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THE STORY OF SONNY SAHIB

MRS. EVERARD COTES

'Ayah,' the doctor-sahib said in the vernacular, standing beside the bed, 'the fever of the mistress is like fire. Without doubt it cannot go on thus, but all that is in your hand to do you have done. It is necessary now only to be very watchful. And it will be to dress the mistress, and to make everything ready for a journey. Two hours later all the sahib-folk go from this place in boats, by the river, to Allahabad. I will send an ox-cart to take the mistress and the baby and you to the bathing ghat.'

'Jeldi karo!' he added, which meant 'Quickly do!'--a thing people say a great many times a day in India.

The ayah looked at him stupidly. She was terribly frightened; she had never been so frightened before. Her eyes wandered from the doctor's face to the ruined south wall of the hut, where the sun of July, when it happens to shine on the plains of India, was beating fiercely upon the mud floor. That ruin had happened only an hour ago, with a terrible noise just outside, such a near and terrible noise that she, Tooni, had scrambled under the bed the mistress was lying on, and had hidden there until the doctor-sahib came and pulled her forth by the foot, and called her a poor sort of person. Then Tooni had lain down at the doctor-sahib's feet, and tried to place one of them upon her head, and said that indeed she was not a worthless one, but that she was very old and she feared the guns; so many of the sahibs had died from the guns! She, Tooni, did not wish to die from a gun, and would the Presence, in the great mercy of his heart, tell her whether there would be any more shooting? There would be no more shooting, the Presence had said; and then he had given her a bottle and directions, and the news about going down the river in a boat. Tooni's mind did not even record the directions, but it managed to retain the words about going away in a boat, and as she stood twisting the bottle round and round in the folds of her ragged red petticoat it made a desperate effort to extract their meaning.

'There will be no more shooting,' said the doctor again, 'and there is a man outside with a goat. He will give you two pounds of milk for the baby for five rupees.'

'Rupia! I have not even one!' said the ayah, looking toward the bed; 'the captain-sahib has not come these thirty days as he promised. The colonel-sahib has sent the food. The memsahib is for three days without a pice.'

'I'll pay,' said the doctor shortly, and turned hurriedly to go. Other huts were crying out for him; he could hear the voice of some of them through their mud partitions. As he passed out he caught a glimpse of himself in a little square looking-glass that hung on a nail on the wall, and it made him start nervously and then smile grimly. He saw the face of a man who had not slept three hours in as many days and nights--a haggard, unshaven face, drawn as much with the pain of others as with its own weariness. His hair stood up in long tufts, his eyes had black circles under them. He wore neither coat nor waistcoat, and his regimental trousers were tied round the waist by a bit of rope. On the sleeve of his collarless shirt were three dark dry splashes; he noticed them as he raised his arm to put on his pith helmet. The words did not reach his lips, but his heart cried out within him for a boy of the 32nd.

The ayah caught up her brass cooking-pot and followed him. Since the doctor-sahib was to pay, the doctor-sahib would arrange that good measure should be given in the matter of the milk. And upon second thought the doctor-sahib decided that precautions were necessary. He told the man with the goat, therefore, that when the ayah received two pounds of milk she would pay him the five rupees. As he put the money into Tooni's hand she stayed him gently.

'We are to go without, beyond the walls, to the ghat?' she asked in her own tongue.

'Yes,' said the doctor, 'in two hours. I have spoken.'

'Hazur! the Nana Sahib--'

'Honoured one.'

'The Nana Sahib has written it. Bus!' the doctor replied impatiently. Put the memsahib into her clothes. Pack everything there is, and hasten. Do you understand, foolish one?'

'Enough.'

'Very good said the ayah submissively, and watched the doctor out of sight. Then she insisted--holding the rupees, she could insist--that the goat-keeper should bring his goat into the hut to milk it; there was more safety, Tooni thought, in the hut. While he milked it Tooni sat upon the ground, hugging her knees, and thought.

The memsahib had said nothing all this time, had known nothing. For two days the memsahib had been, as Tooni would have said, without sense--had lain on the bed in the corner quietly staring at the wall, where the looking-glass hung, making no sign except when she heard the Nana Sahib's guns. Then she sat up straight, and laughed very prettily and sweetly. It was the salute, she thought in her fever; the Viceroy was coming; there would be all sorts of gay doings in the station. When the shell exploded that tore up the wall of the hut, she asked Tooni for her new blue silk with the flounces, the one that had been just sent out from England, and her kid slippers with the rosettes. Tooni, wiping away her helpless tears with the edge of her head covering, had said, 'Na, memsahib, na!' and stroked the hot hand that pointed, and then the mistress had forgotten again. As to the little pink baby, three days old, it blinked and throve and slept as if it had been born in its father's house to luxury and rejoicing.

Tooni questioned the goat-keeper; but he had seen three sahibs killed that morning, and was stupid with fear. He did not even know of the Nana Sahib's order that the English were to be allowed to go away in boats; and this was remarkable, because he lived in the bazar outside, and in the bazar people generally know what is going to happen long before the sahibs who live in the tall white houses do. Tooni had only her own reflections.

There would be no more shooting, and the Nana Sahib would let them all go away in boats; that was good khaber--good news. Tooni wondered, as she put the baby's clothes together in one bundle, and her own few possessions together in another, whether it was to be believed. The Nana Sahib so hated the English; had not the guns spoken of his hate these twenty-one days? Inside the walls many had died, but outside the walls might not all die? The doctor had said that the Nana Sahib had written it; but why should the Nana Sahib write the truth? The Great Lord Sahib, the Viceroy, had sent no soldiers to compel him. Nevertheless, Tooni packed what there was to pack, and soothed the baby with a little goat's milk and water, and dressed her mistress as well as she was able, according to the doctor's directions. Then she went out to where old Abdul, the table-waiter, her husband, crouched under a wall, and told him all that she knew and feared. But Abdul, having heard no guns for nearly an hour and a half, was inclined to be very brave, and said that without doubt they should all get safely to Allahabad; and there, when the memsahib was better, they would find the captain-sahib again, and he would give them many rupees backsheesh for being faithful to her.

'The memsahib will never be better,' said Tooni, sorrowfully; 'her rice is finished in the earth. The memsahib will die.'

She agreed to go to the ghat, though, and went back into the hut to wait for the ox-cart while Abdul cooked a meal on the powder-blackened ground with the last of the millet, and gave thanks to Allah.

There was no room for Tooni to ride when they started. She walked alongside carrying the baby and its little bundle of clothes. There was nothing else to carry, and that was fortunate, for the cart in which the memsahib lay was too full of sick and wounded to hold anything more. In Tooni's pocket a little black book swung to and fro; it was the memsahib's book; and in the beginning of the firing, before the fever came, Tooni had seen the memsahib reading it long and often. They had not been killed in consequence, Tooni thought; there must be a protecting charm in the little black book; so she slipped it into her pocket. They left the looking-glass behind.

The ox-cart passed out creaking, in its turn, beyond the earthworks of the English encampment into the city, where the mutinous natives stood in sullen curious groups to watch the train go by. A hundred yards through the narrow streets, choked with the smell of gunpowder and populous with vultures, and Abdul heard a quick voice in his ear. When he turned, none were speaking, but he recognised in the crowd the lowering indifferent face of a sepoy he knew--one of the Nana Sahib's servants. Saying nothing, he fell back for Tooni and laid his hand upon her arm. And when the cart creaked out of the town into the crowded, dusty road that led down to the ghat, neither Abdul nor Tooni were in the riotous crowd that pressed along with it. They had taken refuge in the outer bazar, and Sonny Sahib, sound asleep and well hidden, had taken refuge with them.

As to Sonny Sahib's mother, she was neither shot in the boats with the soldiers that believed the written word of the Nana Sahib, nor stabbed with the women and children who went back to the palace afterwards. She died quietly in the oxcart before it reached the ghat, and the pity of it was that Sonny Sahib's father, the captain, himself in hospital four hundred miles from Cawnpore, never knew.

There is a marble angel in Cawnpore now, standing in a very quiet garden, and shut off even from the trees and the flowers by an enclosing wall. The angel looks always down, down, and such an awful, pitiful sorrow stands there with her that nobody cares to try to touch it with words. People only come and look and go silently away, wondering what time can have for the healing of such a wound as this. There is an inscription--

And afterward Sonny Sahib's father believed that all he could learn while he lived about the fate of his wife and his little son was written there. But he never knew.

Tooni and Abdul heard the terrible news of Cawnpore six months later. They had gone back to their own country, and it was far from Cawnpore--hundreds and hundreds of miles across a white sandy desert, grown with prickles and studded with rocks--high up in the north of Rajputana. In the State of Chita and the town of Rubbulgurh there was no fighting, because there were no Sahibs. The English had not yet come to teach the Maharajah how to govern his estate and spend his revenues. That is to say, there was no justice to speak of, and a great deal of cholera, and by no means three meals a day for everybody, or even two. But nobody was discontented with troubles that came from the gods and the Maharajah, and talk of greased cartridges would not have been understood. Thinking of this, Abdul often said to Tooni, his wife; 'The service of the sahib is good and profitable, but in old age peace is better, even though we are compelled to pay many rupees to the tax-gatherers of the Maharajah.' Tooni always agreed, and when the khaber came that all the memsahibs and the children had been killed by the sepoys, she agreed weeping. They were always so kind and gentle, the memsahibs, and the little ones, the babalok--the babalok! Surely the sepoys had become like the tiger-folk. Then she picked up Sonny Sahib and held him tighter than he liked. She had crooned with patient smiles over many of the babalok in her day, but from beginning to end, never a baba like this. So strong he was, he could make old Abdul cry out, pulling at his beard, so sweet-tempered and healthy that he would sleep just where he was put down, like other babies of Rubbulgurh. Tooni grieved deeply that she could not give him a bottle, and a coral, and a perambulator, and often wondered that he consented to thrive without these things, but the fact remains that he did. He even allowed himself to be oiled all over occasionally for the good of his health, which was forbearing in a British baby. And always when Abdul shook his finger at him and said--

'Gorah pah howdah, hathi pah JEEN! Jeldi bag-gia, Warren HasTEEN!'

he laughed and crowed as if he quite understood the joke.

'Howdahs on horses, on elephants JEEN! He ran away quickly did Warren HasTEEN!'

'Jeen' means 'saddles,' but nobody could make that rhyme! Popular incident of an English retreat in Hastings' time.

Tooni had no children of her own, and wondered how long it would be before she and Abdul must go again to Cawnpore to find the baby's father. There need be no hurry, Tooni thought, as Sonny Sahib played with the big silver hoops in her ears, and tried to kick himself over her shoulder. Abdul calculated the number of rupees that would be a suitable reward for taking care of a baby for six months, found it considerable, and said they ought to start at once. Then other news came--gathering terror from mouth to mouth as it crossed Rajputana--and Abdul told his wife one evening, after she had put Sonny Sahib to sleep with a hymn to Israfil, that a million of English soldiers had come upon Cawnpore, and in their hundredfold revenge had left neither Mussulman nor Hindoo alive in the city--also that the Great Lord Sahib had ordered the head of every kala admi, every black man, to be taken to build a bridge across the Ganges with, so that hereafter his people might leave Cawnpore by another way. Then Abdul also became of the opinion that there need be no haste in going.

Sonny Sahib grew out of the arms and necks of his long embroidered night dresses and day dresses almost immediately, and then there was a difficulty, which Tooni surmounted by cutting the waists off entirely and gathering the skirts round the baby's neck with a drawing string, making holes in the sides for his arms to come through. Tooni bought him herself a little blue and gold Mussulman cap in the bazar. The captain-sahib would be angry, but then the captain-sahib was very far away, killed perhaps, and Tooni thought the blue and gold cap wonderfully becoming to Sonny Sahib. All day long he played and crept in this under the sacred peepul-tree in the middle of the village among brown-skinned babies who wore no clothes at all--only a string of beads round their fat little waists--and who sometimes sat down in silence and made a solemn effort to comprehend him.

In quite a short time--in Rubbulgurh, where there is no winter, two years is a very little while--Sonny Sahib grew too big for even this adaptation of his garments; and then Tooni took him to Sheik Uddin, the village tailor, and gave Sheik Uddin long and careful directions about making clothes for him. The old man listened to her for an hour, and waggled his beard, and said that he quite understood; it should be as she wished. But Sheik Uddin had never seen any English people, and did not understand at all. He accepted Tooni's theories, but he measured and cut according to his own. Sheik Uddin could not afford to suffer in his reputation for the foolish notions of a woman. So he made Sonny Sahib a pair of narrow striped calico trousers, and a long tight-fitting little coat with large bunches of pink roses on it, in what was the perfectly correct fashion for Mahomedan little boys of Rubbulgurh and Rajputana generally. Tooni paid Sheik Uddin tenpence, and admired her purchase very much. She dressed Sonny Sahib in it doubtfully, however, with misgivings as to what his father would say. Certainly it was good cloth, of a pretty colour, and well made, but even to Tooni, Sonny Sahib looked queer. Abdul had no opinion, except about the price. He grumbled at that, but then he had grumbled steadily for two years, yet whenever Tooni proposed that they should go and find the captain-sahib, had said no, it was far, and he was an old man. Tooni should go when he was dead.

Besides, Abdul liked to hear the little fellow call him 'Bap,' which meant 'Father,' and to feel his old brown finger clasped by small pink and white ones, as he and Sonny Sahib toddled into the bazar together. He liked to hear Sonny Sahib's laugh, too; it was quite a different laugh from any other boy's in Rubbulgurh, and it came oftener. He was a merry little fellow, blue-eyed, with very yellow wavy hair, exactly, Tooni often thought, like his mother's.

It was a grief to Tooni, who could not understand it; but Sonny Sahib perversely refused to talk in his own tongue. She did all she could to help him. When he was a year old she cut an almond in two, and gave half to Sonny Sahib and half to the green parrot that swung all day in a cage in the door of the hut and had a fine gift of conversation; if anything would make the baby talk properly that would. Later on she taught him all the English words she remembered herself, which were three, 'bruss' and 'wass' and 'isstockin',' her limited but very useful vocabulary as lady's-maid. He learned them very well, but he continued to know only three, and he did not use them very often, which Tooni found strange. Tooni thought the baba should have inherited his mother's language with his blue eyes and his white skin. Meanwhile, Sonny Sahib, playing every morning and evening under the peepul-tree, learned to talk in the tongue of the little brown boys who played there too.

When Sonny Sahib was four he could drive the big black hairy buffaloes home from the village outskirts to be milked. Abdul walked beside him, but Sonny Sahib did all the shouting and the beating with a bit of stick, which the buffaloes must have privately smiled at when they felt it on their muddy flanks, that is if a buffalo ever smiles, which one cannot help thinking doubtful. Sonny Sahib liked buffalo milk, and had it every day for his dinner with chupatties, and sometimes, for a treat, a bit of roast kid. Chupatties are like pancakes with everything that is nice left out of them, and were very popular in Rubbulgurh. Sonny Sahib thought nothing in the world could be better, except the roast kid. On days of festival Abdul always gave him a pice to buy sweetmeats with, and he drove a hard bargain with either Wahid Khan or Sheik Luteef, who were rival dealers. Sonny Sahib always got more of the sticky brown balls of sugar and butter and cocoa-nut for his pice than any of the other boys. Wahid Khan and Sheik Luteef both thought it brought them luck to sell to him. But afterwards Sonny Sahib invariably divided his purchase with whoever happened to be his bosom friend at the time--the daughter of Ram Dass, the blacksmith, or the son of Chundaputty, the beater of brass--in which he differed altogether from the other boys, and which made it fair perhaps.

At six Sonny Sahib began to find the other boys unsatisfactory in a number of ways. He was tired of making patterns in the dust with marigolds for one thing. He wanted to pretend. It was his birthright to pretend, in a large active way, and he couldn't carry it out. The other boys didn't care about making believe soldiers, and running and hiding and shouting and beating Sonny Sahib's tom-tom, which made a splendid drum. They liked beating the tom-tom, but they always wanted to sit round in a ring and listen to it, which Sonny Sahib thought very poor kind of fun indeed. They wouldn't even pretend to be elephants, or horses, or buffaloes. Sonny Sahib had to represent them all himself; and it is no wonder that with a whole menagerie, as it were, upon his shoulders, he grew a little tired sometimes. Also he was the only boy in Rubbulgurh who cared to climb a tree that had no fruit on it, or would venture beyond the lower branches even for mangoes or tamarinds. And one day when he found a weaver-bird's nest in a bush with three white eggs in it, a splendid nest, stock-full of the fireflies that light the little hen at night, he showed it privately first to Hurry Ghose, and then to Sumpsi Din, and lastly to Budhoo, the sweeper's son; and not one of them could he coax to carry off a single egg in company with him. Sonny Sahib recognised the force of public opinion, and left the weaver-bird to her house-keeping in peace, but he felt privately injured by it.

Certainly the other boys could tell wonderful stories--stories of princesses and fairies and demons--Sumpsi Din's were the best--that made Sonny Sahib's blue eyes widen in the dark, when they all sat together on a charpoy by the door of the hut, and the stars glimmered through the tamarind-trees. A charpoy is a bed, and everybody in Rubbulgurh puts one outside, for sociability, in the evening. Not much of a bed, only four short rickety legs held together with knotted string, but it answers very well.

Sonny Sahib didn't seem to know any stories--he could only tell the old one about the fighting Abdul saw over and over again--but it was the single thing they could do better than he did. On the whole he began to prefer the society of Abdul's black and white goats, which bore a strong resemblance to Abdul himself, by the way, and had more of the spirit of adventure. It was the goat, for example, that taught Sonny Sahib to walk on the extreme edge of the housetop and not tumble over. In time they became great friends, Sonny Sahib and the goat, and always, when it was not too hot, they slept together.

Then two things happened. First, Abdul died, and Sonny Sahib became acquainted with grief, both according to his own nature and according to the law of Mahomed. Then, after he and Tooni had mourned sincerely with very little to eat for nine days, there clattered one day a horseman through the village at such a pace that everybody ran out to see. And he was worth seeing, that horseman, in a blue turban as big as a little tub, a yellow coat, red trousers with gold lace on them, and long boots that stuck out far on either side; and an embroidered saddle and a tasselled bridle, and a pink-nosed white charger that stepped and pranced in the bazar so that Ram Dass himself had to get out of the way. It ought to be said that the horseman's clothes did not fit him very well, that his saddle girth was helped out by a bit of rope, and that his charger was rather tender on his near fore-foot; but these are not things that would be noticed in Rubbulgurh, being lost in the general splendour of his appearance.

Sonny Sahib ran after the horseman with all the other boys, until, to everybody's astonishment, he stopped with tremendous prancings at Tooni's mud doorstep, where she sat to watch him go by. Then Sonny Sahib slipped away. He was afraid--he did not know of what. He ran half a mile beyond the village, and helped Sumpsi Din keep the parrots out of his father's millet crop all day long. Nor did he say a word to Sumpsi Din about it, for fear he should be persuaded to go back again. Instead, he let Sumpsi Din sleep for long hours at a time face-downwards on his arm in the sun, which was what Sumpsi Din liked best in the world, while he, Sonny Sahib, clapped his hands a hundred times at the little green thieves, abusing them roundly, and wondering always at the back of his head why so splendid a horseman should have stopped at his particular doorstep. So it was not until the evening, when he came back very hungry, hoping the horseman would be gone, that he heard Tooni's wonderful news. Before she gave him water or oil, or even a chupatty, Tooni told him, holding his hand in hers.

'The Maharajah has sent for you, O noonday kite; where have you been in the sun? The Maharajah has sent for you, lotus-eyed one, and I, though I am grown too old for journeys, must go also to the palace of the Maharajah! Oh, it is very far, and I know not what he desires, the Maharajah! My heart is split in two, little Sahib! This khaber is the cat's moon to me. I will never sleep again!'

Then for some reason the fear went out of Sonny Sahib. 'Am I not going with you, Tooni-ji?' said he, which was his way of saying 'dear Tooni.' 'There is no cause for fear. And will it not be very beautiful, the palace of the Maharajah? Sumpsi Din says that it is built of gold and silver. And now I should like six chupatties, and some milk and some fried brinjal, like yesterday's, only more, Tooni-ji.'

The palace of the Maharajah at Lalpore was not exactly built of gold and silver; but if it had been, Sonny Sahib could hardly have thought it a finer place. It had a wall all round it, even on the side where the river ran, and inside the wall were courts and gardens with fountains and roses in them, divided by other walls, and pillared verandahs, where little green lizards ran about in the sun, and a great many stables, where the Maharajah's horses pawed and champed to be let out and ridden. The palace itself was a whole story higher than the stables, and consisted of a wilderness of little halls with grated windows. It smelt rather too strong of attar of roses in there--the Maharajah was fond of attar of roses--but the decorations on the whitewashed walls, in red and yellow, were very wonderful indeed. The courtyards and the verandahs were full of people, soldiers, syces, merchants with their packs, sweetmeat sellers, barbers; only the gardens were empty. Sonny Sahib thought that if he lived in the palace he would stay always in the gardens, watching the red-spotted fish in the fountains, and gathering the roses; but the people who did live there seemed to prefer smoking long bubbling pipes in company, or disputing over their bargains, or sleeping by the hour in the shade of the courtyard walls. There were no women anywhere; but if Sonny Sahib had possessed the ears or the eyes of the country, he might have heard many swishings and patterings and whisperings behind curtained doors, and have seen many fingers on the curtains' edge and eyes at the barred windows as he went by.

This was the palace, and the palace was the crown of Lalpore, which was built on the top of a hill, and could lock itself in behind walls ten feet thick all round, if an enemy came that way.

The Maharajah was to receive them in one of the pillared verandahs, one that looked out over the river, where there was a single great ivory chair, with a red satin cushion, and a large piece of carpet in front of it, and nothing else. It was the only chair in the palace, probably the only chair in all the Maharajah's State of Chita, and as Sonny Sahib had never seen a chair before he found it very interesting. He and Tooni inspected it from a respectful distance, and then withdrew to the very farthest corner of the verandah to wait for the Maharajah. A long time they waited, and yet Tooni would not sit down. What might not the Maharajah do if he came and found them disrespectfully seated in his audience hall! Patiently she stood, first on one foot and then on the other, with her lips all puckered up and her eyes on the floor, thinking of things that would be polite enough to say to a Maharajah. They were so troublesome to think of, that she could not attend to what Sonny Sahib said at all, even when he asked her for the sixth time how you made a peacock with blue glass eyes, like the one on each arm of His Highness's chair. Sonny Sahib grew quite tired of watching the mud-turtle that was paddling about in a pool of the shallow river among the yellow sands down below, and of counting the camels that were wading across it, carrying their packs and their masters; and yet the Maharajah did not come.

'Tooni,' he said presently, 'without doubt I must sit down,' and down he sat plumply, with his back against the wall, and his two small legs, in their very best striped cotton trousers, stretched out in front of him.

As a matter of fact the Maharajah was asleep, and had forgotten all about Sonny Sahib in the hall of audience. It was Moti who reminded him, whispering in his ear until he awoke. Moti was the little Maharajah, and that was his pet name. Moti was privileged to remind his father of things.

A pearl.

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