To
MURIEL
Reynard’s Retreat
Monk Sherborne
1926
He was free, on this occasion, from any intention of eavesdropping. He had come upstairs for a special purpose of his own---to look out for something that would be coming down the road, and he was not primarily interested in their grown-up-sisterly remarks about him. But the verandah, where they were taking siesta, was directly under his bedroom window, and he could not help hearing, and to some extent, as shall be shown, profiting by what he heard.
It was Vic who began. With a yawn and a creak of her basket chair she asked, in her languid, lackadaisical way:
“Where’s Drew all this time?”
“Oh, somewhere about,” murmured Barby---snug, as he could tell from the sound of her voice, among many cushions, and loth to be disturbed.
“He didn’t come and help me pack for him, that’s all I know,” Les complained, evidently a little put out because for once she had forgone her sleep.
“He wouldn’t,” said Vic.
And why, he wondered, should he? Bad enough to he going to school at all: preposterous to mar the last afternoon with packing. It would be like setting a premature seal on his own doom.
No, only a desire to make quite certain of seeing the carts the moment they appeared in the gap, so that he would have plenty of time in which to get ready for them, had reconciled him to facing the dismal, dismantled room and the new black box, so conspicuously labelled “D. Bartle, Godelin College, Bareilly,” that encumbered the floor. The window gave the best view of the road---that was why he was up here, and for no other reason.
But they were discussing him again.
“What do you want Drew for, Vic?” yawned Barby.
“I don’t. Only Mr. Pell’s coming to tea---that’s all.”
So much the better, he thought. That meant drawing-room tea instead of terrace tea---so the coast would be clear. No one would see him meet the carts.
“What’s Mr. Pell’s coming to tea got to do with Drew?” Barby inquired, with drowsy persistence.
A delicate, deprecating ghost of a giggle floated upwards, and there was whispering that he could not catch. Then Les intervened sharply, saying:
“Instead of talking bosh you’d better come and help me with the flowers, or there’ll be none.”
And they all got up.
He saw Vic’s golden head emerge, and was just in time to withdraw his own as---a little guiltily, he thought---she glanced up at the window. Then Les and Barby followed her out, and the three of them strolled arm in arm down the terrace towards the rose garden. He watched them through the muslin curtain, and at intervals caught the sound of his own name. And then he frowned, because he knew perfectly well what Vic was driving at.
She wanted him out of the way at tea-time: she was trying to get Les to say that he could take his tea in Ahmed Ali’s pantry or out in the compound, and Les was objecting because father disapproved of Ahmed Ali teas, while Barby was probably also objecting on sentimental grounds---because it was his last day. The result would be a compromise---he would not be pressed to take tea anywhere; and that would suit him down to the ground, because he had no intention of taking tea anywhere. While tea was in progress he, he was firmly determined, would be riding down on a bullock-cart to Chandragalli.
He had been nerving himself for weeks to do it, and this was the last chance he would ever have of doing it, and he was going to do it. So the arrangement suited him admirably.
But that was by the way, and did not in the least excuse Vic’s conduct in making insulting insinuations about his personal appearance.
He knew, of course, what was at the bottom of it---this Mr. Pell, whoever he might be. If he were absent from the company at the tea-table Mr. Pell would be agreeably impressed with his first encounter with the family. If, on the other hand, he were present Mr. Pell would think there was a catch somewhere, and perhaps omit to call a second time at Hazrat Bagh. Nor would he blame Mr. Pell if he did so omit, for he was the first to acknowledge---though he couldn’t quite forgive Vic for casting it up at him on the last day---that he was somewhat of a handicap at tea-parties; that, to put it bluntly, he certainly was apt, by the mere fact of his presence, to give the show away.
Who, for example, seeing those three sisters strolling down the terrace, or seated round the tea-table, would imagine that they were anything but what they appeared to be---three thoroughly English girls, making the best of a home in the Indian hills? They bore a good, solid English name; they had all three been educated in England---an advantage, if it were an advantage, that, being much younger, and born in harder times, he had missed; they talked genuine, unclipped English, without, so far as he could judge, a trace of the chi-chi that, in spite of all their efforts to eradicate it, haunted his speech; ably seconded by the darzi and the ayah, they dressed in the latest English fashion, if fashion-plates were anything to. go by; and, to do them justice, he was sure there was no deceit about it---that they felt just as English as they looked and sounded. So it would take a very sharp person indeed to detect in them the tiniest spark of that Indian taint---if taint it was; personally he stoutly refused to regard it as anything but an advantage---that flared out so unmistakably in him.
The explanation, of course, was that they all three took after father’s side of the family---particularly Vic, who was the prettiest mixture of pink and cream and gold, and, slim in her apple-green taffeta, looked as if she had stepped this very instant out of the cover of some juicy English summer number. Les and Barby, it is true, were dark, but it was only a superficial darkness---a mere matter of hair and eyebrows and, in the case of Les, of the faintest possible moustache. It was not even a skin-deep darkness; for Les, who constantly wore a veil out of doors, giving the sun no chance to get at her, was justly proud of a particularly white and satiny complexion; while Barby, who was ten years younger and less careful about the sun, contrived by means of carved tortoiseshell hair-combs and highly-coloured scarves and shawls to give the fashionable Spanish touch to her florid tan. But he was in a different category altogether.
Ten years after the Jubilee year, when a pink and golden baby had been born and patriotically christened Victorine, twelve years after Barbara, and more than twenty after Lesley, who had taken the place of his mother ever since he could remember---at long last, for some inscrutable reason best known to itself, the lurking spark had flared out, and he had been born brown.
Rude people called him a throw-back. Privately he had a better and a politer name for himself. But---call it what you liked---the fact remained that he was brown, indelibly brown, and daily getting browner . . . to the scarcely concealed horror of his sisters, getting browner.
Nor was it the land of brown that you could explain away lightly as sunburn or disguise as Spanish. It was something far more significant and deep-seated---a rich, glossy, golden tan, seldom to be seen outside the world’s mellower races, accustomed to the minimum of clothing and the maximum of sunlight; and more prized, he had noticed, in inanimate objects, such as meerschaum pipes and amber beads and honey and old ale, than in human beings. But there it was, and on the whole, in spite of criticism, he was inclined to think that it suited him. For he certainly had the kind of face that went with it.
High cheeks; narrow eyes---deep set, and rather squeezed in, so that there never seemed to be quite room enough for what was a fine crop of lashes; a thick, wiry fuzz of hair---so thick that he had found it to be sun-proof; a little nose, very clearly defined, and a big mouth, very red, very expressive of his moods, and pleasingly pliable for the pastime of face-making . . . in sum, it was just the kind of countenance that went best with his colour. Given the one, the other must follow; and he was content that it should be so.
Privately he called himself Nubby Bux. The name seemed more suitable to his personality. Besides, he had never liked the name Drew, having long ago got tired of having perpetually to explain that it wasn’t short for Andrew, but after an uncle. But the result of calling himself Nubby Bux had been that he had inclined more and more to think of himself as Nubby Bux---no difficult matter to one whose natural bent was to think in Hindostani, rather than the bubble-and-squeak English that he talked---and that had proved so fascinating, so engrossing a pursuit that Drew, in comparison, had seemed dulness personified. He was, in fact, thoroughly discontented with the whole state of being Drew---especially now that Drew was about to be sent to school---and yearned to experiment, before it was too late, with the magnificent possibilities inherent in the constitution of Nubby Bux.
For Nubby Bux had not yet, so to speak, come out into the open. His activities had been purely flights of fancy. He had never had even the ghost of a real fling. The most he had achieved was to disport himself, on the sly, in a loin-cloth---a strip of pink flannelette from an old dressing-gown, amazingly like the real article---in the place of bathing drawers, when he took a dip in the brook at the bottom of the orchard. But no one had seen him in the loin-cloth; no one, therefore, had been taken in; and he yearned, above all things, to take someone in. That someone who was not familiar with him as Drew---some unbiased stranger—should accept him, loin-cloth and all, and treat him as Nubby Bux---that was his supreme ambition. Nothing less would satisfy him---he had come to that. Someone must be taken in.
So he had cast about in his mind for someone.
And then the carts had arrived on the scene.
A shoal of half a dozen bullock-carts, laden with wood, trundling down a white and dusty road on an October evening---as common a spectacle as any that India has to offer, but up at Hazrat Bagh something of an event. For the house---its name, meaning “Grove of a thousand trees,” was an exaggeration of the size of the orchard---was planted on a broad, burly hog’s-back of a hill well within the welter of the lower Himalaya, where most of the carrying was done on human heads or donkeys. The wheeled traffic mostly stopped short at Chandragalli, four miles down the valley, and, with the exception of their own buggy, it was unusual to see anything in the shape of a vehicle on the road. So the coming of the carts was noteworthy. People talked about them: they were, as it were, in the public eye; and everybody knew that they belonged to roving Ahirs---carters by caste, born and bred to cart---that they were under three weeks’ contract to convey railway-sleepers in the rough to Chandragalli timber yard, that the contract would end to-night, and that to-morrow they would go their ways and be no more seen---all that was the commonest of common property. But no one else had seen in them what he had seen---a heaven-sent opportunity for testing---romantically, adventurously testing---the resourcefulness of Nubby Bux.
Strangers---here to-day and gone to-morrow---roving people who would tell no tales, romantic people by their very calling . . . they had taken his imagination at a jump the very first evening, and possessed it ever since. No need for further search---the someone for whom he was looking was found, perched on a cart-pole, and the next move lay with Nubby Bux.
He had cherished it for the last day. It seemed appropriate---appealed to his sense of the dramatic. Not till the very last day of all should Nubby Bux gird his loins for action and, stepping out into the road, stake his identity on his ability to ask a stranger for a lift; and until that day and that moment came he had resisted all temptation to steal such trivial advantage as might have been gained by spying on the carters and determining which of the six looked the nicest and the least formidable. Fair play and no favour---they were to meet as strangers, strangers on both sides. He had stoutly refused to acquaint himself with their faces, the most that he had permitted himself being the general impression obtainable from the bedroom window . . . which was of a series of hunched figures, sparsely clad, squatting under canopies of fresh-sawn yellow wood, and hardly distinguishable from their brown-backed bullocks. Of what they would look like at close quarters---whether young or old, handsome or repulsive, inhumanly ferocious or absurdly mild---he had no more idea than the man in the moon. Ignorance was bliss . . . and, after all, it all added to the excitement, not to know.
But, subject to these restrictions, he was au fait with their movements. He knew what to look for, and where to look for it. There would be, first, a fluff of dust, like sheep’s wool, caught in the blue niche between the grizzled haunches of the hill, a mile or more away. Then, slowly, the fluff would unravel, and the carts would emerge from it, looking like a toiling tribe of some strange sort of beetle, horny and yellow-backed---to trundle sedately down the gently-sloping chine of the hill to within distant hail of the house; there to turn broadside, showing their upper halves in profile over the orchard wall---little horns, little brown backs, little brown men, and planks in piles---till they showed themselves in full opposite the drive gates. And there, at that point, Nubby Bux would come into the picture.
The rest of the way---the bold slant of the road through berry brake and oak glade, the burnished jungle and the green; the long threading of the tiny fields that lined the bottom of the valley, nudging and jostling with their humped backs turned, like dwarfs in little coats of green and orange and chocolate brown; the last, sharp pitch to the shining river and the blue mystery of the village---all that he would share with them, as one of themselves; all that, and perhaps more than that, if . . .
If only they, too, would enter into the spirit of the thing . . .
But it wasn’t the time to think of difficulties.
For there, in the gap, was the fluff of dust that he was looking for. They were coming!
At last, they were coming down the road. And . . . now or never!
No time to dwell on them---to watch that woolly fluff uncurl and conjure carts out of itself, fascinating as he had found the process. He must hurry; for, though they would take some time to reach the drive gates, so might he. There were many people to be dodged, and his passage down the stairs, across the hall below, out through the back door, and down the vegetable garden might be fraught with difficulties. He must be ready to pick his moment.
His first act was to jam the door with a chair.
Then, extracting the cherished strip of pink flannelette from its hiding-place behind the wardrobe, he quickly undressed, throwing his clothes pell-mell on to the bed, only pausing for a few instants, when he had done, to survey himself, up and down, before and behind, in a hand-glass.
The sight reassured him. If he failed, it would not be the fault of his skin. He really was beautifully brown---not the faintest suggestion of a pale patch anywhere---and the touch of pink in the middle seemed, if anything, to emphasize his rich, peculiar hue. In fact, with his rumpled hair and flushed face, he looked just made for the part that he purposed to play---that of a vagrant urchin, just awoken after a good sleep in the sun by the roadside. All he needed, as a finishing touch, was a sprinkling of roadside dust---and there was plenty of that where he was going.
Yes, he could lay down the glass with confidence. He would do.
He ran, exulting in a new nimbleness that made him all agog to be running, to the window, and again peeped through the muslin curtains. The girls had not yet come in---with luck the coast might be clear, and he could make a dash for it at once, without waiting till they were all safely at tea in the drawing-room.
Bother! No luck.
Mr. Pell was coming up the drive---a fair-haired, fastidious-looking young man with spectacles, fanning his face with his white topi. So the only thing to do was to wait----wait while the carts grew distinct from their dust, while brown blobs turned slowly into brown bullocks, and there floated in the first fault mutter of groaning, grinding wheels.
Rumble---r-r-rump! Rumble---r-r-rump . . . Why, it was getting quite distinct! Would Mr. Pell never finish fanning his face?
At last---thank goodness! And there was father’s voice from the verandah:
“How do, Pell . . . Stiff pull, Pell . . .”
So Mr. Pell was disposed of.
And here, bother it all, were the girls, running in from the rose-garden. Heaven knew when he would get away now, for they would all be coming up to tidy for tea, and he daren’t risk meeting them on the stairs. More waiting. But watch the carts any longer, and listen to that Rumble---r-r-rump coming closer and closer, he would not. He was all of a jump as it was. Much better to turn his back on the window and ignore the carts.
He went to the door and, removing the chair from in front of it, opened it a crack and listened.
Vic and Barby had already come upstairs. The bedrooms were all on the same landing, and their doors were open.
“Is my comb on straight?” he heard Barby ask.
Then Les came up, cross because she had been left to do the flowers alone, and went into her room. Barby was requested to call for the ayah. Ayah couldn’t be found. So Barby herself was called back to do Les up. Five minutes had passed, and he was raging with impatience, when, slowly and sedately, the three of them dawdled down to the drawing-room.
He waited, dancing with anxiety, till the how-d’you-do’s were over and the drawing-room door was finally closed. Then he opened his own, tiptoed out on to the landing, and peeped over the banisters into the hall below---only to see yet another impediment.
This time it was Ahmed Ali, the khitmatgar---a ponderous person with a black beard and a face of wood, and got up to-day in stiff, starchy white garments, that made his movements slower even than usual. He had put down his tray on the floor and, kneeling beside it, was fiddling with the teaspoons and juggling with the cups, which had become confused in transit from the compound.
Fortunately, after an agonizing minute, Vic came out and drove him into the drawing-room. But even then the ordeal was not over. Vic herself must needs disappear on to the verandah, where she tinkled a little bell and called, not very enthusiastically, “Droo!”
Droo, needless to say, made no response; and, after a brief interval, Vic returned.
“I couldn’t find him anywhere . . .” he heard her say before the door really, finally did close---and smiled to himself, for that was precisely and exactly what he had expected her to say.
And now, at last, with luck, the coast was clear.
He lost no time getting down the stairs, and was across the hall, under a hanging bead curtain, and down the passage leading to the back verandah, in less time than it had taken Vic to shut the door. Then another door---the back door---was nearly his undoing.
It opened inwards just as he reached it; and, narrowly avoiding a nasty smash in the face, he cannoned straight into Ahmed Ali, laden with a second tray.
There was very nearly a catastrophe. Cakes rocked, cucumber sandwiches trembled and slid; and Ahmed Ali, too taken aback to speak, looked unutterable things.
Not that it mattered what Ahmed Ali looked, so long as his hands were occupied---as they were---with the tray. So he was able to slip past, and even to give a further playful jog to the tray in passing.
“Greetings from Nabhi Bukkus,” he called back laughingly over his shoulder as he ran down the steps of the back verandah.
Ahmed Ali found his voice.
“Wait till my hands are free, and I will give thee greetings to Nabhi Bukkus,” came the exasperated reply.
But he had no intention of waiting for Ahmed Ali’s convenience. He was making full speed across the compound for the vegetable garden, which, dipping in a series of narrow terraces to the orchard, provided a shorter way than the winding drive---and with good reason; for already he could see, through the huddle of trees below, a trail of dust, slowly advancing towards the white stone pillars that were his goal.
He could do it---there was a curve to be rounded before they came in view of the gates---but only just do it. No time to pick his way, if he was going to arrive at the gates in time to make those little trifling preparations that must be made before the carts came round the curve. Cabbage beds and melon patches must take their chance, as they had often done before.
And a fine old scramble it was, with a six-foot drop every few yards, and beds of deep mould, clogging to the feet, in between. If he had been wearing boots he could never have done it, and, as it was, he had scarcely breath enough to fight his way through the tangle of low apple-boughs and high grass, miscalled orchard, that constituted the final barrier between himself and the gates. And when he did arrive he could only lean against one of the posts and gasp.
But he was through, and thanks to the absence of hampering garments, particularly boots, he had a minute or so in hand. There was no sign of the carts on the curve, and, by their sound, they had still some little way to travel before they came into view. And---hardly less important---there was no sign of Ahmed Ali either. Not a soul was stirring up above, where the house showed through the trees, dumped down upon the terrace like a big, square, sallow box. So not a soul would see him accost the carts, or know what he was doing and where he had gone. He could put the house and its inhabitants out of mind, as well as out of sight.
He slipped across the road to where massive bushes, growing in the waste, sagged outwards---looking, in their autumn red, like big burnished balloons. Screened by these, he lay down in the soft, downy dust at the roadside and rolled over, coating himself with a fine flour of white, before he settled himself in an attitude of sleep, with his arms thrown out and his face to the sun . . . to wait . . .
To wait---after all the excitement and impatience, to lie quite still, watching and listening; while the rumble swelled, ominously swelled, like a little thunderstorm rolling down the ravine, till he seemed to hear in it a threatening note, something almost angry.
And still to wait . . .
To see, presently, out of the corner of his eye, the heads of the first pair of bullocks come groping round the curve---lowering heads, swaying from side to side and nosing in the dust---heads that he did not at all like the look of, heads that gave him the shivers, because they had long horns and because they looked just as if they were nosing for him.
And still to wait . . .
Till the rumble grew into a roar. Till he felt so shaky that he longed for the dust to rise up and hide him altogether, before the men---those men of mystery whose faces he had never allowed himself to see---set eyes on him.
Rumble---r-r-rump . . . Rumble---r-r-rump . . .
Talk about nerves!
Suppose they saw through him, recognized him as a Saheb---they who had nothing else to do in life but look at people and size them up---what would they do to him? They might not appreciate practical jokes---they might resent them very much. Wild men of the road weren’t people to be trifled with, and these might be worse than wild. For aught he knew they might be Bhantus or dacoits in disguise, with a price on their heads, and ready to knife you as soon as look at you . . . he couldn’t tell. He hadn’t a notion what they were like---more fool he---for he had never taken the trouble to look at them close . . .
Rumble---r-r-rump---rumble . . .
And now he dared not look at them. But they must have seen him right enough---no use thinking of running away. If he wanted a knife in his back, the best way of getting it would be to run away. Asking for trouble, to run away. It wouldn’t be the first time a dead body had been heaved on to a cart, and chucked into a river farther down the road, while its unsuspecting relatives talked over their tea. And a nice, cheerful sort of first ride on a bullock-cart for Nubby Bux that would be. Better for him if he had stuck to being Drew---safe, dull old Drew, sitting down to his buttered scone in the drawing-room.
Oh, why hadn’t he stuck to being Drew? He wasn’t cut out for the wild, and knives in his back . . .
R-r-rump---r-r-rump---gr-r-rump!
. . . and noise. Talk about noise! About as much use trying to ask for a lift as expecting to make oneself heard on a penny whistle in an avalanche. He could shout himself hoarse and they’d hardly hear a chirp. All his carefully-prepared sentences about having fallen asleep might as well have never been made. Not that he could remember them---or anything else---in this confusion of carts, in the noise, and the dust, and . . . Goodness, what a face!
One look was enough. To save his life he would not have ridden on a cart with that first man. He had a very black beard and very yellow teeth, and, sitting crouched on the pole, with two long hairy arms outstretched to steady his beasts, under a nodding canopy of saffron wood, he looked like some mis-shapen, malevolent image---a sort of monkey-god on wheels; and still as an image except for his eyes, which glared from side to side like a fierce animal’s. No, not for anything would he have ridden with that man. Yet, when it was over, and the man had passed, and dust hid him and his cart, he took heart of grace.
After all, the man hadn’t eaten him---only glared. And anyone would see that he was the sort of man who could glare at anything---or perhaps even nothing. It would have been unusual if he hadn’t glared. In fact, the glare was more of a tribute than anything else to the unobtrusiveness of Nubby Bux.
If that man had suspected for a moment that he was trying to deceive him he wouldn’t have stopped at glaring---not that man.
So Nubby Bux was accepted by competent authority---it was heartening, really, if you looked at it the right way.
It was so heartening that he jumped out at the next cart as if it were nothing at all formidable, with the result that the bullocks shied, nearly upsetting the man on the pole---an ancient, wizened man who showed his toothless gums, crimsoned with betel-nut, and spat at him.
He was overjoyed. Nothing could have been more eloquent of acceptance than that spit. So delighted he was that he forgot to get out of the way of the third cart, which was forging along at its own sweet will---the driver being asleep---with the result that there was nearly an accident. But here again he received recognition, though tardy. The picked and piercing pahari in which he was cursed would have been wasted on anything but the real article---completely wasted, for instance, on Drew. In its way, indeed, this flow of amenities was the biggest tribute of all; there was a man-to-man element in it that filled him with pride and nerved him to respond suitably, standing on tiptoe and making a trumpet of his hands.
Meanwhile the fourth cart lumbered by . . .
The driver of the fifth was far gone in opium. His glazed eyes accepted everything and saw nothing, and his bullocks did exactly what they liked. He could have jumped on that cart; indeed, he could have done more---he could have appropriated it altogether, for sooner or later the man was certain to roll off into the road; but he happened to like the look of the next one better.
For one thing it wasn’t piled up with planks. It wasn’t, in fact, a timber-cart at all, but more of a trotting-cart, with wicker sides standing up like Barby’s brown Spanish combs, and open ends. The wood that it carried was of a lesser calibre---chunks rather than slabs---and the bullocks looked meek and mild, not to say meagre. Where the rest rumbled it squeaked---a pleasant, chirpy, homely squeak---and altogether it was on a less blatant scale, like the humble equipage that so often chips into the tail of great, ponderous processions, and supplies the human and the homely and even the comic element. He liked it the moment he saw it. It was obvious that a little child could drive it.
Naturally. Because, as luck would have it, a little child was driving it. A midget of about seven, or eight at most---brown, and bulbous as to the tummy with the undiminished bulbosity of extreme youth---was balanced upon the pole, looking like a little legged loaf; a cottage loaf in two dumps, big dump for tummy, and less big dump for head; and a dormant, dreamy loaf, till it dawned on its loaf-like intelligence that someone was looking at it, and perhaps even admiring it. Then it fairly woke up. An arm shot out of it and prodded and belaboured indiscriminately with a pointed stick; another arm shot out and twisted a convenient tail; the squeak of a human voice rose shrilly above the mere mechanical squeaks of the cart; eyes flashed perkily, proudly---as if to say, “Can’t I just drive? Wouldn’t you like to be me?” In fact, there was altogether as gratifying a demonstration of enthusiasm as the most exacting Nubby Bux could wish for.
So Nubby Bux hopped on without ado. It was a low cart, and he just hopped on behind, with his back to the midget and his legs dangling out. The pile of wood provided a convenient rest to his back, and after one or two trifling adjustments he was extremely comfortable. The cart had a pleasant rocking motion. Its squeak was a lullaby in itself.
Whether the midget had seen him hop on or not he didn’t trouble to discover. He was happy. He was bound on the great adventure. The bungalow was already dwindling into insignificance; while, as for Drew, he was less than a louse---he was nothing---he had never been anything much, but now he was nothing, and the past in which he had played his ignoble part was dropping away, like the road itself, at every spurn of the wheels.
But ahead---what chances, what raptures! What dreams of danger and delight! Down an enchanted valley they would roam, softly rocking, till the village fires were all a-wink in the dove-grey dusk; and the houses on the street, faintly flushed from the fires, would peep and peer at them, like soft-eyed faces through their dim, mysterious eaves; and then, in the courtyard of the serai, they would unhitch the gentle . . .
Unless the gentle bullocks capsized first! They were wobbling rather.
Wobbling more than rather.
In some trepidation he glanced back over his shoulder, to encounter eyes---solemn, engrossed eyes; eyes that stared unwinkingly out of a brown bulb of a head, lodged among the topmost wood-chunks like a croquet ball on a rockery. Nothing else. No neck. Just croquet ball, slightly mossy on the top, with a couple of marbles driven into it. Meanwhile, the wobbles increased in volume. The cart groaned, as if in pain; and sundry chunks of wood, sharp-edged and splintery, jostled the small of his back.
“Khubrdar, Ullu!” he shouted. “Sambalo. Teri man . . .”
Not perhaps the happiest of greetings, but effective. The croquet ball vanished; there were squeaks on the remote slopes of the woody mountain---squeaks and lambastings---and for the moment he had to hold on with both hands. Then, once more, all was peaceful; the wheels well away from the rutty sides of the road; the body of the cart balanced, gently rocking as before, like a cradle . . .
And there was that boy staring again!
Why should he stare? There wasn’t anything very extraordinary to look at, was there---just Nubby Bux sitting on a cart tail; nothing wonderful about that. Yet you might have thought, from the way his eyes were popping out of his head, that he’d never seen anyone of his own race sitting on a cart tail before.
Well, he must get used to it, that was all. Nubby Bux wasn’t going to put himself out explaining and apologising to a kid like that. No self-respecting Nubby Bux would dream of it.
Not that he was afraid of the sound of his own voice---far from it. He had mimicked the children in the compound far too often---taken in Ahmed Ali scores of times---and he knew the bat backwards. But people of thirteen didn’t start gushing straight off to people of eight as if they had known them all their lives---not on bullock carts---and it would be highly suspicious if they did. They unbent gradually, in a dignified fashion. The most that could be expected of him at this stage was some such trifling act of condescension as a protruding of the tongue or a neatly-executed squint, and even that was unnecessary.
However, it might be as well to amuse the midget. After all, a great deal depended on the midget---any minute it could pipe up to the men on the other carts and have him murdered, so it was worth propitiating.
He propitiated to the extent of putting out his tongue.
The response was instant. The midget wriggled with shy delight and, with a tongue that would have done credit to an ant-eater, went one better and distinctly licked the tip of its own nose.
He threw in a squint for luck---his best, his most side-splitting squint---but it was nothing to the midget’s. Its pupils disappeared altogether, like little black mice making for a common hole. But, when they came out again, they did not omit to stare.
Thoroughly on his mettle, he went through his whole stock of facial contortions, with flattering results---for no one could beat him when he really began; but when the pantomime was over, when the squeaks had subsided and the grins faded, back crept that maddening stare.
Worse than ever.
He began to wonder whether there could be anything wrong about him? Had he inadvertently committed some casual, thoughtless Drewism---whistled, for instance; or blown his nose with the wrong fingers; or carelessly put up his hand to cover a yawn? It hardly seemed possible. He was scarcely likely to do as Nubby Bux what he so seldom had done as Drew. Still . . . that stare.
He turned his back on it. He tried to think of other things---the succulence of the little fields above the road, tempting as coloured biscuits in a tilted tin. A yellow biscuit for a mustard field; brown rusk for fallow; gingerbread for . . .
“How is it you do not sleep?” came a little puzzled pipe, in pahari, “Why do you sit and not sleep---you who have nothing else to do?”
He started. So that was it---of course.
A Nubby Bux who did not take the opportunity of a snooze---unheard of! No wonder the bachcha had stared. It was lucky he hadn’t done more than stare---squealed out, for instance, “Help! There’s an extraordinary boy on my cart who isn’t asleep, though he’s got nothing to do. And I’ve made all sorts of funny faces at him to laugh at in his dreams---yet still he doesn’t sleep! Come and look at him---he must be a Saheb!” And then the fat would have been in the fire.
“I have been wondering,” came the pipe again, “why you do not sleep. Is it that you are under a vow?”
This could not go on.
“I have slept,” he replied, with quiet dignity; adding as an afterthought a little modest embroidery, “I have slept all morning by the road---see how dusty I am. I was sleeping when thy carts came and woke me. I have slept enough. My eyes are as empty of sleep as my belly is of food. Sleep thyself, baby, and let other folk alone.”
He was rather proud of that---it had just the right ring. But the baby did not seem particularly impressed. Staring rather more, if possible, than before, it merely replied:
“It is not possible to have enough sleep.”
And the matter, one felt, was dismissed. There was no more to be said about it. It was his business to sleep---or else incur grave suspicion. He wished he had slept---or rather had pretended to, for who would sleep on an adventure? And if ever a similar occasion arose he had every intention of profiting by the experience. For sleep had its points.
Distinctly sleep had its points. It was the best disguise in the world. You couldn’t make any mistakes over it, as you could over yawning, or blowing your nose, or even talking. For sleep, whoever was indulging in it---Viceroy or villager, Drew Saheb or Nubby Bux, Poop Singh or Mr. Pell---was just sleep; a closing of the eyes, an opening of the mouth, a snuggling, a snoring---bus. You couldn’t improve on it. Girls thought they could; but they couldn’t. They did it just like anybody else when it came to the point and they thought the summer-house was empty.
And it certainly saved the trouble of talking, of answering awkward questions. In fact, “When in doubt, drop off,” might well be the first maxim of Nubby Bux. But he wasn’t going to drop off because a midget who ought to be slumbering in its cradle thought he ought to. He would keep his first sleep for someone a bit bigger---the man with the black beard and the yellow fangs, for instance, or the old man who spat. He might be glad of it later on; a timely snore might save his life.
But, all the same, he was grateful to the midget. The whole affair showed how careful he must be---not merely to leave undone the more obvious Drewisms, but also to perform, at the right moment, the necessary Nubby-buxities. It was quite clear that Nubby Bux would not go far in the world if he were content with merely sitting on a cart-tail.
He would have to assert himself---sleep, glare, stare, chew, spit, clear his throat frequently, advertise himself, in fact, as being alive---or men and midgets would wonder what he was up to.
He cleared his throat expressively.
An attentive head bobbed up, stared a grudged approval, then seemed to sadden. It struck him that the midget was not driving with quite such zest and enthusiasm as at the moment when he had hopped on. There was a restlessness, a something yearning and wistful that he could not quite fathom. The child seemed to want something and to be afraid to ask for it. Well, it needn’t be afraid of Nubby Bux. Nubby Bux was quite all right, if you didn’t try to dictate to him---quite kindly disposed.
“What bird, then, roosts in thy belly?” he asked pleasantly.
The midget gulped.
“Thou sittest in comfort, yet dost not sleep. I, who would gladly sleep, sit in no comfort and drive. That bird.”
What a chance!
To drive a pair of bullocks---if there was one thing in the world that he had always wanted to do, above all others, it was that. And these were such nice meek, measly bullocks---just the sort to start on. But steady, Nubby Bux would never exchange comfort for discomfort out of mere charity. If only for the look of the thing, he must drive a bargain first.
What did he want?
He glanced round for inspiration; saw the little fields displayed in rows all along the hill-side like . . .
Biscuits! Something to eat.
Of course. It was long past tea-time. And though he hadn’t felt hungry yet---much too excited---he soon would.
He squinted---a shrewd, calculating, crafty squint; the squint of a Bunjara at a pony deal, of a bunnia in the jewel bazaar.
“Doubtless I could drive thy two bullocks, poor as they are . . .” he began, and seemed to hesitate.
Desire struggled with pride in the infant’s face.
“They are beautiful bullocks. My father paid a hundred and fifty rupees for them,” it burst out; then, with a wistful yawn, added;
“If thou wert to have the good fortune to drive them as far as Chandragalli serai . . .”
“. . . on an empty belly . . .” he prompted.
“. . . then, if it is thy belly that concerns thee, thy belly would be comforted.”
“How? To what extent?”
Nubby Bux was surprising himself. Whence came this strange power? In what dream had Drew learnt to drive a bargain? None that he could remember; and yet Nubby Bux was taking to it like a duck to water.
“Thou art a bunnia, and the son of a bunnia,” murmured the midget.
He did not deny it. It was flattering.
“How much?” he reiterated.
“A chupatti. A mess. We feed, from a common pot---enough for all, and the same for all.”
“A man’s chupatti? A man’s mess?”
“Enough to fill two of thee,” was the scornful reply, “Come, take my place. Quietly. Not a word. Let them think that I, Kullu, am still sitting between their tails. If they guessed that a bunnia, was in Kullu’s place they would run away, being honest beasts. Enough. Sit.”
He obeyed, climbing over the logs and dropping down on to a narrow cross-board just large enough to accommodate so much of him as sat, while the little pomposity whom he now knew as Kullu wriggled past him and took up a commanding position on the summit of the logs behind him. His hand closed on a workmanlike bamboo cane, with a nail sticking out of one end; and his eye lit, with pleasurable surprise, first on one and then on another ridgy little brown rump, situated just under his two elbows, and moving---positively moving---in rhythmical agitation because he was sitting where he was.
Under his orders and for his convenience, those rumps were bestirring; those horned heads were bobbing; those twin tails were switching those hard little hoofs, as if to spur them on. Under his orders---that laboured snuffing and blowing; for his convenience---that ready, responsive squeaking of the wickerwork and the wheels. All for him! A wonderful thought. To be able to say to oneself, “I’m driving. I’m at the back of all that”--- wonderful!
“They think Kullu, son of Chhotu, Is still upon the pole,” came a pompous little pipe from above his head, with just a tinge, he thought, of disappointment in it, “If they were to turn their heads and see thee, they would surely run away. It is fortunate for thee that their heads are well roped, or there would be no belly for us to fill.”
He laughed, too happy to mind. He was driving bullocks at last, so close to them that he could feel their flanks against his thighs, and stroke their warm, smooth backs, and smell the sweet, milky savour of their blowing. He knew now why the Ahir log slept with their beasts, and would not be parted from them---breathing their air, and using their soft sides for pillows; why they made much of them, calling them by baby, endearing names, and hung blue china beads on their foreheads and silver bells round their necks, though they themselves went unadorned. For there was something lovable about cattle when you came close to them; a cosiness; a fine, friendly, fragrant company.
And if they liked you how much better they went. Why these two, since Nubby Bux had taken charge, were different animals! Transformed, they were! There was a sprightliness about them, a responsive eagerness, that was almost pathetic to witness, for what they would do when Nubby Bux said farewell to them he could not imagine. Such fine, discriminating, intelligent beasts---no wonder they had cost a hundred and fifty rupees. And how sadly wasted on that little brat, Kullu, son of Chhotu.
“See them!” he cried, “they know their master. There is new life in their legs.”
Kullu, lying at full length on the logs, opened a disgruntled eye.
“More than there will be in thine,” he grumbled, “when they kick. For thine will surely be broken. Whoever saw an Ahir drive with his feet dangling in the dust? Thou art certainly a bunnia, or thou wouldst be sitting on thy heels, ready to swarm along the pole if their heads became locked; with thy hands on their outer flanks in case they break outwards, hind first, and turn round to laugh at thee. As they surely will, for thou art certainly a laughable, clumsy bunnia. These are not ekka ponies, tied to the fists by reins, so that a blind baby could drive them. These are . . . arré, thy legs!”
He was just in time, and only just. His left foot had brushed against the near bullock’s leg, which appeared to be ticklish. There was a vicious little forward kick, which, missing his calf by a hair’s-breadth, caught the off bullock a wicked whack at the back of the knee. The off bullock responded in kind. There was a lively kicking match just under his perch, where he sat, crouched, like a bewildered bird.
“Khubrdar, Ullu. Sambalo. Sambalo!” yelled Kullu---his own identical words, thrown back at him, and he had to swallow them. For he hadn’t the vaguest idea what to do. The cart had stopped. The two brown rumps, a moment ago so demure under his elbows, were edging rapidly outwards, beyond reach of his hands. He grabbed at them, first one, then the other; missed; lost his balance; fell sprawling on his face in the road; and for a long moment knew nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing, tasted nothing but dust. Smothering, blanketing, muffling, ignominious dust---in his eyes, up his nose, down his throat---everywhere. Thanks to it, he was not in the least hurt. But he couldn’t see. He couldn’t speak. All he could do was to lie on his back and choke and rub his smarting eyes, which felt as if they were full of pepper. And at last vision, of a watery, painful sort, returned.
A curious spectacle met his eyes. The bullocks were side by side again, but this time they were facing the cart. It looked like a tug-of-war---bullocks against cart, with the pole for rope---anything but a peaceful tug-of-war, for one side had its horns locked, and the other side was half in a deep rut and half up a bank. In the background a furious brown imp, whirling a bamboo cane, danced and raged and pushed and pulled; while, far down the road, the rest of the carts plodded on, with their backs turned in dignified disgust, well out of hearing.
And all this because Nubby Bux had hung out his feet to cool instead of sitting on them! It was most humiliating. Still more so when, dizzy with dust, he ran round to help, and was promptly belaboured across the back by an infuriated infant less than half his size. So it was Kullu, son of Chhotu, who finally forced himself between the beasts; wrenched them apart, prodded them back to their proper places; swore at them, cajoled, pleaded with them, and finally patted their trembling, sweating backs, and whispered baby talk into their big, soft ears; then hopped nimbly on to the pole and made them draw the cart back on to the level. He, meanwhile, hung about aimlessly, feeling more foolish than he had ever imagined it possible to feel, but conscious, too, of a real and growing respect for Kullu, son of Chhotu.
Never, in fact, had he been so greatly surprised and impressed by anyone in so short a space of time, as by Kullu, son of Chhotu. And. never, apparently, had Kullu, son of Chhotu, encountered a more miserable specimen than Nubby Bux!
“But what art thou?” he squeaked, “Even a bunnia would have kept his seat, and he in his sleep. The cart was as steady as a bed---what’s a kick to a cart like this? I could never have believed that anyone would fall off as thou didst, save perhaps a Saheb. Yet my eyes saw it. And I say, what art thou?”
He never knew why he did it, but something in the puzzled little face---something genuine, appealing---made him decide, quite on the spur of the moment, to trust Kullu, son of Chhotu, with his secret. It was, perhaps, his way of acknowledging a failure. The humiliation, he felt, would be less poignant when it was explained; and if he owed anybody an explanation---not to say an apology---it was this Kullu.
“I am a Saheb,” he said lightly---as if it were the most ordinary thing for Sahebs to run about practically naked and board bullock-carts---and hopped up behind the child, who was apparently stricken dumb.
“I am a Saheb. That is what I am,” he repeated, settling himself comfortably among the logs, a great weight off his mind, for the strain of sustaining Nubby Bux single-handed had been considerable.
And now it was over. Someone knew. And he did not care what happened.
He breathed a deep sigh of relief.
“A Saheb,” he murmured for the third time, “Now you know.”
Kullu found his voice.
“That is a lie,” he squeaked, with praiseworthy composure. “Get off my cart.”
A lie! It was laughable. After all the trouble he had been taking to disown Drew, to be told that Drew didn’t even exist!
“But I am a Saheb,” he insisted, a little petulantly.
“Thou art probably a thief. Get off my cart,” was all the answer.
“But look---listen. Who but a Saheb could do this?” he shouted in exasperation, and proceeded to do all the things that he had lately, at great pains, been refraining from doing. He whistled “The Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee”; he blew a real nose with a life-like imaginary handkerchief; he yawned portentously, covering his mouth up with a polite gesture and saying, “Excuse me.” He went further. He took out an imaginary watch out of an imaginary waistcoat pocket and said, “Bless my soul, it’s six,” exactly like father. He lit a cigar, puffed out pantomime smoke with an air, and cried, “Quai hai, chhota peg lao!”
All of which display Kullu watched with breathless interest, his smile broadening, his eyes threatening to drop out of his head. But all he said at the end of it was:
“Do some more, bhai. Never have I seen such things.”
Nothing loth, he did some more. He played upon a mock piano; plied a convincing spoon and fork; went through an elaborate formality of greeting, taking off an imaginary topi to the delighted Kullu and addressing him, in affected falsetto, as “Dear, darling Mr. Pell,” ending up with a handshake of more than British warmth and vigour.
“Now,” he gasped, in breathless triumph, “now you know that I am a Saheb. I need do no more.”
For the truth was he couldn’t. He had come to the end of his tether. It was remarkable, really, how little a Saheb could do to establish his Saheb-hood when he hadn’t any clothes. Never before had he realised the supreme significance of clothes in the matter of identity. But of course Kullu was convinced now. He was doubled up with laughter; he was in danger of falling off his perch.
“Kiya tamasha! Kiya tamasha!” the child was burbling, between the gusts that shook him like a jelly. “Kabhi ham aisa tamasha nahin dekha.”
“Is it so funny, then, to be a Saheb?” he demanded with some asperity. No one minded a good hearty laugh, but this was altogether too much---positively rude this was.
With an effort Kullu recovered himself, and looked up slyly, affectionately into his face.
“Thou art no Saheb,” he chuckled, “thou hast only seen Sahebs and copied them. Never even in Bareilly bazaar have I seen such a mimic.”
He gasped, too dumbfounded to speak.
“Such a mimic,” continued Kullu, indulging his sweet fancy, “that---if thou wert but the colour of barley, say, instead of the colour of good wheat---thou could’st even pass as a sallowish Saheb and go among them and learn their inmost secrets, and make money in the biggest bazaars. But, alas! thou are true wheat.”
Kullu sighed, then added consolingly:.
“Never mind, they will give thee good money in any serai to which we folk go. Hai mai, who will not give?”
Then, in a new, wheedling whisper:
“Come with us. I have taken a liking for thee.”
He stared. Then slowly it dawned on him---his luck, his thundering luck. He had hit on the best disguise of all---no disguise whatever. And oh! the fun he was going to have now!
The difference it made!
No more trouble. No more bother. No more thinking---how would Nubby Bux do this or say that? No more remembering not on any account to be Drew. Just be his natural self, and enjoy every minute of it---that was the idea.
With Kullu as his devoted slave, following whatever he did with eyes agog, with twitching mouth ready to spurt laughter at the smallest provocation. And with it all proud as Punch, for had he not found the prodigy? Was not the prodigy riding upon his, Kullu’s, own cart? Had not the prodigy driven these very bullocks?
“I’ll drive them again,” he said.
Nothing easier. The slightest wish was a command.
“They will be honoured,” squeaked Kullu, “if thou drivest them like a Saheb. Do drive them exactly like a Saheb.”
So he did. He pretended they were a pair of ponies, attached to his hands with reins; made a great to-do with the imaginary reins; shouted “Come up, you!” and “Hutt jao!” and behaved generally just as if he were driving to the Club down a crowded Mall. And the odd thing was that the bullocks entered into the spirit of the thing. They positively trotted. Not for long, but trot they did.
He turned round in triumph, to see an enraptured, wildly gesticulating Kullu standing on a quivering mountain of logs.
“Shabash! Shabash! They know. Who can doubt, when they know?”
It was most gratifying. He reinstated the tradition that he had always wanted to drive a bullock-cart.
And the way he steadied them down. The way he laid the bamboo along their flanks when they showed signs of edging away from the pole. Masterly! You wouldn’t see it better done on the cavalry drag in Meerut Mall.
“Where did you learn?” gasped Kullu.
“In service,” he replied coolly, taking his cue from Kullu himself, “I have seen many Sahebs.”
“Without doubt.”
“My uncle being a khitmatgar,” he invented. Now seemed to be the time for giving concrete identity to Nubby Bux, Kullu being in a condition to believe anything.
“A head khitmatgar,” he embroidered. “A butler, in fact.”
“His name?”
“Ahmed Ali Khan.”
“And thine?”
“Nabhi Bukkus.”
He brought it out with the grandest air, as if he himself were the head khitmatgar announcing a personage of the highest importance. He almost expected Kullu to salaam, or at least to make some gesture of respect.
But Kullu did nothing of the kind. He looked the reverse of impressed. In fact, he frowned.
“Nabhi Bukkus!” he said, with contempt, “Never. In the city there are three of the name of Nabhi Bukkus in every street, but none on the road, and few in the fields. One short name serves us,” he patted his chest, “Kullu, Chhotu, Mathoo, Nathoo, Jugtoo---these are the names of the open country, where men are not afraid of the sun on their backs. Nabhi Bukkus---Wah! He sits upon a chubutra all day in a gilded cap and pajamas, pretending to be a Punjabi. A man who has never set eyes on his own legs---that is Nabhi Bukkus. But thou---thou art of us. I found thee by the road. Is it not so?”
He meekly admitted it. It was trying to be deprived of his name at this early stage in the proceedings. It was like strangling someone in infancy. Besides, he had liked the name. It had a seasoned, leathery, tanny sound, and he would always retain a sneaking affection for it, whatever it conveyed to Kullu, son of Chhotu. But of course if Kullu thought it unsuitable, unsuitable it must be. He must drop it till he took to sitting on a chubutra in his pyjamas. Sitting on a cart-pole in a loin-cloth he must be someone else: Confusing, perhaps, but no doubt correct.
Meanwhile, he must reassure Kullu. The child looked quite crestfallen, as if he had found a serious flaw in an otherwise perfect creation. His brow was puckered; his mouth moved mournfully, repeating at intervals “Nabhi Bukkus. Nabhi Bukkus, he said,” as if the name were a dose of medicine; finally, with infinite scorn, he spat it out.
“Was that truly thy name?” he inquired, dismally regarding that which had fallen from his lips.
“No,” he said, stoutly and emphatically. Better to be caught out in a lie than to inflict such suffering on the innocent.
It was a treat to see the child’s face. Light flooded back into it. Never had he seen such obvious and unabashed relief. Indeed, Nubby Bux had died in a good cause.
“So thou wert joking. Thou art a great joker, for thy face never moved when thy mouth uttered that foolish name. For that too they will give thee money down in the serai, for they will believe whatever thou sayest, save when thou sayest ‘I am a Saheb.’ That they will never believe. But anything else, readily.”
Suddenly Kullu’s face puckered again.
“The khitmatgar,” he exclaimed, “thy uncle? That Ahmed Ali Khan? Is he too a joke? Or was it that he took thee from thy village, seeing that thou wert very rare, being gandam-goon---the true wheat colour---and therefore beautiful, besides being an excellent mimic, and took thee into his house, and gave thee the name of Nabhi Bukkus in adoption, as a khitmatgar would? Hoping to make money by thee? And thou didst run away, for hatred of the name, as anybody but a khitmatgar would? Was that it?”
He caught eagerly at so flattering an account of himself. Gandam-goon! For the first time his skin was being appreciated at its true worth by someone besides himself.
“That was it,” he hastened to say, “thou hast guessed exactly. The khitmatgar stole me by force from my village, shooting the padhan and one or two besides, not to speak of wounding my father, and, although I struggled and tore the very beard from his face . . .”
How often had he straggled and made passes at Ahmed All’s beard!
“. . . he, with the help of other khitmatgars and a fat khansamah and a treacherous ayah, bore me away with my head in a blanket and locked me up in a godown. Whence I only escaped this very day. Wherefore thou didst find me at the gates of the bungalow, where is the godown of my imprisonment, waiting in the road, with an empty belly, for what might pass.”
“That I believe,” said Kullu with reverence, “That they in the serai will also believe, for it is true. Be sure thy belly will be filled, brother, when they hear that tale.”
He accepted the homage as no more than was due. Never had his thoughts flowed so magically. Why, he positively believed the story himself! Khitmatgars, khansamah, ayah, struggling, wrestling with an animated blanket---he could see them, feel them---and the legs that shot out from the folds into their perspiring faces were the richest, the very choicest gandam-goon!
Gandam-goon---“Therefore beautiful”---if only the girls could have heard that! “Rare---the true wheat colour---and therefore beautiful”. . . oh, superb!
“Kullu, son of Chhotu, I love thee,” he said.
Kullu wriggled with delight.
“And thou wilt slay that khitmatgar?” he whispered.
“Assuredly.”
“And the khansamah, who is fat? And the ayah, who is treacherous? And the remaining khitmatgars, whatever their number and stature?”
“All of them.”
“Then, thou who wert called Nabhi Bukkus, I love thee---I, Kullu, son of Chhotu---in spite of thy name.”
It was unexpected. He felt himself blushing---if gandam-goon people could blush. He hadn’t altogether meant to go quite so far . . . not to deceive. . . .
Of course, he needn’t actually murder Ahmed Ali and the Khansamah Ji and the ayah. When the time came he could easily make some excuse---he had it on the best authority that anything he said would be believed---and vanish. But what about Kullu? Kullu was serious. Kullu really and truly did love him, for anything that Kullu said like that---with such solemn, doggy eyes---must also be believed.
It seemed rather mean---all this deceit. Here was Kullu in the seventh heaven, expecting all sorts of wonderful things to happen, full to the brim with thrills at this marvellous new friend of his. Dreaming, planning, squeezing up his hands into an ecstatic ball, as if there, safe, were the very dreams themselves. Oh, he knew exactly what was going on inside Kullu---it had gone on so often inside himself. He too had squeezed up his hands tight, often and often, just like that, hoarding some lovely idea that had come to him, gloating over it, keeping it ever so safe and snug. And it had always got out in the end.
And that was what was going to happen to Kullu. In a few hours---such a few---Kullu was going to be empty-handed. The marvellous friend would have gone, as he had come---hopped off the cart as he had hopped on, without a word or a by-your-leave, and vanished into the night, taking away with him all the lovely thoughts and promises that he had brought with him. And Kullu was going to look round and see an empty cart, and get a horrid little feeling in the middle of his chest---like someone else’s clammy hand, not his own, on the works of his heart---and squeak out, in a funny, frightened little voice, “Where is he? What’s happened to him? Is it another of his jokes? Or has he really gone?” Then would come a cry, “O Nabhi Buk-kus! Ohe, Nabhi Buk-kus! Kahan tu chala gya?”
No answer. Nothing but the blowing of the bullocks, and the chirp of the wheels, and the little noises of the night. Horrid for Kullu.
For he knew exactly what Kullu would feel like. Empty. Lonely. Robbed. No one could help feeling that when a dream slipped away---for that was what Nubby Bux was to Kullu now; a whole, live dream.
And to himself. It was going to be just as bad for him now---to vanish, of his own free will, and be Drew again, and go away to school in the morning. Really it didn’t bear thinking of. For this dream was not an ordinary dream that you could afford to let slip because there would be others coming along to take its place. At first it might have been, when Drew saw the carts---but it had grown since then, grown out of all knowledge, till now it seemed to be the only dream that he had ever dreamed worth dreaming, and this---this make-believe that for once had made believe---the only thing in the world worth doing, and the only thing in the world he had ever really, badly, wanted to do.
Yes. The only dream. The only thing that had ever stirred him. To play Indian---perhaps because all the others would so persistently play English. To have an Indian name; to travel in Indian fashion along an Indian road to an Indian village; to play, or even to work, in Indian fields; to roam an Indian jungle; to sit and to sleep by an Indian fire---that had been the one great dream, ever since . . . ever since he had opened a Christmas parcel and pulled out a certain picture book. Perhaps before---only he couldn’t remember anything before. Certainly ever afterwards.
And now it had come true. In its own wonderful way it had come true; and here, for want of a better name, was Nubby Bux---dream, dreamer, and all.
He looked round; all round him, to capture it, to take it in, or, in the attempt, lose himself in it. This . . . the road; the chirp and the plod of the wheels through the soft dust; the village, far along, tossed in air---as it seemed---on those high horns, like a paper picture, every time the beasts bowed their heads; fields on a hill, so neatly packed, so scrunchable; his own brown toes, playing “Up Jenkins!”; Kullu, asleep now on the logs, asleep and smiling at his pet dream . . . this, this was what he had always been running after, chasing, missing.
And now he had landed plump, bang in the middle of it!
And now he held it tight in the hollow of his hand!
Both. For you could do funny things with a dream, and only with a dream. You could hold it in the hollow of your hand, or disport yourself on its bosom---just according to how you looked at it. It was your kingdom or your toy---just according. But for the moment let it rather be a toy, to be turned over and examined in detail, at leisure, with no one looking; perhaps even to be taken to pieces, very gently, very carefully, and put together again, in the right order, from the very beginning. . . .
No, it hadn’t begun with the picture book. It had begun with a little girl at a party calling him “Eight annas.” And he had said, “Why eight?” And she had said, “Because eight’s half a rupee, and you’re half a black.” And he had said, “Then I’d sooner be a whole black. He’s worth more.” And she had said, “I’m a whole white, and that’s worth more still,” and they had fought about it. Then he had gone home and tried to ink himself with Les’s stylo, and broken the nib, and been smacked---all because there hadn’t been a Kullu at hand to tell him that the best people were neither black nor white, but gandam-goon. What a lot of bother it would have saved if he could have said quietly to that little girl, “You know I’m gandam-goon, and therefore beautiful.”
However---bygones were bygones.
But that was the absolute beginning of wanting to be Indian, instead of only half-Indian. Just plain Indian, of course, in those distant days---not any particular kind of Indian. Discrimination had come with the picture book.
And what a mix-up he had been in before he had finally settled which to be. First this one, then that, then the other. Such a flutter from page to page, and back, before he had decided on the one. How he had clung to “Indian brass-worker” when the book first came, because it was a cold day, and “Indian brass-worker” had a fire and bellows, and looked warm and ruddy beside his pyramid of brass bowls. But the moment the sun had shone in he had deserted him for “Indian dhobi or washerman,” because “Indian dhobi or washerman” had the privilege of cooling his feet in an oozy blue ghat all day. And how he had spanked the clothes down on that round, smooth stone! Yes, “Indian dhobi”; had had his day too.
So had “Indian potter.” Such rich, such red, such particularly potty pots! And “Weaver,” whose threads were like the rainbow, caught and bent straight in a wooden frame. And who could forget “Grain Merchant” or his grain---the red heap for wheat, and the orange heap for maize, and the milky white for the very best Patna rice?
“Grain Merchant,” who need never go hungry while there was a seed to crack---he had very, very nearly won.
But he had plumped for “Indian Peasant” in the end. And stuck to him too, long after Les had thrown away the book and started him on Grimm. Once he had really got to know “Indian Peasant” the rest had been nowhere. “Indian Peasant” had been the one.
Not merely because he was the frontispiece, mark you, and therefore more beautiful, and better provided with this world’s goods. Oh, no. Nor because he had a handsome smile; though he had---a very handsome smile, and such a grand moustache. Nor because he wore no clothes for “Indian dhobi” to ruin, though that too was nice. But because he was free. He could do exactly what he liked.
The potter could only make pots. The brasswala was limited to brass, “Grain Merchant” to an eternal choice of three kinds of grain, “Dhobi” to shirts and pyjamas without end---and those, all other people’s shirts and pyjamas. Life for them was but a passing from pot to pot, from brass lota, to brass lota, from maize to best Patna, from shirt to pyjamas and back again; and then again. And when all was said and done they only existed for the convenience of “Peasant.” When, for instance, a pot was finished, “Peasant” was the purchaser. For there, plain enough in the corner of the frontispiece, was the pot itself---a little red midget of a pot, perched on “Peasant’s” wife’s head, journeying jauntily down to a pond as oozily blue as “Dhobi,” ever paddled in.
Same with “Brass-worker’s” lotas, pinnacled on the little daughter’s head; and “Weaver’s” rainbow---where did it end but on another head----“Peasant’s” own? Weaver’s rainbow ended as “Peasant’s” puggaree.
“Grain Merchant’s” grain---why, “Peasant” grew it. You could see it growing in the distance, behind the little pink house, and the mango tope, and the lemon orchard all hung with wee yellow lamps of lemons---see it growing by the field instead of in measly little heaps; and see it again in the fat sacks on “Peasant’s” bullock-cart. So “Grain , Merchant,” like the rest, was nowhere without “Peasant.”
Happy “Peasant” with potters to pot for him, weavers to weave, merchants to buy his grain, women to scour his lotas, and nothing in the world to do himself but ride behind his bullocks; ride, smiling, clean out of the picture!
Oh, no wonder, he had made “Peasant” his choice, and pored over him, and learnt him, so that he could see him now---sitting, right in the front of the picture, on his bullock-cart, ready to drive on---but never quite driving---down the shady road that led through his fields. See every detail, though it was years since Les had thrown away the book; the milky kine, with rolls of fat in front like skims of cream, and brass caps with tassels on their horntips, and blue beads on their foreheads; the little hooded cart, with sacks reaching nearly to the roof, and, lying on top of them, a tiny boy asleep, with his head in the red corn---like Kullu on the logs. Strangely, wonderfully like Kullu. And, crouching under the hood, smiling in your face---“Peasant.” Dear old “Peasant,” with his long droopy moustache and his contented eyes.
Where was he going? he had wondered. What did he see? Why did he smile?
Was it the road, and the tunnel of green trees? Or the glimpse of a village or a town, far down? Or just the thought of shopping in the market, and bringing home a brighter puggaree or a better pot? Or a friend coming up the road? He had never known.
Only guessed.
But he knew now. For he himself was “Peasant” to-day. “Peasant” at last, riding into the picture---not out of it. And what “Peasant” was smiling at was a serai, not very far away---a two-storied serai at the bottom of a hill, with a courtyard full of carts, unloading wood, great yellow wedges of wood.
The bullocks were already unyoked, and standing in stalls round the courtyard, and there in the middle, busy lighting a fire, were “Peasant’s” friends; and it was at these, of course, that “Peasant” was smiling chiefly. For they were not unloading the carts---oh no. They were not having to bend double with tree-trunks on their backs and creep out, down a slippery path, to the stream---there to consign the great clumsy things to the waters, to be floated down to Kathgodam. That was the job they left to others---coolies. They sat down in the shelter of their carts, lit a fire, and doubtless told stories---stories that “Peasant” would presently hear.
. . . Unless he gave it all up---walked out of the picture, out of the dream---and went back to supper before Kullu woke up.
So that Kullu wouldn’t miss him so very, very much---or he Kullu. So that he would never know how wonderful the stories were, because he would never hear the stories. Nor want to go on being “Peasant” for ever, as he would if once he sat with other “Peasants” round that fire.
It was so difficult to leave a fire. So much more difficult even than to leave a bullock-cart. You just hopped off a bullock-cart, as you had hopped on, and left the beasts to wander that little way on their own. No fear of their missing the serai and going on into the village, with those stalls inviting them, and the other bullocks with their feed-bags on. And who would see a boy drop down from the cart and run off into the bushes? And who would bother if he did? With the dusk falling, and the lire flaring, and the round of stories beginning, who would jump up to chase a boy all up that long road to Hazrat Bagh? Not “Peasant,” any way.
But who, on the other hand, was going to walk back three miles to supper along a lonely dusty road---hungry before he even started, because he had missed his tea---when there, not a hundred yards away, was not only a fire but a pot upon it? Not “Peasant,” any way.
He ought to have done it while he was Nubby Bux, an hour ago, when Kullu had first fallen asleep. To do it now, as “Peasant,” was ridiculous.
Besides, what would happen to Kullu when the bullocks wandered in of their own sweet will, with Kullu asleep on the logs? “Peasant” couldn’t bring down punishment on an innocent child; on “Peasant’s” own and only friend, whom, he had said, he loved. That settled it.
“O Kullu, son of Chhotu,” he cried, “wake up! The serai!”
Kullu rolled over and rubbed his eyes.
“Ah, thou art here,” he murmured contentedly, “As I dreamed, I was not sure . . . but thou art here.” Then added, “Tell me---it puzzled me---what was thy name, in the village, before they took thee away, those khitmatgars? What wert thou? Thy father---what was he?”
“Just a peasant,” he smiled, “just an ordinary plain peasant. Like thee. Like those.”
Pointing at the figures round the fire.
“Ah. As I thought. But it troubled me in the dream, for thou hadst no name. What was thy name?”
Name? “Peasant” had never had a name.
He was just “Indian Peasant” like all the rest of the people in the book. He had never seemed somehow to need a name---not in those days.
He scratched his head.
“I forget,” he said, “the head khitmatgar struck me over the head with a lathi, and I forget things. Some things, not others. My name is one of them. Also the name of the village. And my father’s name.”
Kullu pondered.
“Yet thou rememberest thy father---his look, his voice?”
Indeed, yes. Especially the over-the-top-of-the-newspaper look. And as for the voice---well . . . “How do, Pell! Stiff pull, Pell!”
“Certainly I remember his look,” he replied, “He is an old man, well stricken in years; of a barley-coloured complexion; and, though he has white hairs growing upon his upper lip, the hair hath withered from the top of his head, which shines at night like a ripe melon.”
He passed his hand across his forehead in a supreme effort of vision.
“I see him seated by a fire,” he whispered, as ever unable to resist the dramatic, “He hath a guest, a young man from the bazaar, who will shortly be betrothed to one or other of the womenfolk. His name, too, I have forgotten---also theirs. They pull at a pipe, my father and the young man. They talk of the Government, of the fruit crop. My father hath a news-sheet in his hand. He reads aloud from the news-sheet---this concerning the Government, and that concerning the fruit crop. I see him look over the top of it at that young man to ascertain whether he be listening---like this.”
He copied the face. It was exciting, this. He was getting quite worked up over it.
“I know,” said Kullu delightedly, “My uncle, who is a Naib Patwari and can read, does likewise. To look at thee is to see my uncle . . .”
“Yes, but my father, of whom we were speaking---he is looking up, just as I am looking now, and suddenly his face changes. He is remembering. He is wondering. He is saying . . .”
“What is he saying?”
Kullu was breathless.
“Where’s Drew?”
It came out before he could stop it---the familiar drawl, with its husky roll and rumble of the “r” deep in the throat, like a good gargle---before he knew what he was saying. For that was just what father would be asking, especially if he had looked at the clock.
“Durroo?” said Kullu, catching at it. And then again, thoughtfully:
“Durroo?”
And then, in the squeaky top-note of discovery, of inspiration:
“Durroo! Why, of course---thy name! Thy name, brother!”
He winced. Back to Drew again! He didn’t want the name. He was tired of it.
“Is it,” he said uncomfortably, “is it a name with thy people?”
“Of course,” bubbled Kullu excitedly, “there was a Durroo in our village, a pound-keeper. He was gored in the belly by a buffalo. I well remember him. And as for the name, it is a good name---it means ‘Substance.’ Thou art destined to be a man of substance. As I foretold. Say---quick---before we turn in---thou rememberest? It was thy name?”
They were at the gates. He could see the faces of the men in the courtyard, firelit against the shadows, and no doubt concerned at the lateness of the cart and the presence of the stranger upon the pole. Suddenly shy, he felt glad enough, in all this strangeness, to carry with him something out of the past---even if it was only an old name.
“I remember,” he said with due solemnity, “it was my name.”
Kullu sighed a deep sigh.
“In my dream,” he said, “I lost thee, and I could not call because I knew no name to call, having forgotten that which the khitmatgar gave thee. But now thou art Durroo, and I shall never lose thee. Thou wilt never be able to stray.”
He wondered. Wouldn’t he? Perhaps he wouldn’t. Even Nubby Bux had found the idea of straying from Kullu distasteful. “Peasant” had found it more than distasteful. Durroo might give it up altogether, if the fire were warm, and the food good, and if the men---well---confined themselves strictly to telling good stories.
If . . .
For somehow, now they were at close quarters, they didn’t look quite so peasantish as he had thought them ten minutes ago---those men by the fire. It was quite on the cards they might not like Durroo. In which case Durroo might be quite glad after all to avail himself of the first opportunity of . . . straying.
It all depended.
He had an anxious moment when Kullu jumped down and honked the bullocks through the gates. A voice grumbled from the fire:
“Who is that with thee? Why art thou late? Why are thy beasts sweating?”
“Now for it!” he thought, and prepared to stray with some alacrity. But Kullu merely waved his hand.
“I will explain,” he sang out cheerfully, “Let me unyoke and feed and water, and then I will explain all.”
They trundled on, past the fire, into an empty corner. He breathed again. But it had been bad while it lasted---and there was still the explaining to be done.
“Art thou sure . . .?” he began.
Kullu laughed.
“All will be well. That was only Chhotu, my father. Sit down upon this bag of bhoosa while I stall the beasts. I shall not be long, be sure, for---smell!---there is venison in the pot.”
“Thou art quite sure they will welcome me?”
“More than that. They will give thee money. Thy name is Durroo.”
And Kullu scurried away.
Somewhat reassured, he sat down, bashfully, behind the cart, upon a bag of chaff. Through the spokes of the wheels he could see the group round the fire, sitting in the shelter of the line of carts. Certainly they seemed peaceable enough. The most formidable of all of them---the man with the black beard, who had been driving the first cart, and who had glared at him---was completely absorbed in contemplation of the fire. The old man, who had spat, was silently chewing; only his mouth moved. A younger man tended the fire, raking the sticks close up under the base of a big round pot, and putting on dung-cakes to husband the flame. A pleasant smell came drifting---peaty wood-smoke and stewing flesh---and he realized how hungry he was.
No, they didn’t look so very ferocious, those three. Still less the opium-eater, who was leaning against a cart-wheel, his head dropped on chest and his legs sprawled out anyhow, taking up the room of three men---yet they let him be. The only other was a youth, squatting apart and sluicing himself with water from a round red pot like “Potter’s”; looking down with satisfaction at his glistening shoulders and the drops that flashed, like molten sparks, from the tips of his fingers. And when the pot was empty he shook himself, sending out a rain of those fire-lit sparks, and set to work without ado to prepare dishes for the meal.
His fingers flickered busily, playing over the flat brass dishes and in and out of little bags; mixing, shredding, peeling, pouring---mixing again; and all the time he crooned to himself. Nothing to fear in him---he was much too busy with chupattis and the pulse and the savoury paste to concern himself with Durroo. What did a Durroo more or less matter to him or to any of these peaceful, sleepy folk by the fire? This wasn’t some wild, dacoit-infested solitude. This was the serai.
He looked it up and down, loving it for its attitude; its solicitous, sheltering shape; its disposal of itself around the courtyard that was its care. For only on one side of the square---the side bordered by the road---was the court open to the wind and the weather; and there already the dusk hung deep, so that the coolies, carrying away the last of the logs, seemed to pass through a curtain of some shadowy blue gauze---a curtain that stirred ever inwards, as from the breath of an open window---before they reached the road. On the other three sides, the building---the serai proper, lodging-place of man and beast---drooped cherishingly with its jutting, gabled balconies, as if to nurse its children below, with their bonfire and their big, wheeled toys, till bed-time came. Then, as he could see when the fire flamed up gustily and lit the wooden arches above, there were rows of rooms ready for them---little bare cribs, just big enough to hold a man. And he seemed to know at last why he had always loved a bare room---because he was born to live in one; because some ancestor of his, some long-forgotten dusky nonentity on his mother’s side, had once been happy in one, and the memory ran on in the blood.
It must be so, he thought; else why did he feel so happy at the idea of rolling himself up in a blanket and lying down on the floor of one of those narrow cells? With Kullu, maybe, squeezed in with him for extra warmth and company, and to help scare away the rats---but nothing else; no bed, no blind, no carpet, no comfort of the kind that he was used to. Why did he feel that he would sleep as he had never slept before---dream deeper---awake more refreshed?
In spite of the rats, that he could hear now scampering over the bare floors. In spite of the things that would bite and tickle in the night, creeping out of the warm blanket as they were creeping this moment out of the warm bhoosa. In spite of the drowsy flies that would drop upon his face from the ceiling, and cluster there---as they were clustering now on his chest, in little lazy lozenges of jet. In spite of all the things that he had always learnt to look upon as loathsome and horrible.
Why did he feel that these things didn’t so much matter---that he would still sleep that wonderful sleep in spite of them? Wasn’t it because something in his blood told him that there were other things to compensate---the feel, the air, the very sense of the serai all about him? The soft, soothing stir of the beasts in the stalls below; the savour of milkiness, of chopped chaff, and honest, mellow dung that would drift up, seasoned with smouldering wood, to drug the nostrils---weren’t these things worth the price of a little discomfort that a morning dip in the stream would wash away?
He looked. He listened. He sniffed. Yes, he knew they were. Then . . .
A pair of warm hands dropped on his shoulders, and gently shook them; a familiar voice piped in his ear;
“Wake, Durroo. Thou art dreaming. I have watched them feed, those greedy beasts, and oh! I am hungry. And see---the meal is ready. Come.”
But he caught the hands and pulled Kullu down beside him. There was something that he wanted to know.
“Kullu,” he whispered, “I have been thinking. If I feed with thee . . .”
“Thou wilt afterwards sleep with me. The serai is free to all. A blanket for me, and my fine quilt for thee. What else?”
He nodded.
“Yes. And to-morrow?”
“To-morrow? To-morrow is as to-day. We go on, up the road, down the road, carrying. Maybe wood, maybe corn, maybe straw. Ours are roving carts, going from serai to serai. Once in a way we go back to the village for a feast, or repairs, or harvest---but mostly our life is from serai to serai, as now. To-day, to-morrow---it is all one. But to-morrow thou wilt perhaps help with the feeding and the watering.”
“Gladly,” he laughed, “and with the driving. But what will they say?”
He pointed to the men round the fire.
Kullu snorted.
“They? What should they say? What do they say to Jugtoo there, who sucks opium all day and dreams when others are working---save to pick him up when he falls off the pole? What do they say to the old man, my grandfather, who cannot lift a yoke, and is mad besides? They suffer them---what would they be saying to thee, of whom I have already said that they would give thee money? Besides, are they not my father and my own brothers---he of the black beard my father, and those who cook and tend my brothers? Come and hear thyself what they will say.”
Father, grandfather, brothers---somehow that took the last vestige of sting out of them. A family party. There was no more to be afraid of than if he were walking into the dining-room at Hazrat Bagh, a little late for supper. A glare, perhaps, from father---but all fathers glared, and if they didn’t all wear black beards, they wore something equally bristly. Besides, imagine if the cases were reversed, and it were Kullu who was hesitating , outside the dining-room door at home---would it be half as pleasant for Kullu as it was going to be now for him? With Ahmed Ali in full chase with a bamboo lathi?
Poor Kullu, if he tried it on! Half the compound would be at his heels.
But Kullu wouldn’t want to try it on. Kullu was better off as he was. Serai to serai; to-day, to-morrow, all one . . .
There came a tug at his arm:
“Up, dreamer---or I leave thee to thy fast.”
He jumped up.
“I am coming.”
“To stay,” piped Kullu possessively, taking him by hand and elbow and leading him towards the fire.
He hung back, hesitating. Then somehow the serai seemed to clinch the matter---to catch at him, and clasp him, and gather him in.
“To stay?” he repeated, wondering at himself, “Yes, if they will have me.”
“This is Durroo, my father. He hath a story to tell.”
That was all. None of your elaborate introductions---none of the flummery that went on when a Mr. Pell was ushered into the drawing-room. Simple, direct: “This is Durroo.”
Blackbeard looked from one to the other.
“Perhaps he can tell why thy cart came in late, and thy bullocks sweating,” he growled, slow of speech and as fatherlike as a father could be, while the others looked on with mild interest and the old man dribbled down his chin.
“For laughter, my father,” chirped Kullu, “not only the bullocks sweated, but I also, rolling about with laughter. As thou wilt anon.”
“I! I laugh!”
The two younger men sniggered, as if they thought it unlikely. As indeed it was, for the face was a set mask of solemnity, and the deep eyes looked as if they had stared so long, into fires and down dusky roads, that they could never blink nor brighten again. A slow, dull, heavy man, this father of Kullu---but not unkind, evidently, or Kullu would not be so free with him, sidling up to him and saying:
“Even thou, my father. Have I not told thee that bullocks have already succumbed?”
The old man gave a sudden cackle.
“A rupee to him who sets Chhotu off. I’d as lief try tickle a dead buffalo.”
Kullu glanced over his shoulder in triumph. “There you are,” said his eyes, “I told you there would be money flying about.”
“Who maketh even the bullocks to laugh?” inquired one of Kullu’s brothers, who was engaged in apportioning the stew.
“Durroo. Who else? He is a mimicker of Sahebs and I know what else besides---maybe thyself, Puttoo---but chiefly of Sahebs. He hath lived in a bungalow. Thereby hangs the tale he hath to tell.”
“Well, let him mimic one, and earn the rupee,” said a practical voice; and a sharp, shrewd face, hairless and tight-skinned as drawn parchment, peered through the fume of steam.
Kullu. recoiled in apparent horror.
“Before he hath eaten, most venerable of my brothers?” he squeaked indignantly, “’Tis a thin belch comes from an empty belly.”
“True,” said the other brother---somewhat of a dandy, this one, with his oiled ringlets and ear-rings, and curled moustache and rakish pink puggaree, “He hath a meagre, starven belly at best. Let him fill it---it will hold little enough. Sit him down and let him mimic a Saheb at meat, if he can---though at better meat than ever Saheb ate.”
Whereat, without further ado, room was made for him, and he sat down between Kullu and the dandified one himself.
Instantly a brown hand, holding a solid, shallow brass dish, generously heaped up and all smoking, shot out at him through the fume of fire and food. Ek dum---no waiting. None of that uneasiness that Mr. Pell, for instance, would have to put up with while Ahmed Ali juggled the soup plates over his head and father cleared his throat for action. No stupid, unnecessary conversation. No staring even---not now. The faces that he could see, dimmed down now that he was on their level, were entirely preoccupied with dishes similar to his own; fingers were already dipping with discrimination into the outlying portions of steamy mysteries, and disappearing, laden, into tilted and receptive red mouths. Sounds, suggestive of succulency and appreciation, passed, bandied from mouth to mouth, like the echo of some vocal and expressed spirit of enjoyment. And even the opium-eater had woken up and, with the mechanical precision of a drunkard or a sleep-walker, was finding the way to his mouth.
He looked down, with a strange sense of adventure, at his own dish.
Good fare. A heap, a mound of a nature not to be analysed as yet, nor wholly identified, because it was securely tented over with a particularly pasty and pliant chupatti of browned suet; but providing, none the less, subtle and inviting inklings of itself in the wisps of fragrant steam that escaped at the edges. What was it? Not exactly a pie, nor yet a pudding; and certainly not stew, and anything but hash---yet, by the smell, a pleasing combination of the sweeter qualities of all these, not excluding “greens.” Meatiness; butteriness; granularity; greens---all there. And something besides, that gave the spice of adventure to every sniff. Some herb perhaps. Nifty, whatever it was.
Phew, it was hot, though!
How did one eat it? Three fingers of the right hand; mouth upturned like a goblet; tongue depressed for reception, but exerted immediately for retention---curled over, pressed firmly against the roof of the mouth, and finally released with a click when all was clear. Oh, and used, every three mouthfuls or so, for purposes of private dental exploration, and public expression of enjoyment. So here a tongue was a tongue---not just something to talk with, and keep in.
Well, he had one, just like anybody else. And as for mouth, there wasn’t a better one for the purpose in the serai. More like a bucket than a goblet. So---here goes.
He whipped off the chupatti, disclosing beneath a volcano of rice; not the refined, tasteless snowflakes of pudding rice, but rice that was grain, grown in the ground, and looked it. Ripe rice that came out of a husk---not a paper-bag.
He nibbled a pellet. Yes, that had grown from the green paddy and felt the sun---and had not forgotten it either. That tasted.
He clicked.
Kullu looked up approvingly, then burst out laughing.
“See. He eats like a Saheb. He strips off his chupatti, just as the Sahebs take off their hats---instead of husbanding the warmth and the goodness within. Phit---off it goes! That was a fine thought of thine, Durroo!”
The dandy looked slightly impressed.
“Sahebs are certainly improvident,” he remarked.
“Sahebs are mad,” growled Chhotu in his beard, “I would not see a friend of mine behave as the Sahebs do.”
“Yet he too will laugh at thee when he hath finished his meat,” muttered Kullu, “Have no fear. He is ever difficult before his meat, and as mellow as milk after it.”
“I once saw a Saheb eating,” said the dandy at large, “He was sitting by the side of the road when my cart went by, and besides the knife in his right hand---which was a finicking little knife, such as a man gives to a child or a woman---he had in his left a pronged thing, wherewith he assiduously chased fragments of an egg over a white platter as flat as this chupatti. And I believe to this day that the pronged thing was of silver. Fool, when he might have melted it into money, and still have eaten his egg. Though for a grown man to eat an egg at all passes my comprehension.”
“Did he not turn away from thee when he saw thee coming---thee, a man of another race---and eat in privacy, as a decent man must?” came the disapproving drawl of the father of a family.
“Nay, he continued to pursue the little pieces of egg most diligently.”
“Shame! Sahebs have no manners,” exploded Chhotu.
The opium-eater belched magnificently.
“No manners,” he repeated, as if by rote, “no manners.”
“And I have never actually seen a Saheb eat,” mourned Kullu, “only a Memsaheb in the train---and she had a veil down to her upper lip, so that the flakes of her chupatti were partly spent before they reached her mouth.”
“Talk not of Memsahebs or their mouths. It is unseemly,” thundered father, and the black beard bristled. Whereat the conversation ceased abruptly. The opium-eater continued to alternate his natural expressions of relief and gratitude for good fare with the mournful reflection, “No manners.” The old man, evidently intrigued at the mention of a mouth, produced a succession of quaint, whimsical, lunatic grimaces, possibly reminiscent of some dim and faded vision of Memsahebs, tittering at himself, like a child before a looking-glass. The rest chumped---stolidly and audibly chumped. And the rice on the platters melted like snow in the sun.
For himself he dawdled over it---it was so good. Down in the crater, as it were, of his personal volcano there lurked a brownish lava, molten of course, but sufficiently thick and glutinous to cleave to the fingers and permit of being sucked off at leisure; and it tasted even more wonderful than it smelt. Pilao, pineapple, peppermint---the old brigade of his desires---paled before it, became the mere phantoms of dead and discarded relishes; while, as for eggs---who, after merely seeing his fingers emerge in their rich plaster, could contemplate without contempt the sallow insipidity of eggs? And who, after experiencing the sympathetic and genial presence of those same fingers in the mouth, could ever again abide the cold and callous contact of a fork or a spoon?
He perfectly understood the dandy’s views on the subject of forks. They were only fit to be melted down into the filthy lucre that would provide more helpings of this marvellous, mysterious, unforgettable sauce.
If you could demean it by calling it a sauce. Better really to leave it unnamed---a tang, a glow, a memory in the mouth---and smack the lips while the fingers adventured anew . . . probing . . . mining . . .
Sometimes they brought up a nugget of meat; and that too had a tang---a peculiar, gamy relish of its own. One thought instinctively of the jungle---of wild, fervid, impetuous meats; a mountain sheep, perhaps, or a brisk, bright-coated cheetal, poached in its prime---and remembered with pious horror that Mr. Pell, if he had stayed to supper, was at the moment engaged in devouring cold mutton.
“Is this a feast-day?” he whispered reverently to Kullu when his dish was at length clean. “Surely this is special fare, and to-morrow there will be mutton.”
“Did I not tell thee,” came the quick rebuke, “that to-morrow is as to-day?”
“But the food. Surely . . .”
“Mamuli. Of the most ordinary. Where wert thou reared that thou dost not know rice for rice and gravy for gravy? But I forget---thou hast lived in the shadow of a bungalow. Perchance they starved thee on eggs, and thou hast forgotten the meaning of food. Know then that we are rice-eaters to-day and to-morrow and for ever. As for the meat, that may vary a little. Sometimes, in the higher hills, there will be a gurral, or a khaker, such as this is; or, in the plains, a stag; sometimes only a bird---pheasant, jungle cock, water-bird, as my brother’s snares provide; sometimes but a mean, garbage-fed hare---but the sauce of my elder brother ennobles it. Or one of the bails will die, and we eat him up. All according to the season and the luck of the road. But meat there always is.”
He puffed himself out with pride, and gravely emitted, in his childish treble, the same expression of internal adjustment and relief that, on a lower note, had more than once escaped the opium-eater.
“We are not mean egg-eaters,” he concluded, “We fare well. But eat up thy chupatti, for we await thy belch. Jugtoo hath no manners---he belches before the guest. But he is in a dream, and therefore to be excused. Eat thy chupatti. My father awaits.”
He dug his teeth into the taut, tough wheaten hide, and tasted cleanliness itself---grain from the handmill, crushed in its skin, and cooked simply with water. As he gnawed, all the cloy of the grease departed, and only the tang remained to remind him of an utter and comprehensive satisfaction.
“Now drink.”
Cold stream water from an earthenware beaker went gurgling down.
“Now, thy belch. ’Tis the guest’s privilege, as thou knowest---and grace for good fare.”
He obliged. Indeed, after the cold water it was inevitable to make some recognition of the fact that he had breath.
A courteous and flattering echo resounded round the company. Only the old man, when it came to his turn, remained unresponsive, fidgeting uncomfortably and making queer, yearning faces.
“My grandfather is unfortunate,” whispered Kullu, “age hath deprived him of the power. Thou wilt excuse him.”
Ceremony was at an end. The dishes were removed. The opium-eater relapsed into slumber. The others pressed in closer to the fire, stirring it up so that it flamed gustily in their faces and shed a red sheen on their bare chests. Kullu was commissioned to fill a wide-bowled pottery pipe, in shape like a wine-strainer, with a black, dry, dusty substance that looked and smelt like charcoal, and to get it alight. Thereafter it passed from mouth to mouth among the elders, each sucking it strenuously---like a child getting the last drop of juice out of an orange---till a glow was obtained. Whereat the smoker threw back his head, coughed deeply and luxuriously, and passed on the pipe.
Strange, potent fumes began to swirl about, tickling the throat and nostrils and producing a curious sensation in the head---half dizzy, half excited. For a moment he did not know whether he would get up and dance about, or lie down and be sick. Then both extremes passed and he was floating, rather than sitting, in the centre of a pleasant, swimming haze. He did not want to do anything in particular---just to float, and watch the faces, and feel the glow, and be happy, till Sleep---that reliable and restful presence in the background---opened its deep lap.
And to-morrow? Just the same as to-day. Comforting thought. Another serai, maybe, but the same spell. The same inward fulness and content; the same firelight; the same faces. Kullu rocking on his heels, his bright eyes questing; Chhotu, his father, solemn as midnight, sucking till the tiny furnace in the blackened pipe glowed like a red star; the dandy, drawing at his jaunty “Red Lamp” cigarette between cupped, careful hands; the old man slavering betel, with a baby’s delight in his own dribble; Jugtoo, the lanky, lost in his lazy dream; the sharp-faced brother, who was always busy; and, once again, Kullu, Kullu of the melon-head with his bright, beady eyes---they would all be there to-morrow, just the same; blotting out with the very vigour of their colouring and their grouping the weak, little picture that languished on the wall of yesterday.
How far away it seemed; how insignificant; how unreal---that drawing-room with its pale walls, its insipid fire, its ungainly, inhospitable spaces. An elderly man, his bald head doming over the Pioneer; a grown-up girl, sorting out music on the piano; two more playing patience; a boy, marooned on a lumpy chair, kicking his heels, haunted by unsatisfying memories of weakly hash and chocolate shape; a little mild cigar smoke; an occasional cough . . . that was yesterday evening, summed up and rendered in full, fair measure. And how could it live, how could it exist beside the strong, vivid, pungent presence of to-day? Beside the equally potent promise of to-morrow? What chance had the people in it beside these people, who, whatever they did---whatever they said, or smoked, or ate, or played---did it with a punch, striking in at the senses, and stirring up the mind? Why, they simply vanished; fled; faded away. Puff. Patience table and piano and papery Pioneer---puff. Blown away. All gone.
At a dig in the ribs from Kullu and a quick breath in the ear:
“Awake, dreamer. It is time for thee to win thy rupee. Show us what the Sahebs do when their dinner is done, how they sit and pass the pipe, and tell us what they say.”
With an effort he recalled the picture. It would certainly come in useful.
“I am a Saheb . . .” he began.
“I am a Saheb,” he repeated uncertainly, half expecting someone to say, “Why, so you are!” But no one did. Only the old man tittered, “Did you hear him? He said he was a Saheb,” as if it were the biggest joke in the world.
So Kullu was right---there was one thing they would never believe. He hardly believed it himself---that was what made it so difficult to go on and be a Saheb.
But they were looking at him. He must go on.
He cleared his throat, putting up his hand to his mouth as if an obstruction in the throat were a crime; heard an encouraging whisper---“See, he covers his mouth. Thus did my Memsaheb”---and a growl---“Be silent!”---and started in earnest.
“I am a Bara Saheb, ancient of years, and my head is bald. My teeth I can instal or remove at pleasure, having purchased them from the toothmaker at a great price, for they are bedded in gold and inlaid with precious stones . . .”
“Peace! Do not mock at us,” muttered Chhotu.
“Nay, it is so,” put in the dandy---an authority evidently, “I have heard even that said, that there is traffic in teeth, though as to gold and precious stones . . .”
“It is so,” he insisted, “Surely a man may speak of his own teeth. To continue---upon my nose I wear spectacles such as babus and pundits wear, also of gold, attached by a golden chain to my raiment. These are to support my dignity and increase my honour, and not for use, like the spectacles of poor men, so that it is but rarely that I look through them; but, rather, over them---thus.”
He turned sharply and scrutinised the dandy over imaginary pince-nez---to be met with a gratifying giggle.
“Thus the Magistrate Saheb looked at me in Court when I bore witness in the cattle-stealing case, saying, ‘Thou art an ignorant pahari. Go back to thy bails.’ I have never forgotten it. Indeed, this is an excellent mimic,” said the dandy.
Chhotu growled.
“He knows too much, this boy.”
Though in some trepidation, he turned on him.
“Have I not said I am a Saheb---a Bara Saheb, maybe a Magistrate even---and no boy?” he shouted, reproducing the parental nag, “Hold thy tongue when a Saheb speaks, thou black-headed, blunderfooted buffalo!”
For a second he thought he had overshot the mark, for Kullu, at his side, choked convulsively. The black beard twitched, like a horse’s jowl at a fly-sting, and he got a glare that staggered him. But he was keyed up now to a pitch of excitement---flushed and heady with the firelight and the fumes and the flattery---and he brazened it out, clapping his hands sharply in the man’s face, as his father invariably did when patience was exhausted, and following it up with a peremptory “Get out! Don’t stand staring at me!”
Everybody jumped. The dandy actually looked guiltily over his shoulder. But his own eyes were concentrated on Chhotu’s face, so that they saw first what he had hardly expected to see---a faint, bewildered ghost of a smile craving a crevice for foothold in that stone wall of impassivity; nay more, actually, for one brief instant, finding it. Somewhere about the corners of the eyes. Then it had gone again. Abashed, doubtless.
But not before Kullu had seen it too. Out came the accusing finger.
“My father. That was a laugh. A laugh may be seen as well as heard. He hath earned his fee.”
“I saw it peep out from behind thy beard,” he chimed in himself, “like a bird, and roost in thine eye. Maybe it makes a nest, for I can see it still. Look, all, at the bird in the buffalo’s eye.”
“Tee, hee,” the old man twittered, “the bird in the buffalo’s eye! And the rupee is thine. Give him his rupee, Chhotu. All that thou hast is mine, and I bid thee give him a rupee.”
Then came the surprising answer---a low chuckle, deep in the thicket of the beard; and a mutter, almost caressing compared with the usual growl, addressed to himself:
“Thou art bold, my son. I have not been called a buffalo for twenty years. Then it was a Forest Saheb, over a matter of felling trees. Now it is a baby, over my own fire. Yet the voice is the same. Take thy rupee, though thou art too good a mimic to be honest. Were it not for thy colour and thy speech I should say that some Saheb’s blood flows in thee. As it is, I say that thou art a vagabond, and a disgrace to thy kind.”
A coin spun up in a shimmering arc over the fire.
“Yet the bird still builds in the buffalo’s eye, whatever he may bellow,” he cried, catching the coin. Then, suddenly sobered, he handed it back.
“I want no money,” he said, “I did it for fun. Please take it back.”
The old man nearly had a fit.
“He wants no money,” he quavered, spluttering with mirth, “Did ye hear him? ‘Take it back,’ he said. Why he’s as mad as me!”
The thought seemed to afford him exquisite pleasure. He kept on repeating, “He’s as mad as me,” while the others stared and muttered, as if indeed a lunatic had walked into then’ midst. Not to want money . . .!
Then light burst in on the dandy.
“Said like a Saheb!” he exclaimed, “See, he mimics to the last. ‘I want no money’---and never a muscle of his face moved. That is how they say it. I have seen it, and heard. When I was at the ‘Iscool’ at Chhota Haldi, a great Saheb, a Commissioner, came riding upon an elephant to inspect that village; and the zemindar of the village, desiring doubtless to be made a Khan Bahadur, met him at the gates, and, malting obeisance, proffered ten gold mohurs wrapped up in a napkin of clean linen. I saw them, for I was standing near, and a wind chanced to blow back the napkin---ten gold mohurs---a sight not to forget. And what did that Saheb do? He but touched the fringe of the napkin with the tips of the fingers of his right hand, and said gravely---just like this boy here---‘I am obliged, Zemindar Ji. But take them back. I want no money.’ The same words! The same look! Truly this boy is a wizard. He should go from serai to serai . . .”
Quick as thought, he seized his opportunity.
“Then take me with thee!” he cried, “Let me go from serai to serai with this company, riding on Kullu’s cart. If what thou sayest is true, I shall earn my keep, and over. But whether I do or no, I will work at the carts, and wash the dishes, and lay the fire, and fill the pipe---whatever is needed I will willingly do, as soon as I have learnt. And Kullu will teach me. Wilt thou not, brother?”
Kullu nodded vigorously.
“See the advantage,” he went on quickly, “Suppose an aged driver desires to ruminate over the ripe, red betel in peace,” he glanced at the old man, “and cannot, because the road is rough and he dare not neglect his beasts---well, henceforth he may, for I, Durroo, shall be there to take his place.”
“True,” twittered the old man, “true, and excellently put. Frequently he could take my place, when the stones drive a man’s liver up into his mouth and the nut turns sour.”
“Or suppose,” he continued, looking at the dandy, “that a young and beautiful driver of bullocks is in need of a love-sleep; or would linger awhile in a bazaar that is bright with new merchandise, fingering over the goods---puggaree cloth of hues, or silver ear-rings, for himself; or blue beads for his beasts; or a pipe with a brass mouthpiece, perhaps, for his father; or, for his grandfather, a packet of the juiciest nut, fresh garnered; or, for his uncle, a ser of that weed that is crushed from Bihar poppies and brings better dreams than the rank growth of these hills. . . . then that young and beautiful driver of bullocks has but to call out ‘Durroo, O Durroo, come drive my bullocks,’ and Durroo comes.”
The dandy grinned.
“For me, thou has liberty to come,” he said, “for, drive or no, thou canst entertain.”
Excitedly he warmed to his theme:
“Or suppose that Jugtoo hath, stored away in his loin-cloth, a present of those black, dream-giving poppy pills, yet can only nibble now and then, like a squirrel at its nut, instead of rolling the whole sweet pill on his tongue---lest he drop off into a deep sleep, and fall under the wheel; and is hungry, and restless, and greatly tantalized . . .”
“As ever. There is never complete peace,” came a dull, weary voice from under the nearest cart, as with a sigh the dreamer rolled over.
“Well, then, that he may have that complete peace, Durroo is ready . . .”
“Thou art ready with thy tongue, young man---that I know,” growled Chhotu, “but as for thy hands . . .”
Kullu broke in:
“Why, my father, he hath slaved with his hands. The son of a substantial father, even as thou art to me---well respected in his village, and a man of mark in the market---he was stolen away at night by khitmatgars, by a khansamah who was fat and an ayah who was treacherous, whom, he will presently punish, and given a name of shame, and set to drudge in a bungalow. He hath been shamefully treated. Wouldst thou, then, who art also a father of substance and remark, turn him away? Suppose it were I, Kullu, who were entreating, and that his father were sitting in thy place. And suppose . . .”
“Suppose! Suppose! Enough of supposings, his and thine. He is all suppose, and thou art little better.”
Chhotu reached for the pipe with a gesture of impatience.
“But if he comes with us, my father,” cried Kullu, resourceful as ever, “he will then cease to suppose. He will be cured of his fit of supposing.”
“I promise never to suppose again,” he put in earnestly.
Chhotu ignored him.
“What of his own father?” he grumbled, “If he has a father, why does he not go to him, instead of troubling other fathers with more than enough already on their hands?”
“Oh, as to that,” was the airy reply, “he would greatly prefer his own father, who is a kindly and generous man and very soft in his speech to those younger than himself; but unfortunately he hath forgotten his father’s name. The khitmatgar made a hole in his head with a lathi and the name popped out. Also his own name; but that, being a name of substance, lodged in the opening, and with my help he recovered it. But his father’s is flown beyond recall.”
“However,” Kullu added, with quick resource, “though he cannot, for obvious reasons, ask for his father, he may, while he is with us, chance to see his father; for we travel many roads, and pass many villages. Who knows? And then his father, instead of reviling thy name---as he would if thou wert to abandon his son---would reward thee.”
Chhotu blew out a great gout of smoke, and pretended to be absorbed in its slow uncurl.
“Maybe,” he said at length, “It is possible that he hath indeed forgotten his father’s name. That is not unusual in these days. But there is a little matter besides---the village of his birth. Am I to suppose that that too . . .”
He saw his chance and took it.
“Beware!” he cried out. “Thou art in extreme danger.”
Chhotu started in mock alarm.
“Of what, pray? Of thee, belike----thou road-picking?”
“Nay, not of me.”
“Of what, then? I am ready.”
And ready he looked---a nasty man to meet, with his black frown and his jutting beard and his hairy chest, all tattooed with shadowy shapes from the fire; a nightmare to anyone who had not chanced to see that one stray smile flit in and out.
“Of what am I in danger?”
“Why, of supposing,” he said blandly, “What else? ‘Am I to suppose . . .’ thou didst say”---he mimicked the growl to perfection---“and I say that I have saved thee from that supposing. Which, as thou didst thyself remark, is very dangerous.”
A laugh went up. Kullu clapped his hands.
“He had thee there, my father,” cried the dandy, “Thou wilt have to take him now, if only to save thee from further supposing. Truly an evil habit.”
Chhotu clapped his two hands to his head.
“Have it your own way,” he roared, “Bring him along, with any other street-scrapings that thou canst gather. We must all be rajahs these days, and travel with a riff-raff of boys, and buffoons, and beggars. Doubtless he is a thief and a cutpurse and a liar---but bring him along. Anything to swell the rajah’s train, and take the heart out of the bullocks, and . . .”
The rest was lost in a fit of coughing that shook the serai. Not that he would have listened, or cared what he was called, so long as the one great fact was established---that he was to go on. Nothing else mattered. He was to go on---that was enough for him---go on and share the luck of the road with these fascinating folk; share their food and their firelight and all their fun; to-morrow, next day, the day after---always; village to village; serai to serai.
Already he was dizzy with visions of what their little company of carts, adventuring, would do and see; the roads that they would unravel. White roads, caught among the intricate hills like strands of a spider’s web; brown roads, laid lazy along the open fields below, tanned deep to sunny tints; green roads, that burrowed, that tunnelled into tangled thickets, where shy eyes would stare, and the little lost villages, tucked away to sleep in the green, would stir in a surprise at the creaking of the carts. And down each and every road, always ahead, never quite caught up, yet never quite lost sight of, a dancer would go dancing. A dancer whimsical, womanlike; full of ardour and colour and quick throbbing change; and her name was India.
India!
He had seen a little---climbed a hill here and there, and used his eyes; made a journey or two, and kept his head at the carriage window---enough to guess what she would be wearing. Glimpses of her wardrobe, as you might say, with the clothes hanging up. A head-dress, shaped of many mountains, purple and rose-pink, and soft bruised blue, silver-piped to mark the snow-line; a tunic of graceful green---light, leafy tissues and delicate foam of buds---all a’billow over the breasts, the many breasts that drooped and melted among her plains; a patchwork, gipsy skirt of all colours, made of thousands upon thousands of little fields, and ending in a fierce, fiery braid; yes, he knew more or less what she would wear.
The clothes. But never the flesh and blood; never the real, live dancer herself. That was all to come. That was the luck of the road.
India---radiant, alive, dancing---the very thought set him a-jig. He seemed to see her in the firelight, itself all dance; in the swaying smoke, and the restless, uneasy shadows. There was an invitation in it all, a summons to get out of himself, to go crazy for once in a way, to erupt into sparks. There were fumes in his head, and feelings like fumes---excitements; dizzy, giddy spasms of happiness---and they drove him to his feet. Before he knew what he was doing he was suddenly capering about, singing snatches, imitating this person and that, making everybody laugh, and laugh, and laugh . . .
What did he look like? He didn’t care. He wasn’t himself. He wasn’t any Drew that ever had been or ever would be again. He was a spirit; a drollery; a something fey; a product of firelight and fumes, with a gift, a largesse of laughter, to scatter abroad---to fling in this face and that, like bright coin among a crowd.
He hardly knew what he did. He would see a face, laughing or ready to laugh, and something would suggest itself. A person, perhaps, to be mimicked. And without an effort the sprite in him would jump into that person’s skin, and produce that person to the life. Or a song. Tune, words and all, they just came out of his head---song of Kullu, song of Jugtoo, song of a betel-chewer to his nuts---anything that was put there, out it came.
And then the next thing; and, with every new thing, a sense of response; a feeling---“That went home!”; and a perpetual joyful wonder at himself---“How is it I can do it? I never did it before.”
But even this was only the beginning. It was when the dandy and Kullu joined in that things began to hum; when the dandy fetched out a long-tailed stringed instrument, and Kullu a fat little drum, shaped like half an orange. Then he squatted in a sort of happy haze, singing himself hoarse when he caught the lilt of the queer, quavering songs they sang---or, silent, feeling every fibre of him rocking and reeling in time with the thrum of the strings and the thub-thub-thub of the drum. Till, as he grew steeped in the sound, the whole serai seemed to rock---faces and firelight and all; and the little drum leaped like a live thing in Kullu’s lap; and the light went shooting up and down the thrumming wires, like some fanciful fairy thing.
People came in then, drawn out of the darkness, like stray moths coming to a light. He saw men’s faces, villagers, cowled in blankets, craning out of the darkness into the fan of firelight. Children sprang up from nowhere and added to the din. Once he caught sight of a woman’s painted eyes, staring at him from under a hood, studying him. And still the voices quavered, and still the little drum throbbed and leapt, and the gleam went shooting along the wires . . . till he was sitting altogether in a maze, and could see nothing individual at all, but only the jigging of points of light against a screen of shadow. Finally, he closed his eyes, for the lights pricked.
He was very tired now. Glad to lie down.
For a time he was conscious of the drum beating at his ear, close, insistent . . . then farther away, and less and less insistent, till there was no more of it. More than half asleep, he had but a vague inkling of people moving about him---feet shuffling away, and bodies being heaved up out of comfortable positions---and that only served to strengthen his intention of continuing to lie exactly where he was. Voices there were, but he refused to let them mean anything to him---he was too gloriously tired and comfortable and drowsy to bother about anything in the world, except sleep; or to wonder about anything. He had wondered so much that he was purged of wonder. It was used up in him. There was one thing and only one---sleep.
But the voices would hang about, hover over him---they wouldn’t go to bed. They wanted him to move, it seemed, to get up and walk upstairs to some cell or other, where they were going themselves---a thing that he absolutely refused to do. Let them go, if they liked. He wasn’t going to start the whole business of going to sleep all over again---not he.
He rolled over on his face, determined to escape from them---but the voices pursued him; even gained a hold on his unwilling, shrinking ear.
“Another roll, and he will roll into the fire,” said one, “Shall I carry him up?”
The idea! Couldn’t they see he was perfectly comfortable where he was, and quite capable of avoiding the fire?
“Let him be,” said another voice, and he sighed his relief.
“I will lie between him and the fire,” came a third---a little eager one that he would love again to-morrow, if only it would leave him in peace to-night.
“Throw wood upon it, then, and keep it alive---for who knows what prowls when a fire is dead? For myself I sleep upstairs, when God provides stairs. There are panther in these parts . . . but that is thy affair, and his. Likely enough he means to run off in the night, and in the morning a bullock will be missing.”
“Nay, sleep easy, my father. I will answer for him. I will watch.”
Grunt.
Feet padded away. Something rustled above him, then gently descended to cover him---some warm, soft, quilted thing. Light fingers played over his feet and up his side to his neck, and left him swathed---tucked up from head to foot---and drowsily grateful. Then, with a little sigh of pleasure, someone lay down beside him and snuggled near.
There was warm breath on his face, and a soft, whispering voice:
“0 Durroo, I am content.”
Then, for a time, no more voices. Peace.
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
But they came back again soon enough---came back, botheringly, into a dream---the voices. Only this time it wasn’t Chhotu. Absurdly enough, it was Ahmed Ali and---of all people---Mr. Pell, who wanted him to get up and go upstairs. And once more he protested vigorously, shutting his eyes tight and stoutly refusing to budge, while they argued and nagged over him and flashed lanterns in his face.
And once more Kullu stood up for him, begging and pleading with them to let him stay where he was.
But it was no good this time. They picked him up in the end. Kullu began to sob; and, as for himself, he screamed out for all he was worth, because for the moment he thought they were taking him away from Kullu for ever.
Then a hand was clapped over his mouth. He was carried . . . and the sobbing died away . . .
And then everything seemed to be quite all right again, for he was where he had always wanted to be---on a bullock cart, and driving. Driving from serai to serai. And what a lovely drive it was, for the bullocks trotted all the way, like ponies, without the slightest effort on his part, and there was a fine jingle of bells all the time. So he was quite sorry when he reached the next serai. The drive was too soon over.
And then again he decided that he did not, after all, mind getting there. For he was rather cold, and very tired, and bed was after all the best place for him, even if it was upstairs. He was quite grateful to have a quilt thrown over him, and to be left, warm again and snug, to sleep at last in peace.
But it seemed that, even now, he was not to sleep; for someone began coughing---Chhotu, it was, wheezing over his old pipe---and would keep on coughing and coughing, and choking and choking, till he was nearly driven mad.
So he had to wake up and open his eyes.
And then he thought he really had gone mad.
For the moment he could only stare blankly. He was back in bed in his own room, with that black box mocking him from the foot of the bed and Ahmed Ali coughing outside. No getting away from it; no use shutting his eyes and pretending that he was still dreaming---it was all too terribly real.
Yes, he was Drew again---miserable Drew. It was Durroo who belonged to the dream; and, if it were not for poor Durroo’s pink loin-cloth, lying disconsolate in the grate, and the faint fumes of serai that still clung about his pillow, he might almost believe that Durroo had never existed at all, that he was all dream from beginning to end. That was what made it so devastating---the cruel, callous completeness of Durroo’s extinction.
He felt stunned. He didn’t know what to begin to do. Staggering, it was, like a blow in the face.
If only he had realized . . .
For of course he remembered---the uneasiness, the sense of being dragged out unwillingly from great depths; voices calling, nagging, arguing far, far above his head, stabbing, as it were, into the heart of his dream. If only he had thought. But how was he to have known? There had been voices all along---Chhotu’s, he remembered, fussing about the fire; that had put him off his guard. If it hadn’t been for Chhotu’s fussing first of all he might have thought more of those other ones.
But the light, shining in his face---what had possessed him that he had not tumbled to the light? He must have been half awake, for he could distinctly remember wincing at the sudden glare close to his eyes. If only he had opened his eyes. But then, at that moment he had been clinging for all he was worth to sleep. That had been the fatal thing---his determination to sleep at all costs; because he had been tired; and sleep had seemed, just then, the best thing in all the world. Yes, it was sleepiness that had let him down---sheer sleepiness. That was the cruellest part of it---to have to pay so heavily for something one couldn’t help.
But fancy mistaking the buggy for a bullock-cart! For of course it had been the buggy. Why, he could hear the buggy bells now---“Jingle, jingle, jingle, jingle,” and the “cloppety, cloppety, clop” of Susan’s hoofs---he would have sworn he could spot them anywhere, even in a dream. And the rate they had come up the road---how could he have imagined that bullocks could travel like that?
Well, there it was. No use crying over spilt milk. Just his luck to have had bullocks on the brain, so that, when he had first felt the swaying and heard the trotting, he had instantly thought of bullocks and imagined that he was driving again. Naturally. That was the worst of a dream---it betrayed you by its very reasonableness, by its uncanny knowledge of things you liked.
The stairs again---wasn’t it just his luck that the last words he should have heard before dropping off had been connected with stairs? He had expected to be carried upstairs. So, no surprise when it had actually happened; no suspiciousness; no stopping to wonder why these were carpeted stairs instead of stone ones, and about twice as long---the dream had seen to that.
Ah, but there was one thing---Kullu’s sobbing. Dream or no dream, he ought to have paid more attention to Kullu’s sobs. Kullu wouldn’t sob so easily as all that . . . though he might be still sobbing, sobbing now. Poor Kullu!
Poor dead Durroo, too! He felt very like sobbing himself.
Silly, though, to give in already. He wasn’t quite dead yet. Try and do something, first of all, anyhow; and then, if that failed and everything failed, then was the time to sob.
But do what?
Obviously, get out of bed. Get out of the room. Get out of the house. Get out of the horrible, powerless blob of indecision that was Drew, and always had been Drew, and cultivate a little of the Durroo spirit, before it was quite, quite dead. Move. in fact There was a serai to be sought, and if that serai failed, try another serai. Find those carts. Go from serai to serai till you did find them---they, at least, had not been diddled by a dream, nor their drivers either. They were sound enough, plodding along somewhere---only it would be a mistake to let them get too far, through just sitting in bed. India was a wide, wide place. Millions of carts---millions of Kullus. Only too easy to lose them for ever, and then where would Durroo be?
Where he deserved, if he wavered one moment more.
Move!
He took the boldest course; walked straight to the door and opened it, catching Ahmed Ali, who was squatting outside, at the climax of an extra-sepulchral and heart-rending cough. But that didn’t prevent Ahmed All’s long arm from shooting out and effectually barring his path.
“Let me go,” he blustered, “I wish to go out.”
The only result was a firm grasp on his knee and a stupid, knowing grin on Ahmed Ali’s face.
“Already, Saheb? One would have thought that thou wert a little weary of being Nubbi Bukkus.”
“Oh, let me go!” he insisted, struggling, “I must go. It’s serious.”
“Doubtless,” mocked the brute, getting a firmer grip, “but unfortunately there is an order, and that likewise is serious---even more serious than thy desire. It is to the effect that thou art to stay in this room till twelve o’clock, when the trap comes to take thee to the station. Perhaps Nubbi Bukkus had forgotten that to-day was the day of going to school, but he will surely recall it now that he sees his box packed and his clothes ready. It is now close on eleven o’clock. . .”
Eleven! The carts would be gone. Hours and hours ago. They would start at dawn, and by now . . .
“I will kill you if you don’t let me go!” he whispered, hurling himself at the man, striking out, kicking wildly, butting with his head. He heard a grunt, and some portion of Ahmed Ali’s clothes came away, with a rip, in his hands. Then he was picked up like a baby and deposited within the room.
Ahmed Ali, unperturbed, stood at the door looking at him.
“Thou hast already gone far towards killing thy servant,” he said, in that good-humoured, bantering voice that was so maddening, “driving him out into the night to look for thee, and keeping him in the cold passage outside thy door. Cough, cough, cough . . . all thy doing. And, likely enough, fever to follow. And then, as if that were not enough, thou sayest, ‘I will kill thee.’ Well, so be it---kill on. I am wax in thy hands.”
“Thou art brass,” he said ruefully, “one big brass elephant. Had I an ancus now, I would prick thy hide.”
Ahmed Ali grinned.
“They say I am strong,” he said, complacently swelling himself in the doorway. And he looked it. Force was no use. The only hope was to wheedle. He had wheedled before---why not now? Ahmed Ali was awfully vain, and if he got him talking he might be able to dodge past him and slip out.
With an assumption of ease, he sat down on the bed.
“I will spare thee this once, Ahmeda Ji,” he said, “Tell me, now, how thou didst find me? Or perhaps it was someone else who found me---the ayah, and not thou.”
“Nay, it was I. How should they find thee? The matter was wholly entrusted to me. They knew nothing.”
Good. Most encouraging. Lead him on. Get him right inside the room, and then . . . bolt.
“I knew it was thou, Ahmeda Ji,” he said softly.
“Of course. The eldest Miss Saheb came straight to me. ‘Ahmed Ali,’ she said, ‘the Chhota Saheb is lost. He has left his clothes on his bed, even down to his shoes, and I cannot find him anywhere. Can it be that he has gone down to bathe and has been drowned?’ To which I replied, ‘Have no fear, Miss Saheb---he is not of the kind that God takes early. There is no danger of his being drowned. But maybe the thought of school hath caused him to run away. I will go, therefore, and look for him on the road, where his foot-marks in the dust will betray him, and bring him back.’ To which she responded, ‘Thou art a jewel, Ahmed Ali---I leave it all to thee. Bring him back as quickly as may be.’ That was about supper-time. So, taking only a lantern, I went down to the road.”
Better and better. Ahmed Ali was slowly but surely edging into the room now. But there was still a hand lingering on the door knob. A Little farther, though, and . . .
“What then?” he inquired, with a smile as eager and ingratiating as he could make it.
“What then? I looked for the imprints of thy flabby feet---to find them soon enough, crossing the road from the gates to the bushes, where, I saw, thou hadst lain down for a while in the dust, repenting, doubtless, of thy intention to run. For thy foot-prints went no farther, and, though I called and flashed the lantern everywhere among the bushes, there was no trace of thee.”
“And then?”
“Then I concluded that thou hadst chosen a more comfortable way and stolen a ride upon one of the carts, whose tracks also showed in the dust, down to Chandragalli serai. But before returning to the Miss Saheb and saying positively, as a less conscientious man would have done, ‘He hath gone down, Miss Saheb, upon a bullock-cart to Chandragalli serai,’ I put myself to the trouble of following the carts a short way---to make certain that no one had dealt with thee according to thy deserts and thrown thee off again. And presently I did indeed come upon an imprint of thine full in the middle of the road, so that it was evident that thou hadst been thrown off, or hadst tumbled off. But it was also evident that thou hadst been helped on again, for there were little feet beside thy feet---hard little feet beside thy flabby ones---and I knew that thou hadst found a friend.”
He groaned inwardly. That friend, where was he now? What was he thinking?
Kullu . . . what would his feelings be? He seemed to see a mournful little figure, drooping, very tiny, between the tall sides of a cart that went---dwindling, dwindling---down a long road. Drooping, because a dream had died. Poor little Kullu!
Ahmed Ali’s voice droned on. He hardly heard. He was lost in a brown study, following Kullu down the road, trying to invent some comforting thought for him, to carry him along till---till the dream rose up again from the dead.
“I went back to the Miss Saheb. Supper was over. They were playing the bajar, and singing songs . . . We got into the buggy, I and the Miss Saheb and Pell Saheb . . . At the gates of the serai the Miss Saheb called, but there was no answer. So taking the lantern and followed by Pell Saheb, I went inside the serai . . .”
“. . . I saw thee almost at once, sleeping beside a cart under a common cotton quilt, such as ahirs and similar low folk buy in the cheap bazaar . . .”
Oh, he hated Ahmed Ali---hated and loathed and detested him. But---patience. Kullu was at stake, and those fingers were lying very lightly on the door-knob now.
“Close to thee was a little boy of the ahirs---a dirty, common little boy . . .”
With an effort ho mastered a mounting and murderous rage. If only he had a knife---anything sharp---he knew where it would go. Slick into that pompous, complacent stomach. But he only had hands. What was the use of hands?
“. . . There was also a man of sorts, drunk or dead in opium, sprawling under the cart. I pointed thee out. Pell Saheb said, ‘This is never the Miss Saheb’s brother!’ ‘Brother he is,’ I replied, handing him the lantern, and picked thee up. The Saheb was all in a maze, after that. It was I who acted throughout---not that there was much to do, as I freely admit. For the man under the cart never stirred. And, as for the little boy, when he cried out and gave trouble, wailing to his friends above and making a commotion, a cuff across the face with my open hand was enough to send him spinning . . .”
It was too much.
“You brute! You swine!” he cried out, and flew at the man’s throat. Once more there was a brief struggle, and one grunt of pain and irritation when he got in a good tug at the beard. But in the end he was back on the bed, with a stinging and a singing in the ears, looking at the door.
He heard the key turn in the lock.
So that chance had slipped. Well, it couldn’t be helped. If he had it all over again, he would do just the same thing---when it came to that part about Kullu. Besides there was always the window.
He looked out. It was a long drop, but desperate people---in books, at any rate---made nothing of that sort of thing. They knotted a couple of sheets together and tied one end to the bed-post, and there they were. He would have to risk the chance of anyone’s being in the verandah underneath. And, anyhow, there was no one in the garden.
But sheets, he found, were awkward things to knot. Two went nowhere. By the time the knot was accomplished there was precious little sheet left. It was all knot and no sheet. And blankets were worse---they wouldn’t knot at all, till he thought of wetting them and twisting them into a sort of rope; and that took time; and when it was done the rope didn’t reach down far enough. There was still a fair drop after that.
However, beggars couldn’t be choosers. He climbed up on to the sill; gave a tug to see that the bed-post end was firm; looked down with some distaste at the dangling untidiness that his hands had created; commended his soul to Providence; thought of Kullu; and gingerly lowered himself out of the window.
The bed-post creaked ominously, so ominously that he kept a hand on the sill. He saw the knot tighten, and felt the first sheet stretching in his hand in little jerks, like a live thing, as his weight told. Far down, between his feet, he saw gravel---hard, sharp, callous little pebbles, waiting for him. It suddenly became immensely difficult to forgo that purchase on the sill, and trust to the first of the sheets. It looked such an old sheet. There was a little hole in it that seemed to be getting bigger. He watched it, fascinated, unable to let go of the sill.
Then, suddenly, he saw the top of the door swing inwards. There was a rush across the room, and too late he let go. The hand that had been holding the sill was caught in a grip of iron---then the other hand; one quick lug, and it was all over, and Ahmed Ali was carrying the bedclothes out of the room.
He stood, rubbing a grazed elbow, and watched the tail of his rope waggle away through the door. Another chance gone---but this time, much as he detested Ahmed Ali, he couldn’t help feeling a slight sense of relief. Those knots had been so very clumsy, and those pebbles had looked so very---so very, very hard. He wasn’t built for jumping out of a window. Better save himself for jumping out of the buggy instead a little later on. Yes, that was the plan---jump out of the buggy; and. really, though the uncertainty was hateful, he wouldn’t be losing any time, because of course the buggy would reach Chandragalli in less time than he would take to run there. In fact the buggy would be useful, rather than otherwise. They would put him at the back, of course---they always did. Les---Les would be going, of course; always on the job, Les---would sit in front, and he would be behind with that beastly box. Easy to hop off. Chandragalli bazaar would be the best place. Hop off and nip down a side street; hide in some yard or other, to get rid of the horrible College clothes that he would be wearing; and then . . .
Ahmed Ali came in. A tub and hot water this time.
“Miss Saheb giving the order to undress and thoroughly wash the Chhota Saheb, as he is sure to be verminous from the serai,” he explained coldly, “There is no necessity to undress thee, and no pleasure whatever in washing thee, but I exist to do the Miss Saheb’s bidding. Sit down, therefore, in the tub.”
He submitted to the indignity without a murmur, hardly noticing the subsequent scrubbing and rubbing---so busy was he maturing his plan. There was a little crooked street about the middle of the bazaar, leading down into a wood-yard. That would be the one. It would be empty at mid-day---you never saw a soul in Chandragalli at mid-day---and he could hide among the wood-stacks. Les was short-sighted, and Perbhoo the syce was lame---besides, Perbhoo hated leaving Sarah, especially in the bazaar, and with luck there wouldn’t be anyone about to hold her head---so he could easily give them the slip. As to changing his clothes, he must have his buttons ready undone and his shoes unlaced---and the loin-cloth, of course, on under. So he would walk out of that wood-yard as Durroo, pure and simple, in two ticks.
Lucky they had forgotten to take away the loincloth . . .
“That is done. Here is the towel, and thy clothes are upon the bed. The beestie will remove the water when thou art gone, and I think it is the dirtiest water the beestie will ever have removed. I go to bring thee thy tiffin as ordered by the Miss Saheb. The Miss Saheb is very merciful. Hadst thou been my son there would have been no tiffin.”
Again the lock clicked in the door. He rescued the strip of pink stuff from the grate; dried himself; and put it on. It had a pleasant, homely, encouraging cling about it, and, as he surveyed the effect, he felt more hopeful---more like Durroo; less like Drew. As he needed to feel, for the clothes that had to go on top of it were simply horrid.
He could hardly bear to put them on---such soulless, colourless clothes; cold white and deadly black; no relief anywhere, no ray of cheer. When it came to brushing his hair----for Les mustn’t suspect anything---it was torture to look in the glass; to see, poking up from the stiff Eton collar and the black bootlace of a tie, not his own smiling, sunny face, but the face of some sulky, sour-eyed stranger. Impossible to see Durroo there. Impossible to believe that somewhere beneath that merino coat and vest, glossy black, smelling of the shop, and wholly abominable, the heart of Durroo was still beating, were it not for the warm clasp of the old, familiar flannelette a little lower down. Never, never had he felt so passionate a disgust for mere clothes. It would be a pleasure to tear them off, and leave them to moulder and green and provide provender for the wood-lice in some murky recess of that yard.
Meanwhile, though, he must suffer. He must put up with the discomfort and the starchiness and the shoppy smell; and, when the time came, go downstairs wearing a meek and penitent look, as one who would say, “I’ve learnt a lesson, and I’ll never, never do it again.” No need actually to say it, but he must at least look it. After all, it was only for an hour or so. And then . . . and then, oh, the joy of feeling his own free limbs again! Of taking the sunlight, warm and real, in his arms, and hugging it to him. And thinking, “No more clothes---ever!” And then---dancing down the road to catch up Kullu . . . oh, all was going to be well!
But, talk about impatience! He was all on tenterhooks when Ahmed Ali came in with the tray. A boiled egg---he couldn’t sit down to eat a boiled egg. After all that had been said about eggs last night, too. And with a spoon---after all that had been said about spoons.
Still, he would have to eat something. It might be hours before he found Kullu. And while he was eating, it would be nice to think: “This is the last egg. This is the last time I shall ever eat with a spoon. Never another cup of tea after this. No more bread and butter, no more rice pudding, no more cold mutton for ever and ever. Only rice that is rice, and chupatti that tastes of the wheat, and meat with a wild, gamy tang.”
He beheaded the egg. But he couldn’t face it, after all. It wasn’t boiled enough to have tempted him even in his egg-eating days, before his palate had been educated to better things. It was “runny.” He threw it out of the window and, with a certain satisfaction, watched it explode in a rose-bush, like a pallid, daylight squib.
The last egg.
The last mutton---he got it down somehow, by dint of closing his eyes and imagining that marvellous sauce; making believe that his fingers were still plastered with it, and his mouth aglow. But it was uphill work, and he was heartily glad when it was gone.
The last rice pudding---it was a revelation even to him. What did they do to the rice? There must have been a time when it had grown, and felt the sun, and tasted of something. And as for bread and butter. . . .
Oh, for a chupatti! Oh, for something to gnaw, and try your teeth on, something that left your tummy comfy and your mouth clean!
One more piece of bread and butter, and he would be sick.
Yet he was hungry. If a brown hand were to shoot through the window and deposit a steaming volcano, such as he had in his mind’s eye, upon the table, he wouldn’t leave much of that volcano. But . . . bread and butter. No.
Nor weak, washy tea either. Tea poured out of a pot, hot and strong and brown, was passable, if you put plenty of sugar in it. But tea carried in a cup from the other side of the compound; tea that had slopped in the saucer; tea with the tea-leaves floating on its pale surface, and no sugar to put in it---never. Bath-water was better.
Well, it was over. He had eaten his last tiffin, and felt as empty as before. To-night he must make up for it. He would ask Kullu if he could have a second helping, or at least an extra chupatti. He would be needing it by then. But Kullu wouldn’t stint him. Kullu would see to it that he had enough. When he found Kullu, that is. . . .
Of course he would find Kullu.
If only the buggy would hurry up and come round, if only he could start. It was this waiting, with nothing to do but look out of the window, that was making him anxious. Once he was on the road, and there was a chance of seeing Kullu, or anyhow of getting ready---undoing his shoe-laces and so on---he would be all right. It was only this hanging about that was so nerve-racking. You couldn’t help imagining the road, the empty road, stealing out of Chandragalli, leaving the little roof of the serai lonely in its wake, and dwindling, dwindling among the hills. What was a day’s journey on that road?
Nothing. A mere hank in a far-flung endless thread. How far would his feet---flabby ones at best; Ahmed Ali was right there---how far would they take him before night fell? To the end of the valley? To the first green hill? Doubtful.
And what of the valleys beyond, among the hills that were blue? What of the roads, that web of which this road was after all but a single strand? And, beyond again, the huge, unmeasurable spaces of the Plains? India? What chance had he of finding six little crawling carts, once India had swallowed them up and they were gone? When he didn’t even know where they came from---which of the thousand valleys, the million villages---and had never thought of asking where they were going.
“Serai to serai”---what was the use of that? There were a million serais, and into them there drove at night ten million carts. Ten million carts---and he was looking for six---and still the buggy wouldn’t come, so that he could at least begin to look. . . .
A cough at the door made him jump. But it was only Ahmed Ali coming in to take away his box.
“Why doesn’t the buggy come?” he raged, “We shall be late. We shall miss the train.”
Ahmed Ali gave him a curious look.
“Thou art strangely anxious to catch that train,” he remarked dryly; “had it been a cart, now, I could have understood better.”
He bit his lip. He must be careful.
Then Les came in.
She was dressed, as he had guessed she would be, to go with him. She was dust-coated, and goggled, and green veiled, and she imported a smell of kid gloves. There was little of her face to be seen, but what he could see was ominous---distinctly ominous. Her mouth, for instance---like Kullu’s unknown lady in the railway carriage, she had her veil drawn up above her upper lip, where it lay like a wispy green moustache---her mouth was severely compressed, and the crumb that adhered to one corner of it trembled. Her eyes---well, she had a look in her eyes that no green veil could soften.
“How could you, Drew---and the last day, too. What possessed you? Those filthy, horrible people . . . what induced you to do it?”
It was the type of question that required no answer. He gave none: merely looked meek and listened for the buggy bells.
“What poor Mr. Pell must have thought I can’t imagine,” she went on, tapping with her foot on the floor, “Our guest, father’s guest, seeing you like that . . . he looked quite upset. Shocked. And I don’t wonder. You might have thought of us, Drew, really you might.”
Us---that was all they cared about---themselves. If Mr. Pell hadn’t happened to have seen him there wouldn’t have been half such a fuss.
“Well, you’d better come down now and say good-bye, though really you can’t expect any of us to feel very sorry you’re going,” the crumb on her lip trembled with emotion, “it’s beyond human nature. You should have thought of us yesterday, if you wanted us to think about you to-day.”
Us, us, us . . . however, this was almost the last of “us.” A few minutes of patience, and “us” would be done with for ever. And, from what Les had said, it looked as if there would be general relief all round.
“Perhaps it’s as well I’m going,” he couldn’t help saying.
“It certainly looks like it,” was the dry answer, “and you’ve only yourself to thank. You should have considered other people, Drew.”
She went out. He followed. Between the banisters he saw, below, a bald head emerging from the study---like some rotund, flesh-coloured fish swimming out of a subterranean cave.
“There’s father,” said Les, “I’m sure I don’t know what he would say if he knew.”
Something that didn’t involve more than three words at most---he was certain of that. And you couldn’t get much variety out of a three-word man---nothing, at any rate, that could be called exciting. That was perhaps why he was experiencing no emotion of any kind whatsoever at the thought that he was about to hear, the last three words of father.
Actually, when it came to the point, there were about two and a half; a sort of valedictory grunt---“Groob,” it sounded like, and was possibly meant for “Good-bye, my boy”---and a brief reference to finance. By the time he had pocketed a ten rupee note the study door was in its usual condition---firmly closed.
Barby and Vic next---waiting one each side of the front door, like rather long-suffering sentinels. Each wearing a patient, pious expression, as if to say, “You don’t deserve to find me here at all, and I think that, under the circumstances, I’m extraordinarily forgiving. But don’t expect anything in the nature of a demonstration, because you won’t get it.”
Neither did he want it. Enough for him that, at last, the buggy was at the door; that Sarah, anxious to be off, was cocking her brown ears at the road; and that Perbhoo, having finished stowing the box away under the seat, was preparing to start. A little patience, now. Only a little.
But it was sorely tried, even at this last. There was one of those silly, footling little delays. Les had forgotten her book; the others ran to fetch it; they couldn’t find it. “It doesn’t matter.” “Oh, but it does.” “Really it doesn’t, dears.” “But of course you must have it.” Talk, talk---he nearly went mad.
Only a few seconds---but anything might have happened to the carts in a few seconds. It might make all the difference between finding them and missing them. Suppose they took a short cut somewhere---only a few seconds. . . .
Oh, they had got the book. Thank goodness!
“Good-b . . .” he began. No use. It was something else now.
“Do you think you ought to go, dear. It’s such a trying journey. Let me go instead. Truly, I wouldn’t take a minute to dress. You lie down. She looks worn out, doesn’t she, Barb? She oughtn’t to go.”
“Of course I’m going. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Not a thought of his going. Much they cared whether he looked worn out or not. All they did was to look daggers at him, as if he had been actually trying to wear Les out.
“I’ll nip up and get ready in two ticks,” repeated Vic, without, however, showing any signs of nipping.
“Can’t he take himself to school?” grumbled Barby.
“Of course I can,” he put in eagerly, but without effect. They were off about something else---cushion for Les this time.
And every minute those carts---somewhere, on some road---were trailing farther and farther away. Dwindling. Getting mixed up, merged in the moil and the dust of the million carts of India . . . and Les must have a cushion. Cushion! He’d cushion her.
At last!
“Good-bye, Drew.”
Peck on the right cheek. Brief tickle of golden hair.
“Good-bye, dear.”
Peck on the left cheek. Ditto of dark hair. Taste of powder.
“Good-bye, you dear thing. Come straight back.”
Warm, wet, succulent embraces, involving last-moment adjustments of Les’s veil. Murmurs of “Saint and martyr,” and similar exaggerations, while he danced from one leg to the other, trying to get by, frenzied at the thought of those dwindling carts. But would they move---even now? Not they. Les and Vic were locked in a long ecstasy; Barby, oblivious of him, was regarding them with moist eyes. . . .
He trod on her toe---it was the only way to get through---and ran out on to the steps. Then, suddenly, the very heart seemed to die within him. Hope crumpled up, like something shot in mid flight, and dropped. For Ahmed Ali was coming too.
No hopping off the back seat now; no slipping down a lane to a wood-yard and setting out, free, to find the carts. The carts would go on---on---on without him. For there, ready on the back seat, sat the policeman.
He would never find the carts, never see Kullu again, never set eyes on any of that, good company. For a few days they would talk of him; perhaps, as they turned some corner, and left some road behind, they might even look back for him, and wonder whether he would find his way. Then they would forget. And that would be the last of Durroo.
Oh, why hadn’t he thought? He might have known that Ahmed Ali would be in at the death.
“Come along, Drew. Don’t stand staring, or we’ll miss the train. Get up by Ahmed Ali. What’s come over you?”
Just the way. All flurry and bustle, now that it didn’t matter---now that it was too late. Just the way.
Spiritless, stunned, he took his seat. Ahmed Ali tucked a rug round him, pinning his legs adroitly.
“To save thee from falling off a cart a second time,” he explained, with a grin, “a second time it might be painful. We do not want to lose thee.”
Then, with a jerk and a jingle, they were off.
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
“You might at least have waved,” said Les, over her shoulder, a moment or two later.
Somehow that was the crowning insult---he might have waved. With his world toppling down in ruins---with Kullu lost, and the carts gone astray, and the policeman’s hand ready to catch him by the collar if he so much as moved---he might have waved.
Waved!
“Here were thy footprints. See if thou canst see them now,” came a mocking voice in his ear, “Here too are the thorns where I tore my pajama. Look well, that thou mayest remember when thou art at school.”
He screwed his eyes up tight. He refused to see the road come curving down to him---empty. No rumble-rumble---r-r-rump of the carts’ slow coming; nothing but their old tracks on the white road, and their dust on the thorn bushes, to remind him that they were gone.
“Here thou didst climb up upon the cart.”
Kullu’s cart. And in a moment Kullu’s head would come bobbing up over the wood-pile, and Kullu’s round eyes---so bright, so, somehow, doggy---would stare; and then the face-making; and all the palaver over his driving. He hadn’t been at all nice to Kullu about that--- thinking of nothing but his own stomach. It had served him right to fall off, really.
“And here thou didst fall off the cart,” murmured the torturer, “How much better it is with Ahmed Ali at thy side than that common little boy.”
“Oh, chup!” he muttered, firing up. What had he done to deserve this persecution---this constant calling of attention to things that he wanted to forget? Was it a judgment on him, for taking the brute’s name in vain and inventing stories about him? Was he being paid back for all that tale about the kidnapping, which had so deceived Kullu? “And thou wilt slay that khitmatgar?”--- quite serious, as if slaying “that khitmatgar” were a matter of course---he could hear it now. A fine figure he had been with his “Assuredly”---and a fine figure he was now!
Slay that khitmatgar indeed---if only he could!
Yes, it was a judgment on him for having talked such a lot of rot. If he had spent a little more of his time finding out about Kullu---where he came from, where he was going to---instead of inventing fine stories about himself, he wouldn’t be in this mess. Instead, he would be laughing up his sleeve at Ahmed Ali, knowing that, the moment his back was turned, he could slip off and follow up the carts. To-morrow, if not to-day. If only he had made sure of the name of that next serai.
Nor would the thought of the school keep on cropping up to worry him, however much he tried to think of other things. If only he knew where to go, what place to ask for, what road to take, school wouldn’t be troubling him for a moment. A school wasn’t a prison. It might be anything else that was horrid, and probably it was---but at least it wasn’t a prison. People---in books, at least; and books must occasionally be right---people had no particular difficulty in running away from school. True, they were generally caught again, but that was because they were---like himself---improvident. They never made up their minds where they wanted to run away to. Running away in itself was nothing; where you ran to---that was everything. He would run away, of course, if they ever got him as far as school. That went without saying. But where? Where? Where?
Here was the serai. But the serai couldn’t tell him. Little account it kept of who came and went, and whence they came and where they went. A jumble of cart tracks at the gate; a grey ghost of a dead fire; a bone or two picked clean by the birds and the rats; a litter of chaff and a few old rags---that was all the serai had to show for an evening’s happiness . . . if it was really there that he had been happy, for in its desolation he hardly recognized it at all. Without the firelight, and the faces, and the fun it was a sorry old husk of hospitality---the serai. Nothing wonderful about it. Just one of a million, up and down India, all much alike---when they were empty.
How Kullu’s words---that he had thought so fine and picturesque and romantic---mocked him now: “Ours are roving carts, going from serai to serai.”
Delightful, treacherous vagueness. So subtle, that he had never thought of disturbing the picture it suggested---that dim, serene picture of life as one unending serai---with a single practical question, such as, “Which serai next?” To have asked that would have been to lose a fragment of the romance.
Well, he was paying for his romance now. Here were four roads, splitting Chandragalli into quarters; each taking a different valley, and each leading to a different serai. On each of them were cart-tracks, converging at the cross-roads into one great slur of tracks, where dozens of carts had gone their ways.
Hopeless. Even if he were on the ground, and free to make a close inspection, he could never tell which way they had gone. No, his only hope would have been to ask a coolie. Then he would have found out. Someone would have seen. Someone would know---to-day, while it was fresh in their minds. But if he were to ask to-morrow, they might have forgotten. And every day the chance of their remembering would be less; and every day the carts would be moving on. Serai to serai . . . that maddening vagueness again.
But this was the place---these cross-roads. Back here he must come---whether from the station, or from some other station on the line, or right away from Bareilly---back here he must come and begin again. So the sooner they reached the station the better. Meanwhile . . . carts!
Carts! Ahead. Carts lumbering in a cloud of dust. Over Les’s shoulder. If only Les would sit still . . .
Suppose they were! Suppose they actually were---that that black blob on top of what looked like sacks---yes, certainly sacks---suppose it were Kullu’s head. Easily might be. Too far to tell.
They might have started late, mightn’t they?
A short day’s march---just a mile or two---to the station, perhaps. Why not? And loading up the sacks---fetching them too, perhaps from some farm up the hill---that would take time. Even if they had started at crack of dawn---and why should they necessarily?---sacks would take time. With only Chhotu and the two brothers to load. Kullu couldn’t. They were heavy-looking sacks---great white things. Nor could the old man, or Jugtoo . . .
Or perhaps it was something to do with Jugtoo. Jugtoo had fallen off and hurt himself---that might be it. Accident. Anything. They must be the carts. They must be.
He’d jump off, of course. No holding him. Jump off and make straight for Chhotu. Simply. One glare from Chhotu would be enough for Ahmed Ali. Run for his life, Ahmed Ali would. God help him if he didn’t!
Les? Send her home. Simply say, “Good-bye, Les. These are my friends. You’d better go home quietly.”
But were they his friends? Were they? If only he could see. What with Les’s hat and that great ballooning veil . . .
“Those are not thy carts. They are supply carts from Ranikhet. There’s a duffadar in khaki riding at the head. Alas! A great pity; but the duffadar is unmistakable.”
That voice again. Just as he was beginning to think, to hope, to believe . . .
“Thou wilt see many carts, but seldom the same carts twice. The particular carts which are in thy mind will have travelled from Chandragalli serai about nine kos---which is eighteen miles---but in what direction, God knows. It is unfortunate that they are among the carts that thou wilt certainly never see again.”
Tears came into his eyes---hot ones, angry ones. The carts ahead blurred into a mist, but even in the mist a duffadar was riding. Ahmed Ali was right. Why were such people allowed to be right? Why didn’t their tongues fall off? Why weren’t they stricken dumb?
“But be comforted. What’s in a cart? One cart is like another cart, and there are many. Thou wilt have no lack of a choice.”
The taunt was only too true. They were many---more than he had even imagined. As they neared the station they kept coming upon them---carts in sixes, in dozens, in twenties, in fifties; some coming up; some going down; corn carts, wood carts, pleasure carts, all bullock-drawn, all looking alike in the distance and the dust, when they were end-on to him---the same plod of horned, humpy beetles, trailing a white cloud, and rumbling, rumbling along. with the same slow sound. And every time he felt the surge and shiver of hope---perking up in spite of himself and thinking, “These, these must be they!” ----only to hear, in that taunting whisper, some very good reason why these shouldn’t be they. The bullocks were the wrong kind---they were too big, or else too small, or the wrong colour---always something to kill that new-born hope of his when it had hardly begun to breathe.
And then, to make it harder still, it must needs be market day in Kathgodam. Perbhoo had to walk the pony through the pack of country-people that pressed, chattering and chaffering, round the open booths in the station road; and if carts were misleading in the mass and the dust---what about faces? The bewilderment of those multitudinous faces---so many of them elusive, pre-occupied, turned half away, as if to evade the recognition that he sought; faces that would not wait to be claimed, would not keep still. . . . it was appalling. He couldn’t cope with them. He wasn’t used even to seeing crowds---much less to picking them to pieces and, from all the conglomeration of faces, extracting the one face that he wanted. All he saw was a confusion.
But in that confusion a dozen Kullus dodged and danced about. Every bevy of children, scampering from this bright booth to that, harboured its momentary, fleeting, phantom Kullu. And surely that black head, bent to draw the utmost of smoke from a glowing pipe, was Chhotu’s head. Or that one? Or again that one? Too many Chhotus. Too many Kullus. And as for Jugtoos---from every doorway peered the same drugged, lack-lustre eyes, to make him start, and wonder, and despair again.
Once, though, when Sarah nearly knocked over an old man, he was certain. That puckered, fluttering mouth. That red dribble down the chin. He made a jump . . . and Ahmed Ali’s hand closed on his shoulder like a vice, jerking him back into his seat, to remind him that even if it was the right old man---which it wasn’t---the policeman was there.
And this was only one little country town! There would be half a dozen such down the line, each as full of faces; and then the big town, with ten times as many as all of them could show, put together; and from that big town the roads ran, agog, and the teeming trains, to a hundred other towns as big and bigger . . . oh, he couldn’t go on with it. It was too immense, too terrible, to be thought of---the nightmare size, the nightmare crowdedness of India, when you were looking for only six little crawling carts and six faces.
He would never find them. What was the use of looking? What was the use of anything? With the policeman’s hand on his shoulder, what could he do? Better forget them. Soon he would be miles and miles away from any place where they could possibly be---and perhaps then it would be easier to forget.
But it wasn’t, he found. The farther away he got the better he remembered them and the more he thought of them. When the brief fuss of buying tickets and finding a luggage coolie and an empty carriage was over, and the faces---still more faces---of the countrymen on the platform had faded, and their gabble had died away; when there was nothing left to listen to but the throb of the train, and the flip-flip of the pages of Les’s book, and nothing left to look at but Les, who didn’t like being looked at, or the view out of the window---how could he help remembering them and thinking of them?
When there was a trunk road clinging close to the railway, as if for company---refusing to be parted from it, whether in the green glades of jungle, or among the sunny fields that followed, or in the tortuous intricacies of wayside villages---and upon that broad road were carts, and sitting on the carts Kullu’s cousins by the score---who could help thinking of Kullu? Think---there was nothing else to do but think. Les never talked in the train, even when she was in the best of humours---it tired her, she always said, quicker than anything; just as reading in the train, or anywhere else for that matter, tired him---so there was nothing for it but to think. And if you were going to think, it was at least less painful to think of pleasant things, even if they were past, even if they were lost for ever, than to think of the dark and dismal present, or the still darker and dismaller future.
Of Ahmed Ali, for instance, taking his officious stand as sentinel outside the carriage door, whenever the train stopped at a station. Or of school---worse evil even than Ahmed Ali, because it was evil unknown. Better surely to look out of the window and dream; and watch Kullu’s cousins on their carts, and imagine that one day Kullu himself---the one, inimitable Kullu of all Kullus, on the cart of carts---would come riding down to Bareilly by the big trunk road.
He could almost fancy it, looking at that road. It wasn’t like the little roads that he had left behind---the roads that strayed and played and loitered till they lost themselves and each other in the hills. It wasn’t just one skein of a tangled, heart-breaking muddle of network. It was more like a river---a big, broad, placid, leisurely, comfortable river---stretching across the vast, vague, motley puzzle of the Plains. With a deep dust in place of water, and a fine surf of dust in place of spray; and green aisles of trees, arched over shady side-tracks, on either of its banks. And what a comfort it was to see it there.
After that nightmare vision of India as a gigantic jumble, a riddle without an answer, a maze without a meaning---how good it was to see something permanent and definite and, as it were, confident in itself. It made him feel more confident in himself. It was like finding a friend in need. And as he pored over it, and came gradually to be familiar with it, he looked upon it more and more in that light---as a friend; a homely, good-natured sort of fellow who spent most of his time in the fields.
So he was sorry when it shook off the fields, and, under the eyes of bazaar windows, began to smarten itself up and take on a city air. When he saw it indulging in luxuries and extravagances---water-carts and lamp-posts and mounted policemen and motor cars---and passing the time of day with similarly equipped acquaintances at every corner. A road no more, its name was Street now; and he, who had thought everything lost long ago, viewed with a faint surprise the loss of something more---something that he was still capable of missing. For, watching it, he had been able to see Kullu, even to imagine that some day it might draw Kullu in with his cousins and bring him down to Bareilly----it had such an inviting, compelling air. But he could not picture Kullu on it now---only as a forlorn, scared little figure, left behind where the first lamp-post of the city put an abrupt end. to the long tale of green trees.
Then he lost the road altogether; and the last trace of touch with Kullu seemed, all at once, to go. He was passing through places where Kullu and his kind surely never ventured---down the packed platform of a city station, palled over with thunder-clouds of smoke and steam, hideous with the nightmare noises of men and machines; and a station yard agog with gharries, waving whips, shouting mouths---so forlorn and bewildered and dazed that, even if the policeman had not been dogging him close behind, he would never have had the nerve to run away. It was all so strange that he seemed to have lost the power of action---to have left it behind with the memories of Kullu on the trunk road.
Meekly he got into the gharry beside Les. Ahmed Ali hopped up on the front seat next the driver. A whip cracked; the ponies started, with a leap and a lurch; an old sweeper woman with a dung basket fled, shrilly abusive, from under their feet; Ahmed Ali and the driver answered in kind, and a lump of dung burst like a bomb on the front wheel---and they were out on the city road, exchanging the little, local amenities of the station yard for the roar and rush of the world.
It was impossible to talk for the dust---not honest dust that was nothing but itself, but dust tainted with motor fumes and stale with the stench of open drains. Les had her handkerchief to her mouth, and for that he was grateful---she would only lecture, or talk about school. Time enough to think about school when they arrived. Stave it off as long as possible---though it couldn’t be very long now---or, at least, only think of it as a place where he had to go, but needn’t stay long. Imagine that he was just paying a call with Les---one of those uncomfortable ordeals that he had so often been through before he had grown too dark for public exhibition---and that after the introducing and the tea and the talk there would be “good-bye.”
For Les at least. She would do the shaking hands part of it, and be seen off at the door, and be whirled off again in this fretful, peevish, troubled tide of traffic, all among the motors, and the ekkas, and the tongas, and the buggies, and the bicycles and the sordid, citified bullock-carts, to the station. Attended, of course, by her manservant. While he . . . he would decide to walk. He would be absent-minded and forget to say “Good-bye. Thank you for the nice tea and the lovely cakes.” He would just remember an engagement and slip away, without troubling anybody, before it got quite dark. Yes. To the trunk road. He might even drive---at a safe distance behind Les---to be sure of getting there. He could afford a tonga---he had ten rupees in his pocket, hadn’t he?
And once on the trunk road, of course, he would get out of these Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes that made the call-paying so lifelike, and exchange them for a blanket or something useful.
No, no---not a quilt. It didn’t do to think of quilts---it brought back the serai and that gleeful voice in his ear, “A blanket for me and my fine quilt for thee”; and the feel of that fine quilt, lightly thrown over, deftly tucked in; and again the voice, again and for the last time, very soft, very near, “O Durroo, I am content.”
Oh, why had he thought of it? It didn’t do. It only made him see difficulties; only made the road darker and longer and more forlorn; only brought nearer the yearning he would be feeling a few hours hence---for firelight and his friends. Better not to think so far ahead. Come back a bit and imagine instead---imagine for all you were worth . . .
Call-paying, not going to school. Just a simple matter of call-paying. Here were the bungalows with their nice little gardens and neat little drives, and the names of the people all beautifully painted on the gates. Mr. Chattergee, B.A.; P. W. Firkins, Indian Civil Service; Sir William and Lady Spurge---just the sort of people Les would love to be calling on, if she weren’t making for rather a larger house, with a somewhat longer name; that is to say, if its nameboard were anything like its note-paper. “Godelin College for the sons of European Gentlemen” it would be called, and . . .
Heavens! was this it? Was this school---this measly little . . .?
No. How silly. And how silly to get in such a state about it. It was only call-paying, remember. Fancy being frightened of “Gompertz Collins, F.D.S., European Dental Surgeon”---it wasn’t a bit like when you came to look at it; and if it had been “Godelin College, etc., etc.,” there was nothing to get into a sweat about. It was only for an hour or two. A sort of tea-party, that was all it was, with plenty of people of his own age and similarly attired, some of whom he had already noticed, driving along in similar gharries. Just a casual collection of people of his own age, whom he needn’t talk to unless he wanted to, and, after this evening, would never see again.
Doubtless many of them---all the new ones, anyhow---would be feeling as---well, as strange as he was. Possibly they were making their own plans for an early escape. He might have company on the road yet. Who knew? Anyhow, there was nothing to get into a state about . . . not yet . . .
“I shan’t stay long, you know,” murmured Les through her handkerchief---with a suspicion of defiance, as if she anticipated his begging and imploring her to stay as long as possible. “I don’t see that I need do more than just see Matron, deposit you, and get straight back. You’re sure to be having tea almost at once. Of course, Matron may offer tea,” her voice trailed on, engrossed, as ever, with her own affairs, “but I don’t think I shall accept, even if she’s very pressing. I can get a cup of tea at the station, and then I shall be sure of my seat. The only other thing to do would be to send Ahmed Ali straight back to keep the seat, but then there’s always a chance of my missing him. No, I think on the whole I’ll go straight back and get a cup of tea at the station. Yes, that’s what I’ll do.”
She sighed expressively into her handkerchief.
“Yes, I’ll do that.”
Exactly what he wanted her to do---it left the coast clear for him. And yet it annoyed him. She might just as well have said, “You don’t deserve to have me running about after you. You’re in disgrace, and I’m not going to put myself out for you,” and have done with it. And that word “deposit”---as if he were a parcel, not a human being at all. That passing, casual reference, again, to his tea---as if it were a matter of the least importance, to be dismissed lightly and forgotten before passing on to the absorbing, engrossing subject of her tea.
Yes, Les was a trying creature, and no mistake. No humanity about her, no tact. Who else in the world but Les would have talked so glibly about “getting away”---rubbing it in for all she was worth---to the one person with whom it might be supposed to be a sore subject? So easy for her. So comfortable. Just a matter of getting into a gharry and driving off. Whereas for him it might be extremely difficult, with so many other boys about---all wanting to ask him his name and see his stamp album and so on---if they were like the boys in books, that is.
He would have to make excuses---“Excuse me, but I’ve just remembered leaving something at the station. I won’t be long. I’ll tell you my name and everything when I come back.” He might even have to be rude, if they were what Les called “very pressing.”
And then, of course, there would be masters. He would have to be polite to them. It wouldn’t do to let them suspect that he was running away practically at once.
And all that would take time. It might he an hour or more before he was really clear of the place . . . and even then . . .
“Ah, there’s what I was looking out for. There’s the wall,” said Les, with sudden satisfaction, and proceeded to arrange her veil.
He leant across her and looked out, expecting to see one of those little yellow stucco walls, with ornamental posts at intervals, that enclosed most of the bungalow gardens that they had passed; rather more noticeable perhaps in the case of a school, since naturally there would be more to enclose, but the same sort of thing, of course. But what he saw was different---different enough to make him look twice, and then keep on looking. With a first flicker of doubt---a strange stir of uneasiness.
What did they want with a wall like that?
There was no doubt of its being connected with the College, for a gharry containing a boy was just turning in at a drive entrance in the middle of it; besides, Les was titivating---a sure sign of getting there. But---what an unpleasant thing to have running round you! On all sides, apparently---for not only did it spoil the last traces of good looks in the main road, but shot off at right angles, down a side road; and, as another road cut across the far end of the side road, there was every reason to suppose that that too came under the ban; and another side road at the other end, just to finish off the square, seemed clearly indicated. No, he did---not---like it. He didn’t like it at all.
Great ugly, staring, whitewashed thing.
And why, in the name of goodness, that glass---that scurf of glass all along the top, catching the slant of the afternoon sunlight and advertising itself? Did they grow fruit on the inside like they did at home---pears and greengages and so on? Was the glass to keep the boys out? Or---sinister suspicion that would not be denied---was it conceivably to keep the boys in?
Well, there was always the gate, wasn’t there? Where a gharry could drive in a boy could walk out, couldn’t he? But it narrowed you. There might be some awkwardness about getting through the gate, whereas anybody could hop over an ordinary, reasonable sort of wall. Someone---some master, or chowkidar or someone---might ask bothering questions. Where he was going? Was it urgent? So on.
Let them, then. A school wasn’t a prison, was it? Of course, you had to turn up for lessons and meals and prayers, same as at home, and very likely a few other things besides; but the rest of your time---surely that was your own. If you wanted to run down the town and shop, for instance, you could go, couldn’t you?
Of course. Otherwise what was the use of father’s handing out ten rupees? Last thing father would do without a reason. All he had to say, then, if anyone interfered with him at the gate, was that he was going out to buy something. A stud, say. No one could raise objections to his getting a stud.
So that was settled. Thank goodness! That wall had upset him---he hadn’t realized before how absolutely essential it was for him to run away at once, without an instant’s delay, and the wall had brought it home to him. Well, that was all right. No need to have worried, after all.
He sat back, reassured, and prepared to turn in at the gate.
But the next moment all his uneasiness came back, redoubled. Judging from what he had seen of the entrances to the other bungalows down the road, there should have been two gate-posts, possibly equipped with hinges, or even, in the special case of a school, with something in the nature of a gate. None of the bungalows had had actual gates---except one empty one, which had makeshift ones made of old packing-cases---but a school might be expected to be more particular. So he was prepared for a gate.
But not gates. Not iron ones, with spiked tops, polished like lances and shining in the sun. And who was that Sikh---that great big, bearded six-footer---with his khaki and his medals and his air of authority? What was he doing there, standing outside the little white lodge? Why were there keys in his hand?
“Is he going to lock them?”
The words came out involuntarily---he had not meant to say them aloud. But Les wasn’t going to let slip an opportunity for preaching. Not she.
“Of course he is. You don’t expect to run wild here, do you? Because, if you do, you’ll be disappointed. Salaam, chowkidar.”
Returning the Sikh porter’s salute with complacent dignity.
“But he’d let you out, wouldn’t he? Suppose you had to go to a shop.” He gasped, conscious of a terrible sinking within.
“I should think not indeed,” was the tart reply, “I know the town’s out of bounds, except with a master, and quite right too. Imagine you boys gallivanting all over the bazaar! No, your shop’s in the grounds, and a very nice shop it is too. Father and I were particularly impressed. So clean.”
So it was a prison. Nothing but a prison after all. He might have guessed.
“The proceeds go to the Church Missionary Society, so all the money doesn’t go into your stomachs, and there’s a very capable woman in charge . . .”
A prison---why hadn’t he thought? But what would have been the use? If someone had told him, “You’re going to a prison---whatever they may like to call it,” he couldn’t have done anything . . .
“. . . thoroughly reliable. I was glad to see she stood no nonsense with the boys. And all the tuck, as they call it, home-made. Most tempting. Even father . . .”
. . . not with Ahmed Ali sitting up there on the box. If he had jumped off the moment he saw the wall, Ahmed Ali would have caught him. Only too glad of the chance---with that sly grin of his over his shoulder, as if to say, “Well, here you are. Get out of this if you can.”
“I will! you beast. I will!” he ached to shout---if only to put the man in his place, and show that he wasn’t giving in. But down in his heart there was dread and dismay.
He didn’t see the smallest chance of getting out---short of the holidays. And they were months ahead, so far away that they weren’t worth thinking about.
Meanwhile what was going to happen to him? What did it mean---this prisondom that they hid under another name? In those white buildings, down the drive---what went on? He had never asked himself. But now it was urgent. The buildings were close. There were boys about. What went on?
It wasn’t fair, being rushed into it like this. At the last moment. Without knowing what went on.
As it turned out, he could not complain, exactly, of being rushed into it. There was quite a considerable space for reflection, since the gharriwala, with an eye to his fresh paint, slowed down to a walk to give room to a long succession of similar vehicles returning empty along the narrow drive. So he had ample time at least to take in his surroundings, if not to guess broadly what went on in them.
Not that there was much to take in. A stark, callous, geometrical simplicity in the lay-out of the place revealed, at first glance, what it was---a trap, naked and unashamed. It did not even pretend to be anything else.
The drive led like an arrow into the heart of the trap---a big, white, double-winged building, flat roofed and colonnaded below, enclosing three sides of a grass plot, which Les referred to as a quadrangle. In shape, he noticed with a pang, it recalled the serai---or rather mocked the serai. In shape---but in nothing else. It had none of that sweet, motherly, sheltering air. Its job, evidently, was not to harbour the willing, but to absorb the unwilling, guest; and the boys who were dodging in and out among the white, toothy pillars of the colonnade looked less like human beings than the dangling morsels of some giant’s meal---the giant being an untidy feeder, with gaps between his teeth. He pitied them nearly as much as he pitied himself. They had such a dishevelled, munched look. They had been inside.
Not all of them. A further assortment of victims---all dressed and prepared in exactly the same manner as he was himself, except that some of them wore striped caps instead of white topis and some were hatless---were dotted about the quadrangle in readiness to be devoured. Most of them were about his own size, though a few were a good deal bigger. Not that it mattered much. Big and little, all were dwarfed and made pitiable by the hateful building with the teeth.
“That’s the College itself,” said Les.
He didn’t need to be told so. There was no mistaking the grim purpose for which it stood. Such other buildings as there were being merely of a satellite description; a row of tiny red bungalows, for instance, fronting on a couple of gravel tennis courts, upon one of which a bald man in flannels---a master, no doubt---was waiting with evident impatience for someone to come and play with him; a green hut---probably, judging from the crowd clustered round it, and the paper bags in their hands, the shop where all was home-made; a cricket pavilion; shedding; and others. A little archipelago, as you might say, of islands known and unknown. And, instead of sea, a flat expanse of grass, faintly green in places, but mostly brown, and divided up---where free space permitted---by chalk hues and little red flags, to make perhaps half a dozen hockey grounds.
Finally, of course and needless to say, there was the wall---omnipresent, all-embracing; finality itself. For there was no view. No hint of a hill beyond; not even a cloud in the sky to counterfeit a hill; only the top half of a red building that might be a post office---some dark, distant city roofs---an English church spire---and, at intervals, the heads of a few trees, their lower portions jealously excluded by the wall.
For trees, clearly, were not encouraged at Godelin College. Or perhaps they refused to grow on the suspect soil---preferring, decent souls, to flourish elsewhere. Anyhow, there were none worthy of the name; only two thin trails of dwarf cypresses, marking the approach to the crested porch in the centre of the main building, and reminding Les, apparently, of the entrance to the Taj Mahal----though he couldn’t believe it was possible that a place as famous as the Taj could harbour such mean little travesties of trees. It was almost a pleasure to see, as they drove up the little avenue, a boy engaged in conscientiously kicking the base of each tree in turn. It seemed to show that there was someone else in the world who felt as he did---who yearned for real trees and resented the presence of these substitutes.
“Little vandal!” exclaimed Les.
But he let it pass. Why bother? If people didn’t know the difference between a real tree and one out of a doll’s garden, made in Germany, they didn’t. But oh, for some domes and towers of true green! Never till this moment had he realized how much he had loved and depended on the sight of trees. Why, even as lately as an hour ago, in his deepest distress he had been soothed by the sight of those green aisles bordering the trunk road. And now even that comfort was taken away.
Well, it was all you could expect from a prison.
“Do for goodness’ sake wake up, Drew. Show them you’ve learnt some manners.”
Oh, they were there, were they? He hadn’t noticed.
He got out. Les followed. A group of boys standing on the steps inside the big, pillared porch, and staring hard, explained Les’s agitation.
What were they staring at?
“Go on. Do something. Ask them the way to the Matron’s room,” whispered Les, all in a flurry, tapping her foot on the gravel.
Fancy her being nervous. Did she think they were staring at her? Because they weren’t. No such luck. They were staring at him.
“Go on, Drew---there’s a dear. You can’t expect me to---it isn’t suitable.”
Despising her, he approached the group, dragging feet that felt like lead up the steep flight of steps. A boy tittered. He heard murmurs:
“My godfathers---did you ever?”
“Belongs to, the All Black Brigade, he does.”
“Fancy letting that in here!”
Not exactly reassuring.
“Please, where’s the Matron’s room?” he managed to say.
“Chi-chi!” commented a boy in spectacles, “I told you so.”
“Ma Dhobi?” said another, with red hair and freckles, mimicking his voice, “You want Ma Dhobi?”
“He’s calling for the washing,” put in Spectacles.
“I’ll show you Ma Dhobi,” proffered Redhead, “Give her fits, your face. Tell your auntie to hop up.”
Les, ignoring the group, was pretending to watch the departure of his box on the back of some College menial. He had to call out, “This way, Les!”
More titters. And, when Les had passed, someone singing, sotto voce, a catchy, teasing little air:
“I am Portuguese Eurasian,
Guv’ment give me that pet name.
Father was a . . . “
He did not gather what father was, though he could well imagine. But what beastly boys! Was this what went on? Would everybody mimic his voice and make remarks about his face? Was it a disgrace, here too, to be dark and talk chi-chi? And, if so, what would they do to him when Les’s back was turned?
Oh, he would give anything to be getting out instead of going in. He didn’t like them. They didn’t like him. It was going to be awful. Absolutely awful. He couldn’t bear the place.
With a wink at his friends, Redhead passed through the big oak doors; Les stalked behind; he trailed. Now they were crossing the colonnade---long paved, pillared verandah running right and left. Rows of teeth, he thought, and shivered.
Now glass swing doors, deftly kicked open by Redhead. Now a sombre, tiled entrance hall, with more doors leading out of it---one, on the left, into a huge hall with pillars all round and a great pack of desks in the middle; another, opposite, into a similar hall, with many tables laid for tea, and khitmatgars in white flitting about; a third door, shut, labelled “Headmaster. Private.”; a fourth; a fifth; no end.
In the middle of the hall a white statue of a man, seated in a chair and peering out---enough to give anybody the jumps. “The Right Honourable Charles Ernest, third Baron Godelin, Governor of the North-West Province, Founder of this College, which bears his name”---no chance to read more. Through another door; down a passage; turn to the left; another passage; kitchens; more passage; linen room . . .
Suppose you were alone---at night---ill or something; suppose there was a fire, and you were desperately anxious to get out. You never would. You’d be burnt. You’d die. No one ever got out. You might wander for hours . . .
A door with a notice:
“MATRON’S ROOM.
Knock, please.”
“Here you are,” said Redhead, “This is Ma Dho---Matron.”
“Thank you very much indeed,” said Les, knocking.
“Might have stood me something---mingy old bunnia,” muttered Redhead, and was gone. But not without a savage glance at him.
“He’ll take it out of me,” he thought wearily, “He’s sure to take it out of me. Les might have thought.”
The door opened. A woman in a sort of uniform---dark blue, with a white apron---rose from her writing-table to greet Les. A darzi, trailing garments and cottons under his arm, slipped out, closing the door. Les and the woman became involved in the usual amenities, leaving him to the usual contemplation of the room.
He decided that it was a horrid little room. Wherever he looked he was reminded of what, after his recent experience, he most wanted to forget---boys. Not that there were any actually present, though he could hear their sounds in the distance and see an occasional figure or two knocking a hockey ball about outside. No, it was the photos that stared everywhere from the walls, reminding him of the boys on the steps.
“Ah, you’re looking at my boys. All my special pets---they always remember Matron. Perhaps when we know each other better . . .”
He looked, up, grinning feebly, and distinctly saw her start at the sight of his face. Her own face was sharp and expressive---one of those faces that say what they mean with their eyebrows---and there was little concealment of the horror and amazement which he inspired. The nice, friendly sentence which she had begun was never finished. Instead, there was an awkward pause before she said, in quite a different tone of voice:
“Perhaps, as you’re so rushed, Miss Bartle, we’d better go straight to his dormitory. It’s round in the front---not out of your way.”
Les assenting, they passed out on to a small private verandah, and thence on to the playing fields at the back of the big building. As they walked round the Matron pointed out, in her practical, matter-of-fact way, various objects of interest:
“That’s my sanatorium---empty so far, I’m glad to say, though a nice well-behaved patient doesn’t come amiss . . . And that’s my laundry. We do our own dhobi work . . . Here’s the swimming bath and changing rooms. That’s Gym. That’s Shop. I think I remember showing you Shop when you looked over. Yes, of course I did. But it’s new to him, isn’t it.”
She shot a penetrating glance at him.
“Unusually dark, isn’t he? I should have hardly believed you were sister and brother.”
“He’s very burnt,” said Les stiffly, “I’m afraid he’s rather run wild lately.”
“Quite so,” said the Matron, and hummed a little tune, as if she didn’t believe a word of it.
Les frowned. He was glad someone else besides himself was uncomfortable.
“I was only afraid he might find it a little difficult just at first,” pursued the Matron after a short pause, “Boys are so apt to jump to conclusions, aren’t they---India being India. And his complexion’s so very---er---uncommon, isn’t it? Of course, I noticed at once what he’d been up to. Quite a tan, I said to myself. But boys . . . well, you know, Miss Bartle . . . they have their prejudices.”
“I dare say,” said Les, visibly nettled.
“It’s the way they’re brought up,” continued the Matron sweetly, “So many of them officers’ sons, don’t you know, who’ve come out to settle in a new country. Rather narrow-minded, perhaps; but then they have to be on their guard, haven’t they? Personally I’ve always found that the right sort of Eurasian---girls, for instance, if you take them young enough . . .”
“I’m afraid, if we ‘re going to see Drew’s dormitory, we really must hurry, Matron,” said Les in her coldest and hardest voice, “I don’t want to miss my train.”
At any other time he would have felt an unholy joy at this bit of Les-baiting---she was so exquisitely touchy. But now he was merely apprehensive. This face of his---not to speak of the rest of him---was going to get him into trouble. People were going to do more than stare and make remarks. He felt it in his bones that he was going to suffer. Redhead’s face, as he had run away; that teasy little rhyme---how did it go?---about a Portugese Eurasian; the Matron’s remark, “he might find it a little difficult”--- everything pointed to acute suffering in the near future.
Not for any fault of his, mark you---as if a face that Kullu had called “gandam-goon and therefore beautiful” could be a fault; but simply because Les and father, in choosing the beastly school, had been afraid to own to his being a Eurasian---for their own sakes. Never thinking of him. Never pausing to find out what was likely to happen to a person of his colour, when confronted by his less-unusually-coloured companions. No, they had been obsessed from beginning to end by that “Sons-of-European-gentlemen” business. It sounded so well. “Drew’s school? Oh, strictly limited, of course, to sons of European gentlemen. Most particular”---he could hear them saying it.
And this was the result. Not only was it a prison, but it might very easily become a torture-chamber into the bargain. He could imagine Redhead getting to work; Redhead, with that nasty, nosy, freckled blob that he called a European face. Give him his own face any day. And why he should suffer for it . . .
“Here we are, Miss Bartle. You remember the dormitory wing?”
They were round at the front part again, at the end of one of the long wings, which stood out of an untidy, tousled laurel shrubbery like the stern of a white barge in a wash of sloppy dark green waves. An unhealthy green mildew, he noticed, was creeping up the wall, where the shrubs cast their shadows---and this accounted for the presence of an elderly mistri, with a broad brush and a big earthenware pot of whitewash, painting it out.
A homely sight, he thought, with his bare limbs and ragged loin-cloth, and one of “Potter’s” good pots by his side. Someone, at last, from the dear old workaday world outside---a human being, who knew what firelight meant and had slept in a serai instead of dozing in a dormitory. Worth a passing glance---for what he recalled, for what he represented---the old man.
It hurt him to hear the Matron say, in her sharp way: “I thought the order was to finish this by the end of the holidays, Mistri. You know no workmen are allowed inside when the Saheb Log are here. Finish to-morrow without fail.”
“Ji, Huzoor. I will get help and finish to-morrow.” Wearily, sadly.
Poor old man---last, lone straggler from another world, hanging on---only to be turned away. Well, if he only knew his luck, he was happier outside. No dormitories for him. No sufferings for the skin’s sake. Lucky old man, rather.
He followed Les and the Matron across the ubiquitous verandah and through the nearest door of a long series of doors, dotted at intervals down the wing.
“You remember this, Miss Bartle. We always put the new boys all together here in ‘Minto.’ All the dormitories are named after Viceroys, and all the classrooms after battles---so much more impressive, don’t you think, than the usual numbers and letters. You should hear them shouting ‘Plassey’ and ‘Sobraon’ in the hockey cup ties! He’ll be in ‘Kandahar,’ of course---that’s the form where the bachhas, as we call them, begin. We leave them to themselves as much as possible the first term.”
His attention wandered. What was the use of all those high-sounding names? A prison was a prison. A cell was a cell. You couldn’t alter them by calling them something else. ‘Minto’ indeed!
“It’s what we call a modified cubicle system . . .”
Modified cubicles! Just so many cells with wooden partitions, each containing a bed, a chest of drawers, a strip of blue dhurry, and a chair; six on one side of the room, six on the other; bare boards down the middle; door at one end, leading on to the verandah; door at the other end, leading into a wash-house, equipped with a row of white basins. Bus. Cell system, not in the least modified.
“There’s a chowkidar in charge of the verandah---one of our old soldiers. If a boy wants to leave the room at night he must ask chowkidar, who of course is in constant touch with the master on duty, who sleeps at the other end. There’s a strict rule against their leaving dormitory without permission.”
He was not surprised. Nothing would surprise him now. Given the prison, it all followed---cell system, warders, all the rest of it. Only the manacles were lacking. Perhaps they were kept in “Kandahar.” It wouldn’t surprise him in the least to see a dozen pairs ready on pegs, with a neatly-printed name over each.
For they were certain to be labelled. Everything was. Not only the cells in the dormitory, but even the paraphernalia of the wash-house---each basin, each locker for hockey clothes, each boot-hole, each hat-peg. Even their sponges, it seemed, were numbered and their tooth-brushes ticketed---his own with the rest. For someone had evidently unpacked his box.
“Hasn’t he any knick-knacks or photographs?” he heard the Matron say, as if he were guilty of some strange omission, “We allow something on the chest of drawers, but no tin-tacks in the wall. The others, you see, have theirs out already.”
The others, he was aware, had attempted to palliate prison after their feeble manner, and pretend it was something else; trotting out their poor little personal belongings and arranging them round their looking-glasses. Here a framed photo, here a Christmas calendar; an autograph birthday book, a stamp album; a little china dog with a pin-cushion in its paws; so on. A pathetic, pitiable array---the more so because it seemed to imply some sort of acceptance, a weak submission to the intolerable situation. These people---Baxter and Dench and de Silva mi., Hearsay and Lapeuta and Misquith, and all the rest of them, whoever they might be---were obviously determined to make the best of it, even perhaps to persuade themselves that they liked it. Well, he would never make the best of it, and never like it. It was prison, and nothing could make it anything else but prison, and people who tried to were contemptible fools.
“All sorted out and settled down, you see,” said the Matron, with breezy cheerfulness, leading the way out.
At that moment he seemed to see into her very soul---and it was exactly like an office; a bare, bleak office, where the prison records were kept. She might take in other people with her “pets” and her photographs, but she couldn’t take him in. That “sorted out and settled down” betrayed her. No one with any proper feelings could speak of human beings like that. Sorted and settled---ugh! And Les was actually agreeing with her.
“A very happy little party, I’m sure,” she bleated, “Now I really must be off.”
Good riddance---if that was all she had to say.
Give him the old mistri, splashing his innocent paint about outside, as before. Worth the pair of them put together---that last stray wanderer from the great outside. He longed to turn back and say, “Take me with you, mistri. Do what you like with me, so long as you get me out of here.”
But that, of course, was mere foolishness. Nothing could get him out. Matron and Co. would see to that.
Mercifully brief---the final act of incarceration. A short walk down the colonnade to where Ahmed Ali, with unconcealed impatience, was holding open the door of the gharry; a curt good-bye from Les to the Matron, whose remarks on the subject of colour evidently still rankled; a cruder one still to him, for possessing a colour that called for remarks; a kiss, consisting entirely of veil, rasping his cheek---and all was over. Without further ado the two arch-conspirators, having completed their fell work, proceeded to drive away, leaving him alone on the steps.
He stood, watching them dwindle---too miserable to respond to the one wave of a kid-gloved hand that expressed Les’s relief, or even to resent the mock salaam that registered the unrighteous triumph of Ahmed Ali. Noting rather, with a dull despair, that, the moment the gharry wheels were clear of the gates, the watchful porter pounced upon those gates and shut them---with a malicious, audible thoroughness.
Then the far-off clash of their closing was forgotten in a new sound---the bray of a big bell somewhere overhead; a raucous braggart of a bell that compelled attention, penetrating into the inmost recesses of being and exercising a curious influence on the lower limbs---like a twitching and tugging of wires. Impossible to listen to it for a moment without feeling the impulse to move, to run, to be busy. He was not surprised to see boys tumbling out of a score of doorways all along the corridor; and more boys streaking in from the playing fields, like black bees in swarm. There was the same summons to his own legs.
Faces flocked in, ringwise, towards the steps. He had a panic sense of multitude---of staring eyes; of twittering, buzzing voices. “Tea . . . tea”---the one word, thrown up to him, as it were, from all directions, caught his attention, and he saw in imagination, that dining-hall---lines of tables, rows of places laid; everybody pouring in at once and sitting down plump in their places; and himself left standing without a place to sit in. Stranded.
Wandering up and down---and everybody staring---mocking at his face . . .
Someone starting up that wickedly catchy little refrain---
“I am . . . Portu . . . guese Eur . . . asian,
Guv’ment . . . give me . . . that pet . . . name”
---and the whole multitude thundering in with the chorus.
And still nowhere to sit down . . .
Rather than face that ordeal he fled in first. At least he would make sure of a seat.
He was only just in time. Observing him, breathless, mob-ridden, at the door, a passing khitmatgar took pity, and with a “New boys sitting at far end, Sir,” escorted him to a distant table under a dais. Hardly had he sat down, with his back to the room, when he heard behind him the rush of feet, the scraping of benches, the almost instantaneous filling up of empty places.
What an escape! A moment more and he would have been caught, bang in the middle of the room. Now the only people who would see his face would be the new boys. They didn’t matter so much.
A boy slipped into the place opposite. He glanced up, meaning perhaps---he wasn’t sure---to smile; and saw surprise flit into a face that, he was certain, had been similarly prepared to smile, given encouragement---uncomfortable, suspicious surprise, that stayed. It annoyed him.
“You’re not such great shakes yourself,” he thought, for the boy was dark. Only it was a different sort of dark---a kind of olive. An inferior colour, but not so pronounced, certainly, as his own. Meanwhile, the staring match went on.
Others dropped in. The places beside him were filled in that same silent, surreptitious way. An albino---rather unfortunate, this---on his immediate left; a pallid specimen, with very short hair, practically white, and no eye-brows---put there by Providence to show him up. On his right a fat person with very red cheeks, who seemed to take up all the room. Both stared, sideways.
Suddenly the pressure on his right seemed to relax.
“Steady on, I say, Dench,” said someone beyond---someone with a sharp, inquisitive, freckled nose, who was also attempting to stare. He was aware, then, that this Dench was engaged in edging away from him, but couldn’t get far because the table was full. Twelve places, twelve boys---assorted; a big hulk with flap ears, like an elephant’s; a little foxy-face; some lumps, with nothing particular about them; some he couldn’t see at all, but could hear champing and munching bread and butter down the line---here, they all were, and all, to the best of their ability, staring. An uncanny, eerie experience, because---save for Dench’s next-door; neighbour---not one of them had spoken. Behind them the big hall eddied and surged with every sort of imaginable sound that human beings and crockery could produce---a troubled sea of din---but in this still backwater they seemed to be afraid of their own voices. They could only stare and stare---stuck---and munch bread and butter.
It gave him the jumps. He hadn’t somehow expected it from new boys. A glance or two he had been prepared for---even in the serai they had taken his measure before, good people, they had taken him to themselves; even there he had had his ordeal---but not for this cold, sustained scrutiny, directed entirely at him. They were all new together. Why didn’t they stare at each other? Why fix on him?
He was the last to arrive, of course---that might partly explain it. As that woman had remarked, they were “all sorted out and settled down” before he had appeared on the scene. Very likely they had already met at tiffin and got over a certain amount of preliminary work---so were able to concentrate their full forces on him; and presently, when they had made a really satisfactory job of it and turned him clean inside out, they would chuck it and make friends.
He hoped so, for he wanted to make friends with someone---with anyone; he wanted to badly.
Ordinary, common kindness was what he needed more than anything else at the moment---nothing tremendous---just a word from someone, and he would feel better. And the memory of last nights---when everybody had been kind in their ways, and one so kind that he dare not think of him---that memory would not be quite so painful, would not jab and jab.
If it was only last night. Somehow, sitting here, it seemed to him farther away and longer ago. Had he really had everything in the world that he wanted as lately as last night? That happiness---if it had lived---would it still be less than twenty-four hours old? Oh, this school, this school---it was sending him cracked! He must talk to someone.
He asked the albino for the bread and butter---in a little voice that hardly sounded like his own. The albino started as if he had been stung, but passed the plate. They watched him take a piece. They watched him eat it. They followed the very cup to his lips and down again, when he tried the tea. And when in desperation he looked away from them---up, because there was nowhere else to look, and he dared not turn round and face the multitude---what must meet his eyes but yet another starer, a horrid bust on a bracket, that seemed to follow his every movement with mild marble disdain. He began to wonder how long it took to go mad---would two meals do it, or would it take three?
Not more than three, he thought. Or would he starve first? For eat this bread and butter he could not. Even after soaking in his tea-cup it stuck in his throat. And as for the seed cake, he would think twice before he gave it to a dog.
And last night every time he had dipped his fingers into that brass dish he had tasted Heaven . . . but what was the good of thinking of that? It only made him hungry. Stomach-hungry. Heart-hungry. All-hungry.
Well, hungry he must go---for this was the end of tea . . .
A little bell tinkled. There was a great rumble as everyone stood up. Someone at the other end of the room said grace. And the tide poured out as it had poured in.
He tagged on to the new boys---a little sheepish huddle that lingered, muttering and wondering, till the tide was out. It gave him a faint feeling of protection to be with them. He felt safer---but no happier.. For, though there was less positive staring, there were furtive, doubtful glances; and now there were whispers too. Dench, he knew, was saying something about him to Foxy-face, and the others were trying to hear what it was. In a minute they would probably tell him they didn’t want his company.
And then what would become of him?
But they suffered him. He was allowed to trail along with them, in the desultory, hesitating little company they made, outside again, to hang about in the corridor and wonder what they ought to be doing. No one spoke to him, of course. But among themselves their tongues were loosened, now that they were less likely to be overheard, and he learnt something about them. That the olive-faced boy---who was just as Eurasian, he was sure, as he was, only nobody seemed to notice it---was called Lapeuta, and didn’t mind telling you that his father had something pretty important to do with a Rajah; that the albino was Misquith; that Flap-ears was Leith-Brown, and Foxy-face de Silva mi.; and that these, having arrived before tiffin, considered themselves a cut above the others, who had arrived after tiffin; and that Dench had shaken hands with the Headmaster---which perhaps accounted for Dench’s very superior attitude to everybody, especially himself; and other trifling personal matters.
But the important problems---what to do, where to go, no one attempted to solve. They just hung about, hoping for the best, talking in undertones, and pretending to be absorbed in the view, whenever---as was frequent---anybody went by.
Yet he was conscious of happenings---of strange, mysterious forces already at work among them. Fellow-feelings were emerging all the time---frail foundations of alliances being laid. Dench was gravitating, slowly but surely, to de Silva mi., because Dench was superior and de Silva mi. at least had the distinction of a brother in “Plassey.” Leith-Brown, a snob second only to Dench, was making tender inquiries after Lapeuta’s Rajah. Misquith laughed whenever a lump named Tutt opened his mouth---it was never funny; yet Misquith was observed to laugh. Two other lumps, named Piggott and Baxter, had a mutual interest in stamps. Slowly the group was disintegrating, splitting up into pairs. And, now that he noticed it, they were only following, in their fumbling way, the example of their elders and betters. The place was littered with pairs.
Promenading pairs, up and down the corridor, the quadrangle; hockey-enthusiast pairs, practising “passing” on the grass; intimate, linked pairs, seeking seclusion under the wall; half a pair waiting on the drive to greet the other half when he drove in---there was no mistaking the tendency. It was not universal, of course; but it was noticeable. Yet no one was attempting to make a pair with him.
He saw what would happen. He would be the only boy in the school who went about alone . . . till he starved or went mad, that is, and the merciful end came. Meanwhile, in the Matron’s encouraging phrase, he was going to find it “a little difficult”---more than a little difficult. Especially if he met Redhead. He had not forgotten that vindictive look outside the Matron’s door. And, going about alone, he would be so much more noticeable. Oh, if only he could hire someone just to trail about with when the others had settled their pairs. He wouldn’t ask him to talk, or show any signs of affection---only just to be there.
It wasn’t as if it would be for long, either. If two hours of Godelin could be like this, could reduce him to this state of misery---only two hours!--- he would soon be worn down. A day or two at most---a few more meals; a few more agonies in the corridor---and the hireling would be free to choose another friend.
Ah, exactly---Dench and de Silva mi. going off to explore. He had known how it would be. And Leith-Brown stealing away in the other direction to hear some of Lapeuta’s court secrets. Whispering, intimate, wrapped up in each other and the Rajah---already. And the rest would follow suit. Only a matter of time, once the rot had set in.
What was that?
“Let’s go and find ‘Kandahar.’”
That was Tutt.
“Oh, do let’s.”
Misquith, of course. Like an echo. Another couple gone. And where were Baxter and Piggott? Vanished.
This was desperate. Only himself, two lumps, and a little boy with enormous eyes and no chin, who looked as if he had been crying. And---Heavens!---the trio of them showed distinct symptoms of moving off together.
Something about hockey sticks . . .
He would lose them! He would be left all alone!
“I say”----in desperation he addressed a lump---“Do you mind keeping with me? Only for a day or two. I’ll . . . “
He was going to say “I’ll pay you,” but the lump---lumpish no longer, but alert, decisive---hurriedly cut him short.
“I’m going with Flake to buy a hockey-stick. Aren’t I, Flake?”
Instant decision on the part of Flake. They were off, their doubts settled, their problem solved. A mere suggestion from him had precipitated their alliance. But for him they might have languished apart for ever.
But were they grateful? Not a bit of it.
“You’d better fix up with Hearsay. He’s got no one.”
Casually---over the shoulder---as one might throw something to a dog.
“Oh, but I was going with them . . .” piped a puny, tearful voice. But he knew weakness when he saw it; and he hadn’t sunk so low as to be denied by a person who was given to tears and had no chin.
“You don’t want a hockey stick. You know you don’t,” he said, with sudden, desperate resolution, barring the path.
Hearsay hesitated. Hearsay yearned at the receding backs of Jonas and of Flake.
But Hearsay was puny. Hearsay had no mind of his own.
“Perhaps I d-don’t,” he stammered.
God had delivered Hearsay into his hand.
It wasn’t much---but it was something; and he meant to make the most of it. He would wear Hearsay as a shield. No more yearning after forbidden things for Hearsay. The alliance of Jonas and Flake should have full time to cement itself while Hearsay was being skilfully piloted to a deserted corner of the grounds.
In process of piloting he learnt the cause of the recent tears. Hearsay had been kicked. A sharp-toed shoe---he laid particular stress on the sharp toe---had stabbed him with almost surgical precision, in such wise that, every time he sat down, exquisite pains at the base of his spine recalled the exact shape and consistency of someone else’s shoe. Simply for going by mistake into “Plassey,” instead of “Kandahar,” without knocking. But “those louts” would kick you for anything. Their favourite pastime, according to de Silva mi., who was closely related to one of them, was to kick. “Rooting,” they called it. The only thing, therefore, was, at all times and all places, to avoid “those louts.”
He heartily concurred. That was exactly what he was doing, and intended to go on doing. This, then, they had in common.
But nothing else. From the start it promised to be an unhappy union. Hearsay could never be more to him than a mere convenience; he could never be more to Hearsay than a somewhat risky last resort. The boy’s puckered and uncomfortable expression---not to speak of an annoying habit of darting off in a new direction every time anybody came within a hundred yards of them---revealed that clearly enough. Hearsay was restive. And dangerous too. There was no subtlety about his avoidances. He plunged headlong where he should have steered delicately. A dangerous companion.
Every minute he expected to be pulled up and rooted.
Rooted . . . he had never been rooted. He would hate not to be able to sit down without recalling the imprint of someone’s shoe. And there was so much sitting-down---so much desk. Hours of it every day, according to Hearsay. No, he mustn’t run the slightest chance of being rooted.
“You’ll come in for an awful time,” he was reminded, “They’re awfully down on . . . “
The word “Eurasian” evidently should not soil those childish lips. But what a jolly Job’s comforter! Just because he had suffered a bit himself, wanting to make other people squirm. Peevish, insinuating little beast.
“If Lapeuta’s father hadn’t been something pretty important to do with a Rajah, Franks would have kicked him for coming here,” continued the malicious, peevish pipe, “He said so. ‘We don’t want eight-anna people here,’ he said, ‘unless they’ve got a jolly good excuse.’ And you’re worse than Lapeuta. I hope they won’t kick me again for going about with you.”
The selfishness of it---he could hardly believe his ears. When one thought of Kullu; Kullu who had given up his fine quilt on a cold night; Kullu who would give up anything---even his life---for his friend; Kullu who never said anything or did anything mean-minded in his life. And “worse than Lapeuta”---positively, as if darkness were a disease, instead of an adornment. But Kullu knew. “Therefore beautiful.” Oh, Kullu, Kullu . . .!
“What’s your father?” queried Hearsay, exploring the avenues of possible excuse.
“Colonel Bartle,” he said shortly, “Hazrat Bagh. Kumaon.”
Hearsay looked incredulous.
“Not a Colonel?” he said, “Why, mine’s only a Major. But of course he’s in British service. What’s yours in?”
“Kumaon Volunteers.”
“Oh, only an Honorary!” as if an Honorary were less than the dust, “Then he’s something else besides.”
“No, ho isn’t. He used to manage a brewery, but he’s retired.”
The literal truth. Anyone more thoroughly retired than father couldn’t be imagined---so much retired that he could hardly be said to exist. It seemed quite funny to be talking about him as if he did exist.
“What did he brew?” persisted Hearsay.
“Beer, of course.”
Hearsay’s jaw---if it could be called a jaw---dropped. “Flake’s father’s a Sir,” he muttered, and appeared to ruminate. You could see the passing of the thought: “Is this dark person whose father was a brewer of beer better than nothing or isn’t he?” He could sympathize, for much the same thought was passing through his own mind---was Hearsay worth humouring? Wouldn’t it be more satisfactory to root---since rooting was in vogue---to root once and reject for ever?
But then he would be alone. Absolutely and utterly alone. No, he must be patient with Hearsay. Hearsay must be retained, at whatever cost.
They walked on in silence. He gazed at the grass---there being nothing else to gaze at except Hearsay’s discontented little face and a section of wall---till his very soul seemed to grow green of boredom. He could picture a sort of creeping mildew of the spirit, similar to the effect of the shrubs on the dormitory wall. It would take more than the old mistri’s whitewash to wipe that out, though. And this was only the first day. He had been in the place . . . three hours. It was barely dusk. At least two hours before he could hope to go to bed. And even then, what hope of comfort? There was no comfort anywhere, save under Kullu’s fine quilt. And that was . . . where?
In some dusky serai? Lying forlorn in the bottom of the cart, while Kullu watered and fed the bullocks, and the men nursed the first frail flame of their fire? Would Kullu, as he passed, look at it and say mournfully to himself: “Last night it was over Durroo. Where is Durroo now?”
Poor Kullu. No drumming by the fire to-night in that serai, if he knew Kullu. Moping misery there, as well as here. But . . . better misery by the serai fire than misery with Hearsay on the Godelin grass.
“Do you collect anything?” broke in a fretful voice---the voice of the disillusioned, the man who has backed the wrong horse and knows it---yet hopes against hope. “I collect all three.”
“What all three?” he muttered, goaded.
“Stamps, eggs and butterflies, of course.”
“No!” he almost bellowed.
Something died in Hearsay’s face.
“I think I’ll go and find Flake,” he murmured, “if you don’t mind.”
His voice was quite expressionless. It was final. The little beast meant to go.
The bell rang.
“Roll-call,” gasped Hearsay, and began to run.
They were standing at the back of the big hall with pillars, in the tail of a long column that filled the floor-space and swamped what had seemed to him, glancing into the place when it was empty, a vast pack of desks. Far away, on a raised platform, a bald-headed man with a straggly untidy moustache, was braying monotonously in a high, harsh voice, and pausing between each bray for an answering voice, which might be anything---high or low, eager or reluctant, brazen or squeaky---but invariably said, “Here, sir.” The man was wearing a black gown. Similarly gowned figures sat at a table at the man’s elbow, taking a mild interest in the proceedings. Spectacles flashed in the gaslight, malting him aware, distantly, of a fair-haired young man, rather like Mr. Pell.
Fancy being taught by Mr. Pell. Fancy being taught by anyone except Kullu. Kullu had been going to teach him to drive the cart, and wash the dishes, and lay the fire; long, long ago. Nothing else was worth learning. Yet he would be expected to learn. Those were masters---he would have to reckon with them too, to-morrow. But to-night he couldn’t---there was too much concentrated boy between him and them. Endless heads, of every shape and shade permissible to heads, growing, like strange globular vegetables of the cactus order, out of black tubs with white rims. That was what they looked like in their black merino coats and their Eton collars. If only that was what they were! If only they were fixed, and there was no fear of the mass of heads seething into significance as faces.
To be looked at, merely looked at, by so many---it gave him the shivers to think of it. Yet the time was coming. The time must be coming very close---for the “Here, sirs” now were of a uniform junior brand, all squeaks and quirks---when he must make his first public utterance, and stand ashamed before them all. For he was certain to make a bosh of it.
“Here, sir. Here, sir. Here, sir,” he practised, feverishly striving for the casual, the careless, the commonplace.
Hearsay’s lips also moved. Hearsay, he saw, was sweating. Well, so was he, but not so moistly as Hearsay.
“New boys in alphabetical order. Answer up, please. Bartle!”
It was thinking about Hearsay that did it. Taken unawares, unexpectedly brayed at---what more natural than to respond with a stentorian “Hearsay” when he meant “Here, sir.” But---the pity of it---he couldn’t leave it at that. He must needs improve upon it, correcting himself, clutching at the elusive sounds as the victim of a quagmire clutches at the stray straws at its edge, till he sunk, conscious to the last, into the uttermost depths of dither.
“. . . Hearsi, sir . . . hearse . . . hearsearsay, sir . . . sirsay . . .”
Awful! Ghastly! A hundred faces smiling, gloating, watching him drown before their eyes---drown and yet not die. That was what was so terrible---one did not die; one went on feeling, breathing, suffering---hearing the titters, and the echoes of titters, and the renewed bray, and the correct answers of other people, including even the owner of that treacherous, corrupting name. No---one lived; aged, shattered beyond repair, one lived to do the same thing to-morrow, if one were not murdered for it to-night.
And Hearsay, who was the cause of it all, had quietly turned his back on him. Well, if that wasn’t adding insult to injury, what was? Hearsay, of all people---Hearsay, who ought, if anything, to be apologising for his name.
What now? Oh, prayers. He would need them. He would need to be defended from all perils and dangers of this night after that exhibition. He entirely approved of prayers. He hoped that the bray was going home, right home to every heart---though he doubted it; there was too much fidgeting, too great an alacrity in getting over the Amens; and, when the last was said, in arising and dusting the knees and preparing to go.
No, not to go. No such luck. To file rather in solemn procession past the masters, who had descended from their platform and formed up in line, and shake the hand of each; from the hand of the person like Pell to the hand of the big bray who, Dench was saying, fairly looked at you when he shook.
Hadn’t he been looked at enough? Was he yet to experience an even more devastating look than any that had gone before, even while he was struggling in those uttermost depths of dither? Because he couldn’t stand it. His knees would give way. He would grovel,
But the relentless moment came. The long procession, which ended in him, dwindled. Remorselessly the hands pumped, till his own hand was caught and possessed by a big bony hand; and then by a plump, cushiony hand; and then a hot, and then a limp, and then a trembling hand; a dozen hands. He dared not look up. He looked at their waistcoat buttons, or their trousers, or their feet. But he was aware of their voices---gruff, mechanical “How d’you do’s”---and very painfully aware of their eyes, and the thoughts behind their eyes. He knew what they were thinking----“Good Lord---have I got to teach this?”
One, who smelt of tweed and tobacco and recalled, rather more than the others, the open air---that one, he was positive, winced.
The sight of him made a strong, shag-smoking, tweedy man wince . . .
The last hand. The Head’s. What a grip! And what a look---clean through the top of your head, like a pair of wires. Steady now, though. Time to let go. Couldn’t the man see that Hearsay was scuttling away as fast as his legs would carry him, leaving him alone. Let go, man!
But no. It was, “Look up, boy. I can’t have my boys behaving like criminals, and avoiding the Headmaster’s eye. I’m tempted to say, ‘What have you done?’”
He had to look, though his whole soul protested against the unfairness of having to compete with eyes that were like burnt pebbles---ratings of a fire that still smouldered in the cheeks, showing up red patches, deep-seated in their grey.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Bartle.”
“H’m.” A long stare. “Well, you can go, Bartle.”
That was all. But it was the worst yet. Easily the worst.
“H’m”---so expressive. Made you feel, not brown, not even copper-coloured, but black. Black as the Headmaster’s boot.
“H’m.”
He was in “Kandahar.” How he had been permitted to get there---all down that long corridor, with an open door every few paces---he hardly knew. He had expected every doorway to belch forth boys---boys whom he could see, assembled in the lighted classrooms, with nothing in the world to do but pounce out on him. Some even had been lounging outside, and he had had to slip along quickly by the pillars, thanking his stars that the corridor was ill lit, and that one black suit was like another. Nor had he come through quite unnoticed; for from the doorway of “Arcot” a voice had pursued him---a familiar voice, intoning a familiar melody:
“I am Portuguese Eurasian---
Guv’ment give me that pet name.
Father was a kuchh parwani,
Mother was . . .”
Mother’s character and calling---doubtless it was something that he ought to be blushing for---he had missed, for he had run from the voice. It had been a real relief to see “Kandahar” inscribed over the last doorway, and slip in unscathed. Something of a haven, “Kandahar,” seen from outside, with the gaslight shining on the polished yellow desks and counterfeiting, however feebly, that better thing that the dusk cried out for---firelight.
But a cold, inhospitable haven when you saw it from the inside. A bleak place, palely lit and smelling of the gas; yellow walls, yellow desks, yellow light; over the windows chick curtains of a dull green, so tattered that they let in long rifts of the blackness outside; a map of India, a map of England, a blackboard on a tripod, a bookcase full of sombre books in monotonous series---a dozen or more copies of each book---made more monotonous even than was needful by having paper discs pasted on their backs; and that was all. Except, of course, that it was inhabited. Once more he was in the bosom of the new boys. That was the bleakest bit of all. There were bleakening as well as blackening looks, and he hardly knew which were the worst.
He was not welcome.
They had been talking of him as he had come in. He had surprised sibilant attempts to reproduce his ill-starred response at roll-call, and had also distinctly caught the word “Brewer.” Putting two and two together, it had seemed probable that they were engaged in launching a legend to the effect that he had come from home the worse for liquor. Dench had been very prompt to ask, “What did the Head say to you?” and upon his answering “Nothing,” had advanced a curious theory.
“Must have smelt you,” Dench had said, ruminatively, “That’s the worst of beer.”
That was perhaps three-quarters of an hour ago. Since then he had sat, as he was sitting now, at a desk by one of the windows, making little drawings of faces in its polished surface with his forefinger and rubbing them out with his elbow---as he was doing now.
Once he had raised the curtain and looked out of the window for some sign, somewhere, of a kindlier existence---a fire, perhaps, kindling far away in some city serai, that he could picture and people---but only to see the school wall, taped like a cheap braid on the curtain of night. The last thing that he wanted to see. So he had come back to drawing faces and rubbing them out.
No one, of course, had spoken to him. He didn’t expect it. The word had gone forth that he was the offspring of a Portuguese Eurasian beer-swiller, and didn’t even collect eggs, so it was much as anyone’s life was worth to be seen talking to him. He hardly blamed them for congregating at the other end of the room, where was set the superior desk of the absent Mr. Loosely, the form master, and mostly turning their backs. He would have done the same himself. Besides, he was past caring whether anybody talked to him or not. He had made his feeble bid for Hearsay, and lost. He wasn’t going to try again. Hearsay could join the noble army of stamp collectors and welcome. If little bits of coloured paper stuck in a book caused him and Piggott and Baxter to gloat, let them gloat.
Listen to them!
“I’ll swap you a whole set of unused Nicaraguas for your three-cornered Cape of Good Hope.”
“Wait a bit---let’s look at the watermarks. Steady on---don’t blow. They’re fudges. They haven’t got any watermarks. No swap.”
No swap! As if one bit of paper wasn’t as good as another bit of paper. All “tikkuts,” as Kullu would say---if Kullu had ever seen a stamp. What would Kullu think if he were here and could see Hearsay and Piggott and Baxter holding their breath over the album so as not to disturb the things? If he were here. If only he were. “Mad,” he’d say, “all mad.”
So they were. Listen to Dench and de Silva mi. over some silly book advertisement:
“What about Leila the Star of Mongrelia? Or look here---this is hot stuff---Rosa Lambert---gay life she lead---after great temptation, sells herself---- Whew! All for two rupees, eight annas.”
“I’d sooner have Catchy Memoirs of Mary Price, Maidservant. More pages. Illustrated too.”
“That’s four chips, though. If you’re going to bust four chips you might as well go for Loves of the Harem.
And Lapeuta chipping in:
“Our Rajah’s got a harem.”
Who’d talk about women? Better fun drawing faces on a desk and rubbing them out by oneself than joining that gang, even if they asked him. And, anyhow, it was only five minutes to supper.
And, after supper, not more than half an hour in “Kandahar.” That would pass . . . somehow. And then, bed.
Bed. Even this day---the longest, the most cheerless, the least befriended of all the days he had ever lived through---must end at last.
Of to-morrow he refused to think. He refused to believe that there really could be, in store for him, a to-morrow like to-day. That was a thought for Kullu to think---not for him; a thought that belonged to happy lives, to happy places. Enough for him that to-day would end; would at last die.
It dragged out. There was a last-but-one bray of the bell, and they all flocked down the corridor to stand-up supper in hall. Milk and biscuits, swallowed in haste and trembling; but he hid behind the fat rotundity of Dench, and escaped notice. Coming and going, too, he kept with the pack, and found their company protective, if nothing else. They were just “the bachhas” when they were all together---and no one bothered much about them in the mass. The isolated “bachha” was a different story.
But that dread belonged to to-morrow. He wasn’t going to think of to-morrow. Let to-day die first.
But it did drag out. There was another half-hour in “Kandahar”---more aimless drawing on the desk for him; more prattle of stamps and Rajahs and girls on their part---before the last, long expiring bray that called to bed. And then they talked at their cubicle doors instead of undressing.
He shut his, glad at last to be alone. He could hear their chatter, of course, for the partitions were not much higher than your head; and there was always a chance of someone peeping over from next door, so that you had to be wary even here. Still, he was as private as he ever would be here, in this cell. He could undress in peace.
Fancy still having on the old loin-cloth! He had put it on under his clothes for the transformation from Drew into Durroo---what ages ago it seemed---and here it was still.
And here it should stay, round him, close to him---on. It was the only thing left---of all that had been his, the only thing that you could touch, and see, and feel. They had their keep-sakes---their photographs, and their calendars, and their pin-cushions---and he would have his. Not on a chest of drawers, where anyone could see it, but on himself, where no one could. He would take it oft if he had to, when he washed---it depended on just how far one washed---but only then.
For what else could he do with it but wear it? It wasn’t a thing to leave about. Suppose that Matron saw it and guessed what it was. What a hullabaloo there would be! And if a Portuguese Eurasian was unpopular, what would they say to a full-fledged peasant?
Yes, he would have to be very careful, especially in the swimming bath; but it was fun somehow to wear it. A sort of challenge to them all---I’m still Durroo underneath for all you can do.
He put his pyjamas on over it and got into bed.
The others too, one by one. He listened to their good-nights, wondering at the headway they had made with each other, with the place. “Not such a bad old place,” he actually heard, “not half as bad as I expected”; and “they do at least let you alone.” Then someone in slippers came in and turned down the light that hung from the middle of the ceiling. “Silence, please,” said a man’s voice, “Good-night.”
“Good-night, sir,” in chorus.
For a little there were noises---heavy breathing from Dench next door, ponderously getting used to a new bed; shufflings; sighs, indicative of sleep; presently, nothing but the competitive ticking of two little clocks, one on either side of him, faint through the match-boarding; and, when he got used to them, nothing. A blank. A lull.
He lay awake---too wide-awake---staring, over the top of his partition wall, at the shadow of the dimmed lamp on the white ceiling, ringed and petalled like a flat flower, for the moths and their big butterfly shadows to play about. Listening---not for anything especial, but because the very quality of the lull lured him into listening---till soft the sounds came creeping in; shy sounds; vagrants of the night, trespassers perhaps in these precincts, but bent on homing to him. Troubling guests they were---they brought so much with them, refusing to leave anything behind---but he couldn’t shut them out; they meant well; it wasn’t their fault if they hurt him.
A tinkle of ox-bells down the road; plod and creak of the slow night traffic, the traffic that comes out when the motors go to bed and the city sleeps---those were the first to come. And how could they help bringing carts into the room---a ghostly file of carts, with a little boy sitting on the pole of the last---since they were sounds sent out by carts, and carts alone? Every creak, every tinkle of them . . . yet he couldn’t help listening.
Then a man sang. He knew the song. The dandy had sung it, and he had joined in. He couldn’t hear the words now---the singer was far away and getting farther, for he was sitting on one of the carts---he couldn’t hear a single word; only the sound of the song, the quaver and the catch in the voice; only the sound----but it brought in with it the whole serai. All the firelight, all the fun. While it lasted he was Durroo again, every fibre of him---Durroo again, squatting among his friends, singing with them, smiling at them, seeing their smiles come back through the ruddy, happy haze. But when it ended . . . he wished he had never heard it.
And someone beat a drum. Miles away in the bazaar someone beat a drum. Dub-dub-dub; dub-dub-dub---muted, whispering, like the faintest of faint taps on a distant door. But he heard it; he followed every tap of the fingers on that drum---and a fat little drum it was, he was sure, and plump and warm were the fingers. They had rested on his shoulder---he ought to know their touch. And when that ended . . .
Oh, it wasn’t the sound---it was the fingers, staying behind to tuck him in, that finally upset him. The fingers, letting fall over him something light, lightly to be tucked in; playing over his feet and up his side; tugging at last at his tears.
He had to put his head under the bed-clothes for fear of revealing to the others what Kullu’s fingers could do to him, when the drum stopped, and they came . . . near.
How dreams did cling! He could have sworn that Kullu and Chhotu were still arguing about where he should sleep---upstairs in the serai, or down among the carts. A gruff voice, a squeaky voice---the two dream voices to a T; and in himself, still lingering, the same drowsy determination to go on sleeping just where he was, whatever they might choose to say.
But of course it was morning, not night. This was the dormitory, not the serai. And, as for the voices, they belonged to the old mistri outside and some little boy whom he was instructing in the art of applying whitewash. The mistri had told the Matron that he would get help, and that squeak was the help---and no bad investment either, if the owner was as like Kullu as his squeak was.
Disappointing. But that was the worst of dreams---they had some sense in them, but never quite enough; producing something---some feeble imitation of what was promised---when it would be so much kinder to produce nothing at all. Like the Parsee in the General Stores at Naini Tal, who, if he hadn’t got what you wanted, always had something exactly like and, according to him, just as good. So with a dream. “I haven’t got a serai in stock at the moment, but this dormitory is extremely resemblant, being similarly equipped throughout. Please, sir, to notice the arrangement of cells---an improvement on the old-fashioned serai model. And, though the Kullu which I promised has not come, here is a squeak so life-like that you will never know the difference.”
So life-like . . . There it was again, asking questions---”O mistri ji . . .”---and something or other that he couldn’t quite catch. The irrepressible Kullu babble to the life.
And the old man:
“Get on with thy work. It is not for babes to babble. And remember this---the work must be finished to-day, or the Bari Miss Saheb will tan thy hide and mine. Even if thou art compelled to remain at work after dark, it must be finished.”
A touch of Chhotu there.
“Even so, my father.” Soft answer---a trifle too submissive to be quite Kullu.
“But remember---not one pie more than two annas, even if thou art at work all day and all night.”
“Ji.”
Rather a disconsolate “Ji.” Kullu would not have been so easily snubbed. Kullu would have stood out for an anna overtime at least, instead of subsiding meekly into a silence, broken only now by the swish-swish of two brushes and the slop-slop of molten wash. Kullu would have . . .
Oh, what was the use of thinking about Kullu? What good did it do? Surely he had learnt his lesson in the night---that thinking did not help; only made you more miserable. If every sound that remotely recalled Kullu was going to play such havoc with him---catch at his heart, tug at his tears, work him up into a state one minute and let him down again worse than before the next---he’d be a wreck in no time. And considering that he needed every shred of guts that he possessed to carry him through another day in this place, it was sheer silliness to handicap himself. Better to pull himself together once and for all; say firmly to himself “I will not think”; in fact, forget Kullu and all that Kullu stood for, and try to make the best of it where he was.
Of prison, that is. But other people managed to put up with prison. Prisoners, he had heard Les say, were the most contented class in India. And, after all, no one had touched him yet. He hadn’t been “rooted.” Stared at---yes---and remarked about; but words and looks shouldn’t be allowed to hurt. One oughtn’t to let them hurt. One ought to be above that sort of thing.
Well, why not try? Start again with the morning, and try to make the best of it. Get up and see what cold water would do for him; go out, see sunlight again, and sniff the good morning up into his head; try---at least try---backed by these, to go through with it. After all, he was alive.
He got up, collected his clothes, and quietly opened his door. The other doors were shut, and from behind them came the sounds of sleep, culminating in Dench’s snore. Already he felt a faint glow of righteousness, of superiority. The top of the morning was his; shared at most with a mistri and a little boy---welcome partners. The sun came in across the verandah and through the wire doors, making a golden court for him to stand in. By the time they got up it would have shifted. Already his warm court was being restricted.
Even Godelin grass was pretty with the dew spangling it. But the dew was being dried apace---it was like lights going out, and, unless the others hurried, they would miss the last of the lights; and he, too, must hurry with his dressing, or so would he. And he wanted to run over that lighted grass. All the air suggested it. It wasn’t quite the same as his hill air, that tasted of snow on the tongue and always got him out of bed for a taste; but it was good air, clean and early, and it called him out as usual.
He went into the wash-house. There was plenty of cold water in his jug, and with that he sluiced his head and shoulders. That too was good---just as good as it always had been. Dressing as quickly as he could, he promised himself that every day he would do this---steal an hour and make it good, so as to start the day on one good hour. Then he went to the wire doors that opened on to the verandah, and . . .
They refused to open.
He rattled them---rattled them hard. Still they refused to open. A drowsy voice behind him said, “Shut up, can’t you!” but really he couldn’t give up his hour because Misquith happened to be a light sleeper. High time Misquith was up himself.
He continued to rattle.
Then suddenly feet came padding up outside.
A chowkidar appeared, cowled in a blanket, and apparently none too pleased to be woken up himself.
“What do you want?” muttered the chowkidar.
“To get out, of course.”
“What for?”
“To eat the air---what else?”
“Then eat it inside. I will open the doors at second bell, as ordered, and not before. Bus.”
“Oh, shut up. Chup, can’t you?” from an agonized Misquith.
“There! You wake the world up. Is it not enough to have the mistri’s gabble, without thine? Sahebs should have the sense to be silent.”
And the chowkidar, grumbling, departed.
He felt dashed---disheartened. He had really meant to try, and he made such a good start . . . and this was all the result. Sent back to lack his heels in the cubicle, and listen to Misquith’s peevish mutterings.
What uphill work making the best of it was!
He didn’t, though, have to kick his heels very long. The bell soon brayed, and there was a certain satisfaction in hearing the others getting up. They got up so unwillingly, and they did so hate cold water. And Hearsay had lost his tooth-paste, and to hear him go on about it you would have thought it was a tube of molten gold instead of peppermint paste. Altogether he was able to retain a little of that comforting sense of superiority. However much of a worm he might be at night, he could at least face morning better than most of them. And morning, he found, faced in that spirit, was not nearly so formidable as he had expected.
There was at least none of the terrible tediousness of the evening---none of that aimless waiting about in “Kandahar” for the bell to go.
The bell went without being waited upon, and went pretty briskly. In fact, once it had got into its stride, it went with such briskness that it kept the whole school on the run with it. No dawdling about admiring the dew. The moment the chowkidar opened those wire doors it was a case of run or be late for roll-call and prayers. The seniors at the other end of the wing might take their time, and stroll. But for him and his ilk it was run all the way---down fifty yards of corridor, stone flags all the way; round a sharp corner; twenty more yards; up at least a dozen steps, across the entrance hall and so in, helter skelter, all gasp and glow. And he was easily first of the lot from “Minto.” Easily. He had recovered his breath completely by the time Hearsay staggered and Dench rolled in.
Of course, he had always liked running, especially first thing in the morning, and had always known that he could run. But he had never run against anyone, even casually like this---never had the fun of overtaking, as he had overtaken Dench and Misquith and the rest of them, and knowing that he could do the same thing every time he tried.
A little thing---but it brought confidence. It got him over the dreaded “Here, sir,” at any rate. This time no one looked round, and no one had any reason to look round, unless to congratulate him. For his “Here, sir,” was exemplary. Firm without being forced, deferential without being cringing---it compared favourably, he thought, with any of the morning’s bag. Most of them were so very early-morningish.
And then, in the course of a few remarks that intervened between roll-call and prayers, the Head referred to hockey. After tea to-day, the Head said, there would be, in addition to the usual games, a game for the purpose of trying the form of the new boys. So everyone would have an early opportunity of seeing him run.
He decided to ask Hearsay to go with him after breakfast and buy a hockey stick. He had never played hockey, of course---never had the chance---but from what he had seen of the game, as played on Lucknow maidan, it was the runner’s paradise upon earth. There were rules, doubtless, and it was necessary to smite a ball, and smite it with greater vigour----though less precision---than in croquet, for instance. But the running was what really counted. And he could run. If he couldn’t do anything else, he could run.
Why, there was actually something now that he was looking forward to! Wonderful---but there was. True, there were also things to which he was not looking forward---a general knowledge paper, for instance, lasting three hours, to determine his place in form. True, there were hazardous hours to be lived through----hours in which anything might happen---before he emerged on the hockey field. But they would pass, and . . . he really was looking forward to hockey. It meant motion, freedom, speed. Clad in light zephyrs and really running, whether he hit the ball or no, he would feel a different person. Why, he hadn’t run properly for ages.
And after hockey the swimming-bath was to be open---the Head said so. Good again. Because he could swim. And if the water wasn’t quite of his own choosing---not that sun-stroked, glossy, golden kind that you found in the brook at home---the kind that passed on something of the sun, and something of the golden gloss, and something of the stroking that it had received; even if it had never been on the most distant terms with the sun, and had been conveyed out of the bowels of the earth by prosaic pumps and pipes---at least it would be water. And if he couldn’t swim in it better than Dench and the rest of them swum he’d never swim again.
Only he must remember to take that loin-cloth off privately before he went in---or perhaps he’d never have a chance of swimming again.
Yes, hockey and the bath . . . two things he really could look forward to. . . . whoever would have thought it possible? It only showed you what a difference morning made.
And evening wouldn’t be so bad either, because hockey and the bath between them would fill up the whole of that deadly time between tea and dusk. Not only were they desirable in themselves, but they provided an escape from book-babble and girl-babble and the weariness of stamps---if from nothing worse. And then there was “Preparation hour”---a new thing---to come afterwards. Oh, the day would pass . . .
Wonderful how quickly prayers flashed by when you had something really quite moderately nice to think about!
And breakfast too. He positively had an appetite. He found himself eating kedgeree---not exactly with gusto, for no amount of appetite could have persuaded him that a solid slab of congealed rice, daisied over with a sparse pollen of powdered egg to make up for an inward deficiency of fish (if not of fish-bones) was a thing to be relished. Still, he ate it. It went down. And, before the inevitable creeping lethargy of the kedgeree-eater could entirely claim him, he was careful to approach Hearsay and settle the matter of the hockey stick.
He had chosen the right moment. Dazed, deadened in spirit by the load on his stomach, Hearsay consented to be led outside. Then, as misgivings made themselves felt and Hearsay began to show signs of wanting to go somewhere else, he clinched the matter with the challenge:
“Race you to the shop!”
And after Hearsay had run a few yards he had him, body and soul. He could do what he liked with him.
“There . . .” gasp “. . . must have been . . .” gulp “. . . something very funny in my . . .” gasp “kedgeree, do stop,” he heard behind him, and, magnanimous in victory, he did stop. But with an air---making it quite clear to Hearsay that when he stopped he stopped out of charity, not from necessity, as Hearsay himself was forced grudgingly to admit.
“You’ve given me indigestion,” gasped Hearsay, “I’ve got a stomach-ache now, all through you.”
A testimonial as gratifying as it was unexpected. He glowed with superiority, and like good wine it brought the desire for more.
“Well, then, own I can sprint.”
Hearsay blustered.
“Sprint? Anybody can sprint.”
“You can’t---not against me.”
“I’ve got indigestion, I tell you.”
“But I gave it you.”
“You didn’t. It was the kedgeree.”
“I did. You just said I did. ‘All through you,’ you said. You wouldn’t have a stomach-ache now if I couldn’t sprint. Would you now? Would you?”
He would have that admission. He wasn’t going to be baulked of a triumph. Like wine, it was, like wine to his soul, after all their stand-offishness and superiority, to get a little of his own back. Perhaps now they wouldn’t be quite so conceited over their silly stamp collections and things.
“Would you?” he repeated.
“Perhaps . . . perhaps I wouldn’t. Not a stomach-ache, at least.”
“Then own I can sprint.”
“Oh, well then . . . you do bother. I own. You can sprint.”
Wine. Warm wine. Who could resist another draught?
“That was nothing,” he remarked casually, “I wasn’t even out of breath. If you want to see some real sprinting, you wait till you see me at hockey to-night.”
“What---have you played hockey?”
“Of course.”
Irresistible. After all, he had seen it played, and it was only a question of sprinting. He could sprint. Therefore he could play hockey. Therefore he might just as well have played hockey. Which was only another way of saying that he was a hockey player.
“I’m a keen hockey player,” he supplemented. After all, the most pernickety and exacting conscience could not object to that. How often had he heard, for instance, a Sunday guest give vent to an eager “Yes, I’m a keen croquet player,” with, as subsequent events had shown, far less excuse. And then, if anything untoward happened, all was explained by the single casual remark, “I’m off my game to-day.” Not that he would have to resort to that. He felt in his bones that he was going to astonish people before he went to bed to-night---astonish even himself. He had the sensation---the indescribable flair of success. Give him a hockey stick and . . .
“I say, that’s thick.” Hearsay was complaining---positively complaining, “None of us have played.”
Last night he would have resented that “none of us” as implying that the new boys, in thinking of themselves corporately, drew the line at him; but in this connection it was gratifying. It savoured of a tribute, and he took it as such.
“You’ll soon pick it up, I dare say,” he remarked, “There’s nothing in it, as long as you can sprint fairly well. Of course, if you can’t sprint . . . I mean, I doubt if Dench, for instance, will be any good.”
“That was what Dench was saying at breakfast,” said Hearsay, obviously impressed, “Dench was doubtful himself. But it was the dribbling that worried Dench. When Franks was practising yesterday afternoon the ball hardly seemed to touch the ground. He seemed to keep it just on the end of his stick, and when anybody else tried to take it away he gave a little hoick up with his stick, and the ball jumped over the other chap’s stick, and Franks went on as if nothing had happened, dribbling. Dench thought it looked awfully difficult. We all did. Dribbling, I mean.”
Truth to tell, he was a little impressed himself---he had not grappled with the problem of dribbling. He wished he had not been quite so positive in his assertion that he had actually played hockey. But there was no drawing back. Already, owing to his perspicacity in singling out Dench as unlikely to shape well at the game---not, admittedly, on dribbling grounds, but on grounds of fat---owing to this, he was being regarded already as something of an authority. There was, for the first time, a suggestion of deference in Hearsay’s large and troubled eyes. Perhaps he was even regretting that he had patched up that hasty triple alliance with Piggott and Baxter---an alliance that could never stand the test of time, because no one went about in three’s---with the flimsy aid of stamp-paper. Yes, Hearsay was wavering.
Hearsay might be won. Hockey was more powerful than postage stamps. Not that Hearsay was worth winning---awful little worm, he looked, really, and so fussy about his tooth-paste this morning---but power was good. Power gave a pleasant feeling. A still warmer wine---power.
“A great deal in dribbling depends on the stick,” he said judicially.
“That was what Misquith thought,” exclaimed Hearsay, more impressed than ever, “He noticed Franks had a fatter stick than the others, with a rubber ring round it.”
“That’s it,” he condescended, “Get a good fat stick, and you’re all right. And it’s just as well to have a rubber ring, while you’re about it. The rest’s a question of sprinting. I mean a hockey ball travels. You’ve got to move, to be any good.”
Les on croquet---his model---wasn’t in it with him now. But it was dizzy work, once you started---inventing. You got led on so. Whew! You did get led on.
“And passing? They were practising passing . . .” murmured Hearsay, as a mere tyro, seeking after information, defers to an expert.
“Don’t you worry about passing,” he said genially, “You’ll never need to pass if you can sprint. You’ll be too busy scoring goals to bother about passing to other people.”
“But of course you must have a decent stick,” he added emphatically, for they had come to the door of Shop, and in its window were displayed many sticks, one of which must in due course be selected. Fortunately though, thanks to Hearsay, he now had a criterion for selection---the favoured stick must be fat.
“I suppose you left your own stick at home,” said Hearsay innocently as they walked in.
He started. Of course, as an experienced player, he would be expected to possess a stick, or even sticks. That was the worst of allowing yourself to be led on---details escaped you.
“Broke it,” he replied, “I’m always smashing sticks.”
Then he blushed, for he got a look that said as plainly as possible: “Forgive me. I was mistaken in you. I see you’re somebody worth cultivating in spite of your skin, if you can really smash those excessively solid-looking sticks.” All that it said. Almost it said more. Almost it said “Hero!”
He blushed considerably. He really hadn’t meant to go quite so far. But that was the way with him---he never could resist making a good story out of it, as it were, once he started. It had been just the same with Kullu over the khitmatgars. He had ended by engaging to murder the lot. And Kullu’s eyes had even more definitely said “Hero!”
What an ignominious end there had been to that fine story! Carried away, meek as a lamb, by the very first khitmatgar who appeared on the scene, without raising a finger! It made him hot all over to think of it.
Yet here he was embarked on another fine tale. A dangerous game. High stakes. Suppose, after all, he turned out to be as big a failure at hockey as he had been at fighting khitmatgars. It didn’t bear thinking of. He must carry it off.
“Which do you think?” came a deprecating voice at his side. The babu in charge of Shop was also looking for a lead.
“A hockey stick, please,” he said to the babu with becoming magnificence, “the best you have.”
“This, sir, is best in Shop. Six rupees, eight annas.”
He took it; swiped at an imaginary ball.
“Not fat enough,” he decided, handing it back.
Hearsay made an appreciative sound. The babu rummaged deferentially.
“This, sir, is actually fattest.”
He could well believe it. It was a magnificent weapon, with its bulbous, curving blade of highly-polished white wood emerging from its pink paper wrapping; with its taut, stout binding, with just enough of the beeswax adhering to endear it to the hot hand of the holder. A trifle long, perhaps---almost as long as himself---and on the heavy side, compared with the first, and rejected, stick. But clearly an exceptionally fine product of the stickmaker’s art; a stick, in fact, on the heroic scale.
“I’ll take this,” he said.
“Captain of hockey choosing a similar stick yesterday,” observed the babu, as he wrapped it up.
Gasp of admiration and awe from Hearsay.
“May as well have one of those india-rubber rings,” he threw out casually.
“Ring one rupee extra. Total, seven rupees, eight annas. Thank you, sir. You are experienced player, I see.”
Noble babu! That one remark alone was worth the whole seven rupees, eight annas. An experienced player . . .
Hearsay also purchased a stick. A minor transaction altogether, involving the disbursement of a mere beggarly four rupees, and brought to an ignominious conclusion by the sudden ringing of the bell. The babu selected it if anybody did, and a shoddy, sorry-looking affair it was. Thin, wizened, whittled blade; inferior string---a stick utterly without character, as he would have pointed out, if he had been able to bring himself to take any interest in the selection of a stick out of that common four-rupee bundle.
Not even a wrapping . . .
Yet Hearsay seemed to be quite contented.
“I like the feel of it,” he said, “Yours strikes me as a bit heavy for anyone who isn’t used to it. To run with, I mean.”
They were running at the time, in the direction of “Kandahar,” and certainly---now that his attention was called to it---the care-free abandon of his recent exhibition was lacking. Running at the moment was not so much a joyous recreation as a rather tedious necessity. The fine, free rapture of the sprint had degenerated into dogged ding-dong effort. There was a sense of encumbrance.
Perhaps, without the ring . . .
Silly of him to have added to the weight. That ring must weigh pretty nearly a pound. Solid rubber. Expensive too. Still . . . “experienced player.” Some things were worth paying a stiff price for, even if they left you pretty hard-up, and that was one of them.
“Why, you’re puffing like a grampus,” panted Hearsay, “I didn’t think you’d be out of breath.”
It certainly was rather disturbing.
“It’s the kedgeree,” he groaned, but without much conviction. He had a horrid suspicion that it might be the stick. That sense of encumbrance---of something holding you back, getting in your way; and not knowing quite how to dispose of it, whether over the shoulder or under the arm . . .
“Look out. If you’re going to trip, do trip the other way,” expostulated Hearsay.
And to think that he had paid seven rupees, eight annas---practically cleaned himself out---for the beastly thing!
But---the dramatic moment that followed! That triumphal entry into “Kandahar”---so different from last night’s, when he had slunk in like a pariah, to sit forlorn, target for their verbal and ocular brick-bats. Who, conscious of the contrast, could fail to feel uplifted, sustained, vindicated! Who could be so mean-minded as to cherish misgivings in face of such a reception?
Not he, at any rate. Confidence was completely restored---not only in the stick, but in himself. The moment he entered the room he savoured success.
Everything was in train for the dramatic; for they were all sitting at their desks, alert and expectant, because they were awaiting the arrival of Mr. Loosely with the General Knowledge Paper, and both Mr. Loosely and the General Knowledge Paper were unknown quantities. Thus there was bound to be a stir of anticipation when the door opened.
But when it did open, and behold! not Mt. Loosely at all, but Bartle with a stick---or, more precisely, a stick and Bartle, for he went in stick first---stir wasn’t the word. The stick might have been a sceptre from the way their eyes flew to it and fastened on it; Bartle might have been Royalty; Hearsay, the aide-de-camp on duty. Lapeuta’s Rajah himself could not have made a more effective entry than Bartle did with that stick.
He wondered whether he ought to bow---but modestly decided to give the credit where credit was due, to the stick.
“Just bought it,” he murmured.
“Let’s have a look at it.”
Dench was the first to give vent in words to the pent-up feelings of awe and admiration that affected all. He felt that he had misjudged Dench. He had a nice, friendly fat face, Dench---chubby, you might say.
In a reverent hush Dench handled the symbol.
“Yes, it’s the spit of Franks’s,” was the deliberate, impressive verdict, as he handed it to Lapeuta.
“Franks is captain, isn’t he?” ventured Lapeuta.
Funny he had never realized how nice-looking Lapeuta was. That olive complexion---so warm and sunny. No wonder Leith-Brown was beginning to call him “Beauty” for short.
“Franks bought his yesterday. The Shop babu mentioned it,” put in Hearsay, determined not to be out of the picture, “It’s about twice as heavy as mine.”
“What did they rush you for it?” inquired Misquith.
He permitted Hearsay to answer. Somehow the sordid details of purchase came better from Hearsay. Besides, there was no stopping Hearsay. Cute little fellow, Hearsay---he saw which way the wind was blowing.
“Seven chips, eight. He asked straight out for the best in the Shop.”
That was the best of having a mouthpiece---it managed matters so much better than you could yourself. He would never have thought of putting in that last touch. Yet, how revealing! How eloquent of wealth and substance!
“He’s broken all his others . . .”
There again! How graphic, how arresting!
“What---he hasn’t played, has he?”
“Of course he has. He’s an experienced player.”
“Oh!”
More eloquent than all the rest of their remarks put together, that “Oh,” echoed from mouth to mouth. Vistas appeared. At a glance he saw magical possibilities. Then once more the door opened.
“Take your places, please,” said a voice, and the fair-haired young man, whose resemblance to Mr. Pell he had remarked at last night’s roll-call, proceeded to the superior desk, which faced the humbler ranks, and sat down. He wore a black gown over his grey flannel suit; he carried an important-looking sheaf of papers in addition to a number of books; his spectacle-rims were of rolled gold; he looked every inch a master. Yet no one seemed really to notice him.
There was no stir---no show of interest, much less of excitement. They were too much occupied in grasping the fact that Bartle was experienced at hockey---in inward and spiritual Oh-ing---to attach any importance to the advent of Mr. Loosely and the General Knowledge Paper.
Again, quite a minor affair.
Formalities followed. On a minor scale there was a repetition of roll-call. For the personal satisfaction of this Louse-bug---as, according to de Silva mi., Mr. Loosely was variously called---it became necessary to answer, “Here, sir,” for the second time in the day: an ordeal which presented no difficulties to an experienced hockey player, whose very name caused a mild stir in the room, as if they were saying to themselves, “Ah, Bartle---that’s his name, is it?” Under such circumstances roll-call was a gratifying experience, and he would gladly have lingered over it.
But Mr. Loosely was not one to linger over anything. He was brisker than he looked, and much brisker than he sounded, and before you could say knife sundry distributions had been made. At lightning speed Mr. Loosely relieved himself of his various burdens, commissioning Dench to give out the pens, Misquith the blotting-paper, and Lapeuta the foolscap; then, with the air of one dispensing favours to the unworthy, he himself bestowed the flimsy sheets, headed “General Knowledge---New Boys,” that embodied the serious business of the morning.
“Open your inkpots. Write on one side of the paper only, and don’t forget to put your name at the top,” concluded the Louse-bug, subsiding into his superior chair.
A little apprehensively he handled the sheet, crisp and curling and really beautifully printed in bright blue ink---first reminder of a new and strange side of school life. “General Knowledge.” They wanted to know what he knew---a quaint fancy on their part. Les had never troubled her head about that. Her idea of lessons had been that she was the person whose business it was to know. She would have pooh-poohed the idea of his knowing anything whatever. Ridiculous, she would have called it, putting notions into the boy’s head. The most she had ever admitted, in her most genial moments, was that he was “quick.”
But, as for knowledge . . . he could imagine her scorn.
“Fancy asking Drew!” she would have said, “It’s a waste of good paper.”
Yet here was this golden-spectacled, gowned personage, this man, asking for his views on quite a number of subjects---six subjects, to be precise. Rather a compliment, really---it almost reminded him of Hearsay’s deferential attitude to his views on hockey.
He was feeling in a gracious mood. Mr. Loosely should have his views and welcome, though he might have saved him the inconvenience of having to write them. He did so hate writing.
However . . .
He studied the sheet.
Question one: “What is the date of the Battle of Plassey? Between whom was it fought, and in the reign of which king? What would you say, shortly, was the chief result of the battle? Draw a map of India, marking in all the battles after which classrooms in this school are named, with their dates.”
He didn’t want to know much, did he, this Mr. Loosely! Call that one question---he might just as well have said, “Write out as much as you can remember of whatever history and geography books you have come across.” He’d have saved himself a lot of trouble, and the result, in this case at any rate, would have been just the same---a teat-like pendulosity, labelled “India,” dripping a blot of ink, labelled “Ceylon,” and containing three battles---“Plassey,” “Kandahar,” and “Minto,” one in each corner, with “Delhi” thrown in in the middle for luck. Of dates and all the rest of it no mention. Mr. Loosely couldn’t expect to get everything from one person. Hearsay, doubtless, who was writing reams with a very chirpy stylo, would oblige with the dates. Or Dench. Deep-breathing, industrious Dench.
He blotted the map with relief, and looked at it for the last time. Yes, he had given Mr. Loosely the pith of question one.
Now for two: “Your favourite poem---quote as much of it as you can remember, and say why you like it.” Pity he couldn’t remember a poem. If only the Louse-bug had said “hymn” now! His head was fairly buzzing with hymn. But that was the way---when you were looking for something you wanted, something you didn’t want was certain to keep cropping up. “What though the spicy breezes blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle” in this case, and---bother the thing, he had just drawn Ceylon. Mr. Louse-bug wouldn’t want a whole paperful of Ceylon. Very likely he had the strongest objection to Ceylon; and considering he had asked for views on every conceivable subject except Ceylon, it seemed more than likely. If he had wanted a hymn about Ceylon he wouldn’t have asked for a poem about . . .
What were poems about? He couldn’t think. Nothing but those stirring lines about Ceylon would come. “What though the spicy breezes . . .”
Oh, bother the poem!
Question three: “A motor cyclist, whose machine does forty-five miles to the gallon, fills up his two-and-a-half gallon tank, and starts on a trip from Bareilly to Lucknow. He breaks down at Fyzabad and discovers that his tank is empty. What is the distance from Bareilly to Fyzabad?”
As if he could be expected to know anything about motor-bikes, when father wouldn’t even run to a push-bike! If it had been carts, now, he might have worked it out.
But he mustn’t think of carts. He was very happy here. He was going to do marvellous things with a hockey stick, and everybody was going to like him, and one day---quite soon perhaps---he was going to be captain. Let the carts go. Forget the carts.
Question four: “Cleanliness is next to godliness. To what extent is this recognized in the ritual of the Old Testament? Is it borne out in the teaching of the New? Quote to support your answers.”
Well, Naaman washed for one. No one could accuse Naaman of not washing. Seven times in Jordan---not to speak of Abana and Pharpar. Naaman must certainly be included in the washing list. And Noah---so very near to the water, Noah; he could hardly have helped washing. And, of course, Moses---as a baby, at least. Among the bullrushes. Though whether he kept it up in later life was doubtful, since he spent so much of his time on mountains. Pahari log did not wash---it was no use pretending they did, and Moses in later life was a confirmed pahari. Better put “in babyhood,” to be on the safe side.
And what about all those people who sat by the waters of Babylon and wept---did they count? Obviously they didn’t want to wash, but that was no reason for saying that they didn’t have to. They were in captivity, weren’t they? Suppose, when the time came, he were to say that he wasn’t going into the swimming-bath---a fat lot of difference it would make! Certainly put the people in Babylon. Write “Made to wash.” And if that didn’t make up for the poem and the motor-bike, Mr. Louse-bug must be very hard to please.
Question five: “Translate into Latin, French and Hindustani: (1) She will have gone into the garden to cut cabbages, but I can tell her you have brought the book. (2) I did it. I did it myself. He did not do it, did he?”
Did people in real life really know Latin and French, or was Mr. Loosely simply showing off? Was it possible that Hearsay, with that chirpy stylo of his, would make some Latin or French khitmatgar inform a Latin or French Mr. Pell that it was too much trouble for him to find Les in the garden, or asseverate that it was he, and no one else, who had cleaned the silver? It seemed so unnecessary, when the sentences so obviously belonged to the repertoire of Ahmed Ali, to give them to Flaccus or to Alphonse. Why, they were like a voice from the past---a singularly unpleasant voice. But, of course, he would get full marks for the Hindustani. Even Ahmed Ali had his uses.
And how lovely to slip into Hindustani again---even in writing: even to express the debased sentiments of Ahmed Ali. “Main ne kiya. Khud main ne kiya. Us shaks ne kaise kiya hoga?”--- how crisp, how expressive! Every word going home like a little compact pellet from the muzzle. Why weren’t there more Hindustani questions? Why wasn’t there a little bit of Kullu, for instance, for him to translate---something to take him back . . .
“O Durroo, main to razi ho ohuka.” “Oh, Durroo, I am content . . .”
Kullu’s last words---he hadn’t meant to think of them. He had done with all that. He was going to be captain of the hockey team. He was going to be Mr. Louse-bug’s bright boy.
He was going to be all sorts of wonderful things. Spout Latin and French like a native, he would, and reel off poems by the yard. One day he might even have a motor-bike given him for being such a very bright boy, and go riding off to Lucknow like the gentleman in question three. What was Kullu, son of Chhotu, to Mr. Louse-bug’s bright boy? What was Kullu of the carts---the slow, plodding carts---to the champion sprinter and future motorcyclist? Really he mustn’t let himself be handicapped and held back just because someone had once called him “Durroo” and whispered “I am content.”
No. Question six. Question six:
“What would you like to be? Give your reasons.”
Ah! Something like a question, that. Straightforward, stimulating---a pleasure to answer, especially when you’d practically decided the answer in thinking over question five. Captain of hockey; head of the school; motor-cyclist---so far so good, and very well it looked on paper. Mr. Louse-bug would be delighted to read the record of such sterling ambitions.
And afterwards? When he had grown up? More hockey, more Latin and French and poetry, more motor-cycling? Well, hardly. Rather a tall order to keep all that up indefinitely. All very well for a time, being splendid and successful and in the limelight; but a pity to overdo it. He mustn’t wear himself out. The most splendid people took a rest sometimes, got out of their smart clothes, and went quietly off somewhere . . . somewhere away from the beaten track, and really enjoyed themselves. With a friend, maybe---someone who loved them and understood their ways---someone with whom they could be natural for once, these splendid people, instead of acting. No ceremony about it. No fuss. Just two people---or more, if you were sociable and wanted some fun of an evening---out to enjoy themselves, with all the roads in India to choose from. Yes, there were points about that.
No appearances to keep up. No worry at the back of your mind, no haunting fear---“Shall I be able to be as splendid as I’ve told everybody I’m going to be---when the time comes?” For in that life no one expected you to be splendid. They knew you too jolly well for that. All they expected you to be was . . . just yourself.
No plans. No “What shall I do to-morrow? What shall I wear? What shall I eat? Where shall I sleep?” For in that life to-morrow would be no different from to-day. One road was as good as another. You just roved from serai to serai . . .
“Time. Collect your papers neatly, in the order of the questions, and hand them up to me.”
Just as well Mr. Loosely had spoken. Suppose he had been silly enough to write, “I don’t want to be anything. I just want to ride away on a cart with Kullu, son of Chhotu, and never, never come back again.” Whatever would Mr. Loosely have thought of him?
A ridiculous thing to have even thought of writing. Why, it would have quite spoilt the effect of an otherwise admirable set of answers. Not a very exhaustive set, perhaps---what reams Hearsay had written!---but perfectly clear and intelligible as far as it went. To have crossed out “Captain of hockey, head of the school, motor-cyclist,” and substituted “I don’t want to be anything”---absurd!
And yet . . .
Well, anyhow, it was only an old examination paper. And now it was finished. Done with, thank goodness. No more work to-day.
Really, Mr. Loosely was taking himself too seriously. What was the matter with the man? Lessons after tiffin---incredible! Even Les had drawn the line at lessons in the afternoon. She had always gone, as a matter of course, to lie down. Everybody lay down after tiffin. Some slept, some didn’t---it depended of course on what you had eaten---but everybody of a certain age lay down.
Except, apparently, Mr. Loosely. Mr. Loosely preferred to sit at a superior desk and shuffle about with papers. There he was, large as life, openly disobeying that ordinance of nature which said as clearly as possible, “Lie down, Mr. Loosely.”
There was something unhealthy about the man---he ought to be lying down. Someone ought to tell him about it---point out that he was getting pallid and peaky and liverish-looking, and that a good rest in the afternoon would do him good. Why, the man was as yellow as bar soap! And he needn’t pretend that it was just the effect of tiffin. They hadn’t been palmed off with watery hash and a date pudding---as innocent of dates as Bartle’s answer to question one---up at the masters’ table. Curried chicken there, as anyone with eyes could see, if he couldn’t smell it.
All the less excuse, then, for not lying down. Curried chicken was a summons, a clarion call to lie down. Whereas hash . . .
What was the man talking about? General Knowledge papers? Surely to goodness they at least were over and done with.
What? So badly written, except in the case of Hearsay’s, that Mr. Loosely couldn’t decipher the answers . . . have to read out their own answers . . . . in alphabetical order, starting from . . .
Not Bartle? Surely not Bartle? This was too monstrous.
“Come along, Bartle. First question. This was set, not only to discover what you know of military history, but also to find out whether you use your eyes. Now then, date of Plassey . . . What? You don’t know the date of Plassey . . . or the combatants? On neither side, Bartle? Surely you’ve heard of Clive . . . I suppose it has never occurred to you to wonder what event was mainly responsible for the fact that yesterday you travelled by a British railway line from a British home---er, presumably a British home---to study in a college bearing the name of a British Governor. Something must have happened to make all that possible, you know, Bartle. People haven’t always just sat still and said nothing. India didn’t become British by just twiddling your thumbs, you know. There was Plassey, for instance, and one or two other little . . . Oh, you did a map, did you? Let’s see it. Pass it up. . . . H’m. Glad to be acquainted with the astonishing discovery of the Battle of Minto. Thank you, Bartle. Next, please. Baxter on Plassey.”
Peace. Time to wipe the sweat off the brow and compose the breath again. But what a man! What an odious, sarcastic, liverish, bad-tempered brute of a man! To think that hour by hour, day by day, year by year, he was going to be steadily ground down, bulked, badgered, hounded by that man.
“Thank you. Some are better than others, but you mostly seem to have picked up something. Now for the poetry question. Bartle---your favourite poem?”
“. . . Oh, you don’t know any poems. Only hymns. Never heard them referred to as religious poetry by any chance, I suppose? Well, some of them are, you know---they really are. Some of the finest poems in the language are only hymns, as you put it. Meanwhile, Baxter . . . Quite sound, Baxter, except that it isn’t Shakespeare, but Byron . . . Now, Dench . . .”
The iniquity of it---that he should be suffering in this way, held up to public ridicule, just because Mr. Loosely couldn’t be bothered to read the papers to himself. Why have troubled, why have written anything at all, why . . .?
“Now for the little sum, Bartle. How far did the man on the motor-bike get? Perhaps you’re a mathematician in disguise . . . Oh, you thought it was all about motor-bicycles, and once more omitted to write anything. You shouldn’t think, you know, till you’ve read the question right through, or unsympathetic people may draw the conclusion that you couldn’t be bothered to read it through . . . Who was responsible for your education---who taught you, I mean, what I haven’t yet succeeded in discovering, what you know? . . . Oh, your sister. She has my profound sympathy. Baxter how far did the cyclist get?”
O Lord, how long?
And it wasn’t as if the others were suffering equally---or suffering at all. They were being treated as human beings. True, of course, they had mostly put up some sort of answer to most of the questions; but surely it was better to leave an honest blank than to pretend you knew a thing when you obviously didn’t. Dench, for instance, serving up a so-called poem that didn’t even rhyme . . . and then actually being told by Mr. Loosely that it showed a nice taste in blank verse . . . fantastic! Blank verse, indeed. There was only one kind of blank verse, and that was his own kind---the verse you left blank. But Mr. Loosely wouldn’t see it---not he.
However, let them- wait a bit. Let them wait till they heard Bartle’s list of the people in the Bible who washed. That would make them sit up. Something better than “Well tried” when that came along.
What was that?
Though highly interesting, not what was meant by the question? Danger of ceremonial observances being mistaken for true religion? Cleanliness being made a sort of substitute for godliness,and stigmatized as such in the New Testament . . . Scribes and Pharisees . . . parallel in the exaggerated importance attached to washing ritual by high-caste Brahmins . . . excellent little essay by Hearsay . . . Oh, he had no patience with all this! The question was as plain as a pikestaff---Who washed? Mr. Loosely had a down on him because of his face, and nothing that he could ever do would ever be right. If anyone else had given Naarnan and Moses and the people of Babylon they would have got full marks, and some over.
Hearsay hadn’t given a single name---only something about Pharisees making clean the outside of the cup and platter---and the result? “Excellent little essay.” But then Hearsay had a face as white as cotton-wool, and Bartle hadn’t. That made all the difference.
Pallid little poop . . .
So Bartle had a highly suspicious acquaintance with back-door Hindustani idiom, had he? Thank you, Mr. Louse-bug. Better than all the Latin and Trench you ever learnt, Mr. Louse-bug, and much more expressive. If Bartle had the chance of telling you what he thought of you, Mr. Louse-bug, in that excellent back-door Hindustani idiom, you would hear something you wouldn’t forget.
“Well, Bartle, what have you decided you’d like to be?”
No, he couldn’t read it out. He really couldn’t---not all that about being Captain of Hockey and Head of the School. He hadn’t the face to. It wouldn’t be appreciated. Mr. Louse-bug would be certain to make some joke about it. Better to say nothing. It was only, after all, what was expected of him.
“Nothing, sir.”
So, after all, it had come to that. He might just as well have had the satisfaction of writing it down, of seeing it on paper---“Nothing.”
“A noble ambition, Bartle, and only what I should have expected of you, but I fear you may have to modify it as time goes on. We don’t exactly encourage professed nonentities here. In fact, the sooner you think of something you’d like to be the better, if I may say so, for you. Next, please. Baxter.”
“Schoolmaster, sir.”
Toad!
“The profession is honoured, Baxter. Why particularly schoolmaster?”
“I’ve put ‘because education is vital to the prosperity of our Empire, sir.’”
Hypocrite!
“Good. Dench?”
“Missionary, sir.”
Really it was too revolting---the way, one after another, they grovelled to this man. Did anyone seriously imagine that Dench was going to devote his life to converting the heathen, or that Hearsay wouldn’t know a moment’s happiness until he was a doctor? Because he didn’t. But Mr. Loosely was lapping it all up like a cat. Giving them marks too----positively rewarding them for their hypocrisies, while the one honest boy in the room went markless and forlorn.
Well, he was cured of one ambition anyhow. He would never be Mr. Loosely’s bright boy. The post was vacant.
“I will now read out the form order, as determined by your marks in this paper. Hearsay---quite a promising paper, Hearsay. Dench---yours too, Dench, de Silva. Tutt. Leith-Brown. Piggott. Misquith. Baxter. Lapeuta. Flake. Jonas. And Bartle. That will do for to-day.”
“And Bartle”----fitting climax to the most disappointing, the most devastating, the most inexpressible afternoon he had ever spent.
“And Bartle!” Really, if it weren’t for the thought of that hockey after tea, life wouldn’t be worth living. “And Bartle” indeed! But let them just wait. He would show them yet, the sniggerers. They would change their tune when “And Bartle” walked on to the hockey field.
There was a certain grim satisfaction in observing them. All through tea it was nothing but the General Knowledge paper---General Knowledge paper and bread and butter, General Knowledge paper and stale cake, General Knowledge paper and vegetable-marrow jam. It tainted the food. But after tea there was a subtle change. When people clad in white shorts and emblazoned sweaters, and armed with ferocious-looking hockey sticks, stamped in studded boots down the corridor, there was less of General Knowledge and more of particular ignorance, and no one was more grateful for such shreds of information as the despised “And Bartle” condescended to bestow than that prime sycophant and sniggerer---Hearsay.
It was simply impossible to get rid of him. Even when they were in “Minto,” changing, and he had carefully closed his cubicle door in order to remove his loin-cloth before getting into his hockey things, Hearsay must come bursting in to ask whether he ought to wear his zephyr inside his shorts or outside; and, having burst in, refused to budge. Nothing would dislodge him.
“I’m quite ready now, thanks. I’ll wait for you,” was the only reply to his suggestion that Hearsay might be more comfortable in his own cubicle.
So he was still wearing the loin-cloth underneath when they went out. Annoying, because, in the rush for the swimming-bath afterwards, he might forget to take it off until---well, until there was nothing else to take off. And then people might ask questions. Hitherto he had managed to avoid “people”---thanks largely to the indefatigable activity of the school bell---and he was not anxious to attract then attention now. Unless, of course, it was to his outstanding proficiency in hockey. When that was established, the more attention he got the better he would be pleased.
When . . . Ah, when. Somehow, as they approached the ground, where most of the inhabitants of “Kandahar” were already clustered in little lugubrious knots, waiting for someone to come and show them how to begin, the prospect of that proficiency seemed unaccountably to dim. It would be all right, of course, once they got going, but just for the moment he didn’t feel very like hockey. Energetic, yes; after those pent hours in “Kandahar” he was fairly lusting for exercise; but hockily energetic, no. Not quite. There was something a little limiting, a trifle embarrassing to a fine, free, careless spirit about those chalk lines and those serried red flags. He wanted to range---to range far and free---untrammelled, unencumbered. There were no chalk lines on the maidan at Lucknow, where he had watched hockey being played as it should be played. No finicking flags. A yelling bevy of barefoot boys pursuing a ball over the boundless plain---that was his idea of hockey; the ball travelling where it listed, and the boys pursuing with clamour and brandished sticks---not this stilted, restricted, tame business of lines and flags.
Untrammelled, unencumbered . . . which reminded him of the stick.
Of course he would get used to the stick. Once he began to sprint it would adapt itself naturally to him and permit itself to be forgotten; just as the boots---why hadn’t he adopted Les’s suggestion of trying on the boots when they had arrived from Whiteaway & Laidlaw’s? It wouldn’t have taken a minute, and then she could have sent them back and ordered the next size larger---just as the boots would expand, and give, and accommodate themselves to the feet, instead of pinching his toe knuckles and making him hobble. The warmth of the feet would soften the leather, as people in boot shops were so fond of saying, and the boots, like the stick, would permit themselves to be forgotten, once he began to play . . .
“They’ve started over there,” suddenly exclaimed Hearsay, “Do let’s stop a sec. and look.”
He was surprised. He had been studying his boots, of course, and thinking how very unsympathetic the pale, pea-green leather of the toe-caps looked---but his ears at least were disengaged; he had hardly expected to have to be told when a game of hockey had begun. On Lucknow maidan a ringing rapture of voices had proclaimed the fact to everybody within a radius of three miles. To the residents of Lucknow hockey was distinctly one of the facts of life that could not be ignored, even by the hard of hearing. What hole-in-corner affair, then, was this?
A game without a noise! A game! Why, the idea was ludicrous. Hearsay must be dreaming.
“Are you sure?” he said, stopping for the third time to loosen a bootlace that seemed to tighten automatically as he walked. “I can’t hear anything.”
“Well, your ears must be bunged up then. Can’t you hear the sticks---and Franks shouting?”
“Oh, that!”
For some time he had been vaguely conscious, at intervals, of a faint woodeny tapping or clicking---like the sound a woodpecker makes, busy on some distant bole---and of an occasional human voice, issuing directions to one or more subordinates. He had imagined it might be the old mistri, pursuing his vocation away back at the end of the dormitory wing. But, now that his attention was called to it, the voice was English. “Pass out to your wing, Jenkins,” it had just said, though what on earth that had to do with hockey was more than he could tell.
“You can see ’em, can’t you---over there on the big ground. Your eyes aren’t bunged up too, are they?” said Hearsay sharply, nudging him.
“No, only my boots, and I can’t unbung them,” he responded wearily, “Where’s this hockey?”
“There, of course.”
“Oh .. . that! Have they begun?”
Hearsay stared.
“Of course they’ve begun. I thought you . . .”
“Oh, so they have. Of course. I didn’t notice,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“You must be bunged up, Bartle. That’s the first game. Franks is captain. Half those chaps are in the First Eleven. Do you mean to say you didn’t even notice?”
Hearsay was suspicious.
“If you had to wear these boots,” he groaned, “you’d have quite enough to notice without looking round the ground. My feet feel quite dead in ’em.”
But it was his heart that felt dead. Was that hockey?
Where was the mob---the racing, revelling, stick-brandishing mob? Where was the fine, free ardour of the sprint? Where was there any sigh that a game was being played at all? Silence he could have understood, as the result of a too-breathless running. But this silence on the part of people who were mostly engaged in doing nothing whatever---there was no sense in it. Why did they bother to change? Why did they put themselves to the expense of buying sticks and uncomfortable boots, if all they were going to do was to stand about like storks all over the field and watch two or three people in the middle of it engaged apparently in hammering the ball into the green ground?
Those two chaps leaning against a goal-post, for instance---one at each end of the ground---did they suppose they were playing, or merely watching? And if playing, why didn’t they play? And if watching, why encumber themselves with the implements of play? Where was the sense?
Ah, wait though----there was a sprint. That nippy little chap in the striped shirt could sprint, if the great lout in the white one didn’t keep getting in his way and dabbing between his legs at the ball. So could the other striped ones who kept up with him, but for some reason best known to themselves didn’t make the smallest effort to assist him---preferring, no doubt, to keep their distance and avoid the responsibility of the ball. Oh, there was the will to sprint all right, and the capacity to sprint---only it was checked, foiled at every turn. The opportunity to sprint---that was what was lacking.
They never got going. The moment some stripe possessed himself of the ball, and began to sprint with it, some white was certain to pounce on him and bash the thing away, checking him in mid-sprint. It happened a dozen times in one minute. Anybody who hadn’t been told that this was hockey would think that it was an elaborate conspiracy for the repression of would-be sprinters. It was cruel. He could not bear to look at it. As a sprinter himself, he felt every fibre of him protesting against the outrage.
“They’re pretty evenly matched. Neither side seems to be able to get away, do they?” said Hearsay in his prosy way, “What about your sprinting?”
Ah, indeed, what about his sprinting? He had been wondering himself. If, after all he had been saying, he was going to be deprived of the opportunity to sprint, he might, as well drown himself in the swimming-bath and be done with it. For there was nothing else he could do---fetter his sprint, and he was done for. Lost. Oh, what madness had made him say he was a keen hockey player? An experienced hockey player? They would be expecting to see something when he came on to the ground. Listen to what Hearsay was saying now.
“I expect they’ll shove you up into one of the top games after to-day. Perhaps you’ll even be playing in that game. I do hope you will. What’s the matter?”
He had groaned involuntarily.
“Only my boots,” he muttered.
“Oh, they’ll be all right when you start. Come on. I believe they’re picking up sides. Shall you tell the captain you’re an experienced player?”
“No,” he burst out savagely, “And don’t you either, or I’ll brain you alive.”
To say Hearsay looked flabbergasted was to put it mildly.
“You seem jolly nervy for a chap who can play,” he said, “If it was any of us, now, there might be some excuse, but I don’t see anything for you to worry about even if your boots are tight. If they are.”
“Of course they are.”
“Well, you’d better tell that red-haired chap so, not me. He’s picking up.”
“Red-haired chap”---a chill, premonitory shiver went shooting down his spine. At this juncture he did not want to meet red-haired chaps---or, for that matter, at any juncture. He had too vivid a memory of a red-haired chap who, having volunteered to escort Les to the Matron’s room, had felt justly aggrieved at her failure to dispense a suitable reward. “Mingy old bunnia!” had been the term used of Les; and, though nothing had been said to him personally at the time---owing to the sudden appearance of Matron in the doorway---the red-haired chap’s look had conveyed volumes. If this Redhead should be his Redhead he was indeed doubly lost.
He glanced nervously at the little congregation assembled by the goal-posts for which they were making---half of them old acquaintances, half of them strangers from above. Yes, right in the centre of the straggling circle---set in authority, like a sun among its satellites---a head burned red. The rest of its owner’s person was momentarily obscured by the fat back of Dench, but he had little hope. There was an aggressive, ferocious familiarity about that head. It flaunted itself. There could not be two such heads in the world. Like Judgment, it was---Judgment, flaming red, to deal with him according to his iniquities.
Hearsay, who seemed suddenly to have got tired of him, had run on to join the throng, which was rapidly splitting into two groups---one centred round the red head and the other round some normal, inoffensively-pated person, as yet unknown. Sides---it was only too true---were being picked up, and Redhead---his Redhead---was, indeed, the captain of one of them.
Well, the only thing to do under the circumstances was, with the utmost alacrity compatible with dignity, to efface himself. If questioned afterwards, he could put it down to the boots. But face Redhead he could not.
He turned. Ahead, like a smooth green sea separating him from the distant block of white buildings, stretched the acres of flatness. What was the use? There wasn’t cover enough to hide a worm. And anyhow, it was too late.
While he hesitated, a voice---sufficiently familiar to dash any lingering hope that his Redhead might after all have a twin---shouted out:
“Hi, who’s that skunking? You there, come here!”
Nothing for it but to obey. But, even in his extremity, the grins that flitted from face to face, especially Dench’s and Hearsay’s, were not lost on him. “That chap’s a fraud!” they said, as clearly as possible, and that chap, to do him justice, felt it. He was a fraud, and he was about to suffer for it.
“Why, it’s the Portugee Eurasian!”
“Why, it’s the little tick whose aunt, or whatever she was, asked me the way to Ma Dhobi’s yesterday, and never stood me an anna. Fagged all the way to show her, and all she said was, “Thank you.” Portugee be damned---he’s a Dago.”
“And don’t he look it?”
Looking down at his hands and knees, he was conscious that he did---cruel to make him wear white; he wasn’t meant to wear white; everything was against him, even his clothes.
“Well, I don’t want him,” said the boy in spectacles, who, he remembered, had first sung that horrid “Portuguese Eurasian” after him on the steps. All his enemies were gathered against him. All the ungodly compassed him about.
“I’m sure I don’t,” returned Redhead truculently.
“You’ve got to. He’s last pick. Shove him in goal.”
“Oh, well, I shan’t see him in goal. Look here, Dago, you get into goal and stay there, and if you let any through I’ll borrow a pair of tongs and skin you.”
With shame he slunk into goal. The others dispersed over the ground, Redhead and the boy with spectacles assigning them their places.
Far across the field, in the other goal, he could see Hearsay; and even at that distance Hearsay seemed to be wearing a distinct grin. On the other, nearer faces---Dench’s and Lapeuta’s and Misquith’s---there was even less doubt about the grin. “So much for the experienced player,” they seemed to say, “It’ll be some time before we let him hear the end of this. My word, won’t we make him squirm for it, too!”
No mercy. He could expect none. The thing had bitten too deep; he had stirred their envy; they would never forgive him.
So this was the end. There was nothing for it but, when he got into the swimming-bath, quietly to sink, and stay sunk. He had often clung to the roots at the bottom of the brook at home, watching his breath go up in bubbles. This time he would have to stay a little longer, that was all, and watch a few more bubbles . . . till the last bubble relieved him of the necessity and the power of watching anything. It did not hurt, he had heard. He could not imagine water hurting, and anyhow the last bubble would put an end to anything of that kind.
A pity---but there it was. And, after all, he had only himself to blame. He ought never to have let himself be inveigled into this place. He ought to have fought tooth and nail to get back to Kullu, before the prison gates had closed.
And now Kullu would never even know . . .
Far down the field, in the neighbourhood of Hearsay’s goal, the sticks choked and clashed monotonously; the white-clad figures spurted and checked, spurted and checked by spasms---braced to sprint, never sprinting.
Then suddenly there was dashing delight. Someone hit clear, and the ball came down the field towards him, chased by a bevy---all twinkling, fluttering white between the green grass and blue heaven.
The sprint at last . . . and he was in goal. A bitter thing to watch, a sprint, from goal.
The game was over. He had “played” his hockey---an oddly cynical expression for the uninterrupted agony of the last hour. He would never “play” hockey again. There was one comforting thought, even in this extremity---he would never “play” hockey again.
Never be startled out of his senses with a sudden yell when, for once in a way, the ball hurtled in his direction, as if he and he only were responsible for its eccentricities; never be told again, in expressive and picturesque language, what he knew the moment he had done it---that instead of using his stick he ought to have used his hands, or that instead of using his hands he ought to have used his stick---in other words, that he was always wrong, whatever he did; never again flinch at those shrill, ear-piercing cries that proceeded from Redhead---“Wake up, Dago!” “Stay in, Dago!” “Come out to him, Dago!” “Punk, Dago!” “Pool, Dago!” and so on, till he didn’t know whether he was standing on his head or his heels; never see the new boys grin and giggle with venomous delight at each fresh shaft of what they seemed to think was wit. Never again. The swimming-bath for Dago.
One last, mad swim to show them that there was still something that Dago could do---by the way, what a lot of names he had collected in the last three days of life: Nubby Bux . . . Durroo . . . Dago . . . anybody who saw them all on his tomb might imagine he was popular---one last swim, and then the end.
Not an easy end. No wavy roots of trees to entwine him---smooth and tender as arms, counterfeiting a last love; they didn’t grow at the bottom of the swimming-bath.
Hot-water pipes were the most that he could expect there. And under those hot-water pipes his head must firmly and finally be wedged, if there was to be any hope of success. He knew too well the look of the air from under water---the irresistible impulse to come up and enjoy one more sight of it, one more big breath---to leave anything to chance, Not an easy or a pleasant end---there was something so sordid about hot-water pipes somehow---but better, far better, than the prospect of another of these “games.”
Yes, better death by drowning than to-morrow’s hockey.
To-day he had only let through seven goals. To-morrow he might let through seventeen---it entirely depended upon the whims of the ball---and then they would certainly brain him with their sticks, so he was doomed anyhow.
Three goals before half-time, four afterwards; and the last he had assisted in himself, with the wrong side of his stick. It was the only time that wonderful seven-rupee-eight-anna stick had come into actual contact with the ball---its maiden essay---so it was an expensive stroke. In terms of cash that stroke had cost him seven rupees eight annas---so it was a pity it had gone into the wrong goal, and caused so much annoyance, losing the game for Redhead’s side just on the stroke of time, because Hearsay in the other goal had only let through six. Most unfortunate. A sad waste of money, in fact.
Of course, the stick was just as good as new---only the merest trifle soiled---so it wouldn’t be quite a dead loss. Part of the outlay would be recovered at the auction of his effects afterwards; but it was poor consolation to think that that seven rupees, eight annas, which might have been spent so profitably on the confectionery side of Shop, was merely going back into father’s pocket after all.
He might make a will, of course, and leave everything to Kullu. “To Kullu of the carts, my only friend, I leave all that I have, which isn’t much.” But what was the use? If he himself, with all the will in the world to find Kullu, had despaired, how could he expect Mr. Loosely or the Matron, or whoever it was that dealt with the last Wills and Testaments Department of the College, to succeed? Why, the moment they saw the address---“Kullu, the Carts, India”; for what more was there to put?---they would scrawl “Untraced. Insufficient address.” across the Will, and pocket the money. If it was Mr. Loosely, he would buy a new pair of rolled-gold spectacles; if it was Matron, she would invest in a knick-knack. He refused to provide Mr. Loosely with spectacles and Ma Dhobi with knick-knacks.
Besides, by the time he had rushed into “Kandahar” and ferreted out pen and paper, and written the thing, and stamped it with a stamp out of Hearsay’s album---assuming he could find the album---and put it in an envelope, and addressed it to the Wills Department, Godelin College, Bareilly, and posted it . . . by the time he had done all that the swimming-bath would be closed, and it would be time for roll-call and prayers.
Already time was getting on. He had purposely dawdled behind when the game was finished, remaining in the background while the others sped away, dispersing to their dormitories to get their clothes. It had occurred to him that he might save himself the trouble of going to “Minto” and getting his clothes. He would not need clothes. So he had followed on slowly by himself---naturally one wasn’t exactly in a tearing hurry; it was only under the gravest necessity that one brought oneself to do it at all---and the nearer he had come to the shed with “Swimming-bath” painted on the door the slowlier he had walked. But now he would really have to hurry, if he meant business.
The sun was setting. A rose-pink light was flooding the dun grass and striking flame out the little scarlet flags; but in the shelter of the buildings wisps of the dusk were already a-creep. He would have liked to linger, for there was beauty about---even here there was beauty---but there were also warning signs of the imminence of roll-call. The players in the senior games, which had started first and were over long before his game, had already emerged, fully dressed, from the swimming-bath and had crossed over to the classrooms. There were lights in the classrooms and all down the corridors. In Big Hall, too, a coloured memorial window---would he ever have a coloured memorial window? Not much---was glowing red and blue. Any minute the bell might go, and someone come and lock the swimming-bath door.
Yes, he must hurry. It seemed hard---it was a pretty evening---but there it was. To-morrow would not be pretty---no use imagining that it would be. Mr. Loosely---hockey. No, anything but pretty. Besides, this present prettiness was doomed. Any second the sun would plop into the ground, and the rosiness would fade, and the shadows come leaping out in their black battalions to claim the earth, chasing all other feeble claimants in on their defences. Big Hall and “Kandahar” for some: and for some a serai fire. Well, he was one of the unlucky ones---that was all. He had surrendered his serai fire. Chances did not come twice.
He tried the door. Not locked yet. Not quite such a desperate hurry: time at least to look round.
Poking his head round the corner, he looked.
It was not inviting. All round, a big barn-like building with dark wooden walls and a raftered, cobwebby roof, pierced by one narrow slit of skylight; stretching away from before his feet, away into gloomy corners, an oblong tank about the size of a tennis court, nearly brimful of dusky water, chopping and slopping against the glimmering grey tiles that lined the tank; between walls and water, on three sides, a bordering ledge of sloppy stone, from which various snout-like diving-boards projected, and, on the fourth side, nearest the door and himself, a broader ledge equipped with a long bench upon which were piles of clothes and towels. A single gas-lamp, defectively incandescent, glowing wanly and dimming by turns in the draught of the door, shed a depressing sallow light on the nearer wall, while on the nearer water its rippled reflections writhed away like thin, tenuous, yellow snakes into the murk of the middle, where some splashing was going on.
There he was aware of Dench, wallowing like a fat white whale; of Redhead, red no longer in this light---a blackened poppy; of Lapeuta, engaged in flipping water into Misquith’s face; of Spectacles, unspectacled, strange; of Hearsay, shivering by himself; and the rest of them---black, bobbing heads; ghostly, shimmering bodies. Twenty or so. A gloomy lot.
He gloomed over them.
They didn’t look happy somehow---or was it only his unhappy eyes that saw them so? They looked cold---or was it only he that was cold? He was sure they were waiting for something to wake them up, to enliven them; they didn’t know what to do with themselves, down there in the water; they had jumped in---and now there was a lull, a suspense, a time to be filled in somehow before they got out again. They didn’t feel at home, he was sure, out there in the middle of the murk. They would be glad to get out.
And he . . .?
Oh, he didn’t want to be drowned. To get in was bad enough---it was all so cheerless---but to get in finally, without that sweet prospect of getting out, ever . . . he couldn’t face it.
Then he must be prepared, after six hours of Mr. Loosely in a derisive “Kandahar,” to take part in another game of hockey to-morrow, and the day after to-morrow, and all the to-morrows . . . and he couldn’t face that either. No, he couldn’t.
Get in, then. Oh, yes, it was beastly enough---but everything was beastly, and beggars couldn’t be choosers, and anyhow this was the very end.
He came in, dragging his feet; passed along by the bench under the light in the middle; hesitated . . .
“Here’s Dago, skunking as usual! Let’s duck him! Duck him! Guard the door, one of you!”
In a flash it happened. Before the last words were out of Redhead’s mouth someone had nipped out and banged the door behind him. A dozen dripping figures followed, in full cry, like hounds. Spectacles with his war-cry again, “I am Portuguese Eurasian”; Redhead with another---” Duck the Dago---duck the Dago, duck the Da-ago”---tune of Auld Lang Syne; someone else yelling “Yoicks, yoicks” in his ear . . . screaming confusion.
Redhead had him by one arm, Spectacles by the other; Dench in front, others behind, all heaving and pushing. He fought, clinging to the bench. It was one thing to drown oneself, quite another to be ducked by other people. A voluntary dip, yes; but in his own time and manner, please, for if there was one thing he resented more than another it was being assisted in doing something that he was perfectly capable of doing by himself. And he said so. Lying on his back on the sloppy tiles, clinging to the bench for all he was worth, he said so in lurid terms.
But they were raving round him like lunatics. No one heard.
The bench came over. Clothes and towels cascaded into the slop. Someone screamed of a broken toe. But he clung. If he was to go in, that bench was going with him, clothes and all.
Dench tried to lift him by the legs. He kicked Dench vigorously in the stomach, and Dench disappeared backwards into the bath. In the wan light he saw on that fat face an expression of surprised agony---just before the big splash that finally soused all the clothes. And he was glad---glad. He was an expensive duck. He was dying hard.
Did anyone else want a kick in the stomach? Because, if they did . . .
“Off with his boots,” muttered Redhead, breathing hard. Willing hands tore at his bootlaces. He kicked them. Someone sat on his legs, then---no more kicking---and through the labyrinth of their legs he could see the water getting nearer, nearer . . .
“Now his vest!”
Rip it went.
“Gosh, what a colour---look at his neck!” grunted Redhead, stooping over to unfasten his belt. Drops from the wet, hated head came dripping on to his chest, and, loosing the bench, he hit out at it---right, left---getting in on the ear and nose.
“I’ll drown you for that, you little swine!”
Will you, he thought, and decided then and there that he had done with drowning. When people like Redhead began to talk about it it was time to think of something else. And life was precious. Life was fun. Redhead’s nose was bleeding, and life was fun!
Arms pinioned. Someone on his chest. Belt undone. Someone else ripping off his stockings. Now his knickers.
Oh, murder . . . he had forgotten the loin-cloth!
“Why---look here---I say---he’s got on a lousy old loin-cloth!”
Serious matter though it was, he couldn’t help giggling. Pinioned, prisoned, exhausted---with five people sitting on him, and fifteen more hemming him round---he achieved a weak giggle. It was, for a second or two, almost the only sound---his giggle; that and their concerted gasp.
It really was so funny . . . their consternation: their surprise at actually seeing what they ought to have been prepared to see, if they reduced a Dago to his drawers. He would never forget it.
He giggled again. Delicious! Dressed Dago---more than they bargained for. What would they think? Who cared what they thought? He wasn’t going to explain.
“Why . . . why he’s a real Dago! Gosh!” whispered Redhead, almost awed: then, triumphantly, “I told you he was!”
“Anyhow, I’m going to duck him,” he concluded, “He’s made my nose bleed.”
They nearly had him in that time, but Spectacles intervened.
“I say, wait a bit, you chaps---what’s he doing here?”
Fresh clamour.
“He’s a blooming Thug . . .”
“He’s one of those Gandhi-ites. He’s a Satyagraha . . .”
Go on. A few more names. Had anyone ever had so many names as he?
He opened his mouth . . . to giggle again.
“Chup, you!”
All right. Let them find out for themselves what he was.
Gabble, gabble.
“He’s one of those chaps . . . he’d have been blowing up the place in two ticks . . . bet there are bombs in his box . . . I say, oughtn’t we to take him to the Head?”
“Whatever he is, he’s a fuggy beast, and he’s made my nose bleed, and I’m going to duck him . . .”
“Yes, but . . .”
“No, but . . . I’m going to duck him, I tell you.”
“Yes, but do think. We ought to take him to the Head. He may be wanted by the police. You never know with these chaps. Look at the way he bamboozled everybody about the hockey. He’s a slippery chap. I vote we take him straight to the Head.”
The Head! Oh, Lord---not another “H’m”---anything but that. Fight tooth and nail to escape that.
“Chup! Baitho!”
Wonderful how they lapsed into the vernacular, as soon as they saw what he really was! But he wasn’t going to the Head. He . . . wasn’t.
“I say, it may be serious. Stop, you chaps. The Head!” implored Spectacles.
Bother Spectacles.
“I’m going to duck him. Take him to the blooming Head afterwards. Trot him into Big Hall . . .”
“. . . Yes, trot him into Big Hall . . . just as he is . . . my aunt, they’ll stare . . .” in servile chorus.
“But I’ll damn well duck him first,” concluded Redhead, “Heave him up!”
Up.
“Come on---more of you---swing him!”
Swinging. And horrid little grunty remarks---“My word, he’s fishy! Makes you go all goosey to touch him,” “Never mind, you can go in after him and wash it off,” Wash? I’m going straight to Ma Dhobi for Keatings”---and so on.
“Say when!”
“WHEN!”---in a roar---and WUMP he was in. A gorgeous splash---more wet clothes for someone. Good old water, and himself so hot that he sizzled. And good old Redhead, for at least giving him a sporting chance of escaping that Head.
“All in! All in! Yoicks, tear ’im. Yoi, duck him then!”
Plop, plop, plop, plop---a score of plops. All in, like ducklings. Under, now. Deep, deep. Catch your Dago before you duck him, if you can catch him. Mind he doesn’t dive between your . . . legs!
Pink legs---pinch ’em. Fat white something-else---smack it!
“Where is he? I say. He’s just smacked my . . .”
Under again. Dive. Deep. Swim for it, like a trout, quick along the bottom. Now up. Wave at ’em. Lead ’em on. Make ’em fairly tumble over each other. Into the deep end, into the dark. Good. Now up and breathe---quick, you’ll want it, all you can got. Gulp, gulp---oh, the good air!---gulp it down.
“There he is! Cornered! Tally-ho boys, Ee---leu in then!”
Now, patience. Wait. Hang on, till they’re right on top, the whole lot of ’em, and there’s not a soul left at the door-end. Hang on. Pretend you’re dead-beat. Cower.
Still hang on . . .
NOW! Wallop right in the middle of ’em and quick under. Leave ’em to duck each other till they find out their mistake. Swim . . . swim as you’ve never swum before, all under water, till your finger-tips . . . touch . . . the steps.
Good.
Now very quietly . . . wriggle . . . out . . . just . . . like . . . an old mugger on his . . . tummy and . . . quick! Heave a boot at the gas!
Great! Got it in one . . .
Now shove in the bench on top of ’em. Over she goes!
Now, the door. Take the key---Oh, come out, key!---slip out, lock the beastly---Oh, go in, key---door, and . . .
Done ’em! Done ’em brown!
He leaned against the locked door, gasping, incapable for the moment of movement---though, as he knew, there was no time to lose. He had had the maddest, merriest minute in the world’s history---now that it was over, that is---and had won a brief breathing-space, which goodness knew he needed; but the real ordeal---to get clear, somehow, before they could break out and catch him and haul him before the Head to be dealt with after his iniquities---that ordeal was to come. He must think, not merely gulp---and plan---and plan pretty briskly.
Rattles, shouts, poundings on the other side of the door, wild theories and alarms, babble about bombs, frantic wails over wet clothes---all this did not exactly make for clear thinking. But the door was quite stoutish, and the porch was shelter: there was no object in running blind---perhaps straight into the enemy’s arms. Lucky, though, that the roll-call bell had at last begun to bray, for that more or less drowned the din.
But it was a desperate business. In exactly three minutes the bell would stop, and then anyone might hear. Not to speak of the chance of their breaking down the door any moment.
Three minutes . . . Oh, batter away!
Still, it was no use sprinting blind. He would only come up against the wall. There it was, all along on the left, a white band to the dun, dusk-ridden, deserted grounds, and he could follow it round till a higher and nearer white mass---the back of the dormitory wing---intervened and shut out everything. Yes, the wall was a facer. The only hope was to get out through the gates.
That meant tackling the big Sikh porter. Well, he must bluff him. He was Durroo now, remember---not Drew, nor Bartle, nor Dago, nor anybody else---but Durroo in a loin-cloth, and Durroo must run up to that big Sikh and invent something. Treat it all as a joke, and say, “Guru Ji, I am a Saheb, and I want to run away”---the old honesty-best-policy dodge: desperate enough, but what else was there?---and hope that the man would do nothing more than clout him for a cheeky beggar and kick him out.
Would it work? There was a faint hope. The man would want to get rid of him at once, or someone might be asking what he meant by letting in beggars. And, yes, he must be ready to play on that . . . pretend he got in yesterday afternoon on the tail of a gharry . . . by mistake, of course, asleep on the tail of a gharry . . . and that the gharry had driven away and left him . . . and that he had slept ever since in a corner of the grounds, and was very hungry, and---please---he couldn’t possibly be a thief, because obviously he had nowhere to bestow his ill-gotten gains except in a loin-cloth that he was quite prepared to take off and shake out for the Guru Ji . . .
Yes, all that in reserve, in case the Saheb stunt failed. But, with luck, a clout and a kick would end the matter. Pray Heaven a clout and a kick would.
The gates, then---and the sooner the better. Round the dormitory wing---bother that wing for getting in the way; but there it was, and he would have to lump it, and thank goodness it wasn’t the verandah side, with chowkidars to pounce out---round the wing, on to the drive, and . . .
Mercy---the bell had stopped already. And they were using the bench as a battering-ram. Crash, bang---no door would stand that. Out of this, and double quick!
He sped.
Behind him he heard the door groan and splinter, and Redhead’s shrill, triumphant “One more, boys!” Then he was close under the building, running at the stoop. Ahead a dark mass jostled the white extremity of the wing---the shrubbery that he had so much maligned. He blessed it now. If he could gain that, before they burst open the door and saw him against the whiteness, he would be all right---for the moment, at least.
Sprint!
Just in time. As he crashed head foremost among the shrubs he heard a last rending of wood, and babel was released. Looking back as he picked himself up, he saw, through a lattice of twigs, a bevy of figures in fluttering white burst out and spread fanwise. They did not go far; for, after running a few steps, they stopped and looked blank, turning again to one another for confabulation. He knew what had occurred to them---that the whole school and all the masters were in roll-call: and the question was---should they intrude or should they wait? On their decision depended his fate. If they waited, he would have time to bluff the porter. If they didn’t, he might easily be caught in mid-bluff. It depended on them.
He listened anxiously. They were standing in a little knot, not far from the swimming-bath, arguing.
Shrill, babbling voices pierced the tense silence of dusk. One of them was the voice of Spectacles. Spectacles thought strongly that someone ought to go straight in and inform the Head---but Spectacles wasn’t the one to do it: “I can’t with only a towel on,” was his plaintive cry.
“Well, you can’t expect me to in this bally vest,” said someone else.
Everybody thought it ought to be done. Nobody was the one to do it. Then came the voice of decision---that deep, sulky voice that matched with an insolent head of hair:
“I know what I’m going to do---warn the porter. Then he can’t get out. You go and ring the fire-bell. That’ll fetch ’em out of Hall,” and a figure shot out of the group and came running, straight in his direction.
Fool, oh fool, to have waited! Now he was caught. If he left the shrubbery now, Redhead would see him running ahead. And if he stayed where he was the fire-bell would ring, the whole school would be out, there would be a hue-and-cry, and he would be caught just the same, skulking about in the bushes. No use, either, trying to waylay Redhead---he was such a beefy brute. If he had had that hockey stick now, for instance, he might have caught him one and laid him out---but of course, he had left the thing behind in the swimming-bath.
So he was done. Here was Redhead---and he was done. Too late to jump out at him, even if he could have made up his mind, for Redhead had passed him now. Running doggedly in his shirt and trousers---elbows to sides, cheeks blowing out, hair like a bonfire---Redhead was rounding the end of the shrubbery and about to set foot on the drive. He could hear him hailing the porter: “Chowkidar! Hi, Chowkidar!” and an answering hail: “Mam hazir hun, Saheb. Kiya bat?” Then the end of the wing hid him.
He must see what happened---what they did. There was just a chance they might do something silly---risk leaving the gates, never thinking he might be so near, and give him a chance to slip out . . .
Careful, though. The light from the lamps on the gate-post fell here.
Cautiously he crept round the corner . . . then started back in surprise and disgust.
Oh, Lord! Another obstacle!
A few yards away, standing among the shrubs with his back turned, was a little boy---a little boy as meagrely covered as himself, except that he was smeared and powdered from head to foot with whitewash. The old mistri’s assistant, of course---the boy whose chatter had woken him up in the early morning and reminded him of Kullu. Now, instead of getting on with his work and clearing off the premises, he must needs waste his employer’s time staring at the very commonplace spectacle of a bearded Sikh and a red-haired boy with his braces dangling arguing under an arc lamp. And the same light that blazed on them fell faintly on him, making him look, in his coating of white, like a powdered statuette---like a little lazy god, peering and peeping at what did not concern him, among the dark green leaves.
Wretched little beast! Hanging about like this when he ought to have been in bed long ago. And looking so annoyingly like Kullu, too, with his big ball head and his podgy shoulders---just at the one moment in life when he would give anything in the wide world to have Kullu at his side. Ah, if only it were Kullu---sensible, reliable, devoted Kullu---instead of a little brute who would squeal the place down if one as much as . . .
Heavens! What a din.
There was a sudden wild jangle as the school bell went mad. Starting back, he stumbled over something round, that gave a gurgle. The little boy looked quickly over his shoulder and . . .
Why . . . why . . . it was . . . though it couldn’t possibly be, it somehow was . . . Kullu himself!
“Owl of a Durroo, right that pot! Thou art wasting a good man’s wash.”
The very voice---the old, assertive pipe: he couldn’t understand it, but there it was, bless it, and all was well. He didn’t care what happened now. Kullu was here. Kullu would find a way. How Kullu had got there---no time to ask, even to wonder.
“O Kullu, Kullu, I am glad . . .”
“Pick up the pot first---then tell me how glad thou art.”
There was a round-bellied pot at his feet, lying on its side and exuding liquid whitewash. Mechanically he righted it---then flew for Kullu . . . hugged him hard, and was hugged. And the bell jangled like a mad thing, and he did not care.
“They are after me, Kullu,” he breathed, “Thou canst get me out?”
Knowing the answer---that was the happiest thing---knowing the answer, because he knew Kullu.
“Of course. For that I came. Take thy end of the ladder . . .”
A ladder---he had a ladder!
“. . . and my quilt to save thy rump from the glass . . .”
The old quilt, soft over his shoulder!
“Now, in the shadow of these shrubs, but not so close as to entangle us, run as I lead---run!”
With what a will! Behind him he could hear the school clattering out of Big Hall, pouring down the passages---excited sounds everywhere. But the ladder was light bamboo; the good grass was a spring to his feet; and Kullu was guide. In no time they were under the wall.
Gently Kullu placed the ladder, whispered hurried directions:
“Listen, Durroo, When thou art up, do not suddenly pop thy head over the wall, but look cautiously. If there are men on foot upon the road, draw back and wait---for a man on foot will step aside to catch a thief; but a man on a cart, never. And if there are carts, so much the better, for their dust will hide thee. So bide thy time for men, but not for carts. That is one thing. Another is---have the quilt ready folded in four, to smother the glass, and do not dally on top of the wall, but jump at once. There is soft dust below, for I have marked the place, and thou wilt be falling into bed. But do not take the quilt with thee, because the moment thou art down, thou must up again and run. Do not look round, or cross the road to the lamplit side or go towards the gates, but run under the wall, away from the gates, till . . .”
A sudden qualm seized him. Why all these directions? Wasn’t Kullu coming too?
“But thou art coming thyself . . .” he began.
Kullu checked him scornfully:
“Wouldst thou have me leave a good man’s gear behind, and proclaim to the world besides that it was the mistri’s boy who helped thee escape? Nay, I go out as I came in---by the gates. Who knows, too, but what I may be of service to thee yet. Waste not my time and thine, but listen. Run as I bade thee, and after a hundred paces thou wilt come upon cross-roads. Take no notice, but run straight on. Then the bungalows will end and the Sadr Bazaar will begin. The third house on this side is the serai of Ajit Singh. Thou canst not mistake it, for there will be carts in the courtyard---though not our carts. Go into that courtyard . . .”
He glanced over his shoulder. There were lights dotted about over the ground,---bobbing, dancing, lively lights---and a hubbub of voices that seemed on the point of becoming a howl.
“Quick!” muttered Kullu, “I must not be seen running with a ladder. By the water-troughs, then, in that serai. Go!”
He ran up the ladder---peered over. A motorcar had just passed, going towards the gates, and its brilliant lamps shone full in the faces of a troop of boys who had just run out into the middle of the road. They looked dazed. It was his chance.
He put the folded quilt on the coping---knelt on it---felt the glass crumble underneath---slewed his legs round---and slid, to land sitting in a feather-bed of dust. In a second he was up and running, silently, as one runs on snow, in the shadow of the wall, well out of range of the lamps that lined the farther side of the broad road. He could scarcely see his own feet---only the grey fume of the dust he was raising. Ahead the road was empty. He did not look behind.
Now he was parting company with the wall---and now he was over the cross-roads, just in time to avoid having to wait for a stream of ekkas to trot past: glad of them, once he was over, because they screened him from anybody who might be looking up the road.
And here was the last bungalow, as Kullu had said, and just ahead the road narrowed into a bazaar street, garish with lights and the hanging signs of shops and all the gay colours of a crowd.
He dropped into a walk and became one of the crowd. Then, for the first time, he looked back.
Far down the road, at the mid of the wall, where the arc lamp of Godelin gates shed a brighter glare, a little black knot of people was still standing. To them came out a midge bearing a ladder and a midget pot on his head, and pointed within. After a moment or two of talk the group dispersed at the run, inside the gates, and the midge had the road to himself. Clever midge!
He sighed his relief, for the clever midge was Kullu, and Kullu was safe.
As he walked into the dim courtyard of the serai of Ajit Singh he heard, faint through the din of the bazaar at his back, the nagging bray of a bell; and he laughed, for that was the farewell bray of that big, corporate ass---Godelin College.
Then the serai claimed him.
Claimed him---grew on him---gained him, as breath came back, and easiness, and a sense of the place he was in. Once more there were stooping, sheltering eaves over his head; and, in the dim below, carts drawn up, and unseen cattle feeding near. But the drivers doubtless were out in the lighted street, buying their suppers, for no one questioned him as he came in, or disturbed him in his corner.
He sat, resting his back against a stone trough, into which water softly tinkled, as if it would keep young the spirit of old charity that haunted the place, and turn it to a tune. And soothed by that sound, and by the smell of kine, and by the distant drift of the world without the gates, watched lazily through the spokes of many wheels, he waited for Kullu.
And presently Kullu came---Kullu, panting, but serene; with his fine quilt over his shoulder, and a lamp in his hand, and a bundle of sticks under his arm, and a supper in dishes on his head.
“All is well?” he asked, beaming at Kullu.
“All is well,” was the satisfied reply, “I have returned the good man his gear, and taken my wage, and here is firing and supper.”
One by one Kullu deposited the burdens; then, with a sigh of content, dropped down beside him, saying:
“All is very well. I was back at work when they came searching with their lanterns, and was able to direct as many as asked me whether I had seen thee to the roof, where they are doubtless still looking for thee. I said that I had seen thine ugly face peering over at me, and so believing were thy Saheb friends and so anxious to find thee, that one of them left his lantern behind him. So we have light.”
Kullu chuckled.
“Also, while they were roof-walking, I was able to recover something that is thine---something out of the pocket of thy Saheb-fashioned pajamas Indeed, thy last serai had many cribs; but only one that was bare---so I knew thine when I saw it. Take thy change. Two rupees---and the eight annas I have spent upon supper and provisions for the road. This money, with what I have earned, will keep us till we come by my father’s carts again.”
A warm hand snuggled into his, and left behind coin.
“Say I am clever, Durroo whom I love . . .”
“Thou art more than clever. Thou art a magician. And thou wilt really and truly take me with thee to the carts?”
“Really and truly. First we will light the fire and have a fine feed . . .”
“As on the other night . . .” he put in.
“All shall be as on the other night, except thy going away---on this night and every other night. Thou art of us now.”
He beamed. He could not speak---he was too happy. “Thou art of us now”---the certitude of it, the peace.
Kullu prattled on.
“Yes, the finest feed in honour of thee. And then we will sleep a little, under my quilt, as we did before---but not even for so long as then, for in the morning the police will be watching the roads for thee. These carts here start soon after midnight, to gain a clear road through the city, and upon one of these I had already arranged to go. It was in my mind to come to thee in the night, while the chowkidar went his rounds, but this is better.”
He marvelled. All these plans ready laid---everything thought out---and here was he, still in the dark as to how Kullu had even got here. It had just happened---a miracle, a piece of magic; and, like most people who are privileged to witness magic and miracle, he had taken it for granted. It all worked so smoothly, and Kullu was such a matter-of-fact magician.
But now he had time to wonder.
“Kullu,” he said, “reveal thy magic. I despaired of ever finding thee. How is it that thou hast not only found me, but saved me so skilfully that, at the time, I did not even stop to wonder how?”
“Just as well,” grunted Kullu, with a grin. Adding:
“It is a long tale, and there should be firefight for tales. I will tell it while the food is cooking, and then, when it is done, thou wilt know whether or not Kullu, son of Chhotu, is wise.”
So he waited while Kullu built a little scaffolding of sticks and filled it with chaff, and lit it, and blew, bringing up a glow; watched him build round the glow with bigger sticks, and still bigger, till there were logs alight and their corner was a rosy, smoke-scented bower. Then, when the brass dishes, borrowed from some kindred magician round the corner who provided cooked meals, were put to warm up, and the chupattis were toasting between Kullu’s toes, and all was snug, he heard that tale of a pilgrimage, told from the beginning, with all the honours due to a tale.
“I begin from the serai at Chandragalli,” intoned Kullu, in the sing-song voice that belonged to firelight, “with thee asleep in this quilt; and me half asleep, watching thee; and a one-horse gharry jingling down the road outside. At the serai gates the gharry stopped, a light shone, and a khitmatgar, accompanied by a Saheb, came in; and I knew that khitmatgar, and knew that he was in league with the Sahebs, and that they would take thee away. So I jumped up and cried out to my father and brothers above, to come and kill the khitmatgar. But nobody heard.”
Tears came into Kullu’s eyes. Something burned in his own. And the tale went on.
“They took thee away. I fought, but what was the use? The khitmatgar rapped me on the head, and the next thing I knew was that the gharry was gone, jingling up the road whence it had come. I cried a little---but, again, what was the use? Soon I was wiser, and went to my father and begged him and begged my brothers to come with me to the bungalow and kill thy captors and rescue thee. They refused---they were heavy with sleep, and would not stir. So I took my quilt and my gear and went alone up the road to the bungalow, and hid in some berry bushes by the gates, and watched. From midnight till dawn, and from dawn till noon did I watch that bungalow, and the Sahebs that came and went, and the Mem Sahebs, and the khitmatgars, and the ayah whom thou saidst was treacherous---and not till after noon did I see a sign of thee. And then only a glimpse of thee, driving past in the same gharry, clad in thy Saheb’s clothes and looking miserable, with thine eyes tight shut that thy tears might not shame thee before the Mem Saheb that was with thee.”
He remembered. He had screwed his eyes up that he might not see the empty road. But it wouldn’t have mattered if he had kept them open; he would never have seen Kullu in those thick bushes.
“So thou wert in the bushes all the time,” he murmured.
“Had it not been for the khitmatgar at thy side, I could have touched thy knee---thy Saheb-fashioned knee,” said Kullu, with a mischievous glance at him, “Shame on them to have made a Saheb of thee!”
“Kullu, I am a Saheb,” he broke out. There must be no more deceit.
Kullu eyed him quizzically. Perhaps now he did believe, perhaps he didn’t---it was hard to tell; but whatever he thought in his inmost heart, he clearly wasn’t going to give it away.
“Thou art Durroo,” he said, smiling up, “That is enough for me. But this I say---that none but a Saheb would interrupt a tale that is but half told, as thou hast done. Thou wilt have to get used to longer tales than mine, O Durroo, and tales less true, if thou art to sit at our fire in peace.”
“I will try to remember,” he promised, with due humility, “Continue to delight thy unworthy listener.”
Kullu grinned.
“There spoke no Saheb, at any rate. But a Saheb rode down Chandragalli road in a gharry, and his humble servant followed on foot to the station, where the Saheb’s luggage on the gharry betrayed that he was bound, and learned, from the coolie who stuck the tikkuts on the same luggage, that the Saheb had gone to Bareilly. So to Bareilly the humble servant went, by a later train, arriving towards dawn of this very day, and . . .”
“But, Kullu---thy fare? It must have cost thee five rupees at least.”
“Peace, Saheb!” Kullu held up a protesting hand. “Who but a Saheb would imagine that I paid?”
Once more he subsided.
“Again thou hast lost me the thread,” smilingly complained Kullu, “even as Kullu himself was lost on that Bareilly City station in the dim before dawn. Never have I been in such a jungle---trains trumpeting in my ears like must elephants, and men all lying about like sick monkeys, blear-eyed with sleep and stricken deaf and dumb with noise. Had it not been for an old dung-gathering crone outside in the yard, harvesting the first-fruits of the day in a basket . ..”
“I remember her!” he couldn’t help putting in, recalling a ragged, scuttling figure, and abuse, and a lump of dung spattering on the front wheel of the gharry, as they had driven out of the station.
“And she had cause to remember thee,” rejoined Kullu, “since thy wheel nearly put an end to her. Indeed, she sent thee a message in kind, which I shall surely deliver if thou dost interrupt my tale once more. Enough that it was she who directed me to the school, saying: ‘Thou wilt come to a wall that will remind thee of thy proper place---Bareilly Jail---and to iron gates that a jailbird should recognize; though, if thou thinkest that thou wilt enter in there as easily as thou hast entered similar jails thou art mistaken.’ And she was right, for the gates were locked. I saw, through the iron bars, gaunt buildings, set in a waste; a waste treeless save for the little black trees that they plant in cemeteries, and moreover scattered with red flags such as they fly to mark the tombs of the saints; and I thought, in horror, ‘The woman hath deceived me. This is no school, and yet no jail, but a Kafiristan---a place of the dead. And Durroo is dead, and I shall never see his face again.’ Indeed, indeed, I despaired for thee, Durroo, in that dim dawn, and cast dust on my head. See, it shakes out even now!”
He nodded his head vigorously, and grinned; then came closer. Then shoulders met, and Kullu snuggled against him, whispering:
“Now it is I who interrupt. But oh! it is pleasant to remember that dust-throwing and that despair, with thee here and alive---so that it all seems but a game that I played, a game of ‘Find,’ though at the time it was no game at all. For indeed I did despair. In my misery I would have turned away from the gates, had not the old man, the mistri, come up behind me with his paint-pot and ladder and stood beside me, looking in and grumbling. So I spoke to him. ‘Mistri Ji,’ I said, ‘tell me quickly---is there life in this place, or is it a kafiristan?’ To which he replied, ‘Nay, I wish it were, and all within it dead, especially the Miss Saheb who commands me to finish three days’ work in the space of one day, yet will not open the gates that I may begin, bidding me wait without like a beggar until a certain bell of theirs is rung---so I miss the cool of the morning.
And moreover pays me so poorly that I cannot afford an assistant at the work---for how can I give more than two annas to a helper, when she gives me but five all told? And who is fool enough to do a day’s work for two annas?’ Whereto I replied quickly---for I saw that God had sent this good man to me---‘Here is the fool whom thou seekest. Give me the paint-pot!’ So he gave me the paint-pot, also the ladder, and presently a big bell did ring, and there came out a ferocious man of the Sikh persuasion, who, after some grumbling, let us in, closing the gates after us. And I thought, ‘If it is as difficult to get out of this place as it is to get in, God help Durroo and me.’ But at least I was in.”
Kullu looked up and smiled.
“Was I not wise to take service with that mistri, O Durroo? Tell me that I was wise.”
“The word hath not been devised to describe thy wisdom,” he replied, “Thou shalt no longer be called Kullu, son of Chhotu, but Kullu the Wise.”
Kullu, wriggling with delight, adopted the title.
“So Kullu the Wise came at last to school,” he said, “and was put to work upon a wall, and instructed in the art of applying whitewash.”
“I heard thy instruction,” he observed, “It was thy instruction that woke me this morning from my dreams---the mistri’s commands and thy replies. But, fool that I was, I could not believe that the voice was thine. I thought it was just a voice like thine, sent to mock me, and I closed my ears.”
“Also thine eyes, it seems, for though I saw thee often throughout the day, never once did thine eyes light on me,” was the sharp retort, “What were thine eyes doing, Durroo, not to see me?”
He was humble.
“Mine eyes erred and strayed,” he said, “We are not all so sharp as thou art, O Kullu the Wise. But continue thy tale.”
“With a will. With more will than I worked on that wall, for it was a man’s work and the arm soon tired. But presently I was cheered, for I heard thy voice urging the chowkidar of the place to let thee out. I did not mistake thy voice, Durroo. But---no matter: for the future thou wilt know my voice, if thou art still living after this long tale. And soon there was something better and surer than a voice, for presently mine eyes were gladdened by a sight of thee thyself---thee in good health and trim, in spite of all; for thou wert running in company with others, and outstripping all. And I said to myself, ‘Good! He is trying his speed against the time of escape.’ And was it not so?”
He shook his head.
“Nay, I had no thought of escape at that time. I had neither thy wisdom nor thy faith.”
Kullu swelled with pride.
“But wisdom came to thee later,” he said, consolingly, “and faith besides; for presently I saw thee running again, in the company of one other---a miserable runner---and both were armed with clubs. And I rejoiced, seeing that thou hadst found both arms and an ally---though I could have wished thee a stouter arm and a less miserable ally than that was.”
He laughed. So much for Hearsay and hockey sticks!
“. . . And then, for the space of three hours, I saw thee not at all, though the time was ripe to use that club of thine. What wert thou doing those three hours?”
“Imparting my knowledge upon paper for the benefit of a munchi called by the name of a louse,” he replied.
“Ah! Then thy culpable inactivity is explained. I was afraid that they had deprived thee of thy club and put thee in irons, till I saw thee again, far away, entering a door, and knew that at least thou wert still at large. That was about the time of the mid-day meal, and I myself was permitted to rest for half an hour, during which time I laid all these plans that have brought us here---inspecting the wall, and the road on the other side, and this serai, and arranging with a carter to carry us hence. But I have this further to ask thee---what wert thou doing throughout the afternoon?”
No difficulty about answering that question. It would be some time before that afternoon in “Kandahar” ceased to rankle.
“Submitting to the insults and ingratitude of the munchi previously referred to as Louse,” he replied.
“What looking a louse?” inquired Kullu.
“A black-winged louse with gold-rimmed eyes.” Kullu clapped his hands.
“Such a louse as thou describest I sent up with the others on to the roof to look for thee; and in climbing up the iron ladder he stumbled, and I heard a tinkle of glass, and a strange Saheb-fashioned oath. I misdoubt he hath gold-rimmed eyes any longer,” said Kullu.
“Kullu, I thank thee,” he said earnestly, “Thou hast paid a debt.”
“It is nothing. Had I known, I would have followed him and pushed him off the roof. But, look you, Durroo---with thy interruptions the tale is prolonged. Supper is almost ready. I will end by telling of my joy when I saw thee again, lightly clad and more like thy true self, with thy club in hand and thine allies around thee going out to battle. But alas! I could not see the battle, owing to the shrubs and the presence of the mistri. I could but hear the cries and the clash of the clubs; and once, when there was a long silence and some of the combatants began to come in, I was afraid that thou wert hurt. Then, in the dusk, when the mistri had departed and left me to bring out the gear, I was more afraid. Feet came running . . . and they were not thy feet, but the feet of one with hair as red as my father’s beard, when he hennas it for a feast. He ran to the Sikh at the gates, that red-haired one, and I stood trembling for fear of what he might say to the Sikh---for fear he might say, ‘Fetch a doctor. Durroo is hurt,’ or, ‘Fetch a priest. Durroo is dead.’”
He paused dramatically; then, with a sly grin, added, “I need not have feared. For there, just behind me, with his clumsy foot in my paint-pot, was that dear Durroo himself.”
There was a silence---each to his own thought, and the serai to its own soft sounds. Water awoke again at the trough, to tinkle its eternal tune; and once more there was the slow stir and munch of the kine. Presently Kullu leaned forward, drew out a dish from among the embers, and stirred it with the tips of his fingers, wafting a rich fragrance.
Then a log rolled over lazily to usurp the place of the dish, and blazed up, as if minded to record the scene in a picture and make material for memory . . . of Kullu, squatting on his heels, his face intent over the dish, his back rounded to match the restful shape of the nearest big cart-wheel, that presided over the corner; of two shadowed heads, Kullu’s and his own, on an old wall---heads that moved till, in rapt contemplation, of a shadowed dish, they met.
“Bus,” said Kullu, “The tale ends---the tale begins---in supper.”