AT Kamala’s age doubts, fears, and anxiety find no abiding-place in the heart. Time no longer hung heavy on her hands and she had no inclination to brood over Ramesh’s attitude towards her.
The autumn sunshine displayed the country-side in its most varied aspects, with the golden river as a setting to the whole. Kamala delighted in her rôle of mistress of a little household, and each day, as it went by, was like a fresh page in some book of artless poems.
She faced the day’s work every morning with renewed ardour. Umesh did not miss the steamer again, and he always returned from foraging expeditions with a full basket, and its contents never failed to excite wonder among the members of the little party.
“My goodness, look at the gourds! Where on earth did you get the beans? Look, Uncle, he has brought sour beets! I never knew one could get such things in these up-country places.” Such were the exclamations that might be heard any morning over the basket.
Only when Ramesh was present was there a jarring note, for he always suspected pilfering. Kamala would exclaim, “Why, I counted the money out to him myself!” and Ramesh would reply, “That only gives him a twofold opportunity; he can steal both the money and the vegetables!” Then he would summon Umesh and bid him give an account of his expenditure.
Of course the boy’s figures could never be made to agree. If one went by his own statements the amount that he had spent always exceeded the amount that had been given him; but that did not disturb Umesh in the slightest. As he said himself, “If I could keep accounts correctly I shouldn’t be here at all, I’d be bailiff of an estate, shouldn’t I, grandpapa?”
Then Chakrabartti would put in a word. “Adjourn the case till after breakfast, Ramesh Babu; you’ll be able to deliver a sound judgement then. For the moment I can’t resist taking the boy’s side. Umesh, my lad, the art of acquisition is no easy one and it’s not many people that can practise it. Many try but few succeed. I know how to appraise talent when I find it, Ramesh Babu. This isn’t the season for beans and I don’t think there are many boys Who would manage to get you some so early in the morning in a strange place. Any one is capable of suspecting, sir; it’s only one in a thousand who can acquire!”
Ramesh. “Now this isn’t right, Uncle; you shouldn’t take his side.”
Chakrabartti. “He hasn’t many talents and if we allow this one to run to waste for lack of encouragement we’ll regret it before we leave this steamer. Look here, Umesh, I’ll want some nim leaves to-morrow — the higher up the tree the better they are. I need something like that, my dear. They call me a physician — well, blow the physic, I’m wasting time! Mind and wash the greens well, Umesh.”
The more Ramesh suspected and scolded Umesh the closer was the boy drawn to Kamala. With the adherence of Chakrabartti Kamala’s party became independent of Ramesh. Ramesh and his scruples were left out in the cold while Chakrabartti, Umesh, and Kamala worked and played together with mutual sympathy as the cement of their alliance. Chakrabartti, since his arrival, had infected Ramesh with some of the fervour of his devotion to Kamala, yet Ramesh could not go the length of enrolling himself among her followers. He was like a vessel of great draught which cannot lie up against the bank but has to anchor in midstream and contemplate the land from a distance while small boats and skiffs pass easily over the shallows.
The moon was now nearly full. One morning the travellers rose to find the sky overspread with dark clouds while the breeze veered from one point of the compass to another. Showers alternated with spells of sunshine. There was no other craft in midstream. A few boats were to be seen inshore, but their, movements betrayed the uneasiness of their crews. Women who descended to the waterside to fill their jars did not linger there long, and now and then the surface of the river seemed to shiver from bank to bank.
The steamer ploughed on as usual and Kamala did not allow the elements to interfere with her culinary operations.
“You may not be able to cook this evening,” remarked Chakrabartti, with a glance at the sky, “so you had better get food ready for supper now. If you put the kedgeree on now I’ll mix some dough for bread.”
It was late before they all finished breakfast. The squalls gradually increased in violence and the river foamed up in billows. The sun disappeared behind banks of clouds long before nightfall and no one marked his setting. The anchor was dropped betimes.
Night fell and the moon gleamed out now and then from among the ragged clouds with a wan delirious smile. The wind rose to a hurricane and the rain came down in sheets.
Kamala had suffered shipwreck once and the force of the gale naturally alarmed her. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Kamala,” said Ramesh reassuringly; “we’re safe enough on the steamer. Go to sleep and don’t worry about it. I’ll be in the next cabin and I shan’t go to bed just yet.”
Chakrabartti came to her door next. “Don’t be frightened, dear; I dare this cursed storm to touch you!” Cursed though the storm might be, there was no doubt about its effect on Kamala. She sprang to the door and cried beseechingly, “Come in and sit beside me, please, Uncle!”
Chakrabartti hestitated. “It’s time you people were in bed. I had better—” He stepped inside as he spoke and at once noticed that Ramesh was not in the cabin. “Why, where’s Ramesh Babu?” he exclaimed in surprise; “he surely hasn’t gone off to steal vegetables on a wild night like this!”
“Hallo, is that you, Uncle? I’m in here, next door.”
Chakrabartti peeped into the adjoining cabin and saw Ramesh lying propped up in bed reading a book in the lamplight.
“Your good lady’s nervous, all by herself,” he remarked, “you had better put away your book seeing that you can’t frighten the storm away with it! Come along in here.”
An uncontrollable instinct deprived Kamala of her self-command. “No, no, Uncle!” she ejaculated in a half-stifled voice, seizing him by the hand. In that howling tempest her voice did not penetrate to Ramesh’s ears, but Chakrabartti heard and turned back in dismay.
Ramesh laid down his book and entered the other cabin. “What’s the matter, Uncle Chakrabartti?” he asked; “Kamala and you seem to be—”
“No, no!” interjected Kamala, without looking up at Ramesh; “I just asked him to come in for a chat.” What she was negativing when she exclaimed, “No, no!” she did not herself know, but the meaning behind the words was, “If you think I need some one to allay my fears you’re mistaken, I don’t. If you imagine that I require company you’re wrong; I do not!”
“It’s getting late, uncle,” she went on, “you had better go to bed; you might just see if Umesh is all right. I’m afraid he may be frightened at the storm.”
“Nothing frightens me, mother,” said a voice in the darkness outside; Umesh, it appeared, was sitting shivering outside his mistress’s door. Touched by his devotion Kamala hurried out crying, “Umesh, you’re just getting soaked with the rain!
Run away, you bad boy, and sleep in Uncle’s cabin.”
Umesh trotted off obediently with Uncle Chakrabartti. Affectionate though her tone was, the fact that Kamala had called him a bad boy impressed the lad.
“Shall I talk to you till you go to sleep?” Ramesh asked Kamala.
“No, thank you. I’m very sleepy.”
Ramesh fully understood the current of Kamala’s thoughts but he did not attempt to gainsay her. He saw at a glance the injured pride in her expression and slunk away to his own cabin.
Kamala was far too agitated to compose herself to sleep but she forced herself to lie down. The waves were now running high as the storm increased in violence. The deck-hands were astir and at intervals the ting-ting of the telegraph conveyed some order from the master to the engine-room. The anchor alone did not suffice to hold the steamer in the teeth of the gale and the engines were now working slowly.
Kamala threw off her bedclothes and stepped out on to the deck. The rain had ceased for the moment, but the wind roared like a stricken creature as it veered from one quarter to another.
The night was overcast, and a full moon faintly illumined the wild sky in which clouds scurried before the storm like spirits of destruction. The banks were almost blotted out, the surface of the river was barely visible, but sky and earth, the near and the distant, the seen and the unseen, were all blended in one swirling tumult which seemed to take shape as the fabled black buffalo of King Death, a hideous monster tossing its horned head aloft in fury.
Kamala could not define the emotion that stirred in her breast as she gazed upon the wild sky and the turmoil of the night; it may have been fear and it may have been joy.
There was an untamed force, an untrammelled freedom, in the raging of the elements that struck some dormant chord in her soul. The violence of Nature’s revolt fascinated her. Against what was Nature rebelling? In the roaring of the tempest Kamala heard no answer to this question. The reply was inarticulate, like the storm in her own breast. Surely it was an effort to tear asunder and cast aside some formless impalpable web of deceit, illusion, and obscurity that shook the earth to its foundations to the accompaniment of the agonised shrieking of the tempest.
It was “No, no!” simply a blank refusal that the whirlwind vociferated as it swept from the uttermost confines of trackless space across the blackness of the night. What, then, was it refusing? There could be no certain answer, but it was emphatically a “No, no, never; no, no, no!”