I take no man at rumor's price,
Nor as the gossips cry him.
A son may ride, and stride, and stand;
His father's eye--his father's hand--
His father's tongue may give command;
But ere I trust I'll try him!
BUT before young Cunningham was called upon to pay even a portion of the
price of fealty there was more of the receiving of it still in store
for him, and he found himself very hard put to it, indeed, to keep
overboiling spirits from becoming exultation of the type that nauseates.
None of the other subalterns had influence, nor had they hereditary
anchors in the far northwest that would be likely to draw them on to
active service early in their career. They had already been made to
surrender their boyhood dreams of quick promotion; now, standing in
little groups and asking hesitating questions, they discovered that
their destination--Fort William--was about the least desirable of all
the awful holes in India.
They were told that a subaltern was lucky who could mount one step of
the promotion ladder in his first ten years; that a major at fifty, a
colonel at sixty, and a general at seventy were quite the usual thing.
And they realized that the pay they would receive would be a mere
beggar's pittance in a neighborhood so expensive as Calcutta, and that
their little private means would be eaten up by the mere, necessities
of life. They showed their chagrin and it was not very easy for young
Cunningham, watching Mahommed Gunga's lordly preparations for the long
up-country journey, to strike just the right attitude of pleasure at the
prospect without seeming to flaunt his better fortune.
Mahommed Gunga interlarded his hoarse orders to the mule-drivers with
descriptions in stateliest English, thrown out at random to the world at
large, of the glories of the manlier north--of the plains, where a man
might gallop while a horse could last, and of the mountains up beyond
the plains. He sniffed at the fetid Bombay reek, and spoke of the clean
air sweeping from the snow-topped Himalayas, that put life and courage
into the lungs of men who rode like centaurs! And the other subalterns
looked wistful, eying the bullock-carts that would take their baggage by
another route.
Fully the half of what Mahommed Gunga said was due to pride of race
and country. But the rest was all deliberately calculated to rouse the
wicked envy of those who listened. He meant to make the son of “Pukka”
Cunnigan feel, before he reached his heritage, that he was going up to
something worth his while. To quote his own north-country metaphor, he
meant to “make the colt come up the bit.” He meant that “Chota” Cunnigan
should have a proper sense of his own importance, and should chafe at
restraint, to the end that when his chance did come to prove himself he
would jump at it. Envy, he calculated--the unrighteous envy of men less
fortunately placed--would make a good beginning. And it did, though
hardly in the way he calculated.
Young Cunningham, tight-lipped to keep himself from grinning like a
child, determined to prove himself worthy of the better fortune; and
Mahommed Gunga would have cursed into his black beard in disgust had
he known of the private resolutions being formed to obey orders to the
letter and obtain the good will of his seniors. The one thing that the
grim old Rajput wished for his protege was jealousy! He wanted him so
well hated by the “nabobs” who had grown crusty and incompetent in high
command that life for him in any northern garrison would be impossible.
Throughout the two months' journey to the north Mahommed Gunga never
left a stone unturned to make Cunningham believe himself much more than
ordinary clay. All along the trunk road, that trails by many thousand
towns and listens to a hundred languages, whatever good there was was
Cunningham's. Whichever room was best in each dak-bungalow, whichever
chicken the kansamah least desired to kill, whoever were the stoutest
dhoolee-bearers in the village, whichever horse had the easiest
paces--all were Cunningham's. Respect were his, and homage and
obeisance, for the Rajput saw to it.
Of evenings, while they rested, but before the sun went down, the old
risaldar would come with his naked sabre and defy “Chota” Cunnigan to
try to touch him. For five long weeks he tried each evening, the Rajput
never doing anything but parry,--changing his sabre often to the other
hand and grinning at the schoolboy swordsmanship--until one evening, at
the end of a more than usually hard-fought bout, the youngster pricked
him, lunged, and missed slitting his jugular by the merest fraction of
an inch.
“Ho!” laughed Mahommed Gunga later, as he sluiced out the cut while his
own adherents stood near by and chaffed him. “The cub cuts his teeth,
then! Soon it will be time to try his pluck.”
“Be gentle with him, risaldar-sahib; a good cub dies as easily as a poor
one, until he knows the way.”
“Leave him to me! I will show him the way, and we will see what we will
see. If he is to disgrace his father's memory and us, he shall do it
where there are few to see and none to talk of it. When Alwa and the
others ask me, as they will ask, 'Is he a man?' I will give them a true
answer! I think he is a man, but I need to test him in all ways possible
before I pledge my word on it.”
But after that little accident the old risaldar had sword-sticks
fashioned at a village near the road, and ran no more risks of being
killed by the stripling he would teach; and before many more days of
the road had ribboned out, young Cunningham--bareback or from the
saddle--could beat him to the ground, and could hold his own on foot
afterward with either hand.
“The hand and eye are good!” said Mahommed Gunga. “It is time now for
another test.”
So he made a plausible excuse about the horses, and they halted for four
days at a roadside dak-bungalow about a mile from where a foul-mouthed
fakir sat and took tribute at a crossroads. It was a strangely chosen
place to rest at.
Deep down in a hollow, where the trunk road took advantage of a winding
gorge between the hills--screened on nearly all sides by green
jungle whose brown edges wilted in the heat which the inner steam
defied--stuffy, smelly, comfortless, it stood like a last left
rear-guard of a white-man's city, swamped by the deathless, ceaselessly
advancing tide of green. It was tucked between mammoth trees that
had been left there when the space for it was cleared a hundred
years before, and that now stood like grim giant guardians with arms
out-stretched to hold the verdure back.
The little tribe of camp-followers chased at least a dozen snakes out
of corners, and slew them in the open, as a preliminary to further
investigation. There were kas-kas mats on the foursquare floors, and
each of these, when lifted, disclosed a swarm of scorpions that had to
be exterminated before a man dared move his possessions in. The once
white calico ceilings moved suggestively where rats and snakes chased
one another, or else hunted some third species of vermin; and there was
a smell and a many-voiced weird whispering that hinted at corruption and
war to the death behind skirting boards and underneath the floor.
It had evidently not been occupied for many years; the kansamah looked
like a gray-bearded skeleton compressed within a tightened shroud of
parchment skin that shone where a coffin or a tomb had touched it. He
seemed to have forgotten what the bungalow was for, or that a sahib
needed things to eat, until the ex-risaldar enlightened him, and then he
complained wheezily.
The stables--rather the patch-and-hole-covered desolation that once had
been stables--were altogether too snake-defiled and smelly to be worth
repairing; the string of horses was quartered cleanly and snugly under
tents, and Mahommed Gunga went to enormous trouble in arranging a ring
of watch-fires at even distances.
“Are there thieves here, then?” asked Cunningham, and the Rajput nodded
but said nothing. He seemed satisfied, though, that the man he had
brought safely thus far at so much trouble would be well enough housed
in the creaky wreck of the bungalow, and he took no precautions of any
kind as to guarding its approaches.
Cunningham watched the preparations for his supper with ill-concealed
disgust--saw the customary chase of a rubber-muscled chicken, heard its
death gurgles, saw the guts removed, to make sure that the kansamah did
not cook it with that part of its anatomy intact, as he surely would do
unless watched--and then strolled ahead a little way along the road.
The fakir was squatting in the distance, on a big white stone, and in
the quiet of the gloaming Cunningham could hear his coarse, lewd voice
tossing crumbs of abuse and mockery to the seven or eight villagers
who squatted near him--half-amused, half-frightened, and altogether
credulous.
Even as he drew nearer Cunningham could not understand a word of what
the fakir said, but the pantomime was obvious. His was the voice and
the manner of the professional beggar who has no more need to whine
but still would ingratiate. It was the bullying, brazen swagger and
the voice that traffics in filth and impudence instead of wit; and, in
payment for his evening bellyful he was pouring out abuse of Cunningham
that grew viler and yet viler as Cunningham came nearer and the fakir
realized that his subject could not understand a word of it.
The villagers looked leery and eyed Cunningham sideways at each fresh
sally. The fakir grew bolder, until one of his listeners smothered
an open laugh in both hands and rolled over sideways. Cunningham came
closer yet, half-enamoured of the weird scene, half-curious to discover
what the stone could be on which the fakir sat.
The fakir grew nervous. Perhaps, after all, this was one of those
hatefully clever sahibs who know enough to pretend they do not know!
The abuse and vile innuendo changed to more obsequious, less obviously
filthy references to other things than Cunningham's religion, likes,
and pedigree, and the little crowd of men who had tacitly encouraged him
before got ready now to stand at a distance and take sides against him
should the white man turn out to have understood.
But Cunningham happened to catch sight of a cloud of paroquets that
swept in a screaming ellipse for a better branch to nest in and added
the one touch of gorgeous color needed to make the whole scene utterly
unearthly and unlike anything he had ever dreamed of, or had seen in
pictures, or had had described to him. He stood at gaze--forgetful of
the stone that had attracted him and of the fakir--spellbound by the
wonder-blend of hues branch-backed, and framed in gloom as the birds'
scream was framed in silence.
And, seeing him at gaze, the fakir recovered confidence and jeered new
ribaldry, until some one suddenly shot out from behind Cunningham, and
before he had recovered from his surprise he saw the fakir sprawling on
his back, howling for mercy, while Mahommed Gunga beat the blood out of
him with a whalebone riding-whip.
The sun went down with Indian suddenness and shut off the scene
of upraised lash and squirming, naked, ash-smeared devil, as a
magic-lantern picture; disappears. Only the creature's screams
reverberated through the jungle, like a belated echo to the restless
paroquets.
“He will sleep less easily for a week or two!” hazarded Mahommed Gunga,
stepping back toward Cunningham. In the sudden darkness the white
breeches showed and the whites of his eyes, but little else; his voice
growled like a rumble from the underworld.
“Why did you do it, risaldar? What did he say?”
“It was enough, bahadur, that he sat on that stone; for that alone
he had been beaten! What he said was but the babbling of priests. All
priests are alike. They have a common jargon--a common disrespect for
what they dare not openly defy. These temple rats of fakirs mimic them.
That is all, sahib. A whipping meets the case.”
“But the stone? Why shouldn't he sit on it?”
“Wait one minute, sahib, and then see.” He formed his hands into a
trumpet and bellowed through them in a high-pitched, nasal, ululating
order to somebody behind:
“Oh-h-h--Battee-lao!”
The black, dark roadside echoed it and a dot of light leapt up as a man
came running with what gradually grew into a lamp.
Mahommed Gunga seized the lamp, bent for a few seconds over the still
sprawling fakir, whipped him again twice, cursed him and kicked him,
until he got up and ran like a spectre for the gloom beyond the trees.
Then, with a rather stately sweep of the lamp, and a tremble in his
voice that was probably intentional--designed to make Cunningham at
least aware of the existence of emotion before he looked--he let the
light fall on the slab on which the fakir had been squatting.
“Look, Cunningham-sahib!”
The youngster bent down above the slab and tried, in the fitful light,
to make out what the markings were that ran almost from side to side, in
curves, across the stone; but it was too dark--the light was too fitful;
the marks themselves were too faint from the constant squatting of
roadside wanderers.
Mahommed Gunga set the lamp down on the stone, and he and the attendant
took little sticks, sharp-pointed, with which they began to dig
hurriedly, scratching and scraping at what presently showed, even in
that rising and falling light, as Roman lettering. Soon Cunningham
himself began to lend a hand. He made out a date first, and he could
feel it with his fingers before his eyes deciphered it. Gradually,
letter by letter--word by word--he read it off, feeling a strange new
thrill run through him, as each line followed, like a voice from the
haunted past.
A.D. 1823. A.D.
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF GENERAL ROBERT FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM
WHO DIED ON THIS SPOT
AETAT 81
FROM
WOUNDS INFLICTED BY A
TIGER
There was no sound audible except the purring of the lamp flame and
the heavy breathing of the three as Cunningham gazed down at the very
crudely carved, stained, often-desecrated slab below which lay the first
of the Anglo-Indian Cunninghams.
This man--these crumbled bones that lay under a forgotten piece of
rock--had made all of their share of history. They had begotten “Pukka”
Cunningham, who had hacked the name deeper yet in the crisscrossed
annals of a land of war. It was strange--it was queer--uncanny--for the
third of the Cunninghams to be sitting on the stone. It was unexpected,
yet it seemed to have a place in the scheme of things, for he caught
himself searching his memory backward.
He received an impression that something was expected of him. He knew,
by instinct and reasoning he could not have explained, that neither
Mahommed Gunga nor the other men would say a word until he spoke. They
were waiting--he knew they were--for a word, or a sign, or an order
(he did not know which), on which would hang the future of all three of
them.
Yet there was no hurry--no earthly hurry. He felt sure of it. In
the silence and the blackness--in the tense, steamy atmosphere of
expectancy--he felt perfectly at ease, although he knew, too, that there
was superstition to be reckoned with--and that is something which a
white man finds hard to weigh and cope with, as a rule.
The sweat ran down his face in little streams a the prickly heat began
to move across his skin, like a fiery-footed centiped beneath his
undershirt, but he noticed, neither. He began to be unconscious anything
except the knowledge that the bones of his grandsire lay underneath
him and that Mahommed Gunga waited for the word that would fit into the
scheme and solve a problem.
“Are there any tigers here now?” he asked presently, in a perfectly
normal voice. He spoke as he had done when his servant asked him which
suit he would wear.
“Ha, sahib! Many.”
“Man-eaters, by any chance?”
Mahommed Gunga and the other man exchanged quick glances, but Cunningham
did not look up. He did not see the quick-flashed whites as their eyes
met and looked down again.
“There is one, sahib--so say the kansamah and the head man--a full-grown
tiger, in his prime.”
“I will shoot him.” Four words, said quietly--not “Do you think,” or “I
would like to,” or “Perhaps.” They were perfectly definite and without a
trace of excitement; yet this man had never seen a tiger.
“Very good, sahib.” That, too, was spoken in a level voice, but Mahommed
Gunga's eyes and the other man's met once again above his head.
“We will stay here four days; by the third day there will be time enough
to have brought an elephant and--”
“I will go on foot,” said Cunningham, quite quietly. “Tomorrow, at dawn,
risaldar-sahib. Will you be good enough to make arrangements? All we
need to know is where he is and how to get there--will you attend to
that?”
“Ha, sahib.”
“Thanks. I wonder if my supper's ready.”
He turned and walked away, with a little salute-like movement of his
hand that was reminiscent of his father. The two Rajputs watched him
in heavy-breathing silence until the little group of lights, where the
horse-tents faced the old dak-bungalow, swallowed him. Then:
“He is good. He will do!” said the black-beard who had brought the lamp.
“He is good. But many sahibs would have acted coolly, thus. There must
be a greater test. There must be no doubt--no littlest doubt. Alwa and
the others will ask me on my honor, and I will answer on my honor, yes
or no.”
It was an hour before the two of them returned, and looked the horses
over and strolled up to bid Cunningham good night; and in the meanwhile
they had seen about the morrow's tiger, and another matter.