by Talbot Mundy
“Is Hull, then, worse than London?” The voice was deep and steady, and the speaker seemed scarcely to expect an answer. He had voiced a question, but he seemed rather to have passed a judgment.
“No, I dare say not! They’re all bad places — London, and Birmingham, and Manchester, and Hull — for those that haven’t got the price! You can take your choice, and starve in any of ’em! It wasn’t millionaires that gave Hull a bad name, you may depend on it; it was folks like those in there!”
He nodded in the direction of a door that led from the saloon to the four-ale bar. Somebody had swung the door open, and Aga Khan saw an unlovely vision that he had grown accustomed to of late. Amid a babel of coarse voices and foul oaths, two beery hags slouched their down-trodden heels across the sanded floor in what was meant to be a dance, screaming with drunken laughter as the crowd applauded them. Along a bench that ran round three sides of the boozing-den men lounged who seemed only men by courtesy; scarecrows would have been less vile, because less capable of villainy.
And in one corner, grouped together, half desperate and wholly ragged, stood a little knot of younger men who listened with mouths agape, or with cynical unbelief, to a recruiting-sergeant. He was buying beer for them. And he was straight-backed, stone-cold-sober, and immaculate.
“Good hunting-ground, this, for the recruiting-sergeants!” said the publican as the door was kicked shut again. “Trade’s bad, and they’re about the only men who’re doing any business! They’re roping ’em in fast!”
“Are all the soldiers gotten thus?” asked Aga Khan. He evidently did expect an answer to that question, and he waited for it while the publican removed a broken-down gentleman who was trying to sell boot-laces.
“Go and join the army!” he growled at him, as he pushed him out into the street. Then he turned again to the man who could afford, and did not apparently object, to pay twice the regular price for milk.
“Not all of ’em, but more than half, I guess! They make ’em drunk, and get ’em sworn in before they’ve time to reconsider it. Once they’re sworn in they’ve got to stop! Any army where you come from?”
“Oh, yes, there’s an army,” answered Aga Khan. “But tell me, do these men not want to join?”
“Lord bless you — who’d want to be a soldier! When trade’s bad, and there’s no pickings anywhere, they join in hundreds, so’s to have a bed and bellyful!”
“Do they not care to serve their Queen, and to fight for her enormous empire?”
“They? Why should they? Why should I, for that matter? The Empire’s all right enough in its way, but what do they or I care about fighting for it! We’ll all shout ‘Rule Britannia’ when the orchestra plays it in the Halls, and most folks I’ve seen’ll wave their hats and cheer when the Queen rides past; but what’s all that compared to bread-and-cheese?”
“I had thought,” said Aga Khan, speaking slowly like a man who is half convinced and half afraid that he may be wrong, “I had thought that possibly there might be some great spirit emanating from the lower classes that had led to conquest. That you, for instance, and men like you — and like those in there — were the real heart of the Empire.”
“You thought wrong, then!” said the publican. “The Empire belongs to the privileged few. I dare bet that you can’t find a man in here, for instance, who knows a thing about it, or cares about it, or who ever got a penny’s worth of good out of it. I never did, for one!”
“I am surprised!” said Aga Khan, paying his little bill and walking out. He went, then, to an inconspicuous address in Bloom-bury, and wrote a long letter in a character that few in London could have read, and in a language that even fewer could have understood.
II.
AGA KHAN was not a man of kaleidoscopic changes; he was more like a chameleon, who blends with his surroundings without losing a fragment of his individuality. He was as much at home — and as little at home, for that matter — in Pall Mall as in the Seven Dials, and he carried with him letters of introduction that procured him admission everywhere. Where he went he contrived to excite little curiosity, but to absorb an enormous quantity of information.
He walked from Bloomsbury down Little Queen Street past Drury Lane into the Strand; and at the corner of Wellington Street his boots were blacked for him by an able-bodied man who called him “sir,” and touched his cap, and thanked him extravagantly for twopence, which happened to be twice the regulation price.
“Are you English?” he asked him.
“Yes, sir — born in London, sir — thank you, sir — yes, sir, I’m English.”
“I suppose you’re proud to be an Englishman?”
“Me, sir? Why? I’d as soon be a furriner! Sleep in a doss-’ouse — eat what I can get, an’ black boots for a living. Gawd! I’d as soon be a dawg. I’m thinking I’ll go and join the army!”
A week later Aga Khan passed that same corner, and noticed that same man in the toils of a glib-tongued recruiting-sergeant; but in the meantime he had noticed many other things. He had stood at a theatre entrance, and had seen a man in uniform refuse admission to a soldier, who wore a cleaner, better uniform. He had stood in the throng of Houndsditch — beside the barrows where the brass-lunged costers bellowed out their prices, and the down-and-out brigade fought fiercely in among them for a chance to live — and had seen a clean-skinned, spick-and-span sergeant of the Line sneered at and pushed into the street.
He had sat in the stranger’s gallery of the House of Commons, and had heard a loud-voiced demagogue who thumped his chest declaim about the Estimates, denouncing expenditure on armaments and howling for the dissolution of the Empire. And he had noticed that no man present took the trouble even to seem annoyed. Further, he had heard another demagogue, at Hyde Park Corner, describe the Queen as the dummy-head of a greedy oligarchy, while a crowd and four policemen looked on, and grinned, and listened. And no man threw a stone.
“Is such a speech as that permitted?” he inquired, in his gentlemanly unimpassioned tone.
“Why not?” asked the constable.
“Then is it not your duty to prevent him?”
“No. It’s my business to protect him if the crowd gets nasty!”
And wondering — very deeply wondering — the bearded, keen-eyed Aga Khan went back to Bloomsbury, and wrote another letter.
And he had sat, together with a whiskered civilian in spectacles, in the luxuriously appointed smoking-room of a most exclusive club.
“Yes,” said the club-member, scrunching in his pocket the unwelcome letter of introduction, and trying to alight on a topic of common interest, “I have a cousin in India — Civil Service, don’t you know — younger son, and all that kind of thing — had to earn his living — might as well go to India as any other place. Like it, eh? Couldn’t say, I’m sure! A man mustn’t quarrel with his bread-and-butter! He always seems very glad to get home on his vacation — looks me up as a rule. He was here about eight months ago — came and had lunch with me — told me a lot of stories about cobras, and tigers, and famines, and plague. Very interestin’. Any tigers where you come from?”
“No,” said Aga Khan, leaning back in his chair, and eyeing his surroundings. “This club is very comfortable.”
“Yes. Isn’t it!”
The club-member was interested now, and went into long details about club-management, and the different degrees of exclusiveness of clubs; and Aga Khan sat still and seemed interested too. But really he was listening to the conversation of two men who had dropped into the chairs behind him, and were sitting with their tall hats forward over their eyes, too bored, apparently, even to order drinks.
“Rotten, isn’t it!” said one of them, in a voice that was weary with disgust.
“Don’t talk about it!”
“Got to let steam off somehow! How’s a fellow goin’ to finance it, I’d like to know!”
“Renewin’ promissory notes, I suppose; money-lenders are a long-sufferin’ breed!”
“At twenty
-five per cent., yes, I s’pose they are! But Good Lord! Think of it! India, now, with the ‘season’ just coming on!”
“Yes, and all the old men time-expired, or pretty nearly all, and nothing but a lot of rotten, raw, pie-faced rookies on the strength!”
“They tell me the price of polo-ponies has gone up to nearly double in the last few years out there.”
“I know it has. Come on — don’t let’s think about it. Let’s go and see the Jew — may as well get that part over!”
They went, languidly and discontentedly — two clean-brushed dandies from a bandbox — as indifferent, it seemed, as dummies to anything but self, and tired of that.
“Would you tell me what those men are?” asked Aga Khan, glancing at their backs.
“Their names, you mean?”
“No. What they are.”
“Army officers — both in the same regiment. Their regiment has just been ordered out to India.”
“They seem displeased.”
“Yes? Well, London will get along without them!”
“Must they go, whether they will or not?”
“They could resign, of course.”
“They go, then, for the pay?”
The club-member smiled. “No,” he answered, “their pay scarcely covers their mess-bills.”
“They go, then, at their own expense?”
“Practically. They’ll get a very uncomfortable passage on a troop-ship, but they’ll have to buy new uniforms and all that kind of thing themselves.”
“Then why are they officers — why do they not resign?”
“Couldn’t say, I’m sure; each man to his own taste, I suppose! The social position’s fair, for one thing.”
“I heard them speak of promissory notes?”
“Did you? Well, I suppose that they’re in debt, or have got to borrow money.”
“Against what do they borrow? Against their pay?”
“Oh, Lord, no! Against their expectations! Their fathers happen to be rich, and can’t live forever!”
“Then, for the social position, and to go to India, where they do not want to go, they give a mortgage on their patrimony?”
“Not exactly. Those two men would have a good social position in any case.”
“Then why?”
“Rather difficult to explain, Mr. — ah — Khan, I’m afraid!”
“Do they so love their Queen?”
“Personally?”
“How else?”
“I don’t suppose they either of them know her personally!”
“Then her ministers — is it for them? Are they members possibly of a political party, and very loyal?”
“Good Heavens, no! There’s a Radical ministry in power, and they’re both of them staunch Tories!”
“What do they stand to gain?”
“Nothing, unless you count fever, and conceivably a wound or two.”
“Can they win great promotion? — great favor? — great honor?”
“Hardly. They’re captains. Might become majors. Might get a medal or so.”
“Ah! The medals would carry great distinction? Men would applaud them?”
“The medals would be about the same as those the rank and file would get; nobody’d even know they had ’em — they don’t wear ’em, you know, except on parade. And nobody’d care one way or the other!”
“Are they of the upper classes?”
“Certainly!”
“And they do not want to go to India, for I heard them say so — and they can gain nothing, but will lose much by it, in money and possibly in health — and they very likely do not know their Queen — they hate her ministry — they have to borrow if they will obey — I heard them say that the men whom they must lead are ‘rotten’ — and yet, they go! Can you solve me this riddle?”
“It’s a question of privilege, I think,” said the club man.
“Ah! Privilege! Now, what privilege?”
“The privilege of going!”
Aga Khan was infinitely too polite to shake his head, or to give any other sign of incredulity. Only his brown eyes showed skepticism, and something that was more, as he rose and thanked his host, and said good-by. But the letter that he wrote that evening was full of certainties — conclusions drawn by process of cold logic from his mental memoranda. And his conclusions would not have been changed in any way could he have overheard a conversation between that club-man and a crony, which took place ten minutes after his departure.
“Who was your friend?” asked a man who had been watching.
“Man named Aga Khan — brought me a letter of introduction from a man I know in India.”
“What part of India does he come from?”
“No part. He’s an Afghan, traveling to study social problems, so he says. Wants to know why army officers go all the way to India!”
“Did you enlighten him?”
“Can’t say I did. Not sure I know myself! There are two things, though, that beat me. One is, why the Indian Government allows such men to escape from their native hills.”
“And the other?”
“Is why anybody bothers about India! We’d be just as well off without it. It’s a nuisance, and the Afghans are a nuisance!”
III.
THE Afghans truly were, and are, a nuisance. Then, though, they possessed an Emir who had eaten with the under-dog and had learned to know men, or at least Afghans, from the bottom upward before he came into his own. And he not only was a nuisance; he had a yearning for lost provinces.
He had, too, sound common sense, blended, after a strangely Eastern manner, with romanticism and a patriarchal sense of duty that was almost Biblical. He believed that the fighting tribes on India’s northern frontier who had once sworn fealty to his ancestors were his by right — his children — his to rule with an iron rod that would suit their temperament and his own idea of fitness.
He had read more than a little, and had remembered what his national traditions were. He knew that India had been conquered from the North times without number. He was a statesman, and he guessed that the surest means of knitting together a nation torn by strife was to give it a national idea and start a war of conquest. And he knew that India would make good plundering. Once India were his, his warriors could plunge their arms down elbow-deep into the loot, and he, their Emir, would get the credit for it; the Afghan blood-lust would be sated for a time, and men could rest from the killing and grow prosperous.
He could dream, could that Emir. But underneath his dreams there lay that bedrock of common sense on which he had raised himself to clamber to the throne, and he did not forget that India had been conquered from the South and from the West once, or that her conquerors were still in power. British bayonets had helped him to the throne of Kabul, and he had no false impressions of what the British soldiers had been worth in those days.
But the British, once in Kabul, had set him firmly on the throne, and had gone away again — away down South beyond the Himalayas. They had told him to keep his eye on Russia, and to make Afghanistan a buffer-state between the gray-clad Russian hordes and England’s thin red line. And that, to his Oriental mind, showed weakness.
What conquerors relaxed their grip on a country they could hold? What general retreated when his base was safe and there was nothing to oppose him? What king or queen accepted promises in lieu of tribute, and left an alien — unwatched — to guard the border-line, unless his or her hands were full elsewhere? Would he act thus? Allah — God of the faithful and confounder of the infidel — forbid! There must be something rotten in the state of England.
Hence Aga Khan; and hence another man. The Emir was no man to leave his fighting force unwatched while he himself went in search of information; no man, either, to trust his ministers too far, or to let them grow lazy from too little work. They were schemers who might scheme against him unless he kept them busy, and there were things that he needed very much to know. So Aga Khan, the wisest of his graybeards, and the most o
bservant, and the one who knew most English, went to London; and Ullah Khan, who was better versed in Hindustani, and who loved above all things to trade in horses, took the long trail down the Khyber with some four-year-olds.
And, like Aga Khan, who was threading in and out amid the slums and clubs of London, Ullah Khan saw wonders. Being a horse-trader, he had three perfectly good reasons for disliking the Bengali babus; but he had his orders, and he did need an interpreter, for in India men speak two hundred dialects. So Boghal Grish, the fat, unspeakable iconoclast, went with him, and had trudged, complaining, in the dust from end to end of almost endless provinces.
He had been a useful person — very. He had translated for Ullah Khan’s benefit hundreds of seditious Hindu editorials, taken at random from lithographed native newspapers with two-hundred-copy circulations; and he had interpreted the exaggerated vaporings of “failed B.A.’s” and even lesser lights who had failed to get a “Government poseetion.” With quick babu perception he had very soon divined that Ullah Khan was not in search of things to be admired, and he had brought men to him whose point of view was likely to prove acceptable.
In the bewildering bazaars of Lucknow and Delhi and Cawnpore he had shown him the locked-up stores and houses where the plague had ravaged, and had read aloud for him the notices nailed on the doors, and had interpreted for him the bitter revilings of the men whose privacy had been invaded by ruthless, caste-careless sanitary commissioners.
“They care nothing for our native customs,” explained Boghal Grish. “Nor yet for our religion! See!” And he led him to a Hindu temple, whose holiness had been denied by Christian disinfectant. “Even our gods are nothing to them! With one hand they break down our privacy; with the other they pacify malcontents by raising them to positions of authority.”
And he had interpreted the remarks of the Hindu priests, whose cow-dung-plastered shrines still bore the shameless stain of cleanliness-applied-by-force-majeure.
Ullah Khan had seen for himself the native scowls as Tommy Atkins swaggered, laughing and careless, through the crowded market, and he had needed no interpreter to make the meaning of the murmurs clear to his understanding; there were no love-croonings in among them! And he knew enough English on his own account to understand the conversation of occasional British officers, when chance favored him and he could overhear without appearing too inquisitive.