“But when the desire cometh,
it is a tree of life.-The
Bible.
The first-class passengers, leastways
the passengers travelling first class, lay stretched
out side by side, one sex to starboard, t’other
to port, divided, however, more by the fear of the
eyes of the other sex, than by any hatch piled with
chairs, or ship rule pinned upon the notice-board,
and signed by the chief.
Surely the hours of the tropical nights
passed in sleep on deck are those in which we should
return thanks for lacking the gift of seeing ourselves
as the officer going on, or coming off watch, the fugitive
apprentice, or some stray passenger see us.
Human chrysalis, wrapt in the cocoon
of sheet or unsightly night attire, with starboard
boudoir cap awry, exposing the steel cracker or the
lanky lock; unsightly pedal extremities peeping from
the unfeminine pyjama; ruby lips, uncarmined, ajar;
whilst to port like rocks from the ocean, unshaven
chins rise unrebuked from blanket billows, and pyjama
button and buttonhole play touch across the unseemly,
unrestrained and unconfined masculine torso.
It was one of those insufferably hot
nights you get sometimes as you turn into the Hoogli,
when the smell of the land comes in sickening wafts,
and the enchantment of the East is considerably lessened
in your opinion by the oppression of the atmosphere.
You are going up the Hoogli! you are
passing the Sunderbunds! you can almost see the tigers
squatting in rows at the water’s edge! it is
the East! it is India!-also it is infernally
hot, and having retired to your cabin to disrobe,
you anathemise your stable companion who has been
likewise inspired; curse your overworked cabin steward
who has heaved your bedding on to the wrong site;
re-arrange everything and bed down.
Everyone was asleep when the light
of the full moon caused a subdued lustre under the
awnings, and a greenish light in Leonie’s wide-open,
staring eyes, as she suddenly swung herself over the
side of her bunk and slid unhurt to the floor.
She made an arresting picture as she
stood listening intently, her flimsy garment falling
away from her shoulders, leaving the slender white
back bare to the waist, while she held handfuls of
the transparent stuff crushed against her breast,
upon which lay a jewel hung from a gold chain.
Her feet were bare, her arms were
bare, and her tawny mass of hair hung in two thick
scented plaits to her dimpled knees; and she repeated
some words over and over again like one insane or
delirious.
“Ham abhi ate hai-ham abhi ate
hai.”
Which being translated means “I come-I
come.”
Without the slightest hesitation she
opened the door of N state-room, which she had
had to herself after Port Said, and which, as anyone
who has travelled on this particular boat will know,
gives on to the dining saloon; passed swiftly along
the narrow passage past the notice board and the head
steward’s cabin, and stood among the human cocoons
on deck.
For a moment she paused irresolute,
turned, and swiftly mounted the companion-way to the
bridge deck, her bare feet making no sound, her beautiful
body shining like ivory through the flimsy garment
she held gathered to her breast.
Oh! well for her was it that the ship
slept, and that the awnings made it almost impossible
for those on the bridge to see what took place on
the deck.
Though a report of sleep-walking on
board would only have served to broaden the lines
of laughter in the chief officer’s mercurial
soul, and deepen the lines of cynicism around the
second officer’s cynical mouth when the one
relieved the other on the bridge at the matutinal
hour of four a.m.
And very well for Leonie was it that
the captain had forbidden sleeping on his deck, and
that the high caste native who had come aboard at
Colombo was sitting on the port side as she approached.
Owing to his high caste, and the purity
of his habits, the young native had passed the days
apart from his fellow-passengers since he had come
aboard; and the days left were too few for the white
folk to show any curiosity concerning the handsome
man.
You don’t feel curious about
anything after almost five weeks seafaring; you feel
kind of stunned.
Leonie, therefore, had not noticed
him particularly as he sat apart with his delicate
oval face behind a book when she approached, or passed
his chair; neither had she felt the gentle luminous
eyes resting upon her from the nape of her sunkissed
neck to her slim ankle.
Nor did he now, long after midnight,
make any sign when, without touching the rails, she
came swiftly up the companion-ladder, bending her
bronze head to miss the edge of the awning; and he
made no movement as she sped past him, crossed the
deck to the starboard rail, and putting both hands
upon it, swung her body back as you do when you are
going to vault clear.
No movement of his body, but he gave
a jerk of his will-power which brought the veins out
like whipcord upon his forehead, and drove the nails
deep into the palms of his hands.
And in response, Leonie’s arms
slackened. She stood quite still, staring out
to where the Sunderbunds lay hidden under mist; then
she put one bare foot upon the lower rail, and swinging
herself up, sat sideways, leaning far over; in such
a position that the slightest lurch of the ship would
have sent her headlong into the water.
The native’s eyes narrowed to
slits, and his nostrils dilated strangely as he pitted
his will against the force which was impelling her.
He dared not speak, he dared not touch
her. For he knew that one moment of recognition,
one breath of scandal touching himself and the woman
he trailed, meant the crumbling of the altar he was
building stone by stone to his god.
For that reason he had taken the mail
instead of the slow boat she had chosen, and had thought
long before deciding to come aboard, even at Colombo.
He was afraid because of the evening
she had answered when he called her across London
to his side, by the image of Kali the Terrible in a
glass case; afraid that she might recognise him and
be on her guard, undoing all that he had done in the
last year in obedience to the mandate of the old priest.
Sleeping Leonie, having descended
from her perilous seat, stood for a moment with outflung
arms, looking across the waters; then turned and walked
swiftly and softly like a cat, straight up to the man
who rose. Sweetly she laughed up into his face
as she laid one little hand upon the great white cloak
which swung from his shoulders, unaware that in moving
her hand her own garment had slipped, and that her
beauty lay exposed like a lotus bud before his eyes.
She came so close that her bare shoulder
touched the fine white linen, and the curves of her
scarlet lips wet but a fraction of an inch from his
own; and her whimpered words in the eastern tongue
were as a flame to an oil well.
“This plant,” she murmured,
with the light of unholiness in her gleaming eyes,
“this plant is honey born-at the tip
of my tongue honey-mayest thou come unto
my intent!”
He answered softly in the same sonorous
tongue and she swayed towards him like a flower.
“About thee with an encompassing
sugar-cane have I gone, in order to absence of mutual
hatred; that thou mayest be one loving me, that thou
mayest be one not going away from me!”
Where is the dividing line?
What is it that causes the saint suddenly
to fling aside his holiness and hurl himself headlong
to perdition? or the sinner to hurl aside his evilness
and fling himself headlong into a monastery?
The jogging of memory, mostly, I think.
For what resolutions can not be conceived,
and accomplished, or broken by the scent of a flower,
the touch of a hand, or the feel of a piece of stuff.
Love, sudden, overpowering oriental
love consumed the man, passion scorched his soul,
and desire shook him from his dark head to the slender
feet.
He was awake and the girl was asleep,
and craving to set his seal upon her in her unconsciousness,
he bent towards her until the fierceness of his breath
disturbed the lacey frill about her breast, bringing
to view the jewel suspended from a golden chain.
Instantly his joined hands were raised
towards his face mechanically in prayer, his eyes
burned with the fanaticism of his creed, and his face
became old in knowledge.
The dividing line? the lifted veil?
Nay! nothing but a jewel with the form and the colouring
of a cat’s-eye, which had cunningly winked up
at him from the secret places of the girl’s
bosom; so that she returned to her cabin with her
body unscathed, and her soul on the edge of the precipice.
And the most razor-tongued, detested
colonel mem-sahib of the line in India thanked her
stars that the mosquitoes had roused her frantically,
but just in time, to see the trailing edge of Leonie’s
indecorous night attire disappear through the door.
Aloofness, allied to perfect shoes
and silken hose, will find a woman more enemies on
board than all the pretty faces and frocks in the
world; and if, in addition, she can heap on
such items as a seductive face and figure; and if
gossip via the newspapers can and does supply
information as to the contents of her pass-book, plus
savoury rumours concerning mysterious incidents in
her past; well! ’twere better for that woman
to stop at home, bob her hair, and take to that field
of literature which is not bound on any side by the
hedge of convention.
So it came about that her friends,
after stumbling up the gangway at the Kidderpore Docks,
with handkerchiefs held against their noses to protect
them from the effluvia wafted from Garden Reach, lifted
their eyebrows slightly at the frostiness of the adieux
between their guest and her fellow-passengers.
And no one in the scramble and flurry
noticed the elderly pock-marked ayah who had been
engaged as Leonie’s bodywoman as she lifted the
hem of the mem-sahib’s skirt and laid it against
her forehead, and touched the instep of the high caste
native when he passed behind the girl and disappeared
in the crowd of his countrymen which opened up a way
before him.
An ayah, who, to the utter astonishment
of her friends, had given up the high position of
head body-woman to a Ranee of the North, in order
to accept the humble post of ayah to a mem-sahib.
A post she had gained by the baffling
methods of the East which bind each man’s work
to that of his neighbour with an unbreakable, untraceable
chain; and gained too, over the sleek heads of many
of her sister ayahs, who, armed with countless and
phenomenally laudatory chits, had squatted patiently
for hours in the servants’ quarters of the bungalow
at Alipore.