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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Deodars, by Rudyard Kipling
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under the Deodars
+
+Author: Rudyard Kipling
+
+Posting Date: January 8, 2009 [EBook #2828]
+Release Date: September, 2001
+Last Updated: October 7, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE DEODARS ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE DEODARS
+
+By Rudyard Kipling
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+     The Education of Otis Yeere
+     At the Pit’s Mouth
+     A Wayside Comedy
+     The Hill of Illusion
+     A Second-rate Woman
+     Only a Subaltern
+     In the Matter of a Private
+     The Enlightenments of Pagett. M. P.
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE DEODARS
+
+
+
+
+THE EDUCATION OF OTIS YEERE
+
+
+I
+
+     In the pleasant orchard-closes
+        ‘God bless all our gains,’ say we;
+     But ‘May God bless all our losses,’
+        Better suits with our degree.
+            The Lost Bower.
+
+This is the history of a failure; but the woman who failed said that it
+might be an instructive tale to put into print for the benefit of the
+younger generation. The younger generation does not want instruction,
+being perfectly willing to instruct if any one will listen to it. None
+the less, here begins the story where every right-minded story should
+begin, that is to say at Simla, where all things begin and many come to
+an evil end.
+
+The mistake was due to a very clever woman making a blunder and not
+retrieving it. Men are licensed to stumble, but a clever woman’s mistake
+is outside the regular course of Nature and Providence; since all good
+people know that a woman is the only infallible thing in this world,
+except Government Paper of the ‘79 issue, bearing interest at four and
+a half per cent. Yet, we have to remember that six consecutive days
+of rehearsing the leading part of The Fallen Angel, at the New Gaiety
+Theatre where the plaster is not yet properly dry, might have brought
+about an unhingement of spirits which, again, might have led to
+eccentricities.
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee came to ‘The Foundry’ to tiffin with Mrs. Mallowe, her one
+bosom friend, for she was in no sense ‘a woman’s woman.’ And it was a
+woman’s tiffin, the door shut to all the world; and they both talked
+chiffons, which is French for Mysteries.
+
+‘I’ve enjoyed an interval of sanity,’ Mrs. Hauksbee announced, after
+tiffin was over and the two were comfortably settled in the little
+writing-room that opened out of Mrs. Mallowe’s bedroom.
+
+‘My dear girl, what has he done?’ said Mrs. Mallowe sweetly. It is
+noticeable that ladies of a certain age call each other ‘dear girl,’
+just as commissioners of twenty-eight years’ standing address their
+equals in the Civil List as ‘my boy.’
+
+‘There’s no he in the case. Who am I that an imaginary man should be
+always credited to me? Am I an Apache?’
+
+‘No, dear, but somebody’s scalp is generally drying at your wigwam-door.
+Soaking rather.’
+
+This was an allusion to the Hawley Boy, who was in the habit of riding
+all across Simla in the Rains, to call on Mrs. Hauksbee. That lady
+laughed.
+
+‘For my sins, the Aide at Tyrconnel last night told me off to The
+Mussuck. Hsh! Don’t laugh. One of my most devoted admirers. When the
+duff came some one really ought to teach them to make puddings at
+Tyrconnel The Mussuck was at liberty to attend to me.’
+
+‘Sweet soul! I know his appetite,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘Did he, oh did
+he, begin his wooing?’
+
+‘By a special mercy of Providence, no. He explained his importance as a
+Pillar of the Empire. I didn’t laugh.’
+
+‘Lucy, I don’t believe you.’
+
+‘Ask Captain Sangar; he was on the other side. Well, as I was saying,
+The Mussuck dilated.’
+
+‘I think I can see him doing it,’ said Mrs. Mallowe pensively,
+scratching her fox-terrier’s ears.
+
+‘I was properly impressed. Most properly. I yawned openly. “Strict
+supervision, and play them off one against the other,” said The Mussuck,
+shovelling down his ice by tureenfuls, I assure you. “That, Mrs.
+Hauksbee, is the secret of our Government.”’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe laughed long and merrily. ‘And what did you say?’
+
+‘Did you ever know me at loss for an answer yet? I said: “So I have
+observed in my dealings with you.” The Mussuck swelled with pride. He is
+coming to call on me to-morrow. The Hawley Boy is coming too.’
+
+‘“Strict supervision and play them off one against the other. That,
+Mrs. Hauksbee, is the secret of our Government.” And I daresay if we
+could get to The Mussuck’s heart, we should find that he considers
+himself a man of the world.’
+
+‘As he is of the other two things. I like The Mussuck, and I won’t have
+you call him names. He amuses me.’
+
+‘He has reformed you, too, by what appears. Explain the interval of
+sanity, and hit Tim on the nose with the paper-cutter, please. That dog
+is too fond of sugar. Do you take milk in yours?’
+
+‘No, thanks. Polly, I’m wearied of this life. It’s hollow.’
+
+‘Turn religious, then. I always said that Rome would be your fate.’
+
+‘Only exchanging half-a-dozen attaches in red for one in black, and if I
+fasted, the wrinkles would come, and never, never go. Has it ever struck
+you, dear, that I’m getting old?’
+
+‘Thanks for your courtesy. I’ll return it. Ye-es, we are both not
+exactly how shall I put it?’
+
+‘What we have been. “I feel it in my bones,” as Mrs. Crossley says.
+Polly, I’ve wasted my life.’
+
+‘As how?’
+
+‘Never mind how. I feel it. I want to be a Power before I die.’
+
+‘Be a Power then. You’ve wits enough for anything and beauty!’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee pointed a teaspoon straight at her hostess. ‘Polly, if you
+heap compliments on me like this, I shall cease to believe that you’re a
+woman. Tell me how I am to be a Power.’
+
+‘Inform The Mussuck that he is the most fascinating and slimmest man in
+Asia, and he’ll tell you anything and everything you please.’
+
+‘Bother The Mussuck! I mean an intellectual Power not a gas-power.
+Polly, I’m going to start a salon.’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe turned lazily on the sofa and rested her head on her hand.
+‘Hear the words of the Preacher, the son of Baruch,’ she said.
+
+‘Will you talk sensibly?’
+
+‘I will, dear, for I see that you are going to make a mistake.’
+
+‘I never made a mistake in my life at least, never one that I couldn’t
+explain away afterwards.’
+
+‘Going to make a mistake,’ went on Mrs. Mallowe composedly. ‘It is
+impossible to start a salon in Simla. A bar would be much more to the
+point.’
+
+‘Perhaps, but why? It seems so easy.’
+
+‘Just what makes it so difficult. How many clever women are there in
+Simla?’
+
+‘Myself and yourself,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee, without a moment’s
+hesitation.
+
+‘Modest woman! Mrs. Feardon would thank you for that. And how many
+clever men?’
+
+‘Oh er hundreds,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee vaguely.
+
+‘What a fatal blunder! Not one. They are all bespoke by the Government.
+Take my husband, for instance. Jack was a clever man, though I say so
+who shouldn’t. Government has eaten him up. All his ideas and powers of
+conversation he really used to be a good talker, even to his wife in the
+old days are taken from him by this this kitchen-sink of a Government.
+That’s the case with every man up here who is at work. I don’t suppose
+a Russian convict under the knout is able to amuse the rest of his gang;
+and all our men-folk here are gilded convicts.’
+
+‘But there are scores--’
+
+‘I know what you’re going to say. Scores of idle men up on leave. I
+admit it, but they are all of two objectionable sets. The Civilian who’d
+be delightful if he had the military man’s knowledge of the world and
+style, and the military man who’d be adorable if he had the Civilian’s
+culture.’
+
+‘Detestable word! Have Civilians culchaw? I never studied the breed
+deeply.’
+
+‘Don’t make fun of Jack’s Service. Yes. They’re like the teapoys in the
+Lakka Bazar good material but not polished. They can’t help themselves,
+poor dears. A Civilian only begins to be tolerable after he has knocked
+about the world for fifteen years.’
+
+‘And a military man?’
+
+‘When he has had the same amount of service. The young of both species
+are horrible. You would have scores of them in your salon.’
+
+‘I would not!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee fiercely.
+
+‘I would tell the bearer to darwaza band them. I’d put their own
+colonels and commissioners at the door to turn them away. I’d give them
+to the Topsham Girl to play with.’
+
+‘The Topsham Girl would be grateful for the gift. But to go back to the
+salon. Allowing that you had gathered all your men and women together,
+what would you do with them? Make them talk? They would all with one
+accord begin to flirt. Your salon would become a glorified Peliti’s a
+“Scandal Point” by lamplight.’
+
+‘There’s a certain amount of wisdom in that view.’
+
+‘There’s all the wisdom in the world in it. Surely, twelve Simla seasons
+ought to have taught you that you can’t focus anything in India; and
+a salon, to be any good at all, must be permanent. In two seasons your
+roomful would be scattered all over Asia. We are only little bits of
+dirt on the hillsides here one day and blown down the road the next. We
+have lost the art of talking at least our men have. We have no cohesion.’
+
+‘George Eliot in the flesh,’ interpolated Mrs. Hauksbee wickedly.
+
+‘And collectively, my dear scoffer, we, men and women alike, have no
+influence. Come into the verandah and look at the Mall!’
+
+The two looked down on the now rapidly filling road, for all Simla was
+abroad to steal a stroll between a shower and a fog.
+
+‘How do you propose to fix that river? Look! There’s The Mussuck head of
+goodness knows what. He is a power in the land, though he does eat like
+a costermonger. There’s Colonel Blone, and General Grucher, and Sir
+Dugald Delane, and Sir Henry Haughton, and Mr. Jellalatty. All Heads of
+Departments, and all powerful.’
+
+‘And all my fervent admirers,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee piously. ‘Sir Henry
+Haughton raves about me. But go on.’
+
+‘One by one, these men are worth something. Collectively, they’re just
+a mob of Anglo-Indians. Who cares for what Anglo-Indians say? Your salon
+won’t weld the Departments together and make you mistress of India,
+dear. And these creatures won’t talk administrative “shop” in a crowd
+your salon because they are so afraid of the men in the lower ranks
+overhearing it. They have forgotten what of Literature and Art they ever
+knew, and the women--’
+
+‘Can’t talk about anything except the last Gymkhana, or the sins of
+their last nurse. I was calling on Mrs. Derwills this morning.’
+
+‘You admit that? They can talk to the subalterns though, and the
+subalterns can talk to them. Your salon would suit their views
+admirably, if you respected the religious prejudices of the country and
+provided plenty of kala juggahs.’
+
+‘Plenty of kala juggahs. Oh my poor little idea! Kala juggahs in a
+salon! But who made you so awfully clever?’
+
+‘Perhaps I’ve tried myself; or perhaps I know a woman who has. I have
+preached and expounded the whole matter and the conclusion thereof.’
+
+‘You needn’t go on. “Is Vanity.” Polly, I thank you. These vermin’ Mrs.
+Hauksbee waved her hand from the verandah to two men in the crowd below
+who had raised their hats to her ‘these vermin shall not rejoice in a
+new Scandal Point or an extra Peliti’s. I will abandon the notion of a
+salon. It did seem so tempting, though. But what shall I do? I must do
+something.’
+
+‘Why? Are not Abana and Pharpar.’
+
+‘Jack has made you nearly as bad as himself! I want to, of course. I’m
+tired of everything and everybody, from a moonlight picnic at Seepee to
+the blandishments of The Mussuck.’
+
+‘Yes that comes, too, sooner or later. Have you nerve enough to make
+your bow yet?’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee’s mouth shut grimly. Then she laughed. ‘I think I see
+myself doing it. Big pink placards on the Mall: “Mrs. Hauksbee!
+Positively her last appearance on any stage! This is to give notice!” No
+more dances; no more rides; no more luncheons; no more theatricals with
+supper to follow; no more sparring with one’s dearest, dearest friend;
+no more fencing with an inconvenient man who hasn’t wit enough to clothe
+what he’s pleased to call his sentiments in passable speech; no more
+parading of The Mussuck while Mrs. Tarkass calls all round Simla,
+spreading horrible stories about me! No more of anything that is
+thoroughly wearying, abominable, and detestable, but, all the same,
+makes life worth the having. Yes! I see it all! Don’t interrupt, Polly,
+I’m inspired. A mauve and white striped “cloud” round my excellent
+shoulders, a seat in the fifth row of the Gaiety, and both horses sold.
+Delightful vision! A comfortable arm-chair, situated in three different
+draughts, at every ball-room; and nice, large, sensible shoes for
+all the couples to stumble over as they go into the verandah! Then at
+supper. Can’t you imagine the scene? The greedy mob gone away. Reluctant
+subaltern, pink all over like a newly-powdered baby, they really ought
+to tan subalterns before they are exported, Polly, sent back by the
+hostess to do his duty. Slouches up to me across the room, tugging at
+a glove two sizes too large for him I hate a man who wears gloves like
+overcoats and trying to look as if he’d thought of it from the first.
+“May I ah-have the pleasure ‘f takin’ you ‘nt’ supper?” Then I get up
+with a hungry smile. Just like this.’
+
+‘Lucy, how can you be so absurd?’
+
+‘And sweep out on his arm. So! After supper I shall go away early, you
+know, because I shall be afraid of catching cold. No one will look for
+my ‘rickshaw. Mine, so please you! I shall stand, always with that mauve
+and white “cloud” over my head, while the wet soaks into my dear, old,
+venerable feet, and Tom swears and shouts for the mem-sahib’s gharri.
+Then home to bed at half-past eleven! Truly excellent life helped out
+by the visits of the Padri, just fresh from burying somebody down below
+there.’ She pointed through the pines toward the Cemetery, and continued
+with vigorous dramatic gesture,
+
+‘Listen! I see it all down, down even to the stays! Such stays!
+Six-eight a pair, Polly, with red flannel or list, is it? that they
+put into the tops of those fearful things. I can draw you a picture of
+them.’
+
+‘Lucy, for Heaven’s sake, don’t go waving your arms about in that
+idiotic manner! Recollect every one can see you from the Mall.’
+
+‘Let them see! They’ll think I am rehearsing for The Fallen Angel. Look!
+There’s The Mussuck. How badly he rides. There!’
+
+She blew a kiss to the venerable Indian administrator with infinite
+grace.
+
+‘Now,’ she continued, ‘he’ll be chaffed about that at the Club in the
+delicate manner those brutes of men affect, and the Hawley Boy will tell
+me all about it softening the details for fear of shocking me. That boy
+is too good to live, Polly. I’ve serious thoughts of recommending him to
+throw up his commission and go into the Church. In his present frame of
+mind he would obey me. Happy, happy child!’
+
+‘Never again,’ said Mrs. Mallowe, with an affectation of indignation,
+‘shall you tiffin here! “Lucindy your behaviour is scand’lus.”’
+
+‘All your fault,’ retorted Mrs. Hauksbee, ‘for suggesting such a thing
+as my abdication. No! jamais! nevaire! I will act, dance, ride, frivol,
+talk scandal, dine out, and appropriate the legitimate captives of any
+woman I choose, until I d-r-r-rop, or a better woman than I puts me to
+shame before all Simla, and it’s dust and ashes in my mouth while I’m
+doing it!’
+
+She swept into the drawing-room. Mrs. Mallowe followed and put an arm
+round her waist.
+
+‘I’m not!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee defiantly, rummaging for her handkerchief.
+‘I’ve been dining out the last ten nights, and rehearsing in the
+afternoon. You’d be tired yourself. It’s only because I’m tired.’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe did not offer Mrs. Hauksbee any pity or ask her to lie
+down, but gave her another cup of tea, and went on with the talk.
+
+‘I’ve been through that too, dear,’ she said.
+
+‘I remember,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee, a gleam of fun on her face. ‘In ‘84,
+wasn’t it? You went out a great deal less next season.’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe smiled in a superior and Sphinx-like fashion.
+
+‘I became an Influence,’ said she.
+
+‘Good gracious, child, you didn’t join the Theosophists and kiss
+Buddha’s big toe, did you? I tried to get into their set once, but they
+cast me out for a sceptic without a chance of improving my poor little
+mind, too.’
+
+‘No, I didn’t Theosophilander. Jack says--’
+
+‘Never mind Jack. What a husband says is known before. What did you do?’
+
+‘I made a lasting impression.’
+
+‘So have I for four months. But that didn’t console me in the least. I
+hated the man. Will you stop smiling in that inscrutable way and tell me
+what you mean?’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe told.
+
+‘And you mean to say that it is absolutely Platonic on both sides?’
+
+‘Absolutely, or I should never have taken it up.’
+
+‘And his last promotion was due to you?’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe nodded.
+
+‘And you warned him against the Topsham Girl?’
+
+Another nod.
+
+‘And told him of Sir Dugald Delane’s private memo about him?’
+
+A third nod.
+
+‘Why?’
+
+‘What a question to ask a woman! Because it amused me at first. I am
+proud of my property now. If I live, he shall continue to be successful.
+Yes, I will put him upon the straight road to Knighthood, and everything
+else that a man values. The rest depends upon himself.’
+
+‘Polly, you are a most extraordinary woman.’
+
+‘Not in the least. I’m concentrated, that’s all. You diffuse yourself,
+dear; and though all Simla knows your skill in managing a team.’
+
+‘Can’t you choose a prettier word?’
+
+‘Team, of half-a-dozen, from The Mussuck to the Hawley Boy, you gain
+nothing by it. Not even amusement.’
+
+‘And you?’
+
+‘Try my recipe. Take a man, not a boy, mind, but an almost mature,
+unattached man, and be his guide, philosopher, and friend. You’ll find
+it the most interesting occupation that you ever embarked on. It can be
+done you needn’t look like that because I’ve done it.’
+
+‘There’s an element of risk about it that makes the notion attractive.
+I’ll get such a man and say to him, “Now, understand that there must be
+no flirtation. Do exactly what I tell you, profit by my instruction and
+counsels, and all will yet be well.” Is that the idea?’
+
+‘More or less,’ said Mrs. Mallowe, with an unfathomable smile. ‘But be
+sure he understands.’
+
+
+II
+
+     Dribble-dribble trickle-trickle
+        What a lot of raw dust!
+     My dollie’s had an accident
+        And out came all the sawdust!
+
+       Nursery Rhyme.
+
+So Mrs. Hauksbee, in ‘The Foundry’ which overlooks Simla Mall, sat at
+the feet of Mrs. Mallowe and gathered wisdom. The end of the Conference
+was the Great Idea upon which Mrs. Hauksbee so plumed herself.
+
+‘I warn you,’ said Mrs. Mallowe, beginning to repent of her suggestion,
+‘that the matter is not half so easy as it looks. Any woman even the
+Topsham Girl can catch a man, but very, very few know how to manage him
+when caught.’
+
+‘My child,’ was the answer, ‘I’ve been a female St. Simon Stylites
+looking down upon men for these these years past. Ask The Mussuck
+whether I can manage them.’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee departed humming, ‘I’ll go to him and say to him in manner
+most ironical.’ Mrs. Mallowe laughed to herself. Then she grew suddenly
+sober. ‘I wonder whether I’ve done well in advising that amusement?
+Lucy’s a clever woman, but a thought too careless.’
+
+A week later the two met at a Monday Pop. ‘Well?’ said Mrs. Mallowe.
+
+‘I’ve caught him!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee: her eyes were dancing with
+merriment.
+
+‘Who is it, mad woman? I’m sorry I ever spoke to you about it.’
+
+‘Look between the pillars. In the third row; fourth from the end. You
+can see his face now. Look!’
+
+‘Otis Yeere! Of all the improbable and impossible people! I don’t
+believe you.’
+
+‘Hsh! Wait till Mrs. Tarkass begins murdering Milton Wellings; and I’ll
+tell you all about it. S-s-ss! That woman’s voice always reminds me of
+an Underground train coming into Earl’s Court with the brakes on. Now
+listen. It is really Otis Yeere.’
+
+‘So I see, but does it follow that he is your property!’
+
+‘He is! By right of trove. I found him, lonely and unbefriended, the
+very next night after our talk, at the Dugald Delanes’ burra-khana. I
+liked his eyes, and I talked to him. Next day he called. Next day we
+went for a ride together, and to-day he’s tied to my ‘richshaw-wheels
+hand and foot. You’ll see when the concert’s over. He doesn’t know I’m
+here yet.’
+
+‘Thank goodness you haven’t chosen a boy. What are you going to do with
+him, assuming that you’ve got him?’
+
+‘Assuming, indeed! Does a woman do I ever make a mistake in that sort of
+thing? First’ Mrs. Hauksbee ticked off the items ostentatiously on her
+little gloved fingers ‘First, my dear, I shall dress him properly. At
+present his raiment is a disgrace, and he wears a dress-shirt like
+a crumpled sheet of the Pioneer. Secondly, after I have made him
+presentable, I shall form his manners his morals are above reproach.’
+
+‘You seem to have discovered a great deal about him considering the
+shortness of your acquaintance.’
+
+‘Surely you ought to know that the first proof a man gives of his
+interest in a woman is by talking to her about his own sweet self.
+If the woman listens without yawning, he begins to like her. If she
+flatters the animal’s vanity, he ends by adoring her.’
+
+‘In some cases.’
+
+‘Never mind the exceptions. I know which one you are thinking of.
+Thirdly, and lastly, after he is polished and made pretty, I shall, as
+you said, be his guide, philosopher, and friend, and he shall become a
+success as great a success as your friend. I always wondered how
+that man got on. Did The Mussuck come to you with the Civil List and,
+dropping on one knee no, two knees, a la Gibbon hand it to you and say,
+“Adorable angel, choose your friend’s appointment”?’
+
+‘Lucy, your long experiences of the Military Department have demoralised
+you. One doesn’t do that sort of thing on the Civil Side.’
+
+‘No disrespect meant to Jack’s Service, my dear. I only asked for
+information. Give me three months, and see what changes I shall work in
+my prey.’
+
+‘Go your own way since you must. But I’m sorry that I was weak enough to
+suggest the amusement.’
+
+‘“I am all discretion, and may be trusted to an in-fin-ite extent,”’
+quoted Mrs. Hauksbee from The Fallen Angel; and the conversation ceased
+with Mrs. Tarkass’s last, long-drawn war-whoop.
+
+Her bitterest enemies and she had many could hardly accuse Mrs. Hauksbee
+of wasting her time. Otis Yeere was one of those wandering ‘dumb’
+characters, foredoomed through life to be nobody’s property. Ten years
+in Her Majesty’s Bengal Civil Service, spent, for the most part, in
+undesirable Districts, had given him little to be proud of, and nothing
+to bring confidence. Old enough to have lost the first fine careless
+rapture that showers on the immature ‘Stunt imaginary Commissionerships
+and Stars, and sends him into the collar with coltish earnestness and
+abandon; too young to be yet able to look back upon the progress he had
+made, and thank Providence that under the conditions of the day he had
+come even so far, he stood upon the dead-centre of his career. And when
+a man stands still he feels the slightest impulse from without. Fortune
+had ruled that Otis Yeere should be, for the first part of his service,
+one of the rank and file who are ground up in the wheels of the
+Administration; losing heart and soul, and mind and strength, in the
+process. Until steam replaces manual power in the working of the Empire,
+there must always be this percentage must always be the men who are used
+up, expended, in the mere mechanical routine. For these promotion is far
+off and the mill-grind of every day very instant. The Secretariats know
+them only by name; they are not the picked men of the Districts with
+Divisions and Collectorates awaiting them. They are simply the rank and
+file the food for fever sharing with the ryot and the plough-bullock the
+honour of being the plinth on which the State rests. The older ones
+have lost their aspirations; the younger are putting theirs aside with
+a sigh. Both learn to endure patiently until the end of the day. Twelve
+years in the rank and file, men say, will sap the hearts of the bravest
+and dull the wits of the most keen.
+
+Out of this life Otis Yeere had fled for a few months; drifting, in the
+hope of a little masculine society, into Simla. When his leave was over
+he would return to his swampy, sour-green, under-manned Bengal district;
+to the native Assistant, the native Doctor, the native Magistrate, the
+steaming, sweltering Station, the ill-kempt City, and the undisguised
+insolence of the Municipality that babbled away the lives of men. Life
+was cheap, however. The soil spawned humanity, as it bred frogs in
+the Rains, and the gap of the sickness of one season was filled to
+overflowing by the fecundity of the next. Otis was unfeignedly thankful
+to lay down his work for a little while and escape from the seething,
+whining, weakly hive, impotent to help itself, but strong in its power
+to cripple, thwart, and annoy the sunkeneyed man who, by official irony,
+was said to be ‘in charge’ of it.
+
+‘I knew there were women-dowdies in Bengal. They come up here sometimes.
+But I didn’t know that there were men-dowds, too.’
+
+Then, for the first time, it occurred to Otis Yeere that his clothes
+wore rather the mark of the ages. It will be seen that his friendship
+with Mrs. Hauksbee had made great strides.
+
+As that lady truthfully says, a man is never so happy as when he is
+talking about himself. From Otis Yeere’s lips Mrs. Hauksbee, before
+long, learned everything that she wished to know about the subject
+of her experiment: learned what manner of life he had led in what she
+vaguely called ‘those awful cholera districts’; learned, too, but this
+knowledge came later, what manner of life he had purposed to lead and
+what dreams he had dreamed in the year of grace ‘77, before the
+reality had knocked the heart out of him. Very pleasant are the shady
+bridle-paths round Prospect Hill for the telling of such confidences.
+
+‘Not yet,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee to Mrs. Maliowe. ‘Not yet. I must wait
+until the man is properly dressed, at least. Great heavens, is it
+possible that he doesn’t know what an honour it is to be taken up by
+Me!’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee did not reckon false modesty as one of her failings.
+
+‘Always with Mrs. Hauksbee!’ murmured Mrs. Mallowe, with her sweetest
+smile, to Otis. ‘Oh you men, you men! Here are our Punjabis growling
+because you’ve monopolised the nicest woman in Simla. They’ll tear you
+to pieces on the Mall, some day, Mr. Yeere.’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe rattled downhill, having satisfied herself, by a glance
+through the fringe of her sunshade, of the effect of her words.
+
+The shot went home. Of a surety Otis Yeere was somebody in this
+bewildering whirl of Simla had monopolised the nicest woman in it, and
+the Punjabis were growling. The notion justified a mild glow of vanity.
+He had never looked upon his acquaintance with Mrs. Hauksbee as a matter
+for general interest.
+
+The knowledge of envy was a pleasant feeling to the man of no account.
+It was intensified later in the day when a luncher at the Club said
+spitefully, ‘Well, for a debilitated Ditcher, Yeere, you are going it.
+Hasn’t any kind friend told you that she’s the most dangerous woman in
+Simla?’
+
+Yeere chuckled and passed out. When, oh, when would his new clothes be
+ready? He descended into the Mall to inquire; and Mrs. Hauksbee,
+coming over the Church Ridge in her ‘rickshaw, looked down upon him
+approvingly. ‘He’s learning to carry himself as if he were a man,
+instead of a piece of furniture, and,’ she screwed up her eyes to see
+the better through the sunlight ‘he is a man when he holds himself like
+that. O blessed Conceit, what should we be without you?’
+
+With the new clothes came a new stock of self-confidence. Otis Yeere
+discovered that he could enter a room without breaking into a gentle
+perspiration could cross one, even to talk to Mrs. Hauksbee, as though
+rooms were meant to be crossed. He was for the first time in nine years
+proud of himself, and contented with his life, satisfied with his new
+clothes, and rejoicing in the friendship of Mrs. Hauksbee.
+
+‘Conceit is what the poor fellow wants,’ she said in confidence to Mrs.
+Mallowe. ‘I believe they must use Civilians to plough the fields with in
+Lower Bengal. You see I have to begin from the very beginning haven’t I?
+But you’ll admit, won’t you, dear, that he is immensely improved since
+I took him in hand. Only give me a little more time and he won’t know
+himself.’
+
+Indeed, Yeere was rapidly beginning to forget what he had been. One of
+his own rank and file put the matter brutally when he asked Yeere, in
+reference to nothing, ‘And who has been making you a Member of Council,
+lately? You carry the side of half-a-dozen of ‘em.’
+
+‘I I’m awf’ly sorry. I didn’t mean it, you know,’ said Yeere
+apologetically.
+
+‘There’ll be no holding you,’ continued the old stager grimly. ‘Climb
+down, Otis climb down, and get all that beastly affectation knocked out
+of you with fever! Three thousand a month wouldn’t support it.’
+
+Yeere repeated the incident to Mrs. Hauksbee. He had come to look upon
+her as his Mother Confessor.
+
+‘And you apologised!’ she said. ‘Oh, shame! I hate a man who apologises.
+Never apologise for what your friend called “side.” Never! It’s a man’s
+business to be insolent and overbearing until he meets with a stronger.
+Now, you bad boy, listen to me.’
+
+Simply and straightforwardly, as the ‘rickshaw loitered round Jakko,
+Mrs. Hauksbee preached to Otis Yeere the Great Gospel of Conceit,
+illustrating it with living pictures encountered during their Sunday
+afternoon stroll.
+
+‘Good gracious!’ she ended with the personal argument, ‘you’ll apologise
+next for being my attache--’
+
+‘Never!’ said Otis Yeere. ‘That’s another thing altogether. I shall
+always be.’
+
+‘What’s coming?’ thought Mrs. Hauksbee.
+
+‘Proud of that,’ said Otis.
+
+‘Safe for the present,’ she said to herself.
+
+‘But I’m afraid I have grown conceited. Like Jeshurun, you know. When
+he waxed fat, then he kicked. It’s the having no worry on one’s mind and
+the Hill air, I suppose.’
+
+‘Hill air, indeed!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee to herself. ‘He’d have been
+hiding in the Club till the last day of his leave, if I hadn’t
+discovered him.’ And aloud,
+
+‘Why shouldn’t you be? You have every right to.’
+
+‘I! Why?’
+
+‘Oh, hundreds of things. I’m not going to waste this lovely afternoon
+by explaining; but I know you have. What was that heap of manuscript you
+showed me about the grammar of the aboriginal what’s their names?’
+
+‘Gullals. A piece of nonsense. I’ve far too much work to do to bother
+over Gullals now. You should see my District. Come down with your
+husband some day and I’ll show you round. Such a lovely place in the
+Rains! A sheet of water with the railway-embankment and the snakes
+sticking out, and, in the summer, green flies and green squash. The
+people would die of fear if you shook a dogwhip at ‘em. But they know
+you’re forbidden to do that, so they conspire to make your life a burden
+to you. My District’s worked by some man at Darjiling, on the strength
+of a native pleader’s false reports. Oh, it’s a heavenly place!’
+
+Otis Yeere laughed bitterly.
+
+‘There’s not the least necessity that you should stay in it. Why do
+you?’
+
+‘Because I must. How’m I to get out of it?’
+
+‘How! In a hundred and fifty ways. If there weren’t so many people on
+the road I’d like to box your ears. Ask, my dear boy, ask! Look! There
+is young Hexarly with six years’ service and half your talents. He asked
+for what he wanted, and he got it. See, down by the Convent! There’s
+McArthurson, who has come to his present position by asking sheer,
+downright asking after he had pushed himself out of the rank and file.
+One man is as good as another in your service believe me. I’ve seen
+Simla for more seasons than I care to think about. Do you suppose men
+are chosen for appointments because of their special fitness beforehand?
+You have all passed a high test what do you call it? in the beginning,
+and, except for the few who have gone altogether to the bad, you can all
+work hard. Asking does the rest. Call it cheek, call it insolence, call
+it anything you like, but ask! Men argue yes, I know what men say that a
+man, by the mere audacity of his request, must have some good in him. A
+weak man doesn’t say: “Give me this and that.” He whines: “Why haven’t
+I been given this and that?” If you were in the Army, I should say learn
+to spin plates or play a tambourine with your toes. As it is ask! You
+belong to a Service that ought to be able to command the Channel Fleet,
+or set a leg at twenty minutes’ notice, and yet you hesitate over asking
+to escape from a squashy green district where you admit you are not
+master. Drop the Bengal Government altogether. Even Darjiling is
+a little out-of-the-way hole. I was there once, and the rents were
+extortionate. Assert yourself. Get the Government of India to take you
+over. Try to get on the Frontier, where every man has a grand chance
+if he can trust himself. Go somewhere! Do something! You have twice the
+wits and three times the presence of the men up here, and, and’ Mrs.
+Hauksbee paused for breath; then continued ‘and in any way you look at
+it, you ought to. You who could go so far!’
+
+‘I don’t know,’ said Yeere, rather taken aback by the unexpected
+eloquence. ‘I haven’t such a good opinion of myself.’
+
+It was not strictly Platonic, but it was Policy. Mrs. Hauksbee laid
+her hand lightly upon the ungloved paw that rested on the turned-back
+‘rickshaw hood, and, looking the man full in the face, said tenderly,
+almost too tenderly, ‘I believe in you if you mistrust yourself. Is that
+enough, my friend?’
+
+‘It is enough,’ answered Otis very solemnly.
+
+He was silent for a long time, redreaming the dreams that he had dreamed
+eight years ago, but through them all ran, as sheet-lightning through
+golden cloud, the light of Mrs. Hauksbee’s violet eyes.
+
+Curious and impenetrable are the mazes of Simla life the only existence
+in this desolate land worth the living. Gradually it went abroad among
+men and women, in the pauses between dance, play, and Gymkhana, that
+Otis Yeere, the man with the newly-lit light of self-confidence in his
+eyes, had ‘done something decent’ in the wilds whence he came. He had
+brought an erring Municipality to reason, appropriated the funds on his
+own responsibility, and saved the lives of hundreds. He knew more about
+the Gullals than any living man. Had a vast knowledge of the aboriginal
+tribes; was, in spite of his juniority, the greatest authority on the
+aboriginal Gullals. No one quite knew who or what the Gullals were till
+The Mussuck, who had been calling on Mrs. Hauksbee, and prided himself
+upon picking people’s brains, explained they were a tribe of ferocious
+hillmen, somewhere near Sikkim, whose friendship even the Great Indian
+Empire would find it worth her while to secure. Now we know that Otis
+Yeere had showed Mrs. Hauksbee his MS. notes of six years’ standing on
+these same Gullals. He had told her, too, how, sick and shaken with the
+fever their negligence had bred, crippled by the loss of his pet clerk,
+and savagely angry at the desolation in his charge, he had once damned
+the collective eyes of his ‘intelligent local board’ for a set of
+haramzadas. Which act of ‘brutal and tyrannous oppression’ won him
+a Reprimand Royal from the Bengal Government; but in the anecdote as
+amended for Northern consumption we find no record of this. Hence we are
+forced to conclude that Mrs. Hauksbee edited his reminiscences before
+sowing them in idle ears, ready, as she well knew, to exaggerate good or
+evil. And Otis Yeere bore himself as befitted the hero of many tales.
+
+‘You can talk to me when you don’t fall into a brown study. Talk now,
+and talk your brightest and best,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee.
+
+Otis needed no spur. Look to a man who has the counsel of a woman of or
+above the world to back him. So long as he keeps his head, he can meet
+both sexes on equal ground an advantage never intended by Providence,
+who fashioned Man on one day and Woman on another, in sign that neither
+should know more than a very little of the other’s life. Such a man goes
+far, or, the counsel being withdrawn, collapses suddenly while his world
+seeks the reason.
+
+Generalled by Mrs. Hauksbee, who, again, had all Mrs. Mallowe’s wisdom
+at her disposal, proud of himself and, in the end, believing in himself
+because he was believed in, Otis Yeere stood ready for any fortune that
+might befall, certain that it would be good. He would fight for his own
+hand, and intended that this second struggle should lead to better issue
+than the first helpless surrender of the bewildered ‘Stunt.
+
+What might have happened it is impossible to say. This lamentable thing
+befell, bred directly by a statement of Mrs. Hauksbee that she would
+spend the next season in Darjiling.
+
+‘Are you certain of that?’ said Otis Yeere.
+
+‘Quite. We’re writing about a house now.’
+
+Otis Yeere ‘stopped dead,’ as Mrs. Hauksbee put it in discussing the
+relapse with Mrs. Mallowe.
+
+‘He has behaved,’ she said angrily, ‘just like Captain Kerrington’s pony
+only Otis is a donkey at the last Gymkhana. Planted his forefeet and
+refused to go on another step. Polly, my man’s going to disappoint me.
+What shall I do?’
+
+As a rule, Mrs. Mallowe does not approve of staring, but on this
+occasion she opened her eyes to the utmost.
+
+‘You have managed cleverly so far,’ she said. ‘Speak to him, and ask him
+what he means.’
+
+‘I will at to-night’s dance.’
+
+‘No o, not at a dance,’ said Mrs. Mallowe cautiously. ‘Men are never
+themselves quite at dances. Better wait till to-morrow morning.’
+
+‘Nonsense. If he’s going to ‘vert in this insane way there isn’t a day
+to lose. Are you going? No? Then sit up for me, there’s a dear. I shan’t
+stay longer than supper under any circumstances.’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe waited through the evening, looking long and earnestly into
+the fire, and sometimes smiling to herself.
+
+‘Oh! oh! oh! The man’s an idiot! A raving, positive idiot! I’m sorry I
+ever saw him!’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee burst into Mrs. Mallowe’s house, at midnight, almost in
+tears.
+
+‘What in the world has happened?’ said Mrs. Mallowe, but her eyes showed
+that she had guessed an answer.
+
+‘Happened! Everything has happened! He was there. I went to him and
+said, “Now, what does this nonsense mean?” Don’t laugh, dear, I can’t
+bear it. But you know what I mean I said. Then it was a square, and I
+sat it out with him and wanted an explanation, and he said Oh! I haven’t
+patience with such idiots! You know what I said about going to Darjiling
+next year? It doesn’t matter to me where I go. I’d have changed the
+Station and lost the rent to have saved this. He said, in so many words,
+that he wasn’t going to try to work up any more, because because he
+would be shifted into a province away from Darjiling, and his own
+District, where these creatures are, is within a day’s journey.’
+
+‘Ah hh!’ said Mrs. Mallowe, in a tone of one who has successfully
+tracked an obscure word through a large dictionary.
+
+‘Did you ever hear of anything so mad so absurd? And he had the ball
+at his feet. He had only to kick it! I would have made him anything!
+Anything in the wide world. He could have gone to the world’s end. I
+would have helped him. I made him, didn’t I, Polly? Didn’t I create
+that man? Doesn’t he owe everything to me? And to reward me, just when
+everything was nicely arranged, by this lunacy that spoilt everything!’
+
+‘Very few men understand your devotion thoroughly.’
+
+‘Oh, Polly, don’t laugh at me! I give men up from this hour. I could
+have killed him then and there. What right had this man this Thing I had
+picked out of his filthy paddy--fields to make love to me?’
+
+‘He did that, did he?’
+
+‘He did. I don’t remember half he said, I was so angry. Oh, but such
+a funny thing happened! I can’t help laughing at it now, though I felt
+nearly ready to cry with rage. He raved and I stormed I’m afraid we must
+have made an awful noise in our kala juggah. Protect my character, dear,
+if it’s all over Simla by to-morrow and then he bobbed forward in the
+middle of this insanity I firmly believe the man’s demented and kissed
+me.’
+
+‘Morals above reproach,’ purred Mrs. Mallowe.
+
+‘So they were so they are! It was the most absurd kiss. I don’t believe
+he’d ever kissed a woman in his life before. I threw my head back, and
+it was a sort of slidy, pecking dab, just on the end of the chin here.’
+Mrs. Hauksbee tapped her masculine little chin with her fan. ‘Then, of
+course, I was furiously angry, and told him that he was no gentleman,
+and I was sorry I’d ever met him, and so on. He was crushed so easily
+then I couldn’t be very angry. Then I came away straight to you.’
+
+‘Was this before or after supper?’
+
+‘Oh! before oceans before. Isn’t it perfectly disgusting?’
+
+‘Let me think. I withhold judgment till tomorrow. Morning brings
+counsel.’
+
+But morning brought only a servant with a dainty bouquet of Annandale
+roses for Mrs. Hauksbee to wear at the dance at Viceregal Lodge that
+night.
+
+‘He doesn’t seem to be very penitent,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘What’s the
+billet-doux in the centre?’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee opened the neatly-folded note, another accomplishment that
+she had taught Otis, read it, and groaned tragically.
+
+‘Last wreck of a feeble intellect! Poetry! Is it his own, do you think?
+Oh, that I ever built my hopes on such a maudlin idiot!’
+
+‘No. It’s a quotation from Mrs. Browning, and in view of the facts of
+the case, as Jack says, uncommonly well chosen. Listen
+
+     Sweet, thou hast trod on a heart,
+        Pass! There’s a world full of men;
+     And women as fair as thou art
+        Must do such things now and then.
+     Thou only hast stepped unaware
+        Malice not one can impute;
+     And why should a heart have been there,
+        In the way of a fair woman’s foot?
+
+‘I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee angrily, her
+eyes filling with tears; ‘there was no malice at all. Oh, it’s too
+vexatious!’
+
+‘You’ve misunderstood the compliment,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘He clears
+you completely and ahem I should think by this, that he has cleared
+completely too. My experience of men is that when they begin to quote
+poetry they are going to flit. Like swans singing before they die, you
+know.’
+
+‘Polly, you take my sorrows in a most unfeeling way.’
+
+‘Do I? Is it so terrible? If he’s hurt your vanity, I should say that
+you’ve done a certain amount of damage to his heart.’
+
+‘Oh, you can never tell about a man!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE PIT’S MOUTH
+
+
+     Men say it was a stolen tide
+        The Lord that sent it He knows all,
+     But in mine ear will aye abide
+        The message that the bells let fall--
+     And awesome bells they were to me,
+     That in the dark rang, ‘Enderby.’
+            --Jean Ingelow
+
+Once upon a time there was a Man and his Wife and a Tertium Quid.
+
+All three were unwise, but the Wife was the unwisest. The Man should
+have looked after his Wife, who should have avoided the Tertium Quid,
+who, again, should have married a wife of his own, after clean and
+open flirtations, to which nobody can possibly object, round Jakko or
+Observatory Hill. When you see a young man with his pony in a white
+lather and his hat on the back of his head, flying downhill at fifteen
+miles an hour to meet a girl who will be properly surprised to meet
+him, you naturally approve of that young man, and wish him Staff
+appointments, and take an interest in his welfare, and, as the proper
+time comes, give them sugar-tongs or side-saddles according to your
+means and generosity.
+
+The Tertium Quid flew downhill on horseback, but it was to meet the
+Man’s Wife; and when he flew uphill it was for the same end. The Man
+was in the Plains, earning money for his Wife to spend on dresses and
+four-hundred-rupee bracelets, and inexpensive luxuries of that kind. He
+worked very hard, and sent her a letter or a post-card daily. She also
+wrote to him daily, and said that she was longing for him to come up to
+Simla. The Tertium Quid used to lean over her shoulder and laugh as she
+wrote the notes. Then the two would ride to the Post-office together.
+
+Now, Simla is a strange place and its customs are peculiar; nor is
+any man who has not spent at least ten seasons there qualified to pass
+judgment on circumstantial evidence, which is the most untrustworthy in
+the Courts. For these reasons, and for others which need not appear,
+I decline to state positively whether there was anything irretrievably
+wrong in the relations between the Man’s Wife and the Tertium Quid. If
+there was, and hereon you must form your own opinion, it was the Man’s
+Wife’s fault. She was kittenish in her manners, wearing generally an
+air of soft and fluffy innocence. But she was deadlily learned and
+evil-instructed; and, now and again, when the mask dropped, men saw
+this, shuddered and almost drew back. Men are occasionally particular,
+and the least particular men are always the most exacting.
+
+Simla is eccentric in its fashion of treating friendships. Certain
+attachments which have set and crystallised through half-a-dozen seasons
+acquire almost the sanctity of the marriage bond, and are revered as
+such. Again, certain attachments equally old, and, to all appearance,
+equally venerable, never seem to win any recognised official status;
+while a chance-sprung acquaintance, not two months born, steps into the
+place which by right belongs to the senior. There is no law reducible to
+print which regulates these affairs.
+
+Some people have a gift which secures them infinite toleration, and
+others have not. The Man’s Wife had not. If she looked over the garden
+wall, for instance, women taxed her with stealing their husbands. She
+complained pathetically that she was not allowed to choose her own
+friends. When she put up her big white muff to her lips, and gazed over
+it and under her eyebrows at you as she said this thing, you felt
+that she had been infamously misjudged, and that all the other women’s
+instincts were all wrong; which was absurd. She was not allowed to own
+the Tertium Quid in peace; and was so strangely constructed that she
+would not have enjoyed peace had she been so permitted. She preferred
+some semblance of intrigue to cloak even her most commonplace actions.
+
+After two months of riding, first round Jakko, then Elysium, then Summer
+Hill, then Observatory Hill, then under Jutogh, and lastly up and down
+the Cart Road as far as the Tara Devi gap in the dusk, she said to the
+Tertium Quid, ‘Frank, people say we are too much together, and people
+are so horrid.’
+
+The Tertium Quid pulled his moustache, and replied that horrid people
+were unworthy of the consideration of nice people.
+
+‘But they have done more than talk they have written written to my hubby
+I’m sure of it,’ said the Man’s Wife, and she pulled a letter from her
+husband out of her saddle-pocket and gave it to the Tertium Quid.
+
+It was an honest letter, written by an honest man, then stewing in the
+Plains on two hundred rupees a month (for he allowed his wife eight
+hundred and fifty), and in a silk banian and cotton trousers. It said
+that, perhaps, she had not thought of the unwisdom of allowing her name
+to be so generally coupled with the Tertium Quid’s; that she was too
+much of a child to understand the dangers of that sort of thing; that
+he, her husband, was the last man in the world to interfere jealously
+with her little amusements and interests, but that it would be better
+were she to drop the Tertium Quid quietly and for her husband’s sake.
+The letter was sweetened with many pretty little pet names, and it
+amused the Tertium Quid considerably. He and She laughed over it, so
+that you, fifty yards away, could see their shoulders shaking while the
+horses slouched along side by side.
+
+Their conversation was not worth reporting. The upshot of it was that,
+next day, no one saw the Man’s Wife and the Tertium Quid together. They
+had both gone down to the Cemetery, which, as a rule, is only visited
+officially by the inhabitants of Simla.
+
+A Simla funeral with the clergyman riding, the mourners riding, and the
+coffin creaking as it swings between the bearers, is one of the most
+depressing things on this earth, particularly when the procession passes
+under the wet, dank dip beneath the Rockcliffe Hotel, where the sun is
+shut out, and all the hill streams are wailing and weeping together as
+they go down the valleys.
+
+Occasionally folk tend the graves, but we in India shift and are
+transferred so often that, at the end of the second year, the Dead have
+no friend only acquaintances who are far too busy amusing themselves up
+the hill to attend to old partners. The idea of using a Cemetery as a
+rendezvous is distinctly a feminine one. A man would have said simply,
+‘Let people talk. We’ll go down the Mall.’ A woman is made differently,
+especially if she be such a woman as the Man’s Wife. She and the Tertium
+Quid enjoyed each other’s society among the graves of men and women whom
+they had known and danced with aforetime.
+
+They used to take a big horse-blanket and sit on the grass a little to
+the left of the lower end, where there is a dip in the ground, and where
+the occupied graves stop short and the ready-made ones are not
+ready. Each well-regulated Indian Cemetery keeps half-a-dozen graves
+permanently open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the
+Hills these are more usually baby’s size, because children who come up
+weakened and sick from the Plains often succumb to the effects of the
+Rains in the Hills or get pneumonia from their ayahs taking them through
+damp pine-woods after the sun has set. In Cantonments, of course, the
+man’s size is more in request; these arrangements varying with the
+climate and population.
+
+One day when the Man’s Wife and the Tertium Quid had just arrived in the
+Cemetery, they saw some coolies breaking ground. They had marked out a
+full-size grave, and the Tertium Quid asked them whether any Sahib was
+sick. They said that they did not know; but it was an order that they
+should dig a Sahib’s grave.
+
+‘Work away,’ said the Tertium Quid, ‘and let’s see how it’s done.’
+
+The coolies worked away, and the Man’s Wife and the Tertium Quid watched
+and talked for a couple of hours while the grave was being deepened.
+Then a coolie, taking the earth in baskets as it was thrown up, jumped
+over the grave.
+
+‘That’s queer,’ said the Tertium Quid. ‘Where’s my ulster?’
+
+‘What’s queer?’ said the Man’s Wife.
+
+‘I have got a chill down my back just as if a goose had walked over my
+grave.’
+
+‘Why do you look at the thing, then?’ said the Man’s Wife. ‘Let us go.’
+
+The Tertium Quid stood at the head of the grave, and stared without
+answering for a space. Then he said, dropping a pebble down, ‘It
+is nasty and cold: horribly cold. I don’t think I shall come to the
+Cemetery any more. I don’t think grave-digging is cheerful.’
+
+The two talked and agreed that the Cemetery was depressing. They also
+arranged for a ride next day out from the Cemetery through the Mashobra
+Tunnel up to Fagoo and back, because all the world was going to a
+garden-party at Viceregal Lodge, and all the people of Mashobra would go
+too.
+
+Coming up the Cemetery road, the Tertium Quid’s horse tried to bolt
+uphill, being tired with standing so long, and managed to strain a back
+sinew.
+
+‘I shall have to take the mare to-morrow,’ said the Tertium Quid, ‘and
+she will stand nothing heavier than a snaffle.’
+
+They made their arrangements to meet in the Cemetery, after allowing
+all the Mashobra people time to pass into Simla. That night it
+rained heavily, and, next day, when the Tertium Quid came to the
+trysting-place, he saw that the new grave had a foot of water in it, the
+ground being a tough and sour clay.
+
+‘Jove! That looks beastly,’ said the Tertium Quid. ‘Fancy being boarded
+up and dropped into that well!’
+
+They then started off to Fagoo, the mare playing with the snaffle and
+picking her way as though she were shod with satin, and the sun shining
+divinely. The road below Mashobra to Fagoo is officially styled the
+Himalayan-Thibet road; but in spite of its name it is not much more than
+six feet wide in most places, and the drop into the valley below may be
+anything between one and two thousand feet.
+
+‘Now we’re going to Thibet,’ said the Man’s Wife merrily, as the horses
+drew near to Fagoo. She was riding on the cliff-side.
+
+‘Into Thibet,’ said the Tertium Quid, ‘ever so far from people who say
+horrid things, and hubbies who write stupid letters. With you to the end
+of the world!’
+
+A coolie carrying a log of wood came round a corner, and the mare went
+wide to avoid him forefeet in and haunches out, as a sensible mare
+should go.
+
+‘To the world’s end,’ said the Man’s Wife, and looked unspeakable things
+over her near shoulder at the Tertium Quid.
+
+He was smiling, but, while she looked, the smile froze stiff as it were
+on his face, and changed to a nervous grin the sort of grin men wear
+when they are not quite easy in their saddles. The mare seemed to be
+sinking by the stern, and her nostrils cracked while she was trying to
+realise what was happening. The rain of the night before had rotted the
+drop-side of the Himalayan-Thibet Road, and it was giving way under
+her. ‘What are you doing?’ said the Man’s Wife. The Tertium Quid gave no
+answer. He grinned nervously and set his spurs into the mare, who rapped
+with her forefeet on the road, and the struggle began. The Man’s Wife
+screamed, ‘Oh, Frank, get off!’
+
+But the Tertium Quid was glued to the saddle his face blue and white and
+he looked into the Man’s Wife’s eyes. Then the Man’s Wife clutched at
+the mare’s head and caught her by the nose instead of the bridle. The
+brute threw up her head and went down with a scream, the Tertium Quid
+upon her, and the nervous grin still set on his face.
+
+The Man’s Wife heard the tinkle-tinkle of little stones and loose earth
+falling off the roadway, and the sliding roar of the man and horse going
+down. Then everything was quiet, and she called on Frank to leave his
+mare and walk up. But Frank did not answer. He was underneath the mare,
+nine hundred feet below, spoiling a patch of Indian corn.
+
+As the revellers came back from Viceregal Lodge in the mists of the
+evening, they met a temporarily insane woman, on a temporarily mad
+horse, swinging round the corners, with her eyes and her mouth open, and
+her head like the head of a Medusa. She was stopped by a man at the risk
+of his life, and taken out of the saddle, a limp heap, and put on the
+bank to explain herself. This wasted twenty minutes, and then she was
+sent home in a lady’s ‘rickshaw, still with her mouth open and her hands
+picking at her riding-gloves.
+
+She was in bed through the following three days, which were rainy; so
+she missed attending the funeral of the Tertium Quid, who was lowered
+into eighteen inches of water, instead of the twelve to which he had
+first objected.
+
+
+
+
+A WAYSIDE COMEDY
+
+
+  Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore
+  the misery of man is great upon him.
+  --Eccles. viii. 6.
+
+Fate and the Government of India have turned the Station of Kashima into
+a prison; and, because there is no help for the poor souls who are now
+lying there in torment, I write this story, praying that the Government
+of India may be moved to scatter the European population to the four
+winds.
+
+Kashima is bounded on all sides by the rocktipped circle of the Dosehri
+hills. In Spring, it is ablaze with roses; in Summer, the roses die and
+the hot winds blow from the hills; in Autumn, the white mists from
+the jhils cover the place as with water, and in Winter the frosts nip
+everything young and tender to earth-level. There is but one view in
+Kashima a stretch of perfectly flat pasture and plough-land, running up
+to the gray-blue scrub of the Dosehri hills.
+
+There are no amusements, except snipe and tiger shooting; but the tigers
+have been long since hunted from their lairs in the rock-caves, and the
+snipe only come once a year. Narkarra one hundred and forty-three miles
+by road is the nearest station to Kashima. But Kashima never goes to
+Narkarra, where there are at least twelve English people. It stays
+within the circle of the Dosehri hills.
+
+All Kashima acquits Mrs. Vansuythen of any intention to do harm; but all
+Kashima knows that she, and she alone, brought about their pain.
+
+Boulte, the Engineer, Mrs. Boulte, and Captain Kurrell know this. They
+are the English population of Kashima, if we except Major Vansuythen,
+who is of no importance whatever, and Mrs. Vansuythen, who is the most
+important of all.
+
+You must remember, though you will not understand, that all laws weaken
+in a small and hidden community where there is no public opinion. When
+a man is absolutely alone in a Station he runs a certain risk of
+falling into evil ways. This risk is multiplied by every addition to the
+population up to twelve the Jury-number. After that, fear and consequent
+restraint begin, and human action becomes less grotesquely jerky.
+
+There was deep peace in Kashima till Mrs. Vansuythen arrived. She was a
+charming woman, every one said so everywhere; and she charmed every
+one. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, since Fate is so
+perverse, she cared only for one man, and he was Major Vansuythen. Had
+she been plain or stupid, this matter would have been intelligible to
+Kashima. But she was a fair woman, with very still gray eyes, the colour
+of a lake just before the light of the sun touches it. No man who had
+seen those eyes could, later on, explain what fashion of woman she was
+to look upon. The eyes dazzled him. Her own sex said that she was ‘not
+bad-looking, but spoilt by pretending to be so grave.’ And yet her
+gravity was natural. It was not her habit to smile. She merely went
+through life, looking at those who passed; and the women objected while
+the men fell down and worshipped.
+
+She knows and is deeply sorry for the evil she has done to Kashima; but
+Major Vansuythen cannot understand why Mrs. Boulte does not drop in
+to afternoon tea at least three times a week. ‘When there are only two
+women in one Station, they ought to see a great deal of each other,’
+says Major Vansuythen.
+
+Long and long before ever Mrs. Vansuythen came out of those far-away
+places where there is society and amusement, Kurrell had discovered
+that Mrs. Boulte was the one woman in the world for him and you dare
+not blame them. Kashima was as out of the world as Heaven or the Other
+Place, and the Dosehri hills kept their secret well. Boulte had no
+concern in the matter. He was in camp for a fortnight at a time. He was
+a hard, heavy man, and neither Mrs. Boulte nor Kurrell pitied him. They
+had all Kashima and each other for their very, very own; and Kashima
+was the Garden of Eden in those days. When Boulte returned from his
+wanderings he would slap Kurrell between the shoulders and call him ‘old
+fellow,’ and the three would dine together. Kashima was happy then when
+the judgment of God seemed almost as distant as Narkarra or the railway
+that ran down to the sea. But the Government sent Major Vansuythen to
+Kashima, and with him came his wife.
+
+The etiquette of Kashima is much the same as that of a desert island.
+When a stranger is cast away there, all hands go down to the shore to
+make him welcome. Kashima assembled at the masonry platform close to
+the Narkarra Road, and spread tea for the Vansuythens. That ceremony was
+reckoned a formal call, and made them free of the Station, its rights
+and privileges. When the Vansuythens settled down they gave a tiny
+house-warming to all Kashima; and that made Kashima free of their house,
+according to the immemorial usage of the Station.
+
+Then the Rains came, when no one could go into camp, and the Narkarra
+Road was washed away by the Kasun River, and in the cup-like pastures
+of Kashima the cattle waded knee-deep. The clouds dropped down from the
+Dosehri hills and covered everything.
+
+At the end of the Rains Boulte’s manner towards his wife changed and
+became demonstratively affectionate. They had been married twelve years,
+and the change startled Mrs. Boulte, who hated her husband with the hate
+of a woman who has met with nothing but kindness from her mate, and, in
+the teeth of this kindness, has done him a great wrong. Moreover,
+she had her own trouble to fight with her watch to keep over her own
+property, Kurrell. For two months the Rains had hidden the Dosehri hills
+and many other things besides; but, when they lifted, they showed Mrs.
+Boulte that her man among men, her Ted for she called him Ted in the
+old days when Boulte was out of earshot was slipping the links of the
+allegiance.
+
+‘The Vansuythen Woman has taken him,’ Mrs. Boulte said to herself;
+and when Boulte was away, wept over her belief, in the face of the
+over-vehement blandishments of Ted. Sorrow in Kashima is as fortunate as
+Love because there is nothing to weaken it save the flight of Time. Mrs.
+Boulte had never breathed her suspicion to Kurrell because she was not
+certain; and her nature led her to be very certain before she took steps
+in any direction. That is why she behaved as she did.
+
+Boulte came into the house one evening, and leaned against the
+door-posts of the drawing-room, chewing his moustache. Mrs. Boulte was
+putting some flowers into a vase. There is a pretence of civilisation
+even in Kashima.
+
+‘Little woman,’ said Boulte quietly, ‘do you care for me?’
+
+‘Immensely,’ said she, with a laugh. ‘Can you ask it?’
+
+‘But I’m serious,’ said Boulte. ‘Do you care for me?’
+
+Mrs. Boulte dropped the flowers, and turned round quickly. ‘Do you want
+an honest answer?’
+
+‘Ye-es, I’ve asked for it.’
+
+Mrs. Boulte spoke in a low, even voice for five minutes, very
+distinctly, that there might be no misunderstanding her meaning. When
+Samson broke the pillars of Gaza, he did a little thing, and one not to
+be compared to the deliberate pulling down of a woman’s homestead about
+her own ears. There was no wise female friend to advise Mrs. Boulte,
+the singularly cautious wife, to hold her hand. She struck at Boulte’s
+heart, because her own was sick with suspicion of Kurrell, and worn out
+with the long strain of watching alone through the Rains. There was
+no plan or purpose in her speaking. The sentences made themselves; and
+Boulte listened, leaning against the door-post with his hands in his
+pockets. When all was over, and Mrs. Boulte began to breathe through her
+nose before breaking out into tears, he laughed and stared straight in
+front of him at the Dosehri hills.
+
+‘Is that all?’ he said. ‘Thanks, I only wanted to know, you know.’
+
+‘What are you going to do?’ said the woman, between her sobs.
+
+‘Do! Nothing. What should I do? Kill Kurrell, or send you Home, or
+apply for leave to get a divorce? It’s two days’ treck into Narkarra.’ He
+laughed again and went on: ‘I’ll tell you what you can do. You can ask
+Kurrell to dinner tomorrow no, on Thursday, that will allow you time to
+pack and you can bolt with him. I give you my word I won’t follow.’
+
+He took up his helmet and went out of the room, and Mrs. Boulte sat till
+the moonlight streaked the floor, thinking and thinking and thinking.
+She had done her best upon the spur of the moment to pull the house
+down; but it would not fall. Moreover, she could not understand her
+husband, and she was afraid. Then the folly of her useless truthfulness
+struck her, and she was ashamed to write to Kurrell, saying, ‘I have
+gone mad and told everything. My husband says that I am free to elope
+with you. Get a dek for Thursday, and we will fly after dinner.’ There
+was a cold-bloodedness about that procedure which did not appeal to her.
+So she sat still in her own house and thought.
+
+At dinner-time Boulte came back from his walk, white and worn and
+haggard, and the woman was touched at his distress. As the evening wore
+on she muttered some expression of sorrow, something approaching to
+contrition. Boulte came out of a brown study and said, ‘Oh, that! I
+wasn’t thinking about that. By the way, what does Kurrell say to the
+elopement?’
+
+‘I haven’t seen him,’ said Mrs. Boulte. ‘Good God, is that all?’
+
+But Boulte was not listening and her sentence ended in a gulp.
+
+The next day brought no comfort to Mrs. Boulte, for Kurrell did not
+appear, and the new lift that she, in the five minutes’ madness of the
+previous evening, had hoped to build out of the ruins of the old, seemed
+to be no nearer.
+
+Boulte ate his breakfast, advised her to see her Arab pony fed in the
+verandah, and went out. The morning wore through, and at mid-day the
+tension became unendurable. Mrs. Boulte could not cry. She had finished
+her crying in the night, and now she did not want to be left alone.
+Perhaps the Vansuythen Woman would talk to her; and, since talking
+opens the heart, perhaps there might be some comfort to be found in her
+company. She was the only other woman in the Station.
+
+In Kashima there are no regular calling-hours. Every one can drop in
+upon every one else at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and
+walked across to the Vansuythens’ house to borrow last week’s Queen. The
+two compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed
+through the gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back.
+As she passed through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that
+cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband’s voice, saying,
+
+‘But on my Honour! On my Soul and Honour, I tell you she doesn’t
+care for me. She told me so last night. I would have told you then if
+Vansuythen hadn’t been with you. If it is for her sake that you’ll have
+nothing to say to me, you can make your mind easy. It’s Kurrell.’
+
+‘What?’ said Mrs. Vansuythen, with a hysterical little laugh. ‘Kurrell!
+Oh, it can’t be! You two must have made some horrible mistake. Perhaps
+you you lost your temper, or misunderstood, or something. Things can’t
+be as wrong as you say.’
+
+Mrs. Vansuythen had shifted her defence to avoid the man’s pleading, and
+was desperately trying to keep him to a side-issue.
+
+‘There must be some mistake,’ she insisted, ‘and it can be all put right
+again.’
+
+Boulte laughed grimly.
+
+‘It can’t be Captain Kurrell! He told me that he had never taken the
+least the least interest in your wife, Mr. Boulte. Oh, do listen! He
+said he had not. He swore he had not,’ said Mrs. Vansuythen.
+
+The purdah rustled, and the speech was cut short by the entry of a
+little thin woman, with big rings round her eyes. Mrs. Vansuythen stood
+up with a gasp.
+
+‘What was that you said?’ asked Mrs. Boulte. ‘Never mind that man. What
+did Ted say to you? What did he say to you? What did he say to you?’
+
+Mrs. Vansuythen sat down helplessly on the sofa, overborne by the
+trouble of her questioner.
+
+‘He said I can’t remember exactly what he said but I understood him
+to say that is But, really, Mrs. Boulte, isn’t it rather a strange
+question?’
+
+‘Will you tell me what he said?’ repeated Mrs. Boulte. Even a tiger will
+fly before a bear robbed of her whelps, and Mrs. Vansuythen was only
+an ordinarily good woman. She began in a sort of desperation: ‘Well, he
+said that the never cared for you at all, and, of course, there was not
+the least reason why he should have, and and that was all.’
+
+‘You said he swore he had not cared for me. Was that true?’
+
+‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Vansuythen very softly.
+
+Mrs. Boulte wavered for an instant where she stood, and then fell
+forward fainting.
+
+‘What did I tell you?’ said Boulte, as though the conversation had been
+unbroken. ‘You can see for yourself. She cares for him.’ The light began
+to break into his dull mind, and he went on, ‘And what was he saying
+to you?’
+
+But Mrs. Vansuythen, with no heart for explanations or impassioned
+protestations, was kneeling over Mrs. Boulte.
+
+‘Oh, you brute!’ she cried. ‘Are all men like this? Help me to get her
+into my room and her face is cut against the table. Oh, will you be
+quiet, and help me to carry her? I hate you, and I hate Captain Kurrell.
+Lift her up carefully, and now go! Go away!’
+
+Boulte carried his wife into Mrs. Vansuythen’s bedroom, and departed
+before the storm of that lady’s wrath and disgust, impenitent and
+burning with jealousy. Kurrell had been making love to Mrs. Vansuythen
+would do Vansuythen as great a wrong as he had done Boulte, who
+caught himself considering whether Mrs. Vansuythen would faint if she
+discovered that the man she loved had forsworn her.
+
+In the middle of these meditations, Kurrell came cantering along the
+road and pulled up with a cheery ‘Good-mornin’. ‘Been mashing Mrs.
+Vansuythen as usual, eh? Bad thing for a sober, married man, that. What
+will Mrs. Boulte say?’
+
+Boulte raised his head and said slowly, ‘Oh, you liar!’ Kurrell’s face
+changed. ‘What’s that?’ he asked quickly.
+
+‘Nothing much,’ said Boulte. ‘Has my wife told you that you two are free
+to go off whenever you please? She has been good enough to explain
+the situation to me. You’ve been a true friend to me, Kurrell old man
+haven’t you?’
+
+Kurrell groaned, and tried to frame some sort of idiotic sentence about
+being willing to give ‘satisfaction.’ But his interest in the woman was
+dead, had died out in the Rains, and, mentally, he was abusing her for
+her amazing indiscretion. It would have been so easy to have broken off
+the thing gently and by degrees, and now he was saddled with Boulte’s
+voice recalled him.
+
+‘I don’t think I should get any satisfaction from killing you, and I’m
+pretty sure you’d get none from killing me.’
+
+Then in a querulous tone, ludicrously disproportioned to his wrongs,
+Boulte added,
+
+‘Seems rather a pity that you haven’t the decency to keep to the woman,
+now you’ve got her. You’ve been a true friend to her too, haven’t you?’
+
+Kurrell stared long and gravely. The situation was getting beyond him.
+
+‘What do you mean?’ he said.
+
+Boulte answered, more to himself than the questioner: ‘My wife came
+over to Mrs. Vansuythen’s just now; and it seems you’d been telling
+Mrs. Vansuythen that you’d never cared for Emma. I suppose you lied, as
+usual. What had Mrs. Vansuythen to do with you, or you with her? Try to
+speak the truth for once in a way.’
+
+Kurrell took the double insult without wincing, and replied by another
+question: ‘Go on. What happened?’
+
+‘Emma fainted,’ said Boulte simply. ‘But, look here, what had you been
+saying to Mrs. Vansuythen?’
+
+Kurrell laughed. Mrs. Boulte had, with unbridled tongue, made havoc of
+his plans; and he could at least retaliate by hurting the man in whose
+eyes he was humiliated and shown dishonourable.
+
+‘Said to her? What does a man tell a lie like that for? I suppose I said
+pretty much what you’ve said, unless I’m a good deal mistaken.’
+
+‘I spoke the truth,’ said Boulte, again more to himself than Kurrell.
+‘Emma told me she hated me. She has no right in me.’
+
+‘No! I suppose not. You’re only her husband, y’know. And what did Mrs.
+Vansuythen say after you had laid your disengaged heart at her feet?’
+
+Kurrell felt almost virtuous as he put the question.
+
+‘I don’t think that matters,’ Boulte replied; ‘and it doesn’t concern
+you.’
+
+‘But it does! I tell you it does’ began Kurrell shamelessly.
+
+The sentence was cut by a roar of laughter from Boulte’s lips. Kurrell
+was silent for an instant, and then he, too, laughed laughed long and
+loudly, rocking in his saddle. It was an unpleasant sound the mirthless
+mirth of these men on the long white line of the Narkarra Road. There
+were no strangers in Kashima, or they might have thought that captivity
+within the Dosehri hills had driven half the European population mad.
+The laughter ended abruptly, and Kurrell was the first to speak.
+
+‘Well, what are you going to do?’
+
+Boulte looked up the road, and at the hills. ‘Nothing,’ said he quietly;
+‘what’s the use? It’s too ghastly for anything. We must let the old life
+go on. I can only call you a hound and a liar, and I can’t go on calling
+you names for ever. Besides which, I don’t feel that I’m much better. We
+can’t get out of this place. What is there to do?’
+
+Kurrell looked round the rat-pit of Kashima and made no reply. The
+injured husband took up the wondrous tale.
+
+‘Ride on, and speak to Emma if you want to. God knows I don’t care what
+you do.’
+
+He walked forward, and left Kurrell gazing blankly after him. Kurrell
+did not ride on either to see Mrs. Boulte or Mrs. Vansuythen. He sat in
+his saddle and thought, while his pony grazed by the roadside.
+
+The whir of approaching wheels roused him. Mrs. Vansuythen was driving
+home Mrs. Boulte, white and wan, with a cut on her forehead.
+
+‘Stop, please,’ said Mrs. Boulte, ‘I want to speak to Ted.’
+
+Mrs. Vansuythen obeyed, but as Mrs. Boulte leaned forward, putting her
+hand upon the splashboard of the dog-cart, Kurrell spoke.
+
+‘I’ve seen your husband, Mrs. Boulte.’
+
+There was no necessity for any further explanation. The man’s eyes were
+fixed, not upon Mrs. Boulte, but her companion. Mrs. Boulte saw the
+look.
+
+‘Speak to him!’ she pleaded, turning to the woman at her side. ‘Oh,
+speak to him! Tell him what you told me just now. Tell him you hate him.
+Tell him you hate him!’
+
+She bent forward and wept bitterly, while the sais, impassive, went
+forward to hold the horse. Mrs. Vansuythen turned scarlet and dropped
+the reins. She wished to be no party to such unholy explanations.
+
+‘I’ve nothing to do with it,’ she began coldly; but Mrs. Boulte’s sobs
+overcame her, and she addressed herself to the man. ‘I don’t know what
+I am to say, Captain Kurrell. I don’t know what I can call you. I think
+you’ve you’ve behaved abominably, and she has cut her forehead terribly
+against the table.’
+
+‘It doesn’t hurt. It isn’t anything,’ said Mrs. Boulte feebly. ‘That
+doesn’t matter. Tell him what you told me. Say you don’t care for him.
+Oh, Ted, won’t you believe her?’
+
+‘Mrs. Boulte has made me understand that you were that you were fond of
+her once upon a time,’ went on Mrs. Vansuythen.
+
+‘Well!’ said Kurrell brutally. ‘It seems to me that Mrs. Boulte had
+better be fond of her own husband first.’
+
+‘Stop!’ said Mrs. Vansuythen. ‘Hear me first. I don’t care I don’t want
+to know anything about you and Mrs. Boulte; but I want you to know that
+I hate you, that I think you are a cur, and that I’ll never, never speak
+to you again. Oh, I don’t dare to say what I think of you, you man!’
+
+‘I want to speak to Ted,’ moaned Mrs. Boulte, but the dog-cart rattled
+on, and Kurrell was left on the road, shamed, and boiling with wrath
+against Mrs. Boulte.
+
+He waited till Mrs. Vansuythen was driving back to her own house,
+and, she being freed from the embarrassment of Mrs. Boulte’s presence,
+learned for the second time her opinion of himself and his actions.
+
+In the evenings it was the wont of all Kashima to meet at the platform
+on the Narkarra Road, to drink tea and discuss the trivialities of
+the day. Major Vansuythen and his wife found themselves alone at the
+gathering-place for almost the first time in their remembrance; and
+the cheery Major, in the teeth of his wife’s remarkably reasonable
+suggestion that the rest of the Station might be sick, insisted upon
+driving round to the two bungalows and unearthing the population.
+
+‘Sitting in the twilight!’ said he, with great indignation, to the
+Boultes. ‘That’ll never do! Hang it all, we’re one family here! You must
+come out, and so must Kurrell. I’ll make him bring his banjo.’
+
+So great is the power of honest simplicity and a good digestion over
+guilty consciences that all Kashima did turn out, even down to the
+banjo; and the Major embraced the company in one expansive grin. As he
+grinned, Mrs. Vansuythen raised her eyes for an instant and looked at
+all Kashima. Her meaning was clear. Major Vansuythen would never know
+anything. He was to be the outsider in that happy family whose cage was
+the Dosehri hills.
+
+‘You’re singing villainously out of tune, Kurrell,’ said the Major
+truthfully. ‘Pass me that banjo.’
+
+And he sang in excruciating-wise till the stars came out and all Kashima
+went to dinner.
+
+That was the beginning of the New Life of Kashima the life that Mrs.
+Boulte made when her tongue was loosened in the twilight.
+
+Mrs. Vansuythen has never told the Major; and since he insists upon
+keeping up a burdensome geniality, she has been compelled to break her
+vow of not speaking to Kurrell. This speech, which must of necessity
+preserve the semblance of politeness and interest, serves admirably to
+keep alight the flame of jealousy and dull hatred in Boulte’s bosom, as
+it awakens the same passions in his wife’s heart. Mrs. Boulte hates
+Mrs. Vansuythen because she has taken Ted from her, and, in some curious
+fashion, hates her because Mrs. Vansuythen and here the wife’s eyes see
+far more clearly than the husband’s detests Ted. And Ted that gallant
+captain and honourable man knows now that it is possible to hate a woman
+once loved, to the verge of wishing to silence her for ever with blows.
+Above all, is he shocked that Mrs. Boulte cannot see the error of her
+ways.
+
+Boulte and he go out tiger-shooting together in all friendship. Boulte
+has put their relationship on a most satisfactory footing.
+
+‘You’re a blackguard,’ he says to Kurrell, ‘and I’ve lost any
+self-respect I may ever have had; but when you’re with me, I can
+feel certain that you are not with Mrs. Vansuythen, or making Emma
+miserable.’
+
+Kurrell endures anything that Boulte may say to him. Sometimes they are
+away for three days together, and then the Major insists upon his
+wife going over to sit with Mrs. Boulte; although Mrs. Vansuythen has
+repeatedly declared that she prefers her husband’s company to any in the
+world. From the way in which she clings to him, she would certainly seem
+to be speaking the truth.
+
+But of course, as the Major says, ‘in a little Station we must all be
+friendly.’
+
+
+
+
+THE HILL OF ILLUSION
+
+
+     What rendered vain their deep desire?
+     A God, a God their severance ruled,
+     And bade between their shores to be
+     The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.
+            --Matthew Arnold.
+
+He. Tell your jhampanies not to hurry so, dear. They forget I’m fresh
+from the Plains.
+
+She. Sure proof that I have not been going out with any one. Yes, they
+are an untrained crew. Where do we go?
+
+He. As usual to the world’s end. No, Jakko.
+
+She. Have your pony led after you, then. It’s a long round.
+
+He. And for the last time, thank Heaven!
+
+She. Do you mean that still? I didn’t dare to write to you about it all
+these months.
+
+He. Mean it! I’ve been shaping my affairs to that end since Autumn. What
+makes you speak as though it had occurred to you for the first time?
+
+She. I? Oh! I don’t know. I’ve had long enough to think, too.
+
+He. And you’ve changed your mind?
+
+She. No. You ought to know that I am a miracle of constancy. What are
+your arrangements?
+
+He. Ours, Sweetheart, please.
+
+She. Ours, be it then. My poor boy, how the prickly heat has marked your
+forehead! Have you ever tried sulphate of copper in water?
+
+He. It’ll go away in a day or two up here. The arrangements are simple
+enough. Tonga in the early morning reach Kalka at twelve Umballa at
+seven down, straight by night train, to Bombay, and then the steamer of
+the 21st for Rome. That’s my idea. The Continent and Sweden a ten-week
+honeymoon.
+
+She. Ssh! Don’t talk of it in that way. It makes me afraid. Guy, how
+long have we two been insane?
+
+He. Seven months and fourteen days, I forget the odd hours exactly, but
+I’ll think.
+
+She. I only wanted to see if you remembered. Who are those two on the
+Blessington Road?
+
+He. Eabrey and the Penner Woman. What do they matter to us? Tell me
+everything that you’ve been doing and saying and thinking.
+
+She. Doing little, saying less, and thinking a great deal. I’ve hardly
+been out at all.
+
+He. That was wrong of you. You haven’t been moping?
+
+She. Not very much. Can you wonder that I’m disinclined for amusement?
+
+He. Frankly, I do. Where was the difficulty?
+
+She. In this only. The more people I know and the more I’m known here,
+the wider spread will be the news of the crash when it comes. I don’t
+like that.
+
+He. Nonsense. We shall be out of it.
+
+She. You think so?
+
+He. I’m sure of it, if there is any power in steam or horse-flesh to
+carry us away. Ha! ha!
+
+She. And the fun of the situation comes in where, my Lancelot?
+
+He. Nowhere, Guinevere. I was only thinking of something.
+
+She. They say men have a keener sense of humour than women. Now I was
+thinking of the scandal.
+
+He. Don’t think of anything so ugly. We shall be beyond it.
+
+She. It will be there all the same in the mouths of Simla telegraphed
+over India, and talked of at the dinners and when He goes out they will
+stare at Him to see how he takes it. And we shall be dead, Guy dear dead
+and cast into the outer darkness where there is--
+
+He. Love at least. Isn’t that enough?
+
+She. I have said so.
+
+He. And you think so still?
+
+She. What do you think?
+
+He. What have I done? It means equal ruin to me, as the world reckons it
+outcasting, the loss of my appointment, the breaking off my life’s work.
+I pay my price.
+
+She. And are you so much above the world that you can afford to pay it.
+Am I?
+
+He. My Divinity what else?
+
+She. A very ordinary woman, I’m afraid, but so far, respectable. How
+d’you do, Mrs. Middle-ditch? Your husband? I think he’s riding down to
+Annandale with Colonel Statters. Yes, isn’t it divine after the rain?
+Guy, how long am I to be allowed to bow to Mrs. Middleditch? Till the
+17th?
+
+He. Frowsy Scotchwoman! What is the use of bringing her into the
+discussion? You were saying?
+
+She. Nothing. Have you ever seen a man hanged?
+
+He. Yes. Once.
+
+She. What was it for?
+
+He. Murder, of course.
+
+She. Murder. Is that so great a sin after all? I wonder how he felt
+before the drop fell.
+
+He. I don’t think he felt much. What a gruesome little woman it is this
+evening! You’re shivering. Put on your cape, dear.
+
+She. I think I will. Oh! Look at the mist coming over Sanjaoli; and I
+thought we should have sunshine on the Ladies’ Mile! Let’s turn back.
+
+He. What’s the good? There’s a cloud on Elysium Hill, and that means
+it’s foggy all down the Mall. We’ll go on. It’ll blow away before we get
+to the Convent, perhaps. ‘Jove! It is chilly.
+
+She. You feel it, fresh from below. Put on your ulster. What do you
+think of my cape?
+
+He. Never ask a man his opinion of a woman’s dress when he is
+desperately and abjectly in love with the wearer. Let me look. Like
+everything else of yours it’s perfect. Where did you get it from?
+
+She. He gave it me, on Wednesday our wedding-day, you know.
+
+He. The Deuce He did! He’s growing generous in his old age. D’you like
+all that frilly, bunchy stuff at the throat? I don’t.
+
+She. Don’t you?
+
+     Kind Sir, o’ your courtesy,
+        As you go by the town, Sir,
+     ‘Pray you o’ your love for me,
+        Buy me a russet gown, Sir.
+
+He. I won’t say: ‘Keek into the draw-well, Janet, Janet.’ Only wait
+a little, darling, and you shall be stocked with russet gowns and
+everything else.
+
+She. And when the frocks wear out you’ll get me new ones and everything
+else?
+
+He. Assuredly.
+
+She. I wonder!
+
+He. Look here, Sweetheart, I didn’t spend two days and two nights in
+the train to hear you wonder. I thought we’d settled all that at
+Shaifazehat.
+
+She. (dreamily). At Shaifazehat? Does the Station go on still? That
+was ages and ages ago. It must be crumbling to pieces. All except the
+Amirtollah kutcha road. I don’t believe that could crumble till the Day
+of Judgment.
+
+He. You think so? What is the mood now?
+
+She. I can’t tell. How cold it is! Let us get on quickly.
+
+He. ‘Better walk a little. Stop your jhampanies and get out. What’s the
+matter with you this evening, dear?
+
+She. Nothing. You must grow accustomed to my ways. If I’m boring you I
+can go home. Here’s Captain Congleton coming, I daresay he’ll be willing
+to escort me.
+
+He. Goose! Between us, too! Damn Captain Congleton.
+
+She. Chivalrous Knight. Is it your habit to swear much in talking? It
+jars a little, and you might swear at me.
+
+He. My angel! I didn’t know what I was saying; and you changed so
+quickly that I couldn’t follow. I’ll apologise in dust and ashes.
+
+She. There’ll be enough of those later on Good-night, Captain Congleton.
+Going to the singing-quadrilles already? What dances am I giving you
+next week? No! You must have written them down wrong. Five and Seven, I
+said. If you’ve made a mistake, I certainly don’t intend to suffer for
+it. You must alter your programme.
+
+He. I thought you told me that you had not been going out much this
+season?
+
+She. Quite true, but when I do I dance with Captain Congleton. He dances
+very nicely.
+
+He. And sit out with him, I suppose?
+
+She. Yes. Have you any objection? Shall I stand under the chandelier in
+future?
+
+He. What does he talk to you about?
+
+She. What do men talk about when they sit out?
+
+He. Ugh! Don’t! Well, now I’m up, you must dispense with the fascinating
+Congleton for a while. I don’t like him.
+
+She (after a pause). Do you know what you have said?
+
+He ‘Can’t say that I do exactly. I’m not in the best of tempers.
+
+She So I see, and feel. My true and faithful lover, where is your
+‘eternal constancy,’ ‘unalterable trust,’ and ‘reverent devotion’? I
+remember those phrases; you seem to have forgotten them. I mention a
+man’s name.
+
+He. A good deal more than that.
+
+She. Well, speak to him about a dance perhaps the last dance that I
+shall ever dance in my life before I, before I go away; and you at once
+distrust and insult me.
+
+He. I never said a word.
+
+She. How much did you imply? Guy, is this amount of confidence to be our
+stock to start the new life on?
+
+He. No, of course not. I didn’t mean that. On my word and honour, I
+didn’t. Let it pass, dear. Please let it pass.
+
+She. This once yes and a second time, and again and again, all through
+the years when I shall be unable to resent it. You want too much, my
+Lancelot, and, you know too much.
+
+He. How do you mean?
+
+She. That is a part of the punishment. There cannot be perfect trust
+between us.
+
+He. In Heaven’s name, why not?
+
+She. Hush! The Other Place is quite enough. Ask yourself.
+
+He. I don’t follow.
+
+She. You trust me so implicitly that when I look at another man Never
+mind. Guy, have you ever made love to a girl a good girl?
+
+He. Something of the sort. Centuries ago in the Dark Ages, before I ever
+met you, dear.
+
+She. Tell me what you said to her.
+
+He. What does a man say to a girl? I’ve forgotten.
+
+She. I remember. He tells her that he trusts her and worships the ground
+she walks on, and that he’ll love and honour and protect her till her
+dying day; and so she marries in that belief. At least, I speak of one
+girl who was not protected.
+
+He. Well, and then?
+
+She. And then, Guy, and then, that girl needs ten times the love and
+trust and honour yes, honour that was enough when she was only a
+mere wife if if the other life she chooses to lead is to be made even
+bearable. Do you understand?
+
+He. Even bearable! It’ll be Paradise.
+
+She. Ah! Can you give me all I’ve asked for not now, nor a few months
+later, but when you begin to think of what you might have done if you
+had kept your own appointment and your caste here when you begin to
+look upon me as a drag and a burden? I shall want it most then, Guy, for
+there will be no one in the wide world but you.
+
+He. You’re a little over-tired to-night, Sweetheart, and you’re taking a
+stage view of the situation. After the necessary business in the Courts,
+the road is clear to--
+
+She. ‘The holy state of matrimony!’ Ha! ha! ha!
+
+He. Ssh! Don’t laugh in that horrible way!
+
+She. I I c-c-c-can’t help it! Isn’t it too absurd! Ah! Ha! ha! ha! Guy,
+stop me quick or I shall l-l-laugh till we get to the Church.
+
+He. For goodness sake, stop! Don’t make an exhibition of yourself. What
+is the matter with you?
+
+She. N-nothing. I’m better now.
+
+He. That’s all right. One moment, dear. There’s a little wisp of hair
+got loose from behind your right ear and it’s straggling over your
+cheek. So!
+
+She. Thank’oo. I’m ‘fraid my hat’s on one side, too.
+
+He. What do you wear these huge dagger bonnet-skewers for? They’re big
+enough to kill a man with.
+
+She. Oh! don’t kill me, though. You’re sticking it into my head! Let me
+do it. You men are so clumsy.
+
+He. Have you had many opportunities of comparing us in this sort of
+work?
+
+She. Guy, what is my name?
+
+He. Eh! I don’t follow.
+
+She. Here’s my card-case. Can you read?
+
+He. Yes. Well?
+
+She. Well, that answers your question. You know the other’s man’s name.
+Am I sufficiently humbled, or would you like to ask me if there is any
+one else?
+
+He. I see now. My darling, I never meant that for an instant. I was only
+joking. There! Lucky there’s no one on the road. They’d be scandalised.
+
+She. They’ll be more scandalised before the end.
+
+He. Do-on’t! I don’t like you to talk in that way.
+
+She. Unreasonable man! Who asked me to face the situation and accept
+it? Tell me, do I look like Mrs. Penner? Do I look like a naughty woman!
+Swear I don’t! Give me your word of honour, my honourable friend, that
+I’m not like Mrs. Buzgago. That’s the way she stands, with her hands
+clasped at the back of her head. D’you like that?
+
+He. Don’t be affected.
+
+She. I’m not. I’m Mrs. Buzgago. Listen!
+
+     Pendant une anne’ toute entiere
+     Le regiment n’a pas r’paru.
+     Au Ministere de la Guerre
+     On le r’porta comme perdu.
+     On se r’noncait--retrouver sa trace,
+     Quand un matin subitement,
+     On le vit reparaetre sur la place,
+     L’Colonel toujours en avant.
+
+That’s the way she rolls her r’s. Am I like her?
+
+He. No, but I object when you go on like an actress and sing stuff of
+that kind. Where in the world did you pick up the Chanson du Colonel? It
+isn’t a drawing-room song. It isn’t proper.
+
+She. Mrs. Buzgago taught it me. She is both drawing-room and proper, and
+in another month she’ll shut her drawing-room to me, and thank God she
+isn’t as improper as I am. Oh, Guy, Guy! I wish I was like some women
+and had no scruples about What is it Keene says? ‘Wearing a corpse’s
+hair and being false to the bread they eat.’
+
+He. I am only a man of limited intelligence, and, just now, very
+bewildered. When you have quite finished flashing through all your moods
+tell me, and I’ll try to understand the last one.
+
+She. Moods, Guy! I haven’t any. I’m sixteen years old and you’re just
+twenty, and you’ve been waiting for two hours outside the school in the
+cold. And now I’ve met you, and now we’re walking home together. Does
+that suit you, My Imperial Majesty?
+
+He. No. We aren’t children. Why can’t you be rational?
+
+She. He asks me that when I’m going to commit suicide for his sake, and,
+and I don’t want to be French and rave about my mother, but have I ever
+told you that I have a mother, and a brother who was my pet before I
+married? He’s married now. Can’t you imagine the pleasure that the news
+of the elopement will give him? Have you any people at Home, Guy, to be
+pleased with your performances?
+
+He. One or two. One can’t make omelets without breaking eggs.
+
+She (slowly). I don’t see the necessity
+
+He. Hah! What do you mean?
+
+She. Shall I speak the truth?
+
+He Under the circumstances, perhaps it would be as well.
+
+She. Guy, I’m afraid.
+
+He I thought we’d settled all that. What of?
+
+She. Of you.
+
+He. Oh, damn it all! The old business! This is too bad!
+
+She. Of you.
+
+He. And what now?
+
+She. What do you think of me?
+
+He. Beside the question altogether. What do you intend to do?
+
+She. I daren’t risk it. I’m afraid. If I could only cheat
+
+He. A la Buzgago? No, thanks. That’s the one point on which I have any
+notion of Honour. I won’t eat his salt and steal too. I’ll loot openly
+or not at all.
+
+She. I never meant anything else.
+
+He. Then, why in the world do you pretend not to be willing to come?
+
+She. It’s not pretence, Guy. I am afraid.
+
+He. Please explain.
+
+She. It can’t last, Guy. It can’t last. You’ll get angry, and then
+you’ll swear, and then you’ll get jealous, and then you’ll mistrust me
+you do now and you yourself will be the best reason for doubting. And
+I what shall I do? I shall be no better than Mrs. Buzgago found out no
+better than any one. And you’ll know that. Oh, Guy, can’t you see?
+
+He I see that you are desperately unreasonable, little woman.
+
+She. There! The moment I begin to object, you get angry. What will you
+do when I am only your property stolen property? It can’t be, Guy. It
+can’t be! I thought it could, but it can’t. You’ll get tired of me.
+
+He I tell you I shall not. Won’t anything make you understand that?
+
+She. There, can’t you see? If you speak to me like that now, you’ll call
+me horrible names later, if I don’t do everything as you like. And if
+you were cruel to me, Guy, where should I go? where should I go? I can’t
+trust you. Oh! I can’t trust you!
+
+He. I suppose I ought to say that I can trust you. I’ve ample reason.
+
+She. Please don’t, dear. It hurts as much as if you hit me.
+
+He. It isn’t exactly pleasant for me.
+
+She. I can’t help it. I wish I were dead! I can’t trust you, and I don’t
+trust myself. Oh, Guy, let it die away and be forgotten!
+
+He. Too late now. I don’t understand you I won’t and I can’t trust
+myself to talk this evening. May I call to-morrow?
+
+She. Yes. No! Oh, give me time! The day after. I get into my ‘rickshaw
+here and meet Him at Peliti’s. You ride.
+
+He. I’ll go on to Peliti’s too. I think I want a drink. My world’s
+knocked about my ears and the stars are falling. Who are those brutes
+howling in the Old Library?
+
+She. They’re rehearsing the singing-quadrilles for the Fancy Ball. Can’t
+you hear Mrs. Buzgago’s voice? She has a solo. It’s quite a new idea.
+Listen!
+
+Mrs. Buzgago (in the Old Library, con molt. exp.).
+
+See-saw! Margery Daw!
+
+Sold her bed to lie upon straw.
+
+Wasn’t she a silly slut
+
+To sell her bed and lie upon dirt?
+
+Captain Congleton, I’m going to alter that to ‘flirt.’ It sounds better.
+
+He. No, I’ve changed my mind about the drink. Good-night, little lady. I
+shall see you to-morrow?
+
+She. Ye es. Good-night, Guy. Don’t be angry with me.
+
+He. Angry! You know I trust you absolutely. Good-night and God bless
+you!
+
+(Three seconds later. Alone.) Hmm! I’d give something to discover
+whether there’s another man at the back of all this.
+
+
+
+
+A SECOND-RATE WOMAN
+
+
+     Est fuga, volvitur rota,
+        On we drift: where looms the dim port?
+     One Two Three Four Five contribute their quota:
+        Something is gained if one caught but the import,
+     Show it us, Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.
+            --Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.
+
+‘Dressed! Don’t tell me that woman ever dressed in her life. She stood
+in the middle of the room while her ayah no, her husband it must have
+been a man threw her clothes at her. She then did her hair with her
+fingers, and rubbed her bonnet in the flue under the bed. I know she
+did, as well as if I had assisted at the orgy. Who is she?’ said Mrs.
+Hauksbee.
+
+‘Don’t!’ said Mrs. Mallowe feebly. ‘You make my head ache. I am
+miserable to-day. Stay me with fondants, comfort me with chocolates, for
+I am. Did you bring anything from Peliti’s?’
+
+‘Questions to begin with. You shall have the sweets when you have
+answered them. Who and what is the creature? There were at least
+half-a-dozen men round her, and she appeared to be going to sleep in
+their midst.’
+
+‘Delville,’ said Mrs. Mallowe, “‘Shady” Delville, to distinguish her
+from Mrs. Jim of that ilk. She dances as untidily as she dresses, I
+believe, and her husband is somewhere in Madras. Go and call, if you are
+so interested.’
+
+‘What have I to do with Shigramitish women? She merely caught my
+attention for a minute, and I wondered at the attraction that a dowd has
+for a certain type of man. I expected to see her walk out of her clothes
+until I looked at her eyes.’
+
+‘Hooks and eyes, surely,’ drawled Mrs. Mallowe.
+
+‘Don’t be clever, Polly. You make my head ache. And round this hayrick
+stood a crowd of men a positive crowd!’
+
+‘Perhaps they also expected.’
+
+‘Polly, don’t be Rabelaisian!’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe curled herself up comfortably on the sofa, and turned her
+attention to the sweets. She and Mrs. Hauksbee shared the same house
+at Simla; and these things befell two seasons after the matter of Otis
+Yeere, which has been already recorded.
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee stepped into the verandah and looked down upon the Mall,
+her forehead puckered with thought.
+
+‘Hah!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee shortly. ‘Indeed!’
+
+‘What is it?’ said Mrs. Mallowe sleepily.
+
+‘That dowd and The Dancing Master to whom I object.’
+
+‘Why to The Dancing Master? He is a middle-aged gentleman, of reprobate
+and romantic tendencies, and tries to be a friend of mine.’
+
+‘Then make up your mind to lose him. Dowds cling by nature, and I should
+imagine that this animal how terrible her bonnet looks from above! is
+specially clingsome.’
+
+‘She is welcome to The Dancing Master so far as I am concerned. I never
+could take an interest in a monotonous liar. The frustrated aim of his
+life is to persuade people that he is a bachelor.’
+
+‘O-oh! I think I’ve met that sort of man before. And isn’t he?’
+
+‘No. He confided that to me a few days ago. Ugh! Some men ought to be
+killed.’
+
+‘What happened then?’
+
+‘He posed as the horror of horrors a misunderstood man. Heaven knows the
+femme incomprise is sad enough and bad enough but the other thing!’
+
+‘And so fat too! I should have laughed in his face. Men seldom confide
+in me. How is it they come to you?’
+
+‘For the sake of impressing me with their careers in the past. Protect
+me from men with confidences!’
+
+‘And yet you encourage them?’
+
+‘What can I do? They talk, I listen, and they vow that I am sympathetic.
+I know I always profess astonishment even when the plot is of the most
+old possible.’
+
+‘Yes. Men are so unblushingly explicit if they are once allowed to talk,
+whereas women’s confidences are full of reservations and fibs, except--’
+
+‘When they go mad and babble of the Unutter-abilities after a week’s
+acquaintance. Really, if you come to consider, we know a great deal more
+of men than of our own sex.’
+
+‘And the extraordinary thing is that men will never believe it. They say
+we are trying to hide something.’
+
+‘They are generally doing that on their own account. Alas! These
+chocolates pall upon me, and I haven’t eaten more than a dozen. I think
+I shall go to sleep.’
+
+‘Then you’ll get fat, dear. If you took more exercise and a more
+intelligent interest in your neighbours you would--’
+
+‘Be as much loved as Mrs. Hauksbee. You’re a darling in many ways, and
+I like you you are not a woman’s woman but why do you trouble yourself
+about mere human beings?’
+
+‘Because in the absence of angels, who I am sure would be horribly dull,
+men and women are the most fascinating things in the whole wide world,
+lazy one. I am interested in The Dowd I am interested in The Dancing
+Master I am interested in the Hawley Boy and I am interested in you.’
+
+‘Why couple me with the Hawley Boy? He is your property.’
+
+‘Yes, and in his own guileless speech, I’m making a good thing out
+of him. When he is slightly more reformed, and has passed his Higher
+Standard, or whatever the authorities think fit to exact from him, I
+shall select a pretty little girl, the Holt girl, I think, and’ here she
+waved her hands airily “‘whom Mrs. Hauksbee hath joined together let no
+man put asunder.” That’s all.’
+
+‘And when you have yoked May Holt with the most notorious detrimental
+in Simla, and earned the undying hatred of Mamma Holt, what will you do
+with me, Dispenser of the Destinies of the Universe?’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee dropped into a low chair in front of the fire, and, chin
+in hand, gazed long and steadfastly at Mrs. Mallowe.
+
+‘I do not know,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘what I shall do with
+you, dear. It’s obviously impossible to marry you to some one else your
+husband would object and the experiment might not be successful after
+all. I think I shall begin by preventing you from what is it? “sleeping
+on ale-house benches and snoring in the sun.”’
+
+‘Don’t! I don’t like your quotations. They are so rude. Go to the
+Library and bring me new books.’
+
+‘While you sleep? No! If you don’t come with me I shall spread your
+newest frock on my ‘rickshaw-bow, and when any one asks me what I am
+doing, I shall say that I am going to Phelps’s to get it let out. I
+shall take care that Mrs. MacNamara sees me. Put your things on, there’s
+a good girl.’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe groaned and obeyed, and the two went off to the Library,
+where they found Mrs. Delville and the man who went by the nick-name of
+The Dancing Master. By that time Mrs. Mallowe was awake and eloquent.
+
+‘That is the Creature!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee, with the air of one pointing
+out a slug in the road.
+
+‘No,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘The man is the Creature. Ugh! Good-evening,
+Mr. Bent. I thought you were coming to tea this evening.’
+
+‘Surely it was for to-morrow, was it not?’ answered The Dancing Master.
+‘I understood I fancied I’m so sorry How very unfortunate!’
+
+But Mrs. Mallowe had passed on.
+
+‘For the practised equivocator you said he was,’ murmured Mrs. Hauksbee,
+‘he strikes me as a failure. Now wherefore should he have preferred a
+walk with The Dowd to tea with us? Elective affinities, I suppose both
+grubby. Polly, I’d never forgive that woman as long as the world rolls.’
+
+‘I forgive every woman everything,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘He will be a
+sufficient punishment for her. What a common voice she has!’
+
+Mrs. Delville’s voice was not pretty, her carriage was even less lovely,
+and her raiment was strikingly neglected. All these things Mrs. Mallowe
+noticed over the top of a magazine.
+
+‘Now what is there in her?’ said Mrs. Hauksbee. ‘Do you see what I meant
+about the clothes falling off? If I were a man I would perish sooner
+than be seen with that rag-bag. And yet, she has good eyes, but Oh!’
+
+‘What is it?’
+
+‘She doesn’t know how to use them! On my honour, she does not. Look! Oh
+look! Untidiness I can endure, but ignorance never! The woman’s a fool.’
+
+‘Hsh! She’ll hear you.’
+
+‘All the women in Simla are fools. She’ll think I mean some one else.
+Now she’s going out. What a thoroughly objectionable couple she and The
+Dancing Master make! Which reminds me. Do you suppose they’ll ever dance
+together?’
+
+‘Wait and see. I don’t envy her the conversation of The Dancing Master
+loathly man! His wife ought to be up here before long?’
+
+‘Do you know anything about him?’
+
+‘Only what he told me. It may be all a fiction. He married a girl bred
+in the country, I think, and, being an honourable, chivalrous soul, told
+me that he repented his bargain and sent her to her as often as possible
+a person who has lived in the Doon since the memory of man and goes to
+Mussoorie when other people go Home. The wife is with her at present. So
+he says.’
+
+‘Babies?’
+
+‘One only, but he talks of his wife in a revolting way. I hated him for
+it. He thought he was being epigrammatic and brilliant.’
+
+‘That is a vice peculiar to men. I dislike him because he is generally
+in the wake of some girl, disappointing the Eligibles. He will persecute
+May Holt no more, unless I am much mistaken.’
+
+‘No. I think Mrs. Delville may occupy his attention for a while.’
+
+‘Do you suppose she knows that he is the head of a family?’
+
+‘Not from his lips. He swore me to eternal secrecy. Wherefore I tell
+you. Don’t you know that type of man?’
+
+‘Not intimately, thank goodness! As a general rule, when a man begins to
+abuse his wife to me, I find that the Lord gives me wherewith to answer
+him according to his folly; and we part with a coolness between us. I
+laugh.’
+
+‘I’m different. I’ve no sense of humour.’
+
+‘Cultivate it, then. It has been my mainstay for more years than I care
+to think about. A well-educated sense of humour will save a woman
+when Religion, Training, and Home influences fail; and we may all need
+salvation sometimes.’
+
+‘Do you suppose that the Delville woman has humour?’
+
+‘Her dress betrays her. How can a Thing who wears her supplement under
+her left arm have any notion of the fitness of things much less their
+folly? If she discards The Dancing Master after having once seen him
+dance, I may respect her. Otherwise--’
+
+‘But are we not both assuming a great deal too much, dear? You saw
+the woman at Peliti’s half an hour later you saw her walking with The
+Dancing Master an hour later you met her here at the Library.’
+
+‘Still with The Dancing Master, remember.’
+
+‘Still with The Dancing Master, I admit, but why on the strength of that
+should you imagine--’
+
+‘I imagine nothing. I have no imagination. I am only convinced that The
+Dancing Master is attracted to The Dowd because he is objectionable
+in every way and she in every other. If I know the man as you have
+described him, he holds his wife in slavery at present.’
+
+‘She is twenty years younger than he.’
+
+‘Poor wretch! And, in the end, after he has posed and swaggered and lied
+he has a mouth under that ragged moustache simply made for lies he will
+be rewarded according to his merits.’
+
+‘I wonder what those really are,’ said Mrs. Mallowe.
+
+But Mrs. Hauksbee, her face close to the shelf of the new books, was
+humming softly: ‘What shall he have who killed the Deer?’ She was a lady
+of unfettered speech.
+
+One month later she announced her intention of calling upon Mrs.
+Delville. Both Mrs. Hauksbee and Mrs. Mallowe were in morning wrappers,
+and there was a great peace in the land.
+
+‘I should go as I was,’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘It would be a delicate
+compliment to her style.’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee studied herself in the glass.
+
+‘Assuming for a moment that she ever darkened these doors, I should put
+on this robe, after all the others, to show her what a morning-wrapper
+ought to be. It might enliven her. As it is, I shall go in the
+dove-coloured sweet emblem of youth and innocence and shall put on my
+new gloves.’
+
+‘If you really are going, dirty tan would be too good; and you know that
+dove-colour spots with the rain.’
+
+‘I care not. I may make her envious. At least I shall try, though one
+cannot expect very much from a woman who puts a lace tucker into her
+habit.’
+
+‘Just Heavens! When did she do that?’
+
+‘Yesterday riding with The Dancing Master. I met them at the back of
+Jakko, and the rain had made the lace lie down. To complete the effect,
+she was wearing an unclean terai with the elastic under her chin. I felt
+almost too well content to take the trouble to despise her.’
+
+‘The Hawley Boy was riding with you. What did he think?’
+
+‘Does a boy ever notice these things? Should I like him if he did?
+He stared in the rudest way, and just when I thought he had seen the
+elastic, he said, “There’s something very taking about that face.” I
+rebuked him on the spot. I don’t approve of boys being taken by faces.’
+
+‘Other than your own. I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if the
+Hawley Boy immediately went to call.’
+
+‘I forbade him. Let her be satisfied with The Dancing Master, and his
+wife when she comes up. I’m rather curious to see Mrs. Bent and the
+Delville woman together.’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee departed and, at the end of an hour, returned slightly
+flushed.
+
+‘There is no limit to the treachery of youth! I ordered the Hawley Boy,
+as he valued my patronage, not to call. The first person I stumble over
+literally stumble over in her poky, dark little drawing-room is, of
+course, the Hawley Boy. She kept us waiting ten minutes, and then
+emerged as though she had been tipped out of the dirtyclothes-basket.
+You know my way, dear, when I am at all put out. I was Superior,
+crrrrushingly Superior! ‘Lifted my eyes to Heaven, and had heard of
+nothing ‘dropped my eyes on the carpet and “really didn’t know” ‘played
+with my cardcase and “supposed so.” The Hawley Boy giggled like a girl,
+and I had to freeze him with scowls between the sentences.’
+
+‘And she?’
+
+‘She sat in a heap on the edge of a couch, and managed to convey the
+impression that she was suffering from stomach-ache, at the very least.
+It was all I could do not to ask after her symptoms. When I rose, she
+grunted just like a buffalo in the water too lazy to move.’
+
+‘Are you certain?’
+
+‘Am I blind, Polly? Laziness, sheer laziness, nothing else or her
+garments were only constructed for sitting down in. I stayed for a
+quarter of an hour trying to penetrate the gloom, to guess what her
+surroundings were like, while she stuck out her tongue.’
+
+‘Lu cy!’
+
+‘Well I’ll withdraw the tongue, though I’m sure if she didn’t do it when
+I was in the room, she did the minute I was outside. At any rate, she
+lay in a lump and grunted. Ask the Hawley Boy, dear. I believe the
+grunts were meant for sentences, but she spoke so indistinctly that I
+can’t swear to it.’
+
+‘You are incorrigible, simply.’
+
+‘I am not! Treat me civilly, give me peace with honour, don’t put the
+only available seat facing the window, and a child may eat jam in my
+lap before Church. But I resent being grunted at. Wouldn’t you? Do you
+suppose that she communicates her views on life and love to The Dancing
+Master in a set of modulated “Grmphs”?’
+
+‘You attach too much importance to The Dancing Master.’
+
+‘He came as we went, and The Dowd grew almost cordial at the sight of
+him. He smiled greasily, and moved about that darkened dog-kennel in a
+suspiciously familiar way.’
+
+‘Don’t be uncharitable. Any sin but that I’ll forgive.’
+
+‘Listen to the voice of History. I am only describing what I saw. He
+entered, the heap on the sofa revived slightly, and the Hawley Boy and
+I came away together. He is disillusioned, but I felt it my duty to
+lecture him severely for going there. And that’s all.’
+
+‘Now for Pity’s sake leave the wretched creature and The Dancing Master
+alone. They never did you any harm.’
+
+‘No harm? To dress as an example and a stumbling-block for half Simla,
+and then to find this Person who is dressed by the hand of God not that
+I wish to disparage Him for a moment, but you know the tikka dhurzie way
+He attires those lilies of the field this Person draws the eyes of
+men and some of them nice men? It’s almost enough to make one discard
+clothing. I told the Hawley Boy so.’
+
+‘And what did that sweet youth do?’
+
+‘Turned shell-pink and looked across the far blue hills like a
+distressed cherub. Am I talking wildly, Polly? Let me say my say, and
+I shall be calm. Otherwise I may go abroad and disturb Simla with a few
+original reflections. Excepting always your own sweet self, there isn’t
+a single woman in the land who understands me when I am what’s the
+word?’
+
+‘Tete-fele suggested Mrs. Mallowe.
+
+‘Exactly! And now let us have tiffin. The demands of Society are
+exhausting, and as Mrs. Delville says,--’ Here Mrs. Hauksbee, to the
+horror of the khitmatgars, lapsed into a series of grunts, while Mrs.
+Mallowe stared in lazy surprise.
+
+‘“God gie us a guid conceit of oorselves,”’ said Mrs. Hauksbee piously,
+returning to her natural speech. ‘Now, in any other woman that would
+have been vulgar. I am consumed with curiosity to see Mrs. Bent. I
+expect complications.’
+
+‘Woman of one idea,’ said Mrs. Mallowe shortly; ‘all complications are
+as old as the hills! I have lived through or near all all All!’
+
+‘And yet do not understand that men and women never behave twice alike.
+I am old who was young if ever I put my head in your lap, you dear, big
+sceptic, you will learn that my parting is gauze but never, no never,
+have I lost my interest in men and women. Polly, I shall see this
+business out to the bitter end.’
+
+‘I am going to sleep,’ said Mrs. Mallowe calmly. ‘I never interfere with
+men or women unless I am compelled,’ and she retired with dignity to her
+own room.
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee’s curiosity was not long left ungratified, for Mrs. Bent
+came up to Simla a few days after the conversation faithfully reported
+above, and pervaded the Mall by her husband’s side.
+
+‘Behold!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee, thoughtfully rubbing her nose. ‘That is
+the last link of the chain, if we omit the husband of the Delville,
+whoever he may be. Let me consider. The Bents and the Delvilles inhabit
+the same hotel; and the Delville is detested by the Waddy do you know
+the Waddy? who is almost as big a dowd. The Waddy also abominates the
+male Bent, for which, if her other sins do not weigh too heavily, she
+will eventually go to Heaven.’
+
+‘Don’t be irreverent,’ said Mrs. Mallowe, ‘I like Mrs. Bent’s face.’
+
+‘I am discussing the Waddy,’ returned Mrs. Hauksbee loftily. ‘The Waddy
+will take the female Bent apart, after having borrowed yes! everything
+that she can, from hairpins to babies’ bottles. Such, my dear, is life
+in a hotel. The Waddy will tell the female Bent facts and fictions about
+The Dancing Master and The Dowd.’
+
+‘Lucy, I should like you better if you were not always looking into
+people’s back-bedrooms.’
+
+‘Anybody can look into their front drawingrooms; and remember whatever
+I do, and whatever I look, I never talk as the Waddy will. Let us hope
+that The Dancing Master’s greasy smile and manner of the pedagogue will
+soften the heart of that cow, his wife. If mouths speak truth, I should
+think that little Mrs. Bent could get very angry on occasion.’
+
+‘But what reason has she for being angry?’
+
+‘What reason! The Dancing Master in himself is a reason. How does it go?
+“If in his life some trivial errors fall, Look in his face and you’ll
+believe them all.” I am prepared to credit any evil of The Dancing
+Master, because I hate him so. And The Dowd is so disgustingly badly
+dressed.’
+
+‘That she, too, is capable of every iniquity? I always prefer to believe
+the best of everybody. It saves so much trouble.’
+
+‘Very good. I prefer to believe the worst. It saves useless expenditure
+of sympathy. And you may be quite certain that the Waddy believes with
+me.’
+
+Mrs. Mallowe sighed and made no answer.
+
+The conversation was holden after dinner while Mrs. Hauksbee was
+dressing for a dance.
+
+‘I am too tired to go,’ pleaded Mrs. Mallowe, and Mrs. Hauksbee left
+her in peace till two in the morning, when she was aware of emphatic
+knocking at her door.
+
+‘Don’t be very angry, dear,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee. ‘My idiot of an ayah
+has gone home, and, as I hope to sleep to-night, there isn’t a soul in
+the place to unlace me.’
+
+‘Oh, this is too bad!’ said Mrs. Mallowe sulkily.
+
+‘Cant help it. I’m a lone, lorn grass-widow, dear, but I will not sleep
+in my stays. And such news too! Oh, do unlace me, there’s a darling!
+The Dowd The Dancing Master I and the Hawley Boy You know the North
+verandah?’
+
+‘How can I do anything if you spin round like this?’ protested Mrs.
+Mallowe, fumbling with the knot of the laces.
+
+‘Oh, I forget. I must tell my tale without the aid of your eyes. Do you
+know you’ve lovely eyes, dear? Well, to begin with, I took the Hawley
+Boy to a kala juggah.’
+
+‘Did he want much taking?’
+
+‘Lots! There was an arrangement of loose-boxes in kanats, and she was in
+the next one talking to him.’
+
+‘Which? How? Explain.’
+
+‘You know what I mean The Dowd and The Dancing Master. We could hear
+every word, and we listened shamelessly ‘specially the Hawley Boy.
+Polly, I quite love that woman!’
+
+‘This is interesting. There! Now turn round. What happened?’
+
+‘One moment. Ah h! Blessed relief. I’ve been looking forward to taking
+them off for the last half-hour which is ominous at my time of life.
+But, as I was saying, we listened and heard The Dowd drawl worse
+than ever. She drops her final g’s like a barmaid or a blue-blooded
+Aide-de-Camp. “Look he-ere, you’re gettin’ too fond o’ me,” she said,
+and The Dancing Master owned it was so in language that nearly made
+me ill. The Dowd reflected for a while. Then we heard her say, “Look
+he-ere, Mister Bent, why are you such an aw-ful liar?” I nearly exploded
+while The Dancing Master denied the charge. It seems that he never told
+her he was a married man.’
+
+‘I said he wouldn’t.’
+
+‘And she had taken this to heart, on personal grounds, I suppose. She
+drawled along for five minutes, reproaching him with his perfidy, and
+grew quite motherly. “Now you’ve got a nice little wife of your own you
+have,” she said. “She’s ten times too good for a fat old man like you,
+and, look he-ere, you never told me a word about her, and I’ve been
+thinkin’ about it a good deal, and I think you’re a liar.” Wasn’t that
+delicious? The Dancing Master maundered and raved till the Hawley Boy
+suggested that he should burst in and beat him. His voice runs up
+into an impassioned squeak when he is afraid. The Dowd must be an
+extraordinary woman. She explained that had he been a bachelor she might
+not have objected to his devotion; but since he was a married man and
+the father of a very nice baby, she considered him a hypocrite, and this
+she repeated twice. She wound up her drawl with: “An’ I’m tellin’ you
+this because your wife is angry with me, an’ I hate quarrellin’ with any
+other woman, an’ I like your wife. You know how you have behaved for the
+last six weeks. You shouldn’t have done it, indeed you shouldn’t. You’re
+too old an’ too fat.” Can’t you imagine how The Dancing Master would
+wince at that! “Now go away,” she said. “I don’t want to tell you what
+I think of you, because I think you are not nice. I’ll stay he-ere till
+the next dance begins.” Did you think that the creature had so much in
+her?’
+
+‘I never studied her as closely as you did. It sounds unnatural. What
+happened?’
+
+‘The Dancing Master attempted blandishment, reproof, jocularity, and the
+style of the Lord High Warden, and I had almost to pinch the Hawley Boy
+to make him keep quiet. She grunted at the end of each sentence and, in
+the end, he went away swearing to himself, quite like a man in a novel.
+He looked more objectionable than ever. I laughed. I love that woman
+in spite of her clothes. And now I’m going to bed. What do you think of
+it?’
+
+‘I shan’t begin to think till the morning,’ said Mrs. Mallowe,
+yawning. ‘Perhaps she spoke the truth. They do fly into it by accident
+sometimes.’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee’s account of her eavesdropping was an ornate one, but
+truthful in the main. For reasons best known to herself, Mrs. ‘Shady’
+Delville had turned upon Mr. Bent and rent him limb from limb, casting
+him away limp and disconcerted ere she withdrew the light of her eyes
+from him permanently. Being a man of resource, and anything but pleased
+in that he had been called both old and fat, he gave Mrs. Bent to
+understand that he had, during her absence in the Doon, been the victim
+of unceasing persecution at the hands of Mrs. Delville, and he told the
+tale so often and with such eloquence that he ended in believing it,
+while his wife marvelled at the manners and customs of ‘some women.’
+When the situation showed signs of languishing, Mrs. Waddy was always on
+hand to wake the smouldering fires of suspicion in Mrs. Bent’s bosom
+and to contribute generally to the peace and comfort of the hotel. Mr.
+Bent’s life was not a happy one, for if Mrs. Waddy’s story were true,
+he was, argued his wife, untrustworthy to the last degree. If his own
+statement was true, his charms of manner and conversation were so
+great that he needed constant surveillance. And he received it, till
+he repented genuinely of his marriage and neglected his personal
+appearance. Mrs. Delville alone in the hotel was unchanged. She removed
+her chair some six paces towards the head of the table, and occasionally
+in the twilight ventured on timid overtures of friendship to Mrs. Bent,
+which were repulsed.
+
+‘She does it for my sake,’ hinted the virtuous Bent.
+
+‘A dangerous and designing woman,’ purred Mrs. Waddy.
+
+Worst of all, every other hotel in Simla was full!
+
+‘Polly, are you afraid of diphtheria?’
+
+‘Of nothing in the world except small-pox, Diphtheria kills, but it
+doesn’t disfigure. Why do you ask?’
+
+‘Because the Bent baby has got it, and the whole hotel is upside down in
+consequence. The Waddy has “set her five young on the rail” and fled.
+The Dancing Master fears for his precious throat, and that miserable
+little woman, his wife, has no notion of what ought to be done. She
+wanted to put it into a mustard bath for croup!’
+
+‘Where did you learn all this?’
+
+‘Just now, on the Mall. Dr. Howlen told me. The manager of the hotel
+is abusing the Bents, and the Bents are abusing the manager. They are a
+feckless couple.’
+
+‘Well. What’s on your mind?’
+
+‘This; and I know it’s a grave thing to ask.
+
+Would you seriously object to my bringing the child over here, with its
+mother?’
+
+‘On the most strict understanding that we see nothing of the Dancing
+Master.’
+
+‘He will be only too glad to stay away. Polly, you’re an angel. The
+woman really is at her wits’ end.’
+
+‘And you know nothing about her, careless, and would hold her up to
+public scorn if it gave you a minute’s amusement. Therefore you risk
+your life for the sake of her brat. No, Loo, I’m not the angel. I shall
+keep to my rooms and avoid her. But do as you please only tell me why
+you do it.’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee’s eyes softened; she looked out of the window and back
+into Mrs. Mallowe’s face.
+
+‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee simply.
+
+‘You dear!’
+
+‘Polly! and for aught you knew you might have taken my fringe off. Never
+do that again without warning. Now we’ll get the rooms ready. I don’t
+suppose I shall be allowed to circulate in society for a month.’
+
+‘And I also. Thank goodness I shall at last get all the sleep I want.’
+
+Much to Mrs. Bent’s surprise she and the baby were brought over to
+the house almost before she knew where she was. Bent was devoutly and
+undisguisedly thankful, for he was afraid of the infection, and also
+hoped that a few weeks in the hotel alone with Mrs. Delville might lead
+to explanations. Mrs. Bent had thrown her jealousy to the winds in her
+fear for her child’s life.
+
+‘We can give you good milk,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee to her, ‘and our house
+is much nearer to the Doctor’s than the hotel, and you won’t feel as
+though you were living in a hostile camp. Where is the dear Mrs. Waddy?
+She seemed to be a particular friend of yours.’
+
+‘They’ve all left me,’ said Mrs. Bent bitterly. ‘Mrs. Waddy went first.
+She said I ought to be ashamed of myself for introducing diseases there,
+and I am sure it wasn’t my fault that little Dora--’
+
+‘How nice!’ cooed Mrs. Hauksbee. ‘The Waddy is an infectious disease
+herself “more quickly caught than the plague and the taker runs
+presently mad.” I lived next door to her at the Elysium, three years
+ago. Now see, you won’t give us the least trouble, and I’ve ornamented
+all the house with sheets soaked in carbolic. It smells comforting,
+doesn’t it? Remember I’m always in call, and my ayah’s at your service
+when yours goes to her meals, and and if you cry I’ll never forgive
+you.’
+
+Dora Bent occupied her mother’s unprofitable attention through the day
+and the night. The Doctor called thrice in the twenty-four hours, and
+the house reeked with the smell of the Condy’s Fluid, chlorine-water,
+and carbolic acid washes. Mrs. Mallowe kept to her own rooms she
+considered that she had made sufficient concessions in the cause of
+humanity and Mrs. Hauksbee was more esteemed by the Doctor as a help in
+the sick-room than the half-distraught mother.
+
+‘I know nothing of illness,’ said Mrs. Hauksbee to the Doctor. ‘Only
+tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.’
+
+‘Keep that crazy woman from kissing the child, and let her have as
+little to do with the nursing as you possibly can,’ said the Doctor;
+‘I’d turn her out of the sick-room, but that I honestly believe she’d
+die of anxiety. She is less than no good, and I depend on you and the
+ayahs, remember.’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee accepted the responsibility, though it painted olive
+hollows under her eyes and forced her to her oldest dresses. Mrs. Bent
+clung to her with more than childlike faith.
+
+‘I know you’ll make Dora well, won’t you?’ she said at least twenty
+times a day; and twenty times a day Mrs. Hauksbee answered valiantly,
+‘Of course I will.’
+
+But Dora did not improve, and the Doctor seemed to be always in the
+house.
+
+‘There’s some danger of the thing taking a bad turn,’ he said; ‘I’ll
+come over between three and four in the morning to-morrow.’
+
+‘Good gracious!’ said Mrs. Hauksbee. ‘He never told me what the turn
+would be! My education has been horribly neglected; and I have only this
+foolish mother-woman to fall back upon.’
+
+The night wore through slowly, and Mrs. Hauksbee dozed in a chair by the
+fire. There was a dance at the Viceregal Lodge, and she dreamed of it
+till she was aware of Mrs. Bent’s anxious eyes staring into her own.
+
+‘Wake up! Wake up! Do something!’ cried Mrs. Bent piteously. ‘Dora’s
+choking to death! Do you mean to let her die?’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee jumped to her feet and bent over the bed. The child was
+fighting for breath, while the mother wrung her hands despairingly.
+
+‘Oh, what can I do? What can you do? She won’t stay still! I can’t hold
+her. Why didn’t the Doctor say this was coming?’ screamed Mrs. Bent.
+‘Won’t you help me? She’s dying!’
+
+‘I I’ve never seen a child die before!’ stammered Mrs. Hauksbee feebly,
+and then let none blame her weakness after the strain of long watching
+she broke down, and covered her face with her hands. The ayahs on the
+threshold snored peacefully.
+
+There was a rattle of ‘rickshaw wheels below, the clash of an opening
+door, a heavy step on the stairs, and Mrs. Delville entered to find Mrs.
+Bent screaming for the Doctor as she ran round the room. Mrs. Hauksbee,
+her hands to her ears, and her face buried in the chintz of a chair, was
+quivering with pain at each cry from the bed, and murmuring, ‘Thank God,
+I never bore a child! Oh! thank God, I never bore a child!’
+
+Mrs. Delville looked at the bed for an instant, took Mrs. Bent by the
+shoulders, and said quietly, ‘Get me some caustic. Be quick.’
+
+The mother obeyed mechanically. Mrs. Delville had thrown herself down by
+the side of the child and was opening its mouth.
+
+‘Oh, you’re killing her!’ cried Mrs. Bent. ‘Where’s the Doctor? Leave
+her alone!’
+
+Mrs. Delville made no reply for a minute, but busied herself with the
+child.
+
+‘Now the caustic, and hold a lamp behind my shoulder. Will you do as you
+are told? The acid-bottle, if you don’t know what I mean,’ she said.
+
+A second time Mrs. Delville bent over the child. Mrs. Hauksbee, her face
+still hidden, sobbed and shivered. One of the ayahs staggered sleepily
+into the room, yawning: ‘Doctor Sahib come.’
+
+Mrs. Delville turned her head.
+
+‘You’re only just in time,’ she said. ‘It was chokin’ her when I came,
+an’ I’ve burnt it.’
+
+‘There was no sign of the membrane getting to the air-passages after the
+last steaming. It was the general weakness I feared,’ said the Doctor
+half to himself, and he whispered as he looked, ‘You’ve done what I
+should have been afraid to do without consultation.’
+
+‘She was dyin’,’ said Mrs. Delville, under her breath. ‘Can you do
+anythin’? What a mercy it was I went to the dance!’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee raised her head.
+
+‘Is it all over?’ she gasped. ‘I’m useless I’m worse than useless! What
+are you doing here?’
+
+She stared at Mrs. Delville, and Mrs. Bent, realising for the first time
+who was the Goddess from the Machine, stared also.
+
+Then Mrs. Delville made explanation, putting on a dirty long glove and
+smoothing a crumpled and ill-fitting ball-dress.
+
+‘I was at the dance, an’ the Doctor was tellin’ me about your baby bein’
+so ill. So I came away early, an’ your door was open, an’ I I lost my
+boy this way six months ago, an’ I’ve been tryin’ to forget it ever
+since, an’ I I I am very sorry for intrudin’ an’ anythin’ that has
+happened.’
+
+Mrs. Bent was putting out the Doctor’s eye with a lamp as he stooped
+over Dora.
+
+‘Take it away,’ said the Doctor. ‘I think the child will do, thanks to
+you, Mrs. Delville. I should have come too late, but, I assure you’ he
+was addressing himself to Mrs. Delville ‘I had not the faintest reason
+to expect this. The membrane must have grown like a mushroom. Will one
+of you help me, please?’
+
+He had reason for the last sentence. Mrs. Hauksbee had thrown herself
+into Mrs. Delville’s arms, where she was weeping bitterly, and Mrs. Bent
+was unpicturesquely mixed up with both, while from the tangle came the
+sound of many sobs and much promiscuous kissing.
+
+‘Good gracious! I’ve spoilt all your beautiful roses!’ said Mrs.
+Hauksbee, lifting her head from the lump of crushed gum and calico
+atrocities on Mrs. Delville’s shoulder and hurrying to the Doctor.
+
+Mrs. Delville picked up her shawl, and slouched out of the room, mopping
+her eyes with the glove that she had not put on.
+
+‘I always said she was more than a woman,’ sobbed Mrs. Hauksbee
+hysterically, ‘and that proves it!’
+
+Six weeks later Mrs. Bent and Dora had returned to the hotel. Mrs.
+Hauksbee had come out of the Valley of Humiliation, had ceased to
+reproach herself for her collapse in an hour of need, and was even
+beginning to direct the affairs of the world as before.
+
+‘So nobody died, and everything went off as it should, and I kissed The
+Dowd, Polly. I feel so old. Does it show in my face?’
+
+‘Kisses don’t as a rule, do they? Of course you know what the result of
+The Dowd’s providential arrival has been.’
+
+‘They ought to build her a statue only no sculptor dare copy those
+skirts.’
+
+‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Mallowe quietly. ‘She has found another reward. The
+Dancing Master has been smirking through Simla, giving every one to
+understand that she came because of her undying love for him for him to
+save his child, and all Simla naturally believes this.’
+
+‘But Mrs. Bent--’
+
+‘Mrs. Bent believes it more than any one else. She won’t speak to The
+Dowd now. Isn’t The Dancing Master an angel?’
+
+Mrs. Hauksbee lifted up her voice and raged till bed-time. The doors of
+the two rooms stood open.
+
+‘Polly,’ said a voice from the darkness, ‘what did that
+American-heiress-globe-trotter girl say last season when she was tipped
+out of her ‘rickshaw turning a corner? Some absurd adjective that made
+the man who picked her up explode.’
+
+“‘Paltry,”’ said Mrs. Mallowe. ‘Through her nose like this “Ha-ow
+pahltry!”’
+
+‘Exactly,’ said the voice. ‘Ha-ow pahltry it all is!’
+
+‘Which?’
+
+‘Everything. Babies, Diphtheria, Mrs. Bent and The Dancing Master, I
+whooping in a chair, and The Dowd dropping in from the clouds. I wonder
+what the motive was all the motives.’
+
+‘Um!’
+
+‘What do you think?’
+
+‘Don’t ask me. Go to sleep.’
+
+
+
+
+ONLY A SUBALTERN
+
+
+  .... Not only to enforce by command, but to encourage by
+  example the energetic discharge of duty and the steady endurance
+  of the difficulties and privations inseparable from Military Service.
+  --Bengal Army Regulations.
+
+They made Bobby Wick pass an examination at Sandhurst. He was a
+gentleman before he was gazetted, so, when the Empress announced that
+‘Gentleman-Cadet Robert Hanna Wick’ was posted as Second Lieutenant to
+the Tyneside Tail Twisters at Krab Bokhar, he became an officer and a
+gentleman, which is an enviable thing; and there was joy in the house of
+Wick where Mamma Wick and all the little Wicks fell upon their knees and
+offered incense to Bobby by virtue of his achievements.
+
+Papa Wick had been a Commissioner in his day, holding authority over
+three millions of men in the Chota-Buldana Division, building great
+works for the good of the land, and doing his best to make two blades
+of grass grow where there was but one before. Of course, nobody knew
+anything about this in the little English village where he was just ‘old
+Mr. Wick,’ and had forgotten that he was a Companion of the Order of the
+Star of India.
+
+He patted Bobby on the shoulder and said: ‘Well done, my boy!’
+
+There followed, while the uniform was being prepared, an interval of
+pure delight, during which Bobby took brevet-rank as a ‘man’ at the
+women-swamped tennis-parties and tea-fights of the village, and, I
+daresay, had his joining-time been extended, would have fallen in love
+with several girls at once. Little country villages at Home are very
+full of nice girls, because all the young men come out to India to make
+their fortunes.
+
+‘India,’ said Papa Wick, ‘is the place. I’ve had thirty years of it and,
+begad, I’d like to go back again. When you join the Tail Twisters you’ll
+be among friends, if every one hasn’t forgotten Wick of Chota-Buldana,
+and a lot of people will be kind to you for our sakes. The mother will
+tell you more about outfit than I can; but remember this. Stick to your
+Regiment, Bobby stick to your Regiment. You’ll see men all round you
+going into the Staff Corps, and doing every possible sort of duty but
+regimental, and you may be tempted to follow suit. Now so long as you
+keep within your allowance, and I haven’t stinted you there, stick to
+the Line, the whole Line, and nothing but the Line. Be careful how you
+back another young fool’s bill, and if you fall in love with a woman
+twenty years older than yourself, don’t tell me about it, that’s all.’
+
+With these counsels, and many others equally valuable, did Papa Wick
+fortify Bobby ere that last awful night at Portsmouth when the Officers’
+Quarters held more inmates than were provided for by the Regulations,
+and the liberty-men of the ships fell foul of the drafts for India, and
+the battle raged from the Dockyard Gates even to the slums of Longport,
+while the drabs of Fratton came down and scratched the faces of the
+Queen’s Officers.
+
+Bobby Wick, with an ugly bruise on his freckled nose, a sick and shaky
+detachment to manuvre in ship, and the comfort of fifty scornful females
+to attend to, had no time to feel home-sick till the Malabar reached
+mid-Channel, when he doubled his emotions with a little guard-visiting
+and a great many other matters.
+
+The Tail Twisters were a most particular Regiment. Those who knew them
+least said that they were eaten up with ‘side.’ But their reserve and
+their internal arrangements generally were merely protective diplomacy.
+Some five years before, the Colonel commanding had looked into the
+fourteen fearless eyes of seven plump and juicy subalterns who had all
+applied to enter the Staff Corps, and had asked them why the three
+stars should he, a colonel of the Line, command a dashed nursery for
+double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode
+qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments. He
+was a rude man and a terrible. Wherefore the remnant took measures
+[with the half-butt as an engine of public opinion] till the rumour
+went abroad that young men who used the Tail Twisters as a crutch to the
+Staff Corps had many and varied trials to endure. However, a regiment
+had just as much right to its own secrets as a woman.
+
+When Bobby came up from Deolali and took his’ place among the Tail
+Twisters, it was gently but firmly borne in upon him that the Regiment
+was his father and his mother and his indissolubly wedded wife, and
+that there was no crime under the canopy of heaven blacker than that
+of bringing shame on the Regiment, which was the best-shooting,
+best-drilled, best-set-up, bravest, most illustrious, and in all
+respects most desirable Regiment within the compass of the Seven Seas.
+He was taught the legends of the Mess Plate, from the great grinning
+Golden Gods that had come out of the Summer Palace in Pekin to the
+silver-mounted markhor-horn snuff-mull presented by the last C.O. [he
+who spake to the seven subalterns]. And every one of those legends told
+him of battles fought at long odds, without fear as without support; of
+hospitality catholic as an Arab’s; of friendships deep as the sea and
+steady as the fighting-line; of honour won by hard roads for honour’s
+sake; and of instant and unquestioning devotion to the Regiment the
+Regiment that claims the lives of all and lives for ever.
+
+More than once, too, he came officially into contact with the Regimental
+colours, which looked like the lining of a bricklayer’s hat on the end
+of a chewed stick. Bobby did not kneel and worship them, because British
+subalterns are not constructed in that manner. Indeed, he condemned them
+for their weight at the very moment that they were filling with awe and
+other more noble sentiments.
+
+But best of all was the occasion when he moved with the Tail Twisters
+in review order at the breaking of a November day. Allowing for duty-men
+and sick, the Regiment was one thousand and eighty strong, and Bobby
+belonged to them; for was he not a Subaltern of the Line the whole Line,
+and nothing but the Line as the tramp of two thousand one hundred and
+sixty sturdy ammunition boots attested? He would not have changed places
+with Deighton of the Horse Battery, whirling by in a pillar of cloud
+to a chorus of ‘Strong right! Strong left!’ or Hogan-Yale of the White
+Hussars, leading his squadron for all it was worth, with the price of
+horseshoes thrown in; or ‘Tick’ Boileau, trying to live up to his fierce
+blue and gold turban while the wasps of the Bengal Cavalry stretched
+to a gallop in the wake of the long, lollopping Walers of the White
+Hussars.
+
+They fought through the clear cool day, and Bobby felt a little thrill
+run down his spine when he heard the tinkle-tinkle-tinkle of the empty
+cartridge-cases hopping from the breech-blocks after the roar of the
+volleys; for he knew that he should live to hear that sound in action.
+The review ended in a glorious chase across the plain batteries
+thundering after cavalry to the huge disgust of the White Hussars, and
+the Tyneside Tail Twisters hunting a Sikh Regiment, till the lean lathy
+Singhs panted with exhaustion. Bobby was dusty and dripping long before
+noon, but his enthusiasm was merely focused not diminished.
+
+He returned to sit at the feet of Revere, his ‘skipper,’ that is to say,
+the Captain of his Company, and to be instructed in the dark art and
+mystery of managing men, which is a very large part of the Profession of
+Arms.
+
+‘If you haven’t a taste that way,’ said Revere between his puffs of
+his cheroot, ‘you’ll never be able to get the hang of it, but remember,
+Bobby, ‘t isn’t the best drill, though drill is nearly everything, that
+hauls a Regiment through Hell and out on the other side. It’s the man
+who knows how to handle men goat-men, swine-men, dog-men, and so on.’
+
+‘Dormer, for instance,’ said Bobby, ‘I think he comes under the head of
+fool-men. He mopes like a sick owl.’
+
+‘That’s where you make your mistake, my son. Dormer isn’t a fool yet,
+but he’s a dashed dirty soldier, and his room corporal makes fun of his
+socks before kit-inspection. Dormer, being two-thirds pure brute, goes
+into a corner and growls.’
+
+‘How do you know?’ said Bobby admiringly.
+
+‘Because a Company commander has to know these things because, if he
+does not know, he may have crime ay, murder brewing under his very nose
+and yet not see that it’s there. Dormer is being badgered out of his
+mind big as he is and he hasn’t intellect enough to resent it. He’s
+taken to quiet boozing, and, Bobby, when the butt of a room goes on the
+drink, or takes to moping by himself, measures are necessary to pull him
+out of himself.’
+
+‘What measures? ‘Man can’t run round coddling his men for ever.’
+
+‘No. The men would precious soon show him that he was not wanted. You’ve
+got to--’
+
+Here the Colour-Sergeant entered with some papers; Bobby reflected for a
+while as Revere looked through the Company forms.
+
+‘Does Dormer do anything, Sergeant?’ Bobby asked with the air of one
+continuing an interrupted conversation.
+
+‘No, sir. Does ‘is dooty like a hortomato,’ said the Sergeant, who
+delighted in long words. ‘A dirty soldier and ‘e’s under full stoppages
+for new kit. It’s covered with scales, sir.’
+
+‘Scales? What scales?’
+
+‘Fish-scales, sir. ‘E’s always pokin’ in the mud by the river an’
+a-cleanin’ them muchly-fish with ‘is thumbs.’ Revere was still absorbed
+in the Company papers, and the Sergeant, who was sternly fond of Bobby,
+continued, ‘’E generally goes down there when ‘e’s got ‘is skinful,
+beggin’ your pardon, sir, an’ they do say that the more lush
+in-he-briated ‘e is, the more fish ‘e catches. They call ‘im the Looney
+Fishmonger in the Comp’ny, sir.’
+
+Revere signed the last paper and the Sergeant retreated.
+
+‘It’s a filthy amusement,’ sighed Bobby to himself. Then aloud to
+Revere: ‘Are you really worried about Dormer?’
+
+‘A little. You see he’s never mad enough to send to hospital, or drunk
+enough to run in, but at any minute he may flare up, brooding and
+sulking as he does. He resents any interest being shown in him, and the
+only time I took him out shooting he all but shot me by accident.’
+
+‘I fish,’ said Bobby with a wry face. ‘I hire a country-boat and go down
+the river from Thursday to Sunday, and the amiable Dormer goes with me
+if you can spare us both.’
+
+‘You blazing young fool!’ said Revere, but his heart was full of much
+more pleasant words.
+
+Bobby, the Captain of a dhoni, with Private Dormer for mate, dropped
+down the river on Thursday morning the Private at the bow, the Subaltern
+at the helm. The Private glared uneasily at the Subaltern, who respected
+the reserve of the Private.
+
+After six hours, Dormer paced to the stern, saluted, and said ‘Beg y’
+pardon, sir, but was you ever on the Durh’m Canal?’
+
+‘No,’ said Bobby Wick. ‘Come and have some tiffin.’
+
+They ate in silence. As the evening fell, Private Dormer broke forth,
+speaking to himself,
+
+‘Hi was on the Durh’m Canal, jes’ such a night, come next week twelve
+month, a-trailin’ of my toes in the water.’ He smoked and said no more
+till bedtime.
+
+The witchery of the dawn turned the gray river-reaches to purple, gold,
+and opal; and it was as though the lumbering dhoni crept across the
+splendours of a new heaven.
+
+Private Dormer popped his head out of his blanket and gazed at the glory
+below and around.
+
+‘Well damn my eyes!’ said Private Dormer in an awed whisper. ‘This ‘ere
+is like a bloomin’ gallantry-show!’ For the rest of the day he was dumb,
+but achieved an ensanguined filthiness through the cleaning of big fish.
+
+The boat returned on Saturday evening. Dormer had been struggling with
+speech since noon. As the lines and luggage were being disembarked, he
+found tongue.
+
+‘Beg y’ pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but would you would you min’ shakin’
+‘ands with me, sir?’
+
+‘Of course not,’ said Bobby, and he shook accordingly. Dormer returned
+to barracks and Bobby to mess.
+
+‘He wanted a little quiet and some fishing, I think,’ said Bobby. ‘My
+aunt, but he’s a filthy sort of animal! Have you ever seen him clean
+them muchly-fish with ‘is thumbs”?’
+
+‘Anyhow,’ said Revere three weeks later, ‘he’s doing his best to keep
+his things clean.’
+
+When the spring died, Bobby joined in the general scramble for Hill
+leave, and to his surprise and delight secured three months.
+
+‘As good a boy as I want,’ said Revere the admiring skipper.
+
+‘The best of the batch,’ said the Adjutant to the Colonel. ‘Keep back
+that young skrim-shanker Porkiss, sir, and let Revere make him sit up.’
+
+So Bobby departed joyously to Simla Pahar with a tin box of gorgeous
+raiment.
+
+‘Son of Wick old Wick of Chota-Buldana? Ask him to dinner, dear,’ said
+the aged men.
+
+‘What a nice boy!’ said the matrons and the maids.
+
+‘First-class place, Simla. Oh, ripping!’ said Bobby Wick, and ordered
+new white cord breeches on the strength of it.
+
+‘We’re in a bad way,’ wrote Revere to Bobby at the end of two months.
+‘Since you left, the Regiment has taken to fever and is fairly rotten
+with it two hundred in hospital, about a hundred in cells drinking to
+keep off fever and the Companies on parade fifteen file strong at the
+outside. There’s rather more sickness in the out-villages than I care
+for, but then I’m so blistered with prickly-heat that I’m ready to hang
+myself. What’s the yarn about your mashing a Miss Haverley up there? Not
+serious, I hope? You’re over-young to hang millstones round your neck,
+and the Colonel will turf you out of that in double-quick time if you
+attempt it.’
+
+It was not the Colonel that brought Bobby out of Simla, but a
+much-more-to-be-respected Commandant. The sickness in the out-villages
+spread, the Bazar was put out of bounds, and then came the news that
+the Tail Twisters must go into camp. The message flashed to the Hill
+stations. ‘Cholera Leave stopped Officers recalled.’ Alas for the
+white gloves in the neatly-soldered boxes, the rides and the dances and
+picnics that were to be, the loves half spoken, and the debts unpaid!
+Without demur and without question, fast as tonga could fly or pony
+gallop, back to their Regiments and their Batteries, as though they were
+hastening to their weddings, fled the subalterns.
+
+Bobby received his orders on returning from a dance at Viceregal Lodge
+where he had But only the Haverley girl knows what Bobby had said, or
+how many waltzes he had claimed for the next ball. Six in the morning
+saw Bobby at the Tonga Office in the drenching rain, the whirl of the
+last waltz still in his ears, and an intoxication due neither to wine
+nor waltzing in his brain.
+
+‘Good man!’ shouted Deighton of the Horse Battery through the mist.
+‘Whar you raise dat tonga? I’m coming with you. Ow! But I’ve a head and
+a half. I didn’t sit out all night. They say the Battery’s awful bad,’
+and he hummed dolorously,
+
+     Leave the what at the what’s-its-name,
+     Leave the flock without shelter,
+     Leave the corpse uninterred,
+     Leave the bride at the altar!
+
+‘My faith! It’ll be more bally corpse than bride, though, this journey.
+Jump in, Bobby. Get on, Coachwan!’
+
+On the Umballa platform waited a detachment of officers discussing the
+latest news from the stricken cantonment, and it was here that Bobby
+learned the real condition of the Tail Twisters.
+
+‘They went into camp,’ said an elderly Major recalled from the
+whist-tables at Mussoorie to a sickly Native Regiment, ‘they went into
+camp with two hundred and ten sick in carts. Two hundred and ten fever
+cases only, and the balance looking like so many ghosts with sore eyes.
+A Madras Regiment could have walked through ‘em.’
+
+‘But they were as fit as be-damned when I left them!’ said Bobby.
+
+‘Then you’d better make them as fit as bedamned when you rejoin,’ said
+the Major brutally.
+
+Bobby pressed his forehead against the rain-splashed window-pane as the
+train lumbered across the sodden Doab, and prayed for the health of the
+Tyneside Tail Twisters. Naini Tal had sent down her contingent with
+all speed; the lathering ponies of the Dalhousie Road staggered into
+Pathankot, taxed to the full stretch of their strength; while from
+cloudy Darjiling the Calcutta Mail whirled up the last straggler of the
+little army that was to fight a fight in which was neither medal nor
+honour for the winning, against an enemy none other than ‘the sickness
+that destroyeth in the noonday.’
+
+And as each man reported himself, he said: ‘This is a bad business,’
+and went about his own forthwith, for every Regiment and Battery in the
+cantonment was under canvas, the sickness bearing them company.
+
+Bobby fought his way through the rain to the Tail Twisters’ temporary
+mess, and Revere could have fallen on the boy’s neck for the joy of
+seeing that ugly, wholesome phiz once more.
+
+‘Keep’ em amused and interested,’ said Revere. ‘They went on the drink,
+poor fools, after the first two cases, and there was no improvement. Oh,
+it’s good to have you back, Bobby! Porkiss is a never mind.’
+
+Deighton came over from the Artillery camp to attend a dreary mess
+dinner, and contributed to the general gloom by nearly weeping over the
+condition of his beloved Battery. Porkiss so far forgot himself as to
+insinuate that the presence of the officers could do no earthly good,
+and that the best thing would be to send the entire Regiment into
+hospital and ‘let the doctors look after them.’ Porkiss was demoralised
+with fear, nor was his peace of mind restored when Revere said coldly:
+‘Oh! The sooner you go out the better, if that’s your way of thinking.
+Any public school could send us fifty good men in your place, but it
+takes time, time, Porkiss, and money, and a certain amount of trouble,
+to make a Regiment. ‘S’pose you’re the person we go into camp for, eh?’
+
+Whereupon Porkiss was overtaken with a great and chilly fear which a
+drenching in the rain did not allay, and, two days later, quitted this
+world for another where, men do fondly hope, allowances are made for the
+weaknesses of the flesh. The Regimental Sergeant-Major looked wearily
+across the Sergeants’ Mess tent when the news was announced.
+
+‘There goes the worst of them,’ he said. ‘It’ll take the best, and then,
+please God, it’ll stop.’ The Sergeants were silent till one said: ‘It
+couldn’t be him!’ and all knew of whom Travis was thinking.
+
+Bobby Wick stormed through the tents of his Company, rallying,
+rebuking, mildly, as is consistent with the Regulations, chaffing the
+faint-hearted; haling the sound into the watery sunlight when there
+was a break in the weather, and bidding them be of good cheer for
+their trouble was nearly at an end; scuttling on his dun pony round
+the outskirts of the camp, and heading back men who, with the innate
+perversity of British soldiers, were always wandering into infected
+villages, or drinking deeply from rain-flooded marshes; comforting the
+panic-stricken with rude speech, and more than once tending the dying
+who had no friends the men without ‘townies’; organising, with banjos
+and burnt cork, Sing-songs which should allow the talent of the
+Regiment full play; and generally, as he explained, ‘playing the giddy
+garden-goat all round.’
+
+‘You’re worth half-a-dozen of us, Bobby,’ said Revere in a moment of
+enthusiasm. ‘How the devil do you keep it up?’
+
+Bobby made no answer, but had Revere looked into the breast-pocket of
+his coat he might have seen there a sheaf of badly-written letters which
+perhaps accounted for the power that possessed the boy. A letter came
+to Bobby every other day. The spelling was not above reproach, but the
+sentiments must have been most satisfactory, for on receipt Bobby’s eyes
+softened marvellously, and he was wont to fall into a tender abstraction
+for a while ere, shaking his cropped head, he charged into his work.
+
+By what power he drew after him the hearts of the roughest, and the
+Tail Twisters counted in their ranks some rough diamonds indeed, was
+a mystery to both skipper and C. O., who learned from the regimental
+chaplain that Bobby was considerably more in request in the hospital
+tents than the Reverend John Emery.
+
+‘The men seem fond of you. Are you in the hospitals much?’ said the
+Colonel, who did his daily round and ordered the men to get well with a
+hardness that did not cover his bitter grief.
+
+‘A little, sir,’ said Bobby.
+
+‘Shouldn’t go there too often if I were you. They say it’s not
+contagious, but there’s no use in running unnecessary risks. We can’t
+afford to have you down, y’know.’
+
+Six days later, it was with the utmost difficulty that the post-runner
+plashed his way out to the camp with the mail-bags, for the rain was
+falling in torrents. Bobby received a letter, bore it off to his tent,
+and, the programme for the next week’s Sing-song being satisfactorily
+disposed of, sat down to answer it. For an hour the unhandy pen toiled
+over the paper, and where sentiment rose to more than normal tide-level,
+Bobby Wick stuck out his tongue and breathed heavily. He was not used to
+letter-writing.
+
+‘Beg y’ pardon, sir,’ said a voice at the tent door; ‘but Dormer’s
+‘orrid bad, sir, an’ they’ve taken him orf, sir.’
+
+‘Damn Private Dormer and you too!’ said Bobby Wick, running the blotter
+over the half-finished letter. ‘Tell him I’ll come in the morning.’
+
+‘’E’s awful bad, sir,’ said the voice hesitatingly. There was an
+undecided squelching of heavy boots.
+
+‘Well?’ said Bobby impatiently.
+
+‘Excusin’ ‘imself before ‘and for takin’ the liberty, ‘e says it would be
+a comfort for to assist ‘im, sir, if--’
+
+‘Tattoo lao! Get my pony! Here, come in out of the rain till I’m ready.
+What blasted nuisances you are! That’s brandy. Drink some; you want it.
+Hang on to my stirrup and tell me if I go too fast.’
+
+Strengthened by a four-finger ‘nip’ which he swallowed without a wink,
+the Hospital Orderly kept up with the slipping, mud-stained, and very
+disgusted pony as it shambled to the hospital tent.
+
+Private Dormer was certainly ‘’orrid bad.’ He had all but reached the
+stage of collapse and was not pleasant to look upon.
+
+‘What’s this, Dormer?’ said Bobby, bending over the man. ‘You’re not
+going out this time. You’ve got to come fishing with me once or twice
+more yet.’
+
+The blue lips parted and in the ghost of a whisper said, ‘Beg y’ pardon,
+sir, disturbin’ of you now, but would you min’ ‘oldin’ my ‘and, sir?’
+
+Bobby sat on the side of the bed, and the icy cold hand closed on his
+own like a vice, forcing a lady’s ring which was on the little finger
+deep into the flesh. Bobby set his lips and waited, the water dripping
+from the hem of his trousers. An hour passed and the grasp of the hand
+did not relax, nor did the expression of the drawn face change. Bobby
+with infinite craft lit himself a cheroot with the left hand, his right
+arm was numbed to the elbow, and resigned himself to a night of pain.
+
+Dawn showed a very white-faced Subaltern sitting on the side of a
+sick man’s cot, and a Doctor in the doorway using language unfit for
+publication.
+
+‘Have you been here all night, you young ass?’ said the Doctor.
+
+‘There or thereabouts,’ said Bobby ruefully. ‘He’s frozen on to me.’
+
+Dormer’s mouth shut with a click. He turned his head and sighed. The
+clinging hand opened, and Bobby’s arm fell useless at his side.
+
+‘He’ll do,’ said the Doctor quietly. ‘It must have been a toss-up all
+through the night. ‘Think you’re to be congratulated on this case.’
+
+‘Oh, bosh!’ said Bobby. ‘I thought the man had gone out long ago only
+only I didn’t care to take my hand away. Rub my arm down, there’s a good
+chap. What a grip the brute has! I’m chilled to the marrow!’ He passed
+out of the tent shivering.
+
+Private Dormer was allowed to celebrate his repulse of Death by strong
+waters. Four days later he sat on the side of his cot and said to the
+patients mildly: ‘I’d ‘a’ liken to ‘a’ spoken to ‘im so I should.’
+
+But at that time Bobby was reading yet another letter he had the most
+persistent correspondent of any man in camp and was even then about to
+write that the sickness had abated, and in another week at the outside
+would be gone. He did not intend to say that the chill of a sick man’s
+hand seemed to have struck into the heart whose capacities for affection
+he dwelt on at such length. He did intend to enclose the illustrated
+programme of the forthcoming Sing-song whereof he was not a little
+proud. He also intended to write on many other matters which do not
+concern us, and doubtless would have done so but for the slight feverish
+headache which made him dull and unresponsive at mess.
+
+‘You are overdoing it, Bobby,’ said his skipper. ‘Might give the rest
+of us credit of doing a little work. You go on as if you were the whole
+Mess rolled into one. Take it easy.’
+
+‘I will,’ said Bobby. ‘I’m feeling done up, somehow.’ Revere looked at
+him anxiously and said nothing.
+
+There was a flickering of lanterns about the camp that night, and a
+rumour that brought men out of their cots to the tent doors, a paddling
+of the naked feet of doolie-bearers and the rush of a galloping horse.
+
+‘Wot’s up?’ asked twenty tents; and through twenty tents ran the answer
+‘Wick, ‘e’s down.’
+
+They brought the news to Revere and he groaned. ‘Any one but Bobby and I
+shouldn’t have cared! The Sergeant-Major was right.’
+
+‘Not going out this journey,’ gasped Bobby, as he was lifted from
+the doolie. ‘Not going out this journey.’ Then with an air of supreme
+conviction ‘I can’t, you see.’
+
+‘Not if I can do anything!’ said the Surgeon-Major, who had hastened
+over from the mess where he had been dining.
+
+He and the Regimental Surgeon fought together with Death for the life
+of Bobby Wick. Their work was interrupted by a hairy apparition in a
+bluegray dressing-gown who stared in horror at the bed and cried ‘Oh, my
+Gawd! It can’t be ‘im!’ until an indignant Hospital Orderly whisked him
+away.
+
+If care of man and desire to live could have done aught, Bobby would
+have been saved. As it was, he made a fight of three days, and the
+Surgeon-Major’s brow uncreased. ‘We’ll save him yet,’ he said; and the
+Surgeon, who, though he ranked with the Captain, had a very youthful
+heart, went out upon the word and pranced joyously in the mud.
+
+‘Not going out this journey,’ whispered Bobby Wick gallantly, at the end
+of the third day.
+
+‘Bravo!’ said the Surgeon-Major. ‘That’s the way to look at it, Bobby.’
+
+As evening fell a gray shade gathered round Bobby’s mouth, and he turned
+his face to the tent wall wearily. The Surgeon-Major frowned.
+
+‘I’m awfully tired,’ said Bobby, very faintly. ‘What’s the use of
+bothering me with medicine? I don’t want it. Let me alone.’
+
+The desire for life had departed, and Bobby was content to drift away on
+the easy tide of Death.
+
+‘It’s no good,’ said the Surgeon-Major. ‘He doesn’t want to live. He’s
+meeting it, poor child.’ And he blew his nose.
+
+Half a mile away the regimental band was playing the overture to the
+Sing-song, for the men had been told that Bobby was out of danger. The
+clash of the brass and the wail of the horns reached Bobby’s ears.
+
+     Is there a single joy or pain,
+     That I should never kno-ow?
+     You do not love me, ‘tis in vain,
+     Bid me good-bye and go!
+
+An expression of hopeless irritation crossed the boy’s face, and he
+tried to shake his head.
+
+The Surgeon-Major bent down ‘What is it, Bobby?’ ‘Not that waltz,’
+muttered Bobby. ‘That’s our own our very ownest own. Mummy dear.’
+
+With this he sank into the stupor that gave place to death early next
+morning.
+
+Revere, his eyes red at the rims and his nose very white, went into
+Bobby’s tent to write a letter to Papa Wick which should bow the white
+head of the ex-Commissioner of Chota-Buldana in the keenest sorrow of
+his life. Bobby’s little store of papers lay in confusion on the table,
+and among them a half-finished letter. The last sentence ran: ‘So you
+see, darling, there is really no fear, because as long as I know you
+care for me and I care for you, nothing can touch me.’
+
+Revere stayed in the tent for an hour. When he came out his eyes were
+redder than ever.
+
+Private Conklin sat on a turned-down bucket, and listened to a not
+unfamiliar tune. Private Conklin was a convalescent and should have been
+tenderly treated.
+
+‘Ho!’ said Private Conklin. ‘There’s another bloomin’ orf’cer da ed.’
+
+The bucket shot from under him, and his eyes filled with a smithyful of
+sparks. A tall man in a blue-gray bedgown was regarding him with deep
+disfavour.
+
+‘You ought to take shame for yourself, Conky! Orf’cer? Bloomin’ orf’cer?
+I’ll learn you to misname the likes of ‘im. Hangel! Bloomin’ Hangel!
+That’s wot’e is!’
+
+And the Hospital Orderly was so satisfied with the justice of the
+punishment that he did not even order Private Dormer back to his cot.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE MATTER OF A PRIVATE
+
+
+  Hurrah! hurrah! a soldier’s life for me! Shout, boys, shout! for it
+  makes you jolly and free.
+       --The Ramrod Corps.
+
+PEOPLE who have seen, say that one of the quaintest spectacles of
+human frailty is an outbreak of hysterics in a girls’ school. It starts
+without warning, generally on a hot afternoon among the elder pupils. A
+girl giggles till the giggle gets beyond control. Then she throws up her
+head, and cries, “Honk, honk, honk,” like a wild goose, and tears mix
+with the laughter. If the mistress be wise she will rap out something
+severe at this point and check matters. If she be tender-hearted, and send
+for a drink of water, the chances are largely in favor of another girl
+laughing at the afflicted one and herself collapsing. Thus the trouble
+spreads, and may end in half of what answers to the Lower Sixth of
+a boys’ school rocking and whooping together. Given a week of warm
+weather, two stately promenades per diem, a heavy mutton and rice meal
+in the middle of the day, a certain amount of nagging from the teachers,
+and a few other things, some amazing effects develop. At least this is
+what folk say who have had experience.
+
+Now, the Mother Superior of a Convent and the Colonel of a British
+Infantry Regiment would be justly shocked at any comparison being made
+between their respective charges. But it is a fact that, under certain
+circumstances, Thomas in bulk can be worked up into ditthering, rippling
+hysteria. He does not weep, but he shows his trouble unmistakably, and
+the consequences get into the newspapers, and all the good people
+who hardly know a Martini from a Snider say: “Take away the brute’s
+ammunition!”
+
+Thomas isn’t a brute, and his business, which is to look after the
+virtuous people, demands that he shall have his ammunition to his hand.
+He doesn’t wear silk stockings, and he really ought to be supplied with
+a new Adjective to help him to express his opinions; but, for all that,
+he is a great man. If you call him “the heroic defender of the national
+honor” one day, and “a brutal and licentious soldiery” the next, you
+naturally bewilder him, and he looks upon you with suspicion. There is
+nobody to speak for Thomas except people who have theories to work off
+on him; and nobody understands Thomas except Thomas, and he does not
+always know what is the matter with himself.
+
+That is the prologue. This is the story:
+
+Corporal Slane was engaged to be married to Miss Jhansi M’Kenna,
+whose history is well known in the regiment and elsewhere. He had his
+Colonel’s permission, and, being popular with the men, every arrangement
+had been made to give the wedding what Private Ortheris called “eeklar.”
+ It fell in the heart of the hot weather, and, after the wedding,
+Slane was going up to the Hills with the Bride. None the less, Slane’s
+grievance was that the affair would be only a hired-carriage wedding,
+and he felt that the “eeklar” of that was meagre. Miss M’Kenna did
+not care so much. The Sergeant’s wife was helping her to make her
+wedding-dress, and she was very busy. Slane was, just then, the only
+moderately contented man in barracks. All the rest were more or less
+miserable.
+
+And they had so much to make them happy, too. All their work was over
+at eight in the morning, and for the rest of the day they could lie on
+their backs and smoke Canteen-plug and swear at the punkah-coolies. They
+enjoyed a fine, full flesh meal in the middle of the day, and then threw
+themselves down on their cots and sweated and slept till it was cool
+enough to go out with their “towny,” whose vocabulary contained less
+than six hundred words, and the Adjective, and whose views on every
+conceivable question they had heard many times before.
+
+There was the Canteen, of course, and there was the Temperance Room with
+the second-hand papers in it; but a man of any profession cannot read
+for eight hours a day in a temperature of 96 degrees or 98 degrees in
+the shade, running up sometimes to 103 degrees at midnight. Very few
+men, even though they get a pannikin of flat, stale, muddy beer and hide
+it under their cots, can continue drinking for six hours a day. One man
+tried, but he died, and nearly the whole regiment went to his funeral
+because it gave them something to do. It was too early for the
+excitement of fever or cholera. The men could only wait and wait and
+wait, and watch the shadow of the barrack creeping across the blinding
+white dust. That was a gay life.
+
+They lounged about cantonments-it was too hot for any sort of game,
+and almost too hot for vice-and fuddled themselves in the evening,
+and filled themselves to distension with the healthy nitrogenous food
+provided for them, and the more they stoked the less exercise they took
+and more explosive they grew. Then tempers began to wear away, and men
+fell a-brooding over insults real or imaginary, for they had nothing
+else to think of. The tone of the repartees changed, and instead of
+saying light-heartedly: “I’ll knock your silly face in,” men grew
+laboriously polite and hinted that the cantonments were not big enough
+for themselves and their enemy, and that there would be more space for
+one of the two in another place.
+
+It may have been the Devil who arranged the thing, but the fact of the
+case is that Losson had for a long time been worrying Simmons in an
+aimless way. It gave him occupation. The two had their cots side by
+side, and would sometimes spend a long afternoon swearing at each other;
+but Simmons was afraid of Losson and dared not challenge him to a fight.
+He thought over the words in the hot still nights, and half the hate he
+felt toward Losson be vented on the wretched punkahcoolie.
+
+Losson bought a parrot in the bazar, and put it into a little cage,
+and lowered the cage into the cool darkness of a well, and sat on the
+well-curb, shouting bad language down to the parrot. He taught it to
+say: “Simmons, ye so-oor,” which means swine, and several other things
+entirely unfit for publication. He was a big gross man, and he shook
+like a jelly when the parrot had the sentence correctly. Simmons,
+however, shook with rage, for all the room were laughing at him--the
+parrot was such a disreputable puff of green feathers and it looked so
+human when it chattered. Losson used to sit, swinging his fat legs, on
+the side of the cot, and ask the parrot what it thought of Simmons. The
+parrot would answer: “Simmons, ye so-oor.” “Good boy,” Losson used to
+say, scratching the parrot’s head; “ye ‘ear that, Sim?” And Simmons
+used to turn over on his stomach and make answer: “I ‘ear. Take ‘eed you
+don’t ‘ear something one of these days.”
+
+In the restless nights, after he had been asleep all day, fits of blind
+rage came upon Simmonr and held him till he trembled all over, while he
+thought in how many different ways he would slay Losson. Sometimes he
+would picture himself trampling the life out of the man, with heavy
+ammunition-boots, and at others smashing in his face with the butt, and
+at others jumping on his shoulders and dragging the head back till the
+neckbone cracked. Then his mouth would feel hot and fevered, and he
+would reach out for another sup of the beer in the pannikin.
+
+But the fancy that came to him most frequently and stayed with him
+longest was one connected with the great roll of fat under Losson’s
+right ear. He noticed it first on a moonlight night, and thereafter
+it was always before his eyes. It was a fascinating roll of fat. A man
+could get his hand upon it and tear away one side of the neck; or he
+could place the muzzle of a rifle on it and blow away all the head in
+a flash. Losson had no right to be sleek and contented and well-to-do,
+when he, Simmons, was the butt of the room, Some day, perhaps, he would
+show those who laughed at the “Simmons, ye so-oor” joke, that he was as
+good as the rest, and held a man’s life in the crook of his forefinger.
+When Losson snored, Simmons hated him more bitterly than ever. Why
+should Losson be able to sleep when Simmons had to stay awake hour after
+hour, tossing and turning on the tapes, with the dull liver pain gnawing
+into his right side and his head throbbing and aching after Canteen? He
+thought over this for many nights, and the world became unprofitable to
+him. He even blunted his naturally fine appetite with beer and tobacco;
+and all the while the parrot talked at and made a mock of him.
+
+The heat continued and the tempers wore away more quickly than before.
+A Sergeant’s wife died of heat--apoplexy in the night, and the rumor ran
+abroad that it was cholera. Men rejoiced openly, hoping that it would
+spread and send them into camp. But that was a false alarm.
+
+It was late on a Tuesday evening, and the men were waiting in the deep
+double verandas for “Last Posts,” when Simmons went to the box at the
+foot of his bed, took out his pipe, and slammed the lid down with a
+bang that echoed through the deserted barrack like the crack of a rifle.
+Ordinarily speaking, the men would have taken no notice; but their
+nerves were fretted to fiddle-strings. They jumped up, and three or four
+clattered into the barrack-room only to find Simmons kneeling by his
+box.
+
+“Owl It’s you, is it?” they said and laughed foolishly. “We thought
+‘twas”--
+
+Simmons rose slowly. If the accident had so shaken his fellows, what
+would not the reality do?
+
+“You thought it was--did you? And what makes you think?” he said, lashing
+himself into madness as he went on; “to Hell with your thinking, ye
+dirty spies.”
+
+“Simmons, ye so-oor,” chuckled the parrot in the veranda, sleepily,
+recognizing a well-known voice. Now that was absolutely all.
+
+The tension snapped. Simmons fell back on the arm-rack
+deliberately,--the men were at the far end of the room,--and took out
+his rifle and packet of ammunition. “Don’t go playing the goat, Sim!”
+ said Losson. “Put it down,” but there was a quaver in his voice. Another
+man stooped, slipped his boot and hurled it at Simmon’s head. The prompt
+answer was a shot which, fired at random, found its billet in Losson’s
+throat. Losson fell forward without a word, and the others scattered.
+
+“You thought it was!” yelled Simmons. “You’re drivin’ me to it! I tell
+you you’re drivin’ me to it! Get up, Losson, an’ don’t lie shammin’
+there-you an’ your blasted parrit that druv me to it!”
+
+But there was an unaffected reality about Losson’s pose that showed
+Simmons what he had done. The men were still clamoring on the veranda.
+Simmons appropriated two more packets of ammunition and ran into the
+moonlight, muttering: “I’ll make a night of it. Thirty roun’s, an’ the
+last for myself. Take you that, you dogs!”
+
+He dropped on one knee and fired into the brown of the men on the
+veranda, but the bullet flew high, and landed in the brickwork with a
+vicious phant that made some of the younger ones turn pale. It is, as
+musketry theorists observe, one thing to fire and another to be fired
+at.
+
+Then the instinct of the chase flared up. The news spread from barrack
+to barrack, and the men doubled out intent on the capture of Simmons,
+the wild beast, who was heading for the Cavalry parade-ground, stopping
+now and again to send back a shot and a Lurse in the direction of his
+pursuers.
+
+“I’ll learn you to spy on me!” he shouted; “I’ll learn you to give me
+dorg’s names! Come on the ‘ole lot O’ you! Colonel John Anthony Deever,
+C.B.!”--he turned toward the Infantry Mess and shook his rifle--“you
+think yourself the devil of a man--but I tell ‘jou that if you Put your
+ugly old carcass outside O’ that door, I’ll make you the poorest-lookin’
+man in the army. Come out, Colonel John Anthony Deever, C.B.! Come out
+and see me practiss on the rainge. I’m the crack shot of the ‘ole
+bloomin’ battalion.” In proof of which statement Simmons fired at the
+lighted windows of the mess-house.
+
+“Private Simmons, E Comp’ny, on the Cavalry p’rade-ground, Sir, with
+thirty rounds,” said a Sergeant breathlessly to the Colonel. “Shootin’
+right and lef’, Sir. Shot Private Losson. What’s to be done, Sir?”
+
+Colonel John Anthony Deever, C.B., sallied out, only to be saluted by a
+spurt of dust at his feet.
+
+“Pull up!” said the Second in Command; “I don’t want my step in that
+way, Colonel. He’s as dangerous as a mad dog.”
+
+“Shoot him like one, then,” said the Colonel, bitterly, “if he won’t
+take his chance. My regiment, too! If it had been the Towheads I could
+have understood.”
+
+Private Simmons had occupied a strong position near a well on the edge
+of the parade-ground, and was defying the regiment to come on. The
+regiment was not anxious to comply, for there is small honor in being
+shot by a fellow-private. Only Corporal Slane, rifle in band, threw
+himself down on the ground, and wormed his way toward the well.
+
+“Don’t shoot,” said he to the men round him; “like as not you’ll hit me.
+I’ll catch the beggar, livin’.”
+
+Simmons ceased shouting for a while, and the noise of trap-wheels could
+be heard across the plain. Major Oldyne Commanding the Horse Battery,
+was coming back from a dinner in the Civil Lines; was driving after his
+usual custom--that is to say, as fast as the horse could go.
+
+“A orf’cer! A blooming spangled orf’cer,” shrieked Simmons; “I’ll make a
+scarecrow of that orf’cer!” The trap stopped.
+
+“What’s this?” demanded the Major of Gunners. “You there, drop your
+rifle.”
+
+“Why, it’s Jerry Blazes! I ain’t got no quarrel with you, Jerry Blazes.
+Pass frien’, an’ all’s well!”
+
+But Jerry Blazes had not the faintest intention of passing a dangerous
+murderer. He was, as his adoring Battery swore long and fervently,
+without knowledge of fear, and they were surely the best judges, for
+Jerry Blazes, it was notorious, had done his possible to kill a man each
+time the Battery went out.
+
+He walked toward Simmons, with the intention of rushing him, and
+knocking him down.
+
+“Don’t make me do it, Sir,” said Simmons; “I ain’t got nothing agin you.
+Ah! you would?”--the Major broke into a run--“Take that then!”
+
+The Major dropped with a bullet through his shoulder, and Simmons stood
+over him. He had lost the satisfaction of killing Losson in the desired
+way: hut here was a helpless body to his hand. Should be slip in another
+cartridge, and blow off the head, or with the butt smash in the white
+face? He stopped to consider, and a cry went up from the far side of
+the parade-ground: “He’s killed Jerry Blazes!” But in the shelter of the
+well-pillars Simmons was safe except when he stepped out to fire. “I’ll
+blow yer ‘andsome ‘ead off, Jerry Blazes,” said Simmons, reflectively.
+“Six an’ three is nine an one is ten, an’ that leaves me another
+nineteen, an’ one for myself.” He tugged at the string of the second
+packet of ammunition. Corporal Slane crawled out of the shadow of a bank
+into the moonlight.
+
+“I see you!” said Simmons. “Come a bit furder on an’ I’ll do for you.”
+
+“I’m comm’,” said Corporal Slane, briefly; “you’ve done a bad day’s
+work, Sim. Come out ‘ere an’ come back with me.”
+
+“Come to,”--laugbed Simmons, sending a cartridge home with his thumb.
+“Not before I’ve settled you an’ Jerry Blazes.”
+
+The Corporal was lying at full length in the dust of the parade-ground,
+a rifle under him. Some of the less-cautious men in the distance
+shouted: “Shoot ‘im! Shoot ‘im, Slane!”
+
+“You move ‘and or foot, Slane,” said Simmons, “an’ I’ll kick Jerry
+Blazes’ ‘ead in, and shoot you after.”
+
+“I ain’t movin’,” said the Corporal, raising his head; “you daren’t ‘it
+a man on ‘is legs. Let go O’ Jerry Blazes an’ come out O’ that with your
+fistes. Come an’ ‘it me. You daren’t, you bloomin’ dog-shooter!”
+
+“I dare.”
+
+“You lie, you man-sticker. You sneakin’, Sheeny butcher, you lie. See
+there!” Slane kicked the rifle away, and stood up in the peril of his
+life. “Come on, now!”
+
+The temptation was more than Simmons could resist, for the Corporal in
+his white clothes offered a perfect mark.
+
+“Don’t misname me,” shouted Simmons, firing as he spoke. The shot
+missed, and the shooter, blind with rage, threw his rifle down and
+rushed at Slane from the protection of the well. Within striking
+distance, he kicked savagely at Slane’s stomach, but the weedy Corporal
+knew something of Simmons’s weakness, and knew, too, the deadly guard
+for that kick. Bowing forward and drawing up his right leg till the heel
+of the right foot was set some three inches above the inside of the left
+knee-cap, he met the blow standing on one leg--exactly as Gonds stand
+when they meditate--and ready for the fall that would follow. There was
+an oath, the Corporal fell over his own left as shinbone met shinbone,
+and the Private collapsed, his right leg broken an inch above the ankle.
+
+“‘Pity you don’t know that guard, Sim,” said Slane, spitting out the
+dust as he rose. Then raising his voice--“Come an’ take him orf.
+I’ve bruk ‘is leg.” This was not strictly true, for the Private had
+accomplished his own downfall, since it is the special merit of
+that leg-guard that the harder the kick the greater the kicker’s
+discomfiture.
+
+Slane walked to Jerry Blazes and hung over him with ostentatious
+anxiety, while Simmons, weeping with pain, was carried away. “‘Ope you
+ain’t ‘urt badly, Sir,” said Slane. The Major had fainted, and there was
+an ugly, ragged hole through the top of his arm. Slane knelt down
+and murmured. “S’elp me, I believe ‘e’s dead. Well, if that ain’t my
+blooming luck all over!”
+
+But the Major was destined to lead his Battery afield for many a long
+day with unshaken nerve. He was removed, and nursed and petted into
+convalescence, while the Battery discussed the wisdom of capturing
+Simmons, and blowing him from a gun. They idolized their Major, and his
+reappearance on parade brought about a scene nowhere provided for in the
+Army Regulations.
+
+Great, too, was the glory that fell to Slane’s share. The Gunners would
+have made him drunk thrice a day for at least a fortnight. Even the
+Colonel of his own regiment complimented him upon his coolness, and the
+local paper called him a hero. These things did not puff him up. When
+the Major offered him money and thanks, the virtuous Corporal took the
+one and put aside the other. But he had a request to make and prefaced
+it with many a “Beg y’pardon, Sir.” Could the Major see his way to
+letting the Slane M’Kenna wedding be adorned by the presence of four
+Battery horses to pull a hired barouche? The Major could, and so could
+the Battery. Excessively so. It was a gorgeous wedding.
+
+* * * * *
+
+“Wot did I do it for?” said Corporal Slane. “For the ‘orses O’ course.
+Jhansi ain’t a beauty to look at, but I wasn’t goin’ to ‘ave a hired
+turn-out. Jerry Blazes? If I ‘adn’t ‘a’ wanted something, Sim might ha’
+blowed Jerry Blazes’ blooming ‘ead into Hirish stew for aught I’d ‘a’
+cared.”
+
+And they hanged Private Simmons-hanged him as high as Haman in hollow
+square of the regiment; and the Colonel said it was Drink; and the
+Chaplain was sure it was the Devil; and Simmons fancied it was both,
+but he didn’t know, and only hoped his fate would be a warning to
+his companions; and half a dozen “intelligent publicists” wrote six
+beautiful leading articles on “‘The Prevalence of Crime in the Army.”
+
+But not a soul thought of comparing the “bloody-minded Simmons” to the
+squawking, gaping schoolgirl with which this story opens.
+
+
+
+
+THE ENLIGHTENMENTS OF PAGETT, M.P.
+
+
+  “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field
+  ring with their importunate chink while thousands of great cattle,
+  reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and
+  are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are
+  the only inhabitants of the field-that, of course, they are many in
+  number or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled,
+  meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the
+  hour.”--Burke: “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”
+
+THEY were sitting in the veranda of “the splendid palace of an Indian
+Pro-Consul”; surrounded by all the glory and mystery of the immemorial
+East. In plain English it was a one-storied, ten-roomed, whitewashed,
+mud-roofed bungalow, set in a dry garden of dusty tamarisk trees and
+divided from the road by a low mud wall. The green parrots screamed
+overhead as they flew in battalions to the river for their morning
+drink. Beyond the wall, clouds of fine dust showed where the cattle and
+goats of the city were passing afield to graze. The remorseless white
+light of the winter sunshine of Northern India lay upon everything and
+improved nothing, from the whining Peisian-wheel by the lawn-tennis
+court to the long perspective of level road and the blue, domed tombs of
+Mohammedan saints just visible above the trees.
+
+“A Happy New Year,” said Orde to his guest. “It’s the first you’ve ever
+spent out of England, isn’t it?”
+
+“Yes. ‘Happy New Year,” said Pagett, smiling at the sunshine. “What a
+divine climate you have here! Just think of the brown cold fog hanging
+over London now!” And he rubbed his hands.
+
+It was more than twenty years since he had last seen Orde, his
+schoolmate, and their paths in the world had divided early. The one
+had quitted college to become a cog-wheel in the machinery of the great
+Indian Government; the other more blessed with goods, had been whirled
+into a similar position in the English scheme. Three successive
+elections had not affected Pagett’s position with a loyal constituency,
+and he had grown insensibly to regard himself in some sort as a pillar
+of the Empire, whose real worth would be known later on. After a few
+years of conscientious attendance at many divisions, after newspaper
+battles innumerable and the publication of interminable correspondence,
+and more hasty oratory than in his calmer moments he cared to think
+upon, it occurred to him, as it had occurred to many of his fellows in
+Parliament, that a tour to India would enable him to sweep a larger lyre
+and address himself to the problems of Imperial administration with a
+firmer hand. Accepting, therefore, a general invitation extended to him
+by Orde some years before, Pagett had taken ship to Karachi, and only
+over-night had been received with joy by the Deputy-Commissioner of
+Amara. They had sat late, discussing the changes and chances of twenty
+years, recalling the names of the dead, and weighing the futures of the
+living, as is the custom of men meeting after intervals of action.
+
+Next morning they smoked the after breakfast pipe in the veranda, still
+regarding each other curiously, Pagett, in a light grey frock-coat and
+garments much too thin for the time of the year, and a puggried
+sun-hat carefully and wonderfully made. Orde in a shooting coat, riding
+breeches, brown cowhide boots with spurs, and a battered flax helmet. He
+had ridden some miles in the early morning to inspect a doubtful river
+dam. The men’s faces differed as much as their attire. Orde’s worn and
+wrinkled around the eyes, and grizzled at the temples, was the harder
+and more square of the two, and it was with something like envy that the
+owner looked at the comfortable outlines of Pagett’s blandly receptive
+countenance, the clear skin, the untroubled eye, and the mobile,
+clean-shaved lips.
+
+“And this is India!” said Pagett for the twentieth time staring long and
+intently at the grey feathering of the tamarisks.
+
+“One portion of India only. It’s very much like this for 300 miles
+in every direction. By the way, now that you have rested a little--I
+wouldn’t ask the old question before--what d’you think of the country?”
+
+“‘Tis the most pervasive country that ever yet was seen. I acquired
+several pounds of your country coming up from Karachi. The air is heavy
+with it, and for miles and miles along that distressful eternity of rail
+there’s no horizon to show where air and earth separate.”
+
+“Yes. It isn’t easy to see truly or far in India. But you had a decent
+passage out, hadn’t you?”
+
+“Very good on the whole. Your Anglo-Indian may be unsympathetic about
+one’s political views; but he has reduced ship life to a science.”
+
+“The Anglo-Indian is a political orphan, and if he’s wise he won’t be
+in a hurry to be adopted by your party grandmothers. But how were your
+companions, unsympathetic?”
+
+“Well, there was a man called Dawlishe, a judge somewhere in this
+country it seems, and a capital partner at whist by the way, and when I
+wanted to talk to him about the progress of India in a political sense
+(Orde hid a grin, which might or might not have been sympathetic), the
+National Congress movement, and other things in which, as a Member of
+Parliament, I’m of course interested, he shifted the subject, and when I
+once cornered him, he looked me calmly in the eye, and said: ‘That’s all
+Tommy rot. Come and have a game at Bull.’ You may laugh; but that isn’t
+the way to treat a great and important question; and, knowing who I was.
+well. I thought it rather rude, don’t you know; and yet Dawlishe is a
+thoroughly good fellow.”
+
+“Yes; he’s a friend of mine, and one of the straightest men I know. I
+suppose, like many Anglo-Indians, he felt it was hopeless to give you
+any just idea of any Indian question without the documents before you,
+and in this case the documents you want are the country and the people.”
+
+“Precisely. That was why I came straight to you, bringing an open mind
+to bear on things. I’m anxious to know what popular feeling in India
+is really like y’know, now that it has wakened into political life.
+The National Congress, in spite of Dawlishe, must have caused great
+excitement among the masses?”
+
+“On the contrary, nothing could be more tranquil than the state of
+popular feeling; and as to excitement, the people would as soon be
+excited over the ‘Rule of Three’ as over the Congress.”
+
+“Excuse me, Orde, but do you think you are a fair judge? Isn’t the
+official Anglo-Indian naturally jealous of any external influences
+that might move the masses, and so much opposed to liberal ideas, truly
+liberal ideas, that he can scarcely be expected to regard a popular
+movement with fairness?”
+
+“What did Dawlishe say about Tommy Rot? Think a moment, old man. You
+and I were brought up together; taught by the same tutors, read the same
+books, lived the same life, and new languages, and work among new races;
+while you, more fortunate, remain at home. Why should I change my mind
+our mind-because I change my sky? Why should I and the few hundred
+Englishmen in my service become unreasonable, prejudiced fossils, while
+you and your newer friends alone remain bright and open-minded? You
+surely don’t fancy civilians are members of a Primrose League?”
+
+“Of course not, but the mere position of an English official gives him
+a point of view which cannot but bias his mind on this question.” Pagett
+moved his knee up and down a little uneasily as he spoke.
+
+“That sounds plausible enough, but, like more plausible notions on
+Indian matters, I believe it’s a mistake. You’ll find when you come to
+consult the unofficial Briton that our fault, as a class--I speak of the
+civilian now-is rather to magnify the progress that has been made toward
+liberal institutions. It is of English origin, such as it is, and the
+stress of our work since the Mutiny--only thirty years ago--has been in
+that direction. No, I think you will get no fairer or more dispassionate
+view of the Congress business than such men as I can give you. But I may
+as well say at once that those who know most of India, from the inside,
+are inclined to wonder at the noise our scarcely begun experiment makes
+in England.”
+
+“But surely the gathering together of Congress delegates is of itself a
+new thing.”
+
+“There’s nothing new under the sun When Europe was a jungle half Asia
+flocked to the canonical conferences of Buddhism; and for centuries the
+people have gathered at Pun, Hurdwar, Trimbak, and Benares in immense
+numbers. A great meeting, what you call a mass meeting, is really one
+of the oldest and most popular of Indian institutions In the case of
+the Congress meetings, the only notable fact is that the priests of the
+altar are British, not Buddhist, Jam or Brahmanical, and that the whole
+thing is a British contrivance kept alive by the efforts of Messrs.
+Hume, Eardley, Norton, and Digby.”
+
+“You mean to say, then, it s not a spontaneous movement?”
+
+“What movement was ever spontaneous in any true sense of the word? This
+seems to be more factitious than usual. You seem to know a great deal
+about it; try it by the touchstone of subscriptions, a coarse but fairly
+trustworthy criterion, and there is scarcely the color of money in it.
+The delegates write from England that they are out of pocket for
+working expenses, railway fares, and stationery--the mere pasteboard
+and scaffolding of their show. It is, in fact, collapsing from mere
+financial inanition.”
+
+“But you cannot deny that the people of India, who are, perhaps, too
+poor to subscribe, are mentally and morally moved by the agitation,”
+ Pagett insisted.
+
+“That is precisely what I do deny. The native side of the movement is
+the work of a limited class, a microscopic minority, as Lord Dufferin
+described it, when compared with the people proper, but still a very
+interesting class, seeing that it is of our own creation. It is composed
+almost entirely of those of the literary or clerkly castes who have
+received an English education.”
+
+“Surely that s a very important class. Its members must be the ordained
+leaders of popular thought.”
+
+“Anywhere else they might be leaders, but they have no social weight in
+this topsy-turvy land, and though they have been employed in clerical
+work for generations they have no practical knowledge of affairs. A
+ship’s clerk is a useful person, but he is scarcely the captain; and an
+orderly-room writer, however smart he may be, is not the colonel. You
+see, the writer class in India has never till now aspired to anything
+like command. It wasn’t allowed to. The Indian gentleman, for thousands
+of years past, has resembled Victor Hugo’s noble:
+
+     ‘Un vrai sire
+     Chatelain
+     Laisse ecrire
+     Le vilain.
+     Sa main digne
+     Quand il signe
+     Egratigne
+     Le velin.
+
+And the little egralignures he most likes to make have been scored
+pretty deeply by the sword.”
+
+“But this is childish and medheval nonsense!”
+
+“Precisely; and from your, or rather our, point of view the pen is
+mightier than the sword. In this country it’s otherwise. The fault
+lies in our Indian balances, not yet adjusted to civilized weights and
+measures.”
+
+“Well, at all events, this literary class represent the natural
+aspirations and wishes of the people at large, though it may not exactly
+lead them, and, in spite of all you say, Orde, I defy you to find
+a really sound English Radical who would not sympathize with those
+aspirations.”
+
+Pagett spoke with some warmth, and he had scarcely ceased when a well
+appointed dog-cart turned into the compound gates, and Orde rose saying:
+
+“Here is Edwards, the Master of the Lodge I neglect so diligently, come
+to talk about accounts, I suppose.”
+
+As the vehicle drove up under the porch Pagett also rose, saying with
+the trained effusion born of much practice:
+
+“But this is also my friend, my old and valued friend Edwards. I’m
+delighted to see you. I knew you were in India, but not exactly where.”
+
+“Then it isn’t accounts, Mr. Edwards,” said Orde, cheerily.
+
+“Why, no, sir; I heard Mr. Pagett was coming, and as our works were
+closed for the New Year I thought I would drive over and see him.”
+
+“A very happy thought. Mr. Edwards, you may not know, Orde, was a
+leading member of our Radical Club at Switebton when I was beginning
+political life, and I owe much to his exertions. There’s no pleasure
+like meeting an old friend, except, perhaps, making a new one. I
+suppose, Mr. Edwards, you stick to the good old cause?”
+
+“Well, you see, sir, things are different out here. There’s precious
+little one can find to say against the Government, which was the main of
+our talk at home, and them that do say things are not the sort o’ people
+a man who respects himself would like to be mixed up with. There are no
+politics, in a manner of speaking, in India. It’s all work.”
+
+“Surely you are mistaken, my good friend. Why I have come all the way
+from England just to see the working of this great National movement.”
+
+“I don’t know where you’re going to find the nation as moves to begin
+with, and then you’ll be hard put to it to find what they are moving
+about. It’s like this, sir,” said Edwards, who had not quite relished
+being called “my good friend.” “They haven’t got any grievance--nothing
+to hit with, don’t you see, sir; and then there’s not much to hit
+against, because the Government is more like a kind of general
+Providence, directing an old--established state of things, than that
+at home, where there’s something new thrown down for us to fight about
+every three months.”
+
+“You are probably, in your workshops, full of English mechanics, out of
+the way of learning what the masses think.”
+
+“I don’t know so much about that. There are four of us English foremen,
+and between seven and eight hundred native fitters, smiths, carpenters,
+painters, and such like.”
+
+“And they are full of the Congress, of course?”
+
+“Never hear a word of it from year’s end to year’s end, and I speak the
+talk too. But I wanted to ask how things are going on at home--old Tyler
+and Brown and the rest?”
+
+“We will speak of them presently, but your account of the indifference
+of your men surprises me almost as much as your own. I fear you are a
+backslider from the good old doctrine, Ed wards.” Pagett spoke as one
+who mourned the death of a near relative.
+
+“Not a bit, Sir, but I should be if I took up with a parcel of baboos,
+pleaders, and schoolboys, as never did a day’s work in their lives, and
+couldn’t if they tried. And if you was to poll us English railway
+men, mechanics, tradespeople, and the like of that all up and down the
+country from Peshawur to Calcutta, you would find us mostly in a tale
+together. And yet you know we’re the same English you pay some respect
+to at home at ‘lection time, and we have the pull o’ knowing something
+about it.”
+
+“This is very curious, but you will let me come and see you, and perhaps
+you will kindly show me the railway works, and we will talk things over
+at leisure. And about all old friends and old times,” added Pagett,
+detecting with quick insight a look of disappointment in the mechanic’s
+face.
+
+Nodding briefly to Orde, Edwards mounted his dog-cart and drove off.
+
+“It’s very disappointing,” said the Member to Orde, who, while his
+friend discoursed with Edwards, had been looking over a bundle of
+sketches drawn on grey paper in purple ink, brought to him by a
+Chuprassee.
+
+“Don’t let it trouble you, old chap,” ‘said Orde, sympathetically. “Look
+here a moment, here are some sketches by the man who made the carved
+wood screen you admired so much in the dining-room, and wanted a copy
+of, and the artist himself is here too.”
+
+“A native?” said Pagett.
+
+“Of course,” was the reply, “Bishen Siagh is his name, and he has two
+brothers to help him. When there is an important job to do, the three go
+‘ato partnership, but they spend most of their time and all their money
+in litigation over an inheritance, and I’m afraid they are getting
+involved, Thoroughbred Sikhs of the old rock, obstinate, touchy,
+bigoted, and cunning, but good men for all that. Here is Bishen
+Singn--shall we ask him about the Congress?”
+
+But Bishen Singh, who approached with a respectful salaam, had never
+heard of it, and he listened with a puzzled face and obviously feigned
+interest to Orde’s account of its aims and objects, finally shaking his
+vast white turban with great significance when he learned that it was
+promoted by certain pleaders named by Orde, and by educated natives.
+He began with labored respect to explain how he was a poor man with no
+concern in such matters, which were all under the control of God, but
+presently broke out of Urdu into familiar Punjabi, the mere sound of
+which had a rustic smack of village smoke-reek and plough-tail, as
+he denounced the wearers of white coats, the jugglers with words who
+filched his field from him, the men whose backs were never bowed in
+honest work; and poured ironical scorn on the Bengali. He and one of
+his brothers had seen Calcutta, and being at work there had Bengali
+carpenters given to them as assistants.
+
+“Those carpenters!” said Bishen Singh. “Black apes were more efficient
+workmates, and as for the Bengali babu-tchick!” The guttural click
+needed no interpretation, but Orde translated the rest, while Pagett
+gazed with in.. terest at the wood-carver.
+
+“He seems to have a most illiberal prejudice against the Bengali,” said
+the M.P.
+
+“Yes, it’s very sad that for ages outside Bengal there should be so
+bitter a prejudice. Pride of race, which also means race-hatred, is
+the plague and curse of India and it spreads far,” pointed with his
+riding-whip to the large map of India on the veranda wall.
+
+“See! I begin with the North,” said he. “There’s the Afghan, and, as
+a highlander, he despises all the dwellers in Hindoostan-with the
+exception of the Sikh, whom he hates as cordially as the Sikh hates him.
+The Hindu loathes Sikh and Afghan, and the Rajput--that’s a little lower
+down across this yellow blot of desert--has a strong objection, to put
+it mildly, to the Maratha who, by the way, poisonously hates the Afghan.
+Let’s go North a minute. The Sindhi hates everybody I’ve mentioned. Very
+good, we’ll take less warlike races. The cultivator of Northern India
+domineers over the man in the next province, and the Behari of the
+Northwest ridicules the Bengali. They are all at one on that point.
+I’m giving you merely the roughest possible outlines of the facts, of
+course.”
+
+Bishen Singh, his clean cut nostrils still quivering, watched the large
+sweep of the whip as it traveled from the frontier, through Sindh, the
+Punjab and Rajputana, till it rested by the valley of the Jumna.
+
+“Hate--eternal and inextinguishable hate,” concluded Orde, flicking the
+lash of the whip across the large map from East to West as he sat down.
+“Remember Canning’s advice to Lord Granville, ‘Never write or speak of
+Indian things without looking at a map.’”
+
+Pagett opened his eyes, Orde resumed. “And the race-hatred is only a
+part of it. What’s really the matter with Bisben Singh is class-hatred,
+which, unfortunately, is even more intense and more widely spread.
+That’s one of the little drawbacks of caste, which some of your recent
+English writers find an impeccable system.”
+
+The wood-carver was glad to be recalled to the business of his craft,
+and his eyes shone as he received instructions for a carved wooden
+doorway for Pagett, which he promised should be splendidly executed and
+despatched to England in six months. It is an irrelevant detail, but in
+spite of Orde’s reminders, fourteen months elapsed before the work was
+finished. Business over, Bishen Singh hung about, reluctant to take his
+leave, and at last joining his hands and approaching Orde with bated
+breath and whispering humbleness, said he had a petition to make.
+Orde’s face suddenly lost all trace of expression. “Speak on, Bishen
+Singh,” said he, and the carver in a whining tone explained that his
+case against his brothers was fixed for hearing before a native judge
+and--here he dropped his voice still lower till he was summarily stopped
+by Orde, who sternly pointed to the gate with an emphatic Begone!
+
+Bishen Singh, showing but little sign of discomposure, salaamed
+respectfully to the friends and departed.
+
+Pagett looked inquiry; Orde with complete recovery of his usual
+urbanity, replied: “It’s nothing, only the old story, he wants his case
+to be tried by an English judge-they all do that-but when he began to
+hint that the other side were in improper relations with the native
+judge I had to shut him up. Gunga Ram, the man he wanted to make
+insinuations about, may not be very bright; but he’s as honest as
+day-light on the bench. But that’s just what one can’t get a native to
+believe.”
+
+“Do you really mean to say these people prefer to have their cases tried
+by English judges?”
+
+“Why, certainly.”
+
+Pagett drew a long breath. “I didn’t know that before.” At this point a
+phaeton entered the compound, and Orde rose with “Confound it, there’s
+old Rasul Ah Khan come to pay one of his tiresome duty calls. I’m afraid
+we shall never get through our little Congress discussion.”
+
+Pagett was an almost silent spectator of the grave formalities of
+a visit paid by a punctilious old Mahommedan gentleman to an Indian
+official; and was much impressed by the distinction of manner and fine
+appearance of the Mohammedan landholder. When the exchange of polite
+banalities came to a pause, he expressed a wish to learn the courtly
+visitor’s opinion of the National Congress.
+
+Orde reluctantly interpreted, and with a smile which even Mohammedan
+politeness could not save from bitter scorn, Rasul Ah Khan intimated
+that he knew nothing about it and cared still less. It was a kind of
+talk encouraged by the Government for some mysterious purpose of its
+own, and for his own part he wondered and held his peace.
+
+Pagett was far from satisfied with this, and wished to have the old
+gentleman’s opinion on the propriety of managing all Indian affairs on
+the basis of an elective system.
+
+Orde did his best to explain, but it was plain the visitor was bored
+and bewildered. Frankly, he didn’t think much of committees; they had
+a Municipal Committee at Lahore and had elected a menial servant, an
+orderly, as a member. He had been informed of this on good authority,
+and after that, committees had ceased to interest him. But all was
+according to the rule of Government, and, please God, it was all for the
+best.
+
+“What an old fossil it is!” cried Pagett, as Orde returned from seeing
+his guest to the door; “just like some old blue-blooded hidalgo of
+Spain. What does he really think of the Congress after all, and of the
+elective system?”
+
+“Hates it all like poison. When you are sure of a majority, election is
+a fine system; but you can scarcely expect the Mahommedans, the most
+masterful and powerful minority in the country, to contemplate their own
+extinction with joy. The worst of it is that he and his co-religionists,
+who are many, and the landed proprietors, also, of Hindu race, are
+frightened and put out by this election business and by the importance
+we have bestowed on lawyers, pleaders, writers, and the like, who have,
+up to now, been in abject submission to them. They say little, hut
+after all they are the most important fagots in the great bundle of
+communities, and all the glib bunkum in the world would not pay for
+their estrangement. They have controlled the land.”
+
+“But I am assured that experience of local self-government in your
+municipalities has been most satisfactory, and when once the principle
+is accepted in your centres, don’t you know, it is bound to spread, and
+these important--ah’m people of yours would learn it like the rest.
+I see no difficulty at all,” and the smooth lips closed with the
+complacent snap habitual to Pagett, M.P., the “man of cheerful
+yesterdays and confident to-morrows.”
+
+Orde looked at him with a dreary smile.
+
+“The privilege of election has been most reluctantly withdrawn from
+scores of municipalities, others have had to be summarily suppressed,
+and, outside the Presidency towns, the actual work done has been badly
+performed. This is of less moment, perhaps-it only sends up the
+local death-rates-than the fact that the public interest in municipal
+elections, never very strong, has waned, and is waning, in spite of
+careful nursing on the part of Government servants.”
+
+“Can you explain this lack of interest?” said Pagett, putting aside the
+rest of Orde’s remarks.
+
+“You may find a ward of the key in the fact that only one in every
+thousand af our population can spell. Then they are infinitely more
+interested in religion and caste questions than in any sort of politics.
+When the business of mere existence is over, their minds are occupied by
+a series of interests, pleasures, rituals, superstitions, and the like,
+based on centuries of tradition and usage. You, perhaps, find it hard to
+conceive of people absolutely devoid of curiosity, to whom the book, the
+daily paper, and the printed speech are unknown, and you would describe
+their life as blank. That’s a profound mistake. You are in another
+land, another century, down on the bed-rock of society, where the family
+merely, and not the community, is all-important. The average Oriental
+cannot be brought to look beyond his clan. His life, too, is naore
+complete and self-sufficing, and less sordid and low-thoughted than you
+might imagine. It is bovine and slow in some respects, but it is never
+empty. You and I are inclined to put the cart before the horse, and to
+forget that it is the man that is elemental, not the book.
+
+     ‘The corn and the cattle are all my care,
+     And the rest is the will of God.’
+
+Why should such folk look up from their immemorially appointed round
+of duty and interests to meddle with the unknown and fuss with
+voting-papers. How would you, atop of all your interests care to conduct
+even one-tenth of your life according to the manners and customs of the
+Papuans, let’s say? That’s what it comes to.”
+
+“But if they won’t take the trouble to vote, why do you anticipate that
+Mohammedans, proprietors, and the rest would be crushed by majorities of
+them?”
+
+Again Pagett disregarded the closing sentence.
+
+“Because, though the landholders would not move a finger on any purely
+political question, they could be raised in dangerous excitement by
+religious hatreds. Already the first note of this has been sounded by
+the people who are trying to get up an agitation on the cow-killing
+question, and every year there is trouble over the Mohammedan Muharrum
+processions.
+
+“But who looks after the popular rights, being thus unrepresented?”
+
+“The Government of Her Majesty the Queen, Empress of India, in which, if
+the Congress promoters are to be believed, the people have an implicit
+trust; for the Congress circular, specially prepared for rustic
+comprehension, says the movement is ‘for the remission of tax,
+the advancement of Hindustan, and the strengthening of the British
+Government.’ This paper is headed in large letters--
+
+‘MAY THE PROSPERITY OF THE EMPIRE OF INDIA ENDURE.’”
+
+“Really!” said Pagett, “that shows some cleverness. But there are things
+better worth imitation in our English methods of--er--political statement
+than this sort of amiable fraud.”
+
+“Anyhow,” resumed Orde, “you perceive that not a word is said about
+elections and the elective principle, and the reticence of the Congress
+promoters here shows they are wise in their generation.”
+
+“But the elective principle must triumph in the end, and the little
+difficulties you seem to anticipate would give way on the introduction
+of a well-balanced scheme, capable of indefinite extension.”
+
+“But is it possible to devise a scheme which, always assuming that
+the people took any interest in it, without enormous expense, ruinous
+dislocation of the administation and danger to the public peace, can
+satisfy the aspirations of Mr. Hume and his following, and yet safeguard
+the interests of the Mahommedans, the landed and wealthy classes, the
+Conservative Hindus, the Eurasians, Parsees, Sikhs, Rajputs, native
+Christians, domiciled Europeans and others, who are each important and
+powerful in their way?”
+
+Pagett’s attention, however, was diverted to the gate, where a group of
+cultivators stood in apparent hesitation.
+
+“Here are the twelve Apostles, by Jove--come straight out of Raffaele’s
+cartoons,” said the M.P., with the fresh appreciation of a newcomer.
+
+Orde, loth to be interrupted, turned impatiently toward the villagers,
+and their leader, handing his long staff to one of his companions,
+advanced to the house.
+
+“It is old Jelbo, the Lumherdar, or head-man of Pind Sharkot, and a
+very’ intelligent man for a villager.”
+
+The Jat farmer had removed his shoes and stood smiling on the edge of
+the veranda. His strongly marked features glowed with russet bronze, and
+his bright eyes gleamed under deeply set brows, contracted by lifelong
+exposure to sunshine. His beard and moustache streaked with grey swept
+from bold cliffs of brow and cheek in the large sweeps one sees drawn
+by Michael Angelo, and strands of long black hair mingled with the
+irregularly piled wreaths and folds of his turban. The drapery of stout
+blue cotton cloth thrown over his broad shoulders and girt round his
+narrow loins, hung from his tall form in broadly sculptured folds,
+and he would have made a superb model for an artist in search of a
+patriarch.
+
+Orde greeted him cordially, and after a polite pause the countryman
+started off with a long story told with impressive earnestness. Orde
+listened and smiled, interrupting the speaker at ‘times to argue and
+reason with him in a tone which Pagett could hear was kindly, and
+finally checking the flux of words was about to dismiss him, when Pagett
+suggested that he should be asked about the National Congress.
+
+But Jelloc had never heard of it. He was a poor man and such things, by
+the favor of his Honor, did not concern him.
+
+“What’s the matter with your big friend that he was so terribly in
+earnest?” asked Pagett, when he had left.
+
+“Nothing much. He wants the blood of the people in the next village, who
+have had smallpox and cattle plague pretty badly, and by the help of
+a wizard, a currier, and several pigs have passed it on to his own
+village. ‘Wants to know if they can’t be run in for this awful crime.
+It seems they made a dreadful charivari at the village boundary, threw a
+quantity of spell-bearing objects over the border, a buffalo’s skull and
+other things; then branded a chamur--what you would call a currier--on
+his hinder parts and drove him and a number of pigs over into Jelbo’s
+village. Jelbo says he can bring evidence to prove that the wizard
+directing these proceedings, who is a Sansi, has been guilty of theft,
+arson, cattle-killing, perjury and murder, but would prefer to have him
+punished for bewitching them and inflicting small-pox.”
+
+“And how on earth did you answer such a lunatic?”
+
+“Lunatic I the old fellow is as sane as you or I; and he has some ground
+of complaint against those Sansis. I asked if he would like a native
+superintendent of police with some men to make inquiries, but he
+objected on the grounds the police were rather worse than smallpox and
+criminal tribes put together.”
+
+“Criminal tribes--er--I don’t quite understand,” said Paget.
+
+“We have in India many tribes of people who in the slack anti-British
+days became robbers, in various kind, and preyed on the people. They are
+being restrained and reclaimed little by little, and in time will become
+useful citizens, but they still cherish hereditary traditions of
+crime, and are a difficult lot to deal with. By the way what; about the
+political rights of these folk under your schemes? The country people
+call them vermin, but I sup-pose they would be electors with the rest.”
+
+“Nonsense--special provision would be made for them in a well-considered
+electoral scheme, and they would doubtless be treated with fitting
+severity,” said Pagett, with a magisterial air.
+
+“Severity, yes--but whether it would be fitting is doubtful. Even those
+poor devils have rights, and, after all, they only practice what they
+have been taught.”
+
+“But criminals, Orde!”
+
+“Yes, criminals with codes and rituals of crime, gods and godlings of
+crime, and a hundred songs and sayings in praise of it. Puzzling, isn’t
+it?”
+
+“It’s simply dreadful. They ought to be put down at once. Are there many
+of them?”
+
+“Not more than about sixty thousand in this province, for many of the
+tribes broadly described as criminal are really vagabond and criminal
+only on occasion, while others are being settled and reclaimed. They are
+of great antiquity, a legacy from the past, the golden, glorious
+Aryan past of Max Muller, Birdwood and the rest of your spindrift
+philosophers.”
+
+An orderly brought a card to Orde who took it with a movement of
+irritation at the interruption, and banded it to Pagett; a large card
+with a ruled border in red ink, and in the centre in schoolboy copper
+plate, Mr. Dma Nath. “Give salaam,” said the civilian, and there
+entered in haste a slender youth, clad in a closely fitting coat of grey
+homespun, tight trousers, patent-leather shoes, and a small black velvet
+cap. His thin cheek twitched, and his eyes wandered restlessly, for the
+young man was evidently nervous and uncomfortable, though striving to
+assume a free and easy air.
+
+“Your honor may perhaps remember me,” he said in English, and Orde
+scanned him keenly.
+
+“I know your face somehow. You belonged to the Shershah district I
+think, when I was in charge there?”
+
+“Yes, Sir, my father is writer at Shershah, and your honor gave me a
+prize when I was first in the Middle School examination five years ago.
+Since then I have prosecuted my studies, and I am now second year’s
+student in the Mission College.”
+
+“Of course: you are Kedar Nath’s son--the boy who said he liked
+geography better than play or sugar cakes, and I didn’t believe you. How
+is your father getting on?”
+
+“He is well, and he sends his salaam, but his circumstances are
+depressed, and he also is down on his luck.”
+
+“You learn English idiom at the Mission College, it seems.”
+
+“Yes, sir, they are the best idioms, and my father ordered me to ask
+your honor to say a word for him to the present incumbent of your
+honor’s shoes, the latchet of which he is not worthy to open, and who
+knows not Joseph; for things are different at Sher shah now, and my
+father wants promotion.”
+
+“Your father is a good man, and I will do what I can for him.”
+
+At this point a telegram was handed to Orde, who, after glancing at it,
+said he must leave his young friend whom he introduced to Pagett, “a
+member of the English House of Commons who wishes to learn about India.”
+
+Orde bad scarcely retired with his telegram when Pagett began:
+
+“Perhaps you can tell me something of the National Congress movement?”
+
+“Sir, it is the greatest movement of modern times, and one in which all
+educated men like us must join. All our students are for the Congress.”
+
+“Excepting, I suppose, Mahommedans, and the Christians?” said Pagett,
+quick to use his recent instruction.
+
+“These are some mere exceptions to the universal rule.”
+
+“But the people outside the College, the working classes, the
+agriculturists; your father and mother, for instance.”
+
+“My mother,” said the young man, with a visible effort to bring
+himself to pronounce the word, “has no ideas, and my father is not
+agriculturist, nor working class; he is of the Kayeth caste; but he had
+not the advantage of a collegiate education, and he does not know
+much of the Congress. It is a movement for the educated young-man”
+ -connecting adjective and noun in a sort of vocal hyphen.
+
+“Ah, yes,” said Pagett, feeling he was a little off the rails, “and what
+are the benefits you expect to gain by it?”
+
+“Oh, sir, everything. England owes its greatness to Parliamentary
+institutions, and we should at once gain the same high position in
+scale of nations. Sir, we wish to have the sciences, the arts, the
+manufactures, the industrial factories, with steam engines, and other
+motive powers and public meetings, and debates. Already we have a
+debating club in connection with the college, and elect a Mr. Speaker.
+Sir, the progress must come. You also are a Member of Parliament and
+worship the great Lord Ripon,” said the youth, breathlessly, and his
+black eyes flashed as he finished his commaless sentences.
+
+“Well,” said Pagett, drily, “it has not yet occurred to me to worship
+his Lordship, although I believe he is a very worthy man, and I am not
+sure that England owes quite all the things you name to the House of
+Commons. You see, my young friend, the growth of a nation like ours
+is slow, subject to many influences, and if you have read your history
+aright”--“Sir. I know it all--all! Norman Conquest, Magna Charta,
+Runnymede, Reformation, Tudors, Stuarts, Mr. Milton and Mr. Burke, and
+I have read something of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Gibbon’s ‘Decline and
+Fall,’ Reynolds’ Mysteries of the Court,’” and Pagett felt like one who
+had pulled the string of a shower-bath unawares, and hastened to stop
+the torrent with a question as to what particular grievances of the
+people of India the attention of an elected assembly should be first
+directed. But young Mr. Dma Nath was slow to particularize. There were
+many, very many demanding consideration. Mr. Pagett would like to hear
+of one or two typical examples. The Repeal of the Arms Act was at last
+named, and the student learned for the first time that a license was
+necessary before an Englishman could carry a gun in England. Then
+natives of India ought to be allowed to become Volunteer Riflemen if
+they chose, and the absolute equality of the Oriental with his European
+fellow-subject in civil status should be proclaimed on principle, and
+the Indian Army should be considerably reduced. The student was not,
+however, prepared with answers to Mr. Pagett’s mildest questions on
+these points, and he returned to vague generalities, leaving the M.P. so
+much impressed with the crudity of his views that he was glad on Orde’s
+return to say good-bye to his ‘very interesting’ young friend.
+
+“What do you think of young India?” asked Orde.
+
+“Curious, very curious-and callow.”
+
+“And yet,” the civilian replied, “one can scarcely help sympathizing
+with him for his mere youth’s sake. The young orators of the Oxford
+Union arrived at the same conclusions and showed doubtless just the
+same enthusiasm. If there were any political analogy between India and
+England, if the thousand races of this Empire were one, if there were
+any chance even of their learning to speak one language, if, in short,
+India were a Utopia of the debating-room, and not a real land, this
+kind of talk might be worth listening to, but it is all based on false
+analogy and ignorance of the facts.”
+
+“But he is a native and knows the facts.”
+
+“He is a sort of English schoolboy, but married three years, and the
+father of two weaklings, and knows less than most English schoolboys.
+You saw all he is and knows, and such ideas as he has acquired are
+directly hostile to the most cherished convictions of the vast majority
+of the people.”
+
+“But what does he mean by saying he is a student of a mission college?
+Is he a Christian?”
+
+“He meant just what he said, and he is not a Christian, nor ever will
+he be. Good people in America, Scotland and England, most of whom would
+never dream of collegiate education for their own sons, are pinching
+themselves to bestow it in pure waste on Indian youths. Their scheme
+is an oblique, subterranean attack on heathenism; the theory being that
+with the jam of secular education, leading to a University degree, the
+pill of moral or religious instruction may he coaxed down the heathen
+gullet.”
+
+“But does it succeed; do they make converts?”
+
+“They make no converts, for the subtle Oriental swallows the jam and
+rejects the pill; but the mere example of the sober, righteous, and
+godly lives of the principals and professors who are most excellent and
+devoted men, must have a certain moral value. Yet, as Lord Lansdowne
+pointed out the other day, the market is dangerously overstocked
+with graduates of our Universities who look for employment in the
+administration. An immense number are employed, but year by year the
+college mills grind out increasing lists of youths foredoomed to
+failure and disappointment, and meanwhile, trade, manufactures, and the
+industrial arts are neglected, and in fact regarded with contempt by our
+new literary mandarins in posse.”
+
+“But our young friend said he wanted steam-engines and factories,” said
+Pagett.
+
+“Yes, he would like to direct such concerns. He wants to begin at the
+top, for manual labor is held to be discreditable, and he would never
+defile his hands by the apprenticeship which the architects, engineers,
+and manufacturers of England cheerfully undergo; and he would be aghast
+to learn that the leading names of industrial enterprise in England
+belonged a generation or two since, or now belong, to men who wrought
+with their own hands. And, though he talks glibly of manufacturers, he
+refuses to see that the Indian manufacturer of the future will be the
+despised workman of the present. It was proposed, for example, a few
+weeks ago, that a certain municipality in this province should establish
+an elementary technical school for the sons of workmen. The stress of
+the opposition to the plan came from a pleader who owed all he had to a
+college education bestowed on him gratis by Government and missions.
+You would have fancied some fine old crusted Tory squire of the last
+generation was speaking. ‘These people,’ he said, ‘want no education,
+for they learn their trades from their fathers, and to teach a workman’s
+son the elements of mathematics and physical science would give him
+ideas above his business. They must be kept in their place, and it was
+idle to imagine that there was any science in wood or iron work.’ And he
+carried his point. But the Indian workman will rise in the social scale
+in spite of the new literary caste.”
+
+“In England we have scarcely begun to realize that there is an
+industrial class in this country, yet, I suppose, the example of men,
+like Edwards for instance, must tell,” said Pagett, thoughtfully.
+
+“That you shouldn’t know much about it is natural enough, for there are
+but few sources of information. India in this, as in other respects, is
+like a badly kept ledger-not written up to date. And men like Edwards
+are, in reality, missionaries, who by precept and example are teaching
+more lessons than they know. Only a few, however, of their crowds of
+subordinates seem to care to try to emulate them, and aim at individual
+advancement; the rest drop into the ancient Indian caste groove.”
+
+“How do you mean?” asked he, “Well, it is found that the new railway and
+factory workmen, the fitter, the smith, the engine-driver, and the rest
+are already forming separate hereditary castes. You may notice this down
+at Jamalpur in Bengal, one of the oldest railway centres; and at other
+places, and in other industries, they are following the same inexorable
+Indian law.”
+
+“Which means?” queried Pagett.
+
+“It means that the rooted habit of the people is to gather in small
+self-contained, self-sufficing family groups with no thought or care for
+any interests but their own-a habit which is scarcely compatible with
+the right acceptation of the elective principle.”
+
+“Yet you must admit, Orde, that though our young friend was not able to
+expound the faith that is in him, your Indian army is too big.”
+
+“Not nearly big enough for its main purpose. And, as a side issue, there
+are certain powerful minorities of fighting folk whose interests an
+Asiatic Government is bound to consider. Arms is as much a means of
+livelihood as civil employ under Government and law. And it would be
+a heavy strain on British bayonets to hold down Sikhs, Jats, Bilochis,
+Rohillas, Rajputs, Bhils, Dogras, Pahtans, and Gurkbas to abide by the
+decisions of a numerical majority opposed to their interests. Leave the
+‘numerical majority’ to itself without the British bayonets-a flock of
+sheep might as reasonably hope to manage a troop of collies.”
+
+“This complaint about excessive growth of the army is akin to another
+contention of the Congress party. They protest against the malversation
+of the whole of the moneys raised by additional taxes as a Famine
+Insurance Fund to other purposes. You must be aware that this special
+Famine Fund has all been spent on frontier roads and defences and
+strategic railway schemes as a protection against Russia.”
+
+“But there was never a special famine fund raised by special taxation
+and put by as in a box. No sane administrator would dream of such
+a thing. In a time of prosperity a finance minister, rejoicing in
+a margin, proposed to annually apply a million and a half to the
+construction of railways and canals for the protection of districts
+liable to scarcity, and to the reduction of the annual loans for public
+works. But times were not always prosperous, and the finance minister
+had to choose whether he would bang up the insurance scheme for a year
+or impose fresh taxation. When a farmer hasn’t got the little surplus
+he hoped to have for buying a new wagon and draining a low-lying field
+corner, you don’t accuse him of malversation, if he spends what he has
+on the necessary work of the rest of his farm.”
+
+A clatter of hoofs was heard, and Orde looked up with vexation, but his
+brow cleared as a horseman halted under the porch.
+
+“Hellin Orde! just looked in to ask if you are coming to polo on
+Tuesday: we want you badly to help to crumple up the Krab Bokbar team.”
+
+Orde explained that he had to go out into the District, and while the
+visitor complained that though good men wouldn’t play, duffers were
+always keen, and that his side would probably be beaten, Pagett rose to
+look at his mount, a red, lathered Biloch mare, with a curious lyre-like
+incurving of the ears. “Quite a little thoroughbred in all other
+respects,” said the M.P., and Orde presented Mr. Reginald Burke, Manager
+of the Siad and Sialkote Bank to his friend.
+
+“Yes, she’s as good as they make ‘em, and she’s all the female I possess
+and spoiled in consequence, aren’t you, old girl?” said Burke, patting
+the mare’s glossy neck as she backed and plunged.
+
+“Mr. Pagett,” said Orde, “has been asking me about the Congress. What is
+your opinion?” Burke turned to the M. P. with a frank smile.
+
+“Well, if it’s all the same to you, sir, I should say, Damn the
+Congress, but then I’m no politician, but only a business man.”
+
+“You find it a tiresome subject?”
+
+“Yes, it’s all that, and worse than that, for this kind of agitation is
+anything but wholesome for the country.”
+
+“How do you mean?”
+
+“It would be a long job to explain, and Sara here won’t stand, but you
+know how sensitive capital is, and how timid investors are. All this
+sort of rot is likely to frighten them, and we can’t afford to frighten
+them. The passengers aboard an Ocean steamer don’t feel reassured when
+the ship’s way is stopped, and they hear the workmen’s hammers tinkering
+at the engines down below. The old Ark’s going on all right as she is,
+and only wants quiet and room to move. Them’s my sentiments, and those
+of some other people who have to do with money and business.”
+
+“Then you are a thick-and-thin supporter of the Government as it is.”
+
+“Why, no! The Indian Government is much too timid with its money-like
+an old maiden aunt of mine-always in a funk about her investments. They
+don’t spend half enough on railways for instance, and they are slow in
+a general way, and ought to be made to sit up in all that concerns
+the encouragement of private enterprise, and coaxing out into use the
+millions of capital that lie dormant in the country.”
+
+The mare was dancing with impatience, and Burke was evidently anxious to
+be off, so the men wished him good-bye.
+
+“Who is your genial friend who condemns both Congress and Government in
+a breath?” asked Pagett, with an amused smile.
+
+“Just now he is Reggie Burke, keener on polo than on anything else, but
+if you go to the Sind and Sialkote Bank to-morrow you would find Mr.
+Reginald Burke a very capable man of business, known and liked by an
+immense constituency North and South of this.”
+
+“Do you think he is right about the Government’s want of enterprise?”
+
+“I should hesitate to say. Better consult the merchants and chambers
+of commerce in Cawnpore, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. But though these
+bodies would like, as Reggie puts it, to make Government sit up, it is
+an elementary consideration in governing a country like India, which
+must be administered for the benefit of the people at large, that the
+counsels of those who resort to it for the sake of making money should
+be judiciously weighed and not allowed to overpower the rest. They are
+welcome guests here, as a matter of course, but it has been found best
+to restrain their influence. Thus the rights of plantation laborers,
+factory operatives, and the like, have been protected, and the
+capitalist, eager to get on, has not always regarded Government action
+with favor. It is quite conceivable that under an elective system the
+commercial communities of the great towns might find means to secure
+majorities on labor questions and on financial matters.”
+
+“They would act at least with intelligence and consideration.”
+
+“Intelligence, yes; but as to consideration, who at the present moment
+most bitterly resents the tender solicitude of Lancashire for the
+welfare and protection of the Indian factory operative? English and
+native capitalists running cotton mills and factories.”
+
+“But is the solicitude of Lancashire in this matter entirely
+disinterested?”
+
+“It is no business of mine to say. I merely indicate an example of how
+a powerful commercial interest might hamper a Government intent in the
+first place on the larger interests of humanity.”
+
+Orde broke off to listen a moment. “There’s Dr. Lathrop talking to my
+wife in the drawing-room,” said he.
+
+“Surely not; that’s a lady’s voice, and if my ears don’t deceive me, an
+American.”
+
+“Exactly, Dr. Eva McCreery Lathrop, chief of the new Women’s Hospital
+here, and a very good fellow forbye. Good-morning, Doctor,” he said, as
+a graceful figure came out on the veranda, “you seem to be in trouble. I
+hope Mrs. Orde was able to help you.”
+
+“Your wife is real kind and good, I always come to her when I’m in a fix
+but I fear it’s more than comforting I want.”
+
+“You work too hard and wear yourself out,” said Orde, kindly. “Let me
+introduce my friend, Mr. Pagett, just fresh from home, and anxious to
+learn his India. You could tell him something of that more important
+half of which a mere man knows so little.”
+
+“Perhaps I could if I’d any heart to do it, but I’m in trouble, I’ve
+lost a case, a case that was doing well, through nothing in the world
+but inattention on the part of a nurse I had begun to trust. And when I
+spoke only a small piece of my mind she collapsed in a whining heap on
+the floor. It is hopeless.”
+
+The men were silent, for the blue eyes of the lady doctor were dim.
+Recovering herself she looked up with a smile, half sad, half humorous,
+“And I am in a whining heap, too; but what phase of Indian life are you
+particularly interested in, sir?”
+
+“Mr. Pagett intends to study the political aspect of things and the
+possibility of bestowing electoral institutions on the people.”
+
+“Wouldn’t it be as much to the purpose to bestow point-lace collars
+on them? They need many things more urgently than votes. Why it’s like
+giving a bread-pill for a broken leg.”
+
+“Er-I don’t quite follow,” said Pagett, uneasily.
+
+“Well, what’s the matter with this country is not in the least
+political, but an all round entanglement of physical, social, and moral
+evils and corruptions, all more or less due to the unnatural treatment
+of women. You can’t gather figs from thistles, and so long as the system
+of infant marriage, the prohibition of the remarriage of widows,
+the lifelong imprisonment of wives and mothers in a worse than penal
+confinement, and the withholding from them of any kind of education
+or treatment as rational beings continues, the country can’t advance a
+step. Half of it is morally dead, and worse than dead, and that’s just
+the half from which we have a right to look for the best impulses. It’s
+right here where the trouble is, and not in any political considerations
+whatsoever.”
+
+“But do they marry so early?” said Pagett, vaguely.
+
+“The average age is seven, but thousands are married still earlier. One
+result is that girls of twelve and thirteen have to bear the burden
+of wifehood and motherhood, and, as might be expected, the rate of
+mortality both for mothers and children is terrible. Pauperism,
+domestic unhappiness, and a low state of health are only a few of the
+consequences of this. Then, when, as frequently happens, the boy-husband
+dies prematurely, his widow is condemned to worse than death. She
+may not re-marry, must live a secluded and despised life, a life so
+unnatural that she sometimes prefers suicide; more often she goes
+astray. You don’t know in England what such words as ‘infant-marriage,
+baby-wife, girl-mother, and virgin-widow’ mean; but they mean
+unspeakable horrors here.”
+
+“Well, but the advanced political party here will surely make it their
+business to advocate social reforms as well as political ones,” said
+Pagett.
+
+“Very surely they will do no such thing,” said the lady doctor,
+emphatically. “I wish I could make you understand. Why, even of the
+funds devoted to the Marchioness of Dufferin’s organization for medical
+aid to the women of India, it was said in print and in speech, that they
+would be better spent on more college scholarships for men. And in
+all the advanced parties’ talk-God forgive them--and in all their
+programmes, they carefully avoid all such subjects. They will talk about
+the protection of the cow, for that’s an ancient superstition--they
+can all understand that; but the protection of the women is a new and
+dangerous idea.” She turned to Pagett impulsively:
+
+“You are a member of the English Parliament. Can you do nothing? The
+foundations of their life are rotten-utterly and bestially rotten.
+I could tell your wife things that I couldn’t tell you. I know the
+life--the inner life that belongs to the native, and I know nothing
+else; and believe me you might as well try to grow golden-rod in a
+mushroom-pit as to make anything of a people that are born and reared as
+these--these things’re. The men talk of their rights and privileges. I
+have seen the women that bear these very men, and again-may God forgive
+the men!”
+
+Pagett’s eyes opened with a large wonder. Dr. Lathrop rose
+tempestuously.
+
+“I must be off to lecture,” said she, “and I’m sorry that I can’t
+show you my hospitals; but you had better believe, sir, that it’s more
+necessary for India than all the elections in creation.”
+
+“That’s a woman with a mission, and no mistake,” said Pagett, after a
+pause.
+
+“Yes; she believes in her work, and so do I,” said Orde. “I’ve a notion
+that in the end it will be found that the most helpful work done
+for India in this generation was wrought by Lady Dufferin in drawing
+attention-what work that was, by the way, even with her husband’s great
+name to back it to the needs of women here. In effect, native habits and
+beliefs are an organized conspiracy against the laws of health and happy
+life--but there is some dawning of hope now.”
+
+“How d’ you account for the general indifference, then?”
+
+“I suppose it’s due in part to their fatalism and their utter
+indifference to all human suffering. How much do you imagine the great
+province of the Pun-jab with over twenty million people and half a score
+rich towns has contributed to the maintenance of civil dispensaries last
+year? About seven thousand rupees.”
+
+“That’s seven hundred pounds,” said Pagett, quickly.
+
+“I wish it was,” replied Orde; “but anyway, it’s an absurdly inadequate
+sum, and shows one of the blank sides of Oriental character.”
+
+Pagett was silent for a long time. The question of direct and personal
+pain did not lie within his researches. He preferred to discuss the
+weightier matters of the law, and contented himself with murmuring:
+“They’ll do better later on.” Then, with a rush, returning to his first
+thought:
+
+“But, my dear Orde, if it’s merely a class movement of a local and
+temporary character, how d’ you account for Bradlaugh, who is at least a
+man of sense taking it up?”
+
+“I know nothing of the champion of the New Brahmins but what I see in
+the papers. I suppose there is something tempting in being hailed by a
+large assemblage as the representative of the aspirations of two hundred
+and fifty millions of people. Such a man looks ‘through all the roaring
+and the wreaths,’ and does not reflect that it is a false perspective,
+which, as a matter of fact, hides the real complex and manifold India
+from his gaze. He can scarcely be expected to distinguish between the
+ambitions of a new oligarchy and the real wants of the people of whom he
+knows nothing. But it’s strange that a professed Radical should come to
+be the chosen advocate of a movement which has for its aim the revival
+of an ancient tyranny. Shows how even Radicalism can fall into academic
+grooves and miss the essential truths of its own creed. Believe me,
+Pagett, to deal with India you want first-hand knowledge and experience.
+I wish he would come and live here for a couple of years or so.”
+
+“Is not this rather an ad hominem style of argument?”
+
+“Can’t help it in a case like this. Indeed, I am not sure you ought not
+to go further and weigh the whole character and quality and upbringing
+of the man. You must admit that the monumental complacency with which he
+trotted out his ingenious little Constitution for India showed a strange
+want of imagination and the sense of humor.”
+
+“No, I don’t quite admit it,” said Pagett.
+
+“Well, you know him and I don’t, but that’s how it strikes a stranger.”
+ He turned on his heel and paced the veranda thoughtfully. “And, after
+all, the burden of the actual, daily unromantic toil falls on the
+shoulders of the men out here, and not on his own. He enjoys all the
+privileges of recommendation without responsibility, and we-well,
+perhaps, when you’ve seen a little more of India you’ll understand. To
+begin with, our death rate’s five times higher than yours-I speak now
+for the brutal bureaucrat--and we work on the refuse of worked-out
+cities and exhausted civilizations, among the bones of the dead.”
+
+Pagett laughed. “That’s an epigrammatic way of putting it, Orde.”
+
+“Is it? Let’s see,” said the Deputy Commissioner of Amara, striding into
+the sunshine toward a half-naked gardener potting roses. He took the
+man’s hoe, and went to a rain-scarped bank at the bottom of the garden.
+
+“Come here, Pagett,” he said, and cut at the sun-baked soil. After
+three strokes there rolled from under the blade of the hoe the half of a
+clanking skeleton that settled at Pagett’s feet in an unseemly jumble of
+bones. The M.P. drew back.
+
+“Our houses are built on cemeteries,” said Orde. “There are scores of
+thousands of graves within ten miles.”
+
+Pagett was contemplating the skull with the awed fascination of a man
+who has but little to do with the dead. “India’s a very curious place,”
+ said he, after a pause.
+
+“Ah? You’ll know all about it in three months. Come in to lunch,” said
+Orde.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Deodars, by Rudyard Kipling
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