CHAPTER II
THE PROOF
The moon, surrounded by fleecy clouds, was climbing the eastern sky, as a man drew his body slowly out of the water of the tank that lay over against the main portals of Angkor Wat.
He clambered to the summit of the causeway.
Before him, the temple rose a huge, shapeless bulk of shadows, out of which its gigantic cones sprang heavenward, with outlines sharply defined. Behind him, emerging from the obscurity, the causeway, its flags white in the moonlight, lay like an immense prostrate column.
Stepping deftly, one foot at a time, into the loop of a cotton waist-skirt, he pulled the dry garment upward to shield his nakedness, and let slip his dripping loin-clout. Next, by means of a few practised turns and twists, he converted the cloth into the likeness of a pair of short, baggy pants; and standing erect, stretched himself luxuriously, and brushed the drops of moisture from his eyes and hair.
The years which had passed since that fateful afternoon, upon which chance had revealed to him the secret of his birth, had changed him from boy to man, and by them the early promise of beauty had been splendidly fulfilled. His features, while retaining their distinctively Hindu character, were now more strongly marked. The nose was straighter, the chin more firm, but the thin lips conveyed a suggestion of sensuality, in spite of the rigid asceticism of their lines. His head, under its close covering of fine, black hair, was small and shapely, lending to him a delusive air of stature. His hands and feet, too, were small, bearing testimony, as did every part of him, to the high-caste blood that ran in his veins. He moved as move the wild things of the forest—every motion graceful, clean, and sure, eloquent of the immense reserve of force that freed it from all trace of effort.
Almost nude, bronze-tinted, statuesque, magnificently developed by the unremitting toil which, as yet, was making, not breaking, his manhood, he stood there in the transparent darkness of the moonlight as perfectly fashioned a young animal as ever humanity had bred. Nature herself had stamped him with the seal of the great ruling caste; yet no Brahman's wafer was on his forehead, his body was clothed in a single coarse garment, the palms of his hands were roughened by constant labour, and he himself, an unconsidered unit in a host of toilers, had been until that night a serf and a hewer of stone.
Fate had decreed that his days should be spent among the casteless folk, who were as driven cattle before their Brahman lords; but from that day, long ago, when the water had whispered its secret to his childish ears, he had hugged to his heart a dear, inspiring conviction. In that hour he had been aware of something that stirred within him and matched that which the reflection of his features had revealed—the soul of the Dominant Race moving, like a babe in the womb, in the heart and brain of this its unacknowledged son. An excitement of pride and of delight, a sudden, new, strange sense of power—of latent force, of potential greatness—had shaken the boy with long-drawn passionate throbs; and thereafter the knowledge that he was not as other toilers in the dust had sustained and uplifted him. To his fellows life was bereft of hope. It stretched away before them, an endless vista of monotony and labour, till it lost itself at last in the smoke of the burning-ghats. But to Chun it was full of promise. The days through which he was living were merely a period of trial, of probation. Fortified by the conviction, which he cherished with so triumphant a certainty, and hid from his fellows with so jealous a care, he could make terms with the unendurable. The pains and troubles of the moment were powerless to oppress the spirit of one who lived, not for the present, but for the future. When the appointed hour should strike, he would slough his pretended inferiority, as a snake sheds its worn-out skin, and would suddenly blaze forth, before the eyes of those who had known him for one casteless like themselves, a demigod confessed.
In anticipation of that hour he prepared himself with a diligence and resolution that never slackened. With the aid of old Slat, the wise man, he acquired a knowledge of the sacred script, such as was rarely possessed by men of his supposed estate; and he had even made a little acquaintance with the holy, forbidden books. And the ease wherewith he had gotten this lore had itself been full of wonderful surprises. It had been as though he remembered, rather than learned—remembered things half forgotten and now recalled to memory. Once more it was the Brahman blood astir in his brain, bringing with it that pulsing sense of power.
Secretly, too, he had performed a thousand acts of purification, the better to fit himself for the moment, when, as he surely believed, he should be received back into caste by the demigods, his brethren. While he awaited the dawning of that day, he herded with the dull masses of his fellows, and with them prostrated himself before the priest-princes, the offspring of those who, in the beginning, sprang from the mouth of Purusha, the Fount of the Universe, the eternal Soul of Things. But always he felt that he, in truth, belonged to the number of the adored, not to the adorers; and already, almost unconsciously, he lorded it over the latter, less by virtue of his thews and sinews, than by the magic force of mind.
Thus, through childhood on into early manhood, the secret of his divinity had been to Chun a wondrous spinner of dreams. How good life was—to taste, to smell, to touch—while these great visions made of it a fairy tale that yet was true!
Breathlessly he had awaited the time when, having come to man's estate, he should put the faith that was in him to its final, supreme test—the test that lay ever ready to his hand. But when at last he knew himself free to act, he was long restrained by fears and hesitations. The dream was in itself so beautiful that he feared to shatter it. Morever, the awful punishment of failure terrorised his imagination.
In the angle formed by the causeway and the western extremity of the great basic platform of the Wat, a tank held its clear waters within massive walls of stone, wonderfully carved. This was the bathing-place sacred to the use of those demigods who performed the offices of their religion within the temple. Only a Brahman might lave himself here, and for one of the low-caste folk to dip in it so much as a finger-tip was untold pollution and defilement. Also it was known to all men that, save for the twice-born, these waters were a flaming death—that they would peel and strip the flesh from off the bones of the impious one who dared to let his unclean hand so much as brush their surface. Folk drew away from them shuddering, as from a boiling caldron, and there were living even then in Angkor one or two wrecked and mangled wretches who, in a moment of folly, had set at defiance the universal belief.
For months Chun had been haunted and obsessed by the thought of that placid pool, in which there lurked, perhaps, a dreadful death. Again and again those calm waters, so tranquil in their massive confinement beneath the star-set sky, had drawn him to themselves with a compelling, magnetic attraction again and again, his young blood rebelling against the peril in its fierce love of life, he had recoiled, terror-stricken and ashamed. Death, fearful, unspeakably agonising—death in this life and in all future lives—glared at him from those still depths. Though his faith in his godhead was so firmly rooted in him as to have become an integral part of his being, yet was the risk appalling. He clung to the dream, longed hungrily for the reality, but still was held a prisoner by his fears.
And now to-night, at last, desire had won the mastery; and with bursting heart and throbbing veins, he had nerved himself for the worst that might befall, had drawn his muscles taut to resist the threatened agony, had closed his eyes, and with a great outcry to the Gods, had leaped.
The surprise, that yet was no surprise; the sudden release from the tense, agonising suspense; the wild triumph that flared up in him like a roaring flame; the glad, intoxicating relief that had possessed him, as the waters broke cool and refreshing about his fevered body—had almost shocked him into insensibility; but instantly he had recovered, and had drunk his fill of the most magical of all elixirs—success snatched gloriously from the very teeth of death.
Later, lying on his back and gazing upward through the shadows of the night at the immense, brooding mass of the Wat, darker than the enveloping darkness, gradually there had stolen upon him, with a force never hitherto experienced, the tremendous conviction of his godhead. Like some celestial, healing balm it descended upon the soul of him, dowering him suddenly with a sense of ineffable peace; so calm was it, so certain, so strengthening and all-pervading. He glowed with a triumph which steadied and uplifted, while it filled and thrilled him. All his childlike faith awoke to add force and glory to the impression. It was as though the sacred waters, which were powerless to do him hurt, were breathing new virtue and vigour into him through every gaping pore. Almost could he hear the footfalls of the Deva, the Shining Ones—of Indra, Lord of the Air and of the Thunders—of Brahma, the universal, self-existing soul—of Atharvan, the Proto-Priest—passing out from the holy places, builded for their worship, to administer this unique baptism to him, the offspring of the Gods.
Long that vision held him; but in the end he drew his body out of the water, and donned the coarse garment that was his daily wear. Then, a god confessed, he stood, godlike, on the flags of the big causeway, delighting in the strength and beauty of his young manhood, and in the glorious, strange world into which he had been new-born—the world which the god in him should presently shape to his will.
Slowly the moon was freeing itself from its escort of clouds. Before Chun, at the causeway's end, the wide stairway that leads upward to the main entrance of the cloisters lay heaped in shadow. On either side of it, dimly seen, great cobras, seven-headed, fashioned monstrously in stone, writhed into the darkness. Lions in strange postures, and hideous giants, resting immense, folded hands on grounded clubs, flanked them, vague and ghostly in the uncertain light. Above them, the long, uneven line of the cloisters' roof-ridge ran away and lost itself in the obscurity to right and left; and over it again uprose the solid bulk of the temple and the huge cones in which it culminated. Every moment the strength of the moonlight increased, touching tenderly the carved edges of the towers, silvering the fretted stone-work, revealing hidden tints in moss and lichen, suggesting more than it disclosed, plunging great masses of the Wat into mystery and gloom. But the causeway, raised above the surrounding enclosure to a height of a dozen feet, was white, all white, with every rigid line of it clearly defined; and the man, standing there alone upon it, with a long, black shadow extending over the flags behind him, became suddenly conspicuous.
He had forgotten prudence, forgotten the necessity for caution, for concealment. The intoxication that flooded his brain was of such overpowering potency that it left no space for the thoughts of every day. He, in his newfound divinity, forgot to fear mankind, or even his fellows, the demigods.
With a bell-like clink of bangles, a girl stepped suddenly from the shadows huddled about the stairway of the temple, placed soft fingers upon his arm and drew him into concealment. As she emerged from the darkness, and ere she again vanished into it, dragging him after her, Chun saw her, as in a flash, and took in the vision of her with a wonderful completeness.
She was very small and slender and beautifully formed, as though the Gods who fashioned her had taken joy in the exquisite perfection of their handiwork; and the slim symmetry of her figure was delicately revealed by the soft silk cloth which, draped across her breasts, and leaving the right shoulder nude, fell from waist to ankles. Her arms, bare, shapely, something over thin—little virginal arms—showed against that vesture like foam upon a wave. Chun was struck breathless by the extreme whiteness of her—the whiteness and the divine frailty.
The small, oval face, under its low, wise forehead, was of an even transparent pallor. Her deep brown eyes looked out, with steady gaze, from beneath brows tenderly curved. Her lips, full and parted, lent to her face its single note of rich colour; but for all their fulness, they were firm, and from behind them peeped two tiny sharp teeth, shaped like the poison-fangs of a snake, which broke the evenness of their fellows. But her chiefest glory was her hair. It was very dark, with a marvellous deep shadow in it, such as falls at dusk in the secret places of the woods. Dry and soft, it waved back in two rounded billows from a natural parting on her forehead. The pallor of her face enhanced its beauty; its darkness etherialised the extreme whiteness of her; and the deep, grave eyes, glancing from beneath it, borrowed therefrom an added mystery.
Those eyes were bent upon Chun as she stepped toward him, scanning him closely, and as she touched his arm, they were of a sudden clouded, till their brown was almost black. For an instant the little pale face became fixed and rigid; and across it there swept a gust of some strange magic of the emotions, or, it might be, a subtle exhalation from the well-nigh obliterated memories of lives long passed. In that instant her face—the face of a child just budding into the maturity of girlhood—became the face of a Seer, infinitely old, wise beyond the limits of human wisdom, filled with unearthly knowledge of the mysteries of life and death, of the past and of the future; fateful, seeing in a single flash all the manifold mischance of sad humanity.
Chun marked the change with wonder but without surprise; for to him this was no woman, though the touch of her fingers was soft and warm upon his flesh. Through the glamour of her loveliness and the air of mystery that, like a vapour, seemed to cast a veil around her, she shone forth for him an Incarnation of some Deva who, in this supreme moment of his emotional experience, had stepped down from her heaven to hallow his baptism. So deep-seated in the soul of him was this conviction that, forgetful of the pride and triumph of his own godhead, he sank at her feet in the shadows, prostrating himself, murmuring in the ancient tongue broken words of praise, of supplication, of gratitude.
Thus, from the first moment of their meeting, Chun knelt to her, his divinity—was on his knees before her in worship of her beauty, of her mystery, of the compelling magic that was hers. There were times through which he was yet to live, when he was to rise up to leave her, curbing his wrath lest he should lay violent hands upon her, and drag her in the dust into which she had stamped him. But ever the real Chun, as now in the beginning, was on his knees at her feet in an eternal agony of adoration.
A musical ripple of laughter sounded above him in the darkness; and squatting on the flags, Chun raised his head and looked at her. She was convulsed with merriment, the slim figure shaking till all her bangles were chiming to her laugh. For a moment she could not find breath for speech.
"A Deva! I!" she gasped. "An Incarnation of the Shining Ones!"
There was bitter derision in her tones; and then, of a sudden, she was grave, and to her eyes and face that strange look of age returned.
"And yet . . ." she said presently, as-though she were speaking, not to Chun, but to herself. "And yet . . . who knows? Which of us can guess what we are, or whence we come, or why? I am that which I am; but even to me—to me, perhaps beyond the common lot-at times far-off voices have whispered. They make themselves heard in the stillness, in the hush of the night. They murmur of . . . I know not what—shadowy memories of lives long passed. Or are they only dreams—dear, impossible dreams?"
Chun rose quickly to his feet, towering above her in the half light. He knew now that his imagination had betrayed him, and that the girl at his side was no Deva, but a woman fashioned of warm flesh and blood. The reaction from the pitch of intensity to which a moment before his emotions had been tuned was abrupt and stunning as a blow; yet he was still exalted by the consciousness that at last his godhead had been proved. That knowledge warmed his heart, soothed and stimulated his soul, satisfied his every ambition, fulfilled his wildest hopes. But the perfection of his triumph, he dimly felt, was somehow marred by the presence of this girl. She aroused the man in him, appealing strongly to his passions, and in that hour he would fain have been only a god.
Yet somewhere, deep down in him, there was set stirring a secret, intimate joy that she was no Deva, but a woman, and that he, though a demigod, was still a man.