Tide marks

by H. M. Tomlinson

I felt at that moment a spasm of apprehensive indignation at the cruelty of it; but the bulls understood each other. It was all right. Anyhow, one bull understood the other. The little champion appeared to be outmatched. He kept carefully his front on feet as nimble as a cat’s, but was pushed about the field. I felt I could only wait for his end. There were sharp convulsive onsets, or the fighters stood with horns interlocked, waiting for each other to move. But I noticed each time that it was the big aggressive fellow who moved first. Once the two fighters separated—gazed round calmly at us while their flanks heaved—ignored each other—showed clearly that this was fun and that they had had enough of it. But the war cry aroused them, and the cry rose an octave when they met in the shock of another charge. The champion stumbled at the impact. His opponent instantly became distinctly savage and more active, and the bookmakers thereupon raced round the inclosure, offering three to one on the champion, which I thought was ridiculous logic. The champion was bleeding at the shoulder. He was tired and was in retreat. Once or twice now, when their horns were mingled and they stood with their muzzles to the ground for a breathing space, like statues, watching each other, I thought I observed that the little fellow experimented with his challenger. He appeared to test him with a modest feint or two. Yet this only inflamed to fury his enemy, who drove him backward again straddle-legged over a dozen yards or so.

This happened once too often. At the end of one of these retreats the little champion played some caper. I do not know what. I could not see it. It was instantaneous. But there the big bull was, on his ribs, and his enemy’s armed front was prodding his belly, daring him to move. The beaten bull, lately so aggressive, did not move. Once he raised his head, and if there was not in his eyes a pathetic appeal to let him off, then I do not know that expression. The champion understood it, like the gentleman he was. He turned away his head, as though he had forgotten something, and on the instant the defeated gladiator was on his feet and trotting away briskly to his corner.

CHAPTER XXXIII

With our possessions assembled into six small packs roped in rubber sheets, next morning at daybreak Smith and I took train for Rantau Panjang, a village on the right bank of the Golok River, twenty miles from its mouth—this is mentioned just in case there should be any curiosity to discover exactly where we were. The Golok is the division between Malaya and Siam. At that little village the headman, on reading our mandate, found three men for us without parley. And the chief of police, who happened to be an Englishman, was so alarmed by the inadequacy of our preparations and the puerility of our plans that he forced on me also a rifle and ammunition. I understood from him that I might be required to shoot a tiger or a seladang at any moment. “But don’t shoot an elephant,” he admonished me, “unless you must.” I assured him that I would resist every temptation to harm a wild elephant unnecessarily. Thereupon we marched off. The policeman shook his head over us in mirthful pessimism.

It was ten in the morning; and the spaciousness of the bare and brazen prospect to which then we set our faces under that sun was a matter for firm courage. I could have played tennis with the rifle at the start. In less than an hour it was a worse evil than many tigers, for we had to cross some miles of padi fields and open land, all of it hard and rough in the dry season, with the loam of the furrows and ridges as unaccommodating as granite. We marched toward a line of blue hills, but the shelter of their woods seemed at a distance no effort could measure. Smith was ahead of me, so I could watch the dark stains begin on his khaki tunic, and spread till their boundaries merged and the back of his jacket was uniform again with sweat. When he turned to me now and then I saw he was suffering, for he was of a stout and hemispherical habit of body. Yet certainly this was better than all the motor-cars and steamers, for at least we hardly knew where we were going, and had no idea where we should be that night. A spot named Nipong was mentioned; but by looking, first at the chart, and then at Smith, I judged that Nipong was best considered as a fond dream. We came to a swamp, then managed to scramble over a small tree prone across a stream (a rifle is useless as a balancing pole), and the track became a tunnel in a forest immediately it left the far end of the fallen trunk.

Nothing could be guessed of that path except that it would get more illegible the farther it beguiled us from the things that were familiar and understood. It would please itself, though perhaps not Smith, who was a little sketchy in his geography. He, indeed, appeared to be sure only that there was a lot of jungle to be traversed before we reached Nipong, where folk lived; and we were going to rely on Malay hospitality for shelter for the night. So I wondered in these circumstances what had gone amiss with me, because it is odd to feel tired, yet sure you can light-heartedly continue till the best man of the party has had enough of it.

I felt I had known the Malay jungle all my life. This place had no incubus. It was still the first day there, and not even noon. I would not have used that rifle on any polite tiger, and it occurred to me from the look of the place that the animals there would be friendly. Besides, the Malay who had chosen to march near to me had rolled his sarong into a loin cloth. But for that he was naked. He was a middle-aged man, slender and tough, and his figure appeared to be so proper to that murky place where fragments of sunlight had sunk down the deep silence to rest on improbable and immovable leaves on the floor, that I knew I should be lucky if the two of us were designed to go on like that till we emerged from the other side of it, where the Bay of Bengal would stop us at a beach. I liked the mild but critical eye of that fellow. He did not look at me, but there could be no doubt he was appraising, by a standard we should find difficult to meet, the two white men who were with him, and I am bound to say I desired that that barbarian should not view me in any miserable, inadequate, thin, faded, apologetic loin rag of civilization. I did not want my culture to shame me. I will swear that fellow was a sound judge, whose verdict might be guessed only in the aloofness of his contempt. When the police inspector that morning had pointed to the far hills, and peered at us sardonically as we turned to go there, I was a little dubious of my sanity. Why was I asking for trouble? But something had happened to me in the meantime. I would have repudiated my past if I could have done so, denied St. Paul, pretended I had never heard of a doctor of literature (what on earth is that?), and swopped all the noble heritage of two thousand years of London for a couple of bananas, only there can be no escape from what we are. I wished then that Mr. Santayana had been with us. I would have given even the bananas for a sly peep at my barbaric Malay as he viewed in that wild our more blanched and tenuous refinement. I wonder to what it really amounts? An accidental ray through the roof of that forest had dropped on it, and you could hardly tell Ancoats from Oxford; yet the Malay’s quick and questioning glance had been not only revealing, but pleasing to me. There are other worlds, but we so seldom glimpse them.

We came to the sandy shore of a larger stream. It flowed swiftly and silently out of the darkness on one side of us and into the shades on the other. There was no bridge. Quite naturally I looked for it, because it is our right to cross a river by a bridge, and to find an inn on the other side of it. Our Malays did not pause. They walked straight in, somehow kept their feet with the water near their shoulders, climbed the opposite bank, and vanished within the foliage without looking round. It began to occur to me that I was expected to get wet, and I followed the natives with but the briefest hesitation. We are so used to the provision of bridges and things that at first it appears to be an oversight on the part of nature, and an affront to our dignity, to have to wet the shirt. Something was broken in my mind during that pause. On the other side, as I went up the sandy slope with heavier boots, I saw a footprint not made by our party. A tiger had been there before us. Crossing that little stream took me into a quite different region, where the usual counters of thought were not current. We use the supports of our civilization without knowing they are there, and even suppose we are supporting ourselves. Profound philosophers will do this, unaware that without the favor of the rude tinkers, tailors, and candlestick-makers beneath them their minds would give way, would sprawl in a most uncultured and helpless manner next to an earth even ruder and more intractable than a revolutionary tinker, and that they would perish long before they could raise a few coarse oats for sustenance. I followed my Malay, as though I had not gone over a boundary which parted me from all that hitherto had kept my feet. What my civilization had given me, I realized, was altogether inadequate and counterfeit. Even my rifle was fraudulent. A philosopher’s finest thought cannot move with the infernal subtlety of a tiger.

A little later another stream ran athwart our way. There was no wading over that. It was wide and swift, and moved with a silent power that betrayed its depth. There was no passage over it but by a fallen tree. The huge butt of the tree was on our side, and descended in a nasty curve to the center of the river, which in places swirled over the partly submerged hole. I knew I could not do it. “Buaya,” warned my Malay, and trotted over without a fault. And crocodiles, too? Smith essayed the pass ahead of me, but he began to treat his foothold too punctiliously just when his daring courage should have entered recklessly both his feet; paused, and made to look back; tried to go forward again; and fell. I was at that moment on a greasy length of it, waving the rifle about helplessly and trying not to judge how many more seconds I should last. Smith bumped off, but snatched at a projection and hung on desperately. The current carried his legs downstream.