‘I’ll take her at that,’ quoth a red-haired subaltern, nicknamed Carrots, later Gaja, and then for brevity’s sake, Guj. ‘Let me have her out this afternoon. I want her more for hacking than anything else.’
Guj tried Thurinda exhaustively and had no fault to findwith her. ‘She’s all right,’ he said briefly. ‘I’ll take her. It’s a cash deal.’‘Virtuous Guj!’ said Hordene, pocketing the cheque. If you go on like this you’ll be loved and respected by all who know you.’
A week later Guj insisted that Hordene should accompany him on a ride. They cantered merrily for a time. Then said the subaltern: ‘Listen to the mare’s beat a minute, will you? Seems to me that you’ve sold me two horses.’
Behind the mare was plainly audible the cadence of a swiftly trotting horse. ‘D’you hear anything?’ said Guj. ‘No – nothing but the regular triplet,’ said Hordene; and he lied when he answered. Guj looked at him keenly and said nothing. Two or three months passed and Hordene was perplexed to see his old property running, and running well, under the curious title of ‘Sleipner–late Thurinda.’He consulted the Great Major, who said: ‘I don’t know a horse called Sleipner, but I know of one. He was a northern bred, and belonged to Odin.’‘A mythological beast?’‘Exactly. Like Bucephalus and the rest of ’em. He was a great horse. I wish I had some of his get in my stable.’‘Why?’‘Because he had eight legs. When he had used up one set, he let down the other four to come up the straight on. Stewards were lenient in those days. Now it’s all you can do to get a crock with three sound legs.’
Hordene cursed the red-haired Guj in his heart for finding out the mare’s peculiarity. Then he cursed the dead man Jale for his ridiculous interference with a free gift. ‘If it was given – it was given,’ said Hordene, ‘and he has no right to come messing about after it.’ When Guj and he next met, he enquired tenderly after Thurinda. The red-haired subaltern, impassive as usual, answered: ‘I’ve shot her.’‘Well – you know your own affairs best,’ said Hordene. ‘You’ve given yourself away,’ said Guj. ‘What makes you think I shot a sound horse? She might have been bitten by a mad dog, or lamed.’‘You didn’t say that.’‘No, I didn’t, because I’ve a notion that you knew what was wrong with her.’‘Wrong with her! She was as sound as a bell—‘‘I know that. Don’t pretend to misunderstand. You’ll believe me, and I’ll believe you in this show; but no one else will believe us. That mare was a bally nightmare.’ ‘Go on,’ said Hordene. ‘I stuck the noise of the other horse as long as I could, and called her Sleipner on the strength of it. Sleipner was a stallion, but that’s a detail. When it got to interfering with every race I rode it was more than I could stick. I took her off racing, and, on my honour, since that time I’ve been nearly driven out of my mind by a grey and nutmeg pony. It used to trot round my quarters at night, fool about the Mall, and graze about the compound. You know that pony. It isn’t a pony to catch or ride or hit, is it?’‘No,’ said Hordene; ‘I’ve seen it.’‘So I shot Thurinda;that was a thousand rupees out of my pocket. And old Stiffer, who’s got his new crematorium in full blast, cremated her. I say, what was the matter with the mare? Was she bewitched?’
Hordene told the story of the gift, which Guj heard out to the end. ‘Now, that’s a nice sort of yarn to tell in a messroom, isn’t it? They’d call it jumps or insanity,’ said Guj. ‘There’s no reason in it. It doesn’t lead up to anything. It only killed poor Marish and made you stick me with the mare; and yet it’s true. Are you mad or drunk, or am I? That’s the only explanation.’‘Can’t be drunk for nine months on end, and madness would show in that time,’ said Hordene.
‘All right,’ said Guj recklessly, going to the window. ‘I’ll lay that ghost.’ He leaned out into the night and shouted: ‘Jale! Jale! Jale! Wherever you are.’ There was a pause and then up the compound-drive came the clatter of a horse’s feet. The red-haired subaltern blanched under his freckles to the colour of glycerine soap. ‘Thurinda’sdead,’ he muttered, ‘and – and all bets are off. Go back to your grave again.’
Hordene was watching him open-mouthed.
‘Now bring me a strait-jacket or a glass of brandy,’ said Guj. ‘That’s enough to turn a man’s hair white. What did the poor wretch mean by knocking about the earth!’
‘Don’t know,’ whispered Hordene hoarsely. ‘Let’s get over to the Club. I’m feeling a bit shaky.’
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy.
The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life and one not easy to follow. I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances which prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy. I have still to be brother to a Prince, though I once came near to kinship with what might have been a veritable King, and was promised the reversion of a Kingdom – army, law-courts, revenue and policy all complete. But, to-day, I greatly fear that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go and hunt it for myself.
The beginning of everything was in a railway train upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. There had been a deficit in the Budget which necessitated travelling, not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First-class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. There are no cushions in the Intermediate-class, and the population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated. Intermediates do not patronise refreshment rooms. They carry their food in bundles, and pots, and buy sweets from the native sweetmeat sellers, and drink the roadside water. That is why in the hot weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all weathers are most properly looked down upon.
My particular Intermediate happened to be empty till I reached Nasirabad, when a huge gentleman in shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed the time of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but with an educated taste for whiskey. He told tales of things he had seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners ofthe Empire into which he had penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his life for a few days’ food. ‘If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more than the crows where they’d get their next day’s rations, it isn’t seventy millions of revenue the land would be paying – it’s seven hundred millions,’ said he; and as I looked at his mouth and chin I was disposed to agree with him. We talked politics – the politics of Loaferdom that sees things from, the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off – and we talked postal arrangements because my friend wanted to send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir which is the turning-off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel westward. My friend had no money beyond eight annas which he wanted for dinner, and I had no money at all, owing to the hitch in the Budget before mentioned. Further I was going into a wilderness where, though I should resume touch with the Treasury, there were no telegraph offices. I was, therefore, unable to help him in any way.
‘We might threaten a Station-master and make him send a wire on tick,’ said my friend, ‘but that’d mean enquiries for you and for me, and I’ve got my hands full these days. Did you say you are travelling back along this line within any days?’
‘Within ten,’I said.
‘Can’t you make it eight?’ said he. ‘Mine is rather urgent business.’
‘I can send your telegram within ten days if that will serve you,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t trust the wire to fetch him now I think of it. It’s this way. He leaves Delhi on the 23rdfor Bombay. That means he’ll be running through Ajmir about the night of the 23rd.’
‘But I’m going into the Indian Desert,’ I explained.
‘Well and good,’ said he. ‘You’ll be changing at Marwar Junction to get into Jodhpore territory – you must do that – and he’ll be coming through Marwar Junction in the early morning of the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that time? ’Twon’t be inconveniencing you
because I know that there’s precious few pickings to be got out of these Central India States – even though you pretend to be correspondent of the Backwoodsman.’
‘Have you ever tried that trick?’ I asked.
‘Again and again, but the Residents find you out, and then you get escorted to the Border before you’ve time to get your knife into them. But about my friend here. I must give him a word o’ mouth to tell him what’s come to me or else he won’t know where to go. I would take it more than kind of you if you was to come out of Central India in time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and say to him: “He has gone South for the week”. He’ll know what that means. He’s a big man with a red beard, and a great swell he is. You’ll find him sleeping like a gentleman with all his luggage round him in a Second-class compartment. But don’t you be afraid. Slip down the window and say: “He has gone South for the week,” and he’ll tumble. It’s only cutting your time of stay in those parts by two days. I ask you as a stranger – going to the West,’ he said with emphasis.
‘Where have you come from?’ said I.
‘From the East,’ said he, ‘and I am hoping that you will give him the message on the square – for the sake of my mother as well as your own.’
Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers, but for certain reasons, which will be fully apparent, I saw fit to agree.
‘It’s more than a little matter,’ said he, ‘and that’s why I ask you to do it – and now I know that I can depend on you doing it. A Second-class carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man asleep in it. You’ll be sure to remember. I get out at the next station, and I must hold on there till he comes or sends me what I want.’
‘I’ll give the message if I catch him,’ I said, ‘and for the sake of your mother as well as mine I’ll give you a word of advice. Don’t try to run the Central India States just now as the correspondent of the Backwoodsman. There’s a real one knocking about here, and it might lead to trouble.’
‘Thank you,’ said he simply, ‘and when will the swine be gone? I can’t starve because he’s ruining my work. I wanted toget hold of the Degumber Rajah down here about his father’s widow, and give him a jump.’ ‘What did he do to his father’s widow, then?’‘Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she hung from a beam. I found that out myself, and I’m the only man that would dare going into the State to get hush-money for it. They’ll try to poison me, same as they did in Chortumna when I went on the loot there. But you’ll give the man at Marwar Junction my message?’
He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard, more than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers and bleeding small Native States with threats of exposure, but I had never met any of the caste before. They lead a hard life, and generally die with great suddenness. The Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers, which may throw light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand barouches. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk or diseased from one end of the year to the other. Native States were created by Providence in order to supply picturesque scenery, tigers and tall-writing. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty; touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It was all in the day’s work.
Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as I had promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar Junction, where a funny little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed railway runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail fromDelhi makes a short halt at Marwar. She arrived as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her platform and go down the carriages. There was only one Second-class on the train. I slipped the window and looked down upon a flaming red beard, half covered by a railway rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt and I saw his face in the light of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.
‘Tickets again?’ said he.
‘No,’ said I. ‘I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week. He is gone South for the week.’
The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes. ‘He has gone South for the week,’ he repeated. ‘Now that’s just like his impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything? – ‘Cause I won’t.’
‘He didn’t,’ I said and dropped away, and watched the red lights the out in the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train – not an Intermediate carriage this time – and went to sleep.
If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it as a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of having done my duty was my only reward.
Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not do any good if they foregathered and personated correspondents of newspapers, and might, if they ‘stuck up’ one of the little rat-trap states of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into serious difficulties. I, therefore, took some trouble to describe them as accurately as I could remember to people who would be interested in deporting them: and succeeded, so I was later informed, in having them headed back from the Degumber borders.
Then I became respectable, and returned to an office where there were no kings and no incidents except the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for commands sit down andsketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve or twenty-four leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother missionary under special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, carriage couplings and unbreakable swords and axle trees call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamour to have the glories of their last dance more fully expounded; strange ladies rustle in and say: ‘I want a hundred ladies’ cards printed at once, please,’ which is manifestly part of an Editor’s duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone bell is ringing madly, and kings are being killed on the Continent, and empires are saying ‘You’re another,’ and Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon the British Dominions, and the little black copy-boys are whining like tired bees for more copy to feed the racing machines, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred’s shield.
That is the amusing part of the year. There are other six months wherein none ever come to call, and the thermometer walks inch by inch to the top of the glass, and the office is darkened to just above reading-light, and the press machines are red-hot of touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women whom you knew intimate
ly, and the prickly heat covers you as with a garment, and you sit down and write: ‘A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Jhanta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District authorities is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret we record the death, &c.’
Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less recording and reporting the better for the peace of the subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings continue to divert themselves as selfishly as before, and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really ought to come out once in twenty-four hours, and all the people at the Hill Stations in the middle of their amusements say: ‘Good gracious! Why can’t the paper be sparkling? I’m sure there’s plenty going on up here.’
That is the dark half of the moon, and as the advertisements say ‘must be experienced to be appreciated’.
It was in that season, and a remarkably evil season, that the paper began running the last issue of the week on Saturday night, which is to say Sunday morning. This was a great convenience, for immediately after the paper was put to bed, the dawn would lower the thermometer from 96°to almost 84° for half an hour, and in that chill – you have no idea how cold is 84° on the grass until you begin to pray for it – a very tired man could set off to sleep ere the heat roused him.
One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone. A king or courtier, or a courtezan, or a community was going to the or get a new constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram. It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the loo,the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads and called for water. The thing that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the loo dropped, and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event. I drowsed, and wondered, whether the telegraph was a blessing, and whetherthis dying man or struggling people, was aware of the inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three o’clock, and the machines spun their fly-wheels two and three times to see that all was in order, before I said the word that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud.
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales Page 16