Lies home beneath a sickly sun,
Where humbleness was taught me?
Or here, where spurs my father won
On bended knee are brought me?
HE landed, together with about a dozen other newly gazetted subalterns
and civil officers, cramped, storm-tossed, snubbed, and then disgorged
from a sailing-ship into a port that made no secret of its absolute
contempt for new arrivals.
There were liners of a kind on the Red Sea route, and the only seniors
who chose the long passage round the Cape were men returning after
sick-leave--none too sweet-tempered individuals, and none too prone
to give the young idea a good conceit of himself. He and the other
youngsters landed with a crushed-in notion that India would treat
them very cavalierly before she took them to herself. And all, save
Cunningham, were right.
The other men, all homesick and lonely and bewildered, were met by
bankers' agents, or, in cases, only by a hotel servant armed with a
letter of instructions. Here and there a bored, tired-eyed European had
found time, for somebody-or-other's sake, to pounce on a new arrival
and bear him away to breakfast and a tawdry imitation of the real
hospitality of northern India; but for the most part the beardless boys
lounged in the red-hot customs shed (where they were to be mulcted for
the privilege of serving their country) and envied young Cunningham.
He--as pale as they, as unexpectant as they were of anything approaching
welcome--was first amazed, then suspicious, then pleased, then proud, in
turn. The different emotions followed one another across his clean-lined
face as plainly as a dawn vista changes; then, as the dawn leaves a
landscape finally, true and what it is for all to see, true dignity was
left and the look of a man who stands in armor.
“His father's son!” growled Mahommed Gunga; and the big, black-bearded
warriors who stood behind him echoed, “Ay!”
But for four or five inches of straight stature, and a foot, perhaps,
of chest-girth, he was a second edition of the Cunnigan-bahadur who had
raised and led a regiment and licked peace into a warring countryside;
and though he was that much bigger than his father had been, they dubbed
him “Chota” Cunnigan on the instant. And that means “Little Cunningham.”
He had yet to learn that a Rajput, be he poorest of the poor, admits no
superior on earth. He did not know yet that these men had come, at one
man's private cost, all down the length of India to meet him. Nobody had
told him that the feudal spirit dies harder in northern Hindustan than
it ever did in England, or that the Rajput clans cohere more tightly
than the Scots. The Rajput belief that honest service--unselfishly
given--is the greatest gift that any man may bring--that one who has
received what he considers favors will serve the giver's son--was an
unknown creed to him as yet.
But he stood and looked those six men in the eye, and liked them. And
they, before they had as much as heard him speak, knew him for a soldier
and loved him as he stood.
They hung sickly scented garlands round his neck, and kissed his hand
in turn, and spoke to him thereafter as man to man. They had found their
goal worth while, and they bore him off to his hotel in clattering glee,
riding before him as men who have no doubt of the honor that they
pay themselves. No other of the homesick subalterns drove away with a
six-man escort to clear the way and scatter sparks!
They careered round through the narrow gate of the hotel courtyard as
though a Viceroy at least were in the trap behind them; and Mahommed
Gunga--six medaled, strapping feet of him--dismounted and held out an
arm for him to take when he alighted. The hotel people understood at
once that Somebody from Somewhere had arrived.
Young Cunningham had never yet been somebody. The men who give their
lives for India are nothing much at home, and their sons are even less.
Scarcely even at school, when they had made him captain of the team, had
he felt the feel of homage and the subtle flattery that undermines a
bad man's character; at schools in England they confer honors but take
simultaneous precautions. He was green to the dangerous influence of
feudal loyalty, but he quitted himself well, with reserve and dignity.
“He is good! He will do!” swore Mahommed Gunga fiercely, for the other
emotions are meant for women only.
“He is better than the best!”
“We will make a man of this one!”
“Did you mark how he handed me his purse to defray expenses?” asked a
black-bearded soldier of the five.
“He is a man who knows by instinct!” said Mahommed Gunga. “See to it
that thy accounting is correct, and overpay no man!”
Deep-throated as a bull, erect as a lance, and pleased as a little
child, Mahommed Gunga came to him alone that evening to talk, and to
hear him talk, and to tell him of the plans that had been made.
“Thy father gave me this,” he told him, producing a gold watch and
chain of the hundred-guinea kind that nowadays are only found among
the heirlooms. Young Cunningham looked at it, and recognized the heavy
old-gold case that he had been allowed to “blow open” when a little boy.
On the outside, deep-chiseled in the gold, was his father's crest, and
on the inside a portrait of his mother.
“Thy father died in these two arms, bahadur! Thy father said: 'Look
after him, Mahommed Gunga, when the time is ripe for him to be a
soldier.' And I said: 'Ha, huzoor!' So! Then here is India!”
He waved one hand grandiloquently, as though he were presenting the
throne of India to his protegé!
“Here, sahib, is a servant--blood of my own blood.”
He clapped his hands, and a man who looked like the big, black-ended
spirit of Aladdin's lamp stood silent, instant, in the doorway.
“He speaks no English, but he may help to teach thee the Rajput tongue,
and he will serve thee well--on my honor. His throat shall answer for
it! Feed him and clothe him, sahib, but pay him very little--to serve
well is sufficient recompense.”
Young Cunningham gave his keys at once to the silent servant, as a tacit
sign that from that moment he was trusted utterly; and Mahommed Gunga
nodded grim approval.
“Thy father saw fit to bequeath me much in the hour when death came on
him, sahib. I am no boaster, as he knew. Remember, then, to tell me if I
fail at any time in what is due. I am at thy service!”
Tact was inborn in Cunningham, as it had been in his father. He realized
that he ought at once to show his appreciation of the high plane of the
service offered.
“There is one way in which you could help me almost at once, Mahommed
Gunga,” he answered.
“Command me, sahib.”
“I need your advice--the advice of a man who really knows. I need
horses, and--at first at least--I would rather trust your judgment than
my own. Will you help me buy them?”
The Raiput's eyes blazed pleasure. On war, and wine, and women, and a
horse are the four points to ask a man's advice and win his approval by
the asking.
“Nay, sahib; why buy horses here? These Bombay traders have only crows'
meat to sell to the ill-advised. I have horses, and spare horses for
the journey; and in Rajputana I have horses waiting for thee--seven,
all told--sufficient for a young officer. Six of them are
country-bred-sand-weaned--a little wild perhaps, but strong, and up to
thy weight. The seventh is a mare, got by thy father's stallion Aga
Khan (him that made more than a hundred miles within a day under a
fifteen-stone burden, with neither food nor water, and survived!). A
good mare, sahib--indeed a mare of mares--fit for thy father's son. That
mare I give thee. It is little, sahib, but my best; I am a poor man. The
other six I bought--there is the account. I bought them cheaply, paying
less than half the price demanded in each case--but I had to borrow and
must pay back.”
Young Cunningham was hard put to it to keep his voice steady as he
answered. This man was a stranger to him. He had a hazy recollection
of a dozen or more bearded giants who formed a moving background to his
dreams of infancy, and he had expected some sort of welcome from one or
two perhaps, of his father's men when he reached the north. But to have
men borrow money that they might serve him, and have horses ready for
him, and to be met like this at the gate of India by a man who admitted
he was poor, was a little more than his self-control had been trained as
yet to stand.
“I won't waste words, Mahommed Gunga,” he said, half-choking.
“I'll--er--I'll try to prove how I feel about it.”
“Ha! How said I? Thy father's son, I said! He, too, was no believer in
much promising! I was his servant, and will serve him still by serving
thee. The honor is mine, sahib, and the advantage shall be where thy
father wished it.”
“My father would never have had me--”
“Sahib, forgive the interruption, but a mistake is better checked. Thy
father would have flung thee ungrudged, into a hell of bayonets, me,
too, and would have followed after, if by so doing he could have served
the cause he held in trust. He bred thee, fed thee, and sent thee
oversea to grow, that in the end India might gain! Thou and I are
but servants of the peace, as he was. If I serve thee, and thou the
Raj--though the two of us were weaned on the milk of war and get our
bread by war--we will none the less serve peace! Aie! For what is honor
if a soldier lets it rust? Of what use is service, mouthed and ready,
but ungiven? It is good, Chota-Cunnigan-bahadur, that thou art come at
last!”
He saluted and backed out through the swinging door. He had come in his
uniform of risaldar of the elder Cunningham's now disbanded regiment,
so he had not removed his boots as another native--and he himself if
in mufti--would have done. Young Cunningham heard him go swaggering and
clanking and spur-jingling down the corridor as though he had half a
troop of horse behind him and wanted Asia to know it!
It was something of a brave beginning that, for a twenty-one-year-old!
Something likely--and expressly calculated by Mahommed Gunga--to bring
the real man to the surface. He had been no Cunningham unless his sense
of duty had been very near the surface--no Englishman, had he not been
proud that men of a foreign, conquered race should think him worthy of
all that honor; and no man at all if his eye had been quite dry when
the veteran light-horseman swaggered out at last and left him to his own
reflections.
He had not been human if he had not felt a little homesick still,
although home to him had been a place where a man stayed with distant
relatives between the intervals of school. He felt lonely, in spite of
his reception--a little like a baby on the edge of all things new and
wonderful. He would have been no European if he had not felt the heat,
the hotel was like a vapor-bath.
But the leaping red blood of youth ran strong in him. He had
imagination. He could dream. The good things he was tasting were a
presage only of the better things to come, and that is a wholesome point
of view. He was proud--as who would not be?--to step straight into the
tracks of such a father; and with that thought came another--just as
good for him, and for India, that made him feel as though he were a
robber yet, a thief in another's cornfield, gathering what he did not
sow. It came over him in a flood that he must pay the price of all this
homage.
Some men pay in advance, some at the time, and some pay afterward.
All men, he knew, must pay. It would be his task soon to satisfy these
gentle-men, who took him at his face value, by proving to them that
they had made no very great mistake. The thought thrilled him instead
of frightening--brought out every generous instinct that he had and made
him thank the God of All Good Soldiers that at least he would have a
chance to die in the attempt. There was nothing much the matter with
young Cunningham.