THE SON OF HIS FATHER
“It is a queer name,” Mrs. Strickland admitted, “and none of our family have ever borne it; but, you see, he is the first man to us.”
So he was called Adam, and to that world about him he was the first of men—a man-child alone. Heaven sent him no Eve for a companion, but all earth, horse and foot, was at his feet. As soon as he was old enough to appear in public he held a levée, and Strickland’s sixty policemen, with their sixty clanking sabres, bowed to the dust before him. When his fingers closed a little on Imam Din’s sword-hilt they rose and roared till Adam roared too, and was withdrawn.
“Now that was no cry of fear,” said Imam Din afterwards, speaking to his companion in the Police lines. “He was angry—and so young! Brothers, he will make a very strong Police officer.”
“Does the Memsahib nurse him?” said a new recruit, the dye-smell not yet out of his yellow cotton uniform.
“Ho!” said an up-country Naik scornfully; “it has not been known for more than ten days that my woman nurses him.” He curled his moustaches as lordly as ever an Inspector could afford to do, for he knew that the husband of the foster-mother of the son of the District Superintendent of Police was a man of consideration.
“I am glad,” said Imam Din, loosening his belt. “Those who drink our blood become of our own blood, and I have seen, in those thirty years, that the sons of Sahibs once being born here return when they are men. Yes, they return after they have been to Belait [Europe].”
“And what do they in Belait?” asked the recruit respectfully.
“Get instruction—which thou hast not,” returned the Naik. “Also they drink of belaitee-panee [soda-water] enough to give them that devil’s restlessness which endures for all their lives. Whence we of Hind have trouble.”
“My father’s uncle,” said Imam Din slowly, with importance, “was Ressaldar of the Long Coat Horse; and the Empress called him to Europe in the year that she had accomplished fifty years of rule. He said (and there were also other witnesses) that the Sahibs there drink only common water even as do we; and that the belaitee-panee does not run in all their rivers.”
“He said that there was a Shish Mahal—a glass palace—half a mile in length, and that the rail-train ran under roads; and that there are boats bigger than a village. He is a great talker.” The Naik spoke scornfully. He had no well-born uncles.
“He is at least a man of good birth,” said Imam Din, and the Naik was silent.
“Ho! Ho!” Imam Din reached out to his pipe, chuckling till his fat sides shook again. “Strickland Sahib’s foster-mother was the wife of a gardener in the Ferozepur district. I was a young man then. This child also will be suckled here and he will have double wisdom, and when he is a Police officer it will be very bad for the thieves in this part of the world. Ho! Ho!”
“Strickland Sahib’s butler has said,” the Naik went on, “that they will call him Adam—and no jaw-splitting English name. Udaam. The padre will name him at their church in due time.”
“Who can tell the ways of Sahibs? Now Strickland Sahib knows more of the Faith than ever I had time to learn—prayers, charms, names and stories of the Blessed Ones. Yet he is not a Mussulman,” said Imam Din thoughtfully.
“For the reason that he knows as much of the gods of Hindustan, and so he rides with a rein in each hand. Remember that he sat under the Baba Atal, a faquir among faquirs, for ten days; whereby a man came to be hanged for the murder of a dancing girl on the night of the great earthquake,” the Naik replied.
“True—it is true. And yet—the Sahibs are one day so wise—and another so foolish. But he has named the child well; Adam. Huzrut Adam. Ho! Ho! Father Adam we must call him.”
“And all who minister to the child,” said the Naik quietly, but with meaning, “will come to great honour.”
Adam throve, being prayed over before the Gods of at least three creeds, in a garden almost as fair as Eden. There were gigantic clumps of bamboos that talked continually, and enormous plantains, trees on whose soft, paper skin he could scratch with his nails; green domes of mango-trees as huge as the dome of St. Paul’s, full of parrots as big as cassowaries and grey squirrels the size of foxes. At the end of the garden stood a hedge of flaming poinsettias higher than anything in the world, because, childlike, Adam’s eye could not carry to the tops of the mango-trees. Their green went out against the blue sky, but the red poinsettias he could just see. A nurse who talked continually about snakes and pulled him back from the mouth of a fascinating dry well, and a mother who believed that the sun hurt little heads, were the only drawbacks to this loveliness. But, as his legs grew under him, he found that by scaling an enormous rampart—three feet of broken-down mud wall at the end of the garden—he could come into a ready-made kingdom, where everyone was his slave. Imam Din showed him the way one evening, and the Police troopers, cooking their supper, received him with rapture, and gave him pieces of very indigestible, but altogether delightful, spiced bread.
Here he sat or sprawled in the horse-feed where the Police were picketed in a double line, and he named them, men and beasts together, according to his ideas and experiences, as his First Father had done before him. In those days everything had a name, from the mud mangers to the heel-ropes, for things were people to Adam exactly as people are things to folk in their second childhood. Through all the conferences—one hand twisted into Imam Din’s beard, and the other on his polished belt buckle—there were two other people who came and went across the talk—Death and Sickness—persons greater than Imam Din, and stronger than the heel-roped horses. There was Mata, the small-pox, a woman in some way connected with pigs; and Heza, the cholera, a black man, according to Adam; and Booka, starvation; and Kismet, who settled all questions, from the untimely choking of a pet mungoose in the kitchen-drain to the absence of a young Policeman who once missed a parade and never came back. It was all very wonderful to Adam, but not worth much thinking over; for a child’s mind is bounded by his eyes exactly as a horse’s view of the road is limited by his blinkers. Between all these objectionable shadowy vagrants stood a ring of kind faces and strong arms, and Mata and Heza would never touch Adam, the first of men. Kismet might do so, because—and this was a mystery no staring into his looking-glass would solve—Kismet was written, like Police orders for the day, in or on Adam’s head. Imam Din could not explain how this might be, and it was from that grey, fat Mohammedan that Adam learned through every inflection the Khuda jhanta [God knows!] that settles everything in the mind of Asia.
Beyond the fact that “Khuda” [God] was a very good man and kept lions, Adam’s theology did not run far. Mrs. Strickland tried to teach him a few facts, but he revolted at the story of Genesis as untrue. A turtle, he said, upheld the world, and one-half the adventures of Huzrut Nu [Father Noah] had never been told. If Mamma wanted to hear them she must ask Imam Din.
“It’s awful,” said Mrs. Strickland, half crying, “to think of his growing up like a little heathen.” Mrs. Strickland had been born and brought up in England, and did not quite understand Eastern things.
“Let him alone,” said Strickland. “He’ll grow out of it all, or it will only come back to him in dreams.”
“Are you sure?” said his wife.
“Quite. I was sent home when I was seven, and they flicked it out of me with a wet towel at Harrow. Public schools don’t encourage anything that isn’t quite English.”
Mrs. Strickland shuddered, for she had been trying not to think of the separation that follows motherhood in India, and makes life there, for all that is written to the contrary, not quite the most desirable thing in the world. Adam trotted out to hear about more miracles, and his nurse must have worried him beyond bounds, for she came back weeping, saying that Adam Baba was in danger of being eaten alive by wild horses.
As a matter of fact he had shaken off Juma by bolting between a couple of picketed horses, and lying down under their bellies. That they were old personal friends of his, Juma did not understand, nor Strickland either. Adam was settled at ease when his father arrived, breathless and white, and the stallions put back their ears and squealed.
“If you come here,” said Adam, “they will hit you kicks. Tell Juma I have eaten my rice, and I wish to be alone.”
“Come out at once,” said Strickland, for the horses were beginning to paw.
“Why should I obey Juma’s order? She is afraid of horses.”
“It is not Juma’s order. It is mine. Obey!”
“Ho!” said Adam. “Juma did not tell me that”; and he crawled out on all fours among the shod feet. Mrs. Strickland was crying bitterly with fear and excitement, and as a sacrifice to the home gods Adam had to be whipped. He said with perfect justice—
“There was no order that I should not sit with the horses, and they are my horses. Why is there this tamasha [fuss]?”
Strickland’s face showed him that the whipping was coming, and the child turned white. Motherlike, Mrs. Strickland left the room, but Juma, the foster-mother, stayed to see.
“Am I to be whipped here?” he gasped.
“Of course.”
“Before that woman? Father, I am a man—I am not afraid. It is my izzat—my honour.”
Strickland only laughed—(to this day I cannot imagine what possessed him), and gave Adam the little tap-tap with a riding cane that was whipping sufficient for his years.
When it was all over, Adam said quietly, “I am little and you are big. If I had stayed among my horse-folk I should not have been whipped. You are afraid to go there.”
The merest chance led me to Strickland’s house that afternoon. When I was half-way down the drive Adam passed me without recognition, at a fast run. I caught one glimpse of his face under his big hat, and it was the face of his father as I had once seen it in the grey of the morning when it bent over a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder.
“Let me go!” he screamed; though he and I were the best of friends, as a rule. “Let me go!”
“Where to, Father Adam?” He was quivering like a haltered colt.
“To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before a woman! Let me go!” He tried to bite my hand.
“That is a small matter,” I said. “Men are born to beatings.”
“Thou hast never been beaten,” he said savagely (we were talking in the native tongue).
“Indeed I have; times past counting.”
“Before women?”
“My mother and my ayah saw. By women, too, for that matter. What of it?”
“What didst thou do?” He stared beyond my shoulder up the long drive.
“It is long ago, and I have forgotten. I was older than thou art; but even then I forgot, and now the thing is only a jest to be talked of.”
Adam drew one big breath and broke down utterly in my arms. Then he raised his head, and his eyes were Strickland’s eyes when Strickland gave orders.
“Ho! Imam Din!”
The fat orderly seemed to spring out of the earth at our feet, crashing through the bushes, and standing at attention.
“Hast thou ever been beaten?” said Adam.
“Assuredly. By my father when I was thirty years old. He beat me with a plough-beam before all the women of the village.”
“Wherefore?”
“Because I had returned to the village on leave from the Government service, and said of the village elders that they had not seen the world. Therefore he beat me to show that no seeing of the world changes father and son.”
“And thou?”
“I stood up to the beating. He was my father.”
“Good,” said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word.
Imam Din looked after him. “An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime, but he breeds elephants. Yet, I am glad I am no father of tuskers,” said he.
“What is it all?” I asked.
“His father beat him with a whip no bigger than a reed. But the child could not have done what he desired to do without leaping through me. And I am of some few pounds weight. Look!”
Imam Din stepped back through the bushes, and the pressed grass showed that he had been lying curled round the mouth of the dry well.
“When there was talk of beating, I knew that one who sat among horses such as ours was not like to kiss his father’s hand. He might have done away with himself. So I lay down in this place.” We stood still looking at the well-curb.
Adam came along the garden path to us. “I have spoken to my father,” he said simply. “Imam Din, tell thy Naik that his woman is dismissed my service.”
“Huzoor! [Your Highness!]” said Imam Din, stooping low.
“For no fault of hers.”
“Protector of the Poor!”
“And to-day.”
“Khodawund! [Heaven-born!]”
“It is an order. Go!”
Again the salute, and Imam Din departed, with that same set of the back which he wore when he had taken an order from Strickland. I thought that it would be well to go too, but Strickland beckoned me from the verandah. When I came up he was perfectly white, rocking to and fro in his chair.
“Do you know he was going to chuck himself down the well—because I tapped him just now?” he said helplessly.
“I ought to,” I replied. “He has just dismissed his nurse—on his own authority, I suppose?”
“He told me just now that he wouldn’t have her for a nurse any more. I never supposed he meant it for an instant. I suppose she’ll have to go.”
Now Strickland, the Police officer, was feared through the length and breadth of the Punjab by murderers, horse-thieves, and cattle-lifters.
Adam returned, halting outside the verandah.
“I have sent Juma away because she saw that—that which happened. Until she is gone I do not come into the house,” he said.
“But to send away thy foster-mother!” said Strickland with reproach.
“I do not send her away. It is thy blame,” and the small forefinger was pointed to Strickland. “I will not obey her. I will not eat from her hand. I will not sleep with her. Send her away!”
Strickland stepped out and lifted the child into the verandah.
“This folly has lasted long enough,” he said. “Come now and be wise.”
“I am little and you are big,” said Adam between set teeth. “You can beat me before this man or cut me to pieces. But I will not have Juma for my ayah any more. She saw me beaten. I will not eat till she goes. I swear it by—my father’s head.”
Strickland sent him indoors to his mother, and we could hear sounds of weeping and Adam’s voice saying nothing more than “Send Juma away!” Presently Juma came in and wept too, and Adam repeated, “It is no fault of thine, but go!”
And the end of it was that Juma went with all her belongings, and Adam fought his own way into his little clothes until the new ayah came. His address of welcome to her was rather amazing. In a few words it ran: “If I do wrong, send me to my father. If you strike me, I will try to kill you. I do not wish my ayah to play with me. Go and eat rice!”
From that Adam foreswore the society of ayahs and small native boys as much as a small boy can, confining himself to Imam Din and his friends of the Police. The Naik, Juma’s husband, had been presuming not a little on his position, and when Adam’s favour was withdrawn from his wife he thought it best to apply for a transfer to another post. There were too many companions anxious to report his shortcomings to Strickland.
Towards his father Adam kept a guarded neutrality. There was not a touch of sulkiness in it, for the child’s temper was as clear as a bell. But the difference and the politeness worried Strickland.
If the Policemen had loved Adam before the affair of the well, they worshipped him now.
“He knows what honour means,” said Imam Din. “He has justified himself upon a point thereof. He has carried an order through his father’s household as a child of the Blood might do. Therefore he is not altogether a child any longer. Wah! He is a tiger’s cub.” The next time that Adam made his little unofficial inspection of the lines, Imam Din, and, by consequence, all the others, stood upon their feet with their hands to their sides, instead of calling out from where they lay, “Salaam, Babajee,” and other disrespectful things.
But Strickland took counsel with his wife, and she with the cheque-book and their lean bank account, and they decided that Adam must go “home” to his aunts. But England is not home to a child who has been born in India, and it never becomes homelike unless he spends all his youth there. Their bank-book showed that if they economized through the summer by going to a cheap hill-station instead of to Simla (where Mrs. Strickland’s parents lived, and where Strickland might be noticed by the Government) they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be hard pinching, but it could be done.
Dalhousie was chosen as being the cheapest of the hill-stations;—Dalhousie and a little five-roomed cottage full of mildew, tucked away among the rhododendrons.
Adam had been to Simla three or four times, and knew by name most of the drivers on the road there, but this new place disquieted him. He came to me for information, his hands deep in his knickerbocker pockets, walking step for step as his father walked.
“There will be none of my bhai-bund [brotherhood] up there,” he said disconsolately, “and they say that I must lie still in a doolie [palanquin] for a day and a night, being carried like a sheep. I wish to take some of my mounted men to Dalhousie.”
I told him that there was a small boy, called Victor, at Dalhousie, who had a calf for a pet, and was allowed to play with it on the public roads. After that Adam could not sufficiently hurry the packing.
“First,” said he, “I shall ask that man Victor to let me play with the cow’s child. If he is muggra [ill-conditioned], I shall tell my Policemen to take it away.”
“But that is unjust,” said Strickland, “and there is no order that the Police should do injustice.”
“When the Government pay is not sufficient, and low-caste men are promoted, what can an honest man do?” Adam replied, in the very touch and accent of Imam Din; and Strickland’s eyebrows went up.
“You talk too much to the Police, my son,” he said.
“Always. About everything,” said Adam promptly. “They say that when I am an officer I shall know as much as my father.”
“God forbid, little one!”
“They say, too, that you are as clever as Shaitan [the Evil One], to know things.”
“They say that, do they?” and Strickland looked pleased. His pay was small, but he had his reputation, and it was dear to him.
“They say also—not to me, but to one another when they eat rice behind the wall—that in your own heart you esteem yourself as wise as Suleiman [Soloman], who was cheated by Shaitan.”
This time Strickland did not look so pleased. Adam, in all innocence, launched into a long story about Suleiman-bin-Daoud, who once, out of vanity, pitted his wits against Shaitan, and because God was not on his side Shaitan sent “a little devil of low caste,” as Adam put it, who cheated him utterly and put him to shame before “all the other Kings.”
“By Gum!” said Strickland, when the tale was done, and went away, while Adam took me to task for laughing at Imam Din’s stories. I did not wonder that he was called Huzrut Adam, for he looked old as all time in his grave childhood, sitting cross-legged, his battered little helmet far at the back of his head, his forefinger wagging up and down, native fashion, and the wisdom of serpents on his unconscious lips.
That May he went up to Dalhousie with his mother, and in those days the journey ended in fifty or sixty miles of uphill travel in a doolie or palanquin along a road winding through the Himalayas. Adam sat in the doolie with his mother, and Strickland rode and tied with me, a spare doolie following. The march began after we got out of the train at Pathankot, in a wet hot night among the rice and poppy fields.