Sir Philip Hanbury Erskine, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.--whose other titles, in the liberal type of the Royal Commission, which that day had been read before the Legislative Council, had filled up many lines of print, 'Our trusty and well-beloved Philip Hanbury-Erskine', as the said Commission had it--was pursued by the twin devils of restlessness and insomnia. Old memories--memories that mocked his present eminence--tore at the heart of him; and after sundry vain attempts to read, first a turgid official report and subsequently a frivolous French novel, he slipped from under his mosquito-net, and paddled barefoot on to the wide verandah that flanked his bedroom.
Leaning over the balustrade, he looked forth upon the sleeping capital of his kingdom. The throne which he had that day ascended had been for many years the Mecca of his pilgrimage, the goal of his ambitions, the dream of a man to whom hard toil of a practical kind had left scant space for dreaming. From the verandah upon which he stood aided by the eminence upon which Government House was set, he looked in bird's-eye fashion over the town that lay sleeping about his feet. The ethereal moonlight of south-eastern Asia spread its glamour all about, blurring and softening details, but revealing essentials as clearly as the light of day could do. Against the distant skyline the wooded cones of a little archipelago seemed to float like giant lotuses upon the surface of the glittering sea; nearer inshore the lights of moored shipping were points of garish, crudely-red fire against the black bulks of the hulls; immediately before them big stone buildings huddled closely together as though striving for standing room marked the offices and godowns the stores and shops of the business quarter of the town.
Sir Philip's eye passed casually over all these things--though each one of them held for him memories of a half-forgotten youth--and drawing farther inland, dwelt upon the packed yet straggling native quarter, which, beginning where the solid edifices devoted to toil and trade had their ending, covered closely some ten square miles of alluvial flat, and broke up, just as a wave sprays against a rock, around the foot of the hill upon which Government House had its stand. Far away to the right, the bungalows of the European population gave a hint of their presence by glimpses of tiled roofs embowered in clustering vegetation.
Although the town was sleeping, from the restless native quarter there came a low, monotonous buzz and hum, that was as a familiar music in Sir Philip's ears. The pulsing of native drums, faint as a heart-beat, but instinct with a wild, half-savage unrest, came to him fitfully, like a voice crying from the past, and set his nerves tingling. The subtle scent of an Eastern bazaar--which is compact of spice and garlic and fruit, and of warm, voluptuous humanity--was borne to him, faint and enervating, upon the sauntering breezes of the night, awakening old thoughts, old memories, old desires, with a vividness that is possible only when an appeal is made to us through our sense of smell. Sight and sound and scent--each one of them so strangely, so startlingly familiar; each one of them an experience that belonged to a dim and distant past--whipped Sir Philip with a sudden craving for freedom and for youth; pricked him with an unfettered recklessness; rowelled him with a passionate hatred for the ordered present with its conventions, its formalities, its duties, its burdens, its petty responsibilities; and held forth to him as a lure the delight of one 'crowded hour of glorious life' down there in the seething ant-heap of native life--one more hour, only one, such as had been his of old.
He was a thick-set but active man, somewhat below middle size, with coarse black hair and dark, piercing eyes. He bore his fifty years more lightly than many men his juniors by a decade bore the burden of their age; and to-night memory and association had awakened in him the recklessness, the impetuosity and something of the divine, audacious folly of youth. He was quivering like a terrier as he stood there gazing out into the night, inhaling with fierce eagerness the scents that were borne to him from the bazaar; and his grasp upon the verandah-rail tightened till the iron seemed to eat into his palms. It was to him as though he were holding on with might and main to the conventional, respectable, ironbound realities that hem in the life of a high Colonial official; yet he held on to them, mechanically, instinctively, reluctantly--for of a sudden these things were revealed to him as harassing trivialities that were of nothing worth.
He had left this land on promotion three-and-twenty years before; and in leaving, it had always seemed to him, he had left behind him also his youth. Since then, in uncounted quarters of the Empire, he had served in this post or the other, garnering unsought honours by the way, dealing with problems of various degrees of interest, complexity, difficulty, or dulness; and climbing ever higher, higher in the Colonial hierarchy, until now, in the fulness of time, his dearest, his only steady, ambition had been gratified, and he had returned, at last to the land in which his first years of toil had been spent, to rule over it as Governor. All through those years, in climates good and bad--climates whose unvarying heat had tanned his face to a dull, colourless brown--the attainment of this position had ever nestled somewhere at the back of his mind as a cherished hope. Now that hope had been realised, and Philip Hanbury-Erskine, loosing his hold on the verandah-rail, threw passionate hands aloft, and broke out into the oldest and surely the bitterest of all human cries, 'O vanitas vanitatum! Which of us has his desire, or, having it, is satisfied?'
He had won back his kingdom; but the cruelty of convention still withheld from him a taste of his vanished youth. Should it? Must it? To the devil with conventions and respectabilities!
He had loosed his hold on the verandah-rail, and with it his grip upon the staid and straitened path, in the rut of which the feet of a Colonial Governor should rest. He passed into his bedroom with a furiously beating heart, and presently youth and memory had wrought their miracle. Sir Philip Hanbury-Erskine passed, I have said, into his bedroom, but the man who presently emerged therefrom was not, to all outward seeming, Sir Philip Hanbury-Erskine. One distinguished potentate had dropped for the nonce out of the Colonial Office List: one unconsidered entity the more had been added to the seething, shifting, brown thousands of the native quarter.
As he slipped over the rail of the ground-floor veranda--using in his exit from his own house as much caution as a thief might have adopted in effecting an entrance--he laughed to himself with a light-hearted recklessness that had not visited him for years. His staid, official self had been left among the tumbled bed-sheets and the cast-off pyjamas in his room upstairs, and with it had remained the burden of advancing age.
Once free of the house and within the shelter of the black shadows, cast by a clump of palms, he stamped his bare feet into the cool fragrance of the dew-drenched grass, and with difficulty restrained a shout of exultation. He was young again--young, young, young! He was going back to 'his own people', as he had always affectionately called them--the people among whom his youthful days had been spent; the people whose language, thoughts, and hopes and fears had of old been as his own. He was about to dip once again into the secret wells of native life, to hear the old sounds, smell the old smells, experience the old sensations, and for a brief hour to forget that he was one upon whose shoulders Fate had imposed the burden of official greatness, with all its dwarfing, soul-stunning conventionalities. For years--such long, long weary years--he had not been suffered to be natural, to be himself--even to be a Man. Instead, he had been only an Official, only the temporary holder of a given post--one who was so much in the public eye in the little worlds wherein he had laboured, that his every action, his every opinion, almost his every chance word, had been regarded as legitimate subject for comment and for criticism. Now, just for once, before it was too late, before his should have become a figure too familiar in the place for such wild pranks to be possible, he would steal from the hampering fictions wherewith his life was beset one little hour of freedom absolute, of unshackled individuality, of manhood and of youth.
It is one of the many astounding facts of Asia that two sets of human lives, the white and the native can coexist side by side in a single locality, each almost completely ignorant of the other, each barely touching its neighbour on the outside edges, and then only at rare intervals. Yet the man who is, as it were, amphibious--to whom the terra firma of solid British convention and the deep waters of Oriental life are alike familiar--finds himself stepping from one to the other at will and with an appalling suddenness. Philip Hanbury-Erskine had in the days of his youth been one of these rare amphibians; and even now his memory held the key which can unlock the gates that are barred so jealously against all but a handful of his countrymen. Within half an hour of the time that had seen him leave the outer shell of His Excellency the Governor the G.C.B. and the G.C.M.G. and all the rest of it, in a discarded heap upon his bedroom floor, Europe and its memories had been thrust into the obscure distance, and he was back once more in the old, old East.
His bare feet puddled the dust of the roadway, already set with the impressions of countless unshod feet; his eyes dwelt lovingly upon the string-bedsteads placed in the five-foot ways before the native shops, and upon the white figures stretched corpse-like upon them; the throbbing beat of drums, each thud and lilt of which held for him its inner meaning, came to his ears, the half-savage cadences keeping time to his own unrest; the reek--the old, familiar reek--of an Asiatic bazaar, pungent, penetrating, enervating, voluptuous, pervaded the stillness of the night, and he opened wide his nostrils and snuffed it in lovingly because it awoke in him such wild visions of the past.
Noiselessly as a shadow he flitted along the broad road--flanked by native shops and by the sleeping, white-clad figures aping the likeness of the dead--and presently turned down a narrow alley on his left, where old and dilapidated houses leaned helplessly on one another's shoulders, as though overcome with weariness, their roofs nearly joining ragged hands across the crooked fairway.
'Deplorably insanitary,' was the comment of Sir Philip.
'Homey, homey, homey!' cried the new-born man in him. 'Unchanged by a hair's breadth in a quarter of a century! Asia was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! Asia, my Asia!'
He groped his way down the straitened passage, for the bulging roofs overhead nearly excluded the moonlight, and paused presently to take his bearings.
'This must be the place,' he murmured to himself 'I wonder if it is unchanged too. I'll try.'
He crept into the shadow, and drew near to a door sunken below the level of the alley, and rapped upon its panel with the knuckles of his hand. He rapped seven times with 'dots' and 'dashes', much as a telegraph operator manipulates his instrument; and a moment later the door shuddered and creaked, and then drew cautiously backward for the space of a few inches.
'Salam Aleikum!' said a creaking, nasal voice.
'Aleikum salam!' returned Sir Philip mechanically.
'Whither comest thou?' pursued the voice.
'I come,' said Sir Philip--and in a flash the old jingling formula, which he had not thought upon for years, recurred to his memory--
'I come from the forests that know no paths,
From the waters that hold no fish,
From the place where the wild kite veers and sails,
Where the man-apes drink as they swing from the boughs,
Where no Law runs and where men are free !'
'Enter, Brother,' said the voice, and the door stood wide.
Philip had no need for the flaring torch which the woman who had opened to him held high above her head. The narrow passage down which they were walking, with its meaningless twists and turns, was to him at that moment the most familiar thing in all the world, though his feet had not trodden it for a quarter of a century. It gave presently upon a big square room, the centre of which was filled by a raised platform or dais, covered with thick carpets, upon which near a dozen natives, men and women, were seated playing cards. The only light in the place was shed by damar-torches fixed in heavy wooden stands. The players glanced up at the approach of the new-comer.
'Peace be upon this house and upon all who sit therein!' said Philip from the doorway.
'And upon thee peace!' came in answering chorus from the card-players.
'This be a Brother who hath strayed far,' piped the woman, indicating Philip with a gesture that had in it something of proud proprietorship. 'His password is that of the forest!'
The players laid down their cards and stared at Philip.
'That password hath not been used for twenty year and more,' declared an old man who sat among them. 'Say, little Brother, whither hast thou been, that thy password dates from the days of long ago?'
'I have been far,' said Philip; 'far, very far--farther than eye can see, farther than horse may gallop, farther than bird can fly! Listen! Even my mother-tongue hangs awry upon my lips!'
'Didst thou incur the sentence of Bombay?' asked the man quite simply. 'Bombay', in the vernacular, stands for 'transportation'.
'Yes,' said Philip, with a sullen nod: and he felt that he spoke the truth.
'What thing led thereto?' pursued his interrogator.
'Certain services I rendered to the Kompani' said Philip, again with perfect truth. In these lands, where the memory of 'Old John Company Bahadur' still lingers, the Government continues to be known among the natives by the ancient title.
'The Kompani hath a long arm and a longer memory, said another of the card-players. 'Art wise to return, my friend?'
'Of my wisdom Brother, I am by no means assured,' said Philip, feeling that he and Truth were indeed walking hand-in-hand to-night. 'But thou knowest the saying: "A golden rain in a stranger's land and a pelt of hail in the land of thfathers; yet dearer ever must thine own land be." To-night, I am feeling, according to the saying of the men of old, as feels the eel when it wins back to its mud-hole, the sirih-leaf to its vine, or the areca-nut to its twig!'
'And behold, there be yet another returned this day,' piped the woman who had let him in. '"Tuan Iskin" we were wont to call him in the old days and now he is the Tuan Gubnor who is set to rule over all our land!'
'Of old he had a man's tongue in him,' said one of the card-players, a lithe, clean-limbed, sharp-featured fellow of about Philip's own age, extravagantly dressed in silks of many hues, and armed, in defiance of the white men's law, with a native kris of wonderful workmanship. 'He and I were as brothers, close in friendship as is the quick and the nail; and the word passed amongst us that he was one of the Faithful.'
'In very truth he was,' screamed the woman, who had now seated herself on the edge of the dais. 'Else, had he been an unbeliever, would I, Si-Bedah, have loved him?'
Philip Erskine, half hidden among the wavering shadows, looked keenly first at the man, then at the woman; and as he looked their faces came up through the mists of memory and grew plain to him, much as the face of a diver grows plain to the sight as it comes upward through still waters. Raja Sulong was the name of the man, he recalled--a roistering young scion of a royal house whose recklessness, extravagance, and courage had passed in those days into a byword. The woman--he would never unassisted have recognised her--was Bedah, the dancing-girl, of old the cause of much 'madness', as the emphatic vernacular phrase has it, to the love-lorn youths of the city. In those days she had been a dainty creature with bright eyes, sleek flower-decked hair, soft, delicately-tinted yellow cheeks, and a wondrous grace of movement. Now she was a hag, no less; for a quarter of a century brings old age to womanhood that blossoms prematurely before the teens are reached.
'But he did not love thee, mother,' sneered one of the other women present--'or so men say.'
'He did! He did!' screamed the woman who had of old been Bedah. 'But he was not fashioned in the mould of common men. He loved me, but I was what Fate had made of me--a woman of the bazaar! He had no appetite for sisa--the scraps that remain when others have had their fill; wherefore he threw me to the dogs--such dogs as you, and you, and you!' And with a furious gesture she indicated several of the men present.
'Better such "dogs", as thou namest us, than a white man!' said one, and he turned aside to spit as a token of his unutterable disgust.
'Yet is he the only man that I have ever known,' yelled the woman, her voice rising in tremulous, discordant sharps and flats. 'He was full of pity and of compassion, like Allah's Self, the Merciful, the Compassionate. To him women-folk were not oxen to be yoked for the service of man, their master, but queens; and as a queen he treated me--me, Bedah, the dancing-girl of the bazaar! I loved him and he loved me; but owing to the devil of perversity within him, never did our love know happiness. Yet had I rather been loved once after a fashion such as his than a thousand times by you--men of monstrous passions and dwarfish souls. Now hath he come back to rule over this our land, and you, who prate sedition against the Kompani and hatch clutches of addled plots, have a care, I say, have a care, for ye have now to deal with a Man!'
An angry growl broke from several of the men, and the old woman, drawing deeper into the shadows, fell to mumbling to herself as her emotions simmered away.
'To-morrow I go to him,' said Raja Sulong, 'and he will receive me brotherly for the sake of old days. The pig-folk of the Kompani are in sore doubt anent the free tribes of the frontier, for their minds are divided as to the quarter whence the threatened raid will come. They think, poor deluded ones, that this said raid will be like unto its forerunners--a police stockade surprised, a few slaughtered Sikhs sent screaming to the Terrible Place, some fifty villages in flames, and then retreat. They know not that the eve of the Great Combat is at hand, that the Jehad which shall see the extermination of the Infidel' (all present spat in unison at the word) 'draws hourly more near, and that the Holy One of Paloh hath promised victory, final and everlasting, to the Children of the Prophet. Say, Brother,' he continued, turning towards the shadow in which Philip had his seat, 'hast thou also a mind to take a hand in this game of hazard which we are about to play, with men's lives for the dice and kingdoms for the stakes?
'Allah aiding me,' said Philip from the darkness in deep, guttural tones, 'I too will take some little part in the said game!'
'And the plan, the plan!' said a youngster eagerly. 'Hath all been thought out with wisdom and with strategy?'
'Judge ye, then; judge!' said Raja Sulong, and while the rest of the party gathered about him, he proceeded, by means of the contents of a match-box, some cards, and bone counters to produce a rough map of the area which would be involved in the coming rising. Philip, watching keenly, heard the old names of men and places crop up one after the other; and though sprinkled among them there were a few which were to him unfamiliar, in half an hour he found himself in possession of the whole of the Raja's scheme.
'And to-morrow,' that worthy concluded triumphantly,'I go to Tuan Iskin, who now hath been made Governor over us, and he will receive me in brotherly fashion for the sake of old memories. Then shall I fill his ears with false rumours and vain report; and he, reposing in me much confidence, will order all things as we, who have framed this plan, would elect that they should be ordered. In this is plainly to be discerned the finger of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, who is mindful ever of his children.'
Philip rose to his feet and stepped forth very deliberately into the full glare of the damar-torches. 'What doth it profit to wait for the morrow?' he asked, in a soft and even voice. 'Speak now, friend, that he whom you name Tuan Iskin may hear.'
The recklessness that had been upon him that evening, as a veritable demoniacal possession, had mastered him now. Prudence had bidden him depart as he had come, undetected; but prudence he had thrown to the winds. He knew that he had but to follow her wise counsels, and presently he would find himself safe within the walls of Government House, where, armed with the authority that belongs to rulers, he would be able to baffle utterly the paltry schemes that had been laid bare for his inspection. But to-night, for a little space, he had promised himself, he would put off the things of his authority and would pass down, for the only, for the last time, into the world of men, to be there just a man among his fellows. If he were to defeat Raja Sulong and his conspiracies, he would compass his end unaided by powers external to himself. Therefore he rose and spoke, and waited with a tense, quivering excitement, that was all pleasurable, to see what would result.
For an instant those who heard him sat in stunned silence; then the room buzzed like a hive into which a stone has been flung. Men and women sprang to their feet--the former feeling for their weapons, the latter screaming their fear. Torches and brass ewers were overturned; bare feet scuttered and stamped; voices a-thrill with excitement gave vent to fierce ejaculations, though their tones were sunken to prudent whispers; and the flickering light of the unextinguished torches glinted upon the blades of knives held in nervous, eager hands.
A clutch fell upon Philip's arm, and he was drawn back against one of the immense bevelled pillars that stood at each corner of the dais; someone, crouching upon the floor at his feet, thrust a naked sundang--the stout Malayan broadsword--into his hand; and the voice of the hag, who of old had been Bedah the dancing-girl, whispered to him to be wary. The solid wooden pillar that protected his back from all possibility of assault filled him with a splendid confidence.
'Speak now, friend, if thou hast a mind to speak,' he said, and a laugh of sheer exultation broke from him. He had promised himself freedom from trammelling conventions, he had promised himself a revival of the memories of his youth. His wildest hopes had never suggested the possibility of a rough-and-tumble such as now was imminent, a situation such as this, which belonged to what had so long seemed a closed chapter of his history. Of old, too, life had spread inviting vistas ahead of him: now he had explored them and found them empty. His supreme indifference to the event, let what would befall, steeled him with a new courage. He was having a moment of big emotions, and the rest mattered not at all.
A breathless silence had fallen upon the room, out of which there presently emerged a voice that cried, 'He is a dead man! He hath mastered our secrets! He must die!'
'Hold ! Hold!' cried other voices.
Suddenly there was a scuttering rush made at him by three or four men, and Philip, swinging his broadsword, heard the flat of the blade tell loudly upon the faces of his opponents. He had as yet no occasion to use the edge, for two men went down and climbed painfully out of harm's way, while their fellows drew back into the darkness. 'Well struck, but why didst thou not slay?' piped Bedah at his feet.
A loud knocking came suddenly from the outer door, and a hushed silence followed on its heels. The knocking came again more insistent than before, blent with the rough voice of a white man demanding admittance in sadly mispronounced Malay.
'The police, the police!' whispered half a dozen voices, and the last torch was extinguished, while bare feet pattered hastily across the mat-strewn floor. Heavy blows were falling now upon the outer door. The police were breaking it in.
'Come, heart of my heart,' whispered Bedah; and holding his hand in hers, she led him down from the dais and into some by-passage of this human rabbit-warren. Still clutching his broadsword, he followed blindly through the intense darkness; and as the shouts of the police and the hammering upon the yielding door grew faint in the distance, he found himself being led out into the moonlight.
The passage gave upon a narrow alley--the identity of which came back to Philip's memory, as so many identities had recurred that night--and as Philip and his guide emerged through the straitened doorway a lithe figure flung itself upon them, the moonlight glinting on a bared blade. Philip saw in a flash the nervous, muscular arm upraised, the snake-like kris poised aloft, the fierce face of Raja Sulong--with flaming eyes, hair flying backward wildly, and tilted prominent chin--and knew that the broadsword he was himself raising in his defence was stayed, as weapons are arrested in a nightmare, by the lintel of the door.
With a grunt from Raja Sulong the kris descended, and Philip, feeling his impotence, nerved himself to receive the blow; but with a shrill scream Bedah threw herself upon him, and the snaky blade was buried in her back. Philip, freeing himself from her grip, leaped clear of the doorway, and concentrating all his strength and all his fury in a single stroke, brought the broadsword down upon the head of Raja Sulong, cleaving it to the cheek-bones. The man's body dropped limply across the body of the woman.
Philip, kneeling on one knee, turned Bedah on her side, and laid a hand above the region of her heart. No faintest throb responded. Stooping low above her, he kissed her reverently, and rising, turned and left her.
'A life for a life,' he murmured, 'and his was taken in self-defence, and hers was given for me. God forgive me this night's work, for never shall I forgive myself!'
The dawn was breaking greyly as Sir Philip Hanbury-Erskine was born once more into the official world of which he is still by no means the least distinguished ornament.
Next day, clothed and in his right mind, he wrote the famous Minute forecasting the plan of campaign which the natives were about to adopt in the threatened frontier rising--the Minute upon which rests the almost superstitious belief of his subordinates in his prescience and understanding of native character. Later, as in duty bound, he bade the police make diligent search for the author of the double murder reported to have occurred upon the previous night in an alley of the native city. Later still he opened a charity bazaar, and made a speech so strikingly appropriate to the occasion that it has been pirated and sold widely for the benefit of uninventive country vicars.
And when the day was ended, in the dead unhappy night, he told himself that old age had come upon him in the space of a single hour.
Last updated: September 2, 2002