Part 14

Tom shifted uneasily, and once again the strenuous, eager voice, struggling bravely against the harshness of the English language, was the only sound held in the white walls of the Mission School at Ilmpur, a little Punjab town set in a waste of sand. The hot sunshine slanted across it in broad, golden rays from the upper windows, to lay broad, yellow squares on the cool whitewash. Through the doors, set open to the air on all sides, the same hot, yellow sunshine slanted in on the upturned faces of the students, all bent--with elation in their looks--on the prize English speaker, who was declaiming his set speech out of Burke's famous impeachment of Warren Hastings. Declaiming it before, as the local paper put it, "Mr. Commissioner Gordon and his good lady, Mr. Tom Gordon, a fine young man worthy of his great father who has lately entered India from Eton in quest of police post, the beautiful Miss Gordon, and many others of European renown, including natives of high official positions, who have honoured the Reverends Freemantle and Smith with attendance at their mission-school prizegiving."

They sat in a semicircle on the dais. A quaint company. Mr. Commissioner Gordon, with a painstakingly pious expression on his grizzly red-bearded face, inwardly rehearsing the speech he would have to make in his turn; his good lady nervously eyeing the gilt books which she would have to give away, spread out on the table before her. It was covered with a royal red cloth, and on it stood a packed posy of jasmine blossoms and marigolds. The odour of the crushed blossoms mingled with the confused scent of cocoanut oil, roses, and curry powder which is inseparable from every Indian assembly. On one side of the Commissioner sat the Reverend Freemantle, a gentleman with a beard grown white in the service of education. Mild, placid, benevolent, his face beamed out over his students. They were all doing well, and Gunpat-Rai was simply excelling himself by showing complete mastery over both vowels and consonants. Indeed, in the whole semicircle of eager teachers and approvers upon the platform there was not to be seen a dissentient expression; and one _zenana_-worker positively wept tears of joy, because it was through her dreary daily drudgery amongst fetid alleys and sunless back courts that the prize pupil had originally come to the mission-school.

Otherwise he might have remained as his father had remained all his life, proprietor of an odd little shop right away from all other shops, where they sold matches and oil, flour and earthenware dishes, string and pipe-bowls--everything, in fact, which might suddenly be wanted in the big, high, tenement houses that elbowed and shouldered the little dark lane.

"The law is the security of the people of England! It is the security of the people of India!"

Gunpat-Rai's voice, overtaxed, almost broke over the climax of Burke's rhodomontade, but the tumultuous, undisciplined applause which followed, covered the fact, and he sat down feeling dazed, confused. It was the first time he had ever spoken in public, and he had found that he had not been afraid. That, in itself, was disturbing--he had not felt afraid!

Meanwhile, Mr. Commissioner Gordon's loud voice was bombarding the wall with fitful explosions of words which reverberated amidst an echo of hesitating stutters.

"Gives me great pleasure, unalloyed pleasure to--er--er--er--to--to see Indian youth--er--er--er--taking their place with--with--er--er--er----" Here a glance at his son--who, after the manner of sons when their fathers are speaking, was burying his face in his hands--seemed to supply the lacking phrase--"with the youth of England."

"Good Heavens!" groaned Tom Gordon aside plaintively; "I say, Nell, how long do you think the Guv'nor will be on his legs, for I'll slope out, and have a smoke----"

"S--st, Tom!" reproved his sister severely. "You can't--and you've got to play in the cricket match, you know."

Tom groaned again, but less plaintively; and so the speechifying went on, the burden of all being the incalculable advantage of a good sound English education in every walk of life. Did they but choose, every student present--at any rate, students of the stamp of Gunpat-Rai--might "rise to higher things."

So, with a final and formal hand-shake to the lad who had so distinguished himself, the company trooped out into the sunshine and the mission-school lay empty. Only in the place where Gunpat-Rai had sat ere rising to speak, a tiny packet wrapped in silver-leaf betrayed its presence by shining like a star. It was the talisman which his little fifteen-year-old wife had given him that morning ere he started, with tears and laughter, because it was only the first half-chewed, half-sucked piece of dough-cake his firstborn had ever had. It had dropped from his nerveless hand when, in a dire funk, he had stood up in answer to the call of his name.

It did not, however, shine long, for an impudent sparrow soon discovered that it was but dough made silvern, and promptly carried it off.

Meanwhile the cricket match was in full swing, Tom Gordon captaining one side, and the Reverend Mr. Freemantle (who still cherished an old blue cap he had worn in his Oxford days) the other.

Youth, however, had to be allowed for, so the last-comer from Eton found himself, to his great delight, at the head of ten smaller boys--jolly little chaps with bright eyes and boundless obediences--while the big students, including Gunpat-Rai--who was cock at cricket as in English, ranged themselves under their master.

They won the toss, and Tom Gordon, as he suppled his hands with the ball, told himself the bowling must be good.

And good it was, especially in style. The tall young figure in white flannels, close clipped about the lean flanks with the light blue belt, reminded one of a flying Mercury as it poised in delivery. Every woman's eye was on it in admiration. As for the swift balls it sent, they were a revelation to these Indian boys, who had never seen real cricket. They crumpled up before them like agitated spiders when they came off the wicket, and when they came on it, they looked helplessly at the umpire to see if they were really out. The Reverend Mr. Freemantle made a good stand, the memory of many a past day coming back to give half-forgotten skill to his bat, his sheer delight in his youthful adversary's prowess making him bold. Still the score stood ominously at one figure when Gunpat-Rai took his place. Tom Gordon hitched up his belt and looked.

"I should say leg before," he muttered, "but they're so thin, they hardly count."

And then he let drive.

Now, whether the ball chose to hit Gunpat-Rai's bat or Gunpat-Rai's bat chose to hit the ball, is immaterial. Away it went beyond the boundary, and Gunpat-Rai's long legs scored four. A sharp, hissing roar of delight rose from the assembled school, and Tom Gordon frowned faintly; but he was far too good-humoured to withstand what followed. Heartened up by his absolutely unlooked-for success, Gunpat-Rai who, though his legs were thin, was a powerful enough young fellow, did everything and more than everything that could be expected of him. He gambolled out and slogged wildly, he pirouetted like a teetotum and nearly killed his wicket-keep, and finally let drive at his partner's wicket, demolishing all three stumps.

"Out!" cried the umpire ruefully, but with commendable impartiality, and when Tom Gordon had sufficiently recovered from his laughter to assert that no one but the stumps had suffered, another hissing roar of applause rose from the school.

All things, however, must come to an end, and a skying block of Gunpat-Rai's was finally caught by Tom Gordon as it appeared to be descending on his mother's lap. But the score stood at thirty-six, and as the batsman walked past him proudly yet sheepishly, the Eton boy shook him by the hand.

"By George, you know," he said, "you'd be another Ranji, with practice! I never saw such an innings played--never!"

Gunpat-Rai flushed up under his dark skin and gave back the grip with all the curious, lissome strength of an Indian hand, in which the sinews seem made of iron, the bones of velvet.

After that it seemed of little count that Tom Gordon, who began the next innings, should, by a judicious foresight and the obedience of his small boys combined, carry out his last bat as last man with a score of seventy-two.

"You are too good for us, Gordon," laughed the Rev. Mr. Freemantle. "We must deport him from the station, or request him not to play again, mustn't we, boys?"

But the hissing roar which followed was of dissent, not assent, and when it had died away, Gunpat-Rai, as head of the school, spoke up, to his own surprise again, fluently.

"Cricket," he said, "is a noble game. We learn everything noble from England. So are we pleased to acquire proficiency at the hands of Mr. Tom Gordon, Esquire."

The soft dark eyes looked almost appealingly at the blue ones.

"All right," said their owner, curtly. "I'll come down and coach you a bit, if you like."

And he did.

II GOLDEN SILENCE

"Why on earth can't you learn to hold your tongue, Gunpat?" said Tom Gordon roughly. "I thought you had more sense than to mix yourself up with those Arya Somajh agitators. You'll be getting yourself into trouble some day!"

The years had passed since the famous innings, making of the bowler an Assistant District Superintendent of Police, of the batsman a pleader in the High Court. Practically the balance of progress was all in favour of the latter. Coming from the house of a miserable merchant whose monthly earnings barely touched a living wage of the poorest description, he had risen far beyond his birthright, whereas Tom Gordon, on his pay of two hundred a month, with poor promotion before him, had, if anything, fallen from his. But discontent sat in the dark eyes and cheerful acquiescence in the blue ones. Perhaps the owner of the latter was a better appraiser of his own worth, for he knew he was not clever; knew that though he was "jolly good" at this, he was not "jolly good" at that. Not so Gunpat-Rai. Clever at school--the cleverness of imitation, of memory--and gifted with a fluency of words beyond even that of most of his class, he had spent the first years of his young manhood in waiting for an appointment which never came. How could it come when every school in India turns out dozens of applicants as capable as he for every Government post from Cape Comorin to Holy Himalaya? Yet resentment at this failure of the impossible ate into his soul. So he had turned pleader, had drifted into the editing of a native newspaper, a copy of which lay on Tom Gordon's office table as he looked with kindly contempt at the man who sat opposite him. For, though Gunpat-Rai had not turned out a second Ranji, the memory of the old days when he had coached the Ilmpur school still lingered with the Eton boy, and he had shaken hands as frankly as ever when Gunpat-Rai had called to welcome him to his new district.

"I'll tell you what it is, Gunpat," continued Tom Gordon, "you fellows don't know what anybody wants but yourselves. Now, take this district--it's a very fair sample." He turned over the leaves of the last Census report which lay on his table rapidly. "Hum--m--m, here we are, Jahilabad, population 560,000 odd--240,000 Jat cultivators of the soil, 35,000 Banyas, presumably moneylenders--literacy--let's take the average for all India if you like--it tells enormously against my argument, but it can stand it! Now think! At fifty-three per thousand we have twenty-nine--let's say 30,000 men who can scrawl their names and spell out a line or two in their own vernacular. How many of these are put out of court by the 35,000 moneylenders? More than half, I'll wager. There you are, you educated men, a negligible minority, taking India as a whole. So why don't you speak for yourselves, not for the country at large? Because you don't really mean anything, you don't know what you want yourselves." Tom Gordon paused in this unusual eloquence, and, with a laugh, turned to the handsome little fellow of six whom Gunpat-Rai had shown off with pride as his eldest son.

"Jolly little chap," said the Assistant Superintendent irrelevantly. "I suppose he's married?"

Gunpat-Rai flushed up under his dark skin as he had done five years before at the cricket match.

"The women----" he began.

"Oh, I know!" interrupted the young Englishman. "'_Stri acchar_,' and all that. But, I say, Gunpat! How the deuce are you going to govern India if you can't even settle your womenkind? No, my dear fellow! I haven't the faintest sympathy with you. You sail pretty near sedition in this copy." Here he laid his hand on the blurred, blotched broadsheet which called itself _The Star of Hope_. "But, by George! if you jib it the least bit more, I shall have to run you in. So don't be a fool. You're a good sort, Gunpat, and I shall never forget that innings of yours--never! If you would only have stuck to it instead of 'seeking a post in white clothing' you might have been----"

He paused, unable to say what; and Gunpat-Rai, feeling a like inability, the conversation ended uncomfortably.

And so it came to pass that not many more days afterwards, Tom Gordon sat once more in that curious atmosphere of cocoanut-oil and curry powder which is inseparable from Indian crowds, listening to Gunpat-Rai's voice. But he sat disguised in one of the front benches of the crowded hall, so that he had to look far back more than once to see that his constables were all in evidence. For a notable agitator on tour had stopped at the little town; and this was a meeting which must be reported upon, since here was no audience composed of peacefully seditious Bengâli clerks and irresponsible students, but of stalwart Jats, discontented over some new, but as yet untried, scheme of irrigation. Now, irrigation stands closer to the heart of a Jat that does wife and children. What! was the Sirkar to deny the land its drink?

The other speakers had been innocuous. Their very vehemence had passed by the slumbering passions of the long-bearded Jats who listened to them with ill-concealed yawns. But with Gunpat-Rai it was different. At the first word Tom Gordon felt that he was in the presence of a born orator. And yet--and yet--surely the words were vaguely familiar in their import, if not in their sound?

"The crimes we charge against this alien Government of India," came the liquid Indian voice, "are not lapses, defects, errors of common frailty which we, brethren, as we know them in ourselves, can allow for. They are no crimes that have not arisen from evil passions--passions which it is criminal to harbour"--an iron mailed stick held by a burly farmer fell with a clang as its owner shifted it to his right hand--"no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper----" Each epithet seemed punctuated by a growing stir amongst the audience. "In short, in nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart."

Tom Gordon had it now! The Billingsgate he had confounded years ago, of course--Burke's Billingsgate!

He had flung off his disguise and leapt to the dais in a second.

"Oh, hold your jaw! Do, there's a decent chap! Don't go spouting other folks' abuse!" he cried.

But Gunpat-Rai was helpless before the sudden need for decision. "Dyed ingrain with malice, vitiated----" he went on mechanically.

The young Assistant Superintendent of Police gave a sharp glance behind him. What he saw there was not reassuring. "Oh! do shut up! Tell them the meeting's over, or there'll be mischief."

"Corrupted, gangrened----"

"Constables," came the order keenly, "clear the room! For Heaven's sake, Gunpat, don't get yourself into trouble!"

They were the last words Tom Gordon spoke. His hand slipped from Gunpat-Rai's shoulder as he was struck full on the bare head from behind by an iron-bound staff which crashed into his skull.

Even then the tyranny of words held Gunpat-Rai, though the suddenness of the shock dislocated his sequence.

"Dyed ingrain, corrupted to the very core."

Then he stood staring at what lay before him, and a great silence--a golden silence from words--came to him at last.

He only broke it once, when he was on trial. The court was full of his friends, and on the dais sat Englishmen, so the conditions were nearly the same as they had been years ago when the hot sunshine had slanted from the Tipper windows at Ilmpur to lay broad squares on the cool whitewash.

"I learnt it at school," he said dully; and then he began: "But the crimes we charge against you----"

"Hush--h!" said the judge gravely. "We know what you learnt at school."

But that did not lessen the sentence.

THE FOOTSTEPS OF A DOG

She passed, smiling softly, though a vague trouble seemed to clutch at her heart. She had found him asleep so often of late, and if the driver slept, the oxen might well pause in their task of drawing water, and so the fields which needed it so much be deprived for yet another day of their life-giving draught. They were not, however, pausing now, at any rate. Their slow circling brought her sleeping husband to Sarsuti's eyes, and carried him away again, wheeling round by the well from whose depths a stream of water splashed drowsily into a wooden trough and then hurried away--a little ribbed ribbon of light--out of the shade of the great banyan tree into the sun-saturated soil beyond where the young millet was sprouting.

How cool it was, after her hot walk from the village! No wonder he slept! She sat herself down beside the runnel of water where a jasmine bush threw wild whips of leaf and blossom over the damp earth. There was no need to wake him yet. The bullocks would not pause now that she was there to make them do their work.

That was her task in life!--to make them do their work.

She sighed, and yet she smiled again, as the slow-circling oxen brought her husband Prema almost to her feet once more. How handsome he was, his bare head lying on the turban he had pressed into the service of a pillow. And his slender limbs! How ingeniously he had curved them on the forked seat so as to gain a comfortable resting-place! Trust Prema to make himself and everyone else in the world comfortable! A sudden leap of her heart sent the blood to dye her dark face still darker, as she thought of the softness, the warmth, the colour he had brought into her life.

How long had they been married? Ten years--a whole ten years, and there was never a child yet. It was getting time. No! No! Not yet--not yet! She need not look that in the face yet.

She rose suddenly as the wheeling oxen brought him to her once more, and staying them with one swift word, bent over the sleeping man.

"Prem!" she said. "Prema! I am here." His arms were round her in an instant, his lips on hers; for here, out in the shadow amongst the sunshine, they were alone.

"Sarsuti! Wife!" he murmured drowsily, then with a laugh, shook his long length and stood beside her, his arm still about her waist. Tall as he was, she was almost as tall, a straight, upstanding Jatni woman with eyebrows like a broad bar across her face.

But, as her dark eyes met his in passionate adoration, something in the sight of his exceeding beauty smote her to the heart. The thought that there was none to inherit it, the knowledge that if it passed it would leave nothing behind it. It is a thought which has driven many an Indian woman to take another woman by the hand and lead her home to be a hand-maiden to the lord. It drove Sarsuti--after long weeks, nay, months of thought--almost to speech.

"Prem!" she faltered, hiding her face on his breast,

"I have been thinking--thou needst a son--and----" But she could get no further, partly because the words seemed to choke her, partly because Prema, turning her face to his with his soft, supple hand, stopped her mouth with kisses.

What was the use? What was the use, she asked herself fiercely, thinking of such things when she loved him so? Some morning, aye! some summer morning after a summer's night, she would rather make the Dream-compeller send her to sleep, once and for all!--to sleep and dreams of Prema and his love! Then he could marry again, and there would be children to light up the old house, a son to light the funeral pyre.

But now--no! Not yet!...

The sunshine filtering through the broad leaves dappled them with light and shade; the oxen resting stood head down, nosing at the damp earth; the water, ceasing to splash, ran silently more and more slowly on its way, and all around them a yellow glare of heat hemmed them in breathlessly. Yet here, at the well, the jasmine grew green, a big datura lily, rejoicing in the shade, threw out its wide white blossoms, and, looking down to the mirror-like pool of water into which the long, unending circle of deftly-arranged earthen pots and ropes dipped, you could see the tufts of maidenhair fern which came God knows whence. They were like love in the heart--Heaven--sent!

"Thou wilt call at the Lala-_jee's_ this evening, Sarsuti," said Prema, with a faint note of half-shamed uneasiness in his voice, as, his midday meal of milk and hearth-cakes over, she prepared to go back. "He deals more justly with thee than with me--may he be accursed, and may the footsteps of a dog ..."

"S'st! Prema," she interrupted, "the Lala-_jee_ is no worse than his kind; and we have asked so much--lately."

Yes! she thought as she trudged homewards, they had asked much, for Prema had a lavish hand. Yet she would, of course, have him keep up his position as head man of the village; the position that had been hers by right as the only child of her father. Prema, her cousin, had gained it through his marriage to her, by special favour of the Sirkar, in memory of good service done in the Mutiny time by the old man. He had been a better husbandman than Prema, and money had gone fast these few years since he died, though she had tried to keep things as they had been. Still, who could grudge Prema the handsomest yoke of oxen in the country-side, the fleetest mare? And those mad experiments of his with new ploughs, new seeds that the Huzoors spoke about! It was well to keep to the soft side of the masters, no doubt, yet it should be done discreetly--and when was Prema ever discreet? She almost laughed, even while she stooped to let the water from an overflooded plot run into the next by removing the clod which her husband had forgotten, thinking of his indiscreetness--of the gifts he showered on her when he had money in his pocket to pay for them; sometimes when he had not. Of course, the Lala-_jee_ would listen to reason and lend more on the coming crop--who could deny Prem anything?

But the Lala was curiously obdurate. He was an old man, who had backed the luck of the village for three generations, and never had a dispute with his creditors.

"See you, daughter," he said. "Prem for all he is head man and thy husband, is but man, and there is none to come after him."

Her face darkened with a hot blush again.

"The land will be there," she replied, haughtily.

"Aye, but who will own it! Strangers, they say, from far away. I have no dealings with strangers."

"There will be my share," she protested.

"Aye! but how wilt thou fare with strangers also, thou--childless widow?" he asked.

Her hot anger flamed up. "Wait thou and see! Meanwhile, since thou art afraid, take this," she tore off the solid gold bangle she wore, "'tis worth fifty rupees at the veriest pawnshop--give me forty!"