The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories Read online

  ‘Yes; it was absurd. Now you try,’ he said, giving place to the girl. ‘Look out! A goat’s not a cow.’

  The goat protested against the amateur, and there was a scuffle, in which Scott snatched up the baby. Then it was all to do over again, and William laughed softly and merrily. She managed, however, to feed two babies, and a third.

  ‘Don’t the little beggars take it well!’ said Scott. ‘I trained ’em.’

  They were very busy and interested, when, lo! it was broad daylight, and before they knew, the camp was awake, and they kneeled among the goats, surprised by the day, both flushed to the temples. Yet all the round world rolling up out of the darkness might have heard and seen all that had passed between them.

  ‘Oh,’ said William, unsteadily, snatching up the tea and toast. ‘I had this made for you. It’s stone-cold now. I thought you mightn’t have anything ready so early. Better not drink it. It’s – it’s stone-cold.’

  ‘That’s awfully kind of you. It’s just right. It’s awfully good of you, really. I’ll leave my kids and goats with you and Mrs Jim; and, of course, anyone in camp can show you about the milking.’

  ‘Of course,’ said William; and she grew pinker and pinker and statelier and more stately, as she strode back to her tent, fanning herself vigorously with the saucer.

  There were shrill lamentations through the camp when the elder children saw their nurse move off without them. Faiz Ullah unbent so far as to jest with the policemen, and Scott turned purple with shame because Hawkins, already in the saddle, roared.

  A child escaped from the care of Mrs Jim, and, running like a rabbit, clung to Scott’s boot, William pursuing with long easy strides.

  ‘I will not go – I will not go!’ shrieked the child, twining his feet round Scott’s ankle. ‘They will kill me here. I do not know these people.’

  ‘I say,’ said Scott, in broken Tamil, ‘I say, she will do you no harm. Go with her and be well fed.’

  ‘Come!’ said William, panting, with a wrathful glance at Scott, who stood helpless and, as it were, hamstrung.

  ‘Go back,’ said Scott quickly to William. ‘I’ll send the little chap over in a minute.’

  The tone of authority had its effect, but in a way Scott did not exactly intend. The boy loosened his grasp, and said with gravity, ‘I did not know the woman was thine. I will go.’ Then he cried to his companions, a mob of three-, four-, and five-year-olds waiting on the success of his venture ere they stampeded: ‘Go back and eat. It is our man’s woman. She will obey his orders.’

  Jim collapsed where he sat; Faiz Ullah and the two policemen grinned; and Scott’s orders to the cartmen flew like hail.

  ‘That is the custom of the Sahibs when truth is told in their presence,’ said Faiz Ullah. ‘The time comes that I must seek new service. Young wives, especially such as speak our language and have knowledge of the ways of the Police, make great trouble for honest butlers in the matter of weekly accounts.’

  What William thought of it all she did not say, but when her brother, ten days later, came to camp for orders, and heard of Scott’s performances, he said, laughing: ‘Well, that settles it. He’ll be Bakri Scott to the end of his days’ (Bakri, in the northern vernacular, means a goat). ‘What a lark! I’d have given a month’s pay to have seen him nursing famine babies. I fed some with conjee [rice-water], but that was all right.’

  ‘It’s perfectly disgusting,’ said his sister, with blazing eyes. ‘A man does something like – like that – and all you other men think of is to give him an absurd nickname, and then you laugh and think it’s funny.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Jim, sympathetically.

  ‘Well, you can’t talk, William. You christened little Miss Demby the Button-quail last cold weather; you know you did. India’s the land of nicknames.’

  ‘That’s different,’ William replied. ‘She was only a girl, and she hadn’t done anything except walk like a quail, and she does. But it isn’t fair to make fun of a man.’

  ‘Scott won’t care,’ said Martyn. ‘You can’t get a rise out of old Scotty. I’ve been trying for eight years, and you’ve only known him for three. How does he look?’

  ‘He looks very well,’ said William, and went away with a flushed cheek. ‘Bakri Scott, indeed!’ Then she laughed to herself, for she knew the country of her service. ‘But it will be Bakri all the same’; and she repeated it under her breath several times slowly, whispering it into favour.

  When he returned to his duties on the railway, Martyn spread the name far and wide among his associates, so that Scott met it as he led his paddy-carts to war. The natives believed it to be some English title of honour, and the cart-drivers used it in all simplicity till Faiz Ullah, who did not approve of foreign japes, broke their heads. There was very little time for milking now, except at the big camps, where Jim had extended Scott’s idea, and was feeding large flocks on the useless northern grains. Enough paddy had come into the Eight Districts to hold the people safe, if it were only distributed quickly; and for that purpose no one was better than the big Canal officer, who never lost his temper, never gave an unnecessary order, and never questioned an order given. Scott pressed on, saving his cattle, washing their galled necks daily, so that no time should be lost on the road; reported himself with his rice at the minor famine-sheds, unloaded, and went back light by forced night-march to the next distributing centre, to find Hawkins’s unvarying telegram: ‘Do it again.’ And he did it again and again, and yet again, while Jim Hawkins, fifty miles away, marked off on a big map the tracks of his wheels gridironing the stricken lands. Others did well – Hawkins reported at the end that they all did well – but Scott was the most excellent, for he kept good coined rupees by him, and paid for his own cart-repairs on the spot, and ran to meet all sorts of unconsidered extras, trusting to be recouped later. Theoretically, the Government should have paid for every shoe and linchpin, for every hand employed in the loading; but Government vouchers cash themselves slowly, and intelligent and efficient clerks write at great length, contesting unauthorized expenditure of eight annas. The man who wishes to make his work a success must draw on his own bank-account of money or other things as he goes.

  ‘I told you he’d work,’ said Jimmy to his wife at the end of six weeks. ‘He’s been in sole charge of a couple of thousand men up north on the Mosuhl Canal for a year, and he gives one less trouble than young Martyn with his ten constables; and I’m morally certain – only Government doesn’t recognize moral obligations – that he’s spent about half his pay to grease his wheels. Look at this, Lizzie, for one week’s work! Forty miles in two days with twelve carts; two days’ halt building a famine-shed for young Rogers (Rogers ought to have built it himself, the idiot!). Then forty miles back again, loading six carts on the way, and distributing all Sunday. Then in the evening he pitches in a twenty-page demi-official to me, saying that the people where he is might be “advantageously employed on relief-work”, and suggesting that he put ’em to work on some broken-down old reservoir he’s discovered, so as to have a good water-supply when the Rains come. He thinks he can caulk the dam in a fortnight. Look at his marginal sketches – aren’t they clear and good? I knew he was pukka, but I didn’t know he was as pukka as this!’

  ‘I must show these to William,’ said Mrs Jim. ‘The child’s wearing herself out among the babies.’

  ‘Not more than you are, dear. Well, another two months ought to see us out of the wood. I’m sorry it’s not in my power to recommend you for a V.C.’

  William sat late in her tent that night, reading through page after page of the square handwriting, patting the sketches of proposed repairs to the reservoir, and wrinkling her eyebrows over the columns of figures of estimated water-supply.

  ‘And he finds time to do all this,’ she cried to herself ‘and … well, I also was present. I’ve saved one or two babies.’

  She dreamed for the twentieth time of the go
d in the golden dust, and woke refreshed to feed loathsome black children, scores of them, wastrels picked up by the wayside, their bones almost breaking their skin, terrible and covered with sores.

  Scott was not allowed to leave his cart-work, but his letter was duly forwarded to the Government, and he had the consolation, not rare in India, of knowing that another man was reaping where he had sown. That also was discipline profitable to the soul.

  ‘He’s much too good to waste on canals,’ said Jimmy. ‘Any one can oversee coolies. You needn’t be angry, William: he can – but I need my pearl among bullock-drivers, and I’ve transferred him to the Khanda district, where he’ll have it all to do over again. He should be marching now.’

  ‘He’s not a coolie,’ said William, furiously. ‘He ought to be doing his regulation work.’

  ‘He’s the best man in his service, and that’s saying a good deal; but if you must use razors to cut grindstones, why, I prefer the best cutlery.’

  ‘Isn’t it almost time we saw him again?’ said Mrs Jim. ‘I’m sure the poor boy hasn’t had a respectable meal for a month. He probably sits on a cart and eats sardines with his fingers.’

  ‘All in good time, dear. Duty before decency – wasn’t it Mr Chucks said that?’

  ‘No; it was Midshipman Easy,’ William laughed. ‘I sometimes wonder how it will feel to dance or listen to a band again, or sit under a roof. I can’t believe that I ever wore a ball-frock in my life.’

  ‘One minute,’ said Mrs Jim, who was thinking. ‘If he goes to Khanda, he passes within five miles of us. Of course he’ll ride in.’

  ‘Oh no, he won’t,’ said William.

  ‘How do you know, dear?’

  ‘It’ll take him off his work. He won’t have time.’

  ‘He’ll make it,’ said Mrs Jim, with a twinkle.

  ‘It depends on his own judgement. There’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t, if he thinks fit,’ said Jim.

  ‘He won’t see fit,’ William replied, without sorrow or emotion. ‘It wouldn’t be him if he did.’

  ‘One certainly gets to know people rather well in times like these,’ said Jim, drily; but William’s face was serene as ever, and, as she prophesied, Scott did not appear.

  The Rains fell at last, late, but heavily; and the dry, gashed earth was red mud, and servants killed snakes in the camp, where every one was weather-bound for a fortnight – all except Hawkins who took horse and splashed about in the wet, rejoicing. Now the Government decreed that seed-grain should be distributed to the people as well as advances of money for the purchase of new oxen; and the white men were doubly worked for this new duty, while William skipped from brick to brick laid down on the trampled mud, and dosed her charges with warming medicines that made them rub their little round stomachs; and the milch-goats throve on the rank grass. There was never a word from Scott in the Khanda district, away to the south-east, except the regular telegraphic report to Hawkins. The rude country roads had disappeared; his drivers were half mutinous; one of Martyn’s loaned policemen had died of cholera; and Scott was taking thirty grains of quinine a day to fight the fever that comes if one works hard in heavy rain; but those were things he did not consider necessary to report. He was, as usual, working from a base of supplies on a railway line, to cover a circle of fifteen miles radius, and since full loads were impossible, he took quarter-loads, and toiled four times as hard by consequence; for he did not choose to risk an epidemic which might have grown uncontrollable by assembling villagers in thousands at the relief-sheds. It was cheaper to take Government bullocks, work them to death, and leave them to the crows in the wayside sloughs.

  That was the time when eight years of clean living and hard condition told, though a man’s head were ringing like a bell from the cinchona, and the earth swayed under his feet when he stood and under his bed when he slept. If Hawkins had seen fit to make him a bullock-driver, that, he thought, was entirely Hawkins’s own affair. There were men in the North who would know what he had done; men of thirty years’ service in his own department who would say that it was ‘not half bad’; and above, immeasurably above all men of all grades, there was William in the thick of the fight, who would approve because she understood. He had so trained his mind that it would hold fast to the mechanical routine of the day, though his own voice sounded strange in his own ears, and his hands, when he wrote, grew large as pillows or small as peas at the end of his wrists. That steadfastness bore his body to the telegraph-office at the railway station, and dictated a telegram to Hawkins, saying that the Khanda district was, in his judgement, now safe, and he ‘waited further orders’.

  The Madrassee telegraph-clerk did not approve of a large gaunt man falling over him in a dead faint, not so much because of the weight, as because of the names and blows that Faiz Ullah dealt him when he found the body rolled under a bench. Then Faiz Ullah took blankets and quilts and coverlets where he found them, and lay down under them at his master’s side, and bound his arms with a tent-rope, and filled him with a horrible stew of herbs, and set the policeman to fight him when he wished to escape from the intolerable heat of his coverings, and shut the door of the telegraph-office to keep out the curious for two nights and one day; and when a light engine came down, the line, and Hawkins kicked in the door, Scott hailed him weakly, but in a natural voice, and Faiz Ullah stood back and took all the credit.

  ‘For two nights, Heaven-born, he was pagal,’ said Faiz Ullah. ‘Look at my nose, and consider the eye of the policeman. He beat us with his bound hands; but we sat upon him, Heaven-born, and though his words were tez, we sweated him. Heaven-born, never has been such a sweat! He is weaker now than a child; but the fever has gone out of him, by the grace of God. There remains only my nose and the eye of the constabeel. Sahib, shall I ask for my dismissal because my Sahib has beaten me?’ And Faiz Ullah laid his long thin hand carefully on Scott’s chest to be sure that the fever was all gone, ere he went out to open tinned soups and discourage such as laughed at his swelled nose.

  ‘The district’s all right,’ Scott whispered. ‘It doesn’t make any difference. You got my wire? I shall be fit in a week. ’Can’t understand how it happened. I shall be fit in a few days.’

  ‘You’re coming into camp with us,’ said Hawkins.

  ‘But look here – but – ’

  ‘It’s all over except the shouting. We shan’t need you Punjabis any more. On my honour, we shan’t. Martyn goes back in a few weeks; Arbuthnot’s returned already; Ellis and Clay are putting the last touches to a new feeder line the Government’s built as relief-work. Morten’s dead – he was a Bengal man, though; you wouldn’t know him. ’Pon my word, you and Will – Miss Martyn – seem to have come through it as well as anybody.’

  ‘Oh, how is she?’ The voice went up and down as he spoke.

  ‘She was in great form when I left her. The Roman Catholic Missions are adopting the unclaimed babies to turn them into little priests; the Basil Mission is taking some, and the mothers are taking the rest. You should hear the little beggars howl when they’re sent away from William. She’s pulled down a bit, but so are we all. Now, when do you suppose you’ll be able to move?’

  ‘I can’t come into camp in this state. I won’t,’ he replied pettishly.

  ‘Well, you are rather a sight, but from what I gathered there it seemed to me they’d be glad to see you under any conditions. I’ll look over your work here, if you like, for a couple of days, and you can pull yourself together while Faiz Ullah feeds you up.’

  Scott could walk dizzily by the time Hawkins’s inspection was ended, and he flushed all over when Jim said of his work in the district that it was ‘not half bad’, and volunteered, further, that he had considered Scott his right-hand man through the famine, and would feel it his duty to say as much officially.

  So they came back by rail to the old camp; but there were no crowds near it, the long fires in the trenches were dead and b
lack, and the famine-sheds stood almost empty.

  ‘You see!’ said Jim. ‘There isn’t much more for us to do. Better ride up and see the wife. They’ve pitched a tent for you. Dinner’s at seven. I’ll see you then.’

  Riding at a foot-pace, Faiz Ullah by his stirrup, Scott came to William in the brown-calico riding-habit, sitting at the dining-tent door, her hands in her lap, white as ashes, thin and worn, with no lustre in her hair. There did not seem to be any Mrs Jim on the horizon, and all that William could say was: ‘My word, how pulled down you look!’

  ‘I’ve had a touch of fever. You don’t look very well yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I’m fit enough. We’ve stamped it out. I suppose you know?’

  Scott nodded. ‘We shall all be returned in a few weeks. Hawkins told me.’

  ‘Before Christmas, Mrs Jim says. Shan’t you be glad to go back? I can smell the wood-smoke already’; William sniffed. ‘We shall be in time for all the Christmas doings. I don’t suppose even the Punjab Government would be base enough to transfer Jack till the new year?’

  ‘It seems hundreds of years ago – the Punjab and all that – doesn’t it? Are you glad you came?’

  ‘Now it’s all over, yes. It has been ghastly here. You know we had to sit still and do nothing, and Sir Jim was away so much.’

  ‘Do nothing! How did you get on with the milking?’

  ‘I managed it somehow – after you taught me.’

  Then the talk stopped with an almost audible jar. Still no Mrs Jim.

  ‘That reminds me I owe you fifty rupees for the condensed milk. I thought perhaps you’d be coming here when you were transferred to the Khanda district, and I could pay you then; but you didn’t.’

  ‘I passed within five miles of the camp. It was in the middle of a march, you see, and the carts were breaking down every few minutes, and I couldn’t get ’em over the ground till ten o’clock that night. But I wanted to come awfully. You knew I did, didn’t you?’