Chapter V: Part 5

A knot of village lads from twelve to sixteen were scuffling for places on the shooting-mat as Boy Jones left the shed. On his way to the range, across the windy Downs, he preserved a silence foreign to his sunny nature. Jevons, the bricklayer’s assistant, and the F. R. G. S. trotted past him—rifles at the carry.

“Awkward wind,” said Jevons. “Fishtail!”

“What’s a fishtail?” said Boy Jones.

“Oh! It means a fishy, tricky sort of a wind,” said the Friend. A shift in the uneasy northeast breeze brought them the far-away sob of a service rifle.

“For once in your young life,” the Friend went on, “you’re going to attend a game you do not understand.”

“If you mean I’m expected to make an ass of myself again——” Boy Jones paused.

“Don’t worry! By this time I fancy Jevons will have told the Sergeant all about your performance in the shed just now. _You_ won’t be pressed to shoot.”

A long sweep of bare land opened before them. The thump of occasional shots grew clearer, and Boy Jones pricked his ears.

“What’s that unholy whine and whop?” he asked in a lull of the wind.

“The whine is the bullet going across the valley. The whop is when it hits the target—that white shutter thing sliding up and down against the hillside. Those men lying down yonder are shooting at five hundred yards. We’ll look at ’em,” said the Friend.

“This would make a thundering good golf-links,” said Boy Jones, striding over the short, clean turf. “Not a bad lie in miles of it.”

“Yes, wouldn’t it?” the Friend replied. “It would be even prettier as a croquet-lawn or a basket-ball pitch. Just the place for a picnic too. Unluckily, it’s a rifle-range.”

Boy Jones looked doubtful, but said nothing till they reached the five-hundred-yard butt. The Sergeant, on his stomach, binoculars to his eye, nodded, but not at the visitors. “Where did you sight, Walters?” he said.

“Nine o’clock—edge of the target,” was the reply from a fat, blue man in a bowler hat, his trousers rucked half-way to his knees. “The wind’s rotten bad down there!” He pointed towards the stiff-tailed wind-flags that stuck out at all sorts of angles as the eddy round the shoulder of the Down caught them.

“Let me try one,” the Sergeant said, and reached behind him for a rifle.

“Hold on!” said the F. R. G. S. “That’s Number Six. She throws high.”

“She’s _my_ pet,” said Jevons, holding out his hand for it. “Take Number Nine, Sergeant.”

“Rifles are like bats, you know,” the Friend explained. “They differ a lot.”

The Sergeant sighted.

“He holds it steady enough,” said Boy Jones.

“He mostly does,” said the Friend. “If you watch that white disc come up you’ll know it’s a bull.”

“Not much of one,” said the Sergeant. “Too low—too far right. I gave her all the allowance I dared, too. That wind’s funnelling badly in the valley. Give your wind-sight another three degrees, Walters.”

The fat man’s big fingers delicately adjusted the lateral sight. He had been firing till then by the light of his trained judgment, but some of the rifles were fitted with wind-gauges, and he wished to test one.

“What’s he doing that for?” said Boy Jones.

“You wouldn’t understand,” said the Friend. “But take a squint along this rifle, and see what a bull looks like at five hundred yards. It isn’t loaded, but don’t point it at the pit of my stomach.”

“Dash it all! I didn’t _mean_ to!” said Boy Jones.

“None of ’em mean it,” the Friend replied. “That’s how all the murders are done. Don’t play with the bolt. Merely look along the sights. It isn’t much of a mark, is it?”

“No, by Jove!” said Jones, and gazed with reverence at Walters, who announced before the marker had signalled his last shot that it was a likely heifer. (Walters was a butcher by profession.) A well-centred bull it proved to be.

“Now how the deuce did he do it?” said Boy Jones.

“By practice—first in the shed at two hundred yards. We’ve five or six as good as him,” said the Friend. “But he’s not much of a snap-shooter when it comes to potting at dummy heads and shoulders exposed for five seconds. Jevons is our man then.”

“Ah! talking of snap-shooting!” said the Sergeant, and—while Jevons fired his seven shots—delivered Boy Jones a curious little lecture on the advantages of the foggy English climate, the value of enclosed land for warfare, and the possibilities of well-directed small-arm fire wiping up—“spraying down” was his word—artillery, even in position.

“Well, I’ve got to go on and build houses,” said Jevons. “Twenty-six is my score-card—sign please, Sergeant.” He rose, dusted his knees, and moved off. His place was taken by a dark, cat-footed Coastguard, firing for the love of the game. He only ran to three cartridges, which he placed—magpie, five o’clock; inner, three o’clock; and bull. “Cordery don’t take anything on trust,” said the Sergeant. “He feels his way in to the bull every time. I like it. It’s more rational.”

While the F. R. G. S. was explaining to Boy Jones that the rotation of the earth on her axis affected a bullet to the extent of one yard in a thousand, a batch of six lads cantered over the hill.

“We’re the new two-hundred-ers,” they shouted.

“I know it,” said the Sergeant. “Pick up the cartridge-cases; take my mackintosh and bag, and come on down to the two hundred range, quietly.”

There was no need for the last caution. The boys picked up the things and swung off in couples—scout fashion.

“They are the survivors,” the Friend explained, “of the boys you saw just now. They’ve passed their miniature rifle tests, and are supposed to be fit to fire in the open.”

“And are they?” said Boy Jones, edging away from the F. R. G. S., who was talking about “jump” and “flip” in rifle-shooting.

“We’ll see,” said the Sergeant. “This wind ought to test ’em!”

Down in the hollow it rushed like a boulder-choked river, driving quick clouds across the sun: so that one minute, the eight-inch Bisley bull leaped forth like a headlight, and the next shrunk back into the grey-green grass of the butt like an engine backing up the line.

“Look here!” said the Sergeant, as the boys dropped into their places at the firing-point. “I warn you it’s a three-foot wind on the target, _and_ freshening. You’ll get no two shots alike. Any boy that thinks he won’t do himself justice can wait for a better day.”

Nothing moved except one grin from face to face.

“No,” said the Sergeant, after a pause. “I don’t suppose a thunder-storm would shift you young birds. Remember what I’ve been telling you all this spring. Sighting shots, from the right!”

They went on one by one, carefully imitating the well-observed actions of their elders, even to the tapping of the cartridge on the rifle-butt. They scowled and grunted and compared notes as they set and reset their sights. They brought up their rifles just as shadow gave place to sun, and, holding too long, fired when the cheating cloud returned. It was unhappy, cold, nose-running, eye-straining work, but they enjoyed it passionately. At the end they showed up their score-cards; one twenty-seven, two twenty-fives, a twenty-four, and two twenty-twos. Boy Jones, his hands on his knees, had made no remark from first to last.

“Could I have a shot?” he began in a strangely meek voice.

But the chilled Sergeant had already whistled the marker out of the butt. The wind-flags were being collected by the youngsters, and, with a tinkle of spent cartridge-cases returned to the Sergeant’s bag, shooting ended.

“Not so bad,” said the Sergeant.

“One of those boys was hump-backed,” said Boy Jones, with the healthy animal’s horror of deformity.

“But his shots aren’t,” said the Sergeant. “He was the twenty-seven card. Milligan’s his name.”

“I should like to have had a shot,” Boy Jones repeated. “Just for the fun of the thing.”

“Well, just for the fun of the thing,” the Friend suggested, “suppose you fill and empty a magazine. Have you got any dummies, Sergeant?”

The Sergeant produced a handful of dummy cartridges from his inexhaustible bag.

“How d’you put ’em in?” said Boy Jones, picking up a cartridge by the bullet end with his left hand, and holding the rifle with his right.

“Here, Milligan,” the Friend called. “Fill and empty this magazine, will you, please?”

The cripple’s fingers flickered for an instant round the rifle-breech. The dummies vanished clicking. He turned towards the butt, pausing perhaps a second on each aimed shot, ripped them all out again over his shoulder. Mechanically Boy Jones caught them as they spun in the air; for he was a good fielder.

“Time, fifteen seconds,” said the Friend. “You try now.” Boy Jones shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “This isn’t my day out. That’s called magazine-fire, I suppose.”

“Yes,” said the Sergeant, “but it’s more difficult to load in the dark or in a cramped position.”

The boys drew off, larking among themselves. The others strolled homewards as the wind freshened. Only the Sergeant, after a word or two with the marker, struck off up the line of firing-butts.

“There seems to be a lot in it,” said Boy Jones, after a while, to his friend. “But you needn’t tell me,” he went on in the tone of one ill at ease with himself, “don’t tell _me_ that when the hour strikes every man in England wouldn’t—er—rally to the defence of his country like one man.”

“And he’d be _so_ useful while he was rallying, wouldn’t he?” said the Friend shortly. “Imagine one hundred thousand chaps of your kidney introduced to the rifle for the first time, all loading and firing in your fashion! The hospitals wouldn’t hold ’em!”

“Oh, there’d be time to get the general hang of the thing,” said Boy Jones cheerily.

“When that hour strikes,” the Friend replied, “it will already have struck, if you understand. There may be a few hours—perhaps ten or twelve—there will certainly not be more than a day and a night allowed us to get ready in.”

“There will be six months at least,” said Boy Jones confidently.

“Ah, you probably read that in a paper. I shouldn’t rely on it, if I were you. It won’t be like a county cricket match, date settled months in advance. By the way, are you playing for your county this season?”

Boy Jones seemed not to hear the last question. He had taken the Friend’s rifle, and was idly clicking the bolt.

“Beg y’ pardon, sir,” said the Marker to the Friend in an undertone, “but the Sergeant’s tryin’ a gentleman’s new rifle at nine hundred, and I’m waiting on for him. If you’d like to come into the trench?”—a discreet wink closed the sentence.

“Thanks awfully. That ’ud be quite interesting,” said Boy Jones. The wind had dulled a little; the sun was still strong on the golden gorse; the Sergeant’s straight back grew smaller and smaller as it moved away.

“You go down this ladder,” said the Marker. They reached the raw line of the trench beneath the targets, the foot deep in the flinty chalk.

“Yes, sir,” he went on, “here’s where all the bullets ought to come. There’s fourteen thousand of ’em this year, somewhere on the premises, but it don’t hinder the rabbits from burrowing, just the same. _They_ know shooting’s over as well as we do. You come here with a shot-gun, and you won’t see a single tail; but they don’t put ’emselves out for a rifle. Look, there’s the Parson!” He pointed at a bold, black rabbit sitting half-way up the butt, who loped easily away as the Marker ran up the large nine-hundred-yard bull. Boy Jones stared at the bullet-splintered frame-work of the targets, the chewed edges of the woodwork, and the significantly loosened earth behind them. At last he came down, slowly it seemed, out of the sunshine, into the chill of the trench. The marker opened an old cocoa box, where he kept his paste and paper patches.

“Things get mildewy down here,” he explained. “Mr. Warren, our sexton, says it’s too like a grave to suit _him_. But as I say, it’s twice as deep and thrice as wide as what _he_ makes.”

“I think it’s rather jolly,” said Boy Jones, and looked up at the narrow strip of sky. The Marker had quietly lowered the danger flag. Something yowled like a cat with her tail trod on, and a few fragments of pure white chalk crumbled softly into the trench. Boy Jones jumped, and flattened himself against the inner wall of the trench. “The Sergeant is taking a sighting-shot,” said the Marker. “He must have hit a flint in the grass somewhere. We can’t comb ’em all out. The noise you noticed was the nickel envelope stripping, sir.”

“But I didn’t hear his gun go off,” said Boy Jones.

“Not at nine hundred, with this wind, you wouldn’t,” said the Marker. “Stand on one side, please, sir. He’s begun.”

There was a rap overhead—a pause—down came the creaking target, up went the marking disc at the end of a long bamboo; a paper patch was slapped over the bullet hole, and the target slid up again, to be greeted with another rap, another, and another. The fifth differed in tone. “Here’s a curiosity,” said the Marker, pulling down the target. “The bullet must have ricochetted short of the butt, and it has key-holed, as we say. See!” He pointed to an ugly triangular rip and flap on the canvas target face. “If that had been flesh and blood, now,” he went on genially, “it would have been just the same as running a plough up you.... Now he’s on again!” The sixth rap was as thrillingly emphatic as one at a spiritualistic séance, but the seventh was followed by another yaa-ow of a bullet hitting a stone, and a tiny twisted sliver of metal fell at Boy Jones’s rigid feet. He touched and dropped it. “Why, it’s quite hot,” he said.

“That’s due to arrested motion,” said the F. R. G. S. “Isn’t it a funking noise, though?”

A pause of several minutes followed, during which they could hear the wind and the sea and the creaking of the Marker’s braces.

“He said he’d finish off with a magazine full,” the Marker volunteered. “I expect he’s waiting for a lull in the wind. Ah! here it comes!”

It came—eleven shots slammed in at three-second intervals; a ricochet or two; one on the right-hand of the target’s frame-work, which rang like a bell; a couple that hammered the old railway ties just behind the bull; and another that kicked a clod into the trench, and key-holed up the target. The others were various and scattering, but all on the butt.

“Sergeant can do better than that,” said the Marker critically, overhauling the target. “It was the wind put him off, or (he winked once again), or ... else he wished to show somebody something.”

“I heard ’em all hit,” said Boy Jones. “But I never heard the gun go off. Awful, I call it!”

“Well,” said his friend, “it’s the kind of bowling you’ll have to face at forty-eight hours’ notice—_if_ you’re lucky.”

“It’s the key-holing that I bar,” said Boy Jones, following his own line of thought. The Marker put up his flag and ladder, and they climbed out of the trench into the sunshine.

“For pity’s sake, look!” said the Marker, and stopped. “Well, well! If I ’adn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have credited it. You poor little impident fool. The Sergeant _will_ be vexed.”

“What has happened?” said Boy Jones, rather shrilly.

“He’s killed the Parson, sir!” The Marker held up the still kicking body of a glossy black rabbit. One side of its head was not there.

“Talk of coincidence!” the Marker went on. “I know Sergeant’ll pretend he aimed for it. The poor little fool! Jumpin’ about after his own businesses and thinking he was safe; and then to have his head fair mashed off him like this. Just look at him! Well! Well!”

It was anything but well with Boy Jones. He seemed sick.

* * * * *

A week later the Friend nearly stepped on him in the miniature rifle shed. He was lying at length on the dusty coir matting, his trousers rucked half-way to his knees, his sights set as for two hundred, deferentially asking Milligan the cripple to stand behind him and tell him whether he was canting.

“No, you aren’t now,” said Milligan patronizingly, “but you were.”

A DEPARTURE

Since first the White Horse Banner blew free,
By Hengist’s horde unfurled,
Nothing has changed on land or sea
Of the things that steer the world.
(As it was when the long-ships scudded through the gale
So it is where the Liners go.)
Time and Tide, they are both in a tale
“Woe to the weaker—woe!”

No charm can bridle the hard-mouthed wind
Or smooth the fretting swell.
No gift can alter the grey Sea’s mind,
But she serves the strong man well.
(As it is when her uttermost deeps are stirred
So it is where the quicksands show,)
All the waters have but one word—
“Woe to the weaker—woe!”

The feast is ended, the tales are told,
The dawn is overdue,
And we meet at the wharf in the whistling cold
Where the galley waits her crew.
Out with the torches, they have flared too long,
And bid the harpers go.
Wind and warfare have but one song—
“Woe to the weaker—woe!”

Hail to the great oars gathering way,
As the beach begins to slide!
Hail to the war-shields’ click and play
As they lift along our side!
Hail to the first wave over the bow—
Slow for the sea-stroke! Slow!
All the benches are grunting now—
“_Woe to the weaker—woe!_”

THE BOLD ’PRENTICE

_This story is very much of the same sort as “An Unqualified Pilot,” and shows that, when any one is really keen on his job, he will generally find some older man who is even keener than he, who will give him help and instruction that could not be found in a whole library of books. Olaf Swanson’s book of “Road-Locos Repair or the Young Driver’s Vademecome,” was well known in the Railway sheds in its day, and was written in the queerest English ever printed. But it told useful facts and, as you will see, saved a train at a pinch. It may be worth noticing that young Ottley’s chance did not come to him till he had worked on and among engine-repairs for some five or six years and was well-grounded in practical knowledge of his subject._

Young Ottley’s father came to Calcutta in 1857 as fireman on the first locomotive ever run by the D. I. R., which was then the largest Indian railway. All his life he spoke broad Yorkshire, but young Ottley, being born in India, naturally talked the clipped sing-song that is used by the half-castes and English-speaking natives. When he was fifteen years old the D. I. R. took him into their service as an apprentice in the Locomotive Repair Department of the Ajaibpore workshops, and he became one of a gang of three or four white men and nine or ten natives.

There were scores of such gangs, each with its hoisting and overhead cranes, jack-screws, vises and lathes, as separate as separate shops, and their work was to mend locomotives and make the apprentices behave. But the apprentices threw nuts at one another, chalked caricatures of unpopular foremen on buffer-bars and discarded boilers, and did as little work as they possibly could.

They were nearly all sons of old employés, living with their parents in the white bungalows of Steam Road or Church Road or Albert Road—on the broad avenues of pounded brick bordered by palms and crotons and bougainvilleas and bamboos which made up the railway town of Ajaibpore. They had never seen the sea or a steamer; half their speech was helped out with native slang; they were all volunteers in the D. I. R.’s Railway Corps—grey with red facings—and their talk was exclusively about the Company and its affairs.

They all hoped to become engine-drivers earning six or eight hundred a year, and therefore they despised all mere sit-down clerks in the Store, Audit and Traffic departments, and ducked them when they met at the Company’s swimming baths.

There were no strikes or tie-ups on the D. I. R. in those days, for the reason that the ten or twelve thousand natives and two or three thousand whites were doing their best to turn the Company’s employment into a caste in which their sons and relatives would be sure of positions and pensions. Everything in India crystallizes into a caste sooner or later—the big jute and cotton mills, the leather harness and opium factories, the coal-mines and the dockyards, and, in years to come, when India begins to be heard from as one of the manufacturing countries of the world, the labour Unions of other lands will learn something about the beauty of caste which will greatly interest them.

Those were the days when the D. I. R. decided that it would be cheaper to employ native drivers as much as possible, and the “Sheds,” as they called the Repair Department, felt the change acutely; for a native driver could misuse his engine, they said, more curiously than any six monkeys. The Company had not then standardized its rolling-stock, and this was very good for apprentices anxious to learn about machines, because there were, perhaps, twenty types of locomotives in use on the road. They were Hawthornes; E. types; O types; outside cylinders; Spaulding and Cushman double-enders and short-run Continental-built tank engines, and many others. But the native drivers burned them all out impartially, and the apprentices took to writing remarks in Bengali on the cabs of the repaired ones where the next driver would be sure to see them.

Young Ottley worked at first as little as the other apprentices, but his father, who was then a pensioned driver, taught him a great deal about the insides of locomotives; and Olaf Swanson, the red-headed Swede who ran the Government Mail, the big Thursday express, from Serai Rajgara to Guldee Haut, was a great friend of The Ottley family, and dined with them every Friday night.

Olaf was an important person, for besides being the best of the mail-drivers, he was Past Master of the big railway Masonic Lodge, “St. Duncan’s in the East,” Secretary of the Drivers’ Provident Association, a Captain in the D. I. R. Volunteer Corps, and, which he thought much more of, an Author; for he had written a book in a language of his own which he insisted upon calling English, and had printed it at his own expense at the ticket-printing works.

Some of the copies were buff and green, and some were pinkish and blue, and some were yellow and brown; for Olaf did not believe in wasting money on high-class white paper. Wrapping-paper was good enough for him, and besides, he said the colours rested the eyes of the reader. It was called “The Art of Road-Locos Repair or The Young Driver’s Vademecome,” and was dedicated in verse to a man of the name of Swedenborg.

It covered every conceivable accident that could happen to an engine on the road; and gave a rough-and-ready remedy for each; but you had to understand Olaf’s written English, as well as all the technical talk about engines, to make head or tail of it, and you had also to know personally every engine on the D. I. R., for the “Vademecome” was full of what might be called “locomotive allusions,” which concerned the D. I. R. only. Otherwise, it would, as some great locomotive designer once said, have been a classic and a text-book.

Olaf was immensely proud of it, and would pin young Ottley in a corner and make him learn whole pages—it was written all in questions and answers—by heart.

“Never mind what she _means_,” Olaf would shout. “You learn her word-perfect, and she will help you in the Sheds. I drive the Mail,—_the_ mail of all India,—and what I write and say is true.”

“But I do _not_ wish to learn the book,” said young Ottley, who thought he saw quite enough of locomotives in business hours.

“You _shall_ learn! I haf great friendship for your father, and so I shall teach you whether you like it or not.”

Young Ottley submitted, for he was really fond of old Olaf, and at the end of six months’ teaching in Olaf’s peculiar way began to see that the “Vademecome” was a very valuable help in the repair sheds, when broken-down engines of a new type came in. Olaf gave him a copy bound in cartridge paper and hedged round the margins with square-headed manuscript notes, each line the result of years of experience and accidents.

“There is nothing in this book,” said Olaf, “that I have not tried in my time, and I say that the engine is like the body of a man. So long as there is steam—the life, you see,—so long, if you know how, you can make her move a little,—so!” He waggled his hand slowly. “Till a man is dead, or the engine she is at the bottom of a river, you can do something with her. Remember that! _I_ say it and I know.”

He repaid young Ottley’s time and attention by using his influence to get him made a Sergeant in his Company, and young Ottley, being a keen Volunteer and a good shot, stood well with the D. I. R. in the matter of casual leave. When repairs were light in the Sheds and the honour of the D. I. R. was to be upheld at some far-away station against the men of Agra or Bandikui, the narrow-gauge railway-towns of the west, young Ottley would contrive to get away, and help to uphold it on the glaring dusty rifle-ranges of those parts.

A ’prentice never dreamed of paying for his ticket on any line in India, least of all when he was in uniform, and young Ottley was practically as free of the Indian railway system as any member of the Supreme Legislative Council who wore a golden General Pass on his watch-chain and could ride where he chose.

Late in September of his nineteenth year he went north on one of his cup-hunting excursions, elegantly and accurately dressed, with one-eighth of one inch of white collar showing above his grey uniform stock, and his Martini-Henry rifle polished to match his sergeant’s sword in the rack above him.

The rains were out, and in Bengal that means a good deal to the railways; for the rain falls for three months lavishly, till the whole country is one sea, and the snakes take refuge on the embankment, and the racing floods puff out the brick ballast from under the iron ties, and leave the rails hanging in graceful loops. Then the trains run as they can, and the permanent-way inspectors spend their nights flourishing about in hand-carts pushed by coolies over the dislocated metals, and everybody is covered with the fire-red rash of prickly heat, and loses his temper.

Young Ottley was used to these things from birth. All he regretted was that his friends along the line were so draggled and dripping and sulky that they could not appreciate his gorgeousness; for he considered himself very consoling to behold when he cocked his helmet over one eye and puffed the rank smoke of native-made cigars through his nostrils. Until night fell he lay out on his bunk, in his shirt-sleeves, reading the works of G. W. R. Reynolds, which were sold on all the railway bookstalls, and dozing at intervals.

Then he found they were changing engines at Guldee Haut, and old Rustomjee, a Parsee, was the new driver, with Number Forty in hand. Young Ottley took this opportunity to go forward and tell Rustomjee exactly what they thought of him in the Sheds, where the ’prentices had been repairing some of his carelessness in the way of a dropped crown-sheet, the result of inattention and bad stoking.

Rustomjee said he had bad luck with engines, and young Ottley went back to his carriage and slept. He was waked by a bang, a bump, and a jar, and saw on the opposite bunk a subaltern who was travelling north with a detachment of some twenty English soldiers.

“What’s that?” said the subaltern.

“Rustomjee has blown her up, perhaps,” said young Ottley, and dropped out into the wet, the subaltern at his heels. They found Rustomjee sitting by the side of the line, nursing a scalded foot and crying aloud that he was a dead man, while the gunner-guard—who is a kind of extra-hand—looked respectfully at the roaring, hissing machine.

“What has happened?” said young Ottley, by the light of the gunner-guard’s lantern.

“_Phut gya_ [she has gone smash],” said Rustomjee, still hopping.

“Without doubt; but where?”

“_Khuda jahnta!_ [God knows]. I am a poor man. Number Forty is broke.”

Young Ottley jumped into the cab and turned off all the steam he could find, for there was a good deal escaping. Then he took the lantern and dived under the drive-wheels, where he lay face up, investigating among spurts of hot water.

“Doocid plucky,” said the subaltern. “_I_ shouldn’t like to do that myself. What’s gone wrong?”

“Cylinder-head blown off, coupler-rod twisted, and several more things. She is very badly wrecked. Oah, yes, she is a tottal wreck,” said young Ottley between the spokes of the right-hand driver.

“Awkward,” said the subaltern, turning up his coat-collar in the wet. “What’s to be done, then?”

Young Ottley came out, a rich black all over his grey uniform with the red facings, and drummed on his teeth with his finger nails, while the rain fell and the native passengers shouted questions and old Rustomjee told the gunner-guard to walk back six or seven miles and wire to someone for help.

“I cannot swim,” said the gunner-guard. “Go and lie down.” And that, as you might say, settled that. Besides, as far as one could see by the light of the gunner-guard’s lantern, all Bengal was flooded.

“Olaf Swanson will be at Serai Rajgara with the Mail. He will be particularly angry,” said young Ottley. Then he ducked under the engine again with a flare-lamp and sat cross-legged, considering things and wishing he had brought his “Vademecome” in his valise.

Number Forty was an old reconstructed Mutiny engine, with Frenchified cock-nosed cylinders and a profligate allowance of underpinning. She had been through the Sheds several times, and young Ottley, though he had never worked on her, had heard much about her, but nothing to her credit.

“You can lend me some men?” he said at last to the subaltern. “Then I think we shall disconnect her this side, and perhaps, notwithstanding, she will move. We will try—eh?”

“Of course we will. Hi! Sergeant!” said the subaltern. “Turn out the men here and do what this—this officer tells you.”

“Officer!” said one of the privates, under his breath. “’Didn’t think I’d enlisted to serve under a Sergeant o’ Volunteers. ’Ere’s a ’orrible street accident. ’Looks like mother’s tea-kettle broke. What d’yer expect us to do, Mister Civilian Sergeant?”

Young Ottley explained his plan of campaign while he was ravaging Rustomjee’s tool-chest, and then the men crawled and knelt and levered and pushed and hauled and turned spanners under the engine, as young Ottley told them. What he wanted was to disconnect the right cylinder altogether, and get off a badly twisted coupler-rod. Practically Number Forty’s right side was paralyzed, and they pulled away enough ironmongery there to build a culvert with.

Young Ottley remembered that the instructions for a case like this were all in the “Vademecome,” but even he began to feel a little alarmed as he saw what came away from the engine and was stacked by the side of the line. After forty minutes of the hardest kind of work it seemed to him that everything movable was cleared out, and that he might venture to give her steam. She leaked and sweated and shook, but she moved—in a grinding sort of way—and the soldiers cheered.

Rustomjee flatly refused to help in anything so revolutionary as driving an engine on one cylinder, because, he said, Heaven had decreed that he should always be unlucky, even with sound machines. Moreover, as he pointed out, the pressure-gauge was jumping up and down like a bottle-imp. The stoker had long since gone away into the night; for he was a prudent man.

“Doocid queer thing altogether,” said the subaltern, “but look here, if you like, I’ll chuck on the coals and you can drive the old jigamaroo, if she’ll go.”

“Perhaps she will blow up,” said the gunner-guard.

“’Shouldn’t at all wonder by the sound of her. Where’s the shovel?” said the subaltern.

“Oah no. She’s all raight according to my book, I think,” said young Ottley. “Now we will go to Serai Rajgara—if she moves.”

She moved with long _ssghee! ssghee’s!_ of exhaustion and lamentation. She moved quite seven miles an hour, and—for the floods were all over the line—the staggering voyage began.

The subaltern stoked four shovels to the minute, spreading them thin, and Number Forty made noises like a dying cow, and young Ottley discovered that it was one thing to run a healthy switching-locomotive up and down the yards for fun when the head of the yard wasn’t looking, and quite another to drive a very sick one over an unknown road in absolute darkness and tropic rain. But they felt their way along with their hearts in their mouths till they came to a distant signal, and whistled frugally, having no steam to spare.

“This _might_ be Serai Rajgara,” said young Ottley, hopefully.

“’Looks more like the Suez Canal,” said the subaltern. “I say, when an engine kicks up that sort of a noise she’s a little impatient, isn’t she?”

“That sort of noise” was a full-powered, furious yelling whistle half a mile up the line.

“That is the Down Mail,” said young Ottley. “We have delayed Olaf two hours and forty-five minutes. She must surely be in Serai Rajgara.”

“’Don’t wonder she wants to get out of it,” said the subaltern. “Golly, what a country!”

The line here dipped bodily under water, and young Ottley sent the gunner-guard on to find the switch to let Number Forty into the siding. Then he followed and drew up with a doleful _wop! wop! wop!_ by the side of the great forty-five-ton, six-wheel, coupled, eighteen-inch inside-cylinder Number Twenty-five, all paint and lacquer, standing roaring at the head of the Down Mail. The rest was all water—flat, level and solid from one point of the horizon to the other.

Olaf’s red beard flared like a danger-signal, and as soon as they were in range some knobby pieces of Giridih coal whizzed past young Ottley’s head.

“’Your friend very mad?” said the subaltern, ducking.

“Aah!” roared Olaf. “This is the fifth time you make delay. Three hours’ delay you make _me_—Swanson—the Mail! Now I will lose more time to break your head.” He swung on to the foot-board of Number Forty, with a shovel in one hand.

“Olaf!” cried young Ottley, and Olaf nearly tumbled backward. “Rustomjee is behind.”

“Of course. He always is. But you? How you come here?”

“Oah, we smashed up. I have disconnected her and arrived here on one cylinder, by your book. We are only a—a diagram of an engine, I think.”

“My book! My very good book. My ‘Vademecome’! Ottley, you are a fine driver. I forgive my delays. It was worth. Oh, my book, my book!” and Olaf leapt back to Number Twenty-five, shouting things about Swedenborg and steam.

“Thatt is all right,” said young Ottley, “but where is Serai Rajgara? We want assistance.”

“There is no Serai Rajgara. The water is two feet on the embankment, and the telegraph office is fell in. I will report at Purnool Road. Good-night, good boy!”

The Mail train splashed out into the dark, and Ottley made great haste to let off his steam and draw his fire. Number Forty had done enough for that night.

“Odd chap, that friend of yours,” said the subaltern, when Number Forty stood empty and disarmed in the gathering waters. “What do we do now? Swim?”

“Oah, no! At ten-forty-five thiss morning that is coming, an engine will perhaps arrive from Purnool Road and take us north. Now we will lie down and go to sleep. You see there _is_ no Serai Rajgara. You could get a cup of tea here once on a time.”

“Oh, my Aunt, what a country!” said the subaltern, as he followed Ottley to the carriage and lay down on the leather bunk.

For the next three weeks Olaf Swanson talked to everybody of nothing but his “Vademecome” and young Ottley. What he said about his book does not matter, but the compliments of a mail-driver are things to be repeated, as they were, to people in high authority, the masters of many engines. So young Ottley was sent for, and he came from the Sheds buttoning his jacket and wondering which of his sins had been found out this time.

It was a loop line near Ajaibpore, where he could by no possibility come to harm. It was light but steady traffic, and a first-class superintendent was in charge; but it was a driver’s billet, and permanent after six months. As a new engine was on order for the loop, the foreman of the Sheds told young Ottley he might look through the stalls and suit himself.

He waited, boiling with impatience, till Olaf came in, and the two went off together, old Olaf clucking, “Look! Look! Look!” like a hen, all down the Sheds, and they chose a nearly new Hawthorne, No. 239, which Olaf highly recommended. Then Olaf went away, to give young Ottley his chance to order her to the cleaning-pit, and jerk his thumb at the cleaner and say, as he turned magnificently on his heel, “Thursday, eight o’clock. _Mallum?_ Understand?”

That was almost the proudest moment of his life. The very proudest was when he pulled out of Atami Junction through the brick-field on the way to his loop, and passed the Down Mail, with Olaf in the cab.

They say in the Sheds that you could have heard Number Two hundred and Thirty-nine’s whistle from Raneegunge clear to Calcutta.

THE NURSES

When, with a pain he desires to explain to the multitude, Baby howls Himself black in the face, toothlessly striving to curse; And the six-month-old Mother begins to enquire of the Gods if it may be Tummy, or Temper, or Pins—what does the adequate Nurse?

See! At one turn of her head the trouble is guessed; and, thereafter She juggles (unscared by his throes) with drops of hot water and spoons, Till the hiccoughs are broken by smiles, and the smiles pucker up into laughter, And he lies o’er her shoulder and crows, and she, as she nurses him, croons!

When, at the head of the grade, tumultuous out of the cutting, Pours the belated Express, roars at the night, and draws clear, Redly obscured or displayed by her fire-door’s opening and shutting— Symbol of strength under stress—what does her small engineer?

Clamour and darkness encircle his way. Do they deafen or blind him? No!—nor the pace he must keep. He, being used to these things, Placidly follows his work, which is laying his mileage behind him, While his passengers trustfully sleep, and he, as he handles her, sings!

When, with the gale at her heel, the barque lies down and recovers— Rolling through forty degrees, combing the stars with her tops, What says the man at the wheel, holding her straight as she hovers On the shoulders of wind-screening seas, steadying her as she drops?

Behind him the blasts without check from the Pole to the Tropic, pursue him, Heaving up, heaping high, slamming home, the surges he must not regard:

Beneath him the crazy wet deck, and all Ocean on end to undo him; Above him one desperate sail, thrice-reefed but still buckling the yard!

Under his hand fleet the spokes and return, to be held or set free
again;
And she bows and makes shift to obey their behest, till the master-wave
comes
And her gunnel goes under in thunder and smokes, and she chokes in the
trough of the sea again!
Ere she can lift and make way to its crest; and he, as he nurses her,
hums!

_These have so utterly mastered their work that they work without thinking; Holding three-fifths of their brain in reserve for whatever betide. So, when catastrophe threatens, of colic, collision or sinking, They shunt the full gear into train, and take the small thing in their stride._

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 levée, 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 companion in the Police lines. “He was angry—and so young! Brothers, he will make a very strong Police officer.”

“Does the Memsahib nurse him?” said a new 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 nurses 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 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 those thirty years, that the sons of Sahibs once being born here return when they are men. Yes, they return after they have been to Belait [Europe].”

“And what do they 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 Long Coat Horse; and the Empress called him to Europe in the year that she had accomplished fifty years of rule. _He_ said (and there were also other witnesses) that the Sahibs there drink only common water even as do we; and that the _belaitee-panee_ does _not_ run in all their rivers.”

“He said that there was a Shish Mahal—a glass palace—half a mile in length, and that the rail-train ran under 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 at least a man of good birth,” said Imam Din, and the Naik was silent.

“Ho! Ho!” Imam Din reached out to his pipe, chuckling till his fat sides shook again. “Strickland Sahib’s foster-mother was the wife of a gardener in the Ferozepur district. I was a young man then. This child also will 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 part of the world. Ho! Ho!”

“Strickland Sahib’s butler has said,” the Naik went on, “that they will call him Adam—and no jaw-splitting English name. Udaam. The _padre_ will name him at their church in due time.”

“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 Mussulman,” said Imam Din thoughtfully.

“For the reason that he knows as much of the gods of Hindustan, and so he rides with a rein in each hand. Remember that he sat under the Baba Atal, a _faquir_ among _faquirs_, for ten days; whereby a man came to be hanged for the murder of a dancing girl on the night of the great earthquake,” the Naik replied.

“True—it is true. And yet—the Sahibs are one day so wise—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 bamboos that talked continually, and enormous plantains, trees 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 anything 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 everyone 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 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 greater than Imam Din, and stronger than the heel-roped horses. 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 settled all questions, from the untimely 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 his 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 his looking-glass would solve—Kismet was 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 Mohammedan that Adam learned through every inflection the _Khuda jhanta_ [God knows!] that settles everything in the mind of Asia.

Beyond the fact that “Khuda” [God] 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.

“It’s awful,” said Mrs. Strickland, half crying, “to think of his growing up like a little heathen.” Mrs. Strickland had been born and brought up in England, and did not quite understand Eastern 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.

“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 anything 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 old 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 I wish to be alone.”

“Come out at once,” said Strickland, for the horses were beginning to paw.

“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_ [fuss]?”

Strickland’s face showed him that the whipping was coming, and the child turned white. Motherlike, 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 had 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 it in the grey of the morning when it bent over a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder.

“Let me go!” he screamed; though he and I were the best of friends, as a rule. “Let me go!”

“Where to, Father Adam?” He was quivering like a haltered colt.

“To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before a woman! Let me go!” He tried to bite my hand.

“That is a small matter,” I said. “Men are born to beatings.”

“_Thou_ hast never been beaten,” he said savagely (we were talking in the native tongue).

“Indeed I have; times past counting.”

“Before women?”

“My mother and my 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 only 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 at 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?”