Thorne rose abruptly. He nodded in the direction of the white house at the foot of the hill.
“Let us go down and talk to Wingrove,” he said. “He is not in pain now and can see us.”
The two men walked down to the famous hunter’s bungalow
II. THE BIRD, THE CAT AND —
WINGROVE, A BLOND giant of a man, received them in an upstairs room, where he lay in bed with a cradle lifting the bedclothes from his broken leg. He was propped against a heap of pillows, his face and head showing up against the white linen like a gigantic orange, and he was reading with the concentration of a student the latest issue of The Sporting Times obtainable in Mogok. He dropped his newspaper as his visitors were shown into the room and ordered chairs to be set for them by the bed.
“So you are going to help us, Colonel Strickland?” he said. “We shall be very grateful, I can assure you.”
“But I don’t know that he’s going to help us,” Thorne rejoined. “We have come to you to advise us.”
Wingrove looked from one to the other of his visitors.
“What’s the difficulty? If it’s a rifle, I have a .470 Rigby, which is at Colonel Strickland’s disposal.”
“Thank you,” said Strickland with a smile. He was quite willing to let Thorne argue. He had not a doubt that Wingrove and he could, and would, arrange the expedition between them before he left the house.
“But the rifle isn’t the difficulty at all,” cried Thorne, and he explained that Strickland had had no experience at all. “I am putting the worst of it, of course, Wingrove, because I want him to go, if its fair to let him go?”
Strickland had slept out, no doubt, in the strangest places; he had been alone, no doubt, under the most exacting conditions. But this one thing he had not done. He had not sat up in a tree, absolutely by himself, through a whole night, waiting for a tiger in the depths of a jungle.
“It’s a nerve-racking business when you’re one of a party. But alone! The first time! What have you got to say to that?”
Wingrove’s face really made words unnecessary. It grew very grave and doubtful. Strickland was provoked by it to a flippancy which he regretted before he had completed its utterance. For these two men, both of them armed with knowledge, were weighing him in the balance. He felt suddenly as though he were a small boy before a board of examiners. But, above all, he felt an intense curiosity. He must know, by experience, what sort of a test this ordeal about which they were all so grave might be, Thorne had spoken of a night in a haunted house. Within a minute Strickland had yet another image and parallel to put beside that.
“I can’t see what risk there can be, unless I fall asleep and tumble off my branch,” he said lightly.
Wingrove shook his head and let it fall back against the pillows.
“You won’t do that, Colonel Strickland,” he answered softly. “No, there’s not the slightest fear of it.”
He remained for a few moments silent, with his eyes closed. Then he opened them again and smiled.
“I was trying to recapture the sensations which I experienced the first night I set out for a tiger. But it’s not so easy after all these years and all the other expeditions. And I wasn’t alone either. Remember that, Colonel Strickland! I had a friend in the next tree. I could have spoken to him and he would have answered. That makes a world of difference. But even so—” He hoisted himself up suddenly upon his elbow, whilst a spasm of pain distorted his face. But he had remembered.
“I thought of a novice keeping her vigil in her convent chapel through the night before she took her vows. Curious, eh? The crack of a board would sound like a thunderclap. Some tiny animal, a mouse or a rat, scampering across the stones of the aisle behind her would seem the fluttering feet of the dead risen from their tombs. The whirr of a bat would be to her, kneeling upon the flags, the hovering of demons above her head. And the night would be eternal, eh? Yes, eternal.”
His voice sank to a whisper, whilst his eyes rested steadily, searchingly, upon Strickland’s. Strickland returned his gaze as steadily. These two men were not trying to frighten or deter him. Indeed, they both wished him to go, if it was safe to let him go. But each in his own way was at pains to make him understand the gravity of the ordeal through which he must pass. Strickland no longer disparaged it. But, after all, he had been challenged, and in the qualities a man most treasures.
“I should, nevertheless, like to go,” he said evenly; and the modesty of his answer won the day.
Wingrove dropped back again upon his pillows.
“Good!” he cried in a brisk voice. “The two shikaris who go with me are out now tracking the brute. If he kills to-day or to-night, he will leave his kill until to-morrow night — that’s my lord the tiger’s way. He’s like the rest of us; he likes his game hung for a bit. If the trackers locate a kill, they will return here in the morning and take you to the spot. They’ll build a little platform for you — a machan we call it — in a tree, and then they’ll leave you with your rifle, or, rather, my rifle.”
He raised an arm above his head and rang a bell.
“I’ll have the foresight touched up for you with luminous paint. You’ll have a strong moon, but even so, you’ll need the paint.”
He sent for the rifle, and painted the foresight as he lay in bed, and handed the weapon back to his servant with an order.
“He will take it up now with a bag of cartridges to the Guest-House and give it to one of your boys,” Wingrove explained to Strickland.
“Thank you.”
Strickland and Thorne rose as one man to take their leave, but the crippled hunter would only let Thorne go.
“There’s a detail or two you ought to fix in your mind,” he said to Strickland; and when the two men were alone, he ordered a peg of whisker and soda for each of them, and drew up from the well of his experience a bucket or two of jungle-lore.
“The tiger,” he said, “is a very important person in the kingdom of animals and does net go to his dinner either unannounced or unprotected. You will know long beforehand of his approach, and he, unless you are very still, with a cool grip upon your nerves, will know whilst he is still out of danger, that you are waiting for him. In which case either (a) you will not see him at all, or (b) he may set about hunting you.”
“How shall I know of his approach?” Strickland asked.
“First of all a bird will come, a big kind of nighthawk. You will see it flitting in and out of the trees in the moonlight, and you will find its flight curiously eerie.”
“The bat in the convent chapel,” said Strickland.
“Yes, but perhaps a little more startling. For if you are very quiet, the bird will settle on a branch and call on a harsh piercing note. Then for a while nothing more will happen. The jungle-cat will come next. But you will probably not see the cat at all — not even in a strong moonlight. He will be so silent and swift, so — one with the shadows. But you will hear him — and that’s where “ — Wingrove’s face broadened into a grin and he repeated softly— “Yes, that’s where it’ll be up to you, my friend. You’ll hear him suddenly snarling and tearing the kill at the foot of your tree, and you’ll find the impulse to loose off your rifle at that jungle-cat overwhelming. Yes, even though I have warned you! You’ll feel that you must! No other sin in your whole life will ever tempt you more. I tell you that even now I have to watch myself with all my attention, lest I should let go with a rush and do that wicked thing. But if you manage to sit very quiet, after a time the snarling and the tearing will cease altogether. There will follow a silence which will last a minute or so whilst the cat listens. Then it will utter a yelp like a dog in fear; and that will be all you’ll have to do with the jungle-cat. Another interval of time will pass — Oh, two or three hundred years! — and in due course, my lord himself will come.”
Wingrove lay back, with the memories of a century of such nights glowing in his eyes and transfiguring his face. He beat with his clenched fists upon the sheets in a gust of
passion.
“Oh, how I wish I were going with you!” he cried.
“So do I,” Strickland agreed whole-heartedly.
He walked back to the bungalow on the hill in a curiously expectant mood. He was hardened to solitary bivouacs in desolate spaces, but both Thorne and Wingrove were aware of that, and made light of it as a preparation for his vigil of to-morrow. He could not but be impressed by their disregard of it. It was not that they overlooked, but they deliberately set it aside as of small account. He must be ready for some contingency which was quite new to him, something different in kind from anything he had known, something altogether on the outer edge of experience.
He had the bungalow still to himself that evening, and whilst lie smoked his cigar upon the veranda after his lonely dinner, that expectancy deepened and strengthened until it became a foreboding. The moon would not rise on that night until many hours had passed. Beneath him the lights of Mogok twined and strayed over the floor of that cup in the hills. Above his head a myriad of stars marched across a clear, dark sky. High up, under the very rim of the mountains, a bush fire lit up a wild tract of country. Some way off, upon his left hand, long parallel rows of ascending lamps marked the many steps to the great Pagoda. Behind him the illimitable jungle whispered its secrets.
A night in a haunted house The vigil of a novice in a convent chapel, filled with the little menacing voices which plot and plan in the darkness! Both those images were vividly etched in his mind. From them, and from the witchery of the tropical night, and from his own imagination — for no man content with months of loneliness is without that gift — from the combination of these circumstances, there was born suddenly in Strickland’s mind a conviction that something tremendous in its consequences would happen to-morrow in that jungle whispering behind him. In nine times out of ten — no, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the premonition is shown afterwards to be a mere marsh-light and delusion.
But the hundredth time it is the truth.
III. AND THE TIGER
WHEN STRICKLAND CAME out the next morning to his breakfast upon the veranda, he saw two strange natives seated on the ground; and before he had finished his meal, Captain Thorne ascended the winding path between the flower-beds and joined him.
“These are Wingrove’s two shikaris,” Thorne explained. “A big sambhar was killed yesterday a few miles from the village in the jungle. There isn’t much doubt that you’ll get your opportunity to-night. The shikaris will guide you to the spot, build your machan, and come back for you in the morning. The place is four hours’ marching from here. So you will do well to start after an early luncheon.”
Strickland set off in the heat of the day, with Wingrove’s trackers and two others who carried a native bedstead between them to make a platform in the branches of a tree. They marched by forest paths and during the last hour through brushwood in many places as dense as a hedge. And towards sunset they came to a small ragged glade in the very heart of the jungle. At the foot of a great tree on the edge of the open space a dead stag lay, his mouth open and black, and the flies crawling in and out of it.
The trackers built the charpoy into the branches twelve feet above the ground and then shouldered Strickland up into the great tree. But all with the greatest silence and precaution; and if a word had to be said, it was said in a whisper.
“For the tiger will be near his kill,” murmured one of the men. “Sir, we will return for you at daylight, and may you have good fortune.”
They stole away with an amazing noiselessness. Not a twig snapped. The faint swish and rustle of bushes might have been the stir made by a passing wind. Then that ceased and only the swoop and chatter of birds above the trees were audible. Then those voices too died away. Strickland had brought with him a case of sandwiches and a flask. He laid Wingrove’s rifle, already loaded, on the charpoy at his side, and whilst he ate his meal took a careful survey of the tiny arena. He had a clear view of the sambhar beneath him, and between the leaves he commanded every corner of the glade. It was a rough oval with a floor of coarse grass, and a solid green wall ringing it about — except just at one spot. At the end upon his right-hand side there was a small break in the undergrowth where bushes had been crushed to the ground. It was black like the opening of a cavern.
“That’s the path he made,” Strickland said to himself. “That’s the path I must watch.”
But the light was already failing. Even whilst he watched, the black cavern mouth was no blacker than the undergrowth about it. The glade became a place of gloom and shadows. Its walls receded.
Strickland altered the position of his rifle, so that its muzzle pointed directly to the fast disappearing gap; and as he did so, he noticed a silvery stump of tree just by the side of it. Hardly noticeable before, it glimmered more and more importantly as the darkness fell.
“I shall know where to look now,” he assured himself with a considerable relief. For, the swiftly changing twilight transfigured everything. The little round of grass was widening into a prairie; metres were extending into miles. And suddenly it was quite dark.
Jungle and open space alike vanished. He might have been lifted above an infinite plain, for all the knowledge with which his eyes could furnish him. As yet there were no stars, and as yet his eyes were not accustomed to the darkness. But in a little while he became like a man once blind who recovers some shadow of his vision. He felt along the barrel of his rifle, and ever so far away he saw a speck of white, the mark of the path by which the royal brute with the velvet paws must come. He had now nothing to do but to wait.
Nothing but that! Whilst he waited, he recalled those other nights which had been quoted to him roughly as parallels, the watcher in a haunted house, the novice in her convent chapel. Curious phrases Wingrove had used — the eternity of the night, its eeriness. Eerie it was, and Strickland caught at the reason of its eeriness. The loss of vision had sharpened his hearing, so that in that tremendous hush, the tiniest noise resounded like a trumpet, and sounds could be heard where there were no sounds at all.
Certain changes took place in the aspect of the night, even to his unaccustomed eyes. The stars came out over his head, were caught in the high branches of the tree, trembled and shook in their captivity, freed themselves and wheeled on. In a very short while now the moon would be rising, he reflected cheerfully; and he took from his pocket his watch with the luminous hands. It had stopped, of course, for the hands only pointed to nine. But when he raised it to rewind it, he heard it ticking. He remembered that he had set it before he left the bungalow, and had wound it before he climbed into the tree. It was only nine o’clock then? It was incredible! There were three hours still to run before moon-rise.
It was some time after this that a small bird settled upon a spray; and the sound it made was a clatter which split the night and set his heart pounding at his side; and later, after hundreds and hundreds of years, some leaves broke from a bough and in a shower rustled and pattered down to the ground. Back there in the bungalow he had thought of the feet of the dead. Here it seemed to him that some old watchman from another century had come to life and sprung his rattle in the deep of the forest.
“This won’t do,” said Strickland. “No, it won’t”; and he spoke in a curious agitated whisper, of which he caught the note — a note of flightiness which alarmed him — almost a note of panic.
To re-establish himself, he strained his eyes towards the white stump. So long as he could see that he was satisfied. But even the stump failed him. It was visible, certainly, in the place where it was rooted, but as he watched it, suddenly, without giving him a hint of warning, it dashed across the ground like a white animal. Strickland closed his eyes, pressing the lids together tightly, and then opened them in a hurry lest something should happen to him whilst they were closed. Both Thorne and Wingrove had calculated aright. The tension and loneliness of that vigil had indeed brought him to the very edge of reason.
But soon he became aware of a change. The vault o
f the sky had lost its ebony, the stars had grown wan. Somewhere, beyond the prison house of the jungle, the moon had risen. A light, vaporous, unearthly, tender and beautiful as the sheen of pearls, was welling out in a silent tide from under the rim of the sky. It invaded the pool of darkness in which Strickland was plunged. The trees and the glade resumed their contours, and suddenly the leaves upon the topmost sprays sparkled like jewels. Over them she came sailing in her golden panoply, the Huntress, and no lover ever welcomed her more fervently than the watcher in the tree. For in her train came sanity.
Strickland worked his shoulders to loosen his sinews.
“At any moment now,” he said to himself. He sat forward with his eyes upon the white mark. But oddly enough, although the storm of his nerves had quieted, his forebodings of yester-evening crowded back upon him so vividly that, willy, nilly, he must take them for prophecies. The hush of the night, the lonely glade, the very quiet of the trees all seemed ominous and fateful. Strickland waited in a transcendent expectation. Something tremendous would be born out of that night.
Then all forebodings vanished from his mind. In a moment, brain, eyes, and muscle were subdued to one purpose, the purpose for which he had come. For in the enclosure of the trees a bird was flying. Strickland heard first of all the flutter of its wings as it circled about the enclosure. Then he caught a glimpse of it. It was a big bird, a hawk, and as it flitted in the misty light, now and then the underside of its wings flashed like silver. It settled upon a bough and called with a startling loudness in a peculiarly harsh and piercing note. A warning or an invitation? The call ceased. Strickland clenched his hand round the neck of the stock of his rifle.
“I — must — not — shoot.”
He repeated Wingrove’s admonition, emphasising each word slowly like a child learning a lesson. It was well that he did. For at the foot of his tree there arose such a clamour of snarling and rending, that his heart jumped within his breast and his rifle was up to his shoulder. Though he knew that if he did shoot, his night was wasted, the temptation to shoot was almost a necessity. But he mastered himself. His rifle was lowered on to his knees. But he felt that he had lost years out of the years which remained to him.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 59