George Macmunn

The Ghilzai’s Wife and Other Stories of East and West

The Ghilzai’s Wife

“For whither thou goest, I will go; . . .
and thy people shall be my people.”
— The Book of Ruth.

I

The “Craft” is a very wonderful thing, there is no doubt about that, quite apart from the truth or otherwise of its traditional foundation by Royal Solomon. At times it shows its members many a queer byway of life, and brings them up against folk whom they would otherwise pass by in the wayside. The world has many a sidelight for those who tarry awhile to look, and whom the gift of human sympathy may at times illumine. If so be the onlooker is a Master Mason, then will his opportunities be doubled.

A couple of years or so ago I chanced to be travelling from Rangoon to Colombo, and thence on to Bombay by an Australian boat. It was the monsoon, and foul at that, so the saloon passengers were few, and most of those below, while huddled wet misery personified was the lot of the steerage, many of whom were natives of India doing the short passage. These seemed mostly Muhammadans of the trader class, who frequent the seaports of the Empire and are to be found trading wherever the British flag flies, and under many another flag as well. The second day out from Colombo we were having it as bad as it can be in the Indian Ocean in monsoon time, and I had struggled on deck for a little fresh air. Holding on to the rail, I stood looking at the unhappy humans in the waist, huddled up in blankets and swept with spray, too listless even to seek shelter below. As my eye wandered over the scene I became aware that a Freemason was calling me. I rubbed my eyes that were wet with spray, but could see only a dozen figures in their blankets. I climbed with difficulty down the gangway. It was a vile day and no mistake. Down in the waist I staggered past the battened hatch and the donkey engine, and landed on the top of three figures lying on a coil of hawser.

“I thought you’d come, boss,” said a figure who struggled to his feet. A roll of the ship sent him against me. “Knee to knee,” said he. “It’s a very bad day, sahib, and I want your help.”

“You shall have it,” I said. “Come in here,” and I drew him into a bunk where the steerage cooking-pots were piled.

“My wife is very ill, sahib, and I want some sahib’s food for her.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Sea-sickness, I suppose, sahib.”

“Will you take me to her?”

He nodded, and I said, “But first tell me who you are.” I asked the question in Pushtoo. I thought so—he understood, though he answered in excellent English, or rather Australian.

“I am a Pathan, a Ghilzai of the Suleiman Khel, and am returning to Ghuzni after ten years on the Coolgardie goldfields, and my wife is with me. She is an Australian girl.”

“What the devil do you mean by bringing an Australian girl steerage like this?”

“We lost our ready money, sahib, though I have plenty with a seth¹ at Peshawur. Besides,” he said, “she is not so very white, and people make a fuss if they see us together.”

“What do you mean by saying she is not so very white?”

“You know what I mean, sahib.”

“I’m d——d if I do, you brute!”

“Well, sahib, you have seen it in Afrique, no doubt. I did, when I went there with Dhanjhi-boy’s ambulance tongas. There are white people who are brought up like black people, they run wild about the veldt with kafirs, and nobody will know them.”

Pah! It was quite true, I knew the mean white well, I had had them as transport boys and voor-loopers. “Crocodile” Henry as driver, and John Smith, mean white, as voor-looper, and not ashamed even, for he knew no better, and had always eaten his scoff with the boys, I knew, too, what the mean Dutch, or bijwoner, was to the farmer, and how like a dog he was treated. I have always wanted to go back to the veldt and see how the bijwoner, who had been the mainstay of the commando for the last half of the war, had settled down after a year or so on other people’s mutton. However, that is another pair of shoes. I knew the mean white, East and West, and only a few weeks before had seen an Austrian lad, with fair hair, blue eyes, of unknown parentage, tootling a fife among a band of the blackest of black Madrassi bandsmen.

So I went without more ado down to the comfortless steerage bunk, to find the wretched mean Australian bush girl who was going alone to Afghanistan with a Ghilzai husband, and sorry enough she looked, though a fine day and a smooth sea would doubtless work wonders. At any rate I went for the ship’s doctor and explained the situation. I also explained that there was little to gain by talking, and that the pair had best be left with such assistance as a brother in the Craft could give, to work out their own salvation in their own way. To cut a long story short, the girl improved under treatment, and was about on deck the day we ran into the comparative calm of Bombay harbour.

There I had some speech with her, and found her a rough enough diamond, rough of speech and sturdy of character, almost illiterate, but used since an infant to shift for herself and live as she could. “Aldo,” as she called her husband (a missionary it appeared had married them and asked no questions), had been driving a donkey engine up at the goldfields, and she had found him lying in the bush with a broken head, robbed apparently by some whites. She had got him water, they had struck up an alliance, and they had married. Aldo had done well, and had later been running goods on pack-camels, and they were now off to Afghanistan to trade in ready-made black frock-coats. This plan of her husband’s, whose real name he told me was Sultān Jān, was by no means so absurd as it sounds. The Afghan nobleman affects a dress of this nature, and English frock-coats are in great request. A merchant calling with such at the country seats of the Afghan gentry would undoubtedly be well received, and the ready-made frock-coat, as baled by Messrs. Whiteaway & Laidlaw, had, I knew, a ready market. Once when I was on the Chinese frontier of Upper Burma, in a small rain-bound post, with 150 Gurkhas as garrison, the parcel post (which came in about once in six weeks) climbed the hill on a Government elephant. It contained huge parcels by the Value Payable Post, addressed to various sepoys of the garrison. That evening the whole of the garrison turned out for the evening parade in mufti, every man wearing a black Angola morning coat, which had been ordered by letter from the attractive price lists of the same enterprising firm. It was dull on that mountain border, in the monsoon, and to order goods and wait to see if they would come was the only diversion. Only the week before we, the officers, had wired to Calcutta for a wedding, a christening, and a birthday cake, to cheer our drooping appetites. We also used to ponder with glee on what the firm would say to the order. We had specially stipulated for plenty of almond icing.

Anyway, Susie Hammerslip, now Mrs. Sultān Jān of the Suleiman Khel, was going to seek her fortune in Afghanistan, with a caravan of frock-coats. One had heard tales now and again of Australian women returning with the Powindahs, as the trading clans of the Ghilzai are called. I had often wondered how they had fared, and whether or no they had held their own among the fierce clansmen and their dark, handsome, jealous womenfolk. Whether or no, as they lost their looks, they were drifting to the position of the old mother carrying the samovar,—such a one as you may see tottering after the caravan, instead of occupying the lacquered khajawah, that had been her right twenty years before, now relegated to fighting the fire, and catching the camels that broke away at night from their moorings. Perhaps Susie was of sterner clay, that would control by right of tongue and brawnier arm, and assert the fact that white is white in the East, till the blood is diluted out of all knowing.

However that may be, Susie and I stood overlooking the harbour by the iron bulwarks in the waist of the ship, while spirits and colour returned to her cheek, at freedom from the motion and the prospect of terra firma. And I saw that she was a red-haired, round-faced lass, with a good stubborn lip, and a firm-set chin, her skin covered with that fine down which marks those much in the open air. It was a Saxon or a Teuton face, full of good temper and devoid of any evil. I chatted to her of what she was to see, and what Afghanistan might be like, to her chorus of “Oh, my,” while her husband collected their belongings. When they finally appeared for landing, Sultān Jān was in a suit of rough tweeds, more or less resembling a member of one of the Latin races, for the Afghans are a fair people, while Susie was in a blue print dress with a Rob Roy shawl over her shoulders. To my inquiry if he wanted any money, Sultān Jān replied that he did not, as he would find a friend in Bombay to give him all he wanted, and that he should stay to do a day’s business and then travel second-class to Peshawur. He was grateful for my assistance during the voyage, and had expressed himself as a mason should, vowing that if ever I needed help across the border in men or money, work or amusement, I was to call on him. Susie was not good at putting her thanks into words, but I took the liberty of giving her a small pocket revolver, and also my address in the Punjab, urging her to send to it if she found the situation more than she could handle. Further, I told her, which I knew to be the case, that she would not be allowed to cross the British border into Afghanistan until she had appeared before a British magistrate and satisfied him that she went of her own free will. However, she had no misgivings. The prospect before her seemed infinitely brighter than anything she had seen in her hovel existence on the edge of the Bush, and she seemed to have Sultān Jān in hand, unconsciously asserting the superiority of her very inferior white blood.

The last I saw of them was in a taxi, if you please, driving along the Back Bay, evidently very pleased with themselves and in no want of money. A few months later I inquired up on the Frontier, and was told that a Powindah had crossed the border with a white wife, and that according to the orders of the Government of India she had been interviewed by the magistrate of the frontier district through which she passed. It happened to be Dera Ismael Khan, and she had expressed herself perfectly content, and anxious to proceed to her husband’s people. So two things were obvious, one that Sultān Jān was not a bad sort of fellow, and secondly, that the lass had plenty of grit and force of character.

II

A couple of years after my meeting with Sultān Jān and lass Susie, I happened to be at Attock, at the end of April, just as the hot weather was beginning. The Frontier looks at its best in the early April mornings, the haze has not yet hidden the frontier snows, and the fleecy tumuli of cloud have not yet gathered round the tops of the peaks. Roses are in every garden, and the green wheat is everywhere dazzling in its brightness. The air is soft with the heavy scent of flowers, and there is only a pleasant feeling of lassitude and a desire to sit and feel the soft warm breeze on the cheek. There is hardly any hint of the coming vengeance when the land shall be a fiery furnace, and a pea-soup haze heavy with dust shall descend on the land like an extinguisher. The old fortress of Attock, so old in its origin that legend even is silent, stood as it always stands, overhanging the Indus, in clear silhouette against the wall of peaks beyond. The old walls look their best as you face them coming from the north-west, as they were meant to face, guarding India against the waves of the North.

Peshawur and the Peshawur valley lie, as all the world knows, west of the great river Indus, and they are both geographically part of Afghanistan. Ethnographically, too, for the matter of that, as the peasantry have been Afghan for many a long year. Almost since Islam came to be a world force the Muhammadan waves of the North and North-West have swept into India, and the road from Kabul through the Khaiber, and past Peshawur over the Indus at the Attock ferry, has been one of the roads by which the North swept the South. It is also the way by which Alexander of Macedon entered the country of King Porus, to defeat him within a mile or so of where “Paddy” Gough fought the Sikhs by the mud village of Chillianwallah. The Peshawur valley and Euzufzai are full of Greek remains. Unsophisticated peasants will sell you real Greek coins, and the sophisticated ones will forge them for you, and one is as like another as two peas.

So to stand on the Afghan side and look on Fort Attock, or to stand on the bastions and look out on the ring of mountains and the great snow wall of the Sufaid Koh, is to look into the mirror of the ages and also on to a kinema of a thousand years, if God has given you wit to see it. Ghilzai, Tartar, Afghan, Moghul, all the ruthless hordes of the high bare plateaus, longing for the riches of the warm South, have passed over the ferry and fought as to who should hold dominion of the fortress. Only just across the river, too, lying between the Black Mountain and Euzufzai, is the great hill of Mahabun, which alone fulfils the description by the Alexandrian historians of the rock of Aomos that the conqueror himself stormed. Every peasant lad in the countryside can tell you something of Badshah Sikunder (King Alexander). How many of England know who scoured out the White Horse, and why? Yet Alexander lived a thousand years before Alfred, which is all the difference between a people who do forget and a people who don’t.

It was early morning, then, in April, that I had sat for a moment, on a bastion in the fort and watched the good garrison artillery slew about the heavy guns that guard the now British Attock, and saw these monsters get their morning dose of petrol jelly, before mounting a pony to go and see the life on the great trunk road. The ferry-boat is not in great request, and the bridge of boats is long gone, though the boatman of Attock is famous as a harnesser of wild rivers all Asia over. He is fit to be compared with a Canadian voyageur, and could show a Thames lighterman quite a lot. But the great English Sirkar has thrown an iron two-floor bridge over the gorge below the fort, where the waters swirl a hundred feet deep. The railway runs atop and the road traffic below, and even the wild Bactrian camel learns to stomach the rumble of the iron camel over his head. The bridge is flanked with loop-holed blockhouses, and the great iron gates can close, to turn the whole bridge into a fortress if need be. A few policemen watch it, seemingly, but a very short notice will bring the soldiery to take their place.

To those very idle folk who have time for such things there is more value in the variety of humans who cross the bridge at Attock than in most places of vantage chosen of the muser. Here also, probably, the secret service agent and the police detective watch the crowd. A hundred Lee-Enfield rifles have been stolen from a down-country cantonment. They will be making their ways to the frontier in small parcels. As in the Transvaal, Oud Missis went to bed with the family rifles in the hope of profiting by the well-known bashfulness of the British subaltern, so the old lady on the bullock cart may be sitting on a dozen. The Indian police have few finer feelings in such matters. They are out to get the rifles. The Wahabee fanatic and agent provocateur from Patna is making his way to Buner to stir the faithful to beat the drum ecclesiastic and annoy the Government. He was last heard of at Lahore. A secret service agent is looking for him at Attock Bridge. A drove of pack bullocks comes by with some Punjabees bringing maize from their village. Three handsome clean-built lads and two such jolly lasses with dark-blue petticoats and shawls. You can well believe, to see them, that Alexander really did, as tradition says, leave his invalid Greeks to rest awhile and colonise. Those well-moulded heads and limbs speak for themselves. A string of horses and ponies with an Indian cavalry orderly or two come along, stirring a different note. There is a polo tournament in Nowshera, and the English officers from Rawal Pindi would fain compete. Their ponies march, but well guarded, since the Afghan is par excellence a horse thief. But the great sight to see that day was the assembling of the Powindah kafilas.² The great Ghilzai clans come down with their camels each year, and have done so for generations, to winter in the plains of India. In April they collect by tribe and sept and clan, and march back. Many come down from Ghuzni and leave their camels and wives and children in the Derajat, other clans come into the Peshawur valley and the Rawal Pindi district. As I wait the bridge warden sounds his drum. That means that all passage from the Peshawur side is to cease and let the string from India have its chance, which is only another form of the policeman at Hyde Park Corner.

I watched this string with even greater interest. I knew it well, and it was always new. Big, handsome, bearded men, heads of clans, stride at the head, who in a couple of days will be wearing sword and buckler and carrying a rifle, now safely lodged in the frontier post at Jamrud for the preservation of the Pax Britannica. Behind them come the large camels that carry the lacquered khajawahs in which ride the younger women and their fat roly-poly babies, with many hair ornaments and a fierce, determined, yet merry face, which they are not averse to show, especially if lord and master be not looking. Then come hundreds of laden camels with the household goods and the Persian pussy-cats, and also the merchandise, the bales of frock-coats, and tin plates and all the goods that the East now wants of the West, even in primitive Afghanistan. After the laden camels come the dachis, the female camels, which never carry loads, and running by their side their absurd and supercilious young. There is nothing in the world so supercilious in its air and its lines and contours as a baby camel. Here in these large kirris they come by the hundred, born during the winter on the flats around the Indus.

At the head of one of the parties I met a headman with whom I had a nodding acquaintance, and passed him the time of day, after the stately and courtly manner of the Afghans, which begins—“Don’t be tired,” “Don’t be cast down,” “Are you well?” “Are you strong?” “Is all your family well?” and so forth. When we had exchanged our running fire of inquiry and counter-inquiry, we talked of trade and the border and what might be the state of politics at Kabul. That is always an interesting theme. The Amir of Kabul then ruled a kittle race. It is Sir Alfred Lyall who makes the late Amir Abdur Rahman say, as he looks over the fair vineyards from his palace in the Bala Hissar—

“You might think I am reigning in heaven I know I am ruling in hell.”

Once I knew an Englishman who was paying a visit of ceremony to the Amir, and sat in the balcony of an upper storey eating ice-cream with his Highness. Suddenly in the courtyard below a hundred or so mutinous soldiers of a Herati regiment were marched in in chains. The Amir scowled at them and gulped his ice-cream. “Poke their eyes out!” he growled. And poked out they were, then and there, while the Afghan ate on. But if you would rule an Afghan you must apparently be ruthless. At any rate Kabul gossip was always worth hearing, and it was some time before I thought to ask my friend if he knew aught of one Sultān Jān of the Turbaz Khel of the Suleiman Khel. My friend at once replied, Certainly he did; and that his camp was a mile or so across the Indus and up the bank in a patch of green among reeds and marsh. Presently he volunteered the information that I had not cared to ask for—viz. that he had brought a memsahib as a wife, and had twin children. I venture to inquire, after some beating about the bush, how the memsahib had got on among the women of the kirri. “Well,” he said, “of course, sahib, I do hear the women’s gossip; but as you know, sahib, we Afghans do keep our women and our families pretty much to themselves. Once I heard that Sultān Jān’s wife beat three Ghilzai women, just as a sahib beats his syce, because they would not let her fill water-pots at a well. They came home frightened, and said they had been beaten with a wooden spoon. But I know not. It is not well in Afghanistan to be mixed up with other men’s women.”

So I let the subject drop; and after more discussion on Kabul affairs we turned to the ever-interesting subject of the arms traffic. In the days of the old wars, when Keene and Nott and Pollock went up the passes, the long tribal matchlock was a far better weapon for sharpshooting than good Brown Bess. Then the tribes sat o’ nights on the hill-tops and flicked hammered bullets into British camps with impunity. Then the British possessed themselves of a rifle and became top dog once again. But soon the whole of Afghanistan set itself to obtain rifles by hook or by crook; and for many years a man mounted sentry on the frontier, and indeed in Upper India generally, with the knowledge that it was even betting that he would be knifed in the night by a rifle thief. In every sort of guise, from helper to harlot, the rifle thief would stalk the sentry or steal to the arms-racks. Up in the Kohat Pass an expert mechanic had set up a factory in which he actually turned out Martinis by hand, and would even fake the Tower mark on them, so old and so far-reaching is the craft of doping. But sentries grew very wary, and the Sirkar posted them in pairs, and it gradually became hard for a rifle thief of even the first flight to gain a fair living. Then, since necessity is the mother of invention, and rifles the tribes must have, some one hit on the idea of a vast rifle caravan trade from the Persian Gulf through Seistan. Good English merchants took it up eagerly. Cheap Birmingham rifles, with “God bless the work” inlaid in Arabic on the lock, flowed into the Gulf for the dhow-runners to land on the Mekran coast. Rifles almost became a drug in the market. From four hundred rupees double, they fell to rupees one-fifty Kabuli, and every evil-conditioned lad on the border-side had a passable Martini-Henry slung on his back. Breech-loading ammunition, which was formerly certainly worth its weight in copper, came down in proportion. Instead of lying await for your neighbour till you could get the muzzle of your rifle close under his arm-pit, you could afford to snipe at him from a hill-top while he took his family for an airing. The which was a very great scandal. The good English soon realised that not only was some one sowing a crop of dragon’s teeth for them to reap, next time haute politique or even mere police work took them over the border, but that even into India itself would this rifle-trade spread. But Afghanistan is a free country, where the hand keeps the head, and if the Amir does not mind, or knows he cannot prevent, his subjects exchanging jezails for magazine rifles, it is no one else’s legal business. Yet there was a very fair case for doing something in that it was in the interests of humanity, good government, and what scoffing Liberal papers call “lauranorder,” to suppress the traffic by fair means or foul. Therefore, the British Government which would not restrain its own Christian merchants from flooding the Gulf with cheap rifles, decided to turn pirate and hoist the Jolly Roger on its own ships of war in the Persian Gulf. The wisdom of this action, from all dictates of humanity and policy and good government, was beyond discussion. To the Afghan mind, however, it appeared an act of pure piracy. This was to some extent enhanced by the fact that after the immense profits that accrued when the first few caravans came through, all the widows and orphans put their money into the arms traffic as folk rushed to the South Sea Bubble. Therefore, said my friend, the action of the British patrols on the Gulf shores had created many mixed situations. All of which was interesting, and to one who had spent many nights out of bed after the said rifle thieves, quite good hearing.

So, after watching some more of the Powindah kirris go by, I turned up to the rest-house, determining to try and find Sultān Jān’s camp in the cool of the evening. At the rest-house I found a new-comer and old acquaintance, no less than Dr. H——, one of those medical missionaries of whom Dr. Pennell of Bannu was such a famous type. Up and down the Afghan Border are settled the British Medical Missions, working on the principle of mend the body and then heal the souls. We had our murghi rost³ together, and I told him the tale of Sultān Jān, the Ghilzai, and Susie Hammerslip, and how she had gone for an Afghan wife a couple of years or so ago.

“Aha!” said H——, “I know her well, for I was at Dera Ismael Khan when they went through. I had a message from the man to ask me to come and see him on urgent business, and I rode over to his camp, near the rukh,⁴ on the Paharpur road. He came out to meet me and said in English, ‘Good evening, Mr. H——, my wife is down with fever.’ To my surprise he let me in at once, and there I found this white girl. There was not much wrong. A sharp go of fever in a new subject. I saw her twice, and the Deputy-Commissioner saw her, and she was quite happy, and prepared to go over the border.”

H—— therefore fell readily into my proposal that we should go and look for their camp that the Powindah malik had told me of, and we started off on horseback when we had had tea. It took us three miles to cross the bridge and ride round the gorge, and emerge off the road on to the grass flats and reeds of the Indus bed. We saw some tents on a green patch half a mile or so away, and cantered on towards them, flushing a flight of teal and a couple of Brahmini duck as we did so. Outside the camp was standing my old acquaintance of the steamer, Sultān Jān, the Ghilzai, otherwise “Aldo,” attracted by the galloping over the turf. As we drew up he recognised us both, and rushed towards us with the Afghan welcomes. We were more than welcome, said he, and his wife would give us tea and show us the children. The tents were good ones, the ordinary camp outfit of a police officer, or something of that sort. We entered the first, to find it an empty tent save for a couple of small stools and an ordinary Indian durrie on the ground. Sultān Jān pressed us to sit on the stools, and said his wife would come in a minute. A minute more and come she did, with two of the jolliest roly-poly children imaginable, one on each hand. Susie was dressed in the black calico skirts and shawl that made an Afghan matron’s working costume. She was looking happy and roundabout, and seemed genuinely glad to see us, and immensely proud of the two grey-eyed, fat children, a boy and girl, as like as two peas, with the healthy olive tan of the Powindah babes who turn somersaults for you as you drive by, and call paisa wacha-wa, which may be interpreted “throw us a copper.” Whether they were to be fair or dark, or just half-way, it was not possible to say. They showed neither parentage in a marked way, while Afghan children are always fair to commence with. Susie chatted to H——, and had questions to ask of the children’s ailments, and I inquired of life with the Ghilzais, and how the world was treating them. The frock-coat venture had turned out a great success, and Sultān Jān had decided to embark on the arms trade, sending his own brother to the coast for the rifles. He had spent on this venture not only the most of his own ready money, but that of several sections and influential persons in Birmal, and the consignment was to have been a very large one. But, alas! the best laid plans go agley, and when reckoning on carrying out a harmful trade, even in the best of good faith, you have to reckon with the British Government anywhere east of Suez. The caravan got safely down to the coast, its camel-drivers armed to the teeth themselves. The money was handed over to the rifle-merchants at Muscat, and four dhows heavily laden were making for the Mekran coast. Just as they were about to land, a steam pinnace of H.M.S. Lavender appeared in sight, and at once cleared for action. The dhows were beached, and at once attacked by the patrol. The expectant camel-men, waiting on the dunes above the shore, hurried to their assistance, and while a pretty fight among the sand-hills was in progress, the Lavender herself steamed in and brought her quick-firers into play. The game was then up, and the dhows became prize, while the caravan sullenly returned inland to mourn for its empty saddle-bags and vanished rupees. Sultān Jān, in addition to losing his own money, had incurred the deadly enmity of half a dozen influential men in Birmal, whose money he had promised to double for them, and who could not believe that all had been on the square. It was to avoid these same gentry that Sultān Jān had come with the kirrie down the Kurram instead of down the Gomal as usual, and he confessed he was in some anxiety lest some one should be in wait for him on the return journey. Susie, he said, was all for braving it out, but he feared the worst, and yet was compelled to go back with a fresh cargo of frock-coats, the friendly seth having advanced the money. Then he appealed to me by the old appeal to look after his family if anything happened to him. Duty as well as inclination made me give a hearty promise, and say that perhaps the Medical Mission at Bannu would be the best place to send a request to me for help, or else the Deputy-Commissioner’s house at Peshawur. After some billy-made tea, preferable far to the native-made variety, we said good-bye to the party, and wished them all fortune, returning to Attock by the ferry. H—— told me of what he could gather of their life from his talk with Susie. She had said that she got on with the women, that they were all afraid of her, yet seemed to like her, and that Sultān Jān was very good to her, and she liked the rough nomad life they lived. She had good tents, and they had sufficient servants to be comfortable. In fact there was nothing to regret in the far harder life she had led in the Bush. That night we sat talking of the border, and how Pennell managed the tribesmen, and of his wonderful old mother, in her British soldier’s sun helmet, and her constant suspicion lest her white visitors should smell of tobacco. Those were the days before Pennell had married Dr. Sorabjie, and later died untimely, at the point of duty, in the middle of high achievement. In the morning we went our several ways, and beyond an occasional remembrance, Susie and her family passed out of my mind.

III

A few months later the border had been extremely restless. That firebrand, the Mullah Powindah, had, as usual, been pulling out the British tail-feathers. Government was also, as usual, very disinclined to have a military expedition to bring the border folk to reason. Also, it was quite the worst time of year for moving troops. So it was advisable to pretend that the trouble was merely the young bloods frolicking, and that no doubt the elders would make restitution in due course. Still, precautions were necessary, and the political officers of the border, and those lost souls who form for the time being the Frontier garrisons, were enjoying the month of August in tents at the mouth of the Tochi, one of those popular passes leading from Afghanistan to England via Waziristan. It was a foul night. Hot? No, hardly; it wants a better word than hot to describe the mouth of a Frontier pass in August. The raw red cliffs have baked in the sun all day, and are now yielding the heat to the atmosphere at compound interest. A dust haze hung around, and the river had given off some of its moisture to make that dust hang, as a velvet curtain hangs, heavy and still. The soldiery lay and gasped, the only good thing in the world being water-melons. A water-melon in the Tochi, after a day in the sun and dust, is far, oh! far better, than a dinner at the Ritz, for the whole world goes by contrast. When you have ridden long from border post to border post, and your horse can hardly crawl, there is no hostel to compare with the officers’ mud room, in the Frontier post. There is then no meal like the tea and mixed biscuits out of a tin, with an old bound volume of Maga, dealing of tales from the outposts in the ’seventies, or how the Bengal Fusiliers marched to Delhi and the like.

However, the soldiery were sucking melons for consolation, all except a chapao, or ambush, with a British subaltern in charge, out to catch one of the krab admis,⁵ who had fired into the camp the night before from his Majesty’s turnpike road. Those who had not melons lay and gasped. A foul moon redolent of heat sneered down on the bivouac, and Aldebaran looked like the fiery eye of some devil. Then a shot; only one, and from our side. The camp sat up and said, “Got the blighter this time.” But then on the restless air came a murmur. There were prisoners, and they were bringing them along. To me as warden the party was brought, as they were rounded up on the road. The shot had been nerves on the part of the sentry. And this was what the party consisted of. A great shaggy Central Asian camel, with a female figure on top, with a long rolled bundle in her arms resting across the camel’s hump. On either side of the camel was a pannier, and in each a frightened child. Behind, disarmed but mounted, two Afghans.

It was Susie Hammerslip and her twin babies, with her man’s corpse in her arms, and two clansmen behind her. The officer of the piquet had a letter in his hand. On it was written to “Brother Baring sahib.” Inside was a strange mark, and the words in badly written English, “Remember the children of the widow.” That was how Susie came back to her own people, her man with her.

The camel knelt outside my tent, and Susie, hollow-eyed and silent, climbed down from her seat. In her hand was a long-barrelled Colt pistol. The children were lifted out in silence, and taken to a spare tent of mine. The two Afghans went off to see the political serai. The story, as I gathered it from the clansmen and as Susie confirmed it next day, was simple enough. The caravan I had seen in the spring had got through with the bales of frock-coats. Sultān Jān had effectively eluded any one waiting for him. They had gone up into their summer camp after disposing of their wares, and had their camels and their flocks grazing on the downs north of Ghuzni. In the peace and quiet of the upland summer there had been no troubles save with the young camels. The children rambled through the aromatic heather and filled their skirts with the Prophet’s flower. There had been no talks of war or raids, and even the news from Kabul was uneventful. One night a small caravan, however, came along, apparently of Wazirs from Birmal, and had craved hospitality, which was of course freely offered them. The guests had talked trade and politics, and dipped deep into the cinnamon stew of fat-tailed sheep, and slept as tired men sleep. In the morning Sultān Jān had accompanied them to the edge of his camp, and his guests lingered while their camels moved ahead. Then one had struck him with a knife and another shot him through the chest simultaneously and galloped off. Susie and a servant had rushed out to find her husband lying dying but able to speak. He had told her that the men had said to him, “This will teach you to trade in rifles,” and then had scrawled the note to me, and told her to come over the border to the British at once. This had only happened the day before yesterday in the morning, and she with two of her husband’s relatives had brought the children and his body straight through, unmolested by tribesmen. Sultān Jān had evidently feared that the vendetta might be carried on to his children, and Susie had moved immediately with the help of his two relatives, bringing, as so often is done in the East, the poor corpse with her.

The rest of the story is uneventful. Next day Sultān Jān was buried by his relatives and some Pathans from the militia in the little Muhammadan cemetery, under a willow-tree, by the shrine of a local saint. The grave, after the fashion of Islam, contained the recess for the examining angel to question the departed on his record of life. He had done his best by the wild girl of alien creed and race, and she had done him equally well. In both accounts it is without doubt recorded.

Susie and her children went down to Kohat by tonga next day, consigned to the nuns in a quiet convent in the Himalaya, till I and the brethren could make permanent arrangements. One little glimpse I had of the youngsters that cheered me. Rosy, jolly folk the two of them—the girl a little frightened, the boy sturdy and defiant. They were waiting for the tonga, by their small bundle of possessions, and their Afghan relatives were saying farewell. One knelt to the boy, and said, “Now, sonnie, what will you do for us who have rescued you and brought you down with such care?”

“I will cut the throats of the lot of you,” said the boy, and the fierce men of the hills laughed approval. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! This mingling of Briton and Afghan is a sturdy blend, and some of the sons of such mingling have already carved a mark or two in history.

So Susie and her twins galloped away into the dust of the Frontier road, and I and the troops went about our business. Since then it has been arranged that she and her children shall be installed on a small fruit and chicken farm in the Himalaya, and the children in due course properly educated. And there the tragedy rests for the time being.

The Lost Garden

I

Below the Pir Panjal

Ever since mankind have searched for and pondered on the lost site of the Garden of Eden, the finding of an old site that once was a pleasaunce has always filled souls with delight. And there are so many places in the world to be found by those who look for them; some carefully tended, with ruins to match, so that they are not really lost, but only gone before. Others struggle with bramble and overgrowth unknown, a broken idol or an old-world fane amid the screen of creepers. I have met such round the world, and sometimes you find them in Ireland, lying to the soft, wet west wind, looking through the mullion of what once was a chapel window, amid the saxifrages and old-world things grown wild.

The East is perhaps where they strike you most, especially since Lord Curzon has had gardens planted round all the famous ruins of the Mogul days, too tidy perhaps for their purpose, but before his conserving hand came eastward, you might ramble along among the ill-kept or forgotten baghs. The ruins and remains of Mogul gardens are the most fascinating things in India. They were great gardeners, those Turkish and Mogul princes. Somewhere in Central Asia the garden cult had excelled, making use of mountains and streams and using for their purpose the fruit and the rose, the narcissus and the iris which grow wild. A Chăgătai⁶ garden relied not on its wealth of flowers, but on the beauty of its layout.

Some years ago, chance willed that I should journey from the ancient bastioned city of Jammu at the Indian foot of the Kashmir Himalayas to Kashmir itself. But I was to have with me as furniture and recreation a newly-raised mountain battery, formed under my supervision for the army of the Kashmir state. And we were to march to Gilgit, far away towards the tumbled mountains that lead to the Pamirs and the “Roof of the World.” But as never a man had marched before and few of them could even girth up a gun mule, which is a feat of strength, we were going leisurely so that the men should learn, far from the haunts of men and troops who might jeer. Also we were going by a route that no one knew, across the great Chenab, at Akhnoor, all under the slopes of the Pir Panjal, and then into the little principality of Poonch and thus on to join the great highway into Kashmir and thence up the snowy passes to Gilgit.

So we marched by way of stony country paths along the foot-hills, past here and there a castle, some still garrisoned and some derelict, till we came to the level of the lower pines, the longifolia. The length and breadth of the Himalaya you will find the grouping of the accurate Old Testament! The cedar, the pine, the fir, and the box, Cedaris deodaris, Pinus excelsa, and longifolia, the Norwegian fir, the Abies Webbiana and Taxus baccata and no doubt many another, always together, as wise old Isaiah chants, “The cedar, the pine, the fir and the box.” But first and foremost, as you leave the plains and the hot plain air you come to the longifolia amid the sandstone hills. Then as we marched, we struck into the ancient ways of the Mogul emperors when they journeyed from Lahore in May, as was their programme, right over the Pir Panjal, by a cobbled road which rises still to many thousand feet and passes out of the forest to the birch tree and the juniper bush, close to the great glaciers, and then down into the Happy Valley of which Tommy Moore sang so convincingly.

And the Moguls longed for their Central Asian gardens, and made them in miniature at every stage—and from Lahore to Srinagar is thirty-one stages—as they had made them at Agra and Delhi and Lahore aforesaid; walled serais with bastions round the garden, planted with peaches and plums, and with iris and flowering shrubs and little rills and channels and fountains. Elephants and even guns, wives and eunuchs and courtiers, tramped up and down these mountain roads, spring and autumn, for a century or more, for the great emperors with their sonorous Persian titles, since on the ascension to the throne their names left them. They sing themselves as they go, as I have said before, Jehāngir, Shāhjĕhān, Ālămgir, Shah Ālăam. . . . Intone them aright as you would a Kyrie—“The World-Holder,” “The King of the Universe,” “The World Encircler,” “The Ruler of the World,” so let them go.

And their gardens, those in the great places rescued by the great world-holder, George Curzon, the rest left to the dragon and the bittern and to some toothless old keeper, too old to keep the ivy from displacing the carved stones in the summer-houses. Here, marching from Jammu City to Kashmir, we struck into the first by the old castle of Rampur Rajaori on that good fishing ground the Rajaori Tawi.

The battery camped outside the serai, and I went in to look and fell a-musing. The headman of the village brought me two gold coins in a handkerchief as nazzar to touch and to remit after the way of magnates, for was I not the supermaster of a battery of artillery and the only Angrez, for here they use the old forgotten name of the English, who had come this many a year. I found it all as Tavernier had said, the French chirurgeon of the Mogul, nearly three hundred years before.

It was a hot day, though within the lower bilk and there was little to do save spin for mahseer in the Tawi and explore the garden. The pattern of the serai seemed to be sealed, for one had seen the high archway and the bastioned corners, with the umbrella-shaped awning in red sandstone, wherever the Moguls had built their pleasaunces. But this garden was on the side of the hill, and water from a canal could enter it. Down the centre came the long stone water-trough, and the series of cascades each cut in stone in a different pattern, so that the water should ripple contrariwise in the sunlight, and fill the round, breast-like fountain tops long dry and silent. Gnarled old apple trees were still in blossom, and the almond tree flourished hard by the husk of an arabesque pleasure-house. The iris and the Prophet’s Flower peeped out among the gentle banafra, the spring violets that all the world use as tisane. The little pink tulips abounded along the paths and narcissi in crowded profusion sprouted in the side channels, and squirrels chattered among the pilasters. I looked for the canal that should bring the water in, and heard it gurgling outside, taking the clear hill water to the terraced wheatfields. It was easy to dam it and to turn it into the garden under an arch in the wall. It pushed masses of fallen leaves along and made its way to the masonried troughs and the channels which lead to the stone cascades; at last it got room to move and opened out over the fluted stone. Then began the music of long-parched rills and the water danced as it danced to the Mogul ladies. Besides me stood the gardener, toothless and doubled with age and rheumatism. One yellow tooth peered at me over a mouth so old that it was like a rotten medlar, fringed with beard and moustache dyed red, after the red hair of the Prophet.

“Sahib,” he said, “it is forbidden, but who can compel the Angrez, though the Presence will certainly reward his faithful servant, who has not had wherewithal to smoke this twelvemonth,” and he fell a-mumbling that aforetime he was a man and a king’s servant and carried a matchlock in a red baize bag behind a potentate, and now had not even a huqah fill, and so forth after a manner of ancient mariners and gardeners all the world over.

So while the battery rested, and when the fishing had grown dull, I brought my camp chair to the chabutra and sat among the ruins and watched the apple blossoms fall and smelt the sweet narcissi and wondered, for—

“I love the cities to whose ruined walls
The ivied vesture of oblivion clings,”

and would fain have seen the Turkish ladies of the marching train disporting on the sides of those mountain ripples.

And so the day just frittered itself away and the soft breezes blew, till “boot and saddle” called us on our way. Then at dawn we swung out, the jinketty-jink of the gun mules sounding on the pavé, whose large rounded pebble-ways suited the spongy feet of our baggage camels. And we followed the ancient way for fifteen miles, till we came to the next stage, in a dark cool glen under a pine-clad hill-side, above which towered the snowy peaks of the Pir Panjal, and against the green background I could see the great arch of the serai, but the modern camping-ground lay half a mile back from it, alongside a Moslem burial-ground, with iris growing over the tombs. My Moslem orderly rolled out the Arabic greeting, “As Salaam Aleikum ahl-i-kabool,” “Peace be with you, dwellers in the tomb.” By a small white shrine, a dozen bamboos carried the fluttering rags that pilgrims leave, and near it grovelled a leper, who joined his arm stumps and sought largesse, in a cry forged on anvils hot with pain.

II

The Sanniyasi

Later in the day I strolled down to the serai to look for another tangled garden, and found outside it a Hindu shrine, of severe and very ancient style, standing by a sward of turf. Up and down the green walked the sanniyasi, “The world renouncer,” the recluse in charge, apparently deep in thought, grave of mien and austere of countenance, as becomes one who long ago renounced in seven years’ novitiate the pleasures and pains of this world. I accosted him humbly and courteously, as a man should speak to a recluse. He halted in his pacing and looked at me for a second, and then he bowed. I smiled at him, and a flicker of a smile played across his smooth, lineless face in answer.

“My son, what seek you?”

“Nahin Baba! I seek nothing, I but eat the air after a long march, wandering hither and thither without a purpose, but I would enter the old Mogul garden that must belong to this serai.”

“What brings you to the old garden?”

“Curiosity, father, and a love for old places. Especially would I call to memory the times of the Chăgătai, and see their courtiers and their ladies a-marching to Kashmir.”

The sanniyasi nodded and smiled to himself. “My son, you have spoken well. I, too, love to muse on things that have passed as well as on things that are to come. Perhaps I can help you in your quest. You will not find the garden by the serai. It is up on the hill, and the Chăgătai put it there because of the karez, the water channel which runs out of the rock.”

“Indeed, Baba,” I replied, “if you could help me or tell me some legend of the place that would be a great pleasure.”

“Come first with me.” And he led me towards the little shrine of grey limestone carved outside with a curious pattern, something resembling the rose and portcullis of the Tudor period. The entrance was through a high pointed arch, and the darkness within for the moment was unfathomable. And then my eyes slowly recovered from the numb of the outside glare, and I could see that a tiny flat lamp, or chirāg, flickered in front of an image. Then I saw that it was not the popular conception of Mahadeo, but the solemn, deep-browed Indra, another persona of the deity. The figure was cut of black basalt, dark and polished, and then the chirāg flared as the sanniyasi dropped something over it. As it flared I could see the countenance of the carven image, and it was a countenance that betrayed calm and peace on a road untold, far different from the more common Hindu figures. The stone eyes seemed to watch and follow one, with a look that would penetrate one’s deepest thoughts. I looked at the sanniyasi, who smiled at me, and said, “That is the great Indra who knoweth and maketh all. Yesterday, to-day, and forever are but one, and could you but see as those eyes see, you would know all that you want of the garden of the Turks. Now look at me.”

And I looked, and he passed his hands in front of my face, and the chirāg flared again. Then we went out.

“Now I will take you to the garden.”

III

The Garden

Above the temple a cobbled stairway led up the face of the hill-side. And we climbed up, the Indian leading, on to a plateau which lay at the foot of a wooded hill-side, and below me lay the dressed lines of the battery camp. Thus we came by a clump of pine to the Kaiseri Darwaza, the door of the Emperor. To my surprise it stood in good order, complete in arch, and the polished plaster of marble surface intact instead of peeling. Over the inner gateway was a Persian inscription similar to that in the jasper-inlaid entrance over the Hall of Private Audience in the Mogul Palace at Delhi. Here it is in its beautiful Persian:

"Agar Fardous ba rue zaminast
Haminast! Haminast! Haminast!"

which may be translated:

“If there is a heaven on earth
It is this! It is this! It is this!”

The Chăgătai were famous for their inscriptions, and were students and lovers of Persian poetry, as were all the cultivated folk of Central Asia. But written on the great gate in the tomb of saintly Salim Chistie, in Akbar’s wonderful city of Fatehpur Sikri, that is now deserted, is a more wonderful one still. Akbar would have founded such a religion as has been the despair of many great thinkers, that should combine the good of every creed regardless of the fact that no human mind could make the selection. But he culled what he could, and on the gateway of the Chistie’s tomb is recorded the following in that beautiful flowing ornate form of Arabic the Khaita Kufi: “And Jesus said, the world is a bridge, you must not build on it.” Pass over, and build not tenements as men of old built on London Bridge. There it stands, a new message for Christendom, and for all the world, and now above me stood the words of different import, claiming that the garden within was a heaven on earth. And if you notice these things, you will see that the word used for heaven is fardous not behisht. Now fardous, or paradise as the Greeks spelt it, means that thing of longing to Eastern potentates, a hunting-park, a New Forest, while behisht is the real haven of peace, not of the slaying of game. Of all the beautiful names in the East, this is given to the water-carrier, the name that men so thinkingly use, the bheesti or bihishti, the water-carrier, “The man of heaven.” You can hear the cry going down the platforms of the railway-station on an Eastern day in midsummer. “Oh, man of heaven, bring water.” You can hear Dives calling to Lazarus, “Touch my tongue with water, I burn.”

And here above me was the promised heaven on earth, and outside the gate a bheesti with his leather water-bag sprinkled water to lay the dust.

So together the sanniyasi and I entered the garden and stepped on the soft green lawn, greener than even the lawns of Curzon the World-Holder, in Delhi. And up the centre was a row of Italian cypresses, and beyond, the marble trough with the fountain at play, I could hear the drowsy splash and the rippling of the cascades as we stepped on the grass. Who, I reflected, had so endowed this garden that it had never fallen to decay? Had Curzon been this way and made an edict?

But the recluse laid his finger on his lips and we walked on. Indeed it seemed that speech was out of place, the blossom shone in the morning sun, and its rays scintillated a hundred lights and colours from the ripples, the tall spangled poplars on the edge of the garden waved and whispered and I caught a glimpse among the apricots of the goodly wings of the peacock. Not a sound save the murmur of the winds, and the whisper of the water, and we came to a terrace and ascended steps by the side of steeper and more splashy ripples, over stone that was cut in the shape of lotus and their leaves. Then as we looked came the sound of silver voices, the voices of women prattling, and six maidens came down a marble path by an upper row of fountains, lithe figures and pretty faces, with embroidered bodices of plum-coloured silk, little pieces of mirror sewn thereon, which sparkled in the sun like the ripples on the cascade. Their arms, and their bodies below their bosoms, were bare to the waist, and below were very voluminous skirts of white muslin. And they were carrying crimson rugs, and two of them a crimson and gold umbrella. The rugs they spread at one end of the terrace where stood a small marble summer-house, athwart the channel above a cascade, and the umbrella they stuck in the lawn, for itwas attached to a long gilt pole shod with iron.

As they spread the rugs and arranged the cushions, one of them struck the strings of a zither. The notes twanged across the rippling water, soft and sweet and restful. Presently they sprang to their feet, and we heard more voices. Down the same path now walked a beautiful woman, clad much as the maidens, save that she wore above her bodice a shawl of embroidered muslin, and on her head a high cap of crimson, bound with a gold frame set with turquoise, the head-dress of a Tartar lady of rank. By her side walked a tall, olive-faced man, with a black beard, and a small gold and white turban on his head. His dress was a long yellow gown on which were embroidered roses, and round his waist a crimson sash, in which was stuck a green velvet gold-shod scabbard containing a sword with golden hilt. Behind them two Nubian boys waved fly-whisks gracefully, as the royal pair walked, for royal I judged them to be.

“Is the Rajah of Poonch here?” I whispered.

“That is no rajah, my son,” replied the sanniyasi, “that is Jehangir the Great Mogul, who passes to Kashmir, and with him is Nur Jehan his wife, the Light of the World. See they sit.”

And then the pair sat themselves on the cushions in the summer-house, where a little balcony projected over the water which ran out on to the cascade. Behind them two more women followed with baskets of fruit, green mangoes and melons crystal cold, and laid them before them, while she that had the zither sang.

And she sang from the songs of Saadi that are written in the book With Saadi in the Garden, so that we too sat and listened, hiding behind a cypress hedge so that we should not trespass, and as we listened I must have fallen asleep.

And when I woke the Emperor and the women were gone, and the sanniyasi said, “Come home, sahib, for the sun is getting high in the heavens,” and we walked once more on the cool turf to the door. But the plaster had fallen from the gateway, and the arch was broken, and I turned round to the garden. The cascades and the fountains were there, but dry and choked with dust. The fruit trees were old and twisted, though ablaze with blossom still; the cascades were chipped and lichen grew in the crevices as it did at Rajaori; the poplars were broken and only barely alive, and coarse grass grew where the lawns had been.

The sanniyasi said, “Thus it is, my son, that the pomp and power of the Mogul are long dead, and there is little of what you seek. Many of the marble squares are stolen, and all is broken and desecrated.”

“But, sanniyasi-jee, where is the garden that I saw just now, and the maidens, and Jehangir and his consort that you showed me?”

“I, my son? Not I! Perhaps Indra may have brought before you things as they were, for to him time is nought. Yesterday, to-day and for ever. Here it is as you see it now, though perhaps you may rebuild it for yourself.”

But when I got back to the camp I found the Dogra commandant of the battery waiting to see me. It was slightly overcast, there being a cloud over the sun, and the poplars in the gulley ahead looked dark, and somewhat menacing for the moment, as the breeze sighed through them, and the ruined serai stood up a black mass.

“Sahib,” said the commandant, “the men would like to march on this afternoon, and say they are quite rested and the mules are fresh.”

“Why, Khajur Singh? What is the matter? Don’t they find this a restful place?”

“No, sahib, they don’t. Saving your presence they say this place is haunted. There are boots⁷ about.”

Boots or no boots, I was a little inclined to agree with them. The place was perhaps not quite canny. There were plenty of beautiful spots ahead, and, as he said, the mules were all right, despite their novice drivers. So march we did.

An hour later we left camp and I rode over to the sanniyasi to say good-bye, for I had been attracted by his grave, kind face, and I told him we were off. He expressed no surprise and merely said, “Peace be with you, my son. Don’t dwell too much in the past, for it is all one with the present and the future, and the world is Maya, a delusion.”

At the foot of the path up to the garden I halted, gave my horse to my trumpeter and climbed, for I felt I must see it again. There it stood, with its broken arch and its tangled trees and shrubs, and its dead water-courses. A peacock ran across my front, and for the moment I thought I saw the green and crimson bodices of the girls. I forced my way through a couple of peach trees, knocking off the blossom, but all was silence. Then I turned to go on my way, but as I turned, was it fancy? . . . a zither seemed to twang softly behind the rose bushes.

Below me the battery was closing up and I slipped down the path and mounted. I certainly agreed with the men that we’d better go.

Hans across the Border

Mor—r—re bee—i—er! Moore bi—errr!” A bleer-eyed, half terrified Teuton face appeared round the door of the mess anteroom and preferred its demand for liquid refreshment, “More beer!” To which Branson, who sat in the mess, had promptly responded.

“Oh, bearer! Baja wallah sahib ko aur beer shrab do.”⁸ And then to the ramshackle Teuton who had now brought himself into the room muffled up in wraps,

“Certainly, William.” His name was Hans, but then William is good German for all Teutons,—“certainly, they’ll bring it in a minute. How’s that old piano getting on?”

“Ach, not at al. I tel you, mister, it is von thing to tchun a pi-ano when onlee von or two strrings are wrronng. It is anoder thing to tchun a pi-ano when al ze strrings are wrrong, so!” and with this rolling protest the dishevelled figure withdrew itself, and in the next room the beer could be heard going gluck-gluck.

Hans Breitman was a piano-tuner from Lahore, whom business had brought all the way up the Tochi to tune a piano in the mess-house of a frontier militia corps, all because too long a life of carousal in messes and places where they sing had been too much for its internals. At last the mess had said they could stand it no longer and had telegraphed to Lahore for a tuner, regardless of expense.

And in due course the tuner had arrived. Poor tuner! Life in Lahore, where the trades society is considerable, had been bearable enough to the German employee of a music depôt, but the journey to the frontier to carry out the order had been a terrifying experience. He had had to come many miles by rail, while long-haired men of the North had stared into his railway carriage, and then he had driven eighty miles through rock and sand and dust and evils till he had got to the other end of nowhere. But at the other end of nowhere he found that his troubles were only about to begin, for now he had to cross the British border, past militia posts that were full of armed men. A tonga⁹ and mounted escort of levies awaited him, and the wind down the pass grew colder and colder and the road grew rougher and rougher. The fierce men of the “livy,” with their shaggy sheepskin coats and long knives and wild appearance, had brought that poor tuner to a state of collapse, so that when he arrived at the end of a fifty miles’ trans-border drive, it took many bottles of beer to restore him. Bass and Murree beer, “Helles” and “Dunkles,” were poured into him, and his fireplace was piled high with logs, and it was not till nearly noon the day after his arrival that “William” could turn to with the piano in which “Al ze strrings are wrrrong.” The very interior of the fort was terrifying, for the great snow hills enclosed it, and to the north lay the huge white wall of the Sufaid Koh. Each company in the fort as they fell in daily on their company parades looked wilder and fiercer and more hairy than its neighbour, and Hans prayed each half-hour of the long day for his deliverance from such surroundings. However, it is a long lane that has no turning, and by the evening of the second day after his arrival, Han’s really musical ear had agreed that that sorely handled piano was at last in tune, “Al ze strrings,” and on the strength of his white blood the officers asked the good Hans to dine in mess with them. Under the flow of strong mulled beer and glowing logs “William” unbent and cheered up, and even remembered how he once had been a soldier, a private in the Artillery of the Guard, if you please (and very much his sloppy nature had hated it!). He had grown quite enthusiastic at the toast of “The King,” and even felt himself the brother-in-arms. After dinner he had sung a song, too,

“Das Lied vom Wein ist leisht und klein
Und floszt euch lust zum Trinkem ein,”

and had been voted quite a good sort of bird. Branson himself had promised to see him on his way down the pass to-morrow, as he was going on an inspection, and his escort would do for both, since economy in escorts is a prime consideration. As Hans was nervous, he should be lent Branson’s sporting mauser as a tribute to his nationality.

So down the pass the next day went Hans Breitman, thanking his stars that he had seen the last of wildmanland, seated in the Levy tonga, clutching the mauser carbine and sucking at a bubbly pipe. Branson sat in front, a pistol by his side and four mounted troopers cantering adjacent, who were changed every eight miles by fresh men on fresh horses. It is thus that the frontier officer used to make his rounds, a-tonga or a-horse-back, a cockshy for the outlaw on the hill-tops. However, all went well enough that day, and the road was varied frequently with camel caravans of Ghilzai traders, babies and goats and Persian pussy-cats lashed atop the humpy shaggy camels.

But the sight of the hairy, well-armed men, and even their hairy camels, only increased Hans’s desire for the open plains, and the reassurance of even a frontier railway. The tonga galloped steadily on, past olive and mimosa-planted shrine, and saturnine tribesmen, till the raw red stones and the palosin scrub gave way to broad corn-flats when the valley broadened. At last, late in the afternoon, they won through to a gentler valley and a vista of cultivated plains and homesteads. Five miles, however, from the outlet to the plains they came to the Levy post which men call Durraband, or the “closed door,” and here Branson found some business with local tribesmen which would detain him, and Hans must either wait or go on alone. He could, of course, have the escort, but he must sit alone in the tonga. Hans, longing to be away, took the latter course, and in fifteen minutes had moved on, still grasping the trusty mauser. Branson was glad enough to see him go, for even ex-Prussian Guardsmen were out of place on a frontier when trouble of some kind was about, and the news he had got at Durraband might mean anything. So Hans drove off into haze of the winter afternoon, and Branson set himself about his local business, which included unravelling, so far as might be, certain conflicting rumours of outlaws and their young village following being on the warpath.

But escape is not always to the swift, and just as Hans was congratulating himself at getting out of the hills and reaching the border post held by a regular garrison of soldiers, twenty rifles and dozen sabres, the whole complexion changed.

Outside the mud fort at Drenashta was a group of soldiers, villagers, and border police. In the midst of them stood a British officer of the cavalry regiment stationed in the big cantonment that lay fifteen miles or so inland. He had ridden out with half a dozen of his men to inspect the detachment in the post, and when he arrived there a message had come to say that there had been a raid by outlaws at a village near by. He had ridden over at once to find that the village shopkeeper had been left for dead, his shop looted, two village watchmen shot through both legs to teach them to resist, and the shopkeeper’s wife carried off. As the shopkeeper would not show where his money was, the outlaws had gently roasted his legs for ten minutes or so, whipped his wife, and then stabbed the poor old man’s ample paunch. Happily, however, some one had not taken it all lying down, for a patrol of border military police had come up in time at any rate to fire on the raiders moving off, and hang on to their coat-tails. Fortunately it had only just happened as Maitland the cavalry officer arrived, and there was still an off-chance of getting them. He had therefore galloped back to the post with the intention of turning out every man, locking up its gate and hurrying them off to block three or four adjacent small passes that the raiders would probably use. Just as this was being arranged, Hans in his tonga drove up. The accession of four troopers was hailed with delight. They must accompany the cavalry at once. What, demanded poor Hans, was he to do? The duffedar in charge of Hans, saluting him, suggested that the only thing for the captan to do was to go too, and pointing to his mauser carbine remarked that it was just the thing. It was also explained to Hans that he could not well wait alone in the post, as it was to be abandoned, and that it would not be at all safe for him to drive on alone. It has been mentioned that Hans, like all his compatriots, had some military experience hidden behind that very unmilitary exterior, and how beer and surroundings the night before had stirred it. To be saluted and called captain by a non-commissioned officer—how he had hated all such when he was soldiering in Metz—completed the awakening of ardour. Rather than be left alone in an empty fort, or be driven unprotected through fifteen miles of border-land, he would go with the English officer. Maitland, who was highly amused, but had little time to enjoy it, patted him on the back, and said he was a stout fellow. So ten minutes after arrival Hans found himself on the docter babujee’s tat,¹⁰ ambling alongside Maitland. Just, however, as the parties were about to turn off to the various darras in the foothills that they were to watch, a messenger came from the border military police party. He said that the party had come up with the raiders, who had shut themselves up in a small mosque at the opening of the Tor-darra. From this they were firing at all and sundry, but the border police said they could hold them as long as daylight lasted. Now the Tor-darra was but two miles off. Maitland considered the proposition, and decided to send all his party there at once.

“We may want a mountain-gun to get those swine out of that. . . . I must send in to let them know in the cantonment. There is a telegraph office or a telephone at Palunda. Here, jemadar sahib, give me a trooper to take a message to Palunda.” And the party halted for a moment while a message was written out, asking for fifty more men, and a gun to be brought out in a tonga, in case the situation could not be tackled with the men at his disposal. Maitland and the cavalry then cantered off, and the infantry with captan Hans followed in their wake. It took the best part of half an hour for even the cavalry to get to their destination. The ground was cut up with the deepish irrigation cuts that lead the salt impregnated water from the darra down to numerous wheat-fields. The mounds of an old Graeco-Bactrian town also impeded them, but as they drew near the foothills the “pock” of dropping rifle-fire came down on the breeze. That was satisfactory; it showed that the outlaws were still there. A man of the police was waiting for them, and could not conceal his delight at the arrival of a sahib. At the most, they had hoped for the Indian troopers from the post. He eagerly described the situation. The outlaws had got into the mosque, but finding themselves trapped, had attempted to get out. Some had got up a narrow gorge, at the back, from which, however, there was no exit except by overhand climbing, but three or four were still in the mosque. The police jemadar and eight of his men had gone after them merely to keep them there. Four of the men were lying down a hundred yards from the door of the mosque, behind some tombs, to prevent the three inside getting out. Oh yes, one or two of the police had been hit; he thought Mustapha Khan Bhatanni had been killed. “By Jove,” exclaimed Maitland, “these old ‘Barder’¹¹ have done jolly well; but I haven’t yet heard who it is that’s leading the raiders.” Turning to the policeman, he said, “Who is it that you’ve got?”

“Sahib, the villagers all say it’s Lal Khan.”

“What! Lal Khan Jowaki?”

“The same, sahib.”

“Phe-e-ew! No wonder you are hanging on to his tail like this, though you are brave men. Why, every jack man of you will be promoted. There is a big reward, too.”

“Rs. 10,000, sahib, by your honour’s kindness.”

“Oh, well, we must help you get it. Here, Jemadar sahib, leave four men here with these policemen. They are to get in as near that mosque as possible, and take care they don’t get shot. There are three mafrus¹² in there.”

And then Maitland dismounted his men, sent the horses into a small walled orchard, and hurried on with the policeman to the rift in the hills where the outlaws were said to be. A fairly sharp fire was in progress. Maitland found the jemadar with half a dozen men at the mouth of the cleft, a curious rift into the rock of the hillside. They were lying down firing vigorously, and said that the outlaws had been trying to come out. A couple of the men were wounded, but not seriously, though farther back under a rock lay police-lad Mustapha Khan dead, as the policeman had said. The native officer of the “Barder” said he had four men at the top of the creek in charge of a man who had been born near, and who had said that there was practically no way out. Any news of the woman they had carried off? Oh yes, she was left away back on the fields with her nose cut off. Then a great anger seized Maitland’s heart, with an intense desire to finish off Lal Khan and his following, so that they should harry the border-side no more. He sent half of his men to the head of the cleft, and left half with the police jemadar at the opening, for it was more than probable that the outlaws might try and rush out, as the far end had probably been found impracticable. That being for the moment secure, Maitland then went back to meet the small party of infantry, who were following with Hans close on the heels of the cavalry. He found them coming up to the mosque, and was able to withdraw the four men he had left, leaving the police and half a dozen rifles watching the door and back of the mosque, lest the outlaws should burrow under the wall. With the remainder, including Hans, he returned once more to the cleft. The outlaws had not been inactive. Feeling the net closing on them, they had made a rush to the opening of the cleft after a few minutes of rapid fire, in which two of Maitland’s own men had been hit, and had then retired again. Three of the troopers had tried to follow them up the cleft, but had met too hot a fire. The noise had been considerable, as the rifle-shots reverberated from the conglomerate cliffs. The first thing to do was to double-close the opening. Already the men there were piling up a stone wall as best they could under cover. Maitland put all his newcomers on to help at this, and to drag the dried mimosa-thorn from the edge of a small patch of buckwheat and throw it on the other side of their wall as an obstacle. The infantry jemadar, with the police, were then left at the cleft. The remainder of the force, some twenty troopers and half a dozen of the “Barder” he ranged out in pairs round the cleft on both sides, the said ravine being apparently a hundred yards long. Maitland himself took up a position about the middle of one of the sides.

It was now dark, and there was every prospect of a long cold night, with the possibility of the outlaws escaping. The man who knew the place then came and whispered that there was little cover down below, and that were it not for the dark the men would all, or nearly all, be visible from above. The thorn all round, he said, was now dry, and exceedingly inflammable. Let it be cut and lighted and thrown down, and let each pair of men round the edge do this. Then there would be light enough to shoot the outlaws by. The plan was a good one. There was, after all, likely to be vengeance on these cruel wolfheads for whose death the whole country-side cried aloud.

Maitland sent the order round, and in ten minutes launched a mass of burning thorn rolling over the side of the cliff. On all sides a similar phenomenon. The whole gully was illuminated, and some of the men below could be seen hurrying to find shelter. For the moment the laugh was certainly on the side of the assailants. Those watching above fired rapidly at the scurrying illuminated figures below, and certainly one bullet found an avenging billet. The scene was a dramatic one, worthy of being portrayed. It was now quite dark, and round this crevasse clustered unseen the little knots of Maitland’s men. The higher hills round stood out clear-cut against the sky, and the stars shone out on the frosty night. Rigel and Betelgeux flickered across to Gemini and the Great Square, and the outlaws lay doggo in the deep gloom below. Then the happy thought of the local man, the sudden lightning of thorn-bush bundles, rolled flaming down the sides of the cliffs, till its nigged plum-pudding sides shone red in their conglomerate layers, and the heads of troopers lit up round the edge! To crackling of thorns was added the crack of rifles and the curses from the desperadoes below. And above it all rose an order from Maitland to shoot carefully and finish it off. Then as the thorn-bushes burnt out there ensued a thrice-thickened darkness and a tense silence. Below, near the mosque, an occasional rifle-shot rang out, more as a sign that all was well than a definite attempt to break into that solid building.

Hans, in charge of a man of his own escort, lay close behind Maitland, grasping his carbine, and resigned to any happening. Again the thorns were lit and hurled below with a fresh volley as the cleft lit up, and another raider was declared hit. But the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Between the fires men were rolling down boulders and preparing for a third and bigger conflagration. But by this time some at least of the outlaws had ensconced themselves under cover. For the third time the flaming bundles were thrown down, and the avenging figure of Maitland stood up the better to direct affairs. Three rifle-shots from below rang out, and the British officer pitched backward. He fell into the arms of his orderly, an old Dogra of many years’ service. “Bring a light,” he murmured; “I must write to the memsahib.” But the orderly demurred.

“Nay, sahib. Nay. They know where we are now; if you light a light you will be hit again. Better wait a bit, sahib.”

“Atchcha,” murmured the wounded officer, “never mind, memsahib ko salaam do,” and died with never a word more.

Through all India the pathos of the story has gone, as told by the old orderly. Just how the sahib had said, “Never mind, give my greeting to my wife,” and had then and there died. The thought of the wife fifteen miles off in the cantonment, meeting perhaps next day a tonga with a corpse in lieu of a living husband, and the simple story of Khajoor Singh, the orderly! It has brought tears to every memsahib’s eye and many a sahib’s too. There is an old Punjab saying which says,

“War should be made by men without wives,
Bangles ring softly and sadly.”

Khajoor Singh turned to Hans and said, “The sahib is dead, will the Captān give orders.” Hans knew little enough of the vernacular, but the purport of words were clear to him. He, the only-white man, was by force of colour in command! He, a good German, in command of English troops! Many things passed through that usually slow-moving mind, and there came a story of his youth of how a great-uncle had fought for the English at Waterloo with Kielmansegge. He, too, would do the same. It was evident that there was not much to do but continue the process. Hans’s limited command of Hindustani would only run to one word, “Maro,” meaning “Shoot,” or “Strike,” “Maro,” he repeated, “Maro.”

Now Khajoor Singh had seen something of war. It would be well not to say anything about Maitland’s death yet awhile, and as there was a real white man present, he would do as well. So he called out: “The sahib’s orders are to go on with it. Let the light and the fire be continuous. Let half throw at one time and the other half be ready as soon as the light dies down.” And it was so, and the gully re-echoed with the rolling musketry while the number of rifles replying grew less.

Down by the stone wall and thorn fence at the cleft the jemadar of infantry was in command, a stout Muhammadan of a fighting Rajpoot clan. When he saw the burning bushes falling over he was delighted, and was able to get in some volleys himself. By the light he could see thirty or forty yards farther up an earthen dam, used no doubt to store rain-water. He saw that the ground was clear up to it, and determined to close up. This he did at the third conflagration, and at the next was able to shoot three of the raiders. By this time some dry grass down below had got alight and there was a permanent glare. A man was then sent up to say that the men above should shoot no more, and he would finish it, which he did.

Up above Hans himself had started firing with his mauser, and the battle-lust had seized him. Twice had an outlaw’s bullet rapped against the rock close to him, and he had replied with a whole clip at the spot whence the shot came. When the message from below arrived he was quite beside himself, so that Khajoor Singh took the carbine from him as a nurse from a child. Down below the jemadar was finishing up the business, which consisted of giving the coup-de-grâce to two who fought on, and of binding one wounded man who offered no resistance. The fire below was kept alight while the cleft was searched thoroughly, and ten bodies and a wounded prisoner were collected.

Now that the fight was over, reinforcements were coming up. The first to arrive was Branson, with all the men he could muster. The news had come to him five miles up the pass a couple of hours ago. Riding down to the plain quam celerrime, he had seen the blazing bushes and heard the rifle-shots. At the mosque he had been directed to the cleft, and arrived in time to find the jemadar in possession. Just as he rode up the message from above had come down to say that Maitland sahib had been killed, and that the Captān was in command.

“What Captān?” demanded Branson.

“I don’t know what Captān,” replied the jemadar. “He may be a barrack-master sahib (road engineer) or naksha wallah (survey); he was with Maitland sahib, and had ridden the doctor babujee’s pony. Stay! he had heard some one say that it was a music sahib, and had come in a tonga.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Branson, “it can never be poor old man Hans! Anyway, I must go to the top. Get your men together now, and get the police to collect the bodies. They must go into Palunda for the magistrate to see.”

And then Branson rode up to the height above to find poor Maitland’s body and a half-hysterical elated piano-tuner, who burst into tears when he saw the Englishman. But Branson was a man of some perception, and he put his hand on the other’s shoulder, saying,

“My dear old piano-tuner, well down! gallantly done!” and he gripped his hand. Then turning to the men round he said, “This sahib is a very distinguished sahib, but is not a jangi sahib¹³ at all; but, as you see, has helped you out of trouble when your own sahib was killed.”

And it was quite true. That one word Maro from the tuner had kept up the continuity of command, and of the action that had held the raiders engaged while the party closed in. Hans’ simple heart had been touched with glory for one brief quarter of an hour, and the Kings of Orion had entered in.

There is little more to tell. The troops assembled and bivouacked for the night, leaving a strong guard on the mosque. During the night more men arrived from the distant cantonment, bringing a mountain-gun in a tonga with another one full of ammunition behind. At daybreak the mosque was battered in, and three shell-mangled corpses extracted. It was ruthless enough; but there was no ruth in the raiders, who would have taken more life had any other method of attack been adopted. As it was, besides Maitland, there were three of our men dead and four wounded. Happily, however, the bodies of thirteen of the outlaws—including the notorious Lal Khan—were laid out for the coroner’s inquest at Palunda, which solemnly sat to say how those shell-battered and other corpses came by their death.

Hans himself drove off from the uncongenial scene next morning, and with him Khajoor Singh, to give with an aching heart that last salaam to the stricken memsahib and the small son, who, dressed as a trooper in his father’s regiment, awaited his return at the garden gate.

As for Hans, he wanted only to escape quietly to Lahore, but before long there came a grant that enabled him to achieve the wish of his heart and set up a music depôt of his own, with a certain Swiss roll of a nurse installed as its mistress. And there were present at the wedding the Officers of the Levy, the Deputy Commissioner, and the great German Consul-General himself, while among the presents was a silver coffee pot inscribed, “Hans Breitman, from the Viceroy.”

But while fortune came with both hands full to the piano-tuner, which no one grudged him, a sad widow hugged a small son on an Ellerman liner, to be haunted for many years with that simple sad farewell, “Memsahib ko salaam do,” from the man that died for the peace of a border. But “They shall be mine, sayeth the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels.”

Hotee Coal

I

A Story of the Veld

Before the farmers, as the Boer forces were called in Cape Colony, invaded British Colony in 1899, by way of Fourteen Streams and the Vaal bridge at Warrenton, or turned aside to test the lure of Cecil Rhodes and the people of Kimberley, the little settlement at Modder River was something of a pleasure ground and jaunting house for Kimberley week-enders. There was not much to it, but between the river and kopjies of Magerstein was a hospitable hotel and a few fruit and pleasure gardens along the river-bank. A few tubby boats on the river, the brown mud river that gave it the name, a few eucalyptus trees and willows, a little garden here and there watered by a wind-pump or two, and that was the whole of it. Nevertheless the glorious upland air, the feeling of being on the roof which the kopjie-tops, hull-down on the horizon gave you, had a charm all its own. There were guinea-fowl and redwing for the hunting, as all shooting is known on the veld, and there were great loblolly hares that would sit up in the light of a diamond mine searchlight, and let you pot them indecently. In fact, Modder River as holiday resorts go, in a sardine-tin country, was no bad spot.

But the war had devastated it to desolation. The hotel had become the military headquarters of what my reservist barber from Trufits called Lord “Methewen” after the battle of the Modder, when the British really discovered what the Mauser bullet on an open glacis was like and the farmers found that the soldier was no longer a roibatjie, a red-jacket with white belts for bull’s-eyes, but a gentleman in khaki with a fair knowledge of his rifle, the which was a sore disappointment. And with the coming of the army that pretty Modder River had disappeared in dust and the unwatered heat of South Africa’s summer, and Piet Cronje sat on the Magersfontein kopjies and made sad work of the Highland Brigade to their no small surprise, and poked fun for several weeks at Lord “Methewen,” and recked little of the gathering storm, which was to lead him to St. Helena like a better man before him.

All of which is by the way, and by way of aperitif to the romantic story of Hotee Coal, with which I had some concern a year or so later when the war was far advanced in the guerilla stage and the turn of the wheel brought us back down the line from the Vaal, in one of the many De Wet hunts. I have sufficiently turned it round to disguise personalities to all but one or two of us.

II

And this is the manner of it, and the little romance of the sour veld, and if you remember the difference between soueet and sour veld yet, then you have not forgotten all that three years’ war with the Brethren taught you! Lord Roberts had occupied Pretoria, the larger commandos had surrendered and gone to their homes with their tongues in their cheek, and then De Wet had raised the standard of Guerilladom. Whether it was bad luck, or whether we were fooled from the start does not matter now, but the whole of the army was being turned into mounted troops, and the world was being conscripted for horses. Lord K. was turned loose on us after a manner peculiarly his own, and I happened then to be commanding a detachment of artillery that was part of “Settle’s Circus” before it degenerated into pure Pantomime. With us was a corps of the New Yeomanry, as distinct from the original I.Y. containing fewer members of Parliament but perhaps better soldiers. We had been hunting commandos from the Orange and the Fouriesberg-Luckoff road to Honeynest Kloof and back again and had come into the Modder for supplies and horses. The principal ingredients of the story are a squadron of the Roughshooters who could both sharpshoot and roughride and the members of a travelling circus that had been in Kimberley, and had come to Modder where there had been an attempt to revive the week-end fun when the tide of war rolled north. Fweddie and I,—Fweddie was my subaltern of artillery, pink but venturesome,—Carteret who had been in a Yorkshire regiment and was now dug out for the I.Y., and the lad Bannister. We four had been keeping the road together, generally coffee-housing in each other’s company, and having now marched post-haste from Rama Springs, decided to stand ourselves dinner at the “Modder Hotel.” We did not expect much, but it would be better than trek ox, and there might be some Drakenstein and if we were lucky a little Vanderhum. The dullest meal leaves a bright memory if you settle it with Vanderhum. There were plenty more lads of spirit in the force, but we four were an intimate party, and whenever the rest of the party dined we would secure a table. So Fweddie was sent cantering off even before the sacred duty of watering the skins was accomplished, to be quite sure that we got a table, and if liquor was scarce that we got some of it.

He came back in great form.

“What larks! I’ve arranged a table and two skirts.”

“Wha-at!”

“Two skirts, what sort of skirts? What the devil do you mean, Fweddie?”

“Mean what I say. Two skirts will give us the pleasure of their company. Two English skirts, none of your kapjie-wearing Dutch matjies.”

“Where did you raise them, Frederick?” demanded Carteret who had drawn nigh to see what the chatter was about.

“The fact is,” said Master Frederick, “there is a circus here, with three English women. One, the wife of the owner, is sick; the other two are girls, and I have asked them to dine, had to ask the owner too, but he is not a bad chap, was in the Diamond Fields Artillery, and I met him at Bosh off just after the relief of Kimberley.”

Trust Fweddie to find a skirt or, as the modern army would call them in Arabic, a “bint.” As a matter of fact, he need not have been so scornful of the Dutch matjies, or misses, as he usually had plenty to say to them, and indeed the young Dutch girl is very attractive in her kapjie, or sunbonnet. In fact, only a day or two ago we had walked up in Jacobsdal two neat little kapjied figures in front of us to find, when we got abreast, that the faces inside were kaffirs. That is where the kapjie gets you, or rather lads like my Fweddie, down. However, that is another story, and the fact remained that we were to have a dinner with our legs under a table, a dinner that was not trek-ox or Maconachie and with two English girls of sorts to talk to. So we complimented Fweddie, saying that for a young soldier he had shown commendable enterprise and acumen, which he had.

So when sun-down came and the Magersfontein kopjies turned to sapphire in the evening glow we four duly set out, properly shaved and with belts aglow, to what was for men straight from a year’s soldiering a very proper adventure, Fweddie and the lad Bannister greatly excited and the two old pieces of junk, Carteret and myself, amused and quietly expectant. When we got to the hotel, the army was thick in the bar, but Fweddie announced that he had a private room, and there we were ushered in, to find Lieutenant Simpson, of the Diamond Fields Artillery, a quite agreeable Afrikander who owned the circus, and two girls awaiting us, one a pretty doll-faced lass with a head of fair hair, and the other quieter and dark-haired with a neat figure. The one was introduced to us as Fluffie, to which name she answered heartily, and the other was Miss Tilly.

It was a pleasant enough dinner of the dorp hotel type to which we sat down and we soon found out all about our friends. Fluffie told us that her rôle was to wear tights and ballerine skirts and jump through the hoops, while Mr. Simpson did ringmaster, and another lad clowned. Fluffie beamed on Fweddie and shed her aitches happily and unconcernedly. Miss Tilly was not so talkative but told me that they had all been in Kimberley during the siege and that they had both been helping in the hospitals. They had eaten lots of horse flesh, it was all right bar the veins in it, too many veins, and that their circus horses had been used in the Diamond Fields Artillery and had not been eaten. Then I made a faux pas, for while Fluffie was talking of her successes on the great pad horse I asked Miss Tilly if she jumped through the hoop too. She drew herself up haughtily. “Certainly not, I am Hotee Coal!” I looked bewildered. Fweddie kicked me and said ”Haute École.” I tumbled and apologised. Miss Tilly with a neat figure would look the part in long habit skirt and top-hat, taking no notice of the clown’s impertinences and asides. So then I knew where I was, and as an artilleryman, was able to talk of piaffing and caracole and the jargon of the haute école, and of high and low port bits, martingales and standing reins and the like. I found that Miss Tilly was really knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and both loved and understood something of horses and why and how you fed them and the like. Also she could manage her aitches, and was more attractive in a quiet way therefore. Across the table, however, Fluffie was making happy aitchless running with Fweddie, and it all seemed pleasant enough, for it was English feminines to speak to, with or without aitches that seemed the thing that mattered. After dinner Carteret and I left the lasses to Fweddie and Bannister and heard the Simpson version of the Defence of Kimberley and the sortie, and was interested to find that Colonel Kekewich who commanded, in addition to his military qualities, was thought a lot of because he stood up to Cecil Rhodes and ran the defence his own way. Then we discussed Mrs. Simpson’s illness and I promised to see if our doctor would see her, as there was not one at Modder River. Thus a kindly simple evening came to an end, and the long and the short of it was that these young women and occasionally Simpson came a good deal to our camp, during the week that we were awaiting remounts and fresh orders, and it was all very simple and straightforward, and Miss Tilly learnt all about artillery horses and harness, and Fluffie gave an impromptu performance to the men after stables, on the back of a very broad fat off-wheeler, to their huge delight.

Then I was suddenly turned into a brass hat and ordered off as staff officer to a column working hundreds of miles away in Natal, and the whole thing passed away, save that Miss Tilly came to see me off by the midnight train, and between us we did a piece of mischief, at the memory of which I still run cold. A Militia guard was mounted on the station, and these were days when guerillas had been active and vigilance much enjoined. On the platform the guard slept with their rifles leaning against the wall. The sentry slept happily too in Militia fashion. Hotee Coal and I lifted the seven rifles, and carried them into the railway transport officer’s office and hid them behind the never-closed door. Then we left, I for Natal and she for her hotel. But I am never certain in my own mind if I was prompted by the devil raised by circus folk, or the zeal of a newly-baked staff officer, and I never heard what happened. Then, after the manner of soldiering, new duties and scenes wiped clean for a while even my memory of the circus, Settle’s¹⁴ famous one or that of Hotee Coal.

III

But because you find yourself in a column working in Natal, it does not follow that the good Lord K. will let you stay there long, and we soon found ourselves first on the Zulu border marching with a Zulu Impi that wore little more than a twelve-bore cartridge case and a leopard skin per man, and then a-sitting in coal trucks bound for the Free State. The Zulu Impi had been used to keep the Brethren from escaping from us over the Zulu border, in the midst of a De Wet hunt. The good De Wet however, slipped away, minus a good many tail feathers, and we sped after him by train to collar him low on his way north. Then the De Wet cycle passed and we took to clearing the country, moving about with long wagon convoys to bring the derelict families to where they could be fed, while we cleared the country of all food. It’s a rough game, the warfare of guerillas, and a game we slowly learned to play far more effectively than the Boers who started it.

The clearing game was a weary one nevertheless, and especially to those who had to drive the meat from the veld. Cattle were not too bad, but sheep were the very devil. On the particular trek of which I am writing, we had something like 40,000 sheep, and getting the last lot over a spruit with a hundred hungry young Dutchmen hanging on to your rear-guard was no joke. Cross the ford the last batch would not. Orders came to slay them, but who can slay 10,000 sheep? The infantry soldier with a bayonet was no use, shooting them was impossible and more than dangerous. A hundred kaffir boys with knives are the best, but even then it sounds much easier in Army Headquarter offices than in practice. And so for days did we foul the fair veld with slaughtered sheep while all the while Jappee Fouchie or Cos Vandermerwe or some other venturesome field cornet would give the rear-guards hell. The column staff had often the worst of it in their anxiety lest a rear-guard should get cut off or a flanking party be scuppered.

So it came about that we were rolling across from Fouriesburg with a huge convoy and thousands of sheep making for Orange River, or it might have been Jagersfontein road, and were just through the range of kopjies by Luckoff. A small reinforcement had come to join us in the shape of my old friends the Roughshooters, but I had not had time to look them up and see old friends.

The next two days were like to be a rough ride, for half a dozen small commandos were buzzing round, mad that their girls had been taken off, all except a few honey-pots we had left for night raiding, and which produced a little later quite a different sort of adventure, and they were also determined to have back a few thousand of the sheep we were driving.

We had left our outspan fairly early, the second day after the Roughshooters had joined us, and my column commander had told me to see the great convoy of families rumble off and then keep an eye on the rear-guard as well as the yeomanry flank-guards.

It was not unamusing watching the wagons go by, piled high with furniture and boxes of all kinds, such lares and penates as the women could persuade the party removing them to let them take. The women gave one foul enough abuse and one marvelled where they could have learnt the dregs of English slang.

The girls were better, for I was the Moie Captan,¹⁵ and knew a little of the Taal, sufficiently to pass the time of day and the lighter form of chaff. The family were being taken from a cottage hard by. The women of the house refused to come, and lay on the floor screaming. The corporal in charge came and asked what he had better do. It was fairly simple: “Collar the kids and drive on, mother will follow all right.” She did after remarking that I was several kinds of bastard.

As the great wagon convoy rolled on, it was time to pay attention to flank and rear-guards. I had a couple of signallers from the Household Cavalry with me, and they had their helios in action. It promised to be lively. On several sides I could hear the pac-boc of the Mauser. Rear and flanks were getting it. We were getting near the block-house line, and if the Brethren did not get something from us that day their chance was gone.

I was standing by the gate of the farm fence, one of those great triple barriers of barbed wire that the coming of the rinderpest had forced the farmers to make, and hard by in reserve a couple of troops of yeomanry. The great roll of the veld was entrancing enough, as I stood and watched the shuddering grass and gazed into the far distance turning cobalt with the lengthening shadows, waiting for a flicker on the helio to say that the last of the sheep were over the spruit, and wondering if the mutter of rifles over the horizon was going to become serious, or was merely the brawl of annoyance. Then I heard a new sound, this time to the flank where a line of kopjies hung low on the butt and a squadron of yeomanry was, I knew, serving as flank-guard, and where as yet all had been quiet enough. The sound of musketry, something more than the sniper’s pao-boc came down the breeze, and I bid my Householders throw their beam on a group of horses that I could see on the reverse slope of a kopjie, and as I did so I saw an orderly was coming across as hard as a tired Argentine would let him. I watched him with my glasses, no good panicking till one heard what it was all about. The lad I could see rode well enough, and had spotted my group. Calling to my two reserve troops to get mounted, for there was evidently trouble for the asking, I waited the arrival of the orderly, who proved to be a mere lad, and what was more a lad in tears, tears of excitement and consternation. But that was nothing new with young soldiers, I had had the same experience a day or two before with a survivor from a scuppered yeomanry patrol. I bid him dismount, and patted his back. “Take your time, sonnie, take your time.” And then as the sobs steadied, just the hiccuping sobs of a child I patted his shoulder again. It is the only way.

“There, there. It’s all right, now what has happened?”

“It’s Captain Bannister, sir! Of the Roughshooters. He’s lying wounded up at the kraal there.” I looked where he pointed and saw a small stone sheep-kraal on the side of a kopjie. “A commando raced us for it, and we got there, but as we came up to it they were firing from horseback, the captain was hit, and the troop turned back and galloped for the next kopjie.”

“Where are the Boers?”

“I think they’ve gone after them. I am the captain’s orderly and I left him alone under the wall of the kraal.”

That explained the clump of horses under the kopjie farther to the front. I looked at the orderly, the merest lad who still hiccuped from his sobs.

“Here, my boy, drink some of that,” and I gave him my bottle. “That will be all right, we’ll soon get the captain. Signaller, give me a block, and call up the column.”

I could see the mass of the convoy climbing the hill and I knew my column commander knew his job and would have a good deal of his main body dropping back as we neared the outspan. He knew it all right, which is more than some of them did, who would let the men hurry on to their dixies and leave the rear-guard to shift for itself.

I scribbled, “Right flank-guard in a bit of a mess, have taken reserve to them. Send a couple of squadrons and two ambulances to this helio.”

“You signallers to stay here and come on with the squadrons.”

And then I took the two reserve troops forward extended with four ground scouts well ahead. The flank-guard at the kopjie were still firing, but nothing acharné, and they could evidently wait.

Away over the veld we scampered, the young orderly cantering neatly by my side and helping his tired horse well. We soon arrived at the kraal, without adventure, and there was Bannister lying as reported and waving his handkerchief. As soon as I had the men dismounted inside the kraal, I saw where the Brethren were scrapping with the flank-guard; they were all right for the moment, and we had time to wait for the ambulance, and I turned to Bannister. To my surprise the orderly had his arm round the captain’s shoulders and was supporting him, and crooning to him. Then I remembered the young figure. It was Hotee Coal, Miss Gertie Tilly herself. That accounted for the neat putties I had noted and the trim waist. Phe-ew! However the men must not know, for I presumed they did not. I went over: Bannister was evidently hit in the body and pretty faint.

“Here, Gertie, you little devil, I know you now, I’ll deal with you later; there’s an ambulance coming, and now let’s see what’s the matter.”

Gertie Tilly looked up in my face with very appealing eyes, eyes that were really, if you come to that, worth looking into. All I could say was, “When we get back to camp, and Bannister is in hospital, come and report to me at once; say you are my orderly.”

The squadrons were already approaching the helio station and behind them two tonga ambulances. Bannister seemed shot through the shoulder and perhaps the top of the lung, not too serious, and I left him for the surgeon or dresser who was on his way. I asked no more questions then and contented myself with saying, “Now look here, Gertie, pull yourself together, and I’ll get you out of this mess.”

There is not much more to it. The ambulances came up, and took Bannister and his orderly back with a troop, and with the rest we cleared up the matter of the flank-guard, where there were a couple of wounded yeoman, but what was much more to the purpose took quite good tea with the Boer party who were poking fun at the flank-guard, getting two wounded and three unwounded prisoners with three horses and rifles. And so to camp, while I mused how to get Hotee Coal away without a scandal. Bannister himself had got quite enough for the present and might be left to take his gruel later.

As we rode home the last flock of sheep was coming in with mounted kaffirs, and the rear-guard, still wisely extended, nearing camp, so that my anxieties except for the feminine were over for the day. After reporting what had happened to the column commander, who was pleased to approve, I turned to my tent. As staff officer with work to do, I had the privilege of a tent and an office table. In front of it, to my surprise, was a queer turnout. An old cape cart with a ramshackle horse in the shafts stood before it. On the seat was perched the quaintest of old ladies, with a black bonnet trimmed with grapes and a cape with bugles. Standing to attention was the Yeomanry Orderly, Gertie Tilly, otherwise Hotee Coal. I touched my cap to the old lady.

“I am Mrs. Hudgen, wife of Captain Hudgen, late of the 94th Foot, and I am school marm to the British at Jagersfontein. Rechter Herzogg has ordered me away, and says there are no more British. So here I am.”

La, la, what adventures! “My husband was in the Old War, Captain, and I know these Dutch.”

“Well, well, you must tell me all about that, but what about a dish of tea? Here’s my batman.”

So Mrs. Hudgen climbed down, bugle cape and all, and I gave her tea and heard all her gossip of Pretoria and Paul Kruger from the days since time was.

To my batman I said, “Bring this orderly tea too, while I hear his report.”

The Fates were on the side of the escapaders. I knew that the new Orange River School marm was being withdrawn and was to be sent to Kimberley and so I took the bull by the horns. “You will stay to-night in that farm-house, Mrs. Hudgen, and to-morrow I will send you and this orderly to Kimberley. This orderly is really a young lady on secret service. She will go back to Kimberley with you, in woman’s clothes to-morrow.”

I need not tell the rest of my telling-off of Hotee Coal after I had heard her story, or how I sent my interpreter, Cos Vandermerwe, to Jagersfontein hard by to get a ready-made black dress and a blue kapjie from the Winkel there. I was able to reassure her that Bannister was all right and would go to Kimberley hospital, so she stayed in my tent till midnight, which was a scandal, till her frock arrived, and then I took her over to Mrs. Hudgen, who was to say she was her assistant, and I don’t believe a soul in camp knew about it. I gathered she had been with the Yeomanry as the Captain’s orderly for two months, and it was not worth while asking any more questions.

I heard of her some years after in India as Mrs. Bannister, to use the nom de guerre I have chosen, where, light of hand on the bridle bars, she had a reputation for handling bucking walers in her husband’s regiment.

At a Border Loop-Hole

I

Tender Ruth

The law of the Border is an unwritten law, but it is clear and unmistakable; an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; and of all the samples of border ruth to shudder over, perhaps the most evil are those that centre round the ancient hatred of Afghan and Sikh. Hatreds crusted with years and reciprocating horrors are world old things. Certain races will hate others till all time, certain families and clans have wrecked each other by bitter, unreasoning, instinctive enmity. In the army, old ugly senseless feuds are never forgotten between certain corps. But the cruel hatred of opposing Indian races with all the added bitterness of widely differing religions is easily first in its bitterness. Afghans have burned Sikhs for many generations to the glory of God and his Prophet, and Sikhs have equally invariably chopped those Afghans who have fallen into their hands into the finest mincemeat, and neither can forget it. In case folk should think the Afghan border is getting unduly civilized and these old tales belong to a time now happily dead, we read in this jubilee year of a frontier officer entertaining some border chiefs with a loud speaker broadcasting in Pushtu; one man would talk. His neighbour promptly stabbed him.

Out on the plain of Malazai a red-hot march out of Peshawur, close by the Afghan foothills, a battlefield lay in the cleansing, hard by the frontier outpost of the same name. There had been a bitter fight. The clansmen for no better reason than the roll of a priestly drum, and the surging of young blood, had crossed the border, attacked the armed police, murdered or carried off the grain merchants from the border village, and generally brought red ruin to all British subjects within their reach. Through the hot night and breathless morning the troops from Peshawur had marched, and had fought the invaders in a pitched battle, which had not proved the British leader to be the spoilt child of victory; barely had he won through, and that only by "dogged does it." The British infantry were done to a turn, and could do little more than fire their rifles to their front. The artillery had fired and fired at the tribesmen among the rocks and stones without apparent result, and still the tribesmen had flicked Martini and Snider bullets in to the British. The thermometer had long ago run off the board and dust devils were pirouetting up and down the plain, the gunners at their guns were falling down where they stood with sun-stroke, and all was barely well. The staunchest of staunch Punjabi regiments supported their European comrades with a fine contempt for the sun and with volleys of a pretty precision. Then right across their front and dead on the Afghan flank came a squadron of Indian cavalry, "hell-for-leather" over the rocks and the stones and the boulders. Had you asked their commander in the ordinary way to cross such ground he would, in the language of the barracks, have "volunteered for the guard-room." On this occasion he merely made it so, to his undying renown and that of his regiment. It was enough; the tribesmen broke squealing before the lance-point, and the neatly placed volleys and the spattering shrapnel clinched matters. Once again "dogged" had done it, and that flanking squadron had done for the tired British line what old Blucher had done for the sore pressed British squares nearly a century before.

The General of all the columns had ridden on to the field post-haste, late in the day to take personal charge, and stood with his staff when all was over, surveying the stricken field. The field wanted some clearing, and the worn-out troops some helping. Dead and wounded lay scattered among the boulders and wounded and whole wanted water, water, for a hard put fight in itself develops an all-powerful thirst, quite apart from what a bullet wound may do on its own account. Litters and stretchers for the wounded; water and more water for the living.

The hot wind blew like a breath from a furnace swirling the dust that the troops disturbed, as the General swept the horizon with his glasses and lamented his inability to pursue and put the fear of God and man into the withdrawing clansmen, whose less forward supporters still waved banners on foothills. His eye lit on a wounded Afghan who lay helpless, a couple of hundred yards away. He saw a Sikh trooper from the cavalry detach himself and ride towards the wounded man. Deliberately the man dismounted from his horse, and bent over the Afghan. Then he lifted him a bit and propped him up carefully against a stone, so that his head and body leant up against it. The General was interested.

"Look, gentlemen! Look! People talk of the bitter hatred that still fingers between the Sikh and Pathan. I have always thought it must be dying, and now look! That Sikh trooper has deliberately gone out of his way to go across and help that wounded tribesman!"

The staff all looked. They saw the wounded man now comfortably propped up, and only needing, perhaps, water. Then they saw the trooper turn to his horse and mount, and canter away into the open. A hundred yards away from the wounded man he halted, turned, and shook out his lance, and then, the point held high, he galloped. . . .

"Ah-h-h, Ah-h-h, Ah-h-h . . . Kālsa kee Făteh, . . . Sirkar kee Jai . . . Ah-h-h . . ." The long triumphant cry rose as the horse stretched to a gallop, and the lance point slowly fell, and the charging horse and rider—quadrupedante putrem sonitu—flashed past the wounded man, and the reddened lance-point rose again to a scream of triumph as the trooper gazed up his arm and lance that now stretched out behind him, withdrawn from the heart of his ancient enemy.

II

Mahdu Ram, Kahar

Mahdu Ram, kahar, or dooley bearer and ambulance attendant, dropped by the side of a patch of Mazri palm, done to a turn and oblivious of danger. He, an hereditary bearer who carried wedding parties in Sedan chairs in the plains of Hindostan, and shuffled elderly bankers to their money-lending desks, had in a moment of folly signed on to do the same work in a British Field Ambulance, leaving for an expedition on the Afghan border. The attraction had been considerable it is true, a bounty to leave with his wife, a complete set of warm clothes and a blanket, and a kindly sahib who had promised to be his father and his mother. All had gone well at first. He belonged to a little gang of five under an important person known as a chărribărdār, and the gang carried a dooley, four to carry and one to rest, when the dooley contained a sick or wounded man. A cumbrous thing a dooley or dandy, yet the wit of man can find nothing to replace it in ways where wheels cannot travel. It was always said of the great Sir William Russell, when war correspondent during the Mutiny, that he had reported that the “ferocious Doolies had descended from the hills and carried off the wounded,” but that must have been an expansion of a cable that the office at home had made from his message, that the wounded had been carried away in doolies. In the Mutiny days a press correspondent was a new bird, and the young officers were always, as they put it, “trying it on Billy.” The said “Billy,” having been through the Crimea already, probably had quite an accurate conception of bean-counting, and probably gave better than he got. If he really was “had” over the doolies, the victory should not be forgotten. However, that is as may be, but here under a Mazri bush lay poor Mahdu Ram, thinking of the well in his own village and the smell of the ghee at the banniah’s shop.

In the first week or so of mobilisation all had gone well. There had been new and wonderful sights, and plenty of his own caste fellows, and the Government ration, as the sahib had truly said, was good to eat. He would save all his pay and send it home for his little son. But the last few days had been strenuous, the dooley had almost always had a patient, and hot days and cold nights had brought out the malaria of the plains. The night before he and his gang had lain out with their dooley on the hill-side with a wounded Highlander in it, and there had been a frost, and over-head the bullets had sung and whimpered the long night through. Ague had come with the morning, and Mahdu Ram had fallen out and lost his gang. Nobody seemed to care. The fighting troops had swung off from the kotal down into the gorge, and the transport and the hospitals had jostled and swayed after them, down the worst apology for a goat-track that can be imagined. Mahdu Ram, half dazed and shaking with his ague, had slipped and shuffled along at intervals. Away in a corner of a gully he had wandered aside to find water. Listlessly he had sat and watched some of his own kidney who had broken off from the line of march to search a deserted homestead for loot, unnoticed by the provosts. Almost unheeding he had seen them drag a wounded Pathan on a string bedstead out into the sunlight, and tie him down. Feebly he had watched these brother servants of the Red Cross collect brushwood with the obvious intention of roasting their victim. But the Indian follower is especially hated of the tribesman and gets short shrift when he is caught wandering, and the East knows no mercy, except for itself, never to others. “Dohai Company Bahádur!”¹⁶ was the old cry of those who gave no quarter themselves. The cowardly bearers were about to light their pile while the wounded tribesman watched them in apparent apathy. Then Mahdu Ram saw, also in a dream, a great white sahib on a screaming pony ride among the bearers and beat them so that they yelled and fled, and then he shuffled on lest someone should beat him.

Up on the hill tops above, the piquets held the ridges and the skirmishers’ shots reverberated across the gorges. Up the valleys could be seen more distant peaks, ablaze with the green banners of the Prophet. A wider valley gave a peep of the great snow wall of the Sufaid Koh. The road had widened in a kach or open space in the narrow valley, covered with scrub and dwarf palm. Here off the road then had tired-out Mahdu Ram fallen, b-e-a-t, beat, and he knew it and did not care, after the manner of the really worn-out human. And as he lay half dazed, listening to the footfalls and jink of the baggage animals on the road close by, there slouched up and stood over him just such another derelict as himself, a straggler from a regiment of the British line, whose bones also ached with the aftermath of Peshawur fever that last night’s piquet on a hill-top had evoked. The great alert battalion had gone ahead in its stride and was engaged supporting the advanced guard five miles and more away. Private Albert Smithers had fallen out without reporting himself to his sergeant, with every bit of pride and resolution and grit gone, his khaki jacket soaked with perspiration, his belts and accoutrements awry, and nothing but a shuffle left in his legs. Such are the tricks that sun and a little fever play with the lesser natures, aye, and many of the stronger ones tool

Smithers was a good-hearted soul, and he recognised a fellow in distress.

“What’s the matter, old cock? Got the shakes?” “Beemar,¹⁷ Sahib,” whined the dooley-bearer in a dazed and plaintive drawl.

“Bee . . . mar Hey! Well, I ain’t so blooming achcha.¹⁸ You baitho¹⁹ a bit, see!” And the dishevelled Atkins shuffled on, with just enough sense to know that the wayside would be a dangerous place a little later. Half a mile further through the scrub, his fate overtook him. A commissariat mule, laden with rum, had been hit with a bullet from a sniper on a distant hill-top; it had been loose on the string and had turned aside unnoticed, fallen and shaken off its load. Weary Smithers tumbled across it, and joy seized him. Little he recked that it spelt looting commissariat rum.

“Just my luck if it’s that mucky lime-juice!” and he jammed his bayonet into the bung. It was not lime-juice, and half an hour later the sun beat down on a dead drunk senseless man, and all the while the occasional bullet fired at the piquets hummed overhead.

After a while, Mahdu Ram remembered that someone had spoken not unkindly to him. He struggled to his feet and wandered after him. Instinct drew him to the same spot and the keg suggested water. Yesterday caste would have forbidden it. To-day his soul for a drink! Then Mahdu Ram drank and the drink brought sleep.

The day wore on and the baggage caravans, the food columns and the hospitals passed, and the never-ending stream at last ran dry. The shadows were falling over the valleys, and the firing had ceased away to the front. Behind, however, the piquets were firing and the rear-guard came along, its commander anxiously watching and counting the piquets as they descended from the summits and joined the main-guard. There was more firing than the commander liked, and he and his men passed pre-occupied, no one noticing the drunken figures lying aside from the path.

Next morning search was made for them, and one or two others who had been missing. They found them. Albert Smithers, of Hackney, lay stripped with his heart cut out. Mahdu Ram had been stoned as he lay, and was half buried in the boulders—he who should have been burnt on the banks of the Holy Gunga. It was just one of the incidents of Empire.

III

Old Ginger

There is a curious instinctive vein of savagery in the civilised human that now and again finds vent in strange happenings. Horrors have an attraction half acknowledged for most of us. Less than a hundred years ago, some of the fairest of women even would outbid each other to get a good window at a hanging. Ladies of high degree would remorselessly stab their neighbours’ shoulders at the crush at Courts. Civilisation and Christian instincts constantly struggle with the old Adam of remorselessness. Sometimes this instinct for blood evinces itself in fantastic manner.

It was spring on the North-West Frontier, and there had been considerable trouble, trouble that had its origin and its side connections with the good days when Yanoff and Gromchefski and their Cossacks were popping over the Dorah and Baroghil passes, high above Gilgit and Chitral, and the Chancelleries of Europe, equally with the Native States of India, were gossiping. The adventurous young Russian in those days bulked quite large, and one of them will be remembered in a handsome Cossack uniform, who lay of a broken leg in the Himalayas with Moravian missionaries and there succeeded in composing a manuscript “Life of Christ,” which for the moment confused scientists. Perhaps the tomb in Kashmir, that folk call the Tomb of Christ, as part of that strange legend of an Asian wandering, was parent of the story. It has nothing to do with this particular story, except as one of the side issues of Russian adventure which indirectly conduced to the border trouble.

The British army had assembled with alacrity, and the clans had elected to give battle on a pass quite close to the border lines. That is always inspiring. As the troop trains unload, or the converging troops tramp in, the banners of the Prophet on the sky-line are exhilarating subfeatures. This time there were a whole skit of banners, and the subalterns’ spirits ran high. Some of the older men talked of Umbeyla close by, in ’63 when half the border-side put in an appearance and fought for weeks for the possession of the pass at the opening. However, in this case all went merrily. The General in chief command used those masterly tactics that are the invariable custom of commanders, and after a pretty but not desperate fight, shrapnel assisting artistically, the long crest was carried and the tribesmen pursued down the further spurs, “hell-for-leather and devil take the hindmost.” The chief fanatic who had preached that all the faithful were immune from British bullets and that only those who doubted fell, had tucked up his skirts and run like a hare, to the derisive whistle of a double shell, that was searching out his particular rock pulpit.

All the elect had not been so fortunate. On the top of the kotal, by the small shrine with the fluttering rags on the olive-bush along-side, and a few yards below the crest on the further side, lay the body of an old man with a flaming red beard. The Prophet, says tradition, was blessed with this appendage, and the faithful, in the sere and yellow, dye their grey hairs red too, in devout imitation. The old man had been preaching “glory for all and heaven for those who bleed,” and had attained both glory and heaven by the grace of a Mitford bullet. His green banner and his two-edged sword lay by the old man’s side. Shouting “God is Great!” “Allah Ho Akbar!” and directing his marksmen to fire on some British working up from the valley below, he had fallen to a well-directed volley. These same British, heavily entangled in scrub, had, marvel of marvels, come on a graded cobbled overgrown road up the pass, built by the old Graeco-Buddhists from Gandhara. Century on century it had laid forgotten, with here and there a ruined shrine and Grecian frieze close by. Then, as a miracle almost, had the entangled troops found it and with it an easy way to storm the kotal, howl the red-bearded old gentleman never so fiercely.

Late in the afternoon the troops had got into bivouac on the slopes around, and the long strings of transport had nearly finished winding up from the plain below. The piquets had been set and the camp was preparing for what the more sanguine hoped might be a peaceful night, free from snipers—“the snipers from Snipersville,” as the Yankees would phrase it.

Up on the crest where lay the body of the old fanatic, a piquet of British infantry had been placed for the night, from a battalion that had been in reserve, and to its chagrin had not been engaged that day. A regiment new to India, full of keen young soldiers with hardly a veteran among them. Right and left of them were piquets of experienced frontier corps. The British piquet, like its neighbours, had been busy building themselves a stone wall round, for the memory of Umbeyla has taught piquets not to take chances. A staff officer had come up to study the country ahead with his glasses, by the help of a map, and stayed chatting with the officer in command of the piquet. The men’s rifles, with bayonets fixed, lay handy against the sangar wall, for the scrub came up close and there might easily be swordsmen lurking. The staff officer noticed that now and again a man would take up his rifle and go down into the scrub below the crest, and then return, and after a few minutes another would go on a similar errand. He turned to the officer in command.

“What are your men doing down below the crest? See! another has just come up; that makes the fourth since I have been here.”

“I am sure I don’t know; there is nothing to go there for. We’ll ask the sergeant.”

“Here, Sergeant! Where has that man been?”

“Oh! he has just been down to ’ave a jab at Old Ginger, sir!”

The private’s bayonet was red. The young soldiers of the raw regiment were blooding their bayonets in the corpse of Old Red-beard, as a coping stone to their Board-school education. It was a regiment recruited from the Eastern counties, where the old Danish legend and instinct dies hard. Perhaps the spirit of the Danelagh still breaks out on occasion.

A Broom at the Fore

I

Buldoo Badmash

“Sweep a path, and carpet it with red.”

The deodars waved in the autumn breeze of the Himalaya, and from the terraced flowerbeds came now and again a shriek of delight, as a small head wearing a cardboard helmet and waving a toy sword scrambled among the dahlias and chrysanthemums, and a brown figure dodged before him from one deodar-trunk to another.

On the verandah of the little hill bungalow was an array of lead soldiers, and a cannon or two, by the side of a grey card fort, but the commander of the fortress had apparently sallied out against the dusky foe. In other words commandant-of-garrison Derek Walden was giving chase to leader-of-savages Buldoo, the sweeper’s urchin, the which was contrary to all household rules, white or black, British or Indian.

If there was one rule of the household it was this. Derek was not to play with the sweeper’s son, and the sweeper’s son was not to come up from the terraces below, where his father’s hovel stood in solitude. But mother was out at bridge, and father was at the Viceroy’s, and the establishment were all having a long siesta.

Derek was very partial to the sweeperlet Buldoo, and Buldoo had a penchant for the bungalow’s vicinity, where he worshipped with a deep worship the white-skinned, red-cheeked, golden-haired Derek.

The illicit afternoon had begun with a full-dress parade of dragoons and guardsmen on the verandah plinth, Buldoo’s white teeth and pink lips showing his appreciation and adoration. Then had followed the sortie and merry chase in the woods. No solemn Karim Buksh to chase him away with a whip, and no shrill-voiced ayah to hurl abuse against him and all his relations. Derek was forbidden to play with any of the servant’s children as a matter of order and sanitary precaution, but to play with the mehtar’s son was not a matter of discipline, it was a matter of sheer anathema. And why? The answer in some sort is one with which the good British public has now a bowing and distant acquaintance since the Gandhi Saga and the Knights of the Round Table. Something has been said of India’s sixty million untouchables, of the 9,000 primary schools at which the children of the untouchables must sit outside and learn what they can therefrom.

But among those sixty million untouchables, these descendants of ancient Indian races conquered far away back in the ages by the Aryan immigrants from across the Oxus, there are many levels and gradations. Humblest and most untouchable of them all, almost outside the pale of any Eastern’s human sympathy are the sweepers and scavengers. From what aboriginal or conquered origins or by what other means of social depression and slavery they have sprung, history and even tradition is silent. Tradition, in fact, would not condescend to such unmentionables. So they remain a strange layer of humanity, living if not in service, on carrion and oddments, on lizards, and all the impure beasts of the jungle, the sewer and the gutter.

But in the villages, in the cities and in the European households, they are in request as salaried menials. By that likeable habit of euphemy which the East uses to cover its contempts, the sweeper is known by the title of Mehtar or prince, just as the humble, but not so humble, water carrier is called the Bhisti, the “man of paradise,” and the gentle tailor “the Khalifa,” or “successor” to the Prophet, the Caliph.

The Prince, therefore, is a familiar presence at the gate of every sahib’s bungalow and outhouse, neatly attired with his broom of office, the long hand-broom, so that the British speak of him as “Plantagenet” and the “Knight of the broom,” and yet in a country where all conservancy is by hand, he is the most indispensable. Yet, humble and outcaste though he be, he is little subject to the daily ills of the East compared with other servants, perhaps because he lives largely on a rechauffé of the succulent and nourishing scraps from the European’s table, flung into his platter, which he always places humbly outside the dining-room door.

This outcaste fraternity is a large one, with many laws and customs within itself, and is at times ministered to in such aping of religion as may be permitted to it, by outcaste renegade priests of higher orders, in fact it is a life of which the curious might deduce a strange story where many of the earliest rites of primitive races have a queer and syncopated survival.

To this day, too, I remember a château in France’s Headquarters of the Indian Corps d’Armée, with the long sweep of its drive swept in meticulous patterns by a “knight of the broom” quartered in a deserted gardener’s lodge. Once, too, there died as I was also privileged to tell, a sweeper invalided from France, in a hospital near the New Forest. Most sweepers’ bodies were burned, but this one said his peers must be buried. The Imaam, at Woking, who buried all good Moslems, refused to handle or admit the corpse, and an English vicar came to the healing of one who died for England, and he was buried under the church wall in a Hampshire churchyard hard by the tomb of a true Plantagenet, the most remarkable story of a world upheaval, and a tribute to right-thinking on the part of the vicar.

Of such then was little Buldoo, brown and merry imp of sturdy well-moulded limbs, grown on soup and stew from the swill tub of the big house and the better therefor, lively as a grig and happy as the day was long, with little thought for the strange mould of life into which his body and soul had been poured. Thrice glad was he when the rules could be broken and he could romp and play soldiers with the other little grig of the white skin and the golden hair, whom he usually had to worship afar.

Just as the chases-aux-chrysanthèmes were in full swing, the gardener arrived in fury, and the head servant Karim Buksh, appeared from his siesta, hurriedly putting his pugaree straight and gripping his master’s hunting-crop. Buldoo was going to be chased home and Derek was to be captured and got ready for tea with the mem-sahib. The day’s fun was over, and before long Derek Sahib, the chota sahib, or young master, who reigned in all hearts but especially in those of Indra Singh, the mate of the rickshaw-crew and four stout Garhwali lads, was switched off to the Willayat of myth and wonder where golden-haired lads are turned into young masters and return to be met enthusiastically by old master’s old retainers.

The Garhwali crew were not forbidden as associates, being men of Rajput origin themselves, and often formed squads for Derek to drill, and actually paraded in line to salute him in the little hill railway-train, as he went to Willayat. But before he went he managed to convey to Buldoo his old sword and a box of rather broken life-guardsmen, to be buried and much treasured.

II

Plantagenet

So the chota sahib, the golden-haired Derek, passed away to the mysterious Willayat and school, and Buldoo’s parents sought a new master, while the little brown imp who was darkening and blackening as he grew, cherished the life-guardsmen, but broke and lost his sword.

As time rolled on he too became a “Knight of the broom,” and because he treasured the memory of his father’s soldier masters, became sweeper in the lines of an Indian regiment, halal-khor sweeper, or night-soil removalist. It was not an inspiring role, but Buldoo was now a well-shaped lad, who walked, for all the broom on his arm, with an athlete’s tread, and wrestled with other sweeper lads in the dust or the mud outside the regimental lines. Sometimes as sweepers must, he dimly reflected on the why and the wherefore, and sometimes on a memory of the golden lad with whom he had romped and shrieked when authority was napping, and he spent many a spare hour watching the recruit soldiers drill, and swept the ground in front of the quarter-guard with meticulous care.

He had a friend among sweepers, a lad who swept in the barracks of the British battalion in the same cantonment, and the friend had said to him, “Why do you stay among those black soldiers? Come with me and serve the white men. There is heaps of their food about, and they give you tobacco and life is jolly.”

So Buldoo, who knew well enough that not for one instant in the lines of the Indian regiment could he overstep the ruthless hardfast line below which the outcaste lived, agreed that he, too, would go and see life with the gora log, the “white-folk.” Like all sweepers, meghs, and other outcastes he knew his landmarks well enough, and what horrible penalties came in the night to those who dared presume. He had accepted it without thought, but the vision of the ways of the British soldier who understood not and cared little for such things was entrancing. To the barracks he went, after having paid one rupee earnest money and licence to the jemadar sweeper, and was duly produced before the quarter-master of the regiment and entered as “barrack-sweeper No. 50.”

Life in the sweepers’ lines in better tenements than with the Rajput Regiment he had just left, was good enough. He had a gorgeous green waistcoat which his friend lent him and a great pink pugaree tied in outrageous jaunting fashion when he went down to the bazaar on an off day, so much so that the little gipsy girls who came to town with their gaudy skirts, and neatly bound bosoms, thought him a very fine lad indeed. Buldoo’s heart was drawn to the barrack children who reminded him of the chota sahib, and for them he would bring paper toys from the bazaar, and clay horses at the Dewali, and let off fireworks. Thus he became a licensed player in the Parcherries²⁰ and the wives of the regiment gave him food and oddments and knew him as “Banshoot,” a term of endearment in use in the East.

Buldoo was no fool in the state of life to which he had been called, and he studied life around him. The ways of the Rajput soldiery who curled their beards and moustaches and cursed him if he came too near, he had followed acutely, learning how they cooked their food apart and how they muttered mantras and charms on occasion. He even had copied their swaggering lilt, which he would use when he went to the bazaar, and once a gipsy girl had called to him “Are Sipahi” (Oh! soldier!) and indeed when he stripped to wrestle with the other lad of the broom, his lithe frame was as good as any young Rajput’s, and save for a coarse joint of nostril to face, was almost Aryan of countenance. If you knew that he was a sweeper and could never escape that lot and fate in India, you would sigh for one who seemed built by nature for a fair race in life, and perhaps wonder at the hard ways of the world, especially the Eastern world.

Once after he had left the Rajput lines, swaggering off to the bazaar and to see if the girl who had called him Sipahi was about, he ran into a soldier of the Indian regiment who recognised him. Buldoo cringed and salaamed.

“Oho, Bhangi²¹ who told you to tie your turban like a Rajput, hey?”

Buldoo looked round, cringed again, joined his hands and held them up to the twice-born in respect and supplication.

“Look at your waistcoat,” cried the soldier. “And your pyjamas! They are tighter than a courtesan’s and look like a soldier’s. I’ll teach you, you swine, you dog-eater, I’ll teach you to ape your betters,” and he knocked his pugaree off.

For a moment Buldoo saw red, and made as if to fly at his reviler. Then the ancient fear came on and he could only grovel. The Rajput felt better.

“Don’t let me catch you doing it again, bhangi, or I’ll hammer the life out of you,” and off he swaggered.

Buldoo sat by the side of the road, and after a while recovered himself. Perhaps some spark of the ancient race before the Aryan dominion came to him. He got up, dusted himself, picked up his pugaree, tied it meticulously and as if in derision, tied it with the Rajput tilt and knot, and then set off, but not in the same direction. He made his way back to barracks. On the steps of the wall near No. 1 block a soldier whom he knew was sitting cleaning his rifle.

Buldoo salaamed.

“’Ullo, Jerry, where you been? A-larking down in that bazaar. ’Ere, just hold this,” and he gave Buldoo the butt of his rifle while he hauled a tight pull-through up the barrel.

When this was over Buldoo stood to attention, shouldered the rifle at the short shoulder and brought his hand over in salute.

“No,” said his friend, “that ain’t right. See here!”

He took the rifle and showed the sweeper the proper way. Then he thought it might amuse him to try and put him through the manual. For an hour Buldoo eagerly learnt, and that was the beginning of a friendship between Buldoo, line sweeper to His Majesty’s —th, and Private Albert Jenks, formerly municipal sweeper in Stepney. Because Jenks was a soldier at heart he liked a pupil, and Buldoo became expert at handling his rifle, and was even taken down to the miniature range and was allowed to fire a round on pretence of cleansing the marker’s butt. At last came a day when he was allowed to fire some service rounds poached by Jenks, and used after the musketry party had gone back to barracks on the real range beyond the golf links.

Thus ex-sweeper Jenks, of Stepney, gamecock and full-fledged foot-soldier, and sweeper Buldoo of Bhangi Lane, Arnbala, hereditary poltroon and outcaste, became sworn friends. Little recked Jenks of hereditary untouchability, and exploited the friendship for all it was worth.

Fortunately Jenks had no fancy for the country liquor that has often been the bane of the British rank and file, but a skirt was another matter. Buldoo would introduce his friends of the gipsy and criminal tribes to Jenks, who was not perhaps the worse for a chat out in the thorn thickets with some of these saucy wenches in the yellow and red petticoats and junky silver bangles, disreputable baggages that they were with their rounded busts and glorious white teeth.

But the best of days come to an end, and one day saw the tidings of the Great War over the seas.

Jenks was now all a soldier, and talked by the hour together of what the British Army would do. Buldoo and the yellow skirts listened all agog, and news came that battalion after battalion, European and Indian, was off to Willayat. But Jenks’ corps was excluded, and then one day came an order too, that sent it off to some destination over-seas unknown. The number of the sweepers to go with the corps was much reduced, and Buldoo, to his dismay, was left behind, and taken on by the Barrack Department to keep the barracks swept and garnished. It was not very long before new Europeans came from Europe, so new and so green and so polite, much more so than the regular British soldier. Buldoo soon found himself installed as guide, philosopher and friend to many of the new-comers, to whom he would show the bazaars and the country road, and talk the English he had picked up from Jerry. Many were the little tips that came his way, but his heart would not rest in peace and plenty. The War was calling him, and as he could not get discharged, he made off and walked the countryside to another station a hundred miles away.

Here was a great recruiting depôt for Indian troops, and for a while he had ideas of shipping as a soldier, as the bazaars said that the sahibs were enlisting all and sundry. So he swaggered up one day with the Rajput knot in his pugaree, to offer himself for enlistment. The sight of the high-class soldiery, Rajput and Moslem, however, was too much for him, and his heart went down to his boots, and he slunk into a latrine to re-tie his pugaree, and look like a sweeper again. Not for him the bubble reputation, though he did understand a Mark V. Service Rifle and all its ways.

Once, however, he took a Moslem sepoy’s rifle on sentry-go for an hour, for half a rupee, swearing in the dark that he was a Moslem too, and a reservist, putting on a great coat, and tying his pugaree accordingly. He even in the dark had the courage to challenge someone who had approached his post, in the way that Jenks had taught him. It was only another sweeper, and nothing to swagger about, but it amused him to treat his brother knight in a lofty manner. That was the sum of his military experience, and the memory of the chota sahib and “shabash Buldoo” in a piping voice made his heart ache to be a true and proper soldier and not an outcaste sweeper.

III

The Bubble Reputation

“En avant les enfants perdus.”

Then one day came to Buldoo the first step on a military adventure. Someone said in the bazaar that the Sirkar was enlisting sweepers for Mesopotamia. Buldoo had heard vague stories of the War in the holy places of Islam. It was there that he would go, and before long he found himself, with a numbered tin disc on a cord round his neck, on the great Black Water, the Kala Pani, on his way up the Persian Gulf to the Shaft el Arab, and the town of Bussorah, which men now call Basra. Indeed, it was a strange place for a little outcaste lad to find himself, and so Buldoo thought in a misty way. But sleeping was dry, and food was there in plenty as too many folk could not eat their rations while hearty Buldoo could, and one day as he wandered about the ship, whom should he find on the British soldier’s deck, but his old friend Jenks, wounded in the first advance to Kut, and now on his way back to the force on the Tigris. It was a happy reunion, and before long Jenks had Buldoo at the manual again.

“Yer never know, Jerry, in this blooming country when yer won’t have to fight for your life with them thieving Harabs all over the shop.”

Many a yarn did the wide-eyed Buldoo listen to, and then the great steamer came to a bar at the river’s mouth and everyone was bundled out into a ferry-boat, for the larger transports could not cross the bar. For twelve hours did the crowded ferry-boat steam up the muddy waters of the Shatt through groves of green palm-trees, and presently the palms were hung with festoons of grapes, and everyone felt that Mesopotamia did not look so bad. What a sight met their eyes as they entered the crowded river and port of Basra, ocean steamers everywhere unloading, river steamers, barges empty and full coming down stream and starting up, such a sight as Sinbad the Sailor never dreamed of for his ancestral Bussorah.

Soon the steamer warped in alongside, and Buldoo and all the drafts were hurried off and collected on the newly-made quays . . . quays which a few months earlier were swamps and irrigated date gardens. The drafts had little time to think or look around them. All that Buldoo was aware of, was that a ship near by was being unloaded by a host of black men who were struck by the overseers every time they passed like ants with a hayseed. And somebody said that they came from Misr or Misraim, and that the Pharaohs of old had always whacked them and that they liked it like that. But Buldoo noticed that the sahibs whacked too, but the whack fell on the grain-sack.

Not far from the port was the followers’ depôt, where all the non-combatant men were posted, most of them the menials for the service of the troops, sweepers, bhisties, and also hosts of cooks, these latter men of better class. Cheery hearty discipline prevailed in the camp, and those who did not know the trade they professed were soon taught it. Very thorough was the commandant of the depôt. Many men had come out as cooks who knew nothing except how to prepare their own meals, and Buldoo watched them taught mass cooking, and how to use oil-cookers. In a country where there was no wood but plenty of oil, oil cooking was wise, even he understood that. What pleased him most was to see the final lessons, when the men were made to cook in trenches representing the front line under the fire of bursting bombs. He laughed to see the cooks cower and scuttle and then get used to it. One day he went for temporary duty as extra sweeper to the British Base Hospital, and here his Ambala experience stood him in stead. All the gora log, the white soldiers, were his friends, and he heard many tales of real fighting, in which his friends had invariably bayoneted Turks. Buldoo felt he should like to do that, especially if as one of his friends said, it was a matter of “prodding them in the rump.”

There was lots doing up at the front some hundreds of miles yet, and soon Buldoo found himself on a barge, one of two on each side of a steamer chunking up the river lying lazy listening to the chant of the chainmen. It was fun too, for they passed great Arab boatmen towing their sailing boats when the wind was against them. They towed starko which shocked the Indian soldier on board, who pelted them with potatoes, and Buldoo also laughed at this, but the Arabs, who like potatoes, laughed too.

At one place where the steamer stopped, was an outpost work protecting the narrows, and there Buldoo saw a Garhwali whom he was sure he knew. It was Indra Singh, one of the crew of the rickshaw of chota sahib’s mother at Simla long ago. He salaamed low and asked him, and said how he was the sweeper’s son, and did Indra Singh remember, and where was the chota sahib.

Indra Singh was graciously pleased to take notice, and say he did remember the sweeper’s badmash son. Buldoo grinned. He, too, was looking for the chota sahib, he had heard he was up stream, but many chota sahibs had been killed. But he, Indra Singh, too, longed to see that chota sahib for whom he had a very loving memory, and Buldoo salaamed and passed on.

That night the steamer pulled up by the bank for the night not far from Amara. There was nowhere to go, marsh was all round, and the men were allowed to stroll on the bank. Just as it was dusk, Buldoo came on a prostrate sepoy, weeping quietly. He was but a lad, and said he had bukhar, “fever.” Buldoo massaged his aching knees and shin-bones. “He could not go on,” said the lad, “he wanted to go back. He had not wanted to enlist, his father had made him.” His father was a wounded soldier and loved the Sirkar and the King, but he, Buldeo Singh was going to desert. He was not going to the front to be bayoneted by Turks, his mother would not want that.

A sudden brain-wave came to Buldoo. Why should not he, Buldoo, go to the front as Buldeo Singh Rajput, and take over this lad’s equipment? No one would know. He could tie a Rajput pugaree. He knew how Rajputs eat. The draft was under a strange Indian officer. He could handle a rifle and fire a cartridge. It did not take long to make the exchange, to change the discs on each other’s necks, to put Buldeo Singh into the comfortable loose follower’s jacket, and for Buldoo to put on the Rajput uniform. The lad was to go back as a cook sick with fever, and as a steamer with empty barges going down was moored near by, Buldoo put his dummy on that, giving him his own bedding roll, and taking on the sepoy’s. It did not take long, and the newly-made Rajput went and slept an exciting sleep among his fellows and even dreamed of bayoneting Turks in the rump. No one had told him that that was not the way of the Turk, who liked the prod to be the other way about.

Next morning all was well. No one noticed him, and with the others he took his rifle from the twisted ropestand in the middle of the barge and cleaned it, and that was all he had to do. Being used to cleaning the belts of the European soldiers at Umballa he soon had his equipment in admirable order. Once an officer called him and asked his name. With mingled trepidation and pride he had said “Buldoo Singh, Huzoor.” His whiskers and beard were growing, and these he curled carefully, and it would have been a very penetrating eye to pierce his disguise.

The steamer had chunked up against the stream past Amara, and its rattling traffic, and past the Shrine-of-Ali-in-the-East, and by nightfall had reached the Shrine-of-Ali-in-the-West. Here they were getting near the front, and steamers and barges crowded with wounded passed them, and stories of fierce doings were shouted at them. The British officers on board were parading the details, and chatting encouragingly, and down the wind came the boom of distant guns.

That night they tied up at Sheikh Saad, and next morning ran up a few miles further where the drafts were disembarked, the followers being ordered back to Sheikh Saad now becoming the advanced base of the force. There had been desperate fighting, and ahead lay the beleaguered Kut. Buldoo found himself fallen in on the bank, with twenty-five other men of his Rajput Corps, and ordered to ground arms, and help drag off some guns. Hauling on a rope came easily, and he exerted himself manfully, earning approval. It was a whirl of excitement, with the blue Persian mountains in the distance, the now near sound of guns and musketry. His battalion was in the trenches facing the Turks, and shouldering their bedding rolls the party marched off. It was not more than a mile’s trudge before the party came up to the regimental headquarters. Already Buldoo had seen the chota sahib, and just as he was going to speak to him two other sahibs came up just like him and Buldoo was confused. Perhaps it wasn’t his chota sahib after all.

The new-found soldier was to get his dose at once. He was sent up with a havildar and ten others to join a company in the front line trenches, and the Turks were shelling indiscriminately. A sahib was in command just like the other three he had seen, and the new draft were interviewed and their equipment inspected. The sahib spoke kindly to him, and asked him about service and his home. Buldoo had flushed with pleasure, in giving his concocted answers, full of pride that he was a sepoy and being treated as such. That night the Turks had attacked, and Buldoo had actually shot a man, and had not been seized with fear. His heart exulted as he repeated to himself, “I am a jangi nafar”—“a fighting man.” The corporal by his side had been shot and he, outcaste Buldoo it was, who had gripped the situation, and had given orders to the squad. The sahib had said shabash; and some distant strain in his blood had re-echoed to the phrase.

The commanding officer had come into the trenches, and remarked that Buldoo was a proper enough lad, a baraba jowan, and again his heart leapt. He had eaten his food and prepared it like a Rajput. He had dared give water and hand a chapatti to a comrade, and felt that his bluff was good. That night came orders that if the Turk attacked, and was driven back, he was to be followed into his own trenches.

The day had passed quietly enough. Buldoo had slept and eaten most of the day. The men were chaffing and talking quietly, and he had actually gained approval by telling a ribald yarn from Bombay. To his surprise he seemed talking on equal terms, and no one had seemed to look askance. That night just after the moon had gone down over the marshes towards Babylon, a heavy fire of Turkish artillery had broken out; so heavy that the men were disconcerted. The sahibs and the subahdar had been down the line heartening them when the men on the parapet had begun to fire. Nothing happened, however, but there had been several casualties. Buldoo found himself acting lance-naik, and, later, told off as the company commander’s orderly. That officer himself was but a lad, just one of those chota sahibs who seemed to Buldoo so much alike.

The Turkish artillery grew silent, the rifle-fire stopped as the Rajputs recovered their nerve. The company commander walked along the front-line, with Buldoo, lance-naik and orderly, behind him. He had had time to re-tie his pugaree and give it the most rakish of Rajput twists, with an end sticking out stiff like a plume, and the officer noticed it with approval as they climbed out of a deep trench.

The night was bright and clear with a cool wind off the Pusht-i-Koh. Now and again the sky showed bright as one of the big guns fired a round, and as the echo died away Rigel twinkled to Betelgeux in the clear Chaldean night, as it had twinkled to the ancient astronomers, even when Amaraphael was king of Babylon and Tidal King of Nations, or chief of tribes, in that same Pusht-i-Koh across the way.

Suddenly from out the shadow in front of the parapet came a rush and a whirl and a burst of bombs. The Turks were on top of the Rajputs ere half the men could spring up again to the firing-step. Crash among them burst the bombs and behind the bombers came the rush of fixed bayonets. Clear on the skyline stood Nafar Mustapha, hurling projectiles right and left while the men with bayonets opened magazine fire. Half the Rajputs were down and the front-line trench was lost. But “counter-attack at once” was a good rule, and the company commander brought out his two reserve platoons. Old Subahdar-Major Nihal Singh came forth roaring and the sahib by his side. “Shabash the King’s Own,” “Shabash Rajput Log Maro! Maro! Soor-neen!”

With levelled bayonets and confused throwing of bombs the Rajputs rushed forth against the Turks who had not time to consolidate, and hurled them back once more. Nihal Singh crashed to the ground and as he sprang forward behind the gallant old tyke, the sahib too fell with a bullet in his leg. It was Buldoo then who rushed forward shouting, “Shabash Rajput Log! Maro! Maro! Shabash!”²²

A trench was retaken, but alas the race is not always to the swift. As Buldoo sprang to the top of the parapet to hurl a bomb at the retreating Turk he, too, must fall with a bullet-hole in his forehead, and the back blown out of his head. And just before grim Sergeant Death had called to ex-sweeper Buldoo, “Pile your arms! Pile your arms!” a cry had reached him from the wounded chota sahib, a well-remembered cry from the Simla pine, “Oh Shabash, Buldoo! Shabash!”

“I am calling them home—Come Home! Come Home!
> Tread light o’er the dead in the valley.” > — The Trumpeter

## The Mantle Shop

“Tragedy in a London flat.” That was how the posters had it, and there had been so many tragedies of late, so many short cuts from trouble, that I bought a Standard to read more of it, oblivious of the fact that my own would be waiting for me at home. Alas and alack! Instead of the victim of the tragedy being some unknown quantity, some ship that passed in the night, I read of a woman I had known once, dead in a gas-oven . . . dead as dead could be; with a pitiful story behind it of a life thrown away. There had been many such, but this one I had known in her golden days, when all the world was green for her, and a stage that she might stalk on. I would have sipped honey from that flower—nay, I would have stayed and cared for it, but I was thrown aside for a worse man rather than a better . . . and now . . . there was Madeleine Hayes, glorious Madeleine Hayes, a king’s daughter in her time, dead of a drug-habit, with a gas-oven end to it. A gas-oven! Of all the miserable, sordid, if simple, endings! And they were doing it by dozens: depression, lost jobs, drugs, extravagances and what-not assisting. And why not, if it be their poor pleasure?—save only Madeleine, who was a king’s daughter, and should have lived and died in honour.

Hyde Park Corner; and I would walk across the Park and muse and mourn for a while in the cool December air. So in at Apsley Gate and past the Achilles, and then onto the grass to avoid the beaten way—the very piece of turf on which, years ago, Madeleine had turned me down; only then it was summer, and harder to bear therefore.

My way would lie out at the Marble Arch, or, better in the London tongue, The Murble Urch, and then along Oxford Street awhile, and up one of those quaint alleys which still remain in Kensington and Marylebone. Howeversomuch London be improved, modernised, uglified, some of these quaint alleys still remain—alleys with antique shops, shops where they sell, and perhaps even make, feather or shell flowers, fancy lamp-shades and the like. Because, too, folk who cherish comfortable flats use such ways, an electric-fitting shop will have a window, or a gas company that thinks it can go one better, will lie in wait.

Turning out of Oxford Street so that I might muse the better, I made for my alley by a parallel road, still full of lost Madeleine, and almost felt the taste of gas. Could it be a pleasant end? Only the best gas ought to be used.

Then I came to my own alley, one closed with a cannon upright in the ground, so that none but foot-passengers should pass by; and I turned up it, past the shop where they made lacquered furniture and showed it with an occasional old piece to vitalise it and set a standard; past the shop where they sold the feather flowers, an art of arts; and then, as was my wont, I stopped before the gas-shop, to look at the latest tiled grates and stoves and lamps and cookers. They had been re-arranging the windows, evidently some new stunt, and I paused with interest. There were other passers, too, who stopped to gaze and then wandered on, and I drew across to the feather flowers, wondering what the new stunt was. Some went in to inspect closer, and one tall and worn-looking man, with long spatulate fingers, with which he held his chin, was gazing intently. A woman came, too, just such a one as poor Madeleine might have been in the later days of her failure and her folly. She, too, must stop and gaze.

I could see that there were upholsterings, too, and books on a low table. Evidently some new line, and perhaps a new business. The tired-looking lady came across to the feathers too. Was I to be solicited? No, not quite that; but she spoke, and I raised my hat. It was a faded tenor voice, and this is what she said:

“I want to go into that gas-shop, but I am afraid to. Are you going in? You have been looking at it from this side of the alley for a long time.”

“Yes, I have been looking. It is a favourite window of mine. But there seems to be something new, and I have not examined it closely. There have been several people coming and going, so I stepped aside to watch. They seem to have a new show, but I’ve not been close, or gone in.”

She looked wistful.

“Oh, yes, it is a very good show, I believe. I got a postcard advertising their new stock. Such a good idea, don’t you think? Oh, it makes things much easier . . . so convenient.”

She looked across again, and I studied her face more carefully. It was a beautiful profile; it had been a beautiful face, but worn and sunk. Nerves, sorrow, perhaps drugs, had wrought their worst. She was certainly not an ordinary light-o’-love, and there was no question of her trying to scratch up an acquaintance. A leman, perhaps, of the higher grades, who had long lost her place in heaven. One of the bigger ships in her time, perhaps. A well-educated and cultured woman, too, from her voice. Some of the best courtesans of London may be that—women who have mistressed some of the big ones of the earth, perhaps. At any rate, she was now sad beyond degree. That faded, once beautiful voice, the long, uncut hair, bound in coils—what was her story and what her tragedy? Was she now about to fit up some flat of solitude and retirement, some private drug-parlour? Again I wondered. A wisp of still brown hair fluttered out in the draught that swept the alley.

She was still examining the exhibits in the show-window. The man with the spatulate fingers and the musical face was back.

“Oh, do come in with me. I hate going alone; and it is a long way to go alone. A long way.” That was not a very intelligible remark, and I gazed at her with some surprise. Was she out of her mind?

Together we sauntered over to the window. The warmer damp air inside was dimming the glass, but we could see that all the older lay-outs were gone; there were no more tiled grates and ordinary gas-stoves. There were several tiled and enamelled ovens more like a dog-kennel. There were also piles of little velvet cushions, deep purple or black, with golden cord tassels.

Though the haze on the glass was thickening, I could see what was inside, and that a grave attendant, whose face had a quiet and kindly smile, was talking to a customer. A door at the side said “Mantle Department.” Evidently a bigger establishment than I thought.

The faded lady by my side leant towards me, till her worn sealskin jacket touched my cheek.

“They are very complete. I wonder what the mantles are like?”

So did I. I have a house in the country lit by gas, and mantles are my trouble.

“Let us go in, if you will be so kind.”

And I went with her, because—— Oh, well because she reminded me of Madeleine.

The attendant turned to us, with the smile, the reassuring smile that I had noticed.

“What can we show madame? I am glad you have come so soon. We have only opened this morning in our new line.”

The funny little tiled ovens were picturesque enough, and there was a low couch, with a rest, and one of the stoves or ovens on a side-rest it could swing in. There were two or three couches covered in velvet rugs that matched the cushions; one dark purple, another vieux rose.

“These, sir, are very comfortable. They are more expensive than the plain couch, but the stove is so convenient. Of course you can have the stove alone. We have it in more varied colours, but they won’t come from the works till to-morrow.”

While my companion questioned him and felt the cushions, I turned to an oak table; on it were rather curious plaques and undertakers’ trade notices of estimates. And then I turned to another, with half-a-dozen little books of a devotional appearance; but just as I was going to open one, my companion called.

I went over to her, and she gave me a look of infinite sorrow.

“Would you come in here with me? I want to see the mantles.”

And I went, finding myself not among gas-mantles but in what more resembled the Peers’ robing-room in the Lords, or the Regalia room at a Masonic lodge. A tall, quiet woman, with dark red hair and a nurse’s dress in deep mauve, advanced gravely.

“You want a mantle, madame?”

Round the room, in glass cases, hung silk and velvet mantles—mantles that seemed to be full-length.

My companion said:

“May I see some mantles?”

“Certainly, madame. We have them in velvet and in marocain, but we recommend velvet. And there are many colours. Deep purple, old rose; and we have white . . . with, of course, a dash of heliotrope.”

My companion looked up.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean, madame, that sometimes maiden ladies like white with a dash. But deep purple has been the most popular.”

The customer hesitated, and said:

“I should like to try on the very dark purple one that would match the pillows in the shop.”

I have said that she was tall, and when the saleswoman put on her a deep purple robe with a short cape and Medici collar, she looked even taller and more dignified.

“That I will take, if it can be sent—with the pillow to match. The man who brings it should wait for payment. No; I shan’t want the stove. My own will do.”

Then she turned. “Thank you for your company. I am so sorry I troubled you, but it is a matter that needed support.”

And then we were outside, and I bowed, and she gave me the faded smile that I had already noticed, as we passed away in the night.

One forgets the chance happenings in the turn of the next, and it was not till I looked at my evening paper two days later that the lady and the mantles were recalled. This is how it ran:

I hurried to the details. A lady of some age, with signs of great beauty, had been found dead in the sitting-room of a fashionable suite. She lay on the sofa, in a deep purple mantle, and her head on a purple pillow. Her face was covered with a military gas-mask, but to it had been attached a rubber pipe from the gas-stove in the room. At present no trace of her identity had been found, but everything about her denoted great refinement.

I clapped on my hat and made for my alleyway and the gas-fitting shop. It was foggy, and the lamps shimmered mistily enough as I sidled—I dared not walk—to the strategical cover of the feathers-shop. From its old-world doorway I looked across to the big windows. I rubbed my eyes. It was the old window with its stoves and its lamps and its tiled fire-places. Gone were the notable and unusual fittings of two nights ago. The glass was hazy, so I ventured in. I had something to say about gas-mantles. There they were, in their cylindrical boxes, on the same shelf as of yore. Gone were the Mantle sign, the heap of cushions, and the tables with the books of devotion.

I said to the young man of my acquaintance:

“You have turned it all back again, I see.”

“Yes, sir; yes, sir. Fact is, sir, our young master wanted something new, but the old man would not have it. We were closed all yesterday, getting it to rights.”

Now, what the devil did he mean? But somehow, I can’t get that faded, shapely grace and the soft, tired voice out of my mind—my mind that was full of Madeleine, too. I feel as Butterfly Chang must have felt. “Yesterday I dreamed that I was a butterfly, and I flitted from flower to flower, intent only on my life as a butterfly. Now I am a man again. Now I am not sure if I am not a butterfly, dreaming that I am a man.”

And as I left, the young man said: “The mantles will be round in the morning, and our man will fit them.”

And then the dirge wept for the memory of things that had never happened.

The Bomb Parasts: A Story of Progress

I

The Laarence Gardens

The Mall at Lahore in the long months of the winter is as attractive a spot as anyone could wish to see. As a capital city of the most virile province of India it is well that it should be so. The colleges, the law courts, the public offices have been built with great attention to the continuity and suitability of design, and this Mall is a mingling of Eastern art with inconspicuous Western efficiency that is typical of India at its best.

The Mall and roads are well avenued. Ficus religiosa which men call the Banyan, mulberry, and that great tree of the Punjab, Dalbergia sissu, the Shisham, edge its ways; the public gardens are full of the many eucalypti and all the flowering shrubs that Eastern gardens cherish, and under them the students of the universities sit and study. Unfortunately their study is not always of the best, for if you peer over their shoulders you may find some cheap translation of French eroticism in their hands, or the latest effusion from Moscow, which is a pity and also a scandal.

The most beautiful time of all in this city of palaces is when spring is soon to become fierce summer, when the shisham is at its greenest, when the roses are legion, and the droning of the Persian wheels, bringing the water sleepily from well to garden, sets the world adrowse, for “lazily drowsily, drowsily lazily” is that melodious song of the wheels.

Among the trees on the Mall stands the statue of old John Lawrence, in hot-weather comfy attire, breeches and boots and open shirt. In one hand is a sword, in the other a great quill pen. The subaltern’s version is “How can I sharpen this pen with this sword?” The real question, kindly and harmless, is to the people of the Punjab, “Shall we rule between us by the ways of Peace or the ways of War?” And all went well for half a century and more, and the old folk came in to gaze with affection on Jan Laarence, who was so kindly and withal so firm. Then some thrice-distilled ass, whose self-induced inferiority complex got the better of him, discovered that it meant a slur on the people of India. Had he his deserts he would sit still not to be able to sit down, and now and again Chota Lall or some such goose moves that the statue be removed. Then perhaps a half-anna subscription provides a pot of tar, and someone’s pillow is stolen, and Jan Laarence, whose real statue lies in Punjab prosperity, appears in a guise of feathers, which, no doubt, does not worry his shade.

There is a story in the Punjab told in Clubs and places where they gossip—a story which is not original, for it is told of a greater man in Egypt. But this is how it runs, to the delight of wild asses and men who should know better.

They tell how a certain Governor-General, whose name is best told in asterisks, for the story can be toldof more than one, woke up while visiting in Government House in Lahore to find a shade standing by his bedside gazing sadly at him.

“Who are you?” demanded the Governor-General.

“I am John Lawrence, originally of the Punjab. Who are you?”

“I am . . . Viceroy of India.”

“Ah!” said the shade musingly. “Ah! . . . I remember. The man who saved himself and lost India.”

That is not a nice story, but when your most staunch friend, a police officer, has just been murdered to make a students’ holiday, when a young Sikh soldier has been so worked up that he must slay an English lady in her garden and chase with a sword her screaming children amid the hollyhocks and lupins, strong men are not always just. Also it is d——d annoying to have to play tennis in the Lahore gardens with a revolver on, while students sit round with their indecent novels, and where the peace of eighty years seems to have gone west.

However, Lahore is still Lahore, and Mian Mir is still a stout centre of sturdy Indian troops and Atkinses, the latter better than ever. The good guns still stand in the gun-park on the plain of the Saint Mian Mir, where Sir Charles Napier, of pious memory, showed his engineer how to find a site for a cantonment . . . found it by the simple expedient, as the stone records, of sticking his orderly’s lance in the ground and saying, “This shall be church and centre.”

No! Lahore life still goes on, in those gardens which bear the name of Lawrence, where—

“Lightly the demoiselles tittered and leapt,
Merrily capered the players and all.”

Even if near by—

“ . . . a Mussalman civil and mild,
Watched as the shuttlecocks rose and fell,
And he said as he counted his beads and smiled,
God smite their souls to the nethermost hell.”

But the folk who use the gardens most are the Indian folk, to whom the police band is the last word in music; and as it gets dusk “Old G.,” in his high three-decker old-world fitton,²³ crawls round the drive in phantom, with perhaps, too, dear dead and gone Frank Stevenson, who saw the trouble coming. That is Lahore in the evenings as we love to remember it, and see, as it still does, the Governor’s carriage with its four-in-hand of camels come back from the races, and all the while, so moves the world apace, young Indian girls dance “the Blues” at Stiffles, and police search the bushes for students with revolvers, who want heaven and Isvara by way of the gallows. The which, my Lords and gentlemen, is a mystery.

II

Old Friends in Lahore

“Down the Mall so hot and dusty
I could see a great Kiswasti,
In the distance I could see
His consort Hamare waste bhi."

So runs the nonsense rhyme of the mess-house, and kiswasti which means “why on earth,” is on the lips of many simple folk these days, including those of Ressaldar-major and honorary kaptan Ganesha Singh, late of Simpson’s Doaba Horse. Ganesha Singh had been driven in from the wheat colony by his friend the Assistant Commissioner and was now coming down the Mall flip-flop with his great countryman’s shoes on.

Incidentally he had a red leather pair embroidered with gold, that his young wife Tita-Bhai had given him, in his pocket, for he had come on a twofold mission. He was going to call on one of the magistrates of Lahore, a friend of long standing, with whom he had become friends in the early days of the World War, when men that were men came together.

The manner of it has a charm of its own. Ganesha Singh had even in the remote years before the war joined the pension list, the pasmanda, the list of those “with tired feet” as the expressive Persian has it. But when the Punjab Government called for pensioned Indian officers to officer Labour Corps and the like, Ganesha Singh, burly and white-bearded, turned up at the English sahib’s office.

“Hullo, old soldier,” said the sahib, seeing Ganesha Singh’s snow-white beard. “How long have you been eating pinson?”

“Eleven years, sahib,” replied a very deep voice; “but when my father heard about the war, he said ‘Get out, I won’t have any of you young fellows loafing about the farm. Get out and go to the wars!’ So here I am, sahib. Ho! Ho! Ho!!”

“How old is your father then?”

“I don’t know, sahib, but he was a Ressaldar²⁴ when he went to the Baillie Guard.” (Baillie Guard is the name for the old Residency at Lucknow, to the relief of which many Punjab soldiers went.)

So the two had long been fast friends, and he would go to the sahib’s bungalow and not to his duftar,²⁵ and there was no chaprassi²⁶ so impudent as dare ask for a fee to admit him. But he had not brought his red shoes for the ’gistrate sahib, he knew what solid Punjabi shoes were for, to walk on and no nonsense; but he was also going to see his son a student in the Lahore university. Well, young men nowadays were particular, and his son would expect him to look his best among student friends. La, la! Tita-Bhai knew that, and it was she who had insisted on the red shoes.

Down the Mall, too, had jingled half a dozen Akalis, great, grey, grim Sikh fanatics, whom the police keep an eye on, old soldiers most of them, dressed in deep blue with their five kakas, quoit, and kirpan²⁷ and everything else very much in evidence. Not that they worried Ganesha Singh, for there among them was his old trooper friend, once the drill duffedar in his regiment.

“Aha! Gurdit Singh, Sri Khalsa ji ki jai,”²⁸ and the Akalis clanged an answer.

Then Gurdit Singh dropped behind. “Aha! old friend, where’s that son of yours?”

“He is at ischool,” said the old man proudly, “firsht istandard pass, now at kalij.”

“Ah!” said the Akali, “I misdoubt he needs some bamboo backshish.²⁹ See you do it, and don’t say I did not warn you; so long!” and off he jogged, while his friend stood listening to the long-drawn Punjabi, the aunda and jalla, that lingers on the tongue, and takes longer to say than to write its English equivalent.

“Aha! bamboo backshish, that was a good one, they all wanted the stick, the best backshish perhaps they could have. . . . Spare the rodand spoil the child.” Then the old man started. Did he mean the boy was in mischief? He hurried on to the sahib’s house, now close by.

The wheel was still droning as the patient bullock went round and round, and there was a click of croquet-balls on the pleasant green lawn. There were two memsahibs and another sahib too. Perhaps he had better wait. Your true Indian gentleman is diffident of butting in. But Grayson, the magistrate, saw the old man, and came across smiling with hand extended, and then you might see that very pretty sight a true Punjab greeting, breast to breast with hand over back for all the world like the Five Points of Fellowship, if you know what that means, there on the Englishman’s lawn.

“Welcome, Ganesha Singh, and you are here in the nick of time, for I have something to say to you, and here staying the night with me is my brother-in-law, also a cavalry soldier. Here, Alec, may I introduce Captain Ganesha Singh, formerly of the Doaba Horse.”

The officer came over. “Why, of course I know of Ganesha Singh; his brother was my ressaldar when I joined. Salaam, sahib! Ram Ram!”

And the old man’s face lit up, and out of his waistcoat came a little packet of cardamom seeds, the bond of peace and badge of friendship all India over.

“But first of all you must have some tea and a tot of whisky for the good of the Khalsa, while I and the sahib have our dinner. Come into my study.”

In the study the three sat down.

“I am glad you are here, Alec; it is a bit of luck getting you and the old man together. We are raiding a poisonous rag that is spreading sedition and the bomb-cult, Kali Ma and all the murder ritual, something like the old Thugee business. Several boys from the University have been got hold of. I think the old man’s son is in it. We may even get him there to-night, for they hold their meetings in the Editor’s office. Now that the old man is here, I would perhaps hand his son over to him and keep him out of arrest. It would break the old man’s heart. Also there is another—a young Mussalman I want to save—who is in it. He is the son of old Mehtab Khan Gukkhar, of the 4th Punjab cavalry, who was honorary magistrate in my division. They ought to be in your ranks and not get mixed up with this poisonous tomfoolery. Mind you, there is something in it. The all-fired folly of Government in allowing this quite unnecessary poison to spread beats me. Pah! Because you can let hot air float about Trafalgar Square, or on Tower Hill, you can’t do it here or on the Maidan at Calcutta. They’ve managed to send these boys wild. Then there is the curse of Kali, the mother of destruction, that gets into their hysterical over-wrought minds. If I can get hold of these two boys, can you do anything?”

“Hum! Got quite enough to do to keep the poison out of the regiment. Some devils in the villages are trying to bully their women. We watch them all day like a mother and toddlers. Perhaps the C.O. would take them for a bit, if they are any sort of good, for their father’s sake.”

III

The Bright Star of the Punjab

If you turn out of the Mall as you get towards Anarkali, and take the road to that very Sultan Serai where Mackintosh Jallaluddeen lay dying, the unpublished history of Mother Maturin who kept the seaman’s haunt at Saigon among his papers, and whence Peachy Carneghan and Michael Dravot started for Kafiristan, you will get into some very narrow quarters. Half-way up to the Serai there is a tank, a somewhat fetid tank, and a now forgotten Moslem tomb, and beside it a close bazaar with those carved wood upper balconies so often connected in the East with the courtesans and their lairs. In the middle of them a narrow passage turns to the left, and inside is a hive of more or less disreputable folk, dancers and musicians, some Afghan horse-copers, and the makers of zithers. Up a three-pair back lie the editorial office and press of the Bright Star of the Punjab, a very disreputable paper which has taken the name of a long extinct order founded by Runjhit Singh. The Bright Star circulates among a few hundred students in Lahore, Amritsar and Ferozepore, and has not the ghost of a chance of paying its way save for its advertisements. These advertisements are of the only kind that pay in India, and one in which even more reputable rags deal—that is to say, love philtres and aphrodisiacs for old men and young. In this case the appeal is to the students, whom the decadent ways of the Hindu East may put in need of such.

In the middle of long columns of advertisements one specially powerful for ‘Indian Chieves’ stood the turgid incendiary leading articles, prating of the British sucking their life-blood, of trade ruined, of all agriculture smashed, of daily smothering of “aspirations, of powerful omniscient determinative full of high-cock-a-lorum Indian youth . . . who can withstand us when we call ‘Hail, motherland,’ and say ‘Good-morning, Mister’ to these haughty magistrates.” We may laugh, but it is all very dangerous stuff, especially for the young men of the debating societies, drunk, as the great Disraeli once said, “with the exuberance of their own verbosity.” Here is an appeal to that strange lust of blood that lies somewhere at the back of all human nature, but which in India is especially in evidence, which added to the doctrine of Karma is responsible for most evil, for the cruel irresponsible principles and practice of child-marriage, for the burning of widows and the unabashed worship of the “organs of birth and the circlet of bones and the loose loves carved on the temple stones.”

Siva the Destroyer, the popular god Mahadeo, had a sakhti, a female force, that folk call his wife, and among her many attributes are smallpox and its blessings and destruction of all kinds. She is often depicted as gnashing her teeth over clawfuls of dead. In visions she comes urging men to murder, “Main Bookhi Hun! Main Bookhi Hun!” “I am hungry! Blood! Blood!” and the student seizes his knife to fall on his school inspector, and the young sepoy goes fantee, and hurls himself on his officer’s wife and children flashing sword in his recruit hand. “Main Bookhi Hun!”

Listen to this. “Arise, young man, slay and spare not, wipe them out root and branch. Slay them who spared not your women whom they raped and slew at Amritsar; spare not a child! would you slay a snake and leave the eggs!” and such-like and so forth. And the anaemic-looking prematurely-wifed student, who was assistant editor, smiled with pride at his work and cuffed the small boy who was compositor, and shouted “Kapy chahiye” before he was ready with it.

“Pull Viceroy from his high horse, learn to make bombs from mothers’ milk. Oh, my Lord, how truly magnificent! Kali Ma ki jai! Victory to Mother Kali! who is queen of death traps.” And it is to be observed that our composer of leading articles had now abandoned the words of a European anarchist and was using his own bright phrasing.

And as we watch him sweating to make his mark among his readers, we shall see that folk are gathering. The editor of the Bright Star himself comes in. Not much older than the student, pathetically sallow, with fierce thin, austere lips, a man who had failed to get his B.A. degree largely because he was living with a wife when he should have been in the playing-fields; he stood a failure as regards his great career in a Government office—sour, sour with disappointment, sour for a hundred trivial causes that no young man should have. Half a dozen young men also were on their way, on the stairs or in the courtyard, and there was something to be said for the good side of that. It was not a reputable spot, or suitable for students to loiter outside in the street. There was a zither twanging and a drum, a little erotic drum, throbbing in the Begum Allah Visaya’s quarters with the latticed balcony, and a clink of castanets, and one or two of the students heard the call. If we steal up the stairs in her house while the lads are gathering in the editor’s room of the Bright Star, we shall see the Begum herself sitting with half a dozen girls around her. There is an oleograph of King Edward on the wall, with two little oil lamps burning before it, as to a shrine. For some reason, due presumably to the knowledge that he was a proper and kingly man, his portrait, thus held in sanctity, ornaments still many such a salon, in field-marshal’s guise, or near the ports as an admiral, nor has that of King George taken the place. For twenty years and more now had the Begum presided in that latticed salon, and heard all the gossip of nations pass before her. She had realised also that too much ghee was the devil for dancing girls, and had kept her youth and figure. Sitting there in a rich embroidered crimson velvet waistcoat and green velvet trousers of saucy cut, she looked what she was, a queen of entertainers. Men came to her house for many reasons, for gossip, society and repartee, as well as to consort with her dancers. Her girls filled huqas to perfection, and the rose water in the huqas was the best in the market. The girls, too, were an attractive lot. Two sonsy Punjab widows who were not going to shave their heads and slave for their mother-in-laws to please anyone, let alone burn on any pyre; three little outcast gipsy gamins with breasts like towers, in little green camisoles embroidered with dragons’ wings, aye, and a daughter of her own as fugle-woman—a well-run troop that would defy competition. Also, and it was a very important point, the Begum was on very good terms with the police, so much so, that now and again young Allanson, one of the assistant police officers, a darkish lad who could talk Punjabi like a Gujar, would sit in her dark corner in the guise of a long-haired sulky Baluch and listen. Incidentally at that moment, half a dozen police, disguised as Afghan horse thieves, were sitting on the embroidered cushions in the dark retiring rooms, from one of which a hole behind King Edward’s portrait actually gave peep-way into the editor’s room next door.

Thus as Din Dyal, “failed B.A.” assembled his following, Allanson or one of his men were watching all the while under cover of King Edward, and to him had now come Grayson and with him Ganesha Singh, by way of a back door of the Begum’s, and all the while the zither was twanging and the little drum luring, and shuffling feet kept the visitors amused.

And as they peeped in turn, this is what they saw and heard—the bomb-parast’s³⁰ ritual. The editor’s table was pushed back against the window, which was heavily curtained, and behind, in a niche in the wall, was a glaring oleograph of Kali, jewels and necklace stamped out in tinsel, and Kali Ma with teeth gnashing and hands full of writhing forms. Three little lamps flickered in front, as they did in front of Edward, R.I., next door, and between them stood two Mills hand grenades. In front knelt one of the students, the son, if you please, of ex-Ressaldar of His Majesty’s Doaba Horse and Honorary Captain Ganesha Singh. As the boy crouched with his hands out, palms upwards, a low chant rose. Kali Ma, Kali Ma, Sri, Sri, Kali Ma!

Then the voice of Din Dyal. “Repeating that oath after me: ‘I, Basant Singh, hereby and hereon, do solemnly swear that I will use bomb (put initiate’s hand on bombs) whenever this lodge shall so arder, under no less a penalty of having tongue tarn from throat, and wizand slit, if I fail to obey arder, so help me Kali Ma?’”

And after him the lad Basant Singh repeated the rigmarole, and as he finished, once again the chant, “Jai, Jai Kali Ma, Jai Jai Kali Ma ki.” Then all present bowed and laid their heads on the floor, and Dyal Chand threw some powder and the chirags flared blue and died away.

“Well I’m damned!” said Grayson. “Of all the impudent blighters! Let Ganesha Singh look.”

Ganesha Singh looked, and once again Basant Singh put his hands on the bombs, and the chant rose, “Jai, Jai, Kali Ma.”

“We’ve got the lot, anyway,” said Allanson; “I’ve the whole place surrounded, and they can’t get away. Din Dyal will have a repeating pistol, and there is an old Bengali who has the same. I shall break the door in, Grayson? with four of my men, and the Inspector and I will cover those two with our pistols and take our chance of the others. Shall we start now?”

Grayson nodded, and patted Ganesha Singh’s shoulder.

“You see, old soldier.” But the old man could only mutter through his teeth, “B . . . nch . . .te!”

A few minutes more and the police officer and his men broke in. It was all quiet enough. The levelled pistols prevented any attempt of the bomb-parasts to use their fire-arms, even had they the nerve. Din Dyal and the Bengali were handcuffed, and then one by one the remainder, as their names were taken. Beside Basant Singh was the young Moslem who was the son of Mehtab Khan.

“Those two,” said the Deputy Commissioner, “will come to my house in a police car with Inspector Nurdin and two constables, the remainder to the lock-up.”

And in the ancient Hindu metaphor, “that was that.” It was all done so quickly that in the attices above the zither twanged away, and someone was singing the song of the Girafta Badshah, the Captive King, that moves to love and tears and at times is distinctly “Na manasib.” The scent of musk and atar was wafted down into the court where the champing of the green wheat by the dairyman’s buffaloes chorused with the notes of the song as the puff-bellied hot-weather moon arose.

IV

Bamboo Backshish

It had not taken long to dish the Bright Star, now safely under lock and key, and the magistrate drove back to his bungalow, with the Ressaldar-Major, the young men in a Ford behind.

“I think we had better leave them till the morning, Ganesha Singh; they can be handcuffed for to-night in the garage, the car can stay outside, and we will talk about them.”

“They will be all right with me, Sahib, if the huzur will let me have them. The Inspector says that Mehtab Khan’s boy is his sister’s husband nephew. We want to talk to them.”

“Very well, old soldier. You arrange.” And as he got to the house he called to the Inspector,

“Can you and the Ressaldar manage these lads till the morning?”

“Bila shak, Huzur” (Without doubt), replied the Inspector; “we shall hold them all right, and your Honour’s chaprassi will give me a blanket for them and for myself.”

It was hardly ten o’clock when, having seen to the old man’s comfort, ordering a couple of native beds on to the lawn in front of the garage, Grayson got to the porch in front of his house to find another car there.

As he went up the steps on to the verandah his wife called:

“Here is Colonel Conachie, of the Doaba Horse, come to see us; they are in camp by the fort and have been dining in cantonments. Butler! Bring some whisky-and-soda and ice.”

Colonel Conachie and his adjutant, both in their mess kit, stood up.

“By Jove, Conachie, that is curious. What are you doing here?”

“We’re marching down from Jhelum to Jullunder, and were kept a bit late owing to that frontier trouble. Though we might look you and your wife up, even at this late hour. We are off early, and we got away from the cavalry mess at Mian Mir fairly quickly.”

“Well, anyway, we are delighted to see you, late or early old chap. Have a drink and a cheroot, and I’ll tell you what we’ve been doing.”

So they sat in the cool verandah, for all the heat had gone out of the night, and only the scent of the seringa remained. A bright starry night now, Rigel and Betelgeuse clear in the heavens, and the chant of the grasshoppers, rubbing their hind-legs all around them.

“Do you remember Ganesha Singh, of your regiment?”

“Of course, none better. He was a duffedar in Money’s squadron when I joined the Doabas.”

“Well, his son is a student in the university and got mixed up with the murder gang. A lot of students have been caught by this hysteria. There was Saunder’s murder, and then Mrs. Curtis’, and a lot down country—you know the mess hot air has got us into. Well, to-night we were raiding a wretched rag, the Bright Star of the Punjab, that is at the bottom of all this trouble in this university. The old man chanced to come and see me just as we were off, and I took him too. Sure enough his boy was among them, also a Moslem lad, a son of an old Subhadar Mehtab Khan, of the 4th P.I. I’ve got ’em both here. Don’t worry to run them in with the other scoundrels. D——n it, man, what tomfoolery is this. These northern universities, with all these fine lads has got the Bengal sedition poison running wildfire, for no reason whatever. We’ve warned everyone. Oh, it is not Irwin; he’s a nice kind cove, but it’s too big for him. It began in Chelmsford’s time. In Reading’s it was never gripped, but Montague, he was the lad who sold us and India. Started the show wrong. Upset all our friends. I’ve always wanted to bring this country on fast, but not in a way that it would run away from itself and us. You can’t play games here. They don’t matter in little lands like Ireland or Egypt. You know as well as I do how this country has been saved and helped, and how we are always teaching, helping, building, but always watching some wild devils. Always have, but we never expected some ass would let the intelligentsia go mad. Rotten lot too, many of them, but these Punjabis are different. Well, no use talking to you—you know—but it is going to take us all our time to save the country from itself and these clever fools. It was all going so well too. As for some in authority, hearts full of gold, brains full of feathers, as that clever old lady Dorothy said. There’s heaps of good if it had not taken the wrong turning, and the mass of people are with us, knowing we are working for and with them. Ah! What’s that?”

And well might he ask; there was a fiendish row from the stables. Yells and cries. Whack! Whack! Whack! They rushed down the steps, Grayson thinking of attempts at a rescue of his prisoners. It was some way to go, and when they got there, a chaprassi following with a lantern, there was a struggle in progress on the lawn and some spectators at the side. The struggle had two groups. Two constables held two figures, and it was from these that the sounds came. Whack! Whack! Whack! Sob! Sob! Sob!

Ganesha was leathering his son, and the Inspector his wife’s sister’s husband’s nephew. As they drew near the head chaprassi came and told them, “Don’t got near yet, sahib Ressaldar-Major sahib gāli ni-kalta,” and indeed he was “giving gāli,” good scolding tongue.

“You’ll join a Bengali murder gang, will you? You think the Sirkar a bad Sirkar, do you? Who gave you three marrabbas of irrigated land? Who has brought the whole Punjab to wealth and prosperity? Who treats me as I’ve never been treated before? Who saved your mother’s life when she was ill? I’ll teach you B——te, you worm, you, you swine’s offspring, not my son.”

Whack, whack, whack!

A few yards off the Police Inspector was at work hard, but less vociferously. All that could be heard between the sounds of the blows on the son of Mehtab Khan Ghukkar was a sibilant “Soor- neen, Soor-neen!” which being interpreted is “Swine face.”

Grayson and the colonel watched a minute.

“They’ll kill those lads! Here! Ganesha Singh, Bus, Bus! Enough, enough; stop it at once!”

The old man stayed his hand and kicked his victim, and the Inspector did the same.

”Sahib!” said the old soldier, “I have just been giving samjhana, making him understand, the Khan sahib here has been doing the same to his chacha!”³¹

“I don’t think either of them will give any taklif³² again. Eh Batcha, Bus hogya, backshish bus khaliya?”

“Have you eaten enough gratuity, enough Bamboo backshish, eh?”

The forms on the grass writhed, and one threw his arms round Grayson’s ankles. The two angry relatives rested content on their stout bamboo sticks. By now half a dozen lanterns ringed the group.

Said the colonel, “That’s the sort of stuff to give the troops, Grayson. Knocked all the bombing out of the lads, but I hope no bones are broken. Tell you what I’ll do. We’ll drive the lot down to my camp, and get the regimental doctor to look at them; then it will be all quiet. Not bad-looking lads either.” He was turning them over. “Here stand that Sikh boy up. A tall lad, a choice young man and a goodly when he’s better. Here, let me see that Mussalman lad. H’m, rather slim.”

The boys were still quietly sobbing, now and again a chest would heave and a sob come forth.

Grayson nodded. “Take one and lead on. Here, you old termagant, the sahib is taking the boys down to the doctor sahib.

“Take the boys with you and bring your adjutant, Conachie. I’ll bring the old man. Get up here you two. Wait while I tell the Memsahib.”

Indeed, an anxious lady was shivering on the verandah.

“All right, my dear. Nothing serious, but I shan’t be home for an hour or so; you and Alec go to bed, nothing to worry about. I’ll tell you in the morning. It may all turn out admirably.”

The colonel and the adjutant were helping the bruised and rather helpless lads into their car.

“Here, orderly, lift this boy in.”

The colonel put his hand on a shoulder that still heaved.

“There, there, baba, durro mat! abhi ilaj hojaega. There, there my son, don’t be frightened; you shall now be cured.”

And the cars drove off, the two angry relatives sitting in silence beside the Deputy Commissioner.

V

Back to the Army Again

Down through old Anarkali where Napier had his first cantonments, under the great blocks of houses in the old Moslem capital. Out past the Jama Musjid and the domes like women’s breasts against the sky, under the old Mogul palace fortress and the place where Runjhit Singh’s widows went to their pitiful end, rattled the cars, till they came to the line of silent tents, and as men slept, the Ravi, full of melted snow, sucked at the deep sandbanks hard by.

Lights were out and all was quiet as the leading car drew up in front of the quarter-guard of the sleeping regiment and the adjutant answered the sentry’s challenge, “Hukamdur!” (Who comes there).

“Call the duffedar, sentry!” and the N.C.O. comes out of the tent cramming on his pugaree. “Here, tell the Ressaldar-major and the Wordi-major to come to the colonel sahib’s tent.”

“I’ll call the doctor, sir; I expect he has turned in.”

“Help those lads out, Mackintosh. Get them a blanket and let them squat.”

The medical officer then arrived, a Sikh himself and the wordi-major. The colonel explained the situation.

“These two boys have been properly walloped for their sins. We don’t want to make a fuss about it, and what mischief they have been in is not our business.”

The second car with Grayson now drew up, and Ganesha Singh got out, stiff and old and sad. When you have walloped your son to a jelly, and the fire of temper and righteous wrath dies out from three-score years and ten, you are apt to be tired and worn.

The Ressaldar-major, Hukm Singh, a Dogra Rajput had now arrived. When he saw Ganesha Singh, he bowed low to touch his knees. Had not he been a recruit when the old man was wordi-major (native adjutant).

The colonel said “Hukm Singh, the son of Ganesha Singh has been badly beaten and the doctor sahib is looking to him. I want you to look after him for a day or two. Here you, Ashraf Hussain, there is the son of old Mehtab Khan, of the 4th P.I., in the same plight. They live near you; look after that lad.”

“Who has done this disgraceful thing, sahib? Surely the regiment will take vengeance for Ganesha Singh’s son!”

“Well no, I don’t think that will be easy, fact is they have been up to badmashi³³ and have caught it hot.”

“Ah well, Huzoor, the Doabas are a bit of hard stuff too, and their eyes can wander when they are young. There’s no need to ask whose dovecots they have ruffled. The husband’s must have had good bamboos. Had we not better enlist them? They come of good stock and no one will touch them here. They must be lads of spirit.”

“Hear that, Grayson? How does that strike you? Damn it, these seditions are giving me enough trouble without having some of these young hellhounds in our midst. Why, in the villages, they are even trying to persecute our men’s families.”

Ganesha Singh had followed a good deal. He knelt and kissed the colonel’s feet.

“Sahib! Save the boy and this young Moslem too, for two old men’s sakes. Did we not ride knee to knee at Chakdarra in Swat, sahib?”

“We shall have to try. Here, doctor man, are those boys injured?”

“They won’t lie comfortable for a month, sir, but no bones broken.”

The colonel and his adjutant walked up and down between the silent tents, only the snuffle of a horse at an empty hay-net gave any sign of life, while those around stood waiting. It was a big thing taking young fisad-wallahs³⁴ into a regiment like the Doabas, or indeed, any of His Majesty’s Indian corps which the sedition mongers were so anxious to turn into political machines like the old Sikh army and break the great tradition of camaraderie. But the stock was good, the lads had learnt their lesson, and Ganehsa Singh had a claim.

“Can those boys stand, doctor? Very well, bring them here.”

The bruised and jellied lads shuffled along.

“Will you two boys behave yourselves if I take you into the ranks?”

“Sahib,” said the Moslem, “Hamara peth fissad se bargya.” (My stomach has had enough of rebellion.)

The Sikh boy, Basant Singh, put his hands to his head.

“Very well. Take ’em to the hospital tent. All right, Ganesha Singh, we’ll see to them.”

We ain’t the only one to take a badmash. What was it Kipling wrote, Grayson?

“Last night ye had shot at a border thief,
To-night ‘tis a man of the Guides’.”

A King’s Daughter

If you dabble among Chinese philosophers and the like, some day you will run across the writings of that brilliant mystic Chuang Tzu, who, in the third and fourth centuries before Christ, taught that life is but a dream. And he is known as “Butterfly” Chuang, because of the wonderment on reality that he wrote. And this is how it runs:

“Once upon a time I, Chuang Tzu, dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my senses as butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awakened, and there I was myself again. . . . Now I do not know whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”

That was what Chuang said two thousand years and more ago; and once I went through quietly, as part of the everyday movements and actions of life, a curious happening, which I can no more explain than could Butterfly Chuang explain his story.

It was a drowsy day in early June, and the train ran steadily through the woods and forests of Sussex trees and gorse in all their glory, and I, too, drowsed in my window-seat in what passed for a fast train in Sussex. Opposite I had noticed a woman sitting, but she had been behind her paper. Now my drowsing had come to an end, after dwelling on a dream I had so often dreamt for many years, a dream of one of those King’s daughters for whom the heart of man yearns and rarely deserves. Once two strange pen-fellows, Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, wrote between them The World’s Desire, and told of Argive Helen returned to earth, who sang on the Pylon at Tannais, in Lower Egypt, and every man who heard her, heard the voice of his first love, the woman he had never won, and who had all the wonderful attributes that man can desire. And my dream always takes this form—a brave, staunch English girl, doing her hair by my side in “deshabille,” and the quality that she has “par excellence” is that of super-loyalty, to help, to cheer, to comfort, to sustain, and perhaps to drive upward and onward; the King’s daughter that shall marry you in the old fairy tale. And a tag-end of the old dream had come to me again in the drowsing in the third-class corridor.

And as I slowly grew more wakeful I noticed the knees and legs before me under the paper—knees and legs of that graceful English type which puts M. Worth to despair, and these were better than the usual knees and calves of beige-rose, and wildly captivating, as men know shapely legs can be. And I thought it high time to sit up and take notice, and then my vis-à-vis dropped her paper, and, I do not know how, we slid into conversation.

And we talked long and deep—of Sussex and its glory, of Sussex and its towns, of Pevensey Marsh and its past; and every word she said was full of charm and interest and love for Merrie England. And as we talked I studied her face and figure, and her neat grey coat and skirt. Was she beautiful? Perhaps not as beauty goes, but tall and graceful, and with soft, dark eyes and a deep musical voice too, that one could hear comfortably above the roar of the train, a restful, trustful face, the picture of health and care, the care that women must take of their beauty to do it justice.

And the time and the road slipped by, and now and again we lost the thread of our conversation, and I found her looking at me, looking with a faint puzzled look. But a gorgeous bank of gorse set us talking again, and we ran into West St. Leonards. Here she got out, thanking me for making her journey pleasant, in the deep voice that I had so enjoyed, and was gone, more graceful than ever as she stepped out of the carriage.

Feeling extraordinarily lost, I sat through the long tunnel into Warrior Square, and then walked out to my hotel, where I meant to have two days’ rest, wrote my name in the book, had tea, and then went to stroll in the cool shade of the front, from which the sun goes off so pleasantly by evening time. I was a little vexed to find I could not havemy usual room, and that the hotel was not so cordial as usual. In fact, when I said I wanted Number Twenty-two I was told very flatly that it was engaged for an old visitor who always had that room. Dinner at seven in June leaves hours of daylight, and I strolled out at the back and up over the cliffs to the golf links, the links that look out over the marsh of the Sussex Avon—one of the many Sussex Avons, which, after all, means but a river. The sun was now going down behind Beachy Head, and the foreground, still light, was beginning to take on its faint opal tinge. The lightship was just beginning to show, though, except under the horizon, all was yet daylight.

I could see no one on the golf links, and sat down to enjoy the soft light and the view, and then after a few minutes strolled further. Turning a corner round an old gnarled oak I saw my lady of the train. She rose and came towards me, “Oh, Abel, I knew it was you! Why did you not tell me so in the train?”

I remained silent. The pleasure of meeting was too much for me, and I hardly noticed that she was taking me for someone else.

“Abel! for a long time in the train you just appeared an ordinary person, and then as we talked you seemed to be familiar, but I only now recognise you. Were you playing a trick on me?”

And I stood silent, but since she put her hand on mine I covered it with another. God forgive me if I was wrong!

“Abel, Abel, after all these years! And now I must say good-bye! I came down to see the old place, and I go back to-morrow, for I am marrying Geoffrey. Geoffrey Arnold—you remember?”

I nodded.

“You never came, and you would not write or speak, and you know how good Geoffrey is, and how I never cared for him, was only fond of him; but now I am marrying him in three days’ time. Here, take back your locket. It has my picture in it.”

And then I did a very wicked thing. I put my arm around her, and she did not demur, but looked up at me with those beautiful eyes and said:

“Abel, you shall sit like this for a while, but it is the last time.”

And we sat alone on the soft, short turf, she and I, the strangers of the day, she the Helen of the Pylon, the woman with the voice of the woman I had dreamed of, and I, posing evilly as the mysterious “Abel.”

“I am glad you have kept your moustache, Abel—I like it so.”

I felt my lip. Yes, I had a moustache, but then I don’t wear one. It was distressing, but I realised that unless I was to mar a situation I must put up with it. Marvelling, and wondering, and enjoying the sitting, with my arm around her waist, I sat on silent, for she, the King’s daughter, whose name to this day I do not know, sat by me.

It was growing dark. Beachy Head now stood out purple with the sun behind it. The marsh below was deep blue, and only the cries of the peewits came from it. To the right a long line of homing crows flew above the railway viaduct.

“Abel, before I go, my dear, kiss me.”

And I kissed her—one of those long soft kisses that seem like heaven. We sat with lips pressed for a considerable time, and then she broke away from me.

“God bless you, Abel dear!” she said, and then down the hill she sped, while I stood, my lips tingling with the kiss that was not mine.

Then I, too, started home, back to the hotel, wondering had I been a cad, or had I been but a man, and had all been for the best.

At my hotel on the Marine the lady in the office was all smiles.

“We expected you by an earlier train, sir. Your room is ready, though a gentleman this afternoon was very annoyed because we would not let him have it. Would you sign your name?”

“But I have signed it already!”

Then I looked over her shoulder, and although the signatures of that date only began half-way down the page, mine was not there. In my handwriting, however, my own sprawling hand, I saw “Abel Winsor.”

I gave it up. A. Winsor was the name of the man who was my war-chum, in the same gun-detachment with me on Vimy Ridge. But his pieces I had helped to pick up just before I was crumpled up myself. It could not have been he.

Perhaps some day I shall see my lady of the train and golf links, the wife of one Geoffrey Arnold whom I know not—but perhaps it might be better so. I offer no explanation, and once again do I feel as old Butterfly Chuang felt, that I do not know “if I am a man dreaming I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.”

But I have in my possession the locket that once was Abel Winsor’s, and I have never dreamed my own dream again. Nevertheless, better than a dream I have a memory of a deep musical voice, and lips that are the lips of a King’s daughter.

A Head for a Head

“How have I tasted and understood
That old world feeling of mortal hate
For the eyes all round us are hot with blood,
They kill us costly—they do but wait.
While I—would sell ten lives at least
For one fair stroke at that devilish priest.”

The above was written by Sir Alfred Lyall of some tragedy that occurred during the Indian Mutiny, and the bitter caged-dog feelings of those who may have found themselves thus awaiting slaughter, and this is just such another story of a tragedy in our time, save that the victim in some measure was satisfied.

In the early days of the war in Mesopotamia, those particular Turks whom the hot-air merchants of the press elected for no known reason, not even by comparison with the Bosche, elected to dub “clean fighting” . . . an epithet which the Kut prisoners would bitterly challenge, had proclaimed to the Arabs a reward. A reward, a handsome reward would they give for every British officer dead or alive. Now the noble Arab of the Tigris and Euphrates, like the horse, however noble an animal, does not as the babu said “always do so.” He frequently lapses and becomes the common jackal and beast of prey or, at any rate, did in the war days. He was also a vampire who will dig up the corpses of his enemies for such small pieces of brass on his buttons and accoutrements he can peddle in the bazaars, which is but the same instinct as makes him the robber of ancient tombs.

So because the Turkish reward was large and the British officer venturesome, it was not long before one fell into their hands. It was in the early days of the great adventure on the Tigris, so light-heartedly undertaken, when the British were driving the Turks slowly up through the marshes below Amara. They are strange places those Chaldean marshes which have so long swallowed the lower waters of a deteriorated Tigris, that their true story is lost amid the huge wastes of waving reeds. Even to this day it is doubtful if all their mysteries have been probed. Certain it is that their inhabitants are queer folk growing web feet in generations of marsh treading. Whatever their true origin they, the Ma’adan, are known as “Marsh Arabs,” which saves a lot of trouble, and in Turkish days they were a wild, savage lot, with their hand against every man. Particularly evil was their offence of turning pirate and raiding the traffic on the rivers, in their peculiarly narrow black bitumen-caulked canoes that slid through the marshes where nothing else could follow, ways that had even stirred the good King Hammurabi to anger.

When they carried their maurauding ways so far as to attempt the same adventurous livelihood at British expense, it was time to put a stop thereto, and as the latter had met with some success at the game of reprisals, Arab enmity was duly stimulated thereby.

Moored under the bank between Qilat Saleh and Quma, lay the launch Tara that had come safely all the way across from the far Irrawaddi to share in the new “River War.” When crammed with soldiery she carried but twenty-four, heel and toe, and her fighting strength with room to move was about fifteen. On this trip she actually carried sixteen lads, fifteen from the Punjab and frontier and Lieutenant Erlton, the prince of the river patrol. Erlton was not his real name for this true story, but it is near enough since he came from the Cotswolds.

The Tara and her freight had been busy enough that day, from the early misty marsh morning, when bones grew chill to the marrow, to the deep sunset over Babylon across the gebel. Because he wanted a good night’s rest for his men Erlton had brought the Tara to berth on a green bank where a ber tree (Ziziphus jujuba) and a former Shabana watch tower just had room to nestle on an island made between the Tigris and what appeared to be an impenetrable jungle of reeds, in deep water that lay at the bank of Ezra’s Tomb. It is curious, this clear marsh water, from whence all sediment and soluble salts have settled and which can do no good to land as irrigation folk have learnt to their chagrin. Some day, when the marsh yields up its soil and its bottom becomes dry land, it will yield a thousand fold for all the long years that it has robbed the world of fertilizers.

However, those were not the problems that troubled Robert Erlton and his tired soldiery. Sleep with a big “S” was what they were looking for, though a doubled sentry on the bank would mount for an hour at a time.

But rest is not always for the tired. Somewhere in the heavens was a moon though it but served to illumine the white mist and reveal nothing, and soon after midnight, the black half moon reed-parting prow of a marsh baylum slipped its way through a heavily overgrown channel, and paddled silently alongside the Tara. On the other side of the Tigris, here none too wide a stream, a dozen Arab mahelas lay at anchor under the protection of the Tara, a fire on the bank smouldered and showed a glare in the fog, and all lay quiet. The half moon baylum came unnoticed alongside and four marsh-Arabs, as practiced thieves as ever were, crept on board the launch and found Erlton asleep on the deck. To muffle his head in a blanket and bind it after, lashing his legs with an aghal without disturbing him, was the work of a minute. To wind the body round with a rope was another, and before any muffled sounds could be heard the unfortunate officer was away in the mist lying at the bottom of that black bitumened half-moon craft. Nor was it till dawn that the officer was found to be missing. How the kidnapping happened was told soon after by Arab spies, who also produced in detail, the circumstantial story of the finale.

At dawn Erlton stiff and numb and still lashed the length of his body, was lifted from the baylum and the blanket unlashed from his head. Then his poor bemused brain tried to think. He had been lifted up a bank away in the heart of the marsh, and was carried through the fog which, however, was rolling off, to a reed hut on the bank of what was an open canal clear of reeds. A fire of reeds and thorns illuminated a group of Arabs, in front of whom stood a villainous-looking Sheikh and his brother surrounded by a dozen Arabs with rifles in their hands. The Sheikh ordered the officer to be unbound, save for his hands and a rope round his waist.

Then he addressed him.

“I’ve been searching some time for you. You’ve been attacking my men on the Tigris.”

The British officer was angered by the tone.

“That’s your fault,” said Erlton, who spoke Arabic, “You’ve heard the British proclamation, that Arabs are forbidden to attack behind the British lines and that the whole of the Tigris land below Amara is in British occupation.”

“We don’t make much of British proclamations in the Marsh, and Ins hallah! we never shall, not that we take much thought for the Turks either, for they, too, are dogs, and the sons of dogs. But they pay good money for the heads of the British officer. Therefore your throat will be cut and your head sent to the Turkish commander at Kut. That will at least satisfy my Arabs for all the harm you have done them.”

And the Sheikh, a tall, powerful man with thick lips and a cast of countenance that was half negro, grinned a cruel diabolical grin, and so did his brother beside him.

Erlton was wide awake now, and his faculties were coming back. God, what would he give for a smack at that leering negroid before him, nothing of the pure Arab, just born of a negress slave. Bah! Look at those great white rabbit teeth! and the captive longed to break them. In vain he looked round for a weapon, he was bound but he had his heavy boots on. Then an idea came to him, just an idea of despair, aye and possibly of escape.

“As God wills,” he said to the Sheikh. “May I take my boots off and say my prayers.”

Surrounded as he was by his guards, the Arab nodded and bade his men untie him and let him take his boots off; it was fitting that a man about to die should go to his God with prayer.

Released for a few minutes the blood running back to his arms, Erlton thought hard and removed his boots slowly. Then one great effort. Seizing the heavy iron shod marching boot, he hurled one straight in the face of his captor. Fair in the face it hit him and two of the great white teeth broke off.

“Damn you, that’ll spoil your beauty,” and before the surprised Arab could act he hurled the other straight in the brother’s face too, and then sprung for the canal.

Alas the race is not always to the swift, as he touched the water the Arabs fired, a dozen shots rang out, and in the glare of the reed fires they could hardly miss him. When daylight came the water was red with blood, but their prisoner had escaped them and was never found. He lies somewhere in the marsh to this day. The Sheikh did not get his reward, and the Briton did not go unavenged. The story of the Sheikh with the broken teeth was soon told round the camp fires in the British lines, and a price far exceeding that of the Turks was placed on his head too, or rather his person. One day there came to a political officer’s tent two Arabs of the marshes also, who rolled out from a sack the grinning head of an Arab less two front teeth and demanded their guerdon. It was one of those terrible cases when the fewer questions that are asked the better, and the reward was paid.

Now peace and prosperity is reaching the Marsh Arab who can trade with his reeds and his reed-woven mats and make an honest living thereby. He has been found to possess many good qualities.

The memory of Erlton, “The Father of Boots” still lives in the marsh as well as in British minds, the memory of one who died, “just for the pride of the old countree.”

The Spoiling of the Egyptian

The Frenchman’s body slipped from their hands to the edge of the canal and Madame burst into a succession of over-wrought screams which under the full Egyptian moon bid fair to raise the very dead from the Pyramids hard by. Carnegie turned on her savagely, and without a moment of hesitation struck her on the chin the blow of silence and safety, and she seemed to give a shudder and then collapsed. Then he thrust the body into the canal, now running swiftly with the night locks open, seized the silent woman in his arms, and carried her back to the house, where he forced some brandy through her teeth.

Slowly she recovered and opened her eyes. “What happened? Where am I?” and sank back into oblivion.

It was a very fair face that lay quiet and still under the electric light in the hall, the light that glared out through the uncurtained windows on to the fountains which were still playing and on to the crimson poinsettias, and ex-Lieutenant-Commander Carnegie listened. Not a sound! The compound seemed deserted. Away in the distance the electric light of Cairo sent out its usual gleam and on the desert side the brighter stars were visible in that wonderful crystal sky, despite the glare of the moon. Not a sound! The compound was indeed deserted. What on earth was he to do with this woman? This beautiful English woman in the Cairene dress who had flown so suddenly into his life an hour ago, and to whom for their common weal he had dealt that knockout blow? This woman whom he had helped dispose of a corpse of which he had no previous knowledge and in which now he had no interest whatever! The face below him, which he could swear was not that of an adventuress, lay pathetically still. Why had he struck her so cruel a blow? He, the strong man of the sea, and she the slip of a girl who had appealed for help. And then his mind answered, “Because silence at all costs was necessary for her, and because your nerves had become so tense that you struck for silence, for her sake and your own,” and reason replied, “The plea is just.”

And this is how James Carnegie, late Lieutenant-Commander R.N.R., and wearer of the Distinguished Service Cross, found himself half way between Cairo and the Pyramids in the glare of the harvest moon helping a strange semi-Cairene woman drag a corpse from her house to a canal, helping her, too, at the risk of missing his ship that was sailing at daylight from Ismailia.

Nine hundred and ninety-nine of every thousand ships that pass through the Suez Canal, enter Lake Timsah and pass on without ever giving a thought to the comfortable settlement of Ismailia where the Canal Administration lives in some content amid Gold Mohr Trees and Casarina. Now and again, however, a steamer turns aside and anchors close into the town to land some cargo close to the spot where Sir Garnet Wolsey landed the force that was to settle the matter of Arabi Pasha at Tel El Kebir.

The steamship Barracouta, Midland Line, Port of Hull, had turned in to discharge into lighters some steel and cable for the Canal Company, and James Carnegie, her Second Officer, had twenty-four hours leave of absence to run to Cairo to see an old war-time messmate.

Lieutenant-Commander Carnegie, D.S.C., R.N.R., now sailing as second officer, was typical of the modern officer of the Merchant Service, but times were more than bad, and a second officer’s berth in a cargo liner was very much better than no berth at all. The “old man” was from Glasgow and pleasant enough to serve under, and James Carnegie was content, and would pace the bridge during his hours of watch and wonder. Wonder why he had come through the War, wonder what he should do with his life. Wonder if any woman would enter it seriously, and why? and why? and why? as men will o’ nights as they watch the ship’s nose plunge up and down to the high seas and the Atlantic roll, or look for the Southern Cross above the Indian ocean.

Coming off watch in time to catch the early train from Port Said, Carnegie had made his way to Cairo and out to the Pyramids Hotel where his friend of the anti-submarine service was now peacefully engaged in archaeology, a pursuit, however, that has a very subtle excitement of its own. Chatting on the verandah after dinner he was horrified to find that he had let the last tram go by, and that unless some one or some taxi was returning to Cairo, he would have to foot it. There proved to be nothing for it but the latter, and in some concern Carnegie started on his walk. The 3 a.m. train would just catch the Barracouta, and catch his ship he must.

It was a brilliant evening moon, and the sand shone back the reflection till all was one vast white glare in which to start his ten mile tramp. His friend went a mile with him and then said good-bye, and Carnegie settled down to steady heel and toe with the best grace he could. Another mile and a road edged by Casarina trees that threw shadows like the rungs of a ladder, turned off to the right. A cool breeze was blowing and the tops of the tall trees waved like ostrich feathers. From under the shadow of a tree a woman stepped out and touched his arm. He turned and saw a Cairene woman in a transparent yashmak and one of those French cut crêpe de chine skirts, which all well bred women of Cairo seem to affect.

“Will you help me?” said a sweet clear voice in English. “I am in great trouble.”

“What can I do for you?” said Carnegie, astonished and intrigued.

“You must come with me to my house.”

“But I have a ship to catch. I have already missed my tram and am walking to Cairo. I could find no car and I have no time to spare.”

“But you must, oh you must! Walk with me and I will explain.”

Needs must when the devil drives, let alone when a pretty woman appeals to a sailor’s heart, and Carnegie let the woman hurry him down the Casarina avenue.

“I am English, you can tell that. My father was Dean of Godchurch. I was foolish, oh, so foolish. I ran away and married the French master I met at school. He was quite worthless, a gambler, and a dishonest gambler, and for three years we have lived a life of adventure, moving from pillar to post. Now something terrible has happened. Oh, you must help me!” and the woman, who was he could see beautiful, sobbed—sobbed with a great bitterness.

For a mile and a half he strode by the side of the hurrying, weeping woman, who gradually composed herself.

They came to the gates of a large garden, within which a bungalow stood. Date-palms and Papoi trees bordering the drive were silhouetted against the sky. The house looked silent and deserted standing on a white plinth.

“Come in,” said the woman, as they climbed the steps, and she switched on the electric light, to reveal a large ante-room hung in Eastern fashion with many mirrors. Thence she took him through to a large drawing-room, the floor covered with rugs.

“Now you must have some refreshment.”

He stammered something about his train.

“No, I insist, you have had a long walk. There is much to do, and you must hear my story.” And she left the room.

Many thoughts flashed through Carnegie’s mind as he looked around him. Was she some beautiful decoy? Where had she gone!

He began to walk round the room, on the walls of which were hung, as in Persia, the more valuable of the carpets.

At the far end and near a doorway was a couch with its back to him. Walking towards it and bending over, he saw that something lay on it covered with a rug. The spirit prompted him to lift the rug. To his horror, under it lay the corpse of a European in pyjamas.

Carnegie stepped back, dazed. To what den had he been enticed? His blood ran cold and his hair stiffened at the roots. He heard footsteps, and he moved up the room. She was returning.

In came the lady of the house with a tray, on which were a syphon, a brandy bottle and a couple of glasses. Was the brandy poisoned? Had he been lured here to be served as the corpse on the sofa?

Madame had placed the tray on a table at her side of the room near the door. Looking up she saw his face, and turning to the door slammed and locked it, putting the key in her pocket.

“You shall not go till you have heard my story. You must hear and you must stay and help me! I am your country-woman.” Then, as he moved towards her, “Ah, if you touch me!” And she pulled out a pistol.

Carnegie stopped. The yashmak was off her face, and the face, flushed and stirred, was an English face, and a beautiful face, with a perfectly moulded chin that was now set and resolute. Dark wavy brown hair, blue fearless eyes, frightened, haunting, yet fearless in themselves. Carnegie stopped and stood by a chair.

“I told you I was English born. I am still not twenty-two. My husband was a French adventurer. He has been running a gambling house here. He has used me as a decoy. He has tried to prostitute me time and again and lend me to his friends, his Egyptian friends. Last night he told me he had sold me to an Egyptian Pasha. I shot him. . . . There is a canal at the bottom of the garden. You must help me to throw him in it.”

“What will you do then?”

“Do! How should I know? I am mad, I have neither friends no money. This house belongs to the Pasha. But,” she added wearily, “I must get away, I must be free. I must hide myself in the bazaar.” And here a flash, “I whose father is Dean of Godchurch. . . . Pshaw! I have torn myself from that by my folly. Will you help me, Englishman?”

Then Carnegie looked at the face and believed. “I will,” he said, “and let us lose no time, for you must get away and I must catch my ship.”

So together they dragged the Frenchman out over the plinth and down the steps and through the rose garden . . . dragged him slowly, for bodies are heavy. Then, as they reached the canal bank, the woman caught her foot and slipped, and the body broke away from their hands. Then it was that that pent up soul broke down in hysteria and poured forth scream after scream, so that Carnegie hit her in the sudden rage of overstrained nerves, hit her for silence and safety, and she dropped like a log from a cruel kind blow that neither had intended.

And now before him lay the pale face, so attractive as it lay limp and emotionless, but still breathing. He splashed the face with the prickly syphon water, and she came to again and then sat up.

“Don’t fear the brandy,” she said. “Let us both have some.”

He mixed a stiff peg. Both sat silent for a few minutes and then hand-in-hand ran down the steps and along the avenue and out into the Cairo road. There, as luck would have it, a ramshackle phaeton cab discharged by some late roysterer from the Cairo night haunts was jogging back to the city from the Pyramids hotel. With a leer the driver pulled up to take Carnegie and his companion. Silently they climbed up, and silently sat side by side on their strange drive, Madame shaken and shattered, Carnegie trying to think of some plan. At last he said, “Where will you go, and have you any money?”

“I have neither friends nor money, at least that I can get into touch with now.”

“Then I will drive you to a boarding house I know of, respectable and fit to rest quietly in. The proprietress will give you any help she can, but I must catch my ship if I have not already lost it.”

Madame listlessly acquiesced. The revulsion after all she had gone through was heavy on her and sleep, blessed sleep, seemed her first need.

Presently she fell asleep on his shoulder, and required his arm round her to keep the slight form on the slippery cushions of ragged American cloth.

Carnegie directed the driver to Madame Cavalier’s Travellers’ Boarding House, and found the good woman of the house still up, expecting a train load of tourists from Alexandria. He confided the Englishwoman to her care, crushed into her hands every penny from his pockets, and drove wildly to catch his train, which he did by exactly half a minute. As he threw himself into a seat he tried to think, but brain and nerves were too tired and he sank to sleep. It was not till the Barracouta had slipped out of Suez and he found himself on the bridge in the brilliant moonlight that he had time to turn over in his mind the happenings of the night before. Then it was borne in on him, among other things, that he did not even know the name of the lady of the adventure and could not get into touch with her if he wanted to.

But did he want to? Every night that he paced that bridge and whenever he lay in his bunk, he knew that he did; that he wanted to see her again more than anything else in the world.

The Barracouta slipped out of the Gulf of Suez into the Red Sea, past Perim and Aden into the Indian Ocean and under the Southern Cross, and each night the ache grew stronger for all that he had apparently lost, thrown away through want of clearer thinking. He wanted to see that little mouth look happy and at rest. He wanted to see that wavy brown hair by daylight. He wanted to see that smile that he had only once caught half a glimpse of . . . oh, he wanted a thousand things and could not have them, and all the while was the maddening thought that each turn of the screw, each plunge of the ship’s nose into the phosphorescent foam of the sea was taking him further away, further East when he should be going West. So you may clearly see what a very pitiful frame of mind this destroyer of German submarines had got himself into, all through the midnight adventure which was none of his seeking.

After a while he confided some of his story to the first officer, who in turn broke the confidence and told it to the skipper, partly because he thought it right that the skipper should know that his second officer might easily be wanted by the police of Egypt.

And all the while the Barracouta went round to half the ports in India, spending a week at Bombay and several days at Columbo, and did not turn her nose to the West till she had sailed up the Hooghly and berthed at Calcutta. But then there came a day when the good ship turned West with a full cargo for Europe which meant a direct voyage. And then it was that Carnegie went to the skipper and told him all the story, and said he must leave the ship at Suez and search for Madame. Then the skipper came to the rescue and sent messages to the Agent of the Company at Bombay, with the result that Carnegie was told that he could have three months’ leave of absence of which one month would carry pay, and that the Company could by chance put another officer on board at Suez.

II

Grim in his exterior, with eternal turmoil in his heart, Carnegie steeled himself for the voyage to Suez, cursing the old vessel which was really knocking out a very respectable speed for the quality of coal she burnt. At Suez, the quarantine over, he was sent for to the Captain’s cabin, where sat an officer in the uniform of the Egyptian Police.

“Mr. Carnegie,” said the Captain, “let me introduce you to Major Haslet Bey, of the Egyptian police. He wants to hear your story of the murdered Frenchman, and would like to help.”

“Yes, Mr. Carnegie, the Captain has told me something of the story, and if it is a true one, I knew the girl in Godchurch. She was then Elsie Dowman. A beautiful child she was. If you don’t mind you can tell me quite freely, and as a matter of private confidence, and I might be able to find out something for you.”

Carnegie told the story.

“Well, there it is. We have heard nothing of her, nor was the Frenchman’s body ever found or reported to authority, nor have there been enquiries after him, though the police knew that he had disappeared. Go and look for her, but first of all go and see this officer in Cairo and say to him that you have come for a good dragoman,” and here Haslet Bey gave him a slip of paper. “He will then give you a man whom I recommend you to take with you as servant and dragoman, and you may safely tell him what you are looking for, and he will help you a good deal I know. Good-bye, and I do hope you will find the poor girl. I wish you every success. If you want help, come and see me and don’t write unless you are obliged to—and tell her, if you find her, that the police are taking no notice of her husband’s disappearance.”

Then they shook hands and Carnegie shook hands also with his skipper, grasped his suit-case, and slipped down into the pilot’s boat. In two hours’ time he had passed through the ramshackle town of Suez and the tumbledown streets of the older part to the station and was in the mail train for Cairo and slipping past the Casarina trees, the eternal trees of the modern Egyptian landscape, that edged the sweet-water canal.

The early morning air was sharp enough with that odour of wood smoke and camels that marks the cold weather mornings. At Ismailia the train for Port Said was waiting, and he watched a party of British soldiers for the camp at Moescar who were getting out their baggage and hustling the slow Egyptian porters. Presently he went to the restaurant car for a cup of early tea, and passed the time of day with a British subaltern, who was drinking tea and nibbling chocolate, and in a talkative mood. “Going to Cairo? Ah! full of this Zaglul fuss, processions everywhere of schoolboys and masters and students shouting, ‘We want Zaglul’; could not make out why Allenby stood it.”

And then the train moved on and the lad bustled out. Cairo was now approaching, and Carnegie determined to drive at once to M. Cavalier’s boarding-house, both as a place to stay at, and to try and get some news of Madame-whose-name-he-did-not-know, though Haslet Bey had mentioned her maiden name, the name of the Dean of Godchurch. But, alas, M. Cavalier had little enough to tell him. The lady had slept till dejeuner, had then come down, received the money that Carnegie had left for her and disappeared. Mme. Cavalier had heard or seen nothing further of her and indeed had no cause to enquire. She had paid for her lodging and stepped out.

Then Carnegie went to see the police officer whose name he had received from Haslet Bey. Sending in his name he was admitted at once to the officer’s private room, and said as Haslet had told him, “I have come for a good dragoman.” The officer smiled.

“Very well,” and he took up his telephone.

“Send John Havelian here.”

In a minute or two the door opened and in came a dragoman in blue with the embroidered Moorish jacket that it pleases dragomen to affect.

“John, this gentleman wants a good dragoman. He has a special search to make and wants your help.”

“I know very well,” said the dragoman.

“You should take him at once. I know him well and you can trust him.”

So Carnegie and John Havelian drove away to Mme. Cavelier’s boarding-house and there Carnegie told him something of what he was after.

“I know very well,” said the dragoman, by which he meant that he did not feel the search beyond his powers, and then he proposed that he should go away for two days and then come back and report.

At the end of two days of great perturbation of spirit for Carnegie, John returned.

“Well?” cried Carnegie, all of a-twitter at what he might hear.

“I know very well,” said John Havelian.

“What the devil do you know very well?”

“I know very well—going Luxor.”

And so to Luxor by train went Carnegie and Havelian, for a river steamer crowded with American tourists was too slow for the hammer within Carnegie that beat as if his head would burst.

But when they got to Luxor there was little to do for the moment.

“I know very well,” said the dragoman, and that was all Carnegie could get out of him.

But the second day he came and said:

“I know very well. I thinking that Pasha living here. Master never minding, master seeing tombs and temples, taking ladies lunch at tombs, I find out. I know very well,” and he disappeared again. And there was nothing to do but get through the time as best he could at the quieter hotel that he had selected, where, however, he found a British officer, one Gordon, on leave after malaria from the Soudan, with whom he foregathered mightily, and with whom he did the sights and possessed his soul in patience as best he could. And the presence of a man whom he liked was a great solace. Together they hired horses and rode the country round, and then they hired camels and explored the desert. All the while Carnegie was bitterly disappointed that he could do nothing and must leave all enquiry to his mysterious dragoman.

Happily the life of a sailor makes for patience, an enduring patience that sees no land, yet waits and hopes.

The dragoman spent his time in the bazaars, drinking coffee and smoking with other dragomen, hearing all the gossip, good and bad, how Zaglul would get rid of all the Europeans and frighten away all the tourists and ruin honest dragomen, and all who sold bogus antiques to visitors. How Carter Bey was quarrelling with the French, because the French must quarrel with the English in Egypt since the days of Napoleon, and how there must be much gold in the new tomb if only robbers could get at it. No such luck, and the Egyptian Police dare not let themselves be squared. How American misses let dragomen make love to them, and here the stories would get specially scandalous, and how much that rich American was paying for Haifa Pasha’s dahabieh, but nothing yet that would suggest a clue to the whereabouts of Madame-who-he-did-not-know.

Time weighed heavily on his hands, despite his subaltern friend’s society, and Carnegie grew tired of watching the corn ripen round his hotel, tired of the hawkers of necklace and scarab, tired of the amber shops and of elderly American School marms and travel clubs, with black grips, decanted at his hotel from the river steamers, who would start in black satin knickers to bestride donkeys en route to the temples of Karnak.

Tired, too, of admiring the ingenuity of these American ladies of a type who made their upper garments from the summer curtains and their skirts from the winter curtains, tired of lunch at the tombs with more exciting visitors, and at his heart a great fear. No one knew better than he with the lawless knowledge of the sailor, what might happen to stranded white women in the Bazaars of Cairo and of Alexandria. On those days his blood ran cold and he cursed himself for his folly in leaving poor Madame-who-he-did-not- know to her fate like this, cursing himself for not realizing how that little face that he had struck so fiercely and yet so necessarily, and how that figure he had carried to the house, were to twine themselves into his heart, and how deep in the warp and weft of his memory that voice was to weave itself.

And then a curious thing happened. After spurning for many days the offers of donkey boys to let him ride “Mary Pickford” or “Mr. Ramsay” to the temples at Karnak, he slipped out in the cool of the morning to walk there through the green wheat that was soon to ripen for the sickle, in the soft sweet breezes from the Nile, the wonderful Nile that had been the Mother of all for so many centuries. It had a soothing effect; the soft breezes and the smell of the wheat fields, a sense of age so old that nothing mattered, and Carnegie’s tired imagination took comfort.

And so he strolled on, past the first avenue of Ram Sphinxes, now a village canal and drain, past the first temple of the Hathor with its love-goddesses cut in outline, its bees and ducks and hieroglyphs, past the great ruin that earthquakes had wrought, till he came to the second avenue of Ram Sphinxes, that led up from the banks of Mother Nile. Then up to the Roman wall, which surrounded the vast pylons of the Great Temple, the wall that turned it into a Roman Arsenal before high heaven. Through the great square entrance, also carved in hieroglyphs, under the vast lotus pillars and the granite obelisk of victory, through the carved scenes of Asian conquest that Pharaoh had recorded in stone, Carnegie wandered greatly wondering . . . as who would not . . . till he came to the end of the enclosure beyond a pool of pink waterlilies. Then at the edge of the grounds on the northern side he came to a small gateway carved as before with figures in slight relief, with little more than the cut outline an inch deep with the edge rounded off in the case of figures, and he sat down on a fallen granite block, to enjoy the balm in the breeze, and the murmur of bees, and then he rubbed his eyes. Facing him was the outline of a comely, shapely maid offering flowers to some deity, but though only cut in outline, the figure lived. The limbs, the beautifully rounded limbs, in relief, curved and shaded, the arms a soft tan, and the moulded thighs graceful and living! The little breasts in the camisole stood out dainty and firm, and the happy little face that seemed to be as God meant it, free of all care . . . it was the face . . . surely it was the face of “ Madame-whom-he-did-not-know!” And now he knew also it was the face of her of whom he had dreamed and planned all those lonely years of the sea, when the eyes had peered out into the brine and the salt sea breeze, in those hours, those lonely hours of the morning watch.

He gazed a while and then got up and went over to the wall. The figure was nothing but the cut outline slightly rounded off. He went back to his seat on the fallen block and again the figure stood out as one alive, alive in charm and grace, and so he sat and feasted his eyes, and then perhaps he slept and the figure seemed to say, “Be of good cheer, she whom you seek should be found,” and then perhaps he dreamed of the mighty temples in ancient being and heard the “Word of Power” echo through them, and he woke greatly comforted. But turning to the wall, the little maid was but a cold bare outline, for the sun had shifted a point.

As he rose from the stone there came round the wall a pappa, or priest, an elderly priest, to whom he passed the time of day after the manner of sailors, and the pappa, a Coptic pappa, answered, answered too in English, though somewhat broken at that, and together they strolled back to the big temple. Together they climbed to the top of the big Pylon, and the pappa told him that he lived in a monastery five miles off on the very edge of the desert. A monastery with a convent hard by. On the top of the Pylon, amid the broken steps, the father slipped, and Carnegie caught his hand and pulled him up, saying involuntarily “hand to hand,” and the pappa gave the proper answer. “Where?” began Carnegie. “Cairo,” answered the other, “Engleese Constitution.”

“Well, to think of that, on the top of the temple of Karnak!”

And they now fell to talking hard, so hard that Carnegie told the other of his story and of his quest, and how he was anchored at Luxor waiting for some clue.

The pappa sat with his chin in his hand for a while.

“Two and a half months ago an Englishwoman, an English lady, came to our monastery riding a donkey and asked for the convent, to which I directed her. I believe she is still there, and does needlework, and cooks for the good nuns.”

“Where? Where is it? Oh, show me now, father!”

“Patience, my son. I do not know and I cannot yet tell thee if this be the woman thou seekest. I will see the Mother Superior this evening, and find out, and will come to thee at Luxor to-morrow “

So Carnegie had fain to be content, and when he got back to his hotel, John Havelian was waiting for him.

Carnegie told him his news.

“I knowing very well.”

“You don’t know, you infernal old humbug,” began Carnegie.

Then John, somewhat affronted, drew himself up and turned back the lapel of his coat and showed his secret service badge. “I knowing very well, I watching that Pasha and asking everyone very much.”

“What Pasha?”

“That Turkish Pasha looking very hard for English lady. That Pasha wanted buy her in Cairo.”

“Why the devil didn’t you tell me?”

“That time I not knowing very well. . . .”

And that was all John would say, and Carnegie could but be content and let him go.

It was a night of excitement and perturbation, and Carnegie spent the most of it walking up and down the banks of the Nile with his soldier friend from the Soudan, who was now as intent on the chase as Carnegie himself. Plans and counterplans were eagerly discussed, but it largely came back to the fact that apparently John Havelian meant to run the affair his own way, and would not let on till he was ready. “Unless,” as Gordon said, “your friend the pappa is able to help us steal a march on him.”

They were up at six to meet the Coptic priest who ambled in on his white donkey soon after seven. Carnegie strode up to his side and grasped his hand. “Well, father, what of her?”

“My son, she left the convent two days ago to go to another convent on the western side of the hills beyond those in which lies the valley of the Tombs of the Kings behind Thebes. The Mother Superior said she was afraid of some Turkish Pasha finding her.”

“Can we not go to the convent now? That hotel dragoman will get us horses in half an hour.”

“My son, she has not reached the convent, a message came last night to say so.”

“Not reached the convent? What do you mean?”

“She rode away on a white donkey like mine, with two small boxes on a camel. A convent servant rode the camel.”

At that moment a camel, bestrode by someone who belaboured it heartily, came running up the dusty lane from the bazaar, and John Havelian and steed scuttled in at the garden gate. To Carnegie, burning with anxiety, the tugging at the camel’s nose-stud and the solemn procedure of see-sagging into a recumbent position was maddening. As the camel folded itself up, John alighted and ran to his employer.

”I know very well that Pasha taking lady, day before yesterday, going to Ben Saleem Convent.”

The pappa. said something in Coptic. John smiled.

“What are we to do?” said Carnegie. “Do you know where he has taken her to?”

“I know very well. He taking her to house in hills, in one tomb of the nobles, at the top of the Valley of the Kings. That Pasha got house there.”

The priest spoke with him again, and then said, “He only suspects this, he knew that the Pasha was taking an interest in her movements, and he feels sure that this is what has become of her. I think he is probably right.”

“Then we must go at once. Get your pistol, Gordon. Now, John, come here. We must go to that house you know of and see if she is there, but may he not take her to his dahabieh?”

“I thinking no. I thinking he going to that house for day or two to make him quiet.”

“Shall we go there now?”

“I thinking go there now and try and find out, and then make plan.”

“I don’t care what we do as long as we get a move on.”

“I got three horse on opposite bank from hotel dragoman; boat now waiting.”

“What do you think, Gordon? Shall we go straight there?”

“Yes, I don’t see for the moment that we can do more. If we get near, then John can go and spy out the land. At any rate we can do no good, unless we find out where she is. But we ought to watch that dahabieh too. Where is it now?”

“Where is that Pasha’s dahabieh, John?”

“That dahabieh one mile down stream on opposite bank.”

“Can the pappa watch it while we go to the tomb?”

That the priest was prepared to do, and said that as he often stayed in a village on the other bank, he knew all the people about.

Then as there was little to wait for, Carnegie and Gordon having secured their pistols hurried down to the Nile bank, and were duly sailed across in the ferry. Under a group of palm trees three horses were waiting their arrival, and in a very few minutes the party were heading for the Valley of the Kings, and past the great statues of Memnon and the village of Ain Kadeis. Out from the green fringe of the Nile, onwards into the opening of the desert valley the cavalcade headed, a party of sightseers seemingly, but an hour or two earlier perhaps than the usual comers, trending to the right, past the temples of Hatshepsu and the great necropolis of Thebes.

It was early for sightseers in the stony barren and desolate valley of the royal sepulture, and the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings lay bleak and silent before the sunlight had penetrated it. Carnegie frowned and cursed to himself to think that his lady love might be immuned somewhere in such surroundings. Without conversing, however, they wound up the valley round the boulders and debris that had strewn it for ages and in which the entrance to the tombs had so long been hidden from the world. Past the first group of entrances, past the police on the door of Tut-ank-amen’s last abode of splendour, up a mule path that grew worse as they climbed. Then by the side of the hill under and overhanging the rock John stopped them. Steps led down a dark passage.

“Wait,” called John, who disappeared into the tomb with a bundle.

In a couple of moments he appeared, dressed as a policeman.

“Now we start,” and winding up and over the spur, the track struck a wider one galleried out of the side of the hill.

“Now we see Pasha’s house.”

Under the cliff in a gully a sufficient space had been quarried out of the rock to build a small house against its face, in pursuance no doubt of the fashion to be interested in archaeology and to entertain distinguished tourists and archaeologists. It was a one-storied house clamped on to the face of rock with a verandah that looked out eastwards to the glorious silver streak of the Nile with its fringe of green, and below them the houses and ruins and jackal villages on the site of the burial grounds and temples of ancient Thebes. The view was perfectly vignetted within the rocky sides of the gully.

“That Pasha’s house. Never get in this way. I go and look. You all wait here, Effendi,” and he took the party and the Arab horseholder to a recess in the rock where some humbler tomb had been begun. “Waiting here,” he said laconically, and then went and knocked at the door in the centre of the verandah. His police dress would be ample excuse for his making enquiries.

A Berber servant in white with a crimson waist sash, opened the door, which was singularly massive for so small a dwelling.

John produced a pocket book and turned over the pages and asked how many people lived there.

“I and another,” was the answer.

“To whom does the house belong?”

“To Ali Fuad Pasha.”

“Is he here?”

“He is not.”

“No one else here? Any family?”

“No.”

“Any ladies?”

“No.”

“Does the Pasha come here often?”

“When he feels inclined. Sometimes not for months, sometimes often.”

“Are you lonely here?”

The servant gave a shudder. “Yes, very.”

“Ah well. There has been some robbery of travellers, and a police post may be established for your protection. I should like to look in, I hear the Pasha has made it very comfortable.”

“You may look in the outer room if you like.”

John entered, and found himself in a fair-sized square hall, painted pink with several divans. A passage ran away at right angles with doors on each side.”

John made as if to go down to it, but the servant stopped him.

“I am not allowed to admit you. I have shown you the hall. It is enough. The Pasha has no concern with the police.”

“True,” replied John, who had no desire to attract particular attention, and he returned to the party, noticing however that the massive door was well provided with bolts and that the windows had strong shutters.

“No Pasha here now, perhaps lady. Now I show a way in.”

Then he led them back along the path and turned left-handed up the hillside where Gordon remained in observation of the house and John and Carnegie took a track up a small ravine above the main path. At a small opening in the ravine the dragoman told the Arab to stay with the horses. They followed the ravine, which grew narrow and winding, till it suddenly ended against a ledge of protruding rock, behind which John showed Carnegie a small narrow opening cut in the up-ended strata.

“I got light, I go first.”

He produced an electric torch and showed a shaft descending gently. They followed him down the slanting way in which it was necessary to crouch, till the torch showed them the top of a flight of stairs. Descending some dozen steps, the torch now revealed a large square chamber hewn from the rock in which they could stand erect. The flashlight showed that it was carved and painted with representations of life on a landed estate, cows were being milked, goats counted, sheaves of wheat stacked, and watching it all was the Lord of the manor seated under a palm with slaves farming him. It was evidently part of the tomb of some Egyptian noble, perhaps 3,000 years before. On the opposite face of the wall, the embalming of the lord was shown, and the taking of the body by water to its last rest. On another face he was shown worshipping the gods of lower Egypt. But though John flashed the torch this way and that no opening was visible. They had apparently come to a stop. No passage was revealed and they were on the point of turning back, when a distant glimmer shone away through a dark corner where the rock seemed now to be cleft. There was evidently a further passage, and some one was coming. The two flattened themselves into a recess as the light came nearer, and presently footfalls could be heard. Eventually two Egyptians appeared, one the Berber servant, leading an ordinary fellah whom the servants held tight by his clothes.

As they came into the ante-chamber the Berber pointed to the glimmer of light that showed along the passage down which John and Carnegie had come.

“There you are, Abdul, this is the way out. Now get you gone home, and be careful you say a word to no one, or the Pasha will make it worse for you.” And he held up a lantern to show the fellah the steps. The latter, an ordinary Egyptian villager, salaamed and slunk off. The Berber held the lamp up awhile and when the fellah had entered the slanting passage, turned back with his companion and withdrew by the way he had come.

As they disappeared, Carnegie said, “We must get that fellah,” and they followed him up the steps and the passage and caught him at the exit.

“Oho, Abdul,” said John, “what are you doing here?”

The Egyptian, scared out of his wits on seeing a constable standing by him, held up his hands in supplication.

“Tell us what you are doing here, or come to jail at once.”

“I am a camel man from village of Sidi Bayan.”

“Where is the lady you have been carrying?”

“What lady?”

“Come now. . . . You were the man who left the convent at Bassiout with a lady. Where is she?” And John accompanied the question by a kick of the knee in the small of the fellah’s back. But the sight of a policeman was enough and no kicks were needed.

“I will tell you everything. Ali Fuad Pasha stopped the lady when we had left the convent, and brought us here. The lady is now in that house.”

“How can we get in?”

“We were taken in by the front door, and I was brought out this way.”

“What was the passage you have come through like?”

“We came through a strong narrow door.”

“Have you seen the Pasha?”

“Not since we came up here.”

“We shan’t get much more out of that creature “ said John. “I think let him go.”

“Yes, John, let him go, and we will get back into that tomb at once.”

The man gladly disappeared, after being enjoined to hold his tongue or live in fear of the police for ever after.

The two then re-entered the dark passage and soon found themselves again in the ante-chamber, where the passage through which the servants had disappeared was now readily visible. The light of the torch led them through forty or fifty feet of passage in which one man only could move at a time. At last they came to a door in the living rock, a door of massive iron-studded wood.

“No breaking in here,” quoth Carnegie, as he flashed his light up and down. “We’ve come to the place called ‘stop.’ Wait though,” he added, as he saw a glimmer of light from the left. A sloping shaft up which a man could crawl led away to the left, and at the end was the glow of light which had attracted his attention.

“I am going to crawl up this, John. Have you your pistol? Then see that I am not taken at a disadvantage from behind.”

With some difficulty Carnegie crawled up the slope and found himself on a small ledge. Two feet along the ledge was a strong iron grating, through which the light came. Crawling to the grating he gasped with surprise. Below him a comfortable room hung with carpets, and on a divan lay a woman, resting or sleeping, wrapped in the clothes of a lay sister of the convent. His heart beat as he recognized the lissom figure, the figure that had struggled with the corpse and the face that he had struck so fiercely. What was he to do? Should he wake her? It was important to let her know that he was looking for her.

He called to her, called to her by the maiden name, all that he knew. ”Elsie Dowman?”

She was awake and sprang up.

“Who called Elsie Dowman?”

“It is I, Carnegie, the man who helped you with your husband’s body at Cairo.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been looking for you for weeks. I came back from India because I could not bear to think of you alone in this land. And you?”

“I’ve been hiding, from the police and from Ah Fuad Pasha. The day before yesterday he found me riding off from the convent at Sidi Bayan and has carried me here. He has told me that unless I go with him, he will give me up to the police. He is coming to-day to take me to his dahabieh . . . or to the police.”

“You need not fear the police. They know all about you and I have the authority of the Chief of Police to say that they want to know nothing and are not looking for you.”

“Oh! I’ve been in such fear and misery,” and she clasped her hands. “But the good convent folk have given me peace and rest. Then I heard the Pasha was looking for me, and the Mother Superior arranged for me to move to the other convent in the desert, and then he found me, and since yesterday I have been in great despair, for I saw only trial for murder or to stay with him,” and she shuddered and covered her face with her hands.

“Well, now we must make plans. It seems to me that you must go with the Pasha to the dahabieh and that we will rescue you there. You will be watched by us all the time you are going there. You must temporize with the Pasha, and you must not be afraid, for we will not let you go out of our sight. The pappa whom you saw at Sidi Bayan is watching the dahabieh. So now, dearest, I shall get you safe to me and all will be well.”

“But what will you do with me?”

“Do with you! Why do you suppose I have hurried back from India. What do you suppose I’ve dreamt of ever since I left you in Cairo?”

Madame-who-he-did-not-know looked up swiftly at him, and her colour slowly deepened.

“If you will come with me I will marry you in Cairo the first moment that you will.”

But Elsie called, “Hush, someone is coming.” A knock at the door and the Berber servant entered.

“Madame, the Pasha is here, he waits your pleasure. The woman will come and attend you, for the Pasha takes us back to the boat tonight.”

“Tell the woman to come, for I am ready.”

And the servant salaamed and went.

“Good-bye, dearest, do not be afraid. Go to the boat with him, and we will be there.”

Elsie looked and smiled, and then kissed her hand.

Carnegie then saw an Egyptian woman enter the room, and scrambled back from the grating excited but grim and determined. He told the dragoman all that had passed.

“I know that Pasha very well. We first watch her go to dahabieh. Can you speak Arabic? No? Gordon Effendi can? Yes? Come, I tell plan presently.”

They then returned to the rock ante-chamber and up the passage into the cool evening air. It was nearly dark, and the last flush of sunset was fading out of the west. They found the horses, but bade the Arab wait awhile till they had rejoined Gordon. Having found him and heard of the coming of the Pasha with a litter and a dozen retainers, John then withdrew them into the ravine to discuss plans. Carnegie eagerly related to Gordon all that had befallen.

“Shall we attack the caravan when they move out?” asked the latter. “If we do we may have trouble, they will be armed, and if we are successful we have no bearers or means of getting her away except on our horses. . . . I think we had better get back now. We can’t miss her again, and we must arrange how to get her from the dahabieh, but we had better see her off from here.”

But John now interposed, “I think no very great time to spare, perhaps that dahabieh leaving very quickly. I know very well that I get motor boat. Now riding quickly to that hotel.”

It did not take long to get the horses down to the path after seeing that the Pasha’s cavalcade was not on the road, and before it was dark they were back in the Valley of the Kings, and speeding for the ferry.

“What do you propose we should do now, John?”

“Master know Arabic?”

“No.”

“That master know Arabic?”

“Captain Gordon knows Arabic well.”

“Then I think we all go to dahabieh as Police officers. I getting clothes. This Effendi going as Police officer, you go as European Sergeant, only say ‘damn.’ I coming as constable, getting motor boat at Luxor.”

“What do you say, Gordon? Can you do the police officer’s part? Remember that friend Dallas Bey will see us through.”

“Oh yes, it will be a lark, but what do you propose to do? Shall we arrest the Pasha or threaten him with arrest unless he lets the lady go?”

“We must do something like that, eh, John?”

“First getting to hotel while I getting motor boat and police kit. Then I telling.”

“What a secretive old devil he is, or do you think he has not yet made up his mind? Eh, Gordon?”

“I expect it’s the latter. Any way, let’s get back and get outside some food, and then we shall be ready for anything. What do you propose to do with her, bring her to the hotel?”

“No, I have been turning this over in my mind for some time. There is a slow train to Cairo about midnight. If we can get her in time, I propose she should go straight to Madame Cavelier’s there. She will then have plenty of time to rest, get clothes, etc., while I tell Dallas, and we can make further plans. Can one get a special licence in Cairo or anything that corresponds thereto?”

“Oh ho! Did you propose to her in that tomb room through those bars?”

“Shut up rotting, old chap. Of course I said I wanted to marry her at once.”

“What did she say?”

“What a lot of questions to ask. Of course it was all understood.”

“Oh, was it? Well you sailors seem to know your own mind. But I still am anxious to know what the lady who had only seen you on that night full of tragedy said to you through the bars.”

“Well, you’ll jolly well have to wait till you can ask her yourself, Gordon, and if you only knew what this finding her had meant to me you would let me alone.”

“All right, old chap. I won’t rag any more, and here we are at the ferry.”

It was not long before they were back in the hotel and remembered that they had eaten nothing since breakfast, it now being seven o’clock. By eight John turned up with a bundle.

“I know very well that Pasha’s dahabieh going down river to-night. Boat is all ready. I tell masters’ servants packing clothes.”

“We’ve told them, John, and they are to go to the station and wait for us there.”

“I think master starting at 8.30. Motor boat is ready at stairs. Put on police clothes in boat.”

It was not half-past eight when the party entered the boat and slipped away to the quiet bank opposite, where John produced three sets of police uniforms. Captain Gordon put on that of an officer with the Taiboosh. Carnegie that of a sergeant, and John resumed that which he had worn during the day, but had taken off before his return to Luxor.

“Now, John, we must settle our plan of action. How far to the dahabieh?”

“Taking half hour to get there.”

“Are we going to run alongside and board her and demand the lady?”

“I think we run alongside and ask to see Pasha, Gordon Bey asking, then seeing.”

It seemed to be best at any rate to get within hail of the dahabieh, and the motor boat slipped down the stream past the blazing light of the Luxor Hotel and the tourist steamers, till it ran clear from the glare and into the purer light of the growing moon. The Nile shone in its soft radiance, and then the cool breeze blew in their faces and now and again some Egyptian guitar sounded from the villages. In half an hour, as John predicted, they were clear of everything and some way ahead shone the lights of a vessel moored to the western shore.

Then from the western bank a boat with two men paddling shot out from the shore, and the tall hat of the pappa was silhouetted against the distant sky.

“Hullo, Father!” called Carnegie. “What news?”

“My son,” said the priest, “the Pasha and Madame have been in the dahabieh over an hour. The dahabieh is ready to sail, but the Pasha has been seeing men from his estate at Luxor, who are still crowded on the bank.”

“Well, Father, as you see, we are policemen and we are going to take Madame. You need not fear that we shall get her.”

“Well, my son, the boat is not much further down. Have you any more need of me?”

“No, Father. You know how grateful I am for your help,” and Carnegie shook the old man’s hand and pushed his paddle off.

As the boat made for the shore the old man held up his hand. “The peace that is past all understanding be with you,” and the motor boat ran on.

“That Pasha’s dahabieh.” And John for the first time showed some signs of excitement. They ran past her, and brought the motor boat alongside up stream. A dragoman and two servants ran out. Gordon became spokesman.

“We want to see the Pasha. I am a police officer,” and he stepped on to the dahabieh, followed by police sergeant Carnegie and constable John.

After five minutes’ wait, the dragoman returned and asked them to follow him. They were shown into a comfortable lounge upholstered in the velvet that Pashas affect, where the Pasha himself sat smoking and rose when he saw the European officer.

“Good evening, won’t you sit down? To what do I owe this privilege?”

“We are seeking a lady, an English lady, Pasha.”

“An English lady, Effendi! Where do you expect to find her?”

“On this dahabieh, Your Excellency.”

“On my dahabieh, Effendi! Surely not.”

“Yes, we do, Pasha. We want the lady who was in the Tomb House at the head of the Valley of the Kings to-day.”

The Pasha sat quiet, merely knocking the ash from his cigarette tip with his little finger.

“Ah, you want that lady?”

“We do, Pasha.”

“That lady is my wife, she belongs to my household. You cannot possibly have her, moreover she would not go with you. On what grounds do you want her? Are you her relative? Has she Committed an offence?”

“You have no right to have her here, Pasha. You have carried her off.”

The Pasha watched his cigarette smoke curl upwards and smiled.

“On what grounds do you say that I have carried her off?”

“We know that it is so. We know how you took her when travelling to Ben Saleem.”

“Perhaps you would like to see her?”

John came up and whispered to Gordon and Carnegie, “Plenty Egyptian men here waiting outside.”

Then a brilliant idea came to Carnegie, for it was obvious that a row was to be avoided between themselves as bogus policemen and the Pasha’s retainers. Why not pretend to arrest her for her husband’s murder?

He stepped forward and saluted Gordon and said:

“We have orders to arrest her for the murder of her French husband. The Pasha, too, will come quietly and let us take the lady and himself.”

The Pasha now looked perturbed, and the olive cheek blanched.

“I know nothing whatever of the murder of her husband. I was not there.”

“I am afraid we must arrest you both. She for the murder and you for aiding and abetting. You say that you have not stolen her, but that she is your wife and stays with you willingly. You both murdered the husband perhaps for this end.”

The Pasha was now considerably ruffled, and turned to the sergeant.

“I tell you I know nothing of her husband, and she is not my wife.”

John stepped forward and handed Carnegie a pair of handcuffs and Gordon said, “I am afraid I must arrest you both. But if you hand the lady over to me, you can proceed to Cairo in your own boat and wait till the police send for you.”

The Pasha rose again and led the way to an inner cabin, drew back a curtain and slid back a door.

“Madame is here. Madame, here is a pretty to do. The police want to arrest you and me for the murder of your husband.”

Elsie sprang to her feet, and looked at the police officer in bewilderment. Carnegie stepped towards her as if to handcuff her. “It is I, Elsie, do what I tell you.”

Elsie gave her hands to be manacled.

“My husband, Pasha? You had nothing to do with his murder.”

“Aha! Effendi. Do you hear that?”

“I do, Pasha. Perhaps if Madame comes quietly with us and you do not obstruct us, you need not be under arrest. You may go quietly anywhere you like and if the police want you we shall always know where to find you. Madame will no doubt repeat on oath what she has said here that you had nothing to do with the murder of her husband and that will be enough for us.”

The Pasha appeared relieved.

“If Madame is ready she must come with us now. Is there any woman with her to get her kit? Good. Tell her to be sharp. Now, Sergeant,” said Gordon, “take your prisoner to that boat and wait till the woman brings her clothes. Keep those handcuffs on her.”

In a few minutes the maid appeared, and while waiting Gordon had a few heart to heart words with the Pasha. Told him of the corpse of the Frenchman thrown into the canal, rather giving him to understand that it had been found, hinted too at the story of the sale of Madame, and then he concluded:

“I think, Pasha, that you are very well out of this, if Madame sticks to her story that you are not concerned. I shall also let it be known how you have helped the police in arresting the lady.”

And then the motor boat left the side of the dahabieh with the Pasha in a frame of mind that was not in the least likely to give them any trouble.

And so it came about that Carnegie and Madame-who-he-did-not-know, escorted by the triumphant John Havelian and Captain Gordon, of the 10th Soudanese, came soon after midnight to the railway station at Luxor barely an hour before the Cairo train was due to start, to find that John had ordered a coupé for Madame and that Gordon’s servant was there with kit. The rest of the story hardly needs telling, ending as all such adventures should end. Elsie, peacefully asleep in her coupé, dead to the world with fatigue, and wrapped in content after her months of nightmare; Carnegie sitting watching her in the corner and gazing at that delicate chin which he had struck so cruelly, and wondering, as a man will wonder, how such a thing had come into his life. And he sat and watched her breathing, watched the shadow of the train on the moonlit desert, and smelt the smells of the dew on the wheat and the aromatic herb at the village side . . . watched the lamps sway till the break of day, and the lass before him sleeping.

What more to be said, save to agree with John Havelian who remarked as they descended from their carriages at Cairo, “I knowing very well.”

A Study in Martyrdom

I

The Keep of Doom

“Glory for all, and Heaven for those that bleed.”

Five o’clock on a frontier afternoon, and the walls and loopholes of the militia fort at Sarwekai in the mountains of Southern Waziristan stood out sharp against the hillsides and in the lengthening shadows.

. . . Above the mud walls rose the inner keep on which all eyes in the garrison were directed. And an observer would have noticed that while there was no enemy to be seen, yet the garrison were under arms and gazing seemingly up at the keep. Half-hidden by a mud-plastered buttress on the rampart, a British officer and two Indian officers also gaze upwards, also with rifles in their hands, and with them is an Indian corporal.

Then a khaki-clad figure climbed to the top of the keep parapet, rifle in hand, stretched himself erect, and flung his rifle down among the soldiery gazing at him and cried Allah ho akbar! The corporal raised his rifle, aimed at the erect figure at the top of the keep, and fired. The figure remained for a moment poised still erect, spun round, and then fell with a crash into the terreplein of the fort below. A prolonged “Aah-a-h-h——” of relief went up. An assistant-surgeon knelt over the body for a while and then waved his hand, upon which four men brought up a stretcher covered with a white cloth, raised the body and bore it away.

It was not the only corpse within the walls of the fort on which the Jack of Empire flew. Up in the officers’ quarters, awaiting portage to consecrated ground, lay the body of Major B—— of the Political Service, murdered in his bed the preceding night by the sentry on duty outside the quarters, merely to make a Mahsud holiday. The strange scene just witnessed was no less than the execution of the murderer in due if peculiar form.

And this is the story of it, and when it is told, it is but by way of introduction and appetiser for its more dramatic sequel. Between the frontier of India, that real frontier within which “everything—yea everything—is peace and goodwill,” in which the lamb and the lion lie down together and the political frontier of Afghanistan, stand as all the world knows, the “Frontier Hills.” In geographical language they are known as the Mountains of Solomon, and in one of the great bluffs is actually an inaccessible and sacred place known as the Takht-i-Suleiman, the Throne or Seat of Solomon whence he bade an Indian bride on their magic carpet, a-flying home to Palestine, bid her native land good-bye. To this day both Hindus and Moslems make pilgrimage, and the wild tribes take toll and safe passage therefrom, and thank their stars that someone still likes to go a-pilgriming.

II

Point and Counter-Point

“Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?”

The folk of these hills, mostly Aryan long turned Moslem, have acknowledged no writ and served no king, since even the days of Darius the Persian and Alexander of Macedon, within whose territories their hills have lain. Kabul, Ghazni, and Delhi have owned the provinces within which the highlands lay, and the young men of the mountains have ridden with kings to Delhi, carved out for themselves estates in Hindustan, but the clansmen have never bowed in any man’s house. They have preyed on traders, they have shot at the strong, and slashed at the weak, they have come to terms as to caravan dues, when the kings around them kept good order, but that is all. Along the borders of the plains hard by the present frontier posts are to be found guarding the same raiders’ ways, the remains of the posts of the Graeco-Bactrian Kings of the Punjab, who also cribbed the clansmen as much as they could. But the great trade ways from Central Asia to India have had to thread certain definite passes, and caravans must fight or pay, so it is not hard to realise the condition of the ruthless lawless folk with whom the first Afghan War brought the British in touch, and for whose control and betterment the British became responsible when they annexed the Punjab in 1849. It is since those days that the crop of frontier expeditions date, over a thousand-mile-long border. Eusafzai, Swat, Black Mountain, Muhmand, Afridi, Waziri, Baluch; the names vary, but the ways have been much the same, and when their raids on peaceful Indian subjects became too vexatious, then some form of punitive expedition took place. It was a poor way of life, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, but any process of annexation or rather pacification and administration has always involved a prohibitive tax on the Indian taxpayer. Therefore the hills have remained in their primitive state, while the choice young men and goodly have come down to serve in the Indian Army, carrying back with them some few ideas on the good and bad of the Pax Britannica.

But the nineteenth century rolled on, and the trade routes from Central Asia had to be made safe for traders. This, and the necessity for being prepared on the frontier for the results of the approach of Russia to the Oxus, compelled the British to make good the main alley-ways without interfering with the inner hills. The irritation this produced resulted in the frontier wars of 1897-8, quite the most serious we have ever had to tackle. When it was over we were left with large bodies of regular soldiers in trans-frontier garrisons. Then came Lord Curzon, impatient at the cost and failure to affect any permanent amelioration. He withdrew all the regulars from out-lying stations, and raised a considerable quantity of local tribal militia. It was hoped that young men thus employed would cease to raid, and that the tribal chiefs would acquiesce in the maintenance of order and be glad of a Government allowance to distribute in lieu of their irregular extortions from traders’ caravans, in itself a not illegitimate source of revenue. This little piece of history is necessary to put the execution scene on the stage in intelligible form.

III

En Avant Les Enfants Perdus

“Plantez un croix sur son tombeau
Gravez son nom, son numereau.”

In accordance with Lord Curzon’s policy the new militia was organised by some of the very best officers obtainable in the Indian Army.

The tribesman, the Pathan—virile, active, jaunty, loving swagger, a worshipper of arms, pleasing to talk—appeals irresistibly to many British officers. There are others to whom the black-hearted irresponsible treachery to which he is also prone, and the intense cruelty which seems to lie at the base of his nature, makes him equally anathema. The contradictory traits in his character are no doubt due to the mixed origins and the countless generations of lawless, freebooting existence. Through the ages a very distinct organisation and code has evolved, but with self-preservation perhaps as leading and guiding light. The tribal ways and organisation vary considerably. In the southern hills the chiefs have pronounced a despotic control, in the north the tribes are intensely democratic, while in the Waziristan no man seems bound by any custom that is to his own detriment.

As an example of the absence of all ruth in the make-up, I may quote a story which my own orderly, a Ranizai of Swat, used to tell with peculiar pleasure and gusto. As a boy he and several other children of his own clan caught a little wretch of the village across the stream with which they had been at enmity for many a year. The lad had strayed over the burn and had been seized. Then and there in childish conclave they stretched his little wezand, and slit it to the glory of God and His Prophet and of their clan.

The frontier tribesmen in the past followed in the train of Afghan and Central Asian conquerors to India, and were generally known as Rohillas or “men of the mountain,” and as the district which we now call the Frontier Hills was known as Roh. They were in India considered to be void of all mercy, ruth, honour or faith. But faithless as public opinion holds all Pathans and Afghans to be, the Waziri, especially the Mahsud Waziri, was by general consent of the frontier, trans- and cis-border, given the palm as quite the most savage and unreliable of all. “Devoid of all trust” was the verdict far and wide. Two militia battalions were to be raised in the country, those of Northern and Southern Waziristan, and the general feeling was that service therein might mean a short life if an exciting one. In any case a considerable leaven of men from reliable tribes was introduced on the “class company” system.

Happily the more difficult and adventurous the job, the more the better type of Briton comes forward, and the Waziri Militia were soon officered with enterprising efficient officers to whom service with Pathans was a joy.

But arrogant childish vanity—vanity of a peculiar inhuman kind—is included in the Pathan makeup, and more especially in that of the Shabi Khel section of the clan. It had entered into the head of a tribesman of the Shabi Khel that, however contented with their lot or attached to their officers they might be, it would redound to the credit of their clan if he murdered a British officer, the more important the better. Further the Political Officer of the area was now sleeping under his protection as sentry on duty, ten yards off. Whereupon he up and shot him in his sleep! Having done so, he retired with his rifle and ammunition to the tower of the keep, which was unoccupied, and from there began to fire on anyone who came near. The officer commanding, who had hurried to the scene with the men of the post, ordered all under cover till daylight. The Indian, or rather Pathan, officers and the British officer were in parley, and the question of how to secure the murderer without loss at his hands was discussed. Communications with the desperado, at first confined to abuse, were entered into. Men of other tribes, furious at the deed, now covered every loophole of the murderer’s sconce with their rifles, and now and again a marksman’s bullet spat into the loopholes behind which he was lurking. At last it was agreed that if he were shot by any ordinary man a blood-feud would ensue. That this penalty should not be thrust unmerited on any individual, the men of the tribe in the corps, and the Indian officers generally, had come to the conclusion that the proper thing now was for the murderer to be shot by a relative and thus come into the category of accidental death.

The murderer’s exaltation had now effervesced, and before him loomed a dog’s death on the ramparts after a snarling fight to a finish, or hanging in pigskin in front of a British prison with all the world a-watching to witness his discomfort in this world and the next. So when the proposal came to him that he should stand forth and be shot cleanly through the heart by a blood-brother and a marksman, he gladly accepted, stipulating only that his body be restored to his relatives. To this request those in authority themselves agreed, thoughtlessly, lest worse befall.

And it was the closing scene in this strange chapter from the white man’s burden that is described at the opening of this story. Before passing on to the sequel, there is an interlude. The friends and relatives of the Shabi Khel bore their scion away, and buried him in ancient form with the recess for the questioning angel to sit by the body in the grave. But they also built a shrine above it, which was lit up with flickering chirags o’ Fridays. All the countryside came to pay homage and say their prayers at the grave of one who had so upheld the clan’s reputation for irresponsible evil, and ruthless treachery, and all the young sprigs of the countryside thought to do likewise. And thus were two young men martyred by the evil of one.

IV

The Glamour of the Shrine

“Shoot straight who may, ride hard who can,
The odds are on the cheaper man.”

It was not long before the first fruits of the lighted shrine were gathered, the result of the promise that the officer in Sarwekai had so thoughtlessly, though to Christian minds so reasonably given. A few months later a new regiment came marching up into the frontier station and cantonment of Bannu on the banks of the Kurram River. It was that most beautiful of all seasons on the Indian frontier, early spring. The air was yet clear of haze, and the ring of snowy mountains of Pit Gul and Shwedhar and their spurs glistened in the morning sun above the cobalt hills that formed the Waziri habitat.

The Brigadier-General commanding and his Brigade-Major had ridden down the road that wound from Kohat below the Kafir Kot, the hill of the unbelievers, where ruins of Macedon survive to this day. A dozen of the officers of the garrison and their wives were with the party to welcome the new arrivals, and with them the band of the out-going corps.

Up the road came the new battalion playing on dole and sarnai that lawless haunting Kabul lovesong Zakhmi Dil, the “Bleeding Hard Heart,” so lilting and yet so lawless that no man dare put it into English, and the tired legs of the marchers responded. Half a mile from the station the Brigadier met the new-comers, and set himself at the head with the new band and all the welcomers, and in front of all the Brigade-Major. Then to “My love is like the red, red rose,” to which in India men sing “The boar, the boar, the mighty boar,” the battalion swung along, past the clump of bamboos that waved a welcome, past the shrine and the old faqir who muttered under his breath as in duty bound, “God smite their souls to the nethermost hell,” past the cemetery where murdered officers and dead English babies lie in witness to the wandering race, over the bridge on to the place d’armes in front of the fort. Then just as the band broke to “Garryowen,” a shot from under the culvert—it was hardly a bridge—and the Brigade-Major at the head of the procession fell from his horse. The men of the leading company flung themselves into the spruit and dragged out a tribesman, bayoneted, hammered with rifle-butts, half-scragged, and wholly man-handled him before the officers could intervene.

“Let them finish the brute off”; but the Brigadier called out “Take him alive! We must find out who sent him.” So sufficient pieces to hang at leisure were collected, and all the while an English gentleman lay by the roadside dying, his wife and two surgeons by his side, and a ring of furious soldiery around, most of them frontiersmen at that.

A litter soon arrived, the battalion re-formed, and dragging the murderer in their midst filed to their lines, but with all the excitement and éclat of their arrival faded.

The Frontier Crimes Act loses no time in the administration of justice. The wretch before the court admitted that he belonged to the Shabi Khel, that he had come to murder a sahib to show what dare-devil lads his clan could produce, and because the Mullah Powindah had promised a straight pass to Paradise to all who slew an unbeliever. La! La! The ignorance that would class a Christian one of the Ahl-i-Kitab one of the “People of the Book,” as “unbeliever!” The garrison cursed their old enemy the Mullah, and the clansman went to his doom as they shoot a mad dog, his doom of the gallows in a pigskin, to disabuse his mind and any of his friends of mistaken ideas of Paradise for such as he. Before he died the prisoner was consumed with grief to learn that he had missed the General, whom he thought must be riding first, and his dying moments were further saddened to hear, as he was falsely told, that his victim would live.

And this was all of a spring morning, well into the twentieth century, when two more souls left the world before their time.

V

The Harvest Moon

“Rien n’est sacre pour un sapeur.”

But tragedies such as I have related are but the cracking of the kitchen pipkins of Imperial policy and the months rolled on and the militias grew in strength and discipline in the hills beyond the border. And after the Saxon manner the officers of each battalion declared that theirs, and theirs alone, justified the Curzon experiment. In the Southern Waziristan Militia all was especially well, for they had the very best of all the frontier officers as Colonel, one who understood the Pathan inside out, loved them all and was loved by them, yet to whom their uncurbed vanity, and folly and all their ways both good and bad lay open. Discipline, activity, reliability was the reputation they were acquiring, and on the mountain tops in the Himalayas the good Lord Curzon and his advisers rubbed together the hands of wisdom and prescience. But they had reckoned without their Shabi Khel. There had been no outrage for some time, an attempt to murder an officer on the golf links at Bannu having failed. It had not been possible for the tribesmen to obtain the body of him who hung in the pigskin, and the shrine of the hero of Sarwekai alone bore the burden of remembrance. But on that the mullahs set great store, and once a month held feast thereat, lest the youth of the glen should forget. Every Friday the little lamps flickered and leapt, and the pious dropped a stone on the growing cairn hard by.

In the fort on the upland hill-girt plain of Wana, which was the headquarters of the Southern Waziristan Militia and guarded the great trade route of the Gomal to Ghuzni, the Colonel of the battalion sat at dinner with his officers, to the number of four, which included the political agent of the district and a Subaltern of Engineers who attended to the roads and posts. Suddenly the mess havildar rushed in and shouted Sipahi agya —A soldier has come!

Behind, a young militiaman in uniform raised his rifle, the good Martini Henry of Government make, and shot the Colonel across the mess-table through the heart. All was uproar, a dozen sepoys sprang from nowhere, an officer felled the assailant with a chair, the guard rushed out and secured the prisoner, but the Colonel lay a-dying—dying to make a Mahsud holiday once again, for the murderer the third time was a Mahsud Waziri of the Shabi Khel.

But that was not all the story. Men of the garrison knew that something was afoot, and several of the Mahsud company had been seen to run from the vicinity of the officers’ quarters. The Mahsud company happened to be in charge of the inner keep for that month, and to be quartered therein. Within the keep was all the ammunition, the rations and the water reserve. How far was the company cognisant of the outrage? What were their intentions?

The officers of the corps held hasty conference with the Indian officers of the non-Mahsud companies. It was agreed that the first thing was to get that company out of the keep, and put a company beyond suspicion in. It was a most delicate and difficult matter, and to this day no one knows how the subahdar-major and two others persuaded that arrogant, unreasonable, and excited crowd to come out. At last, however after some hours of anxiety, the move was achieved. The Mahsuds filed out, laid their arms, and proceeded to tents outside the fort. The British officers now breathed more freely, for the nearest troops were close on a hundred marching miles away on the Indus banks, save for some small outposts. Four Europeans alone stood to hold some three hundred odd excited border militiamen, of whom a large proportion came from outside the actual border, over whom through their families authority had no control . . . excited militiamen with arms, precious Martini Henry in their hands! Happily a bold front was shown and happily the Mahsud is hated as the prince of faithlessness along the whole border. The other clans stood staunch, and seeing it was so, the old British instinct to rule and lead shone forth. After an anxious night the murderer was put on his trial, while the militia, and, no doubt, the tribes around wondered. There could be but one sentence, and that the magistrate under the Crimes Act promptly awarded. To hang by the neck till he was dead.

But it was one thing to condemn a Moslem to death under such circumstances, and quite another to carry out the sentence. Who was to do it? Not the Darwesh Khel Waziris! Not the Afridi or Orakzai! Not the Khattak or Bangash! That were trying loyal men and fellow-Moslems too high. Not the scavengers of the fort establishment. Nay! That would be a deadly affront to all believers.

His Majesty’s Royal Engineers are the handmaids of the Army, as well as its guide, philosopher, and friend. The Subaltern of Engineers should make a gallows and a noose, and with the officers as sheriffs and warders Vengeance, the vengeance of the law, must be carried out at all costs, or the whole countryside might see the sahibs had fear.

So that Subaltern of Engineers set about his business, which the formation of the keep made easy enough for a man of resource. The keep was open—that is to say, its four walls contained barracks and store-rooms with rampart above, with a crenellated parapet on the outside, and a plain one on the side that surrounded and looked down into the inner court. A stout beam thrown across a corner of the inner court would serve as a gallows tree with a rope and noose of sufficient length. Two Afridi officers brought up the murderer, who was duly trussed by British officers.

The sun had set, and the long shadows had fallen on the valleys as the harvest moon came over the eastern hills. The well of the keep stood deep in gloom, and the crenellated parapet caught the last ray of after-glow. An Afridi held a torch as the Engineer adjusted the noose, and at a sign from the magistrate the officers heaved and the murderer hung in the gloom below, his limbs a-quivering. . . . It was not in derision that the bugler sounded and all the officers stood to attention, but in tribute to the Empire whose writ ran once, even as the Admiral raised his hat and thanked the mutineer at the Nore as the body was hauled to the yard-arm.

One more task remained in the fort. There must be no more of the shrine and illumination business to inflame young men’s minds. The body was taken by officers and scavengers out in the still moonlight through the postern at dead of night and buried deep beneath the scattered heaps of burning litter from the mule lines, so that in the morning no man could tell the spot. A hundred miles away they buried the Colonel in consecrated ground, with muffled drums a-moaning and then as the troops marched home to jaunty airs, the frontier set itself to the old task, policing, doctoring, teaching, relieving, in the hope that some day, good might come of it.

And that is the story of three British officers martyred to make a Mahsud holiday, and three highland vanity merchants, whom God had made for a better end, leaving the world by way of bullet and glamoured grave, the pigskin noose and the dung-yard, with six mothers a-grieving, “But the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations.”

The Triumph of the Tea Trays

A Tale of the Tigris

Scattered in the peaceful corners of the land are to be found the homes of those who have served the State in times of stress and anger, with their swords beaten into ploughshare and golf club, often enough with little of companionship beyond their innate content and the pipe that sings and whistles in its comfortable foulness. It was to a typical resting-place of such a one under the lee of the South Down that I hied myself to look up an old friend, and while waiting in the sitting-room of his stone cottage, I poked around its fittings. You will generally find them much the same. A group or two framed, Jorrocks, the head of a shrapnel shell, Adam Lindsay Gordon’s verses, a volume or two of Kipling, a photo of some quite inaccessibly beautiful feminine, the Queen of the Might Have Been, a rod and a gun and a box of tackle. These are the rules; after that, season to taste.

But in this particular cot, as I saw my friend come up the garden path in his old service breeches and gaiters my eye caught an unusual trophy, nothing less than a glass case on the wall and in it a Rockingham teapot without a spout, and under it the photo of an Indian servant with his hand across his breast, and one finger missing.

After greetings I demanded the meaning of the teapot relic and the fingerless man hard by, and this is what he told me:

“Why, you remember the story of Kut and how Sir John Nixon and his Headquarters staff had to do a bunk before Townshend got shut up, and how his convoy of steamers was attacked by the Bedus, jolly nearly done in. That teapot is a relic of it. You remember the yarn?”

No! I shall not allow my friend of the Sussex Den to tell it; I will tell it in my own way, for I know the story well, only I had forgotten it, and he and his teapot but acted as the remembrancer, tucked away under the South Down. And this is what there is to it. If anyone remembers the story of the Ridge at Delhi, and the valley of the shadow of death, the open valley behind the Hindu Rao’s house, along which rebel round shot hopped and skipped, they may remember how the cook boys of the 60th Rifles, with the riflemen’s dinners, skipped and hopped in unison as the round shot trundled by, absolutely regardless of anything save getting the dinners to their masters. The story of the teapots is just such another, only with a tinge more drama and glory.

It was late autumn on the Tigris, and Townshend after his advance towards Bagdad—that advance which should never have been ordered—and his quite brilliant temporary victory under the old Sassanian dome of the hall of audience of the Chusroes, which men wrongly call an arch, was falling back on Kut with the Turk at his heels.

A little over a hundred miles by road from Kut to Bagdad the winding Tigris must needs demand more than thrice that distance to satisfy its insistence on pear-shaped curves and hairpin bends. The gentlemen of England who sit at home in ease, and were so busy just then with their arm-chair strategy, had asked for a blow at Bagdad, regardless of the fact that steamers to implement their wishes lay thousands of miles away, across monsoon-swept seas.

Sir John Nixon and his staff fell off their perch, too, hypnotised perhaps by the dreaded effect in the East, of the escape from Gallipoli, and casting from them all that they had ever learnt of logistics and how armies live—not by ravens and cruses of oil, or the manna of the desert—consented. The lesson of the long camel line and bullock train that the road to Kabul had taught them, forgotten when studied in terms of steamers and swift and winding rivers, was of no avail. Townshend, gallant vocative Townshend, Signor McStinger as the Army knew him, because of the song that he sang, marched up those hundred miles to Ctesiphon, with no adequate fleet behind him, and was now on his way back, with all the cursed jackal Arabs hanging on his skirts to murder his wounded and pilfer his dead.

Kut, which should be pronounced Koot, and is short for Kut el Omra, “The castle of the Chiefs,” was the only town on the river between Amara and Bagdad, and it was the base from which Townshend had started. An important trading centre, dealing with the grain from that ancient Tigris bed now known as the Shalt el Hai, and a meeting-place for the caravans from the Persian hills, it had grown to a town of considerable size. In addition to its Arab population there were many Jew traders and Chaldean Christians, the latter much concerned in furnishing crews for the Lynch steamers. The mosques had minarets, a fact which always denotes importance and well-to-do supporters, and in ordinary times the bustle of sailing craft of all kinds and sizes would be considerable.

At this moment when Townshend had turned back, the traffic was of course abnormal. Many Arab craft from Basra had brought up supplies and even lay in reserve as baggage-carriers, with their muscular, stalwart crews that tow their boats against the wind starko, to the horror of the Indian soldiery, for many a mile. If you study the tablets from Tel el Amarna on the Nile where for some strange reason some of the correspondence of King Hammurabbi, the Amaraphel of Genesis, has been found, you will find that his Arab boatmen were the same mixture of efficiency and untrustworthiness as they are to-day. I rejoiced to see that even such peremptory orders as I used to send with hint of lash and gallows, anent missing bags of grain and sacks of potatoes, were sent in identical language by Hammurabbi, king of Babylon, twice a thousand thrice a hundred years before Christ, for there is no new thing under the sun.

If you want to know more about the Arabs who tow starko, why, the by-ways of the Prophet Ezekiel will enlighten you, for they were attractive to the women of Israel whose wimples and crisping pins and changeable apparel so enraged Isaiah, as well as their dallying with the inhabitants.

But in addition to the Arab mahelas and shaktus with their burly crews, there was a little jam of British steamers, some from India and Burma, some the craft which the descendants of Captain Blosse Lynch, the companion of Euphrates Chesney owned. Not only were there valuable steamers to get away before the Turkish net should envelop the town, but a host of sick and wounded. Alas, last but not least, the whole of the Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief in Mesopotamia, General Sir John Nixon, his Chief of the General Staff, his Adjutant and Quartermaster-General, and all the lesser stars of a headquarters, supply officers, medical officers, provost-marshals et hoc genus omne, and as the song used to say—

“The General Commanding and his brigade-major
And our fussy friend the D.A.Q.M.G.”

It scans better when you say it than it looks on paper; it is always rather sad that the ribald rhymes of one’s subaltern days come to lip just as one is getting to the serious part of a story.

Now Sir John Nixon realised at once that he could do no good if he stayed to see Townshend straggle in, and that he must away with his galaxy, and take with him all the steamers and all the sick and wounded he could bundle aboard. Townshend would need support or relief and he was short enough of steamers and troops to do it with. So bustle and activity prevailed, the hospitals were cleared on to the steamers, twice as many as the decks would hold, with rations for the voyage down, and all through the night and the next morning the work went on. A river war is a fascinating thing, with its bustle of steamers, its sidling and its chunking, its blowing of whistles and clanging of steamer bells. Later when Government took this phase of the national War more seriously, and the rivers of the world sent their steamers, the Nile and the Hooghly and the Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Irrawadi and even Father Thames himself, with pleasure boats that still smelt of Bath buns, then that river of the Arabs was a sight to see. But even at this juncture, commissariat officers and embarkation officers sweated far into the night, to get off their loads of sick and wounded and great men. But getting away is a slow business, and it was not till well on in the afternoon, that the Commander-in-Chief could shake the commandant of Kut by the hand and charge him with messages for Townshend. Then the bells clanged and the whistles went and the Mejidieh and the Malamir and the rest of the fleet chunked out from the banks and wended their way cautiously. The Tigris was low and the polemen from the Irrawadi and the Chaldeans from Bagdad were in the chains and the chant of the chainmen came up in cadence to the captain’s ear. Sare do baam! Sare do baam! and then a change of note that gave the shallow warning, ek baam ek hath! or the Arab equivalent, Ma wajib . . . ma wajib!

Down went the procession on the stream, and all the while the snows of the Persian hills known as the Pusht-i-koh shone clear in their snow line, where Lur and Bakhtiari chiefs kept watch and sold sheep to both belligerents, hills where long ago had dwelt, in the verbiage of Genesis, Tidal king of nations. That is none other than Tidal chief of tribes, tribes as now, which carry the brand of Cain in the Mongol fold, and where the Tidal of the day still intrigues to keep his hegemony.

The afternoon was peaceful enough and the sun shone steadily so that the sand and desert leapt and shimmered into mirage, and one could see “wonders in the land of Ham.” But palm trees and minarets on the horizon where such do not exist, only fog the issues and baffle the artilleryman, and make fighting a delusion. However, all was quiet enough in the desert round, and the wounded dozed and dreamt of the comforts in India to which they were hieing, and before and behind scudded the little Arab boats of those who had heard the bad news and thought that Kut might not be healthy, since the returning Turk might have a short way with those who had helped his enemies.

And then arose one of those cursed afternoon storms which the habitués of the Tigris know so well and dread. It blew like billy-oh from off the Pusht-i-Koh, clouds of dust which choked the mouth and eyes and prevented the steersman steering. But it did much worse than that, as the wounded on the decks buried their heads in sheets and shirts, for it blew the ships full tilt to the shore, whence no amount of paddle chunking would bring them off. One after the other the five steamers followed suit, and plumped against the bank and there remained. The Commander-in-Chief swore, because he wanted to make Immam Ali Gharbi, the shrine of Ali in the East, that night, and the skippers of the steamers swore, too, chiefly because skippers hate being mastered by the weather, and the wounded thought that a little bit more unpleasantness more or less was all in the day’s wait.

Then something arose to give cause for their annoyance. They were chock-a-block on the curve of a big bend in the river, and the bows of the steamer faced due south. Looking westward there was little to be seen but some mounds of some ancient Sassanian atash-gah, dancing in the sky with a refraction of water below. Nearer on the flank were mounds of ancient dead canals. In the mirage or rather from out of it, from the north-west came a spurt of rifle bullets. Rattle on the funnels, crash against the sides, the banks hardly protected the steamers. A cry from the decks where the wounded lay; hard to be hit while lying! What the devil was up? Turks? Bedus? The Arabs would surely play any dirty trick. The bullets were coming obliquely through the mirage. Peering with glasses into the shimmer someone saw a line of mounted men, that came and vanished. The Commander-in-Chief climbed to the bridge of his steamer, while his A.D.C. remonstrated. The escort, a weak wing of the 67th and some oddments of Dorsets or Norfolks, sprang to their rifles and leapt ashore and then proceeded to extend, making for a bank to the north-west from whence the attack appeared to be coming. Soon the answering rattle of the escort added to the din.

But the ships must have stood up to it with the setting sun full on them, dropping to the horizon behind Babylon, and again and again the sick decks were raked.

Then the fire commenced from the west and south-west. “D——n these confounded Bedus,” said the Commander-in-Chief from his place on the bridge where his staff had insisted on padding him with bedding-rolls, “I shall have to take them on myself,” but the Headquarters staff and the sergeant clerks were already turning out. The Adjutant and Quartermaster-General and his little lot were already on shore, rifles in their hands and the Chief of the General Staff was falling in his squad. The P.M.O. said that the Geneva convention did not apply, and followed the others to the flood embankment that faced the direction of the new attack fifty yards on from the steamers. The Judge-Advocate-General went, too, and the Director of Supplies, including the Headquarter Camp Commandant and the surgeon dentist, in fact all the Brass Hats from Brasshat-ville, as they would say in the States. A message had also gone to Kut to send someone down the right bank of the Tigris.

And as Brass Hats love a bit of a scrap, everyone skipped over the side readily enough, with any fire-arm he could raise. The sergeant clerks were mostly marksmen, and many had been prize-winners at Indian musketry meetings, and they nestled down to fire their darnedest, jesting the while especially at the P.M.O. and the Judge-Advocate-General, who were clumsy at the loading.

Four had slipped to four-thirty, and four-thirty to five, and still the hostile bullets sought their billets and the Brass Hats plugged away. The Chief of the General Staff had gone forward to order the escort to push on to attack the Bedus or at least ascertain where they were. The skipper of the leading steamer had crossed the river in a boat with a holdfast and a cable in the hope of trying to warp the craft out into the stream so that they could re-act to their paddles, a hopeless enough task in that wind. The Arab craft frightened at so much firing, had drawn in to the steamers as they drew abreast and were nestling under cover anxiously, while since it was watering time with the sandgrouse, they were coming down in hundreds to the sand spit over the way, knowing full well that sportsmen had other fish to fry.

And the evening drew on and the Chief fell a-wondering if the wind would never drop, when there occurred a portent. At five-fifteen precisely, the mess khidmutghar of the Headquarter Mess clapped his hands and there emerged from the headquarter vessel down the gang-planks a procession, unperturbed and solemn, of officers’ bearers, and each of them held aloft a tea tray, a black japanned tea tray with brown Rockingham atop, in single file for all the world like the haggises without the bagpipes at a St. Andrew’s day dinner. And the procession filed solemnly across to where the sahibs of the Headquarter’s staff were solemnly firing, wheeled to the left and led down the line taking his teapot each to each. Not a bearer flinched or dipped however-so-much the bullets whistled by, although the spout flew from a teapot, and some bearer was shot in the finger. It was magnificent and it was War with a big “W,” for whether it was the arrival of this strange reinforcement that put the wind up the Bedus, as the mule carts did at the Battle of Shaiba, or whether (as more likely) reinforcements had been seen moving downstream from Kut, certain it is that the fire almost immediately began to die away, and soon had ceased altogether.

Then, too, as the sun dipped to the horizon, the wind, as was the daily wont of such winds, died too, and the skippers became once again masters of their craft. It was “in grapnels” and “up gang-planks” as the 67th Punjabis filed aboard with a few wounded, and the officers and men of the Headquarters came aboard the Mejidieh, and within half an hour of the debouch of the tea trays, the whole flotilla were off downstream again and all the Arab craft with them.

And that was the end of that story, and Nabbi Baksh the “Gift of the Prophet” was having his finger tied up minus the top joint in the skipper’s cabin, quite the hero of the hour, though in all the stirring days that followed few of us thought of it again, till here in the Sussex cottage was the spoutless Rockingham, preserved in all honour with a photograph of the simple soul who had borne it.

Sed Servitor sect pro magistro.

Asphodels

I

The Weli of Sheikh Nuran

As you travel through the low country of Beersheba, and among the hills of the Shepelah, or in the broken hills of the Negeb, you will notice many a small white dome and shrine, as indeed you will in most Moslem countries. They are usually the burial-place of some departed saint or rogue, tended by some living hermit, who for a consideration will pray for your health and welfare, for an increase to your family, or whatever may be your dearest desire. These little shrines are known as “Welis”, and in their hearts of hearts the inhabitants know that there are far too many of them, and that far too many hermits and hangers-on of religion gain a parasitic living from them. And if you happen to know some village elder more than well, he may tell you his real opinion on the subject of Welis and their holy men. Or again he may not.

One that I knew well, instead of giving me his opinion in so many words, told me a story concerning a Weli, and a very good story it was. It is, too, a story which in different form but with identical motive will be told you perhaps in any priest- and shrine-ridden country. And it ran in this wise.

There lived once in the Shepelah a hermit who tended a popular wayside shrine, tending its lighted lamps in the alcove and praying for those who brought offerings thereto, living in a small mud and stone chamber hard by. Now the hermit had adopted a small orphan boy, whom he had found dropped by some caravan by the side of the road. The boy had lived happily with him, and had swept and tended his patron’s hut, and had cooked and fetched and carried for him. But he daily grew in height and strength and hunger, as young men must. There was no doubt that he made a very considerable hole in the daily offerings of meal and pistachios and dried apricots that the faithful brought to their faithful hermit. And the hermit reflected that the profit of the lad’s services and companionship did not counterbalance the cost of his keep.

So at last one day in spring when the young grass gave a shimmer to the country-side, and the crimson rose of Sharon sprang from under every stone by the wayside, the hermit summoned his disciple.

“My boy”, said he, “you are growing up and will soon be a man. It is not right that an old man such as I should tie a young man to his side. The blood of youth and adventure is rising in you, and it is time that you should go forth into the world, and seek a better fortune than such as I can ever give you. You have your blanket, and here are a few pence, and I will give you as my parting gift this ass, which has grown up with you, and of which you are so fond.” And so, nothing loath, the young man laid his blanket on the ass and took the hermit’s blessing and went his way to the coast and the way of the Philistines.

He had travelled several stages, picking up such food as he could at the hands of kindly folk, sleeping by the roadside in his blanket, while the ass picked up his living as best it could, as asses happily are able to do where other beasts would die. But now a great calamity fell on him. One day, after they had journeyed a few miles, the ass lay down and refused to budge, and during the night died. The lad was disconsolate, but he could not leave the companion and playfellow of his youth to have its eyes picked from its head and its entrails torn out by the vulture and the raven. So with his brass drinking bowl the lad scraped a grave in the soft sand of the wayside and buried the ass. When his task was finished it was past high twelve and a great grief fell upon him. His money was spent, and his ass was dead, and he was alone in the world.

And he sat by the grave, his face buried in his hands. And after a while he heard a voice and he looked up. By him stood two men who had descended from a camel, and the elder, a man of some importance, said: “My poor boy, you are very sad, and you must mourn for some dear relative or friend that you have buried here. You have all our sympathy. But it is not right to mourn for ever. Come, let us make a proposition to you. This is a district of some importance, yet we have no Weli. The relative that you have buried must evidently be a person of good repute or you would not mourn him so sorely.” And the lad still wept with his face in his hands, while the Arab went on. “We will build a Weli over the grave of this friend of yours, and you shall be the hermit in charge and pray for those who pass by. Do you accept our proposal?”

The lad continued to weep, but at last looked up and bowed his head in acquiesence with the proposal of the worthy wayfarer. So it came about in a very few days the masons came with bricks and mortar and built a small shrine with a swelling dome and a niche for the lighted lamps, and a small square room near by for the hermit in charge to live in. And thus it was that Weli of Sheikh Nuran arose in a district which for a wonder had been Weli-less. Now the young hermit in charge was a good-looking, well-spoken lad, versed, too, in the proper conduct that a hermit of a Weli should show towards his supporters, and he speedily became popular, and his fame spread abroad, since women must needs talk, and the shrine gained a reputation for working of cures, and that prayers raised to the Almighty there were speedily answered. After a while the fame of the new Weli came to the ears of the old hermit who had sent his young disciple out into the world, but who little expected to find that disciple as the new incumbent. Now a new shrine within marching distance of one already famous is not to be treated lightly, and the old hermit thought he would pay it a visit and find out what all the talk was about. So one day hiring a camel he set forth, and on the evening of the second day arrived at the Weli of Sheikh Nuran.

As he dismounted and walked over towards the Weli, the young disciple saw his old master and rushed out to greet him, overjoyed. “Welcome!” he cried. “Welcome! How delightful to see you after all this long time! I have so much to hear and to tell you of.” But the old man demanded, “Whom have you got buried in that grave?” “Oh, my dear protector,” said the lad, “why bother about such things as that? It is time now to rest, while I prepare for you an evening meal, just as I used.” And the old man was led away and his feet washed, and given curds, while the evening meal was a-cooking. But with the curds came persistence. “Tell me now who is buried in that grave?” But the lad again refused to discuss it. “Presently, father! presently. I have much to ask of you yet; you have not told me of the old Weli and all our friends there, and see, supper is ready.”

And since the smell of a cinnamon stew is well calculated to banish other subjects, the hermit acquiesced and set himself to enjoy his disciple’s hospitality, as well he might, since Sheikh Nuran folk saw to it that their protégé lived suitably and as a curer of sick had a right to live. But when the meal was over, and the two sat smoking the pipe of contentment, and watched the evening star set over the Desert of Sinai, once again came the demand, “Now I want to know who is buried in this grave by which you worship and read Al Qoran.”

“Father,” replied the young man, “the hour is late and you have travelled far; let us sleep, and in the morning we will talk of important things.” Then once again the old man stifled his curiosity, and rolling himself in his blanket slept beside his disciple under the canopy of stars, in the peaceful Eastern evening.

But in the morning, rising at the voice of the bird, he remembered his demand. The young man, however, had been up before him, and stood beside laughing. “Now, young man,” quoth he, “are you going to tell me without more ado, who is it that lies buried in this tomb?”

“Nay, father, that I will not do, unless you promise to tell me what I ask.”

“What is that, my son?”

“Ah! that I will not tell, but it is easily within your power, and unless you promise to answer the question that I shall ask you, I will not tell you who the holy man was, who lies buried in my shrine.”

So overwhelmed was the old man with his desire to know, that he consented, and swore that he would do so. And then the lad told him the secret. The old man turned on him in fury.

“What,” said he, “do you mean to tell me that you are imposing on all the good people of this district, those people who comforted you in your distress? How dare you humbug them with your grave of an ass? How dare you, in the name of God and His Prophet, work this imposture? How dare you shame my teaching? . . .” and here words failed him. The young man stood before him a trifle crestfallen and then plucked up his courage.

“Father, no doubt I have done wrong. But now will you keep your promise to me. Who, I demand of you, lies buried in the tomb that you have tended all these years?” But it seemed that the old man heard him not. Again the lad persisted. “Father, you promised. Again I demand of you, who lies buried in that shrine of yours? “

Then the hermit placed his hand on his disciple’s shoulders. “Boy, I will tell you. It is the ass’s mother!”

II

The Dome of the Rock

In the centre of the mosque of the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem stands, bare and unhewn as it has stood for many a thousand years, the Stone of Sacrifice, the same that lay outside the Temple of Solomon. It is virgin stone, that man has never cut nor moved, save only to cut runnels for the blood of the victims. It is the bare rock of the hill top, one of those “High places” at which mankind had sacrificed to the Deity long before Israel came out of Egypt, or Abraham came north from the country of Ur of the Chaldees. Who were the people who first worshipped there and in what century, archaeology and exploration may still tell us, but the legend of the countryside tells us a simple tale to explain the fact of its well recognised and extremely ancient sanctity. And this is the story the Arab may tell you as he winnows his com in the morning breeze on the terrace below the high spurs of Jerusalem.

Once upon a time two brothers owned adjoining fields so long ago that even mighty Numrood had not cast his spells on Eastern lands. They were brothers born of one mother, which, as all the East knows, is a very different matter from brothers of a different mother. And the brothers had grown up in friendship, therefore, even if quite different in their lives. One was married, with a large family, and the other was a bachelor, and the bachelor was the more wealthy, and had traded in far lands, for he travels the farthest who travels alone. But they were now advanced in years and tilled their adjoining lands in amity, on the terraces that lay just below the Rock or Stone of Sacrifice, which in those days was nothing more notable than the limestone outcrop at the highest part of the ridge. On either side of the outcrop at the end of a long and narrow terrace stood each of their threshing floors, a circle plastered in mud and cow dung, surrounded by upright stones like a ring of whispering knights. And in these circles the ox would slowly tread the corn and break up the straw. But this year there had been some quarrel over a landmark, a straggling goat or what not, and the brothers had threshed and winnowed the grain apart, on their adjacent threshing floors.

Tired by the long labours of the day, they laid them down to sleep, each by his own pile of yellow corn that shone in the moonlight. In the morning it would be carried away and garnered in long earthern jars, but to-night it must be watched. And each brother lay under the stars in the soft restful western breeze that came up over the Shepelah, and the Maritime Plain, from the warm Levant waters. And the married brother lay awake, turning over the events of the harvest, and the foolish little quarrel with his brother. And this is what he thought. “Ah! my poor brother, he has a cheerless and lonely life . . . no wife to cook for him and to feed him . . . no children around him . . . it has no doubt hardened him. . . . I should like to see him happier. . . . I wonder why he has never married . . . perhaps he fears the cost . . . has feared it all his life. . . . Perhaps he will put an end to his cheerless life if the harvest is good, ere it is too late.” So thinking he roused himself and went to wake the two labourers who had helped him thresh. “Come,” said he, “help me, my brother is poor and I would increase his harvest.”

For an hour under the harvest moon, he and his two labourers carried baskets of grain from his heap to that on his brother’s floor. And then he slept the peaceful sleep of a kindly soul. But now the brother awoke and lay looking at the stars above him, and he too thought of his altercation with his brother and of their relations. And this is what he thought. “Ah! my poor brother. He has many troubles and anxieties . . . and many mouths to feed . . . no wonder he looks so worn and is sometimes peevish . . . no doubt he worried . . . anxiety for a full harvest must get on his nerves. . . . I have no worries . . . I am free to go and to come . . . no wife and children to support . . . now I think of it no wonder that my brother is anxious. . . . I should like to make sure that his store of corn is a large one.” Then he, too, goes to call two of his labourers, and for an hour transferred baskets of corn from his threshing floor to that of his brother, and again turns in to sleep happily under the light of the Plough and the sinking moon.

In the morning each congratulated the other on their ample thrash, and went about their business with brotherly love in their hearts, but the labourers spread the story in the villages, and the countryside agreed that for ever they would say their prayers and make their offerings at that stone of goodwill. Then as centuries rolled by the rock became a Holy place revered of all men, and in time became the Stone of Sacrifice, as it stands to this day, and the story of its origin is handed down in the villages from generation to generation. And over it all the world has come and gone, and a mosque of Islam stands over the stone. And below where once lay the brothers’ terraced field, the Jews wail for the glory that is departed from a kingdom that rose and fell long after the story had its origin.

The Countless Stones

It has been said that the English scatter their dead over the world like old cigar-ends, and the alchemist who writes of the English epic, wrote that of our wayside, world-strewn, graves before the Great War. Before, that is to say, our people had out-ubiqu’d Darius the Achaemenian, or outmarched Alexander of Macedon, or tramped the Legions’ road to Rimini. But whereas formerly only the widow and the orphan kept ken of the bed of the countless stones, the law of sacrifice and duty has now come to most.

The story of the unknown soldier has sent a deep wave of understanding through that curious yet simple-hearted people the British, and has touched the very fount of pathos, but the story had occurred before.

This is the story of another unknown soldier, told in somewhat flippant tones because of the flippancy of the diction rather than of the motive. The pathos of the story remains.

Over twenty years ago—though the world will pay no heed to it at present—Britain, that country so well described as “in a sea a swan’s nest,” had two considerable wars on hand, after her wont. The larger one need not be referred to, save as a reading of the Riot Act in one of her nurseries; but the other will be remembered as the running amuck of the yellow man, for some psychological reason that we were too lazy to fathom. To that war came the policeman nations, and with them a thief or two. They say that a keeper and a poacher are but sib, and no doubt a policeman and a thief are the same. For instance, Hans Breitman on the Pei-Ho, with his jacket stuffed with loot, standing to attention and denying his acts, “Nein! Herr Hauptman, Nein!” would be a case in point.

The setting is as follows. Low down on the river by the flats that border the northern sea, the armies disembarked en route for Pekin, by lighter and barge and wherry, horses and guns and soldiers, and the embarkation officers sweating far into the night. China was throwing off a sickness, and the cure seemed worse than the disease; at any rate, so it seemed to the Royal Indian Marine, who had the dirty work to do for all the nations. For the benefit of those who do not know, it may be explained that the Royal Indian Marine did all the hard-work sea-service of the Government of India, and they were like the Royal Navy, only more so. If you want to imagine them at their longshore duties, you must try and visualise what an army getting ashore at an open mud beach is like. The army from the Dardanelles knows something of it, except for the mud and a tidal river, thrown in to make it easier. A camel being landed in slings is not within the power of human imagination, and you must move in the astral plane if you would conjure the picture; but as a horse in a sling is to a bale of piece goods in oddity, so is a camel to a horse. The supercilious curl of the nostril has gone, terror spawned on imbecility has supervened. Yet the Indian Marine could and did land him safely, as at this juncture they were landing the contingents of the civilised world, with which the United States may be incorporated.

The mention of that world-power brings me to the point, the story of the unknown soldier of 1901, flippant in its diction, but full of the lachrimae rerum to those whose minds dwell on the end of soldiers. The contingent of the United States had landed and gone to the front, full of zeal, rather short of what the Old World calls discipline, bursting with camaraderie for the Britisher, whose officers, for some peculiar and psychological reason, they elected to salute; very adverse to Dagoes and Dutchmen, into which categories they divided the rest of the armed world.

It was past high time on the beach, and embarkation staff, Marine officers, and conscientious searchers for missing stores had assembled in the shanty that served as a beach mess, for what in the sea-service is called “elevenses,” feeling that they had deserved it. They probably had, for in addition to the day’s work, some 500 mules had got loose in the mud, and everybody who had a right to be angry was saying so with some wealth of blasphemy, the which is an enigma.

Up to the mess sauntered a weird-looking gentleman with a wide hat and revolver on a waist-belt.

“Good morning, misters.”

“Good morning; come and have a drink.”

“I believe I will; but you will want to know who I am.”

“Never mind that; have a drink. What is it to be?”

“Oh, just whisky.”

“Whisky-and-soda?”

“No, just whisky—what more would a man drink?—just whisky with a chaser. But you will like to know who I am. I am commanding Uncle Sam’s corps of corpse collectors . . . thank you.”

“Corpse collectors!”

“Yep, corpse collectors. You perhaps don’t realise that it is the inalienable right of every freeborn American citizen who loses his life for his country outside the precincts and boundaries of the United States to have his body duly delivered by Uncle Sam at his own doorstep. Yes, sir! . . . Thank you; no, I’ll drink the chaser presently.”

“Is your corps with you?”

“It is, Cap! and three hundred best zinc-lined maple-wood casketts.”

“Casketts?”

“Yes, casketts. I believe you call them coffins; we call them casketts, and that is where I want your help. I understand that if you are ever in trouble, ask a British officer.”

“Well, what is the trouble?”

“It is just those same casketts. I want to get them up-river. Uncle Sam’s soldiers are gone ahead, and I don’t want to be late with my assistance, and I gather I need only ask a British officer. Two of those barges of yours would take all my casketts P.D.Q. . . . Thank you, I will have just another, a half this time.”

“Have you got them on shore?”

“I have them right here on the mud close to that pier of yours there. Assistant Corpse Collector Martin P. Jones is sitting on them now. I can tell you, sir, that Uncle Sam is mighty particular about the re-mains of his freeborn soldiers, don’t you forget it. And I think you gentlemen will agree with me that every American mother ought to be more than proud when she received her son’s corpse on her own doorstep in one of the United States best zinc-lined casketts.”

Well, since camaraderie is camaraderie, and a helping hand is part of the game of war, though some Allies forget it, after supplying just one more whisky irrigator and administering the chaser, the whole of that party went to inspect the “casketts,” and discuss the matter further with Assistant Corpse Collector Martin P. Jones, whose views were equally refreshing. It must be realised that I have but rendered the foregoing dialogue in the European form of the Anglo-Saxon language, and if the reader would get the glory in full, he must divest it of its distressing old-world English accent and use the proper Western intonation.

By 5 p.m. of that day, two hundred-ton barges, piled high with casketts, were duly lashed to a paddle-tug, and with the Chief Corpse Collector on the bridge and his men atop the said casketts, were chunking away into the setting sun.

With the disappearance of that strange steamer-load, into the evening haze, the matter passed away as an incident of the day’s work; casketts or no casketts, freeborn American citizens dead or alive, armies must be landed and fed, generals and their staffs must be pacified, and system and order maintained in a situation prone to run to disorder as the result of even half an hour’s easy. The incident of the whisky and its chaser had already brought its nemesis in the shape of camels in the mud. Now mules in the mud are one thing, camels in deep mud are another. To one it is pure joy, to the other slow death, or an opportunity for scoring you off by splitting in two on the middle seam. The supercilious smile turns to a beseeching leer in the slime and ooze. The desert will tell you why the camel has that eternal supercilious smile, and the story is a strange one till one remembers that the desert is older even than China, and has forgotten more than China ever learnt. And the theory is this. There are certain things in this world that ordinary man is not allowed to know, but which most men know is denied them. First, there is the hundredth name of God. Islam, telling its beads and inscribing its monuments, can glibly tell ninety and nine—the “All-Merciful,” “the All-Powerful,” the “All-Seeing,” and so forth. The hundredth is denied to ordinary mortals. Then, again, there is the Great Name of God. The great “I AM,” that only the High Priest of the Jews dare mention, and that the multitude could never know, nor the few that know ever repeat. Thirdly, there is that mystery of mysteries, the missing word of the master-mason. They are all one and the same, and go to the very heart of things. The camel knows, says the desert, and is scornful of man, therefore and thereby. The tale is a pretty one, and since scornful cats eat horrid mice, there is joy to mankind to see a camel deep in the mud. The which, however, is but a side issue to this story.

As the days rolled by, the British established themselves along the road and rail and river to Pekin, and “Blobs,”³⁵ little recking of the Baku to come, held high sway in a dozen languages and fifteen dialects in Tientsin. French and Russian, German and Jap, squabbled with each other, and caballed against the British; while the American just scratched himself, well aware that John Bull could hold his own without help. Le Systems “D” carried on to perfection. Debrouillez-vous is a simple rule, and the tidy English had fits, and the Allies kept off Jock Reid’s toes, having stepped there once or twice and caught a tartar. All of which was known to the Lost Legions of the Great War, but the knowledge is fast disappearing.

Be that as it may, it was interesting to note the Allies of those days, and their essential traits as developed in the Great War. The German, a cad always, especially in his cups, refusing to acknowledge the salutes of the Indian soldiers. The Frenchman, business-like and devoid of any sentiment where business, especially his own, was concerned. Especially good at making his troops comfortable, with the inevitable table, benches, and wine-barrel, that makes a French camp so homely at once. The American soldier, keen and alert and democratic, except when he met a British officer. The Britisher, careless yet competent, with whom every foreigner was glad to appear to have a personal acquaintance—which is another bit of the world’s psychology—always coming advantageously out of the world’s muddles, not because he is perfide—not a bit—but because he is so placed in the world that every event despite itself turns to his advantage. And over it all the imperturbable “Blobs,” on whose breast the nations wept.

At the entrepôt of the nations at Tientsin, on his way for a little sight-seeing at the Imperial City, arrived one morning that important entity the Senior Marine Transport Officer, the same that had seen the casketts safely up-stream, and whose whisky had flowed before the chaser.

Strolling up and down the platform, whom should he see but his American friend the caskett king, still picturesque and revolvered, on his way to the station bar.

“My, this is bully. Come right in, Cap, and have a straight whisky. I always heard that you had only to ask a British officer when in trouble, and but for you where would those freeborn American corpses have been!”

“Has all gone well with you, then, and have you finished the job?”

The fighting was over, and the Americans were coming down.

“Yes, I’ve finished the job, and a mighty queer one it’s been. I was late with them casketts, thanks to our booreau at Washington, and it’s no thanks to them I’ve got all the boys’ corpses. One hundred and eighty-seven American citizens, sir, have given up their lives. This body-snatching is not all pleasure. No, sir! Looking for their graves, I’ve dug up dead donkeys and I’ve dug up dead Chinks, and I’ve dug my patent grave-indicator into every international grave in this here country.”

It indeed sounded a pleasant occupation. The army will remember the days when the Boers buried rifles in graves, and before we dug we used an indicator, which told clearly whether the grave contained a corpse or no, but that failed when the Boers buried rifles under their own dead to baffle the searcher. The troubles of the corpse-collector were certainly not magnified, and the listener expressed his sympathy.

“Well, Uncle Sam should be more than grateful to you. Have you finished all your searching?”

“I have, Cap; at least, I have 187 full casketts, and I’ve found 186 freeborn American citizens. I was not going to open any more of those graves, not for the President himself.”

“But you have got 187 full casketts.”

“That is so, and those 187 casketts will be buried with all the pomp and circumstance, sir, that a grateful country can bestow on the bodies of its enlightened citizens, sir, who have given up their lives for the United States. By James, sir! and I reckon there’s a British Red Marine among them, who will be durned surprised to find himself in Paradise alongside George Washington.”

The End