Voices in the Night Part 20

'Who? thyself!' came viciously from the foremost row of priests. 'Where is thy sacred thread, apostate?'

Chris flinched for the first time. It was true. In a fit of anger when his own received him not, he had removed the badge of the twice-born with his own hands. So he had nothing to which he could appeal. Nothing old or new!

'Listen!' he began again helplessly, and the crowd feeling the helplessness surged closer.

'Kill him!' said one voice, dominating the others by the very simplicity of its advice. 'He is nothing. He is not of us, nor of the _Huzoors_. Who wants him?'

Another instant and the advice might have been followed had not some one claimed poor Chris--had not a voice from behind said softly--

'Well! I'm dashed if it ain't the guv'nor! Now then! you n.i.g.g.e.rs!'

The next instant, with a plentiful if quite good-natured use of heels and elbows, Chris Davenant's foreman of works was through the crowd into the water, and so, facing round on those threatening faces, was backing towards Chris, and making furious feints with his fists the while.

'_Ram-ram_, gents,' he said affably. 'Now, w'ot you've got to do is to tell me w'ot all this is about. W'ot are you doin' to my guv'nor? Don't you speak, sir!' he added in a hasty whisper. 'I don't really want to know nothing. You and me's got to get out o' this galley, thet's all.

An' if we don't,' he continued philosophically, 'you'll 'ave to explain up top, and I kin listen then. Them kind o' words ain't no use down 'ere. Lem'me speak mine!'

With that he ceased sparring, walked two paces forwards in the water, put his hands in his trousers-pockets, and began on his lingo coolly--

'_Dekko_ (look here), you want this _admi_ (man) _abhi_ (now), but you ain't goin' to get 'im. _Tumhara nahin_ (not yours). He's mine, _mera admi_ (my man), _sumjha_? (do you understand?) If you want _lurro_ (fight), come on. You shall 'ave a bellyful, an' there'll be a plenty on you to _phansi_ (hang). But w'ot I say is, don't be _pargul soors_ (foolish pigs). I don't do your bally 'ole temples any 'arm. It's "_durm shaster ram-ram_[14] an' _hurry gunga_," so far's I care. But this man's my guv'nor. You don't touch 'im. _Kubhi nahin_ (never). I'm a _nek admi, burra usseel_ (virtuous man, very gentle) w'en I'm took the right way; contrariwise I'm _zulm_ an' _ficker_ an' _burra burra affut_. Now you ask ole 'Oneyman if I ain't. 'E knows both sides o'

Jan-Ali-shan, and 'e'll give 'is opinion, like the genl'eman 'e is.'

He paused, for an idea, a chance had suggested itself. Then at the top of his voice, with a devil-may-care lilt in it, he began--

'Click, click?

Like a monkey on a stick.'

The answer followed in a second. With rustlings and boundings the monkeys came to the rescue of the familiar voice; for the crowd behind, weary of being unable to see what was pa.s.sing in front, turned instinctively to the new interest, and so, losing cohesion, the mult.i.tude lost unity of purpose also for the moment.

'Now's your time, sir,' shouted John Ellison; 'keep close to me!' Then with a wild yell of

'Clear the decks, comrades,'

he rushed head down at the fat stomach of the chief priest, bowled him over, and treating the rest as he would have treated a crush at football, found himself, with Chris at his heels, on the top of the steps almost before the crowd had realised what was happening.

'Pull up, sir,' he said, pausing breathlessly; 'never run a hinch more nor you can 'elp with n.i.g.g.e.rs. An' they'll be all right now we're off them steps. I know 'em! As peaceable a lot as ever lived, if you don't touch their wimmin or their G.o.ds.'

And with that he turned to the peaceable lot with his usual urbanity.

'_Ram-ram_, gents. I done you no 'arm, and you done me no 'arm. That's as it should be. So good afternoon. _Salaam alackoom!_--Now then, sir, you come along to my diggin's an' get your pants.'

But as they hurried off to the Strangers' Home, he shook his head gravely.

'If it hadn't bin for my bein' in a surplus ch.o.r.e seven year, and so knowin'

"Lord a' mercy"

to the Ten Commandments, and my dooty to my neighbour, you'd never a wore breeches agin, sir, for I wouldn't never ave come back to them steps with a p.r.i.c.k in my cons.h.i.+nse, sir, for fear as there was more in them dress pants than meets the eye, as the sayin' is; though why the nation, savin' your presence, sir, you come to took 'em off, beats me!'

Chris told him. Told him the whole story, as he might not, perhaps, have told a better man, and John Ellison listened decorously, respectfully. It was not till Chris, attired in the fateful garments, with his subordinate's white uniform coat superadded and the devotee's shawl twined as a turban (since it had not been deemed feasible to recover the rest of the dress-suit that night), was ready to return to civilisation, that John Ellison ventured on a parting remark.

'It's the onsartainty, sir, that does the mischief. Beer's beer, an'

whisky's whisky. It's when you come to mixin' 'em that you dun'no where you are. It taste beastly to begin with, and then it don't make a chap, so to speak, punctooal drunk. So it throws 'im out o' reckonin', and makes 'im onsartin--an' that don't work in

"Hinjia's coral strand."'

CHAPTER IX

UNCERTAINTIES

There were many people in many parts of Nushapore that Sunday evening who were echoing Jan-Ali-shan's estimate of the danger and discomforts of uncertainty.

For, far and near, from Government House, where Grace Arbuthnot sate at the head of a glittering dinner-table round which half the empire-making bureaucracy of the province was gathered, to the veriest hovel on the outcast outskirts of the city, where two women--the lowest of the low--were grinding at the mill for their daily bread such sweepings of the corn-dealers' shops as they had been able to gather during the day, the feeling that none knew what the coming dawn might bring to hovel and house, home and country, and people, lay heavily, almost suffocatingly.

It is a feeling which comes to India, none can tell how, or why. It is in the air like plague and pestilence. There is no remedy for it, and the fact that we aliens have learnt to recognise its existence is often the only difference between the vague unrest which dies away, as it came, irrationally, and that which brought us the mutiny, and which may, conceivably, bring us one again.

There is only one thing certain about this feeling. Whatever pa.s.sion, or injustice, or ignorance, causes the first quickened heart-beat, it is not long before, however obscurely, the great problem of s.e.x becomes involved in the quarrel between East and West. For there lies the crux of toleration, of loyalty.

So, with plague and its inevitable interference with domestic life looming before them, the hard-worked officials who for six days of the week had borne the heaviest burden men can bear--absolute executive responsibility, when the executive authority is limited--knew perfectly well, as they deliberately tried to forget that burden round the dinner-table at Government House, that very little would suffice to upset that unstable equilibrium of law and order, which--taken in conjunction with the peaceful, law-abiding temperament of the people--is so remarkable in India.

And there was so much that might conceivably upset it. To begin with, the tape machine under lock and key in the private secretary's office next the dining-room! At any moment, in the middle of a jest, or a _pate de foie gras_, its electric bell might begin to ring, and the verdict of British ignorance, embodied in a message from a Secretary of State, print itself out in obliteration of the verdict of practical experience. For telegrams had been coming fast and frequent of late; would inevitably come faster and more frequent every year, every month, every day, as the lessening length of time between India and England made the pulsebeats of either audible to the other.

Then, every one round the table knew that those days, those hours were, also inevitably, bringing nearer and nearer that quarrel as to whether cleanliness comes next to G.o.dliness, or G.o.dliness to cleanliness, which has yet to be settled between East and West. Between a race which prides itself on a.s.serting the former in its proverb, yet in its practice insists on sanitation and leaves salvation to take its chance; and a race which, while a.s.serting that salvation is impossible without physical purity, practically ignores cleanliness. A quarrel which is surely the quaintest dissociation of theory and practice which the world can show! All the quainter in that the Western proverb is a quotation from the sacred wisdom of the East.

The question therefore, 'When will the plague come?' with its corollary, 'If it comes, what shall we do?' underlay the laughter of two-thirds of the guests. For they were men. The remaining third, being women, were as yet unconcerned; the danger had not yet come within their horizon of personal good or evil. All except Grace Arbuthnot; and that it had come into hers was due simply to an enlargement of that personal horizon; not from any general sense of duty.

Yet, in a way, the men also limited their wonder to their own line of work. The city magistrate with reference to the back slums of Nushapore, peopled by the idlest, most dissolute, most depraved population in India. The Inspector-General of Hospitals thought of his native doctors, his dispensaries. The police-officer of his bad-character list, his licences to carry arms. The General-in-command of the station, again, thought of his garrison, of the four hundred sick in hospital out of eighteen hundred men, who might be wanted ere long. His were not pleasant thoughts, and they were urgent. Only that morning he had driven down from cantonments to catch the Lieutenant-Governor before he went to church and discuss the doctor's fiat that nothing short of a complete change, a complete severance from the bazaars which, crowding round the barracks, placed the troops, as it were, in the midst of a native town, was likely to do any good. So they had discussed the question during service hours, while others were saying 'Good Lord, deliver us' from a variety of evils; with the result that Sir George had promised to go down to cantonments the very next day, and see for himself what the state of affairs was.

Yet, despite the fact that all the repressed anxiety present centred round the one word 'plague,' the first hint of the subject mooted gravely, brought instant protest from a high-pitched Irish brogue.

'Oh, plague take it altogether! for it is becoming a bore of the fullest dimensions! But I hearrd a fine story about it an' old Martineau yesterday. There has been a suspected case in one of his districts. An old Mohammedan woman, travelling alone in a country gig, died; and the deputy-collector--a Hindoo hungering for promotion--thought he 'ud curry favour with the powers by bein' prompt.

So he burrnt the cart an' the clothes an' the corpse. They didn't mind the corpse--bein' a woman--though it's perdition, me dear Mrs.

Carruthers, for a Mohammedan to be burrnt; but the clothes were another story, and the relatives kicked up a bit of a fuss. So Martineau had to hold an inquiry. "Did you burrn the corpse?" he roared--ye know his sucking-dove of a voice. "Sir," says the deputy half blue-funk, half-elation at his own action, "I did; the rules provide----" "I didn't ask for the rules, sir," roars Martineau; "did you burrn the clothes?" "_Huzoor!_" bleats the _baboo_, forgetting his English, "it is laid down." "I didn't ask what's laid down," comes the roar; "did you burrn the cart?" "_Ghereeb-na-waz_" blubbers the deputy, "I thought----" "Confound you, sir! I didn't ask what you thought; did you burrn the driver?" "No! no!" shrieked the wretched creature, fallin' on his knees. "It is a lie! It is malice! It is an invention of my enemies. I didn't." "Then, sir," thunders Martineau, "you're a d--d fool, sir, not to have stopped his mouth."'

There was a light-hearted laugh round the table which, for the time being, focussed all the qualities which go to make empire; not the least of which is the faculty for such laughter. Laughter which comes to the West, sometimes, to be celebrated in song and story, like that of the ball before Waterloo, or of the French _n.o.blesse_ in the _conciergerie_, but which is ever present in India, giving to its Anglo-Indian society an almost wistful frivolity, studious in its gay refusal to take anything _aux grands serieux_ till the stern necessity of doing so stares it in the face.

And, with the laugh, the grave, white-coated, dark-faced servants pa.s.sed round the table also, ignoring the mirth, ignoring all things save French dishes and iced champagne.

'Lucky it was a woman, wasn't it!' said a voice. 'If it had been a man, there would have been real trouble.'