by Talbot Mundy
“Then you confirm my own opinion. You are inclined to think that this is an organized and country-wide rebellion?”
“I know of what I speak, sahib!”
“You don’t think that you are being influenced in your opinion by the fact that you have seen a massacre, and have lost everything you had?”
“Nay, sahib! This is no hour for joking, or for bearing of false tidings. I tell you, up, sahib! Boots and saddles! Strike!”
The general chewed at his mustache another minute.
“You know this province well?” he asked.
“None better than I. I have traversed every yard of it, attending to my business.”
“And your business is?”
“Each to his trade, sahib. My trade is honorable.”
“I have good reasons for asking, and no impertinence is meant. Be good enough to tell me. I wish to know what value I may place on your opinion.”
“Sahib, I am a full sergeant of the Rajput Horse retired. I bear one medal.”
“And—”
“I sell charms, sahib.”
“What sort of charms?”
“All sorts. But principally charms against the evil eye, and the red sickness, and death by violence. But, also love-charms now and then, and now and then a death-charm to a man who has an enemy and lacks swordsmanship or courage. I trade with each and every man, sahib, and listen to the talk of each, and hold my tongue!”
“Strange trade for a soldier, isn’t it?”
“Would you have me a robber, sahib? Or shall I sweep the streets — I, who have led a troop before now? Nay, sahib! A soldier can fight, and can do little else. When the day comes that the Raj has no more need of him — or thinks that it has no more need of him — he must either starve or become a prophet. And his own home is no place for a prophet who would turn his prophesying into silver coin!”
“Ah! Well-now, tell me! What is your opinion, without reference to what anybody else may think? You have just seen the massacre at Jailpore, and you know how many men I have here. And you know the condition of the road and the number of the mutineers. Would you, if you were in my place, strike at Jailpore immediately?”
“Nay, sahib. That I would not. I would strike north. And I would strike so swiftly that the mutineers would wonder whence I came. In Jailpore, all is over. They have done the harm, and they are in charge there. They have the powder-magazine in their possession, and the stands of arms, and the first advantage. Leave them there, then, sahib, and strike where you are not expected. In Jailpore you would be out of touch. You would have just that many more miles to march when the time comes — and it has come, sahib! — to join forces with the next command, and hit hard at the heart of things.”
“And the heart of things is—”
“Delhi!”
“You display a quite amazing knowledge of the game.”
“I am a soldier, sahib!”
“You would leave Jailpore, then, to its fate?”
“Jailpore has already met its fate, sahib. The barracks are afire, and the city has been given over to be looted. Reckon no more with Jailpore! Reckon only of the others. Listen, sahib! Has any message come from the next command? No? Then why? Think you that even a local outbreak could occur without some message being sent to you, and to the next division south of you? Why has no message come? Where is the next command? The next command north? Harumpore? Then why is there no news from Harumpore? I will tell you, sahib.”
“You mean, I suppose, that the country is up, in between?”
“You know that it is up, sahib!”
“You think that no message could get through to me?”
“I know that it could not! Else had one already come. My advice to you, sahib, as one soldier to another and tendered with all respect, is to up and leave this Bholat. Here, of what use are you? Here you can hold a small city, until the countryside has time to rise and lay siege to you and hem you in! Outside of here, you can be a hornet-storm! They will burn Bholat behind you. Let them! Let them, too, pay the price. Swoop down on Harumpore, sahib — join there with Kendrick sahib’s command. There make a fresh plan, and swoop down on some other place. But move, quickly, and keep on moving! And waste no time on places that are already lost.”
“Then you would have me leave those women and that child, that you tell me of to their fate?”
“Nay, sahib! I am not of your command. I have done my duty to the Raj, and I now go about my own business.”
“And that is?”
“To repay a debt that I owe the Raj, sahib!”
“Your answers are rather unnecessarily evasive, Juggut Khan. Be good enough to explain yourself!”
“I ride back to Jailpore, sahib. I would have stayed there, but it seemed right and soldierly to bring through the news first. Now, I return to do what I may to rescue those whom I hid there. I owe that to the Raj!”
“You mean that you will ride alone?”
“At least half of the distance, sahib. I had a favor to ask.”
“Well?”
“Are you marching north, sahib?”
“I have not determined yet.”
“Determined, sahib! This is no hour for dallying! Give orders now! Up! Strike, sahib! Listen! Should you march on Jailpore, the mutineers, who far outnumber you, will learn beforehand of your coming, and will put the place in a state of defense. It may take you weeks to fight your way in! Leave Jailpore, and those who are left in it to me, and lend me that non-commissioned officer of yours who guards the crossroads, and his twelve men. With a few, we can manage what a whole division might fail to do. And you march north, sahib, and burn and harry and slay! Strike quickly, where the trouble is yet brewing, and not where the day is lost already!”
It was case of the British power in India on one side of the scale, against three women and a child on the other; sentiment in the balance against strategy. And strategy must win, especially since this Rajput was offering his services.
“What are their names, you say?”
“Mrs. Leslie, wife of Captain Leslie; Mrs. Standish, wife of Colonel Standish and mother of Mrs. Leslie; Mrs. Leslie’s child — I know not his name, he is but a child in arms — and the child’s nurse.”
The general still found it difficult to make up his mind.
“What proof have I of you?” he asked.
“Sahib, my honor is in question! I have a debt to pay!”
“What debt?”
“To the Raj.”
“To the Raj?”
“Aye, Sahib! I have but one son, and his life was saved for me by a British soldier. A life for a life. Four lives for a life. I ride! I need, though, a fresh horse. And I ask for the loan of that sergeant, and those twelve men.”
“I wonder whether a man such as you can realize exactly what it means to us to know that white women are in Jailpore, at the mercy of black mutineers? I mean, are you sufficiently aware of the extreme horror of the situation?”
“Knew you Captain Collins Sahib, of the Jailpore command?”
“Know him well.”
“Knew you his memsahib?”
“She was a niece of mine.”
“I slew her myself, with this sword!”
“When? Why?”
“Yesterday. Because her husband could not get to her himself, and since he and I knew each other, and he trusted me. I said to her, ‘Memsahib! I have your husband’s orders!’ She asked me ‘What orders, Juggut Khan?’ I said, ‘Why ask me, memsahib? Is my task easier, or yours?’ She said ‘Obey your orders, Juggut Khan, and accept my thanks now, since I shall be unable to thank you afterward!’ And then she looked me bravely in the face, and met her death, sahib. Of a truth I know! I am to be trusted!”
“I believe you, Juggut Khan. And, incidentally, I beg your pardon for having doubted you. Have you slept?”
“Nay, Sahib. And I sleep not on this side of the crossroads!”
“I don’t place Sergeant Brown under your command — you’ll unders
tand that’s impossible — but, it’s quite impossible for him to catch me up. He may as well cooperate with you. Wait.” He paused, and wrote, then continued, “Here is a note to him, in which I order him to work with you, and to take your advice whenever possible. Go to the stables, and choose any horse you like except my first charger. Here — here is money; you may need some. Count that, will you. How much is it? Four hundred rupees? Write out a receipt for it. Now, good luck to you, Juggut Khan. And if you should get through alive — I’ll pay you the compliment of admitting that you won’t come through without the women, and I know that Brown won’t — if you should have luck, and should happen to get through, why, look for me at Harumpore, or elsewhere to the northward of it. I start with my division in an hour.”
“Salaam, sahib!” said Rajput, rising and standing at the salute.
“Salaam, Juggut Khan! Take any food, or drink, or clothing that you want. Good-by, and your good luck ride with you. I feel like a murderer, but I know I’ve done the best that can be done!”
VI.
Now if Sergeant Brown possessed a sweetheart, and the sweetheart lived in England, and if Brown still loved her — as has already been more than hinted at — it is not at all unreasonable to wonder why he had no likeness of her, no news of her, nothing but her memory around which to weave the woof of sentiment — at least, it’s not unreasonable so to wonder in this late year of grace.
Then, though, in 1857, when a newspaper cost threepence or thereabouts, and schools were so far from being free that only the sons of gentlemen (and seldom the daughters of even gentlemen, remember) attended them, the art of reading was not so common as it now is. Writing was still more uncommon. And it has not been pretended that Brown was other than a commoner. He was a stiff-backed man, and honest. And the pride that had raised him to the rank of sergeant was even stiffer than his stock. But he came from the ranks that owned no vote, nor little else, in those days, and he owned a sweetheart of the same rank as himself, who could neither read nor write. And when people whose somewhat primitive ideas on right and wrong lead them to look on daguerreotypes as works of the devil happen too to be living more than five thousand miles apart, when one of the two can not write, nor readily afford the cost of postage, and when the other is nearly always on the move from post to post, it is not exactly to be wondered at that memory of each other was all they had to dwell upon.
A journey to India in ‘57 meant, to the rank and file, oblivion and worse. There were men then, of course, just as there are now, who would leave a girl behind them tied fast by a promise of futile and endless devotion; men who knew what the girls did not know — that India was all but inaccessible to any one outside of government employ, and that a common soldier’s chance of sending for his girl, or of coming home again to claim her, was something in the neighborhood of one in thirty thousand.
But there were other men, like William Brown, who were a shade too honest and too stiff-chinned to buckle under to the social conditions of England in those days, and who were consequently not exactly pestered with offers of employment. And a man who could see the difference between doffing his ragged cap to a dissolute squire or parson, and saluting his better on parade, could also see the selfishness of leaving an honest girl to languish for him. Brown could not get a living in England. So he told his girl to get a better man, swung his canvas bag across his shoulder and marched away.
“What kind of a man is a better man than Bill?” she had wondered. Men like Bill seem to have a knack of judging character, and of picking girls who are as steadfast as themselves. So it is not to be wondered at that almost before her tears were dry she had set about attempting what few women of her type and time would have dreamed of. If Bill had set her free, she reasoned, Bill had no more authority over her, and she might do exactly what she chose. Bill could release, but he could not make her take another man. So, for all that the local yeomen, and local tradesmen even, haunted the little cottage on the Downs, and pestered her with their attentions, no one supplanted Bill.
Bill could tell her — and had told her — that India was no country for a white woman; that there were snakes there, and black men and tigers and even worse. But, since he had set her free, if she could manage it she was quite at liberty to brave the tigers and the snakes. And, once there, she would see whether she was free or not, and whether Bill was, either!
It took Bill Brown six years of constant honest effort to become a sergeant. It took Jane Emmett six weeks of pride-consuming and vexatious vigilance to procure for herself a job as nurse in a soldier-family. And it took her six more years of unremitting diligence, sweetened by all the attributes that seem desirable when nursing other people’s children and embittered by the shame of grudging patronage, before she was considered dependable enough to be recommended for the service of a family just leaving for Bengal. Then, however, her world was a real world again!
Five months on a sailing-ship around the Cape — deep-laden, gunwales awash in a beam — on Bay-of-Biscay “snorer,” hove-to for a week off Cape Agul — has, while the clumsy brigantine rolled the masts loose in her, all but dismasted in a typhoon come astray from the China Sea, fed on moldy bread, and even moldier pork, with a fretful child to nurse, and an exacting mother to be pleased! Jane Emmett laughed at it. Bill had been there before her, and had done more on his way, and worse Bengal did not frighten her. Nor did the knowledge, when she reached it, that Bill was very likely still some hundreds of miles away. She, who had come five thousand miles as the crows are said to fly and nine thousand by the map, could manage the odd hundreds. And she could wait. She had waited six long years. What was another month or two?
She had not even a notion where Bill was, beyond a vague one that he belonged to another province. For when the Honorable East India Company was muddling the affairs of India, the honors and emoluments and privileges — such as they were! — were reserved for the benefit of the commissioned ranks.
So a transfer to Jailpore did not mean to Jane Emmett ten extra degrees of heat, the neighborhood of jungle-fever and a brand-new breed of smells. Those disadvantages, which weighted down the souls of her employers, were completely overshadowed, so far as she was concerned, by the knowledge that she was traveling nearer by a hundred leagues or so to where her Bill was stationed. She was going west; and somewhere to the west was Bill. Anything was good — fever, and prickly heat, and smells included — that brought her any nearer him.
There would be no sense in endeavoring to analyze her sensations when the sudden outburst overwhelmed the inner-guard at Jailpore. The sight of white women being butchered, and of white men with the blood of their own women on their hands, selling their lives as dearly as the God of War would let them in a holocaust of flames, blinded her. It was probably just a splurge of fire and noise and smoke and blood in her memory, with one or two details standing out. The only real sensation that she felt — even when a tall, lean Rajput flung her across his shoulder, ran with her and dropped her down through a square hole into stifling darkness — was a longing for Bill Brown, her Bill, the one man in the world who could surely stop the butchery.
The others prayed. But she refused to pray. She felt angry — not prayerful! Had she come nine thousand miles, and sacrificed six good years of youth and youth’s heritage, to be cast into a reeking dungeon and left to die there in the dark? Not if Bill should know of it! And so she changed her argument, and prayed for Bill. If only Bill knew — straight-backed, honest, stiff-chinned, uncompromising, plain Bill Brown. He would change things!
“Oh, Bill! Bill! Bill!” she sobbed. “Dear God, bring Bill to me!”
VII.
When a man knows what is out against him, and from which direction he may look to meet death, he only needs to be a very ordinary man to make at least a gallant showing. Gallery or no gallery to watch, given responsibility and trained men under hire, not one man in a thousand will fail to face death with dignity.
But Brown knew practically nothing, and un
derstood still less, of what was happening. He had Juggut Khan’s word for it that Jailpore was in flames, and that all save four of its European population had been killed. He believed that to be a probably exaggerated statement of affairs, but he did not blink the fact that he might expect to be overwhelmed almost without notice, and at any minute. That was a fact which he accepted, for the sake of argument and as a working-basis on which to build a plan of some kind — His orders were to hold that post, and he would hold it until relieved by General Baines or death. But there are several ways of holding a hot coal besides the rather obvious one of sitting on it.
It would have been a fine chance to be theatrical, had play-acting been in his line. Many and many a full-blown general has risen to authority and fame by means of absolutely useless gallery-play. He believed that he would presently be relieved by General Baines, who he felt sure would march at once on Jailpore; and had he chosen to he could have addressed the men, have set them to throwing up defenses and have made a nice theatrical redoubt that he could have held quite easily with the help of nine men for a day or two. And since the really worthwhile things go often unrewarded, but the gallery-plays never, nobody would have blamed him had he chosen some such course as that.
But Brown’s idea of holding down a place was to make that place a thorn in the side of the enemy. And since he did not know who was the enemy, or where he was, nor why he was an enemy, nor when he would attack, he proposed to find out these things for himself preparatory to making the said enemy as uncomfortable as his meager resources would permit, when eked out by an honest “dogged-does-it” brain.
He buried the three men whom Fate had seemed to value at the price of a fakir’s freedom. And, being a religious man, to whom religion was a fact and the rest of the universe a theory, he was able to say a full funeral service over them from memory. He said it at the grave-end, with a lantern in his hand and one man facing him across the grave — as the English used to drink when the Danes had landed, each watching for the glint of steel beyond the other’s shoulder.
