Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (697 page)

“But why,” I interrupted, “did Beshakl tell lies?”

“Oh! He is a low-caste man, and desired consideration. Now he is a witness in a great law-case, and men will go to the jail-khana on his account. It was to give trouble and obtain notice.”

“Was it all lies?” said Strickland,

“Ask him,” said Adam, cheerily, through the mango-juice.

Strickland passed through the door; there was a howl of despair in the servants’ quarters up the hill, and he returned with the one-eyed groom.

“Now,” said Strickland, “it is known. Declare!”

“Beshakl,” said Adam, while the man gasped. “Imam Din has caught four men, and there are some more at Peshawur.
Bus! Bus! Bus!
Tell about the mare and how she rolled.”

“Thou didst get drunk by the wayside, and didst make a false case to cover it. Speak!”

Like many other men, Strickland, in possession of a few facts, was irresistible. The groom groaned.

“I — I did not get drunk — till — till — Protector of the Poor, the mare rolled.”

“
All
horses roll at Dhunnera. The road is too narrow before that, and they smell where the other horses have rolled. This the bullock-drivers told me when they came there,” said Adam.

“She rolled. The saddle was cut, and the curb-chain was lost.”

“See!” said Adam, tugging a curb-chain from his pocket. “That woman in the shop gave it to me for a love-gift. Beshakl said it was not his when I showed it. But
I
knew.”

“Then they in the grog-shop, knowing that I was the servant of the Presence, said that unless I drank and spent money they would tell.”

“A lie. A lie,” said Strickland. “Son of an owl, speak truth now at least.”

“Then I was afraid because I had lost the curb-chain, so I cut the saddle across and about.”

“She did
not
roll, then?” said Strickland, bewildered and very angry.

“It was the curb-chain that was lost. That was the beginning of all. I cut the saddle to look as though she had rolled, and went to drink in the shop. I drank, and there was a fray. The rest I have forgotten, till I was recovered.”

“And the mare the while? What of the mare?”

The man looked at Strickland, and collapsed. “I will speak truth.

“She bore fagots for a wood-cutter for a week.”

“Oh, poor
Diamond
!” said Mrs. Strickland.

“And Beshaki was paid four annas for her hire three days ago by the wood-cutter’s brother, who is the left-hand man of the jhampanis here,” said Adam, in a loud and joyful voice. “We
all
knew. We all knew. I and all the servants.”

Strickland was silent. His wife stared helplessly at the child — the soul called out of the Nowhere, that went its own way alone.

“Did no man help thee with the lies?” I asked of the groom.

“None, Protector of the Poor — not one.”

“They grew, then?”

“As a tale grows in the telling. Alas! I am a very bad man,” and he blinked his one eye dole-fully.

“Now four men are held at my station on thy account, and God knows how many more at Peshawur, besides the questions at Multan, and my izzat is lost, and the mare has been pack-pony to a wood-cutter. Son of devils, what canst thou do to make amends?”

There was just a little break in Strickland’s voice, and the man caught it. Bending low, he answered in the abject, fawning whine that confounds right and wrong more surely even than most modern creeds, “Protector of the Poor, is the police service shut to — an honest man?”

“Out!” cried Strickland, and swiftly as the groom departed he must have heard our shout of laughter behind him.

“If you dismiss that man, Strick, I shall engage him. He’s a genius,” I said. “It will take you months to put this mess right, and Billy Watson won’t give you a minute’s peace.”

“You aren’t going to tell him?” said Strickland, appealingly.

“I couldn’t keep this to myself if you were my own brother. Four men held in your district — four or forty at Peshawur — and what was that you said about Multan?”

“Oh, nothing. Only some camel men there have been — ”

“On account of a curb-chain. Oh, my aunt!”

“And whose memsahib was thy aunt?” said Adam, with the mango stone in his fist. We began to laugh again.

“But here,” said Strickland, pulling his face together, “is a very bad child who has caused his father to lose honour before all the policemen of the Punjab.”

“Oh,
they
know,” said Adam. “It was only for the sake of show that they caught the people. Assuredly they all knew it was
benowti
[make-up].”

“And since when hast thou known?” said the first policeman in India to his son.

“Four days after we came here — after the wood-cutter had asked Beshakl of the health of his head. Beshaki all but slew a wood-cutter at that bad-water place.”

“If thou hadst spoken then, time and money and trouble to me and to others had all been spared. Baba, thou hast done a wrong greater than thy knowledge, and thou hast put me to shame, and set me out upon false words, and broken my honour. Thou hast done very wrong. But perhaps thou didst not think?”

“Nay, but I
did
think. Father,
my
honour was lost when that happened that — that happened in Juma’s presence. Now it is made whole again.”

And, with the most enchanting smile in the world, Adam climbed on to his father’s lap.

An English School

OF ALL
things in the world there is nothing, always excepting a good mother, so worthy of honour as a good school. Our School was created for the sons of officers in the Army and Navy, and filled with boys who meant to follow their father’s calling.

It stood within two miles of Amyas Leigh’s house at Northam, overlooking the Burroughs and the Pebble-ridge, and the mouth of the Torridge whence the
Rose
sailed in search of Don Guzmán. From the front dormitory windows, across the long rollers of the Atlantic, you could see Lundy Island and the Shutter Rock, where the
Santa Catherina
galleon cheated Amyas out of his vengeance by going ashore. If you have ever read Kingsley’s
Westward Ho!
you will remember how all these things happened.

Inland lay the rich Devonshire lanes and the fat orchards, and to the west the gorse and the turf ran along the tops of the cliffs in combe after combe till you come to Clovelly and the Hobby and Gallantry Bower, and the homes of the Devonshire people that were old when the Armada was new.

The Burrows, lying between the school and the sea, was a waste of bent rush and grass running out into hundreds of acres of fascinating sandhills called the Bunkers, where a few old people played golf. In the early days of the School there was a small Club-house for golfers close to the Pebble-ridge, but, one wild winter night, the sea got up and drove the Pebble-ridge clean through the Club basement, and the walls fell out, and we rejoiced, for even then golfers wore red coats and did not like us to use the links. We played as a matter of course and thought nothing of it.

Now there is a new Club-house, and cars take the old, red, excited men to and from their game and all the great bunkers are known and written about; but we were there first, long before golf became a fashion or a disease, and we turned out one of the earliest champion amateur golfers of all England.

It was a good place for a school, and that School considered itself the finest in the world, excepting perhaps Haileybury, because it was modelled on Haileybury lines and our caps were Haileybury colours; and there was a legend that, in the old days when the School was new, half the boys had been Haileyburians.

Our Head-master had been Head of the Modern Side at Haileybury, and, talking it over with boys from other public schools afterwards, I think that one secret of his great hold over us was that he was not a clergyman, as so many headmasters are. As soon as a boy begins to think in the misty way that boys do, he is suspicious of a man who punishes him one day and preaches at him the next. But the Head was different, and in our different ways we loved him.

Through all of five years I never saw him lose his temper, nor among two hundred boys did any one at any time say or hint that he had his favourites. If you went to him with any trouble you were heard out to the end, and answered without being talked at or about or around, but always
to
. So we trusted him absolutely, and when it came to the choice of the various ways of entering the Army, what he said was so.

He knew boys naturally better than their fathers knew them, and considerably better than they knew themselves. When the time came to read for the Final Army Examinations, he knew the temper and powers of each boy, the amount of training each would stand and the stimulus or restraint that each needed, and handled them accordingly till they had come through the big race that led into the English Army. Looking back on it all, one can see the perfect judgment, knowledge of boys, patience, and above all, power, that the Head must have had.

Some of the masters, particularly on the classical side, vowed that Army examinations were making education no more than mark-hunting; but there are a great many kinds of education, and I think the Head knew it, for he taught us hosts of things that we never found out we knew till afterwards. And surely it must be better to turn out men who do real work than men who write about what they think about what other people have done or ought to do.

A scholar may, as the Latin masters said, get more pleasure out of his life than an Army officer, but only little children believe that a man’s life is given him to decorate with pretty little things, as though it were a girl’s room or a picture-screen. Besides, scholars are apt, all their lives, to judge from one point of view only, and by the time that an Army officer has knocked about the world for a few years he comes to look at men and things “by and large,” as the sailors say. No books in the world will teach that knack.

So we trusted the Head at school, and afterwards trusted him more.

There was a boy in the Canadian Mounted Police, I think, who stumbled into a fortune — he was the only one of us who ever did — and as he had never drawn more than seven shillings a day, he very properly wrote to the Head from out of his North-Western wilds and explained his situation, proposing that the Head should take charge of and look after all his wealth till he could attend to it; and was a little impatient when the Head pointed out that executors and trustees and that sort of bird wouldn’t hand over cash in that casual way. The Head was worth trusting — he saved a boy’s life from diphtheria once at much greater risk than being shot at, and nobody knew anything about it till years afterwards.

But I come back to the School that he made and put his mark upon. The boys said that those with whom Cheltenham could do nothing, whom Sherbourne found too tough, and whom even Marlborough had politely asked to leave, had been sent to the School at the beginning of things and turned into men. They were, perhaps, a shade rough sometimes. One very curious detail, which I have never seen or heard of in any school before or since, was that the Army Class, which meant the Prefects, and was generally made up of boys from seventeen and a half to nineteen or thereabouts, was allowed to smoke pipes (cigarettes were then reckoned the direct invention of the Evil One) in the country outside the College. One result of this was that, though these great men talked a good deal about the grain of their pipes, the beauty of their pouches, and the flavour of their tobacco, they did not smoke to any ferocious extent. The other, which concerned me more directly, was that it went much harder with a junior whom they caught smoking than if he had been caught by a master, because the action was flagrant invasion of their privilege, and, therefore, rank insolence — to be punished as such. Years later, the Head admitted that he thought something of this kind would happen when he gave the permission. If any Head-master is anxious to put down smoking nowadays, he might do worse than give this scheme a trial.

The School motto was, “Fear God, Honour the King “; and so the men she made went out to Boerland and Zululand and India and Burma and Cyprus and Hongkong, and lived or died as gentlemen and officers.

Even the most notorious bully, for whom an awful ending was prophesied, went to Canada and was mixed up in Riel’s rebellion, and came out of it with a fascinating reputation of having led a forlorn hope and behaved like a hero.

All these matters were noted by the older boys, and when their fathers, the grey-whiskered colonels and generals, came down to see them, or the directors, who were K.C.B.’s and had been officers in their time, made a tour of inspection, it was reported that the School tone was “healthy.”

Sometimes an old boy who had blossomed into a Subaltern of the Queen would come down for a last few words with the Head-master, before sailing with the regiment for foreign parts; and the lower-school boys were distracted with envy, and the prefects of the Sixth Form pretended not to be proud when he walked with one of their number and talked about “my men, you know,” till life became unendurable.