“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.