Selected Stories (62 page)

A pink and fattish youth arrived in the red-hot noonday, whimpering a little at fate and famines, which never allowed anyone three months' peace. He was Scott's successor – another cog in the machinery, moved forward behind his fellow, whose services, as the official announcement ran, ‘were placed at the disposal of the Madras Government for famine duty until further orders'. Scott handed over the funds in his charge, showed him the coolest corner in the office, warned him against excess of zeal, and, as twilight fell, departed from the Club in a hired carriage, with his faithful body servant, Faiz Ullah, and a mound of disordered baggage atop, to catch the Southern Mail at the loopholed and bastioned railway-station. The heat from the thick brick walls struck him across the face as if it had been a hot towel, and he reflected that there were at
least five nights and four days of travel before him. Faiz Ullah, used to the chances of service, plunged into the crowd on the stone platform, while Scott, a black cheroot between his teeth, waited till his compartment should be set away. A dozen native policemen, with their rifles and bundles, shouldered into the press of Punjabi farmers, Sikh craftsmen, and greasy-locked Afreedee pedlars, escorting with all pomp Martyn's uniform-case, water-bottles, ice-box, and bedding-roll. They saw Faiz Ullah's lifted hand, and steered for it.

‘My Sahib and your Sahib,' said Faiz Ullah to Martyn's man, ‘will travel together. Thou and I, O brother, will thus secure the servants' places close by, and because of our masters' authority none will dare to disturb us.'

When Faiz Ullah reported all things ready, Scott settled down coatless and bootless on the broad leather-covered bunk. The heat under the iron-arched roof of the station might have been anything over a hundred degrees. At the last moment Martyn entered, hot and dripping.

‘Don't swear,' said Scott, lazily; ‘it's too late to change your carriage; and we'll divide the ice.'

‘What are you doing here?' said the policeman.

‘Lent to the Madras Government, same as you. By Jove, it's a bender of a night! Are you taking any of your men down?'

‘A dozen. Suppose I'll have to superintend relief distributions. Didn't know you were under orders too.'

‘I didn't till after I left you last night. Raines had the news first. My orders came this morning. McEuan relieved me at four, and I got off at once. Shouldn't wonder if it wouldn't be a good thing – this famine – if we come through it alive.'

‘Jimmy ought to put you and me to work together,' said Martyn; and then, after a pause: ‘My sister's here.'

‘Good business,' said Scott, heartily. ‘Going to get off at Umballa, I suppose, and go up to Simla. Who'll she stay with there?'

‘No-o; that's just the trouble of it. She's going down with me.'

Scott sat bolt upright under the oil lamp as the train jolted past Tarn-Taran station. ‘What! You don't mean you couldn't afford –'

‘Oh, I'd have scraped up the money somehow.'

‘You might have come to me, to begin with,' said Scott, stiffly; ‘we aren't altogether strangers.'

‘Well, you needn't be stuffy about it. I might, but – you don't know my sister. I've been explaining and exhorting and entreating and commanding and all the rest of it all day – lost my temper since seven this morning, and haven't got it back yet – but she wouldn't hear of any compromise. A woman's entitled to travel with her husband if she wants
to, and William says she's on the same footing. You see, we've been together all our lives, more or less, since my people died. It isn't as if she were an ordinary sister.'

‘All the sisters I've ever heard of would have stayed where they were well off.'

‘She's as clever as a man, confound her,' Martyn went on. ‘She broke up the bungalow over my head while I was talking at her. Settled the whole
subchiz
[outfit] in three hours – servants, horses, and all. I didn't get my orders till nine.'

‘Jimmy Hawkins won't be pleased,' said Scott. ‘A famine's no place for a woman.'

‘Mrs Jim – I mean Lady Jim's in camp with him. At any rate, she says she will look after my sister. William wired down to her on her own responsibility, asking if she could come, and knocked the ground from under me by showing me her answer.'

Scott laughed aloud. ‘If she can do that she can take care of herself, and Mrs Jim won't let her run into any mischief. There aren't many women, sisters or wives, who would walk into a famine with their eyes open. It isn't as if she didn't know what these things mean. She was through the Jaloo cholera last year.'

The train stopped at Amritsar, and Scott went back to the ladies' compartment, immediately behind their carriage. William, a cloth riding-cap on her curls, nodded affably.

‘Come in and have some tea,' she said. ‘Best thing in the world for heat-apoplexy.'

‘Do I look as if I were going to have heat-apoplexy?'

‘Never can tell,' said William, wisely. ‘It's always best to be ready.'

She had arranged her belongings with the knowledge of an old campaigner. A felt-covered water-bottle hung in the draught of one of the shuttered windows; a tea-set of Russian china, packed in a wadded basket, stood ready on the seat; and a travelling spirit-lamp was clamped against the woodwork above it.

William served them generously, in large cups, hot tea, which saves the veins of the neck from swelling inopportunely on a hot night. It was characteristic of the girl that, her plan of action once settled, she asked for no comments on it. Life with men who had a great deal of work to do, and very little time to do it in, had taught her the wisdom of effacing as well as of fending for herself. She did not by word or deed suggest that she would be useful, comforting, or beautiful in their travels, but continued about her business serenely: put the cups back without clatter when tea was ended, and made cigarettes for her guests.

‘This time last night,' said Scott, ‘we didn't expect – er – this kind of thing, did we?'

‘I've learned to expect anything,' said William. ‘You know, in our service, we live at the end of the telegraph; but, of course, this ought to be a good thing for us all, departmentally – if we live.'

‘It knocks us out of the running in our own Province,' Scott replied, with equal gravity. ‘I hoped to be put on the Luni Protective Works this cold weather; but there's no saying how long the famine may keep us.'

‘Hardly beyond October, I should think,' said Martyn. ‘It will be ended, one way or the other, then.'

‘And we've nearly a week of this,' said William. ‘Sha'n't we be dusty when it's over?'

For a night and a day they knew their surroundings; and for a night and a day, skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a narrow-gauge line, they remembered how in the days of their apprenticeship they had come by that road from Bombay. Then the languages in which the names of the stations were written changed, and they launched south into a foreign land, where the very smells were new. Many long and heavily-laden grain trains were in front of them, and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from far off. They waited in extemporized sidings blocked by processions of empty trucks returning to the north, and were coupled on to slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where; but it was furiously hot; and they walked to and fro among sacks, and dogs howled.

Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the untravelled Englishman – the flat, red India of palm-tree, palmyra-palm, and rice, the India of the picture-books,
of Little Henry and His Bearer
¹⁷
– all dead and dry in the baking heat. They had left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and far behind them. Here the people crawled to the side of the train, holding their little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would be left behind, men and women clustering round and above it like ants by spilled honey. Once in the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a regiment of little brown men, each bearing a body over his shoulder; and when the train stopped to leave yet another truck, they perceived that the burdens were not corpses, but only foodless folk picked up beside their dead oxen by a corps of Irregular troops. Now they met more white men, here one and there two, whose tents stood close to the line, and who came armed with written authorities and angry words to cut off a truck. They were too busy to do more than nod at Scott and Martyn, and stare curiously at William, who could do nothing except make tea, and watch how her men staved off
the rush of wailing, walking skeletons, putting them down three at a time in heaps, with their own hands uncoupling the marked trucks, or taking receipts from the hollow-eyed, weary white men, who spoke another argot than theirs.

They ran out of ice, out of soda-water, and out of tea; for they were six days and seven nights on the road, and it seemed to them like seven times seven years.

At last, in a dry, hot dawn, in a land of death, lit by long red fires of railway sleepers, where they were burning the dead, they came to their destination, and were met by Jim Hawkins, the Head of the Famine, unshaven, unwashed, but cheery, and entirely in command of affairs.

Martyn, he decreed, then and there, was to live on trains till further orders; was to go back with empty trucks, filling them with starving people as he found them, and dropping them at a famine-camp on the edge of the Eight Districts. He would pick up supplies and return, and his constables would guard the loaded grain-cars, also picking up people, and would drop them at a camp a hundred miles south. Scott – Hawkins was very glad to see Scott again – would, that same hour, take charge of a convoy of bullock-carts, and would go south, feeding as he went, to yet another famine-camp, far from the rail, where he would leave his starving – there would be no lack of starving on the route – and wait for orders by telegraph. Generally, Scott was in all small things to do what he thought best.

William bit her underlip. There was no one in the wide world like her one brother, but Martyn's orders gave him no discretion. She came out, masked with dust from head to foot, a horse-shoe wrinkle on her forehead, put there by much thinking during the past week, but as self-possessed as ever. Mrs Jim – who should have been Lady Jim, but that no one remembered to call her aright – took possession of her with a little gasp.

‘Oh, I'm so glad you're here,' she almost sobbed. ‘You oughtn't to, of course, but there – there isn't another woman in the place, and we must help each other, you know; and we've all the wretched people and the little babies they are selling.'

‘I've seen some,' said William.

‘Isn't it ghastly? I've bought twenty; they're in our camp; but won't you have something to eat first? We've more than ten people can do here; and I've got a horse for you. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! You're a Punjabi too, you know.'

‘Steady, Lizzie,' said Hawkins, over his shoulder. ‘We'll look after you, Miss Martyn. Sorry I can't ask you to breakfast, Martyn. You'll
have to eat as you go. Leave two of your men to help Scott. These poor devils can't stand up to load carts. Saunders' (this to the engine-driver, half asleep in the cab), ‘back down and get those empties away. You've ‘line clear' to Anundrapillay; they'll give you orders north of that. Scott, load up your carts from that B. P. P. truck, and be off as soon as you can. The Eurasian in the pink shirt is your interpreter and guide. You'll find an apothecary of sorts tied to the yoke of the second wagon. He's been trying to bolt; you'll have to look after him. Lizzie, drive Miss Martyn to camp, and tell them to send the red horse down here for me.'

Scott, with Faiz Ullah and two policemen, was already busy on the carts, backing them up to the truck and unbolting the sideboards quietly, while the others pitched in the bags of millet and wheat. Hawkins watched him for as long as it took to fill one cart.

‘That's a good man,' he said. ‘If all goes well I shall work him – hard.' This was Jim Hawkins's notion of the highest compliment one human being could pay another.

An hour later Scott was under way; the apothecary threatening him with the penalties of the law for that he, a member of the Subordinate Medical Department, had been coerced and bound against his will and all laws governing the liberty of the subject; the pink-shirted Eurasian begging leave to see his mother, who happened to be dying some three miles away: ‘Only verree, verree short leave of absence, and will presently return, sar –'; the two constables, armed with staves, bringing up the rear; and Faiz Ullah, a Mohammedan's contempt for all Hindoos and foreigners in every line of his face, explaining to the drivers that though Scott Sahib was a man to be feared on all fours, he, Faiz Ullah, was Authority itself.

The procession creaked past Hawkins's camp – three stained tents under a clump of dead trees; behind them the famine-shed where a crowd of hopeless ones tossed their arms around the cooking-kettles.

‘Wish to Heaven William had kept out of it,' said Scott to himself, after a glance. ‘We'll have cholera, sure as a gun, when the Rains come.'

But William seemed to have taken kindly to the operations of the Famine Code, which, when famine is declared, supersede the workings of the ordinary law. Scott saw her, the centre of a mob of weeping women, in a calico riding-habit and blue-grey felt hat with a gold puggaree.
¹⁸

‘I want fifty rupees, please. I forgot to ask Jack before he went away. Can you lend it me? It's for condensed milk for the babies,' said she.

Scott took the money from his belt, and handed it over without a word. ‘For goodness sake take care of yourself,' he said.

‘Oh, I shall be all right. We ought to get the milk in two days. By the way, the orders are, I was to tell you, that you're to take one of Sir Jim's horses. There's a grey Cabuli here that I thought would be just your style, so I've said you'd take him. Was that right?'