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In the Guardianship of God

by Flora Annie Webster Steel · English · Gutenberg #39795 · 417,672 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: In the Guardianship of God

Author: Flora Annie Webster Steel


        
Release date: May 25, 2012 [eBook #39795]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39795

Credits: Produced by Charles Bowen. from page scans provided by
        Google Books (Harvard University)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE GUARDIANSHIP OF GOD ***




Produced by Charles Bowen. from page scans provided by
Google Books (Harvard University)











Transcriber's Notes:

   1. Page scan source:
      http://books.google.com/books?id=uj6lOyePLCYC
      (Harvard University)

   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe]; "a" with a macron
      above by [=a]





                      In the Guardianship of God






                         In the Guardianship

                                of God




                                  BY

                          FLORA ANNIE STEEL

          AUTHOR OF "ON THE FACE OF THE WATERS," "VOICES OF
                THE NIGHT," "HOSTS OF THE LORD," ETC.





                               New York

                        THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

                    LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.

                                 1903

                        _All rights reserved_






                           Copyright, 1908,
                       By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

                              *   *   *

            Set up, electrotyped, and published May, 1903.





                            Norwood Press
               J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
                        Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




                               CONTENTS


       In the Guardianship of God.

       A Bad-character Suit.

       Fire and Ice.

       The Shahbash Wallah.

       The Most Nailing Bad Shot in Creation.

       The Reformer's Wife.

       The Squaring of the Gods.

       The Keeper of the Pass.

       The Perfume of the Rose.

       Little Henry and his Bearer.

       The Hall of Audience.

       In a Fog.

       Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh.

       Surabhi.

       On the Old Salt Road.

       The Doll-maker.

       The Skeleton Tree.




                      IN THE GUARDIANSHIP OF GOD


"Dittu Sansi, aged twenty-one, theft, six months," read out the
overseer of the gaol, who was introducing a batch of new arrivals to
the doctor in charge of a large gaol in the Upper Provinces of India.
It was early morning. Outside the high mud walls, which looked like
putty and felt like rock, the dew was frosting the grass in the garden
where a few favoured criminals were doing the work of oxen for the
well-wheel, and turning the runnels of fresh water to the patches of
spinach and onion. But here, inside the gaol square, everything had
the parched, arid look of sun-baked mud. Not a speck was to be seen
anywhere; the very prisoners themselves, standing in a long line
awaiting inspection, with their dust-coloured blankets folded upon the
ground in front of them, looked like darker clay images waiting to be
put on their pedestals. There was a touch of colour, however, close to
the arched gateway. First, a red-turbaned warder or two, guarding the
wicket; then half-a-dozen constables in yellow trousers, and a
deputy-inspector of police smart in silver laces and fringes; finally
the gaol _darogah_, or overseer, a stoutish, good-looking Mahomedan
with a tendency to burst out, wherever it was possible, into gay
muslin, and decorate the edges of his regulation white raiment with
fine stitchings. These, with a nondescript group fresh from the
lock-up, were gathered about the plain deal table set in full sunlight
where the Doctor sate, ticking off each arrival on the roster. He
matched the gaol, being dressed from head to foot in dust-coloured
drill, with a wide pith hat which might have been carved out of the
putty walls.

"All right, _Darogah_," he said with a yawn. "Number five hundred and
seven. Go on,--what's the matter?"

Shurruf Deen, the Overseer, was looking intently at the paper in his
hand, and the rich brown of his complacent face seemed to have faded a
little. "Nothing, _Huzoor_," he replied glibly enough, though a quick
observer might have seen the muscles of his brown throat labouring
over the syllables. "The list is badly written, in the broken
character. Thou shouldst speak to the clerk in thine office,
Inspector-_jee_; this name is almost illegible."

"'Tis Shureef, clear enough, _Darogah-jee_," dissented the Inspector,
huffily; "and I should have thought it fits thine own name too close
for--"

"Shureef," read out Shurruf, the Overseer, brusquely, "Shureef, Khoja,
thirty-five, lurking house trespass by night, habitual offender, ten
years."

The Doctor looked up sharply. Ten years meant business; one can teach
a lot in ten years--carpet-weaving, wood-carving, pottery-making--and
the Doctor's hobby was his gaol. What he saw was a man, looking many
years older than his age, haggard and grey, yet despite this with a
lightness and suppleness in every limb. Though this figure was lean
where the Overseer was fat, wrinkled where the Overseer showed smooth,
there was a similarity in the rich colour of their skins, in the
regularity of their features, which made the Englishman turn to look
at the _Darogah_ with the mental remark that the race-characteristics
of India were very instructive; for Shurruf was a Khoja also. "All
right," said the Doctor. "Number five hundred and eight."

"Five hundred and eight," repeated the habitual offender, calmly. "I
will not forget. Salaam, _Huzoor!_ Salaam, _Darogah-jee!_"

"Do you know the man?" asked the Doctor quickly of his subordinate; he
was sharp as a needle, and there had been a note in the salutation
which he did not understand.

"He was in for two years when I was sub-overseer at Loodhiana,
_Huzoor_," replied Shurruf, imperturbably. "He gave much trouble
there; he will not here, since the Doctor-_sahib_ knows how to manage
such as he."

Once more there was an undertone, but the Doctor's attention was
riveted by the adroit flattery, and he rose to begin his inspection
with a smile. It was true; he did know how to manage a gaol, and there
could not possibly be any cause for complaint when he was there to
apportion each ounce of food scientifically, to rout every germ, every
microbe, and treat even contumacy as a disease. The five hundred and
odd prisoners were, as it were, the Doctor's chessmen. He marshalled
them this way and that, checkmating their vile souls and bodies while
they were in his care. If they passed out of it into their own, he
took no heed. They might make what they liked of themselves. But if
they died, and, as the phrase runs, chose the Guardianship of God, he
buried them temporarily in the gaol graveyard with all possible
sanitary precautions, against the time when relations or friends might
appear to claim the corpse. There was no official regulation as to the
limit of time within which such claim could be preferred; but as a
dead body remains in the special Guardianship of God for a year, it
was an understood thing that man should take over the task before the
Almighty gave up the job; it was more satisfactory, especially if the
corpse was a Hindu and had to be burned. As for the Doctor, he would
have preferred to burn the lot, Hindu and Mahomedan alike; failing
that, he--took precautions.

As he walked down the line rapidly his sharp eye noted every detail,
and Shurruf Deen had many a swift, probing question to answer. He
answered them, however, as swiftly, for he was the best gaoler
conceivable; so good that even the Doctor allowed that he was almost
capable of managing the gaol himself. A man of unimpeachable
character, he had yet a curious insight into the minds of the
criminals he guarded, and a singular tact in managing them, so that
his record of continual rise in the world seemed likely to lengthen
itself by an appointment to the most important gaolership in the
Province. Shurruf Deen was working all he knew to secure this, and
therefore, as he followed the Doctor, his keen, bold eyes were
everywhere forestalling the possibility of blame. They fell, among
other things, on Shureef's thin, somewhat bowed figure, as it was
marched off to be shaved, washed, manacled, and dressed to pattern.
Then they turned almost mechanically to the paper he still held.
_Shureef Deen, Khoja--ten years' hard--three months' solitary_. He
gave a faint sigh of relief. Solitary confinement, even when broken up
by philanthropy into blocks of a week, gave time. It meant many
ameliorations to a prisoner's lot which would be unsafe amid the ruck.
Besides no man, he told himself, would be fool enough to risk losing
these favours simply to spite another man.

He repeated this thought aloud that same evening, after lights were
out, and the silence of solitary cells lay all over the gaol, save in
one of the latter, where Shurruf sate whispering to Shureef. In the
utter darkness the curious similarity of the place to a wild beast's
cage, with its inner grating-barred cubicle and its outer high-walled
yard let open to the sky, was lost, and the two men might have been
anywhere. Shurruf, however, sate on the millstones, as being more
suited to his figure, while Shureef crouched on the ground beside the
little heap of corn he was bound to give back ounce for ounce in flour
and bran. And as he crouched, leaning listlessly against the wall, his
supple hand moved among the wheat raising it idly, and as idly letting
it slip back through his thin fingers.

"Fate!" he echoed to something the other said; "nay, 'twas not Fate,
brother, which sent me to thy gaol. I was hard pressed; I am growing
old for the life; it kills men soon. The police would have had me in
the big _dacoity_ case at Delhi despite all; so I bungled one farther
north, to come--where thou wast--brother."

"And thou didst right," assented Shurruf, eagerly; "I can make things
easy for thee."

The wheat slipped with a soft patter, like rain, through Shureef's
fingers. "'Twas not that either which brought me to thy gaol. Listen.
I am far through this life, but another begins. I am not going to
plead _guilty_ there. It is _not guilty_ there, _not guilty_ on the
first count, _not guilty_ as a lad of fifteen for theft--" He paused,
then a faint curiosity came to his listlessness and he looked at the
half-seen figure beside him--"and such a theft! I--I have not done so
mean a one--since--"

Shurruf moved uneasily. "Mayhap not; boys do things men do not. And I
have always--yea! thou knowest it--upheld thee better than some think.
What then? Thy life is past amendment now, save for tobacco and such
like; and these I will give, if thou art wise, for the ten years--"

"I shall not live three months of the ten years, brother," interrupted
Shureef, calmly; and at the words a pang of regret that the solitary
confinement could not be inflicted straight on end shot through
Shurruf's breast, killing the faint remorse the remark had awakened;
it would have simplified matters so much to have Shureef safe from the
possibility of tale-bearing for those three months. "And, as I said, I
want none of these things," went on Shureef; "I only want the truth.
Promise to tell it, and I say naught; wilt promise, brother?"

"No!" whispered Shurruf, fiercely. "What good would it do now?"

"It would make some mourn for me; it would make more than cursing
follow me; it would be evidence for me, a boy, at the Great Court."

The sleek face beside the anxious one took a strange expression, half
joy, half fear. "That is fools' talk. Doth not the Lord know, is He
not just?"

"Yes, He knows," persisted Shureef; "but others must know, else they
will not claim my body, else my grave will not be cooled with tears.
It would not harm thee much, Shurruf. Mayhap 'twould be wiser for thee
not to seek advancement, since one, who might hear if the truth were
told, seeks it also; but if thou stayest in this fat post--"

"Peace, fool!" interrupted Shurruf, passionately. "I will not. Thou
hast no proof, so do thy worst. Thou canst claim me brother if thou
wilt, naught else--" Shureef bent forward and whispered a name in his
ear, making him start back. "It is not true," he went on rapidly; "he
died long since. Think not I do not understand, that I cannot follow
thy evil thoughts. Have I not watched thee these twenty years? Have I
not seen thee sink, and sink, and sink? Can I not guess thy guile--"

"Because it should have been thine own, Shurruf," interrupted his
brother in a new tone. "But let that be. It matters not. I asked this
thing of thee that thou mightest do it freely; if not, I take it--for
I can take it now. I give thee a fortnight to consider; till then I
have no more to say, and thy words will be wasted."

He rose, feeling his way by the wall to the inner cell, and Shurruf,
after pausing a moment uncertainly, stole from the outer one, locking
the door behind him. There were stronger arguments than words at his
command, and he had a fortnight wherein to use them. And use them he
did, unsparingly. The week of solitary confinement which followed, and
the week of work in the general ward, were alternately hell and
comparative heaven; a hell of scant food, work beyond limit, and
punishments; a heaven of tobacco, opium, even a nip of country liquor
now and then; and, as a foretaste of favours to come, there was a day
of work in the gaol-gardens among the cool runnels of water and the
spinach-patches. For the Doctor, having small faith in things beyond
his ken, was dividing the dead who were in the Guardianship of God,
from the living who were in his own; in other words, he was enclosing
a new graveyard beyond the garden, and as this involved work in the
absolute open air, with greater chance of escape, the good-conduct men
from the walled garden were drafted outwards, and their place supplied
from within. But neither fifteen lashes, nor the privilege of smoking
surreptitiously behind a thicket of jasmine and roses, tempted Shureef
from the settled resolve which gave his face a curiously spiritual
look. The Doctor called it something else, and in the private list he
kept of those in his care, put the name of an incurable disease
opposite Shureef's, with this after it: _? three months_--and he did
not try to teach him carpet-weaving or pottery-making.

The Overseer, however, felt that three months was all too long for
him, when, another week of solitary confinement coming round, he
slipped over in the dead of night to Shureef's cell, and found him
once more fingering the corn idly; but as it was a moonlight night
now, he could see the grains of wheat, shining like gold, slip through
the lean fingers.

"It is not much I ask, brother," persisted Shureef, almost gently;
"only that the home folk may claim my body when I die. That is why I
came to thy gaol; for they will not, if the truth be not told, and
only thou canst tell it without flaw. True, I can harm thee, but I
have no wish for that. See! I give thee yet another week for thought.
That is three from three months; but I give no more."

Shurruf Deen went back to his quarters over the big entrance-gate,
where the warders waited on him as if he were a prince, and pondered
over the dilemma in a white heat of indignation. It was so selfish of
Shureef; when God knew, what were a few tears more or less when a man
had deliberately cast away his right to wailing a dozen times over?
What Shureef had said about the first count was true, but what of the
others? What right had he to claim any compensation for that first
injustice? What right had he even to claim commiseration for the
result of a life he had chosen? Yet the Doctor gave it him; he even
ordered him back to the garden after a day or two, with the remark to
the native assistant-surgeon that it was a case of the candle of life
having been burned at both ends. "He might live a year," he said
critically, "but I give him three months; and, of course, he might
drop down dead any day."

He might; if he only would before the week was out, thought Shurruf,
longingly. It would save so much trouble, for though the whole truth
could easily be shirked, it would scarcely be possible to deny the
relationship, or hush up his own share in the youthful escapade. For
there had been sufficient for him to be dismissed by the magistrate
with a reprimand for keeping bad company; and this, added to the
scandal of a notorious criminal claiming kin to him, would militate
against promotion. If Shureef would only drop down dead!

He did. The very day before the week was up he was shot in an
organized attempt at escape on the part of five or six prisoners, who
saw their opportunity in the temporary freedom of garden-work. A very
determined attempt it was, involving violence, in which Shurruf gained
fresh laurels by his promptness in ordering the sentry to fire. One
man was wounded in the arm, and broke his leg in falling back from the
wall he was scaling. Shureef was picked up quite dead behind the
thicket of jasmine and rose. As two or three shots had been fired in
that direction, it was possible it might have been an accident, and
that he was not really one of the plotters; on the other hand both
opium and tobacco were found upon him, proof positive that he had
friends in the gaol. And though the warder, who had connived at the
attempt at escape, and now pleaded guilty in the hope of lessening
punishment, swore that Shureef was not in the plot, he had nothing to
reply when Shurruf asked him for the name of any other gaol official
who tampered with his duty.

"Poor devil!" said the Doctor, musingly, as he finished the necessary
examination. "He was a fool to try--if he did; the run would have
finished him to a certainty. Even the excitement of being in the fun
might have killed him without anything else, for it was worse than I
thought; his heart was mere tissue-paper."

Once more the Overseer's rich brown skin seemed to fade, though he was
glib enough with his tongue. "He is to be buried tonight?" he asked
easily.

"The sooner the better. _His_ friends aren't likely to want him back;
but all the same put him in the new yard." The Doctor's hand, as he
drew up the sheet, finally lingered a bit. "If--if he wanted to get
outside, he may as well, poor devil!"

So in the cool of the evening Shureef, wrapped in a white cloth, was
taken from a solitary cell and given into the Guardianship of God in
the sun-baked patch of earth where he was the first to lie. It was a
desolate patch, bare of everything save a white efflorescence of salt,
showing, as the warder remarked cynically, that it was only fit for
corpses. Not even for them, dissented the diggers, who, with leg-irons
clanking discordantly, lingered over their task while Shureef, a
still, white roll of cloth, waited their pleasure. The soil, they
said, was much harder than in the old place, and if folk were to be
dug up as well as buried--not that any would want the expense of
moving Shureef, whose name was a byword--here the Overseer's portly
figure showed in the adjoining garden, and they hurried on with their
work.

Shurruf did not come over to the grave, however, perhaps because he
was in a demi-toilet of loose muslin, without his turban, and in
charge of his little son, a pretty child of four, whom the obsequious
gardener had presented with a bunch of jasmine and roses, and who,
after a time becoming bored by his father's interest in the spinach
and onions, drifted on by himself to find something more attractive,
until he came to stand wide-eyed and curious in the mourners' place at
the head of the grave. And there he stood silent, watching the
proceedings and keeping a tight clutch on his flowers, until a hand
from behind, dragging him back passionately, sent a shower of earth
over the edge on to Shureef's body which had just been laid in its
last resting-place, and sent also a bunch of roses and jasmines to lie
close to Shureef's heart, for the child dropped them in his fright.

"Weep not, my prince!" cried the warder. "Thou shalt have them again.
Here, some one, go down and hand them up."

But Shurruf, the Overseer, who, with his little son clutched up in his
arms, stood now in the mourners' place, his face almost grey, turned
on the man with a curse. "Let the flowers lie," he said; "there are
plenty more in the garden." So, without another word, he left them to
fill up the grave; and they, having done it, left Shureef with the
flowers on his breast to the Guardianship of God.

And there he stayed month after month, until the year drew close to
its end. And Shurruf Deen stayed in the gaol, for, after all, the man
whose place he had hoped to get was allowed another year's extension
of service. Perhaps it was the deferred hope which told on the
Overseer's nerves; but certain it is that the passing months brought a
strange look of anxiety to his face. Perhaps it was that, though he
had set aside much, he could not quite set aside the thought of that
bunch of roses and jasmine which his little son's hand had thrown upon
Shureef's breast. Something there was in his mind without a doubt,
which made him, but a few weeks before the Guardianship of God must
end, and before the momentous question of promotion must be decided,
steal out more than once at night to Shureef's solitary grave, as he
had stolen to his solitary cell. But the memory of the still, white
roll of cloth with the flowers upon it, touched him more closely than
the memory of the listless figure letting the wheat-grains slip
through its idle fingers. Why it should have done so it were hard to
say. Fear had something to do with it--sheer superstition that when
the Guardianship of God was over, the uncared-for body might fall into
the keeping of the devil and torment him. Love had its part too; love,
and a vague remorse born more of the chance which had made his little
son chief mourner, than of a sense of personal guilt. Plainly it did
not do to try and escape the tie of kindred altogether.

So, by degrees, the thought grew that it would indeed be safer for
Shureef to pass into other guardianship before God's ended. He had
asked for nothing, save that his grave might be cooled by tears; if
this could be compassed, surely he ought to be satisfied, ought to
forget everything else and leave his kindred in peace. And it might be
compassed with care. Shureef's mother--not his own, for they had only
been half-brothers--was alive, alive and blind, and poor too, since
his father, stung by his son's disgrace, had sent her back to her own
people. Poor, blind, and a mother! Here was material ready to his
hand. It would not cost half a month's pay, even with the expenses of
moving the body; and then--yes, then, when they were no longer needed,
those flowers, even if they were dust, as they must be, could be taken
away and forgotten.

It was the anniversary of Shureef's burial, and in the cool of the
evening the clanking leg-irons were once more at work upon his grave;
for, much to the Doctor's disgust, an old woman had put in an
appearance at the last moment with unimpeachable credentials of
relationship and sufficient cash to convey the remains to her village.
There was, as Shurruf, the Overseer, said regretfully, no valid excuse
for refusal, and the Doctor-_sahib_ might rely upon his doing all
things decently and in order, and on strict sanitary principles.
Whereupon the Doctor had smiled grimly, and said that in cases of
resurrection there was safety in extremes.

Nevertheless, it was the love of horrors, no doubt, which made the
gathering round the opening grave so large. The old woman sate in the
mourners' place, her tears flowing already. The others, however,
talked over probabilities, and told tales of former disinterments with
cheerful realism, while Shurruf Deen bustled backwards and forwards
among his elaborate arrangements.

They dug down to one side of the original grave after approved
fashion, so that there should be as little disturbance as possible,
and when traces of what was sought showed in a fold of still, white
shroud, extra cloths were sent down, in which, covering as they
exposed, the workmen gradually swathed all that was mortal of the dead
_dacoit_.

"He hath not lost much weight," said those at the ropes as they
hauled.

So there the task was done, decently and in order. But Shurruf wanted
something which he knew must still lie within the brand-new shroud,
and, ere they lifted the gruesome bundle to the coffin awaiting it, he
stooped,--then stood up suddenly, grey to the very lips, and crushing
something in his hand, something, so it seemed to those around, pink
and white and green. But his face riveted them. "In the Guardianship
of God," he muttered, "in the Guardianship of God."

"What is it?" said one to another, as he stood dazed and speechless.
Then they, too, stooped, looked, touched, until, as he had lain when
they found him behind the rose and jasmine thicket, Shureef lay before
them looking more as if he was asleep than dead.

"_Wah!_" said a voice in the crowd; "he cannot have been so bad as
folk thought him, if the Lord has taken all that care of him."

Shurruf gave a sort of sob, stepped back, lost his footing on the edge
of the open grave and fell heavily. When they picked him up he was
dead.

The Doctor, summoned hastily, shook his head. Death must have been
instantaneous, he said; the neck was broken. After which he went over
and looked at Shureef curiously; then stooped down and picked up some
of the earth on which the body lay, earth which had come from the
bottom of the grave. "Look," he said, pointing out minute white
crystals in it to the native assistant; "that's bi-borate of soda. I
knew there was some of it here when I chose this patch. It's a useful
antiseptic; but he has been in a regular mine of it--a curious case of
embalming, isn't it?"

It certainly was; and it was still more curious that a bunch of fresh
roses and jasmine should have been found on Shurruf Deen the
Overseer's breast, as he lay in Shureef's grave; but, as the Doctor
said, the obsequious gardener had most likely given them to him as he
passed through the spinach and onion patches. And perhaps it was so.




                         A BAD-CHARACTER SUIT


A flood of blistering, yellow sunshine was pouring down on to the
prostrate body of Private George Afford as he lay on his back, drunk,
in an odd little corner between two cook-room walls in the barrack
square; and a stream of tepid water from a skin bag was falling on his
head as Peroo the _bhisti_ stood over him, directing the crystal curve
now on his forehead, now scientifically on his ears. The only result,
however, was that Private George Afford tried unavailingly to scratch
them, then swore unintelligibly.

Peroo twisted the nozzle of the _mussuck_ to dryness, and knelt down
beside the slack strength in the dust. So kneeling, his glistening
curved brown body got mixed up with the glistening curved brown
water-bag he carried, until at first sight he seemed a monstrous
spider preying on a victim, for his arms and legs were skinny.

"_Sahib!_" he said, touching his master on the sleeve. It was a very
white sleeve, and the buttons and belts and buckles all glistened
white or gold in the searching sunlight, for Peroo saw to them,
as he saw to most things about Private Afford's body and soul;
why God knows, except that George Afford had once--for his own
amusement--whacked a man who, for his, was whacking Peroo. He happened
to be one of the best bruisers in the regiment, and George Afford, who
was in a sober bout, wanted to beat him; which he did.

There was no one in sight; nothing in fact save the walls, and an
offensively cheerful castor-oil bush which grew, greener than any
bay-tree, in one angle, sending splay fingers of shadow close to
Private Afford's head as if it wished to aid in the cooling process.
But despite the solitude, Peroo's touch on the white sleeve was
decorous, his voice deference itself.

"_Sahib!_" he repeated. "If the _Huzoor_ does not get up soon, the
Captain will find the master on the ground when he passes to rations.
And that is unnecessary."

He might as well have spoken to the dead. George Afford's face,
relieved of the douche treatment, settled down to placid, contented
sleep. It was not a bad face; and indeed, considering the habits of
the man, it was singularly fine and clear cut; but then in youth it
had evidently been a superlatively handsome one also.

Peroo waited a minute or two, then undid the nozzle of his skin bag
once more, and drenched the slack body and the dust around it.

"What a tyranny is here!" he muttered to himself, the wrinkles on his
forehead giving him the perplexed look of a baby monkey; "yet the
master will die of sunstroke if he be not removed. _Hai, Hai!_ What it
is to eat forbidden fruit and find it a turnip."

With which remark he limped off methodically to the quarter guard and
gave notice that Private George Afford was lying dead drunk between
cook-rooms Nos. 7 and 8; after which he limped on as methodically
about his regular duty of filling the regimental waterpots. What else
was there to be done? The special master whom he had elected to serve
between whiles would not want his services for a month or two at
least, since that period would be spent in clink. For Private George
Afford was a habitual offender.

Such a very habitual offender, indeed, that Evan Griffiths, the second
major, had not a word to say when the Adjutant and the Colonel
conferred over this last offence, though he had stood Afford's friend
many a time; to the extent even of getting him re-enlisted in India--a
most unusual favour--when, after an interval of discharge, he turned
up at his ex-captain's bungalow begging to be taken on; averring,
even, that he had served his way out to India before the mast in that
hope, since enlistment at the Depot might take him to the other
battalion. The story, so the Adjutant had said, was palpably false;
but the silent little Major had got the Colonel to consent; so Private
George Afford--an ideal soldier to look at--had given the master
tailor no end of trouble about the fit of his uniform, for he was a
bit of a dandy when he was sober. But now even Major Griffiths felt
the limit of forbearance was past; nor could a court-martial be
expected to take into consideration the trivial fact which lay at the
bottom of the observant little Major's mercy, namely, that though when
he was sober George Afford was a dandy, when he was drunk--or rather
in the stage which precedes actual drunkenness--he was a gentleman.
Vulgarity of speech slipped from him then; and even when he was
passing into the condition in which there is no speech he would excuse
his own lapses from strict decorum with almost pathetic apologies. "It
is no excuse, I know, sir," he would say with a charming, regretful
dignity, "but I have had a very chequered career--a very chequered
career indeed."

That was true; and one of the black squares of the chessboard of life
was his now, for the court-martial which sentenced Private George
Afford to but a short punishment added the rider that he was to be
thereinafter dismissed from Her Majesty's Service.

"He is quite incorrigible," said the Colonel, "and as we are pretty
certain of going up to punish those scoundrels on the frontier as soon
as the weather cools, we had better get rid of him. The regiment
mustn't have a speck anywhere, and his sort spoils the youngsters."

The Major nodded.

So Private George Afford got his dismissal, also the bad-character
suit of mufti which is the Queen's last gift even to such as he.


                          *   *   *   *   *


It was full six weeks after he had stood beside that prostrate figure
between cook-rooms Nos. 7 and 8 that Peroo was once more engaged in
the same task, though not in the same place.

And this time the thin stream of water falling on George Afford's face
found it grimed and dirty, and left it showing all too clearly the
traces of a fortnight's debauch. For Peroo, being of a philosophic
mind, had told himself, as he had limped away from the quarter guard
after his report, that now, while his self-constituted master would
have no need of his services, was the time for him to take that leave
home which he had deferred so long. Therefore, two or three days after
this event, he had turned up at the Quartermaster's office with the
curious Indian institution, "the changeling," and preferred his
request for a holiday. It was granted, of course; there is no reason
why leave should not be granted when a double, willing even to answer
to the same name, stands ready to step into the original's shoes,
without payment; that remaining a bargain between the doubles.

"Here," said Peroo, "is my brother. He is even as myself. His
character is mine. We are all water-carriers, and he has done the work
for two days. I will also leave him my skin bag, so that the Presence
may be sure it is clean. He is a Peroo also."

He might have been _the_ Peroo so far as the Quartermaster's
requirements went. So the original went home and the copy took his
place; but not for the two months. The order for active service of
which the Colonel had spoken came sooner than was expected, and Peroo,
hearing of it, started back at once for the regiment. A "changeling"
could pass muster in peace, but war required the reality; besides,
the master would, no doubt, be released. He was surely too good
fighting material to be left behind, Peroo told himself; yet there his
hero was, lying in the dust of a bye-alley in the bazaar in a ragged
bad-character suit, while the barrack squares were alive with men, not
half so good to look at, talking, as the mules were laden, of the
deeds they were to do!

The wrinkles on Peroo's forehead grew more like those of a monkey in
arms than ever. This was indeed a tyranny! but at least the Presence
could be moved out of the burning sun this time without, of necessity,
getting him into more trouble. So a few friends were called, and
together they carried George Afford into the windowless slip of a room
which Peroo locked at four o'clock in the morning and unlocked at ten
at night, but which, nevertheless, served him as a home. There was
nothing in it save a string bed and a drinking vessel; for Peroo,
after his kind, ate his food in the bazaar; but that for the present
was all the Englishman required either. So there Peroo left him in the
darkness and the cool, safe for the day.

But after that? The problem went with Peroo as he limped about filling
the cook-room waterpots, for on the morrow he must be filling them on
the first camping-ground, fifteen miles away from that slip of a room
where the master lay. What would become of him then?

The sandy stretches in which the barracks stood were full of mules,
camels, carts, and men of all arms belonging to the small picked force
which was to march with the one solid regiment at dawn on their
mission of punishment.

"_Pani_ (water)," shouted a perspiring artilleryman, grappling with a
peculiarly obstinate mule, as Peroo went past with his skin bag.
"_Pani_, and bring a real _jildi_ (quickness) along with it. W'ot! you
ain't the drinkin'-water, ain't yer? W'ot's that to me? I ain't one o'
yer bloomin' Brahmins; but I'll take it outside instead o' in, because
of them black-silly's o' the doctor's. So turn on the hose, Johnnie;
I'll show you how."

"'E knows all about it, you bet," put in one of the regiment
cheerfully. "Wy, 'e's bin hydraulic engineer and waterworks combined
to that pore chap as got the sack the other day--George Afford--"

"Sure it was a thriflin' mistake wid the prepositions his godfathers
made when they named him; for it was on and not off-erd he was six
days out of sivin," remarked a tall Irishman.

"You hold your jaw, Pat," interrupted another voice. "'E was a better
chap nor most, w'en 'e wasn't on the lap; and, Lordy! 'e could fight
when he 'ad the chanst--couldn't 'e, Waterworks? Just turn that hose
o' yours my way a bit, will yer?"

"_Huzoor_," assented Peroo, deferentially; he understood enough to
make the thought pass through his brain that it was a pity the master
had not the chance. Perhaps the curve of water conveyed this to that
other brain beneath the close, fair curls, whence the drops flew
sparkling in the sunlight. At any rate, their owner went on in a
softer tone--

"Yes, 'e fit--like fits. Looked, too, as if 'e was born ter die on the
field o' glory, and not in a bad-character suit; but, as the parson
says: 'Beauty is vain. I will repay, saith the Lord.'"

The confused morality of this passed Peroo by; and yet something not
altogether dissimilar lay behind his wrinkled forehead when, work
over, he returned to the slip of a room and found Afford vaguely
roused by his entrance.

"I--I am aware it is no possible excuse, sir," came his voice,
curiously refined, curiously pathetic, "but I really have had a very
chequered life, I have indeed."

"_Huzoor_," acquiesced Peroo, briefly; but even that was sufficient to
bring the hearer closer to realities. He sat up on the string bed,
looked about him stupidly, then sank back again.

"Get away! you d----d black devil," he muttered, with a sort of
listless anger. "Can't you let me die in peace, you fool? Can't you
let me die in the gutter, die in a bad-character suit? It's all I'm
fit for--all I'm fit for." Voice, anger, listlessness, all tailed away
to silence. He turned away with a sort of sob, and straightway fell
asleep, for he was still far from sober.

Peroo lit a cresset lamp and stood looking at him. Beauty was
certainly vain here, and if the Lord was going to repay, it was time
He began. Time some one began, at any rate, if the man who had fought
for him, Peroo, was not to carry out his desire of dying in the
gutter--dying in a bad-character suit! The latter misfortune could,
however, be avoided. Things were going cheap in the bazaar that
evening, as was only natural when it was to be deserted for six months
at least, so it ought not to be hard to get the master an exchange for
something more suitable to his beauty, if not to his death.

Five minutes afterwards George Afford, too much accustomed to such
ministrations to be disturbed by the process of undressing, was still
asleep, his chin resting peacefully on Peroo's best white cotton
shawl, and the bad-character suit was on its way to the pawnshop round
the corner. It was nigh on an hour, however, before Peroo, having
concluded his bargain, came back with it, and by the light of the
cresset set to work appraising his success or failure. A success
certainly. The uniform was old, no doubt, but it was a corporal's; and
what is more, it had three good-conduct stripes on the arm. That ought
to give dignity, even to a death in the gutter.

Peroo brought out some pipeclay and pumice-stone from a crevice, and
set to work cheerfully on the buttons and belts, thinking as he worked
that he had indeed made a good bargain. With a judicious smear of
cinnabar here and there, the tunic would be almost as good as the
master's old one--_plus_ the good-conduct stripes, of course, which he
could never have gained in the regiment.

But out of it? If, for instance, the Lord were really to repay Private
George Afford for that good deed in defending a poor lame man?--a good
deed which no bad one could alter for the worse! Peroo on this point
would have been a match for a whole college of Jesuits in casuistry,
as he laid on the pipeclay with lavish hand, and burnished the buttons
till they shone like gold.

It was grey dawn when George Afford woke, feeling a deferential touch
on his shoulder.

"_Huzoor!_" came a familiar voice, "the first bugle has gone. The
_Huzoor_ will find his uniform--a corporal's, with three good-conduct
stripes--is ready. The absence of a rifle is to be regretted; but that
shall be amended if the _Huzoor_ will lend a gracious ear to the plan
of his slave. In the meantime a gifting of the _Huzoor's_ feet for the
putting on of stockings might be ordered."

George Afford thrust out a foot mechanically, and sate on the edge of
the string bed staring stupidly at the three good-conduct stripes on
the tunic, which was neatly folded beside him.

"It is quite simple," went on the deferential voice. "The _Huzoor_ is
going to march with the colours, but he will be twelve hours behind
them; that is all. He will get the fighting, and by-and-by, when the
killing comes and men are wanted, the Colonel-_sahib_ may give a
place; but, in any case, there will always be the fighting. For the
rest, I, the _Huzoor's_ slave, will manage; and as there will, of
necessity, be no canteen, there can be no tyranny. Besides, since
there is not a cowrie in the master's jacket, what else is he to do?"

The last argument was unanswerable. George Afford thrust out his other
foot to be shod for this new path, and stared harder than ever at the
good-conduct stripes.

That night, despite the fatigues of a first day in camp, Peroo trudged
back along the hard white road to meet some one whom he expected; for
this was the first step, and he had, perforce, been obliged to leave
his charge to his own devices for twelve hours amid the distractions
of the bazaar. Still, without a cowrie in his pocket--Peroo had
carefully extracted the few annas he had found in one--a man was more
or less helpless, even for evil.

Despite this fact, there was a lilt in the lagging step which, just as
Peroo had begun to give up hope of playing Providence, came slowly
down the road. It belonged to George Afford, in the gentlemanly stage
of drink. He had had a chequered life, he said almost tearfully, but
there were some things a man of honour could not do. He could not
break his promise to an inferior--a superior was another matter. In
that case he paid for it honestly. But he had promised Peroo--his
inferior--to come. So here he was; and that was an end of it.

It seemed more than once during the next few hours as if the end had,
indeed, come. But somehow Peroo's deferential hand and voice
extricated those tired uncertain feet, the weary sodden brain, from
ditches and despair; still it was a very sorry figure which Peroo's
own hasty footsteps left behind, safely quartered for the day in a
shady bit of jungle, while he ran on to overtake the rear-guard if he
could. The start, however, had been too much for his lameness, and he
was a full hour late at his work; which, of course, necessitated his
putting in an excuse. He chose drunkenness, as being nearest the
truth, was fined a day's wages, and paid it cheerfully, thinking with
more certainty of the sleeping figure he had left in the jungles.

The afternoon sun was slanting through the trees before it stirred,
and George Afford woke from the sleep of fatigue superadded to his
usual sedative. He felt strangely refreshed, and lay on his back
staring at the little squirrels yawning after their midday snooze in
the branches above him. And then he laughed suddenly, sate up and
looked about him half confusedly. Not a trace of humanity was to be
seen; nothing but the squirrels, a few green pigeons, and down in the
mirror-like pool behind the trees--a pool edged by the percolating
moisture from the water with faint spikes of sprouting grass--a couple
of egrets were fishing lazily. Beyond lay a bare sandy plain, backed
by faint blue hills--the hills where fighting was to be had. Close at
hand were those three good-conduct stripes.

That night Peroo had not nearly so far to go back along the broad
white road; yet the step which came echoing down it, if steadier,
lagged more. Nor was Peroo's task much easier, for George Afford--in
the abject depression which comes to the tippler from total
abstinence--sate down in the dust more than once, and swore he would
not go another step without a dram. Still, about an hour after dawn,
he was once more dozing in a shady retreat with a pot of water and
some dough cakes beside him, while Peroo, in luck, was getting a lift
to the third camping-ground.

But even at the second, where the sleeping figure remained, the
country was wilder, almost touching the "skirts of the hills," and so,
when George Afford roused himself--as the animals rouse themselves to
meet the coming cool of evening--a ravine deer was standing within
easy shot, looking at him with head thrown back and wide, startled
nostrils, scenting the unknown.

The sight stirred something in the man which had slept the sleep of
the dead for years; that keen delight of the natural man, not so much
in the kill as in the chase; not so much in the mere chase itself as
in its efforts--its freedom. He rose, stretching his long arms in what
was half a yawn, half a vague inclination to shake himself free of
some unseen burden.

But that night he swore at Peroo for leading him a fool's dance; he
threatened to go back. He was not so helpless as all that. He was not
a slave; he would have his tot of rum like any other soldier as--

"_Huzoor_," interrupted Peroo, deferentially, "this slave is aware
that many things necessary to the _Huzoor's_ outfit as a soldier
remain to be produced. But with patience all may be attained. Here, by
God's grace, is the rifle. One of us--Smith-_sahib_ of G Company,
_Huzoor_--found freedom to-day. He was reconnoitring with Griffiths,
Major-_sahib_, when one of these hell-doomed _Sheeahs_--whom Heaven
destroy--shot him from behind a rock--"

Private George Afford seemed to find his feet suddenly. "Smith of G
Company?" he echoed in a different voice.

"_Huzoor!_--the _sahib_ whom the _Huzoor_ thrashed for thrashing this
slave--"

"Poor chap!" went on George Afford, as if he had not heard. "So
they've nicked him--but we'll pay 'em out--we--" His fingers closed
mechanically on the rifle Peroo was holding out to him.


                          *   *   *   *   *


It was a fortnight after this, and the camp lay clustered closely in
the mouth of a narrow defile down which rushed a torrent swollen from
the snows above; a defile which meant decisive victory or defeat to
the little force which had to push their way through it to the heights
above. Yet, though death, maybe, lay close to each man, the whole camp
was in an uproar because Major Griffiths' second pair of _putties_ had
gone astray. The other officers had been content with one set of these
woollen bandages which in hill-marching serve as gaiters, and help so
much to lessen fatigue; but the Major, being methodical, had provided
against emergencies. And now, when, with that possibility of death
before him, his soul craved an extreme order in all things, his clean
pair had disappeared. Now the Major, though silent, always managed to
say what he meant. So it ran through the camp that they had been
stolen, and men compared notes over the fact in the mess-tent and in
the canteen.

In the former, the Adjutant with a frown admitted that of late there
had been a series of inexplicable petty thefts in camp, which had
begun with the disappearance of Private Smith's rifle. That might
perhaps be explained in an enemy's country, but what the deuce anybody
could want with a pair of bone shirt-studs--

"And a shirt," put in a mournful voice.

"_Item_ a cake of scented soap," said another.

"And a comb," began a third.

The Colonel, who had till then preserved a discreet silence, here
broke in with great heat to the Adjutant.

"Upon my soul, sir, it's a disgrace to the staff, and I must insist on
a stringent inquiry the instant we've licked these hill-men. I--I
didn't mean to say anything about it--but I haven't been able to find
my tooth-brush for a week."

Whereupon there was a general exodus into the crisp, cold air outside,
where the darkness would hide inconvenient smiles, for the Colonel was
one of those men who have a different towel for their face and hands.

The stars were shining in the cleft between the tall, shadowy cliffs
which rose up on either side, vague masses of shadow on which--seen
like stars upon a darker sky--the watchfires of the enemy sparkled
here and there. The enemy powerful, vigilant; and yet beside the
camp-fires close at hand the men had forgotten the danger of the
morrow in the trivial loss of the moment, and were discussing the
Major's _putties_.

"It's w'ot I say all along," reiterated the romancer of G Company. "It
begun ever since Joey Smith was took from us at Number Two camp. It's
'is ghost--that's w'ot it is. 'Is ghost layin' in a _trew-so_. Jest
you look 'ere! They bury 'im, didn't they? as 'e was--decent like in
coat and pants--no more. Well! since then 'e's took 'is rifle off us,
an' a greatcoat off D Company, and a knapsack off A."

"Don't be lavin' out thim blankets he tuk from the store, man,"
interrupted the tall Irishman. "Sure it's a testhimony to the pore
bhoy's character annyhow that he shud be wantin' thim where he is."

"It is not laughing at all at such things I would be, whatever," put
in another voice seriously, "for it is knowing of such things we are
in the Highlands--"

"Hold your second sight, Mac," broke in a third; "we don't want none
o' your shivers tonight. You're as bad as they blamed niggers, and
they swear they seen Joey more nor once in a red coat dodging about
our rear."

"Well! they won't see 'im no more, then," remarked a fourth
philosophically, "for 'e change 'is tailor. Leastways, 'e got a
service khakee off Sergeant Jones the night afore last; the Sergeant
took his Bible oath to 'ave it off Joey Smith's ghost, w'en 'e got
time to tackle 'im, if 'e 'ave ter go to 'ell for it."

Major Griffiths meantime was having a similar say as he stood,
eye-glass in eye, at the door of the mess-tent. "Whoever the thief
is," he admitted, with the justice common to him, "he appears to have
the instincts of a gentleman; but, by Gad, sir, if I find him he shall
know what it is to take a field officer's gaiters."

Whereupon he gave a dissatisfied look at his own legs, a more
contented one at the glimmering stars of the enemy's watchfires, and
then turned in to get a few hours' rest before the dawn.

But some one a few miles farther down the valley looked both at his
legs and at the stars with equal satisfaction. Some one, tall, square,
straight, smoking a pipe--some one else's pipe, no doubt--beside the
hole in the ground where, on the preceding night, the camp flagstaff
had stood. That fortnight had done more for George Afford than give
his outward man a trousseau; it had clothed him with a certain
righteousness, despite the inward conviction that Peroo must be a
magnificent liar in protesting that the _Huzoor's_ outfit had either
been gifted to him or bought honestly.

In fact, as he stood looking down at his legs complacently, he
murmured to himself, "I believe they're the Major's, poor chap; look
like him somehow." Then he glanced at the Sergeant's coatee he wore
and walked up and down thoughtfully--up and down beside the hole in
the ground where the flagstaff had stood.

So to him from the dim shadows came a limping figure.

"Well?" he called sharply.

"The orders are for dawn, _Huzoor_, and here are some more
cartridges."

George Afford laughed; an odd, low little laugh of sheer satisfaction.


                          *   *   *   *   *


It was past dawn by an hour or two, but the heights were still unwon.

"Send some one--any one!" gasped the Colonel, breathlessly, as he
pressed on with a forlorn hope of veterans to take a knoll of rocks
whence a galling fire had been decimating every attack. "Griffiths!
for God's sake, go or get some one ahead of those youngsters on the
right or they'll break--and then--"

Break! What more likely? A weak company, full of recruits, a company
with its officers shot down, and before them a task for veterans--for
that indifference to whizzing bullets which only custom brings. Major
Griffiths, as he ran forward, saw all this, saw also the ominous
waver. God! would he be in time to check it--to get ahead? that was
what was wanted, some one ahead--no more than that--some one ahead!

There was some one. A tall figure ahead of the wavering boys.

"Come on! come on, my lads! follow me!" rang out a confident voice,
and the Major, as he ran, half-blinded by the mists of his own haste,
felt it was as a voice from heaven.

"Come on! come on!--give it 'em straight. Hip, hip, hurray!"

An answering cheer broke from the boys behind, and with a rush the
weakest company in the regiment followed some one to victory.


                          *   *   *   *   *


"I don't understand what the dickens it means," said the Colonel
almost fretfully that same evening, when, safe over the pass, the
little force was bivouacking in a willow-set valley on the other side
of the hills. Before it lay what it had come to gain, behind it danger
past. "Some one in my regiment," he went on, "does a deuced plucky
thing--between ourselves, saves the position: I want naturally to find
out who it was, and am met by a cock and bull story about some one's
ghost. What the devil does it mean, Major?"

The Major shook his head. "I couldn't swear to the figure, sir, though
it reminded me a bit--but that's impossible. However, as I have by
your orders to ride back to the top, sir, and see what can be done to
hold it, I'll dip over a bit to where the rush was made, and see if
there is any clue."

He had not to go so far. For in one of those tiny hollows in the level
plateau of pass, whence the snow melts early, leaving a carpet of blue
forget-me-nots and alpine primroses behind it, he, Sergeant Jones, and
the small party going to make security still more secure, came upon
Peroo, the water-carrier, trying to perform a tearful travesty of the
burial service over the body of George Afford.

It was dressed in Sergeant Jones' tunic and Major Griffiths'
_putties_, but the Sergeant knelt down beside it, and smoothed the
stripes upon the cuff with a half-mechanical, half-caressing touch,
and the Major interrupted Peroo's protestations with an odd tremor in
his voice.

"What the devil does it matter," he said sharply, "what he took
besides the pass? Stand aside, man; this is my work, not yours.
Sergeant! form up your men for the salute--ball cartridge."

The Major's recollection of the service for the burial of the dead was
not accurate, but it was comprehensive. So he committed the mortal
remains of his brother soldier to the dust, confessing confusedly that
there is a natural body and a spiritual body--a man that is of the
earth earthy, and one that is the Lord from heaven. So following on a
petition to be saved from temptation and delivered from evil, the
salute startled the echoes, and they left George Afford in the keeping
of the pass, and the pass in his keeping. And as the Major rode
campwards, he wondered vaguely if some one before the great white
throne wore a bad-character suit, or whether wisdom understood the
plea, "I've had a very chequered life, I have indeed."

But Peroo had no such thoughts; needed no such excuse. It was
sufficient for him that the _Huzoor_ had once been the protector of
the poor.




                             FIRE AND ICE


It was in a little lath-and-plaster house down by the river that it
all happened. The veriest confection of a house, looking for all the
world as if it were a Neapolitan ice. Strawberry and vanilla in
alternate stripes, with shuttered windows of coffee, and a furled
wafer of an awning over the filagree chocolate balcony. And it rested,
so to speak, against a platter of green plantain-leaves, bright as any
emerald. No doubt the trees belonging to the leaves grew somewhere to
the back or the side of it, but from the wide street in front you
could see nothing but the green leaves surrounding the ice-cream.

For the rest it was a three-storeyed house outwardly; inwardly a
two-storeyed one; or to be strictly accurate, it consisted of a storey
and a half, since the further half of the ground floor and the whole
of the middle storey belonged to a different house, having a different
entrance in a different street, which lay in a different quarter. A
very respectable quarter indeed, whereas the less said about the
morals of the wide street down by the river the better. They were so
bad that the modesty of the middle storey did not permit of a single
window whence they could be seen. And this gave the house a queer,
half-hearted look, for the top storey, and that half of the lowest one
which belonged to it, were full of windows and doors opening on to the
broad path leading to destruction. There were five, with fretted
wooden architraves filling up the whole of the ground floor, so that
you could see straight into the long, shallow hall whence there was no
exit save by a narrow slit in the middle, showing a dim, steep
staircase. It was always empty, this hall, though it was carpeted with
striped carpets, and painted elaborately in flowery arabesques of a
dull, pale, pink and flaming crimson; an odd mixture reminding you
vaguely of bloodstains on a rose-leaf. And there was a red lamp over
the centre door, which sent a rosy redness into the growing dusk; for
it was lit early.

So was the pale--the palest of green lights--on the top storey which
you could see swinging from the roof when the coffee-ice shutters were
thrown back as the evening breeze came down the river. It was pale,
yet bright like the first star at sunsetting.

And sometimes, but not often, if you watched in the early dusk you
might see the owner of the ice-cream house flit across the open
window. She was like a sugar-drop herself, rose or saffron decked with
silver leaf, a slender scrap of a creature who tinkled as she walked
and gave out a perfume of heavy scented flowers. But this was seldom;
more often you only heard the tinkle, either of silver or laughter,
since Burfani--for that was her name--was of those who barter the one
for the other. It was in truth her hereditary trade, though neither
her father nor her mother had practised it; their role in life having
been that of pater and mater-familias. A very necessary one if the
race is to survive, and so in this generation, also, her brother had
undertaken the duty of marrying his first cousin. The young couple
being now, in the privacy and propriety of the second storey, engaged
in bringing up a fine family of girls to succeed to the top storey
when Burfani's age should drive her to a lower place in life. In the
meantime, however, she allowed them so much a month; enough to enable
idle Zulfkar to fight quail in the bazaars and keep his wife Lazizan
in the very strictest seclusion--as befitted one filched from the
profession of bartering smiles in order to fulfil the first duty of a
woman--the rearing of babes.

Thus, in more ways than one, the house was conglomerate. On the side
overlooking the broad path there was the stained rose-leaf hall,
empty, swept, and garnished, and the dark stair leading up and up to
the wandering star of a lamp twinkling out into the sunset amid the
sound of laughter and money. On the side giving upon narrow
respectability a hall full of household gear and dirt where the little
girls played, and a dark stair leading to a darker room where Lazizan
sat day after day bewailing her sad fate; for, of course, life would
have been much gayer over the way, since she was a beautiful woman.
Far more beautiful in a lavish, somewhat loud fashion, than the lady
belonging to the ice-cream house with her delicate, small face; but
that was the very reason why she had been chosen out from many to
carry on the race as it ought to be carried on. Burfani, of course,
was clever, and that counted for much, but it never did in their
profession to rely on brains above looks. Nevertheless Lazizan, when
in a bad temper, was in the habit of telling herself that if she had
been taught to sing and dance, as the little lady had been taught, she
could have made the ice-cream house a more paying concern than it
was--to judge by the pittance they received from it! And this angry
complaint grew with her years until as she sat suckling her fourth
child, she felt sometimes as if she could strangle it, even though it
was a boy, and though as a rule she was an affectionate mother. In
truth the sheer animal instinct natural to so finely developed a
creature lasted out the two or three years during which her children
were hers alone; after that, when they began crawling downstairs and
playing in the hall where she might never go, she became jealous and
then forgot all about them.

Nevertheless, the boy being only some nine months old when he was
suddenly carried off by one of those mysterious diseases common to
Indian children, she wept profusely, and told Burfani--who, as in duty
bound, came round decently swathed in a _burka_ to offer condolence on
hearing of the sad event--that some childless one had doubtless cast a
shadow on him for his beauty's sake, seeing that--thank Heaven!--all
her children were beautiful. There was always a militant flavour
underlying the politeness of these two, and even the presence of the
quaint little overdressed dead baby awaiting its bier on the bed did
not prevent attack and defence.

"They favour thee, sister," replied Burfani, suavely. "In mind also,
to judge from what I see. Therefore I shall await God's will in the
future ere I choose one to educate."

Lazizan tittered sarcastically, despite her half-dried tears.

"'Tis my choice first, nevertheless. The best of this bunch in
looks--ay, in brains too, perchance--marries my brother's son,
according to custom. Sure my mother chose thus, and I must do the
same, sister."

She spoke evenly, though for the moment the longing to strangle
something had transferred itself to the saffron-coloured sugar-drop
all spangled with silver which had emerged from its chrysalis of a
_burka_. What business had the poor thin creature with such garments
when _her_ beauty was hidden by mere rags?

Burfani laughed in her turn; an easy, indifferent laugh, and stretched
out her slim henna-dyed palm with the usual friendly offering of
cardamoms.

"Take one, sister," she said soothingly, "they are good for spleen and
excessive grief. _Hai! Hai!_ thou wilt be forlorn, indeed, now thy
occupation is gone."

Lazizan, with her mouth full of spices, tittered again more
artificially than ever. "I can do other things, perchance, beside
suckle babes. Maybe I weary of it, and am glad of a change."

The saffron-coloured sugar-drop, seated on a low stool in front of the
white-sheeted bed with its solemn little gaily-dressed burden, looked
at its companion distastefully through its long lashes, and the
slender, henna-dyed hand, catching some loops of the jasmine chaplets
it wore, held them like a bouquet close to the crimson-tinted lips.

"It is a virtuous task, my sister," quoth Burfani, gravely sniffing
away at the heavy perfume, as if she needed something to make her
environment less objectionable. "Besides, it is ever a mistake to
forsake the profession of one's birth--"

"And wherefore should I?" interrupted Lazizan, seizing her opportunity
recklessly. "Hast thou forsaken it, and are we not sisters?"

Again a cold, critical look of dislike came from the long, narrow eyes
with their drowsy lids.

"Such words are idle, sister. Forget them. Thou wouldst not find it
easier--"

"How canst tell?" interrupted Lazizan once more. "As well say that
thou couldst put up with my life."

The saffron and silver daintiness shifted its look towards the bed,
and the henna-dyed hand straightened a wrinkle in the sheet softly.

"God knows!" she said with a sudden smile. "Anyhow, sister, 'tis not
wise to change one's profession as one grows old."

As one grows old! This parting shot rankled long after the decent
_burka_ had slipped like a shadow through the swept and garnished
hall, and so up the dark stairs to the wandering starlight shining
feebly out into the sunset; long after the preacher and the bier, and
the family friends had carried the gaily-dressed baby to its grave,
leaving the mother to the select and secluded tears of her neighbours;
long after the little girls, wearied out with excitement, had fallen
asleep cuddled together peacefully, innocent of that choice in the
future; long after Zulfkar, full of liquor, tears, and curses, due to
a surplusage in the funeral expenses allowed by Burfani, to parental
grief, and to bad luck at cards, came home, desirous of sympathy. He
got none, for Lazizan, despite her seclusion, had never lost the
empire which he felt she deserved as the handsomest woman he knew.
'Twas his own fault, she said curtly; he could marry another wife,
have more liquor, and gamble as much as he liked if he chose. It was
but a question of money, and if he were content to put up with
beggarly alms from his sister, that ended the matter.

Whereupon, being in the maudlin stage of drink, he wept still more.

It must have been fully three months after the baby's funeral
procession had gone down the respectable street, and so by a side
alley found its way into the broad path leading alike to destruction
and the graveyard, that Burfani went round to her sister-in-law's
again. This time she was in pink and silver, like a rose-water ice,
and her words were cold as her looks.

"Say what thou wilt, Lazizan, the youth lingers. Have I not windows to
my house? Have I not eyes? And such things shall not be bringing
disgrace to respectable families."

Lazizan tittered as usual: "Lo! what a coil, because an idle stranger
lingers at the back instead of the front, 'Tis for thy sake doubtless,
sister, though thou art unkind. I wonder at it, seeing he is not
ill-favoured."

"So thou _hast_ seen him! So be it. See him no more, or I tell
Zulfkar."

"Tell him what? That thou hast cast eyes on a handsome stranger, and
because he comes not to thy call wouldst fasten the quarrel upon me?
Zulfkar is no fool, sister, he will not listen!"

"If he listen not, he can leave my house--for 'tis mine. And mark my
words, Lazizan Bibi, no scandal comes nigh it."

Caesar's wife could not have spoken with greater unction, and in good
sooth she meant her words, since in no class is seclusion bound to be
more virtuous than in that to which Burfani belonged.

So, as the motes in the sunbeam of life danced along the broad path in
front of the ice-cream house, and drifted up its dark stair, the
painted and perfumed little lady under the pale green lamp kept an eye
upon the virtue of her family. Thus ere long it came to be Zulfkar's
turn to listen to his sister's warning, and as he listened he sucked
fiercely, confusedly, at the inlaid hookah which stood for the use of
approved visitors; for in good sooth there had been more money to
spend of late, and Lazizan was discreet enough save to those watchful,
experienced eyes. The sound of his hubblings and bubblings therefore
was his only answer, and they filled the wide, low, white-plastered
upper storey, frescoed round each coffee-shuttered window with flowery
devices, until Burfani lost patience, and began coldly:

"Hast been taking lessons of a camel, brother?" she asked, rustling
the tinsel-decked fan she held; and then suddenly she seemed to grasp
something, and the contemptuous indifference of her bearing changed to
passionate anger. Her silver-set feet clashed as they touched the
floor, and she rose first to a sitting posture, finally to stand
before the culprit, the very personification of righteous wrath.

"So! thou hast taken gold! This is why thou canst ruffle with the best
at Gulabun's--base-born parvenu who takes to the life out of
wickedness--as _she_ hath done, bringing disgrace to the screened
house where thy mother dwelt in decency. But thou dwellest there no
longer--thou eatest no bread of mine--I will choose my pupil from
another brood."

"Nay, sister, 'tis not proved," stammered Zulfkar.

"Not proved!" she went on still more passionately. "Nay, 'tis not
proved to thy neighbours, maybe, but to me? Mine eyes have seen--I
know the trick--and out thou goest. I will have no such doings in my
house, and so I warned her months ago. But there! what need for
railing? Live on her gold an thou wiliest, it shall not chink beside
mine."

She sank back upon the silk coverlet again, and with a bitter laugh
began to rustle the tinsel fan once more. And Zulfkar, after
unavailing protests, slunk down the dark stairs, and so along the
street to a certain house over the liquor-seller's shop, about which a
noisy crowd gathered all day long.

And that night screams and blows came from the second storey, and
unavailing curses on the mischief-maker. But if the latter heard them,
she gave no sign to the approved visitors drinking sherbets in the
cool upper storey with the windows set wide to the stars.

It was Zulfkar beating his wife, of course, because she was so
handsome primarily; secondly, because she had been foolish enough to
be found out; thirdly, because even in liquor he was sharp enough to
recognise that Burfani would keep her word.

And she did. The supplies stopped from that day. Within a week the
second storey lay empty, while Lazizan wept tears of pain and spite in
a miserable little lodging in the very heart of the city. It is
difficult even to hint at the impotent rage the woman felt towards her
sister-in-law. Even Zulfkar's blows were forgotten in the one mad
longing to revenge herself upon the pink-and-saffron daintiness which
would not spare one crumb from a full table. For so to Lazizan's
coarse, passionate nature the matter presented itself, bringing with
it a fierce delight at the perfections of her own lover. He had
deserted her for the time, it is true, but that was the way of lovers
when husbands were angry; by-and-by he would come back, and there
would be peace, since Zulfkar must have gold.

So ran her calculations; but she reckoned without a certain fierce
intolerance which the latter shared with his sister; also somewhat
prematurely on an immediate emptying of his pockets. But luck was not
all against him; the cards favoured him. And so, when a few days after
the flitting from the second storey, she, being sick to death of
dulness, thought the time had come for self-assertion, she found
herself mistaken. Zulfkar, still full of Dutch courage, fell upon her
again, and beat her most unmercifully, finishing up with an
intimidatory slash at her nose. It was not much, not half so serious
as the beating, but the very thought of possible disfigurement drove
her mad, and the madness drove her to a corner where she could plan
revenge while Zulfkar slept heavily--for he was more than half drunk.
And _this_, too, was the fault of the saffron-and-rose devil in the
upper storey, who had her amusement and spied upon other women's ways.
And _this_ meant days more ere she, Lazizan, would be presentable,
even if she did not carry the mark to her grave, and all because that
she-devil was jealous--jealous of _her_ lover!

Oh for revenge! And why not? The door was unlatched, since Zulfkar had
forgotten it in his anger; the streets were deserted. Even the broad
path down by the river would be asleep, the green light gone from
above, only the red lamp swinging over the outer door, sending a
glow.... Fire! The thought leapt to her brain like a flame itself. Why
not? Zulfkar had purposely kept--all unbeknown to the she-devil--a
second key to that empty second floor, and he was in a drunken sleep.
If she stole it--if she took the bottle of paraffin--if she set fire
to the wooden partition separating the stairs--if she broke the red
lamp and pretended that was it--

She did not stop to think. She had begun the task almost before she
had thought out the details, and was fumbling in Zulfkar's pockets as
he lay. And there were two bottles of paraffin in the corner; that was
because he had brought one home, and the market-woman another by
mistake. So much the better, so much the bigger blaze. Then out into
the street, not forgetting a box of safety matches--strange companions
to such a task. She knew her way well, having wandered free enough as
a child before the lot was drawn, the die cast which sent her to
suckle babes. Yet, being a woman beset by a thousand superstitious
fears, it needed all her courage ere she found herself face to face
with the thin wooden partition surrounding the steep stair leading
upwards. How many times had she not listened to feet ascending those
unseen stairs, and heard the tinkle of laughter as the unseen door
above opened?

Well, it would blaze finely, and cut off at once all means of escape.
A devilish plan indeed, and the leaping flames, ere she left them to
their task, showed the face of a fiend incarnate.

And so to wait for the few minutes before the whole world must
know that the saffron and the rose daintiness was doomed. No more
laughter--no more lovers--that would be for her, Lazizan, not for the
other with her cold sneers.

A licking tongue of flame showed for an instant and made her pray
Heaven none might see it too soon. Then a crackle, a puff of smoke,
next a cry of fire, but, thank Heaven, only from the broad path. And
what good were the running feet, what good the shouts of the crowd in
which her shrouded figure passed unnoticed, unless the upper storey
had wings? For the stairs must be gone--hopelessly gone--by this time.

More than the stairs, for with one sudden blaze the lath-and-plaster
house seemed to melt like ice itself before the sheet of flame which
the soft night wind bent riverwards.

And still the top storey slept, or was it suffocated? No! there was
some one at the window--some one gesticulating wildly. A man--not a
woman.

"Throw yourself down!" cried an authoritative foreign voice, "'tis
your only chance."

Surely, since the ice melted visibly during the sudden hush which fell
upon the jostling crowd.

"Throw yourself down!" came the order again; "we'll catch you if we
can. Stand back, good people."

"Quick! it's your last chance," came the inexorable voice once more.
Then there was a leap, a scream--a crash, as in his despair the man
overleapt the mark and fell among the parting crowd. Fell right at
Lazizan's feet face uppermost.

And it was the face of the handsome stranger--of her lover.

Her shriek echoed his as she flung herself beside him. And at the
sound something white and ghostlike slipped back from the window with
a tinkle of laughter.

"Burfani! Burfani!" shouted the crowd. "Drop gently--we'll save you!
Burfani! Burfani!"

But there was no answer; and the next moment with a roar and a crash
Vice fell upon Virtue, and both together upon the swept and garnished
hall and the hall where the little girls had played.

The ice-cream house had become a blazing pile of fire.




                         THE SHAHBASH WALLAH


Shahbash, Bhaiyan, Shahbash!

The words, signifying "Bravo, boys, bravo!" came in a despondent drawl
from the coolie leaning against the ladder--one of those crazy bamboo
ladders with its rungs tied on with grass twine at varying slants and
distances, whereon the Indian house-decorator loves to spend long days
in company with a pot of colour-wash and a grass brush made from the
leavings of the twine.

There were two such ladders in the bare, oblong, lofty room, set round
with open doors and windows, and on each was balanced a man, a pot,
and a brush--all doing nothing. So was the coolie below.

He was a small, slight man, with a dejected expression. Stark naked,
save for two yards or so of coarse muslin wisped about his short hair
and a similar length knotted about his middle. What colour either had
been originally could not be guessed, since both were completely
covered with splashes of colour-wash--blue, green, yellow, and pink.
So was his thin body, which, as he stood immovable at the bottom of
the ladder, looked as if it was carved out of some rare scagiola.

For they were doing up the hospital in Fort Lawrence, and
Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien, of the 10th Sikh Pioneers--then
engaged in making military roads over the Beloochistan frontier--had
an eye for colour. Not so, however, Surgeon-Major Pringle, who that
very morning had marched in with the detachment of young English
recruits which had been sent to take possession of the newly enlarged
fort. It was a queer mud building, looking as if it were a part of the
mud promontory which blocked a sharp turn in the sun-dried, heat-baked
mud valley, through which the dry bed of a watercourse twisted like
the dry skin of a snake. Everything dry, everything mud, baked to
hardness by the fierce sun. It was an ugly country in one way,
picturesque in another, with its yawning fissures cracking the mud
hills into miniature peaks and passes, its almost leafless flowering
shrubs, aromatic, honeyful, and its clouds of painted butterflies. A
country in which colour was lost in sheer excess of sunshine.

That, however, was not the reason why Surgeon-Captain O'Brien had
painted his wards to match Joseph's coat. As he explained to
Surgeon-Major Pringle, who, as senior officer, took over charge, it
was wiser, in his opinion--especially with youngsters about--to call
wards by the colour of their walls rather than by the diseases to be
treated in them; since if a patient "wance found out what was really
wrong with his insoide, he was sure to get it insthanter."

The Surgeon-Major, fresh from England and professional
precisions--fresh also to India and its appeals to the
imagination--had felt it impossible to combat such statements
seriously. Besides, there was no use in doing so. The walls were past
remedy for that year, and even the _post-mortem_ house--that last
refuge of all diseases--was being washed bright pink; a colour which,
according to Terence O'Brien, was "a nice, cheerful tint, that could
not give annyone, not even a corpse, the blues."

In the course of which piece of work the small man at the foot of the
ladder was becoming more and more like a statue in _rosso antico_, as
he repeated: "_Shahbash, bhaiyan, shahbash!_" at regular intervals.

His voice had no resonance, and not an atom of enthusiasm about it;
but, like a breeze among rain-soaked trees, it always provoked a
pitter-patter of falling drops--a patter of pink splashes like huge
tears--upon the concrete floor and the scagiola figure. For the words
set the brushes above moving slowly for a while; then the spasm of
energy passed, all was still again, until a fresh "Bravo, boys,
bravo!" was followed by a fresh shower of pink tears.

"Lazy brutes!" came a boy's voice from the group of young recruits who
were enjoying a well-earned rest after having marched in fifteen
miles, carrying their kits as if they had been born with them, and
settling down into quarters as if they were veterans. For they were
smart boys, belonging to a smart regiment, whose recruiting ground lay
far from slums and scums; one whose officers were smart also, and kept
up the tone of their men by teaching them a superior tolerance for the
rest of the world. "Jest look at that feller--like an alley taw. He
ain't done a blessed 'and's turn since I began to watch 'im." They
were seated on some shady mud steps right over against the hospital
compound, and the _post-mortem_ house being separate from the wards,
and having all its many windows and doors set wide, the inside of it
was as plainly visible as the out.

"Rum lot," assented another voice with the same ring of wholesome
self-complacency in it. "I arst one of the Sickees, as seems a decent
chap for a nigger and knows a little decent lingo, wot the spotted pig
was at with his everlastin' _shabbashes_, an' 'e says it's to put
courage to the Johnnies up top. Not that I don't say I shouldn't
cotton myself much to them ladders, that's more like caterpillars than
a decent pair o' 'ouse-steps. A poor lot--that's wot they are, as
doesn't know the differ in holt between a nail and a bit o' twine."

"Well, mates," said a third voice, "all I can say is that if they
ain't got no more courage than _shahbash_ can put to them, it's no
wonder we licks the blooming lot of them--as we does constant."

There was a faint laugh first, and then the group sucked at their
pipes decisively as they watched the doings in the _post-mortem_.
Though they would have scouted the suggestion, the _shahbash wallah_
had justified his calling; for patriotism brings courage with it.

He did not trouble his head about justification, however. Some one, in
his experience, always did the shouting, and it suited him better than
more active occupation, for he was lame; stiff, too, in his back.
Surgeon-Major Pringle, coming in later to find the _post-mortem_ very
much as it had been hours before, looked at him distastefully, and
began a remark about what two English workmen could have done, which
Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien interrupted with his charming smile:
"Sure, sir, the sun rises a considerable trifle airlier East than
West, an' that's enough energy for wan hemisphere. Besides, ye can't
get on in India without a _shahbash wallah_. Or elsewhere, for that
matter. Ye always require 'the something not ourselves which makes for
righteousness'--"

"Makes for fiddlesticks!" muttered the senior under his breath, adding
aloud, "Who the dickens is the _shahbash wallah_ when he is at home,
and what's his work?" He asked the question almost reluctantly, for
his junior's extremely varied information had, since the morning,
imparted a vague uncertainty to a round world which had hitherto, in
Dr. Pringle's estimation of it, been absolutely sure--cocksure!

"What is he? Oh! he's a variety of names. He's objective reality,
moral sanction, antecedent experience, unconditioned good. Ye can take
yer choice of the lot, sir; and if ye can't win the thrick with
metaphysics--I can't, and that's the thruth--play thrumps.
Sentiment!--sympathy! Ye can't go wrong there. Ye can't leave them out
of life's equation, East or West. Just some one--a fool, maybe--to say
ye're a fine fellow, an' no misthake, at the very moment whin ye know
ye're not. Biogenesis, sir, is the Law of Life. As Schopenhauer says,
the secret that two is wan, is the--"

His senior gave an exasperated sigh, and preferred changing the
subject. So at the appointed time, no sooner, no later, the last
patter of pink tears fell from the brushes upon the floor of the
_post-mortem_ and upon the still figure, which might have been a
corpse save for its drowsy applause--"Bravo, boys, bravo!" Then the
caterpillar ladders, with the decorators and the pots of colour-wash
and the brushes still attached to them, crawled away, and the
_shahbash wallah_ followed in their wake, his skin bearing mute
evidence to the amount of work he had provoked.

His turban and waistcloth testified to it for days--in lessening
variety of tint as the layers of pink, green, blue, and yellow
splashes wore off--for at least a fortnight, during which time
Surgeon-Major Pringle, busy in making all things conform to his ideal,
constantly came across the _shahbash wallah_ bestowing praise where,
in the doctor's opinion, none was deserved. What right, for instance,
had the water-carriers filling their pots, the sweepers removing the
refuse, to senseless commendation for the performance of their daily
round, their common task?

Especially when it was so ill performed; even in the matter of
punkah-pulling, a subject on which the native might be credited with
some knowledge. Surgeon-Major Pringle seethed with repressed
resentment for days over the intermittent pulse of the office punkah,
and finally, in a white heat of discomfort and indignation, burst out
into the verandah, harangued the coolie at length, and in the fulness
of Western energy went so far as to show him how to keep up a regular,
even swing. His masterly grasp of a till then untouched occupation not
only satisfied himself but also the _shahbash wallah_, who, as usual,
was lounging about in the verandah doing nothing. So, of course, his
"_Shahbash, jee, shahbash_," preceded Surgeon-Major Pringle's hasty
return to the office and prepared Terence O'Brien for the dictum that
the offender must be sent about his business; for _if_ he was a
camp-follower he _must_ have some business, some regular work.

"Worrk, is it?" echoed Terence with his charming smile of pure
sympathy. "Be jabers! yes. Worrk--plenty, but not regular, as a rule.
The man's a torch-bearer. If it happens to be a dark night, and
annybody wants a _dhooli_, he carries the torch for it."

Dr. Pringle's resentful surprise made him stutter: "Do you mean to say
that--that--that--that--the public money--the ratepayers' money--is
wasted in entertaining a whole man for so trivial a task?"

"Trivial, is it? When he's a pillar of fire by night an' a cloud of
witnesses by day? And then he isn't a whole man, sir, at all at all.
Wan of his legs is shorter than the other. I had to break it twice,
sir, to get it as straight as it is. Thin, I've grave doubts about his
spinal column; and as I trepanned him myself, I know his head isn't
sound. It was two ton of earth fell on him, sir, last rains, when he
was givin' a drink to wan of the Sikhs that got hurt blasting. It's
nasty, shifty stuff, sir, is the mud in these low hills--nasty silted
alluvial stuff, with a bias in it. So, poor divvle! seeing he wasn't
fit for much but the hospital, I put him to the staff of it. And he
kapes things going. Indeed, I wouldn't take it upon myself to say that
he doesn't do the native patients as much good as half the drugs I
exhibit to the unfortunate craythurs, since for sheer mystherious
dispensations of Providence commend me to the British pharmacop[oe]ia."

Once again Surgeon-Major Pringle felt that professional dignity could
best be served by silent contempt, and orders that the offender was,
at least, not to loaf about the verandahs.

But the fates were against the fiat. In the moonless half of May,
driest of all months, a Hindu returning from Hurdwar fell sick, and
half-an-hour after the report, Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien, going
out of the ward with his senior, paused in his cheerful whistling of
"Belave me, if all those endearing young charms," to say under his
breath, "Cholera, mild type." Now cholera, no matter of what type, has
an ugly face when seen for the first time, especially when the face
which looks into it, wondering if it means life or death, has youth in
its eyes. So in the dark nights the _dhooli_ came into requisition,
and with it the torch-bearer, until the green and the blue and yellow
wards overflowed into the verandahs, and even the pink _post-mortem_
claimed its final share of boys. Not a large one, however, since, as
Terence O'Brien said, "It was wan of those epidemics when ye couldn't
rightly say a man had cholera till he died of it."

It was bad enough, however, to make the Surgeon-Major, who had never
seen one before, set to work when it passed, suddenly as it had come,
to cipher out averages, and tabulate treatments, with a view to what
is called future guidance. And so, as he confided to his assistant
with great complacency, it became clear as daylight that the largest
percentage of recoveries, their rapidity, and as a natural corollary
the incidence of mildness in the attack itself, seemed in connection
with the position of the cots. Those close to the doors, or actually
on the verandahs, were the most fortunate, and so he was inclined to
believe in the value of currents of fresh air.

"Fresh air, is it?" echoed Terence, with an encouraging smile. "Maybe;
maybe not. God knows, it may be anything in the wide wurrld, since
there's but wan thing you can bet your bottom dollar on in cholera,
sir, and that is that ye can't tell anything about it for certain, and
that your experience of wan epidemic won't be that of the next."

"Neither does your experience, Mr. O'Brien," retorted his senior,
sarcastically, "militate against mine being more fortunate. I mean to
leave no stone unturned to arrive at reliable _data_ on points which
appear to me to have been overlooked. For instance, I shall begin by
asking those cases of recovery if they remember anything which seemed
at the time to bring them relief, to stimulate in them that vitality
which it is so essential to preserve."

In pursuance of which plan he went out then and there to the verandah,
where a dozen or more lank boys were lounging about listlessly, just
beginning to feel that life might soon mean more than a grey duffle
dressing-gown and a long chair.

"No, sir," said the first, firmly. "I disremember anythin' that
done me good. I jest lay with a sickenin' pain in my inside, an' a
don't-care-if-I-do feelin' outside." He paused, and another boy took
up the tale sympathetically.

"So it was. A reg'lar, don't-care except w'en that little 'eathen--'im
that's always saying _shahbash_, sir, come along; an' that seem
to me most times. 'E made me feel a blamed sight--beggin' pardon,
sir--worse. For I kep' thinkin' of where I see 'im first, like a alley
taw in the dead 'ouse; and the dead 'ouse isn't a cheerful sorter
think w'en you ain't sure but wot you're going there. It made me--" he
paused in his turn.

"Made you what?" asked Terence O'Brien, who had followed to listen.

"Give me the 'orrors, sir, till I'd 'ave swopped all I knew to kick
'im quiet; but not bein' able, I jest lay and kep' it for 'im against
I could, till it seemed like as I must; an' so I will."

"In cases of extreme nervous depression, sir," began the junior,
mischievously, "a counter irritant--"

"Pshaw!" interrupted Dr. Pringle, angrily, and walked back with great
dignity to the office.

But the conversation thus started lingered among the grey
dressing-gowns, the result of comparing notes being a general verdict
that "Alley taw" deserved that kicking. He did not actually get it,
however; the boys were too big, and he too small for that. But he sank
into still greater disrepute, becoming, in truth, that most unenviable
of all things not made nor created, but begotten of idle wit--a
garrison butt. Not that he seemed to care much. He grew more furtive
in his lounging, but nothing seemed to disturb the divine calm of his
commendation for the world which he had created for himself with his
"Bravo, boys, bravo!" Behold, all things in it were very good! That,
at least, was Terence O'Brien's fanciful way of looking at the
position. As he went about his work whistling "Belave me, if all those
endearing young charms"--a tune which, he said, cheered the boys--he
would often pause to smile at the _shahbash wallah_. After a time,
however, the smile would change to a quick narrowing of the eyes, as
if something in the bearing of the man was puzzling. Finally, one day,
coming upon the man sidling along a bit of brick wall, which had been
built to strengthen a crack in the mud one overhanging the dry
watercourse, he pulled up, asked a few rapid questions, and then
lifted the man's eyelids and peered into the soft brown eyes, as if he
wanted to see through them to a crack he knew of in the back of the
man's skull.

"And you are sure you see as well as ever?" he asked again.

"Quite as well, _Huzoor_," came the answer, with a faint tremor in it.
"I can see to carry the torch on the darkest of nights if it is
wanted, _Huzoor!_"

"Hm!" said Dr. O'Brien, doubtfully, promising himself to test the
truth of this statement. But the fates again decreed otherwise. The
next day's mail brought orders for him to go and act elsewhere for a
senior on two months' leave.

Dr. Pringle was not sorry. How could you collaborate properly with a
man who calmly admitted that at a pinch he had used a bullet-mould to
extract a tooth?

The monsoon had long since broken in the plains ere the young doctor
returned; but in the arid tract in which Fort Lawrence lay rain came
seldom at any time. And that was a year of abnormal drought. The
fissures in the mud seemed to widen with the heat, and the fringe of
green oleanders which followed every turn of the dry watercourse,
mutely witnessing to unseen moisture below, wilted and drooped. In the
new-built fort itself a crack or two showed in the level platform
jutting out across the low valley on which the building stood, and in
more than one place portions of the low mud-cliffs crumbled and broke
away. The whole earth, indeed, seemed agape with thirst.

But water in plenty came at last. On the very day, in fact, when
Terence O'Brien returned to the fort, which he reached on foot, having
had to leave his _dhooli_ behind, owing to a small slip on the road;
nevertheless, as he crossed over from the mess to his quarters close
to the hospital that evening, he told himself that he had the devil's
own luck to be there at all. For the rain was then hitting the hard
ground with a distinct thud, and spurting up from it in spray, showing
white against the black mirk of the night. And the rush of the stream
filling up the dry bed of the watercourse, and playing marbles with
the boulders, was like a lion's roar.

It did not keep him awake, however, for he was dead tired. So he slept
the sleep of the just. For how long he did not know. It was darker
than ever when he woke suddenly--why he knew not, and with the same
blind instinct was out into the open, quick as he could grope his way.

Not an instant too soon, either. A deafening crash told him that,
though he could not see his own hand. The rain had ceased, but the
rush of the river dulled hearing to all lesser sounds. As he stood
dazed, he staggered, slipped, almost fell. Was that an earthquake, or
was the solid ground parting somewhere close at hand? And if his house
was down, how about the hospital and the sick folk?

He turned at the thought and ran till, in the dark and the silence of
that overwhelming roar, he came full tilt upon some one else running
in the dark also. It was the Surgeon-Major.

"The hospital's down. Have you a light--anything--a match?" panted Dr.
Pringle. "We must have a light to see--"

"_Oh, masal! Oh, masal-jee!_" (Oh, the torch! Oh, the torch-bearer!)
shouted Terence at the top of his voice as he ran on till stopped by
something blocking the way. Ruins! And that was the sound of voices.

"What's up?" he cried.

"Don' know, sir," came from unseen hearers. "Part o' the 'orspital's
down, but we can't see. It's a slide o' some sort, for there's a crack
right across nigh under our feet. If we could get a light!"

"_Oh, masal! Oh, masal-jee!_" The doctor's voice rang out again
towards the camp-followers' lines, but the roar was deafening. And in
the night, when all men are asleep, the news of disaster travels
slowly. Yet without a light it was impossible even to realise what had
happened, still less to help the sick who might lie crushed.

"_Oh, masal! Oh, masal-jee!_--thank God! there's a light at last."

There was, in the far distance across the quadrangle. But it was not a
torch; it was only an officer in a gorgeous sleeping-suit running with
a bedroom candle. Still it was a light!

"Come on, man!" shouted Terence O'Brien, as it slackened speed,
paused, stopped dead. His was the only voice that seemed to carry
through the roar.

But the gay sleeping-suit stood still, waving its candle.

"It's the crack, sir," called some one in Terence O'Brien's ear. "It
goes right across, I expect--we'd best find out first."

It did. A yawning fissure, twenty feet wide, had cut the hospital
compound in two, and isolated one angle of the fort--that nearest the
river--from the rest. Twenty feet wide, at least, judged by the
glimmer of light! And how deep? Had the river cut it? Was it only a
matter of time when the mud island on which they stood should be swept
away? And what were the means of escape? There was more light now;
more bedroom candles and sleeping-suits; a lamp or two, and others
behind, as the boys--last to wake--came running, to pause like the
first-comers, at the unpassable gulf; for the more it could be seen,
the more difficult seemed the task of crossing it at once. By-and-by,
perhaps, with ladders and ropes it would be possible--but now? Terence
O'Brien, feeling the "now" imperative, skirted the crumbling edge
almost too near for safety in his eagerness to find some foothold for
a daring man; but there was none. True, the brick wall, built to
strengthen the cracked mud one, still bridged the extreme end of the
fissure, looking as if the mud had deliberately shrunk from its
intrusion. It hung there half seen, on God knows what slender
foundation--perhaps on none. But it could give no help. To trust it
would be madness; a touch might send it down into the river below. No!
Since none could cross the gap there must be more light on the farther
side; torches, a bonfire, anything to pierce the dark and let men see
how to help themselves and other men!

"_Oh, masal! Oh, masal-jee-an!_" The cry went out with all the force
of his lungs. Surely the camp-followers must be awake by now.

One was, at any rate; for, surrounded by a halo from the faggot of
blazing pitch-pine it carried, a figure showed upon the path worn,
close to the mud walls of the native quarters, by the foot-tracks of
those whose duty took them to the hospital. It was the _shahbash
wallah_, coming slowly, almost indifferently, in answer to the call;
coming as if to his ordinary duty towards the growing fringe of
ineffectual candles and eager men bordering the impossible. That was
better! Given half-a-dozen more such haloes--and there were plenty if
they would only come--and eager men on the other side would see how to
help themselves and their comrades!

But no other halo appeared behind the one which followed the
foot-track of others so closely; and so once again the call was
given--

"_Oh, masal! Oh, masal-jee-an! Oh, masal! Oh, masal-jee!_"

"_Hazr, Huzoor!_" (Present, sir).

The nearness of the voice made Terence O'Brien look up, for it was
the first voice he had heard clearly from the other side against that
roar of the river. But as he looked another voice beside him said
hurriedly--

"My God! he's coming across!"

He was. Surrounded by the halo of his own light, and keeping
religiously to the beaten path, the _shahbash wallah_, leaving the mud
wall of the quarters, had struck the outer brick one as it stood,
supported for a few yards by a spit of earth upon which the foot-track
showed as the light passed. A spit narrowing to nothing--no! not to
nothing, but to a mere ledge of earth and mortar clinging like a
swallow's nest to the brick--wider here, narrower there, yet still
able to give faint foothold upon the traces of those feet which had
passed and repassed so often to their trivial round, their common
task. Foothold! Ay! But what of the brain guiding the feet? What of
the courage guiding the brain?

And even then, what of the foundation?

A sort of murmur rose above the roar. "He can't do
it--impossible--tell him. Call to him, O'Brien. Tell him not to try."

The doctor stood for one second watching the figure centring its
circle of light against the background of wall; then, even though
there was no need for it, his voice fell to a whisper. "Hush!" he
said. "Don't hustle him. By the Lord who made me, he doesn't know;
he's feeling his way every inch by the wall! He's blind, and by God!
if anybody can do it, he will."

He did. Step by step, slowly, confidently, in the footsteps of others.

And the great cry of "Bravo, brother, bravo!" which went up from both
sides of the gap as he and his torch stepped on to firm ground,
brought him as much surprise as a voice from heaven might have done.


                          *   *   *   *   *


"Pressure on the brain!" said Surgeon-Captain Terence O'Brien, about
three weeks after this, when he and Dr. Pringle had had a consultation
over the _shahbash wallah_. He was not only blind now, but there was a
drag in the good leg as he limped about, over which both doctors shook
their heads. "And there's nothing to be done that I can see. The bhoys
will miss him!"

That was true. Alley Taw had come into favour since the night when, as
Terence phrased it, "he had done a brave deed without doing it," and
by failing to see the evil, had enabled other men to do good. For the
torch had not disclosed irretrievable disaster, and by timely rescue
not a life had been lost.

Surgeon-Major Pringle frowned. He was beginning to understand his
India a little, but the idea of the _shahbash wallah_ being a useful
member of society was still as a red rag to a bull. And so, out of
sheer contrariety, he began to talk doctor's talk as to the
possibility of this or that.

"It's life or death, annyhow," said the junior, shaking his head, "but
I don't see it. I wouldn't thry it myself--not now at any rate."

Perhaps not then. But after a month or two more he said, "It's your
suggestion; I don't belave it can be done; but you may as well thry."

For the _shahbash wallah_, half paralysed, had even given up his cry.
So, part of the hospital being still under repair, they took him to
the pink _post-mortem_ house and set all the doors and windows wide
for more light. He was quite unconscious by that time, so Terence
O'Brien only had the chloroform handy, and kept his finger on the
pulse. Half-a-dozen or more of the boys were on the mud steps over
against the hospital compound waiting to hear the _shahbash wallah's_
fate. But you might have heard a pin drop in the _post-mortem_,
save for the occasional quick request for this or that as the
Surgeon-Major, with the Surgeon-Captain's eyes watching him, set his
whole soul and heart and brain on doing something that had never been
done before.

So the minutes passed. Was it to be failure or success? The
Surgeon-Major's fingers were deft--none defter.

The minutes passed to hours. That which had to be done had to be done
with one touch light as a feather, steady as a rock, perfect in its
performance, or not at all.

And still the minutes passed. Terence O'Brien's face was losing some
of its eagerness in sympathy, Dr. Pringle's gaining it in anxiety; for
clear, insistent, not-to-be-silenced doubt was making itself heard.
Only the _shahbash wallah_ cared not at all as he lay like a corpse.

It had come to the last chance. The last; and Dr. Pringle, with a
pulse of wild resentment at his own weakness, realised that his nerve
was going, his hand shaking. Still, it had to be done. The splinter of
bone raised--the whole process he had thought out as the last chance
gone through. He steadied himself and began. Failure or success?
Failure--failure--failure! The word beat in on his heart and brain,
bringing unsteadiness to both.

"Dresser, the chloroform," said Terence O'Brien, sharply; for there
was a quiver in the man's eyelids.

But ere the deadening drug did its work, the _shahbash wallah's_
brain, set free to work along familiar lines by the raising of that
splintered bone, had sent its old message to his lips--

"_Shahbash, bhaiyan, shahbash!_"

In telling the story Dr. Pringle says no more; generally because he
cannot.

But after a time, if you are a brother craftsman, he will give you all
details of the biggest and most successful operation he ever did.

And though he is slow to allow the corollary, he never denies that the
_shahbash wallah's_ verdict put courage into him.




                     THE MOST NAILING BAD SHOT IN
                               CREATION


This again is one of poor Craddock's stories which he told me
when we were stretching a steel-edged ribbon of rail across shifting
sandhills; that ribbon uniting West to East on which, a few years
later, he met his death in trying to rid the permanent-way of
something which Fate had decreed should be permanently in the way.

It happened in mutiny time; shortly after his appearance down the
King's Well, which is told elsewhere. He was serving as a volunteer in
one of the breastworks which, as the long hot-weather months dragged
by, began to seam and sear the face of the red rocks on the Ridge at
Delhi; creeping nearer and nearer to the red face of the city wall.

And with him, as the catch phrase runs, "lay" Joe Banks, the
Yorkshireman; tall, stolid, silent. Good-looking also, with a thick
close crop of curly brown hair and hard, honest blue eyes. He was not
stupid by any means; only phenomenally silent, except when the talk
turned on women, and then, as Craddock put it tersely, he "damned
free"; perhaps because, as the latter worthy used to add with a
suspicion of sympathy in his drink-blurred face, he had "cared a sight
deal too much for one woman to 'ave much likin' left for the lot."

To one side of the breastwork lay a dry ravine where every day the
vipers used to sun themselves on the hot red rocks. Just across it,
within range, rose a small Mahomedan shrine amid sparse brushwood,
which thickened a bit till it was barred by the ruined wall of a
garden where the slow oxen circled round the well, sending runnels of
slippery-looking water to the scented shade of citrons, roses, and
mangoes, heedless of the great cannon-balls which sometimes came
trundling, like playthings, down the wide walks. Not often, though,
for the stress of strife lay at the other angle of the breastwork
which faced the city wall.

Still, those who came to smoke a hard-earned pipe in what was the
safest spot in the outpost, soon found that the pious-looking shrine,
the peaceful garden, were not always so innocent as they looked. In
the dusk of dark or dawn they were tenanted by what, after a time, the
men agreed to call the "most nailin' bad shot in creation." "The
direction wasn't, so to speak, so bad, sir," Craddock used to explain
to me. "'E'd about 'ave 'it the sea-serpent for length; it was the
elevation which, as Bull's-eyes said, savin' your presence, sir, was
d----ficient. The top o' the Monument was about in it, sir, an' that
was why the only feller as really use langwidge was Joe Banks; for 'e
was a 'ead and shoulders higher than the lot o' us." So when, in the
dark, a flash used to glimmer for a second among the brushwood like a
firefly, the men learnt to sing out, "That's for you, Joey," "Duck, my
darlin', duck," and other witticisms of that kind, until the big
Yorkshireman's face darkened beyond jesting-point: for he had the
devil's own temper when roused. It was this, joined to his extreme
good looks and a somewhat hazy recollection of the Bible and the
classics among the volunteers, which earned him the nickname of
Apollyon. So to soothe him, some of the wilder spirits would organise
a charge over the ravine, scattering, perhaps, a few drowsy adders
which had forgotten to go to bed; but nothing else. The blind old
fakeer in the shrine was always fast asleep, the bullocks in the
garden circling slowly, driven by a drowsy lad curled up behind them.

So the days passed; and, despite practice, the Most Nailin' Bad Shot
shot badly as ever. The odds, however, as the men pointed out gravely
to Apollyon, kept on improving; so that sooner or later there must be
a "casualty" in the garrison of Number One outpost. Joey, too, would
get careless; he wouldn't smart enough, etc., etc. And, sure enough,
one evening just as the moonlight was mixing with the daylight, and
Joey Banks had risen to his full height in a huff because Craddock for
once had sided against him in the perennial argument as to whether it
was worth while fighting for women who didn't know what they would be
at, and hadn't the pluck of a mouse, one of these firefly flashes was
followed by a sudden clapping of the giant's hands to the very crown
of his head.

"We looked, sir," Craddock used to say gravely, with that reminiscent
biblical knowledge of his which had doubtless supplied Apollyon, "for
'im to fall dead; as 'e deserve rich; for 'e'd been damnin' uncommon
free, sir. But 'e only use it worse. And then, savin' your presence,
sir, we see that 'e'd 'ad, so ter speak, a narrer-gauge line laid down
thro' 'is jungle--right through 'is curls, sir. Lordy! 'ow we laughed.
It was a lady, we told 'im, as wanted some locks an' no mistake. It
sorter made 'im mad, for 'e just stooped and gathered the lot--bein'
fair, you could see it shinin' in the dust--together.

"'She shall 'ave 'em, never fear,' 'e says, quiet like. 'Yes! the
person who fired that shot shall 'ave more o' my 'air than he reckons
for.'"

Just at that moment, however, one of those sudden alarms which for
three months kept the men and officers before Delhi on the alert by
day and night broke up the company, and so Joe Banks' loss passed out
of most minds. Except his own, of course. It lingered there, aided by
that narrow gauge over his brain on which the cool night wind blew
pleasantly.

So when the alarm passed, instead of coming back to rest, he crept out
surreptitiously by the back of the breastwork, for such sorties were
strictly out of order, and so by a slant downwards across the ravine.
It was a brilliant moonlight night, and he caught the sparkle of many
a deadly pair of eyes among the rocks. But he was in no mood to step
aside from any danger, and once beyond fear of recall he strode along
straight as if the whole place belonged to him; it might have, for all
the opposition he met. The fakeer was asleep as usual, the oxen
circling round the well, and in the scented shade of the roses and
citrons he could find nothing save some drowsy birds who fluttered and
twittered helplessly as his tall head forced a way through the
thickets.

Feeling ill-used, he set his face back towards the breastwork, until
the extraordinary peace of the moonlit scene, which, as Craddock
asserted, used in the interval of onslaught to make the beleaguered
city look like the New Jerusalem, brought him to a standstill; first
to look, then to take out his pipe; finally to sit on a rock and think
vaguely of the Yorkshire wolds and of some one, no doubt, who had not
had the courage of her convictions, for after a bit he murmured, "She
were a raight down coward, that's where it is, aw'm thinkin'."

He had not much time for reflection, however, for at that moment there
was a flash, a crack, and something whizzed past his left ear. The
Most Nailin' Bad Shot was better at close quarters. His blood was up
in a second, and without pausing to pick up his musket, which he had
laid aside, he was off to the spot whence the flash had come. And
there! _whoop forward! gone away!_ was his quarry for sure, running
like a hare for some hiding-place, no doubt, among the rocks. It might
have been reached, for romance tells of many secret passages between
palaces inside the city and gardens without, but for a true lover's
knot of viper which refused to budge from the path; which made the
flying figure give a screech, and the flying feet, in their effort to
overleap it, miss footing and fall.

The next instant Joe Banks was on it as it lay, and conscious even in
his hurry that what he gripped was something young and soft--a boy, no
doubt--devil's spawn.

"Aw'm go[=a]n ter choak ye on t' hair," he said grimly. "Open yer
domed mouth, d'ye hear?"

It was almost as if the prostrate figure understood; but the next
instant a set of gleaming white teeth had closed like a squirrel's
round Joe Banks' first finger. He let off an echoing yell to the
previous screech, and an oddly satisfied smile came to the fierce
little face he could scarcely see for his big hand. It was an oval
face, smooth as a girl's.

"That's nowt to Joey Banks, lad, he can kill anoother waay," he
growled savagely, as he shifted a knee to press his prisoner down,
loosened his left hand, his right being detained, and deliberately
drew out one of the many knives stuck in his enemy's waistband. "Aw'll
lay t' hair abun tha' heaart, tha' wrigglin' worm, and driv it
ho[=a]m--that aw wull."

In pursuance of which plan, he undid an embroidered satin waistcoat,
and began to push aside an inner muslin vest. A whiff of musk and
roses mingled with the moonlight.

"Stinks and bites like a foumart," he muttered. "Soa lie thee still,
will tha? an' tak' that to thissen ma--gor amoighty!"

Joe Banks was on his feet; so was his enemy. Both dazed, uncertain.
Flight seemed to come uppermost to the latter's thought, when the big
man suddenly laughed a low chuckle of sheer amusement.

"An' t' coom like a wild cat at Joey Banks--that caps owt!"

The next instant he was grappling with a whirlwind of knives and
nails, anything.

"Woa! woa! ma lass! Hands off, tha little vixen, till a' git a look at
tha!" he said soothingly, as he prisoned two small hands in one huge
fist, and with the other held his adversary almost tenderly at arm's
length. What he saw, as he afterwards described it to Craddock, was
just a "moit o' pistols an' pouches."

"Well! well! _Aw'm,--aw'm_ jiggered!" he exclaimed at last; adding
argumentatively, "Whatten iver mad tha' go fur t' do it, tha foolish
lass?"

Something in his broad, not unkindly rebuke seemed to take the starch
out of the Most Nailin' Bad Shot. It seemed to cower in on itself and
become smaller; though, as Joe Banks told himself perplexedly, it had
been small enough to begin with.

"Well, aw _am_ jiggered," he repeated more softly. "Whatten iver mad
tha' do it, ma lass?"

The answer was feminine and disconcerting; a sudden storm of tears. So
they stood, the quaintest couple in the world. She bristling with cold
steel of sorts; he bareheaded in the moonlight, with nothing but his
hands for weapons.

"Dunnot," he said soothingly, not without a certain trepidation. "Aw'm
no[=a]n go[=a]n t' hurt thee, ma gell. We'm not thaat soort t'
womenkind; an' tha's a main pratty gell." Here he laughed softly; a
laugh that was lost in a third--

"Wall, aw'm _jiggered_."

He appeared to be so, for he ceased thrusting her from him--she being,
indeed, too much engaged with tears to make it dangerous--and passed
his hand over his forehead as if to clear his brain.

"Aw'm no[=a]n go[=a]n t' hurt tha, ma lass," he repeated suddenly, as
if for his own information. "Aw'm nobbut go[=a]n t' shame tha' fur
tha' badness."

And with that he lifted her right up like a baby, sate down on a
neighbouring rock, and set her on his knee.

"Thou'rt as light as a feather," he said almost admiringly. "An' t'
coom at Jooey Banks like a wild cat; for sure it caps owt; but thou'rt
a bad gell, an' mun be shamed. So set tha still an' be doon wi' it."

Once more he might have claimed comprehension, for the Most Nailin'
Bad Shot sate still; with the half-wicked, half-frightened look of a
curious squirrel, as one by one he transferred knives and pistols to
his own person. It was rather a lengthy business by reason of his
right hand--the one that had been bitten--being still occupied in
prisoning hers. Not that she struggled; on the contrary, she sate
curiously still, checking even her sobs.

"Now for t' hair," he went on methodically, pulling off the large
green turban wound around the small head. He sate half perturbed and
breathless after this was done, and the half-wicked, half-frightened
dark eyes watching him, seemed to admit a faint smile.

"Whew-w-w," he said under his breath, "it's long, for sartin sure." It
was, and a faint scent of orange-blossom assailed him as he loosed the
plaits. His hand trembled among them a little, and lingered.

"Aw mun be as good's ma word," he muttered, "as Joey Banks' word. See
tha here--sit tha still, there's a good lass, an' let me hurry up;
wilt thee?" There was almost an appeal in his voice, and both hands
shook a little as the long black tresses twined themselves about the
big fingers like snakes.

"Aw'm no[=a]n go[=a]n t' hurt," he reiterated blandly; when, perhaps
fortunately, the whole bewildering face before him relapsed into a
mischievous smile, and one small finger pointed derisively to the
crown of his head. He flushed up scarlet.

"Thee'm nobbut a wicked, bad gell," he said fiercely, "an' Joey
Banks'll shame tha--a bold hussy." So he set her on her feet, and
attacked her last bit of masculinity. This was a long, green waistband
wound about her middle, and which had carried a score or so of
pistols, yataghans, and Heaven knows what murderous weapons. Of this
portion of the toilette Craddock said it was hard to get Joey Banks to
speak at all, and when he did, his voice dropped to a whisper, and he
looked positively scared. She was so main slender, he said, that he
thought he would never have done unwinding, though after a bit she
helped cheerfully by twiddling like a teetotum. At last, however, she
stood there, slim, girlish, her long hair shimmering, her dark eyes
shining, half with tears, half with smiles.

"'An' then, Joey?' I arst 'im, sir, when 'e sate mumchance," Craddock
interpolated.

"Aw out wi' 'Fower angels rouand ma bed,' man, an' a' up wi' her in ma
arms, an' a' kissed her fair an' oft, man, fair an' oft, just t' shame
her, an' a' runned awaay. That's what a' did--aw runned awaay."

Half-way across the ravine, however, he paused to pick up his musket
and look back. The Most Nailin' Bad Shot in creation was standing
where he had left her, her face hidden in her hands. For an instant
something tore at his heart, bidding him go back; then he set his
teeth with an oath, and ran on. Five minutes afterwards he had slipped
into a favourite cranny of rock beside Craddock and was puffing away
at his pipe as if nothing had happened, absolutely silent, till,
according to the latter's report, he "give a silly sort of laugh," and
in the moonlight his eyes could be seen shining like stars as he
turned and said softly--

"Well, lad--a' ha' dune it this toime."

"Done what, Apollyon?" asked Craddock.

"A' dunnot roightly kna', but a' ha' dune it, for sartin sure,"
replied Joe Banks, succinctly; and then he told the story.

"One of them _gazes_[1] as they call 'em," interrupted Craddock, when
the big man told of his discovery in a sort of hushed voice. "They
makes 'em male an' female--the latter most wicious. Bad lots out o'
the bazaar, needin' a passport to the skies--or the devil."


---------------------

[Footnote 1: _Ghazie_--religious fanatic.]

---------------------


Joey Banks' big fist came down like a sledgehammer on Craddock's knee.

"Hush, mon!" he said peremptorily. "She woan't none that sort. When a'
kissed her--" he stopped short, and blushed furiously.

"Apollyon!" remarked Craddock, after a pause, with great severity. "It
ain't wholesome to keep sech things comfortable in yer own buzzum.
It's better to 'ave up an' done with it an' begin agin. When you kiss
her--w'ot then?"

But Joe Banks' shining eyes were looking out into the soft darkness,
soft and dark for all their shininess. "A' meant to 'a' keppen
coont--but a' didn't somehow." His voice was quite dreamy, and
Craddock rose in wrath.

"It's my belief, same as I was in the catechising, Joey Banks,
that you bin an' fallen in love with a female _gaze_; but mark my
word--there ain't no gratitoode to speak of in _gazes_, and she'll
nick you yet, sure as my name's Nathaniel James. She'll nick you yet,
I du assure you."

But Craddock was wrong. Whatever else she did, the Most Nailin' Bad
Shot shot no more. Not that it mattered much to Joey Banks whether she
did or not, since but a few days after there was a "casoolty" in
Number One outpost, Volunteer Joseph Banks, sometime canal overseer,
was reported missing after a sortie; but as he had been last seen
mortally wounded close to the city wall, his comrades mourned Apollyon
from the first as dead. So as Craddock said feelingly, "there weren't
even a lock o' 'is 'air for 'is old mother, an' she was a widder."

Not that there was much time for mourning in the outpost, since the
long months of the siege were drawing to a close. Then came the final
assault, the ten days of struggle within the city, until even the
Palace was ours, and the army which had taken it prepared to move on
elsewhere. It was the evening before the start, and Craddock, who, as
a volunteer, had more liberty to go and come as he chose, went down to
the now deserted outpost to smoke a last pipe, and think over the past
with the pleasing melancholy which goes so admirably with tobacco.

"Poor Joey Banks!" he thought, as memory came round to that episode,
"'im an' 'is female _gaze_. I shan't never forget 'em."

I will tell the rest in Craddock's own words; they suit it.

"I look up, sir, an' you might 'ave knock me over with a ninepin, for
there was Joey, lookin' as spry as spry. 'Joey,' says I, takin' it as
one does, sir, for all them sayin's of ninepins and feathers and such
like, quite calm, 'so you're not dead?'

"'Na! lad,' he says back, as calm like. 'Aw'm go[=a]n t' be married,
an' a've coom t' get t' best man.'

"It took me all of a 'eap, sir, sorter Malachi an' the minor prophets,
sir, as things does sometimes. 'Joey, my boy,' I says, 'you ain't
never goin' to marry a female _gaze?_' says I.

"But 'e was, sir. Ter cut a long story short, she'd found 'im an'
nursed him. An' we all knows wot that means, white or black, sir. 'E'd
a 'eap to tell--though Lord knows where 'e got it, for 'e didn't know
no 'Industani to speak of, sir--about 'ow she lived in quite a fine
'ouse an' 'ow her father an' brothers 'ad bin killed, so as she kinder
'adn't no choice but _gazing_. But I wasn't to be took with chaff, so
I says to 'im quite solemn like, 'Afore I'm best man, I've got to
know, Joey--is she square?' 'E just looked at me, sir, as if I were
slush.

"'She'd gotten ma hair in t' buzzum,' he said, an' said no moor.

"So I gave my word to be best man, sir, an' 'e sighed like as a weight
was took off him. 'Then coom awa' wi' me t' passon,' says 'e, 'fur I'm
go[=a]n t' be marrid afoor aw goes with t' army to-morer.'

"'Then you've 'ad the banns cried,' says I, for my father bein'
bell-ringer same as give me my name in 'oly baptism, sir, I was up to
them dodges. 'E give me a real Apollyon frown, sir.

"'Na, lad; aw've no[=a]n had nought cried, but aw'm go[=a]n t' wed her
fair afoor a' fight, so save t' breath an' coom t' passon.'

"Well, sir, parson wasn't a bad chap, as I knowed, 'aving seen 'im
doing dooty stiddily like the rest o' us, but 'e'd got 'is black coat
on agin, an' 'e were by nature, the canonised red bricky sort; so 'e
wouldn't none o' it, though I stood solemn for Joe like as if I bin
godfather, tellin' 'im 'ow Joe would 'ave bin a deader but for 'er,
an' 'ow she was willin' to become a Christian in 'oly baptism wen she
'ad a chanst, an' 'ow Joe wouldn't never 'ave bin in a 'urry without
bridesmaids but for bein' that eager to fight 'is country's foes
agin--for of course, sir, 'e 'adn't 'ad a look in at anythin' but
beef-tea an' barley water till we took the city.

"'Why doesn't he wait decently till he comes back?' says parson. 'The
sacrament of marriage is not a responsibility to be entered into
unawares, my good--'

"Joe rose up--Lord bless you!--two 'eads taller nor parson. 'Coom
awa'! best man,' 'e says. 'It's waaste toime heere, an' aw'll need tha
at t' mosque; passon theer ar'n't so scrumfumptious, an' she towt ma
t' Kulma this marnin' foor fear'--that's their creed, sir, same as the
_Gazes_, male an' female, yell when they're a stickin' of you.

"Well parson 'e brought up sharp at this an' said, 'Stay a bit.' Then
'e look at Joe, an' Joe look at 'im.

"'Tha see she's gotten t' be ma wife, man,' said Joe apologetic like,
an' parson 'e push 'is red bricky prayer-book away fretful.

"'But I don't know anything,' he said. 'I don't even know if she is a
spinster or a widow. Will you swear she hasn't a husband living?'

"Well, sir, Joe looked at parson, and then 'e looked at me, an' then
'e scratch 'is 'ead--the curls 'ad grown tight as ever, sir--an' then
sudden 'e smile--one o' them smiles like the sun on a daisy, sir.

"' Aw dunnot rightly knaw,' says 'e, 'aw nivver arst her,' an' parson
'e look at me an' at 'im and at the solemnisation o' 'oly matrimony as
'f 'e didn't know which was which.

"Well, the end o' it was that the three o' us went down to one o' them
light an' shady open-air houses with a tree growin' out o' a wall, and
a lot o' pigeons. Parson 'e stood in one o' the arches raise up a step
or two, an' they stood in the space below, right in the sun, an' I
stood 'twixt an' between, for you see, sir, I was clerk as well as
best man.

"'Will you take this woman to be thy wedded wife?' arst parson.

"'Such is my desire,' says I, in order; but Joe Banks wouldn't none o'
that.

"'Fur better fur worse,' 'e says, 'fur richer fur poorer, domed if a'
doan't.'

"So 'e was wedded to the Most Nailin' Bad Shot in creation."

"And was she pretty?" I asked of Craddock.

He shook his head. "I niver set eyes on her, sir, though I was best
man. She was wrap up in a white veil, an' 'e kep' her so--said she
liked it--they does, sir, when they've got a good 'usband."

"So they lived happy ever after?"

"Not for long, sir--" here Craddock slipped his hands into his pockets
as the first step towards slouching off. "That sort o' thing don't
somehow last long, sir," here his eyes caught the gold of the setting
sun, as they had a trick of doing when they grew soft. "Seems to
me--savin' your presence, sir--as if there was too much o' the Noo
Jerewsalem about that sort o' thing fur this world; that's 'ow it is.
She died, sir, a few years after, when 'e was back in the Canals, in a
God-forsaken spot, where there wasn't no one to--to be best man like.
An' so they found 'im lying beside 'er with a bullet in 'is brain. So
I was a minor prophet after all, an' Joey Banks got nicked at last by
the Most Nailin' Bad Shot in creation."




                         THE REFORMER'S WIFE

                          A SKETCH FROM LIFE


He was a dreamer of dreams, with the look in his large dark eyes,
which Botticelli put into the eyes of his Moses; that Moses in doublet
and hose, whose figure, isolated from its surroundings, reminds one
irresistibly of Christopher Columbus, or Vasco da Gama--of those, in
fact, who dream of a Promised Land.

And this man dreamt as wild a dream as any. He hoped, before he died,
to change the social customs of India.

He used to sit in my drawing-room, talking to me by the hour of the
Prophet and his blessed Fatma--for he was a Mahomedan--and bewailing
the sad degeneracy of these present days, when caste had crept into
and defiled the Faith. I shall never forget the face of martyred
enthusiasm with which he received my first invitation to dinner. He
accepted it, as he would have accepted the stake, with fervour, and
indeed to his ignorance the ordeal was supreme. However, he appeared
punctual to the moment on the appointed day, and greatly relieved my
mind by partaking twice of plum-pudding, which he declared to be a
surpassingly cool and most digestible form of nourishment, calculated
to soothe both body and mind. Though this is hardly the character
usually assigned to it, I did not contradict him, for not even his
eager self-sacrifice had sufficed for the soup, the fish, or the
joint, and he might otherwise have left the table in a starving
condition. As it was, he firmly set aside my invitation to drink water
after the meal was over, with the modest remark that he had not eaten
enough to warrant the indulgence.

The event caused quite a stir in that far-away little town, set out
among the ruins of a great city, on the high bank of one of the Punjab
rivers; for the scene of this sketch lay out of the beaten track,
beyond the reach of _babus_ and barristers, patent-leather shoes and
progress. Beyond the pale of civilisation altogether, among a quaint
little colony of fighting Pathans who still pointed with pride to an
old gate or two which had withstood siege after siege, in those old
fighting days when the river had flowed beneath the walls of the city.
Since then the water had ebbed seven miles to the south-east, taking
with it the prestige of the stronghold, which only remained a
picturesque survival; a cluster of four-storeyed purple-brick houses
surrounded by an intermittent purple-brick wall, bastioned and
loop-holed. A formidable defence, while it lasted. But it had a trick
of dissolving meekly into a sort of mud hedge, in order to gain the
next stately fragment, or maybe to effect an alliance with one of the
frowning gateways which had defied assault. This condition of things
was a source of sincere delight to my Reformer Futteh Deen (Victory of
Faith) who revelled in similes. It was typical of the irrational,
illogical position of the inhabitants in regard to a thousand
religious and social questions, and just as one brave man could break
through these sham fortifications, so one resolute example would
suffice to capture the citadel of prejudice, and plant the banner of
abstract Truth on its topmost pinnacle.

For he dreamt excellently well, and as he sate declaiming his Persian
and Arabic periods in the drawing-room with his eyes half shut, like
one in presence of some dazzling light, I used to feel as if something
might indeed be done to make the Mill of God grind a little faster.

In the matter of dining out, indeed, it seemed as if he was right. For
within a week of his desperate plunge, I received an invitation to
break bread with the municipal committee in the upper storey of the
Vice-President's house. The request, which was emblazoned in gold,
engrossed on silk paper in red and black, and enclosed in a brocade
envelope, was signed by the eleven members and the Reformer; who, by
the way, edited a ridiculous little magazine to which the committee
subscribed a few rupees a month. Solely for the purpose of being able
to send copies to their friends at court, and show that they were in
the van of progress. For a man must be that, who is patron of a
"Society for the General Good of All Men in All Countries." I was, I
confess it, surprised, even though a casual remark that now perhaps
his Honour the Lieutenant-Governor would no longer suspect his slaves
of disloyalty, showed me that philanthropy had begun at home. For the
little colony bore a doubtful character, being largely leavened by the
new Puritanism, which Government, for reasons best known to itself,
chooses to confound with Wahabeeism.

The entertainment given on the roof amid starshine and
catherine-wheels proved a magnificent success, its great feature being
an enormous plum-pudding which I was gravely told had been prepared by
my own cook. At what cost, I shudder to think; but the rascal's
grinning face as he placed it on the table convinced me that he had
seized the opportunity for some almost inconceivable extortion. But
there was no regret in those twelve grave, bearded faces, as one by
one they tasted and approved. All this happened long before a
miserable, exotic imitation of an English vestry replaced the old
patrician committees, and these men were representatives of the
bluest blood in the neighbourhood, many of them descendants of those
who in past times had held high offices of state, and had transmitted
courtly manners to their children. So the epithets bestowed on the
plum-pudding were many-syllabled; but the consensus of opinion was
indubitably towards its coolness, its digestibility, and its evident
property of soothing the body and the mind. Again I did not deny it.
How could I, out on the roof under the eternal stars, with those
twelve foreign faces showing, for once, a common bond of union with
the Feringhee? I should have felt like Judas Iscariot if I had struck
the thirteenth chord of denial.

The Reformer made a speech afterwards, I remember, in which, being
wonderfully well read, he alluded to love-feasts and sacraments, and a
coming millennium, when all nations of the world should meet at one
table, and--well! not exactly eat plum-pudding together, but something
very like it. Then we all shook hands, and a native musician played
something on the _siringhi_ which they informed me was "God Save the
Queen." It may have been. I only know that the Reformer's thin face
beamed with almost pitiful delight as he told me triumphantly that
this was only the beginning.

He was right. From that time forth the plum-pudding feast became a
recognised function. Not a week passed without one. Generally--for my
gorge rose at the idea of my cook's extortion--in the summer-house in
my garden, where I could have an excuse for providing the delicacy at
my own expense. And I am bound to say that this increased intimacy
bore other fruits than that contained in the pudding. For the matter
of that it has continued to bear fruit, since I can truthfully date
the beginning of my friendship for the people of India from the days
when we ate plum-pudding together under the starshine.

The Reformer was radiant. He formed himself and his eleven into
committees and subcommittees for every philanthropical object under
the sun, and many an afternoon have I spent under the trees with my
work watching one deputation after another retire behind the oleander
hedge in order to permutate itself by deft rearrangement of members,
secretaries, and vice-presidents into some fresh body bent on the
regeneration of mankind. For life was leisureful, lingering and
lagging along in the little town where there was neither doctor nor
parson, policeman nor canal officer, nor in fact any white face save
my own and my husband's. Still we went far and fast in a cheerful,
unreal sort of way. We started schools and debating societies, public
libraries and technical art classes. Finally we met enthusiastically
over an extra-sized plum-pudding, and bound ourselves over to reduce
the marriage expenditure of our daughters.

The Reformer grew more radiant than ever, and began in the
drawing-room--where it appeared to me he hatched all his most daring
schemes--to talk big about infant marriage, enforced widowhood, and
the seclusion of women. The latter I considered to be the key to the
whole position, and therefore I felt surprised at the evident
reluctance with which he met my suggestion, that he should begin his
struggle by bringing his wife to visit me. He had but one, although
she was childless. This was partly, no doubt, in deference to his
advanced theories; but also, at least so I judged from his
conversation, because of his unbounded admiration for one who by his
description was a pearl among women. In fact this unseen partner had
from the first been held up to me as a refutation of all my strictures
on the degradation of seclusion. So, to tell truth, I was quite
anxious to see this paragon, and vexed at the constant ailments and
absences which prevented our becoming acquainted. The more so because
this shadow of hidden virtue fettered me in argument, for Futteh Deen
was an eager patriot, full of enthusiasms for India and the Indians.
Once the sham fortifications were scaled, he assured me that
Hindustan, and above all its women, would come to the front and put
the universe to shame. Yet, despite his successes, he looked haggard
and anxious; at the time I thought it was too much progress and
plum-pudding combined, but afterwards I came to the conclusion that
his conscience was ill at ease, even then.

So the heat grew apace. The fly-catchers came to dart among the
_sirus_ flowers and skim round the massive dome of the old tomb in
which we lived. The melons began to ripen, first by ones and twos,
then in thousands--gold, and green, and russet. The corners of the
streets were piled with them, and every man, woman, and child carried
a crescent moon of melon at which they munched contentedly all day
long. Now, even with the future good of humanity in view, I could not
believe in the safety of a mixed diet of melon and plum-pudding,
especially when cholera was flying about. Therefore, on the next
committee-day I had a light and wholesome refection of sponge-cakes
and jelly prepared for the philanthropists. They partook of it
courteously, but sparingly. It was, they said, superexcellent, but of
too heating and stimulating a nature to be consumed in quantities. In
vain I assured them that it could be digested by the most delicate
stomach; that it was, in short, a recognised food for convalescents.
This only confirmed them in their view, for, according to the Yunani
system, an invalid diet must be heating, strengthening, stimulating.
Somehow in the middle of their upside-down arguments I caught myself
looking pitifully at the Reformer, and wondering at his temerity in
tilting at the great mysterious mass of Eastern wisdom.

And that day, in deference to my Western zeal, he was to tilt wildly
at the _zenana_ system.

His address fell flat, and for the first time I noticed a distinctly
personal flavour in the discussion. Hitherto we had resolved and
recorded gaily, as if we ourselves were disinterested spectators.
However, the Vice-President apologised for the general tone, with a
side slash at exciting causes in the jelly and sponge-cake, whereat
the other ten wagged their heads sagely, remarking that it was
marvellous, stupendous, to feel the blood running riot in their veins
after those few mouthfuls. Verily such food partook of magic. Only the
Reformer dissented, and ate a whole sponge-cake defiantly.

Even so the final Resolution ran thus: "That this committee views with
alarm any attempt to force the natural growth of female freedom, which
it holds to be strictly a matter for the individual wishes of the
man." Indeed it was with difficulty that I, as secretary, avoided the
disgrace of having to record the spiteful rider, "And that if any
member wanted to unveil the ladies he could begin on his own wife."

I was young then in knowledge of Eastern ways, and consequently
indignant. The Reformer, on the other hand, was strangely humble,
and tried afterwards to evade the major point by eating another
sponge-cake, and making a facetious remark about experiments and vile
bodies; for he was a mine of quotations, especially from the Bible,
which he used to wield to my great discomfiture.

But on the point at issue I knew he could scarcely go against his own
convictions, so I pressed home his duty of taking the initiative. He
agreed, gently. By-and-by, perhaps, when his wife was more fit for the
ordeal. And it was natural, even the _mem-sahiba_ must allow, for
unaccustomed modesty to shrink. She was to the full as devoted as he
to the good cause, but at the same time--Finally, the _mem-sahiba_
must remember that women were women all over the world--even though
occasionally one was to be found like the _mem-sahiba_ capable of
acting as secretary to innumerable committees without a blush. There
was something so wistful in his eager blending of flattery and excuse
that I yielded for the time, though determined in the end to carry my
point.

With this purpose I reverted to plum-puddings once more, and, I fear,
to gross bribery of all kinds in the shape of private interviews and
soft words. Finally I succeeded in getting half the members to consent
to sending their wives to an after-dark at-home in my drawing-room,
provided always that Mir Futteh Deen, the Reformer, would set a good
example.

He looked troubled when I told him, and pointed out that the
responsibility for success or failure now lay virtually with him, yet
he did not deny it.

I took elaborate precautions to ensure the most modest seclusion on
the appointed evening, even to sending my husband up a ladder to the
gallery at the very top of the dome to smoke his after-dinner cigar. I
remember thinking how odd it must have looked to him perched up there
to see the twinkling lights of the distant city over the soft shadows
of the _ferash_ trees, and at his feet the glimmer of the white
screens set up to form a conventional _zenan-khana_. But I waited in
vain--in my best dress, by the way. No one came, though my ayah
assured me that several jealously-guarded _dhoolies_ arrived at the
garden-gate and went away again when Mrs. Futteh Deen never turned up.

I was virtuously indignant with the offender, and the next time he
came to see me sent out a message that I was otherwise engaged. I felt
a little remorseful at having done so, however, when, committee-day
coming round, the Reformer was reported on the sick-list. And there he
remained until after the first rain had fallen, bringing with it the
real Indian spring--the spring full of roses and jasmines, of which
the poets and the bul-buls sing. By this time the novelty had worn off
philanthropy and plum-pudding, so that often we had a difficulty in
getting a quorum together to resolve anything; and I, personally, had
begun to weary for the dazzled eyes and the eager voice so full of
sanguine hope.

Therefore it gave me a pang to learn from the Vice-President, who,
being a Government official, was a model of punctuality, that in all
probability I should never hear or see either one or the other again.
Futteh Deen was dying of the rapid decline which comes so often to the
Indian student.

A recurrence of a vague remorse made me put my pride in my pocket and
go unasked to the Reformer's house, but my decision came too late. He
had died the morning of my visit, and I think I was glad of it.

For the paragon of beauty and virtue, of education and refinement, was
a very ordinary woman, years older than my poor Reformer, marked with
the small-pox, and blind of one eye. Then I understood.




                       THE SQUARING OF THE GODS


It was the night before the great Eclipse. A vast, vague expectancy
brooded over the length and breadth of India. Of prophesying there had
been no lack, for signs and wonders had been as blackberries in
September.

So, far and near, east, west, south, and north, the people of
Hindustan--many-hued, many-raced, many-faithed--were watching for they
knew not what, watching with grave, silent, yet curious composure.

But there was no outward sign of this inward expectation on either
side. The millions of dark faces behind which it lay were as
inscrutable as the telegraph wires through which the mere fraction of
white faces responsible for the safety of those millions of dark ones
were flashing silent messages of warning and preparation.

And here, in the Sacred City, beside the Sacred River, in which
multitudes of those millions hoped to bathe on the morrow during the
fateful moments of the sun's eclipse, the dim curves of the world had
never been outlined against a calmer, more restful sky--a sky almost
black in its intensity of shadow. Yet the night was clear, full of a
starlight that could be seen, which showed the bend of the broad
river, angled on one side by the straight lines of its curved sequence
of bathing-steps that swept away to the horizon on either side.

The steps themselves, shadowy, vague, were spangled as with stars by
the little trembling lamps of the myriads on myriads of pilgrims
already gathered on them waiting for the dawn. The reflection of these
lamps lay in the water beside the reflection of the stars, making it
hard to tell where heaven ended, where earth begun.

Behind this long length of bathing-steps--irregular in height, in
slope, in everything save an inevitable crowning by the tall temple
spires--lay Benares. Benares, the only city in the world--since the
reputation of Rome lives by works as well as faith--whose every stone
tells of that search after righteousness which lies so close to the
heart of humanity. Benares, with its sunless alleys, full of the
perfume of dead flowers and spent incense--alleys which thread their
way past shrine after shrine, holy place after holy place; mere niches
in a worn stone, perhaps, or less even than that; only the bare
imprint of a bloody hand on the tall, blank walls of the crowded
tenement houses which seem to narrow God's sky as they rise up toward
it. Benares, where the alien master steps into the gutter to let a
swinging corpse pass on its way to the Sacred River, but where the
priest behind it--his dark forehead barred with white, or smeared with
a bold patch of ochre--steps into the opposite gutter, and clings to
the shrine-set wall like a limpet, lest he be defiled by a touch, a
shadow. Benares, which is, briefly, the strangest, saddest city on
God's earth.

It lay this night, far as the eye could reach along the outward curve
of the Ganges, dreamful exceedingly, dimly paler than the sky. But on
the other side of the river, where the land bulged into the stream,
lay a scene as, dreamful; yet dreamful in a different way; for here,
almost from the water's edge, the young green wheat stretched away
into that level plain of India, the most densely populated
agricultural country in the world, where myriads and myriads of men
live content as the cattle with which they till the soil.

So a whole world lies between these two banks of the Ganges; between
the men of whom pilgrims are made, and the pilgrims made of those men.
And spanning them, joining them, aggressively, unsympathetically, is
the railway bridge built by the alien "Bridge-builders."

Seen in the starlight, with its lattice of dark girders showing
against the sky, its white piers blocking the water-slide at
intervals, this bridge looked quaintly like a fell and monstrous hairy
caterpillar out for a night-walking, one of those caterpillars with
turreted excrescences at its former and its latter end. The hinder one
here was clearly outlined against a distant block of greater darkness.
This was a dense grove of mango trees; and through its far-off shadow
shone twinkling coloured lights, while from it came fitfully, at the
wind's caprice, a faint sound of drumming, a twangling of _sitaras_;
for, in the shelter of the grove, some of the white faces who were
responsible for the dark ones were in camp--in a pleasure-camp full of
guests come to see the show, and whither the telegrams of warning
flashed and whence the answers flashed back, even while the _nautch_,
bidden to amuse those guests, went on and on in twanglings, drummings,
screechings, posturings.

Such details, however, were hidden even from the nearest point of the
angled curve of bathing-steps which swept right away to the starlit
horizon on the opposite side of the river. The only movement visible
thence by the waiting crowd, as it looked across the river, was a
curious dazzling flicker, as if the bridge were shivering, which was
caused by the continuous stream on its outer footway of arriving
pilgrims, showing now against the dark girders, now against the paler
sky.

"Mai Gunga hath her hands full!" murmured one of the group squatting
immovable on these nearest steps; "they come, and come."

A face or two, patient, dark, turned to the bridge, and another voice
came, calm, passive.

"Ay! 'tis easier for folk to find salvation with 'rails' and bridges
than, as of old, with blistered feet and boats." A dark hand nearest
the water's lip, as it lapped a lazy, silvery whisper on the worn
stone steps, slid into the sacred flood with a sort of tentative
caress.

"Yet they said _She_ would revenge Herself for the rending of Her
bosom, for the burden of bricks laid on Her; but She hath not. She
gives and takes as ever."

The long, dark fingers gathered some of the fallen petals which the
river was returning to those who had cast their flower-offering on its
surface, and the dark eyes watched a white-swathed corpse that was
drifting down stream, a faint streak in the slumbering shadow.

"True!" came another passive voice; "but the time is not past. There
is to-morrow yet."

The absolutely unrepresentable _chuck!_ made by the tongue against the
roof of the mouth, which is the most emphatic denial of India, echoed
suddenly, aggressively, into the peaceful air.

It came from the blackness of a low masonry abutment which, traversing
the last three steps, projected a few feet into the river, like a
pier. A yard maybe above the water, some three long, and perhaps a
couple broad, there was just room on its outer end for a small square
temple with a rude spiked spire--the plainest of temples, guiltless of
ornament, looking out over the Ganges blankly. For its only aperture,
a low arched doorway, faced the steps and showed now as a blot of
utter darkness.

"Not She, brethren!" said a cracked voice following on the denial.
"She or Her like will never harm the _Huzoors!_ They have paid their
toll, see you, they have squared the gods."

A dozen or more faces turned to the voice, the figures belonging to
them remaining immovable, as if carved in stone.

"Dost think so really, Baha-_jee?_" came a question. "I have heard
that tale before--and that 'tis done in the 'Magic-houses.'"[2]


---------------------

[Footnote 2: The natives call Freemasonry Lodges by this name.]

---------------------


The emphatic denial rose again. "Not so! These eyes saw it done--here,
in this very place, forty years ago! here, at Mai Kali's shrine!"

In the pause that followed, a pair of claw-like hands could be seen
above the bar of shadow, wavering salaams to the little temple, in the
perfunctory manner of priesthood all over the world.

"'Tis old Bishen, the flower-seller," said a yawning voice. "He was
here in the Time of Trouble,[3] and he tells tales of it--when he
remembers!"


---------------------

[Footnote 3: The Mutiny.]

---------------------


"Then let him tell," yawned another, "since the night is long and the
dawn lingers. How was't done, Baha-_jee?_"

There was a pause.

"Many ways, doubtless. Here and there different ways. But here, one
way. Forty years ago, brothers! Yea, forty years ago, these eyes saw
the 'squaring of the gods.' In this wise ..."

There was another dreamful pause, and then, from the shadow, came the
old thin voice once more.

"Yonder, where the bridge stands now, was Broon-_sahib's_ house--"

"Broon-_sahib?_" echoed a curious listener. "Dost mean Broon-_sahib_
who built the bridge?"

"Who built the bridge?" hesitated the tale-teller. "God knows! More
like his son; for the years pass--they pass, Mai Gunga! and I grow
old. Grant me this last cleansing, Mother! Wash me from sin ere I go
hence ..."

"Lo! thou hast made him forget the rest," reproved another listener,
"as if there were not Broon-_sahibs_ ever! Even now, here in Benares!
Yes! Baba-_jee_, of a certainty, Broon-_sahib's_ house stood here,
where the bridge stands now."

The old memory, started afresh, went on.

"It was a boy, the child. A toddler, but with the temper of tigers.
Lo! it would scream and yell in the _ayah's_ arms, and beat her face
to be let crawl down the steps to pull the spent bosses of the
marigolds out of the water and fling them back like balls. A mite of a
boy; white as jasmine in the face, yellow as the marigolds themselves
in hair. The _mem_, its mother, had the like face and hair. I used to
see her in the verandah over the river, and driving above the steps.
There were many _sahibs_ came and went to the house, after their
fashion, and she smiled and spoke to them all. There was one of
them--so young, he might have been a son almost--who came often; and
she smiled on him, too, as he played, like a boy, with the child. He
was one of the _sahibs_ who have eyes; so, after a time, he would nod
to me and say '_Ram! Ram!_' with a laugh as he passed above me,
sitting here in the shadow, selling my garlands.

"So, one day, as he came by, there was the baby screaming in its
_ayah's_ arms to be let crawl to the water, and she was denying it by
the _mem's_ orders. What the young _sahib_ said at first I know not;
but after a bit he came running down the steps, the child in his arms,
calling back to the woman, in her tongue, 'Trouble not, _ayah!_ I'll
square it, never fear!'

"And there he was beside me, the two white faces, the yellow
heads--for he was but a boy himself, slim, white, yellow-haired--close
together, brother-like, buying a garland of the biggest marigolds I
had. So down at the water's edge, he teaching the child how to throw
them in like a thrower.

"'No underhand work, brotherling,' he said in our tongue, for the
baby, after the fashion of the _baba-logue_, knew none other. 'So!
straight from the shoulder. Bravo! Thou wilt play crickets, by-and-by,
like a man.'

"After that once of chance, it came often of set purpose. He would
come down from the house with the child, and I had to keep the biggest
marigolds for the game, since, see you, they held the bits of brick
better with which he weighted them.

"Thus it went on till one day all the _sahibs_ and _mems_ were at the
house yonder, for God knows what amusement! and in the cool they
strolled down here--the _mems_ dressed so gay, the _sahibs_ all black
and smoking--to see how well the toddler, who could scarce speak, had
learnt to throw. At least, so it seemed, for they watched and laughed;
but after a time they took to throwing the flowers themselves,
laughing more and jesting, until not a marigold was left. Then they
began on Shivjee's _dhatura_ blossoms, filling their white horns with
pebbles, and hurling them far, far into the stream.

"So, when paying time came, the young _sahib_--he had the child by the
hand--flung rupees into my empty basket, and said, 'Lo! Bishen'--for
he was one of those who remember names--'those who seek to curry
favour with the gods will have no chance to-day. We are beforehand. We
have squared them.'

"At this the _mem_, standing close by, frowned and spoke some reproof;
maybe because she was of those who drive to church often. But the boy
only laughed, and, catching the child up, cried, 'Lo! brotherling,
then are we sinners indeed; since we do it so often, you and I!'

"And with that he raced up the steps with the child, calling '_Ram,
Ram!_' and '_Jai Kali Ma!_' like any worshipper; so that the _mem_ and
the others strolling after could not but laugh. And some echoed the
cry as they went up the steps."

The old voice paused in its even sing-song; and when it began again,
there was a new note in it which seemed to bring a sense of hurry and
stress even to that uttermost peace.

"But they came down again. How long after matters not. I see them so
in my old eyes. Going up, laughing in the sunset, then returning. It
was starlight when they came down, the _mems_ and the _sahibs_ and the
_baba-logue_. Starlight as it was now, brethren, but not still, like
this. There were cries, and flames yonder, and folk running.

"The boats lay here below the temple. And one--a Mahomedan--came with
them, promising safety. So they begun to get into the boats, and one
moved off, the crowd looking on. Then suddenly, God knows why! it
ceased looking on, and began to kill. They were half in, half out of
the boat; the _sahib-logue_ and some cried to stop, some to go on. But
the _mems_ made no noise; only you could see their faces white out of
the shadows.

"And his, the young _sahib's_, was whiter than any, glittering,
it seemed, with a white fire. The _mem_ was in the boat, and
Broon-_sahib_ on the bottom step, the baby in his arms. But he, the
boy, was above him facing the crowd--making time.

"Then, just as the mem stretched her hands for the child, a
bullet--they were firing from the top steps--hit Broon-_sahib_, and he
fell half in, half out of the water, pushing the boat out in his fall.
So it began to slide down stream.

"Some in it would have stopped it, but the _mem_ gave a look at those
other _mems_, those other babies, and laid her hand on one that would
have gone back.

"'No!'

"That was the cry she gave--a great cry; but a greater one rang out
through the shadows and the lights, from the boy who had caught up the
child as it fell upon the steps.

"I know not what it was, but it was great, and it echoed out as the
boat slipped fast to safety. And he held the child to his breast and
waved his sword, so that the _mem's_ white face rose from her hands,
where she had hidden it, and she looked back. That was the last thing
I saw out of the shadows as the boat slipped to safety; but it held
me, so that when I looked round, the boy was no longer on the steps.

"He had leaped to the plinth of the temple, and his arms were empty of
his burden. Only he stood in front of the doorway with his glittering
white face--his glittering white face, his glittering white sword!

"' Come on, you devils!' he shouted in our tongue. 'Come on! Mai Kali
shall have blood to-night if she wants it.'"

"And she had, brothers!

"It ran from the plinth and trickled to the river; for none could
touch him from behind, and his sword was in front.

"There was a method in its hackings and hewings. At least so it seemed
to me, watching helpless for good or evil, from my place in the
shadow. For ever, as its keenest stroke fell, so another body fell
blocking the plinth, until he had to stand almost in the arch itself.

"Then a burly Mahomedan trooper challenged him, and I knew not which
way the fight was going, till, with a shout that was almost a laugh,
the white face and the white sword showed, lunging back at the big
body as they broke past. And it fell sidelong, blocking the doorway
quite.

"But none thought of that, of it. None thought of anything save the
glittering face and the glittering sword that had burst through the
circling crowd, and now, facing it again, was backing up the steps,
fighting grimly as it backed.

"Up and up, step by step, and we--even I, brothers, watching
helpless--drawn after it perforce, to see--to know ...

"So the steps were left silent in the starlight. I did not see the
end, brothers. It was beyond my sight. They told me afterwards it was
in the bazaar, with half the town to see; but I had crept away, a
great shivering on me, for I had remembered the flowers and the young
_sahib's_ words about the gods.

"And I remembered the child. What had become of the child?

"Then suddenly I understood. Then I knew what the method of the sword
had been--how it had hidden, had lured!

"It was nigh dawn when I remembered; dawn as it is now. Look! The iron
of night's scabbard grows into the steel of day's sword upon the
water; and hark! that is the cry of the mallards. The world is waking.
So it was when I crept down to Kali's shrine.

"The blood was still dripping into the water, and when I drew the dead
mass of flesh from blocking the doorway, the red of it lay in a pool
up to Her feet. But the child had crawled on Her knees, brothers, and
had cried itself to sleep there.

"Yet when it wakened at my touch it did not cry, for, see you, it knew
me; and so, when it saw the milk, set in a bowl before Her as
offering, it stretched its hands for it.

"Thus it was made clear. So I gave it Mai Kali's milk, knowing it was
true what he had said, 'that they had squared the gods.'"

The voice paused, and another asked, "And then?" before it went on
dreamily.

"Yea! it was true indeed, for ere the day ended they were back with
guns and soldiers. So, since silence is better than speech when nought
is sure, I crept in the night to a Colonel's house and left the child
in the garden for them to find.

"Forty years ago, brothers! Forty years is it since the boats slipped
down to safety with the _Huzoors_, and now ..."

There was a sudden stir in the waiting crowd.

A boat had slipped up the river shadows from the bridge and was making
for the steps.

"That's your station, Brown," said an English voice; "the water is a
bit deep about the shrine, remember, and the old women are devilish
hard to keep back. All right!" it continued, as a man stepped out. "Go
on to the next. We are a bit early on the field; but it is as well to
be beforehand, and square things."

As the boat paddled on, another English voice in the stern said in a
low tone, "Why did you put Brown there? Just where his father was
killed, don't you remember?"

"Just why I did! He won't stand any nonsense, and it is a troublesome
job. Besides, he wasn't killed, and there's luck in it. That was a
queer story. Some one saved him, of course, but why? and how? Now,
Smith! there you are. And, as I said to Brown, for Heaven's sake look
after the old dodderers, male and female. When they've nothing left to
live for ..."

The rest was lost as the boat went on to a yet farther station.

So, as the sun rose, it rose on that great angled sweep, not of steps,
but of humanity; full, pressed down, running over into the spired town
behind--on a million and more of dark faces, and a dozen white ones
dotted here and there at the most dangerous points.

And Broon-_sahib_, bearded, a bit burly with his forty and odd years,
sat on the plinth, and thought, no doubt, of that past at first, then
took out his pipe, and with it some scraps of smoked glass, since the
coming eclipse must not be lost, even though one _was_ on duty.

The sun climbed up, brilliantly unconscious, or at least regardless,
of its coming fate. And after a time boats began to slide up and down,
and a big barge came punting up stream sedately. It was full of
English women and children; and under its wide awning a table was laid
with flowers and sparkling silver against the champagne breakfast
which was to follow on a successful performance of duty.

For not even here could there be allowed hint or sign of that
expectancy of possible evil. A little girl holding her mother's hand
nodded her yellow curls delightedly, as the barge went past, to Dada
sitting swinging his legs just where the blood had dripped into the
stream forty years ago; but something in the woman's face made a call
echo over the water.

"It's all right. Show going A 1!"

As a show there could be no doubt of that. There was a breathlessness
in it, a mighty surge of emotion from one end of that bank of humanity
to the other, a curious wail in the ceaseless roar of voices, that
struck through eyes and ears to the heart.

And now, what was that?

Broad daylight still; not a shadow had shifted, and yet a sense as if
a candle had gone out somewhere.

Broon-_sahib_ put his pipe in his pocket, looked through a glass
darkly, stood up, raised his helmet, wiped his forehead, and put it on
again.

The time had come--there was a nibble of shadow on the ball of
light!--the monster had begun his meal!

As he looked round, unarmed, defenceless, on the hundreds of thousands
of dark heads which held this thought, he smiled and nodded with the
words.

"Have patience, brethren; there is time!" Doubtless, but not much time
to think of other things beyond the mere keeping of that forward crush
of bathers, that backward crush of those that had bathed, from
inextricable confusion.

So much the better, perhaps. Less time, at any rate, for expectation
of the new King who was to fall from the sun and sweep away existing
kingdoms. Less time to notice the white horse led out ostentatiously
by the Brahmins at the biggest temple, sign that such talk was true,
that one aeon had passed away, and another--in which Vishnu should
appear in his final incarnation--had begun.

"Have patience! Have patience!"

That was the burden of the cry from the few white faces dotted among
the dark ones, and it was caught up and echoed by the connecting links
of yellow-legged policemen stationed every ten yards along the lowest
step.

"Have patience! Have patience!"

A hard saying indeed.

Broon-_sahib_ slipped down from the plinth and collared an old
pantaloon just as he fell, hefted him up like a baby, and set him
squatting in safety above. Then an old woman, gasping, gurgling from
the first mouthful of the water into which, regardless of depth, she
had literally been propelled.

"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!"

A harder saying, now that all things had grown grey; though
still--weird, uncanny, beyond belief--not a shadow had shifted.

Hopelessly grey, and hopelessly cold--so cold. So curiously quiet,
too; for the great roar of voices seemed to have severed itself from
things earthly, and was like a mighty wind from heaven.

"Have patience, brethren! Have patience! There is time!"

A harder saying still, when in the greyness, the coldness, a flock of
scared pigeons overhead sent a weird flight of faint grey shadows down
that long length of angled curve, packed by expectant humanity.

Was He coming indeed?--that new ruler? Were these the heralds?

There was quite a little row, now, of rescued old dodderers on Mai
Kali's plinth, whence the blood had dropped forty years ago.

What was that? Had some one withdrawn a veil? Had some one said, "Let
there be light"?

The greyness, the coldness, lost their character in an instant. There
was promise in them now--promise of light to come! The sun was
reasserting its sway, and--not half of humanity had bathed!

"Have patience, brethren! Have patience!" shouted Broon-_sahib_, and
there was a certain fierce determination in his tone.

Hardest saying of all, when the precious moments were going--going so
fast!

"_Huzoor!_" came a piteous, confused voice behind him from the
plinth, "it is my last chance. I am old--I forget. I have forgotten so
much--only this remains. For pity's sake--for the sake of forty years
ago--let old Bishen, the flower-seller, find salvation!"

Even in his hurry, in his breathless recognition that here
was the crucial instant--that a single mistake might bring
disaster--Broon-_sahib_ flung a quick look behind him.

He saw a pathetic old face, humble even in its grief.

"It's all right, _Baba_; there's plenty of time!" he said swiftly.
"Here! look through this bit of glass--you'll see for yourself."

It only took a moment, those quick words; he was back, ready with hand
and voice of command, almost without a break; but they did more for
peace and order than a regiment of soldiers. For old Bishen, after one
look through the smoked glass, rose to his feet and salaamed again and
again, set, as he was, on high, in sight of all.

"Yea! it is true," he cried, in his thin old voice. "There _is_ time.
Let us wait, brethren; for they know--the gods have told them."

Half-an-hour afterwards, with its table laid with flowers and silver,
the sliding barge held Englishmen as well as Englishwomen; and one of
them was drinking deep draughts of iced beer, while a little girl with
yellow hair watched him admiringly, and a woman, still rather pale of
face, stood looking at him with evident relief.

"I told you it would be all right, my dear," he said, smiling. "There
never was any rush to speak of but once; and then I gave a bit of
smoked glass to an old chap, and he saw through a glass darkly what
was up, and told the others. So we squared 'em--gods and Brahmins and
all-as I told you we should, in spite of all the talk and the
telegrams."




                        THE KEEPER OF THE PASS


The low hills, as they lay baking in the sunshine of noon, showed in
scallops of glare against the light-bleached sky. A fine dust, reddish
but for that same bleaching of light, hid every green thing far and
near, making them match the straggling camel-thorns, the stunted
wormwood, the tufts of chamomile, and many another nameless aromatic
herb which in these low hills come into the world ready dressed in
dust, as it were, against the long rainless months.

Yet it was not hot here in the uplands, and so the district officer's
tent was opened at one side and propped up by bamboos more for the
convenience of its occupant holding an open-air audience than from any
quest after coolness. The upward tilt gave the tent a quaintly
lopsided look, as if it were some gigantic bird flapping one wing in
its attempt to rise and fly away from the little hollow in which it
stood.

It was a motley crowd, indeed, which awaited the fiat of the Dispenser
of Justice in these fastnesses of the central hills of India; those
climbing, rolling upward sweeps of sandstone where the ripple mark of
the tides that built them remains to tell of the vanished sea which
had once covered this dry and thirsty land, where no water is for nine
long months of the year.

It was a curious crowd also. It could not fail of being that, since it
struck the two extremes of that vast Indian scale of so-called
culture, so-called civilisation. For a land case involving several
miles of country was in dispute, and the semi-Europeanised, wholly
clothed lawyers engaged on it stood cheek by jowl with the
semi-clothed wholly aboriginal witnesses in it; representatives for
the most part of the wild tribes belonging to these waste lands and
forests. Rude iron-smelters, almost touching the bronze age in
absolute savagery; or wandering fowlers, barbaric even to the extent
of eating their poor, old, undesirable relations!

In one group, however, consisting of an old man and a young one, a
quick observer might have noticed a palpable discrepancy between the
dress (or the lack of it) and the address of the wearers. A
discrepancy which made the magistrate of the district look up with a
smile.

"Hullo! Nagdeo!" he said. "On the warpath after a tiger?" The old man
salaamed down to the ground. His skin was very dark, so that his white
moustache and thin white whiskers, brushed out to stand, each hair
singly, in a forward curve, like the whiskers of a cat, seemed to
glisten against it. For the rest, he was small, slight, but extremely
muscular, and he carried himself with no little dignity and
importance.

"Not so, _Huzoor_," he replied, and his speech rose higher in that
scale of culture and civilisation than his dress, which was no more
than a waistcloth, a string of tiger claws, and a tasselled spear--"I
come to put another foot on it. This is my grandson, _Huzoor_."

The dignity, the importance grew fifty-fold as he turned to the lad by
his side. A good head taller, fairer of skin, infinitely better
looking, there was yet something about the figure which made the eye
turn back to the smaller, older one, as it stood before authority with
a certain authority of its own.

He was, as all knew, explained Nagdeo, the keeper of one of the
wildest passes in that wild country, as his father and his father's
father had been. Who could deny it? Was not their very caste name, to
distinguish them from others, _Ghatwal_, or pass-keeping ones?

He had had to keep his a long time, because the Old God had decreed
that his son should be defeated by a tigress and her cubs; which might
happen to the best of pass-keeping ones, since those things feminine
were untrustworthy. Consequently he (Nagdeo) had had to go on beyond
the years of greatest activity until his grandson reached them.

But here the boy was now. Of age, twenty; than most, taller; as any,
learned in jungle law; with the spear, nimble; to keep the pass,
ready; to be enrolled, present, the Old God before--

With his subject the old man's words had returned to the idiom of a
wilder tongue, and he drew out of his waistcloth a little iron image
of a tiger, not three inches long, to which he salaamed reverently.

For this was the Old God.

"What is your grandson's name?" asked the district officer.

It was Baghela (tiger cub), said Nagdeo.

It had seemed a suitable name for one born six months after his father
had been found lying dead on the top of a dead tigress, his dead lips
close to the teats that would suckle her dead whelps no more.

That had been a misfortune, deplorable yet without shame, and due,
possibly, to the dead youth's over-soon marriage to a thing feminine;
such things being notoriously untrustworthy! Therefore he had
refrained from entangling _this_ one with such things feminine, the
more so because there were already sufficient of them in the house,
what with Baghela's mother and grandmother. Briefly, the worship of
two female things was sufficient for any lad without adding to the
adulation by a third!

So, in the evening, when the magistrate's legal work was over, the old
man and the young one came up to the tilted tent again, and, after a
curious little oath of fealty to the Old God--in the shape of the
three-inch tiger--and a vow of war till death against live things that
mimicked his shape had been taken from his grandfather's dictation by
Baghela, the latter's name was duly enrolled as hereditary guardian of
the Jadusa Pass, and the two struck a bee-line towards home over the
low jungle as if it belonged to them.

As indeed it did; since few travellers, save the keepers of the
passes, ventured to brave the tigers dreaming in their lairs, or
pacing the trackless wastes hungrily, after dark.

But old Nagdeo was jubilant over the mere chance of coming across one;
not that it was likely, since what tiger ever was whelped which would
dare to face him and his grandson? "Men"--here he gave a sidelong
glance of pure adoration at Baghela's height--"who had no backs; who,
if they failed, as even pass-keepers must sometimes, were found face
up to the sky, face up to the claws, face up to the teeth!"

Of course, sometimes, the accursed brutes who assumed the shape of the
Blessed Budhal Pen--the Old God of Gods--would, out of sheer spite,
roll a dead man over and claw at his back; but that also was without
shame, since dead men had no choice.

So the old man babbled on garrulously, and the young one listened,
till they reached the little village at the foot of the pass. The moon
had risen by this time, and showed the upright slabs of sandstone
clustering under the wide-spreading tamarind trees on its outskirts.
Slabs marking the graves of dead and gone inhabitants.

"I am ready now for the young girls to break their pitchers and cover
my emptiness with the shards," said the old man, pausing for a second
beside a cluster of these stones. Then he raised his hand and spoke to
the unseen: "Fear not, Slumberers! He who comes to join you hath no
scratch upon his back."

That was his _Nunc Dimittis_. After which he made his way to a low
shingled stone hut, covered with gourds, which stood on some rising
ground outside the hamlet towards the pass; drank to excess--from pure
joy--of a nauseous spirit made by the untrustworthy feminine out of
wild berries, and then slept as sound as if he were indeed with the
Slumberers.

For this question of the due keeping of the pass had been on the old
man's nerves for months. The rains would be due ere long, bringing, no
doubt, those twinges of lumbago to a grandfather's back which had of
late made it difficult, indeed, to keep the pass open for travellers;
since to do that a man must give the beasts no rest. He must harry
their lairs when they were absent, scare them from the road with
strange noises and ringing of bells, and, if they were obdurate, face
claws and teeth.

But now there was some one to do all this. Some one of the true race,
yet by the fiat of the Old God bigger than most. Ay! and with more
personal enmity than most towards the evil ones who stole the Old
God's likeness. For must not those six unborn mouths of wrong, of
loss, of grief and anger, count for something?

Yes! Baghela would be a Keeper of the Pass, indeed! That was the old
man's thought as he fell asleep, his dream as he lay sound as the
Slumberers themselves. And Baghela slept, too, the badge of his new
office, a necklace of tiger claws, round his neck, a tasselled spear,
hung with jingling bells, beside him. But the untrustworthy feminine,
the mother, the grandmother, still sate by the embers of the fire
whispering fearfully; for _they_ knew that those six unborn mouths,
translated in _their_ way, might mean something very different.

Baghela himself, however, had no suspicion of the possibility. He set
about his new duties with an immense amount of swagger. The least hint
of a marauding intruder about the winding path which led to the
fertile valleys towards the south, would send him through the village
with boastful jinglings of his bells. And, as luck would have it, that
jingling seemed all powerful for a time towards the keeping of the
pass.

Nagdeo, who, now that the necessity for presenting a youthful
appearance was over, permitted himself a seat amongst the village
elders, a certain stiffness of carriage generally, used to boast of
this peace dogmatically. Such a thing as no _news_, even, of
intruders, so far on in the season, was unheard of. He himself, in his
palmiest days, had never been so fear-compelling. It was those six
unborn mouths of hereditary hatred which did it, no doubt.

And Baghela thought so too, as long as the rain was slight, as long as
the flocks and herds kept to the uplands, and only the shepherds and
herdsmen had tales to tell of loss. Then, one day, the clouds broke in
slanting shafts of almost solid rain, and the water ran over the
rippled sandhills as if it had been a tide once more. Then the sun
shone for another day, and at dusk everything but a yard or two of
shadow round Baghela as he patrolled the path was a blank nothingness,
blotting out even the darkness with wet, impenetrable vapour, dulling
even the sound of the bells, deadening all scent.

So, neither he nor the tiger had an instant's warning.

They were face to face in a moment.

Then Baghela knew what those unborn mouths had wrought in him. Terror,
absolute, uncontrollable, seized on all his young strength; he knew
nothing save the desire to escape. The next instant he felt a hot
vapour on his back, heard the husky angry cough that sent it there,
and all that young strength of his spent itself in a cry like that of
the untrustworthy thing feminine, when they had told it of a young
husband's death.

Into the mist he fled, feeling the cold vapour in his face, the hot
behind; until, suddenly desperate, every atom of him leaped forward
from what lay behind, and he fell.

None too soon; for even as he shot downward a shadow shot over him in
the mist, and something ripped his bare back lightly, as, with greater
impetus than his, that shadow plunged into the void.

A second afterwards a long-drawn howl of rage and spite rose upward
through the mist to meet Baghela's whimpers as he lay, caught above
the sheer precipice, by a bush.

After a while he rose and crept carefully up to the verge; then sate
and shivered at himself; at this inheritance of fear. And more than
once his hand sought that faint scratch upon his back. It was not
much; not more than a kitten might have made in play, but he felt it
like a brand.

By degrees, however, he began to think. The tiger must be lying dead,
or at least helpless, below the rocks. He must get down to it, leave
the marks of his spear in it; the mark of its claws ...

A surge of shame swept through him. No! he must go back unscathed; no
one must have the chance, in dressing wounds, of seeing that faint
mark behind.

So the next morning, old Nagdeo could scarcely contain himself for
pride, as he sate among the village elders. The boy had killed his
first tiger without a scratch. Had brought home its skin, the biggest
seen for years. True, the lad himself had found the fight too hard,
and was even now shivering and shaking with ague; but that only proved
how hard the fight had been. And the untrustworthy feminine were
dosing him, so he would be afoot again in a day or two. Then the
village would see that, ere a month was over, a naked child might go
through the pass alone in safety. But it was not so!

Baghela, it is true, was well enough by day, but as the dusk came on,
his strong young limbs always fell a shivering and a shaking. "There
is more room for quaking, see you, in him than in me," old Nagdeo
would explain elaborately to his cronies, as he held out an arm, which
with the inaction, the sudden cessation of imperious efforts, began to
show its age clearly; "but one must pay for size and strength, and
courage; and there is no harm done as yet. The mimicking devils had
their lesson when he killed their champion without a scratch."

But the harm came in time. A party of salt-carriers, taking advantage
of a break in the rains, arrived at the village carrying an extra
load; the body of a man killed by a tiger, half eaten by jackals.

"Ague or no ague, sonling," said old Nagdeo almost coaxingly to the
lad half-an-hour after the appearance of this grim visitor, "thy bells
must be heard in the pass to-night. They will be all-sufficient,
considering the lesson thou hast taught the beasts. And thou art
strong enough for the ringing of bells. Thou canst return afterwards
to shiver and shake, sonling, since thou art not of those to do that
in the pass. No! no!"

The old man's chuckle at his little joke was tenderly triumphant; but,
when he had gone, and the untrustworthy feminine alone remained,
Baghela turned with a sob to his mother, who crouched beside him, and
hid his face in her clothes, as if he had been a hurt child.

"Mother!" he cried, "I got it from thee!"

"Yes! heart of my heart," she answered passionately, "and from thy
murdered father too. Have I not told thee so, often? As for this old
man! See you! Since _this_ has come upon us, and the shivering is no
longer refuge--go! There is no need to ring the bells--no need to go
farther than the little caves. And the old man fails fast. He will
not live long. Then, when he is dead, the old tale will be told,
and we can tell a new one, like other folk. Why, even now, see you,
there is no need for travellers to cross the pass. Let them take the
'rail' which the _Huzoors_ have made! All this old-world talk is
foolishness--yesterday's bread has been eaten, its water drunk; 'tis
time for a new dinner!"

It was more than a month after this that some one, sitting on the
village dais underneath the tamarind trees in sight of the Slumberers,
in trying to use a betel-cutter, said carelessly, "_It hath grown
rusty, like Baghela's bells!_"

Nagdeo turned on the speaker like lightning. That month had left him
curiously aged, with a wistful, anxious expectancy on his old face.
Though when, more than once, folk had commented on his changed looks,
and asked what ailed him, he had only replied, almost apologetically,
"Death lingers; 'tis time I was with the Slumberers, since Baghela
keeps the pass as his fathers did."

But now his old voice rose haughtily, "Like thy wits rather! Canst not
see that the youth hath been overbrave? The mimicking devils will not
face the bells. And who can kill a foe that keeps his distance? And if
the bells ring not, is it not in hopes to lure the cowards close--to
take them unawares?"

The arguments came swiftly, as if they had been rehearsed before;
rehearsed without audience; and yet when old Nagdeo moved off as if in
displeasure, his hands crept out towards the stones which marked the
Slumberers, his eyes sought them almost pitifully.

And that night, after Baghela had gone on his rounds, after the
untrustworthy feminine had slothfully sought its bed, the old Keeper
of the Pass crept out in the rear of the young one, spear in hand; yet
without the jingles, since what need was there for two sets?

Two! But where was the one?

The old man's face grew more feline in its watchful anxiety, as he
prowled among the bushes in the half moonlit darkness, listening for
the challenge. And none came, though more than once in the denser
shadow of thick jungle, he saw two spots of green light telling that
some one was _waiting_ to be challenged. But where was the challenger?

The night was far spent ere he was found, fast asleep on a bed of dry
leaves in the little cave.

The sight seemed to take the finder back, not to his more immediate
ancestors, the purely savage hunters of those low hills, but to
something older still, to the barbarians who had swept down on them to
found principalities and powers; for all the calm dignity of the
Indo-Scythic sculptures was in Nagdeo's pose as he pricked the sleeper
with his spear.

"Rise up, Keeper of the Pass; they wait for thee without."

Baghela was on his feet in a second. He knew the time had come, and
something of the old racial courage in him held that new fear in
check.

Until, not a hundred yards without the cave, in the faint grey light
of the now coming dawn, a paler shadow showed in the darker shadows,
long, low, sinuous; and something moved across their path with no
sound of footfall; only a crackle of dry twigs, a sudden, soft, short
wheeze, and then silence.

"Ring the bells, Keeper of the Pass," came the old man's voice. "There
is no fear. Has not the tale of thy prowess spread among the tiger
people?"

His prowess! The sting of that slight scratch was as fire on the lad's
back; he paused. But a spear from behind reached to his, struck it
sideways, and the next instant the challenge echoed through the pass.

And was accepted.

The shadow grew short, showed paler; till two green lights flashed
out, and with a roar that rolled among the rocks, the tiger faced
them, crouched and sprang.

Old Nagdeo, his vanished youth returning for a space, sprang too,
watching that other spring; so, spear in hand, found himself close to
the striped skin of the base usurper of the Old God's shape, into
which, with all the force he possessed, he drove his weapon's point.
But Baghela, with no thought but flight, felt the full force of those
mighty claws on his back, and fell. Perhaps his neck was broken;
anyhow, he lay still, heedless of the piteous cry that followed:--

"Face him, Keeper of the Pass! Face the teeth, face the claws, ere
thou seekest the Slumberers!"

Yet the entreaty was not utterly disregarded; since--Baghela
dead--that Keepership passed again to one whose face faced the old
enemy bravely.

That face, however, had no triumph of victory in it, when Nagdeo
stooped over his grandson's body, and turned its scored back to be
hidden by Mother Earth. There was no mark anywhere else--not a
scratch. That, at any rate, must not be. That must be remedied before
the villagers saw it; before even the sun saw it. For was not Budhal
Pen, the Old God, the Sun-god also?

So he drew the lad's body deliberately within reach of the mighty
claws, and used them, slack as they were in newly-come death, for his
purpose.

Then he sat down beside the two dead bodies, and looked at his own for
scratch or hurt. There was not one; not even a bruise, not a spot of
blood. So none need know. The girls might weep as they broke their
pitchers over Baghela bewailing his dead courage.

The courage which had died before he did, though none should know of
it. Yet it had died. And who was to blame?

Nagdeo sat gazing stupidly at his grandson's long length, at his
fairer beauty; then suddenly he stood up.

That was it, of course!

And if that were so, then it were best to settle it before dawn, when
folk might come prying. He bent curiously over the dead lad, then laid
his hand on the dead heart.

"Go! Keeper of the Pass, to the Slumberers without fear. I, Nagdeo,
will punish the intruder."

Half-an-hour after, he stood silently in his hut beside his still
sleeping wife. The old woman, blind, deaf, near her end as it was,
scarcely stirred as he drove his spear through her heart.

"I doubt thee not, Naole," he said inwardly, "unless a devil wronged
thee; but thy son's son must be avenged. He must take no stranger's
blood to the Slumberers."

But Herdasi, the lad's mother, was awake, and screamed.

"Hold thy peace, fool!" said the old man, fiercely, "if thou wouldst
not proclaim thyself harlot. Thy son is dead--face downwards. It came
not from me, nor from my son; so that of us which goes to join the
Slumberers must be avenged on the vile spirit that took form within
thee. Come out from under the bed, woman! if thou wouldst prove he got
it not with thy knowledge. Oh! untrustworthy feminine!"

And after a pause the untrustworthy feminine did come out with a
curious dignity.

"He got it not from me but from my love. Yet what matter if he be
dead!" said Herdasi, and so died with her face to the foe to save her
son's name. Since, if it was a devil's doing, none could blame the
lad.

They found the old man sitting beside the two dead women when they
came to tell him that the Keeper of the Pass had given his life for
its safety.

"Yea, I know," replied Nagdeo, quietly. "I went and found him before
dawn when he returned not. So I came home and slew these useless ones.
Since he was dead, and I am nigh death, and there was none to keep the
untrustworthy feminine from wandering."

He adhered to this story steadfastly in the district magistrate's
court, and when he was condemned to death made but one request--that
he might be allowed to face it with the insignia of his office about
him. So on the eve of his execution they gave the old man back his
necklace of tiger claws, and told him he would be allowed to jingle
his bells on his way to the scaffold. But when they came to rouse him
in the morning he was lying dead, face upward; his arms, his chest,
his throat all rent and ripped by those same tiger claws.

But there was not even a scratch upon the back of the last Keeper of
the Pass.




                       THE PERFUME OF THE ROSE


"I think we ought to be going back to the others," said the girl.

She was a pretty, fair English girl, fresh as a rose in her dainty
pink muslin dress, flounced as they wore them in the mutiny year--in
three full flounces to the waist, like the corolla of a flower. And
the lace sunshade she held tilted over her shoulder as a protection
against the slanting rays of the afternoon sun added to her
rose-likeness by its calyx of pale green lining.

"Ought we?" said the young Englishman who walked beside her, his hand
clasping hers. They were a good-looking pair, pleasant to behold.
"What a bore; it is so jolly here."

The epithet was not happy, save as an expression of the speaker's
frame of mind. For the garden into which these engaged lovers had
wandered away from the gay party of English men and women who had
taken possession of the marble summer-house in its centre for a
picnic, or, as the natives call it, "a fool's dinner," was something
more than jolly.

It was beautiful, this garden of a dead dynasty of kings past and gone
like last year's roses.

But there were roses and to spare still within its high four-square
walls that were hidden from each other by the burnished orange-groves,
by the tall forest trees fringing its cross of wide marble aqueducts
bordered by wide paths.

Such blossoming trees! The _kachnar_ flinging its bare branches, set
thick with its geranium flowers, against the creamy feathers waving
among the dense dark foliage of the _mangoes_, the _bakayun_ drooping
its long lilac tassels beside the great gold ones of the _umultas_,
and here and there its whole vitality lavished on a monstrous leaf or
two, a huge flower or two, white, curved, solid, as if cut in cold
marble, yet with a warm fragrance at its heart, a hill magnolia
challenged the scent of the roses below.

Ineffectually, at least here in this square of the garden; for that
cross of wide, empty aqueducts divided it into squares.

And this one was a square of roses--roses everywhere, even in the
lower level of what in the old kingly days had been a marble-edged
water-way, which now, half filled with soil, held more roses.

But they were all of one kind--the pink Persian rose, whose outer
petals pale in the sunlight, whose rose of roses heart is full of an
almost piercing perfume.

What wonder, when it is the otto of roses rose! It grew here for that
set purpose in orderly lines, its grey green, velvety leaves almost
hidden by its profusion of flowers.

And the scent of them filled the whole square of garden, where the
air, still warm from the past noon, lay prisoned in that fringe of
blossoming trees.

It seemed to fill the brain, also, with the quintessence of gladness,
beauty, life, and love.

So His arm sought Her waist and their eyes met.

But only for a second; the next, Her blush matching Her flounces, She
had drawn back, and He with an angry frown was glaring in the
direction of the voice which had interrupted them.

It was a high, clear voice full of little trills and bubblings like a
bird's, and it sang on incessantly, as if to give those two time to
recover from their confusion. And as it sang, the Persian vowels
seemed as piercingly sweet as the perfume into which they echoed.


   "The rose-root takes earth's kisses for its meat,
    The rose-leaf makes its blush from the sun's heat,
    The rose-scent wakes-who knows from what thing
        sweet?
                   Who knows
   The secret of the perfume of the rose?"


As the song ended, a head showed above the tufted bushes. It was
rather a fine head; bare of covering, its long grizzled hair parted in
the middle lying in a smooth outward curve on the high narrow
forehead, then sweeping in an equal inside curve between the ear and
throat. So much, no more, was to be seen above the roses, save, for a
moment, a long-fingered, delicate brown hand hiding the face in its
_salaam_.

"Who the _shaitan_ are you?" asked the young man fiercely in
Hindustani.

The head and hand met in a second _salaam_, then the face showed;
rather a fine face, preternaturally grave, but with a cunning
comprehension in its gravity.

"I am Hushmut the essence-maker, _Huzoor_," was the reply. "I belong
to the garden, and, being hidden from the noble people in my
occupation of plucking roses for my still, I sang to let them know."

The young Englishman gave a half-embarrassed laugh.

"What does he say?" asked the girl. She had only been two months in
India, and these had been spent in falling in love.

"He thought we might like to know he was there, that's all--a joke,
isn't it?" answered her lover. She smiled, and so holding each other's
hands boldly they stood facing that head above the roses.

It nodded cheerfully.

"The _Huzoors_ are doubtless about-to-marry persons," came the voice.
"It is not always so, even with the _Huzoors_. But this being
different, if they require essences for the bridal let them come to
Hushmut. Rose, jasmine, orange, sandal, lemon grass. I make them all
in their season. Yea, even 'wylet'[4] which the _memi_ love. It is not
really _banafsha_, _Huzoor_; they grow not in the plains. I make it
from the _babul_ blossom, and none could tell the difference. Mayhap
there _is_ none, since He who makes the perfume of the flowers in His
still, may send the same to many blossoms, as I send my essences to
many lovers; even the noble people!"


---------------------

[Footnote 4: Violet.]

---------------------


There was distinct raillery in the last words, and the young
Englishman's smile vanished.

"We people hold not with essences," he said curtly; adding to the
girl, "Come, dear, I think we really ought to go back, your father
will be wanting to go home--he has a lot of work, I know--"

A shuffle in the bushes made the lovers pause, a curious shuffle such
as a wounded bird makes in its efforts to escape.

"If the most noble will tarry, this slave will at least make the
luck-offering to the bride," came the voice again, and to point its
meaning the delicate brown hand held up a circular shallow basket
heaped with rose-petals. Heaped so lightly, that the hand held it
level, and it seemed to glide on the top of the bushes, heralding the
grizzled head which slid after it with a faintly undulating movement.

The cause of this became clear when the limit of the roses was
reached.

Hushmut the essence-maker must have been a cripple from birth. The
loose blue cloth, such as gardeners wear knotted round their loins
like a petticoat, hid, however, all deformity, even when he clambered
up the marble edge of the old water-way, and shuffled with sidelong
jerks along the path to the pink muslin flounces.

The wearer's eyes grew soft suddenly. The mystery of such births came
home to the woman who was so soon to be a wife, perhaps a mother.

She gave him a mother's look anyhow; the look of almost passionate
pity a woman gives to a child's deformity.

Perhaps he saw it. Anyhow he paused; then, with his bold black eyes
twinkling, held out the basket.

"A handful, _Huzoor_, for luck!" he cried.


             "A rose ungathered is but a rose,
              Pluck it, lover, don't mind a thorn;
              Tuck it away in your bosom-clothes,
              And drink its beauty from night to morn."


The voice trilled and bubbled quite decorously, but the young
Englishman intercepted a deliberate wink, and felt inclined to kick
Hushmut to lower levels; till he remembered that the girl could not
understand.

"Take a handful," he said, "and let's get rid of him." The girl
obeyed, but, by mere chance, the little white hand with his ring on it
did tuck its handful of pink rose-leaves away in the loose pink
ruffles on her breast. Whereat Hushmut's approval became so
unmistakable that the young Englishman felt that the only thing was to
escape from it.

Yet as he hurried the girl back to the summerhouse he turned to listen
to the essence-maker's voice as he went on with his song, and his
rose-picking.


      "Dig, gardener! deep; till the Earth-lips cling tight.
       Prune, gardener! keep those blushes to the light.
       Then, gardener, sleep! he brings the scent by night.
                         Who knows
       The secret of the perfume of the rose?"


There was nothing to be seen now but the stunted grey green bushes
half hidden in blossom; even the head had disappeared. They were a
queer people, thought the young man, very difficult to understand.
Then the refrain returned to him--


                        "Who knows
       The secret of the perfume of the rose?"


"Hushmut?" answered an older man who lounged smoking in one of the
marble-fretted balconies of the dead King's pleasure-house. "Oh, yes!
he is quite a character. A scoundrel, I believe; at least he knows all
the worst lots in the city. They come to the garden at night, you see,
and the bazaar women get all their essences from him. So I expect he
knows at any rate of all the devilry that's going on. I wish I did."
The speaker's face looked a trifle harassed.

"Is it true, sir, what they say?" asked another voice, "that
Hushmut is really the King's son. That his mother was a Brahmin girl
they kidnapped, who cried herself to death in one of these rooms.
Then, when the child was a cripple, the King--by Jove, he was a
brute!--disowned it."

"Is that about Hushmut?" asked the girl, who had joined the group in
time to hear the last words.

The men looked at each other, and the older one said: "Yes, my dear;
they say he was deserted by his parents because he was a cripple.
Rather rough on him. Now I think I'll go and get your mother to come
home. It's getting late. You'll follow, I suppose?"

"Yes, father, with him," she said, with a rose-blush.

So, by degrees, in couples, as a rule, but sometimes with a pale-faced
child tucked into the carriage between father and mother, the
pleasure-seekers left the garden of dead Kings to the scent of the
roses. Left it cheerfully, calling back to their friends times and
places where they were to meet again, as English men and women did on
those fatal evenings in May, '57.

Only the girl in the pink frock and her lover lingered; while the
dogcart in which he was to drive her home waited under the blossoming
trees.

And as they stood talking, as lovers will, Hushmut the essence-maker,
thinking the coast was clear, came shuffling down the scented shadow
of the path--for the sun had left the garden--pushing his basket of
rose-leaves before him, dragging his crippledom behind him.

"Do you think he would show us his still?" said the girl, suddenly.
"I've never seen one. Ask him, will you?"

Hushmut's big, bold black eyes twinkled. Certainly the Miss-_sahiba_
might see. There was no secret in his work. He took the scent as he
found it, as wise men took love. Again there was that faint suspicion
of raillery only to be pardoned by the girl's ignorance, and also by a
conviction that Hushmut counted on that ignorance, and meant the
remark only for the you

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