‘I’ve had to cut the Service,’* and the Infant; ‘but that’s no reason why my vast stores of experience should be lost to posterity.’ He was just thirty, and in that same summer an imperious wire drew me to his baronial castle: ‘Got good haul; ex Tamar* Come along.’
It was an unusually good haul, arranged with a single eye to my benefit. There was a baldish, broken-down captain of Native Infantry, shivering with ague behind an indomitable red nose—and they called him Captain Dickson. There was another captain, also of Native Infantry, with a fair moustache; his face was like white glass, and his hands were fragile, but he answered joyfully to the cry of Tertius. There was an enormously big and well-kept man, who had evidently not campaigned for years, clean-shaved, soft-voiced, and catlike, but still Abanazar for all that he adorned the Indian Political Service; and there was a lean Irishman,* his face tanned blue-black with the suns of the Telegraph Department. Luckily the baize doors of the bachelors’ wing fitted tight, for we dressed promiscuously in the corridor or in each other’s rooms, talking, calling, shouting, and anon waltzing by pairs to songs of Dick Four’s own devising.
There were sixty years of mixed work to be sifted out between us, and since we had met one another from time to time in the quick scene-shifting of India—a dinner, camp, or a race-meeting here; a dak—bungalow* or railway station up country somewhere else—we had never quite lost touch. Infant sat on the banisters, hungrily and enviously drinking it in. He enjoyed his baronetcy, but his heart yearned for the old days.
It was a cheerful babel of matters personal, provincial, and imperial, pieces of old call-over lists, and new policies, cut short by the roar of a Burmese gong, and we went down not less than a quarter of a mile of stairs to meet Infant’s mother, who had known us all in our school-days and greeted us as if those had ended a week ago. But it was fifteen years since, with tears of laughter, she had lent me a gray princess-skirt* for amateur theatricals.
That was a dinner from the Arabian Nights served in an eighty-foot hall full of ancestors and pots of flowering roses, and, this was more impressive, heated by steam. When it was ended and the little mother had gone away—(‘You boys want to talk, so I shall say good-night now’)—we gathered about an apple—wood fire, in a gigantic polished steel grate, under a mantelpiece ten feet high, and the Infant compassed us about with curious liqueurs and that kind of cigarette which serves best to introduce your own pipe.
‘Oh, bliss!’ grunted Dick Four from a sofa, where he had been packed with a rug over him. ‘First time .I’ve been warm since I came home.’
We were all nearly on top of the fire, except Infant, who had been long enough at Home to take exercise when he felt chilled. This is a grisly diversion, but one much affected by the English of the Island.
‘If you say a word about cold tubs and brisk walks,’ drawled M‘Turk, ‘I’ll kill you, Infant. I’ve got a liver, too. ’Member when we used to think it a treat to turn out of our beds on a Sunday morning—thermometer fifty-seven degrees if it was summer—and bathe off the Pebble Ridge? Ugh!’
‘’Thing I don’t understand,’ said Tertius, ‘was the way we chaps used to go down into the lavatories, boil ourselves pink, and then come up with all our pores open into a young snowstorm or a black frost. Yet none of our chaps died, that I can remember.’
‘Talkin’ of baths,’ said M‘Turk, with a chuckle, ‘’member our bath in Number Five, Beetle, the night Rabbits-Eggs rocked King? What wouldn’t I give to see old Stalky now! He is the only one of the two Studies not here.’
‘Stalky is the great man of his Century,’ said Dick Four.
‘How d’you know?’ I asked.
‘How do I know?’ said Dick Four scornfully. ‘If you’ve ever been in a tight place with Stalky you wouldn’t ask.’
‘I haven’t seen him since the camp at Pindi in ’87,’ I said. ‘He was goin’ strong then—about seven feet high and four feet thick.’
‘Adequate chap. Infernally adequate,’ said Tertius, pulling his moustache and staring into the fire.
‘Got dam’ near court-martialled and broke* in Egypt in ’84,’ the Infant volunteered. ‘I went out in the same trooper with him—as raw as he was. Only I showed it, and Stalky didn’t.’
‘What was the trouble?’ said M‘Turk, reaching forward absently to twitch my dress-tie into position.
‘Oh, nothing. His Colonel trusted him to take twenty Tommies out to wash, or groom camels, or something at the back of Suakin, and Stalky got embroiled with Fuzzies five miles in the interior. He conducted a masterly retreat and wiped up eight of ’em. He knew jolly well he’d no right to go out so far, so he took the initiative and pitched in a letter to his Colonel, who was frothing at the mouth, complaining of the “paucity of support accorded to him in his operations.” Gad, it might have been one fat brigadier slangin’ another! Then he went into the Staff Corps.’
‘That—is—entirely—Stalky,’ said Abanazar from his armchair.
‘You’ve come across him too?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied in his softest tones. ‘I was at the tail of that—that epic. Don’t you chaps know?’
We did not—Infant, M‘Turk, and I; and we called for information very politely.
‘’Twasn’t anything,’ said Tertius. ‘We got into a mess up in the Khye-Kheen Hills* a couple o’ years ago, and Stalky pulled us through. That’s all.’
M‘Turk gazed at Tertius with all an Irishman’s contempt for the tongue-tied Saxon.
‘Heavens!’ he said. ‘And it’s you and your likes govern Ireland. Tertius, aren’t you ashamed?’
‘Well, I can’t tell a yarn. I can chip in when the other fellow starts. Ask him.’ He pointed to Dick Four, whose nose gleamed scornfully over the rug.
‘I knew you couldn’t,’ said Dick Four. ‘Give me a whisky and soda. I’ve been drinking lemon-squash and ammoniated quinine while you chaps were bathin’ in champagne, and my head’s singin’ like a top.’
He wiped his ragged moustache above the drink; and, his teeth chattering in his head, began:
‘You know the Khye-Kheen-Malôt expedition when we scared the souls out of ’em with a field force they daren’t fight against? Well, both tribes—there was a coalition against us—came in without firing a shot: and a lot of hairy villains, who had no more power over their men than I had, promised and vowed all sorts of things. On that very slender evidence, Pussy dear——
‘I was at Simla,’ said Abanazar hastily.
‘Never mind, you’re tarred with the same brush. On the strength of those tuppeny-ha’penny treaties, your asses of Politicals reported the country as pacified, and the Government, being a fool, as usual, began road-makin’—dependin’ on local supply for labour. ’Member that, Pussy? ’Rest of our chaps who’d had no look-in during the campaign didn’t think there’d be any more of it, and were anxious to get back to India. But I’d been in two of these little rows before, and I had my suspicions. I engineered myself, summo ingenio,* into command of a road-patrol—no shovellin’, only marching up and down genteelly with a guard. They’d withdrawn all the troops they could, but I nucleused* about forty Pathans, recruits chiefly, of my regiment, and sat tight at the base-camp while the road-parties went to work, as per Political survey.
‘’Had some rippin’ sing-songs in camp, too,’ said Tertius.
‘My pup’—thus did Dick Four refer to his subaltern—‘was a pious little beast. He didn’t like the sing-songs, and so he went down with pneumonia. I rootled round the camp, and found Tertius gassing about as a D.A.Q.M.G.,* which, God knows, he isn’t cut out for. There were six or eight of the old Coll. at base-camp (we’re always in force for a frontier row), but I’d heard of Tertius as a steady old hack, and I told him he had to shake off his D.A.Q.M.G. breeches and help me. Tertius volunteered like a shot, and we settled it with the authorities, and out we went—forty Pathans, Tertius, and me, looking up the road-parties. Macnamara’s—’member old Mac, the Sapper, who played the
fiddle so damnably at Umballa?*—Mac’s party was the last but one. The last was Stalky’s. He was at the head of the road with some of his pet Sikhs. Mac said he believed he was all right.’
‘Stalky is a Sikh,’ said Tertius. ‘He takes his men to pray at the Durbar Sahib at Amritzar,* regularly as clockwork, when he can.’
‘Don’t interrupt, Tertius. It was about forty miles beyond Mac’s before I found him; and my men pointed out gently, but firmly, that the country was risin’. What kind o’ country. Beetle? Well, I’m no word-painter, thank goodness, but you might call it a hellish country! When we weren’t up to our necks in snow, we were rolling down the khud.* The well-disposed inhabitants, who were to supply labour for the road-making (don’t forget that, Pussy dear), sat behind rocks and took pot-shots at us. ’Old, old story!* We all legged it in search of Stalky. I had a feeling that he’d be in good cover, and about dusk we found him and his road-party, as snug as a bug in a rug, in an old Malôt stone fort, with a watch-tower at one corner. It overhung the road they had blasted out of the cliff fifty feet below; and under the road things went down pretty sheer, for five or six hundred feet, into a gorge about half a mile wide and two or three miles long. There were chaps on the other side of the gorge scientifically gettin’ our range. So I hammered on the gate and nipped in, and tripped over Stalky in a greasy, bloody old poshteen,* squatting on the ground, eating with his men. I’d only seen him for half a minute about three months before, but I might have met him yesterday. He waved his hand all sereno.
‘ “Hullo, Aladdin! Hullo, Emperor!” he said. “You’re just in time for the performance.”
‘I saw his Sikhs looked a bit battered. “Where’s your command? Where’s your subaltern?” I said.
‘ “Here—all there is of it,” said Stalky. “If you want young Everett, he’d dead, and his body’s in the watch-tower. They rushed our road-party last week, and got him and seven men. We’ve been besieged for five days. I suppose they let you through to make sure of you. The whole country’s up. ’Strikes me you walked into a first-class trap.” He grinned, but neither Tertius nor I could see where the deuce the fun was. We hadn’t any grub for our men, and Stalky had only four days’ whack* for his. That came of dependin’ upon your asinine Politicals, Pussy dear, who told us that the inhabitants were friendly.
‘To make us quite comfy, Stalky took us up to the watchtower to see poor Everett’s body, lyin’ in a foot o’ drifted snow. It looked like a girl of fifteen—not a hair on the little fellow’s face. He’d been shot through the temple, but the Malôts had left their mark on him. Stalky unbuttoned the tunic, and showed it to us—a rummy sickle-shaped cut on the chest. ’Member the snow all white on his eyebrows, Tertius? ’Member when Stalky moved the lamp and it looked as if he was alive?’
‘Ye-es,’ said Tertius, with a shudder. ‘’Member the beastly look on Stalky’s face, though, with his nostrils all blown out, same as he used to look when he was bullyin’ a fag? That was a lovely evening.’
‘We held a council of war up there over Everett’s body. Stalky said the Malôts and Khye-Kheens were up together; havin’ sunk their blood-fueds to settle us. The chaps we’d seen across the gorge were Khye-Kheens. It was about half a mile from them to us as a bullet flies, and they’d made a line of sungars* under the brow of the hill to sleep in and starve us out. The Malôts, he said, were in front of us promiscuous.* There wasn’t good cover behind the fort, or they’d have been there, too. Stalky didn’t mind the Malôts half as much as he did the Khye-Kheens. He said the Malôts were treacherous curs. What I couldn’t understand was, why in the world the two gangs didn’t join in and rush us. There must have been at least five hundred of ’em. Stalky said they didn’t trust each other very well, because they were ancestral enemies when they were at home; and the only time they’d tried a rush he’d hove a couple of blasting-charges among ’em, and that had sickened ’em a bit.
‘It was dark by the time we finished, and Stalky, always sereno, said: “You command now. I don’t suppose you mind my taking any action I may consider necessary to reprovision the fort?” I said “Of course not,” and then the lamp blew out. So Tertius and I had to climb down the tower steps (we didn’t want to stay with Everett) and got back to our men. Stalky had gone off—to count the stores, I supposed. Anyhow, Tertius and I sat up in case of a rush (they were plugging at us pretty generally, you know), relieving each other till the mornin’.
‘Mornin’ came. No Stalky. Not a sign of him. I took counsel with his senior native officer—a grand, white-whiskered old chap—Rutton Singh, from Jullunder*-way. He only grinned, and said it was all right. Stalky had been out of the fort twice before, somewhere or other, accordin’ to him. He said Stalky ’ud come back unchipped, and gave me to understand that Stalky was an invulnerable Guru of sorts. All the same, I put the whole command on half rations, and set ’em to pickin’ out loop-holes.
‘About noon there was no end of a snowstorm, and the enemy stopped firing. We replied gingerly, because we were awfully short of ammunition. ’Don’t suppose we fired five shots an hour, but we generally got our man. Well, while I was talking with Rutton Singh I saw Stalky coming down from the watch-tower, rather puffy about the eyes, his poshteen coated with claret-coloured ice.
‘ “No trustin’ these snowstorms,” he said. “Nip out quick and snaffle what you can get. There’s a certain amount of friction between the Khye-Kheens and the Malôts just now.”
‘I turned Tertius out with twenty Pathans, and they bucked about in the snow for a bit till they came on to a sort of camp about eight hundred yards away, with only a few men in charge and half-a-dozen sheep by the fire. They finished off the men, and snaffled the sheep and as much grain as they could carry, and came back. No one fired a shot at ’em. There didn’t seem to be anybody about, but the snow was falling pretty thick.
‘ “That’s good enough,” said Stalky when we got dinner ready and he was chewin’ mutton-kababs off a cleanin’ rod. “There’s no sense riskin’ men. They’re holding a pow-wow between the Khye-Kheens and the Malôts at the head of the gorge. I don’t think these so-called coalitions are much good.”
‘Do you know what the maniac had done? Tertius and I shook it out of him by instalments. There was an underground granary cellar-room below the watch-tower, and in blasting the road Stalky had blown a hole into one side of it. Being no one else but Stalky, he’d kept the hole open for his own ends; and laid poor Everett’s body slap over the well of the stairs that led down to it from the watch-tower. He’d had to remove and replace the corpse every time he used the passage. The Sikhs wouldn’t go near the place, of course. Well, he’d got out of this hole, and dropped on to the road. Then, in the night and a howling snowstorm, he’d dropped over the edge of the khud, made his way down to the bottom of the gorge, forded the nullah* which was half frozen, climbed up on the other side along a track he’d discovered, and come out on the right flank of the Khye-Kheens. He had then—listen to this!— crossed over a ridge that paralleled their rear, walked half a mile behind that, and come out on the left of their line where the gorge gets shallow and where there was a regular track between the Malôt and the Khye-Kheen camps. That was about two in the morning, and, as it turned out, a man spotted him—a Khye-Kheen. So Stalky abolished him quietly, and left him—with the Malôt mark on his chest, same as Everett had.
‘ “I was just as economical as I could be,” Stalky said to us, “If he shouted I should have been slain. I’d never had to do that kind of thing but once before, and that was the first time I tried that path. It’s perfectly practicable for infantry, you know.”
‘ “What about your first man?” I said.
‘ “Oh, that was the night after they killed Everett, and I went out lookin’ for a line of retreat for my men. A man found me. I abolished him—privatim—scragged him. But on thinkin’ it over it occurred to me that if I could find the body (I’d hove it down some rocks) I might decorate it with the Malôt mark and leave
it to the Khye-Kheens to draw inferences. So I went out again the next night and did. The Khye-Kheens are shocked at the Malôts perpetratin’ these two dastardly outrages after they’d sworn to sink all blood-feuds. I lay up behind their sungars early this morning and watched ’em. They all went to confer about it at the head of the gorge. Awf’ly annoyed they are. ’Don’t wonder.” You know the way Stalky drops out his words, one by one.’
‘My God!’ said the Infant explosively, as the full depth of the strategy dawned on him.
‘Dear-r man!’ said M‘Turk, purring rapturously.
‘Stalky stalked,’ said Tertius. ‘That’s all there is to it.’
‘No, he didn’t,’ said Dick Four. ‘Don’t you remember how he insisted that he had only applied his luck? Don’t you remember how Rutton Singh grabbed his boots* and grovelled in the snow, and how our men shouted?’
‘None of our Pathans believed that was luck,’ said Tertius. ‘They swore Stalky ought to have been born a Pathan, and—’member we nearly had a row in the fort when Rutton Singh said Stalky was a Sikh? Gad, how furious the old chap was with my Pathan Jemadar! But Stalky just waggled his finger and they shut up.
The Complete Stalky & Co Page 34