A Soldier and a Gentleman/Chapter 3

OPI LALL, like other bandits of less visionary latitudes, had a half developed, half mocking notion of his own almost divinity. And, as greater men have done before him, he left his own country with neither following nor prospects, and came back to it an all-crowned king. The price put on his head by another Province had wrought the change for him.

He was certainly a humorist, in his own grim way. Three thousand rupees—at which a smarting and indignant Government valued him—was a fortune in itself; and, when he came back with policemen on his trail to his own Bengal, he was penniless. So he decapitated the first tax paying villager he could find whose size and general ugliness were something like his own, doctored the head with a knife, removed one eye, dried out the socket, and sent the resulting horror in a basket to police headquarters by the hand of a trusted lieutenant. He also sent a dozen witnesses to identify the thing and lay low himself until the blood reward was paid.

Of course feud followed, for the lieutenant claimed one-third of the money, and the witnesses all clamored for their share as well. As the logical result all thirteen men lay pegged out one afternoon on anthills, and to cap his quaint conceit Gopi Lall sent their heads to the police, with an accompanying homily, laboriously written out in blood. It was typically babooese, and it ended with a moral such as Æsop might have penned, but the concentrated gist of it was, “Such should be the end of all dishonest men!”

So the Government, which has no sense of humor, loved him, and did its ceaseless best to capture him, that it might hug him properly—with a slip knot and a hempen rope. And since Bengal breeds Bengalis, as well as snakes and jungle fever and the Indian Penal Code, Gopi Lall had ample opportunity to exercise his wit. If any knew where his hill-and-jungle-hidden ærie was, none dared tell of it; and, as for the native press, it used him as political ammunition, treating him one day as a national hero in revolt against bureaucracy, and the next as proof of crass incompetence on everybody’s part.

The police, of course, used him as a scapegoat, and gave him warning of their moves whenever their three English officers were indiscreet enough to drop a hint.

They robbed right and left, and gave Gopi Lall the credit for it. But credit was not passed on and taken at its mere face value. When a robbery occurred that he had had no hand in, his share of it had to be left in some hiding place where he knew where to look for it, or else a dead policeman would be found within a day or two, staring up at the sun without his eyelids. He was not afraid of the police, and he was at much pains to make the fact apparent.

But the Tail-Twisters were another matter altogether. The man who can buy, blackmail, coax away, or steal the honor of a Rajput gentleman who wears a regimental crest could bribe high Heaven; and that Regiment, pawing and perspiring in its tented lines, was something that made Gopi Lall afraid. He took no liberties with it, and sent no greased night creepers to steal the horse feed and accouterments. Nor did he waylay the troopers who swaggered now and then along the jungle paths.

But he worked hard and quickly in an opposite direction. He made a levy on the villages to the north of him that exceeded all of his previous exactions, and with the money thus extorted he bribed the native press of eight cities to declaim against the Government for ordering out troops. For that once, the police became national heroes, or very nearly so, and even the Governor in person was denounced as an iconoclast for contemplating such a thing as the supersession of the “honorable constabeels.”

Lithographed one-thousand-copy circulations hummed with indignation at the thought of turning loose a thousand “predatory horsemen” on the suffering countryside. So the Government of India, which always listens for a while before it acts and then smites hard and fast, kept the “brutal and licentious soldiery” in camp.

And Yasmini sang songs to her guitar, and danced, and melted strong men’s hearts. And Colonel Stapleton wrote letters. And young Boileau—“Bandobust Boileau,” who could lead a squadron like a gray wolf on a breast high scent, but who could not hold his tongue—talked just a little bit too loudly in his tent of “old women in the Service nowadays,” and of “Don Quixotes who should be at home in padded cells.”

So at dawn one morning when the Tail-Twisters swooped like a jingling whirlwind out of camp to round up Gopi Lall, in a tent that thrummed already with the morning heat sat Boileau, with a pile of documents in front of him that would keep him busy for a dozen days—him and the baboo. When the Colonel of a regiment does need to tame the rising flood of youthful insolence, there are always plenty of blue indent forms, and payment vouchers that need auditing, and other things even less interesting to the military type of wit.

He sat and watched the dust go up above the Regiment; saw the glittering lance heads rise, and dip, and vanish; heard the thunder of the hoofs die down; and then faced the task in front of him. He realized that the fault was his, and that the more quickly the red-tape-tied routine was waded through, the sooner he would lead his men again; but he felt like a schoolboy kept in after hours, with the sting of temporary ostracism added to the drudgery.

“Must admit the old man landed on me where I’d feel it,” he told himself. “Did it neatly, too. ‘Captain Boileau, I have to leave one officer behind to attend to details. I’ve selected you.’ Cuss him! Left me to think out the reason for myself, and—blast his stateliness!—let the men think what they liked, too!”

A man, whose job, and honor, and promotion all depend on making sons of the sons of soldiers regard him as a demigod is vulnerable where he keeps his pride.

He toiled at the maddening “returns in triplicate” until the flies drove him from the tent. In spite of the netting and the squeaky improvised punkah, even the ink pot was full of flies, and even the baboo gave up regarding them as essential elements like air and earth.

He went to the gloomy, empty Mess tent, where a solitary servitor provided him with curried goat and flies.

There were more flies in his whisky peg and in the butter, and even the boy he sent for to stand behind his chair failed to keep the still uncooked ones from promenading on his cheek.

So he went back to the office tent again and tried to drown his consciousness of the hot, pestilential loneliness in hard work.

But the official office working hours in salubrious Bengal are limited, and the Bengali baboo, who has his uses, is a man who also knows his rights.

The clerk had gone without his noonday two-hour snooze in deference to Boileau’s wishes, but, as he expressed it, he was “theoreticallee antagonistic, sir, to policy of working overtime without increased emolument.”

So Boileau cursed him thoroughly and let him go at three o’clock. He did not see the force of borrowing money, at sixty odd percent, from the baboo’s relatives to spend even fractions of it on the baboo.

For the next few hours he sat and swore and read the three-weeks-old Home newspapers alternately. Then he went out and looked his horses over. Then the thought of dinner all alone again, with mosquitos this time instead of flies, swept over him, and for a while nostalgia had him in its depressing maw. And after that, of course, the particular red devil who sits on tree tops all over India and beckons to the lonely European drew nearer and held converse with him.

Youth called, and the fire of youth that leads the Anglo-Saxon into mischief. Mischief he must have, or see, or do within an hour or two, or else weep; and no soldier has any hankering for tears. Besides, for what is mischief, unless for the amusement of men of stamina?

“Who is this Yasmini?” he asked of the first native he could find.

The man waxed interminably eloquent, after the eloquence which belongs to the East alone.

“What language does she speak?”

“All languages; the language of love, sahib, is a common tongue.”

“Does she make love in English?”

“Nay, sahib. Who could? Neither does she make love, ever. The gods, who made her, made that unnecessary. When she lacks love, men bring it to her.”

“She sounds amusing.”

“Sahib—she is Yasmini.”

“Um-m-m! D’you think she would receive me?”

“Who knows, sahib?” responded the native. “He who can tell the color of an unborn infant’s eyes might know perhaps what Yasmini will do. There be dead men, sahib, who might tell, too, what good they had from her—none other!”

“Then, babooji, you wouldn’t care to call on her, eh?”

“Sahib, have you seen a serpent hypnotize a bird? Would you be that bird? Have you watched a moth that fluttered round a lamp, and envied him?”

“I’ve seen the moths at it, baboo. But how about the notion of skating over thin ice?”

“Yasmini and ice, sahib, are as different as Kinchinjunga from the Plains.”

“Which is the nearest way to where she lives? You’ve got me interested, babooji. I’ll call on the lady.”

“Nay, God forbid, sahib! I have warned you. I will not direct you to your undoing! There are women of the countryside in hundreds who–”

“Chup!” commanded Boileau. So the baboo held his tongue.

But fifteen minutes later Boileau’s servant came to him, carrying his Panama to replace the helmet that in that climate in the daytime a man must wear even inside his tent.

“D’you know the way to Yasmini’s?” he asked.

And the wicked, wrinkled old Abdullah grinned.

“I’ll not bother about dinner. As soon as it’s dark bring a lamp and lead me to her.”

“Will the sahib dress?” he asked deferentially.

“Um-m-m-n-yes. She’s a—ah—a—er—she’s what we white men call a lady, isn’t she?”

“Sahib, she is Yasmini. There is no woman like her in the world!”

“Yes, I’ll dress as though for dinner. And—ah—Abdullah—”

“Sahib?”

“Hold your tongue!”

Abdullah grinned again.