dived behind a mound. He was pulled down a kind of shaft, and found
himself in a room buried right underground, where three officers
were drinking and smoking. The soldiers saluted and handed them a
type-written dispatch. The officers looked at him drunkenly, and one
came up and pulled his beard and spat in his face and called him “an
old English swine.” He then shouted out some instructions to the
soldiers, and they led him out into the narrow trench. One walked
behind him, and occasionally prodded him with the butt-end of a gun.
The trenches were half full of water and reeked of gases, powder,
and decaying matter. Shells were constantly bursting overhead, and
in places the trenches had crumbled and were nearly blocked up. They
stumbled on, sometimes falling, sometimes dodging moving masses, and
occasionally crawling over the dead bodies of men. At last they
reached a deserted-looking trench, and one of the soldiers pushed
him into the corner of it and growled something, and then
disappeared round the angle. Old Sam was exhausted. He leaned
panting against the mud wall, expecting every minute to be blown to
pieces by one of those infernal things that seemed to be getting
more and more insistent. The din went on for nearly twenty minutes,
and he was alone in the trench. He fancied he heard a whistle amidst
the din. Suddenly one of the soldiers who had accompanied him came
stealthily round the corner, and there was a look in his eye old Sam
did not like. When he was within five yards the soldier raised his
rifle and pointed it at Sam’s body. Some instinct impelled the old
man at that instant to throw himself forward on his face. As he did
so he was aware of a terrible explosion, and he had just time to
observe the soldier falling in a heap near him, and then he lost
consciousness.
His consciousness appeared to return to him with a snap. He was
lying on a plank in a building, and he heard some one say:
“I believe the old boy’s English.”
He looked round. There were a lot of men lying there, and others in
khaki and white overalls were busy among them. He sat up, rubbed his
head, and said:
“Hi, Mister, where be I now?”
Some one laughed, and a young man came up and said: “Well, old man,
you were very nearly in hell. Who are you?”
Some one came up, and two of them were discussing him. One of them
said:
“He’s quite all right. He was only knocked out. Better take him in
to the colonel. He may be a spy.”
The other came up, touched his shoulder, and remarked:
“Can you walk, Uncle?”
He replied:
“Aye, I can walk all roight.”
“That’s an old sport!”
The young man took his arm and helped him out of the room into a
courtyard. They entered another room, where an elderly, kind-faced
officer was seated at a desk. The officer looked up and exclaimed:
“Good God! Bradshaw, do you know who you’ve got there?”
The younger one said:
“No. Who, sir?”
“It’s Paul Jouperts!” exclaimed the colonel.
“Paul Jouperts! Great Scott!”
The older officer addressed himself to Sam. He said:
“Well, we’ve got you once more, Paul. We shall have to be a little
more careful this time.”
The young officer said:
“Shall I detail a squad, sir?”
“We can’t shoot him without a court-martial,” replied the kind-faced
senior.
Then Sam interpolated:
“Look ’ee ’ere, sir, I’m fair’ sick of all this. My name bean’t
Paul. My name’s Sam. I was a-thinnin’ a loine o’ turnips—”
Both officers burst out laughing, and the younger one said:
“Good! Good! Isn’t it amazing, sir, the way they not only learn the
language, but even take the trouble to learn a dialect!”
The older man busied himself with some papers.
“Well, Sam,” he remarked, “you shall be given a chance to prove your
identity. Our methods are less drastic than those of your _Boche_
masters. What part of England are you supposed to come from? Let’s
see how much you can bluff us with your topographical knowledge.”
“I was a-thinnin’ a loine o’ turnips this mornin’ at ’alf-past seven
on Mr. Hodge’s farm at Halvesham when one o’ these ’ere airyplanes
come down among the swedes. I tells ’e to get clear o’ that, when
the feller what gets out o’ the car ’e drahs a revowlver and ’e
says, ‘You must ’company I—’”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted the senior officer; “that’s all very good.
Now tell me—where is Halvesham? What is the name of the local vicar?
I’m sure you’d know that.”
Old Sam rubbed his chin.
“I sits under the Reverend David Pryce, Mister, and a good,
God-fearin’ man he be. I took him a cookin’ o’ runner beans on’y
yesterday. I works for Mr. Hodge, what owns Greenway Manor and ’as a
stud-farm at Newmarket, they say.”
“Charles Hodge?” asked the young officer.
“Aye, Charlie Hodge. You write and ask un if he knows old Sam
Gates.”
The two officers looked at each other, and the older one looked at
Sam more closely.
“It’s very extraordinary,” he remarked.
“Everybody knows Charlie Hodge,” added the young officer.
It was at that moment that a wave of genius swept over old Sam. He
put his hand to his head, and suddenly jerked out:
“What’s more, I can tell ’ee where this yere Paul is. He’s actin’ a
gardener in a convent at—” He puckered up his brows, fumbled with
his hat, and then got out, “Mighteno.”
The older officer gasped.
“Mailleton-en-haut! Good God! what makes you say that, old man?”
Sam tried to give an account of his experience and the things he had
heard said by the German officers; but he was getting tired, and he
broke off in the middle to say:
“Ye haven’t a bite o’ somethin’ to eat, I suppose, Mister; or a
glass o’ beer? I usually ’as my dinner at twelve o’clock.”
Both the officers laughed, and the older said:
“Get him some food, Bradshaw, and a bottle of beer from the mess.
We’ll keep this old man here. He interests me.”
While the younger man was doing this, the chief pressed a button and
summoned another junior officer.
“Gateshead,” he remarked, “ring up the G.H.Q. and instruct them to
arrest the gardener in that convent at the top of the hill and then
to report.”
The officer saluted and went out, and in a few minutes a tray of hot
food and a large bottle of beer were brought to the old man, and he
was left alone in the corner of the room to negotiate this welcome
compensation. And in the execution he did himself and his county
credit. In the meanwhile the officers were very busy. People were
coming and going and examining maps, and telephone bells were
ringing furiously. They did not disturb old Sam’s gastric
operations. He cleaned up the mess tins and finished the last drop
of beer. The senior officer found time to offer him a cigarette, but
he replied:
“Thank ’ee kindly, sir, but I’d rather smoke my pipe.”
The colonel smiled and said:
“Oh, all right; smoke away.”
He lighted up, and the fumes of the shag permeated the room. Some
one opened another window, and the young officer who had addressed
him at first suddenly looked at him and exclaimed:
“Innocent! You couldn’t get shag like that anywhere but in Norfolk.”
It must have been an hour later when another officer entered and
saluted.
“Message from the G.H.Q., sir,” he said.
“Well?”
“They have arrested the gardener at the convent of St. Eloise, and
they have every reason to believe that he is the notorious Paul
Jouperts.”
The colonel stood up, and his eyes beamed. He came over to old Sam
and shook his hand.
“Mr. Gates,” he said, “you are an old brick. You will probably hear
more of this. You have probably been the means of delivering
something very useful into our hands. Your own honor is vindicated.
A loving Government will probably award you five shillings or a
Victoria Cross or something of that sort. In the meantime, what can
I do for you?”
Old Sam scratched his chin.
“I want to get back ’ome,” he said.
“Well, even that might be arranged.”
“I want to get back ’ome in toime for tea.”
“What time do you have tea?”
“Foive o’clock or thereabouts.”
“I see.”
A kindly smile came into the eyes of the colonel. He turned to
another officer standing by the table and said:
“Raikes, is any one going across this afternoon with dispatches?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the other officer. “Commander Jennings is
leaving at three o’clock.”
“You might ask him if he could see me.”
Within ten minutes a young man in a flight-commander’s uniform
entered.
“Ah, Jennings,” said the colonel, “here is a little affair which
concerns the honor of the British army. My friend here, Sam Gates,
has come over from Halvesham, in Norfolk, in order to give us
valuable information. I have promised him that he shall get home to
tea at five o’clock. Can you take a passenger?”
The young man threw back his head and laughed.
“Lord!” he exclaimed, “what an old sport! Yes, I expect I can manage
it. Where is the forsaken place?”
A large ordnance-map of Norfolk (which had been captured from a
German officer) was produced, and the young man studied it closely.
At three o’clock precisely old Sam, finding himself something of a
hero and quite glad to escape from the embarrassment which this
position entailed upon him, once more sped skyward in a “dratted
airyplane.”
At twenty minutes to five he landed once more among Mr. Hodge’s
swedes. The breezy young airman shook hands with him and departed
inland. Old Sam sat down and surveyed the familiar field of turnips.
“A noice thing, I must say!” he muttered to himself as he looked
along the lines of unthinned turnips. He still had twenty minutes,
and so he went slowly along and completed a line which he had begun
in the morning. He then deliberately packed up his dinner-things and
his tools and started out for home.
As he came round the corner of Stillway’s meadow and the cottage
came in view, his niece stepped out of the copse with a basket on
her arm.
“Well, Uncle,” she said, “is there any noos?”
It was then that old Sam really lost his temper.
“Noos!” he said. “Noos! Drat the girl! What noos should there be?
Sixty-nine year’ I live in these ’ere parts, hoein’ and weedin’ and
thinnin’, and mindin’ Charlie Hodge’s sheep. Am I one o’ these ’ere
story-book folk havin’ noos ’appen to me all the time? Ain’t it
enough, ye silly, dab-faced zany, to earn enough to buy a bite o’
some’at to eat and a glass o’ beer and a place to rest a’s head
o’night without always wantin’ noos, noos, noos! I tell ’ee it’s
this that leads ’ee to ’alf the troubles in the world. Devil take
the noos!”
And turning his back on her, he went fuming up the hill.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MOTI GUJ—MUTINEER
By RUDYARD KIPLING
ONCE upon a time there was a coffee-planter in India who wished to
clear some forest land for coffee-planting. When he had cut down all
the trees and burned the underwood the stumps still remained.
Dynamite is expensive and slow fire slow. The happy medium for
stump-clearing is the lord of all beasts, who is the elephant. He
will either push the stump out of the ground with his tusks, if he
has any, or drag it out with ropes. The planter, therefore, hired
elephants by ones and twos and threes, and fell to work. The very
best of all the elephants belonged to the very worst of all the
drivers or mahouts; and the superior beast’s name was Moti Guj. He
was the absolute property of his mahout, which would never have been
the case under native rule: for Moti Guj was a creature to be
desired by kings; and his name, being translated, meant the Pearl
Elephant. Because the British government was in the land, Deesa, the
mahout, enjoyed his property undisturbed. He was dissipated. When he
had made much money through the strength of his elephant, he would
get extremely drunk and give Moti Guj a beating with a tent-peg over
the tender nails of the forefeet. Moti Guj never trampled the life
out of Deesa on these occasions, for he knew that after the beating
was over, Deesa would embrace his trunk and weep and call him his
love and his life and the liver of his soul, and give him some
liquor. Moti Guj was very fond or liquor—arrack for choice, though
he would drink palm-tree toddy if nothing better offered. Then Deesa
would go to sleep between Moti Guj’s forefeet, and as Deesa
generally chose the middle of the public road, and as Moti Guj
mounted guard over him and would not permit horse, foot, or cart to
pass by, traffic was congested till Deesa saw fit to wake up.
There was no sleeping in the daytime on the planter’s clearing: the
wages were too high to risk. Deesa sat on Moti Guj’s neck and gave
him orders, while Moti Guj rooted up the stumps—for he owned a
magnificent pair of tusks; or pulled at the end of a rope—for he had
a magnificent pair of shoulders, while Deesa kicked him behind the
ears and said he was the king of elephants. At evening time Moti Guj
would wash down his three hundred pounds’ weight of green food with
a quart of arrack, and Deesa would take a share and sing songs
between Moti Guj’s legs till it was time to go to bed. Once a week
Deesa led Moti Guj down to the river, and Moti Guj lay on his side
luxuriously in the shallows, while Deesa went over him with a coir
swab and a brick. Moti Guj never mistook the pounding blow of the
latter for the smack of the former that warned him to get up and
turn over on the other side. Then Deesa would look at his feet,
examine his eyes, and turn up the fringes of his mighty ears in case
of sores or budding ophthalmia. After inspection, the two would
“come up with a song from the sea,” Moti Guj all black and shining,
waving a torn tree branch twelve feet long in his trunk, and Deesa
knotting up his own long wet hair.
It was a peaceful, well-paid life till Deesa felt the return of the
desire to drink deep. He wished for an orgy. The little draughts
that led nowhere were taking the manhood out of him.
He went to the planter, and “My mother’s dead,” said he, weeping.
“She died on the last plantation two months ago, and she died once
before that when you were working for me last year,” said the
planter, who knew something of the ways of nativedom.
“Then it’s my aunt, and she was just the same as a mother to me,”
said Deesa, weeping more than ever. “She has left eighteen small
children entirely without bread, and it is I who must fill their
little stomachs,” said Deesa, beating his head on the floor.
“Who brought you the news?” said the planter.
“The post,” said Deesa.
“There hasn’t been a post here for the past week. Get back to your
lines!”
“A devastating sickness has fallen on my village, and all my wives
are dying,” yelled Deesa, really in tears this time.
“Call Chihun, who comes from Deesa’s village,” said the planter.
“Chihun, has this man got a wife?”
“He!” said Chihun. “No. Not a woman of our village would look at
him. They’d sooner marry the elephant.”
Chihun snorted. Deesa wept and bellowed.
“You will get into a difficulty in a minute,” said the planter. “Go
back to your work!”
“Now I will speak Heaven’s truth,” gulped Deesa, with an
inspiration. “I haven’t been drunk for two months. I desire to
depart in order to get properly drunk afar off and distant from this
heavenly plantation. Thus I shall cause no trouble.”
A flickering smile crossed the planter’s face. “Deesa,” said he,
“you’ve spoken the truth, and I’d give you leave on the spot if
anything could be done with Moti Guj while you’re away. You know
that he will only obey your orders.”
“May the light of the heavens live forty thousand years. I shall be
absent but ten little days. After that, upon my faith and honor and
soul, I return. As to the inconsiderable interval, have I the
gracious permission of the heaven-born to call up Moti Guj?”
Permission was granted, and in answer to Deesa’s shrill yell, the
mighty tusker swung out of the shade of a clump of trees where he
had been squirting dust over himself till his master should return.
“Light of my heart, protector of the drunken, mountain of might,
give ear!” said Deesa, standing in front of him.
Moti Guj gave ear, and saluted with his trunk. “I am going away,”
said Deesa.
Moti Guj’s eyes twinkled. He liked jaunts as well as his master. One
could snatch all manner of nice things from the roadside then.
“But you, you fussy old pig, must stay behind and work.”
The twinkle died out as Moti Guj tried to look delighted. He hated
stump-hauling on the plantation. It hurt his teeth.
“I shall be gone for ten days, O delectable one. Hold up your near
forefoot and I’ll impress the fact upon it, warty toad of a dried
mud-puddle.” Deesa took a tent-peg and banged Moti Guj ten times on
the nails. Moti Guj grunted and shuffled from foot to foot.
“Ten days,” said Deesa, “you will work and haul and root the trees
as Chihun here shall order you. Take up Chihun and set him on your
neck!” Moti Guj curled the tip of his trunk, Chihun put his foot
there and was swung on to the neck. Deesa handed Chihun the heavy
_ankus_—the iron elephant goad.
Chihun thumped Moti Guj’s bald head as a paver thumps a curbstone.
Moti Guj trumpeted.
“Be still, hog of the backwoods! Chihun’s your mahout for ten days.
And now bid me good-by, beast after mine own heart. Oh, my lord, my
king! Jewel of all created elephants, lily of the herd, preserve
your honored health; be virtuous. Adieu!”
Moti Guj lapped his trunk round Deesa and swung him into the air
twice. This was his way of bidding him good-by.
“He’ll work now,” said Deesa to the planter. “Have I leave to go?”
The planter nodded, and Deesa dived into the woods. Moti Guj went
back to haul stumps.
Chihun was very kind to him, but he felt unhappy and forlorn for all
that. Chihun gave him a ball of spices, and tickled him under the
chin, and Chihun’s little baby cooed to him after work was over, and
Chihun’s wife called him a darling; but Moti Guj was a bachelor by
instinct, as Deesa was. He did not understand the domestic emotions.
He wanted the light of his universe back again—the drink and the
drunken slumber, the savage beatings and the savage caresses.
None the less he worked well, and the planter wondered. Deesa had
wandered along the roads till he met a marriage procession of his
own caste and, drinking, dancing, and tippling, had drifted with it
past all knowledge of the lapse of time.
The morning of the eleventh day dawned, and there returned no Deesa.
Moti Guj was loosed from his ropes for the daily stint. He swung
clear, looked round, shrugged his shoulders, and began to walk away,
as one having business elsewhere.
“Hi! ho! Come back, you,” shouted Chihun. “Come back and put me on
your neck, misborn mountain! Return, splendor of the hillsides!
Adornment of all India, heave to, or I’ll bang every toe off your
fat forefoot!”
Moti Guj gurgled gently, but did not obey. Chihun ran after him with
a rope and caught him up. Moti Guj put his ears forward, and Chihun
knew what that meant, though he tried to carry it off with high
words.
“None of your nonsense with me,” said he. “To your pickets,
devil-son.”
“Hrrump!” said Moti Guj, and that was all—that and the forebent
ears.
Moti Guj put his hands in his pockets, chewed a branch for a
toothpick, and strolled about the clearing, making fun of the other
elephants, who had just set to work.
Chihun reported the state of affairs to the planter, who came out
with a dog-whip and cracked it furiously. Moti Guj paid the white
man the compliment of charging him nearly a quarter of a mile across
the clearing and “Hrrumping” him into his veranda. Then he stood
outside the house chuckling to himself, and shaking all over with
the fun of it, as an elephant will.
“We’ll thrash him,” said the planter. “He shall have the finest
thrashing ever elephant received. Give Kala Nag and Nazim twelve
foot of chain apiece, and tell them to lay on twenty blows.”
Kala Nag—which means Black Snake—and Nazim were two of the biggest
elephants in the lines, and one of their duties was to administer
the graver punishments, since no man can beat an elephant properly.
They took the whipping-chains and rattled them in their trunks as
they sidled up to Moti Guj, meaning to hustle him between them. Moti
Guj had never, in all his life of thirty-nine years, been whipped,
and he did not intend to begin a new experience. So he waited,
waving his head from right to left, and measuring the precise spot
in Kala Nag’s fat hide where a blunt tusk would sink deepest. Kala
Nag had no tusks; the chain was the badge of his authority; but for
all that, he swung wide of Moti Guj at the last minute, and tried to
appear as if he had brought the chain out for amusement. Nazim
turned round and went home early. He did not feel fighting fit that
morning, and so Moti Guj was left standing alone with his ears
cocked.
That decided the planter to argue no more, and Moti Guj rolled back
to his inspection of the clearing. An elephant who will not work,
and is not tied up, is about as manageable as an eighty-one-ton gun
loose in a heavy seaway. He slapped old friends on the back and
asked them if the stumps were coming away easily; he talked nonsense
concerning labor and the inalienable rights of elephants to a long
“nooning”; and, wandering to and fro, he thoroughly demoralized the
garden till sundown, when he returned to his pickets for food.
“If you won’t work, you shan’t eat,” said Chihun angrily. “You’re a
wild elephant, and no educated animal at all. Go back to your
jungle.”
Chihun’s little brown baby was rolling on the floor of the hut, and
stretching out its fat arms to the huge shadow in the doorway. Moti
Guj knew well that it was the dearest thing on earth to Chihun. He
swung out his trunk with a fascinating crook at the end, and the
brown baby threw itself shouting upon it. Moti Guj made fast and
pulled up till the brown baby was crowing in the air twelve feet
above his father’s head.
“Great Lord!” said Chihun. “Flour cakes of the best, twelve in
number, two feet across, and soaked in rum, shall be yours on the
instant, and two hundred pounds’ weight of fresh-cut young
sugar-cane therewith. Deign only to put down safely that
insignificant brat who is my heart and my life to me.”
Moti Guj tucked the brown baby comfortably between his forefeet,
that could have knocked into toothpicks all Chihun’s hut, and waited
for his food. He ate it, and the brown baby crawled away. Moti Guj
dozed, and thought of Deesa. One of many mysteries connected with
the elephant is that his huge body needs less sleep than anything
else that lives. Four or five hours in the night suffice—two just
before midnight, lying down on one side; two just after one o’clock,
lying down on the other. The rest of the silent hours are filled
with eating and fidgeting and long grumbling soliloquies.
At midnight, therefore, Moti Guj strode out of his pickets, for a
thought had come to him that Deesa might be lying drunk somewhere in
the dark forest with none to look after him. So all that night he
chased through the undergrowth, blowing and trumpeting and shaking
his ears. He went down to the river and blared across the shallows
where Deesa used to wash him, and there was no answer. He could not
find Deesa, but he disturbed all the other elephants in the lines,
and nearly frightened to death some gypsies in the woods.
At dawn Deesa returned to the plantation. He had been very drunk
indeed, and he expected to get into trouble for outstaying his
leave. He drew a long breath when he saw that the bungalow and the
plantation were still uninjured, for he knew something of Moti Guj’s
temper, and reported himself with many lies and salaams. Moti Guj
had gone to his pickets for breakfast. The night exercise had made
him hungry.
“Call up your beast,” said the planter, and Deesa shouted in the
mysterious elephant language, that some mahouts believe came from
China at the birth of the world, when elephants and not men were
masters. Moti Guj heard and came. Elephants do not gallop. They move
from places at varying rates of speed. If an elephant wished to
catch an express train he could not gallop, but he could catch the
train. So Moti Guj was at the planter’s door almost before Chihun
noticed that he had left his pickets. He fell into Deesa’s arms
trumpeting with joy, and the man and beast wept and slobbered over
each other, and handled each other from head to heel to see that no
harm had befallen.
“Now we will get to work,” said Deesa. “Lift me up, my son and my
joy.”
Moti Guj swung him up and the two went to the coffee-clearing to
look for difficult stumps.
The planter was too astonished to be very angry.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
GULLIVER THE GREAT
By WALTER A. DYER
IT was a mild evening in early spring, and the magnolias were in
bloom. We motored around the park, turned up a side street, and
finally came to a throbbing standstill before the Churchwarden Club.