Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  The march thence to the barracks seemed to Bill Holder longer than the whole tramp to Ali Musjid and back. But Shuggy was still waiting by the little bridge over the runnel when at last he was free; and as a consequence of the conversation they had together, when Carruthers sat down to breakfast the next morning he saw His Highness the Prince of Tokot and Bill the drummer-boy waiting his pleasure on his verandah.

  “That’s Sugar-and-Milk,” he cried to his wife. “He got away, then!”

  Both the boys stood up and grinned: Bill saluted: Sugar-and-Milk bowed as to an equal.

  “What in the world happened to you?” Carruthers asked, going to the open window.

  Marjorie Carruthers had a shrewd eye and a practical mind. “We’ll hear their story when they have had breakfast. Sugar-and-Milk,” she said, with a friendly smile, “doesn’t look to me to have breakfasted at all, and I never heard of a drummer-boy who couldn’t tuck away a second one.”

  She clapped her hands to summon her Pathan butler and sent the boys away with him to be fed; and half an hour later Shuja-ul-Mulk told the pair of them the story of his escape.

  “We escaped in the darkness — my mother and I and Wafadar,” he explained. “The news of my father’s death was not known in Tokot until the next morning. We took three ponies, and by daylight we were far away. At one or two places, where the road ran over a wooden gallery built against a cliff-face, Wafadar broke it down behind us, and here and there in the villages Wafadar had friends who sent us on our way.”

  They had reached Peshawur with a few rupees in hand and made some more by the sale of their ponies. They had a small lodging in the bazaar, and Wafadar was working in a shoe factory.

  “And what do you want to do?” Carruthers asked of Shuja-ul-Mulk.

  Shuja-ul-Mulk grinned all over his face.

  “I want to be a drummer in the Punjab Infantry,” he said. “Perhaps Your Excellency can pull a string.”

  “You poor boy!” cried Marjorie. She had not yet learned with what ease an Oriental can accept the reverses of Fortune.

  Carruthers had an idea. He leaned forward in his chair.

  “You have got a drum?” he asked, and the Tokoti boy nodded vigorously.

  “The drum. I would not leave it behind. I carried it on my pony.”

  “The Yudeni drum? From the top of the tower?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good! Now I tell you what you shall do. We have a hut in our compound. You and your mother and Wafadar shall live in it. Meanwhile I will see what I can do.”

  What Carruthers did was to ask that morning for an interview with the Governor of the North-West Province.

  “The young Prince of Tokot, Shuja-ul-Mulk, is in Peshawur,” he pleaded, “without money. He escaped with his mother.”

  “We can’t put him back,” answered the Governor. “For us Nizam is the Khan of Tokot. He has already sent representatives to the Government of India, asking for the continuance of our policy and the establishment of the Agency.”

  Carruthers proceeded to pull a string as Shuja-ul-Mulk had put it.

  “It wasn’t to suggest an expedition to restore Shuja-ul-Mulk to his position that I asked for this interview, Sir,” he said meekly. “But I thought that it would interest you to know that he brought away the Yudeni drum with him.”

  Sir Arthur’s face lit up.

  “Did he?” he cried. “I should like to see that drum.”

  Carruthers was afraid to make too much of that instrument, lest the Governor should be disappointed when he saw it.

  “It’s just an ordinary native drum.”

  “Have you seen it?” asked the Governor.

  “I was never on the roof of the tower,” answered Carruthers. “If you like, Sir, I’ll bring Shuja-ul-Mulk up here with it.”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea,” said Sir Arthur. “I should like to see the boy.”

  Shuja-ul-Mulk, the contributor to a chapter on Folk-lore, was a very much more welcome personage than Shuja-ul-Mulk the Pretender to a principality in the Hindu Khush. Sir Arthur could see how the chapter would begin. It would be a picturesque beginning after the style of the Golden Bough: the young Khan fleeing in the night and taking the sacred drum with him so that it might not defend and protect the usurper. Sir Arthur felt much more humanly disposed towards Sugar-and-Milk.

  “Poor boy!” he said sympathetically. “About twelve, you said? Is he? Sad! Yes! Well, I don’t know; perhaps something might be done for him. A little pension, perhaps. Let him bring the drum here this afternoon. At five. The Yudeni Drum! Ha!”

  His Excellency received Carruthers and Shuja-ul-Mulk in the Rose Garden at the side of the Residency. The boy put his drum upon a garden-table and bowed with due ceremony and deference. But Brooke was moved to an unusual warmth by the good-humour of the outcast princeling and by a quiet dignity which the lad wore.

  “I am very sorry,” he said, holding out his hand, “both for your father’s death and your own misfortune. I shall take pains to find a way by which the misfortune can be lightened. Your mother is with you, I understand.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency.”

  “Of course, officially, you understand that your uncle Nizam is Khan of Tokot.” There must be no doubt of that. There would be only one cause which would force the Government to interfere in the internal administration of Tokot or any other of the border States: a definite act of hostility against the Sirkar — the English rule — in the person of one of its Representatives. And the sooner Shuja-ul-Mulk was certain about that the better.

  But the boy was not pleading for assistance.

  “Carruthers Sahib and his wife have given me a lodging in their compound. Wafadar, a faithful servant of my father, is with us. He works and provides for our wants, which are few. In a little time I shall hope to earn money myself. If your Excellency will use your great influence to make me a drummer-boy in the Punjab Infantry, I shall begin at once. For the rest, what God has taken away from me, He can restore to me if He will.”

  Sir Arthur Brooke’s experience of ruling families beyond the frontier was of greedy people clamouring for subsidies. He was a trifle abashed by the quiet and graceful independence of this boy.

  “We shall see,” he said. “Yes, we shall see.”

  “Meanwhile Your Excellency wished to see my drum,” and a smile lightened up the grave, small face and set the eyes dancing.

  “Ah, yes, the Yudeni drum! To be sure! I had an idea that I would like to see it.”

  His Excellency spoke with the most admirable detachment. But the effect was not as careless as it was meant to be. For all through the short conversation his eyes had been straying towards that drum as covetously as the eyes of any Pathan chieftain to a bag of rupees.

  Shuja-ul-Mulk fetched the drum, and Sir Arthur took it into his hands. It was not a thing of beauty. It was just an old weather-beaten native instrument which had lain out in the open through rain and shine, night and day upon the top of a tower. Yet Sir Arthur handled it as though it were as precious as the Royal Crown. In the end he set it behind his seat on an iron garden-table, and if he saw, he did not heed the anxiety which strained the boy’s face when he saw his treasure put out of his reach.

  “I shall tell you what I will do,” said Sir Arthur Brooke, with the air of one conferring a favour. “I shall, in exchange for this old drum, make you a present of the very best one which can be bought in the bazaar. You will like that. Yes, indeed, you will like that very much.”

  But it was evident that Shuja-ul-Mulk did not like it at all. His mouth dropped at the corners. A look of intense distress convulsed his face. There crept into his eyes a stubbornness which was not to be denied.

  “Your Excellency is generous, but I must not part with that drum.”

  His Excellency was annoyed. His first thought was to hand back the drum to the ungrateful little beggar at once, and have done with him. On the other hand, he was curious. The boy was running a risk of losing his favour and goodwi
ll. And the boy knew it. What was the overpowering motive which compelled him — he had used the word “must” — not to part with the Yudeni drum?

  “Why?” asked the Governor.

  “I beat that drum when it was not for me to beat it,” the lad explained gently. “It was on the roof — a sacred thing — and I meddled with it. I am not sure now that all the evil which has happened to my family was not a retribution.”

  The Governor nodded his head. Here was something much better than the drum. Here was the complete chapter on the Yudeni drum for his Folk-lore book, with a perfect conclusion. Had he been given the drum, what would he have had? A photograph of it, a sketch of it, to insert in the letter-press. But he had a much better picture now: the picture of a lad surreptitiously beating it in the dusk on the roof-top to deceive the people, falling upon ruin in consequence, stealing the drum and not daring to part with it lest his misfortunes be multiplied a hundred-fold.

  “Yes, I understand,” said Sir Arthur.

  But even now he did not completely understand. It needed yet another remark of the lad to open his eyes altogether to the remorse which was at work in him.

  “I have been thinking much about it since I have been idle here at Peshawur. It was a sin for me, a mortal, to beat the drum and give the sign that all was well with us. It was perhaps a worse sin to take it away from its appointed place. Some day, when I am quite forgotten, I shall creep back to Tokot and try to put it once more in its place.”

  There was something so forlorn in the aspect of the boy — nay, in the very sound of the words he used — that it drove the very thought of that masterpiece of a chapter out of Brooke’s mind. He was moved to a greater tenderness. Almost he regretted that he couldn’t send his troops and the boy and the drum up over the passes to Tokot, and replace the one on his throne and the other on the roof-top. He gave back the drum, and said gently: “Keep it safely, then, until the time comes.”

  At dinner that night he said to his wife:

  “I must do something about that boy. When the spring comes, the Carruthers will be away at Tokot. There will be a stranger in their house, and others will use the compound.”

  “So you are letting Marjorie Carruthers go up to Tokot,” said his wife with a smile. There had been skirmishes and a pitched battle upon that question, as she very well knew, and Marjorie had won.

  Sir Arthur shrugged his shoulders.

  “I couldn’t prevent it. Nizam is now as eager for a Resident as his brother was. Umra Beg is quiet. There is no sign of trouble in the valley. And Carruthers will be at Tokot for two years. He’ll do his work ever so much better if he hasn’t to worry over a wife at Peshawur,” and his thoughts went back to Shuja-ul-Mulk.

  “A little pension, I think — that is, if he’ll take it. A drummer-boy in a regiment? That’s absurd. No! A little pension. Ha!”

  Whilst he thus talked, Shuja-ul-Mulk was sitting at the feet of Marjorie Carruthers on the verandah of her house. To her he was a lonely and unhappy little boy, and softened by the warm pity of her voice, the mask of indifference which he usually wore melted away. He was frightened too. Each religion has its unforgivable sin. Wise men leave it alone. They don’t waste their time guessing which of all the possible sins it might be and whether they have committed it. But the imagination of boys takes hold of it. They are sure it was this bad thing they did yesterday, and that they are damned for ever. Or it is this wickedness which, in a fit of bravado or to spite their parents, they are going to commit to-morrow. Shuja-ul-Mulk was a little boy like another — a little more courage, perhaps, a little more fatalism, a little more cheeriness than are usual, but swayed by the same terrors and moved by the same kindness. In the dark of the verandah he wrung his hands over his drumming on the tower-top — half of it fun, half of it defence against the treachery of Nizam, and all of it unforgivable sin. Marjorie Carruthers set her kind wits to comfort him, and the boy’s tears flowed from his eyes and took away from him the worst of his misery. She leaned forward and set her hand upon his shoulder.

  “Shuggy, we shouldn’t love you so much unless we knew you to be true and lovable. Unforgivable things leave their mark upon the face and forehead so that we run away at the sight of it. But we don’t run away from you, Shuggy. And when we go away from here we shall leave behind us others who will be as kind to you.”

  Shuggy sat back upon his heels.

  “You are going away?” he whispered aghast. “You and Carruthers Sahib?”

  “For awhile. But we are going to your country, Shuggy, and we’ll want your help. You know so much of Tokot; we know nothing at all. You have friends there; we shall have none. You must tell us about them, and we shall send news of them and messages from them to you.”

  She led him on to talk of his country, of the friends he had made, of the little incidents which had given savour to his life. She sent him back to his mother’s hut in the compound soothed in spirit and with an adoration for Marjorie which was a greater pride and delight to him than he had ever known.

  “I shall never forget to-night,” he said to her as he went down the steps.

  “No. We’ll both remember it, Shuggy,” she said.

  6

  HALF-WAY THROUGH THE month of May in that year, a small man in a brown hair-cloth robe girded up at the waist strode through the Bajauri gate of Peshawur. He carried a long staff in his hand and, stopping a water-carrier, drank eagerly and thirstily. He asked for a man named Wafadar and, on the water-carrier disclaiming any knowledge of the name, he passed quickly on into the town. He was tired and hungry, but some fever kept him on his feet and drove him forward. From bazaar to bazaar he pushed, asking eternally for any who knew Wafadar. Some laughed and, seeing that he was a stranger, sent him upon useless journeys. Others, no more kind, said: “Is it the Wafadar with the hump back? No. Then it may perhaps be the Wafadar with the eight fingers on his right hand? No. Let me see! There is a Wafadar who breathes fire through his nose. Would it be that one, perchance?”

  But the stranger did not wait for the end of the question. Nor did he quarrel with those who made a butt of him. He pushed between the jesters and went on. Towards the evening, when he was dropping from hunger and fatigue, he stopped at a native eating-house close to a tiny brick bridge which spanned a runnel of water in the middle of an open space. Whilst he ate he put his question.

  “Do you know one Wafadar who comes from Tokot?”

  And at last he got an answer.

  “A cobbler who waits upon a little boy with a drum?”

  “That is he,” and he rose from his chair.

  But the other man forced him down again.

  “Nay, rest easily. He comes here sometimes to eat, sometimes to hear the news. For many men from the hills look for their friends at my shop.”

  Wafadar indeed was already approaching. He caught sight of the stranger. He uttered a yell.

  “Rajab!”

  And in a second he was at his side.

  “You have news?” Wafadar asked eagerly.

  “And good news,” replied Rajab.

  The two men were talking a language which the keeper of the eating-house did not understand. It was the dialect of Tokot, and this travel-worn stranger who had descended upon Peshawur was the man who with Wafadar had formed the bodyguard of the old Khan’s son.

  “The young Prince is with you?” Rajab asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And well?”

  “You shall see him for yourself.”

  Wafadar led his companion to an open spot which no one could approach unnoticed.

  “But first tell me what brings you.”

  Nizam had been a disappointment. The poor were still poor. No army was sent out to seize the lands of Umra Beg. Only a few families had been sold into slavery, and those were Tokotis, and they had been sold for Nizam’s private profit. For the most part of the day he sat in his Fort fuddling himself with drink and timid as a girl. And what policy he had was to play with both sides. Ca
rruthers and his wife were at the Residency, and no man could be more friendly or submissive than Nizam. At the same time he was treating with Umra Beg. The Mullah and the Wasir Dadu had gone over to Umra Beg. The Mullah preached that Nizam had sold his country to the British. He was carrying the torch of Islam far beyond the borders of Tokot. All the tribes of the Hindu Khush were to rise at a given signal and the flames of war would burn from Dir to Hunza and Turkestan.

  Wafadar was at a loss to see how this would profit Shuja-ul-Mulk. Nizam would disappear, no doubt, but Umra Beg would rule in his place with the authority which his army gave him. His power would be wider and more sure.

  “It is the signal,” Rajab answered, his face all wreathed in smiles and his eyes darting this way and that lest he be overheard. “All lies in that.”

  “The signal?”

  “The signal for the rising. In six days from now falls the great carnival of Muharram. On that night, when the bonfires are lighted, the British Agency will be stormed. It has but a handful of levies to protect it, and of those three are already on our side.”

  Wafadar was startled. He began to understand the gleeful hopes of Rajab.

  “Carruthers Sahib and his wife — —” he whispered.

  “That’s it,” Rajab agreed, nodding his head. “They will be put to the sword on the sixth night from now. And then? Good Wafadar, what then?” and he tapped Wafadar joyfully on the knee as he sat beside him on the ground.

  “Yes . . . yes . . .” Wafadar said thoughtfully.

  The whole of Rajab’s tortuous reasoning was plain to him now. The Indian Government never allowed the murder of its Agents to go unpunished. The wild priest, the cunning Minister, might light the countryside, but the troops of India would beat the flames down and exact the penalty. They would bring young Shuja-ul-Mulk up from Peshawur and set him firmly on his throne with a British Regency until he was old enough to take the reins of government into his own hands.