A Vision of the River

I

IT was that memorable occasion, the first of many such, when I and Padmanabham, and Nagabushana Rao, the rising poet, and his cousin Murahari, the hope of Andhra painting, and young Venugopalan of the first-year class — who was neither a poet nor a painter, and yet perhaps a theme for both — sailed up Godavari to the hills in a borrowed staff-boat, blown by the strong south wind of a bygone April. We set out with all the courage of the Argonauts; and indeed for me, and perhaps also for my young companions and scholars, — for in ancient India, whose ideals it was our study to recapture, ‘such mixture was not held a stain,’ — the excursion was fraught with much of the strangeness and romance, and promise of half-divine adventure, with which the imagination surrounds that earlier expedition. My shipmates’ ways of life and thought, in spite of their English words, were hardly less different from mine than Jason’s or Orpheus’s would have been. Our roll call the Western reader will find even more outlandish. Here were the names, at least, of gods to set beside the names of heroes; for it is the custom among the Brahmins of the South to call their sons almost invariably by one or other of the thousand names of God; behind which practice lies a certain tremendous doctrine of their pantheistic faith.

We had planned to start from the bastions of the old fort, now crowned by the English Club, at four in the afternoon. We had only a short holiday, and were anxious to reach Polavaram, eighteen miles toward the hills, before the upstream wind fell, as we knew it would, at ten o’clock in the night. In India the spicy breezes blow by schedule, and only man is unpunctual. Sure enough, our crew, when we arrived, was nowhere to be seen. We were kept kicking our heels and eating Homeric hearts while a whole sunlit navy of thriftier sails went by at racing speed, and careless terns, as if to beguile our impatience, wrote exquisite arcs and curves on a kindling sky. My good friends of the English Club looked down in glory as from a Biblical city wall and mocked our desperate hope of reaching the gorges and returning in less than a week with sails alone. They forgot that in such an enterprise the adventure may be not less precious than the goal.

The start at last into the windy afterglow more than made up for these preliminary vexations. At once the ample prospects of the river, broad as an arm of the sea; the sudden sense of escape and speed and expectation; the multitudinous rustle and throb of the great waves, delicate and pure and warm as the sapphire twilight that invested them, yet strong enough to shake and lift the hulking staff-boat; these, and the sight and smell of caulked planks and ropes and anchors about us, and other immemorial implements of heroic travel, filled our hearts with the authentic glory; and sweet were the taste and saltless odor of the spray. Staff-boats may be poled or towed or shoved along as occasion arises. In a strong following wind they may even be sailed, as ours was sailed that night, but they are not handy craft at the best of times. Designed for the quiet canals of the Delta, they are usually lashed to steamers on the open river; it was our failure to provide ourselves with any such sordid escort that excited the skepticism of my English friends. Steamers, however, were not for unofficial mariners like us; nor, if they had been, could any steamer have made the gorges at that season; in any case it would have spoiled all the fun. Even so, there was a considerable danger of shoals. But our serang was a trusted pilot, the wind was high, the river unusually full for the time of year, and there seemed every prospect of our reaching Polavaram that night in spite of our late start. Meanwhile we were glad to be alive and afloat. The gallant trim of my friend Bellamy’s stalf-boat, with its clean decks, and well-appointed cabins, and colored lights on port and starboard (Bellamy had nautical forbears and took a pride in his boat), added not a little to our sense of borrowed but none the less pleasurable importance.

II

The orange light of sunset faded, and the planet Hesperus, which the Hindus make the Chaplain of the Demons, having for some time strown with silver a pathway over the waves before us, sank at last behind the palms of the western shore. Our course, which at first had crossed the river, so as to skirt the ragged continent of shoals above the town, now lay upstream due north. The lights of the town had long been left behind, and even the frequent rockets, which proclaimed the month of marriages, rose and crawled afar off, silent as meteors. We sat in the dark on the foredeck, whiling away the time with talk and singing.

The early April night was warm — on land the season was now fast becoming unpleasantly warm — and our costume, as beseemed the river solitudes, was of the scantiest. My young companions appeared in that sane and seemly apparel which was accounted full dress by the culture of their ancestors, but which modern respectability is fain to supplement, except in the purest privacy of Hindu life, with uncomfortable and barbarous European garments. Costume is a part of mood, as well as the heraldry of the ages, and the classic draperies and reasonable nakedness of my companions carried me away to some Platonic region of the mind, and made me feel that we had indeed set sail into a purer tract of time, and left far behind us the vulgarity that grates more harshly in India than elsewhere, because it is more evidently not a part of the picture.

Of songs, which formed the staple fare of our intellectual picnic, there was no dearth. The Hindus are passionately musical, though their brains observe antique scales and measures very difficult for an Englishman to follow. None of our party, except myself, was ever at a loss for a tune, always cast in the same unfamiliar melodic language, the music of an older world; which had this advantage at least of later styles at such a time, that it was in no wise daunted or disabled by the lack of instrumental accompaniment. Our laureate Bushanam sang, like Orpheus, his own poems. In the East the poet is still a singer, and poetry is always sung, not spoken; a verse without a tune is a boat out of water. Murahari was a lover of the modern drama, which in India is a kind of opera; he chanted long strophes fire-new from Bombay — where he was supposed to be studying art — to fashionable Parsee melodies. Padmanabham, as usual in those days, — he was not yet known as an original singer, — drew upon his inexhaustible store of rustic ballads; while young Venugopalan, the least ready with words, made pleasant variety by playing on a bamboo flute, and that so prettily that we all declared him to be rightly named; for Venugopalan means Piping Cowherd, a name of the Lord Krishna.

Our music was various, but I noticed presently that it was haunted by a single theme, the story of the same Sri Krishna — that ‘ latest born and loveliest vision far’ of all India’s not yet faded hierarchy. I do not know what wandering influence or suggestion controlled this preference. Holi, the great spring festival of Krishna, is not observed in those parts, and our holiday was actually in honor of Rama, an earlier avatar; but even the old tale of Rama and Sita in the forest, of which the Indian singer never tires, was for once forgotten. Krishna subduing the King of the Serpents, Krishna stealing the clothes of the bathing neatherdesses, or keeping a separate lovetryst with a thousand of them at once, or shielding them and all his bucolic fellowship under a mountain uprooted and lifted umbrella-wise against the wrath of Indra — these and all the scenes of that romantic allegory, which is at once the Song of Songs and the New Testament of Hinduism, seemed to be represented in our casual recital.

III

So many and various were the points of interest abroad, and so entirely detached and secluded from the main of common experience did the situation of our little party seem, that I had almost forgotten the progress and problems of our voyage. We had been perhaps two hours afloat. The wind still blew lustily, the waves ran high, and the heavy staff-boat, clumsy sailer that she was, rode half-beam-on under her inadequate sail, but making rapid headway notwithstanding. Beyond the gleam of our own few lights the rolling waste of waves was dark under the stars, and the far-off banks hung invisible upon the edges of the night. The lights of Polavaram were not in sight, and we believed that the windy void had nothing else to give us, either for our advantage, for our amusement, or for our peril.

Suddenly, while we jested, and praised our young piper for his tunes, a sound of women singing arose as it were out of the waves before us. We abounded in conceits that night, I remember, and had early developed the comparison, which I have already exploited, between ourselves and the Argonauts. We had even amused ourselves by distributing the parts in detail, a refinement with which I will not trouble the reader, except to mention that we called Venugopalan Hylas, because he was young and beautiful. He was afterward to justify the apellation more specifically, but this final felicity passed unnoticed at the time, for reasons that will be obvious. Indeed our original and scholastic similitude had already yielded place in the minds of my companions to another and a dearer figure; and when I now remarked, in the spirit of the former make-believe, that we were apparently approaching the rocks of the Sirens, I was made aware of the change at once.

‘Say rather,’ said Bushanam, the poet, with the obvious approval of the others, ‘that yonder is the song of the Gopis [neatherdesses] of Brindaban answering the flute of Krishna.'

I still thought my simile the better fooling.

‘Do the Gopis float in the air, or ride upon the waves?’ I asked. ‘For these singers appear to be doing one or the other.’

Padmanabham, the mythologist, came to the rescue of the poet.

‘No doubt these arc Apsarases [celestial dancers] playing the part of Gopis for the occasion,’ he said.

After listening for a moment, ‘Anyhow,’ I said, ‘they sing no better and no worse than your countrywomen sing at their work in the rice-fields. What on earth, or rather what on the water or in the air, can they be doing?’

Most of the others were as much puzzled as I, but Bushanam, whose village home lay hereabouts, laughed at our bewilderment.

‘As a matter of fact they are neither Sirens nor Apsarases,’ said he, ‘but village women returning by boat from the islands and the farther shore. Hundreds of them are sometimes employed there by the Public Works to plant pampas grass to hold the banks together.’

Murahari irreverently complained that ‘this poet’ had spoiled our marvel for us; but Padmanabham, in whom I had often noticed a streak of realism curious in one so mystically minded, declared that he liked the marvel rather better for understanding it; the explanation, he said, seemed somehow to make it more convincing. I thought I recognized a wayward reminiscence of a recent lecture of my own on Bergson’s Laughter, while I was vaguely reminded also of Wordsworth. These professional subleties, however, I kept to myself. There was a gayer comment to the effect that anyhow it was comforting to feel that we were not losing our wits; but our folk-song specialist, who was listening carefully to the now nearing melody, signed for silence, and almost immediately began to nod, and then to hum, and then to sing in unison with the unseen choir. Apparently the catch was familiar, for the others took it up; and presently our whole party were singing merrily together, while between the lines the lagging cadence of the women’s voices answered faintly, like an echo. I thought at first that they were singing an ordinary love-song; but I soon realized that it was intended, for all its human archness, to voice the sentiments of Krishna’s sweetheart Radha, whose romance is an image of the relation of the soul to God.

This unpremeditated outburst and its apt occasion were thrilling enough; but we were shortly to experience a series of very different thrills. For now upon the larboard bow a boat became dimly visible, presumably one of those long, narrow, and antique local craft, called, in a classic echo, naira. ‘ Presumably,’ because it was not the boat that we descried so much as the passengers; the nawa seemed to be strangely full.

For some reason our singing faltered and stopped, but we were all so intent upon the music and mystery of our odd encounter that the notion of physical danger did not readily occur to us. Quite suddenly I realized that we were about to run the stranger down. As I sprang to my feet I heard our helmsman, far back upon the roof of the cabins, shout upon the wind. We too shouted, a Homeric shout, but the people in the boat paid no heed. Either the sound of their own singing drowned our voices, or they were too closely crowded and helpless to control the course of their own boat. Only when the red glare of our port light loomed over them, and revealed at the same time to our own horrified eyes the fantastically overloaded plight of the little craft, did a sense of their fate dawn on them.

The song upon their lips changed with uncanny continuity into a wail of terror, for many of them were still singing when the wail began to rise. Our steersman put his helm hard-astarboard, but the ponderous ark bore down, broadside-on before the wind, upon the helpless nawa.

As we stumbled across the foredeck someone missed his footing and went overboard with a splash. It was Venugopalan, who thus appropriately, but most inopportunely, kept his appointment, as Hylas, with the waternymphs. Knowing that the boy was a good swimmer, I had no fear that the episode would be enacted to its tragic end. I merely shouted to him to keep clear of the crowd, to swim round and scramble up on the other side of the staff-boat. I saw him set off with a will. Then I forgot him suddenly and completely.

The nawa was alongside or under us, and a swarm of people, whimpering with unutterable fear, — a multitude such as one would never have believed a craft of the size could have carried for a moment, — clung to the gunwale like an army of great bats, or a boarding party of marine animals. Our deck rose at an appalling angle, and between the pressure of the wind on the one beam and the weight of the people on the other the staff-boat showed every sign of heeling over.

Calling to the others to do as I did, I seized a woman by the wrists, — a lean old hag she was, like a witch out of the night, — half-dragged, halfcarried her across the foredeck, set her down upon the punter’s gangway that overhung the starboard gunwale, and rushed back for another. It seemed the only thing to do, and perhaps it saved us. My companions followed my example. Others we dragged through the cabin windows and hustled out of the opposite windows on to the same gangway. Laboring like giants, and agonizing as men agonize in dreams, — for every moment we expected the staff-boat to come over on us, — we at last had the weather gunwale and the far side of the cabin weighted with an array of wretches sufficient to counterbalance those who were still crawling out of that dreadful nawa and to restore the equilibrium of the staff-boat.

The short breathing space that followed our first frantic spell of rescue was a moment of intense thankfulness, but we were stilt tingling with horror. The river at that place was unusually deep and wide, and the thought of all those women, the wives and mothers, perhaps, of a whole village, overtaken in that waste of night and crushed through black waves into the abyss, had come too near, seemed still too terribly near to immediate reality, to bear thinking of. We turned with relief to what remained to be done.

We helped the rest of the passengers into the cabin, until the water-logged nawa lay empty in our lee and those whom we had seated along the starboard gunwale could likewise be drawn into the cabin. Then we made the rounds of the ship, peering over the sides to see if there was anyone in the water or clinging to the hull. Padmanabham and I, being the best swimmers of the party, — except perhaps Venugopalan, who had gone to change his wet raiment, — went lightly overboard and swam scouting downstream into the gloom, as much to allay the still persisting impulse to action as in any serious hope of finding possible castaways in that waste of waves. With senses calmed and cooled we got aboard again, donned a dry cloth or so, and joined the others.

IV

Except for the reflected light of a hurricane lantern on the foredeck the cabin was in darkness, but we could see that it was thronged with the refugees. It seemed incredible that such a multitude had ever got into their slender craft. Seated patiently on the floor where we had set them, they were a pitiful company, mostly women; old crones, buxom wenches with bangles on their arms and gold rings in their noses, weary women with babies at the breast; the more part dazed and cowering, but some already talkative, and some feebly hysterical. No one, they said, was lost; hardly anyone was wet, except with tears. They explained that the contractors who hired them to plant reeds made money by providing fewer ferryboats than were charged for in the estimate. They were quite shrewd enough to understand a wrong which they were powerless to prevent.

We lay rocking in mid-river with our dolorous and heavy freight, waiting and calling to the shore for boats to take the women off, and wondering at the strangeness of this sudden invasion of our quiet by the troublesome world. Our careless talk, our music and philosophy, of half an hour before seemed very far away. Suddenly, as suddenly but not so violently as it had been dissipated, that earlier mood of the night came back to us.

While talking of other matters, — some of us were chaffing Venugopalan about certain purples and fine linen in which he had reappeared after his involuntary swim, and which made him look, according to Murahari, ‘like a bridegroom,’ — I became conscious of a growing excitement among the folk at the far end of the cabin. Presently Padmanabham, who had been moving among them, brought a spark of it across to us. One of the women, he said, was declaring that she had seen Sri Krishna himself intervene to save us. Startled at this independent recurrence of a theme which had haunted us all the evening, I went over and we spoke to her.

She was a woman of middle age, with an intelligent face, and her story was positive and circumstantial. Barely had she taken her seat on the gangway — she had been placed at the forward end of the row; she pointed at the spot through the window — when the Lord Krishna came up out of the darkness and laid his hands upon the heeling bulwark beside her, and bowed himself over it, and slowly pressed it down, and set his foot upon it, so that the ship righted herself, and the god went upward swiftly into the night. Questioned further, she described him as a beautiful young man, exactly like his picture on the wall of the Tirupati temple; his naked arms and shoulder shone, she said, in the darkness ‘as blue [Sri Krishna’s color is always blue or green in Indian art] as the sky at noonday.’ A young woman at her side also claimed to have seen the vision, and vehemently corroborated her description.

The solemnity and aptness of this marvelous tale, the precision and vividness with which it was told, and the obvious conviction of the tellers, reënforced as they were by the singularity of our situation and the memory of all that went before, profoundly moved us; and our emotion was intensified by the response of the rest of the women, which broke forth like a flame as soon as their prophetess had told her tale in the ear of authority. Their fear, their weariness, their sense of grievance, their awe of their hosts and social betters, were forgotten. They laughed, they wept, they called aloud the many names of Krishna. They recited the story one against another until every woman believed that she had seen the vision herself. And suddenly — and almost, as it seemed, with one accord — they lifted up their voices and sang again the song of the neatherd women of Brindaban, the song that we had heard them singing from afar before we saw them.

When it was finished they sang other songs, but still Sri Krishna was the theme. It must have been nearly an hour before the boats arrived from the shore to take them away, and all the time, without an appreciable pause, they sang the songs of Krishna. Their store of these seemed to be inexhaustible. Most of them, according to Padmanabham, — who gathered that night a record harvest of new songs and versions, — were choric dancing songs, intended to be sung by dancers in a ring, such as oftenest beguile the long evenings in the villages; but now the women sang them sitting as they were upon the floor. Strange and beautiful must have been the sight and sound of our lonely ark of melody, if any listener, mortal or immortal, were abroad that night upon the windy river. I am reminded how, nearly a week later, as we lay moored for the night beside a sand-bank not far from this very spot, after seeing (for we saw) the wonder of the hills, suddenly, but softly at first, I heard grow up out of the silence of the river, like an auricular mirage, a vast chirping of tree crickets, such as fills every Indian glade at night with a sound as of a thousand tinkling waterfalls. Leaning out of the window in amazement, — since for miles about there was only water and sand, — I discovered that this wandering and elfin forest music arose from a great raft that was slowly drifting by, one of those immense bamboo stages, a hundred yards or more in length, which are constantly floated down from the upland forests, each in charge of a couple of hillmen, to the urban timber-yards. It appeared that Padmanabham was also awake and listening, for as our indomitable and star-girt serenaders floated out of hearing he asked me — we two had a habit of bandying similitudes — what they reminded me of, citing for his own part the village women singing of Sri Krishna in midriver there the week before. His epic simile has remained in my memory as if it had been actually a part of the poem that Reality wrote there on the first night of the voyage.

So also the women went quiring from us into the river and the night as they had come, only they came and went alike in a great wind. The manner of their going was not unworthy of the strange occasion. Four boats they filled, each as large as the magic boat that brought them. They say that faith works miracles, but the greed of the contractors seems in this case to have been hardly less potent. The business of reëmbarking was set only to the music of Telugu speech and happy laughter, but as the last boatload pushed clear the singing began again, and this was the prettiest passage of all. I was told that while the women sang in the cabin there was never a repetition, save what the music ordered, but now, like the chorus of a Wagnerian opera, they returned again to the melody which had heralded their first appearance. My companions joined them in a stanza, but soon broke off to listen. The now familiar carol sounded fainter and fainter above the rustle of the waves, until it sank at last into the darkness whence it came.

V

We were alone again, and free to resume our voyage. The wind still called, but we found that our crew had been so much frightened by the accident that they insisted on remaining where we were for the night, and we were not sorry to acquiesce. We fell to discussing our adventure; but on the subject of the vision, which must have been foremost in the minds of us all, my companions at first said very little. As a man of alien faith I took care to respect their seeming reticence, curious as I was to explore their thought of the matter. My curiosity was not long to remain unsatisfied.

Just as I was preparing to turn in, Padmanabham came to me with rather a mysterious air and said he had ‘something beautiful’ to show me. I followed him into the cabin and was told not to look round until the word was given. I stood at the far end of the cabin with my back to the door. Padmanabham said, ‘Now,’ and immediately I heard behind me the sound of a flute, and turned.

Beyond the doorway of the cabin a small porch, supported on two pillars, projected over the three steps that led up to the foredeck. The cabin was still in darkness, but the porch was now lit with a mysterious emerald radiance, and appeared like the shrine of a little temple, of which the cabin formed the nave. Between the pillars of this shrine, softly phosphorescent against the square of outer darkness framed in the doorway, I saw the very form and canonical attitude of the blue-green Cowherd God, standing with crossed legs and playing on his flute. The graceful form, the beautiful face, the glossy Rajput curls I recognized as those of our young scholar Venugopalan, as if he had lent his person as a vehicle to the divinity whose name he borrowed; but what was the meaning of that strange transfiguring radiance, the ‘shadowed livery’ of the blue-green god himself? For a moment the solemn import and unearthly beauty of the spectacle held me like a spell. Then, with unconscious equivocation, I addressed the apparition by name, the boy’s name and the god’s at once. The emerald vision of the avatar was extinguished, and my scholar stood before me in the dark. I strode past him to the door and there I read the explanation, not only of the immediate mystery, but of that night’s earlier epiphany as well; for under the eaves of the porch hung a plain green lamp, the starboard lamp of the staff-boat.

Padmanabham was watching me with a look that claimed appreciation, such as he would use in reporting a choice ballad, or indicating some gem of local art. ‘Now you see, sir, ‘ said he, ‘ what the woman saw, only in her case there was no artifice behind it.’

‘You mean that she saw Gopal clamber aboard after his ducking at the beginning?’ I said.

‘Just that. He happened to climb up in front of the green light. You told him to swim round to that side. This woman was one of the first to be taken across, and must have been at the end of the row, just behind the light. Those that followed her were taken through the cabin.’

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘I wonder I did n’t think of it before. She naturally did n’t suppose that a mere mortal would come up out of the river at such a time. Gopal would have frightened anybody.’

‘But what would I not have given, sir, to have seen him with her eyes! Just so did Sri Krishna come up out of the pool where he fought with the Lord of Serpents. Gopal’s flute was still in his hand. She did n’t mention it, but no doubt it formed part of her impression. And how marvelously every little circumstance conspired to help her interpretation — for misinterpretation I dare not call it. Gopal had difficulty in getting aboard, owing to our heavy list to port, and she read his struggles as the effort of the god to right the ship. Once aboard, he climbed by way of the roof to the dressing-room — ‘

‘But,’ I interrupted, ‘he was standing within a yard of her in the cabin when she told her story. I suppose she did n’t know him in the dark.’

‘No, and the crowd; and she was n’t expecting to find him there; and besides he had changed his linen waistcloth for that purple silk one, and also put on a Salem scarf.’

‘ I ‘ve no doubt you are right,’ I said. ‘It was very clever of you to guess it all. I thought the woman might have seen you or me swimming in the water, and dreamed the rest. I quite forgot about Gopal.’

‘It was Murahari, painter and opera-goer, who first explained the miracle. He wanted Gopal to stage his little mystery in the porch while the women were still in the cabin, but we would n’t allow it. We did n’t want to wreck their beautiful belief. Now,’ his eyes glowed, ‘it will grow into a legend.’

I smiled at his enthusiasm. ‘I suppose I ought to be flattered,’ I said, ‘that you don’t class me with those simple souls, but I could almost wish that you had been as careful even of my feebler wisp of illusion. You don’t seem to feel at all like that yourself, Padmam. I suppose you find the miracle more “convincing” now that you can account for it, like the voices on the water that began it.’

Padmanabham reflected for a moment. ‘Yes, I think I would rather know that something beautiful actually happened than be left in doubt whether the woman did n’t imagine everything. But I don’t see why this explanation should altogether destroy the spiritual meaning of the vision. I, as you know, am a pantheist. I believe that God works His will, not by breaking in upon the order of events, but in the order itself. Why should not His epiphanies be accomplished in the same way?’

‘Such epiphanies,’ I said, tempting him, ‘would always be liable to be dismissed as accidental illusions.’

‘Nothing is really accidental,’ replied my young scholar and preceptor, ‘and everything, as we perceive it, is illusion. To the sannyasin even the incarnation of Sri Krishna himself is an illusion, justified in the last resort, like the rest of our experience, only by its beauty and helpfulness. It seems to me that our river vision has a measure at least of the same justification.'

This time it was my turn to pause and think.

‘The hour is late,’ I said at last, ‘the matter complicated; and I suspect that you are something of a sophist. I admit that your interpretation is the better poetry, and I claim that mine’s the better history. I am still doubtful which is the better religion. But if you believe, and I deny, the right will be with one of us.’

‘Or between us,’ he said.