I think he was right; but Dicky Hatt never
reappeared
to settle the
question.
question.
Kipling - Poems
The Legal Member had built,
and bolstered, and embroidered, and amended that Bill, till it looked
beautiful on paper. Then the Council began to settle what they called
the "minor details. " As if any Englishman legislating for natives knows
enough to know which are the minor and which are the major points, from
the native point of view, of any measure! That Bill was a triumph of
"safe-guarding the interests of the tenant. " One clause provided that
land should not be leased on longer terms than five years at a stretch;
because, if the landlord had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years,
he would squeeze the very life out of him. The notion was to keep up
a stream of independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and
ethnologically and politically the notion was correct. The only drawback
was that it was altogether wrong. A native's life in India implies the
life of his son. Wherefore, you cannot legislate for one generation at
a time. You must consider the next from the native point of view.
Curiously enough, the native now and then, and in Northern India more
particularly, hates being over-protected against himself. There was
a Naga village once, where they lived on dead AND buried Commissariat
mules. . . . But that is another story.
For many reasons, to be explained later, the people concerned objected
to the Bill. The Native Member in Council knew as much about Punjabis as
he knew about Charing Cross. He had said in Calcutta that "the Bill was
entirely in accord with the desires of that large and important class,
the cultivators;" and so on, and so on. The Legal Member's knowledge
of natives was limited to English-speaking Durbaris, and his own red
chaprassis, the Sub-Montane Tracts concerned no one in particular,
the Deputy Commissioners were a good deal too driven to make
representations, and the measure was one which dealt with small
landholders only. Nevertheless, the Legal Member prayed that it might be
correct, for he was a nervously conscientious man. He did not know that
no man can tell what natives think unless he mixes with them with the
varnish off. And not always then. But he did the best he knew. And the
measure came up to the Supreme Council for the final touches, while Tods
patrolled the Burra Simla Bazar in his morning rides, and played with
the monkey belonging to Ditta Mull, the bunnia, and listened, as a child
listens to all the stray talk about this new freak of the Lat Sahib's.
One day there was a dinner-party, at the house of Tods' Mamma, and the
Legal Member came. Tods was in bed, but he kept awake till he heard the
bursts of laughter from the men over the coffee. Then he paddled out in
his little red flannel dressing-gown and his night-suit, and took refuge
by the side of his father, knowing that he would not be sent back. "See
the miseries of having a family! " said Tods' father, giving Tods three
prunes, some water in a glass that had been used for claret, and telling
him to sit still. Tods sucked the prunes slowly, knowing that he would
have to go when they were finished, and sipped the pink water like a man
of the world, as he listened to the conversation. Presently, the Legal
Member, talking "shop," to the Head of a Department, mentioned his Bill
by its full name--"The Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment. "
Tods caught the one native word, and lifting up his small voice
said:--"Oh, I know ALL about that! Has it been murramutted yet,
Councillor Sahib? "
"How much? " said the Legal Member.
"Murramutted--mended. --Put theek, you know--made nice to please Ditta
Mull! "
The Legal Member left his place and moved up next to Tods.
"What do you know about Ryotwari, little man? " he said.
"I'm not a little man, I'm Tods, and I know ALL about it. Ditta Mull,
and Choga Lall, and Amir Nath, and--oh, lakhs of my friends tell me
about it in the bazars when I talk to them. "
"Oh, they do--do they? What do they say, Tods? "
Tods tucked his feet under his red flannel dressing-gown and said:--"I
must fink. "
The Legal Member waited patiently. Then Tods, with infinite compassion:
"You don't speak my talk, do you, Councillor Sahib? "
"No; I am sorry to say I do not," said the Legal' Member.
"Very well," said Tods. "I must fink in English. "
He spent a minute putting his ideas in order, and began very slowly,
translating in his mind from the vernacular to English, as many
Anglo-Indian children do. You must remember that the Legal Member
helped him on by questions when he halted, for Tods was not equal to the
sustained flight of oratory that follows.
"Ditta Mull says:--'This thing is the talk of a child, and was made up
by fools. ' But I don't think you are a fool, Councillor Sahib," said
Tods, hastily. "You caught my goat. This is what Ditta Mull says:--'I am
not a fool, and why should the Sirkar say I am a child? I can see if
the land is good and if the landlord is good. If I am a fool, the sin is
upon my own head. For five years I take my ground for which I have saved
money, and a wife I take too, and a little son is born. ' Ditta Mull has
one daughter now, but he SAYS he will have a son, soon. And he says: 'At
the end of five years, by this new bundobust, I must go. If I do not go,
I must get fresh seals and takkus-stamps on the papers, perhaps in the
middle of the harvest, and to go to the law-courts once is wisdom, but
to go twice is Jehannum. ' That is QUITE true," explained Tods, gravely.
"All my friends say so. And Ditta Mull says:--'Always fresh takkus and
paying money to vakils and chaprassis and law-courts every five years or
else the landlord makes me go. Why do I want to go? Am I fool? If I am a
fool and do not know, after forty years, good land when I see it, let
me die! But if the new bundobust says for FIFTEEN years, then it is
good and wise. My little son is a man, and I am burnt, and he takes the
ground or another ground, paying only once for the takkus-stamps on the
papers, and his little son is born, and at the end of fifteen years is
a man too. But what profit is there in five years and fresh papers?
Nothing but dikh, trouble, dikh. We are not young men who take these
lands, but old ones--not jais, but tradesmen with a little money--and
for fifteen years we shall have peace. Nor are we children that the
Sirkar should treat us so. "
Here Tods stopped short, for the whole table were listening. The Legal
Member said to Tods: "Is that all? "
"All I can remember," said Tods. "But you should see Ditta Mull's big
monkey. It's just like a Councillor Sahib. "
"Tods! Go to bed," said his father.
Tods gathered up his dressing-gown tail and departed.
The Legal Member brought his hand down on the table with a crash--"By
Jove! " said the Legal Member, "I believe the boy is right. The short
tenure IS the weak point. "
He left early, thinking over what Tods had said. Now, it was obviously
impossible for the Legal Member to play with a bunnia's monkey, by way
of getting understanding; but he did better. He made inquiries,
always bearing in mind the fact that the real native--not the hybrid,
University-trained mule--is as timid as a colt, and, little by little,
he coaxed some of the men whom the measure concerned most intimately to
give in their views, which squared very closely with Tods' evidence.
So the Bill was amended in that clause; and the Legal Member was filled
with an uneasy suspicion that Native Members represent very little
except the Orders they carry on their bosoms. But he put the thought
from him as illiberal. He was a most Liberal Man.
After a time the news spread through the bazars that Tods had got the
Bill recast in the tenure clause, and if Tods' Mamma had not interfered,
Tods would have made himself sick on the baskets of fruit and pistachio
nuts and Cabuli grapes and almonds that crowded the verandah. Till he
went Home, Tods ranked some few degrees before the Viceroy in popular
estimation. But for the little life of him Tods could not understand
why.
In the Legal Member's private-paper-box still lies the rough draft of
the Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment; and, opposite the
twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal
Member, are the words "Tods' Amendment. "
IN THE PRIDE OF HIS YOUTH.
"Stopped in the straight when the race was his own!
Look at him cutting it--cur to the bone! "
"Ask ere the youngster be rated and chidden,
What did he carry and how was he ridden?
Maybe they used him too much at the start;
Maybe Fate's weight-cloths are breaking his heart. "
--Life's Handicap.
When I was telling you of the joke that The Worm played off on the
Senior Subaltern, I promised a somewhat similar tale, but with all the
jest left out. This is that tale:
Dicky Hatt was kidnapped in his early, early youth--neither by
landlady's daughter, housemaid, barmaid, nor cook, but by a girl so
nearly of his own caste that only a woman could have said she was just
the least little bit in the world below it. This happened a month
before he came out to India, and five days after his one-and-twentieth
birthday. The girl was nineteen--six years older than Dicky in the
things of this world, that is to say--and, for the time, twice as
foolish as he.
Excepting, always, falling off a horse there is nothing more fatally
easy than marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less than
fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-shop. After
the declarations of residence have been put in, four minutes will
cover the rest of the proceedings--fees, attestation, and all. Then the
Registrar slides the blotting-pad over the names, and says grimly, with
his pen between his teeth:--"Now you're man and wife;" and the couple
walk out into the street, feeling as if something were horribly illegal
somewhere.
But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just
as thoroughly as the "long as ye both shall live" curse from the
altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and "The Voice that
breathed o'er Eden" lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt
kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had received an
appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary from the Home
point of view. The marriage was to be kept secret for a year. Then Mrs.
Dicky Hatt was to come out and the rest of life was to be a glorious
golden mist. That was how they sketched it under the Addison Road
Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend and Dicky
steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings
a week bed-and-living room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near
the Knightsbridge Barracks.
But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land, where "men" of
twenty-one were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was expensive.
The salary that loomed so large six thousand miles away did not go far.
Particularly when Dicky divided it by two, and remitted more than the
fair half, at 1-6, to Montpelier Square. One hundred and thirty-five
rupees out of three hundred and thirty is not much to live on; but
it was absurd to suppose that Mrs. Hatt could exist forever on the 20
pounds held back by Dicky, from his outfit allowance. Dicky saw this,
and remitted at once; always remembering that Rs. 700 were to be paid,
twelve months later, for a first-class passage out for a lady. When you
add to these trifling details the natural instincts of a boy beginning a
new life in a new country and longing to go about and enjoy himself, and
the necessity for grappling with strange work--which, properly speaking,
should take up a boy's undivided attention--you will see that Dicky
started handicapped. He saw it himself for a breath or two; but he did
not guess the full beauty of his future.
As the hot weather began, the shackles settled on him and ate into his
flesh. First would come letters--big, crossed, seven sheet letters--from
his wife, telling him how she longed to see him, and what a Heaven upon
earth would be their property when they met.
Then some boy of the chummery wherein Dicky lodged would pound on the
door of his bare little room, and tell him to come out and look at a
pony--the very thing to suit him. Dicky could not afford ponies. He had
to explain this. Dicky could not afford living in the chummery, modest
as it was. He had to explain this before he moved to a single room next
the office where he worked all day. He kept house on a green oil-cloth
table-cover, one chair, one charpoy, one photograph, one tooth-glass,
very strong and thick, a seven-rupee eight-anna filter, and messing by
contract at thirty-seven rupees a month. Which last item was extortion.
He had no punkah, for a punkah costs fifteen rupees a month; but he
slept on the roof of the office with all his wife's letters under his
pillow. Now and again he was asked out to dinner where he got both a
punkah and an iced drink. But this was seldom, for people objected
to recognizing a boy who had evidently the instincts of a Scotch
tallow-chandler, and who lived in such a nasty fashion. Dicky could not
subscribe to any amusement, so he found no amusement except the pleasure
of turning over his Bank-book and reading what it said about "loans
on approved security. " That cost nothing. He remitted through a Bombay
Bank, by the way, and the Station knew nothing of his private affairs.
Every month he sent Home all he could possibly spare for his wife--and
for another reason which was expected to explain itself shortly and
would require more money.
About this time, Dicky was overtaken with the nervous, haunting fear
that besets married men when they are out of sorts. He had no pension to
look to. What if he should die suddenly, and leave his wife unprovided
for? The thought used to lay hold of him in the still, hot nights on the
roof, till the shaking of his heart made him think that he was going to
die then and there of heart-disease.
Now this is a frame of mind which no boy has a right to know. It is
a strong man's trouble; but, coming when it did, it nearly drove poor
punkah-less, perspiring Dicky Hatt mad. He could tell no one about it.
A certain amount of "screw" is as necessary for a man as for a
billiard-ball. It makes them both do wonderful things. Dicky needed
money badly, and he worked for it like a horse. But, naturally, the men
who owned him knew that a boy can live very comfortably on a certain
income--pay in India is a matter of age, not merit, you see, and if
their particular boy wished to work like two boys, Business forbid that
they should stop him! But Business forbid that they should give him an
increase of pay at his present ridiculously immature age! So Dicky won
certain rises of salary--ample for a boy--not enough for a wife and
child--certainly too little for the seven-hundred-rupee passage that he
and Mrs. Hatt had discussed so lightly once upon a time. And with this
he was forced to be content.
Somehow, all his money seemed to fade away in Home drafts and the
crushing Exchange, and the tone of the Home letters changed and grew
querulous. "Why wouldn't Dicky have his wife and the baby out? Surely he
had a salary--a fine salary--and it was too bad of him to enjoy himself
in India. But would he--could he--make the next draft a little more
elastic? " Here followed a list of baby's kit, as long as a Parsee's
bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and the little son
he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy is entitled
to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-man letters,
saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and would the little
wife wait yet a little longer? But the little wife, however much she
approved of money, objected to waiting, and there was a strange, hard
sort of ring in her letters that Dicky didn't understand. How could he,
poor boy?
Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another
youngster who had "made a fool of himself," as the saying is--that
matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement, but
would lose him his present appointment--came the news that the baby, his
own little, little son, had died, and, behind this, forty lines of
an angry woman's scrawl, saying that death might have been averted if
certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if the mother and
the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at Dicky's naked heart;
but, not being officially entitled to a baby, he could show no sign of
trouble.
How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept
alight to force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on, the
seven-hundred-rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style of living
unchanged, except when he launched into a new filter.
There was the strain of his office-work, and the strain of his
remittances, and the knowledge of his boy's death, which touched the boy
more, perhaps, than it would have touched a man; and, beyond all, the
enduring strain of his daily life. Gray-headed seniors, who approved
of his thrift and his fashion of denying himself everything pleasant,
reminded him of the old saw that says:
"If a youth would be distinguished in his art, art, art,
He must keep the girls away from his heart, heart, heart. "
And Dicky, who fancied he had been through every trouble that a man is
permitted to know, had to laugh and agree; with the last line of his
balanced Bank-book jingling in his head day and night.
But he had one more sorrow to digest before the end. There arrived a
letter from the little wife--the natural sequence of the others if
Dicky had only known it--and the burden of that letter was "gone with
a handsomer man than you. " It was a rather curious production, without
stops, something like this:--"She was not going to wait forever and the
baby was dead and Dicky was only a boy and he would never set eyes on
her again and why hadn't he waved his handkerchief to her when he left
Gravesend and God was her judge she was a wicked woman but Dicky was
worse enjoying himself in India and this other man loved the ground she
trod on and would Dicky ever forgive her for she would never forgive
Dicky; and there was no address to write to. "
Instead of thanking his lucky stars that he was free, Dicky discovered
exactly how an injured husband feels--again, not at all the knowledge
to which a boy is entitled--for his mind went back to his wife as he
remembered her in the thirty-shilling "suite" in Montpelier Square, when
the dawn of his last morning in England was breaking, and she was crying
in the bed. Whereat he rolled about on his bed and bit his fingers. He
never stopped to think whether, if he had met Mrs. Hatt after those
two years, he would have discovered that he and she had grown quite
different and new persons. This, theoretically, he ought to have done.
He spent the night after the English Mail came in rather severe pain.
Next morning, Dicky Hatt felt disinclined to work. He argued that he had
missed the pleasure of youth. He was tired, and he had tasted all the
sorrow in life before three-and-twenty. His Honor was gone--that was the
man; and now he, too, would go to the Devil--that was the boy in him. So
he put his head down on the green oil-cloth table-cover, and wept before
resigning his post, and all it offered.
But the reward of his services came. He was given three days to
reconsider himself, and the Head of the establishment, after some
telegraphings, said that it was a most unusual step, but, in view of the
ability that Mr. Hatt had displayed at such and such a time, at such and
such junctures, he was in a position to offer him an infinitely superior
post--first on probation, and later, in the natural course of things,
on confirmation. "And how much does the post carry? " said Dicky. "Six
hundred and fifty rupees," said the Head slowly, expecting to see the
young man sink with gratitude and joy.
And it came then! The seven hundred rupee passage, and enough to have
saved the wife, and the little son, and to have allowed of assured and
open marriage, came then. Dicky burst into a roar of laughter--laughter
he could not check--nasty, jangling merriment that seemed as if it
would go on forever. When he had recovered himself he said, quite
seriously:--"I'm tired of work. I'm an old man now. It's about time I
retired. And I will. "
"The boy's mad! " said the Head.
I think he was right; but Dicky Hatt never reappeared to settle the
question.
PIG.
Go, stalk the red deer o'er the heather
Ride, follow the fox if you can!
But, for pleasure and profit together,
Allow me the hunting of Man,--
The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul
To its ruin,--the hunting of Man.
--The Old Shikarri.
I believe the difference began in the matter of a horse, with a twist in
his temper, whom Pinecoffin sold to Nafferton and by whom Nafferton was
nearly slain. There may have been other causes of offence; the horse was
the official stalking-horse. Nafferton was very angry; but Pinecoffin
laughed and said that he had never guaranteed the beast's manners.
Nafferton laughed, too, though he vowed that he would write off his fall
against Pinecoffin if he waited five years. Now, a Dalesman from beyond
Skipton will forgive an injury when the Strid lets a man live; but a
South Devon man is as soft as a Dartmoor bog. You can see from their
names that Nafferton had the race-advantage of Pinecoffin. He was a
peculiar man, and his notions of humor were cruel. He taught me a new
and fascinating form of shikar. He hounded Pinecoffin from Mithankot
to Jagadri, and from Gurgaon to Abbottabad up and across the Punjab,
a large province and in places remarkably dry. He said that he had no
intention of allowing Assistant Commissioners to "sell him pups," in the
shape of ramping, screaming countrybreds, without making their lives a
burden to them.
Most Assistant Commissioners develop a bent for some special work after
their first hot weather in the country. The boys with digestions hope to
write their names large on the Frontier and struggle for dreary places
like Bannu and Kohat. The bilious ones climb into the Secretariat. Which
is very bad for the liver.
Others are bitten with a mania for District work, Ghuznivide coins or
Persian poetry; while some, who come of farmers' stock, find that the
smell of the Earth after the Rains gets into their blood, and calls them
to "develop the resources of the Province. " These men are enthusiasts.
Pinecoffin belonged to their class. He knew a great many facts bearing
on the cost of bullocks and temporary wells, and opium-scrapers, and
what happens if you burn too much rubbish on a field, in the hope of
enriching used-up soil. All the Pinecoffins come of a landholding
breed, and so the land only took back her own again. Unfortunately--most
unfortunately for Pinecoffin--he was a Civilian, as well as a
farmer. Nafferton watched him, and thought about the horse. Nafferton
said:--"See me chase that boy till he drops! " I said:--"You can't get
your knife into an Assistant Commissioner. " Nafferton told me that I did
not understand the administration of the Province.
Our Government is rather peculiar. It gushes on the agricultural and
general information side, and will supply a moderately respectable man
with all sorts of "economic statistics," if he speaks to it prettily.
For instance, you are interested in gold-washing in the sands of the
Sutlej. You pull the string, and find that it wakes up half a dozen
Departments, and finally communicates, say, with a friend of yours
in the Telegraph, who once wrote some notes on the customs of the
gold-washers when he was on construction-work in their part of the
Empire. He may or may not be pleased at being ordered to write out
everything he knows for your benefit. This depends on his temperament.
The bigger man you are, the more information and the greater trouble can
you raise.
Nafferton was not a big man; but he had the reputation of being very
"earnest. " An "earnest" man can do much with a Government. There was
an earnest man who once nearly wrecked. . . but all India knows THAT
story. I am not sure what real "earnestness" is. A very fair imitation
can be manufactured by neglecting to dress decently, by mooning about in
a dreamy, misty sort of way, by taking office-work home after staying
in office till seven, and by receiving crowds of native gentlemen on
Sundays. That is one sort of "earnestness. "
Nafferton cast about for a peg whereon to hang his earnestness, and for
a string that would communicate with Pinecoffin. He found both.
They were Pig. Nafferton became an earnest inquirer after Pig. He
informed the Government that he had a scheme whereby a very large
percentage of the British Army in India could be fed, at a very large
saving, on Pig. Then he hinted that Pinecoffin might supply him with the
"varied information necessary to the proper inception of the scheme. "
So the Government wrote on the back of the letter:--"Instruct Mr.
Pinecoffin to furnish Mr. Nafferton with any information in his power. "
Government is very prone to writing things on the backs of letters
which, later, lead to trouble and confusion.
Nafferton had not the faintest interest in Pig, but he knew that
Pinecoffin would flounce into the trap. Pinecoffin was delighted at
being consulted about Pig. The Indian Pig is not exactly an important
factor in agricultural life; but Nafferton explained to Pinecoffin that
there was room for improvement, and corresponded direct with that young
man.
You may think that there is not much to be evolved from Pig. It all
depends how you set to work. Pinecoffin being a Civilian and wishing
to do things thoroughly, began with an essay on the Primitive Pig, the
Mythology of the Pig, and the Dravidian Pig.
Nafferton filed that information--twenty-seven foolscap sheets--and
wanted to know about the distribution of the Pig in the Punjab, and
how it stood the Plains in the hot weather. From this point onwards,
remember that I am giving you only the barest outlines of the
affair--the guy-ropes, as it were, of the web that Nafferton spun round
Pinecoffin.
Pinecoffin made a colored Pig-population map, and collected observations
on the comparative longevity of the Pig (a) in the sub-montane tracts of
the Himalayas, and (b) in the Rechna Doab.
Nafferton filed that, and asked what sort of people looked after Pig.
This started an ethnological excursus on swineherds, and drew from
Pinecoffin long tables showing the proportion per thousand of the caste
in the Derajat. Nafferton filed that bundle, and explained that the
figures which he wanted referred to the Cis-Sutlej states, where he
understood that Pigs were very fine and large, and where he proposed
to start a Piggery. By this time, Government had quite forgotten their
instructions to Mr. Pinecoffin.
They were like the gentlemen, in Keats' poem, who turned well-oiled
wheels to skin other people. But Pinecoffin was just entering into the
spirit of the Pig-hunt, as Nafferton well knew he would do. He had a
fair amount of work of his own to clear away; but he sat up of nights
reducing Pig to five places of decimals for the honor of his Service. He
was not going to appear ignorant of so easy a subject as Pig.
Then Government sent him on special duty to Kohat, to "inquire into"
the big-seven-foot, iron-shod spades of that District. People had been
killing each other with those peaceful tools; and Government wished
to know "whether a modified form of agricultural implement could
not, tentatively and as a temporary measure, be introduced among the
agricultural population without needlessly or unduly exasperating the
existing religious sentiments of the peasantry. "
Between those spades and Nafferton's Pig, Pinecoffin was rather heavily
burdened.
Nafferton now began to take up "(a) The food-supply of the indigenous Pig,
with a view to the improvement of its capacities as a flesh-former.
(b) The acclimatization of the exotic Pig, maintaining its distinctive
peculiarities. " Pinecoffin replied exhaustively that the exotic Pig
would become merged in the indigenous type; and quoted horse-breeding
statistics to prove this.
The side-issue was debated, at great length on Pinecoffin's side, till
Nafferton owned that he had been in the wrong, and moved the previous
question. When Pinecoffin had quite written himself out about
flesh-formers, and fibrins, and glucose and the nitrogenous constituents
of maize and lucerne, Nafferton raised the question of expense. By this
time Pinecoffin, who had been transferred from Kohat, had developed a
Pig theory of his own, which he stated in thirty-three folio pages--all
carefully filed by Nafferton. Who asked for more.
These things took ten months, and Pinecoffin's interest in the potential
Piggery seemed to die down after he had stated his own views. But
Nafferton bombarded him with letters on "the Imperial aspect of
the scheme, as tending to officialize the sale of pork, and thereby
calculated to give offence to the Mahomedan population of Upper India. "
He guessed that Pinecoffin would want some broad, free-hand work after
his niggling, stippling, decimal details.
Pinecoffin handled the latest development of the case in masterly
style, and proved that no "popular ebullition of excitement was to
be apprehended. " Nafferton said that there was nothing like Civilian
insight in matters of this kind, and lured him up a bye-path--"the
possible profits to accrue to the Government from the sale of
hog-bristles. " There is an extensive literature of hog-bristles, and the
shoe, brush, and colorman's trades recognize more varieties of bristles
than you would think possible. After Pinecoffin had wondered a little
at Nafferton's rage for information, he sent back a monograph, fifty-one
pages, on "Products of the Pig. " This led him, under Nafferton's tender
handling, straight to the Cawnpore factories, the trade in hog-skin
for saddles--and thence to the tanners. Pinecoffin wrote that
pomegranate-seed was the best cure for hog-skin, and suggested--for the
past fourteen months had wearied him--that Nafferton should "raise his
pigs before he tanned them. "
Nafferton went back to the second section of his fifth question.
How could the exotic Pig be brought to give as much pork as it did in
the West and yet "assume the essentially hirsute characteristics of its
oriental congener? " Pinecoffin felt dazed, for he had forgotten what
he had written sixteen month's before, and fancied that he was about
to reopen the entire question. He was too far involved in the hideous
tangle to retreat, and, in a weak moment, he wrote:--"Consult my first
letter. " Which related to the Dravidian Pig. As a matter of fact,
Pinecoffin had still to reach the acclimatization stage; having gone off
on a side-issue on the merging of types.
THEN Nafferton really unmasked his batteries! He complained to the
Government, in stately language, of "the paucity of help accorded to me
in my earnest attempts to start a potentially remunerative industry, and
the flippancy with which my requests for information are treated by a
gentleman whose pseudo-scholarly attainments should at lest have taught
him the primary differences between the Dravidian and the Berkshire
variety of the genus Sus. If I am to understand that the letter to which
he refers me contains his serious views on the acclimatization of a
valuable, though possibly uncleanly, animal, I am reluctantly compelled
to believe," etc. , etc.
There was a new man at the head of the Department of Castigation.
The wretched Pinecoffin was told that the Service was made for the
Country, and not the Country for the Service, and that he had better
begin to supply information about Pigs.
Pinecoffin answered insanely that he had written everything that could
be written about Pig, and that some furlough was due to him.
Nafferton got a copy of that letter, and sent it, with the essay on the
Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in full. The
essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of
paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not
have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant
self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter
inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question. " Many
friends cut out these remarks and sent them to Pinecoffin.
I have already stated that Pinecoffin came of a soft stock. This last
stroke frightened and shook him. He could not understand it; but he felt
he had been, somehow, shamelessly betrayed by Nafferton.
He realized that he had wrapped himself up in the Pigskin without need,
and that he could not well set himself right with his Government. All
his acquaintances asked after his "nebulous discursiveness" or his
"blatant self-sufficiency," and this made him miserable.
He took a train and went to Nafferton, whom he had not seen since
the Pig business began. He also took the cutting from the paper, and
blustered feebly and called Nafferton names, and then died down to a
watery, weak protest of the "I-say-it's-too-bad-you-know" order.
Nafferton was very sympathetic.
"I'm afraid I've given you a good deal of trouble, haven't I? " said he.
"Trouble! " whimpered Pinecoffin; "I don't mind the trouble so much,
though that was bad enough; but what I resent is this showing up in
print. It will stick to me like a burr all through my service. And I DID
do my best for your interminable swine. It's too bad of you, on my soul
it is! "
"I don't know," said Nafferton; "have you ever been stuck with a horse?
It isn't the money I mind, though that is bad enough; but what I resent
is the chaff that follows, especially from the boy who stuck me. But I
think we'll cry quite now. "
Pinecoffin found nothing to say save bad words; and Nafferton smiled
ever so sweetly, and asked him to dinner.
THE ROUT OF THE WHITE HUSSARS.
It was not in the open fight
We threw away the sword,
But in the lonely watching
In the darkness by the ford.
The waters lapped, the night-wind blew,
Full-armed the Fear was born and grew,
And we were flying ere we knew
From panic in the night.
--Beoni Bar.
Some people hold that an English Cavalry regiment cannot run. This is
a mistake. I have seen four hundred and thirty-seven sabres flying over
the face of the country in abject terror--have seen the best Regiment
that ever drew bridle, wiped off the Army List for the space of two
hours. If you repeat this tale to the White Hussars they will, in all
probability, treat you severely. They are not proud of the incident.
You may know the White Hussars by their "side," which is greater than
that of all the Cavalry Regiments on the roster. If this is not a
sufficient mark, you may know them by their old brandy. It has been
sixty years in the Mess and is worth going far to taste.
Ask for the "McGaire" old brandy, and see that you get it. If the Mess
Sergeant thinks that you are uneducated, and that the genuine article
will be lost on you, he will treat you accordingly. He is a good man.
But, when you are at Mess, you must never talk to your hosts about
forced marches or long-distance rides. The Mess are very sensitive; and,
if they think that you are laughing at them, will tell you so.
As the White Hussars say, it was all the Colonel's fault. He was a new
man, and he ought never to have taken the Command. He said that the
Regiment was not smart enough. This to the White Hussars, who knew they
could walk round any Horse and through any Guns, and over any Foot on
the face of the earth! That insult was the first cause of offence.
Then the Colonel cast the Drum-Horse--the Drum-Horse of the White
Hussars! Perhaps you do not see what an unspeakable crime he had
committed. I will try to make it clear. The soul of the Regiment lives
in the Drum-Horse, who carries the silver kettle-drums. He is nearly
always a big piebald Waler. That is a point of honor; and a Regiment
will spend anything you please on a piebald. He is beyond the ordinary
laws of casting. His work is very light, and he only manoeuvres at a
foot-pace. Wherefore, so long as he can step out and look handsome,
his well-being is assured. He knows more about the Regiment than the
Adjutant, and could not make a mistake if he tried.
The Drum-Horse of the White Hussars was only eighteen years old, and
perfectly equal to his duties. He had at least six years' more work in
him, and carried himself with all the pomp and dignity of a Drum-Major
of the Guards. The Regiment had paid Rs. 1,200 for him.
But the Colonel said that he must go, and he was cast in due form and
replaced by a washy, bay beast as ugly as a mule, with a ewe-neck,
rat-tail, and cow-hocks. The Drummer detested that animal, and the best
of the Band-horses put back their ears and showed the whites of their
eyes at the very sight of him. They knew him for an upstart and no
gentleman. I fancy that the Colonel's ideas of smartness extended to
the Band, and that he wanted to make it take part in the regular parade
movements. A Cavalry Band is a sacred thing. It only turns out for
Commanding Officers' parades, and the Band Master is one degree more
important than the Colonel. He is a High Priest and the "Keel Row" is
his holy song. The "Keel Row" is the Cavalry Trot; and the man who has
never heard that tune rising, high and shrill, above the rattle of the
Regiment going past the saluting-base, has something yet to hear and
understand.
When the Colonel cast the Drum-horse of the White Hussars, there was
nearly a mutiny.
The officers were angry, the Regiment were furious, and the Bandsman
swore--like troopers. The Drum-Horse was going to be put up to
auction--public auction--to be bought, perhaps, by a Parsee and put into
a cart! It was worse than exposing the inner life of the Regiment to the
whole world, or selling the Mess Plate to a Jew--a black Jew.
The Colonel was a mean man and a bully. He knew what the Regiment
thought about his action; and, when the troopers offered to buy the
Drum-Horse, he said that their offer was mutinous and forbidden by the
Regulations.
But one of the Subalterns--Hogan-Yale, an Irishman--bought the
Drum-Horse for Rs. 160 at the sale; and the Colonel was wroth. Yale
professed repentance--he was unnaturally submissive--and said that,
as he had only made the purchase to save the horse from possible
ill-treatment and starvation, he would now shoot him and end the
business. This appeared to soothe the Colonel, for he wanted the
Drum-Horse disposed of. He felt that he had made a mistake, and could
not of course acknowledge it. Meantime, the presence of the Drum-Horse
was an annoyance to him.
Yale took to himself a glass of the old brandy, three cheroots, and his
friend, Martyn; and they all left the Mess together. Yale and Martyn
conferred for two hours in Yale's quarters; but only the bull-terrier
who keeps watch over Yale's boot-trees knows what they said. A horse,
hooded and sheeted to his ears, left Yale's stables and was taken, very
unwillingly, into the Civil Lines. Yale's groom went with him. Two men
broke into the Regimental Theatre and took several paint-pots and some
large scenery brushes. Then night fell over the Cantonments, and there
was a noise as of a horse kicking his loose-box to pieces in Yale's
stables. Yale had a big, old, white Waler trap-horse.
The next day was a Thursday, and the men, hearing that Yale was going
to shoot the Drum-Horse in the evening, determined to give the beast a
regular regimental funeral--a finer one than they would have given the
Colonel had he died just then. They got a bullock-cart and some sacking,
and mounds and mounds of roses, and the body, under sacking, was carried
out to the place where the anthrax cases were cremated; two-thirds of
the Regiment followed. There was no Band, but they all sang "The Place
where the old Horse died" as something respectful and appropriate to the
occasion. When the corpse was dumped into the grave and the men began
throwing down armfuls of roses to cover it, the Farrier-Sergeant ripped
out an oath and said aloud:--"Why, it ain't the Drum-Horse any more than
it's me! " The Troop-Sergeant-Majors asked him whether he had left
his head in the Canteen. The Farrier-Sergeant said that he knew the
Drum-Horse's feet as well as he knew his own; but he was silenced
when he saw the regimental number burnt in on the poor stiff, upturned
near-fore.
Thus was the Drum-Horse of the White Hussars buried; the
Farrier-Sergeant grumbling. The sacking that covered the corpse was
smeared in places with black paint; and the Farrier-Sergeant drew
attention to this fact. But the Troop-Sergeant-Major of E Troop kicked
him severely on the shin, and told him that he was undoubtedly drunk.
On the Monday following the burial, the Colonel sought revenge on the
White Hussars. Unfortunately, being at that time temporarily in Command
of the Station, he ordered a Brigade field-day.
and bolstered, and embroidered, and amended that Bill, till it looked
beautiful on paper. Then the Council began to settle what they called
the "minor details. " As if any Englishman legislating for natives knows
enough to know which are the minor and which are the major points, from
the native point of view, of any measure! That Bill was a triumph of
"safe-guarding the interests of the tenant. " One clause provided that
land should not be leased on longer terms than five years at a stretch;
because, if the landlord had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years,
he would squeeze the very life out of him. The notion was to keep up
a stream of independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and
ethnologically and politically the notion was correct. The only drawback
was that it was altogether wrong. A native's life in India implies the
life of his son. Wherefore, you cannot legislate for one generation at
a time. You must consider the next from the native point of view.
Curiously enough, the native now and then, and in Northern India more
particularly, hates being over-protected against himself. There was
a Naga village once, where they lived on dead AND buried Commissariat
mules. . . . But that is another story.
For many reasons, to be explained later, the people concerned objected
to the Bill. The Native Member in Council knew as much about Punjabis as
he knew about Charing Cross. He had said in Calcutta that "the Bill was
entirely in accord with the desires of that large and important class,
the cultivators;" and so on, and so on. The Legal Member's knowledge
of natives was limited to English-speaking Durbaris, and his own red
chaprassis, the Sub-Montane Tracts concerned no one in particular,
the Deputy Commissioners were a good deal too driven to make
representations, and the measure was one which dealt with small
landholders only. Nevertheless, the Legal Member prayed that it might be
correct, for he was a nervously conscientious man. He did not know that
no man can tell what natives think unless he mixes with them with the
varnish off. And not always then. But he did the best he knew. And the
measure came up to the Supreme Council for the final touches, while Tods
patrolled the Burra Simla Bazar in his morning rides, and played with
the monkey belonging to Ditta Mull, the bunnia, and listened, as a child
listens to all the stray talk about this new freak of the Lat Sahib's.
One day there was a dinner-party, at the house of Tods' Mamma, and the
Legal Member came. Tods was in bed, but he kept awake till he heard the
bursts of laughter from the men over the coffee. Then he paddled out in
his little red flannel dressing-gown and his night-suit, and took refuge
by the side of his father, knowing that he would not be sent back. "See
the miseries of having a family! " said Tods' father, giving Tods three
prunes, some water in a glass that had been used for claret, and telling
him to sit still. Tods sucked the prunes slowly, knowing that he would
have to go when they were finished, and sipped the pink water like a man
of the world, as he listened to the conversation. Presently, the Legal
Member, talking "shop," to the Head of a Department, mentioned his Bill
by its full name--"The Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment. "
Tods caught the one native word, and lifting up his small voice
said:--"Oh, I know ALL about that! Has it been murramutted yet,
Councillor Sahib? "
"How much? " said the Legal Member.
"Murramutted--mended. --Put theek, you know--made nice to please Ditta
Mull! "
The Legal Member left his place and moved up next to Tods.
"What do you know about Ryotwari, little man? " he said.
"I'm not a little man, I'm Tods, and I know ALL about it. Ditta Mull,
and Choga Lall, and Amir Nath, and--oh, lakhs of my friends tell me
about it in the bazars when I talk to them. "
"Oh, they do--do they? What do they say, Tods? "
Tods tucked his feet under his red flannel dressing-gown and said:--"I
must fink. "
The Legal Member waited patiently. Then Tods, with infinite compassion:
"You don't speak my talk, do you, Councillor Sahib? "
"No; I am sorry to say I do not," said the Legal' Member.
"Very well," said Tods. "I must fink in English. "
He spent a minute putting his ideas in order, and began very slowly,
translating in his mind from the vernacular to English, as many
Anglo-Indian children do. You must remember that the Legal Member
helped him on by questions when he halted, for Tods was not equal to the
sustained flight of oratory that follows.
"Ditta Mull says:--'This thing is the talk of a child, and was made up
by fools. ' But I don't think you are a fool, Councillor Sahib," said
Tods, hastily. "You caught my goat. This is what Ditta Mull says:--'I am
not a fool, and why should the Sirkar say I am a child? I can see if
the land is good and if the landlord is good. If I am a fool, the sin is
upon my own head. For five years I take my ground for which I have saved
money, and a wife I take too, and a little son is born. ' Ditta Mull has
one daughter now, but he SAYS he will have a son, soon. And he says: 'At
the end of five years, by this new bundobust, I must go. If I do not go,
I must get fresh seals and takkus-stamps on the papers, perhaps in the
middle of the harvest, and to go to the law-courts once is wisdom, but
to go twice is Jehannum. ' That is QUITE true," explained Tods, gravely.
"All my friends say so. And Ditta Mull says:--'Always fresh takkus and
paying money to vakils and chaprassis and law-courts every five years or
else the landlord makes me go. Why do I want to go? Am I fool? If I am a
fool and do not know, after forty years, good land when I see it, let
me die! But if the new bundobust says for FIFTEEN years, then it is
good and wise. My little son is a man, and I am burnt, and he takes the
ground or another ground, paying only once for the takkus-stamps on the
papers, and his little son is born, and at the end of fifteen years is
a man too. But what profit is there in five years and fresh papers?
Nothing but dikh, trouble, dikh. We are not young men who take these
lands, but old ones--not jais, but tradesmen with a little money--and
for fifteen years we shall have peace. Nor are we children that the
Sirkar should treat us so. "
Here Tods stopped short, for the whole table were listening. The Legal
Member said to Tods: "Is that all? "
"All I can remember," said Tods. "But you should see Ditta Mull's big
monkey. It's just like a Councillor Sahib. "
"Tods! Go to bed," said his father.
Tods gathered up his dressing-gown tail and departed.
The Legal Member brought his hand down on the table with a crash--"By
Jove! " said the Legal Member, "I believe the boy is right. The short
tenure IS the weak point. "
He left early, thinking over what Tods had said. Now, it was obviously
impossible for the Legal Member to play with a bunnia's monkey, by way
of getting understanding; but he did better. He made inquiries,
always bearing in mind the fact that the real native--not the hybrid,
University-trained mule--is as timid as a colt, and, little by little,
he coaxed some of the men whom the measure concerned most intimately to
give in their views, which squared very closely with Tods' evidence.
So the Bill was amended in that clause; and the Legal Member was filled
with an uneasy suspicion that Native Members represent very little
except the Orders they carry on their bosoms. But he put the thought
from him as illiberal. He was a most Liberal Man.
After a time the news spread through the bazars that Tods had got the
Bill recast in the tenure clause, and if Tods' Mamma had not interfered,
Tods would have made himself sick on the baskets of fruit and pistachio
nuts and Cabuli grapes and almonds that crowded the verandah. Till he
went Home, Tods ranked some few degrees before the Viceroy in popular
estimation. But for the little life of him Tods could not understand
why.
In the Legal Member's private-paper-box still lies the rough draft of
the Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment; and, opposite the
twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal
Member, are the words "Tods' Amendment. "
IN THE PRIDE OF HIS YOUTH.
"Stopped in the straight when the race was his own!
Look at him cutting it--cur to the bone! "
"Ask ere the youngster be rated and chidden,
What did he carry and how was he ridden?
Maybe they used him too much at the start;
Maybe Fate's weight-cloths are breaking his heart. "
--Life's Handicap.
When I was telling you of the joke that The Worm played off on the
Senior Subaltern, I promised a somewhat similar tale, but with all the
jest left out. This is that tale:
Dicky Hatt was kidnapped in his early, early youth--neither by
landlady's daughter, housemaid, barmaid, nor cook, but by a girl so
nearly of his own caste that only a woman could have said she was just
the least little bit in the world below it. This happened a month
before he came out to India, and five days after his one-and-twentieth
birthday. The girl was nineteen--six years older than Dicky in the
things of this world, that is to say--and, for the time, twice as
foolish as he.
Excepting, always, falling off a horse there is nothing more fatally
easy than marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less than
fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-shop. After
the declarations of residence have been put in, four minutes will
cover the rest of the proceedings--fees, attestation, and all. Then the
Registrar slides the blotting-pad over the names, and says grimly, with
his pen between his teeth:--"Now you're man and wife;" and the couple
walk out into the street, feeling as if something were horribly illegal
somewhere.
But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just
as thoroughly as the "long as ye both shall live" curse from the
altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and "The Voice that
breathed o'er Eden" lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt
kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had received an
appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary from the Home
point of view. The marriage was to be kept secret for a year. Then Mrs.
Dicky Hatt was to come out and the rest of life was to be a glorious
golden mist. That was how they sketched it under the Addison Road
Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend and Dicky
steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings
a week bed-and-living room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near
the Knightsbridge Barracks.
But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land, where "men" of
twenty-one were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was expensive.
The salary that loomed so large six thousand miles away did not go far.
Particularly when Dicky divided it by two, and remitted more than the
fair half, at 1-6, to Montpelier Square. One hundred and thirty-five
rupees out of three hundred and thirty is not much to live on; but
it was absurd to suppose that Mrs. Hatt could exist forever on the 20
pounds held back by Dicky, from his outfit allowance. Dicky saw this,
and remitted at once; always remembering that Rs. 700 were to be paid,
twelve months later, for a first-class passage out for a lady. When you
add to these trifling details the natural instincts of a boy beginning a
new life in a new country and longing to go about and enjoy himself, and
the necessity for grappling with strange work--which, properly speaking,
should take up a boy's undivided attention--you will see that Dicky
started handicapped. He saw it himself for a breath or two; but he did
not guess the full beauty of his future.
As the hot weather began, the shackles settled on him and ate into his
flesh. First would come letters--big, crossed, seven sheet letters--from
his wife, telling him how she longed to see him, and what a Heaven upon
earth would be their property when they met.
Then some boy of the chummery wherein Dicky lodged would pound on the
door of his bare little room, and tell him to come out and look at a
pony--the very thing to suit him. Dicky could not afford ponies. He had
to explain this. Dicky could not afford living in the chummery, modest
as it was. He had to explain this before he moved to a single room next
the office where he worked all day. He kept house on a green oil-cloth
table-cover, one chair, one charpoy, one photograph, one tooth-glass,
very strong and thick, a seven-rupee eight-anna filter, and messing by
contract at thirty-seven rupees a month. Which last item was extortion.
He had no punkah, for a punkah costs fifteen rupees a month; but he
slept on the roof of the office with all his wife's letters under his
pillow. Now and again he was asked out to dinner where he got both a
punkah and an iced drink. But this was seldom, for people objected
to recognizing a boy who had evidently the instincts of a Scotch
tallow-chandler, and who lived in such a nasty fashion. Dicky could not
subscribe to any amusement, so he found no amusement except the pleasure
of turning over his Bank-book and reading what it said about "loans
on approved security. " That cost nothing. He remitted through a Bombay
Bank, by the way, and the Station knew nothing of his private affairs.
Every month he sent Home all he could possibly spare for his wife--and
for another reason which was expected to explain itself shortly and
would require more money.
About this time, Dicky was overtaken with the nervous, haunting fear
that besets married men when they are out of sorts. He had no pension to
look to. What if he should die suddenly, and leave his wife unprovided
for? The thought used to lay hold of him in the still, hot nights on the
roof, till the shaking of his heart made him think that he was going to
die then and there of heart-disease.
Now this is a frame of mind which no boy has a right to know. It is
a strong man's trouble; but, coming when it did, it nearly drove poor
punkah-less, perspiring Dicky Hatt mad. He could tell no one about it.
A certain amount of "screw" is as necessary for a man as for a
billiard-ball. It makes them both do wonderful things. Dicky needed
money badly, and he worked for it like a horse. But, naturally, the men
who owned him knew that a boy can live very comfortably on a certain
income--pay in India is a matter of age, not merit, you see, and if
their particular boy wished to work like two boys, Business forbid that
they should stop him! But Business forbid that they should give him an
increase of pay at his present ridiculously immature age! So Dicky won
certain rises of salary--ample for a boy--not enough for a wife and
child--certainly too little for the seven-hundred-rupee passage that he
and Mrs. Hatt had discussed so lightly once upon a time. And with this
he was forced to be content.
Somehow, all his money seemed to fade away in Home drafts and the
crushing Exchange, and the tone of the Home letters changed and grew
querulous. "Why wouldn't Dicky have his wife and the baby out? Surely he
had a salary--a fine salary--and it was too bad of him to enjoy himself
in India. But would he--could he--make the next draft a little more
elastic? " Here followed a list of baby's kit, as long as a Parsee's
bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and the little son
he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy is entitled
to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-man letters,
saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and would the little
wife wait yet a little longer? But the little wife, however much she
approved of money, objected to waiting, and there was a strange, hard
sort of ring in her letters that Dicky didn't understand. How could he,
poor boy?
Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another
youngster who had "made a fool of himself," as the saying is--that
matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement, but
would lose him his present appointment--came the news that the baby, his
own little, little son, had died, and, behind this, forty lines of
an angry woman's scrawl, saying that death might have been averted if
certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if the mother and
the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at Dicky's naked heart;
but, not being officially entitled to a baby, he could show no sign of
trouble.
How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept
alight to force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on, the
seven-hundred-rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style of living
unchanged, except when he launched into a new filter.
There was the strain of his office-work, and the strain of his
remittances, and the knowledge of his boy's death, which touched the boy
more, perhaps, than it would have touched a man; and, beyond all, the
enduring strain of his daily life. Gray-headed seniors, who approved
of his thrift and his fashion of denying himself everything pleasant,
reminded him of the old saw that says:
"If a youth would be distinguished in his art, art, art,
He must keep the girls away from his heart, heart, heart. "
And Dicky, who fancied he had been through every trouble that a man is
permitted to know, had to laugh and agree; with the last line of his
balanced Bank-book jingling in his head day and night.
But he had one more sorrow to digest before the end. There arrived a
letter from the little wife--the natural sequence of the others if
Dicky had only known it--and the burden of that letter was "gone with
a handsomer man than you. " It was a rather curious production, without
stops, something like this:--"She was not going to wait forever and the
baby was dead and Dicky was only a boy and he would never set eyes on
her again and why hadn't he waved his handkerchief to her when he left
Gravesend and God was her judge she was a wicked woman but Dicky was
worse enjoying himself in India and this other man loved the ground she
trod on and would Dicky ever forgive her for she would never forgive
Dicky; and there was no address to write to. "
Instead of thanking his lucky stars that he was free, Dicky discovered
exactly how an injured husband feels--again, not at all the knowledge
to which a boy is entitled--for his mind went back to his wife as he
remembered her in the thirty-shilling "suite" in Montpelier Square, when
the dawn of his last morning in England was breaking, and she was crying
in the bed. Whereat he rolled about on his bed and bit his fingers. He
never stopped to think whether, if he had met Mrs. Hatt after those
two years, he would have discovered that he and she had grown quite
different and new persons. This, theoretically, he ought to have done.
He spent the night after the English Mail came in rather severe pain.
Next morning, Dicky Hatt felt disinclined to work. He argued that he had
missed the pleasure of youth. He was tired, and he had tasted all the
sorrow in life before three-and-twenty. His Honor was gone--that was the
man; and now he, too, would go to the Devil--that was the boy in him. So
he put his head down on the green oil-cloth table-cover, and wept before
resigning his post, and all it offered.
But the reward of his services came. He was given three days to
reconsider himself, and the Head of the establishment, after some
telegraphings, said that it was a most unusual step, but, in view of the
ability that Mr. Hatt had displayed at such and such a time, at such and
such junctures, he was in a position to offer him an infinitely superior
post--first on probation, and later, in the natural course of things,
on confirmation. "And how much does the post carry? " said Dicky. "Six
hundred and fifty rupees," said the Head slowly, expecting to see the
young man sink with gratitude and joy.
And it came then! The seven hundred rupee passage, and enough to have
saved the wife, and the little son, and to have allowed of assured and
open marriage, came then. Dicky burst into a roar of laughter--laughter
he could not check--nasty, jangling merriment that seemed as if it
would go on forever. When he had recovered himself he said, quite
seriously:--"I'm tired of work. I'm an old man now. It's about time I
retired. And I will. "
"The boy's mad! " said the Head.
I think he was right; but Dicky Hatt never reappeared to settle the
question.
PIG.
Go, stalk the red deer o'er the heather
Ride, follow the fox if you can!
But, for pleasure and profit together,
Allow me the hunting of Man,--
The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul
To its ruin,--the hunting of Man.
--The Old Shikarri.
I believe the difference began in the matter of a horse, with a twist in
his temper, whom Pinecoffin sold to Nafferton and by whom Nafferton was
nearly slain. There may have been other causes of offence; the horse was
the official stalking-horse. Nafferton was very angry; but Pinecoffin
laughed and said that he had never guaranteed the beast's manners.
Nafferton laughed, too, though he vowed that he would write off his fall
against Pinecoffin if he waited five years. Now, a Dalesman from beyond
Skipton will forgive an injury when the Strid lets a man live; but a
South Devon man is as soft as a Dartmoor bog. You can see from their
names that Nafferton had the race-advantage of Pinecoffin. He was a
peculiar man, and his notions of humor were cruel. He taught me a new
and fascinating form of shikar. He hounded Pinecoffin from Mithankot
to Jagadri, and from Gurgaon to Abbottabad up and across the Punjab,
a large province and in places remarkably dry. He said that he had no
intention of allowing Assistant Commissioners to "sell him pups," in the
shape of ramping, screaming countrybreds, without making their lives a
burden to them.
Most Assistant Commissioners develop a bent for some special work after
their first hot weather in the country. The boys with digestions hope to
write their names large on the Frontier and struggle for dreary places
like Bannu and Kohat. The bilious ones climb into the Secretariat. Which
is very bad for the liver.
Others are bitten with a mania for District work, Ghuznivide coins or
Persian poetry; while some, who come of farmers' stock, find that the
smell of the Earth after the Rains gets into their blood, and calls them
to "develop the resources of the Province. " These men are enthusiasts.
Pinecoffin belonged to their class. He knew a great many facts bearing
on the cost of bullocks and temporary wells, and opium-scrapers, and
what happens if you burn too much rubbish on a field, in the hope of
enriching used-up soil. All the Pinecoffins come of a landholding
breed, and so the land only took back her own again. Unfortunately--most
unfortunately for Pinecoffin--he was a Civilian, as well as a
farmer. Nafferton watched him, and thought about the horse. Nafferton
said:--"See me chase that boy till he drops! " I said:--"You can't get
your knife into an Assistant Commissioner. " Nafferton told me that I did
not understand the administration of the Province.
Our Government is rather peculiar. It gushes on the agricultural and
general information side, and will supply a moderately respectable man
with all sorts of "economic statistics," if he speaks to it prettily.
For instance, you are interested in gold-washing in the sands of the
Sutlej. You pull the string, and find that it wakes up half a dozen
Departments, and finally communicates, say, with a friend of yours
in the Telegraph, who once wrote some notes on the customs of the
gold-washers when he was on construction-work in their part of the
Empire. He may or may not be pleased at being ordered to write out
everything he knows for your benefit. This depends on his temperament.
The bigger man you are, the more information and the greater trouble can
you raise.
Nafferton was not a big man; but he had the reputation of being very
"earnest. " An "earnest" man can do much with a Government. There was
an earnest man who once nearly wrecked. . . but all India knows THAT
story. I am not sure what real "earnestness" is. A very fair imitation
can be manufactured by neglecting to dress decently, by mooning about in
a dreamy, misty sort of way, by taking office-work home after staying
in office till seven, and by receiving crowds of native gentlemen on
Sundays. That is one sort of "earnestness. "
Nafferton cast about for a peg whereon to hang his earnestness, and for
a string that would communicate with Pinecoffin. He found both.
They were Pig. Nafferton became an earnest inquirer after Pig. He
informed the Government that he had a scheme whereby a very large
percentage of the British Army in India could be fed, at a very large
saving, on Pig. Then he hinted that Pinecoffin might supply him with the
"varied information necessary to the proper inception of the scheme. "
So the Government wrote on the back of the letter:--"Instruct Mr.
Pinecoffin to furnish Mr. Nafferton with any information in his power. "
Government is very prone to writing things on the backs of letters
which, later, lead to trouble and confusion.
Nafferton had not the faintest interest in Pig, but he knew that
Pinecoffin would flounce into the trap. Pinecoffin was delighted at
being consulted about Pig. The Indian Pig is not exactly an important
factor in agricultural life; but Nafferton explained to Pinecoffin that
there was room for improvement, and corresponded direct with that young
man.
You may think that there is not much to be evolved from Pig. It all
depends how you set to work. Pinecoffin being a Civilian and wishing
to do things thoroughly, began with an essay on the Primitive Pig, the
Mythology of the Pig, and the Dravidian Pig.
Nafferton filed that information--twenty-seven foolscap sheets--and
wanted to know about the distribution of the Pig in the Punjab, and
how it stood the Plains in the hot weather. From this point onwards,
remember that I am giving you only the barest outlines of the
affair--the guy-ropes, as it were, of the web that Nafferton spun round
Pinecoffin.
Pinecoffin made a colored Pig-population map, and collected observations
on the comparative longevity of the Pig (a) in the sub-montane tracts of
the Himalayas, and (b) in the Rechna Doab.
Nafferton filed that, and asked what sort of people looked after Pig.
This started an ethnological excursus on swineherds, and drew from
Pinecoffin long tables showing the proportion per thousand of the caste
in the Derajat. Nafferton filed that bundle, and explained that the
figures which he wanted referred to the Cis-Sutlej states, where he
understood that Pigs were very fine and large, and where he proposed
to start a Piggery. By this time, Government had quite forgotten their
instructions to Mr. Pinecoffin.
They were like the gentlemen, in Keats' poem, who turned well-oiled
wheels to skin other people. But Pinecoffin was just entering into the
spirit of the Pig-hunt, as Nafferton well knew he would do. He had a
fair amount of work of his own to clear away; but he sat up of nights
reducing Pig to five places of decimals for the honor of his Service. He
was not going to appear ignorant of so easy a subject as Pig.
Then Government sent him on special duty to Kohat, to "inquire into"
the big-seven-foot, iron-shod spades of that District. People had been
killing each other with those peaceful tools; and Government wished
to know "whether a modified form of agricultural implement could
not, tentatively and as a temporary measure, be introduced among the
agricultural population without needlessly or unduly exasperating the
existing religious sentiments of the peasantry. "
Between those spades and Nafferton's Pig, Pinecoffin was rather heavily
burdened.
Nafferton now began to take up "(a) The food-supply of the indigenous Pig,
with a view to the improvement of its capacities as a flesh-former.
(b) The acclimatization of the exotic Pig, maintaining its distinctive
peculiarities. " Pinecoffin replied exhaustively that the exotic Pig
would become merged in the indigenous type; and quoted horse-breeding
statistics to prove this.
The side-issue was debated, at great length on Pinecoffin's side, till
Nafferton owned that he had been in the wrong, and moved the previous
question. When Pinecoffin had quite written himself out about
flesh-formers, and fibrins, and glucose and the nitrogenous constituents
of maize and lucerne, Nafferton raised the question of expense. By this
time Pinecoffin, who had been transferred from Kohat, had developed a
Pig theory of his own, which he stated in thirty-three folio pages--all
carefully filed by Nafferton. Who asked for more.
These things took ten months, and Pinecoffin's interest in the potential
Piggery seemed to die down after he had stated his own views. But
Nafferton bombarded him with letters on "the Imperial aspect of
the scheme, as tending to officialize the sale of pork, and thereby
calculated to give offence to the Mahomedan population of Upper India. "
He guessed that Pinecoffin would want some broad, free-hand work after
his niggling, stippling, decimal details.
Pinecoffin handled the latest development of the case in masterly
style, and proved that no "popular ebullition of excitement was to
be apprehended. " Nafferton said that there was nothing like Civilian
insight in matters of this kind, and lured him up a bye-path--"the
possible profits to accrue to the Government from the sale of
hog-bristles. " There is an extensive literature of hog-bristles, and the
shoe, brush, and colorman's trades recognize more varieties of bristles
than you would think possible. After Pinecoffin had wondered a little
at Nafferton's rage for information, he sent back a monograph, fifty-one
pages, on "Products of the Pig. " This led him, under Nafferton's tender
handling, straight to the Cawnpore factories, the trade in hog-skin
for saddles--and thence to the tanners. Pinecoffin wrote that
pomegranate-seed was the best cure for hog-skin, and suggested--for the
past fourteen months had wearied him--that Nafferton should "raise his
pigs before he tanned them. "
Nafferton went back to the second section of his fifth question.
How could the exotic Pig be brought to give as much pork as it did in
the West and yet "assume the essentially hirsute characteristics of its
oriental congener? " Pinecoffin felt dazed, for he had forgotten what
he had written sixteen month's before, and fancied that he was about
to reopen the entire question. He was too far involved in the hideous
tangle to retreat, and, in a weak moment, he wrote:--"Consult my first
letter. " Which related to the Dravidian Pig. As a matter of fact,
Pinecoffin had still to reach the acclimatization stage; having gone off
on a side-issue on the merging of types.
THEN Nafferton really unmasked his batteries! He complained to the
Government, in stately language, of "the paucity of help accorded to me
in my earnest attempts to start a potentially remunerative industry, and
the flippancy with which my requests for information are treated by a
gentleman whose pseudo-scholarly attainments should at lest have taught
him the primary differences between the Dravidian and the Berkshire
variety of the genus Sus. If I am to understand that the letter to which
he refers me contains his serious views on the acclimatization of a
valuable, though possibly uncleanly, animal, I am reluctantly compelled
to believe," etc. , etc.
There was a new man at the head of the Department of Castigation.
The wretched Pinecoffin was told that the Service was made for the
Country, and not the Country for the Service, and that he had better
begin to supply information about Pigs.
Pinecoffin answered insanely that he had written everything that could
be written about Pig, and that some furlough was due to him.
Nafferton got a copy of that letter, and sent it, with the essay on the
Dravidian Pig, to a down-country paper, which printed both in full. The
essay was rather highflown; but if the Editor had seen the stacks of
paper, in Pinecoffin's handwriting, on Nafferton's table, he would not
have been so sarcastic about the "nebulous discursiveness and blatant
self-sufficiency of the modern Competition-wallah, and his utter
inability to grasp the practical issues of a practical question. " Many
friends cut out these remarks and sent them to Pinecoffin.
I have already stated that Pinecoffin came of a soft stock. This last
stroke frightened and shook him. He could not understand it; but he felt
he had been, somehow, shamelessly betrayed by Nafferton.
He realized that he had wrapped himself up in the Pigskin without need,
and that he could not well set himself right with his Government. All
his acquaintances asked after his "nebulous discursiveness" or his
"blatant self-sufficiency," and this made him miserable.
He took a train and went to Nafferton, whom he had not seen since
the Pig business began. He also took the cutting from the paper, and
blustered feebly and called Nafferton names, and then died down to a
watery, weak protest of the "I-say-it's-too-bad-you-know" order.
Nafferton was very sympathetic.
"I'm afraid I've given you a good deal of trouble, haven't I? " said he.
"Trouble! " whimpered Pinecoffin; "I don't mind the trouble so much,
though that was bad enough; but what I resent is this showing up in
print. It will stick to me like a burr all through my service. And I DID
do my best for your interminable swine. It's too bad of you, on my soul
it is! "
"I don't know," said Nafferton; "have you ever been stuck with a horse?
It isn't the money I mind, though that is bad enough; but what I resent
is the chaff that follows, especially from the boy who stuck me. But I
think we'll cry quite now. "
Pinecoffin found nothing to say save bad words; and Nafferton smiled
ever so sweetly, and asked him to dinner.
THE ROUT OF THE WHITE HUSSARS.
It was not in the open fight
We threw away the sword,
But in the lonely watching
In the darkness by the ford.
The waters lapped, the night-wind blew,
Full-armed the Fear was born and grew,
And we were flying ere we knew
From panic in the night.
--Beoni Bar.
Some people hold that an English Cavalry regiment cannot run. This is
a mistake. I have seen four hundred and thirty-seven sabres flying over
the face of the country in abject terror--have seen the best Regiment
that ever drew bridle, wiped off the Army List for the space of two
hours. If you repeat this tale to the White Hussars they will, in all
probability, treat you severely. They are not proud of the incident.
You may know the White Hussars by their "side," which is greater than
that of all the Cavalry Regiments on the roster. If this is not a
sufficient mark, you may know them by their old brandy. It has been
sixty years in the Mess and is worth going far to taste.
Ask for the "McGaire" old brandy, and see that you get it. If the Mess
Sergeant thinks that you are uneducated, and that the genuine article
will be lost on you, he will treat you accordingly. He is a good man.
But, when you are at Mess, you must never talk to your hosts about
forced marches or long-distance rides. The Mess are very sensitive; and,
if they think that you are laughing at them, will tell you so.
As the White Hussars say, it was all the Colonel's fault. He was a new
man, and he ought never to have taken the Command. He said that the
Regiment was not smart enough. This to the White Hussars, who knew they
could walk round any Horse and through any Guns, and over any Foot on
the face of the earth! That insult was the first cause of offence.
Then the Colonel cast the Drum-Horse--the Drum-Horse of the White
Hussars! Perhaps you do not see what an unspeakable crime he had
committed. I will try to make it clear. The soul of the Regiment lives
in the Drum-Horse, who carries the silver kettle-drums. He is nearly
always a big piebald Waler. That is a point of honor; and a Regiment
will spend anything you please on a piebald. He is beyond the ordinary
laws of casting. His work is very light, and he only manoeuvres at a
foot-pace. Wherefore, so long as he can step out and look handsome,
his well-being is assured. He knows more about the Regiment than the
Adjutant, and could not make a mistake if he tried.
The Drum-Horse of the White Hussars was only eighteen years old, and
perfectly equal to his duties. He had at least six years' more work in
him, and carried himself with all the pomp and dignity of a Drum-Major
of the Guards. The Regiment had paid Rs. 1,200 for him.
But the Colonel said that he must go, and he was cast in due form and
replaced by a washy, bay beast as ugly as a mule, with a ewe-neck,
rat-tail, and cow-hocks. The Drummer detested that animal, and the best
of the Band-horses put back their ears and showed the whites of their
eyes at the very sight of him. They knew him for an upstart and no
gentleman. I fancy that the Colonel's ideas of smartness extended to
the Band, and that he wanted to make it take part in the regular parade
movements. A Cavalry Band is a sacred thing. It only turns out for
Commanding Officers' parades, and the Band Master is one degree more
important than the Colonel. He is a High Priest and the "Keel Row" is
his holy song. The "Keel Row" is the Cavalry Trot; and the man who has
never heard that tune rising, high and shrill, above the rattle of the
Regiment going past the saluting-base, has something yet to hear and
understand.
When the Colonel cast the Drum-horse of the White Hussars, there was
nearly a mutiny.
The officers were angry, the Regiment were furious, and the Bandsman
swore--like troopers. The Drum-Horse was going to be put up to
auction--public auction--to be bought, perhaps, by a Parsee and put into
a cart! It was worse than exposing the inner life of the Regiment to the
whole world, or selling the Mess Plate to a Jew--a black Jew.
The Colonel was a mean man and a bully. He knew what the Regiment
thought about his action; and, when the troopers offered to buy the
Drum-Horse, he said that their offer was mutinous and forbidden by the
Regulations.
But one of the Subalterns--Hogan-Yale, an Irishman--bought the
Drum-Horse for Rs. 160 at the sale; and the Colonel was wroth. Yale
professed repentance--he was unnaturally submissive--and said that,
as he had only made the purchase to save the horse from possible
ill-treatment and starvation, he would now shoot him and end the
business. This appeared to soothe the Colonel, for he wanted the
Drum-Horse disposed of. He felt that he had made a mistake, and could
not of course acknowledge it. Meantime, the presence of the Drum-Horse
was an annoyance to him.
Yale took to himself a glass of the old brandy, three cheroots, and his
friend, Martyn; and they all left the Mess together. Yale and Martyn
conferred for two hours in Yale's quarters; but only the bull-terrier
who keeps watch over Yale's boot-trees knows what they said. A horse,
hooded and sheeted to his ears, left Yale's stables and was taken, very
unwillingly, into the Civil Lines. Yale's groom went with him. Two men
broke into the Regimental Theatre and took several paint-pots and some
large scenery brushes. Then night fell over the Cantonments, and there
was a noise as of a horse kicking his loose-box to pieces in Yale's
stables. Yale had a big, old, white Waler trap-horse.
The next day was a Thursday, and the men, hearing that Yale was going
to shoot the Drum-Horse in the evening, determined to give the beast a
regular regimental funeral--a finer one than they would have given the
Colonel had he died just then. They got a bullock-cart and some sacking,
and mounds and mounds of roses, and the body, under sacking, was carried
out to the place where the anthrax cases were cremated; two-thirds of
the Regiment followed. There was no Band, but they all sang "The Place
where the old Horse died" as something respectful and appropriate to the
occasion. When the corpse was dumped into the grave and the men began
throwing down armfuls of roses to cover it, the Farrier-Sergeant ripped
out an oath and said aloud:--"Why, it ain't the Drum-Horse any more than
it's me! " The Troop-Sergeant-Majors asked him whether he had left
his head in the Canteen. The Farrier-Sergeant said that he knew the
Drum-Horse's feet as well as he knew his own; but he was silenced
when he saw the regimental number burnt in on the poor stiff, upturned
near-fore.
Thus was the Drum-Horse of the White Hussars buried; the
Farrier-Sergeant grumbling. The sacking that covered the corpse was
smeared in places with black paint; and the Farrier-Sergeant drew
attention to this fact. But the Troop-Sergeant-Major of E Troop kicked
him severely on the shin, and told him that he was undoubtedly drunk.
On the Monday following the burial, the Colonel sought revenge on the
White Hussars. Unfortunately, being at that time temporarily in Command
of the Station, he ordered a Brigade field-day.
