Centuries of oppression and massacre made the Bhil a cruel and half-crazy thief and cattle-stealer, and when the English came he seemed to be almost as open to civilisation as the tigers of his own jungles. But John Chinn the First, father of Lionel, grandfather of our John, went into his country, lived with him, learned his language, shot the deer that stole his poor crops, and won his confidence, so that some Bhils learned to plough and sow, while others were coaxed into the Company’s service to police their friends.
When they understood that standing in line did not mean instant execution, they accepted soldiering as a cumbrous but amusing kind of sport, and were zealous to keep the wild Bhils under control. That was the thin edge of the wedge. John Chinn the First gave them written promises that, if they were good from a certain date, the Government would overlook previous offences; and since John Chinn was never known to break his word – he promised once to hang a Bhil locally esteemed invulnerable, and hanged him in front of his tribe for seven proved murders – the Bhils settled down as steadily as they knew how. It was slow, unseen work, of the sort that is being done all over India today; and though John Chinn’s only reward came, as I have said, in the shape of a grave at Government expense, the little people of the hills never forgot him.
Colonel Lionel Chinn knew and loved them, too, and they were very fairly civilised, for Bhils, before his service ended. Many of them could hardly be distinguished from low-caste Hindoo farmers; but in the south, where John Chinn the First was buried, the wildest still clung to the Satpura ranges, cherishing a legend that some day Jan Chinn, as they called him, would return to his own. In the mean time they mistrusted the white man and his ways. The least excitement would stampede them, plundering, at random, and now and then killing; but if they were handled discreetly they grieved like children, and promised never to do it again.
The Bhils of the regiment – the uniformed men – were virtuous in many ways, but they needed humouring. They felt bored and homesick unless taken after tiger as beaters; and their cold-blooded daring – all Wuddars shoot tigers on foot: it is their caste-mark – made even the officers wonder. They would follow up a wounded tiger as unconcernedly as though it were a sparrow with a broken wing; and this through a country full of caves and rifts and pits, where a wild beast could hold a dozen men at his mercy. Now and then some little man was brought to barracks with his head smashed in or his ribs torn away; but his companions never learned caution; they contented themselves with settling the tiger.
Young John Chinn was decanted at the verandah of the Wuddars’ lonely mess-house from the back seat of a two-wheeled cart, his gun-cases cascading all round him. The slender little, hookey-nosed boy looked forlorn as a strayed goat when he slapped the white dust off his knees, and the cart jolted down the glaring road. But in his heart he was contented. After all, this was the place where he had been born, and things were not much changed since he had been sent to England, a child, fifteen years ago.
There were a few new buildings, but the air and the smell and the sunshine were the same; and the little green men who crossed the parade-ground looked very familiar. Three weeks ago John Chinn would have said he did not remember a word of the Bhil tongue, but at the mess door he found his lips moving in sentences that he did not understand – bits of old nursery rhymes, and tail-ends of such orders as his father used to give the men.
The Colonel watched him come up the steps, and laughed.
‘Look!’ he said to the Major. ‘No need to ask the young un’s breed. He’s a pukka Chinn. Might be his father in the Fifties over again.’
‘Hope he’ll shoot as straight,’ said the Major. ‘He’s brought enough ironmongery with him.’
‘Wouldn’t be a Chinn if he didn’t. Watch him blowin’ his nose. Regular Chinn beak. Flourishes his handkerchief like his father. It’s the second edition – line for line.’
‘Fairy tale, by Jove!’ said the Major, peering through the slats of the jalousies. ‘If he’s the lawful heir, he’ll . . . . Now old Chinn could no more pass that chick without fiddling with it than . . . .
‘His son!’ said the Colonel, jumping up.
‘Well, I be blowed!’ said the Major. The boy’s eye had been caught by a split-reed screen that hung on a slew between the veranda pillars, and, mechanically, he had tweaked the edge to set it level. Old Chinn had sworn three times a day at that screen for many years; he could never get it to his satisfaction.
His son entered the anteroom in the middle of a fivefold silence. They made him welcome for his father’s sake and, as they took stock of him, for his own. He was ridiculously like the portrait of the Colonel on the wall, and when he had washed a little of the dust from his throat he went to his quarters with the old man’s short, noiseless jungle-step.
‘So much for heredity,’ said the Major. ‘That comes of four generations among the Bhils.’
‘And the men know it,’ said a Wing officer. ‘They’ve been waiting for this youth with their tongues hanging out. I am persuaded that, unless he absolutely beats ’em over the head, they’ll lie down by companies and worship him.’
‘Nothin’ like havin’ a father before you,’ said the Major. ‘I’m a parvenu with my chaps. I’ve only been twenty years in the regiment, and my revered parent he was a simple squire. There’s no getting at the bottom of a Bhil’s mind. Now, why is the superior bearer that young Chinn brought with him fleeing across country with his bundle?’ He stepped into the verandah, and shouted after the man – a typical new-joined subaltern’s servant who speaks English and cheats in proportion.
What is it?’ he called.
Plenty bad man here. I going, sar,’ was the reply. ‘Have taken Sahib’s keys, and say will shoot.’
Doocid lucid – doocid convincin’. How those up-country thieves can leg it! He has been badly frightened by someone.’ The Major strolled to his quarters to dress for mess.
Young Chinn, walking like a man in a dream, had fetched a compass round the entire cantonment before going to his own tiny cottage. The captain’s quarters, in which he had been born, delayed him for a little; then he looked at the well on the parade-ground, where he had sat of evenings with his nurse, and at the ten-by-fourteen church, where the officers went to service if a chaplain of any official creed happened to come along. It seemed very small as compared with the gigantic buildings he used to stare up at, but it was the same place.
From time to time he passed a knot of silent soldiers, who saluted. They might have been the very men who had carried him on their backs when he was in his first knickerbockers. A faint light burned in his room, and, as he entered, hands clasped his feet, and a voice murmured from the floor.
‘Who is it?’ said young Chinn, not knowing he spoke in the Bhil tongue.
‘I bore you in my arms, Sahib, when I was a strong man and you were a small one – crying, crying, crying! I am your servant, as I was your father’s before you. We are all your servants.’
Young Chinn could not trust himself to reply, and the voice went on: ‘I have taken your keys from that fat foreigner, and sent him away; and the studs are in the shirt for mess. Who should know, if I do not know? And so the baby has become a man, and forgets his nurse; but my nephew shall make a good servant, or I will beat him twice a day.’
Then there rose up, with a rattle, as straight as a Bhil arrow, a little white-haired wizened ape of a man, with medals and orders on his tunic, stammering, saluting, and trembling. Behind him a young and wiry Bhil, in uniform, was taking the trees out of Chinn’s mess-boots.
Chinn’s eyes were full of tears. The old man held out his keys.
‘Foreigners are bad people. He will never come back again. We are all servants of your father’s son. Has the Sahib forgotten who took him to see the trapped tiger in the village across the river, when his mother was so frightened and he was so brave?’
The scene came back to Chinn in great magic-lantern flashes. ‘Bukta!’ he cried; and all in a breath: ‘You promised nothing
should hurt me. Is it Bukta?’
The man was at his feet a second time. ‘He has not forgotten. He remembers his own people as his father remembered. Now can I die. But first I will live and show the Sahib how to kill tigers. That yonder is my nephew. If he is not a good servant, beat him and send him to me, and I will surely kill him, for now the Sahib is with his own people. Ai, Jan haba – Jan haba! My Jan haba! I will stay here and see that this does his work well. Take off his boots, fool. Sit down upon the bed, Sahib, and let me look. It is Jan haba.’
He pushed forward the hilt of his sword as a sign of service, which is an honour paid only to viceroys, governors, generals, or to little children whom one loves dearly. Chinn touched the hilt mechanically with three fingers, muttering he knew not what. It happened to be the old answer of his childhood, when Bukta in jest called him the little General Sahib.
The Major’s quarters were opposite Chinn’s, and when he heard his servant gasp with surprise he looked across the room. Then the Major sat on the bed and whistled; for the spectacle of the senior native commissioned officer of the regiment, an ‘unmixed’ Bhil, a Companion of the Order of British India, with thirty-five years’ spotless service in the army, and a rank among his own people superior to that of many Bengal princelings, valeting the last-joined subaltern, was a little too much for his nerves.
The throaty bugles blew the Mess-call that has a long legend behind it. First a few piercing notes like the shrieks of beaters in a far-away cover, and next, large, full, and smooth, the refrain of the wild song: ‘And oh, and oh, the green pulse of Mundore – Mundore!’
‘All little children were in bed when the Sahib heard that call last,’ said Bukta, passing Chinn a clean handkerchief. The call brought back memories of his cot under the mosquito-netting, his mother’s kiss, and the sound of footsteps growing fainter as he dropped asleep among his men. So he hooked the dark collar of his new mess-jacket, and went to dinner like a prince who has newly inherited his father’s crown.
Old Bukta swaggered forth curling his whiskers. He knew his own value, and no money and no rank within the gift of the Government would have induced him to put studs in young officers’ shirts, or to hand them clean ties. Yet, when he took off his uniform that night, and squatted among his fellows for a quiet smoke, he told them what he had done, and they said that he was entirely right. Thereat Bukta propounded a theory which to a white mind would have seemed raving insanity; but the whispering, level-headed little men of war considered it from every point of view, and thought that there might be a great deal in it.
At mess under the oil-lamps the talk turned as usual to the unfailing subject of shikar – big game shooting of every kind and under all sorts of conditions. Young Chinn opened his eyes when he understood that each one of his companions had shot several tigers in the Wuddar style – on foot, that is – making no more of the business than if the brute had been a dog.
‘In nine cases out of ten,’ said the Major, ‘a tiger is almost as dangerous as a porcupine. But the tenth time you come home feet first.’
That set all talking, and long before midnight Chinn’s brain was in a whirl with stories of tigers – man-eaters and cattle-killers each pursuing his own business as methodically as clerks in an office; new tigers that had lately come into such-and-such a district; and old, friendly beasts of great cunning, known by nicknames in the mess – such as ‘Puggy’, who was lazy, with huge paws, and ‘Mrs Malaprop’, who turned up when you never expected her, and made female noises. Then they spoke of Bhil superstitions, a wide and picturesque field, till young Chinn hinted that they must be pulling his leg.
‘ ’Deed, we aren’t,’ said a man on his left. ‘We know all about you. You’re a Chinn and all that, and you’ve a sort of vested right here; but if you don’t believe what we’re telling you, what will you do when old Bukta begins his stories? He knows about ghost-tigers, and tigers that go to a hell of their own; and tigers that walk on their hind feet; and your grandpapa’s riding-tiger, as well. Odd he hasn’t spoken of that yet.’
‘You know you’ve an ancestor buried down Satpura way, don’t you?’ said the Major, as Chinn smiled irresolutely.
‘Of course I do,’ said Chinn, who had the chronicle of the Book of Chinn by heart. It lies in a worn old ledger on the Chinese lacquer table behind the piano in the Devonshire home, and the children are allowed to look at it on Sundays.
‘Well, I wasn’t sure. Your revered ancestor, my boy, according to the Bhils, has a tiger of his own – a saddle-tiger that he rides round the country whenever he feels inclined. I don’t call it decent in an ex-Collector’s ghost; but that is what the Southern Bhils believe. Even our men, who might be called moderately cool, don’t care to beat that country if they hear that Jan Chinn is running about on his tiger. It is supposed to be a clouded animal – not stripy, but blotchy, like a tortoiseshell tom-cat. No end of a brute, it is, and a sure sign of war or pestilence or – or something. There’s a nice family legend for you.’
‘What’s the origin of it, d’ you suppose?’ said Chinn.
‘Ask the Satpura Bhils. Old Jan Chinn was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Perhaps it was the tiger’s revenge, or perhaps he’s huntin’ ’em still. You must go to his tomb one of these days and enquire. Bukta will probably attend to that. He was asking me before you came whether by any ill-luck you had already bagged your tiger. If not, he is going to enter you under his own wing. Of course, for you of all men it’s imperative. You’ll have a first-class time with Bukta.’
The Major was not wrong. Bukta kept an anxious eye on young Chinn at drill, and it was noticeable that the first time the new officer lifted up his voice in an order the whole line quivered. Even the Colonel was taken aback, for it might have been Lionel Chinn returned from Devonshire with a new lease of life. Bukta had continued to develop his peculiar theory among his intimates, and it was accepted as a matter of faith in the lines, since every word and gesture on young Chinn’s part so confirmed it.
The old man arranged early that his darling should wipe out the reproach of not having shot a tiger; but he was not content to take the first or any beast that happened to arrive. In his own villages he dispensed the high, low, and middle justice, and when his people – naked and fluttered – came to him with word of a beast marked down, he bade them send spies to the kills and the watering-places, that he might be sure the quarry was such an one as suited the dignity of such a man.
Three or four times the reckless trackers returned, most truthfully saying that the beast was mangy, undersized – a tigress worn with nursing, or a broken-toothed old male – and Bukta would curb young Chinn’s impatience.
At last, a noble animal was marked down – a ten-foot cattle-killer with a huge roll of loose skin along the belly, glossy-hided, full-frilled about the neck, whiskered, frisky, and young. He had slain a man in pure sport, they said.
‘Let him be fed,’ quoth Bukta, and the villagers dutifully drove out a cow to amuse him, that he might lie up near by.
Princes and potentates have taken ship to India and spent great moneys for the mere glimpse of beasts one-half as fine as this of Bukta’s.
‘It is not good,’ said he to the Colonel, when he asked for shooting-leave, ‘that my Colonel’s son who may be – that my Colonel’s son should lose his maidenhead on any small jungle beast. That may come after. I have waited long for this which is a tiger. He has come in from the Mair country. In seven days we will return with the skin.’
The mess gnashed their teeth enviously. Bukta, had he chosen, might have invited them all. But he went out alone with Chinn, two days in a shooting-cart and a day on foot, till they came to a rocky, glary valley with a pool of good water in it. It was a parching day, and the boy very naturally stripped and went in for a bathe, leaving Bukta by the clothes. A white skin shows far against brown jungle, and what Bukta beheld on Chinn’s back and right shoulder dragged him forward step by step with staring eyeballs.
‘I’d forgotten it
isn’t decent to strip before a man of his position,’ said Chinn, flouncing in the water. ‘How the little devil stares! What is it, Bukta?’ ‘The Mark!’ was the whispered answer.
‘It is nothing. You know how it is with my people!’ Chinn was annoyed. The dull-red birthmark on his shoulder, something like a conventionalised Tartar cloud, had slipped his memory or he would not have bathed. It occurred, so they said at home, in alternate generations, appearing, curiously enough, eight or nine years after birth, and, save that it was part of the Chinn inheritance, would not be considered pretty. He hurried ashore, dressed again, and went on till they met two or three Bhils, who promptly fell on their faces. ‘My people,’ grunted Bukta, not condescending to notice them. ‘And so your people, Sahib. When I was a young man we were fewer, but not so weak. Now we are many, but poor stock. As may be remembered. How will you shoot him, Sahib? From a tree; from a shelter which my people shall build; by day or by night?’
‘On foot and in the daytime,’ said young Chinn.
‘That was your custom, as I have heard,’ said Bukta to himself ‘I will get news of him. Then you and I will go to him. I will carry one gun. You have yours. There is no need of more. What tiger shall stand against thee?’
Strange Tales (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 33
