The Day's Work - Part 01

"It's awful," said Mrs. Strickland, half crying, "to think of his growing up like a little heathen." Mrs. Strickland (Miss Youghal that was, if you remember her) had been born and brought up in England, and did not quite understand things.

"Let him alone," said Strickland; "he'll grow out of it all, or it will only come back to him in dreams.""Are you sure?" said his wife, to whom Strickland's least word was pure truth.

"Quite. I was sent home when I was seven, and they flicked it out of me with a wet towel at Harrow. Public schools don't encourage any-thing that isn't quite English."

Mrs. Strickland shuddered, for she had been trying not to think of the separation that follows motherhood in India, and makes life there, for all that is written to the contrary, not quite the most desirable thing in the world. Adam trotted out to hear about more miracles, and his nurse must have worried him beyond bounds, for she came back weeping, saying that Adam Baba was in danger of being eaten alive by wild horses.

As a matter of fact, he had shaken off Juma by bolting between a couple of picketed horses and lying down under their bellies. That they were personal friends of his, Juma did not understand, nor Strickland either. Adam was settled at ease when his father arrived, breathless and white, and the stallions put back their ears and squealed.

"If you come here," said Adam, "they will hit you kicks. Tell Juma I have eaten my rice and wish to be alone."

"Come out at once," said Strickland, for the horses were beginning to paw violently.

"Why should I obey Juma's order? She is afraid of horses."

"It is not Juma's order. It is mine. Obey!"

"Ho!" said Adam, "Juma did not tell me that." And he crawled out on all fours among the shod feet. Mrs. Strickland was crying bitterly with fear and excitement, and as a sacrifice to the home gods Adam had to be whipped. He said with perfect justice: "There was no order that I should not sit with the horses, and they are my horses. Why is there this tamasha?"

Strickland's face showed him that the whipping was coming, and the child turned white. Mother-like, Mrs. Strickland left the room, but Juma, the foster-mother, stayed to see.

"Am I to be whipped here?" he gasped.

"Of course."

"Before that woman? Father, I am a man — I am not afraid. It is my izzat — my honour."

Strickland only laughed (to this day I cannot imagine what possessed him), and gave Adam the little tap-tap with a riding-cane that was whipping sufficient for his years.

When it was all over, Adam said quietly: "I am little, and you are big. If I stayed among my horse folk I should not have been whipped. You are afraid to go there."

The merest chance led me to Strickland's house that afternoon. When I was half-way down the drive Adam passed me, without recognition, at a fast run. I caught one glimpse of his face under his big hat, and it was the face of his father as I had once seen that in the grey of morning when it bent above a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder.

"Let me go!" he screamed, and he and I were the best of friends, as a rule. "Let me go!"

"Where to, Father Adam?" He was quivering like a new-haltered colt.

"To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before women! Let me go!" He tried to bite my hand.

"That is a small matter," I said. "Men are horn to beatings."

"Thou hast never been beaten," he said savagely.

"Indeed I have. Times past counting."

"Before women?"

"My mother and the ayah saw. By women too, for that matter. What of it?"

"What didst thou do?" He stared beyond my shoulder up the long drive.

"It is long ago, and I have forgotten. I was older than thou art; but even then I forgot, and now the thing is but a jest to be talked of"

Adam drew one big breath and broke down utterly in my arms. Then he raised his head, and his eyes were Strickland's eyes when Strickland gave orders.

"Ho! Imam Din."

The fat orderly seemed to spring out of the earth at our feet, crashing through the bushes, and standing to attention.

"Hast thou ever been beaten?" said Adam."Assuredly. By my father when I was thirty years old. He beat me with a plough-beam before all the women of the village.""Wherefore?"

"Because I had returned to the village on leave from the Government service, and had said of the village elders that they had not seen the world. Therefore he beat me, to show that no seeing of the world changed father and son."

"And thou?"

"I stood up. He was my father."

"Good," said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word.

Imam Din looked after him. "An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime, but he breeds elephants. Yet I am glad I am no father of tuskers," said he.

"What is it all?" I asked.

"His father beat him with a whip no bigger than a reed. But the child could not have done what he desired to do without leaping through me. And I am of some few pounds weight. Look!"

Imam Din stepped back through the bushes, and the pressed grass showed that he had been lying curled round the mouth of the dry well.

"When there was talk of beating I knew that one who sat among horses, such as ours, was not like to kiss his father's hand. So I lay down in this place." We both stood still looking at the well-curb.

Adam came back along the garden path to us. "I have spoken to my father," he said simply. "Imam Din, tell thy Naik that his woman is dismissed my service."

"Huzoor!" said Imam Din, stooping low.

"For no fault of hers."

"Protector of the Poor!"

And to-day."

"Khodawund!"

"It is an order! Go!"

Again the salute, and Imam Din departed, with that same set of the back which he wore when he had taken an order from Strickland. I thought that it would be well to go too, but Strickland beckoned me from the verandah. When I came up he was perfectly white, and rocking to and fro in his chair, repeated "Good God!" half a dozen times.

"Do you know that he was going to chuck himself down the well — because I tapped him just now ~" he said helplessly.

"I ought to," I replied. "He has just dismissed his nurse — on his own authority, I suppose?"

"He told me just now that he wouldn't have her for a nurse any more. I never supposed he meant it for an instant. I suppose she'll have to go."

It is written elsewhere that Strickland was feared through the length and breadth of the Punjab by murderers, horse-thieves, and cattle-lifters.

Adam returned, halting outside the verandah, very white about the lips.

"I have sent away Juma because she saw that — that which happened. Until she is gone I do not come in the house," he said.

But to send away thy foster-mother ~" said Strickland, with reproach.

"I do not send her away. It is thy blame, and the small forefinger was pointed to Strickland. "I will not obey her; I will not eat from her hand, and I will not sleep with her. Send her away."

Strickland stepped out and lifted the child into the verandah.

"This folly has lasted long enough," he said. "Come, now, and be wise."

"I am little, and you are big," said Adam, between set teeth.

"You can beat me before this man or cut me to pieces. But I will not have Juma for my ayah any more. I will not eat till she goes.

I swear it by — my father's head."

Strickland sent him indoors to his mother, and we could hear sounds of weeping, and Adam's voice saying nothing more than, "Send Juma away." Presently Juma came in and wept too, and Adam repeated, "It is no fault of thine, but go!"

And the end of it was that Juma went, with all her belongings, and Adam fought his own way alone into his little clothes until a new ayah came. His address of welcome to her was rather amazing. In a few words it ran: "If I do wrong send me to my father. If you strike me I will try to kill you. I do not wish my ayah to play with me. Go and eat rice."

>From that day Adam forswore the society of ayahs and small native girls as much as a small boy can, confining himself to Imam Din and his friends of the police. The Naik, Juma's husband, had been presuming not a little on his position, and when Adam's favour was withdrawn from his wife he judged it best to apply for a transfer to another post. There were too many companions anxious to report his shortcomings to Strickland.

Towards his father Adam kept a guarded neutrality. There was not a touch of sulkiness in it, for the child's temper was as clear as a bell. But the difference and the politeness worried Strickland.

If the other men had loved Adam before the affair of the well, they worshipped him now.

He knows what honour means," said Imam Din; "he has justified himself upon a point thereof. He has carried an order through his father's household as a child of the blood might do. Therefore he is not altogether a child any longer. Wah! He is a tiger's cub." The next time that Adam made his little unofficial inspection of the line, Imam Din, and by consequence all the others, stood upon their feet, with their hands to their sides, instead of calling out from where they lay, "Salaam, Babajee," and other disrespectful things.

But Strickland took long counsel with his wife, and she with the cheque-book and their lean bank-account, and they decided that Adam must go "home" to his aunts. But England is not home to a child that has been born in India, and it never becomes home-like unless he spends all his youth there. The bank-book showed that if they economised through the summer by going to a cheap hill-station instead of to Simla, where Mrs. Strickland's parents lived, and where Strickland might be noticed by the powers, they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be hard pinching, but it could be done. In India all the money that people in other lands save against a rainy day runs off in loss by exchange, which to-day cuts a man's income down almost exactly to one-half There is nothing to show for money when all is put by, and that is what makes married life there so hard. Strickland used to say, sometimes, that he envied the convicts in the jail. They had no position to keep up, and the ball and chain that the worst of them wore was only a few pounds weight of iron.

Dalhousie was chosen as being the cheapest of the hill-stations; Dalhousie and a little five-roomed cottage full of mildew, tucked away among the rhododendrons.

Adam had been to Simla three or four times, and knew by name the most of the Tonga drivers from Kalka to Tara Deva; but this new plan disquieted him. He came to me for information, his hands deep in his knickerbocker pockets, walking, step for step, as his father walked.

"There will be none of my bhai-bund [Brotherhood] up there," said he, disconsolately, "and they say that I must lie still in a doolie for a day and a night, being carried like a sheep. I wish to take some of my mounted men to Dalhousie."

I told him that there was a small boy called Victor, at Dalhousie, who had a calf for a pet, and was allowed to play with it on the public roads. After that Adam could not sufficiently hurry the packing.

"First," said he, "I shall ask that man Victor to let me play with the cow's child. If he is mug-gra [ill-conditioned] I shall tell my policemen to take it away."

"But that is unjust," said Strickland, "and there is no order that the police should do injustice."

"When the Government pay is not sufficient, and low-caste men are promoted, what can an honest man do?" he replied, in the very touch and accent of Imam Din, and Strickland's eyebrows went up.

"You talk too much to the police, my son," he said.

"Always, about everything," said Adam, promptly. "They say that when I am an officer I shall know as much as my father." "God forbid, little one!"

"They say, too, that you are as clever as Shaitan to know things."

"They say that, do they?" said Strickland, looking pleased. His pay was small, but he had his reputation, and that was dear to him.

"They say also — not to me, but to one another when they eat rice behind the wall — that in your own heart you esteem yourself as wise as Suleiman, who was cheated by Shaitan."

This time Strickland did not look so pleased. Adam, in all innocence, launched into a long story about Suleiman-bin-Daoud, who once, out of vanity, pitted his wits against Shaitan, and because God was not on his side Shaitan sent "a little devil of low caste," as Adam put it, who cheated him utterly, and put him to shame before "all the other Rajas."

"By Jove!" said Strickland, when the tale was done, and went away, while Adam took me to task for laughing at Imam Din's story. I did not wonder that he was called Huzrut Adam, for he looked old as all time in his grave childhood, sitting cross-legged, his battered little helmet far at the back of his head, his forefinger wagging up and down, native fashion, and the wisdom of serpents on his unconscious lips.

That May he went up to Dalhousie with his mother, and in those days the journey ended in fifty or sixty miles of uphill travel in a doolie or palanquin, along a road winding through the Himalayas. Adam sat in the doolie with his mother, and Strickland rode and tied with me, a spare doolie following. The march began after we got out of the train at Pathankot, in a hot night among the rice — and poppy-fields.

It was all new to Adam, and he had opinions to advance — notably about a fish that jumped on a wayside pond.

"Now I know," he shouted, "how Khuda puts them there. First He makes them and then He drops them down. That was a new one." Then, lifting his head to the stars, he cried, "O God, do it again, but slowly, that I, Adam, may see."

But nothing happened, and the doolie-bearers lit the noisome, dripping rag torches, and Adam's eyes shone big in the dancing light, and we smelt the dry dust of the plains that we were leaving after eleven months' hard work.

At stated times the men ceased their drowsy, grunting tune, and sat down for a smoke. Between the guttering of their water-pipes we could hear the cries of the beasts of the night, and the wind stirring in the folds of the mountain ahead. At the changing stations the voice of Adam, the first of men, would be lifted to rouse the sleepers in the huts till the fresh relays of bearers shambled from their cots, and the relief-pony with them.

Then we would re-form and go on, and by the time the moon rose Adam was asleep, and there was no sound in the night except the grunting of the men, the husky murmur of some river a thousand feet down in the valley, and the squeaking of Strickland's saddle. So we went up from the date-palm to deodar, till the dawn wind came round a corner all fresh from the snows, and we snuffed it. I heard Strickland say: "Wife, my overcoat, please," and Adam, fretfully: "Where is Dalhousie, and the cow's child?" and then I slept till Strickland turned me out of the warm doolie at seven o'clock, and I stepped into the splendour of a cool hill day, the plains sweltering twenty miles back and three thousand feet below.

Adam waked too, and needs must ride in front of me to ask a million questions, and shout at the monkeys, and clap his hands when the painted pheasants bolted across our road, and hail every wood-cutter and drover and pilgrim within sight, till we halted for breakfast at a staging-house. After breakfast, being a child, he went out to play with a train of bullock-drivers haltered by the road-side, and we had to chase him out of a native liquor-shop where he was bargaining with a naked seven-year-old for a mynah in a bamboo cage.

Said he, wriggling on my pommel, as we went on again: "There were four men behosh [insensible] at the back of that house. Wherefore do men grow behosh from drinking?"

"It is the nature of the water," l said, and calling back: "Strick, what's that grog-shop doing so close to the road? It's a temptation to any one's servants."

"Dun'no," said a sleepy voice in the doolie. "This is Kennedy's district. 'Twasn't here in my time."

"Truly the water smells bad," Adam went on. "I smelt it, but I did not get the mynah even for six annas. The woman of the house gave me a love-gift, that I found, playing near the verandah."

"And what was the gift, Father Adam?"

"A nose-ring for my ayah. Ohe! ohe! Look at that camel with a bag on his nose." A string of loaded camels came cruising round the corner, as a fleet rounds a cape.

"Ho, Malik! why does not a camel salaam like an elephant? His neck is long enough," Adam cried.

"The Angel Jibrail made him a fool from the beginning," said the driver, as he swayed on the top of the led beast, and laughter ran all along the line of red-bearded men.

"That is true," said Adam, and they laughed again.

At last, in the late afternoon, we came to Dalhousie, loveliest of the hill-stations, and separated.Adam hardly could be restrained from setting out at once to find Victor and the "cow's child." I found them both, something to my trouble, next morning. The two young sinners had a calf on a taut line just at a sharp turn in the Mall, and were pretending that he was a Raja's elephant who had gone mad. But it was my horse that nearly went mad, and they shouted with delight. Then we began to talk, and Adam, by way of crushing Victor's repeated reminders that he and not "that other" was the owner of the calf, said: "It is true I have no cow's child, but a great dacoity has been done on my father."

"We came up together yesterday. There could have been nothing," I said.

"It was my mother's horse. She has been dacoited with beating and blows, and now it is so thin." He held his hands an inch apart. "My father is at the tar-house sending tars. Imam Din will cut off all their heads. I desire your saddle-cloth for a howdah to my elephant. Give it me."

This was exciting, but not lucid. I went to the telegraph-office and found Strickland in a bad temper among many telegraph-forms. A dishevelled, one-eyed groom stood in a corner, whimpering at intervals. He was a man whom Adam invariably addressed as "Be-shakl be-ukl, be-ank" — ugly, stupid, eyeless. It seemed, according to Strickland, that he had sent his wife's horse up to Dalhousie by road, a fortnight's march. This is the custom in Upper India. Among the foot-hills near Dhunnera or Dhar, horse and man had been violently set upon in the night by four men, who had beaten the groom (his leg was bandaged from knee to ankle in proof), had incidentally beaten the horse, and had robbed the groom of the bucket, and all his money eleven rupees, nine annas, three pie. Last, they had left him for dead by the wayside, where wood-cutters had found and nursed him. Then the one-eyed howled with anguish, thinking over his bruises. "They asked me if I was Strickland Sahib's servant, and I, thinking the protection of the name would be sufficient, spoke the truth. Then they beat me grievously."

"Hm!" said Strickland. "I thought they wouldn't dacoit as a business on the Dalhousie road. This is meant for me personally — sheer badmashi [impudence]. All right."

In justice to a very hard-working class, it must be said that the thieves of Upper India have the keenest sense of humour. The last compliment that they can pay a Police officer is to rob him, and if, as once they did, they can loot a Deputy Inspector-General of Police, on the eve of his retirement, of everything except the clothes on his back, their joy is complete. They cause letters of derision and telegrams of condolence to be sent to the victim; for of all men, thieves are most compelled to keep up with modern progress.

Strickland was a man of few words where his business was concerned. I had never seen a Police officer robbed before, and I expected some excitement; but Strickland held his tongue. He took the groom's deposition and retired into himself for a time, evolving thieves. Then he sent Kennedy, of the Pathankot charge, an official letter and an unofficial note. Kennedy's reply was purely unofficial, and it ran thus: "This seems a compliment solely intended for you. My wonder is, you didn't get it before.

The men are probably back in your district by this time. The Dhunnera and foot-hill people are highly respectable cultivators, and seeing my Assistant is an unlicked pup, and I can't trust my Inspector out of my sight, I am not going to turn their harvest upside down with a police investigation. I am run off my feet with vaccination police work. You'd better look at home. The Shubkudder Gang were through here a fortnight back. They laid up at the Amritsar Serai, and then worked down. No cases against them in my charge, but remember you lagged their malik for receiving in Prub Dyal's burglary. They owe you one."

"Exactly what I thought," said Strickland. "I had a notion it was the Shubkudder Gang from the first. We must make it pleasant for them at Peshawur, and in my district too. They are just the kind that would lie up under Imam Din's shadow."

>From this point onward the wires began to he worked heavily. Strickland had a very fair knowledge of the Shubkudder Gang, gathered at first hand.

They were the same syndicate that had once stolen a Deputy Commissioner's cow, put horse-shoes on her, and taken her forty miles into the jungle before they lost interest in the joke. They added insult to insult by writing that the Deputy Commissioner's cows and horses were so much alike that it took them two days to find out the difference, and they would not lift the like of such cattle any more.

The District Superintendent at Peshawur replied to Strickland that he was expecting the gang, and Strickland's Assistant in his own district, being young and full of zeal, sent up the most amazing clues.

"Now that's just what I want that young fool not to do," said Strickland. "He hasn't passed the lower standard yet, and he's an English boy born and bred, and his father before him. He has about as much tact as a bull, and he won't work quietly under my Inspector. I wish the Government would keep our service for country-born men. Those first five or six years give a man a pull that lasts him his life. Adam, if you were only old enough to be my 'Stunt"!" He looked down at the little fellow on the verandah. Adam was deeply interested in the dacoity, and, unlike a child, did not lose interest after the first week. On the contrary, he would ask his father every evening what had been done, and Strickland had drawn him a picture on the white wall of the verandah showing the different towns in which policemen were on the lookout for the thieves. They were Amritsar, Jullundur, Phillour, Gurgaon, in case the gang were moving south; Rawal Pindi and Peshawur, with Multan. Adam looked up at the picture as he answered:

"There has been great dikh [trouble] in this case."

"Very great trouble. I wish thou wert a young man and my assistant to help me."

"Dost thou need help, my father?" Adam asked curiously, with his head on one side.

"Very much."

"Leave it all alone. It is bad. Let loose everything."

"That must not be. Those beginning a business continue to the end."

"Thou wilt continue to the end? Dost thou not know who did the dacoity?"

Strickland shook his head. Adam turned to me with the same question, and I answered it in the same way.

"What foolish people!" he said, and turned his back on us. He showed plainly in all our dealings afterwards how we had fallen in his opinion. Strickland told me that he would sit at the door of his work-room and stare at him for half an hour at a time as he went through his papers. Strickland seemed to work harder over the case than if he had been in office on the plains.

"And sometimes I look up and I fancy the little chap's laughing at me. It's an awful thing to have a son. You see, he's your own and his own, and between the two you don't know quite how to handle him," said Strickland. "I wonder what in the world he thinks about?"