The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX the moon treacherously gleaming through blown wrack of clouds. I found it impossible to ride my pony, for his hoofs slipped on the wet flags in the darkness. Walking was almost as bad, for my ironshod mountain boots were as slippery as the shoes of the tatu. But we pushed on, gasping, up hill, down dale, all through the night. Dawn broke, chill and grey, on the crest of a great mountain. Far in the distance I saw specks. I left my pony, and ran headlong down the slopes. I had got almost to the bottom of the hill when I saw the Consul’s litter. Forrest ran forward. I turned sadly back, for I saw that the Consul’s legs were tied. I knew that he was dead. In that country where a thousand plagues hunt down mankind, it was most urgent that a medical man should certify the cause of death. How lucky that we had with us a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine! There was only one slight hitch in the programme. The moment that I told him that the Consul was dead, he turned his donkey and bolted for safety. Holy Kali, it might be an infectious disease! There was no point in chasing the creature at the moment. The matter could wait our return. We brought the Consul to his house and Forrest asked me to bring the doctor round. It was necessary to make an official report of the death, and the cause of the death. I went round to the house of the “distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine.” He was seated before a pyra- mid of rice. I attracted his attention by burying a whalebone cutting whip in the rolls of his fat. Between fifty and sixty applications of this instrument secured his presence in the room where we had the corpse. But not even the fear of the whip would induce him to touch it. Rabindranath Tagore is the biggest bluff ever put over the unsuspecting Ameri- can public. His mysticism makes even Maeterlinck’s wishy-washy twaddle seem virile. I have never read such slop. The illustrations match it. The whole pro- duction of Young India is babu in the Anglo-Indian sense of the word. The spirit of India is utterly absent. Drawings and writing alike resemble the senseless flourishes of some callow student. And all this while the babu, while accepting what he imagines to be honours, such as knighthood, from England, is plotting sneakishly in the Bengali manner against her. I would to God that the British would withdraw from India for six months, so that the men of India might exter- minate these fatherless fish-eaters, this spawn of female dogs that, without caste even in its own slime of bastardy, asserts itelf in America as a ‘young nation.’ Kwaw Lr Ya. Tue Dance or Suiva. By Dr. ANANDA Kent Coomaraswamy. Sunwise Turn, Inc. Price, 8 annas. Tue plot thickens. There is certainly no one equal to Dr. Coomaraswamy for tangling up situations, perhaps not always too pleasantly. Nor can one be very sure how far Dr. Coomaraswamy is himself responsible, for wherever he is the line between meum and tuum becomes gossamer of a kind that has seen better 292