I.

An old man dreaming of a past day and night as he sat waiting, and these were his dreams.

* * * * *

Darkness, save for the light of the stars in the sky and the flare of blazing roof-trees on earth. Two shadowy figures out in the open, and through the parched silence of the May night a man's voice feeble, yet strenuous in appeal.

"Dhurm Singh?"

"Huzoor!"

The kneeling figure bent closer over the other, waiting.

"The mem sahiba, Dhurm Singh."

"Huzoor--dhurm nâl."[[9]]

Then silence, broken only by the long howl of jackals gathering before their time round that scene of mutiny and murder.

* * * * *

Darkness once more. The darkness of daylight shut out by prisoning walls. The sweltering heat of July oozing through the shot-cracked walls; the horrors of starvation, and siege, and sickness round two dim figures. And once again a strenuous voice--this time a woman's.

"Dhurm Singh!"

"Huzoor."

The answer came as before--broad, soft, guttural, in the accent of the north--

"Sonny baba, Dhurm Singh!"

"Huzoor--dhurm nâl."

Then silence, broken only by the whist-ch-t of a wandering bullet against the wall of the crumbling fort, where one more victim had found peace.

* * * * *

Both the May night and the July day were in old Dhurm Singh's thoughts as he sat on his heels looking out from the Apollo Bunder at Bombay across the Black Water, waiting, after long years, for Sonny baba's ship to loom over the level horizon. A stranger figure among the slight, smooth coolies busy around him with bales and belaying pins than he would have been among the dockers at Limehouse. Tall, gaunt, his long white beard parted over the chin and bound backwards over his ears, his broad mustache spreading straight under his massive nose, his level eyebrows like a white streak between the open brown forehead and the open brown eyes. A faded red tunic, empty of the left arm, a solitary medal on the breast, and above the unseen coils of white hair--long as a woman's--the high wound turban bearing the sacred steel quoit of the Sikh devotee.

Such was Dhurm Singh, Akâli; in other words, Lion of the Faith and member of the Church Militant. Pensioner to boot for an anna or so a day to a Government which he had also served dhurm nâl as he had served his dead captain, his dead mistress, and, last of all, Sonny baba!

Twenty years ago. Yes! twenty years since he had answered those strenuous appeals by his favourite word-play on his own name. He had used it for many another promise during those long years; as a rule, truthfully. For Dhurm Singh, as a rule, did things dhurm nâl--partly because a slow, invincible tenacity of purpose made all chopping and changing distasteful, partly because fidelity to the master is sucked in with the mother's milk of the Sikh race: very little, it is to be feared, from conscious virtue. Twenty years ago he had carried Sonny baba through the jungles by night on his unhurt arm, and hidden as best he could in the tiger-grass by day, because of his promise. And now, as he sat waiting for Sonny baba to come sailing over the edge of his world again, the broad simple face expanded into smiles at the memory. He passed by all the stress and strains of that unforgotten flight in favour of a little yellow head nestling back in alarm against the bloodstains on the old tunic, when the white mems in the big cantonment of refuge had held out their arms to the child.

Sonny baba had known his friends in those days; ay! and he had remembered them all these years: he and the mem's sister, who had taken charge of the boy in the foreign land across the Black Waters whence the masters came--a gracious Miss who wrote regularly once a year to ex-duffadar Dhurm Singh, giving him the last news of Sonny baba and as regularly urging her correspondent to safeguard himself against certain damnation by becoming an infidel. For this, briefly, crudely, was the recipient's view of the matter as he sat staring at the little picture texts and tracts in the Punjâbi character which invariably accompanied the letters. They puzzled him, those picture cards in the sacred characters which were printed so beautifully in the far off land by people who knew nothing of him or his people, and who yet wrote better than any mohunt.[[10]] Puzzled him in more ways than one, since duty and desire divided as to the method of their disposal. Respect for the captân-sahib, whom he had left lying dead at the back of the native lines on that May night, forbade his destroying them; respect for his own religious profession forbade his disseminating the pictures, irrespective of the letterpress, as playthings among the village children. So he tied them up in a bundle with his pension papers, and kept them in the breast pocket of the old tunic under the bloodstains and the solitary medal which was beginning to fray through its parti-coloured ribbon--an odd item in that costume of a Sikh devotee which he had assumed when the final loss of his arm forced him into peace and a pension. As a rule, however, the tunic was hidden under the orthodox blue and white garments matching the turban, just as the huge steel bracelets on his arms matched the steel quoit on his head; but on this day loyalty to the dead had spoken in favour of the old uniform. It may seem a strange choice, this of devoteeship, but to the old swash-buckler it was infinitely more amusing, even in these degenerate days when Akâli-dom had lost half its power, to go swaggering about from fair to festival, from festival to fair, representing the Church Militant, than to lounge about the village watching the agricultural members of the family cultivate the ancestral lands. They did it admirably without his help, as they had done it always; so Dhurm Singh, at a loose end now legitimate strife was over, took to cultivating his hair with baths of buttermilk instead, adopted the quoit and the bracelets, and used the most pious of Sikh oaths as he watched the wrestlers wrestle, or played singlestick for the honour of God and the old regiment. And there were other advantages in the profession. A man might take a more than reasonable amount of opium occasionally without laying himself open to a heavier accusation than that of religious enthusiasm; since opium is part of the Akâli's stock in trade.

As he sat among the tarred ropes with his back against a consignment of beer and rum for the British soldier, he broke off quite a large corner of the big black lump he kept in the same pocket with the tracts, and swallowed it whole. Sonny baba's ship was not due, they told him, for some hours to come, so there would be time for quiet dreams both of past and future. The latter somewhat confused, since the Miss-sahib's letters had not always been adequately translated by the village schoolmaster. Only this was sure: Sonny baba was three and twenty, and he was coming out to Hindustan once more as an officer in the great army. In fact, he was a captân already, which was big promotion for his few years. So Dhurm Singh--who to say sooth, was becoming somewhat tired of the Church Militant now that younger men began to beat him at singlestick--had returned to the old allegiance and made his way down country, like many another old servant, to meet his master's son and take service with him. You see them often, these old, anxious-looking retainers, waiting on the Apollo Bunder, or coming aboard in the steam launches with wistful, expectant faces.

And some beardless youth, fresh from Eton or Harrow, says with a laugh, "By George! are you old Munnoo or Bunnoo? Here! look after my traps, will you?" And the traps are duly looked after, while the Philosophical Radical on the rampage is taking the opportunity afforded by baggage parade to record in his valuable diary the pained surprise at the want of touch between the rulers and the ruled, which is, alas! his first impression of India. In all probability it will be his last also, since it is conceivable that both rulers and ruled may be glad to get rid of him on the approach of the hot weather. Mosquitoes are troublesome, and cholera is disconcerting, but they are bearable beside the man who invariably knows the answers to his own questions before he asks them.

Dhurm Singh's dreams, however, if confused, were pleasant; full of strong meats and drinks, and men in buckram. He could not, of course, serve the Sirkâr again with the chance of batta and loot, but he could serve the chota sahib and wear a badge. After all, a badge-wearer had his opportunities of hectoring. And then, how he could talk round the camp fires! What tales he could tell!--bearing in mind, of course, the advancement of God and the Gurus. He fell asleep finally in the sunshine, blissfully content. The tide ebbed in the backwaters, the guardship lay white and trim in the open, the tram horses clattered up and down, the Royal Yacht Club pennant flew out against the blue sky, a match was being played on the links hard by, and the very coolies, as they hauled and heaved, used a polyglot of sailors' slang. Only the palm-trees on the point over the bay gave an Oriental touch to the scene.

* * * * *

"Dhurm Singh! my dear, dear old friend! Look, comrades, this is the man who carried me to safety in his arms even as the Good Shepherd carries His lambs."

The speech had that unreal sound which is the curse of the premeditated, except in the mouth of a born actor, which Sonny baba was not. And yet the young curves of the lips quivered. Perhaps the commonplace exclamation of the British boy mentioned before would have come more naturally to them, but Staff-captain Sonny baba of the Salvation Army was on parade, and bound to keep up his character. Nevertheless there was no lack of warmth in the grip he got of the old man's reluctant hand.

"Huzoor," faltered Dhurm Singh, taken aback at this condescension, and letting the sword he was about to present fall back on its belt with a clatter. The fact being that the said sword had been an occasion of much mental distress; as an actual ex-duffadar it was irregular, but as a possible bodyguard it was strictly de rigueur. Perhaps, however, times had changed in this as in other ways during those twenty years. The very uniform worn by the score or so of men drawn up on the deck was strange; and what did that squad of mem sahibs mean? Their dress did not seem so strange to the old Akâli, since in those palmy days before the Mutiny the fashions were not so far removed from the costume of a Salvation lass; but the tambourines!

"Come and speak to the General," said Sonny baba somewhat hurriedly. He spoke in English; but just as the formula, "Look after my traps" is "understanded of the common people" at once, so the word "General" brought a relieved comprehension to the old Sikh's face. There were blessed frogs on this one's coat also, which, like the word Mesopotamia, were charged with consolation.

The General looked at him with that curious philanthropic smile which, while it welcomes the object, has a kind of circumambient beam of mutual congratulation for all spectators of the benevolence.

"You have seen service, my good old friend," he exclaimed in fluent Urdu, as he pointed with a declamatory wave of his hand to the solitary medal, "but it was poor service to what we offer you now. Come to us, be our first-fruit, and help to carry the colours of the Great Army in the van of the fight."

A speech meant palpably for the gallery.

Dhurm Singh, however, took it at attention, and saluted--

"Pension-wallah, Huzoor, unfit for duty," he replied with modest brevity, indicating his empty sleeve.

The General caught at the occasion for even greater unction with a complacency which could not be concealed.

"The Great Army is recruited from those who are unfit for duty, from those who are sinners. Is it not so, comrades? Are we not all maimed, halt, blind, yet entering into life?"

"Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" cried the company, bursting into the refrain of a hymn, in which Sonny baba joined with an angelic voice. The voice, in fact, was largely responsible for the position in which he found himself. The old swash-buckler's eyes grew moist as he looked at him, thinking that he was the very image, for sure, of his dead father, who had been the pride of the regiment. Nevertheless the effervescence of song left the old man still deprecating and fumbling in his tunic.

"The General-sahib mistakes; these are my pinson papers."

That proved a climax. When, just as you are setting foot on a country which you have sworn to conquer, an old warrior comes aboard and produces a bundle of Scripture texts and Salvation hymns out of his innermost breast pocket, naturally nothing is left but to enthuse. What followed Dhurm Singh only dimly understood, but he stuck manfully to his intention of following Sonny baba to the death if needs be. The result being that at four o'clock in the afternoon he took part in a procession round the town of Bombay--mortal man of his mould being manifestly unable to resist the temptation of marching in step behind a big drum, with the colours of a whole army on his shoulders; especially when unlimited opportunity for scowling defiance at hostile crowds is thrown into the bargain. By eight o'clock, however, matters had assumed a different complexion; so had Dhurm Singh, as he sat in the lock-up, vastly contented with his black eye and an ugly cut on the nose, which he explained gleefully to Sonny baba put him in mind of old times. The latter, through the medium of a fellow-passenger who knew Punjâbi, was meanwhile trying to make the old sinner understand that he had got the whole army into trouble, and that personally he must stand his trial for a breach of the peace.

"And tell him, please," said Sonny baba with grieved diffidence, "that we all think he must have been drunk."

An odd smile struggled with the gravity of Dr. Taylor's interpretation of the reply.

"He says, of course he was drunk, as you all were. In fact, he bought a bottle of rum instead of taking his opium, so that the effects might be uniform--I'm telling you the sober truth, my dear boy. You see you don't know the people or the country, or anything about them. I do. Besides, the Tommies--the regular soldiers I mean--always make a point of getting drunk if they can when they go down or come up to the sea in ships. Perhaps it's the connection between reeling to and fro, you know. I beg your pardon; no offence--but really, what with the tambourines--"

Dr. Taylor paused with his bright eyes on the boy's face. They had been cabin companions, and despite an absolute antagonism of thought, chums. It is so sometimes, and as a rule such friendships last.

"Did you tell him the General was greatly displeased? It is such a terrible beginning to our campaign; so unscriptural," mourned Sonny baba evasively.

"I don't know about that; wasn't there some one who smote off some one else's ear? and that, I believe, is what the old man is accused of doing. I beg your pardon again, but the coincidence is remarkable."

"And what is he saying now?" put in the other hurriedly.

Dr. Taylor paused.

"He is calling down the blessing of the one true God upon your head, now and for all eternity," he answered slowly, and there was a sort of hush in his voice.

Sonny baba's eyes grew suspiciously moist, but he shook his head dutifully. "How--how sad," he began.

"Very sad that you can't understand what he says," interrupted Dr. Taylor curtly, "because as I've only just time to catch my train I must be off. Salaam, Akâli sahib!"

Dhurm Singh, standing to salute, detained the doctor for a minute with eager questioning.

"What is it?" asked Sonny baba again. "What is it he wants to know?"

Dr. Taylor gave a short laugh. "He wants to know who the General's papa and mamma were, because he isn't a gentleman. You needn't stare so, my dear fellow. That is the first thing they find out about an Englishman, and it needs a lot of grit and go in a man to get over the initial drawback. Well, good-bye, and if you will take my advice, come up north, see the people, learn their language, and appreciate their lives before you try to change them. And look here! don't go taking an Akâli about in a religious procession with drums and banners. It isn't safe, especially if you are going to Bengal."

"Why Bengal more than other places?"

"Accustomed to lick them, that's all--hereditary instinct. Well, good-bye again, and take my advice and come north. The old swash-buckler might be of some use to you there. He'll be in the way down country."