The Marriage of Meldrum Strange/Chapter 2

RT is individual, and knows no limits. Fools are they who sneer at new tools, and processes of giving form to idea. Ommony, an artist in his own way, paid suitable homage to Charley’s camera, because the thing of brass and glass and wood was the tool of a true enthusiast.

That forest and its outskirts are a thousand square miles. There are temples in it, not wholly ruinous but older than written history, and in places trees have forced themselves up from between the stones of forgotten cities. Men live there, known now as junglis, naked and afraid, whose ancestors were kings in lost Lemuria if the very ancient books are true. And the animals live where human pride one time adored itself.

Above all, there are spots of sunlight filtered through gaps in the foliage; fire-lanes—Ommony’s first charge—along which light flows like a river; clearings where creatures, whose every habit is an open book to Ommony, lie basking, playing with their young; and a look-out rock from which, if the bears aren’t there before you, you may view the leagues of jungle spread like a sun-lit sea.

Charley was in his element, and Ommony no less.

“My, you know,” said Charley, “you can do this stuff early and late, when the raw’s left out and the real thing’s looking at you! They say you can’t, but you can! I know you can!”

“Let’s try,” said Ommony.

So they slept at noon, and stalked the mysteries of twilight, when two-thirds of the earth is waking and a third shades into the unknown.

“Any fool can shoot a tiger on the hop!” swore Charley. “Can you shoot him so he’ll show on the negative how light ripples off his pelt? I’ll bet you!”

“All bets off,” said Ommony. “I think you can.”

But they needed the junglis to show exactly where the tiger lay, and Ommony’s low whistle to make the beast look up in such way that his proper aspect faced the lens, while Diana the staghound lay growling in rumbled undertones. And once it was Ommony’s rifle that changed death’s course, when a leopard rushed the click of the ambushed camera and Charley hugged his one tool, turning his back to protect it better.

“So that’s all right,” said Ommony, measuring the two strides and a half that death had lacked.

“Hope so, at any rate,” Charley answered. “I think I got him before he moved. Half a second, while I slip in another plate. Did you notice the brown of that shadow, and how his ’hind-end seemed afloat in it? If that shows on the negative it’s worth the trip to India.”

“How much will you get for it?”

“No more than for a punk one. You can’t make money at this game.”

“Nor at mine. But it’s good, isn’t it?”

“You betcha!”

THEY seemed to have been friends a year when Jeff turned up, walking from the station because he loved the feel of brown earth underfoot—Jeff with a beard like Ommony’s, and a boy’s grin, but bigger and heavier than Ommony and Charley both together. The veranda chair creaked under him, but not even the terrier was afraid, and Diana’s long tail thumped approval on the floor. Jeff’s grin set all the servants grinning. They passed and repassed on imaginary errands, to admire his hugeness and the depth of his bass voice, that is India’s measure of a man’s heart.

“Strange wanted me along,” he said, “so I came to discover if that’s convenient. A telegram wouldn’t have told you what you want to know”

“You mean what you want to know, don’t you?” said Ommony, chuckling.

Jeff laughed aloud.

“You’re right. Charley wrote such a glowing account of you that Strange is suspicious. You know, a multi-millionaire is a poor who thinks every one is trying to work him for something. Thirty per cent of what he thinks is true. Strange can’t escape even in India. There’s a lady on his heels. He wants to abuse your hospitality until Venus sets, and he’d like to be sure in advance that you won’t work him for anything.”

“What will you tell him?” asked Ommony.

“Shall I send for my tent from the station, or have you a spare bed?” Jeff answered.

So Jeff’s big tent was pitched, and two of the dogs adopted it forthwith, while Jeff’s one servant cleaned his boots alongside in the sun and bragged to Ommony’s assembled household about Jeff’s prowess.

“As a horse, he is, yet stronger! Lo, with his fist, thus, he slew a man! They say the skull was broken like an egg-shell, but that I saw not. I have seen him lift a boat with two men in it. When the wrestlers from Tirhoot came to Delhi he threw them all, one by one, and he not weary at the end. They say that once, when men of evil purpose locked him behind doors, he broke down a door with nothing but his hands, and smote them with the pieces of it. Yet he laughs, and his heart is as a woman’s, but not as a too inquisitive woman’s. The dastari is good.”

So they were now three who trod the jungle-lanes, and laughed until rocks that had known the laughter of four forgotten races re-echoed to the high, the middle and the bass—until the junglis brought word of a bear, hurt fighting, whom the flies were driving mad, and Jeff strode off to end that misery. (For Ommony is a prince of hosts, reserving to himself no more than right to judge emergency.)

The bear-skin lay pegged out, raw-side upward, in the sun the morning Strange came, and Charley told him how Jeff had to use four bullets and the butt. Jeff’s leg was bandaged; it was nothing serious, but he did not walk to the station.

“I hope you didn’t shoot all the game before I got here,” Strange growled when he met Jeff on the veranda. “Hurt again? You’re always in trouble!”

He was suffering from bachelor’s spleen, and as fearful for his tracks as a hunted animal.

“I think I’ve given a miss in balk,” he said, sitting down at the breakfast-table next to Ommony. “It’s in the papers that I’m on my way home. Met your sister—splendid woman! It was she who first suggested my visiting you. What’s Charley doing? Shooting game too?”

“Visiting me,” said Ommony, meeting no man’s eye.

“I meant that you and I and Ramsden” Strange began.

“I’ve invited Charley too,” said Ommony.

“He has his living to get.”

“Charley has lived more and better in these last few days than in all his previous life,” said Ommony. “You’re entirely welcome here, Strange; but so’s he.”

“Hurrumm!” Strange nearly exploded, then governed himself. “Where did you get these eggs? They’re the best I’ve had in India.”

So Ommony talked poultry for a while, and of the business of keeping leopards from the hen-house, which calls for ingenuity.

“Why don’t you shoot ’em all?” Strange asked him.

“I shoot nothing in the jungle as long as it behaves.”

“D’you call stealing chickens behavior?”

“It’s natural to leopards.”

“Then you mean we’re to shoot nothing but beasts that have broken through the hen-wire?” Strange asked disgustedly.

“You’ll find criminals in the jungle in the same proportion as among humans,” Ommony answered.

“How do you tell ’em?”

Strange had decided Ommony was crazy, and made a perfectly obvious effort to humor him. You could almost hear the mental mechanism click as he decided to cut his visit short.

“They’re just like other criminals. They tell you,” answered Ommony.

Strange sat there looking like Ulysses Grant without the modesty. His was the only face at table that was legible. He resembled the bear that Jeff killed, hurt and driven nearly crazy by the flies of public criticism, and the servants were afraid of him, hardly daring to hand him things to eat. Jeff and Charley, having experienced his moods, were careful to say nothing, so the brunt of it fell on their host, who was at a loss for the present how to manage the situation. Silence fell, as if the fun of recent days had dried up and blown away along a bitter wind.

“I came to kill a tiger,” Strange said suddenly.

“I believe you did. I think you shall,” said Ommony.

“Now I wonder what the you mean by that remark?” Strange asked him.

One thing was obvious. Strange had looked up Ommony in the Gazette and so believed him to be quite a minor personage. He spoke rather as a man might to his game-keeper—a man who deserved neither game nor keeper, but had both. It was in his mind that no man drawing such small salary in the middle-age was of much account, or had much right to dispense the forest privileges. Feudalism, an ancient gas that ever crept along with money, and deluded men, caused him to regard his host as some one who had scant option in the matter. He didn’t enjoy being kotowedkowtowed [sic] to, but expected it, and his new great business organization had made him more tyrannous than ever.

Breakfast, that should have struck the key-note for holiday and comradeship, came to an end on B-flat, and Jeff Ramsden tried to corner Strange alone; for Jeff fears nothing except his own slow-wittedness, which he strangely over-estimates.

“Look here,” he began; but Ommony interrupted him, sent him and Charley on imaginary business of looking for a leopard’s spoor across the vegetable garden, and took Strange off alone to introduce him to the wilderness.

'THEY took rifles and walked to the look-out rock—two miles down a fire-lane rutted by the wheels of loaded carts.

Strange’s mood backed and veered without improving. He may have been wondering why he, a man with an income in the millions, should have to hide himself in a forest. From hat to shoe-soles, rifles and all, the same two hundred dollar bill would have purchased the entire kit, down to the skin, of either himself or Ommony. It annoyed him that Ommony strode beside him like the owner of the place.

“I’ve a notion,” he said presently, “to buy a tract of desert in Nevada or somewhere, and plant such a forest as this.”

“Money won’t do it,” said Ommony.

“Oh, you can always hire brains.”

“But not knowledge. Once a man knows, he’s his own man.”

“Well, they hired you, didn’t they?”

“Who did?”

“The Indian Government.”

“Not at all. I offered them my services—years ago—for just so long as I believe I can be useful.”

“They pay you.”

“No. The forest pays me. When I cease to row my own weight and over, I’ll resign.

Strange was piqued, but interested.

“Well! Suppose I offer you double what you’re getting here, to come and superintend my forest?”

“You can’t. You haven’t got it to offer.”

Strange began to feel like a patient in one of those rest-cure resorts, where rest consists in humoring the whims of other inmates.

“What do you mean?” he blustered.

“If you’ll stay a month, I’ll show you.”

A month! Strange wondered whether he could endure it a week. It was not the wilderness that got on his nerves; for all his life he had been a solitary man, brooding alone over plans and power. He was used to the “Come, and he cometh; go, and he goeth” of Rome’s centurion, with reason neither asked nor given. Difference of opinion was a trumpet-call to battle, in which the strongest will won. There were men, such as Grim and Ramsden, whom he hired to tell the truth to him and to apply their brains. To them he listened, but always of his own free will, with a feeling he was getting something for his money. This man, who did not even own the forest, yet was so visibly unimpressed by the power of invested millions, irritated him.

“This timber’s growing to waste here,” he said abruptly.

“The next generation will need it,” said Ommony.

“The next generation will govern themselves, let’s hope.”

“Yes, we all hope that.”

It was on the tip of Strange’s tongue to say something discourteous about the British having not so long to rule in India.

But it filtered vaguely though his mind that Ommony wouldn’t care, and he knew better, from experience, than to waste sharp comment on indifference.

“Then why grow trees for them?” he asked.

“Why not?” said Ommony.

Strange could not answer him, or saw the uselessness of answering. He was cheek by jowl with a fanatic, it seemed to him, and he made a praise-worthy effort to change the flow of thought.

“Well, let’s shoot a tiger,” he said abruptly. “You promised me one at breakfast. Are they as dangerous as they’re said to be, or is that another of these”

“The one I’ll let you shoot is,” Ommony answered; and Strange looked at him sharply again, aware of a hidden meaning, or a double meaning—something he detested. Yet he couldn’t lay his finger on it.

“How so?” he demanded.

“Tigers are like people. Decent tigers are like decent people, only on a lower plane. They only kill for food, and let alone what they can’t use. A few of them are greedy, and kill too much. Some are lazy, and kill cattle, which is stealing. Sometimes you can drive those and make them go to work. They’ve a right to be tigers, just as we’ve a right to be men; left to themselves, but watched, they work out a destiny that possibly we can’t understand. Now and then I think I understand it. They turn criminal at times, though. Man-killers. Nobody’s fault but theirs then. Short shrift.”

“You’re after a man-killer?”

“Yes.”

“This morning?”

“Get him within the month,” said Ommony.

Strange was more than ever puzzled.

“I should think you’d put your whole force on a man-killer. Go after him, and get him before he can do any more harm. Why not?”

“If you have him where he can’t do harm, why hurry?” answered Ommony.

“Oh, you have him rounded up where he can’t escape?”

“He might escape, but I hope not. No. I didn’t round him up. He wandered out of his territory into an environment that he thinks he understands, but doesn’t. We’ll have fun with him.”

“I should call that dangerous.”

“Perhaps. For him. He won’t kill men while we have him under observation. This is the look-out rock.”

Ommony sent the staghound first up the well worn track that circled to the summit, to make sure there were no bears or leopards to misinterpret the intrusion. He went next, springing up quickly, leaving Strange to scramble slowly after him. He had talked all the tiger he chose to just then.

For about five minutes, panting on the summit, Strange took in the view of a forest like a raging sea arrested in mid-turmoil. Waves and waves of green, and purple where the shadows were, so shook, and seemed to plunge, in the breath of a light wind that a man could think dead tree-tops were the rigging of sunken ships. There were rocks like islands. On the far horizon was a bank of clouds for shore. Kites wheeled like darkened sea-gulls; and the murmur of the wind among the trees was like the voice of “many-sounding ocean.”

Size—all enormousness—was something that appealed to Meldrum Strange. He could think in millions as he stood there, and it pleased him. Sight of all those myriads of living things, governed, as he sensed it, by one man, there for one purpose, under his hand, available, awaiting one word by a man with brains, to be swept into the jaws of Titan-industry and pulped, sawed, planed, bent into profitable use by folk who couldn’t grow a tree or even buy a whole one—thrilled him.

“How many of these were here when you came?” he demanded.

“Very few. Just scattered copses.”

“Grew them all, eh?”

“No, they grew themselves. Nature attends to all that, if you coax her.”

“This ’ud be a good place to start an industry. This interests me. I must interview the Government about it. Cheap labor. A railway. Only a hundred miles or so from the coast. We could ship this stuff. No small proprietors to bother with. It looks like opportunity. What’s the Government thinking of, I wonder?”

“The next generation,” said Ommony.

“Good Lord, man! The British won’t be here. There’ll be an Indian government by that time, grafting and playing politics. They’ll waste, destroy, ruin”

“That’s their lookout. It won’t be cut in my day.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Strange was himself again. He stood with arms folded on his breast and the old light burning in his eyes—devouring light, that could not see use in unexploited profit. His brain was already figuring in terms of import duties, labor, and exchange—sea-freight—subsidies—and a market where the men who put in number nineteen bolts all day long must have what they can pay for ready-made.

He looked again at Ommony—made a new appraisal. Mad, of course. A fanatic. Yet a man of one idea is like a horse in harness. You can use him. He can be a strong cog in the intricate machine. The punishing grind, that kills or makes a rebel of the fellow who can see both sides of anything, only spurs a fanatic to further effort He might use Ommony. No doubt flattery

“A man needs genius at this business, as at everything else, if he’s to succeed. You’re wasted here now. You’ve done it. You should go ahead. A man on half your salary could carry on, while you devote yourself to”

“That’s my ambition,” Ommony interrupted. He was tired already of the subject Strange had broached. “I’d like to spend my whole time studying trees. But my plan would cost too much.”

“There’s no such thing as too much, if it’s a sound plan,” Strange assured him.

“The Government’s hard up. Can’t afford experiments. They’d listen to me if they had the money, but India’s poor.”

“Good Lord! Turn this into money then!”

“Trees have never been studied properly. As you see, they grow themselves, given a chance and the right location. My theory is that all the waste land in the world might be turned into forests at very small expense, if we only took the right precautions first and studied the thing from the beginning. It’s the first part—travel, observation, comparative analysis, experiment on a sufficient scale— that would prove too costly.”

Strange made a motion with his tongue, almost suggestive of changing a quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other.

“You say the Government would listen to you. Value your advice, eh? Well, advise them to give me a concession to exploit this forest. If it comes off, look to me for help in the other matter. Think what it would mean.”

“I’m thinking.”

Diana the staghound was growling in a sort of subterranean undertone, not more than loud enough for Ommony to hear. He glanced to his right, where an enormous teak-tree, mother of the grove around her, reached three-quarters as high as the rock. An almost naked jungli in a gap among the lower branches caught his eye and signaled. Ommony’s eye followed the line of the jungli’s arm.

“That might be your|tiger,” he said quietly.

“Where? Show me!”

Strange clutched his rifle that he had leaned against a corner of the rock, and looked over Ommony’s shoulder, trying to get the line.

“You see a rock about a hundred yards from the base of this one—shaped roughly like an egg at this end. Carry your eye to the right from that. Now: d’you see a patch of brown leaves with light and shadow playing on them. Part’s lighter than the rest—more gold in it. You get that? That’s your tiger. He’s looking up at us. It’s a very difficult shot indeed from here.”

“I used to shoot well once. I’ll have a crack at him.”

Strange aimed, and hesitated. The light played tricks with his unaccustomed eye. It was almost as if the shadow were limpid water, with little patches of sunlight dancing on it. The angle was awkward and the rifle heavy. He stepped back behind the rock and rested the weapon on a projecting corner.

“Now!” he said, and began to aim again. “Is he still there? I’ve lost sight of him.”

“Still there, looking up at you.”

“Curse that dog! She’ll scare the brute away!”

“Better shoot then.”

“He’s moving, isn’t he?”

“That was his head that moved. He’s standing head-on toward you. He’s heard us talking. His tail’s twitching now. Can you see it? He’ll make his mind up in a minute. Better be quick. You’ll likely kill him if you hit him at this angle.”

Strange fired.

“Too late, and a yard wide—to the right and beyond him,” said Ommony. “Well, perhaps he’ll take the hint. Some do.”

“I wonder if this foresight’s any good,” said Strange, battling with irritation. “Was that the man-eater?”

“No. One at a time. That was only a greedy brute that kills more than he needs. Too bad you missed, but he gets another chance.”

“You don’t tell me you can recognize one tiger from another in that light, through the branches! How d’you know he isn’t hit, and hiding down there?”

“It’s part of my business to know that sort of thing,” said Ommony, and glanced at Diana. She was lying down licking herself. “That tiger’s a quarter of a mile away by now, and still going.”

“I’d like to look,” said Strange. “I didn’t see him go. I don’t believe he did.”

“All right. Go down and look. You’ll be perfectly safe. I’ll sit here and smoke while you hunt for him,” said Ommony.

But he made a signal to the jungli, who dropped from a lower branch and kept an eye on Meldrum Strange as one would watch a new unusual animal.