Life's Handicap eBook

Holden could neither eat nor sleep.  The heavens sent down eight inches of rain in that night and washed the earth clean.  The waters tore down walls, broke roads, and scoured open the shallow graves on the Mahomedan burying-ground.  All next day it rained, and Holden sat still in his house considering his sorrow.  On the morning of the third day he received a telegram which said only, ’Ricketts, Myndonie.  Dying.  Holden relieve.  Immediate.’  Then he thought that before he departed he would look at the house wherein he had been master and lord.  There was a break in the weather, and the rank earth steamed with vapour.

He found that the rains had torn down the mud pillars of the gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that had guarded his life hung lazily from one hinge.  There was grass three inches high in the courtyard; Pir Khan’s lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch sagged between the beams.  A gray squirrel was in possession of the verandah, as if the house had been untenanted for thirty years instead of three days.  Ameera’s mother had removed everything except some mildewed matting.  The tick-tick of the little scorpions as they hurried across the floor was the only sound in the house.  Ameera’s room and the other one where Tota had lived were heavy with mildew; and the narrow staircase leading to the roof was streaked and stained with rain-borne mud.  Holden saw all these things, and came out again to meet in the road Durga Dass, his landlord,—­ portly, affable, clothed in white muslin, and driving a Cee-spring buggy.  He was overlooking his property to see how the roofs stood the stress of the first rains.

‘I have heard,’ said he, ‘you will not take this place any more, sahib?’

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘Perhaps I shall let it again.’

‘Then I will keep it on while I am away.’

Durga Dass was silent for some time.  ‘You shall not take it on, sahib,’ he said.  ’When I was a young man I also—­, but to-day I am a member of the Municipality.  Ho!  Ho!  No.  When the birds have gone what need to keep the nest?  I will have it pulled down—­the timber will sell for something always.  It shall be pulled down, and the Municipality shall make a road across, as they desire, from the burning-ghat to the city wall, so that no man may say where this house stood.’

AT THE END OF THE PASSAGE

 The sky is lead and our faces are red,
 And the gates of Hell are opened and riven,
 And the winds of Hell are loosened and driven,
 And the dust flies up in the face of Heaven,
 And the clouds come down in a fiery sheet,
 Heavy to raise and hard to be borne. 
 And the soul of man is turned from his meat,
 Turned from the trifles for which he has striven
 Sick in his body, and heavy hearted,
 And his soul flies up like the dust in the sheet
 Breaks from his flesh and is gone and departed,
 As the blasts they blow on the cholera-horn. 
                            Himalayan.