CHAPTER XIV
To say that Traherne and Crespin were less than intensely perturbed at the situation in which they found themselves, and still worse in which they had landed the woman who was dear to them both, would be to wrong their intelligence—or any even mediocre intelligence. And these men had each more than average intelligence, mental equipment more acute and deeper than Crespin often had been credited with—for we most of us make the common and crass mistake of thinking that a mind, an intelligence, totally different from our own, is not so fine. Antony Crespin had punished and soiled his once fine body, almost hopelessly now, but, except for sheer physical nervousness that drugged it sometimes, he had not deeply injured his mind. He had been no carpet-soldier. Again and again, on active service, he had “made good,” as soldier and as man. Traherne was the better man, but Crespin was the better soldier—which was as it should be. It was Major Crespin’s business to make wounds, it was Dr. Traherne’s business to heal them—unless the other had done his work so well that no chance or cause of help was left.
They were thoroughly frightened, but they took it lightly, of course: they were British. And but for the woman’s being with them, they might even have found tingle and excitement not altogether unpleasant in the undeniable predicament. Lucilla made all the difference—she and, to Crespin, the two babies in Pahari. He was thinking of them as he turned back from his fruitless mission. And his mouth set hard and sharp, and his tongue felt dry and thick. But he sauntered idly enough across the small flagged courtyard, and said with a careless shrug:
“It’s no use—he doesn’t understand a word of Hindustani. You know Russian, don’t you, Doctor?”
“A little.”
“We must be well on towards Central Asia,” Crespin declared. “Suppose you try him in Russian. Ask him where the hell we are, and who owns the shooting box up yonder.”
“Right-o,” Traherne nodded. “It’s worth trying at least.”
Lucilla and Crespin followed a little behind him as he moved to the temple priest. And when he said something in Russian they saw that the priest’s face kindled. He pointed to the rock-hung castle, pointed down to the ground, and then with one magnificent, wide, sweeping gesture that seemed to take in not only the whole country, but to indicate title-deed to all the world, exclaimed:
“Rukh! Rukh! Rukh! Rukh!” in a herald voice that proclaimed that the fortress-like castle was Rukh, the ground they stood on Rukh, the cave-temple, the immense horn of metallic lacquer poised on a crag beyond the castle—the most unique and surprising thing in all the amazing picture—the sky above, all of creation that mattered or counted—Rukh, imperial, incomparable Rukh—Rukh, the apex of the world.
But for all that his statement meant to them Crespin said disgustedly, “What the deuce is he rooking about?”
“Goodness knows,” Traherne rejoined.
But the woman jumped to it.
“I believe I know!” she broke in. Crespin and Traherne gazed at her in surprise—her husband incredulous, Traherne very curious. “Wait a minute!” she commanded, searching her pockets excitedly—almost, in her quiet, well-bred English way, as excited as Yazok himself. “I thought I had the paper with me. I wish I could find it. But I did have it, and I did read it. I know I did. I read it in the Leader just before we started, that the three men who murdered the Political Officer at Abdulabad came from a wild region at the back of the Himalayas, called Rukh.”
“Yes,” Traherne told them, “now that you mention it, I have heard of the place.”
“Well, that’s something,” Crespin exclaimed. “Come, we’re getting on.”
“Perhaps,” the physician said under his breath, as he turned again to Yazok the priest and accosted him once more in a few Russian words, pointing interrogatively to the palace.
But the priest’s Russian was little, less than Traherne’s own, and Yazok had no intention of being over-communicative.
“Raja Sahib,” he said—so he had some smattering of Hindustani after all—“Raja Sahib,” he repeated several times; but that was all that he would say.
But those two familiar words told them a good deal of what they wished to know.
“Oh,” Crespin grunted, “it’s Windsor Castle, is it? Well, we’d better make tracks for it. Come, Lucilla.” He put his hand on her arm, and they turned to go.
But the priest barred their way, in a frenzy of excitement, pouring forth a wild torrent of, to them, quite unintelligible language.
Traherne intervened, speaking again in Russian, and it served to calm the hillsman measurably, though the native throng at his elbows still muttered and gesticulated threateningly. But Yazok listened, if surlily, and presently vouchsafed in reply a few Russian words which he spoke slowly and with evident difficulty.
“His Russian is even more limited than mine,” Traherne told the others, “but I gather that the Raja has been sent for, and will come here.”
“All right,” Crespin said wearily, “then we’d better await developments,” and, lighting a cigarette, seated himself on one of the green painted stones, and began to smoke with impatient patience.
Oriental Bedlam broke loose. Almost before the Englishman had gained his hard seat Yazok rushed on him wildly, caught at his shoulders, and with wild exclamations and fierce blazing eyes, hustled him off, and then, disregarding utterly the amazed and furious Major, salaamed low and penitentially to the stone, bent again and again with humble, deprecatory gestures, and a frightened hurricane of propitiatory formulas, an inchoate sing-song of throaty, guttural words that sounded half wailing woe, half cringing prayer. And the people no longer shrank away, but pressed towards Major Crespin brandishing fists and weapons, and storming determinedly, “Oo-ae, oo-ae, gak-kok-oo-ae, gak-gak!”
Crespin’s red face turned white in his anger, his tired eyes stiffened and flashed, and quicker than told his hand lay on his revolver-case. He still smoked on imperturbably, but Yazok was nearer death than he ever had been.
“Confound you, take care what you’re doing!” Crespin warned him, snapping the words out coldly from between clenched teeth. “You’d better treat us civilly or—”
Basil Traherne broke in. “Gently, gently, Major,” he begged with a hand on Crespin’s right arm. “This is evidently some sort of sacred enclosure, and you were sitting on one of the gods.”
“Well,” Crespin retorted with a vexed, contemptuous laugh, “damn him, he might have told me!”
Lucilla smiled for the first time, and drew close to her husband, but her eyes were frightened and her heart was pounding. But Lucilla Crespin matched her pluck with theirs—she who had the most to live for, and the most to make her welcome death.
“If he had,” Traherne expostulated, “you wouldn’t have understood. The fellow seems to be the priest—you see, he’s begging the god’s pardon.”
“If I knew his confounded lingo I’d jolly well make him beg mine,” Crespin retorted with a murderous scowl at the still penancing, groveling priest, as oblivious of them in the stress of his penitential perturbation as if they’d been three ants in a crack of the rocks.
“But you don’t know his lingo,” Mrs. Crespin said, rather as if she did not regret it, and moving away cautiously but curiously towards the other side of the enclosure.
“We’d better be careful not to tread on their corns,” Traherne urged. “We have Mrs. Crespin to think of.”
Antony’s face knotted and crimsoned again. “Damn it, sir,” he growled rudely, “do you think I don’t know how to take care of my wife?”
“I think you’re a little hasty, Major, that’s all,” Traherne replied pleasantly. “These are evidently queer people, and we’re dependent on them, you know, to get out of our hobble.”
Crespin scowled and smoked on moodily, but made no reply. Some men, and not bad sorts at that, who knew him as Traherne did, might have felt inclined to throttle him as he sat there, surly, quarrelsome and ungrateful—a positive menace to them all in their grave predicament, the man who had ruined the life of the woman Traherne loved—as far as one human being can wreck the life of another—who had spoiled her joy, sullied her mind, and made of her radiant young wifehood a sour memory that ached and reeked; the man whose bloated, degenerated being stood the only barrier between Traherne and the woman he longed for, as only clean, upright men of scrupulous life can long—if the roué but knew what he misses of nature’s greatest impulse!—the man to whom Traherne had ministered unflaggingly for hard, patient years, between whose self and its worst parts and the impending consequences of ill-doing Traherne had stood persistently. But Basil Traherne had no such impulse. Towards Antony Crespin he had no harsher feeling than pity and sympathy. He pitied Lucilla and grieved for her, but his pity and grief for the husband were more. For his science told him that the recreant man’s plight and misery were greater than the guiltless woman’s. The physician knew. And he was true to his vocation—the vocation than which earth has none higher and finer. Traherne knew what Crespin’s lifelong handicap had been—ancestral taint, youth misguided and unprotected, and he did not judge the other who had succumbed to a strain and propensities that he himself, so circumstanced and tainted, might have succumbed to as completely and more. And, too, Traherne knew—for he had seen—as Lucilla willfully blind and incapacitated by nature never had seemed to see—how heroically Antony again and again had stood naked in Ephesus and fought his own soul beasts—knew and honored him for it. And the physician knew, as no lay mind can, the terrible provocation of torn, jumping nerves; and he sometimes, though without blaming her, wondered that Mrs. Crespin had not realized at least something of this. But nerves are the one part of masculine anatomy of which few women take any account, and of which such women as Lucilla Crespin take less than none—incapable always of intrinsic justice to the sex which they somewhat arrogantly judge by their own imperious and narrowed, if “nice,” standards, rather than by the measure nature has set. What Antony had done to her and her children she computed hotly over and over, but she gave less than a fair thought and pity to what he had done to himself, and made no mark at all of what he’d resisted. Dr. Traherne did, and he scanned Antony Crespin with a gentleness that was both masculine and splendid—and, because of his passion of heart, soul and body for the other’s wife, was heroic and fine. Lucilla Crespin would have been amazed could she have known how the scales of Traherne’s judgment weighed her and Antony against each other; and, being a woman, her resentment would have been more than her surprise.
Dr. Traherne loved Lucilla Crespin with the one man-love of his life; but he did not overrate her, and still less did he credit her with attributes and abilities that nature had denied her. For Major Crespin Traherne had little love left perhaps—but he had some, and far more than a meaner soul could have understood—and he had big, yearning pity. No matter how tender such men are to all womanhood, the wreck of manhood always must seem to such men as Traherne a deeper tragedy than any feminine suffering. And one thing else weighed with him on Crespin’s side of the balancing scales: Lucilla had and would hold the love and admiration of their children; Antony would lose it, if he lived. And Traherne sensed how intensely Crespin loved his youngsters. Lucilla did not. The Edelweiss keeps its admirable purity high up in the cold of the inscrutable Alps, the clover bloom is bruised and stained in the wayside dirt; but why praise the Edelweiss, why, in Heaven’s name, blame the clover “low i’ the dust”? Draggled and broken, the clover-head still gives a perfume, shows a color the unsmirched flower in the ice and snow forever lacks. And, if Traherne never forgot—what every physician knows—that “to step aside is human,” he not only pitied Crespin for all in the older man that was faulty and weak, he also liked and respected him for what was strong and good. And there was much.
Antony Crespin’s wife was unhappy; she needed no added heartache, but she might have been unhappier yet, had she seen her husband as Dr. Traherne saw him.
Certainly the world would be a far duller place if we all were as fair-minded as Basil Traherne, and if life carried no privilege and zest of censure. You’d be less contented and comfortable, if you did not think that you were better than I am, and I should be less comfortable and contented, if I did not know that I am better than you are.