THE TONGA
"Badshah Junction, Mr. Amber ... Badshah Junction ... We'll be there in
'alf an hour ..."
Inexorably the voice droned on, repeating the admonition over and over.
Mutinous, Amber stirred and grumbled in his sleep; stirred and,
grumbling, wakened to another day. Doggott stood over him, doggedly
insistent.
"Not much time to dress, sir; we're due in less than 'alf an hour."
"Oh, _all_ right." Drowsy, stiff and sore in bone and muscle, Amber sat
up on the edge of the leather-padded bunk and stared out of the window,
wondering. With thundering flanges the train fled from east to west
across a landscape that still slept wrapped in purple shadows. Far in
the north the higher peaks of a long, low range of treeless hills were
burning with a pale, cold light. A few stars glimmered in the cloudless
vault--glimmered wan, doomed to sudden, swift extinction. Beside the
railroad a procession of telegraph poles marched with dipping loops of
wire between. There was nothing else to see. None the less the young
man, now fully alive to the business of the day, said "Thank God!" in
all sincerity.
"Even a tonga will be a relief after three days of this, Doggott," he
observed, surrendering himself to the ministrations of the servant.
It was the third morning succeeding that on which he had risen from his
bed in the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, possessed by a wild anxiety
to find his way with the least possible delay to Darjeeling and Sophia
Farrell--a journey which he was destined never to make. For while he
breakfasted a telegram had been brought to him.
"_Your train for Benares_," he read, "_leaves Howrah at nine-thirty.
Imperative_." It was signed: "_Pink Satin_."
He acted upon it without thought of disobedience; he was in the hands
of Labertouche, and Labertouche knew best. Between the lines he read
that the Englishman considered it unwise to attempt further
communication in Calcutta. Something had happened to eliminate the trip
to Darjeeling. Labertouche would undoubtedly contrive to meet and
enlighten him, either on the way or in Benares itself.
In the long, tiresome, eventless journey that followed his faith was
sorely tried; nor was it justified until the train paused some time
after midnight at Mogul Serai. There, before Amber and Doggott could
alight to change for Benares, their compartment was invaded by an
unmistakable loafer, very drunk. Tall and burly; with red-rimmed eyes
in a pasty pockmarked face, dirty and rusty with a week-old growth of
beard; clothed with sublime contempt for the mode and exalted beyond
reason with liquor--a typical loafer of the Indian railways--he flung
the door open and himself into Amber's arms, almost knocking the latter
down; and resented the accident at the top of his lungs.
"You miserable, misbegotten blighter of a wall-eyed American----" At
this point he became unprintably profane, and Doggott fell upon him
with the laudable intention of throwing him out. In the struggle Amber
caught his eye, and it was bright with meaning. "Pink Satin!" he
hissed. "He's gone ahead.... You're to keep on to Agra.... Change for
Badshah Junction, Rajputana Route.... Then tonga to Kuttarpur....
Farrell's there and his daughter.... That's right, my man, throw me
out!..."
His downfall was spectacular. In his enthusiasm for the part he played,
he had erred to the extent of delivering a blow in Doggott's face more
forcible, probably, than he had intended it to be. Promptly he landed
sprawling on the station platform and, in the sight of a multitude of
natives, but the moment gone by his shrieks roused from their sleep in
orderly ranks upon the floor, was gathered into the arms of the
stationmaster and had the seriousness of his mistake pointed out to him
forthwith and without regard to the sensitiveness of human anatomy.
And the train continued on its appointed way, bearing both Amber and
the injured Doggott.
Thus they had come to the heart of Rajputana.
In the chill of dawn they were deposited at Badshah Junction. A scanty
length of rude platform received them and their two small travelling
bags.
On their left the Haiderabad express roared away, following the night,
its course upon the parallel ribbons of shining steel marked by a
towering pillar of dust. On their right, beyond the sharp-cut edge of
the world, the sun had kindled a mighty conflagration in the skies. On
every hand, behind and before them, the desert lay in ebbing shadows, a
rolling waste seared by arid nullahs--the bone-dry beds of
long-forgotten streams. Off in the north the hills cropped up and stole
purposelessly away over the horizon.
They stood, then, forlorn in a howling desolation. For signs of life
they had the station, a flimsy shelter roofed with corrugated iron, a
beaten track that wandered off northwards and disappeared over a
grassless swell, a handful of mud huts at a distance, and the
ticket-agent. The latter a sleepy, surly Eurasian in pyjamas, surveyed
them listlessly from the threshold of the station, and without a sign
either of interest or contempt turned and locked himself in.
Amber sat down on his upturned suit-case and laughed and lit a
cigarette. Doggott growled. The noise of the train died to silence in
the distance, and a hyena came out of nowhere, exhibited himself upon
the ridge of a dry desert swell, and mocked them sardonically. Then he,
like the ticket-agent, went away, leaving an oppressive silence.
Presently the sun rose in glory and sent its burning level rays to cast
a shadow several rods long of an enraged American beating frantically
with clenched fists upon the door of an unresponsive railway station.
He hammered until he was a-weary, then deputised his task to Doggott,
who resourcefully found him a stone of size and proceeded to make dents
in the door. This method elicited the Eurasian. He came out, listened
attentively to abuse and languidly to their demands for a tonga to bear
them to Kuttarpur, and observed that the mail tonga left once a day--at
three in the afternoon. Doggott caught him as he was on the point of
returning to his interrupted repose and called his attention to the
unwisdom of his ways.
Apparently convinced, this ticket-agent announced his intention of
endeavouring to find a tonga for the sahib. Besides, he was not
unwilling to acquire rupees. He scowled thoughtfully at Amber,
ferociously at Doggott, went back into the station, gossipped casually
with the telegraph sounder for a quarter of an hour, and finally
reappearing, without a word or a nod left the platform for the road and
walked and walked and walked and walked. Within thirty yards his figure
was blurred by the dance of new-born heat devils. Within a hundred he
disappeared; the desert swallowed him up.
An hour passed as three. The heat became terrific; not a breath of wind
stirred. The face of the world lost its contours in wavering mirage.
The travellers found lukewarm water in the station and breakfasted
sparingly from their own stores of biscuit and tinned things. Then, in
the shadow of the station, they settled down to wait, bored to
extinction. Lulled by the hushed chatter of the telegraph sounder,
Doggott nodded and slept audibly; Amber nodded, felt himself going,
roused with a struggle, and lapsed into a dreary mid-world of
semi-stupor.
In the simple fulness of Asiatic time a tonga came from Heaven knew
where and roused him by rattling up beside the platform. He got up and
looked it over with a just eye and a temper none the sweeter for his
experience. It was a brute of a tonga, a patched and ramshackle wreck
of what had once been a real tonga, with no top to protect the
travellers from the sun, and accommodation only for three, including
the driver.
The Eurasian ticket-agent alighted and solicited rupees. He got them
and with them Amber's unvarnished opinion of the tonga; something which
was not received with civility by the driver.
He remained in his seat--a short, swart native with an evil countenance
and, across his knees, a sheathed tulwar--arguing with Amber in broken
English and, abusing him scandalously in impurest Hindi, flinging at
him in silken tones untranslatable scraps of bazaar Billingsgate. For,
as he explained in an audible aside to the ticket-agent, this sahib was
an outlander and, being as ignorant as most sahibs, could not
understand Hindi. At this the Eurasian turned away to hide a grin of
delight and the driver winked deliberately at Amber the while he
broadly sketched for him his ancestry and the manner of his life at
home and abroad.
Thunderstruck, Amber caught himself just as he was on the point of
attempting to drag the driver from his seat and beat him into a more
endurable frame of mind. He swallowed the hint and gave up the contest.
"Oh, very well," he conceded. "I presume you're trying to say there
isn't another tonga to be had and it can't be helped; but I don't like
your tone. However, there doesn't seem to be anything to do but take
you. How much for the two of us?"
"Your servant, sahib? He cannot ride in this tonga," asserted the
driver impassively.
"He can't! Why not?"
"You can see there is room for but two, and I have yet another
passenger."
"Where?"
"At the first dak-bungalow, Sahib, where the mail-tonga broke down last
night. This tonga, which I say is an excellent tonga, an _aram_ tonga,
a tonga for ease, is sent to take its place. More than this, I am
bidden to go in haste; therefore there is little time for you to decide
whether or not you will go with me alone. As for your servant, he can
follow by this afternoon's mail tonga."
Upon this ultimatum he stood, immovable; neither threats nor bribery
availed. It was an order, he said: he had no choice other than to obey.
Shabash! Would the sahib be pleased to make up his mind quickly?
Perforce, the sahib yielded. "It'll be Labertouche; he's arranged
this," he told himself. "That loafer said he'd gone on ahead of us."
And comforted he issued his orders to Doggott, who received and acceded
to them with all the ill-grace imaginable. He was to remain and follow
to Kuttarpur by the afternoon's tonga. He forthwith sulked--and Amber,
looking round upon the little Tephet that was Badshah Junction, had not
the heart to reprove the man.
"It's all very well, sir," said Doggott. "I carn't s'y anything, I
know. But, mark my words, sir--beggin' your pardon--there'll be trouble
come of this. That driver's as ill-favoured a scoundrel as ever I see.
And as for this 'ere ape, if 'e smiles at me just once more, I'll give
'im what-for." And he scowled so blackly upon the Eurasian that that
individual hastily sought the seclusion which the station granted.
Amber left him, then, with a travelling-bag and a revolver for company,
and the ticket-agent and his bad temper to occupy his mind.
Climbing aboard, the Virginian settled himself against the endless
discomforts of the ride which he foresaw; the tonga was anything but
"an _aram_ tonga--a tonga for ease," there was no shade and no breeze,
and the face of the land crawled with heat-bred haze.
To a crisp crackling of the whip-lash over the backs of the two sturdy,
shaggy, flea-bitten ponies, the tonga swept away from the station,
swift as a hunted fox with a dusty plume. The station dropped out of
sight and the desert took them to its sterile heart.
On every hand the long swales rolled away, sunbaked, rocky, innocent of
any sign of life other than the trooping telegraph poles in the south,
destitute of any sort of vegetation other than the inevitable ak and
gos. Wherever the eye wandered the prospect was the same--limitless
expanses of raw blistering ochres, salmon-pinks, and dry faded reds,
under a sky of brass and fire.
Amber leaned forward, watching the driver's face. "Your name,
tonga-wallah?" he enquired.
"Ram Nath, sahib." The man spoke without moving his head, attending
diligently to the management of his ponies.
"And this other passenger, who awaits us at the dak-bungalow, Ram
Nath--is he, perchance, one known both to you and to me?"
Ram Nath flicked the flagging ponies. "How should I know?" he returned
brusquely.
"One," persisted Amber, "who might be known by such a name as, say,
Pink Satin?"
"What manner of talk is this?" demanded Ram Nath. "I am no child to be
amused by a riddle. I know naught of your 'Pink Satin.'" He bent
forward, shortening his grasp upon the reins, as if to signify that the
interview was at an end.
Amber sat back, annoyed by the fellow's impudence yet sensitive to a
suspicion that Ram Nath was playing his part better than his passenger,
that the rebuke was merited by one who had ventured to speak of secret
things in a land whose very stones have ears. For all that he could say
their every move was watched by invisible spies, of whom the
rock-strewn waste through which they sped might well harbour a hidden
legion.... But perhaps, after all, Ram Nath had nothing whatever to do
with Labertouche. Undeniable as had been his wink, it might well have
been nothing more than an impertinence. At the thought Amber's eyes
darkened and hardened and he swore bitterly beneath his breath. If that
were so, he vowed, the tonga-wallah would pay dearly for the
indiscretion. He set his wits to contrive a way to satisfy his doubts.
Meanwhile the tonga rocked and bounded fiendishly over an infamous
parody of a road, turning and twisting between huge boulders and in and
out of pebbly nullahs, Ram Nath tooling it along with the hand of a
master. But all his attention was of necessity centred upon the ponies,
and presently his tulwar slipped from his knees and clattered upon the
floor of the tonga. Amber saw his chance and put his foot upon it.
"Ram Nath," he asked gently, "have you no other arms?"
"I were a fool had I not." The man did not deign to glance round. "He
hath need of weapons who doth traffick with the Chosen of the Voice,
sahib."
"Ah, that Voice!" cried Amber in exasperation. "I grow weary of the
word, am Nath."
"That may well be," returned the man, imperturbable. "None the less it
were well for you to have a care how you fondle the revolver in your
pocket, sahib. Should it by any chance go off and the bullet find
lodgment in your tonga-wallah, you are like to hear more of that Voice,
and from less friendly lips."
"I think you have eyes in the back of your head, Ram Nath." Amber
withdrew his hand from his coat pocket and laughed shortly as he spoke.
"There is a saying in this country, sahib, that even the stones in the
desert have ears to hear and eyes to see and tongues withal to tell
what they have seen and heard."
"Ah-h!... That is a wise saying, Ram Nath."
"There be those I could name who would do well to lay that saying to
heart, sahib."
"You are right, indeed.... Now if there be aught of truth in that
saying, and if one were unwisely to speak a certain name, even
here----"
"The echo of that name might be heard beyond the threshold of a certain
Gateway, sahib."
Amber grunted and said no more, contented now with the assurance that
he was in truth in touch with Labertouche, that this Ram Nath was an
employee of the I.S.S. The wink was now explained away with all the
rest of the tonga-wallah's churlishness. Since there was a purpose
behind it all, the Virginian was satisfied to contain his curiosity.
Nevertheless he could not help thinking that there must be some
fantastic exaggeration in the excessive degree of caution that was thus
tacitly imposed upon him.
He looked round him, narrowing his eyes against the sun-glare; and the
desert showed itself to his eyes a desert waste and nothing more. The
day lay stark upon its lifeless face and it seemed as if, within the
wide rim of the horizon, no thing moved save the tonga. They were then
passing rapidly over higher ground and seemed to have drawn a shade
nearer to the raw red northern hills. Amber would have said that they
could never have found a solitude more absolute.
The thought was still in his mind when the tonga dipped unexpectedly
over another ridge, began to descend another long grade of dead,
parched earth, and discovered some distance ahead of them on the
wagontrack a cloud of dust like a tinted veil, so dense, opaque, and
wide and high that its cause was altogether concealed in its reddish,
glittering convolutions. But the Virginian knew the land well enough to
recognise the phenomenon and surmise its cause, even before his ears
began to be assailed by the hideous rasping screech of wheels of solid
wood revolving reluctantly on rough-hewn axles guiltless of grease. And
as the tonga swiftly lessened the distance, his gaze, penetrating the
thinning folds, discerned the contours of a cotton-wain drawn by twin
stunted bullocks, patient noses to the ground, tails a-switch. Beside
his cattle the driver plodded, goad in hand, a naked sword upon his
hip. Within his reach, between the rude bales of the loaded cart, the
butt of a brass-bound musket protruded significantly.... All men went
armed in that wild land: to do as much is one of the boons attendant
upon citizenship in an unprogressive, independent native State.
Deliberately enough the carter swerved his beasts aside to make way for
the tonga, lest by undue haste he should make himself seem other than
what he was--a free man and a Rajput. But when his fierce, hawk-like
eyes encountered those of the dak traveller, his attitude changed
curiously and completely. Recognition and reverence fought with
surprise in his expression, and as Ram Nath swung the tonga past the
man salaamed profoundly. His voice, as he rose, came after them,
resonant and clear:
"_Hail, thou Chosen of the Gateway! Hail_!"
Amber neither turned to look nor replied. But his frown deepened. The
incident passed into his history, marked only by the terse comment it
educed from Ram Nath--words which were flung curtly over the
tonga-wallah's shoulder: "Eyes to see and ears to hear and a tongue
withal ... sahib!"
The Virginian said nothing. But it was in his mind that he had indeed
thrust his head into the lion's mouth by thus adventuring into the
territory which every instinct of caution and common-sense proclaimed
taboo to him--the erstwhile kingdom of the Maharana Har Dyal Rutton. It
was, in a word, foolhardy--nothing less. But for his pledged word it
had been so easy to order Ram Nath to convey him back to Badshah
Junction to order and to enforce obedience at the pistol's point, if
needs be! Honour held him helpless, bound upon the Wheel of his
Destiny: he must and would go on....
He sat in silent gloom while sixty minutes were drummed out by the
flying hoofs. The hills folded in about the way, diverting it hither
and yon with raw, seamed spurs, whose flanks flung back harsh and heavy
echoes of the tonga's flight through riven gulch and scrub-grown
valley. And then it was that Ram Nath proved his mettle. Hardened
himself, he showed no mercy to his passenger, and never once drew rein,
though the tonga danced from rock to ridge and ridge to rut and back
again, like a tin can on the tail of an astonished dog. As for Amber,
he wedged his feet and held on with both hands, grimly, groaning in
spirit when he did not in the flesh, foreseeing as he did nine hours
more of this heroic torture punctuated only by brief respites at the
end of each stage.