Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  He would ride before dawn and when the evening breeze had come to cool the hot earth a little through the blazing afternoons he would lie in the place of honor by some open window, where he could watch a hireling flick the flies off his lean, road-hardened horse, and listen to the plotting and the carried tales of plots, pretending always to be sympathetic or else open to conviction.

  “A soldier? Hah! A soldier fights for the side that can best reward him!” he would grin. “And, when there is no side, perhaps he makes one! I am a soldier!”

  If they pressed him, he would point to his medal ribbons, that he always wore. “The British gave me those for fighting against the northern tribes beyond the Himalayas,” he would tell them. “The southern tribes — Bengalis of the south and east — would give better picking than mere medal ribbons!”

  They were not all sure of him. They were not all satisfied why he should ride on to Peshawur, and decline to stay with them and talk good sedition.

  “I would see how the British are!” he told them. And he told the truth. But they were not quite satisfied; he would have made a splendid leader to have kept among them, until he — too — became too powerful and would have to be deposed in turn.

  His own holding was a long way from Peshawur, and he was no rich man who could afford at a mere whim to ride two long days’ march beyond his goal. Nor was he, as he had explained to Miss McClean, a letter-carrier; he would get no more than the merest thanks for delivering her letters to where they could be included in the Government mail-bag. Yet he left the road that would have led him homeward to his left, and carried on — quickening his pace as he neared the frontier garrison town, and wasting, then, no time at all on seeking information. Nobody supposed that the Pathans and the other frontier tribes were anything but openly rebellious, and he would have been an idiot to ask questions about their loyalty.

  Because of their disloyalty, and the ever-present danger that they were, the biggest British garrison in India had to be kept cooped up in Peshawur, to rot with fever and ague and the other ninety Indian plagues.

  He wanted to see that garrison again, and estimate it, and make up his mind what exactly, or probably, the garrison would do in the event of the rebellion blazing out. And he wanted to try once more to warn some one in authority, and make him see the smouldering fire beneath the outer covering of sullen silence.

  He received thanks for the letters. He received an invitation to take tea on the veranda of an officer so high in the British service that many a staff major would have given a month’s pay for a like opportunity. But he was laughed at for the advice he had to give.

  “Mahommed Gunga, you’re like me, you’re getting old!” said the high official.

  “Not so very old, sahib. I was a young man when Cunnigan-bahadur raised a regiment and licked the half of Rajputana into shape with it. Not too old, sahib, to wish there were another Cunnigan to ride with!”

  “Well, Mahommed Gunga, you’re closer to your wish than you suppose! Young Cunningham’s gazetted, and probably just about starting on his way out here via the Cape of Good Hope. He should be here in three or four months at the outside.”

  “You mean that, sahib?”

  “Wish I didn’t! The puppy will arrive here with altogether swollen notions of his own importance and what is due his father’s son. He’s been captain of his college at home, and that won’t lessen his sense of self-esteem either. I can foresee trouble with that boy!”

  “Sahib, there is a service I could render!”

  The Rajput spoke with a strangely constrained voice all of a sudden, but the Commissioner did not notice it; he was too busy pulling on a wool-lined jacket to ward off the evening chill.

  “Well, risaldar — what then?”

  “I think that I could teach the son of Cunnigan-bahadur to be worth his salt.”

  “If you’ll teach him to be properly respectful to his betters I’ll be grateful to you, Mahommed Gunga.”

  “Then, sahib, I shall have certain license allowed me in the matter?”

  “Do anything you like, in reason, risaldar! Only keep the pup from cutting his eye-teeth on his seniors’ convenience, that’s all!”

  Mahommed Gunga wasted no time after that on talking, nor did he wait to specify the nature of the latitude he would expect to be allowed him; he knew better. And he knew now that the one chance that he sought had been given him.

  Like all observant natives, he was perfectly aware that the British weakness mostly lay in the age of the senior officers and the slowness of promotion. There were majors of over fifty years of age, and if a man were a general at seventy he was considered fortunate and young. The jealousy with which younger men were regarded would have been humorous had it not come already so near to plunging India into anarchy.

  He did not even trouble to overlook the garrison. He took his leave, and rode away the long two-day ride to his own place, where a sadly attenuated rent-roll and a very sadly thinned-down company of servants waited his coming. There, through fourteen hurried, excited days, he made certain arrangements about the disposition of his affairs during an even longer absence; he made certain sales — pledged the rent of fifty acres for ten years, in return for an advance — and on the fifteenth day rode southward, at the head of a five-man escort that, for quality, was worthy of a prince.

  A little less than three months later he arrived at Bombay, and by dint of much hard bargaining and economy fitted out himself and his escort, so that each man looked as though he were the owner of an escort of his own. Then, fretful at every added day that strained his fast-diminishing resources, he settled down to wait until the ship should come that brought young Cunningham.

  CHAPTER V

  Lies home beneath a sickly sun,

  Where humbleness was taught me?

  Or here, where spurs my father won

  On bended knee are brought me?

  HE landed, together with about a dozen other newly gazetted subalterns and civil officers, cramped, storm-tossed, snubbed, and then disgorged from a sailing-ship into a port that made no secret of its absolute contempt for new arrivals.

  There were liners of a kind on the Red Sea route, and the only seniors who chose the long passage round the Cape were men returning after sick-leave — none too sweet-tempered individuals, and none too prone to give the young idea a good conceit of himself. He and the other youngsters landed with a crushed-in notion that India would treat them very cavalierly before she took them to herself. And all, save Cunningham, were right.

  The other men, all homesick and lonely and bewildered, were met by bankers’ agents, or, in cases, only by a hotel servant armed with a letter of instructions. Here and there a bored, tired-eyed European had found time, for somebody-or-other’s sake, to pounce on a new arrival and bear him away to breakfast and a tawdry imitation of the real hospitality of northern India; but for the most part the beardless boys lounged in the red-hot customs shed (where they were to be mulcted for the privilege of serving their country) and envied young Cunningham.

  He — as pale as they, as unexpectant as they were of anything approaching welcome — was first amazed, then suspicious, then pleased, then proud, in turn. The different emotions followed one another across his clean-lined face as plainly as a dawn vista changes; then, as the dawn leaves a landscape finally, true and what it is for all to see, true dignity was left and the look of a man who stands in armor.

  “His father’s son!” growled Mahommed Gunga; and the big, black-bearded warriors who stood behind him echoed, “Ay!”

  But for four or five inches of straight stature, and a foot, perhaps, of chest-girth, he was a second edition of the Cunnigan-bahadur who had raised and led a regiment and licked peace into a warring countryside; and though he was that much bigger than his father had been, they dubbed him “Chota” Cunnigan on the instant. And that means “Little Cunningham.”

  He had yet to learn that a Rajput, be he poorest of the poor, admits no superior on earth. He did not
know yet that these men had come, at one man’s private cost, all down the length of India to meet him. Nobody had told him that the feudal spirit dies harder in northern Hindustan than it ever did in England, or that the Rajput clans cohere more tightly than the Scots. The Rajput belief that honest service — unselfishly given — is the greatest gift that any man may bring — that one who has received what he considers favors will serve the giver’s son — was an unknown creed to him as yet.

  But he stood and looked those six men in the eye, and liked them. And they, before they had as much as heard him speak, knew him for a soldier and loved him as he stood.

  They hung sickly scented garlands round his neck, and kissed his hand in turn, and spoke to him thereafter as man to man. They had found their goal worth while, and they bore him off to his hotel in clattering glee, riding before him as men who have no doubt of the honor that they pay themselves. No other of the homesick subalterns drove away with a six-man escort to clear the way and scatter sparks!

  They careered round through the narrow gate of the hotel courtyard as though a Viceroy at least were in the trap behind them; and Mahommed Gunga — six medaled, strapping feet of him — dismounted and held out an arm for him to take when he alighted. The hotel people understood at once that Somebody from Somewhere had arrived.

  Young Cunningham had never yet been somebody. The men who give their lives for India are nothing much at home, and their sons are even less. Scarcely even at school, when they had made him captain of the team, had he felt the feel of homage and the subtle flattery that undermines a bad man’s character; at schools in England they confer honors but take simultaneous precautions. He was green to the dangerous influence of feudal loyalty, but he quitted himself well, with reserve and dignity.

  “He is good! He will do!” swore Mahommed Gunga fiercely, for the other emotions are meant for women only.

  “He is better than the best!”

  “We will make a man of this one!”

  “Did you mark how he handed me his purse to defray expenses?” asked a black-bearded soldier of the five.

  “He is a man who knows by instinct!” said Mahommed Gunga. “See to it that thy accounting is correct, and overpay no man!”

  Deep-throated as a bull, erect as a lance, and pleased as a little child, Mahommed Gunga came to him alone that evening to talk, and to hear him talk, and to tell him of the plans that had been made.

  “Thy father gave me this,” he told him, producing a gold watch and chain of the hundred-guinea kind that nowadays are only found among the heirlooms. Young Cunningham looked at it, and recognized the heavy old-gold case that he had been allowed to “blow open” when a little boy. On the outside, deep-chiseled in the gold, was his father’s crest, and on the inside a portrait of his mother.

  “Thy father died in these two arms, bahadur! Thy father said: ‘Look after him, Mahommed Gunga, when the time is ripe for him to be a soldier.’ And I said: ‘Ha, huzoor!’ So! Then here is India!”

  He waved one hand grandiloquently, as though he were presenting the throne of India to his protegé!

  “Here, sahib, is a servant — blood of my own blood.”

  He clapped his hands, and a man who looked like the big, black-ended spirit of Aladdin’s lamp stood silent, instant, in the doorway.

  “He speaks no English, but he may help to teach thee the Rajput tongue, and he will serve thee well — on my honor. His throat shall answer for it! Feed him and clothe him, sahib, but pay him very little — to serve well is sufficient recompense.”

  Young Cunningham gave his keys at once to the silent servant, as a tacit sign that from that moment he was trusted utterly; and Mahommed Gunga nodded grim approval.

  “Thy father saw fit to bequeath me much in the hour when death came on him, sahib. I am no boaster, as he knew. Remember, then, to tell me if I fail at any time in what is due. I am at thy service!”

  Tact was inborn in Cunningham, as it had been in his father. He realized that he ought at once to show his appreciation of the high plane of the service offered.

  “There is one way in which you could help me almost at once, Mahommed Gunga,” he answered.

  “Command me, sahib.”

  “I need your advice — the advice of a man who really knows. I need horses, and — at first at least — I would rather trust your judgment than my own. Will you help me buy them?”

  The Raiput’s eyes blazed pleasure. On war, and wine, and women, and a horse are the four points to ask a man’s advice and win his approval by the asking.

  “Nay, sahib; why buy horses here? These Bombay traders have only crows’ meat to sell to the ill-advised. I have horses, and spare horses for the journey; and in Rajputana I have horses waiting for thee — seven, all told — sufficient for a young officer. Six of them are country-bred-sand-weaned — a little wild perhaps, but strong, and up to thy weight. The seventh is a mare, got by thy father’s stallion Aga Khan (him that made more than a hundred miles within a day under a fifteen-stone burden, with neither food nor water, and survived!). A good mare, sahib — indeed a mare of mares — fit for thy father’s son. That mare I give thee. It is little, sahib, but my best; I am a poor man. The other six I bought — there is the account. I bought them cheaply, paying less than half the price demanded in each case — but I had to borrow and must pay back.”

  Young Cunningham was hard put to it to keep his voice steady as he answered. This man was a stranger to him. He had a hazy recollection of a dozen or more bearded giants who formed a moving background to his dreams of infancy, and he had expected some sort of welcome from one or two perhaps, of his father’s men when he reached the north. But to have men borrow money that they might serve him, and have horses ready for him, and to be met like this at the gate of India by a man who admitted he was poor, was a little more than his self-control had been trained as yet to stand.

  “I won’t waste words, Mahommed Gunga,” he said, half-choking. “I’ll — er — I’ll try to prove how I feel about it.”

  “Ha! How said I? Thy father’s son, I said! He, too, was no believer in much promising! I was his servant, and will serve him still by serving thee. The honor is mine, sahib, and the advantage shall be where thy father wished it.”

  “My father would never have had me—”

  “Sahib, forgive the interruption, but a mistake is better checked. Thy father would have flung thee ungrudged, into a hell of bayonets, me, too, and would have followed after, if by so doing he could have served the cause he held in trust. He bred thee, fed thee, and sent thee oversea to grow, that in the end India might gain! Thou and I are but servants of the peace, as he was. If I serve thee, and thou the Raj — though the two of us were weaned on the milk of war and get our bread by war — we will none the less serve peace! Aie! For what is honor if a soldier lets it rust? Of what use is service, mouthed and ready, but ungiven? It is good, Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, that thou art come at last!”

  He saluted and backed out through the swinging door. He had come in his uniform of risaldar of the elder Cunningham’s now disbanded regiment, so he had not removed his boots as another native — and he himself if in mufti — would have done. Young Cunningham heard him go swaggering and clanking and spur-jingling down the corridor as though he had half a troop of horse behind him and wanted Asia to know it!

  It was something of a brave beginning that, for a twenty-one-year-old! Something likely — and expressly calculated by Mahommed Gunga — to bring the real man to the surface. He had been no Cunningham unless his sense of duty had been very near the surface — no Englishman, had he not been proud that men of a foreign, conquered race should think him worthy of all that honor; and no man at all if his eye had been quite dry when the veteran light-horseman swaggered out at last and left him to his own reflections.

  He had not been human if he had not felt a little homesick still, although home to him had been a place where a man stayed with distant relatives between the intervals of school. He felt lonely,
in spite of his reception — a little like a baby on the edge of all things new and wonderful. He would have been no European if he had not felt the heat, the hotel was like a vapor-bath.

  But the leaping red blood of youth ran strong in him. He had imagination. He could dream. The good things he was tasting were a presage only of the better things to come, and that is a wholesome point of view. He was proud — as who would not be? — to step straight into the tracks of such a father; and with that thought came another — just as good for him, and for India, that made him feel as though he were a robber yet, a thief in another’s cornfield, gathering what he did not sow. It came over him in a flood that he must pay the price of all this homage.

  Some men pay in advance, some at the time, and some pay afterward. All men, he knew, must pay. It would be his task soon to satisfy these gentle-men, who took him at his face value, by proving to them that they had made no very great mistake. The thought thrilled him instead of frightening — brought out every generous instinct that he had and made him thank the God of All Good Soldiers that at least he would have a chance to die in the attempt. There was nothing much the matter with young Cunningham.

  CHAPTER VI

  I take no man at rumor’s price,

  Nor as the gossips cry him.

  A son may ride, and stride, and stand;

  His father’s eye — his father’s hand —

  His father’s tongue may give command;

  But ere I trust I’ll try him!

  BUT before young Cunningham was called upon to pay even a portion of the price of fealty there was more of the receiving of it still in store for him, and he found himself very hard put to it, indeed, to keep overboiling spirits from becoming exultation of the type that nauseates.

  None of the other subalterns had influence, nor had they hereditary anchors in the far northwest that would be likely to draw them on to active service early in their career. They had already been made to surrender their boyhood dreams of quick promotion; now, standing in little groups and asking hesitating questions, they discovered that their destination — Fort William — was about the least desirable of all the awful holes in India.