The gates of Lalpore were shut, and all about her walls the yellow
sandy plains stretched silent and empty. There did not seem to be
so much as a pariah dog outside. Some pipal-trees looked over the
walls, and a couple of very antiquated cannon looked through them,
but nothing stirred. It made a splendid picture at broad noon, the
blue sky and the old red-stone city on her little hill, holding up
her minarets and the white marble bubbles of her temples, and then
the yellow sand drifting up; but one could not look at it long.
Colonel Starr, from the door of his tent, half a mile away, had
looked at it pretty steadily for two hours, so steadily that his
eyes, red and smarting with the dust of a two hundred mile ride,
watered copiously, and made him several degrees more uncomfortable
than he had been before.
I doubt whether any idea of the beauty of Lalpore had a place in
the Colonel's mind, it was so full of other considerations. He
thought more, probably, of the thickness of its walls than of their
colour, and speculated longer upon the position of the arsenal than
upon the curves of the temples. Because, in the Colonel's opinion,
it had come to look very like fighting. In the opinion of little
Lieutenant Pink the fighting should have been over and done with
yesterday, and the 17th Midlanders should be 'bagging' the
Maharajah's artillery by now. Little Lieutenant Pink was spoiling
for the fray. So were the men, most of them. They wanted a change
of diet. Thomas Jones, sergeant, entirely expressed the sentiments
of his company when he said that somebody ort to pay up for this
blessed march, they 'adn't wore the skins off their 'eels fer two
'undred mile to admire the bloomin' scenery. Besides, for Thomas
Jones's part, he was tired of living on this yere bloomin' tinned
rock, he wanted a bit of fresh roast kid and a Lalpore curry.
Colonel Starr had been sent to 'arrange,' if possible, and to fight
if necessary. Perhaps we need not inquire into the arrangements
the Government had commissioned Colonel Starr to make. They were
arrangements of a kind frequently submitted to the princes of
independent States in India when they are troublesome, and their
result is that a great many native States are governed by English
political residents, while a great many native princes attend
parties at Government House in Calcutta. The Maharajah of Chita
had been very troublesome indeed. Twice in the year his people had
raided peaceful villages under British protection, and now he had
killed a missionary. It was quite time to 'arrange' the Maharajah
of Chita, and Colonel Starr, with two guns and three hundred
troops, had been sent to do it.
His Highness, however, seemed indisposed to further his social
prospects in Calcutta and the good of his State. For the twenty-four
hours they had been in camp under his walls the Maharajah had
taken no more notice of Colonel Starr and his three hundred
Midlanders than if they represented so many jungle bushes. To all
Colonel Starr's messages, diplomatic, argumentative, threatening,
there had come the same unsatisfactory response--the Maharajah of
Chita had no word to say to the British Raj. And still the gates
were shut, and still only the pipal-trees looked over the wall, and
only the cannon looked through.
By the time evening came Colonel Starr was at the end of his
patience. He was not, unfortunately, simultaneously at the end of
his investigations. He did not yet know the position or the
contents of the arsenal, the defensibility of the walls, the water
supply, or the number of men under arms in that silent, impassive
red city on the hill. The reports of the peasantry had been
contradictory, and this ordinary means of ascertaining these things
had failed him, while he very particularly required to know them,
his force being small. The Government had assured Colonel Starr
that the Maharajah of Chita would be easy to arrange; that he was a
tractable person, and that half the usual number of troops would be
ample, which made His Highness's conduct, if anything, more
annoying. And Colonel Starr's commissariat, even in respect to
'tinned rock,' had not been supplied with the expectation of
besieging Lalpore. The attack would be uncertain, and the Colonel
hesitated the more because his instructions had been not to take
the place if he could avoid it. So the commanding officer paced
his tent, and composed fresh messages to the Maharajah, while
Lieutenant Pink wondered in noble disgust whether the expedition
was going to end in moonshine after all, and Thomas Jones,
sergeant, remarked hourly to his fellow-privates, 'The 17th 'aint
come two 'undred miles for this kind of a joke. The bloomin'
Maharajer 'ull think we've got a funk on.'
But neither Colonel Starr nor Thomas Jones was acquainted with the
reason of the remarkable attitude of Lalpore.
A week before, when the news reached him that the Viceroy was
sending three hundred men and two guns to remonstrate with him for
his treatment of Dr. Roberts, the Maharajah smiled, thinking of the
bravery of his Chitans, the strength of his fortifications, the
depth of his walls, and the wheat stored in his city granaries.
No one had ever taken Lalpore since the Chitans took it--in all
Rajputana there were none so cunning and so brave as the Chitans.
As to bravery, greater than Rajput bravery simply did not exist.
The Maharajah held a council, and they all sported with the idea of
English soldiers coming to Lalpore. Maun Rao begged to go out and
meet them to avenge the insult.
'Maharajah,' said he, 'the Chitans are sufficient against the
world; why should we speak of three hundred monkeys' grandsons? If
the sky fell, our heads would be pillars to protect you!'
And after a long discussion the Maharajah agreed to Maun Rao's
proposal. The English could come only one way. A day's march from
Lalpore they would be compelled to ford a stream. There the
Maharajah's army would meet them, ready, as Maun Rao said in the
council, to play at ball with their outcast heads. There was a
feast afterwards, and everybody had twice as much opium as usual.
In the midst of the revelry they made a great calculation of
resources. The Maharajah smiled again as he thought of the
temerity of the English in connection with the ten thousand rounds
of ammunition that had just come to him on camel back through
Afghanistan from Russia--it was a lucky and timely purchase. Surji
Rao, Minister of the Treasury, when this was mentioned, did not
smile. Surji Rao had bought the cartridges at a very large
discount, which did not appear in the bill, and he knew that not
even Chitan valour could make more than one in ten of them go off.
Therefore, when the Maharajah congratulated Surji Rao upon his
foresight in urging the replenishment of the arsenal at this
particular time, Surji Rao found it very difficult to congratulate
himself.
It all came out the day before the one fixed for the expedition.
His Highness, being in great spirits, had ordered a shooting
competition, and the men were served from the new stores supplied
to the State of Chita by Petroff Gortschakin of St. Petersburg.
The Maharajah drove out to the ranges to look on, and all his
Ministers with him. All, that is, except the Minister of the
Treasury, who begged to be excused; he was so very unwell.
Some of the men knelt and clicked and reloaded half a dozen times
before they could fire; some were luckier, and fired the first time
or the third without reloading. They glanced suspiciously at one
another and hesitated, while there grew a shining heap of
unexploded cartridges, a foot high, under the Maharajah's very
nose. His Highness looked on stupefied for ten minutes, then burst
into blazing wrath. Maun Rao rode madly about examining,
inquiring, threatening.
'Our cartridges are filled with powdered charcoal,' he cried,
smiting one of them between two stones to prove his words. There
was an unexpected noise, and the noble General jumped into the air,
bereft of the largest half of his curled moustache. That one was
not. Then they all went furiously back to the palace. The only
other incident of that day which it is worth our while to chronicle
is connected with Surji Rao and the big shoe. The big shoe was
administered to Surji Rao by a man of low caste, in presence of the
entire court and as many of the people of Lalpore as chose to come
and look on. It was very thoroughly administered, and afterwards
Surji Rao was put formally outside the city gates, and told that
the king desired never to look upon his black face again. Which
was rubbing it in rather unfairly, as His Highness's own complexion
was precisely the same shade. With great promptitude Surji Rao
took the road to meet the English and sell his information, but
this possibility occurred to the Maharajah soon enough to send men
after him to frustrate it.
'There shall be at least enough sound cartridges in his bargain for
that,' said His Highness grimly.
The Chitan spirit did not flourish quite so vaingloriously at the
council that night, and there was no more talk about the sky
falling upon dauntless Chitan heads. The sky had fallen, and the
effect was rather quenching than otherwise. The previous stores
were counted over, and it was found that the men could not be
served with three rounds apiece out of them. When this was
announced, nobody thought of doubting the wisdom of the Maharajah's
decision to shut up the gates of the city, and trust to the
improbability of the English venturing to attack him in such small
numbers, not knowing his resources. So that very night, lest any
word should go abroad of the strait of the warriors of Chita, the
gates were shut. But all the city knew. Moti knew. Sunni knew.
Two days later, Moti and Sunni heard the English bugles half a mile
away. They were playing 'Weel may the keel row!' the regimental
march-past, as Colonel Starr's Midlanders did the last half mile to
their camping-ground. The boys were in the courtyard among the
horses, and Sunni dropped the new silver bit he was looking at,
held up his head, and listened. He was the same yellow-haired,
blue-eyed Sunni, considerably tanned by the fierce winds of
Rajputana; but there came a brightness over his face as he
listened, that had not been there since he was a very little boy.
'How beautiful the music is!' said he to Moti.
Moti put his fingers in his ears.
'It is horrible,' he cried. 'It screams and it rushes. How can
they be able to make it? I shall tell my father to have it
stopped.'
Presently the bugles stopped of themselves, and Moti forgot about
them, but the brightness did not go out of Sunni's face, and all
day long he went about humming the air of 'Weel may the keel row,'
with such variations as might be expected. He grew very thoughtful
toward evening, but his eyes shone brighter than any sapphires in
the Maharajah's iron boxes. As to an old Mahomedan woman from
Rubbulgurh, who cooked her chupatties alone and somewhat despised,
she heard the march-past too, and was troubled all day long with
the foolish idea that the captain-sahib would presently come in to
tea, and would ask her, Tooni, where the memsahib was.