TO BE HELD FOR REFERENCE.
By the hoof of the Wild Goat up-tossed
From the Cliff where She lay in the Sun,
Fell the Stone
To the Tarn where the daylight is lost;
So She fell from the light of the Sun,
And alone.
Now the fall was ordained from the first,
With the Goat and the Cliff and the Tarn,
But the Stone
Knows only Her life is accursed,
As She sinks in the depths of the Tarn,
And alone.
Oh, Thou who has builded the world
Oh, Thou who hast lighted the Sun!
Oh, Thou who hast darkened the Tarn!
Judge Thou
The Sin of the Stone that was hurled
By the Goat from the light of the Sun,
As She sinks in the mire of the Tarn,
Even now--even now--even now!
From the Unpublished Papers of McIntosh Jellaludin.
"Say, is it dawn, is it dusk in thy Bower,
Thou whom I long for, who longest for me?
Oh be it night--be it--"
Here he fell over a little camel-colt that was sleeping in the Serai
where the horse-traders and the best of the blackguards from Central
Asia live; and, because he was very drunk indeed and the night was
dark, he could not rise again till I helped him. That was the
beginning of my acquaintance with McIntosh Jellaludin. When a
loafer, and drunk, sings The Song of the Bower, he must be worth
cultivating. He got off the camel's back and said, rather thickly:--
"I--I--I'm a bit screwed, but a dip in Loggerhead will put me right
again; and I say, have you spoken to Symonds about the mare's
knees?"
Now Loggerhead was six thousand weary miles away from us, close to
Mesopotamia, where you mustn't fish and poaching is impossible, and
Charley Symonds' stable a half mile further across the paddocks. It
was strange to hear all the old names, on a May night, among the
horses and camels of the Sultan Caravanserai. Then the man seemed
to remember himself and sober down at the same time. He leaned
against the camel and pointed to a corner of the Serai where a lamp
was burning:--
"I live there," said he, "and I should be extremely obliged if you
would be good enough to help my mutinous feet thither; for I am more
than usually drunk--most--most phenomenally tight. But not in
respect to my head. 'My brain cries out against'--how does it go?
But my head rides on the--rolls on the dung-hill I should have said,
and controls the qualm."
I helped him through the gangs of tethered horses and he collapsed
on the edge of the verandah in front of the line of native quarters.
"Thanks--a thousand thanks! O Moon and little, little Stars! To
think that a man should so shamelessly . . . . Infamous liquor,
too. Ovid in exile drank no worse. Better. It was frozen. Alas!
I had no ice. Good-night. I would introduce you to my wife were I
sober--or she civilized."
A native woman came out of the darkness of the room, and began
calling the man names; so I went away. He was the most interesting
loafer that I had the pleasure of knowing for a long time; and later
on, he became a friend of mine. He was a tall, well-built, fair man
fearfully shaken with drink, and he looked nearer fifty than the
thirty-five which, he said, was his real age. When a man begins to
sink in India, and is not sent Home by his friends as soon as may
be, he falls very low from a respectable point of view. By the time
that he changes his creed, as did McIntosh, he is past redemption.
In most big cities, natives will tell you of two or three Sahibs,
generally low-caste, who have turned Hindu or Mussulman, and who
live more or less as such. But it is not often that you can get to
know them. As McIntosh himself used to say:--"If I change my
religion for my stomach's sake, I do not seek to become a martyr to
missionaries, nor am I anxious for notoriety."
At the outset of acquaintance McIntosh warned me. "Remember this.
I am not an object for charity. I require neither your money, your
food, nor your cast-off raiment. I am that rare animal, a self-
supporting drunkard. If you choose, I will smoke with you, for the
tobacco of the bazars does not, I admit, suit my palate; and I will
borrow any books which you may not specially value. It is more than
likely that I shall sell them for bottles of excessively filthy
country-liquors. In return, you shall share such hospitality as my
house affords. Here is a charpoy on which two can sit, and it is
possible that there may, from time to time, be food in that platter.
Drink, unfortunately, you will find on the premises at any hour: and
thus I make you welcome to all my poor establishments."
I was admitted to the McIntosh household--I and my good tobacco.
But nothing else. Unluckily, one cannot visit a loafer in the Serai
by day. Friends buying horses would not understand it.
Consequently, I was obliged to see McIntosh after dark. He laughed
at this, and said simply:--"You are perfectly right. When I enjoyed
a position in society, rather higher than yours, I should have done
exactly the same thing, Good Heavens! I was once"--he spoke as
though he had fallen from the Command of a Regiment--"an Oxford
Man!" This accounted for the reference to Charley Symonds' stable.
"You," said McIntosh, slowly, "have not had that advantage; but, to
outward appearance, you do not seem possessed of a craving for
strong drinks. On the whole, I fancy that you are the luckier of
the two. Yet I am not certain. You are--forgive my saying so even
while I am smoking your excellent tobacco--painfully ignorant of
many things."
We were sitting together on the edge of his bedstead, for he owned
no chairs, watching the horses being watered for the night, while
the native woman was preparing dinner. I did not like being
patronized by a loafer, but I was his guest for the time being,
though he owned only one very torn alpaca-coat and a pair of
trousers made out of gunny-bags. He took the pipe out of his mouth,
and went on judicially:--"All things considered, I doubt whether you
are the luckier. I do not refer to your extremely limited classical
attainments, or your excruciating quantities, but to your gross
ignorance of matters more immediately under your notice. That for
instance."--He pointed to a woman cleaning a samovar near the well
in the centre of the Serai. She was flicking the water out of the
spout in regular cadenced jerks.
"There are ways and ways of cleaning samovars. If you knew why she
was doing her work in that particular fashion, you would know what
the Spanish Monk meant when he said--
'I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Aryan frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp.--'
and many other things which now are hidden from your eyes. However,
Mrs. McIntosh has prepared dinner. Let us come and eat after the
fashion of the people of the country--of whom, by the way, you know
nothing."
The native woman dipped her hand in the dish with us. This was
wrong. The wife should always wait until the husband has eaten.
McIntosh Jellaludin apologized, saying:--
"It is an English prejudice which I have not been able to overcome;
and she loves me. Why, I have never been able to understand. I
fore-gathered with her at Jullundur, three years ago, and she has
remained with me ever since. I believe her to be moral, and know
her to be skilled in cookery."
He patted the woman's head as he spoke, and she cooed softly. She
was not pretty to look at.
McIntosh never told me what position he had held before his fall.
He was, when sober, a scholar and a gentleman. When drunk, he was
rather more of the first than the second. He used to get drunk
about once a week for two days. On those occasions the native woman
tended him while he raved in all tongues except his own. One day,
indeed, he began reciting Atalanta in Calydon, and went through it
to the end, beating time to the swing of the verse with a bedstead-
leg. But he did most of his ravings in Greek or German. The man's
mind was a perfect rag-bag of useless things. Once, when he was
beginning to get sober, he told me that I was the only rational
being in the Inferno into which he had descended--a Virgil in the
Shades, he said--and that, in return for my tobacco, he would,
before he died, give me the materials of a new Inferno that should
make me greater than Dante. Then he fell asleep on a horse-blanket
and woke up quite calm.
"Man," said he, "when you have reached the uttermost depths of
degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to
you of no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the gods; but
I make no doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in the
garbage."
"You were abominably drunk if that's what you mean," I said.
"I WAS drunk--filthy drunk. I who am the son of a man with whom you
have no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-
hatch you have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how
lightly I am touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for
I do not even feel the headache which should be my portion. Now, in
a higher life, how ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter
my repentance! Believe me, my friend with the neglected education,
the highest is as the lowest--always supposing each degree extreme."
He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and
continued:--
"On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have
killed, I tell you that I CANNOT feel! I am as the gods, knowing
good and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it
not?"
When a man has lost the warning of "next morning's head," he must be
in a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with
his hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think
the insensibility good enough.
"For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it IS good and most
enviable. Think of my consolations!"
"Have you so many, then, McIntosh?"
"Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm which is essentially the weapon
of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical
and literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking--
which reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night, I
sold the Pickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the
Clothesman has it. It fetched ten annas, and may be redeemed for a
rupee--but still infinitely superior to yours. Secondly, the
abiding affection of Mrs. McIntosh, best of wives. Thirdly, a
monument, more enduring than brass, which I have built up in the
seven years of my degradation."
He stopped here, and crawled across the room for a drink of water.
He was very shaky and sick.
He referred several times to his "treasure"--some great possession
that he owned--but I held this to be the raving of drink. He was as
poor and as proud as he could be. His manner was not pleasant, but
he knew enough about the natives, among whom seven years of his life
had been spent, to make his acquaintance worth having. He used
actually to laugh at Strickland as an ignorant man--"ignorant West
and East"--he said. His boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man
of rare and shining parts, which may or may not have been true--I
did not know enough to check his statements--and, secondly, that he
"had his hand on the pulse of native life"--which was a fact. As an
Oxford man, he struck me as a prig: he was always throwing his
education about. As a Mahommedan faquir--as McIntosh Jellaludin--he
was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked several pounds of
my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things worth knowing;
but he would never accept any gifts, not even when the cold weather
came, and gripped the poor thin chest under the poor thin alpaca-
coat. He grew very angry, and said that I had insulted him, and
that he was not going into hospital. He had lived like a beast and
he would die rationally, like a man.
As a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia; and on the night of his
death sent over a grubby note asking me to come and help him to die.
The native woman was weeping by the side of the bed. McIntosh,
wrapped in a cotton cloth, was too weak to resent a fur coat being
thrown over him. He was very active as far as his mind was
concerned, and his eyes were blazing. When he had abused the Doctor
who came with me so foully that the indignant old fellow left, he
cursed me for a few minutes and calmed down.
Then he told his wife to fetch out "The Book" from a hole in the
wall. She brought out a big bundle, wrapped in the tail of a
petticoat, of old sheets of miscellaneous note-paper, all numbered
and covered with fine cramped writing. McIntosh ploughed his hand
through the rubbish and stirred it up lovingly.
"This," he said, "is my work--the Book of McIntosh Jellaludin,
showing what he saw and how he lived, and what befell him and
others; being also an account of the life and sins and death of
Mother Maturin. What Mirza Murad Ali Beg's book is to all other
books on native life, will my work be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg's!"
This, as will be conceded by any one who knows Mirza Ali Beg's book,
was a sweeping statement. The papers did not look specially
valuable; but McIntosh handled them as if they were currency-notes.
Then he said slowly:--"In despite the many weaknesses of your
education, you have been good to me. I will speak of your tobacco
when I reach the Gods. I owe you much thanks for many kindnesses.
But I abominate indebtedness. For this reason I bequeath to you now
the monument more enduring than brass--my one book--rude and
imperfect in parts, but oh, how rare in others! I wonder if you
will understand it. It is a gift more honorable than . . . Bah!
where is my brain rambling to? You will mutilate it horribly. You
will knock out the gems you call 'Latin quotations,' you Philistine,
and you will butcher the style to carve into your own jerky jargon;
but you cannot destroy the whole of it. I bequeath it to you.
Ethel . . . My brain again! . . Mrs. McIntosh, bear witness that I
give the sahib all these papers. They would be of no use to you,
Heart of my heart; and I lay it upon you," he turned to me here,
"that you do not let my book die in its present form. It is yours
unconditionally--the story of McIntosh Jellaludin, which is NOT the
story of McIntosh Jellaludin, but of a greater man than he, and of a
far greater woman. Listen now! I am neither mad nor drunk! That
book will make you famous."
I said, "thank you," as the native woman put the bundle into my
arms.
"My only baby!" said McIntosh with a smile. He was sinking fast,
but he continued to talk as long as breath remained. I waited for
the end: knowing that, in six cases out of ten the dying man calls
for his mother. He turned on his side and said:--
"Say how it came into your possession. No one will believe you, but
my name, at least, will live. You will treat it brutally, I know
you will. Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish
fools. I was their servant once. But do your mangling gently--very
gently. It is a great work, and I have paid for it in seven years'
damnation."
His voice stopped for ten or twelve breaths, and then he began
mumbling a prayer of some kind in Greek. The native woman cried
very bitterly. Lastly, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as
slowly:--"Not guilty, my Lord!"
Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died. The native
woman ran into the Serai among the horses and screamed and beat her
breasts; for she had loved him.
Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh had once gone
through; but, saving the big bundle of old sheets in the cloth,
there was nothing in his room to say who or what he had been.
The papers were in a hopeless muddle.
Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that the writer was
either an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the
former. One of these days, you may be able to judge for yourself.
The bundle needed much expurgation and was full of Greek nonsense,
at the head of the chapters, which has all been cut out.
If the things are ever published some one may perhaps remember this
story, now printed as a safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin
and not I myself wrote the Book of Mother Maturin.
I don't want the Giant's Robe to come true in my case.
