Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the untravelled Englishman – the flat, red India of palm-tree, palmyra-palm, and rice, the India of the picture-books, of Little Henry and His Bearer17 – all dead and dry in the baking heat. They had left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and far behind them. Here the people crawled to the side of the train, holding their little ones in their arms; and a loaded truck would be left behind, men and women clustering round and above it like ants by spilled honey. Once in the twilight they saw on a dusty plain a regiment of little brown men, each bearing a body over his shoulder; and when the train stopped to leave yet another truck, they perceived that the burdens were not corpses, but only foodless folk picked up beside their dead oxen by a corps of Irregular troops. Now they met more white men, here one and there two, whose tents stood close to the line, and who came armed with written authorities and angry words to cut off a truck. They were too busy to do more than nod at Scott and Martyn, and stare curiously at William, who could do nothing except make tea, and watch how her men staved off the rush of wailing, walking skeletons, putting them down three at a time in heaps, with their own hands uncoupling the marked trucks, or taking receipts from the hollow-eyed, weary white men, who spoke another argot than theirs.
They ran out of ice, out of soda-water, and out of tea; for they were six days and seven nights on the road, and it seemed to them like seven times seven years.
At last, in a dry, hot dawn, in a land of death, lit by long red fires of railway sleepers, where they were burning the dead, they came to their destination, and were met by Jim Hawkins, the Head of the Famine, unshaven, unwashed, but cheery, and entirely in command of affairs.
Martyn, he decreed, then and there, was to live on trains till further orders; was to go back with empty trucks, filling them with starving people as he found them, and dropping them at a famine-camp on the edge of the Eight Districts. He would pick up supplies and return, and his constables would guard the loaded grain-cars, also picking up people, and would drop them at a camp a hundred miles south. Scott – Hawkins was very glad to see Scott again – would, that same hour, take charge of a convoy of bullock-carts, and would go south, feeding as he went, to yet another famine-camp, far from the rail, where he would leave his starving – there would be no lack of starving on the route – and wait for orders by telegraph. Generally, Scott was in all small things to do what he thought best.
William bit her underlip. There was no one in the wide world like her one brother, but Martyn’s orders gave him no discretion. She came out, masked with dust from head to foot, a horse-shoe wrinkle on her forehead, put there by much thinking during the past week, but as self-possessed as ever. Mrs Jim – who should have been Lady Jim, but that no one remembered to call her aright – took possession of her with a little gasp.
‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,’ she almost sobbed. ‘You oughtn’t to, of course, but there – there isn’t another woman in the place, and we must help each other, you know; and we’ve all the wretched people and the little babies they are selling.’
‘I’ve seen some,’ said William.
‘Isn’t it ghastly? I’ve bought twenty; they’re in our camp; but won’t you have something to eat first? We’ve more than ten people can do here; and I’ve got a horse for you. Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come! You’re a Punjabi too, you know.’
‘Steady, Lizzie,’ said Hawkins, over his shoulder. ‘We’ll look after you, Miss Martyn. Sorry I can’t ask you to breakfast, Martyn. You’ll have to eat as you go. Leave two of your men to help Scott. These poor devils can’t stand up to load carts. Saunders’ (this to the engine-driver, half asleep in the cab), ‘back down and get those empties away. You’ve ‘line clear’ to Anundrapillay; they’ll give you orders north of that. Scott, load up your carts from that B. P. P. truck, and be off as soon as you can. The Eurasian in the pink shirt is your interpreter and guide. You’ll find an apothecary of sorts tied to the yoke of the second wagon. He’s been trying to bolt; you’ll have to look after him. Lizzie, drive Miss Martyn to camp, and tell them to send the red horse down here for me.’
Scott, with Faiz Ullah and two policemen, was already busy on the carts, backing them up to the truck and unbolting the sideboards quietly, while the others pitched in the bags of millet and wheat. Hawkins watched him for as long as it took to fill one cart.
‘That’s a good man,’ he said. ‘If all goes well I shall work him – hard.’ This was Jim Hawkins’s notion of the highest compliment one human being could pay another.
An hour later Scott was under way; the apothecary threatening him with the penalties of the law for that he, a member of the Subordinate Medical Department, had been coerced and bound against his will and all laws governing the liberty of the subject; the pink-shirted Eurasian begging leave to see his mother, who happened to be dying some three miles away: ‘Only verree, verree short leave of absence, and will presently return, sar –’; the two constables, armed with staves, bringing up the rear; and Faiz Ullah, a Mohammedan’s contempt for all Hindoos and foreigners in every line of his face, explaining to the drivers that though Scott Sahib was a man to be feared on all fours, he, Faiz Ullah, was Authority itself.
The procession creaked past Hawkins’s camp – three stained tents under a clump of dead trees; behind them the famine-shed where a crowd of hopeless ones tossed their arms around the cooking-kettles.
‘Wish to Heaven William had kept out of it,’ said Scott to himself, after a glance. ‘We’ll have cholera, sure as a gun, when the Rains come.’
But William seemed to have taken kindly to the operations of the Famine Code, which, when famine is declared, supersede the workings of the ordinary law. Scott saw her, the centre of a mob of weeping women, in a calico riding-habit and blue-grey felt hat with a gold puggaree.18
‘I want fifty rupees, please. I forgot to ask Jack before he went away. Can you lend it me? It’s for condensed milk for the babies,’ said she.
Scott took the money from his belt, and handed it over without a word. ‘For goodness sake take care of yourself,’ he said.
‘Oh, I shall be all right. We ought to get the milk in two days. By the way, the orders are, I was to tell you, that you’re to take one of Sir Jim’s horses. There’s a grey Cabuli here that I thought would be just your style, so I’ve said you’d take him. Was that right?’
‘That’s awfully good of you. We can’t either of us talk much about style, I’m afraid.’
Scott was in a weather-stained drill shooting-kit, very white at the seams and a little frayed at the wrists. William regarded him thoughtfully, from his pith helmet to his greased ankle-boots. ‘You look very nice, I think. Are you sure you’ve everything you’ll need – quinine, chlorodyne, and so on?’
‘Think so,’ said Scott, patting three or four of his shooting-pockets as the horse was led up, and he mounted and rode alongside his convoy.
‘Good-bye,’ he cried.
‘Good-bye, and good luck,’ said William. ‘I’m awfully obliged for the money.’ She turned on a spurred heel and disappeared into the tent, while the carts pushed on past the famine-sheds, past the roaring lines of the thick, fat fires, down to the baked Gehenna19 of the South.
II
So let us melt and make no noise,
No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
’Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
A Valediction.20
It was punishing work, even though he travelled by night and camped by day; but within the limits of his vision there was no man whom Scott could call master. He was as free as Jimmy Hawkins – freer, in fact, for the Government held the Head of the Famine tied neatly to a telegraph-wire, and if Jimmy had ever regarded telegrams seriously, the death-rate of that famine would have been much higher than it was.
At the end of a few days’ crawling Scott learned something of the size of the India which he served; and it astonished him. H
is carts, as you know, were loaded with wheat, millet, and barley, good food-grains needing only a little grinding. But the people to whom he brought the life-giving stuffs were rice-eaters. They knew how to hull rice in their mortars, but they knew nothing of the heavy stone querns of the North, and less of the material that the white man convoyed so laboriously. They clamoured for rice – unhusked paddy, such as they were accustomed to – and, when they found that there was none, broke away weeping from the sides of the cart. What was the use of these strange hard grains that choked their throats? They would die. And then and there there were many of them kept their word. Others took their allowance, and bartered enough millet to feed a man through a week for a few handfuls of rotten rice saved by some less unfortunate. A few put their shares into the rice-mortars, pounded it, and made a paste with foul water; but they were very few. Scott understood dimly that many people in the India of the South ate rice, as a rule, but he had spent his service in a grain Province, had seldom seen rice in the blade or the ear, and least of all would have believed that, in time of deadly need, men would die at arm’s length of plenty, sooner than touch food they did not know. In vain the interpreters interpreted; in vain his two policemen showed by vigorous pantomime what should be done. The starving crept away to their bark and weeds, grubs, leaves, and clay, and left the open sacks untouched. But sometimes the women laid their phantoms of children at Scott’s feet, looking back as they staggered away.
Faiz Ullah opined it was the will of God that these foreigners should die, and therefore it remained only to give orders to burn the dead. None the less there was no reason why the Sahib should lack his comforts, and Faiz Ullah, a campaigner of experience, had picked up a few lean goats and had added them to the procession. That they might give milk for the morning meal, he was feeding them on the good grain that these imbeciles rejected. ‘Yes,’ said Faiz Ullah; ‘if the Sahib thought fit, a little milk might be given to some of the babies’; but, as the Sahib well knew, babies were cheap, and, for his own part, Faiz Ullah held that there was no Government order as to babies. Scott spoke forcefully to Faiz Ullah and the two policemen, and bade them capture goats where they could find them. This they most joyfully did, for it was a recreation, and many ownerless goats were driven in. Once fed, the poor brutes were willing enough to follow the carts, and a few days’ good food – food such as human beings died for lack of – set them in milk again.
‘But I am no goatherd,’ said Faiz Ullah. ‘It is against my izzat [my honour].’
‘When we cross the Bias River21 again we will talk of izzat,’ Scott replied. ‘Till that day thou and the policemen shall be sweepers to the camp, if I give the order.’
‘Thus, then, it is done,’ grunted Faiz Ullah, ‘if the Sahib will have it so’; and he showed how a goat should be milked, while Scott stood over him.
‘Now we will feed them,’ said Scott; ‘thrice a day we will feed them’; and he bowed his back to the milking, and took a horrible cramp.
When you have to keep connection unbroken between a restless mother of kids and a baby who is at the point of death, you suffer in all your system. But the babies were fed. Morning, noon and evening Scott would solemnly lift them out one by one from their nest of gunny-bags22 under the cart-tilts. There were always many who could do no more than breathe, and the milk was dropped into their toothless mouths drop by drop, with due pauses when they choked. Each morning, too, the goats were fed; and since they would straggle without a leader, and since the natives were hirelings, Scott was forced to give up riding, and pace slowly at the head of his flocks, accommodating his step to their weaknesses. All this was sufficiently absurd, and he felt the absurdity keenly; but at least he was saving life, and when the women saw that their children did not die, they made shift to eat a little of the strange foods, and crawled after the carts, blessing the master of the goats.
‘Give the women something to live for,’ said Scott to himself, as he sneezed in the dust of a hundred little feet, ‘and they’ll hang on somehow. But this beats William’s condensed-milk trick all to pieces. I shall never live it down, though.’
He reached his destination very slowly, found that a rice-ship had come in from Burmah, and that stores of paddy were available; found also an overworked Englishman in charge of the shed, and, loading the carts, set back to cover the ground he had already passed. He left some of the children and half his goats at the famine-shed. For this he was not thanked by the Englishman, who had already more stray babies than he knew what to do with. Scott’s back was suppled to stooping now, and he went on with his wayside ministrations in addition to distributing the paddy. More babies and more goats were added unto him; but now some of the babies wore rags, and beads round their wrists or necks. ‘That,’ said the interpreter, as though Scott did not know, ‘signifies that their mothers hope in eventual contingency to resume them offeecially.’
‘The sooner the better,’ said Scott; but at the same time he marked, with the pride of ownership, how this or that little Ramasawmy was putting on flesh like a bantam. As the paddy-carts were emptied he headed for Hawkins’s camp by the railway, timing his arrival to fit in with the dinner-hour, for it was long since he had eaten at a cloth. He had no desire to make any dramatic entry, but an accident of the sunset ordered it that, when he had taken off his helmet to get the evening breeze, the low light should fall across his forehead, and he could not see what was before him; while one waiting at the tent door beheld, with new eyes, a young man, beautiful as Paris,23 a god in a halo of golden dust, walking slowly at the head of his flocks, while at his knee ran small naked Cupids. But she laughed – William, in a slate-coloured blouse, laughed consumedly till Scott, putting the best face he could upon the matter, halted his armies and bade her admire the kindergarten. It was an unseemly sight, but the proprieties had been left ages ago, with the tea-party at Amritsar Station, fifteen hundred miles to the northward.
‘They are coming on nicely,’ said William. ‘We’ve only five-and-twenty here now. The women are beginning to take them away again.’
‘Are you in charge of the babies, then?’
‘Yes – Mrs Jim and I. We didn’t think of goats, though. We’ve been trying condensed milk and water.’
‘Any losses?’
‘More than I care to think of,’ said William, with a shudder. ‘And you?’
Scott said nothing. There had been many little burials along his route – many mothers who had wept when they did not find again the children they had trusted to the care of the Government.
Then Hawkins came out carrying a razor, at which Scott looked hungrily, for he had a beard that he did not love. And when they sat down to dinner in the tent he told his tale in few words, as it might have been an official report. Mrs Jim snuffled from time to time, and Jim bowed his head judicially; but William’s grey eyes were on the cleanshaven face, and it was to her that Scott seemed to speak.
‘Good for the Pauper Province!’24 said William, her chin in her hand, as she leaned forward among the wine-glasses. Her cheeks had fallen in, and the scar on her forehead was more prominent than ever, but the well-turned neck rose roundly as a column from the ruffle of the blouse which was the accepted evening-dress in camp.
‘It was awfully absurd at times,’ said Scott. ‘You see I didn’t know much about milking or babies. They’ll chaff my head off, if the tale goes north.’
‘Let ’em,’ said William, haughtily. ‘We’ve all done coolie-work since we came. I know Jack has.’ This was to Hawkins’s address, and the big man smiled blandly.
‘Your brother’s a highly efficient officer, William,’ said he, ‘and I’ve done him the honour of treating him as he deserves. Remember, I write the confidential reports.’
‘Then you must say that William’s worth her weight in gold,’ said Mrs Jim. ‘I don’t know what we should have done without her. She has been everything to us.’ She dropped her hand upon William’s, which was rough with much handling of reins, and William patted
it softly. Jim beamed on the company. Things were going well with his world. Three of his more grossly incompetent men had died, and their places had been filled by their betters. Every day brought the rains nearer. They had put out the famine in five of the Eight Districts, and, after all, the death-rate had not been too heavy – things considered. He looked Scott over carefully, as an ogre looks over a man, and rejoiced in his thews and iron-hard condition.
‘He’s just the least bit in the world tucked up,’25 said Jim to himself, ‘but he can do two men’s work yet.’ Then he was aware that Mrs Jim was telegraphing to him, and according to the domestic code the message ran: ‘A clear case. Look at them!’
He looked and listened. All that William was saying was: ‘What can you expect of a country where they call a bhistee [a water-carrier] a tunnicutch?’ and all that Scott answered was: ‘I shall be precious glad to get back to the Club. Save me a dance at the Christmas ball, won’t you?’
‘It’s a far cry from here to the Lawrence Hall,’26 said Jim. ‘Better turn in early, Scott. It’s paddy-carts tomorrow; you’ll begin loading at five.’
‘Aren’t you going to give Mr Scott one day’s rest?’
‘Wish I could, Lizzie. ’Fraid I can’t. As long as he can stand up we must use him.’
‘Well, I’ve had one Europe evening, at least… By Jove, I’d nearly forgotten! What do I do about those babies of mine?’
‘Leave them here,’ said William – ‘we are in charge of that – and as many goats as you can spare. I must learn how to milk now.’
‘If you care to get up early enough tomorrow I’ll show you. I have to milk, you see; and, by the way, half of ’em have beads and things round their necks. You must be careful not to take ’em off, in case the mothers turn up.’
‘You forget I’ve had some experience here.’