Leonard Woolf

“ So Punchi Menika and Hinnihami grew up to be somewhat different from the other village children, who crawl and play about the compounds, always with the women and always listening to women's gossip. Long before they had grown strong and big enough to go down in the morning and evening with Karlinahami to the tank, and to carry back on their heads the red earthenware waterpots, they had learnt from Silindu to sit by his side for hour upon hour through the hot afternoons, very still and very silent, while he stared silently before him, or droned out his interminable tales. ”

“ The spirit of the jungle is in the village, and in the people who live in it. They are simple, sullen, silent men. In their faces you can see plainly the fear and hardship of their lives. They are very near to the animals which live in the jungle around them. They look at you with the melancholy and patient stupidity of the buffalo in their eyes, or the cunning of the jackal. And there is in them the blind anger of the jungle, the ferocity of the leopard, and the sudden fury of the bear.
In Beddagama there lived a man called Silindu, with his wife Dingihami. ”

“ I am going.'
'And are there no other charms, Silindu? No other devils in the trees? You have learned wisdom surely from a wise woman.'
'Do not listen to him, Appochchi. He can no longer harm us. The god has aided us.' She turned upon Punchirala. 'Do you wish me to stay in the house? Yes, there are still devils in the trees. Do not I too come from the jungle? I shall be like a yakkini to you in the house, you dog. You can tell them, they say, by the eyes which do not blink. Rightly the village women call me yakkini. I will stay with you. Look at my arms. Are they not as strong as a man's arms? ”

“ If such a life were possible for men from distant villages, who did not know the jungle, it would be easy for Silindu. But as he squatted under the trees thinking of what he should do, a feeling of horror for such a life crept over him, and his repugnance to flying became stronger and stronger. He was very tired. What he desired—and the desire was sharp—was to rest, to be left alone untroubled in the village—in his hut, in his compound—to sleep quietly there at night, to sit hour after hour through the hot day under the mustard-tree in the compound. But in the jungle there would be no rest. ”

“ They followed in the rear of the procession, where men roll over and over in the dust, and childless women touch the ground with their forehead between every step, in fulfilment of their vows.
Silindu, with drawn face and vacant eyes, dragged himself along, leaning on Babun: Karlinahami, devout and stolid, raised the ceremonial cry at the due stopping-places. But Hinnihami felt the power of the god in her and over them all: she felt how near he was to them, mysteriously hidden beneath the great cloth which lay upon the elephant's back. ”

“ He was a rich man. Ohé! what a town is Colombo. There we lived in a great building, and all around us were houses and houses, and people and people: no jungle or snakes or wild beasts; not even a paddy-field or a cocoanut-tree. Always streets and people walking, walking backwards and forwards on the red roads (and very few even known to you by sight) , and bullock-carts and carriages and rickshaws, hundreds upon hundreds. And there are houses, very high, as high as the hill at Beragama, full of white Mahatmayas and their women, always coming and going from the ships. ”

“ Silindu began to speak with great excitement. As he went on his voice began to get shriller and shriller; it trembled with anger and fear and passion.
'I am afraid of everything, Arachchi; the jungle, the devils, the darkness. But, above all, of being hunted. Have you ever been hunted, Arachchi? No, of course you are not a hunter, and therefore have never been hunted. But I know. It happens sometimes to the cleverest of us. The elephant, they say; but that I have never seen. But the buffalo: I have seen that—here—on this very track—before it was cleared—many years ago. ”

“ The charms of the vederala did not take long to act upon Silindu. He felt that he was a doomed man, and his mind could think of nothing but the impending evil. The banian-trees of the ruined village of Bogama obsessed his mind: he knew that ruin waited for him there, and yet a horrible desire to see them was always present with him. He could no longer remain in the hut or compound: he wandered through the jungle, fighting against the pull of the desire: his wanderings became a circle, of which the banian-trees were the centre. ”

“ And behind the herd comes the leopard, slinking through the undergrowth. Whom has he to fear? Yet there is fear in his eyes and in his slinking feet, fear in his pricked ears and in the bound with which he vanishes into the shadows at the least suspicious sound.
In the time of the rains the jungle might seem to be a pleasant place. The trees are green, and the grass stands high in the open spaces. Water lies in pools everywhere; there is no need to go stealthily by night to drink at rivers or water-holes. ”

“ Only a fool measures his grain before it is on the threshing-floor.'
'Then all these villagers do that, for they are all fools. Aiyo! what cattle! what trouble they give a man!'
'We are poor men, aiya, and ignorant.'
'I'm not thinking of you, Babun, but of the others. There is only one man in the village; all say that, and I've seen it myself. But the others! They will ruin me. How much do they owe me! Only a very good crop will pay it, but they don't care. They don't fence the chena or watch it; they sit and sleep in the compound, and the deer and pig go off with my rupees in their bellies. ”

“ But life is very short in the jungle. Punchi Menika was a very old woman before she was forty. She no longer sowed grain, she lived only on the roots and leaves that she gathered. The perpetual hunger wasted her slowly, and when the rains came she lay shivering with fever in the hut. At last the time came when her strength failed her; she lay in the hut unable to drag herself out to search for food. ”

“ No man will ever do any other work, nor will he leave the village in search of work. But even in a good year the grain from the chenas was scarcely sufficient for the villagers. And just as in the jungle fear and hunger for ever crouch, slink, and peer with every beast, so hunger and the fear of hunger always lay upon the village. It was only for a few months each year after the crop was reaped that the villagers knew the daily comfort of a full belly. And the grain sown in chenas is an evil food, heating the blood, and bringing fever and the foulest of all diseases, parangi. ”

“ It is of great power: before I could only see what was doing in this country; but now, by its help, I can see over the sea, to the white Mahatmaya's country. Then they say: this is a mad old man. Well, well, who knows? I am always on the path—to-morrow I shall leave this village—from village to village, from town to town, and from jungle to jungle. I see many different men on the path. Strange men, and they do strange things. Thieving, stabbing, killing, cultivating paddy. I do not cultivate paddy, nor do I thieve or kill. ”

“ I am an ugly man, and the bear's claws have made me uglier; a poor bed-fellow for a girl! And so was he, black as a Tamil, and a great belly swaying as he walked. But she came to the cave, to the calling of my father's charm. Oh yes, she came, she came.'
Punchirala walked away chuckling. Silindu was trembling with excitement and fear. Karlinahami burst out into a wail of despair.
'Aiyo! what will become of us, brother? He is a bad man, a bad man; very cunning and clever. There is no protection against his charms. He will bring evil and disease upon the house: he will make devils enter us. ”

“ If you walk all day through the jungle along its tangled tracks, you will probably see no living thing. It is so silent and still there that you might well believe that nothing lives in it. You might perhaps in the early morning hear the trumpeting and squealing of a herd of elephants, or the frightened bark of the spotted deer, or the deeper bark of the sambur, or the blaring call of the peacock. ”

“ The jungle had only drawn its ring closer round the remaining huts; it had not broken into the village—the village had remained a whole, intact. But now the jungle cut across the village, separating Silindu's and Bastian Appu's hut from the rest. The villagers themselves noted it: they felt that they were living in a doomed place. 'The village is dying,' Nanchohami had said before she left. 'An evil place, devil-haunted. It is dying, as its young die with the old. No children are born in it now. An evil place. ”

“ There is no one like these fishers for finding money and women everywhere. Allah! They call us Moormen cunning and clever. The only thing I ever found in Beddagama was bad debts. And here this swine of a fisher finds not only bags of grain, and bags of rupees there, but women too. But I am sorry for you, Babun. I remember you; you were a good man in that accursed village. Come in here now, and I'll see what I can do for you. I should like to stop that swine's game. But it is difficult. One wants time. We must send a petition; the Agent Hamadoru would stop it if he knew. ”

“ I do not like this Babun; all the trouble has come from him. I am a quiet man in the village, you know that. I said to my daughter on the way here by the big palu-trees at the second hill—I said to her, "The man is now sent away; he will be over there for six months. He is a foolish man. It is he who has brought the trouble. The Mudalali is a good man. The Arachchi, too, is a good man. Why should we quarrel with those two? There is no shame in your going to the Mudalali." Then my daughter said, "I will do as you think best, Appochchi." Do you understand now, Arachchi?'
Silindu stopped. ”

“ No children were born to them now in their hut, their women were as sterile as the earth; the children that had been born to them died of want and fever. At last they yielded to the jungle. They packed up their few possessions and left the village for ever, to try and find work and food in the rice-fields of Maha Potana.
They tried to induce Punchi Menika to go with them, but she refused. She remembered her misery and loneliness upon the road to Tangalla, and the words of the old man from Mahawelagama, who sat among the cows upon the hill there. ”

“ It is what usually happens in the jungle—to women especially—the mind dies before the body. Imperceptibly the power of initiative, of thought, of feeling, dies out before the monotony of life, the monotony of the tearing hot wind, the monotony of endless trees, the monotony of perpetual hardship. It will happen at an age when in other climates a man is in his prime, and a woman still bears children. The man will still help at the work in the chena, cutting down the undergrowth and sowing the crop ”

“ Hinnihami, both in face and form, was more desirable than any of the other women. It was about a year after Babun and Punchi Menika began to live together that proposals began to be made about her. There lived in one of the huts, with his old mother, a man called Punchirala. He was a tall, thin, dark man, badly afflicted with parangi. The naturally crafty look of his face had been intensified by an accident. When a young man he had been attacked by a bear, which met him crawling under the bushes in search of a hive of wild bees which he had heard in the jungle. ”

“ How can they live in there, always shut in between walls? These town people—they do not mind, but we——Surely I should know—I am from Mahawelagama, a village in the jungle over there. I would go back now, but I am too old. When one is old, it is useless; but you——Go back to your village, woman. It is folly to leave the village. There is hunger there, I know, I remember that; but there is the hut and the compound all by themselves, and the jungle beyond. ”

“ And Punchi Menika altered. Her blind love for her father and her sister remained, but it was swamped by a fierce attachment to Babun. She felt the barrier which had grown up and separated her from Silindu, and in a less degree from Hinnihami. And as her life became different, she lost some of the wildness which had before belonged to her. She began to lead a life more like the other village women. She no longer went to, or worked, in the chena; the jungle began to lose its hold on her. ”

“ There is a tale about that charm. In those days there lived a Korala Mahatmaya by the sea, a big-bellied man, a great lover of women. Down the coast, beyond his village, was a village in which only Malay people live. The Malay women are before all others in beauty, very fair, with eyes shaped like pomegranate seeds. They are Mohammedan people, and no Sinhalese can approach their women; for the men are very jealous, and also strong and fearless. They are bad men. ”

“ Hinnihami pressed the fawn to her.
'Yes, he has come to me out of the jungle, a sign from the god, a great charm against evil. Did not the god himself take the doe as his mistress? They told it to us at Beragama. And now in the same night he has sent me a son and a daughter from the jungle.'
So Hinnihami suckled the child and the fawn together. The village looked on with astonishment and disapproval. 'The woman is as mad as the father,' was the general comment. It was commonly rumoured that she showed more love for Punchi Appu, as the fawn was called, than for her daughter. ”

“ When they grew old enough to trot along by his side, Silindu used to take them out with him into the jungle. The villagers were astonished and shocked, but Silindu went his own way. He showed them the water-holes upon the rocks; the thick jungle where the elephant hides himself from the heat of the day, strolling leisurely among the trees and breaking off great branches to feed upon the leaves as he strolls; the wallow of the buffalo, and the caves where the bear and the leopard make their lairs. He showed them the sambur lying during the day in the other great caves ”

“ The air is heavy with the heat-beating up from the earth, and with the smell of dead leaves. All the bushes and trees seem to be perpetually dying for ten months of the year, the leaves withering, and the twigs and branches decaying and dropping off, to be powdered over the ground among the coarse withered grass and the dead and blackened shrubs. And yet every year, when the rains come, the whole jungle bursts out again into green ”

“ A man may wash himself clean of oil, but however much he rubs himself he will never rub off fate. And then there was Punchirala; it was he who was the real cause of the evil. Why had he ever come with his hateful face into the compound? He would go in the early morning and take his gun and shoot the vederala dead as he came out of his house. And yet what would be the good of that now—now that Hinnihami was dead? It would only be more evil. It would be useless. It was useless for him to do anything now.
For days Silindu sat about the compound 'thinking and thinking,' as Punchi Menika called it. ”

“ To the villagers Fernando was, owing to his dress and habits, a Mahatmaya. He did not treat them as his equals, and they—being in his debt—treated him as a superior. He was, however, on terms of intimacy with Babehami; and although he had a small boy with him as servant, he took all his meals in the headman's house.
Punchi Menika very soon attracted Fernando's attention. Her face and form would have been remarkable even in a town: to find her among the squalid women of so squalid a village astonished him. He wanted a woman to live with him; he was always wanting a woman ”