THE SON OF HIS FATHER
“It is a queer name,” Mrs. Strickland admitted, “and none of our family have ever borne it; but, you see, he is the first man to us.”
So he was called Adam, and to that world about him he was the first of men—a man-child alone. Heaven sent him no Eve for a companion, but all earth, horse and foot, was at his feet. As soon as he was old enough to appear in public he held a levée, and Strickland’s sixty policemen, with their sixty clanking sabres, bowed to the dust before him. When his fingers closed a little on Imam Din’s sword-hilt they rose and roared till Adam roared too, and was withdrawn.
“Now that was no cry of fear,” said Imam Din afterwards, speaking to his companion in the Police lines. “He was angry—and so young! Brothers, he will make a very strong Police officer.”
“Does the Memsahib nurse him?” said a new recruit, the dye-smell not yet out of his yellow cotton uniform.
“Ho!” said an up-country Naik scornfully; “it has not been known for more than ten days that my woman nurses him.” He curled his moustaches as lordly as ever an Inspector could afford to do, for he knew that the husband of the foster-mother of the son of the District Superintendent of Police was a man of consideration.
“I am glad,” said Imam Din, loosening his belt. “Those who drink our blood become of our own blood, and I have seen, in those thirty years, that the sons of Sahibs once being born here return when they are men. Yes, they return after they have been to Belait [Europe].”
“And what do they in Belait?” asked the recruit respectfully.
“Get instruction—which thou hast not,” returned the Naik. “Also they drink of belaitee-panee [soda-water] enough to give them that devil’s restlessness which endures for all their lives. Whence we of Hind have trouble.”
“My father’s uncle,” said Imam Din slowly, with importance, “was Ressaldar of the Long Coat Horse; and the Empress called him to Europe in the year that she had accomplished fifty years of rule. He said (and there were also other witnesses) that the Sahibs there drink only common water even as do we; and that the belaitee-panee does not run in all their rivers.”
“He said that there was a Shish Mahal—a glass palace—half a mile in length, and that the rail-train ran under roads; and that there are boats bigger than a village. He is a great talker.” The Naik spoke scornfully. He had no well-born uncles.
“He is at least a man of good birth,” said Imam Din, and the Naik was silent.
“Ho! Ho!” Imam Din reached out to his pipe, chuckling till his fat sides shook again. “Strickland Sahib’s foster-mother was the wife of a gardener in the Ferozepur district. I was a young man then. This child also will be suckled here and he will have double wisdom, and when he is a Police officer it will be very bad for the thieves in this part of the world. Ho! Ho!”
“Strickland Sahib’s butler has said,” the Naik went on, “that they will call him Adam—and no jaw-splitting English name. Udaam. The padre will name him at their church in due time.”
“Who can tell the ways of Sahibs? Now Strickland Sahib knows more of the Faith than ever I had time to learn—prayers, charms, names and stories of the Blessed Ones. Yet he is not a Mussulman,” said Imam Din thoughtfully.
“For the reason that he knows as much of the gods of Hindustan, and so he rides with a rein in each hand. Remember that he sat under the Baba Atal, a faquir among faquirs, for ten days; whereby a man came to be hanged for the murder of a dancing girl on the night of the great earthquake,” the Naik replied.
“True—it is true. And yet—the Sahibs are one day so wise—and another so foolish. But he has named the child well; Adam. Huzrut Adam. Ho! Ho! Father Adam we must call him.”
“And all who minister to the child,” said the Naik quietly, but with meaning, “will come to great honour.”
Adam throve, being prayed over before the Gods of at least three creeds, in a garden almost as fair as Eden. There were gigantic clumps of bamboos that talked continually, and enormous plantains, trees on whose soft, paper skin he could scratch with his nails; green domes of mango-trees as huge as the dome of St. Paul’s, full of parrots as big as cassowaries and grey squirrels the size of foxes. At the end of the garden stood a hedge of flaming poinsettias higher than anything in the world, because, childlike, Adam’s eye could not carry to the tops of the mango-trees. Their green went out against the blue sky, but the red poinsettias he could just see. A nurse who talked continually about snakes and pulled him back from the mouth of a fascinating dry well, and a mother who believed that the sun hurt little heads, were the only drawbacks to this loveliness. But, as his legs grew under him, he found that by scaling an enormous rampart—three feet of broken-down mud wall at the end of the garden—he could come into a ready-made kingdom, where everyone was his slave. Imam Din showed him the way one evening, and the Police troopers, cooking their supper, received him with rapture, and gave him pieces of very indigestible, but altogether delightful, spiced bread.
Here he sat or sprawled in the horse-feed where the Police were picketed in a double line, and he named them, men and beasts together, according to his ideas and experiences, as his First Father had done before him. In those days everything had a name, from the mud mangers to the heel-ropes, for things were people to Adam exactly as people are things to folk in their second childhood. Through all the conferences—one hand twisted into Imam Din’s beard, and the other on his polished belt buckle—there were two other people who came and went across the talk—Death and Sickness—persons greater than Imam Din, and stronger than the heel-roped horses. There was Mata, the small-pox, a woman in some way connected with pigs; and Heza, the cholera, a black man, according to Adam; and Booka, starvation; and Kismet, who settled all questions, from the untimely choking of a pet mungoose in the kitchen-drain to the absence of a young Policeman who once missed a parade and never came back. It was all very wonderful to Adam, but not worth much thinking over; for a child’s mind is bounded by his eyes exactly as a horse’s view of the road is limited by his blinkers. Between all these objectionable shadowy vagrants stood a ring of kind faces and strong arms, and Mata and Heza would never touch Adam, the first of men. Kismet might do so, because—and this was a mystery no staring into his looking-glass would solve—Kismet was written, like Police orders for the day, in or on Adam’s head. Imam Din could not explain how this might be, and it was from that grey, fat Mohammedan that Adam learned through every inflection the Khuda jhanta [God knows!] that settles everything in the mind of Asia.
Beyond the fact that “Khuda” [God] was a very good man and kept lions, Adam’s theology did not run far. Mrs. Strickland tried to teach him a few facts, but he revolted at the story of Genesis as untrue. A turtle, he said, upheld the world, and one-half the adventures of Huzrut Nu [Father Noah] had never been told. If Mamma wanted to hear them she must ask Imam Din.
“It’s awful,” said Mrs. Strickland, half crying, “to think of his growing up like a little heathen.” Mrs. Strickland had been born and brought up in England, and did not quite understand Eastern things.
“Let him alone,” said Strickland. “He’ll grow out of it all, or it will only come back to him in dreams.”
“Are you sure?” said his wife.
“Quite. I was sent home when I was seven, and they flicked it out of me with a wet towel at Harrow. Public schools don’t encourage anything that isn’t quite English.”
Mrs. Strickland shuddered, for she had been trying not to think of the separation that follows motherhood in India, and makes life there, for all that is written to the contrary, not quite the most desirable thing in the world. Adam trotted out to hear about more miracles, and his nurse must have worried him beyond bounds, for she came back weeping, saying that Adam Baba was in danger of being eaten alive by wild horses.
As a matter of fact he had shaken off Juma by bolting between a couple of picketed horses, and lying down under their bellies. That they were old personal friends of his, Juma did not understand, nor Strickland either. Adam was settled at ease when his father arrived, breathless and white, and the stallions put back their ears and squealed.
“If you come here,” said Adam, “they will hit you kicks. Tell Juma I have eaten my rice, and I wish to be alone.”
“Come out at once,” said Strickland, for the horses were beginning to paw.
“Why should I obey Juma’s order? She is afraid of horses.”
“It is not Juma’s order. It is mine. Obey!”
“Ho!” said Adam. “Juma did not tell me that”; and he crawled out on all fours among the shod feet. Mrs. Strickland was crying bitterly with fear and excitement, and as a sacrifice to the home gods Adam had to be whipped. He said with perfect justice—
“There was no order that I should not sit with the horses, and they are my horses. Why is there this tamasha [fuss]?”
Strickland’s face showed him that the whipping was coming, and the child turned white. Motherlike, Mrs. Strickland left the room, but Juma, the foster-mother, stayed to see.
“Am I to be whipped here?” he gasped.
“Of course.”
“Before that woman? Father, I am a man—I am not afraid. It is my izzat—my honour.”
Strickland only laughed—(to this day I cannot imagine what possessed him), and gave Adam the little tap-tap with a riding cane that was whipping sufficient for his years.
When it was all over, Adam said quietly, “I am little and you are big. If I had stayed among my horse-folk I should not have been whipped. You are afraid to go there.”
The merest chance led me to Strickland’s house that afternoon. When I was half-way down the drive Adam passed me without recognition, at a fast run. I caught one glimpse of his face under his big hat, and it was the face of his father as I had once seen it in the grey of the morning when it bent over a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder.
“Let me go!” he screamed; though he and I were the best of friends, as a rule. “Let me go!”
“Where to, Father Adam?” He was quivering like a haltered colt.
“To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before a woman! Let me go!” He tried to bite my hand.
“That is a small matter,” I said. “Men are born to beatings.”
“Thou hast never been beaten,” he said savagely (we were talking in the native tongue).
“Indeed I have; times past counting.”
“Before women?”
“My mother and my ayah saw. By women, too, for that matter. What of it?”
“What didst thou do?” He stared beyond my shoulder up the long drive.
“It is long ago, and I have forgotten. I was older than thou art; but even then I forgot, and now the thing is only a jest to be talked of.”
Adam drew one big breath and broke down utterly in my arms. Then he raised his head, and his eyes were Strickland’s eyes when Strickland gave orders.
“Ho! Imam Din!”
The fat orderly seemed to spring out of the earth at our feet, crashing through the bushes, and standing at attention.
“Hast thou ever been beaten?” said Adam.
“Assuredly. By my father when I was thirty years old. He beat me with a plough-beam before all the women of the village.”
“Wherefore?”
“Because I had returned to the village on leave from the Government service, and said of the village elders that they had not seen the world. Therefore he beat me to show that no seeing of the world changes father and son.”
“And thou?”
“I stood up to the beating. He was my father.”
“Good,” said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word.
Imam Din looked after him. “An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime, but he breeds elephants. Yet, I am glad I am no father of tuskers,” said he.
“What is it all?” I asked.
“His father beat him with a whip no bigger than a reed. But the child could not have done what he desired to do without leaping through me. And I am of some few pounds weight. Look!”
Imam Din stepped back through the bushes, and the pressed grass showed that he had been lying curled round the mouth of the dry well.
“When there was talk of beating, I knew that one who sat among horses such as ours was not like to kiss his father’s hand. He might have done away with himself. So I lay down in this place.” We stood still looking at the well-curb.
Adam came along the garden path to us. “I have spoken to my father,” he said simply. “Imam Din, tell thy Naik that his woman is dismissed my service.”
“Huzoor! [Your Highness!]” said Imam Din, stooping low.
“For no fault of hers.”
“Protector of the Poor!”
“And to-day.”
“Khodawund! [Heaven-born!]”
“It is an order. Go!”
Again the salute, and Imam Din departed, with that same set of the back which he wore when he had taken an order from Strickland. I thought that it would be well to go too, but Strickland beckoned me from the verandah. When I came up he was perfectly white, rocking to and fro in his chair.
“Do you know he was going to chuck himself down the well—because I tapped him just now?” he said helplessly.
“I ought to,” I replied. “He has just dismissed his nurse—on his own authority, I suppose?”
“He told me just now that he wouldn’t have her for a nurse any more. I never supposed he meant it for an instant. I suppose she’ll have to go.”
Now Strickland, the Police officer, was feared through the length and breadth of the Punjab by murderers, horse-thieves, and cattle-lifters.
Adam returned, halting outside the verandah.
“I have sent Juma away because she saw that—that which happened. Until she is gone I do not come into the house,” he said.
“But to send away thy foster-mother!” said Strickland with reproach.
“I do not send her away. It is thy blame,” and the small forefinger was pointed to Strickland. “I will not obey her. I will not eat from her hand. I will not sleep with her. Send her away!”
Strickland stepped out and lifted the child into the verandah.
“This folly has lasted long enough,” he said. “Come now and be wise.”
“I am little and you are big,” said Adam between set teeth. “You can beat me before this man or cut me to pieces. But I will not have Juma for my ayah any more. She saw me beaten. I will not eat till she goes. I swear it by—my father’s head.”
Strickland sent him indoors to his mother, and we could hear sounds of weeping and Adam’s voice saying nothing more than “Send Juma away!” Presently Juma came in and wept too, and Adam repeated, “It is no fault of thine, but go!”
And the end of it was that Juma went with all her belongings, and Adam fought his own way into his little clothes until the new ayah came. His address of welcome to her was rather amazing. In a few words it ran: “If I do wrong, send me to my father. If you strike me, I will try to kill you. I do not wish my ayah to play with me. Go and eat rice!”
From that Adam foreswore the society of ayahs and small native boys as much as a small boy can, confining himself to Imam Din and his friends of the Police. The Naik, Juma’s husband, had been presuming not a little on his position, and when Adam’s favour was withdrawn from his wife he thought it best to apply for a transfer to another post. There were too many companions anxious to report his shortcomings to Strickland.
Towards his father Adam kept a guarded neutrality. There was not a touch of sulkiness in it, for the child’s temper was as clear as a bell. But the difference and the politeness worried Strickland.
If the Policemen had loved Adam before the affair of the well, they worshipped him now.
“He knows what honour means,” said Imam Din. “He has justified himself upon a point thereof. He has carried an order through his father’s household as a child of the Blood might do. Therefore he is not altogether a child any longer. Wah! He is a tiger’s cub.” The next time that Adam made his little unofficial inspection of the lines, Imam Din, and, by consequence, all the others, stood upon their feet with their hands to their sides, instead of calling out from where they lay, “Salaam, Babajee,” and other disrespectful things.
But Strickland took counsel with his wife, and she with the cheque-book and their lean bank account, and they decided that Adam must go “home” to his aunts. But England is not home to a child who has been born in India, and it never becomes homelike unless he spends all his youth there. Their bank-book showed that if they economized through the summer by going to a cheap hill-station instead of to Simla (where Mrs. Strickland’s parents lived, and where Strickland might be noticed by the Government) they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be hard pinching, but it could be done.
Dalhousie was chosen as being the cheapest of the hill-stations;—Dalhousie and a little five-roomed cottage full of mildew, tucked away among the rhododendrons.
Adam had been to Simla three or four times, and knew by name most of the drivers on the road there, but this new place disquieted him. He came to me for information, his hands deep in his knickerbocker pockets, walking step for step as his father walked.
“There will be none of my bhai-bund [brotherhood] up there,” he said disconsolately, “and they say that I must lie still in a doolie [palanquin] for a day and a night, being carried like a sheep. I wish to take some of my mounted men to Dalhousie.”
I told him that there was a small boy, called Victor, at Dalhousie, who had a calf for a pet, and was allowed to play with it on the public roads. After that Adam could not sufficiently hurry the packing.
“First,” said he, “I shall ask that man Victor to let me play with the cow’s child. If he is muggra [ill-conditioned], I shall tell my Policemen to take it away.”
“But that is unjust,” said Strickland, “and there is no order that the Police should do injustice.”
“When the Government pay is not sufficient, and low-caste men are promoted, what can an honest man do?” Adam replied, in the very touch and accent of Imam Din; and Strickland’s eyebrows went up.
“You talk too much to the Police, my son,” he said.
“Always. About everything,” said Adam promptly. “They say that when I am an officer I shall know as much as my father.”
“God forbid, little one!”
“They say, too, that you are as clever as Shaitan [the Evil One], to know things.”
“They say that, do they?” and Strickland looked pleased. His pay was small, but he had his reputation, and it was dear to him.
“They say also—not to me, but to one another when they eat rice behind the wall—that in your own heart you esteem yourself as wise as Suleiman [Soloman], who was cheated by Shaitan.”
This time Strickland did not look so pleased. Adam, in all innocence, launched into a long story about Suleiman-bin-Daoud, who once, out of vanity, pitted his wits against Shaitan, and because God was not on his side Shaitan sent “a little devil of low caste,” as Adam put it, who cheated him utterly and put him to shame before “all the other Kings.”
“By Gum!” said Strickland, when the tale was done, and went away, while Adam took me to task for laughing at Imam Din’s stories. I did not wonder that he was called Huzrut Adam, for he looked old as all time in his grave childhood, sitting cross-legged, his battered little helmet far at the back of his head, his forefinger wagging up and down, native fashion, and the wisdom of serpents on his unconscious lips.
That May he went up to Dalhousie with his mother, and in those days the journey ended in fifty or sixty miles of uphill travel in a doolie or palanquin along a road winding through the Himalayas. Adam sat in the doolie with his mother, and Strickland rode and tied with me, a spare doolie following. The march began after we got out of the train at Pathankot, in a wet hot night among the rice and poppy fields.
II
It was all new to Adam, and he had opinions to advance—notably about a fish that jumped in a way-side pond. “Now I know,” he shouted, “how God puts them there! First He makes them up above and then He drops them down. That was a new one.” Then, lifting his head to the stars, he cried: “Oh, God, do it again, but slowly, so that I, Adam, may see.”
But nothing happened, and the doolie-bearers lit the noisome, dripping rag-torches, and Adam’s eyes shone big in the dancing light, and we smelt the dry dust of the plains that we were leaving after eleven months’ hard work.
At stated times the men ceased their drowsy, grunting tune, and sat down for a smoke. Between the guttering of their water-pipes we could hear the cries of the beasts of the night, and the wind stirring in the folds of the mountain ahead. At the changing-station the voice of Adam, the First of Men, would be lifted to rouse the sleepers in the huts till the fresh relay of bearers shambled from their cots and the relief pony with them.
Then we would re-form and go on, and by the time the moon rose Adam was asleep, and there was no sound in the night except the grunting of the men, the husky murmur of some river a thousand feet down in the valley, and the squeaking of Strickland’s saddle. So we went up from date-palm to deodar, till the dawn wind came round a corner all fresh from the snows, and we snuffed it. I heard Strickland say, “Wife, my overcoat, please,” and Adam, fretfully, “Where is Dalhousie and the cow’s child?” Then I slept till Strickland turned me out of the warm doolie at seven o’clock, and I stepped into all the splendour of a cool Hill day, the Plains sweltering twenty miles back and four thousand feet below. Adam waked too, and needs must ride in front of me to ask a million questions, and shout at the monkeys and clap his hands when the painted pheasants bolted across our road, and hail every woodcutter and drover and pilgrim within sight, till we halted for breakfast at a rest house. After that, being a child, he went out to play with a train of bullock-drivers halted by the roadside, and we had to chase him out of a native liquor shop, where he was bargaining with a native seven-year-old for a parrot in a bamboo cage.
Said he, wriggling on my pommel as we went on again, “There were four men behosh [insensible] at the back of that house. Wherefore do men grow behosh from drinking?”
“It is the nature of the waters,” I said, and, calling back, “Strick, what’s that grog-shop doing so close to the road? It’s a temptation to any one’s servants.”
“Dunno,” said a sleepy voice in the doolie. “This is Kennedy’s District. ’Twasn’t here in my time.”
“Truly the waters smell bad,” Adam went on. “I smelt them, but I did not get the parrot even for six annas. The woman of the house gave me a love gift that I found playing near the verandah.”
“And what was the gift, Father Adam?”
“A nose-ring for my ayah. Ohe! Ohe! Look at that camel with the muzzle on his nose!”
A string of loaded camels came cruising round the corner as a fleet rounds a cape.
“Ho, Malik! Why does not a camel salaam like an elephant? His neck is long enough,” Adam cried.
“The Angel Jibrail made him a fool at the beginning,” said the driver, as he swayed on the top of the leading beast, and laughter ran all along the line of red-bearded men.
“That is true,” said Adam solemnly, and they laughed again.
At last, in the late afternoon, we came to Dalhousie, the loveliest of the hill-stations, and separated, Adam hardly able to be restrained from setting out at once to find Victor and the “cow’s child.” I found them both, something to my trouble, next morning. The two young sinners had a calf on a tight rope just at a sharp turn in the Mall, and were pretending that he was a raja’s elephant who had gone mad; and they shouted with delight. Then we began to talk, and Adam, by way of crushing Victor’s repeated reminders to me that he and not “that other” was the owner of the calf, said, “It is true I have no cow’s child; but a great dacoity [robbery] has been done on my father.”
“We came up together yesterday. There could have been nothing,” I said.
“It was my mother’s horse. She has been dacoited with beating and blows, and now is so thin.” He held his hands an inch apart. “My father is at the telegraph-house sending telegrams. Imam Din will cut off all their heads. I desire your saddle-cloth for a howdah for my elephant. Give it me!”
This was exciting, but not lucid. I went to the telegraph office and found Strickland in a black temper among many telegraph forms. A dishevelled, one-eyed groom stood in a corner whimpering at intervals. He was a man whom Adam invariably addressed as “Be-shakl, be-ukl, be-ank” [ugly, stupid, eyeless]. It seemed that Strickland had sent his wife’s horse up to Dalhousie by road, a fortnight’s march, in the groom’s charge. This is the custom in Upper India. Among the foothills, near Dhunnera or Dhar, horse and man had been violently set upon in the night by four men, who had beaten the groom (his leg was bandaged from knee to ankle in proof), had incidentally beaten the horse, and had robbed the groom of the bucket and blanket, and all his money—eleven rupees, nine annas. Last, they had left him for dead by the way-side, where some woodcutters had found and nursed him. Then the one-eyed man howled with anguish, thinking over his bruises. “They asked me if I was Strickland Sahib’s servant, and I, thinking the Protection of the Name would be sufficient, spoke the truth. Then they beat me grievously.”
“H’m!” said Strickland. “I thought they wouldn’t dacoit as a business on the Dalhousie road. This is meant for me personally—sheer badmashi [impudence]. All right.”
In justice to a very hard-working class it must be said that the thieves of Upper India have the keenest sense of humour. The last compliment that they can pay a Police officer is to rob him, and if, as once they did, they can loot a Deputy Inspector-General of Police, on the eve of his retirement, of everything except the clothes on his back, their joy is complete. They cause letters of derision and telegrams of condolence to be sent to the victim; for of all men thieves are most compelled to keep abreast of progress.
Strickland was a man of few words where his business was concerned. I had never seen a Police officer robbed before, and I expected some excitement, but Strickland held his tongue. He took the groom’s deposition, and then retired into himself for a time. Then he sent Kennedy, of the Pathankot District, an official letter and an unofficial note. Kennedy’s reply was purely unofficial, and it ran thus: “This seems a compliment solely intended for you. My wonder is you didn’t get it before. The men are probably back in your district by now. My Dhunnera and foot-hill people are highly respectable cultivators, and, seeing my Assistant is an unlicked pup, and I can’t trust my Inspector out of my sight, I’m not going to turn their harvest upside down with Police investigations. I’m run off my feet with vaccination Police work. You’d better look at home. The Shubkudder gang were through here a fortnight back. They laid up at the Amritsar Serai, and then worked down. No cases against them in my charge; but, remember, you imprisoned their head-man for receiving stolen goods in Prub Dyal’s burglary. They owe you one.”
“Exactly what I thought,” said Strickland. “I had a notion it was the Shubkudder gang from the first. We must make it pleasant for them at Peshawur, and in my District, too. They’re just the kind that would lie up under Imam Din’s shadow.”
From this point onward the wires began to be worked heavily. Strickland had a very fair knowledge of the Shubkudder gang, gathered at first hand.
They were the same syndicate that had once stolen a Deputy Commissioner’s cow, put horse-shoes on her, and taken her forty miles into the jungle before they lost interest in the joke. They added insult to insult by writing that the Deputy Commissioner’s cows and horses were so much alike that it took them two days to find out the difference and they would not lift the like of such cattle any more.
The District Superintendent at Peshawur replied to Strickland that he was expecting the gang, and Strickland’s Assistant, in his own district, being young and full of zeal, sent up the most amazing clues.
“Now that’s just what I want that young fool not to do,” said Strickland. “He’s an English boy, born and bred, and his father before him. He has about as much tact as a bull, and he won’t work quietly under my Inspector. I wish the Government would keep our service for country-born men. Those first five or six years in India give a man a pull that lasts him all his life. Adam, if only you were old enough to be my Assistant!” He looked down at the little fellow in the verandah. Adam was deeply interested in the dacoity, and, unlike a child, did not lose interest after the first week. On the contrary, he would ask his father every evening what had been done, and Strickland had drawn him a map on the white wall of the verandah, showing the different towns in which Policemen were on the look-out for thieves. They were Amritsar, Jullunder, Phillour, Gurgaon, Rawal Pindi, Peshawur and Multan. Adam looked up at it as he answered—
“There has been great dikh [trouble] in this case?”
“Very great trouble. I wish that thou wert a young man and my Assistant to help me.”
“Dost thou need help, my father?” Adam asked curiously, with his head on one side.
“Very much.”
“Leave it all alone. It is bad. Let loose everything.”
“That must not be. Those beginning a business continue to the end.”
“Thou wilt continue to the end? Dost thou not know who did the dacoity?”
Strickland shook his head. Adam turned to me with the same question, and I answered it in the same way.
“What foolish people!” he said, and turned his back on us.
He showed plainly in all our dealings afterwards how we had fallen in his opinion. Strickland told me that he would sit at the door of his father’s workroom and stare at him for half an hour at a time as he went through his papers. Strickland seemed to work harder over the case than if he had been in office in the Plains.
“And sometimes I look up and I fancy the little chap’s laughing at me. It’s an awful thing to have a son. You see, he’s your own and his own, and between the two you don’t quite know how to handle him,” said Strickland. “I wonder what in the world he thinks about.”
I asked Adam this later on, quietly. He put his head on one side for a moment and replied: “In these days I think about great things. I do not play with Victor and the cow’s child any more. Victor is only a baba.”
At the end of the third week of Strickland’s leave, the result of Strickland’s labours—labours that had made Mrs. Strickland more indignant against the dacoits than any one else—came to hand. The Police at Peshawur reported that half of the Shubkudder gang were held at Peshawur to account for the possession of some blankets and a horse-bucket. Strickland’s assistant had also four men under suspicion in his charge; and Imam Din must have stirred up Strickland’s Inspector to investigations on his own account, for a string of incoherent telegrams came in from the Club Secretary in which he entreated, exhorted, and commanded Strickland to take his “mangy Policemen” off the Club premises. “Your men, in servants’ quarters here, examining cook. Billiard-marker indignant. Steward threatens resignation. Members furious. Grooms stopped on roads. Shut up, or my resignation goes to Committee.”
“Now I shouldn’t in the least wonder,” said Strickland thoughtfully to his wife, “if the Club was not just the place where the men would lie up. Billy Watson isn’t at all pleased, though. I think I shall have to cut my leave by a week and go down to take charge. If there’s anything to be told, the men will tell me.”
Mrs. Strickland’s eyes filled with tears. “I shall try to steal ten days if I can in the autumn,” he said soothingly, “but I must go now. It will never do for the gang to think that they can burgle my belongings.”
That was in the forenoon, and Strickland asked me to lunch to leave me some instructions about his big dog, with authority to rebuke those who did not attend to her. Tietjens was growing too old and too fat to live in the plains in the summer. When I came, Adam had climbed into his high chair at table, and Mrs. Strickland seemed ready to weep at any moment over the general misery of things.
“I go down to the Plains to-morrow, my son,” said Strickland.
“Wherefore?” said Adam, reaching out for a ripe mango and burying his head in it.
“Imam Din has caught the men who did the dacoity, and there are also others at Peshawur under suspicion. I must go to see.”
“Bus! [enough],” said Adam, between sucks at his mango, as Mrs. Strickland tucked the napkin round his neck. “Imam Din speaks lies. Do not go.”
“It is necessary. There has been great dikh-dari [trouble-giving].”
Adam came out of the fruit for a minute and laughed. Then, returning, he spoke between slow and deliberate mouthfuls.
“The dacoits live in Beshakl’s head. They will never be caught. All people know that. The cook knows, and the scullion, and Rahim Baksh here.”
“Nay,” said the butler behind his chair hastily. “What should I know? Nothing at all does the Servant of the Presence know.”
“Accha [good],” said Adam, and sucked on. “Only it is known.”
“Speak, then,” said Strickland to him. “What dost thou know? Remember my groom was beaten insensible.”
“That was in the bad-water shop where I played when we came up here. The boy who would not sell me the parrot for six annas told me that a one-eyed man had come there and drunk the bad waters and gone mad. He broke bedsteads. They hit him with a bamboo till he was senseless, and fearing he was dead, they nursed him on milk—like a little baba. When I was playing first with the cow’s child, I asked Beshakl if he were that man, and he said no. But I knew, because many woodcutters in Dalhousie asked him whether his head were whole now.”
“But why,” I interrupted, “did Beshakl tell lies?”
“Oh! He is a low-caste man, and desired to get consideration. Now he is a witness in a great law-case, and men will go to the jail on his account. It was to give trouble and obtain notice that he did it.”
“Was it all lies?” said Strickland.
“Ask him,” said Adam, through the mango-pulp.
Strickland passed through the door. There was a howl of despair in the servants’ quarters up the hill, and he returned with the one-eyed groom.
“Now,” said Strickland, “it is known. Declare!”
“Beshakl,” said Adam, while the man gasped. “Imam Din has caught four men, and there are some more at Peshawur. Bus! Bus! Bus! [Enough.]”
“Thou didst get drunk by the way-side, and didst make a false case to cover it. Speak!”
Like a good many other men, Strickland, in possession of a few facts, was irresistible. The groom groaned.
“I—I did not get drunk till—till—Protector of the Poor, the mare rolled.”
“All horses roll at Dhunnera. The road is too narrow before that, and they smell where the other horses have rolled. This the bullock-drivers told me when we came up here,” said Adam.
“She rolled. So her saddle was cut and the curb-chain lost.”
“See!” said Adam, tugging a curb-chain from his pocket. “That woman in the shop gave it to me for a love-gift. Beshakl said it was not his when I showed it. But I knew.”
“Then they at the grog-shop, knowing that I was the Servant of the Presence, said that unless I drank and spent money they would tell.”
“A lie! A lie!” said Strickland. “Son of an owl, speak the truth now at least.”
“Then I was afraid because I had lost the curb-chain, so I cut the saddle across and about.”
“She did not roll, then?” said Strickland, bewildered and angry.
“It was only the curb-chain that was lost. Then I cut the saddle and went to drink in the shop. I drank and there was a fray. The rest I have forgotten till I recovered.”
“And the mare the while? What of the mare?”
The man looked at Strickland and collapsed.
“She bore faggots for a week,” he said.
“Oh, poor Diamond!” said Mrs. Strickland.
“And Beshakl was paid four annas for her hire three days ago by the woodcutter’s brother, who is the left-hand man of our rickshaw-men here,” said Adam, in a loud and joyful voice. “We all knew. We all knew. I and the servants.”
Strickland was silent. His wife stared helplessly at the child; the soul out of Nowhere that went its own way alone.
“Did no man help thee with the lies?” I asked of the groom.
“None. Protector of the Poor—not one.”
“They grew, then?”
“As a tale grows in telling. Alas! I am a very bad man!” and he blinked his one eye dolefully.
“Now four men are held at my Police station on thy account, and God knows how many more at Peshawur, besides the questions at Multan, and my honour is lost, and my mare has been pack-pony to a woodcutter. Son of Devils, what canst thou do to make amends?”
There was just a little break in Strickland’s voice, and the man caught it. Bending low, he answered, in the abject fawning whine that confounds right and wrong more surely than most modern creeds, “Protector of the Poor, is the Police service shut to—an honest man?”
“Out!” cried Strickland, and swiftly as the groom departed he must have heard our shouts of laughter behind him.
“If you dismiss that man, Strick, I shall engage him. He’s a genius,” said I. “It will take you months to put this mess right, and Billy Watson won’t give you a minute’s peace.”
“You aren’t going to tell him?” said Strickland appealingly.
“I couldn’t keep this to myself if you were my own brother. Four men arrested with you—four or forty at Peshawur—and what was that you said about Multan?”
“Oh, nothing. Only some camel-men there have been——”
“And a tribe of camel-men at Multan! All on account of a lost curb-chain. Oh, my Aunt!”
“And whose memsahib [lady] was thy aunt?” said Adam, with the mango-stone in his fist. We began to laugh again.
“But here,” said Strickland, pulling his face together, “is a very bad child who has caused his father to lose his honour before all the Policemen of the Punjab.”
“Oh, they know,” said Adam. “It was only for the sake of show that they caught people. Assuredly they all knew it was benowti [make-up].”
“And since when hast thou known?” said the first policeman in India to his son.
“Four days after we came here, after the woodcutter had asked Beshakl after the health of his head. Beshakl all but slew one of them at the bad-water place.”
“If thou hadst spoken then, time and money and trouble to me and to others had all been spared. Baba, thou hast done a wrong greater than thy knowledge, and thou hast put me to shame, and set me out upon false words, and broken my honour. Thou hast done very wrong. But perhaps thou didst not think?”
“Nay, but I did think. Father, my honour was lost when that beating of me happened in Juma’s presence. Now it is made whole again.”
And with the most enchanting smile in the world Adam climbed up on to his father’s lap.