Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Line after line after crimson-coated line — color-tipped khaki where the turbaned native cavalry sat knee-to-knee with British — blue and gold where the jingling gun-teams pawed the ground — and dark gray where Ghurkas and British riflemen stood alternating with the kilted Highlanders — one hundred thousand men waited in obedient silence, facing the saluting-point.

  “And now, your Highness,” said the Viceroy, “I think we might take their salute. What do you say?”

  They rose — lean, clean-limbed Anglo-Saxon and swart, sturdy Afghan side by side — silk-hatted, frock-coated representative of new ideals and turbaned and bejeweled despot; and they drove to the saluting-point in an English carriage, which was drawn by English horses ridden by Indian postilions, and was followed by a bearded, six-foot, crimson-coated escort of Maharajahs’ sons.

  One sword shot upward, and scintillated for a second in the sun. A hundred bugles answered instantly. In instant answer to a hundred barked commands there came a flash of brilliant steel — one movement, as a flash of lightning moves — sudden, swift, unexpected motion — then a thud — then silence.

  Seated on his war-horse — a small, straight-backed, gray-haired figure in front of the middle of the line — the Commander-in-Chief had given one silent order — and one hundred thousand men behind him had come to the salute.

  A massed band, five hundred strong, struck up the national anthem. The Viceroy raised his hat. The Emir sat rigid beside him, controlling his expression carefully; but his eyes wandered sideways, in the direction of his own rather ragged-looking warriors, who had followed the crimson-coated Rajputs and now sat their horses in a line beside them.

  One hundred and one guns boomed out a Viceroy’s salute. The Viceroy raised his hat again. There was a pause, and one-and-twenty guns boomed out. The Viceroy whispered something, and the Emir bowed. The Commander-in-Chief turned his head, and gave an order to a man who rode behind him; and as he spurred his horse to where the Viceroy sat, and took his place beside the carriage, one bugle spoke — and then a trumpet. And, like a storm-cloud with the glint of lightning in it, a brigade of Horse Artillery detached itself from the far end of the line — wheeled at the flag — and came thundering down past the saluting-point.

  A man who has seen massed Horse Artillery wheel at the gallop, gun-wheel to gun-wheel, hoof to hoof, and thunder past in line of batteries, with the mounted men like a close-packed, wind-splitting hornet-horde in front and the great, black, death-familiar monsters dancing along behind in a whirlwind of noise and dust — has seen the first wonder of the world.

  “From the slums?” thought the Emir, gripping rather tightly on the jeweled hilt of his scimitar. “And from the clubs? Nay! These are their picked men. This is meant to blind me to the poorness of the others. We shall see!”

  And what he did see followed on in such premeasured sequence and with such amazing speed that neither he nor the hill-bred warriors who were near him could do more than marvel. It was wonder following on wonder, to a changing tune.

  Before the gun-dust had been scattered by the wind, another trumpet blared out in rising cadence, and a cavalry brigade revolved within itself, as drilled dust-devils might, and — squadron after squadron, in dense-packed, glittering line of squadrons — ten thousand horsemen swooped to where the guns had wheeled. The drums of the massed band thundered out six double beats, and then — lively as a sunbeam on a frosty morning — the strains of the cavalry canter started with a crash.

  Ten thousand horsemen, bright-eyed and dean and glittering, rode past the Emir, each horse cantering in time to the music of “Bonnie Dundee,” and nose to nose and tail to tail in line. As line after line of them danced past the saluting-point, commands barked out, and at the word each pair of eyes turned sharply to the right. It seemed to the Emir as they passed him that they were the eyes, and faces, of men who were neither unwilling, nor unhappy, nor afraid.

  “Their European cavalry is good!” muttered the Emir to himself. “Those men must be chosen from the colonies that I have read about. Those are men indeed, and their officers ride like men who are indeed proud of them. There remains, though, the native cavalry!”

  But the tune played on, and other trumpets sounded. Before the last line of cantering horsemen had swept past the saluting-point, a four-square khaki cloud, steel-tipped — a set-square sea of turbans and fluttering lance-pennants — had wheeled, and had launched itself in the wake of the British regiments. The Emir could see now for himself how the disaffected natives looked!

  “Rajputs!” said the Viceroy, raising his hat in acknowledgment of their sudden, swift “Eyes Right!”

  “Guides!”

  “Bengal Horse!”

  “Punjabis!”

  “Sikhs!”

  They swept past behind British officers, cantering to a British tune, saluting a British Viceroy, and riding with the easy, perfect, centaur-seat of men who are born to the task, and like it.

  “Such horses!” said the Emir, forced against his will to a grudging exclamation, and too cautious still to praise the men who rode.

  “Each man brings his own horse when he joins,” explained the Viceroy.

  “But why?”

  “Because they want to join! There is competition! They know a good thing when they see it, so they bring their best, and ask to join!”

  But the tune had changed, and the wonders that had only just begun changed with the tune to other wonders. The Emir looked to where the crimson brigades of infantry had stood — and clutched his hilt again, and held his breath. The whole line was in movement. The sun shone on a sea of glittering bayonets and helmet-spikes, and the earth reverberated to the tramp of densely packed regiments that followed, one behind the other, with a space between.

  And as he watched, the massed band struck up yet another tune, and a regiment of Highlanders wheeled by companies and came swinging down toward him, their pipers to the front. None march like Highlanders — none anywhere.

  Their kilts and sporrans swinging, and their rifles at the slope, they came on like the lords of all creation — stately, dignified, alert — as men march who have earned the right to other men’s respect. They went by to their own tune— “The Campbells Are Comin’” — the tune that the holders of Lucknow had heard, and many another beleaguered garrison — and there was that in their salute as they passed him, an indefinable, exhilarating something, which thrilled the reluctant Emir and reminded the Viceroy — who needed no reminder — what manner of men they were who held him there as Empress’s Deputy.

  “Are these your best?” asked the Emir, in a voice that had something approaching awe in it.

  “Not a bit of it, your Highness! You’ll find it very hard to choose! Listen! Here come the Lincolns!”

  “Oh, ’tis my delight of a shiny night....”

  The poacher-tune that half the world has listened to, from the Lincoln Fens to the Hlinadetalone* and back again by way of Abyssinia, crashed out as the last of the Highlanders swaggered out of view, and the Emir was treated to another style of marching. It was different, but it was just as good. No men could march like that whose hearts were anywhere but in their uniforms, and no men who marched like that could be otherwise than men. They went by like one welded, tempered, keen-edged unit, and saluted like men who confer an honor by saluting.

  “Fenmen, those!” said the Viceroy. “Sons of farm-hands mostly. Listen! Here come the Warwicks!”

  “Oh, d’ye ken John Peel, with his coat so gray?”

  Like a following wave, amid a thundering sea of men, the Warwicks advanced and passed, and vanished.

  “East Surrey!” said the Viceroy, as once again the tune changed.

  “East Kent — the Old Half Hundred!”

  “Devon and Somerset!”

  “The Black Watch!”

  “Here come the Ghurkas! You know those!”

  The Ghurkas marched like white men, with almost the swing and swagger of the Highlanders, and grinning to a man. Ther
e was no doubt about them either; they were there because they liked it.

  “Northumberland Fusileers!”

  “Scottish Borderers!”

  “Welsh Fusileers!”

  The tune changed, and the regiments changed — wheeling regiment after regiment into line, and tramping past in quarter-column. The Emir, try as he would, could make no choice among them. He knew men. He could tell by their very atmosphere what spirit might be in them, and he sat by the Viceroy and marveled.

  “Bedfords!” said the Viceroy.

  “Yes,” said the Emir, seeing light suddenly. “These that you tell me are the names of the regiments. But whence come the men themselves? From the colonies, perhaps?”

  “No, your Highness!” said the Viceroy. “From London, and English cities mostly. From ‘Hell, Hull, and Halifax’ — just anywhere.”

  The Emir stroked his beard. “I have two men,” he said reflectively, “two ministers — whose heads shall shortly decorate the Gate of Kabul!”

  “Why? Been making trouble?”

  “No! They are fools! A wise man sees, and a bad man may be made to see, but a fool, never! I will breed no more from that breed!”

  “You mean that your Highness is wise, and has seen? What have you seen?”

  “I have seen an army that all Asia could not beat, and made up of men who were—”

  “Under-dogs?”

  “Aye! Under-dogs!”

  “Your Highness has some fine material in the North! You have seen how the native regiments shape; your stuff is as good as ours, or better!”

  “Yet look at mine!” The Emir’s eyes turned in the direction of his own warriors again.

  “This is the answer, your Highness,” said the Viceroy, looking where he looked, and looking away again. “You rule Afghanistan with justice, and with a rod of iron. Why?”

  “For mine own honor’s sake!”

  “Good — and true! Do you consider yourself, or your own comfort?”

  “Not one iota!”

  “Likewise good — and true! And your men?”

  “They think only of themselves!”

  “There is your answer! These men that you have seen to-day — these men from Hell, Hull, and Halifax — thought only of themselves until they were taught otherwise. Now, each man is for his company — each company is for its regiment — each regiment is for the army — and the army is for the collective honor of them all.”

  “And your Excellency?”

  “I — I am but a deputy for Her Majesty the Queen!”

  “And she?”

  “She represents that honor!”

  The Emir sunk his head on to his breast, and lapsed into deep thought.

  THE END

  OAKES RESPECTS AN ADVERSARY

  THE stories Fred Oakes can tell of his adventures in all corners of the world are, Heaven knows, numberless. I have known people to doubt that so much could ever happen to one man. But I have known him too long and intimately ever to doubt one word he says, and to my mind the thing to be amazed at is his length of memory. His own explanation is worth recording:

  “There’s nothing remarkable about it. We get what we look for. Take a parson, for instance: doesn’t he dodge devils every day? Is there anything to comment on if a lawyer fights two cases or more a week? Or if a soldier goes to war pretty often? I tell you, a hunter hunts, a fisherman fishes, a ship’s captain masters the elements. A true adventurer adventures, not specializing so much as embracing all occupations in the one. Very early in life I decided to adventure; and I qualified to be a prospector with that one end in view.

  “So you see, I’ve been soldier, lawyer, hunter, fisherman — you’d be surprised how often a fisherman! — ship’s captain on occasion — everlastingly at war with the elements and chance — and I’ve buried too many good and true men not to have a slice of parson in my make-up.

  “But it’s as prospector for minerals that an alert adventurer finds his widest field; and as free-lance writer that he can best keep in touch with opportunity, or feather an empty nest. Those are my two chosen standbys. So, if things hadn’t happened to me thick and fast, that would be astonishing. That they did happen is only natural. To me, adventure is life, and life is a succession of adventures. Monotony is death, and the only death. I adventured into the world by being born in a dungeon in the Tower of London — I refuse to say how long ago — and I pray God I may adventure out again when the proper time comes!”

  “In a dungeon in the Tower?” I asked. “How can that be?”

  “I will tell you some day. Monty could have told you better, for his father and mine were intimate. Good Lord, how the time goes! Think of it— ‘Didums’ went over the border eleven years ago this afternoon!”

  We grew silent, he thinking no doubt of a hundred adventures he had shared with the bravest gentleman either of us ever knew, and I of the many I had shared with both of them, playing always a minor part yet generously accorded a greater portion of the credit than was due me. They were strong men in the prime of life when I was a stripling out of college. By their kindness to me they gained a hero-worshiper — which is sometimes not such a useless asset, if you are tolerant — and by my effort to live up to their standard of manliness I gained two friends such as seldom fall to the lot of man.

  Thought’s processes are swift. Probably Oakes, in the chair that faced me on the club veranda, tugging at his grizzled, upturned mustache, reviewed a lifetime. Having less than he to remember, it was naturally I who finished first, and broke the silence.

  “Speaking of death and of Didums,” I said, “you have never told me why you didn’t kill him that time in the Libomba foothills.”

  Fred Oakes sat up, and his eyes blazed for an instant, as I have seen them do very often when the sight of oppression angered him, or the odds against himself and friends were ten or more to one. Then he laughed at himself, and leaned back.

  “I’ve never told any man,” he answered.

  “Tell me now.”

  But he sat silent after that for thirty minutes, and I supposed him unwilling to lay his heart bare.

  As for me, who also had loved Monty, those memories were the reverse of terrible — chiefly, I suppose, because they included my own return from nether hell to something more resembling heaven. I hold no brief against college life, but I do maintain that it unfits a man for life before the mast on sailing ships.

  I consider it less to my discredit than a proof of gentle raising, that after a voyage that had led — at the dictates of a nearly crazy skipper — along the arc of a composite grand circle into Antarctic blizzards — after battling for months with wet cotton sails, and ice, and adverse winds, manning the clumsy pumps often for days and nights on end, and eating worse than crow to help line the aforesaid skipper’s pocket, I left my wages on board a three-masted British bark at the first chance, and deserted.

  At the time it did not look much like the act of God that the port was Lourenço Marques — unless you consider God, as the Vikings did, a very present spell for causing trouble.

  It is easy to say at this late day that I had no business in the fo’castle of any such ship, or of any ship at all, and that the experience served me right. But unless, and until you have yourself left college penniless, have seen all your hopes for a career go up in smoke, and have trudged the streets of London city in search of honorable hire, you are not qualified to pass judgment. I had muscle and a good opinion of my pluck. I used them both; and if that particular experience was ugly, it led to my meeting Oakes and Lord Montdidier — an outcome worth the payment, in advance, of any price.

  But to get back to the bark: we had not put in, for that would have cost our skipper harbor dues, but lay wallowing in the outer bay while a south wind kept three cables taut ahead of us, and the old blunt-nosed anachronism — named by some one with a gift for irony the Heatherbell — scooped up the muddy waves and tossed them over herself like a must elephant heaving hay.

  However, a Greek
boatman will dare anything less than eternity for the sake of unrighteous profit, and it happened that I was made night watchman — deck, not anchor watch. The skipper and mate had a bottle of peach brandy between them in the cabin; and the second mate, who had been snubbed for suggesting we would ride more comfortably higher up the bay, made himself snug in the break of the poop and went to sleep.

  Nobody could tell that I had a shore-suit under my oilskins, and in my pocket the last of a too-lean patrimony in the shape of English gold. I had another suit and some odds and ends in a small bag carefully hidden, and a heart full of rebellion that was much less easy to conceal.

  Only one Greek dared the elements that night. He worked his open boat up under our plunging stern, lowered his little sail, and threw me a line very handily, little expecting such swift returns. But I had no choice.

  I bent a life-line to the handle of my bag and sent it down to him between waves. Then, before he guessed what was happening I came down the life-line hand over hand, bringing his own line with me. I let go the instant my feet touched the boat bottom, and we were away from under the Heatherbell’s stern, beam on to a whale of a sea, and in dire need of action, not argument, before the Greek could remonstrate.

  When the south winds blow there is no shelter in all that roadstead except the little concrete pier where passengers land and the customs officers take toll. I have seen twenty ships drag anchor there of an afternoon and all go banging and plunging together to the confluence of the Tembe and Umbuluzi rivers.

  Until we reached that pier the Greek and I worked like Trojans. Then, in the rain and the dark, each with a hand on the pierwork to keep the little boat from being ground to splinters, we argued out our business problem, while a Portuguese sentry up above the steps regarded us with Sphinx-like disapproval.