made much money by obeying the Viceroy. You must remember, Mr. Powell, that in time of war there are strict rules. Over there—in China—there are always strict rules. No, not strict rules. But rules that are cruel and terrible. All this country was once Chinese. I will show you some time what that meant.”

A constraint had come into their conversation. She was aware of questioning in her companion, and resented it.

Clive had never served on any frontier, but only in long-settled Bengal, where “law” was a code of infinite teasing elaboration, a labyrinth with nooks innumerable for rogue and lawyer to hide and lurk. Death was inflicted for murder—or for “waging war against the King-Emperor and seeking to deprive him of the sovereignty of India”. And inflicted with a rarity that to the puzzled onlooker, knowing nothing of the complicated game, might seem caprice—inflicted because the Supreme Government recognised this particular murder as accompanied by peculiarly aggravating circumstances or because it was rattled by sense of ground mined beneath it and shaking with volcanic fury seeking an outlet.

“Please remember, Mr. Powell, it is always the time of war here. There are always strict rules. Or we should all die very quickly.”

She seemed about to say more, and he was half listening for it. Whatever it was, she refrained from saying it. Impatience found another expression. She called an order to her escort, in tones whose fiery sudden sharpness startled. Then a long silence ensued, during which she rode ahead, as if directing the way and studying it.

When she fell back again she showed that she had decided to forget what had separated them; and there was in her manner that which touched Clive, with sense of her forlornness and uncertainty, and appeal for understanding and help. “Mr. Powell, this village to which we are going—it is called Rissum—it is giving us trouble because of head-hunting. Do you know about head-hunting?”

“Not much. Tell me about it.”

“It is a game. Like your cricket and football. A game with rules. It is also—of course—a religion.”

“Like our cricket or football?” he asked, and smiled.

She smiled back radiantly. “Of course! There is a proper season for head-hunting, just as in England for your fox-hunting or your shooting. March and April, they are the right season. It is not considered quite—well, not really sporting, or—or—really religious—to take heads at other seasons. Unless there are really grave reasons why you should take them.”

“What sort of reasons?”

“Presently I will tell you.”

II

They crossed the ridge, and dropped into a region of screes and clearances, a desolation studded with blackened fir-stumps. A fire had been here, and the monsoon had followed intolerantly, denuding the slope, which passed instantaneously into desert that now grew nothing but a little scrub of juniper. They looked down a long ravine, dipping very far down.

“Look!” she said, pointing. “You can see there are many villages.”

He saw that it was so: a succession of tiny clusters of huts built of the yellowish-brown clay. Each hamlet had a dense zareba of cactus before it, looking strangely alien between the evergreen wilderness above it and the almost tropical lushness of the depths below it.

“That valley”, she said, “is very deep, with a river flowing down it. It is also very hot. We can grow tobacco there, and rice, and the opium poppy. In March, which is the best season for head-hunting, all down there” (she pointed again) “you would see it white with fields of opium poppy. That is another reason why China wishes to conquer all this country, that she may have our opium for nothing. This country is rich, Mr. Powell. It can grow beans and wheat and many kinds of corn, besides the rice that we grow to make drink for the men. But the country is also full of danger. In Burma the people do not know what danger is. Here we know it, every hour of every day and every night. Especially, every hour of every night. But the enemies that the people fear most are the ghosts and devils which were on these hills before any men came to them. These ghosts and devils are still not friends with men. There is the great strong Earth-Spirit, they say, who is most angry of all. It is hard for her to have to bear corn, rice, beans, fruit, year after year, for men and women to eat. It gives her pain, this continual bearing of food, just as it gives pain—not so much to the women here, who are used to work and to suffering, but still some pain—to women who have to bear many children. It takes away her strength, and she is angry and afraid lest she too will grow old and ugly, as our women do after bearing many children. So she must be given strength again, by the death of men and women who have taken her strength for their own lives. That is why our people think they must gather heads. Otherwise they will not get crops. The head is put up in the fields, and the Earth-Spirit is pleased, and says, ‘For this one year more I will bear crops for the people of this village’. ‘It is only fair,’ she says. ‘You have taken my strength, and you must give me strength back, by your own lives’.”

The argument was reasonable.

“How has your father got round this general opinion?”

He had paid her and him the compliment of assuming that in the Sawbwa’s dominions head-hunting had ceased, and she was pleased. “He has not got round it. It is still what everyone believes. I will tell you about this head-hunting, which down in Mandalay makes you so angry. Our people say, ‘When we have got some heads, then the ghosts to which the heads belong will stay by them.’ Their heads were very dear to the ghosts, you see. Before they became ghosts.”

“Yes, I see that.”

“They did not like to lose them. So they stay by them, and in time they feel that the place where their heads are is their home, and that they must guard this place against all the other ghosts, against all the wicked ghosts that are wandering through the forest and are always seeking to come into people’s houses and drink their blood while they are sleeping.”

“It must be very unpleasant living near a village that holds these views.”

“That is where you are mistaken. For if a village that head-hunts is next to yours, then the ghosts of that village’s heads will sometimes look after your village as well, if you are wise enough to put out coconut milk for them and the blood of fowls. You must make them some payment, of course! Ghosts do not work for nothing, any more than men do. Also”, she added, “that village will not take heads from your village.”

“No. I suppose not. It might be awkward to have a blood-feud with people close to you.”

“Not only that! Ghosts are known to be very stupid, as well as inclined to wickedness and bad temper. And you must remember that when a head is first brought the ghost who comes with it—naturally—does not feel at home in his new place. He is tempted to go back to his old home.”

“Even without his head?”

“Yes. For he is comfortable there, and knows the district. It is where he played when he was a child and where he worked in the fields. His own children may very likely be there. So, if that place is near, very likely he will go back to it, and what use will it be to have his head then—without the ghost to stay by it? No use at all!”

“Except that it will have given pleasure to the Earth-Spirit.”

“But that is only for one year! Or perhaps three years! To keep her always pleased, you must give her at least one new head each year. So”, she concluded, “it is always best to get the heads of strangers. Then the ghosts will not care to go back—through all the rough and bad way they have come, where there are plenty of other ghosts waiting to jump at them and to be angry because they have no right to be there. Besides, they will be afraid of losing their way.”

Clive thought this over. It all seemed reasonable. There were weak places, of course. But in what argument, human or divine, do we not find these?

He asked, however, “But can they be sure of a friendly reception from the ghosts of the new place—the place where their own heads are hung up?”

“Yes. For these ghosts often get tired of guarding the village, and they get frightened of all the thousands of ghosts that are everywhere and are trying their might and main to break in. They know it is their duty to guard the village where their own heads are, and they are very glad when a new ghost comes to help them. Especially as this ghost is a young strong ghost, whereas they are slowly fading, as their skulls grow old and white in the sun.”

It seemed a parable. Clive thought, That is what happens to us all, to the wisest heads no less than the most foolish. Memory survives us, which is our ghost; but it is fading and growing old and white and fragile, with every sun that goes its destroying way through the heavens. At the last, memory also crumbles; the end of all is dust, and indistinguishable from the countless dust of all the ages.

III

They drew near to Rissum, their destination. Dita concluded her lecture in natural theology.

“This valley is our boundary, Mr. Powell, and all beyond it belongs to another Sawbwa, who is a subject of the Emperor of China. The men of this village are very strong and brave, so that my father has always loved them. But they have also been famous head-hunters, so that every year, almost, they have made us anxious.”

“How can your father stop them from head-hunting? The arguments for it, as you have given them to me, seem to me very strong.”

She laughed. “That is what I used to say to the girls when I was at school, in France—and England. I used to say, You do not understand head-hunters. They are not wicked people at all. Only people who argue in a way that you cannot understand! Just as you are not wicked people! Only people who argue in a way that we cannot understand! My father knows this, for he understands his people. So he does not argue. He merely says, You—must—not—do this. If you do it I will put you to death. They understand that! Besides, he says, If you go head-hunting in a country which belongs to the Emperor of China, then—perhaps—some time, when China is not so busy as she is now—China will send an army against me, and though my people are brave there are not many of them.”

Their approach had caused excitement. For some time past, horns had been blowing, in mournful blasts dying away in the hills, that caught up and prolonged them in deep grim moans that seemed like answers rather than continuations. The hamlet’s foreground broke into a medley of colour.

She dismounted, and accepted her subjects’ homage. But she exchanged few words with them. To Clive she said, “These people can wait, while I use my eyes, to find out things that interest me very much.”

“Why not question them?” Clive had left his palanquin, and was walking beside her.

“There is only one person here who will not lie to me, in this matter that interests me. My own eyes—they alone!—will tell me the truth!”

They were standing on the outward bulge of an earthen rampart thrown out in front of the hamlet. The rampart was strengthened by a dense hedge—a forest, rather—of prickly pear and taloned rattans. Fear had entrenched itself on this mountain ridge.

“Mr. Powell, I will show you how close we live to fear! Look!”

She showed him, low down, a tunnel cut inward through the hedge. It left room—barely room—for a body to worm its way, lying flat and crawling slowly. It was long and tortuous, and full of corners round which it disappeared. As if this were not enough, its floor was bristling with pointed stakes, each some nine inches high. To avoid them, the body must be thrust forward on its side.

Clive bent down, and peered within. The whole way was in darkness.

The village, watching their interest, broke into a clamour in which Clive thought he could distinguish varying tones—terror (above all, terror), pleading, protest, sullenness. Dita listened, and said an occasional word, generally one of question.

“The ghosts are growing unfriendly,” she told Clive.

“How do they know that?”

“Last week, as the headman’s youngest daughter was crawling through that tunnel, one of the snakes that guard it stung her, and she died. That, shows, they argue, that what they have long feared is true. The ghosts are no longer going to keep them from their enemies.”

She stood, shading her eyes with her hand, and looking down the deep ravine, from whose bottom the murmur of a stream floated up to them.

“You see how hard men and women have to work here, to keep alive,” she said. “Down there, where that river is, they have made their fields. And they have to climb down and then up again, all this hard stony way. While children with sharp eyes—and ghosts, whose eyes are sharper yet—stand here, on this place where we are, and watch all day long, lest head-hunters come from other countries! Then at night, when they are very tired and weary, they crawl inside by this tunnel. And now their own ghosts will not keep watch any longer!”

She had said she was using her eyes, to ask her questions for her. Clive realised that she was being herself questioned, by the eyes of others. The men and women of Rissum, standing outside their palisade, were watching. They followed her when she took Clive on a little path that led diagonally uphill, away from the village.

Clive asked, “What happens if head-hunters from some other district manage to surprise these people?”

“It has not happened for some years,” she said grimly. “The last time it happened, they came from over there” (she pointed westward), “and my father followed them back till he stormed their village. He executed the chief men of that village in front of their own houses. It has not been forgotten.”

Clive was startled. “But they were not his subjects, surely?”

“No. They belonged to another Sawbwa.”

“Didn’t that Sawbwa say anything?”

“Yes. He said he would make war. The Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe reminded him that war was the way in which he himself had conquered his own dominions from the Emperor of Burma. He said also that he himself had merely been head-hunting, because he had ghosts of his own to appease. Now, Mr. Powell,” she said impatiently and defiantly, “do you understand? We have border law here. My father has caught head-hunters in his territory—sometimes—before they have got their heads. His law is well understood. They are shot—on his parade ground, beside our lake. But it does not often happen. As I have told you, all these hills remember the time when the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe surrounded that village far away, one dawn, and left their chief men lying there dead, with his message that if they wanted heads he could provide them with plenty more—in the same manner.”

She had led him to an avenue of ancient enormous oaks, perhaps a quarter of a mile from end to end. Along one side of the avenue was another line, one made by man: wooden posts, about four feet high, each with a niche cut in it, about a yard above the ground. The posts were smeared with paint and ochre. The niches held skulls.

At the further end of the avenue stood the usual teak-and-bamboo-built shrine of the nats, a mere roof on four corner posts. “That”, said Perdita, pointing to it, “is our ghosts’ zayat. They rest there, and hold their discussions. That is where, when they are dissatisfied, they plot against those who are not ghosts.”

A murmur of fear and frightened anger rose from the crowd curiously following her. She turned, and it died away.

“I am going to walk through this avenue, Mr. Powell. I am regent for my father”—again that pride stiffened her manner and carriage—“while he is bringing the Chinese Ambassador to Buddhawbwe.”

“I will come with you,” he said.

The aged trees with their furred boughs seemed to stand guard above those posts and their burden. The avenue watched them from innumerable eyeless sockets.

“Yes. These”, said Perdita, with a carelessness that was half contempt, “are old skulls. I am not interested in them.”

She paused, by the largest oldest oak of all, and listened; and as she caught a low spontaneous excited murmur from the crowd at the avenue’s entrance her face darkened. She drew Clive’s attention to a head hanging in the boughs, with strips of half-mummified flesh clinging to it. “It is as I thought. That head is not older than last year. You hear how the people are talking together! We heard that a head had been taken and brought here. But we did not hear the drumming when it came, for the wind was in the wrong direction.”

On their return, she questioned the people, in occasional brief sentences across the torrent of complaint, fright, and expostulation which greeted them. She met the storm squarely, quelling it with some statement that, whatever it was, was only too clearly understood. It was received with sullenness and a subsidence into what was—not acceptance, not acquiescence, but—at any rate, silence.

To Clive, or perhaps to herself only, she said quietly and musingly, “The opium crops failed last year, and will fail this year also. That is what their priests are prophesying.”

IV

They were nearly halfway back to Buddhawbwe, before she spoke to Clive again. Then, “I want you to see something, Mr. Powell.”

His bearers, at a sign from her, halted, and put the palanquin on the ground. He got out, and she dismounted. Their escort exchanged glances which escaped neither of them. Ignoring them, she led him into a round hidden openness amid walnuts and rhododendrons, some distance uphill from the path. Here a roughly cut elephant head and tusks, carved in teak, stood on a stake. Faded lines of colour, that had once made it brightly hideous, still streaked it.

She gave it a push. It revolved, rattlingly and clumsily.

“When my father became Sawbwa, the people did not merely head-hunt. They sacrificed victims to the Earth-Spirit, on these tusks. They sent the elephant spinning round, while they chopped a child—or a slave—to pieces. They did it slowly, for if the sacrifice died without shedding many tears the rain would not be abundant. The people of Rissum were very skilful in killing their victims after much misery. Father knew at once what it was, when he found this place, for the sacrifice had happened when he was a magistrate in India.”

A spark fell on gunpowder in Clive’s brain, igniting forgotten memories. In Gabriel’s first month at Ratangiri he had wired to his friend, begging him to come over and advise him on a matter. Clive went, and Gabriel told him the country was seething with expectation that the old meriah sacrifices would be revived. The crops had failed, and the rumour was that “the Mother” must have her ancient honours again. Villages would not let their children herd cattle in the jungle, lest they be kidnapped.

Clive had thought there could be nothing in it. They had talked it over, and he had returned to his district. A week later, the confidential circulars issued to every Government servant had told of the finding of a child’s skeleton in Gabriel’s territory. The flesh had been hacked off the living bones. He would never forget (yet, until this day, he had forgotten!) Gabriel’s mad fury of indignation when, after he had put all other interests aside and tracked the murder to its perpetrators, Government had declined to carry out the death sentence and had commuted it for a term of imprisonment.

“I remember it,” he told Gabriel’s daughter. “Your father was the only man who could have traced the murder to the men who did it.”

“Naturally,” she said proudly. “He was a king, not a mere magistrate. His ancestors had been kings in their own right. That was why he loved and understood the people.”

She looked fixedly at him; and he was waked out of his memories and brought back to the place where they were standing. The horror and agony of what had been mere folk-lore—to him, but not to Gabriel—grew vivid to him. His mind was losing its life-imposed layers of office and routine, and remembering how, even in battened-down Bengal, a primitive criminality kept its sub-surface being. It was not sub-surface here.

“Mr. Powell, I have told you things that no doubt in Mandalay” (she made a gesture of contempt, dismissing the outside meddling world) “the Government would be horrified to know. I will tell you one more. My father has left this idol here, lest his people forget. He does not mean that they should forget. These sacrifices are still practised everywhere” (her arm made a wide circuit of the theatre of hills surrounding them) “except in the dominions of the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe.”

But she had not told him all she had begun to say. He sensed this, and waited, listening.

“In March and April, when the season of head-hunting and taking victims for sacrifice is on, my father and I keep much awake at night. But we have not heard the drumming now for five years. That is, for certain. Only, we think we should have heard it last year, if it had not been a night of tremendous wind blowing away from Buddhawbwe.”

They walked back to their escort. “If they get a head, by old custom the Earth-Spirit must be told in this grove, and so we shall know it. Unless it is a night of tempest and storm, when we can hear nothing except the noise which the Spirit herself is making. But they will never again sacrifice a living victim here. You see, Mr. Powell——”

She told him at last. “When they last sacrificed a child on the tusks of that elephant, father did not send them in front of a shooting file.”

Even yet she seemed to hesitate. Then, explosively, “Mr. Powell, that picture which you have seen in our rest-house—it is of the crucifixion of Jesus. Of course! It is the way our people think that his crucifixion took place——”

“I have seen it,” he said. “It is a very terrible picture. The pictures of the crucifixion which we have seen in Europe are merely childish beside it.”

“Mr. Powell, the artist who painted it was present when my father killed the men who sacrificed the child here!”

V

She was angrily telling herself that this man, who had been her father’s friend and had led so easy and ordered a life, had no right to any opinion. For him it had always been a matter only of reading and hearing evidence, while men argued one way or another. That is, if he had ever had to decide questions of life or death at all; she knew nothing about that. If he had, in the end he had merely passed his decision, and left its conclusion to other hands. He did not see the condemned cell. He read of the gallows in the morning paper at his breakfast.

Yet, having drawn so close to him and having made so urgent an appeal for his friendship and sympathy, pulled his way by half the current of her blood and by what she had seen of the outside world, she was miserable, and rode beside him in silence, neither knowing what to say.

When she dared to confront him at last, and their eyes met, she did not see the wasted grey shadow of a man that had accompanied her. She saw only his spirit—standing watching outside her own life—judging nothing—listening and noting all in the detachment of humility and friendliness.

He smiled; and she was smiling back, with the beginning of tears in her eyes. “You told me”, he said, “that your people were good Buddhists.”

“Ah, that is only the people who came with my father. These others—yes, our monks have made them Buddhists. And no doubt they are Buddhists:—good Buddhists,” she laughed. “When they wish to please my father, which is generally. But they also wish to be good head-hunters—that is, in March and April, when they are troubled about how the Earth-Spirit is going to feed them.”

“At any rate, good enough Buddhists to think it wrong to take life! Except when it happens to be human life!”

“That is true also. They do not understand people like your Mr. Barron, who go through these woods and wherever they have been leave birds and animals to creep away and be miserable! Besides those they have killed for their own pleasure. Our people are full of pity and mercy.”

“Yet they are head-hunters!”

“Some of them, yes. Though not now in Buddhawbwe,” she emphasised. “But that is different. It is because of their fear. You do not kill because of fear, as we do.”

“No, I suppose not. We kill to show we are brave.”

“That is why we kill also,” she cried. “But it is only men that we kill, men who can kill us back if they are quicker and cleverer than we are. Besides, head-hunting is not fear only. It is religion, too. And religion tells us we must do many things which we know are wicked.”

He agreed; and she was comforted.

Chapter VI

I

When they reached Buddhawbwe it was sunset.

Gussie was all excitement. “Mr. Powell, Raja Gabriel has brought the Ambassador from the Chinese Viceroy over the mountains, and all those tents beside the lake are for him and his men. Raja Gabriel has been making himself rich all these years, and now China has seen it and means to take all his country.”

“Surely these lonely hills are not worth taking, Gussie?”

Gussie’s eyes expanded widely. “But they are full of silver! Major Balfour told my poor mother, One day all the world will get its silver from Raja Gabriel’s country! And it is silver that China wants most of all!”

“How did he know about it? I thought that no one knew this country. Except Raja Gabriel.”

“Major Balfour knew everything! He came up here—oh, twenty years before this—and he is the only Englishman who has ever seen the old mines which the Chinese worked, centuries ago, in Raja Gabriel’s country. Of course, I do not mean that Raja Gabriel has not seen them. But then, he is now not British but Burmese, Only Major Balfour knew them, and he told my poor mother all about them. That was why I was anxious to learn about Raja Gabriel’s country. For if there is going to be some British Company formed, Mr. Powell——”

He stopped, then continued earnestly, “Mr. Powell, when you have got back to England and formed your Company——”

“I am not going to form any Company, Gussie.”

“Oh, but, Mr. Powell, there are mines here which can supply more silver than all the rest of the whole world! That is why this Lidgett is here. That is why the British Government has got frightened, and has sent this Mr. Barron here—to prevent Raja Gabriel from giving the concession to you. That is why——”

“Tell me, Gussie. I suppose everyone here thinks that I am after concessions?”

“Of course! No one would come into Raja Gabriel’s country for anything else. And they all say—all these servants in the guest-house are saying—that Pole Sahib will easily get the concessions, because Princess Dita loves him very much and trusts him. Then will you not give me a post in your Company, Mr. Powell? I am willing to labour very greatly, for you have been kind to me, and I know that you are good.”

“I’m sorry, but I am not wanting concessions, really.” As Gussie’s face fell, he added, “But I promise you, you shall not lose for having helped me as you have. Without you I could never have got here.”

“Oh, that is nothing, Mr. Powell. You were kind to me, although you were a high official, and Captain MacKenzie said——” He was overcome by disappointment, and brushed away tears.

Clive was remorseful. “Listen, Gussie, if I were out for concessions I know I could not find anywhere a clerk who would be more useful or more faithful than you have been——”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Powell! thank you! Then you will remember——”

“I promise you, you shall not be forgotten,” Clive said solemnly. “But now tell me about Major Balfour. You say he visited this country?”

“Oh, that was nothing! He used to go everywhere. You see, he belonged to an old Scotch family, and was very clever.”

“Did he come up here with an army? I mean, with some armed force or other?”

“Oh, no! Why, he came disguised as an old Chinese pedlar, selling little brass images of the Lord Buddha. Oh, it was quite easy for him to do! He wore the blue trousers and blue jacket that the Chinese wear, and the little round cap. One of his wives—I mean, a very nice Burmese lady who was great friends with Major Balfour—and great friends with my poor mother—in fact, they were all great friends with one another—she helped him, and travelled with him. It is all true, Mr. Powell,” he said, with even more than usual earnestness. “If you look up this country in the book that the Burmese Government has printed for use by officials—I have a cousin who is a typist in the Commissioner’s office at Pyawbwe, and he has seen the book—then you will read that only one Englishman has ever visited the ancient mines which are said to have been worked by the Chinese in the Wa country, and that he was disguised as a Chinese pedlar. That was Major Balfour, though of course it does not say so.”

“I should like to have known Major Balfour,” said Clive.

“Oh, he would have loved you very much!” Gussie assured him. “He would have found in you, Mr. Powell, a bird of his own kidney, and you would have both flocked together, like two fish out of water. He was always so kind to her, poor mother always says.”

“He must have been a remarkable man.”

“You are quite right, Mr. Powell. And the Commander-in-Chief told him one day—I was a little boy, and I heard Major Balfour tell this story to my poor mother—the Commander-in-Chief said to him, ‘Balfour, I’ve a great mind to tell Bobs’—that was Lord Roberts, you know, they used to call him ‘Bobs’, because his name was Roberts, and that is like the plural of Robert, which we make into ‘Bob’—‘Balfour,’ he said, ‘I’ve a great mind to tell Bobs, when I get home, that if there’s one chap in Burma who ought to have a baronetcy—a knighthood isn’t half good enough—it is you.’ And Major Balfour said, ‘I hope Your Excellency will not do that. It would put me into great difficulty. I should not be able to decide who should succeed to my title.’ So, you see, he could have been made a baronet, if he had wished, Mr. Powell! And a baronet is above a K.C.I.E. or even a K.C.S.I. In fact, it is next to the House of Lords. But he said that he did not want it and he refused it. Because of family difficulties, my poor mother always said. But he was a very great man, and if he were in Burma now he would have known what to do about Raja Gabriel and the concessions for his silver mines.”

“I am quite sure that he would.”

II

As they sat together smoking after dinner, that night, Barron said, “I think we three ought to come to an understanding.”

Clive looked up, surprised—as might a traveller belated in some enchanted wood, finding himself a guest at the fireside of beings of another world and wondering if he should engage in it. But he could think of nothing he could say that would have any relevance.

“Lidgett and I have been talking about this so-called Chinese Ambassador, Powell, and we thought we should have a pretty serious chat about him.”

“Need you take him seriously?” asked Clive. “As far as I can gather from my chap, he’s simply here on a mission from some subordinate governor or other, and he’ll go away after having been banqueted on sea-slugs or peaches or whatever it is they feed Chinese ambassadors on in these hills—that is, when they turn up here, which I don’t fancy is very often. China isn’t exactly in a position to send ambassadors anywhere just now. She’s got her hands rather more than full at home. Of course, I know nothing about it, really; but that’s more or less how it strikes me.”

“You haven’t grasped things as they are in Burma,” said Barron. “Lidgett will bear me out—if you don’t know”, he said with meaningful emphasis, immense suspicion, “that these hills, once you scratch beneath the surface, are pretty well solid silver. And silver means the Trade of China! The whole trade of a quarter of the human race! Not to mention what it means as regards the trade of Japan, Indo-China, Siam, the East Indies, India, Burma itself! It means the political control of the whole Middle and Far East! China’s in a mess, as you say, Powell. But she won’t stay in a mess always! And because she’s in a mess other countries are seeing their chance! They’re getting busy, Powell. America——”

“Ah!” said Lidgett. “America, Powell! America!”

“When we get down country again I’ll show you things, Powell. Papers and information that have come into the Government’s possession, that show how American capital means to jump in here and get control of these mines, to sell the silver on terms that would tie China up with American trade. They’ve agents now, who are meaning to work up into Travers’s country from China.”

Jake reinforced this appeal. “Keep them out, Powell, that’s what I say! These bloody scheming Yanks! They jolly well keep our fingers out of the huge three-quarters of the world pie that they’ve bagged for themselves! Why should they claim a whole hand inside the little bit they’ve so far left free to the rest of the world?” It was a strong argument.

Jake continued it. “Then there’s Japan, Powell. And France, over on the other side, in Indo-China. She’s starting to push up here. And China thinks she may as well stake out her own claim first of all; there’s this agent of the Yunnan Viceroy who calls himself an Ambassador. Isn’t it damned lucky that the first three fellows who’ve actually got into the country happen to be all British? and British, presumably, with some patriotism!”

Clive asked, “What can I do?”

“Oh, come now, Powell!” said Barron.

“It’s this way, Powell,” said Jake. “You’re no fool, we can see that. And you’ve fairly got ahead of us, we freely admit it. And we admire you for it! I’ve been working to get into this country for over twenty years—because I knew what it was worth, see? And what it would one day mean to my country! And you come up, knowing nothing about it except that it’s simply jumping with silver and rubies and pretty well everything else! Not even knowing a sentence of Burmese! and within a couple of days you’re where you wanted to be!”

“Everyone”, said Barron, “knows that this girl runs every last thing. That Travers is now nothing but a shouting lunatic, whatever he may have been once.”

“When she came in this morning”, said Jake, “you were the only one she would speak to! that she would condescend to even see! In fact, she was damned rude to Barron!”

Barron temporarily dropped out of the attack.

Jake, however, was equal to supporting the whole of it. “You’ve had the day with her, getting your concessions practically fixed up. You’ve been damned smart, Powell, and we hand it to you. But you’ll find it’ll be no go, if you try to run things alone.”

“What will be no go?” Clive felt at liberty to ask.

A prolonged pretence of innocence, or of simplicity, is the most exasperating thing in the world. Jake, fortunately, had great powers of self-restraint. He merely said, in the most reasonable tones imaginable, “You’ll get your concession, whether you see Travers or not. We grant you that. As Barron says, the girl runs everything. And she’s fallen for you, Powell, like a girl often does for a man of your age,” concluded Jake tactfully.

Clive found himself amused. “Then what do you want me to do? As a patriotic Englishman,” he added.

“That’s how we knew you’d take it,” said Jake approvingly. “We both said” (with his graceful gesture of drawing in Barron as corroboration) “Powell’s a white man, and we shall find that he’ll act like one. Now! have you formed your company yet?”

“No,” admitted Clive truthfully.

“I thought not. Barron said he thought you had, but I said not.”

“Never mind what I said,” broke in Barron. “We’ve got to come to an understanding to-night. This Ambassador’s getting in his say to-morrow.”

“I make you an offer,” said Jake, “and Barron is witness. You get the concession, Powell, and then come in with me and my people! We’ve got the money and the mining plant, all ready and waiting in Singapore. We’ll give you a square deal, Powell. If we try to wriggle out of it, there’s the Government, whose representative’s the witness now, to see that we don’t. I’ve got big money behind me, Powell. Big money and big people! You come in with us! You won’t regret it, I give you my word of honour!”

“I think you ought to do it, Powell,” said Barron, with a new tone in his voice, that made Clive for the first time look at him with respect.

III

Clive started, and looked hard at Barron; and the freemasonry of their service linked them in the beginnings of understanding. Differences that age had made, and physical changes and the burning up of ambition in the one, lessened. They became colleagues again, if only for a limited time and purpose.

There was behind these differences a greater difference still, whose extent neither had realised. It is true, both were members of the world’s most tenacious trade union. But India and Burma lived in widely severed ages. India had a long tradition of legal and ordered passage from year to year, and decade to decade, with as little as possible of any change other than temporal. Burma had leapt into being only yesterday, from a chaos which Robert Clive would have understood. Only yesterday, Burma had been a land of confused and brutal patriotisms, of flyers and pacifiers, rushed police-posts and stormed jungle-stockades. Princes had roamed the wilderness with a price on their heads: had “executed” “subjects” who under compulsion gave their pursuers guidance: had themselves dangled from some improvised gallows. All the widely varying strains that make up the watchful and unsparing strength which the outside world knows as just “British”—cautious Devon, impulsive Wales, the reiver blood of the Borders, the fierceness of covenanting Ulster, the roving valour of Celt and Scot and Saxon—had exercised their gifts in a field that seemed to have been made for them.

Even now, the Government was merely a central core, with quaking “unadministered” edges of primeval unexplored forest and mountain. The tradition of national independence still lived. Thibawmin may have been something of a painful thought—but what of good King Mindonmin, firm Buddhist and lordly patriarch? The country was one where still, after a quarter of a century’s occupation, a swift and unembarrassed decision of action was the best recommendation to the esteem of a populace at home in the woods and mighty rivers, skilful with oar and horse and dah¹ and shotgun. What was the use of pretending that the Indian Civil Service and the Burmese Civil Service were one and the same Service, except in name? The Ten Commandments, pace Mr. Kipling, came some distance eastward of Suez. But had they ever been even unpacked on Rangoon jetty?

All this difference fell away, and Clive roused himself to come to grips with the suspicion that had followed him, and which he had not troubled to think about. Of course Barron had assumed that his madly unmotived journey was directly linked up with hope that he could work on old acquaintance with Gabriel, to persuade that irregular person that through him, Powell, he could make himself (and Powell) rich. Gabriel would presently abandon his comic-opera kingdom. Back in England, money would cover his past of defiance and promiscuousness, and he would die in a ripe old age, Master of Foxhounds, Lord Lieutenant of the County, Member of Parliament, Sir Gabriel Travers. Why not? If he wanted, these stars?

Of course Barron had assumed all this. How could he assume anything else? Clive read in his eyes surprise and regret. It was all right for Lidgett, known from Shanghai to Rangoon as a disreputable adventurer, to be up here risking his life to cajole concessions from a half-mad English “Raja”; if China was thrusting forward her claims again, it might be as well to give way to the rogue who was actually on the spot, and to support (on stringent conditions) the concessions he might obtain. They would at any rate stake out firmly the British political claims on a country that might some day prove useful. But it let the Service down badly, when a man of Powell’s record and time of life competed with the likes of Jake Lidgett!

Clive saw all this, and reminded himself that, in his slowly dimming dream and the low-keyed vitality which was all that was left to him of life, he was missing a thousand things that to everyone else were obvious. Barron, as he and Lidgett understood things, was the only one of the three of them who was out to get nothing for himself. Approval at headquarters, yes; a bit more certainty of that ultimate “K”, and perhaps a quickening of the pace at which it would come along. But no substantial gain, no increase of income or bank balance or shares. He was here to do his job, to push the rights and interests of the Government—not the people or the country (they were not his business), but the Government which he was pledged to serve. He had disliked and distrusted Clive, but he was not going to let that hinder his trying to appeal to the loyalty they presumably had in common.

IV

“You can’t carry it through without me,” urged Jake. “You don’t know the language or the country or the way to handle the people. I know Burma; and I know China. I can speak not only Burmese, but the queer half-Burmese, half-Chinese stuff they talk here.”

It was true—within limits. Jake spoke a surprising variety of native dialects, with an utter disregard of the niceties of grammar and pronunciation, but with reasonable efficiency. He had gifts which, if he had been trained in the perception and practice of ethics, would have procured him a useful (though perhaps not highly remunerative) post in the service of his fellows. He might have risen to be an interpreter for a Travel Agency, which requires far greater and far more versatile ability than is needed to hold any professorship in any university of any country. Instead of this (like that friend of our youth, the gentleman whom the judge reproved for stealing ducks), he had gone about the country—about many countries—doing things that held out promise of quicker, richer returns.

“You haven’t the strength or stamina,” he reminded Clive. “We were saying only yesterday that it beats us how you ever got here at all, when anyone can see how dicky you are. It shows no end of pluck, doesn’t it, Barron?”

“Indeed it does,” said Barron hastily.

Their eager glances—one sharp and cunning yet so superbly stupid, the other grave and searching—seemed to hypnotise Clive. He took his place with them, as an outline in a picture. They were three figures seated there, in this dripping, high-withdrawn, aloof silence, with the moths blundering in and dying, flutteringly caught in the hot wax stream that ran down to the flickering candles’ sockets. If God so willed, they might so sit here for ever until the worlds had all been folded away! They lost all reality, and became a glimpse of the fashion of time that was passing from them all, though from Clive first.

When at last he spoke, it was with a tired indifference that to one of his hearers carried conviction that he spoke truth. “I want no concessions”, he said, “of any sort.”

The door opened, and Murdoch entered unexpectedly. He stood regarding them with his air of disapproval, and gave his message succinctly, addressing himself to Clive. “His Highness’s compliments,” he announced. “And it is his wull to receive His Excellency the Ambassador from China in public audience at noon precisely to-morrow. You can hae places to see it if you wish it.”

Saying this, he went out again.

V

Barron’s anger flared up at this announcement. “That’s the final straw! It’s the evidence I’ve been wanting, and you two fellows are witnesses! Sham rajas who intrigue with our enemies or with other countries will find their thrones kicked from beneath them! You heard what that fellow said, Powell?”

“Yes.”

“Well? What do you think about it?”

“I think he’s making a fool of himself.”

“Still,” Jake pointed out, “if he’s ruler here and China sends someone to see him, he can’t very well get out of seeing him.”

“He’s got out of seeing us! Of seeing me—the Supreme Government’s Representative!”

“It’s unadministered territory,” said Jake.

“On the map we’ve always claimed it.”

“They don’t see maps here. They haven’t any stationers’ shops in these hills, remember.”

“All Burma came to us when we took over from Thibaw. This country has been ours for whenever we chose to put out our hand and take it. If Travers thinks he can play off China against us, he’ll find himself mistaken!”

The door reopened, for Murdoch again. This time he addressed himself to Barron.

“His Highness’s compliments to you, sir, and your coolies and ponies will be ready at six to-morrow morning.”

“My coolies and ponies! Ready for me?”

“Aye. To tak’ you back to Hkamti—or, if that suits you better, to Homalin. His Highness is no particular where—so lang as you go.”

Barron was astounded. “Mr. Travers thinks he can treat the Representative of the Supreme Government in this fashion?”

“I ken nothing aboot the Supreme Government or Mr. Travers. My orders is to tell you that, on her leddyship’s complaint, His Highness means you to gang.”

Clive stepped forward. “I don’t know what has been said by Miss Travers, but I do know that what her father is doing is a terrible mistake. There must be some misunderstanding. Perhaps if I could see Miss Travers—”

Murdoch’s manner changed to respectfulness. “There’s no misunderstanding, sir. It’s Mr. Barron has made it so that His Highness canna keep him.”

“I mean to insist on having this cleared up,” said Barron, striding to the door. Murdoch was there before him.

“It’s too late to speak with her leddyship tonight,” he said. “And for that matter, it’s too late to speak to either her or His Highness again. It’s your ain fault, sir! And you canna say but what you were given fair warning, and you wouldna tak’ it!”

“Fair warning of what?” asked Clive.

Murdoch asked Barron a question. “Can you deny it, sir, that this afternoon, when both His Highness and her leddyship were awa’ from Buddhawbwe, you went shooting by oor lake and made what you’d admit was a vera fair bag?”

Jake whistled. “So you went, after all!” he could not refrain from saying.

“Yes, of course I went,” said Barron. “I told her I intended to go. It’s the only place in this confounded damnable hole where a man can get any sport.”

“Well, you got a bit too much sport, as you call it. So you maun leave Buddhawbwe; and His Highness wilna see you. And if you’ll tak’ advice, you’ll no seek to see His Highness, after what has happened. There’s not many would care to see him, in your place! You canna deny that her leddyship told you you wasna to go shooting by the lake. Yet you went!”

“I’ve told you,” Barron began.

“Yes,” said Clive. “But the point is, this lake happens to be a very special lake. It’s famous all over Burma. There’s more to what Travers is doing now than mere annoyance, Barron.” He looked questioningly at Murdoch.

Murdoch moved to the door. “I’ve merely done my orders, gentlemen,” he said. “Mr. Barron had his orders, from a leddy, and he chose not to mind them. But Mr. Powell’s right about the lake. His Highness couldna keep Mr. Barron any longer, if he would. So you’ll go your ways, sir, while there’s a chance you can get down country in safety. Your ponies and men will be ready, as I telled you.” He went out.

Barron went out also. Lidgett seemed to want to talk, but Clive followed Barron’s example.

The land was every side filled with slow drumming, at intervals like the firing of minute guns. The hills were dotted with moving torches.

VI

Clive found Gussie all excitement. “Mr. Barron is being sent away, Mr. Powell! But that isn’t all! The monks say they will appeal to the Emperor of China, through his Ambassador who is here, if the Law of the Lord Buddha is not going to be kept even beside their lake. Raja Gabriel has had to promise them—oh, lashings of gold and precious stones, if they will only forget what has happened. He is going to build a new shrine for their relic.”

“What relic?”

“Why, the tooth of Lord Buddha.”

“Oh, yes, the tooth,” said Clive, remembering.

“What is that drumming?” he asked presently, when he was sitting up in bed.

“The Sawbwa has sent to tell his people everywhere that on no account is a life to be taken for the lives which Barron has taken. When men drum—slowly—like that, then people know there is a sudden important order from their Raja. He is reminding them, You know my law; if a head is brought into my territory, then I myself must have a head to pay for that head.”

From the trees that nestled round the guesthouse a terrible cry was flung up. Clive’s blood curdled, and he peered into the darkness. The crescent of the new moon, a sickle of lovely silver, shone above the grove’s black outline.

Gussie shrank into the room’s interior. “Oh, do not look out, Mr. Powell! Do not let yourself be seen, or the Htaw will think that Mr. Barron is here, and then nothing will save us!”

Bit by bit, from the fright and confusion in his mind, Clive unravelled the figures of were-wolf and were-tiger, Gussie was not sure which but was convinced of both. These haunt the Burmese wilderness and are reality, not dream, if casualties are any witness. At the new moon’s rising they have their power most of all, and rip the life out of the throat of any man with whom the nats are angry. They have skill to use the bodies of mortal wolf and mortal tiger, whose footprints you find where they have been.

“Yes, yes, Mr. Powell, I know it is very absurd and quite impossible, and, yes, supernatural! No doubt! But every year men are killed by these devils!”

Clive’s mind subsided into depths of quiet perplexed thinking. Presently he managed to soothe Gussie enough, for him to look (though at a distance from the window) at the points of widely scattered light. They did not hear the door open.

Gussie said, “Raja Gabriel has promised that Barron shall go out to-morrow by the western gate. That is a very great disgrace, you must understand, Mr. Powell. If you go out by that gate, then you admit that you are a subject of the king whom you are leaving. In the old days, when Burma was independent, my poor mother used to tell us, the British ambassadors always went out by the western gate. Because they did not understand. They thought that one gate was just the same as the others, and that it was a matter of convenience. So Barron is to go out by the western gate, and Raja Gabriel’s people will be made a little quieter.”

“There seem to be guards all round the guest-houses,” said Clive, pointing to the glow of torches in the grove and to where they could hear steel clashing. Fires were being swiftly lit. They had been surrounded suddenly.

“Of course! Raja Gabriel will have to have special guards on all of us for to-night. Until Barron has gone. Especially now that it is known that the Htaw is seeking Barron. They will have fires all night, and they will not dare to leave those fires.”

They happened to turn, and saw Barron. “I’m sorry, Powell,” he said. “I knocked, and got no answer, so I took the liberty of coming in.”

Gussie was flustered, and hurried out.

“Perhaps it’s as well I came in,” Barron said. It was his only reference to what he had overheard.

“I want a last talk with you, Powell,” he added. “I’ll sit down for a few minutes, if you don’t mind. It’s because I’m going to-morrow. That is, I have decided to go, though at first I felt inclined to call Travers’s bluff and stick his insolence out.”

“I think you’re right. It’s the only thing to do. Under the circumstances.”

Nothing more was said on this subject.

Barron said presently, “I misunderstood you entirely when you first came up here, Powell. To tell the truth, everyone did. It wasn’t unnatural, altogether.”

“Perfectly natural.”

“You see, it isn’t usual to have a senior member of the Service coming from another province, as you did, just when we were all worried about what monkeywork might be going on up here. You know, this business of silver and world currencies is a very big thing. One of the things,” he said earnestly, “on which the balance of power is going to turn. If ever Britain is edged out of the East, silver, as likely as not, will be the lever that did it.”

VII

Clive assented, happy to have got a fellow human being on to the plane where he was at his best. That plane might not be one where a man understood other men; where he gained insight, sympathy, quick stirrings of pity and indignation, all that makes angry denial of God often the only genuine religion.

But it made men statesmen, it trained them to see mankind in large-scale maps and statistics. Nations are saved (when they are saved), not by their poets and saints, and the rank and file who live lives of humble service, but by their statesmen. It has pleased the Power that made the world to keep its treasures in these earthen vessels. It might conceivably have chosen others. But it did not. And all is best, though we oft doubt.

Barron had failed when what was asked was a reasonable care for what less important people thought. But back with his files he would be Antaeus on earth again. Clive, the district officer, had never studied this question of silver. Now he saw that it was important, and certain to become more important. Four hundred million souls, potential buyers of kerosene, cheap cotton cloths, hurricane lamps, tiny brass idols, joss and junk, they all depended on the market price of silver, for the amount which they could purchase. India, too—so poverty-stricken, yet so important a market for Lancashire and Birmingham—India was touched by this question of silver.

VIII

Clive nodded, therefore; and Barron continued. “Mind if I have a pipe? Your window’s open.”

“I think”, Barron said, as he proceeded to light up, “things would have gone better if you and I had been alone here, without this fellow Lidgett. He’s a bad hat, Powell, and I want you to remember it and to keep an eye on him. If I told you all that is known of his career these last twenty years in Burma, you’d ask me why he isn’t in prison or deported. But that’s another matter. The point is, though he thinks I don’t know it, I know”—he bent his head down, puffing at his pipe in a place out of the draught, to get it going—“and we know, in the Government at Mandalay, that he’s sold his knowledge of the country, which is”—he succeeded in getting his pipe going well, and the anger began to fade out of his face and the lines to grow self-confident again—“extensive and peculiar—and altogether disreputable. He’s sold this knowledge, and he’ll stick at nothing to get what he wants.”

Again Barron paused to do some hard thinking. “He’s come from China now,” he said at last, “where he’s had pretty well as shady a record as he’s had in Burma, which is saying a whole lot. I wouldn’t take it for granted that the visit of this so-called Chinese Ambassador now isn’t a put-up job between him and Lidgett. However”, he decided, “even if that’s so, he’ll let the Chinks down. He means to work the concessions from the Burmese side, if he can make arrangements with our Government. He’ll use any tool he can, of course—China included. But he’ll have to dance to the tune his employers call, and of course he knows that, and his employers aren’t the Chinese. China never yet put up a single penny for any person or any company. So, as I was saying, it’s not Chinese, and not British, but American interests that will benefit. It’s America that’ll get hold of Travers’s silver; and there’s whole mountain-ranges of it, really, Powell. Then America’ll get the China trade just where she wants it! Her business interests can sell cheap or dear, just as they choose, by manipulating the silver market, which is the only one the East can afford to buy in. If they want, they can lower the whole standard of living—for a nation. Or they can put political pressure on the Governments that have to use silver, and by putting it can grab other things for their nationals. Of course—if we get a grip on Travers’s country we can do the same, I grant you that. But hang it all, Powell! we’ve a right to do it, for we’re here already! And, besides, we’ve built up some sort of technique of how to do it, and of how not to do it. And, having been in India so long, and in the East generally, we do know something that guarantees that our business combines can’t put the screw on the people beyond a certain point. If they do, then Government steps in, and says, ‘You can’t do this. Simply can’t do it at all!’ However, that isn’t quite what you and I have to discuss. What we’ve got to bear in mind, Powell, is that the key to the political control of China lies in these hills; and that there’s a fellow here, who’s prepared to sell that key for foreign money.”

Clive leant back on his pillows, listening. “Thinking you were on the same game as Lidgett,” continued Barron, “and thinking, too, that at any rate you stood for British interests, and that you had already done so damned well that it was clear you were going to get what you were after, I made up my mind to back an arrangement by which you and Lidgett could get the concessions together. Then Government would see to it that the political side of them stayed British. I relied on you helping with this, when you got to London. But I’ve come to see I’ve misjudged you—that you’ve been telling simple truth all along, and that you aren’t after any sort of concession. I wish”, he said, going off his argument for a moment, “I’d seen this sooner. What with your having known Travers when he was in the Service, you and I could have afforded to wait until we’d seen him, and could have warned him to grant no concessions—to anyone—until he had full sanction from the Burmese Government. We could have persuaded him that the only thing for him to do is what he’ll have to do sooner or later—that is, come to some arrangement with the Government. He could have remained His Highness—if he wanted—or he could have sold out his mining rights, and we could have seen that he got the price he wanted.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” said Clive. “His only chance is to accept formal British protection. Then he can tell the Chinks to go and chase themselves on their native hills.”

“Of course he can!” said Barron. “As it is, there’s nothing to stop a horde of Chinks coming down and overrunning this place and then calling it part of China. It would be damned awkward for us, having to tell them afterwards that it wasn’t China and was never going to be China and that we couldn’t afford to let it be China! That’s the sort of trouble I was sent to stop. It’s the one thing that makes me, even now, inclined to say to this girl and her father, ‘I’m here, and you can murder me if you like, but I won’t budge until I know definitely what sort of monkeywork I’ve to report as having been put through with China here.’”

“I don’t think that would be wise,” said Clive. “You see, your going gives you a strong card to play.”

“Yes?” asked Barron eagerly.

“Why, when he gets time to think, Travers will see that it’s damned awkward for him, what has happened. I don’t see that he could help it or do anything else—you hear those drums——”

Barron was disconcerted. But the other’s apologetic manner, as of one mentioning what could not be suppressed from the argument, disarmed even humiliation. “Quite. His people are savages. It’s just damned superstition. But you’ve got to reckon with it.”

“You’ve got to reckon with it,” Clive agreed. “Travers, too, has got to reckon with it. But he’ll know, as soon as you’ve gone, that he’s got to come to some settlement with the British Government. He can’t hang on for ever as an independent Raja on our borders.”

“Of course he can’t! Even if we could allow any stray Englishman who could collect a dozen rifles to set himself up as a king, he’s far too small to act as buffer state between us and China. He’s got to come to terms. But there’s this Chinese fellow here now, Powell——”

“I know. But I think—in fact, I’m absolutely sure—that Travers isn’t going to acknowledge himself a vassal of China. He’ll fight first, and from what I gather has happened on former occasions the Chinks are going to find him a warm handful. Horribly warm, Barron!”

“Then there’s Lidgett——”

“I know. But if Pradita—Travers’s girl, you know—has any say in things, Lidgett isn’t going to get much change, either. I tell you what, Barron. You’re going back to Mandalay. You can suppress a good deal of what’s happened here—there’s no sense in making trouble. But you can tell what’s, after all, the truth—that Travers is a difficult man to handle——”

“My God! but he is that! You’re right, Powell. You know, of course, that he’s a lunatic?”

“I know he isn’t exactly normal. I’m not sure that in his own world he isn’t sane enough. However, that’s what I’ve got to find out presently. But tell your Government—what, again, I’m sure is the truth—that the only way to approach Travers is as he is being approached now, through a man who knew him when he was a young fellow just come out in the Service?”

“Before all this madness of imagining himself an independent Prince?”

“Exactly. I promise you—if Travers sees me at all, or listens to me at all—and I think I can make him listen, though I don’t underestimate the difficulty of the job ahead of me—well, I’ll make him see sense about the Chinese and about making a treaty with his own people. Though, mind you, I’m quite sure there’s no danger about China. Not yet.”

“I think you may be right,” said Barron reflectively. “Well, it’s been an immense comfort to me, having this talk before I went off. You see——”

He stopped short, embarrassed.

“I know. One doesn’t like to leave a job unfinished. But we’re not leaving it unfinished. I’m as anxious as you are to save Travers from making a ghastly mistake. After all, he was my friend, long ago. And you’ve done part of your job” (Clive managed to suppress a smile) “finding out that at any rate I wasn’t up to any concession-hunting up here. Confess now! it was that suspicion that made you have to hurry up to Buddhawbwe!”

Barron did not smile, either. He was too pleased to find a path of escape, both from his problems and from his wounded self-esteem. “It was,” he admitted eagerly. “You’ve no idea how your turning up at Mandalay upset us all. And there was a sentence in the letter about you from H.E. of Bengal, that we didn’t like. He said, ‘I’m not keen on Mr. Powell’s being allowed to go up country.’ We thought that meant they knew in Bengal that you were concession-hunting; and put it up to us to stop you—tactfully, of course. H.E. sent me straight off to Monywa, to take the Government launch upstream. I tell you, it was a bit of a shock when you walked in here! I didn’t think you’d be along for a good while yet. I suppose MacKenzie managed it for you? No one else could have done it.”

“Yes,” said Clive. “MacKenzie worked everything.”

“To tell the truth, I rather doubted if you’d ever get up here. I rather hoped that you’d see the job was beyond you, and would come back to Mandalay after getting perhaps as far as Kindat.”

Clive laughed. He straightened his face, to add, “We can help each other, then. I’ll try to keep Travers good. In return, will you tell Craven-Simpson that I’m not a gold-digger or a ruby-digger or a silver-digger, or anything else that he’s been imagining?”

“I will, Powell. And now—in case I don’t see you to-morrow—au revoir. We’ll meet in Mandalay, where you’ll stay with me. I insist on that. You’ll want looking after, having come up here when you knew you weren’t fit to do it. I’ll see you get it.”

“Right. I’ll roll up in Mandalay, in a month or so, and report to you, and discuss what’s to do next.”

“Of course! And now you’ll promise to take things easy? As a matter of public, as well as personal duty. I’m sorry I’ve kept you up all this while.”

“No, I’m glad. You had to do it. Good night. And many thanks.”

Gussie tiptoed in, and put out Clive’s lamp.

IX

Clive was not to sleep yet, however. A few minutes passed, his door opened noiselessly, and Lidgett asked in a whisper, “You asleep, Powell?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, I’m not going to keep you awake. But I say—you’ve just had a long talk with Barron, haven’t you? You and he have fixed things up?”

“Fixed up what? There are matches on that chair, if you like to light the lamp. Be careful, though. You’ll find the glass very hot.”

“No, there’s no need for a light. I shan’t stay more than a few seconds. I mean, you and Barron have fixed up about our concessions—when he gets back to head-quarters?”

“You refuse to believe me. But—for the tenth time—I have no concessions, and want no concessions.”

“Then what were you and Barron having that long buk about?”

“I give you my word of honour, Lidgett—not about any concessions. Barron believes me, if you don’t. He came in to say so, in fact.”

“Oh!”

This seemed to introduce a new and disconcerting element into Lidgett’s thinking. He turned the statement over in his mind, and wondered if he could accept it; and, if he could, how it should affect his conduct.

“Yes. He understands the situation at last.”

“Well, of course, Powell. I mean to say, anyone could see——”

But Jake found himself unable to say clearly what it was that anyone could see, so left the rest of the sentence blank.

He tried another tack. “What was Barron saying? I mean, since the three of us are working together we’ve got to pool all we’re doing or know. You see, he goes back, leaving us here. So we expect to know what steps he’ll be taking in Mandalay, in defence of our joint interests.”

Clive saw he had no escape, unless he could rouse himself for long enough to make some sort of answer that would sound, as well as be, honest. He said, therefore, “Barron isn’t bothering about concessions, either. His only concern is to prevent China slipping edgewise into this country. There’s this Ambassador having his interview to-morrow.”

“We needn’t bother about him. I’ve been making my enquiries. I’ve found out all about him. But I’ll tell you later,” Jake said hurriedly. “I won’t keep you awake now.”

Clive, in a faint stirring of interest through his drowsiness, looked questioningly at him. Then the questioning, and all desire to question, died out. It was not raining, but lightnings were dancing on the hills opposite, and grey spears of reflection were flying through this room. They revealed Jake’s cunningly stupid face, with a wisp of coal-black hair thrust up on one side, like the horn on a fiend’s head. Clive was chatting with a demon at his bedside—a very opinionated and unteachable demon—on whose face the lightning was playing. What was the use of trying to get sense into a demon’s head? However—

“Naturally,” Clive conceded sleepily, for even a demon is entitled to politeness, if he leaves his native woods and slips in to converse at your bedside, “Barron isn’t too pleased about having to go back before he knows what has happened between Raja Gabriel and the Chinese Ambassador.”

“I should say not! Gosh, but he’s made a bloody fool of himself, hasn’t he, Powell? In a way, you and I ought to be rather glad. He’s not the sort of man they should have sent on a delicate job like this one. That kind of man is only useful when he’s got all his files before him, and a full squad of chaprasis. He hasn’t any finesse, any insight. He doesn’t understand Jack Burman, or Johnny Chink, either. I know Barron—so does everyone—and I knew he’d make a muck of things. He wouldn’t have helped us either, Powell. When we’d got our concessions—and no thanks to him!—he’d have tried to mess us up by insisting, on behalf of Government, on all sorts of rot. No employment of slave labour or children. Say! when you’ve seen these Chinese mines you’ll ask yourself how on earth anyone could work them without using children! My God, Powell! do fellows like Barron think they’re running a Sunday School out here? What I mean is——”

A remark of Gabriel’s, of all people, swam up into Clive’s memory, from the depths of the forgotten years. “When a fellow keeps on saying, ‘What I mean is’, you can be sure he’s a most appalling liar, Clive!”

“You listening, Powell?”

“Yes.”

“What I mean is, it’s a good thing Barron’s got the Order of the Boot. We can get on better, not having a fool like that watching and interfering all the time. You and I now have a free hand. We’re in luck, meeting this way, Powell! Now, I warned Barron these people were extra strict Buddhists! Why ever did he think the place was called Buddhawbwe? But the bloody fool thought he knew better than anyone else, and wouldn’t listen! Why, I know the people through and through! I spent a couple of years running a show that was trading with this district from China——”

He had not mentioned this before. It was interesting.

“I’ll tell you something, Powell, since you’re my partner. I’ve found out that I know this fellow who’s come as the Chinks’ Ambassador. I used to have dealings with him when I was working in China. Very reasonable Johnny he was, too, if you knew how to take him. And once we’ve got our concessions, there’ll be plenty in the business for him as well as for us. I’ve arranged to have a talk with him to-morrow. Then we shan’t need to bother about Barron. We can have a steady trade with the outside world through China, with this fellow’s help. Now, here’s the programme, Powell. You see Travers—or Travers’s girl—better manage to see Travers himself, though, so as to have everything definitely fixed up, so that there can be no lawyers’ hanky or politicals’ hanky afterwards, about what they call irregularities. You see Travers and get our concessions——”

“Concessions?” murmured Clive.

“Yes. Our concessions,” said Lidgett, controlling a fierce impulse to shake Clive into wakefulness. “You see Travers, while I see his Chink Excellency and explain to him what there’s going to be for him, as well as for us, in the Buddhawbwe Trading Company Limited.”

But Clive was asleep.

“All right,” said Jake, as he left him. “So you’re that sort, are you? Think yourself too good to work with ‘a mere adventurer’! And what do you think you and your set are? You think that the two of you can have a long confidential chat, and keep me out of it? You’re not interested in concessions! in mere wealth! mere dross and filthy lucre! Always the high-minded I.C.S., the perfect gentleman! Tell that to the Marines! I know how to handle people who think they can work on their own, and leave me cold!”

Chapter VII

I

When he came in to chat with Clive as the latter drank his morning tea, Gussie reported an incident that had marked Barron’s departure.

“His men and his coolies were all ready, and they were waiting just in front of the western gate, Mr. Powell. Then Mr. Barron came out, and he ordered them to march back, through Buddhawbwe, and through the other gate. There was a great shout of anger raised by all the people, and the coolies were afraid. Mr. Barron tried to make them go through the other gate, but they lay down and would not. Because they knew, you see, that if they did that, then they would be killed by the people when they came back from Hkamti presently. So Mr. Barron and his Sikhs and policemen marched through the eastern gate, and left his coolies to do as they chose. But the coolies waited before the western gate, and did not dare to follow, though Mr. Barron was also waiting, on the road lower down, where the paths from both the gates meet. Then Princess Pradita came, and she asked what is the matter, and why are all these men sitting here? And they told her, These coolies are refusing to join Mr. Barron, because he has gone out through the gate of honour after killing our birds on our sacred lake. So she was very angry, and she said, These coolies had my orders to take Mr. Barron’s things quickly, and they are daring to delay! And she ordered their sirdar to be given a beating—ten strokes with a bamboo. But the people are very angry also, for they say, This man has done great wickedness, yet our Princess allows him to go out by the gate that is honourable! That is not according to the will of God. So there is much dissatisfaction, and people say, We do not know what will happen, if men who have done great wickedness are allowed such honour by our Princess.”

All that Clive said, musingly, as he sipped his early tea, was, “Good for Barron! I could have liked that fellow, if he could have stopped being an official for five minutes.”

“Yes, no doubt it was brave of him. And of course, it was important that he should support Government’s prestige. Major Balfour used to say to my poor mother, ‘It does not matter if you are a bloody fool, so long as you are a bloody fool who can kick damned hard when he does kick’. Mr. Powell, I think that perhaps the reason why Mr. Barron would not go out by the western gate was because he may have heard what I was saying when he came in last night.”

“I think that was so, Gussie. And on the whole, I’m rather glad. These little dodges, by which they make us look silly—in their eyes only—without our guessing it, give the heathen a lot of pleasure; and I don’t fancy they do anyone much harm, really. But that doesn’t alter the fact that if by some accident we do see through them it’s up to us not to fall in with the game.”

“Yes, Mr. Powell. I think so, too. I think Mr. Barron did right.”

“Would Major Balfour have agreed with us, Gussie?”

“No doubt of it! He was up to all the people’s tricks. My poor mother used to tell of how, when he was Special Commissioner for all the Chindwin valley, a man who was a son of Mindonmin——”

Beyond his wont, Clive poured himself out a second cup of tea. “He had many sons, had he not?” he asked.

“A hundred and twenty-three,” answered Gussie promptly. “But my poor mother used to say that it was more than that, really and truly.”

“Well, tell me about the one who saw Major Balfour.”

“Oh, he called himself King of Burma. This was after we had put down King Thibaw, you must understand, Mr. Powell. This man who called himself King of Burma was defeated by Major Balfour many times, till at last he said he wanted to make peace. So Major Balfour said, ‘All right. You may come and make peace. But you must do it respectfully’. So he came, bringing many presents and saying many good words. But Major Balfour would not see him, and sent him away, and told him, ‘You may come again, when you come respectfully’.”

“What had he done that was wrong?”

“Why, he had brought with him his own spittoon, Mr. Powell.”

“Is that a very wrong thing to do?”

“Of course. When you take your spittoon with you to anyone’s house, it is a sign that you consider yourself that man’s superior. My poor mother used to say, ‘They did not think that Major Balfour knew this, and so they brought their own spittoons. But that would not do, so he sent them back’. And on their way back, when they were full of fear, because they were not sure why Major Balfour had refused to see them (and you see, Mr. Powell, they did not realise that he knew about the spittoons), they were suddenly surprised by Major Balfour’s men, in a narrow place among the hills. They thought these men were dacoits. But they understood when all they did was to take the Prince’s spittoon and throw it over a high cliff. The spittoon was one that was made of gold, with rubies all round its edges. So then they knew that the men were not dacoits, and they went back to Major Balfour, as he had ordered, respectfully.”

“Using spittoons provided for them by their host?”

“Of course. And he was very kind to them. So all was well. That was how Major Balfour brought peace to the Chindwin valley. He was a very great man, my poor mother used always to say. He was a great friend of poor mother’s and he was of a very old Scotch family. I think they came over with William the Conqueror, though poor mother was not quite sure of this.”

II

The air was shaken and tormented. Horns and conchs and trumpets swelled in full blast. The Chinese Ambassador’s tents, Clive noticed, were being struck. This region of phantasy grew momentarily more perplexing and evasive.

Presently, with a fanfare and tumult of what (he supposed) must come under the general head of music, as the Celestial mind interprets that widely misused term, the whole troop seemed on the march again, towards Raja Gabriel’s frontiers. Clive could not even guess what was happening. But no doubt (as Browning surmised concerning the world) it all meant intensely, and meant good.

Breakfast brought another, though minor, surprise. Jake Lidgett did not show up at all.

Clive wondered if he were by any chance unwell. It seemed unlikely. The Jake Lidgetts of his experience did not become unwell. There were no bands in their death, and comparatively few in their colourful expansive lives. They flourished, if not like the green bay tree, then like the blotchy and leprous (but apparently healthy) plane tree, which can grow in any air, even the murkiest; and sooner or later—but generally, and most unfortunately, later—they disappeared; and presumably Providence was seeing to them, as their deeds had merited, elsewhere.

He remembered confusedly some kind of a discussion that Jake had held with his dream-self, in darkness during the night that was just over. He had an impression that during the discussion he had not carried himself entirely so as to win Jake’s complete approbation. He could remember intense weariness, and a conversation blotted out by frequent blurrings. But yes! there seemed to remain a certain feeling of missing something of absolute agreement and understanding.

Murdoch entered with an announcement. “Her leddyship’s compliments to you, Mr. Powell, and there will be no durbar for His Excellency the Chinese Ambassador.”

“Why, what on earth has happened, Murdoch? Anything gone wrong?”

“To tell the truth, sir, I think evera last thing has gone wrang. His Excellency has been dismissed by His Highness the Sawbwa.”

“Dismissed?”

“Aye. To his ain country.”

The British and Chinese Ambassadors both dismissed, in the course of one twenty-four hours! No, in less! Within the course of half a day! It was as if Guatemala had gone mad and had declared war on Europe and America simultaneously.

III

Invaluable Gussie produced the key to part of the confusion, as Clive was watching the procession away of what had so recently added a glory to these hills—and imagining (so much does our mind tincture what we see) that, even in its back view, that immense imponderable stateliness showed an outraged dignity. The golden dragons, as they flapped out fiercely in the gusts from the ridges, whipped the air wrathfully. The world’s oldest empire was breathing vengeance against a mountain princeling.

“They are burning the Chinese Ambassador’s roofs.”

Gussie pointed to a bonfire, which Clive had not noticed. Smoke was curling and rising; tongues and spires of flame were audibly crackling, even at this distance, a quarter of a mile away.

“Burning whose roofs, Gussie?”

“The Ambassador’s. He brought a great deal of baggage on the backs of his men, but Raja Gabriel thought, Oh, it is only presents or opium for his wives or something like that. But it was roofs. I mean, wooden roofs such as you see, Mr. Powell, on all these houses in the royal quarters. Raja Gabriel did not talk much with the Ambassador yesterday. Of course he was very polite and all that. He said, I will talk with you to-morrow, and for this night your men may pitch their tents in a good place which I will show them, and Your Excellency must be my guest and sleep in the special palace which I have built for honourable men like yourself. So His Excellency replied, Very well, I will sleep there, and to-morrow all shall be as you say. But when Raja Gabriel awoke this morning, his servants said to him, See, Your Highness, what His Excellency’s carpenters have done in the night. So he rushed out of his bed, and when he saw he was very angry, so that they say no man will dare to speak to him again to-day, and perhaps not even to-morrow.”

“But what had His Excellency’s carpenters done in the night, Gussie?”

“Why, they had taken the roofs that His Excellency had brought, and put them up on long poles beside the house where Raja Gabriel had put him, to make it look bigger and grander. Oh, it was only for show! Of course! You see, Mr. Powell, in this country the big men live in the big houses. You count, and you say, Seven roofs! that is a very great man! Nine roofs! that man is two roofs greater still! Raja Gabriel’s house has nine roofs, which we say is the right number for a king’s house. The guest-house, where you are sleeping, has only three roofs. We say, that is the right number for a gentleman who is—a gentleman, but not really important. Mr. Barron and Mr. Lidgett were put in a house that has only one roof. But when the Ambassador’s carpenters had finished, his house this morning had fifteen roofs, which meant of course that Raja Gabriel was not the king here but only the Chinese Emperor’s subject! Raja Gabriel was furious, and he said, You are all idle and good for nothing, for you did not tell me before, and His Excellency’s carpenters must have been hammering all night long! How is it that you did not hear? And his watchmen answered, We did not hear, for all night long it was stormy, and there was a high wind. Besides, Chinese carpenters can work without any noise, and these carpenters are very special ones, for we have learnt that in their own country they are makers of coffins, and if you are making coffins you must do it without any sound, for those who are living do not like to hear the sound of making coffins. And Princess Pradita took their part, and she said, That is true, father. Chinese carpenters can work without any noise. So Raja Gabriel said, Well, whether that be so or not, I shall burn all those roofs up where all my people can see. The Chinese Ambassador was very angry, and he said, If you burn my Emperor’s dragons it will be great insult to my master and the dragons will be very furious against all this land and they will come and burn up all your crops with their fiery breathing. The Buddhist monks also said, That will surely happen. We shall have no crops this year. We shall have no opium to sell and no rice-spirit. But Raja Gabriel has had the roofs burnt, as you see, Mr. Powell, and the golden dragons which he saw this morning on those sham roofs which the Ambassador had secretly brought, they are all in that fire! So the Ambassador is very angry, and the people too are very troubled. For they say, Our poppies are now ripening, and we know that already the nats are angry, for they sent no rain in February, when our poppies were flowering. The Was say that the Earth-Spirit is angry because Raja Gabriel has stopped their head-hunting, and the Buddhists say the nats are angry because Barron has killed their birds. And now everyone says, the dragons also will be angry, for a dragon is always angry if you burn him in a great fire where all men can see the shame that you have put upon him.”

His Excellency’s army of followers, no longer encumbered with loads of hidden woodwork, wound their way beside the lake, to screeching protesting music. They were travelling with uncelestial celerity.

IV

The wind blew into Clive’s nostrils a sweet faint fragrance as of unseen wood-flowers; and the pyre, conquering its own white heart, blazed into high gemlike radiance.

“That will be the honey,” observed Gussie.

“The honey? What honey?”

“Yes, Mr. Powell. You see, when an Ambassador comes to visit a King he must bring presents. Of course! But this Ambassador brought very little. Only a few simple things, that you could buy in an ordinary bazaar, and six mule-loads of honey. So that is another reason why Raja Gabriel is so angry. And he has said, Well, you must burn the honey with the roofs. So they are doing that.”

“But how childish, Gussie! To burn up good honey!”

“You are quite right, Mr. Powell. But then, we do not eat honey in Burma. You see, when a monk or any other great person dies, his friends say, It is not right that we should forget our friend at once. So they preserve his body for a whole year, in honey. And after that, because they do not like to waste the honey, they give it to some English friend—to a missionary, generally. But if there is no missionary, then it can be given to some high official. Because, you see, the honey is not needed any longer. Major Balfour always used to say, Well, I have eaten many things in Burma. I have eaten dogs and caterpillars and swallows’ nests, but I will not eat honey. So, when the honey was given to Raja Gabriel, he was very angry, though of course he did not say anything to the Ambassador openly. But now he has told his servants that all the honey is to be burned. And the Ambassador will be told, and he will say (though he will be angry, Mr. Powell), Well, Raja Gabriel is a Raja who understood, which was why he would not take my honey, that I meant as a secret insult. It will add to Raja Gabriel’s prestige. And you must remember, with savages, as Major Balfour used to say, Prestige is your father and your mother. In fact, it is your all in all.”

V

“And that is the reason”, said Gussie, “why British heads are the best of all. Because of our prestige.”

“But how on earth do British heads get on the market?”

“Ah, it is not often, Mr. Powell. But the Sawbwa of Chentingyang has two. That is why everyone says he is so great and so important. He paid three pigeon’s blood rubies for each of them. It was when the Government were making a road beyond Lashio. That would be more than—oh, about twelve years ago. Two officers of an Indian regiment went into a village when it was market day, Mr. Powell, and there were some Was there, buying things. They had had much opium, and much drink (no doubt!), so they got excited when they saw the two officers. Because they had such good heads, you see. So they began to be excited, and the Englishmen were afraid—because the Was had spears, and were very drunk, Mr. Powell, and the officers had not brought their guns with them, for they were there for curiosity only. Well, the officers said, It is better for us to get out of here, but the Was followed them, and killed them, and took their heads!”

“And did Government do nothing about it?”

“Oh, it was not necessary to do anything. You see, Mr. Powell, the regiment was very angry and said, This is a thing that should not be allowed, that these fellows should take the heads of our officers, and they destroyed that village and killed the men as they tried to escape. So the Was say, English heads are good, no doubt. They are the best of all heads, and if they could be bought in our bazaars, as sometimes you can buy the heads of low and mean fellows, criminals whom the Shan Sawbwas have executed, it would be a good arrangement. But it is better not to take them by force.”

“Quite. I’m glad that is the general feeling.”

“You are quite right, Mr. Powell. They all say this, everywhere in these hills.”

Gussie was taking his usual cross-country route, over hill, over dale. But he would get to his point if you listened, so Clive listened.

“But the thing is, Mr. Powell, the murderers did not come from that village at all. So when the soldiers said, Well, we have utterly burnt and destroyed this village, and no doubt we have burnt the heads of our two officers also, they were quite wrong. The heads were already at a distance! And the Was who took them sold them to the Sawbwa of Chentingyang, and his people say, Our country is beyond doubt dear to the nats and to God, for they have given us the ghosts of two Englishmen who were officers in the fierce Indian Army, to keep guard on our fields and our wives.”

Clive stared at his follower, “in a maze”, like one of Bunyan’s characters. Before he had come to himself, Gussie opened into new meanderings.

“When a head is taken from a man, then he is very sorry. And his friends are sorry also. For they say, Now we shall see that his family will die out. The women will have no more children, and those of his sons who marry will have none also. But the Was say, These two heads that the Sawbwa of Chentingyang has bought are not ordinary heads. For those lose their power within three years, and then you must get fresh heads. But these heads have been at Chentingyang for twelve years—twelve years, Mr. Powell!—and their power is as it was at the beginning. They have had rain in Chentingyang, enough always but not too much or too little. Every woman there has many children! So the Sawbwa was very astonished, and he said, Well, these are not usual heads, and no doubt other things about them will be strange also. So he said, Well, we must find out if their families in England have died out, as we know they would have done if these heads were like other heads. So he enquired secretly what the officers’ names were, and when he had learnt that they were Jones and Wilson he sent men to Rangoon, to find out if there are still those two families in England. And the men came back, and they said, We have learnt beyond a doubt that there are still these two families in England. Indeed, we have seen sons of these families in Rangoon itself! So all his people were surprised, and the Magicians said, It is because one of our heads has red hair, which is not seen in our country. You see, Mr. Powell, everyone in this country knows that red hair is exceedingly lucky. If you have red hair, then all men know that you are lucky.”

VI

Gussie had still more information, and even more interesting.

“Raja Gabriel would have spoken to you this morning, Mr. Powell, if it had not been for Mr. Lidgett. Princess Dita said to him, You must see Mr. Powell, father, for he is your old friend, and he has become my friend also. And he said, Well, I will see him, since he was my old friend and he is your friend also. But then one of his officers came up to him and he said something about Lidgett.

You must know, Mr. Powell, that Mr. Lidgett has met this Chinese Ambassador before, when they were both in Yunnan, that is over there.” He pointed north-north-eastward.

Clive began to remember. Surely Lidgett had said something about the Ambassador and himself, when he was dreaming last night and drifting out of all hearing. “Met the Chinese Ambassador?”

“Oh, he has not always been an ambassador. He began as a brigand. Twenty years ago, he was a very famous and skilful brigand. Then he became a General, and made himself Governor of part of Yunnan. They still call him General Li. So when his officer came up, and said something about this Lidgett, Raja Gabriel stopped short all at once, and said, ‘Lidgett? Is it that Lidgett?’ And Princess Dita said that it was.”

“Was what Lidgett?” asked Clive, bewildered.

“Oh, did I not explain, Mr. Powell? Why, when this Lidgett first came to Burma, twenty years ago, he was not then Lidgett at all. He called himself Vansittart, and he sold things—at terrible prices, you may be sure, Mr. Powell—to the British soldiers who were putting down the Burmese dacoits. In those days many men were hanged, and Lidgett accidentally found out that he could get a good price for their heads, if he could sell them to the head-hunters. But Major Balfour found out that he was doing this, and he nearly hanged Lidgett himself. So Lidgett escaped, and went to Hong-Kong, where he changed his name to Thompson, which is a very British name, Mr. Powell, and a very good name.

Then he came into China, to trade in opium and other things, and he met General Li. So he and General Li became friends, and they started a trading company together, and he changed his name again, to Lidgett, and they called themselves ‘Lee’—spelling it L—e—e, to make it seem very British, Mr. Powell—they called themselves ‘Lee and Lidgett, General Traders and Stockists’. Or sometimes, ‘The General China Trading Company’. Then, when General Li made himself a kind of Governor, he let Lidgett have the heads of all the men whom he beheaded, and Lidgett sold these to the Was in Raja Gabriel’s country and wherever the Was are. General Li did a lot of beheading—sometimes forty or fifty men in one morning—for he said, This country has become very disorderly and disgraceful and this must cease. And of course he was quite right. Things had become very bad in all that country where he had been a brigand for so long. So the Was were very happy in those days, and they have never been quite so happy since. They said that the Earth-Spirit and all the other spirits were pleased, for they had plenty of heads, and these heads were very good heads, Chinese heads, for which you must pay a high price. In fact, Lidgett said to General Li, You must not behead so many men, for the price of heads is getting less. So General Li agreed, and he said. Well, I will not do so, since the country is getting quieter now. So then the Was got just sufficient heads, for a fair price; and they were very glad, for Chinese ghosts are very faithful and stay where their heads are and do not wish to go back to China, where there are Governors like General Li.”

“Good God!” said Clive.

“So that was how Raja Gabriel first heard of Lidgett. And when someone mentioned Lidgett again, just as he had been thinking of General Li, Raja Gabriel said suddenly, ‘Lee and Lidgett!’ And Princess Dita said, ‘Yes. Lee and Lidgett.’ So Raja Gabriel——”

“Do you mean to say that Lidgett had the nerve to come back to Burma from China?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Powell. You see, he is a bad man, but he is brave. Besides, there was the Boxer rising, so he had to fly for his life. General Li also did not do so well in that rising, and when a new Governor was sent to Yunnan he saw that he could not remain a Governor himself, so he made peace and became an Ambassador instead. And Lidgett stayed in Hong-Kong until someone told him that Major Balfour had gone home and would not return, so then he came back to Burma, but of course he did not wish to call himself Vansittart again, so he said he was Jacob Lidgett, from Cork. He says he is not in trade, but is a prospecting engineer. But everyone knows he is not a very good man. That is why they will not let him join the European Club at Monywa. He can join the Mandalay Club, of course, but not the Monywa one. And now I think he will soon have to leave Buddhawbwe. You see, Raja Gabriel’s officers have told how Lidgett has been talking to General Li. And I think they talked together before either of them came here. So Raja Gabriel knows they will be plotting, no doubt, and he will watch Lidgett. They call Raja Gabriel the duwa—that means chief—who has a thousand eyes.”

VII

Clive was to learn that the two eyes that were visible could be very terrible eyes.

It became evident that His Excellency’s departure did not mean that all things would resume their normal course. In the royal horse-lines, and where the elephants were picketed, and in the barracks, there was sign of excitement and haste. The Raja’s State elephant was being caparisoned, and his charger being got ready. The Sawbwa himself suddenly appeared, a tall strong figure resplendent in scarlet robes on which golden serows were thickly embroidered. He came striding along the terrace, to where Clive was standing.

Just at this moment the versatile and energetic Jake reappeared, after his mysterious absence. He came jauntily up, and opened the conversation as if it had been broken off in mid-sentence yesterday.

“Well, what did I say, Powell? Barron got the push, didn’t he, as I knew he would? These fellows don’t understand how to handle Orientals. That leaves the coast free for those who do. And now His Chink Excellency——”

He stopped in mid-speech. The Sawbwa had halted near them. His eyes were wandering as if uncertain of the object of their search.

The face which Clive saw after so many years was changed to darker and wilder, as if long-dead generations and races, whose days and deaths were harsher and sterner than any we have dreamed of, had arisen from their dust and returned to the stage of living present action. The face was unhappy and miserable, and in all its lines pride and lust of rule were written. They were not thrown up as in assertion, but as if accepted as a right, by every nerve and thread of being, every thought that passed through that brain. If pride and conviction of a right to power can make a face mad, then that face was mad.

Yet it seemed to harbour for a moment other thoughts also. Baffled and bewildered, it seemed to falter into something like a desire to question had it known where to find an answer—its wretchedness a contrast with that other face—so desireless, and so happy in its humility and conquest over passion.

Then his glance fell on Lidgett, and into it came a concentration of anger and resentment that drove out even its pride. He held Lidgett in his gaze, as if with that look he would have killed him; and it would not have seemed strange to Clive if Lidgett had failed to support such a look.

He turned, as if by strong compulsion on himself, and strode on again. Lidgett was trembling from head to foot.

“God!” he said. “The man’s a lunatic!”

Clive thought so, too; and the interview that lay before him was seen to be harder than ever. They had passed irrevocably into different lives and worlds.

“Let’s get away from this, Powell!” said Lidgett. “The man will do us some mischief!”

Princess Perdita, ready for riding, came up to them. She addressed herself to Clive.

“My father will see you, Mr. Powell, when he has returned from seeing to his forts and frontiers.”

“When will that be?” Clive forced himself to ask.

“I think, in perhaps three days.”

She turned to Lidgett. “You will leave Buddhawbwe to-day,” she said.

“But it’s just murder!” he protested. “To send a man down those hills when the weather is just going to break!”

Clive could not help admiration for the resilience which years of existence by his wits had brought. It enabled Jake to begin to recover, even while the perspiration was still on his forehead. The man plainly knew himself—which the philosophers have advised as life’s aim and highest achievement. He knew that, once fear had declined from its crest, he would find himself thrusting back, to reach Buddhawbwe and its treasures somehow. Instinct bade him even now keep a possible way back open.

“It is of no consequence to us what God sees fit to do with you,” she answered; and left them.

Clive went to his room. Presently Gussie joined him. “Her Highness has sent me with a message, Mr. Powell. She asks, Will Mr. Powell have breakfast with me, and not with Mr. Lidgett?”

“But I’ve had breakfast, Gussie, as you know!”

“Yes, I told her that, and she said, Then ask Mr. Powell if he will sit with me and have a talk?”

“Are you sure she wants it? She was obviously about to go out.”

“She told me very particularly to beg you to come.”

“Tell her, Of course I will come.”

“I have told her that already, Mr. Powell.”

VIII

“The Ambassador has gone,” said Perdita. “But he will not go far. He will pretend to go. Then he will say his men and horses are tired and must rest. So my father is seeing to his forts and his armies.”

“I suppose trouble with China might be very awkward?”

“Yes. With China. But not” (she made a scornful gesture) “with General Li. With Lee and Lidgett, General Stockists and Traders! Mr. Powell!” she said earnestly, “those two are old friends, and Lidgett will try to get back. They think we do not understand. But we understand very well. We know they have spoken together. So I thought it would not be convenient for you, to be with Lidgett just when he is being sent away. So I asked you—you will forgive me, will you not?—to spend a few minutes with me?”

So they were to waste a few minutes—half an hour?—while the ejected Lidgett was tumbled pell-mell after Barron. Meanwhile, Perdita was dressed for riding; and while they talked her eyes were restless.

The whole world was restless also. From the ridge beyond the lake came fitfully, as the wind allowed, a noise of drum-drum-drumming.

“Mr. Powell, in Buddhawbwe we are two nations. Just as you are in England. My nation, the Fringanas, are rich and wise and strong. The other nation is ignorant and poor and weak—those Was, to whose village I took you the other day. Listen!”

She stooped disdainfully, and pushed off the ash of her cheroot, on to a tray. Pausing, she seemed to listen intently, to that far-off drumming.

Whatever her thoughts were, she did not impart them; but wandered into far-distant history, as if thinking aloud. “When my father saw King Thibaw, King Thibaw saw that he was one whom all men must follow. So he said, ‘The Fringanas are a disobedient people, and have driven back my messengers. If you can speak with them and get them to follow you, you shall become their Sawbwa.’ So my father went to the Fringanas’ country, and they said, ‘This man is clearly a king, and since our Sawbwa has no son—only a daughter, and she is not married—he must become our Sawbwa’. So he married my mother, and when her father died he became their Sawbwa. Then Thibaw sent word, ‘Now that there is a new Sawbwa he must pay me much money, as is the custom’. But the Fringanas said, ‘That is not our custom. We have not paid money to the Kings of Burma for a great while. We are not your servants, and we shall pay you nothing.’”

Thibaw’s armies had been wasted on a campaign such as the East India Company’s armies once fought against the Gurkhas in their Himalayan fastnesses. Gabriel had even taken the offensive: he had brought from China (possibly from Messrs. Lee and Lidgett, General Stockists and Traders) light guns, which he mounted on barges piled deep with pebbles to smother the recoil, and had shelled the Chindwin forts. Dita’s eyes glowed, and her voice was exultant, as she told the saga of her father’s triumphs. Clive saw the demigod in process of creation, in this legend of one man striding the peaks and ridges and haunting the deep-foliaged hollows. Gabriel had emerged lord of the mountains. Thibaw had been forced to acknowledge his independence.

“But then, Mr. Powell, there was war between the British and King Thibaw. My father said, ‘The British will conquer, for Thibaw’s soldiers are no good, as we have proved. And this time they will take all Burma, and not, as they did before, only those parts that are by the sea. They will want to make us also their servants. They will rule us by many documents and by men who sit in offices and men who will be paid much money to deceive judges. So we will go where they cannot follow us.’”

He had led them to this rolling downland, inside its mighty pale of glorious trees, and walled with snow-peaks northward. At its crest, or just before you overpassed that crest and entered on the downs, the Fringanas had built their capital, almost at their frontiers. The emotion of their first glimpse of Buddhawbwe and its quiet lake—of the sense of peace and security experienced at last—still clung to the lake and to thought of it.

In a dropping of the breeze the foolish insistence of the drums came clearly through. She made a gesture in its direction. “These others whom we found here, they understand only the fear in their hearts, and they say, ‘These nats in the woods and rivers and mountains are full of anger and seek to kill us. They desire to drink blood.’ Lidgett paid his coolies, not only by much money, but by a skull which”—again that gesture of disdain—“he had found—or bought—in China, it may be. But in my father’s kingdom the Was know they must not buy heads or kill men to get their heads. So they remain unhappy, and full of fear.”

She rose, to signify that the time of talk and waiting was over, and looked through the window. “I see that Lidgett is moving away. And I think—that not only in my father’s kingdom are there two nations, one rich and wise and strong, and the other poor and ignorant and weak and unhappy! I know that in me also there are two nations! Why did my father send me—not to France! there the people have not this pride of wickedness, but they say, ‘It is all one, and if a woman has beauty or a man has strength, it does not matter to what nation they belong!’ But to England, where I learnt that I am not a king’s daughter but just a Burmese girl! No, it is far worse, in your eyes! I know now that, though my father is a king and my mother was a king’s daughter—though I have in my veins the blood that has always been that of brave men and beautiful women, for many hundreds, yes, thousands of years—for I know that no drop of weak or coward blood has come down to me—yet I am only a half-caste girl! I am like your poor man Gussie—in your eyes!” she cried desperately. “If I should say, ‘I am English, not Burmese at all, and I will live as the English do, because I have been at school in England and I have seen that your ways are better, except that you must shed blood and give pain as long as you have the strength to do so’, yet I know that you will always say, ‘Oh, she is only a half-caste girl!’ You must always have two nations in your Empire! Those who rule and may take their pleasure with those who are ruled—and those who must serve, in every way! So I must forget what was taught me in my father’s country, in England! and must be a wife in some Sawbwa’s house in this land of savages!”

She gave him no chance to answer, but left the room tempestuously.

Almost immediately he heard the stir of men and animals, and saw her riding swiftly away.

Chapter VIII

I

Gussie that evening was simmering with gentle pleasure. “Lidgett went out by the western gate, Mr. Powell. That is the gate through which criminals always go when they are to be executed. Though he thinks he understands these people, he did not know that! And when they said, This is the best gate and we have arranged that you shall go out by it, he said, Very well, I have no objection. Barron knew better than that, Mr. Powell! So Lidgett has gone.”

So Lidgett had gone, and in his going had provided what his late compulsory hosts considered a good joke against him. Those are our best jokes—the ones we provide but do not enjoy ourselves.

“Princess Dita is very angry,” Gussie presently volunteered. “A letter has come from a Sawbwa whose kingdom is in China. He says he will marry her, although her feet are so large, Mr. Powell.”

“Her feet large!” exclaimed Clive. “Princess Dita’s feet—large! And what an extraordinary message—even from a Chinese Sawbwa!”

“Oh, but you must understand, this Sawbwa considers himself a very great sawbwa, so he has adopted all Chinese customs. And he has heard of Princess Dita’s beauty, but he has heard also that Raja Gabriel is a very careless king, and that his daughter’s feet have not been bound up, as they should have been, and that she walks and even rides, instead of being carried by men, as a princess should be. But he says, Well, I will not care for that, since her beauty is great. And I have skilful women who shall bind her feet after she is my wife, so that she will not wish to walk or ride any longer but she can then be carried, as a princess must be. And I will make her, although she has such large feet, a first-chop wife. I shall make her my Supayalat.”

“But that was the name of Thibaw’s notorious Queen, Gussie!”

“Ah, that is what Europeans call her always. But you must understand, Mr. Powell, it was not her proper name. She was the Middle Princess—the Supayalat. It was her title, not her name. And this Sawbwa says that Princess Dita shall be his Supayalat. In fact, he says he is willing to promise that after a time, if he likes her very much and her feet are then not so large, he may make her his chief wife and princess over all his other wives.”

“He seems a generous and most encouraging suitor! And Princess Dita, if I may judge from what I have seen of her, is doubtless brimming over with delight and pride!”

“Oh, no! you are quite mistaken, Mr. Powell! She is very very angry, and she says her father will be angry also when he hears. She has answered the message herself, which is a thing that will be considered very full of shame—no,” he said, correcting what might appear an ambiguity to his simple-minded employer—“a thing without shame, utterly without shame, Mr. Powell. She has sent a message that the lion’s feet are for the lion’s own use, and that to the hare they will doubtless always seem big feet. But the lion’s feet were given by God to bear the lion’s majesty, and the hare’s little feet were given that the hare might skip away when the lion is coming. I do not think that the Sawbwa will like that message, Mr. Powell.”

“What makes you think that, Gussie?”

“Because he considers that he is a very high Sawbwa. In fact, he is so great and high—in his own opinion—that he has tried to make his people altogether Chinese, and not Shans any longer. So, naturally, he did not expect that when he said he would marry Princess Pradita she would be so disrespectful. You must remember, too, Mr. Powell, that Princess Dita is now very old! She is twenty, at least! Major Balfour used to say that Raja Gabriel made a great mistake in not marrying her mother until she was nearly twenty. Because she was then so old. Major Balfour often said this to my poor mother.”

Clive was as impressed as Gussie, but not by the same thing. “Poor child!” he said to himself.

“I do not understand, Mr. Powell.”

“It’s poor fun for this child (whom you think so old, Gussie), to be here, as half-English, half-Burmese. Whom can she marry? If it isn’t some savage of a Sawbwa, it’s no one!”

There are men and women, he thought, who are meant for a life of dedicated chastity. Not Dita, though. Every line of her body cried a different language.

II

Gussie caught that part of Clive’s meaning that came closest to his own miseries. “You are quite right, Mr. Powell. We are English, yet the English will not treat us as English! They think we are like these people who have never been educated and do not understand anything. That is their mistake! It is true, we may not have gone to your Harrow or your Girton or your other famous schools. But we have studied your Shakespeare and your Smiles’ Self-Help and Rowe and Webb’s Hints on English and your other great poets and your great writers. My poor mother used to say, The King himself, and Queen Victoria before him, knew us. We are of a very old Scotch family. Yet the English despise us. They despise us”, concluded poor Gussie, bursting into tears, “because they say we are not pukka,” he said, using the meanest word in Anglo-India’s whole mean vocabulary of mean phrases mirroring forth the mean thoughts of mean minds. “We may be engine-drivers or the firemen of your railways. We may have the posts where you must have those whom you can trust to be always faithful and to work hard for little pay. The Burmese will not do that! So we must do it. Yes, and be clerks on low wages. Yet we exist because your great officials and your proud soldiers—and your old Scotch families, whom the King of England himself knows—came to this country and lived with its women. Yes, and they will live with its women now! And with our women, too—because our girls are very beautiful, Mr. Powell—you saw my sisters and my cousins at Sagaing, where they were wishing you, and you saw what they were like. They will live with our Eurasian girls. But they will not marry them! Because in the whole world there are no people so unjust and so proud as the English!”

As the un-English passion and excitement huddled his words out, over and over each other, with sentence running into sentence and oratio recta and oratio obliqua jostling juxtaposed, Clive was pityingly reminded of the same manner overturning Perdita’s self-control and the far stronger restraint imposed by her higher and finer training. He saw that, deep down, blood is a bond with blood.

He said, “I’m coming to the belief that you’re right, Gussie. And I’m coming to see that the reason why Christianity hasn’t helped mankind as it might have done is because its Founder said practically nothing about sexual relations. He left it all for our own age to say, and we’re saying it with a rare confusion of voices.”

“But of course I know that the English are the greatest and best nation in the whole world,” said Gussie, correcting his lapse into sedition. “And of course—we are English. So we are very proud of that. My poor mother used to say, Always be proud that you are English, Gussie. That you come of a very old Scotch family.”

“She was right, Gussie. You need never doubt that British pluck and loyalty—if they are any different from any other pluck and loyalty—have come down to you.”

Gussie’s tears rushed out again, and more wildly and fiercely than ever. “But you are not like any other British gentleman that I have ever met, Mr. Powell. I have told my people, when I wrote back from Kindat, and then from Homalin, Mr. Powell is a great official but he has been like a brother to me. I have told them——”

Clive meant to comfort him, and to escape from his own embarrassment. Besides, at the back of his mind remained the picture of Gabriel’s daughter, whose position was so much lonelier and harder than that of Gussie’s sisters and cousins, even at its worst, could be. So he said, “I’ve a faith that some time, somehow, the world will work out as fairer than it can possibly be expected to work out. God knows how! But, after all, it’s His job to know! Now tell me about Princess Pradita. Why hasn’t she married before? Surely, not from want of admirers.”

“You are quite right, Mr. Powell. They say that every Sawbwa in all Burma—and in China as well—has wanted to marry her. But her father has always answered, It is as my daughter wills. And she has always said, I am Raja Gabriel’s daughter, and I am not going to be the wife of some Sawbwa—perhaps his Queen of the North—perhaps his Queen of the South, which is of course a still greater honour—perhaps not one of his four chief Queens at all, when my beauty has begun to fade, but just one of I do not know how many women who have slept in His Highness’s bed and are sometimes permitted to wave a fan of peacock feathers over His Highness’s brows when His Highness is playing with some other younger woman! And Raja Gabriel has said, That is quite right. When I am gone my daughter will be the Queen of all the Fringanas, and every man will be her servant. Why, then, should she make herself the servant of one man, particularly since there is no one man who is worthy even to tie up her shoes? She is of a different class from all these others, since she is my daughter and has been my regent when I am absent. If a man is king, as I have been king, he can then send for any woman that he wishes. So, if my daughter is queen, all men will be her servants, and she can send for any man if she wishes. So it is evidently God’s will that she should keep her freedom. That is what Raja Gabriel has always said, Mr. Powell.”

Chapter IX

I

After Gussie left him, Clive lay down to rest before dinner, and he drowsed.

Drowsed; and then wakened, into strangling agony and terror. A black heavy figure sat on his bed. Eyes gleaming inside rings of hot brightness stared down. Two hands of iron encircled his throat, pressing consciousness out.

By a spasm such as may bring back into a man’s last physical action all the strength that has ebbed with the years, Clive half flung off the figure, and cried out. His escape was only momentary, for he was hurled back overwhelmingly, and the hands tightened their grip again. There was a flash, the air exploded before his eyes; a din of thunder burst in his ears; and Clive reeled into forgetfulness.

When he came to, Gussie was standing beside him.

As bit by bit the power to understand and listen returned, Clive marvelled at the courage and loyalty of his servant. The Htaw, he gathered, had attacked him, willing to avenge Barron’s guilt on Barron’s countryman, since Barron had escaped. Gussie, busy laying out new garments for Clive after his bath, had heard his master’s shout and had entered and fired his blunderbuss. The Htaw had leapt off its victim, and flown through the window, leaving a trail of blood that led into the forest. Henceforward, its vengeance would be watching for Gussie.

Yet Gussie had saved Clive’s life.

As he lay there, sick and faint, Clive’s mind took control of his body, sorting out and reassembling its confused fears. Its time was brief now, and mind had become a tyrant. The body existed on sufferance, and had to put by its own urgencies, even those of agony and weakness.

Gussie stammered of demon assailants; of the Htaws that congregated on dark nights, to exhume and feed on corpses; of magicians who entered beasts of ravin; of hate-filled creatures that prowled as wolf and tiger and leopard.

Clive knew, however, that his had been no supernatural visitant. Unreasoning terror vanished with this realisation, and recovery began. The numb misery on his throat reminded him that it was well his enemy had come from a primitive folk, who had no steel except in the form of dahs. A more sophisticated were-wolf would have jagged his life out with claws that were daggers, ripping it open like a seam.

The plan had been to choke him on his bed, and pass his body out through the window, to someone waiting to decapitate it in the grove.

He did not know Perdita had entered, until he was aware of her standing beside him, grimness in her eyes. She said nothing. She had asked her questions of Gussie, and drawn her conclusions.

Then she went out. All that night, as he tossed in pain, Clive was conscious of her watchful care. Whenever he woke, the red glow of fires showed on the blackness outside.

Next day, he ignored the torture of his swollen throat, that made articulation and even drinking difficult; and by an effort he shed all fear, as a man stepping from a river sheds its water from his limbs. How intense had been the terror of the moment when he waked from dozing, he knew well; but he was not going to look at that moment again. Mind had too much to do, in its few remaining days, to glance back at its own dark minutes.

Throughout the following day also he rested, and the swelling became easier. He satisfied himself that there was still a little oil left in his lamp of strength, enough to justify him in rising presently, and going about as if nothing had happened.

Just as dusk was due to fall, Murdoch entered. “Her leddyship’s compliments, sir, and she has returned, and has sent me to move your bed from your window, sir.”

“But I like it by the window, Murdoch,” said Clive, sitting up.

“Aye, sir, and you shall have it back again. But her leddyship thinks it’s all too chill and close to the rain and mist for you now, after what happened that ither night.”

Clive consented, therefore, and got out of bed. As he did so, he looked out, and saw the lake’s foreshore packed with people. He asked what was happening.

“Oh, it’ll likely be her leddyship holding a public reception for her father, His Highness.”

When the bed was in position, and Clive back in it, Murdoch lingered, between it and the window. For once, he seemed not unwilling to talk.

Or rather, as Clive remembered afterwards, he seemed to admit the compulsion of some duty that told him he ought to be willing to talk. Natural constraint and sense of this duty were struggling together.

“Have you been at Buddhawbwe long?” Clive asked.

“Aye.”

“How long?”

But Murdoch harked back to the previous question. He felt he had allowed himself to be precipitated into an improper decisiveness. “It depends on what you’d call long.”

“Of course. But still—how many years?”

(After thought) “Seventeen.”

“I should call that pretty long.”

“There’s some that would.”

“Don’t you ever feel you’d like to get back to Scotland?”

“Whiles I do. To see my ain people, that is.”

“Naturally. But this is a lovely place.”

“It’s a guid life. Sae lang as His Highness is here.”

“I suppose he does make all the difference.”

“He maks all the difference, does His Highness. If you—or I, for that matter—was to stir away from Buddhawbwe—without we had His Highness’s or her leddyship’s strong word as to what would happen if any harm came to us, as you had when you came up here, sir—well, oor lives wadna last for vera lang!”

“You spoke of while His Highness is living.”

“I did.”

“But even if he died there’d still be Princess Dita. She strikes me as pretty capable.”

“She’s capable enough. There’s none here will gainsay that. But she hasna her father’s will or power. If he went, there’s some of us is doubting if she’d hold her own. What with the Chinese and the savages that call themselves Sawbwas and what not! And there’s some inside this vera kingdom that would maybe push her away, if her father were gone.”

The outlines of a problem which Clive had not thought of when he came were growing clear. The beginnings of a plan tried to disentangle themselves from the mind’s perplexity.

Murdoch thawed out astonishingly. “He’s a guid king, is His Highness,” he volunteered.

“He was always considered a very promising young officer when he was in Bengal,” observed Clive; and then laughed at himself, for having slipped so glibly into his old official skin, and talked the parrotese that had been his proper tongue in that shed incarnation. Gabriel had always been considered a very promising young officer—until he astounded them all by exploding into a djinn or spirit-whirlwind, and vanishing! But had he been considered a promising young officer? Memory, scrupulously honest and detached, recalled exasperation, long before the end came, at Gabriel’s sinful minimum of files and correspondence.

Clive’s comment was felt as a discordant note. “We’ve no need for promising young officers here,” said Murdoch severely. “And may God Almighty in his maircy grant that we never may have!” he said with fervour. “In Buddhawbwe we’ve no such nonsense as you get in England—or Scotland, now—of Parliaments and such like. But His Highness does evera last thing. We’ve none of your lawyers, and consequently we’ve none of your cheating or bullying of witnesses or hiding or twisting of facts that are known to evera single pairson. And, unless oor people is fair scared for their lives, as when His Highness is on the rampage for something that’s been done that’s wrang, I doot if they ken how to tell a lie. In fact, sir, it would tak’ years of instruction by learned counsel to teach them what a lie is, and how you tell it. They’ve ither faults, and I’m not denying it. They’re quick with their knives, and we get murder mair often than is maybe altogether right and proper. But it isna murder, sir, if you tak’ my meaning. For the maist part it’s just a quick-spirited and hasty action, and for the maist part His Highness is willing so to regard it. And for all that happens or is done, he sees to it. He hears evera case himself, if it means he’s fair exhausted—even him, and it’s no easy to exhaust a man who has—in a manner of speaking, sir,” he said, dropping his voice, “a demon, as the Bible puts it. He’s no quite sane, sir, and that’s the truth! and mair’s the pity, for a man who has done the guid he has, and has saved this people the way he has, from the savages here, and from the British Government that would have made them slaves.”

II

The door opened, and the flutter of the small banner that denoted a messenger from His or Her Highness blew inward, in the rain-impregnated breeze. The golden serows leapt up, in high aerial dance.

Clive was handed a note from Perdita.

“I am very sorry, but I must join His Highness at once, at one of his fortresses. I have given orders for a palanquin to take you there this night. It will be very easy. The bearers know the way, and it is quite a good way. You can sleep all the night while you are travelling, and in the morning you will have breakfast at one of our guest-houses. Then I am sure that I can arrange for you to see my father. If you do not do this I cannot say when it will be possible for you to see him.

“Please come. You must see my father.”

As Clive held the letter in his hand, hesitating, Murdoch gave away the fact that he knew its contents. This self-betrayal was of no importance, since neither noticed it at the time.

“I should go, sir,” he said eagerly. “It’s as Her Highness says, you can rest while you go. It’s a smooth road to whaur His Highness is now, and the bearers will run as if they were rocking you to sleep, sir. And you’ll see His Highness, if her leddyship says so, and you’ll be able to do with him what there’s none ither can do. And you’ll breakfast at Maungpadwe, whaur you’ll find all fit and convenient and can rest an hour or two before going on to meet her leddyship. She wull nae doot have already started, and wull be riding through the night.”

“I’ll go,” said Clive.

“Then I’ll leave you now, sir, and get all ready for your starting.”

He went out, as Gussie entered. “You saw that crowd by the lake, Mr. Powell?” cried Gussie. “It was for an execution.”

“An execution?” asked Clive in horror.

“Yes. You know that drumming we heard. The Chief of Rissum and his best warriors have been absent for several days. They were sure that the Earth-Goddess had been angry for so long that nothing but a head would make her happy again. When people heard the noise of drumming they knew the Sawbwa’s law had been broken and a head had been brought. Princess Dita found out also that in that village a magician who died this morning had sent the Htaw that tried to kill her guest. That is why she has been away all day till now. She arrested the three chief men of Rissum, and brought them here as prisoners.”

“Yes?”

“She judged them. They have just been shot—before all the people.”

Chapter X

I

It was night, of an exceptional blackness, when Clive began his journey. Climbing, at first they went slowly. Then they crossed the ridge north of the palace and its satellite hamlet, and the bearers ran with rhythmical steady pace over gently sloping ground. A cool breeze blew, caressingly, and induced drowsiness. The chant of the palanquin-bearers further deadened the brain’s workings, from which it had been left so weary.

Clive did not know Burmese. But the song of palanquin-bearers, rickshaw coolies and the rest of their brief-living tribe is the same, all the world over. If this chant resembled that of their Indian brethren he could guess what his bearers sang (and did guess it):

“The road is very bad” (sway gently to your right).
“This man is very heavy” (sway back again).
“But as is his bulk so is his generosity” (to your right).
“He will give us mighty largesse” (back to your left).

Mile after mile they paced, not men any longer but a smooth machine; and bore him ever northward, away from Buddhawbwe. He fell asleep.

II

When he awoke in earnest, it was to a sharp stirring of cold moving over the world. His palanquin was in a rest-house, under cover of a veranda. Looking out, he realised that he was on the Empire’s edges, where they fall imperceptibly into the vast amorphousness which is called China.

The keen ice-needled breeze stabbed him into full consciousness. He got up, and, shivering, drew round his body a blanket that had been over him.

An almost encircling ridge of snow-capped mountains confronted him. Peak after peak was trembling and changing as he gazed. From the pallor carried through the hours of darkness and of pre-dawn half-darkness they were momently brightening, leaping from glow to glow. Everything was alive! Clive was at the centre of a ring of living beings! The Sons of God were shouting for joy, at the ever-new work of the day’s creation.

Taking shape out of the dimness, emerged enormous ice-fields, far up: and hills, lower and nearer—within what he supposed were technically (so long as China’s opinion was not asked) Burmese boundaries. They were snow-rimmed, rather than snow-capped, and had dark collars that must be dense forest, with glaciers running through them like white fingers.

The sky began to seethe with many colours. The line of snows reddened. Sunset, the night before, had packed away a vast up-piling of clouds. They became a cosmic flowering, a burning enormous rose, wildly, madly luxuriant. The colours passed from seething to boiling, the ice-peaks became a furnace.

And in the east, where the peaks were lowest, a mere thirteen thousand feet or so, the sun climbed out of the Chinese plain.

Clive’s bearers were chatting and smoking round a fire of fir and juniper boughs, that crackled as it tossed out resin-laden gusts and vapours. Other servants, attached to the rest-house or detailed to relieve them when he went on, were sitting with them or were getting his breakfast ready.

The hour sent its invigorating message through his veins, and reminded him of other hours—dawns in the chill glorious Northern Indian winter, when the kokils shouted that night was over. The message that had come to his body when it was young and packed with health, making it feel all over that of a god who could never age or grow sick or weary or wish to die, came to the same body now—an illusory momentary quickening.

III

He breakfasted, and continued his journey, over high rolling plains. Noisy, panicky white-crested thrushes dashed from the copses. From low azalea bushes called or ran francolins and gorgeous-hued pheasants—not alone the lovely but comparatively drab kalege which may be styled the ordinary pheasant of Himalayan or Burmese hill scrub, but monal and tragopan and impeyan and amherst and golden and blood pheasant. Flocks of warblers and finches and minivets and waxwings and sunbirds and orioles and bulbuls and barbets and flycatchers and robins and redstarts and bee-eaters and woodpeckers and pigeons and blue Chinese magpies flitted and perched. The air seemed full of flowers that flew, as well as flowers that kept their stations.

Cuckoos were madly shouting; and whenever the bushes drew away and left a meadow, the singing of larks cascaded down.

A noble pine-marten scurried across the path. A few minutes later, so did a gigantic squirrel, the most impressive fellow Clive could have imagined—a deep brown monster who looked the size of a small leopard, but full of benevolence as he shot up on to his hind legs and inspected these humans. He was Zakhai, the king of all squirrels that God has made, and God must have been very proud of him. His soft creamy cheeks worked with astonishment as he met Clive’s enquiring eyes. “Who are you?” his own eyes asked back. “So strangely clad and coloured!” Zakhai decided that the rhododendrons were the best place for him.

The Chindwin’s forests are the capital of the squirrels’ kingdom, and this was its outlying suburb. They saw many of Zakhai’s subjects, flying from tree to tree.

As for the flowers, Clive’s mind barbarically and lumberingly parodied Browning:

“It was azaleas, azaleas, all the way!
With primulas mixed in my path like mad!”

It was all that. But infinitely—and infinitely variously—more. Blue poppies: on the crown of rocky outcroppings, sentinel clusters of monkshood: round the stony bases a sea of pieris, the air spangled with its innumerable tiny snowy bells. A prairie of bee orchis, meadow-rue, cuckoo-pint, cranesbill, would give place to a wet plat of sundew and saxifrage and bellflower and balsam and meadowsweet and willowherb and mimulus and iris and fern: which would harden again into a prairie of stitchwort and sinjunwort: or a carpet of strawberries in fruit and blossom at once: a spinney of waxen-stemmed raspberries, whose orange harvest the bearers could not always refrain from pausing to rifle as they padded by. Coverts of hydrangea and hawthorn, and wild roses coming into golden bud, would disappear into tangles of yellow clematis and jasmine and red-throated honeysuckle. Interstices which the flowers had forgotten to fill were packed tight with knee- high bracken. As they swung past, from shining low bushes rose clouds of dazzling colour, as if a hand thrust under lifted them. They fluttered, a riot of splendid indecision; then settled to their feast again.

IV

Clive had travelled since breakfast for perhaps two hours, and by the sun’s position guessed the time to be eleven or a little later, when his bearers halted, and pointed. The downlands and bushes were ending where a line of almost naked mountains stood up steeply. In their foreground was a cavalcade whose central figure was Perdita.

They went on, and came up with her. The palanquin was put down, and Clive got out, and answered a few questions about his journey and his comfort, and thanked her for her care of him.

The gardens were finished. Between them and the mountain wall stretched a bleak valley, tumbled with rocks and stones, and a mile or more across. From its heart came the noise of a torrent flinging itself along.

Perdita dismounted, and asked Clive to accompany her. They followed a path among the rocks to the river’s bank, and walked downstream. Stooping where the bank had shelved away, she picked out of the river-bed a stone, one of myriads, and handed it to him.

He took it. It shone with sullen majestic splendour.

“Jade?” he asked.

She nodded.

“But such miles of it!”

“Yes. For this river China would pay mule-loads of silver. She would pay the lives of thousands of men. But she plans to get both our jade and our silver for nothing. This” (with a wave of dismissal) “is what men have died already to take from us.”

They approached a roar of waters, where the torrent plunged down in a leap of a hundred feet or more, shooting up clouds of rain and vapour. A bamboo bridge swung across the ravine. “We have to go over this,” she said.

They crossed it, and on the other side came on a narrow track beaten firm by naked steps, as mud by the strokes of a beaver’s tail. It ran through a tangle of dry grasses, and rose to the mountains.

Clive, wishing to walk beside her, left the track for the grass. Something brittle broke under him, with crunching sound. He stood still, and Perdita turned.

He followed the glance of her downward eyes, and saw that the grass was full of the tiny crumbling skulls of children.

“I will show you the Chinese mines,” Perdita said. “Then you will understand. Many of them had to be worked by little children, who went blind in the darkness and then died, always—yes, always—before they were twelve or thirteen.”

Presently she paused, on a higher place, before a tunnel not more than three feet in diameter. It curved inward, to their right, and in the direction of the rapidly falling river.

“You will see many holes like this, Mr. Powell, if you climb over these mountains. They go down to a steep valley, very far down, below the river’s waterfall and below another waterfall after that. Much of our silver is there, and the children had to bring the earth in baskets, which they pushed slowly up, through these tunnels. You see, you cannot get to that place from the other side—not without great trouble, for the rocks over there are very high and very hard. But this side it is only clay. So they chained the baskets to the children, who lay down and pushed them up through these tunnels. Some of the tunnels are two miles long, and the children were in darkness all that time. That is why they went blind and died.”

They climbed steeply, almost abruptly, as up steps and stairs, to a pocket of level ground, a small estuary into which a pass over the mountains fell and widened, before descending further to the river. Here was a strong picket of guards, whose officer came forward and said something to the Princess. She asked him a question or two, and dismissed him.

The surrounding banks and walls were now an orange-coloured clay, in which masses of jade were embedded, like raisins in pudding. The clay sparkled with innumerable points of light also; and the ground over which they walked was a drift of flashing stones. Dita lifted one, and flung it down again.

But first, for a moment, she had held it against the ruby on her forehead, for Clive to compare.

“I thought that it was perhaps a pigeon’s blood ruby—like this one. But it is only a bright stone. We have to dig for our rubies, and to guard the diggers. Rubies have always belonged to the kings of this land, until the British Government gave them to merchants. Yes” (answering the question in his eyes), “we get rubies here. We get also everything else.”

It was easy to believe this. The mountains held all colours, from black green to nearly scarlet: all shades, from opaqueness to translucency: the grey of limestone, the yellow of the ruby matrix, the deep golden clay in which shining masses of marble were caught.

Rain had washed down a detritus, over which they scrambled. It was washed with some dullness of alloying earth, but sown with seeds of brightness. The Princess led Clive to a shed against the mountain wall. Inside it were tables on which gems lay awaiting the jeweller’s cutting and polishing. There were sapphires, brilliant red spinels, beryls, tourmalines, topazes, rubies, jacinths, catseyes, jasper, agates, cornelians, apatite, jades of both sorts, hard golden burnite.

“It is here,” said Perdita, “that the Earth-Spirit is most greedy. Here she has drunk blood since the beginning of the world. That mountain” (she pointed to a peak, peering to the south-eastward) “is in China. And the Chinese frontier is behind us also. It runs along there, through these hills.”

V

Then the constraint which had been in her manner, ever since they had returned from Rissum, rose to expression.

“Mr. Powell, I have tried all the time to persuade father to see you. And at first he said, No, for you would try to draw him back into his old life and to things that he hated. Then, presently, he would say nothing at all. And it is when he is silent that we are most afraid, for it is then that his mind is working in ways that we cannot see. He has now become very strange, and I am very troubled. I never forget that he was not one of these people when he came here, and though he has been their king all these years, still their life and their thinking cannot be really his. Mr. Powell, when you first came I was glad, for Captain MacKenzie said you were a good man and my father’s friend, and would do him good in his mind. But now I am very afraid of what may happen.”

“I have been wondering, too,” said Clive. “Perhaps I ought never to have come.”

“Yes. Sometimes I have thought that,” she admitted. “Since I saw how strange my father became, knowing you were here. You see, I have been afraid—oh, often and often—that, what with his loneliness here, and his dangers, and with the outside world trying to come and take his kingdom from him, and with no one but myself to help him or for him to speak to—that my father might go mad! And now you have come, and he has become so strange and silent. And at first, as I say, he said he would not see you.”

“Is he going to see me, Dita?”

“Yes. He says he will see you. And perhaps—because you were his friend—you will be able to help him, Mr. Powell!”

VI

Behind the shed a larger tunnel, in which a man could stand upright, pierced into the mountain.

Perdita called to her again the officer of the guard and gave some order. Though in broad daylight, as he stood there the officer held a lantern behind his back, between him and the tunnel. The action called up superstitions in Clive’s ancestral Shropshire, where the last man leaving such a tunnel as this held behind him till he reached the outer air his lamp, to ward off the ghost of the last miner who had been killed.

Clive followed Perdita along the tunnel. They needed no lantern, and walked erect and easily, to a long subterranean hall, crosswise athwart the tunnel, like the head on a hammer’s handle. The light was dim, but sufficient when you had taken a minute to get used to it.

They gave themselves this minute. Then, peering round the chamber, Clive saw that its walls were pitted with niches, each a man’s height. In every niche dangled whitish patches.

“The Chinese came over these mountains,” said Perdita, “and made slaves of the people, to dig out silver for them. At night, the slaves were chained to places in the wall.”

Clive, following some indication of her eyes, went up to the nearest of the glimmering patches. It was a skeleton, hanging still in chains and steel collar that bound it to the wall.

That lantern at the tunnel’s exit had been to keep back the mine’s spirit guardians. No third person had accompanied them. He and Perdita were alone.

He ought not to have felt faint with such a wave of horror and pity. He knew there must be martyr nations, martyr classes, martyr social groups. It is only by the wasting away of the lives of the many—by the degradation and agony of some—that civilisation can be kept at its peak. Yet the doctrinaire, the dreaming Liberal—and foolish ignorant imaginative youth—think the world has been so made that some time and somehow there will, and can, be leisure, culture, happiness, for all!

The Chinese, too statesmanlike to be squeamish about a necessity, kept their slaves chained underground. The unaesthetic modern age (and England most of all) has allowed them to appear beside the pleasant fields where lights, music, gaiety are all in all, and to make a festering edge to the world of theatre and show and gymkhana. It has been a great mistake, and thank God! we are coming to see it. Our serfs will be driven back to the caves where they are to leave their bones. There their ghosts can keep guard on the sources of our silver, that our sons and daughters may have as good a time as we have had. It would be selfish to wish otherwise, and to think only of ourselves.

“Selfishness”, says the Tartar sage, “is sin. Selfishness brings a man to penury and insignificance. Think with the State, of which thou art a servant, and by this unselfishness thou shalt attain to sit with those in highest esteem.” These words are as true as they are noble.

“If some danger,” Clive heard Perdita saying, “threatened their masters in the daytime, they were chained here standing, while their masters watched outside. And something must have happened, so that their masters never came back; and they died, each standing in his place.”

His mind echoed her words. “Something must have happened . . . their masters never came back . . . they died, each standing in his place.” While some forgotten far-off battle sank into quietude, these chattels had waited chained, till the accumulation of thirst and starvation and weakness released the spirit in despairing madness.

The silent years had followed. The body’s juices had dried, the flesh had crumbled. At last only the whiteness of bone and the sullen glimmer of rusted steel remained, a grey-gleaming half-evanescence, to testify to the cave’s living burial.

Something had happened. They had died, men and women, each standing in the allotted niche, proportioned to the exact cubic space that each required.

Clive felt the cloud of madness closing round his own brain. Some power was present, a tenseness claiming his thought also. As when the head is gripped—and slowly turned—by strong hands laid upon it—to confront someone or something—so now, invisible hands seemed placed upon him, bidding him turn.

He did turn, and found he was with Gabriel. Princess Dita had gone.

VII

From his earliest days Clive had been conscious, as some are, of a mind and judgment within him, standing aloof from his own mind and judgment—a Being queerly impersonal and personal, in some way and for some reason interested in the soul he watched and sometimes addressed. This dweller in the innermost—Clive’s daemon—guided him now. In the next few moments decisions were made for him, in which he bore no deliberate part; to which he contributed nothing of reflection or volition.

He was made aware, and instantaneously, that the world of shared experience had perished, so far as one of them was concerned. There was nothing of it left, by which he might put up any appeal. At any rate, nothing in this moment.

Clive’s dweller in the innermost signified to him that he must drop—and forget—the thoughts he had brought with him; and Clive with a gesture of acquiescence signified back that he understood and agreed.

Then the dweller in the innermost signified also, “If you will wait, that part of the buried past that still matters—its abiding pain and humiliation—will show itself again, and you can help.” And again Clive replied that he understood and was willing to wait.

Then the dweller in the innermost said to Clive “This is the hour of the spirit’s fever. Yet speak to him; and his madness will be laid to sleep, and he may answer you.”

He looked at the incongruously majestic figure—the garb that mingled the convenience of Western dress with the cloak of scarlet velvet overset with glittering points of jewellery; the head-piece that was a gilded helmet running into spiral and turret, completing the whole effect of a Being about to spring from the earth in flames.

The gods who dwell on Kailas come delineated so; and so, even more, do the nats of the rivers and forests and hills and the air. His daily necessity of power and awfulness had compelled this appearance on a man who had once sat shirt-sleeved at an office table. But our necessity drives its piles deep in the bases of the spirit; no man could have lived from wake to sleeping as Gabriel had done all these years, without this flashing surface of gilt and glitter and gaudy pigmentation colouring the soul with its own madness.

In this cave of the dead, Clive was closeted alone with a nat—with one of the greatest of all nats, the demi-deity who watched over earth’s as-yet-unravished treasures. His words reverberated from the roof and hollows; thoughts answered each other, like men calling out of the dimness of different worlds, where each sought his way in uncertainty.

Clive tried to find his way all the distance back, desperately, across the gulf of thirty years. “Why did you cut me out of your life, Gabriel?”

Throughout persisted this strange impression of a double conversation: of words unspoken as well as Clive’s spoken ones. And it was the unspoken ones that mattered.

“Whatever others say has been proved against me.” The words, unsaid by either, passed from brain to brain, and it was against them that Clive cried out. “What else could I say, Gabriel? Being a fool! and knowing only that you had gone in a cloud of chatter and rumour! almost before I even realised there was anything wrong! I had to say something! I wanted only to say that I believed in you!”

He broke down, and could say nothing more. For in his mind a question posed itself. By what right was he asking this man, who had lived all these years as Akbar and Alexander had done, to step across the gulf to where they could stand side by side? Gabriel had built up a new self; and if Clive succeeded in the demand he was making upon him, such loss of self-esteem and self-assuredness would come as we can imagine coming on each one of us in that moment of revelation that must follow on bodily dissolution, when first the discarnate knows itself. When last the mind was working we saw with eyes, we touched with hands, matter was our tool and servant. Now all that is revealed as over. It has dropped into the abyss of the ages, and left us naked and powerless and bewildered.

He knew the way of men’s minds when they are close to madness. They are close to it so often in India, where Clive had spent his life: the unceasing strain of half-starvation and fear and humiliation is their daily experience, too often. Or the hardest strain of all, the demand that the mind should live in two opposing worlds simultaneously, which he had now put on Gabriel.

They stood watching each other. And he knew that Gabriel, too, was trying to find a way back. This much at least the man before him had achieved; his disinterested refusal to judge, or even to hold by those standards which he understood and approved, made its appeal. The nat’s visage seemed about to admit a subtle change—to waver into remembrance of humanity (for nats too, like gods and men and worms and serpents, are subject to the law of transmigration), even of English humanity.

Before this could happen, Perdita reappeared.

Chapter XI

I

She spoke hurriedly, in a tongue Clive did not understand. The dawn whose first grey glimmer had shown was quenched, as the Sawbwa, knit into sudden decision of activity, strode out to the upper world. Clive and Dita followed him.

It was now that Clive, watching curiously as from the wings of some theatre, was enabled to see that Gabriel’s old vigour and self-certainty persisted unimpaired. Rather, they were enhanced beyond anything he remembered, by a lifetime of despotic authority. He was giving orders, which his gilded and scarlet-velveted centurions acknowledged with alacrity and put into operation immediately. Bodies of men were creeping up the hillside, and others were making their way down the river, with the naturalness and inevitability of mountain mists gliding from place to place. Their perfect acceptance of cover, which they seemed to pluck to themselves like a cloak that materializes out of nothing, made them seem in fact as insubstantial as mists are. In five minutes they had vanished, and the landscape was empty, except for Clive and Princess Dita.

The Sawbwa’s face, when she came up to him and gave her message, had instantaneously become “distempered”, like Prospero’s when he reminded himself how he had forgot

“the foul conspiracy
Of that beast Caliban and his confederates.”

It had worked with the appalling passion that filled it when he halted face to face with Lidgett.

Lidgett was recalled now by Perdita. “General Li”, she told Clive, “only pretended to go, as I said he would. He is now trying to bring his men back along this river. Lidgett has joined him, and is working along a different way. But it will all be soon over. So will you please wait here, Mr. Powell.”

Clive waited, on a high rock overlooking the torrent and wide stone-tumbled bed. The miles were deserted, and there was nothing to be seen. He would not have believed it possible that warriors as colourful as Gabriel’s could have sunk so quickly and completely into drab brown earth and green intermittency of scrub and river-grass.

He found himself watching, instead, Perdita. She had left him, and thrown herself full length, with head resting on her hands, on an outflung spur to the southward and above him. She was watching intently, and was evidently at intervals seeing more than he was.

Clive, in his younger days, and when there had been opportunity, a lover of landscape painting, realised that “the pathetic fallacy” is not man’s gratuitous invention. The universe has itself imposed it on the pictures of which we are insignificant details. It has placed the shepherd amid the moor’s loneliness and under the sky’s measureless aloofness—the fisherman on the swelling night of immensity beneath him—and all of us between two silences that stretch to where no thought can reach. Clive sat there, a figure forgotten and out of place on this roof where two empires met, his old self nothing to himself or anyone else. He was watching Perdita, a lonelier figure yet.

II

Thoughts came in desultory confusion, their only link some quality close to despair. He recognised the absurdity of the position: that he, whose whole life had been so ordered by rule and regulation and precedent, should be, not in retirement at Oxford or Cheltenham, but deep in “unadministered territory”, waiting while another former member of his Service rounded up a “Chinese Ambassador” and conducted an irregular battle on frontiers whose very existence was debatable. On a spur above him, that ex-official’s half-caste daughter, Her Highness of Buddhawbwe, was living intensely in her own world, which was neither his nor her father’s.

As for the ex-official’s rank or right here, if the question ever troubled him at all it had ceased to trouble him. Thirty years had passed since he himself came out to India, a devout believer in the secret ballot, universal suffrage, universal education, universal home rule—in a word, in democracy. The common man was perfectable material, needing only to be set free and given a vote and taught to read, to become a little lower than the angels! That myth had long since vanished; and he knew that demos was an animal with little memory and less wisdom, and that democracy everywhere was merely oligocracy. His own mood, after his life’s experience, was towards one-man rule, for no better reasons than these, that there is a chance that sometimes one man may be reasonably unselfish and noble, which is more than can ever happen with a whole group of men equipped with the proper quota of wives and mistresses and sons and daughters and relations; and that one man, if evil, is sooner disposed of than a group are. Death sets a period to the mischief which each of us can do alone.

As little trivial thoughts will swim up in our times of hardest stress, Clive remembered an incident from adolescence. He had been a prefect at his school, and had written to a distinguished statesman of whom they were all proud, asking for some support or other—some message glorifying the dear old school, in some appeal it was making; and he had been hurt, even shocked, by the cold reply explaining that the writer had long since entirely “disinterested” himself in this section of his past life, which Clive’s enthusiasm had imagined must be an ever-welling source of pride and gratitude within him. The great statesman’s days at his school had been few and evil, and altogether detested. He wished neither to acknowledge them nor to be reminded that he had ever sojourned at so loathsome a place.

Now that he knew how completely Gabriel had changed, Clive’s affection passed into intensity of pain. He realised how, in his own forlornness, he had built on the belief that his friend was somewhere still living, that they had only to meet for the old kindness to rekindle. There might be awkward pauses. But nothing which a laughing dismissal of ancient misunderstandings—or, better still, a laughing refusal to admit that they had ever existed—would not dispose of. But now he knew that the controversy between Gabriel and his own Government had not been quite as he had chosen to assume, and that he and Gabriel had not even thirty years ago really inhabited the same world. And, every day of every year since, they had been travelling further and further apart.

He quieted his distress by telling himself that the essential Gabriel, the only one that mattered, existed still. Only Clive’s friend had died; and to be troubled about that was merely selfishness. The courage, and energy and determination to see things with an Eastern people’s eyes, and not with the eyes of an alien nation—the proudly fierce conviction of a power to do this, as no other could—all this had survived, and had found a sphere, though a hidden one, in these hills. Gabriel, he told himself, had plucked a primitive people out of at least the crueller of their own barbarisms; and he had kept their self-respect and freedom, saving them from subjugation by either China or Great Britain, and from any necessity or justification for such subjugation. As for Clive himself, the best he could do was to go back to the outside world again, as quietly as he had come. There had never been any real kinship between them; and he had lost, not a solid truth but only a mirage. They had once both been young: and they had been thrown together; and he had admired Gabriel. Now, he recognised that he had always been merely the voice and face of external approval and applause which Gabriel needed:

“The soul whose likeness with thy soul
Was—but its love for thee.”

Yet even the loss of what was nothing but self-delusion can bring suffering.

III

And Perdita?

He had found more of friendship in her than in her father. He set himself to think how he could leave her the better for their brief time of meeting. If his own country had ever built up an Empire citizenship or any comity of civilised men and women with equal rights and status, her courage and beauty and brains would be sure of having their value allowed, from which only her faults would detract. But in the world, as God and Britain had made it, she was only a little better than Gussie’s sisters, if she ever left her precarious eminence in a mountain state at whose foundations strong outside powers were knocking. When Gabriel died, this state would dissolve, with herself as rebellion’s almost certain first victim. Or China would swarm over and absorb it. Later, perhaps (after her murder), China might be given tardy notice to retire again. Eventualities, all of them, that would matter nothing to the piece of childhood that had been thrown away long before!

His mind, even before he suspected this, was revolving how it could pay its final debt to friendship, both dead and new-discovered; and might lay down, before he went, as friendship’s memorial solid ground where he had found a quag.

IV

How long they waited, both of them watching, Clive did not know, and did not think to guess. About an hour after noon, there was a sharp burst of firing, which passed into a regular battle that lasted for another hour or so. Then there was silence.

After a time, Perdita came down. “We must go back across the river, Mr. Powell. It is all over, and I think we shall see General Li again.”

On the river’s further bank they saw the Sawbwa, on an improvised throne. Gorgeous silk cloths were laid under a high chair of elaborate magnificence. Umbrella-bearers and men with huge peacock-feather fans stood by, and in the breeze that the afternoon drew down from the snows the golden and green serows were more exultantly rampant than ever.

The Sawbwa’s face was flushed with triumph and excitement.

Towards him came a picturesque body, a medley of colours and weapons, and presently halted, with a flourish of what may be called, compendiously, Oriental noises of homage and greeting.

They were armed with matchlocks, rifles of more or less modern make, bows and bamboo sticks and spears, crossbows. Hardly adequate to confront a Gurkha or “Piffer” battalion, thought Clive. However, they had just won a notable victory over China—part of China. They made a brave showing, and their centre-piece was particularly noteworthy. It was His Excellency the late Chinese Ambassador. His robes were ruffled, and river-water had contributed patches of mud and moisture. But he was dignified still.

Gabriel had changed back to jewelled fantastic majesty. His chieftains were disposed into horns that made a crescent before his throne, and they stood with spears at attention. Clive found a place where he could see, himself inconspicuous; and Perdita ranged herself by him.

A chair was set for His Excellency, which he condescended to accept.

V

It became plain that, though his men might have been defeated, and for all anyone cared might be lying dead where they had fallen in their river-battle, General Li did not yet consider himself worsted. In the skirmish of words which began, Gabriel was losing his temper; and Clive feared that in his mood of desperation and anger the captive before him might lose his life.

It seemed to make little difference to that captive. The Ambassador, composed, insolent, had in his gestures more of greatness than the other could put into his furious outbursts, and merely drew his draggled robes about him, arranging himself into a picture, answering little and that little contemptuously and decidedly. If he was to be slain by this ruffianly foreign devil, his manner indicated, he would be slain as a gentleman of China, able to endure death as easily as to inflict it, and anxious only that he should die as a cut-down lily dies, with grace and solemnity. Qualis artifex pereo.

Gabriel’s mind, working on problems whose solution he could not see, was a gnawing misery, and was serving him badly. His antagonist, who had lost all, had recovered what mattered—himself.

VI

Clive asked Perdita, “What is he saying?”

With a tiny gesture of scorn, she answered, “He says that we are his servants. That this country is China. That his Emperor will send his armies to put us all to the death of a thousand cuts. But I think that my father will kill him first. He has been a very wicked man, as everyone knows. They know it in China also.”

They might do. But His Excellency was not bothering about his reputation; he was too much of a realist for that. He concentrated on the fact that he held strong cards, which he was at no trouble to hide.

China’s admitted frontier was not two leagues away, and these mountains were not difficult to cross here. As for the frontier China claimed, it seeped down, over this plain and all Buddhawbwe, far into Burma. Part of His Excellency’s case was that the Sawbwa before him was a rebel; and as a statesman of experience he knew that a case is not weakened, but strengthened, when bolstered up with doubtful arguments (indeed, with every argument that can be gathered together). He had also (though this he did not mention) a colleague still at large, Jake Lidgett. He threw out a suggestion that violence to himself might be unwise.

A hesitation that mingled with Gabriel’s exasperation, a hint of insecurity and apprehension, made Clive ask, “Where are General Li’s men?”

“They are either dead, or waiting as prisoners,” said Perdita carelessly, indicating the direction from which the Ambassador had been brought. She added, “But they were only a few. There are some others with Lidgett, but we are seeing to them. General Li’s chief army is in the pass, in those mountains. That is why my father is troubled. They will come down here when they know that General Li is a prisoner.”

A dust-cloud, some distance down river, proclaimed that another of the Sawbwa’s scattered maniples was coming up. And from the direction of Buddhawbwe, from the last of the rhododendron copses, emerged a smaller group still, a dozen mounted men whose commander, with terror and cringing in every movement, prostrated himself before his Raja, and poured out a confused gabble of explanations of some kind.

Perdita trembled from head to foot. As for the Sawbwa, he sprang from his throne, and strode forward. He cut his messenger short, and jerked him to his feet; and bade him do something, that would put a period to what he was saying.

Clive found himself standing beside the Sawbwa.

Gabriel commanded the unveiling of a burden that had been set down.

Instantaneously, there was a blinding light inside their brains; and nothing else that had been happening mattered. Gabriel, in the miracle of a moment, was shocked back into the world of reality, and stood aghast and staring, fascinated and frightened. As for Clive, the scene he had accepted as illusion shattered into the fiercer illusion we call life, that imagines it suffers and knows emotion.

Barron’s head lay before them, its glazed eyes still unclosed.

While the Sawbwa continued to stare, Clive bent down, and pulled the cloth back over Barron’s head. Then he addressed Gabriel.

“The Representative of the British Government has been murdered. Your kingdom is finished, Travers.”

The kingdom of Buddhawbwe had vanished. The wheel of existence had come full circle; the nat’s period of demi-deity was over, and he was entering a human incarnation of a helpless, dangerous kind.

Neither its bristling apron of wilderness nor its helmeting mists would save this card-kingdom when the avenging columns came. Both visualised the steady unhurried thrust. Gun-boats and P-boats would choose their season, to advance to Hkamti and disembark the mission (it would undoubtedly be called a mission). There would be sputters of useless valour: crackle of musketry in the forest: a straying sepoy or two caught in the bushes and scuppered: a stockade or two ignominiously tossed by artillery fire, as a rotten fence is tossed by a bull. There might be a regrettable incident, or incidents, which after all would not be regretted very poignantly or widely, since no one would ever hear of them—in the outside world, that is; they might be chuckled over during after-dinner masculine reminiscence.

But nothing would stop discipline, science, experience, the momentum gained from success in hundreds of such expeditions as this one. The white openings where tracks climbed out of forest, and appeared on the sky-line, would darken with the khaki-clad ranks. The camp-fires’ smoke would rise higher and closer. The hour would come when the invaders topped Buddhawbwe’s guardian ridges, and looked across at its roofs, shining and conquered.

There was nothing much happening in Europe, and no reason to expect that the autumn would bring anything particularly unusual. So Gabriel would have his brief notoriety. “Traitor Briton taken.” “British Raja’s Fort Stormed.” “Suicide of Rebel Englishman.” The word sawbwa might be taken into the language.

Well, then, he could resist, and whip up his people to defence. If he did this, laws which he rejected but would be powerless to evade would hold him guilty of treason; and of murder, if any life were lost because of his resistance. He was still an Englishman. However he detests his own people there is no way in which a man can escape from his nationality, except by an act of deliberate acceptance of another. Even then, it must be a nationality which is recognised as civilised. You do not escape by becoming a Naga or a Kamschatkan.

VII

His Excellency had gathered the essentials of what had happened, and his eyes exulted. When the Sawbwa marched to meet the mission, China would move into occupation behind him, to be in possession when the time for bargaining with the Burmese Government came.

The dust-cloud down river materialised as soldiers and prisoners, and reached the Sawbwa’s durbar. Their officer tried to say something, which Gabriel hardly heard, waving him aside. Perdita heard it, however, and in a low voice told Clive, “Lidgett has been killed.”

“Please be my interpreter, Dita,” Clive caught himself saying, as he stepped forward and stood before the Ambassador.

The Ambassador had been staring at the apparition dressed in English fashion. He stared afresh. Everyone else stared also.

“Tell him,” said Clive, “that I am a British officer, the British Government’s Representative here.”

Perdita translated; and His Excellency bowed. He had been trapped—not merely literally and in person, by Gabriel’s men in the river-battle, but by this high official lurking incognito at the interview where he was a captive. But he was ready to acknowledge rank, under any circumstances; and this apparition asserted that it possessed official rank.

“Tell him that I have taken the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe, and the country and people of Buddhawbwe, under the protection of the British Government, and that this is acknowledged British and Burmese territory henceforward.”

Perdita interpreted.

“Tell him also”, Clive concluded, “that the boundaries of Buddhawbwe extend into these mountains and along the passes, to a distance of six miles from the river’s further bank. Tell him he will be escorted to the frontier now, and set free there; and that he is to withdraw his troops to his side of the border. You need not talk of war. But you can make it clear that it means war if China persists in pushing into Buddhawbwe territory.”

Perdita translated with vivacity and clarity.

Then she said something to her father. He nodded; and, like a man making an effort to throw off a burden, seemed to be struggling to emerge from his dream. In a strange constrained voice he called to his people some order which they acknowledged with the clash of spear-butts and muskets, grounded. He signed to an attendant, who brought forward a flag. Then the Sawbwa stood in front of Clive, whose right hand he took in his own, and their two hands together touched the golden serow embroidered on the silken folds.

“I accept the Protection of the British Government,” Gabriel said; and repeated it in Chinese and Burmese. To his own people it was plain that the announcement brought relief.

He bowed low before Clive, in ceremonial abasement. Then he stepped outside the circle of his sawbwahood, into ordinary conventional English humanity, and held out his hand, stiffly and like a remembered gesture. Clive, no longer representing anything or anybody, took it smilingly. No smile came in return.

The Sawbwa sharply gave command to dismiss the Ambassador. “If he wishes”, he told Perdita, with grim satisfaction, “he can speak to Lidgett.” His Excellency caught the name and followed the look, and understood. “The heads of the firm of Lee and Lidgett, General Stockists and Traders, can meet.”

This was perhaps not meant for translation. And perhaps there was no need to translate what was understood so well.

Chapter XII

I

Clive had no intention or desire to take up the rôle of Resident with Native Prince. Some day, doubtless, the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe would dovetail into the Imperial structure. If he became an affable hospitable creature, London Society might give him the distinction of a nickname, and the Savoy and Ritz know him as often as his own State. Up here, on the Chinese borders, there would be the ritual of State tennis and State shoots and State bridge in the evening.

But that time was a long way off. Neither Clive nor the present Sawbwa would participate in such felicity.

Nevertheless, there had to be an official interview, at which Perdita was present.

Clive asked, “How did Barron come to be murdered?”

“I thought it hardly necessary”, said the Sawbwa, “to send out orders for his protection. The Subject does not presume to protect the Paramount Power.”

He relapsed into angry silence.

“Why didn’t his armed escort protect him?”

Perdita hesitated. Then she said, “That is one of the matters my father will look into. You see, Mr. Powell, they were drugged by opium, which was put into some sweetmeats that they bought, at one of their halting-places for the night. So while his Sikhs and policemen slept, Mr. Barron was killed, and his head was brought to Buddhawbwe and stuck on a pole beside the lake.”

“What has happened to his escort?”

“They are waiting where he was killed. They say, ‘There is a sahib still in Buddhawbwe, that Pole Sahib, and perhaps he will come and tell us what to do now.’”

Clive made it plain to Perdita that in his judgment all that had happened was a formal change, since the Burmese Government could not for many years yet take over these unadministered areas. Saying this, he made a way straight to the heart of Gabriel’s humiliation. The wound to pride became a pin-scratch, not a cut. The Sawbwa began to believe that he was not going to be dragged ignominiously back into the civilisation and system that had rejected him.

Raja Gabriel saw, too, the advantages of what had happened. With his new security against encroaching neighbours, his sovereignty became a lighter burden, and lost only a fictitious glitter. It had been no independence, when he had two borders to consider, one near and encroaching, and the other border—though pushed to a distance by the debatable land of hill and forest to his kingdom’s southward and westward—likely at any time to become active (and, when it acted, irresistible).

Clive watched the fear and vexation lifting, and realised how much the Sawbwa had been troubled by his political position. Military weakness combined with the possession of immense unexploited natural wealth does not make a ruler’s waking moments happy ones, or his slumbers easy.

Gabriel had been shaken into sanity. He now, by a process less violent, passed into a state of mind which enabled him to accept his new life as a relief. His pride thus carefully consulted, and his self-exacerbation healed, he became willing to offer concessions. Breaking silence at last, he asked Clive to wait in his capital until he could arrange a public act of recognition of the Burmese Government’s suzerainty.

Clive answered that a written acceptance would serve, for him to give the Government at Mandalay. He repeated, he was not willing to wait one day longer than he must. The murder of a British official, and the public exposure of his head, are not small things or of common occurrence. The rumour and awe of them would have already spread far through this upper country, and some vague and almost certainly exaggerated story of them would presently be known as far down as Mandalay. Clive wanted to reach Mandalay soon enough to prevent any precipitate resolution or action, and to secure at the first moment the public announcement of the Sawbwa’s repudiation of the murder and exoneration from responsibility for it, along with his formal acceptance of British protection. The announcement would quiet the India Office in London; and, flying over the wires to the ends of the earth, would be a check to the financial interests that had been intriguing to end Buddhawbwe’s existence.

Gabriel saw this, and concurred. And, as the interview entered the quietness of destined harbour Perdita, seeking some pretext, left them, and did not return.

Then Gabriel found both speech and thought at once, and his apologia pro vita sua poured out in a torrent.

“They said I took gifts! But what are they taking, all the time? Everything the people have, that matters! And not as gifts, but as wrung from their poverty and weakness! They never troubled to understand the difference between my case and theirs. I was a king, and all that my people possessed was mine by right! But all that I possessed was my people’s also! It would have been my work to persuade the Government and the English to give back India to herself! that India should be ruled, not by our soldiers and civil servants, by people who draw their pay and then go back to a foreign country to live on their pensions and forget India for ever, except when they are angry with it, but by its own kings and leaders. The people should have had the right to meet together again, as they did in old days, and to decide what they needed, village by village—not for imperial policy or cost of the army or other things that are too dear for a poor people, but for roads and wells and rest-houses. Village by village, they should have decided what taxes they would pay and what service they would give. And the lawyers and judges and members of council should have been dismissed. In time, that is. I knew that it would have taken time, to persuade the Government and the lawyers.”

It would, indeed. And the Indian streak in Gabriel’s mind had been deeper and more compelling than Clive had ever imagined! This was the peasant ideology, which makes India and Russia so akin, and sets such a gulf between them and us who move by system and parliament and precedent. The man was an Oriental, with his eyes on tiny units, villages and fistfuls of villages that called themselves kingdoms and had their separate rajas! India thinks like this, still—after millenniums in which world-victors have marched ruthlessly across her trivial princedoms and polities.

But we have also taught India—Europeanly intelligent and educated India, that is—to think in minutes and schemes and essays. At any rate, to think thus with the shallow outward stratum of the mind, that part of us which talks and writes but is dead during our long fruitful silences. So Clive was not astonished when Gabriel asked with simple earnestness, “Did you not see the memorandum I sent in to the Secretariat?”

Clive shook his head.

“But I had copies printed for every member of council and commissioner! I sent them all to the Lieutenant-Governor!”

Something was explained, then: the legend that clung still to Indian India, that this man had been its martyr at the hands of British India. Gabriel had entrusted his thoughts to Indian printers, Indian compositors. He had broken the strong commandment, Thou shalt not let the governed in on any discussion that takes place among the governing. And he had been mad utterly, to imagine that the Government of India in the eighties of the last century had been open to reconsideration of any problem whatsoever, or to questioning of its own legend of even-handed magnificence of efficiency and benevolence.

Gabriel, however, had not said one word to disperse the darker rumours that had followed like a black cloud the mystery of his dismissal.

Perhaps, Clive thought, he had forgiven himself for whatever was culpable long ago, as we tend to forgive ourselves for sins committed against a code we no longer acknowledge, and only half acknowledged even when we were compelled to pay it some sort of lip-worship. When the brain gets a kink, it sees everything from some angle that pleases; and refuses to judge its possessor’s actions.

There was a hint that even now Gabriel was not yet willing to look at himself and his deeds with no intervening veil of blurring half-oblivion, to soften the picture he might otherwise have presented to himself.

So Clive thought; and dismissed the thought as ungenerous. Yet it had entered his mind, and from something in Gabriel’s manner, some hint of evasion that suggested regions outside the track his words had taken.

In Clive himself there was nothing left any longer which he cared to conceal or evade. Why should a creature feel shame, in a world where no eyes remained but his own? If Gabriel were not yet ready to know himself without any cloaking delusion of self-evasion, it did not matter.

Clive’s own struggles, though their burning memory lived somewhere, were over; the last of all had been the briefest of all, in that night when he first knew that he was dying. But Gabriel’s battle and angry defiance had never weakened. He had burst from India in a torment of bitterness: he had wrested from a bewildered people and a shaking empire the power and independence he felt essential to the fulfilment of his nature: he had withdrawn from the approach of his own conquering nation, as a dragon withdraws to his rocky fastness, when he hears the thunder of armies that are hunting him. For thirty years he had endured no word, no look even, of gainsaying or dispute.

Yet the gainsaying and dispute had been there all along, inside the fortress of his own spirit. He had won his kingdom, but at the cost of banishment. At the cost of something else also, that had become a part of him; he would always carry that face of struggle and unacquiescence, though no foe might be present. He would carry it beyond this life, into any other life that might follow it.

“Men like you do your best, Powell,” he said scornfully. “But the Government above you is something that cannot be changed, because its roots go so far back, into ideas that were everyone’s ideas once upon a time. The Government desires only to have a framework that no one will dare to change; to have law and order, and allow people to live, so long as they do not get restless enough to want to live freely. It wants peace, so as to be able to get everything it can out of the country; or to let business men, as you call them, get it. That is what the Government is wanting to do here, with my silver and my jade and my rubies. They would not chain the slaves now—not openly, that is. But the silver would be dug out by slaves, though you would not call them slaves; and their lives would be crushed to make men rich, who would never see what was happening, and would be careful not to see it or to hear even a whisper of it.”

Then, at last, seeing again that all argument was irrelevant beside the little that now mattered, and that he had set right all that could be set right between them, Clive himself took refuge in evasion.

“We took different paths, Gabriel,” he said gently, “and you belonged to a different world from mine. But I always cared about your friendship, and I have come back to exchange kindness before too late. My thoughts have never strayed from the conviction that we were friends, whatever happened.” So he guided their talk away from harsher memory; and for a few fleeting minutes the Sawbwa, without embarrassment and without resentment, again inhabited an English world.

II

That night, as he travelled back, with Perdita riding beside him, before sleep overpowered him Clive reflected on the irony by which, when his days of service were finished, he had been made an Empire-builder, an inadequate link in the legend of Nikal Seyn and Napier. This was what came of being christened Clive! His godfather had been present unseen, and had forced his hand in these trans-Burmese uplands.

However, he had saved Gabriel’s self-respect; and Perdita’s. The Sawbwa’s presumed, or assumed, share of responsibility for Barron’s death had already lessened. An official cognisant of the facts, so far as any official was, had condoned it, accepting Buddhawbwe into the Empire. He had done a last office of friendship, and achieved all that anyone could achieve for Gabriel and Perdita. Now he must leave them to God and their own destiny.

Chapter XIII

I

While the Sawbwa remained to settle his marches, back in Buddhawbwe the Princess, as an act of ceremonial regret, to be related to the Paramount Power later, gave the Englishmen’s remains elaborate burial.

Gussie reported that the affair had given wide-felt pleasure. “You see, Mr. Powell, the people say, Now we have an Englishman’s head, which is the best of all, to guard Buddhawbwe. The Buddhists are glad also, for they say, This man has been made to give his head to the nats of the lake.”

So by destiny’s skilful arrangement Barron, who had left Buddhawbwe breathing wrath, had become the corner-stone of a new political stability for its Sawbwa. Clive felt that Perdita, with her undying grudge against the dead man, took a pleasure in this.

Wa sentiment, however, though important in these hills, in Mandalay counted for rather less. Viewed there, by narrow and irreligious minds, what would be seen would be not a smiling commonwealth of nats and men—Buddhawbwe’s prestige able to speak on equal terms with that of the other State that possessed British heads—the Was happy as they went about their lawful occasions in their opium fields and their less lawful ones on the trail of other, not so wary Was—the pongyis contented because an account had been properly settled—the lady of the lake and her husband complacent on the hidden bases of their hills! Not this at all! Clive was restless to get away. If the dreaded “mission” once reached Hkamti, “proof” of the Sawbwa’s collusion in Barron’s murder would be easily obtained.

II

Two notes were simultaneously put into Clive’s hands. He knew that Gabriel, though he confined his actual administration within a restricted and definite boundary, had a system of posts running more or less regularly between him and MacKenzie. Barron had evidently made connection with one of these. When he was killed, fear had held up its delivery. He had written:

Dear Powell,

I’ve sent ahead a roughish outline of what’s happened, and of how we’ve all misjudged your motives. The police post at Homalin will send it on. They may as well have a bit of time at Mandalay to chew on the facts, to save my time when I turn up.

No more now. Wish you were with me! Meet you in Mandalay.

Yours ever

Charles J. N. Barron.

The other note was from MacKenzie:

The Bonnie Lassie,
at Homalin, May 6th, 1912.

Dear Powell,

As you know, and I know, you’ve no right to be doing anything so daft as you are now. However, you have your reasons, and I understand them, so I’ll say only, Do what you’ve gone to do, and get back the first moment you can. Once the pukka monsoon starts, which will be any day after June is fairly here, you’ll find there’ll be no getting down country again.

So this is to tell you where you’ll find me. I’m going to Monywa now, with some junk I bought after you left me. I’m returning the first moment I can, and reckon to reach Hkamti about the last day of this month, or a day or two sooner, if I can make it. I’ll wait at Hkamti until I get word from you. It will be a convenience if you can let me know as soon as ever you can. But better still, come yourself in person.

Rob MacKenzie.

III

Perdita tried hard to keep him. “My father will be back in a few days, Mr. Powell. And I am sure that you and he will now be friends. There is so much that he will want to discuss about with you.”

He explained afresh that the monsoon would soon be blowing its magazines of storms and rain along these mountains. In Mandalay, the rumours would arrive of Barron’s murder, and a slower but not less remorseless wind would be blowing up against Gabriel’s kingdom. He must get to the capital before prestige was too much involved, and must placate the coming vengeance by news of the Sawbwa’s submission.

He did not use so tactless a word as submission. But she understood; and accepted his decision as right.

Then she broke down. “You came to us, not because you wanted our silver and our rubies, but because you loved my father, whom his own people hated—and drove out—and despise,” she cried angrily and miserably, “because they say he has gone native and is a savage. But we are English, he and I, though you will not accept us as English! You will take us into your Empire as your subjects, but not as your friends and your equals! You will not regard us as English like yourselves! I was able to talk to you, Mr. Powell, because you were not like other men whom I have met, but were like my own father. And I could talk to you and tell you all that was in my mind and was troubling me. You could have made my father happy, and he is so—wretched! Because he is a king, and we have no friends! Now you are going, and—we have to live here, with our silver—that is so hateful, because it makes all men want to rob us and to kill us—and our people, who are not English, as we are!”

“We none of us choose our way, Dita,” he said gently. “I used to think we did, but now I know better. My own life has been bound in with rules and regulations; and, now that it is finishing, I find myself wondering if it ever mattered (‘to anyone now living’, his mind said silently). But your father though for a short time he was one of us in India was never meant to be one of us. He has had power over people who used to be in great fear all their lives. And he has brought peace not only to them, but also to what I used to think of small importance, the wild creatures who have such dread of man. Think of him and yourself as servants, Dita. In that thought is the only rest, for any one of us.”

“Yes, of course. God made my father a king, which is why he must always be working. It was why he could not continue among his own people, who wanted to make him a slave.”

“Yes, God made him a king, Dita, as he made you a princess. And your father will be a king always, as long as he lives. But to make sure of that I must get down to Mandalay as quickly as possible.”

By an angry outburst she showed that she still resented it that Barron should be the cause of their parting, and that, indeed, she felt resentment on every remembrance of him.

“It is true”, she said rebelliously, “that my father did not think he need send out his very special orders to save Barron’s life, after what he had done here! But it is true also, my father did not know, for he was then very troubled about China and the Chinese Ambassador, how very frightened and angry our people were because of what Barron had done. But it was not our people, Mr. Powell, who killed Mr. Barron, though no doubt our people sent this word everywhere—for they were very frightened, you see—that this Barron was a man whom the nats of the forest hated, because he had killed their people. My father, when he comes back to Buddhawbwe, will lead his soldiers to the village where Mr. Barron was killed—he will find out, you may be sure of that! and he will execute its chief men. He will do this, and everyone everywhere is now very afraid. They say, ‘We did not know that the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe considered this man, whose hands were full of blood, one of his own people, for he did not send out his special orders, as he did for Mr. Powell. How were we to know that his killing would be considered great wickedness?”

Clive’s decision was taken while she rambled desperately on. “Buddhawbwe is now under British protection,” he reminded her.

“Of course,” she admitted through her tears. “Everyone is very glad because of that. They say, ‘Now we need not be afraid of the Chinese any longer, and need not be always expecting to fight to keep them from becoming our masters’.”

“Yes. But it means also that while I am in Buddhawbwe I am the Resident. The British Government’s Representative,” he said gravely. “So no sentence of death can be carried out without my consent. Dita, it is my wish that what is past should be regarded as done in ignorance. The village where Mr. Barron was killed may have to be punished, so that they will know his murder was a crime against the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe as well as the British Government. But no one is to be killed—by my wish, Dita.”

“I will tell my father, Mr. Powell, and I think he will be very glad. And I will send word through all these hills where you are going now, that because of Pole Saheb’s wish no life will be taken for Barron Saheb’s life. Then everyone will say of you, ‘This man is a man of forgiveness and pity, and beyond doubt in his next life he will be born as one of ourselves and will acknowledge the Excellent Law’. It will make you safer than ever, because of the reverence that all men will feel for you.”

Another matter, strangely overlooked, stirred in Clive’s mind. “Of course,” he said slowly, “when I get to Mandalay there is not only Barron’s death. There is Lidgett’s.”

“Ah, Lidgett!” she said scornfully. And they left it at that.

Chapter XIV

I

Clive and Gussie left Buddhawbwe next day, somewhat later than they had intended, because Dita insisted that the Representative of the Paramount Power should go out with due ceremony. The royal elephants led the procession, with Dita and Powell on the foremost beast. Gussie, to his intense delight, rode on the second, as a distinguished apanage of his master and the British Raj. The cavalry caracoled and curvetted, the drums banged, the trumpets and serow horns raised a majestic braying. The Was of Rissum contributed a special item of devil-dancers, complete with masks and horns and swinging buffalo tails.

When they reached the new-made graves, the Resident dismounted, and left a wreath of white and yellow lilies. The general satisfaction deepened. The British Representative, who had set a fence between them and their meddlesome neighbours of China, had now dropped his floral tribute to the offended spirits of the lake. Peace was established between heaven and earth; the seen and the unseen, Buddhawbwe and its encircling foreign powers; and in a few days the Sawbwa would be back, to inaugurate a new era.

So where the frightened dwellers in the hill cloud-capital had rubbed their eyes to see, staring bloodshot and blood-stained at them, the propitiation which some zealot or zealots unknown had brought in the night-time and stuck up by the temple, there now lay lilies on a mound of earth.

II

His sick body exchanged the swaying of the elephant for the palanquin’s easier motion; and Clive at last crossed the ridge, and began to forget Buddhawbwe. The echoes of the drums and horns ceased to reverberate. It was late afternoon.

Since his first arrival in Buddhawbwe, the weather in the central forest massif had changed to worse. The mists had thickened, the clouds were denser. These were the advance-guards and pickets of the advancing monsoon.

Clive picked up Barron’s escort, and plunged deep into the silences, and for days together travelled through a white darkness. In the ravines, immense cauldrons brewed and boiled up the formless vapours; the path skirted razor-edges that peered over into blindness. Icy moisture-laden gusts swept the wilderness. Hooded and cowled, the trees wept in the dimness.

The delay in starting made the first day’s trek a short one. Their subsequent halting-places were therefore different from those used in their journey hither. The second night was spent in a spot infested with sandflies; the intensifying of the rain which always more or less hung about these hills had increased them. Clive went down with sandfly-fever. There was no help in remaining, so he went on, and traversed the rest of the way in a kind of half-coma, half-delirium. He was conscious of aches and weariness, and a brain exhausted yet restless; and of Gussie, assiduous and miserable and anxious.

When the fever began to lessen, he wakened—lying on the platform of a zayat while the storm thrashed at the open sides, and the mists swept through it and over him. As the vapour swirled across his bed it seemed to thin out and tower into a human shape that bent down with face almost touching his, then straightened swiftly and was away at the further rafters. He remembered the attack by night, whose marks were still on his throat. In his half-drowse he was startled into full consciousness, and was simultaneously aware of a knocking at his heart’s door. It was a repetition of the night he remembered, when he had first learnt that his life was finished.

Pain became his companion.

Pain; and a strange new inexperienced aloofness. His past life, his thoughts and hopes, everything, reeled away into the mists and wandering tempests. His coolies and bearers, Gussie, the shaken woods and mysterious mountains, Clive saw without seeing. All things were swimming from him, and he was being left in a solitude that seemed meant for the spirit and its God.

He who labours prays; and perhaps his whole life patient and for the most part without ambition, eager and happy in its work and making no high claims for the worker, had been more of a prayer than he had ever imagined. The universe now seemed to be asserting its right to him, and to its power and authority to take him to itself. He felt his kinship with what he was leaving—the unseen lives that lurked in covert and cranny or were seen flying over in some interval of the swathing mists—Gussie, whose eyes were red with distress—the coolies and bearers and muleteers who had never questioned that they were meant to serve and be patient. His own patience had linked him in strong bonds with all these, though there was no means of expression by which he could tell them; and somewhere there was a deeper, vaster patience yet, that was gathering him to its comfort.

For the most part the God who was finding him seemed impersonal. Yet personality also seemed to pervade things; to lie within them somehow, like a power that is diffused and in solution.

III

They reached Hkamti, and he lay in the rest-house there, for four days, waiting for MacKenzie. The Bonnie Lassie appeared at last, and its master stood by his bedside, sorrowful and reproachful.

“It’s no use saying anything, MacKenzie,” said Clive. “I’ve done what I wanted to do; and I had to do it. And you’ve nothing against Gussie——”

“I left you in his chairge,” began MacKenzie.

And if I’d been in anyone else’s charge I’d have died.”

“Ah, well,” began the skipper; and acquiesced.

As they went down stream, Clive shook off the last of his sickness, and was able to get about, though weak and exhausted. The skipper was as anxious as Gussie, and was with him as much as possible, which he could manage the more easily, since they were now going down stream and gliding day by day nearer to the deep water. Clive watched again the deer on the banks; the otters swimming like furry snakes and lifting their inquisitive heads; the terns poised at their fishing or darting lance-flight down to pick up their prey. And they talked of Raja Gabriel and Dita, and of Barron’s and Lidgett’s death, while Gussie learnt his new job as The Bonnie Lassie’s clerk and storekeeper.

“I’ve got so much pity now for the men and women everywhere, Mac, who’ve got into blind alleys or missed their way—their way with one another or with the whole world—that I wish I were the Almighty’s angel and could go through the cities and countries as the angel went through the Egyptians when he slew their first-born. Only, instead of killing the first-born, those who were still full of vigour and conceit with themselves and the lust of life, whenever I came to a face that was tired or had lost hope that life could bring any change or anything that it had once been thought it might bring, I would touch that face’s forehead and say, “You’ve done all you can and it’s a useless infliction making you live out your days.” And they should die, all these men and women, and perhaps wake up to a fresh incarnation with a new chance and with forgetfulness of the futility of the old one.”

“Then I’m thinking you’d be taking out of the world everyone that isn’t a dry stick of contentment Powell, or just a juicy damn vegetable. You’d kill off all those men and women that have developed something you can call indeewduallty, something that’s worth talking to and worth listening to, and that maybe makes us not just the puir silly animals that you and I know we are.”

IV

At Kindat, MacKenzie did some telegraphing, and Gussie picked up a packet of mail, addressed in flowing female scripts. John the Madrasi, Clive found, had acquired a new master and had vanished.

Gussie burst into a cry of sorrow. “Oh, Mr. Powell, my sister writes that Major Balfour has died.”

“It’s bad, to hear that,” said MacKenzie, coming up just then. “So auld Sandy’s feenished! Well, well, he was a man that did much guid in his time—much guid—as well as much that might be reckoned not so guid. For he was a gey busy man, and one that must be doing something—guid if guid happened to fall handy, and something else if it did not.”

“You are quite right, Captain MacKenzie,” said Gussie solemnly. “England has lost one of her greatest sons.”

“Ah, well,” said MacKenzie reassuringly, “you needna mind auld Sandy’s going as you might have done. For you’ve shown yourself a guid lad, Gussie, both to Mr. Powell and myself, and you needna lie awake any mair crying out for Government bairths that are small use when you get them. You’re staying on The Bonnie Lassie, as lang as Rob MacKenzie stays on her.”

Then he addressed himself to Clive. “Haymann’s coming for a crack with you at Monywa, when we get there. You’re not fit to travel to see him at Mandalay. I’ve wired him, and told him, and he’s coming.”

“But I have to go to Mandalay, to get to Rangoon and my boat to India.”

“You have to do no such thing, Powell. Me and Gussie are seeing you in The Bonnie Lassie down to Rangoon, so you’ll no need to go to Mandalay. I havena seen Rangoon for donkeys’ years, and there’s business there I’d be glad of a chance of doing. And Gussie has a girl-cousin who lives there, and he’d be glad of a chance to see her and her man again. So it’s all settled.”

V

Sir Charles Haymann came on board at Monywa, his manner changed to respectfulness without suspicion; and heard from Clive the outline of events, lightly sketched where they concerned Barron and fuller where they concerned the Ambassador.

He summed up his agreement with the narrator. “I think you’re right, and that on the whole it suits our book to let Travers keep his comic opera kingdom, so long as we have no more regrettable incidents.”

“I think so. But I want to put in a special strong word for recognition of his daughter.”

“I’ll support you, after all you’ve told me. She seems a useful person, and we must get her down to Mandalay. In fact, she strikes me as likely to be more useful than her father. That leaves only the commercial aspects to be considered. We’ll have to get a Company working on those mines, of course. But a real pukka British company. They’ll pay Travers royalties and recognise his full sovereignty, and he can keep things quiet generally. After all, he did a good job for us as well as himself, when he shoved out the Chinese fellow; and that can count for something on his side of the ledger, against Barron’s murderer. And the whole affair will be liquidated when we have publicly explained that the Sawbwa of Buddhawbwe is taking steps to punish the murder and that he jumped as fast as he could to expiate it, in so far as he could be held to blame for its happening, by accepting British suzerainty. So”, Sir Charles concluded, “we’ve made the best clean-up possible of the whole business. And it’s been mainly year doing, Powell.”

“I don’t see that. I happened to be there.”

“Quite. Still, it was your idea to warn China off, by taking Travers under British protection.”

“What else was there to do?”

“Quite. When you put it that way, it was the obvious thing, the right thing. Still, you saw it, and you did it. You killed two birds with one stone. We’ve tried to get Travers to accept British protection before, and you’ve no idea how sticky he’s always been. But you saw you had him in a hole—that you had both him and the Chinese in holes—and you did the statesmanlike thing, you helped them both out—on conditions. And now the State owes you something. You’ve given the Empire silver mines and ruby mines and God knows what else. And given China’s fingers a smart rap when they came pushing over the map. If that doesn’t deserve a ‘K’ . . ., tell me what does! I’m sure H.E. will see it as I do.”

But Clive wanted no distinction, though grateful for the kindness that was willing to press his claims to it.

VI

The Bonnie Lassie continued her course, entered the Irawadi, and ultimately reached Rangoon. The season being slack, Clive had no difficulty in exchanging his passage to India for an earlier one. He had only two days to wait.

Mackenzie accompanied him to a lawyer’s office in Rangoon, where Clive made a new and final will mainly for the purpose of ensuring Gussie an income of two hundred rupees a month for life. After a gift whose smallness shamed him (it was all that MacKenzie would accept, as a kindness token only), he disposed of the rest of his property. Having no close relations in India, it went to the people of India, by whose service it had come to him. He felt entitled to name Sir Robertson Chesters, for old times’ sake, as his executor, to see to the distribution of his charities.

He left also the sum of two thousand pounds, to Perdita, child of Gabriel Travers, Esquire, better known by the title of His Highness of Buddhawbwe, to be expended at the latter’s discretion, in travel to Europe or the United States of America, or in a course at some University of recognised standing in Great Britain. He hoped the University course would be selected. Then added:

“Thinking this over, I am not sure. Do what you think best, Gabriel. Yours ever—Clive Powell.”

VII

“They’ve signalled up from the sea that it’s dirty weather,” said MacKenzie. “I’m not sure that Gussie and me should let you sail. If the Rangoon River pilots signal dirty weather, it’s something that most men would flee to the warld’s end to escape! And it’s June, Powell, and though the monsoon hasna broken on the shore yet, it’s waiting in the Bay for you.”

They parted, with MacKenzie shaking his head and Gussie unashamedly weeping. Then the Shivajee reeled out to her punishment. Irawadi’s mouths ran swollen, under a black madness lit up with the dance of lightnings. The ship staggered across the Bay in tempest.

Her emptiness had conveyed in advance an awful warning of what was expected. Before he retreated to his cabin, Clive caught glimpses of his three fellow-passengers: one supremely wretched Eurasian doctor going to Calcutta to be operated on for stone in the kidney, and two lionesses in cages on the deck, coming, appropriately enough, from Singapore, the Lion City. The doctor kept on saying only, “My God!” or “My God! how awful! I’m a damn bad sailor!”

As for the lionesses, they roared unceasingly, and the storm swept the testimony of their misery into the ship’s every recess, in violent appalling gusts. Amid the elements raging outside, the thunders of the sky and sea and suffering brutes, the fantastic shapes of the monsoon clouds, with the lightning licking and flickering and playing round them, Clive in his bunk could think only of

“Crownèd Cybele’s great turrets
Rock and crumble on her head;
Roar the lions of her chariot
Towards the wilderness unfed.
Scornful children are not mute!
‘Mother! mother! walk afoot!’”

Astonishing woman, Elizabeth Browning! The cheery daftness which tossed “chariot” at “turrets” as a rhyme, and then conjured up a mob of suicidal children invoking a worse fate than that once dealt out by Elisha’s bears, haunted Clive as he turned to one side and the other, hoping that he might sleep or at least that this terrible headache would lessen. Why must those lines worry him now, when he hadn’t thought of them since undergraduate days? And why, oh, why, must crowned Cybele shift and change—now into the nat-king of the serpents, now into Gabriel in his Sawbwa’s robes in that cave?

Her lions began a sober rhythmical pacing round and round the cave’s walls. The skeletons, still keeping their chains, began a sober rhythmical dance round a mound of silver in their midst. Clive knew now how he had squandered the six months of normal life that had been given him, with an unthinking prodigality that had drained them to their dregs.

All Passion Spent

Chapter I

I

Hugli, when at last the Shivajee gained the shelter of its reaches, looked lovelier than “Pison, through Havilah that softly ran”. Calcutta, attained in the late forenoon, merited the title Clive had always wondered that Bengalis should give it, of “The City of Palaces”.

He slowly raised himself from what he had hoped would be his bed of death, and went to his hotel. The air was close and heavy, the lurking monsoon about to break, earlier than its time.

As soon as he entered his room, Clive lay down, and what he would have predicted, had he stopped to think, happened instantaneously. He fell asleep.

In his sleep he was conscious of pain. But he flung it by, as he had been flinging it by all these weeks. Presently it accepted the rebuff, and sank out of knowledge, into the depths below all consciousness. He was not thinking of pain; and he knew that he would never think of it again. He had done with it for ever.

Letty had come back; and he told her, as we tell of yesterday when it is over, the story of the months since she had left him. But they mattered so little now, that he mentioned them only because it was on his mind to explain that he was withdrawing from his body, as we withdraw from anything that we have used and need no longer. The habit of his life had returned, to tell her of all he proposed, and ask her how it seemed to her. And she had approved with her tiny gesture of touching his cheek when she was pleased; and had said, “Let your whole mind and will release life, and life will go from you quietly and easily. You have come where it will not stay with you one day longer than you keep it, Clive.” He cried out that this was what he wanted, and would surely do.

II

When he awoke, it was late afternoon. He bathed and dressed, with infinite slowness—he was doing everything slowly now, and it gave him time to think of many things. The bathing reminded him of an incident that had always stuck in his memory, Socrates’ consideration for the women, when he bathed before drinking the hemlock, to save them the disagreeable trouble of washing his dead body. It had impressed Clive deeply, this action of a gentleman; and he had always maintained, by this and other examples, that his own countrymen could not claim the credit which some have given them, of having first discovered the ideal embodied in that word. He was glad to be reminded now, that he still had something to do, to save trouble after he was dead.

So he wrote his last notes, and left in an envelope full payment for his room and service at the hotel, with explanation that he was taking a room in hospital. He made this arrangement by telephone; and telephoned also to his doctor, and sent Chesters a letter asking him for old friendship’s sake to see his immediate dues paid as soon as possible. The request was in the will which he had made at Rangoon, which he now sent by registered post to Darjeeling, where Sir Robertson had gone with the rest of the Bengal Government.

Then he sat awhile under the potted palms and electric fans, in the lounge that faced on Chowringhee, and drank iced coffee through a straw. It presently seemed too inviting outside, to waste his last hours of India thus. “Terence, this is stupid stuff,” he told himself; and went out.

The underlying stuff of heat was no doubt as fierce as ever—or almost as fierce as ever. But a surface coolness was blowing off it, there was the beginning of a breeze. Ayahs were pushing their charges. In Sudder Street three durwans,² old cronies seated on a step together, were filling themselves up with ice. Four young Britons, complete with racquets, while a sort of communal bearer walked behind complete with towels, were walking eagerly towards the maidan.³ They were obviously a daily fixture, strictly for health and nothing for society—heading now towards a succession of hard “men’s fours”, to end with the mopping of streaming brows and wrists and the lounging back in long chairs for long pegs, as the flying foxes started their procession overhead towards someone or other’s guava gardens.

III

The ghost lingered, after dismissal at last, its visage turned by memory’s insistence, to gather up one final vision of life that it was leaving. As he went along the crowded front, Clive picked out individuals, and told himself their race and job. He thought how these people were still, in the deepest places of their life, alien to him. But at least they had long ago won his tolerance and respect. He was ashamed to remember his assurance of superiority when he first came out, a boy-ruler, ignorant and inexperienced—the confidence with which he picked up the clichés of condemnation from others, and repeated them as his own discoveries. He knew better now; and, though wisdom had come as it always does come, too late to be any use, it had come. He knew something of difficulties for which they were not to blame—was remorseful for the Bengali’s disinheritance in his own Calcutta, where more than half these hurrying people were foreigners of one sort or another.

He could pick these foreigners out at a glance now, and the glance connected each one up with some thread of the perplexing job of ruling this land. That was a Sikh, whose sect in some queer manner had already made a corner in the new mechanised travelling which was just coming in; somehow the few taxis (whose novelty was starting to wear off) were all theirs. He picked out, as he went along the Chowringhee front, Marwaris, Parsees, a Goanese, Muslim upcountry servants, a young Scots matron obviously flushed with new importance—Dundee or Aberdeen suddenly come into possession of a burra memsahib’s resources—an unmistakably English business man (planter probably, to judge from his shrivelled look) who had seen better days. He could guess what each was doing, and putting himself back in his old life he could see how important it seemed to each one of them—as the balls and routs and plays and jobs and duels and scandals and libels and wars had seemed to their predecessors in Warren Hastings’s time. They were presenting afresh this illusion of life, which was so quickly to die down into less than a dream.

Well, it was a very vigorous dream at this moment. And he himself was content to linger on Lethe Wharf and watch it. A shadow about to walk out of time for ever, he had nothing to do in this pageant.

No Indian, of all these variegated multitudes—and in no country does human life exist, so plainly evanescent, and bearing against the whitened sky and dust-hued earth so ghostlike a quality—moved more greyly silent. After life’s fitful fever he had found a place where nothing could stab him awake to ecstasy of joy or suffering again.

Yesterday had been as this day, and to-morrow would pass a sponge across all these faces, the chattering and the still, the burdened and the care-free—across those tennis players, these equestrians, the cars streaming past, and their occupants eating the solid substantial air. Even memory would be an indistinct blur, in which the rememberer would recall—nothing.

He walked on as the mood took him, and gathered up the sights repeated from thousands of evenings.

IV

He found himself going past Waggett’s, the big horse-dealer’s. He looked in, and Mr. Waggett recognised him. “Hullo, Mr. Powell. I thought you’d gone home.”

“No, I’m going to-night.”

“Nice for you, sir!” Then Waggett thought he might repeat the regret he had expressed three months earlier, when he had taken a share in settling up Mr. Powell’s affairs. “I was sorry I couldn’t get any more for you, Mr. Powell, for that little mare I sold for you last March.”

“It was a bad time, Mr. Waggett.”

“Very bad. But still—three-fifty—for a mare like that! I told them it was an insult. They screwed you down because they knew you were going,”

“Oh—well. Haven’t we all done it in our time? Or watched others do it?”

“You’re right, Mr. Powell. Still, I told you, sir, you could have easily got double if you had been willing to wait until next cold weather.”

(Wait until next cold weather! To-morrow—and to-morrow—and to-morrow!)

“And have had the difference all eaten up in keep in the meantime?”

“Yes, of course, they’d figured all that out, and thought they had you.”

“Well, I knew it was a bad time for selling. I didn’t expect much.”

Waggett thought, “Lucky to be some people! to drop hundreds of rupees without lifting an eyelash! Oh, well! I suppose a few hundred dibs make precious little difference if you’ve got a whacking pension, and no wife or son, and have been saving hand over fist for years!”

Clive, however, had hardly heard the conversation in which he had taken part. The soul withdraws from hearing before it withdraws from seeing. The world was passing before him in pictures, and for the most part silent ones. To the sannyasi in his forest meditation the hours go by like movement painted on a wall, and this sunlighted spinning-top is as static as the tales set down in books.

He watched the sawdust track, the stalls, the sleek walers and mincing Arabs, the stable-boys. The clear tropical day was beginning to have occasional streaks of almost evening.

A grey-roan pony was being brought to the yard’s centre. Mr. Waggett ordered it to be taken back.

“That pony’s not to go out. He’s being kept for someone.”

“The lady’s come, Mr. Waggett.”

The lady—a slight-bodied girl, in a cream tussore habit—joined herself to the picture-gallery, turning round from a stall whose occupant she was inspecting. Mr. Waggett apologised.

“I didn’t see you, miss. All right, Jack.”

Besides his own horses, Waggett was housing others that he was going to auction two days later. A handful of possible purchasers were going round, looking at the wares he would offer. It is a pleasant occupation; and, if you can risk burning money, the auction when it comes is a pleasant enough round game. You may pick up something good, dirt cheap, because the owner has had to go home and other bidders are wisely wary of what looks too plainly a bargain. You may curse yourself afterwards for buying a beast in harness, not guessing that the blinkers masked a blinded eye. Or you may find you have bought a showy crock that had done no exercise except eating, until the morning when it was cantered up and down the stable-yard; or a devil that had been temporarily drugged. The dealer is not responsible, except for his own horses. He merely lends his premises. If the buyer does not know the meaning of the phrase, Caveat emptor—why, he buys a double bargain, and picks up some education as well as something that comes under the genus equus.

There were two youngsters, ignorant but trying to look knowing as they went round the stalls, hoping to pick up information. The impassive-faced stable-boy saw through them, and their carefully phrased, carefully casual questions were answered with respectful ambiguity. Clive sympathised with them; and his mind went back to when he had been in their place—about to buy his first pony, and on the eve of an auction (before he had learnt better) trying to guess why this fetching little mare was being sent out on such a chance, and what (if anything) was wrong with the superb waler that went so flawlessly in the confined arena where the stable-boy was showing off its paces and graces.

There were another couple, man and wife, heavy hulking creatures who ought to be kept by law to purely mechanical and unfeeling transport, breathing heavily, he over his cigar and she over an endless succession of cigarettes, as they also went from stall to stall, with crafty sunken pig-eyes that seemed perpetually winking to each other. He hoped they would be sold a pup to-morrow—two pups would be better. He caught Mr. Waggett’s gaze as it fell disapprovingly on them—it seemed to say, “A horse-dealer can’t choose his company, he has to be hail-fellow-well-met to all kinds of human trash. But those two’ll get no change out of me, when they come up before going, with their clever flattering feelers. I see through them, and I don’t like them.

Well, Clive thought, someone has to buy the bad horses. It is a good thing when the people who get stung with them can afford it.

In the middle, up and down the yard’s extreme length, an Indian stable-boy, a piece of gunny across his knees, cantered the grey-roan pony that the girl was interested in. He wore the expressionless mask of his calling; and was physically perfect, a Greek with darkened skin, as though the legend of Alexander’s veterans having left their blood in this land had a living proof in him. For any sign that he showed, or that the beast he was setting off was allowed to show, the latter was faultless under any sort of saddle. If there were errors in this appearance, they would be discovered later, when some less experienced hand was on the bridle.

Clive’s eyes drank their fill. Then he went out, and towards the maidan.

V

There was a rumble of thunder in the distance, and a shower of huge warm drops fell all about him. The long-thirsting earth threw up its scents, the last he was to experience. He knew the monsoon would burst this evening.

Ten minutes later, he was overtaken, just before Chowringhee, by the girl in the cream tussore habit. She was on the pony the young Greek god had been showing off.

Coolies had been feasting, and the pavement was littered with their platters of skewered-together banyan leaves. One whirled up flapping, and the pony blew out its nostrils. Clive put his foot on the menace, and the rider bowed her acknowledgment, smiling. Then she went on, she and her mount—with a soft cloud-like lightness, in that sun-blanched air and against those dust-hued buildings.

At Chowringhee he caught them up again. Motors were beginning to be common, and they streamed past as if their drivers thought everyone should take his chance. Clive and the girl paused till the crossing should be safe to the maidan, where they were both going.

He was glad of the check, giving him afresh that picture. Halted on the beach of this roaring torrent, the cloud-grey slimness—the almost whiteness jetted with freaks, and mottled with circles of dark rich colour—and the cloud-grey slightness above it, ceased to be silhouette, and grew solid and real. Eyes were the quick flutter of birds, glancing this way and that; the brute was high-strung power, and his rider (a tensely wakeful Argus!) almost an irrelevance in the storm washing round his senses. Clive was watching too, and for them far more than himself. The girl was conscious of this, and their looks met as each signified to the other that the crossing was clear at last. She smiled again, and there were compensations in being an elderly man whose solicitude was understood to be fatherly kindness.

Then beauty took control, as before a mirror. This man was only a stranger, but he was going to watch her out of sight. A car swung round from behind them, and across their front, hooting. The pony jumped, as his world took wings, exploding and droning into a dream of horror. But his rider survived it: and over-swayed it: and driving him into his own skid pushed him quickly, if deviously, across the road while it remained empty. A glance thanked Clive for his fears, while dismissing them. And she was going from him, with shoulders disdainfully straight.

He gazed after her; and she merged into another image, of pride and wilful grace challenging life, challenging death, and now gone down the years. Presently he crossed Chowringhee, and stood on the maidan’s edges: and watched the last whiteness in the sky beyond the tall grasses that marked the hidden runnels: the last whiteness, and the human figures walking between.

Then he turned, and went back.

Finis