Actions and Reactions Part 23

Long and long ago, when Devadatta was King of Benares, I wrote some tales concerning Strickland of the Punjab Police (who married Miss Youghal), and Adam, his son. Strickland has finished his Indian Service, and lives now at a place in England called Weston-super-Mare, where his wife plays the organ in one of the churches. Semi-occasionally he comes up to London, and occasionally his wife makes him visit his friends.

Otherwise he plays golf and follows the harriers for his figure's sake.

If you remember that Infant who told a tale to Eustace Cleever the novelist, you will remember that he became a baronet with a vast estate.

He has, owing to cookery, a little lost his figure, but he never loses his friends. I have found a wing of his house turned into a hospital for sick men, and there I once spent a week in the company of two dismal nurses and a specialist in "Sprue." Another time the place was full of schoolboys--sons of Anglo-Indians whom the Infant had collected for the holidays, and they nearly broke his keeper's heart.

But my last visit was better. The Infant called me up by wire, and I fell into the arms of a friend of mine, Colonel A.L. Corkran, so that the years departed from us, and we praised Allah, who had not yet terminated the Delights, nor separated the Companions.

Said Corkran, when he had explained how it felt to command a native Infantry regiment on the border: "The Stricks are coming for to-night-with their boy."

"I remember him. The little fellow I wrote a story about," I said. "Is he in the Service?"

"No. Strick got him into the Centro-Euro-Africa Protectorate. He's a.s.sistant-Commissioner at Dupe--wherever that is. Somaliland, ain't it, Stalky?" asked the Infant.

Stalky puffed out his nostrils scornfully. "You're only three thousand miles out. Look at the atlas."

"Anyhow, he's as rotten full of fever as the rest of you," said the Infant, at length on the big divan. "And he's bringing a native servant with him. Stalky be an athlete, and tell Ipps to put him in the stable room."

"Why? Is he a Yao--like the fellow Wade brought here--when your housekeeper had fits?" Stalky often visits the Infant, and has seen some odd things.

"No. He's one of old Strickland's Punjabi policemen--and quite European--I believe."

"Hooray! Haven't talked Punjabi for three months--and a Punjabi from Central Africa ought to be amusin'."

We heard the chuff of the motor in the porch, and the first to enter was Agnes Strickland, whom the Infant makes no secret of adoring.

He is devoted, in a fat man's placid way, to at least eight designing women; but she nursed him once through a bad bout of Peshawur fever, and when she is in the house, it is more than all hers.

"You didn't send rugs enough," she began. "Adam might have taken a chill."

"It's quite warm in the tonneau. Why did you let him ride in front?"

"Because he wanted to," she replied, with the mother's smile, and we were introduced to the shadow of a young man leaning heavily on the shoulder of a bearded Punjabi Mohammedan.

"That is all that came home of him," said his father to me. "There was nothing in it of the child with whom I had journeyed to Dalhousie centuries since."

"And what is this uniform?" Stalky asked of Imam Din, the servant, who came to attention on the marble floor.

"The uniform of the Protectorate troops, Sahib. Though I am the Little Sahib's body-servant, it is not seemly for us white men to be attended by folk dressed altogether as servants."

"And--and you white men wait at table on horseback?" Stalky pointed to the man's spurs.

"These I added for the sake of honour when I came to England," said Imam Din Adam smiled the ghost of a little smile that I began to remember, and we put him on the big couch for refreshments. Stalky asked him how much leave he had, and he said "Six months."

"But he'll take another six on medical certificate," said Agnes anxiously. Adam knit his brows.

"You don't want to--eh? I know. Wonder what my second in command is doing." Stalky tugged his moustache, and fell to thinking of his Sikhs.

"Ah!" said the Infant. "I've only a few thousand pheasants to look after. Come along and dress for dinner. We're just ourselves. What flower is your honour's ladys.h.i.+p commanding for the table?"

"Just ourselves?" she said, looking at the crotons in the great hall.

"Then let's have marigolds the little cemetery ones."

So it was ordered.

Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting, and death.

That smell in our nostrils, and Adam's servant in waiting, we naturally fell back more and more on the old slang, recalling at each gla.s.s those who had gone before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay window overlooking the park, where they were carting the last of the hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles, but waited for the moon, and continued our talk in the dusk that makes one remember.

Young Adam was not interested in our past except where it had touched his future. I think his mother held his hand beneath the table. Imam Din--shoeless, out of respect to the floors--brought him his medicine, poured it drop by drop, and asked for orders.

"Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary," said his mother, and Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.

"Now what d'you expect to get out of your country?" the Infant asked, when--our India laid aside we talked Adam's Africa. It roused him at once.

"Rubber--nuts--gums--and so on," he said. "But our real future is cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District."

"My District!" said his father. "Hear him, Mummy!"

"I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market."

"But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?" she asked.

"My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of black soil that was just the thing for cotton."

"Ah! What was your Chief like?" Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.

"The best man alive--absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose yourself. The people call him"--Adam jerked out some heathen phrase--"that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know."

"I'm glad of that. Because I've heard from other quarters" Stalky's sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long delayed. "Other quarters!" Adam threw out a thin hand. "Every dog has his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!" The shake of his head was as I remembered it among his father's policemen twenty years before, and his mother's eyes s.h.i.+ning through the dusk called on me to adore it. I kicked Stalky on the s.h.i.+n. One must not mock a young man's first love or loyalty.

A lump of raw cotton appeared on the table.

"I thought there might be a need. Therefore I packed it between our s.h.i.+rts," said the voice of Imam Din.

"Does he know as much English as that?" cried the Infant, who had forgotten his East.

We all admired the cotton for Adam's sake, and, indeed, it was very long and glossy.

"It's--it's only an experiment," he said. "We're such awful paupers we can't even pay for a mailcart in my District. We use a biscuit-box on two bicycle wheels. I only got the money for that"--he patted the stuff--"by a pure fluke."

"How much did it cost?" asked Strickland.

"With seed and machinery--about two hundred pounds. I had the labour done by cannibals."

"That sounds promising." Stalky reached for a fresh cigarette.

"No, thank you," said Agnes. "I've been at Weston-super-Mare a little too long for cannibals. I'll go to the music-room and try over next Sunday's hymns."

She lifted the boy's hand lightly to her lips, and tripped across the acres of glimmering floor to the music-room that had been the Infant's ancestors' banqueting hall. Her grey and silver dress disappeared under the musicians' gallery; two electrics broke out, and she stood backed against the lines of gilded pipes.