The Day's Work - Part 01

"Before women?"

"My mother and the ayah saw. By women too, for that matter. What of it?"

"What didst thou do?" He stared beyond my shoulder up the long drive.

"It is long ago, and I have forgotten. I was older than thou art; but even then I forgot, and now the thing is but a jest to be talked of"

Adam drew one big breath and broke down utterly in my arms. Then he raised his head, and his eyes were Strickland's eyes when Strickland gave orders.

"Ho! Imam Din."

The fat orderly seemed to spring out of the earth at our feet, crashing through the bushes, and standing to attention.

"Hast thou ever been beaten?" said Adam."Assuredly. By my father when I was thirty years old. He beat me with a plough-beam before all the women of the village.""Wherefore?"

"Because I had returned to the village on leave from the Government service, and had said of the village elders that they had not seen the world. Therefore he beat me, to show that no seeing of the world changed father and son."

"And thou?"

"I stood up. He was my father."

"Good," said Adam, and turned on his heel without another word.

Imam Din looked after him. "An elephant breeds but once in a lifetime, but he breeds elephants. Yet I am glad I am no father of tuskers," said he.

"What is it all?" I asked.

"His father beat him with a whip no bigger than a reed. But the child could not have done what he desired to do without leaping through me. And I am of some few pounds weight. Look!"

Imam Din stepped back through the bushes, and the pressed grass showed that he had been lying curled round the mouth of the dry well.

"When there was talk of beating I knew that one who sat among horses, such as ours, was not like to kiss his father's hand. So I lay down in this place." We both stood still looking at the well-curb.

Adam came back along the garden path to us. "I have spoken to my father," he said simply. "Imam Din, tell thy Naik that his woman is dismissed my service."

"Huzoor!" said Imam Din, stooping low.

"For no fault of hers."

"Protector of the Poor!"

And to-day."

"Khodawund!"

"It is an order! Go!"

Again the salute, and Imam Din departed, with that same set of the back which he wore when he had taken an order from Strickland. I thought that it would be well to go too, but Strickland beckoned me from the verandah. When I came up he was perfectly white, and rocking to and fro in his chair, repeated "Good God!" half a dozen times.

"Do you know that he was going to chuck himself down the well — because I tapped him just now ~" he said helplessly.

"I ought to," I replied. "He has just dismissed his nurse — on his own authority, I suppose?"

"He told me just now that he wouldn't have her for a nurse any more. I never supposed he meant it for an instant. I suppose she'll have to go."

It is written elsewhere that Strickland was feared through the length and breadth of the Punjab by murderers, horse-thieves, and cattle-lifters.

Adam returned, halting outside the verandah, very white about the lips.

"I have sent away Juma because she saw that — that which happened. Until she is gone I do not come in the house," he said.

But to send away thy foster-mother ~" said Strickland, with reproach.

"I do not send her away. It is thy blame, and the small forefinger was pointed to Strickland. "I will not obey her; I will not eat from her hand, and I will not sleep with her. Send her away."

Strickland stepped out and lifted the child into the verandah.

"This folly has lasted long enough," he said. "Come, now, and be wise."

"I am little, and you are big," said Adam, between set teeth.

"You can beat me before this man or cut me to pieces. But I will not have Juma for my ayah any more. I will not eat till she goes.

I swear it by — my father's head."

Strickland sent him indoors to his mother, and we could hear sounds of weeping, and Adam's voice saying nothing more than, "Send Juma away." Presently Juma came in and wept too, and Adam repeated, "It is no fault of thine, but go!"

And the end of it was that Juma went, with all her belongings, and Adam fought his own way alone into his little clothes until a new ayah came. His address of welcome to her was rather amazing. In a few words it ran: "If I do wrong send me to my father. If you strike me I will try to kill you. I do not wish my ayah to play with me. Go and eat rice."

>From that day Adam forswore the society of ayahs and small native girls as much as a small boy can, confining himself to Imam Din and his friends of the police. The Naik, Juma's husband, had been presuming not a little on his position, and when Adam's favour was withdrawn from his wife he judged it best to apply for a transfer to another post. There were too many companions anxious to report his shortcomings to Strickland.

Towards his father Adam kept a guarded neutrality. There was not a touch of sulkiness in it, for the child's temper was as clear as a bell. But the difference and the politeness worried Strickland.

If the other men had loved Adam before the affair of the well, they worshipped him now.

He knows what honour means," said Imam Din; "he has justified himself upon a point thereof. He has carried an order through his father's household as a child of the blood might do. Therefore he is not altogether a child any longer. Wah! He is a tiger's cub." The next time that Adam made his little unofficial inspection of the line, Imam Din, and by consequence all the others, stood upon their feet, with their hands to their sides, instead of calling out from where they lay, "Salaam, Babajee," and other disrespectful things.

But Strickland took long counsel with his wife, and she with the cheque-book and their lean bank-account, and they decided that Adam must go "home" to his aunts. But England is not home to a child that has been born in India, and it never becomes home-like unless he spends all his youth there. The bank-book showed that if they economised through the summer by going to a cheap hill-station instead of to Simla, where Mrs. Strickland's parents lived, and where Strickland might be noticed by the powers, they could send Adam home in the next spring. It would be hard pinching, but it could be done. In India all the money that people in other lands save against a rainy day runs off in loss by exchange, which to-day cuts a man's income down almost exactly to one-half There is nothing to show for money when all is put by, and that is what makes married life there so hard. Strickland used to say, sometimes, that he envied the convicts in the jail. They had no position to keep up, and the ball and chain that the worst of them wore was only a few pounds weight of iron.

Dalhousie was chosen as being the cheapest of the hill-stations; Dalhousie and a little five-roomed cottage full of mildew, tucked away among the rhododendrons.

Adam had been to Simla three or four times, and knew by name the most of the Tonga drivers from Kalka to Tara Deva; but this new plan disquieted him. He came to me for information, his hands deep in his knickerbocker pockets, walking, step for step, as his father walked.

"There will be none of my bhai-bund [Brotherhood] up there," said he, disconsolately, "and they say that I must lie still in a doolie for a day and a night, being carried like a sheep. I wish to take some of my mounted men to Dalhousie."

I told him that there was a small boy called Victor, at Dalhousie, who had a calf for a pet, and was allowed to play with it on the public roads. After that Adam could not sufficiently hurry the packing.

"First," said he, "I shall ask that man Victor to let me play with the cow's child. If he is mug-gra [ill-conditioned] I shall tell my policemen to take it away."