Little Bobby lay asleep in his tent, when suddenly something half awoke him. The great, big Indian full moon, bright almost as daylight, was streaming in through the curtain-door of the tent, which had been left open for air. Outside, in the shadow of the mango-grove, all was inky darkness. The tent itself was feebly lit by a funny little lamp in the corner—merely a wick of cotton burning in a saucer of oil.
Opening one eye, Bobby saw that little Phil was asleep on the small camp-bed beside his own, Ayah, a mere bundle of clothes, lying on the ground beside him. Across, beyond the pole, in the centre of the tent, Aunt Gladys, his beautiful new aunt, just come out from England, lay in her bed, with the long, fair hair Bobby had admired so when she had arrived streaming over the pillow.
All was as usual, the silence of the night only broken by the distant howl of a jackal by the nearest village; yet Bobby had a vague feeling that there was somebody—something—else, near him.
He sat up, and then he became aware in the dim light that some large animal was creeping about the tent. He felt horribly frightened. All sorts of dreadful stories of wild beasts came into his mind. Was a jackal, or even a wolf, going to attack him? There were plenty about, he had heard. Or it might be even one of the tigers that father was going to shoot.
Bobby sat still, too frightened to call or move. The creature, whatever it was—long, hairy, slouching—slunk past quite close to his bed, but did not notice him. It crept towards the corner of the tent where the lamp was. The next moment, the tent was in darkness. Bobby, breathless, sat, hands extended into the night, to ward off the spring he felt would follow.
Was no one awake? Would no one help? In despair, Bobby remembered how the old chokedar—the watchman, supposed to walk round and round the tents with his big stick all night—invariably dozed in some snug corner, and that Ayah always slept with her wadded quilt wrapped over her head, and was deaf and blind to everything.
He listened, his heart beating. Was the wolf eating up little Phil or pretty Auntie?
Then suddenly came a sound from the corner by the lamp—lap, lap, lap, quite steadily for a few minutes; then it ceased. A grey form slunk once more past Bobby’s bed, out of the door. Bobby saw it for just a moment, distinctly in the moonlight. It looked like a large dog.
Then, and only then, did he have courage to put his feet out of bed and shake Ayah awake. She made a light. Something had come into the tent, upset the saucer, and had carefully drunk up all the oil—something very hungry.
Bobby’s father was a magistrate in India, and the family, during the winter months, moved about the villages which formed the district he ruled over, for father to judge prisoners and hear grievances. They lived in tents, and moved every few days to a new camping-ground—such a nice out-of-door life. The evening after Bobby’s fright in the night they were dining out of doors as usual, when a native dog came up from among the trees, gradually slinking nearer the table. He looked so thin and miserable that Aunt Gladys’s kind heart went out to him.
‘Oh, that poor dog!’ and she threw him a cutlet bone.
‘He’s only a poor “pie” dog,’ said Father.
‘How hungry he is!’ cried Bobby, and threw him a whole cutlet.
One gulp and it was gone!
The old kitmutghar, waiting at table, would have beaten him off, but Mother forbade him; and the ‘pie,’ only too easily alarmed, slunk away into the mango-grove.
Poor ‘pie’! he was nameless, homeless, masterless, long and gaunt, dirty white in colour, with a short, rough coat, sharp prick ears, a narrow head, and a long nose. He was neither beautiful to look upon nor beautiful in his nature. He was just a ‘pie,’ a pariah, an outcast, a mongrel!
Poor wretch! he had a hard life—one long search for food; his only amusement one long search for fleas. Yet he was but one of hundreds of similar dogs roaming about Indian villages. Like the rest, our ‘pie’ kept company with the lepers, also outcasts, who sat begging, their ghastly faces hidden under their head-cloths, at the outskirts of the village, a cloth spread out before them on which the charitable cast their alms. He played with the children, too, the half-naked Indian children, clad with little else than bangles, rolling in the dust; and when both were tired they would lie down to sleep, side by side, on the bare ground, under the shadow of the village peepul-tree. He followed the labourer when the latter went out with his oxen to plough, and lay down as if to guard his bundle of cotton clothes and his long earthenware pipe, left under the mango-grove. When noontide came, and the sun shone fiercely down, and the husbandmen returned to eat their midday frugal meal, the poor ‘pie’ would sit wistfully at a little distance, hoping he might get a stray morsel of the unleavened cakes, smeared with rancid butter, which smelt to him so good. He was always hungry, and could not afford to be particular as to what, where, and when he ate. In fact, he rather preferred feeding at night, when, under the cover of the darkness, he could rummage with his long nose, unmolested, among the rubbish heaps, and even do a little picking and stealing.
For the ‘pie’ was not a nice dog—distinctly not a nice dog—at all events, in his youth. What a change came over him later on, you shall see. There is some good, apparently, even in the most degraded creatures, but certainly the ‘pie’ did not look a dog to make a pet of. His grandparents for generations and centuries long had been beaten and starved and ill-used, till the very name of dog has become the worst by which you can call a man in India. Our ‘pie’ was an arrant coward, too; you could see that in his eye. He would flinch and cringe and slink away at the mere suggestion of a blow, poor thing! He did not know even how to fight, pluckily and briskly, as English dogs do. Not but what there was plenty of quarrelling always going on among the village dogs, especially over any stray morsel one might have picked up. Then they had dog laws, too. Woe betide any dog that ventured out of his village and its neighbourhood into the next. The dogs there would set upon him with one accord and hunt him back, snarling and showing their teeth, and pursuing him with shrill barks not unlike those of wolves or jackals, for pariah dogs have no honest ringing voices like the dogs we love in England.
Our ‘pie’ loved a place rather than a person. He was an animal with many enemies and few friends. The gipsies were among the former. ‘When the gipsies come in at one side of the town,’ says a Hindoo proverb, ‘the dogs file out at the other.’ ‘Dog-cookers’ the gipsies are called; but not only for this reason do the pariah dogs dread them, for they keep dogs of their own, a sort of greyhound, useful both as watchdogs and for the chase; and any dog with a master—a dog comfortable, fed, cared for, and loved—is dreaded and envied by the poor, homeless, starved ‘pie.’
Then the train was his enemy, too. A new railway had recently been made near the village. The pariah dogs had to learn by bitter experience that it is dangerous to go to sleep on the rails in the sun, and to be caught napping by a train. Ere long there was more than one with a leg or a tail missing. Yet they found the advent of the railway not so bad after all. In India, on the long journeys, travellers take many meals in the trains, and there are always scraps or leavings to be picked up, and the pariahs learnt to prowl about the station on the look out for them. One day our ‘pie’ had a great find. As the train was stopping at the station there was in one carriage an Englishman having a nice meal—cold chicken, salad, bread-and-butter; it made the ‘pie’s’ mouth water! The windows of Indian railway-carriages are large and low. The ‘pie’ could not resist the temptation. Nothing venture, nothing have! With one bound he was into the carriage; another took him out again, but with the cold fowl in his mouth! It was the Englishman that went hungry that time!
Poor ‘pie’! No doubt the memory of that unaccustomed and unexpected tit-bit lingered long in his mouth. He did not smell such food again till the white walls of Bobby’s canvas home arose one morning by the mango-grove beyond the village. The oil of Bobby’s lamp had been a great find in the night, but that cutlet——!
Next morning, when the family were at breakfast, our ‘pie’ plucked up courage again. Again he was noticed, and not forgotten. He seemed grateful, and lingered wistfully, as if he knew he would not be cruelly driven off. Bobby eyed him pitifully.
‘Poor dog! He is so hungry! Doesn’t anyone feed him? Hasn’t he any master? Perhaps it was he who came into my tent last night and frightened me so. But he did not mean any harm, though. He only came to drink up the nasty lamp oil, Ayah says. He was so hungry! Come here, poor fellow!’
He clicked his fingers at him, and the ‘pie’ obeyed. Never in his life before had he had a gentle word said to him—never had anyone looked at him kindly like that! Perhaps deep down in his nature was the longing for a master or a mistress to attach himself to, and Bobby’s voice was soft and kind. It was the beginning of a new life for him.
From that moment the ‘pie’ never left the camp. Following their master’s example, the servants did not hunt him away, but gave him all the scrap’s. The ‘pie’ had to dodge the crows who hovered about, also hungry, but he feasted as he had never feasted before in all his life.
But one morning they took down the tents and packed them in bullock-carts. The magistrate was moving on to another village. The ‘pie’ was in despair. His friends were going away. As the slow, creaking bullock-carts moved forward, and the hooded cart with Bobby and his baby brother, and Father, Mother, and Auntie riding horses, the ‘pie’ followed the procession at a respectful distance. That evening, when the family sat down to dinner at their new camp, there he was again, waiting for stray bits.
Bobby was delighted to recognise him. He beckoned to him again, and gave him such a dinner!
‘I like that dog, Mummy. He isn’t at all fierce and wild, though he is a “pie.” I should like to have him for my very own to make a pet of.’
‘What? An ugly, mongrel “pie”?’ exclaimed Father.
‘I should,’ repeated Bobby, with decision. ‘I haven’t any dog now poor Crib’s dead, and I’m often very dull now Reggie has gone away to England to school, and little Phil is too small to play with. Do let me have the dog, Mummy—do!’
Mother hesitated, and then smiled rather sadly. The little sister close to Bobby’s age, who should have been his playmate, slept in the white-walled cemetery at Pugreepore, and Bobby missed his big brother, gone home across the seas.
‘Certainly that “pie” is not lovely,’ Auntie Gladys remarked.
‘Or very clean,’ put in Father.
‘But if Bobby fancies him——’ said Mother.
‘Well, if Mother does not mind the creature about; but before Bobby handles him the sweeper must wash and brush him.’
Which was easier said than done. The sweeper, the low-caste servant who had charge of all the dogs and birds and pets, did not half like the job. The ‘pie,’ utterly unused to such a proceeding, snarled, and showed his ugly teeth unpleasantly. If Bobby had not stood by and bribed him with food, I do not think he would ever have got through his first toilet. At its conclusion he was certainly much improved in appearance, and Bobby felt sure that, in time, when with good feeding his bones and ribs became less visible, he would almost be thought pretty.
‘And now to give him a name!’ he cried.
‘Faa-nee-ee (Fanny) good name for dog,’ remarked the sweeper, giving a final polish to the ‘pie’s’ coat.
‘Or what sahibs often call English dogs—“Kumere,”’ added the old bearer.
‘Kumere?’ repeated Bobby. ‘I’ve never heard such a name for a dog.’
‘Your highness often hears sahibs call it to their dogs,’ persisted the bearer.
Then Father understood and explained.
‘“Kumere.” “Come here,” he means; don’t you see, Bobby? Ha, ha! Kum ’ere!’
‘That’s just what I said to him that first night he ever came to dinner,’ cried Bobby. ‘“Kum’ere” I shall call him.’
So Kum’ere the homeless, nameless ‘pie’ became. To Bobby in especial did he attach himself. He followed him everywhere, and slept under the wing of his tent. Gradually he grew less frightened and cowardly, more sociable, and even playful. You would not have known him for the same dog, either in ways or looks, after Bobby and the sweeper had had him in hand for a few weeks.
It was rather a sad camp life that year for Father and Mother and Bobby. For it was not only the ‘pie’ dogs that were hungry. The grip of famine was on the land. No rain had fallen during the hot summer months, as is usually the case. In consequence no crops had grown up, and the people were starving. In India, when it does not rain, much the same state of things happens as that which we read of in the book of Genesis, and that Jacob and his sons suffered from. There are such millions of people, all very, very poor, almost entirely living on grain and rice, with little or no meat.
The country was all bare and dry, the people like skeletons, and, as they hardly wear any clothes, their bones seemed almost coming through their skins. It made Aunt Gladys miserable to meet them.
One morning as the magistrate’s family were all breakfasting under the shadow of a big mango-tree, some little half-naked children came slowly wandering across from the native village of mud huts nearby—such wretched-looking little objects, their faces all big black eyes, their legs and arms all bones. There were three of them—two tiny toddles and an elder boy. They stood at a little distance and watched Bobby eat his nice breakfast with a ravenous look, like starving animals. Yet they were patient and dumb, and did not cry or beg.
Bobby could not stand their mute appeal. He jumped off his chair and ran towards them with all his food piled on his plate. The little ones hardly realised what he meant; but the elder boy snatched at the plate greedily. Bobby thought he was going to eat it all himself; but no. This good little elder brother turned to the others with it. They grabbed at it like hungry puppies, and not till they had eaten nearly all did he touch a morsel himself.
In the evening, at Bobby’s supper-time, the children, emboldened by their success, drew near again, and the same performance was repeated.
‘Oh, Bobby!’ said his Mother. ‘It’s all very well, but remember that we cannot possibly feed all the children who are starving round.’
‘Just this one lot, Mummy,’ pleaded Bobby. ‘We move away from here to-morrow. And he is such a kind little brother!’
At breakfast-time next day they crept up again. But their brother was not with them. A man, evidently their father, brought them, and then stood at a distance, as they toddled up to Bobby alone, holding out their hands beseechingly.
‘Ask him where the big boy is,’ said Bobby to his Mother, standing by.
The father shook his head and began to weep.
‘The boy died in the night. He was too weak for want of food to resist the fever which came on him. Half the village has died these last few weeks. But his highness the little sahib (meaning Bobby) has spared to me these only two of my children which are left, by feeding them.’
Bobby crept up to his Mother, feeling as if he would like to cry too. The little elder brother had been about his age and size.
‘I am so glad we fed them, Mummy,’ he whispered.
‘My little Bobs!’ she said, kissing him; and Bobby felt happy again, for ‘Bobs’ was his pet name, and Father and Mother only called him that when he was good and brave, like the great General whose name he was so proud to bear.
This time Mother made no demur. With her own hands she fed both the starving mites and their father.
Just then Father came out of his office tent.
‘Here’s news for you! A runner has brought me a note from Mr. Woods. He has heard of a tiger near here, and is taking me with him to shoot to-morrow. He will be here to dinner, Mother.’
Then he turned to the native and his boys, who were going off, and added:
‘There will be money for the villagers, too; they will be wanted to come and help beat the jungle for the tiger.’
Bobby was pleased. Mr. Woods was a great hero of his. He ran off to tell Aunt Gladys, who was playing with Phil, building for him with his new gay Benares bricks.
‘When I’m grown up, Auntie Gladys—when I’m grown up quite—I’m going to be a forest officer, like Mr. Woods. He never lives in a house much, but moves about in tents most all the year round, ’cept at Christmas, when he comes in to Pugreepore to spend it with us at our bungalow. He’s a sort of big gardener what looks after all the forests, and plants them, and cuts them down, ’cos if there wasn’t no trees there wouldn’t be no rain. We’re just in his parts now; the little low hills are beginning what run up to the great mountains where we go, Mummy and Phil and me, when it’s very hot. Mr. Woods has shot ever such a lot of tigers. He’s a very brave man—very big!’
Then Bobby turned to his Father.
‘Is Mr. Woods bringing Maharajah?’
‘Certainly, and his other elephant too. How else could we go after the tiger?’
Bobby’s joy was now complete. All the afternoon he lay in wait, scanning the horizon for his friend’s arrival. Towards sundown a little procession came slowly across the plain. It resolved itself into an Englishman riding on a pony, followed by two elephants.
‘He’s come! he’s come!’ cried Bobby, running under the awning of the tent and dragging out Aunt Gladys.
Mr. Woods trotted up, and flung himself off his pony.
‘Well, my little Bobs, and how goes the world with you?’
Then he perceived Aunt Gladys approaching, and took off his big sun-hat. Mr. Woods did not meet a new English lady every day.
‘This,’ said Bobby—‘this is my pretty new Auntie, just come out from England, with our new clothes and the toys Gran’ma has sent. Auntie Gladdie I call her, ’cos she always seems so glad, and makes everybody else glad!’
Having thus effected an introduction, Bobby ran off to Maharajah. But was it the setting sun which turned Auntie’s face so pink?
Tied up by a big iron chain to one of the largest mango-trees in the grove, Bobby found Maharajah, with Mohum in attendance. He was a very fine elephant. He and Mohum had grown up together, as it were. He had been brought in from the keddah, or trap, in the forest, where they catch and tame the wild young elephants, and when quite a small boy Mohum had never been afraid of him, and was now his mahout, or driver and attendant.
Woe betide any stranger who would have dared to feed Maharajah or to order him about, for elephants know but one master. Bobby looked on with a sort of awe while Mohum popped the great flapjack cakes he had made into Maharajah’s mouth, and handed him a bit of the sugar-cane he loved. The great beast stood munching and swaying the while gently from side to side, as an anchored ship sways in the tideway, and whisking himself with a wisp of grass held in his trunk to keep the flies off.
Then came what Bobby thought the greatest fun of all—namely, to see Mohum wash Maharajah. He led him down to the well, and made him useful by drawing up the bucket with his trunk. Then, at a word of command from Mohum, he lay down, raising head or leg as ordered, while Mohum climbed about him and rubbed him down—not with a brush, but with a brickbat!
Maharajah was rather inattentive during the process, blowing clouds of dust from his trunk, lifting the wrong leg and rolling over at the wrong moment; he had sometimes to be scolded, even slapped. But when the washing was all over he slung up his nurse on to his neck with his trunk, and shuffled back to his resting-place.
This evening, Maharajah’s toilet over, Bobby still lingered with Mohum and the other servants, as they squatted, smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, under the tree. He had almost made up his mind that to be a mahout was even a more glorious thing than to be a forest officer. But then he had never heard of an Englishman being a mahout. He determined to ask Mr. Woods about it.
‘Be quiet, Maharajah piyari (darling),’ exclaimed Mohum. The great beast was taking up the dust in his trunk and powdering his skin with it to keep it cool. ‘See,’ he continued, ‘how he obeys me! There is no animal like my lord the elephant, who will sleep and eat to order.’
‘And he obeys none but you,’ put in the water-carrier, leaning back against the goat-skin which he had just filled from the well, for Phil’s evening bath. ‘So it is always with them.’
‘Mostly,’ returned the mahout; ‘but when I was no bigger than the little Bobby sahib there (who promptly pricked up his ears and drew nearer), ‘I heard tell of a mahout who was anything but friends with his elephant, and the mighty one did him terribly to death.’
‘How did it happen?’ asked a grass-cutter, as he rubbed at Mr. Woods’s saddle.
‘They had a grudge one against another,’ the mahout went on, ‘and it came about in this wise. The mahout, was a poor man, and he had been blessed with many children, and he stole one of the twelve cakes which the elephant was allowed for supper. But the wise beast turned the cakes all over and laid them out in a row—the eleven—and then when his mahout came by he trumpeted loudly. That mahout was beaten with shoes,’ he added.
Bobby gazed up at Maharajah’s mighty form, dark in the fading light. He seemed to him the embodiment of wisdom.
‘But the elephant did not forget,’ Mohum went on, ‘and when he was not armed with his goad the mahout had to be careful to keep out of his reach. Especially at night did he spread his sleeping blanket beyond the wave of his enemy’s trunk. But one night the elephant got a long bamboo and chewed the end till the fibres were long and brush-like. Then, pushing it gently and slowly along, nearer and nearer, he entangled it in the poor man’s hair, and drew him towards him before he could awake, and then trampled him quickly to death!’
‘Ah, indeed!’ muttered the bhisti, shouldering his water-skin; ‘when the one-handed one puts forth his handiness, man is but as a fly before him.’
‘All the same, it is strange how afraid he is of a little dog,’ added Mohum.
Maharajah had caught up a long sugar-cane stalk from the pile before him, and was whisking it unpleasantly near the heads of the little group.
Bobby, rather alarmed by the turn the conversation had taken, looked round for Kum’ere, who was generally at his heels.
‘Come along, Kum’ere,’ he cried; ‘let’s be getting back to Mother.’
But Kum’ere was not there.
Bobby ran back to the camp. Father had finished his office work, and had come out of his tent. The servants had spread a carpet on the ground in front of the dining-tent, and placed the four large easy-chairs that folded up upon it. Father was telling Aunt Gladys a story of a tiger he had shot when he was a grif, or young fellow just out from England. But Bobby noticed that Auntie seemed more interested in Mr. Woods, who sat in the chair next to her, and was teaching his terrier Smudge a new trick.
The little boy wedged himself in between the two chairs, stole one little hand inside Mr. Woods’s big brown one, and laid the other on Auntie Gladys’s small white one.
‘I’m rich to-night. Two people to tell me stories!’ he remarked; for the hour before bedtime, when Phil was being put to bed, he always considered his especial time. ‘You don’t know, Mr. Woods, what nice stories Auntie Gladdie tells—all about home’ (he called it so, though he had never been to England), ‘and Gran’ma and her garden. Quite as nice as your forest stories about animals, only different, you know. Do you know next hot weather I’m going home?—to live with Gran’ma and to go to school—I shall be such a big boy. And I shall see the sea, and the King, and oh, such toy-shops—shops full of nothing but toys! Shan’t I, Auntie?’
Auntie nodded, and Bobby went on:
‘Then, when I’ve been to school and am kite grown up, I shall come out here again, and be your ’sistant, Mr. Woods (you know you promised), and cut down trees ’long with you, such big trees—-whack! whack! Get away, Kum’ere; don’t bother.’
For the dog had come trotting up, and was rubbing and pawing at Bobby as if to attract his attention.
‘You should have come with me, Auntie Gladdie, to see Maharajah washed and dressed. (Go down, Kum’ere!) And you’d have heard such stories of elephants—oh! creepy-crawly ones—but I forgot you don’t know the bat (language) yet. I must teach you! (Lie down, Kum’ere, and be quiet; it’s my time for being talked to and told stories.) I’m ready now, Mr. Woods, please, if you are; I think it’s your turn to-night, as you’re new. A forest story, please, and—Aunt Gladdie, I think you’re too small for that very big chair, and that I can curl up ’side of you. (Kum’ere, do stop bothering!) Couldn’t we have a tiger story to-night, as you’re going to shoot one to-morrow?’
And that was how Bobby heard the story of how the tiger cubs were taken in.
‘The sun was going to bed,’ began Mr. Woods, ‘just as it is now, between beautiful coloured blankets of red and yellow; but the forest folk were just getting up. They had been dozing all through the heat of the day, and were waking up feeling very much like supper. Tawny and Stripes and Spots, three little yellow cubs, jumped up and shook themselves, and then began to tumble about and paw each other over Mummy Tiger, who was fast asleep, like so many yellow little kittens. This woke her up, and she stretched her great tawny legs and opened her great red mouth and yaw-aw-awned! You could hear her a hundred yards off.
‘“We’re very hungry, please, Mummy!” they all purred at once. “Do go and get us a monkey, or perhaps, if you’re lucky, a nice fat deer!”
‘Off went the Mummy Tiger, slinking away stealthily, creepy-crawly through the long grass and the prickly yellow mimosa-bushes, and she told the cubs to be good children and not to wander away and get into mischief.
‘For a bit the cubs played about, trying to jump at the parrots and the peacocks that came flying about among the trees. But the parrots only shrieked at them, laughing from a safe height; and once, when a big peacock did alight and spread out its tail, the size and the gayness of the tail so struck the cubs that they stood open-mouthed staring at it. Then a big brown monkey came along, leaping from tree to tree.
‘“Cuk! Cuk! Cuk!” he jabbered. “You can’t catch me!”
‘Suddenly Spots, the oldest and the biggest of the cubs, stopped short in the act of rolling over Stripes and listened attentively.
‘“What’s that?” he exclaimed.
Stripes sat up and listened too.
‘“Baa-baa-baa!” came a sound, like Phil’s woolly sheep makes when you pinch its sides.
‘Now, Tawny was the most knowing of the cubs, and he said it was a kid.
‘“A kid’s something good to eat!” he cried. “I’ve heard Mummy say it’s much nicer than a deer even, next best to a cow. Let’s go and catch it, and give her a nice surprise for supper.”
‘Stripes, who was the goodest of the three, tried to remind them that the Mummy Tiger had told them not to wander; but the others had already set off, and he was frightened to be left alone, so he followed them.
‘Off they scampered in the direction of the bleating, which, now near, now far, led them to a place where the trees ended, and there was only high, whitish grass waving over their heads in the evening breeze. There, suddenly, the grass ended, and the astonished cubs looked out into a widespread, unknown world of desert plain.
‘“Baa-aa-aa!”
‘“Where can that kid be?” Spots wondered. “I heard it close by just now.”
‘“And I wonder what those are?” said Tawny. “Are they good for supper?” as he spied two figures slinking away across the plain in the twilight.
‘Now, these were two natives, tracking down the tigers for the sahib to shoot next day.
‘“That was a good trick,” one said to the other, “imitating a kid. I thought it would deceive the cubs, and the old one will soon follow them.”
‘When it had grown dark the Mummy Tiger came along, hunting everywhere for her children. She found them playing in the long grass on the edge of the forest.
‘“Oh, you disobedient little things!” she growled, and she gave Stripes, who happened to be the nearest, a box on the ear with her great paw, which sent him flying. “You little naughty scamps! You’ve strayed away ever so far from the pool where we always drink, and now you’ll have to go to bed thirsty.”
‘Next morning it was quite early, still almost dark, when Stripes and Spots and Tawny were awakened by the most fearful din they had ever heard. Peeping, trembling, through the grass, they saw more of those dreadful two-legged animals, shouting and banging drums, and beating tin-pots and brandishing sticks. There they came, marching in line through the thickest part of the high grass. The buck fled, bounding in great jumps, and the peacocks and the partridges and the parrots flew away overhead, shrieking and screaming and whirring. You never heard such a to-do in the jungle.
‘The tigers also were all in a fright, as you may well imagine. They all three cried at once:
‘“Oh, Mummy, let’s get away out of this dreadful place, and run away out into the open!”
‘But the Mummy Tiger told them they were sillies, and that rather should they all get away into the thickest part of the jungle and hide.
‘Suddenly, as she was speaking, two animals, the like of which Stripes and Spots and Tawny had never beheld, came stalking down the grass—huge black animals, with short tails and long noses, which stood up in the air ‘
‘I know!’ cried Bobby, delighted; ‘elephants—Maharajah!’
‘And on the back of each sat another funny animal, white, with a round white head——’
‘I know!’ he cried again—‘you and daddy!’
‘And when the elephants came near they smelt the tigers, and, curling their trunks, they trumpeted shrilly, till the cubs didn’t know for fright if they were standing on their heads or their tails. But the Mummy Tiger lay down in the grass, all long and lithe, and quite quiet; only her tail kept going so from side to side, just as pussy’s does.
‘Suddenly there was a gleam of light on the top of one of the elephants. It was the barrel of one of the sahib’s guns shining in the sun, as he prepared to fire.
‘“Run! run!” cried the Mummy Tiger, “and get away into the thick forest. Run!”
‘Now, the three cubs were very small, and the tall grass hid them nicely; but from the top of the elephant the sahib saw the grass open for a moment, and wave over a great mass of brown and yellow. That was the Mummy Tiger following them.
‘Bang! he fired—such a big bang. It startled the elephants, and the birds shrieked, and any deer that remained fled across the plain.
‘“Woo-oh! Woo-oo-aah!”’
‘I know; that was the Mummy Tiger!’
Bobby was so excited that he had slid down and was standing gazing up at Mr. Woods in rapt attention.
Mr. Woods nodded and went on.
‘Poor Mummy Tiger! she ran away on three legs, holding up a wounded paw.’
‘Same as Kum’ere does when he gets a thorn in it going into the m’mosa-bushes.’
‘And so, on four legs or three, they all ran and bounded and crept till they reached the secret place in the thickest part of the forest that Mummy Tiger knew of, where the big trees and the little trees and the creepers and the brushwood were so thick that no elephant could get through it.
‘“You seem all very out of breath,” remarked an old python snake that lived in a swamp near, when they lay down to rest, popping his ugly head out of the mud.
‘“And you’d be more so,” answered the Mummy Tiger, licking her poor wounded paw. “But we’re safe here, for if any sahib follows us on foot I’m a match for him. And, you silly children, you’ve had a good fright, and a run for your lives. Don’t he taken in like that again!”’
As Mr. Woods ended, a white figure came out of the gloom of the trees. It was Ayah.
‘Phillee baba to go bed,’ she said.
Mother looked round the little party.
‘Phil is not here! Have you not got him, Ayah?’
Ayah shook her head, and thought he was with Mother.
Mother rose up and called him. No answer. She and Ayah went off to look in all the tents. One heard them calling.
The sun had set, and the short Indian twilight was coming on.
Auntie Gladys grew anxious, and went to help seek the little baby boy. Presently she came running back to Father.
‘We can’t find baby anywhere!’ she exclaimed, frightened.
Bobby grew frightened too, and left off attending to Kum’ere, who had grown more and more restless and excited during the calling.
Presently Mother returned with a white face, followed by Ayah, beating her breast.
For little Phil was quite lost!
Upon anxious inquiry it came out that while Bobby was listening to the story the Ayah had gone to smoke her hubble-bubble, and the little baby boy was toddling about outside the tent. After a while she came to look, and missed him. He had wandered away, and no one could tell what had become of him,.
Now, it was difficult for even such a small child to get lost in a flat country, all plain and fields. The frightened servants had searched the mango-grove where the tents were pitched. Though Phil could hardly have wandered so far alone, they hunted the native village of mud huts which lay not far off. But the child was nowhere to be found. No one had seen or heard anything of him.
The magistrate’s brow grew grave. Was it possible that some native, out of spite for a judgment given against him or a punishment awarded, had stolen the child away?
He was just about to order the head-man of the village to be brought before him when he noticed Kum’ere at his feet, whining and restless.
‘What’s the matter with Kum’ere, Bobby?’
‘He’s been going on like that ever since I came back from seeing Maharajah.’
‘Perhaps he knows something about Phil,’ said Father.
He rose and walked a few steps. Kum’ere did likewise, evidently delighted, and ran on ahead, barking.
‘It’s very strange! Perhaps he does know something!’ cried Mother, jumping up. ‘Let’s follow him.’
So they did. Kum’ere, much pleased, led them out, up the mango-grove, and a little way across a field close to it. In one corner of the field was a heap of earth. On the other side of this, under a bank, was an old, disused, forgotten well, deep but dry. There was no sort of protection round the edge. Kum’ere stopped short and barked. The others peeped over.
There, deep down at the bottom, lay a little white heap. It was poor little Phil, moaning feebly.
How he had wandered so far, and how he had managed to tumble in, no one could ever make out. But that by Kum’ere’s sagacity and devotion he had been saved from a dreadful and lingering death there could be no doubt.
‘Dear good Kum’ere!’ said Bobby, hugging his pet, while Mother sat hugging Phil and soothing him to sleep. ‘Dear good Kum’ere, I am glad we were all kind to you, and fed you. Mother, wasn’t it a good thing you let me have Kum’ere as a pet? But for him we’d never have found Phil.’
Father pushed aside the cane curtain which hung at the tent door to keep the flies out, and looked in at the little group.
‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ he remarked. ‘I do not know exactly what kind of a dog your pet is intended to be, Bobby; but we can’t look upon him as a mere “pie” or pariah now, can we?’
The children were soon tucked in bed beneath the mosquito curtains, and Aunt Gladys looked in to kiss them good night.
‘Auntie, play us to sleep, will you? with your fiddle. Mr. Woods, is that you there, peeping in behind the cluck (cane curtain)? Ask her to play. She will if you ask her; won’t you, Auntie?’
For Aunt Gladys had brought her fiddle out from England, and it was a never-ending delight and astonishment to Bobby how she managed to produce such beautiful sounds from it.
The grown-ups had to have their dinner first, under the awning at the door of the dining-tent. But Auntie promised music afterwards, when they were all sitting out in the moonlight. Bobby promised himself to stay awake and listen for it. But it was not so easy. Everything gradually grew so very quiet. Phil dropped asleep, and Ayah stole away to the other servants to eat her supper and smoke her hubble-bubble pipe, and before he knew it, Bobby had dropped asleep.
He was suddenly awakened by the feeling that something was prowling round about him. He opened his eyes, and thought he saw some animal passing out of the chick. At first he thought it was only Kum’ere, and was about to doze off again when the animal, whatever it was, returned.
In the bright moonlight streaming into the tent Bobby saw distinctly that it was an animal, but not Kum’ere. What could it be?
A jackal? They often came prowling round the camp after the refuse, and to their horrid yells and weird howls when they hunted in packs Bobby was quite accustomed. Yet he did not fancy a jackal in his tent.
But was it a jackal? Bobby wondered. All the jackals he had ever seen had bushy tails and long, cunning-looking faces. This creature had not a bushy tail; his head was larger, and his looks much fiercer. He was taller, too, and more powerfully made about the neck. He pushed aside the cane curtain and came stealing in, stealthily, but with determination.
He made for the corner of the tent where little Phil lay. The child, feeling ill and feverish after his fall and fright, had thrown off the bedclothes, and his fat little arms and legs and neck lay bare.
With a thrill of horror Bobby believed it must be a wolf.
Ayah’s stories of children stolen away out of their mother’s very arms while the mother slept came flashing into his mind. What should he do?
With a mighty effort Bobby controlled the scream which might have drawn the wolf’s attention. Phil lay motionless. If Bobby did not scream the wolf might slink away without seeing either of them. Any moment Ayah might return, or one of the others. Father, Mother, Aunt Gladys, Mr. Woods—all sitting out there away in the moonlight on the edge of the mango-grove where the camp had been made, talking and laughing, all unconscious of the peril of their darlings.
Bobby held his breath. He felt if he stirred the beast might spring at his throat.
The wolf—for indeed it was a wolf—came circling round the tent, gradually, stealthily approaching the sleeping baby. Every moment it drew nearer its prey. But suddenly it stopped dead short.
For from away at a little distance came beautiful sounds—the soft and sweet sounds of a violin, rising and falling in the still night air. Aunt Gladys was doing what Bobby had asked her. She was playing to Mr. Woods, and playing Bobby to sleep. But she was doing something else, of which she had not the slightest idea, for the wolf did not think the violin at all beautiful. He had never heard sounds like that in all his wild life before, and he did not admire them.
As Bobby lay staring at him with wide-open, terrified eyes, to his amazement, the wolf began to tremble violently. Then all its fur rose, stood upon end, as it were with fright, till the beast looked ever so much larger. The louder Auntie played, the more go and pace she put into her music, the more the wolf shook from head to foot, as if half palsied with fear. Its tail drooped between its legs.
Auntie came to an end of the first part of the piece. Bobby gasped with fear. He knew the piece, and the soft, sad, minor part which ought to come next. Was she going on?
Yes. The minor part came, and took hold of the wolf as it was wont to do with Bobby. He trembled till the boy thought he would have a fit. He drew back his lips until Bobby could see his white teeth protruding from his red gums and shining in the moonlight—horrid, cruel-looking long fangs, which made Bobby shudder.
Auntie played on and on. She was in her best form to-night. Mr. Woods, lying back in a chair opposite her, smoking, and watching her white fingers glide up and down the strings, and her golden hair shining in the moonlight, thought he had never seen her look so pretty, or heard her play so beautifully.
So did Bobby. And how thankful he was to hear her! What a protection seemed the music! Gradually he forgot all about the wolf. His eyes would keep closing, and each time he opened them it seemed to him as if there was no longer any wolf there.
Auntie played on and on. Bobby lay dreaming all sorts of beautiful dreams the music brought him, but when he awoke the music had ceased. The faint grey dawn was stealing in at the tent-door, and Ayah lay snoring on the ground by his bedside.
The camp was astir very early next morning, even before the faint glimmer in the east showed dawn was near. When Bobby came out of his tent he found Maharajah and the other elephant ready dressed and waiting outside. A group of villagers sat shivering in their cotton clothes, armed with sticks and tom-toms (drums) to beat the jungle with and frighten out the game. Aunt Gladys, too, was ready dressed in her large white sun-helmet, for she was going to ride on one of the elephants, and see the sport. Mother would not leave Phil, who was bruised and shaken with his fall.
It quickly grew light. The trees showed up in the gloom, then the people, and then the distance, and the sky grew light. Mr. Woods led Aunt Gladys away beyond the mango-grove, to where they could see a long distance on the bare, flat plain. Bobby followed.
‘See, there?’ said Mr. Woods, pointing into the clear east, as yet untinged by the coming sunrise. A line of white points, like sugar-loaves, rose in the air above the horizon, too sharp-cut, too distinct, to be clouds. ‘There,’ said Mr. Woods, ‘those are the eternal snows of the Himalayas!’
But, even while they looked, the snows vanished, swallowed up, as it were, by the lurid glow of the approaching sun.
Father called to the others to start.
‘Who will you ride with, Gladys?’ he asked. ‘On my elephant or Woods’?’
Auntie hesitated, and so Bobby replied for her:
‘Ride on Maharajah, Aunt Gladdie; he and Mr. Woods will take care of you.’
Maharajah wore a great leather pad, girthed on with cotton ropes, with two very narrow little seats, one in front of the other, and high sides all round.
‘How am I to get up?’ asked Auntie, looking up at the beast towering above her.
Mohum seized Maharajah’s tail, and making a bend in its end, Mr. Woods used it as a strap and hoisted himself up on to his back. Auntie put her foot on it in the same way, Father pushing her from below and Mr. Woods helping her from above. At last she was safely seated in the front seat, and Mr. Woods in the one behind, with his rifle and ammunition.
Father’s was what is called a pad elephant. It carried no howdah, only the leather pad, on which father found what seemed to Bobby a very precarious seat.
‘Good-bye!’ he shouted, ‘and take care of Auntie Gladdie, Mr. Woods.’
‘That I will,’ replied the latter warmly.
They were ready to start. Maharajah at a word from Mohum flung his trunk round the mahout’s body, and hoisted him up to his seat behind his great flapping ears, on his head, and off they set.
Bobby watched them till they vanished out of sight across the plain. Then Mother called to him to come and have his ‘little,’ or early, breakfast. After that she made him do his reading and his copy before it grew too hot in the tents.
But Bobby was depressed. If only he had been big enough to go too!
Such a joggle-joggle Auntie found it, for Maharajah, though a well-trained and wise old beast, rocked to and fro in a lumbering walk, like a ship at sea. Auntie had hard work to keep her white umbrella from thrusting off Mr. Woods’s sun-helmet. It grew very hot as they proceeded slowly across the plain, and Auntie longed to reach the shade of the thick jungle; but there was the river to be crossed first, a deep, sluggish stream, flowing stealthily over its sandy bed.
The other elephant had waded safely across, and Maharajah had nearly reached the further bank, when, for some reason or another, he got out of the straight line, and walked into a dangerous quicksand. First one foot and then the other sank down as fast as he tried to find a firm foothold. He staggered and stumbled, and Auntie and Mr. Woods were in terror of being pitched off. Mohum had slipped off at the first sign of danger, and had half swum, half waded, ashore. But to get out of the howdah was no easy matter for the others, especially as the animal’s hind-legs were sinking up to his knees, and his back like an inclined plane.
From the safety of the shore the natives shouted, encouraged, and implored. But the elephant is the wisest of beasts. Maharajah hit upon a device to save himself from being sucked in, but a horrible one.
His curling trunk came whirling over his back. It snatched off Mr. Woods’s helmet, and, flinging it at his feet, trampled on it in his wild endeavours to gain a firm footing. Of course, it was useless.
Round whisked the trunk again in search of fresh material. It was Auntie Gladdie’s white umbrella that was wrenched out of her hand this time. Down it was flung. The elephant struggled and floundered, but still sank.
Round came the trunk again, and as it did so Mr. Woods gave a cry of terror.
‘Bend down! bend down!’ he cried to Auntie, forcing her down below her little seat. ‘Keep under, for Heaven’s sake, or he’ll have you!’
He did not think of himself; but Maharajah had turned his head, and in his wonderful instinct for self-preservation, looking at him out of the corner of his eye, kept whisking and whirling his trunk about him.
Another minute and the clever beast would certainly have seized Mr. Woods, but there came a cry from the bank.
A native, bearing a bundle-of hastily cut grass and branches, plunged into the water and gave it to the elephant, who, seizing it with his trunk, laid it at his feet.
A mighty plunge, a struggle, which nearly dislodged Mr. Woods, and Maharajah was in safety on the bank.
It had all happened so quickly, in such a few minutes, that Auntie Gladys perhaps hardly realised the awful death she had so narrowly escaped. It was a face very white under the sunburn that bent over her from behind as she got back into her seat.
‘Are you very frightened? And what shall I say to Bobby? He told me to take care of you.’
But Auntie Gladys gave him a smile of forgiveness with lips that quivered.
The elephants went on—now through forest; now through tall, waving white grass, called elephant grass, so tall that it nearly hid them; and then again across arid, sun-baked plain, till they came to the patch of jungle where the tiger—they had found out from the natives—was in the habit of taking his noonday nap. The coolies were now sent into the jungle to walk through it in line, making every possible noise with shouting and beating of tom-toms to induce the tiger to come out. At the other end of the jungle the two elephants with the sportsmen on them waited, motionless, half hidden by the tall, grey grass. Maharajah evidently knew that something was up, and probably smelt the tiger.
Screaming pea-fowl got up, whirring partridges, quail, wild-boars, and pretty spotted deer, under the very noses of the elephants, but the sportsmen let them all escape unhurt. Suddenly the grass in the jungle began to wave, as if something very big were moving through it. A few minutes later, and a patch of colour flashed on the outskirts nearest the magistrate’s elephant.
Bang! bang! Father, kneeling on the pad elephant, fired.
Then, in the twinkling of an eye, a wounded and infuriated tiger charged the elephant, and with a mighty leap sprang upon her, digging its claws into the trappings of the elephant, and also probably its back.
This pad elephant was not so good or well trained as Maharajah, also it was terrified by its unexpected passenger, and with a lurch, which unshipped both the mahout and Father, it bolted, shaking off the tiger too.
But Father had fallen heavily to the ground, and upon his own rifle. His leg was doubled under him, and his ankle badly sprained. There he lay, helpless on the ground, a badly wounded tiger, mad and ready to charge anything, crouching for a spring a few yards off.
It was a terrible position. Mr. Woods, his rifle at his shoulder, stood up ready to give the tiger his death-wound; but he was afraid to fire, for fear of hitting Father also.
Auntie Gladys covered her face with her hands to shut out the fearful sight. But they had reckoned without Maharajah.
A word, a prod from Mohum, and he shuffled across to where Father lay. Quick as lightning his agile trunk swooped down upon him, and Father was placed on Maharajah’s back.
Bang! bang! and the tiger lay stretched dead, a striped and tawny patch in the grey grass.
They returned at once to camp, for Mother to bind up poor Father’s ankle. Mr. Woods went out again on his elephant in the afternoon and shot some deer. When he returned, he called to Bobby to come and see the tiger-skin, lying on the ground beyond the tents. Bobby gazed at it with awe: it looked so big and dangerous in the twilight.
‘I’ve taken away the claws and the whiskers,’ remarked Mr. Woods, ‘for the natives steal them for charms. Do you think, Bobs, your Auntie would like a tiger-claw set as a brooch to remember to-day by?’
‘I don’t know. You had better ask her.’
‘So I will—some day. But I think perhaps she has had enough to remember just at present. Now to pay the beaters.’
They were sitting patiently in a row waiting the sahib’s pleasure—poor half-starved things, to whom the coin or two earned by the morning’s not too safe work would prove such a help.
When he had passed down the line, putting the money into each man’s hand, lest the headman of the village should steal it, Mr. Woods asked:
‘And where is the native who had the happy thought of cutting a bundle of grass for the elephant to tread on when he was in the quicksand?’
He rose and stepped forward. Bobby gave a cry.
‘Why, Mr. Woods, that’s the father of the little children we fed!’
The man grinned as he saw Bobby. Thus had he returned the little boy’s kindness, and saved his Aunt Gladys’s life.
Bobby went to say good night to Maharajah. He was munching a special treat for supper—a reward for his rescue of the magistrate Sahib, Mohum said; a sort of huge tipsy-cake—brandy, ginger, cloves, pepper, treacle, mixed with flour—such as elephants love.
‘Hullo, Gladys!’ cried the magistrate. ‘Here’s a bother! Your board-ship friend Mr. Walker has written asking if he may come to us for a few days’ shooting!’
‘What a bother!’ exclaimed Auntie.
‘And I tied by the leg, and our wild man of the woods gone back to his work. However, Walker must get on as best he can shooting alone.’
Father lay in the largest folding-chair, his sprained foot extended on another chair in front of him. His accident had caused the family to stay on in the old camp a few days longer. Father could not get about, and was doing what work he could from his chair. Mr. Woods and Maharajah had departed, back to their forests in the low hills under the great mountains.
‘Who is Mr. Walker?’ asked Bobby.
‘A globe-trotter, my son; that is to say, an English gentleman travelling round the world for amusement. He came out to see India in the same ship as Auntie.’
Mr. Walker duly arrived, with an English-speaking bearer he had picked up on landing at Bombay, and who cheated him; a whole armoury of guns and rifles, and marvellous things in the way of sun-hats bought in Bond Street. He wore an eyeglass, which he was always dropping, and called the natives ‘niggers,’ and abused them when they did not understand his English.
The evening he came Auntie Gladys said she had a headache from the sun, and went to bed almost as soon as Bobby. In the morning Mr. Walker was aroused very early, much to his disgust, and set forth sleepily across the plain, to stalk a herd of black buck which Father had been told of the day before. His way led him in the direction of the village where Nandi lived.
Nandi, in his youth, as a calf had been as unlike an English calf you see in a farmyard lowing for his mother as you can well imagine. To begin with, Nandi could not low—he had no voice; a mere grunt was the only sound he and his relations could give vent to. Then, instead of the long straight back which is one of the marks of a well-born English calf, Nandi had a queer hump on his shoulders, which became larger as he grew up, and of which you will hear again.
Nandi’s early recollections were not of the pleasantest. His mother was kept tied up to a ring against her master’s little mud hut in the narrow street of a village, which was only a collection of such mud huts. At stated hours they came to milk his mother, and Nandi was kept on very short commons, that there might be more milk for the family. How it tantalised the starving calf, too, to see the first milk from the cow allowed to run away on the ground! But the natives are very superstitious, and the Earth Goddess has to be appeased. As time went on and Nandi was weaned he had to subsist on what food he could get, and he found out the truth of the old Indian proverb ‘Six handfuls to the cow-calf and one to the poor labouring ox.’
His place at his mother’s side was taken by a dummy calf—a calf-skin stuffed with straw. She was not at all an easy milker, in spite of many blows and hard words rained on her, though her master dared not kick a cow—that would have been unlucky.
Nandi now went out to graze with the others over the sun-baked plain, picking up what scanty pasture they might find round the pools and among occasional clumps of trees. Gokul, the village cowherd, tended them, followed by a swarm of boys, learning early how to beat and abuse them, and singing quaint old rhymes as the silent cattle, thin, bony, and patient, trooped home at sundown to the village, raising a cloud of dust across the plain.
In due course Nandi was set to work and began a laborious life. Sometimes he was yoked in a low creaking bullock-cart, with broad wheels, and he was goaded along unmercifully, under a heavy load, by the half-naked turbaned driver, who squatted on the pole. He prodded him pitilessly with an iron nail at the end of a bamboo stick, and when that failed to quicken poor Nandi’s steps along the deep dust-track which did duty for a road, the driver resorted to something worse. In no country are the people as cruel to their animals as are the Hindoos. Nandi got his tail twisted. His hard master would seize it and turn it till the last two or three joints ground together, and then wouldn’t the wretched ox hurry up! Many cattle he saw around him had their tails permanently dislocated by this cruel trick, and some had even lost their tails altogether, which was very awkward when the flies were troublesome in the hot weather.
Then Nandi was put to plough. He had to sally forth ere the sun rose, he and his yoke-companion, with the heavy yoke on their shoulders and the chain dangling about their heels, while the ploughman followed with the cumbersome wooden share across his shoulder. Then, up and down in the blazing sun, among the corn-fields and the poppy-fields, and in the soft, loose rice-soil. The ploughman Nandi found more patient than the carters. Perhaps hours of plodding steadily at his oxen’s heels soothed his temper, which, indeed, suffered much. For Nandi and his yoke-companions did not work willingly and zealously, like horses. They had not the best of tempers either; a hard life and ill-treatment had not improved them. Stubborn, slow, and lazy with some ploughmen, Nandi would not stir without beating and tail-twisting and abuse. With others, a click, or a tock, and a hand laid persuasively on his back were enough to urge him forwards. How Nandi enjoyed the noontide rest under the mango-tree, when he ate his meal of grain and chaff off his master’s turban, spread out upon the ground, while the latter squatted in the shade, smoking his tall hubble-bubble pipe!
It was through little Moti Ram that a delightful change came over Nandi’s hard life. Poor little Moti Ram, the master’s only son! It was indeed a bad omen that he fell over Nandi’s mother, asleep in the dark in front of the house. All the family knew how unlucky it is to stumble over a cow. Moti Ram got the smallpox. Neither he nor his parents had ever heard of vaccination, and he was like to die. His father’s grief was great. In his trouble he gave Nandi as an offering to his great goddess, Shiva, the destroyer, should she spare Moti Ram’s life.
Moti Ram got well, and Nandi got free. Moti Ram was badly marked with the smallpox, and Nandi was badly marked with blows, but his tail was whole, which was something.
He was free. Henceforth he was a semi-sacred creature, on whom no one dared lay a hand, to work, or to kill; free to wander about the village street, poking his nose unmolested into any gram-baskets left exposed at the forage-sellers’ open shops; free to roam unchastised among the green corn and in the crops at harvest, no man daring to say him nay. He got christened, too, receiving the name of Nandi, or the ‘Happy One,’ after Shiva’s steed, which sat carved in stone before the temple in the city of Pugreepore. Nandi was honoured and made much of. Had not the great god Krishna once been a cowherd, when on earth, and was not respect, therefore, due to a pun, or dedicated bull, such as Nandi had now become? At religious festivals the girls and women hung garlands of marigolds about his neck, and adorned his flanks and shoulders with an open hand painted in red.
Now, like most young things allowed to have too much their own way, Nandi became headstrong, and a little wild. He grew larger and less bony, his hump a mass of fat. He wore a black mane, which he could toss over his forehead, and a tuft of black hair on his chest a very handsome animal indeed.
About this time his poor mother’s life, which had been far sadder than Nandi’s, ended very mysteriously. She had grown old and useless, but her master dared not kill such a sacred object as a cow; he would as soon have killed his son. But most opportunely, just when he could no longer afford to keep her, the cow died. As payment for burying her, the leather-dresser of the village got her skin, and leather is becoming dearer and more valuable every year in India.
The magistrate, however, Bobby’s father, found that there were so many cows dying about that neighbourhood that he made it his business to inquire into the cow’s death. The leather-dressers, summoned to the magistrate’s tent in their dirty rags, advanced, salaaming, and gravely informed His Highness that the village gods, the sort that they particularly worshipped, had been neglected, and were slaying cows in vengeance.
So they made a great feast, and gave offerings to the gods. Their beating of tom-toms kept Bobby awake that night.
But the magistrate was not to be taken in. He sent a native doctor to inquire into the case, and what do you think he found? A poisoned thorn had been run in under the cow’s skin! The religious Hindoos had not considered this cow-murder. But a few days later Bobby saw the leather-dresser, handcuffed, being marched off to prison along the road which led to Pugreepore.
Meanwhile Nandi roamed the plain at large. No one would have dared to poison him. The grain-sellers might grumble over their rifled baskets, and the villagers over their trampled crops. Nandi led a sacred life till the luckless day when the globe-trotting Mr. Walker came into the neighbourhood.
The latter had sallied forth, as we have seen, armed and accoutred in the full panoply of sport, to shoot big game, as he said. He bestrode a pony across the plain till he was near the jungle where report said the black buck were to be found. By the time he reached it, the sun was up and climbing the heavens. Mr. Walker began to think that the magistrate was right, and that it would have been wiser to have started earlier. He dismissed the pony and the native in charge, and set out on foot to stalk the deer, wiping his brow, which perspired beneath his Bond-Street-made helmet. The deer he expected to find feeding on the outskirts of the jungle where there was a little grass round a swamp. He did not find them; but they saw him. They were off before he was even faintly aware of their whereabouts, and hardly noticed, if he saw, against the horizon of the plain, glimmering in the hot sun, the bounding procession of the herd, far, far off as it fled.
He startled something else too. Our friend Nandi was indulging in a little browse on the grass before betaking himself to his noontide nap in the jungle. He became aware of Mr. Walker’s presence. For the first time in his life he set eyes on a white man, and for some reason or other Nandi did not like the looks of him. Nandi had a sharp nose—animals have a keener scent than human beings—and perhaps he disliked the Englishman’s odour, or, rather, want of odour.
Anyhow, whatever it was, something raised Nandi’s ire. He put down his head, cocked his tail, and with a preliminary pawing of the dust, charged down upon the stranger, his black mane waving over his eyes, while his bellowing seemed to fill the air around.
Mr. Walker had never been so frightened in his life—not even when his new motor-car had skidded and waltzed round in Piccadilly. He shot an anxious glance around. Not a human creature was in sight—the groom safe asleep under the tree to which he had tethered the pony. Above, a brazen sky and glaring sun, in front of him the lonely plain, behind him the swamp, on his left the thick grass jungle. Not even a tree tall enough on which to take refuge from the infuriated Nandi’s savage-looking horns. So, without a moment’s hesitation, he raised his rifle, and shot Nandi dead when the said horns were within two yards of his sun-hat.
The report attracted the notice of some ploughmen, the ploughmen called to the villagers, and such a to-do ensued as can hardly be imagined.
A sahib had come and shot the sacred bull!
He might as well have shot a child. But for the timely arrival and interference of the village watchman, who marched the terrified and expostulating Mr. Walker off to the lock-up, I verily believe the angry natives would have torn him in pieces—this wicked beef-eater from across the seas!
The sun was sinking low. Father put away his papers and came hobbling out of his office tent, but Mr. Walker had not returned.
‘He must be having plenty of sport,’ said the magistrate to Aunt Gladys, with an ironical smile.
‘Let’s go and see if we can meet him, by the way he went,’ cried Bobby, looking up from playing with Phil under the tent awning. ‘It’s quite cool now: let’s go for a walk.’
Aunt Gladys hesitated.
‘I don’t suppose Mr. Walker would want to see us when he’s busy shooting,’ she demurred.
‘I’m sure he’d be glad to see you, Auntie,’ cried Bobby. ‘ He was pleased when he came, more pleased than you were! And he seemed so s’pointed when you went to bed early with that headache last night, and so sorry that afterwards, when I went to say good night, I told him I fought it wasn’t a very bad headache, ’cos you hadn’t got a wet rag on your forehead (as Mother always has when she gets a headache) and was sitting up reading.’
‘Bobby,’ exclaimed Auntie, almost crossly for her, ‘little boys shouldn’t go and discuss grown-up people, unless they’re told to.’
‘I didn’t ’cus,’ replied Bobby indignantly. ‘It’s wicked to ’cus, Mummy says: it’s using bad words. All the same, Mr. Walker did cuss at his bearer ’cos he couldn’t understand what he ordered him in English—after I told him about your head not being bad—he was cross!’
‘To create a diversion,’ suggested Father to Auntie, who stood looking very red and not quite knowing whether to laugh or be angry, ‘I suggest that you two take a stroll in the direction of the jackal grove. You’ll see a strange sight there at sundown. The bearer will show you the way.’
The jackal grove lay just on the opposite side to the village, a beautiful feathery clump of waving, fluttering bamboo. A little path led twisting in and out among the canes, and following it, Auntie Gladys and Bobby reached an open space in the centre, where a rough little shed had been erected.
A wild and dirty old man, with long grey hair and beard, and little on in the way of clothes, came out of the shed and salaamed to them.
‘That,’ explained the bearer, ‘is the old hermit. He lives here all alone in the middle of the grove, and does worship by feeding the jackals. Hark! the sun sets, and he will now call them to him!’
Indeed, it was growing shadowy in the bamboo grove, and the hermit raised a curved cow-horn to his lips, and blew a long, weird, unlovely blast.
It swept through the bamboo, and echoed far and wide over the plain.
He blew again, and then those he was calling began to come.
‘Bobby, sahib,’ whispered the bearer, as they stood watching, breathless, for they knew not what, ‘take hold of Kum’ere!. They like not dogs—they may kill him!’
Bobby knelt down at Auntie’s feet, and threw his arms round the dog and clasped him firmly.
Then they began to appear.
Stealthily, noiselessly, sneaking like a grey shadow, a great jackal slunk up from out among the leafy bamboo; and then another, and another, and another—and another.
There was no sound. Out of the darkling brake stole the jackals in answer to the weird blast, and, in less time almost than it takes to tell, Bobby and Auntie Gladys found themselves surrounded by the pack.
Aunt Gladys turned quite white.
‘Oh, Bobby!’ she whispered, ‘I know they’ll fly at our throats!’
Kum’ere gave a low growl, and struggled in Bobby’s arms.
All the time the strange old hermit was jabbering fast and low to his weird pets. He called them by endearing terms, and kept up quite a conversation with them. Then he retired into his shed, and came back with a pot full of victuals.
This he flung among the jackals. There ensued a jostling and a snarling and snapping as they dashed at the food—a grey, heavy mass of hairy heads and waving tails.
It was more than Kum’ere could stand. All his pariah instincts awoke in him. With a low snarl he struggled in Bobby’s arms.
‘Be quiet, Kum’ere; they’ll eat you up!’ besought his little master.
But, well fed though he was, the sight of the jackals enjoying food for the possession of which he had so often had a pitched battle with them in his outcast days, was not to be endured. Kum’ere bounded out of Bobby’s arms, and rushed into the struggling mass, a yellow patch among the grey.
With a cry of terror, before Aunt Gladys or the bearer could stop him, Bobby rushed in after his pet.
How it was that his face and bare hands and legs escaped unscathed among the angry gleaming fangs, I cannot say! But the next minute the hermit had rushed to his rescue, laying about him with his staff, while the bearer, taking off his stout slipper, his only weapon, belaboured impartially dog and jackal, and Auntie assisted, to the great detriment of her white umbrella.
In less time than it takes to tell the bamboo grove was deserted and silent. Swiftly and noiselessly as they had come, the cowardly, skulking creatures had vanished back to their own private haunts, each carrying his own particular spoil. The bamboos waved peacefully in the evening breeze, and Kum’ere scrunched a hardly-won buffalo bone.
Bobby shuddered and caught Auntie’s hand.
‘Horrid things they are! How can he make pets of them? Auntie, let us go back to the camp and homeward they turned, while Auntie murmured:
‘“He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man, and bird, and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things, both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”’
As they drew near the camp they saw, a hurrying figure running up from the direction of the village.
‘Looks like Mohum, who went out with Mr. Walker’s pony,’ suggested Bobby.
‘I hope the pony hasn’t kicked him off!’ laughed Auntie.
‘I shouldn’t care much. I don’t like Mr. Walker; he’s so grown up—not like Mr. Woods. You don’t like him as well as Mr. Woods, do you, Auntie?’
‘Let’s hurry on and see what’s the matter!’ she replied, evasively.
Father lay extended in his long cane-chair outside his tent, enjoying the evening cool. The groom rushed up at the same time as Bobby.
‘Oh, Your Highness,’ he panted, ‘come quick, and deliver the English sahib with the eye of glass. The village folk are about to tear him to pieces! He has shot the sacred bull, and the village gods demand vengeance, Highness!’
‘Bring me my pony at once and I will go to him,’ exclaimed the magistrate.
Mother interposed.
Oh, John, your ankle! You mustn’t ride!’
‘This is a serious business,’ and he waved her aside.
With difficulty the magistrate mounted and hurried off. As he drew near the village he heard an uproar of angry voices. Urging his pony into a gallop and parting the crowd, he rode up to the watch-house, among the angry hum and the threatening looks and gestures of the crowd surrounding it.
Mr. Walker’s terrified voice was heard appealing to them through the barred windows of the watch-house, where they had shut him up to prevent his being murdered!
The magistrate addressed the crowd, and was just in time to prevent a riot. Gradually they calmed down, and Mr. Walker, a woebegone object, with his clothes torn, his eyeglass gone, and without his beautiful new Bond Street helmet, was presently brought into camp. Aunt Gladys, standing at the door of her tent, was seized with such a desire to laugh when she saw him, that she hastily withdrew, but not before Mr. Walker had noticed it.
With a good deal of trouble the magistrate arranged matters, and rupees avenged the death of Nandi. The village godlings had to be appeased, of course, and the priest received a bribe to avert their wrath from the village cattle and crops. Kodar Bux and Kodar Bux’s father and his belongings had to be remembered. Altogether it was a very expensive day’s shooting for Mr. Walker. But native superstitions and prejudices have to be respected. The only advantage he got out of his sport was that of the dinner of a nice juicy fat hump of beef. Poor Nandi had been well fed, and a hump of beef is a great delicacy.
‘This is very good,’ said Bobby when he had finished a second help. ‘Mr. Walker, won’t you stay another day, and go and shoot another beef?’
‘Oh, do!’ said Auntie Gladys, with an ironical smile.
But Mr. Walker was understood to remark that he thought the country districts in India in a very dangerous and disturbed condition, and that in future he would stick to the towns. Besides, he had lost his eyeglass, and could not see to shoot without it.
The day after Mr. Walker’s departure, the magistrate moved his camp on to the outskirts of Currypore, where the big Rajah lived. He was rather an important landowner in that part of the country, and dwelt in large shady grounds surrounding a palace of pink stone, carved with elaborate patterns, and adorned with little turrets and hanging windows with balconies. The town of Currypore was surrounded by a cactus fence, so prickly that no one could get through, and beyond that there was a high mud wall with a great arched gateway.
‘It looks like the Sleeping Beauty palace in the fairy tale,’ remarked Auntie, peeping through the curtains of the bullock-cart as they drove up to the new camping-ground, well outside the dust and dirt of Currypore, and where their white tents were awaiting them.
‘Wait till you see the “Beauty” that lives in it,’ laughed Father.
The party were breakfasting after their long ride when the gate of the city opened, and out came an elephant—a wonderful sight. His forehead was painted gaily; he was saddled with a red-covered howdah with a top to it. He had a silver frontlet, and a great bell hung at his side, which rang as he moved along.
Under the top of the howdah sat the fattest man Bobby had ever beheld. It was the Rajah, come to pay a state call on the magistrate.
When he reached the office tent, the mahout made the elephant kneel down, and the Rajah’s guards drove back to a distance the rag-tag and bobtail which had accompanied the procession out of Currypore. The elephant kneeled down: first two fore-legs—plump. Bobby thought the Rajah would pitch out, and wondered vaguely if he would go squash if he fell hard on the ground. Then two hind-legs—plump. The Rajah lurched backwards, but remained. They brought a ladder, and he descended from the howdah, and waddled into Father’s office tent, where the latter sat waiting to receive him. When the mass of dirty-white draperies, crowned by the gay turban, disappeared, Bobby turned his attention to the elephant. Here was a grander beast even than Maharajah. Maharajah was kept for work, this one for show. The Rajah’s elephant had a great attraction for him.
Bobby paid him a visit that evening, wandering across to the gate of Currypore. The elephant was tethered by head- and heel-ropes under the high wall. His mahout and a group of the Rajah’s numberless retainers were squatting round him, smoking hubble-bubbles and chatting on the usual subjects of rice and pice (money), varied by grumbling over the Rajah’s tyranny.
It was a hot night. The weather was growing much warmer now that the hot season was approaching. The great yellow moon was bright enough to read by, and cast shadows black as ink. The elephant loomed large, casting a shadow almost as dense as that of the high wall, and he kept picking up dust with his trunk and pouring it over himself to keep his back cool. Suddenly he shuffled his huge feet uneasily and clanked his great chains.
‘Be quiet, Piyari (love),’ remarked the mahout, ‘and go to sleep, my necklace of beauty. Maharajah seems inclined to be a little bobbery tonight.’
Then he perceived Bobby standing near, and at Bobby’s heels, of course, Kum’ere.
‘Ah, it is the dog upsets him,’ explained the mahout. ‘How he hates dogs!’
The elephant lifted up his trunk and trumpeted shrilly, scaring the flying-foxes which hung asleep in the gloom of the archway.
Bobby thought it was prudent to go back to the tents.
Next morning Father rode off to some inspection work at a distance, and Mother and Auntie went with him. They were to be away till evening, and took lunch on a pannier-pony.
Bobby watched them depart with a sigh. He felt that he was in for a long, dull day by himself. Little Phil, never much use as a playmate at any time, was feeling the heat very much, and was peevish. He lay in Ayah’s arms, rather inclined to cry, if she ceased crooning and rocking him, and singing him silly rhymes that had no meaning. Bobby felt cross and naughty too. Disdaining loftily the old bearer’s suggestion to come and build bricks with him under the awning, he wandered aimlessly over to the gateway, to have another look at the Rajah’s elephant.
How he wished he was big enough to have a pony of his own and ride about with Father and Mother! Then he would go all over the country and see the jungles Mr. Woods told stories of, and the wild-boars, and the beautiful peacocks. Yes, Bobby was decidedly cross.
All was bustle outside the city gate. It was the day the elephant went out into the jungle to fetch his supply of fodder. His mahout took him, and sundry of the Rajah’s men too, to cut sugar-cane and grass and leaves with which to load the bullock-cart.
Bobby watched the preparations wistfully. Every one seemed on the move and going out, except himself. The elephant was unchained, and a sort of mattress tied on his back to carry the forage on. He knelt obediently enough, but he fidgeted and waved his trunk about.
Suddenly, a very naughty idea came into Bobby’s curly head. When the bullock-cart driver was not looking, he climbed up into the cart and hid himself at the bottom under some coats which lay there. Of course he took Kum’ere with him, for company, and he thought himself very grand when they were both hidden. No one would know where to look for him, and Bobby would have his day out in the jungle after all!
Kum’ere was indeed somewhat difficult to keep quiet. He would wriggle and poke his head out from under the coats. That long yellow nose of his was too inquisitive.
‘Lie down, old boy! Quiet, Kum’ere!’ whispered Bobby, rubbing him gently behind the ear, in a persuasive manner. ‘You’re no good at playing hide-and-seek at all! There, now, keep your tail still, do. They’ll wonder whatever is moving the coats!’
However, the pair were unnoticed, and were soon lumbering and creaking out under the archway into the dusty highway, beyond fear of being sent back, and at last the monotonous rumble sent them both to sleep.
The mahout only smiled when they arrived at the foraging-ground and the boy’s escapade was discovered. Indian natives are very indulgent to children.
So Bobby ran about and watched the men cut huge bundles of sugar-cane and juicy young bamboo to load on the elephant’s back and the bullock-cart. There was no hurry—the Indian day is long—and soon came the hot hour of the noonday meal. The elephant was lightly tethered to a tree, and given a bit of sugar-cane to amuse him. The men squatted under a rude shelter of boughs, and each, according to his caste, began to cook his dinner.
When the leathery flap-jacks were all eaten, the lentil mess finished, they settled themselves to smoke. Then came a midday snooze, whilst a hush of intense, calm heat seemed to brood over the jungle. Bobby slept too—the flapjacks had been very stodgy—likewise Kum’ere, who had not been forgotten when the food was going.
Suddenly they were both aroused by a terrific shouting and confusion. Bobby heard a trampling, a trumpeting, a rushing among the grass and trees, while the mahout’s voice was raised, calling to the elephant in despairing, imploring tones.
Running out of the hut, he was horrified to see that the elephant had broken loose from the tree to which he had been tethered, and with trunk in air, and huge feet trampling and kicking at everything he came across, was in one of those sudden fits of rage or madness to which elephants are subject. His trunk was waving wildly, seizing the branches of young trees, and flinging them down under his feet to be smashed up.
Hardly had Bobby left the hut than the great beast rushed at it, and levelled it to the ground, kicking the roof to fragments.
The terrified men were scattered far and wide over the plain, and those who could climbed tall trees. The frightened bullocks had bolted with the cart, and upsetting it on a bank, had broken loose and made off with yokes rattling on their necks.
But poor little Bobby had been left behind—forgotten—to face the maddened beast!
Whither should he flee? What chance had he against those mighty legs—that sweeping, writhing trunk?
The elephant came at him. Bobby, with a scream of terror, gave himself up for lost.
But he had reckoned without Kum’ere. Strange though it may seem, the huge beast which in his frenzy heeded not even his mahout’s familiar voice, was daunted by a little dog.
Elephants hate dogs, and are frightened almost to death at them. So it came to pass that, when Kum’ere, barking shrilly, ran pluckily in between his little master and the maddened monster, the latter turned and fled, utterly routed.
Bobby darted for refuge to the nearest natives.
But Kum’ere did more. It was entirely owing to his running round the elephant in a circle, and barking the while, that the men were gradually able to drive him into a clump of trees, and there secure him with his chains till his mad fit should be over.
It was a bitterly howling and penitent little Bobby that they lifted into the bullock-cart, where he sat, his arms tightly round the neck of his rescuer, as they hurried him back to Currypore, as fast as the bullocks could be made to go, Kum’ere licking his tearful little face.
The Rajah’s men were very frightened. What would the Rajah have done to them if the little sahib had been trampled to death?
As the weather was becoming hotter, and tent-life not so pleasant, the Rajah of Currypore had kindly invited the magistrate and his family to occupy, during their stay near that town, a sort of garden-house among the trees in the grounds which surrounded his palace.
This invitation was gratefully accepted, and Bobby found his new quarters very pretty and cool and comfortable. The garden-house, a one-storied building, stood on a raised terrace, and was square and built of pink stone. An arched verandah ran all round. There were no doors or windows to the rooms, only arched openings from the verandah, and all the walls and ceilings and doorways were elaborately carved. The mehtar, or sweeper, came with his brush and swept out the rooms; the bearer and the other servants brought in the camp bedsteads and the folding chairs and tables, and lo and behold! the garden-house was ready for occupation. The dim, cool recesses were a pleasant change after the stuffy tents, and Bobby and Phil found the garden very nice to wander about in.
The straight set walks among the orange and pomegranate trees were shady after the sun-baked plain, and a great stone-edged tank of water, lying silently among the dark shrubberies like a huge mirror, seemed delightfully cool and refreshing. In the morning bright green lizards sunned themselves on the stone parapet; and at dusk great yellow bull-frogs sat on the still surface of the water, and opening their gaping mouths, filled the evening air with a sonorous croaking, and then when Bobby ran up to see them nearer, dived down beneath the water with a splash that made him start.
The day after Bobby had settled into the garden-house, Father and Mother took him to an entertainment got up by their host for the amusement of his visitors.
The fat Rajah received them on the wide steps of his pink stone palace, which led up into a huge verandah opening with high arches on to the garden. It was afternoon and the sun was still hot and shining, and high up in the carved recesses of the arches Bobby could see the flying-foxes—sort of bats—hanging by their tails, fast asleep till darkness came, when they would flap round through the trees in the gardens, hunting for their supper of insects.
The fat Rajah sat on a rather shabby gilt and velvet chair of European make (Bobby could not help hoping it was very strong), and was clad in pink satin, trimmed with gilt lace, and wore jewels in his turban. He looked rather like an enormous satin sofa cushion, Bobby thought. He salaamed politely to the magistrate and his wife, and when he saw Bobby he called to one of the many attendants who stood behind him in shabby uniforms. These produced a little boy of about Bobby’s age, such a funny little object. He was dressed exactly like his father, the Rajah, in pink satin, only that he wore a gold embroidered cap on his little shaven head.
The magistrate and his wife were given chairs beside the Rajah, and the little Rajah, solemn as a judge, perched himself upon one beside Bobby. To keep away the flies and mosquitoes, attendants waved huge palm-leaf fans over all their heads.
At a signal from the Rajah, a grey-bearded old man came out and did wonderful conjuring tricks before them. He put a sword half down his throat and apparently swallowed it. Then he pulled it out again, and behold, he was not a penny the worse!
‘Why, he’s not even bluggy, nor the sword!’ exclaimed Bobby, open-mouthed with astonishment.
Then this wonderful old man set fire to some tow, and crammed handfuls of the burning stuff into his mouth. Yet he did not seem even singed.
He now picked up a shabby old piece of red twill, laid it on the ground, and then took a mango-stone, the seed of the hot-weather fruit Bobby liked so much. He hid the stone under the red rag, fumbled about with it for a minute or two; then he whipped off the cloth, and, wonder! in that short space of time the stone had grown into a little mango-tree a foot high. This he hid again under the cloth, and after a minute or two pulled it out. It had grown at least two feet!
‘Wah! wah!’ (‘Fine! fine!’) shouted the Rajah’s little boy.
‘Oh! I say! exclaimed Bobby. ‘Father’—and he sidled up close to the magistrate—‘Father, is that old man a djinn? he asked. For Ayah and the bearer often told him stories of genii, good and bad, and of the wonderful and magical things they did.
‘No fear, my son,’ laughed Father. ‘It’s all tricks, which any one could perform. But see now the big basket they are bringing. This is the most wonderful thing of all. It looks rather horrid, but don’t be frightened.’
A small boy, his little brown body dressed in little else than a white loin-cloth and a string of beads, came out of the crowd of retainers and lookers-on, and got into the basket. This was securely fastened down.
Then the conjurer seized his sword. With much dash he drove it into the basket. The most appalling shrieks proceeded from within. He withdrew the sword seemingly covered with blood! Bobby fairly screamed and hid his face against his Father’s arm.
Again and again did the conjurer stab the basket, again and again withdrew the bloody sword. The shrieks died away; all was silent, when——
The little boy ran out from among the crowd safe and smiling!
Bobby gazed at him with a sigh of relief.
‘How could it be?’ he asked Father.
Father smiled down upon him mysteriously.
‘The question is,’ he replied, ‘if it be indeed the same little boy, or one very like him, and dressed, or undressed, in the same fashion.’
‘Then, is he really deaded?’
‘I fancy that if you lifted that basket now you would find it heavier than when it was first brought on. Most likely it still contains the first little boy, safe and sound.’
‘But the sword was bluggy!’
‘Red, certainly; but many things would colour it red besides blood. However, we mustn’t pry too closely into the conjurer’s art. Remember that he earns his living by it,’ and the magistrate flung the old man a rupee.
The Rajah now led his guests into an inner courtyard, surrounded by high walls. Passing through an archway up some stairs, they seated themselves in an overhanging stone balcony to watch a fight of beasts.
First two elephants were brought in, each very cross. Bobby did not at all like the looks of them. It reminded him too much of his adventure the day before. The great beasts came trotting in, trumpeting, with uplifted trunks, shuffling about, stamping their great fat feet.
When each saw the other they gave a shrill challenge and rushed at each other. Soon the two huge black bodies were locked together, writhing, swaying, with intertwined trunks, and kicking at each other gently. It was a very tame performance, and the Rajah after a while, wishing for a more exciting fight, called to the mahouts to separate them and take them away.
After a little persuasion from their attendants, the huge beasts obeyed, and their place was taken by two fighting rams.
These animals were most elaborately got up for the occasion. They had been neatly clipped, except that tasteful tufts had been left about their quarters and tails, poodle fashion, and these had been dyed yellow and mauve. Each wore a large collar of blue beads, and one a necklace of hawk-bells as well.
Their attendants egged them on to combat and the animals galloped at each other from opposite sides of the courtyard, heads down, and their great curving horns bent forward.
With a shock they met. The weakest staggered. For a while they wrestled and butted with interlocked horns, and then their attendants disengaged them and led them away for a second charge.
Bobby was quite excited.
‘I think the one with the bells the strongest; he’ll knock the other down.’
He very nearly did, but not quite. A third charge ensued. This time the necklaced ram proved the victor. His antagonist picked himself up, somewhat crestfallen, but accepted his defeat, for nothing would bring him up to the charge again.
The Rajah rose from his seat in the balcony and dismissed the rams and the crowd.
‘Would the little sahib like to come and see me feed my muggers? he asked the magistrate.
They followed their host down narrow winding stairs, along narrow passages, through several bare rooms with arches for doors, and no glass in the stone mullioned windows, and eventually found themselves on another balcony overlooking a large artificial pond which bathed that side of the palace. Bobby looked down into the depths below.
What seemed like logs of brown wood lay motionless on the surface of the water—logs of wood which overlapped each other, scattered haphazard.
‘Bring meat,’ ordered the Rajah; and a servant threw down a great chunk of beef.
In an instant all the logs of wood were astir. They resolved themselves into scaly brown monsters with tapering tails, which wriggled and flapped the water, and blunt snouts, above which opened small keen eyes.
The moment the meat touched the water great mouths opened. Bobby saw rows of white gleaming teeth against the brown, and there followed a gaping and a snapping and a jostling—the piece went down whole.
Bobby shuddered.
‘I shouldn’t like them to get hold of me—those teeth,’ he said. ‘Do they eat people?’
‘The bottle-nosed ones do,’ said Father. ‘Not those with the long snouts. Many are the deer, or the weakly buffalo calf coming to drink, the washerman’s donkey, or even the washerman himself, that jaws like those have accounted for. I don’t advise you to tumble into this pond!’
It was all the fault of the yellow pariah—not Kum’ere, you know, but one of his unlucky kindred. But for him the story of this adventure of Bobby’s would probably never have been written. But the yellow pariah would have told you, I dare say, that it was all the fault of the jackals.
The yellow pariah had found out where the dead buffalo calf lay, its little black form, the same colour as the mud of the fast-drying swamp on the plain outside Currypore, where it had breathed its last. The pariah, everlastingly homeless and hungry, as we all know Kum’ere to have been in his miserable outcast days, slunk out at dawn from the city to get a good breakfast off this calf.
Imagine his disgust and despair when he found that the jackals had been beforehand with him. Only the white skeleton of the prey, every bone picked clean, awaited the yellow pariah. And the jackals in the distance were laughing at him mockingly.
All day long the yellow pariah mooned breakfastless about the streets and the garbage-heaps. Hard words and worse were thrown at him when he tried to pick and steal. It seemed unfair. The sleek Brahmin bull, tossing his black mane over his cream-coloured neck, stalked unchidden through the bazaar, and helped himself out of the baskets of forage that the grain-sellers exposed for sale in the open shop-fronts. For was he not sacred to Shiva, the terrible, the destroying god?
Then there were the brown monkeys, too, haunting the flat house-tops. They might pilfer as much as they dared. No one said them nay, for the very good reason that they were much too clever for those whom they pilfered.
But the unhappy yellow pariah, unable to spring, and not possessing a tail he could hang himself up by, and, moreover, of no account whatever in the eyes of the religious Hindoo, and, further, abhorred by the devout Mussulman, had a bad time.
Towards sundown savoury odours arising from the garden-house attracted him into the palace grounds. The first thing he saw was Kum’ere—Kum’ere, the rescued outcast, fat and prosperous, trying to eat four cutlet-bones at once—Father’s, Mother’s, Aunt Gladys’s, and Bobby’s.
This shameful greediness was more than the hungry pariah could stand. He hastened to relieve Kum’ere of the self-imposed task. Hunger gave him strength. Poor Kum’ere found himself fatter and more short of breath than of yore.
There ensued such a growling and snarling, such wrath and evil-speaking, that the magistrate dispatched one of the servants to drive away those fighting dogs which were disturbing him at his dinner.
What became of the cutlet-bones no one knoweth, unless it be the yellow pariah, and he had fled and was no more seen. But poor Kum’ere limped up to the garden-house on three legs, bleeding from a bad bite on the fourth, and very sorry for himself indeed.
He met with much sympathy, more, indeed, than by right should have been his. Every one pitied him; Mother hastened to bind up his wounds; Bobby gave him another cutlet-bone, and, sitting down beside him, endeavoured to console him.
Kum’ere was not really grateful. He did not understand the bandage, and it bothered him very much. He spent the next hour trying to bite or rub it off. When Mother went out for a ride with Father and Aunt Gladys, she begged Bobby to look after the dog, and keep him quiet, or the wound would never heal.
‘Mind he doesn’t scratch the bandage off,’ were her last words as she rode away.
Bobby, left alone with his charge, found Kum’ere a bad patient, and as much as he could manage. Finally, in despair, he tied a rope round his neck, and, making a loop to the end of it, put the leg of a chair inside it, and thus Kum’ere was a prisoner.
Phil was playing on the ground close by, building with his Benares bricks.
‘See Kum’ere doesn’t get away,’ ordered Bobby. ‘The sun’s quite low now, and I’m going to walk about in the garden. Don’t let him come running after me. Kum’ere, old boy, do be good!’
And off Bobby marched, quite forgetting how very silly he had been when Mother had been obliged to tie up his right hand, sore with mosquito-bites he had scratched.
Bobby wandered off under the shady guava-trees to where the tank lay dark and cool in the evening shadows. The great yellow bull-frogs were assembling from around and below for their evening concert—fine fellows, puffed out and speckled, opening hugely wide mouths. Bobby leant over the tank for awhile, standing very quiet till the creatures were no longer frightened of him, and popped in and out of the water, and lay sprawling on the surface. One came swimming so near that Bobby thought he could almost catch it. But feeling sure it would be cold and clammy to touch, Bobby fished out his little pocket-handkerchief to pick it up with.
But the bull-frog was not going to be caught; be instantly, with a ‘chawk,’ dived deep, and the handkerchief was left alone floating on the surface of the water, floating away beyond Bobby’s reach.
‘Never mind,’ said the little boy to himself; ‘I’ll get Bearer to come with a long pole and fish it out before I go to bed.’
And he sauntered away towards the palace.
Currypore was waking up after the heat of the day. The air was full of smoke and an evil odour, for the inhabitants were cooking their evening meal. From the tall minarets of the mosques came the cry of the Mohammedan priests, calling to evening prayers. The cattle came lowing homewards across the bare plain beyond. All around in the garden rose the dull whir of the cicalas, or grasshoppers.
Suddenly something—dark objects—one, two, and a third, came flying over the tree-tops, swaying, hovering, fluttering.
Bobby wondered what they could be. They were unlike any bird he had ever seen. No birds had such long fluttering tails. The next minute he saw that they were kites. Kite-flying is the great Indian evening amusement, and Bobby, running about the garden, soon traced the kites by their strings down to their flyers.
On the flat roof of a wing of the palace two or three grey-bearded men were squatting, solemnly flying their kites one against the other. A little boy stood watching them. In him Bobby, looking up, thought he recognised the little Rajah.
How comic it seemed, grown-up people—old men—flying kites! How he would like to join! Perhaps they would let him. Perhaps the little Rajah would lend him a kite.
Bobby determined to try. But how was he to get up on to the roof?
He climbed the broad steps on to the verandah, where the conjurer had performed his marvels, and then, seeing no one about, boldly passed on into the palace. A flying-fox, waking up to see about its supper, flapped down heavily over his head from the lofty, dim arches above, and made him jump.
The great hall was empty. The Rajah, had Bobby but known, had gone out for his evening ride on his fat pink horse, and the servants and retainers had vanished to their own huts to eat and smoke. Bobby made for a narrow winding stair at one corner of the hall, thinking it must lead to the roof; but instead he only found himself in a narrow arched passage, and then on from one small room to another. It seemed endless, and all silent and deserted.
At last an open archway let in the air and the sky. Bobby stepped out on to a little balcony with a low stone balustrade. He found he had reached the other side of the palace. The great tank lay below him.
What about the muggers? Were they there?
Half frightened, Bobby leant over to see. Yes, there lay the muggers, log-like, asleep. Bobby stared at them, fascinated. Would they move? Did that one flap his tail?
Bobby peered over to see more closely, and in doing so overbalanced.
With a cry that echoed through the vaulted arches behind him, Bobby tumbled headlong down into the tank.
As he fell he struck his head against the stone support under the balcony, and knew no more.
‘Well, Bobby, and how’s the poor invalid?’
It was Mother’s voice inquiring, as she jumped off her horse and came up the steps of the garden-house.
Phil and the bricks were still in the verandah, but Bobby had vanished.
Kum’ere spoke for himself. Tied to the leg of the chair, he scratched and whined and tried to get free.
‘No, no,’ said Mother, ‘you’re much better as you are. Lie down, Kum’ere.’ Then she turned to the Ayah. ‘Where is the little sahib?’
‘He plays in the garden, highness.’
‘Go and fetch him. It grows dark. It is time he came in.’
The Ayah disappeared, and her call of ‘Bobbee! Bobbee!’ soon sounded through the trees.
Then Aunt Gladys rode up. But instead of coming in, she went for a stroll in the garden, now dim and cool after the glare of the day.
She heard the Ayah calling, and at every turn she expected to see Bobby running towards her, instead of which she met Ayah.
‘I have called everywhere, but the little sahib makes no reply.’
‘Where can he have gone, all alone, and it is getting dusk? Bobby! Bobby! I expect he’s hiding somewhere, and will spring out upon me from behind a tree to make me jump,’ thought Aunt Gladys, judging from past experience.
But there was no sign of him. The Ayah went in the opposite direction, still calling, and Auntie could hear the Bearer’s voice calling too. She wandered on till she reached the tank. Her appearance brought the bull-frogs’ concert to an abrupt end. They disappeared like stones beneath the dark waters. But something else, something white, floated on the surface, now dark with the shades of night. Some strange fish——
Auntie leaned over the stone parapet, and looked more closely. Then, failing to find out, she poked it with the point of her riding-whip.
A piece of paper—a rag——
Auntie drew it to shore, and lifted it up, draggled. A pocket-handkerchief!
She was very puzzled. Natives do not use pocket-handkerchiefs. This was one of English make. What was it doing there?
Auntie opened it out and laid it on the parapet. It seemed somehow familiar to her, and then, with a sudden grip at her heart, she recognised—for had she not embroidered it herself?—the big red B in one corner!
It was a white-faced, terrified Auntie that sped up the steps of the garden-house to where Mother and Phil sat with the Benares bricks.
‘Come quick!’ she shrieked. ‘Bring Bearer, bring men! I think Bobby has fallen into the tank!’
Never in the whole course of their little lives had the bull-frogs known such a commotion in their pool. In vain they jumped and swam and dived. Men came with sticks and poles and long arms, and searched and prodded and ferreted in every corner. As fast as they took refuge at one end, they were hunted off to the other. That end of the garden seemed in an uproar, all the natives jabbering at once. The magistrate, pale but calm, directed the dragging operations, and Mother and Aunt Gladys, with beating hearts, hoping, yet dreading, straining their eyes, peered into the dark depths for the beloved little form.
Kum’ere was just as excited as anyone else. He was still a prisoner tied to the leg of the chair. But only Phil seemed to notice his whining and scratching; for Ayah had thrown her shawl over her head, and was beating her breast and rocking herself to and fro, in an agony of grief.
Phil was little more than a baby, but he could understand more than he could say. He understood perfectly what Kum’ere wanted. He also understood that Mother had told the dog to lie down quietly.
But Phil, finding himself alone, and Ayah too miserable to notice, felt suddenly prompted by a spirit of mischief. He pulled himself up by the chair, chattering the while to the dog in his baby language. Then, finding himself erect and firm on his feet, he pulled the leg of the chair away from the loop of rope, lifting it a little.
In a moment Kum’ere was free.
Down the steps he fled on three legs, the bandage of the injured one trailing behind him. Then he put his faithful old nose to the ground and vanished—but not in the direction of the garden-tank.
The fat Rajah, on his fat horse with the mane and tail dyed pink, returned from his evening ride, curvetting and prancing up to his palace for the admiration of his faithful retainers. When he heard that the magistrate’s little son was lost, he became very grave and alarmed. Finding that they had dragged the tank and failed to discover him, he sent his servants to raise a hue and cry through the city. Meanwhile, the magistrate’s servants had searched every nook and corner of the gardens, but no one in the palace—not even the kite-flyers on the roof —had seen anything of Bobby.
But Kum’ere was sitting on the little stone balcony overhanging the muggers’ tank, and baying at something down below. He could not bark properly, short and sharp, like an English dog, this poor pariah; he uttered something between a bark and a howl, and it was taken up by many another pariah slinking about the streets of Currypore (even, perhaps, by the yellow pariah himself), and it was echoed by the jackals out on the plains beyond.
But Kum’ere’s baying, such as it was, gave vent to his feelings, which were these
‘Oh, why didn’t you let me come with you? Why have you gone down there where I can’t get at you? Why don’t you speak to me?’ was what he tried to say in the intervals of licking his wounded leg and getting rid of the remaining length of bandage, which was all that his race through the garden and up the stairs and through the many rooms had left him.
‘Bother that yellow pariah!’ he went on. ‘If it had not been for him I should never have been tied up and kept away from following you. There they are, calling and hunting, stupid things! Why don’t they sniff your track out in a sensible fashion? What’s the use of noses to them? Oh, little sahib mine, why don’t you wake up and speak to me? Are you sleeping down there?’
Aunt Gladys was the first one in the course of this dreadful search to ask where Kum’ere was.
‘I left him tied up in Bobby’s room,’ tearfully responded Mother. ‘I wish I hadn’t. The dog never leaves him, and if he had been with him he would have come back and told us, perhaps.’
Some one went back to Bobby’s room. There was no sign of the dog. The chair to which he had been tied was upset, and when they asked Phil where Kum’ere was he only looked very wise and replied:
‘Gone! gone! All gone!’
But just then Kum’ere’s howling fell upon their ears. There was just a few minutes’ pause before the answering voices of the city broke in, and Auntie had time to say:
‘There’s a dog barking in the palace—high up it sounds. Could it be Kum’ere?’
Catching at any straw, they now started to search the palace.
It had grown dark; but the Rajah had torches brought, and their weird light lit up the vaulted roof and the carved arches, as the search-party explored hall and chambers and stairs. Kum’ere’s persistent bark guided them, and at last they reached him, sitting dejectedly on the balcony.
Some of the Rajah’s servants ran forward, but the dog, turning suddenly fierce, made as though he would fly at them. They drew back alarmed. Natives do not like dogs, and treat them either with contempt or dread.
It was Aunt Gladys who spoke. She alone had come with Father and the search-party. Mother they had persuaded to stop with little Phil, fearing some dreadful discovery.
‘He’s guarding something—somebody!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know his way. But oh! what can it be? Can it be that Bobby——’
She paused a moment, putting her hands to her eyes as if to shut out some horrid sight. Then she pulled herself together with a great effort.
‘He will let me pass. Kum’ere, good dog! good dog!’
He gave a low growl, but wagged his tail at the same time, and made no attempt to stop her.
Placing one hand on his collar, with the other Aunt Gladys steadied herself against the parapet, and bent down over the pond. The Rajah’s men lowered their torches and lighted up weirdly the dark depths below.
Aunt Gladys staggered back and clutched Father’s arm.
‘On the mud—lying, oh! so still—near the muggers—Bobby!’
Father called for a rope with which to lower himself down to the rescue.
The Rajah was for sending men with hunks of meat to the far end of the pond, and thus enticing the muggers away; but Father feared to disturb them. He thought the safest plan was for him to descend quite quietly without attracting their attention.
With a beating heart, Aunt Gladys watched him lowered over the balcony, while she clutched Kum’ere, who seemed half inclined to spring after him.
They saw Father descend safely, and alight noiselessly on the bank of soft mud which lay against the palace wall. But the unwonted light of the torches seemed to have aroused the muggers a little. Here and there a tail flapped, a log-like, scaly body stirred, and once Auntie thought she saw a great mouth open and white teeth flash.
‘Oh! make haste! make haste!’ she whispered under her breath. ‘Kum’ere, dear Kum’ere, be quiet, do!’
Bobby was lying quite still. Father thought he had been killed by the fall. He raised him gently in his arms, and, with as little movement as possible, and no noise—thanks to the soft mud—proceeded with his free arm to adjust the noose of rope about himself again. He gave the signal to hoist.
But the inferior native-made rope (the nearest to hand they had found, and time pressed) frayed against the parapet of the balcony during his descent, broke under the double burden, and Father, Bobby in his arms, fell to the ground again.
This time the muggers really did stir. Many-toed paws crept up the bank, fresh snouts peered out of the water, great tails lashed the water and each other’s horny, scaly sides. Huge mouths opened at the prospects of an extra supper, and row upon row of fierce teeth gleamed in the torch-light.
Auntie gave a cry of terror. Kum’ere, with his wonderful dog instinct, perceiving that danger was threatening Bobby, began to bark furiously, which was the best thing he could have done, for now all need for quiet and stealth was passed.
‘I must make a bolt for it,’ cried Father. ‘No time to bother about a new rope. Shout! shout! will you? Make a noise! Throw down torches to scare them!’
He lifted the unconscious Bobby high on his shoulders, and turned along the narrow strip of mud towards the right-hand bank of the pond.
Once he could gain it they would be safe, and out of reach of the terrible jaws. But the palace wall was high and long, the strip of mud narrow; beyond, the dark water, ruffled with half-hidden danger.
How he reached dry land safely Father never could or would tell. More than once a lucky bound carried him over a mugger which seemed to bar his way. More than once he thought his leg had been caught—more than once a snap behind him told him of the danger escaped. But Bobby knew nothing of all this. As is so often the case with a blow on the head, he remembered nothing of what had immediately preceded it.
When he opened his eyes it was early morning, and he lay in his own little camp-bed. Mother, Father, Aunt Gladys, sat round, and Kum’ere was stretched full length beside him.
‘Oh, those kites!’ murmured Bobby, sleepily.
‘Mummy, I want to go and fly a kite!’
And it was not till many years after, when he was quite a big boy at school in England, that they told him of the awful escape he had had.
Bobby was back again in his bungalow home at Pugreepore. The camp life was over for the season, for it had grown hot—hot, so hot. It scorched his lungs almost to breathe. The very crows in the mango-trees sat gasping, too hot to caw. Only the crickets seemed wide awake, and whirred ceaselessly in the sultry air, like a chorus of policemen’s rattles.
Bobby had a birthday. Directly he got out of bed he saw that the servants had decorated the arches of the verandah with strings of yellow and red marigolds in his honour, and as soon as he was dressed the servants, headed by old Warsali, the bearer, came to present him with ‘dollys.’ Not dolls—Bobby was too much of a boy for that—but gifts in trays which they called ‘dollys.’ The cook brought a cake, edged with green leaves, which was very good, and several sorts of native sweetmeats, which were not good, though Bobby tasted each one till he felt a little sick! The molly, or gardener, brought queer stiff bouquets of roses, bougainvilleas, and damandas, and asters, all tied tightly up together, without much regard to colour. The other servants—grooms, waiters, washermen—all came in solemn procession, with more trays of sweetmeats or flowers, salaaming to the ‘little Bobby sahib.’
The magistrate’s red-coated messenger who brought the mail letters up from the post office that morning was heavily laden. Grandmamma, in far-away England, had not forgotten the little grandson she had never seen, and there was a big parcel of presents from her, also a letter. Auntie Gladys read it to Bobby (who couldn’t read writing well yet) as they sat together in long chairs in the verandah. Bobby often sat quite quiet now, for he seemed to himself always too tired to play—the heat had become so great.
But he listened with great interest to Grandmamma’s letter, and then stole his hand into Auntie’s.
‘Yes, it’s very nice of G’nma to send me nice presents; but you’re the nicest present she has ever sent me!’
But ere many days were over Bobby had nearly changed his mind, for Mr. Woods had remembered his birthday, and sent him a most entrancing present.
Mr. Woods had come into Pugreepore on a little visit to Father and Mother—that was how he knew that Bobby’s birthday was coming on. At Aunt Gladys’s suggestion, Bobby had told Mr. Woods the story of Mr. Walker and the sacred bull, and how he had looked when Father had brought him in, rescued from imprisonment; and Mr. Woods had laughed very much, as they all sat in the verandah after tennis, and so had Aunt Gladys; and Mr. Woods had called Bobby ‘Bobs,’ and given him a ride round the garden on his pony.
Now, it chanced that Mr. Woods, riding that evening through the narrow streets of the native city of Pugreepore, came upon a little group of idle coolies, half-dressed children, water-carriers on their way to the well—a crowd of brown, dirty-white-clad people, admiring Tota’s performances.
Tota was a small green parrot with a yellow tail. Down the shady Mall, where the gnarled old mango-trees with their evergreen branches joined across the dusty macadamized road, there was a certain hole in a certain venerable tree-trunk. Here Tota was hatched. His father, his mother, his brothers and sisters and cousins—a great tribe—darted shrieking about the gardens and the fields of Pugreepore, feeding on fruits. The custard-apples in the garden, the little figs among the fig-trees, the mangoes, even the orange-coloured chillies in the garden that burnt the mouths of most people—in all of these did the green parrot family delight.
What thieves they were! How the dusky gardener, squatting on watch in the mango-grove in an English sahib’s garden, dreaded the sudden whisk with which the parrots, like a streak of lightning, settled on his best fruit-trees, shrieking, whistling, chattering, and set to work to play havoc with them!
The gardener, indeed, like other natives in his part of India, believed a little in the old legend that the parrot earned the gratitude of man by bringing in its beak seeds of the fruit and grain of Paradise from the Garden of Eden, and scattering them about the world after the Flood to grow for his use; but, as long as anyone could remember, the parrots had always been considered the most shameless thieves among birds, and the natives had forgotten to be grateful to them.
However, they liked them well. A parrot is the favourite tame pet bird of the East, as, indeed, it is in England. So it was that Tota, instead of darting about in the sun like a live emerald, screaming wildly, and flinging himself recklessly about with the rest of his tribe, became a prisoner for life. There is something very sad in those words. I wonder how many of us—free, independent, running, walking, sitting, moving as we like—will ever realise what it means when we keep a bird in a cage? And such a prison as poor Tota’s was, too!
Imagine a small dome-shaped cage of hoop-iron, with an iron floor. During the hot weather in India it is quite painful to touch anything of metal, it becomes so hot. Tota’s cage was a perfect torture-chamber, and he was almost roasted to death in his tiny oven-like prison.
Kodar Bux, indeed, said it was the bird’s own fault. If Tota had not with his sharp, powerful beak utterly destroyed the wooden cage he had first been placed in, an iron one would have been unnecessary. But, then, Kodar Bux did not reflect that Tota’s sharp beak had been given him to enable him in his natural free life to break the outer coverings of all sorts of fruit so as to get at the inside.
Kodar Bux was the boy who had climbed up the old mango-tree on the Mall and taken Tota out of his nest. He was a cook-boy at the magistrate’s, and bent upon educating Tota and selling him as a valuable bird. Kodar Bux was a lazy youth, who liked such easy play as teaching a parrot to talk better than the hard work of running to and fro between the bungalow and the cook-house with the dinners. Whenever he had a spare moment, and the fat old cook was looking the other way, Kodar Bux chimed into the parrot’s ears:
‘Latpat, panchhi, chatur Sujan, Sub-ka, dada Sri Bhugwan. Parho Gunga Ram,’ which means in English: ‘Pretty bird, clever bird, and knowing. God is the Giver of all. Say “Gunga Ram”’ (the Hindoo name for God).
‘Mian Mittu,’ Kodar Bux called him, a pet name meaning ‘my darling’; and Tota learnt quickly to say a few words very well, and became a great favourite down in the line of mud-huts where the magistrate’s servants lived.
‘Doesn’t my parrot read well this morning?’ exclaimed the cook-boy, as he put the bird through its performances; and the cook’s wife, looking on, agreed and rewarded Tota with half an almond. The other half she gave to her little baby, believing that by doing so she prevented the child from stammering, and made sure of its being free and bold of speech. The cook himself liked Tota’s cage to be hung up over the door of his hut, imagining he brought him good luck.
One day a bird-fancier from the native city, passing along the Mall, heard Tota holding forth, and immediately made Kodar Bux an offer for him. For three rupees did Tota change masters, and was carried off into the city of Pugreepore. Here, in a tiny courtyard behind the bird-fancier’s house, or in the cool of the mornings and evenings upon the flat roof, he went through a very severe training. But his new master was by no means unkind. Hungry Tota often was, but his hunger was satisfied, and his taking pains rewarded by the choicest of dainties. In the end, a most accomplished bird, Tota was seen by Mr. Woods performing in the streets of Pugreepore. The bird-fancier with his solemn air, his grey beard and huge turban, squatted cross-legged on a little carpet. By his side were two or three cages containing his different performing birds, and among them was Tota’s iron prison. Close by, the bird-fancier’s little boy, just clad in a shirt and ankle-bangles, with his head shaved, gnawed at a bit of sugar-cane and stared with wide-open eyes at the parrot.
Tota sat on a wooden perch, holding in his beak a tiny torch, lighted at each end, which he whirled in the air with great zest. Next he loaded and fired a little toy cannon, and then, at his master’s word of command, lay down as dead, and then came to life again; and all this he did with an air of eagerness and enjoyment, and not as if he merely cared for the reward of tit-bits which followed his tricks.
Mr. Woods pulled up his pony and watched the parrot, and an idea came into his head. There followed a long haggling with the old bird-fancier. In the end Tota changed hands again, and Mr. Woods carried him off to the magistrate’s bungalow. Here Mother kept the bird carefully hidden, a deep secret from Bobby. Only on his birthday did he see Tota.
The little boy was enchanted.
‘His tricks are lovely, Mummy—as good as any dog’s. But won’t he talk? Parrots can talk, I know!’
‘Let’s try and teach him!’ suggested Auntie Gladys.
Now, as every one knows, parrots learn to talk best in a dark room. But how was Bobby to get a dark room in the bungalow? It seemed a difficulty. But clever Auntie solved the matter. Where there’s a will (or well) there’s a way.
In the corner of the garden lay the well—a deep, deep well, surrounded by a low wall.
Over this low wall, evening after evening, Auntie, or Mother, or Bobby himself might have been seen leaning, peering down the well, and apparently engaged in conversation with some one who had fallen down it. But the person down the well was none other than Tota, hanging in his cage, and the conversation was a very dull one, for it was at first quite one-sided.
For many days it consisted—for Bobby was a loyal little British boy—in the proper sentiment of ‘God save the King.’
At first the parrot would not respond. He sat quite silent. But after a time he improved, and was promoted to learning to whistle in response to the order ‘Call the dog!’ At last it even advanced to calling ‘Kum’ere’ so well as to even take in that sagacious animal, and to recognise its own English name of Polly, rather than its Hindoo name of Tota.
His education thus far finished, Tota came to hang in the wide verandah by Bobby’s nursery, and Auntie began to have hopes that in time, at the ‘little breakfast’ hour in the early morning, he would learn to cock his head knowingly on one side, and say: ‘Poor Polly wants a biscuit,’ like the big grey parrot at Grandmamma’s at home.
It was at this time that the thieving of Saju Lal, the coachman, was discovered.
For some while past Mother had noticed that when the carriage came round to take her for her evening drive, the white horses, so gay with the pheasant’s feathers standing up behind their ears, seemed always tired. She fancied, too, that they seemed to be growing thinner and thinner. Yet their forage was not stinted. Every morning their grooms (horses in India have a groom apiece) came round to the house, and Mother saw them herself measure off out of the grain-store the feeds for each horse. The question was, Did they get them?
One dark night, just after feeding-time, when the natives were already turning in, Father walked noiselessly across the compound to the stables, from whence ought to have proceeded a steady sound of munching and scrunching.
Instead, all seemed silent. The grooms lay about, already asleep, but the horses stirred and turned as he entered, restless and inquiring. There are no mangers in an Indian stable. The horses are fed off the ground, generally off a rug or sheet belonging to the groom. There was no sign of this or of any forage about.
Father went up to them. One whinnied and laid his nose against Father’s shoulder.
‘Poor old boy!’ exclaimed the magistrate under his breath. ‘I expect if you could speak you would tell me you’ve not had your supper, eh?’
With which he marched off to the row of huts where the servants were lodged. He entered Saju Lal’s, kicked that worthy lightly, as he lay asleep on the ground, and turned a lantern full on the little hovel. Furniture was almost entirely wanting—natives do not use chairs and tables—a rough bedstead and some boxes were all the room contained, except the wife and a herd of small bony children with next to no clothes on, who fled out into the night, startled at this most unexpected appearance of their master.
Father tried one or two of the boxes, one of them seemed extraordinarily heavy. He ordered Saju Lal to open it.
The latter fell on his face whining. With tears and implorings, he called upon his master as the Protector of the Poor, the great Maharajah, your highness, his father, his mother, his benefactor.
But in vain. The magistrate set his face as a flint and only pointed to the box.
Saju Lal dragged himself along the ground towards it, beating his breast. He opened it. It was filled to the brim with fodder!
It was a first offence, and Saju Lal was not carried off by the blue-coated policeman. But next evening Mother was driven by a new coachman, and from that time onwards the appearance and the speed of her carriage-horses improved.
A few mornings later Bobby came running in to her as she was dressing for her early morning ride.
‘Oh, Mummy!’ he cried. ‘Do come and look at Tota. He won’t talk, and he doesn’t seem to notice anything. He must be ill, I’m afraid.’
Bobby was indeed right. Mother found Tota sitting in evidently a state of deep dejection about something or other—cause unknown. He heeded not their approach; he took no notice of the familiar voices. There he sat, his eyes, closed from the lower lids, parrot fashion, not making a sound. When Bobby put his hand into the cage and tried to take him, Tota fluttered about wildly in a state of terror and even attempted to peck Bobby. This from Tota, so carefully trained, so completely tame! It was strange indeed.
Aunt Gladys came out of her room, the servants gathered. Every one jabbered at once and asked what had come over Tota. No one could say.
In vain the Ayah spoke to him in Hindoostanee; in vain Bobby implored him to say ‘God save the King.’ Not a word; Tota had utterly lost his tongue.
Bobby, almost in tears, ran and fetched Tota’s little torch. Ayah lighted it, and Bobby poked it inside the cage, as usual, for Tota to seize it in his claw and twirl. But the bird, in a frenzy of fright, dashed itself against the bars. What had come over it?
Bobby then produced the tiny cannon. But Tota did not evince the slightest wish to fire it off.
‘And he’s always so ready and so pleased to perform!’ wailed Bobby. ‘He must be ill!’
‘Let us try to tempt him with a dainty,’ suggested Auntie.
The table-servant ran off and produced a loquat out of the dessert-dishes on the sideboard. The loquats were just getting ripe, a delicious juicy fruit, the size of a large cherry, inside such a hard and horny shell.
Bobby peeled it and offered it to the parrot. Any doubt as to Tota’s state of health was promptly set at rest. He grabbed at the fruit, and nibbled it all up.
Much reassured, they offered him other titbits. Auntie fetched an English biscuit; Mother sent for an orange; Phil, sitting on a mat on the verandah, busy with his ‘little breakfast,’ offered some pish-pash. To one and all, to everything that was proffered, Tota grabbed with an alacrity that was positively voracious.
‘One would think the bird was starving,’ said Mother.
The sweeper, whose duty it was to take care of all the pets, salaamed deeply.
‘Oh, highness!’ he exclaimed, ‘did I not feed the bird last night as of usual?’
Yet it was very strange that Tota did not speak. All day he sat mum. No coaxing would induce him to say a word. He paid no attention whatever to the well-known voices by which he had been so carefully trained.
‘It is indeed much to be wondered at,’ remarked the old bearer. ‘Tota must have seen a wolf.’
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Auntie.
‘Ah! your highness knows not, but certain it is that those on whom the wolf in the moonlight turns its face are struck dumb.’
The explanation apparently satisfied the servants, but their master and mistress did not accept it. Tota’s silence remained an unravelled mystery. So also did his unaccountable fright and shyness when they attempted to handle him—Tota, who was usually so tame.
When two days had passed, and Tota showed no signs of becoming his own self again, Bobby grew so unhappy that one evening Aunt Gladys invited him to come with her on an expedition into the native city.
‘Miss Smith, the kind lady missionary, who goes about teaching the poor native women about God, is going to drive me to see some of them in their homes. Would you like to come with me, Bobby? It will be quite a change for you.’
Bobby was always willing to go anywhere with Auntie, and the crowd and hubbub in the bazaar, as the narrow street with little open shops each side is called, amused him. The carriage had to be left outside, the streets being too narrow for wheeled vehicles. A blue-coated policeman, armed with a stout stick, marched ahead and made a passage for them through the motley, noisy, jabbering crowd. Big brown monkeys grinned at them cunningly from the flat house-tops; lazy pariah-dogs, lying asleep in the roadway, had to be kicked out of their way; and once, stalking down the street, monarch of all he surveyed, Bobby came face to face with a sacred Brahmin bull, cream coloured with a hump, such as Nandi, of blessed memory, had worn, and tossing his long black mane, that hung over his eyes, in a rather alarming manner. But he seemed really quite tame, only intent on poking his nose into the grain-dealers’ baskets.
Miss Smith took them first to call on the fat little wife of a shopkeeper, living behind the shop in a little courtyard, surrounded by chubby children, who were teaching her to read. This rather topsy-turvy arrangement a little surprised Bobby. But Miss Smith explained that native women are mostly shut up in their houses, always when married, and are never taught anything as children. But the lady missionaries had opened a school for little girls, where they taught them not only about the true God, but also how to read the Bible and sew. This school the shopkeeper’s little children attended. Their mother, imprisoned though she was, seemed busy and happy making their clothes and keeping the shop accounts in a rough-and-ready fashion. She pressed native sweetmeats upon Bobby, the first English little boy she had ever seen, but Bobby found them too cloying and spicy for his taste.
Miss Smith next took them to see a poor widow, who lived with her father, a clerk, in a dull little yard opening out of the street, and surrounded by very high walls. The widow was a tall woman, very, very thin, clad all in a white sari, or shawl, and she looked very sad.
‘And well she may,’ exclaimed Miss Smith, as Aunt Gladys commented on her appearance, ‘for she has been a widow all her life. Married as a child to a child, who died when he was eight, she may never re-marry. Moreover, being a very strict Brahmin, she may only have one meal a day.’
‘No wonder she looks so thin!’ exclaimed Bobby. ‘I should not like that! Why,’ he added, looking round the little high-walled yard, ‘this place is like a prison! Do you never go out for a walk?’ he asked her.
‘Never,’ she answered sadly. ‘I live here and take care of my father, who is old. But this kind lady comes to see me, and reads to me in the good Book.’
‘Which soon, I hope, you will learn to read for yourself,’ added Miss Smith.
Bobby stared. To be so big and so old, and not able to read!
‘Aren’t you very dull?’ he asked.
‘Often,’ she replied. ‘ But now I have my bird—a parrot. Would your highness like to see him?’ and she vanished into the little sort of shed which was her house, and reappeared bringing a bird-cage.
Bobby looked grave. He was reminded of his own dear Tota at home, who was so ill; for the widow’s parrot was the same species of bird. It had the plum-coloured head, the vivid green body, and the long, tapering, bright blue tail, and it seemed tame and bright and lively, as Tota used to be. Bobby admired it very much.
‘It is indeed a beautiful bird, and a clever one, too! It has been well taught. Not by me, for my father only brought it me as a present a few days ago; for oft-times I am dull and lonely, having no children like other women. My Mian Mittu (darling) I call it. Would you like to see it perform?’
She fetched a little torch, and, lighting it, gave it to the bird, and lo and behold! it twirled it round; the very same trick Tota could do—when he liked!
Bobby gave a cry of delight, and advanced towards the cage.
‘Polly! Pretty Polly!’ he exclaimed, and put his finger in between the bars of the cage to stroke the pretty purple head.
The bird dropped the torch, and sidled along the perch towards Bobby’s hand, uttering soft sounds.
‘And is he not a loving bird?’ exclaimed the widow. ‘But so learned, too; you should hear him talk! He prays a long prayer to Gunga Ram, just like any good Hindoo, also other words which I do not understand. Speak, speak, pretty bird! Say Gunga Ram.’
‘God save the King!’
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
Blank amazement. Dead silence.
Then, to the widow’s stupefaction, Bobby tore open the cage door and popped in his hand. On it perched the parrot, and Bobby drew it forth in triumph, leaning his own yellow little head on the plum-coloured one, and the bird gently pecked at his hair, chirping softly.
‘Pretty Polly! My own Polly! It is really you! It is really you!’
‘Is he not a loving bird and a learned?’ went on the widow, much puzzled. ‘He is worth much money. Did not my father give Saju Lal five rupees for him?’
‘Saju Lal!’ cried Auntie. ‘Then it was he who changed the parrots. The wretch!’ and she poured forth the story to Miss Smith, who in her turn interpreted it to the widow.
When at last the widow understood, she looked awhile sadly at the bird that Bobby was fondling. The tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down her thin cheeks.
‘Ai-ya! Ai-ya!’ she wailed. ‘My Mian Mittu, my child, thou must leave me! Ai-ya!’
And the poor lonely woman sat down in a corner of the little yard and rocked herself to and fro.
Bobby looked up from his long-lost and newly-found pet. His eyes wandered round to the high walls shutting out the world beyond. Then he looked again at the widow; then again stroked Tota’s head.
At last he rose up quickly, the parrot on his wrist, and went across to the widow.
‘Take,’ he said, ‘take your Tota. You seem so sad and dull here without him, and you love him. Miss Smith, please make her understand that I won’t take Tota away. Per-per-haps s-some day I shall have t-taught the other Tota to be as n-nice. Auntie, let’s go home,’ he added in English, abruptly, running across to her and burying his face in her sleeve lest they should see a big little English boy crying.
It was nearly dusk. The sun was setting—a huge ball of crimson in a saffron sky—when the carriage came round to take Mother for a drive—the landau with the two white horses, a plume of pheasant’s feathers at their ears, and the two grooms in white, with red sashes and turbans, standing on a step either side of the hood behind, and hanging on.
Auntie Gladys had gone for a ride with Father; Ayah had taken Phil out in the chair-saddle on the pony, led by a groom. But Bobby felt too tired with the heat to want to ride, and therefore went with Mother.
‘Where would you like to drive, Bobs?’ asked Mother, settling herself in the corner of the carriage with a fan. The air seemed as hot now in the evening as at midday—hot to breathe in.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied Bobby, listlessly; and Mother sighed as she looked down at the limp little figure in white, and the white face, beside her.
‘What do you say to the monkey-grove?’ she asked.
Just outside the native city, in an old, old peepul-tree, with its many stems and trunks, forming a grove in itself, lived the sacred colony of monkeys of Pugreepore.
Bobby and Mother arrived just in time. From out of a little mud hovel beneath the tree came the guardian angel of the monkey-grove—a dirty, shaggy Hindoo hermit, who had taken upon himself the duty of looking after these sacred animals. He raised to his lips a cow-horn, and a long blast echoed through the evening air, across to the city, where the blue smoke rising showed them the inhabitants were preparing their evening meal.
The noise made Bobby’s head ache, but it was a welcome sound to the inhabitants of the grove. Out they came—from high and low, from far and near, racing, jumping, swinging, jabbering, grinning, quarrelling, fighting, they crowded round the old man.
‘The monkeys don’t seem to feel it hot, Mother,’ remarked Bobby. ‘But I shouldn’t like to be wearing a fur coat. Oh, see! how they do fight! Look at those quarrelling over the grain! Ah! he’s got his ears boxed!’
‘Ho! Bunda! Ho! Maharaj!’ chuckled the old hermit, as he threw handfuls of grain about, imagining the while that he was pleasing one of the many Hindoo gods, and performing a religious act.
It was the first time that Bunnoo and Bobby had met, only they were not aware of the fact—Bobby in the carriage and Bunnoo, too young to run or climb alone, carried underneath his mother, his arms tightly clinging to her body for dear life. It was some time ere they were to meet again, and much was to happen.
Not long after, the old hermit died, and his pensioners had to disperse in search of food. Bunnoo took up his abode in a street of the native part of Pugreepore, close by. His favourite haunt was the flat roof of Warsali’s house, whence he could peer over into the street below and watch all that was going on. Sakina, Warsali’s little daughter, soon became an ally of Bunnoo’s. He was not shy of her, and would eat dough-cakes out of her hand. But when, in the cool of the evening, Warsali came up on to the roof, and brought up his little network bedstead to take a quiet nap after his day’s work, that was a different affair.
Warsali didn’t like the monkeys and the monkeys didn’t like Warsali. Bunnoo was impudent and thievish. He could spring down upon the basket which some passer-by was carrying on his head, nip out a morsel of food, and be up again, grinning, on the roof before the thief was discovered. He even stole a pat of butter with the leaf it was wrapped in, just as Warsali had put it down for a second, preparatory to buttering his dough-cake. Nothing was safe from Bunnoo. He found out the cupboard in the wall where Warsali kept the lentils and the rice, and would open the door and help himself when the master was away at work.
All the same, not Warsali nor any other inhabitant of Pugreepore would have killed or even beaten Bunnoo, no matter how badly he behaved. Among the poor ignorant Hindoos, who worship the monkey-god among their many, many idols, Bunnoo was a sacred creature, and it almost seemed as if he were aware that he would never be punished for his misdeeds.
But Bunnoo was only one of many sinners. Since the old hermit’s death the crowd of monkeys who infested their roofs and streets were becoming a perfect pest in Currypore. Indian shops are only like very large cupboards, open to the streets; and fat grocers, nodding placidly on their baskets of wares during the noontide heat, became the prey of the cunning, active ‘monkey folk,’ as they called them. Their stores were emptied as if by magic; and the sly thieves did not even respect the diligent mistresses of houses, cooking the family dinner over the embers in the little courtyard, but would pounce upon the dough-cakes under their very noses. What was to be done?
In despair they appealed to the magistrate. Father put on his thinking-cap. One day, at lunch, he even discussed the subject with Bobby.
‘Why not send them right away, the little thieves, just as you told me you sent the big native thief away to the islands in the sea?’
‘A very good idea,’ remarked Father.
‘Of course it would be better to poison them, as we do rats in England,’ put in Mr. Walker, who had come to lunch; ‘but out of deference to native opinion it wouldn’t do, I suppose. We might have a second Mutiny, eh?’
Aunt Gladys was heard to murmur something about a monkey being an easy shot. But Mr. Walker, observing a twinkle in her eye, disdained to reply.
So the edict went forth that the monkeys were to be banished from the town. Away up the railway, beyond Chutneeghur, rose the big mountains, and there the Government felt sure that the monkeys would live happy for ever after, and find plenty of food without taking what did not belong to them.
This was easier said than done. In the case of our friend Bunnoo it was brought about by strategy. I am sorry to say that Sakina turned traitor. She held out a nice piece of greasy dough-cake, such as Bunnoo could not resist. He jumped down unsuspectingly to seize it from her hand. At the same moment Warsali seized him from behind, and behold, Bunnoo was a prisoner!
At the same time a number of other monkeys were captured—monkeys black, monkeys brown, monkeys young and monkeys old, great and small; but not without much difficulty and many a scratch and bite.
At last, however, the streets and roofs of Currypore were clear of their pests, and the astonished station-master of Chutneeghur received notice of the arrival of a freight of monkeys!
Huddled together in a couple of cattle-trucks—screeching, squeaking, snarling, whining, biting, scratching—came the monkeys, more astonished than even the station-master over their journey and their unusual surroundings. The trucks were drawn up in a siding, and preparations were made to transfer their inmates to covered bullock-carts, which were waiting to convey them to the hills.
A good many of the monkeys had already been bundled into the carts, Bunnoo among the rest; and more and more monkeys—their sisters, their cousins, and their aunts—were being hustled and tumbled in on the top of them, when, suddenly, Bunnoo made a discovery. He it was who found out the little hole in the corner of the cover of the cart. Others promptly helped him to enlarge it, so that, just as the unfortunate station-master had cleared his trucks, and fondly imagined that he had got his troublesome cargo off his hands, behold, there was a sudden bulge in the corner of the cover of the cart.
Before he knew what was the matter, out sprang Bunnoo, followed by all the rest as fast as their little legs could carry them, helter-skelter, jumping, scampering all over the place, and making gibbering sounds and hideous grimaces at the petrified officials.
Meanwhile, at home, Warsali went to work in peace, leaving the cupboard door ajar, and the pot of butter in the corner on the clay floor.
But ere many days had passed he returned one day to find, like Mother Hubbard, the cupboard bare and the butter missing.
‘Cuk! cuk!’ squeaked an impudent little voice from the roof; and there sat the returned convict, as bold as brass, licking his lips over the butter.
When he saw Warsali he gave a derisive leap over his head to the other side of the narrow street, and running along the roofs of the houses till he reached a tree, disappeared among the branches.
Now, Bunnoo had quite made up his mind to be revenged on Warsali for transporting him. One night, Warsali’s wife, when she went to bed, took off a silver necklace she wore round her neck, and which represented all the family plate, and laid it down on the floor. Well would it have been could she have seen Bunnoo’s bright little face peering at her through the half-open curtain, his head on one side, most interested.
Next morning the necklace was nowhere to be found. The neighbours were aroused, the village watchman (who was in the habit of sleeping soundly at his post) was summoned, but could give no clue to the thief. The house was searched through and through, and Mrs. Warsali scolded and lamented by turns.
Overhead sat Bunnoo, a wicked look on his face.
‘Cuk! cuk! Why don’t you ask me?’ was what he squeaked.
But Bunnoo had a gentle heart, for all his mischief, and was not ungrateful to Sakina for her kindness. One day, when she was not looking, he fished the necklace out of the hole under the roof where he had hidden it, and brought it to the little girl with a soft, purring sound.
Warsali was so angry about the hiding of the necklace that he declared that he would banish Bunnoo again, and more securely this time. But something happened to put the monkey quite out of his head. He had to go with Sakina one day into the great city to sell some of his grain, and to buy a few necessaries. It was a very long walk, and it was very hot, even for natives. Sakina’s head ached as she staggered along the dusty road under the scorching sun, a heavy bundle on her head. Before she reached the city she was burning with fever, and forced to lie down under a tree, while Warsali went on alone.
Bobby and Aunt Gladys were sitting in the verandah, when he saw the little figure lying by the roadside.
‘Look, Auntie, at that poor little girl! I’m sure she is ill; hear how she moans!’
Auntie called Mother, and they went out to see.
They had Sakina carried into one of the servants’ huts, and gave her medicine and cooling drink. But the fever was very bad indeed. Sakina first burned and then shivered, and when it left her, she was so weak that for some days she could hardly stand.
Warsali and his wife were most grateful to the mem-sahib (lady) who had treated Sakina so kindly; they were profuse in their thanks to Bobby when they heard that it was he who had first perceived their little daughter’s sad plight.
‘May your shadow never grow less, highness, Protector of the Poor!’ they called him, in their poetical language.
A day or two later, Mr. Walker having expressed a wish to go into the native city to see the great temple of Pugreepore, which his guidebook told him was so well worth seeing, and which Auntie Gladys had not seen yet, an expedition thither was arranged.
Now, the streets of Pugreepore were so narrow that no carriage could drive through them. It was too hot to walk, so an elephant was borrowed from the Government engineer. When Bobby heard it was a case of a ride on an elephant he perked up and wanted to go too.
It was too hot now to do anything out of doors, except in the late evening or very early morning. So the family might have been seen at their early breakfast in the verandah before the sun was up. The air was delicious, cool and refreshing. Bobby, to Mother’s great delight, tackled a second egg.
The carriage came round, and the party drove as far as the city gate, where the elephant stood awaiting them. It carried, not a howdah, but a kind of large chair-saddle, holding two persons each side, and wore a crimson saddle-cloth. Bobby was wedged in between Mr. Walker and Aunt Gladys; while Father and Mother sat on the other side, and the elephant rose and shuffled off under the gateway. Father’s chupprassie, or messenger, in his red coat, walked ahead, armed with a large stick, with which he cleared the way among the dusky, dirty, half-clad throng which jostled and jabbered below them. There were water-carriers plodding along, bent double under their shiny, glistening water-skins; horse-dealers from the far north swaggered about, clad in sheep-skin coats, worn inside out, and top-heavy turbans; a native carriage, called an ekka, like a tea-tray on wheels, with a canopy over it, drawn by a lean and ragged pony, made its way with much difficulty; inside sat two or three fat baboos, or clerks, their white-trousered legs, ending in patent-leather boots, hanging out over the wheels; they salaamed to the magistrate sahib as the elephant stalked by. Small woolly ponies, smaller donkeys, driven by the washermen, and both overladen, pariah dogs, beggars, sharp and mischievous small boys, with very little on in the way of clothes; and all these Mr. Walker and Aunt Gladys looked down upon with wonderment. On a level with them the balconies and hanging windows of the women’s parts of the houses, where the veiled faces of the poor imprisoned inmates peeped out; above, on the roofs, brown monkeys at mischief or at play, and here and there a watchful crow, scavenging. Once the elephant had to stop, for a marriage procession, heralded by loud tom-toming, came by. There was no bride to be seen, and the bridegroom, who was carried enthroned in a sort of Guy Fawkes chair, decorated with wreaths of paper flowers, was a little boy not much bigger than Bobby.
They stopped at the sort of square in front of the temple. Mr. Walker went in. They made him take off his shoes on entering the holy place, instead of his hat. The ladies were not allowed in.
It was while Mr. Walker was inside inspecting the temple that Bobby’s attention was diverted from the whining of the beggars, who had gathered round, exhibiting their sores and their withered arms, by a man and a woman and a little girl, who approached salaaming to the ground, while a tame monkey hovered in the rear.
‘Oh, Mummy! See!’ he cried. ‘That’s little Sakina and her father and mummy!’
Mother inquired kindly as to the former’s health. Then Bobby perceived Bunnoo.
Oh, Mummy! What a dear little monkey! It has such a nice begging face, and its hair parted in the middle, and yet it looks full of fun! See how fond he is of Sakina! Oh! how I should like to have it for a pet!’
In consequence of which remark, Warsali, glad at the same time to show his gratitude to Bobby, and also, as you may imagine, to rid himself of Bunnoo, offered him to Bobby as a present, which was accepted with delight.
Bunnoo was packed off in a basket to Bobby’s home, and lived such a life of luxury as he had never dreamt of. The old hermit’s bounty was nothing to it! Every day the little boy with his own hands prepared his pet’s dinner—nice little tit-bits, the best of everything. Bunnoo would sit beside him eyeing his proceedings with the deepest interest. Then Mahomet, the table-servant, would come in and carry off the plate, and afterwards the monkey would be fed on the verandah.
Now, you would have thought that Bunnoo would now have become a reformed character, and have given up picking and stealing. But I am sorry to say that this was not the case. He was as a rule quite gentle and docile. But they had to put a little collar on him and chain him up now and again, when his mischief passed bounds.
Mahomet, the table-attendant, did not love Bunnoo. To begin with, he was a Mohammedan and not a Hindoo, and monkeys had no sanctity in his eyes. Secondly, he himself was quite as greedy as Bunnoo, and was in the habit of filching the best pieces off the plates and eating them himself. Bunnoo was not going to stand this. One day as Mahomet, helping himself as he went, reached his pantry with a tray of dishes, Bunnoo was there before him. In a second he had armed himself with all the plates and saucers which lay about, and crash! smash! he flung them at Mahomet’s head as fast as he could pelt!
The unfortunate servant had to make a run for it, and, moreover, to pay for the broken crockery, as he had no business to leave the pantry door open.
The hot weather had really come. The trees in the Mall had shed their leaves; the garden was bare and sun-dried—hardly a vegetable to be had. All day long the sun poured down pitilessly from a brazen sky. The bungalow was shut up from dawn to dusk. Grass mats had been put over the windows and doors, and these were kept sprinkled with water, that the air blowing through them might come in cool; for it was a hot wind that blew all the daytime, making dust-clouds on the white Mall—a wind that scorched the lungs.
In every room a great curtain—a punkah—hung from the ceiling, and, pulled ceaselessly by relays of coolies in the verandah without, swayed over table and chair and bed. Every one, even Father, wore white cotton clothes, and Phil, indeed, very little of them!
At night Bobby’s bed was carried out into the garden along with the others, and he managed to sleep there a little, hot though the night was, secure from the onslaughts of the mosquitoes, under a tent of white net.
What wonder that Bobby felt ill and could not eat! The doctor came and ordered him goat’s milk, and so Moti was bought. Many an evening, as Bobby lay listlessly in the long chair in the verandah, it had amused him to watch the herd of goats, homeward driven from the plain, and stirring up a cloud of dust under the trees on either side the road, stand on their hind-legs and nibble with a frantic effort at any green shoot that came within their reach, only to be belaboured with the goatherd’s stick, and driven onward with shouts and threats.
‘Dry leaves, twigs, sticks! Nothing comes amiss to the Indian goats, which can’t get green grass,’ remarked Auntie Gladys. ‘I wonder what they’ll eat next!’
She little knew.
Moti was the pride of the herd, stalking along with head and horns proudly erect, entirely white, save for her dark horns and hoofs.
‘I shall call’ her Moti’ (pearl), said Bobby, when she was brought up to his chair, stroking her silky hair and long, dangling ears.
Moti was made free of the verandah. But woe betide her if the gardener chanced to espy her straying along the drive in the direction of his domain! A trail of destruction forthwith marked out her promenade. The few roses or alamandas, or gay bougainvilleas, the brinjals and custard-apples, he reared with such care by ceaseless watering them by rivulets each side the path from the well in the corner, all disappeared if within Moti’s reach, and Moti, standing on her hind-legs could reach amazingly far.
‘I wonder what’s become of Moti’s little baby-goat!’ remarked Bobby one evening, as he finished his nice draught of goat’s milk.
They were all sitting on the sort of raised platform in the middle of the garden, round which the roses grew, safe above the snakes and crawling things which might lurk in the moistened garden. There had been a difference of opinion between Moti and Kum’ere, as the former had come up to be milked, and the dog had been butted, howling, off the platform, and was being consoled by Bobby with the bit of cake, for which he did not feel hungry.
‘Perhaps it has been offered down in the city at one of the temples of Kali,’ replied Father. ‘They sacrifice a kid to her honour every morning, and the priest eats it!’
‘Perhaps the goatherd sold it to some Mussulman to slay as a thank-offering on the birth of a boy, or when his child was sick,’ said Mother.
‘Perhaps he sold it to the cook,’ put in Father, ‘and it has been figuring on our table as lamb!’ he laughed.
‘As if I could not tell the difference between kid and lamb!’ and Mother tossed her head.
Bobby and Kum’ere wandered off across the dusky garden to the dim verandah, where Ayah was singing Phil to sleep. He squatted on the ground by the old woman and the cot, and jingled the bangle-bells on her wrists and naked ankles, while she told him old-world stories of the wonderful magical things goats were supposed to know and do.
‘Outside in the desert plain,’ she said, ‘where a well was, but now no well is, the goats will stand in a flock round the ancient well-brink, though no one is able to see any sign of it. They know, too, the wise ones, where the ginns (spirits) live, in caves underground, and will lead men thither.’
Bobby gazed up at Moti standing by, looming large and white in the gloom, with her white beard like a sage.
‘Away in my city,’ Ayah went on, ‘there was once a milch-goat which came home dry, and they found she had let down her milk at a sacred spot. A very fine temple is built there now, and the gods love the city well.’
The old bearer came noiselessly into the verandah, barefoot, but with slightly rustling white garments, bringing the lamp, which he set on a table. It was Mother’s evening for paying the servants their wages.
He looked affectionately at Bobby.
‘The little sahib’s health is better,’ he said. ‘The milk of Moti is good for him. True, it is,’ he added, being a true Mussulman, for the Hindoo Ayah’s benefit, ‘that the Prophet says that there is no house possessing a goat but a blessing abideth thereon; and that there is no house possessing three goats but the angels pass the night there praying.’
Evidently the servants thought that Moti had brought good luck. Before many minutes, however, one of them at least changed his mind considerably.
Mother came in from the garden, and sat herself down by the table in the verandah, where mosquitoes and moths, and insects of all kinds, were very busy committing suicide round the lamp. She called to a punkah-coolie to come and stand behind her and wave his giant palm-leaf fan.
The old bearer fetched the heavy bag of rupees he had brought from the bank that morning, and, squatting on the ground beside his mistress, proceeded to count out the heavy silver coins, and the dirty bank-notes, and arrange them in little heaps. The servants came trooping up—there are so many in an Indian household. They all stood at the bottom of the verandah steps, and advanced, one by one, to receive with clasped hands the handful of rupees or notes, and each, as he was paid, touched his forehead and gave her highness, Protector of the Poor, thanks.
Bobby watched the performance, and Moti stood half-way down the steps, nibbling at anything and everything that came in her way.
The fat old cook advanced slowly, and puffed up the steps, his ample white petticoats rustling. As he was one of the chief servants, Mother handed the bearer a ten-rupee note, as well as some silver for him. But either the cook was clumsy, or a whiff from the punkah-fan caught the note just as the bearer was putting it into his hand; anyhow, the note fluttered away down the steps towards Moti.
Even the pampered goat could not resist the habits of her race for picking up any stray trifle that came in her way. Scarcely had the note reached the ground than she made a dart forward, seized it, nibbled, and in a minute it had disappeared down Red Lane!
There followed a terrible to-do. The servants, greedy of money, as all natives are, burst into loud lamentations and scoldings. They all seemed suddenly to have changed their minds about Moti.
‘Got nothing to bother you; then go and buy a goat!’ quoted the old cook, angrily, adding that it was all the bearer’s clumsiness.
‘What may not a goat eat or a fool say?’ quoted the bearer in return; and then both turned and vented their wrath upon the luckless Moti. Even Mother, by no means pleased, though she could not help laughing, ordered the goat to be removed to the stables.
‘Far too expensive a pet for you to have about, Bobby!’ she exclaimed to the boy, in English.
Bobby’s eyes filled with tears as Moti was led away in disgrace.
‘Oh, Mother! the cook will kill her, and sell her to you as lamb!’
Mother relented.
‘Well, after all, we owe Moti something, don’t we? She has done you a lot of good, Bobs. If she has rather an abrupt way of taking payment, well—I suppose we must put up with it. Here, cook, here’s another note for you, and keep it safe out of the way of the goat,’ she added.
She was glad afterwards that she had not banished Moti, for a day or two afterwards a terrible thing happened.
Moti strayed into the garden, snatching and nibbling as usual, and before anyone could prevent her she had eaten of the datura-plant, a deadly poison, which Mother had grown for its beautiful white flowers.
Nothing could save poor Moti. She died very shortly afterwards. Indeed, for a while there was a fear lest Bobby should have drunk some of her poisoned milk. However, he escaped safe, but inconsolable for the loss of this, the newest pet.
Moti’s skin the water-carrier took, and cured, and made himself a new mussuck with, to carry water in from the well. Thus it happened that even in death Moti got into more mischief, which occurred in this wise. Early one morning, when it was still almost cool, and ere the brain-fever bird, that hot-weather bird of ill-omen, had begun its shrill screech of ‘Brain fever, brain fever, brain fever!’ on three notes, rising higher and higher, till they rang all over the garden—one morning, quite early, Aunt Gladys stood on the verandah steps in her white cotton riding-habit and big sun-hat. Brown Sherry, her pony, was waiting below.
‘Bobby,’ she said, ‘I’m rather in a fix;’ and her eyes wandered up and down the road. ‘Mr. Walker wants me to go and ride with him this morning to an old shrine out in the country, which his guide-book tells him he must not leave Pugreepore without seeing. Then, before I was up, Mr. Woods sent me a note, saying he has come into Pugreepore to stay——
‘Hurrah!’ put in Bobby.
‘It’s too hot in the jungle for him now, and he wants me to ride with him, as he has got a new pony for me to see. Now, what am I to do, Bobby?’
‘Make them draw lots,’ suggested Bobby.
But it was Moti that decided.
Sounds of horses’ hoofs were heard in the distance advancing from opposite directions towards the bungalow. Mr. Woods hove in sight, cantering easily along in the soft dust on the side of the Mall, in an old cotton coat in checks, made out of duster material. Towards him came Mr. Walker, bestriding a tall, raw-boned, country-bred horse of evidently uncertain temper, and which he seemed to have some difficulty in riding. He was faultlessly clad in a brand-new very light-coloured coat and breeches, cut by an English tailor. His Bond Street helmet wibble-wobbled to and fro on his head as he cantered; his eyeglass glittered, and the sunlight glinting on him through the trees showed a grand sight.
When he came near the bungalow he saw Aunt Gladys, and sat back in his saddle, and squared his elbows and stuck out his toes. To give himself an appearance of ease, he flourished his riding-cane.
He came up with the water-carrier, trudging along, his full mussuck—poor Moti’s skin—hanging over his back, shining and glistening in the sun like a plump porpoise, its four legs sticking up in the air, and its throat, whence the water is poured, securely closed with a thong.
A sudden freak seized Mr. Walker. As he came up with the bhistie, the fat mussuck looked so tempting—he poked it with his stick—it burst open!
But he did not know that it was filled with dirty water only, for watering the drive.
In less time than it takes to tell, a muddy cataract spouted out right over him, ruining his beautiful new suit beyond hope!
Aunt Gladys rode with Mr. Woods that morning, while Mr. Walker retired back to his hotel to change his clothes. He left Pugreepore next day without seeing that famous shrine.
Bobby was off to the hills to the cool! No one who has not been in India in the hot weather can quite realize what a happy change it meant.
But it was a long and tiresome journey for them all—Mother, Auntie Gladys, Bobby, and little Phil, to say nothing of the pets, Kum’ere and Bunnoo, who, of course, went too.
The only person who was left behind to stew in the heat was poor Father. He had to sit in a hot, smelly court-house all day, trying prisoners, and would have no holiday till the autumn.
They started one evening, for it was too hot to be in the train by day—Bobby listless and sleepy with a sleepiness that could not sleep, little Phil very peevish and whiny. The monkey and the bird were put in charge of the servants, but Kum’ere travelled first-class with his little master.
A burning hot wind was blowing down the dark station, flickering the oil-lamps. A jabbering horde of natives, with moving bundles of clothes, their wives, and all armed with bedding and water-bottles, had at last been pushed into the carriages. At last the blue-coated railway coolie had clanged the bar of iron which did duty for a bell. At last the train moved, and with it the machine punkah overhead, and the revolving grass mats in each carriage window, wetting themselves as they turned, that the hot wind might blow through cool.
On they rushed through the dark, suffocating night, through the thirsty, gasping land. They passed twinkling lights of mud-hut villages, lurid, noisy, big stations, with more crowds of waiting natives, more clanging of iron, more shouting for water. And so on through the night.
Daylight dawned. It showed a hideous landscape of sun-baked plain, and something else.
‘How black your face is, Auntie!’ remarked Bobby, glancing up at the top sleeping-berth, where Auntie had been trying to slumber.
‘And yours, too,’ she rejoined; ‘we’re coated with dust! Bobby, reach me a bottle of soda-water out of the ice-box. Ha! look! What is that?’ she added, glancing out of the window.
An indistinct cloudy outline fringed the level plain to the eastwards. It was the Himalayas.
But between them lay a sixty-miles’ jolt in a dak-gharry. Imagine a bathing-machine, with sliding doors each side, and a perch for the driver in front. Inside was spread bedding.
Mother and little Phil went in one gharry, Bobby and Auntie, and, of course, Kum’ere, in another. The servants perched outside amongst the luggage. Bobby and Auntie lay at full length; so did Kum’ere, and he took up a good deal of room, Auntie said.
To this carriage were harnessed by arrangements of rope and leather two small ponies, which were changed every five miles. They were always overworked, and very unwilling to start. It required a great deal of shouting and scolding and pushing and beating to get them into a sort of gallop.
‘I feel like a pill in a pill-box!’ gasped Bobby, as the machine lurched and jolted and swayed. ‘And look through the dust! I see such a big ditch—each side!’
However, by the evening they all arrived safely at the foot of the great mountains, towering above them, dark in the twilight. All around lay dim forests, and lights shone in a little rest-house above the shingly banks of a stream.
Who do you think was standing there in the dusk to help Auntie Gladys out of the dak-gharry?
Why, Mr. Woods!
‘I’m at home here, you see,’ he explained to Bobby, who was staring up at him open-mouthed with surprise at his sudden appearance. ‘The wild forests are my charge. I have to see that they are properly cut down and planted.’
‘Is it here that the tigers live?’ asked Bobby—’Tawny and Stripes and their mummy. You must tell me another tiger story to-night, ’fore I go to bed!’
He reminded his friend about it after dinner, as they all sat out in the verandah of the rest-house, enjoying the cool freshness of the air. Through the darkness came a pleasant sound of running water.
‘I needn’t go to bed yet, need I, Mummy? Remember, I’ve been lying down like in bed all day in that old dak-gharry!’
‘Oh, mayn’t I tell my story first?’ begged Mr. Woods. ‘What shall it be?’
As he spoke, from the depths of the forest came a little short bark.
‘Is that a wild dog?’ asked Bobby.
‘No,’ replied Mr. Woods; ‘that’s a little barking-deer calling to its mate. Listen, and you’ll hear the answer. This is the time when the wild forest things hunt for their suppers.’
Every one sat mousy quiet. There was no moon—only the red end of Mr. Woods’s cigar shone in the dimness.
Suddenly they heard another quite different sound. Mr. Woods started up and listened attentively.
The sound was as if some giant yawned.
‘Oh-o-o-o-o-o-an!’ long drawn out, as if some monster had just awakened and was stretching himself.
‘Oh-o-o-o-o-o-an!’ it re-echoed through the night and the jungle.
‘The little barking deer had better look out,’ quoth Mr. Woods. ‘That is a tiger’s call!’
Bobby edged himself nearer to Auntie.
‘It sounds very near.’
‘It is probably a mile or more off—I wish I knew. I’d tie up a buffalo calf to bleat and attract him, and sit up in a tree all night, and shoot him when he came to eat it at dawn.’
They listened long and silently, but the tiger’s call was not repeated.
‘I guess he has found his supper—the little deer, perhaps, or a monkey.’
Then Mother looked at Bobby and mentioned bed again.
‘But I’ve not had my story, and I’m not a bit tired.’
Mr. Woods begged again. Then:
‘Another tiger story, eh?’
‘Oh no; he’s much too near—-the real tiger. I’ll have such bad dreams—that he’s walking in to scrunch me up in bed! Some other wild beast, please.’
Mr. Woods considered a moment.
‘You had such adventures—you’ve shot so many wild beasts,’ suggested Auntie.
‘You’re such a Wild Man of the Woods, eh?’ laughed Bobby, patting his friend’s knee.
‘What do you say to a bear story—of the great snows away above us out there?’
‘Oh yes, a bear story!’
‘Well, once upon a time, just in this month—April—a great red-brown bear, taller than I am when he stood on his hind-legs, woke up out of his winter’s sleep, high up in the mountains, where the snow-line meets the pines. Baloo (that was his name) was very thin and dreadfully hungry, for he’d had nothing to eat all the winter!’
‘Poor thing! How wasn’t he starved to death?’
‘Because he had been so greedy all the summer long. He had stuffed himself with walnuts and apricots. He was very good at climbing trees, and had found out where lots of wild bees had made a nest, and had dug out all their honey, and licked his paws—’
‘Dirty bear!’
—’and had gone to bed for the winter so fat that he had lived on his fat all the time. But now he had awakened awfully hungry. The snow was beginning to melt, and he knew from past experience that on sunny patches on the hill-side among the rocks and stones the wild young carrots were springing up. And oh! they were sweet and juicy when you had dug them out! Baloo licked his lips and shambled off at a trot to look for them. On the way he met Mrs. Baloo, who had wakened up too, and they agreed to go together. “But we must be careful,” she said. “There’s a new sort of queer animal about on the hill-side. I saw it yesterday. It has got only two legs, and no fur to speak of, except on its face; but it has two arms, one longer than the other, and it goes bang! when it holds it out straight.”’
‘I know! I know!’ cried Bobby, so interested that he stood up and looked into Mr. Woods’s face. ‘It was a Man with a Gun! Go on! go on!’
‘That’s what the bears did. They reached their feeding-ground, found the carrots, and began to guzzle! If they had not been so greedy this sad tale would never have been told. Let it be a warning to all little boys who are too fond of mettai (sweetmeats).’
‘English choccy’s best,’ put in Bobby.
‘For the bears were so busy feeding that they had not time to keep a look out. Baloo did not see very well out of his small eyes, deep-sunk in his head. Had he been a tiger or a deer, he would have been far more on the alert. But, as I said before, when he got his nose into anything good, he could think of nothing else! And the Something Else had drawn nearer and nearer, stealthily and noiselessly, step by step, crouching and scrambling up the hill-side. The Something Else was now within thirty yards, peering over a rock, and his Long Arm was peering too—the Arm that went bang!
‘Too late the bears suspected danger. Mrs. Baloo rose on her hind-legs, showing the great white horseshoe mark on the fur of her red-brown breast. She grunted and sniffed the air.
‘Bang! went that Long Arm.
‘Off shambled Mrs. Baloo into the birch bushes as fast as she could shuffle; but one of her arms—great furry-clad arms—hung helpless beside her.
‘Now, where was Mr. Baloo? That was the question the Man with the Gun asked himself. He had bolted too, but not in the same direction as his wife.
‘So the Man with the Gun advanced cautiously, creepy-crawly among the rocks, crouching, scrambling, climbing, sometimes on all-fours, as if he were a bear himself. At last a big rock barred his way. He could see no further.
‘With his gun at full cock, he peeped—oh, so stealthily—over the top. And what do you think he saw?
‘Some one else was peeping too!
‘Face to face, almost touching noses, he found himself with Baloo, looking, as the French say, into the whites of each other’s eyes. And such ugly little deep-set cunning eyes they were.
‘“Oh my, what a surprise!” But Baloo was the most surprised of the two. Remember, he had never seen a man so near before, and he did not like it.
‘Round he swung, but only to receive his death-wound and topple down the hill. His first sight of a man had been his last.
‘But what of his wounded wife?
‘The Man with the Gun set off down a track which led below the birch bushes to find out.
‘Suddenly he heard a cry from below. It was his faithful huntsman shouting to him:
‘“Not that way, not that way, sahib! For the love of Allah, no! Climb that tree and look!”
‘The Man with the Gun did not need telling twice. In a twinkling he had swarmed up the nearest-tree to look out for the bear.
‘And then, resting on the very path he was taking, was Mrs. Baloo on the look out for me!*’
‘For you? Ah, I knowed it was you all the time!’ cried Bobby delightedly. ‘Go on!’
‘Which was just what Mrs. Baloo didn’t do. She turned and gave me one look—just enough for me to aim well at the white horseshoe on her chest, and then--bang! Down she tumbled—down the hill-side to join her husband. And thus endeth the tale of the Greedy Bears. And so, good night!’
Next morning, very early, the party started up the mountains. Mr. Woods said good-bye, and returned to his forests.
Aunt Gladys rode a small but sure-footed hill-pony; the servants walked, but Mother, with Phil in her arms, and Bobby, were borne aloft in dandies, a sort of arm-chair on poles, earned on men’s shoulders.
‘Reminds me of the fifth of November!’ laughed Mother.
‘I won’t be called a “guy,”’ Auntie laughed back. She was feeling better and merrier already.
At every step up the narrow winding paths, cut out of the hill-side, the air got fresher and cooler. The sun peeped over the forest-clad hills and flickered through the ilex-trees on to the path. But Bobby was glad he had got a coat on, and remarked he could eat a second breakfast. .
Kum’ere, running on ahead, enjoyed his liberty again.
On they went, and ever upward. Rosy rhododendrons dyed the hill-side crimson; stately deodars and hoary gnarled ilexes half blocked the way. Down in a deep gorge on one hand a river rushed and tumbled among the dark cliffs, while numberless unseen little torrents and waterfalls answered it from the hills around. In front fold after fold of purple mountain opened to the view.
Everything was changed. The strapping coolie woman in gay petticoats and short-waist red jacket, who hoisted some of the luggage on to her head, was utterly different from her languid betrousered sister in the plains. The sturdy little hillmen plodded up with the dandies, mile after mile, to a sort of chorus of cheerful grunts. Cow-bells jingled from upland pastures, and then there came a note to Auntie, only too familiar.
‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’
‘Oh, Bobby!’ she turned in her saddle and cried back to him, ‘the English cuckoo! It’s like home!’
‘The koel bird,’ corrected Mother, ‘but a good imitation!’
‘Much nicer than that old brain-fever bird I was getting so tired of,’ remarked Bobby. ‘And oh, Mother, see, see, what a beautiful butterfly!’
Bobby slept that night without mosquito-nets in his new mountain home, a little wooden house perched among the rhododendrons. He asked for a blanket on his bed, and Bunnoo was put into a little red coat Mother had had made for him.
When he opened his eyes next morning Bobby felt in a new world. The monotonous punkah no longer waved over his head. A pleasant sunshine streamed in at the windows through green branches, instead of the white glare of the world below.
Suddenly—plump! flop! scamper! scuttle! scamper! As he lay half awake, he became aware of a trampling overhead. The bungalow was one-storied and had an iron roof. The noise was as if a crowd of people were running and jumping about upon it, and the green branches of the ilex on the terrace swayed as if with a wind. Yet it was quite a still morning.
‘What’s the matter, Aunt Gladdie?’ asked Bobby, popping his head from under the bedclothes.
Auntie peeped out of the next bed, her yellow hair streaming around her.
‘Yes, indeed!’ she exclaimed. ‘What can be the matter?’
‘Do you think it’s rats, or muir cats, Auntie?’
These are creatures that take up their abode in the large space between the high-pitched thatched roofs of the bungalows in the plains of India, and the white cloths which form the ceilings of the rooms.
‘No, I don’t think there is any room for such animals on this roof,’ replied Auntie, much puzzled as the trampling continued. ‘Perhaps it is people coming to sweep the chimneys!’ she added.
Bobby laughed. Auntie had not long come out from England.
‘Oh no, Auntie! Nobody ever sweeps chimneys here. Why, it is only up in the hills here that there are any fireplaces at all, and then it will be only little wood fires, Mother says. Oh, I can’t stand it any longer. I must jump up and see!’
With that Bobby bounded out of bed, and running on to the terrace with his little feet bare, looked up at the house.
‘Oh, Auntie!’ he cried. ‘A lot of old men with grey beards!’
Auntie Gladdie, hastily donning a dressing-gown, had followed him.
‘Oh, you little goose, not old men, but monkeys!’
So indeed they were, a group of long-bearded, long-furred hill monkeys, or lungoors, bounding down the forest-side when out for a morning ramble, who had rested awhile to play on the roof of the bungalow, or had probably been tempted by the apricot-tree in the garden.
‘Bow! wow! wow!!!’
Kum’ere had followed his master, and now flew in the direction of the intruders. Off they scampered, leaping from branch to branch through the swaying forest, till they were lost to sight in a sea of green.
‘I wonder where they come from?’ said Bobby, gazing up into the mysterious depths above.
He wondered many times during the day, and when, in the afternoon, Mother and Auntie went off, carried in their dandies, to pay calls, and Ayah had crept off to her little dog-kennel of a hut behind the bungalow to smoke and chew the pan which dyed her teeth such an ugly red, Bobby called to Phil:
‘Come along, Phil, Let’s go down there among the trees and see where the monkeys have gone to!’
Down, down, down! Down the narrow steep stony path behind the house, zigzagging down the mountain-side; under the shade of the ilex, among the thick gnarled branches where the ferns hung like beards. The partridges called ‘Chickaw! chickaw!’ and the pheasants whirred unseen among the forest. Beautiful butterflies, swallow-tailed and many-hued, flitted across the path, and lizards and brilliant chameleons flashed over the bare rocks.
Bobby, who had so nearly caught a swallowtail with his hat, suddenly heard a cry from little Phil. He turned and saw him wading by the side of the path in a mass of maidenhair fern, picking pink begonias.
‘Oh! my toe! my toe! It’s all bluggy!’
Bobby, dreadfully frightened, ran up to him.
‘Oh, Phil! you’ve not been bitten by a snake?’
‘No, nuffin bit me; but see—it’s all bluggy!’
Sure enough, blood was oozing out over the white sock. Bobby hastily tore off shoe and sock, but no wound was to be seen.
Stay, something small and fat and black fell out of the sock, like a small slug.
‘It’s a leech!’ cried Bobby. ‘Oh, Phil mustn’t go in the long grass! Mother said there were leeches in the grass!’
But Phil was frightened and was inclined to cry.
‘Me wants Mummy—show Mummy me’s bad foot!’
‘Come along home, then, to Mummy!’
They retraced their steps, and on the way they found a little stream oozing out of the fern swamp, and there they sat awhile and dabbled Phil’s poor foot.
Meantime, the sun had almost set, and it was growing dark under the shadow of the great mountains and the big trees. Kum’ere stood watching them. Every now and then he ran on a few yards, and then came back again, sometimes barking a little. In dog language he was begging them to come home.
Some one else was watching them too, out of the thick brush-wood, unseen, but close at hand.
Had they looked in that direction, the little boys would have seen a pair of shining eyes glaring at them through the gloom.
Happily, the children sat still, laughing and talking and dabbling.
Happily, it was Kum’ere who moved off first, ahead on the homeward road.
Then suddenly a spring—a dark mass leaping out of the wood!
There followed a terrified howl from Kum’ere—a scuffle—growling—snarling; then the dog came back to them, limping, whining, bleeding.
‘It’s some wild beast; he’s bitten him—my poor, dear Kum’ere. Oh, sit quiet, Phil, do, or he’ll jump out again!’ and Bobby, shaking with fright, flung one arm round his little brother and another round his injured pet.
It was a very tearful little voice that was lifted up and rang through the gleaming woods.
‘Ayah! Ayah! Mother! Mummy—Mum-mee!’
‘Mummy’s gone away—Mummy not here!’ sobbed little Phil.
Bobby’s heart sank. He dared not move. How would anyone find them? No one knew where they had gone. How he wished he had never come!
But he shouted again and again.
Mr. Woods told Auntie Gladys later that it was probably his shouting that scared away the leopard and saved the little boys’ lives.
At last, when it was nearly dark—at last, after what seemed hours—there came a sound of voices calling, far above:
‘Bobby! Bobby!’
‘Bobs! Bo-obs!’
‘Bobbee! Phillee!’
The light of a lantern came swinging down the mountain-side. The voices drew nearer and nearer. The next moment and Bobby and Phil were in their Mother’s arms.
‘Kum’ere’s a brave dog!’ quoth Bobby, as he progressed homewards up the hill, carried on the old bearer’s shoulder. ‘He fought the leopard for us, Auntie. While Mother’s ’tending to Phil’s foot you’ll ’tend to poor Kum’ere’s back, won’t you? The leopard’s horrid claws scratched it, Bearer says.’
Auntie could not speak. Her only answer was to catch Bobby’s hand and lay it against her cheek.
‘Why, Auntie, your cheek’s all wet!’
Every morning, early, the lungoors came down from the heights above where they lived in the cliffs. Bobby learnt to look for his morning callers, and spread food to induce them to linger that he might watch their antics more closely.
But lungoors are shy creatures, much more so than the brown monkeys, like Bunnoo. It was some time before they got used to human beings. It was the food that did it. English Huntley and Palmer biscuits they could not resist. Gradually they came to springing down on to the terrace and clutching at bits close to Bobby’s feet, while Mother and Aunt Gladys sat close by. Then they would bound up the nearest tree, each nibbling and gobbling hastily, as if in fear that Bobby or Kum’ere or the other monkeys would snatch them from them, jabbering and snarling the while.
The lungoors could not bear Kum’ere, and Kum’ere did not like the monkeys. Perhaps he was jealous over the biscuits, too, and I dare say he did not see why the monkeys should get them all; so the dearest wish of Kum’ere’s life became to catch one of the lungoors. He was successful, he knew, with rats and stray cats, and he just longed to get a monkey. But they were always too many for him. In vain he tried dodging, barking, running. The lungoors had longer legs than he, and then they could jump, whereas Kum’ere could only run. When he thought he had just got one, sitting apparently unsuspicious at the foot of the big ilex—shush! off it would bound, with one tremendous leap, almost to the topmost bough, and Kum’ere would be left barking, discontented and indignant, below.
One happy day, however, he was in luck. There was quite a young monkey, old enough to run and jump alone, without being carried, clinging to its mother, but not old enough to have much wisdom. If it had stayed up in the branches where its mother left it, Kum’ere would never have had a chance; but the silly little thing ventured down with the others after the bait of biscuits on the terrace, where Kum’ere, who was pretending to be asleep in the verandah, looked out of the corner of his wicked little eye, and made a sudden rush.
The older monkeys scampered off, but the little one could not jump so far, and in an instant Kum’ere was shaking it as he would a rat. In vain Bobby called to him to let go, begging and scolding. Kum’ere had got his chance at last.
But he had reckoned without a big grey-bearded monkey, almost as tall as a man, the great-grandfather and chief of all the tribe. With one leap this personage bounded to the assistance of the poor little victim.
The next moment the latter was scurrying off free, and Kum’ere, howling, had taken refuge under Auntie’s chair, with two marks of the big monkey’s sharp teeth in his neck.
‘Serve him right, too, for bullying the poor little monkey!’ cried Bobby.
‘Still, I owe him one for hurting our poor Kum’ere,’ said Mother, as Auntie removed the dog to bathe and anoint his wounds. ‘Bobby, run and fetch me that tin of stale biscuits I opened yesterday, and which we could not eat.’
The lungoors, who, from coigns of vantage among the trees only known to themselves, had attentively watched the discomfiture of Kum’ere, were presently amazed at the feast spread for them on the terrace. It seemed to be raining biscuits. Such a meal they had never seen before.
Cautiously, one by one, they descended and approached. The coast was clear. The enemy was in the house being doctored, and only Bobby and Mother, to whom they were quite used, watched them from the verandah. They gained courage, and fell upon the biscuits. Now came the fun.
English biscuits, exported all the way to India in tins, often acquire a particularly unpleasant, stale, and rancid taste if kept too long. This was the case with those Mother had now scattered.
The monkeys clawed and pouched them greedily, till, at the first mouthful, they discovered that they were not the same as those they usually got—more, that they were very nasty. They made comical faces of disgust, spat them out vigorously, rubbed the biscuits on their sides or on the ground, inspected them attentively, with their heads cocked on one side, chattering and grinning in rage and disgust. They would have none of them, and quite realised the trick which was being played upon them. Bobby and Auntie laughed and shouted to see their funny faces, with Mother joining in, too. Kum’ere, who had slunk in the background, would have laughed also, if he could, and had not been feeling so ill.
The lungoors, in high dudgeon, and frightened by the peals of laughter, fled back to the forest.
‘I think you’ve had your revenge, Kum’ere,’ laughed Auntie, as she gave a nice fresh biscuit to the injured dog.
But Auntie little knew. He laughs longest who laughs last. In this case it was the lungoors.
‘A wounded little hero!’ That was what Mr. Woods called Kum’ere when he came, a few days later, up to the hills on leave, and, dropping in to lunch, heard Bobby’s breathless and glowing account of his adventure and escape, and of Kum’ere’s prowess.
‘All the same,’ sighed the little boy at the conclusion of the recital as he sat on Mr. Woods’s knee—‘all the same, I’ve never yet got really into the mountains where the lungoors live. I suppose I’m too little yet.’
‘When you’ve been home to school, Bobs, and are a “grown man,” as you call me, you look quick and pass your exam., and then you’ll become a forest officer like me, and know all the hill-forests and the four-footed folk who live in them.’
‘Then, tell me about them,’ coaxed Bobby—‘do-ee now!’
They were sitting in the verandah after lunch, looking on to the lovely view of mountain and forest, with, deep down through a gap, a glimpse of far-away plains shimmering in the noontide heat.
‘It’s good to be up here,’ said Mr. Woods, with a sigh of contentment. But it was at Auntie Gladys, playing on the floor with Phil, that he looked, and not at the view. ‘Bearer, bring me fire!’
The old bearer emerged from the house, in his hands a pair of tongs, in the tongs a live piece of charcoal. Mr. Woods, having received a nod of permission from Mother, lit his pipe, and, lying back in his chair, asked Bobby:
‘Would you like to hear how the Argus pheasant lost his tail?’
‘Wouldn’t I!’ cried Bobby. ‘Gee-up!’
‘This is a middle-of-the-day story. It was hot down in the deep ravine, where the stream went tumbling between the rhododendrons on its way to the plains. Hot noonday, the sun striking down between the rocks, and the bird-world sat cool among the branches. A beautiful Argus pheasant, with a tail four feet long, shimmering wings all shining, and with quantities of white eyes dotted all over them, sat using the quiet pool under the big ilex as a looking-glass. Mrs. Argus, a plain little quiet bird, dressed in brown, sat admiring her lord and master as much as he admired himself, which is saying a great deal.
‘“There he is, at it again!” chirped a common little red-legged partridge to its mate as they flew across the ravine, and Mr. Argus folded and unfolded his glittering wings. “Chickaw! chickaw!” the partridge chuckled.
‘A little family of green parakeets flashed by like a streak of green lightning, and then suddenly swooped down on the tree in a little cloud.
‘“What’s the joke?” they shrieked all at once, cocking their plum-coloured heads, and twisting their ringed necks, and opening wide their red eyes, from which the lids fell upwards, and not downwards.’
‘Like a lot of Totas,’ put in Bobby.
‘The partridges pointed to Mr. Argus. “Stuck-up old thing, admiring himself again!”
‘But the parakeets shrieked there was not much to admire in a bird like that, with such a dull-coloured head. And the partridges added that they thought his wings, for all their beauty, were not much good at flying fast.
‘“Really, I wouldn’t give much for my life if I couldn’t fly better than Mr. Argus,” said one, “with all the dangers there are about.”
‘“We should think so,” shrieked the parakeets. “There’s not much to eat on us, and yet down in the valley, where there are men, we get shot at.”
‘“There may be more pickings down in the crops by the village, but I prefer this snug ravine,” Mr. Partridge said.
‘The parakeets set to work pulling off and nibbling the red rhododendron blooms till the steep bank was strewn with a crimson carpet.
‘Then suddenly the great branches of the ilex waved and fluttered. Two big paws came into view, and then a very brown, rugged face, with untidy white hair, and a straggling white beard, and then two more big brown paws, just like the others.’
‘I know! I know!’ Bobby cried; ‘it was an old lungoor!’
‘Plump! he sprang down into their midst. “I heard of you,” he grunted, “with your shrill voices, which can be heard a mile off! You should be more careful how you discuss your neighbours. Who have you been picking to pieces now?”
‘“The rhododendrons!” mocked a green parakeet, nodding its plum-coloured head, and gobbling down a juicy bud.
‘“No; that conceited bird over the pool,” put in the partridges. “He thinks such a lot of himself because he has got such a long tail and white-spotted wings.”
‘“If he were a peacock he couldn’t be vainer,” shrieked the parakeets; “and then he would have something to be proud of—peacocks have a voice almost as fine as ours!”
‘“That depends on whether you have an ear for music,” grunted the lungoor. “Some people might think there wasn’t a pin to choose between you. But really,” he went on, “the way you birds go on is quite absurd! I suppose you make such a fuss about your wings because you’ve only got two claws instead of four, poor things!”
‘And the lungoor rose up, stretched out his four great hairy hands, and gave himself a little swing in the rhododendron-tree.
‘“Don’t! Don’t I” shrieked all the parakeets at once. “You’ll spoil our dinner, shaking all the buds down just because you don’t care about them.”
‘“Eating such trash, when there’s a wild-apricot tree not far off, that I know of,” grunted the lungoor; and then, being of an inquisitive turn of mind, he let himself down the steep side of the rocks by his hands, much as if it had been a ladder, and plump! squatted on the bank where Mr. Argus was pluming his glittering wings in the sunshine.
‘The pheasant “passed the time of day” with the monkey, and explained that he was very busy indeed—that was the worst of having such beautiful clothes to take care of. And Mrs. Argus on a branch above turned her pale head towards the new-comer and remarked how very particular her husband was about himself.
‘“Now, I shouldn’t think,” she added, glancing at the lungoor’s rough and matted fur, “that that coat of yours gives you much trouble.”
‘“No, I can’t say I ever bother myself much about my personal appearance,” grunted the monkey.
‘“But I owe it to myself,” Mr. Argus remarked, taking a beautiful feather in his beak and preening it all the way down. “There’s no bird in all the forest anything like as handsome as I am! I must say that, sometimes, I do wish that these wings of mine were lighter and easier to fly with; but we can’t have everything, and if one is as handsome as I am, one can’t have everything else. Besides, I have a fine old name to keep up, too.”
‘“What’s in a name?” grunted the old lungoor. “Pooh!”
‘“A very great deal,” the pheasant went on, cleaning his left tail-feather. “I—I am the Argus pheasant. There’s the Manāl pheasant about, a blue sort of bird, no size at all, and such a short tail, and no eyes! Then there’s the golden pheasant, a pretty little bit of a thing to be sure; but I—I am the Argus pheasant!”
‘But the old lungoor had never been to school, and did not know any of the fairy stories they read there in Greek, and he said so.’
‘Oh,’ put in Bobby, ‘they read fairy stories at school, do they? That sounds nice!’
‘Wait till you try to read them in Latin and Greek,’ laughed Mr. Woods. ‘Well, the pheasant said he was much shocked at the ignorance of some people, who didn’t know why he was called the Argus pheasant.
‘“Did you never hear of Argus, the hundred-eyed one?”’
‘I never did,’ put in Bobby, shaking his curls. ‘I’m as bad as the lungoor. But, then, Mummy often calls me a monkey!’
‘“Never heard of the gentleman,” the lungoor replied; “but I shouldn’t mind being in his shoes. I’m sure one needs eyes at the back of one’s head in this thick forest, with all the leopards there are about.”’
‘Leopards!’ repeated Bobby, and he shuddered. ‘But this is only a story, isn’t it?’
‘“If those eyes,” the lungoor went on, “as you call those shiny white markings on your wings, were really of any use to you, I should think something of them.”
‘The Argus sighed.
‘“You’ve evidently no eye for beauty and then he told him the story of Argus.
‘“Once upon a time there was a great goddess, named Juno, who could do all sorts of wonderful fairy things. And there was a lady named Io, with whom she was displeased, and Juno turned her into a cow. Then she gave her in charge of Argus the hundred-eyed, to take care of and prevent her straying. But Hermes, who was another great god, wanted to steal the cow, so he played his flute so sweetly that he played Argus soundly to sleep, with all his hundred eyes tightly shut, and then, what do you think he did? Why, he cut off his head! And Juno took all his hundred eyes and transplanted them into the peacock’s tail and into the wings of the Argus pheasant, and there they have been ever since.”’
‘A hundred eyes!’ mused Bobby. ‘It must have been dreadfully difficult for Argus to get to sleep. And then, when he cried, think what a lot to wipe! ’Spensive in pocket-hankies!’
‘Well, this was the story of the Argus’s eyes—the bird’s, I mean—and he told it with much pride to the monkey.
‘“Well,’ replied the *lungoor, “I hope it is a great comfort to you, and makes up to you for not being quite so quick on the wing as other birds, for all those blind eyes of yours. But, good evening; I must be off. The sun has sunk below the mountain, and it will soon be dusk. I myself am a bit nervous about being out late, and in the dark.”
‘“I have not quite finished dressing myself yet,” replied the pheasant, “and am not ready to go to roost.”
‘And as the lungoor bounded away through the branches, he heard Mr. Argus continue to hold forth to his wife with his clear call, while he went on with his toilet.
‘Some one else heard him, too, away up at the head of the ravine, where the mountains closed in, and the stream issued forth from the dark holes and clefts, and the bare crags lay piled one atop of the other.
‘Somebody, who, now that? the sun had sunk low and the world began to grow gloomy, opened his green eyes and awoke from his noonday slumber—and awoke hungry.
‘Somebody, hearing the pheasant’s call, crept out of his dark lair among the rocks, and stole noiselessly down the ravine towards him, softly and stealthily, with catlike action of great soft paws which made no sound.
‘Somebody stalked nearer and nearer through the thick undergrowth, his keen green eyes glittering as a cat’s do in the dark.
‘“Well, I really think that will do now,” Mr. Argus was saying. “Don’t I look handsome, my dear?”
‘But before poor Mrs. Argus could answer, with one tremendous bound the leopard sprang down upon her from the branch above, and at the same moment made a grab at Mr. Argus’s lovely tail.
‘How the pheasant got away he never knew, but certain it is that he escaped with the loss of half the appendage of which he was so proud, and his poor little wife he never saw again.
‘“What’s come over Mr. Argus?” asked the parakeets of the partridges a few days later. “He’s not half as conceited as he used to be.”
‘The partridges did not know, but the old lungoor, who had found a heap of pheasant’s feathers by the pool, had his suspicions; but he said nothing.’
Mr. Woods had scarcely finished his story, and Bobby was still silent, pondering the Argus’s fate, when the sound of a horse’s trot was heard. A pony came round the sharp corner of the steep little drive on to the terrace, and on the pony sat Mr. Walker.
Bobby slid down off his friend’s knee, and ran to greet the new-comer.
‘Hullo!’ he cried. ‘You’ve come up here! What for?’
Mr. Walker hesitated a moment, and eyed Bobby a little askance.
‘Oh, to—to see the hills!’
‘Do you know,’ Bobby went on quite gravely, ‘that if you stay so long seeing India you’ll never get on round the world, and Father said you were a globe-trotter.’
Mr. Walker looked at Bobby as if he would like to eat him. But there was no time to reply, for the unexpected happened.
A pair of bright eyes had been watching Mr. Walker’s arrival unsuspected. It was Bunnoo bathing in the water-tank at the corner of the verandah, diving, splashing, and enjoying himself. He eyed Mr. Walker with his cunning little face just peeping out of the water.
Mr. Walker was about to dismount; he had just got one leg across the saddle, when Bunnoo made a sudden spring, leapt with one bound out of the bath, alighted on to the pony’s back, and dug his sharp teeth into it to hold on by.
This was more than any pony could be expected to stand. Down went his head, up went his heels, and off went both Mr. Walker and Bunnoo.
The former was so heavy and fat that it was the monkey who picked himself up first. When Mr. Walker resumed an upright position, and had dusted himself a little, the first thing he saw was the mischievous monkey grinning at him in the verandah.
He dashed at Bunnoo in a rage. Bobby trembled for his pet. But Bunnoo was too quick. He bounded into the drawing-room and took refuge on the mantelpiece. When Mr. Walker rushed in, red and fuming, and made for Bunnoo with his riding-whip upraised, the latter looked round for a missile of defence. There was one nice and handy. The next minute Mr. Walker saw the little gilt travelling-clock come whizzing at his head! He dodged it just in time, and the clock shattered on the floor, while Bunnoo sat up aloft chattering and chuckling with delight.
This was too much even for Bobby’s pet. All the servants rushed in and chased Bunnoo. Bunnoo fled for his life. Out of the drawing-room, through the verandah, out into the forest and the mountains, and there, among the gnarled ilexes and the tall deodar pines, he found the lungoors.
What a free and happy life was theirs in the vast green world of branches! thought Bunnoo. Bobby had certainly been very kind, but then, that collar and that chain! Bunnoo had been a sort of prisoner. If he missed Bobby’s tit-bits, at least he had liberty.
The lungoors were very kind. They showed him where the berries grew, and the wild-apricot trees, and, away up among the rocks and the birches, where the wild carrots hid away near the snow-line. It was a free and happy life while it lasted.
But a little fat, well-fed monkey among the lonely hills was a rare sight.
At least, the lammergeier thought so.
The lungoors he knew. They were big and strong, likewise lean and tough. But Bunnoo offered a tempting morsel. Poor little creature, unused to danger and all unconscious of the evil intentions of the great sharp-beaked bird of prey hovering over him!
The lungoors, faithless friends that they were, fled as the lammergeier swooped down. Bunnoo was left to his fate.
One afternoon Aunt Gladdie and Mr. Woods went out for a ride together. They did so nearly every afternoon, Bobby noticed. They were riding along the mountain road, so steep and stony.
‘Let us go up to Snow Seat,’ Auntie had said, ‘and see the sunset.’
And on their way from feasting their eyes on the great transformation scene—like the transformation scene in a pantomime—that went on every evening, the great snow range, the mighty row of sugar-loaves, turning pink, then rosy, then crimson, then fiery, and then fading back again into cold blue-whiteness—on their way back in the twilight, Auntie’s pony trod on something in the path.
Mr. Woods got down and looked. It was the tiny skeleton of a monkey.
Bobby, like the sun, had also gone to bed, when the two came in and stood over him.
Auntie held something in her hand, a little brass collar, and she showed it to Bobby.
‘Bunnoo’s!’ cried the little boy. ‘My lost Bunnoo’s!’ Then they told him what they had found.
The tears came welling up in Bobby’s eyes. He leaned his curly head for comfort against Auntie’s shoulder, as she sat on the bed in her riding-habit.
Suddenly something pricked.
‘You’ve got a pin in your tie, Auntie,’ he cried. ‘Take it out; it hurts!’
Auntie did as she was bid quickly, for Bobby was very near tears.
It fell on the counterpane.
‘Hullo!’ exclaimed Bobby, quite forgetting his trouble over Bunnoo. ‘What’s that? A new brooch—why, yes, it is. I say, Mr. Woods, you have given her that tiger-claw made into a brooch at last!’
‘Yes, at last,’ replied Mr. Woods. ‘Bobby, I’m going to be your uncle; Auntie Gladdie has said she will marry me!’
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
There was such a grand wedding. Bobby had a new blue-velvet suit, and a three-cornered hat with a white feather. In dandies and on ponies, all the English dwellers in the bungalows perched about the mountain-side flocked to the church of St. John in the Wilderness, for roads and carriages there were none. Even Auntie Gladys, in her white satin dress and lace veil, was borne in a jampan, high on men’s shoulders, and Mr. Woods rode by her side on his pony. In another jampan followed Bobby, arrayed in his blue-velvet suit, and he carried his Aunt’s train up the church.
After the wedding the bride and bridegroom and all the guests returned to the bungalow, where the wedding-breakfast was laid out in the dining-room which opened on to the terrace. A splendid meal had been prepared. Champagne and dainties from far-away Europe, grapes from Cabul, oysters from Bombay, and a beautiful wedding-cake from Calcutta—all silver and white sugar without, and dark and delicious within—had been placed in the middle of the table.
But while the party were at church the house was left deserted, and when the wedding procession entered the dining-room, two and two, what a fearful sight met their eyes! Torn from its proud position, dealing in its fall devastation to all the other dishes near it, the beautiful bride-cake had vanished!
A melancholy little trail of silver leaves and sugar ornaments marked where it had gone—out of the window!
With a cry of dismay, Mother, followed by Bobby, rushed out. There on the terrace lay the last remains of the cake, surrounded by lungoors. Lungoors everywhere, stuffing, clawing, jabbering and chuckling, up among the branches and the tree-trunks, enjoying that cake as much as any of the guests would have done!
Bobby lifted up his voice and howled. He had been so looking forward to that cake. It was one of the nicest things about Auntie’s wedding; it almost made up in his eyes for the losing Auntie. I am afraid Bobby was rather a greedy little boy! But then, one doesn’t get a chance of wedding-cake every day, and his mouth had been watering for a taste ever since he had helped unpack it from its soft folds of silver paper.
And now the lungoors had hardly left him a mouthful!
To Bobby’s cries of despair followed Kum’ere’s bark. Quite recovered, and adorned with a wedding-favour on his collar, he rushed upon his foes in a terrible rage. If he could not give them a taste of his teeth he would give them a taste of his tongue.
The lungoors, alarmed also by the sudden appearance of the large wedding-party, bolted back to the forest. Bobby sorrowfully picked up a sugar flower all covered with dust, and his Mother looked fit to cry with vexation.
But Auntie Gladdie was so happy that nothing could put her out. She smiled up at Mr. Woods as the latter exclaimed:
‘I think, Bobby, the lungoors have scored off you and Kum’ere this time!’