CHAPTER XX

ERNIE IN INDIA

The Regiment was wonderfully well run for the men on its social side, for the Colonel was a bachelor, and much was trusted to Mrs. Lewknor.

She was at Ernie's bedside the day after he had his first attack of fever.

The little lady, so delicate, yet so strong, stood above the lad whose mother she might have been with a curious thrill.

He was so like his father, yet so unlike; and he was not only sick of fever, but dreadfully homesick too.

Mrs. Lewknor knew all about that, and the cure for it.

"Tell me about your people, Caspar," she said, after the ice had been broken.

The lad unloosed the flood-gates with immense relief.

He talked of Beachbourne, of Rectory Walk with the virginia-creeper on the wall and the fig-tree at the back; of his mother, of Mr. Pigott, even of Alf, and all the time of dad and the Downs.

On rising to go, Mrs. Lewknor said that when she came next day she would read to him.

"What shall I read?" she asked.

"Would you read me Matthew Arnold's _Scholar-Gypsy_?" said the boy.

Mrs. Lewknor looked down at the lad with brilliant eyes.

"Is that your father's favourite?" she asked.

"One of them, 'm. Wordsworth's the one."

There was only one man in the Regiment who possessed a Matthew Arnold, but that man happily was Mrs. Lewknor's husband.

Next day, as the little lady read the familiar lines, Ernie lay with eyes shut, the tears pouring down his face.

"Takes me right back," he said at last as she finished. "I'm not here at all. I'm laying just above the Rabbit-walk over Beech-hangar, with the gorse-pods snapping in the sun, and the beech-leaves stirring beneath me, and old dad with his hat over his eyes and his hands behind his head reciting."

That afternoon Mrs. Lewknor told Mr. Royal, who had dropped in to tea, that she had been reading Matthew Arnold to a man in his company.

Mr. Royal looked blank.

He had cold, speedwell blue eyes, that seemed all the brighter for his curly dark hair, a fine skin, rather pale, and an always growing reputation for hard efficiency.

"Matthew Arnold!" he said. "And who might Mr. Matthew Arnold be?"

He said it a thought aggressively. It was clear that not only had he never heard of Matthew Arnold, but that he would have considered it bad form to have done so.

"I believe he was a poet who seldom went to church," said the Major in the chi-chi voice which he could imitate to the life.

"Indeed," said Mr. Royal. "A poet!--Ah, I'm too busy for that sort of thing myself." He said it with a crushing air of finality.

When he had gone, Mrs. Lewknor looked at her husband with deprecatory eyes.

"My Jock," she said with a little sigh, "tell me!--Is it the system?--is it the man?--What is it?"

The Major sat upright on a little hard chair.

His eyes twinkled maliciously in his somewhat bony head. He looked like a gaunt satyr.

"My dear," he said, "in the British Army you must do as the British Army does. And there is one thing which the British Army _Will Not_ tolerate, and that is--a cultivated mind."

"I don't think that's peculiar to the Army," replied Mrs. Lewknor. "The attitude's characteristic of our race."

Mr. Royal was not in fact popular among his brother officers. His superiors complained that his manner was slightly insolent, his juniors that it was so damn superior. The men liked him for his efficiency, and some women admired him--too much it was whispered.

Mrs. Lewknor followed Ernie's military career with quiet interest. Not that there was very much to follow: for Ernie, apart from the cricket-field, had no career.

He did not seek promotion, and was not in fact offered it. As Mr. Royal very truly said,--"He can't come it enough to make an N.C.O." The habit of authority indeed sat ill on his shoulders; but he was liked by officers and men; and his cricket gave him a place in the regimental team.

But there was little in Army life to do for Ernie the one thing essential self demands--encourage growth; and not a little to repress it.

When the first newness had worn off, Ernie was spiritually unsatisfied and solitary.

The grosser vices of the men never appealed to him, and the men themselves were not his sort. To get away from them he sometimes wandered far a-field, poking and prying into the temples of the various sects, and not seldom found himself in the crowded streets of the native city, a lonely khaki figure in a sun-helmet, regarding the many-coloured crowd, and asking himself, in the philosophical way he inherited from his father,

"What's the meaning of it all?"

It was on one of these rambles that the solitary incident of his career in India occurred to him.

He was standing at the foot of the hill in the native city of Lahore, watching the traffic in the narrow streets, when he saw a mem-sahib driving a tum-tum slowly through the heavy ox-traffic.

The syce for some reason had descended, and the lady was alone.

Just then a huge elephant with painted sides came swinging down the steep street, at the head of a religious procession, singing and clashing cymbals.

The lady's pony, a dun country-bred, took fright and bolted.

Ernie saw her face, quite calm beneath her solar topee, as she rushed past him, pulling at the run-away. It was Mrs. Lewknor.

A few yards down the street the wheels of the tum-tum cannoned into a sack borne by a small donkey. The donkey, already tottering beneath his load, collapsed and lay in the dust unable to rise.

The driver of the donkey, an unsavoury giant, pock-marked, abused the mem-sahib. A crowd gathered. The religious procession was held up, the elephant swinging his trunk discontentedly and spouting showers of dust over his flanks.

Ernie didn't like the look of things, for it was common talk in the lines that the native city was mutinous.

He came up quickly. The presence of the man in khaki steadied the crowd and stopped the chatter.

"Best get out of this, 'm," he suggested. "They look a bit funny."

He took the pony's head and turned him.

"You get up alongside me then," said Mrs. Lewknor.

He obeyed.

The crowd made way. The pock-marked man began again to beat his donkey. The procession resumed its march.

"One up for the Hammer-men!" the little lady laughed, as they emerged from the gate of the native city.

"Yes, 'm," said Ernie. "Only one thing. The native city's out of bounds for me."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled.

"I'm not one of the Military Police," she said....

That evening she put to her husband a question that had often puzzled her.

"Why doesn't Caspar get on?" she asked. "He's got twice the intelligence of men who go over his head."

"My dear," replied the Major with the sententiousness that grew on him with the greying years, "intelligence is the last thing we want in the ranks of the Army. Intelligence always leads to indiscipline. The Army wants in the lower ranks only one thing--what is called 'character.' And by character it means the quality of the bull who rammed his head against a brick-wall till he was unconscious and went at it again when he came round saying--_My head is bloody but unbowed_."

During Ernie's years of service the Battalion moved slowly North, exchanging the plains of the Central Provinces for the frosty nights and red sand-hills of the Punjauh.

Major Lewknor became Colonel; and Mr. Royal adjutant.

Ern and the new Colonel were curiously sympathetic; Ern and the adjutant the reverse.

It may be that the Colonel, unusual himself, and lonely because of it, recognized a kindred spirit in the man; it may be that he never forgot that Ern was the son of his old contemporary Hathri Caspar of Trinity; or perhaps Mrs. Lewknor played an unconscious part in the matter. It is certain that on the one occasion Ern was brought before him in the Orderly Room for a momentary lapse into his old weakness, the Colonel merely "admonished" the offender.

Captain Royal, a ruthless disciplinarian, was aggrieved.

"He's such a rotten slack soldier, sir," he complained, after the culprit, congratulating himself upon his escape, had disappeared.

"Isn't he?" said the Colonel, enjoying to the full the irritation of his subordinate. "That man'd be no earthly good except on service."

Even at the wicket indeed Ernie was only at his best when he had to try. A first-rate natural bat, he would have been left out of the regimental team for slackness but that, as the Sergeant-Major said,

"Caspar's always there when you want him most."

In fact, Ernie ended his career in the Army with something of a flourish.

The Regiment was playing the Rifle Brigade at Rawlpindi in the last round for the Holkar Cup. Half-way through the second day, when the Hammer-men were batting, a rot set in. There were still two hours to play when the last man went in.

"Who is it?" asked Mrs. Lewknor, keen as a knife.

"Your friend, Caspar, Mrs. Lewknor," answered the senior subaltern, one Conky Joe, with the beak of a penguin, the eyes of an angel, and the heart of a laughter-loving boy. "They're sending him in last for his sins in the field--which were many and grievous."

"He won't live long against their fast bowler," commented the Boy gloomily. "I know Caspar."

"I never like to differ from my superiors," said the Colonel. "But I'm not so sure."

"Nor am I," said Mrs. Lewknor defiantly.

The Colonel and his wife proved right. Ernie batted with astonishing confidence from the first. At the end of twenty minutes it was anybody's game. Royal, well into his second century, was flogging the ball all over the ground. And Ernie's clear voice--"Yes, sir! No, sir! Stay where you are!" gave new heart to the watching Hammer-men.

In the end the two men played out time with consummate ease, and were carried together off the ground.

"It was like bowling at two rocks," said one of the defeated side.

"Spiteful rocks too!" replied the other. "Stood up and slashed at you!"

The Colonel went up and shook hands with the victorious batsmen, and Mrs. Lewknor waved her parasol.

"Well done, Caspar!" she cried. "Stuck it out!"

A few days later, his time being up, Ernie was detailed for a draft for home.

The Colonel, on signing his papers, said that he was sorry to be parting, and meant it.

"Charming fellow!" he said to the Adjutant, when Ern had left the room.

"Yes," answered Captain Royal in his lofty way. "Too charming. He'll never be any good to himself or us either."

"I'm not so sure," replied the Colonel. "He's the sort that never does well except when he's got to."

That evening Ern went up to the Colonel's bungalow to say good-bye to Mrs. Lewknor.

"Where are you going?" asked the little lady.

"Back home, 'm," Ernie answered. "Old Town, Beachbourne. There's no place in the world to touch it."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled at his enthusiasm.

"I know it," she said. "The Colonel comes from those parts--Hailsham-way. Perhaps we shall follow you when we retire."

"Beachbourne!" mused the Colonel, after Ernie had departed. "Famous for two things: Mr. Trupp, the surgeon, who by a brilliant operation saved the other day the life of the man the world could have done best without, and the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"What's the Hohenzollern Hotel?" asked Mrs. Lewknor.

"My dear," said the Colonel, "Captain Royal will enlighten you in his more intimate moments."