The Day's Work - Part 01

End of WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR — PART II

THE SON OF HIS FATHER

"It is a queer name," Mrs. Strickland admitted, "and none of our family have ever borne it, but, you see, he is the first man to us."

So he was called Adam, and to that world about him he was the first of men — a man-child alone. Heaven sent him no Eve for a companion, but all earth, horse and foot, was at his feet. As soon as he was old enough to appear in public, he held a levee; and Strickland's sixty policemen, with their sixty clanking sabres, bowed to the dust before him. When his fingers closed a little on Imam Din's sword-hilt, they rose and roared — till Adam roared, too, and was withdrawn.

"Now, that was no cry of fear," said Imam Din, afterwards, speaking to his companions in the Police Lines. "He was angry — and so young! Brothers, he will make a very strong Police officer."

"Does the Memsahib give him the breast?" said a new Phillour recruit, the dye smell not yet out of his yellow cotton uniform.

"Ho!" said an up-country Naik, scornfully. "It has not been known for more than ten days that my woman suckles him." He curled his moustaches as lordly as ever an Inspector could afford to do, for he knew that the husband of the foster-mother of the son of the District Superintendent of Police was a man sure of consideration.

"I am glad," said Imam Din, loosening his belt. "Those who drink our blood become of our own blood, and I have seen, in these thirty years, that the sons of the Sahibs, once being born here, return when they are men. Yes, they return after they have been to Belait [Europe]."

"And what do they do in Belait?" asked the recruit, respectfully.

"Get instruction — which thou hast not," returned the Naik. "Also they drink of belaitee-panee [soda-water], enough to give them that devil's restlessness which endures for all their lives. Whence we of Hind have trouble."

"My father's uncle," said Imam Din, slowly, with importance, "was Ressaldar of the Longcoat Horse; and the Empress called him to Belait in the year that she had accomplished fifty years of rule. He said (and there were also other witnesses) that the Sahibs there drink common water, even as do we; and that the belaitee-panee does not run in all the rivers.

"He said also that there was a Shish Mahal — half a glass palace — half a koss in length and that the rail-gbarri ran under the roads, and that there are boats bigger than a village. He is a great talker." The Naik spoke scornfully. He had no well-born uncles.

"He is a man of good birth," said Imam Din, with the least possible emphasis on the first word, and the Naik was silent.

"Ho! ho!" Imam Din reached out to his pipe, chuckling until his fat sides shook again. "Strickland Sahib's foster-mother was the wife of an Arain in the Ferozepur district. I was a young man then, ploughing while the English fought. This child will also be suckled here, and he will have double wisdom, and when he is a Police officer it will be very bad for the thieves in this illakha."

"There will be no English in the land then. They are asking permission of clerks and low-caste men to continue their rule even now," said the Naik.

"All but foolish men — such as those clerks are — would know that this asking is but an excuse for making trouble, and thus holding the country more strictly. Now, in an investigation, is it not our custom to permit the villagers to talk loosely and give us abuse for a little time? Then do we not grow hot, and walk them to the thana two by two — as these clerks will be walked? Thus do I read the new talk."

"So do not I," said the Naik, who borrowed the native newspapers.

"Because thou art young, and wast born in time of peace. I saw the year that was to end the English rule. Men said it was ended, indeed, and that all could now take their neighbour's cattle. This I saw ploughing, and I was minded to fight too, being a young man. My father sent me to Gurgaon to buy cattle, and I saw the tents of Van Corlin Sahib(1) in the wheat, and I saw that he was going up and down collecting the revenue, neither abating nor increasing it, though Delhi was all afire, and the Sahibs lay dead about the fields. I have seen what I have seen. This Raj will not be talked down; and he who builds on the present madness of the Sahib-log, which, O Naik, covers great cunning, builds for himself a lock-up. My father's uncle has seen their country, and he says that he is afraid as never he feared before. So Strickland Sahib's boy will come back to this country, and his son after him. Naik, have they named him yet?"

"The butler spoke to my household, having heard the talk at table, and he says that they will call him Adam, and no jaw-splitting English name. Ud-daam. The padre will name him at their church in due time."(1) Van Cortland?

"Who can tell the ways of Sahibs? Now, Strickland Sahib knows more of the Faith than ever I had time to learn-prayers, charms, names, and stories of the Blessed Ones. Yet he is not a Musalman," said Imam Din, thoughtfully.

"For the reason that he knows as much of the gods of Hindustan, and so rides with a rein in each hand. Remember that he sat under the Baba Atall, a fakir among fakirs, for ten days: whereby a man came to be hanged for the murder of the dancing-girl on the night of the great earthquake," said the Naik.

"True — it is true — and yet.. they are one day so wise, the Sahibs, and another so foolish. But he has named the child well:

Adam. Huzrut Adam! Ho! ho! Father Adam we must call him."

"And all who minister to the child," said the Naik, quietly, but with meaning, "will come to great honour."

Adam throve, being prayed over before the gods of at least three creeds, in a garden almost as fair as Eden. There were gigantic clumps of bamboo that talked continually, and enormous plantains on whose soft paper skin he could scratch with his nails; green domes of mango-trees as huge as the dome of St. Paul's, full of parrots as big as cassowaries, and grey squirrels the size of foxes. At the end of the garden stood a hedge of flaming poinsettias higher than any-thing in the world, because, childlike, Adam's eye could not carry to the tops of the mango-trees. Their green went out against the blue sky, but the red poinsettias he could just see. A nurse who talked continually about snakes and pulled him back from the mouth of a fascinating dry well, and a mother who believed that the sun hurt little heads, were the only drawbacks to this loveliness. But, as his legs grew under him, he found that by scaling an enormous rampart — three feet of broken-down mud wall at the end of the garden — he could come into a ready-made kingdom where every one was his slave. Imam Din showed him the way one evening, and the police troopers cooking their supper received him with rapture, and gave him pieces of very indigestible but altogether delightful spiced bread.

Here he sat or sprawled in the horse-feed where the police horses were picketed in a double line, and he named them, men and beasts together, according to his ideas and experiences, as his First Father had done before him. In those days everything had a name, from the mud mangers to the heel-ropes; for things were people to Adam, exactly as people are things to folk in their second childhood. Through all the conferences — one hand twisted into Imam Din's beard, and the other on his polished belt-buckle — there were two other people who came and went across the talk — Death and Sickness — persons stronger than Imam Din, and stronger than the heel-roped stallions. There was Mata, the small-pox, a woman in some way connected with pigs; and Heza, the cholera, a black man, according to Adam; and Booka, starvation; and Kismet, who quietly settled all questions, from the choking of a pet mungoose in the kitchen drain, to the absence of a young policeman who once missed a parade and never came back. It was all very wonderful to Adam, but not worth much thinking over; for a child's mind is bounded by his eyes exactly as a horse's view of the road is limited by blinkers. Between all these objectionable shadowy vagrants stood a ring of kind faces and strong arms, and Mata and Heza would never touch Adam, the first of men. Kismet might do so, because — and this was a mystery no staring into the looking-glass would solve — Kismet, who was a man, was also written, like police orders for the day, in or on Adam's head. Imam Din could not explain how this might be, and it was from that grey fat Muhammadan that Adam learned through every inflection the Khuda janta (God knows) that settled everything in his mind.

Beyond the fact that "Khuda" was a very good man and kept lions, Adam's theology did not run far. Mrs. Strickland tried to teach him a few facts, but he revolted at the story of Genesis as untrue. A turtle, he said, upheld the world, and one-half the adventures of Huzrut Nu (Father Noah) had never been told. If Mamma wanted to hear them, she must ask Imam Din. Adam had heard of a saint who had made wooden cakes and pressed them to his stomach when he felt hungry, and the Feeding of the Multitude did not impress him. So it came about that a reading of miracle stories generally ended in a monologue by Adam on other and much more astonishing miracles.

"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."