Son of Power

by Will Levington Comfort; Zamin Ki Dost

As night came on, Skag thought more and more of the parting; and that there had been no words about Carlin's coming again. He felt himself living breathlessly towards the thought of seeing her; and it was not long before this fervour itself awoke within him a counter resistance. Manifestly this pain and yearning and tension—was not the way to the full secret. As carefully stated before, Skag approved emphatically of the Now. The present moving point was the best he had at any given time. He thought a man should forget himself in the Now—like the animals.

Yet the hours tortured. That night had little sleep for him, and the marvels of Carlin—face and voice, laugh, heart, hand—grew upon him contrary to all precedent. This was a battle against all the wild animals rolled into one; most terribly, a battle because there seemed such a beauty about the yearning which the girl awoke in him.

He was abroad early next day. The thought had come, that she might find him in the jungle at noon or soon afterward as yesterday. As the dragging forenoon wore on, Skag was in tightening tension. He hated himself for this, but the fact stubbornly remained that all he cared for in the world was the meeting again. It seemed greater than he—this agony of separation. It brought all fears and self-diminishing. It told him that Carlin would run from him, if she knew he wanted her presence so. He knew her kind of woman loves self-conquest—the man who can powerfully wait and not be victimised by his own emotions. . . .

So it was that Skag fled from himself, when there was still a half hour before noon. He could not meet her, longing like this.

There was sweat on Skag's forehead as his limbs quickened away from the place of meeting yesterday. The more he left it behind, the more sure he became that Carlin would come. It seemed he was casting away the one dear and holy thing he had ever known—yet it resolved to this: that he dared not stand before her with his heart beating as if he had run for miles and his chest suffocating with emotions—the very features of his face uncertain, his voice unreliable. . . . If a man entered the cage of a strange tiger, as little master of himself as this—it would be taking his life in his own silly hands. Skag couldn't get past this point, and he had a romantic adjustment in his mind about Carlin and the tiger—one all his own.

Deeper and deeper into the jungle he went, along the little river, but all paths appeared to lead him to the monkey glen; and there he sat down at last and remembered all that Alec Binz had told him about handling himself in relation to handling animals, and all that Cadman Sahib had told him from the lips of wise men of India . . . but all that Skag could find was pain—rising, thickening clouds of pain.

He kept seeing her continually as she entered the jungle (walking so silently and swift, her face flushed from crossing the open space this side of the city in the terrible heat of noon)—and then not finding him there. Something about this hurt like degrading a sacred thing, but he didn't mean to. He repeated that he didn't mean to hurt her. . . . Then suddenly it occurred to him that it was all his own thinking about her coming at noon. There had been no word about it. She might not have thought of coming again. This was like a cold breath through the jungle. It was as intolerable as the other thought of her disappointment.

. . . There was an almost indistinguishable slithering of soft pads in the branches. Skag looked up suddenly and the air seemed jerked with a concussion of his start. The monkeys were back. They had been watching, the branches filling. When he looked up, the whole company stirred nervously.

Skag laughed. It was good. There was but one formulated thought—that Carlin would be glad to hear this; she would appreciate this. The return of the monkeys had a deep significance to Skag, because he had really first seen the wonder of Carlin just here—working over the wounded one. The immediate tree-lanes were filled with watchers in suffocating tension then. It was curiosity now—nothing covered, but playful. Skag wished he could chant like the priests, for the monkey-folk. He wished he had many baskets of chapattis to spread out upon the grasses for them. . . . As he sat, face-lifted, he heard that tiger-cough again.

The monkeys huddled a second—it was panic—then they melted from sight. It was like the swift blowing away one by one, of the top papers of a deep pile on a desk.