Perhaps the climate
consoled
him.
Kipling - Poems
These, hearing nothing of the Collector-Sahib for some time,
and heartily despising the Hindu Sub-Judge, arranged to start a little
Mohurrum riot of their own. But the Hindus turned out and broke their
heads; when, finding lawlessness pleasant, Hindus and Mahomedans
together raised an aimless sort of Donnybrook just to see how far they
could go. They looted each other's shops, and paid off private grudges
in the regular way. It was a nasty little riot, but not worth putting in
the newspapers.
Michele was working in his office when he heard the sound that a man
never forgets all his life--the "ah-yah" of an angry crowd.
[When that sound drops about three tones, and changes to a thick,
droning ut, the man who hears it had better go away if he is alone. ] The
Native Police Inspector ran in and told Michele that the town was in an
uproar and coming to wreck the Telegraph Office.
The Babu put on his cap and quietly dropped out of the window; while
the Police Inspector, afraid, but obeying the old race-instinct
which recognizes a drop of White blood as far as it can be diluted,
said:--"What orders does the Sahib give? "
The "Sahib" decided Michele. Though horribly frightened, he felt that,
for the hour, he, the man with the Cochin Jew and the menial uncle in
his pedigree, was the only representative of English authority in the
place. Then he thought of Miss Vezzis and the fifty rupees, and took the
situation on himself. There were seven native policemen in Tibasu, and
four crazy smooth-bore muskets among them. All the men were gray with
fear, but not beyond leading. Michele dropped the key of the telegraph
instrument, and went out, at the head of his army, to meet the mob. As
the shouting crew came round a corner of the road, he dropped and fired;
the men behind him loosing instinctively at the same time.
The whole crowd--curs to the backbone--yelled and ran; leaving one man
dead, and another dying in the road. Michele was sweating with fear, but
he kept his weakness under, and went down into the town, past the house
where the Sub-Judge had barricaded himself. The streets were empty.
Tibasu was more frightened than Michele, for the mob had been taken at
the right time.
Michele returned to the Telegraph-Office, and sent a message to
Chicacola asking for help. Before an answer came, he received a
deputation of the elders of Tibasu, telling him that the Sub-Judge said
his actions generally were "unconstitional," and trying to bully him.
But the heart of Michele D'Cruze was big and white in his breast,
because of his love for Miss Vezzis, the nurse-girl, and because he had
tasted for the first time Responsibility and Success. Those two make
an intoxicating drink, and have ruined more men than ever has Whiskey.
Michele answered that the Sub-Judge might say what he pleased, but,
until the Assistant Collector came, the Telegraph Signaller was the
Government of India in Tibasu, and the elders of the town would be held
accountable for further rioting. Then they bowed their heads and said:
"Show mercy! " or words to that effect, and went back in great fear; each
accusing the other of having begun the rioting.
Early in the dawn, after a night's patrol with his seven policemen,
Michele went down the road, musket in hand, to meet the Assistant
Collector, who had ridden in to quell Tibasu. But, in the presence of
this young Englishman, Michele felt himself slipping back more and more
into the native, and the tale of the Tibasu Riots ended, with the strain
on the teller, in an hysterical outburst of tears, bred by sorrow that
he had killed a man, shame that he could not feel as uplifted as he had
felt through the night, and childish anger that his tongue could not
do justice to his great deeds. It was the White drop in Michele's veins
dying out, though he did not know it.
But the Englishman understood; and, after he had schooled those men
of Tibasu, and had conferred with the Sub-Judge till that excellent
official turned green, he found time to draught an official letter
describing the conduct of Michele. Which letter filtered through the
Proper Channels, and ended in the transfer of Michele up-country once
more, on the Imperial salary of sixty-six rupees a month.
So he and Miss Vezzis were married with great state and ancientry; and
now there are several little D'Cruzes sprawling about the verandahs of
the Central Telegraph Office.
But, if the whole revenue of the Department he serves were to be his
reward Michele could never, never repeat what he did at Tibasu for the
sake of Miss Vezzis the nurse-girl.
Which proves that, when a man does good work out of all proportion to
his pay, in seven cases out of nine there is a woman at the back of the
virtue.
The two exceptions must have suffered from sunstroke.
WATCHES OF THE NIGHT.
What is in the Brahmin's books that is in the Brahmin's heart.
Neither you nor I knew there was so much evil in the world.
--Hindu Proverb.
This began in a practical joke; but it has gone far enough now, and is
getting serious.
Platte, the Subaltern, being poor, had a Waterbury watch and a plain
leather guard.
The Colonel had a Waterbury watch also, and for guard, the lip-strap of
a curb-chain. Lip-straps make the best watch guards.
They are strong and short. Between a lip-strap and an ordinary leather
guard there is no great difference; between one Waterbury watch
and another there is none at all. Every one in the station knew the
Colonel's lip-strap. He was not a horsey man, but he liked people to
believe he had been one once; and he wove fantastic stories of the
hunting-bridle to which this particular lip-strap had belonged.
Otherwise he was painfully religious.
Platte and the Colonel were dressing at the Club--both late for their
engagements, and both in a hurry. That was Kismet. The two watches
were on a shelf below the looking-glass--guards hanging down. That was
carelessness. Platte changed first, snatched a watch, looked in the
glass, settled his tie, and ran. Forty seconds later, the Colonel did
exactly the same thing; each man taking the other's watch.
You may have noticed that many religious people are deeply suspicious.
They seem--for purely religious purposes, of course--to know more about
iniquity than the Unregenerate. Perhaps they were specially bad before
they became converted! At any rate, in the imputation of things evil,
and in putting the worst construction on things innocent, a certain type
of good people may be trusted to surpass all others. The Colonel and
his Wife were of that type. But the Colonel's Wife was the worst. She
manufactured the Station scandal, and--TALKED TO HER AYAH! Nothing
more need be said. The Colonel's Wife broke up the Laplaces's home. The
Colonel's Wife stopped the Ferris-Haughtrey engagement. The Colonel's
Wife induced young Buxton to keep his wife down in the Plains through
the first year of the marriage. Whereby little Mrs.
Buxton died, and the baby with her. These things will be remembered
against the Colonel's Wife so long as there is a regiment in the
country.
But to come back to the Colonel and Platte. They went their several
ways from the dressing-room. The Colonel dined with two Chaplains, while
Platte went to a bachelor-party, and whist to follow.
Mark how things happen! If Platte's sais had put the new saddle-pad on
the mare, the butts of the terrets would not have worked through the
worn leather, and the old pad into the mare's withers, when she was
coming home at two o'clock in the morning. She would not have reared,
bolted, fallen into a ditch, upset the cart, and sent Platte flying over
an aloe-hedge on to Mrs. Larkyn's well-kept lawn; and this tale would
never have been written. But the mare did all these things, and while
Platte was rolling over and over on the turf, like a shot rabbit, the
watch and guard flew from his waistcoat--as an Infantry Major's sword
hops out of the scabbard when they are firing a feu de joie--and rolled
and rolled in the moonlight, till it stopped under a window.
Platte stuffed his handkerchief under the pad, put the cart straight,
and went home.
Mark again how Kismet works! This would not happen once in a hundred
years. Towards the end of his dinner with the two Chaplains, the Colonel
let out his waistcoat and leaned over the table to look at some Mission
Reports. The bar of the watch-guard worked through the buttonhole, and
the watch--Platte's watch--slid quietly on to the carpet. Where the
bearer found it next morning and kept it.
Then the Colonel went home to the wife of his bosom; but the driver of
the carriage was drunk and lost his way. So the Colonel returned at an
unseemly hour and his excuses were not accepted. If the Colonel's Wife
had been an ordinary "vessel of wrath appointed for destruction," she
would have known that when a man stays away on purpose, his excuse
is always sound and original. The very baldness of the Colonel's
explanation proved its truth.
See once more the workings of Kismet! The Colonel's watch which came
with Platte hurriedly on to Mrs. Larkyn's lawn, chose to stop just under
Mrs. Larkyn's window, where she saw it early in the morning, recognized
it, and picked it up. She had heard the crash of Platte's cart at two
o'clock that morning, and his voice calling the mare names. She knew
Platte and liked him. That day she showed him the watch and heard his
story. He put his head on one side, winked and said:--"How disgusting!
Shocking old man! with his religious training, too! I should send the
watch to the Colonel's Wife and ask for explanations. "
Mrs. Larkyn thought for a minute of the Laplaces--whom she had known
when Laplace and his wife believed in each other--and answered:--"I will
send it. I think it will do her good. But remember, we must NEVER tell
her the truth. "
Platte guessed that his own watch was in the Colonel's possession, and
thought that the return of the lip-strapped Waterbury with a soothing
note from Mrs. Larkyn, would merely create a small trouble for a few
minutes. Mrs. Larkyn knew better. She knew that any poison dropped would
find good holding-ground in the heart of the Colonel's Wife.
The packet, and a note containing a few remarks on the Colonel's
calling-hours, were sent over to the Colonel's Wife, who wept in her own
room and took counsel with herself.
If there was one woman under Heaven whom the Colonel's Wife hated with
holy fervor, it was Mrs. Larkyn. Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous lady,
and called the Colonel's Wife "old cat. " The Colonel's Wife said that
somebody in Revelations was remarkably like Mrs. Larkyn.
She mentioned other Scripture people as well. From the Old Testament.
[But the Colonel's Wife was the only person who cared or dared to say
anything against Mrs. Larkyn. Every one else accepted her as an amusing,
honest little body. ] Wherefore, to believe that her husband had been
shedding watches under that "Thing's" window at ungodly hours, coupled
with the fact of his late arrival on the previous night, was. . . . .
At this point she rose up and sought her husband. He denied everything
except the ownership of the watch. She besought him, for his Soul's
sake, to speak the truth. He denied afresh, with two bad words. Then a
stony silence held the Colonel's Wife, while a man could draw his breath
five times.
The speech that followed is no affair of mine or yours. It was made up
of wifely and womanly jealousy; knowledge of old age and sunken cheeks;
deep mistrust born of the text that says even little babies' hearts
are as bad as they make them; rancorous hatred of Mrs. Larkyn, and the
tenets of the creed of the Colonel's Wife's upbringing.
Over and above all, was the damning lip-strapped Waterbury, ticking away
in the palm of her shaking, withered hand. At that hour, I think, the
Colonel's Wife realized a little of the restless suspicions she had
injected into old Laplace's mind, a little of poor Miss Haughtrey's
misery, and some of the canker that ate into Buxton's heart as he
watched his wife dying before his eyes. The Colonel stammered and tried
to explain. Then he remembered that his watch had disappeared; and the
mystery grew greater. The Colonel's Wife talked and prayed by turns
till she was tired, and went away to devise means for "chastening the
stubborn heart of her husband. " Which translated, means, in our slang,
"tail-twisting. "
You see, being deeply impressed with the doctrine of Original Sin, she
could not believe in the face of appearances. She knew too much, and
jumped to the wildest conclusions.
But it was good for her. It spoilt her life, as she had spoilt the life
of the Laplaces. She had lost her faith in the Colonel, and--here the
creed suspicion came in--he might, she argued, have erred many times,
before a merciful Providence, at the hands of so unworthy an instrument
as Mrs. Larkyn, had established his guilt.
He was a bad, wicked, gray-haired profligate. This may sound too sudden
a revulsion for a long-wedded wife; but it is a venerable fact that, if
a man or woman makes a practice of, and takes a delight in, believing
and spreading evil of people indifferent to him or her, he or she will
end in believing evil of folk very near and dear. You may think, also,
that the mere incident of the watch was too small and trivial to raise
this misunderstanding. It is another aged fact that, in life as well as
racing, all the worst accidents happen at little ditches and cut-down
fences. In the same way, you sometimes see a woman who would have made a
Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces
over all the mean worry of housekeeping. But that is another story.
Her belief only made the Colonel's Wife more wretched, because it
insisted so strongly on the villainy of men. Remembering what she had
done, it was pleasant to watch her unhappiness, and the penny-farthing
attempts she made to hide it from the Station. But the Station knew and
laughed heartlessly; for they had heard the story of the watch, with
much dramatic gesture, from Mrs. Larkyn's lips.
Once or twice Platte said to Mrs. Larkyn, seeing that the Colonel had
not cleared himself:--"This thing has gone far enough. I move we tell
the Colonel's Wife how it happened. " Mrs. Larkyn shut her lips and shook
her head, and vowed that the Colonel's Wife must bear her punishment
as best she could. Now Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous woman, in whom none
would have suspected deep hate. So Platte took no action, and came to
believe gradually, from the Colonel's silence, that the Colonel must
have "run off the line" somewhere that night, and, therefore, preferred
to stand sentence on the lesser count of rambling into other people's
compounds out of calling hours. Platte forgot about the watch business
after a while, and moved down-country with his regiment. Mrs. Larkyn
went home when her husband's tour of Indian service expired. She never
forgot.
But Platte was quite right when he said that the joke had gone too far.
The mistrust and the tragedy of it--which we outsiders cannot see and
do not believe in--are killing the Colonel's Wife, and are making the
Colonel wretched. If either of them read this story, they can depend
upon its being a fairly true account of the case, and can "kiss and make
friends. "
Shakespeare alludes to the pleasure of watching an Engineer being
shelled by his own Battery. Now this shows that poets should not write
about what they do not understand. Any one could have told him that
Sappers and Gunners are perfectly different branches of the Service.
But, if you correct the sentence, and substitute Gunner for Sapper, the
moral comes just the same.
THE OTHER MAN.
When the earth was sick and the skies were gray,
And the woods were rotted with rain,
The Dead Man rode through the autumn day
To visit his love again.
--Old Ballad.
Far back in the "seventies," before they had built any Public Offices at
Simla, and the broad road round Jakko lived in a pigeon-hole in the P.
W. D. hovels, her parents made Miss Gaurey marry Colonel Schreiderling.
He could not have been MUCH more than thirty-five years her senior; and,
as he lived on two hundred rupees a month and had money of his own,
he was well off. He belonged to good people, and suffered in the cold
weather from lung complaints. In the hot weather he dangled on the brink
of heat-apoplexy; but it never quite killed him.
Understand, I do not blame Schreiderling. He was a good husband
according to his lights, and his temper only failed him when he was
being nursed. Which was some seventeen days in each month. He was almost
generous to his wife about money matters, and that, for him, was a
concession. Still Mrs. Schreiderling was not happy. They married her
when she was this side of twenty and had given all her poor little heart
to another man. I have forgotten his name, but we will call him the
Other Man. He had no money and no prospects.
He was not even good-looking; and I think he was in the Commissariat or
Transport. But, in spite of all these things, she loved him very
madly; and there was some sort of an engagement between the two when
Schreiderling appeared and told Mrs. Gaurey that he wished to marry her
daughter. Then the other engagement was broken off--washed away by
Mrs. Gaurey's tears, for that lady governed her house by weeping over
disobedience to her authority and the lack of reverence she received
in her old age. The daughter did not take after her mother. She never
cried. Not even at the wedding.
The Other Man bore his loss quietly, and was transferred to as bad a
station as he could find.
Perhaps the climate consoled him. He suffered
from intermittent fever, and that may have distracted him from his other
trouble. He was weak about the heart also. Both ways. One of the valves
was affected, and the fever made it worse.
This showed itself later on.
Then many months passed, and Mrs. Schreiderling took to being ill.
She did not pine away like people in story books, but she seemed to pick
up every form of illness that went about a station, from simple fever
upwards. She was never more than ordinarily pretty at the best of times;
and the illness made her ugly. Schreiderling said so. He prided himself
on speaking his mind.
When she ceased being pretty, he left her to her own devices, and went
back to the lairs of his bachelordom. She used to trot up and down Simla
Mall in a forlorn sort of way, with a gray Terai hat well on the back of
her head, and a shocking bad saddle under her.
Schreiderling's generosity stopped at the horse. He said that any saddle
would do for a woman as nervous as Mrs. Schreiderling. She never was
asked to dance, because she did not dance well; and she was so dull
and uninteresting, that her box very seldom had any cards in it.
Schreiderling said that if he had known that she was going to be such
a scare-crow after her marriage, he would never have married her. He
always prided himself on speaking his mind, did Schreiderling!
He left her at Simla one August, and went down to his regiment.
Then she revived a little, but she never recovered her looks. I found
out at the Club that the Other Man is coming up sick--very sick--on an
off chance of recovery. The fever and the heart-valves had nearly
killed him. She knew that, too, and she knew--what I had no interest in
knowing--when he was coming up. I suppose he wrote to tell her. They had
not seen each other since a month before the wedding. And here comes the
unpleasant part of the story.
A late call kept me down at the Dovedell Hotel till dusk one evening.
Mrs. Schreidlerling had been flitting up and down the Mall all the
afternoon in the rain. Coming up along the Cart-road, a tonga passed me,
and my pony, tired with standing so long, set off at a canter. Just by
the road down to the Tonga Office Mrs. Schreiderling, dripping from head
to foot, was waiting for the tonga. I turned up-hill, as the tonga was
no affair of mine; and just then she began to shriek. I went back at
once and saw, under the Tonga Office lamps, Mrs. Schreiderling kneeling
in the wet road by the back seat of the newly-arrived tonga, screaming
hideously.
Then she fell face down in the dirt as I came up.
Sitting in the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the
awning-stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache, was the
Other Man--dead. The sixty-mile up-hill jolt had been too much for his
valve, I suppose. The tonga-driver said:--"The Sahib died two stages out
of Solon. Therefore, I tied him with a rope, lest he should fall out
by the way, and so came to Simla. Will the Sahib give me bukshish? IT,"
pointing to the Other Man, "should have given one rupee. "
The Other Man sat with a grin on his face, as if he enjoyed the joke of
his arrival; and Mrs. Schreiderling, in the mud, began to groan. There
was no one except us four in the office and it was raining heavily. The
first thing was to take Mrs. Schreiderling home, and the second was to
prevent her name from being mixed up with the affair. The tonga-driver
received five rupees to find a bazar 'rickshaw for Mrs. Schreiderling.
He was to tell the tonga Babu afterwards of the Other Man, and the Babu
was to make such arrangements as seemed best.
Mrs. Schreiderling was carried into the shed out of the rain, and for
three-quarters of an hour we two waited for the 'rickshaw. The Other
Man was left exactly as he had arrived. Mrs. Schreiderling would do
everything but cry, which might have helped her. She tried to scream as
soon as her senses came back, and then she began praying for the Other
Man's soul. Had she not been as honest as the day, she would have prayed
for her own soul too. I waited to hear her do this, but she did not.
Then I tried to get some of the mud off her habit. Lastly, the 'rickshaw
came, and I got her away--partly by force. It was a terrible business
from beginning to end; but most of all when the 'rickshaw had to squeeze
between the wall and the tonga, and she saw by the lamp-light that thin,
yellow hand grasping the awning-stanchion.
She was taken home just as every one was going to a dance at Viceregal
Lodge--"Peterhoff" it was then--and the doctor found that she had fallen
from her horse, that I had picked her up at the back of Jakko, and
really deserved great credit for the prompt manner in which I had
secured medical aid. She did not die--men of Schreiderling's stamp marry
women who don't die easily. They live and grow ugly.
She never told of her one meeting, since her marriage, with the Other
Man; and, when the chill and cough following the exposure of that
evening, allowed her abroad, she never by word or sign alluded to having
met me by the Tonga Office. Perhaps she never knew.
She used to trot up and down the Mall, on that shocking bad saddle,
looking as if she expected to meet some one round the corner every
minute. Two years afterward, she went Home, and died--at Bournemouth, I
think.
Schreiderling, when he grew maudlin at Mess, used to talk about "my
poor dear wife. " He always set great store on speaking his mind, did
Schreiderling!
CONSEQUENCES.
Rosicrucian subtleties
In the Orient had rise;
Ye may find their teachers still
Under Jacatala's Hill.
Seek ye Bombast Paracelsus,
Read what Flood the Seeker tells us
Of the Dominant that runs
Through the cycles of the Suns--
Read my story last and see
Luna at her apogee.
There are yearly appointments, and two-yearly appointments, and
five-yearly appointments at Simla, and there are, or used to be,
permanent appointments, whereon you stayed up for the term of your
natural life and secured red cheeks and a nice income. Of course, you
could descend in the cold weather; for Simla is rather dull then.
Tarrion came from goodness knows where--all away and away in some
forsaken part of Central India, where they call Pachmari a "Sanitarium,"
and drive behind trotting bullocks, I believe. He belonged to a
regiment; but what he really wanted to do was to escape from his
regiment and live in Simla forever and ever. He had no preference for
anything in particular, beyond a good horse and a nice partner. He
thought he could do everything well; which is a beautiful belief when
you hold it with all your heart. He was clever in many ways, and good to
look at, and always made people round him comfortable--even in Central
India.
So he went up to Simla, and, because he was clever and amusing, he
gravitated naturally to Mrs. Hauksbee, who could forgive everything
but stupidity. Once he did her great service by changing the date on an
invitation-card for a big dance which Mrs. Hauksbee wished to attend,
but couldn't because she had quarrelled with the A. -D. -C. , who took
care, being a mean man, to invite her to a small dance on the 6th
instead of the big Ball of the 26th. It was a very clever piece of
forgery; and when Mrs. Hauksbee showed the A. -D. -C. her invitation-card,
and chaffed him mildly for not better managing his vendettas, he really
thought he had made a mistake; and--which was wise--realized that it
was no use to fight with Mrs. Hauksbee. She was grateful to Tarrion and
asked what she could do for him. He said simply: "I'm a Freelance up
here on leave, and on the lookout for what I can loot. I haven't a
square inch of interest in all Simla. My name isn't known to any man
with an appointment in his gift, and I want an appointment--a good,
sound, pukka one. I believe you can do anything you turn yourself to do.
Will you help me? " Mrs. Hauksbee thought for a minute, and passed
the last of her riding-whip through her lips, as was her custom when
thinking.
Then her eyes sparkled, and she said:--"I will;" and she shook hands
on it. Tarrion, having perfect confidence in this great woman, took no
further thought of the business at all. Except to wonder what sort of an
appointment he would win.
Mrs. Hauksbee began calculating the prices of all the Heads of
Departments and Members of Council she knew, and the more she thought
the more she laughed, because her heart was in the game and it amused
her. Then she took a Civil List and ran over a few of the appointments.
There are some beautiful appointments in the Civil List. Eventually, she
decided that, though Tarrion was too good for the Political Department,
she had better begin by trying to get him in there. What were her own
plans to this end, does not matter in the least, for Luck or Fate played
into her hands, and she had nothing to do but to watch the course of
events and take the credit of them.
All Viceroys, when they first come out, pass through the "Diplomatic
Secrecy" craze. It wears off in time; but they all catch it in the
beginning, because they are new to the country.
The particular Viceroy who was suffering from the complaint just
then--this was a long time ago, before Lord Dufferin ever came from
Canada, or Lord Ripon from the bosom of the English Church--had it very
badly; and the result was that men who were new to keeping official
secrets went about looking unhappy; and the Viceroy plumed himself on
the way in which he had instilled notions of reticence into his Staff.
Now, the Supreme Government have a careless custom of committing
what they do to printed papers. These papers deal with all sorts of
things--from the payment of Rs. 200 to a "secret service" native, up to
rebukes administered to Vakils and Motamids of Native States, and rather
brusque letters to Native Princes, telling them to put their houses
in order, to refrain from kidnapping women, or filling offenders with
pounded red pepper, and eccentricities of that kind. Of course, these
things could never be made public, because Native Princes never err
officially, and their States are, officially, as well administered as
Our territories. Also, the private allowances to various queer people
are not exactly matters to put into newspapers, though they give quaint
reading sometimes.
When the Supreme Government is at Simla, these papers are prepared
there, and go round to the people who ought to see them in office-boxes
or by post. The principle of secrecy was to that Viceroy quite as
important as the practice, and he held that a benevolent despotism like
Ours should never allow even little things, such as appointments of
subordinate clerks, to leak out till the proper time. He was always
remarkable for his principles.
There was a very important batch of papers in preparation at that time.
It had to travel from one end of Simla to the other by hand.
It was not put into an official envelope, but a large, square, pale-pink
one; the matter being in MS. on soft crinkly paper. It was addressed to
"The Head Clerk, etc. , etc. " Now, between "The Head Clerk, etc. , etc. ,"
and "Mrs. Hauksbee" and a flourish, is no very great difference if the
address be written in a very bad hand, as this was. The chaprassi who
took the envelope was not more of an idiot than most chaprassis. He
merely forgot where this most unofficial cover was to be delivered, and
so asked the first Englishman he met, who happened to be a man riding
down to Annandale in a great hurry. The Englishman hardly looked, said:
"Hauksbee Sahib ki Mem," and went on. So did the chaprassi, because that
letter was the last in stock and he wanted to get his work over. There
was no book to sign; he thrust the letter into Mrs. Hauksbee's bearer's
hands and went off to smoke with a friend.
Mrs. Hauksbee was expecting some cut-out pattern things in flimsy paper
from a friend. As soon as she got the big square packet, therefore, she
said, "Oh, the DEAR creature! " and tore it open with a paper-knife, and
all the MS. enclosures tumbled out on the floor.
Mrs. Hauksbee began reading. I have said the batch was rather
important. That is quite enough for you to know. It referred to some
correspondence, two measures, a peremptory order to a native chief and
two dozen other things. Mrs. Hauksbee gasped as she read, for the first
glimpse of the naked machinery of the Great Indian Government, stripped
of its casings, and lacquer, and paint, and guard-rails, impresses even
the most stupid man. And Mrs. Hauksbee was a clever woman. She was
a little afraid at first, and felt as if she had laid hold of a
lightning-flash by the tail, and did not quite know what to do with it.
There were remarks and initials at the side of the papers; and some
of the remarks were rather more severe than the papers. The initials
belonged to men who are all dead or gone now; but they were great in
their day.
Mrs. Hauksbee read on and thought calmly as she read. Then the value of
her trove struck her, and she cast about for the best method of using
it. Then Tarrion dropped in, and they read through all the papers
together, and Tarrion, not knowing how she had come by them, vowed that
Mrs. Hauksbee was the greatest woman on earth.
Which I believe was true, or nearly so.
"The honest course is always the best," said Tarrion after an hour and a
half of study and conversation. "All things considered, the Intelligence
Branch is about my form. Either that or the Foreign Office. I go to lay
siege to the High Gods in their Temples. "
He did not seek a little man, or a little big man, or a weak Head of a
strong Department, but he called on the biggest and strongest man that
the Government owned, and explained that he wanted an appointment at
Simla on a good salary. The compound insolence of this amused the Strong
Man, and, as he had nothing to do for the moment, he listened to the
proposals of the audacious Tarrion.
"You have, I presume, some special qualifications, besides the gift of
self-assertion, for the claims you put forwards? " said the Strong Man.
"That, Sir," said Tarrion, "is for you to judge. " Then he began, for
he had a good memory, quoting a few of the more important notes in the
papers--slowly and one by one as a man drops chlorodyne into a glass.
When he had reached the peremptory order--and it WAS a peremptory
order--the Strong Man was troubled.
Tarrion wound up:--"And I fancy that special knowledge of this kind is
at least as valuable for, let us say, a berth in the Foreign Office, as
the fact of being the nephew of a distinguished officer's wife. " That
hit the Strong Man hard, for the last appointment to the Foreign Office
had been by black favor, and he knew it. "I'll see what I can do for
you," said the Strong Man. "Many thanks," said Tarrion. Then he left,
and the Strong Man departed to see how the appointment was to be
blocked. . . . . . . . . .
Followed a pause of eleven days; with thunders and lightnings and much
telegraphing. The appointment was not a very important one, carrying
only between Rs. 500 and Rs. 700 a month; but, as the Viceroy said, it
was the principle of diplomatic secrecy that had to be maintained,
and it was more than likely that a boy so well supplied with special
information would be worth translating. So they translated him. They
must have suspected him, though he protested that his information was
due to singular talents of his own. Now, much of this story, including
the after-history of the missing envelope, you must fill in for
yourself, because there are reasons why it cannot be written. If you do
not know about things Up Above, you won't understand how to fill it in,
and you will say it is impossible.
What the Viceroy said when Tarrion was introduced to him was:--"So, this
is the boy who 'rusked' the Government of India, is it? Recollect, Sir,
that is not done TWICE. " So he must have known something.
What Tarrion said when he saw his appointment gazetted was:--"If Mrs.
Hauksbee were twenty years younger, and I her husband, I should be
Viceroy of India in twenty years. "
What Mrs.
and heartily despising the Hindu Sub-Judge, arranged to start a little
Mohurrum riot of their own. But the Hindus turned out and broke their
heads; when, finding lawlessness pleasant, Hindus and Mahomedans
together raised an aimless sort of Donnybrook just to see how far they
could go. They looted each other's shops, and paid off private grudges
in the regular way. It was a nasty little riot, but not worth putting in
the newspapers.
Michele was working in his office when he heard the sound that a man
never forgets all his life--the "ah-yah" of an angry crowd.
[When that sound drops about three tones, and changes to a thick,
droning ut, the man who hears it had better go away if he is alone. ] The
Native Police Inspector ran in and told Michele that the town was in an
uproar and coming to wreck the Telegraph Office.
The Babu put on his cap and quietly dropped out of the window; while
the Police Inspector, afraid, but obeying the old race-instinct
which recognizes a drop of White blood as far as it can be diluted,
said:--"What orders does the Sahib give? "
The "Sahib" decided Michele. Though horribly frightened, he felt that,
for the hour, he, the man with the Cochin Jew and the menial uncle in
his pedigree, was the only representative of English authority in the
place. Then he thought of Miss Vezzis and the fifty rupees, and took the
situation on himself. There were seven native policemen in Tibasu, and
four crazy smooth-bore muskets among them. All the men were gray with
fear, but not beyond leading. Michele dropped the key of the telegraph
instrument, and went out, at the head of his army, to meet the mob. As
the shouting crew came round a corner of the road, he dropped and fired;
the men behind him loosing instinctively at the same time.
The whole crowd--curs to the backbone--yelled and ran; leaving one man
dead, and another dying in the road. Michele was sweating with fear, but
he kept his weakness under, and went down into the town, past the house
where the Sub-Judge had barricaded himself. The streets were empty.
Tibasu was more frightened than Michele, for the mob had been taken at
the right time.
Michele returned to the Telegraph-Office, and sent a message to
Chicacola asking for help. Before an answer came, he received a
deputation of the elders of Tibasu, telling him that the Sub-Judge said
his actions generally were "unconstitional," and trying to bully him.
But the heart of Michele D'Cruze was big and white in his breast,
because of his love for Miss Vezzis, the nurse-girl, and because he had
tasted for the first time Responsibility and Success. Those two make
an intoxicating drink, and have ruined more men than ever has Whiskey.
Michele answered that the Sub-Judge might say what he pleased, but,
until the Assistant Collector came, the Telegraph Signaller was the
Government of India in Tibasu, and the elders of the town would be held
accountable for further rioting. Then they bowed their heads and said:
"Show mercy! " or words to that effect, and went back in great fear; each
accusing the other of having begun the rioting.
Early in the dawn, after a night's patrol with his seven policemen,
Michele went down the road, musket in hand, to meet the Assistant
Collector, who had ridden in to quell Tibasu. But, in the presence of
this young Englishman, Michele felt himself slipping back more and more
into the native, and the tale of the Tibasu Riots ended, with the strain
on the teller, in an hysterical outburst of tears, bred by sorrow that
he had killed a man, shame that he could not feel as uplifted as he had
felt through the night, and childish anger that his tongue could not
do justice to his great deeds. It was the White drop in Michele's veins
dying out, though he did not know it.
But the Englishman understood; and, after he had schooled those men
of Tibasu, and had conferred with the Sub-Judge till that excellent
official turned green, he found time to draught an official letter
describing the conduct of Michele. Which letter filtered through the
Proper Channels, and ended in the transfer of Michele up-country once
more, on the Imperial salary of sixty-six rupees a month.
So he and Miss Vezzis were married with great state and ancientry; and
now there are several little D'Cruzes sprawling about the verandahs of
the Central Telegraph Office.
But, if the whole revenue of the Department he serves were to be his
reward Michele could never, never repeat what he did at Tibasu for the
sake of Miss Vezzis the nurse-girl.
Which proves that, when a man does good work out of all proportion to
his pay, in seven cases out of nine there is a woman at the back of the
virtue.
The two exceptions must have suffered from sunstroke.
WATCHES OF THE NIGHT.
What is in the Brahmin's books that is in the Brahmin's heart.
Neither you nor I knew there was so much evil in the world.
--Hindu Proverb.
This began in a practical joke; but it has gone far enough now, and is
getting serious.
Platte, the Subaltern, being poor, had a Waterbury watch and a plain
leather guard.
The Colonel had a Waterbury watch also, and for guard, the lip-strap of
a curb-chain. Lip-straps make the best watch guards.
They are strong and short. Between a lip-strap and an ordinary leather
guard there is no great difference; between one Waterbury watch
and another there is none at all. Every one in the station knew the
Colonel's lip-strap. He was not a horsey man, but he liked people to
believe he had been one once; and he wove fantastic stories of the
hunting-bridle to which this particular lip-strap had belonged.
Otherwise he was painfully religious.
Platte and the Colonel were dressing at the Club--both late for their
engagements, and both in a hurry. That was Kismet. The two watches
were on a shelf below the looking-glass--guards hanging down. That was
carelessness. Platte changed first, snatched a watch, looked in the
glass, settled his tie, and ran. Forty seconds later, the Colonel did
exactly the same thing; each man taking the other's watch.
You may have noticed that many religious people are deeply suspicious.
They seem--for purely religious purposes, of course--to know more about
iniquity than the Unregenerate. Perhaps they were specially bad before
they became converted! At any rate, in the imputation of things evil,
and in putting the worst construction on things innocent, a certain type
of good people may be trusted to surpass all others. The Colonel and
his Wife were of that type. But the Colonel's Wife was the worst. She
manufactured the Station scandal, and--TALKED TO HER AYAH! Nothing
more need be said. The Colonel's Wife broke up the Laplaces's home. The
Colonel's Wife stopped the Ferris-Haughtrey engagement. The Colonel's
Wife induced young Buxton to keep his wife down in the Plains through
the first year of the marriage. Whereby little Mrs.
Buxton died, and the baby with her. These things will be remembered
against the Colonel's Wife so long as there is a regiment in the
country.
But to come back to the Colonel and Platte. They went their several
ways from the dressing-room. The Colonel dined with two Chaplains, while
Platte went to a bachelor-party, and whist to follow.
Mark how things happen! If Platte's sais had put the new saddle-pad on
the mare, the butts of the terrets would not have worked through the
worn leather, and the old pad into the mare's withers, when she was
coming home at two o'clock in the morning. She would not have reared,
bolted, fallen into a ditch, upset the cart, and sent Platte flying over
an aloe-hedge on to Mrs. Larkyn's well-kept lawn; and this tale would
never have been written. But the mare did all these things, and while
Platte was rolling over and over on the turf, like a shot rabbit, the
watch and guard flew from his waistcoat--as an Infantry Major's sword
hops out of the scabbard when they are firing a feu de joie--and rolled
and rolled in the moonlight, till it stopped under a window.
Platte stuffed his handkerchief under the pad, put the cart straight,
and went home.
Mark again how Kismet works! This would not happen once in a hundred
years. Towards the end of his dinner with the two Chaplains, the Colonel
let out his waistcoat and leaned over the table to look at some Mission
Reports. The bar of the watch-guard worked through the buttonhole, and
the watch--Platte's watch--slid quietly on to the carpet. Where the
bearer found it next morning and kept it.
Then the Colonel went home to the wife of his bosom; but the driver of
the carriage was drunk and lost his way. So the Colonel returned at an
unseemly hour and his excuses were not accepted. If the Colonel's Wife
had been an ordinary "vessel of wrath appointed for destruction," she
would have known that when a man stays away on purpose, his excuse
is always sound and original. The very baldness of the Colonel's
explanation proved its truth.
See once more the workings of Kismet! The Colonel's watch which came
with Platte hurriedly on to Mrs. Larkyn's lawn, chose to stop just under
Mrs. Larkyn's window, where she saw it early in the morning, recognized
it, and picked it up. She had heard the crash of Platte's cart at two
o'clock that morning, and his voice calling the mare names. She knew
Platte and liked him. That day she showed him the watch and heard his
story. He put his head on one side, winked and said:--"How disgusting!
Shocking old man! with his religious training, too! I should send the
watch to the Colonel's Wife and ask for explanations. "
Mrs. Larkyn thought for a minute of the Laplaces--whom she had known
when Laplace and his wife believed in each other--and answered:--"I will
send it. I think it will do her good. But remember, we must NEVER tell
her the truth. "
Platte guessed that his own watch was in the Colonel's possession, and
thought that the return of the lip-strapped Waterbury with a soothing
note from Mrs. Larkyn, would merely create a small trouble for a few
minutes. Mrs. Larkyn knew better. She knew that any poison dropped would
find good holding-ground in the heart of the Colonel's Wife.
The packet, and a note containing a few remarks on the Colonel's
calling-hours, were sent over to the Colonel's Wife, who wept in her own
room and took counsel with herself.
If there was one woman under Heaven whom the Colonel's Wife hated with
holy fervor, it was Mrs. Larkyn. Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous lady,
and called the Colonel's Wife "old cat. " The Colonel's Wife said that
somebody in Revelations was remarkably like Mrs. Larkyn.
She mentioned other Scripture people as well. From the Old Testament.
[But the Colonel's Wife was the only person who cared or dared to say
anything against Mrs. Larkyn. Every one else accepted her as an amusing,
honest little body. ] Wherefore, to believe that her husband had been
shedding watches under that "Thing's" window at ungodly hours, coupled
with the fact of his late arrival on the previous night, was. . . . .
At this point she rose up and sought her husband. He denied everything
except the ownership of the watch. She besought him, for his Soul's
sake, to speak the truth. He denied afresh, with two bad words. Then a
stony silence held the Colonel's Wife, while a man could draw his breath
five times.
The speech that followed is no affair of mine or yours. It was made up
of wifely and womanly jealousy; knowledge of old age and sunken cheeks;
deep mistrust born of the text that says even little babies' hearts
are as bad as they make them; rancorous hatred of Mrs. Larkyn, and the
tenets of the creed of the Colonel's Wife's upbringing.
Over and above all, was the damning lip-strapped Waterbury, ticking away
in the palm of her shaking, withered hand. At that hour, I think, the
Colonel's Wife realized a little of the restless suspicions she had
injected into old Laplace's mind, a little of poor Miss Haughtrey's
misery, and some of the canker that ate into Buxton's heart as he
watched his wife dying before his eyes. The Colonel stammered and tried
to explain. Then he remembered that his watch had disappeared; and the
mystery grew greater. The Colonel's Wife talked and prayed by turns
till she was tired, and went away to devise means for "chastening the
stubborn heart of her husband. " Which translated, means, in our slang,
"tail-twisting. "
You see, being deeply impressed with the doctrine of Original Sin, she
could not believe in the face of appearances. She knew too much, and
jumped to the wildest conclusions.
But it was good for her. It spoilt her life, as she had spoilt the life
of the Laplaces. She had lost her faith in the Colonel, and--here the
creed suspicion came in--he might, she argued, have erred many times,
before a merciful Providence, at the hands of so unworthy an instrument
as Mrs. Larkyn, had established his guilt.
He was a bad, wicked, gray-haired profligate. This may sound too sudden
a revulsion for a long-wedded wife; but it is a venerable fact that, if
a man or woman makes a practice of, and takes a delight in, believing
and spreading evil of people indifferent to him or her, he or she will
end in believing evil of folk very near and dear. You may think, also,
that the mere incident of the watch was too small and trivial to raise
this misunderstanding. It is another aged fact that, in life as well as
racing, all the worst accidents happen at little ditches and cut-down
fences. In the same way, you sometimes see a woman who would have made a
Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces
over all the mean worry of housekeeping. But that is another story.
Her belief only made the Colonel's Wife more wretched, because it
insisted so strongly on the villainy of men. Remembering what she had
done, it was pleasant to watch her unhappiness, and the penny-farthing
attempts she made to hide it from the Station. But the Station knew and
laughed heartlessly; for they had heard the story of the watch, with
much dramatic gesture, from Mrs. Larkyn's lips.
Once or twice Platte said to Mrs. Larkyn, seeing that the Colonel had
not cleared himself:--"This thing has gone far enough. I move we tell
the Colonel's Wife how it happened. " Mrs. Larkyn shut her lips and shook
her head, and vowed that the Colonel's Wife must bear her punishment
as best she could. Now Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous woman, in whom none
would have suspected deep hate. So Platte took no action, and came to
believe gradually, from the Colonel's silence, that the Colonel must
have "run off the line" somewhere that night, and, therefore, preferred
to stand sentence on the lesser count of rambling into other people's
compounds out of calling hours. Platte forgot about the watch business
after a while, and moved down-country with his regiment. Mrs. Larkyn
went home when her husband's tour of Indian service expired. She never
forgot.
But Platte was quite right when he said that the joke had gone too far.
The mistrust and the tragedy of it--which we outsiders cannot see and
do not believe in--are killing the Colonel's Wife, and are making the
Colonel wretched. If either of them read this story, they can depend
upon its being a fairly true account of the case, and can "kiss and make
friends. "
Shakespeare alludes to the pleasure of watching an Engineer being
shelled by his own Battery. Now this shows that poets should not write
about what they do not understand. Any one could have told him that
Sappers and Gunners are perfectly different branches of the Service.
But, if you correct the sentence, and substitute Gunner for Sapper, the
moral comes just the same.
THE OTHER MAN.
When the earth was sick and the skies were gray,
And the woods were rotted with rain,
The Dead Man rode through the autumn day
To visit his love again.
--Old Ballad.
Far back in the "seventies," before they had built any Public Offices at
Simla, and the broad road round Jakko lived in a pigeon-hole in the P.
W. D. hovels, her parents made Miss Gaurey marry Colonel Schreiderling.
He could not have been MUCH more than thirty-five years her senior; and,
as he lived on two hundred rupees a month and had money of his own,
he was well off. He belonged to good people, and suffered in the cold
weather from lung complaints. In the hot weather he dangled on the brink
of heat-apoplexy; but it never quite killed him.
Understand, I do not blame Schreiderling. He was a good husband
according to his lights, and his temper only failed him when he was
being nursed. Which was some seventeen days in each month. He was almost
generous to his wife about money matters, and that, for him, was a
concession. Still Mrs. Schreiderling was not happy. They married her
when she was this side of twenty and had given all her poor little heart
to another man. I have forgotten his name, but we will call him the
Other Man. He had no money and no prospects.
He was not even good-looking; and I think he was in the Commissariat or
Transport. But, in spite of all these things, she loved him very
madly; and there was some sort of an engagement between the two when
Schreiderling appeared and told Mrs. Gaurey that he wished to marry her
daughter. Then the other engagement was broken off--washed away by
Mrs. Gaurey's tears, for that lady governed her house by weeping over
disobedience to her authority and the lack of reverence she received
in her old age. The daughter did not take after her mother. She never
cried. Not even at the wedding.
The Other Man bore his loss quietly, and was transferred to as bad a
station as he could find.
Perhaps the climate consoled him. He suffered
from intermittent fever, and that may have distracted him from his other
trouble. He was weak about the heart also. Both ways. One of the valves
was affected, and the fever made it worse.
This showed itself later on.
Then many months passed, and Mrs. Schreiderling took to being ill.
She did not pine away like people in story books, but she seemed to pick
up every form of illness that went about a station, from simple fever
upwards. She was never more than ordinarily pretty at the best of times;
and the illness made her ugly. Schreiderling said so. He prided himself
on speaking his mind.
When she ceased being pretty, he left her to her own devices, and went
back to the lairs of his bachelordom. She used to trot up and down Simla
Mall in a forlorn sort of way, with a gray Terai hat well on the back of
her head, and a shocking bad saddle under her.
Schreiderling's generosity stopped at the horse. He said that any saddle
would do for a woman as nervous as Mrs. Schreiderling. She never was
asked to dance, because she did not dance well; and she was so dull
and uninteresting, that her box very seldom had any cards in it.
Schreiderling said that if he had known that she was going to be such
a scare-crow after her marriage, he would never have married her. He
always prided himself on speaking his mind, did Schreiderling!
He left her at Simla one August, and went down to his regiment.
Then she revived a little, but she never recovered her looks. I found
out at the Club that the Other Man is coming up sick--very sick--on an
off chance of recovery. The fever and the heart-valves had nearly
killed him. She knew that, too, and she knew--what I had no interest in
knowing--when he was coming up. I suppose he wrote to tell her. They had
not seen each other since a month before the wedding. And here comes the
unpleasant part of the story.
A late call kept me down at the Dovedell Hotel till dusk one evening.
Mrs. Schreidlerling had been flitting up and down the Mall all the
afternoon in the rain. Coming up along the Cart-road, a tonga passed me,
and my pony, tired with standing so long, set off at a canter. Just by
the road down to the Tonga Office Mrs. Schreiderling, dripping from head
to foot, was waiting for the tonga. I turned up-hill, as the tonga was
no affair of mine; and just then she began to shriek. I went back at
once and saw, under the Tonga Office lamps, Mrs. Schreiderling kneeling
in the wet road by the back seat of the newly-arrived tonga, screaming
hideously.
Then she fell face down in the dirt as I came up.
Sitting in the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the
awning-stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache, was the
Other Man--dead. The sixty-mile up-hill jolt had been too much for his
valve, I suppose. The tonga-driver said:--"The Sahib died two stages out
of Solon. Therefore, I tied him with a rope, lest he should fall out
by the way, and so came to Simla. Will the Sahib give me bukshish? IT,"
pointing to the Other Man, "should have given one rupee. "
The Other Man sat with a grin on his face, as if he enjoyed the joke of
his arrival; and Mrs. Schreiderling, in the mud, began to groan. There
was no one except us four in the office and it was raining heavily. The
first thing was to take Mrs. Schreiderling home, and the second was to
prevent her name from being mixed up with the affair. The tonga-driver
received five rupees to find a bazar 'rickshaw for Mrs. Schreiderling.
He was to tell the tonga Babu afterwards of the Other Man, and the Babu
was to make such arrangements as seemed best.
Mrs. Schreiderling was carried into the shed out of the rain, and for
three-quarters of an hour we two waited for the 'rickshaw. The Other
Man was left exactly as he had arrived. Mrs. Schreiderling would do
everything but cry, which might have helped her. She tried to scream as
soon as her senses came back, and then she began praying for the Other
Man's soul. Had she not been as honest as the day, she would have prayed
for her own soul too. I waited to hear her do this, but she did not.
Then I tried to get some of the mud off her habit. Lastly, the 'rickshaw
came, and I got her away--partly by force. It was a terrible business
from beginning to end; but most of all when the 'rickshaw had to squeeze
between the wall and the tonga, and she saw by the lamp-light that thin,
yellow hand grasping the awning-stanchion.
She was taken home just as every one was going to a dance at Viceregal
Lodge--"Peterhoff" it was then--and the doctor found that she had fallen
from her horse, that I had picked her up at the back of Jakko, and
really deserved great credit for the prompt manner in which I had
secured medical aid. She did not die--men of Schreiderling's stamp marry
women who don't die easily. They live and grow ugly.
She never told of her one meeting, since her marriage, with the Other
Man; and, when the chill and cough following the exposure of that
evening, allowed her abroad, she never by word or sign alluded to having
met me by the Tonga Office. Perhaps she never knew.
She used to trot up and down the Mall, on that shocking bad saddle,
looking as if she expected to meet some one round the corner every
minute. Two years afterward, she went Home, and died--at Bournemouth, I
think.
Schreiderling, when he grew maudlin at Mess, used to talk about "my
poor dear wife. " He always set great store on speaking his mind, did
Schreiderling!
CONSEQUENCES.
Rosicrucian subtleties
In the Orient had rise;
Ye may find their teachers still
Under Jacatala's Hill.
Seek ye Bombast Paracelsus,
Read what Flood the Seeker tells us
Of the Dominant that runs
Through the cycles of the Suns--
Read my story last and see
Luna at her apogee.
There are yearly appointments, and two-yearly appointments, and
five-yearly appointments at Simla, and there are, or used to be,
permanent appointments, whereon you stayed up for the term of your
natural life and secured red cheeks and a nice income. Of course, you
could descend in the cold weather; for Simla is rather dull then.
Tarrion came from goodness knows where--all away and away in some
forsaken part of Central India, where they call Pachmari a "Sanitarium,"
and drive behind trotting bullocks, I believe. He belonged to a
regiment; but what he really wanted to do was to escape from his
regiment and live in Simla forever and ever. He had no preference for
anything in particular, beyond a good horse and a nice partner. He
thought he could do everything well; which is a beautiful belief when
you hold it with all your heart. He was clever in many ways, and good to
look at, and always made people round him comfortable--even in Central
India.
So he went up to Simla, and, because he was clever and amusing, he
gravitated naturally to Mrs. Hauksbee, who could forgive everything
but stupidity. Once he did her great service by changing the date on an
invitation-card for a big dance which Mrs. Hauksbee wished to attend,
but couldn't because she had quarrelled with the A. -D. -C. , who took
care, being a mean man, to invite her to a small dance on the 6th
instead of the big Ball of the 26th. It was a very clever piece of
forgery; and when Mrs. Hauksbee showed the A. -D. -C. her invitation-card,
and chaffed him mildly for not better managing his vendettas, he really
thought he had made a mistake; and--which was wise--realized that it
was no use to fight with Mrs. Hauksbee. She was grateful to Tarrion and
asked what she could do for him. He said simply: "I'm a Freelance up
here on leave, and on the lookout for what I can loot. I haven't a
square inch of interest in all Simla. My name isn't known to any man
with an appointment in his gift, and I want an appointment--a good,
sound, pukka one. I believe you can do anything you turn yourself to do.
Will you help me? " Mrs. Hauksbee thought for a minute, and passed
the last of her riding-whip through her lips, as was her custom when
thinking.
Then her eyes sparkled, and she said:--"I will;" and she shook hands
on it. Tarrion, having perfect confidence in this great woman, took no
further thought of the business at all. Except to wonder what sort of an
appointment he would win.
Mrs. Hauksbee began calculating the prices of all the Heads of
Departments and Members of Council she knew, and the more she thought
the more she laughed, because her heart was in the game and it amused
her. Then she took a Civil List and ran over a few of the appointments.
There are some beautiful appointments in the Civil List. Eventually, she
decided that, though Tarrion was too good for the Political Department,
she had better begin by trying to get him in there. What were her own
plans to this end, does not matter in the least, for Luck or Fate played
into her hands, and she had nothing to do but to watch the course of
events and take the credit of them.
All Viceroys, when they first come out, pass through the "Diplomatic
Secrecy" craze. It wears off in time; but they all catch it in the
beginning, because they are new to the country.
The particular Viceroy who was suffering from the complaint just
then--this was a long time ago, before Lord Dufferin ever came from
Canada, or Lord Ripon from the bosom of the English Church--had it very
badly; and the result was that men who were new to keeping official
secrets went about looking unhappy; and the Viceroy plumed himself on
the way in which he had instilled notions of reticence into his Staff.
Now, the Supreme Government have a careless custom of committing
what they do to printed papers. These papers deal with all sorts of
things--from the payment of Rs. 200 to a "secret service" native, up to
rebukes administered to Vakils and Motamids of Native States, and rather
brusque letters to Native Princes, telling them to put their houses
in order, to refrain from kidnapping women, or filling offenders with
pounded red pepper, and eccentricities of that kind. Of course, these
things could never be made public, because Native Princes never err
officially, and their States are, officially, as well administered as
Our territories. Also, the private allowances to various queer people
are not exactly matters to put into newspapers, though they give quaint
reading sometimes.
When the Supreme Government is at Simla, these papers are prepared
there, and go round to the people who ought to see them in office-boxes
or by post. The principle of secrecy was to that Viceroy quite as
important as the practice, and he held that a benevolent despotism like
Ours should never allow even little things, such as appointments of
subordinate clerks, to leak out till the proper time. He was always
remarkable for his principles.
There was a very important batch of papers in preparation at that time.
It had to travel from one end of Simla to the other by hand.
It was not put into an official envelope, but a large, square, pale-pink
one; the matter being in MS. on soft crinkly paper. It was addressed to
"The Head Clerk, etc. , etc. " Now, between "The Head Clerk, etc. , etc. ,"
and "Mrs. Hauksbee" and a flourish, is no very great difference if the
address be written in a very bad hand, as this was. The chaprassi who
took the envelope was not more of an idiot than most chaprassis. He
merely forgot where this most unofficial cover was to be delivered, and
so asked the first Englishman he met, who happened to be a man riding
down to Annandale in a great hurry. The Englishman hardly looked, said:
"Hauksbee Sahib ki Mem," and went on. So did the chaprassi, because that
letter was the last in stock and he wanted to get his work over. There
was no book to sign; he thrust the letter into Mrs. Hauksbee's bearer's
hands and went off to smoke with a friend.
Mrs. Hauksbee was expecting some cut-out pattern things in flimsy paper
from a friend. As soon as she got the big square packet, therefore, she
said, "Oh, the DEAR creature! " and tore it open with a paper-knife, and
all the MS. enclosures tumbled out on the floor.
Mrs. Hauksbee began reading. I have said the batch was rather
important. That is quite enough for you to know. It referred to some
correspondence, two measures, a peremptory order to a native chief and
two dozen other things. Mrs. Hauksbee gasped as she read, for the first
glimpse of the naked machinery of the Great Indian Government, stripped
of its casings, and lacquer, and paint, and guard-rails, impresses even
the most stupid man. And Mrs. Hauksbee was a clever woman. She was
a little afraid at first, and felt as if she had laid hold of a
lightning-flash by the tail, and did not quite know what to do with it.
There were remarks and initials at the side of the papers; and some
of the remarks were rather more severe than the papers. The initials
belonged to men who are all dead or gone now; but they were great in
their day.
Mrs. Hauksbee read on and thought calmly as she read. Then the value of
her trove struck her, and she cast about for the best method of using
it. Then Tarrion dropped in, and they read through all the papers
together, and Tarrion, not knowing how she had come by them, vowed that
Mrs. Hauksbee was the greatest woman on earth.
Which I believe was true, or nearly so.
"The honest course is always the best," said Tarrion after an hour and a
half of study and conversation. "All things considered, the Intelligence
Branch is about my form. Either that or the Foreign Office. I go to lay
siege to the High Gods in their Temples. "
He did not seek a little man, or a little big man, or a weak Head of a
strong Department, but he called on the biggest and strongest man that
the Government owned, and explained that he wanted an appointment at
Simla on a good salary. The compound insolence of this amused the Strong
Man, and, as he had nothing to do for the moment, he listened to the
proposals of the audacious Tarrion.
"You have, I presume, some special qualifications, besides the gift of
self-assertion, for the claims you put forwards? " said the Strong Man.
"That, Sir," said Tarrion, "is for you to judge. " Then he began, for
he had a good memory, quoting a few of the more important notes in the
papers--slowly and one by one as a man drops chlorodyne into a glass.
When he had reached the peremptory order--and it WAS a peremptory
order--the Strong Man was troubled.
Tarrion wound up:--"And I fancy that special knowledge of this kind is
at least as valuable for, let us say, a berth in the Foreign Office, as
the fact of being the nephew of a distinguished officer's wife. " That
hit the Strong Man hard, for the last appointment to the Foreign Office
had been by black favor, and he knew it. "I'll see what I can do for
you," said the Strong Man. "Many thanks," said Tarrion. Then he left,
and the Strong Man departed to see how the appointment was to be
blocked. . . . . . . . . .
Followed a pause of eleven days; with thunders and lightnings and much
telegraphing. The appointment was not a very important one, carrying
only between Rs. 500 and Rs. 700 a month; but, as the Viceroy said, it
was the principle of diplomatic secrecy that had to be maintained,
and it was more than likely that a boy so well supplied with special
information would be worth translating. So they translated him. They
must have suspected him, though he protested that his information was
due to singular talents of his own. Now, much of this story, including
the after-history of the missing envelope, you must fill in for
yourself, because there are reasons why it cannot be written. If you do
not know about things Up Above, you won't understand how to fill it in,
and you will say it is impossible.
What the Viceroy said when Tarrion was introduced to him was:--"So, this
is the boy who 'rusked' the Government of India, is it? Recollect, Sir,
that is not done TWICE. " So he must have known something.
What Tarrion said when he saw his appointment gazetted was:--"If Mrs.
Hauksbee were twenty years younger, and I her husband, I should be
Viceroy of India in twenty years. "
What Mrs.
