A dog-cart drove up, and a man entered, mopping his head. He was editor of the one daily paper13 at the capital of a province of twenty-five million natives and a few hundred white men, and as his staff was limited to himself and one assistant, his office hours ran variously from ten to twenty a day.
‘Hi, Raines; you’re supposed to know everything,’ said Martyn, stopping him. ‘How’s this Madras “scarcity” going to turn out?’
‘No one knows as yet. There’s a message as long as your arm coming in on the telephone. I’ve left my cub to fill it out. Madras has owned she can’t manage it alone, and Jimmy seems to have a free hand in getting all the men he needs. Arbuthnot’s warned to hold himself in readiness.’
‘“Badger” Arbuthnot?’
‘The Peshawur chap. Yes, and the Pi wires that Ellis and Clay have been moved from the North-West already, and they’ve taken half a dozen Bombay men, too. It’s pukka14 famine, by the looks of it.’
‘They’re nearer the scene of action than we are; but if it comes to indenting on the Punjab this early, there’s more in this than meets the eye,’ said Martyn.
‘Here today and gone tomorrow. Didn’t come to stay for ever,’ said Scott, dropping one of Marryat’s novels, and rising to his feet. ‘Martyn, your sister’s waiting for you.’
A rough grey horse was backing and shifting at the edge of the verandah, where the light of a kerosene-lamp fell on a brown calico habit and a white face under a grey felt hat.
‘Right, O,’ said Martyn. ‘I’m ready. Better come and dine with us if you’ve nothing to do, Scott. William, is there any dinner in the house?’
‘I’ll go home first and see,’ was the rider’s answer. ‘You can drive him over – at eight, remember.’
Scott moved leisurely to his room, and changed into the evening-dress of the season and the country: spotless white linen from head to foot, with a broad silk cummerbund. Dinner at the Martyns was a decided improvement on the goat-mutton, twiney-tough fowl, and tinned entrées of the Club. But it was a great pity Martyn could not afford to send his sister to the Hills for the hot weather. As an Acting District Superintendent of Police, Martyn drew the magnificent pay of six hundred depreciated silver rupees a month, and his little four-roomed bungalow said just as much. There were the usual blue-and-white striped jail-made rugs on the uneven floor; the usual glass-studded Amritsar phulkaris15 draped to nails driven into the flaking whitewash of the walls; the usual half-dozen chairs that did not match, picked up at sales of dead men’s effects; and the usual streaks of black grease where the leather punka-thong ran through the wall. It was as though everything had been unpacked the night before to be repacked next morning. Not a door in the house was true on its hinges. The little windows, fifteen feet up, were darkened with wasp-nests, and lizards hunted flies between the beams of the wood-ceiled roof. But all this was part of Scott’s life. Thus did people live who had such an income; and in a land where each man’s pay, age, and position are printed in a book, that all may read, it is hardly worth while to play at pretences in word or deed. Scott counted eight years’ service in the Irrigation Department, and drew eight hundred rupees a month, on the understanding that if he served the State faithfully for another twenty-two years he could retire on a pension of some four hundred rupees a month. His working life, which had been spent chiefly under canvas or in temporary shelters where a man could sleep, eat, and write letters, was bound up with the opening and guarding of irrigation canals, the handling of two or three thousand workmen of all castes and creeds, and the payment of vast sums of coined silver. He had finished that spring, not without credit, the last section of the great Mosuhl Canal, and – much against his will, for he hated office work – had been sent in to serve during the hot weather on the accounts and supply side of the Department, with sole charge of the sweltering sub-office at the capital of the Province. Martyn knew this; William, his sister, knew it; and everybody knew it.
Scott knew, too, as well as the rest of the world, that Miss Martyn had come out to India four years before, to keep house for her brother, who, as everyone, again, knew, had borrowed the money to pay for her passage, and that she ought, as all the world said, to have married long ago. Instead of this, she had refused some half a dozen subalterns, a civilian twenty years her senior, one major, and a man in the Indian Medical Department. This, too, was common property. She had ‘stayed down three hot weathers’, as the saying is, because her brother was in debt and could not afford the expense of her keep at even a cheap hill-station. Therefore her face was white as bone, and in the centre of her forehead was a big silvery scar about the size of a shilling – the mark of a Delhi sore, which is the same as a ‘Bagdad date’. This comes from drinking bad water, and slowly eats into the flesh till it is ripe enough to be burned out with acids.
None the less William had enjoyed herself hugely in her four years. Twice she had been nearly drowned while fording a river on horseback; once she had been run away with on a camel; had witnessed a midnight attack of thieves on her brother’s camp; had seen justice administered, with long sticks, in the open under trees; could speak Urdu and even rough Punjabi with a fluency that was envied by her seniors; had altogether fallen out of the habit of writing to her aunts in England, or cutting the pages of the English magazines; had been through a very bad cholera year, seeing sights unfit to be told; and had wound up her experiences by six weeks of typhoid fever, during which her head had been shaved; and hoped to keep her twenty-third birthday that September. It is conceivable that her aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling all over her head; who answered indifferently to the name of William or Bill; whose speech was heavy with the flowers of the vernacular; who could act in amateur theatricals, play on the banjo, rule eight servants and two horses, their accounts and their diseases, and look men slowly and deliberately between the eyes – yea, after they had proposed to her and been rejected.
‘I like men who do things,’ she had confided to a man in the Educational Department, who was teaching the sons of cloth merchants and dyers the beauty of Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’ in annotated cram-books; and when he grew poetical, William explained that she ‘didn’t understand poetry very much; it made her head ache’, and another broken heart took refuge at the Club. But it was all William’s fault. She delighted in hearing men talk of their own work, and that is the most fatal way of bringing a man to your feet.
Scott had known her more or less for some three years, meeting her, as a rule, under canvas when his camp and her brother’s joined for a day on the edge of the Indian Desert. He had danced with her several times at the big Christmas gatherings, when as many as five hundred white people came into the station; and he had always a great respect for her housekeeping and her dinners.
She looked more like a boy than ever when, after their meal, she sat, one foot tucked under her, on the leather camp-sofa, rolling cigarettes for her brother, her low forehead puckered beneath the dark curls as she twiddled the papers. She stuck out her rounded chin when the tobacco stayed in place, and, with a gesture as true as a school-boy’s throwing a stone, tossed the finished article across the room to Martyn, who caught it with one hand, and continued his talk with Scott. It was all ‘shop’ – canals and the policing of canals; the sins of villagers who stole more water than they had paid for, and the grosser sin of native constables who connived at the thefts; of the transplanting bodily of villages to newly-irrigated ground, and of the coming fight with the desert in the south when the Provincial funds should warrant the opening of the long-surveyed Luni Protective Canal System. And Scott spoke openly of his great desire to be put on one particular section of the work where he knew the land and the people, and Martyn sighed for a billet in the Himalayan foot-hills, and spoke his mind of his superiors, and William rolled cigarettes and said nothing, but smiled gravely on her brother bec
ause he was happy.
At ten Scott’s horse came to the door, and the evening was ended.
The lights of the two low bungalows in which the daily paper was printed showed bright across the road. It was too early to try to find sleep, and Scott drifted over to the editor. Raines, stripped to the waist like a sailor at a gun, lay in a long chair, waiting for night telegrams. He had a theory that if a man did not stay by his work all day and most of the night he laid himself open to fever; so he ate and slept among his files.
‘Can you do it?’ he said drowsily. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you over.’
‘About what? I’ve been dining at the Martyns’.’
‘The famine, of course, Martyn’s warned for it, too. They’re taking men where they can find ’em. I sent a note to you at the Club just now, asking if you could do us a letter once a week from the south – between two and three columns, say. Nothing sensational, of course, but just plain facts about who is doing what, and so forth. Our regular rates – ten rupees a column.’
‘Sorry, but it’s out of my line,’ Scott answered, staring absently at the map of India on the wall. ‘It’s rough on Martyn – very. Wonder what he’ll do with his sister. Wonder what the deuce they’ll do with me? I’ve no famine experience. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Am I ordered?’
‘Oh, yes. Here’s the wire. They’ll put you on relief-works,’ Raines went on, ‘with a horde of Madrassis dying like flies; one native apothecary and half a pint of cholera-mixture among the ten thousand of you. It comes of your being idle for the moment. Every man who isn’t doing two men’s work seems to have been called upon. Hawkins evidently believes in Punjabis. It’s going to be quite as bad as anything they have had in the last ten years.’
‘It’s all in the day’s work, worse luck. I suppose I shall get my orders officially sometime tomorrow. I’m glad I happened to drop in. Better go and pack my kit now. Who relieves me here – do you know?’
Raines turned over a sheaf of telegrams. ‘McEuan,’ said he, ‘from Murree.’16
Scott chuckled. ‘He thought he was going to be cool all summer. He’ll be very sick about this. Well, no good talking. Night.’
Two hours later, Scott, with a clear conscience, laid himself down to rest on a string cot in a bare room. Two worn bullock-trunks, a leather water-bottle, a tin ice-box, and his pet saddle sewed up in sacking were piled at the door, and the Club secretary’s receipt for last month’s bill was under his pillow. His orders came next morning, and with them an unofficial telegram from Sir James Hawkins, who did not forget good men, bidding him report himself with all speed at some unpronounceable place fifteen hundred miles to the south, for the famine was sore in the land, and white men were needed.
A pink and fattish youth arrived in the red-hot noonday, whimpering a little at fate and famines, which never allowed anyone three months’ peace. He was Scott’s successor – another cog in the machinery, moved forward behind his fellow, whose services, as the official announcement ran, ‘were placed at the disposal of the Madras Government for famine duty until further orders’. Scott handed over the funds in his charge, showed him the coolest corner in the office, warned him against excess of zeal, and, as twilight fell, departed from the Club in a hired carriage, with his faithful body servant, Faiz Ullah, and a mound of disordered baggage atop, to catch the Southern Mail at the loopholed and bastioned railway-station. The heat from the thick brick walls struck him across the face as if it had been a hot towel, and he reflected that there were at least five nights and four days of travel before him. Faiz Ullah, used to the chances of service, plunged into the crowd on the stone platform, while Scott, a black cheroot between his teeth, waited till his compartment should be set away. A dozen native policemen, with their rifles and bundles, shouldered into the press of Punjabi farmers, Sikh craftsmen, and greasy-locked Afreedee pedlars, escorting with all pomp Martyn’s uniform-case, water-bottles, ice-box, and bedding-roll. They saw Faiz Ullah’s lifted hand, and steered for it.
‘My Sahib and your Sahib,’ said Faiz Ullah to Martyn’s man, ‘will travel together. Thou and I, O brother, will thus secure the servants’ places close by, and because of our masters’ authority none will dare to disturb us.’
When Faiz Ullah reported all things ready, Scott settled down coatless and bootless on the broad leather-covered bunk. The heat under the iron-arched roof of the station might have been anything over a hundred degrees. At the last moment Martyn entered, hot and dripping.
‘Don’t swear,’ said Scott, lazily; ‘it’s too late to change your carriage; and we’ll divide the ice.’
‘What are you doing here?’ said the policeman.
‘Lent to the Madras Government, same as you. By Jove, it’s a bender of a night! Are you taking any of your men down?’
‘A dozen. Suppose I’ll have to superintend relief distributions. Didn’t know you were under orders too.’
‘I didn’t till after I left you last night. Raines had the news first. My orders came this morning. McEuan relieved me at four, and I got off at once. Shouldn’t wonder if it wouldn’t be a good thing – this famine – if we come through it alive.’
‘Jimmy ought to put you and me to work together,’ said Martyn; and then, after a pause: ‘My sister’s here.’
‘Good business,’ said Scott, heartily. ‘Going to get off at Umballa, I suppose, and go up to Simla. Who’ll she stay with there?’
‘No-o; that’s just the trouble of it. She’s going down with me.’
Scott sat bolt upright under the oil lamp as the train jolted past Tarn-Taran station. ‘What! You don’t mean you couldn’t afford –’
‘Oh, I’d have scraped up the money somehow.’
‘You might have come to me, to begin with,’ said Scott, stiffly; ‘we aren’t altogether strangers.’
‘Well, you needn’t be stuffy about it. I might, but – you don’t know my sister. I’ve been explaining and exhorting and entreating and commanding and all the rest of it all day – lost my temper since seven this morning, and haven’t got it back yet – but she wouldn’t hear of any compromise. A woman’s entitled to travel with her husband if she wants to, and William says she’s on the same footing. You see, we’ve been together all our lives, more or less, since my people died. It isn’t as if she were an ordinary sister.’
‘All the sisters I’ve ever heard of would have stayed where they were well off.’
‘She’s as clever as a man, confound her,’ Martyn went on. ‘She broke up the bungalow over my head while I was talking at her. Settled the whole subchiz [outfit] in three hours – servants, horses, and all. I didn’t get my orders till nine.’
‘Jimmy Hawkins won’t be pleased,’ said Scott. ‘A famine’s no place for a woman.’
‘Mrs Jim – I mean Lady Jim’s in camp with him. At any rate, she says she will look after my sister. William wired down to her on her own responsibility, asking if she could come, and knocked the ground from under me by showing me her answer.’
Scott laughed aloud. ‘If she can do that she can take care of herself, and Mrs Jim won’t let her run into any mischief. There aren’t many women, sisters or wives, who would walk into a famine with their eyes open. It isn’t as if she didn’t know what these things mean. She was through the Jaloo cholera last year.’
The train stopped at Amritsar, and Scott went back to the ladies’ compartment, immediately behind their carriage. William, a cloth riding-cap on her curls, nodded affably.
‘Come in and have some tea,’ she said. ‘Best thing in the world for heat-apoplexy.’
‘Do I look as if I were going to have heat-apoplexy?’
‘Never can tell,’ said William, wisely. ‘It’s always best to be ready.’
She had arranged her belongings with the knowledge of an old campaigner. A felt-covered water-bottle hung in the draught of one of the shuttered windows; a tea-set of Russian china, packed in a wadded basket, stood ready on the seat; and a travelling spirit-lamp was cla
mped against the woodwork above it.
William served them generously, in large cups, hot tea, which saves the veins of the neck from swelling inopportunely on a hot night. It was characteristic of the girl that, her plan of action once settled, she asked for no comments on it. Life with men who had a great deal of work to do, and very little time to do it in, had taught her the wisdom of effacing as well as of fending for herself. She did not by word or deed suggest that she would be useful, comforting, or beautiful in their travels, but continued about her business serenely: put the cups back without clatter when tea was ended, and made cigarettes for her guests.
‘This time last night,’ said Scott, ‘we didn’t expect – er – this kind of thing, did we?’
‘I’ve learned to expect anything,’ said William. ‘You know, in our service, we live at the end of the telegraph; but, of course, this ought to be a good thing for us all, departmentally – if we live.’
‘It knocks us out of the running in our own Province,’ Scott replied, with equal gravity. ‘I hoped to be put on the Luni Protective Works this cold weather; but there’s no saying how long the famine may keep us.’
‘Hardly beyond October, I should think,’ said Martyn. ‘It will be ended, one way or the other, then.’
‘And we’ve nearly a week of this,’ said William. ‘Sha’n’t we be dusty when it’s over?’
For a night and a day they knew their surroundings; and for a night and a day, skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a narrow-gauge line, they remembered how in the days of their apprenticeship they had come by that road from Bombay. Then the languages in which the names of the stations were written changed, and they launched south into a foreign land, where the very smells were new. Many long and heavily-laden grain trains were in front of them, and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from far off. They waited in extemporized sidings blocked by processions of empty trucks returning to the north, and were coupled on to slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where; but it was furiously hot; and they walked to and fro among sacks, and dogs howled.