The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories

by Christopher Dolley (ed)

  Scott knew, too, as well as the rest of the world, that Miss Martyn had come out to India four years before, to keep house for her brother, who, as every one, again, knew, had borrowed the money to pay for her passage, and that she ought, as all the world said, to have married long ago. Instead of this, she had refused some half a dozen subalterns, a civilian twenty years her senior, one major, and a man in the Indian Medical Department. This, too, was common property. She had ‘stayed down three hot weathers’, as the saying is, because her brother was in debt and could not afford the expense of her keep at even a cheap hill-station. Therefore her face was white as bone, and in the centre of her forehead was a big silvery scar about the size of a shilling – the mark of a Delhi sore, which is the same as a ‘Bagdad date’. This comes from drinking bad water, and slowly eats into the flesh till it is ripe enough to be burned out with acids.

  None the less William had enjoyed herself hugely in her four years. Twice she had been nearly drowned while fording a river on horseback; once she had been run away with on a camel; had witnessed a midnight attack of thieves on her brother’s camp; had seen justice administered, with long sticks, in the open under trees; could speak Urdu and even rough Punjabi with a fluency that was envied by her seniors; had altogether fallen out of the habit of writing to her aunts in England, or cutting the pages of the English magazines; had been through a very bad cholera year, seeing sights unfit to be told; and had wound up her experiences by six weeks of typhoid fever, during which her head had been shaved; and hoped to keep her twenty-third birthday that September. It is conceivable that her aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes – yea, after they had proposed to her and been rejected.

  ‘I like men who do things,’ she had confided to a man in the Educational Department, who was teaching the sons of cloth merchants and dyers the beauty of Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ in annotated cram-books; and when he grew poetical, William explained that she ‘didn’t understand poetry very much; it made her head ache,’ and another broken heart took refuge at the Club. But it was all William’s fault. She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work, and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.

  Scott had known her more or less for some three years, meeting her, as a rule, under canvas when his camp and her brother’s joined for a day on the edge of the Indian Desert. He had danced with her several times at the big Christmas gatherings, when as many as five hundred white people came into the station; and he had always a great respect for her housekeeping and her dinners.

  She looked more like a boy than ever when, after their meal, she sat, one foot tucked under her, on the leather camp-sofa, rolling cigarettes for her brother, her low forehead puckered beneath the dark curls as she twiddled the papers. She stuck out her rounded chin when the tobacco stayed in place, and, with a gesture as true as a school-boy’s throwing a stone, tossed the finished article across the room to Martyn, who caught it with one hand, and continued his talk with Scott. It was all ‘shop’, – canals and the policing of canals; the sins of villagers who stole more water than they had paid for, and the grosser sin of native constables who connived at the thefts; of the transplanting bodily of villages to newly-irrigated ground, and of the coming fight with the desert in the south when the Provincial funds should warrant the opening of the long-surveyed Luni Protective Canal System. And Scott spoke openly of his great desire to be put on one particular section of the work where he knew the land and the people, and Martyn sighed for a billet in the Himalayan foot-hills, and spoke his mind of his superiors, and William rolled cigarettes and said nothing, but smiled gravely on her brother because he was happy.

  At ten Scott’s horse came to the door, and the evening was ended.

  The lights of the two low bungalows in which the daily paper was printed showed bright across the road. It was too early to try to find sleep, and Scott drifted over to the editor. Raines, stripped to the waist like a sailor at a gun, lay in a long chair, waiting for night telegrams. He had a theory that if a man did not stay by his work all day and most of the night he laid himself open to fever; so he ate and slept among his files.

  ‘Can you do it?’ he said drowsily. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you over.’

  ‘About what? I’ve been dining at the Martyns’.’

  ‘The famine, of course, Martyn’s warned for it, too. They’re taking men where they can find ’em. I sent a note to you at the Club just now, asking if you could do us a letter once a week from the south – between two and three columns, say. Nothing sensational, of course, but just plain facts about who is doing what, and so forth. Our regular rates – ten rupees a column.’

  ‘Sorry, but it’s out of my line,’ Scott answered, staring absently at the map of India on the wall. ‘It’s rough on Martyn – very. Wonder what he’ll do with his sister. Wonder what the deuce they’ll do with me? I’ve no famine experience. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Am I ordered?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Here’s the wire. They’ll put you on relief-works,’ Raines went on, ‘with a horde of Madrassis dying like flies; one native apothecary and half a pint of cholera-mixture among the ten thousand of you. It comes of your being idle for the moment. Every man who isn’t doing two men’s work seems to have been called upon. Hawkins evidently believes in Punjabis. It’s going to be quite as bad as anything they have had in the last ten years.’

  ‘It’s all in the day’s work, worse luck. I suppose I shall get my orders officially some time tomorrow. I’m glad I happened to drop in. Better go and pack my kit now. Who relieves me here – do you know?’

  Raines turned over a sheaf of telegrams. ‘McEuan,’ said he, ‘from Murree.’

  Scott chuckled. ‘He thought he was going to be cool all summer. He’ll be very sick about this. Well, no good talking. ’Night.’

  Two hours later, Scott, with a clear conscience, laid himself down to rest on a string cot in a bare room. Two worn bullock-trunks, a leather water-bottle, a tin ice-box, and his pet saddle sewed up in sacking were piled at the door, and the Club secretary’s receipt for last month’s bill was under his pillow. His orders came next morning, and with them an unofficial telegram from Sir James Hawkins, who did not forget good men, bidding him report himself with all speed at some unpronounceable place fifteen hundred miles to the south, for the famine was sore in the land, and white men were needed.

  A pink and fattish youth arrived in the red-hot noonday, whimpering a little at fate and famines, which never allowed any one three months’ peace. He was Scott’s successor – another cog in the machinery, moved forward behind his fellow, whose services, as the official announcement ran, ‘were placed at the disposal of the Madras Government for famine duty until further orders’. Scott handed over the funds in his charge, showed him the coolest corner in the office, warned him against excess of zeal, and, as twilight fell, departed from the Club in a hired carriage with his faithful bodyservant, Faiz Ullah, and a mound of disordered baggage atop, to catch the Southern Mail at the loopholed and bastioned railway-station. The heat from the thick brick walls struck him across the face as if it had been a hot towel, and he reflected that there were at least five nights and four days of travel before him. Faiz Ullah, used to the chances of service, plunged into the crowd on the stone platform, while Scott, a black cheroot between his teeth, waited till his compartment should be set away. A dozen native policemen, with their rifles and bundles, shouldered into the press of Punjabi farmers, Sikh craftsmen, and greasy-locked Afreedee pedlars, escorting with all pomp Martyn’s
uniform-case, water-bottles, ice-box, and bedding-roll. They saw Faiz Ullah’s lifted hand, and steered for it.

  ‘My Sahib and your Sahib,’ said Faiz Ullah to Martyn’s man, ‘will travel together. Thou and I, O brother, will thus secure the servants’ places close by, and because of our masters’ authority none will dare to disturb us.’

  When Faiz Ullah reported all things ready, Scott settled down coatless and bootless on the broad leather-covered bunk. The heat under the iron-arched roof of the station might have been anything over a hundred degrees. At the last moment Martyn entered, hot and dripping.

  ‘Don’t swear,’ said Scott lazily; ‘it’s too late to change your carriage; and we’ll divide the ice.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said the policeman.

  ‘Lent to the Madras Government, same as you. By Jove, it’s a bender of a night! Are you taking any of your men down?’

  ‘A dozen. Suppose I’ll have to superintend relief distributions. Didn’t know you were under orders too.’

  ‘I didn’t till after I left you last night. Raines had the news first. My orders came this morning. McEuan relieved me at four, and I got off at once. Shouldn’t wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing – this famine – if we come through it alive.’

  ‘Jimmy ought to put you and me to work together,’ said Martyn; and then, after a pause: ‘My sister’s here.’

  ‘Good business,’ said Scott, heartily. ‘Going to get off at Umballa, I suppose, and go up to Simla. Who’ll she stay with there?’

  ‘No-o; that’s just the trouble of it. She’s going down with me.’

  Scott sat bolt upright under the oil lamp as the train jolted past Tarn-Taran station. ‘What! You don’t mean you couldn’t afford – ’

  ‘Oh, I’d have scraped up the money somehow.’

  ‘You might have come to me, to begin with,’ said Scott, stiffly; ‘we aren’t altogether strangers.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t be stuffy about it. I might, but – you don’t know my sister. I’ve been explaining and exhorting and entreating and commanding and all the rest of it all day – lost my temper since seven this morning, and haven’t got it back yet – but she wouldn’t hear of any compromise. A woman’s entitled to travel with her husband if she wants to, and William says she’s on the same footing. You see, we’ve been together all our lives, more or less, since my people died. It isn’t as if she were an ordinary sister.’

  ‘All the sisters I’ve heard of would have stayed where they were well off.’

  ‘She’s as clever as a man, confound her,’ Martyn went on. ‘She broke up the bungalow over my head while I was talking at her. ‘Settled the whole subchiz in three hours – servants, horses, and all. I didn’t get my orders till nine.’

  ‘Jimmy Hawkins won’t be pleased,’ said Scott. ‘A famine’s no place for a woman.’

  ‘Mrs Jim – I mean Lady Jim’s in camp with him. At any rate, she says she will look after my sister. William wired down to her on her own responsibility, asking if she could come, and knocked the ground from under me by showing me her answer.’

  Scott laughed aloud. ‘If she can do that she can take care of herself, and Mrs Jim won’t let her run into any mischief. There aren’t many women, sisters or wives, who would walk into a famine with their eyes open. It isn’t as if she didn’t know what these things mean. She was through the Jaloo cholera last year.’

  The train stopped at Amritsar, and Scott went back to the ladies’ compartment, immediately behind their carriage. William, a doth riding-cap on her curls, nodded affably.

  ‘Come in and have some tea,’ she said. ‘Best thing in the world for heat-apoplexy.’

  ‘Do I look as if I were going to have heat-apoplexy?’

  ‘Never can tell,’ said William, wisely. ‘It’s always best to be ready.’

  She had arranged her belongings with the knowledge of an old campaigner. A felt-covered water-bottle hung in the draught of one of the shuttered windows; a tea-set of Russian china, packed in a wadded basket, stood ready on the seat; and a travelling spirit-lamp was damped against the woodwork above it.

  William served them generously, in large cups, hot tea, which saves the veins of the neck from swelling inopportunely on a hot night. It was characteristic of the girl that, her plan of action once settled, she asked for no comments on it. Life with men who had a great deal of work to do, and very little time to do it in, had taught her the wisdom of effacing as well as offending for herself. She did not by word or deed suggest that she would be useful, comforting, or beautiful in their travels, but continued about her business serenely: put the cups back without clatter when tea was ended, and made cigarettes for her guests.

  ‘This time last night,’ said Scott, ‘we didn’t expect – er – this kind of thing, did we?’

  ‘I’ve learned to expect anything,’ said William. ‘You know, in our service, we live at the end of the telegraph; but, of course, this ought to be a good thing for us all, departmentally – if we live.’

  ‘It knocks us out of the running in our own Province,’ Scott replied, with equal gravity. ‘I hoped to be put on the Luni Protective Works this cold weather; but there’s no saying how long the famine may keep us.’

  ‘Hardly beyond October, I should think,’ said Martyn. ‘It will be ended, one way or the other, then.’

  ‘And we’ve nearly a week of this,’ said William. ‘Shan’t we be dusty when it’s over?’

  For a night and a day they knew their surroundings; and for a night and a day, skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a narrow-gauge line, they remembered how in the days of their apprenticeship they had come by that road from Bombay. Then the languages in which the names of the stations were written changed, and they launched south into a foreign land, where the very smells were new. Many long and heavily-laden grain trains were in front of them, and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from far off. They waited in extemporized sidings blocked by processions of empty trucks returning to the north, and were coupled on to slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where; but it was furiously hot; and they walked to and fro among sacks, and dogs howled.

  Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the untravelled Englishman – the flat, red India of palm-tree, palmyra-palm, and rice, the India of the picture-books, of Little Henry and His Bearer – all dead and dry in the baking heat. They had left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and far behind them. Here the people crawled to the side of the train, holding their little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would be left behind, men and women clustering round and above it like ants by spilled honey. Once in the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a regiment of little brown men, each bearing a body over his shoulder; and when the train stopped to leave yet another truck, they perceived that the burdens were not corpses, but only foodless folk picked up beside their dead oxen by a corps of Irregular troops. Now they met more white men, here one and there two, whose tents stood close to the line, and who came armed with written authorities and angry words to cut off a truck. They were too busy to do more than nod at Scott and Martyn, and stare curiously at William, who could do nothing except make tea, and watch how her men staved off the rush of wailing, walking skeletons, putting them down three at a time in heaps, with their own hands uncoupling the marked trucks, or taking receipts from the hollow-eyed, weary white men, who spoke another argot than theirs.

  They ran out of ice, out of soda-water, and out of tea; for they were six days and seven nights on the road, and it seemed to them like seven times seven years.

  At last, in a dry, hot dawn, in a land of death, lit by long red fires of railway sleepers, where they were burning the dead, they came to their destination, and were met by Jim Hawkins, the Head of the Famine, unshaven, unwashed, but cheery, and entirely in command of affairs.

  Martyn, he decreed, then and there, was to liv
e on trains till further orders; was to go back with empty trucks, filling them with starving people as he found them, and dropping them at a famine-camp on the edge of the Eight Districts. He would pick up supplies and return, and his constables would guard the loaded grain-cars, also picking up people, and would drop them at a camp a hundred miles south. Scott – Hawkins was very glad to see Scott again – would, that same hour, take charge of a convoy of bullock-carts, and would go south, feeding as he went, to yet another famine-camp, far from the rail, where he would leave his starving – there would be no lack of starving on the route – and wait for orders by telegraph. Generally, Scott was in all small things to do what he thought best.

  William bit her underlip. There was no one in the wide world like her one brother, but Martyn’s orders gave him no discretion. She came out, masked with dust from head to foot, a horseshoe wrinkle on her forehead, put there by much thinking during the past week, but as self-possessed as ever. Mrs Jim – who should have been Lady Jim, but that no one remembered to call her aright – took possession of her with a little gasp.