by Talbot Mundy
One, and only one, consideration kept the rissaldar from defending himself — the same that prevented him from striking back or summoning assistance. There were twenty rival clans in camp, every man of whom would have instantly made common cause with him if the rissaldar had raised a finger. They would have beaten that white man to death, with consequences that any fool could foresee.
But the white man mistook the self-control for meekness, a quality that exasperates ill-temper. He struck again and again, until the boy let go his father’s hand and shouted shame on the horse-traders who could look on and not retaliate.
That was all that was needed. There would have been murder, and inevitable hangings afterward, but for another small boy. As he rode an Arab pony around the lines he saw the first blow struck, and, being the only son of Cuthbert “Raj-bahadur” King, who was sixth of his line to serve in India, he knew how to choose the right course even at that age.
While the men of a dozen rival factions ran to avenge the rissaldar, young Athelstan King spurred his pony in the opposite direction and reined in at his father’s tent.
“What is it, boy?”
Those two had learned to understand each other in eight years. You must, if you ever mean to, in a land that the white man’s son may not know between the years of eight and eighteen. It is as children that the English learn the art of governing, and grown men return to India to pick up reins which were dropped when they left for “Home” and school. Nine or ten words were enough. Raj-bahadur Cuthbert King lifted his son from the saddle and galloped across camp as fast as the red pony could lay hoof to earth under him.
He was in time to burst through a yelling swarm armed with knives and sticks and take on his own body a last blow aimed at Mahommed Babar. The white man was afraid now, with the bully’s fear that seeks to terrify the strong by hammering the weak. The blow would have killed if it had landed on the old man’s head. Instead, it gave Raj-bahadur King excuse for the only means of saving the situation.
He struck back, dismounted, and waded in with his fists, treating the white man to a licking such as few white men have ever had in front of an Eastern crowd. Not a man from Delhi to Peshawar would willingly have laid a finger on Raj-bahadur King. Rather than harm him they forewent their rage and stood back in a circle until it dawned that the thrashing he meted out was better, and more just, than the murder they had intended. After that they ceased shouting and watched in silence, while all the theoretic principles of the army were broken and an officer thrashed a civilian with his fists.
Finally Raj-bahadur King threw the victim into his tent, resumed his jacket, and addressed himself to Rissaldar Mahommed Babar.
“I’m sorry, old friend, that this should have happened. Are you hurt?”
“Nothing that I cannot endure for your sake, sahib.”
“Is the boy hurt?”
“Not he. He has had a lesson.”
King picked the youngster up and set him on the pony.
“Ride over to my tent,” he ordered.
Then he took Mahommed Babar’s arm and the two walked side by side across the camp, as equals, all the camp wondering. Raj-bahadur Cuthbert King was considered the equal of viceroys in all except rank, and greater than any viceroy in his grip on the hearts of men.
When they reached the tent he with his own hands set a chair for Mahommed Babar, and made his own son bring the old man breakfast, even as the Black Prince waited on the French king after Agincourt. Then they sat and smoked together in view of all those northern traders, so that the news of the honor done to Mahommed Babar was certain to be spread from Delhi as far as Khabul after a month was out. Then:
“Is there anything I can do to make amends, Mahommed Babar?”
“By your God, sahib, may dogs eat me if I bear one grudge! I am old, and that fool struck me harder than he knew. Let him not know. He is not worthy to have killed a rissaldar of the ‘Peishwaris.’ Moreover, if it were said that I die because of him, better men than he would presently be hanged for taking law in their own hands.”
There was fire smoldering behind King’s eyes, but he nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Gallopers could have brought an army surgeon here by noon.”
“My time has come. Why trouble the surgeons? This is thy son?”
King nodded again. The rissaldar knew well the youngster was his son, but there are proper ways of approaching subjects, and a man who fought on the right side in ‘57 is not to be denied his measure of stateliness.
“This is my son: Like thine, he shall carry on the purpose. He shall serve the Raj. They two may be the last for all we know. None may know that, save Allah. My boy’s name is the same as mine, Mahommed Babar. And thine?”
“Athelstan.”
“A king’s name! Good. Mahommed, lay thy hand on his. Be thou his man as long as Allah gives thee breath!”
“Shake hands with him, Athelstan,” said Cuthbert King, swallowing something and hiding emotion angrily after the manner of his kind.
The two boys shook hands, the Englishman frankly with a smile, and the other with some embarrassment.
“Say something!” commanded Raj-bahadur King.
“All right. I’ll remember,” said Athelstan. And that was surely as good as anything he could have said.
“Mahommed,” said the gray ex-rissaldar, moving himself very gently in the chair for fear of hemorrhage, “do thou remember likewise. Other men’s memories will fail them in the years that come. There will be talk of this and that. Let no talk seduce. Hot words are emptiness. Nothing is good in Allah’s sight but deeds well done. I, thy father, who am Allah’s slave, will stand at the gate of paradise and question thy deeds when thy time comes! Color, clan, creed, tribe, wealth, honor are all nothing in the scales against one deed. Remember!”
“Do you hear that, Athelstan? This is for you, too. Are you listening?” demanded King senior.
“Take no vengeance. That is Allah’s. But requite in full. Repay. Owe no man. Thou hast seen how this sahib repaid, disgracing his own countryman and honoring me. Think well on that.”
The old man laid his head back and moved his hand to signify the episode was over.
“And now, sahib, shake hands with me. Thine is a friendship bearing no regrets. If your honor’s servants have nothing better to do, it would be kind to have me laid on a litter and carried home. Good-by, sahib. May Allah bless your son — and mine!”
CHAPTER 2. “Twenty-five years later.”
Poona, Bombay Presidency. Three words to a man who knows the western side of India like three sniffs in the dew to a hunting-dog. They tell the whole story. Poona, summer government headquarters, depot for artillery, cavalry and favored infantry, sick-and-short-leave station — second-class Simla, as it were, where the pale-faced men and women who have bridled the rising Eastern peril meet once in a lustrum and exchange remarks, was the same after the war as before it. Only the people had changed a little. There were new faces, and the old ones were older. That was all.
Pig-sticking, polo, and gymkhana dove-tailed into the day’s work, and the nights were fabulous — Arabian. India lends herself to that. Hot skies and hard sport go together. The star-powdered Indian sky is the background of them all for nodding paper-lanterns. Turbaned servants, flitting on naked feet among shadows darker than themselves, suggest intrigue that never sleeps. A khaki uniform looks golden, a white one silver, and a woman’s bare shoulders like a glimpse of Heaven.
The fortnightly dance at the gymkhana differed in no wise from a hundred that preceded it. A dozen scattered men in evening dress among two hundred only punctuated the color scheme and made the whirling pattern easier to read.
One of the men in black was Cotswold Ommony. He never wore uniform, being of the Woods and Forests. You could tell at a glance that he never walked abroad without a gun under his arm — a sturdy, stocky man with a queer, old-fashioned look that made you take a second glance at him.
He was the only man in the r
oom who wore a beard; one of the very few that danced in the new style. Most of them waltzed round and round in the Victorian way that Byron thought so scandalous and that looks so absurdly antique to Americans. But Ommony did the fox-trot and the one-step. He was no expert, but an enthusiast, and the high and mighty into whom he bumped did not approve. They said so at intervals, but Ommony smiled; whereat you knew immediately why he held his job.
Among the scandalized objectors was young Mrs. Wilmshurst, so-called because her husband was a middle-aged High Court judge. She angrily chafed an elbow as she talked with Athelstan King against the veranda rail, with a blue Chinese lantern swaying gently overhead. They stood together exactly at the point where the yellow ballroom glare outpouring through wide doors and windows met dark night and defeat.
King was safe to dance with. He had not learned the new tricks. Moreover, he did not dance too much and get too hot, and had no beard; and women always liked to talk with him because he had never been known to make love to any one, and in a case like that there is always hope.
Although both men were in evening dress he looked as different from Ommony as a carriage-horse from a cart-horse; taller, although the two were really the same height; lighter, although they weighed about the same; darker- complexioned, in spite of Ommony’s dark gray-shot beard; more active, although Ommony was prancing like a satyr, and King stock-still.
Mrs. Wilmshurst was in her bitterly cynical mood, which she believed becoming to a High Court judge’s wife whose elbow has been hurt by a Woods and Forests man.
“Has India seeped into your blood and made you mad, that you should have left the army in your prime, Major King?”
“Perhaps,” he answered. He was thoroughly bored with her, but quite able to be bored without letting her know it.
“I suppose there’s more money in your present job.”
“No. Less money.”
“Gracious! Then you surely are mad! Do explain! I’m crazy about complexes. My husband has been reading Freud and talks about it at breakfast.” She tapped his shoulder familiarly with her fan. “Come, let me analyze you!”
King turned to face the ballroom and leaned his back against the rail.
“There’s a man enjoying himself! Look at Cot Ommony!” he laughed.
Mrs. Wilmshurst understood that she had failed to please, and her bitterness became as nearly genuine as anything she usually felt.
“Does he prance that way in the forest glades?” she wondered. “What a pity a man said to be so brilliant should waste his time among monkeys — and learn manners from them!”
“Ommony has learned more from the beasts than most of us learn anywhere,” King answered.
“Oh, is he a friend of yours? I see you’re huffed. So sorry. I thought you had no intimates — so everybody says.”
“Ommony and I are friends.”
“I suppose it would be rude to say I don’t envy either of you! I like warmth about my friendships. How can you possibly be friends, when he lives in his great forest and you disappear over the Himalayas for months on end? Do you write each other billets-doux?”
“Practically never write. I think your next partner is looking for you,” King answered. “Here you are. Don’t let me rob you, Campbell.”
She left on Campbell’s arm, but had the last word and took care that King heard it.
“So glad you came, Captain Campbell. I was frightfully bored.”
King chuckled and lighted a cigar. A moment later Ommony joined him, wiping the inside of his collar with a handkerchief.
“Hello,” said Ommony.
“Hello, Cot.”
“You’re lean. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Got a scratch up Khyber way. Brass bullet in the stomach. All right now.”
“Where are you going next?”
“To stay with you.”
“Excellent.”
Ommony pulled out a gold watch that must have been an heirloom, because nobody nowadays would buy such a thing. “Seventy-two minutes. One A.M. train.”
“Ready when you are.”
The fact that they had not met for nearly four years was as unimportant as the water that had tumbled during that time over Poona bund. They resumed where they had left off, those two, hardly troubling to exchange remarks over a whisky-and-soda at the bar; then striding side by side into the darkness to interrupt gambling by candle-light and send their “boys” in search of baggage..
Servants and baggage went in a tikka-gharri to the station, but they walked, characteristically saying no good-byes. Ten words from each of them and their servants went about the business of going somewhere — anywhere — with that unsurprised contentment that is homage of elementary intelligence to men who know their minds. There is more than art or violence in being well served; more also than money payment.
They had not more than enough time to catch the train, but you could have hurried an era just as easily as either of those men. Two things — knowledge of the exact number of minutes at their disposal, and an all- absorbing interest — took them out of their way through winding streets instead of straight down the high-road to the station. Add to that the faith in their servants of two men who have kept faith, and you have their whole motive. But it was promptly misinterpreted.
India never sleeps. And because the long night of her subjection to innumerable despotisms has probably begun to wane and life moves in her hidden roots, night is the time when secrets draw near the surface. Just as you can hear the jungle grow at night, so you can see India seeing visions, if you look. Not very many trouble to look.
There were voices on the roofs. Guttering candles made a beautiful golden glow among shadows where only hate lurked. Light emerged from the chinks of shutters, sound crowding through after it — mostly of men talking all at once, but now and then of one man’s voice declaiming. The gloom of the narrow streets, with the occasional ineffectual-looking “constabeel” under a lamp at a corner, produced an unreal effect, as if they were walking in a dream.
A door opened violently as they passed, and a copper-colored man with his long hair coiled in a chignon and sweat running in streams down his naked, hairy belly, stood boldly with a hand on each doorpost and eyed them as agreeably as a caged beast eyes its captors. His eyeballs rolled, and he spat into the gutter. Then, turning with slobber on his jaws as if frenzy had gone beyond control, he shouted in the Maharati tongue to the men in the room behind him:
“Come and look at them! Oh, brothers, come and look at them! How long shall we endure? Those lords, eh? See them swagger down the streets! We labor to pay their salaries, but—”
Someone pulled him in by the waist-cloth and the door slammed shut. The constable at the next corner, who had heard every word of the tirade, saluted rigidly and stared after King and Ommony in a sort of dumb perplexity. He was not obliged to salute them, for they were not in uniform.
“I’ve been up and down India recently,” said King. “It’s like that everywhere. It isn’t honest discontent that common sense and guts could deal with, it’s something else. The troops are beginning to get it. They’re wondering. Did you notice that policeman? Nothing but his pay between him and anarchy. What’s happening?”
“God knows,” said Ommony.
“Of course, living in your forest—”
“You can learn a lot in a forest.”
“Granted. But—”
“This, for instance — goats will keep a forest down. Control the goats, and they do it good; it grows. Turn them loose and they kill it. That’s us. We controlled the goats for a hundred years, and India grew. We were so busy policing goats that we overlooked other things. The forest’s getting out of hand.”
“I often think we English are the blindest fools that breathe,” said King.
“Queer, isn’t it?” Ommony answered. “I’ve puzzled over it. Read a lot — specially foreign criticism. But the critics don’t help. They only sneer at our faults as if we weren’t aware of them. Th
e nearest I’ve come to explaining it is that we’re so busy policing goats, jailing robbers, passing cautious laws, cleaning unhealthy places, that we can’t see beyond that. We’re near-sighted.”
“And where there is no vision—” King suggested.
“No foresight, yes.”
“ — the people perish. May I die with my boots on!”
“Amen!” said Ommony.
“Some of us will, some won’t. There’ll be all kinds of us, in all sorts of predicaments, when that hour comes. If that brass bullet didn’t let all the steam out of you we’d better put on speed now. We’ve exactly seven minutes.”
CHAPTER 3. “I’ll prove to you that there’s not much wrong with Mahommed Babar.”
Ommony being official overlord of half-a-million acres of forest and stream, he and King traveled in a compartment all to themselves. Characteristically, Ommony asked no questions. Their car was cut off, bunted and shunted from one track to another. They smoked, said little, and were fed from luke-warm tin cans at intervals by servants who climbed monkey-fashion along the footboard for two long days and three longer nights. And at last they left the train at dawn at a station kept by one lone babu who was station-master, telegrapher, freight-agent, porter, and every other thing. He looked glad to see Ommony and told him the gossip of the line, which was mainly about sudden death, that being Moplah country.
A decrepit tonga waited, drawn by two nags not yet quite old enough for pension, and driven by a man, most of whose property was on his back (three yards of cotton cloth, less wear and tear) and he contented. That tonga was the last link for a while with the life that is smothered under stiff shirts.
“Feels good here,” said King, with his knees nearly up to his chin on the back seat and the early morning flies making patterns on his sleeves and helmet.
“This is home,” Ommony answered, lighting a cigar beside him, with his heels on piled-up luggage on a level with his head. “I hope to die here, if there’s anything in death. Heaven’ll be a forest. Lots to do; lots of time to do it. By George, it’s going to be hot among the trees!”