“Send my salary for September to my mother.... done great things with
the Bank if I had been spared.... mistaken policy.... no fault of mine.”
Then he turned his face to the wall and died.
Reggie drew the sheet over Its face, and went out into the verandah,
with his last “mental stimulant”--a letter of condolence and sympathy
from the Directors--unused in his pocket.
“If I'd been only ten minutes earlier,” thought Reggie, “I might have
heartened him up to pull through another day.”
TOD'S AMENDMENT.
The World hath set its heavy yoke
Upon the old white-bearded folk
Who strive to please the King.
God's mercy is upon the young,
God's wisdom in the baby tongue
That fears not anything.
The Parable of Chajju Bhagat.
Now Tods' Mamma was a singularly charming woman, and every one in Simla
knew Tods. Most men had saved him from death on occasions. He was beyond
his ayah's control altogether, and perilled his life daily to find out
what would happen if you pulled a Mountain Battery mule's tail. He was
an utterly fearless young Pagan, about six years old, and the only baby
who ever broke the holy calm of the supreme Legislative Council.
It happened this way: Tods' pet kid got loose, and fled up the hill, off
the Boileaugunge Road, Tods after it, until it burst into the Viceregal
Lodge lawn, then attached to “Peterhoff.” The Council were sitting at
the time, and the windows were open because it was warm. The Red Lancer
in the porch told Tods to go away; but Tods knew the Red Lancer and most
of the Members of Council personally. Moreover, he had firm hold of the
kid's collar, and was being dragged all across the flower-beds. “Give
my salaam to the long Councillor Sahib, and ask him to help me take
Moti back!” gasped Tods. The Council heard the noise through the open
windows; and, after an interval, was seen the shocking spectacle of
a Legal Member and a Lieutenant-Governor helping, under the direct
patronage of a Commander-in-Chief and a Viceroy, one small and very
dirty boy in a sailor's suit and a tangle of brown hair, to coerce a
lively and rebellious kid. They headed it off down the path to the Mall,
and Tods went home in triumph and told his Mamma that ALL the Councillor
Sahibs had been helping him to catch Moti. Whereat his Mamma smacked
Tods for interfering with the administration of the Empire; but Tods met
the Legal Member the next day, and told him in confidence that if the
Legal Member ever wanted to catch a goat, he, Tods, would give him all
the help in his power. “Thank you, Tods,” said the Legal Member.
Tods was the idol of some eighty jhampanis, and half as many saises.
He saluted them all as “O Brother.” It never entered his head that
any living human being could disobey his orders; and he was the
buffer between the servants and his Mamma's wrath. The working of that
household turned on Tods, who was adored by every one from the dhoby
to the dog-boy. Even Futteh Khan, the villainous loafer khit from
Mussoorie, shirked risking Tods' displeasure for fear his co-mates
should look down on him.
So Tods had honor in the land from Boileaugunge to Chota Simla, and
ruled justly according to his lights. Of course, he spoke Urdu, but he
had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee bolee of the
women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-coolies alike.
He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with natives had taught
him some of the more bitter truths of life; the meanness and the
sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and milk, to deliver solemn
and serious aphorisms, translated from the vernacular into the English,
that made his Mamma jump and vow that Tods MUST go home next hot
weather.
Just when Tods was in the bloom of his power, the Supreme Legislature
were hacking out a Bill, for the Sub-Montane Tracts, a revision of the
then Act, smaller than the Punjab Land Bill, but affecting a few
hundred thousand people none the less. The Legal Member had built,
and bolstered, and embroidered, and amended that Bill, till it looked
beautiful on paper. Then the Council began to settle what they called
the “minor details.” As if any Englishman legislating for natives knows
enough to know which are the minor and which are the major points, from
the native point of view, of any measure! That Bill was a triumph of
“safe guarding the interests of the tenant.” One clause provided that
land should not be leased on longer terms than five years at a stretch;
because, if the landlord had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years,
he would squeeze the very life out of him. The notion was to keep up
a stream of independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and
ethnologically and politically the notion was correct. The only drawback
was that it was altogether wrong. A native's life in India implies the
life of his son. Wherefore, you cannot legislate for one generation at
a time. You must consider the next from the native point of view.
Curiously enough, the native now and then, and in Northern India more
particularly, hates being over-protected against himself. There was
a Naga village once, where they lived on dead AND buried Commissariat
mules.... But that is another story.
For many reasons, to be explained later, the people concerned objected
to the Bill. The Native Member in Council knew as much about Punjabis as
he knew about Charing Cross. He had said in Calcutta that “the Bill was
entirely in accord with the desires of that large and important class,
the cultivators;” and so on, and so on. The Legal Member's knowledge
of natives was limited to English-speaking Durbaris, and his own red
chaprassis, the Sub-Montane Tracts concerned no one in particular,
the Deputy Commissioners were a good deal too driven to make
representations, and the measure was one which dealt with small
landholders only. Nevertheless, the Legal Member prayed that it might be
correct, for he was a nervously conscientious man. He did not know that
no man can tell what natives think unless he mixes with them with the
varnish off. And not always then. But he did the best he knew. And the
measure came up to the Supreme Council for the final touches, while Tods
patrolled the Burra Simla Bazar in his morning rides, and played with
the monkey belonging to Ditta Mull, the bunnia, and listened, as a child
listens to all the stray talk about this new freak of the Lat Sahib's.
One day there was a dinner-party, at the house of Tods' Mamma, and the
Legal Member came. Tods was in bed, but he kept awake till he heard the
bursts of laughter from the men over the coffee. Then he paddled out in
his little red flannel dressing-gown and his night-suit, and took refuge
by the side of his father, knowing that he would not be sent back. “See
the miseries of having a family!” said Tods' father, giving Tods three
prunes, some water in a glass that had been used for claret, and telling
him to sit still. Tods sucked the prunes slowly, knowing that he would
have to go when they were finished, and sipped the pink water like a man
of the world, as he listened to the conversation. Presently, the Legal
Member, talking “shop,” to the Head of a Department, mentioned his Bill
by its full name--“The Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment.”
Tods caught the one native word, and lifting up his small voice
said:--“Oh, I know ALL about that! Has it been murramutted yet,
Councillor Sahib?”
“How much?” said the Legal Member.
“Murramutted--mended.--Put theek, you know--made nice to please Ditta
Mull!”
The Legal Member left his place and moved up next to Tods.
“What do you know about Ryotwari, little man?” he said.
“I'm not a little man, I'm Tods, and I know ALL about it. Ditta Mull,
and Choga Lall, and Amir Nath, and--oh, lakhs of my friends tell me
about it in the bazars when I talk to them.”
“Oh, they do--do they? What do they say, Tods?”
Tods tucked his feet under his red flannel dressing-gown and said:--“I
must fink.”
The Legal Member waited patiently. Then Tods, with infinite compassion:
“You don't speak my talk, do you, Councillor Sahib?”
“No; I am sorry to say I do not,” said the Legal Member.
“Very well,” said Tods. “I must fink in English.”
He spent a minute putting his ideas in order, and began very slowly,
translating in his mind from the vernacular to English, as many
Anglo-Indian children do. You must remember that the Legal Member
helped him on by questions when he halted, for Tods was not equal to the
sustained flight of oratory that follows.
“Ditta Mull says:--'This thing is the talk of a child, and was made up
by fools.' But I don't think you are a fool, Councillor Sahib,” said
Todds, hastily. “You caught my goat. This is what Ditta Mull says:--'I
am not a fool, and why should the Sirkar say I am a child? I can see if
the land is good and if the landlord is good. If I am a fool, the sin is
upon my own head. For five years I take my ground for which I have saved
money, and a wife I take too, and a little son is born.' Ditta Mull has
one daughter now, but he SAYS he will have a son, soon. And he says: 'At
the end of five years, by this new bundobust, I must go. If I do not go,
I must get fresh seals and takkus-stamps on the papers, perhaps in the
middle of the harvest, and to go to the law-courts once is wisdom, but
to go twice is Jehannum.' That is QUITE true,” explained Tods, gravely.
“All my friends say so. And Ditta Mull says:--'Always fresh takkus and
paying money to vakils and chaprassis and law-courts every five years or
else the landlord makes me go. Why do I want to go? Am I fool? If I am a
fool and do not know, after forty years, good land when I see it, let
me die! But if the new bundobust says for FIFTEEN years, then it is
good and wise. My little son is a man, and I am burnt, and he takes the
ground or another ground, paying only once for the takkus-stamps on the
papers, and his little son is born, and at the end of fifteen years is
a man too. But what profit is there in five years and fresh papers?
Nothing but dikh, trouble, dikh. We are not young men who take these
lands, but old ones--not jais, but tradesmen with a little money--and
for fifteen years we shall have peace. Nor are we children that the
Sirkar should treat us so.”
Here Tods stopped short, for the whole table were listening. The Legal
Member said to Tods: “Is that all?”
“All I can remember,” said Tods. “But you should see Ditta Mull's big
monkey. It's just like a Councillor Sahib.”
“Tods! Go to bed,” said his father.
Tods gathered up his dressing-gown tail and departed.
The Legal Member brought his hand down on the table with a crash--“By
Jove!” said the Legal Member, “I believe the boy is right. The short
tenure IS the weak point.”
He left early, thinking over what Tods had said. Now, it was obviously
impossible for the Legal Member to play with a bunnia's monkey, by way
of getting understanding; but he did better. He made inquiries,
always bearing in mind the fact that the real native--not the hybrid,
University-trained mule--is as timid as a colt, and, little by little,
he coaxed some of the men whom the measure concerned most intimately to
give in their views, which squared very closely with Tods' evidence.
So the Bill was amended in that clause; and the Legal Member was filled
with an uneasy suspicion that Native Members represent very little
except the Orders they carry on their bosoms. But he put the thought
from him as illiberal. He was a most Liberal Man.
After a time the news spread through the bazars that Tods had got the
Bill recast in the tenure clause, and if Tods' Mamma had not interfered,
Tods would have made himself sick on the baskets of fruit and pistachio
nuts and Cabuli grapes and almonds that crowded the verandah. Till he
went Home, Tods ranked some few degrees before the Viceroy in popular
estimation. But for the little life of him Tods could not understand
why.
In the Legal Member's private-paper-box still lies the rough draft of
the Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment; and, opposite the
twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal
Member, are the words “Tods' Amendment.”
IN THE PRIDE OF HIS YOUTH.
“Stopped in the straight when the race was his own!
Look at him cutting it--cur to the bone!”
“Ask ere the youngster be rated and chidden,
What did he carry and how was he ridden?
Maybe they used him too much at the start;
Maybe Fate's weight-cloths are breaking his heart.”
Life's Handicap.
When I was telling you of the joke that The Worm played off on the
Senior Subaltern, I promised a somewhat similar tale, but with all the
jest left out. This is that tale:
Dicky Hatt was kidnapped in his early, early youth--neither by
landlady's daughter, housemaid, barmaid, nor cook, but by a girl so
nearly of his own caste that only a woman could have said she was just
the least little bit in the world below it. This happened a month
before he came out to India, and five days after his one-and-twentieth
birthday. The girl was nineteen--six years older than Dicky in the
things of this world, that is to say--and, for the time, twice as
foolish as he.
Excepting, always, falling off a horse there is nothing more fatally
easy than marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less than
fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-shop. After
the declarations of residence have been put in, four minutes will
cover the rest of the proceedings--fees, attestation, and all. Then the
Registrar slides the blotting-pad over the names, and says grimly, with
his pen between his teeth:--“Now you're man and wife;” and the couple
walk out into the street, feeling as if something were horribly illegal
somewhere.
But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just
as thoroughly as the “long as ye both shall live” curse from the
altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and “The Voice that
breathed o'er Eden” lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt
kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had received an
appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary from the Home
point of view. The marriage was to be kept secret for a year. Then Mrs.
Dicky Hatt was to come out and the rest of life was to be a glorious
golden mist. That was how they sketched it under the Addison Road
Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend and Dicky
steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings
a week bed-and-living room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near
the Knightsbridge Barracks.
But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land, where “men” of
twenty-one were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was expensive.
The salary that loomed so large six thousand miles away did not go far.
Particularly when Dicky divided it by two, and remitted more than the
fair half, at 1-6, to Montpelier Square. One hundred and thirty-five
rupees out of three hundred and thirty is not much to live on; but
it was absurd to suppose that Mrs. Hatt could exist forever on the 20
pounds held back by Dicky, from his outfit allowance. Dicky saw this,
and remitted at once; always remembering that Rs. 700 were to be paid,
twelve months later, for a first-class passage out for a lady. When you
add to these trifling details the natural instincts of a boy beginning a
new life in a new country and longing to go about and enjoy himself, and
the necessity for grappling with strange work--which, properly speaking,
should take up a boy's undivided attention--you will see that Dicky
started handicapped. He saw it himself for a breath or two; but he did
not guess the full beauty of his future.
As the hot weather began, the shackles settled on him and ate into his
flesh. First would come letters--big, crossed, seven sheet letters--from
his wife, telling him how she longed to see him, and what a Heaven
upon earth would be their property when they met. Then some boy of the
chummery wherein Dicky lodged would pound on the door of his bare little
room, and tell him to come out and look at a pony--the very thing to
suit him. Dicky could not afford ponies. He had to explain this. Dicky
could not afford living in the chummery, modest as it was. He had to
explain this before he moved to a single room next the office where
he worked all day. He kept house on a green oil-cloth table-cover, one
chair, one charpoy, one photograph, one tooth-glass, very strong and
thick, a seven-rupee eight-anna filter, and messing by contract at
thirty-seven rupees a month. Which last item was extortion. He had no
punkah, for a punkah costs fifteen rupees a month; but he slept on the
roof of the office with all his wife's letters under his pillow. Now and
again he was asked out to dinner where he got both a punkah and an iced
drink. But this was seldom, for people objected to recognizing a boy who
had evidently the instincts of a Scotch tallow-chandler, and who lived
in such a nasty fashion. Dicky could not subscribe to any amusement, so
he found no amusement except the pleasure of turning over his Bank-book
and reading what it said about “loans on approved security.” That cost
nothing. He remitted through a Bombay Bank, by the way, and the Station
knew nothing of his private affairs.
Every month he sent Home all he could possibly spare for his wife--and
for another reason which was expected to explain itself shortly and
would require more money.
About this time, Dicky was overtaken with the nervous, haunting fear
that besets married men when they are out of sorts. He had no pension to
look to. What if he should die suddenly, and leave his wife unprovided
for? The thought used to lay hold of him in the still, hot nights on the
roof, till the shaking of his heart made him think that he was going to
die then and there of heart-disease. Now this is a frame of mind which
no boy has a right to know. It is a strong man's trouble; but, coming
when it did, it nearly drove poor punkah-less, perspiring Dicky Hatt
mad. He could tell no one about it.
A certain amount of “screw” is as necessary for a man as for a
billiard-ball. It makes them both do wonderful things. Dicky needed
money badly, and he worked for it like a horse. But, naturally, the men
who owned him knew that a boy can live very comfortably on a certain
income--pay in India is a matter of age, not merit, you see, and if
their particular boy wished to work like two boys, Business forbid that
they should stop him! But Business forbid that they should give him an
increase of pay at his present ridiculously immature age! So Dicky won
certain rises of salary--ample for a boy--not enough for a wife and
child--certainly too little for the seven-hundred-rupee passage that he
and Mrs. Hatt had discussed so lightly once upon a time. And with this
he was forced to be content.
Somehow, all his money seemed to fade away in Home drafts and the
crushing Exchange, and the tone of the Home letters changed and grew
querulous. “Why wouldn't Dicky have his wife and the baby out? Surely he
had a salary--a fine salary--and it was too bad of him to enjoy himself
in India. But would he--could he--make the next draft a little more
elastic?” Here followed a list of baby's kit, as long as a Parsee's
bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and the little son
he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy is entitled
to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-man letters,
saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and would the little
wife wait yet a little longer? But the little wife, however much she
approved of money, objected to waiting, and there was a strange, hard
sort of ring in her letters that Dicky didn't understand. How could he,
poor boy?
Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another
youngster who had “made a fool of himself,” as the saying is--that
matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement, but
would lose him his present appointment--came the news that the baby, his
own little, little son, had died, and, behind this, forty lines of
an angry woman's scrawl, saying that death might have been averted if
certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if the mother and
the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at Dicky's naked heart;
but, not being officially entitled to a baby, he could show no sign of
trouble.
How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept
alight to force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on, the
seven-hundred-rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style of living
unchanged, except when he launched into a new filter. There was the
strain of his office-work, and the strain of his remittances, and the
knowledge of his boy's death, which touched the boy more, perhaps, than
it would have touched a man; and, beyond all, the enduring strain of
his daily life. Gray-headed seniors, who approved of his thrift and his
fashion of denying himself everything pleasant, reminded him of the old
saw that says:
“If a youth would be distinguished in his art, art, art,
He must keep the girls away from his heart, heart, heart.”
And Dicky, who fancied he had been through every trouble that a man is
permitted to know, had to laugh and agree; with the last line of his
balanced Bank-book jingling in his head day and night.
But he had one more sorrow to digest before the end. There arrived a
letter from the little wife--the natural sequence of the others if
Dicky had only known it--and the burden of that letter was “gone with
a handsomer man than you.” It was a rather curious production, without
stops, something like this:--“She was not going to wait forever and the
baby was dead and Dicky was only a boy and he would never set eyes on
her again and why hadn't he waved his handkerchief to her when he left
Gravesend and God was her judge she was a wicked woman but Dicky was
worse enjoying himself in India and this other man loved the ground she
trod on and would Dicky ever forgive her for she would never forgive
Dicky; and there was no address to write to.”
Instead of thanking his lucky stars that he was free, Dicky discovered
exactly how an injured husband feels--again, not at all the knowledge
to which a boy is entitled--for his mind went back to his wife as he
remembered her in the thirty-shilling “suite” in Montpelier Square, when
the dawn of his last morning in England was breaking, and she was crying
in the bed. Whereat he rolled about on his bed and bit his fingers. He
never stopped to think whether, if he had met Mrs. Hatt after those
two years, he would have discovered that he and she had grown quite
different and new persons. This, theoretically, he ought to have done.
He spent the night after the English Mail came in rather severe pain.
Next morning, Dicky Hatt felt disinclined to work. He argued that he had
missed the pleasure of youth. He was tired, and he had tasted all the
sorrow in life before three-and-twenty. His Honor was gone--that was the
man; and now he, too, would go to the Devil--that was the boy in him. So
he put his head down on the green oil-cloth table-cover, and wept before
resigning his post, and all it offered.
But the reward of his services came. He was given three days to
reconsider himself, and the Head of the establishment, after some
telegraphings, said that it was a most unusual step, but, in view of the
ability that Mr. Hatt had displayed at such and such a time, at such and
such junctures, he was in a position to offer him an infinitely superior
post--first on probation, and later, in the natural course of things,
on confirmation. “And how much does the post carry?” said Dicky. “Six
hundred and fifty rupees,” said the Head slowly, expecting to see the
young man sink with gratitude and joy.
And it came then! The seven hundred rupee passage, and enough to have
saved the wife, and the little son, and to have allowed of assured and
open marriage, came then. Dicky burst into a roar of laughter--laughter
he could not check--nasty, jangling merriment that seemed as if it
would go on forever. When he had recovered himself he said, quite
seriously:--“I'm tired of work. I'm an old man now. It's about time I
retired. And I will.”
“The boy's mad!” said the Head.
I think he was right; but Dicky Hatt never reappeared to settle the
question.
PIG.