Part 20

A tall, handsome, light-hearted fellow, full of life, full of everything, apparently, likely to make him go up; instead of which he had gone down steadily--so steadily that at last even a Government which prides itself on ignoring breaches of social law, had been driven into first banishing him to the charge of a solitary jungle district, where there was no world to be scandalised, and then with warning him that he must either pull up or send in his papers.

He chose the latter course decisively, sending in his checks to another tribunal.

"He wasn't a bad sort when he first came out," continued my partner; "had, in fact, distinct glimmerings of sense, and to the last he wasn't, so to speak, a bad officer. But the wine and the women--well, there you are--and--make the best of it."

This last might have been meant for the nice hand which he displayed. We had cut for partners again, with the only result of shifting the deal. I took it that way, anyhow, and said no more.

There was, in fact, nothing to be said, so when I got home, I told the bearer of my transfer, and, sitting down, wrote an effusively-cheerful letter to my wife, who was in the hills with the babies, enlarging on the manifold advantages of my transfer, and making much of the fact that, though it brought no extra pay, it was, in a measure, promotion.

Then I smoked a pipe, feeling virtuous, for those two estimable creatures--my bearer and my wife--invariably do my duty for me. In fact, I am the happiest man in existence. I have told my wife so a hundred times, and she believes it firmly. The faculty, by the way, which good women have of believing things that ought to be true, is occasionally appalling, but is always immensely convenient to their husbands.

I always wrote her cheerful letters, and in return I used to get delightful daily budgets, giving me all the wonderful ways and works of the chicks, and imploring me to let her know regularly what the cook gave me for dinner, and if I ate it. Also if I were morally sure that the water was boiling for my tea every afternoon, as, if I was not, she would infallibly hand the babies over to hirelings, and come down to her ill-used hubby.

Such delightful, tender, womanly budgets were her replies that I swear and declare that, had I been asked to read them aloud, a lump in my throat would have interfered with my elocution.

Yet I swear and declare, also, that I would far rather the kettle were not boiling than that any one I cared for should fuss over it and a charcoal brazier on a hot verandah on a sweltering August day. But, then, as my wife is always telling me, I have no real sense of duty.

I wrote her, therefore, as cheerfully as I could, telling her, which was true, that solitude would be better than bad bridge. Also that it really was a move nearer to her, since, in case of emergency, I could cut across country by dhoolie to the foot of the hills. Finally, I enlarged on the fact that my successor would take over our house as it stood until her return, so that she need not fuss about moving anything, as I should do well in my new house, which was to remain as it was until my predecessor's unfortunate affairs had gone through the Administrator-General's office--a business, as a rule, of months.

I even mentioned the existence of a Bechstein grand piano, with a hint that if I could get rid of our cottage, I might buy it when the sale came on--an additional craftiness, since my wife loves to think I am allowed to have my own way in everything. It makes her more certain that we have won the Dunmow flitch of bacon--which we undoubtedly have.

Having done my best to set her wifely anxiety at rest, I advanced fifty rupees to my bearer.

In consequence of which we started next day for my new district, bag and baggage. Though the most part of the journey was by train, the bearer insisted on buckling a big sword he had picked up somewhere round his capacious middle. It decidedly had an effect on the railway coolies.

About three a.m. we turned out at a roadside station, where, thanks to that fifty rupees, a dak gharri was waiting to convey me the remaining twenty miles. I was very sleepy, and as I tumbled into my new conveyance I got a vague impression of a howling wilderness of sand, tufted with tiger grass, desolate utterly; so falling asleep again, and not waking until, in the darkness, I tumbled out--this time into a large empty room, with a tiny camp bed set in its midst--I carried on, as it were, the impression of desert surrounding me. But not for long. The next day would, I suspected, be a trifle trying, since my unfortunate predecessor's methods of business would scarcely be conducive to a mechanical taking over charge of his office. So I was soon asleep, without even realising that probably I was sleeping where he had lain dead but a day or two before.

When I opened my eyes next morning I felt a curious content and surprise. The room was bare in the extreme. The camp bed on which I lay, a deck chair, the cover of a travelling chest-of-drawers doing duty as a wardrobe, the top of a travelling bath doing ditto as a table, a bit of looking-glass hung above it by a string--these were its furniture. The furniture of the light-hearted boy who had come out in the same year as I had. With an odd, guilty remorse, I remembered that I had long since exchanged these simple satisfactions of youth for more luxurious methods. An unpaid bill of Maple's, indeed, flashed to my mind, as, looking round the walls, which were hung with full-sized photographs and copies of the great masters, I realised that my predecessor had spent his spare cash in a different fashion to what I had.

Very different, indeed. My remorse vanished in contempt, as, opening one of the drawers, a very strong scent of sandal wood made itself perceptible, and in one corner I saw a trumpery piece of native jewellery.

A certain anger took possession of me then, as I looked up into the eyes of the Sistine Madonna, which hung in a conspicuous place, and I felt virtuous in realising that, after all, it was a natural refinement and pure love of order and beauty which lay at the bottom of our civilised cult of comfortableness.

So thinking, I passed out on to the verandah, still with last night's impression on me that I was in a howling desert.

What I saw, therefore, gave me a shock. For here was a garden such as I had never seen. Neither English nor Indian, yet reminiscent of both in its wide sweeps of well-kept lawns, its dense thickets of flowering shrubs, both, at this break in the rainy season, looking their best. It took me a moment, however, to realise what it was which gave this garden its curious distinction from other gardens. There was no path in it. Though where I stood must once have been the front door, since a huge pillared porch jutted beyond the verandah, the grass swept right up to the very house. It had a curious untrodden look. A huge-leaved, waxen-flowered Beaumontia almost covered the porch with its cold, white scentless blossoms, and between the pillars Eucharis lilies rose above a marvellous mass of maidenhair.

The delicate greenery, the chill whiteness made me think involuntarily of the newly dead, and had I had on my hat I felt as if I should have removed it.

As it was, I stepped, with a slight shiver, beyond the porch into the sunlight.

The chilliness was gone in a moment, though the cloistered air remained, due to the great tamarind trees, which on all sides shut out the world, shut in the flowers. The birds, too. I never saw so many. A golden oriole was challenging the sun with its full-throated call from the bronze rain-shoots of the huge banyan tree, which filled up one corner, and there were at least a dozen ruby-throated humming-birds among the hibiscus flowers--those strangely mutable flowers, white in the dawn, which blush into a crimson death before sunset.

The banyan tree, promising a well in its shade, and the well promising the possibility of a gardener whom I could question--for I was beset by curiosity--I strolled over to it, and found what I wanted--a very old, wizened man, pretending to weed an offensive patch of yellow African marigolds, which was carefully hidden away behind a henna hedge.

"Yes!" he replied, with the tearless regret one often hears in native voices, the dead Huzoor had been very fond of his garden--in a way. (Here the regret became personal and aggrieved.) He had never sent for European seeds, so, of course, it had been impossible even for the most skilful of malas to make it into a real garden. But if the new Huzoor would employ this slave--who had many certificates--here the usual bundle was drawn out from some mysterious hiding-place--mysterious because he was more than half-naked--he would make proper paths and "rippin' beds," and set them ablaze with "floccus" and "soot-ullians" and "gerabians and----"

He was beginning to reel off a seedsman's catalogue when I pulled him up by pointing to the marigolds. He pursed up his lips in pious horror. Oh, no, there would be no more "gooljafari" or "genda" grown in that garden. They had been for the other folk, who, of course, would no longer---- The mixture of cunning question and scandalised propriety on the old humbug's face made me mentally resolve that he should "no longer" either. In fact, before my wife and the bairns came down I must have the whole place cleared and fumigated. But the garden? No, it must not be touched.

I had my breakfast in a huge dark, central room, which was absolutely bare save for a ricketty table and two chairs. There were not even any photographs on the walls. It was so dark that they could not have been seen.

"They found the Huzoor lying there, at the door," said my bearer calmly, after apologising profusely for an oversight in the matter of marmalade, which, he trusted, might be forgotten, and not reported to the memsahib. "He had been dead a long time, for he had paid off all the servants and sent away the other people and the children on the evening before, saying he was going on a journey. His bearer waited for him at the station with his baggage, only he never came, nor his horse, either.

"It was the office which found him, when it came for signature of papers next day, and there was nothing disturbed, only the Huzoor lying where they could see him easily from the front door, and the horse comfortable in its stall, with plenty of grass. He was always thoughtful to the poor was the sahib, and never gave trouble to others. At least, so his servants say--but what can they know--poor, mean creatures, who do not even know when a kettle boils!"

I let him talk, for somehow I did not wish to think. In much the same mood I went doggedly through my day's work in taking over charge and reducing chaos to order--or, rather, conventional order, for through all the disgraceful neglect of ordinary routine ran the unmistakable thread of one man's control, and of a strong man at that, even in its favouritism, its flagrant derelictions from the ordinary conception of a magistrate's duty.

As I got into my dogcart to come home, an orderly came forward, with a doubtful air, carrying a small bag, such as natives use as a purse.

"It was the custom," he began; but by this time I felt that I must return to a right judgment of things, so I purposely lost my temper, and let it be known that all old customs were to be abolished. "It was only the pennies for the children on Fridays," stuttered the orderly. "The Huzoor used always to give them----"

I drove off, thinking that, perhaps, my predecessor might have been wise in choosing a higher tribunal.

My bearer, however, who, as usual, stood in the verandah to receive my hat, had no doubts in the totality of his blame. He was full of virtuous activities. Order, in some measure, had been restored. Certain screens of grass, which had been removed against a time when the mem might find them useful in the poultry yard, and the outhouses having been finally cleared--by the aid of the police--of various pensioners and idle folk, who wept profusely, had been duly distributed among the servants, he himself having taken one with a women's enclosure, which would be the cause of great comfort.

I bid him take what he liked, and for the first time went into the drawing-room, where he said my tea awaited me.

I shall never forget my first look at that room, with its five straight, undraped windows, set in a row round one slightly curved wall. The others bare, save for the shadows, which were fast creeping to obliterate even the bareness. The windows were mere oblongs of dim light, stretching up into the lofty roof, and that shadow looming in one shadowy corner, across a vast expanse of shadowy matting, must be the Bechstein piano. I made a move towards it, and stumbled against my own tea-table, a highly ornate, sham Oriental, carved thing, which the bearer, by my wife's orders, carried about with him religiously, and at the same time the bearer himself entered with the reading lamp, without which, so I am told, I cannot exist.

I gave up the Bechstein, therefore, for a time, and had caviare sandwiches with my tea instead.

I do not know why--my wife would have said because the water was not boiling--but I did not enjoy my tea. The pity of all things in this incomprehensible world struck me with a vague anger. I sat wondering if, after all, a higher tribunal----

Good heavens! What was that? Someone was playing on the Bechstein. I did not turn. I sat staring at those five solemn oblongs of the glimmering windows, showing lighter and lighter as the shadows deepened in the big bare room.

It was Walther's song out of "Tannhauser"--the song of divine love....

The bearer said I was asleep when he came to tell me it was time to dress for dinner. Perhaps I was, for sound sleep brings perfect peace and rest, and that had come to me with the music which had come out of the windows.

I have a dim recollection that the khansaman apologised because the soup was not clear, and that the bearer explained that a wire mattress had not arrived owing to the breaking down of a bullock cart. But I know that I sat up till all hours of the night in the dark, hoping to hear the Bechstein again, but it was silent as the grave.

Perhaps at dusk I might hear it once more. I raced off to the office early, in order to be home in time, and was almost glad of a few flagrant derelictions of duty cropping up to keep my moral nature from too much sympathy.

Yet even so, as I drove home, I put my hand in my pocket and drew out a handful of coppers for a group of children I passed on the road. I could not help it when I remembered a certain paper I had sent up to the Administrator-General that day, showing the way in which a certain sinner had spent his last pay.

"Tea is ready in the drawing-room," said the bearer; and even in my preoccupation I thought there was something odd in his voice.

But a look into the big bare room was sufficient. I shouldn't have known it, women have such a way of altering the whole character of a house by a yellow silk bow. She had taken the little camp bed and made a couch out of it with cushions and phulkarees. The five fateful windows, like the five senses looking out on the garden of the soul, were tucked and festooned, and through one of them came the familiar sound of a pair of bellows, and then a still more familiar exclamation:

"There! That's really boiling at last."

The next instant my wife was in my arms, tearful, tender, triumphant.

Cheerful letters were all very well, but she knew; so she had just left the babies in charge of some super-excellent creature, and run away down to see I was really comfortable.

"And, after all," she said, nodding her head as she poured out the tea, "it is as well I did come, for really there seems to be nothing in the house except the Bechstein."

I looked over to it dully, and noticed that it was now ornamented by my photograph in a filigree frame.

"Yes," I said--I hope I kept some of the regret out of my voice--"only the Bechstein."

And as we sat and talked of the children, and our own happiness, and the seeds we were going to sow in the garden, the five windows grew lighter as the shadows deepened.

But the spirit of the room was silent.

SEGREGATION

"I've got the plague, sir, upon my sam, I 'ave. I'll show yer the spot, sir, same as they 'ad in 1666 w'en the Tower o' London was burnt down, an' Sir Christopher Wren built St. Paul's--so 'elp me Gawd."

The speaker was a plausible loafer of the usual type. He was dressed in white, or what had once been white raiment. A gilt button or two hung round the coat; mute testimony to its having once belonged to a man who did some work of some kind for the Government. He was not a Eurasian, that you could see by the line of white on his forehead above the tan, as he stood apologetically in the court room holding his helmet before him with both hands as if he meant to offer it up as a bribe. It was certainly the most valuable thing about him, for it had a wadded quilted cover and looked, what the rest of him did not--respectable.

"The plague!" echoed the magistrate (I am the magistrate). "Nonsense, man! you're drunk--that's what's the matter with you. Inspector, remove that man: put him into the lock-up if he gives trouble."

The inspector approached, but the loafer stood his ground, not without quiet dignity; the dignity that comes to some people in the first stage of intoxication. "Excuse of me, sir," he said, "but I ain't going to make myself a noosance to nobody. That's w'y I came 'ere. That's w'y I spent my last bloomin' _hart hanner_ (eight annas) in takin' a _ticca ghari_ (hired carriage) to the 'orspitals, every one of 'em, so as there might be no infections. Bless your 'art, I don't want to do no 'arm to anyone. I wants to be seggergated, that's all, afore I does any."

The magistrate smiled faintly: there was something likeable in the man's face.

"So you've been to the hospitals, have you? What did the doctors say!"

"Same as you, sir," he replied cheerfully, "as I was drunk; but if I am, Job Charnock--that's me, sir--never got real on afore with one glass o' _harrack_--an' beastly bad stuff it was, too--smelt like a dead dorg an' tasted like a tannery."

Perhaps the name, Job Charnock, awoke memories of the founder of Calcutta, who, before his fortunes were made, must have been more or less of a friendless wanderer in an eastern land; perhaps it was because the magistrate was waiting for a file to be brought from the record office; but the spirit of cross-examination entered into him. "One glass of arrak--is that all you've had?"

The loafer paused, an expression of the utmost candour came to his face. "All I've 'ad to-day, sir, s'elp me, 'cos I 'adn't a pice more left ter buy a bit o' food with. Only the _hart hanner_ I spent Christian-like on a _ticca ghari_ ter try an' get seggergated afore it was too late. An' they said I was drunk!"

The mournful cadence of his voice was irresistible.

"Chaprassi, take that man to the serai, and tell the _darogah_ to give him some breakfast. I'll pay for it. Now you go quietly, my man, and sleep it off. You'll have got rid of the plague by morning."

The file had come in from the record office, I was immersed in the endless, hopeless attempt to drag truth from the bottom of the well in a land suit; so I thought no more of Job Charnock until I met the civil surgeon at tennis in the evening.

"Yes," he replied to my query, "Segregation was on his rounds again this morning. You're new, but he is a regular institution here. He gets the funks on board, generally about a month after a bout, and comes to every one of us in turn to be segregated. I think he is a bit looney on the plague--has a real _phoby_ about it. He'll get it, I expect, some day, from sheer fright--but there's none about at present."

The something likeable in the man's face, however, returned to memory with the obvious fact that he had appeared chiefly concerned to "do no 'arm to anyone." So the next morning, having ten minutes to spare on my way from the city, I called in at the _serai_. It was like all other _serais_: a dreary cloistered square, deserted absolutely between five a.m. until eight p.m.; that is to say, the hours during which travellers are on the road. Now, close on nine o'clock, only the muck of last night's bivouac remained. A sweeper, with a broom and a basket, was busy removing some of the more salient rubbishes. Otherwise all was still as the grave. But, seated on a rush stool in one of the little octagonal turret rooms, which, built on either side of the gateway, are reserved for European wayfarers, I found Job Charnock. He had evidently paid a visit to the well, for he looked cleaner and was distinctly sober, but he was more voluble than ever.

"I give 'arf the breakfast you stood me away to the sweeper, sir," he said, "an' 'e brought me some _omum_ water as cured me in a jiffy. That's all I was wantin', sir, an' none o' them doctors could spare me 'arf a pint. It seems strange, don't it, sir? And ter think the 'arm as I might do going about with the plague spot under my harm, as it's all writ truthful in that book by Mr. 'Arrison Hainsworth, Esquire. 'Ave you read it, sir?" he asked blandly.

I assured him I had, told him he was a fool, advised him to go north to the new railway to find work, gave him five rupees to find his way there. It was indiscreet and quite contrary to the rules of the Charity Organisation Society, but as I have said, something in the man's face appealed to me.

Thereafter he passed from my memory under the usual pressure of work and worry which is the lot of an Indian official.

It was in the middle of the hot weather, when the civil surgeon rushed into me at my office with a telegram in his hand.

"Will you arrange with Spiller for my work," he said excitedly, "I must be off at once. Read that--you see, I gave the assistant surgeon at the Bimariwallah dispensary a few days' leave off my own bat, and there's only a dresser in charge; so there will be the devil of a row if anything goes wrong."

The telegram read as follows: "Outbreaks of much plague amongst European gentlemen here. Please arrange for supplies of sufficient brandy."

"But there are no Europeans at Bimariwallah," I began.

"I know that," broke in the doctor, "and, of course, brandy isn't the right treatment; but that's just where it is. The fool of a dresser doesn't know English, doesn't know anything, so I'm bound to go."

"Well, if you'll curb your impatience for two hours, till I've finished this case, I'll motor you so far down the Trunk road, and _dak_ you on. I have an Executive Municipal Council to-morrow morning at Raipur, and it's all on the way."

There had been a shower of rain--an advance scout of the coming monsoon to spy out the dryness of the land--so our spin of thirty miles down the road was pleasant enough, though the great wains of corn and straw that still defy the network of railways which has immeshed India, had possession of a large portion of the highway. But, to my mind, there is always something "satisfactory" in finding that no amount of preliminary hooting changes the path of the slow-moving wheels, and that, in the end, even a Siddeley-Wolsey car must either hold up until comprehension comes to the carter who moves as slowly as the wheels, or else pass by on a side-walking. It seems to presage safety; to give assurance that India will not, after all, run off the rails.

The buggy and horse were waiting at the cross roads, and it only needed a _detour_ of three miles to drop the doctor at the very door of the dispensary.