'Twixt loot and law--'tween creed and caste--
Through slough this people wallows,
To where we choose our road at last.
I choose the RIGHT! Who follows?
HEMMED in amid the stifling stench and babel of the caravansary,
secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other
Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga--all six, according to their turbans,
followers of Islam--discussed matters that appeared to bring them little
satisfaction.
They sat together in a dark, low-ceilinged room; its open door--it was
far too hot to close anything that admitted air--gave straight onto the
street, and the one big window opened on a courtyard, where a pair of
game-cocks fought in and out between the restless legs of horses, while
a yelling horde betted on them. On a heap of grass fodder in a corner
of the yard an all-but-naked expert in inharmony thumped a skin tom-tom
with his knuckles, while at his feet the own-blood brother to the
screech-owls wailed of hell's torments on a wind instrument.
Din--glamour--stink--incessant movement--interblended poverty and riches
rubbing shoulders--noisy self-interest side by side with introspective
revery, where stray priests nodded in among the traders,--many-peopled
India surged in miniature between the four hot walls and through the
passage to the overflowing street; changeable and unexplainable, in
ever-moving flux, but more conservative in spite of it than the very
rocks she rests on--India who is sister to Aholibah and mother of all
fascination.
In that room with the long window, low-growled, the one thin thread of
clear-sighted unselfishness was reeling out to very slight approval.
Mahommed Gunga paced the floor and kicked his toes against the walls,
as he turned at either end, until his spurs jingled, and looked with
blazing dark-brown eyes from one man to the other.
“What good ever came of listening to priests?” he asked. “All priests
are alike--ours, and theirs, and padre-sahibs! They all preach peace and
goad the lust that breeds war and massacre! Does a priest serve any but
himself? Since when? There will come this rising that the priests speak
of--yes! Of a truth, there will, for the priests will see to it! There
is a padre-sahib here in Howrah now for the Hindoo priests to whet their
hate on. You saw the woman ride past here a half-hour gone? There is a
pile of tinder ready here, and any fool of a priest can make a spark!
There will be a rising, and a big one!”
“There will! Of a truth, there will!” Alwa, his cousin, crossed one leg
above the other with a clink of spurs and scabbard. He had no objection
to betraying interest, but declined for the present to betray his hand.
“There will be a blood-letting that will do no harm to us Rajputs!”
said another man, whose eyes gleamed from the darkest corner; he,
too, clanked his scabbard as though the sound were an obbligato to his
thoughts. “Sit still and say nothing is my advice; we will be all ready
to help ourselves when the hour comes!”
“It is this way,” said Mahommed Gunga, standing straddle-legged to face
all five of them, with his back to the window. He stroked his
black beard upward with one hand and fingered with the other at his
sabre-hilt. “Without aid when the hour does come, the English will
be smashed--worn down--starved out--surrounded--stamped
out--annihilated--so!” He stamped with his heel descriptively on the
hard earth floor. “And then, what?”
“Then, the plunder!” said Alwa, showing a double row of wonderful white
teeth. The other four grinned like his reflections. “Ay, there will be
plunder--for the priests! And we Rajputs will have new masters over us!
Now, as things are, we have honorable men. They are fools, for any
man is a fool who will not see and understand the signs. But they are
honest. They ride straight! They look us straight between the eyes, and
speak truth, and fear nobody! Will the Hindoo priests, who will rule
India afterward, be thus? Nay! Here is one sword for the British when
the hour comes!”
“I have yet to see a Hindoo priest rule me or plunder me!” said Alwa
with a grin.
“You will live to see it!” said Mahommed Gunga. “Truly, you will live to
see it, unless you throw your weight into the other scale! What are we
Rajputs without a leader whom we all trust? What have we ever been?”
He swung on his heels suddenly--angrily--and began to pace the floor
again--then stopped.
“Divided, and again subdivided--one-fifth Mohammedan and four-fifths
Hindoo--clan within clan, and each against the other. Do we own
Rajputana? Nay! Do we rule it? Nay! What were we until Cunnigan-bahadur
came?”
“Ah!” All five men rose with a clank in honor to the memory of that man.
“Cunnigan-bahadur! Show us such another man as he was, and I and mine
ride at his back!” said Alwa. “Not all the English are like Cunnigan!
A Cunnigan could have five thousand men the minute that he asked for
them!”
“Am I a wizard?--Can I cast spells and bring dead men's spirits from
the dead again? I know of no man to take his place,” said Mahommed Gunga
sadly.
He was the poorest of them, but they were all, comparatively speaking,
poor men; for the long peace had told its tale on a race of men who are
first gentlemen, then soldiers, and last--least of all--and only as a
last resource, landed proprietors. The British, for whom they had often
fought because that way honor seemed to lie, had impoverished
them afterward by passing and enforcing zemindary laws that lifted
nine-tenths of the burden from the necks of starving tenants. The new
law was just, as the Rajputs grudgingly admitted, but it pinched their
pockets sadly; like the old-time English squires, they would give their
best blood and their last rack-rent-wrung rupee for the cause that
they believed in, but they resented interference with the rack-rents!
Mahommed Gunga had had influence enough with these five landlord
relations of his to persuade them to come and meet him in Howrah City to
discuss matters; the mere fact that he had thought it worth his while
to leave his own little holding in the north had satisfied them that he
would be well worth listening to--for no man rode six hundred miles on
an empty errand. But they needed something more than words before they
pledged the word that no Rajput gentleman will ever break.
“Find us a Cunnigan--bring him to us--prove him to us--and if a blade
worth having from end to end of Rajputana is not at his service, I
myself will gut the Hindoo owner of it! That is my given word!” said
Alwa.
“He had a son,” said Mahommed Gunga quietly.
“True. Are all sons like their fathers? Take Maharajah Howrah here; his
father was a man with whom any soldier might be proud to pick a quarrel.
The present man is afraid of his own shadow on the wall--divided between
love for the treasure-chests he dare not broach and fear of a brother
whom he dare not kill. He is priest-ridden, priest-taught, and fit to be
nothing but a priest. Who knows how young Cunnigan will shape? Where is
he? Overseas yet! He must prove himself, as his father did, before he
can hope to lead a free regiment of horse!”
“Then Cunnigan-bahadur's watch-word 'For the peace of India,' is
dead-died with him?” asked Mahommed Gunga. “We are each for our own
again?”
“I have spoken!” answered Alwa. As the biggest clan-chief left on all
that countryside, he had a right to speak before the others, and he
knew that what he said would carry weight when they had all ridden home
again, and the report had gone abroad in ever-widening rings. “If the
English can hold India, let them! I will not fight against them, for
they are honest men for all their madness. If they cannot, then I am for
Rajputana, not India--India may burn or rot or burst to pieces, so long
as Rajputana stands! But--” He paused a moment, and looked at each man
in turn, and tapped his sabre-hilt, “--if a Cunnigan-bahadur were among
us--a man whom I could trust to lead me and mine and every man--I would
lend him my sword for the sheer honor of helping him hack truth out of
corruption! I have nothing more to say!”
“One word more, cousin!” said Mahommed Gunga. “I was risaldar in
Cunnigan-bahadur's regiment of horse. There was more than mere
discipline between us. I ate his salt. Once--when he might have saved
himself the trouble without any daring to reproach him--he risked his
own life, and a troop, and his reputation to save a woman of my family
from capture, and something worse. There was never a Rajput or any other
native woman wronged while he was with us.”
“Well?”
“I am no friend of Christian priests--of padres. But--”
“She who rode by just now? What, then?”
“I ride northward now, and then very likely South again. I can do
nothing in the matter, yet--were he in my shoes, and she a native woman
at the mercy of the troops--Cunnigan-bahadur would have assigned a guard
for her.”
“Ho! So I am thy sepoy?” sneered Alwa, standing sideways--looking
sideways--and throwing out his chest. “I am to do thy bidding, guarding
stray padres” (he spoke the word as though it were a bad taste he was
spitting from his mouth), “and herding women without purdah, while thou
ridest on assignations Allah knows where? Since when?”
“I have yet to refuse to guard thy back, or thy good name, Alwa!”
Mahommed Gunga eyed him straight, and thrust his hilt out. “The woman is
nothing to me--the padre-sahib less. It is because of the debt I owe to
Cunnigan that I ask this favor.”
“Oh. It is granted! Should she appeal to me, I will rip Howrah into
rags and burn this city to protect her if need be! She must first ask,
though, even as thou didst.”
Mahommed Gunga saluted him, bolt-upright as a lance, and without the
slightest change in his expression.
“The word is sufficient, cousin!”
Alwa returned his salute, and raised his voice in a gruff command. A
saice outside the window woke as though struck by a stick--sprang to his
feet--and passed the order on. A dozen horses clattered in the courtyard
and filed through the arched passage to the street, and Alwa mounted.
The others, each with his escort, followed suit, and a moment later,
with no further notice of one another, but with as much pomp and noise
as though they owned the whole of India, the five rode off, each on his
separate way, through the scattering crowd.
Then Mahommed Gunga called for his own horse and the lone armed man of
his own race who acted squire to him.
“Did any overhear our talk?” he asked.
“No, sahib.”
“Not the saice, even?”
“No, sahib. He slept.”
“He awoke most suddenly, and at not much noise.”
“For that reason I know he slept, sahib. Had he been pretending, he
would have wakened slowly.”
“Thou art no idiot!” said Mahommed Gunga. “Wait here until I return, and
lie a few lies if any ask thee why we six came together, and of what we
spoke!”
Then he mounted and rode off slowly, picking his way through the throng
much more cautiously and considerately than his relatives had done,
though not, apparently, because he loved the crowd. He used some
singularly biting insults to help clear the way, and frowned as though
every other man he looked at were either an assassin or--what a good
Mohammedan considers worse--an infidel. He reached the long brick wall
at last--broke into a canter--scattered the pariah dogs that were nosing
and quarreling about the corpse of the Maharati, and drew rein fifteen
minutes later by the door of the tiny school place that Miss McClean had
entered.