The Days Work, vol 1 | Page 8

to it that we get a new guru. Finlinson Sahib, it
darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been eaten. Be
wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on an
empty belly. Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will do."
"The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it."
"Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?" said Peroo, laughing. "I
was troubled for my boats and sheers before the flood came. Now we
are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take
these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all
weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing
else to-day at all."
He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waistbelt and thrust it
into Findlayson's hand, saying " Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more
than opium - clean Malwa opium!"
Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand,
and hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at
least a good guard against fever - the fever that was creeping upon him
out of the wet mud - and he had seen what Peroo could do in the
stewing mists of autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.
Peroo nodded with bright eyes. "In a little - in a little the Sahib will find
that he thinks well again. I too will -" He dived into his treasure-box,
resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down to watch the
boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier, and the night
seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson stood with his
chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about one of the piers -

the seventh - that he had not fully settled in his mind. The figures
would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one and at
enormous intervals of time. There was a sound rich and mellow in his
ears like the deepest note of a double-bass - an entrancing sound upon
which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo was at
his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats
were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a
long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.
"A tree hit them. They will all go," cried Peroo. "The main hawser has
parted. What does the Sahib do? "
An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson's
mind. He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and
angles - each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which
was the master rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it
was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet
would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But
why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he
hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the Lascar aside,
gently and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and,
further, to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so
difficult. And then - but it was of no conceivable importance - a
wirerope raced through his hand, burning it, the high bank disappeared,
and with it all the slowly dispersing factors of the problem. He was
sitting in the rainy darkness - sitting in a boat that spun like a top, and
Peroo was standing over him.
"I had forgotten," said the Lascar, slowly, "that to those fasting and
unused, the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go
to the Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great
ones. Can the Sahib swim?"
"What need? He can fly - fly as swiftly as the wind," was the thick
answer.
"He is mad!" muttered Peroo, under his breath. "And he threw me aside
like a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat

cannot live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to
look at death with a clear eye."
He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows
of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft, staring through the mist at the
nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson, the
Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops
struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of all
time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and
perceived that he was perfectly secure,