Fever Birds

Carlin had been listless for a day or two. This was several weeks after her forty-two hours on Mitha Baba. They were still living in Malcolm M'Cord's bungalow. Skag woke in the night, not with a dream, but rather with a memory. He was broad awake and recalled an incident that had entirely escaped his day-thoughts for a long time. It had to do with that hard-testing period, just after his meeting with Carlin, when he had journeyed to Poona to confer with the eldest brother, Roderick Deal, and had been forced to wait more than a month. In that interval he had learned about hyenas at first hand, through the plight of Beatrice Hichens and the children; also his servant Bhanah had come to him, and the Great Dane, Nels; still it had been a vague stretch of days, in retrospect.

It was during the return-trip to Hurda that the thing happened which held him now as he lay broad awake. Toward twilight, as the train halted at one of the civil stations, a white-covered cot was lifted aboard. There was a kind of silence about that station. The mountains were near on the left hand which was to the West. The white glare of Indian day had softened into delicate rose. A haze of orange and bronze lay upon the lower slopes of the mountains, magically enriching the greens; and the blue against which the mountains were contoured, was pure and immense and still. It was difficult to remember the fret and pain and discolouration of a world bathed in so vast a peace. . . .

At first he thought that the body on the cot was in its shroud. The hush about it and from the mountains touched him with a feeling that he had not quite known before, the depth of it having to do with Carlin. Then he saw, back of the natives who had lifted the cot, yet not too near, the figure of an Englishman of the Military—standing quietly by, as if casually ordering a platoon of soldiers in the duty of loading the train. Now Skag looked at the man's face. It had nothing to do with the lax grace of the officer's figure. This was the face of a man who could endure anything without a cry—a narrow face, tanned and a bit hard possibly from years of self-repression—a silent man, doubtless loved for the feeling around him, rather than because of what he was accustomed to say or do—a face stricken now to the verge of chaos—unchanging anguish of fear and loneliness and sorrow imprinted from within. A strange white glow, that had nothing to do with the tan, shone forth from the skin—etheric disruption, subtler than the breakdown of mere cells. This man would put a bullet in his brain if pressed too far, but he would not cry out. Just now he was close to his limit.

Skag knew something of what passed in the English officer's heart, because he himself was learning what love means. Before his hour with Carlin in the afterglow, on their way back from the monkey glen, he would never have dreamed that there was such feeling in the world; in fact, he would have been unable to read the vivid story of it in the officer's face. . . . So much in a second or two.

The cot had been partly lifted into the coach. The face now was uncovered—the white wasted face of a lovely woman, a woman still living; an utterly delicate face, telling the story of one who had never met a rough impact from the world. It was as if there had always been a strong hand between her and the grit and the grind of world-affairs—first her father's and then the lover's. In the great silence, the eyelids opened. It seemed that night and chill had suddenly come in. The lips moved. The most mournful and hopeless voice spoke straight into Skag's eyes:

"Oh, won't you please stop those fever birds!"

Skag supposed it an isolated sentence of delirium. He didn't understand. There was a drive of drama or tragedy back of it, but his mind did not give him details. He did not see the English officer again. He did not know if he entered the train. One thing Skag knew: Deep under that narrow masculine face there was a capacity for feeling that this officer's men never saw; that his closest associates never saw. The American reverenced the secret. . . . Sometimes during the hushes of the night, when the train stopped for a moment, Skag lying awake, heard the voice of the woman. There was a feeling from it utterly strange to him. It carried him out of himself, as if he shared something of her delirium and something of the man's agony.

The next day was one of the hardest that Skag ever lived, for Carlin was not at Hurda to meet him. She had gone with a strange elephant into the country. That was the day of the chase on the great young elephant Gunpat Rao, the day in which the story of the monster Kabuli unfolded. The face of the man at the mountain station and the sentence of the woman were completely erased from his surface consciousness, as the memory of an illness.

That was months away, and life had been very full in between. . . .

Carlin said she was just tired, when he went to her room in the morning. She looked at him long. It suddenly came to him vaguely, that she wasn't thinking; rather that her eyes were merely turned to his face. A queer breathlessness came to him a little later, as her head rolled to one side—such a sinking of weakness in the movement. It reminded him with a shock that she had never seemed quite tireless since that long ride on Mitha Baba's neck. But never before had her face turned away from him.

And now he saw a certain inimitable loveliness of her. There were no words to describe the last—only that it was Spirit made of all the dusks and all the white fires. There was something little about her that called an undreamed-of tenderness; and something superb and mysterious, so vast that he could be held in it like a toy in the hands.

Burning Indian day was walled and curtained and barred from the place where she lay. White of the walls, white of her face, white of the pallet—the rest a breathless, ungleaming shadow that held a heat not from the sun, as it seemed, but from the centre of the earth.

. . . Skag was away in timelessness and an unfamiliar space. This space was not fixed to one dimension, but moved back and forth. As Bhanah came to him, he saw more than Bhanah animate upon the features—like someone who had belonged always, whom he had known for ages, whom Carlin had always known. So many things struck him differently now; as if they belonged not just to this crisis, but to a crisis of eons.

Yet externals in the main were so trifling. Carlin didn't eat; people seemed to take that as significant. Malcolm M'Cord came. Margaret Annesley came. Horace Dickson's father came. Skag went to the bazaars and back again. He went to the monkey glen. It was all a blur. Once he caught himself walking on the great Highway-of-all-India; and once deep in the jungle. He passed the civil surgeon of Hurda on his own verandah; and someone said that the old "family doctor" was to come from Poona. . . . Now he was in Carlin's room and Carlin was looking at him. He saw her face the moment he entered the room, and the fact that he had come in from the fierce daylight into the shadows did, not seem to blur his eyes, even for a second.

Her people in the room—Bhanah, the ayah, the civil surgeon, Ian Deal and someone else—but the line from her eyes to Skag was not crossed. The heart of the man leaped from what he saw—the transcendent understanding which needed no words; the look of all looks that meant herself—a little lingering smile on the lips, the endless lure of her wise eyes.

But all that was whipped away as he came three steps nearer her couch. The wonder of it was not taken, but the old pain returned; rather, the pain had been there all the time, but he had forgotten for a space. He saw the ashen and frail face again and the inexpressible weariness of her eyes, too tired to tell of it, too tired to stay! Then the face of the English officer appeared for his eyes—hovering back of the people, in a background of mountains. . . .

Carlin seemed listening. What she heard came out of a grey intolerable monotony; but still her eyes held his. They seemed concentrated upon some weakness of his nature—some dementia that had been before her for years, that had confronted her in every highway of life, frightened away every opportunity and spoiled every day. Her hand lifted just slightly, the palm turned toward him:

"Oh, won't you please stop those fever birds?"

. . . Then one day Skag, standing in the darkened library, heard Margaret Annesley and one of her friends speaking together in the verandah.

"But does she really hear anything?" the friend asked.

"Oh, yes; though you never hear them unless you are ill with the fever."

"How strange and terrible, and is it a particular fever?"

"Jungle fever, dear. It comes to us sometimes of itself, but more often after a shock. . . . Carlin's night in the dark—"

Skag's arm lifted in a curve to cover his face as if from a blow. . . . Yet Margaret Annesley was not quite right; for he had learned to hear what Carlin heard:

From far away very faint, curiously thin tones came to him; always repeating one word, with an upward inflection, like a question. Every repetition sounded the fraction of a degree higher than the last, till they were far above the compass of any human voice:

"Fee-vur? fee-vur? fee-vur? fee-vur? — — —" and on and on.

When it began, quite low, he heard infinite patience in it; gradually, it grew full of fear; then it climbed into a veritable panic of terror.

When it stopped at last, on a long distracted "u-u-u-r-r-r-r?"—he heard the male bird's answer, sounding nearer, in deep tones of utter hopelessness, with a prolonged descending inflection:

"Bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r!"—the Indian word for fever, repeated only three times. Then the female began again; so, day and night—night and day.

After he had once heard it, he could always hear it. So he learned that they never rest. Always, by listening, he could hear it at some point of its maddening scale—its insane assurance of the hopelessness of jungle fever.

Skag faced the ultimatum. This was different. It had nothing to do with his world of animal dangers. This was a slow devouring which he could not touch nor stay. Carlin was melting before his eyes. . . . The brothers had come in, one by one, from over India. (Margaret Annesley had attended to that.) Skag met them, moved quietly about, yet could not remember their faces one from another. He answered when spoken to, but retained no registration as to whom he had spoken, or what had been said. Sometimes he was alone for a few moments with Carlin; and when her eyes were open he was appalled by the growing sense of distance in them. Then before she spoke, he would hear what she heard:

"Bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r! bhoo-kha-a-a-r-r-r!"

There were queer rifts of light in his mind, instants when he realised that all the hard moments of the past had prepared him for this. He saw clearly that he could not have endured, even to the present hour, without every experience life had shown him—especially without the difficult ones. He lived again the great moments—all the Indian afterglows that were identified with Carlin—perfect lessons of mercy she had taught him, through the very yearning of his own heart in her presence to be worthy of days with her. Never useless words from Carlin, but always the vivid meaning. He had been slow at first to see how much more magic were their days together, because she paid for them with a night-and-day readiness to go forth to the call of service to others.

Yet through all, he was utterly, changelessly desolate. Not only bitterness, but an icy bitterness, was upon all meaning and movement of life. It was almost like a conspiracy that no part in ministration was demanded of him by those who were now in his house. The doctors talked to Miss Annesley or to the servants; the brothers came and went with their fear and fidelity—but spoke to Skag of other things than the illness. Still, in his heart a concept slowly formed—that he had something which Carlin needed now; that this something had to do, though it was different, with the power he used to change animals. It seemed absurd even to think of this—with all these wise ones around him, not perceiving it. They formed a barrier of their thoughts which kept him from expression. He stood apart for hours as the days passed, thinking of his part; and yet the icy bitterness held him from action.

Sometimes his heart seemed dying; chill already upon it. Again he seemed filled with a strange vitality, other than his own. This phenomenon frightened him more than the first, so that he would hurry to look at Carlin lest the strength had come from her. He tried to think the strength back to her; to think all his own besides; but there was no drive to his mind-work because he did not have faith in himself.

At length came the night when the fever birds ceased for Carlin. Out of a great soft depth of tone which no one but Skag had heard before (which he had thought no other would hear until there was a baby in her arms), her words came with unforgettable intensity:

"Oh, the jungle shadows! The jungle shadows!"

After that he did not know whether it was night or day, until he heard the end of a sentence from the doctor from Poona:

". . . only four hours left to break the fever."

The room was in great still heat—heat of a burning night, a smothering heat to the couch from a distant lamp—the fire of the day coming up from the ground like flashes of anger. . . .

A strange stillness was settling on everything; the silence before had not been so heavy. The old family doctor from Poona came into it; and Margaret Annesley stood by him near the bed.

"Carlin has not spoken for more than an hour," Skag heard her tell him.

It seemed long before he answered:

"She has passed too far down into the shadows. She will not speak again."

The words came to Skag as if through limitless space; but the last ones penetrated deep and laid hold.

Margaret went out swiftly and the doctor followed. He looked a very, very old man—with his head bent, like that.

. . . She will not speak again!

The universe was falling into disruption.

It was all white where she lay. Only the heavy masses of her dark hair, spread on the pillows and across one shoulder, showed any colour—shadowed gold, shadowed red.

. . . She will not speak again!

Seven tall men filed into the room before Skag's eyes, and ranged on either side of her. These were her own brothers. Skag felt the vague pang again, of being alien to them.

Roderick Deal, the eldest—the one with the inscrutable blackness of eyes—leaned and kissed the white, white forehead; and a fold of the splendid hair.

One figure had gone down at the lower end of the bed—long arms stretched over her feet—slender dark hands clenching and unclenching. The detail of it cut into Skag, like a spear of keen pain through chaos. Returned away—it was intolerable.

. . . An arm fell about Skag's shoulders.

"Brother?" Roderick Deal's fathomless eyes drew Skag's and held them while he spoke: "We are leaving you to be alone with her—at the last!"

The arm gripped as he added:

"You are to know this—we will not fail you, now!" and he was gone.
They were all gone.

Faint tones of the fever bird, ascending, came from far out. Other tones, descending, came from greater distances within. . . . She will not speak again!

Bhanah touched his sleeve.

"My Master!" The man's nearness of spirit, as he spoke, vibrated into Skag and roused him to something different, something clearer. "A mystic from the Vindha mountains has but just reached this place. They are very powerful, having great knowledge. This man is blood-kin to her. Give me permission and I will call him."

Skag looked into Bhanah's eyes, finding the ancient friendship there; then he said only one word:

"Hurry!"

Bhanah leaped away across the lawn and Skag turned to stand by Carlin's side.

The silence seemed absolute now; the whiteness absolute. He remembered that she had gone down into shadows. He bent his head toward her breast and looked down.

. . . Sense of time was gone—even the endlessness of it. Sense of whiteness was gone. His vision wakened, as he groped through deepening shadows, on and on—till they turned to utter blackness. In that utter blackness appeared a thread of pure blue; he traced it back up till it entered Carlin's body. There, it was not blue any more, but a faint glow of high white light centred in her breast and shed—like moonlight—through all her person.

The heart of his heart called to her. . . . There was no answer.

. . . He became aware that a tall slender man stood at his side; but it did not disturb him. The man wore long straight robes of camel's hair. The sense of him was strength. At last he spoke:

"Son, why do you call to her? She cannot come back—of herself. You cannot fetch her back."

"Why?" breathed Skag. "I ought to be able to."

"No," the man said kindly, "you are not able to—I am not able to—no created being is able to."

The man emphasised the word created.

"What can?" Skag asked.

"First you must learn not to depend on yourself; then you must know something of the law."

The man was holding one hand out, above Carlin's head—quite still, but not close, while he spoke. Skag felt his strength more than at first.

"Do you want her for yourself?" he asked.

Skag looked into his kind dark eyes—his own eyes speaking for him.

"Do you want her for her own sake—because she loves you? Is it that you have knowledge what will be best for her? Did you create her—did you prepare her ultimate destiny, do you even know it?"

"I know that I am in it!"

Skag answered very low, but with conviction. His eyes were agonised; but the man bored into them, without relenting.

"Do you want her to come back from the margin of departure, for the sake of others—for the sake of her ministry to their need?"

The answer to this last question came up in Skag—waves on waves, rolling into engulfing billows.

"That answer may avail!" the man said conclusively. "If it is accepted—if your love for her is perfect enough to forget itself—if you are able to make your mind altogether inactive—"

"Then how shall I work—if not with my mind?" Skag interrupted.

"First know that you yourself can do nothing." The man spoke with soft, slow emphasis. "No created being has power to do that kind of work."

"What has?" Skag asked.

"A Power that we are not worthy to name," the man answered, with reverence. "If it accepts your reason why she should stay—if your love is found to be without tarnish of self—it will work her restoration; not otherwise.

"Make yourself still. Give your mind to the apprehension of her nature—till your mind has come to be as if it were not. . . . Peace!"

The man dropped his head a moment, before he moved to stand at the food of her bed. With his eyes on her face he leaned, laying his palms over her feet; then, seeming to float backward to the wall, he sank slowly—to sit as the Hindus do.

The sense of his strength seemed to fill the whole room. It was the last outward thing Skag was aware of.

. . . It was as if Skag had passed through eons of ages trying to put away all the tender yearning anguish of his love for Carlin. He came to know her as a beneficent entity of high voltage—needed in more than one place.

It must be that he should make it possible for her to serve here, more potently than there—else she could not be held back. With all his strength, he would try.

"Son," the mystic's voice rang out, "now give yourself to your love for her—with your strength!"

Presently a warm glow flowed up into Skag's feet, filling his person and extending his physical sentiency into her body. That body was utterly bound in a strange vise—very heavy; as if every particle of every part were separately frozen.

. . . It seemed to Skag as if he could not breathe.

"Breathe!" the mystic said, as he rose from the floor to stand on his own feet.

That instant an impact of force from him struck Skag like a blow; and the next moment his sense of strength had become like that of twenty men—it was hard to bear.

"Steady—slow!" It was a soft, but imperative order.

Gradually the warmth increased; not in degree, but in the rate of its flow. At last it was a surge, so intense that Skag could feel his own blood-pulse—a different kind of pulse.

The need of help was very great. There was a faintness—surely more terrible than any death!

"Fear not!" the mystic called tenderly. "The Supreme Power cares for her—more than you can!"

As he heard these words, a great tide rose up into Skag, penetrating his body and his mind and the uttermost deeps of his consciousness. A vast sweeping tide—it descended below all depths, it ascended above all heights, it compassed all reaches. It was ineffable love—transcendent. It was for her! But it was for him—too! Nay—it was for every living thing in this mortal condition and in all other conditions!

. . . Carlin turned her head a little, lifted one hand a little and sighed deeply. Then she moved till she lay easily on one side, just murmuring:

"I think I'll sleep."

Carlin had spoken again!

"Son" (the mystic spoke very softly, while he drew Skag to a large couch in the same room), "it is finished. She is altogether safe now. You should be this far away; stretch yourself here and give yourself to sleep also—it will be best for her if you do.

"Be at perfect rest—there is no fear. (I will give Bhanah directions.) Now—Peace be on thee; and on thy house, forever!"

His words permitted no answer. He went and smiled down on Carlin. He touched her forehead with his finger-tips—he even kissed her curling hair.

"Child of my brother's love!" he said softly, as he turned away.

Then Skag also slept.

*******

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