II
It was all new to Adam, and he had opinions to advance—notably about a fish that jumped in a way-side pond. “Now I know,” he shouted, “how God puts them there! First He makes them up above and then He drops them down. That was a new one.” Then, lifting his head to the stars, he cried: “Oh, God, do it again, but slowly, so that I, Adam, may see.”
But nothing happened, and the doolie-bearers lit the noisome, dripping rag-torches, and Adam’s eyes shone big in the dancing light, and we smelt the dry dust of the plains that we were leaving after eleven months’ hard work.
At stated times the men ceased their drowsy, grunting tune, and sat down for a smoke. Between the guttering of their water-pipes we could hear the cries of the beasts of the night, and the wind stirring in the folds of the mountain ahead. At the changing-station the voice of Adam, the First of Men, would be lifted to rouse the sleepers in the huts till the fresh relay of bearers shambled from their cots and the relief pony with them.
Then we would re-form and go on, and by the time the moon rose Adam was asleep, and there was no sound in the night except the grunting of the men, the husky murmur of some river a thousand feet down in the valley, and the squeaking of Strickland’s saddle. So we went up from date-palm to deodar, till the dawn wind came round a corner all fresh from the snows, and we snuffed it. I heard Strickland say, “Wife, my overcoat, please,” and Adam, fretfully, “Where is Dalhousie and the cow’s child?” Then I slept till Strickland turned me out of the warm doolie at seven o’clock, and I stepped into all the splendour of a cool Hill day, the Plains sweltering twenty miles back and four thousand feet below. Adam waked too, and needs must ride in front of me to ask a million questions, and shout at the monkeys and clap his hands when the painted pheasants bolted across our road, and hail every woodcutter and drover and pilgrim within sight, till we halted for breakfast at a rest house. After that, being a child, he went out to play with a train of bullock-drivers halted by the roadside, and we had to chase him out of a native liquor shop, where he was bargaining with a native seven-year-old for a parrot in a bamboo cage.
Said he, wriggling on my pommel as we went on again, “There were four men behosh [insensible] at the back of that house. Wherefore do men grow behosh from drinking?”
“It is the nature of the waters,” I said, and, calling back, “Strick, what’s that grog-shop doing so close to the road? It’s a temptation to any one’s servants.”
“Dunno,” said a sleepy voice in the doolie. “This is Kennedy’s District. ’Twasn’t here in my time.”
“Truly the waters smell bad,” Adam went on. “I smelt them, but I did not get the parrot even for six annas. The woman of the house gave me a love gift that I found playing near the verandah.”
“And what was the gift, Father Adam?”
“A nose-ring for my ayah. Ohe! Ohe! Look at that camel with the muzzle on his nose!”
A string of loaded camels came cruising round the corner as a fleet rounds a cape.
“Ho, Malik! Why does not a camel salaam like an elephant? His neck is long enough,” Adam cried.
“The Angel Jibrail made him a fool at the beginning,” said the driver, as he swayed on the top of the leading beast, and laughter ran all along the line of red-bearded men.
“That is true,” said Adam solemnly, and they laughed again.
At last, in the late afternoon, we came to Dalhousie, the loveliest of the hill-stations, and separated, Adam hardly able to be restrained from setting out at once to find Victor and the “cow’s child.” I found them both, something to my trouble, next morning. The two young sinners had a calf on a tight rope just at a sharp turn in the Mall, and were pretending that he was a raja’s elephant who had gone mad; and they shouted with delight. Then we began to talk, and Adam, by way of crushing Victor’s repeated reminders to me that he and not “that other” was the owner of the calf, said, “It is true I have no cow’s child; but a great dacoity [robbery] has been done on my father.”
“We came up together yesterday. There could have been nothing,” I said.
“It was my mother’s horse. She has been dacoited with beating and blows, and now is so thin.” He held his hands an inch apart. “My father is at the telegraph-house sending telegrams. Imam Din will cut off all their heads. I desire your saddle-cloth for a howdah for my elephant. Give it me!”
This was exciting, but not lucid. I went to the telegraph office and found Strickland in a black temper among many telegraph forms. A dishevelled, one-eyed groom stood in a corner whimpering at intervals. He was a man whom Adam invariably addressed as “Be-shakl, be-ukl, be-ank” [ugly, stupid, eyeless]. It seemed that Strickland had sent his wife’s horse up to Dalhousie by road, a fortnight’s march, in the groom’s charge. This is the custom in Upper India. Among the foothills, near Dhunnera or Dhar, horse and man had been violently set upon in the night by four men, who had beaten the groom (his leg was bandaged from knee to ankle in proof), had incidentally beaten the horse, and had robbed the groom of the bucket and blanket, and all his money—eleven rupees, nine annas. Last, they had left him for dead by the way-side, where some woodcutters had found and nursed him. Then the one-eyed man howled with anguish, thinking over his bruises. “They asked me if I was Strickland Sahib’s servant, and I, thinking the Protection of the Name would be sufficient, spoke the truth. Then they beat me grievously.”
“H’m!” said Strickland. “I thought they wouldn’t dacoit as a business on the Dalhousie road. This is meant for me personally—sheer badmashi [impudence]. All right.”
In justice to a very hard-working class it must be said that the thieves of Upper India have the keenest sense of humour. The last compliment that they can pay a Police officer is to rob him, and if, as once they did, they can loot a Deputy Inspector-General of Police, on the eve of his retirement, of everything except the clothes on his back, their joy is complete. They cause letters of derision and telegrams of condolence to be sent to the victim; for of all men thieves are most compelled to keep abreast of progress.
Strickland was a man of few words where his business was concerned. I had never seen a Police officer robbed before, and I expected some excitement, but Strickland held his tongue. He took the groom’s deposition, and then retired into himself for a time. Then he sent Kennedy, of the Pathankot District, an official letter and an unofficial note. Kennedy’s reply was purely unofficial, and it ran thus: “This seems a compliment solely intended for you. My wonder is you didn’t get it before. The men are probably back in your district by now. My Dhunnera and foot-hill people are highly respectable cultivators, and, seeing my Assistant is an unlicked pup, and I can’t trust my Inspector out of my sight, I’m not going to turn their harvest upside down with Police investigations. I’m run off my feet with vaccination Police work. You’d better look at home. The Shubkudder gang were through here a fortnight back. They laid up at the Amritsar Serai, and then worked down. No cases against them in my charge; but, remember, you imprisoned their head-man for receiving stolen goods in Prub Dyal’s burglary. They owe you one.”
“Exactly what I thought,” said Strickland. “I had a notion it was the Shubkudder gang from the first. We must make it pleasant for them at Peshawur, and in my District, too. They’re just the kind that would lie up under Imam Din’s shadow.”
From this point onward the wires began to be worked heavily. Strickland had a very fair knowledge of the Shubkudder gang, gathered at first hand.
They were the same syndicate that had once stolen a Deputy Commissioner’s cow, put horse-shoes on her, and taken her forty miles into the jungle before they lost interest in the joke. They added insult to insult by writing that the Deputy Commissioner’s cows and horses were so much alike that it took them two days to find out the difference and they would not lift the like of such cattle any more.
The District Superintendent at Peshawur replied to Strickland that he was expecting the gang, and Strickland’s Assistant, in his own district, being young and full of zeal, sent up the most amazing clues.
“Now that’s just what I want that young fool not to do,” said Strickland. “He’s an English boy, born and bred, and his father before him. He has about as much tact as a bull, and he won’t work quietly under my Inspector. I wish the Government would keep our service for country-born men. Those first five or six years in India give a man a pull that lasts him all his life. Adam, if only you were old enough to be my Assistant!” He looked down at the little fellow in the verandah. Adam was deeply interested in the dacoity, and, unlike a child, did not lose interest after the first week. On the contrary, he would ask his father every evening what had been done, and Strickland had drawn him a map on the white wall of the verandah, showing the different towns in which Policemen were on the look-out for thieves. They were Amritsar, Jullunder, Phillour, Gurgaon, Rawal Pindi, Peshawur and Multan. Adam looked up at it as he answered—
“There has been great dikh [trouble] in this case?”
“Very great trouble. I wish that thou wert a young man and my Assistant to help me.”
“Dost thou need help, my father?” Adam asked curiously, with his head on one side.
“Very much.”
“Leave it all alone. It is bad. Let loose everything.”
“That must not be. Those beginning a business continue to the end.”
“Thou wilt continue to the end? Dost thou not know who did the dacoity?”
Strickland shook his head. Adam turned to me with the same question, and I answered it in the same way.
“What foolish people!” he said, and turned his back on us.
He showed plainly in all our dealings afterwards how we had fallen in his opinion. Strickland told me that he would sit at the door of his father’s workroom and stare at him for half an hour at a time as he went through his papers. Strickland seemed to work harder over the case than if he had been in office in the Plains.
“And sometimes I look up and I fancy the little chap’s laughing at me. It’s an awful thing to have a son. You see, he’s your own and his own, and between the two you don’t quite know how to handle him,” said Strickland. “I wonder what in the world he thinks about.”
I asked Adam this later on, quietly. He put his head on one side for a moment and replied: “In these days I think about great things. I do not play with Victor and the cow’s child any more. Victor is only a baba.”
At the end of the third week of Strickland’s leave, the result of Strickland’s labours—labours that had made Mrs. Strickland more indignant against the dacoits than any one else—came to hand. The Police at Peshawur reported that half of the Shubkudder gang were held at Peshawur to account for the possession of some blankets and a horse-bucket. Strickland’s assistant had also four men under suspicion in his charge; and Imam Din must have stirred up Strickland’s Inspector to investigations on his own account, for a string of incoherent telegrams came in from the Club Secretary in which he entreated, exhorted, and commanded Strickland to take his “mangy Policemen” off the Club premises. “Your men, in servants’ quarters here, examining cook. Billiard-marker indignant. Steward threatens resignation. Members furious. Grooms stopped on roads. Shut up, or my resignation goes to Committee.”
“Now I shouldn’t in the least wonder,” said Strickland thoughtfully to his wife, “if the Club was not just the place where the men would lie up. Billy Watson isn’t at all pleased, though. I think I shall have to cut my leave by a week and go down to take charge. If there’s anything to be told, the men will tell me.”
Mrs. Strickland’s eyes filled with tears. “I shall try to steal ten days if I can in the autumn,” he said soothingly, “but I must go now. It will never do for the gang to think that they can burgle my belongings.”
That was in the forenoon, and Strickland asked me to lunch to leave me some instructions about his big dog, with authority to rebuke those who did not attend to her. Tietjens was growing too old and too fat to live in the plains in the summer. When I came, Adam had climbed into his high chair at table, and Mrs. Strickland seemed ready to weep at any moment over the general misery of things.
“I go down to the Plains to-morrow, my son,” said Strickland.
“Wherefore?” said Adam, reaching out for a ripe mango and burying his head in it.
“Imam Din has caught the men who did the dacoity, and there are also others at Peshawur under suspicion. I must go to see.”
“Bus! [enough],” said Adam, between sucks at his mango, as Mrs. Strickland tucked the napkin round his neck. “Imam Din speaks lies. Do not go.”
“It is necessary. There has been great dikh-dari [trouble-giving].”
Adam came out of the fruit for a minute and laughed. Then, returning, he spoke between slow and deliberate mouthfuls.
“The dacoits live in Beshakl’s head. They will never be caught. All people know that. The cook knows, and the scullion, and Rahim Baksh here.”
“Nay,” said the butler behind his chair hastily. “What should I know? Nothing at all does the Servant of the Presence know.”
“Accha [good],” said Adam, and sucked on. “Only it is known.”
“Speak, then,” said Strickland to him. “What dost thou know? Remember my groom was beaten insensible.”
“That was in the bad-water shop where I played when we came up here. The boy who would not sell me the parrot for six annas told me that a one-eyed man had come there and drunk the bad waters and gone mad. He broke bedsteads. They hit him with a bamboo till he was senseless, and fearing he was dead, they nursed him on milk—like a little baba. When I was playing first with the cow’s child, I asked Beshakl if he were that man, and he said no. But I knew, because many woodcutters in Dalhousie asked him whether his head were whole now.”
“But why,” I interrupted, “did Beshakl tell lies?”
“Oh! He is a low-caste man, and desired to get consideration. Now he is a witness in a great law-case, and men will go to the jail on his account. It was to give trouble and obtain notice that he did it.”
“Was it all lies?” said Strickland.
“Ask him,” said Adam, through the mango-pulp.
Strickland passed through the door. There was a howl of despair in the servants’ quarters up the hill, and he returned with the one-eyed groom.
“Now,” said Strickland, “it is known. Declare!”
“Beshakl,” said Adam, while the man gasped. “Imam Din has caught four men, and there are some more at Peshawur. Bus! Bus! Bus! [Enough.]”
“Thou didst get drunk by the way-side, and didst make a false case to cover it. Speak!”
Like a good many other men, Strickland, in possession of a few facts, was irresistible. The groom groaned.
“I—I did not get drunk till—till—Protector of the Poor, the mare rolled.”
“All horses roll at Dhunnera. The road is too narrow before that, and they smell where the other horses have rolled. This the bullock-drivers told me when we came up here,” said Adam.
“She rolled. So her saddle was cut and the curb-chain lost.”
“See!” said Adam, tugging a curb-chain from his pocket. “That woman in the shop gave it to me for a love-gift. Beshakl said it was not his when I showed it. But I knew.”
“Then they at the grog-shop, knowing that I was the Servant of the Presence, said that unless I drank and spent money they would tell.”
“A lie! A lie!” said Strickland. “Son of an owl, speak the truth now at least.”
“Then I was afraid because I had lost the curb-chain, so I cut the saddle across and about.”
“She did not roll, then?” said Strickland, bewildered and angry.
“It was only the curb-chain that was lost. Then I cut the saddle and went to drink in the shop. I drank and there was a fray. The rest I have forgotten till I recovered.”
“And the mare the while? What of the mare?”
The man looked at Strickland and collapsed.
“She bore faggots for a week,” he said.
“Oh, poor Diamond!” said Mrs. Strickland.
“And Beshakl was paid four annas for her hire three days ago by the woodcutter’s brother, who is the left-hand man of our rickshaw-men here,” said Adam, in a loud and joyful voice. “We all knew. We all knew. I and the servants.”
Strickland was silent. His wife stared helplessly at the child; the soul out of Nowhere that went its own way alone.
“Did no man help thee with the lies?” I asked of the groom.
“None. Protector of the Poor—not one.”
“They grew, then?”
“As a tale grows in telling. Alas! I am a very bad man!” and he blinked his one eye dolefully.
“Now four men are held at my Police station on thy account, and God knows how many more at Peshawur, besides the questions at Multan, and my honour is lost, and my mare has been pack-pony to a woodcutter. Son of Devils, what canst thou do to make amends?”
There was just a little break in Strickland’s voice, and the man caught it. Bending low, he answered, in the abject fawning whine that confounds right and wrong more surely than most modern creeds, “Protector of the Poor, is the Police service shut to—an honest man?”
“Out!” cried Strickland, and swiftly as the groom departed he must have heard our shouts of laughter behind him.
“If you dismiss that man, Strick, I shall engage him. He’s a genius,” said I. “It will take you months to put this mess right, and Billy Watson won’t give you a minute’s peace.”
“You aren’t going to tell him?” said Strickland appealingly.
“I couldn’t keep this to myself if you were my own brother. Four men arrested with you—four or forty at Peshawur—and what was that you said about Multan?”
“Oh, nothing. Only some camel-men there have been——”
“And a tribe of camel-men at Multan! All on account of a lost curb-chain. Oh, my Aunt!”
“And whose memsahib [lady] was thy aunt?” said Adam, with the mango-stone in his fist. We began to laugh again.
“But here,” said Strickland, pulling his face together, “is a very bad child who has caused his father to lose his honour before all the Policemen of the Punjab.”
“Oh, they know,” said Adam. “It was only for the sake of show that they caught people. Assuredly they all knew it was benowti [make-up].”
“And since when hast thou known?” said the first policeman in India to his son.
“Four days after we came here, after the woodcutter had asked Beshakl after the health of his head. Beshakl all but slew one of them at the bad-water place.”
“If thou hadst spoken then, time and money and trouble to me and to others had all been spared. Baba, thou hast done a wrong greater than thy knowledge, and thou hast put me to shame, and set me out upon false words, and broken my honour. Thou hast done very wrong. But perhaps thou didst not think?”
“Nay, but I did think. Father, my honour was lost when that beating of me happened in Juma’s presence. Now it is made whole again.”
And with the most enchanting smile in the world Adam climbed up on to his father’s lap.