THE INVIDIOUS BAR
Violet Oliver drove back to her camp in the company of her friends and
they remarked upon her silence.
"You are tired, Violet?" her hostess asked of her.
"A little, perhaps," Violet admitted, and, urging fatigue as her excuse,
she escaped to her tent. There she took counsel of her looking-glass.
"I couldn't possibly have foreseen that he would be here," she pleaded to
her reflection. "He was to have stayed in Chiltistan. I asked him and he
told me that he meant to stay. If he had stayed there, he would never
have known that I was in India," and she added and repeated, "It's really
not my fault."
In a word she was distressed and sincerely distressed. But it was not
upon her own account. She was not thinking of the awkwardness to her of
this unexpected encounter. But she realised that she had given pain where
she had meant not to give pain. Shere Ali had seen her. He had been
assured that she sought to avoid him. And this was not the end. She must
go on and give more pain.
Violet Oliver had hoped and believed that her friendship with the young
Prince was something which had gone quite out of her life. She had closed
it and put it away, as you put away upon an upper shelf a book which you
do not mean to read again. The last word had been spoken eight months ago
in the conservatory of Lady Marfield's house. And behold they had met
again. There must be yet another meeting, yet another last interview. And
from that last interview nothing but pain could come to Shere Ali.
Therefore she anticipated it with a great reluctance. Violet Oliver did
not live among illusions. She was no sentimentalist. She never made up
and rehearsed in imagination little scenes of a melting pathos where
eternal adieux were spoken amid tears. She had no appreciation of the
woeful luxury of last interviews. On the contrary, she hated to confront
distress or pain. It was in her character always to take the easier way
when trouble threatened. She would have avoided altogether this meeting
with Shere Ali, had it been possible.
"It's a pity," she said, and that was all. She was reluctant, but she had
no misgiving. Shere Ali was to her still the youth to whom she had said
good-bye in Lady Marfield's conservatory. She had seen him in the flush
of victory after a close-fought game, and thus she had seen him often
enough before. It was not to be wondered at that she noted no difference
at that moment.
But the difference was there for the few who had eyes to see. He had
journeyed up the broken road into Chiltistan. At the Fort of Chakdara, in
the rice fields on the banks of the Swat river, he had taken his luncheon
one day with the English commandant and the English doctor, and there he
had parted with the ways of life which had become to him the only ways.
He had travelled thence for a few hundred yards along a straight strip of
road running over level ground, and so with the levies of Dir to escort
him he swung round to the left. A screen of hillside and grey rock moved
across the face of the country behind him. The last outpost was left
behind. The Fort and the Signal Tower on the pinnacle opposite and the
English flag flying over all were hidden from his sight. Wretched as any
exile from his native land, Shere All went up into the lower passes of
the Himalayas. Days were to pass and still the high snow-peaks which
glittered in the sky, gold in the noonday, silver in the night time,
above the valleys of Chiltistan were to be hidden in the far North. But
already the words began to be spoken and the little incidents to occur
which were to ripen him for his destiny. They were garnered into his
memories as separate and unrelated events. It was not until afterwards
that he came to know how deeply they had left their marks, or that he set
them in an ordered sequence and gave to them a particular significance.
Even at the Fort of Chakdara a beginning had been made.
Shere Ali was standing in the little battery on the very summit of the
Fort. Below him was the oblong enclosure of the men's barracks, the stone
landings and steps, the iron railings, the numbered doors. He looked down
into the enclosure as into a well. It might almost have been a section of
the barracks at Chatham. But Shere Ali raised his head, and, over against
him, on the opposite side of a natural gateway in the hills, rose the
steep slope and the Signal Tower.
"I was here," said the Doctor, who stood behind him, "during the Malakand
campaign. You remember it, no doubt?"
"I was at Oxford. I remember it well," said Shere Ali.
"We were hard pressed here, but the handful of men in the Signal Tower
had the worst of it," continued the Doctor in a matter-of-fact voice. "It
was reckoned that there were fourteen thousand men from the Swat Valley
besieging us, and as they did not mind how many they lost, even with the
Maxims and our wire defences it was difficult to keep them off. We had to
hold on to the Signal Tower because we could communicate with the people
on the Malakand from there, while we couldn't from the Fort itself. The
Amandara ridge, on the other side of the valley, as you can see, just
hides the Pass from us. Well, the handful of men in the tower managed to
keep in communication with the main force, and this is how it was done. A
Sepoy called Prem Singh used to come out into full view of the enemy
through a porthole of the tower, deliberately set up his apparatus, and
heliograph away to the main force in the Malakand Camp, with the Swatis
firing at him from short range. How it was he was not hit, I could never
understand. He did it day after day. It was the bravest and coolest thing
I ever saw done or ever heard of, with one exception, perhaps. Prem Singh
would have got the Victoria Cross--" and the Doctor stopped suddenly
and his face flushed.
Shere Ali, however, was too keenly interested in the incident itself to
take any note of the narrator's confusion. Baldly though it was told,
there was the square, strong tower with its door six feet from the
ground, its machicoulis, its narrow portholes over against him, to give
life and vividness to the story. Here that brave deed had been done and
daily repeated. Shere Ali peopled the empty slopes which ran down from
the tower to the river and the high crags beyond the tower with the
hordes of white-clad Swatis, all in their finest robes, like men who have
just reached the goal of a holy pilgrimage, as indeed they had. He saw
their standards, he heard the din of their firearms, and high above them
on the wall of the tower he saw the khaki-clad figure of a single Sepoy
calmly flashing across the valley news of the defenders' plight.
"Didn't he get the Victoria Cross?" he asked.
"No," returned the Doctor with a certain awkwardness. But still Shere Ali
did not notice.
"And what was the exception?" he asked eagerly. "What was the other brave
deed you have seen fit to rank with this?"
"That, too, happened over there," said the Doctor, seizing upon the
question with relief. "During the early days of the siege we were able to
send in to the tower water and food. But when the first of August came we
could help them no more. The enemy thronged too closely round us, we were
attacked by night and by day, and stone sangars, in which the Swatis lay
after dark, were built between us and the tower. We sent up water to the
tower for the last time at half-past nine on a Saturday morning, and it
was not until half-past four on the Monday afternoon that the relieving
force marched across the bridge down there and set us free."
"They were without water for all that time--and in August?" cried
Shere Ali.
"No," the Doctor answered. "But they would have been had the Sepoy not
found his equal. A bheestie"--and he nodded his head to emphasise the
word--"not a soldier at all, but a mere water-carrier, a mere
camp-follower, volunteered to go down to the river. He crept out of the
tower after nightfall with his water-skins, crawled down between the
sangars--and I can tell you the hill-side was thick with them--to the
brink of the Swat river below there, filled his skins, and returned
with them."
"That man, too, earned the Victoria Cross," said Shere Ali.
"Yes," said the Doctor, "no doubt, no doubt."
Something of flurry was again audible in his voice, and this time Shere
Ali noticed it.
"Earned--but did not get it?" he went on slowly; and turning to the
Doctor he waited quietly for an answer. The answer was given reluctantly,
after a pause.
"Well! That is so."
"Why?"
The question was uttered sharply, close upon the words which had preceded
it. The Doctor looked upon the ground, shifted his feet, and looked up
again. He was a young man, and inexperienced. The question was repeated.
"Why?"
The Doctor's confusion increased. He recognised that his delay in
answering only made the answer more difficult to give. It could not be
evaded. He blurted out the truth apologetically.
"Well, you see, we don't give the Victoria Cross to natives."
Shere Ali was silent for a while. He stood with his eyes fixed upon the
tower, his face quite inscrutable.
"Yes, I guessed that would be the reason," he said quietly.
"Well," said his companion uncomfortably, "I expect some day that will
be altered."
Shere Ali shrugged his shoulders, and turned to go down. At the gateway
of the Fort, by the wire bridge, his escort, mounted upon their horses,
waited for him. He climbed into the saddle without a word. He had been
labouring for these last days under a sense of injury, and his thoughts
had narrowed in upon himself. He was thinking. "I, too, then, could never
win that prize." His conviction that he was really one of the White
People, bolstered up as it had been by so many vain arguments, was put to
the test of fact. The truth shone in upon his mind. For here was a
coveted privilege of the White People from which he was debarred, he and
the bheestie and the Sepoy. They were all one, he thought bitterly, to
the White People. The invidious bar of his colour was not to be broken.
"Good-bye," he said, leaning down from his saddle and holding out his
hand. "Thank you very much."
He shook hands with the Doctor and cantered down the road, with a smile
upon his face. But the consciousness of the invidious bar was rankling
cruelly at his heart, and it continued to rankle long after he had swung
round the bend of the road and had lost sight of Chakdara and the
English flag.
He passed through Jandol and climbed the Lowari Pass among the fir trees
and the pines, and on the very summit he met three men clothed in brown
homespun with their hair clubbed at the sides of their heads. Each man
carried a rifle on his back and two of them carried swords besides, and
they wore sandals of grass upon their feet. They were talking as they
went, and they were talking in the Chilti tongue. Shere Ali hailed them
and bade them stop.
"On what journey are you going?" he asked, and one of the three bowed low
and answered him.
"Sir, we are going to Mecca."
"To Mecca!" exclaimed Shere Ali. "How will you ever get to Mecca? Have
you money?"
"Sir, we have each six rupees, and with six rupees a man may reach Mecca
from Kurrachee. Till we reach Kurrachee, there is no fear that we shall
starve. Dwellers in the villages will befriend us."
"Why, that is true," said Shere Ali, "but since you are countrymen of my
own and my father's subjects, you shall not tax too heavily your friends
upon the road."
He added to their scanty store of rupees, and one after another they
thanked him and so went cheerily down the Pass. Shere Ali watched them as
they went, wondering that men should take such a journey and endure so
much discomfort for their faith. He watched their dwindling figures and
understood how far he was set apart from them. He was of their faith
himself, nominally at all events, but Mecca--? He shrugged his
shoulders at the name. It meant no more to him than it did to the White
People who had cast him out. But that chance meeting lingered in his
memory, and as he travelled northwards, he would wonder at times by night
at what village his three countrymen slept and by day whether their faith
still cheered them on their road.
He came at last to the borders of Chiltistan, and travelled thenceforward
through a country rich with orchards and green rice and golden amaranth.
The terraced slopes of the mountains, ablaze with wild indigo, closed in
upon him and widened out. Above the terraces great dark forests of pines
and deodars, maples and horse chestnuts clung to the hill sides; and
above the forests grass slopes stretched up to bare rock and the
snowfields. From the villages the people came out to meet him, and here
and there from some castle of a greater importance a chieftain would ride
out with his bodyguard, gay in velvets, and silks from Bokhara and chogas
of gold kinkob, and offer to him gold dust twisted up in the petal of a
flower, which he touched and remitted. He was escorted to polo-grounds
and sat for hours witnessing sports and trials of skill, and at night to
the music of kettledrums and pipes men and boys danced interminably
before him. There was one evening which he particularly remembered. He
had set up his camp outside a large village and was sitting alone by his
fire in the open air. The night was very still, the sky dark but studded
with stars extraordinarily bright--so bright, indeed, that Shere Ali
could see upon the water of the river below the low cliff on which his
camp fire was lit a trembling golden path made by the rays of a planet.
And as he sat, unexpectedly in the hush a boy with a clear, sweet voice
began to sing from the darkness behind him. The melody was plaintive and
sweet; a few notes of a pipe accompanied him; and as Shere Ali listened
in this high valley of the Himalayas on a summer's night, the music took
hold upon him and wrung his heart. The yearning for all that he had left
behind became a pain almost beyond endurance. The days of his boyhood and
his youth went by before his eyes in a glittering procession. His school
life, his first summer term at Oxford, the Cherwell with the shadows of
the branches overhead dappling the water, the strenuous week of the
Eights, his climbs with Linforth, and, above all, London in June, a
London bright with lilac and sunshine and the fair faces of women,
crowded in upon his memory. He had been steadily of late refusing to
remember, but the sweet voice and the plaintive melody had caught him
unawares. The ghosts of his dead pleasures trooped out and took life and
substance. Particular hours were lived through again--a motor ride alone
with Violet Oliver to Pangbourne, a dinner on the lawn outside the inn,
the drive back to London in the cool of the evening. It all seemed very
far away to-night. Shere Ali sat late beside his fire, nor when he went
into his tent did he close his eyes.
The next morning he rode among orchards bright with apricots and
mulberries, peaches and white grapes, and in another day he looked down
from a high cliff, across which the road was carried on a scaffolding,
upon the town of Kohara and the castle of his father rising in terraces
upon a hill behind. The nobles and their followers came out to meet him
with courteous words and protestations of good will. But they looked him
over with curious and not too friendly eyes. News had gone before Shere
Ali that the young Prince of Chiltistan was coming to Kohara wearing the
dress of the White People. They saw that the news was true, but no word
or comment was uttered in his hearing. Joking and laughing they escorted
him to the gates of his father's palace. Thus Shere Ali at the last had
come home to Kohara. Of the life which he lived there he was to tell
something to Violet Oliver.