“See that beggar? ... Got ’im,”
Seven hundred yards away, and a full two hundred down
the hillside, the deserter of the Aurangabadis pitched
forward, rolled down a red rock, and lay very still,
with his face in a clump of blue gentians, while a
big raven flapped out of the pine wood to make investigation.
“That’s a clean shot, little man,”
said Mulvaney.
Learoyd thoughtfully watched the smoke clear away.
“Happen there was a lass tewed up wi’
him, too,” said he.
Ortheris did not reply. He was staring across
the valley, with the smile of the artist who looks
on the completed work.
By the hoof of the Wild Goat up-tossed
From the Cliff where She lay in
the Sun,
Fell the
Stone
To the Tarn where the daylight is
lost;
So She fell from the light of the
Sun,
And alone.
Now the fall was ordained from the
first,
With the Goat and the Cliff and
the Tarn,
But the
Stone
Knows only Her life is accursed,
As She sinks in the depths of the
Tarn,
And alone.
Oh, Thou who hast builded the world!
Oh, Thou who hast lighted the Sun!
Oh, Thou who hast darkened the Tarn!
Judge Thou
The sin of the Stone that was hurled
By the Goat from the light of the
Sun,
As She sinks in the mire of the
Tarn,
Even now—even
now—even now!
—From the Unpublished Papers of
McIntosh Jellaluidin.
“Say is it dawn, is it dusk in thy Bower, Thou
whom I long for, who longest for me? Oh, be it
night—be it”—Here he fell
over a little camel-colt that was sleeping in the
Serai where the horse-traders and the best of the
blackguards from Central Asia live; and, because he
was very drunk indeed and the night was dark, he could
not rise again till I helped him. That was the
beginning of my acquaintance with McIntosh Jellaludin,
When a loafer, and drunk, sings “The Song of
the Bower,” he must be worth cultivating.
He got off the camel’s back and said, rather
thickly, “I—I—I’m
a bit screwed, but a dip in Loggerhead will put me
right again; and, I say, have you spoken to Symonds
about the mare’s knees?”
Now Loggerhead was six thousand weary miles away from
us, close to Mesopotamia, where you mustn’t
fish and poaching is impossible, and Charley Symonds’
stable a half mile farther across the paddocks.
It was strange to hear all the old names, on a May
night, among the horses and camels of the Sultan Caravanserai.
Then the man seemed to remember himself and sober
down at the same time. We leaned against the camel
and pointed to a corner of the Serai where a lamp
was burning.
“I live there,” said he, “and I
should be extremely obliged if you would be good enough
to help my mutinous feet thither; for I am more than
usually drunk—most—most phenomenally
tight But not in respect to my head. ’My
brain cries out against’—how does
it go? But my head rides on the—rolls
on the dunghill I should have said, and controls the
qualm.”
