Her man took breath, for the operation had hurt him abominably, albeit he had not let the least little moan. "O woman, what talk is this?—It is a moon-and-a-half of a matter before broken leg-bone knits strongly; how am I to keep it in one shape so long?—when I am sleeping, say? Wah! You are very clever, but I shall break it again before morning."
The girl thought hard, sitting at the entrance of the cave and studying the curve of the young moon just visible, afloat in the darkening blue, her people's totem and her own, and her favourite object among the heavenly host. "O Moon, Little Moon, teach me to medicine my man!" she murmured. "Here are not the things which we of your people use in such a case. This cave-floor is hard rock, I cannot drive little pegs to keep the limb in place, nor while this frost holds can I dig clay to make a mould to hold it firm. What shall I do for him, O Little Moon?"
And, behold it came, a Thought, an Expedient, bright and wonderfully simple, and perfectly novel and practicable. Arising without a word, she fetched six straight hazel wands, and, having wound the limb carefully in a deer's hide, bound it within a cradle of splints. 'Twas new practice, she had never seen nor heard of such work before, nor had her man, but he let her have her way with him, for he was not only very weak and weary, but the fellow saw that he had fallen into the hands of a wise woman. We, too, are by way of recognising that here was that rare and invaluable creature, a born inventor. Such are of altogether incalculable value to the race. And, bethink you, how seldom do they appear. Our own age, verily an age of miracles, is altogether exceptional; never in the whole course of man's history has there been such a time. Dimly one descries a period, the so-called Second Dynasty, when the Egyptian brain, then young and new and plastic, scintillated once in a century or so, admirable inventions, the wedge, the lever, inclined plane, wheel-and-axle, but who invented anything since until our own day?—Gunpowder and printing, the arch, and steel, the mariner's compass, you'll remind me, and what else in the course of six thousand years? Within the memory of living men if an Oxford don wanted light in haste he had recourse to flint and steel and an oil lamp. If he wished to reach London in haste a good horse was his best servant. Rameses the Great would have done no otherwise in either emergency. Most of earth's greatest men have harboured an inexplicable prejudice against inventors, the Greek philosophers, for instance; even the greatest generals in history would trust nothing that was new, Alexander, Hannibal, Marlborough conquered with the ordinary weapons of their day; Wellington distrusted the rocket and preferred Brown Bess to the rifle, Napoleon (fortunately for Liberty and England), sneered at inventions and had a nickname for inventors.
No, not only the practice of invention, but the very theory of it is modern: the mere idea that there is anything that can be discovered (without mortal sin) is of yesterday. Your ancient inventor investigated at the risk of his life, and published his invention in terror. However obvious and useful it might chance to be, if it hit a vested interest, or offended a priest, the man would be burned for having commerced with the devil.
So with the lowest savages; not the filthiest of their foods, the most objectionable of their customs, or the silliest and clumsiest of their tools or weapons, but is bound up in some way with their religion, and protected from innovation by its sanctions. Did not Mumbo Jumbo give them the throwing-stick in the days before the Moon began to chase his sister the Sun?—Who so presumptuous then as to suggest any improvement upon the throwing-stick, the divinely-inspired throwing-stick? Let him be skinned alive and eaten, says Mumbo Jumbo, and let the best and tenderest of his chops be the portion of me, Rum Tum, the High Priest of Mumbo Jumbo.
Thus hampered, man's intelligence moves slowly, and racial advance has not been precipitate in Korea, say, or Spain. Among the Little Moons the very possibility of inventing anything had been long forgotten. From his childhood to his death each member of the tribe moved in a web of routine, and did what he did at stated times because it was the custom of the community. There was never any change, improvement was impossible, for the corpus of the law which regulated his life and bound him hand and foot, resided in the retentive memories of the oldest and most pig-headed of his people, themselves brought up in a similar environment and mentally incapable of breaking away from it in any one smallest particular.
Hence this departure from practice in the matter of treating a broken leg filled the man's bosom with wonder too deep for words. He found himself encumbered with novel feelings, feelings for which he had no suitable vocabulary. When a young brave went on a wife-hunt it was not to be supposed that he should respect or reverence the dejected and sulky captive whom he drove home before him. That in the course of years their mutual relations might improve, that some regard for the mother of his sons, some admiration even for her capacity and judgment might arise was possible, but at the first her lot was a sorry one; she stood for the proof of her captor's strength, courage and address; his slave, no more.
But, Dêh-Yān stood for nothing of the kind. And what she did stand for Pŭl-Yūn was at a loss to explain to himself. Having nothing to do, he watched her about the cave and marvelled at her—also at himself and at something which was going on inside him.
And in her, though he did not know it. The first passage of their eyes had begun it, but much had happened since. She had touched him. She had handled, lifted, supported him—given him exquisite pain (as she knew by intuition), fed him, rubbed his cold stiff limbs back to warmth and suppleness. Needless to say that this girl had never had occasion to deal thus with a man-creature of her own age hitherto. What she had done, she had done with a steady and purposeful hand, but now it was over, she found herself shaking as if from cold. Yet she was not cold. What was it?—Dêh-Yān could put no name to this novel experience, and whilst she thought upon it, seated as far from her patient as the limits of the cave permitted (for the revulsive fit was upon her) it came over her with a horrid clearness how near she had been to handing this delightful, troublesome, beautiful, helpless, bewilderingly strange creature-comrade of hers over to the braves of her tribe. With a momentary gleam of insight, she saw him as he might have been at the stake. The sight wrung her heart. "Ooh!"—she groaned, and clapped a hand over her mouth. Then, with a second gleam of prescience, she saw herself in a like predicament—as yet might be her fate—and laughed!