In The Permanent Way Part 11

He sat, cuddled up in a cream-coloured cotton blanket, edged with crimson, shoo-ing away the brown rats from the curved cobs of Indian corn. The soft mists of a northern November hung over the landscape in varying density. Heavy over the dank sugar-cane patch by the well, lighter on the green fodder crop, dewy among the moisture-loving leaves of the sprouting vetches, and here, in the field of ripening maize, scarcely visible between the spa.r.s.e stems. He was an old man with a thin white beard tucked away behind his ears and a kindly look on his high-featured face. Every now and then he took up a little clod of earth from the dry, crumbling ridge of soil which divided the field he was watching from the surrounding ones, and threw it carefully among the maize, saying in a gentle, grumbling voice, "_Ari_, brothers! Does no shame come to you?"

It had no perceptible effect on the rats, who, owing to the extreme sparsity of the crop, could be seen every here and there deliberately climbing up a swaying stem to seat themselves on a cob and begin breakfast systematically. In the calm, windless silence you could almost hear the rustle and rasp of their sharp white teeth. But Nanuk Singh--as might have been predicted from his seventy and odd years of life in the fields--was somewhat hard of hearing; somewhat near of vision also. For when so many years have been spent watching the present furrow cling to the curves of the past one, in sure and certain hope of similar furrows in the future, or in listening to the endless lamentations of a water-wheel ceasing not by day or night to proclaim an eternity of toil and harvest, both eyes and ears are apt to grow dull towards new sights and sounds. Nanuk's had, at any rate, even though the old familiar ones no longer occupied them; fate having decreed that in his old age the peasant farmer should have neither furrows nor water-wheel of his own. How this had come about needs a whole statute book of Western laws to understand. Nanuk himself never attempted the task. To him it was, briefly, the will of G.o.d. His district-officer, however, when the case fell under his notice by reason of the transfer of the land, thought differently; and having a few minutes' leisure from office drudgery to spare for really important work, made yet one more representation regarding the scandalous rates of interest, the cruelty of time-foreclosures, and the general injustice of applying the maxim "_caveat emptor_" to transactions in which one party is practically a child and the other a Jew. A futile representation, of course, since the Government, so experts affirm, is not strong enough to attack the Frankenstein monster of Law which it has created.

In a measure, nevertheless, old Nanuk was right in attributing his ruin to fate, since it had followed naturally from the death of his three sons. One, the eldest, dying of malarial fever in the prime of life, leaving, alas! a young family of girls. Another, the youngest, swept off by cholera just as his hand began to close firmly round his dead brother's plough-handle. The third, when on the eve of getting his discharge from a frontier regiment in order to take his brothers'

places by his father's side, being struck down ingloriously in one of the petty border raids of which our Punjab peasant soldiers have always to bear the brunt.

And this loss of able hands led inevitably to the loss of ill-kept oxen; while from the lack of well-cattle came that gradual shrinkage of the irrigated area where some crop is certain--rain or no rain--which means a less gradual sinking further and further into debt; until, as had been the case with Nanuk, the owner loses all right in the land save the doubtful one of toil. Even this had pa.s.sed from the old man's slackening hold after his wife died, and the daughters-in-law, with starvation staring them in the face, had drifted away back to their own homes, leaving him to live as best he could on the acre or so of unirrigated land lent to him out of sheer charity. For public opinion still has some power over the usurer in a village of strong men, and all his fellows respected old Nanuk, who stood six feet two, barefoot, and had tales to tell of the gentle art of singlestick as applied to the equitable settling of accounts in the old days, before Western laws had taken the job out of the creditor's hands.

Strangely enough, however, Nanuk, as he sat coping inadequately with the brown rats, felt less resentment against the usurer who had robbed him, or the law which permitted the robbery, than he did against the weather. The former had made no pretence of favouring him; the latter, year after year, had tempted his farmer's soul to lavish sowings by copious rain at seed time, and thereinafter withheld the moisture necessary for a bare return of measure for measure. Briefly, he had gambled in grain, and he had lost. Lost hopelessly in this last harvest of maize, since, when the sound cobs should be separated from those which the wanton teeth had spoilt, they would not yield the amount of Government revenue which the old man had to pay; certainly would not do so if the cobs became scarcer day by day and the rats more throng. In fact, the necessity for action ere matters grew worse appeared to strike Nanuk, making him, after a time, draw out a small sickle and begin to harvest the remaining stalks one by one.

"_Bullah!_ neighbour Nanuk," cried the new man who, better equipped for the tasks with sons and cattle, was driving the wheel and curving the furrows for the usurer, "I would, for thy sake, the task was harder. And as if the crop were not poor enough, the dissolute rats must needs play the wanton with the half of it. But, 'tis the same all over the land, and between them and the revenue we poor folk of the plough will have no share."

Nanuk stood looking meditatively at a very fine cob out of which a pair of sharp white teeth were taking a last nibble, while a pair of wicked black eyes watched him fearlessly.

"They are G.o.d's creatures also, and have a right to live on the soil as we others," he said slowly.

"Then they should pay the revenue," grumbled Dittu. "Why should _you_, who have no crop whereon to pay? _Ai teri!_" he added sharply to one of the oxen he was driving to their work, "sleepest thou? and the well silent! Dost want to bring me to Nanuk's plight?"

So with a prod of the goad, he pa.s.sed on, leaving old Nanuk still looking at the brown rat on the corncob. Why, indeed, should he have to pay for G.o.d's other creatures? In the old days justice would have been meted out to such as he. The crop would have been divided into heaps, so many for the owner of the soil, so many for the tiller, so many for the State. Then if _Purameshwar_[24] sent rats instead of rain the heaps were smaller. That was all. And if the equity of this had been patent to those older rulers, who had scarcely given a thought in other ways to the good of their subjects, why should it not be patent to those new ones who, G.o.d keep them! gave justice without respect of persons, so far as in them lay? There must be a mistake somewhere; the facts could not have been properly placed before the _Lat-sahib_--that vice-regent of G.o.d upon earth. This conviction came home slowly to the old man as he finished his harvesting; slowly but surely, so that when he had spread the cobs out to dry on his cotton blanket he walked over to the well, and, between the whiffs of the general pipe, hinted that he thought of laying the matter before the authorities. "I will take the produce of my field," he said, "in my hand--it will not be more than five _seers_ when the good is sifted from the bad--and I will say to the _Lat-sahib_, 'This is because _Purameshwar_ sent rats instead of rain. Take your share, and ask no more.'"

[Footnote 24: The Great G.o.d.]

Dittu, the new man, laughed scornfully. "Better take a rat also, since all parties to the case must be present by the law."

He intended it as a joke, but Nanuk took it quite seriously. "That is true," he a.s.sented; "I will take a rat also; then there can be no mistake."

That evening, when he sat with his cronies on the mud das beneath the _peepul_ tree, where he was welcome to a pull out of anybody's pipe, he spoke again of his intention. The younger folk laughed, but the seniors thought that it could at least do no harm. Nanuk's case was a hard one; it was quite clear he could not pay the revenue, and it was better to go to the fountain-head in such matters, since underlings could do nothing but take fees. So, while the stars came out in the evening sky, they sat and told tales of Nausherwan, and many another worthy whose memory lingers in native minds by reason of perfectly irrational acts of despotic clemency, such as even Socialists do not dream of now-a-days. The corn-cobs then being harvested, dried, and sh.e.l.led, he set to work with the utmost solemnity on rat-traps; but here at once he realised his mistake. By harvesting his own crop he had driven the little raiders further afield; and though he could easily have caught one in his neighbour's patch, a desire to deal perfectly fair with those who, in his experience, dealt perfectly fairly with facts, made him stipulate for a rat out of his own.

This necessitated the baiting of his property with some of the corn in order to attract the wanton creatures again; and even then, though he sat for hours holding the cord by which an earthen dish was to be made to fall upon the unsuspecting intruder, he was unsuccessful.

"Trra! not catch rats!" cried a most venerable old pantaloon to whom he applied for advice, remembering him in his boyhood as one almost G.o.dlike in his supreme knowledge of such things. "Wait awhile; 'tis a trick--a mere trick--but when you once know it you cannot forget it."

All that day the old men sat together in the suns.h.i.+ne, profoundly busy, and towards evening they went forth together to the field, chattering and laughing like a couple of schoolboys. It was long after dusk ere they returned, full of mutual recrimination. The one had coughed too much, the other had wheezed perpetually; there was no catching of rats possible under such circ.u.mstances. Then the old pantaloon went a-hunting by himself, full of confidence, only to return dejected; then Nanuk, full of determination, sat up all one moonlight night in the field where--now that he had no crop to benefit by it--the night-dew gathered heavily on every leaf and blade, on Nanuk, too, as he sat crouched up in his cotton blanket, thinking of what he should say to the _Lat-sahib_ when the rat was caught, which it was not. Finally, with angry misgivings as to the capabilities of the present generation of boys, the old pantaloon suggested the offering of one whole anna for the first rat captured in Nanuk's maize-field. Before the day was over a score or two of the village lads, long-limbed, bright-eyed, were vociferously maintaining the prior claims of as many brown rats, safely confined in little earthen pipkins with a rag tied round the top. They stood in a row, like an offering of sweets to some deity, round Nanuk's bed, for--as was not to be wondered at after his night-watch--he was down with an attack of the chills. That was nothing new. He had had them every autumn since he was born; but he was not accustomed to be surrounded on such occasions by brown rats appealing to him for justice. It ended in his, with feverish hands, giving one anna to each of the boys, and reserving his selection until he was in a more judicial frame of mind.

Still, it would not do to starve G.o.d's creatures, so every morning while the fever lingered--for it had got a grip on him somehow--he went round the pipkins and fed the rats with some of the maize. And every morning, rather to his relief, there were fewer of them to feed, since they nibbled their way out once they discovered that the top of their prison was but cloth. So as he lay, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, the idea came to him, foolishly enough, that this was a process of divine selection, and that if he only waited the day when but one rat should remain, his mission would bear the seal of success. An idea like this only needs presentation to a mind, or lack of mind, like old Nanuk's. So what with the harvesting and the rat-catching, and the fever and the omen-awaiting, it was close on the new year when, with a brown rat, now quite tame, tied up in a pipkin, some five _seers_ of good grain tied up in the corner of his cotton blanket, and Heaven knows what a curious conglomeration of thought bound up in his still feverish brain, the old man set out from his village to find the _Lat-sahib_. Such things are still done in India, such figures are still to be seen, making some civilised people stand out of the road bareheaded, as they do to a man on his way to the grave--a man who has lived his life, whose day is past.

Owing also to the fever and the paying for rats, etc., old Nanuk's pockets were ill-provided for the journey, but that mattered little in a country where a pilgrimage on foot is in itself presumptive evidence of saints.h.i.+p. Besides, the brown rat--to which Nanuk had attached a string lest one of the parties to the suit might escape him on the road--was a perpetual joy to the village children, who scarcely knew if it were greater fun to peep at it in its pipkin or see it peeping out of the old man's cotton blanket, when in the evenings it nibbled away at its share of Nanuk's dinner. They used to ask endless questions as to why he carried it about, and what he was going to do with it, until, half in jest, half in earnest, he told them he was the _muda-ee_ (plaintiff) and the rat the _mudee-ala_ (defendant) in a case they were going to lay before the _Lat-sahib_; an explanation perfectly intelligible to even the babes and sucklings, who in a Punjabi village now-a-days lisp in numbers of pet.i.tions and pleaders.

So the _muda-ee_ and _mudee-ala_ trampled along together amicably, sometimes by curving wheel-tracks among the furrows--ancient rights-of-way over the wide fields, as transient yet immutable as the furrows themselves; and there, with the farmer's eye-heritage of generations, he noted each change of tint in the growing wheat, from the faintest yellowing to the solid dark green with its promise of a full ear to come. Sometimes by broad lanes, telling yet once more the strange old Indian tale of transience and permanence, of death and renewed birth, in the deep gra.s.s-set ruts through which the traffic of centuries had pa.s.sed rarely, yet inevitably. And here with the same knowledgeable eye he would mark the homing herds of village cattle, and infer from their condition what the unseen harvest had been which gave them their fodder. Finally, out upon the hard white high-road, so different from the others in its self-sufficient straightness, its squared heaps of nodular limestone ready for repairs, its elaborate arrangements for growing trees where they never grew before, and where even Western orders will not make them grow. And here Nanuk's eyes still found something familiar in the great wains creaking along in files to add their quota of corn sacks to the mountain of wheat c.u.mbering the railway platforms all along the line. Yet even this was in its essence new, provoking the wonder in his slow brain how it could be that the increased demand for wheat and its enhanced price should have gone hand-in-hand with the financial ruin of the grower.

To say sooth, however, such problems as these flitted but vaguely through the old man's thought, and even his own spoliation was half forgotten in the one great object of that long journey which, despite his cheerful patience, had sapped his strength sadly. To find the _Lat-sahib_, to make his salaam, and bid the _mudee-ala-jee_ do so likewise, to lay the produce of the field at the sahib's feet, and say that _Purameshwar_ had sent rats instead of rain--that in itself was sufficient for the old man as he trudged along doggedly, his eyes becoming more and more dazed by unfamiliar sights as he neared the big city.

"_Bullah!_" said the woman of whom he begged a night's lodging. "If we were to house and feed the wanderers on this road, we should have to starve ourselves. And thou art a Sikh. Go to thine own people. 'Tis each for each in this world." That was a new world to Nanuk.

"Doth thy rat do tricks?" asked the children critically. "What, none?

Trra! we can see rats of that mettle any day in the drains, and there was a man here yesterday whose rat cooked bread and drew water. Ay!

and his goat played the drum. That was a show worth seeing."

So Nanuk trudged on.

"See the _Lat-sahib_" sneered the yellow-legged police constable when, after much wandering through bewildering crowds, the old Sikh found himself at a meeting of roads, each one of which was barred by a baton. "Which _Lat-sahib_--the big one or the little?"

"The big one," replied Nanuk stoutly. There was no good in underlings; _that_ he knew.

Police Constable number seventy-five called over to his crony number ninety-six on the next road.

"_Ari_, brother! Here is another _durbari_. Canst let him in on thy beat? I have no room on mine." And then they both laughed, whereat old Nanuk, taking courage, moved on a step, only to be caught and dragged back, hustled, and abused. What! was the Great Durbar for the like of him--the Great Durbar on which lakhs and crores had been spent--the Great Durbar all India had been thinking of for months? _Wah!_ Whence had he come if he had not heard of the Great Durbar, and what had he thought was the meaning of the Venetian masts and triumphal arches, the flags and the watered roads? Did he think such things were always?

_Ari!_ if it came to such ignorance as that, mayhap he would not know what _this_ was coming along the road.

It was a disciplined tramp of feet, an even glitter of bayonets, a straight line of brown faces, a swing and a sweep, as a company of the Guides came past in their _kakhi_ and crimson uniform. Old Nanuk looked at it wistfully.

"Nay, brother," he said, "I know that. 'Twas my son's regiment, G.o.d rest him!"

"Thou shouldst sit down, old man," said a bystander kindly. "Of a truth thou canst go no further till the show is over. Hark! there are the guns again. 'Twill be Bairanpore likely, since Hurriana has gone past. _Wah!_ it is a show--a rare show!"

So down the watered road, planted out in miserable attempts at decoration with barbers' poles unworthy of a slum in the East End, came a bevy of Australian horses, wedged at a trot between huge kettledrums, which were being whacked barbarically by men who rose in their stirrups with the conscientious precision of a newly imported compet.i.tion-_wallah_. Then more Australian horses again in an _orfeverie_ barouche lined with silver, where, despite the glow of colour, the blinding flash of diamonds in an Indian sun, despite even the dull wheat-green glitter of the huge emerald tiara about the turban, the eye forgot these things to fix itself upon the face which owned them all; a face haggard, sodden, superlatively handsome even in its soddenness; indifferent, but with an odd consciousness of the English boy who--dressed as for a flower show--sat silently beside his charge. Behind them with a clatter and flutter of pennons came a great trail of wild hors.e.m.e.n, showing as they swept past, dark, lowering faces among the sharp spear points.

And the guns beat on their appointed tale, till, with the last, a certain satisfaction came to that sodden face, since there were none short in the salute--_as yet_. The measure of his misdoings was not full _as yet_.[25]

[Footnote 25: A reduction in the number of guns is the first punishment for bad administration.]

The crowd ebbed and flowed irregularly to border the straight white roads, where at intervals the great tributary chiefs went backwards and forwards to pay their State visits, but Nanuk and his rat--the plaintiff and the defendant--waited persistently for their turn to pa.s.s on. It was long in coming; for even when the last flash and dash of barbaric splendour had disappeared, the roar of cannon began louder, nearer, regular to a second in its even beat.

"That is the _Lat_-salute" said one man to another in the crowd. "Let us wait and see the _Lat_, brother, ere we go."

Nanuk overheard the words, and looked along the road anxiously, then stood feeling more puzzled than ever; for there was nothing to see here but a plain closed carriage with a thin red and gold trail of the body-guard behind it and before. The sun was near to its setting, and sent a red angry flare upon a bank of clouds which had risen in the east, and the dust of many feet swept past in whirls before a rising wind.

"It will rain ere nightfall," declared the crowd, contentedly, as it melted away citywards. "And the crops will be good, praise to G.o.d."

Once more Nanuk overheard, and this time a glad recognition seemed to rouse him from a dream. Yes! the crops would be good. Down by the well, on the land he and his had ploughed for so many years, the wheat would be green--green as those emeralds above that sodden face.

"The _Lat_ has gone out," joked Constable Seventy-five as he went off duty; "but there are plenty of other things worth seeing to such an ignoramus as thou."

True; only by this time Nanuk was almost past seeing aught save that all things were unfamiliar in those miles and miles of regiments and rajahs, electric lights and newly macadamised roads, tents and make-believe gardens, all pivoted, as it were, round the Royal Standard of England, which was planted out in the centre of the Viceroy's camp. As he wandered aimlessly about the vast canvas city, hustled here, sent back there, the galloping orderlies, the shuffling elephants, the carriages full of English ladies, the subalterns cracking their tandem whips, and the native outriders had but one word for him.

"_Hut! Hut!_" (Stand back--stand back!)

A heavy drop of rain came as a welcome excuse to his dogged perseverance for sheltering awhile under a thorn bush. He was more tired than hungry, though he had not tasted food that day; and it needed a sharp nip from the defendant's teeth, as it sought for something eatable in the folds of his blanket, to remind him that others of G.o.d's creatures had a better appet.i.te than he. But what was he to give? There was the five _seers_ of grain still, of course; but who was to apportion the shares; who was to say, "This much for the plaintiff, this much for the defendant, this much for the State?" The familiar idea seemed to give him support in the bewildering inrush of new impressions, and he held to it as a drowning man in a waste of unknown waters clutches at a straw.